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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Michio Kaku
Read between
May 2 - June 5, 2020
We face the danger of weaponized microbes, such as airborne AIDS or Ebola, which can be transmitted by a simple cough or sneeze. This could wipe out upward of 98 percent of the human race.
Thanks to the Human Connectome Project, which will map every neuron in the human brain, one day we may be able to send our connectomes into outer space on giant laser beams, eliminating a number of problems in interstellar travel. I call this laser porting, and it may free our consciousness to explore the galaxy or even the universe at the speed of light, so we don’t have to worry about the obvious dangers of interstellar travel.
Goddard died in 1945 and did not live long enough to see the apology written by the editors of the New York Times after the Apollo moon landing in 1969.
Nevertheless, two billionaires have taken the lead in fast-tracking the space program: Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon and owner of the Washington Post, and Elon Musk, founder of PayPal, Tesla, and SpaceX.
Rare earth elements are crucial for the electronics industry but are mostly found in China. (Rare earths are located everywhere in small quantities, but the Chinese rare earth industry makes up 97 percent of the world trade.
Tungsteno
NASA officials did not know that commander Alan Shepard had secretly smuggled a six-iron golf club into the space capsule. They were surprised when he proceeded to take out the club and hit a golf ball two hundred yards on the lunar surface.
Golf. el primer deporte en practicarse en la Luna
China has already launched ten “taikonauts” into orbit and is proceeding with ambitious plans to construct a space station and develop a rocket as powerful as the Saturn V by 2020.
Llegamos a su deadline
the Deep Space Gateway, which will act as a refueling and resupply station for missions to Mars and the asteroids. It will be the basis for a permanent human presence in space. Construction of this lunar space station will begin in 2023 and it will be operational by 2026. Four SLS missions will be required to build it.
2026…a tan solo 6 años.
The first people on the historic mission to Mars are probably alive today, perhaps learning about astronomy in high school.
A figure skater, for example, can only spin about four times in the air on the Earth. No skater has ever performed a quintuple jump. This is because the height of the jump is determined by the velocity at takeoff and the strength of gravity.
Rodney Mullen abandoned the chat.
The largest Martian canyon, Mariner Valley, which is probably the largest canyon in the solar system, is so vast that, if placed on North America, it would extend from New York City to Los Angeles.
In many ways, we actually know more about the surface of Mars than the surface of the Earth. About three-quarters of the Earth is covered by the oceans, while Mars has no oceans.
The Europa Clipper is scheduled for launch sometime around 2022. Costing approximately $2 billion, its purpose is to analyze the ice cover of Europa and the composition and nature of its ocean for signs of organic chemicals.
Titan could become an important gas station in space.
Graphene consists of a single molecular layer of carbon atoms tightly bonded to form an ultra-thin, ultra-durable sheet. It is almost transparent and weighs practically nothing, yet is the toughest material known to science—two
In 2016, the field of artificial intelligence was electrified by the news that AlphaGo, DeepMind’s computer program, had beat Lee Sedol, the world champion of the ancient game of Go.
Your laptop never learns—it is just as dumb today as it was yesterday or last year. But the human brain literally rewires itself after learning any task.
“Life may seem pointless if we are fated to spend it staring stupidly at our ultra-intelligent progeny as they try to describe their ever more spectacular discoveries in baby-talk that we can understand.”
I theorize that humans are different from animals because we understand time. We have temporal consciousness in addition to spatial and social consciousness. The latest part of the brain to evolve is the prefrontal cortex, which lies just behind our forehead. It is constantly running simulations of the future.
One reason why childhood lasts so long is because there is so much subtle information to absorb about human society and the natural world.
As a practice run before aiming for distant stars, scientists may decide to send nanoships to closer destinations within the solar system. It would take them only five seconds to zip to the moon, about an hour and a half to get to Mars, and a few days to reach Pluto.
It was Johannes Kepler who first noticed the effect when he realized that, contrary to expectations, comet tails always point away from the sun. Kepler correctly surmised that pressure from sunlight creates these tails by blowing dust and ice crystals in comets away from the sun.
The leading fusion reactor using magnetic confinement at present is called the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER), located in southern France.
Also, antimatter is the most expensive form of matter in the world. At today’s prices, a gram would go for about $70 trillion.
Physicists believe that at the instant of the Big Bang, the universe was in perfect symmetry and there was an equal amount of matter and antimatter. If so, the annihilation between the two would have been perfect and complete, and the universe should be made of pure radiation. Yet here we are, made of matter, which should not be around anymore. Our very existence defies modern physics.
