Theoretical physicist Michio Kaku explores humanity’s future, dismissing fears of quantum computers or time travel but warning Earth’s survival hinges on a 10–20% chance to achieve type 1 civilization status—planetary energy mastery—in 100 years. He links dark matter (95% of the universe) and dark energy to Tesla’s lost theories, speculating that advanced civilizations could manipulate them to escape cosmic death. Kaku also debunks RHIC black hole risks, notes Mars as a possible life origin, and critiques politicians’ short-term focus amid accelerating ice cap loss—suggesting only hyperbeings or type 3 civilizations could wield true divine-scale energy. [Automatically generated summary]
North all the way to the Pole, south into South America, and more or less worldwide on the internet.
This is coast to coast, a.m.
Bell.
Good morning.
Second day back.
Great to be here.
New affiliates joining tonight.
St. Louis.
You've been waiting for this, I know.
How about KFTK?
That's KFTK in St. Louis, Missouri.
97.1 megahertz.
F. 100,000 watts, so it ought to be heard from here to Kalamazoo.
Little you should have no problem with it in St. Louis.
That's KFTK, 97.1, 100,000 watts.
That's a big electrical bill, I'll tell you.
WJBO in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, 1150 on the dial, welcome.
WQBC in Vicksburg, Mississippi, welcome.
And WFRC in Athens, Georgia.
Welcome.
All brand new and with us tonight on top of the, I don't know what it was, Fortin that we did last night.
So welcome in, everybody.
On the second hour tonight, one of our nation's premier physicists, theoretical physicist, Dr. Michio Kaku.
He's a real heavyweight.
You're going to enjoy that.
In the meantime, we'll just sort of fiddle around a little bit.
I got about, I'm getting in the order of 3,000 or 4,000 emails a day.
So I'm trying to make it through the emails.
I'm trying.
I'll do the best I can.
No promises.
But a lot of them said the following, Art, the fifth hour is missing from your first show.
Is this going to be temporary or what?
I can only listen during the day and it kills me to miss the final hour.
The new fifth hour.
Well, there were certain messages encoded in the fifth hour that we couldn't repeat.
That would be one explanation.
The real explanation is that, you know, the timers were only set to record the first four hours because somebody along the line forgot the program is now a five-hour show.
So we have sent messages.
How long they will take to sink in, I don't know.
Maybe we'll get lucky tonight.
Looking around the world a little bit with security officers keeping news media at bay.
The former vice president, Al Gore, delivered a lecture at Columbia.
He said it was off the record and just teaching and don't ask any political kind of questions.
Ariel Sharon, the tough-talking former general dubbed the Bulldozer, the Bulldozer, that's a name to have, has won handily in Israel.
We'll see what happens.
President Bush is telling the nation's four largest airlines workers today that they should avoid strikes because if they don't, if they don't settle differences, well, he's keeping all options open.
I'm not sure what that means.
Who else would fly the planes?
Happy birthday, Ronald Reagan 90.
And he's had a pretty tough way to go.
There is some worrisome health news on a couple of points here.
We have possibly the first case of brace yourself, Ebola in the Northern Hemisphere.
Health officials are working to determine if a woman who traveled from Africa and is now being hospitalized in Canada is suffering from Ebola hemorrhagic fever in what would be the first known case in North America.
Health Canada, the nation's health department, confirmed a laboratory in Winnipeg had received blood samples from the woman.
The hospital where she's being treated is testing now for viral hemorrhagic fevers, including Ebola, a severe, often fatal disease.
Actually, Ebola generally, if you catch it, you can count to 10.
You've got about 10 days to live, and then you die.
I received a fax today from Dr. Lorraine Day.
And this is kind of worrisome.
Says all the nice things at the beginning, great to have you back at home, so forth and so on.
But here's what she says.
She's talking about appearing as a guest and probably will have her.
But listen to this.
She said, Art, there's another big cover-up going on, and that's the mad cow epidemic and its related forms in pigs, sheep, chicken, and so forth, which will, she says, now get this, make AIDS seem like a day at the beach.
Yes, an epidemic that is sweeping around the world, her words, and will cause unprecedented death and devastation.
It's in this country right now, even though the authorities are denying it as they always do.
Now more than ever, people need to understand there is a way to avoid this dreaded, fatal disease, but it's not just in the food chain.
It's in gelatin capsules, in fillers, in processed foods, cosmetics, and in gelatin as a binder in supplemental pills.
That's some rough stuff, if true, from Lorraine Day.
And so I think I'll get hold of Dr. Day and we'll find out what she's talking about.
Yikes.
An Australian, this is from NewsMats.com, an Australian inventor has come up with a gun, a gun that can fire 180 rounds in a hundredth of a second, or, if you wish, an impossible million rounds a minute, so fast that a bullet enters the barrel before the preceding one has even left the muzzle.
So till this one gets in the hands of gang members, huh?
Incredibly, storekeeper James Michael O'Dwyer's gun has no moving parts and operates entirely on electrical impulses.
Great, we need this gun.
Despite the fact that O'Dwyer's invention has vast and even dizzying implications as, for example, an awesome military weapon or a street sweeper, I had just added, when he approached the Australian defense officials in 1994 with the idea, they turned a deaf ear.
And when he showed the gun to former U.S. Special Forces Chief Wayne Downing, the general said O'Dwyer was certifiably crazy.
No longer true now, the general is now a member of the board of directors of Get This Metal Storm Limited.
O'Dwyer's new company is calling it Metal Storm Limited.
Well, that'd be a Metal Storm, all right, wouldn't it?
180 rounds in a hundredth of a second or an impossible 1 million rounds a minute.
Now, that's just got to have applications.
You know, that's got to have applications, probably not ones that you want to know about.
It's amazing.
The charges are set off when electrical contacts spark them in precisely timed electronic sequence, much the way an inkjet printer sprays ink.
So, yeah, we sure want to see this one in the hands of some street people.
Holy mackerel.
And I'm sure you've heard about this.
This news broke, oh, I don't know, a week or two ago.
It sure is interesting.
Moscow, an airport in southern Siberia, was shut down for an hour and a half on one last Friday when an unidentified flying object was detected hovering above its runway.
All according to the Interfax News Agency, the crew of an Aleutian 76 cargo aircraft refused to take off, claiming they saw a luminescent object hovering above the runway of the Siberia's Barnal airport.
Local aviation company director Ivans Kosmarov was quoted as saying the crew of yet another cargo plane refusing to use the runway for the same reason landed their jet at another airport.
The UFO finally took off and vanished from the airport 90 minutes later.
Well, somebody out there ought to have some really good pictures, wouldn't you think?
We'll be right back.
Still looking for new little replacements for this, but this one is not bad.
All right, listen, Ginger.
I've got an interesting piece of information here on Ginger, and I'm not saying that this is Ginger, but it might be.
This person claims to be very close.
In fact, part of the investment group behind Ginger.
But this person anonymously, of course, says it stands for Inductance Transportation Vehicle.
A neat mobile little gadget that may eliminate the need for cars in the future.
Ah, an air car maybe.
He goes on.
However, if there are a large number of vehicles operating in the same area, it does require magnetic tracks to be installed to prevent the possibility of, get this, collisions or magnetic interference with other its.
In other words, if you're zipping along in your it and another it zips along and your two magnetic fields become entangled, your it or the other guy's it or both its could plunge, well, you get the picture.
The breakthrough technology, it goes on, that runs the it is ginger.
Ginger, the geomagnetic inductance neutralizing gasoline engine replacement.
This clean, quiet, inexpensive engine will be the real moneymaker whether it becomes popular or not.
It could be used extensively in defense, shipping, and many other industries.
This should answer a few of the questions about ginger slash it, although it will probably generate many more.
They should all be answered next year when DK makes the official announcement.
Regards, he signs it anonymously as Ginger Guy, but you know, that sounds pretty good, doesn't it?
Do you think that's it?
I have no idea.
Now, there is a good friend of mine here in Perrump, Nevada, named Paul Bowman.
In fact, really, what I ought to do is give you his email address after I do this.
He's got the cutest little daughter, and her name is Maggie.
Maggie defines cute as about, I think she's about a three-year-old now.
And she literally does define cute.
And she made a few liners for me.
You know, Ross Mitchell, like Ross Mitchell, only not quite exactly like Ross Mitchell.
I mean, Maggie's only three.
So she made a few liners, and I thought I would try them out on you and see what you think.
And by the way, I think if you go to the website right now, we've got a link to Maggie's photograph.
I put Maggie's photograph up there, oh, I don't know, last spring.
And I thought you might enjoy the voice of Maggie.
A group of astronomers has come up with a plan they claim will save life on Earth from an early demise.
That's serious.
Their deadline is about 3.5 billion years in the future.
At that time, the scientists say our sun, get this, will be 40% brighter than it is today.
Now, that's very bad.
And the Earth they go on will be much too hot to sustain life.
