Art Bell honors his late wife Ramona, a soulmate who died suddenly of asthma on January 5th despite her family’s history with the condition, leaving him devastated and questioning unanswered financial mysteries. Grief-stricken but determined to keep KNYE Radio alive, he shifts to Dr. Michio Kaku, exploring whether the universe’s finely tuned constants—like gravity and nuclear force—imply divine design or multiverse randomness via string theory’s 11-dimensional "cosmic music." Kaku dismisses Krauss’s critiques, comparing string theory to discovering alien science in a laptop, while Bell muses if humanity’s 1945 atomic tests marked our rise as a Type 0.7 civilization, potentially inviting observation—or rejection—by advanced extraterrestrials, who Kaku argues would avoid destruction due to their age and immortality. [Automatically generated summary]
And that's the only way I know to do this is to come on and talk to you as I always have absolutely honestly.
That's what you're going to get.
And because of that, I would like to say, please, if you have children in the room or children are listening, I think it might be inappropriate.
So please take the opportunity with the break coming up to get them out of the room.
And it may be inappropriate for some of you, too.
I don't know.
In the second hour, of course, we're going to interview Dr. Michio Kaku.
I'm very much looking forward to that.
But in the meantime, during the break, if you feel my discussing my wife's death is inappropriate for the children or yourself, please take this opportunity to tune out and just come on back in the second hour.
For those of you willing to listen, stay right there.
Okay, here we go.
My wife, Ramona, my wife of 15 years of, you know, you hear people use the phrase soulmate.
You hear people bandy the phrase soulmate around.
Well, let me tell you, we were the real McCoy.
We really were.
Ramona and myself, from the moment we met at KDWN Radio in Las Vegas, we never spent a day, we never spent a night apart, not one ever.
We really were the real thing.
God, we were in love.
We were so in love.
And I never thought that would happen to me.
But it did.
And I swept her off her feet, and she got swept off her feet.
And from that second, when I said, you're going to be my wife, until January 5th, and it still goes on, of course.
It will never change.
This love will last forever.
Whoever might chance cross my life in some way, no matter what happened, might happen to me in the future, Ramona will always be with me and will always be my love.
Anyway, I'm going to tell you the story now of what happened.
Although, just one more, I guess, note before I begin.
Ramona had very, very serious asthma.
I'm sure that many of you who have listened through the years know that I've been off the air at times taking care of asthma, my wife's asthma attack, which would be horrible.
Some very serious, some not.
And I've seen her turn blue.
You know, actually, her skin actually turned blue.
And so as a result of that, we have everything here.
We have what's called a nebulizer, which is a machine and augments the inhaler that she used too damn much.
We have oxygen.
We have everything short of what a hospital can do.
I remember one time going to the hospital with Ramona during an attack, scared the hell out of me because the doctor said, look, I'm going to have to give her a shot, and it's a very dangerous shot, and I'm going to listen to her heart while I give this shot.
And what they had to do was cause her heart to race and get more oxygen into her system.
But it was such a serious drug that he was administering that he said he'd have to listen as he actually gave the shot.
And that's the kind of thing we've been through.
And I've learned many things, some of them just as recently as tonight.
This is something that my wife's mom wrote.
They were estranged for a number of years.
And during that time, Julie, bless you, Julie, wrote to Ramona.
And I'm just going to read about a sentence of this because it's really all that's relevant.
It says, where is my little girl?
You know, it was an attempt to sort of patch things up.
Where is the little girl that I nursed through all those asthma attacks, whom I rushed to the hospital almost every night when the weather was damp and foggy?
That was Ramona as a baby, and as an adult, she's always had very, very serious asthma.
Tonight I spoke to Julie, her mom, and I was shocked to find out that Ramona's brother, one of her brothers, died at the age of 31.
And I had, of course, known that.
I knew that she had a younger brother who had died at 31 and that there had been some difficulty with him.
He had had a temperature when he was young.
And at any rate, at 31 years of age, it turns out he died of asthma.
I had no idea her brother also died of asthma and at such a young age, 31.
I found that out tonight.
Anyway, here's what happened, folks.
It was Tuesday, and we decided we were going to take a trip.
And one of the reasons I retired, you know, was so that we could spend more time together and we could do all kinds of things.
We loved Paris.
We loved traveling.
We loved the RV, you know.
So we packed up.
Somebody had suggested to us that we might go to Quartzite down in Arizona and said it was interesting.
Well, it turned out not to be all that interesting to us.
At any rate, we packed up the RV as we loved to do.
And we took our two little kitties, you know, our two smallest kitties who were wonderful travelers in the RV.
And we took off, you know, just to have fun.
And instead of taking Route 95 from here, because we were in the RV, 95 is a rock and roll kind of road, up, down, round, all of that kind of thing, we went, we drive all night.
You know, I'm an all-night person.
So we went down Interstate 15 to San Bernardino, caught the 10, and went back to Arizona and Quartzite.
We drove all night long.
You know, we're night owls.
I'll be a night owl all my life, I suppose.
We arrived in Quartzite well after the sun had come up, and boy, were we tired.
I mean, it was like all night driving.
We were dead tired.
And so we started calling RV parks while sitting sort of in a truck stop there in Quartzite.
And we found one, and we drove in, first one, and we went up to registration.
They were about to send us on, and one of our, actually both of our little kitties, poked their little heads up above the dashboard.
And the guy who was about to admit us to the park said, sorry, no pets.
Go next door.
So we went next door to this other RV park that allegedly allowed pets.
And we couldn't fit into the spot they had at that time of the morning.
So off we went to, by now we're really dead, you know, tired.
We went to the third RV park, which turned out to be nothing more than sort of a dirt lot with power poles in it.
But, you know, by then we were both so doggone tired, must have been 10.30 in the morning, that we just said, the hell with it.
Let's plug in, get some sleep, and move on.
Now, by this point, Ramona's beginning to have asthma.
Kind of light at this point, but she was beginning to have it in the morning in Quartzite.
Nevertheless, we parked, we went to sleep, and woke up after dark.
Now, Quartzite was just not everything we wanted.
It was, I don't know, a kind of a, it's very interesting, I'm sure, for some people, but for us, it wasn't our cup of tea.
It was a giant swap meet with RV places all over.
And we just, you know, there wasn't a restaurant close to where we happened to be.
And that evening, Ramona's asthma had worsened a little bit.
So I said, okay, hun, let's go to Laughlin.
Now, we know Laughlin and went to the Riverside.
As a matter of fact, a beautiful place.
They've got a very nice RV park there and, you know, a restaurant.
And with the asthma, she wouldn't have to cook and all the rest of that.
We proceeded then after, it was after dark when we left Quartzite for Laughlin.
And it took, I don't know, another five or six hours to get there.
And when we got there, it was midnight.
And by now, Ramona's asthma is really kicking.
And so I just sat with her.
From midnight until 5.30 in the morning, I just sat with her.
And I don't know, some of you will understand what I'm about to say.
Asthmatics, when they're having an asthma attack, they have to sit up at the very least.
Either sit up or stand up and then brace your hands on a chair or a table or something like that to try and breathe.
