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March 14, 2002 - Art Bell
01:43:24
Coast to Coast AM with Art Bell - Dr Michio Kaku - Theoretical Physics
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Time Text
This is Dr. Michio Kaku.
Dr. Kaku, welcome.
Glad to be on, Art.
Great to hear your voice again.
All right.
Gee, where to begin?
I read a story the other day that I want to ask you about straight out of the chute here.
It was, and I don't have it in front of me, but basically it said there was a tabletop experiment recently, virtually could be done on a coffee table, in which nail polish remover or acetone or something like that was bombarded With some sort of a sound, a cavitation, something or another, anyway, little bubbles formed of energy which indicated to the experimenters that there was some sort of reaction going on, some sort of a chain reaction or reaction or production of energy.
Have you heard about this and what is it?
Yes, this is creating quite a bit of a stir in the physics world.
The result was done at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, where the uranium for the atomic bomb was processed.
This effect is called sonoluminescence, that is the creation of light from bubbles.
This effect was first noticed by the Nazis during World War II.
They were trying to perfect submarine blades that could go into the oceans to knock out Allied ships.
And they noticed that as the blades were spinning, bubbles began to form.
And when these bubbles collapsed, these bubbles collapsed very uniformly and evenly.
And when they collapsed, they created temperatures comparable to the surface of the sun.
Now, this is rather incredible.
Bubbles collapsed, creating temperatures of about 10,000 degrees Fahrenheit, comparable to the surface of the sun.
You can still see it.
sufficient to make these bubbles glow. Now the Nazi scientists thought this was an odd
effect. That is, submarine blades create bubbles that could sparkle when you looked at them.
But it was considered an anomaly. And of course then World War II took place and people forgot
about this. You can still see it. I mean, I've been on a number of cruises and you go
to the back of the cruise ship at night and you can look down and see the glow from the
cavitation. Aha. Well, this is an effect that is rather easy to produce. Okay.
Now, the key is, if these bubbles were to collapse extremely uniformly, and that's the key, if they collapse very uniformly, then temperatures skyrocket as a consequence, and temperatures of perhaps hundreds of thousands of degrees can actually be attained in the laboratory.
Now, here's the catch, and this is what's creating a lot of controversy.
If you can hit temperatures of about 10 million degrees, then at that temperature you can get hydrogen diffused.
That is, the hydrogen nuclei combine to create helium with extra neutrons.
Right.
That's what takes place in the center of the sun, not just on the surface of the sun, but in the center of the sun.
And that's fusion.
So in other words, anyone who can create fusion on a tabletop could in fact create a second industrial revolution.
Now, this of course has to be verified in other laboratories, and it has to be watched very carefully.
There are already some naysayers who say that perhaps there was contamination involved.
But this group at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory claims that neutrons, which are of course nuclear radiation, neutrons were coming out of acetone.
Yeah, they measured it, right?
They measured the radiation.
Yeah, they measured the neutron radiation coming out, and neutrons are the telltale signal signals that a nuclear reaction, not a chemical reaction,
but a nuclear reaction is taking place.
Now of course, chemists and physicists were burned once, back in the 1990s,
when Pons and Fleischmann announced that they had fusion in a glass of water.
Well, they're over in Europe still working on that.
Yeah, and maybe they did, maybe they didn't, but the question is, it has to be reproducible on demand.
If you have a Toyota or a Chevy and you turn on the ignition switch, you want to make damn sure that that engine turns on with your cold fusion device inside your engine.
That's right.
So far, it's iffy.
Sometimes it seems to work, sometimes it doesn't work, and it's not reliable, and there's a lot of controversy about it.
However, here, There's no doubt that sun illuminations can attain a few hundred thousand degrees.
There's no doubt about that.
That's been done in the laboratory, far beyond what the Nazis envisioned during World War II.
The question is, can you attain perhaps 10 to 100 times that, or perhaps 10 million degrees, at which point hydrogen will then turn to fusion, and that's what makes the sun shine by E equals mc squared.
Well, how likely, or how promising, I guess I should ask, do you consider this experiment to be?
How promising?
Well, very promising.
However, it has to be verified.
There are some naysayers who say that contamination from outside neutron sources may have created the burst of neutrons from this glass of water, basically, this glass of acetone.
However, if, and this is a big if, if it turns out that this glass of acetone actually did compress bubbles up to 10 million degrees Fahrenheit, then this would be the world's first.
That is, cold fusion would then take place in a small glass of acetone, or nail polish remover, as you said.
Well, as a matter of curiosity, any idea why acetone versus anything else?
It could be almost anything.
You want a pure liquid, a liquid that's extremely pure in composition, that has lots of hydrogen molecules.
Okay.
And acetone has lots of organic chemicals, so it has lots of hydrogen molecules in it, and that's what you want.
It didn't have to be that.
It could have been, you know, dry cleaning fluid that's also rich in hydrogen molecules.
What does it mean if it works?
If it works, and you can make this on a large scale, and there are a lot of ifs involved, okay, then it means a second industrial revolution Where energy comes from small little glasses of water or acetone or hydrogen-rich materials.
Now, the oceans of the Earth are full of hydrogen.
Therefore, in some sense, seawater could be used to drive a lot of these things to create fusion reactors, which would be safer.
They would be still radioactive, but they would be relatively safer than fission reactors that we have at the present time.
And, of course, we are slowly running out of oil.
And the other option is nuclear, but you know, nuclear has a lot of safety problems, and so some people think that perhaps coal fusion is the way to go, if this result can be verified in laboratories.
It would be an inexhaustible source of energy.
Fusion depends on seawater, and we have plenty of seawater in the oceans, and its waste product would only be helium gas.
I mean, think about that.
A waste product would be an inert gas that's non-polluting, Okay.
And it's almost too good to be true.
Just remember that this is the energy source of the universe.
This is what the universe uses for its energy.
Stars burn very cleanly.
Hydrogen is converted to helium.
Helium is a waste product, but it's a very benign waste product.
And helium will also fuse in a red giant.
Alright, just for the sake of this discussion, let us assume that all of this turns out to be true.
How big a step for humanity would that be toward becoming a Type 1 civilization?
Well, this would be an enormous big step, with a lot of ifs that have to be satisfied, of course.
We're talking about inexhaustible sources of energy, almost for free.
This would be comparable to the unleashing of steam power.
About 150 years ago.
Steam power, of course, was the energy source that energized the Industrial Revolution and took the feudal societies of ancient Europe into the locomotive age.
And it was the locomotive, of course, that helped to colonize the United States within just 100 years.
A twinkling of an eye!
And so it was steam power that revolutionized the last century.
So we're talking about a new leap on that scale if these results pan out.
Well, you know, that's interesting because it has always seemed like a race to me between self-destruction, on the one hand, and attaining Type I status.
On the other hand, as you have so always clearly pointed out, maybe we ought to go over it for the audience again, what the different types of civilizations are, and we will, but it's been a race.
Do we self-destruct, or do we make it to Type I?
I think it's still too close to call, don't you?
That's right.
You see, any society in outer space coming out of the swamp, rising to attain modern status, would inevitably discover element 92, uranium.
It's inevitable.
They would discover hydrogen, helium, lithium, and eventually they hit the number 92, uranium.
And also, of course, they discover plastics and hydrocarbon chemistry and pollution.
So it's inevitable that they will face two very important milestones.
One is the ability to blow themselves apart, and the other is the ability to poison themselves to death.
Okay?
This is inevitable in outer space.
So the transition from a Type 0 economy, which is based on basically oil and coal, that is, dead plants, a Type 0 civilization may never make it to a Type 1 civilization, which is truly planetary.
A planetary society.
A society based totally on planetary energy, capable, for example, of controlling earthquakes, of controlling the weather, of having cities on the ocean, totally in command of anything planetary.
We may not make it, because we have those two very destructive aspects of the industrial age, that is, nuclear weapons and pollution.
And in outer space, perhaps that's one of the reasons why Type 0 civilizations never make it to Type 1.
Perhaps that's why our radio telescopes don't pick up signals.
Dead planets.
They're probably dead planets.
When we go into outer space in the future and visit some of these planets, we may find radioactive atmospheres.
When the Berlin Wall came down and the Soviet Union collapsed, we all went hooray, you know, and they moved the doomsday clock back many minutes and we thought it was all over.
Well, gee, just the other day the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists moved the clock forward an unprecedented Two minutes in reaction to the 9-1-1 affair, what's going on in the Middle East, the war in Afghanistan, and the whole mess.
So, in this race right now, it seems like we've just taken about two steps to the rear.
That's right.
We're talking about the proliferation of nuclear weapons and nuclear materials.
Nuclear materials are proliferating every which way.
A lot of it from the former Soviet Union.
There are, for example, 4.4 pounds of Highly enriched uranium that are missing from the Russian stockpile.
And no matter how many times we ask the Russians to account for all their enriched uranium, there's four pounds of unaccounted for enriched uranium.
Four pounds.
Four pounds.
And that's not enough for an atomic bomb yet.
To get an atomic bomb, you have to get 10 to 20 pounds of highly enriched uranium.
But it's not comforting knowing that weapons grade materials now, not just ordinary reactor grade or hospital grade.
But highly enriched uranium, some of it is unaccounted for in Russia.
There are even those who say there are actual bombs unaccounted for.
Well, I live in New York City, not that far from the World Trade Center.
Right.
And there was that blip in the news last month.
Time Magazine reported the fact that perhaps a 10 kiloton nuclear weapon could be smuggled into New York City the same way that heroin comes into New York City.
And that would really ruin my day if a 10 kiloton nuclear bomb were to blow up in New York Harbor.
Hundreds of thousands, ultimately, of deaths, correct?
Approximately millions of deaths.
There are about 8 million people just in the New York City metropolitan area.
Some would die very slowly of poisoning, right?
That's right.
Instantly, perhaps hundreds of thousands would perish if a bomb were that size.
But ultimately millions with the poisoning.
That's right.
Doctor, hold on, we're at the bottom of the hour.