Too hot.
Now, you've got to bear in mind that where I am here near Death Valley, we go to, well, I don't know, 110, 113, 115 degrees sometimes in the summer.
If you were to add 40% to that, we'd be toast big time.
They say even looking just a billion years down the road, the increased brightness of the sun would cause a, quote, moist greenhouse effect, which will have a catastrophic impact on the planet.
However, say they, what if we could move the Earth farther away from the Sun before it gets too hot?
So researchers at NASA and Fred Adams of the University of Michigan say the idea of changing the Earth's orbit is almost alarmingly feasible, but how would we do it?
Scientists' theory is outlined in a paper entitled Astronomical Engineering, a strategy for modifying planetary orbit.
The paper has been accepted for publication in the Journal of Astrophysics and Space Science, so it's very serious.
The researchers' theory is a twist on the gravity assist technique used to send spacecraft to the outer planets.
They say that by shooting a large object, like an asteroid about 62 miles across, past the Earth, the planet could gradually be pulled away from the sun.
And they would change our orbit.
Now, that's pretty neat stuff, huh?
All right, well, listen, I want to take some calls in the balance of this hour, and whatever you would like to say is fair game.
But again, I remind you as yesterday, while I don't like goodbyes, I don't like hellos, so I very much appreciate all that.
I've got thousands of hellos.
I mean, so many in my email, I can't possibly deal with them.
And while I would appreciate your saying hi and welcome back and all that, just assume that I've heard you say it mentally, because I have thousands of you, millions.
And if you want to see Maggie right now on the What's New portion of our website, you'll see Maggie the Liner Girl.
And when you go there, just click on the picture and you'll get the big version and you'll see a levitating Maggie.
And if you have comments on Maggie, a lot of you are obviously in an emailing mood.
So fire off an email to Maggie's dad.
That would be Paul.
That's P-A-U-L.
Paul at 2330.com.
Paul at 2330.com is his email address.
Probably not for long, but it's this.
Well, just one more brief little thing.
You're going to love this.
Scientists have succeeded in growing sperm in a laboratory for the first time, paving the way for infertile men to produce their own genetic offspring.
The team from the Mishida District of Tokyo also believes they'll be able to reprogram male cells into producing eggs so that men can both father and mother children.
This could allow gay men to be parents together.
At the moment, the technique which clones embryo cells and turns them into sperm has been attempted only with mice.
But now it's men.
So that men can be pregnant.
You know, I used to joke about that.
What if men could be pregnant?
And it figures in my lifetime it's going to be possible.
I'm sure you were ripped apart by a lion at some earlier point.
unidentified
But no, I just had a question or comment that I wanted you to ask.
I mean, just a possibility.
You know, like with all the UFO sightings that goes on, you know, I'm not talking about, you know, like, let's say if one just pop up it then I happen to see it.
But I'm like saying like, let's say like, is there a possibility that it was in the area earlier to say like somebody, maybe somebody was having an abduction experience at that time?
Has anybody ever tried to research that to see?
Like, could there be a connection to a lot of these sightings?
Like, could there be anybody in the neighborhood experiencing abduction or something like that?
All right, let's just say like from that point of time that you saw the UFO, that somewhere along in that time before you saw it, maybe somebody else, like in the neighborhood or in that region, probably.
That was when I had the box here, and I was going to have a scheduled install, and I hadn't heard anything from the installers who were actually coming out of Las Vegas.
And I called you to find out if you were a local guy.
And it's because it's because people do like to be scared.
He had it right.
I like to get myself scared, too.
And a lot of times when I do it, I turn the lights down in here.
And some of the story is just scare the young watt out of you.
And there's a good reason for it.
It's because I completely believe that ghosts are real.
I completely believe that.
There are ghosts.
There are entities.
And I began to consider something interesting earlier today.
Somebody sent me a fax about invisible people.
Invisible people.
Now, I don't know whether he meant actual people who are invisible, which is one possibility, or whether he meant entities that perhaps at one time were people and are invisible to us and nevertheless able to observe us.
I'm an ex-Navy submariner, missile tech, Polaris guy.
So I've been in the aerospace industry a while, and I was watching an interesting show today on our Public Access channel, and I just caught the middle of it.
But the thing that really struck me, and it kind of correlated with the high-energy sun solar radiation in the Van Allen belts, and how we actually protected the astronauts outside the Van Allen belts during that time when we had high solar radiation.
We had a very interesting discussion on ham radio the other night.
This, of course, is nothing but a conspiracy theory, but it's kind of worth thinking about.
You know, when you fly in an airliner at 30,000, 40,000 feet, if there's a solar flare, you get a fair amount of radiation.
If it's a big flare, you get quite a bit of radiation, actually.
I wonder if we could get a pilot talking about that.
But when you fly the Concorde and you're up at 60,000 plus feet, you get a lot of radiation.
And we were sort of mulling over the other day.
They, of course, had the Concorde crash.
And I still, to this very day, don't understand why they grounded the whole fleet of Concords.
We were talking about this on ham radio.
I mean, there is an airplane that has never had an accident, never, never, never, all these years, until it has one accident, and it's, we believe, because of something it picked up junk on the runway.
Would that really be a reason to ground an entire fleet of aircraft?
Not really.
Now, there may be more to it, we'll find out, and maybe there is a reason, but if that's the reason, it's not good enough.
And so we started speculating about, well, why might they ground the Concord fleet?
Well, we're at solar maximum, or just past it, one of the two, but it's really hot up there right now.
And we thought, well, maybe it's just a reason.
Maybe the real reason they're not so unhappy to put Concords down is because we are at solar maximum, and there's an awful lot of radiation that occurs at that altitude.
Just a conspiracy theory, but we kind of thought about it.
Okay, on the international line, you're on the air.
And if you want to really know, go to my website and listen to the interview done on the NBC Today show, and that will explain it all to you so I don't have to do it right now.
unidentified
Well, it's good to see that the refreshing fellow like you is back on the air.
Well, we had some interesting reports on Australia Day weekend, Australia Day itself, our national celebration day, where F-111s and fighter jets were doing dumping fuels, and people on that particular day were ringing up the hotline left, right, and center.
So people seemed to be wanting to see strange things in the sky once again.
Well, listen, another gentleman called from Australia just prior to yourself, and he was talking about the possibility of, as you know, Miras coming down.
Hopefully not on you, but apparently near you.
And the percentage of possible miss includes you.
So how do you feel about that?
unidentified
Well, I think Australia is a very big continent island, and there's very few people here.
The chances of Mir hitting someone is less remote than being bitten by a mosquito.
In this a pretty song, of course, is Lorena McKinnon.
Dr. Kaku is to physics what Carl Sagan was to astronomy.
He is a professor of theoretics at City College of New York.
He is co-founder of String Field Theory.
He's a heavyweight.
He's the author of the critically acclaimed and best-selling Hyperspace as well as Beyond Einstein with Jennifer Thompson, Quantum Field Theory, a modern introduction, and introduction to super strings.
He hosts his own hour-long weekly radio science program that is nationally syndicated.
At least I think he still does that.
We'll ask him.
And oh, I've got to ask him about his website, too.
So coming up in a moment, Dr. Michio Kaku, it'll be quite a night.
We will use Fast Blast tonight.
And I'll try and get to as many calls with Dr. Kaku as I can.
Well, you know, I think when a kid is about 10, 11, 12, before they hit 13, that's when they're ripe to really have their eyes open to the wonders of physics and cosmology and science.
By the time they hit 13, 14, puberty kicks in.
The hormones kick in, right?
And you start to worry about girls and dating and your parents and stuff like that.
So I think when you get kids that are young, and at that point, they really begin to wonder, where did the sun come from?
Where did the oceans come from?
Where did they come from?
That's the time to hit them.
And that's what hit me when I was 10 and 11 years old.
And around that time, everyone was talking about the fact that Einstein had just died.
Everyone was talking about the fact that the greatest scientist of our age had died with his greatest work unfinished.
And then people forgot about it because it was such a grand quest.
He was so far ahead of his time that it would take another 40 years before people began to retrace the steps laid out by Einstein back in the 40s and 50s.
Now, since you went there, I happen to have this New York Times article in front of me entitled, Scientists Bring Light to Full Stop, Hold It, Then Send It On Its Way.
At that point, the media went crazy and said that the physicists at Texas A ⁇ M University disproved Einstein, that you really can outrace a train and you really can outrace a light beam.
However, Einstein still has the last laugh.
Einstein said that the speed of light is a constant in a vacuum.
In a vacuum, you cannot outrace a light beam.
These people shot a laser beam into a bunch of gas molecules.
The gas molecules absorbed the light beam, held it, held it, and then re-emitted it much later.
As a consequence, there was a delay factor, a delay factor in the absorption and re-emission of the light beam.
And that's why, for example, light slows down in your glasses.
