Beyond: Our Future in Space (42 page)

12
. Built in the early 1950s, the Arecibo dish is a formidable radio telescope. It’s so large that it’s not steerable; it just stares at a strip of sky that passes overhead. The dish is made of aluminum panels equal in area to a dozen football fields. The feed that detects the radio waves is suspended above the dish by three towers the size of the Washington Monument. Frank Drake likes to say that the dish could hold 100 million boxes of breakfast cereal or all the beer drunk on Earth in a single day.

13
. “The Great Filter—Are We Past It?” by R. Hanson 1998, an unpublished paper archived online at http://hanson.gmu.edu/greatfilter.html.

14
. “Where Are They? Why I Hope the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence Finds Nothing” by N. Bostrom 1998.
MIT Technology Review
, May/June, pp. 72–77.

14: A Universe Made for Us

  
1
.
Year Million: Science at the Far Edge of Knowledge
, ed. by D. Broderick 2006. Giza, Egypt: Atlas and Company.

  
2
. The evanescence of our civilization and cultural artifacts is sobering, given the technological prowess we exhibit. One book that conveyed this vividly was
The World Without Us
by A. Weisman 2007. New York: Picador. Weisman plays out a future where we cease to exist overnight and the infrastructure of human civilization decays and disappears with surprising rapidity. The Long Now Foundation swims against the dominant cultural trend by espousing “slower and better” over “faster and cheaper” and supporting projects with a millennial time frame. Most notably, its
Clock of the Long Now
is a mechanical timekeeping device designed to operate for 10,000 years without human intervention.

  
3
.
Wired
magazine, April 2006, online at http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/14.07/posts.html?pg=4.

  
4
. The experiments on mice are being conducted by Mark Roth at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle. See http://labs.fhcrc.org/roth/. Dog experiments have been done at the Safar Center for Resuscitation Research in Pittsburgh. See http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/11/magazine/11ideas_section4-21.html?_r=0.

  
5
.
Cloning After Dolly: Who’s Still Afraid?
by G. E. Pence 2004. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield.

  
6
. “Embryo Space Colonization to Overcome the Interstellar Time Distance Bottleneck” by A. Crowl, J. Hunt, and A. M. Hein 2012.
Journal of the British Interplanetary Society
, vol. 65, pp. 283–85.

  
7
. “Transmission of Information by Extraterrestrial Civilizations” by N. Kardashev 1964.
Soviet Astronomy
, vol. 8, p. 217. For his more recent work, see “On the Inevitability and Possible Structures of Supercivilizations” by N. Kardashev 1984, in
The Search for Extraterrestrial Life: Recent Developments
, ed. by M. G. Papagiannis. Dordrecht: Reidel, pp. 497–504.

  
8
. “The Physics of Interstellar Travel: To One Day Reach the Stars” by M. Kaku 2010, online at http://mkaku.org/home/articles/the-physics-of-interstellar-travel/.

  
9
. “Search for Artificial Stellar Sources of Infrared Radiation” by F. J. Dyson 1960.
Science
, vol. 131, pp. 1667–68.

10
. “Fermilab Dyson Sphere Searches” using data from NASA’s IRAS satellite, with results quoted online at http://home.fnal.gov/~carrigan/infrared_astronomy/Fermilab_search.htm.

11
.
Universe or Multiverse?
ed. by B. J. Carr 2007. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. See also “Multiverse Cosmological Models” by P. C. W. Davies 2004.
Modern Physics Letters A
, vol. 19, pp. 727–44.

12
. The first fine-tuning argument was the fact that the age of a biological universe cannot be too short or too long, “Dirac’s Cosmology and Mach’s Principle” by R. H. Dicke 1961.
Nature
, vol. 192, pp. 440–41. Since then, the idea has been explored by a number of physicists, for example:
Coincidences: Dark Matter, Mankind, and Anthropic Cosmology
by J. Gribbin and M. Rees 1989. New York: Bantam. Also:
The Goldilocks Enigma: Why Is the Universe Just Right for Life?
by P. Davies 2007. New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. For a philosophical perspective, see
A Fine-Tuned Universe: The Quest for God in Science and Theology
by A. McGrath 2009. Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press.

