Art Bell’s farewell episode features theoretical physicist Michio Kaku, who explains Cherenkov radiation’s deadly blue glow in nuclear accidents—killing seven Americans with doses 4–10x lethal limits—and warns that evolution couldn’t adapt humans to detect radiation. Kaku critiques Al Gore and George W. Bush for fossil fuel dependence, dismisses Velikovsky’s planetary collisions but supports panspermia, and argues $500B Mars missions are premature due to radiation risks. He also discusses wandering black holes, detected by Hubble, and humanity’s 10–20% chance of avoiding collapse, stressing democratic energy solutions over failed missile defenses like Star Wars. The universe’s accelerating expansion and parallel dimensions—unreachable with current tech—hint at a lonely future unless advanced civilizations master quantum bubbles, but Kaku doubts human maturity will prevent misuse. [Automatically generated summary]
From the high desert and the great American Southwest, I bid you all good evening or good morning, as the case may be across this great land of ours, commercially heard from the Tahitian and Hawaiian Islands in the west, eastward to the Caribbean, in the U.S. Virgin Islands, South and South America, north all the way to the Pole, and of course worldwide on the internet.
This, for one last time, for me, is Coast to Coast AM.
And I'm Marpell.
Well, I'm not good at goodbyes.
I'm just not good at goodbyes.
So, there is going to be a very minimal amount of that tonight, I can tell you right now.
I've always hated them.
I don't know how to say them right.
And all that kind of stuff.
So, not going to be a lot of it.
In fact, as little as I can muster.
In my life, there's been music that, you know, has affected me.
I'm really, really, really attached to the music that I play.
I don't play it just to play it.
I play it, the bumper music I choose.
I choose because it has meaning to me.
And music has always been one of the best altered states in the world.
And that's true for me.
I can literally alter my state by listening to a certain piece of music.
And as you know, and I think you will recognize, the song I'm about to play holds a lot of meaning for me.
It really holds a lot of meaning for me.
It just went straight to my heart and grabbed it and sort of tore it out.
And it just holds a lot of meaning.
And I know when you hear it as many times as I've played it at critical moments, and I pick my moments with music, as you well know, you know it has a lot of meaning to me.
unidentified
It's been a too long time with no peace of mind.
I'm ready for the task to get better.
I've got to tell you, I've been rocking my brain, hoping to find a way out.
I've had enough of this continuing changes have come, no doubt.
It's been a good long time with no peace of mind.
I'm ready for the times who get better.
You seem to want from me what I cannot give.
I used to love some of my time.
I have a dream that I wish I could live.
It's burning holes in my mind.
It's been a two long time with no peace of mind.
I'm ready for the time To get better Na na na na na na na na na na love.
Na-na-na-na-na-na-na-na-na-na It's been a two long time with no peace of mind.
And I'm ready for the times to get better.
guitar solo
guitar solo It's been a two long time with no peace of mind.
You know, I actually Think that I said it before, music is like it puts you in an altered state, and it must release something in your body that actually, or in your brain, endorphins maybe, or something that happens to you when you listen to music.
unidentified
It does.
Yeah, I know that certain sounds, I can feel it when I sing a certain sound, I feel it through my body, and my ears are different than other sounds that I can sing.
It's like, whoa, I like that.
And it's not, you know, how I'm singing it, it's just that tone that'll come.
It's like listening to some beautiful flute music that I love, the Indian flute, the pan flutes.
And when I was talking to you on the phone, I mentioned that I have this gigantic poster of you, which is the most angelic picture of any woman I've ever seen in my whole life.
Just absolutely angelic.
And it's got to be an older picture.
It's got to be when you were probably about how old?
unidentified
Oh, gosh.
That particular picture came out of, I think, my third album.
It'll be a nice, you know, if they stay like the days have been the last couple days, beautiful sky, the blue sky, you know, everything's getting so green.
Well, you have really something in front of you, something wonderful in front of you.
It's more than wonderful, and you know what you've created with the audience, and it's something very special that I haven't seen created anyplace else than talk radio.
The funny thing is, I really don't know.
I just, you know, it's been one of those things.
It just comes, and it just came.
I still don't dissect it nor fully even understand it myself, and I was always thinking I probably shouldn't try.
And that same thing will happen to you as time goes on.
You will sort of mesh into the consciousness of what's happening.
It's an inevitability.
You and I have talked about that off the air.
And let me say to your audience that I cannot ever repay the debt of the support that you've given me through this process.
We've talked at length about this, and I thank you for that publicly.
But I agree with you, and I've tried to say to everyone, from the people at the Premier Radio Networks to the audience, to Alan Corbett, the producer, and to everyone else, that this program really has a life of its own.
That's what you've, in effect, created with the audience.
And I'm not here to change anything.
I'm just here to facilitate and allow it to grow by the audience being the driving force of the program.
You will find your own way.
And it will, I'm very, very happy.
You know, the program is going to stay in its genre.
It's like having a baby and seeing the baby grow.
But within that genre, you're going to end up to be your own person on the air.
You're not me.
You're you.
And so there will be different adventures and roads for you to go down, which will be a good thing for you and the audience.
They'll get a little taste of something a little bit different.
And that should grow the show.
And what I want to see happen to the show is for it to grow.
And you'll grow with it, and everything will grow.
And I think had you stayed with it, and I know you're very content with your decision from what we've discussed privately, and I think the audience should know that, that this is a very important decision for you, but you are fully content with it.
I think you would have done the same thing.
I think you would have grown the program as you've obviously been doing.
And we both talked about this off the air.
There is still room for this program to grow.
Oh, sure.
Sure.
This is a completely different kind of talk radio, and that's why it has come to where it is right now.
There was a void waiting, I guess.
And, you know, when I modified the program years and years and years ago, it just slipped into that void.
And America, I guess, has figured out that there's more to talk radio than just is the president a good guy or a bad guy.
Pretty much that's what it boils down to, you know, on political talk radio.
And so there's room for so much more.
And lately, the talk shows that have been succeeding are the ones that have been going out there and looking for something else.
So that's what you've got, is something else, but it's no neat little formula.
In fact, I'm not exactly sure I know what the hell the show is night tonight.
Maybe that's the best part of it, you know, the fact that it unfolds with you.
And actually, that's what I thought when I filled in for you in the last several weeks in doing the programs and what I will do in an ongoing way is, number one, as you said, stay in the genre.
But number two, let the program take its own course.
And I once worked at a radio station for a very competent and wonderful broadcaster, a general manager who had been around this business for about 40 years.
And the station became very successful.
And all the way through the process, and I was there as it grew, he said, we're going to let this radio station take us where it goes, and we're not going to force it anywhere.
In other words, there are going to be changes in the program.
There'll be changes in the website.
Hell, there's changes in life.
Everything changes.
But you'll have some new roads, some new interesting roads to go down.
And you've got a lot of really cool stuff to explore.
Whatever it is that you decide, and I've told you this privately, and I'll tell it to you publicly.
When you get a job like this, everybody's a program director.
Man, I don't care who they are, whether it's the audience or all the program directors, the affiliates or the network or whoever it is, everybody's a program director, and everybody thinks they know how it should be done.
You're the only one who really knows how it should be done, and you need to listen to yourself and forget about everybody else.
That's a profound yet simple word of wisdom.
And, you know, it's very interesting because one of the major trade publications in our industry did a piece about this, and then they had a whole page.
I'm sure you know about this.
You told me about it in R ⁇ R or something, wasn't it?
Yeah.
And all of the major programmers in the country, or most of them anyway, had comments about where the program should go if you retired.
And I wouldn't read it.
I specifically did not read it because you're right.
You obviously created this.
I have a lot of faith in my own talent to follow in your footsteps, and it's an enormous challenge that I have to undertake.
But in the end, it's going to be me and the audience.
That's it.
Well, listen, buddy, you have a program to do tomorrow night, I think, with Robert Ghostwolf, my friend, Robert Ghostwolf, right?
That's right.
That's going to be an important program.
They found some stuff here in America that he's going to expand on, I'm sure, tomorrow night that will just blow your socks off.
You'll see some of the photos.
It's amazing stuff, Mike, and it's right here in America.
So that's what you're going to be doing tomorrow night.
It's a great opening, and look, your production staff has been incredible, and I'm looking forward to tomorrow night.
I wish you and Ramona nothing but peace and contentment and happiness in your retirement.
You deserve every minute of that.
And I thank you again for all of your support.
Thank you, my friend, and take good care of this program.
I promise you.
It is your child, and I promise you that as the foster parent, I will raise it in the way you want.
Well, you know, I've never done this over the years, but it's high time I did, I guess, here in the last program.
And that is to thank the people who directly make possible this program.
And I've named some of them in the past, but I really do want to name a few.
Ted Alexander, who's a board op in Oregon, Medford, where all of this comes from or originates and then bounces from satellite to satellite to satellite and gets to New Jersey and then back to satellite and then back down eventually to radio stations.