The reason why light slows down in your glasses is because the atoms of your glass absorb the light and then re-emit it with a slight time delay.
Well, these people have been able to delay it so much that they can essentially stop light.
However, this is very interesting for what is called quantum computers.
One day we may be able to replace silicon with light beams.
And if we can then stop a light beam by having it absorbed by a gas molecule, then we can use it to compute, you see.
And so this may usher in something called the post-silicon era, an era 20, 30 years down the line when silicon power is exhausted and silicon valley becomes a rust belt.
And so when Silicon Valley becomes a rust belt, we're going to have to go to the next generation beyond silicon, and that's where we may be able to use optical computers and quantum computers.
Yeah, I think in 15 years, we're going to be gradually hitting the limit because the layers of silicon, these layers of silicon that we pile on top of each other will be about five atoms across.
Right now, the thinnest layer in a Pentium chip is about 20 atoms across.
At that point, your Christmas tree presents under the Christmas tree are not going to be twice as powerful as they were in the previous Christmas.
People are going to get bored realizing that computers have flattened out in terms of power, that their toys this year are identical to the toys the previous year.
anyway in my book visions which became a bestseller partly because of my being on your show I think my book visions takes us 20 30 40 years into the future when computers become essentially the size of dust particles and when we have computers Yeah, the military and corporations are looking at computers the size of dust particles.
This we call smart dust.
If you have a battlefield, for example, and you spray it with dust particles, these dust particles could have sensors on it.
Because each dust particle has little pieces of silicon etched on its transistors, which then sense the battlefields.
And so the military is quite interested in this.
The idea that you can simply spray over a battlefield dust, which monitors troop movements, allows you to guide missiles and essentially see the whole battlefield in three dimensions.
Well, I would hope that the car itself is gradually going to become intelligent so that the car itself will be able to drive, you know, large distances without any human intervention.
I think the young are going to be the one propelling this revolution.
I do a lot of traveling in Europe, and in Europe, it's the young people that are gravitating to the cell phones and to this whole wireless technology.
And they're the future.
And they accept this technology as if it's like their birthright.
They assume that computers are going to be twice as powerful every Christmas.
They assume that that's just the way it is and that they want the latest gadgets.
And I think that the young are going to be the ones propelling super fast chips with tremendous computing power with the ability to recognize human speech for decades to come.
Gosh, I'm old enough to remember my dad bringing home the first television, a giant monolith of a thing with a little seven-inch screen.
And so to me, television really has been always there, and I assume television.
I take it for granted.
And in just this short time between when I was born and perhaps when I pass on or when I'm old and gray, older and grayer, they're going to be assuming this sort of technology.
When you talk to young people about the fact that, you know, we oldsters remember a period before television, I mean, it's just unimaginable because for them, they expect to have television in their wristwatches.
Well, it's going to have to come with voice command technology because I've seen some of the wristwatches and nobody but a complete idiot would try to push the buttons.
And that's coming, you know, within about five years' time, the computer power will be sufficient to analyze human speech in a reasonable way.
Right now, it's pretty funky.
But in five years' time, they'll get the bugs out and we'll simply, you know, communicate or wave our hands and fingers in three-dimensional space, like a conductor, and be able to communicate with electronic devices.
Well, I have now, I have wireless internet, I have satellite internet, I have all these wonderful broadband services available to me, even out here in Loll Perump.
So I know all of this is coming, but I'm not certain that it's a good, I'm not convinced it's a good thing.
Well, I think it's going to be a good thing if it means that information will gradually weaken dictatorships.
Dictatorships and authoritative regimes rely upon a control of information to keep their subjects unhappy and ignorant of what's happening around the world.
Well, yes, but, you know, my wife and I went to the Super Bowl in Tampa here recently, and there was just a big story that every single person who went into the Super Bowl was scanned.
Their picture was compared to every known criminal.
They were hunting for everybody.
So with the kind of technology you're talking about, I mean, here we are already doing it at the Super Bowl, for goodness sakes.
Imagine what it's going to be like when you have this sort of wideband stuff on your wrist.
But suppose you were a big-time IRS evader, or, I don't know, you had robbed a bank or perhaps something much lesser, and there you are arrested on the spot.
All I'm saying is that was mild compared to what you're talking about in terms of technological capability.
And so with it is going to come some of the Big Brother stuff, right?
The big problem is that your neighbor is going to be nosy, and your neighbor is going to want to know about your credit card transaction and who you call the telephone and who you associate with.
And we're going to have millions of busybodies with all these electronic gadgets trying to get access to your credit card, your purchase transactions.
And there's going to have to be a whole generation of software to prevent that.
I think we will have a big market for blockers in a few years as people want to block all these little brothers down the street that want to find out all about your transactions.
So I think the market for blockers is coming.
Right now, of course, people are still nosy.
They want to get access to other people's bank transactions.
You're listening to Dr. Michio Kaku, who is one of our nation's greatest theoretical physicists.
How does the future sound to you?
Imagine your toilet commenting on your diet.
Perhaps when, you know, the silicon's gone, the new computers will even develop a sense of humor, a place where you don't want to hear it.
I'm Art Bell.
unidentified
is Close to Coast AM.
We need so much.
The sight of the touch, or the scent of the sand, or the spend of an unwilling speak in the ground.
To wonder the flowers to be covered and then to burst up to tarmac to the sun again.
Or to fly to the sun without burning a wing.
To lie in the middle and hear the grass sing How all these things in our memories are And the youth is the cause To fight To fight To fight To fight To take this place I'll
never listen Just for me But you can't Take a seat I'll never listen Just for me Want to take a ride?
Call Art Bell 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.
The wildcard line is open at 1-775-727-1295.
And to call 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 from the Kingdom of Nineveh.
Well, quantum computers, which is perhaps the ultimate computer, computers that compute on individual atoms and individual light beams, they're still decades away.
At the present time, we can compute on about five atoms.
That's the limit before you get interference, disturbances, impurities, and the thing becomes unstable.
Now, to get a quantum computer that would outrage the human brain, for example, or do fantastic calculations for the space program, that would require several million atoms.
And we simply can't do that yet in the laboratory.
Once we assemble a collection of atoms, more than about five or six, it gets unstable.
Impurities begin to form and interference takes place.
But it's only a practical consideration.
Within a few decades, if we can eliminate the interference, if we can eliminate all the disturbances, and we could create a quantum computer, we might be able to approach the computational ability of the human brain.
And again, that's decades away.
So I don't think that we're going to be placed in a zoo anytime soon by robots who are going to take over the earth.
I think the way to go backwards in time, assuming that's possible, the way to bend time into a pretzel is to amass an incredible amount of energy comparable to that of a black hole and then to walk through it.
Now, just a few days ago, it was announced that physicists have more or less seen the event horizon of a black hole.
They've seen black holes eat their lunch.
They've seen black holes eat up whole stars in the galaxies in outer space.
But this is the first time we've seen the outlines of what appears to be the event horizon.
And that's incredible.
There's even a science fiction movie called The Event Horizon.
With the Hubble Space Telescope and other devices, they've seen the swirling disk of gas being eaten up by the black hole.
The black hole is basically having lunch, eating whole stars.
However, now they got closer and closer to the black hole itself, and they can actually begin to see the rough outlines of the event horizon.
The event horizon is a point of no return.
Once you go past the event horizon, then you automatically are crushed by the mass of the star.
Now, for example, if you take our sun and you were to squeeze our sun to about one mile, which is impossible, you're not going to be able to do that with gravity.
But if you could squeeze our sun to about one mile, that's the event horizon of the sun, at that point the sun would collapse into a black hole.
And any object that came within this radius of one mile of the squeezed sun would then be crushed forever.
Now, our universe probably has an event horizon because our universe is probably a black hole.
If you want to know what it looks like to be inside the event horizon, look around your room.
Our universe satisfies the black hole equation, which simply means, by the way, that you can't escape our universe.
Once you're inside the event horizon, you cannot escape because of the intense gravitational pull of the black hole.
Well, you can't escape our universe either.
Try leaving our universe.
No matter where you jump, you can't escape our universe.
Which simply means that our universe is probably a hyperbubble.
Our universe is probably a bubble.
We live on the skin of this bubble.
And no matter where we jump, we're always stuck on the surface of this bubble.
So our universe itself is probably a black hole.
Now I mentioned this because there is a theory that if you go through a black hole or through tremendous concentration of energy, you may wind up before you left.
And there are many solutions of Einstein's equations which allow for time travel.
The simplest one is if the universe itself were to rotate.
If you had a rotating universe and you walked around the universe in a circle, you would arrive before you left.
And this, of course, is the classic definition of a time machine.
Now Einstein knew this.
Einstein knew that in 1949, his neighbor, Kurt Goethe, found this solution which allowed for time travel.
And in Einstein's memoirs, he was very much worried about this.
He didn't like to have time travel in his universe.
And he said in his memoirs that you can rule out this time travel universe because of physical considerations.
