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Nov. 20, 1997 - Art Bell
03:23:08
Coast to Coast AM with Art Bell - Michio Kaku - Space Exploration
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This is the CDC Radio Network.
The mind of a man.
The mind of a man.
From the high desert and the great American Southwest, I bid you all good evening or good morning, as the case may
be across this great country.
As the case may be across this great land, stretching from the Tahitian and Hawaiian island chains in the West, all
the way eastward to the Caribbean and the U.S.
Virgin Islands, top of the morning in St.
Thomas, And south into South America?
Maybe all the way down and north to the pole, where I suppose we'd meet up.
Worldwide on the Internet, this is Close to Close AM.
Good morning, I'm Art Bell, and tonight you are in for a serious treat.
One of the nation's preeminent theoretical physicists, Dr. Michio Kaku, from the City College of New York, is my guest.
He's been here before, and we've got lots and lots of interesting stuff to, uh, talk about tonight.
Tomorrow night, uh, we will have Bob Cazell here, who has authored a very interesting-sounding book, uh, with a very interesting-sounding title.
Uh, basically, it is, nothing in this book is true, but it's exactly how things are.
Ha ha ha ha ha ha.
It'll be fun to find out how he explains that one.
Nothing is true, but that's exactly how things are.
And in front of that show, for the first few moments, we will update the nation.
Actually, Tim, Ken, and Will are the Art Bell Chat Clubs, which seem to be flourishing in all sorts of things.
So if you are interested in beginning one, in one now, want to know what's going on in yours, tomorrow night you're going to want to listen at the Now, in a moment, we'll go to New York and Dr. Michio Kaku, a fascinating, fascinating man, I think well on his way to filling the rather large shoes of Dr. Carl Sagan, as sort of, I don't know, we'll get it from him, but the science, the preeminent physicist
Scientists in America capable of explaining things that most Americans otherwise wouldn't stand a chance of understanding.
When you listen to Dr. Kaku, you will understand.
All you have to do is turn your radio up a little bit, open your ears, and even though the subject is physics, you'll find that, oh my, the light bulb is going on.
Boom, boom, boom, boom, right on through the program.
You'll see.
Well, in Iraq, it looks like there's a settlement.
It looks that way.
And our inspectors, in fact UN inspectors, have been gone so long now, not inspecting, that you've got to imagine anything they wanted to move, build, concoct in some hard little soup, has been moved, built, or concocted.
And so now they're saying, well, okay, no conditions.
They can come back.
I don't know.
Mission achieved.
But we continue to move big time hardware over there.
We'll have to see what happens.
Dr. Michio Kaku is an authority on relativity theory and quantum physics.
As a matter of fact, he is, as I said, 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 the Washington Post selected as one of the top science books of the year.
He is also the author of Beyond Einstein and Quantum Field Theory, a modern introduction.
He's got a new book.
It's called Visions, or How Science Will Revolutionize the 21st Century.
In other words, what we have to look forward to just ahead, and that is a fascinating topic.
Dr. Kaku, welcome back to the program.
Glad to be on, Art.
Great to have you.
How's the weather in New York?
The weather is fine.
In fact, I've been actually gone from New York for the last three weeks.
I've been on a book tour around the country, and I want to say that every time I did a book signing in Milwaukee or Madison or Berkeley or Los Angeles, people would come up to me And say that I heard you on the Art Dell Show.
So whatever city I was in, there were always people that were fans of yours that wanted to be there at the book signing because they heard me on your show.
That's a good thing, I think.
Wonderful.
All right.
I've got several places I would like to go right away.
First of all, there was, I've got from Florida Today.
Today, the article is entitled First observation of space-time distortion by black holes, released by NASA.
Astronomers using NASA's Rossi X-ray Timing Explorer, or RXT spacecraft, said today they have observed a black hole that is literally dragging space and time around itself as it rotates.
This bizarre effect called Frame-dragging is the first evidence which apparently supports a prediction made in 1918 using Einstein's Theory of Relativity.
That's right.
So, is this in the category of big news?
It's big news in the sense that it's one more verification of Einstein's Theory of General Relativity, which gives us the Big Bang, black holes, curved space, and maybe in the future will give us the possibility of warp drive, okay?
The easiest way to visualize this is throw a stone into a pond.
And you know that the stone creates a ripple, and the ripples then emerge from the pond.
However, if you spin, if you spin the stone, okay, then of course you know that you get circular waves that also come out of the stone when you rotate it.
Right.
Now this means that, as Einstein pointed out, that matter in space is just not a lump on a log just sitting there.
It causes a disturbance.
It causes a warping, a disturbance in the space-time around it.
So that if I throw a rock into a pond, the ripples that form as a consequence are like gravity waves.
Okay?
However, if the stone rotates, then the stone can actually drag the water with it.
And so space is not so empty as people once thought.
Space is not nothing.
Space is dynamic.
Space and time changes according to how much matter you put into the system.
And so this is once again a verification of Einstein's Theory of General Relativity.
Okay, may I stop you and ask you, I don't quite grasp it, space.
Space, when you're not talking about the mass that occupies certain portions of the space, what is, it may sound like a dumb question, but what really is in between?
Is it sufficient to say space, or is there actually a mass to this apparent nothingness?
Dumb question?
No, I think it's a very good question, because you see, the way Newton looked at it 300 years ago is like an actor on a stage.
The actor can move on the stage, and space was basically empty and inert.
It was just a stage on which matter then danced and did all its magic tricks, okay?
Now Einstein said, no, no, that's wrong.
You can't simply say that the stage is empty and flat.
The stage itself moves, okay?
So now think of the stage as being warped, bent, okay?
And as the actors dance along the stage, the stage itself begins to change.
Now you begin to realize that it's much more complicated than originally thought, that the stage itself can begin to warp, change, bend, as the dancers move along the stage, okay?
Now this may one day give us the ability, perhaps, to go to the stars.
NASA, as you probably heard, Had a rather unorthodox conference just a few months ago on advanced propulsion systems.
Systems that may one day take us to the stars.
And so it was, everyone was invited to this conference sponsored by NASA.
And all sorts of, well, some harebrained schemes were proposed to go to the stars.
But some of the more serious physicists looked at the idea that perhaps we could one day bend the stage.
So that we can one day, perhaps, drill a hole between point A to point B. One, perhaps, maybe make a wormhole or perhaps a warp drive system by which we could go to the stars.
Okay?
And so this is being seriously looked at by scientists.
It doesn't mean that we can design a system like this because, of course, we're talking about the energy of a star.
Otherwise, we've got to get to a wormhole or a black hole.
How far away is the closest opportunity?
Well, in our galaxy, we now believe, looking at the latest pictures from the Hubble Space Telescope of the center of our galaxy, that there probably is an aging black hole in the center of the Milky Way.
Now, we've seen some beautiful photographs of 12 black holes in outer space in galaxies called M87 and NGC 4258.
They're just gorgeous pictures of this disk With this huge amount of galactic matter swirling around this disk.
And we think that at the center of this disk, there's not a dot like we used to think.
We used to think that a black hole was nothing but a dot, right?
Very uninteresting, and if you fell into it, you would die, and that's the end of it, right?
Now we believe that at the center of this disk, there is a ring.
A ring?
ring of neutrons, such that if you fell through the ring of neutrons, you would not fall to
the other side of the ring, you would fall to the other side of the galaxy, or the other
side of the universe, or perhaps even into another universe.
Okay?
Now, this is still, of course, controversial.
It's not proven because we haven't sent a space probe through a black hole yet, but
we do believe that even in our own galaxy, there is a black hole now.
Oh, now that's where I was going.
In other words, the closest available black hole to us, if there is one in our galaxy,
what would be a guess about how far away it might be?
Well, the center of our galaxy is on the order of, oh, let's say 60,000 or so, less than
that, about 50,000 light years away.
Excuse me, 50,000 light years?
Yeah, the galaxy is about 100,000 light years across, and we're about two-thirds the way out from the center of the galaxy.
However, there could be nearby black holes, much closer than that, that we're not aware of.
The Hubble Space Telescope can only photograph very bright objects in space, And it's possible that a dying star, a nearby star, will one day become a black hole.
And those are much more difficult to photograph.
Okay?
So far, the only thing that we've photographed are galactic black holes.
That is, black holes that weigh perhaps a million stars.
And we photograph these not actually by seeing the hole itself, but by seeing the swirl of material that's headed into it?
That's right.
A black hole is invisible.
So people ask the question, if it's invisible, how can you photograph the damn thing?
Right.
And the answer is we look at the indirect swirling of matter.
We look at indirect clues to the black hole.
And we know from the swirling of matter, just using Newton's laws of motion, we can calculate how much the black hole weighs.
And then we can calculate that light itself, light itself cannot escape from the center of the black hole.
And that's the definition of a black hole, by the way.
If I ask you for a second to give up on all your Theoretical physics that might get us into, you know, and we'll talk about that, into some sort of warp situation or jump situation or whatever it is.
And we have to depend on conventional known means of acceleration.
And by that I mean getting into orbit, then leaving Earth's orbit and going into either a fairly fast or fairly slow Acceleration rate until you get just below the speed of light.
If that is the limit, then what does that mean for us?
Well, it means that within the next 50 to 70 years, okay, we may be able to feel the first interstellar probe that travels a good fraction of the speed of light.
My personal bet would be that the REMJET fusion engine Uh-huh.
...may be developed within that time frame, now, 50 to 70 years into the future, whereby we could attain, perhaps, 10%, maybe 50%, the speed of light.
Now, the ramjet fusion engine looks like a gigantic ice cream scoop.
It moves in a forward direction, scooping up hydrogen gas... Right.
...and using the hydrogen gas of interstellar space as fuel, okay?
Then it fuses it at the very center of the Ramjet fusion engine, and using what is called a proton-proton fusion process, and that creates energy.
Now, so far, to be very blunt about this, we have not yet really attained fusion on the planet Earth.
We've attained glimmers of fusion at the Princeton Tokamak, which was recently closed this year, by the way.
Right.
However, we do think that in outer space, given now a 50-70 year time frame now, okay, That it may be possible to create a fusion engine in space, such that we can drive interstellar space probes.
Now, the reason for doing this is that within the next 10 years, NASA is going to be fielding a new set of satellites, including the Kepler satellite, which is going to prove the existence of Earth-like planets outside our solar system.
Now, this is incredible if you think about it.
We know that there are about 12 planets outside the solar system, but they're huge.
They're Jupiter-sized planets, and we don't think there's any water on them, and we don't think there's any life to speak of on these gigantic, super-Jupiter-sized planets.
If we couldn't live on them, the gravity would be far too much for us.
That's right.
They're probably made out of hydrogen gas, and they're probably either very hot, very cold, or what have you.
And they're not like Earth, which has liquid water.
Worse than the worst day in L.A.
That's right.
However, within the next 10-15 years now, we will be fielding a new generation of satellites, like the Kepler, which will be able to detect Earth-like planets, tiny planets like the Earth that have liquid water on them.
And liquid water is a universal solvent.
It allows you to dissolve amino acids that will one day create proteins and perhaps even DNA molecules out there in outer space.
And once we find the first Earth-like planet in outer space, there's going to be a huge clamor to build starships.
Okay?
Not just to go to the Moon or Mars.
But once we know that they're out there, once we know that there's a twin of the Earth that is hospitable to life just as we know it, there's going to be a clamor among scientists to begin the process I'm seriously looking at what it would take to reach the nearby stars at sub-light speed velocity.
All right.
Well, here seems like a relevant question.
At sub-light.
If there was another Earth-like planet out there, and we can imagine that it has developed, we have been listening for it.
SETI has been listening for any signals from space.
Now, I don't know how far we've really searched.
I don't know how much listening we've really done, whether we've listened in the right place, but so far, nobody's knocking on the door.
Now, radio signals would be coming at the speed, or near the speed of light.
So, in effect, if there is life out there, we've had little spaceships of electromagnetic energy aimed at us for some time now, and yet nothing.
Yes, there are several reasons for that.
First of all, we've only probed the Tiniest fraction of the galaxy.
Our own galaxy is 100,000 light-years across, as I said before.
About 100,000 light-years across.
And we've only scanned rigorously out to about 100 light-years.
I repeat, the galaxy is 100,000 light-years across.
It would take light 100,000 years to go from one end to the other.
And we've only scanned rigorously to about 100 light years from the planet Earth.
Most of the stars within a sphere 100 light years across have been scanned from the planet Earth, and we see, as you pointed out, nothing.
But that's only 0.1%, as you can tell, of the length of the galaxy.
We've scanned almost nothing, nothing, in comparison to the entire galaxy itself.
Plus, we've looked in the wrong direction.
You realize that when we scan for galaxies out there, we look for just one frequency, like on your radio dial?
Sure.
But you see, that's the wrong way to do it.
Aliens in outer space are not going to send precious signals on one frequency, because a passing star could disrupt it.
What they're going to do is smear it out over all frequencies.
They're going to take the signal, smear it out over all frequencies, and then reassemble it at the other end.
It's sort of like when you're on the Internet, you know, the Internet chops up your messages.
Oh, actually, you're talking about spread spectrum technology.
That's right.
That's what star systems, advanced star systems are going to do, is to smear out, spread out the spectrum of signals.
And if you were to listen in on one frequency of this mirrored signal, you'd hear nothing.
Garbage!
Yeah, just white noise.
That's right.
So in other words, the galaxy could be teeming with all sorts of interesting conversations between star systems, and you never know it.
Yes, but you know, you're really on to something.
I understand exactly what you're saying, but without the key to put together the spread spectrum A logic.
You're never going to know it's there.
That's right.
In fact, I've talked to, on my radio show in New York, I've interviewed the top people in the SETI project, and I asked them this question.
Aren't you barking up the wrong tree?
I mean, aren't you listening for the wrong signal?
And they admitted to me that, yes, but hey, look, we're poor.
We don't have the money.
We don't have the key, as you pointed out, To look at the spread signal and to reassemble it as the other, and take the computer to do that, by the way.
Oh, absolutely.
My audience will understand, because I advertise a spread spectrum 900 MHz phone, and I've talked to them about that a little bit, and so the light bulb just went on.
I'm sure you're absolutely correct.
Doctor, hold on, we're at the bottom of the hour.
Of course.
Why didn't I think of that?
Spread spectrum.
We'll talk about that.
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Now back to Dr. Cockridge.
Doctor, so there you go, spread spectrum technology, and if the noise floor, say at 1.2 gigs or 4 gigs or, you know, movie contact, whatever, wherever we're looking, if the noise floor was just slightly higher in a certain spectrum, we'd never even notice.
That's right.
You know, in the movie Contact, the assumption was made that alien life in outer space is going to be pretty much like us.
They use the same crude code system that we use, and they're going to be not that much different from us in terms of communication.
Well, that's silly, because when you communicate between stars, you get a lot of interference, a lot of noise, a lot of static.
Big noise floor.
That's right.
And so you want to smear the message out, so that even if one or two frequencies get knocked out by a hacking star, you have all the other frequencies to play with.
Of course.
And if you were to listen in there for, we earthlings, listen in on one frequency, it's like, you know, looking at a keyhole.
When you get just like a small little slice of light on the other side of the door, you can't reconstruct the entire image with just listening at one frequency.
You hear garbage, gibberish.
Yeah.
That's why The galaxy could be teeming with all sorts of interesting conversations between different, let's say, type 1, type 2, type 3 civilizations.
Of course.
And we'd never know, okay?
Well, how about this?
In other words, is there a way, when you talk to the people at SETI, and they're looking at all these millions of frequencies, by the way, they've got this big program now for people with PCs to help them out, help them look.
My question is, if we decided we wanted to look for a spread spectrum signal, Could we engage a computer, a large one, a Cray or whatever it would take, to begin looking for some sort of a pattern that it could begin to recognize and then start toward looking for a key?
That's right, but it costs money, and that's the bottom line.
So when I confronted the director of the SETI Institute on the West Coast and the SETI League on the East Coast, And I asked them, well, obviously, you're looking at the wrong signal.
You should look at all signals.
And they said, well, look, we're very poor on money.
We're not funded.
The government withdrew funding for our project a few years ago.
Was that wise?
I don't think so.
Because if they're out there, we should know about their intentions.
And we should know about what they're thinking about when they talk about us.
So, they admitted to me that all they can do is look for rises and falls in that one frequency.
So, assuming that there is a larger pattern that's smeared out over all frequencies, it goes up and down, and they would only assume that their one little slice, their one little teeny-weeny slice also goes up and down.
And I said, that's primitive.
And they admitted.
They admitted to me that they don't have the foggiest clue As to what's really out there, because alien life is not going to communicate like we communicate on one frequency.
They're going to be much more sophisticated, and there's lots of noise in outer space, and they're going to use error correction codes, which means they're going to spread the signal out.
What about simply looking for unusual rises in noise floors up in the 1, 2, 3, 4 gigahertz range?
Could you begin there, at least?
Yeah, if you have lots of listening posts with lots of different frequencies that you're looking at, then it's possible you may be able to get a glimmer of the full signal, but that's still very crude.
It's like having two keyholes and peering on the other side of a door through two keyholes, right?
