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Aug. 22, 1997 - Art Bell
02:45:19
Coast to Coast AM with Art Bell - Theoretical Physics - Michio Kaku
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Time Text
Welcome to Art Bell, Somewhere in Time.
Tonight featuring Coast to Coast AM, from August 22nd, 1997.
From the high desert in the great American Southwest.
El Nino bound soon, by the way.
Good morning, everybody.
It is yet another Friday night, Saturday morning, or whatever date you happen to be listening to this, or day, in whatever time zone, ranging from the Tahitian and Hawaiian island chains in the west, all the way east, To Volcano Country.
Montserrat, though, we're heard there.
The U.S.
Virgin Islands.
South into South America.
North all the way to the Pole.
And worldwide on the Internet.
This is Coast to Coast AM and I am Art Bell.
Good to be here.
And it's going to be a very, very good night.
Tell you all about it in a moment.
The big news of the day.
The Prez is going to have to face In trial, Paula Jones, in May.
I guess May 27th.
That will be an interesting period of time.
Because you know what it is that Paula charges that Mr. President Clinton did.
There is a new Teamsters election ordered.
It'll be Ron Perry vs. James Hoppa once again, but with a recent Hard bargaining, and I'm going to be generous there on the part of Mr. Carey.
I would think Mr. Carey would be a shoo-in.
Burger King is not selling hamburgers.
It seems that E. coli has crept into their suppliers' meat, and the entire plant's being closed.
25 million pounds of frozen hamburger patties.
That's a lot of hamburger, and so Burger King is trying to talk people into eating fish and fish sandwiches and all kinds of, I guess, bacon sandwiches and whatever else they might have on hand.
The Mirror Crew connected all the cables.
One of the cosmonauts nearly losing pressurization in his suit, and he would have gone More or less.
That's an implosion sound I was trying to make.
But that didn't happen.
They got it fixed, got the cables connected, and it will be some time whether they, to know whether they are going to be able to power back up or not.
I wonder why they don't know.
Can't somebody up there get out a voltmeter, measure current draw, find out what it's doing?
Guess not.
So they'll wait.
Now, before I get into what we're going to be doing tonight, Let me inform you that Monday I have booked exactly the person I wanted to book.
He is Dr. Charles Pike, who is a climatologist and particularly an expert on El Nino.
And as you know, there is a monster of an El Nino building in the Pacific.
As a matter of fact, when I talked with him earlier in the day, He said our temperatures are anywhere between 5 and not 10 but 11 degrees up in the Pacific and that does not bode well for us.
He also will talk of an interesting connection between El Nino and volcanoes.
And of course Montserrat as you know is threatening to go kaboom.
Or continue to erupt in a fashion that will continue to disrupt the lives of those on Montserrat.
So that basically covers what news there is and the show coming on Monday.
I would like to remind everybody that up on the website right now there are several very, very interesting things for you to go and look at.
My website address is www.artbell.com.
Up there you will find a picture of a chupacabra.
Question mark.
Who knows what it is?
But you know what?
Nobody's identified it yet.
It's a fearsome looking little thing.
You will find a new crop circle.
A new one at Alton Barnes, that is very much like one at Silbury, with a distinct, subtle, and fascinating differences.
Go take a look.
And then finally, you will find, well, among many other things, the Rogue Market.
I'm trying to encourage everybody to buy, buy, buy.
Go to the Rogue Market, fill out their little forms, and you will get $10,000 to $15,000 in Rogue Market dollars.
And by the way, you can win things, you know, t-shirts, cups, that sort of thing.
If your investments go well, and I'm trying to talk to people who are investing in me, and apparently it's working because we're certainly at the top of the heap and headed for the sky, so the time to get in and buy Art Bell stock is now.
Buy!
Anyway, that link is up on the website, so hop on over and buy some Art Bell stock and you will do well.
I can assure you I'm getting all these messages from saying, I'm getting rich!
from your stock.
So, go buy as much as you can, as quick as you can.
You'll see the link there.
Buy Smart Bell Stocks on the website.
Now, coming in a moment is a heavy-duty dude.
I'm going to read you the email that he sent me.
Ah, dear Mr. Bell, I am a professor of theoretical physics at City University of New York, where I've done research for the past 25 years.
I am an establishment, he puts that in quotes, physicist, and hence, I suppose I'd be a bit skeptical about some of the material you present.
I don't blame you, doctor.
I am too.
However, professionally, I work on completing Einstein's unified field theory, Many of my textbooks are required reading for PhD students at major universities about the world, around the world.
My professional work takes me into ten-dimensional hyperspace, which is currently the most active area in theoretical physics.
Oh my!
Did you folks know that?
Ten different dimensions in hyperspace?
That's the most active area in theoretical physics.
Hmm.
Maybe we're not so far off base after all, huh?
I recently wrote a popular book on the subject called Hyperspace, A Scientific Odyssey Through Parallel Universes, Time Warps, and the Tenth Dimension.
That would be Oxford University Press and Anchor Books.
To my surprise, it became a national bestseller.
Anyway, a number of readers have written me asking me about the relationship between the paranormal, discussed here greatly in physics.
Quite a few have mentioned your program.
I also host a national science radio talk show called Explorations, where I explore the relationship between science and politics.
We'll have to talk about that.
Sending plutonium into outer space.
Ah, yes, Cassini.
Star Wars?
New generations of nuclear weapons?
Fusion?
Life in outer space?
And some of my listeners have also mentioned your program as well.
What they've asked is whether the feats commonly associated with the paranormal, in other words, disappearing, rematerializing, reading sealed envelopes, escaping from vaults, time shifts, all of that could be explained by physics, in principle.
The answer is yes!
All these feats would be child's play if one could access higher dimensions.
However, I'm also very careful to point out the energy necessary to create wrinkles in time-space is ten times, I think, greater than 19 billion electron volts.
Which is far beyond anything we can access on Earth, so perhaps intelligent life in outer space, a type 2 or type 3 civilization, might have this kind of energy.
I wonder what type we are.
Anyway, if you are interested in doing a show and so forth, so yes, of course I'm interested, and one additional short note, so you know his background, Dr. Michio Kaku, ...is a professor of theoretical physics at City University of New York, where he has done research for the past 25 years, a BA at Harvard University, 1968, Phi Beta Kappa, summa cum laude, and number one in his physics... number one in his physics class!
PhD, University of California at Berkeley, Radiation Lab, 1972, Research Associate, Princeton University, in 1973.
A visiting professor, Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, 1990.
Honors, Elected Fellow of the American Physical Society, an honor held by the top 10% of physicists in the US.
voted by New York Magazine as one of the top 100 smartest New Yorkers.
And his book, Hyperspace, and he's got a new book called Visions, and that basically is a treatise, I guess, on how science
will revolutionize the 21st century.
In other words, the changes that we can expect.
So here is a man who is into just about every area that we have discussed on this program, including time travel.
Should be an interesting evening.
And now, one of the top 100 smartest New Yorkers.
Here is Dr. Kaku.
Hi, Doctor.
Hi.
Glad to be on your show.
More than happy to have you.
You're into all sorts of things that I am interested in.
And I am surprised that I have not before heard your name.
And I just don't know how I've missed you.
I should have run into you a long time ago.
The higher dimensions, Doctor, we have talked many, many times about other dimensions as explanations for all kinds of things.
UFOs, creatures, we can't account for things that appear and then disappear.
Stories that people will tell, that others consider fish stories.
Paranormal, in other words.
What support is there, and I certainly had no idea that in theoretical physics now, just about the number one topic, is other dimensions.
I had no idea that was going on.
That's right.
Perhaps the greatest movement in theoretical physics in the last 30, 40 years, I think, is the movement toward hyperspace.
You see, the goal of physics is to attain the Holy Grail, an equation one inch long, which would explain the four fundamental forces that govern the universe.
We have gravity that holds us to the Earth.
We have electricity and magnetism that lights up our cities and illuminates the cosmos.
And we have the two nuclear forces that lights up the stars and the galaxies.
And yet these four fundamental forces don't look anything like each other at all.
And for many, many decades, the greatest scientists of the century, Einstein and Heisenberg and Pauli, have tried to fit these four jigsaw puzzle pieces together, and they wouldn't fit!
Now we physicists realize that if you simply go to a higher dimension, that is, to ten dimensions, you have enough room in which to fit all four fundamental forces into a very simple equation.
These equations, by the way, are pages and pages long.
And they collapse to an equation just a few inches long if you go to 10-dimensional hyperspace with little strings vibrating in them.
Now this is such a fantastic development.
Already about 10,000 papers have been published in nuclear physics journals, including Nuclear Physics, Physical Review, Physical Review Letters.
You go to any modern research center at Harvard, Princeton, Caltech, MIT, And they're just books and books.
In fact, my books are, in fact, the Bible on this subject.
I wrote the basic textbooks for this subject.
But the average person doesn't know about this.
Including me.
So let me stop you right away and ask you.
You're talking about ten dimensions.
I know of three.
I can see three or experience three.
And I can't even imagine what the fourth is, much less the tenth.
Yeah, if you think of the fourth dimension being time, Einstein gave us a four-dimensional way in which we can visualize the universe, right?
Right.
However, we realize that Einstein didn't go far enough, and he spent the last 30 years of his life beating his head against the wall at Princeton, trying to find a theory that would explain galaxies, the stars, the Big Bang, as well as the lilies of the field, and chemistry, and perhaps even love.
However, he failed, because he didn't go far enough.
We think now that if you had dimensions higher than four, up to ten dimensions, then you can include all the forces of the universe.
Now let me explain.
When I was a child growing up in San Francisco, I used to go to the Japanese tea garden, and as you know there are fish, carp, that swim just beneath the lily pads in a very shallow pond.
Yes.
And I asked a question that only a child would ask, and that is, what would the universe look like to a fish?
Well, to a fish, the world would be flat.
Two-dimensional.
You could swim forward, backward, left, and right, but anyone who said there's a direction called up, outside the lily pads, outside the universe, would be considered crazy, would be considered a lunatic, you know, somebody that has to be sent to the loony farm.
However, I once thought, what happens if you reach down there and grab one of the fish?
Lifted the fish into hyperspace.
The third dimension.
Right.
This fish would see world unseen.
New laws of physics would start to unfold.
People moving without fins.
People breathing without water.
A whole new law of physics erupting once you go into hyperspace.
And then if you put the fish back in the pond, can you imagine the tale this fish is going to tell?
Yes, and what sort of derisive life he would be leading?
That's right.
He would have disappeared out of the pond and simply rematerialized someplace else.
Now we, as beings in hyperspace, looking down on the fish, say, well, these fish are silly.
They're simply two-dimensional things.
Why don't they realize that the universe is obviously in hyperspace?
We would have the powers of a god.
We'd be able to lift fish out of the pond, put them back anywhere else, whereupon they would Rematerialize out of nowhere.
We could reach into safes and take out gold.
It would be child's play to reach into any sealed container and take out the gold.
Now the revolution in physics in the last 10 years has been the realization that we are the fish.
We spend our life smugly, arrogantly in three dimensions.
Moving forward, backward, left, right, up, down.
Thinking that what we see in our little pond is all there is.
But you see, that can't be true.
Because in three dimensions, there's not enough room to explain gravity, the nuclear force, the electromagnetic forces.
But in ten-dimensional hyperspace, everything collapses down to an equation so simple you could put it in your pocket.
So in other words, as Stephen Hawking has stated, we are now about to read the mind of God.
Now, some of you may have, a few of you may have tried to read his book, Brief History of Time, and fewer still may have actually finished his book.
Well, my book takes you beyond where Stephen Hawking leaves off.
He ends his book, by the way, by saying that, wait, there's this new theory on the horizon.
It's a theory defined in ten dimensions.
It's the most fantastic theory physicists have ever seen.
I'm constantly amazed by this theory.
However, I'm at the end of my book.
So, the end.
He ends his book.
He ends his book on what I think is the greatest romance of the last half century.
And that's the romance of hyperspace.
And that's why I decided to write a book for people that don't know any math at all.
People that never took a physics course in their life would appreciate a book explaining how hyperspace could explain black holes, the possibility of time travel, The intricacies of perhaps life in outer space.
That's why I decided to write the book Hyperspace, which the New York Times called one of the best science books of the year.
Both the Washington Post and the New York Times loved the book and said it was one of the best books they've seen in the area of science.
So I want the average person to realize that the feats of the paranormal are child's play.
If you are a being living in hyperspace, looking down on the pond, That we so arrogantly believe in our universe.
Yes.
There are a lot of people, of course, who would be very angry at such a concept.
Many of them are religious folks, like Pat Robertson and company, who live within this three-dimensional universe and staunchly refuse to imagine anything at all beyond that that does not have something to do with that being they call the Creator, God.
Well, you know, at the turn of the century, there was a lot of speculation by religious people, by theologians, as to where to place heaven and earth.
And in my book, Hyperspace, I did some research on this.
And there was a debate, because people had telescopes at the turn of the century, they looked for heaven, and they couldn't find it.
And the Church of England, in fact, was quite embarrassed that there was no place for heaven.
However, at that time, mathematicians had discovered hyperspace for the first time.
It wasn't a physical theory, it was a mathematical theory.
And theologians love the idea, because why not place heaven in the fourth, fifth, and sixth dimensions?
You couldn't see it.
It'd be all around you, just like the pond.
You know, hyperspace touches every single point of the pond, and it would be everywhere, and that's a place where you could put heaven, or for that matter, ghosts, because anyone who lives in hyperspace could easily go right through walls, go right through safes and banks, And reach into people's most treasured places in their house with ease because they are simply looking down on the pond, you see.
Now, I'll be very frank about this.
I'm a physicist and, you know, I have computers and I have access to government funding and so on and so forth.
I don't expect anyone in their garage to be able to build a machine that could punch a hole in space and leap out of the pond.
Because I can also calculate the energy necessary to do this.
And this is a catch.
You probably wondered, where's the catch, right?
Well, alright.
Uh, good.
A catch.
We're at the bottom of the hour, and the catch is we've got a break, and that holds them over and teases them a bit.
So, uh, coming back on the other side of the bottom of the hour here, Dr. Michio Kaku will tell us about the catch.
The energy catch.
But you know, that is a lot of energy.
But then again, we're going to have to ask the good doctor about something called zero-point energy.
Because there's a lot of energy there, too.
We'll be right back.
You're listening to Art Bell, somewhere in time, on Premier Radio Networks.
Tonight an encore presentation of Coast to Coast AM from August 22nd 1997
Without your love, oh baby, don't leave me this way, oh I can't expect, I'll surely miss your tender kiss
Yeah.
Don't leave me this way.
Baby!
My heart is full of love and desire for you.
Now come on down and do what you gotta do.
You started this fire down in my soul.
In my bones, now can't you see it's burning like a straw?
Waka ae ae yo, ae ae yo, ae ae ae yo.
Waka ae ae yo, ae ae yo, ae ae ae yo.
You're listening to Art Bell, somewhere in time.
Tonight featuring a replay of Coast to Coast AM from August 22, 1997.
My guest is Dr. Michio Kaku, who is a professor of theoretical physics at New York University.
See?
Is that right?
I'm getting a little bit confused here, I'm sure.
Actually, it's City University of New York.
