Zachariah Sitchin’s 12th Planet theory claims Anunnaki from Nibiru genetically engineered humans 450,000 years ago for gold mining, later elevating them to partners every 3,600 years. Michio Kaku links this to string theory’s 10-dimensional vibrations, suggesting advanced civilizations could manipulate Planck energy for wormholes or teleportation. NASA’s $14B budget, mostly spent on the $100B ISS, could instead fund $0.3B Mars robotic missions, where Viking data confirms ancient riverbeds and oceans. Kaku critiques NASA’s Cold War-era priorities while acknowledging persistent conflicts may keep humanity stuck as a "type zero" civilization despite progress toward type 1 global unity. [Automatically generated summary]
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 land of ours and beyond.
From the Tahitian and Hawaiian Islands out west, visions of hammocks and native girls and drinks with umbrellas, eastward to the Caribbean, where there are similar visions, south into South America, north all the way to the pole, and worldwide on the internet.
This is Coast to Coast AM.
I'm Art Bell.
Coming up in just a moment is Zachariah Sitchin.
And Zachariah's time is always at a premium, so we've only been able to get him for an hour.
Sadly, only for an hour.
He promises one of these days he will spend an entire program with us and with what he's got to say.
Certainly, it takes that to get some of the information to you, but we'll do our best.
Zachariah Sitchin coming up shortly.
And then in the next hour, Neil Walsh, a fellow who has authored a best-selling book now called Conversations with God.
That's a little change in scheduling for tonight, but I did that because I got so many calls from so many of you who had read that book.
And what you had to say about it, I found shocking.
So we'll ask the author himself, Neil Walsh.
That's coming up in the next hour.
Zechariah Sitchin, one of a small number of Orientalists who can read these Sumerian clay tablets, which trace Earths and human events to their very earliest times, was born in Russia, raised in Palestine.
where he acquired a profound knowledge of modern and ancient Hebrew and of other Semitic and European languages, the Old Testament, and the history and archaeology of the Near East.
He graduated from the University of London, majoring in economic history, having attended the London School of Economics and Political Science, and after a writing career as a journalist, began writing his Earth Chronicle series of books.
Many thousands of years ago, a race of extraordinary visitors to planet Earth deciphered the cosmic code and used genetic engineering to short-circuit evolution and bring about us, Homo sapiens.
Their footprints include the vast monolithic structures on Earth and the surface of Mars.
Zachariah Sitchin, internationally acclaimed author, biblical scholar, and Orientalist, reconstructed in his books the events on Earth from the time the Anunnaki, those who from heaven came to Earth, had come here for gold, created Adam as a primitive worker, and after the deluge gave mankind increasingly sophisticated knowledge every 3,600 years when their planet Nibiru comes closer to Earth.
But the knowledge embedded in the Cosmic Code, his latest book, by the way, remained an enigma.
And so we'll ask him about Cosmic Code.
And here he is once again on the program.
Zachariah Sitchin, welcome back to the program, Zachariah.
I think everybody should be familiar with your theory of the 12th planet, but maybe you could take one second for those new listeners, and there are many who have never heard it, and tell them what it is.
Okay, if there are still any left that are not familiar, briefly it is my eighth book started with the twelfth planet 22 years ago, and it's still going strong.
And it answered the question by saying, based on archaeological evidence and texts that were considered sacred in antiquity, and some of them, like the Bible, are still held sacred and divinely inspired to this day.
And the answer was that yes, there is one more planet, not out there light years away from us, but in our own solar system, from which intelligent beings started to come and go between their planet and our planet about 450,000 years ago.
As you mentioned, their purpose for coming here was selfish.
They needed gold, which is still the only perhaps retainer of value compared to the paper currencies that are current.
Well, not for coins and not for currency and not for jewelry, but because this is the evidence, the answer that comes to us from primarily the Sumerian writings.
They apparently were losing atmosphere on their planet, which depended on its internal heat and its only atmosphere.
And if they would have lost it, they couldn't survive.
And they tried to create a shield of gold particles to protect their atmosphere and their planet and to be able to survive.
And at the beginning, they thought they'll get gold here the easy way from the waters of the Persian Gulf, but when it didn't work, they went to Southeast Africa, started mining, and there there's evidence of mining 80 and 100,000 years ago.
And at some point, when the few of them who were here, astronauts who were turned to the job of toil in the mines, mutinied.
A Sumerian text describes very vividly the mutiny.
Any of your listeners who have access to ancient literature may look up the so-called epic or myth of Atrahasis.
And in the course of the mutiny, the chief scientist, his name was Enki, said, I have a solution.
Let us create a Lulu Amelu, a primitive worker.
And when the others questioned him, said, How can you create a new being?
He said, oh no, the being that we need already exists.
All we have to do is put our genetic mark on it.
And then there are texts that describe a course, a trial and error of genetic engineering, trying to combine their genes with those of the hominids that already existed on earth until finally a perfect model was achieved.
And what I'm doing in my new book is not justly telling this general tale, but what I said to myself is if we would know, like a watchmaker who,
if he knows how the watch was put together, knows how to repair it, if we would study those ancient texts in detail, step by step, of how the genetic combination process took place and such texts exist, we would be far ahead in repairing the genetic defaults that are really the cause of our sicknesses.
So what I've done in this new book, the COSME Code, is really take it from the general to the individual.
There was the general story which I've told in the previous books.
And now I'm dealing with the issue of how can it affect, how can it cure each one of us individually.
There are, for example, texts that describe how the two Anunnaki, the chief scientist and the chief medical officers, trying to bring about what they call the perfect model, the Adam, how they tried by adding or detracting or subtracting this gene or that gene, came up with beings that had some defect.
For example, if they did it this way, then the being that they produced had only one kidney or was deaf.
Or some of them described what we call a genius or idiots that have a very low IQ, but they can really play fantastic music.
music.
They can remember music without notes.
And all these instances are described in the text.
What I'm saying that if others, not me, because I'm not a biologist, I can read ancient tablets, but I'm not a biologist, I'm not a geneticist.
But I see enough there that if people who are in the field and who are providing us almost daily with these headlines that here they find a way how to reach the stem cells and here they find a way how to fight cancer, etc.
If they would see detail by detail how we were made, how we were created step by step genetically, there would be a shortcut and time would be saved and they would be able to cure us and help avoid the maladies, especially the genetic ones, much quicker.
At the beginning, yes, but now we are unraveling the human genome.
As you said, we're getting very close.
Just a few more years.
And my question, Zachariah, is, when we do unravel it and we begin to modify our own genetic structure and use more of our brains and cure our sicknesses, the next time the Anunnaki come back, they're going to be rather surprised, aren't they?
I don't think so, because at the beginning, indeed, they just needed us for manpower, creating us as hybrids, and then through a second genetic manipulation, which is the story of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, gave us the ability to procreate.
But after the flood, after the deluge, they treated us as partners, not as workers for them, not as slaves, and started to give us knowledge.
We call it civilization.
And again, the text, which I now go into detail in this new book, The Cosmic Code, describe the methods by which that knowledge was transmitted and given to us.
And because I wondered, for example, many are familiar with the biblical tale of Moses going up to Mount Sinai and God dictating to him for 40 days and 40 nights information or instructions which spread over pages and pages and pages in the Bible.
And all that was, according to the same Bible, written on just two stone tablets.
So in what language was the dictation made?
How could so much information be contained just on two tablets which Moses could carry?
The Sumerian taste tells how much vaster information was carried on on whatever computer chips.