So by 5.30 in the morning, now we're up to 15 or 20 hours of driving.
We're really dead.
And by 5.30 in the morning, Mona said, look, we're really dead tired.
We've got to get some sleep.
And I said, well, Hannah, are you sure?
She said, yeah, I think it's a little better, and I can lie down.
So to me, you see, a sign that she was willing to lie down meant, hallelujah, the asthma's letting up a little bit.
She had taken a pregnisone.
That's an anabolic steroid that she would take kind of in declining doses, but right away when she began to have serious asthma, so she had already taken that.
And I said, hallelujah, it's a little bit better.
And she said, yeah, I think it is.
And so we both climbed into bed.
And I put my arms around her.
And thank God, I said, as I always do every day, I love you.
And she said, I love you so much.
And we held on to each other.
And I fell asleep promptly.
I mean, just bo-woom, fell asleep.
And then I woke up at 1.30 in the afternoon.
And I said, hey, Han, you know, because Ramona would always get up before me.
It didn't matter whether we were home or away.
She always was up before me.
And I just said, hey, Han.
I'm still saying that, by the way.
At any rate, I received no answer.
And I got up and I went into the living room portion of the RV.
And there she was in the middle of the couch, obviously dead.
She was white.
She was sitting with her head back on the couch, as though she was asleep, by the way.
Not a tortured look on her face.
I want you to know that because it's important to me.
It didn't look like she was gasping for her last breath.
She looked at peace.
I touched her and she was cold.
And I went, oh my God, and Ran over and got dressed and ran down to the little office they have there at the RV Park and said, My God, please call the police, the coroner, everybody, my wife has passed away.
And from that moment, from that moment on, I went directly into shock.
And I mean I went into really serious shock.
That's the only state I can describe.
I didn't cry.
I cried very briefly when I called Ramona's mom and talked to her.
And then I didn't cry again for 36 hours.
In fact, I didn't sleep for 36 hours.
I just...
I was with a man named Father Joe, who gave her her last rite.
She was Catholic, you know, what the priest at her funeral called a relaxed Catholic, but nevertheless a Catholic.
And Ramona had been dead for quite some time, some hours.
And here's what seems to have happened.
When I went to sleep, she got back up again pretty quickly, I think.
And she went into the living room and got out her nebulizer.
We carry a nebulizer.
It's a machine for asthmatics and an alternative to these damn inhalers.
Anyway, she had the nebulizer out and she had used two or three ampules of whatever it is you put in those things.
I can't, I think, oh, albuterol or something like that.
She had used two or three of these vials.
I didn't get that good a look.
And it appears as though she may have, according to the coroner, in fact, they had to bring the coroner from Las Vegas.
They don't have one in Laughlin.
I didn't know that.
So it took some time.
I was in this hotel in a room they had provided for me, and I was just, I was, I'm telling you, I was in such shock.
And I think the reason that I, you know, I'm a very emotional person.
However, well, let me give you an example.
When Abby had his stroke and he brought himself from one side of the house to the other, you know, clawing with his front claws, front paws.
He didn't really have claws.
He had paws.
And he had made it all the way across the house and cried by my bed until I woke up.
And then, of course, I carried him to the vet and Ramona drove and I just bawled like a baby all the way there.
And then when he passed the next day, I bawled like a baby again.
But in the case of Ramona, it was so over.
It was so final.
There was nothing that I could do.
There was no last-minute rush to the hospital.
There was nothing.
And there was nothing to do.
It was just she was gone.
And I went into this deep, horrible shock.
For 36 hours, I didn't sleep.
After I slept, I went to the funeral home.
You know, the days get foggy after that.
I went to the funeral home, and there I really lost it and have many times since.
But, in fact, during the first week of Ramona being gone, I lost eight pounds.
Eight pounds.
I didn't eat.
What I ate was one hamburger and one bowl of cereal in a week.
And so there you are.
Anyway, this is going to come in pieces.
I'm going to give you information in pieces.
The coroner, and there was an autopsy, said the only remarkable thing in the autopsy that he had seen was hyper-inflated lungs, hyper-inflated lungs, typical in asthmatics.
Now, I'm not an expert, but apparently when the lungs get that large due to the medicine, you know, the inhalers or just the asthmatic attack itself, I don't know that much about it, but at that point, you cannot exchange air, you know, air in, other stuff out.
It's the way it's supposed to be, and that just doesn't occur.
Now, the coroner said, and I find some comfort in this, he said first the same thing, that she had a relaxed look on her face, and it was his opinion that she either fell asleep and then passed away, or passed out and passed away.
And of course, one of my immediate questions was, why in God's name didn't she wake me up?
And he said, well, she probably couldn't.
My answer to that is, and why didn't she wake me up when she realized she had to get up and go get the nebulizer?
But, you know, you can look back on this and you analyze the hell out of it and nothing changes.
And apparently, that did happen.
She either went to sleep and passed away or passed out and passed away.
The first talk screen is in, and there was nothing worth comment in the first talk screen.
There's going to be more.
They've got tissue samples now that they're studying, and I hope that they'll give us some kind of an answer.
You know, that we can, they said anything could have happened.
It could have been her heart.
It could have been a lot of things, and I really hope that I get some...
I'm sure you understand.
I want answers.
And maybe those tissue samples or analysis will give us some kind of answer.
I think I'm going to talk to you a little bit about grieving now, and I'm going to be awfully honest with you.
I'm lost without Ramona.
I'm really lost without Ramona.
In fact, I wasn't really sure that I had a reason to live.
When she passed away, I went through, well, I've been through now many, many of these cycles.
I guess it's a normal way for people to grieve, but the first giant black cloud that descends on you after you've lost, God, how could she be gone?
After you've lost somebody so close to you, you go into this series of these very black places.
I mean, these very dark places.
God, I cannot tell you how dark.
Dark enough that I took out a big bottle of Vallium and I sat down with it and I thought real hard.
Yeah, it was real close.
I thought real hard about joining my wife because I'm still struggling.
I'm being very honest with you here.
I'm struggling to have a reason to live.
And I'll tell you why I'm still here right now.
I have five kitty cats, five.
We had them, and Ramona loved them, and I love them.
And they're one of the main reasons I'm here.
You know that, and Mona always told me, and I, you know, she was a strong woman, very strong woman, as you know.
God, she was a great woman, just an incredible woman.
And she always told me that you are supposed to play out the hand you're dealt.
I mean, we talked about this kind of thing.
And she told me in no uncertain terms that do you talk to your wife about this kind of thing or your husband?
If not, you should.
Anyway, it was her feeling that suicide was wrong and that you're supposed to play out the cards you're dealt.
So my kitty cats and those words stopped me.
Otherwise, nothing would have.
And it was that close.
And when you go into this first black hole, there's one for you, Michio, a black hole.
When you go into this black hole, the first one is the most dangerous because you don't know that it's ever going to change.
You don't know you're ever going to come out of it.
And you think this is the way it's always going to be.
And believe me, that'll get you to reach for, you know, the Vallium or whatever.
