Dr. Michio Kaku and Art Bell explore cosmic threats like Betelgeuse’s potential supernova (harmless but brightening skies) and gamma-ray bursters disrupting Earth’s ionosphere, while Kaku warns North Korea’s nuclear escalation risks global proliferation without urgent diplomacy. They dissect climate collapse—Kyoto’s failure, U.S. inaction despite 25% of global emissions, and feedback loops like methane release—highlighting humanity’s delayed response to crises. Meanwhile, Kaku predicts a "human body shop" within a decade, using stem cells to grow organs, and gene manipulation extending lifespans, but notes societal unpreparedness amid Europe’s population decline. Physics’ "theory of everything," including Planck energy and bubble universes, hints at future civilizations resolving conflicts—yet rogue forces remain a risk. [Automatically generated summary]
High desert and the great American good evening, good morning, good afternoon, wherever you may be in all the world's time zone.
From the darkness of the high desert.
It's close to post a.m I'm glad to be here.
It's going to be a very busy, busy, busy night tonight.
And we're going to go through them tonight, so.
Oh, by the way, um, if you don't get all of post-to-post and that means that the Saturday portion of post and Sunday get the weekday portion of post- If you don't get the Saturday and Sunday portion of post You don't want to call up your radio page and we're going to go pull up the Wednesday was uh Saturday and Sunday night posted there oh my god where are you?
In a moment, John made a portion, and I'll tell you more about John in a moment, he's a very special person, followed by one of the greatest minds in contemporary America.
In the contemporary world, actually.
A Dr. Michio Coxu.
So if everybody will stay right there, it's going to be a busy night.
We went out to Hanoi Bay today and sort of drove about the island and went out and had lunch at one of the nice hotels here.
So it's been a great opportunity for me because I'm working with David Tickle, who produced Princess Purple Reign and Rod Stewart and most of the major, major hits of the 1980s.
And I actually have created a documentary series that I'm writing, and he's directing the first one.
And I think we're going to trade off on actually directing a couple of these.
But we have some really major capital behind being able to start moving ahead and start doing some of the things that you and I have been talking about for many, many years to try to bring some of this stuff to the mainstream.
So right now the working title, and I'm not sure if we're going to be able to keep this one, is Challengers of the Unknown.
We may have to change that.
There may be some rights problems with Warner Brothers.
But for right now, we're doing a Mystery of the Pyramid show.
So we're actually off to Egypt.
I'm leading a tour there from November 2nd through the 16th, and then we're shooting from the 16th all the way through the rest of the month.
But what we're going to focus on, I think, for the first time is we're going to try to focus on more of the esoteric meanings of the pyramid, not just the debate about when it was built or how it was built.
Of course, we can only really speculate because people that were initiated into these secret societies don't really talk about them a great deal.
Manly P. Hall speaks of them.
Madam Blavatsky spoke of the initiation in the pyramid.
The idea being is that the initiate in the pyramid goes through the same pathways, if you will, of the three paths.
One that leads to the pit, one that leads to the queen's chamber of the material, and one that leads to the king's chamber of ascension.
And just as the initiate is going through his own initiation, he is in fact going through the microcosm of the macrocosm of what all mankind is going through.
And being a prophecy in stone, literally, I think that there are a number of dates actually within the pyramid that are about ready to happen.
And when I was a kid learning about these things, my family lived in Cairo when I was about 14, 15 years old.
When I was learning about this, I used to think that 2004 and 2005, they were just so far away.
It seemed like science fiction.
I kept thinking, I'm going to be in my 40s by that time.
I'm probably not even going to live that long.
And now, they are literally not hundreds of years or decades, but these predictions are now coming up on us as being months away.
So that's going to be one of the things that we're specifically going to focus on for that.
It was one of those things originally that I think my first intuitive flash was Gus Grissom, the astronaut, was a very close friend of our family.
He was around a lot.
He was like a second father to me.
And I had a series of horrible, horrible dreams when I was about, I think it was about eight, nine years old or so, about Gus's death in Apollo 1, where I saw very, very vividly, I saw Gus trapped inside of space.
I saw him, I saw him burning, trying to get out, clawing at a space at a window, people looking in through a window, about the fire on the Apollo 1 accident.
And that was when I really started opening up to it.
And then I had a series of experiences actually in Egypt, in the pyramid itself, that began to open me up more to understanding not only what the pyramid meant.
Well, there's another, one of the famous stories about it is Napoleon asked to be left in the king's chamber alone, and he was so rattled and so shaken up by what happened to him there that he would never speak of it, even on his deathbed.
They asked him, What happened to you in the pyramid?
And he said, If I told you, you would not believe me.
I made the prediction on your program in December of 2001, where I said that I felt that bin Laden would be killed between January 25th and February 5th of 2002.
A very highly placed intelligence source, a man who works for the National Security Agency, who is best friends with George Tennant, who is an advisor to the president, I had a conversation with on August 20th and asked him specifically about Osama bin Laden.
And he said, well, your prediction was about between the 25th and the 5th of February.
And I said, yes.
And he said, well, that would be exactly right because his exact statement was, is that we tracked bin Laden moving from one location to another.
He was either spotted by satellite or by a remote-controlled spy aircraft.
The caravan of people that was moving along actually was then hit by a missile.
They, in the process of cleaning up after this particular missile strike, they had body parts, they had blood samples, they did various DNA samples and actually found Osama's blood there.
And his exact words to me were that bin Laden had been hit with shrapnel, that he then went into the city of Kaust to try to get treatment because the wounds that he was suffering became infected.
He said that that was when they almost caught him, was actually in the city of Kaust, that this is when he escaped in a rather odd way.
There was a safe house that he was in and had a series of tunnels that actually ran underneath it.
And we missed him by not a lot.
And his statement was that Osama bin Laden has been dead, that he lived approximately eight weeks, to the best of their knowledge, after the missile attack on February 5th, which means it puts his death at somewhere in late April to May.
Well, the tapes themselves, the last tape that I saw, I didn't see the tape yesterday, but the tapes that I saw were older tapes in which he's making rather vague threats.
And then somebody comes across and actually speaks over them.
So it's your view, then, that eventually we will all know that the date will fall in that range, and that the tapes we're getting now are either old or someone else.
And I wrote this in my newsletter last month, and I think I talked to George about it on the radio as well, saying that one of the most interesting things about this, and this was the discussion I was having with this intelligence officer, was, you know, in the research that I've been doing in the Bible Code, and especially in preparation for this documentary that we're working on, I've had access to some of the great experts in the world.
We're actually flying to Israel to personally interview Rabbi Elihu Ripps, who was the gentleman who discovered the Bible Code in the 1980s.
There is the name Bin Laden, just the last name, mind you, that is laced through a series of these codes.
Well, in all the research that I've done so far, here's the problem.
The problem is that you have to know what you're looking for before you actually go into the code.
And on the one hand, the people who are the professors of the code, if you will, people like Harold Gans of the National Security Agency, who say that he ran a computer program that said the error ratio in the code is something like one in five million, which proves that there is some sort of divine writing in it.
The problem is that when you're trying to predict a future event with the code, the code itself says that time is mutable.
The code itself says that time, very much like a river, comes together for a certain event to occur, and that mankind then has a choice to either step into the abyss, if you will, or back off from it.
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A classic example of this is that there are the words...
The Bible, I understood, was to be the infallible word of God.
It was, is the infallible word of God.
Now, you're telling me the Bible itself suggests that nothing is essentially written in stone and that what it says and predicts for mankind is just somewhat malleable and may not come to pass?
And as I was explaining, it gives multiple dates for certain events to occur as well.
But in the end of this, even in the final words of Moses, where he talked about the end of days, he always said that God's Grace would come down through those who performed in a righteous way.
That you can either bring this upon your heads and bring about the end of days or through grace and repentance, etc., etc.
There has always been the grace aspect that an event would not occur if people were to stop and think.
And as I said in one of the codes, specifically there were two dates given for an atomic holocaust on Jerusalem.
The first one being 1997 and the second one being 2006.
So it's very interesting because you have a series of events that were leading up to what quite possibly could have been some kind of atomic holocaust or some kind of atomic confrontation in 1997.
It's very interesting, Sean, in your work as a psychic, with remote viewers and their work, with everybody who sort of looks through the same, I don't know, kind of lens, there's always the same problem for all, and that involves timelines.
Very difficult to get timelines correct.
And even the Bible doesn't nail it down, you're suggesting.
Or it gives multiple dates for when certain things will occur.
