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Jan. 20, 2000 - Art Bell

02:02:17

Coast to Coast AM with Art Bell - Michio Kaku - Future Technology

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	From the high desert and the great American Southwest, I bid you all good evening and
	or good morning wherever you may be across this great land of ours.
	Commercially heard from the Tahitian and Hawaiian island chains in the west, eastward to the Caribbean and the U.S.
	Virgin Islands, south into South America, north of course, all the way to the pole, wherever it may be at the moment.
	And worldwide on the Internet, this is Coast to Coast AM, and I'm Art Bell.
	Coming up here in the first hour, in a few moments, my co-author Whitley Streber, because there's a lot of news to talk about that relates coincidentally to what we have written.
	As you well know, the network's blasted it all yesterday about climate change.
	We'll get to that, and then in the second hour, one of the, actually, Perhaps one of the greatest minds in America today, that of Professor Michio Kaku.
	He's just an amazing, remarkable man with whom we can discuss all kinds of things that otherwise sound like science fiction.
	I caught him on a financial channel in a discussion the other day that was really awesome.
	I mean, he had them reeling on their heels.
	There'll be a lot of interesting talk in the next hour, this one as well.
	That's kind of a brief outline of what's going to happen now.
	The moon tonight, as you know, has gone through total eclipse.
	It's going through it.
	You know, I live here in the desert where, I swear to you, we must have, on average, 345 days at least if not more of pure sunshine clear skies in the desert because that's what you get except when you have a celestial event of this magnitude and then the high clouds come in and screw up picture-taking totally!
	So I have taken a fairly pathetic picture of the moon as it looks here About 20 minutes ago, just as the moon was starting to come back, barely, you can see a little bit at the bottom, and it is a pathetic picture because I was doing it through the clouds.
	So, if any of you out there, and I presume that some of you out there have done good things and have really good pictures I would like to invite you now to send them to my webmaster who is alert and ready and all set to receive your pictures and put up the really good ones so who out there got a really really good picture of what was in fact a blood red moon eclipse send your pictures right now at the speed of light to webmaster
	That's the address.
	And we will share them with the world as the moon does its thing.
	Kind of an eerie thing, too, isn't it, to see the moon disappear that way?
	Anyway, send your best candidates right now to webmaster at artbell.com and we'll get them up for you.
	Coming up in a moment, my co-author, Of a soon-to-be-announced New York Times best-selling book called Becoming Global Superstorm.
	And we're going to cover sort of a multitude of things here.
	It should be rather interesting.
	Be it sight, sound, smell, touch, the something.
	Inside that we need so much.
	The sight of a touch, or the scent of a sound, or the strength of an oak when it's deep in the ground.
	The wonder of flowers to be covered and then to burst up through tarmac to the sun again.
	Or to fly to the sun without burning a wing.
	To lie in a meadow and hear the grass sing.
	To have all these things in our memory's horn.
	and they use them to count us to five.
	Yeah!
	Ride, ride like she sold, take this place on a strip just for me.
	Wanna take a ride?
	Well, call Art Bell from west of the Rockies at 1-800-618-8255.
	East of the Rockies at 1-800-825-5033.
	First time callers may reach Art at 1-775-727-1222.
	to the Rockies at 1-800-825-5033.
	First time callers may reach out at 1-775-727-1222.
	The wildcard line is open at 1-775-727-1295.
	And to reach out on the toll free international line, call your AT&T operator and have them dial 800-893-0903.
	This is Coast to Coast AM with Art Bell on the Premier Radio Network.
	On a night when we're having a full eclipse of the moon, and I took a totally shameful, pathetic photograph of a partially cloud-enshrouded moon over the desert.
	And I am ashamed of it.
	So I've now erased it.
	It was on my webcam.
	And I went to my own website and looked at Dr. Skye's photograph of the Blood Red Moon.
	And I hung my head in shame.
	It is a beautiful, astoundingly beautiful photograph of the fully eclipsed Blood Red Moon.
	You should see it.
	It's on my website.
	Just dial up Dr. Skye on the front page there.
	Boy, was mine pathetic.
	You are about to meet one of the greatest minds in America today.
	You may know him already because he has been a frequent guest over the past, oh, I don't know, two, three years, whatever.
	He is Professor Michio Kaku, and he is a professor of theoretical physics at the City College of New York.
	He is an amazing man, and we've got lots to talk about, so that's directly ahead.
	All right, once again, Professor Michio Kaku.
	So you know who you're dealing with.
	He is a professor of theoretical physics at City College of New York.
	He is co-founder of the String Field Theory.
	That's right.
	Co-founder of the String Theory.
	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 Super Strings.
	Now, you would imagine somebody of that stature would speak a language completely incompatible with the normal human being.
	But quite to the contrary, he is able to address in a way that others cannot.
	And before him, only Carl Sagan was able to do.
	Address these Cosmic issues in a way that you can understand and I can understand.
	That's why he's here.
	Brilliant mind, indeed.
	Here is Professor Michio Kaku.
	Professor, I was watching a financial news show on one of the financial news channels the other day.
	I know you know this.
	There you were.
	I sat and my wife and I watched you and went, And the two anchor people who were there asking you questions were into something that you could see them getting more and more excited as you were talking about what's coming with the new millennium to the degree where when it was time for you to go, they were ready to blow off the next program to keep you around.
	It was great.
	That's right.
	You know, I was talking about my latest book, Visions, about how science will revolutionize the 21st century.
	And with the AOL-Time Warner merger, it caught everyone off guard, except we physicists were the ones who predicted that it would be this way.
	And the book's been a bestseller.
	In fact, I just got back from Paris last month, and it's been a bestseller in England, Germany.
	The London Times serialized the book, in fact.
	So the London Times actually devoted several issues to the book in the paris uh... the main weekly in paris
	devoted to full pages uh... full
	centerfold to the book and in germany it at the best that a list and
	it create quite a controversy they were
	uh... columnist arguing back and forth uh... are the germans being left behind by the americans
	who are creating about the internet
	then creating the future Well, let's do a little bit of that.
	In other words, here we are.
	It is now 2000.
	Purists say it doesn't begin until 2001, but it seems here to me.
	Where are we going?
	Everywhere you look now, everywhere you look, everything's dot com ad nauseam.
	I mean, it's everywhere.
	The Internet is everywhere.
	Where is it going from here?
	Well, as I mentioned on CNN, we're entering what we physicists call the third stage of computing.
	The first stage of computing was like when IBM had gigantic mainframe computers, and you had a hundred scientists clamoring to get on one computer.
	Right.
	Okay, a hundred to one.
	Fighting for time.
	That's right.
	And stage two took place in the 80s, when we had the PC.
	We had one person, one computer, And then Microsoft and Intel dominate Stage 2.
	But we're now entering Stage 3.
	And Microsoft is fighting for its life, in fact.
	And in Stage 3, we're going to have one human, one million computer chips distributed throughout the environment.
	By 2020, computer chips will cost one penny.
	That's the cost of bubblegum wrappers.
	That's the cost of scrap paper.
	A penny for each computer chip.
	It means we'll have them in our clothes, our glasses, we'll have them in the walls, we'll have wall screens.
	Next time you want to download a movie, you'll simply talk to your glasses and download Casablanca in your glasses.
	They actually have prototypes now, don't they?
	That's right.
	So, you know, a lot of people look back in history, like the old World's Fair, where they predicted the way things would be now, and it didn't come true.
	However, it seems like the predictions you're talking about now That's right, because we have what is called Moore's Law, that every 18 months, computer power doubles.
	And by taking a calculator, you can calculate that by 2020, computer chips will cost a penny, which means that when you want to access the Internet, you'll talk to your watch.
	Your watch will be the portal to the Internet, and your glasses will teleconference with your home office, even if you're at the beach.
	Okay?
	You're at the beach, and your glasses ring.
	So you pick up your glasses and say, hello.
	And your boss says, we have a mandatory meeting at the home office.
	And you say, no problem.
	Just download the conference in my glasses, and I will participate at the meeting.
	Is this a good thing?
	I think it's a good thing.
	These glasses will also recognize people's faces.
	How many times have you been at a cocktail party and you didn't know who to suck up to?
	Because you didn't know who people were.
	In other words, in your glasses you'll have like a little heads-up display where you'll see this face and there'll be a sort of a little flashing suck-up sign above it.
	That's right, that's right.
	Exactly, that's the way it's going to be.
	And so when somebody comes up to you... I know, but the boss is going to have a pair of glasses and it's going to have a heads-up display saying, he's coming to suck up, he's coming to suck up.
	That's right, a little radar in his glasses warning him.
	What a future!
	Also, your clothes will be intelligent, too, you know, and when you go to the bathroom, your toilet will be intelligent and will monitor all your bodily fluids and tell you that you eat too much, you have too much salt and too much sugar in your diet.
	Your own toilet will tell you this.
	Now, isn't the future great?
	No, not necessarily.
	I get lectured every time I go to the doctor, and I'm not sure I want to be lectured every time I go to take a poop.
	But also, your toilet will tell you if you are harboring cancer cells maybe a decade before a tumor forms.
	I know, but just imagine walking in and doing a little business and then hearing as you're leaving, oh my God, look at this cholesterol figure, what are you going to do?
	Yes, but you know, if you're in a car accident and you're in a lonely road and you're bleeding to death, normally you would simply die, right?
	In the future, your clothes will call the police and the ambulance.
	Your clothes will locate your body.
	Your clothes will monitor your vitals?
	That's right.
	Your clothes will monitor your heartbeat, your pulse.
	And if you are unconscious, we'll automatically call the police and alert them to your location.
	We'll locate your position of your body by global positioning satellites to within 20 feet.
	Holy mackerel!
	So you'll never be able to die alone in the future.
	So like 501 Penny and Pants?
	That's right.
	So you see what the AOL-Time Warner deal is all about?
	The architecture of the 21st century is not in place yet.
	It's obvious.
	Microsoft does not dominate Stage 3.
	Okay?
	When Bill Gates wrote that book, The Road Ahead, which was a bestseller, the book was wrong.
	He had to repudiate large portions of the book, and he came out with a second edition, because the first edition neglected to talk about Stage 3.
	Well, here's a few things that I don't understand.
	invisible that's why microsoft has been fighting for its life that's why a well
	made this big deal with time warner because a well does not have access to
	cable boxes and that's going to be the future of internet access dsl and cable
	boxes well here's a few things that i don't understand when we all get dsl or
	better and there's that kind of bandwidth spread around right what
	happens to television What happens to radio?
	What happens to... I mean, we could just go on and on and on and on, but my industry, we'll begin with that, television and radio, it doesn't need to go through the air anymore, not the way it did anyway.
	Anymore.
	It can go through the internet, and people will be able to access any form of media through their watch, through their glasses, through the wall screen in their house.
	And they'll be able to pick and choose what they want.
	And of course, on one hand, it means a democratic proliferation of channels.
	Instead of 500 channels, we'll have 5 billion channels.
	Every human will have a channel.
	You'll be able to bore billions of people with your baby pictures on the Internet.
	And everyone will have their own channel in the future.
	But it also means, of course, you'll have big companies like AOL, Time Warner.
	And they will have shows that are produced with high quality production values.
	And most people will watch the few shows produced by the big conglomerates, but everyone will have their own channel on the internet.
	Five billion channels in the future.
	Just like everybody can have a webpage now.
	That's right, but now in the future you'll have motion picture video of your baby pictures on your channel, and you'll be able to be a one-man broadcasting network.
	You are, in some ways, describing a kind of a hell, too, though.
	Well, in some sense, some people are worried about Big Brother.
	I think the real worry is Little Brother.
	Well, that's where I was, yeah, but what about as all of this technology becomes available and it becomes very two-way, what about privacy?
	That's why we're going to have to have software programmers develop programs to shield us from the prying eyes of Little Brother, that is, our next-door neighbor who's nosy and wants to know everything about his sex life and other credit card transactions.
