6. The Proxmire incident was described in “Searching for Good Science: The Cancellation of NASA’s SETI Program” by S. J. Garber 1999. Journal of the British Interplanetary Society, vol. 52, pp. 3–12. Bryan’s attack is described in “Ear to the Universe Is Plugged by Budget Cutters” by J. N. Wilford, in the New York Times on October 7, 1993, online at http://www.nytimes.com/1993/10/07/us/ear-to-the-universe-is-plugged-by-budget-cutters.html.
7. “That Time Jules Verne Caused a UFO Scare” by R. Miller, online at http://io9.com/that-time-jules-verne-caused-a-ufo-scare-453662253.
8. “Where Is Everybody? An Account of Fermi’s Question” by E. Jones 1985. Los Alamos Technical Report LA-10311-MS, scanned and reproduced online at http://www.fas.org/sgp/othergov/doe/lanl/la-10311-ms.pdf.
9. More than fifty (mostly) plausible explanations for the “Great Silence” and the absence of contact are laid out in If the Universe Is Teeming with Aliens . . . Where Is Everybody? by S. Webb 2002. New York: Copernicus Books.
10. Rare Earth: Why Complex Life Is Uncommon in the Universe by P. D. Ward and D. Brownlee 2000. Dordrecht: Springer-Verlag.
11. There’s a robust argument to be made for procrastination. In any field where the technology advances exponentially, the sum of all previous projects will be eclipsed by the next project. In astronomy, this was the case through the 1980s and 1990s as CCD detectors advanced in size and sensitivity so rapidly that each new survey greatly surpassed the one that preceded it. The same argument could be made currently for mapping genomes. The argument is facetious, and of course science progresses because scientists continue to try to advance knowledge without waiting for the better capability that’s imminent.
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 by R. Hanson 1998, an unpublished paper archived online at http://hanson.gmu.edu/greatfilter.html.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 2
1 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 (continued)
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
in space exploration, 50
Art of Electronics, The (Horowitz), 237
artificial intelligence (AI), 179, 208, 245, 249, 259
human intelligence surpassed by, 258
Artist in Space program, 74, 76
Artsutanov, Yuri, 149
Asia, population dispersion into, 7–8, 11, 15, 218
Asimov, Isaac, 94
Asteroid Redirect Mission, 104–5, 146, 156
asteroids:
capture of, 104–5, 146, 173, 276
impacts by, 245
mining of, 155–56, 182
astrobiology, 123–24
astronauts, 141, 272
physiological effects on, 114–17
selection criteria for, 73–75
sex and, 200
see also specific individuals
Atacama Desert, population adaptation to dry environment in, 119
Athene, 163
Atlantic Ocean, first non-stop flight over, 90–91
Atlas rocket, 36–37, 71, 72
atmosphere:
of Earth, 8, 70–71, 70, 118, 167, 172, 174
of exoplanets, 216
habitability requirements for, 132–33, 216–17
of Mars, 124, 164–66, 173–74, 216
of Venus, 171
atomic bomb:
Soviet, 35, 36
US development of, 35, 36, 239, 244
atomic energy, 219, 244
Atomic Energy Commission, 99, 222
Atomists, 18
atoms, 19
manipulation of, 258
in nanotechnology, 151
rearrangement of, 229–30, 232
attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), 11, 12, 86
Australia:
isolation in, 204
population dispersion into, 7–8
Autonomous Nanotechnological Swarm (ANTS), 182
aviation industry, 91, 99
accident rate for, 108
Aviation Week, 71
B-2 bomber, 70
Babylonians, 163
Bacon, Roger, 23
bacteria, 172, 180
Baikonur Cosmodrome, 65–66
Bailey, Ronald, 207
Baker, David, 169
ballistic missiles (ICBMs):
Chinese, 141
intercontinental, 36–37, 65
long-range, 30–34, 33
balloons:
flight principles for, 68–69
high-altitude, 32
hot-air, 47, 68, 89
Barrow
, John, 258
Bass, Ed, 192–93, 285
Baumgartner, Felix, 68, 272
behavioral b’s, 15
Bell X-1, 71
Bell, Alexander Graham, 78
Bell Labs, 153
Benford, Gregory, 223–24
Benford, James, 223–24
Bennett, Charles, 230
Bering Strait, land bridge across, 8, 120, 218
Berlin Rocket Society, 32
Berlin Wall, 41
Berners-Lee, Tim, 78–79
Bernoulli, Daniel, 68
Berserker series (Saberhagen), 177, 259
Bezos, Jeff, 103
Bible, 148–49
big bang theory, 131, 255
“Big Ear” telescope, 237
Bigelow, Robert, 102–3
binary stars, 126
biohackers (grinders), 207
biomarkers, 216–18
Biosphere 2 experiment, 192–97, 193, 285–86
black projects, 69–70, 72, 144
Blade Runner, 204, 208, 259
Blue Origin, 103
Boeing X-37, 72, 85
Bohr, Niels, 213, 288
Bostrom, Nick, 207, 245–47, 260–61
Bounty, HMS, 202
Bradbury, Ray, 164
brains:
computer interfaces with, 205–7
human, 12–17, 203, 283
of orcas, 190
radiation damage to, 115
simulation of, 259–61
“brain in a vat” concept, 260
Branson, Holly and Sam, 89
Branson, Richard Charles Nicholas, 80, 86–89, 95, 97–98, 101–2, 106
Breakthrough Propulsion Physics, 290
Brezhnev, Leonid, 42
Brightman, Sarah, 102
Brin, Sergey, 275
British Airways, 87
British Interplanetary Society, 221
Brokaw, Tom, 74
Brother Assassin (Saberhagen), 177
Bryan, Richard, 238
buckyballs, 151, 231
Buddhism, 20, 267
Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, 197
Buran, 72
Burnett, Mark, 75
Burroughs, Edgar Rice, 164
Burrows, William, 35–36
Bush, George W., administration of, 93
Bussard, Robert, 222
butterfly effect, 195
By Rocket into Interplanetary Space (Oberth), 31
California, population dispersion into, 8
California, University of: