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

by Michio Kaku

Since Mars is frozen solid, all you would have to do is dig a few feet until you hit the permafrost. Then you could excavate the ice, melt it, and purify it for drinking water, or extract oxygen for breathing and hydrogen for heating and rocket fuel. For protection against radiation and dust storms, colonists might have to dig into the rock to build an underground shelter. (Because the atmosphere of Mars is so thin and its

magnetic field is so weak, radiation from space is not absorbed or deflected

Mars is roughly the same duration as a day on Earth.

The tilt of Mars with respect to the sun is also the same as Earth’s.

gravity on Mars, which is only 40 percent of the gravity on Earth, and, as on the moon, they would have to exercise vigoro...

temperature on Mars rarely exceeds the freezing point of water, and after the sun goes down, it can plunge to as low as -127 degrees Celsius or -197 degrees Fahrenheit, so any power failure or blackout could prove life threatening.

Because the gravity on Mars is a little bit more than one-third the gravity on Earth, a person can in principle jump three times higher on Mars. A person would also be able to throw a ball three times farther on Mars, so basketball courts, baseball diamonds, and football fields would have to be enlarged.

atmospheric pressure on Mars is about 1 percent that of Earth, meaning that the aerodynamics of baseballs and footballs are drastically modified. The main complication is the precise control of the ball. On Earth, athletes are paid millions of dollars because of their uncanny ability to control the motion of a ball, which takes years of practice. This skill has to do with their ability to manipulate the ball’s spin.

When a ball moves through the air, it creates turbulence in its wake, small eddy currents that cause the ball to swerve slightly and slow down. (For a baseball, these eddy currents are created by the stitching on the ball, which determines its spin. On a golf ball, it is caused by the dimples on its surface...

Time-lapse videos show that this is correct. If a baseball is thrown

that it has minimal spin (as in a knuckleball), turbulence is maximized and the ball’s path becomes erratic. If a baseball is spinning rapidly, then the air pressure on one side of the baseball can be greater than the pressure on the other side (via something called Bernoulli’s principle) and hence the ball will swerve a certain way.

world-class athletes from Earth, the reduced air pressure on Mars may cause them to lose their ability to control the ball, so that an entirely new crop of Martian athletes may rise in their place. Mastery o...

sulfuric acid, which is highly reflective, is the reason why Venus shines so brightly in the night sky.

Due to the planet’s high atmospheric pressure, being on the surface of Venus is equivalent to being three thousand feet below the surface of Earth’s oceans. You would be crushed

The air is so dense that, when walking on the surface, you would have the sensation of walking through molasses, and the ground under your feet would feel soft and squishy because it is made of molten metal.

The acid rains would eat through the tiniest tear in your space

suit, and one false move and you might sink into...

generated by

metal within a liquid core, creating electrical currents. Since the core of Mars is made of solid rock, it cannot create an appreciable magnetic

believed that heavy meteor bombardment three or so billion years ago triggered so much chaos that the original magnetic field was disrupted. This may explain why Mars lost its atmosphere and water. Without a magnetic field to protect it against harmful solar rays and flares, the atmosphere was gradually blown into outer ...

carbon dioxide levels began to drop, a reverse greenhouse effect took place and the planet went into a deep freeze.

Northern Lights, which are created when the sun’s radiation

how to keep Mars from returning to its prior state after it has been terraformed. One ambitious method is to artificially generate a magnetic field around Mars. To do this, we would have to place huge superconducting coils around the Martian equator.

such a tremendous undertaking is beyond our capabilities in this century.

scientists are looking beyond Mars as well. The most exciting prospects may be the moons of the gas giants, including Europa, a moon of Jupiter, and Titan, a moon of Saturn. The moons of gas giants were once thought to be barren hunks of rock that were all alike,

but they are now seen as unique wonderlands, each with its own array of geysers, oceans, canyons, and atmospheric lights. These moons are now being eyed as future habitats for human life.

The gas giants all have colorful bands, which are caused by impurities in the atmosphere interacting with the spin of the planet.

largest is Jupiter, named after the father of the gods in Roman mythology. It’s so massive that it outweighs all the other planets combined. It could comfortably encompass 1,300 Earths.

Jupiter is surrounded by a huge, deadly band of radiation, which is the source of much of the static you hear on the radio and TV. (A small fraction of that static comes from the Big Bang itself.)

Computer simulations show that, without Jupiter, the Earth even today would be bombarded with giant meteors, which would make life impossible.