I say this because we don't know better technologically.
That could be hundreds of them carried in one hand.
So in what language, in what code?
Because all that, as is clear from both the Bible and from Mesopotamian texts, was transmitted through encoding in a kind of a shorthand.
And I'm trying to give the answer is the new book.
And that information is also the basis for all the prophecies and other events that happened in the last millennium BC.
So it is a vast yarn.
I'm trying to tell it in the new book as concisely as possible with illustrations, etc.
And hopefully it will serve its purpose and that is to stimulate interest by people whose business or profession it is to look at those ancient texts now with a more microscopic and believing eye.
Would you please now when we talked the other day before you came on the program you told me about a Catholic priest who had been following your work Father Charles Moore.
Well, he should certainly speak for himself, but may I say this, that About two years ago, a sitchin studies day was conducted in Denver, and he was one of the participants that contributed to the studies of that day.
Others were some college professors and others.
And all those proceedings are available in a book titled Of Heaven and Earth, and I hope we'll tell people how they can get it.
And so they can read and not just wait for the interview with you.
But what he said was this, that number one, what I did was I provide a bibliography of the Bible.
I give all the ancient sources on which the Bible is based.
So to understand the Bible, read Sitchin, he said.
Secondly, he said, in order to grasp the immensity of a cosmic God with the capital G, you have to accept the evidence of God's present on earth with the small G, which where the Anunnaki, those who from heaven to earth came.
And if, as I point in this new book, if you understand that they too had God with the capital G, the one that we really should accept and venerate, the cosmic God, then he says everything falls into place and any doubts people have about the veracity of the biblical story falls away and the whole thing becomes much clearer.
There were messengers, there were emissaries of the creator of the universe who came here.
You asked me why did the Anunnaki come here?
They thought that they are coming for their own selfish purposes, but indeed they were only carrying out some cosmic plan by the God of the whole universe.
And I have no doubt, and the book also deals interlia with the issues of what is the difference between fate and destiny, that we too have a destiny.
The fact that we were genetically engineered is not an accident.
It's not the will of just some visitor to Earth 300,000 years ago.
I think this is part of the destiny, part of the godly with the capital G plan, and that one day we will repeat the same thing.
We will go to some other planet and for our own selfish reasons and end up doing the same thing and carrying the seed of life from one planet to another, from one solar system to another.
He has published worldwide, beginning with the 12th planets, and now the newest, the latest, the most detailed, the Cosmic Code by Zachariah Sitchin.
That's what we're talking about, and we'll be right back.
In the Cosmic Code, Zachariah's latest book, the newest entry in a lifetime of research and writings based on Sumerian clay tablets, the Bible, and archaeological evidence in the Old and New World.
Zachariah Sitchin lifts the veil that has separated humanity's fate from its destiny and dares reveal the nature of prophecy in the Old and New Testaments and the secret code that links mankind to the stars.
In doing so, he reconstructed the dramatic events of the last millennium BC when a god, small G, returned to earth and another came back from exile and the last king of Babylon heard prophecies of the end days.
And I still have a hard time, Zachariah, understanding how any Catholic priest could accept the presence of gods with small G's.
Well, you have Father Charlie to ask, and I think he's a better man to answer than me.
I'm not a Catholic priest, but all those that truly believe in the biblical tales believe in angels, believe in emissaries, and that's really what the Anunnaki or the gods of antiquity with the small G where they were just emissaries and angels.
And once you read the word, for example, the term angel, which in Hebrew is Malach, literally means emissary.
Does not mean one with wings, means emissary.
So it is very easy once you grasp the difference between God, the Creator, with the capital G and his emissaries with the small G, I think everything falls into place.
But you will have him to ask.
But may I say this, Art, while when I in my writings or now and then speak of the ancient texts with all their information, genetic information, encoding information, etc., people may say, well, we don't read Sumerian.
We don't read Akkadian.
We don't even know Hebrew.
So we sort of have to take what Zachariah Sitchin says in trust, though there's no argument by anybody that those texts exist and they say what they say, except other scholars say, well, yes, there is such a text, but this is a myth.
And I say, no, it's not a myth.
These things really happen.
But there's evidence all around us.
And I've been traveling sometimes by myself to research, sometimes with small groups of my fans, to look at the evidence which is spread, as you said, both in the old world and the new world.
And I've been just barely two months ago in Syria and Lebanon.
In Lebanon, there is a place called Baalbek, which anyone can visit.
Now it's a little more safer than it used to be.
In the Cedar Mountains, there, the Sumerian text that call it the landing place, it is an immense structure with an immense stone platform that rises many, many feet, almost 100 meters high, built of colossal stone blocks, some of them weighing well over a thousand tons each, which someone, someone in antiquity,
according to the evidence even before the flood, quarried, picked up, and put in place, stone upon stone, that withstood all the earthquakes and other natural and man-made assaults on the place.
And when I was there trying to figure out whether it was really a landing place, the way the Sumerians called it, and then just two weeks later, it was at Cape Canaveral, the night there was a launch there of the shuttlecraft, I realized that indeed this was a giant stone-made launching pad.
If you go to Jerusalem, the so-called newly opened archaeological tunnel along the western wall, and I say that Jerusalem served after the flood as mission control center, you also come upon three colossal stone blocks weighing almost 600 tons each that somebody again quarried, brought over and then placed in place, not on the ground,
but lifting them and pushing them into place.
And that's something other evidence of pre-deluvial or certainly prehistoric activities by someone that people can see with their own eyes.
There's even a much smaller object.
I take pride in achieving a great achievement that the Archaeological Museum in Istanbul in Turkey has kept an object that was discovered 25 years ago that really depicts a one-man spacecraft.
And they did not put it on exhibit claiming that it's a fake.
I showed them that the reason to doubt whether it is a fake, maybe it is not a fake, and persuaded them to put it on exhibit so that people could come and judge for themselves.
So there's evidence like that all around us.
People do not have to devote a lifetime to studying Sumerian or Akkadian or Egyptian hieroglyphics.
And I really urge people to go to these various places, to the various museums.
In the British Museum, and I give illustrations in my books, there is a round tablet that really depicts the route, the space travel route between Nibiru and our planet, which they call the seventh planet, as anyone would who comes in from the outside into our solar system.
So the evidence is all around us.
And I mention it, I show illustrations, but people can go and see with their own eyes.
And I think this is really the beauty of the fact that they don't really have to rely on me saying this text says this or that text says that.
People should really have an open mind and seek or search for the truth by themselves.
All the scriptures, if that's the right word to refer to them, say that the last things will be the first things.
The first things are the last things.
This is stated by all the prophets of the Old Testament.
This is repeated in the New Testament Book of Revelation.
And there's no doubt, and this is part of the answer of this code, that how could prophecy exist unless somebody could refer to records or information of the first things and an indication that this will be repeated.
There are cycles, there are repetitions, and not only for events on earth or not only the comings and goings every 3,600 years, but cycles like that and repetitions in the universe.
And what was done to us, we will go and do to others.
Well, it's available in all major bookstores, but there are other things that are not readily available, like the book that I mentioned that records what Fathers Charlie Moore and others have said, which is of heaven and earth.
I think if they actually buy some of the video or this book of heaven and earth, they may even get as a bonus as a special for my appearance on your talk show art because they got for free.
What you just cited some archaeological evidence, very ancient evidence.
What other evidence would you cite?
There are many people who say if all this was true, there should have been great amounts of evidence all over the earth, if not above, then below ground.