In other words, the universe expands.
It doesn't rotate.
If the universe rotated instead of expanded, then time travel would be commonplace.
Sorry, then that conflicts with what I've got here from CNN today a group of astronomers.
The headline is astronomers hatch plan to move Earth's orbit from warming sun.
They're saying that in about three and a half billion years, our sun will be 40% brighter than it is today, and that the only way we could live is to move the Earth farther away from the sun.
With the greenhouse effect, for example, it's just going to increase the temperature of the Earth just for a few degrees, and that could wipe out the growing areas of many parts of the United States.
Imagine what happens if the temperature rises by a few hundred degrees.
Life on Earth would be impossible as we know it.
And by that time, we may have to have rocket ships to leave the Earth.
Or if we're very advanced, like we become what is called a type 2 civilization, we may want to simply move the Earth away from the sun.
And that, of course, is now a billion to 3 billion years into the future.
Well, in terms of energy, we're barely on the scale.
If you take a thermometer and measure the energy of a consumption of a type 1, type 2, and type 3, we're just barely off zero in terms of energy consumption.
Now, a type 2 civilization has exhausted the power of a planet, and they essentially can control the power of a star.
The Federation of Planets in Star Trek is a beginning, emerging type 2 civilization.
They can just begin to ignite single stars.
A mature type 2 civilization can play with stars.
And then a type 3 civilization is galactic, truly galactic.
They control the power of the black hole at the center of the Milky Way galaxy, for example.
And they have many, many star systems around the galaxy that's been colonized.
Each level is separated from the previous level by 10 billion times.
You can compute numerically the energy scale at which each civilization exists.
Now, we grow at about 3% a year in terms of our energy consumption on the Earth, about 3% a year.
At that rate, we will hit type 1 in about 100 years.
And you can see it all around you.
The internet is nothing but a type 1 telephone system.
We will have a planetary culture, the culture of Hollywood, the culture of English.
And then we will have local cultures, local cultures which flourish and have their language systematized on the Internet.
These languages will live forever on the Internet, even if no one speaks them anymore.
But the meta-language, the language of the Earth itself, educated people around the Earth will all speak English and will all be hooked up to this planetary culture.
But I think it's coming, and it's coming very rapidly, that in about 100 years, gradually we're going to have a planetary culture with a planetary language.
The European Union, for example, all these countries in Europe have been killing each other and slaughtering each other for the last 500 years.
And now they're banding together.
They have to, because the economies of the world are gradually being globalized.
So we're seeing the birth of type 1.
And once we hit type 2, that could happen within just a few thousand years, by the way, we may have the power to move the Earth.
Our energy will be 10 billion times the energy of a type 1.
And that's sufficient to begin to move the Earth itself.
Well, we're going to talk a lot about dark energy, but before humans who are listening to this get their heads too swelled, they should know, I've asked you in the past, we're type zero plus zero zero one or whatever it is, way down on the scale right now.
But the chances of our making it from zero to one are not exactly really hot, are they?
In other words, most type zero civilizations probably blow themselves up.
When we scan outer space and we don't see much out there, there should be thousands of type 1 civilizations out there communicating by radio, television, the internet, what have you, right?
So the laws of probability are such that perhaps in outer space, there are dead planets, planets with irradiated atmospheres, planets with atmospheres too hot because of the greenhouse effect to carry life.
And so in outer space, there could have been many attempts to make the transition from type 0 to type 1.
And that's the most dangerous of all transitions.
You see, a type 2 civilization is immortal.
Nothing known to science can destroy type 2.
Meteors, comets, supernovas, nothing can destroy type 2.
Now, between type 0 to type 1, the transition that we are undergoing right now, we are undergoing the greatest transition in the history of the human race.
Well, you know, if we develop a Star Wars program, the Chinese have vowed to pierce and overwhelm it, and the Russians too, and then the Indians have vowed to match the Chinese, and the Pakistanis have vowed to match the Indians.
So if the Pakistanis are matching the Indians, are matching the Chinese, are matching the Russians, are matching the Star Wars program, you can imagine there's going to be a vast increase in the number of unstable nuclear weapons in the next five years.
We're talking about war in outer space, and we're talking about billions of dollars that will only make the Chinese, the Indians, and the Pakistanis more fearful.
And they will want the Hindu bomb.
They will want the Muslim bomb.
They will want the Confucius bomb to rival our Star Wars program.
Well, think of the French just before World War II.
They built what is called the Maginot Line.
And the Maginot Line was supposed to be this impregnable line of defense to protect them against the Germans.
No frontal assault of the Germans would penetrate the Maginot Line.
Well, the Germans were not stupid.
They knew that.
They knew they couldn't launch a frontal assault.
So what did they do?
They launched the Blickstreak.
They went over it and around it and completely overwhelmed the Maginot line within a matter of hours.
So all the equivalent of billions of dollars spent on the defense between France and Germany came to naught because it was so much easier to go over it and around it.
The same thing with the Star Wars program.
You can put balloons, aluminum tinfoil balloons and chaff inside the nose cone of a missile, which will release millions of decoys into the enemy's radar system, fusing our radar.
And instead of seeing the enemy missile come at you, you'll see a million balloons that you don't know which one is the real missile.
And so far, none of our missiles have been able to penetrate through just a handful of balloons.
It only takes us a handful of balloons to fool our most advanced Star Wars system.
So I'm not saying that you can't do it in principle.
I'm just saying it may bankrupt the United States.
And in the meanwhile, the Russians and the Chinese, they're not stupid.
Neither were the Germans.
They're going to go around it and over it.
meaning they're simply going to overwhelm it with balloons and decoys and chaff, or go around it in the form of, let's say, putting a hydrogen bomb on a tugboat and then sending the tugboat to the San Francisco harbor.
Well, first of all, by satellites, we can see other nations build nuclear weapons.
So we've got to stop it at the source, okay, rather than having the enemies proliferate thousands and thousands of cheap nuclear weapons to penetrate our shield.
So I think even though it doesn't sound very dramatic, even though it doesn't sound very glamorous, I think we should engage in treaties and enforcement by satellite and on-site inspections to make sure that these multi-billion dollar infrastructures are not developed by these small nations who are tempted to proliferate small atomic bombs.
All right, but in the case, say, of a North Korea, we see them building, we know what they're building, and we know why they're building it, and what they're probably going to do with it.
Now, we can sign treaties with them until the CALs come home, and they're going to keep doing it.
When the ultimate crunch point comes, do you send in planes and bomb their ability to do that out of existence as a final measure?
We know an incredible amount about Yongbyeong, which is just north of the North Korean capital, where they have a reactor which produces plutonium waste.
We know the rate of plutonium production.
We know what's going on at the site.
We just don't know what the North Koreans are doing with the plutonium that the reactor can produce.
However, the very fact that we have all this surveillance means that if we deal with other countries and we demand on-site inspections with satellites and whatever, then we can monitor exactly where the plutonium is going.
Just remember that in order to have a credible threat against the United States, you just can't have just one atomic bomb.
If you have one atomic bomb, it could be a dud.
It has no threat value.
No country is going to launch a war against the United States with just one atomic bomb.
The danger is they could smuggle it.
I mean, you know, we can't control our borders with heroin.
And they could just smuggle it just like you smuggle heroin.
They could smuggle the bomb parts.
So we have to stop it at the source rather than simply ranting and raving against nations that have proliferated hundreds of bombs to overwhelm a Star Wars system.
Well, ultimately, okay, if everything fails, then we are talking in the North Korean area.
We are talking about perhaps 5 million people dying in the first week of a war on the Korean Peninsula.
Let's be frank, every general that I've talked to, every military man that I've come in contact with, and, you know, I get invitations to speak at the War College to talk about, you know, nuclear strategy and nuclear technology on the battlefield.
Anyway, they say that in the first week, if everything fails, okay, we're talking about the South Korean capital, which is very close to the border, being overwhelmed in about four or five days.
I mean, whenever I gaze at the stars at night, and I realize that we scientists have identified 50 planets now orbiting other star systems that, and the stars themselves, you can see with binoculars on an evening.
And then I wonder, do any of them have any life on them?
Probably not.
But if there were planets, Earth-sized planets out there, they would be facing perhaps millions of years ago the same problem that we're facing today.
They will discover element 92, uranium.
It's inevitable they will discover element 92.
And with that, the ability to perhaps blow themselves to smithereens.
And so we are in the most dangerous transition in the history of the human race.
Never before have the human race the capability to destroy itself.
And that may be the reason why we don't see aliens landing in our backyard every day.
Well, there is a book called Rare Earth, which argues that.
I've interviewed the authors of that book, and I hit them with a blistering set of critical questions, and they sort of melted, I thought, when I hit them with this.
The galaxy, just our own Milky Way galaxy, our backyard, has about 100 billion stars, a half of which, half of which we now believe have planets.