Dr. Michio Kaku is my guest.
I made a sort of a slip there, and I said nuclear physicist.
The answer certainly is not that, but you were given the opportunity to be that, weren't you?
That's right.
When I was about to initiate my doctoral work, Edward Teller, the father of the hydrogen bomb, who was sort of a mentor of mine in high school, and when I was at Harvard, made a very strong push for me to go to the Livermore
National Laboratories or the Los Alamos Laboratories.
And he pretty much offered me a fellowship to study at Livermore.
How did you come to turn that down?
Well, I began to realize that, you know, science is a double-edged sword.
You know, it's very powerful. One edge of the sword can create weapons of mass destruction.
side of the sword can reduce poverty and cure disease and create a material abundance.
Surely, though, Dr. Teller must have made some kind of moral argument to you to try
and convince you.
Well, you see, I'm a physicist, and we physicists are challenged by puzzles.
And a hydrogen bomb, believe it or not, is built like a watch.
And the explosion takes place in stages, microsecond by microsecond.
Right.
And he was sort of appealing to me as an intellectual challenge to the whole process of creating nuclear weapons and an intellectual puzzle, a challenge to create the largest bang per buck, basically.
And I personally was more interested in the biggest bang of all, that is the Big Bang, the creation of the universe.
Yes.
But he made a very strong push for me to go to perhaps MIT or Or mainly the Livermore National Laboratory or Los Alamos.
But I decided eventually that this was not my cup of tea.
That I would rather, you know, carry on the tradition set forth by Einstein many decades ago.
That must have been some hard decision for you.
A lot of hard decisions, because the scholarship that I was on at Harvard was the Hertz Engineering Scholarship, which is the Star Wars scholarship, as the New York Times has now dubbed it.
And it was the scholarship that propelled the whole generation of physicists like myself
into Livermore and into Los Alamos to design the Star Wars program.
So my whole career basically up to that point was basically funded by other physicists who
wanted me and people like me to join the weapons laboratories.
Alright, tonight I had asked you, I've been hearing all these stories about quantum entanglement
and you wrote back that quantum entanglement is not at all an easy concept to explain to
the public.
Some aspects you say are quite difficult and mind-blowing, but I'd love to make a try.
Maybe we ought to start down and just discuss, when you say quantum, what does that mean?
Well, quantum is an overused word.
You have quantum securities, quantum healing, everything is quantum these days.
It's a very sexy word.
Quantum Leap is a TV program.
But quantum physics is basically atomic physics.
And in the atomic world, the world of photons or particles of light, electrons, we have rather bizarre properties that defy common sense.
Electrons that can be apparently more than one place at the same time.
Objects that spring into existence when you observe them.
It's a very bizarre world at the atomic level.
However, the quantum theory is perhaps the most successful theory ever proposed by the human mind.
It's been shown to be accurate to one part in about 10 billion, which makes it the most accurate theory ever proposed.
And electronics, laser beams, computers, all the electronic marvels that we have in our living room, all of them are made possible by the quantum theory.
By electrons that dance between orbitals and are in two places at the same time.
All right.
Objects that don't exist until you look at them.
Okay.
Bizarre properties.
Properties that defy common sense are commonplace at the atomic level.
All right.
Then, if that is the case, what does the term quantum entanglement imply?
Okay, quantum entanglement could be the key to what is called quantum teleportation.
Now, in 1993, at IBM Laboratories, scientists there made a thought experiment about what it would take to transport, like in Star Trek, by the way, an object from point A to point B using quantum physics.
And they came up with the world's first realistic scenario for what a transporter may look like, even though, of course, it may take centuries to actually build one of these damn things.
But in principle, it seems to work.
And a few years ago, it was actually proven to work.
We can now transport individual photons, or particles of light, using this method.
That's what I've heard, yes.
And in the next decade, we hope to transport the first molecule, perhaps a buckyball, you know, one of these carbon atoms that look like a soccer ball.
Yes.
And perhaps beyond that, the first virus.
Okay, so this is sort of the game plan.
A virus, huh?
Yeah.
In maybe 10 years, a rather complicated molecule, like a bucketball, and perhaps maybe in 20 years, a virus.
Now, quantum entanglement means that the universe is not local.
When we think that if we touch something here in our room, this means that the effect is only apparent in our room.
Right.
We don't think that when we touch something here, that in a neighboring star, Something else occurs in a neighboring star.
That would make the world non-local.
You mean action-reaction?
Yes.
Or action-action, which... Right, so if something here on Earth could immediately affect something on Alpha Centauri, which is four light-years away, that's considered impossible.
That means that things could travel faster than the speed of light, for example.
Now, unfortunately, the world is non-local, and this is called entanglement.
that something here on Earth could be entangled with something in Alpha Centauri
so that if you make a measurement here on the planet Earth, it immediately affects something in Alpha Centauri
faster than the speed of light.
Or here on Earth as well, somewhere else here on Earth.
Or even here, under two places on Earth.
This is a whole non-local argument.
Now, let me ask you this.
I have interviewed... Our own government had this remote viewing program going on for 20 years.
You know, at taxpayer expense, they had remote viewers trying to visualize gas canisters in Iraq and all those sorts of things.
And there was some success with it.
Some level of success, despite what has been said about it.
There was success, and the remote viewers claim that their information comes from this non-local everything.
You know, that everything is connected, and that their information flows from this, what would you call it, this non-locality.
Right, okay, well let me try to explain non-locality.
First of all, Einstein himself didn't like it.
And Einstein proposed an experiment to try to prove that the universe was not non-local, but apparently it is.
The universe really is non-local, and Einstein was wrong on this one.
And this experiment has been done quite a few times in the last decade.
It was first done in 1963, I think.
Here's what you do.
You get a beam of light, like a laser beam, and you split it using a piece of glass.
You know, a piece of glass will bend a beam to the left and to the right simultaneously.
Part of it will reflect And part of it will go right through.
So if I have a laser beam and it goes through a piece of glass, part of it goes through, and part of it is reflected.
We've all seen this, when light bounces off a clear piece of glass.
So the two beams, one beam that went to the left and one beam that went to the right, have information on them.
For example, everyone knows that when you go to the drug store, you buy a polarizer.
A polarizer knocks out a lot of the harmful light, Because light can be in two states.
It can be polarized up and down, or horizontally, left-right.
So light beams can vibrate up and down, or left and right.
Okay.
So if we split the laser beam on the left-hand side, let's say it vibrates up and down, this means on the right-hand side it has to vibrate in the opposite direction.
So if it's up on the left, it is down on the right.
Okay.
If it is down on the left, it is up on the right.
Okay, the opposite.
Sure.
Now let's wait ten years.
After 10 years, these beams are separated by 20 light years.
We're talking about the distance between stars now.
Right.
And if you make a measurement on the left-hand beam, and the measurement says it is now pointing up, that means that 20 light years away, on a distant star, instantly, you now know that the other beam is pointing down.
Okay, polarized down.
Right.
You can do that with an ordinary polarizer you buy at a drugstore.
Okay.
Now, Einstein said, now, wait a minute.
This violates my theory.
Relativity, said Einstein.
Nothing can go faster than the speed of light.
This would be a disaster.
The universe would collapse, said Einstein.
Well, this experiment was done in Paris in the early 1960s, and sure enough, the world is non-local.
Okay?
Now, the question is, can you send the Wall Street Journal this way?
Can you send Morse Code this way?
Because, of course, Morse Code is did-it-it, da-da-da, did-it-it, right?
That's right, yes.
Can you send up-down, up-down information faster than the speed of light to the other side of the universe?
Okay?
That probably is not possible.
Or 1s and 0s.
Or 1s and 0s, right?
And, of course, you could put the Encyclopedia Britannica on 1s and 0s, right?
That's right.
So, when you make a measurement on the left, you immediately know something on the right.
But there's a problem there.
There's a catch.
Einstein had the last laugh on this one.
And the catch is, just because you know something about the other side of the universe, that is, that the other photon is spinned down, it doesn't necessarily mean that you can alter it or send a message this way.
It just means you know something about the other side of the universe.
And so this is rather bizarre.
Here I am sitting in my living room in New York City.
I'm making a measurement here, just looking around the room.
I've now influenced something on a distant star faster than the speed of light.
My eyeball has made a measurement.
It's made a measurement on light coming in from the stars.
I now know information about something happening on that star faster than the speed of light.
But it doesn't mean I can send a message that way.
It just means I know something.
It doesn't mean I can send a message that way.
Now we scientists like to put it this way.
Let's say you have a friend of yours who wears a pink sock on one foot and a green sock on the other foot.
Okay?
Pink sock on one foot and a green sock on the other foot.
And he mixes them up every day so you don't know which sock is which.
I do not socialize with people like this.
Let's say one day you look at one of his socks and it's green.
Okay.
This means that immediately you know the other one is pink.
Uh-huh.
But does that mean that you can influence the other sock?
Not really.
It just means you know something about his other foot.
You've never seen his other foot, you've never peeked at his other foot, but you know immediately it's pink.
Right.
Because the first sock is green.
Right.
This means that even though you know something on the planet Earth, that is, the laser beam is pointing up, this means that 20 light years away, you now know that beam is pointing down.
Okay?
But it doesn't mean that you can send information, usable information, like Morse code, or the Wall Street Journal, or, you know, if you could do it this way, you could actually have a time machine this way.
Alright.
It doesn't mean you can send tomorrow's, you can get tomorrow's Wall Street Journal and invest in the stock market faster than the speed of light.
So there's a catch there.
Well, there's a catch, but suppose, right now, we can't do anything with it, though we know it, we can't do anything with it, but as we make advances in quantum Computers?
What promise might be ahead there?
Yeah, that's going to be the immediate application.
Some people say, well, what's in it for me?
I mean, am I going to get better color television?
Am I going to get better cable television out of this?
And in some sense, the answer is yes.
In the next several years, we're going to be building more and more complicated quantum computers.
Now, the reason why we're doing this is because Silicon Valley will eventually become a Rust Belt.