All right, Dr. Cartou, welcome back.
Try and give us, if you would, an idea of how much energy, that is, energy required to access the 10th dimension.
Okay, first of all, to summarize real quick, if you have the power of hyperspace, that is, 10-dimensional hyperspace, beyond the dimensions that we see, you could, in principle, harness the power of time machines, which is now a very active area of research for theoretical physicists.
Perhaps open up wormholes, or holes in space, like Alice in Wonderland's Looking Glass, by which you can enter another dimension, right?
Or like the movie Contact.
That's right.
In fact, the movie Contact was based on this theory, by the way, okay?
Carl Sagan talked to Kip Thorne, who works on quantum gravity, which is the subject of my book, Hyperspace.
I asked all my guests, so I'll ask you.
You saw that movie, I hope.
That's right, I did.
Did you enjoy it?
Well, I thought it was a little bit on the slow side.
However, I think for a kid that is first getting interested in science and how science progresses and how it's performed and all the blind alleys and the jealousies and the triumphs of science, I think it's good for a kid.
As Hollywood entertainment, I thought it was not quite as good as Men in Black, which I also saw.
Really?
But I thought that Contact, at least, was a serious attempt to try to tell people that wormholes are, in fact, subject to very serious scientific work by the world's leading physicists.
I myself work in wormholes and things like that.
Would, theoretically, such a machine be possible?
Yes.
However, the catch, and this is where I would disagree with how Carl Sagan treated it in his book, We told Carl Sagan when he first approached us physicists about the concept of opening up a hole in space, that the energy necessary to harness this is 10 to the 19 billion electron volts.
That's a quadrillion times greater than the supercollider which Congress cancelled, which was to be built outside Dallas, Texas.
It was supposed to be the biggest scientific machine ever built in history, bigger than the... I'm sorry, I missed the figure.
How many times greater than the supercollider?
A quadrillion.
It was to be a quadrillion... to make contact with aliens via a wormhole would require a quadrillion times more energy than the supercollider.
So it's not for any basement inventor to come up with a time machine or a wormhole machine.
However, We physicists have also looked into outer space, and this is what we also told Carl Sagan, that perhaps Type 2 or Type 3 civilizations in outer space already have this energy, and already are using it to go between galaxies.
All right, let me slow you down and ask you, what's a Type 1?
Are we a 1?
No, a Type 1 civilization is a truly planetary civilization.
They control the weather, they control earthquakes, They get their energy from the center of the Earth.
Anything planetary is theirs for the taking.
We're a zero.
Yeah, we're zero.
Type II civilization harnesses the power of a star.
So, in other words, when Junior wants to borrow the rocket ship for a hot date, the father says, OK, put a white dwarf inside the gas tank and you can take off.
So, Type II civilizations gouge out chunks of the sun for their power.
Just scoop pieces of sun into their engines.
A Type 3 civilization is galactic.
They harness the power of an entire galaxy.
Now, we're Type 0, because our energy source is not the galaxy, it's not a star, it's not even, you know, the center of the Earth.
Our energy source is dead plants.
Oil.
Yes, dead plants, oil, right.
What probability do you assign to the possibility of there being any other types, period?
Well, every physicist I've talked to, okay?
And, you know, I'm very well established within the physics community, right?
Everyone believes that there is intelligent life in outer space.
It would be arrogant of us to think that we're the only ones, okay?
There's so many stars in the galaxy, so many galaxies that we can photograph.
I saw one photograph with a billion galaxies in it.
It's just mind-blowing how many galaxies are out there.
And each galaxy, in turn, contains 100 billion stars.
Now, where we differ among physicists is whether or not they've actually visited us.
Okay?
Now, when a Type II or a Type III civilization would visit us, it's not going to be Captain Kirk coming out of his Enterprise, because that's the most inefficient way, as I point out in my book, Hyperspace, to colonize the galaxy.
What you would do is you would send probes out that are self-replicating.
They would land on a moon, which has very little gravity, They would then mine the moon and make copies of themselves.
Millions of copies of themselves.
And these would then rocket off into new star systems, and then they would land on a moon and it would start all over again.
So starting from one probe, you could get trillions of probes and explore the galaxy at the speed of light.
Nanotechnological work.
That's right.
This is using nanotechnology.
That's the movie 2001.
Everyone asks, what the hell was that monolith in 2001?
That was called the von Neumann probe.
Of course, Kubrick never mentioned that, but we physicists are the ones who invented it.
A von Neumann probe is a self-replicating robot using nanotechnology.
It lands on the moon, makes copies of itself, and is basically an alarm clock.
So whenever you reach the moon, okay, you set off the alarm clock, which then tells the mother civilization that, oh, gee, the apes have finally reached the moon and have space travel.
And that was the instant in the movie 2001, remember, when the astronaut touched the monolith and there was this ringing sound and everyone had to hold their ears.
That was the alarm clock that went off saying that humans have come of age.
Do you think that is where the alarm clock would be set or would it be when we leave our solar system?
It would be sent on a moon, because the moon has very low gravity.
It would be very easy to land and take off for a von Neumann probe, which is, again, a self-replicating robot.
So, there's been a lot of debate within the scientific community as to whether or not there are von Neumann probes in our solar system.
If a Type II or a Type III civilization exists in our galaxy, which I believe do exist, They would be immortal.
Asteroids, comets, could be deflected.
Earthquakes could be controlled.
Ice ages, or a cup of tea to them.
Even a supernova would be no problem at all, because they could build a space ark, or even dampen the nuclear fires of a supernova.
So they're immortal.
They would last forever.
Okay, there are many people, Doctor, who believe that there have been, on this Earth, civilizations that have come and gone through Earth changes.
Well, that cannot be ruled out, because we became intelligent within a span of 2 million years.
So, in other words, how frequently does a Type 0 take the leap and become a Type 1?
Well, it would take for a Type 0 civilization like ours about 200 years or so to attain Type 1 status.
In other words, to have a real Buck Rogers type.
Okay, that's timeline if everything went well.
and you know, mining the ocean and stuff like that.
But it would take a few thousand years for us to reach type two
on an exponential curve and about, oh, maybe a hundred thousand years after that to reach type
three.
Okay, that's timeline if everything went well.
My question was, what are the odds of us even getting from zero to one
without going through a destructive phase and another destruction, destroying ourselves?
Ah, I think you've hit the nail on the head.
The reason why there are not that many of these things out there is that many Type Zero civilizations discovered Element 92.
Element 92 is uranium.
Yes.
And they also discover, as Dustin Hoffman discovered in the movie The Graduate, plastics.
And with plastics comes a hydrocarbon pollution type chemistry.
And you can pollute your atmosphere or blow your atmosphere apart with nuclear bombs.
My mentor, by the way, was Edward Teller, who designed the hydrogen bomb.
And most of my professors are the ones who built the atomic bomb and built our nuclear arsenal.
Most of them are friends of mine.
And they tell me that in outer space, it's not so difficult for them in outer space to discover Element 92.
And the Type 0 civilization, just on the verge of Type 1 status, just on the verge of reaching for the stars, may self-destruct.
Because with this power of space travel, also comes the power of nuclear weapons, and the power of chemical pollution.
And so, is there any way to imagine, or to project, how frequently one destructs versus takes the leap and makes it to Type 1?
Well, I would suspect that even if Even if, like, 1% of Type 0 civilizations make it to Type 1 status, a planetary civilization, a Garden of Eden, really, without any racial strife and sectarian national wars... Do you imagine the odds to be that tall?
I think, well, we're being tested in some sense.
We're at that juncture, that same juncture that these other civilizations have also faced.
Yes.
In other words, the generation of humans now alive is the most important generation of humans that have ever walked the earth.
They're the only generations that have within it the power to master element 92, uranium and pollution.
And this is the coming of age of any type zero civilization.
We're being tested right now.
This very generation, now alive, is the most important generation of all the generations that have walked the Earth for the last 2 million years, ever since we separated from the apes.
So that's why it's important for us to understand that in outer space, very few type 0s have actually made it to type 1 and type 2.
So the odds are not with us?
Not with us.
However, there are so many stars out there, there are so many galaxies, that even within our own galaxies, Frank Drake, the famous astronomer, estimated that there are probably about 10,000 planets in our own Milky Way galaxy that have probably attained Type I or Type II status.
The physicists at Princeton have actually searched for Type II civilizations because They emit a certain characteristic type of waste heat energy.
Are we searching in a totally foolish way?
We are looking for radio and television emissions at 2 gigahertz and 4 gigahertz in those areas where we think they might transmit.
But in fact, wouldn't the period of time in any civilization's growth, type 0 forward, when they would be transmitting in the spectrum be a very short period indeed?
Well, if they self-destruct, it would be a very short period indeed.
However, I think people are searching the stars in the wrong way.
And I've talked to the president of the SETI League and the president of the SETI Institute, and they agree with me that because of budget cuts, they're looking at stars in the wrong way.
See, if I'm an alien in a Type II or Type III civilization, I'm not going to send on one band signal.
See, we're talking right now on one band signal.
That creates a lot of energy loss, as it goes around mountains and valleys and what have you.
Sure.
It's much better to smear the message across the entire spectrum.
Smear it across the entire spectrum, and then reassemble it at the other end.
And that takes quite advanced electronics.
Even today, our military would have a hard time doing that.
But in physics, you can do that.
Are you talking about a more advanced form of spread spectrum technology?
Yeah, this is called Fourier Transform.
In the literature, that's what it's called.
You take a signal, and instead of broadcasting it on one band, which is quite dangerous, because if that one band interferes with a passing white dwarf star, you've just lost your signal, right?
Sure.
You smear it over all frequencies, and then at the other end you reassemble it to give you a pure sound.
That's how you can avoid the static, the noise, the disturbances of supernovas, and passing white dwarfs, and what have you.
But how do you give the intelligence at the other end the key to do that reassembly?
Well, they, of course, would be advanced, too.
Advanced enough to know that you have to take the Fourier Transformer and reassemble it at the other end.
You see, our civilization is so stupid that we think that intelligent life is going to broadcast on one frequency.
Yes.
Which is stupid, because if that one frequency hits a white dwarf star, hits an exploding supernova, there goes your signal.
Intelligent life in outer space are much smarter than we are, okay?
And they've already mastered the ability to send signals over all spectrums.
Therefore, it's not surprising to me that we haven't heard any signals.
We could be listening to billions of signals out there, and we'd never know it.
It's just part of the white noise.
That's right.
Exactly.
All you would hear listening in on one frequency is white noise, because a Type II or a Type III civilization would smear the signal over all frequencies.
Sure.
You see?
And if you just zero in on one frequency, you hear white noise.
That shhh sound, basically.
Sure.
Sure.
And that's why I think the SETI searches, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, have not picked up type 2 in type 3 civilization.
Now, by the way, in our own solar system, as I mentioned, there's quite a bit of debate among physicists as to whether or not a type 2 or type 3 has actually tapped into our solar system.
Now, we're not talking about Captain Kirk.
We're not talking about Independence Day.
We're talking about the most logical way to probe our solar system.
Which is to send nanoprobes, these tiny von Neumann probes that the movie 2001 profiled, land them on our moon, and simply, you know, again, place an alarm clock there, and when we colonize the moon, it would ship a wire, and then people in outer space would then realize that we now have a base on the moon.
So probably we're not even advanced enough to warrant the attention of a Type 2 or a Type 3.
Alright, here's a good question.
As we approach this juncture point, and I surely agree with you on that, we are at that point now, is it logical to presume that a Type I or Type II civilization would step in at a critical juncture And show us how to avoid becoming somewhere in the minus column, in other words, blowing ourselves to bits.
Would they likely step in?
Would they have evolved that way?
Yeah, I've often asked myself that question.
You see, most physicists I've talked to look at the question as, well, if you walk down the street and you meet an anthill, You go down to the ants and say, I bring you trinkets, I bring you medicine, I bring you nuclear weapons, I bring you mathematics, computers, I bring you a golden age, or do you step on a few of them?
Well, of course, if you're a type 2 civilization and can harness the power of a star, and you meet this puny type 0 civilization, you may just want to step on a few of them.
However, I agree with you.
I would think that a type 2 or type 3, knowing how precious life is, knowing how How much struggle it takes to go between type 0 to type 1 to finally attain type 2 status.
They may take a shine to us and then they realize that it's so precious to have life and to have a civilization that can love and aspire and dream that they may want to interfere a bit.
Yeah, the presumption is that they have achieved, turned that magical corner and they would then want to assist where they could others to do the same to promote life because of the sanctity of life.
Yeah, and they would probably do it quietly, you know, because they wouldn't want to scare people.
I mean, you know, you don't want to go down to the ants and scare them, right?
They would probably do it indirectly, right?
But my point is that a lot of physicists I've talked to about these things say the problem is that, well, the distances are so far between stars, you know, it takes Many, many years to go just as near a star with a starship, right?
Correct.
You see, with hyperspace, with this new theory that we're talking about, 10 to the 19 billion electron volts, which is the energy necessary to build a time machine or to open up a hole in space, is child's play for these people, okay?
And they wouldn't even need flying saucers.
Flying saucers is something out of the imagination of the 50s.
They would simply open up a gate.
You saw the movie Stargate, right?
Well, again, the movie Stargate was based on the work of physicists.
It's based on this theory.
You know, there are all these movies, by the way, based on this theory that most people don't even know what this theory is.
It's a theory beyond Einstein.
It's called Superstring Theory.
And it's a theory in 10-dimensional hyperspace, which is a theory of quantum gravity.
Anyway, in the movie Stargate, they find this ring, this ring, which allows you to walk through it into another dimension, into someplace far away.
That actually comes from Einstein's theory.
Einstein looked at black holes and thought that anyone who fell into a black hole would die because a black hole was basically a point, a dot that had infinite density.
Einstein was actually wrong on that point.
We've seen 12 black holes now in outer space, the Hubble Space Telescope, the Large Array Telescope, Has photographed 12 of them in space now.
Have they positively identified them as black holes?
That's right.
The escape velocity is the speed of light.
So, by definition, they're black holes.
So, in other words, nothing can escape them.
Their escape velocity is the speed of light.
Now, they're spinning, and they spin very rapidly.
In 1963, mathematician Roy Kerr of New Zealand approved that Einstein's equations, if you have a rotating black hole, Show that the mass does not collapse to a dot, as Einstein thought.
It collapses to a ring.
A ring of fire.
A ring of neutrons.
Now, the ring of neutrons does not collapse because it's spinning.
And it's spinning so rapidly that centripetal force holds it apart, even though gravity wants to crush it.
Okay?
If you were to fall through the ring, you'd fall through the Stargate.
The event horizon?
Yeah, well, the event horizon is actually something else.
The horizon is this imaginary point, which is the point of no return.
So you're actually talking about the black hole, the center of the black hole itself.
Right.
I'm talking about the matter itself.
The black hole is not a dot, as we once thought.
It's actually a ring.
OK?
We photographed these disks with the Hubble Space Telescope.
Beautiful photographs, by the way, that you can access on the web.
All right.
This is fascinating.
Doctor, we've got to pause here at the top of the hour.
And we will pick up exactly where we have left off, with black holes being A ring.
A spinning ring.
Wow.
