The Future of Humanity: Terraforming Mars, Interstellar Travel, Immortality, and Our Destiny Beyond Earth

by Michio Kaku

Failure is an option here [at SpaceX]. If things are not failing, you are not innovating enough.”

Considering that Venus is linked to the Greek goddess of love and beauty, it is ironic that this sulfuric acid, which is highly reflective, is the reason why Venus shines so brightly in the night sky.

This could help to break down barriers between people. Often, it is hard to understand other people’s point of view, their suffering and anguish. But with brain net, we would be able to experience firsthand the anxieties and fears that trouble others.

A million years is nothing but the blink of an eye in cosmic terms.

The advantage of this approach is that there is no need for messy, expensive booster rockets or space stations. You never face the problem of weightlessness, asteroid collisions, radiation, accidents, and boredom because you are transmitted as pure information. And at the speed of light, you have taken the fastest possible journey to the stars. From your point of view, the trip is instantaneous. All you remember is entering the laboratory and then instantly arriving at your destination. (This is because time effectively stops while riding on the light beam. Your consciousness is frozen as you move at the speed of light, so you travel across the cosmos without any time delay. This is quite different from suspended animation, since when traveling at the speed of light, as I mentioned, time effectively stops. And while you would not see the sights while you were in transit, you could stop at any relay station and observe your surroundings.)

Perhaps a Type III civilization would have a vast laser porting superhighway connecting the stars in the Milky Way galaxy with trillions of souls in transit at any one time.

Placing your connectome on a laser beam is not a problem, since lasers can in principle transport unlimited amounts of information. The main problem is to create a network of relay stations along the way that receive your connectome, amplify it, and send it along to the next station. As we mentioned, the Oort Cloud extends several light-years from a star, so the Oort Clouds from different stars can overlap. Thus, stationary comets in the Oort Cloud may provide ideal sites for these relay stations. (Creating relay stations on Oort Cloud comets would be preferable to placing them on a distant moon, since moons orbit around planets and are often obscured by them, while these comets are stationary.)

Once the accelerator attains this energy, it can focus that energy onto a single point. A wormhole should open up there. It would then be injected with enough negative energy to stabilize it so it doesn’t collapse.

One theory is that dark matter is a higher vibration of the superstring. The leading candidate is the superpartner of the photon, which is called the “photino,” or “little photon.” It has all the right properties to be dark matter: it is invisible because it does not interact with light, and yet it has weight and is stable.

Another hotly debated question among physicists is what happens if you enter a wormhole and go backward in time. If you then kill your grandfather before you are born, then you have a paradox. How can you exist at all if you just killed your ancestor? Einstein’s theory actually allows for time travel (if negative energy exists) but says nothing about how to resolve these paradoxes. String theory, because it is a finite theory in which everything can be calculated, should be able

to resolve all these mind-twisting paradoxes. (My own strictly personal opinion is that the river of time forks into two rivers when you enter a time machine—in other words, the timeline splits. This means that you have killed someone else’s grandfather who looks just like your own grandfather but exists in another timeline in an alternate universe. So the multiverse resolves all time paradoxes.)

Bertrand Russell, the great British philosopher and mathematician, once wrote: All the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness of human genius, are destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar system, and [the] whole temple of man’s achievement must inevitably be buried beneath the debris of a universe in ruins…Only within the scaffolding of these truths, only on the firm foundation of unyielding despair, can the soul’s habitation henceforth be safely built.

Because, by definition, a Type IV civilization can harness extragalactic energy, they might manipulate some of the extra dimensions revealed by string theory and create a sphere in which dark energy reverses polarity, so that the cosmic expansion is reversed.

Every dream begins with a dreamer. Always remember, you have within you the strength, and the passion, to reach for the stars to change the world. —HARRIET TUBMAN