	See, the marketplace is supply and demand.
	Right now, there is a demand to find out what your buying habits are.
	I mean, how do we know that when all this comes to pass, you don't put your watch down on the headboard of the bed and find yourself on worldwide glass vision the next day?
	Well, that could happen if you leave your watch unaccidentally.
	You forgot to turn it off.
	and someone accesses your watch by remote control.
	That's why we have to have new software written to protect privacy, so we can turn our gadgets off
	and we can keep prying eyes away from our credit card transactions.
	And no, there's not a demand for that yet.
	But when consumer demand picks up for that, you can be sure there are gonna be thousands
	of software programmers writing programs to block the prying eyes of Little Brother.
	So it'll be a war.
	It'll be a tug of war, that's right.
	With large corporations wanting to get access to your buying habits and wanna sell these buying habits,
	of course, to other corporations.
	And other software programmers selling you software that will protect you against the prying eyes of the big corporations.
	And then laws will have to be passed, too.
	And so then it'll be must-buys.
	You have to buy something like that.
	That's right.
	And that's coming.
	But right now there's no demand for it.
	The average consumer does not realize how easy it is to get all their credit cards, all their credit buying information.
	They simply don't know that.
	Once they figure that out, there's going to be a tremendous demand for privacy.
	And that's coming.
	Look, MSNBC the other day had quite a demonstration and they pulled up On a supposed secure server, private passwords, financial information on everybody who had bought something or another.
	Oh, it was horrible!
	Yeah.
	You see, we physicists and mathematicians created the Internet, right?
	This is our creation.
	In fact, a physicist wrote the World Wide Web program.
	You know, the World Wide Web was created exclusively for theoretical physicists in Geneva, Switzerland.
	So they all could talk to each other?
	That's right.
	In fact, you know, as you know, the Department of Defense originally created the Internet.
	It wasn't Al Gore, right?
	Originally created the Internet to fight a nuclear war.
	And so I've been on the Internet for about 20 years now, mainly because the government wanted physicists to be hooked up so that we could help fight a nuclear war and rebuild America after a nuclear war.
	That figures.
	And that's why we did not put into place all these checks and balances.
	People wonder, where's the cop on the block on the internet?
	Where's the white pages?
	It was never designed.
	It was never designed?
	We specifically designed it.
	This is deliberate.
	Because we wanted to rebuild America after a nuclear war, and we didn't want any censor.
	We did not want any police, any cop on the block to tell us that we could not rebuild America after a nuclear war.
	And that's why we deliberately had no white pages, no yellow pages, no cop on the block.
	It was to be an open road for any scientist to get on to rebuild America after a nuclear war.
	How did it get so out of control?
	What happened was, it was strictly a military project until around 1989.
	At that point, the Soviet Union broke up, and then we realized that we were not going to be fighting a nuclear war.
	And we created this tremendous, beautiful highway, and so what we did was we gave it away.
	We just let it go into the public domain.
	It was after the breakup of the Soviet Union that everybody jumped onto the fantastic highway that we had paved with, you know, Pentagon dollars.
	That's how it happened.
	And now, today, the Pentagon is worried most about what?
	Cyber-terrorism.
	That's right, a cyber-war.
	In fact, I got an email from the War College last year.
	They read my book, Visions.
	They wanted to invite me to the War College to talk about cyber war, and what cyber war will look like in the 21st century.
	Could a cyber war, in its own way, be as serious as a nuclear war?
	I mean, what can you imagine?
	In some sense, yeah.
	If you were able to seize control of an enemy's computer system, you could then turn their munitions against them, right?
	You could blind them.
	You could send spurious signals to them.
	During the Balkans War, that was the first major war where the United States deliberately messed up banking records, messed up communication protocols, and basically paralyzed the Yugoslav electronic infrastructure.
	It's sort of like in a fight, throwing sand in the enemy's eyes.
	If you throw sand in the enemy's eyes for a few brief minutes, he's paralyzed, right?
	He's defenseless.
	It'll take time for him to get his bearings again, right?
	So you could kill a lot of people with a computer?
	That's right.
	And that's why, in the future, the opening shots of a war will be fought with computers first.
	To soften up the enemy.
	To blind them, basically.
	And in fact, Desert Storm was the very brief introduction to that.
	That's right.
	That's some world to imagine.
	I remember, I think it was, I think it was a Star Trek in which a planet was visited where they had wars by computer and if you were the loser you had to send so much of your population to be killed immediately.
	It was sort of a civilized, they thought, way to have a war, you know, and so these people just march off to the Death Chambers, when the computer determined they had lost.
	It was really weird.
	Doctor, hold on.
	We'll be right back after the bottom of the hour.
	Doctor Michio Kaku is here.
	And he's really something.
	Oh, miracle. Oh, it was beautiful, magical.
	And all the birds in the trees, they'd be singing so happily.
	Oh, joyfully. Oh, playfully, watching me.
	But then they sent me away, to teach me how to be sensible.
	Logical.
	Oh, responsible.
	Practical.
	And then they showed me a world where I could be so dependable.
	Oh, clinical.
	Oh baby girl, are we delectable?
	There are times when all the world is still The question marks...
	Oh baby girl, are we delectable?
	So I wonder if it would be fair to generalize, Professor Kaku, that in the future a war might be won by those with the fastest processor and the most storage?
	That's definitely possible, because more and more every industrialized nation is going to be dependent on the Internet.
	We are entering stage 3 now, and there are going to be literally millions of chips distributed throughout the environment as the decades go by.
	And it means that communications, commerce, in fact, maybe a third of commerce may eventually go up on the Internet.
	And we see that reflected in Wall Street with the stocks, with the mergers and stuff like that.
	Oh, the Nasdaq is absolutely, it's towering up there based on investments.
	Do you think these people who are investing in these tech stocks are going to come out okay?
	Well, I think the market is way too high.
	However, what we are creating is the architecture of the 21st century.
	That's true.
	Think of the automobile market.
	The automobile industry in the 1920s had a shake-out, and out of that shake-out came Ford and General Motors by the 1940s.
	We're still in that early era.
	The basic players of cyberspace are not in place yet.
	People don't realize what kind of infant technology we're facing right now.
	And so the basic players, the infrastructure, the lay of the land is not in place yet.
	Boy, it sure is.
	I heard that a stock or stocks on the Nasdaq were worth more than all of our, you know, GM and Ford and Chrysler and all of that thrown together.
	The worth that they had collected toward the building of this thing that's ahead of us.
	Right.
	Well, I think there's going to be a shakeout and I think certain people will be burned.
	However, I think other people will be investing in the future general motors of cyberspace.
	And so I think we're going to see the turmoil that also happened in the automobile industry.
	You don't think we'll go through another cycle where we take people like yourself, intellectuals, and put them up on pieces of wood and burn them, do you?
	No, I don't think so.
	Because I think cyberspace creates wealth.
	And I think every nation knows this.
	I was in Beijing just two months ago, and the Chinese government, for example, realizes that they hate the Internet.
	The Internet is democratic, information flows through, and in the future, you'll be able to download the Internet from your watch.
	But they realize they don't want to be poor.
	If they ban the Internet, they're going to be poor in the 21st century.
	Well, they tried.
	And for a while, the traffic from China got pretty sparse, but I mean, they're everywhere now, so they did not succeed.
	They did not succeed.
	And the same thing in France, by the way.
	You know, my book hit Paris just a few months ago, and the French wanted to keep the Internet out of France.
	Because there were too many English webpages around.
	But then they realized that they're going to be poor in the 21st century without the Internet.
	Now they say that let us create French webpages to compete with English webpages, right?
	Yeah, that's the French, right?
	Some things never change.
	The French have always been that way.
	Right.
	But you see, prosperity in the future is going to be linked to the Internet.
	All scientists are on the Internet.
	All engineers, all technicians were all wired up because, of course, we created it.
	The internet to begin with, right?
	And that's why prosperity, wealth, industrial activity, all that is going to be tied to e-commerce.
	And that's why nations are going to have to allow the internet in, or else be poor in the 21st century.
	And there will be many that will be poor.
	Those that don't have, in other words, in some ways the gap between the haves and have-nots is going to be very sharp, isn't it?
	Well, yes and no.
	You see, when I talked to the economists at MIT, they told me that capitalism itself is beginning to change.
	Adam Smith thought that wealth was based on natural resources.
	So if you had coffee beans and tin and copper... Well, it was.
	At once it was.
	At once it was.
	But commodity prices have been dropping for 70 years, and commodity prices will continue their slow decline in the 21st century.
	And there's a shift now, away from commodity capital to intellectual capital.
	So, those nations that invest in education, science, technology, cyberspace, the internet, they're going to reap tremendous rewards.
	Three months ago, I was in Singapore.
	In fact, I was in Singapore twice last year.
	And, you know, in the 1940s, Singapore was a sleepy port for sailors, prostitutes, and drunks.
	Now, Singapore is a fantastic leader in cyberspace, with glass buildings and skyscrapers everywhere you go in Singapore.
	And it's because they invested in intellectual capital.
	Not everybody applauds a change, by the way.
	That's right.
	Of course, you don't want to spit on the street.
	You might get whipped.
	Yes, that's right.
	I was very careful not to spit.
	Good.
	Somehow, I don't picture you as spitting on the streets of New York, either.
	No, I wouldn't do that.
	The point here is that the cyberspace revolution is more than just Internet stocks.
	It's actually the change in the nature of wealth.
	Wealth creation is going to be more and more hooked to intellectual capital.
	Well, look who the wealthiest person in the world is.
	Yeah, that's right.
	And he's fighting for his life, like I said.
	Microsoft is no longer the giant that it used to be with AOL, Time Warner coming along.
	And there are going to be more, by the way.
	It's like a dance card.
	At a dance, you have to fill your dance card with partners.
	Have you seen the commercial that's running on TV?
	The guy who's riding home with a computer next to him in the car, and he's got a P5 computer, it says on the box.
	And he's so proud.
	He's got the latest, the best, the greatest.
	And as he's looking, he sees a commercial on a billboard for the P5 computer and a big smile comes on his face.
	And there's these two guys pasting over P6 computer.
	And you see him frowning.
	Here he is on the way home and his computer is already out of date.
	That's right.
	Like you said, every 18 months, computer power doubles every 18 months.
	So what is a mother to do?
	I mean, my computers are already hopelessly out of date.
	I mean, hopelessly out of date.
	And where is that going?
	Can that continue?
	Can they really keep doubling every 18 months?
	They're going to hit brick wall, aren't they?
	That's right.
	By 2015, 2020, Silicon Valley could become a rust belt.
	In my book, Visions, I take science out to 100 years.
	And by 2020, you may see homeless people and slums in Silicon Valley.
	In fact, your glasses may recognize a humble person selling pencils on the street with a tin cup.
	Your glasses will say, my God, it's Bill Gates.
	The point here is that Silicon cannot sustain these fantastic advances beyond about 2015.
	And the reason is that we'll be etching on molecules by that point.
	We're going to go to DNA computers, protein computers, molecular computers, quantum computers.
	A new generation of computers will be up for grabs.
	So you don't think Silicon Valley will become Molecule Valley?
	That'll be somewhere else.
	If they can make the transition, any nation that sees this transition could grab the leadership of computing power away from Silicon Valley, and they could be the next great powerhouse of the future.
	Computing in the future will be done at the molecular level.
	And we already have DNA computers.
	The first one was built at Princeton about 3-4 years ago.
	And we're now beginning to create the first molecular transistor.
	That was done by Hewlett Packard just a few months ago.
	Well, do you think that we can develop all this technology, obviously the brain power is coming from here, and keep it and market it?
	Or will the Chinese take it and market it and do us in like the Japanese did for a time?
	There's a problem in Asia.
	The problem is that they don't have creativity.
	They're very good at mimicking.
	They're very good at making things run better.
	But idea generation is the problem.
