MICHIO KAKU:
3 MIND-BLOWING PREDICTIONS
ABOUT THE FUTURE
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Jan 4, 2021
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Michio Kaku: 3 mind-blowing predictions about the future
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Carl Sagan believed humanity
needed to become a multi-planet species as an insurance policy against the next
huge catastrophe on Earth. Now, Elon Musk is working to see that mission
through, starting with a colony of a million humans on Mars. Where will our
species go next?
Theoretical physicist Michio
Kaku looks decades into the future and makes three bold predictions about human
space travel, the potential of 'brain net', and our coming victory over cancer.
"[I]n the future, the
word 'tumor' will disappear from the English language," says Kaku.
"We will have years of warning that there is a colony of cancer cells
growing in our body. And our descendants will wonder: How could we fear cancer
so much?"
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MICHIO KAKU:
Dr. Michio Kaku is the
co-founder of string field theory, and is one of the most widely recognized
scientists in the world today. He has written 4 New York Times Best Sellers, is
the science correspondent for CBS This Morning and has hosted numerous science
specials for BBC-TV, the Discovery/Science Channel. His radio show broadcasts
to 100 radio stations every week. Dr. Kaku holds the Henry Semat Chair and
Professorship in theoretical physics at the City College of New York (CUNY), where
he has taught for over 25 years. He has also been a visiting professor at the
Institute for Advanced Study as well as New York University (NYU).
Read Michio Kaku's latest book
"The Future of Humanity: Our Destiny in the Universe" at
http://amzn.to/2X9RRNE
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TRANSCRIPT:
MICHIO KAKU: We are entering
what I call the next golden era of space exploration. We have not just new
energy and new financing and money coming from Silicon Valley, we also have a
new vision emerging. For Elon Musk of SpaceX it's to create a multi-planet
species. However, for Jeff Bezos of Amazon, he wants to make Earth into a park
so that all the heavy industries, all the pollution, goes into outer space. And
Jeff Bezos wants to set an Amazon-type delivery system connecting the earth to
the moon. And so he wants to lift all the heavy industries off the planet Earth
to make Earth a paradise and to put all the heavy industries in outer space.
Now, I once talked to Carl
Sagan and he said that because the earth is in the middle of a shooting gallery
of asteroids and comets and meteors, it's inevitable that we will be hit with a
planet buster. Something like what hit the dinosaurs, 65 million years ago, we
need an insurance policy. Now, he was clear to say that we're not talking about
moving the population of the earth into outer space—that costs too much money.
And we have problems of our own on the earth like global warming. We have to
deal with those problems on the earth not flee to outer space. But as an
insurance policy, we have to make sure that humans become a two-planet species.
These are the words of Carl Sagan.
And now, of course, Elon Musk
has revived this vision by talking about a multi-planet species. He wants to
put up to a million colonists on the planet Mars, sent to Mars by his rockets
financed by a combination of public and private funding, including fusion
rockets, ramjet fusion rockets, including anti-matter rockets. Some of these
rockets, of course, their technologies won't be available till the next 100
years. However, the laws of physics make it possible to send postage-stamp-size
chips to the nearby stars. So think of a chip, perhaps this big, on a parachute
and have thousands of them sent into outer space energized by perhaps 800
megawatts of laser power. By shooting this gigantic bank of laser energy into
outer space, by energizing all these mini-parachutes you could then begin to
accelerate them to about 20% the speed of light. This is with doable technology
today. It's just a question of engineering. It's a question of political will
and economics but there's no physics, there's no law of physics preventing you
from shooting these chips to 20% the speed of light. That means Proxima
Centauri, part of the Alpha Centauri triple star system, could be within the
range of such a device. Now think about that. That means that within 20 years,
after 20 years of launch, we might be able to have the first starship go to a
nearby planet. And it turns out that Proxima Centauri B is an Earth-like planet
that circles around the closest star to the planet Earth—what a coincidence. So
it means that we've already staked out our first destination for visitation by
an interstellar starship. And that...
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