Dr. Michio Kaku is my guest, and he'll be back in a moment.
You're listening to Art Bell, Somewhere in Time.
Tonight, featuring a replay of Coast to Coast AM, from August 22nd, 1997.
Her hands were never cold.
She got better days as I should turn the music on.
You won't have to think twice.
she's pure as new york snow she's pure as new york snow
she's pure as new york snow she's pure as new york snow
let's see if it's standing still Friday night and the lights are low
you Good morning.
Premier Radio Networks presents Art Bell, Somewhere in Time.
The night program originally aired August 22, 1997.
Good morning. My guest is Dr. Michio Kaku.
And he is a professor of theoretical physics at the City University of New York
with an educational background and honors as long as both of my arms.
And we're talking about theoretical physics.
Specifically, black holes, time travel, how it all might relate to the paranormal, whether it does, whether there are other dimensions.
He firmly believes there are.
and we'll get right back to him.
Now back to New York and Dr. Kanku.
Doctor, so a black hole, then, is not a dot in space, or a blob in space, but rather a circle.
That's right.
The old theory that you see in textbooks written for children, that's all wrong.
Most of these textbooks for kids are written by science hacks rather than physicists.
And physicists know that these black holes rotate very rapidly.
The Hubble Space Telescope is now clocked M87, rotating at a million miles per hour.
That is the velocity of this rotation.
In which case, the matter is not going to collapse to a point.
It'll collapse to a ring.
A very fast rotating ring of fire, actually made out of neutrons.
And any object that falls through the ring may not fall out the other side.
There is a theory.
Uh, that says that if you fall through this ring, it's going to fall through hyperspace.
And it's going to fall, perhaps, to the other side of the universe, perhaps in another point in space and time.
This is called a wormhole.
Now, people have a hard time understanding wormholes, so let me give you a simple example.
When you were in elementary school, your teacher told you that the shortest distance between two points is a straight line.
Yes.
I mean, you couldn't pass elementary school until you told the teacher that a straight line is the shortest distance between two points.
Right.
That's not correct at all.
Take a sheet of paper and mark two points and then fold the sheet of paper so that the two points touch each other.
The shortest distance between two points is a wormhole if you have access to the third dimension.
And you can bend a two-dimensional sheet of paper in the third dimension.
So once you have access to a higher dimension, it's child's play to drill a hole through space and wind up on the other side of the universe.
Now, this is why, by the way, we now believe that time travel may be a real possibility.
I was in London last year, and Stephen Hawking, at the same time, made a formal announcement that he now believes that time machines are, in fact, possible.
And the Sunday London Times quoted Stephen Hawking, they quoted me, and mentioned my book, Hyperspace, which has a whole chapter explaining how time machines could be consistent with the laws of physics.
However, as I was also very careful to point out to the Sunday London Times, the energy necessary to open up a hole in time is really for a Type II or a Type III civilization.
Might I ask this?
There are many, many, many people who speak of something called zero-point energy.
That energy that they speculate is all around us and all we need to do is figure out how to tap it properly.
Is that within the realm of possibility?
Well, we've looked at it.
Zero-point energy is something we usually throw away in quantum theory.
Quantum theory has infinities everywhere you look, and we usually simply throw them away and never have to worry about it.
Some people have thought maybe we can access the zero-point energy and extract energy out of it.
So far, no experiment has ever been done that can access the energy of zero-point.
But my point is that for a civilization like a Type 2 civilization, a civilization that can harness the power of a star, like in Star Trek, by the way, the Federation of Planets with Captain Kirk and company is a typical Type 2 civilization.
The Borg, by the way, the enemy of the Federation is a Type 3.
That's why Captain Picard fears the Borg so much, because they are a genuine Type 3 galactic civilization.
They would, in fact, have this kind of energy, the energy of a star.
And they would be able to open up holes in space and time, probably at will, and be able to walk through them.
Flying saucers are not necessary at all.
You simply open up a dimensional window, or a stargate.
And this may also allow you to go backwards in time.
Now, Stephen Hawking originally did not believe in time travel, because he said that visitors from the future have never come to visit him, and therefore there's no such thing as time travel.
Well, he changed his mind.
And he changed his mind because the mathematics is so powerful now.
And now we have theories of hyperspace.
We have theories that give us the ability to go far beyond Einstein now.
Okay, then how do you answer the question, if time travel is possible, where are the time travelers?
Well, I think the answer is pretty simple.
Anyone that advanced, okay, looking back at us, would simply find it so uninteresting.
That they would either leave us alone, because we're simply not that intriguing to them, or they would simply spend their time doing something else.
If we had a time machine, would we spend all our time going back in time to see what a certain dinosaur ate for lunch?
The dinosaur may find it very interesting what he ate for lunch, but we, as humans, we know that dinosaurs are so crude, you know, they're so primitive, you know, why should I care what he ate for lunch, you know, a few tens of millions of years ago, you see.
You know, Professor Mack at Harvard concentrates on this whole abduction syndrome business, and is it possible that another type, one, two, or three, may be occasionally Plucking us from Earth as we would pluck a fish from water and toss it back in?
Possibly.
However, they're not going to be interested in mating with us or eating us, as in the Twilight Zone episode, to serve man.
Because they're not going to have the same DNA as us.
We don't like to eat rocks.
We don't eat dirt.
And aliens are not going to want to eat us, because their proteins cannot absorb our proteins.
And they may not even be based on proteins at all.
Comforting.
So, and they're not going to want to mate with us.
Just like, you know, I'm not going to want to mate with a lobster, because lobsters and I are two different species, separated by about 500 million years of evolution.
So, I have no interest in mating with lobsters.
So, aliens from outer space are also going to have very little interest in abducting Earth women, even if they are easy, as one movie claimed, for the simple reason that we're not made out of the same DNA.
They're not going to want to mate with us.
Star Trek, on the other hand, promotes the myth that, you know, we're all made out of the same DNA.
But I don't think so.
Well, there are many who think that the reason for the abductions has to do with DNA, as you well know, that they're trying to replenish their sinking pool of DNA, their inbred pool of DNA that is somehow weakened.
Yeah, but their DNA, if they even have DNA, is going to be so different from ours, right?
DNA is just one of perhaps many molecules that are autocatalytic, that is, have the capability of reproducing themselves, xeroxing themselves, okay?
And the chances in outer space of another being having exactly the same, you know, sequence of molecules in a range just the same way as ours is fantastically small, I think.
And so I think that they would be much more, in a much more sophisticated design.
They would not be based on the same hydrocarbon chemistry.
That we're based on.
Okay, then, short of a Stargate, as the one in the movie, on Earth, we've got, if we want to travel in time, really travel, or really go a good distance, we've got to get to a black hole.
What is the closest black hole we have thus far identified?
Well, just last year, we discovered the first, and that was M87 and NGC 4258, the very first black hole.
They're very far away.
On the order of 30 to 50 million light years away.
However, they are just the first ones to be discovered because they're so big.
They're galactic in size.
They weigh about a million suns.
However, in our own Milky Way, we now believe, and this was just announced by NASA, by the way, we now believe in the center of our own Milky Way, there could be a black hole, and there could be ones even close to the Earth.
But like I said, if you have a power of a Type II civilization, like the Federation of Planets, which is a very typical Type II civilization, you'd be able to harness the power of a star on the Earth.
Maybe that's what the Dionysian Crystals do for Captain Kirk, right?
The point is that they, by definition, have a quadrillion times more energy than our greatest machines, by definition.
And for them, it's child's play, for them to just simply open up holes in space and time.
But I seem to recall that in the use of that sort of technology, they could not go into warp anywhere near a planet or it would be destroyed.
So how would it be used upon a planet?
Well, again, that's an older conception that we used to have.
For example, the Bermuda Triangle.
Some people think that ships would vanish there.
Other physicists have pointed out that if a black hole existed in the Bermuda Triangle, it would suck up the Earth.
Well, both ideas, I think, are actually wrong.
The latest theory of the Bermuda Triangle is that there's volcanic activity there that emits gas bubbles several miles across.
You've been photographed now.
Bubbles several miles across, and any ship or airplane flying in this would hit this air bubble and simply, you know, collapse as a consequence and suffocate.
We also believe that there are many black holes in outer space.
That's what Stephen Hawking's latest contribution has been.
He became very famous about, oh, ten years ago, postulating that black holes evaporate, get smaller with time, and could even be microscopic in size.
You could even perhaps put one in your pocket.
I thought it was the other way around, that black holes consumed matter and grew.
They do if they're next to a star.
They'll eat up a nearby star.
But if they're just by themselves, If they're just by themselves, alone, without being able to gobble up a nearby star, they will evaporate by the Uncertainty Principle, by Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle.
So they will evaporate, and they will slowly get smaller and smaller, and therefore black holes, we now believe, can be almost any size.
And perhaps there could be even nearby ones.
Alright then, what would happen if a mini black hole, and I've always wondered about this, should collide with Earth?
What would be the result?
Well, it depends on how big it is.
If the black hole has a Schwarzschild radius, as we call it, on the order of a star, then of course it'll simply eat up the Earth and burp.
And not even notice that it bumped into a planet called Earth.
And we'd blink out.
That's right.
However, as I also pointed out, the new theory is, by adding quantum mechanics to Einstein's theory of general relativity, we now know that black holes decay.
They get smaller and smaller as they emit radiation.
It's called Hawking radiation, by the way, in honor of Stephen Hawking.
And so they get smaller, and black holes can be almost arbitrary sized.
In other words, output, no input, so obviously.
That's right.
They decay with time.
And so black holes aren't so black, as Stephen Hawking's famous statement is.
They're actually grayish.
They're not totally invisible, because they will, in fact, radiate some energy.
So there could be nearby black holes in outer space.
And also, Kip Thorne at Caltech, his contribution to the movie Contact, ...was that he found a new solution of Einstein's equations called the Thorn Solution, which postulates something called Exotic Matter.
And if you had Exotic Matter, that would be very easy to open up a Stargate.
A Stargate made out of Exotic Matter would almost automatically open up a hole.
However, and this is a very big however, Exotic Matter falls up, it doesn't fall down.
And I've never seen anything that falls up.
I've never met anyone who said that they saw something fall up rather than down.
However, as the people at Caltech have claimed, if you could create exotic matter and find some, then Stargates could be opened up on the Earth.
What is exotic matter?
Is it antimatter?
No.
Antimatter is simply ordinary matter with reverse charge, so that if you make contact, it would annihilate.
Antimatter has positive energy, by the way.
We have positive energy.
Antimatter has positive energy.
Exotic matter has negative energy.
And that's why when Kip Thorne at Caltech made this theory, it was quite controversial.
A lot of people didn't believe in it, and I was quite amazed that it got published in Physical Review Letters, which is the most prestigious physics journal on the planet Earth.
It got accepted for publication because he stated that there's nothing to rule out the possibility of exotic matter.
And when Carl Sagan called the people at Caltech, he asked them, Can you build a wormhole on the Earth and not destroy the Earth?
Right.
Not have the black hole swallow up the Earth?
Right.
And they said, yes.
If you could build exotic matter, you could then build a machine like a Stargate, which would allow Jodie Foster to go all the way to Vega without being ripped apart, without being crushed by the gravitational force of a black hole.
In fact, you could even calculate that the stresses on Jodie Foster's body would be about 1g.
So she would be like an astronaut blasting off from the Earth.
She wouldn't hardly notice.
One G's even less, really.
Yeah, so the stress on her body would not be that severe going through the device, going to the planet Vega.
However, and this is a big however, you know, I am a physicist, I do believe in experiment, and no experiment yet.
...has discovered exotic matter, or negative energy matter, as it's sometimes called.
May I take you back and ask you, how did we affirm and discover black holes?
If they are black holes, they are discernibly difficult, deep in space, because they are black, aren't they?
They're actually invisible, right?
People often ask the question, how do you know what the sun is made out of if you've never been to the sun?
And the answer is, we look for echoes from the sun, called sunlight.
We put it through a prism.
By analyzing the rainbow, believe it or not, the rainbow of the sun, you can actually see the spectral lines of hydrogen.
The same thing for black holes.
Black holes are invisible, but they emit radiation.
As they eat up stars, these stars circulate at tremendous velocities, and you can see this.
You can see these winds traveling at a million miles per hour, clocked by the Hubble Space Telescope.
And these winds emit a characteristic energy, and we can photograph that.
It has been photographed.
It's on the web.
You dial nasa.gov.
And you can see Hubble Space Telescope pictures of black holes like NGC 4258.
And you see that it is a disk.
It is a rotating disk.
And that can be photographed.
The black hole is at the center, and of course that's invisible.
So even invisible objects can be photographed by looking at the echoes.
Okay.
So that is how we discovered them.
That's right.
And 12 of them have now been discovered definitively, by the way, not no ifs, ands, or buts.
Okay?
And we now suspect that in the Milky Way Galaxy, which is just a hop, skip, and a jump, right?
The center of our Milky Way Galaxy, about 30,000 light years from us, There probably is a black hole.
And also there's fountains of antimatter, by the way.
What is a black hole?
A black hole is, I thought, a collapsed star.
Or galaxy.
That's right.
Or galaxy.
That's right.
A black hole, by definition, is an object that is so massive that light cannot escape.
That's all it is.
By definition, an object whose gravity is so intense that light cannot escape.
And you can measure the mass of MA7.
You can actually weigh it by using Newton's Laws of Motion.
And you can calculate its escape velocity.
This requires freshman physics.
And you calculate that its escape velocity is the speed of light.
So, by definition, these are black holes.
So, the intriguing thing for us is we now have a theory that allows us to go beyond Einstein.
It's a theory called Superstring Theory.
It's a theory in ten-dimensional hyperspace.
And we can now tease apart all the paradoxes That have bedeviled physicists for ever since Einstein cooked up his theory.
Like, for example, if you have a time machine, like Michael J. Fox and his DeLorean, and you go backwards in time and you meet your mother before you're born, and she falls in love with you, what are you going to do if you're Michael J. Fox and your mother just fell in love with you and rejected your future father?
Will you disappear?
Or worse, what happens if you go backwards in time and shoot your parents before you're born?
Right.
Paradox.
How do you answer that?
It's actually quite simple.
The quantum theory allows for parallel electrons and parallel atoms and parallel universes.
When you do chemistry, you learn that the electron is kind of fuzzy, right?
Yes.
And it kind of whizzes around the atom and exists in parallel states called shells.
Right.
One electron can exist simultaneously in many shells.
These are parallel electrons.
Now when you start to quantize the universe, the universe must, in some sense, have been very small, like an electron 15 billion years ago.
And it also exists in shells, and it also exists in parallel states.
These are parallel universes.
Okay.
Just like what you see in Twilight Zone.
Right.
But they really cannot, you cannot exist in both at the same time.
That's right.
That's the catch.
The catch is to go between parallel universes requires a wormhole.
And like soap bubbles, bubbling soap bubbles, and each bubble is an expanding universe.
So you're saying, if I understand this correctly, it would be possible to travel between them, but not exist in both at the same time?
That's right.
So you could go back in time, you could presumably kill your father.
Right.
That could be done, and what would be the result?
The result would, the bubble simply splits in half.
Everyone has seen soap bubbles split in half, right?
