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

by Michio Kaku

One theory states that animals don’t have a sophisticated memory system because they rely on instinct and therefore don’t require the ability to envision the future.

Because the cost of computer chips has dropped dramatically, we could send thousands of them to the stars in the hope that a few of them might survive the hazardous journey. (The strategy mimics that of Mother Nature, in which plants scatter thousands of tiny seeds to the winds to boost the odds that some will succeed.)

A nanoship whizzing by the Centauri system at 20 percent of the speed of light would have just a few hours to complete its mission.

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.

ROCKET ENGINE SPECIFIC IMPULSE Solid fuel rocket 250 Liquid fuel rocket 450 Nuclear fission rocket 800 to 1,000 Ion engine 5,000 Plasma engine 1,000 to 30,000 Nuclear fusion rocket 2,500 to 200,000 Nuclear pulsed rocket 10,000 to 1 million Antimatter rocket 1 million to 10 million

Although chemical rockets might still be the best option for time-sensitive missions, ion engines would be a solid, dependable choice when time is not the most important consideration.

In the wake of the 100 Year Starship symposium, James and Gregory wrote a book, Starship Century: Toward the Grandest Horizon, containing many of the ideas presented there.

James, an expert on microwave radiation, believes that light sails are our best chance of travel beyond the solar system.

Another variation of the Daedalus rocket might be fueled by laser fusion, in which giant laser beams compress a pellet of hydrogen-rich material. This process is called inertial confinement. The National Ignition Facility (NIF), based at the Livermore National Laboratory in California, exemplifies this process. Its battery of laser beams—192 gigantic beams in 4,900-foot-long tubes—is the largest in the world. When the laser beams are focused on a tiny sample of hydrogen-rich lithium deuteride, their energy incinerates the surface of the material, resulting in a mini explosion that causes the pellet to collapse and raises its temperature to one hundred million degrees Celsius. This creates a fusion reaction that unleashes five hundred trillion watts of power in a few trillionths of a second.

When matter and antimatter collide, both are annihilated into pure energy, so the reaction releases energy with 100 percent efficiency. A nuclear weapon, by contrast, is only 1 percent efficient; most of the energy inside a hydrogen bomb is wasted.

Also, antimatter is the most expensive form of matter in the world. At today’s prices, a gram would go for about $70 trillion.

The leading theory is that something violated the perfect symmetry between matter and antimatter at the Big Bang, but we don’t know what it is.

The famous novel Tau Zero by Poul Anderson is about a ramjet fusion rocket that suffers a malfunction and cannot shut down. As it accelerates toward the speed of light, bizarre relativistic distortions begin to occur. Time slows down within the rocket, but the universe around it ages as usual. The faster it goes, the slower time beats inside it. To someone on the starship, however, things seem perfectly normal inside, while the universe outside ages rapidly. Eventually, the starship goes so fast that millions of years pass outside the ship as the crew members watch helplessly. After traveling uncounted billions of years into the future, the crew realizes that the universe is no longer expanding but is actually shrinking. The expansion of the universe is finally reversing. The temperature soars as the galaxies begin to come together toward the final Big Crunch. At the end of the story, just as all the stars are collapsing, the rocket ship manages to skim past the cosmic fireball and witness a Big Bang as a new universe is born.

You need lots of positive energy to naturally create the gateway between universes, as with a black hole. But you also need to create negative matter or energy artificially to keep the gateway open and prevent a collapse.

Although Newton’s laws do not allow negative energy, quantum theory does through the Casimir effect, which was proposed in 1948 and measured in the laboratory in 1997.

Of these, one and only one method has proven to extend the life span of animals, sometimes even doubling it. It is called caloric restriction, or severely limiting the intake of calories in an animal’s diet. On average, animals that eat 30 percent fewer calories live 30 percent longer.

Recently, a promising chemical called resveratrol has been isolated. Resveratrol, found in red wine, helps to activate the sirtuin molecule, which has been shown to slow down the oxidation process, a principle component in aging, and therefore it may help protect the body from age-related molecular damage.

In the long run, digital immortality may be the most efficient way to explore the stars. If our fragile biological bodies cannot stand the strain of interstellar travel, there is the possibility of sending our consciousness to the stars instead.

It’s easy to imagine that, in the future, telepathy and telekinesis will be the norm; we will interact with machines by sheer thought. Our mind will be able to turn on the lights, activate the internet, dictate letters, play video games, communicate with friends, call for a car, purchase merchandise, conjure any movie—all just by thinking.

We will need to study and refine this technique, but by the late twenty-first century, it is conceivable that we might be able to upload complex memories into our brain.

Instead of transmitting bits of information, brain net will transmit entire emotions, feelings, sensations, and memories. 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. This could revolutionize the entertainment industry, in the same way that the talkies rapidly replaced silent movies. In the future, audiences may be able to feel the emotions of the actors, to experience their pain, joy, or suffering. The movies of today may soon be obsolete.

Many scientists hope that eventually some of the genes for certain forms of cancer can also be replaced using CRISPR technology, thereby stopping the growth of tumors.