Now think about that for a moment.
We're talking about 50 billion stars with planets and maybe like 10 planets per solar system like our system.
So already you're talking about an unimaginable number of planets inside our galaxy.
And to assume that none of them have intelligent life, I think, is silly.
It was just announced last week that by looking at interstellar gas, scientists have seen the beginnings of cell membranes, not just proteins and amino acids, but the beginnings of cell membranes in gas nebulas in outer space.
So we now believe that the components of life, amino acids and perhaps proteins and cell membranes, are easier to produce in outer space than we previously thought.
So I think it is arrogance to think that we're the only ones.
Like I mentioned in my book, if there is a five-lane superhighway being built in a forest, and there are a bunch of ants in an anthill nearby, would the ants even know there was a five-lane superhighway being built next door?
We're type zero looking at a superhighway being laid by type three.
We wouldn't even be able to conceive or communicate with or even understand the motives, the design, the equipment being used.
It could be happening right next door to us, just like an anthill could have a superhighway next to it, and the poor ants wouldn't even know what's happening.
So that's why I'm not bothered at all by the fact that we haven't seen them because, or made radio contact with them, because we only listen on one frequency.
Can you imagine ants listening in on only one frequency, trying to listen in on human communication?
We humans communicate on many different kinds of frequencies with many different kinds of modes of communication.
And you know, the SETI program is now moving into a new stage, I believe, where they're beginning to consider looking at light and laser and all kinds of different wavelengths than they've traditionally been looking at.
Well, I interview a man named Seth Shostak, Dr. Shosak, who had SETI, and Dr. Shostak said the same thing about transmitting with extremely high power.
We could do that, of course, but he thinks it would be perhaps not such a hot idea.
You began to mention that, and nobody has explained to me, you have, I know, in the past, but I've never quite fully comprehended, and it's very difficult to comprehend, what in the world dark matter is.
It's a phrase thrown around a lot now, and I don't think people really understand what it is.
Okay, well, when we took high school chemistry, it was so simple.
The universe is made out of 100 different kinds of atoms, starting with hydrogen, going to helium, all the way up to uranium, and a few elements beyond that.
And everywhere we looked in the heavens with our instruments, we just picked up radiation from those hundred elements.
But there was a problem, and the problem is that if you look at our Milky Way galaxy, it spins too fast for its own good.
If you look at Newton's laws of motion and you have a spinning galaxy, it should fly apart.
Now, we've looked at hundreds of galaxies.
They all spin too fast for their own good.
They should fly apart.
Therefore, something has to hold them together.
And that's what dark matter is.
And dark matter makes up, as we now know, about 95% of the mass of the universe.
There's a certain amount of energy associated with nothing called dark energy.
Now, Einstein knew this.
He played with it, but he threw it away.
He thought it was just incredible that nothing could have energy.
But now we know that if you take a look at the universe, the universe, in fact, is accelerating as it expands.
This bubble that we talked about is accelerating.
It will accelerate and eventually become a gigantic, very cold universe.
Too cold to sustain any life.
And dark energy is what's causing the acceleration.
This dark energy is an anti-gravity.
It pushes the galaxies away.
We have the expansion to begin with, but the dark energy pushes the galaxies away.
And that's why the universe is, in fact, is accelerating.
Now, on one hand, it's kind of depressing, realizing that trillions of years from now we're all going to freeze to death, and that the temperature of the universe will approach absolute zero.
It won't reach absolute zero, but get very close.
And some people think that's the end of all type 3s.
That even a type 4 would have to die when the universe becomes that cold.
That's the hope that intelligent life does not have to die when the universe dies.
That a type 4, being masters of space-time, just like type 3 is a master of a galaxy, right?
A type 4 is a master of space itself.
And they would essentially create a small bubble and, like a life raft, leave our bubble, which is too cold to have any kind of intelligent life, to find a warmer universe out there.
And we think there is what is called the multiverse, the megaverse, a multiverse of bubbles out there.
And so we may be forced, as a type 4, to find a warmer universe out there, a universe which can be our new home, basically.
And this, of course, is speculation.
We're now talking trillions of years into the future.
But a trillion years is an awful long time to reach type 4 status.
I don't care when I'm away when I'm away We will open up the fast blasts coming out of this break.
I'm Mark Bell.
unidentified
When I cry, you don't laugh, but you know me.
I'm in you.
You're in me.
I'm in you.
I'm in you.
If anyone waiting for the end, I'm nothing here.
Oh, why can't I get here?
Nothing's gonna hide in heaven today.
Nothing's gonna hide in heaven.
Waiting for me.
Wishing that I just can't win Yet I feel like the old one Yet I can't live I got a lot of those Honey I got a lot of those Teardrum Honey Teardrum All of the way Wanna take a ride?
Well, call Art Bell from west to the Rockies at 1-800-618-8255.
East of 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 Arfell on the Premier Radio Network.
All right, the phone lines are open, and so are the past last questions.
This one not necessarily immediately relevant, but Stephen in Rockport, Texas asks, Hey, Art, if they'd scanned the players at the Super Bowl, would they have had enough players left to play the game?
Oh, well, it's a rough game.
It's a type zero game, but I still like it.
All right, back again to Dr. Michio Kaku.
And Doctor, a lot of people on this Fast Blast thing we have here are asking if you have any idea what it or ginger might be.
You know, there's a million people wondering about that right now, actually millions.
Everything from anti-gravity to replicators to transporters and things right out of Star Trek.
Personally, I think that the hype is so great now that it can't possibly live up to the hype.
And I think people are going to be disappointed when we come back to Earth.
It could be revolutionary in some sense, in a technical sense, but I think the hype is so great now that it's gone through the roof, and there's no way that they're going to be able to match the hype.
Now, it could be, for example, a new way of hooking up circuitry so that we have increased memory, increased speed.
That's well within the realm of technical possibility.
Let me read you very quickly one speculation about what it is.
Somebody who claims they know.
They say, quote, IT stands for Inductance Transport Vehicle, a neat mobile little gadget that may eliminate the need for cars in the future.
However, if there are a large number of vehicles operating in the same area, it does require magnetic tracks to be installed to prevent the possibility of collisions or magnetic interference with other ITs.
The breakthrough technology that runs IT is GINGER, the geomagnetic inductance neutralizing gasoline engine replacement.
This clean, quiet, inexpensive engine will be the real moneymaker whether the IT becomes popular or not.
It could be used extensively in defense, shipping, and many other industries.
Well, if it uses magnetism, it has to have enormous quantities of current.
Anyone who's taken high school physics knows you need a dry cell battery to get a little bit of magnetism in your electromagnet.
You need a lot of energy, a lot of battery power in order to get magnetism that would allow you to float, magnetism that would allow you to sense other vehicles.
And that's one of the problems with the electric car.
The weak point of the electric car is a battery.
That's why, you know, Toyota and Honda are going for the hybrid that use part gasoline, part electric batteries.
I tend to doubt that it's purely magnetic simply because of the power consumption.
The power consumption would be enormous to have magnetic fields sufficient to give you levitation, sensing, any of the things that are mentioned in that speculation.
Wildcardline, you're on the air with Dr. Michio Kaku.
Good morning.
unidentified
Good morning, Art.
This is John at Scottsdale.
Good morning, Dr. Kaku.
Nice to find you both.
Dr. Kaku, I have a quick little comment and then a question.
Sure.
First of all, it is with the greatest humility and respect that I would ask you this, and I ask you, I'm not trying to be disparaging or anything, but in listening to you.
I'm listening to you, and I think you're kind of giving old Homo sapiens maybe a little bit of a slam.
I think that we're capable of more, and I think that you're being a little pessimistic about our options for the future and the directions that we'll head in.
We want to live.
We want to survive, I think, before anything.
And I don't think we'll go too far along a path that lets mad politicians run things anymore and religious leaders to the detriment of the rest of us.
I think most of us are past that, and it's a matter of politics realizing that it's dead and to quit kicking and such that will free us.
Well, I think that the projections I give are more realistic.
If you take a look at what happened before World War I or World War II, today we say, how could civilization have tolerated all these dictatorships, all this warmongering, all this war machine building?
It was obvious it was going to be war.
Why didn't they do anything?
We're intelligent creatures.
And I think in the future, when they look back at us, they'll ask the same question.
They saw global warming coming.
They saw the scarcity of water, the pollution of the oceans.
They saw the South Pole breaking up.
I mean, you've got to be blind not to see the South Pole gradually breaking up huge chunks of ice the size of Delaware.
Why didn't they do anything about it?
So in the same way that we look back at civilizations before World War I and World War II, and we say they fell asleep.
There was no way they could miss the rise of Hitler, for example.
Everyone knew that Hitler was spoiling for a fight, right?
Our children are going to wonder, how come we missed it when it came to all the danger signs, the population explosion, the question of global warming, the question of pollution.