	In the school system, it's quite rigid.
	In the West, there's the expression, the squeaky wheel gets the grease.
	That's right.
	In Asia, there's the expression, the nail that sticks out gets hammered down.
	That's right.
	Which are opposites.
	And that's the problem with the East.
	So again, when I was touring Singapore, Hong Kong, and Beijing, constantly people were saying that they have to change their educational system because Bill Gates would flunk in Asia.
	You know, he flunked out of Harvard, right?
	Right.
	Creative people, people that are entrepreneurs, the young geniuses like the young Einstein, these people would not do well in Asia at all.
	They would stick out, and that's frowned upon in the Asian education system.
	So that's why I think the United States will continue to lead in computer technology for quite a while, because even though our educational system is one of the worst in the world, it does import a lot of foreign scientists, And it also has a lot of very top, very bright entrepreneurs that keep things going.
	We are importing a lot of brain power, aren't we?
	Silicon Valley, believe it or not, is 50% foreign-born.
	50% of the engineers are from Taiwan, India, and places around there.
	And they flock to Silicon Valley because this is where the riches are, and they're highly educated.
	You know, India and Taiwan have highly educated elites, but they leave.
	They leave because of this brain drain.
	Do you think in this future that you describe, there will be more happy people or more unhappy people?
	Well, I think humans are genetically programmed to be slightly unhappy.
	We're never satisfied, you know?
	And that keeps us going.
	That keeps us to strive to the next level.
	So I think that cyberspace will not make people happier.
	What it will give us is more options.
	That's what it's going to give us.
	For example, our news will be able to pick and choose where our news comes from in the morning.
	That's why the big newspapers are already worried about this, because many people get their news from the Internet now.
	You can pick and choose what kind of stories you want to read, and you're not a slave to the big, gigantic media networks.
	And so choice is going to be tremendous in the future.
	You'll be able to download any video, and on a date on Saturday night, for example, you can download Casablanca just by talking to the wall.
	And then you can replace Humphrey Bogart's face and put your face instead of Humphrey Bogart's face.
	Useful.
	And put your date's face instead of Ingrid Bergman's face.
	Very useful.
	Very useful.
	So the future's going to be a lot of fun, I think.
	Well, it sounds like it.
	I guess it's a double-edged sword all the way.
	And it does seem to be coming on very rapidly.
	One thing that did not come on rapidly, and everybody's still waiting for, is this promised revolution.
	By now, we were supposed to have robots that would attend to our needs and take care of us and run around and do all the nasty things we didn't want to do.
	What happened to them?
	Okay, well, first of all, some mathematicians keep claiming every 20 years In 20 more years, we're going to be zoo animals.
	Our robot creations will throw peanuts at us and make us dance, just like we make animals dance in zoos.
	That's not going to happen for many a decade.
	People in computer science do not understand two big problems.
	The first is common sense, and the second is vision.
	Robots can listen, but they don't understand what they hear.
	They can see, but they don't understand what they are looking at.
	Our most advanced robot, one of them is on Mars.
	It's the Mars Rover.
	The Mars Rover has the intelligence of a retarded cockroach.
	You know, if you see a cockroach on your table, and you raise your hand... Actually, it's a retarded, dead cockroach now.
	Well, you know, I live in New York City, and there are a lot of cockroaches in New York, and I'm quite familiar with how advanced they are.
	They immediately recognize my hand and run into the corner.
	If a Martian were to raise his hand to the Mars Rover, It would take it about six to eight hours for the Mars rover to recognize that someone was endangering it.
	Yeah.
	Is that stupid?
	So I think we have a long ways to go before we have any kind of robot that can parallel the complexity of the human mind.
	And I have a whole chapter on this in my book, Visions.
	I've interviewed all the top people in artificial intelligence, and they tell me that it's a long ways away.
	How far?
	What has to happen before we have the first... I don't even know what the right word is.
	Thinking computer?
	Self-aware computer?
	The problem is common sense.
	We know that water is wet.
	That mothers are older than their children.
	That when animals die, they don't come back the next day.
	And animals do not like pain.
	Twins age at the same rate.
	And strings can pull, but strings cannot push.
	Now, how do you know that?
	How do you know that mothers are older than their daughters?
	How do we know that twins age at the same rate, or that water is wet?
	Because we've seen water, we've seen mothers, we've seen animals, they don't like pain, but robots have not.
	Robots have to be told all these lines of common sense.
	Now how many lines of common sense are there?
	Most of our mathematicians have found over a hundred million lines of common sense that a ten-year-old child understands, but a robot doesn't.
	But when you're talking about the development of molecular computers... That's what it will take.
	Do you believe it will be possible one day to have... Is this the right way to ask it?
	A self-aware computer?
	I think that eventually we will have silicon consciousness.
	And this is, of course, on a time scale now, maybe 70 to 100 years.
	But we won't have human consciousness.
	We will have some kind of silicon molecular consciousness that will be different from ours.
	But it'll be very close.
	They probably will be self-aware, and I think we should be very careful to have one of our hands on their plug when this happens, so that we can unplug them if they get too arrogant.
	Well, I wouldn't place any bets on that one, because you know what?
	You can't unplug the Internet.
	That's correct, yeah.
	The Internet is unplugable because it's decentralized.
	Precisely.
	And wouldn't an intelligent machine Put itself, as soon as it could, in the same sort of unplugable position?
	Well, now we're talking a hundred years in the future, right?
	At that point, when robots will be self-aware to the point they may actually want to take over.
	At that point, some scientists have claimed that we should merge with them.
	Again, this is now at least a hundred years in the future.
	Instead of competing with robots, we should merge with them.
	Merge with them.
	Enhance the human capabilities so that we become cyborgs of some sort.
	Now, we're not going to look like the Borg on Star Trek.
	We don't have to look ugly, okay?
	But it may give us enhanced capabilities, and we may be able to solve the aging problem.
	And in fact, many people predict that by mid-century, the computer revolution and the biotech revolution will merge.
	Where computers are going is into DNA.
	And into proteins.
	Well, we are now in the final process, I understand, and it is accelerating, they say, of mapping the entire human genome.
	Is that about right?
	That's correct.
	In fact, this year we'll announce the fruit fly.
	We'll have completely sequenced the fruit fly this year.
	It'll be announced in a few more months.
	And the mouse, probably next year.
	And humans, all the interesting genes, will be sequenced in about a year to two years.
	Of course, the complete sequencing won't be done until about three years.
	But by next year, somebody could announce that all the interesting genes have in fact been sequenced.
	And by 2020, by the way, you'll have a credit card with all your genes on it.
	You'll be able to look at an owner's manual for your body.
	Your credit card will tell you when to expect to have diabetes, heart disease, cancer, and other kinds of diseases which are genetically linked.
	Okay, that's step one.
	The doctor will give you a shot in the arm, not to cure measles or chicken pox, but to cure cystic fibrosis, to cure Tay-Sachs for Jews, to cure sickle cell anemia for African-Americans, and we'll be able to cure many genetic diseases within about 20 years.
	And then eventually we will cure old age, right?
	As a matter of fact, I have a doctor Klatz that I've interviewed, and he said, look, if you can hang on for about another 35 or 40 years, he thinks, there will be an answer that will allow the cessation or even the reversal of the aging process.
	That's right.
	You know, already we can double the lifespan of many animals.
	We can double their lifespan.
	Already just about four months ago, a mouse This mouse was genetically bred for the first time in history to live 35% longer.
	Wow.
	This mouse lives 35% longer just by tweaking one gene and the age genes are now being unraveled.
	We have about three or four of them now that affect some animals and a few that affect humans.
	One of them is called Progeria.
	In the National Enquirer, they always show pictures of children that age prematurely and are going to die of old age.
	Yes, I've seen them.
	Yeah, you know, these children look like birds.
	They're balls.
	It's tragic, yes.
	And the skin looks very leathery.
	And they die of a heart attack by the time they hit puberty.
	And we've isolated that gene now.
	We know precisely what gene causes that progeria.
	Which means we might be able to do the opposite.
	Doctor, hold on.
	We'll be right back and we'll talk about that when we do get back.
	Dr. Michio Kaku is here.
	And if you're listening carefully, you should feel it too.
	It's in the wind.
	Love is all around me.
	And so the feeling grows.
	It's written on the wind.
	It's in the wind.
	Every night I hope and pray A dream lover will come my way
	A girl to hold in my arms And know the magic of her charms
	Cause I want a girl to call my own I want a dream lover
	That's what we dreamed about in the fifties and sixties, right?
	Today we've got parents without partners and I wonder how long it's going to be until we have sex without partners.
	In other words, the complete experience would be available to you In cyberspace.
	And I mean, the complete experience.
	Call Art Bell in the Kingdom of Nye from west of the Rockies at 1-800-618-8255.
	East of the Rockies, 1-800-825-5033.
	First time callers may reach Art at 1-775-727-1222.
	800-825-5033.
	First time callers may reach out at 1-775-727-1222.
	And the wildcard line is open at 1-775-727-1295.
	To reach out on the toll free international line, call your AT&T operator and have them dial 800-893-0903.
	This is Coast to Coast AM with Art Bell from the Kingdom of Nye.
	It's more than a brave new world we're talking about, isn't it?
	Dr. Michio Kaku, Professor Kaku, is my guest tonight.
	One of the best minds, really, in the country right now.
	A man who can break it down so you can understand it.
	We're talking about longevity.
	but he will get back to that in a moment.
	Professor Kaku, and Professor, if this really does occur, if we can, for example,
	a double or triple our lifespan or even stop it and reverse it, is that a good thing?
	Well, I think it's a good thing because I think the human potential can be fully realized.
	You realize that the population of Europe is collapsing right now.
	People just aren't having kids in Europe anymore.
	It takes 2.1 children to have a constant population, and the birth rate in large parts of Europe are down to about 1.7, 1.5.
	But I think if people live longer, okay, they can have fewer children, live longer, and still have a stable population.
	Well, that brings up what I touched on here at the top of the hour.
	I was thinking during the break, we have people now, partners now, with this cyber revolution,
	the complete experience without getting too graphic here, it seems to me, could be embraced
	by a user and would the need for a man and the need for a woman to have a man more or
	less fade into the woodwork?
	I don't think so.
	I think cyber sex is going to revolutionize relations between men and women, of course, but I think initially it's going to increase our interaction between the sexes.
	Within 20 years, for example, you'll simply talk to the wall screen on Friday night and say, ìMirror, mirror on the wall, who's available on Friday night?î Your wall screen will contact all the other wall screens of people who are also talking to their wall screens wondering who's available on Friday night and will match all your characteristics, your choices, income level, looks, all that kind of stuff.
	And boom, you'll see all the faces and profiles of people who are able and willing to go out with you on a Friday night.
	I see.
	But it would still be a physical, a real physical union.
	In other words, you wouldn't meet in cyberspace somewhere having a collective experience.
	That's right.
	Then your wall screen would then set up a date where you two could then meet, okay?
	So in other words, in the future we'll have magic mirrors, just like on a fairy tale, the Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.
	Whereby you'll talk to the wall and be able to meet people that you would never have met before, but that the computer could set up for you because your computer knows basically your taste.
	Now then, the question is, what about real cyber sex that, you know, some scientists have speculated about?
	The complete experience of it.
	Then we're going to have some problems.
	If you've ever been to a virtual reality emporium, if you've ever put on those clunky gloves and those clunky glasses, you'll realize that we have decades to go Before we can begin to simulate real human interactions.
	These gloves are simply gigantic mittens with very low resolution.
	These glasses basically show cartoons to you.
	And so, the whole sense of touch, I think, is going to take many, many decades.
	We're talking mid-century, before we come to the ability to begin to reproduce touch the way that we feel it, okay?
	But remember that sex toys have been with us ever since humans left the forest.
	That hasn't replaced human interaction, because we are social animals.