What happens is, your own father obviously did exist, and your mother did exist and gave birth to you.
That cannot be changed.
But when you went backwards in time and shot your father before you were born...
The universe bifurcates.
The universe bifurcates.
It's split in half like a soap bubble.
And in that other soap bubble, your father is dead.
And you will not exist as a young kid.
This is going to take me a moment to absorb.
We're at the bottom of the hour.
Relax.
I've got to absorb this and come back and ask about it again.
So you could kill your father.
You could kill your father.
We'll get back to this in a moment.
I'm Art Bell.
You're listening to Art Bell, somewhere in time, on Premier Radio Networks.
Tonight, an encore presentation of Costa Costean from August 22, 1997.
Welcome to Costa Coste.
Radio Networks.
Tonight, an encore presentation of Coast to Coast AM, from August 22, 1997.
Dr. Michio Kaku is my guest.
He is a professor of theoretical physics at the City University of New York, where he has been doing research for 25 years.
We'll get back to him in a moment.
What I suggest to you is turning the radio up a little bit, Sitting down, and doing nothing else but listening.
That's what it's going to take.
A good Friday night, Saturday morning to you, Donald.
Dr. Michio Kaku is my guest, and here he is again, and we're talking about this paradox problem.
So, if you could travel in time, and you postulate, indeed, you can, or it would be possible, And you went back and killed your father.
Before you were born.
Right.
You would remain where you are.
You would not wink out.
He would be gone.
How is that possible?
Yeah.
In a lot of science fiction stories, they get it upside down and backwards.
A big game hunter goes back to hunt dinosaurs.
Accidentally steps on a small rodent who happens to be his great-grandmother a few million times removed, and then, boom, he disappears.
Right.
Right.
Because how could he be born if he just stepped on his great-grandmother a million times removed?
Right.
Well, that's silly, because the quantum theory resolves everything.
Just like electrons in an atom can exist simultaneously in many shells, which of course gives us modern chemistry, right?
The universe, if you quantize the universe, can exist in many parallel states.
So, in other words, when you go backwards in time and save Abraham Lincoln from being killed in the Ford Theater, you've saved somebody else's Abraham Lincoln.
Your Abraham Lincoln did, in fact, die, was assassinated at the Ford Theater.
Nothing can change that in your universe.
But you've taken a wormhole.
You've taken a wormhole from your universe, where Abraham Lincoln did die, into another bubble, another universe, Well, you meet Abraham Lincoln and you save him from being killed by John Wilkes Booth at the Ford Theater.
So you cannot affect your own future, only that in another dimension?
That's right.
You see, Einstein said that time is like a river.
Newton thought that time was like an arrow.
Once you fire it, it never deviates.
It always, you know, one second on the Earth is one second on the Moon and one second on Mars.
Einstein said, not so fast, not so fast.
One second on the Earth is not one second on Mars, is not one second on the Moon.
Time speeds up, slows down.
It's like a river, old man river, which meanders around the universe, speeds up and slows down as it approaches stars.
Now Einstein didn't go far enough.
Because now we believe, looking at his equations, that you can have whirlpools.
The river of time can have whirlpools.
and the river of time can fork can fork into two rivers
and that's what happens when you go backwards in time and alter the past
the river of time forks into two rivers
uh... the universe bifurcates so in other words in some sense we could be having the same
conversation in another bubble universe
uh... you know way out there beyond the edge of the universe in another dimension
we could be having the same phone call except something is different
except somebody wasn't born.
Remember that episode in Twilight Zone where a man wakes up and finds out that he was never born?
Yes.
And that his father and mother says, well, we never had any children.
Who are you?
You know?
And you say, well, wait a minute.
How can my father and mother say I was never born?
Obviously I exist.
Well, that is possible in some sense, if you could drill a wormhole to one of these other bubbles out there.
And in fact, the physicists at MIT, several friends of mine at MIT, had done these calculations, in fact.
And of course, I'm very careful to say that it's not for us.
To drill a hole between our bubble and another bubble would require energies of a type 2 or type 3 civilization.
So don't believe it if some high school kid in the basement claims that they can open up a wormhole in their garage.
It's not going to happen.
However, for a type 2 or type 3 civilization, this could be child's play.
And in fact, I do believe they exist in outer space, and we've looked for them.
And they may have the ability to alter the fabric of time.
What, Doctor, is a pulsar?
A pulsar is a rotating neutron star.
Think of a flashlight that rotates.
And it blinks at you, of course, but it's nothing but a flashlight which is rotating.
That's a neutron star.
And when a neutron star collapses, It then, in turn, becomes this fabled black hole.
Now, our sun, for example, will not become a neutron star.
Our sun is actually kind of a baby star.
It's not very big.
Our sun will simply die as a white dwarf.
It'll die as a star about the size of the Earth and just peter away.
But for big stars, you know, ten times bigger than our sun, they will explode.
And after the explosion, they'll collapse to this spinning flashlight called a neutron star.
Which has some characteristics approaching that of a black hole, right?
That's right.
And if you're 50 times more massive than our sun, 50 times more massive than our sun, then chances are it will collapse all the way down to not this point.
That's the old picture.
Forget that old picture of a point.
It'll collapse to a ring, a spinning ring, which could, in fact, be this gateway.
And that was the inspiration for the movie Contact.
That was the inspiration for the movie Stargate.
All these movies you've been seeing, by the way, come from physics.
But the movie Contact, what was it that they created on Earth?
I mean, I understand the concept of the ring of the black hole in space, but how does that work on Earth?
Well, apparently what they found was a vein of exotic matter, or negative matter, on the Earth.
And if you could find negative matter on the Earth, then you wouldn't need black holes.
You wouldn't need this fantastic energy of a star.
You could actually build it on the Earth.
And it would be metallic, let's say, and you could forge it into a ring.
And if you walked through the ring, then you would fall through the other side, just like Alice walking through the Looking Glass, walks into Wonderland, going through this wormhole, okay?
Now, the catch is that we've never seen exotic matter on the Earth, okay?
Now, in my next book, Visions, by the way, which is actually coming out in two weeks, okay?
Two weeks?
Yeah, and September 15th is the pub date for my book, Visions, How Science Revolutionized the 21st Century.
I talk about science of the 22nd century and 23rd century also, when we will become a Type I civilization, okay?
And a Type I civilization will have energies, you know, maybe a million times more than what we have on Earth, And they will be able to dream, you know, within about 200 years, we'll be able to dream about this kind of technology.
We may not have it, but within about 200 years, when we approach Type 1 status, on the Earth now, not far and out of space, but on the Earth, as we approach Type 1 status, we'll be able to change our own DNA, we'll be able to, you know, create cyborg-type life forms and merge with computers, if we feel like, and we'll be able to harness energy on the scale of opening up, perhaps, holes in space, okay?
But not in the 21st century.
We're still primitive.
We're Type 0 at the present time.
Yes, but I'm still remembering the odds against becoming a Type 1.
Now, as you look around the planet right now, with a lot of things that are going on that are rather strange, depletion of ozone, the beginning of changes in genetic structure of simple-celled organisms in the Antarctic, possible global warming, big argument, And weather changes and all the rest of it.
How are we doing at the present moment in our movement toward one day becoming a Type 1?
Well, very badly, unfortunately.
In my book, Visions, I'm optimistic because, you know, I think we physicists are genetically geared to being optimistic.
However, we're also realists and we realize that we know we're depleting fossil fuels very rapidly and putting all that carbon Into the atmosphere, the ozone layer was almost destroyed until, of course, chemists figured out why the ozone layer over the South Pole was opening up.
It almost opened up over the North Pole, by the way, and it could still possibly open up over the North Pole, and that would be a disaster for anyone who wanted to do sunbathing in the Northern Hemisphere.
However, you know, we matured, and we were able to cut back on freon and cut back on chlorofluorocarbons, and that was a great victory of the Montreal Protocol.
So in my book, Visions, I do present a slightly optimistic, a cautiously optimistic assessment that maybe we'll weather the 21st century, you know?
Maybe we'll be able to control DNA, but not let it out of control, like with clones.
Maybe we'll be able to create robots and artificial intelligence, but they won't put us out of work.
Are you surprised, by the way, that cloning was achieved so quickly?
Not really.
I've been following it pretty carefully, because physicists, as you probably are aware, are the ones who created molecular biology to begin with.
Francis Crick was a physicist, and George Gamow, Schrodinger, they were all physicists.
And they were the ones who created molecular biology, perhaps almost from scratch, using the principles of the quantum theory.
So, it was almost on time that the cloning came in, and within five years now, most geneticists think that a human will be cloned, perhaps illegally.
If not already.
If not already.
However, the dynamics are pretty simple.
You know, our embryos are not that different from sheep.
You know, we like to think we're so great, right?
We humans.
However, at the embryonic level, we're not that much different from sheep.
And so, within five years, most geneticists think that somebody will make the attempt to do cloning.
And in my book, by the way, I mention that cloning is not necessarily the greatest victory of the 21st century.
What will be much more important is genetic enhancement.
In other words, rather than Xeroxing a work of Shakespeare, We'll be able to modify Shakespeare and redo Shakespeare.
Yes.
And we'll have the power of a God.
You know, usually God has that power over life and death, right?
But within 20, 30 years, some of the great scientific debates will be over biotechnology.
And about a third of my book, by the way, Visions, is devoted to these questions of how far can we push this technology?
If I want blue eyes, you'll be able to give them to me.
Well, pretty soon we'll be able to do that kind of manipulation, already in animals.
We've been able to tease apart completely the yeast genome.
Bacteria have now been completely decoded, certain bacteria.
Viruses have been decoded.
The next will be the roundworm.
Then after that, within about three years, the mouse.
And within about seven years, A human will be completely deciphered at the molecular level.
Atom for atom will know the location of all the genes within the DNA of a human being by the year 2005.
By the year 2010, most genetic diseases, but there are about 5,000 of them, should be decoded, or a good many of them will be decoded by the year 2010.
And by the year 2020, according to most geneticists, We will have personalized DNA sequences.
You'll have a little CD-ROM with your name on it, with a blueprint, you know, how to create you.
Yes.
An owner's manual for you, okay?
With all your genetic flaws and defects.
Each of us, by the way, have about 10 to 15 flaws in our DNA.
Some of them are quite bad, but of course they don't manifest themselves because they're recessive.
And by the year 2030, according to the geneticists that I've interviewed, We should be able to monkey with it, and that of course is awesome, you know.
We'll be able to grow organs, you know, instead of waiting for livers.
We'll be able to grow livers in the laboratory, and we'll be able to grow certain human parts.
Alright, well that brings on this question then from San Diego by Facts.
I think it's a proper point.
Art, please.
uh... asked the good doctor of society is a goal from one to
to or from two to three face crisis is every bit as serious as
that uh... which encounter as you come from a zero state society
does he think that these transitions would be perhaps more spiritual than material in nature
which leads to the question of whose comedy is this anyway i think that's an extremely perceptive question
uh... on a very basic level the transition from tight zero to type one
is the most excruciating since all the animalistic barbarian instincts given to us
from evolution caveman instincts are still with us
And whether or not we can harness uranium and harness chemicals without polluting ourselves to death or blowing ourselves up is very important.
However, once you attain Type 1 status, you're planetary.
You can communicate with any other being on the Earth.
Racial differences, sexual differences melt away.
And then the problems become spiritual, in the sense that no comet can destroy a Type II.
They have starshifts that will simply deflect comets that come their way.
Yes, but we face the possibility of extinction in the exploration of Element 92.
Don't we face the same possibility with the exploration of some exotic material?
Possibly, but I think the great dilemmas facing us today on the Earth are the dilemmas of power, money, race.
The fractural lines you can even see within American society, right?
Oh, yes.
With a Type II civilization, they've had centuries to have a planetary civilization.
Centuries.
The Internet is like a membrane that connects everybody on the planet.
Your clothes have tiny little microcomputers on it that you can communicate with anybody on the earth.
And so they're already planetary.
They have a planetary culture, a planetary language.
And what could destroy them is not ice ages, because they can just change the weather, by definition.
Their problem is not the sun petering out, because they can control powers of the sun.
Their problem is going to be spiritual.
They're going to wonder, what's it all about?
I mean, they're going to wonder, you know, well, should we explore outer space?
We have the capability of conquering solar systems, but why?
Why should we, you know?
Do you have an answer to that question?
I think that we are evolved from wanderers because of, you know, the last several ice ages, and we were forced to wander on the Earth.
There's genetically programmed in our genes that we wander.
And I think that as we approach the ability to control our own DNA, okay, which we'll have within, you know, 50 to 70 years or so, we'll keep that instinct alive.
We're not going to want to tamper with that instinct to wander around, okay, and see new worlds.
So I think that even if we attain Type II status within a few thousand years now, okay, Type II status within a few thousand years, we'll have that spiritual quality of curiosity, you know.
We'll wonder, What's behind the universe?
Is there a meaning to the universe?
What about God?
What about the origin of the Big Bang?
They'll have so much knowledge about how the Big Bang took place, and how the universe evolved, but they'll wonder what happened before then, or what does it all mean?
Well, our technical evolution, Doctor, does not seem linear.
I mean, if you look at where we've come in the last 10, 20, 30 years, and then project back, it seems very non-linear.
It seems exponential.
That's right.
So, when you project the current rate, and it continues exponentially, it might not be as many thousands of years as you're talking about, or will it be?
It'll still be thousands of years, because to reach the energy of a star, you might think, would take millions and millions of years for our economy growing at 3% GNP.
A 3% GNP rate would take millions of years to reach the power of a star.
But actually, if you do the calculation on the slide roller calculator, you'll realize that within about 200 years, we'll obtain planetary power, power to control the atmosphere, power to control earthquakes.
And within about a thousand, two thousand years after that, on an exponential scale of three percent, three percent GNP rising per year, we'll approach the capability of manipulating small stars within that period of time.
Okay?
So because we are growing exponentially at about three percent, we will have this capability, and you can calculate it, at what point we'll obtain the ability to manipulate a star.
And that point is the point where we can manipulate space and time.
Because stars do it all the time.
Stars can play with space and time.
And we will have that kind of power again as we rise up this energy scale at about 3% per year.
All right.
Interesting question for you.
As you look back over the last, say, 50 years, have there been, in your opinion, any unnatural jumps?
Well, yes.
The unexpected always happens, right?
Right.
In the year 1900, going back even farther, okay, atoms were a mystery.
We didn't know about what life was all about.
We didn't know why airplanes could fly.
We didn't know what made the stars shine.
By 1920, we began to already figure out how atoms formed and what the atom was made out of.
By 1945, of course, we built atomic bombs.
And we figured out how stars generate energy.
So starting from a state of almost complete superstition and ignorance in 1900, we came to an almost complete understanding of the atom by about 1945.
And now the next big chapter is DNA.
DNA to the 21st century will be like nuclear physics to the 20th century.
So we're going by leaps and bounds, you know.
And 20 years ago, no one knew exactly how the DNA was put together.
So can somebody... I don't have almost a complete understanding of viruses and yeast.
I'm right.
So can somebody hypothetically suggest there's been intervention?
Well, you can always make a case for it.
Well, look, I'm a physicist.
And a physicist, by definition, works with what is reproducible.