It's sort of like the timeline will build to a certain thing and then pushing us to the edge, so to speak.
And then when we pull back from it, here's what I see happen, is that instead of our dealing with the root cause of the event that gets us to that abyss of hatred, of prejudice, of spite, of all the lower base instincts of mankind, instead of dealing with the actual cause of this, I think we probably just look at our own destruction, deal with the symptoms, if you will, pull back from it.
But because we're not dealing with the cause, the disease, if you will, just continues to fester and become more malignant, bringing us right back to that same juncture point again at some future point in history.
All of these are possible prospects.
Now, this may be actually a fail-safe that's actually written into the code itself, that humanity, mixing humanity with too much knowledge of its own future is sort of like mixing monkeys and hand grenades or atom bombs and Jerry Springer show gaps.
And when I have these particular intuitions, I call people that I'm directly connected to.
I tell them beforehand there are, and actually certain actions have been taken.
So the two things that I saw was that he had a trip to China coming up fairly soon.
And this is not just me.
Usually when I get this, because I'm in touch with a number of other people as well who are also sensitive and intuitive, I called my intelligence contacts and said that I think that the security needs to be amped around the president in China.
And the kind of weird thing is because we're sensing energy here, we just need to make sure that the security is increased on his visit there.
There is also a foreign conference of nationals coming up here, some meeting of foreign heads of state here in the United States in December.
And when I told my friend in the intelligence agency back in August, I said, well, December is going to be a very dangerous time for the president, and security needs to be increased.
He said, do you know, by the way?
Because I gave him the date saying somewhere around the 8th of December is going to be the central point of this.
And then you move it back and forth about a week or so on either side of that.
And he said, do you know that the president is scheduled to do a major international conference here in the United States on those particular dates?
Bush's name is all through a series of various Bible codes of things that occur in the Middle East, Iraq, and Iran, through 2005 through 2006.
Now, once again, I have an interesting opinion here of a timeline shift.
Bin Laden's name is all through these things as well, but if bin Laden is dead, then it was a shock to me because a couple of months ago, when my intelligence contact said, well, then we should probably be looking for somebody named bin Laden or maybe one of his relatives.
And now that his son, Saad bin Laden, has now reported to be now taking over the terrorist network and he's operating out of Iran, I mean, there is the possibility here, another timeline, that if something does happen to the president now, that his brother Jeb Bush might very likely run in 2004, quite possibly against maybe Hillary Clinton, for example, who may step into the race if something was to actually happen to the president.
So this would actually then explain, you know, the easy part is that, you know, yes, that he's fine and that everything's okay and he wins reelection in 2004 and goes through whatever's going to go on between 2005 and 2006 here.
Do you ever see an event that you're willing to come on and say, come hell or high water, this is going to happen and it's going to happen on the following date?
I've done that a whole lot of times on this program, you know, over the course of the last, I think, 12 years or so.
And in this case, there are so many fascinating things that are occurring in the timelines that I know it sounds wishy-washy and I know it's much more spectacular to come out and say, you know, this is absolutely going to happen.
The fascinating thing about what's going on in all the research that's coming together, whether or not you take the intuitive section of it or the Bible code or the Great Pyramid, all of these things, all of these prophetic timelines are all sort of starting to crash to some sort of great crescendo, if you will.
Beginning in the fall of 2004, there's a pit in the Great Pyramid, which of course you've been to, and there's a lip on the edge of that pit that relates to the date between November of 2004 to 2005, showing that there will be one last great warning to mankind.
What that warning is, whether or not it's in the form of a solar flare or a red sky or a disease of some kind, is a warning that those who are in tune, that those who are hidden, you know, preferably everybody who listens to your program as an example, will realize that this warning is coming, that things are about to get very, very bad, and that phase one of a tribulation era begins in late 2005 to 2006.
certainly is the same you can do is psychics rap artist from the next and against the law all that make them riddance that's what we're going to do a moment if you'll just stay right there or all right scrubbing the neck a number of major events coming in the early timeline between two thousand four and two thousand five and his work for the bible code the following predict
actions i could breast brace yourselves i guess out there a little bit because it these aren't too pretty but what do you see sean okay couple of things going on with start uh...
the character watch right now is going to be saddened lot he has access to all of his family's money he's got access to major weapons and he's he's really pissed off uh...
he's in uh...
he's in iran now and that we need to start focusing on iran because i ran is going to be uh...
there's going to be a new government in iran before the spring of next year so watch for a revolution there my gut feeling is that it's not going to go it's not going to go well it's it's it's going to be a government that even though the united states in the process of subverting the iranian government now there's going to be a new government there that is not going to be what they expect uh...
you know for many many years also in the show we talked about this this third great antichrist uh...
uh...
jamaul and in the blue turban or the gentleman is going to then link up a number of these islamic terrorist organizations was going to come up out of iran and if i've been logged in iran and there's a major shift in the government there uh...
the interesting to see which way israel jumps because right now israel is is doing some of the united states dirty work in in syria and i talked about the that the weapons of mass destruction that they were looking for the uh...
the dirty nuclear devices that were smuggled out of iraq uh...
were uh...
uh...
somewhere in the albuquer valley in between lebanon and syria so that's why i think i said that actually on them on coast to coast back in august that we would have uh...
syria in the crosshairs and we would see attacks on syria sure within thirty days i think it was off by about fifteen days or so but now it israel striking in syria they're softening up some things for some strike teams to go in there and uh...
and go to war with syria july fourth two thousand four it'd be a big one uh...
july fourth two thousand four is going to be some kind of major attack on
Washington DC an explosion of some kind I I can't see right now whether or not it's a it is a truck or an aircraft but it's some something that's going to be near the Capitol building and it's going to cause I see a great deal of chaos and smoke and and there's a huge brouhaha of energy coming out of the Capitol at that time I see like troops moving in and streets closing down but a major attack on Washington D.C. coming up in the in the time frame of July 4th of 2004
and everybody's biggest fear no that's not true my biggest fear is a biological attack and you see one coming don't you well that's not only do I see one coming but all the way back in 1994 and this is this goes all the way back to the Vodger Chronicles which have been up on the web for a couple of years on my on my Delphiassociates.org website I've been talking about a major global plague coming in the fall of 2004 that between 2004 and 2006 that we would see some kind of massive
influenza virus of some kind.
Now, of course, SARS was kind of phase one of this, and I said, well, watch this particular disease because phase one of this being the SARS virus is going to then mutate into phase two of what's going to happen here.
Now, let me just preface this, and this is the interesting thing about when we were talking about intuition, that when you're trying to actually look at an event, and I've been one of the few people that's managed to come up with windows of time for these events to occur, with something like the Bible
code, and with my now having access to some of the best experts in the world on this, the man who literally discovered it, I can then call them and say, all right, look, if I'm seeing this, because here's the problem, the right-hand side of the brain, which is what gets the intuition, looks down the time stream, if you will, because of the nature of the fact that it's not constrained by time itself, it's very difficult for that part of the brain to actually tell time to get a time frame for an event.
So when you can actually put a word or a phrase or an event into the code, and then it comes out with a reasonable sentence that gives you a Hebraic year for when something is going to happen, it's pretty stunning.
Now, there is another attack on New York City in the year 5764, 2004, from the fire of a missile.
And what that missile is, airplanes could be considered missiles, whether or not that's a biological nuclear device of something, some kind but specifically 2004 and then smallpox and even this is the unique part about it when it says that in the Israeli attack smallpox specifically it even gives the exact number of people that will die in the attack in 2005 14,700
people dead in a smallpox attack 2005 in Jerusalem specifically all right good these are all trackable things good these are all so in New York next year 2004 it doesn't give us doesn't give a specific date but what we're tracking for Washington D.C. right now does the July 4th 2004 for the major attack on Washington D.C. Now the next phase of this is that my opinion has always been that after attacks on Washington D.C. that the federal government would start to move to Denver,
Colorado over the course of the latter part of this decade.
It would get to the point of where, well, already, for example, the Internal Revenue Service, the Environmental Protection Agency, over the course of the last 10 years, the federal government has been moving offices directly out there to Denver.
Let me see.
Let me go down this here because I want to be able to get all these in.
For many, many years, I've known that the trigger for a large number of prophecies and predictions that are going to happen on the West Coast are all directly linked to the eruption of Mount Rainier.
Mount Rainier is considered the most dangerous volcano in North America.
The weak side of Mount Rainier faces the city of Seattle.