You really have to remove the door.
You really have to scan all frequencies, or most of the frequencies, And then, as you point out, use a Cray computer to reassemble the signal.
And that's how alien life, if they exist, that's how they're going to communicate.
They're not going to communicate like we communicate.
And I think it's very foolish of us to think that they're going to be just like us.
Do you suppose anybody's doing it?
Now, publicly, SETI is not doing it.
They don't have the money.
But the National Security Agency and people like that Oh, they've got lots of money.
They've got black budgets.
Do you suppose anything like that might be going on, or do you in fact know something like that is going on?
Well, there was a book written by a New York Times reporter called Out There, and he interviewed quite a few military people who were interested in looking at UFO sightings, for example, from a military point of view, because they could be Russian space probes that are confused with UFOs, right?
And he got an acknowledgement from several military people that there were some very unusual sightings that are not quite consistent with meteors, but objects that, you know, penetrated our radar space and created quite a bit of disturbance and might have been a meteor, but then again might have been a UFO as well.
Don't they call these things fast walkers or something like that?
That's right.
And, you see, we also assume that they're going to use the same kind of propulsion system that we use.
They're going to use exhaust and chemical rockets.
And, therefore, if they zigzag in outer space, they say, well, obviously that can't be a chemical rocket.
Therefore, obviously their propulsion system is wrong.
Therefore, it's a mirage, or what have you.
Yes.
Well, maybe, maybe not.
Denial, actually.
Maybe, maybe not.
Because, you see, there are other propulsion systems beyond chemical rockets.
Okay?
Like magnetism, for example.
Okay?
Now, magnetism is much more difficult to harness, because if I have a bar magnet and I put it in the Earth's magnetic field, all it does is spin.
It doesn't do anything but spin like a compass needle.
Right.
That's kind of useless.
And if you were to cut it in half, then of course you have two spinning magnets.
That's right.
So, a flying saucer with a magnet in it would simply flop over and roll over like a dog and not do anything.
However, that's why you would have to go to a monopole, okay?
Now, we physicists believe that at the instant of creation that the universe was full of monopoles, and there may be some relic monopoles left over from the Big Bang, in which case an advanced civilization may use these monopoles to glide On the magnetic fields of galaxies and planets and what have you.
In what form would you find that?
It would be drifting in space?
That's right.
We've looked for monopoles.
You know, several of my friends are experimental physicists and they've looked in the oceans, they've looked on land for evidence of monopoles.
One monopole may have been photographed at Stanford University in the 1960s.
Now this is a magnet with just one pole to it.
That's right.
Just one North Pole or one South Pole.
And you cannot get it by cracking a magnet in half.
No, no, no, no.
Baby magnets.
Right.
Right.
And you say they might have photographed one.
How?
Where?
What did they find?
Where did they find it?
They had a track of a particle that went right through one of their emulsion films.
A beautiful track.
I've seen it.
And it had the characteristics of a one North Pole.
Just one North Pole.
However, no one has seen one since, and therefore that one photograph simply stands there in the archives of science.
It was done by a reputable experimental physicist at Stanford University, who's still there, by the way.
And, well, we physicists believe, though, that there should be remnants of the early universe, monopoles that are perhaps in the oceans, on the land, that we simply haven't picked up yet.
And if we have a monopole like this, instead of spinning in the Earth's magnetic field, it'll glide.
And if you can control, if you can control the intensity of a North and a South, you could pack, like a sailboat, in the magnetic field of the galaxy, in the magnetic field of the Earth.
Alright, well I'm certainly tracking with you.
What about, now there are not just permanent magnets, but there are electromagnets.
That's right.
Now, in the field of electronics, might we consider the possibility of the creation of a monopole?
No, because if you get a coil and you wind it up and you put electricity through it... You get two poles.
You get two poles.
The top part of the loop is north, let's say, and the bottom part of the loop is south, and so you get an electromagnet that has two poles, north and a south pole.
Now, a monopole is consistent with what we call Maxwell's equations.
Maxwell's equations are the equations for light, and a solution of Maxwell's equations is the monopole.
So, we think they exist.
The latest gut theory, the grand unified theory that explains the origin of the hot universe, that is consistent with lots of monopoles, and some of them should be remaining even today.
Not all of them decayed over the billions of years.
and any sophisticated civilization would be able to detect these monopoles
and perhaps even at some point in the future use them to glide effortlessly,
silently through the magnetic fields of the galaxy and the planets and what have you.
Sure.
But still, wouldn't there be the possibility of our, obviously as you point out, you wind a coil and you get a magnet with two poles, I know, but wouldn't our best chance, wouldn't there be some chance for artificial creation of a monopole?
Well, we've tried, you know.
Many of my friends work with atom smashers, like at Fermilab, or at CERN in Switzerland, in Geneva.
And we've smashed atoms apart, and we've broken apart protons, and we've looked for quarks, and all sorts of debris among smashed atoms, and we don't see any monopoles at all.
We have never seen a genuine bona fide monopole by smashing atoms apart, even though they are fully consistent with the laws of physics.
You can write a quantum field theory for a monopole.
Alright, here's another approach.
Would it theoretically be possible to magnify, or amplify, a better word, amplify gravity?
Well, amplification of gravity is quite difficult.
Every piece of matter in the universe has gravity associated with it.
Right.
Gravity is extremely weak.
And it's so weak, in fact, that if you get a comb and you comb your hair, the charge is enough to lift pieces of paper.
You all did that when you were a kid in elementary school, right?
Lift paper.
And defy gravity, sure.
Right.
And the pieces of paper defy gravity.
And the Earth weighs about 6 sextillion tons.
That's the weight of the Earth.
And the Earth's gravitational field is so weak that even a comb, even a comb, Can lift pieces of paper and defy the gravitational pull of 6,000,000,000 tons of dirt.
So gravity is quite weak and it's, according to Einstein, it's not possible to magnify gravity unless you concentrate matter.
If you can concentrate matter, like in a black hole or a neutron star, then of course the gravitational fields can be enormous.
Is gravity a push or a pull?
Well, gravity is nothing but the bending of space itself.
And again, like Newton thought that matter is like dancers dancing on a stage that's flat.
However, if the stage begins to bend, if the stage begins to bend and dancers dance on a stage that is bent, they'll say that there's a force acting on them that prevents them from walking in a straight line.
But that fourth, of course, is nothing but the stage that is warped.
You know, the wood that's warped on the stage?
Right, right.
That's gravity.
Gravity is nothing but space itself being bent out of shape, okay?
And that's why actors dancing on a warped stage would think that there is a tug on them that prevents them from walking in a straight line.
So scientists really do understand the nature of gravity?
I always had it fixed in my mind that for some reason the mass of the Earth was what kept us attracted to it, or even kept the atmosphere attracted to it.
Gravity.
Right.
Well, that's the Newtonian picture, right?
That there is a force that acts between two objects.
But Newton himself didn't like that idea, because there's nothing touching The Earth, making it go around the Sun, right?
The Earth goes around the Sun, but nothing is touching the Earth to make it go around the Sun.
And so Newton himself was unsatisfied with his own theory of gravity, because objects can move without being touched.
Gravity is invisible, right?
Einstein comes along and says there is something touching the Earth.
What is touching the Earth and pushing the Earth around the Sun is space.
Space itself is pushing the Earth, and that's why the Earth goes around the Sun, and that's why you're sitting in your chair, by the way.
The reason why you sit in your chair is not because there's a force that anchors you to the chair, it's just that space itself is pushing on you, and it's pushing you to the floor.
That's why you're not floating in outer space right now, by the way.
And yet, we contemplate Building a space station, for example, someday, or at least certainly if you'll go back to 2001, that rotated.
And that rotation would produce an artificial gravity, depending on how fast the spin was, correct?
That's correct.
But that is not the way you're suggesting we experience gravity now.
Well, according to Einstein, the effect of acceleration, that is, like in a spinning wheel in outer space, the effect of acceleration is indistinguishable from the effect of gravity.
That's why Tom Hanks in the movie Apollo 13, when he was weightless for like five, ten minutes at a time, people were wondering, how do they do that in Hollywood?
How did they get Tom Hanks to be floating like that for several minutes at a time?
And the way they did that was they simply put him in an airplane and shut off the engines.
And if you shut off the engines, then you're in free fall.
You're like an elevator that's falling.
You're weightless.
So the airplane falls, and Tom Hanks fell at the same rate as the airplane.
And so he was weightless with respect to the airplane.
And so this is how you can cancel gravity.
Gravity can be canceled by acceleration.
Or in outer space, like you said, by spinning a wheel in outer space, you can develop what is called artificial gravity.
Because, of course, our astronauts lose a tremendous amount of calcium when they're in outer space.
So, when they come down from outer space, they're like babies.
They can barely walk.
Or, they do the other thing, too.
They get the Vomit Comet.
You know, this airplane that takes a big dive to give the astronauts an opportunity to practice for even seconds in zero G. That's right.
And you're in free fall.
Right.
And that's how they made the movie Apollo 13.
They essentially took an airplane and shot it into the atmosphere and shut off the engines.
And it simply fell in free fall, and since Tom Hanks fell at the same rate that the airplane fell, it appeared as if Tom Hanks was weightless.
So according to Einstein, the effect of acceleration is indistinguishable from the effect of gravity.
That's called the equivalence principle, by the way.
And therefore, in outer space, it is possible to get artificial gravity.
That's correct.
All right, hold it right there, and you've got a good long break.
Relax, and I'm going to think about that during the break, and I think ask you about it again.
I'm getting a lot of emails.
If you want to call the number on the Egypt cruise, it, not Egypt, Alaska, it may be all booked up, or maybe not.
I'm not sure yet.
You can try them.
The nationwide number is 1-800-888-5509, or in California it's area code 310-568-4000.
It's gonna be so.
Dr. Zahi Awass, Daniel Brinkley, Graham Handock, Robert Vivald, Dr. Ed Krupp, and I'll be moderating.
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Oh, good morning everybody from the high desert.
Glad to be here.
Stretching from the Hawaiian Islands in the west, eastward to the Caribbean south, into South America north.
To the Pole and worldwide on the Internet.
This, of course, is Coast to Coast AM.
And I've got a real treat for you this morning.
Dr. Michio Kaku is an authority on relativity theory and quantum physics.
He is a professor of theoretical physics at the City University of New York.
He's 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 year.
He also is author of Beyond Einstein and Quantum Field Theory, a modern introduction.
He is well on his way to filling the shoes of Dr. Carl Sagan in the sense that he is able to communicate to the American public what otherwise scientists seem unable to articulate in a manner that we lowlives can absorb.
It's a real treat.
We're talking, well, we talked a little bit about SETI in the first hour.
And that SETI is actually a rather primitive way to look for signals from elsewhere, and that really you would want to look for spread spectrum transmissions, in other words, transmissions on many frequencies simultaneously, which would achieve much more power, would get by suns and planets that might be in the way, and otherwise stop the signal, giving it an opportunity to get through.
And it was a real aha moment for me.
And we are not looking for any such signal.
So we talked about that, and then we began talking about gravity.
And I'm still not sure I fully got that one down yet, and we'll pick up on that in a moment.
All right, let's try again.
Here he is, a brilliant man, Dr. Michio Kaku from New York.
Doctor?
Yes, I'm right here.
Okay, again with gravity.
I'm still, somehow I'm not quite grasping this.
I hold on to this old Newtonian idea.
That it is the mass of the Earth that keeps us walking around on it without floating away.
And you're suggesting that what keeps the Earth in orbit about the Sun is not the respective masses of the two bodies, but rather The space in between, and I'm trying to grasp that in my mind.
Okay, well, let me give you some more analogies.
Let's say you have a crumpled sheet of paper.
Right.
And you have an ant walking on this crumpled sheet.
Right.
And the ant would say, my God, there's a force tugging at me.
I can't walk in a straight line.
Up and down and up and down and up and down and up and down, because it's a crumpled sheet of paper.
Now, we laugh, because we look down from the third dimension.
Looking down from the third dimension, we see that, well, it's just a paper.
It's crumpled.
That's the reason why the ant can't move in a straight line.
But the ant has two-dimensional eyes.
The ant doesn't know that.
The ant just knows there's a force tugging at it left and tugging at it on right.
Okay?
And that's where gravity comes in.
Because gravity itself is an illusion, in some sense.
It's not a force that Newton thought acted invisibly between the Earth and the Sun.
What keeps the sun moving around the earth is the fact that the sun warps the space around it.
Okay?
Now, in science museums, they sometimes have a funnel, a large funnel that's about like four feet across.
Right.
And they throw a marble, a marble along the side of the funnel.
And the marble orbits around the center of the funnel.
Right.
It orbits.
Right.
You see, the funnel does not exert a force on the marble.
What is pushing the marble is the funnel, the bent surface.
The angle.
The angle, right.
That's what's pushing.
What's pushing the marble in a circle is the bending of the funnel.
But all of these things, if you're in space, become not true.
Isn't that correct?
In other words, in a zero-g environment, does the ant still perceive the climb and the difficulty?
Does the... Well, as a matter of fact, the marble doesn't go around at all.
It just floats up.
That's right.
In zero-g, the crumpled sheet is flat.
And so, you go in a straight line in zero-g.
Okay?
Yes.
And so, the funnel then flattens out.
However, this funnel is driven by a star.
There's a star in the middle of the funnel.
And that's what's making this thing go in a circle.
So the star works the space around it, and it's the space that pushes, the space that pushes the marble around in a circle.
So the reason why the Earth goes around the Sun is not because of the force that exerts, that is exerted on the Earth, because gravity is not really a force at all.
What is really pushing the Earth around the Sun is the space.
The Sun warps the space around the Earth, and that's why the Earth moves in a circle around the Sun, just like a marble moves in a circle inside a funnel.
Inside a funnel.
Now, what's really interesting, of course, is what happens when the marble then starts to get closer and closer to the funnel.
If the center of the funnel is a black hole, okay, then you can actually begin to rip this sheet of paper.
And then that's where the interesting thing happens.
You can now begin to tear space and time.
And if you tear space and time, perhaps you can then go to perhaps another part of the universe.
Now, you knew in elementary school that if I have two points on this sheet of paper, a straight line is the shortest distance between two points.
Remember that?
Of course.
However, that's not true.
It's not really true that a straight line is the shortest distance between two points.
If you fold the paper, of course.
That's right.
If you fold the paper in the third dimension.
But you see, the third dimension is invisible to an ant on the sheet of paper.
The ant cannot see any of this stuff, right?
Sure.
Therefore, once you go to a higher dimension, that is hyperspace, everything becomes clear.
Things become so clear if you go to a higher dimension.
Then you see that what you're looking at is a crumpled sheet of paper.
It folds.
And two points can touch each other even if they're separated by many billions of light years.
Two points can touch each other if you can simply bend the space between them.
All right, then that makes this announcement by NASA today about this black hole they have discovered is literally dragging space and time around itself as it rotates.
That makes that a very, very important announcement if we can find a black hole that we can get to.
That's right.
And think of cream, for example, that's very thick, and you have one of these power rotators that spin very rapidly inside your kitchen.
Right.
And then you see that the cream, you know, bends in a swirl.
It swirls because it's thick, right?
That's space.
Space can be viewed as thick cream, okay?
And so when you have your power rotors that you bake a cake with, right?
You make the dough and the batter with that?
Sure.
That spins the mix.
The mix then is dragged by the rotors.
And that's what frame dragging is all about.
So space itself is kind of thick, okay?
Space is not perfectly thin.
Space is not empty like we once thought.
Space itself is an actor on the stage of reality, you see?
So, space itself now becomes part of the game.
That empty space is not inert.
Empty space can bend.
And when it bends, you have the illusion that there's a force acting upon you.
So, gravity is an illusion.
It's an illusion.
It's an illusion caused by the bending of space.
And of course, you cannot see the bending of space in the same way that an ant cannot see the bending of the sheet of paper.
But you can see the fact that the ant cannot walk in a straight line.
And you see the fact that the Earth cannot move in a straight line in the solar system.
It moves in a curve in the solar system.
Now, to bend space, is there any way that you can imagine that we could do that, other than having an absolutely massive amount of power available to us?
That's the key question.
When NASA had this conference just a few months ago on advanced propulsion systems, They invited everybody to submit papers, no matter how crackpot they may seem, about what it would take to go to the stars.
They are, of course, many light years away, and that's one reason why many scientists are a little bit skeptical about UFOs, is because at sub-light velocity, it would take hundreds of years to simply go to some of the nearby stars.
But if NASA is contemplating the possibility of doing it, then they've got to contemplate the possibility that somebody has done it!
That's right, that are more advanced than us, okay?
Now, we pride ourselves as being very advanced, but then we have to realize that... Compared to what?
Yeah, other star systems out there are going to have technologies hundreds, if not thousands of years more advanced than ours.
Exactly.
And once again, let me invoke the Nikolai Kardashev system of classifications of civilization.
Please do, yes.
We have, again, for the listeners who didn't hear it before, Nikolai Kardashev was a Russian astrophysicist who, back in the 60s, gave the first classification of advanced civilizations that may be thousands of years ahead of ours from the point of view of physics.