13
. “Naturally Speaking: The Naturalness Criterion and Physics at the LHC” by G. F. Guidice 2008, in
Perspectives on LHC Physics
, ed. by G. Kane and A. Pierce. Singapore: World Scientific. See also Prof. Matt Strassler’s excellent primer online at http://profmattstrassler.com/articles-and-posts/particle-physics-basics/the-hierarchy-problem/naturalness/.

14
. “Eternal Inflation and Its Implications” by A. Guth 2007.
Journal of Physics A: Mathematical and Physical
, vol. 40, no. 25, p. 6811.

15
.
Impossibility: Limits of Science and the Science of Limits
by J. Barrow 1998. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

16
. “X-Tech and the Search for Infra Particle Intelligence” by H. de Garis 2014, from
Best of H+
, online at http://hplusmagazine.com/2014/02/20/x-tech-and-the-search-for-infra-particle-intelligence/.

17
.
Intelligent Machinery, A Heretical Theory
by A. Turing 1951, reprinted in
Philosophia Mathematica
1996, vol. 4, no. 3, pp. 256–60. The von Neumann quote comes from Stanislaw Ulam’s “Tribute to John von Neumann” in the May 1958
Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society
, p. 5.

18
. “Are You Living in a Computer Simulation?” by N. Bostrom 2003.
Philosophical Quarterly
, vol. 53, no. 211, pp. 243–55. The views of Kurzweil and Moravec are represented in their popular books, in particular
The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology
by R. Kurzweil 2006. New York: Penguin; and
Robot: Mere Machine to Transcendent Mind
by H. Moravec 2000. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Credits

Figure 1
Creative Commons and Wikpedia/Ataileopard.
Figure 2
Courtesy Elsevier and Chuansheng Chen/University of California Irvine.
Figure 3
The scholar and academic skeptic Carneades, from the medieval book
Nuremberg Chronicle
.
Figure 4
NASA History Division.
Figure 5
A Treatise of the System of the World
by Isaac Newton, published in 1728.
Figure 6
NASA Great Images.
Figure 7
Wikimedia Commons and Fastfission.
Figure 8
Wikimedia Commons and Lokilech.
Figure 9
Wikimedia Commons and Russian Federation.
Figure 10
Mark Wade/Astronautix
.com.
Figure 11
U.S. Government/USAF.
Figure 12
Roel van der Hoorn/NASA.
Figure 13
NASA.
Figure 14
Wikipedia Commons and David Kring/USRA.
Figure 15
Wikimedia Commons and NOAA/Mysid.
Figure 16
Chris Impey.
Figure 17
Chris Impey.
Figure 18
Wikimedia Commons and Kelvin Case.
Figure 19
“Countdown Continues on Commercial Flight,”
Albuquerque Journal
.
Figure 20
NASA/Regan Geeseman.
Figure 21
SpaceX.
Figure 22
NASA.
Figure 23
U.S. Government/FAA.
Figure 24
Wikimedia Commons and Nasa.apollo.
Figure 25
NASA/Kennedy Space Center.
Figure 26
Andrew Ketsdever.
Figure 27
NASA/JPL.
Figure 28
NASA.
Figure 29
Wikimedia Commons and Aldaron.
Figure 30
Matthew R. Francis.
Figure 31
Planetary Habitability Laboratory/University of Puerto Rico.
Figure 32
Postage stamp, Chinese State.
Figure 33
Wikimedia Commons and Dave Rajczewski.
Figure 34
Data source reports of Satellite Industry Association.
Figure 35
Patrick Collins.
Figure 36
NASA/Dennis M. Davidson.
Figure 37
NASA.
Figure 38
NASA/JPL/University of Arizona.
Figure 39
NASA/JPL/Caltech.
Figure 40
NASA/John Frassanito and Associates.
Figure 41
NASA.
Figure 42
Christopher Barnatt/Explaining the Future.com.
Figure 43
NASA/MSFC/D. Higginbotham.
Figure 44
From
Xenology: An Introduction to the Scientific Study of Extraterrestrial Life, Intelligence, and Civilization
by Robert A. Freitas, Jr., 1979, Xenology Research Institute, Sacramento, California.
Figure 45
Biosphere 2, College of Science, University of Arizona.
Figure 46
NASA.
Figure 47
NASA/JSC.
Figure 48
Javiera Guedes.
Figure 49
U.S. Government/LLNL.
Figure 50
NASA.
Figure 51
NASA.
Figure 52
Wikimedia Commons and Picoquant.
Figure 53
H. Schweiker/WIYN and NOAO/AURA/NSF.
Figure 54
NASA.
Figure 55
Wikimedia Commons and Fastfission.
Figure 56
Chris Impey.
Figure 57
Wikimedia Commons and Bibi Saint-Pol.
Figure 58
Andrei Linde.
Figure 59
Wikimedia Commons and Was a bee.