There are so many people, there are something like 25,000 people that have actually built homes directly in the volcanic flumes coming down from Rainier.
So when we put this into the code, Mount Rainier, the code specifically said Mount Rainier will erupt in 1811, and it gave the first date of the eruption for Mount Rainier, and the second date it said, and will erupt also in 2005.
And now that we've had access to these things, I've taken things specifically out of my newsletter going all the way back to 1994 as an example of this.
I've asked questions of the experts and said, look, I see this particular event happening, and the code is now giving us a timeframe for those events to occur.
Well, I think with the advancements of techniques, remember when Rainier erupted in 1811, it covered the entire city of Seattle in a flume, if you will, of mud and soot.
I mean, most of the city of Seattle today is built upon the ruins of what happened to the city when it erupted in 1811.
It's also interesting, too, that when you run this in the code and you actually get an equidistant letter sequence that shows when the mountain erupted before and then gives you a future date as to when the mountain is going to erupt again, it obviously gives you something to go by.
Another classic example of this was the New Madrid Fault in the central part of the United States, because the New Madrid Fault also erupted in the early part of the 1800s.
And the Bible Code, once again, then this is what was interesting about it.
It said that the New Madrid faults ruptured, and I believe it was the same year that Mount Rainier went, because the Madrid fault was either, I think the Numadrid fault was 1811, I'm just off the top of my head, I think it's 1811 or 1812.
Then it said that there was going to be a shifting of the fault in 2006, and then double eruptions of the Numadrid fault or of the Numadrid Fault in 2010, and then again in 2011.
So here with Mount Rainier, we got two specific dates, and here with the eruption of the Numadrid Fault, we got one, two, three.
We got four dates as to when possible things were specifically going to occur.
Now, the Numadrid Fault has been, between myself and Edgar Casey, and every one of the major intuitives out there have talked about the Numadrid Fault being the center point for specifically the United States of America, the dividing point of America.
It was one of the original predictions that Casey talked about back in the 1930s, that the Mississippi River would become 100 miles wide, that you would then have the Great Lakes actually then emptying into the Gulf of Mexico.
So once again, here's something that comes from the psychic realm or the intuitive realm, and we plug it into this computer program, if you will, and it comes up with a coherent sentence that then gives you very specific information about what's going on.
The rest of this, as far as just talking about things that we've seen.
Once again, if you're looking at 2004, specifically November, you have November of 2004 as being the beginning of the great warning for mankind given by the Great Pyramid of Giza however many thousands of years ago.
You have 2004, remember, things always seem to happen in the fall because it seems to follow the Hebrew-Jewish calendar for some reason.
After September, October, the fiscal year sort of begins.
That at that time, I think it's going to be a great choice for humanity.
This is what's going to happen next month with the harmonic concordance, which happens November 8th through the 11th.
The harmonic concordance is a very specific alignment of planets that are going to form a double grand trine, literally the star of David, over a group of cities around the world.
There are going to be celebrations of this in Machu Picchu, in Lhasa, Tibet, in Cairo, Egypt.
That's one of the reasons why we're leading the tour to Egypt there now.
It's a focal point of energy that will be an outpouring Of positive energy, of the love force, if you will, an opening of the sky, showing that this will be an ignition, it'll be what I call a spiritual polar shift, that this will be the ignition of the Christ force, of the messianic force within each one of us at that point in time.
And if people are focused on something positive, and I think it's going to be the great decision.
I think that we now have within us from 2003 to 2004, the choice we're going to be given is going to be a very clear choice between life, between peace, between political and economic prosperity, if you will, to an economy and a civilization based on death, literally, that is going to lead the world into a necrosphere.
Events, whether you want to talk about the weather, you want to talk about geologic events or anything else, the kind of thing that you talk about, we're rushing toward something really big.
I think you said it earlier, and I feel it, and I've felt it for some time now, and I still feel it.
I feel an increased pressure, as though we are moving toward an event of some great magnitude.
It is the literal symbolism of Aquarius, that you have the man of the stars walking across the stars, pouring out the water of wisdom upon the entire planet.
I think it's just going to have to be with a large portion of humanity that is going to choose the good.
And that by choosing the good, by every single one of our smallest actions, we can turn the entire universe towards the good, towards merit, if you will.
And there's going to be a division in society.
I think that it's never been about a plus or minus, if you will, in either or.
I see all three paths happening at the same time.
You see the people moving into the pit, if you will, continuing to go downwards, living the necrosphere, living the death lifestyle, if you will.
You have the material people in the middle who just really don't care one way or the other.
And you have a group of people that are constantly on the path towards ascension.
And all three of these paths of evolution all are happening on the planet at the same time.
And even when I think things begin to occur in 2005, I think the biggest thing is going to be an economic collapse, a gigantic collapse of the economy and the stock market.
Because there's money being pumped into something, specifically, and I think it's one of the reasons why they're changing the money now to the peach $20 bills.
Because I see what's going to happen is that they're going to establish a double currency.
One is going to be a foreign currency, which they're going to call redbacks, or something that's going to be a colored type of money for outside the United States, and then currency for within the United States.
You're going to see a hyperinflation of currency by 2005 that is going to be coupled with a pretty substantial economic collapse around that time.
This is when I, and I've always predicted this from the beginning.
For all the time I've been on your show, and I've been saying people called me nuts when I said the stock market was going to go to $4,000, then to $5,000, then to $8,000, then to $10,000, and then to $12,000.
I'll stick with my prediction that I've been making on the show from the beginning, that the low end, by 2005, within about two years or so, I saw the market going to somewhere around $15,000 or so.
Between $14,000, just underneath $15,000.
It's going to be the barrier the same as $12,000 was.
As a matter of fact, the NASDAQ is going to be, because it's going to be genetic technologies, it's going to be computers.
I said back in January that the two biggest buys were to buy Apple Computer and Pixar.
And now we've got Finding Nemo making, however, almost $1 billion.
You've got the introduction of the G5 supercomputer, which I predicted back in January, with these stocks going up.
And a lot of the technical stocks, specifically for gene sequencing and DNA, and a lot of the things that they're finding now for everything from tanning to sexuality to appetite control.
Everything that they're doing with genetics now is just now starting to filter down into the market.
Now, there's probably, I don't know, 10 or 12 different things that you can write down that he just said.
And we'll hold him to them.
But in the past, John's been pretty good.
we're going to take a break, and when we come back on the other side, prepare yourself for one of the greatest minds in the world: that of Dr. Michio Kaku.
In the middle of the night, you're listening to Coast to Close AM.
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Coast to Close AM Be it sight, sand, or the smell of the touch, the something inside that we need so much.
The sight of a touch, or the scent of a sand, or the strength of an oak roots deep in the ground.
The wonder of flowers to be covered and then to burst up through tarmac to the sun again.
Or to fly to the sun without burning a wing, to lie in the meadow and hear the grass sing, and all these things in our memories home.
From the Houston to Calvary's to the fire.
Right, right that she saw, take this place, on this trip, just for me.
Right, right that she saw, take this place, on this trip, just for me.
Wanna take a ride?
Call Art Bell from west of the Rockies at 1-800-618-8255.
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Dr. Michiu Kaku, one of the world's greatest minds, is an internationally recognized authority in theoretical physics and the environment.
He holds the Henry Summit professorship, rather, in theoretical physics at the City College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.
He has lectured around the world, and his PhD-level texts are required reading at many of the top physics laboratories around the world.
Dr. Kaku graduated from Harvard in 1968, Summo Kumlaud, and number one in his physics class.
He received a Ph.D. from the University of California at Berkeley Radiation Laboratory in 1972.
He has held a lectureship at Princeton University in 1973, then joined the faculty at the City University of New York, where he's been a professor of theoretical physics now for 25 years.
His goal is to help complete Einstein's dream of a theory of everything.
That would be a single equation, perhaps it said, no more than one inch long, which would unify all the fundamental forces in the universe.
That's some goal to have, isn't it?
in a moment we'll begin a journey with dr Thank you.
Lots of questions to ask you through the night, so we'll just have fun.
Actually, somebody just fast-blasted me the question that I had anyway.
Somebody sent me this thing showing the universe as a sort of a faceted soccer ball, suggesting that the universe is finite, that you really, if you went past one edge of a soccer ball, you just re-enter the soccer ball from the opposite side.
If you take a look at the Earth, for example, the Earth looks infinite in two dimensions.
If you're an ant on the Earth or this soccer ball, the Earth looks infinite in two dimensions.