In about 15 to 20 years, you may want to pull your Spock out of Silicon Valley, because the power of silicon will be exhausted in about 15 to 20 years.
Moore's Law will collapse.
This means that every Christmas, your toys are not going to be twice as powerful as they were the previous Christmas.
Oh no!
Now that's Moore's Law.
You realize that the world's economy, the world's economy is dependent on Moore's Law.
That is, that computers double in power every 18 months.
We're talking about hundreds of trillions of dollars of nation's wealth comes out of Silicon Valley and Moore's Law.
That computer power doubles every 18 months.
That's right.
That's going to collapse.
You might as well pull out your stocks, because Silicon Valley could become a rust belt in 15-20 years.
And if you visit Silicon Valley then, you may see a gentleman selling pencils on the street.
And you'll say to yourself, my God, that looks like Bill Gates!
So it could be like the Pendium 8000, and that would be it?
That would be it.
Now, the reason is, by that point, we will be etching on molecules of silicon.
And silicon cannot be used as transistors at the molecular level.
Silicon is leaky at the molecular level.
Electrons do not stay in wires.
They leak.
They short-circuit.
So everything short-circuits.
Once components become so small, That you're now having transistors the size of molecules.
A Pentium chip, for example, that you have on your desk... Yes.
...has a layer of silicon about 20 atoms across.
That's the smallest layer in your Pentium chip on your desktop.
Okay.
About 20 atoms across.
Okay.
When that hits 5 atoms... 5 atoms.
That's about it, huh?
That's about it.
At that point, the electron obeys the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle.
You don't know where the electron is anymore.
It jumps out of the wire, and the whole thing short-circuits, and your computers don't work.
Your toys at Christmas are a big buzz.
We know this for sure.
We're going to run into this wall.
That's right.
That's really interesting.
There's got to be something beyond the wall.
That's right.
And that's why we physicists are desperately, and I mention this in my book, Visions, I have a whole chapter about the rust belt called Silicon Valley.
We are desperately looking at laser computers, that is computers that compute on light beams, As well as DNA computers, computers that actually compute on DNA molecules.
Why is DNA attractive?
Well, think of computer tape.
Computer tape is a long series of 0's and 1's, right?
Correct, yes.
Now think of a DNA molecule.
A DNA molecule is not 0's and 1's.
It's A-T-C-G.
Right.
It's a combination of A's and T's and C's and G's.
Right.
It's called a nucleic acid.
So a DNA molecule is actually more complicated than computer tape.
And by cutting the computer tape, by cutting it up and remixing it, you can do calculations on computer tape or calculations on DNA.
And this was first proven around 1996 by Professor Adler at Princeton University.
He got bottles of liquid containing DNA, mixed them like you do in a laboratory with bottles of water, and he did a calculation that a computer, that rivaled the power of a computer, And so we know that you can in fact compute on DNA molecules.
It's been established for the last 5-6 years.
The other possibility is the ultimate computer.
The computer beyond all computers.
The ultimate computer is the quantum computer.
And this is where entanglement comes in.
Quantum computers compute on atoms.
Individual atoms.
Let's say I have a string of atoms like pearls on a string.
And I hit a light beam on it.
I should light it, like a laser beam on it.
Right.
Okay?
The laser beam will then strike each atom and flip the spin.
So, an atom is like a spinning top.
It either spins up or spins down.
Right.
A spinning top.
So it reverses the spin.
Spin up, spin down, spin up, spin down.
It reverses the spin.
It changes the spins.
Right.
And then it reflects.
That's a calculation.
That string of pearls is computer tape.
So by hitting computer tape with a light beam, that is a string of pearls, a string of atoms, you've made a calculation on atoms.
Now, before you buy any stock on this, let me give you the downside.
The world's record, which was set about two months ago, the world's record for quantum computing is seven atoms.
Seven atoms.
And this computer made headlines two months ago when it calculated that three times five equals fifteen.
So that's where they are.
That's where they are.
I'm going to leave my stock in IBM alone for a while.
The CIA is very interested in this.
The CIA is literally shaking in their boots.
We'll pick up on that point when we get back.
Top of the hour right now.
Back now to Dr. Michio Kaku.
Doctor, you were saying that all this A quantum entanglement would have the CIA, or does have the CIA, shaking in its boots.
Why?
That's right.
You see, when the CIA sends super-secret transmissions of code across telephone wires, they have a certain code in mind, and a computer, of course, can break codes.
Right.
But the most advanced computers of today have a very difficult time breaking CIA codes.
Now, a quantum computer is the ultimate computer.
It's much faster than an ordinary computer, and it can break any known code.
Doctor, by what magnitude?
You say it's faster, as compared to what we have today, over two gigahertz speed.
How much faster?
Well, it depends on how big the quantum computer is.
Right now, we're only at the seven atoms.
That's the world's record, just set about two months ago.
In the future, we hope to get to a few hundred atoms, maybe even a few thousand atoms.
At that point, we can outstrip a supercomputer.
And if, and this is a big if, we can go to a few hundred thousand atoms, at that point, we can crack any code known to science.
We can do calculations that boggle the human mind.
We're talking about the ultimate computing power on computing on atoms in a computer that may be as small as a bread box, because we are computing on individual atoms.
What would be, if we achieved that, what would be mankind's benefit?
Well, immediately, we're talking about cracking codes.
That's why the CIA has invested quite a bit of money studying this thing to see exactly how much of a threat it poses.
And right now it doesn't pose that much of a threat because we don't have quantum computers except as toys right now.
And like I said, three times five is fifteen.
That's two world's record calculation for a quantum computer.
However, eventually, We're talking about maybe approaching artificial intelligence.
Now, you're listening to my voice at about 500 trillion bytes per second.
That's the rate at which the human brain, an idling brain, processes information.
Okay.
Much faster than anything you have on a tabletop.
About 500 trillion bytes per second is the rate of processing of an idling brain.
Wow.
Now, a quantum computer can begin to approach those speeds, okay?
And that's why some people say that in 20 years, when Moore's Law finally collapses for good, perhaps it's a good thing, because then we won't have robots that put humans in zoos, and we're now behind bars, and we have to dance every time a robot throws peanuts at us, right?
Yes.
So maybe it's a good thing.
However, if we have quantum computers, and God knows when we'll have them, if we have quantum computers more than just seven atoms across, Then we may be able to do computations that only the brain can compute at the present time.
Our brain has as many neurons as there are stars in the Milky Way Galaxy.
We're talking about a hundred billion neurons, or about a hundred billion stars in the Milky Way Galaxy.
No computer can come close to that kind of intricate cellular network, and the only rival would be a quantum computer.
So, quantum computers may gradually begin to approach the power of human thought, okay?
And this is another reason why people are very much interested in this, because then we could solve lots of problems.
We could send robots to the planets, for example, that would be more intelligent than they are now.
Our present-day robots have the intelligence of a retarded cockroach.
Think of a retarded cockroach, okay?
With half a brain, lobotomized, retarded, That's the intelligence of our present-day robot being built at Stanford and MIT.
They take about six hours to walk across the room.
Six hours to walk across the room!
Now, does that remind you of any of your relatives, any of your friends, that long to walk across the room?
Well, that's the intelligence of our robots built in our laboratories, and we put them on Mars.
We're going to have a fleet of these robots on Mars in the next five years.
And eventually we'll put them on Europa, a moon of Jupiter, where we think there's an ocean, a real live ocean underneath the ice cover of Europa, a moon of Jupiter, and we're going to put robots there too.
So on a scale now of decades, we hope to put ordinary silicon-powered robots on the various planets, but eventually when we start to have quantum computing, will be able to solve problems that at the present time are
beyond the capability of a computer. By the way I thought we were not supposed to
go to Europe.
Oh no, that was a movie. Yeah. That was a movie.
So, so, but what about consciousness,
doctor? As we approach such a level with with a computer and it begins to approach the
thinking capacity of a human brain, I don't know that we have, we know sufficient
amounts about consciousness to be sure that we are not suddenly getting into the, you know,
into the God business, the creation business, that we create something with
a consciousness, yes? Well we're talking at minimum about 50 years in the future, okay.
So we're not thinking about putting anyone out of business anytime soon.
However, on a 50-year time span, when DNA, laser and optical and quantum computers start to kick in, then we're going to have to ask those very hard questions about what does it mean to be aware of yourself, to be aware of your surroundings.
Not every animal, for example, is aware of its surroundings.
Monkeys are.
Porpoises are.
You put a mirror in front of a porpoise, And the porpoise will preen itself in front of a mirror.
You put a mirror in front of a bug or an octopus, and they want to eat it, rather than preen themselves in front of a mirror.
So not every animal has self-awareness, okay?
Right.
And the question is, do computers have self-awareness?
And the answer at the present time is no.
Not yet.
They're not aware of who I am, where am I, what am I doing here.
Not yet.
Computers don't ask that question yet, right?
Not yet.
Right.
But, you know, on a time frame of about 50 years or so, long after Morse Law has exhausted itself and we have this new generation of computers, we may have computers that have that kind of capability to begin to ask themselves that question.
Now, my personal point of view is that we'll have silicon consciousness or atomic consciousness.
They won't think like us.
Our thinking is the byproduct of revolution on the Earth.
We want to know where our next meal comes from, where our next date comes from.
We want to know how to relax and have fun and be entertained and have a good laugh.
That's our consciousness.
Robots may not have that consciousness.
They may have a totally different way of looking at the universe than us.
Can we imagine how that might be?
We can imagine it.
First of all, they could be dangerous.
They may begin to realize that our consciousness is the consciousness that came out of the forest.
So we want to learn how to dance and laugh and be amused by television and watch pretty girls on TV and stuff like that.
And these robots may say, well, that's a relic of the forest.
We don't need these people.
So I personally believe that we should put an Asimov chip in their brain.
An Asimov chip.
In other words, a chip.
Never harm human, right?
That turns them off.
That shuts their brains off.
Once they start to say to themselves, well, who needs these carbon units?
Who needs these flesh and blood units?
