Art Bell welcomes Michio Kaku to discuss dark energy’s 73% dominance, accelerating the universe toward a "death in ice" via exponential expansion. Kaku proposes escaping through parallel universes or hyperspace tunnels, while predicting hydrogen refueling stations and fusion energy by 2040. He warns of methane tipping points—20x CO₂’s potency—and Gulf Stream collapse risking Europe’s rapid cooling. The Allen Telescope Array’s $25M Paul Allen-funded project boosts SETI odds to a few percent, though Kaku cautions against premature contact due to potential societal panic and advanced extraterrestrial civilizations’ unknown intentions. [Automatically generated summary]
From the high desert in the great American Southwest, I bid you all good evening, good morning, good afternoon, as it may be wherever you are in all these prolific time zones around the world.
Howdy, everybody.
I'm Art Bell, filling in for President Norrie this evening, who's getting a well-deserved night off.
I can tell you from having done it for decades that it's a rough haul, and when you get a night off, you deserve to turn the radio off and simply enjoy it.
So we will fill in this night.
I'd like to assure you that my wife Erin is well indeed.
A more loving, supportive wife, a person could, I guess, not ask for.
She's just incredible.
And updating you on our offspring, if you want to check coasttocoastam.com, it says arts webcam up toward the top of the page there.
Just click on that.
And that is a picture taken by Aaron, I think, about a week ago.
So that picture is about a week old.
And our precious little one, Asia Rainbow, is now, as of today, six months old.
She's the little Filipina immigrant cat that we brought with us.
And she is just, she's really a darling.
She sleeps curled up to my legs every night, all night.
And to finish up on the personal stuff, tomorrow, Saturday, our little Asia becomes a new Catholic, baptized.
And so we will try and stumble our way through the baptism tomorrow.
It's sort of a ritual kind of thing, and I'm not sure I'm altogether prepared for it, but I'm sure one way or the other, we will make it through.
Again, to see a picture of Asia, just go to the coastcoastam.com website.
Up toward the top, it'll say arts webcam.
Click on that, and there she is, her little head in the air.
She's now, well, see, that's the trouble.
When dads get talking about their little ones, it's hard to stop them.
But she can now turn over.
For a while, you know, she would just turn over to her belly, and then she would get frustrated that she was on her belly, and she couldn't get back around.
Well, now, ladies and gentlemen, she has learned, just learned, to turn around the other way.
So that ends a lot of baby frustration for her.
She can actually turn back around.
Now she wants to grab cups of coffee and anything else that her little eyes can see.
All right.
We're going to take a look at the world news, never a totally pleasant task, and then get on to the real stuff.
It was interesting.
Somebody walked into a Clinton office, campaign office, said he had a bomb strapped on him, and they thought he did.
Whole thing went on about six hours.
He finally gave up, let all the hostages out, gave up peacefully and came out.
I wanted to talk to somebody about mental health accessibility.
I suspect he's accessed the mental health system by now.
Four arrested in the murder of the Redskins Taylor.
Police said two men and two juveniles were arrested Friday in the shooting death of Washington Redskins star Sean Taylor.
Unbelievable.
Went to his home intent on stealing, not killing.
And I guess I heard he locked the door.
And I guess they heard him locking the door to the bedroom or whatever and crashed through and shot him.
Congressional Democrats reached a compromise late Friday to boost automobile fuel economy by 40.
Get this, 40%, boy, we can sure use that, huh?
Clearing the way for a House vote probably next week or so on an energy bill that Democrats would like to send to the president before Christmas.
Wonder if he'd consider it a Christmas present.
The agreement came after House Speaker Nancy Pelosi reached an accord with Representative Dingell from Michigan, a longtime protector of the auto industry that dominates his home state.
Evil Knievel's gone, folks.
An icon, I think, for most of us, my age, certainly, Evil Knievel at 69 years of age, dead after a long bout with diabetes and pulmonary problems.
Take care, buddy.
We all watched you.
An Amtrak train ran right into the back of a freight train in Chicago, crushed one end of a box car under its wheels Friday.
It injured dozens, some seriously.
And then finally, looking at the depressing world, yet this Bush administration intends to slash counterterrorism funds for police, firefighters, and rescue departments all across America by more than half next year.
Now, that's a big cut.
That's a really big cut.
It's going to slash counterterrorism funds by half.
The Homeland Security Department has given about $23 billion to states and local communities to fight terrorism since September 11.
And I guess the thinking in Washington, right or wrong, is that that's enough.
And we're ready.
And so now we'll, I don't know, cut the funds or something.
We're going to be doing unscreened open line calls for the balance of this hour.