	We're social animals, we've had sex toys for millions of years, and we still reproduce, we still fall in love, we still have children, we still search for mates.
	So we'll just have better sex toys.
	uh... you will have better sex life right now but they're not going to play
	the real thing could be craved human companionship uh...
	even even you have to got married for god's sake that's true isn't it
	united and so the point is that we crave human companionship and uh... will have
	toyed up but we've always had toys over social animals
	will be able to meet other social animals much better on the internet
	Well, that was really a good answer, because Hugh Hefner could have gone on forever having, heaven knows, 21-year-olds all he wanted, and yet he chose to have a human companion, so you have a good point there.
	Alright, let's turn from this for a second, because there have been some really, really, really interesting stories breaking in the news lately, and that's the first thing that caused me to think I wanted to bring you back on.
	They're talking now About the discovery of lone drifter black holes.
	That's right.
	And the concept is incredible.
	Black holes that don't stay in the same place, but they sort of waltz around.
	They move around.
	And how can that be?
	How can that be?
	That's right.
	This sent shockwaves in Atlanta last week at the 195th meeting of the American Astronomical Society.
	There were several blockbuster announcements made at that conference.
	First is, they discovered a black hole adrift, a lone, wandering black hole, not that far from the planet Earth, that was detected by the Hubble Space Telescope.
	They've also detected 20 galactic black holes that are way the hell out, gigantic, monstrous black holes.
	20 of them have now been authenticated.
	28 planets ...have now been seen outside our solar system.
	28 of them, for God's sake, right?
	Right.
	So we're entering a new era of astronomy.
	We're no longer speculating about extrasolar planets and about black holes and stuff.
	We're seeing them now with the Hubble Space Telescope.
	Yeah, they're there.
	They're there.
	Now, this black hole, by the way, that was seen wandering just outside the Milky Way galaxy, was not seen directly, because black holes are, of course, invisible.
	But it distorted the light around it, and by watching for light being distorted as this black hole wandered, you can trace its trajectory, and we calculated the mass to be six times the mass of our sun.
	So it's not galactic, it's only six times the mass of our sun, but it now means that we have to be very careful.
	There are probably a lot of wandering black holes out there.
	Well, that was where I was going to go.
	What would happen if one wandered into us?
	Okay, if one were to come close to our solar system, first of all, it would throw Pluto and Uranus and Neptune out of orbit.
	Oh, that would be bad.
	This one is six times the mass of our sun, okay?
	And so it'd be invisible.
	We wouldn't even be able to see it, okay?
	We would see, of course, its radiation disk, its accretion disk, but for the most part, it's invisible.
	And as it got closer to the solar system, it would rip out the outer planets, okay?
	The Earth would be perturbed.
	The Earth's orbit would also start to wobble and shake, and it would be very uncomfortable on the Earth.
	Tidal waves, gigantic storms, earthquakes, the crust of the Earth could shake a little bit, opening up cracks on the surface of the Earth.
	Holy smokes!
	So, yeah, if you got close to the solar system, it would not be pretty at all.
	And you would not have much warning either, because these things are invisible.
	And if you saw the movie Predator with Arnold Schwarzenegger... I sure did.
	Yeah, he was up against an invisible monster, but you could tell where the monster was because he distorted light.
	As he moved, the light distorted a bit.
	Right.
	That's what these black holes do.
	These black holes are like lenses.
	Like, think of a thick glass that is invisible.
	Glass is invisible.
	But you can see glass, of course, because it distorts light as light goes through this invisible substance called glass, right?
	Sure.
	And that's how the Hubble Space Telescope detected and confirmed the presence of this black hole six times the mass of our sun, just drifting, just drifting outside the galactic plane.
	And so it means that, one, black holes are more plentiful than we originally thought.
	They don't have to be in double stars, they don't have to be galactic, and they can be quite close to the Earth.
	The closest one, by the way, was also announced at that meeting.
	The closest black hole is only 1,600 light years away.
	That's not very far, is it?
	It's not very far.
	The Milky Way galaxy is 100,000 light years across.
	This is just like 1%, 1% the distance across from the Milky Way, right?
	So if I had a gigantic pizza that's like 3 feet across, Yes.
	It would be just like one little pea, just one little... Now, what you described as planets being tossed hither and yon, and the Earth doing this and that, basically, it would, if it got close enough, it would simply, it would simply extinguish all life, wouldn't it?
	That's right.
	The Earth would be incompatible with life, because of the fact that it would put stretches on the crust of the Earth.
	The oceans would, some of the water would literally fly into the air, if it was attracted by the black hole.
	And the crust of the Earth probably would not be able to withstand these kinds of tidal forces.
	And yeah, the Earth itself would probably be ripped apart.
	So it wouldn't be very pretty if we got too close to it.
	And so there goes another potential Type 1.
	That's right.
	A budding Type 1 system could be ripped apart by a wandering black hole.
	However, by the time we're Type 2, by the time we're Type 2, we become immortal.
	We'll have the energy necessary to deflect a black hole like this.
	At Type-2?
	At Type-2.
	Because Type-2, by definition, is a civilization that has stellar energy.
	They play with stars, by definition.
	Their energy output is about 100 billion times the output of the Earth.
	And they play with stars.
	The Federation of Planets, Star Trek, is an emerging Type-2 civilization.
	They can just begin to play with stars.
	So if there was a wandering black hole and you had a type 2 civilization, they'd be able to deflect it.
	And if you were type 3, then of course you exist on many star systems.
	And then of course you are literally invulnerable.
	You simply move to another star system or simply bounce that black hole back where it came from.
	But that's if you're type 3.
	And that of course requires about, you see, a billion billion times the energy output of the Earth.
	A very good friend of mine, a doctor in Southern California, wrote a sentence that he wanted me to relay to you.
	About when we were talking about black holes tonight, he simply said, and for Dr. Kaku, black holes are where God divides by zero.
	Yes, these are called singularities.
	And if you take a pocket calculator, and you divide by zero on that pocket calculator, the pocket calculator says error, error, error.
	That's right.
	And that's what... And that's what computers, without the proper processor, they say divide by zero, error.
	Right.
	However, we physicists believe that it's not quite division by zero.
	These black holes spin.
	They spin quite rapidly.
	We clock one of them at a million miles an hour, NGC 4258.
	And if they spin that rapidly, they don't really collapse to a dot.
	That's the old picture.
	They collapse to a ring.
	And if this ring is rotating rapidly enough, Centrifugal force will keep it from collapsing totally.
	So it's not quite zero, actually.
	It's not zero, that's right.
	That's the important point.
	This was proven in 1963 by the mathematician Roy Kerr of New Zealand.
	It's not going to be division by zero, exactly.
	Which means you're going to fall through the center of the ring.
	And if you fall through the center of the ring, you might wind up on a parallel universe.
	This is the Einstein-Rosen bridge.
	The famous Einstein-Rosen bridge that gives you a wormhole.
	Connecting one part of the universe with another part of the universe.
	Now, of course, it'll be very dangerous to go through a black hole.
	I was going to ask, could a human, under any conditions you can now imagine, survive that journey?
	Well, you know, in Physical Review Letters, which is the magazine that we publish in, an article came out of Caltech showing that if we had what is called negative energy, an exotic form of energy that exists only in very small quantities, Then we could perhaps build a wormhole machine where the stresses on the body would be no more than an airplane flight.
	It would be just like taking an airplane flight through this long tunnel, and the stresses would no more, wouldn't be any worse than the tumble you get inside in a commercial airline flight.
	Now that of course requires negative energy, and this is a fantastic source of energy that we cannot harness on the planet Earth.
	If you get the latest issue of Scientific American, There's a whole article about Warp Drive in the latest issue of Scientific American.
	Warp Drive, like in Star Trek?
	That's right.
	Transporters, I think, are out of question.
	But Warp Drive, we have a theory of Warp Drive.
	The problem is you have to have the gasoline, the energy, the source of energy that drives the warp drive.
	And if you have that, you could bend space.
	That's right.
	You could stretch space, bend space, and make it curl back on itself.
	And then, yeah, then you're talking about a Type II or a Type III civilization that would use wormholes and things like this to go between distances.
	And again, this is not for us.
	We're Type 0.
	We're barely out of the cradle.
	But the presumption would be there are Type 2s and Type 3s out there, right?
	That's right.
	So the at least possibility would be that we have been or will be visited by one of these Type 2 or Type 3s because that kind of transportation is available to them.
	Precisely.
	Many scientists are skeptical of these visitations by aliens because distances are huge.
	It takes four light years to go to the nearest star, and that's like 24 trillion miles.
	That's a long distance to hitchhike if you want to go to the nearest star.
	But if you are Type II, then, of course, all bets are off.
	By that time, you can harness what is called the Planck energy, and the Planck energy is the energy at which holes begin to open in space and time.
	And then all bets are off.
	If you're a type 2, you can begin to play with holes in space.
	And at that point, then yeah, then Alice in Wonderland Looking Glass becomes an option for you.
	You would not necessarily use flying saucers.
	You would just use gateways.
	Gateways or portals just to walk through these rings that would be, you know, consist of negative energy or negative matter.
	And allow you to go enormous distances in the twinkling of an eye.
	Would you think life to be common or uncommon?
	I think that life is probably universal.
	Universal?
	Throughout the galaxy.
	Microbial life, I think, will probably be found throughout the galaxy.
	Okay, but what about... Intelligent life.
	Okay, I think that yes.
	I think that we'll probably have a few thousand, a few hundred to a few thousand planets in our galaxy which harbor intelligent life.
	Some of them could be, you know, thousands, millions of years ahead of us.
	Yes.
	And if just one, if just one type 2 civilization were to emerge, it eventually would become type 3 and populate the galaxy.
	And the sad thing is that we're probably too primitive to even know the fact that there's a Type 3 civilization in our backyard.
	Well, how would a Type 2, for example, which could travel to us, though I don't know that we've seen them yet, how would they perceive us?
	Would they even consider us beyond as we consider an ant?
	Would they be that far ahead, or would we have... Do you think we would be of some intellectual interest to them?
	Well, we would be of interest to them in the same way that animals are interesting to us.
	Type 2, by definition, has the energy output of about 100 billion times the output of the entire Earth.
	So their total megawattage generation is about 100 billion times that of the planet Earth.
	They're stellar.
	Their output corresponds to that of a star.
	Their energy needs and energy output.
	And on that scale, you're talking about a civilization, you know, maybe a thousand years, a few thousand years ahead of ours.
	In which case, they would consider us quite quaint, quite primitive.
	And they may not consider us very interesting.
	You know, we like to think that we're so marvelous that they're going to want to come to us and visit us and dance with us and perform forbidden experiments on us.
	But, you know, maybe they just don't think of us being that interesting, you know?
	And if you were an ant in a forest and somebody's building a six-lane superhighway right next to you, would the ants be able to detect the presence of a six-lane superhighway being built right next to them?
	The ants wouldn't have the right frequencies, they wouldn't have the right instruments, they would not be able to detect or even understand what a six-lane superhighway was built right next to the anthill.
	And so I think that, ironically enough, There could be a neighboring Type 3 civilization fairly close to the Earth, and we wouldn't even know it.
	Our instruments are so primitive.
	We wouldn't know it, and they would if they cared.
	Yeah, and if they cared, they would probably say, oh yeah, look, there's an emerging Type 0.
	But then again, there are probably a few hundred, a few thousand emerging Type 0 civilizations out there.
	And so we would be interesting to them, to a degree.
	But not much.
	So is it then odd or not a surprise that so far SETI and all the programs that have tried to hear something or see something or get some signal from anywhere else of any intelligent life has thus far absolutely failed?
	That's right.
	The galaxy could be teeming, teeming with radio messages and signals and communications and sitcoms and what have you.
	We're simply too primitive to decode it.
	Again, if you're an anthill sitting next to a six-lane superhighway, the ants wouldn't even know there was a six-lane superhighway next to them.
