Dr. Michio Kaku predicts humanity will master genetic engineering, AI, and fusion within 100–200 years, transitioning from Type 0 to Type I civilization while avoiding self-destruction via nuclear war or pollution—though he warns designer hydrogen bombs risk provoking global catastrophe. Exploring exotic matter like antimatter (costing billions for minuscule amounts) and wormholes, Kaku links NASA’s propulsion theories—ion engines, laser sails—to advanced civilizations’ potential von Neumann probes on the moon. He dismisses warp drive and Hawking radiation-based propulsion as impractical today but acknowledges their speculative plausibility with Type II/III energy. Kaku urges redirecting nuclear scientists toward climate solutions instead of weaponization, arguing that even a fraction of current arsenals could trigger mass extinction-level consequences. [Automatically generated summary]
From the high desert and the great American Southwest, where we are currently bracing for Hurricane Nora.
That's right.
A hurricane headed straight for Nevada.
Great, huh?
From the Hawaiian Islands, the Tehin Island chains, eastward over flyover country, to the Caribbean and the U.S. Virgin Islands, south into South America, north to the Poland worldwide on the internet.
This is Coast Coast AM.
I'm Marvell, and you're in for a wild ride tonight.
Because we have the man who probably is on his way to replacing Carl Sagan.
If anybody ever can replace Carl Sagan as the nation's science spokesman, he is Dr. Michio, Professor Michio Kaku, a professor theoretical physicist of physics, rather, at New York University.
And he'll be up in a moment.
It will be, I guarantee, a wild ride.
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The End Now we take you back to the night of September 24th, 1997, on Art Bell, Somewhere in Time.
Now, I believe it's Kirkus Reviews said that regarding visions, Dr. Kaku's book, with this fascinating volume, Kaku positions himself as a worthy successor to the late Carl Sagan, as a spokesman for the potential of science to revolutionize our lives.
Dr. Michio Kaku is an authority on relativity theory and quantum physics.
He is a professor of theoretical physics at New York City University, or at the City University of New York.
I'll get that straight.
He is also the author of the widely acclaimed bestseller Hyperspace, which both the New York Times and The Washington Post selected as one of the top science books of the entire year.
That's good.
He is also the author of Beyond Einstein and Quantum Field Theory, a modern introduction.
Dr. Kaku graduated Summa Kamlai from Harvard in 1968, received his Ph.D. from Berkeley, and has been a professor at CCNY for the past 25 years.
Co-founder of the string field theory and author of nine books and over 70 scientific articles, Dr. Kaku is currently working on completing Einstein's dream of a theory of everything.
A theory of everything.
A single theory to describe everything from protons, neutrons, and even DNA.
Voted one of the 100 smartest New Yorkers by New York magazine.
He, in fact, hosts a national science radio talk program himself that airs on WBAI in New York, KPFA in Berkeley, KCMU in Seattle, and WWUH in West Hartford.
His scientific commentaries can be heard on Pacifica Radio on over 60 radio stations.
He's appeared on Nightline, Nova, Larry King, BBC, The Learning Channel.
He's about to appear, I think possibly next week on 60 Minutes and the six-part PBS special, Stephen Hawking's Universe.
We have many, many, many things to talk of, but I thought we might begin with, since your book is called Visions and you are obviously a visionary, a scientific visionary of sorts, where you think we are going to go, assuming we make it in the next hundred years.
By the way, when I say assuming we're going to make it, we sit here this very evening awaiting a hurricane in Nevada.
Dr. Hurricane Nora is streaming north, and it looks like we're going to have a dead center hit here with a hurricane.
And they're forecasting five inches of rain in desert areas that really can't stand another inch at this point.
So we're a little concerned out here.
Things are getting a little strange weather-wise around the globe right now.
And there are some pretty strange environmental things going on.
So assuming that we make it past all of this craziness, where are we then headed in the next hundred years?
Well, first of all, I've always been fascinated by the future ever since I was a child watching science fiction movies.
And now that I'm a professor of physics, I decided to interview 150 top scientists.
These are Nobel Prize laureates, six Nobel Prize winners, several Pulitzer Prize winners, and about 20 directors of major laboratories in the United States.
Laboratories of computer science, robotics, genetic engineering and cloning, nanotechnology, lasers, fusion.
And what I got was an exhilarating picture of the fact that in the next 100 years, we're going to be able to stop being simply Observers of nature.
Stop simply being gawkers of nature and wondering what is life, what is intelligence, what is matter, to becoming master choreographers to be able to manipulate life almost at will, to be able to create new substances almost on demand, and to be able to create intelligence practically everywhere in the universe.
Do you believe that the unraveling of the human genome and nanotechnology may lead to a virtual, well, I guess I don't want to say that we would live forever, but a great life extension?
Last month, there was this tremendous announcement made that scientists have isolated two genes, which are extremely important to understanding why cells age and why we grow old.
The first gene was for progeria, which is this bizarre disease that makes children age right before your eyes.
Children just barely out of diapers and going to elementary school, dying of old age.
And they actually inserted this gene, the counterpart into yeast, and actually made yeast age prematurely.
So the gene is now isolated.
Also for something called telomerase.
Now, telomerase is not something that your listeners have heard about probably, but it will be on the lips of perhaps millions of people because telomerase, in some sense, controls the aging of the cell.
And some people are hailing this as perhaps the first of the human-aged genes, that is, genes which actually control the aging process at the cellular level.
This was isolated at MIT and another laboratory.
And if you think of the chromosome of a cell, sort of like a shoestring, like you put on your shoe, and the tips of it, you know, those plastic tips that prevent the fraying of your shoestring?
Oh, I think, well, first of all, I think within 20 years, we'll have most of these age genes isolated.
We'll be able to control the age of a cell almost at will at the genetic level.
Within 20 years, we'll have almost all of them mapped out.
Within five years, of course, we'll have most of the human genome mapped out, right?
And then we'll be able to manipulate them.
You know, I interviewed the director of gene therapy at University of Southern California, and he predicts that we'll be able to go to the doctor's office in 20 years and get a shot, just like getting a polio shot, except that shot will alter your genes, alter the human genome.
So if you have, for example, pay sax because you have a Jewish background, or you have sicklecellanemia because you're African American, or you have cystic fibrosis because you're Caucasian, you'll be able to have this shot.
This shot will consist of a small virus.
It'll make you perhaps sick for a day or so.
But this virus will then inject the correct gene for Tay-Sachs and sicklecell anemia and cystic fibrosis.
So in other words, you take an ordinary flu virus, for example, disarm it so it doesn't cause the flu, inject the correct gene into it, and then inject it into your body, and it becomes like a Trojan horse.
A Trojan horse, it works its way into your cells and injects the correct gene and repairs the incorrect gene.
Now, of course, this has enormous implications because, of course, parents would like to meddle with the heritage Of their children.
They give them violin lessons, they give them sports lessons, and think of what you could do if you could manipulate the genome of your kids a bit, make them taller, perhaps a little bit handsomer.
All I'm saying is that I've interviewed the top directors of these laboratories, and they're confident that in about 20 years or so, this will become commonplace.
You know, it'll be something that is part of going to the doctor's office.
I think, and this is again backed up by scores of scientists who've looked at this thing, that this could be one of the big breakthroughs in aging research on two levels now.
First of all, if your organs begin to peter out, right, and your organs begin to fail, we'll be able to grow new ones.
And again, this statement comes from a Nobel Prize winner.
We can already grow unlimited amounts of skin.
You just take a little bit of skin, we can grow about a football field's worth of skin from a few skin cells, okay?
Heart valves can now be grown.
However, within 20 years, we'll be able to grow artificial livers and kidneys now.
Organs that are not so complicated, like the liver, not so complicated.
We'll be able to grow them and kidneys even.
And within about 40 years, even the hand and the leg could be grown.
And in fact, in Scientific American, there was even a blueprint published as to how to build an artificial, I mean a real living hand by building a plastic scaffolding, injecting cells that then grow into this plastic scaffolding like children taking to a jungle gym and then creating an artificial limb.
Seriously now, not the stuff of science fiction, but getting prototypes of this stuff, right?
And that means that even as we get older and our limbs begin to break down, they could be replaced.
That's right.
Now, within about 30, 40 years now, I had one Nobel Prize winner predict that almost every organ of the body, except the brain, that's one thing that's going to be hard to replace, every organ except the brain will have some sort of cellular regeneration mechanism.
Well, you know, there have been several tantalizing genetic clues to Alzheimer's.
The APO gene, it's not certified yet, but a certain fraction of people who come down with Alzheimer's do have a very specific genetic mutation.
And again, if we have gene therapy, we'll be able to take a shot, according to Dr. French Anderson at University of Southern California, and correct some of these genes.
But not all Alzheimer's is caused by this defect in this one particular gene.
So also, we were beginning to figure out how brain cells can regenerate.
You know that as a child, your brain is growing rapidly and brain cells are multiplying, but then it stops.
And then brain cells just don't regenerate anymore.
