Physics of the Impossible by Kaku Michio

Author:Kaku, Michio [Kaku, Michio]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Anchor
Published: 2008-03-11T04:00:00+00:00

One day in the distant future we will have our last nice day on Earth. Eventually, billions of years from now, the sky will be on fire. The sun will swell into a raging inferno that will fill up the entire sky, dwarfing everything in the heavens. As temperatures on Earth soar, the oceans will boil and evaporate, leaving a scorched, parched landscape. The mountains will eventually melt and turn liquid, creating lava flows where vibrant cities once stood.

According to the laws of physics, this grim scenario is inevitable. The Earth will eventually die in flames as it is consumed by the sun. This is a law of physics.

This calamity will take place within the next five billion years. On such a cosmic time scale, the rise and fall of human civilizations are but tiny ripples. One day we must leave the Earth or die. So how will humanity, our descendants, cope when conditions on Earth become intolerable?

Mathematician and philosopher Bertrand Russell once lamented “that no fire, no heroism, no intensity of thought or feeling, can preserve a life beyond the grave; that all the labors of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness of human genius, are destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar system; and the whole temple of Man’s achievement must inevitably be buried beneath the debris of a universe in ruins…”

To me this is one of the most sobering passages in the English language. But Russell wrote this passage in an era when rocket ships were considered impossible. Today the prospect of one day leaving the Earth is not so far-fetched. Carl Sagan once said we should become a “two planet species.” Life on Earth is so precious, he said, that we should spread to at least one other inhabitable planet in case of a catastrophe. The Earth moves in the middle of a “cosmic shooting gallery” of asteroids, comets, and other debris drifting near the orbit of the Earth, and a collision with any one of them could result in our demise.

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