Life as we know it probably cannot exist on the gas giants. None of them have a solid surface on which organisms can evolve. They lack liquid water and the elements necessary to produce hydrocarbons and organic chemicals. Billions of miles from the sun,

they are also freezing cold.

Albert Einstein, and his theory was called special relativity. He discovered that you cannot outrace a light beam, because the speed of light is the ultimate velocity in the universe. If you approach it, strange things happen. Your rocket becomes heavier, and time slows down inside it. If you were to somehow reach light speed, you would be infinitely heavy and time would stop. Both conditions are impossible, which means you cannot break the light barrier. Einstein became the cop on the block, setting the ultimate speed limit in the universe. This barrier has bedeviled generations of rocket scientists ever since.

Einstein also realized that there was a loophole in his general theory of relativity. The larger a star is, the greater the warping of space-time surrounding it. If a star is heavy enough, it becomes a black hole. The fabric of space-time may actually tear, potentially creating a wormhole, which is a gateway or shortcut through space. This concept, first introduced by Einstein and his student Nathan Rosen in 1935, is today called the Einstein-Rosen bridge.

conclusion, negative energy does exist, and if enough negative

energy could somehow be collected, we could, in principle, create a wormhole machine or a warp drive

engine, fulfilling some of the wildest fantasies of...

parallax, many of the UFOs spotted trailing after our cars are actually sightings of the planet Venus.) Professor Seager’s fascination with the heavens blossomed into a lifelong romance. Parents sometimes buy telescopes for their inquisitive children, but she bought her own first telescope with the money she earned from a summer job. She remembers being fifteen and excitedly talking to two of her friends about an exploding star, named Supernova 1987a, that had just been seen in the

average, every star you see has some kind of planet orbiting around it. About 20 percent of the stars, like our sun, have Earth-like planets—that

Since there are roughly one hundred billion stars in the Milky Way, about twenty billion Earth-like planets may

exist in our backyard. In fact, this is a conservative estimate—the actual numb...

2018, the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) will be launched. Unlike the Kepler, it will scan the entire sky. TESS will examine two hundred thousand stars over a two-year period, concentrating on stars that are thirty to one hundred times brighter than those inspected by the Kepler, including all the possible Earth-sized planets or super-Earths in our region of the galaxy, a number astronomers expect to be around five hundred.

accompanied by Jupiter-sized planets in circular orbits in order to clean out the asteroids and debris that can destroy life. So we have to reduce the number of Earth-like planets to only those that have Jupiter-sized neighbors. Earth-like planets also have to be accompanied by large moons in order to stabilize their spin, or else they will eventually wobble and even flip over after millions of years. (If the moon were tiny, like an asteroid, then small perturbations in the Earth’s spin would gradually build up over the aeons, according to Newton’s laws, and the Earth might eventually flip over. This would be disastrous for life, since there would be giant earthquakes, monstrous tsunamis, and horrendous volcanic eruptions as the crust of the Earth began to crack. Our moon is large enough so that these perturbations do not build up. But Mars, with tiny moons, may actually have flipped over in the distant past.)

all matter and energy in the universe is composed of tiny strings.

Each vibration of the string corresponds to a different subatomic particle. So the electron is not really a point particle. If you had a supermicroscope, you would see that it is not a particle at all but a vibrating string. The electron appears to be

corresponds to a different particle, such as a quark, mu meson, neutrino, photon, and so on. That is why physicists have discovered such a ridiculous number of subatomic particles. There are literally hundreds, all because they are just different vibrations of a tiny string. In this way, string theory can explain the quantum theory of subatomic particles. According to string theory, as the string moves, it forces space-time to curl up exactly as Einstein predicted, and hence it unifies Einstein’s theory and the quantum

turns out that supersymmetry is the largest symmetry ever found in physics. Supersymmetry can take all known subatomic particles and mix them together or rearrange them while preserving the original equation. In fact, supersymmetry is so powerful that it can take Einstein’s theory, including the graviton and the subatomic particles of the Standard Model, and rotate them or interchange them. This gives us a pleasing and natural way to unify Einstein’s theory of gravity and subatomic particles.

Although Einstein’s theory allows for the possibility of wormholes and faster-than-light travel, you need string theory to calculate how stable these wormholes are in the presence of quantum corrections.

these quantum corrections are infinite, so removing these infinities is one of the fundamental problems in physics. String theory eliminates these quantum corrections, because it has two types of quantum corrections that precisely cancel each other. This precise cancellation between particles and sparticles is due to supersymmetry.

must ultimately face the final challenge, which is experiment. CRITICISMS OF STRING THEORY Although this picture is compelling and persuasive, there are valid criticisms one can make of the theory.