Look at Christopher Eeeve, right?
That horrible accident that he had with the horse.
His spinal cord was suffered at a certain point.
And there's no way known today to regenerate it.
But you see, now that we know the DNA of brain cells and we can tease that apart, we'll eventually find the genes that will kick in cell regeneration.
And already in mice now, we can actually make certain cells in mice regenerate even if their spinal cords are cut.
Now this is hopeful because one of these days, once we understand how nerve cells stop reproducing, we'll be able to simply inject baby brain cells that are growing, just like in a child's, into an aging person and they'll simply regenerate the brain again.
No one is claiming a victory over that horrible disease, right?
But all I'm saying is that the top people in the laboratories that I've interviewed are very hopeful that at the cellular level we'll be able to understand this.
Again, within 20 years now, we're not talking about 100, 150 years.
We're not talking tomorrow either.
But we are talking about within about 20 years, we'll be able to understand the mechanism by which this amyloid protein gums up the brain, how we can then regenerate brain cells, and how we can delay the aging process and grow body organs.
Actually, with Art Bell and Professor Michio Kaku.
And we'll get back to them in just a moment.
We're going to talk about 240-year-olds.
Also in advisory, there are flash flood warnings for a lot of areas of the southwest through Arizona, through my area here in Nevada, and parts of California.
Hurricane Nora, with winds to 85 miles an hour, gusting higher at times, is moving north at 17 miles per hour.
Presently located at 26.5 degrees north and 114.8 west is midway up through the Baja Peninsula.
So here we go, folks.
Hurricanes in the Great American Southwest.
What's next?
unidentified
Locusts.
Now we take you back to the night of September 24th, 1997, on Art Bell, Somewhere in Time.
Well, you ask a very good question, because when I interviewed these top scientists in aging research, they evoked this image that is actually incorrect of a nation of nursing home patients, a nation of people that are just barely one foot in the grave, all their organs petering out, but they happen to be 240 years old.
And what about Medicare and what about the strain on the economy and so on and so forth?
And they laughed at that image for two possible reasons.
First of all, the organs can be replaced because we will be able to grow organs in that period of time.
So we'll be healthy.
And polymerase, as I pointed out, is implicated not only for the death of cells, but also for the senescence and cells becoming decrepit.
And before they die, they start to lose cellular function.
So we can extend cellular function so that the cells still are supple, they still are functioning, they're active, and you can start to reverse some of the damage from oxidation, for example, and what I call the mitochondria.
The point here is that, first of all, we'll be able to keep people relatively vigorous so that they're not decrepit.
Second of all, we'll have artificial intelligence.
Now, let me explain.
We'll be able to have robot nurses and robot helpers and robot doctors.
Now, we've all seen science fiction movies, and we've always laughed at how clunky those robots are, and all the predictions that we're going to have robots never panned out, right?
But let me tell you right now that I went to MIT, and I interviewed the people, the directors at the robotics laboratory.
I went to Silicon Valley and I interviewed the top people in Apple and IBM.
And they gave me a totally different hook on the future of computers.
If you see a science fiction movie, you see this huge, gigantic brain of a machine, and you think that scientists of the future will have these big, gigantic brains, and aliens from outer space will have big computers.
That's not the future of computers and artificial intelligence at all.
It's going to be the opposite.
Computers are going to become invisible in the next century.
They're going to become so tiny, you can fit them in your tie clasp.
You'll have the power of a supercomputer in your jewelry, in your eyeglasses.
The walls, the furniture, the tables, everything will become smart.
Now take a look at electricity, right?
When electricity first came along, people thought it was magic, and there was one light bulb in the house when you went home.
Now electricity is in the walls.
We have batteries that place it in the car.
It's everywhere.
You have about 50 motors in your car, for example.
You don't even think about your windshields.
You know that your car is electrified.
Your house is electrified.
You walk into a room and you look for the switch, right?
In the future, you will look for intelligence in the walls, intelligence in the windows, intelligence in the chairs, the glasses.
You will assume automatically that when you walk into a room, everything has a certain amount of primitive intelligence.
Within about 20 years, intelligence will become as common as electricity.
We'll go to the supermarket, we'll pick up a six-pack of batteries, and We'll pick up a six-pack of computers.
These computers will be the size of a tiny little diamond on a diamond ring.
They'll be in your Thai class, your jewelry, your iframe, your glasses, and they'll help you.
You'll be able to access the Internet wherever you are.
You have smart clothing.
The walls will have a screen.
You just talk to the walls, and the walls talk back to you.
The Internet, which of course is this horrible, horrible thing where you can get lost so easily, in the future you'll just talk to it, and you simply ask it a question, and it'll respond, just like in a fairy tale.
In fact, some people think that the future might look like a Disney movie when you talk to the teapot, right?
When I said collective consciousness, though, we may have talked about this last time.
I'm not sure.
But Michael Crichton, who I referred to frequently, has a theory that as we become more and more interconnected, and even with the Internet at its current stages, it will actually begin to slow the process of evolution.
That there will be 10 major ideas worldwide.
There will be the same thought patterns, the same things discussed worldwide.
Innovation will slow.
And actually, our progress as a race, the human race, will begin to slow.
Evolution will slow, not speed up, because of this interconnectivity.
Well, I think it could go the opposite direction, too.
Right now, if you're a genius in India, for example, you may simply die of starvation and never communicate with the rest of the world, like this guy, Ramanujan, one of the greatest mathematicians of the 20th century.
He was an obscure Indian and never got anywhere until he went to Cambridge University and then overturned all of mathematics.
Here we have the situation where the Internet is going to be like a magic mirror, a companion, a friend to 5 billion people on the planet Earth, so that anyone will be able to harness their creative energy, their ideas, their vitality by talking to this magic mirror on the wall.
The magic mirror will talk back to you.
It'll have intelligence.
Well, in that sense, will free up the creativity of billions of people.
And, you know, in my book, Visions, I lay out the timetable that within 20 years, we'll have invisible computers everywhere.
You know, smart rooms, smart tables, smart furniture, smart toasters.
Our toasters will toast bread by themselves.
They'll turn on the tape recorders.
They'll turn on music when you wake up in the morning.
Things will be done for you.
You'll cyber shop on wall screens that are the size of your wall.
TV sets, of course, will disappear.
PCs will disappear.
There'll be PCs, of course, everywhere in your environment.
And then within 50 years now, okay, because we don't see it happening before 50 years, human-like intelligence will begin to emerge.
Machines that have common sense.
Now, believe it or not, many people have a hard time believing this, but the reason why we don't have robots and the reason why we don't have those clunky things you see in science fiction movies is because of things we take for granted.
We take for granted vision and we take for granted common sense.
Everybody knows that a child is younger than the mother.
Everybody knows that when it rains, you get wet.
Everybody knows that animals don't like pain, that people don't like to die.
But computers don't know that.
You have to tell the computer millions and millions of lines of common sense that when it rains, you do get wet.
That twins age at the same rate.
There are about 100 million lines of computer code you have to input into a computer to give it common sense that a 10-year-old understands instinctively.
10-year-olds know that animals don't like pain, right?
When is it possible, or will it be possible, that a computer, as speed and storage increase, will at some point, with enough knowledge, achieve self-awareness?
Okay, now we're getting into a murky area where beyond now 50 years, within 50 years, we'll have a software program you put into your computer, and your computer will talk back to you.
You can joke with it, you can talk to it, it'll plan your schedule for you, it'll ward off people you don't particularly like, it'll set up appointments and so on and so forth.
But then at what point will it have a will of its own?
At what point will it start to say, well, why should I obey this person?
But now within 50 to 100 years, once we have machines that can begin to reason with us and joke with us, there is a possible danger that they will have goals.
Goals which you put into them, of course, but eventually goals which may diverge from your goals.
And at that point, we are going to have to put in something similar to Isaac Asimov's three laws of robotics, that you cannot hurt people, you cannot hurt other robots, and you can't do harm.
That has to be programmed in, because look at the movie 2001.
2001 gave us the future of space travel, that we will have a spaceship that is intelligent.
The spaceship itself has intelligence called HAL 9000.
But then HAL 9000 was given a command that it could not carry out.
And the only way it could carry out its command by a human, which was contradictory, was to eliminate the humans.
Because it went berserk.
It went outside its domain of expertise.
This is called a Mesa effect.
You know what a Mesa is like a table.
You fall off the table.
When you give a computer like this a command that is outside its logical capabilities, it simply keeps on going.
This is called a Mesa effect, and it's also called negative feedback, so that the things get worse and worse.
The computer goes off the deep end and goes mad, literally goes mad, looking for an answer for which there is no answer and executing commands that it shouldn't execute.
For example, killing humans and creating havoc like what HAL 9000 did in the movie 2001.
But you see, that, I think, is going to be where computers are going to go.
We're going to have living spaceships, spaceships which are living.
The walls will have a limited intelligence in it.
You will talk to the spaceship.
You see, that's the most economical way to run a spaceship.