So Ted, Verland Beard, who's chief engineer.
Steve Burgess, who's affiliate relations in the Western Division, West of the Rockies, I guess.
Delani Conrad, in charge of operations, and that means she does a lot.
Believe me.
Will Hilliard, who's a board op.
Roger Daniels, affiliate relations East Division, East of the Rockies, I guess.
Michael Kinkade, a board op.
Lisa Lyon, who you might like to know is the After Dark editor and special projects person.
And that, too, covers special projects.
Have you ever had a title like that?
In charge of special projects.
Man, that means anything.
But she also edits After Dark, which, by the way, will continue.
Sherry Miller in customer service, somebody you might talk to if you'd called the network.
Jim Reed in distribution.
Miley Reed in administration and sales.
Stephanie Smith, an affiliate relations coordinator.
That's all the network stations talk to.
Or through, or I don't know.
Eunice Densgaard in sales.
I want to thank Craig Kitchen, who is the president, CEO, chief dude of Premier Broadcasting, which is a big network of Rush, Laura, myself, Michael Reagan.
And Liz goes on and on and on, all kinds of talk programming.
So it's a big job he's got, and he's helped me out a lot through this last year.
Some rather difficult times, to say the least.
Randy Michaels, who is the chief guy at Clear Channel, which owns Premier, and actually, I think, a good part of the world.
And so I want to thank Randy.
I'll never forget one afternoon when Craig and Randy were here, and we talked about what was happening, and it's an afternoon not to be forgotten.
So they both have helped through all this.
And of course, there are tens I can tell you, and I don't know how I'm ever going to do this, but I have received, since the announcement of my retirement, tens of thousands of emails, taxes, letters from all of you.
And there's simply no way I could begin to acknowledge the heartfelt feelings.
And I'm saving all these.
I don't know what I'll do with them.
There are tens of thousands of them.
Memories, I guess, huh?
So all of you people who sent all of these communications, gazillions of communications, thank you.
It is my intent to return to private life.
And so in that regard, you will find a number of things happening.
You will find the website beginning to remove material associated with me, as it should.
As it should.
And the archives, the programs over the years that were archived and were Not brought back after a certain point, will not come back.
Now, we thought very hard about this, and I had a discussion with Craig Kitchen about this.
And the fact of the matter is, it's a tight call because, on the one hand, I understand that the audience would like to have those archives around.
But on the other hand, if my intent is to return to private life, which it really is, and that means to sort of fade into obscurity, that doesn't mean I'm going to have an obscure life.
It means I'm going to have an obscure public life.
And believe me, I've had enough of the public life aspect of things.
And by the way, for any of you who seek fame, be careful what you wish for, is what I would say.
As you know, I dearly love, this is my baby, this program, what we do here, is a love that I, you know, has been like a love of my life.
And I love doing this show.
But I don't necessarily love everything that comes with it and with fame.
Fame is a pretty weird thing.
And I've never been comfortable with it.
I've never been comfortable with the famous part of it.
You know, doing interviews and appearing in newspapers and going on Larry King and all that kind of stuff.
I've never been comfortable with that sort of thing.
And so that part of it, I have not enjoyed so much.
If it was a perfect world, nobody would know me, and I'd still be able to come on here and talk to millions of people.
And I know that's a very difficult concept, like trying to figure out the nature of time.
It's a very difficult concept, but if I'd had my way, I would have taken away the fame part of it, and I would have left doing the program.
Unfortunately, they're pretty much inseparable.
And then, of course, there is one person I've got to mention, above all, and we are inseparable, and that's my wife, Ramona.
There is no way, there's no way in hell that I would have made it through this last hellish period in my life, in my family's life, without Ramona.
There's no way.
She's been there every minute, you know, in a way that counts.
And so the love of my life, my wife, Ramona, is the one I want to thank the most because she's been here for me every day.
And believe me, some of these have been pretty difficult days, folks.
Pretty difficult days.
So she's gone through a lot of it with me.
And she's a very, very strong woman.
By the way, we took one final webcam photograph, Ramona and myself, just a couple of minutes before the show, I think.
And you will find that on the website tonight.
You'll have to look down, find a studio cam.
But we did take one final photograph, and I'll leave that one up there for you.
Otherwise, I think I'm done.
That's it.
And of course, you know, there's a million people, all the guests who have been so important, and I'm not going to start to name them.
Because if I begin to name my guests, I would inevitably leave out, kind of out, hundreds of guests, you know, and so many of them so important that if I were to begin to name them, I'd leave a bunch of people out.
And so I just want to thank all of you who have been part of this program as a guest in the same way.
Thank you for all you've done.
Coming up here on this show is a little bit different than going on a lot of shows.
I can tell you that because, you know, I've had the travails of going on television and other talk shows, and they're not exactly the same.
This is a different kind of place up here, and it's hard to come on the air for five hours, for any guest to come on the air for four or five hours, and not really open up to who they are.
It's impossible.
You can't do that many hours.
Eventually, you're going to get used to being on the air.
The nervousness goes away, and who you are is going to be finally revealed.
And a lot of guests have done that on this program.
And so I'm not going to start naming you.
All of you know who you are.
The regulars, the semi-regulars, the occasional spectacular guest, the occasional bomb.
You all know who you are.
And thank you.
Even some of the bombs, you know, the learning curve.
And then, of course, Keith Rowland.
Keith has been a friend of mine for years now.
Keith began the website with no connection whatsoever to the radio program.
He was just a fan.
And he began the website with another fellow named Myron.
And it evolved into what it is today.
And that skips an awful lot of territory.
But it evolved into what it is today.
Now, not to worry, it will also, of course, remain exactly where it is, telling you about programs coming up, telling you about guests, no doubt, posting the occasional wild photograph of some kind or another up there.
The domain name, something important for websites, will remain www.artbell.com, but that is going to fade into the background.
I'm going to hold on to that domain personally.
The new name of the website is the best way to get there and the way you ought to get there.
It's www.coast2coastam.com.
Either one of them will, however, take you to that point.
What I Would suggest to you with browsers is when you get to the site, just hit add bookmark and it will automatically add the new URL to get you there.
But Keith has been there awake with me all night long, so many times, and done so many things at the last minute.
You have no idea, even during shows, sometimes inevitably, I mean, Keith got to the point where he would expect it, but I would call Keith up in the middle of the night, and I'd say, oh, my God, Keith, somebody has sent me this incredible photograph.
I'm telling you, Keith, this is the one.
We've got the smoking gun evidence.
I've never seen as clear a photograph of an object or a saucer or a ghost or something or another.
And so I would be sitting here on the air trying to upload this thing to my website to Keith and getting things on the air in the middle of the night.
So Keith never had any choice.
He stuck with the show all the night through.
And he's done that now for years.
So in other words, Keith has really lived the same hours that I have.
And then I guess my best friend, my best friend is Alan Corbeth.
And he's vice president of Premier Radio Networks and came with the show when Premier purchased the show.
Alan Corbeth has, he's in charge of the operations up there, you know, all the people I mentioned to you earlier.
He runs everything.
He's been a personal best friend.
I mean, that's what he is.
He's my best friend.
And he's been that for years.
And I probably talk to Alan too many times every day.
I mean, whenever there's something about the show, I'm on the phone to Alan.
So we talk, I would say, being honest with you, at least three or four times every day.
Sometimes I would say we talk as many as 10 to 15 times every day.
I mean, a lot.
And today is Alan Corbett's birthday.
Today, Alan is 55 years old.
He's a little older than I am.
I'm 54, and I'll be 55 June 17th.
But today, Alan is the big double nickel.
I wonder how that feels.
Well, I'll find out soon enough, I suppose.
But Alan has always been there for me and is going to be there for Mike Siegel.
He's the important component in the show, part of the show.
I mean, I have done things that I know have raised the hackles on the back of Alan's neck and raised the hairs and the hackles and whatever he's got to raise.
I'm sure I raised it plenty of times because I've always done really weird, strange, unpredictable, no doubt from a programmer's point of view, scary things.
I remember all those years ago when I decided I'd had it with politics.
I mean, the show was pretty big.
You know, we had a big show.
It was an open line show.
I wouldn't say just politics.
It was, you know, anything goes kind of show.
And I was, it inevitably went to politics.
And I was getting so sick of politics.
And I said, there's got to be another way to go.
And I said, I'm going to just, I'm going to start doing what I want to do.
And right now, what I don't want to do is politics.
I'm fed up with it.
Oh, God, am I fed up with it?
And so I just, I stopped doing it.
Now, as you might imagine, this came as a severe shock to Alan, who went, gulp, okay.
And, you know, that's how magic happens.
And he was wise enough to allow the magic to happen.
I'm sure I gave him some scary, scary days.
Well, okay.
You know, he said, we'll sure do it.
And I took off and we did it.
But Alan was there for me every minute and acted in so many ways behind the scenes for me.