Well, I mentioned some of the evidence, which people call archaeological evidence, but some I know question it by saying if they were really here and if they came and went and if they did this and they did that, where is the screwdriver?
This is how we among us say it's the question of the sc the missing screwdriver.
But my answer is this.
If they had the technology 450,000 years ago to come and go between their planet and our planet, what would be our technology in 450,000 years from now?
Will we still be using screwdrivers?
Will we still be using computers based on electronics?
Or will we, as the indication is, and I deal with it in my new book, will we use DNA?
for computing, for retaining and transmitting information.
Will we be using metals that rust?
Or will we use biodegrading materials?
So in order to answer or deal with this question, that we seek the evidence based on what we know.
I sometimes say I show an illustration of two astronauts, two Anunnaki, saluting a rocket ship.
But I myself, if this were shown to me 50 or 100 years ago, I would say, well, the two beings saluting a very large pencil.
And if somebody would say, no, no, no, that's a rocket, I would say, what?
A rocket?
What's a rocket?
So we are all, I myself included, we are captives of our technology.
When the text described how the Anunnaki had or retained or kept their information on some tiny, tiny bits of something, I say, well, it's something like computer chips.
But will we use computer chips half a million years from now?
Will we use, I sometimes say, it is really funny to me, all this search called SETI, you know, search for extraterrestrial intelligence.
Well, I have not dealt yet in my books with this issue.
And the question does come up.
You know, I've been traveling, I've been addressing large audiences or having interviews on the air.
And I feel that there's a need, I really must deal with this issue.
And to me, it It is not the question of was a certain person the son of God, because this really diminishes, diminishes the subject or the fact that so many millions venerate this personality, because there were many others.
There were Egyptian pharaohs before Jesus who claimed that they are sons of God.
Alexander the Great rushed from Macedonia to an oasis in Egypt.
And that some say was the real reason for his conquest in order to verify a rumor that existed in the court of Macedonia that his real father was not King Philip, but was an Egyptian God, the God Todd.
And he went all the way to the oasis of Siwa to consult an oracle and said that this was concerned.
So to call somebody the Son of God was really not only nothing new, but was, I think, even degrading.
I think the issue is that at that time there was messianic expectation that things would happen, that a contact, a contact with the cosmos, with God, with the capital G is imminent.
And I think this is really the issue to face or tackle, which I intend to do hopefully in one more book concerning Jesus.
Is it possible, I have something for you to consider, Zachariah, that if we had a sample of the DNA of Jesus, now there are many recorded miracles performed by Jesus, is it possible that if we had a sample of his DNA, that we would find subtle or even large differences in the DNA?
You may be really making a very important suggestion because if indeed the what is it called in Turin, the shroud of the truth, contains remainders of the blood of Jesus, then it has the DNA of Jesus.
And I think that what you have just asked as a question should be made into a very forceful suggestion and something that whoever possesses that shroud, I don't know if it's the Vatican or just a certain church in Italy, in one place, I think that you really raised a tremendous and tremendous issue and something that ought to be done and not just to be speculated upon.
But they did consider those who came to Earth as visitors and taught the Sumerians, they did consider planets as living, as living objects, not as dead bodies, but as something that has its own life cycles and history and origin and a beginning and an end, perhaps.
So to them, planets were living organisms the way the Greeks later on called referred to Gaia.
And there's a whole discussion, I mean, even academic circles called the theory of Gaia, that planets are really living organisms.
Yes, there are also modern astronomers like Professor Van Flandren who believe that there is a great deal of energy within all planets and that suns in fact derive their energy from the planets that revolve around them.
And that, of course, would answer the question of how Nibru is able to survive though it travels far outside the sphere of our sun in a very long cycle.
Right now, I try to sleep in my own bed for a week or two because I've been, I've been invited to speak, and I did speak in Vienna and in Zurich and in Mexico, and I've been all over, and it's time to speak food to celebrate Thanksgiving with my family and welcome the new year here.
From the high desert and the great American Southwest, I bid you all good evening or good morning, as the case may be.
Across all these many varied time zones, and they are varied from the Tahitian and Hawaiian Islands out west, east to the Caribbean and the U.S. Virgin Islands.
Good morning in St. Thomas.
South all the way to South America and north to the Pole and worldwide on the internet.
Thank youbroadcast.com.
This is Coast to Coast AM, and I'm Art Bell.
And tonight you are to be graced with the presence of one of our nation's greatest theoretical physicists, Dr. Michio Kaku.
I'll tell you more about him in a moment.
First, I have an announcement to make.
And I'll give you whatever news there seems to be today.
The announcement is that for the next three days, Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday, I am going to be gone.
Now, the reason I'm going to be going relates in some way to the reason for my absence from the radio, period.
But I will only be gone three days, and it's something I have to tend to.
So there will be some intriguing repeats for you to listen to over the next three nights while I take care of some very important stuff.
Let me put it that way.
And then I'll be back on Monday.
As a matter of fact, Monday, Major Ed Dames is going to be here, Citex Majorette Dames.
And Tuesday, guess who I just booked for Tuesday?
You may remember, we just finished doing a show on these new majestic documents that are sweeping the country that were supplied by Dr. Robert Wood.
Well, the man who gave the documents to Robert Wood, Dr. Wood, is Tim Cooper.
And Tim Cooper wrote a fact to me and said, hey, Art, I am the researcher who turned over the Cantwheel Majestic documents to Dr. Wood.
There is more to tell.
If you're interested, you can contact me at so-and-so.
And I didn't waste two minutes in picking up the telephone, of course, and making that call.
So the man who delivered the documents to Dr. Wood, who would know perhaps where they came from and has apparently information not even contained in these volumes of documents, will be my guest on Tuesday.
But again, let me tell you that in something related to the reason that I left the air in the first place, related to it, I'm going to be gone for the next three days, Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday.
And then we'll be back Monday.
Having said that, looking at the news, what a shock.
The top news item is, Clinton loses key GOP support.
He had some, you mean?
In fact, I guess several House Republican moderates announced their support for impeachment, prompting the president to weigh advice to make an explicit, last-minute confession of wrongdoing to stop the GOP slide.
And then the second headline is, GOP report seeks Clinton removal.
Otherwise, Endeavor is back on Earth.
Iraq is still screwing around with arms and the inspectors.
Nothing new there.
A court has ruled that Libya can be sued in the bombing of the downing of Pan Am Flight 103.
And that's about it.
Now, coming up in a moment, something far more interesting than any of that.
Dr. Michio Kaku.
He is a professor of theoretical physics at the City College of New York.
He is co-founder of the String Field Theory.
I know that sounds like something you can't understand or won't understand or make glaze over your eyes, but trust me on this.
You're going to like this.
You're going to understand it because he is in it.
Really, I think that Dr. Kaku is stepping into the large shoes left by the sad passing, the very, very sad passing of Carl Sagan, which still affects me.
I'm so sorry that Carl is gone.
He is the author of the critically acclaimed and best-selling Hyperspace, as well as Beyond Einstein, Quantum Field Theory, a modern introduction, and introduction to superstrings.
He also has his own weekly radio science program that is nationally syndicated.
Boy, you know, I said it at the beginning of the program, and I made the analogy of you and the late Dr. Carl Sagan, because you both have the ability in your fields uniquely to explain something that normally could never be explained to a regular person, and yet you're able to somehow get them to understand what you're talking about.
Well, you know, I think part of it is that both of us share an enthusiasm.
That is, we see the wonders of the universe, and we think that what's out there is so fantastic, so neat, that it really has to be told to as many people as we can possibly reach.