Well, that brings me back then to what we discussed at first.
Let us assume we get 240-year-olds.
Let us also assume that present social trends don't change drastically, that each pope who comes along continues to suggest birth control is all wrong, and our numbers continue to multiply.
The reason why it's going to level off is that as people get more prosperous, they have fewer kids.
I mean, people have kids because they're poor.
They want insurance policies when they're old.
And most kids die in infancy in poor countries.
So you have lots and lots of kids, of which only a small portion will survive, and they'll support you in old age.
But when you become middle class, you want to have radio, television.
You want to listen to Art Bell.
You want to have all the luxuries.
You don't want to have to be straddled with 10 kids.
You want to have two kids.
So as nations become developed, that's when they automatically limit their population.
That's happened to every country so far.
All of Europe.
Japan has already seen it.
The population is going backwards, in fact.
China is now seeing it as peasants become more middle class.
And so the population will probably rise and double and then seal off at around 11 billion or so.
And of course, that's going to put a tremendous strain on resources.
We have to have genetic engineering to give us better crops and so on and so forth.
And we're going to have to be very careful because pesticides could get out of control.
So it is going to be a strain on the world.
And by then, we'll hopefully have computers that we can communicate with and hopefully have a shutoff mechanism so that they don't get out of control and carry out commands that are not good for us.
Now I mention this, by the way, because the obvious question is, if this book that I've written projects us to 100 years, and if there's intelligent life in outer space, they could be 1,000 years ahead of us, right?
Then if we were to make contact at some point with alien life in outer space that are, let's say, 1,000 years ahead of us, we can begin to see the outlines of what their civilization looks like.
You know, we're not so primitive anymore on the Earth.
You know, we do have supercomputers.
You know, we've tinkered with DNA a bit now.
We have inklings of what molecules are all about.
And we can begin to see sort of what an encounter with an alien civilization would be like.
For example, if a spaceship from outer space were to land with computer technology many, many centuries from now, we would expect it to be along this track.
That is, its shell would be intelligent.
The spaceship is not going to be inert.
It's not going to be just a bunch of bolts.
It's going to be a living object that you can talk to and it'll talk back to you.
And that there will be objects that have artificial intelligence.
And for the most part, flying saucers and whatever will probably be robotic.
It's a waste of resources to send humans or aliens on these robotic missions when you can send robots.
All right, let us talk for a second about the possibility of contact.
People like yourself, Professor Kaku and others, would be, of course, in the forefront of that kind of contact.
But if this ship, I guarantee you, Professor, came down in the wrong place, and there are plenty of wrong places, whatever walked down the little ramp would be so full of lead That it would never make it to the bottom of the ramp because there are still so many in our society who would consider these to be devils, manifestations of the devil and evil and all the rest of it, and they'd fill them full of lead, I guarantee it, Doctor.
So physicists have looked at the question of how do you explore out of space if you are an advanced civilization, right?
And the verdict is, from every physicist that I've interviewed on this question, the verdict is because there's so many planets out there and because some of them are potentially dangerous, right, as you point out.
It was von Neumann who helped to set that into motion.
And he also proved that computers, or what we call Turing machines, that's a scientific term for digital computers.
Turing machines can reproduce themselves.
Now, this was quite an achievement.
It's one of his great scientific proofs in mathematics.
Using pure mathematics, he was able to prove that digital computers, you can program them to build copies of themselves.
Now, this is amazing because if Turing machines are self-replicating and you create one such machine on a distant factory located on a moon someplace, then according to this great mathematician, you can create unlimited copies of these things.
He is an authority on relativity theory and quantum physics.
He is a professor of theoretical physics at the City University of New York.
He is also the author of the widely acclaimed bestseller, Hyperspace, which both the New York Times and Washington Post selected as one of the top science books of the entire year.
He's also the author of Beyond Einstein and Quantum Field Theory, a modern introduction.
And he's got a new book called Visions, which looks at the next hundred years, and you can get visions in nearly any bookstore across the country.
Dr. Kaku graduated Assumma Kamlaadi from Harvard in 1968, received his Ph.D. from Berkeley, has been a professor at CCNY for the past 25 years, co-founder of String Field Theory, author of nine books and over 70 scientific articles.
Dr. Kaku is currently working on completing Einstein's dream of a theory of everything.
A single theory which describes everything from protons to neutrons to DNA.
and we're going to ask him in a moment about the theory of everything.
unidentified
Now we take you back to the night of September 24th, 1997, on Art Bell, Somewhere in Time.
So if we were to initiate contact or try to make contact, we did send out, you'll recall, a little spacecraft with all kinds of information about our civilization.
Did we, in effect, in that spacecraft, tell them to dog on much?
But let me first of all just set the framework like before.
Let me give you the categorizations of what civilizations we're talking about.
The great Russian astrophysicist Nikolai Kardashev ranks civilizations into three basic types.
And then we can talk about encounters with the various types.
A type 1 civilization is a planetary civilization.
It gets energy from the entire planet.
It can, for example, control the weather, so we wouldn't have an El Niño problem.
It can mine the ocean.
It gets its energy from inside the Earth.
A total planetary energy is what a Type I civilization is.
A Type II civilization exhausts the power of a planet.
They have to go to a star, and they control and manipulate stellar energy.
This is not just getting a suntan at the beach via the sun.
This is having starships so that you just grab a chunk of the sun and put it into your gas tank and take off.
So when Junior borrows the starship, Jr. borrows a few white dwarfs and puts it in his gas tank.
That's a type 2.
A type 3 civilization exhausts the power of a star.
Even a star is not big enough for them.
They have colonized many, many star systems, and they're galactic.
They get their energy from galaxies.
That's a type 3 civilization.
Now, on this scale, you can see that we are type 0.
We're nothing on this scale.
We get our energy from dead plants.
In other words, coal and oil.
However, we can see that within about 200 years, we can see the beginning of a type 1 civilization.
And that's how I end my book, Visions, by the way, by saying that the great romance of science and technology, unless we really blow it, will take us within 100, 200 years to a Type 1 civilization.
And that is, recalling our previous conversation, and you said, I think I asked you, what, being absolutely frankly honest, are the odds of our achieving Type 1?
One might imagine that there are many, many Type Zeros that get blown away before they get anywhere near Type 1, or maybe when they get near Type 1.
And I asked you, what are the chances we'll make it to Type 1?
Type 0 civilizations in our galaxy is probably, you know, a dime a dozen.
There are probably thousands of Type Zero civilizations that rise from the swamp.
The problem is, eventually they discover chemicals, and they discover element 1, element 2, element 3.
They just go up the chart.
It's inevitable until they hit element 92, which is uranium.
And with uranium comes the ability to blow themselves apart.
And with a hydrocarbon chemistry and plastics, as Dustin Hoffman discovered in the movie The Graduate, with plastics you get pollution.
And either they can pollute themselves to death or they can blow themselves apart by settling old racial, sectarian, nationalist, fundamentalist scores with nuclear weapons.
So type zero civilizations are very cheap.
There are probably a lot of them out there, just like us, who are then entering this danger period, this danger period, this transition to type 1, when we do have nuclear weapons, when we do have pollution.
So the generation alive right now is perhaps the most important generation that's ever walked the surface of the earth because they are the ones who will determine whether or not we make this great transition to type 1 status without blowing ourselves up.
This is an obvious question that'll probably get you in lots of trouble, but I've got to ask it.
It's from Mark in Santa Monica, California, and he asks, Would you please, Art, tell Dr. Kaku that a theory of everything, including protons, neutrons, and DNA, already exists?
Einstein himself believed that what he was doing was reading the mind of God, that there are mysterious laws that were given to us at the instant of creation, and that his job was to read these laws and to find out what the thinking was that went into creating the universe.
So Einstein believed in God.
He did not believe in the God of intervention, the God that answers prayers, the God of Isaac, Jacob, and Moses that performs miracles.
However, he believed in the God of harmony, the God of beauty, the God of simplicity.
And he felt so deeply about this that he was chasing after the fundamental theory that would give everything and explain how God created the universe and the cosmos and the simplicity of it all.
Now, so far, scientists have been able to get the basic laws down to the quantum theory and relativity.
However, these two great formalisms, relativity, which gives us black holes and the Big Bang, and the quantum theory, which gives us the atomic bomb and transistors and atomic physics, they don't like each other.
We have two polar opposites, the theory of the very big and the theory of the very small.
It's as if nature had a left hand and a right hand, and the two hands didn't communicate.
Why would God have two hands?
A God has a right hand that talks about black holes and quasars and galaxies, and a left hand that governs atoms and molecules, and the two hands don't coordinate with each other.
That was Einstein's dream.
And today we think we have it.
We think we can read the mind of God now.
But to do that, you have to go into hyperspace.
And that was the subject of my earlier book.
We have to go to 10-dimensional hyperspace, which I think is fantastic.
But, you know, we do have to go to higher dimensions.
There's not enough room in the three dimensions that we're familiar with to accommodate all the forces of nature.