But in a moment, we will peruse the other news.
You know, the state of Massachusetts is actually trying to outlaw spanking.
Saw that on CNN the other day.
What is going on in our nation?
Outlaw, pass a law against spanking?
Now, obviously, nobody wants to See any child struck and the line crossed to child abuse, but outlaw spanking.
Weren't most of you spanked?
I certainly was.
And there are times, not many, hopefully, when for a child's own welfare, they have to understand what no means.
And it takes a little swan on the tail to reinforce that.
But to outlaw, outlaw spanking, what are they going to do?
Carry parents that have been rumored to spank off to jail?
Now, if you're going to Japan, you might want to listen up.
They've got a fingerprint and photograph foreigners entering their country beginning next month as an anti-terrorism policy.
And there's a lot of people really angry about it, anyone considered to be a terrorist or refusing to cooperate.
I wonder if that would include somebody going to save the dolphin slaughter.
Anyway, will be denied entry and deported.
They say, quote, it will greatly contribute to preventing international terrorist activities on our soil.
Japanese spokesperson.
Japan, unlike the U.S., will require resident foreigners as well as visitors to be fingerprinted and photographed every single time they re-enter the country.
Forget about the threat that mankind poses to the Earth.
This is going to be a, oh, by the way, coming up next, our Dr. Michiu Kaku, who is one of Earth's greatest minds, theoretical physicist, been on the show many times, brilliant.
This would be a good question for him.
Forget about the threat that mankind poses to Earth.
Our activities may be shortening the life of the universe as well.
The startling claim made by a pair of American cosmologists investigating consequences for the cosmos of quantum theory, the most successful theory we have over the past few years, cosmologists have taken this powerful theory of what happens at the level of subatomic particles and tried to extend it to understand the universe since it began in the subatomic realm during the Big Bang.
Now, what are we talking about here?
There's an odd feature of the theory that philosophers and scientists still argue about in a nutshell.
It suggests that we change things simply by gazing at them, looking at them.
That's it.
And theorists have puzzled over this implication for years.
They often illustrate their concerns about what theory means with mind-boggling experiments, notably Schrodinger's cat.
You've heard about that, right?
In other words, the cat is either dead or alive until you look.
And when you look into the box and you see a dead cat, then it's dead.
But before you look, it could well be alive.
And so the scientist, New Scientist actually, a very well thought of publication, The New Scientist, reports a worrying new variant as the cosmologists claim that astronomers may actually have accidentally nudged our universe closer to its death by observing dark energy.
You can bet we're going to talk about that tonight.
A mysterious anti-gravitic force, which is thought to be speeding up the expansion of the cosmos.
So just by looking at our own universe, we may have changed it.
You could think of our universe as being in a box like a cat.
The origin of life is one of the great unsolved problems of science.
Nobody knows how or where or when life originated.
But all we know for certain is that a microbial life had established itself on Earth in and about 3.5 billion years ago.
In the absence of hard evidence of what came before, there's plenty of scope for disagreement.
30 years ago, the prevailing view among biologists was that life resulted from a chemical fluke so incredibly improbable that it would be very unlikely to have happened twice in the observable, that's a very important word, universe.
That conservative position was exemplified by Nobel Prize-winning French biologist Jacques Monard, who wrote in 1970, quote, man at last knows that he is alone in the unfeeling immensity of the universe, out of which he emerged only by chance.
Now, that's a depressing statement.
Listen again, man at last knows he is alone in the unfeeling immensity of the universe, out of which he emerged only by chance.
Or you could take the other view that the universe is teeming with life.
And that, believe it or not, folks, is something we're going to discuss with Dr. Kaku tonight.
Now, that surprises me because Dr. Kaku's always sort of shied away in the past from discussing SETI or any possibility of aliens, noting, I think, quite logically, that there are so many light years away that they couldn't get here, or we couldn't get there.
They're impossibly far away.
And so, while never denouncing SETI, certainly, scientists like Dr. Kaku have always sort of, well, I don't know, given it a wink and a nod and said, well, I suppose the money is not totally wasted or something of that sort.
Tonight he actually wants to talk about SETI.
That should be really interesting.
Researchers in England have developed, get this their own flying saucer, and it might be going to work for the U.S. and British military.
Now, this will be a big problem for ufology.
GFS projects, unmanned aerial vehicle can actually soar high in the air, hover, bank, fly over any terrain, making it ideal for military surveillance.
Looks like a flying saucer.
It uses an aerodynamic principle known as the Coanda effect.
It takes off vertically from any solid surface.
