Michio Kaku: These Are the Two Paths Humanity Could Take in the Next Century | Hacker News Reader

Michio Kaku: These Are the Two Paths Humanity Could Take in the Next Century

futurism.com

21 pointsyodabodega8 comments

The "PopSci" crowd is getting tiresome. Kaku and DeGrasse are modern day clerics for a new age religion.

The European Union is not new. Confederations of autonomous states have existed under the "Articles of Confederation", under the "Holy Roman Empire", and under a thousand other names. What these all have in common is the urge to federalize. Or, to use a different term, nationalize, which seems to be the boogey man in Kaku's political universe. The EU will centralize more and more authority. This will make it no more and no less a "type 1 government".

You must be mistaking Kaku for someone else... Kaku is concerned that dishonest people attempt to control masses using people like Tyson. He describes two different worlds yes, but rather one where a big government controls thought with propaganda and by manipulating science, vs one which does not attempt to do so. Kaku discusses implications of such manipulations and explorers parallels to history, while DeGrasse Tyson and Bill Nye are simply tools used to carry out those manipulations, for money. One has been driven to obscurity by the mainstream media, the other bathes in it's wealth.

I think Michio Kaku deserves a recognition for his efforts in explaining things in a way that non scientific people can understand. That's not easy. We need more like him.

Kaku mostly tells stories with cosmology and futuristic buzzwords these days. If you want to excite the imagination of a child and foster interest in science, I find his stuff potentially useful. However, the actual educational content is pretty poor.

I used to love Kaku as a kid. I read his book Hyperspace several times in elementary school and even ended up buying a string theory graduate text out of the induced enthusiasm. That book was scary impenetrable to me at the time. Lol

Now Kaku's videos and stuff just leave a bad taste in my mouth. It fells like he mostly sells science as some magical mysterious thing that is only accessible to the intelligentsia elite.

The difficulty of explaining complex concepts in a way that a laymen can understand is underappreciated.

Under appreciated and much needed.

The idea has been proposed in a different branding as the Great Filter (en.wikipedia/Great_Filter).

There are also other explanations as well. Maybe we're just all simulated (in an ancestral simulation). Stars and intergalactic systems are just too cumbersome to simulate all, so maybe whoever programmed us just threw their hands in the air and said "fuck it," and then make them really darn far and unreachable. It would be an entertaining thought to me at least, as a lazy programmer. Here is your 1 mile 3d viewport, anything further than that is not actually 3d but 2d bitmaps with some clever hacks that make them look like 3d to you. Fuck it, let's go bowling.

Someone should have asked how is his "string theory" going? :)

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