Rave
Adam Frank,
The New York Times Book Review
You would be right to think this sounds like science fiction or to be skeptical that some of it is even possible. (I’m good with terraforming but doubt that we are nothing but our neurons.) But the strength of Kaku’s writing is knowing which science fiction ideas are worth following. Kaku grounds his readers in science happening right now, while throwing open the windows to imagine where it might lead in a thousand years. In this effort he is particularly adept at drawing from the lexicon of popular science fiction. From Marvel’s Iron Man to Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar, he uses ideas from our shared cultural warehouse as launchpads for questions of the deep future..
Rave
David Pitt,
Booklist
...[a] deeply fascinating and energetically written book.
Mixed
Steven Poole,
The Wall Street Journal
With admirable clarity and ease, Mr. Kaku rehearses the history of rocketry and the formation of the planets, and explains how we might colonize not only Mars but some of the rocky moons of the gas giants Jupiter and Saturn ...The book has an infectious, can-do enthusiasm and is occasionally even a little silly. But since the author covers so much ground—appropriately enough for a book about traveling the universe—no subject can be treated in great depth.
Mixed
Steve Donoghue,
The Christian Science Monitor
The problem here is immediately obvious: catch-all 'futurist' label notwithstanding, a theoretical physicist is no more specially qualified to speculate about things like advanced AI or human genetic manipulation than is any teenage science nerd uploading videos to YouTube. There are points in The Future of Humanity where this is unavoidably obvious, and it hurts the book.
Pan
Oliver Moody,
The Times (UK)
Kaku is an international treasure and a man of infectious enthusiasm. You may as well kick an endangered penguin as give one of his books a bad review. But this is a weary, clunkily written and incoherent piece of work. It is hard to know who is supposed to read it.
Rave
Kirkus
Always optimistic and undaunted, Kaku delivers a fascinating and scattershot series of scenarios in which humans overcome current obstacles without violating natural laws to travel the universe. The author digresses regularly into related areas of study, including extrasolar planets, radical life extension, intelligent robots, and the details of settling other worlds.
Positive
Publishers Weekly
Kaku wonderfully illuminates possible ways the human race could survive on other planets.