But in three dimensions, the Earth is finite.
It's just nothing but a ball, a bubble.
In the same way, our universe could be infinite in three dimensions, such that if you fire an arrow, the arrow never hits a brick wall that says the end of the universe.
There's no such thing as the end of the universe.
But if you take a look from the fourth dimension, the universe is finite.
It's nothing but a bubble.
So in other words, things which look infinite in three dimensions will actually look finite in hyperspace, from a higher dimensional space.
So people ask, you know, what is the universe expanding into?
If the universe is a bubble or a soccer ball and it's expanding into something, what is it expanding into?
And it's expanding into hyperspace.
It's expanding into a higher dimension.
Just like Columbus showed that the Earth is round because it bends in a higher dimension.
That is the third dimension.
Einstein showed that the universe could be finite.
It's a bubble because the universe bends in a higher dimension that we cannot see, the fourth dimension.
Yes, you all have pretty well figured it out now, haven't you, in terms of what we consider to be the edge of the universe or the very first hunk, oh, the Big Bang.
This year, there's been a spectacular flood of data coming from what is called a WMAP satellite.
This has shocked cosmologists because we finally got definitive numbers.
The WMAP satellite orbiting the Earth right now has given us baby pictures of the Big Bang, baby pictures of the universe when it was just a little tight.
We now know that the universe's age is 13.7 billion years.
All the textbooks, every textbook is now going to be revised this year because of the WMAP satellite, which is orbiting the Earth right now.
That is the age of the universe, which is consistent now with all the discoveries that we know about stars.
It used to be kind of embarrassing because we used to think that stars were about maybe 12, 13 billion years old, the oldest stars, but that the universe was only maybe 10 billion years old.
And so how can a mother be younger than their daughter, right?
You know, people often say the temperature of outer space is 3 degrees above absolute zero.
Well, that is the temperature of the Big Bang today.
The Big Bang is cooled down.
Shock waves are reverberating throughout the universe.
And the afterglow, the afterglow of that Big Bang is now about 3 degrees or 2.7 degrees above absolute zero.
And that's the microwave range.
And that's too small to be picked up by the human eye, but it can be picked up by satellite.
And so our latest satellite data from the WMAP satellite has given us gorgeous photographs of this afterglow of the Big Bang, the shockwave of the Big Bang itself that is still echoing throughout the universe and still can be photographed.
What you see is little dots and irregularities on the surface of this baby bubble.
Think of a bubble that is only 379,000 light years across.
And these little ripples correspond to the galaxies and galactic clusters of today.
So you can actually see the baby formation of the baby galaxies back then that have now expanded to give us the Milky Way galaxy and the Andromeda Galaxy and the galactic clusters.
And so that's what you see when you see this baby picture of the Big Bang.
So think of a bubble.
Think of a bubble that is maybe three times the size of the Milky Way galaxy with ripples on the surface, ripples on the surface.
And this bubble is expanding very rapidly.
It's expanding at the speed of light.
That's what we've been able to photograph now with the WMAP satellite.
And it agrees with all the experimental data.
And so we now have perhaps the most definitive look at the early universe.
Now, what is also shocking scientists is that not only do we have the numbers now, but we can also show that the universe is made out of new kinds of matter and energy that we still cannot explain.
The WMAP satellite shows that only 4% of the universe is made out of atoms that we can see and touch.
The 100 elements that our chemistry teacher beat into us when we were in high school, hydrogen, helium, lithium, beryllium going up to uranium.
Only 4%, 4% of the universe is made out of atoms that we can see and touch.
4%.
23% is made out of dark matter.
That is matter that is invisible, totally invisible, but has weight.
And 73%, and this is a real killer, 73% of the matter energy content of the universe is dark energy, the energy of nothing, the vacuum energy, the zero-point energy that Nikola Tesla talked about in the last century.
But I have what has been published, and I went through them looking for the energy of nothing.
He thought that we could get infinite amount of energy from nothing, and that would solve the energy problem simply by extracting energy from the vacuum.
Well, today we do know that 73% of the entire matter-energy content of the universe is dark energy.
So it's out there, huge quantities of dark energy.
However, it's dispersed.
It's dispersed across the universe, so it's very hard to extract.
And I looked at his collected works, and he speculates.
He speculates about this, but there are no experiments.
There are no experiments showing that he can extract this energy from nothing into something that you could use to drive a toaster or drive your light bulbs in your house.
Well, my guess would be, Professor, that if there were notes about such an experiment, that might be part of the section that you might not have access to.
He lived in the New Yorker Hotel here in New York.
And he was deathly afraid of being poisoned.
And he had special cooks prepare his food every day.
And as a consequence, it was pretty easy for RCA and other big corporations to perhaps swindle him.
This, of course, is still historical conjecture.
But it's conjectured that a lot of the big boys were able to swindle him because he was not savvy with the law.
He did not have teams of lawyers to protect his patents.
And as a consequence, it was pretty easy for the big boys to rip off his inventions, which are now incorporated into the fabric of radio and television.
I've written a new biography of Einstein, looking at him from a fresh point of view, from the point of view of today.
We do have theories about hyperspace and theories about cosmology that Einstein could only dream about.
And Einstein comes out right on top.
We can now verify his theory to within 99.7% accuracy.
We do this by satellites again.
By analyzing neutron stars in outer space that orbit each other, we can actually test the limits of general relativity.
And we find out that Einstein's theory holds up to within 99.7% accuracy, which is the limit of our observational equipment.
And what Einstein did was he set off this enormous chase to find a theory of everything, which is now consuming the entire world of physics.
So you cannot go to any laboratory in the world without bumping into string theory, end theory, the 11th, 10th dimension.
This is a talk of the town.
And this is what Einstein set into motion, even though people thought of him as being senile and over the hill.
And so I decided to write a new biography of Einstein to set the record straight, to really put him into proper perspective from the modern point of view.
One is the quantum theory, and the other is relativity.
Everything we know about the universe comes from two theories.
First of all, Einstein founded relativity all by himself.
He was the godfather of the quantum theory.
He was the one who invented the photon.
The photon is his creation.
In fact, he got the Nobel Prize for the photon.
So he was the godfather of the quantum theory.
But what he wanted was a grand synthesis, this grand synthesis of both theories, both relativity and the quantum theory, both a theory of the Big Bang and black holes, as well as a theory of electrons and protons.
He wanted this grand synthesis in an equation perhaps no more than one inch long that would allow him to, quote, read the mind of God.
That was the goal, to read God's thoughts.
And he wrote about this toward the latter part of his life, and he never got there.
But he set the path, he set the trail, and today we physicists are following in his footsteps.
And so I think that all the biographies of Einstein, who skipped the last 30 years of his life as an embarrassment, that he was over the hills, senile, didn't know what he was talking about, all those biographies of Einstein, I think, are wrong.
And that from a modern perspective, we now realize that he was quite prophetic, quite prophetic in pointing the arrow in a new direction, that is, toward the unification of everything.
And that's the biggest game in town right now.
People think that that's where the next series of Nobel Prizes will lie, is in the theory of everything.
Let's say you got your one-inch equation and we got there.
We got the theory of everything.
What would that, if you translate that to what it would mean for society, what it would mean for the world, and for everybody who lives on the planet right now, what would it mean?
Then we're going to have to see what applications there are.
Now, this year, the first set of gravity wave detectors just went online.
These are some of the biggest scientific instruments on the face of the planet Earth.
They're based in Hanford, Washington, and Louisiana.
It's called LIGO.
It's for laser interferometry.
It's a gravity wave detector, and it will detect vibrations from colliding black holes in outer space.
Colliding black holes, colliding neutron stars, they create shockwaves of gravity that are very weak, but these gigantic laser facilities are sensitive enough to begin to detect some of these things.
And within 15 years, we're going to send LISA into orbit around the Earth.
NASA has given preliminary approval now for LISA.
These are three satellites orbiting the Sun, which will pick up the vibrations from the Big Bang itself.
And that should clinch it.
We should be able to clinch many of these theories of the universe by looking for shock waves, gravity shock waves now, not light shock waves like microwaves, but gravity shock waves from the Big Bang.
And we'll do that within about 15 years when Lisa goes up into outer space and nails it to the wall.
This could be it.
This could be the beginning of a whole string of Nobel Prizes concerning the theory of everything when Lisa goes up into orbit.
First of all, it may settle once and for all the question of time machines and wormholes.
