Here I am, still reading about the Oort Cloud, balance of matter and anti-matter before the Big Bang, scary robots in the future, and the science of the little-known 2016 movie "Passengers" with Chris Pratt and Jennifer Lawrence. It's still Michio Kaku, and I wish I had read him 25 years ago, when I was a kid in my formative years looking for an identity and a career path. I call Kaku's writing "science non-fiction," the perfect medium between hardcore science fiction like Robert Heinlein or Frank Herbert of "Dune" fame and just straight raw science facts in textbooks and encyclopedias. One is riveting and entertaining but not real, the other is real and exactly what surrounds us in our lives, but as riveting as, well, watching water boil. I can see why 11-year-old Robert got past the animals portion of science books but couldn't digest all the physics and astronomy stuff that came after; it just didn't resonate, as hard as my parents tried to push me in the science category. (Like what you see in Asian TV shows, they kind of nudged me towards the science books when I was picking out things to read back then, but I settled instead on books about baseball, teenage sleuths like Encylopedia Brown and the Hardy boys, then fictious worlds like the one in Brian Jacques's Redwall series.
But I could have been a reader of science books, if I had just been given the right book! Just like I have an aversion towards dogs that's mostly unexplained except for getting one bad experience as a kid that I barely remember and hearing about how my kid neighbor got bit by one, I just never liked dogs and never petted them or tried to get close to them, even nowadays shrinking away when I get stuck in an elevator with a dog owner and his or her pet. Just one bad science book and I got turned off for half of my life, I guess. Still got time though! And according to a few "radical" scientists out there, I might have the rest of time to get to know science, because in just a few decades, mankind might find the secret to living forever. Immortality- a strong word, I don't imagine that kind of living forever would entail always having a clear mind and keeping one's mind sharp, but that's still a powerful idea of being alive forever. As a kid of course I wanted to live forever (and got really sad when my grandpa told me he would pass away and that I would one day pass away too) but I'm not so sure that'd be the best; Michio Kaku does a great job of cautioning humans "be careful what you wish for," like King Midas's folly.
Do I really want to live on distant planets like Mars or suns of Jupiter like Io or Europa? That's where Kaku says humankind might be headed, first to Mars (after we deplete Earth of all its resources) then to places where water can form like in the gas giants, where heat isn't the thing that creates water, it's friction and moving of the tides. Beats me, but I do recognize the importance of water in developing life. It's all fascinatign stuff and the genius of Kaku's writing is that he can "Explain it to me like I'm 5," not using any fancy equations or quoting different theorems or laws, he just gets into the basics and then the implications in a way I can understand, using plenty of real-life examples like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos's space race and how billionaires (maybe eventually trillionaires) like them have taken over space exploration after the U.S. government basically ran out of money and Obama declared the space program over, challenging private entrepreneurs to finance the next leg of exploration. (Well, them and possibly China, who has the most momentum right now with their taikonauts). It's all fascinating stuff and makes my petty squabbles over how much to spend on a haircut, fantasy baseball trades, and even Covid-19 outbreaks seem so insignificant in the long run. Space exploration: It's not just science fiction anymore, it's a non-fiction of ever-growing likelihood.
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