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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Michio Kaku
Read between
March 3 - March 18, 2018
All of us are almost clones of one another, brothers and sisters descended from a tiny, hardy group of humans who could have easily fit inside a modern hotel ballroom.
If we scan all the life-forms that have ever existed on the Earth, from microscopic bacteria to towering forests, lumbering dinosaurs, and enterprising humans, we find that more than 99.9 percent of them eventually became extinct.
This means that extinction is the norm, that the odds are already stacked heavily against us.
The Earth has already sustained five major extinction cycles, in which up to 90 percent of all life-forms vanished from the Earth. As sure as day follows night, there will be more to come.
But this flowering has occurred during an interglacial period, meaning we will likely meet another ice age within the next ten thousand years.
We also face the possibility that the supervolcano under Yellowstone National Park may awaken from its long slumber, tearing the United States apart and engulfing the Earth in a choking, poisonous cloud of soot and debris. Previous eruptions took place 630,000, 1.3 million, and 2.1 million years ago. Each event was separated by roughly 700,000 years; therefore, we may be due for another colossal eruption in the next 100,000 years.
The dinosaurs became extinct because they didn’t have a space program. And if we become extinct because we don’t have a space program, it’ll serve us right. —LARRY NIVEN
Perhaps our fate is to eventually create a civilization that spans the entire Milky Way galaxy. Perhaps our destiny is truly in the stars.
Since it has about one hundred billion stars, there might be twenty billion Earth-sized planets orbiting a sun-like star in our galaxy alone. And since there are one hundred billion galaxies that can be seen with our instruments, we can estimate how many Earth-sized planets there are in the visible universe: a staggering two billion trillion.
History reveals that scientific revolutions come in waves, often stimulated by advances in physics. In the nineteenth century, the first wave of science and technology was made possible by physicists who created the theory of mechanics and thermodynamics. This enabled engineers to produce the steam engine, leading to the locomotive and the industrial revolution. This profound shift in technology lifted civilization from the curse of ignorance, backbreaking labor, and poverty and took us into the machine age. In the twentieth century, the second wave was spearheaded by physicists who mastered
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In the twenty-first century, the third wave of science has been expressed in high tech, spearheaded by the quantum physicists who invented the transistor and the laser. This made possible the supercomputer, the internet, modern telecommunications, GPS, and the explosion of the tiny chips that have permeated every aspect of our lives.
fourth wave of science, which consists of artificial intelligence, nanotechnology, and biotechnology.
We will consider the use of self-replicating robots, superstrong, lightweight nanomaterials, and bioengineered crops to drastically cut costs and make Mars into a veritable paradise.
fifth wave technologies will make it possible: nanoships, laser sails, ramjet fusion machines, antimatter engines.
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.
the first step we take in our long journey to the stars begins when we leave the Earth.
As the old Chinese proverb says, the journey of a thousand miles begins with the first step. The journey to the stars begins with the very first rocket.
Tsiolkovsky’s guiding philosophy was, “The Earth is our cradle, but we cannot be in the cradle forever,”
and he believed in a philosophy called cosmism, which holds that the future of humanity is to explore outer space.
The British government was so flummoxed by this advanced weapon that they had no words for it.
Instead of being “everything to everyone,” it became “nothing to nobody,” especially with its cost overruns and flight delays.
“Congress came to see NASA primarily as a jobs program, not an exploratory agency.” They also observed that “very little useful science got done in the space station…The station was about camping in space, not living in space.”
Looking back at those dark days, I am sometimes reminded of what happened to the great Chinese imperial fleet in the fifteenth century. Back then, the Chinese were the undisputed leaders in science and exploration. They invented gunpowder, the compass, and the printing press. They were unparalleled in military power and technology.
“The whole idea is to preserve the Earth…The goal [is] to be able to evacuate humans. The planet would become a park,” he wrote. As Bezos saw it, the polluting industrial output of the planet could eventually be moved into space.