And we share that childlike wonder looking at the heavens.
For example, 1998 has been a banner year in terms of cosmology and astronomy.
And we want to share the fact that in our own Milky Way galaxy, for example, we have now identified a black hole, a black hole right in our own backyard, practically a hop, skip, and a jump away from us.
Black holes can reach that kind of energy, 10 to the 19 billion electron volts.
And some of us believe that at the center of a black hole, there could really be a gateway, a gateway to perhaps another portion of our universe, or perhaps even an anti-universe.
We're not sure.
But our civilization is too puny, you know.
Like I mentioned before on your show, we physicists believe that there are type 1, type 2, type 3 civilizations.
Right now, we are, of course, helpless against the 11-year sunspot cycle.
And in fact, our astronauts, of course, have to be told ahead of time that they're going into a sunspot cycle.
But a type 2 civilization would simply say, hey, let's turn off the sun for a little bit and make sure that there's no disturbance coming from our sun.
Well, turn off the energy bursts that come from the sun.
And then a type 3 civilization has exhausted the power of just one star, and they are galactic.
You know, the recent Star Trek movie that's out, for example, which is the number one movie in the country, and that's the Federation of Planets, which is a Type 2 civilization.
And Captain Kirk and Captain Jean-Luc Picard basically deal with just a few planetary systems in a tiny little sector of a galaxy.
The reason I like the movie, and I thought the second half of it, But the first half of it, you know, when they came to the explanation of we don't want to bargain, we don't want to negotiate, we don't want to talk to you, all we want to do is kill you.
Yes, there has been some speculation among physicists about that fact that if a civilization attains type 4 status, they would have enough computer power to recreate realities of some sort.
And they may simply have a supercomputer with a hard disk, and they may simply want to run simulations like we run simulations in our supercomputers.
Like in my computer, I can run simulations of colliding black holes, for example.
Well, perhaps the Q may put in his, in his super CD-ROM, a simulation of our galaxy.
In which case, this phone conversation that we're having right now could be simply a simulation in somebody's CD-ROM.
Well, sure, but if you imagine that there can be a type 4, a type Q, I hope there's lots of Star Trek fans, and I trust there are out there, who know who Q is, then you really do have to imagine that as one distinct possibility.
Doctor, when I was 12 years old, I was beginning to get an intense interest in electronics.
And I lived at that time in Media, Pennsylvania.
And down the street from me lived a physicist who was deeply involved.
He explained it to me, and I can only explain it to you as he did to me, in trying to get reactions like nuclear reactions from materials other than uranium.
That's the work he was doing.
Is that theoretically possible?
I mean, he would tell me that in the desk in front of you, there is more potential energy if you knew how to unleash it than the world could even handle.
Well, if you have antimatter, which, in fact, when I was in high school, I used to play with antimatter and I photographed antimatter and I went to the National Science Fair and won Grand Prize manipulating antimatter.
If you have large quantities of antimatter, it will annihilate with ordinary matter.
And this is not science fiction.
We do this every day with our atom smashers in Switzerland and in Chicago, outside Chicago.
Then, yeah, even a small piece of rock on your table would be enough to create the energy of a hundred hydrogen bombs.
As a matter of fact, the man's name, I'm sure he's no longer with us, was Dr. Paul Weiss.
And he used to spend afternoons with me teaching me theory and code and electronics and giving me little hints of what he did or the kind of work he was doing.
That was his name, Dr. Paul Weiss.
Wonder if anybody knows him or remembers him.
I'm Art Bell.
This is Coast to Coast AM.
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This is Premier Networks.
That was Art Bell hosting Coast to Coast AM on this Somewhere in Time.
Einstein spent the last 30 years of his life chasing after the theory of everything, an equation one inch long that would allow him to, quote, read the mind of God.
It was an equation one inch long that would unify all the four fundamental forces into one coherent equation.
It would explain gravity, the electromagnetic force, like radio and light.
It would explain the weak nuclear force, which governs radioactive decay, and the strong nuclear force, which helps to light up the sun.
All that was to be included in one equation into one theory, and he failed.
He spent 30 years of his life chasing after this theory of everything, and he blew it.
He couldn't do it.
Well, today we think we have it.
Today, we actually have a candidate for the theory of everything.
Right, which would allow us to calculate what is called quantum gravity.
Quantum gravity is the most exotic.
It's the most gorgeous branch in all of physics.
Quantum gravity is what dominates the instant of the Big Bang and would explain to us what happened before the Big Bang.
Quantum gravity dominates the center of a black hole and would allow us to go through the center of the black hole.
So all the interesting phenomenon as to where the universe came from and what happens at the center of a black hole, we have to go to a theory of everything.
A theory of everything may eventually give us the ability to go through wormholes, perhaps.
This is a question mark, of course.
Perhaps to drill a hole in space and to leap across millions of light years in an instant.
The particle of glue that glues the quarks together are called gluons.
And it's called the color force because the quarks come in three colors.
And so this is called quantum chromodynamics.
And it's the theory of the strong interactions.
So we now have an understanding as to why we don't see individual quarks because they're bound together very tightly by these gluons which hold the quarks together.
We think that in hyperspace there is enough room to accommodate all the fundamental interactions.
Now, we string theorists have the last laugh.
Now, all the major Ivy League schools and the major technical schools are scrambling to hire as many string theorists as they can.
Harvard now has hired two string theorists.
Princeton has three of them now.
Caltech has hired several.
They're all giant cum latelys, but they all begin to realize that, hey, this is the only game in town.
This could be it.
This could be, quote, reading the mind of God.
The mind of God could be in hyperspace, in other words, because only in hyperspace do we have enough room to accommodate all four fundamental forces into equations that can be compressed to just a few inches.
That's what's fantastic.
This is what's causing all the shock waves reverberating through the world of physics.
The latest incarnation of string theory is called M-theory.
If you've been reading the New York Times, you know that.
They had horses and carriages that went five miles per hour.
So he must have cried realizing that he had a theory, an equation one inch long, that would allow him to predict what it would take to manipulate gravity to reach the moon.
He couldn't imagine that one day we would have rocket ships.
Well, today, we physicists feel like Newton.
have a theory a theory of ten dimensions which would allow us to manipulate space allow us to play with space and time like the cube perhaps do you but we don't have the energy to do that do Do you actually have the mathematical formula that you believe proves this?
Well, proving it experimentally is extremely difficult because we would have to recreate...
Doctor, do you think that it will take a virtual evolution in humankind or possibly a savant of some sort to come along and do what Einstein did and take the next step?
Or do you think that, as you said, some young physicist will come along and do it?
The first inkling of strings came in 1968 when two young postdocs at CERN, Geneva, Switzerland, were flipping through a math book of all things and came across the Euler beta function.
And that rocked the foundations of physics when the first indication that there could be simplicity coming from hyperspace rocked the world of theoretical physics.
And then the theory died in the 1970s because no one could believe that the mind of God could be in 10 dimensions.
But now, like I said before, it's the dominant theory in theoretical physics.
If you look at any physics journal, all the big papers on quantum gravity are not dominated by string theory.
It's even worked its way into science fiction, in comic books now.
It's such a powerful theory now.
In comic books, they even refer to string theory.
And I get all sorts of email from science fiction writers who want to incorporate string theory into their latest version of how we will go to the star and see wormholes and stuff like that.
So it's worked its way into the mainstream now.
And in Stephen Hawking's universe, the six-part series and PBS, I was in part six.