A propeller mounted atop the two-foot-wide aircraft apparently pushes air down over the saucer-shaped body, creating a broad cone of thrust extending outward.
Now, this caught my eye because if they begin flying in our skies, we're going to get millions of UFO reports.
I saw a saucer.
Well, indeed, you did.
And how will ufology ever differentiate between these things and those things?
Answer is they really won't.
A physicist and his biologist's son, apparently, get this folks, have destroyed a common virus using a super fast pulsing laser without harming so much as a healthy cell.
The discovery could lead to new treatments for viruses like HIV that have no cure.
Quote, we have demonstrated a technique of using laser to excite vibrations on the shield of a virus and damage it so there's no longer any functional virus at all, said the professor of physics at Arizona State University.
We're now testing it on HIV and hepatitis.
So hope for many if it works.
Here's an article entitled, we have on this program many times talked about nanotechnology, and I've had a lot of nanotechnological people on the air.
And inevitably, I ask, is nanotechnology potentially dangerous?
I always ask that.
And they always answer, oh, no, Art.
No, it's under control.
Don't worry.
And here's an article that states on nanotechnology, experts actually see more risks than does the public.
In a surprising reversal of roles, nanotechnology scientists outrival the general public, all of you, including me, in seeing a cause for concern in some aspects of their work.
Nanotechnology, the science of making things little, measured in units of 10,000 times smaller than the width of a human hair, holds, of course, spectacular promise in virtually every sector.
But it also holds an awful lot of worry.
For example, you might breathe in, you actually might breathe in a little nanotechnological something or another, and it would be so small that it would just go straight to your lung lining.
And who knows what it's designed to do, right?
There's no way to really, it might go in there and start doing it to your body.
So that's something to worry about.
And the people who do these nano-bots, nano-robots and so forth, while they talk about repairing damaged tissue with these little guys, little guys might go racing around your body, tearing up everything in sight.
Something to worry a little bit about.
The weather.
This came from Whitley Streeber's Unknown Country.
Weather wars are a possibility, at least in this article.
It seems to suggest that when it gets either too cold or too hot, the world has more wars, and there is statistical evidence to back it up.
We could look at the mini ice age and get it, there were more wars.
In other words, anytime temperature in the world changes dramatically, or even fairly dramatically, nations begin to get hungry and they go to war with each other.
Now, they tend to go more quickly to war when it gets colder, but they also, more slowly, but inevitably, go to war also when it gets warmer.
Now, it's okay for a while.
Apparently, nations like warming weather for a little while, but then when it gets too warm, that's when it gets cold, they go to war.
Food and that sort of thing.
University of Utah biologists genetically manipulated a, I believe they call it a nematode, little worm.
So the animals were attracted to worms of the same sex, part of a study that shows sexual orientation is wired, at least in their brains.
Biologist Eric Jorgensen says, quote, our conclusion is that sexual attraction is wired into the brain circuits, common to both sexes of these worms, and is not caused solely by extra nerve cells added to the male or female brain.
Our conclusions are narrow in that they are about worms and how attraction behaviors are derived from the same brain circuit, but an evolutionary biologist will consider this to be potentially a common mechanism for sexual attraction.
We cannot say what this means for human sexual orientation, but it raises at least the possibility that sexual preference is wired in the brain.
Humans are subject to evolutionary forces just like worms.
Seems possible that if sexual orientation is genetically wired in worms, it will be in people too.
Humans have free will, so the picture is more complicated in people.
All right, we're going to take a break here at the bottom of the hour in a moment.
When we come back, we're going to get a little promo about a show coming up tomorrow, Ian's show coming up tomorrow, and then we're going to go to unscreened.
That's right, unscreened open lines.
Now, what that means is, I'm not going to have your call screened to see what they're all about, so I want them to be good.
In other words, don't pick up the phone unless you have something really cool that everybody would be interested in.
West of the Rockies, the number is 800-618-8255.
East of the Rockies, 800-825-5033.
First time callers, 800.
No. 818.
Area code, 818-501-4721.
And finally, the wildcard line, not quite finally, at Area Code 818-501-4109.
Internationally, outside the country, 800-893-0903.
Get hold of the international operator.
Tell her you want to call Coast to Coast AM on the International Toll-Free Line.
Again, it's 800-893-0903.
If you didn't get any of those, because I did it quickly, listen closely as we come back.
We'll repeat them for you.
From the high desert and the great American Southwest, I'm Mark Bell, in for George Norrie, and we'll be right back.
Well, first of all, let me just say always a pleasure to hear you on.
And secondly, I thought you'd get this to you.
A friend of mine named David Mack, who writes Daredevil and a couple of other comics.