We silicon quantum-based units are superior.
So I think we should put a chip in their brain to turn them off any time they start to entertain thoughts that perhaps they are the next stage of evolution.
That we are like the Neanderthals to them, and that evolution means that we should give way to the next generation, which is them.
That assumes that we are aware that they're beginning to entertain those thoughts.
That's right.
That means that we have to be sophisticated to read their minds to know that this is a definite possibility.
Well, so then isn't building a computer that is inherently more intelligent thinking in a totally different way than ourselves just absolutely inherently dangerous?
Potentially so.
Right now, of course, they have the intelligence of bugs, so we don't have too much to worry about.
However, again, over the decades, over the decades, it will start to become more and more intelligent.
In fact, the Internet, the Internet will gradually become more intelligent as time goes by.
Right now, of course, the Internet has no intelligence whatsoever, right?
You ask it a question, it gives you, like, 100,000 answers.
But as time goes by, the Internet itself will gradually become more intelligent, and you'll be able to talk to it.
This is the magic mirror of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.
That's where the Internet is going, by the way.
The future of the Internet is a fairy tale.
The future of the Internet is a mirror.
And you go to the mirror and you say, mirror, mirror on the wall.
And you ask it a question, right?
So then actually it's possible that the Internet, as it develops with the new faster and faster and faster and faster and finally quantum computers, could attain a collective intelligence of its own, yes?
Well, this is controversial.
There's something called chaos theory.
And in chaos theory, order emerges out of chaos.
Clouds, for example, all of a sudden condense out of nothingness.
Storms and hurricanes, which are very regular and quite pretty, materialize out of random motions of molecules.
These are called emergent phenomena, phenomena that just by themselves spring into existence.
And if you look at the world, the whole world is based on emergent phenomena, as the stars collapse and condense, they form planets, and as planets condense, they form DNA, and DNA forms people, and so on and so forth.
So the question is, if you have enough neurons, eventually will they become conscious?
Now, if you look at the brain, the brain has 100 billion neurons, but we only have maybe 50,000 genes.
So how is it possible that 50,000 genes, a very small number, can code for the location of 100 billion neurons?
And the conclusion is rather staggering.
It means that a lot of the architecture of the brain is random.
A lot of the brain is randomly slopped together.
It cannot possibly contain the location.
of a hundred billion neurons.
Now, does that account for why they've actually, for example, removed half of a person's brain?
And that person, the person is still functional.
It seems impossible.
There's a famous incident of a teenage girl who complained about headaches and she went to the doctor and the doctor found out she only had half a brain.
She was fully functional, half a brain, and it made neurological history.
It's written up in the textbooks.
Yeah, so doesn't that sort of underwrite what you just said?
Yeah, see the brain is not a standard computer.
A standard computer is called a Turing machine, named after the famous mathematician, Turing.
Our brain is a neural network, and if you've ever watched Star Trek, Data always calls himself a neural network.
That's right.
A neural network is a learning machine, which is totally different from a computer, which is a single processing unit of zeros and ones.
So a computer is a Turing machine.
We are non-Turing machines.
We are learning machines.
We are neural networks.
And neural networks are pretty much assembled randomly.
Which means that even if you take off half the neural network with a pair of scissors, it still functions.
While in a computer, you take out one transistor out of a computer, and the whole thing fails.
That's right.
So that's the difference.
Remember, a computer is a Turing machine, based on zeros and ones, transistors, one component missing, and the whole thing crashes, as we all know.
A brain can exist with half a brain.
You lop off half a brain into still function.
That's a neural network.
It's a learning machine.
And it means that large portions of our brains are pretty much randomly put together, okay?
Which means that the Internet is also randomly put together.
And just like a cloud condensing out of chaos, right?
Emergent phenomenon.
Some people have projected that far in the future.
You know, we're talking decades and decades in the future, when the Internet is many times bigger than it is now.
that some kind of collective phenomenon may occur, consciousness, who knows, but some kind of emergent
phenomenon may happen the same way that our brain is constructed, more or less
randomly. Okay, but here's the problem that I see.
If the Internet is to one day attain some sort of consciousness, if that might be possible, because it becomes essentially a gigantic neural network.
The whole concept, as I understood it, of the creation of the Internet, which was originally done by scientists like yourself and the government for passing information back and forth, is that you could knock out This part of it, or you could knock out that part of it, like slicing a brain in half, and it would keep on going, you know?
It would just, it would be the Energizer Bunny of the world.
It would keep on, you couldn't kill it.
And so, when you're talking about introducing this Asimov chip, or whatever it is, that would never be harmed to humans, how could you turn off something that cannot be turned off?
Well, that's a very good question.
First of all, the Internet was created to fight a nuclear war.
Many of my friends helped to build the Internet.
I've been on the Internet ever since it was first started.
And the reason why your email is divided up into so many pieces and then reassembled at the other end, in part, is because if Los Angeles or New York are atomized by the Russians in a nuclear war, Your email would still go through.
That's right.
Bypass New York, bypass the rubble of Los Angeles.
It would find a neural pathway and go.
And go, right.
That's why the Internet was constructed to be very hardy and resistant to a nuclear attack.
Right.
That's why your email has all these headers at the beginning explaining to you where all the different pieces of your email was split up and where all your emails was reassembled.
That's right.
Yes.
Now, then the question is, if the Internet becomes like a membrane A membrane, a spherical membrane surrounding the Earth.
Okay?
And this membrane has billions of computers.
I mean, every human would have maybe a few hundred computers on their bodies and their glasses and their jewelry hooked up to the Internet.
We're talking about literally billions of cells basically hooked up on this membrane, this membrane called the surface of the planet Earth.
Right?
Right.
Then could an emergent phenomenon occur in that scenario?
Well, if it's a learning machine, Then the answer is potentially yes.
If it's a learning machine.
Right now, the Internet does not learn.
The Internet does not get smarter just because you're on it.
It doesn't learn anything.
It doesn't accumulate anything.
Tomorrow, the Internet is just as stupid as it was yesterday.
It didn't learn anything.
However, one of these days, a computer programmer will put in chips that make it learn.
So that it is really smarter tomorrow than it was yesterday.
It learned something.
It learned that when you ask for George Washington, You don't mean a billion George Washington hotels, George Washington high schools.
You mean the man, George Washington.
Right.
And so when the Internet gradually becomes a learning machine, and it learns so that every day it is smarter than the way it was before, then you may have an emergent phenomenon, okay?
And then you may want to, like I said, pull the plug on it once it starts to get... I know, but you will have gone too far, and you will not be able to pull the plug, because there is no single plug.
Well, that's a problem.
We're going to be very dependent on it.
Whole cities will have their plumbing, their sewage system, their electrical output connected to this internet, right?
And we can't unplug it because then we'll unplug the sewage system and the power supplies and everything that makes our cities work, right?
But again, in my book, Visions, I address this problem, but I also say that this is decades away.
And as we lay the groundwork of the Internet, let us keep some of this in mind.
Well, let me tell you something, Doctor.
I interviewed a man last week, a scientist in Great Britain, who is having a chip transplanted into the neural network of his arm.
Yes, I've met him.
I had dinner with him once.
Well, son of a gun!
I interviewed him for several hours, and his plan, he's about a week or two away from having the second chip implanted, as you know, then.
His wife is going to be implanted.
I talked to his wife.
That's right, and do you know what he's going to do?
He's going to hook himself up to the Internet.
However, when I talked to him, I asked him the key question, and that is, is the chip hooked up to his nervous system?
And the answer is no.
The chip is not wired to the brain.
So in some sense, it's an isolated system.
It's a system that is embedded in the skin.
It's not hooked up to the central nervous system.
Now, when that occurs, then, of course, all sorts of stuff is going to hit the fan when we start to connect chips to the central nervous system.
Now, right now, we can do that with squid neurons.
Squid neurons are actually visible with the human eye.
The human eye can actually see the neurons inside some sea animals like squid.
So we've actually connected a chip to a neuron of a squid and actually sent messages.
You can actually send Windows software right through the neuron of a squid.
You're kidding!
This has been done already.
It was done in Germany at the Max Planck Institute.
We can actually take messages out of the neuron of a squid and then process it and send windows back in the neuron of a squid, which are quite visible.
That's incredible.
Doctor, we're at the bottom of the hour.
Hold on.
Dr. Michio Kaku, one of the world's greatest theoretical physicists, is my guest, and we'll be right back.
Well, very interesting.
Emu, somebody calling himself Emu in Philadelphia says, Squid can run Windows?
Is it Windows 98?
NT or XP?
And what happens when it crashes?
And oh, by the way, does the Justice Department know about all of this?
Doctor, I want to ask you about, and see if this fits into what we've been talking about, Princeton has been doing this really interesting experiment in which they have placed All kinds of computers at different locations around the world, they call them eggs, and these computers are spitting out random numbers.
They are random number generators, or at least, I guess, as close as you can get.
Random number generators.
Now, these eggs, as they call them, feed all the information back to a mainframe computer at Princeton.
They're not talking a lot about this, but Doctor, I've seen some graphs of what happened in New York on September 11th, and an interesting phenomena occurred.
They have a graph that shows these eggs reporting the randomness as sort of a line on a graph, and then about four hours prior to the 9-11 event, the graph began to take up off out of the noise level And the randomness began to become non-random, to the point where when the event occurred, it went right off the chart, and then slowly went back down again.
And they have been charting world events and looking at the results of these eggs, they call them, reporting, and they've had many, many instances of correlating world events Well, I haven't heard about this experiment.
However, there have been some experiments done at the Princeton Mechanical Engineering Department where they've tried to see whether or not human consciousness Or people thinking.
Yes.
And influence the outcome of mechanical events.
Yes.
Think of throwing a bunch of steel balls down a bunch of pins, random set of pins.
Then, of course, the ball, like in a pinball machine, right, should bounce randomly.
And at the very bottom of this whole series of steel pins, you should get a mountain, a mountain of steel balls.
Correct.
And the question is, by thinking, can you alter the distribution?
Yes.