And in part six, Ed Witten, who's the leader of the field, and myself, explained what this theory is.
This is probably the greatest theory ever formulated in the history of humankind, the crowning achievement of 2,000 years of work on the nature of matter and space and time.
But we were careful to say that it's not finished yet.
We can't solve the equations.
We're not smart enough yet.
We're not clever enough to solve these equations.
But if you want to see what these equations look like, you can go to Amazon.com and see references to my book, Introduction to Superstrings, which has all these equations listed for you.
The physical picture of little strings creating musical notes, that our bodies are symphonies of strings, that the harmonies of a string are the laws of physics.
The physics can be reduced to the harmony of music.
In fact, we physicists hate to admit this, but we owe a great debt to the mystics of the turn of the century who tried to capture higher dimensions and to visualize them.
And the techniques they invented back in 1900 or so are still used in mathematics textbooks to visualize higher dimensions, to visualize hypercubes and hyperspheres.
You know, when I was a kid, I used to dream that I could leap into the fourth dimension just by jumping up into the sky.
Now I realize I can't do that because, you know, again, think of fish in a pond, a fish carp swimming beneath the lily pads in a pond.
They think that two dimensions is all there is in the universe.
Their eyes point to the side of their face.
They swim beneath the lily pads.
And this shallow pond of theirs, they think, is the universe.
That's all there is in the universe.
And I used to go to the Japanese tea garden in San Francisco and just spend hours watching the carp swim swim beneath the lily pads in two dimensions.
And I used to wonder what happens if I were to grab one of the fish and lift them into hyperspace, the third dimension, where they would see a whole universe just outside their silly little pond.
Well, to show you why you're doing what you're doing, and I'm now doing what I'm doing when I was that age, I was jumping off of a very tall barns with umbrellas trying to fly.
Let me tell you, coming up this weekend, this Sunday on Dreamland, a brand new show, is William Buhlmann.
And we're going to be talking about the exact thing we left off this last hour talking about, out of body experiences.
That'll be coming up on Dreamland this coming Sunday.
In a moment, back to Dr. Kaku.
Dr. Michio Kaku, one of our nation's greatest theoretical physicists, is our guest.
And we were, actually, it worked rather well what I just did because I am doing a show this coming Sunday that I recorded earlier today, Doctor, on out-of-body travel.
And we were talking about the metaphysical and the kind of work that you do, and that there is a kind of a loose, rarely acknowledged relationship between the two.
The reason why he painted those melted clocks was he was trying to represent time as the fourth dimension.
And in the painting New Descending Staircase, where you see a sequence of the human body walking down a staircase, New Descending Staircase was also an attempt to represent time as the fourth dimension on canvas.
And in Picasso's painting, everyone wonders why is it that the woman's face, you can see her nose and her eyes and her lips, even if she's facing sideways all at the same time.
Picasso was trying to represent the fourth dimension with these women.
Because if you are peering down on the pond and look at the fish, you can see the fish in their entirety, the whole fish, all at once.
Which means that a hyper-being looking down on you could see the front and side and back simultaneously.
That's what Picasso was trying to do with cubism.
The essence of cubism is, in fact, the fourth dimension.
And so we sometimes forget the tremendous debt that we owe the artists, the mystics, the philosophers at the turn of the century who tried to grapple with representations of these higher dimensions in their artwork, their music, and in their artistic creations.
And we mathematical physicists steal, basically, many of the techniques that they pioneered at the turn of the century in our journals.
When we write journals, we use many of the techniques that they pioneered to represent higher dimensions graphically with, and today, of course, we can use PCs and computers.
But we owe a lot of debt to the people of the turn of the century who tried to represent the fourth dimension in their art, in their philosophy, and in their work.
Do you think, Doctor, that some of what is now in the field of the metaphysical, and there are certain things well documented, yogis, things yogis can do that they ought not be able to do, and some psychics and so forth and so on.
Do you think that there ever will be a scientific explanation for what they can do?
That will be when perhaps the theory of everything is upon us.
Well, if you can manipulate these higher dimensions at will, if you are looking down on the pond, looking down on the fish in this very, very shallow pond that are swimming in two dimensions, you would have the power of a god.
That is, you'd be able to lift the fish, make them disappear off the pond, and put them someplace else in the pond.
That's teleportation.
That's disappearing and reappearing someplace else.
To you, of course, it's nothing but lifting a fish in the third dimension.
But to a fish, the third dimension is hyperspace.
So their eyes only look to the side.
They can't see up.
Up makes no sense if you spent your entire life in a shallow two-dimensional pond.
And if you can imagine, you know, people living on a tabletop, two-dimensional stick figures living on a tabletop, you could peer inside their bodies, inside their bodies.
Their guts would be open to you, and you could perform surgery without cutting their skin.
Now imagine that, doing surgery without cutting the skin of a person.
Imagine taking the meat of an orange without even cutting the shell of the orange.
A safe with gold in it would be nothing but a square with little pieces of gold in it that is totally open to you.
You can simply reach into the middle of a clothes safe and take out the gold.
Now, so I'm not saying that there are beings that live in higher dimensions.
But if there really were beings that could move in these higher dimensions, that is type 3 people that have harnessed this kind of power, you could walk through walls, you could disappear, reappear, you could look with x-ray vision right into a safe and take out the gold without breaking the safe, taking out the gold without breaking the safe.
You could perform surgery without cutting people's skin.
And these are feats, of course, that many mystics claim that they can perform.
Now, all I'm saying is, if you attain type 3 status, then the Planck energy, this 10 to the 19 billion electron volts, is yours for the taking, by definition.
And civilization with that kind of galactic power can manipulate energy on that scale.
At which point, space and time become unstable.
Holes begin to form, holes into hyperspace.
And if you could access that and play with it, then in principle, all the feats that you see talked about, walking through walls, disappearing, performing surgery, would be child's play, the same thing that you could do with a stick figure living on a tabletop, basically.
I was about to say that doesn't make sense to me because if we imagine a big bang, boom, it's like an explosion where what is blown up moves out very quickly at the instant of the explosion, but then the velocity of these pieces and parts begins to slow, gravity finally pulling them back to the ground.
Until it reaches absolute zero, near absolute zero.
And that's pretty depressing.
I mean, sometimes I say to myself, why should I wake up tomorrow morning knowing that eventually the universe itself is going to wind down, that the stars will blink out, that eventually the galaxies will collapse into black holes, and everything is going to become dark and cold, and intelligent life is going to huddle next to the embers of dying neutron stars.
In our universe, if the universe gets so cold that we have to huddle like homeless people next to the embers of dying black holes, if it gets to that point, I would suggest that we use the Planck energy to drill a hole in space and leave our universe and go into another universe.
This is called the multiverse idea, which is now the dominant theory in cosmology.
There are now about three or four books written by leading cosmologists on the multiverse idea.
If our universe is a balloon and the balloon is ever expanding and accelerating, getting colder and colder and colder to the point where our machines don't work anymore, we may want to take a lifeboat and drill a hole and go through a wormhole, slide, slide between our universe and the next universe.
There's a Fox TV program called Sliders, and on the very first episode of Sliders, they show a copy of my book, Hyperspace.
A boy is reading my book, and that starts the whole series, basically, called Sliders.
Now, I do not believe that I will slide in my lifetime or the lifetime of my great-great-great-grandkids.
But it is conceivable that billions of years from now, when we do attain, let's say, type 3 status, or type 4 perhaps, we will see the universe dying, and we will be very much tempted to build machines which will allow us to slide to the next bubble.