Besides being my best friend, he was there for me, as so many people were.
And that's how all of this happened.
And as I said, I'm not really good, folks, at goodbyes, and I know I miss saying a lot, so I'm sorry for everything I miss saying.
Tomorrow, I would like to add, no, not tomorrow, Friday, I am going to be in Nashville, Tennessee for a hearing at 9 a.m. Central Time.
It's the Circuit Court for Davidson County at 501 Metro Courthouse, Nashville, Tennessee.
Metro Courthouse is downtown on the corner of 3rd and James Robertson Parkway, I guess.
So there you have it.
That's my immediate future.
And we have a show to do tonight.
Dr. Michiu Kaku is coming on.
he'll be my final guest.
unidentified
Good morning, Christmas sunshine.
You risen up my day.
Sweet of the touch, or the scent of the sand.
Or the strength of the touch of the speech to the ground.
To wait to be covered and meant to burst up.
To come back to the sun again.
Or to fly To the sun without burning a wing, July in the meadow, and hear the breast sing.
All these things in our memories hold me.
Thank you.
Wanna take a ride?
Call Art Bell from west of the Rockies at 1-800-618-8255.
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First-time callers may reach Art at area code 775-727-1222.
Or call the wildcard line at 775-727-1295.
To talk with ART on the Soul Free International Line, call your AT ⁇ T operator and have them dial 800-893-0903.
And he is one of our nation's greatest theoretical physicists.
And I think a fitting final guest on the program.
He is indeed a professor of theoretical physics at City College of New York.
He is co-founder of String Field Theory.
String Field 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.
He hosts himself an hour-long weekly radio program that is syndicated nationally.
And I guess that has forced him into doing what not many people in his position can do.
And that is explain these things that otherwise cannot be understood by the general public, but nevertheless are real.
Dr. Michio Kaku, of course, is in New York, New York City.
And I, for the first time in, God, 30 years, maybe, I went to New York City to visit my childhood.
To visit my childhood, actually.
I got to go to WABC.
And, of course, I'm on WABC right now.
And that was my, all through my childhood, I listened to WABC, Cousin Brucey, the whole gang.
I mean, I was there.
That was it.
That was the only thing you listened to.
And so I want to thank Phil Boyce.
Hey, Phil.
For, you know, being the guy who called me up and said, hey, you want to be on in the Big Apple?
You know, that bowled me over.
And I went back to New York City after all these years, and I expected the old New York City that I remembered, one where you couldn't take five steps without getting hit over the head and have, you know, if you were wearing a watch, it was gone.
One where people pushed and shoved you out of the way and called nasty names after you.
And it was just sort of a foul city.
But New York, the New York that I went back to was not the same New York City.
In fact, it was so clean.
It was so incredibly redone that it reminded me of Paris.
Paris, of course, is very socialistic.
They take a lot of taxpayer money over there, and they keep the place really clean.
Well, New York's done that without the socialism, or at least as much as they have in France.
It's a beautiful city now.
It is the city where Dr. Michio Kaku, co-founder of this string theory thing, is located.
Boy, there's been tens of thousands, and I'll never be able to thank everybody, but thank you.
Doctor, I'm curious how this is sort of a take-you-back question, but I wonder how somebody gets to the rare atmosphere where you are, way up there in theoretical physics.
It seems like an almost impossible place to go, and not very many people go there, and yet there you are.
So what drove you in childhood to move toward where you are now?
Well, what drove me in the direction that I pursued is that when I was eight years old, my elementary school teacher walked in one day and announced that a great scientist had just died.
Everyone was talking about this.
It was front page throughout the world.
And they flashed a picture of his desk with the unfinished manuscript of his greatest work.
Well, that man who had just died was Albert Einstein.
And on his desk was the unfinished manuscript of his greatest unfinished work, The Theory of Everything, the Unified Field theory.
And by golly, I said to myself, I want to know what's inside that manuscript.
And if possible, finish, help finish what Einstein set out to finish.
Because such a great man must have embarked upon a great project.
And then as I read more and more about this individual, I found out that he was chasing after this one-inch equation that would explain everything you see around you, the galaxies, the stars, the creation, DNA, people, maybe even life and love.
For example, if you take a look at light, the ancients were mystified by what is light, and yet light can now be described by an equation that is just half an inch long.
The equation is called Maxwell's equation, and it says that the four-dimensional divergence of an anti-symmetric second-rank tensor equals zero, and that's light.
And in fact, in Berkeley, where I got my PhD, you can buy a t-shirt which says, in the beginning, God said the four-dimensional divergence of an anti-symmetric second-rank tensor equals zero, and there was light, and it was good.
We now believe, and this work comes out of Princeton, that in 11 dimensions, if you add one more, add one more dimension to string theory, then you get membranes coming out.
This is called M-theory, M for membrane, or M for mother of all strings.
And we think that if you add membranes, then this may give us a clue as to where our universe came from.
Everything we see around us, right, may be a membrane that exists in a larger ocean, larger 11-dimensional ocean, which may have other blobs, other bubbles.
And, well, this was the front page of the New York Times.
The New York Times is finally coming around to the fact that, yes, string theory is the leading candidate for this stable unified field theory that will allow us to, quote, read the mind of God.
That's Stephen Hawking's term for the theory, reading the mind of God.
And if this theory is true, it means that these higher dimensions, these other dimensions that we cannot see or touch, could be quite large.
They don't have to be small at all.
Mystics have always assumed that these higher dimensions are very small, because otherwise we could fall into them, and atoms would disappear into these higher dimensions, and our universe would gradually evaporate.
Well, we can't be positively sure, but it seems that matter is conserved.
It seems that matter doesn't disappear.
And if there was a fourth, fifth, or sixth dimension, then rocks and apples and oranges would slowly disappear into these higher dimensions, and we don't see that happening.
In other words, when you think about the whole planet, right, and you're thinking about all the sand and rocks and dirt and everything that makes up the planet, we might not even notice a tiny shift every now and then.
That's also been speculated that maybe it does happen, but it happens at such a slow rate that we're not aware of it.
But the latest theory is that if the universe itself is a bubble, a membrane floating in a larger space, then there could be other bubbles out there, and this could give us a measurable test of the theory.
And that's what's causing all the excitement.
That's why I made the front page.
These bubbles could attract each other gravitationally, and we would see this attraction in our universe as something called dark matter.
Now, dark matter, you've probably been reading about.
It's made big headlines in all the science magazines.
There is a halo, a gigantic halo that surrounds the Milky Way galaxy.
And in fact, all the galaxies that we've measured so far, they all have this gigantic invisible halo that is perhaps 10 times the mass of the galaxy itself.
So your chemistry teacher was wrong.
The universe is not mainly made out of atoms.
Only 10% of the universe that we see is apparently made out of atoms.
And what's causing the excitement is that perhaps dark matter will give us a clue to these other universes.
These other universes may affect our universe through dark matter.
Dark matter may be the attraction that we feel from the presence of other universes out there.
Yeah, we're talking about forces that are beyond human ken, forces that do not even exist on the planet Earth.
And that's why when we eventually do master the unified field theory, when we become what is called a type 3 civilization, then perhaps time travel and perhaps wormholes and perhaps even creating baby universes are going to be within our realm.
If you were to discover, if you actually came up with a theory of everything, and the implications of that would be both positive and negative for humanity, you would be faced with the same kind of decision that Oppenheimer Was, wouldn't you?
And I wonder, Doctor, really, have you ever given much thought to, if you did come up with it, would you set it loose?
When Oppenheimer and Bohr and Heisenberg, and in fact, there's a play called Copenhagen that is debuting on Broadway of all places.
A play called Copenhagen, which was The Rage of London, is now debuting on Broadway about that question.
Really?
What happens when the human mind can conceive of nuclear energy and what happens when a Hitler, a Hitler, wants that energy to create an atomic bomb?
And that's the moral dilemma faced by Bohr and Heisenberg in the Broadway play, Copenhagen.
What happens when humans have the power of the gods and the humans don't have the wisdom of Solomon to go with the power of a god?
Then all sorts of havoc could be unleashed on the world, and that's what happened after World War II.
Now, with the unified field theory, we're talking about cosmic energies, energies that may allow us at some point to harness time machines or perhaps wormholes, that is, shortcuts through space and time, which may allow us to go to the stars perhaps one day.
And I sort of understand, Doctor, sorry for interrupting.
I sort of understand what some of the possibilities are.
Literally, creation or destruction.
I mean, the theory of everything, unified field theory, would probably allow these manipulations.
But my question was, if you had this day when you woke up and there it was, one inch long and you had it and you sat down to consider the consequences, positive and negative, kind of like Einstein got it early, maybe earlier than humanity should have had it, and this was all put in your lap, understanding the nature of humanity right now.
It's more of a social question than anything else.
The nature of humanity, how far we have come in our type zeroness, you'd have to make a decision, wouldn't you?