Now, in physics, we know that there are three basic energy sources in the galaxy.
There are planets, there are stars, and there are galaxies.
That's all there is out there.
So, a Type I civilization is a truly planetary civilization.
They can, for example, control the weather.
They can mine the oceans.
They can control earthquakes.
They can get energy from the inside of their planet.
Truly planetary in scope and power.
Okay, that's a number one.
That's a number one.
Now, sooner or later, a Type I civilization exhausts the energy of a planet, and therefore they have to go to the star.
Now, that means that they simply grab pieces of sun material and they put it into their gas tank.
So, this is not just getting a sun tan on a beach from the sun.
When Junior wants to borrow the Starship, Junior says, Dad, can I borrow the Starship?
And Dad says, yeah, just put a few white dwarf stars inside the gas tank, and off you go.
So, they have stellar energy.
They control the output of a star.
They can play with stars.
A Type III civilization has exhausted the power of a star.
And they now go to galactic systems, okay?
They have many, many star clusters that they get their energy from, and that's called a Type III civilization, okay?
Now, we've looked for these civilizations in space.
A Type II civilization, for example, is immortal.
Nothing known to science can destroy a Type II civilization.
So once one forms in the galaxy... The civilization is immortal, or those within it are, or both?
Probably both.
In the sense that, for example, meteors, comets, they can be deflected by a Type II civilization.
Even a Type I can do that.
Earthquakes, ice ages can be thwarted.
Even a passing supernova, which could destroy many, many planetary systems, even a supernova can be controlled, okay?
And even they themselves may become immortal.
In my book, Visions, that I just completed a book tour with, I take us to the next 100 years in science and DNA and computer technology.
Oh yes.
But beyond 100 years now, beyond 100 years, we are talking about the possibility of extending the lifespan indefinitely by DNA and by even perhaps merging with a silicon and creating, you know, a cyborg to some degree.
And so in space now, a Type II civilization may in fact be immortal both individually as well as collectively.
Therefore, if a Type II civilization forms in our galaxy, it should still be there.
Nothing known to science, even a supernova, can destroy a Type II civilization.
And a Type III civilization, of course, would have already spread throughout many of the star systems.
Now, many physicists, by the way, like Paul Davies among them, believe that on our moon, even our own moon, we may have been visited by A Type II civilization, perhaps thousands of years ago.
What is the evidence to point that way?
Well, simply the laws of statistics.
There are so many stars in the galaxy, about 100 billion stars in the galaxy, and most of these star systems probably have dead planets around them that are not very interesting.
So, sending Captain Kirk to haul the planets is, of course, a waste of time.
Captain Kirk would spend thousands of years going from dead planet to dead planet, right?
Sure.
The most efficient way is to land robots on moons, which have very low gravity, so they're very easy to take off from.
They have no erosion, no rust to worry about.
And you build a factory, a robot factory, on that moon that makes more little robots.
These self-replicating robots are called von Neumann probes, named after the mathematician John von Neumann,
who proved that Turing machines can make copies of themselves.
And so these probes land on the moon, you make a factory and send thousands,
thousands, millions of more probes to other star systems.
They land on a moon, they build a factory, and pretty soon you start with one probe,
then you have a million, then you have a million to the millionth power,
and sooner or later, you have an incredible number of self-replicating
von Neumann probes scattered throughout the galaxy.
The obelisk.
The obelisk in the movie...
Right.
So even on our moon, we may in fact have a von Neumann self-replicating robot waiting for us to make contact with it.
Okay?
And that would be the most efficient way for a civilization to see what's out there.
So there's an alarm clock.
Each probe is an alarm clock that sends a message to the home planet signaling that the natives have made a transition from type 0, which is very uninteresting, To Type 1, which is very interesting because they are truly planetary and very mature in terms of how they use energy and power and what have you.
And so, in the movie 2001, when they touch the obelisk, that set off the alarm clock.
Sure.
And that signaled the fact that we humans have come of age, that we have made it.
We have attained Type 1 status.
We have an operating moon base, a lunar base on the moon.
That, of course, is still 50 to 100 years away.
We're nowhere close to having a moon base.
Arthur C. Clarke was off by quite a bit.
But we do believe that's the most efficient way in which to explore for intelligent life in outer space.
I would think Arthur C. Clarke would have said, or would say if I could reach him, well, we could have done it.
We simply have not made the decision, nor do we have the political will.
That's true too.
After we reached the moon in 1969, we lost political will because we beat the Russians.
There was no more Cold War rivalry to reach the moon.
If there was Cold War rivalry to build a moon base, then of course we would have had one already.
But we reached the moon and it was basically a political drive to beat the Russians.
And so we lost interest, which is quite sad, okay?
You make the case that a probe may be there waiting.
That's right.
But let me just ask you, suppose you're completely wrong.
Suppose, suppose, in fact, we're all alone.
Well, I find that extremely hard to believe because in outer space, just looking at meteorites from outer space and deep space, We've cut them in half and looked at the insides of these meteors.
Yes.
And we find amino acids.
And using our spectrometers, looking at dust clouds, many, many light years from Earth, we also find amino acids out there.
Right.
Now amino acids are the building blocks of proteins.
And that's what we are made out of.
We are walking masses of protein molecules.
And protein molecules are made out of amino acids.
And we see amino acids in dust clouds, We see amino acids in meteors right here on the Earth that came from outer space.
And so it's only a matter of time before these amino acids come together to form real protein molecules and perhaps living organisms out there.
Now there are some scientists, friends of mine in fact, who believe that we are the only intelligent life forms in the universe.
However, they are a minority.
You can count them on your hand.
Every physicist I know, okay, believes that they're out there.
Okay?
And a few eccentric, a few chemists, okay, believe that perhaps we're alone in the universe.
But physicists appreciate the enormous diversity of stars, the incredible number of galaxies, trillions of galaxies we have there, each galaxy containing maybe a hundred billion stars.
And so it'd be silly to believe that we're the only ones.
Now, of course, the reason for bringing this type 1, 2, 3 classification Is that a Type 2 civilization can harness, perhaps, warp drive.
Warp drive is... requires the energy of a star.
Now, at first you say to yourself, oh my God, that's impossible.
I mean, you know, right then and there you can say to yourself, no more warp drive for us.
Well, that's impossible for us.
For us.
For us, a Type 0, which is really the type that you have not yet covered, and we're at the bottom of the hour.
So I want to talk about that.
I want to talk about Type Zero.
and then I want to ask you a question that Jodie Foster received when she was
trying to get her seat on the machine in the movie Combat.
This is Coast to Coast AMI.
I'm Art Bell and we will be right back.
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Now, here again is Art Bell.
One of our nation's greatest theoretical physicists.
Dr. Kaku is with us.
That's 1-800-825-5033.
Now, here again is Art Bell.
One of our nation's greatest theoretical physicists, Dr. Kaku is with us.
Michio Kaku.
It is a valuable slice of time, a time of which I'm going to absorb about 25 more minutes
and then turn it over to all of you.
the next one.
Anyway, Dr. Kaku, welcome back.
Right.
I would like, just for one second, to put you in the seat that Jodie Foster occupied when she was trying to qualify for a seat on the machine.
And I would like to ask you a couple of questions.
A very obvious one for you.
If you could ask one single question of a type 1, 2, or 3 civilization that we were about to make contact with, but only one question, what would it logically be?
Well, I would ask a type 1, 2, or 3 civilization, what are the ultimate laws of physics?
The ultimate laws of the universe?
Now, there's a PBS series called Stephen Hawking's Universe that many of your listeners may have seen.
I'm in Part 6.
Part 6 airs this week, and in Part 6, I raise the whole question of this, that what are the ultimate laws that govern everything around us, the Big Bang and what have you?
That would be the Unified Unified Field Theory, and the leading theory is a theory from 10-dimensional hyperspace.
Little strings vibrating in 10-dimensional hyperspace.
That's what I talk about in Part 6 of Stephen Hawking's Universe, which airs this week across the country.
On PBS television.
So you would be asking, is the string theory, I guess you wouldn't phrase it that way, because they might just say no, and that would be the end of your question.
Right, but I wanted to say, what is, therefore, the mind of God?
If you were to read the mind of God, what would that be?
And that's also how I end the book, Visions, which just came out last month.
As I mentioned earlier, I just got back from a book tour and wherever I was signing books, people came up to me and they said, I heard you won the Art Dell Show.
And let me say, by the way, that it's just below the bestseller list.
40,000 copies were sold in the first month, which is quite, quite good.
And it's just below the bestseller list right now.
Well, let's put you on it.
We can do that.
Believe me, Visions, folks, is an incredible book.
Doctor, they can find it in, you know, Barnes and Nobles and bookstores all over the place.
That's right.
And to my opinion, it's the most authoritative look at the next 20, 50, 100 years in science, because I've interviewed 150 top scientists in the United States.
I've interviewed scores of Nobel Prize winners, scores of directors of major national laboratories that have hundreds of scientists working for them.
And I asked them one question.
What do you think is your vision of the next 20, 50, 100 years in DNA research, in computer technology, in quantum physics?
And they spilled out for me their inner thoughts about how they see artificial intelligence developing and how they see cloning and DNA and genetic engineering developing in the next many decades into the future.
So it's a sneak preview into the future, and it's sort of like a guided tour through the 21st century.
So for me it was an eye-opener too, because I had a chance to meet the world's experts in all the fields of science, and ask them a question that I always wanted to ask when I was a kid, and that is, what does the future hold?
All right, let me ask this.
Are we accelerating in terms of our advancing technology in a linear fashion?
Or an exponential fashion?
It's an exponential fashion.
If you have what is called Moore's Law, Moore's Law says that, for example, computer power doubles every 18 months.
If a car obeyed Moore's Law, which it doesn't, but if a car obeyed Moore's Law, cars today would cost 10 cents.
And you would park the car and leave it.
You wouldn't even bother to put 25 cents in the meter, because the car only costs 10 cents.
That's the power of Moore's Law, which does hold in the computer business.
When you open up a greeting card, and the greeting card says, Happy Birthday to you, and you throw it away, that greeting card has a chip in it with more computer power than all the Pentagon computers of 1945.
Or put another way, if you buy a $2,500 high-end computer desktop today, it's worth about $1,000 inside of 3 or 6 months.
$2,500 high-end computer desktop today is worth about $1,000 inside of three or six months.
That's right. And within 20 years, and this was an eye-opener for me when I interviewed the top people at Silicon Valley,
they tell me that in 20 years, by the year 2020 or so, a chip, a Pentium equivalent chip, will cost about a penny.
Now if a chip costs a penny, that's the cost of scrap paper.
Scrap paper is everywhere, you know, gum wrappers, it's everywhere.
And that's where chips are going to be.
Chips are going to be in the walls, in the furniture, in our wristwatch, in the clothing.
Chips are going to be everywhere.
Even in your glasses, for example.
You can have a tiny camera that'll photograph everything that you see, and that could be relayed by the Internet to somebody else.
And if the husband, for example, goes out and does shopping, the wife can see through his glasses and tell him, no, that tomato is not ripe, you've got to buy this banana, and so on and so forth.
So, these are prototypes that I've seen.
I went to MIT, and I had a chance to interview the people at the robotics laboratory there, and the computer science division.
And I saw prototypes of all these devices that are going to be ours, because chips will cost a penny in the year 21.
Oh, they're going to figure out a way to make them cost a lot more.
Well, the software will be very expensive.
But, you know, in the future, if you can't program a VCR, you simply talk to it, and the VCR will talk back to you.
And you'll talk to your furniture, you'll talk to... intelligence will be scattered throughout the environment.
The internet, by the way, will be in your watch.
Your watch will be an internet node with a TV screen on it, and you'll access the intelligence of the planet Earth.
And you'll have not 500 channels, you'll have 5 billion channels.
Well then they'd better figure out a way to get the watch connected to our neural network, because graphics would be a bummer on a watch.
That's right.
However, your TV screen is also going to disappear, and it's going to go into the walls.
I saw demonstrations of wall screens that are 4 feet across.
Almost as thin as a sheet of paper.
They're about an eighth of an inch thick.
About four feet across, they're wall screens that could double as internet, double as TV screens, and double as a picture on the wall when you don't feel like talking to the TV screen.
All right.
I really want to dive into all of this, but before we leave it, you're still in the same seat I had you in.
And I'm going to put you in the same pickle that she was in.
Okay.
And I thought it was a very, very interesting question, and it was, as a representative of all of humanity to a Type 1, 2, or 3 civilization, a good 95% of the people on Earth, you know where I'm going, believe in the God of the Bible.
Actually, I'm not sure that's quite an accurate statement, but one form or another, Buddha, God, whatever.
Do you believe in such a God?
Well, when Jodie Foster was asked that question before that Congressional Committee, Do You Believe in God?, that was the most embarrassing two minutes of cinema that I've ever sat through.
You squirmed for two minutes as she hemmed and hawed and then finally said, I answered that.
I would have answered it differently.
I would have said, God, by whatever symbols or words you describe the deity, by whatever concepts you ascribe to the deity, This machine, this wormhole machine to the planet Vega, would take you as close as humanly possible to that conception of God.
So God, by whatever symbols, signs, conventions, and mythologies we ascribe to the deity, these machines that we scientists are building are going to take us as close as possible to the deity.
Let me give you an example.
But the specific question was, and I understand, that's a very careful answer, but they would have pressed you and they would have said, do you believe in that deity, the one described in the Bible?
I would answer the following, the way Einstein answered that question.
He said there are really two kinds of gods, the god of order and the god of intervention.
The God of Order is the God of Harmony, that gives us the gorgeous laws of relativity and the quantum principle, that gives us the Big Bang, gives us DNA molecules, and gives us life as we know it on the Earth.
That's the God of Harmony, the God of Order, the God of Mathematics, the God of Relativity and the Quantum Theory.
And then we have the God of Intervention, the God that answers prayers, the God that parts the waters, the God of Isaac, Jacob, Moses... Yes, that God!
I would say that most scientists I know would ascribe to the first God.
The God of order.
Cosmic harmony.
That universe is so gorgeous.
There goes your seat.
There goes your seat.
So even though you would have answered differently, you'd have lost the seat too.
Perhaps.
But I think it would resonate with certain politicians out there who say to themselves, well look, you know, different cultures have different mythologies, right?
But what the common denominator to all these religions of the Earth, right?
The common denominator is that we see this magnificence, that the universe is so gorgeous, the universe is so interesting, that it could not have been a sheer accident.
It couldn't simply have been a random event that simply created the universe.
Look at the religions of the world.
Buddhism, for example, doesn't even believe in God at all.
They believe in nirvana, you know, never-ending No beginning, no end.
The Muslim God, the Christian God, the common denominator between those gods is the fact that we have this beautiful universe of ours.
Just this gorgeous universe that, when Adam and Eve were taken out of the Garden of Eden, they faced many hardships.
But they realized that, yes, there is a bountiful of animals and plants and rocks and stars.
It's a gorgeous universe.
And that cannot have been It's simply a sheer accident.
Do you believe there was an Adam and Eve?
Well, I believe in evolution, okay?
That lower forms, or simpler forms, eventually give rise to higher forms that are more adaptive.
And to me, this resonates, because all life on Earth has a unity, that humans share a common destiny, a common heritage, with all life forms on the Earth, because we're made out of the same DNA.
You can take the animals, the plants of the Earth, and look at their DNA, and it's the same DNA that's in our bodies, rearranged differently, of course.
How can you scientifically prove the ongoing process of evolution?
Can you?
Well, to prove evolution, you simply would have to look at the germs in your own body.
Your body fights a Darwinian battle with germs in your body, which then you take, And evolve to a higher form, and that's why we have resistant germs that are killing people right now, for example.
Resistant versions of staph and pneumonia and tuberculosis are products of evolution that take place in our bodies.
So our bodies, in fact, are Darwinian battlefields that constantly go on every second with germs that evade antibiotics.
A survival of the fittest in our bloodstream As germs learn to cope with antibiotics, learn to cope with our defenses, and that's why we have resistant strains of tuberculosis.
And this then would be a test, I presume, for a type 0 to a type 1.
In other words, we could very likely end as a type 0 because the germs win.
I think you hit a very important point, and that is the danger point in the transition from 0 to 1, 1 to 2, 2 to 3, the dangerous point is between 0 to 1.
That by far is the weakest link in the whole chain, between 0 to 1, because in a time of zero civilization, not only do we have all the savagery of our ancient past still with us, you know, the ancient sectarian, religious, racial, fundamentalist feuds and And blood feuds that go on between different tribes on the Earth.
We also have this war with germs.
We have this war against pollution.
We have this drive to halt the proliferation of nuclear weapons to unstable parts of the Earth.
It's a very dangerous transition between zero to one.
And personally, again, this is just my personal thinking, I think our galaxy is probably full of many types of zero civilizations that are primitive, just like us.
However, most of them never make it.
Well, I wanted to ask you again, because it bears a lot of thought.
We are at Type 0.
What are our best calculated odds of becoming a Type 1?
Well, we are about 100-200 years from Type 1 status.
Our GNP, the world GNP, rises at about 3% a year.