Dear Art, Michio Kaku is one of the world's greatest theoretical nuclear physicists.
I have a thousand questions, but I'll limit it to two.
One, the theory of parallel universes is an intense area of research in contemporary theoretical physics.
Ask the professor, in simpler terms, of course, and I don't know that I can do that, of the idea that the sum of the wave functions of these other shadow universes might be related to dark matter present, Not only in our universe, but in other universes as well?
When we were in high school, we learned that all the chemicals in the universe are made out of atoms, and there are only about 100 different types of atoms.
And we were very smug about that, right?
You had to recite that on your high school exam.
Well, that's wrong.
You can go back to your high school teacher and tell them that most of the universe, 90% of it in fact, is made out of dark matter.
Matter which is invisible, but it has weight.
In other words, if I were to hold dark matter in front of you, it would be invisible.
You would have a handful of nothing.
But if I dropped it on your foot, you'd say, ouch!
You'd feel it.
Now we know that our galaxy, the Hubble Space Telescope confirmed this, by the way.
Our own galaxy and galaxies we see in outer space are surrounded by a halo.
We didn't know this before, by the way.
A halo, 90% of the mass is concentrated in this large halo surrounding galaxies.
And galaxies we now know are much bigger than what you see.
What you see is a tiny little saucer, but surrounding it is something 10 times bigger, which is the dark matter.
And the Hubble Space Telescope has now actually seen deflections of sunlight and starlight through this sphere surrounding the galaxy.
That's called dark matter.
Now, so we know that the universe is full of dark matter, and that may eventually determine whether our universe dies in a big crunch, a fiery big crunch, or the big chill.
That is, we all freeze to death billions of years from now.
You know, the poets have always asked, will the universe end in fire or ice?
Well, we physicists don't know.
If it ends in fire, that's called the big crunch when all the stars collapse.
It's called the big chill if the universe expands and expands forever and the stars blink out and it gets very cold out there.
But dark matter may solve the mystery.
If there's enough dark matter, we will have a big crunch.
If there's not much dark matter, we will have the big chill.
So what happens to the universe may in turn be determined by dark matter.
Now, about parallel universes, that takes us into another realm.
Our universe is apparently a bubble.
In the same way that Columbus showed that the Earth was round, people thought the Earth was infinite in those days, right?
Infinite and flat.
Columbus showed the Earth was really a bubble.
If you went in one direction, pretty soon you came back and met yourself, I mean met Spain in the other direction, right?
All right, but before we leave our bubble, let me get to question two of this factor, which is a good one, fits right in here.
We're talking about transportation.
Stephen Hawkings once hinted at a type of communication between universes.
If this is true, by what process did he allude to, or for this matter, what are your thoughts on interdimensional communication, prior to transportation, communication?
Well, I think this person understands the sheer difficulty of opening up holes in space.
In Alice in Wonderland, we had this magic looking glass that connected Oxford with Wonderland, and you walk through the frame of the looking glass to an alternate universe, right?
Today, we physicists believe that you can open up holes in space, the same way that Alice had this looking glass, except that it's the frame of the looking glass that's the key.
The simplest example would be a black hole.
In the older days, we thought that a star would die and collapse to a dot, and that's the end of that.
You fall into that dot, and you're crushed.
That's the old picture.
We don't believe that anymore.
Because stars spin.
Galaxies spin very rapidly.
And we've now photographed 12 black holes in outer space, 12 of them.
And beautiful pictures from the Hubble Space Telescope of M87, by the way.
Gorgeous photographs.
And they are spinning rings, rings.
And we think that at the middle of this spinning disk, there is this frame of the looking glass such that if you fall through it, you don't fall through a dot.
You fall through a ring.
It's a ring of neutrons that's rotating very rapidly.
Centrifugal force, by the way, prevents it from collapsing because it rotates very rapidly.
And if you were to fall through it, you'd wind up in another dimension, wind up on another part of the universe.
Now that was Jodie Foster's machine in the movie Contact.
But again, the question was, rather than traveling through a wormhole, what are the possibilities of, and I'm just reging now, some sort of communication that would, in effect, be thrust through that hole, allowing communication prior to transportation?
Yes, before we put any humans through one of these things, right, we're going to have to test it.
Mainly test it first by sending subatomic particles through, you know, very simple radiation through such an instability and to see what happens at the other end.
Because, of course, these things could be unstable.
That's one of the sources of controversy among scientists right now.
How long will this hole stay open?
Some physicists have claimed that when you walk through this hole, it'll collapse on you.
And of course, that's horrible.
If you send a test pilot through this wormhole and it collapsed on them, they can't come back.
So the recommendation has always been send subatomic particles first.
That's almost for free.
That's very easy to do.
And to see whether or not the wormhole stays open when you send things like that.
Then later you can send instruments and see whether you can come back.
Well, M87 is the galaxy that we have photographed, and it's very far away.
It's about 30, 40, 50 million light years away.
So traveling like a flashlight would take you about 50 million years to get there.
But we think that black holes could be quite close to us.
The center of our own galaxy, by the way, which is only about 30,000 light years away, the center of our galaxy is probably a black hole.
We have one right in our backyard.
So we're beginning to realize that black holes could be quite common in the universe.
And that's one way to do it.
Another way to do it, which was proposed recently by the physicists at Caltech, is to use something called exotic matter, which would have anti-gravity.
It falls up rather than falling down.
Now, I'll be very frank.
I've never seen anything fall up.
I've only seen things fall down ever since I was a child, right?
But in principle, if you could find exotic matter somewhere deep in the Earth, for example, you could build a stargate with it.
The mathematics is quite straightforward on this.
And you could perhaps build a stargate out of exotic matter.
With regard to black holes, which you say are rings, rotating rings, which makes sense and sure sounds like contact, if you were to go through a black hole, would you be engaging in a sort of a dimensional crapshoot?
In other words, there would be no predetermined way of knowing where you'd end up, would there?
If you solve the equations very carefully for Einstein's theory, you can actually show where you wind up on the other end.
So it's not totally holding your nose and closing your eyes and jumping in and saying, Geronimo, right?
It's not quite like that.
However, you have to know everything about the black hole.
You have to know how it formed.
You have to know its weight.
You have to know how fast it's spinning.
And that you may not know.
You may not know these things, right?
In which case, it is a crap chute.
You don't know what's on the other end of this thing, okay?
However, in that famous episode of Star Trek in the City on the Edge of Forever, Captain Kirk leaped into the wormhole and found a world before World War II.
And he met Joan Collins on the other end of the wormhole.
So in some sense, we do know what's on the other end of at least one wormhole, and that is Joan Collins in the series Star Trek.
If the wormhole connects our universe with itself, like a handle, you know, think of a doughnut, right, where you wind up, you know, you go back into the universe back to itself again.
So you would simply go from point A to point B in the same universe, and laws of physics are the same.
We were discussing what might occur if you were to pop out of a black hole into another dimension where everything is virtually different, where all the laws of physics are virtually different.
That wouldn't be such a good idea, would it, Doctor?
No, that wouldn't be a good idea, because the atoms of your body may not be stable, in which case the atoms will fall apart.
Now, within our universe, the universe of our bubble that we see around us, the laws of physics are pretty much the same.
We don't see any big difference going from one part of a universe to another with our telescopes.
However, if you go between bubbles now, it is possible to open up a wormhole to go between bubbles, which is still quite controversial.
Then, of course, the laws of physics could change dramatically.
You go to what is called a false vacuum.
A new vacuum state emerges, in which case atoms will dissolve and reform.
And quarks, for example, may not be stable, in which case new forms of matter could exist.
So that, of course, is a real wild card, not just going into a black hole and winding up on some part of the universe where you don't know where, but winding up in a universe where your atoms may not be stable.
It may reconfigure into a new thing.
Or, for that matter, new laws of science opening up, in which case, you've got to be very careful.
Now, I'm also careful in all my books to state that the civilization that could do this kind of fantastic maneuvering between dimensions would probably be like a type 2 or a type 3 civilization.
Even a type 1 civilization would be quite hard-pressed to manipulate stars and to combine them and to reform them, to open up these wormholes.
But for a Type II civilization that already has mastered the power of a star, this would be child's play with them.
Well, quite a few physicists believe that they already have, and they have probably visited our moon.
Now, let me explain.
If you were a type II or type 3, looking at all the stars and billions and billions of possible worlds to look at, you would send robots to these things, and you would use nanotechnology to build things, perhaps no bigger than the palm of your hand, to land on a moon, because a moon has low escape velocity.
It's very easy to leave and enter.
And plus, it doesn't rain on the moons, so that you're not going to have rust, and you're not going to have degradation and erosion.
So you land on a moon that then monitors that whole solar system, you see.
And then, of course, this little robot then makes copies of itself.
It makes a little factory.
And it makes copies of itself, and then they fly off to other moons and other solar systems.
That's the most efficient way to look for new planets, because most planets are probably dead.