Well, there is a professor there who claims that it may be possible to skew some of these results.
That you're not going to get this perfect distribution, mountain-like, bell-shaped curve, right?
Right.
However, other people have not been able to reproduce it.
And that's the key.
Science is based on reproducibility.
So even if, for example, you claim to have a cohesion device in your car, and a glass of water energizes your car, You have to make sure that when you mass-produce these cars, that every car turns on exactly at the same time in the rain, the snow.
You bet.
It's reproducible, right?
Sure.
So these experiments done at Princeton are showing that thinking, or people's feelings can influence the motion of steel balls, has not been duplicated in other laboratories around the world.
That's not to say that they didn't find something.
It's just to show you that it's a very ephemeral effect, and it's quite difficult to reproduce.
So I would believe it if you could get other random computers with random number generators to hook up, to show you that different kinds of catastrophic events can influence seemingly random motions.
Well, the interesting aspect of that graph, and it would really knock your socks off to see it, is not so much that it went off the charts when the event occurred, it's that it began going off the charts four hours Prior to the event.
I see.
Do you have like a webpage for this?
I'd be more than happy to look at it.
If my webmaster was at home, he's en route right now.
Oh, send me an email then.
I would be glad to do that, but I mean you must admit that's very interesting when you're talking about a non-locality, a non-local universe, that there could be an anticipatory rise prior to an event of that sort would suggest all kinds of interesting things about time and Right?
Well, you see, at the quantum level, things like this are commonplace.
At our level, at the macroscopic level, we know we're big, right, compared to atoms.
It's quite rare.
It's probabilistically extremely small.
But at the atomic level, things like this happen all the time.
Like, you really don't know the state of an electron until you look at it.
I'll tell you what, let's make this easy.
I know that you have a public email address that you give out, right?
That's right.
Let's give it out, and I guarantee you will get so many charts.
What is your email address?
mkaku.org m-k-a-k-u dot org is my webpage and my email address is on it.
Oh, by the way, I'm getting a lot of fast blast computer messages here as we're on the air saying that there are a bunch of people in... I guess you have a chat room on your website?
That's right.
People can chat on my webpage.
So, I guess they're in there right now talking and I imagine now that we've mentioned it There's going to be a lot of people in there.
That's mkaku.org.
M-K-A-K-U dot org, right?
It's a chat room there, so you can be in contact with other people who like to talk about these weird things.
And that's going on right now, folks, if you've got a computer.
And we've got a link to mkaku.org on my website if you want to go that direction, right under Dr. Kaku's name.
Okay, so back for a second to this Internet, because I wanted to finish up there.
Here we have this professor getting ready to put the chip in.
It's the first step.
How do you look at the possibility of eventually humans interfacing directly with the Internet?
Well, I think that there's nothing technically preventing it.
There are technical hurdles.
For example, the human neurons are very small compared to squid neurons.
They dry up very quickly.
You have to bathe them constantly in fluids and nutrients.
They're very hard to keep alive, human neurons.
But there's no stumbling blocks.
There's nothing in the laws of physics that says you can't hook up the central nervous system to a chip.
The problem is we have not deciphered the spinal cord.
Think of all the cables that go into New York City.
If you were to cut all the cables that went into New York City, and you were to have to re-splice them, it would take you 100 years to try to figure out where each wire went into another wire into New York City, right?
Sure.
Well, the spinal cord is a million times worse than that.
These are microscopic cables, and it'll take quite a while before we can begin the process of figuring out which neuron connects to which muscle in which part of the brain.
And it's a question of deciphering it, okay?
Now, of course, you can stimulate one part of the body and then that stimulates a part of the brain, right?
But how you trace that with your instruments is extremely difficult.
So the question of cyborgs, okay, has... There's nothing in principle that prevents you from having a cyborg like in Terminator 2, okay?
By the way, one restriction to cyborgs is the human skeletal system.
You can create a human arm that's mechanical, that is perhaps 100 times more powerful than our arm, or a human leg that can run much faster than our leg, like in the Bionic Man.
Yes.
The problem is, our bone structure is very weak.
And if you try to lift a car, if you try to lift a car with these mechanical arms, your mechanical arms will do just fine, except your spinal break.
So you have to have an exoskeleton.
So when we go into outer space, And when we have to do dangerous missions on the asteroid belt or things like that, then we may want to, you know, enhance our mechanical capabilities.
And then we'll have to have an exoskeleton, because our skeletal system won't support superhuman kinds of feats.
All right.
Check this out.
I read a story.
It's from The Guardian in Great Britain last night.
It sounds crazy, the stuff of science fantasy, but a respected American surgeon says that within five years, He will be able to graft wings and tails onto human beings.
His name is Johan Hari, and he's a plastic surgeon, and here's what he's saying.
He's saying he can put wings on humans, and that in the same way that when you have an arm cut off, your pathways, your neural pathways, are still telling your brain that that limb is there you know you have the shadow limb effect and he claims that he could move human fat out and take some rib structure and build wings on a human being and that as time went on the opposite process would occur and neural pathways would actually be formed.
Well yes and no.
First let's look at the biology then let's look at the physics.
Okay.
First you have rejection mechanisms Because you're talking about animal proteins, which are foreign proteins to our immune system, and our immune system recognizes foreign proteins, like the proteins in animals.
So, they would be in a rejection system, so you would have to suppress it with drugs.
Right.
You have to suppress the immune system.
Well, we do that now for transplants.
Then you would have to hook up the neurons, and of course, hooking up neurons is no easy feat.
These are invisible with the human eye.
Attaching them can be done.
We've done it, you know, There have been reports of people's arms and limbs cut off.
Absolutely.
They've been able to reattach them.
Yes.
So if you could somehow get rid of the rejection mechanism by drugs, suppress it, then in principle you may be able to hook up the neurons, but then of course the coding of the neurons could be slightly different.
We have to match the neurons to make sure there's a compatibility between the neurons of a human and the neurons of an animal.
And then we would have to learn how to wiggle it.
We would be like children, learning how to walk.
But would it be possible, once you had done some work, for new neural pathways to actually develop?
Yes.
Neural pathways develop and they re-enervate themselves.
They grow.
This does not mean that you're going to be able to fly, because even if you had the wings of an angel, that is much larger than that of an eagle, Your muscles are not powerful enough to make you fly.
Birds have hollow bones, first of all.
No, he actually says that.
He says he doesn't think humans could fly, but he can definitely put functional wings on a human.
That's conceivable.
I mean, if you can, again, suppress the immune system, B, have the compatibility between neurons to be worked out, C, you would have to learn like a baby, learn like a baby how to wiggle that tail, wiggle that wing, and in principle it could be possible.
But again, right now, it is beyond our surgical capabilities.
But five to ten years is the time frame that is, you know, sort of realistic, I think, if you could overcome those hurdles that I just mentioned.
Okay?
So then, it's not impossible, though, that neuron pathways could begin to form?
That was kind of basically my question.
That's right.
In fact, on a stroke victim, this was done in Atlanta, Georgia last year, a stroke victim had a A neuron, I mean a piece of wire placed in the brain, the nerves grew into the glass bead, which then had wires coming out.
The wires were hooked to a laptop, and the person, by thinking, was able to move the cursor on a laptop.
I just read that!
That was at Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia, last year.
So it is possible for a direct brain-laptop connection.
Yikes.
Again, the person had to learn like a baby.
There's no manual for this.
I hadn't even read this to my audience yet.
I have this story.
It just broke.
But it's true.
The person was able to actually control a cursor, as you would control a cursor with a mouse, but by thinking the cursor around.
That's right.
He was semi-paralyzed, and the chip was put into sort of like a dead area of the brain.
And the person is, like I said, partially paralyzed, and yet the person is able to think, think and move the cursor on a screen, which means that eventually the person will be able to move his own wheelchair, perhaps even move arms and legs that are mechanical, by thinking about it, even though certain parts of his central nervous system have been destroyed by a stroke in the brain.
So it is possible to, A, have neurons grow into a glass bead and connect to metal, B, it is possible to learn like a baby, like a neural network, learn like a baby how to control that cursor on the screen.
And then C, you'd be able to control mechanical devices by thinking about it.
But then way down the line somewhere, is it not inevitable that man meets and merges with machines?
Okay, this has been proposed for the far future now.
Now we're talking centuries in the future.
Sure.
That instead of robots being an enemy, Why not merge with them and become immortal?
Yes.
In other words, why not wake up one day and find ourselves immortal in a silicon body?
Okay?
So let's say, again, centuries in the future, our descendants get old and they don't want to die.
They know that flesh is frail and flesh will eventually die, but silicon does not.
Right, right.
Then the surgery would have to replicate the neural structure of each neuron into silicon.
So they would take out one silicon piece, and one piece of neurons, and duplicate it on another table, a piece of silicon.
Kind of like transferring the contents of one hard drive to another.
Right.
And you would be conscious during this whole process.
You would be wired up.
So as parts of your brain are removed, there are wires connecting you to this other part of the brain.
So half your brain is on the other side of the table, half your brain is inside your body, and you're conscious.
You're fully conscious during this whole process.
Kind of like Rush Limbaugh.
Yeah, and you don't feel a thing.
Eventually, all your neurons are then transferred into silicon on the other tabletop, and when you wake up the next day, you have a silicon body.
You are immortal.
You will live forever.
So, in other words, the total you, your consciousness, your thoughts, your memories, everything that is you, is now not in two places, or is it in two places?
It's in one place.
It's in one place.
It has been transferred to silicon.
Right.
Because half your brain is made out of silicon on the other table.
You are still sitting on your tabletop with half your brain missing.
And again, this is centuries in the future.
Don't try this at home, folks.
And it means that you're fully conscious.
Fully conscious during this process, because half your thoughts are on the other side of the table.
But eventually, your brain is transferred fully to the other side of the table, where there is a robot waiting.
An empty robot with no brain.
So then, kind of like the computer in 2001, you would slowly begin singing nursery rhymes toward the end.
Right.
That was a neural network that was gradually disconnected.