And you just get a calculator and calculate.
Yes.
after about a hundred, two hundred years at three percent growth,
a planetary civilization of a type one is going to emerge.
However, the probability of us negotiating all these barriers is also quite dramatic.
How dramatic?
We're talking about the proliferation of nuclear weapons.
We're talking about the greenhouse effect.
Oh, yes.
We're talking about germs that evolve inside our own bodies.
That's right.
It's hard to put a number, but, you know, a gut feeling I would have is maybe, you know, 1 in 10 Type 0 civilizations fully make it to Type 1.
And at that point, as Type 1, we're interesting.
You know, other Type 2 civilizations would want to make contact with us.
We're mature, we're planetary, we're interesting to talk to.
Would it be possible that, in your opinion, that Type Zeros practically never make it to Type Ones without intervention?
Well, I'm not sure about intervention.
In my book, Visions, I end the last chapter, talks about this transition.
Because in the book I talk about DNA, I talk about computers, robots, artificial intelligence,
and all the good things that could come out of technology.
But then I see this as a dark side.
Let's not be children anymore.
This is not a bedtime story.
We're not kids anymore.
We do know that there are nuclear weapons that proliferate to dangerous parts of the world.
We know that there are germs out there, like AIDS, for example, that could one day become airborne.
And that would be horrible if we had an airborne HIV.
Gee, that would end things in about a decade.
That's right, and you know, the HIV mutates about a million times faster than humans do, and therefore they are a million times cleverer than we are in terms of devising protease inhibitors and what have you.
And that's why the danger would be that if Ebola or HIV becomes airborne, that's very dangerous if that happens.
All over.
And that's why I say that maybe a 10% of these Type 0s actually make it to Type 1 status.
And even without intervention, I still think that maybe 10% could make it to Type 1 status.
In my book, Visions, How Science Will Revolutionize the 21st Century, I end on a cautious note, and that is the solution is more democracy, more democratic discussion of pollution, of the greenhouse effect, of how far we want to go with DNA and designing animals and plants.
Let's take these one at a time.
There is a great political battle going on, actually worldwide, Right now, about greenhouse problems, about the ozone depletion, about the amount of pollutants that we're putting into the water.
We now have this cell from hell that has been noted to be now in the North Sea.
How in God's name it got there, they're thinking maybe in shit ballast, they don't know.
This thing that puts sores on fish and now they find human beings as well.
All kinds of new things coming to get us.
How much of a challenge is it really, and how likely are we to end up the winners or the losers, just with regard now to the environmental problems we face?
Well, let's take it one at a time.
The greenhouse effect.
The United Nations assembled a panel of over 2,000 climatologists who said that there is sufficient evidence now that carbon dioxide emissions will raise the temperature of the Earth by 3 to 6 degrees by the middle of the next century.
Now at first you may say to yourself, well that's nothing, 3 to 6 degrees.
Until you realize that 10,000 years ago, New York City was under about a half a mile of ice.
It was an ice age here in New York City, and most of North America.
And it got warm.
It got warm by about 7 degrees.
So 7 degrees separates us from an ice age.
And the Earth may heat up another 3 to 6 degrees if the greenhouse effect kicks in.
And what would that mean?
What would happen?
Well, if you take a look at the polar caps, for example, the South Pole, there's a piece of ice beside the Rhode Island that broke off from the South Pole because of warming.
It's getting warmer on the poles right now.
And eventually, it may mean that the sea level may start to rise.
And for every vertical foot of sea level rise, we're talking about losing 40 feet of beachfront property.
And so, I live in Manhattan, and we're at sea level.
And if the sea level starts to rise, then certain cities are going to start to become underwater.
And the breadbasket of America, like California, and the Corn Belts, and the Wheat Belts, They could turn to dust bowls if the temperature of the Earth gets any higher.
And El Nino, for example, is probably just a preview of the kind of havoc you could get in the weather, because we think, though we cannot prove, That El Nino is affected by small variations in the temperature of the Earth.
By the way, the news yesterday on El Nino was that they have never seen anything like it before.
This is almost December and El Nino continues to build in strength.
That's right, and it's going to be the worst in a hundred years.
We've been tracking El Nino for many decades.
We project into the past and it's probably going to be the worst in a hundred years.
And we had a very bad El Nino in the last decade.
There was massive flooding in Holland, for example.
The dikes that are centuries old were almost destroyed.
I recall that.
By the last El Nino.
And look at the Mississippi River.
The banks overflowed.
That was once in a century, right?
A once in a century overflowing of the banks of the Mississippi.
That was also attributable to El Nino.
And El Nino could be like a canary that miners bring down to them when they go to dig for coal.
Well, it's staggering and about to fall over right now, if it's a canary.
That's right, and canaries are very sensitive to methane gas, and they're the first ones to signal danger inside a mine shaft.
Doctor, hold tight.
We're at the top of the hour.
Take a break, and we'll be right back.
Michio Kaku is my guest.
We'll be right back.
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This is Coast to Coast AM with Art Bell from the Kingdom of Nye.
Now again, here's Art.
The Kingdom of Nye, that's us, alright.
Nye County, Nevada, actually.
Out here with the lizards and the cactus.
My guest is Dr. Michio Kaku.
And he is, I think, the successor to Carl Sagan.
There's no question about it.
He is a professor of theoretical physics at the City of New York University.
City University of New York, I guess.
And we're into some pretty deep but fun stuff.
And we will continue, in a moment, getting to your calls shortly.
All right.
We have been discussing, of course, the various types of civilizations.
We are at Type 0.
Will we make it to, you know, Type 1, for example?
Well, the odds, according to Professor Kaku, are about 1 in 10.
And that means left alone, without some sort of extraterrestrial assistance.
About 1 in 10.
And so we are now discussing the problems inherent with getting to Type 1.
And for those of you who have just joined in Los Angeles, we're currently discussing global warming.
Everybody on the right automatically says there is no such thing as global warming.
It's some perverted plan to cause a one-world government and all the rest.
Of course, that's the political rhetoric from the right.
That's a bit of a problem in terms of trying to deal with it.
Now, I've got an AP article in front of me that just cleared the wire, and I mean just.
It says, natural climate variations started a thaw in the Arctic region long before the Industrial Age, but man-made greenhouse gases are now behind the polar temperature rise, according to researchers.
Both are right.
Those who would charge, it is a natural process, Doctor.
And those who now say, yes, natural, but we are adding to it.
Right.
I would say that we are definitely adding to the global temperatures.
About seven years ago, I visited Iceland.
The physicist there, Yes.
In Iceland, they drill a hole right into the ice crust of Greenland and Iceland.
And when they go right into the ice, you're talking about snow that fell 100,000 years ago on the North Pole.
And so by drilling right into the ice, they can get the atmosphere, the air bubbles, have the atmosphere trapped ...of the Earth as it was 10, 20, up to 100,000 years ago.
And what they found was dramatic.
They found that the carbon dioxide content today is the highest it's been in 100,000 years.
The highest it's been in 100,000 years.
And it's continuing to rise because of the large quantities of carbon dioxide created by the United States and Europe and the industrialized countries.
Now, this is not proof that global warming exists, but we have this Science Project.
We have the Science Project with the Earth as the guinea pig.
And we only have one Earth, of course.
And if it turns out that global warming is truly real in the next 20-30 years, we've blown it.
We've blown the only Earth that we have.
And so I would say, you know, given the fact that carbon dioxide content is the highest it's been in a hundred thousand years, and given the fact that we are injecting, continuing to inject, enormous quantities of greenhouse gases, and given the fact that these ice cores, as they're called, prove that temperatures in carbon dioxide go up and down like a roller coaster in unison, like two roller coasters going up and down in lockstep, I would say it's prudent To begin to convert away from internal combustion engines and coal and oil, and begin the process of going to solar energy, conservation, cogeneration, renewable sources, wind power.
There are a lot of energy sources that don't give off any greenhouse gases at all.
So I think the word's the wise, you know?
A lot of type zero civilizations out there in space probably never made it.
If we ever get a starship to go to these planets out there, we might see dead planets We might see planets whose atmosphere just got so hot that they couldn't grow any food anymore.
Sure.
Doctor, think of it this way.
We absorb in the United States a great percentage, a disproportionate percentage of the world's fossil fuels and whatever, coal, whatever.
Now, Bangladesh, all the countries in Africa, India, All these rather undeveloped nations, as of yet, they want what we've got.
You know, a couple cars in the garage, colored television, all the rest of it.
They want it, and they're going to have it, and they're well on their way toward getting it.
And at the same time, we're facing a doubling in the world's population rather rapidly.
Now, if you think we've got problems now, When the population doubles, and all these people want the two cars and the garage and the rest of it, what chance do you really honestly believe that we have of not overheating?
Well, I think it's going to be a real close call.
You know, in my book, Visions, I went to the experts.
I went to Nobel Prize winners in DNA research, computers, And I went to the United Nations to get the best computer projection of the Earth's population in 2060-2070, and they tell me that the population of the Earth now is about 5.5 billion.
It's going to skyrocket to about 8 billion early in the next century, but then it's going to level off.
By about 2060-2070, it's going to level off at about 11 billion, that is double the present-day population, because the world's most effective contraceptive is prosperity.
That as soon as countries like Germany, Italy, Japan, even Singapore become prosperous, the replacement rate goes negative.
Quite true.
In fact, Germany, Italy, Japan, Singapore, and large portions of Europe actually have a negative replacement rate at the present time.
The population is actually shrinking.
The United States, by the way, would also have the same effect, a negative replacement rate, except for immigration.
Immigration is the only thing that's keeping the United States population growing.
I'll see if it goes the same way as Europe does.
So if the population seals off at 11 billion late in the 21st century, it means of course we're going to be producing much more carbon dioxide gases, and think of all these people who want refrigerators!
They want refrigerators, they want cars, they see these things on television and the movies, and they want them too!
So there's going to be an enormous pressure on the ozone layer if they decide to go to free on gas and have refrigerators.
There's going to be enormous pressure on carbon dioxide if they decide to go to cars and industrialize like we industrialized.
The United States produces 25% of all the carbon dioxide emissions on the Earth.
Europe produces another 25%.
And so we have 50% of the world's carbon dioxide just produced by two small areas on the surface of the Earth.
Okay, there is now a proposed international treaty.
That would begin to handle all of this on a global scale.
But the argument in this country is, we would be the losers.
And frankly, in the beginning, we certainly would be the losers, because we would be subjected to regulations that would put a real clamp on our lifestyle.
So on what side of that political argument, in view of what you believe is going on, do you find yourself?
Well, take a look at how we consume energy in the United States.
In my book, I have a whole projection of the next 100 years in transportation.
It's inevitable we're going to be running out of oil.
40 to 45 years at present rates, yes.
You can already see it.
And even by that point, even if we discover more deposits, the price of oil is going to skyrocket.
That's going to cause a depression in the United States because we're addicted to cheap Middle East oil.
In my book, I say, look, let's take a look at the demographics.
About half that oil is used for transportation in the United States, of which cars absorb a tremendous portion.
Why not go to the electric car or the electric hybrid?
The electric hybrid is the leading contender right now.
Toyota's coming out with the first commercial variety next year of an electric hybrid.
It has a very small gas engine with a battery, and it cuts down the pollution by an enormous amount, absolutely staggering amounts, because it does have a small little gas engine.
However, the mileage is incredible.
You know, 70 miles a gallon you get on this car, okay?
So I would say... Well, this is great, but still, at some point, the energy to charge those batteries has got to be produced.
And the question is, how do we produce that energy without utilizing fossil fuel?
I think eventually we're going to have to go to a solar hydrogen economy.
That's in the cards.
And at the present time, now let's take a look, you know, a hundred years in the future, when we gradually attain Type I status, there are only three inexhaustible sources of energy.
Oil is just a temporary blip.
It's going to be gone in forty years or so.
There are only three inexhaustible sources.
Fusion is the first.
Then is the breeder reactor, is the second.
And then there is solar hydrogen, is the third.
There are only three inexhaustible sources of energy according to the laws of physics.
Now, fusion has problems.
I interviewed the director of the Princeton Plasma Laboratory.
It's in my book, Visions.
I interviewed the top people in all the fields of science.
And they tell me that we're going to have a break even, maybe in 20 years, and perhaps a commercial fusion reactor in 40 years.
So fusion is a dark horse.
We're talking about a commercial fusion reactor by 40 years, by which we'll use seawater.
Seawater as the fuel to energize a power plant that uses energy like the sun creates energy.
So that's still in the distance.
We've got to figure out how to sustain it, then how to contain it.
That's right.
And breeder reactors are second, and breeder reactors are called hard nuclear.
They don't use uranium, they use plutonium as a fuel, in which case we'll have plutonium being shipped right outside our backyard.
And the French are already heavily into a plutonium economy, and they've had a number of fires and a number of accidents with their Phoenix and Super Phoenix breeder reactors.
Another good way to end Type Zero.
That's right.
And I think that is dangerous, because sabotage, saboteurs, terrorists, accidents.
Proponium is the most toxic chemical known to science, and a piece of it the size of your fist will destroy a city the size of Nagasaki.
I know because my professor designed the Nagasaki bomb.
In fact, Philip Morrison, a good friend of mine, is the one who loaded, he physically loaded the proponium into the Nagasaki bomb.
Really?
And he says, this is horrible, we cannot go to a proponium economy, because A piece that the size of your fist will annihilate Nagasaki.
And that leaves, therefore, fusion and solar hydrogen as the alternative, now 40, 50 years into the future.
It's inevitable.
We're going to have a depression in this country.
Now it's a race.
We're going to have to go cold turkey at some point.
There you are.
All right.
Well, we're not going to.
That's not going to happen.
It's not in our nature.
We're short-lived.
We think in small A segment of time, because we live in small segments of time.
We don't think that far ahead.
Now, you mentioned hydrogen.
Is that the best of the dark horses?
Do you now think, based on future trends, or even present trends, that we are going to win this race, or is there going to be a great big Depression at about that 40-45 year mark, or even just before it, as we begin to run out and have not technologically advanced in the areas you've just talked about far enough for that to take over.
What's going to happen, Doctor?
Well, in my book, Visions, I say very bluntly that the transition from Type 0 to Type 1, we may never make it.
If we are very short-sighted, because, as was mentioned, in 40 years or so, we're going to be running out of oil anyway, It's going to create a massive depression in this country, and even though we're selfish at the present time, that we squawk about gasoline costing $1.50 per gallon, forget about that!
We're talking about gasoline being unattainable at any cost, okay, into 40, 50 years into the future, as we run out of oil, okay?
So I would suggest that we bite the bullet.
We bite the bullet relatively soon.
Rather than destroy our nation in the middle of the next century when Mideast oil is all used up and the price of excavating new oil fields rises enormously.
Short of a war that would threaten the existence of America, we're not going to bite any bullets.
That's why I say that maybe we have a 10% chance of negotiating the barrier between Type 0 and Type 1.
Maybe a 10% chance because Humanity, as you pointed out, is very short-sighted, and the oil companies are very powerful.
They control a lot of the media in this country.
Oil companies are going to roll over.
Exactly.
If we lived a longer span of time, if we lived three or four hundred years, or became ageless, our view would certainly begin to change, wouldn't it?
That's right.
And I also, by the way, say that if we can negotiate this very dangerous gap between Type 0 to Type 1, there's a possibility of an age of Aquarius.
Because we are talking about living perhaps 200, 300 years if we can conquer aging.
And in my book, by the way, Visions, I have a whole chapter on the aging process.
And I mentioned the fact that just two months ago a very big breakthrough was made.
We've isolated the first two human genes that control the aging process.
We can actually make cells age right before your eyes, or stop the aging process.
This is incredible, by the way.
This is incredible.
This is fantastic.
A telomerase is a word that many of you have never heard of before, but you're going to hear a lot about that word in the next few years, because every cell is a time bomb.
It divides 60 times, and then it dies.
And so, we biologists have known that a cell is therefore a time bomb.
But a time bomb has a fuse on it.
And the fuse, we have now identified about three years ago.
It's called a telomere.
It's like the plastic tips on your shoelace.
If a chromosome is a shoelace, it's the tip of the chromosome.
And the fuse gets smaller and smaller and smaller after every reproduction.
After 60, it's dead.
Well, wouldn't the real answer be in cancer research?
Cancer is the out-of-control growth of cells.
That's right.
And we now know that that's how cancer cells become cancerous.
There is a defect in what is called p53, a gene, which makes the telomeres get longer, not shorter.
They actually get longer, shorter, longer, shorter.
So we now know how cancer cells become immortal.
Cancer cells are immortal.
That's why they're dangerous.
That's why they kill you.
Because they grow out of control.
We now know how it's done.
And that was just done just last year.
And that's because these, the plastic tips, the telomeres, Do not get shorter after every reproduction, because they have telomerase.
Telomerase stops the clock.
That's how cancerous cells become cancerous, because they have telomerase.
Well, the gene for telomerase was isolated two months ago, and some of your listeners are some of the first people in America to hear about this.
We can now take cells in a petri dish and make them immortal, make them cancerous, or make them live longer.
It's up to us.