Now, we better put the caveat in here that we never got to when you gave the explanation of the various levels of civilizations, and that caveat was, in past shows we've talked about it.
You said, percentage-wise, type zero civilizations, i.e. us, very rarely make it to be type one civilizations after discovery of element 92.
And the last time you and I spoke, I think we had just witnessed Pakistan lighting off a nuke and India lighting off a nuke and the bulletin of atomic scientists went and moved their clock further toward midnight and all the rest of it.
You know, two weeks ago, the USA Today reported that one of the main agencies of the Pentagon that handles the command and control of our nuclear arsenal falsified, falsified data and claimed that they were in compliance with Y2K when they were not.
They told me I was a crackpot, and I noticed two weeks ago on 60 Minutes they validated just about everything that we've been having on this show for a long time now.
And I talk to friends of mine who program big banking programs in Wall Street.
And they tell me that they're hired for a week or two weeks, and they add a small little tentacle to a huge computer program, and then they're fired because they go on to the next project.
And after 20, 30 years, you begin to get an octopus with thousands of these little tentacles created by programmers who are hired for two weeks, do their job, and then they're fired.
Each little tentacle in turn could have a Y2K problem associated with it.
Well, why don't they change it?
Because anyone who tampers with the octopus could perhaps accidentally crash the whole system and cause hundreds of billions of dollars in trading losses.
Yeah, and as a consequence, a second Swedish utility got very nervous, and so it deliberately set its clock forward to 1999, and sure enough, its nuclear power plant would have crashed if it had simply waited to 1999.
So this is the first example of a nuclear power plant that fortunately did not melt down, but simply just shut down as a consequence of hitting a reference, not the year 2000, but a reference to the year 2000.
And so my point of view is that in the main, we're going to get 99% of these bugs eliminated.
We're spending billions of dollars on them.
But only a few percent are necessary to bring down very critical systems.
I think in the United States, we're going to see cripplings of certain major networks, which ones we don't know for sure.
But I think in Russia, and I think in other areas of the world where they simply don't have the cash to duplicate their octopuses and run the program by sitting the clock forward, that's the only way to do it, really.
And they also have embedded chips in their watches and in their refrigerators and what have you, that they're going to have the same kind of problem, except they're not throwing billions of dollars at this problem.
So I think in the rest of the world, you're not going to have a 99% compliance.
You're going to have maybe a 50% compliance because they simply don't have the money.
Well, do you know that on any given night, the Prime Minister of Great Britain said this, billions and billions, if not trillions of dollars flash across the world in trades.
Now, if the rest of the world is not ready, if the Japanese stock market, if the Chinese, the Hong Kong stock market, the rest of them, the British, the French, the Germans, if they're not ready, and we are, it won't make a whole lot of difference, will it?
So do I. Doctor, here's something I want to understand, and maybe you can help me with the power grid.
I always thought that the power grid, as we understand it, existed so that if one little area lost power, it could draw power from another area.
And it existed so that like watertight doors in a submarine, if one compartment flooded, the door would slam shut, preventing the sinking and the death of all involved as you implode at crush depth.
So in other words, it was supposed to stop this cascade of events.
But we've had several examples in the western U.S. of exactly the opposite.
One little tiny problem in Idaho in some little substation somewhere taking down the western third of U.S., Canada, and Mexico.
Yeah, because the system actually operates slightly differently.
One of my friends works for a power company and explained to me that if there's a power outage in one area, you don't want to inconvenience a few thousand people.
So they draw power from the neighboring area.
And in the main, it works perfectly fine.
You simply borrow power from the next.
But if you overload it, then they in turn borrow power from the next, borrow power from the next, until you have this domino effect.
And the domino effect can ripple out and cripple whole power systems.
Now, you may say to yourself, well, they must have compensated for this, right?
But the probability of this happening is so small, and therefore they tend to overlook this problem as a serious problem.
When it brings down the other parts of the system.
So in the Maine, power companies think it's not going to happen, so don't worry about it.
But when it does happen, by saving the power of a few thousand people, you then deprive power to millions of people, and that's why you can bring down whole power systems because it's a self-fulfilling prophecy.
People say it's not going to happen.
Let's not put in the circuit breakers.
Let's not shut off power and inconvenience people and get a thousand angry people at us.
So what happens now is that you can bring down power systems and have a million angry people at you.
For you and I to be able to do what we are now doing requires, let us think about it for a moment, a lot of equipment on my end.
It requires a KU-band uplink that goes to a KU-band satellite, comes back down in Oregon, is mixed and matched, sent back up on another KU-band satellite, which goes to New Jersey, which then sends it up to a great big satellite, which sends it down to all the radio stations.
At the present time, I don't think anyone can say with confidence precisely what's going to happen because it's a race against time.
At least in the States, we're throwing billions of dollars at the problem.
But inevitably, we're going to overlook a few problems here, a few embedded chips there, and inevitably some of the systems are going to be brought down.
I think a few critical systems, I'm not sure which ones, are going to go down.
And around the world, a large number of critical systems could go down.
And all of this is going to occur as people are probably celebrating bringing in the millennium with lots of champagne and they're going to be partying like crazy and midnight is going to come and poof.
And people kept telling me, don't worry about it, you're not responsible, it's not going to happen during our watch, let the next poor jerk worry about it.
And the next poor jerk said the same thing, it's not going to crash during my watch.
I want to be in Florida, i'm going to be retired by the year 2000, so let the next poor jerk worry about it.
And so everyone passed the buck, saying that yes, we know about this problem, we've written about it.
But hey look, i'm not responsible, it'll take people off my job to work on the Y2k.
Well, I think there are going to be a lot of responsible people.
Um, you know, I live in Manhattan, where we have the bridges that are falling apart the Brooklyn Bridge, the Manhattan Bridge yes, but every mayor of New York says well, they're not, the bridges are not going to fall during my watch.
Let me just put a little band-aid on it and let the next poor mayor, the next poor jerk, worry about it.
All right, you said earlier that a lot of the uh things that we imagine for thousands of years, hundreds or thousands of years into the future right, we can't do now because we don't have the computer power for it or the brain power.
And yet computer power and speed is, I forget, doubling every 18 months or something like More's law.
You know, faster and faster and faster, as storage is increasing exponentially.
Uh, because silicon uh, cannot be etched at the molecular level.
We're going to have transistors the size of molecules by then and silicon is not stable at that level.
So um, Silicon Valley could become a rust belt by 2015.
They're going to see real serious problems etching transistors uh, you know billions of them in in an area the size of your fingernail and they're going to be unstable.
And by 2020 silicon, the age of silicon will end, just like the age of vacuum tubes.
Uh, we may have to go to a new generation of computers, optical computers that compute on laser beams, quantum dots that compute on individual electrons, Dna computers that compute on dna molecules, protein computers, and the ultimate computer is the quantum computer, which does not yet exist.
But you know, in the year 2020 you may see a homeless person with a tin cup selling pencils that look suspiciously like bill gates.
Because the age of silicon, the laws of physics say the age of silicon must end, just like the age of vacuum tubes ended.
So Moore's law may begin to break down in 20 years.
In other words, as we get faster, as storage increases, at some point, is it possible, I'm asking you very godlike questions, but is it not possible that a computer will attain what we know to be consciousness, self-awareness?
Okay, well, in my book, Visions, I have a whole chapter on the next 50 years of computers.
In fact, the next 100 years of computers.
Now, our brain computes at about 500 trillion bytes per second.
As you listen to this radio station, your brain is computing at 500 trillion bytes per second.