Most planets are probably too far from the sun, too close to the sun, where there's no liquid water.
You only want to have solar systems that have liquid water on them, because liquid water is a universal solvent that dissolves hydrocarbons that make DNA possible.
Just been sitting there for thousands of years, monitoring our solar system, and there would be an alarm clock on this device, which signals the transition between type 0 to type 1.
Because a type 0 civilization is not that interesting.
They're like barbarians, like we are, right?
Not much energy to speak of.
But a type 1 is quite interesting.
A type 1 civilization is planetary, quite mature, has planetary energy, and could have space probes go around the solar system.
So that's the trigger.
This alarm clock on the moon would trigger when the natives are smart enough to reach the moon.
And that, of course, is what happens in the movie 2001 when they touch the monolith.
The monolith is, in fact, this San Neumann probe.
So that's the most efficient way to explore the system with robotic, self-replicating probes that land on the moon.
And when the natives are smart enough to reach the moon and make contact with the probe, the probe sends a signal to the mother planet saying the natives have now made the transition from type 0 to type 1.
So let's talk to these people.
These people are not very interesting.
We can learn from them and have a dialogue with them.
And so that's why there's some debate.
I've interviewed several physicists that believe that when we colonize the moon, we may pick up remnants of previous visitations.
And again, it's the simplest thing to do because it's easy to land, easy to leave.
The Earth has higher gravity, harder to leave the Earth, plus there's erosion.
You leave a probe on the Earth, it rusts after a while, right?
And over a million years, even the crust of the Earth begins to change.
But the Moon is quite stable, you know?
And that's why lunar probes are probably the way in which these Type II civilizations actually probe most of the galaxy.
How would we, as a matter of interest, discern the difference between a probe found on the moon and an artifact that might have been left over in some way from whatever the moon once was?
Well, this device would be based on nanotechnology, right?
Because we're talking about a very lightweight probe and millions of them just being scattered throughout the heavens to search for liquid water in different solar systems.
So if we stumbled across one of these things, they may not be very big.
They may be as big as your hand on one hand or maybe as big as a monolith in the movie 2001, right?
But you would see regularity and patterns.
You would see that there's tremendous complexity in this machine, that even at the molecular level, there's circuits at the molecular level in this device, a very complicated device that scans the entire solar system.
Now, our satellites today are gradually attaining that capability.
We are scanning the Earth with our satellites.
We're getting very good at it.
Satellites are getting very small.
But you can imagine that in a few hundred years from now, we'll be able to scan solar systems with Devices that are no bigger than a basketball.
And because it has four bonds, like tinker toys you played with when you were a child, you can make all sorts of erector sets and carnival-like devices and boats and cars with it, because it has four bonds.
Silicon has four bonds.
So it's conceivable that other chemicals based on four bonds can also create elaborate molecules.
But to create self-replicating molecules like DNA does require something like carbon or something like silicon.
So I'm not going to say they're going to look like us.
That would be, of course, egocentric, anthropomorphic.
They may not look anything like us.
But the point is that they're eventually going to come up with energy requirements.
They have to have energy for their engines.
And that means planetary energy, stellar energy, or galactic energy, which is type 1, type 2, and type 3.
Let's go back to exotic matter, which you mentioned.
Here's Bob up in the state of Washington who says, hey, Art, relating to exotic matter, please ask Dr. Kaku about the cloud of antimatter just found in our own galaxy.
Okay, as we know from astronomical observations, there is a beautiful fountain of antimatter that is streaming slightly off-center from the center of our galaxy.
Now, we think that this could be caused by a black hole.
A black hole has whips particles like a slingshot effect, again, at tremendous velocities.
And that'll in turn cause collisions.
Now, these collisions could have antimatter, but that's just a theory.
So we now know that antimatter is not so rare in the universe.
But you see, the string theory very easily accommodates this because they're anti-strings.
You know, strings can vibrate, and if you just change the frequency.
And Boris has been doing a lot of work with the pyramids and with acoustics in the pyramids.
And it would seem that the vibrational level or frequency in the pyramids is very close to that of our Earth in the low Hertz areas, 7, 8, 9 Hertz, somewhere in there.
And does that fit in with what you're discussing right now in any way?
It does in the sense that these strings, when they vibrate, create matter, and matter itself vibrates.
So all vibrations can ultimately be reduced down to the vibrations of the superstrings.
So all the harmonies, all the symphony that we see around us called the universe, right, is much simpler than we were ever led to believe, including the harmonies of the Earth, the harmonies we see in space.
They can all be reduced to elemental harmonies going back to the Greeks, the Pythagoreans, they were called.
And the Pythagoreans were onto something.
And that is that the vibrations of these tiny strings can, in fact, explain quarks.
In fact, Murray Gelman is the founder of the quark model.
He's the man who coined the word quark.
And I talked to him.
He's a friend of mine.
And I said, Murray, do you think that the quark model is the ultimate theory of everything?
And he said, well, of course not.
We all know that quarks are an approximation, and they're very good, but ultimately, it's strings.
Ultimately, it's strings vibrating in hyperspace.
So many Nobel laureates have already said that this is the simplest explanation for why we have matter, matter which vibrates, matter which resonates, and that's why we have this symphony called the universe.
Is it possible, and I know I'm reaching, that a type of time travel or a type of travel might be achieved, and I'm reaching now toward the original reason for the pyramids.
Boris Ayed and many others believe the pyramids are not burial places at all, but rather specific resonators at very important points on the Earth with a purpose that we have not yet discerned.
Walter Alvarez, winner of the Nobel Prize, even brought a particle detector into the main pyramid of Giza and detected cosmic rays because if they're hidden chambers, if they're hidden chambers in a certain direction, they're going to be more cosmic rays because, of course, it's air, not solid limestone, right?
And so by looking at the fact that cosmic rays came in at different angles, at different intensities, he could figure out where all the hidden chambers were.
And by putting several of these spark chambers, he was able to triangulate all the hidden chambers of the pyramids.
Unfortunately, he did not find any new ones.
He wanted to find a new chamber that would maybe be called the Alvarez chamber, right?
But unfortunately, he just found the known chambers this way.
Now, about time travel.
We physicists historically would laugh at the idea of time travel.
But I'll be very frank.
Einstein's equations allow for time travel.
Now, if you don't believe me, read Einstein's memoirs.
He states flatly in his memoirs, I am disturbed, he said, that there are solutions found by Gödel, Kurt Gödel, the greatest mathematical logician in the last 1,000 years.
Kurt Gödel found the first time travel solution of Einstein's equations.
So it bothered him.
But he died thinking that they weren't practical.
You couldn't do anything with them.
So why bother?
Since then, we've found hundreds of other solutions which allow for time travel.
And again, we're talking about a type 2 civilization.
No one's talking about an inventor announcing a time machine tomorrow in its basement.
We're talking about maybe our descendants, many, many generations from now, wanting to visit old grandpa, many times removed Art Bell to find out what it was like to live in the end of the 20th century, right?
Or maybe aliens out of space, specifically type 2 and type 3, with the capability of opening up holes in space and time.
So this is no longer conjectural.
Well, it is conjectural, but we now have blueprints.
Yes, but not very long ago, just years ago, we started with a spark transmitter.
Then we used vacuum tubes, which required immense amounts of energy to achieve what we can now achieve with 100 or 200 milliamps with solid-state devices.
So could there not be a quantum leap that would allow what you're thinking would require a great amount of energy with a much smaller amount of energy?
If I take a sheet of paper and crumple it up, right, and put an ant on it, the ant would walk on the sheet of paper saying there's a force tugging on me.
Every time I go over a fold, I get tugged to the left, I get tugged to the right.
There's this force.
I can't walk in a straight line.
I walk like a drunk, right?
Now, we laugh At the ant.
There's no force at all.
It's space that's curved.
It's space that's stretched, wrinkled.
And we laugh at the ant because the ant only has two-dimensional eyes, eyes that can only see on the sheet of paper.
We're entering an area that I really want to talk about, and we're at the top of the hour, and we're going to start to take calls, but I want to finish this up with you, so hang tight.
Good long break here, and we'll be right back to you, Doctor.
Dr. Michio Kaku, Professor Kaku, is my guest.
He is a theoretical physicist, and we've been all over the place, but oh my, what a ride, huh?
So when we come back, we'll talk a bit about gravity, and then I'll get the phone lines open and let you all ask questions.
And by now, you should have quite a few.
From the high desert, threatened now with a hurricane, a hurricane.
This is Coast to Coast AM.
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You're listening to Art Bell somewhere in Time.
Tonight featuring a replay of Coast to Coast AM from September 24th, 1997.
Again, those of you in the American Southwest where I am, I know it's weird, but it's happening.
Hurricane Nora, winds 85 miles an hour, gusting higher, headed north now at 17 miles per hour, and expected probably midway up the Baja Peninsula, expected to come slamming into Arizona, parts of California and Nevada and Utah.
So, just what we needed, huh, folks?
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a hurricane.