And then, you know, I thought a lot about religion, and most religions prohibit it one way or the other.
You know, a sin to take your own life.
But, God, we had a dream marriage.
We had a marriage.
We had the best marriage in the world.
My God, I miss my wife.
I really, really miss her.
I, you know, I smoke.
I'm a smoker, and by the way, so was Ramona.
I really ragged on her about that.
Her asthma, however, wasn't really affected, although it obviously cannot have been good for her, but it wasn't really affected by smoke, cigarette smoke.
Her triggers were dust, temperature changes, perfume, humidity, and then sometimes nothing at all.
She just got an attack, you know.
Certainly when she had a cold or flu, we were always so careful to keep people with colds and flu away.
I had to ask everybody before they came to visit, do you feel okay?
Do you have a cold?
Have you had the flu?
You know, because it was very dangerous for her.
And now, again, I'm going to be as honest as I can.
I am so lonely.
I am so lonely.
My God, I went from a woman and she did everything for me, by the way.
I also have a sense that she might have known that her health was worsening and not have said anything to me.
I mean, an asthmatic always, you know, they, well, they hack stuff up, you know, and she had been doing a lot of that kind of coughing.
And, you know, after she passed, one of the things I had to do was go over our financial situation.
Hell, I didn't even have PIN numbers for my credit cards.
I didn't.
You're talking to somebody who depended totally on his wife.
She did all the shopping.
She paid all the bills.
She ran half the radio station that we both loved.
She so loved KNYE.
I'm going to try and keep it on the air.
I thought hard about that one, too.
But, you know, she really loved that radio station.
I mean, she was so proud of it.
And so I'm going to try and keep it on the air.
She really did love it.
So all her favorite music on there.
She just loved it.
But, God, folks, I'm so lonely.
I'm so no good alone.
So, you know, I went out and I checked the status of my bills and had to cancel her credit cards and go through all this kind of stuff.
And I found out she had paid December 23rd, she had paid like $2,000 ahead on my, you know, satellite TV bills.
She had paid $2,000 ahead on my credit cards.
Hell, we've got a cell phone that's, you know, $20-something bucks a month.
She had $1,000 credit.
All my bills were paid way ahead.
So I'm wavering between wondering if she had a sense something was coming or whether she did that all the time.
And that tells you how little attention I have paid.
I have since, by the way, decided that maybe she did it all the time because it's a pain in the butt to sit down and hell I hadn't written a check in 15 years.
So it's a pain in the butt to sit down and make out all those bills, you know, and if you pay them ahead like that, then you just get a little statement that says, well, you don't owe us anything, and you've still got X number of dollars credit.
But still, I think I had a sense, that she may have had a sense that things were worsening.
She had made some comments to her brother at Thanksgiving that, you know, if I'm not around, I want you to keep art as part of the family.
She may have had a sense.
My wife was very, very intuitive, you know, and she would not have told me.
She wouldn't have told me.
Anyway, look.
I, uh, I'm going to try and deal with my life.
All the things that...
All the things that meant something.
I mean, when Ramona and I met, we had nothing.
Each had a few boxes full of things and a lot of debt, and we fell in love, boom, like that.
And it never changed.
And it's so damn unfair because, you know, she was 47 years old.
She had supported me through going, you know, from nothing to a radio career that brought virtually everything.
And every step of the way, she was with me, at my side.
I think those of you who are longtime listeners know that.
She was there for me every second.
And I and now all of the, it's so damn unfair.
We have all of these things.
We, I guess I'll be that way forever now.
We had all of these wonderful things that money and success could buy.
And now I find that I'm not enjoying them at all.
In other words, you sit down and you watch a high-definition TV and you watch a TV show and God, we used to have a blast saying, isn't that cool?
Look at that picture, you know, and commenting on the program and so forth.
But all of a sudden, when you don't have that person to share these things with, they don't mean a damn thing.
I want to thank all of you, and I'm never going to be able to thank all of you who sent cards.
6,000 emails of condolence.
People who sent cards, and those are going to be sent from California.
They went to California.
How can I ever thank all of you?
I'd like to thank the La Cuesta family.
That's Mona's mom, and she's got a couple of brothers and a sister.
And, of course, I mentioned the brother who died also at 31.
I now find out of asthma.
I'd like to thank Craig Kitchen, the president of Premier, who was at the funeral.
Thank you, Craig, for coming.
And so many others who were at the funeral.
It was private, but you know how that goes.
We had a lot of friends, and they called, and you're not going to turn someone down, so it got bigger than we anticipated.
Here's something I found that I think will be helpful to some of you who may encounter a loss or have encountered a loss.
I found out you need to stay busy.
In fact, there are things in this house now that I have cleaned no less than five times just because I keep walking around kind of in a daze, if you will, and just keep doing the same things, cleaning things, staying on top of the cat box and every little tiny detail in the house, you know, you just make yourself busy so that you don't dwell in those very dark black holes.
And by the way, having come out of that first black hole with my life, I learned something important.
That is that you do come out of them.
That doesn't mean they stop.
They still come, and they're still coming in waves.
But now I know there's another side, that it can be, even though it's never good, it can be a little better.
And so there's a little, it's like there's a little light at the end of the tunnel.
And so the next one you have, you can kind of say to yourself in the middle of it, I know that maybe I'll come out of it.
And then the third one and the fourth one, and pretty soon you can be pretty sure you're going to come out on the other side.
So that's, at least that's the way the grief thing has been working for me.
It's these succession of black holes.
So I'm having to deal with life now.
Hell, I've now washed two loads of laundry, something I haven't done in 15 years.
Didn't even know how to use a machine.
I don't know how to use a dishwasher.
I'm a social cripple.
That's what I've learned.
I'm a social cripple.
In fact, Ramona and myself, because we have a couple of homes here, a house and a guest house and a radio station and all these little outbuildings that we have, we have millions of keys.
Each of us has a lot of keys and a lot of alarms on the keys, you know, that kind of thing.
We looked like a couple of janitors walking around most of the time.
And Ramona would come home with groceries, you know, just lots of groceries in her hand.
And she would struggle with her keys.
And I would be on her all the time because she'd drop her keys, you know.
And these were, you know, you break a remote, you're not going to be able to get into a car or something.
Anyway, she used to drop her keys, and I'd get all over about it and ask her why she couldn't hold on to her keys.
Well, the other day I had to shop for the first time, so I came home.
Here I am, my arms loaded with groceries, struggling with my keys.
I get up to the door, and what do I do?
Drop the damn keys.
And I just stopped, and I looked up in the sky, and I said, yeah, go ahead, laugh.
You know, have a really good laugh, because I just used to be all over her about that, and here I was doing the same damn thing.
So I'm slowly learning, slowly, how to care for myself.
So that was my fault.
You know, I let that beautiful woman do too damn much for me, and I barely know how to do it for myself.
But I'm learning.
I'm gaining on it.
I've done all kinds of things now that I've never done before.
Well, never.
You know, if you don't write a check in 15 years, it's a little alien to you, believe me.
I didn't, as I mentioned, I didn't know the PIN numbers to my credit cards.