I get calls all the time asking about whether or not miracles or angels can exist.
And I'll be very frank.
We only work with what is reproducible in the laboratory.
Unless you can capture an angel and allow it to be studied, you know, in a friendly way, of course, We physicists simply say we don't know, because it has to be reproducible.
That's why miracles are outside the province of physics, because miracles happen only once.
And if they happen only once, they're not reproducible.
So, the same thing here, if there was intervention, that is, if somebody whispered in Einstein's ear, E equals MC squared, right?
Yes.
Or if somebody whispered in Watson and Crick's ear that it's DNA, it's DNA, right?
It's not proteins, it's not alpha cycles, it's DNA, right?
It's hard to prove.
Or it's hard to disprove.
Hard to prove, but that's why I asked you whether you had seen any seemingly unnatural leaps to which you sort of chuckled and responded, yes.
And that provokes the next obvious question.
Anyway, we're at a break point, so relax.
We'll be right back.
Dr. Michio Haku is my guest.
He'll be right back.
You're listening to Art Bell, Somewhere in Time.
Tonight featuring a replay of Coast to Coast AM from August 22, 1997.
Coast to Coast is a musical production of the Los Angeles Times.
It is based on the novel by John M. Kershaw.
The musical is based on the novel by John M. Kershaw.
I see them bloom for me and you.
and I think to myself what a wonderful world
I see skies of blue and clouds of white
the bright blessed day the dark sacred night
I think to myself what a wonderful world
I see skies of blue Bugs that don't seem to be affected even by the last resort antibiotics that we have now.
The strongest last resort stuff.
And that reminded me of 12 Monkeys.
And that reminded me of this song.
We'll ask our guest about that when he gets back in a moment.
He is Dr. Michio Kaku.
And to me, he sounds like the next Carl Sagan.
Frankly, he's a professor of theoretical physics at City University of New York.
And for those in L.A.
who are just joining right now, he's been there doing research for the past 25 years, has a B.A.
from Harvard University, 1968, Phi Beta Kappa, summa cum laude, and number one in his physics class, number one, a Ph.D.
at the University of California at Berkeley, Radiation Lab in 1972, Research Associate, Princeton University in 1973, visiting Professor Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, 1990, Honors elected fellow of the American Physical Society, an honor held by the top 10% of physicists in the US, voted by New York Magazine as one of the 100 smartest New Yorkers, has written a book called Hyperspace, A Scientific Odyssey Through Parallel Universes, Time Warps, and the 10th Dimension.
Which, by the way, became a national bestseller, selected by the New York Times and Washington Post as one of the best science books of last year, has just authored a new book that's about to be out in a week or so, called Visions, How Science Will Revolutionize the 21st Century.
Now, hang in there.
We will get to calls.
We're in the middle of some pretty deep and interesting stuff, and you will get an opportunity
to ask questions coming up.
All right, back now to my guest, Dr. Michio Kaku.
We'll see you next time.
We've just had Los Angeles join the network.
If you would, just very briefly, give us a definition of Type 0 through 3 civilizations.
Okay, a Type 0 civilization is one like ours that uses dead plants or oil for energy.
But a Type 1 civilization, which is maybe 200 years away from us, Star Trek is a truly planetary civilization that can control the weather, mind the oceans, control earthquakes.
A Type 2 civilization is stellar.
They can ignite stars and play with stars, just like the Federation of Planets on Star Trek.
So Star Trek is a typical Type 2 civilization.
A Type 3 civilization is galactic.
They can control not just individual stars, but star clusters and the Borg or the Foundation.
Would be a typical Type 3 civilization, or like in Star Wars with the Empire.
We are Type 0, however, you know, we aspire to be Type 1, and maybe one day we'll obtain Type 2, or even Type 3 status.
Perhaps.
Here's a fact.
Doctor, when I was a kid, I had an aunt farm.
I watched those little critters for a while, and then let them go.
Was more interested in playing doctor with a little blonde gal down the street than mating with an aunt.
However, This does not obviate the possibility that one of my fellow man, for reasons of his own, may be intensely involved in the study of those tiny creatures for a range of reasons, including biological, genetic, interactive, etc.
We should not get into the trap of applying our own reasoning and motivations to others, no matter what class civilization they, in quotes, represent.
Right.
But as a physicist, I also realized that if a Type II civilization were to probe nearby star systems, there's so many, so many potential ant colonies, right?
Yes.
And what they would do is send a small robot probe.
They would use nanotechnology, as I mentioned in my book, Visions, nanotechnology to build robots, small tiny robots about the size of your fist, that would land on a moon, replicate themselves by the millions, And then they would send out millions of other robot probes to other star systems, because there's so many dead planets out there, you don't want to waste your time on the dead planets.
So, perhaps in our solar system, there is a palm-sized device on the moon, sent to us by a nearby Type 2 or Type 3 civilization that's just monitoring.
Monitoring what's happening here on the Earth and in our solar system.
Wouldn't that be the biological equivalent of a virus, like a computer virus, self-replicating?
In some sense, yeah.
But they're benign.
They're just listening devices that you throw thousands of them around just to listen in on what's happening.
And they're self-replicating.
They're what I call von Neumann probes.
They are artificially intelligent.
They can create copies of themselves using moon material and living off the land.
And they would then colonize vast solar systems without touching and interfering with life on these systems.
So it's sort of like if you have a bunch of ant colonies around there, just setting up sensors with video cameras and monitoring them, because there's so many of them, so many places that have no ant colonies at all, and just benignly observing what's out there in the forest.
That's the correct way that a Type II or a Type III civilization would make contact with our solar system.
And there's a lot of debate within physicists as to whether or not we've been probed.
We would be probed not by flying saucers, but we would be probed by these palm-sized nanotechnological devices planted on the moon because escape velocity is so low on the moon, and they could observe quite a bit from our moon.
And until we establish a colony on the moon, we'll never interact with these probes.
Just like in the movie 2001, right, when they met the monolith?
Sure.
That monolith is the probe.
You know, in the movie, by the way, 2001, A Princeton physicist was supposed to introduce the movie, and he was supposed to explain this, that you don't need Captain Kirk to explore outer space, you need these self-replicating probes about the size of a rock or so, and they would replicate.
However, Kubrick, at the last minute, cut the beginning of his own movie.
Really?
And he made it very mysterious as a consequence.
But you see, his whole movie, 2001, is based on a very simple physical principle that we physicists worked out several decades ago that is mentioned in my book, Visions, which is just coming out in two weeks, which is the correct way that intelligent life will probe other star systems, because there are so many dead planets out there that you don't want to waste your time.
You want to find the interesting one, you know, where DNA may have flourished someplace.
Are we interesting?
Well, possibly.
You know, we have discovered now eleven planets outside our solar system.
You know, when we were growing up, we learned there were nine planets, right?
Yes.
You have to memorize Mercury, Earth, Venus, Mars.
Now there are more planets outside our solar system than inside our solar system.
And that's the beginning.
In a few more years, we're going to be launching what is called Kepler and other satellites which will photograph perhaps thousands of planets in outer space, of which perhaps maybe 200 may be Earth-like.
And so I think we're going to come for a shock.
By the year 2010, if these NASA plans go through, we may find perhaps several hundred Earth-like planets within maybe 200 light years of the planet Earth.
And we'll come to realize that we're not alone, that there are Other planets with perhaps liquid water on them.
You know, liquid water is a universal solvent.
It dissolves hydrocarbon chemicals and makes DNA possible.
So there could be a lot of intelligent life forms out there in the universe.
Did you hear the newscast that ran at the top of the hour that little bit toward the end?
Yeah.
We are in a fight with little tiny things right now.
The movie Twelve Monkeys.
Remember that?
Yeah.
Another way for a zero type civilization to never make it to number one.
Which of course could be our fate.
As I mentioned in my book, Visions, there are probably a lot of type zero civilizations out there that never made it to type one.
And if we ever build a starship within maybe a hundred years and visit some of the nearby star systems, We may find dead planets.
We may find planets with a greenhouse effect and with radioactive atmospheres and gigantic craters where nuclear bombs went off.
We could find a lot of dead planets out there that allowed their racial, sectarian and nationalistic passions prevent them from attaining Type I status, which is really a shame because we are so close now.
We're within maybe 200 years.
Of attaining Type 1 status.
Alright, then let me take you back, since we're still at zero.
Mark in Richland, Washington asks, Ask Dr. Kaku about a book that you wrote once called, How to Win a Nuclear War.
Interesting, doctor.
You wrote a book called, How to Win a Nuclear War.
It's called, To Win a Nuclear War.
You see, I'm very worried that we may not reach Type 1 status.
And I wrote a book going through the war plans of the Pentagon, showing that yes, indeed, I'm sure the Russians had plans, and we had plans, too, to fight a nuclear war.
Sure.
And they're declassified now, by the way.
They are publicly available in National Archives.
I wrote a book detailing how close we came to blowing ourselves up in several crises,
the Korean War, the Vietnam War, several crises where American presidents reached for the
atomic bomb and made it clear that we would use the atomic bomb in warfare.
I wrote the book because I began to realize that we may never reach Type I status. We
may never reach the fraternity of stars and star systems out there, which probably do
exist, but if we let our nationalistic passions get the way with us, Element 92 may do within,
like it has probably already done in many Type 0 civilizations that reached for Type
I status and never made it.
Well, I'm curious.
Everybody says such a war would be totally unwinnable.
That's right.
And that was the conclusion of the book.
Oh, it was?
Yeah, the conclusion of the book would be that the consequences would have been enormous.
Nuclear winter, The atmosphere would have been totally irradiated.
The fallout would have poisoned the wells and genetic mutations would have erupted all over.
It would have been horrible.
And I go through the plan.
The Pentagon itself calculated how many millions would die on the order of 300 million people would die almost instantly in an all-out conflict with the Soviet Union.
And we came much closer than our textbooks tell us about these things.
I am not convinced that we are tremendously safer with regard to that possibility than we were during the Cold War years.
All kinds of things are beginning to happen.
We hear that nuclear weapons now are out of the Soviet Union, in the hands of Ayatollah somebody or another, and all that sort of thing.
So, in a way, we live in a more dangerous world now than then.
Yeah, in some sense.
My mentor was Edward Teller, and many of my friends designed these warheads.
I was in Moscow last year, and I met my counterparts in Moscow.
Oh!
Yeah, they designed nuclear weapons there.
There were some nuclear weapons designers there.
And they told me that the price that Russia paid was enormous in terms of cities totally polluted with nuclear waste.
Yes.
Whole villages wiped out in nuclear accidents that were hushed up by Stalin and tremendous problems with managing their nuclear infrastructure, right?
And they deeply regret the fact that they went into this whole nuclear game, you know, with all these polluted cities and reactors that are just lying there rusting.
And, you know, we're maybe a little bit better off, but not much better off, because we, too, have, you know, 17 nuclear weapons plants that are rotting.
And, you know, it just was released a month ago that iodine-131 was in a lot of kids' drinking water in the 50s and 60s.
The government finally owned up to that after, you know, 40 years, right?
So the point I draw in my book, Visions, is that we are headed for Type II status.
We're very close to it now, after, you know, 10,000 years since the Ice Age ended.
You must mean Type I. I'm sorry, that's right.
We're very close to Type I status now.
And, you know, after... It's been 10,000 years since the ice melted, and that made civilization possible.
And it's been so many millions of years since we came out of the forest, right?
And we're just on the verge of attaining Type I status, where we'll have total control over the planets, the energy, the oceans, the atmosphere, right?
And in harmony, we'll have a planetary civilization.
Everyone will be wired up with everybody else, right?
But we could blow it!
You know, we could fumble the ball, you know?
If we allow our passions to get ahead of us, right?
And that's how I end the book, Visions, that we're so close to a planetary civilization.
And at that point, you know, like in the end of the movie Star Trek, First Contact, we'll probably, you know, join the fraternity of planets out there, if there is one.
And it would be great.
I would love to meet intelligent life forms in outer space.
What do you think the crisis point will be and how far away from it are we?
Well, the nuclear problem is still with us.
My friends are still designing new generations of hydrogen warheads, believe it or not.
And in October, Cassini is going to go up with 72 pounds of plutonium.
How do you feel about that, by the way?
The Cassini launch?
Yeah, I'm very much against it.
60 Minutes actually interviewed me for a segment they may air later on.
I'm very worried because, you know, the arrogance of technology.
You know, we think we've mastered space travel.
Look at the mirror.
The mirror's falling apart.
And it brings home to us the fact that space technology is risky.
How risky is it, Doctor, if Cassini were to blow up in the upper atmosphere, or, as I understand it, as it returns toward Earth for the old slingshot effect, re-enters instead of slingshots, if any of that occurs, and this stuff were to get blown into the atmosphere, what would the likely result be?
Well, NASA itself admits that 2,300 people could be killed in a maximum accident.
That's their numbers now.
How many people?
2,300 would die of cancer by ingesting plutonium into their lungs and would come down with a fatal disease because they've got plutonium exposure.
Now, that's NASA's numbers.
I've looked at NASA's numbers because, you know, I'm a physicist.
I can go through their computer calculations pretty easily.
And I think they've underestimated the dangers by a factor of a hundred.
I think perhaps 200,000 people could be killed in a maximum accident, because they have all their radiation landing within two square miles.
Now, give me a break.
The winds blow more than two miles.
Indeed they do.
And you cannot have all the plutonium concentrated within two square miles, which is their assumption.
You know, my jaw hit the floor when I saw that, you know?
So I think, you know, here's the folly of us believing that we're masters of technology, because we've had so many successful space shots, and we forget Apollo 13.
We forget that the mirror is falling apart.
We forget that Gus Grissom and his cohorts died in a Gemini accident.
We forget these things, right?
Well, I wonder from a societal point of view, if something like that occurred, let's say Cassini went wrong and your worst fears came true, Would that be the end of Type 0 moving toward Type 1?
Would we regress technologically for a long period of time?
This is a question for after the bottom of the hour, and I'll come back to it.
Dr. Michio Kaku is my guest, and I promise, coming up shortly, we will get the lines open.
But I trust you're interested in what you're hearing.
I sure am.
From the high desert, I'm Art Bell, and this is Coast to Coast AM.
You're listening to Art Bell, Somewhere in Time, on Premier Radio Network.
Tonight an encore presentation of Costa Costa Yan from August 22, 1997.
Welcome to the Costa Costa Yan.
Music.
Radio Network presents Art Bell, Somewhere in Time.
Tonight's program originally aired August 22, 1997.
Good morning.
Open your eyes.
Get a cup of coffee.
Turn your volume up a little bit.
Sit down and don't do anything else.
But listen, Dr. Michio Kaku is my guest.
It is a very wide-ranging discussion indeed.
It's great.
We'll get back to it in a moment.
Here we go once again.
Dr. Koku, we were talking about Cassini, and I asked, well, if it blew up or something, the worst happened, a couple hundred thousand people died, whatever, what would that do to us?
I recall the setback when the shuttle Challenger blew up.
We damn near gave up the space program.
We didn't, but we considered it.
This would probably cause us to think very hard about venturing forth, wouldn't it?
That's right.
That's why I think we have to save the space program from itself.