Index

Page numbers listed correspond to the print edition of this book. You can use your device’s search function to locate particular terms in the text.

Page numbers starting with 265 refer to endnotes.
Page numbers in
italics
refer to illustrations.

Able (monkey), 47–48

Aboriginal Australians, 8

abstract thinking, 13–17, 18–19

Abu Dhabi, UAE, 106

Adams, Mike, 82

adenine, 6

Advanced Robotic Development Lab,
206

aerodynamics, 26, 66–73, 82–83

aesthetic judgment, 15

A4 rocket,
33

Africa, 15–16, 120

as origin site for early human dispersion, 5, 7–8, 11, 15, 118, 186, 202, 218, 262

Air Force, US, 239

covert projects of, 69, 72

in rocket development, 36–37,
48
, 71,
85

Rutan’s work for, 82

in space exploration, 50, 73, 272

airplanes:

development of, 69–72, 83, 262

safety of,
108
, 109

Albert (monkey), 47

Alcubierre, Miguel, 229–30

Aldrin, Buzz, 108, 170

aliens, extraterrestrial:

aggressive, 259

hyperintelligent, 258, 260,
260
, 262

hypothetical categorization of, 252–57

lack of evidence of, 236–37, 239–44, 257, 291

potential to communicate with, 52, 189, 234–35, 238,
239
,
246

potentially dead civilizations of, 243–44

search for, 186–91,
189
, 236–44,
246
, 291

aliens, extraterrestrial (
continue
d
)

speculative number of, 188, 233–35

as unrecognizable, 216, 244

Allen, John, 192–93

Allen, Paul, 84–85, 188

Allen Telescope Array, 188–89, 243

Alling, Abigail, 194

Alpha Centauri system,
132
, 133, 215,
216
, 219–20, 222, 225–26

Alzheimer’s disease, 115

Amazon, 79, 103

Americas:

European settlement of, 204, 243, 250

population dispersion into, 8, 218

amino acids, 8

Amish, 203

ammonia, 125, 173

Anaxagoras, 17–18,
17

Anderson, Eric, 275

Anderson, Laurie, 76

Anders, William, 270

Andes mountains, 172

population adaptation to altitude in, 119

Andreessen, Marc, 79

Andrews, Dana, 223

animals:

in Biosphere 2, 193

evolution of, 172

human beings compared to, 186, 262

minimum viable population in, 201

in religious sacrifice, 119

in scientific research, 46–49, 250–51

Anonym, Lepht, 207

Ansari, Anousheh, 91

Antarctica, 169

Antares rocket, 275

anthropocentrism, 244, 291

antimatter, 221–22, 254

ants, 193

apes, human beings compared to, 10

Apollo 1, loss of crew of, 43, 107

Apollo 11, 13, 30, 45, 56

Apollo program, 30, 42–44, 49–51, 55,
64
, 108, 157–58,
158
, 170, 176, 196, 219, 270, 271, 272

Arabs, use of rockets by, 23

Archon Genomics X Prize, 93

Archytas, 19, 22

Area 51, 238, 240

Arecibo Observatory,
239
, 243, 292–93

Ares, 163

Ariane 5 rocket, 113

Arianespace, 106

Aristarchus, 19

Aristotle, 19–20

Arizona, University of,
193

Lunar and Planetary Laboratory of, 156

arms race, 24, 36, 139

Armstrong, Neil, 43, 45, 56, 71, 74, 108, 158

Army, German, Ordnance Department, 32

Army, US:

in rocket development, 35, 36