When Apollo 14 landed on the moon in 1971, NASA officials did not know that commander Alan Shepard had secretly smuggled a six-iron golf club into the space capsule.
Mars is there, waiting to be reached. —BUZZ ALDRIN
I would like to die on Mars—just not on impact. —ELON MUSK
“There’s a silly notion that failure’s not an option at NASA,” Musk said. “Failure is an option here [at SpaceX]. If things are not failing, you are not innovating enough.”
Musk summed up his philosophy by saying, “I really don’t have any other motivation for personally accumulating assets,” he said, “except to be able to make the biggest contribution I can to making life multiplanetary.”
The space shuttle had two horrendous accidents out of a total of 135 launches, or about a 1.5 percent failure rate. The overall fatality rate of the space program has been 3.3 percent. Of the 544 people who have ever been in space, 18 have died.
In 1897 H. G. Wells wrote The War of the Worlds. The Martians in the novel plan to annihilate humanity and “terraform” the Earth so that its climate becomes like that of Mars.
There are also ferocious, planet-sized dust storms that can envelop all of Mars in a blanket of sand for weeks. But they would not do much damage, thanks to the planet’s low atmospheric pressure. Hundred-mile-an-hour winds would only feel like a ten-mile-an-hour breeze to an astronaut.
When I asked him what sparked this fascination with space, he told me that it all started with reading science fiction as a child.
“Life is a one-way trip, and one way to spend it is by going to Mars and starting a new branch of human civilization there.”
He believes that five hundred years from now, historians may not remember all the petty wars and conflicts of the twenty-first century, but humanity will celebrate the founding of its new community on Mars.
Planetary magnetic fields are generated by the motion of metal within a liquid core, creating electrical currents. Since the core of Mars is made of solid rock, it cannot create an appreciable magnetic field.
In addition, it is 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 space by the solar wind. As the atmospheric pressure dropped, the oceans boiled away.
Another process accelerated the loss of its atmosphere. Much of the original carbon dioxide on Mars dissolved into the oceans and turned into carbon compounds, which s...
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But because the core of Mars is probably solid, it has no significant tectonic activity, and its carbon dioxide was locked into the ground permanently. As carbon dioxide levels began to drop, a reverse greenhouse effect took place and the planet went into a deep freeze.
How bright and beautiful a comet is as it flies past our planet—provided it does fly past it. —ISAAC ASIMOV
Personally, Galileo believed that science and religion could coexist. He wrote that the purpose of science is to determine how the heavens go, while the purpose of religion is to determine how to go to heaven. In other words, science is about natural law, while religion is about ethics, and there is no conflict between them as long as one keeps this distinction in mind.
Human labor will be scarce and at a premium, yet there will be intense pressure to create new cities on distant worlds. This is where robots can make up the difference. At first, their job will be to perform the “three D’s”—jobs that are dangerous, dull, and dirty.
Then, AI hit a brick wall. Progress slowed to a crawl in the face of two main hurdles: pattern recognition and common sense.
Robots can see—many times better than we can, in fact—but they don’t understand what they see.
Confronted with a table, they perceive only lines, squares, triangles, and ovals. They cannot put these elements together and identify the whole. They do...
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The other obstacle is common sense. We know that water is wet, that strings can pull but not push, that blocks can push but not pull, and that mothers are older than their daughters.
Nature accomplishes miracles of computation by organizing the brain as a neural network, a learning machine. Your laptop never learns—it is just as dumb today as it was yesterday or last year.
The process of putting neural networks into a computer is known as deep learning.
In the future, when you want to talk to a doctor or lawyer, you might talk to your intelligent wall or wristwatch and ask for Robo-Doc or Robo-Lawyer, software programs that will be able to scan the internet and provide sound medical or legal advice. These programs would learn from repeated questions and get better and better at responding to—and perhaps even anticipating—your particular needs.
Like humans, they would be able to learn from experience until they master pattern recognition, which would allow them to move tools in three dimensions, and common sense, which would enable them to handle new situations.