He's written a children's book.
He sent me a copy of it to give to you for Asia Rain about a little girl who wants to be the vet for Bigfoot, Yeti, and The Lotus Monster and other shy creatures.
Hey, yeah, tomorrow night, we have sort of the Michio Kaku of robots tomorrow night.
He's David Levy.
He's written a book called Love, Sex, and Robots.
And it is a futuristic look at companion robots.
He's kind of worked out where we are right now with, even if you saw that piece earlier in the week about Japanese robots that are working on touch, the sensitivity of touch and language.
And he takes a very provocative look, and provocative here, probably being very literal, on how robots will be used as soon as five years and maybe how they could replace human relationships altogether.
Yeah, he talks a lot about people who are in difficult relationships or if there are sexual problems or other things, how robots will continue to serve man, as it were.
You know that thing that we all experience as we get older?
And that is, my God, you call that music?
We change, right?
I've been convinced for years and years, decades actually, that getting older, if you achieve it, if you make it into your 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s, whatever, by the time you're ready to die, by the time you're ready to go, you are so fed up with a world where they've outlawed spanking and robots are available for sex that you just say, God, I'm ready to go.
I was listening to Eon and I was like waiting for him to hang up and I pressed the last digit and I got the ring and I've been hanging on.
It's great to talk with you guys.
You're great.
I just wanted to cover just a few things that was on my mind about the nanotechnology regarding, you know, getting in and starting to, you know, do its thing and starting to build its own, you know, identity and whatnot.
You know, to get back to nature, I was thinking, because I have a friend that has this affliction, and, you know, it's a very delicate question.
And the only thing, and I'm so sad, and it's a hard subject to discuss with her.
And I feel that oregano, if they could just get some good organic oregano that's approved GSA by the FDA approved and everything, just take a couple of drops at a time and maybe get some lotion and start putting it on the stores, you know, oregano.
Maybe.
And then just a couple other things I just want to mention real quick.
One Bigfoot sighting in my life at about nine years of age upstate New York where I grew up up in north of Syracuse.
And I saw it.
I grew up in the woods and I stayed out overnight and made up a lean to.
I got up real early in the morning because a squirrel woke me up.
And anyway, Make a long story short, I got up real quiet.
I stood up, I looked across the turtle pond, that's where all the Boy Scouts used to do their thing, the Girl Scouts.
I looked out and I saw this huge reddish-brown, man-ish, postured thing walking.
And it was just like so slow.
And I saw for like, you know, maybe like 30 frames or something, like maybe like two or three seconds.
I saw this image.
And then another time in the same area, but maybe about 15 miles away, I witnessed a footprint of a Bigfoot going into a canal.
Yeah, but the only thing I can say about Bigfoot all the way around is where are the bodies?
Either Bigfoot is somewhat paranormal and is able to disappear, or we've got to get hold of the one guy I interviewed who knocked off, he claims a couple of them and dig up the bodies.
I just wanted to let you know that I talked, my name is Larry, and I talked to George Norris last week when Christian Wilde was on there on the show.
Yes.
And I called in, and I have congenital heart disease, and I wanted to let him know that I wanted to let George know that I've been in contact with Mr. Wilde.
And he said there's, he doesn't want to give me false hope, but he's going to talk to someone at Columbia University, and they're probably going to help me with, maybe can help me with my congenital heart disease and giving me a new heart.
I've had my own personal sighting, as most of you well know.
And so they certainly are there.
Great, big, gigantic triangular craft that are powered by, well, we don't know, do we?
Something that apparently defies gravity because there's no sound, there's no apparent propulsion system, nor are they going fast enough to traditionally, at least temporarily, escape gravity with the aerodynamic principles we're all well aware of.
A friend of mine, actually, a young man at the time who was a competitor of mine, Billy Goodman.
I wonder how many of you remember.
Now, you'd have to be probably a person who lived out here in the middle of the desert back in the 1980s.
But if you were, you'll recall a young man at that time whose name was Billy Goodman.
It still is, actually.
He's still with us.
But he's fighting cancer.
And I spoke with Billy just yesterday on hearing of his affliction.
And I certainly wished him well.
And it may well be that given an opportunity in one of the programs I've got coming up, I'll have Billy on the air.
We were competitors in Las Vegas.
I worked for KWN Radio.
He worked for, at that time, KVEG, both 50,000-watt radio stations.
And we kind of had a blast.
I mean, we were the only ones in the country doing it as far as I know.
And here all these years later, I got an opportunity to talk to Billy Goodman.
He had a show called The Happening.