	I've got you.
	All right.
	Hold on, Doctor.
	We're at the bottom of another hour.
	Professor Michio Kaku is here, and we're talking about all kinds of stuff.
	And now, you know, they've got this person who's going to make a black hole in his basement.
	I'll tell you more about that in a moment.
	I can see her lying back in her satin dress In a room where you do what you don't confess
	Sundown, you better take care If I find you been creeping round my backstairs
	Sundown, you better take care If I find you been creeping round my backstairs
	Looking like the queen in a sailor's dream And she don't always say what she really means
	Hey life, look at me, I can see the real me You shook me, took me out of my world, I won't back down
	Suddenly I just woke up to the happening When you find that you love the future behind me But when you've got a tender love you don't take care of Then you better beware of To recharge Bell in the Kingdom of Nye, from west of the Rockies, dial 1-800-618-8255.
	East of the Rockies, 1-800-825-5033.
	First time callers may recharge at 1-775-727-1222.
	1-800-825-5033. First time callers may reach out at 1-775-727-1222 or use the wildcard
	line at 1-775-727-1295. To reach out on the toll free international line, call your AT&T
	operator and have them dial 800-893-0903.
	This is Coast to Coast AM with Art Bell on the Premier Radio Networks.
	That would be us, all right.
	Good morning.
	You're listening to one of the greatest minds in America right now, Dr. Professor Michio Kaku, and we're talking about Oh, I don't know, all kinds of things happening around us that we're just discovering.
	Things we didn't know about, like wandering black holes.
	And I was exaggerating a little bit when I talked about basement black holes, but I'll expand and we'll talk about it in a second.
	Okay, so maybe not black holes in your basement, but pretty close.
	Let me read this.
	From the BBC, a physicist has suggested that a A particular type of black hole could be made in the laboratory rather easily.
	It would be about a half meter wide and be made of electrons.
	Until now, black holes in a lab have been the stuff, of course, of science fiction.
	The disaster scenario for an earthly black hole generally begins with an experiment involving a high-energy particle accelerator that smashes subatomic particles together.
	Particle accelerators are designed to collide particles together at incredible energies to recreate the conditions of the Big Bang.
	Matter and energy are indistinguishable in the explosion and obey laws that do not come into play in our everyday universe.
	Actually, they rather feature the Earth would be gone in about an hour.
	Within an hour, it says, the Earth would be gone, replaced by a hole in space and time.
	However, the creation of a black hole on Earth was not thought to be feasible until now.
	Theoretical calculations carried out by King Saud University in Saudi Arabia, of all places, suggest it would be rather easy to make a black hole in the laboratory, but it would not be a black hole as we have imagined them.
	It would be a black hole for electrons only.
	All other particles and light, get this, would be able to pass in and out of the black hole But once an electron went inside, it would be forever trapped.
	Doctor, is all of that possible?
	Well, when you take a look at basement black holes, you have to realize that if I take the sun, the sun, and squeeze it to about a mile, one mile, then it would collapse into a black hole.
	That's how much black holes weigh.
	They're incredible devices, objects weighing basically larger than the sun.
	To be compressed down to a mile.
	Now, when we physicists do these calculations on basement black holes, these calculations, of course, assume that we have access to unlimited amounts of energy and we can squeeze them to incredible distances.
	To create a black hole that weighs as much as the Earth, you would have to squeeze the Earth down to a thimble, okay?
	And then it would start to implode.
	However, my friend Alan Guth, MIT physicist and author of the Inflationary Universe idea, He did a calculation of what it would take to create a universe in your basement.
	A universe?
	A universe.
	If you had an oven, and you were to increase the temperature of the oven to trillions and trillions upon trillions of degrees, at what point would a baby universe begin to emerge?
	The calculation is pretty straightforward.
	It's been published in Physical Review Letters.
	You would have to heat your oven to 100 trillion trillion degrees.
	That's far beyond the temperature of a supernova.
	And if you could do that, then yes, a small universe will begin to emerge in your oven.
	So I asked Alan, wouldn't this be kind of dangerous?
	I mean, building a small little big bang in your, in your, in your basement?
	Right.
	And he said, well, yeah, he calculated it would be equivalent to about maybe a few hundred hydrogen bombs.
	So, in other words, watch out if you create such a device inside your basement.
	Well, there are, but there are people in your line of work who are contemplating this sort of thing.
	Yes, but again, the energy output is that of a Type II civilization.
	You have to be at least Type II before you can even conceive of playing with the energy output of a star, okay?
	And 100 trillion trillion degrees, of course, is a trillion times the temperature of a supernova.
	And so we are talking about a theoretical calculation of what if.
	What if you were type 2?
	And what if you could create in your oven, in your basement, a temperature of 100 trillion trillion degrees?
	Then you would have a baby universe open up, a little wormhole.
	All right, if we took a quantum leap as big as we did when we
	harnessed, well, we didn't harness, when we discovered element 92 and the way to make bombs out of it and so forth.
	If we took that big a leap from where we are now, where would we be?
	Well, that leap was an energy leap of 100 million.
	From chemical explosions to thermonuclear explosions, the ratio is about 100 million.
	That was the leap to hydrogen bombs.
	And now we're talking about another leap, even bigger than that, to a black hole.
	Okay?
	Again, if you take the Sun, compress it to about a mile across, that is the Schwarzschild radius, or the event horizon of the Sun, then the Sun would implode and become a black hole.
	Now, the Sun cannot do that.
	Gravity is not powerful enough to squeeze the Sun to about a mile.
	Therefore, our Sun will not become a black hole.
	Our Sun will... When the Sun dies, The sun will die basically as a white dwarf.
	It will not become a black hole.
	But larger stars, you know, 10 to 50 times larger than our sun, will in fact become black holes.
	You would need that much more mass.
	That much more mass, that's right, about 10 to 50 times the mass of our sun.
	And, you know, judging from the meeting of the American Astronomical Society meeting of last week in Atlanta, we're talking about the galaxy perhaps teeming, teeming, with wandering lone black holes.
	And even in the press release, I have the press release right here in front of me, they even say that this could mean that yet more black holes are discovered wandering around the galaxy without giving us any warning.
	And you saw the movie Armageddon, right?
	If we were to detect a wandering black hole coming toward us, let's say we got lucky and Hubble saw the light shifting radically and we saw this thing and it was coming toward us, what could we do about it now?
	Well, not much.
	You know, in the movie Armageddon, They could put a hydrogen bomb and deflect the path of this comet... A rock.
	...toward the Earth, right?
	A rock, yes.
	But this wandering black hole weighs six times the mass of our sun.
	And if you were to put a hydrogen bomb on this object, it wouldn't even burp.
	It wouldn't even notice it.
	A single solar flare, just one solar flare that the sun flings off... Yes.
	...has the power of several thousand hydrogen bombs.
	Right.
	Right.
	And so, it wouldn't even notice Bruce Willis throwing a hydrogen bomb at it, like in the movie Armageddon.
	Comets can be busted up, but black holes would just... they wouldn't even burp, if that were to happen.
	They wouldn't even notice us as it came by and destroyed us.
	That's right.
	As it sort of came barreling by, it would basically just swallow up the sun.
	It would swallow up the sun and the solar system with it, okay?
	So that's going to be a potential problem that we're going to have to worry about, you know, maybe millions of years into the future.
	But it's something to think about, that there are a lot of things out there now in the universe.
	How do you know it's going to be millions of years in the future?
	Well, it's hard to say.
	You know, the Earth's been around for four and a half billion years.
	So, so far we haven't encountered anything other than comets or meteors that have, you know, extinguished life on the Earth.
	So there hasn't been any planet-killing object that has come by in four and a half billion years.
	But it's hard to say, with this latest discovery.
	What do you think happened to Mars?
	Well, Mars is a small object, about half the size of the Earth.
	Its gravity is quite weak, and the water, which once flowed freely on the surface of Mars... Doesn't anymore.
	Yeah, Mars was tropical.
	You know, life may have started on Mars first.
	Yes.
	Because Mars was tropical when the Earth was steaming hot.
	Exactly.
	So see, you said no planet killers, but that's why I brought up Mars.
	It seems like Mars kind of died.
	Yeah, Mars kind of died.
	It's a frozen desert.
	Most of its surface is below the freezing point of water.
	And so, the gravity is too weak so that most of the water pretty much drifted into outer space or froze into the ice caps in the permafrost.
	So, Mars is a potential future of the Earth, unless we be careful.
	However, there are some people at NASA who've set up a webpage to look at terraforming Mars.
	So that's a possibility, because at some point we're going to have to leave the Earth.
	We really have no choice.
	I was on the Discovery Channel a few months ago talking about this.
	It was called Exodus Earth.
	What would force us off?
	Well, you know, the Earth will eventually die.
	This is a law of physics.
	Nothing lasts forever.
	All things must pass, according to George Harrison of The Beatles.
	And it means that within a scale of tens of thousands of years, we'll have another Ice Age.
	On a scale of millions of years, a comet could destroy life on Earth.
	And on the scale of five billion years, the sun will eat up the Earth.
	Five billion years from now, we'll have the last nice day on Earth.
	The sky will be on fire as the sun expands.
	The oceans will boil.
	The mountains will melt and vaporize, and just like the Bible says... I was about to say, that sounds rather biblical to me.
	That's right.
	We're talking about from Stardust we came, and Stardust we'll go back.
	We came from the sun, and we'll go back into the sun five billion years from now, which means that we have no choice.
	Humans must eventually leave the Earth.
	It's a law of physics.
	And then, of course, we're talking thousands, millions of years in the future.
	But we're not making very good progress right now.
	No, we're not making good progress at all.
	Does that worry you?
	I mean, when you address the larger picture, shouldn't we be moving toward the warp drives you're talking about?
	All kinds of things that would take us off this planet, and we're going in reverse at the moment.
	Yeah, in fact, we're messing up this planet.
	You know, the atmosphere is going berserk, as you know.
	I've noticed.
	These polarized caps are beginning to slowly break up.
	Yes, I heard, by the way, Doctor, you might want to comment on this.
	That the Arctic ice they discovered during the Cold War with our submarines, and they wouldn't tell us about it because it is now 40% less.
	Thinner, right.
	In the last couple of decades.
	It was shocking.
	When I read that, I almost fell off my chair.
	Same here.
	That's right.
	They didn't tell us this because it was the height of the Cold War, but periodic visits to the Arctic with the Nautilus and many other nuclear-powered submarines were able to calculate the thickness of the ice And the ice cover of the Arctic is about half the way it was at the beginning of the Cold War.
	And large parts of Alaska are beginning to thaw out.
	Yes, I talk to Alaskans, they tell me that.
	Now, all of this together, along with what's going on in the Antarctic, I mean, when you look at the world, there's ice at the top, ice at the bottom.
	This ice seems to be going away.
	This is going to have a big effect on us, isn't it?
	That's right.
	In fact, the sea level is already beginning to rise because Simply ocean water warming expands.
	You know, you all know that things expand when they get warm.
	Right.
	So just the rise of one degree in ocean water temperature of the last hundred years has expanded the oceans and has risen sea level rise, caused sea level rise.
	But now as the glaciers begin to melt, and as parts of Alaska begin to thaw out, and as the glaciers begin to recede in the Andes and other places around the Earth, then I think we're going to start to see sea level rise.
	And this does not mean that cities will be underwater.
	It'll mean that hurricanes, monster storms, will then take advantage of the sea level rise to put water into the cities in a major storm.
	Yes, I've heard that.
	For example, I live in Manhattan, and the subway system could be very easily engulfed by a monster storm, and you could paralyze all of Manhattan and all of Wall Street.
	Well, that'd be it for Curtis Leela.
	That's right.
	And even without having sea level rise in Gulf Wall Street, you could have paralysis of major cities simply because of storms that will then fling water into the cities.
	New Orleans has to worry about this, because parts of New Orleans are actually below sea level.