Yes, right.
A lobotomized neural network.
Well, isn't that roughly the same process we're discussing here?
Yeah, he was doing the opposite.
He said, lobotomizing is essentially assembling it on another tabletop.
While you are conscious, fully conscious, you don't feel a thing.
You wouldn't feel yourself slipping and slipping away?
No, you don't feel a thing.
and your consciousness is just as sharp as ever. Your thinking process is identical to your normal thinking
process because neuron for neuron. Every neuron that is deleted
from your brain is then transferred into silicon on the table.
Wouldn't every neuron then, once transferred, be saying you still have a physical body?
Wouldn't you feel every part of that physical body?
Well, all your neurons are connected to your central nervous system, so you would still feel everything.
Yes.
Even though half your brain is on the other tabletop inside the body of a robot.
Yikes!
You would still feel everything in your body until the final, the final switch, the final switch is then made, whereby you have nothing left inside your cranial system, but everything is in silicon on the other tabletop.
And so you are now but we got to inside the body of a robot i understand uh...
but what you were is now just lifeless
it's gonna die anyway it's very old was going to die anyway
so it's the way of preserving everything on their own everything on their own
network inside your brain inside silicon so that you will live forever and become
immortal professor you live in a very intellectual world
Given the opportunity to do something of that sort toward your own physical death, what decision would you make?
Well, I wouldn't mind living a few hundred years.
I don't think it's going to happen in my lifetime.
Minus the physical body, just the intellectual you left.
Well, I personally think that that's perhaps the greatest joy of living, is to be able to see, experience new sensations, have new kinds of thoughts.
And, again, this scenario that I laid out is centuries in the future, but there's nothing in the laws of physics that prevents immortality if there's a merger between carbon and silicon.
So, some people have said that the future is not carbon.
The future is a merger between silicon and carbon, and that will give us immortality.
And, by the way, if we meet aliens from outer space, who are millennia ahead of us, Then they may have already made that transition.
They may already be half robot, half flesh.
That would account for some of the sightings we've had.
Hold on, Doctor.
We're at the top of the hour.
Doctor, welcome back.
As I said, there's a remake of the H.G.
Wells film that actually is already just now hitting the theaters, proving the, and just blasting up the charts, proving How many people are totally fascinated with the concept of time travel?
Do you think it will ever be actually possible?
Well, we physicists think that time travel is theoretically possible.
Not necessarily practical, but we do think that if you use Einstein's equations, there are literally hundreds of solutions that we've discovered which allow for time travel.
Now, think of time as a river.
Time is a river that curves and meanders and speeds up and slows down.
It's like Old Man River going throughout the galaxy.
However, the new wrinkle on this, and this is what's creating all this excitement among physicists, is that the river of time may have whirlpools.
And the river of time may fork into two rivers.
And if the river of time bends on itself, perhaps we can bend it like a pretzel
and bend time back on itself to perhaps meet yourself before you're born
or meet your parents before you're born.
And of course, this of course invites all sorts of paradoxes and things like this.
But we physicists have found that if you have enough energy, enough positive energy or negative energy,
you can use Einstein's equations to open up gateways, holes, portals, by which you can then travel backwards
or forwards in time.
Would travel in one... so many people are saying traveling forwards in time would be perhaps easier than going back.
That's correct.
Oh, it is correct.
Yeah, traveling forwards in time can be done with a rocket ship by traveling near the speed of light.
Time slows down for you in the rocket ship, so it may take you, for example, just one minute to reach the nearby stars.
On the Earth, looking at your rocket ship, you're frozen.
You're frozen for four years, traveling near the speed of light.
But you, in the rocket ship, only sense that you've been in the rocket ship for about one minute.
It's like suspended animation, except without the freezing.
But you have to get near the speed of light.
So in the movie Time Machine, if you had a rocket ship that could then speed for 800,000 years near the speed of light, and then land back on the Earth, For you, it would only have been maybe just one minute.
But for the Earth, it would have been 800,000 years.
Going forwards in time is not so difficult.
Subatomic particles do this all the time.
The question is, can you go backwards in time?
That's the killer.
Now, if you go backwards in time, that requires a whirlpool, or what we physicists call a closed time-like curve.
That's the scientific name for time travel.
If you see in the literature, CTC, CTC is how we physicists talk about time travel, because of course, we don't want to be deluged with all sorts of science fiction fans asking us questions.
Now, if you could open up, for example, a black hole, or if you could amass enormous amounts of what is called negative energy, then you could open up a gateway by which you can then travel backwards in the past to perhaps meet your parents before you're born.
And then of course, the question is what happens if you go backwards in time with a gun?
The paradox.
And kill your parents before you're born.
Of course, yes.
You're in deep doo-doo.
Then, of course, you've killed your parents before you're born, so how could you be born?
But there is an answer to the paradox, isn't there?
Yeah, there are two answers that we physicists are seriously looking at, okay?
The first proposal I don't particularly like, but it's by a Russian physicist, Professor Novikov, in Moscow, and he's a very well-respected authority in Einstein's equations.
And Novikov believes that when you go backwards in time, You, in some sense, fulfill the past.
It was meant to be.
It was written that, in the past, some traveler from the future landed in the past and amazed all the villagers.
So, it was meant to be this way.
That, in some sense, you fulfill the past.
So, as time sort of becomes circular, so that if you go backwards in the past, there is something that prevents you from shooting your parents before you're born.
Okay?
That's one.
That's one way.
The other way, which I prefer, ...is that the River of Time forks.
Forks into two rivers.
Right.
This means that a quantum universe opens up, just the way the quantum universes open up for atoms all the time, you know?
A quantum universe opens up so that when you shoot your parents before you're born, you've actually shot somebody else's parents, who are genetically identical to your parents.
They look just like your parents, they have the memories of your parents, they have the genes of your parents, but they're really not your parents.
A parallel universe opens up.
So, boom, we have just, with that shot, created another universe.
That's right.
We're going backwards in time, and by shooting our parents before you're born, the river of time forks into two rivers, so there are no paradoxes.
Okay?
No paradoxes at all.
But this means, of course, the price you have to pay is you have a multiverse.
Because you can go backwards in time any number of times, right?
And this means that the River of Time would fork into many tributaries, and it means we have a multiverse of universes.
Now, if you read the scientific literature today, most cosmologists believe in the multiverse idea.
Most cosmologists believe that our universe is a bubble coexisting with other bubbles, and that these other bubbles may look just like our bubble, except one quantum difference between our bubble and the next bubble.
Back to quantum.
Yeah, for example, let's say that a cosmic ray went through Churchill's mother, and so Winston Churchill was never born, to oppose Adolf Hitler, which means that one quantum event separates us from a world where the Nazis defeated England and went on to defeat the United States, and we're speaking now today in German, rather than in English.
One cosmic ray separates us from a world where we're speaking in German today, talking about these things.
By the way, I think, I'm sorry, I'm terribly sorry, but I think your chat room just developed another bubble and went into another universe.
It looks like just mentioning it has murdered your chat room temporarily.
Oh, it's been flooded with guests from the future who are ticking in on the past.
That's right.
I know black holes also play a part in the concept.
Incidentally, I've been hearing rumors on the Internet that there are some Russian scientists working on some aspects of time travel.
Have you heard anything about that?
Well, this is Professor Novikov.
He's written quite a few articles about this.
In fact, one article just came out last month, an article that he wrote with Stephen Hawking.
Talking about how the Russians view time travel, that the question he's asking is, what happens if you went backwards in time and told Eve not to eat the apple?
Well, if you told Eve not to eat the apple, of course, humans were never expelled from paradise.
That was actually Adam that ate the apple, I think.
Eve fed it to him.
Fed it to Adam, right.
However, what happens when you go backwards in time and you meet Eve giving the apple to Adam?
Then there must be some kind of force preventing you, some kind of accident, some kind of mishap, preventing you from Adam getting the apple from Eve.
So this is an article he just wrote, and this means that there's no free will, that in some sense you're like a robot when you go backwards in time.
Boy, have I struggled with that one.
Right.
Now, however, I personally believe in the other point of view.
The point of view that is gaining dominance in the world of quantum cosmology, the world of science where we believe that there's a multiverse.
And then there are no paradoxes.
There are no paradoxes at all.
The river of time continues to fork every time you go backwards in the past.
Now, Stephen Hawking, if you go to the London Museum in London, there's a wax image of Stephen Hawking saying that time travel is impossible because where are the tourists from the future?
However, he's now retracted that statement.
His waxed image may keep on saying that, but in real life, he's retracted that statement.
He now believes that time travel is possible.
But it's not practical, because the energy necessary to open up this gateway is the energy of a star.
And we would have to be at least Type 3.
Or a black hole.
Or a black hole.
Either you have lots of negative energy or positive energy.
A black hole would have lots of positive energy, for example.
And you would have to be probably in a very advanced Type 2 or more likely Type 3 civilization before you can manipulate and play with black holes the same way that we play with billiard balls on a table.
Once you have that kind of power that you can juggle black holes, then perhaps you can have gateways to the past.
And again, we think that going through a black hole, you disintegrate, you die, you don't go through.
But actually, black holes are spinning, and they're spinning very rapidly.
We photographed over 50 of them now with the Hubble Space Telescope, and they're spinning very rapidly so that the black hole does not collapse to a dot.
It collapses to a ring, a ring of neutrons.
And this ring of neutrons is spinning very rapidly.
That's why it doesn't collapse.
Centrifugal force prevents it from collapsing.
And if you fell through the ring, you're falling through the looking glass, the looking glass of Alice, which connects Oxford, the countryside of Oxford, to Wonderland.
Just like Contact, the movie.
It's like the movie Contact.
So a wormhole machine and a time machine are basically the same thing.
Okay?
A wormhole will connect you to a distant point in space.
A time machine connects you to a distant point in time.
And they are basically the same.
Okay.
I have dominated you.
Let's let a few people get in here and ask questions.
First time caller on the line, you're on the air with Dr. Kaku.
Hi.
Hey, how you guys doing?