We have to save the space program from the NASA bureaucrats who think that we can shoot plutonium into outer space and not have to worry about the consequences of these things.
My professors were the ones who created plutonium.
Most of the nuclear arsenal in the United States were made by my professors.
And they always told me that you have to handle the stuff with extreme caution, extremely radioactive, a particle that you can't even see will cause you lung cancer.
And unfortunately, some of my professors actually died because of exposure to radiation, because they were careless.
But they always impressed upon me how dangerous radiation is, and if you let it get out of hand.
And when I was in Russia last year, talking to Russian physicists, I saw what actually happened when they let radiation loose on whole cities.
Whole populations were irradiated in Russia.
And I think the Cassini thing is a very bad idea.
And I would even suggest that people write President Clinton and urge him to cancel this mission.
You know, Saturn is not going to go away.
I want to explore Saturn.
I'm a physicist.
I would love to have pictures of Saturn in the rings and so on and so forth.
But it's not going to go away.
And if we lose Cassini, and we lose a city, or if we irradiate a region of the world with plutonium, that's the end of the space program.
And that would be a tremendous tragedy.
It would be a backlash.
I am told that only a few years more would bring the ability, even in deep space, to collect enough energy with solar.
A technology to accomplish the same thing anyway.
Is that right?
NASA itself admits that Cassini is 130 pounds overweight.
That's it, just 130 pounds overweight.
My attitude, and that's 1% overweight.
The whole thing is about 13,000 pounds.
I would suggest we simply downsize it, like the Mars rover.
You know, the Mars rover has shown us the way.
Small, cheap, fast, and solar.
Downsize Cassini.
Remove 130 pounds of equipment.
Remove even more.
Cassini is a Cadillac of space missions.
We can send a Compaq.
Two Compaqs in outer space, rather than a Cadillac in outer space that's based on plutonium.
We can send, for the same price, two small Compaqs made with solar power.
Because we're talking about 800 watts, which is eight light bulbs worth.
Eight light bulbs worth of power.
Solar could make up the difference, okay?
And that's why I think we should have a safe exploration of outer space, like the rover.
The rover has shown us the way.
And I've gone through NASA's studies, and I simply don't believe that they understand how dangerous plutonium really is.
Well, NASA, I believe, prior to the Challenger accident, estimated the possibility of a shuttle blowing up to be about 1 in 100,000.
After Challenger, they were forced to reduce that to 1 in 25.
That's right.
In fact, 2020 gave me a list of their calculations, and they had the probability of one in a million for a Challenger explosion.
One in a million?
Yeah.
Now, everybody knows that a chain is no stronger than its weakest link, and the weak link is the booster rocket.
And the Titan IV booster rocket has a failure rate of one in twenty.
One in twenty is more the correct failure rate, not one in a million.
That's some bureaucrat at NASA saying that space Space travel is like a Sunday picnic.
Can we apply that to the Cassini launch?
Those numbers?
I think so.
The Titan IV is going to be the booster rocket for the Cassini mission on October 6th.
And there are going to be a lot of people crossing their fingers and making sure they get a full tank of gasoline when that thing goes up over Cocoa Beach.
Because if that thing blows up, then it has a propensity to do so.
One in twenty have blown up in the past.
Then they're going to take their car and hit the interstates, and get the hell out of there.
What right do they have to take that chance without our input?
I think you hit the nail on the head.
We live in a democratic society, and a democratic society can only flourish if everybody knows what the real risks are.
We're not children.
If the American people want a simple tournament to outer space, that's their decision.
But at least they should be told that it's potentially dangerous.
That they themselves admit that thousands could be killed.
I suspect hundreds of thousands could be killed.
And they're not being honest.
They're not telling the American people it's dangerous.
All the press releases simply ignore mention.
Well, I have this question also about other science that is going on.
For example, it was a year or two years ago, I can recall, in the San Francisco area, in an effort to do an AIDS experiment, they destroyed with radiation the immune system, or what was left of it, of an AIDS patient.
Is that right?
And replaced it with a baboon's immune system.
Oh, I heard about that experiment, right.
And while it was very interesting, I thought it was also rather risky, since one might imagine that if a baboon had some sort of disease or another that could then be nurtured in a human being and then transmitted from human being to human being.
I don't necessarily object to their doing this kind of work.
I just want to be told about the risks, if indeed all of humanity is at risk.
That's right.
And I think all of us have a right to know precisely what the risks of all these space missions are.
By the way, as an aside, if people want to email me, I'll gladly send them some reports that I have.
my email address maybe i shouldn't do this for the other hand
is m k a k u a l well dot com
i have another address for my university but i keep that for my scientific
correspondence with the russians and french and
Okay, that's M-K-A-K-U at AOL.com.
Right, M-K-A-K-U.
I think they've got, I've found, about a limit of 400 messages, so it'll fill up, and that's as much as you can get, but it will do that for a very long time.
Good luck, doctor.
Okay.
Alright, now, here's something for you.
The doctor thinks that human probes are possible.
Why can't these probes be in the form of bacteria?
That is, why couldn't these advanced civilizations in effect seed the universe with their own DNA?
That would imply that individuals from these advanced civilizations could possibly interbreed with humans.
It could also be possible that we were formed in the image of these beings.
That's possible.
That's called the panspermia thesis, and Fred Hoyle, who's a prominent cosmologist, has actually advanced this theory, stating that life occurred on Earth in a very short period of time.
You know, the Earth is about four and a half billion years old, and within a few hundreds of millions of years, DNA formed.
So that is too short, he claims, and so there were spores or seeding that took place.
Precisely.
Well, it's conceivable.
On Mars, for example, three and a half billion years ago, Mars was quite tropical.
There were oceans and seas on Mars, and meteorites impacted on it, and perhaps we are Martians.
That was actually entertained by some NASA scientists.
Could Mars be a failed zero?
Maybe.
Maybe it's a civilization that sprang up and decided to settle old scores with Element 92, you know, uranium and nuclear weapons.
But, you know, it's also conceivable that a meteorite that hit Mars then floated it out of space and landed on the Earth and seeded the Earth.
So it's conceivable.
We now know there's quite a bit of traffic between the planets because escape velocity is quite low from Mars.
It's easy to shoot things out of space from Mars.
So that might argue there'd be a similarity in DNA?
Possibly.
If the origin of life is just within the solar system, then it's just going to be DNA for us and us only.
And so, in outer space, we expect aliens not to want to mate with us, because they're just different species and different DNA.
However, if panspermia turns out to be true, then perhaps there maybe is a similarity, and perhaps they may not look so much different from us.
Exobiologists... In which case, they'd regard us more kindly, in all probability.
In some sense, yes.
Take a look at what made us intelligent.
We became intelligent because we have an opposable thumb that allows us to manipulate tools.
We have stereo vision.
We're predators, and predators are smarter than prey.
And by having stereo vision and an opposable thumb and a language, those are the three ingredients that allowed us to become intelligent.
So in outer space, we expect alien beings to have tentacles, maybe, or thumbs of some sort,
stereo eyes of some sort, and a language communication by which they can transmit culture and science.
But other than that, that's all you really need for the creation of intelligent life in outer space, those three
things.
So they don't have to look like us.
And when I see pictures of aliens from outer space, they look too similar to us,
with eyes, nose, mouth, shoulders, jaws, torso, legs, arms, so on and so forth,
in exact proportion as a small ape.
So I tend to frown upon that, because if I were to see a picture of a lobster,
I'd say, my God, that looks more realistic to me than something that looks so obviously like a human being.
However, if panspermia turns out to be true, then perhaps eyes, nose, face, chin, shoulders, or so, in the exact proportion of an ape, May turn out to be more universal.
If I might back to space for a second, if you were to go back in time through a wormhole, this is a fact, every time you went back, you would alter that evolution so that you could always go back to a parallel universe, not your own.
Since you could go back literally an infinite amount of times, there would have to be an infinite number of parallel universes, correct?
An infinite number of your real past, and each return would create a more altered universe.
That's correct.
That would evolve completely differently.
That's the leading theory.
It's called the Inflationary Theory of the Universe.
It eventually may win the Nobel Prize.
Yeah, that's the leading theory of creation.
That the Big Bang is nothing but one bubble among a frothing ocean of bubbles.
Think of boiling water.
Each boiling point of water expands rapidly, right?
When you boil water?
Yes.
That's the Big Bang.
Okay?
And there are other big bangs taking place all the time.
So in some sense, in a religious sort of way, it unites the Judeo-Christian theory of Genesis with the Buddhist theory of Nirvana.
Judeo-Christian ethics starts with one instant of creation in Genesis.
However, in Buddhism, there was no beginning and no end.
There was only timelessness.
This theory allows us to merge, merge the Judeo-Christian theory of Genesis with the theory of Nirvana.
Because in the beginning was nirvana, but there's genesis constantly taking place.
And the big question that Stephen Hawking, myself, and others have looked at is whether or not you can communicate with some of these other bubbles.
And the answer is, in principle, yes, but it's, again, not for a Type Zero.
A Type Zero civilization like ours is too puny.
It's pathetic.
We simply don't have the energy necessary to open up wormholes in space and, you know, as I said before, alter the fabric of time.
A Type 2 civilization would have this capability.
And we think our galaxy must be teeming with Type 2 civilizations.
So even to open up the very tiniest of holes would require more energy than we could possibly create presently on Earth?
Well, a calculation was done.
Six years ago, in publishing physical review letters that I looked at, showing that if you use present-day technology, you know, using what is called a Casimir effect, the hole you could open up would be smaller than an atom, so it would not be very practical.
So the authors of this paper, coming from Caltech, were very humble.
They said that with human technology today, the wormhole would be smaller than an atom, therefore useless.
However, In the future, or in an intelligent type 2 civilization in outer space, they could easily open up this wormhole so it's much bigger than an atom, so that whole object could fall through that.
And as I mentioned before, that paper became the basis for the movie Contact.
It gave the theoretical and physical justification for the movie Contact.
I've got to ask you this question on behalf of another guest that I have from time to time named Richard Hoagland
who talks a great deal about hyperdimensional physics and
he uses the number 19.5 and refers us to
19.5 on any planet or planetary body as a point where there is a
particular energy
Does any of that make any sense to you?
And I'm not sure I'm presenting it properly to you.
Well, in physics, the magic numbers are 10 and 26.
These are the numbers that constantly occur in this unified field theory.
It's called superstring theory.
It's a theory where we have little vibrating strings that give rise to the quarks, which give rise to the protons, vibrating in 10-dimensional hyperspace.
In mathematics, the same magic numbers occur over and over again, and they are 10 and 26.
That's why the number 10 is selected out as the dimension of space and time by the string theory.
By the way, Mr. Hoagland talks about faces on Mars.
Yes.
And let me say that I had a chance to interview Donna Shirley, who is the Mars Project Director, Director of the entire Mars Project.
Oh yes, yes, yes.
And I asked her about the face on Mars, because she's the world leading expert on Mars.
Did she smile or frown?
Well, she said, her answer surprised me, because she's a scientist like myself, and she said, I would love it if it were a real face on Mars, because then my budget would balloon, and we'd have billions of dollars, and we'd be rich!
All the money would go to the Mars Exploration Project, right?
But then she said, well, but chances are, it's due to the fact that the human brain has a tendency to fill in the dots.
If you see a lion hiding in the forest, you don't see the whole lion, you see just dots, right?
Our brain has the ability to fill in the dots rapidly because those ancestors of ours that did not have the ability to fill in those dots got eaten up by the tigers.
So we are the descendants of creatures who are very good at filling in the dots, seeing tigers when they're not there, Or maybe they are there.
99% of the time they're not there.
But that 1% of the time is going to save our butt.
Okay, that's an absolutely fair comment.
But on the other hand, look at where they have gone and what we have thus far discovered.
We have found rocks.
Now, why is the area where they presently have gone, which by the way is at 19.5 degrees, why is that more interesting than something that would potentially be shown to be from some previous civilization which would change, of course, everything?
Well, the Mars landers have landed in Utopia Plain, Planitia Plain, and Mars Valley, mainly because they're flat, and there's no gigantic craters and valleys and stuff like that to interfere with.
And they're also in the middle of flood plains, where you can actually pick up, perhaps, debris from water.
So that's one reason why they focused on these rock formations.
But let me say that if that face on Mars looked like a lobster or an octopus, I would really be quite startled.
But it looks too much like a human.
And, like I said before, the human face is largely an accident, because all you have to have is stereo eyes to create intelligence with an opposable thumb, right?
Yes.
Those are the ingredients of intelligence.
Language, an opposable thumb of some sort, and eyes of some sort.
And the arrangement of our nose... You know, like, for example, whales.
Whales breathe through the top of their head, for God's sake.
And they're mammals, just like us.
They're very close to us.
We split off from them maybe a hundred million years ago.
They breathed the top of their head for God's sake, right?
So if we were to see a face on Mars that didn't look like our face, but had obviously a regular feature to it, I would be stunned.
But it's too much like a human face.
Oh, but then we would not have recognized it.
I mean, if it were virtually some sort of crab, built to be seen from space.
But if it was regular, it would be astonishing.
See, in the 1950s, astronomers found the letter M on Mars.
It was quite a stunning thing.
They had quite a bit of headlines.
A big M was seen on Mars, and many people say that Mars is signaling the Earth.
Then other people pointed out that astronomers put pictures upside down, because their telescopes invert the image, And a W is for war.
It's not M for Mars, it's W for war.
Well, it's a warring planet, right?
Well, because of Viking, we now know what that famous M is now.
It turns out there was a dust storm that covered the entire planet except the tops of four volcanoes.
Oh.
And the four volcanoes are aligned exactly like an M. You know, the three things in a row and the base of the M.
So we now can explain why there was this M marking on Mars seen about 1952 or so by astronomers with our telescopes.
So that was startling because it wasn't a human face, it was regular and it immediately sparked interest that it was intelligent life signaling us, earthlings.
So if I were to see something like that on Mars, that to me would be more convincing than a human face.
I understand.
I understand.
I want to ask you about this.
We're going to go to the phones next hour, but very quickly, with very little time, the Brookings Report, which virtually suggested the group most disturbed by extraterrestrial contact would be you guys, scientists.
Well, personally, I'd be thrilled.
It would be the fulfillment of a dream.
But it would disturb paradigms?
It would turn over careers that are based on, you know, grant money that comes from certain theories being so?
In some sense, yeah.
But it would open up huge frontiers.
I mean, they would be based on a different hydrocarbon chemistry than us.
They would have a different way of looking at mathematics.
The mathematics would be the same, but they would approach it differently.
They would have a new way of reformulating physical laws.
So you personally reject it?
Do you reject it for the entire scientific community?
Well, again, I think the public has a stereotype of scientists being spodgy and gruff and kind of like... Well, you're not, but I don't know that you're representative.
Doctor, hold on, we just have to break here.
I'm Art Bell, and this is Coast to Coast.
You're listening to Art Bell, somewhere in time.
Tonight, featuring a replay of Coast to Coast AM, from August 22nd, 1997.
And all the birds in the trees, they'd be singing so happily, or joyfully, or playfully, watching me.
But then they sent me away, teach me how to be sensible, logical, all responsible, practical.
But then they sent me away, teach me how to be sensible, logical, all responsible, practical.