However, the awesome power of the unified field theory is a power that won't be unleashed for thousands of years, in which case humanity may have slowly shed the savagery of the forest, the savagery with which it originally evolved when we came out of the jungle.
And I would hope that by the time we evolved to the point of handling this cosmic energy, the Planck energy as it's called, 10 to the 19 billion electron volts, that we would have the wisdom to bend space and time in a humanitarian and fruitful way rather than for private gain or for conquest.
Instead of liberating humanity, we got enslaved by the Cold War, and we lived under the sword of Damocles, knowing that this power that was unleashed prematurely on the earth held humanity hostage, basically.
So there is that definite possibility that at some future point, when we are able to bend space and time at will, that it could fall into the wrong hands.
But like I said, hopefully, by that time, we'll be a planetary, a stellar, a mature civilization which has had hundreds, thousands of years to handle truly planetary and stellar power, that we would have the wisdom to handle it correctly.
So you would not hesitate to unleash this formula to your peers, to the world, because there would be nothing that could practically be done with it right away?
When Newton worked out the laws of motion, he could calculate what it would take to leap to the moon.
You have to jump at 25,000 miles per hour and you can land on the moon.
He was the first human who, in principle, could even calculate the number of what it would take to jump to the moon.
But he must have cried knowing that in merry old England of the late 1600s, all they had were horses and buggies, and they could only reach about 15 miles per hour.
But he must have dreamed of the time when these horses and buggies could evolve into devices like rockets, which would take us to the moon.
And today we have hydrogen bombs, which are the horses and buggies of today.
And we can dream about the Planck energy, the energy of creation, the energy of black holes.
We can dream about this energy.
But all we have today are hydrogen bombs, which are nothing but horses and buggies compared to the energy necessary to rip open a hole in the fabric of space and time.
Yeah, who then communicates to his dead father of 30 years ago, and as a consequence, tells his dead father how to avoid dying in a fire 30 years ago.
And then he saves his father from being burned, only to then endanger other people because by accident, a mass murderer, a serial murderer, is unleashed who will then go on to kill his mother.
And so by talking in the past with this ham radio, when the northern lights are lighting up the night sky.
By the way, there was a story earlier today, Doctor, that the new sparkling International Space Station, they were trying to launch three times consecutively to get up there and to get it back into a higher orbit, lest it come crashing back to Earth.
And they said the reason they're having this big problem is because of the solar activity.
The solar activity is actually depressing the orbit of this thing, sending it back to Earth.
Yeah, every 11 years, the North and South Pole of the Sun flip.
Believe it or not.
The North Pole and the South Pole of the Sun flip.
The North Pole becomes the South Pole and vice versa.
And that releases a shockwave every 11 years.
And that shockwave eventually hits the Earth and sends a cascade of ions into the North Pole and the South Pole, which creates the Northern lights, these beautiful lights, which in the movie opened up a hole in space and time whereby the hero could then talk to Dennis Quaid, who is the father of 30 Years Past, and change the past.
Even as he spoke on the ham radio, he could change the past, and that would immediately ripple to the present.
So every time he changed the past, the present would be changed, and he would have double memories, triple memories.
He would remember the old universe and the new universe simultaneously.
That's right, because every time he's on the radio, he changes the past by talking to his father of 30 years ago, who then changes the past, which then ripples immediately to the future.
And so even as he's speaking on the ham radio, things around him change.
A linear line such that whenever you change the river of the past, ripples would then progress toward the present and change the present constantly.
So the guy was constantly changing the reality of the present by giving information on the radio to his father of 30 years ago.
Literally, things would change.
Things would change shape, photographs would change, memories would change inside his mind, even as he was altering the past by talking on the hand radio.
You don't have to go into a box and spin a dial and go back in the future.
Here it's just your voice.
It's just radio that goes through a hole in space opened up by the northern lights and allowing you to have a tunnel through time and talk to your parents before you're born.
But you know, you know, Doctor, I went up on the, I have a friend who always looks at new patents.
And on the patent page, there is a very serious presentation of a faster-than-light antenna.
It received its patent.
It's got a patent.
Now, I don't know whether such a thing is really possible or not.
You mentioned the northern lights.
Surely there is a tremendous amount of energy compression going on in our magnetosphere as we get slammed by the sun at a solar maximum.
But could a romantic imagine that a radio signal, maybe a ham signal, like the ones I send all the time, could suddenly traverse, if not the present linear timeframe, then find a hole and make it into another dimension?
The Discovery Channel asked me, and it's going to be aired this Friday on their Discovery News: what would it take if the northern lights do not have enough energy?
And I said what it would take is at least a wandering black hole, a black hole that wanders in the vicinity of the Earth.
Now, this was once considered to be preposterous, and yet just two months ago, three months ago, it was announced that we've now discovered two, not one, but two wandering black holes, over a thousand light years from the Earth.
The End We're talking about things that really are kind of hard to wrap your mind around.
He makes it a lot easier.
Try and imagine, if you can, for a moment, the theory of everything and what will happen.
We'll talk about that.
If it is discovered.
A little formula, one inch long.
Or maybe you'd like to contemplate the possibility of a wandering black hole.
For example, what happens if it wanders toward us?
You know, I've actually been toying with the idea for years now of communicating with all of you after I'm gone, after I'm dead.
I've said for a long time, when I'm gone, watch for me, listen for me in between stations, listen for me somewhere on the airwaves, because that's no doubt if I could communicate back from the dead where I would be.
And I've said that for years and years, and it occurs to me that if I do go, you might check the area adjacent to the hydrogen frequency.
You know, I'll make it easy for you.
We'll do it up near hydrogen somewhere.
But I've been playing with that idea for years, Doctor.
Well, you would have to get within what is called the Schwarzschild radius, the point of no return of the black hole.
And depending upon the size of the black hole, the Schwarzschild radius can change.
The Schwartzhill radius of our Sun, for example, is about one mile across.
Our Sun will never get squeezed to that point, and therefore our Sun will never become a black hole.
But large stars that are 10 to 50 times the mass of our Sun, they will in the future be compressed down to about a few miles across.
And at that point, they would be sufficient to collapse on themselves and become a black hole.
So they would be quite dangerous.
However, they would allow us, I think, to test the unified field theory.
Black holes are objects with gravitational forces so intense that quantum effects we should be able to see, and we should be able to use them as a laboratory.
Just like we hope to use dark matter as a laboratory to test for the unified field theory, we might be able to use wandering black holes also to test for the unified field theory.
By looking at the Hubble Space Telescope pictures, we find that the distortion of starlight moves with time.
They tracked it actually over several years.
In fact, they tracked 300 such objects.
They wander, and as they move, the stars in front of them get distorted.
They brighten, they move, they dim.
And then if you track it over a period of time and then run it like a motion picture, you can actually see this thing move across the heavens, even though it's invisible.
The distortion is clearly visible if you run it real fast through a motion picture camera.
Yes, you can calculate the speed of it because it's sort of like taking time-lapse pictures of starlight and finding that the stars dim and get brighter as this object moves behind the stars.
You can calculate how fast they move.
And like you said, we've now found two of these things, and there are 300 such objects that are being tracked that are not yet conclusively shown to be black holes or anything.
But they're tracking about 300 of these things, and two of them have been calculated to have a mass of six times the mass of our sun, which is just right for a black hole.
And there's one at the center of the Milky Way galaxy, our own home galaxy.
It's not very active.
We now know where it's located, in the direction of Sagittarius, in fact.
And it turns out that the black hole at the center of the Milky Way galaxy is very big, millions of times the mass of our sun.
But gas orbits around this black hole, and that's why it doesn't eat up anything anymore.
So our black hole is not having lunch anymore.
Basically, stars orbit around the black hole at the center of our Milky Way galaxy.
So we orbit around, satellites orbit around the Earth, the Earth orbits around the Sun, and the Sun orbits around the black hole at the center of the Milky Way galaxy in the direction of Sagittarius.
And we think that the quasars, which are the farthest objects that we can photograph with our telescopes, are baby galaxies where we have this raging black hole having breakfast.
They're quite young.
They're still ravaging the stars and the gas around them.
They're not quiescent like our black hole in the Milky Way galaxy.
Our black hole has already had its dinner, and it's quite mild.
It's not eating anything right now.
But the quasars, baby galaxies at the edge of the visible universe, these are the farthest objects you can photograph.
These baby galaxies have raging black holes that are having breakfast.
You can see them just ripping apart the gas and the molecules that make up the quasars or quasi-stellar objects, which we think are baby galaxies.
Our galaxy, our Milky Way galaxy, was probably a quasar 12 billion years ago.
It means that our universe will die in ice rather than fire.
It means our universe will become very cold in the future, and we'll be like homeless people huddled next to the dying embers of neutron stars and black holes.
And, you know, Stephen Hawking's latest book is Black Holes and Baby Universes, where baby universe is a central, central idea to the concept of a multiverse or megaverse, that our universe is one bubble among many bubbles out there that form the multiverse or the megaverse.