You're listening to Ark Bell Somewhere in Time on Premier Radio Networks.
Tonight, an encore presentation of Coast to Coast AM from September 24, 1997.
With a 10-dimensional multi-universe, is then our speed of light just a maximum constant wave made up of other dimensional waves interfering either destructively or constructively?
But at least in the string theory, at least in this theory, which is the leading and in fact only theory to explain all of Einstein's theory, light travels at the speed of light in all dimensions.
So you cannot whiz your way through faster than the speed of light in higher dimensions.
What you can do is take a shortcut through higher dimensions.
Take the same sheet of paper and fold it in half.
Then, of course, you can leap across the fold.
That way you actually apparently went faster than the speed of light without violating any principles.
People will constantly call me up and taunt me with this, and then we'll go to phones.
They will say, if you're traveling very near the speed of light, or just about right up at the speed of light, and you're in effectively a car or a spaceship and flip on your headlights, what happens?
Suppose I'm able to travel at or near, just near the speed of light for 10 or 20 years and then do the same thing and return Earth with a total travel time of 40 years or covering nearly 40 light years.
When I get back to Earth, what will have occurred?
Well, in which case, consistent with the laws of physics, okay, it's probably some kind of magnetic device using monopoles rather than anti-gravity, because so far we've never seen any form of anti-gravity.
Exotic matter would have anti-gravity, but we've never seen exotic matter.
Well, at Stanford University, there was one professor who claimed to have seen a monopole.
And he actually photographed it, a track.
But it's not reproducible.
He's the only one on Earth who has ever photographed a tract of a monopole.
And some people think it was dust in his machine, but he still claims that it was a real monopole.
Many theories of the Big Bang show that the Big Bang must have created lots of monopoles.
In fact, the leading theory of cosmology predicts lots of monopoles.
If there are what are called relic monopoles, monopoles left over from the Big Bang, and a type 2 civilization could harvest them in outer space, then conceivably they could sail in the magnetism of the galaxy and the magnetism of the Earth, which is quite small.
But if you have powerful enough monopoles, you'd be able to sail silently without an exhaust.
You would not use Newton's third law of motion, which of course requires big engines and booster rockets.
You would coast using the laws of Faraday, using the laws, instead of the laws of Newton.
And of course, you know, in the labs of today, we have not seen monopoles other than one registered at Stanford University.
How much work, black work, is going on with your colleagues?
Without getting specific, because I suppose even if you knew, you couldn't talk.
My question is, really, how much black work is being done?
I mean, this is constantly going on with respect to our government, and they take people like yourself and they can get their hands on them and generally give them nice little places to live and work and labs and all they need and want and aim them at a project.
In my field, like nuclear physics, for example, 50% of the funding in one way or another comes from the military.
And we now know, in fact, that the military was trying to hide stealth fighters and stealth bombers by claiming that they're just natural phenomenon, mirages, marsh gas, whatever.
When actually they were stealth fighter jets and stealth bombers with very peculiar shapes.
How are we able to build a laser strong enough to overcome the limiting effects of the lower part of the atmosphere?
I understand they were quite successful with lasers at high altitudes where the atmosphere is very thin, but now we're talking about ground-based lasers.
90% of the energy is absorbed by the air, as you correctly point out.
Therefore, you have to have super lasers that can afford to waste 90% heating up the air as they go through the air to knock out a satellite which is like 200 miles above the Earth's surface, right?
So personally, I think it's not the way to go because we are the most vulnerable to this kind of technology.
And even countries that cannot send satellites into space, they can build lasers.
It's not that hard.
The instructions are published in many books.
But yeah, you're right.
You have to have a powerful laser that can overcome the fact that 90% of the energy goes into heating up the atmosphere rather than shooting down a satellite from space.
Now, by the way, one thing that is not going to come out of these black works is a ray gun.
You're not going to get a handheld portable ray gun coming out because of the power problem.
You need a portable power pack to do that.
We have lasers that are every bit as powerful as what you see in science fiction movies.
That's no problem.
With a nuclear power plant, you can energize a laser beam.
But you can't carry a nuclear power plant in your pocket.
You can't carry a nuclear power plant everywhere you go.
And that's one reason why ray guns were eventually abandoned by the military.
They can be used for blinding, but the blast requires a big power source.
My guest is Dr. Michio Kaku, one of the nation's premier theoretical physicists.
And he'll be back in a moment.
Art, I've got to tell you, this is from Daryl, I was in the process of making an ice cream sundae, imagine this, folks, for Bobby, and put a full half gallon in the microwave to soften it up.
At the same time, I was so absorbed in this discussion that I misset the timer and roamed around the kitchen until I realized I forgot something.
Long and short of it is that I got inundated in a Ben and Jerry's tsunami.
Goes to show me that even with a basic understanding of physics, thought and consciousness, in this case unconsciousness, seems to enter into the equation.
Now, how about on a subatomic level, does not the observer influence that which he observes?
That's an interesting question.
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The End Now we take you back to the night of September 24th, 1997, on Art Bell, Somewhere in Time.
And I want to just say that I think you guys are doing a fantastic job of informing the public about something really interesting.
I invented the force isolator scroll, or labyrinth, if you like, for allowing for recoil propulsion, which theoretically could even be warped drive.
And right now, NASA are looking into that with great interest.
When you go out to do your vacation and check out all these ancient places, are you going to be looking into the possibilities of evidence of this technology being ancient?
Okay, well, let me lay out the next 50 to 100 years worth of propulsion systems being worked out by NASA.
And again, it's all in my book, Visions.
The next generation of rocket propulsions are going to be ionic drives.
Prototypes are now being built.
They will probably have long-haul missions between planets done by ion engines.
Ion engines are like the electron gun in your TV set.
It shoots out electrons on one end and it propels the device in the other direction.
They're not very spectacular, but they're very steady, and they operate for years at a time, while booster rockets, of course, only work for about four minutes.
Yeah, now then we go to the next generation beyond that, which uses light.
There are several versions being proposed.
One is the laser sail, where you shoot a laser beam from a moon to a sail.
And the sail captures the laser beam and then floats and is pushed by the pressure of light.
That has been looked very seriously now for perhaps the first probes to the nearby stars.
They use laser-inflated sails.
My favorite is the Ramjet fusion engine, which of course has a lot of technical problems.
We haven't attained fusion yet.
But once fusion is in the bag, then we may be able to use a scoop to scoop hydrogen gas in the forward direction, fuse it in this chamber, and then blast your way to the nearby stars.
So the Ramjet fusion engine, I think, is perhaps the best bet once we start Nasatox 50 years in the future when we have a better handle on fusion power, which of course is still a pie in the sky.
So again, the three leading contenders are ion engines, which is actually, we have them already.
The next after that are the photon engines based on laser beams.
And the one that is perhaps the dark horse is the Ramjet fusion propulsion device, which probably will take us to the nearby stars.
A hundred years ago, when mysticism was quite popular in England, several future Nobel Prize laureates in physics looked at this question and said that if you could access the fourth dimension, you could then go through walls, you could disappear into hyperspace and come back, you could unravel knots, you could turn right-handed seashells into left-handed seashells, you could do all those tricks if you could access a higher dimension.
Now today, of course, we realize that it takes energy, raw energy to access the fourth and fifth and sixth dimensions.
However, if someone could do that, then of course it would be child's play, literally child's play, to make things disappear and reappear, unravel knots, turn seashells around to the opposite orientation, and reach into walls, break into safes without breaking open the metal.
It would be child's play.
But of course, my personal point of view is that this is for a type 2 civilization, which is far beyond anything that we can conceive of today.
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So we're talking about a couple thousand years down the road then?
Doctor, if the Big Bang theory is correct, that all matter was infinitesimally small until the Big Bang, and that now our universe is expanding, and all matter is moving away from us due to the expansion, does that mean that we too are expanding and just can't tell it because all of our instruments that would measure it are also expanding?
Yeah, you know, many filmmakers give me telephone calls and they want to know how to factually represent certain things in the movies, because otherwise they make real bloopers, right?
They make some outrageous mistake.
Like Star Wars has many mistakes in it, right?
So a lot of filmmakers are actually calling me on the telephone now and asking to clarify certain obscure aspects of Einstein's theory or simple physics of outer space travel, right?
And then he explained to Carl Sagan how you would, in fact, leap across light years of space without the long way, the old-fashioned way, which is by rocket ship.
So for the people on the planet Vega, they would at least be type 2.
And for them, warping space would be child's play.
So for them, of course, we would give them the right to then open up holes in space by which they can grab Jodi Foster and have a decent conversation with her on the planet Vega.
But the energy you extract from the fuel does not increase like that.
So even though you are heavier and heavier, you're not going to be able to get that extra oomph because the energy you get from the fuel cannot carry you faster than the speed of light.
So the extra energy simply takes you one more decimal place closer to the speed of light, but you cannot leap beyond the speed of light.