What is the most important thing in life?
My guest is Dr. Michio Kaku.
He is a professor of theoretical physics at the City University of New York.
And we've got another hour to go.
So if you've got a question, come on in.
Lines are loaded, of course.
And we'll get back to him in just a moment.
Alright, back now to drkaku.com Doctor, do you generally subscribe to the Big Bang Theory?
Yes, I think that the general features of the Big Bang Theory, you can critique this or critique that, but the overall framework has held up remarkably well since the 1930s when it was first proposed.
All right, then let me ask you the really cool question.
What was there one second prior to it?
Well, actually, we have a theory of that now.
Before, it was very embarrassing asking a physicist that, because it could explain a lot of things.
But what happened before the Big Bang, right?
Right.
We now believe, this is called the inflationary universe theory, which again is part of this hyperspatial theory that I'm talking about, that the universe came out of nothing.
That out of nothing came something.
And think of boiling water.
When water just begins to boil, bubbles form.
Yes.
And these bubbles begin to expand very rapidly, and then you get boiling water.
Right.
Well, we now think that there was cosmic nothing, with a capital N in the beginning, but bubbles begin to form.
And because of the quantum principle, because of uncertainty, you know, you cannot have pure nothing.
You have to have some something.
And these bubbles begin to grow rapidly and begin to create whole universes, okay?
So, this theory comes out of MIT, and in fact, Alan Guth, who's a friend of mine, is the creator of this theory.
And he's actually calculated what it would take to create universes, even in your basement.
He's actually done the calculation, believe it or not, of what it would take to create a small, big bang in your basement.
And I asked him once whether or not you'd get killed doing this.
And he said, well, yes, yes, yes, there is a small after effect.
It would be about the equivalent of a hydrogen bomb.
However, if you had enough energy... So even the neighborhood should be concerned.
That's right.
And again, we come back to the same thing.
You could do all sorts of paranormal feats of magic, you know, as Arthur C. Clarke once said, any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
Right.
But it takes energy, an enormous concentration of energy, and Professor Guth at MIT has calculated it would take about a trillion trillion degrees of energy concentrated into A little ball to create one of these bubbles, right, in your own basement.
Okay?
And again, this is something that a Type II civilization would consider easy.
But for us, it's mind-boggling.
I mean, who can create a trillion, trillion degrees in your basement, right?
It's hotter than a supernova, for example.
Oh, yes.
So, before the Big Bang, we think there was nothing.
And these big, these bangs take place all the time.
Okay?
So, in a way, it was like the water before the first bubble.
Yeah, in that sense, right.
And there's a joke that we sometimes tell.
There was a Russian physicist who once visited New York, and he was a famous gambler.
And we asked him what his gambling strategy was, because he was headed to Las Vegas.
And he said, well, you know, he's going to put all his money on the first bet.
And we said, well, that's a stupid strategy.
I mean, you'll lose all your money in Las Vegas, right?
Don't they know any better in Moscow?
And then he said, well, yeah, but in one parallel universe, I'm going to be rich.
I'm going to be rich beyond imagination.
But then I told him, well, look, bud, in this universe, you're going to be broke.
Well, I would have added, in this universe, we appreciate his sort of fellow very much, because we don't have an income tax here, doctor, just because of fellows like him.
I see.
First time caller on the line, you're on the air with Dr. Kaku.
Hello.
Hello.
Go ahead.
My question for the doctor is, Has any studies been done about reflection points in the universe, say that, say if you're looking at yourself in the mirror, what you're actually seeing isn't that second, it's like a trillionth of a second ago.
So my question is, is there any point in space where we can see or listen to the Earth as it was 10,000 years ago?
Well, if you had a lens, a gravitational lens that could bend the light around in a circle, Then, yes, you could look at the Earth as it used to be, okay?
Now, Einstein first proposed these lenses, and he calculated it would be too difficult to measure this in outer space.
Well, that calculation was done, you know, 50 years ago, and we now have instruments that can do it.
We've now used the gravitational lenses to measure the farthest star in the universe, the farthest star in the universe, ...has now been measured by these gravitational lenses, where light will actually bend going around a galaxy.
And by the way, some people ask the question, what is the farthest star?
Is there an object in the universe that says, the end of the universe?
Is there a brick wall that says, the end, do not pass, go, do not collect $200?
We've looked, what, 15 billion light years out?
Something like that?
Right.
Actually, no, because you see, it's the same thing as what Columbus discovered.
Columbus realized that in two dimensions, the universe, the Earth, seems infinite.
You could sail the ocean blue in 1492 and just keep on going.
So in two dimensions, the Earth is infinite.
But in three dimensions, the Earth is obviously a ball, just 8,000 miles across.
This is a little third rock from the sun, right?
So the universe is infinite in two dimensions, but finite in three dimensions.
So our universe, It appears to be infinite in three dimensions.
You can go anywhere and you just keep on going.
There's no brick wall.
There's no gate that says the end of the universe.
But you see, in four dimensions, in hyperspace, the universe is a ball, just like what Columbus discovered.
So in other words, the farthest object in the universe is the back of your head.
Just like Columbus realized the farthest object on the Earth is the back of his head, Because you'd have to sail the ocean blue and come back to Queen Isabel of Spain, right?
According to Einstein, the farthest object in the universe is probably the back of your head.
How's that?
Of course, light cannot make that trip.
But in principle, if you had a super-duper telescope, you would see that somebody's back of the head is facing you that didn't comb his hair that day.
And then you remember that you didn't comb your hair that day either.
All right, sounds good.
Right, take care.
That'll keep him busy for a while.
Back to the phones.
First time caller line, you're on the air with Professor Kaku.
Hi.
Hi, good morning, Mr. Bell and Mr. Kaku.
Where are you, sir?
Oh, Liverpool, New York.
All right.
I was wondering about the different space-time theories at the micro-level, the space-time fabrics.
Like there's Loop Theory by, I think, Ashtekar.
Ashtekar and Sullivan.
That's right.
And there's String, and there's something that's nicknamed Soap Suds.
Right.
That's correct.
Yeah.
I was wondering if there were, you know, oh, and then Twister.
I don't know.
I think that was in the 1960s.
I don't know if it's still around.
That died out.
Right.
Yeah.
I was wondering if there were any others.
No, that's basically it.
The leading one is String Theory.
And that's the one I'm referring to, because strings can only vibrate in 10-dimensional hyperspace.
The loops of Ashtekar and Smola, as you pointed out, have never gotten anywhere because it's probably divergent.
It's probably a divergent theory.
You get infinities cropping up all over the place.
So, the loop thing that you mentioned has not gotten anywhere.
The leading candidate is string theory.
It's a hyperspatial theory.
It exists only in 10-dimensional hyperspace.
And there are at least 10,000 papers written on the subject.
I'm one of the pioneers of the theory, by the way.
I'm the founder of string field theory.
It's my creation.
So, that is the dominant theory right now, which has mesmerized hundreds of physicists in all the leading institutions on the planet Earth at the present time.
You can go to any country on the Earth and they'll have seminars on this theory.
Oh, okay, and one more point.
Could the loops be strings, you know, made into loops?
Yeah, I thought about that.
I've looked at Smolin and Ashnikar's work and I thought maybe they were related to strings, but I don't think so.
Strings, by the way, for people who don't know, vibrate at different frequencies.
Just like the Greeks talked about the Pythagorean harmonies of violin strings, and each note of a violin string corresponds to a note, right?
Each vibration of the superstring corresponds to a particle, like the quarks.
The quarks and the mesons, the Yang-Mills, gauge fields, all of them can be viewed as nothing but vibrations of an elemental string.
So, the harmonies of the string are the laws of physics.
And the symphony created by them is what is called the universe.
And at the present time, this is the leading theory.
Two Nobel Prize winners, Murray Gell-Mann and Steve Weinberg, have publicly stated that this is probably it.
This is the theory that probably eluded Einstein for the last 30 years of his life.
And at the present time, no one is smart enough on the Earth to solve all these equations, unfortunately.
If I was smart enough to solve these equations, I could go to Sweden tomorrow and accept the Nobel Prize.
Wild Guard Line, you're on the air with Dr. Kaku.
Hello.
Hi, this is Dorian from Hyattsville, Maryland.
Okay, you're a little weak, so you're going to have to kind of yell at us.
From Hyattsville, Maryland, go ahead.
I have one quick question for Dr. Kaku.
In regard to the multiple timelines, could that possibly account for the deja vu that people feel sometimes?
That's a good question.
Do these timelines cross any time?
Well, you ask an interesting question, because as Einstein pointed out, we sweep out a timeline, as he pointed out, and the timeline used to be thought to be linear, a straight line, and Einstein induced the concept that the timeline can curve and bend, so that one second on the moon is not one second on the earth.
A clock beats faster on the moon, by the way, than on the earth, okay?
And a clock on the sun would beat slower than a clock on the earth, according to Einstein's theory.
The new twist is that these lines can turn on themselves and fork.
But again, it takes an enormous amount of energy to do that.
So if you have a feeling of deja vu, I would tend to think that the brain is tricking you into thinking that an image that you see in front of you was reproduced from the past.
However, as I'm very careful to point out, all the feats of the paranormal All the feats of the paranormal, not just Deja Vu, but all of them, are conceivably possible if you had enough energy to twist the timeline, to bend time into a pretzel.
You could punch a hole in space and leap into the 10th dimension if you had a sufficient amount of energy, which is, again, only for really a Type II or a Type III civilization.
All right.
That provokes then a question that I have.
You look at things as a physicist looks at things, the required amount of energy to accomplish what you think might be able to be done.
Is it possible, Doctor, that your avenue, the avenue of the physicist, in trying to achieve all of this, may be the wrong road altogether, and that eventually, through some mental process or some other process that we're able to develop, as we continue to evolve, there may be another way?
It's conceivable.
Some people have looked into the possibility of Type 4.
If you watch Star Trek, for example, you know there's a civilization called the Q. Yes.
They are beyond the Borg.
A Borg is a typical Type 3, a typical galactic civilization.
Q is more like a god.
A god, right.
And the question is, is Q within the laws of physics?
And on one point it says, well, no, he seems to have the power of a god, right?
But on the other hand, if you take any physics and extend it far enough, it has enough energy to become God-like.
And at that point, the laws haven't changed.
It's just that you have access to tremendous amounts of energy.
And it appears to be magic.
That appears to be magical, right.
So that's why I'm saying that in principle, if you were to meet somebody like the Q, you would say, well, that's beyond the laws of physics, right?
My attitude is no, that's not necessarily beyond the laws of physics, it's just beyond the laws of common sense.
If you have enough energy, you could perform many of the feats of the cube, because they would essentially be type 4.
They would have the power not of galactic energy, but they would have the power of space and time.
Space and time is like a small Yes.
I'm in Dallas.
I've got a question for the doctor.
old space and time anyway they feel like. You would just hope they wouldn't have the
attitude of Q. Yeah, that's right. What an attitude.
Ease to the Rockies. You're on the air. Good morning.
Yes. Hello there. Where are you?
Yes, I'm in Dallas. Dallas, Texas. All right.
I've got a question for the doctor. Yes.
He mentioned before the...
That's right.
the Federation from the Star Trek TV show, which was a typical Type II civilization, correct?
That's right.
I was wondering what were your thoughts on the possibilities of the transporter device used in that show
being possible?
Oh, yes.
Everyone I've ever talked to thinks that warp drive is impossible, but the transporter is within the realm of
possibility.
I've heard IBM is working on such a thing.
Well, it's actually the reverse.
Warp drive.
There's a theory of warp drive, believe it or not.
Where does the word warp come from?
It comes from Einstein's theory of general relativity.
We have a theory of warp drive.
We do not have a theory of transporters.
The idea of dissolving the body into atoms and then radioing these atoms to another place and then reassembling the atoms, atom for atom, is beyond anything that we physicists can conceive of.
Now that doesn't mean that the Q can't do it with energy beyond comprehension.
It just means that within the next several centuries, within the realm of a Type II civilization, I don't see it happening Well, there are great rumors that IBM is doing some sort of work in that arena.
Well, I've interviewed physicists from IBM.
They're friends of mine, and I haven't picked up anything.
They would, of course, receive the Nobel Prize and corner the stock market if they could invent a device that approached the power of a transporter.
It would revolutionize transportation, technology, our understanding of the fabric of space and time.
It would also be invented, probably, along with a replicator.
Yeah, right.
However, you know, Larry Krauss, who wrote the book The Physics of Star Trek, you know, he's a friend of mine, and he and I both agree that the transporter, we haven't got a clue, really.
With warp drive, we have a theory, you know, you just need dilithium crystals and 10 to the 19 billion electron volts.
But with transporters, we don't even know how to start with a transporter.
It seems so simple, right?
You see it on television every night, right?
Oh, yes.
Reruns.
But, unfortunately, we physicists don't have a clue as to how to do it.
All right.
Gotcha.
Well, for the Rockies, you're on the air with Dr. Kaku.
Hello.
Good morning, Mr. Bell.
This is Robert in the San Joaquin Valley in the shaky state of California that moves northward at the rate that the average fingernail grows.
Yes.
Yes, it's a pleasure really to listen to this program and the doctor on your show.
I really am appreciating it very much.
But, Mr. Bell, I wanted to mention something to you.
I think you'll appreciate this.
Thursday morning, 520 a.m., August 21st, Tom Fenton of CBS interviewed Mr. Trevor Bayless.
Yes, Doctor.
It's a pleasure to speak to you, sir.
and he is now developing a laptop computer with a crank.
Yes, I know.
Well, that was extremely interesting.
He has also developed a flashlight with the same mechanism.
And a great guy.
I enjoyed that.
Anyway.
Yes, Doctor, it's a pleasure to speak to you, sir.
Since I've been listening, my list of about 26 questions, I don't think Mr. Bell let me speak to you for two hours,
but my original question, I wanted to change that because you were talking about the ozone layer and the problems,
and Mr. Bell's show, the information that he has relayed to us,
what's going on in New Zealand about the plants, everything is changing color, how it's affecting all over
the world.
Is there anything that can be done to turn that around?
On this earth?
Yeah, I've reviewed a number of proposals where some scientists have proposed sending high altitude airplanes to seed the upper atmosphere and stuff.
But if you do the calculation, the amount of punnage necessary to make even the smallest dent in ozone depletion would bankrupt any modern industrial nation.
It's simply the fact that we know we've had 40 years in which to destroy the ozone layer, With millions of gallons of this stuff all over the earth.
And it rises very slowly.
One molecule destroys about 100,000 of ozone molecules.
And to reduce that damage, Mother Nature is just going to have to slowly absorb it over a 20-40 year period of time.
Human intervention at the present time with mechanical devices is simply staggeringly expensive at the present time.
Could I ask you one other question, Doctor?
Just quickly, is there How do we as citizens financially become supportive of the work that you're doing?
How do we acquaint ourselves with the procedures?
Well, you can email me.
My email address is mkaku at aol.com and I'll then relay your email address to the relevant group.
Alright, that's mkaku at aol.com, right?
All right.
Hang tight, Doctor.
We are once again at the bottom of the hour with a 30-minute span of time to go, and we'll come back and do that in just a moment.