If you were to talk to Stephen Hawking, whether or not time travel really is possible, whether or not you can drill a hole in space and leap into Andromeda Galaxy, he would say that, well, you know, Einstein's theory fails at that energy.
These are enormous energies.
Einstein's theory fails.
You have to go to a higher theory, which is what Einstein was searching for.
And so the leading theory, as I said before, is superstring theory.
And this could settle it.
This could settle once and for all whether or not we can bend time into a pretzel.
People are taking bets now as to whether or not wormholes are stable, whether or not you can rip time and bend it into a pretzel, and punch a hole in space and leap into hyperspace.
You know, I think it was the last program we did together, and the theory had just been proffered, which I asked the professor about, that everything was actually moving away from everything, and that one day we would look out, and other than the close-in planets, and maybe our own star, everything else in the distant future would be virtually gone.
We would be alone, more alone and frozen than ever.
Yeah, in principle, the WMAP satellite has shown us that the rate of expansion of the universe is accelerating.
This dark energy, which makes up 73% of the matter-energy content of the universe, is anti-gravity.
It's pushing the galaxies apart.
So we have the gravity of Newton, but then we have the anti-gravity of Einstein, which is pushing the galaxies apart and creating an accelerating universe.
So the universe is getting bigger and bigger, faster and faster.
And at some point, it could be quite lonely.
At some point, all the galaxies will be so far away we won't be able to see them.
And our galaxy and our neighboring galaxies could be perhaps alone in the universe.
And it'd be quite cold then, too.
The universe will be much colder than it is today.
The stars will gradually blink out.
The universe will be quite dark.
The stars will exhaust their nuclear fuels.
Even black holes will gradually evaporate most of their energy.
And of course, this is trillions of years in the future.
But it does mean that all intelligent life in the universe is doomed to freeze to death with one possible exception.
I think there's only one way to escape the inevitability that all intelligent life in the universe is doomed.
And that would be to leave the universe.
That is, we physicists now, looking at the WMAP data very carefully, see that inflation is a theory called inflation, which seems to fit all the data coming out of the WMAP satellite.
And inflation, in turn, predicts the existence of parallel universes.
And these are bubble universes, and Alan Guth, the physicist at MIT who proposed this idea, may eventually get the Nobel Prize if it continues to hold up with all the satellite data coming in.
And the foundation of inflation is parallel universes.
Well, because in 500 or 30 dimensions, you have all sorts of mathematical anomalies, divergences, and things which kill you.
It turns out that there are magic numbers in mathematics, and these are the magic numbers of string theory, in which all these divergences, all these anomalies, all these things that screw you up cancel miraculously.
And so in these dimensions, you have a self-consistent mathematical universe.
Now, the man who figured out these magic numbers did that about 100 years ago.
He was an Indian mystic called Ramanujan, perhaps one of the greatest mathematicians of the last century.
And his life was so fantastic, they made a Hollywood movie about it.
And if we were to see one of these things, it would look like an explosion.
It would look like a rather violent explosion as our bubble universe begins to fission and sprout a baby universe from it.
And we think that this sprouting could take place through black holes.
And again, these gamma-ray bursters are, we now believe, are the formation of black holes.
So the mystery of these gamma-ray bursters has gradually been solved now.
What happens is when these gamma-ray bursters take place, they have a pulse of energy that dies down very rapidly within a matter of minutes.
And so by that time, when our satellites look in the direction of the gamma-ray burster, it's gone.
So this is one of the frustrations of the last 20 years, that these titanic explosions, explosions that could theoretically destroy a galaxy, die down so rapidly that we cannot see the embers of these explosions.
We now have detectors in Japan and detectors in, I think, in the desert of near New Mexico, which detects these gigantic bursts of radiation high in the upper ionosphere.
And they're caused by cosmic rays, which we think in turn are caused by things like the collision of black holes.
So we're looking for titanic events, gamma-ray bursters, colliding black holes, that will release these particles, which in turn hit the ionosphere and create what is called a cascade.
A huge cascade, which then interrupts radio transmissions.
One are these gamma-ray bursters, and we now think we have solved the mystery of gamma-ray bursters.
And the other is colliding black holes in outer space.
Now, these gamma-ray bursters, we now believe, are the formation of black holes.
We see black holes in outer space.
We see them in the center of the Milky Way galaxy.
Right in our own backyard, there's a black hole in the center of the Milky Way galaxy.
It points to the constellation Sagittarius, and there's a black hole right there in the constellation Sagittarius.
But we now believe that these black holes are way the hell out, outside our galaxy, in fact.
And when these black holes collapse, they emit radiation through their north and south pole.
So think of a spinning top, a spinning top with a disk with a north pole and a south pole.
The radiation shoots out through the north pole and the south pole.
And if that radiation is pointed toward the earth, if that north pole is pointed toward the earth, then you have enough radiation to send a shockwave billions of light years, perhaps halfway across the visible universe.
That's the power of these gamma-ray bursters.
They are the largest explosions in the entire universe.
And we now believe that they are caused by hypernova.
Well, we used to think that an ordinary supernova, a garden variety supernova, that took place within about 100 light years of the Earth, would be enough to wipe out life on the planet.
We used to think that the dinosaurs were wiped out by a supernova.
Now, of course, we believe that a comet or meteor hit the Yucatan of Mexico 65 million years ago.
But before that, we used to believe that perhaps a supernova would take place, and that would obliterate life on Earth.
And if you look at what's near the Earth, Betelgeuse is a red giant star.
Fortunately, it's outside that range, but it will explode.
It could explode any minute.
It's a gigantic star in the constellation of Orion.
In fact, it makes the shoulder of Orion.
And it could explode tomorrow, a thousand years from now.
So then it's possible, then, that life in various locations comes and goes in instants, in flashes, when a hypernova goes, kaboom, that's it for who knows how many life forms.
And then you'd be incinerated by the power of this thing.
Wow.
And we do think that in the distant past, in the distant past, our Earth was probably bathed by the light of a supernova.
However, we've scanned out to several hundred light years, and we don't see any stars other than stars like Betelgeuse that are unstable and could go off any minute, in fact.
Well, eventually, mankind, I guess, is going to have to get the equivalent of satellites way out where, well, gee, they wouldn't be able to tell us, would they?
When they saw it, it'd be speed of light to get the information back to us.
Do you think they would see Beetlejuice doing a little Beetlejuice dance just before...
Yes, I understand.
But I mean, would there be additional quakes and warnings and flashes and things that astronomers, I don't know, might be able to observe before the big event?
We have these satellites in orbit, and they can locate these gamma-ray bursters.
They can locate these things right after they occur.
But again, this is only within the last five years.
Only within the last five years have we been able to have a very rapid, rapid shifting of telescopes so that we can zero in on the embers of hypernovas.
Professor Kaku and I, I think, share an affinity for the movie Contact.
As you know, it's really set me off.
Anyway, I remember in the very beginning of that movie how we zoomed back from Earth at the speed of light and heard our broadcast deteriorating and going back in time.
Oh my God, it was dramatic.
Well, on the website, Coast to Coast I AM right now.
I've got something that I put up yesterday called The Power of Ten.
You must go and see it before they take it off.
It's called The Power of Ten.
And it opens with a picture of Earth from 10 million light years away, zooms in at a factor of 10, and another 10, another 10, and so on, down to the virtual quarks in an atom of a leaf near Florida.
And what struck me when I watched this was the similarity between when you were really way out there and how incredibly much there was and how tiny everything was and the breadth of it all.
And then by the time you got down to Quarks, it looked kind of the same.
You know, the magnificent everything that was out there.
And then by the time you're down to the tiniest thing, there too.
Has that ever hit you how similar it is when there's everything, and then when you're down into the middle of the tiniest nothing, there's some kind of similarity?
There's a new law of physics opening up each time you go to a new realm.
And so the world of quarks obeys what is called the quantum theory.
But the world of the very large, when we talk about 10 million light years, right, the world of the very large obeys the theory of relativity.
And so the astonishing thing is that even though we can go by powers of 10 from the quarks all the way to the Big Bang and the larger universe and back again, physics, we can't do that yet.
Physics is not continuous.
We have the theory of the very big and we have the theory of the very small, and the two theories have to be unified together to give us a theory that will work over all these powers of 10.
And we don't have that yet.
That, of course, is what we think string theory will solve.
We think that is the leading candidate, which will give us a theory that is uniform throughout all these powers of 10.
But right now we have to use two theories in order to understand these two realms, the realm of the atom and the realm of the galaxies and the universe.
