Quotes from Michio Kaku

Many people ask the simple question, "Why can't we cure the common cold?" Actually, we can. But since there are over 300 rhinoviruses that can cause colds, and since they constantly mutate, it makes no sense to develop 300 vaccines to hit this moving target. We simply live with it.

The next big particle accelerator currently in the planning stage is the International Linear Collider (ILC), consisting of a straight tube approximately thirty miles long in which beams of electrons and anti-electrons will collide.

Your laptop never learns—it is just as dumb today as it was yesterday or last year. But the human brain literally rewires itself after learning any task.

Rare earth elements are crucial for the electronics industry but are mostly found in China. (Rare earths are located everywhere in small quantities, but the Chinese rare earth industry makes up 97 percent of the world trade.

Quantum theory says that there must be quantum corrections to pure blackness, so black holes are actually gray. (And they emit a faint radiation called Hawking radiation.)

And there is no such thing as absolute zero, the temperature at which all motion stops. (Even as we approach it, atoms continue to move slightly, which is called the zero-point energy.)

The process of putting neural networks into a computer is known as deep learning. As this technology continues to develop, it may revolutionize a number of industries. 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.

Hollywood movies, however, have brainwashed us into thinking that we can defeat the alien invaders if they are a few decades or centuries ahead of us in technology. Hollywood assumes that we can win by using some primitive, clever trick. In Independence Day, all we have to do is inject a simple computer virus into their operating system to bring them to their knees, as if the aliens use Microsoft Windows.

Is everything we do determined by the cause-and-effect chain of genes, environment, and the cells that make up our brain, or can we freely form intentions that influence our actions in the world?

This means that subatomic particles are just like musical notes. The universe is a symphony of strings, physics represents the harmonies of these notes, and the "mind of God" that Einstein chased after for so many decades is cosmic music resonating through hyperspace.

Given the issue is so fundamentally important to our view of who we are, a claim that our free will is illusory should be based on fairly direct evidence," he wrote in a 2004 book. "Such evidence is not available.

The Europa Clipper is scheduled for launch sometime around 2022. Costing approximately $2 billion, its purpose is to analyze the ice cover of Europa and the composition and nature of its ocean for signs of organic chemicals.

This is not just an academic exercise, since one day we may have to alter and enhance our bodies using cybernetics or even change our genetic makeup in order to survive in hostile exoplanetary environments. Transhumanism, instead of being a branch of science fiction or a fringe movement, may become an essential part of our very existence.

According to him, microscopic robots, or nanobots, will circulate in our blood and "destroy pathogens, correct DNA errors, eliminate toxins, and perform many other tasks to enhance our physical well-being.

En algún momento debemos esperar que las máquinas tomen el control. ALAN TURING

In 1972, the seagull was deposed when a conference organizer, unable to check back about what Lorenz wanted to call an upcoming talk, wrote his own title that switched the metaphor to a butterfly.)

Since photographs of galaxies only show the beautiful swirling mass of stars, whatever is holding the mass together must not interact with light—it must be invisible.

Once a small planet is discovered, astronomers try to determine which category it belongs to. This is like biologists trying to classify a new animal as either being a mammal or reptile.

Even the deepest point in the ocean is littered with trash: a grocery bag was recently seen drifting along the bottom of the Mariana Trench.

No aspect of our world is as mysterious as consciousness, the state of awareness that animates our every waking moment, the sense of being located in a body that exists within a larger world of color, sound, and touch, all of it filtered through our thoughts and imbued by emotion.

Life may seem pointless if we are fated to spend it staring stupidly at our ultra-intelligent progeny as they try to describe their ever more spectacular discoveries in baby-talk that we can understand.

Fruit flies have only 250,000 neurons, and they too display complex behaviors. In lab experiments, when faced with dim mating prospects, some seek out alcohol, the consciousness-altering substance that's available to them in nature in broken-open, fermenting fruit.

In 2012, a few months after Planetary Resources unveiled its plan at a press conference, NASA announced the Robotic Asteroid Prospector project, which will analyze the feasibility of mining them. Then, in the fall of 2016, NASA launched a billion-dollar probe, called OSIRIS-REx, to meet Bennu, an asteroid measuring sixteen hundred feet across that will pass the Earth in 2135.

La Tierra ya ha sufrido cinco grandes ciclos de extinción, en cada uno de los cuales desapareció hasta el 90 por ciento de las formas de vida. Tan seguro como que el día sigue a la noche, habrá más en el futuro.