Now, is it not possible that somebody would come zooming along, need to refuel, stop by our sun, refuel, virtually dowsing our sun, and just keep going and not even know what they did to us?
So what happens is if a civilization has to refuel and it refuels by sucking off a tremendous amount of energy from our star and our star blinks out, right, that would not be very good.
No.
So far, we have not seen anything like that.
So far, stars are born, stars die.
We haven't seen any stars accelerate their death.
However, if you have Dyson spheres, then, of course, these stars are invisible.
They're covered completely.
And the civilization simply soaks up all the energy of the star.
And we wouldn't even know it.
So far, we have not seen that.
And hopefully, I hope that our sun is not a gas station for some gas guzzler that wants to come by and strip the sun up most of his energy so he can propel himself to the next star system.
East of the Rockies, you're on the air with Dr. Kaku.
Good morning.
unidentified
I have a question with regards to propulsion, magnetic, gravity, and static.
For instance, I work in a polymer lab, and I can take a bag with, say, 30 pounds of resin in it, pellets.
I can turn that bag upside down, and by the force of gravity, if that 30-pound bag, the pellets will fall out onto a tray.
But through static, maybe 15 to 20 grams will adhere to the bag while it's upside down.
I can then take that bag and shake it, and those bags, and those, there will be a handful of pellets that will dance inside of that bag with through static.
Well, people have tried to produce what are called rail guns.
The military is very much interested in this, using electricity instead of chemicals.
You see, if you have a chemical gun, you're limited by the speed of sound.
Shock waves don't go much faster than the speed of sound, which is about 700 miles an hour.
So bullets don't go much more than maybe 1,000 or so miles per hour because they're based on chemical shock waves.
Electricity travels at the speed of light.
So if you could have a rail gun, a gun that looks like a rail, and send electricity along the rail, and then that electricity then drags a piece of metal along with it, then you could conceivably launch an object that will go tens of thousands of miles per hour and into orbit.
Well, my webmaster, Ever Fast on the Draw, if you will go to the guest section of my website at www.artbell.com, besides being able to go and buy Art Bell stock if you go to the rogue market, you will now see by Dr. Kaku's name a link.
And boy, you ought to see what's on his website.
I'm sitting there now looking at nuclear power, both sides.
To win a nuclear war, the Pentagon Secret War Plans.
Beyond Einstein, a cosmic quest for the theory of the universe.
Introduction to superstrings.
Strings.
The formal fields and topology.
Quarks and strings.
Quantum field theory, a modern introduction.
I could go on down the page.
There's an awful lot here.
So if you would like to see a link to the Good Doctor's website, it is up there right now.
It says Michio Kaku Explorations in Science.
Just click on that.
You'll go over to his website.
remarkable, remarkable stuff.
unidentified
*throwing*
Now we take you back to the night of September 24th, 1997, on Art Bell, Somewhere in Time.
Music All right, Dr. Kaku, you'll be interested in this.
This is a Reuters report.
As of now, as of right now, just came in.
U.S. government space scientists have launched a miniature rocket using a ground-based laser beam for propulsion, according to the Advanced Space Transportation Program, or ASTP, on Tuesday.
Well, like I said, the photon engine is an engine that has been seriously looked at for even interplanetary travel and interstellar travel because light has pressure.
Now, on the Earth, the pressure is very minimal.
That's why we prefer to use chemical rockets.
But in space, you know, you can push against the pressure of light beams and have sails, in fact, to use this.
So some people have advocated using laser beams in space, based on the moon, for example.
Yes, and that's why it would be nice to lengthen the lifespan a bit so that we could see some of the fantastic technologies that await us in the next several decades.
Yeah, Dr. Kaku, the critics of superstring theory sometimes say that it's got to be missing a major piece because even though it claims to unify a lot of the forces of nature, it doesn't make any new predictions.
Uh well, the major criticism of superstring theory is that you can't test it because it's a theory of everything and it's a theory of the Big Bang, and therefore you have to recreate a Big Bang in order to actually test the whole theory.
I tend to think that if we solve the theory completely, mathematically, it'll give us the mass of the quarks, it'll give us the properties of atoms, DNA, and in that sense explain the universe that actually exists.
And then, to answer your criticism, it'll actually explain the world of super high energies, the energies found, let's say, inside a supernova.
It'll go beyond ordinary technology and ordinary physics.
So super string theory, the theory of these higher dimensions and little strings vibrating in them, will hopefully explain not only atoms and molecules and DNA, but will also explain what's happening at the center of a supernova and what's happening at the center of the Big Bang.
And that will give us new information.
No theory at present can take us beyond the instant of the Big Bang except superstring theory, because it's the theory of the quantum theory married to Einstein's theory.
So we will get new physics from this.
We won't simply regurgitate the old-fashioned stuff.
We'll get what happened before the Big Bang, which will be very interesting.
It takes us one step closer to God by whatever name you call him or her.
That vacuum, what a layman might think of as a vacuum, could really be composed of particles that are constantly coming into existence with their antipairs and annihilating each other somehow.
What he's trying to say is that even the vacuum of outer space is frothing with virtual particles, particles that dance in and out of the vacuum.
And we've measured this.
In fact, Richard Feynman won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1965 for this theory, along with two other physicists.
unidentified
Okay, let me ask you this.
Would there ever be any way you could think of to cause these little guys to wait a minute before they, well, not a minute, but some finite amount of time, before they annihilated each other and went back to nothing, and to take some from one side of us and put them on the other side of us so that essentially, since they are what we call space, it would be shrinking in one direction and becoming larger and back of us.
Well, that's what Stephen Hawking was trying to get at.
These virtual particles, which dance in and out of the vacuum, amount to nothing because it's still the vacuum.
But if you have a tremendous gravitational field, you can push, as you point out, them in one direction, and thereby you can get net radiation coming out of this.
unidentified
Well, no, that wasn't what I was talking about.
I was talking about taking the paired particles from one side of you, but before they would annihilate, and putting them on the other side of you so that one side of you space would be expanding.
In other words, you make a little section of the gravity around that.
In other words, didn't Einstein say that you couldn't really tell the difference between acceleration and gravity?
And well, so wouldn't it be equivalent if you took some of these particles, these particle pairs, from one side of you and got them to wait just long enough to move them to the other side of you before they did their little thing, kind of concentrated them on one side and made less of them on the other, wouldn't that actually be taking something away from space and making space smaller on one side of you and larger on the other side?
Well, you see, there is a propulsion effect associated with this, as you point out, but you see, the propulsion is even in all directions.
So if I have a black hole, which is a spherical or disk, right, the black hole leaks this radiation, as you correctly point out, these things pop out of the vacuum.
One side goes one way, one side goes the other, but it's uniform, you see, so it all cancels out.
So the black hole does not propel itself in one direction.
It cancels, one to the left, and on the other side of the black hole, one to the right.
unidentified
Well, I understood that, but I wasn't talking about that.
Well, what I'm talking about is somehow, and I have no idea what kind of mechanism this would take, and it would probably be prohibitive in energy or technology, but just theoretically, if you could, since the space consists of these things,
if you could take some of them from one region of space before they went back and did their thing and put them, concentrate them in another region of space, it would seem that since space is these things, you would be making space smaller.
In other words, kind of creating a gravity well that would just be like one little section right local there, kind of pointing from one direction to another direction and use this as a form of propulsion.
Unfortunately, we're much more likely to get funding if antimatter ever gets to be practical in order to create a bomb than we are to get funding to do anything really practical with it.
Well, you asked a good question because, you know, I was offered a job at the Livermore National Laboratory to design these hydrogen bombs.
And at first, it was more a question that I would rather work on Einstein's theory and complete the biggest bomb of all, which was the Big Bang.
But later, I began to realize that these bombs kill people, and they can destroy the Earth.
And now that I understand that we are headed toward a Type 1 civilization, that the main danger preventing us from flourishing as a Type 1 civilization is self-annihilation.
So now it's become ideological.
Now I believe that this is really a test, that every Type 0 civilization in our galaxy, and there are probably hundreds of them, are being tested to see whether they're mature enough and have enough wisdom to handle this powerful technology.
And unfortunately, a lot of them never made the grade, I'm sure.
Do you see any way that there could be use by a national entity of a nuclear device that would not eventually lead to a fuller, more complete nuclear exchange?
Well, I think that's one of the great problems is that, well, you know, like I said, I was in Russia a year and a half ago, and I met my counterparts in the Russian Academy of Sciences.
And they've seen that nuclear weapons helped to bankrupt their country.
You know, they spent their national wealth building these things.
And it broke the bank.
It broke their country.
Their country fell apart as a consequence.
And now their lakes are polluted.
Sverdlovsk is polluted with nuclear reactors.
Semi-Palatinsk is polluted.
Huge areas of Siberia are polluted with nuclear radiation, much worse than in the United States.
And that's the price you pay for reaching for this kind of power, right?
And now, as I mentioned before, we have some of it missing, which of course is another cause of concern.
So when you mix nationalism with nuclear weapons, you get into big trouble.
