The Future of Humanity

One idea is to create a doughnut-shaped magnetic field and have the gas compressed on the inside of the doughnut. But physicists have failed to compress hot gas for more than a tenth of a second, which is too brief to create a self-sustaining fusion reaction.

It is not enough for a robot to try to dominate humans; one has to master the simplest laws of common sense in order to carry out a plan. For example, giving a robot the simple goal of robbing a bank will ultimately result in failure because the robot cannot realistically map out all possible future scenarios

In that story, people have asked over the aeons whether the universe must necessarily die or whether it was possible to reverse the expansion and prevent the universe from freezing over. When asked, “Can entropy ever be reversed?” the master computer replies each time, “There is insufficient data for a meaningful answer.”

Usually, when we simply combine relativity and the quantum theory in a crude shotgun marriage, we can get a prediction for dark energy, but the resulting prediction is off by a factor of 10120, which is the largest mismatch in the history of science. Nowhere do we find a discrepancy this large. It indicates that something is terribly wrong with our understanding of the universe. So the unified field theory, instead of being a scientific curiosity, becomes essential to understanding how everything works. The solution to this question will tell us the fate of the universe and all intelligent creatures in it

In the same way, when we make the transition from a Type II civilization to a Type III civilization, we will, by definition, have enough power to explore the Planck energy, the point at which space-time becomes unstable

Another hotly debated question among physicists is what happens if you enter a wormhole and go backward in time. If you then kill your grandfather before you are born, then you have a paradox. How can you exist at all if you just killed your ancestor

But quantum theory states otherwise. When you look in a mirror, you are not seeing yourself as you really are. You are made up of a vast collection of waves. So the image you see in the mirror is actually an average, a composite of all these waves. There is even a small probability that some of these waves can spread out all over your room and into space

For example, on a very hot day, we fan our faces for relief, thinking that this cools us down. Fanning ourselves does cool down our face, giving us temporary relief, but the heat generated by the motion of our muscles, bones, and so on actually produces more net heat. So fanning ourselves gives us immediate psychological relief, but our total body temperature and the temperature of the air around us actually go up.)

The second law says that entropy (disorder, chaos, or waste) always increases in a closed system

Rather than reaching out and sending radio signals into space to announce our existence to any alien civilization, it might be more prudent to study them first