So the next time your boss, by the way, thinks that you're not performing that well, you tell your boss, you're calculating at 500 trillion bytes per second.
Now, it turns out that by Moore's Law, you can calculate when our PCs will hit that speed.
Yeah, but you see, by 2050, 2050, if Moore's Law were to hold, which it won't, but if Moore's Law were to hold to 2050, then you would have machines that are every bit as fast as our brain is.
But that's not going to happen.
Because by 2020, the age of silicon will end.
We're going to have to have a new type of computer that computes on molecules.
We will be computing on molecules because that's what our brain does.
Our brain is a beautiful molecular computer.
They exist.
Just take a look in the mirror.
You know, that 10 pounds of stuff you have on your shoulders is a molecular computer.
And its transistors, its transistors are on that kind of scale, the scale of molecules.
And that's where we're going to have to go.
We're going to have to go in that direction.
And that's why I think that real thinking machines, machines that have consciousness, will not happen by 2050 because of this problem.
Maybe late in the 21st century.
But some probably have silicon consciousness.
They're not going to think like us.
They'll have a different type of consciousness.
But I think that eventually they'll get closer and closer to our ability to think.
And in my book, by the way, I've interviewed some of the leading people in artificial intelligence theory.
And they all tell me the same thing, that we should have one hand firmly on their plug when we reach that fantastic computation speed, just so that we can yank their plug if they get uppity and too smart allocates.
I mean, from our perspective, they will think logically and as quickly or even eventually faster than we do, no doubt creating their own successors, like nanotechnology tells us.
And eventually, even if we think we have our hand on the plug, they're smarter than we are.
In the 22nd century now, when we do have optical computers or quantum computers that can compute at the molecular level and have machines that are every bit as fast as us, some computer scientists are not worried about this because they claim that we will merge with them, that we are creating the next successor, a homo superior, basically, is what we are creating.
Individuals that will be bioengineered that will have cybernetics included.
They'll be stronger, healthier, prettier, you know, can compute faster and have better personalities and won't be so cranky and what have you.
We could be creating our successors.
Now, I don't know about this, but I was shocked to find that many of the leading people in this field believe this, that we are creating the next step in human evolution, homo superior, that'll be half machine, half genetically engineered to be better than us.
Now, I say that we need enormous democratic controls over this technology.
You know, the ability to create stem cells that could give us a form of immortality, the ability to control telomerase, which will slow the aging process, and the ability to create, you know, computer chips that are every bit as fast as parts of our brain.
Two developments just in 1998 have shocked the world of biology.
One took place this last month with the discovery of human stem cells, which means that one day when our children, our grandchildren, are born, we may create spare parts for them.
We're going to talk about longevity, and I mean longevity with Dr. Michio Kaku in a moment.
As you know, I interview Dr. Klatz frequently, and there really have been a lot of advances recently.
Things that will eventually lead to longer and longer lives, hundreds of years, perhaps, maybe even eternity.
And according to Dr. Klatz, even the possibility, if we can hang on, if you and I can hang on for, say, another 30 years, even the possibility of moving backwards, getting younger.
Can you imagine that?
Is it possible?
unidentified
We will ask Dr. Kaku in a moment to Dr. Michio Kaku.
And just last month, they were isolated for the first time in history.
1998 is a banner year, not just for cosmology, but for biotechnology and the aging process, which means that within five to ten years, according to many of the Nobel laureates and directors of laboratories that I interviewed for my book, Visions, in five to ten years, we'll probably grow the first human liver.
The liver is not that complicated.
It's just a few tissues.
There are about 200 tissues that make up the human body.
The liver is not that complicated on that scale.
And Mickey Mantle, who was a hard-drinking man, right?
Mickey Mantle died because his liver gave out.
And there are thousands of people in line for livers and kidneys.
And in five to ten years, we will start to grow the first of these organs of the human body.
Skin cells already, by the way, can already be grown.
We can grow about two acres of skin from just a few of your skin cells.
And that, of course, would be a godsend in case of a burn.
Burn victims can be saved by being wrapped in their own skin.
And in the future, near future now, because we've isolated the stem cells, we expect to grow livers and perhaps kidneys.
The higher organs are more difficult.
The heart and the other organs have many kinds of tissues and are going to be more difficult to grow.
But we see this happening as organs begin to wear out.
We will simply have spare parts.
And in the future, when children are born, chances are we'll take a few of their embryonic stem cells near birth, at birth, and freeze them as basically spare parts for our children when they're born.
This is, of course, still science fiction, but what is not science fiction is the discovery last month that the holy grail, the holy grail of embryology, was finally found.
Now, in January of this year, the holy grail of the aging process was finally found.
Human skin cells were taken by the Geron Corporation and placed in a petri dish.
Usually human skin cells age by dividing 50 times.
They get old and then they die.
In fact, that's one of the main reasons why we die, because our cells only reproduce about 50 times and then they die.
Isn't the ultimate answer, I mean, cancer, what is cancer?
Cancer is the out-of-control, continuous growth of cells, multiplication of cells, out of control until it finally chokes everything out and kills you.
We now realize that cancer, when it spins out of control, it stops the telomers from contracting to zero, and therefore cancer cells are immortal, just like stem cells are immortal.
These are pictures published in the National Inquirer.
Children look like plucked birds.
They lose all their hair.
They have the features of a bird.
Their teeth fall out.
They die of a heart attack by the time they hit puberty.
That is a gene called progeria, which also accelerates the aging process.
It shortens the telomers real fast.
So we now realize that these telomers are involved with either speeding up or stopping the aging process.
Cancer stops the aging process cold, while progeria accelerates the aging process.
Now, if you can fine-tune this, and this is the key, if you can locate all the AIDS genes and fine-tune it, in the future, our children may take a cocktail of telomerase when they hit 25 or 30 and decide to cruise, cruise at 25 or 30 for 20, 30, 50 more years.
That is now conceivable.
It was inconceivable last year.
It is now conceivable that our children will have a technology by which all the aged genes have been unraveled by the Human Genome Project, and we will fine-tune it.
They will take a cocktail of this substance and slow down the aging process and cruise at the age of 25 for another 25, 30 years.
But very much like our discussion with regard to computers a little while ago, shouldn't we approach this rather cautiously?
We are approaching 6 billion people now on the planet.
Were we to slow down the aging process and therefore the process of dying by that amount or more without proper birth control, and so far we certainly are not controlling ourselves there.
In my book, Visions, I interviewed the people at the United Nations, their best computer projections.
They figured that by 2100, the population of the Earth could begin to seal off and stabilize at about 11 billion, about double the current population.
And the reason for that is that the world's greatest contraceptive is prosperity.
As soon as nations become prosperous, peasants no longer want to have 12 children, of which six die in childbirth, of which two become their social security when they age.
But in third world countries, the numbers are dropping.
Women no longer have 10 kids.
They have like four, three to four kids in places like Bangladesh because of education of women, because of knowledge and education, rather than prosperity.
Their population is dropping.
But this still means that with four children per family in the third world, that's where most of the growth will take place.
Now, this means that if China, for example, has a huge middle-class population, there's enough room for them.
There's no problem with that.
The problem is that if they all want to live like Hollywood movie stars.
So I think that in our galaxy, there probably were many type zero civilizations, just like the astronomer Frank Drake predicted.
Maybe 10,000 of these civilizations that are type 0, just like us.