All right, sir.
Where are you?
Actually, I'm in Phelan, California.
Okay.
And I've actually got two questions.
Is that alright?
Sure.
Yeah, my first question was about quantum computers.
Would there possibly be, say, you know, a quantum computer that could use millions or billions of atoms that could actually use extreme abstract calculations some normal computers can't do?
I'll say like the unified field theory or something in a couple of microseconds.
Alright.
And is abstract calculation possible with that?
Okay, yes.
It turns out that quantum computers can do calculations that ordinary computers cannot do.
Quantum computers can compute quantum calculations.
It takes an infinite amount of time on a computer to perform some of these calculations, an infinite amount of time.
On a quantum computer, it would take a finite amount of time, perhaps seconds, to do a calculation.
So that's one reason why we physicists dreamed up this idea back in the 50s.
Because we realize that certain quantum calculations take an infinite amount of time on a computer.
So why not create a quantum computer that can do a quantum calculation in a finite amount of time?
That's why we dreamed up this idea back in the 50s.
Okay?
So the answer is yes.
We may be able to do calculations that are useful for the unified field theory on a quantum computer that would be impossible on an ordinary computer, because it would take an infinite amount of time on a regular computer.
The CIA is interested in these things.
I bet they are.
My second question was, are you familiar with any of Dr. David Anderson's work?
I don't know.
What has he done?
Actually, he's claimed, along with a few others, that a properly modulated electromagnetic field produces a secondary field inside of itself that actually, when you adjust the frequencies, can affect the flow of time.
Either slow it down or speed it up, only to a certain point.
You know, reversing, actually they put a wall in that area, but they actually put candles and actually watched them melt faster.
You know, old-fashioned clocks take faster until it, I believe it's called a Doppler shift, happens and everything inside the secondary field goes black.
And this is using, you know, a few thousand volts, I believe.
But, you know, this would sort of negate the usual physics saying that, you know, the amount of energy, the amount of a star, a black hole, would be needed for a small amount of time warping.
Yes, well, you're correct.
The standard physical interpretation using Einstein's theory is that it takes the energy of a star to be able to warp time and slow it down to the point where candles burn slower.
Now, we've measured Einstein's theory on the Moon.
It turns out that time beats faster on the Moon So, you have what is called gravitational redshift, and so we've been able to prove that time beats at different rates compared to different gravities.
So the more gravity you have, like on the Earth, the slower time beats.
So the time beats slower on the Moon than it does in outer space, for example.
Now, in order to slow down time, where you can actually see it with the human eye, The standard interpretation is you would need the energy of a star to do this.
Now, with the Hubble Space Telescope, we've now been able to confirm that Einstein's theory is correct to 99.7% accuracy.
That's well within experimental errors.
I repeat, some people think that Einstein's general theory of relativity is only good to maybe 10% or 20%.
We've been able to verify it to 99.7% accuracy.
ninety nine point seven percent that could actually be a hundred percent
and we think that the issue for my factory So I haven't seen this result, but it does seem to contradict what is commonly known about gravity, which, like I said before, has now been confirmed by the Hubble Space Telescope.
Gravity bends light, gravity can act like a lens, all these effects predicted by Einstein have been confirmed to 99.7% accuracy now.
And gravity we know to be a function of mass?
A function of mass, and gravity is an illusion created by the bending of space.
So, gravity, in some sense, is an optical illusion.
You know, Shakespeare said that life is a stage, and we are all actors on a stage.
But if the stage were hilly, if the stage had bumps on it, and you were to reenact Romeo and Juliet on a stage that was curved, you would say that there's a force acting on you.
You can't walk in a straight line.
You cannot walk straight.
There's a force acting on you.
That force is equivalent to gravity.
The gravity is a consequence of the folding and bending of the stage of space itself, which is invisible, of course.
And this has been verified to, like I said, to enormous accuracy now with Hubble Space Telescope.
Okay, let me ask you about perhaps a little problem in this area.
We've got some spacecraft, you know, the Pioneer, early Pioneer spacecraft, that are just really out there now, and... Way beyond Pluto.
Oh, just really moving.
Except for one little problem.
They're slowing down.
And nobody understands why.
I mean, it's like they're hitting this something or another that's beginning to slow the spacecraft down.
What do you think that might be?
Well, I don't know.
I'll have to look into this.
There are solar winds out there, and our solar wind goes out, for example, almost the whole light year.
I think it's beyond that.
In other words, they've accounted for that, and they cannot account for the slowdown in the spacecraft.
It's very interesting.
I don't know.
But the Voyager spacecraft have left the solar system, and it's actually given us the family picture ...of all the planets together.
One family photograph of all the planets together... Isn't that incredible?
...complements of the Voyager spacecraft.
Doctor, hold on.
We're right at the bottom of the hour.
We'll be right back.
I'm Art.
Well, we've only sent about a million people over to Dr. Kaku's website, and one of them just commented on the website, I think, quite accurately.
The good doctor always references Star Trek, quite frequently references Star Trek, and somebody has noticed a striking resemblance between yourself and Sulu.
Uh-huh.
Well, I guess there is some resemblance.
There is, kind of, actually.
Okay, onward we move.
First time caller line, you're on the air with Professor Kaku.
Hello.
Yes, I'm Kara from Denver, listening on KHW.
I had a question about Tesla and Einstein.
I understand from, actually, the After Dark newsletter That Tesla's Unified Field Theory was placed in front of, or maybe they actually met, I'm not sure, in front of Einstein, and he could not understand it.
He could not make heads or tails.
And I wondered if you might be able to comment on that, Dr. Kakou.
Well, I have the complete works of Tesla in a book I came out recently.
And Tesla, of course, was this genius that came out with radio frequency generators,
and he also pushed alternating currents, while Edison was pushing direct currents.
And we all know who won the battle between Tesla and Edison.
It was Tesla.
And every time you put a thing into your wall socket, you owe a debt to Nikola Tesla.
Now, Tesla had some ideas that were very prophetic, and also some ideas that haven't panned out
yet. He thought, for example, that you can get energy from nothing.
And that idea was poo-pooed for many years.
But now we know, from the latest cosmology experiments and the data from our satellites, that nothingness has energy.
It's the energy that is accelerating the universe.
The universe is expanding, and it's actually accelerating right now.
And the acceleration of the universe is due to the fact that there's anti-gravity.
This energy of nothing is pushing the galaxies apart.
So this development is only about two or three years old, but it's the biggest sensation in cosmology, the fact that the universe is expanding very, very rapidly.
So that's sort of like a combination of some of Tesla's ideas of the energy of nothing put into Einstein's equations, because Einstein also had that idea back in 1917 with his cosmological constant theory.
Professor, is it possible, and I've heard as many people have, many things about what Tesla reportedly did, and I'm sure there's myth that's grown out of it, but There's some substance apparently to his having grabbed, either grabbed energy from essentially nothing or transferred energy through the air in a way that we're just, as you mentioned, beginning to come to grips with the possibility of now.
Could he have done that then?
Well, it's not clear.
He thought, you know, reading his works now, not the hearsay, but actually reading his works, he thought that you could actually generate usable energy, energy that you could then use in your kitchen, for example, out of nothing.
And nothing was this storehouse of vast amounts of energy.
Today, we physicists call it zero-point energy.
And we can actually measure it in the laboratory.
It's called the Casimir effect.
It's very small in the laboratory.
However, in outer space, there's a lot of it.
And it's enough to push galaxies apart.
So whether or not Tesla himself realized the full implications of this is not clear.
Einstein did.
Einstein actually put this term into his equations in 1917.
And now we realize that this is perhaps the dominant form of energy in the universe.
The matter you see around you is only a tiny fraction of the amount of dark energy that we see around us.
So dark energy is another word for zero point energy, which is another word for Tesla's energy from nothing.
So then there is the possibility that he was actually doing what we're just beginning to come to grips with at the moment.
Well, he thought we could get usable energy, you know, like energy that would drive our refrigerators and our TV sets and things, right?
However, so far we've only found that it's very small.
It's very tiny.
It's measurable in the laboratory.
It's called the Casimir effect.
But in outer space, there's enough of it in outer space to drive galaxies apart.
We've discovered enough that the poo-pooing has stopped.
Well, we had to take some of his crazy ideas more seriously.
You know, people laugh at the idea of the energy of nothing.
How can nothing have energy?
And now we find out that it is the dominant form of energy in the universe.
You can go to any physics journal, any physics journal on the Earth now, And read about dark energy, and there it is.
It's perhaps the dominant form of energy in the universe.
It's perhaps 100 times more energetic than the amount of matter that you see around you.
So when you look at the 100 chemicals that make up the universe, the elements, realize that that is only a fraction, about 1%, of the actual energy of the universe, which is dwarfed by something called dark matter, and which in turn is dwarfed by dark energy, which is the energy of nothing.
Well, of course, we all know that Tesla's documents were seized.
I mean, the government came rushing in and took all he had and took it away someplace or another.
Yeah, unfortunately, he did not have a team of lawyers to prevent Sarnoff and others from ripping off a lot of the patents, which are now, of course, part of radio and television.
Unfortunately, he was kind of eccentric.
He lived at the New Yorker Hotel.
He lived out of a hotel room and he thought he was being poisoned by his enemies.
So he was quite paranoid, and his problem was that he didn't have a team of lawyers to protect the patents, which many people feel were stolen from him.
But you see, we physicists know what he actually did, right?
So we, in his honor, have named the unit of magnetism after Tesla.
Indeed.
So when you go to an MRI scan, and the MRI technician says that they're going to put one T, where it's a magnetic field, around your brain, right?
Right.
What does T stand for?
Tesla.
Yep.
The next time you have an MRI scan, you owe it to Tesla, because the Tesla is now the unit of magnetism.
Well, in my case, I owe a lot to him, then.
Wildcard Line, you're on the air with Dr. Kaku.
Hello.
Where are you?
I'm in Bozeman, Montana.
Yes, sir.
This is a little bit off kind of the subject, but it's kind of been building up to the question.