	Holland has to worry about this because of the dikes.
	And coastal cities, and most humans live on the coast, are going to have to worry about this.
	So if I were you, I would not think about buying beachfront property too soon.
	I hear you.
	There have been examples recently of monster storms.
	One, for example, actually, no, two, that hit France and knocked down a third of the trees in France.
	That's right.
	And the Palace of Versailles lost a few thousand trees.
	Notre Dame, which has been there for, what, 700 years?
	Yes.
	Its spires, some of its spires toppled over.
	You know, these things have been standing there for 700 years, and all of a sudden these things are beginning to topple over because of monster storms.
	And as the Earth heats up, storms get more powerful, because that's where the energy of hurricanes come from.
	Thank you.
	From ocean water, basically.
	The heat of ocean water.
	And just two days ago, every single network, like somebody threw a switch, did a great big story on, whoa, climate change!
	It's like, everybody woke up at once, I don't know, the media works that way somehow, and suddenly it was climate change, this big horseshoe thing they've now found in the Pacific, La Nina and El Nino, they don't explain what's going on anymore, so now they have this horseshoe thing they're talking about, and they're talking about a generation of climate change.
	That's right.
	And the Europeans are definitely worried about this.
	You know, the Alps may melt.
	The ice caps could very well melt within 50 years.
	And also, if you probably look at a map of the Earth, you realize that England is actually quite north, has a northerly latitude.
	That's right.
	And you realize that Europe, by rights, should be frozen.
	And the only reason why Europe is not frozen, being so high up in altitude, is because of the water, the warm water of the Gulf Stream.
	Thank you, the currents, right?
	The North Atlantic current.
	Up to Canada, up to Greenland, and into England.
	And if that ocean current is disrupted because of the changes in the weather of the Earth, That means you could freeze a large part of Europe and create a mini Ice Age.
	Exactly.
	In other words, if you took, for example, all of the ice at the Arctic and began to add this cold, fresh water to the salt water, why, there's no telling what might happen.
	That's right.
	In other words, if the ice shelves were to gradually break up, and huge chunks the size of Delaware have already broken up, by the way, broken off the Antarctic, The immediate danger would not necessarily be sea level rise.
	The immediate danger would be a disruption of the ocean currents.
	And if these ocean currents are disrupted, that means warm water will not wind up where it should go, like to England.
	And a disruption of that belt of warm water to England could freeze large parts of Europe.
	And it's happened in the past, by the way.
	You know, 10,000 years ago.
	We now realize there was a very major shift in sea level rise about 10,000 years ago.
	And it happened within about just a few years.
	Just a few years, this gigantic rise in sea level took place.
	Well, they found these woolly mammoths, you know, with all the green things in their bellies, undigested.
	Where did the green things come from and how could they have been so quickly frozen?
	In fact, you're going to see a lot of prehistoric men and women and mammoths thawing out because the ice cover is thawing out universally over the planet Earth.
	Every piece of ice on the planet Earth is gradually receding And it's leaving behind frozen carcasses that have been frozen for thousands of years, and they've been stable for thousands of years.
	Stable.
	And all of a sudden we see them, okay?
	And you're going to have more and more science specials on frozen humans and frozen mammoths that are discovered as the glaciers recede, which is a warning.
	The past is warning the present.
	Well, I think the argument has pretty much ceased about the fact that it is changing.
	The argument continues to rage about whether man's hand is playing a big part in it or not much of a part in it.
	You know, it's a natural cycle that's occurring.
	That's right.
	What do you think?
	Well, it used to be, as you pointed out, that some people would even dispute the warming.
	They looked at satellites.
	Satellite data seems to indicate that the Earth is cooling rather than warming.
	But we found the answer to that riddle.
	It turns out that satellites that are far out only measure the outer atmosphere of the Earth.
	They don't measure the ground temperature.
	And that's why they were picking up a cooling effect high up in the Earth's atmosphere.
	And plus, the orbit of that satellite was decaying with time.
	As a consequence, they miscalibrated the satellite.
	They got the radius of the satellite wrong.
	Oh, you mean the people who run our space program could get numbers wrong?
	That's right.
	They got the numbers wrong.
	And that's why the spurious results were being published showing that the Earth was cooling.
	Rather than heating up, because the satellite itself was dis-calibrated.
	They don't make mistakes like that.
	Right.
	But you're right about the other question.
	Yes, they do.
	You remember the Mars probe?
	Meters to feet, wasn't it?
	Yeah.
	You know, the probability of that happening was one in a million.
	But how do you put a number on human stupidity?
	You can't quantify human stupidity.
	Doctor, hold on.
	When we come back, I'm going to open up the lines, and that should be fun.
	Stay right where you are, Dr. Michio Kaku.
	One of the great minds in the world right now is available to you.
	So if you have a question about anything we've talked about, or maybe something we have not yet touched on, that's what we're here for.
	From the high desert, I'm Art Bell, and this is Coast to Coast AM.
	I'm Art Bell, and this is Coast to Coast AM.
	Actually, we have to get out of this place before it is the last thing.
	we try to do All of us.
	Dr. Cantu, we'll be right back.
	Wanna take a ride?
	Call Art Bell from west of the Rockies at 1-800-618-8255.
	East of the Rockies at 1-800-825-5033.
	First time callers may reach Art at area code 775-727-1222.
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	First time callers may reach Art at area code 775-727-1222 or call the wild card line at
	775-727-1295.
	To talk with Art on the toll free international line, call your AT&T operator and have them
	dial 800-893-0903.
	This is Coast to Coast AM with Art Bell.
	It is indeed, and we are honored to have Professor Michio Kaku here.
	Tonight to answer your questions, and... Here's an interesting observation from Los Angeles.
	Regarding those migratory black holes and the resulting wobble effect on Earth, think of the panic that would ensue in Los Angeles when the locals would have to change their sign.
	Think about it.
	All right, here comes your opportunity in a moment to ask one of our nation's greatest theoretical physicists a question.
	Whatever you want.
	And I know a lot of you are intimidated by Dr. Kaku, but you need not be.
	As you will soon find out, he is able to answer questions so that you can understand them.
	And it is our future, collectively, as a human race, That we're talking about.
	So it's absolutely fascinating stuff.
	So, let us begin.
	Dr. Kaku, are you there?
	Right, right here.
	Listen, I want to give you an opportunity.
	I know you have any number of books I have in front of me.
	Visions, I know you have Hyperspace, you have other books.
	If somebody were to begin, Doctor, to read a first-timer, what would you recommend they would read first of your work?
	Well, I would recommend that they read Visions, because that takes us 20, 50, 100 years into the future.
	And then I would recommend Beyond Einstein and Hyperspace, because then we're talking about going a few thousand years into the future, when we have the ability to manipulate hyperspace.
	And of course, that's far beyond anything that we could do at the present time.
	So I would first start with Visions, because it starts with the year 2020, and then works its way up to 2100.
	And I've interviewed 150 of the world's top scientists for that book.
	That book is the most authoritative, the most scientifically valid understanding of the next century, by 150 interviews with the scientists who are inventing the future.
	These are the people inventing the future in their laboratories, and this is their story presented in the book, Visions.
	A thousand?
	A thousand scientists?
	150 scientists were interviewed for the book, Visions, and the book then takes you 20, 50, 100 years into the future with regards to medicine, space travel, quantum physics, robots, artificial intelligence, and talks about what life would look like in the future, as told to me by the scientists who are inventing the computers, inventing the robots, inventing the DNA therapies that will change our lifestyle.
	So it's the most scientifically authoritative account of the next 100 years.
	Now, of course, we're not going to know for a hundred years whether all of this comes true or part of it comes true or actually it understates what's going to occur in that time.
	They did that, as you know, years ago at the World's Fair and none of it or very little of it came true.
	What do you think about this as compared to that?
	Why would we be right now when we were wrong then?
	Right.
	See, the problem is that when We hear about these predictions on the Jetsons.
	They're always done by science fiction writers who are well-meaning and fiction writers, not the scientists themselves.
	That's the difference with my book, Visions.
	My book, Visions, is based on interviews with 150 of the world's top scientists.
	These are Nobel laureates.
	These are directors of the major laboratories.
	And this book is their understanding of how their inventions are going to ripple through society and turn our lives upside down.
	So in the past, Science fiction writers dominated the field.
	Now, real scientists are beginning to make the most learned, most authentic predictions of the future of technology.
	And that's what the book, Vision, is.
	And that's why it's an international bestseller.
	Like I said, the Sunday London Times serialized the book in Paris.
	The main weekly had a two-page spread devoted to the book, Vision, and it created quite a storm in Germany as editorial writers debated what was in the book.
	Because of the fact that the German people feel they're being left behind by all these inventions that are created in the United States.
	Well, they are, aren't they?
	They are, that's right.
	They are being left behind.
	All right.
	Let's go to the lines.
	First time caller line, you're on the air with Dr. Kaku.
	Hi.
	Hi there.
	I'm Clay from Colorado.
	Yes, sir.
	And this is the first time I ever tried calling, and I got through.
	I can't believe it.
	That's why we call it the first time caller line.
	Well, the question I have is, Dr. Kaku was talking about computers becoming more advanced, and I'm an internet programmer myself, and people have always made the comment that if computers get more complex, the need for programmers are going to diminish.
	I've always maintained the opposite, that as computers get more complex, you're going to need programs to deal with those complex systems.
	Say, in 20 years, how does Dr. Kaku feel the role of programs will fit into the scheme of things regarding computer advancements and development?
	You're absolutely right.
	You know, we can mass-produce hardware.
	In fact, we'll be buying chips like we buy pork bellies.
	We'll be buying it by the ton.
	Chips will be as cheap as bubblegum wrappers and as ubiquitous as paper.
	However, you cannot mass-produce the human brain.
	In order to create a software programmer, you have to give birth to one the old-fashioned way.
	They'd have to change his diapers and send it to college.
	It takes 25 years to grow a software programmer.
	Oh, yeah.
	You cannot mass-produce software programmers.
	That's why in the future there are going to be tremendous job opportunities for people who program these machines.
	Machines cannot write software.
	They're not creative.
	They don't understand the human experience.
	They don't have common sense.
	That is the single most important problem facing us that we take for granted.
	We take for granted that machines have common sense.
	Machines don't have any common sense at all.
	They're adding machines.
	And we have to program these adding machines to simulate human functions.
	You're absolutely right.
	We'll mass-produce chips by the ton, but you cannot mass-produce software programmers.
	So there'll always be a job for people like you.
	Well, that's good to hear, being an internet programmer.
	Good news for you, sir.
	Alrighty.
	Alright, thank you.
	I don't frequently read an entire fax, Doctor, but I want to read this to you and get your reaction.
	Mm-hmm.
	Art, on the topic of merging humans with computers, I'm sorry to say, but I'm going to relate it to sports once again.
	As I do a lot of things, what made the great teams in the NFL great?
	The Packers of the 60s, Steelers of the 70s, 49ers of the 80s, and the Cowboys of the 90s were all statistically superior.
	Every one of them.
	On paper, they were tops in statistical categories, like points scored, points allowed, sacks, turnovers, and so forth and so on.
	Those are tangibles.
	Was that what made the team special, or was it the intangibles?
	All those teams had things you couldn't measure, like heart, guts, grittiness, unity.
	The closer we as humans become to computers, the better our statistics will be.
	Less error, less anger, less sadness.
	However, there will also be less triumph, less heart, and less soul.
	Y'all will look good on paper.
	No longer will we be able to dig down deep and perform those last-minute comebacks Those memorable moments, that's what they're made of.
	I'll miss those intangibles.
	That's what human imperfection has to offer.
	That's from Tom in Boise.
	Does that make sense?
	I think that makes a lot of sense.
	Some people look at computers as being cold and unemotional, and they're right.
	They're adding machines.
	We keep forgetting the fact that computers are glorified adding machines.