I didn't know where any important certificates, you know, Ramona had them all placed around the house in special places that she knew about.
and I had to go searching for an awful lot of things.
I suspect that she's here now in some form and watching what I'm doing.
And I hope happy, I hope she's happy that I decided to come back on the air.
I think she would have wanted that.
And so here I am.
And by the way, as I mentioned to you, Craig Kitchen, President of Premier was at the funeral.
And I said, I had learned, believe me, by then, as I mentioned, she was buried the Wednesday following her death, which was Thursday.
So by then, you know, quite a few days had passed.
And I went up to Craig and I said, Craig, keep me busy.
I think I need to be busy.
And, of course, doing a four-hour interview on the show is going to force me to think about something else.
And that's valuable time thinking about something else every now and then, believe me.
So it has been arranged so that I am going to be on every Saturday and every Sunday from now on.
Ian Punnett, by the way, not unemployed or re-employed or anything else as a result of this, is going to be doing, this is kind of exciting, I think.
He'll be doing the prefeeds on at least 250 radio stations every Saturday night live.
So instead of getting a repeat, you're going to get Ian Punnett live on Saturday nights.
That'd be from like 9 o'clock at night to 1 o'clock in the morning East Coast time.
So that's the deal there.
Thank you, Ian.
And I'm going to be doing the weekends.
And I think it's going to be a good thing for me as I try to, I don't know, kind of keep life going.
Let me read you something that a coroner investigator, Rick Jones, sent me.
And I think it's appropriate.
It says, Art, as we discussed, life can be short.
So I often remind my friends, new and old ones, to do me these favors.
We never know when things can change suddenly.
So one, make certain that your circle of loved ones, family and close friends, know that you love them.
Tell them often.
Two, make certain that you never leave your circle of loved ones or let them leave on bad terms, harsh words, and so forth.
I can't tell you the number of times that I have to notify a family that their loved one died, and all the family wanted to do is have one more minute to tell them how much they love them and or tell them they're sorry for what they said or did.
3.
wear a seatbelt anytime you're in a vehicle.
He holds the Henry Summit Professorship in Theoretical Physics at the City College of New York and is graduate and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.
He has lectured around the world and his PhD-level textbooks are required reading at many of the top physics labs.
Dr. Kaku graduated from Harvard in 1968, summa cum laude and number one in his, number one in his physics class.
He received a Ph.D. from the University of California at Berkeley Radiation Lab in 1972, held a lectureship at Princeton University in 73, joined the faculty at the City University of New York, where he's been a professor of theoretical physics for 25 years.
His goal is to help complete Einstein's dream of a theory of everything.
That would be a single equation, perhaps, as he likes to say, no more than an inch long about your thumb, which will unify all the fundamental forces in the universe.
His book, his current book, new book is Parallel Worlds.
And, God, it's interesting.
He starts out, when I was a child, I had a personal conflict over my beliefs.
My parents were raised in the Buddhist tradition, but I attended Sunday school every week, where I loved hearing the biblical stories about whales, arks, pillars of salt, ribs, and apples.
I was fascinated by these Old Testament parables, which were my favorite part of Sunday school.
It seemed to me that the parables about great floods, burning bushes, and parting waters were so much more exciting than Buddhist chanting and meditation.
In fact, these ancient tales of heroism and tragedy vividly illustrated deep moral and ethical lessons which have stayed with me all my life.
One day in Sunday school, we studied Genesis to read about God thundering from the heavens.
Let there be light sounded so much more dramatic than silently meditating about Nirvana.
Out of naive curiosity, I asked my Sunday school teacher, did God have a mother?
She usually had a rather snappy answer, as well as a deep moral lesson to offer.
This time, however, she was taken aback.
No, she replied hesitantly, God probably did not have a mother, but then where did God come from?
She mumbled that she'd well have to consult with the minister about that one.
I didn't realize that I had accidentally stumbled into one of the great questions of theology.
I was puzzled because in Buddhism, there is no God at all, but a timeless universe instead with no beginning or end.
Later, when I began to study the great mythologies of the world, I learned that there were two types of cosmologies in religion, the first based in a single moment when God created the universe, the second based on the idea the universe always was and always will be.
They couldn't both be right, I thought.
Later, I began to find that these common themes cut across many other cultures.
In Chinese mythology, for example, in the beginning there was a cosmic egg, the infant Pongu, resided for almost an eternity in the egg, which floated on a formless sea of chaos.
When it finally hatched, Pongu grew enormously over 10 feet per day, so the top half of the eggshell became the sky and the bottom the earth.
After 18,000 years, he died to give birth to our world.
His blood became the rivers, his eyes the sun, moon, and his voice the thunder.
Just a little taste.
And boy, I'll tell you what.
If you like that, you're going to love this book called Parallel Worlds by Dr. Michiu Kaku, who will be here in a moment.
Well, Art, you ask one of the deep questions Between art and science.
If you take a look at science, we have two basic paradoxical principles.
One is called the Copernicus principle.
The Copernican principle says that humans are not special in any particular way.
That's the Copernican principle.
And the more we discover about the universe, it does seem as if humans are not so special.
However, there is another point of view which has also survived every scientific challenge, and that's the anthropic principle.
The anthropic principle is very simple, and that is that intelligence and life is so difficult, so difficult to create, that you have to realize that, well, some people would say perhaps there's a creator, or perhaps it was a gigantic cosmic accident.
Now, if you take a look at the constants of nature, for example, the mass of the proton, the charge of the electron, the lifetime of the sun, the strength of the nuclear force, you realize that they're tuned just right to make life possible.
If the nuclear force were stronger, the sun would have burnt out billions of years ago, and we wouldn't be here.
If the nuclear force were weaker, the sun wouldn't have ignited at all, and we still wouldn't be here.
If gravity were a little bit stronger, we would have had a big crunch, and the universe would have collapsed billions of years ago.
If gravity were a little bit weaker, then we would have had a big freeze, and we'd all be frozen to death right now.
So you realize that the laws of nature are tuned, tuned very precisely to make life possible in the universe.
So you, I'll tell you what, Professor, hold on just a sec.
I've got to tell my audience, and then we're going to pursue this.
I've got to tell you guys what happened.
I guess some gentleman in Oregon took what I had to say in the first hour and called the Sheriff's Department here in Prump and said that I was in a bad way.
So the reason the alarm went off is because two deputies from the Sheriff's Department came to my door and said, you know, doing a welfare check.
And they are the ones who set off the alarm.
So I had to just go to the door and explain to those nice officers that I'm in the middle of doing a radio program, and honestly, I am okay.
So please don't anybody else do that.
I'm all right.
I will survive is the name of the song.
Anyway, that's what just happened.
So you heard the alarm go off, and then there was a knock at the door, and I explained to the nice officers that I am just fine.
It would be your position, then, Professor, that everything that we experience in the world, being so perfect, is that way because it has to be that way or we wouldn't be here.
Well, that is sort of the essence of the anthropic principle, which is gaining a lot of credibility among string theorists, for example, which simply says that perhaps the universe was tuned, tuned very precisely to make us possible.