Greg Stock, a biophysicist affiliated with UCLA, has emphasized that humans have been changing the genetics of the animals and plants around us for thousands of years. When I interviewed him, he pointed out that what appears “natural” to us today is actually a byproduct of intense selective breeding. The modern dinner table would be impossible without the skills of ancient breeders who cultivated plants and animals to suit our needs. (Today’s corn, for example, is a genetically modified version of maize and cannot reproduce without human intervention. The kernels, or seeds, do not fall off by themselves, and farmers have to remove and plant them for corn to grow.) And the variety of dogs that we see around us are a byproduct of selectively breeding a single species, the gray wolf. So humans have altered the genes of scores of plants and animals, such as dogs for hunting and cows and chickens for food.

Advocates of transhumanism believe that when we meet advanced civilizations in space, they will have evolved to the point of modifying their biological bodies to accommodate the rigors of living on many different planets.

Physicist Paul Davies goes one step further: “My conclusion is a startling one. I think it very likely—in fact inevitable—that biological intelligence is only a transitory phenomenon, a fleeting phase in the evolution of intelligence in the universe. If we ever encounter extraterrestrial intelligence, I believe it is overwhelmingly likely to be post-biological in nature, a conclusion that has obvious and far-reaching ramifications for SETI [the search for extraterrestrial intelligence].”

And what do we want? Surveys show that after our basic needs are met, we place a high value on the opinions of our peers. We want to look good, especially in front of the opposite sex. We want the admiration of our circle of friends. We might hesitate before altering ourselves too dramatically, especially if it makes us look different from those around us.

But I think there is a “baseline” personality that is hardwired into our brains. For example, if drugs are legalized, then many experts estimate that perhaps 5 percent of the human race would become addicted. But the other 95 percent, seeing how drugs can limit or destroy a person’s life, will steer clear of them, preferring to live in the real world rather than a drug-altered one. Similarly, once virtual reality is perfected, perhaps a similar number of people may prefer to live in cyberspace rather than in the real world, but it is not likely to be an overwhelming number.

Remember that our cavemen ancestors wanted to be useful and helpful to others.

It is hardwired into ...

I imagine that in the future, people will have the option of putting on devices, implants, and accessories that give them superpowers and enhanced abilities, but afterward they will take most of them off and interact normally in society. Or if they permanently alter themselves, it will be in a way that enhances their standing in society.

(Perhaps the only people who will clone themselves are rich people who have no heirs, or no heirs they particularly care for.

They might clone themselves and give their wealth to themselves as children.)

Physicist Stephen Hawking has warned, “We only have to look at ourselves to see how intelligent life might develop into something we wouldn’t want to meet.”

Personally, I believe that any advanced civilization in space will be peaceful. They might be aeons ahead of us, which is plenty of time for them to resolve ancient sectarian, tribal, racial, and fundamentalist conflicts. But we must be prepared if they are not. Rather than reaching out and sending radio signals into space to announce our existence to any alien civilization, it might be more prudent to study them first. I believe we will make contact with an extraterrestrial civilization, perhaps sometime in this century. Instead of being merciless conquerors, they might be benevolent and willing to share their technology with us. This would then be one of the most important turning points in history, comparable to the discovery of fire. It could determine the course of human civilization for centuries into the future.

As we have seen, we now know that Earth-like planets have to be accompanied by Jupiter-sized planets in circular orbits in order to clean out the asteroids and debris that can destroy life.

We can make some inferences, however, based on our own evolution. When we analyze how Homo sapiens developed intelligence, we see at least three components that were essential in our rise from the swamp.

1. Some Form of Stereo Eyes

2. Some Form of Opposable Thumb or Grasping Appendage One hallmark of a species that could develop an intelligent civilization is the ability to manipulate the environment.

3. Language Among most species, any lesson an individual might learn dies with that animal. In order to hand down and accumulate essential information from generation to generation, some form of language is crucial. The more abstract the language, the more information can be conveyed between generations.

For example, if one randomly analyzes the English language, one finds that the letter e is the most common letter in the alphabet.

Hiding under a rock and grabbing prey with its tentacles is a very successful strategy, so octopi probably had no need to develop intelligence. In other words, there was no evolutionary pressure placed on them to evolve greater intelligence.

In fact, most animals we see around us are very successful and hence had no evolutionary pressure to change.

Precisely because we are weak and clumsy, we were under enormous pressure to acquire skills the other primates lacked.

To compensate for our deficiencies, we had to bec...

As we’ve discussed, the most common form of life in the galaxy might be aquatic.

But more important, any aquatic species will have a problem with energy, since you cannot burn fossil fuels in water and it’s difficult to shield electrical power.

For example, if intelligent creatures evolved on a place like Venus or Titan, they may be faced with a permanent cloud cover over their world, so they would never see the stars. Their concept of the universe would be limited to their planet.

We are lucky to live on the Earth, where energy sources are plentiful, where fire and combustion are possible, where the atmosphere allows electrical devices to function without short circuits, where silicon is plentiful, and where we can see the night sky.

There are many possible solutions to this paradox. My thinking is as follows: If they have the ability to actually reach the planet Earth from hundreds of light-years away, then their technology is much more advanced than ours. In that case, we are arrogant to believe that they would travel trillions of miles to visit a backward civilization with nothing to offer. After all, when we visit the forest, do we try to talk to the deer and the squirrels? Maybe initially we might try, but since they don’t talk back, we would quickly lose interest and leave.

Using the total energy consumption of the planet Earth, we find that we are currently a Type 0.7 civilization.