That little one-inch, perhaps one-inch equation that would bring everything together, Professor, if I were to ask you for, you know, I asked you to tell us what it would bring us.
If you had that solved, what kind of bomb could you make?
Well, the energy at which this theory operates is what is called the Planck energy.
That's 10 to the 19 billion electron volts.
That's the energy with which you create a baby universe.
That's the energy at which you can, that space-time become unstable.
If I had a microwave oven, for example, and I could heat it up to the Planck energy, which you can't, of course, but if you could, then bubbles would form inside your microwave oven.
Little bubbles would form, and these bubbles would be gateways, gateways to other universes.
They would be like umbilical cords connecting you to other universes.
Now, then the question is, how destructive could this be, right?
If you harness the power, yes, from you would in some sense have the power of a god, in the sense that you'd be able to create a baby universe.
You'd be able to be your own God, creating a little universe in your microwave oven.
Now, when the universe, of course, creates and expands, it does not expand in your universe.
There's an umbilical cord connecting you through hyperspace to another bubble, which then expands.
So your microwave oven is not going to explode or anything, but you will, in some sense, be a creator of another bubble, which then begins to inflate.
And these are called baby universes.
And Stephen Hawking has written quite extensively about this.
And it's a remarkable field of study for physicists to calculate the energy at which you could become like a god and create your own little baby universe that would fission off your universe.
From your universe, it would look like a black hole.
Now, suppose that you came upon this equation and unleashed this, or have the power to unleash it and give the world the kind of power you're talking about, godlike power.
Wouldn't you think twice or three times before you said, hey, I got it?
However, you know, as I've mentioned before, a type 3 civilization with galactic power would have the power to manipulate the Planck energy.
But by the time they are type 3, they've already gone through so many stages.
They've gone through so many millennia by which they could settle their sectarian, religious, fundamentalist, nationalistic, racial problems.
They've had so many millennia Being a planetary civilization, a stellar civilization, a galactic civilization, they've had a long time to settle their differences.
Yeah, I would expect that by the time we encounter a Type 3 civilization in our galaxy, or by the time we become a Type 3 civilization, any such civilization will have had millennia to work out planetary, stellar, galactic differences that they would not be so rapacious and so barbaric.
unidentified
So we wouldn't end up with a Star Trek Q. Yeah, well, of course, Q is malicious.
Well, yes, but how many godlike renegades does one need?
I mean, it could be awful.
Now, you're suggesting that we would mature, and with wisdom, there'd be peace everywhere and everything by the time we could get to that kind of knowledge and manipulation of forces.
unidentified
Yeah, well, there's always a possibility of aberration.
So when we encounter a Type III civilization, that is a civilization that can actually reach us.
Smaller civilizations don't have the energy to actually reach us on the planet Earth.
These civilizations are too far away.
But a Type III would have the capability to reach us.
By the time they attain that capability, I would expect that they have had plenty of time to work out internal differences.
Now, my only fear is that if we do encounter one of these advanced civilizations, they may not think too highly of us.
They may, in their own wisdom, treat other Type III civilizations with dignity, but we may be like ants to them, in which case we may not benefit from their technology simply because we're too small.
By the way, are you depressed over the general state of our space program right now, which is, you know, low orbit, messing around, and we're not adventurous.
We're not going back to the moon.
We're not going to Mars.
We don't have plans to do anything.
Is that as it should be because of the distances and cost involved?
22,000 miles out, we have satellites which are stationary.
Like when you get satellite TV, your dish is stationary, pointed at a stationary satellite, which is moving, of course, but it moves at the same rate that the Earth spins.
And if you were to launch a space shuttle, for example, and drape this cable from the geosynchronous satellite, and just like, you know, a fishing reel, you unravel it, you unravel the reel from the satellite, then essentially you would have this long cable essentially descending from the heavens down to the planet Earth.
It, of course, is a question of getting these carbon nanotubes to become fibers and cables that are thousands of miles long.
It would have to be at least 22,000 miles long in order to get this off the ground.
But at the rate we are creating carbon nanotubes within 15 years, it's projected that the cost will drop considerably, and we'll be able to string a cable to a satellite, and that could reduce the cost of space travel by a factor of 100.
Also, now it takes, what, 18,000 miles an hour plus to escape Earth's gravity, but you're telling me the space elevator could just slowly and easily...
To the traveler who would get in the elevator on the bottom floor, probably at the Cape, and push the up button, what would you experience as you went up?
The official website of Coast to Coast AM is www.coastacoastam.com.
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Left its seeds while I was sleeping And the vision that was planted in my brain Still remains within the sound of silence In restless dreams I walked alone Barrow streets of Conquestone
Near the hill of Hay Streetland I turned my collar to the cold and damp When my eyes were stared by the flash of a neon light It slipped the night I can touch the sound of silence
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This is Coast to Coast AM with Arpell from the Kingdom of Nive.
You know, when Simon and Garfunkel were interviewed about this song, they were questioned quite directly about what it meant, and they said it meant nothing.
And I just never bought that.
Michio Kaku, Dr. Kaku is here and he'll be right back.
Many of you will recall that I had an expert on nanotechnology a couple weekends ago, and he just was talking like crazy about carbon nanotubes and the space elevator and the application.
And nanotechnology, by the way, is going to be a big business within the next few decades.
However, I should also point out that there are some people like Prince Charles of England who think that nanotechnology is going to doom all humanity within a very short period of time.
And I think that we have to put things into proper perspective.
Some people are threatened by nanotechnology because of the possibility of creating goo.
That is self-replicating molecules that simply reproduce themselves like a virus and simply reproduce themselves so that we humans are pushed out of existence by a gray goo.
However, I should point out that even if we have a desktop computer and we ask a computer to replicate itself, it can't do it.
Even machines that are the size of a table, it would be quite difficult to build a machine that could replicate itself.
And at the present time, we know that DNA can do it.
But molecules at the present time are very primitive when we try to manipulate them.
We have never built a mechanical gear yet.
We've never built a mechanical ball bearing.
We've never built a mechanical lever.
So far, we've built an atomic abacus.
We've built atomic letters of the alphabet.
But no one has ever built a mechanical, I mean, atomic ball bearing, lever, pulley, let alone something as complicated as a PC at the molecular level.
And so I think we're literally decades, perhaps maybe a century, away from even coming close to creating an atomic machine that could replicate itself when we can't even make a PC replicate itself.
But I mean, where's the hole in the gray goo idea?
Because once you can cause that kind of replication, that's going to be the basis of, I would think, most of the practical application and one little oops.
Well, we have to put things into proper time perspective.
We're talking about technology 50 to 100 years away from now, because at the present time, we can't even build an atomic machine like an atomic hammer, let alone an atomic device that can self-replicate itself.
Well, while we're on the subject of OOP stuff, I want to ask you about two separate things.
One is HARP.
You know what that is, right?
That's right.
And the other is places like Fermilab and CERN.
I want to ask you about the possibility of OOP stuff.
Now, HARP, of course, is blowing holes in, heating the atmosphere, doing all kinds of weird things.
Are you completely comfortable that they're actually trying to produce with harmonics some kind of chain reaction in our ionosphere and in various layers near the ionosphere?
They're trying to produce a kind of a chain reaction.
And if we monkey with it, we could cause, you know, severe damage to it because it's quite thin and it doesn't take that many molecules of injection to create disturbances there.
And so I think that this is a project that has far outlived its original rationale as a Cold War weapon device.
They're cranking up to about a billion watts of energy, which of course is directed a wide beam from the Earth.
And this is what's so different.
It hits the ionosphere sort of as a small spot beam.
It actually gets thinner until it gets to the ionosphere.
And then they're talking about putting these low-frequency harmonics in to create this incredibly low-frequency resonance that'll, it's just all kind of freaky.
What about Fermilab and CERN and places like that where they're doing some things that might have a surprise or two for us?
Well, what happened was there was a letter to Scientific American a few years ago where somebody just casually mentioned, can a black hole be created by an atom smasher and eat up the earth?
Yes.
Well, that letter was then picked up by the Sunday London Times.
And then the Sunday London Times blasted all over the entire media saying that a black hole in Long Island with the Rick accelerator is going to eat up the Earth.
And so we physicists then had to very carefully explain to the public that there are real dangers to black holes and things like that, but our accelerators can't even come close, can't even come close to the power of a black hole.
Well, you see, we have to put threats on a very firm physical basis.
We have cosmic rays that come in from out of space, cosmic rays that come from outer space that are much more energetic than anything that could be produced by the CERN machine.