How could we miss it?
unidentified
I think Hitler in his time was a first world politician and represented the thinking of first world peoples.
In that 50 or so years since then, we've moved to where such people are third world and on the fringe, on the minority.
So I don't see Hitler happening again in any worldwide or significant way.
But in the future, it's going to be relatively easy for a poor nation to build an atomic bomb.
I mean, look at Pakistan.
I respect the Pakistanis, but their government is extremely poor.
It's one of the poorest nations on the planet Earth.
And there they are building up a stockpile of perhaps 20, 30 atomic bombs.
And so I think that's a very dangerous role model for smaller nations that they'll squander any resources they have to reach for the atomic bomb.
And you saw that the press clips from Pakistan and India, they cheered.
They cheered to have a Hindu bomb.
They cheered to have a Muslim bomb, right?
unidentified
Well, these are the death rattles of politics, I think, on earth.
The question I would have for you would be, the greatest computer, I think, is between our ears, and in fact, we only use 10% of that.
I believe that we've learned enough to seriously postulate that we are genetically engineered creatures and that a potential 90% is waiting for us to unravel if we can figure out the genetics of it and repair the damage or unleash the potential.
So I think our first priority should be to do that.
And hyperdimensional aspects, I think, would help us to conquer some of the problems you present with, from your type 0 to type 1.
The scientific viewpoint seems to be one that is very familiar with flatland, knows it in infinite detail, but hesitates to look up or down.
And I think our first priority should be to fix ourselves so we might even know what we're capable of.
Well, we're genetically engineered in the sense that evolution gave us the capabilities to survive in the forest, in the wilderness, to be able to reason, communicate.
We have a pulsable thumbs, we have stereo vision, and we have speech, a culture, a language.
And those are the three ingredients that any civilization in outer space would have to have to create a large brain.
I mean, we now know enough about the human genome to think that alien creatures in outer space may also have figured that out too, in which case genetic engineering may be possible.
What I liked about 2001 is the fact that they place this higher civilization on the moon.
And that, of course, is the ideal place to put up a listing post if there was a passing Type 3 civilization.
But you see, the movie 2001 talks about the transition between Type 0 and Type 1.
When you are a Type 1 civilization, you have an operating moon base, in which case you can make contact with a listening post set up by a passing Type 3 civilization.
Now, all this was to be explained in the beginning of the movie.
At the beginning of the movie, there were talking heads, scientists, who would explain the fact that, yes, the moon is the ideal listening post for a passing Type 3 civilization, and we are attaining Type 1 status, and we will have movie bases to make contact with these things.
However, in the last few minutes before the movie went to production, Kubrick cut.
Kubrick cut the first five minutes of his own film.
In fact, a few of my friends were the people actually interviewed in the first five minutes of the film.
And they were going through this whole process of explaining how the most accurate rendition of an encounter with an alien species would go this way.
And if you think about it, yeah, if you are passing Type 3 civilization, the moon is the ideal place to leave a listening post because there's no erosion, There's no weather, there's no flooding on the moon, there's no atmosphere on the moon, and you can scan the earth for millions of years with an outpost on the moon.
And a type 1 civilization is interesting.
They're not interested in type 0s.
Type 0s are dime a dozen out there, probably.
They're interested in type 1.
And so they essentially let the type 1 civilization come to them.
It's sort of like a rite of passage, like a bar mitzvah or a puberty rite.
You have to be type 1 to have an operating moon base.
Once you're type 1, you can have an operating moon base and make contact with a type 3.
After doing a lot of research on the internet, doing searches on the zero-point energy and gravity, I think I've come up with an understanding for myself of how gravity may work, and I would like to know what you think about it.
What is holding our feet to the Earth, and why you're sitting in your chair right now rather than being flung into outer space is because the Earth warps the space around you.
And as a consequence, just like a marble going toward a rock that depresses a bed sheet, you are going toward the Earth.
So it's an illusion.
It's an optical illusion that there is a force called gravity that is pulling you.
So the next time you see a rock depress a bedsheet, that is the primal picture that Einstein had to understand why gravity in some sense, the force of gravity is an illusion.
It's really the bending of space that gives the illusion that there's a force.
If you're an ant on a bed sheet, I mean sure ants on a crumpled sheet of paper, an ant on a crumpled sheet of paper would say that there's a force preventing the ant from walking in a straight line.
If appearance and reality were the same, then there would be no necessity for science.
Your common sense would explain the whole universe, right?
So I always like to think of us as ants trying to probe the mysteries of the forest.
We have a whole forest of goodies, a whole forest of phenomena around us, and we're ants just exploring things, realizing that our point of view may not be the point of view of the forest or other creatures in the forest.
West of the Rockies, you're on the air with Dr. Michio Kaku.
unidentified
Hi.
Hello, Mr. Okaku.
I have a question.
I'd like to use your education and your brain because I lack the ability to come up with this equation, and for the question.
My question is that theoretically speaking, if you were to postulate this into a mathematical equation, considering our technology and the number of planets out there that could support Class I civilizations, is it a statistical improbability that we have not found any other intelligent life nor any other intelligent life found us?
If you believe in what is called Drake's equation, and I understand that Frank Drake has been on this radio program, then you come to the conclusion that about 10,000, 10,000 planets in the galaxy harbor intelligent beings just like us, about 10,000.
And then you know the density of the galaxy.
You can calculate, therefore, that the nearest star system that should have intelligent life is not that far away, just a few hundred light years.
And that's the stars you see at night.
The stars you see at night are about 50 to 300 light years away.
Therefore, among the stars you see at night, perhaps one of them has intelligent beings on them.
My attitude is that they're probably so advanced that they don't use radio television the way we use it.
And they've gone far beyond that.
And therefore, we're looking at the wrong frequencies.
They may use all frequencies.
They may use a different frequency.
So it's no accident that even if there are 10,000 intelligent planets beings in the galaxy, even if they're only 100 to 300 light years away, for me it's no accident that we haven't picked up any radiation from them.
That's right, and the phone lines are open, as is the ability for you to ask a question on the Fast Blast, unscreened Fast Blast questions, by going to the website.
Explore the website, as a matter of fact.
Take a look at the new webcam and comment on that for me.
I've got a brand new capture card that I'm proud of, a larger image up.
In fact, there's a whole ton of new stuff on the website right now.
Take a look and tell me what you think.
Tell Keith what you think.
You know, it's a work in progress.
Anyway, Dr. Michio Kaku is here.
He's my guest.
We're talking physics.
He is one of our nation's greatest theoretical physicists.
She physicists really, I guess, kind of a guy that can explain things so that most of us can grasp them.
I'm still not altogether sure about gravity and the push, but we'll work on that one.
For the rest of it, I'm pretty clear.
All right, back to New York City and Dr. Michio Kaku.
Doctor, welcome back.
Let's talk about dimensions for a moment.
There are, how many dimensions do we imagine or know there are now?
Well, of course, we know there are four dimensions, three dimensions of space, one dimension of time.
But the rage of physics is that we live in a 10, perhaps 11 dimensional universe, that there are perhaps six unseen dimensions, dimensions that hover around us that we can't see because we're too primitive and we don't have enough energy to access these higher dimensions.
Well, if you try to construct the theory of everything, the theory that eluded Einstein for the last 30 years of his life, if you want to, quote, read the mind of God, as Stephen Hawking likes to put it, you realize that in three puny dimensions, there's not enough room to put all the forces together into one equation one inch long.
That's what we want, an equation one inch long that summarizes all the physical phenomena of the universe, from the Big Bang to black holes to quasars to the creation of the Earth, the DNA, the people, maybe even love.
Now, in three dimensions, there's not enough room.
You try to put the pieces of the nuclear force, with the electromagnetic force, with gravity together, and they don't fit.
But if you go into hyperspace, then these pieces of the puzzle just collapse.
They fit together.
Think of a beautiful diamond, for example, that exists in three dimensions and shatter it with a tremendous explosion.
If you try to put those pieces together in two dimensions, in flatland, the pieces don't fit.
No matter how you put these pieces of a diamond together, they don't fit in two dimensions.
If you go to hyperspace, the third dimension, then all these pieces fit together and you get this beautiful diamond.
That's why we're going to hyperspace.
In hyperspace, even though we can't measure it, because the energy would be the Planck energy, a fantastic energy that perhaps only type 3 civilizations can play with, at that energy, the fundamental forces of the universe, like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, just fall together.
All of a sudden, the quark model, all of a sudden, Einstein's theory, all of a sudden, radiation, the weak nuclear force, all these forces just sort of tumble together into one cosmic superforce that we think existed at the beginning of time.
Now, of course, to really test the theory, you would have to recreate creation.
You would have to recreate the Big Bang.
We're talking about energies only seen since the instant of creation, or energies that a type 3 civilization may play with, we have no idea where that energy came from, right?
Well, the leading theory is that the universe came from nothing.
Believe it or not, the total energy of the universe is probably zero.