Now, when I was a kid in second grade, my second grade teacher told me that God so loved the earth that he put the earth just right from the sun.
Not too close, not too far.
If the earth were too close, the oceans would have boiled.
If the earth were too far, the oceans would have frozen.
Well, I was quite shocked being in second grade because that was the first time I'd ever heard of this principle, that life is just right to make us all possible.
The earth, the formation of the sun, the solar system is tuned just right to make life possible.
Either there is a God who loved our universe so much that he put our universe just right so that we have mild temperatures and a universe that lives long enough to create DNA and so on and so forth, or there are other universes.
Or there are dead universes where the sun never ignited, or universes where the stars burn out very rapidly, universes where the universe expands so rapidly that everything gets cold, or universes where the universe collapses to a big crunch, everything dies in fire.
So in my book, Parallel Worlds, I lay out the fact that in string theory, the theory that I work on, we have a problem that we have many solutions of string theory.
All of them seem to be self-consistent mathematically.
And so we have this problem.
Perhaps the way to choose our universe is that our universe is the only one that allows for life.
All the other ones are dead universes, universes that consist of lightning bolts, universes that consist of photons, light beams, but no DNA, no living matter.
So in other words, our universe could be quite special among all possible universes.
That's right, because if it didn't turn out right, we wouldn't be here to talk about it to begin with.
There may be dead universes, universes consisting of dead matter and no life.
However, if this theory is correct, it also means that there are other universes that are just like ours, except for one cosmic tiny difference, one cosmic ray that separates us from another universe.
If a cosmic ray went through Hitler's mother, for example, then Hitler may never have been born.
The mother may have had a miscarriage.
It only takes one cosmic ray to create a miscarriage.
Or what happens if that cosmic ray went through Churchill's mother?
It's even possible, for example, that we're being observed.
It's even possible that the people who see these craft that are not simply not possible with the technology we know we have are anywhere close, that, I mean, it's conceivable, Professor, that we are being visited.
And I think a correct scientific attitude is to try to test some of these theories.
And I should point out that in 2008, in just two years' time, we may be able to settle many of these questions when the Kepler probe goes into outer space.
And that'll cause an existential shock when people look up at the night sky and feel very romantic and feel very cosmic, realizing that here, here, over there, over here, over here, all of them may have twins, virtual twins of the Earth, perhaps with liquid oceans, because they are in the Goldilocks zone, which is just right to have liquid water.
Liquid water, in turn, is the universal solvent in which DNA gets off the ground.
And so we may have an existential shock realizing that there are twins and that when we look in the sky at night, somebody else could be looking back at us.
If you have a bunch of ants in the country and they're trying to observe workers building a 10-lane superhighway next door, the ants wouldn't have the foggiest clue as to which frequencies, what modes by which to analyze the presence of workers working right next to their anthill.
Yeah, but I think, personally, I think that's the stupidest thing to do.
It's like the blind man who looks for a key under a lamp because that's the only place he can look.
I mean, a person who's nearsighted, the only place he can look for a lost key is under a lamp at night because that's the only place that's illuminated.
The key could have fallen someplace else, but he only looks where things are visible.
Well, sure, but still, isn't it a logical assumption for them to be making that the signal would be sent near this wonderful hydrogen marker because it's just so outstanding?
I think it's quite logical, but I think an advanced civilization would just have a big laugh, thinking that, oh my God, they're so primitive, they have to communicate at the hydrogen frequencies.
Mark one of the biggest turning points since we left the forest.
But you talk to a person in Congress, and their eyes are going to glaze over, which is very sad.
The SETI budget, if anything, they depend on handouts.
Handouts.
So of course they haven't found anything yet.
I mean, their budget is so limited.
And as I also mentioned, any intelligent species is going to change the frequencies, spread their signal out over many frequencies.
The universe is quite noisy.
And they would have spread signal technology, whereby they would spread the signal over many frequencies and then assemble it, reassemble it at the other end.
And that's what your email does.
Your email is split into many pieces, and it's reassembled at the other end.
So, is it your view we probably are listening to nonsense, that there's a lot of it out there, and we just are looking in all the wrong places with not enough instruments and money to buy them?
Like I said, you know, ants trying to listen in on human conversations wouldn't know the frequencies.
They're being bombarded by all the vibrations and noise from workers next door, but they're clueless because they're listening to the wrong frequencies.
They don't know how to process the information.
And so I think just like ants cannot detect the presence of humans.
Oh, well, if you saw the movie 2001, it's based on the premise that a civilization making a transition between type 0 to type 1 becomes interesting and in some sense worthy of contact.
When in the movie they reached the moon and they made contact with this monolith, that's when the aliens realized that, yes, humans have arrived.
They're type 1.
They have an operating moon base.
We are about 100 years away from that technology.
Arthur C. Clarke was, I think, off by about 100 years.
It's not going to be 2001.
It'll be 2100.
When we have an operating moon base capable of scanning the entire moon for the presence of a monolith.
And the whole purpose of that monolith was to make contact with a Type 1 civilization.
Well, I personally think that if there is concrete presence of extraterrestrial visitation, it will probably in the presence, it probably be as an artifact left on the moon.
If I was a passing type 3 civilization scanning thousands and thousands of planets, I'm not going to send Captain Kirk to visit each one.
It would take him thousands of years to do that.
I would send robotic probes, self-replicating von Neumann probes, like a virus.
A virus lands on a cell and hijacks the cell and makes copies of itself.
So the probe would land on the moon, build a factory, which would then send thousands of other probes to other moons.
Moons are stable.
They don't have erosion or wind or water.
And so they're quite stable.
And then these probe would simply sit there, do nothing, and just wait for the presence of a Type Zero civilization to become Type 1.
Type 0 civilizations are probably dime a dozen, and they self-destruct rather frequently.
So they're not really worth monitoring that much because they're not permanent.
By the time you're type 1, you become interesting.
You're planetary.
You have planetary music, planetary culture, planetary art, planetary mathematics.
I think the detonation of an atomic bomb would signal the fact that a civilization is approaching type 1 status.
And if a probe is sitting there for a million years waiting for an intelligent species to come out of the swamp and gradually rise up this sequence, then the first interesting signal would be a nuclear detonation.
And every nuclear detonation releases a very characteristic flash called a double flash.
We have a satellite up in space called the Vila satellite, which is specifically designed to look for these double flashes, which are the fingerprint of a nuclear detonation.
Well, a double flash on a distant star or a distant planet would be too faint to pick up.
Our satellites, like the Vela, can definitely pick up double flashes on the Earth, and it has picked up signals of an unauthorized detonation of a nuclear device on the Earth.
But in outer space, they're just too far away.
We can just barely make out the presence of Jupiter-sized planets in outer space.
But the point is that as a Type Zero civilization begins to make the transition to Type I, that would be very one noticeable signal that it is nearing Type 1 status.
Well, it's hard to say, but all I'm saying is that the probability is that the most likely place to find evidence for visitation is on the moon, because of the fact that they're ideal places to simply observe the rise and fall of Type Zero civilizations.