	And as a consequence, the spiritual dimension is not going to be fulfilled in cyberspace.
	Some people go into cyberspace thinking they're going to find spirituality, meaning, an attachment to things larger than their sense of self.
	That's not going to happen.
	You don't find fulfillment in cyberspace.
	We create our own meaning.
	We create our own destiny.
	We create our own sense of oneness with the universe.
	And so cyberspace will give us opportunities.
	And that's my point.
	We'll have options that our parents never had.
	We'll have options that our grandparents could only dream of in the future, and in the future we will gradually have the power of a God.
	Well, I was going to say, Doctor, though we might not do that in cyberspace, meet our spiritual selves, what about as we move to a Type 2 or a Type 3, if we make it, odds are fairly small, but if we make it, will we eventually either meet God or realize we are God?
	Well, I think even within the next century, we'll have powers usually reserved to a Greek god.
	Greek gods, as you know, were able to animate the inanimate.
	They were able to create life in their image in Greek mythology.
	We'll have the capability, you know, within 50 to 100 years of being able to animate inanimate objects and extend the lifespan of living things and create life forms that never walked the surface of the earth before.
	The question is, do we have the wisdom of Solomon To go with this tremendous power.
	And this is where spirituality and a sense of oneness with the universe comes from.
	I'm not talking about, you know, psychobabble and touchy-feely New Age stuff.
	I'm talking about something very practical.
	These are enormously powerful inventions we're talking about.
	We're talking about being able to recreate life forms in a test tube that never walked the surface of the Earth before.
	To them we would be gods.
	That's right, and that's happening fairly soon.
	Already we can create designer animals.
	Within 20 years, it'll be possible to create designer children.
	And when we can create children in our own image, this could create havoc, because every parent will want a monkey with the genes of their children.
	And that's why we have to be able to democratically decide which way the human race wants to go with this technology.
	We'll be able to create designer children and eliminate disease, which I'm all for, but somebody is going to want to tinker with their kids to make them prettier.
	To have them enhanced with enhanced musical ability and different kinds of abilities to do well in college.
	And I think that could create a very bad skewing of the human race, as every parent begins to mess with the characteristics of their children.
	So you do have some reservations?
	Oh, definitely.
	I think that with the power of a god, we have to have the wisdom of Solomon to go with it.
	I think we have to realize that this technology could spin out of control unless we are very careful to make sure that we have democratic input.
	This is where the internet comes in, by the way.
	The internet makes democratic control of this technology more feasible.
	Because anyone can set up their own channel now.
	Anyone can put their video pictures on the web now.
	Sure.
	And this means that we'll have access to more democratic input.
	So 1984 is not going to happen.
	It's too late.
	No one dictator can seize control of the Internet.
	Even if Bill Clinton, today, were to declare that the United States is not going to be part of the Internet, people would laugh.
	They'd just laugh at Bill Clinton if he did that.
	The Internet is unstoppable.
	And that's why 1984, this nightmarish vision of Big Brother, is not going to happen.
	Like I said, the real problem is Little Brother.
	I would worry more about, ultimately, not so much our The fact that we cannot stop the Internet, but perhaps that eventually the Internet will be in charge of us, in a kind of a sense.
	No, I don't think so.
	Think of the highway, the interstate highway system.
	That really helped to make America leap into the 20th century with the development of the interstate highway system.
	And now we're gradually going to be paying intelligence on the inter-highway system with chips in the road and what have you.
	But that doesn't mean that the highway system seizes control of America.
	The Internet has no intelligence.
	A cockroach has more intelligence than the Internet.
	The present Internet.
	Right.
	And in the future, we'll gradually start to put some intelligence on the Internet.
	These are called intelligent agents.
	And we'll gradually begin to put intelligent agents on the Internet that will act like our butler, act like our personal secretary.
	But the Internet itself will have no collective intelligence.
	It'll just be a highway for us to use.
	Okay?
	The real intelligence will be intelligent agents that become our secretaries, our personal assistants, that tell us when the stock market is going up and down, even as it goes up and down.
	We'll have these intelligent agents probably within 10 to 15 years.
	Okay?
	That's not long.
	That's not long, right?
	So I think that, again, in the 21st century, we'll gradually have the power of a god, but we're going to have to have the wisdom to exercise this power so that we don't mess with our genes too much, And that we don't invade people's privacy, but that we unleash people's initiatives and make them healthier, make them more vigorous, make them happier, more prosperous.
	That's the hope of the 21st century.
	Well, why isn't part of that hope, for example, making people smarter?
	Well, because... Instead of 10% of the brain, utilize 70, 80%, whatever.
	Yeah, we realize that a good chunk of the genes in our body handle the nervous system.
	And there's probably not one smart gene.
	There are probably hundreds, hundreds of genes which affect our intellectual ability.
	And so it may take us many, many decades before we can tease apart these genes.
	At the present time, we can only figure out the purpose of one gene at a time.
	We knock out one gene, and then we look at what happens, right?
	Intelligence may require hundreds, thousands of genes acting in concert.
	And that's why the mystery of intelligence will be a mystery for Maybe another century.
	Because it'll take many, many decades before we begin to figure out how these genes interact to create the human nervous system.
	Gotcha.
	All right.
	Wild Card Line, you're on the air with Professor Kaku.
	Hello.
	Hi, my name's Dobbin from East Greenwich, New York.
	Yes, sir.
	Really fascinating show.
	I'm really enjoying it a lot.
	There's so many questions I could ask.
	But one thing that's really sort of scary to me is the thought of these roving black holes.
	Something just popped in my mind, it's a real curiosity, is what should happen if one of these wandering black holes should run into a stationary black hole?
	Oh, we have computer simulations of this.
	We have supercomputers now that can shoot two black holes into each other.
	Really?
	And yeah, in the computer program we have this tremendous burst of energy and they coalesce into a larger black hole.
	Wow.
	One black hole basically eats up the other black hole.
	Like two low-pressure systems joining.
	That's right.
	And remember that in our own Milky Way, we have a black hole at the center.
	And in Andromeda, the closest galaxy, we also have a black hole.
	And these two galaxies appear to be on a collision course.
	We have what is called a blue shift toward Andromeda.
	And there's a chance that we could collide with Andromeda in the future.
	And Andromeda is bigger than our galaxy.
	We'll have a hostile takeover of our galaxy.
	We'll be eaten up, basically, by Andromeda.
	And the two black holes at the center will probably collide.
	So this could actually happen even in our own backyard.
	Even in our own Milky Way galaxy.
	Of course, it'll be about 10 billion years from now, so don't hold your breath.
	But we could see the merger of two black holes, even in our own galaxy.
	That would not be good.
	That would not be good.
	However, these wandering black holes are kind of scary, because you would have no warning.
	It's like, again, the invisible predator in the movie Predator.
	They're invisible.
	And you would not have much warning if one of these things got very close to you.
	The only warning you would really have is the distortion of starlight, and the fact that planets are beginning to wobble in their orbits around the Sun.
	That Pluto would be missing, basically.
	So, in other words, some astronomer would be looking at the output of Hubble.
	Everything would begin to get real blurry and shifting.
	Shifting, right.
	And then Pluto would not be where you expect it to be.
	And then you would realize that there's a tremendous gravitational pull on the outer planets.
	And that's how you would first sense the fact that there's this invisible object coming towards you.
	So in other words, we had better figure out how to get the heck off this planet before something like that does happen.
	That's right.
	We have plenty of time.
	But yes, there is this danger factor that the universe is a cosmic shooting gallery.
	There's lots of debris out there.
	Lots of meteors, comets, and now we realize there are wandering black holes out there too.
	Incredible.
	Thanks a lot.
	You bet.
	Take care.
	East of the Rockies, you're on the air with Dr. Kaku.
	Hi.
	Buongiorno.
	Yes, sir.
	Good morning, Michio Kaku.
	Yes.
	Good morning, Ott Bell.
	This is my first time talking to both of you folks.
	Glad to have you.
	Where are you?
	Bronx, New York.
	Just speaking of genes, this is Gino in Bronx, New York.
	All right.
	I listened to you here in New York, Michio.
	I enjoyed your show for many years.
	I'm glad you're on a more international level now.
	I have a question.
	First of all, Art, your music is really exceptional.
	I really enjoy it, and you have a wonderful speaking voice.
	Thank you.
	I tried to tell you that last night.
	My fingers were hurting trying to get through for three and a half hours.
	I see.
	Well, thank you.
	Also, as far as your visions, you did the special here on BAI.
	Everything I was hearing you say with the scientists, there is a man who has somehow
	not been noticed too much and I think he gives a lot of inspiration and a lot of hope for
	dealing with all these questions of power and so on down the road.
	There's a man named Edgar Cayce and everything I've heard you say about clones and mixing
	people, being able to do things with animals, where a pig will fly in six more years, he
	talked all about these things many years ago before this got really big.
	I mean he died in 1945 but he did World War I, World War II, the Dead Sea Scrolls, what
	they'll say.
	He had Nikola Tesla going to him, Thomas Edison, but most importantly he said for dealing with
	these coming times where power and wisdom very rarely go together, as Einstein said,
	individually for everybody listening, he did recommend highly that everybody has a place
	inside them that will help them to navigate these waters if they were to take care of
	body which he saw as a temple.
	All right.
	Caller, hold on.
	We'll come back to you after the break, which is where we are right now.
	Coming up right now, we'll be right back.
	Don't touch that dial.
	I'm Art Bell, and this is Coast to Coast AM, raging through the nighttime like a freight train.
	we'll be right back music playing
	music playing music playing
	music playing music playing
	Dr. Kaku, welcome back.
	And caller, you were mentioning a man.
	Yes.
	Thank you, Mr. Bell.
	Michio was talking about in the future, you know, maybe we'll get the wisdom gene or something.
	But here's a man within our midst who showed that we have these innate abilities.
	And he only had an eighth grade education.
	And he was the most documented spiritual psychic we have in America.
	All right.
	Well, let's hit him with that.
	Doctor, what about people Well, first of all, I'm a physicist, not a psychic.
	So, I don't want to go beyond the boundaries of my scientific expertise.
	Okay, well first of all I'm a physicist not a psychic. So I don't want to go beyond the boundaries of my
	scientific expertise. So in my above visions, I took the most conservative course to simply
	interview the 150 of the world's top scientists who are building the internet, building the DNA technology,
	building the spacecraft which will repel us into the 21st century.
	Now, when I was a child, however, I did read Edgar Cayce, and I read Nostradamus.
	In fact, I used to spend weeks at a time at the library reading all the psychics and mystics about the future.
	And one thing, though, I did notice, reading and spending so many hours in the library, ...was that there was a certain vagueness about some of their predictions.
	Now, that didn't mean their predictions were wrong.
	It just meant that Nostradamus's quatrains were on the vague side, so it was hard to understand exactly what he was saying.
	And that's one reason why I became a scientist, because I wanted to fill in the dots.
	I wanted to be as precise as possible about what we might be able to see in the future by visiting the laboratories, by looking at the therapies, by looking at the devices, Which will propel us into the next century.
	Well, that's a carefully constructed comment.
	Do you think that they had abilities that are presently, still to this very day, inexplicable scientifically?
	Well, it's hard to say.
	You know, science is based on reproducibility.
	And things that are not reproducible We scientists are rather helpless.
	For example, if the Big Bang only occurred once, said David Hume, the great philosopher, then how would scientists make any rational statements about it, because it's not a reproducible event?
	Well, they don't make rational statements about it.
	Oh yeah, well, what we try to do is try to recreate, like a detective, a detective story, based on a crime, and the crime happens only once, it's not reproducible, And we try to fill in the gaps.
	And that is where science is at its weakest.
	Science is at its strength when we have reproducible results.
	That when we take a gas, we take a rock, we can pulverize it, analyze it, heat it up, again and again and again.
	The laws of physics don't change in Russia, they don't change in the United States, and that's how we know so much about materials.