In some sense, we are gods that say, let there be light.
Out of the mist comes a universe that we will create in seven days.
So in some sense, it does seem to correspond to religious mythology.
Yes.
This time, of course, when mortals aspire to be gods, and of course, you would have to be at least a type 3 civilization to do this.
Our civilization is too primitive to do this.
But the laws of physics may allow the possibility of creating a baby universe by which we can escape our dying universe to go into a universe that's warmer.
And even though this was considered a fringe idea several years ago, it's now mainstream cosmology.
You go to any cosmologist and have a very interesting debate about the multiverse, which is now the dominant theory within what is called quantum cosmology.
These are quantum bubbles floating in an ocean of 11-dimensional hyperspace.
And again, this picture is the picture that made the front page of the New York Times last month.
It's a startling picture, but it's totally consistent with the unified field theory, or the piece of it that we have.
And hopefully in the future, as civilization becomes planetary and these passions of old are forgotten, we'll be able to suppress many of these ancient urges that are still with us.
You look at children.
You know, children are in a very primitive state of emotional development.
He was a fourth-level civilization character, and he was an immature troublemaker.
So you've got to wonder if something like that couldn't happen.
How could it happen?
Well, suppose, for example, that we made contacts.
What do I mean by that?
I mean, somebody came to see us, or a Dr. Cuckoo discovers a way to go see somebody else, and we make contacts, and all of a sudden, we know how to do essentially what Q was able to do.
How many out there, raise your hands, think we would survive that experience?
Going to do it to me even on my last day, huh?
All right.
You know, this computer next to me should bear in mind that I have, in the past, shot computers.
That's right.
I've actually shot computers.
It was a very immature act indeed, but I did.
I took a computer out, and I put a 223 through its disgusting little belly.
And hopefully it'll answer a lot of the questions that are being raised in today's program and also give you a way to contact me if you want through email.
Although, you know, what I raised when I came back, can you imagine that another, in other words, contact.
Imagine contact any way you want.
They reach us, we reach them.
More likely they would reach us, I suppose.
And would there be, in your estimation, a prime directive that would keep that information from us, even if there was contact, or is it likely that that would be given to us as a gift that they considered us ready to receive?
Yes, or there's a third possibility if you bump into an ant hill, you don't go down to the ants and say, I bring you trinkets and I bring you beads and I bring you knowledge And power and medicine, you go to the ants and you step on them.
So there's the possibility that perhaps they'll ignore us because we're simply part of the background.
And there's also the possibility that they could be very close to us and we wouldn't even know it.
If you're an ants and somebody's building a 10-lane superhighway next to your anthill, the ants would not even know that there's a 10-lane superhighway being built next to their anthill.
And that's what's sending chills up our spine, knowing that these planets out there, we can detect them the size of Saturn.
And however, there is one depressing thing.
We have now so many planetary systems that we can actually catalog them.
And we find, much to our big disappointment, that none of them have life as we know it on them.
Their Jupiter-sized planets are in highly oval or elliptical shapes.
Now, that's very dangerous, because if our Jupiter all of a sudden had an elliptical orbit and bypassed the Earth's orbit, it would literally fling the Earth into outer space.
And all of these planetary systems that we've seen before either have elliptical, oval, Jupiter-sized planets in these elliptical orbits, or they have their Jupiter-sized planets very close to the Sun, so close that it would rip apart or throw any Earth-like planet into outer space.
Our Jupiter is very far away.
Our Jupiter is in a circular orbit, so it never comes close to the Earth.
And that's good because it takes billions of years to get DNA off the ground.
And if these Jupiters are in highly elliptical orbits, there's no way that DNA could get off the ground in a very short period of time.
If our solar system had a twin in outer space, our telescopes are probably not powerful enough to resolve our own solar system in outer space.
So we do think that once we have the space interferometry satellite in orbit in about 15 years, in about 15 years' time, we should have a satellite in orbit that specifically will look for tiny Earth-like planets in outer space.
And then we'll have an existential shock on a Saturday night date, looking at the stars with our date, realizing that there are hundreds of twins of the Earth staring at us from outer space.
Some of them perhaps with oxygen, some of them with liquid water.
And that's what you need to get life off the ground, liquid water.
It's the universal solvent.
It dissolves chemicals that make DNA possible.
And we think that there may be Earth-sized planets out there with liquid water on them that will be detected in about 15 years' time when we get the space interferometry satellite launched.
And that could be a revolution in how we view the universe, not just Jupiter-sized planets, but twins of the Earth, perhaps, in outer space.
We're just right to have liquid water, the universal solvent that makes DNA possible.
Our galaxy has a Goldilocks zone.
If our Earth were too close to the black hole at the center of the Milky Way galaxy, we'd be fried apart because it's too radioactive and too much cosmic rays there.
If we're too far from the center of the galaxy, then there's not enough heavy elements, you know, heavy elements that make up our body beyond lithium, beryllium, hydrogen, what have you.
So if you're too far from the center of the galaxy, there's not enough raw material to get DNA off the ground.
So we're about two-thirds the way out from the Milky Way galaxy center, which is just right.
It's the Goldilocks zone of the galaxy.
So we think that, yes, it is rare.
We think that life is rare in the galaxy, but there are so many stars in the Milky Way galaxy, 200 billion stars, that even a fraction of them would still give us thousands of planets with intelligent life forms.
So I think it's still premature to make any of these guesses.
Would it change, Professor, your views about creation and the possibility of the God of the Bible, would it change any of that for you if we did make a determination that, hey, we're it?
If we were the only ones in the universe, that would be quite scary.
It would be frightening, in fact, because we are ripping apart our planet, polluting it, degrading the oceans, degrading the atmosphere.
And if we're the only ones, and we are the cradle, the cradle of intelligent life for the Milky Way galaxy, and here we are, you know, flushing it down the toilet, that's very depressing.
So I would like to believe that there are other star systems out there that could have type 1 civilizations that are mature, that have solved the greenhouse effect, that have solved nuclear weapons.
They've attained planetary status.
They are type 1.
I would love to believe that there are stable, mature type 1 civilizations out there that have negotiated all these barriers, because if we're the only one, it's pretty scary.
It's pretty scary to be the only one and to have the cradle of intelligent life and then to mess it up.
Well, let's stick with the depressing thought for a moment that we might be the only one.
And looking at what we're doing, I think most of the audience understands what you mean by a type 0, type 1, a type 2, a type 3, a type 4.
Maybe they don't, and maybe we should give them the 101 on that.
But, you know, as you look around, with 40% of the Arctic ice gone, with the global warming or the greenhouse effect or whatever it is that's going on, our weather certainly is in the midst of a big change.
That's obvious.
A lot of things are happening, some of them not so good for Earth.
You can calculate odds for just about everything else.
Seems to me you can calculate the odds of us becoming type 1 and us remaining type 0 and virtually eliminating ourselves.
Yeah, in 100 years since the United States has been calculating weather patterns, the last three months, January, February, March of 2000, were the hottest months recorded.
And we're paralyzed because people say, well, maybe it's going to go away.
You know, maybe it's just a bad dream we had, right?
But I personally think that there could be a lot of type zeros out there that never made it to type one.
When we develop starships and we visit some of the nearby stars, we may see planets with radioactive atmospheres.
We may see planets that have their atmosphere too hot to sustain life.
And when we visit the nearby stars, it could be very depressing, realizing that some of the intelligent life forms out there never made it past the savagery that's contained in the back of their brain.
Yes, and you may have second thoughts before you buy beachfront property because by the time you retire and give them to your kids, the beachfront property may be worthless if monster hurricanes develop.
Hurricanes get their energy from warm water.
That's where hurricanes get their ferocious power.
And as the ocean water is warm, it gives hurricanes more energy.
Gee, I'm glad you brought that up because I'm sure you've heard that they just measured a half-degree rise at 1,000 feet below sea level and a detectable rise all The way down to 10,000 feet below sea level under the ocean.
Now, it's an unimaginable amount of energy in my mind that could produce.
I mean, it's not a bathtub, for heaven's sakes.
What could produce enough energy to cause a rise of a half degree at a thousand feet?
One of the reasons why the atmosphere of the Earth has only heated one degree after pumping all this carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, most scientists now realize that it's because it went into the oceans.
The oceans do absorb a lot of heat, and they also absorb a lot of carbon dioxide.
So we have a temporary sink that is preventing the Earth from rising more than just about a degree over the last 100 years.
However, sooner or later, the oceans are going to rebel.
Perhaps, you know, the insurance companies are desperately afraid that they're going to go bankrupt if we have a big monster hurricane.
In the future, it may be impossible to get hurricane insurance because one big one could literally wipe out hundreds of billions of dollars throughout the Caribbean.