If a very advanced alien civilization detected an atomic bomb going off and then hydrogen bombs and they'd begin really looking, and we did plenty of above-ground testing to give them lots of examples, right?
It has to be noted, Professor, that Oriental children, Chinese children, because of no doubt family pressure and many other things, perhaps even genetics, that come to this country tend to get straight A's, and they're absolutely brilliant.
And it's true in their home countries, and it's true here.
Now we see the fact that its population is aging very rapidly and that young people, a lot of them are punk rockers and a lot of them are just as silly as American youth.
Well, there are two reasons why the United States does not collapse technologically.
One is brain drain.
50% of Silicon Valley is foreign-born.
If you are a high-tech person overseas, you get the H-1B visa.
You go right to Silicon Valley.
The United States is a gigantic vacuum cleaner that's sucking up all the top brains of the world, which is a tremendous secret weapon.
Most people don't know that we have a secret weapon called the H-1B visa.
Every once in a while, some stupid politician tries to close that H-1B visa, and then even the Wall Street Journal has to tell people that we have this secret weapon, this genius visa, that allows geniuses to float right to Silicon Island.
But after 9-11, MIT, Stanford, they were all howling at the fact that the brightest minds of the world were not coming to America because their visas were not being approved because, you know, the Homeland Security got overcautious and denied permission.
At our university, quite a few of our Chinese PhD students could not come to the United States because Homeland Security got too antsy, as if these Chinese young students are going to be future terrorists in America, right?
There is a fear, and I do know that a lot of ideas, inventions, and new things come from America, but we have this problem of inventing them here and then not doing the practical application, but letting that part of it get away to Japan or China or wherever, that we don't produce it here and that we're not producers.
People are concerned about that.
The factories are not cranking out anymore.
Yes, we have information technology, but we're not producing anything.
Well, producing in the sense of producing like steel.
We're entering a post-industrial society where value is more and more intellectual capital rather than commodity capital.
And nations that stick with commodity capital, that produce agricultural products and steel and tin, commodity prices have been dropping for 150 years.
And that's not where wealth of the future is going to be.
Those nations that have, quote, lots of factories and produce lots of things, yeah, they'll have an industrial revolution.
They'll have their first industrial revolution.
But they're not going to be competitive in the future because it's intellectual capital that's going to be worth a lot.
You realize that Hollywood is this tremendous intellectual capital engine.
The Internet, web designers, all that is creative intellectual capital.
Intellectual capital is not just being a software programmer at some high-tech firm.
Intellectual capital is creativity, leadership, it's talent, it's stuff that we usually associate with the arts, in fact.
So I think that we have to realize that commodity capital is not going to be the future, that we don't want to be an industrial society.
And China is undergoing their first industrial revolution.
In America, we're entering a post-industrial society where we don't necessarily want to have lots of coal mining jobs and lots of steel-making jobs.
We want to have people create entertainment, create creative things like websites, become software engineers, create intellectual capital rather than simply commodity capital.
Well, you know, I do a lot of traveling, and when I go to Europe, all the people in Europe are envious, just tremendously envious of the United States, because it is this creative engine.
Now, in the United States, we like to bellyache.
Everyone bellyaches in the United States until you go overseas.
And when you go overseas, you realize that most people think of the United States as this creative juggernaut.
Well, it's that all the software, all the Hollywood movies, all the songs, everything comes from here.
We're looking at nothing less than the mind of God.
Now, I'm prepared to wait.
Some people are impatient and say, I want results now.
I want to get the data to correspond to where Adam Smash is now.
Well, I'm a little bit more, I take a bigger view, a bigger view, because that's what we're looking for, reading God's thoughts.
Now, you realize that next year, the first piece of evidence may come in, may not, the Large Hadron Collider, the biggest atom smasher ever conceived of and built by the human mind, will be turned on next year.
And I read from his book in the first part of the program, at least the beginning of his guest appearance, and it's fascinating.
I mean, if you want a good book to read, I'm an avid reader.
Parallel Worlds, a journey through creation, either dimensions, higher dimensions, rather, and the future of the cosmos is a total must.
You're absolutely going to love it.
That's all there is to it.
Now, if you hear some meows in the background, the two newest members of the Bell household, both of them kittens, don't like having the door closed at all.
So that will be the sound you hear in the background.
Hopefully it won't penetrate, but they are out there making their case.
Well, first of all, I don't think that's going to happen, but if there is a piece of evidence that is totally inconsistent with string theory, then you have to just pick up the pieces and keep on moving.
However, the problem that we string theorists have, in other words, if I'm going to be my worst critic, if I'm going to be my own worst critic, the problem with string theory is not that, not that at all.
The problem with string theory is that there is a multiverse.
It predicts millions of different kinds of possible universes.
And if we have a multiverse, we have millions and millions of soap bubbles, each soap bubble being an entire universe.
Then, how do we figure out which one is our universe?
If something comes out of the atom smasher in Geneva, Switzerland next year that is inconsistent with one version of string theory, there's another bubble that is consistent with that piece of data.
And so at that point, it has no predictive power anymore.
You see, a predictive power means that you can say ahead of time something which will then decide the truth or falsity of some kind of theory, right?
But string theory predicts a multiverse, millions and millions of parallel worlds.
That's why that's the title of my book, Parallel Worlds.
If we have this multiverse of universes, and like I said, if the Large Hadron Collider comes out with data that doesn't fit one bubble, then perhaps, well, we don't live in that bubble.
And our universe just happens to be this other bubble.
Sorry about that.
Now, this in some sense means that string theory does not have that much predictive power because in some sense it predicts all universes.
And this, of course, drives Larry Krauss crazy.
My attitude is different.
My attitude is that we haven't found the final version of the theory.
The theory was discovered by accident.
And when we find the final version of this theory, this one-inch equation that gets you all of string theory, then we'll be able to settle the question once and for all of all these bubbles, which one is our bubble?
Well, back in 1968, there were two young postdocs, Veniziano and Suzuki, who were at CERN, the same institute that we're talking about in Switzerland, coming through a math book, and they found the Euler-beta function which fit the properties of colliding pi mesons.
Now, science is not supposed to be done this way.
You know, in elementary school, we learn about the scientific method, do an experiment, make a theory, do another experiment, make another theory, and tried and true method called the scientific method.
A formula, a pure mathematical formula that explained the collision of subatomic particles.
Now, the collision of subatomic particles is one of the deepest secrets of Mother Nature.
And yet, thumbing through a math book, for God's sake, we had no right to find an elegant, beautiful formula called the Euler beta function that seemed to fit the properties of the collision of subatomic particles.
So this sent off a fury of papers, hundreds, thousands of papers were published immediately trying to explain the Veneziano formula.
And then finally, around 1972, Nambu, Yochiro Nambu at Chicago and others said string, that there is a vibrating string involved, and that's what's causing all the magical properties of the Veneziano formula.
And so that if I had this supermicroscope, could look at a pi meson, I would see that it's really nothing but one vibration of a rubber band.
Because before then, people were saying the collision of subatomic particles must obey certain properties, so let's try to guess some of the properties of this formula.
So the general features of the formula were known.
People had guessed the general features.