I was kind of inspired by the whole wings thing that you guys got going on.
Oh, yes.
And I've been talking about this kind of subject with my friend for the last couple weeks, and we've been kind of deciding that, you know, with this whole terrorist attack and what's happened in the last, you know, year and whatnot, people are going to be kind of ruined for flying cars and all these, you know, aspirations for the future because of security issues.
You know, we don't want just anybody up in the sky flying, or at least we don't right now anyway.
So then I started wondering, you know, What measures could we take to prevent this?
And I started thinking of, you know, science fiction movies and stuff where they have force fields, you know, like in Star Trek and stuff where there's shields and force fields and things that can prevent things from damaging things.
And I'm just wondering if anybody could answer the question.
It'd be the doctor here.
I mean, is this kind of technology possible?
Actually, that's a pretty good question.
In other words, could force fields Well, you know, when teenagers watch Star Trek, they think that force fields are easy.
I mean, everyone has them.
The Klingons have them, the Romulans.
Everyone has force fields.
that would prevent the kind of thing from happening that occurred?
Well, you know, when teenagers watch Star Trek, they think that force fields are easy.
I mean, everyone has them. The Klingons have them, the Romulans.
So everyone has force fields.
But you see, there are only four forces that we physicists have been able to identify in the universe.
Gravity, electricity and magnetism, or light, and then there are the two nuclear forces,
the strong and the weak nuclear force that lights up the sun.
These four forces do not seem to conform with the concept of a force field.
Take a look at gravity. Gravity is attractive. It's very weak. It's very attractive.
Force fields are repulsive.
Gravity has to be ruled out.
Electricity and magnetism have to be ruled out because plastic will go right through a magnetic field.
You can have an electric field and a magnetic field and throw a piece of plastic and it goes right through both.
So electricity and magnetism have to be ruled out.
And the nuclear force are very short range.
The only work on the distance of the nucleus, which is of course a teeny weeny fraction of the size of an atom, So it's very difficult to do anything with a nuclear force other than unleash it in the form of a hydrogen bomb or a star.
So at the present time, believe it or not, we physicists don't have a clue as to how to build a force field.
We have a working model for a time machine.
You just have to have enough gasoline to propel it.
But we have no blueprint for a force field.
Interesting.
So the simplest object in a science fiction story could be the hardest to produce a force field.
So until we perhaps tap into this new energy and understand more about physics, no force field.
That's right.
At the present time, with our limited primitive knowledge of physics, we don't have a clue as to how to build a force field.
This doesn't mean that in 100 years we can't find new fantastic discoveries, but as of the year 2002, We do not have enough information about the laws of physics to create a force field.
That was a very good question.
All right, East of the Rockies, you're on the air with Dr. Kaku.
Good morning.
Hello.
Hello.
Yeah, first thing, Mr. Bell, I gotta tell you, you have the world's greatest bumper music.
Oh, thank you.
I am on the left coast of the right coast of Florida.
Al, listen to you on WFLA 970.
Yes, sir.
And originally, when I first called, I was listening to, I caught a bit of what Dr. Kottu said about transferring the brain into a robot.
Oh, yes.
I know we've drifted considerably.
That's right.
What is your question?
I would think the ideal person for that would be Stephen Hawking.
Oh, well, yes, indeed.
He makes a good point.
In other words, I would imagine that once that technology would become available, the very few incredible brains like we have... We have so few, and that's a good question unto itself, really.
We have Stephen Hawking, we had Einstein, we have you, and we have a few others, but the numbers are awfully small.
Are we evolving, continuing to evolve as a human race, and why do we have so few Einsteins?
Well, the human race as a race is probably not evolving at all anymore.
Anyone can have children.
Anyone can go across continents with an airplane.
There are no more bottlenecks like Australia that would accelerate evolution.
So our evolution has pretty much been stopped.
What you see is what you're going to get 100 years from now.
Unless we take it with our genes, okay?
However, if you take a look at Einstein's brain, which has been preserved, as you know, and scientists are now beginning to look at it very carefully, we find that there are anomalies in Einstein's brain.
There was one part of the brain that deals with abstract thoughts, visualizations of abstract things, like equations and things.
That was highly developed in Einstein's brain.
Now, of course, it's difficult to make sense out of this information, but one part of Einstein's brain that dealt with very abstract thought, the kind of thinking that you need for equations and things, is very developed in Einstein's brain.
And the question is, was he born that way, or can you make yourself become like that?
I'm of the opinion that you can develop it yourself.
You really think so?
Einstein was not a prodigy.
I just finished writing a biography of Einstein.
It'll come out next year.
But I did a lot of research into Einstein's early life.
He was not a prodigy by any means.
He had the ability, this horse sense, to be able to zero in on simple physical pictures, pictures that a child could understand, that would unravel the paradoxes of light and Newtonian mechanics.
And so I think he had a keen physical instinct, which can be learned.
I think it can be learned.
So I think that it's not all genes, okay?
Mind Science children were not necessarily exceptionally gifted.
One was, in fact, schizophrenic.
The other one became an engineer.
So I don't think it's genetic.
I think you can learn this by having, you know, a lot of mentors when you were a child, a lot of interest, a lot of encouragement as a child.
And, of course, a lot of what is called butt power.
The ability to sit on your butt for hours at a time, contemplating equations.
Do you believe that the process of natural selection was that the engine that drove evolution?
Well, so far, that is the only mechanism that biologists have found that can take random bits of DNA and create more and more complex beings.
we can simulate that on a computer screen now.
Well, there was a scientist, doctor, that theorized the other day, I had a story last week,
that I found fascinating. People got angry about it, but he said
he believes that in the Western world, our part of the world,
evolution has ceased.
And he made his case by suggesting that we have stopped, essentially, the process of natural selection, with all of our modern conveniences and modern medicine.
You know, we save people who otherwise would naturally pass away, and we have stopped evolution.
Would you give some weight to that concept?
Yeah, I think most biologists would say that's correct.
Evolution is forced upon you by a change of the environment, food supply.
Animals do not evolve because they want to evolve.
Animals evolve because they have to evolve because the weather changes and food supply changes and predators come in.
With humans, we don't have to worry about food supply anymore.
We don't have to worry about bears and lions and tigers.
We don't have to worry about diseases so much anymore.
And it means that the pressures placed on humans are simply not there anymore.
And so in science fiction novels, you read that humans are going to have big heads, and we're going to lose our hair, we're going to have childlike features, like in a Spielberg movie, right?
Yeah, right.
But that's not the way it's going.
What you see is what you're going to get 100 years from now, unless we tinker with our genes.
Because there's no pressure.
Selection pressure being pushed on us to make us evolve in one direction or the other because we do have a secure food supply.
The weather is relatively stable until, of course, the greenhouse effect kicks in.
Yes.
And when those extreme situations begin to kick in, then you're going to see evolution of natural selection beginning to come into play.
And, of course, natural selection is not pretty.
It means people die.
Oh, that's right.
It's not pretty at all.
That's right.
We're so short on time.
You have talked, I think it was you, have talked about the concept of putting, you know, sort of a 2001 obelisk on a moon, that that might be a reasonable way for an alien race to monitor the emergence of life.
That's right.
They would do it to monitor us.
Have you heard about this recent story about this incredible gigawatt Transmission from a very, very specific place on the North Pole of Jupiter.
X-rays.
Massive, massive gigawatts of X-rays that about every 45 minutes issue a burst.
Well, I haven't heard about that.
However, Jupiter is an enormous emitter of electromagnetic radiation.
It just staggers the imagination how much radiation comes out of Jupiter.
Our space probes were practically blinded when they got close to Jupiter.
So, we have to be very careful.
But so far, the radiation that we've observed is not necessarily consistent with any pattern.
Are you suggesting that there's some kind of pattern here?
Well, the scientists who just took another look at it, apparently they saw this back in the 70s and sort of just passed by it and came back and took another look at it here recently.
And they were using words like beacon and they mentioned ET.
It's really interesting.
Well, who knows?
We have the Galileo space probe orbiting around Jupiter.
And we have the capability of monitoring it, so we'd be able to pick up radiation, even though, of course, the Galileo spacecraft is fully degrading with time.
We have the ability to monitor the radiation there.
And, you know, the next missions could be focused on Europa, a moon of Jupiter, so it would be very important that we know exactly what the fields of Jupiter are if we put a probe on Europa To look for the possibility of fish or worms that can swim inside the oceans of Europa.
I believe that there's been some thinking that under Europa, not only might there be water beneath the ice, but there might be volcanic heating, and we know that volcanic venting at the deepest levels of our own ocean is why this amazing life surrounds it.
That's right, the most primitive DNA that we can find on the Earth.
is in ocean vents at the bottom of the ocean.
That's the most primitive DNA we can find.
Which means that that could be where life started from.
Back then, the Earth was quite hostile.
Meteors were hitting the Earth all the time.
Oceans were boiling off periodically.
The oceans were probably quite hot in those days.
And so ocean vents, these vents on the bottom of the ocean, are now recognized to be the harbinger of the most ancient
DNA that we have found on the surface of the Earth.
Wow.
And that may have been where the first DNA got off the ground.
And in Jupiter, we have tidal forces that squeeze Europa, and that of course cracks the crust of Europa and causes heating to occur, friction.
Friction is here.
And that also probably creates volcano vents as well.
So the tidal forces caused by Jupiter's gravity is probably sufficient enough to cause volcanoes And yeah, there's probably volcano vents down there, too, which probably give enough energy to perhaps get DNA off the ground.
Doctor, you said you've got a book coming out.
If you were to recommend one book to the new listener who's enjoyed the program tonight, one of your books, what would it be?
Well, Hyperspace, talking about higher dimensions, and Vision, talking about the world of 2020 and 2050.
And folks, those are all available.
If you go to my website, we've got links to all of his books over at Amazon.com.
So, if you liked what you heard tonight, go read some more, grab one of those books.
Doctor, as always, what a pleasure to have you on the air.
Oh, my pleasure.
All right.
Anytime.
Good night.
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