And not to mention, by the way, that, and this is in the New York Times just this week, there's a drought affecting the growing areas of the United States, probably because of global warming, which could mean that the breadbasket, the growing areas that have made food so cheap in the United States, the growing areas could gradually become a dust bowl like they were back in the 1930s or even worse.
Now that could have catastrophic implications for our economy if food, which is one of the big exports of the United States, if food is affected because of drought.
When you think really hard about it, you gotta wonder how a theoretical.
By the way, somebody just noticed and sent me a fact about the fact that the final webcam picture that we are taking, my wife and I took together, and I've got a t-shirt here, a new one from South Park that says Cartman.
But if you'll notice, when my wife is in the picture, you see is not there, and it just says Artman.
So here we are, stuck with all our primal instincts inside the bubblefoot of some balloon horse that a clown has made for some kid at a circus, midway in some circus that's so huge we don't even know it exists.
Well, just another reason not to quit smoking, right, Art?
In other words, that is certainly one possibility that people like yourself have to consider.
And how do you, at times, as you mull these things over, Professor, keep from getting depressed?
Okay, well, when I open up the newspaper, Not only do I see dire warnings of global warming and pollution and the proliferation of nuclear weapons to India and Pakistan, I also see the seeds of a type 1 civilization blossoming before our eyes.
What is the internet?
The internet is nothing but a type 1 telephone system.
It's the beginning of a telephone system of an emerging type 1 civilization.
There's a type 1 language emerging before our eyes.
It's called English.
You can go to any place on the earth and talk to educated people, and we can converse in English as a universal type 1 language.
There's an emerging type 1 economy coming out of the ground.
Look at the European Union.
These countries have slaughtered each other for the last 10,000 years, ever since the ice melted over Europe.
And now, for the first time in 10,000 years, these peoples have banded together to form a common economic union.
There's even a type 1 culture emerging.
You can go to any place on the earth and show pictures of two people instantly recognizable by anyone on the earth.
They're not Bill Clinton or Hillary Clinton.
They're Arnold Schwarzenegger and Madonna.
So my God.
I mean, we're going to have a bubblegum, blue jeans, rock and roll culture that is the foundation of a type 1 culture.
So what I see is every time I open the newspaper, I see the beginnings of a type 1 language, economy, culture, telephone system.
And to me, this means that if we can hold back our rapacious savage instincts, we could create an age of Aquarius on the Earth.
So there are two trends emerging on the Earth right now.
One trend is toward unification, like in Europe.
One trend is toward reaching for a planetary type 1 civilization.
Is toward eating up all natural resources, overpopulation, squandering of the oceans and the air, our birthrights.
We're essentially dumping all this garbage here.
But the other side of the coin is we're seeing the birth pangs of a Type 1 civilization being born right before my eyes.
And sometimes I feel privileged to see it happen.
I'm privileged to see it happen in the newspapers every day, the beginnings of a Type 1 civilization being born.
So if we don't blow it, if we don't really mess up the Earth of nuclear proliferation, as nuclear weapons proliferate to India and Pakistan, we don't blow up global warming, we could literally create a paradise on Earth.
We certainly have enough technology in terms of computers, DNA technology to do this.
And then when I read the medical journals, then we are approaching unraveling the aging process at the genetic level.
unidentified
We are approaching the animal control of medical technology at the genetic level again.
We do have, I think, a few decades the world at the point of no return where the degradation of the atmosphere and the oceans will be so severe that nobody will be able to reverse it.
I think we still have a window, but the window is closing pretty rapidly.
But my attitude is, well, we have to organize.
That has that call, not only to converse with each other and entertain each other, but also to be part of the political process, to influence candidates, to influence initiatives.
You know, we businesses helped to create the Internet to create a nuclear war.
It was to be used to, you know, rebuild America after World War III.
I mentioned in my book, Visions, when I talk about the origin of the Internet, one of the reasons why your email is broken up into many pieces and sent through many cities and then reassembled at the other end.
That's why your header, your header is so big, where all the messages went, is because in a nuclear war, many cities will be vaporized, and so your message may not reach the destination if there's only one path.
Therefore, your message is broken up and sent through many paths and then reassembled at the other end.
I see the seeds trying to bust, the buds trying to bust through this pessimism because when I was on the internet, it was quite depressing at first, realizing that this was a Pentagon device that I was basically allowed to use because scientists Were hooked up first, and it was used basically as a doomsday machine.
But now, I mean, think about it.
Even Greenpeace uses the internet now to organize God's demonstration to save the whales.
So, I think the solution to the problem is democracy, democracy, and more democracy.
The more power is given to people, the power to organize, the power to educate, the power to laugh, the power to love, as long as that power is diffused throughout the people, then democracy will kick in, and then people will get their way.
As Eisenhower once said, one day the people are going to get so fed up, they're going to push the politicians out, and they're going to get their way.
Carl Fagan did that famous study showing that perhaps only 100 nuclear bombs, just 100 megatons, would be enough to set off an atmospheric darkening of the skies, which would plunge the temperature of the Earth so that nothing would grow.
Humans would gradually freeze to death.
Nuclear winter was the possibility with only 100 hydrogen bombs being detonated.
And now we have the former Soviet Union with upwards of 10,000 nuclear bombs.
And, you know, they don't even know where some of these bombs are.
I spoke in Russia about five years ago as a guest of the Russian Academy of Sciences.
And some Russian physicists came up to me and asked me for a job.
These were weapons scientists.
I could have hired weapons scientists and become a nuclear power if I wanted to by hiring some of these people.
They're looking for jobs now.
And that's kind of frightening, knowing that these are bomb physicists who are out of a job and have to feed their families and ask me for a job.
So that's kind of frightening, knowing that they could wind up in some of the most unstable areas of the world.
There may be some survivors, but they'll live in such wretched conditions that, you know, as Khrushchev once said, the living will envy the dead because the living will live in wretched conditions.
Food is going to be scarce.
We'll revert back to Stone Age savagery.
You know, we'd like to think of ourselves as being civilized, but you take a bunch of us and put us in the middle of the forest, and within a few days, we revert back to Stone Age might makes right.
We're that close to being part of the Stone Age culture.
And so I think that if there is a nuclear war, or if a nuclear exchange takes place, then, yeah, the atmosphere could be destabilized and pockets of humanity would live miserably.
And that, by the way, is one reason why I think that the United States should not develop a Star Wars program, because it's frightening the Chinese and the Russians, and it's going to spur them to build more nuclear bombs to penetrate a Star Wars shield.
And it's a system that's frightening the Chinese, frightening the Russians, and they have vowed to pierce it, which means flooding the shield with more bombs and decoys.
You can confuse ground radar by putting chaff or tinfoil, mylar balloons inside the nose cone, and that would be used to pierce any Star Wars system by cooling it, you see.
And that's why I think it's like the Maginot line of the French.
I think now's the time to enrich our schools, to create this age of Aquarius that we could have if we rise to become a Taiwan civilization, rather than reaching for Cold War weaponry, thinking that we're going to fight a nuclear war against North Korea.
Which I think is silly.
The North Koreans can barely see themselves.
Why do we have to fight this war with North Korea?
Because if you have a bulletproof vest and you're in a gunfight and you have a bulletproof vest, the enemy gunfighter freaks out, knowing that his gun is useless, right?
The End And by the way, I didn't really do much at all.
I had David Kagan on as a guest.
I talked briefly with Stephen Segal.
I just put a couple of people together, and that's all.
And I had no idea it coalesced into this, so I'm happy about that.
Professor, speaking of sunstrokes, there was some fairly recent news that suns, stars, if you will, just like ours, occasionally really go berserk for no discernible reason, and they flare out and destroy all the planets around them.
I was a little worried about that, and that would be a sunstroke, all right.
Our sun is a rather ordinary yellow main-sequence hydrogen-burning star.
Meaning that it'll last for about five more billion years before it starts to become very erratic and becomes a red giant.
It'll expand and eat up the Earth.
So the Bible says from dust to dust, ashes to ashes, physicists say from stardust we came and stardust will go back.
We're going to go back into the sun in about five billion years.
So the Earth will end in fire rather than in ice.
Now, however, I should also point out, and this was announced just a few weeks ago, the galaxy, the Milky Way galaxy, is on a collision course with Andromeda, our nearest neighbor.
Yes.
And we could collide in 3 billion years.
So even before our sun dies, we could collide with our nearest galaxy, which, by the way, is visible almost as binoculars.
Look in the direction of the constellation Andromeda, and you'll see a smudge, which is our nearest galaxy, our nearest neighbor, about 2 million light years from Earth.
We are headed towards that galaxy, and it's not going to be pretty.
It's going to be a hostile takeover.
The Andromeda Galaxy is going to eat up our Milky Way galaxy because it's bigger.
The Andromeda Galaxy is much bigger than our galaxy.
Possible, but I think our sun tends to be on the small side and probably is going to be relatively stable.
We have computer programs that tries to simulate our sun, and it shows that it's going to live a pretty quiet Life until it erupts into a red giant, then becomes a white dwarf, and will probably die as a burnt-out dwarf star.
