The Future of Humanity summary

Two events put the US far behind the Soviet Union in the race to outer space: the first was in 1957, when the Soviets launched Sputnik – the first human-made satellite. Then, in 1961 – much to the delight of the Soviet Union and the frustration of the US – Yuri Gagarin became the first human to orbit the earth.

At this low-point, the US became determined to be the first to put a human on the moon.

Getting people to the moon is clearly something we can do, but creating the conditions for comfortable living is another matter.

For humans to survive for long periods, we need enough of three critical things: air, food and water. Can we find these on the moon?

Alongside Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, people around the world have become familiar with the name Elon Musk – the billionaire entrepreneur behind the SpaceX program. While Bezos has his sights set on the moon, Musk is looking a little further, to Mars. He hopes to make human beings “multiplanetary” and give them alternative living quarters to Earth.

Similar to Bezos, Musk has already made contributions to space travel while moving closer to his long-term goal of colonizing Mars.

At this point, you might be thinking, “Isn’t it expensive to build a city on Mars?” Indeed, building a city in the traditional sense, by using manual labor and transporting materials and equipment, would be far too costly: the estimated costs could potentially bankrupt NASA as well as entire nations.

But this doesn’t mean a city is out of the question. Instead, we need to look at different methods of building such as using nanotechnology, including a material known as graphene.

For as long as we’ve been considering our own travels to the moon or Mars, we’ve been wondering about the mysteries that await us on distant planets and faraway galaxies. An important question remains: “Are there any Earth-like planets out there in the deep recesses of space?”

An important tool in answering this question may be the nanoship.

Let’s say we get our nanoships off to other galaxies and find another Earth-like planet with similar gravity and atmosphere. Great, you might think, let’s get off our overcrowded, warming planet and head for this new world. However, before you start packing, you need to realize the distances involved. The habitable planet is likely to be so far away, it’ll take centuries for us to reach.

One way around this problem is to build multigenerational starships, which have the dual capabilities of traveling the vast distances required while sustaining the life and death of several generations of people.

If you have an idea about how an extraterrestrial alien might appear, it’s probably due to the countless Hollywood movies on the subject. But just because they’re the subject of so much science fiction, this doesn’t mean that alien life is out of the question.

If intelligent alien life does exist, they’re likely to have one important similarity to us – they’ll be a carbon-based lifeform. That’s because carbon satisfies two key criteria for life to form: the capacity to store information such as genes and DNA and the ability to reproduce.