But no one ever suspected you could write down a formula, a formula that was actually first proposed 150 years ago by Euler, that actually fit all the criteria that you wanted.
And people at that point had to discover what was making it vibrate and what happens when these strings collide.
In fact, my Ph.D. thesis was to calculate all the possible interaction of these colliding strings when they collide and form all sorts of different kinds of bizarre diagrams.
That was my PhD thesis to catalog all these things.
And then we needed an equation one inch long that summarizes the entire theory.
Metaphorically speaking, I would suspect that on the other end of the galaxy, there's probably an alien out there who's also discovering string theory for the first time and writing down the identical harmonies that I'm writing down in this quadrant of the Milky Way galaxy.
Is there some of string theory that would suggest that perhaps before contact with another dimension or anything else, there will be something in string theory that will allow some crude beginning form of communication?
Yes, communication, for example, with another dimension.
Communication using some science within string theory to an Well, the first signal that we may get from another dimension may come from the next generation of microwave satellites.
Well, the radiation that we photograph in the microwave range fits exactly, precisely, the predictions made by George Gama back in 1948 with his students.
I guess I understand how we can sort of look back on the Big Bang itself or the explosion, but I don't see how you're getting where you say you're going right now.
Any gravity shock wave, not microwave now, but gravity shock wave that is still reverberating around our soap bubble, if it hits this triangle, it'll cause it to jiggle.
The laser beams will go out of sync and will detect the presence of a shock wave, a gravity shock wave from the instant of creation.
This will give us a baby picture of the baby as it emerges from the womb.
Wow.
The instant where the baby emerges from the womb.
We hope to pick up the signs of an umbilical cord.
The umbilical cord, perhaps, that connected our bubble universe to perhaps a parent bubble universe.
And the radiation should give us the first signal from another dimension that if our universe was created in this fashion, you know, one soap bubble peeling off another soap bubble, the radiation has a certain predicted frequency.
LISA should be able to get this frequency and check it against the data and rule in or out some theories.
String theory makes some predictions about what this frequency should look like because the universe came from a parent universe.
And this, again, within five, six, seven years, depending upon when they finally get the satellite launched, measurable results that should tell us about the pre-Big Bang universe.
Well, in the end of my book, Parallel Worlds, I speculate, and I say this as strict speculation now, about what an advanced civilization will do as our universe dies.
Yeah, but even in the 1800s, Charles Darwin realized the laws of physics seem to indicate that the universe is running down, and he was quite depressed.
Well, first of all, if you take a look at Norse mythology for some inspiration, they have the Twilight of the Gods, or Godadamerung, or Ragnarok, where there's a gigantic battle in the heavens, and Odin and Thor die, and the whole universe becomes cold and dies as a consequence.
But then an island forms, a tiny island, and seeds begin to sprout, and then the human race starts up again in this island.
And that's how this whole Gatodamerung myth ends, this Norse mythology.
Well, the universe is dying.
The latest data indicates that it's accelerating out of control.
It's going an exponential expansion called a Desider expansion.
And it's going to get awfully cold in the future, so cold that intelligent life will necessarily die when temperatures reach an absolute zero.
Now, the machine is designed to reach the Planck energy.
The Planck energy is the ultimate energy.
It's the energy at which space and time become unstable.
Bubbles begin to form, and the so-called space-time foam becomes visible.
We think that at very small distances, space becomes foamy, like soap bubbles.
But at the Planck energy, these bubbles can become large.
And so I advocate in the end of the book, an advanced civilization facing death will build a gigantic accelerator, like the one that's opening up next year in Geneva, Switzerland, to concentrate enough firepower at a single point to reach the Planck energy.
They may have to use super laser beams and atom smashers the size of the asteroid belt of the solar system.
I even give you some of the details of how big it would have to be.
We are talking about something that will stretch across star systems.
And its final acceleration may be inside the asteroid belts, where stations inside the asteroid belt concentrate the energy in a circle and then slam all this energy at a single point, reaching the Planck energy.
The Planck energy is a quadrillion times larger than that that'll be attained next year in Geneva, Switzerland with the Large Hadron Collider.
And it could be the last ditch effort, the last project ever done by an intelligent species in our universe.
It's make or break to create a machine about 10 light years across, sufficient to slam particles to reach a temperature approaching that incredible amount.
Now, you can calculate the size of the wormhole that may be created.
Hopefully it'll be big enough to transport a whole civilization through.
But I even give you in the book a worst case scenario, in which case perhaps only molecules can go through this wormhole that's created.
But even at the molecular level, you could probably transport enough data through the wormhole to recreate the DNA of your species on the other side of the wormhole.
Well, and our memories and our personalities to recreate them on the other side so that you would send robots, tiny molecular-sized robots, to then create DNA vats that would then clone the species with their memories, which is nothing but information, right?
And you would send both the molecules, which would then form DNA factories, which then clone the species without a memory, and then the information would go through the wormhole, which would then program the brains to have the memories and personalities of their predecessors.
But there are things in the laws of math that say, according, I believe, to your theory, that there must be type 1s, 2s, 3s, and maybe even 4s out there right now.
Highly likely that if you have a type 0 civilization getting off the ground, that unless it self-destructs, it'll go through this sequence and eventually become type 3 and eventually become galactic.
In fact, Carl Sagan used to wonder, if there was a type 3 civilization in our backyard, would we be intelligent enough to even know it?
And he came to the conclusion, no.
We are so stupid in our technology, we wouldn't even be able to know that we're in the middle of a type 3 civilization.
Well, you know, on Star Trek, there was this one episode where they tried to explain why the Klingons and the Rombulans look just like us and are separated by just 100 years in technology.
And in that episode, rather ingenious, there was a primordial DNA created by a species that seeded our sector of the galaxy.
So we're all descended from the same DNA.
And that's why the Klingons and the Rhombulins look just like us, except they have different nose makeup.
So that was one way to explain w how these species can mate with each other, because if you have two aliens, uh they cannot mate with each other because their DNA is totally different.
Uh That would explain why mating is possible on Star Trek, because we were seeded from the same original DNA.
You know, almost everything you say is so optimistic about life being out there in various stages of development, some of them very far advanced.
And since you believe that, seem to believe that, certainly I've listened very carefully tonight, and you seem to believe that, then you ought to be a supporter of SETI-like affairs.
You should be a supporter of attempts to locate life.
Well, assuming I had an unlimited budget, I would start to look at different frequencies beyond hydrogen.
That is, I think, the worst place to look because that's where all the garbage is.
Why would an advanced species want to communicate on the garbage frequencies of exploding stars and dying stars?
There's a lot of static out there.
Why communicate on the static?
I would start to Fourier transform all the different frequencies and start to look for different kinds of harmonics, different kinds of frequencies, possibility of laser communication, possibility of spread spectrum communication, all of which cost much more money than SETI can afford.
So I'm not astonished at all that they found nothing.
Would it be justified if somebody came before Congress with a plan and asking for enough money to really go at it the way you just talked about, would you back such an effort?
I would definitely support it because, you know, like I said, since we left the forest, this could be an event on that magnitude if we were ever to make contact with an extraterrestrial civilization.