Gravitational energy tends to be negative.
Matter energy tends to be positive.
And we now believe if you add the two together, you get zero.
Now we're talking about the sum total of everything.
You add up everything, including dark energy.
And you come up with the fact that the total energy of the universe could actually be zero.
So it may actually require no effort to create a universe.
Universes may pop out of nothing all the time.
This nothing, of course, is now hyperspace nothing.
We're talking about the nothing of 10 dimensions.
And so in 10-dimensional hyperspace, it could be boiling.
There could be bubbles popping in and out of existence all the time.
Now, at the present time, most physicists believe that these bubbles that pop out of nothing have a big crunch almost immediately.
They have a big bang, and then they have a big crunch almost immediately, and they don't live very long.
However, sometimes some of these universes have just the right characteristics, so they have a big bang and then just keep on going.
They just inflate and keep on going.
So our universe is special in that sense, that we probably coexist with other universes, but these other universes probably have a big crunch, and they don't last very long.
However, that then leads us to conclude that perhaps one of these days our universe may spin off a child, may spin off a daughter universe, may but.
And that, of course, creates speculation that perhaps our universe has budded off another universe in the past.
Well, we would probably notice a black hole forming and energy being sucked into this black hole and then being sucked right out into this twin universe that is budding off our universe.
Well, not much because these black holes are very far away, thank goodness.
Now remember that our universe itself is probably a black hole.
Our universe satisfies what is called the Schore-Schild equation, which simply means that our universe, you can't leave it.
It's a bubble.
But if it's a bubble, maybe it budded off another bubble.
Now we're not sure about this.
Of course, it's a speculation.
But to test the theory, we would have to really be probably a Type 3 civilization.
A Type 3 civilization could play with black holes, and they could probably create them in a laboratory and see whether or not a budding takes place to create a little teeny baby universe in a laboratory.
At Brookhaven National Laboratories, which is not that far from where I'm sitting right now, there was a letter to the editor of Scientific American saying that the Rick Adversmasher would create a black hole and suck in Long Island, not to mention the planet Earth itself.
And it created a firestorm of publicity.
The Sunday London Times carried that letter to the editor.
It was just a letter to the editor, right?
However, if you take a look at the mathematics, we are talking about the energy of a type 3, 3, before you can begin to access the Planck energy.
The Planck energy, that's when space-time becomes unstable.
Bubbles begin to form.
Holes begin to form in space-time.
Now, we're type zero.
Our most powerful atom smasher cannot even create energy that cosmic rays create all the time on the planet Earth.
We're being bathed by cosmic rays that are more energetic than anything created by our machines.
Our machines are puny compared to what's required to create a black hole.
So don't, don't, you don't have to worry tonight that you're going to be sucked into this.
Even as we speak, universes might be being created.
And every time we see a black hole, and we've documented now 38, that's the latest tally now, 38 black holes in outer space.
They may actually be gateways to a baby universe out there.
In fact, that was the title of Stephen Hawking's latest book, Black Holes and Baby Universes.
So this is being considered very carefully by physicists, that this could be a model for creation itself, that our universe may have budded, or our universe may have simply popped into existence out of nothing, because it doesn't take much energy to create a universe.
However, the speculation is that if there's another bubble just a millimeter away from our bubble, we would feel its gravity.
This other universe would be invisible just like the invisible man.
So it could be a paradigm for dark matter.
Of course, this is still wild speculation.
Sure.
But some of the people at MIT are seriously proposing this as a model for dark matter.
Dark matter is invisible, but it has gravity, just like another alternate universe that's about a millimeter away from ours would be invisible because light goes underneath it, but it would have gravity because gravity goes across hyperspace.
Well, we would be in a completely alternate place.
It's not clear what the laws of physics would be.
Currently, we think that the meta-laws of physics, the laws of all these bubbles, is something called superstring theory, the theory of 10-dimensional hyperspace.
So we think that the meta-theory that governs all these bubbles is string theory.
However, there are many solutions of string theory, millions of them, each one perhaps corresponding to one of these bubbles.
Now, in these other bubbles, they may look quite different from ours.
They may have protons that decay very rapidly, so there's no DNA.
However, maybe there's a universe that has just one quantum event different from our universe.
Maybe a cosmic ray went through Hitler's mother, and Hitler was never born because of one cosmic ray that caused a miscarriage in Hitler's mother.
That universe is only one quantum event different from our universe, except they never had World War II.
And in fact, if you watch the first installment of Sliders, where they entertain this possibility, a young boy reads a book to get the idea for sliding.
That's my book, Hyperspace.
So hyperspace essentially became the spawn of a TV series.
But listening to you now, I hear so much about investing all the knowledge of all these great minds into things like computers and the internet, et cetera, et cetera.
But, you know, I wish that they would use it to fix this planet.
You know, stop evolving if possible, mend the ozone, clean up our waters.
Something encouraging.
You know, every now and then you hear something like about solar cars.
However, we as citizens now, we as citizens have to take the responsibility of doing something about it, of translating these warnings into legislation.
And unfortunately, that's not happening.
The politicians just want to get elected every two years.
They see their paychecks.
They see who votes for them.
And unfortunately, people will consider voting for a politician that takes care of their sewer systems before a politician that takes care of the breakup of the North Pole and the South Pole.
So I think that the narrowness is going to take many, many years.
And, you know, the United States has the potential because it's the only remaining superpower on the earth.
But unfortunately, it is sort of like dragging its feet on the question of global warming, and there's a reason for that.
Global warming is created by carbon dioxide, and the United States produces 25% of the world's carbon dioxide, and that translates into jobs.
And so a lot of politicians are hesitant to rein in oil and fossil fuels and stuff like that, because it'll throw oil workers out of jobs, and plus Exxon and those oil companies will have decreased profits.
So, you know, politicians are very wary about doing anything about the 25% of the world's carbon dioxide that is produced right here in the United States, which is very unfortunate.
And that's why small nations, like, you know, nations in the Pacific are screaming mad at us because in a few more decades, they're not going to be around anymore.
Sea levels will rise to the point, in fact, they're rising already.
Sea levels will rise to the point where island nations are completely inundated.
Large parts of Bangladesh may be literally wiped off the face of the earth if sea levels rise.
New Orleans is below sea level for the most part.
We may not have a Mardi Gras in the future if we have storms that hurl water over the dike system and the irrigation system of New Orleans.
So, you know, it comes back to us.
You know, New York, San Francisco, we could be inundated by monster storms with rising sea level and with the increased power of hurricanes.
Slowly, I think the public has to then translate that into legislation to begin the process of converting to more efficient cars, weeding ourselves away from oil and coal and getting into hydrogen fuel cells and getting into solar power and wind power and renewable resources.
For us to reach type one, we have to be mature, mature as a planetary civilization, right?
But on the other hand, we have all these bickering interests and different groups that have different agendas.
It's a race against time to see whether we can outrage what's happening with global warming, what's happening with pollution, with the population explosion, what have you.
Well, personally, I think what's going to happen is for the next 10 years, nothing is going to happen.
Politicians will simply feed at the trough.
We'll have politics as usual.
And then we're going to have over the next 10 years more severe hurricanes, more severe degradation of the polarized regions, rising sea level, until it becomes unbearable.
At that point, people are going to be screaming mad.
Dr. Michio Kaku, the author of Visions, is my guest, and we'll try and get some contact information on the air when we get back in case you want to send him an email or however it is you communicate in this day and age.
I'm Art Bell, and this is Close to Coast AM.
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Here's a question from Patrick in New Orleans, Louisiana, who asks, what would be your solution to the world's overpopulation and how serious a problem is it?
Well, believe it or not, the problem in Europe and Japan is underpopulation.
In those areas, the birth rate is plunging from 2.0 children per family down to about 1.5 children per family.
And so the population of Europe and Japan, their population is aging, but there are very few children coming up the ranks.
And that's why they need immigration to keep the factories and the service sector going, and that of course is creating tension in Europe with regards to immigration.
But on a global scale, even in areas like India and Pakistan, the birth rate is no longer 12 or 8 children per family.
It's dropping down to 3 or 4 children per family.
And once it hits 2.1 children per family, then you have a steady-state situation.
So we are going to see a population explosion mainly in, for example, India, Pakistan.
China is beginning to rein in its population.
And a population implosion in Europe and Japan.
In fact, in Japan, it's a national pastime to calculate when the last Japanese will walk the face of the earth because the population is dropping so fast now in Japan.
Now, in America, our native-born population, its population rate is also below replenishment level.
However, because of immigration, we're at about 2.2 children per family.
So the United States won't have a healthy economy into the 21st century because young people want to work and they want to do things, and we're going to have lots of young people in the United States.
However, in other areas of the world, like India, we're going to have massive poverty.
We're going to have lots of people with very strained resources, and it doesn't look very good for areas like that.