With telomerase, you can stop the clock.
Now, I'm not saying that this is a fountain of youth.
I'm a scientist.
We scientists are very cautious about making predictions.
But what I am saying is that we will find perhaps many genes that control the aging process, and perhaps by gene therapy, manipulate them.
In which case, we may be able to extend the maximum lifespan from 120, which is, we think, the maximum, to maybe double, perhaps beyond 200 years.
So this was once considered science fiction and considered rubbish by most reputable scientists.
Now they're not so sure.
Now we have Palomares.
I was going to say, how close does this new discovery put us?
How much closer?
Well, by 2020, as I prophesize in my book, Visions, after interviewing several Nobel Prize winners, they think that every human on Earth will be able to have a CD-ROM with all their genes listed.
Now, if we get all the centenarians and all the old people and analyze all their CD-ROMs with all their genes on it by computers.
By computers, we can isolate the genes that give them a healthy immune system and a robust health and longevity.
All right, doctor.
We're at the bottom of the hour.
When we come back, we really do have to tackle the phones.
Everybody's been waiting patiently while I've been taking up your time.
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This is Coast to Coast AM from the Kingdom of Nine with Art Bell.
I'm the one, actually the one tonight, is a genius professor of theoretical physics at City College of New York, Dr. Michio Kaku.
Is this fun or what?
Back now to Professor Kaku.
And, uh, Professor, we have got to go to the phone lines.
I've got a million questions for you, but I'm hogging the air time, so, uh, here we go.
First time caller on the line.
You're on the air with Professor Kaku in New York.
Where are you, please?
Uh, hello?
Yes, you.
Yes, I'm from Rhode Island, actually.
Rhode Island, actually.
All right, go ahead.
Okay, um, I just wanted to compliment you on your show art.
You have a great show, and I just discovered this a couple, about a week and a half ago, I haven't gotten much sleep since then, but I have three questions to ask.
Basically, question number one would be, I'm wondering what the doctor's opinion is about the type of alien spacecraft that basically some of your guests have described, what they've seen, some of the technicians and whatnot that you've had on.
For instance, like Bob Lazar, I don't know if you've ever had him on your show.
I have, yes.
Oh, you have, okay.
Basically, the way they described the magnetic field propulsion system.
Yes.
And how the doctor would describe... Actually, I already asked him that with regard to the amplification of gravity.
Okay.
Which relates to the Lazar explanation of what he claims he back-engineered.
And the doctor basically said gravity amplification is difficult.
Not impossible, though, doctor.
Yes, very difficult.
And magnetic propulsion is perhaps the most preferable means for propelling objects silently through space.
However, the problem there, as I mentioned before, is you have to have monopoles.
And monopoles, we think, do exist as a relic from the Big Bang, in fact.
However, we don't see them at the present time.
We've looked for them in the oceans, but we don't see monopoles.
Monopoles would be perhaps the cleanest way to move silently through the Earth's atmosphere.
All right.
Question 2.
Okay, the way that UFOs tend to manipulate light, the way they manipulate electrons and photons, would he consider that an indication, possibly, of that particular type of propulsion system?
That's actually a very good question, Doctor.
Have we observed things, fast walkers and others, that would lead you to guess that we have had craft in our vicinity operating in ways that we cannot operate them?
Well, it's always hard to say.
I've talked to some military people who track these things by radar.
And they do say that they see something there.
It's not just an optical illusion.
And it's not a meteorite, because meteorites would go in a straight line.
And therefore, it must be a propulsion system that is far beyond anything that we have.
And I think magnetism is perhaps the leading possibility.
Some people say matter-antimatter.
However, there's a problem there, and that is antimatter.
Antimatter reactions give you an explosion, and that explosion could be made into an exhaust, but these flying saucers apparently don't have an exhaust that we see.
There's no vapor trail that we see, you know?
So therefore, it would have to be a silent way of generating energy, and there's no way it would be magnetic.
All right, question three?
Okay, taking into consideration the style of flying saucers that Bob Lazar was describing, What level of intelligence would you assume that that particular civilization is at, and maybe how old are they?
That's a very good question.
Again, you may or may not be familiar with Bob Lazar, who claimed to have back-engineered a spacecraft at Area 51, and he described the propulsion system, which basically was a gravity amplifier.
And let's, just for the sake of conversation, assume that such a propulsion system exists, that that would be indicative of what level of civilization?
Okay, that's an easier question to answer, actually, because if you take a look at Einstein's equations, we know at what point a civilization may begin to harness the ability to warp space and time, and at the level of Pipe 2, They would be able to play with space and time the way that we play with chemical rockets.
And again, a Type II civilization sounds fantastic, until you realize that at a 3% growth rate per year, you will hit Type II status, inevitably, within, you know, well, it would take maybe a thousand years or so, but you will hit Type II status, and a thousand years is nothing in outer space.
And at that point, they would begin to manipulate energies on scales of stars, And stars, of course, have enormous gravitational fields, okay?
The things that are unimaginable with, quote, the laws of physics today, are basically unimaginable because we're Type 0.
But once you're Type 2, and you can start to play with stellar materials, okay?
Then you're beginning to talk about opening up holes in space and time.
And so, that would be perhaps the most efficient way to go between star systems, is to open up wormholes.
Now, it's not easy to do so.
In fact, on the Earth, we have nowhere near the capability of opening up holes in space and time.
But, in principle, it is consistent with the laws of physics, as we know them.
Alright.
We're talking Type II and above.
Alright.
There would be, of necessity, and I think we've sort of touched on this, a social change that would go along with the technological change that would enable the leap to a Type I. Are you beginning to see an increasing population Of people that are more Type 1-ish.
In other words, are we seeing an evolution socially that would match the evolution technologically necessary to make the leap?
I think so.
If you take a look at the Internet.
The Internet is one of the beginning signs of a Type 1 civilization.
We're talking about wiring every person on the planet Earth.
Right.
That your watch will be an Internet node There'll be 5 billion channels on the Internet, not 500, because everyone will have their own Internet node and channel on the Internet.
You can see the beginning of English, by the way, being the beginning of a scientific and commercial language.
You cannot go anywhere in science or commerce without knowing the English language.
So you see that beginning as a structure to a Type I civilization.
Now, how politically it winds up, we don't know for sure.
But there's going to be much more cooperation among nations.
You see that with the European Union.
The nations of Europe, which caused two world wars, World War I and World War II, are now ganging together to form a European Union, a trade bloc.
So we're beginning to see the beginnings of a Type I civilization.
And again, I have no crystal ball as to what kind of government it's going to have.
All I'm saying is that it's inevitable that we will have enormous planetary harnessing of power, cooperation among nations, and the Internet, I think, is perhaps the clearest example of the emergence of a beginning Type I civilization.
All right.
Here's some of the faxes, and refers to the research being done in Finland, and now being investigated by NASA.
A rotating chilled disk of ceramic superconductor Allegedly, generates anti-gravity effects.
And I believe that they are trying to prove they have demonstrated this anti-gravity.
It brings us back to the subject, of course, of gravity.
And it's hard to tell whether what they're doing is shielding against what may be pushing or Exactly what they have done here.
What do you make of this research?
Yeah, I've looked at that research and I tend to be a little bit skeptical.
They take a charged disk and rotate it very rapidly and then weigh it to see whether or not the rotation of the electromagnetic force has changed gravity.
If you take a look at what are called Maxwell's equations and Einstein's equations, You see that there should be no effect whatsoever on the gravitational field of that object.
However, they did make the announcement that it got lighter.
Yes.
So, other laboratories are now trying to reproduce their results.
So far, negative.
So far, no other laboratory has been able to reproduce this effect.
So, have we got another Pons and Flashman type deal here?
It could be.
I keep an open mind about these things.
However, it would be quite earth-shaking if such a development were to actually happen, because it would violate the known laws of Maxwell and Einstein,
Maxwell's equations for light and Einstein's equations for gravity.
I keep an open mind about these things, however, no other laboratory has duplicated the Finland
experiment at the present time.
Other laboratories are trying to do this, by the way.
But so far, no other laboratory has announced.
And of course, there's enormous pressure to announce, because there's a Nobel Prize.
There's a Nobel Prize waiting there.
If it could be reproduced.
If it should happen to be true, what does that do to our conventional,
or even your conventional outlook on physics?
Well, if that experiment turns out to be true, and I tend to be skeptical of it, it would require a major revision in how we view light and gravity.
My field, which is, again, strings vibrating in ten-dimensional hyperspace, Uh, requires a separation, uh, between these two forces, because the universe is very old.
Uh, the older the universe, the more the separation between the forces.
Our universe is quite old, maybe 15 billion years old, and as a consequence, light and gravity are quite different, because the, the, the universe is quite old, and the symmetries of the universe cracked at the beginning of time.
So, if this experiment actually turns out to be true, uh, I think a lot of physicists are gonna have to eat their hat, And a new Nobel Prize is going to have to be awarded.
But we'll wait and see.
I tend to keep an open mind about these things.
But we'll wait and see how that experiment measures up with other laboratories now beginning to duplicate their work.
Most physicists don't have much of a taste for hats, do they?
I think you are correct about that.
We tend to be old fogies when it comes to these things.
However, if you're a younger scientist, you realize that that's where the breakthroughs take place.
The Nobel Prizes don't take place when old fogies simply reproduce the old results.
Nobel Prizes take place when young scientists find holes and cracks.
And upset the apple cart.
And upset the apple cart, right.
Now, it's a very big apple cart.
You know, we have very impressive data on Maxwell's equations and Einstein's equations.
It would take an awful lot to upset the apple cart.
And we think, by the way, that at the center of a black hole, at the instant of the Big Bang, that's where you're going to upset the apple cart.
Because then, of course, all bets are off.
New laws of physics start to enter in the picture.
You have to go to hyperspatial theories when you go to the center of a black hole or the beginning of the Big Bang.
When you get to the second part of the Big Bang, you've got to be talking about God, don't you?
That's probably true.
Physicists are the only scientists who could say God and not Blush.
Because we are, quote, reading the mind of God.
That's what Stephen Hawking's famous quote is.
Unified Field Theory will allow us to read the mind of God.
We are talking about an equation, perhaps one inch long, that will summarize all the laws of physics.
In January, PBS Television is going to be airing a five-part series called Scientific Odyssey, one day on biology, one day on physics and astronomy.
I'm Mr. Physics.
I get to explain Einstein, I get to explain the quantum theory on PBS Television for this national program in January.
And I say that in the future we will have this equation one inch long.
An equation one inch long that will summarize everything we know about the universe.
The leading candidate is string theory.
And that equation, by the way, is my equation.
It's the equation of string field theory.
It's not been verified, so I'm not going to get any phone calls from Stockholm or whatever.
However, they're going to show my equation on a t-shirt.
It's so short you could put it on a t-shirt.
And they're going to show it in January in the PBS series called Scientific Odyssey.
Is there a way that you can reasonably explain to the audience so they will understand what your equation tells us, what it means, how it explains the theory of everything?
Well, we think that all the particles of the universe that we see are nothing but notes on a super-violin string.
And therefore, if you could trace the motions of this super-string as it moves in hyperspace, that should give you all the particles of the universe, as well as reproducing all of Einstein's equations.
And the equation that I wrote down, that you could put on a T-shirt that's going to be on public television, shows how strings move and break and reform in space and time.
And again, you know, string theory is still evolving.
There's still much to be learned about the theory.
But at the present time, everything we know about string theory can be summarized in some very short equations that are just inches long.
And that, to me, is incredible.
It didn't have to be that way.
The universe didn't have to be so simple, you know?
The universe could have been very complicated, very messy, very arbitrary and ugly.
What's the most obvious avenue of research to try to validate that theory?
Well, the Super Collider, which was to be built outside Dallas, Texas, this $11 billion machine that Ronald Reagan wanted to build, that would have taken us as close as humanly possible to the instant of the Big Bang and to the moment of creation.
However, the United States Congress cancelled it.
They gave us a billion dollars to dig a hole 50 miles in circumference, and they cancelled it, then they gave us another billion dollars to fill it up.
I can't think of anything more stupid than digging a hole with a billion dollars and filling it up with another billion dollars.
Well, you're just validating our type zero-ness.
That's right.
And so you can see the idiocy that goes on in a type zero civilization like ours.
But that would have taken us as close as possible to verifying theories of this sort.
We would have discovered, perhaps, particles called sparticles, super particles, or sparticles for short, And these particles would have been the higher notes on this violin string, and that would have given us not completely verification, but very convincing evidence that there is a 10th dimension, that there are higher dimensions.
And so echoes from the 10th dimension, that's what we were looking for in the supercollider, which has now been cancelled, and so we're going to have to wait for the Europeans to build their LHC, the Large Hadron Collider, outside Geneva, Switzerland.
That may discover superparticles.
But it's not going to happen in the United States because of the wisdom of the United States Congress.
All right.
Today we have fast computers getting faster by the minute.
We've got technology that is simply overwhelming.
And there was a day in America, early on in technology, I'm 52 and a ham radio operator and I can remember building my first receiver, my first transmitter.
I was able to go in, and for many, many years, go in and work on these.
Today, if something goes wrong with a modern ham transceiver, or if something goes awry in a chip, there is absolutely nothing the average person can do about it, except throw it away and buy a new one.
So we are developing a population of very non-scientific people with very few who control the power, the knowledge, the ability.
Right.
Bad?
Good?
Bad?
Yeah, in fact, that's a very important question.
I have a whole chapter in my book, Visions, addressing precisely that point.
Because on one hand, it means that even illiterates will be able to communicate with computers because they'll simply talk to computers.
Indeed.
We're not going to have keyboards, but we will have keyboards in the future, but computers are going to be user-friendly.
They'll understand a little bit of common sense and will simply talk to them, and even illiterates with no background in computers will be able to access them.
However, as you correctly pointed out, what's on the other side of the screen is going to be infinitely more sophisticated than what we have today.
Because computer power doubles every 18 months.
The fastest computer in the world, by the way, operates at a trillion floating point operations per second.
One teraflop.
And that is built at Livermore National Laboratories.
President Clinton allocated $3 million to build that machine.
And our brain, by the way, our brain operates at about 1,000 teraflops, which is about 1,000 times more powerful than the fastest computer in the world.
But then you can calculate, using Moore's Law, mathematically, when we will have computers that will rival the speed of the human brain.
It's a very simple calculation.
And it comes out about 30 to 50 years.
Between 30 to 50 years from now, our computers will be so powerful, they will begin to rival the speed and memory capability of the human brain.
Will they attain what we think we understand consciousness to be?
Well, we think we will have machines that will have common sense, that you'll be able to talk to them and have interesting conversations with.
The movie 2001, by the way, had the robot HAL 9000.
Yes.
HAL 9000 was supposed to be turned on in the year 1997.
L-9000 was supposed to be turned on in the year 1997.
Get this, 1997 we were supposed to have a robot so sophisticated it could commit murder.
It could operate ships that would go to Jupiter.
You could have interesting conversations with it, jokes with it.
We were way off.
I went to MIT, and for my book, Visions, I interviewed the people at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, and also at Carnegie Mellon.
And they tell me that we were off by 30 years.
30 to 40 more years, we will have HAL 9000.
A computer that you can simply talk in ordinary English and have a conversation with and treat it as a pal.
Will it be aware of itself?
Eventually, I think it will be.
It'll have silicon consciousness.
It's not going to have consciousness just like ours.
However, it will be indistinguishable from our consciousness.
That is, we'll be able to make machines now in mid-century that for all intensive purposes are conscious.
Now, we can debate whether or not they understand that water is wet.
Do they really feel the wetness of water?
Right?
It's just a piece of silicon sitting on a table, right?
We can debate that point.
But for all intensive purposes, if you talk to it, joke with it, exchange a conversation with it, it acts like a human being.
It doesn't happen, though.
I have, after the break here, I have a critical question for you, and I'm sure you can See it coming, and that question involves if we had that computer today, or get it 30 years from now, and it looks at us logically, dispassionately, without the emotions, what would it likely decide with regard to our fates?
We might contemplate that one top of the hour break.
I'm Art Bell, and my guest is Professor Michio Kaku.
We'll be right back.
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Now here again is Art.
Once again, here I am, this is Art.
It may seem like I'm taking calls, but I haven't really been very diligent yet, have I?
We're going to, I promise, get more to the lines this hour.
It's hard.
It's really hard.
One question promotes another, you know?
Alright, back now to Dr. Kaku in New York.
Doctor, the obvious question is, if such a computer is developed, And it were to have access to the Internet, no doubt eventually becoming smarter than even we are, finding back doors into launch facilities, biological facilities, who knows what all.
And the computer decided that we were on a track that would end us as a Type 0 civilization, an event more likely than not, you have already said.
Wouldn't this dispassionate intelligence Begin to take action?
I think there is a distinct danger of that.
Most artificial intelligence robots were in fact pioneered by the Pentagon, and these robots were made not to save humanity, but to kill other humans.
Now, let's be very clear about where we are today with artificial intelligence theory.
On Mars, we have the Mars Rover, a very advanced robot, actually.
The Mars rover has the intelligence of a retarded cockroach.