The Hubble Space Telescope has now peered into the center of our galaxy, and we find gases swirling in a circle.
Now, by calculating the velocity of the gas, we can calculate how much mass there is at the center, and it does obey the equation for a black hole.
The equation for a black hole says the escape velocity is the speed of light.
Therefore, we have indirect evidence that even in our own backyard, just 30,000 light years away or so, at the center of our galaxy, there is in fact a black hole.
So there is good evidence.
It's not 100% yet.
People are not crowing about it yet, that they bagged a black hole in the Milky Way galaxy.
But the Humble Space Telescope gives us a lot of independent checks now that there is, in fact, a black hole right in our own backyard.
You don't have to go 50 million light years to M87 or NGC 4268.
Right in our own backyard, we seem to have one of these things.
As pointed out by a previous scholar, black holes will ooze away some of their energy.
There is this energy of the vacuum, and you have what are called virtual particles.
Some of these virtual particles become real particles, and so the black hole essentially evaporates with time.
So it's conceivable now that some of these are drifting in outer space and perhaps even drifting to the solar system.
However, their mass gradually evaporates.
At a certain point, they can't hold on together, and then they explode.
So we tend to think that they're pretty rare.
We tend to think that they will explode before they become so numerous that we're going to bump into one of these things.
But again, if you want more information about black holes, I have a whole chapter in my book, Visions, How Science Will Revolutionize the 21st Century, about looking farther ahead beyond 100 years when we may make contact with some of these black holes and perhaps maybe even harness the power of some of these black holes.
But that, of course, is now hundreds of years into the future.
But if a drifting mini-black hole were to come by our solar system, some people think that could be a very convenient power source.
We would essentially have the power of a mini-star right in our own backyard.
But that's still speculation.
We have never seen a mini-black hole.
We've only seen these big galactic ones so far.
But perhaps it's only a matter of time before we see smaller ones, perhaps even drifting near the solar system.
Yes, and that is what all the speculation is about.
In fact, I have a friend at MIT who even claims that in your basement, if you could concentrate enough energy in your basement, and of course this is not for us, this is for Tai 2 civilizations, you could create a mini black hole in your basement and a small bubble would form, and this bubble would be a baby universe.
Wow.
So I asked him, well, is that dangerous to create a mini universe in your basement?
And he admitted, well, the shockwave would be about a hydrogen bomb's worth.
But other than that, it's not going to destroy our universe.
So I told him that maybe it's not such a good idea to bake a black hole in your basement.
But the calculations are doable.
I went over them myself, right?
And there it is.
It's conceivable that, again, for a type 2 civilization that can manipulate stellar energies, they can cook a small black hole in a laboratory with a very small event horizon, an event horizon perhaps only maybe 10 feet across, and open up the looking glass.
Yes, and that's why I would hope to live to see some of that.
I would hope that at least our children would have the capability of seeing some of the wonders that await us if we can make the transition from a type 0 to type 1 without blowing ourselves up or polluting our environment.
But if there is global warming, we're going to see a lot of hurricanes.
You know, hurricanes, just like the Greek god Antaeus that had power when he stood on the earth and could be defeated when he was lifted off the earth, hurricanes derive their power from ocean water, hot ocean water.
I would expect, if you've been listening, if there are type 2 or type 3 civilizations, they may indeed have come strolling through and taken a look-see at us.
Again, this is a technology that is far beyond anything that we puny people in the Type 0 civilization can conceive of.
But if you have enough energy and concentrate it into a point, you can open up a hole in space, perhaps, and then perhaps walk through it.
And again, this is the energy content of a star, but type 2 civilizations, by definition, handle that kind of energy.
In which case, they can play with stars and create mini stars in their basements and open up such portals, which allow them to walk through dimensions.
So it would be child's play for a type 2 or a type 3 civilization to perhaps harness these things.
Now, there is some debate about stability.
There are some physicists who claim that they're not very stable.
But assuming you can stabilize these holes so they don't swallow you up and don't close after you go into them, assuming you can stabilize them, then of course you can use them as gateways to other spaces and other times.
Yeah, and I've talked to you once before because I told you that I used one of Richard Hoagland's ideas that he had talked about for my son's science project, and he won.
Well, I've been listening to the doctor since the first of this interview, Doctor, and I am no brain, no nuclear, I'm smart, but I'm not one of these scientist people like you're talking about.
But a lot of the ideas sound like something, if I researched it even further, it might be something that my son could do this year because we were starting early this year.
What a high school kid could do for a science project is, for example, photograph antimatter.
Now, this is not as outrageous as it sounds.
When I was in high school, I sent away for a little piece of sodium-22, which is slightly radioactive, and it emits antimatter by itself, anti-electrons called positrons.
You put that in a cloud chamber, you know, a little chamber with cold on the bottom and wet on top with alcohol.
And you put glass on top of it, and then you shine light in it, and you can actually see beams of antimatter coming out of sodium-22.
Then I built a magnet to bend the antimatter to prove that it was positively charged.
Everyone knows electrons are negatively charged.
But I could prove that this was antimatter by building magnets.
So with relatively, you know, it only cost me 20 bucks to build this thing.
And it got me to the National Science Fair.
And it impressed, they had a lot of the judges.
One of them was Edward Teller, in fact.
And that's how I got to know Edward Teller through my science project.
He never did, but I went to school with his daughter, Wendy.
We used to go on the airplane together, and late at night she would complain that sometimes she would bring a date home, and the father, of course, wants to know what you do for a living, right?
Well, Edward Teller wanted to know what the date's position on communism was before he would allow her to date him.
We are all relaxed in thinking that the Cold War is over, that the large nuclear weapons are being destroyed.
But the truth of the matter is, Doctor, the really dangerous ones, the MERV weapons, they're all still there.
They can be retargeted in minutes, and we're not in any way out from under just yet.
And should there be a large social disturbance or revolution in Russia, for example, the possibility or the danger of a nuclear exchange is still very much there, isn't it?
They're being taken apart at Amaral, Texas, and the pits.
You can actually see some of the pits in Albuquerque, New Mexico, the Australian pits.
So the older bombs are being taken apart, but as you correctly pointed out, the newer bombs are still intact.
And at Livermore, they're even tinkering with these third-generation bombs.
And a lot of the generals in Russia, they're not fools, right?
They're saying, why should we destroy our bombs when the American skis are building third-generation hydrogen bombs, right?
So there's a danger that some of the generals in Russia, seeing that we're not really dismantling our arsenal, will stop dismantling the Russian arsenal.
And as you pointed out, with all this instability, bomb material could be lost.
Generals could perhaps seize control of part of the arsenal, or there could be instability in Russia.
So I think we have a golden opportunity now if Clinton would be brave enough to stabilize the situation, not go for new generations of hydrogen warheads, and in good faith, you know, start to dismantle ours and give money to Russia to stabilize our nuclear scientists, who are, of course, starving to death, and they in turn could leave and go to hotspots around the world, which would make things a lot worse.
So we have this golden opportunity now, but I see it kind of frittering away.
I don't see the president taking big initiatives with regards to closing down Livermore or our Los Alamos National Laboratory and resurrecting them as laboratories for life to work on the greenhouse problem, to work on ozone depletion, the electric car, and all the things that we need in the 21st century.
Oh, it only takes a few hundred megatons to set off nuclear winter, as Carl Sagan pointed out.
Cities would burn, and they would burn for weeks at a time, and the soot from all these burning cities would then blanket the Earth, and we would die the way the dinosaurs died, right?
They died because it got cold, because a comet also set up soot into the air.
And so even if we had a fraction of our current arsenal, that would be sufficient to set off nuclear winter or nuclear autumn and create temperatures so low that we couldn't grow crops anymore.
And a lot of people would freeze to death as a consequence.
So that's why we have all these threats to prevent us from attaining type 1 status, because we have the pull, the pull of the old world, which says we have to have lots of bombs and lots of laboratories to produce them and lots of nuclear scientists to produce more bombs.
My attitude is we have enough problems.
We should take these top scientists and have them solve the greenhouse effect.
You know, the president just allocated $40 billion to modernize our nuclear arsenal.
It's called the Nuclear Stockpile Stewardship Program.
He wants to build a laser that is two football fields across, a laser beam that could be used to set off a hydrogen bomb.
Now, if you're a Russian general and you just learned that President Clinton okayed $40 billion to modernize America's nuclear weapons, you're going to say, but that's not in good faith.
We're dismantling our bombs.
Our bombs are falling apart.
We can barely count our bombs.
And here you are building laser beams two football fields across to design third-generation hydrogen bombs.
So at some point, some general in Russia is going to say, I've had enough.
All right, that's Dr. Amichio Kaku, everybody, and what a night, huh?
Tomorrow night, we're going to do a couple of things.
We are going to interview a guy Finley who's going to be talking about quickening type subjects.
Us, frankly.
And then Ramona will come on and give those of you who are coming on the Egyptian trip and more some helpful hints on packing and what we'll do when we get there.