But China, on the other hand, you know, because of forced restriction on the number of children you can have, has restrained its population explosion.
So I think we're going to see population unevenly explode in the future.
But just remember that not all of them could become middle class.
Not all of them are going to have two cars in the garage, access to Kentucky fried chicken, and as much beef as they want and air conditioning.
That would strain the Earth's resources, which means we have to be much more frugal in the way we use energy on this planet.
We have to be much more careful of waste.
We can't afford to have, you know, 6 billion middle class people throwing away diapers and throwing away all their used goods because where are we going to put all that garbage?
But I guess the question is, as you have described, is the population going to be reduced sufficiently eventually so that the overpopulation problem is not a factor in our demise?
Okay, the best projection, and in my book, Visions, I always interview the best people in each field.
The best projection is by 2100, the world's population will double to about 11 billion people.
And it'll probably stabilize because the world's greatest contraceptive, the greatest contraceptive known to science, is prosperity.
Once peasants become middle class, they no longer want to have 12 children.
Because they have 12 children, because most of them die in poverty, and the rest are your Social Security, your pension plan, right?
People in the third world literally give birth to their pension plan because there is no pension plan in many poor countries.
That's why they have kids.
But once you become middle class, then you want to have one and a half children.
And that's what happened to Japan.
That's what happened, of course, in Europe in the last century.
And that's what's happening to China now as they become more and more middle class.
And as the world becomes middle class, they're going to want to have one and a half children, not 12, 10 children.
And that means that by the year 2100, as we approach a type 1 civilization, assuming we make it to type 1 status unscratched, then the population of the world will gradually stabilize to around 11 billion.
And the big question is, can we tolerate that many people?
Well, I think in principle, we can tolerate 11 billion people.
The question is, what kind of lifestyle are they going to live?
We don't want to have 11 billion poor people and a tiny fraction of rich people.
We want to make sure that productive lives are not wasted as we head toward a type 1 civilization.
So I'm optimistic in one sense.
I'm optimistic that as the world becomes more middle class, that the world's population will stabilize.
However, if it stabilizes at too high a level, we may be consuming resources so rapidly that, again, it exacerbates the greenhouse effect and water pollution and all the other problems that we see with smog and pollution on the planet Earth right now.
So it's a race against time.
You know, on one hand, we have the movement to educate ourselves with the internet to become more connected, the movement to rein in warlike tendencies.
But on the other hand, we have this rapacious desire to burn fossil fuels, to build weapons.
And so it's a race against time to see which is going to dominate by the year 2100.
Well, that has provoked much speculation over the last 100 years.
100 years ago, when mathematicians talked about the fourth dimension, theologians jumped on it because by that time people had telescopes and we realized there was no heaven up there.
They didn't see a throne room.
They didn't see Charlton Heston up there in outer space.
You couldn't see them with a telescope.
And so many people began to disbelieve the concept of heaven.
And so many theologians said, well, if heaven doesn't exist in the third dimension, outer space, maybe heaven's in the fourth dimension, or maybe in hyperspace.
Now, if you are in hyperspace looking down on our world, you do have the power of a God.
You have the power to walk through walls.
You have the power to see through enclosed safes and enclosed containers.
You have the ability to reach to people's guts and perform surgery without cutting their skin.
You can open up packages without breaking open the wrapping.
You have the power of a God.
You can disappear, reappear at will, which of course is commonplace when we look down on ants.
When we look down on ants on a two-dimensional plane, we're like gods to them.
We can scan their entire universe.
We can appear, disappear like magic by putting our finger down in their world.
And so in principle, if you are a hyper-being looking down on our puny universe, you would have a God of the Bible.
Now, I'm not saying that there is a God of the Bible.
I'm just saying that in principle, the miracles that we sometimes attribute to supernatural beings and whatever are compatible with the powers of a superbeing.
However, my point is that the energy necessary to do that is the Planck energy, and that's the energy of a type 3 civilization.
You know, Einstein thought there were two kinds of gods.
One was the God of intervention, the God of prayer, the personal God that parted the water, the God that turned, you know, feeded the people with fish and with bread, the God of Isaac, Moses, and Jacob.
And then there was the God of harmony, the God of Leibniz, the God of Spinoza.
And Einstein leaned toward this second God, the God of harmony, that he believed the universe was so gorgeous, beautiful, so simple.
And who could believe that all the equations of the universe could be summarized, just a handful of equations you can put on a sheet of paper, that there must be a God.
But not the God of intervention, not a personal God that answers prayers and gives you a bicycle if you pray for a bicycle, but a God of harmony, the God of the Big Bang, the God of the cosmic expansion.
That's the God he believed in.
And I think most scientists feel more comfortable with the God of Leibniz, Spinoza, and Einstein than with a personal God that interjects him or herself into human affairs and smites the Philistines.
I have some experience, not so much with God because I'm kind of a I don't know what I am, but I have seen some studies, and I have some personal experience to indicate that prayer seems to work.
Yeah, well, let's say that, you know, God aside, people who believe in prayers can be studied, and every study of people who believe in prayers show that they are slightly healthier than the average person.
Either there is a God smiling down on them because their prayers are being answered, or they feel confident, comfortable, at peace with the universe, and therefore they're indoor fins.
Their endorfins are being released, which gives them a better immune system.
Their stress level is much lower because they think there's a father figure up there.
And with less stress, there's less wear and tear on the heart, less wear and tear on the immune system, less adrenaline coursing through their bloodstream, causing havoc with regards to free radicals.
Well, all well said, but what about studies that show that people in the hospital, for example, with a serious disease, there will be a group of people on the outside who will pray for them without their knowledge.
And then as a control group, they'll have others where there was essentially nobody praying for them.
And they show that there is an effect.
There does appear to be an effect.
Now, that's external without the knowledge of the person in the hospital with the serious disease.
Well, that movie was based on a germ of truth, and that is that some scientists believe that we are the Martians, that the Martians are us, that Mars was tropical when the Earth was still molten.
Mars being farther off from the sun, cooled first.
And so Mars had a longer period of time before the Earth when it had oceans, it had a tropical environment, it had, you know, maybe half a billion years, let's say, to form DNA.
And maybe DNA formed on Mars first.
And then there was a seeding effect, maybe by meteorites, who knows.
But Mars seeded the Earth with DNA.
So there is a scientific thinking that perhaps life on Earth came from out of space, and Mars could be a likely candidate because there is an interplanetary ping-pong going on between Earth and Mars.
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That would kind of correlate with Zachariah Sitchin's belief with the Anunnaki?
Well, no, that's kind of a bit of a different road, but there are a lot of people who indeed believe that we are Martians or that Earth was seeded from Mars.
Right, and there is some scientific reason for believing that.
The Earth was created 4.5 billion years ago, and then for a billion years, that was the age of meteors.
Tremendous meteors hit the Earth, and the oceans probably boiled off many times during that age of meteors.
When the age of meteors ended three and a half billion years ago, the Earth finally formed its modern form with oceans and then DNA got off the ground almost immediately.
And some people have a hard time believing that life could start almost immediately after the age of meteors ended because it takes, you know, maybe a billion years to get DNA off the ground.
And it happened almost instantly on a geologic timeframe.
So some people, like Fred Hoyle, would like to believe that it came from outside rather than on the Earth.
My own particular point of view is different.
My own particular point of view is that the most ancient DNA is on the bottom of volcano vents on the bottom of the ocean.
The most ancient DNA is found near boiling water conditions.
Now during the age of meteors, the oceans probably boiled off many times.
So DNA might have gotten started during the age of meteors because DNA can survive boiling water or near boiling water conditions.
That's what the most ancient DNA is on the planet Earth, near volcano events on the bottom of the ocean.
Well, if there were Martian life, that is intelligent life that sprung up on Mars, and they realized their water was going to the ice caps, their water was going into outer space, drifting into space, bleeding into space, and the water was going underground into the permafrost, then I would suggest they would have three choices.
Either dig underground and have an underground civilization where we couldn't see them, go to the polar ice caps where they would melt ice to get water, or flee into outer space.
That's where the water went on Mars, three places.
And if they stayed on Mars, then the most likely place to find Martians is underground in the permafrost, where they may have machines or hot water springs that keep them going.
And we now know from the latest data that just was announced about three months ago that there probably is a very large permafrost under the Martian surface.
As Mars was bleeding its atmosphere, as Mars was aging, you know, premature aging very rapidly because it has a small gravity, then the Earth would be a very juicy place to go.
So as Mars aged and got colder and as its atmosphere evaporated, the Martians would have a choice, either flee into outer space or go underground.
And if they flee into outer space, Earth would be a very good choice for it, much closer to the sun and with plenty of liquid water, which is the universal solvent, which is the, of course, the amniotic fluid of life, is water.
All right, Doctor, we are approaching the last hour of the program, and I always do give all my guests the opportunity, you know, if they have a big day coming up the next day, to bail out now or to carry forth for another hour.