A retarded cockroach.
If you raise your hand to swat a cockroach, the cockroach scans your hand, recognizes danger, and hides, right?
If a Martian were to raise his or her hand to the Mars rover, the Mars rover would scan the hand for hours, not understanding there's a hand up there about to swat it.
So you have to realize that our most advanced robots, which are called insect toys, or bug bots, pioneered at MIT's Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, are still very primitive.
However, as you point out now, into the future, 30, 40, 50 years into the future, when robots get common sense, The ability to chit-chat with us and understand our lingo.
Then they become dangerous.
Isaac Asimov wrote about the three laws of robotics by which we have to make sure they don't harm us.
Now, however, the people I interviewed in artificial intelligence theory have a different spin on the whole question.
They don't see this necessarily as a danger.
They see this as an opportunity that at some point we may be creating homo superior.
Yes.
Now, I don't particularly subscribe to this idea, but their idea is that as computers become more advanced, and as we begin to understand our central nervous system, why not live forever?
Why not have immortal bodies made out of flesh, and silicon, and steel, and download our intelligence into a robot?
Our consciousness.
Our consciousness, right.
This is called homo superior, or a cyborg.
My personal point of view, however, is that if you want immortality of sorts, I think it can be done genetically.
I think we don't have to go to silicon.
Within five years, for example, five to ten years, we should be able to grow livers in the laboratory.
Livers are not that complicated, actually.
Kidneys may take a little bit longer.
I've interviewed several Nobel Prize winners who gave me a time scale by which to figure out when we'll be able to grow parts of the body.
And they say that within, you know, 40, 50 years, we'll grow every single organ of the body.
So if it's immortality that you want, I think we can do it with flesh rather than with silicon.
All right, try this one out for size.
Do you believe that there are people who are able to heal other people?
The laying on of hands.
Put it this way, I think that our immune system is hooked up to our brain and consciousness in a way that has not yet been explored.
And I think that faith healers are able to hook into this netherworld that medicine has traditionally shunned, However, within the last five years, there's been an avalanche, literally an avalanche, of hard-core, reproducible epidemiological evidence that shows that your state of mind, your friends, your relationship to your wife and husband and children, how many friends you have, have a direct impact on your death rate and your pulse in your heart and your body condition.
So I think that what faith healers can do is Enter into a realm where most physicians and doctors feel paralyzed.
They have a very bad bedside manner, for example.
They don't have much confidence in a lot of people.
And faith healers, I think, are able to get into people's immune systems.
In other words, to accentuate their immune systems by calming them down, by giving them a feeling of unity, of being well, And this has now been documented.
In fact, in my book I list about 20 medical studies, many of them reported in the New England Journal of Medicine, that show beyond a shadow of a doubt that the mind-body link is much more sophisticated than we originally thought.
Jesus, Jesus, as a historical figure, it is pretty well documented, healed.
Now, if we extrapolate the life of Jesus, To modern man, and we look at faith healers, do you suppose it's possible, Doctor, that we will find that there is some sort of genetic difference in those able to, in effect, what we see as perform miracles?
Okay, well let me be very clear about this.
Science is at a disadvantage here, because science works with reproducible experiments that we can reproduce at will.
But we are mapping the genome, though.
We're mapping the genome, right.
So there we have hardcore reproducible information at the genetic level, but at the faith healer level, very few faith healers have been subjected to reproducible experiments in the laboratories.
However, let me give you some exceptions.
Yogas, within the last few decades, from India, have been subjected to reproducible experiments.
And scientists were shocked at what they found.
For example, yogas that can stop their heart.
That, of course, is a, quote, medical impossibility.
That's right.
But what they actually found, hooking up yogas to electrocardiograms, is that yogas are able to fibrillate their heart.
That is, they don't really stop their heart.
Their pulse seems to go to zero, right?
But they can actually induce fibrillation, which was once thought to be medically impossible, controlled by our autonomic nervous system, as we call it.
But we now know that yogis are able to access parts of the brain that were traditionally off-limits to the conscious mind.
Now also, yogis who are buried underground, you've seen pictures of them, they are literally underground for hours at a time, with one hand sticking up.
It's quite dramatic, I've seen photographs and movies of this, where they have a bead that they simply count, That was also subjected to rigorous reproducible laboratory conditions.
The yogas were placed in a glass box, whereby we could calculate the carbon dioxide and oxygen levels and metabolism.
And we found out, much to our shock, that the metabolic rate went below the lethal range.
These people should have died, but because they entered this never-never-land trance, they're able to conserve oxygen to the point where they're living, On amounts of oxygen that would kill a normal person.
What percentage of our DNA do we use actively?
Well, we have a hundred thousand genes in our body.
And we have about a hundred billion neurons in our brain.
Yes.
But the conscious part of our brain is actually a very tiny fraction of what we actually use.
Most of the brain is unconscious.
And this is also a big shock to people who work in artificial intelligence theory.
That most of the thinking of the brain is unconscious.
Common sense, pattern recognition.
When you walk into a room, you scan the room, you immediately know whose faces you see, you know where the tables are, the chairs and stuff like that.
It would take a computer months of computer time to figure out what you just calculated within a fraction of a second.
Right.
And you understand common sense.
No one has to tell you that mothers are older than their children, that animals do not like pain, that people don't come back after they die immediately.
All these lines of common sense, there are millions of them.
Computer programmers have cataloged 200 million lines of common sense that a five-year-old instinctively knows, but that a computer doesn't know, because there's no apparent logic that says that a mother must be older than a child.
That's told to you by biology.
So we now know that most of the brain is actually unconscious, like an iceberg.
The conscious part of the brain is only the tip of the iceberg, And the bulk of the iceberg is actually not available to us.
We do it instinctively, because we are survival machines.
So therefore, as we map the human genome, is it not possible that we will find people who have learned the kind of control you spoke of, that's documentable, what faith healers do, how the laying on of hands, the heat that you hear about, the transfers, that there will be some sort of little genetic Maybe.
that they have managed, either a difference in them that is genetic from the beginning
or one that they have managed to modify within or enliven, what's the right word,
bring to life within their lifespans?
Maybe. You know, humans are genetically very similar.
Oh, yes.
And there are only a handful of genes that separate humans.
If I take two humans at random, for example, their DNA is equivalent to within .1% of their DNA.
If I take two brothers, or a mother and a child, their DNA is equivalent to within 0.01%.
So we're talking about just a handful of genes, basically, that separate individual humans on the Earth.
And so, well, in the future we'll have the Human Genome Project completed in the year 2005.
By 2020, we'll have individual genome sequences.
We'll each of us have a CD-ROM in our pocket, an owner's manual for our body, by the way, and we'll be able to answer precisely those questions that you asked.
By the way, you have an owner's manual for a VCR, refrigerator, television set.
Everything in your house has an owner's manual, except you.
You have no owner's manual.
You will have that in 2020.
Well, that would be the first step.
The second step would be modification.
Yes, and gene therapy, that is the ability to manipulate genes, is moving faster than you realize.
The movie Gattaca, which is making the rounds, that talks about designer children, and that is conceivable now within a 20-30 year time frame, once we have our own personalized DNA sequencing.
All right, I'm going to stop here and say, East of the Rockies, you're on the air with Dr. Khakou.
Good morning.
Good morning.
Um, I was wondering if you could possibly explain the concept of a tesseract to me.
Okay, very good.
A tesseract is an unraveled hypercube.
Now, let me explain what that is.
Take an ordinary cube, okay?
And, uh, let's say it's hollow on the inside, and you unravel it.
If you unravel a cube, you get six squares.
These six squares can be arranged in the form of a cross.
Six squares in the form of a cross that form a cube.
Now, a four-dimensional cube that your brain cannot visualize, but a computer can, if you unravel that, you get a sequence of cubes arranged in a cross.
Now, you've seen that before.
Salvador Dali did a painting, The Crucifixion of Christ.
Christ was crucified on a four-dimensional tesseract in that very famous painting.
Remember, Christ is hovering, floating in space, and behind him is a cross, except the cross is three-dimensional, made out of cubes, rather than two slabs of wood.
That is a tesseract.
All of us have seen tesseracts in modern art, because Picasso and Salvador Dali were fascinated with the fourth dimension.
In fact, that's what cubism is, by the way.
Cubism is an attempt to capture the fourth dimension on canvas.
When you see these women that Picasso painted with their eyes facing the wrong direction?
Yes.
That's what a hyper-being would see looking down on our three-dimensional flatland universe.
They would see a woman's whole body, 350 degrees, unraveled all at once.
That's why Picasso drew the women's eyes facing the wrong direction.
It represents the fourth dimension.
Oh, that's fascinating.
That's what cubism is.
All right.
West of the Rockies, you're on the air with Dr. Akaku.
Hi.
Hi.
I got two questions.
One about our nearest neighbor and one about the Earth.
All right.
Why is moonlight polarized?
What's the mechanism that polarizes the sunlight that reflects off of it?
Well, when objects are hit with light, okay, and light bounces off, Not all of it, but some of it becomes polarized, okay?
Now, that's how we get, for example, polarized light.
This is called the Brewster angle, the angle at which, when light hits, it becomes polarized.
It's hard to explain.
You have to use what is called Maxwell's equations.
And when I was a first-year graduate student getting my Ph.D., we had to actually solve this problem that reflected light at a certain angle, and it became more polarized.
There's no intuitive way that I've ever thought of To explain that.
But moonlight is slightly polarized.
All reflected light, to some degree, is slightly polarized.
But why is it so—it's very strongly polarized.
And it's pretty much unexplainable.
I would have to go through the mathematics.
And unfortunately—well, let me explain this.
Light, as it goes, let's say, past you, is polarized in all directions.
It spins up, down, left, right, and it can be in any polarization space.
When it just vibrates up and down, up and down, not sideways, but up and down, it's called polarized light.
Now, when unpolarized light hits an object, like a mirror, for example, and it reflects, it turns out that the degree of reflection depends on your angle of polarization.
So, up and down reflects maybe a little bit better than sideways.
That's why the reflected light is going to be more polarized than the incoming light.
Great, but the surface of the Moon, there's no flat planar surfaces, or nearly flat.
I would have to look at that.
I really don't know about the degree of polarization.
I'll have to look up the degree of polarization of the Moon, because the Moon's surface, as you pointed out, is rather irregular.
However, looking at a distance of a quarter of a million miles, the distance from the Earth to the Moon, on that scale, the Moon's surface is relatively smooth on a scale of a quarter of a million miles.
Uh-huh.
Yeah, but that's pretty obvious.
What would cause it to be so strongly polarized?
I would have to look that up.
Again, it's something you do in a physics class when you're a first-year graduate student getting your PhD, and there's no intuitive way to do it.
You just simply have to solve Maxwell's equations for that particular object.
So, it may be that because of the distance, the light is widely Distributed, but that which reaches us at the distance from the moon is relative to us and to the moon quite polarized.
Yeah, because of the surface properties, when light reflects off any surface.
Yeah, but we're getting a very small percentage of return.
Right, from the moon.
But here again, this is a question that has no simple answer.
You would really have to go through a math book.
All right, all right.
Doctor, hold on.
We will be right back with Professor Michio Kaku, a theoretical physicist.
I'm Art Bell.
All this of course is Coast to Coast AM.
And I'm going to be doing a little bit of a tour of the area.
So I'm going to be doing a little bit of a tour of the area.
This is the place where I'm going to be doing a little bit of a tour of the area.
And I'm going to be doing a little bit of a tour of the area.
the key was...
You take the sun where it's warm You take the sun where it's warm
When you're up one day, you don't want to leave at all Oh, you'll get a good, a good warm view
And then you'll want to see the big, big moon in the sky And then you'll want to see the big, big moon in the sky
And then you'll want to see the big, big moon in the sky And then you'll want to see the big, big moon in the sky
the modnai by first diving their access nook.
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Well, here's how you take a book bubbling under the bestseller list and cause it to become a bestseller.
It is simply this.
Go get it.
It's called Visions by Michio Kaku, Professor Kaku, author of Hyperspace.
What you do is you go into your local bookstore and look for visions.
If you don't see visions, you walk up to the clerk and you say, what the hell's the matter with you people?
Where's Dr. Kaku's visions?
And before you know it, there it will be.
And that is how you convert a book just bubbling onto the bestseller list to the bestseller list.
If you're not intrigued enough yet, To go out and get visions, then you just simply haven't been listening.
Professor, welcome back.
Glad to be on.
I'm going to just go right to the phones, because if I don't, I won't get there.
First time caller on the line, you're on the air with Professor Kaku.
Hi.
Hello, Mr. Bell.
Hello, Dr. Kaku.
Yes.
In Chapter 5 of your book, it's called Beyond Silicon, you started off with a quote from George Harrison, All Things Must Pass.
And it seems kind of appropriate.
I'm wondering if with all this artificial intelligence and you talk about the ultimate computer, the quantum computer, are we effectively making the human species obsolete?
Are we creating the computer as a machine that's going to surpass us and be the You know, Darwinian survival of the fittest?
Well, I raise that question because even though today, looking at the power of robots, we laugh because robots today have the power of an insect.
They can barely recognize objects around them.
However, though, on the time frame that I mentioned in Chapter 5, on the time frame of 30, 40, 50 years, We are talking about machines that will be faster than humans, and faster than the working of the human brain.
The brain processing information at about a hundred to a thousand teraflops, a trillion floating point operations per second, will be surpassed, inevitably, by next generations of computers.
My personal point of view is that we should have one hand firmly on the plug, so that we can unplug these machines if they start to get too uppity.
Now, in the short term, it means tremendous Bonuses for humans, because computers can do calculations that would make life easier for us.
Wire up the whole planet with an internet.
Make computer chips scattered into our environment to make life easier.
We will simply talk to computers, they'll talk back to us.
However, the downside is that, yes, on that time frame now, by mid-century, computers will begin to rival the intelligence of the human brain.
And we're going to have to put safeguards on them.
We definitely will have to put things like Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics into the machines, because they may develop a will of their own.
Here's a very interesting question.
Dave from the Bay Area asks, I can imagine the possibility in 30 years of computers, for example, having the emotion of happiness, love, sharing, sadness, hate, jealousy, But could a computer have a sense of humor and experience the inclination to laugh?
Okay.
Certain emotions are not that hard to program into a computer.
Those people who watch Star Trek know that data is the robot that wants to be human, just like the Tin Man in The Wizard of Oz.
And it has the biggest problem with jokes and humor.
That's right.
So certain kinds of emotions are actually rather easy to put into a computer.
They're not that hard.
Anger, for example, or embarrassment.
However, humor is difficult because humor depends on the unexpected, the punchline.
The unexpected depends upon what you already know.
And that's why humor is difficult to program into a computer.
However, scientists do know that humor has a definite purpose.
For example, dirty humor.
The reason why dirty jokes are important is because it defines what is forbidden and what is known.
And for a young teenager going through puberty, They don't know the conventions of dating and sexuality.
They don't know those conventions.
And so they're the first people who like dirty humor because that allows them to explore the limits of what is acceptable and what is not acceptable.
And that's why dirty jokes are funny, because we have an unexpected punchline that tells us the limits of what is acceptable behavior and what is not acceptable behavior.
So then one might even extrapolate, dirty jokes are important, if not critical.
In some sense, yes.
Humor is very important.
Every human society has humor, because on one hand, it tells you the limits of what is socially acceptable, because what is funny, of course, are things that are just outside social acceptability.
And for a young child going through puberty, I mean, how's that kid supposed to know what the conventions of society are?
So in a lot of ways, then, we should thank Janet Reno.
If you get a few jokes.
Wild Card Line, you're on the air with Professor Kaku.
Hi.
Good morning.
Good morning to you.
Where are you, sir?
I'm in Buffalo, New York.
Buffalo, okay.
I'm very glad to have gotten through.
Dr. Kaku, fantastic book.
You've been talking about AI the last few minutes.
You brought up the notion of what would happen if Self-aware machines turn their gaze on us and look dispassionately, without emotion, utterly logical.
I saw us languishing, or worse yet, destroying ourselves as a Type 0 civilization.
Right.
I don't understand how you could... I don't understand worrying about self-aware machines annihilating the human race, or just evaluating our situation and deciding that we're not Uh, fit to survive or go on existing?
No, no, no, no.
I think you've got the wrong take on it.
I think that it would be, uh, more like a machine deciding that our survival would depend on taking the following steps, which we are not taking, and it would decide to take for us.
Ah, okay, okay.
Because it's just, it's just the same situation when I was thinking about, uh, I mean, just criminals, uh, you know, without emotion, you know, committing acts of murder.
Uh, it's been going on for, you know, You know, in the entire human history.
Can I get one more question?
Yeah, sure.
Doctor, you were talking about gravity, and I've listened, actually, Art, the first time I heard your show was the first time you had Dr. Kokulon.
And you were talking about gravity as being a push rather than a pull.
And you used the model of the funnel with the marble sprawling around.
How does that, how do you explain the The ellipses of our planets around the Sun, and in particular, how do you explain the orbit of Mars and how it does that little loop-dipsy-doodle?
Okay.
The dipsy-doodle is called retrograde motion.