So the atoms of our body will eventually go back into the sun, and our sun will probably die as a burnt-out cinder.
However, neighboring stars could be unstable, like Betelgeuse.
Betelgeuse is not a movie starring Michael Keaton.
Betelgeuse is a star in the constellation Orion.
It is a red giant, and it is apparently unstable.
And when that star rips, that star undergoes supernova.
And that could wipe out electronics, communications, your CD, your toaster, and the internet could be paralyzed.
Satellites could be blinded by this burst of radiation.
And if a supernova is really close, it could kill life on Earth.
We once thought that the dinosaurs were killed off by a supernova.
Now we believe it was an asteroid or comet that hit Mexico 65 million years ago, the Yucatan of Mexico.
But we used to think it was a supernova that wipes out the dinosaurs.
So that's a very unstable star.
And as I mentioned, Betelgeuse is unstable and probably will undergo supernova, not in our lifetime, of course.
But when it does happen, it could be a little bit dangerous.
It's not very close, but it's close enough to cause trouble with communications, cause weather changes, and, you know, a burst of X-rays, it could kill a lot of life forms on the Earth.
We now realize that a gigantic asteroid or whatever hit Australia, and that may have wiped out the trilobites.
Really?
So, yeah, we've now documented five humongous impact craters on the Earth, one in South Africa, one in Mexico, one in Australia.
And the one in Australia took place roughly 200 million years ago, and that probably wiped out the trilobites.
These small three looks like snails that have three chambers, wiped them out, and they were the first dominant species of life on the Earth about 200 or so million years ago.
So these meteorite impacts are more common than we think they are, and they probably have wiped out 90% of all life forms during the age of trilobites, knocked out the dinosaurs 65 million years ago.
And, you know, the only dinosaur left from that era are probably birds.
Birds are probably descendants from dinosaurs.
And our ancestors used to be eaten up for breakfast or for a snack by dinosaurs.
That's why our ancestors never got it very big.
So I have no problems eating chicken at night, knowing that if that carmator meteor had missed Mexico, that dinosaur would be eating me rather than me eating that dinosaur at dinner time.
Seven Americans have been killed with these kinds of accidents.
Each time you have a supercriticality accident, you basically have a small atomic bomb going off in your face, and you have this blue glow.
This blue glow is the Renkov radiation.
Neutrons are traveling faster than the speed of light in air, which is slower than the speed of light in a vacuum, which nothing can exceed.
And yes, these are called criticality accidents.
These have been pretty much secret.
Most Americans don't know this, but Americans have been blown apart in nuclear accidents and killed nuclear accidents in the United States, mainly by this blue glow, by the Serenkov radiation, the neutrons.
And it happened in Japan.
And one worker died, and another worker probably will die in Japan because he mixed too much uranium.
Critical mass was attained right near his face.
And there was this blue glow as neutrons burst out of this container.
And like I said, at Los Alamos, several workers have been blown apart this way.
Harry Daglian in 1945, right after the Nagasaki bomb, was the first American to be blown apart by having a nuclear detonation happen in his face.
He died one month after Nagasaki, and he tripped and fell, and he tripped on tungsten carbide, which reflected the neutrons.
And there was this blue glow as a burst of neutrons ripped through his body, and he pretty much disintegrated in the Los Alamos hospital.
It took about two weeks for him to die.
And then a few months later, 1946, just in the beginning of the next year, Louis Slaughton, a Canadian physicist, had two hemispheres of plutonium on a tabletop.
And he had a screwdriver.
And with a screwdriver, he could bring these two hemispheres of plutonium closer and closer and closer together.
And if you bring them too close, then you get a nuclear detonation.
Well, one day, he slipped.
There was a brilliant cup that he was turning, and it slipped.
Too many neutrons were reflected.
And in that instant of time, he realized there was going to be an explosion.
So he lunged forward with his bare hands, ripped apart the plutonium, and he took the full blast in his stomach.
So that if there was a full nuclear exchange, would you think there might be an evolutionary change that would allow us to feel pain under such conditions?
Yeah, we physicists know it, because, of course, we have all the documents.
I have many of the documents of these accidents.
And it's outrageous reading the history of how careless we physicists have been handling plutonium, letting it go critical in the walls.
Again, seven Americans have been killed this way.
And there have been...
It's known to physicists, but you really have to dig.
You have to get access to classified material, a material that's semi-classified, and then you read the real history of the dangers of nuclear energy and the people that died, you know, harnessing the power of the atom.
It's like writing the tail of a tiger.
You know, it's very powerful, and if you make a mistake, it'll bite you.
What they would do is they would get these two hemispheres of plutonium, bring them together very slowly, and then Geiger-Counter needles would go off scale, and then you would then bring them apart.
And you would tickle the dragon's tail by bringing them together gently and getting them closer and closer and closer together until, you know, the Geiger-Counter needle went off scale.
First time call online, you're on the air with Dr. Michio Kaku.
Good morning.
unidentified
Good morning, Art.
Good morning, Dr. Kaku.
I have two questions for you.
Let me ask them both at the same time, please, Art, and then I'll hang up and listen on the radio.
Go.
Question number one, regarding a type 1 civilization.
Question number two, regarding the map, the microwave angiotropy probe spacecraft.
Number one, question number one, since George W. Bush is in favor of oil and is in favor of Star Wars, and Al Gore is against Star Wars, and also as an environmentalist, wrote the book Earth in the Balance in 1970.
From a type 1 civilization point of view, wouldn't it be prudent to vote for Al Gore over George W. Bush?
Question number two.
Happening almost at the same day as Election Day, November 6th or 7th, will be the launch of the microwave angios and isotropy probe.
Question number two, would you discuss in detail the microwave anisotropy probe spacecraft?
The first one is an obviously politically charged question.
It might be noted here that though Gore, earlier in his political life, seemed very environmentally friendly, in the campaign, it hasn't been quite the same.
And there are a lot of us who feel it won't make a whole lot of difference one way or the other.
So personally, I think that people should build their conscience, but really, we have to put a certain fire under the butts of some of these politicians to make them take correct positions on building a peaceful, planetary, prosperous Taiwan civilization rather than trying to build walls around ourselves like the Chinese did with their great wall and the French did with their Marginal line, walls that crumble when push comes to show.
Now, you can't see it because your eyes are, you know, the eyes of an animal, basically the eyes of an ape.
And we cannot see microwaves.
Apes cannot, animals cannot see microwave radiation.
But that's the color of the Big Bang.
The Big Bang's color went from, you know, ultraviolet to the optical, and now it's very cold, about three degrees in temperature, which corresponds to microwave.
And that's why we're sending up microwave satellites out there now to take brilliant photographs of the remnants of the Big Bang.
The microwave radiation dates from 300,000 years after the Big Bang.
It's not a photograph of the incident of the Big Bang.
It's a photograph of the Big Bang 300,000 years after the incident of creation.
And there are irregularities in the cosmic explosion.
These irregularities eventually, we think, gave rise to galaxies and gave rise to the clumpiness that we see in the universe around us.
So one of the reasons why the universe is so clumpy, why we have galaxies and galactic clusters, is because there was an anisotropy, an unevenness in the original Big Bang, which then gradually expanded to give us the galaxies of today.
So then this satellite will be able to virtually look beyond these outward markers, these quasars, and actually see the radiation from the bang itself?
You go far enough into the past, and you actually are staring at creation.
So ironically enough, for the Kansas State School Board that does not believe in evolution or the Big Bang theory, every night the Big Bang comes out, except, of course, it takes microwave eyes to see it.
And that's why we sent up the Colby satellite, which was a cosmic background microwave satellite, which took a photograph of, quote, the face of God.
Now, the media called it the face of God.
It was a circular photograph with clumpiness in it.
It's not really the face of God at all.
It's the face of the Big Bang.
We had actually photographed the Big Bang 300,000 years after the initial explosion.
One long question and then one for an inch of paper.
As far as a nuclear detonation, the internet and other such things going down, what would it take to bring them back up quickly to, you know, begin putting the world back together?
And for your inch of paper, matter times infinity.
Where?
Well, I'm not really thinking that.
Okay.
You know, is that do you think that is really a practical idea?
Well, it depends on how much damage had taken place.
If the exchange was only on the level of several megatons, in other words, only a few major cities got wiped out, then you would have a nuclear autumn or nuclear fall.
Temperatures would drop, but civilization would recover perhaps in a few decades.
if you're talking more than a hundred megatons uh...
well and of course uh...
brussia and america have thousands of megatons worth of nuclear bomb uh...
venue are talking about literally sending humanity perhaps a hundred two hundred years into the past uh...
back to the face at the beginning of the industrial revolution where humans would uh...
In such a condition, how long would, after a full exchange, how long would humans have to remain below ground before they could come to the surface again?
Well, most of the radiation would damp out in a few weeks, most of it.