However, very few of them negotiated these barriers, the population problem, discovering element 92, uranium, discovering what Dustin Hoffman discovered in the movie Graduate, plastics and petrochemicals and pollution that comes out of the petrochemical industry.
And you see really the worst of what could happen if things spiral out of control.
And that could happen on a planetary basis, not just in Bangkok, but for the Earth.
If we get too cocky and if we don't realize that the Earth is finite, and there could be a lot of dead type zero civilizations out there in space.
If we go into space and visit other planets, we may find other planets whose atmosphere is radioactive and whose atmosphere is just full of hydrocarbons and pollution.
And maybe that's why we can't pick their signals up with our radio telescopes.
See, once you reach type 1, and that's where we're headed, once you reach type 1, if you successfully reach type 1 civilization, then you become planetary.
Where else can you go unless you colonize Mars?
And that, of course, takes hundreds and hundreds of years to do that.
It is indeed, and my guest is Dr. Michio Kaku, one of our nation's premier theoretical physicists.
He teaches at the City University of New York, and he'll be right back.
Frankly, everything is a race.
Our race to get more energy, better energy, cheaper energy, our race to not multiply as quickly as we are before we can live longer, our race to leave the planet before it becomes unlivable.
Everything's a race.
And we're odds makers here.
The odds don't sound so good to me.
If it's going to be under 10%, that's not a very good bet, but of course, you've got to take it, I guess, huh?
I know, and this is being attributed, for the most part, to global warming.
Now, that may or may not be the case, but I know there is a large political constituency out there that says the whole concept is ludicrous, and it's being promulgated by people who want to return us to the Stone Age and bring the U.S. down to the level of other countries around the world.
And this, Doctor, is a very, very powerful political force.
I agree, but I also think that most scientists, in fact, I would estimate now about 99% of climatologists believe that there are enough signs, enough signs with regards to hurricanes that are battering Florida and the Caribbean, the melting of the tundra of Alaska, the breaking up of the ice shelf in Antarctica, the weird weather we've been having.
Enough signs, all of it pointing in one direction, to warrant caution.
Not that we should have a crash program and go back to the Stone Age, but to begin the process of weaning ourselves away from oil and coal and going towards solar hydrogen as an alternative economy.
Now, I mean, think about it.
We wouldn't have to have a Gulf War.
We wouldn't have to worry about Saddam Hussein anymore.
We wouldn't have to have the, what, the American 7th Fleet keeping oil prices low every time some dictator in the Middle East starts to rattle his saber.
We could begin to increase fuel mileage.
You know that with the electric hybrid car, you can get 60 miles a gallon on the electric hybrid car.
And the hypercar, which the Swedes have been playing with, the hypercar gets 90 miles a gallon.
Now, with that kind of energy efficiency, you wouldn't have to worry about Iraq.
You wouldn't have to worry about all the crises that take place there because we have fuel-efficient cars in the United States.
Our standard of living is going to be as high as ever.
During the 70s, when we had the terrible gas crunch, why we began to get all kinds of fuel-efficient cars, the moment gas got cheap again, where'd we go?
We ring alarm bells all the time about the environment here.
And what it brings, I can tell you, since I talk to millions, it brings anger.
You do your own radio program, and I'm sure when you've talked of these types of topics, you've received all kinds of vitriolic comment, and if not, on the phones, then certainly by email and letter.
But you read the newspapers and you read about the dominance of English, about the dominance of MTV and television, the formation of currencies across national borders.
You know, we're not going to be able to colonize Mars for several hundred years.
We're stuck on the Earth.
And with the Internet wiring up everybody, within 10, 20 years, all of us will have a watch with the Internet on it.
And we'll simply talk to the watch in English and access anybody else's web page and everyone else's channel just by talking to our appliances.
Now, this is coming.
It means that in the future, we'll simply be able to have embedded chips in our clothing and our furniture that will allow us to access the technology of a Type 1 civilization.
For example, I saw a demonstration of the smart glasses.
Glasses that you put on that you can download videos on so that if you're at the beach and there's a home emergency at the home office, your glasses will ring when you're at the beach, and your glasses will be hooked up to the internet, and you'll download the video conference of what's happening at the meeting.
You'll be at the meeting when you're at the beach.
And your glasses will be able to recognize people's faces.
Again, these prototypes already exist.
And at a cocktail party, how many times have we bumped into somebody and said, is this Jim, John, Jake, who is this person?
In the future, your glasses will tell you it's Jim.
Because this is the kind of computer power that's linking the world.
So we're seeing the beginning of a Type 1 civilization emerge.
And I would really hate to see the whole thing spoiled by the fact that we still have the fundamentalism, we have the ethnic passions that have caused massacres and genocide over the last 2,000 years.
And I would really hate to see that spoil our march toward a Type 1 civilization.
I think that's my purpose in life, is scaring people.
Listen, Endeavor, Endeavour, just came back to Earth after attaching our part of the brand new, spanking new, $100 billion space station, our part to the Russian part.
And I'd like to get your thoughts on the efficacy of the $100 billion, or no doubt by the time it's done much more, dollar space station.
Well, this may come as a surprise to many of your listeners, but every scientist who's looked at the science versus the cost has realized that it costs too much for the little science that we're going to get from the space station.
Microgravity is what we call weightlessness, but even President George Bush's science advisor, Dr. Alan Bromley of Yale, once said that microgravity is of micro importance.
The space station, all its duties can be done by single rockets.
We don't need a $100 billion bathtub in outer space.
The money, this $100 billion, could be transferred to a project to go to Mars instead.
You know, Columbus did not need a refueling station.
He did not need a space station in the middle of the Atlantic to reach the new world.
Columbus just did it in one big jump.
And that's how we can do it to Mars and to the other planets.
The Russian space program is basically paid for by you and me and the American taxpayer.
So I think that for the buck, for the buck, we should really begin to put a robot base on the moon and a robot base on Mars, paving the way for eventual human habitation.
Because at some point we're going to have to leave the Earth, right?
I mean, at some point, the Earth's, you know, it's going to be dangerous to be on the Earth with meteors and comets and what have you.
But that's not for centuries.
We still have centuries in which we can lay the foundation for that.
But in the meantime, I think that we're spending too much money on the International Space Station when every scientific body, including the National Academy of Sciences, which advises the United States Congress, every scientific body has said that dollar for dollar, we could better spend the money by simply going to the moon, going to Mars, going to Jupiter with robots, rather than building this bathtub in outer space.
And what are they going to do up there?
Wait at us.
All the experiments that are done up there could be done with single rockets for a fraction of the cost.
I can't let the good doctor get away without asking about UFOs.
Doctor, there is overwhelming evidence that things are flying in our skies that are unidentified.
There's no question about it.
Even if you eliminate all of the obvious hoaxes and the misinterpretations in the swamp gas and all the rest of it, there's been some serious study at major universities lately that's begun to say, hey, look, we had better study what's going on because it appears something is going on.
And he eliminated many of the hoaxes and many of the swamp gases, many of the radar echoes.
And he had a handful of cases where you had airline pilots and people of reputable reputation with multiple sightings, not just one person with one flying saucer, but many people seeing the same object with the same characteristics.
Now, I was a little bit disappointed with the report because the conclusion was that we should simply study these objects.
My attitude is to propose propulsion systems, to propose mechanisms by which these objects can manipulate their trajectories and do things that are quite fantastic.
And my personal point of view is that magnetism is probably the leading choice for a propulsion system, but it would have to be monopoles rather than dipoles.
A dipole simply spins like a compass needle.
And you don't want your flying saucer to simply flop over like a bug upside down.