That's going to be a week done for me, and then a day next week with a climatologist, and it's off to Alaska.
You're listening to Art Bell, somewhere in time on Premier Radio Networks.
tonight on the presentation of coast to coast a m from august twenty second
nineteen ninety seven the
the the
You're listening to Art Bell, Somewhere in Time.
Tonight, featuring a replay of Coast to Coast AM, from August 22, 1997.
Good morning, and welcome to the wonderful world of physics.
My guest is Dr. Michio Kaku.
you'll be right back we might
Might still get by.
Might make it to a Type 1.
But actually, the odds are rather against it.
When you look around the world right now... I don't know.
you give me your assessment my guest is doctor michio kaku and he not only has a great
mind but a strong constitution to be able to hang out here for five hours
Congratulations, doctor.
That's quite a siege.
Oh, well, no problem.
It's a lot of fun, in fact.
It is fun.
Radio's actually a blast.
Here we go again.
First time caller line, you're on the air with Professor Kaku.
Hi.
Hi.
I'm calling from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
My name is Yvonne.
Hi, Yvonne.
Hi.
My question has to do with the radical weather changes due to the fact that the Earth's poles shift minutely, and now more recently, much faster.
It's called the Milankovitch Cycle.
It happens every 40,000 years.
Now, recorded history, you said it only began 5,000 years ago, so apparently there are some ancient texts around.
I heard a doctor that records this.
Now, when this happens, the Earth's tilt, tilting this way, usually precedes the Ice Age, but not necessarily.
Now, there is a Dr. Ike Hartman.
He's at Maharishi International University of Management in Fairfield, Iowa.
It was he that I heard uh... bring up this
uh... factor uh... during the lecture just incidentally because he's an
architect by profession
but are home should be constructed in such a way that we will survive
this phenomenon all right well there is not in there is also of the
possibility of a periodic poll shift
so let us ask about uh... both I don't know if that's in your field, Doctor, but... Yeah, in my book, Visions, which is coming out in two weeks, I have a whole chapter about the future of the weather and the environment and stuff like that.
Yeah, the listener is correct.
The Milankovitch Cycle is one of the leading contenders for the theory of Ice Ages.
These are microscopic processions within the rotation of the Earth, which seems to upset the jet stream.
Now, the jet stream usually circulates near the North Pole, but once in a while the jet streams descend, and when they descend down toward the equator, that's when you can have these tremendous havocs with regards to the Earth's atmosphere.
The last Ice Age ended 10,000 years ago, and the melting of the ice made possible civilization.
Agriculture, believe it or not, didn't exist during the Ice Age, Agriculture made possible cities.
We didn't have to be hunters and gatherers and follow the buffalo anymore.
We could simply plant apples and not have to worry about buffalo.
So 10,000 years ago did mark a tremendous change in the development of civilization as we know it.
We may be headed for another ice age on the scale of tens of thousands of years.
However, the glaciations are not precise, and not every 40,000 years.
Sometimes they're 100,000, sometimes they're 50,000.
It's a little bit irregular.
But that's the only theory that has so far successfully weathered a lot of challenges.
And computer models seem to bear it out.
And again, the reason why these small, incremental, tiny shifts in the poles create the ice age seems to be that it messes up the jet stream.
And then the jet streams descend down carrying tremendous arctic winds, and then that in turn sets off the ice age.
Fascinating.
What about the possibility of a shift of the poles?
Well, the poles definitely have been shifting.
If you go to Hawaii, for example, and drill right into the magma, right, the igneous rock, when magma freezes, it's like freezing a compass needle.
So as you dig, you can actually see that the compass needles, microscopically embedded in the magma, shift dramatically as you dig into volcanic rock.
So we do know, in fact, that the poles have shifted dramatically over the millions of years now, not just thousands of years, but over millions of years, and Antarctica was not always the South Pole.
You can find tropical fossils Right, with the ice.
Because the South Pole was not always the South Pole.
Now, would you imagine that to be a slow or a rather immediate process when it occurs?
It's hard to say.
In the magma rock that has solidified, you know, one inch could be a million years, right?
So it's hard to say how fast they've taken place.
But it does seem to be rather abrupt.
As you dig into volcanic rock, The poles can shift rather dramatically as the deeper you go, the compass needle changes as you dig deeper and deeper.
So, not only do we have the Milankovitch cycles that we talked about, but on scales of millions of years now, we have tremendous shifts in the poles, not to mention, of course, continental drift.
We are moving away from Europe at the rate at which your fingernail grows, as was pointed out by another caller.
About an inch a month is the rate at which America is leaving Europe.
And if you multiply that over about a hundred million years, you find out that we were once connected to Europe.
And dinosaurs, of course, were alive then and could cross the land bridge between Europe and America quite easily.
Well, I don't know, Doctor, as I listen and I think about our possibility of graduation to Type I, I'm tempted to say so close and yet so far away.
Yeah, you know, we're only just a few centuries away from, I think, a near-paradise, where we're going to have a planetary civilization, we're going to be wired up with the ability to control the weather, not simply be at the beck and call of the weather.
And, you know, you have a future guest coming in talking about El Nino, right?
That's correct, Monday.
There is a theory that the reason why El Nino has been acting up, having these temper tantrums, right, and causing flooding in Holland and It's flooding in the Mississippi on the scale of, you know, centuries, right?
Germany is just getting started.
Yeah, there's a theory that says that global warming, even though it's still quite small now and almost imperceptible, does in fact affect small little disturbances in El Nino.
It's not proven, but there is a computer program that I've seen that shows that global warming would be sufficient to disrupt El Nino.
Even though global warming itself is not going to melt the ice caps anytime soon, It is powerful enough to upset El Nino.
So that, of course, could cause billions of dollars in property damage.
So we live in a very narrow ecological range.
Yeah, I think so.
That's why we're headed for a danger period.
The nuclear danger is still with us, and now the environmental dangers are getting more and more severe as humans begin to affect the environment around us.
And that's why nodal points, you know, El Nino is a nodal point on the Earth, just like the thing on your head, the whirls on your skull, where your hair grows out.
That's what El Nino is, it's one of these nodal points.
And these nodal points are quite sensitive to small changes in the atmosphere.
And that's why one of the first effects of global warming could be a disruption in El Nino, even though that's just a theory at the present time.
Alright, Wild Card Line, you're on the air with Dr. Kaku, good morning.
Hi, how are you doing, Art?
This is Rick from Sacramento.
Yes, sir.
I had a question for the doctor.
When our sun reaches the end of its life, it becomes a red giant and then a white dwarf?
That's right.
Is that the same thing as when you say a star goes nova?
No, it's different.
Our sun will not go nova or supernova.
Our sun is about middle age.
It's halfway through its life cycle.
In another five billion years, it'll use up its hydrogen and then become a red giant, a huge star which will eat up the earth.
So the philosophers have always asked whether the earth will die in fire or ice, and we know the answer now.
The earth will die in fire.
In about five billion years, we'll be inside the atmosphere of the sun.
You know, the Bible says, you know, from dust to dust, right?
Ashes to ashes.
Physicists say from stardust to stardust.
We came out of the sun.
We'll go back into the sun in five more billion years.
And then after that, it'll turn into a white dwarf.
And then it'll just peter away.
It'll peter away as a red dwarf, brown dwarf, black dwarf.
It's simply not big enough to nova.
So we had better work on this gate or something else.
Yeah.
Ice ages will take place.
Asteroids will hit us.
Comets will hit us.
On a scale of 5 billion years, the Earth itself will be eaten up by the sun.
So our destiny is to go into outer space.
Or else.
Or else.
We have really no choice in the matter.
Unless we attain type 2 status and become immortal, We're going to have to leave the Earth, because the Earth will die when the Sun eats up the Earth in five billion years.
So you're an obvious continuing proponent of the space program then?
Only if we rein in the excesses.
I don't think we need so many manned flights.
I had another question.
I had another question.
Because the heavy element isn't the son of the second generation star, other than the
That's right.
A lot of people... You're quite knowledgeable about this.
A lot of people... I'm an amateur astronomer, so... Yeah, a lot of people talk about Mother Earth, or they talk about, you know, the Sun being the god that gave us birth.
They don't realize that the atoms of your hand and the atoms of your body could not have been forged in the Sun.
The Sun's not hot enough to make the atoms of your body.
Wouldn't that have to be in a supernova?
That's right.
Our sun is at least a second generation recycled star.
Stars also get recycled.
Coke bottles get recycled.
Stars get recycled.
And there was a supernova that blew up before our sun was born.
Even before our sun was born.
That star has no name.
But that star is our true mother.
It's not really Mother Earth.
It's not really even the mother's son.
There was a star that blew up even before our sun was born that is our true mother.
A mother nova.
A mother nova, right?
And the atoms of your body that you see right in front of you were forged in the heat of this supernova.
It takes about a trillion degrees to forge the atoms of your body.
The sun has temperatures only in the millions of degrees.
So the sun is off by quite a bit.
The sun is not hot enough to make the atoms of your body.
I'll ask you a hard question.
Do you find, in Genesis and generally in the Bible, More contradictions, or do you find more in common with what you believe as a physicist?
Well, I think there are certain parts of the Bible that resonate with science.
You know, Einstein once talked about the God of order, right?
When most people talk about the Bible, they talk about the God of intervention, you know, the God that answers prayers, the God that parts the waters, The God of Isaac, and Jacob, and Abraham, and Moses.
Einstein talked about the God of Order, that it couldn't have been a random accident, that we just came out of the mist with these beautiful laws of physics.
Sometimes I almost cry looking at how gorgeous these equations are.
It's just elegant.
It's like music.
You really have to understand how to write music to understand really how music can resonate in the mind of Beethoven, who was deaf, And to be a mathematical physicist, you almost cry looking at how beautiful these equations are.
And you wonder, was it all an accident?
Was it all just nothingness?
And out popped out these beautiful equations of Einstein and these beautiful equations of the quantum theory.
And it's really hard to believe that it could have been simply just a random accident.
The fact that we have such gorgeous beauty coming out of these things.
And that's why if you take a look at Genesis, From the larger point of view, not from the mythology point of view, but the point of view of, you know, was there a beginning?
Was there a seventh day?
Then you begin to realize that there's a lot of depth in some of these ancient myths that we sometimes laugh at as children, but then as we grow up and we get older and begin to look back at our life, we begin to realize that yes, there are cycles, and yes, there is beauty in the universe that didn't have to be there.
But there it is, staring us in the face.
There is, and I could never adequately explain it, a man named Stan Tennant.
And Stan Tennant has a rather elegant theory.
I'm sure you've heard of the book, The Bible Code?
Yes, where they try to look at numbers that repeat in the Bible?
Yes, that's right.
And everybody seems to be agreeing that they have, in fact, found this code.
Now, Stan Tannin believes that this code translates to geometric patterns and shapes that actually allow one, when one is in a state of meditation with regard to these geometric shapes, to experience what Genesis really is, to experience creation itself.
Just a theory.
Unlike the one, I believe, The Bible Code book seems to predict Kennedy killed or, you know, various occurrences, sort of a Cayce-like prediction series throughout the Bible.
Stan Tennant, on the other hand, seems to feel that these codes are here to produce geometric patterns, very much like, as you suggest, when you look at your hand.
I'm just not doing justice to it, but you might want to look into what his work is.
Yeah, when the New York Times reviewed my book, they put my book, Hyperspace, on the cover, by the way.
It was the lead book that they reviewed.
They ended the article by looking at Jewish mysticism, and they mentioned that in the Kabbalah, the Kabbalists, the number 10 is supposed to be the sign of creation.
And it's ten dimensions that have riveted the attention of the world's physicists for the last ten years, who've just been fascinated at the mathematical beauty that you get the equations that can only exist in ten and twenty-six dimensions.
And then it was pointed out to me by somebody who emailed me that if you take the letters of Yahweh, Jehovah, in the Hebrew, and add up the numerical equivalents, You get the number 26, which is the other magic number in physics.
Exactly.
Now, I'm not a numerologist.
I'm a mathematical physicist.
You have to realize that.
Yes.
But it has been pointed out to me by the New York Times, in fact, that there are mystical theories of the number 26 and the number 10, which happen to be the dimensions singled out by this theory, which is, well, take it or leave it.
Take it or leave it, right.
East of the Rockies, you're on the air with Dr. Kaku.
Hi.
Harrisburg, Pennsylvania.
Yes, sir.
Dr. Taku, explain your analysis of the damaged nuclear reactor at Three Mile Island and how it can go critical again or even melt down.
Yeah, people don't realize that accidents that happen sometimes just keep on going.
Like Chernobyl, for example, the reactor actually goes critical when it rains.
It went critical last year.
I was shocked when the Reuters news wire service carried the story.
But there it was.
Rainwater will slow down neutrons, and slow neutrons can fission more than fast neutrons, which is the opposite of common sense.
So when it rains, water seeps into the core at Chernobyl, reflects the neutrons, slows them down, and the chain reaction starts up again.
And radiation levels soared by a factor of 10 in the Chernobyl reactor.
And the director of the reactor, in fact, was quoted as saying that at some point, we're going to have to go in with bulldozers and, you know, for once and for all, put that core to rest.
You know, the core at Chernobyl is stable because the Red Air Force came out.
You know, the firemen were unable to put it out.
They called out the Red Air Force, and they came out with helicopters and jets to sandbag that reactor.
They put sand all over with boron, and borated sand was then sealed with cement, right?
And that's what's keeping this tomb intact.
But it could go critical.
In fact, it did go slightly critical last year when radiation levels began to rise.
Now, at Three Mile Island, the core has been physically removed.
Most of the uranium is gone.
However, there are fragments of uranium still left in the core, and believe it or not, there is sufficient uranium at Three Mile Island, with most of the core removed, lobotomized, so to speak, to also create criticality.
So, a nuclear accident is forever.
Even at Three Mile Island, there's still dangers of criticality.
Why don't they ever tell us these things?
Because it would scare people, I think.
My professors are the ones who created these things, They thought that these reactors would be built underground, because they're quite unstable.
They would be built underground, so in case of an accident, you just put a manhole cover on it and walk away from it.
But then, the utilities wanted them above ground, you know?
And, you know, we physically got very uneasy.
We said, no, wait a minute, we're not quite finished yet with this technology, you know?
Doctor, we are out of time.
Your book is going to be available in about two weeks, your newest book.
And I take it it will be available nationwide, in all the bookstores, that sort of thing?
That's right.
Anker Doubleday is the publisher.
Okay.
And it's called Visions, How Science Will Revolutionize the 21st Century.
It talks about the future of DNA research, the future of space travel, encounters with civilizations in outer space.
The future of computers and robots.
And the book you have out now, Hyperspace, is that still available?
That's right.
Anchor Books is the publisher of Hyperspace.
It's in paperback.
And it was the best seller and it's still in the market.
Well, this has been a distinct pleasure, Doctor.
And if you'd like to email the good doctor, you'll be getting lots of it.
It's mkaku at aol.com.
Doctor, thank you.
My pleasure.
Have a good sleep.
Okay, I will.
Take care, Doctor.
All right, there you have it, folks.
That's it.
I guess we're done.
We're certainly out of time.
I'm Art Bell.
We'll be here Sunday for Dreamland Live.
Look for us then.
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