If you were to look at Mars, Mars goes, let's say, from east to west, and then it stops in the sky.
It goes backwards, and then it goes, again, east to west.
And you say to yourself, my God, I mean, planets are supposed to move in straight lines.
They're not supposed to go backwards, right?
However, if you're in a car and you pass another car on the highway, you know, you hit the accelerator and you pass another car, that car appears to go backwards.
That car appears to go backwards just because you're going faster than that car at a very close range, okay?
That's why Mars appears to go backwards, because the Earth overtakes Mars in its orbit just like you Overtake a car that you're passing by hitting the accelerator.
Now, the other car, of course, is still moving in a straight line.
The other car is still moving forward, but appears to go backwards.
And that's why Mars has retrograde motion.
Okay?
Now, the old Ptolemaic system of thousands of years ago, I had a hard time explaining that, but the Copernican system very easily explains retrograde motion by simply saying it's the illusion What happens when the Earth overtakes Mars, just like a car overtakes another car?
All right, Doctor.
I want to lead you off in one different direction.
Our magnetic field, is it reasonable to say that our magnetic field protects us from sun flares, from ejecta from the sun?
That in fact when we get slammed real hard from ejecta, It, in effect, expands a bit, and we are protected from the worst of it.
Is that a fair notion?
To some degree, yes.
You see, Mars has very little magnetic field.
In fact, that was one of the big discoveries of the Mars Global Surveyor.
He's photographing Mars right now.
Now, we finally detected a very small, measurable magnetic field around Mars, which means that it doesn't have this protective effect, which means that it's hit full-blown with all the solar flares and all that kind of radiation from the Sun.
And any astronauts going to Mars will have to be very careful, because they're not going to have that shielding effect, okay, due to our magnetic field.
That's the reason why the North Pole has the aurora borealis.
That's what we have in northern light.
Indeed.
It's like a funnel again.
It grabs solar flare material, ions, and it funnels them over the North Pole.
That's why you see these beautiful northern lights over Alaska and the North Pole.
That's where the radiation does, in fact, go.
Here, in fact, is where I was going with the question.
If that is so, I had a guest on the other night who described ...toroidal and colloidal currents which have been shown to flow in ball lightning, and from that he extrapolated that when a current limit is reached, a number of things can occur, including the creation of matter or neutrons.
And then, by extension, his hypothesis was That we are now entering Solar Cycle 23, and many scientists are beginning to suggest that Solar Cycle 23 may be the largest ever recorded.
And that at some point, our Earth, which has the same kind of currents, toroidal and voidal, could get slammed hard enough with ejecta from the Sun, that in effect, for a short time, our shields, if you will, There are many parts of that theory, so let's break them down.
early scientists who suggest the K-T event never occurred, and what killed the dinosaurs
was radiation from the sun. What would you think of that theory?
Okay, well, there are many parts of that theory, so let's break them down. The K-T boundary,
of course, is the Cretaceous-Tertiary boundary where 65 million years ago the dinosaur suddenly
disappeared. If these sunspot cycles are related to that, they would occur much more frequently
than 65 million years.
It would take place on the scale of hundreds or thousands of years.
And yet, 65 million years ago, there was a catastrophic event that wiped out all the dinosaurs.
And we do have this meteor crater in the Yucatan near Cancun.
We do.
In the Yucatan, that's 180 miles in diameter.
It's the largest impact crater in a billion years.
The biggest meteor to hit the Earth in the last billion years, and that crater alone would have been caused by an object sufficient to cause enormous storms and, of course, the blanketing of the sun's rays to create a darkening of the Earth, firestorms throughout most of North America.
By the way, we even know the angle at which the comet or meteor hit the Yucatan.
It came from the south.
Because the debris went north over North America, and a lot of charred carbon is found in North America.
So we think that the meteor came from the south, hit the Yucatan, and sprayed the Tyrannosaurus rex with fire, basically.
And so it was probably fire from the meteors that knocked out the T-Rex.
So you're quite satisfied the KT event accounts for the demise of our larger... It's rare enough.
You know, meteor collisions on that scale take place on the scale of tens of millions of years, while solar flares take place, you know, every 11 years solar flares take place.
They do, but the cycles don't always... are certainly not the same, and we've been recording cycles for only a relatively short period in the larger picture.
That's correct.
So is it possible, Doctor, that ejecta, in fact we've already had several Class X events, I'm sure you've been hearing, and it does look like a whopper of a cycle, particularly with the depleted ozone, that we could be in some danger from the sun in a particularly vicious high solar cycle?
Well, if the solar cycle gets out of control, and if our magnetic field around the Earth is not sufficiently capable to deflect it, precisely, precisely, then, in principle, we could be in for a deep doo-doo.
We could be in for a big trouble if the solar flares would hit the Earth.
However, I should also point out that the reason why we have these sunspots cycles every 11 years is because the Sun's magnetic field It flips north and south every 11 years.
Polarization changes.
That's right.
It's like winding the mainspring of an alarm clock.
Yes.
When the sun rotates, the magnetic field does not.
It's like cranking up an alarm clock.
The spring gets tighter and tighter and tighter.
The spring being the magnetic lines of force around the sun.
Right.
After 11 years, the magnetic field lines are so cranked up That they flip and north and south reverse and that creates a shockwave that then goes throughout space and that's very dangerous for our astronauts.
Radio operators have a hard time every 11 years when the ionosphere is disturbed and it creates a big problem for the space program when our astronauts are up there and they hit a sunspot cycle and it can be quite dangerous for them up there.
Yes.
The question, of course, is whether it could be conceivably very dangerous for us.
I mean, we've already got children in Australia required by law to wear hats because of the amount of UV radiation.
Yes.
The use of freon gas and CSDs, chlorofluorocarbons, was probably sufficient to create this ozone hole over South America, over the South Pole.
And the only reason why we don't have a hole as big over the North Pole, by the way, is a freak of accident.
It turns out that ice crystals are required to act as platforms to create ozone depletion.
It turns out that ice crystals over the North Pole are not as plentiful as ice crystals over the South Pole twice a year.
That's why there's lots of platforms for this chemical reaction to take place over Antarctica, but over the North Pole, we have less ice crystals.
And that's why we don't have a hole opening up, and Santa Claus would have been backed by UV radiation from the sun, and a lot of kids would have been disappointed over Christmas if the hole had opened up over the North Pole.
One other interesting question, and I don't know there's an answer to it, But as we experience the increase in solar cycles, this one, 23, it seems as though more ejecta and more large flares hit the Earth than reasonably should hit the Earth by pure chance.
Well, I'll have to look that up.
I mean, I was not aware of the fact that there was an increase in solar cycle activity.
However, it would be very easy for me to simply call my friends who are professional meteorologists.
It's very recent.
And find out precisely what's happening with the Sunday Spot Cycle.
All right.
It is, in fact, very recent, Doctor.
And based on some of the recent activity, they are predicting this may be one of the largest ones ever recorded.
But again, our experience in recording them is rather short indeed.
All right.
How are you doing?
You awake?
I'm awake.
You're awake.
Alright, we've got another hour to go then, so stand by, take a break, and we'll be back, and I promise, I promise, I promise we'll be deeper into the phones in this final hour, in what markets get this final hour.
My guest is Professor Michio Kaku, a theoretical physicist, and if this isn't fascinating, then you cannot be fascinated.
His book is Visions, And by now, you ought to be ready to go tomorrow to a
bookstore and demand it be put on the shelf.
And by now, you ought to be ready to go tomorrow to a bookstore and demand it be put on the shelf.
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I am never going to hear this music without thinking of the movie 12 Monkeys.
Never.
As a matter of fact, that's what started me playing this.
If you've never seen 12 Monkeys, you've got to see it.
My guest is Professor Michio Kaku, and we'll get back to him in a moment.
Alright, back now to Dr. Kaku.
My guest is Professor Michio Kaku, and we'll get back to him in a moment.
All right, back now to Dr. Kaku. Doctor, did you happen to see 12 monkeys?
No, I didn't.
Could you explain the plot for me?
Basically, yes, I could.
It touches on two things you will find of interest.
One, it involved a small terrorist group that managed to get hold of a virus that would basically, once exposed to air, be spread around the world and kill everybody.
Not so unlikely.
A definite possibility.
You and I have discussed AIDS becoming airborne or any number of other hard little things that could occur, and they're occurring at a faster and faster rate right now.
Now, interestingly, and I hate to ruin the movie for anybody, but in order to prevent this catastrophic event, I'll just put it this way, time travel was involved.
In other words, an event that had occurred Had to be changed.
And so, I guess I would first ask you, how great the risk of these little bitty things getting us?
Well, you know, in the era of genetic engineering, it's possible that some person could take the HIV virus, which only has about nine genes in it.
It's actually a rather simple virus.
And put into that genome, the genome that allows it to float in air.
Because the rhinoviruses are also very simple objects.
Viruses are nothing but floating bits of protein in DNA.
That's all they really are.
Well, I believe back in West Virginia, they did have a form of it that was airborne.
It was just monkeys, not humans.
And that's the danger, because these viruses mutate at an incredible rate, a million times faster than than the rate at which we evolve.
And so that's the danger, that one of these days, one of these genes is going to incorporate a gene
for being airborne, like the rhinovirus, the cold virus, in which case we're in deep trouble if that happens.
You know?
I recall a 60-minute segment in which a scientist in reviewing what had occurred at Reston,
Virginia said, genetically, we were that close.
And he held his fingers as close as he could get to having airborne Ebola.
And you know, at Fort Detrick, where the United States military looked at germ warfare, there were incidences, in fact, where one of them almost escaped.
So we often live under this sort of Damocles, the fact that For those nations that engage in germ warfare and creating designer germs.
You bet.
One of these days, one of these designer germs may escape the laboratory and all hell could break loose.
Mm-hmm.
We've got a fellow working on that right now in Iraq.
Right.
But also on the question of time machines, you know.
Time travel.
Time travel, right.
That used to be considered ridiculous and beyond the pale, but that's not true anymore.
And as I document in my book, Hyperspace, and also again in Visions, There are whole groups of physicists now, not just isolated pockets, but whole groups of physicists that are pursuing the paradoxes and what it would take to design a machine that would then take you back into the past.
And Scientific American, Physical Review, many magazines now have public scores of articles on these things.
And even Stephen Hawking, my friend, Stephen Hawking last year made the announcement that he also believes that time travel is possible.
Yes.
I was interviewed by the Sunday London Times about that when Hawking made that announcement.
And I pointed out that even though it's possible, it doesn't mean it's practical.
Because to bend time into a pretzel would require the technology of a type 2 civilization.
A civilization that could play with stars, for example.
And that kind of civilization could conceivably open up holes in space and time, but it's not for us.
I'm going to ask you to stay good and close to the phone.
For the sake of discussion, let us assume that we are Type II and we have time travel.
What would your expectation be regarding the laws of time travel?
In other words, could you go into the past and change something?
And if you did, what about the old paradox problem?
Well, the old paradox problem is resolved once you go to a quantum theory.
In other words, Einstein's theory is classical.
It's based on smooth space warps, just like we talked about earlier.
And as a consequence, if you go backwards in time, you cannot change the past.
However, with quantum theory, you can make a quantum leap to another universe.
So if you go backwards in time to save Abraham Lincoln from being shot at the Ford Theater?
Yes.
Well, yes, you go backwards in time, you save Abraham Lincoln from being shot, but your Abraham Lincoln, the Abraham Lincoln that existed in your universe, that Abraham Lincoln died.
And what happens is the universe bifurcates, splits in half, creates two universes, the river of time forks into two rivers, not just one, And in one river, of course, is your old universe, where Abraham Lincoln did, in fact, die.
But you've opened up another universe, where, in fact, time will permit an Abraham Lincoln that will not die at Ford Theater.
So, the quantum theory allows a resolution, but the price you pay, of course, is you have a quantum leap.
You have a parallel universe that then opens up.
And therefore, there are really no paradoxes in time travel stories.
All paradoxes are resolved once you allow For the quantum principle to take over.
Okay.
Back to our lines.
First time caller line.
You're on the air with Dr. Kaku.
Good morning.
Good morning, gentlemen.
Where are you, sir?
Westhaven, Connecticut.
Okay.
May I present a very simple and possible, one possible definition of negentropy with which to explain the superiority of a one world government.
Sure.
First, I'd like to point out that the only thing that we're certain of is that the speed of light is 300 million meters per Earth-ship second.
million meters per Earth-ship second.
Yes?
A 300 million meters per second is not specific enough.
Okay, make the connection to the One World Government here.
All right.
Negentropy can be defined as 1 over 1 plus the natural log of the number of groups.
That means the only way to get more order than disorder is to have, at most, two groups.
And much better, even only one group.
Well, uh... So?
Yeah, so, I agree.
Otherwise, there's 185 Hitlers running around.
Well, rest easy then.
We're well on our way, is what I would say.
We have gone from, of course, economies lead political change, and if you look at the way our economies have developed, we have gone from trading with the guy next door, to towns trading with each other, counties, cities, states, regions, and now nations, The progression is obvious and well-documented and political change will follow close behind.
Would you agree, Doctor?
Yes, and I think the emergence of the European Union is an example of how nations will put aside historic animosities that go back 10,000 years, back to the last Ice Age, in fact, because they realize their economic survival depends upon grouping together with the euro currency and stuff.
So I think that, well, I'm not sure what governmental form it's going to take.
All I'm saying is that you can see the beginnings of a planetary civilization on the Earth, whether it's one world or many worlds, who knows?
But we can see the beginnings of a planetary culture, planetary internet, planetary communication systems, planetary trading blocks, And I think that's where the Earth is inevitably going to go, simply by looking at the laws of physics.
If you had to guess, Doctor, it's interesting to speculate about.
We've got one of the better systems, I suppose.
I hope that's not just egotistical, but a fact.
It seems to be doing rather well at the moment.
And we have a republic, a representative democracy.
Do you envision something that would be a singular government as a more pure democracy or a representative democracy as we have now?
Well, I think in the future it may be purer than it is today because of the Internet.
You know, 1984, that novel written by George Orwell?
Oh, yes.
If you read back about that novel, it's very primitive.
The systems of surveillance they had in that book, 1984, We have systems today that are infinitely more powerful, and yet we have more democracy because of the Internet.
And I think as the Internet spreads into the third world and into other regions of the planet, I think we're going to see much more democracy, as the people of the world see what's happening in other countries, and they're not going to tolerate tyrants, they're not going to tolerate poverty, when they see what other countries are doing with their wealth and their freedoms and stuff.
And I think that that's going to create a new wave, a new democratic wave that's going to surface around the Earth.
Now, it may take many decades.
I'm not a Pollyanna.
I'm not saying that everything's going to be okay immediately, because I'm a realist.
We do live in the era of nations.
There's no doubt about that.
What I'm saying is that the long-term trends, the long-term trends are clearly in the direction of becoming much more democratic.
Okay.
The interesting wrinkle, though, when you get to that, is that then you have a pure democracy.
For example, everybody could sit at their computer and vote whatever they want to vote.
I think it's been said by many that when the people determine that they can take what they wish by vote, that we're finished.
In other words, they begin voting themselves everything, and we're done.
Well, I think there's going to be a certain amount of maturity that has to go along with this.
Indeed.
And that's one of the themes in my book, Visions, that we are talking about eventually having the power of a God, the ability to create life in our image, the ability to animate inanimate objects.
But with the power of a God, you have to have the wisdom of Solomon.
And the wisdom of Solomon is required to handle enormous power, enormous information.
And where does wisdom come from?
You can't get it from a five and dime store just by putting in a nickel into a machine.
First, you have to have knowledge.
First, you have to understand what the technologies are, what the responsibilities are.
Then you have to have democratic discussion.
People have to debate how far we want to go with DNA, how far we want to go with computer science.
Well, exactly.
Wisdom seems to come from age, and we're not getting any older, at least not yet.
We're 60, 70, and we leave the planet.
We attain wisdom, but just as we get to the best part, we're gone.
That's right.
But as I also point out, we're going to extend that lifespan much farther than 120 years, which is so far the maximum human lifespan, because among many of the genes that control our body are the genes that control aging.
And the first two were discovered just two months ago.
There are probably several of them.
But we will unlock the secret of aging.
Already now in Drosophila flies and worms, You can actually turn on and off a gene which controls their lifespan.
Wow.
You can actually turn on a gene which makes worms live longer or turn it off and make them live shorter.
Now those are simple organisms.
We're much more complicated.
There are probably many genes that control the human aging process.
But two of them have already been discovered and that was just done two months ago.
So we are talking about perhaps living longer and perhaps being wiser.
I would hope that we have the wisdom to control these technologies,
the wisdom to use the Internet in a wise and just way, so that it doesn't become just a bunch of would-be prophets
yelling at each other.
Sure.
Wow, Cardline, you're on the air with Dr. Kaku.
Hello, where are you, please?
Good morning. This is Dan in Virginia.
Hi, Dan.
Fantastic show.
Thank you.
I have a couple of questions.
One has to do with the magnetic field.
Sure.
My sense is that the magnetic field is that field which holds our physical structure together.
And there's indications from different people that this magnetic field is dissipating.