And the CERN machine and the Fermulab machine are very pale, very pale replications of what Mother Nature does all the time.
And so we have experience.
We have experience doing this thing.
However, HARP is going into uncharted territory.
It's a very thin atmosphere up there.
We don't know precisely what's going to happen.
There's no need to communicate with our nuclear submarines anymore, because what are they going to fire at?
So why are we continuing to try to communicate with nuclear subs when we don't really have to have super sophisticated devices to do that?
Oh, you know, I saw this wild story yesterday that while we're, I guess, on the subject, North Korea is threatening to test a nuke for the world to see.
They actually, the Pynyang News Agency gave this thing out, this news conference, apparently, where they say they're about to demonstrate, I forget how they put it, demonstrate their power or something or another, but it sure sounds like a test coming maybe above ground.
And he said that we're not going to give them a non-aggression pact, which then stokes their suspicion that we are going to be aggressive and that we are going to invade them, which increases their paranoia.
I think that every military analyst that has looked at the logistics of a war in Korea would say that within a matter of minutes, Seoul, the capital of South Korea, would be hit with a barrage of artillery shells and would be flattened within a period of a few hours and then occupied within a period of two or three days.
And it would take months, months for the United States to mount a counter, counter-invasion of an occupied South Korea.
While the North Koreans could do it within a matter of hours, that's the trump card that North Korea has, that the capital of South Korea is literally just a few miles south of the demilitarized zone.
So in some sense, the entire South Korean people are being held hostage with these banks of artillery shells just north of the demilitarized zone.
It's a hair trigger.
And so every military analyst in the Pentagon that's looked at it has stated that the casualties would probably be in the millions.
We're not talking about an Iraq situation with guerrilla warfare and maybe 100 GIs dying.
We're talking about casualties in the millions, okay, because of the very bad logistics, the very bad geography that we have there, that the capital of South Korea is right next to the war zone and could be destroyed within a matter of hours by thousands of artillery shells.
Yeah, in other words, one group would say we won because the other side is blowing back to the year 5000 B.C. And we're only blowing back to the year 2000 B.C. They have bronze and we have iron, therefore we win.
Well, if the North Koreans were to attack first, which I don't think they would do because it would be suicide, the United States would retaliate and basically flatten North Korea.
There are nuclear weapons in the area.
Believe it or not, they're stationed on ships and they're stationed on aircraft.
Well, if the North Koreans were to invade first, which I don't think they're going to do, it would be suicide.
I think at that point, the President of the United States would say this is war.
Now, I think we could defuse the whole crisis by urging the Chinese to broker a mega-deal with North Korea so that the North Korean government would have the right to exist.
Because that's really all they want.
They just want a guarantee, whether it's in writing or whether it's in the form of nuclear weapons.
They want a guarantee that they're going to exist.
And as a consequence, we have not even seen Kim Jong-il in the last several months because he's desperately afraid that he's going to be taken out by a bunker buster.
I think we should broker some deal, and I think China is in a good position to do that, because the North Koreans trust the Chinese, and we can deal with the Chinese, because, you know, after all, Kmart is flooded with Chinese goods.
So I think we're in a situation where the North Koreans will opt for a compromise.
They've even said that, quote, everything is on the table.
That's a quote from the North Korean government.
Everything is on the table.
And rather than having loose nukes, rather than having all these nuclear weapons, you know, wind up on the open market someplace, God forbid, I think we should broker some kind of deal.
It's much better than losing millions of people in a war in the Korean Peninsula, which would be fought over a matter of days.
If they go ahead and they light one off above ground as a demonstration and then politely come back and suggest we sign that pact, do you think that would politically push the United States and the President into a position where they had no choice and had to sign?
And in some sense, time is on their side because the longer we dither and the longer we insist upon multilateral talks versus bilateral talks, the more time they have to reprocess the fuel, the more time they have to assemble a crude nuclear device and test one of these damn things.
So I think that we're losing valuable time dickering over the shape of the table.
What we should do is get the Chinese to broker a deal whereby the North Koreans feel that we're not going to attack them in exchange for giving up their nuclear stockpile.
At a certain point, the North Koreans will finally say that we have our security blanket.
We don't need a non-aggression pact from America.
We will keep what we have.
At that point, we're going to be worse off.
And I think the Bush administration, in its watch, during its watch, will have to justify the fact that during their tenure, the North Koreans became a nuclear power.
We'll have a chance to prevent them from becoming a nuclear power.
Coming up on the top of the hour, we'll take a brief break and be right back with Professor Michio Kaku from the high desert, moving through the night like a great dream.
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And pieces of it now are beginning to create icebergs, which could actually affect shipping in that area.
And this week, it was announced that the Patagonian ice fields of South America, near the South Pole, one of the largest ice fields on the surface of the Earth, its rate of melting has doubled since the 50s.
And it loses ice at the rate of 10 cubic miles per year.
And yeah, and this, by the way, does in fact contribute to sea rise.
In fact, 9% of the sea rise on the planet Earth comes from the melting of the Patagonian ice fields.
About 30% of sea level rise comes from the melting of the Alaskan ice fields.
And it's accelerating.
And what is disturbing is that the temperature rise at the poles are three to six times faster than the temperature rise over the rest of the Earth, which in turn is quite dramatic.
Well, the darker side is that it's going to affect agriculture, in which case all hell breaks loose when the farmers get angry that droughts and massive flooding is ruining the breadbasket of America.
And at that point, the President of the United States is going to have to take notice of this, or else he's not going to become the President of the United States in the second term.
So I think it's going to affect agriculture pretty soon.
Already the bloom dates, the bloom dates of many crops are shifting dramatically.
And this, of course, means that bees and birds and insects are not synchronized yet.
And so we have all these life cycles that have been synchronized for millions of years being thrown a kilter because plants bloom earlier, insects thrive in a much more warmer climate.
And so we're going to see more mosquitoes, more pests, and we're going to see growing seasons thrown a kilter because of this.
And we're also going to see more drought and more flooding and more monster hurricanes.
Well, it's a very sad statement to make, but humanity doesn't wake up until it's staring catastrophe in the face.
This time, however, it may be too late.
By the time most people wake up to the fact that the Earth is heating up and that their SUVs and fossil fuel consumption is driving it, by the time they wake up to that fact, it may be too late to reverse much of the damage.
Well, at a certain point, we're going to hit the point of no return.
That is, we'll be dumping so much carbon dioxide in the atmosphere that to reverse it would require a wrenching of the whole economy of the planet Earth, in which case we would have depressions and riots and things.
And I think that right now we're getting to the point where the nations of the Earth are beginning to realize how dangerous this is.
However, you know, the President of the United States is an oilman, and the oil people don't think that this is a crisis at all.
It could be runaway in the sense that the more gas you release, the more gas you can release.
Like I said, the melting of tundra releases methane, which creates a vicious cycle.
And so the more carbon dioxide you release, the more greenhouse gases you can release as a consequence.
And that would accelerate things.
And I think what's going to happen is that this is just going to keep on going until at some point the President of the United States realizes, oh, my God, I'm not going to get elected anymore.
The farmers are angry at me.
The homeowners are angry at me.
Mosquitoes everywhere.
Monster hurricanes, droughts, famines, the collapsing of the breadbasket of America.
At that point, he'll say, oh, my God, gee, maybe the scientists were right after all.
You know, the vast majority of the world's climatologists say that it is human activity that is driving this dramatic change in the Earth's climate.
Everybody agrees the climate is changing.
There's no doubt about that.
Tropical fish are being caught off the coast of Alacta now.
Everybody agrees that the Earth is warming.
Everybody agrees that the poles are warming many times faster than the rest of the Earth.
However, there are a few holdouts who say that it is not human activity, but these holdouts, in turn, tend to be very closely connected to the oil industry.
Well, you know, with respect to this, you know, too late to turn back point like plane going across the Pacific, you know, once you've used up half your fuel, you're sure as hell not going back to San Francisco.
We're approaching a day of reckoning, a point of no return, past which even the nations of the earth will not be able to reverse much of the environmental damage.
And like I said, it's a very sad statement to make, but most people vote their pocketbook.
They don't vote long term.
Most people in the United States are not aware of what's happening.
And it is the United States which is producing most of these gases.
25% of these gases are coming from the United States, for example.
Yeah, first of all, the human body shop is just five to ten years away, in which case organs, as they get old, will be able to grow them in the laboratory with stem cells, unless, of course, government policy pulls the rug underneath financing for this research.