	But when we look at crimes, and when we look at the Big Bang, and things that happened once, Then, we're a little bit at a loss, because we can't play with it.
	We have to reconstruct the scene of the crime.
	We have to infer and use indirect evidence to sort of piece things together.
	And when it comes to prophecies, and when it comes to spirituality and religion, this is where we're also a little bit at a loss, because it's hard to capture an angel in a laboratory.
	We can't study an angel in a laboratory.
	That doesn't mean that angels don't exist.
	It just means that we're at a loss, because we don't have the data Available to us, reproducible on demand, you see.
	So science has limits, and the limits of science is basically what is reproducible, and this is where predictions of the future were a little bit at a loss, because, well, there are some scientists who think that perhaps there could be something called precognition, but the thing is, you can't bottle it.
	You can't put it in a laboratory and measure it on demand.
	In other words, if I had a psychic who could tell me tomorrow's events in detail, like tomorrow's headlines, The headlines of next week, letter for letter, word for word, then I'd be convinced, okay?
	But it's difficult to do that, because that would be a reproducible event.
	Well, if you guys did get an angel, I wouldn't give two cents for its welfare.
	Well, if you saw the movie E.T., the first thing that the scientists wanted to do to E.T.
	was dissect it and take it apart.
	Rip that sucker apart and let's see what makes it tick.
	Right.
	So that was not a very flattering portrayal of scientists in that movie.
	All right.
	Here's something that should concern us today.
	We all talked about the weather.
	Uh, apparent climate change that's underway right now.
	Obviously, there would be thinking about efforts to remediate the change, or even control the weather.
	Do you suppose that's going on right now, or will be shortly?
	Well, a Type 1 civilization, by definition, could control or manipulate the weather, because they control planetary forces.
	Well, we are maybe a hundred years away from attaining Type 1 status.
	You can just do the math on a sheet of paper.
	We don't have the energy output to do that, which means that we're going to be at the mercy, we're going to be at the mercy of a lot of climate change into the next decade without the ability to change it.
	There's an interesting Air Force website where they actually claim we will own the weather.
	Well, I read their website.
	They only claim that they can tweak the weather.
	For example, the CIA tried to feed the clouds over Vietnam during the Vietnam War to enhance the monsoon season and to play with the weather to knock out the gorillas there.
	And that's where this idea came, that you can tweak the weather by putting crystals, ice crystals, high in the atmosphere to set off the monsoon season.
	But is it not possible?
	I mean, you can also tweak the tail of a tiger.
	And the tiger might not notice, or it might turn around and take a big hunk out of you.
	That's right.
	And with the weather, again, we can probably tweak thunderstorms, and that's where the Pentagon is very much interested in this, because thunderstorms can influence the outcome of a battle, for example.
	That's right.
	Determine wars on the basis of storms.
	You bet.
	But global warming is such a humongous thing, you know, heating up the entire planet.
	We're no longer talking about one thunderstorm in Normandy on D-Day.
	We're talking about the entire Earth.
	And that would require that we change our habits.
	That would require that we wean ourselves off gasoline, go to the electric car, develop fuel cells and solar technology.
	And as you know, electric cars are gradually hitting the market now.
	Well, very gradually.
	What do you actually think the odds are of our moving to these other sources of energy before the last of the oil, commercially viable, is brought from the ground?
	Okay.
	Well, first of all, we're never going to run out of oil, but the price of oil will simply rise as we run out of easily accessible oil.
	That's what I'm saying.
	Commercially viable.
	Right.
	And that means that within 20, 30 years, we're going to see a dramatic increase in the price of oil as the price to reclaim oil starts to skyrocket.
	At that point, there's going to be a massive destruction of industry.
	That's why I say that we should gradually begin to wean ourselves away from the internal combustion engine now, So that 20, 30 years down the line, we don't have this massive disruption as we have fuel prices beginning to soar through the roof.
	And that's why I think that we have to gradually make the transition to the fuel cell car, the electric car, wind power, solar power, for self-interest.
	Because we are going to have a disruption as we gradually run out of oil.
	I absolutely agree with that.
	But the problem is, we have these massive mega-corporations That are retrieving, distributing the oil, and you know, they have the gold, and those people have the gold rule.
	That's right, which means that we will probably face a catastrophic planetary crisis before the governments of the world wake up and say to themselves, oh my God, I didn't realize it was that bad.
	So we're going to play it very close to the edge.
	Humanity has always lived very close to the edge.
	Humanity as a whole never moves unless they see crisis staring at them in the face.
	And that's what's going to happen.
	What's going to happen is we're going to see massive disruptions of the weather.
	We're gradually going to be running out of oil.
	We'll face huge rises in prices as oil starts to rise.
	Coastal cities will gradually be inundated by gigantic storms.
	At that point, we're going to be staring During doomsday in the face.
	And at that point, perhaps, humanity will say, okay, enough is enough.
	We've got to make the transition for pure self-interest.
	Sure.
	So I think it's going to become very close, and that's the way humanity has historically dealt with crises.
	It's true.
	We never move unless we have to, and it's going to become very close.
	It's going to be a race against time, in fact, I think, over the next several decades.
	The next two decades, I think, are going to be extremely important, because the groundwork will be set.
	And the question is, will we cross the point of no return?
	That is the big question mark.
	If we cross the point of no return, then perhaps nothing we do can reverse some of these effects.
	Doctor, is there a way that anybody wanting to communicate with you can email you or ask you a question or provide input?
	Sure, I have a webpage and an email address.
	My email address is mkaku at AOL.com.
	Let me give that again.
	M-K-A-K-U-at-A-O-L-dot-com.
	Right.
	I have a scientific address, but please don't use that.
	I use that for my scientific correspondence.
	Well then, if you don't want to use it, don't give it out.
	Right.
	So the AOL address is fine.
	Okay.
	And I have a webpage address.
	Alright.
	That's www-dot-com.
	Dorsai.org.
	That's D-O-R-S-A-I dot org.
	We've got a link to that on my website.
	Right.
	That's right.
	Slash squiggle M-K-A-K-U.
	And that's the webpage address.
	They're going to have to do something about that pretty soon.
	Slash, squiggle, all the rest of it.
	That should all go away.
	It's got to be simpler.
	Yeah, in fact, yeah.
	The reason why we have that is that we physicists and mathematicians, you know, we didn't care about that.
	We are user-belligerent.
	We're not user-friendly.
	And we created that horrible, horrible nomenclature because that's the way we talk.
	We talk like that.
	You say, well, how are you slash squiggle today?
	That's right.
	We stop talk when we talk to each other.
	Wes to the Rockies.
	You're on the air with Dr. Kaku.
	Hi.
	Hi.
	Good morning, Professor.
	Good morning, Art.
	Morning.
	Rob from L.A.
	here.
	Yeah, things about the black hole and the weather I was going to say about.
	It's strange.
	I don't know.
	You're the first person I've ever listened to that actually talks about the same sort of things I talk about.
	It's weird.
	I explain things in physics to people and stuff.
	It's funny.
	One person asked me about UFOs.
	I said, we're no more going to notice UFOs because if they were here in front of us, they'd be so advanced it'd be like a dog trying to identify a plane flying over.
	It's basically the same thing.
	I think about black holes.
	It's funny, when I was growing up as a kid, when I was in fourth grade, I used to separate myself from the kids and I'd sit there and I'd look at the sky and one star you'd see and the teachers would wonder what I was doing.
	I'd tell them, I'd tell the stars, you know, we don't really see those.
	Somehow, I don't know how I knew this when I was a kid about light speed and I said they're not there.
	The dinosaurs would have seen this.
	I go to the other side of the courtyard and hit the handball and I actually notice there is a time relation before my visual.
	I see the ball hit the wall and see there is a time thing here.
	Then I sit there and I notice the weather in the 70s when it first changed.
	When I did that, somebody from my school, they flew somebody halfway across the United States to talk to me and ask me about that.
	I told the teacher something wrong with the weather.
	That was really strange.
	What I did is I was out playing.
	I was in fourth grade and I went underneath a tree.
	And it took the teacher, I said, come over here, look at this.
	I'm under a tree.
	Last summer, it was warm under the tree, and it was sunny and in the sunlight.
	And I said, now it's cold.
	It's like 10 degrees difference underneath this tree.
	It's actually literally cold in the shade rather than just warm.
	I said, there's something about the weather.
	And after that, some lady, she said, I flew all the way across the US to talk to you.
	That's remarkable.
	That's incredible.
	Well, I guess Children do see things that we have somehow filtered out.
	You, for example, Doctor, you're able to explain things in a way that people really can understand why Do most physicists, most scientists that I would bring on the air cause the eyes to glass over?
	They cannot speak in a language that people understand.
	Why is that?
	Yeah, it's a shame.
	You know, all of us scientists, when we were 10, 11, 12 years old, we had that sense of wonder.
	Right.
	We had that epiphany, looking at the universe and realizing that the Earth was nothing but a small pebble in the sky.
	And we had that existential shock when we saw all the stars in the heavens and we began to understand our place in the universe.
	But then we began to learn the nomenclature, the mathematics, the shop talk, the jargon.
	Yes.
	It's more convenient to talk that way.
	It's much easier for me to talk in equations.
	When I talk to another physicist, we talk in blocks of equations.
	We use certain words to represent blocks of mathematical structures.
	It's very convenient to talk that way.
	And so when an outsider listens in to us physicists talking about superstring theory in the 10th dimension, they think that we're nuts!
	Absolutely nuts!
	Because we're using English words that have no meaning put together when we talk about hyperspace.
	And so we've lost that sense of wonder.
	We've lost that sense of childlike attachment to that first moment of epiphany, when we looked at the sky and realized that we're part of a bigger universe.
	Which is kind of a shame, you know?
	But now, you know, now that the Cold War is over, We scientists have to sing for our supper, because Congress has been cutting our budget, and it means that unless we can convince the American people to fund our machines, we're not going to have machines anymore.
	And therefore, scientists do have to jump into the public arena.
	We do have to make public statements, or else Congress will continue to cut our budgets.
	Because nobody understands, and what they don't understand, they're not going to support.
	That's right, and it's sad because, you know, science is the seed corn of prosperity.
	We're eating our seed corn.
	We're eating our future, if we cut the science budget.
	In fact, that's one of the reasons why the United States is the preeminent scientific power in the world today, because money has been spent on science during the Cold War.
	But now that the Cold War is over, there is a question mark as to whether we can sustain that scientific superiority, because other nations, of course, they have scientists too.
	And there's going to be a competition.
	And that's why we have to make sure that science is kept vibrant and funded and alive in this country, or else we're not going to have the prosperity that we're accustomed to.
	Well, that's a minor problem compared to the scientists that constructed the nuclear devices for Russia right now, who are trying to figure out how to feed their families.
	That's right.
	They've got a real problem.
	Yeah, you know, I was in Russia about five years ago, and speaking to the Russian Academy of Sciences, I was a guest there, and two physicists came up to me and asked for a job.
	These were weapon scientists.
	These people designed hydrogen warheads.
	And I could have hired two physicists right on the spot, if I wanted to.
	I didn't have the funds for it.
	But that's how bad the situation is in Russia right now.
	Do you think that if you had been wearing a turban, and you had had the money, and said, oh, we'll hire you, we've got a project for you, would it matter that you had a turban on?
	I think that it would be a very tempting offer, if somebody had oil money, and were to offer it to these starving bomb scientists in Russia, and were to outfit them with top-rate laboratories, assistance, multi-million dollar budget.
	It's going on.
	To a poor country.
	It's going on right now.
	Doctor, are you good for another hour?
	Uh, yeah.
	Okay.
	Hang tough.
	We'll be right back to you.
	That, in fact, is going on right now.
	The guys with the turbines have made those offers.
	And the work is underway.
	Think about it.
	It is the night.
	My body's weak.
	I'm off to run.
	No time to sleep.

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