So, to me, that would indicate that our physicality is slowly dissolving.
And as that's happening, our frequency, our vibrational frequency, is also going up.
And that we're moving into a higher dimension As you refer to, you know, the tenth dimension and so forth, as you go up in the frequencies, you move into the higher dimensions, and you also move into higher consciousness.
Is there, Doctor, any reason to believe that our magnetic field is lessening in strength?
Okay, well, what holds the atom together is the electromagnetic force.
That's why electrons move around the proton.
And we also know that electricity and magnetism are pretty much the same thing.
Depending upon where you observe it, it's either electricity or it's magnetism, and you can actually convert them into each other.
Now, as far as we know, there is no weakening of the electromagnetic force within the atom, but if there was, as pointed out by the gentleman, atoms would disintegrate.
would literally fly apart if the strength of electromagnetism were to be altered in some way or another.
So far I haven't heard of any such experiment showing that to be true.
However, the other point raised is actually important.
All matter does in fact vibrate.
When you say that something has vibes giving off, it's really true.
Uh, the quantum principle says that you cannot have a state of zero vibration.
That would violate the uncertainty principle, because then you know for certain that it's not vibrating, right?
Right.
So everything has to vibrate because of uncertainty, okay?
So everything does vibrate, and everything does have a particular frequency of vibration.
Matter does.
Now what we're realizing is that space itself can also vibrate.
In fact, it was Einstein who first pointed out that when space vibrates, you get gravity waves.
And one day we will actually find gravity waves coming at us from distant stars.
But when higher dimensions vibrate, we get light and we get the nuclear force.
The leading theory of the nuclear force is that they are created by vibrations in higher dimensions.
So, there is a definite link between frequency and the forces that hold the universe together.
But so far, as far as I know, I don't see any papers written about the weakening of such a force, because if such a weakening were to take place, we're in deep trouble, because atoms, as was pointed out by the caller, would be unstable, and atoms would fall apart.
Which means we would simply disintegrate.
We would disintegrate if that were to be true.
However, you know, we physicists measure these things all the time, and as soon as any weakening is observed, we will definitely let you know.
But so far, we haven't seen any weakening of the electromagnetic force, at least to my knowledge.
Doctor, just a speculative question.
Suppose you were to discover something like that.
Who would you tell?
That's a good question.
You know, uh... It is a good question.
Think about it during the break.
We'll be right back.
This is Coast to Coast AM.
I'm Art Bell.
I keep hearing different stories about my happiness.
All I thought you'd given me is quite the blanket.
If I was walking in your shoes, I wouldn't be wearing them.
Well, you and your friends are worried about me.
I'm having lots of fun.
Cows and flowers on the wall.
That don't bother me at all.
Playing Solitaire's old song.
With the deck of fifty-one.
Holding cigarettes and watching champions.
Thanks Bruno, tell me...
Music Walking every moment in my perception
On the telephone, finding love another day Running and recurring, who would keep the stage inside
Walking in slow motion as you turn around today Say I'll never leave you
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Now again, here's Art.
Once again, here I am.
code 702 727 1222 702 727 1222 this is coast to coast am with art bell now again here's
our once again here i am dr kaku is my guest and we're in the stretch run here too bad huh
We could go on for hours and hours and hours.
All right, back now to Professor Michio Kaku.
His latest book is one you're simply gonna have.
That's all.
Visions.
It's called Visions by Michio Kaku, professor.
And what you do is go into your local bookstore, and if it's bubbling under the bestseller, then maybe they have it, maybe they don't.
If they don't, demand it.
And, oh, I would say within the next three weeks we'll be way up into the best-seller list easily.
That's how it works, isn't it, Doctor?
Well, let's hope so.
I'm crossing my fingers.
Let me ask this for Sean and Iacovalle.
What happens to the paradigm of scientific repeatability if human consciousness can indeed eventually interact with physical devices?
In other words, Can a given set of experimental results then be possible only with certain experimenters and yet be valid though unrepeatable by others following identical procedures?
Well, a similar situation is happening with cold fusion.
Yes, yes.
As you know, many scientists have said that they have found that they can generate energy in a laboratory and they're reputable scientists with long credentials.
Other scientists have tried to reproduce that result, and they say they can't do it, with equally strong credentials.
Producing almost fistfights in some areas.
That's right.
The Japanese corporation, like Toyota, spent hundreds of thousands of dollars developing this, because they wanted to commercialize it.
But just a few months ago, they threw in the towel, because they found this effect, that it depends on who is doing it.
Certain people could do it, other people could not.
Now, one theory is that maybe it's a chemical reaction, that it's not really a nuclear reaction at all, but maybe a chemical reaction.
But you see, my attitude is that if you want to commercialize it in a car, and when you turn on the ignition, you don't want to have to have the experimenter right there with you in the front seat doing the same work.
You want that thing to start immediately, whether or not there's an experimenter there or not.
So, as far as commercialization of coal fusion is concerned, it does require reproducibility under any and all circumstances in a car when you turn on the ignition.
Now, the person who wrote that question, of course, is asking a much deeper question.
Yes.
And what happens to the laws of physics?
In some sense, some laws seem to be dependent on who is doing the measuring.
Witness also the finished experiments.
Right.
That would be, we would be in a very bad situation because reproducibility is the foundation of modern science.
Precisely.
At any laboratory in Russia, the Americas or wherever, we could perform an experiment and on demand reproduce a certain result.
And if it depended upon a certain experimenter's skill to create that result, then it's suspect.
We want to get it down to the point where anyone can reproduce that particular experiment.
It's suspect, but if it continues, if we continue to get... Yeah, then we have to take it seriously.
Because then it could be a very difficult effect to measure.
And perhaps only master experimenters are able to elicit that response because they're so good.
Yes, but eventually, doctor, scientists will be leaping off tall buildings.
Yeah, well, unless they can reproduce this on demand, we're going to be pulling out our hair and be wondering why we can't do this.
Oh, by the way, the last caller who called asked about the disintegration of matter and what's going to happen if all hell breaks loose.
That's right.
And if I ever discover such a thing.
Well, we physicists do discuss this question.
What is the ultimate catastrophe that could defall us if atoms are not stable?
What happens is as follows.
Professor Sidney Coleman at Harvard has conjectured that the vacuum, the vacuum of space and time, maybe it's not stable, in which case a bubble would form with a false vacuum in it.
The bubble would expand at the speed of light, and anything inside that bubble may have unstable atoms.
Atoms, they literally dissolve.
The laws of physics actually change inside the bubble.
Now, if you were to look at this bubble approaching you at the speed of light, A very disappointing sight for a type 0 civilization.
Here you are doing your laundry, right?
You look up in the sky and you see this huge bubble growing at incredible velocity
and within about a second it can go from the moon to the earth, for example.
And by the time it hits you, your atoms would literally dissolve.
New laws of physics would come into play.
Quarks may not be stable.
Protons may not be stable.
New laws of physics could erupt inside this bubble.
Not even time to drop the dirty socks into the laundry.
That's right.
This is called the problem of the false vacuum, or what is called spontaneous symmetry breaking.
So far, the vacuum seems to be stable.
So far, we have not seen any such bubbles exist, but this is within the realm of physics, and physicists have taken this very seriously.
The question of whether or not the vacuum is stable, and if it's not, all hell could break loose.
Atoms could in fact fall apart, in which case the bubble would expand at the speed of light, and you have very little warning of this.
It would hit you before you knew it.
And, uh, your atoms would literally dissolve and reform in a new state of matter, which, of course, depends on the theory that you're talking about.
But, uh... Well, at least that would quiet the debate.
That is, the speed with which it would occur.
That's right.
West of the Rockies, you're on the air with Dr. Kaku.
Hi.
Where are you, please?
Hello?
Yes, hello?
Hi, this is Jerry in Kodiak.
Kodiak, Alaska.
Oh, Kodiak.
Way up there.
All right.
Yeah.
Hi, Doctor.
I read this book by Frank Tipler called The Physics of Immortality.
That's right.
Yeah, he's a friend of mine.
Yeah, I didn't agree with a lot of it, but, you know, when he talks about if you make an exact copy of something, it's the same thing.
I didn't like that part, but that idea about the last moment of the big crunch in a closed universe where the laws of physics break down and it might be possible to, like, resurrect everything there ever was, it seemed, like, really religious to me.
I was thinking maybe that's, like, the Type IV civilization's goal is to survive the The death of the universe, you know, like you said, we're survival machines.
Maybe that's like the master plan that allows a Type 0 civilization to make it to Type 1 is to want to survive everything and maybe, you know, find out the big answer of creation and if there was an infinite intelligence that created us and everything.
My other question was, what happens when two black holes run into each other?
Oh, alright.
Yeah, your first question has been debated extensively by physicists, and that is, does intelligent life have to die when the universe dies?
And if the universe dies in its big crunch, that is, the Big Bang reverses itself, the expanding universe becomes a contracting universe, we have blue shift instead of red shift, and the oceans evaporate and boil, and the mountains melt, and the universe becomes very, very hot, right?
At that point, there may be the possibility of a Type IV civilization, Opening up a wormhole through a higher dimension and escaping like in a lifeboat.
If your boat is sinking, perhaps you should get into a lifeboat and go to another universe.
And in Stephen Hawking's Universe Part 6, which is on PBS television this week, I'm in the program and we talk in Part 6 about the multiverse, that there could be other bubbles out there.
If our universe is a bubble, The bubble expands and may one day come and contract, we don't know for sure, but there could be other bubbles, and perhaps one day, perhaps we'll evolve to type 4, and have the capability of opening up huge wormholes in space and time, and like a lifeboat, escape into it, into another universe.
So this may be the outlet for intelligent life in a dying universe.
It remains to be seen.
You work with the physics of time and space, and we talk about time travel.
Is it possible, one of my favorite movies of all time, a very romantic movie, is called Somewhere in Time.
You ever see that?
No, I didn't.
It involves this man who became enamored with a woman who had lived a century previous.
Was that with Christopher Reeve?
You got it.
Oh, I saw that.
Alright, then you know where I'm going.
Is it possible, and I know I probably ought not ask a hard scientist this question, but is it not possible that we know so little about our brains that in fact travel in time might ultimately be possible not with a machine, not with enormous amounts of current, That we can barely imagine now that we could generate, but within our own brains.
Well, the laws of physics on this question may be incomplete.
The laws of physics that we do have, Einstein's theory, the quantum theory, tells us that we need enormous quantities of energy, on the scale of a star, really, to do this.
However, it's conceivable that perhaps intelligent life in outer space that have already attained this capability, In that movie, Peggy Sue got married.
at will and perhaps maybe even allow humans to go through such devices, okay?
In which case, by thinking about it, you may be able to access this kind of power.
It would have to come from the outside.
It would have to be, I think, aided by an intelligence outside the earth to make that possible.
In that movie, Peggy Sue Got Married, Peggy Sue, I guess, falls asleep
and she imagined she's back in the 50s again.
Oh yes, I recall that.
Well, that's another movie.
Yeah.
But according to the current laws of physics, it does take an enormous amount of energy to bend time into a pretzel.
And for a human to do it, it would require aid from a civilization far beyond our own.
And these are the present-day knowledge, anyway.
All right.
Wild Card Line, you're on the air with Dr. Kaku.
Hi.
Good morning.
Hi, Art.
Hi, Dr. Kaku.
Art, I want to ask you a question real quick.
How many affiliates now since you got KABC?
You mean WABC?
Yeah, WABC.
We're just about at 400.
Wow.
Anyway, do you have a question?
Yeah, I actually got three of them.
Dr. Kaku, if life is so prevalent as one would have to assume all over the universe, Why would you not assume the chances are way more likely we as a typo civilization would run into the leftover remnants or petrified technology left over by a once prevalent one, two, or three civilization effectively giving us their capabilities?
That's question one.
All right, well, no, I'm going to hold you to question one, Caller.
We don't have a lot of time.
But it is a good one.
Why have we not discovered the remnants yet?
Okay, well, the distances between stars are quite large.
And for interstellar travel, we're talking about really Type II, that can go very large distances.
And Type II civilizations are immortal, in the sense that nothing known to science can destroy them.
They can even survive supernovas.
Unless, of course, they have a civil war, or unless they decide to self-destruct.
Wait a minute, you mean a Type II could have a civil war?
They would not have evolved past that and have a single government?
Well, in principle, they have gone through hundreds of years of being a Type 1, and so that they must have eliminated all the sectarian nationalist religious passions that led to the slaughter of millions of their inhabitants as a Type 0 civilization.
But it can't be ruled out.
The present-day thinking is that Type 2 civilizations are simply immortal, they just live forever, and they may have probed us And in which case you may have left remnants of their probing of our solar system.
And if I was in charge of a Type II expedition, I would basically put lots of probes on the moon.
Because they, you know, have no erosion, low gravity, easy to take off.
And so remnants of Type II civilizations in our solar system would probably be most likely found on moons without atmospheres, without erosion.
And these objects could in fact be centuries, thousands of years old, left over from a previous expedition that went through our solar system.
So there could be remnants?
There could be remnants.
They can't be ruled out.
We haven't seen any.
But however, that would be the most likely way in which a Type II civilization would have probed our solar system.
And of course, they would be most interested in a Type 1.
Type 0 civilizations are simply not that interesting.
So actually, from the days that we were dragging women by their hair into caves, until this very moment, we've been 0.
That's right.
And there could be an object waiting for us to make the transition to Type 1 when we become very interesting.
Because we've become a mature civilization capable of controlling the primitive savagery from which we respond, right?
So I think that's one reason why we don't see delegations of aliens waiting to shake our hand saying congratulations, right?
I think it's because we are very close to Type I status.
We could miss it, of course, and there's a very good chance that we will.
But I think that if we do attain Type I status, and if they're out there, That's the point at which they're really going to start to say, okay, you've now matured enough to join the Federation of Planets.
Give me a sense of a definitive benchmark that you would use to say, we are now Type I. A planetary civilization with a planetary form of government of some sort.
It doesn't have to be one world, but it has to be mature.
They have to be able to handle planetary resources.
Let me give you an example of weather control.
Absolute weather control is not possible because of chaos theory.
But in the main, it is possible to alter the course of the weather in a Type I civilization.
But if one nation decides not to be part of this process, you cannot have weather control.
Weather control depends on all nations of the Earth deciding to come into one collective system.
Well, we simply stop their rain until they agree.
Oh, okay.
Or we blackmail them in that sense.
You see that to have weather control requires an incredible amount of cooperation among all the nations of the earth because the weather doesn't respect national boundaries.
National boundaries are artificial, created by humans, right?
And so to have any kind of weather control system for a Type I civilization would require tremendous cooperation on the part of all the nations of the earth.
Doctor, we have treaties that suggest that we and others will not engage in weather control.
Do you think we are abiding by those treaties?
Well, I think every nation at this present time tries to look out for its own skin, right?
And that means produce as much carbon dioxide as they feel like and to hell with your next-door neighbor.
However, I think the Rio Conference and also the Kyoto Conference, which is coming up in a few days now, I think the nations of the world are beginning to realize they have to put away the childishness, because one nation messing up the weather could cause floods and famine in a neighboring nation.
And that's why the Kyoto Conference is going to be hammering out whether or not it's feasible for nations to rein in some of their rapacious use of oil and coal, To begin a planetary cooperation process.
So, like I said, I think we're just seeing the beginnings of Type I. Just the beginnings of it.
You can see it already happening right before your eyes with the Internet, with global trading blocks, with conferences on the weather and stuff like that.
You can see the outlines of an emerging Type I civilization.
All right.
We are so woefully out of time.
Maybe one more call.
East of the Rockies, you're on the air with Dr. Kaku.
Hi.
Yeah, Howard.
Hi, where are you?
I'm in a little town called Paisley, Florida.
Okay.
I've got a question about the new experiments that have been done by a Dr. Nicholas Jensen at the University of Geneva.
It was on the, in relation to the Schroeder's cat.
Okay.
Okay.
As a matter of fact, it says down here, the details of the scientific literature hasn't been published as of yet.
Anyway, they have separated the photons, the electromagnetic energy packets, a distance of 7 miles, and it says there was compelling statistical evidence that the protons knew whether They had been tampered with.
All right, we're going to have to stop it there.
Doctor, do you know about that?
Yes, that's right.
It's a very famous experiment.
You see, we can now take photons and separate, these are packets of light energy, and separate them by miles.
And if you, if you meddle with one photon, the other photon at the other end knows that it's been tampered with.
And that effect travels faster than the speed of light.
So in some sense, you might say, well, maybe Einstein was wrong, that you can tamper with light beams faster than the speed of light.
But the problem is, you cannot send Morse code this way.
You cannot send usable information via quantum effects.
And on that note, Doctor, we're out of time.
That's it.
Show's over and all that.
Visions is going to the bestseller list.
Trust me, it's going to the bestseller list.
I predict three weeks, you'll be on.
Well, I hope so.
Cross my fingers.
We will have you back again, my friend.
Thank you so much.
It's been a real pleasure.
Good night.
Good night.
And that's it.
Dr. Michio Kaku.
I'm Art Bell.
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