And beyond that horizon, within perhaps 10 to 20 years, this is all in my book, Vision.
By the way, Professor, did you see that story about the scientists who's saying that in 125,000 years, the male gene isn't going to be any good anymore and there aren't going to be any more men?
However, I should also point out that there is a gene for violence.
The gene for violence is a male gene.
Violence is almost exclusively connected to the males, not the females.
And so there is a gene for violence, and that is the Y chromosome.
However, I think far beyond, far earlier than that cutoff point when the Y chromosome gets smaller and smaller, we will have the ability to manipulate some of these genes.
And so we'll be able to preserve, I think, maleness.
However, the aging process, as you correctly pointed out, is going to be, it's not unraveled yet.
However, we can already immortalize skin cells.
Human skin cells at the Geron Corporation have already been immortalized, so they will live forever.
They will divide without limit.
And caloric restriction, that is, eating like a hermit, has been experimentally shown to lengthen lifespan of every organism from spiders all the way up to dogs.
In which case, we'll have isolated many of the genes that control the aging process.
Already about 70 human genes have been intimately linked with the aging process.
And we do this very simply by scanning the genes of children, scanning the genes of middle-aged people, scanning the genes of centenarians, and looking at where error accumulates and why centenarians live so long.
And by simply scanning the genes, we can already identify about 70 genes that are intimately involved with the oxidation process and with human well-being and metabolism.
And in the future, all of us will have our genes on a CD-ROM.
And by simply scanning millions, by scanning millions of these CD-ROMs with our genes on it, we'll be able to pick out the genes which control the aging process.
And perhaps embryonic stem cells really are the way to go.
At one point, you were right.
At one point, we thought that adult stem cells could also be just as good as embryonic stem cells.
However, the announcement was made just last week, published in a medical journal, stating that scientists had overestimated the ability of adult stem cells.
I feel very good about it because Einstein was sort of like a hero to me when I was a child.
And as a child, I didn't know what it would take to become a theoretical physicist.
However, reading his life, I had like a career path.
I knew exactly what I had to do at every single milestone of my life to become a professor of theoretical physics.
And now I can really appreciate his work.
I can read all his work.
I can really understand where he was headed for.
And I think there's really been a renaissance, another appreciation of the man, realizing that he was much more of a visionary than we gave him credit for.
I think so, because in the course of time, we've been able to discard some of his incorrectness.
That is, he pooh-pooed the quantum theory, which we now know to be the dominant theory of atomic physics.
And so we now know that it is the foundation upon which all electronics, all of the wonders that we see with electronic wizardry, all of that is based on the quantum theory.
And so I think we have to also put some of his mistakes in.
Many people think he invented antimatter, but actually antimatter comes out of the world of physics, comes out of the work of Paul Dirac in the late 1920s and early 30s.
But Gene Roddenberry read a lot of physics.
He was very well versed in, conversant in the cutting edge of physics.
He knew about antimatter.
He knew about higher dimensions.
And he incorporated ideas from physics.
He actually stole them, like warp drive, for example.
And the word warp drive comes from Einstein's theory, where Einstein created the whole theory of space warps.
So a lot of the jargon many people think Gene Roddenberry created, well, actually it comes from the world of physics.
And it's a pleasure, Dr. Kaku, to speak to you as well.
I just wanted to say that you've made a lot of complex physics and science accessible to the non-scientists such as myself, especially with your work in string theory and subatomic particle physics in the last decade.
I'm asking, I have a question, and it deals with an article I read on the BBC website about five weeks ago under Science and Technology, and it stated that millions of stars are entering our Milky Way galaxy at an unprecedented rate.
And it really didn't go on much beyond that.
And I was wondering if you had any insights into what that was about, or, you know, and I'll leave it at that.
However, we do know that the Milky Way galaxy is much more dynamic than we originally thought.
Galaxies evolve.
And in fact, for example, our Milky Way galaxy is on a collision course with Andromeda.
And instead of a few million stars coming into the Milky Way galaxy, we may have a hostile takeover because the Andromeda Galaxy is much bigger than the Milky Way galaxy.
And our Milky Way galaxy could literally be eaten alive when it collides with Andromeda in about 10, 15 billion years.
Well, I guess when you began to see the first signs of that, you would see stars rushing your way along with their planets and assorted other things that would tend to possibly cause collisions.
When galaxies collide, and we see pictures of colliding galaxies with the Hubble Space Telescope, the stars themselves don't collide because stars are separated by a vacuum.
However, ultimately, galaxies can be gobbled up by other galaxies and they wind up in the galactic center of the other galaxy.
Andromeda has two tiny objects in the center of its galaxy, meaning that it already probably had lunch before.
It probably ate another galaxy in the distant past.
As you're aware, I'm sure, Professor, there are people who feel that our skies are being sprayed with things that don't chemically resemble normal contrails at all, but rather with some sinister something or another, possibly to attempt to affect the weather.
And actually, you know what?
That's a pretty good question in a lot of ways.
If Washington, if enough scientists went to Washington and said, look, a cataclysmic change is underway with our weather right now, knowing Washington, if it was within their grasp and their ability to even order such a thing, they would try to order something done about it.
Well, in principle, but however, practical politics often intrudes, and the politicians basically say, what's in it for me?
Am I going to get re-elected if I jump off this bandwagon?
And, you know, the CIA in the past, by the way, has tried to modify the weather.
During the Vietnam War, there was a very well-publicized case where the military tried to bring on monsoons and bring on rainy seasons by seeding the clouds.
And so this has a long history ever since the airplane went up there in balloons away.
Yeah, there have been proposals by the military, harebrain schemes by the military to control the weather.
However, the weather is very unpredictable.
And even our best computers are at a loss to explain very simple thunderstorms.
And so I think that it's very dangerous to monkey with the weather.
And we do know, for example, that airplane exhaust, as well as the space shuttle, the space shuttle exhaust, contribute to global warming because you can calculate how much carbon dioxide comes off jet airplanes.
Well, it's not unreasonable, is it, to presume that if they finally realized a cataclysmic change was underway and scientists went to the president, sat down with him and said, Look, here's what we're facing, lay it out for you.
The president would say, Is there anything we can do?
Well, we've already told the president that we should cut back on fossil fuel burning, but that affects people's pocketbooks.
And that's what the president does not want to do is to affect people's pocketbooks.
But that's what it's going to take.
And unfortunately, if we delay this, there's going to be a collapse 20, 30 years down the line when we gradually run out of oil and we have to go to a non-renewable source of technology when oil prices skyrocket to the roof.
And it's going to be a tremendous disruption of the world economy when we have to retool.
We should begin the process now rather than doing it 20, 30 years later when we run out of oil and we find out that we have to retool.
Well, in addition, when you look at social behavior and the behavior of nations, prior to our actually running out of oil, because that's what keeps our economy going, we would have wars and the likelihood of the use of nuclear weapons and all sorts of unimaginable things before the last drop was, you know, put into the Volvo or whatever.
Buy ourselves more time, reduce the greenhouse gas by simply having cars more efficient.
And if anything, you know, the Japanese car makers are showing Detroit how to do it with the hybrids.
Hybrid technology is such that you can vastly increase the mileage on a car by having an electric battery with an internal combustion engine on a hybrid.
But Detroit, unfortunately, has to be dragged, kicking, and screaming.
You know, Detroit fought the seatbelt.
Detroit fought the airbag.
Things which today are considered basic car safety.
Well, I think in 10, 20 years, it will be obvious that Joe Sixpack is going to have his standard of living dramatically altered by having the breadbasket of the world altered, by having the weather altered, by having tropical diseases in his backyard.
I think Joe Six-Pack is going to suddenly realize, you know, 10, 15 years down the line that, my God, why did anyone tell me about this?
That's one of the problems of human behavior, that we don't change until we have to.
And unfortunately, that's what it's going to take.
I think it's going to take a major atmospheric crisis.
Major droughts, the major collapse of growing areas, major gigantic monster hurricanes, inundations of tropical diseases and mosquitoes and West Nile virus.
One is Hyperspace, talking about the cutting edge of cosmology, the cutting edge of physics research in higher dimensions.
And then Visions, where I interviewed 150 of the world's top scientists about biotechnology, about computers, robots, artificial intelligence.
And so if you want the collected wisdom of the people who are actually building the future and inventing the future in their laboratories, rather than simply BSing and pontificating about stuff they know nothing about, Visions is the book that gives you the most authoritative look at the next 20 years of technology.