How much concern do you have that contact, certainly our military has a lot of concern about this kind of thing, that contact with another civilization could indeed be dangerous.
I mean, you know, if you're ants confronting workers building a 10-lane superhighway, your concern is not that you're going to be invaded, not that you're going to be experimented with.
Your concern is that you're going to get in the way.
You're going to get paved over.
That's the big concern that they are so advanced that they just may plow you under and not even know it.
Well, the question is, by what percentage would you be concerned that it would be a negative outcome to have contact with a very advanced civilization, assuming that only the advanced one would contact us?
Well, I think we should have a 100% guard that they could be hostile, but I think the probability that they are hostile is very near zero.
Because by the time you're type 3, you are immortal.
Nothing known to science can destroy a type 3 civilization.
Supernovas, ice ages, meteor impacts, all can be deflected or dealt with.
By the time you're type 3, you are immortal.
Nothing known to the laws of physics can destroy a type 3 civilization other than suicide.
And so I would suspect, because also they're so old, you know, type 3 civilizations, just to get one off the ground, a minimum of maybe 100,000 years to a million years to get one off the ground, have gone through all the savagery and all the chaos of their origins from the swamp.
They've had time to iron out all the sectarian, fundamentalist, racial, religious differences that typified their rise from the swamp.
That they're not going to want to come to Earth to plunder us because, first of all, there are many other uninhabited planets that have mineral wealth that can be plundered.
Why bother to plunder a planet that's inhabited?
There are lots of mineral-rich planets that are not inhabited, that they can plunder at will.
And they're not going to want to necessarily mate with us or do hidden experiments because we're not going to be made out of the same DNA.
I think by the time you become type 3, there is the possibility that you've seen everything and therefore cease to have any interest in the rest of the universe.
You know, there are 100 billion stars in the Milky Way galaxy.
And if even only a fraction of them have planets, that means there are an awful lot of planets to explore, each one with a different ecology and a different probability of life.
And so I would suspect that they would have many, many new frontiers to conquer, not to mention the possibility of higher dimensions.
So I would say that the probability of their committing suicide, like how the Chinese committed civilization suicide by burning the boats, I think would be kind of small.
I think they're going to be peaceful because they've had millions of years to outgrow the savagery of their origins.
Yes, I saw a discovery special, and they described exactly what would occur if a large comet hit Earth.
And they showed the Earth ultimately becoming a ball of fire nearly as hot as the surface of the Sun and all life being extinguished, except, the theory went, perhaps life at some depth in the Earth that would live through the heat of, you know, be in just the right place so that the surface heat wouldn't kill them and the heat center of the Earth wouldn't kill them.
And this thin little layer of microbial life would emerge eventually when the planet cooled to once again start life on Earth.
But Halley's Comet, the famous Halley's Comet, it's about 20 miles across, about the size of Manhattan.
So if Halley's Comet were ever to hit the Earth, and we go through the tail of Halley's Comet all the time, every 76 years, but if we were ever to be hit by a Halley's comet, the devastation would be much worse than that of 65 million years ago.
And they've had so many fiascos with regards to whether or not they can keep it buried for 10,000 years.
And the latest federal judge says, well, the possibility may be for millions of years.
Because we physicists believe that this radiation could be, you know, dangerous for millions of years.
The 10,000-year figure that they pulled out of a hat is quite arbitrary, actually.
So that's my attitude, that sooner or later the odds catch up to you.
We had a great shot just a few days ago with the New Horizons mission to Pluto, nine and a half year mission to Pluto.
But my attitude is Pluto is not going to go away.
It'll be there next year.
It'll be the year after that.
And we should think of more advanced systems that don't use nuclear because that could be the end of the space program.
If we have a misfire with plutonium in space and plutonium lands on Disney World, there are going to be a lot of angry people saying that we should shut down NASA.
They put different kinds of layers of protective stuff around it.
But when something blows up, you get a lot of shrapnel.
And the shrapnel and the heat would, I think, be sufficient to breach the containment and release the plutonium.
And NASA itself, NASA itself, if you read their environmental impact statement, has gorgeous maps of Florida showing the areas of possible contamination.
And we even talked to one of the retired NASA officials in charge of evacuating Florida.
And he mentioned that in some scenarios, the cloud of plutonium dust will go over Disney World.
Now, he said that this is what they planned for.
And again, the probabilities are very small.
I grant that.
You know, we're not hysteric saying the sky is going to fall tomorrow.
But my attitude is sooner or later the odds catch up to you.
And even the hint, even the hint that a plutonium cloud went over Disney World would be sufficient to wipe out the economy of Central Florida.
And we have a lot of angry parents waiting for the end of the space program.
So my attitude is let's save the space program and not endanger it unnecessarily by having space missions of, you know, marginal scientific value like this one.
Well, you know, there are people who want to push power in space, and Prometheus is the next thing down the line.
That's a nuclear rocket, not just the nuclear battery.
The previous missions had just had nuclear batteries in space.
But the next one is Prometheus, which is a nuclear rocket.
And, you know, in its defense, they say that they'll put a reactor in space in orbit and then turn it on in orbit so it's not going to blow up on the launch pad.
But, you know, nature has a way of subverting the reasonable alternatives.
If you have a misfire in orbit and you have a crippled spacecraft in orbit, like we've had many times in the past, we once had an angry alligator when the escape shroud did not leave our space capsule.
And we had a dead satellite orbiting the Earth called the Angry Alligator.
Well, let's say we have an angry alligator with a nuclear reactor on board.
And we have this time bomb orbiting the Earth, and people taking odds as to where it's going to land.
Now, we've had this before.
The Russian space program was much more clumsy at this than the U.S. space program.
Well, you would have plutonium dust and uranium dioxide dust in the air, sufficient to be lodged in the deep lungs, about a micron or so in size, sufficient to give you cancer over a long period of time.
And you wouldn't be able to cough it out because the ciliary action of the lungs would not be able to pick up particles of that small size.
So on the other hand, somebody could come along, as you mentioned, tomorrow and suddenly solve it all.
And I remember asking you once, if we solved it, if we came up with that equation that literally explained everything, it really wouldn't mean all that much in practical terms to us right away, would it?
If you're looking at a chess game, it would take you a while to figure out the rules of chess, right, how pawns move.
But that does not mean you're a grandmaster.
Once we figure out the chess game of life, the chess game of the Big Bang, the chess game of physics, it doesn't mean that we're grandmasters, that we'll be able to manipulate and create wondrous things.
It just means we figure out how pawns move and how kings move and the rules of the game.
So that's where we are today.
We think we're very close now to figuring out the rules of the game, the game being the universe.
That's a brilliant, brilliant man, Professor Michio Kaku.
And that's about it for me tonight, folks.
I'm sorry I didn't get to the calls that I had waiting.
Perhaps it is as well.
Please, the hour that's coming up is going to be a repeat of what I had to say about the loss of my very dear wife.
And so though there are some difficult moments in it, I would ask you, as one gentleman obviously did in Oregon, do not call the Sheriff's Department, please.