In 2013, the International Academy of Astronautics issued a 350-page report projecting that with enough funding and research, a space elevator capable of carrying multiple twenty-ton payloads might be possible by 2035. Price estimates usually range from $10 billion to $50 billion—a fraction of the $150 billion that went into the International Space Station.
If you go to Rome, you might want to visit the Campo de’ Fiori—the “Plain of Flowers”—where there is an imposing statue of Bruno on the very spot where he faced his death.
As a result of parallax, many of the UFOs spotted trailing after our cars are actually sightings of the planet Venus.)
Another planet has been discovered that apparently may be made of diamonds. It is called 55 Cancri e and is about double the size of the Earth but weighs about eight times more.
(One midwestern doctor kept a diary of his daily visits to patients. He confessed that there were only two items in his black bag that actually worked. Everything else was snake oil. What actually worked was the hacksaw to cut off injured and diseased limbs, and morphine to dull the pain of amputation.)
For example, aging in a car takes place mainly in the engine, where the oxidation and wear and tear take the greatest toll. The “engines” of a cell are the mitochondria. That’s where sugars are oxidized to extract energy.
the birthrate falls dramatically as a nation industrializes, urbanizes, and educates young girls.
The next level of digital immortality beyond the Library of Souls is the Human Connectome Project, an ambitious effort to digitize the entire human brain.
(For example, all of us talk to ourselves silently. When we do, the left brain, which controls language, consults the prefrontal cortex. But in schizophrenics, we now know, the left brain activates without permission from the prefrontal cortex,
At the 2014 World Cup in São Paolo, Brazil, a man kicked a soccer ball to start the games, an event witnessed by a billion people. This by itself was not remarkable. What was remarkable was that this man was paralyzed.
the human eye can recognize the equivalent of about a million pixels, and a person needs at least 600 pixels to identify faces and familiar objects.)
When Louise Brown, the world’s first test tube baby, was born in 1978, the technology that made it possible was denounced by many clergymen and columnists, who believed that we were playing God. Today there are more than five million test tube babies in the world; your spouse or best friend may be one.
Originally, you were clay. From being mineral, you became vegetable. From vegetable, you became animal, and from animal, man…And you have to go through a hundred different worlds yet. There are a thousand forms of mind. —RUMI
Dr. Seth Shostak of the SETI Institute in Mountain View, California, whom I have interviewed on a number of occasions, believes that we will make contact with an alien civilization before 2025.
(Stapledon gives us another possibility as he writes, “Some of these pre-utopian worlds, not malignant but incapable of further advance, were left in peace and preserved, as we preserve wild animals in national parks, for scientific interest.”)
A Dyson sphere is a gigantic sphere around a star, designed to harvest the energy from its massive amounts of starlight.
A Type I civilization utilizes all the energy of the sunlight that falls on that planet. 2. A Type II civilization utilizes all the energy its sun produces. 3. A Type III civilization utilizes the energy of an entire galaxy.
It is easy to calculate how much sunlight falls on a square foot of land on Earth. Multiplying this by the surface area of the Earth illuminated by the sun and one immediately calculates the approximate energy of an average Type I civilization. (We find that a Type I civilization harnesses the power of 7 x 1017 watts,
Using the total energy consumption of the planet Earth, we find that we are currently a Type 0.7 civilization.
There is also the danger that someone could create a doomsday weapon by bioengineering some existing disease—Ebola, HIV, avian flu—and making it more lethal or causing it to spread more quickly and easily.
If each of them creates another thousand robots, then we have a million. Then a billion. Then a trillion. In just a few generations, we can have an expanding sphere containing quadrillions of these devices, which scientists call von Neumann machines.
Quantum theory says that there must be quantum corrections to pure blackness, so black holes are actually gray. (And they emit a faint radiation called Hawking radiation.)
And there is no such thing as absolute zero, the temperature at which all motion stops. (Even as we approach it, atoms continue to move slightly, which is called the zero-point energy.)
This means that subatomic particles are just like musical notes. The universe is a symphony of strings, physics represents the harmonies of these notes, and the “mind of God” that Einstein chased after for so many decades is cosmic music resonating through hyperspace.
Since photographs of galaxies only show the beautiful swirling mass of stars, whatever is holding the mass together must not interact with light—it must be invisible.