However, the residual will be there for thousands of years, irradiating people, raising the mutation rate.
Monsters would be formed.
You know, humans that look like humans would be treasured because of the fact that there are so many humans that don't look like humans because of the low level of background radiation that's everywhere.
And the human fetus is quite sensitive to radiation as we know it.
And so there would be very high mutation rate that takes place.
And so that's why I believe that we should not allow the bomb to proliferate, you know, and the bomb has not proliferated to Asia, to between, you know, Pakistan and India.
And that's a frightening prospect because between them, they probably have on the order of 100 atomic bombs between them, between each other.
India with roughly maybe 60 to 80 atomic bombs, and Pakistan with probably about 20 atomic bombs.
And that's a lot of bombs.
And that's why I think we really have to force a comprehensive test ban treaty and a nuclear nonproliferation treaty to make sure the bomb doesn't proliferate to other unstable areas of the world.
Okay, there's one perhaps logical argument for the building of something that would stop a ballistic missile.
And the one logical argument is that an all-out nuclear exchange is not at all likely.
And the argument is that what is likely is perhaps a single missile, perhaps a mistake, perhaps, who knows, a terrorist managing to get some sort of ballistic thing together with a warhead.
And in that case, you could take out one or maybe two.
Obviously not hundreds or thousands, but one or two in a limited situation you could take out.
That's why I think that a terrorist is not going to go up against a Star Wars system.
A Star Wars system is useless against a terrorist that will simply use the United States mail to mail a hydrogen bomb or an atomic bomb into the country.
So that's why it thinks that we're going to be spending all this money when the terrorists themselves are not stupid.
They're not dumb.
They know that they're going to be up against this gigantic shield, which may not work.
So they're going to either send it on a cruise missile below ground radar.
You know, the Russians are now saying that they're going to science SALT II, and they're going to cut their nuclear arsenals because, of course, they can't maintain them anymore.
When you're talking about the possible extinction of the human race, it's such a great contrarian piece of music.
Good morning, everybody.
Dr. Michio Kaku is here.
As we approach the end, I'm Art Bell.
right where you are.
All right, once again, Dr. Michio Kaku from New York City, which, by the way, seems to me would be a prime terrorist target, probably that or Washington, D.C. And I bet you've thought about that, haven't you?
I'm speaking from Manhattan right now, and when the World Trade Center bomb went off, I could actually see a lot of the flames and the smoke coming out of the World Trade Center from my apartment house.
The national headquarters of many of our corporations are here.
Indeed.
But in the movie Fail Safe, we knew it was the Russians.
The Russians knew it was us.
In the case of a terrorist, they may simply bomb a city and not even reveal who they are.
And that'd be very frustrating.
Here would be this gigantic giant flailing away at nothing, not understanding who did that bomb threat.
And that's another reason why I think that we should not concentrate efforts on an anti-ballistic missile system, but to concentrate efforts on the control of nuclear materials and nuclear infrastructure to make sure that nobody can start to develop these things.
You know, atomic bombs are hard to build.
They're harder to build and you realize it takes a huge infrastructure to build these things.
And this infrastructure is clearly visible by satellite.
Well, initially, India has been a big stumbling block.
Even though most people remember Gandhi, Hindu nationalism has pretty much taken over Indian politics, and they want to beat their chest and call for a Hindu bomb.
Yeah, and his theories about that there were global catastrophes in historical times like 1500 to 1600 B.C., 1100 B.C., and that these were caused by extraterrestrial agents, and he identifies them as Mars and Venus.
And this seems to dovetail into Dr. Tom Van Plander's exploding planet hypothesis about Mars.
Well, in that work, he thought that Venus was a comet that stabilized in its orbit around the sun.
But a comet is nothing but a dirty snowball.
They're only about 20 miles across.
Venus is the size of the Earth.
It's literally a twin of the Earth.
By using computers, we can backtrack the motion of the planets for thousands of years.
Newton's laws of motion are that accurate.
And if you backtrack the motion of the planets for thousands of years, you don't find them bumping into each other.
You don't find them causing Noah's flood.
You don't find them causing the parting of the Red Sea and so on and so forth.
Now, I think, however, the legacy of when worlds collide is interesting because we are now more receptive to asteroid impacts and devastations on geologic time scales, where asteroids, we think, did, in fact, kill off the dinosaurs and kill off the trilobites as well.
So I think one of the legacies of that work is that we're more accepting now of astronomical explanations for geologic catastrophes.
They, in fact, were tropical before the Earth became tropical.
We were quite hot when Mars cooled down to be tropical.
And that's why some people think that DNA started first on Mars because Mars was the first to have temperate, warm climates with lots of oceans and ideal conditions of life when the Earth was still too hot to have life.
And if you look at the record, life starts very quickly after the Earth has a stable ocean and the age of meteors ends.
Once Meteor impacts no longer hit the earth and dry up the oceans and boil them off, DNA can start.
And DNA starts very soon after the age of meteors ends on the earth.
And so, some people, like Fred Hoyle, astronomer Fred Hoyle, have stated that it's too good to be true.
You know, DNA just pops into existence as soon as the age of meteor ends.
That's why some people would lean toward a panspermia theory of some sort.
And that's why some people have said that they should, you know, go to Mars and create rocket fuel on the way back.
That would give them an incentive to set up a factory on Mars.
There's no fuel to come back.
It's only a one-way trip.
I think there's too many bugs.
And all we have to do is wait a few more decades until the technology of reusable launch vehicles kicks in before we have more dependable rockets that don't blow up on the launch pad.
You know, 1% of our booster rockets blow up on launch.
I know you guys aren't really talking about this anymore.
It's more on the theoretical side, but I'm a philosophy student here at the U of S, and it's regarding the notion of multiple universes that the good doctor was talking about there.
And the question I always have when people start talking about that sort of thing is when you talk about multiple universes, you have to ask, where are they, basically, to put it simply?
And it's a two-part question.
If the answer is simply that they're over there, essentially, that they're located spatially in relation to where we are, then I think it's a misnomer.
When I consider the word universe, it seems to me that it encompasses all of being, you know.
And if you're going to say that there's another universe just over there, I would say that all in all, that's just one smaller part of the greater universe.
And the second part is I have a feeling, and I often talk to physicists about this sort of thing, and I get the answer that the parallel universes are actually taking place simultaneously with ours in the same space.
And I was wondering, it seems to me that you would run into some problems dealing with, say, two objects occupying the same space at the same time.
I was wondering if you could maybe enlighten us a little bit about that.
If I have two parallel sheets of paper, one right on top of the other, I could have two universes that are very complete, people living on them like cookie men on a frying pan, and they would be basically in two parallel universes that can't reach each other.
So they would say, well, where is the parallel universe?
I can go everywhere on this sheet of paper and never bump into another universe.
So this multiverse idea is a bunch of idiocy.
Well, that's because you have to go into hyperspace.
In hyperspace, you can stack as many universes as you want.
And that's where these multiverse universes live.
If we are a three-dimensional bubble floating in 10-dimensional hyperspace, or now 11-dimensional hyperspace, then our rockets cannot reach this other universe.
The only way to reach these other universes would be through wormholes.
And the wormholes would require fantastic amounts of energy, 10 to the 19 billion electron volts, to open up a hole in space.
And, you know, we're too primitive to do that.
So if you ask the question, where are they?
It's like a bug on a balloon saying, where are the other balloons?
And the bug can go anywhere on the balloon and say, well, I don't see anybody.
There's nobody out there.
There's just this one balloon.
And meanwhile, there could be millions of balloons out there.
In fact, there's a TV program called Sliders, which talks about opening up wormholes between parallel universes.
In the very first episode of Sliders, a boy reads a book and gets the idea.
That book is my book.
That's hyperspace.
He's reading hyperspace in the first episode of Sliders.
So they do, in some sense, occupy the same space, but it's in hyperspace.
It's in the other dimensions.
In H.G. Wells' famous novel, The Invisible Man, The Invisible Man was blown in an explosion a few inches off our universe.
So think of a tabletop with a man living just an inch off the surface.
He would be invisible.
The people on the tabletop could not see this invisible man floating just inches above the tabletop.
He'd be floating in the fourth dimension.
And that was the origin of invisibility in H.G. Wells' famous novel, The Invisible Man.
Well, listen, I told you all that I'm not good at goodbyes, and I'm not.
And that is why I prevented callers from saying goodbye to me.
I made that a condition of their getting on the air with Dr. Kaku, that they don't break into goodbyes from me, because I don't know how to handle it.
And I also don't know how, in words, to sum up the pleasure of such a long career on the air.
I don't have words for that.
And since I don't have words for it, I better not try, huh?
In other words.
In other words, there is nothing to say.
Literally nothing to say except goodbye.
Thank you all for being here for all those signs.
Anybody I may have missed, we're going to repeat the first hour where I sort of stumbled through trying to say thank you and goodbye and all that sort of stuff.