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

by Michio Kaku

If one generation corresponds to roughly twenty years, this means that ten generations of humans will be born on the starship, which will be the only home they know. Although this may seem daunting, realize that during the Middle Ages, master architects would design grand cathedrals knowing that they would not live long enough to see the completion of their masterpieces. They knew that perhaps their grandchildren would be the ones to celebrate the opening of the cathedral. Also, realize that during the Great Diaspora, when humans began to leave Africa roughly seventy-five thousand years ago in search of a new home, they realized that perhaps it would take many generations for them to complete their journey. So the concept of a multigeneration voyage is not a new one.

Bioethicists, worried about the possible misuses of this technology, have organized conferences to discuss this new science because the side effects and complications are not known, and they made a series of recommendations to try to cool down the furious pace of CRISPR research. In particular, they raised concerns that this technology may lead to germ-line gene therapy. (There are two types of gene therapy, somatic cell gene therapy, where non-sex cells are modified, so that the mutations do not spread to the next generation, and germ-line gene therapy, where your sex cells are altered so that all your descendants can inherit the modified gene.) Germ-line gene therapy could, if unchecked, alter the genetic heritage of the human race. It means that once we venture among the stars, new genetic branches of the human race might emerge. Usually, this would take tens of thousands of years, but bioengineering may reduce that to a single generation if germ-line gene therapy becomes a reality.

Is the ultimate fate of human civilization to splinter into smaller entities, with only the sketchiest knowledge of one another? This raises the ultimate question: Will we gain the stars but lose our humanity in the process? And what does it mean to be human anyway if there are so many distinct branches of humanity?

perhaps the most startling prediction of string theory is that the universe is not four-dimensional at all but exists in ten dimensions. In all of physics, nowhere have we seen a prediction this bizarre, a theory of space-time that selects out its own dimensionality.

The multiverse can also be viewed from the perspective of theology, where all religions fall into two categories: religions in which there was an instant of creation, and religions that are eternal. For example, the Judeo-Christian philosophy talks about a creation, a cosmic event when the universe was born. (Not surprisingly, the original calculations of the Big Bang were done by a Catholic priest and physicist, Georges Lemaître, who believed that Einstein’s theory was compatible with Genesis.) However, in Buddhism, there is no god at all. The universe is timeless, with no beginning or end. There is only Nirvana. These two philosophies seem totally in opposition to each other. Either the universe had a beginning or it didn’t. But a melding of these two diametrically opposed philosophies is possible if we adopt the multiverse concept. In string theory, our universe did in fact have a cataclysmic origin, the Big Bang. But we live in a multiverse of bubble universes. These bubble universes, in turn, are floating in a much larger arena, a ten-dimensional hyperspace, which had no beginning. So Genesis is happening all the time within the larger arena of Nirvana (hyperspace). This then gives us a simple and elegant unification of the Judeo/Christian origin story with Buddhism. Our universe did in fact have a fiery beginning, but we coexist in a timeless Nirvana of parallel universes.