And Billy is very, very ill with cancer, although feeling that he's with God and has turned his life and fate over to God in terms of treatment for the cancer.
And we had quite a long talk and I guess reminisced.
And we'll probably have Billy on the air to say hello to you.
Now, while one might imagine that we've developed something triangular, secret, and quiet by now, certainly it would not have existed that long ago, now, would it?
unidentified
No, I didn't think so.
He said weather balloon, and I said, no, it's going against the trade winds.
Oh, well, then that would have made it very, very high in the sky, if still within the atmosphere at all, to be reflecting any sunlight whatsoever.
Within an hour or two at the most, I guess, of sunrise, or sunset rather, you might observe, for example, a satellite that would still be in sunlight, but you've got to get awfully high two hours after sunset to be seeing reflected sun on anything.
Well, I'm not sure that was authenticated as a real crop circle insofar as they're able to authenticate crop circles as real, but oh, it was amazing, yes.
unidentified
Well, first, well, I've got to say that that crop circle, there's no way that that could have been done in one night.
Like that crop circle that was made, I have to say that that crop circle was made by the greys themselves.
So, yeah, I know about the reply, the alleged reply, and all the rest of it, but I don't think we were able to authenticate that as beyond any shadow of a doubt.
You know, we saw, for example, molecular changes to the grain and the seeds and that kind of stuff.
And I'm saying prayers for your friend, by the way.
I wish him the best.
And I think it's great he's given his life over to God.
And I also wanted to mention about the Spankings.
I am outraged, absolutely outraged.
And the only way that people, these people, whoever they are, they have some major, major problems.
They can be overcome.
You had a guest on last night with George Norrie.
And that man, to me, is one of these people that says he mentioned that they can be overcome, but they have to be overcome with love, and we have to forgive them.
They have major issues.
They have to know that their soul is on the line.
And make no mistake about it.
Their souls are on the line.
And we have to be brave.
We have to believe in God and know that we will overcome all of their evils.
Can you imagine not being able to give a child, I mean, giving a child a little swat on the back end to stay away from that electric socket or whatever it is for the child's welfare and then having the police march in and arrest you?
unidentified
I am, you know what, Art?
I am one of these people that ordinarily, I don't even believe in corporal punishment.
But let me tell you, I was born, I was raised in an upper middle class family, and I got slatted a few times on the butt.
And this is way over the top, way over the top.
And we as a free American society, we need to speak up, speak out.
I haven't seen the most recent movie with Tom Cruise and Meryl Streep and Robert Redford, but I read a little excerpt, and Robert Redford was saying something to that effect.
We cannot let people, ignorant people and evil people, overrun this country.
We can't let the country become overrun by idiots.
That's the bottom line.
Idiots.
I saw a movie, she mentioned movies, I think it was yesterday, in which the genetic undoing of America was, in a comedic way, described rather accurately.
You know, those with money and wits didn't reproduce and the idiots did, and maybe that's happening to us.
We'll be right back.
Here I am, filling in for George Norrie this Friday night, Saturday morning, coming up in a moment.
Dr. Michio Kaku.
He's an internationally recognized authority in theoretical physics and the environment.
He holds the Henry Summut Professorship in Theoretical Physics at City College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.
He has lectured all around the world, and his PhD-level textbooks are required reading at many of the top physics laboratories.
Dr. Kaku graduated from Harvard in 1968, Summa Kamla, number one in his physics class, received a Ph.D. from the University of California Berkeley Radiation Lab in 1972, held a lectureship at Princeton University in 1973, then joined the faculty of the City University of New York, where he has been a professor of theoretical physics for 25 years.
Indeed, is one of the brightest minds in the world right now, and he'll be up next.
Dr. Michio Kaku, welcome back to Coast to Coast A.M., my friend.
Professor, before we even get to what I'm surprised we're going to be talking about tonight, there's an article in New Scientist, which I'm sure you're aware of.
A couple of fellows, Professor Lawrence Krauss of Case Western and James Denn of Vanderbilt.
Now, you know, Schrodinger's cat, I never worried too much about whether the cat was alive or dead.
But if the observation of dark energy, I mean, they're suggesting that the mere observation of dark energy, like a cat situation, may actually mean nudging our universe closer to its own demise just by observing it.
It seems to be undetectable except, of course, by very indirect means using our satellites and calculating the expansion of the universe.
Dark energy is killing the universe.
It's blowing the universe apart.
It's causing the universe to not slow down but accelerate.
And so it's in a runaway mode right now.
It's in what is called an exponential desider mode.
And it may go on forever, in which case, one day when we look at the night sky, it'll be totally dark.
Totally dark because light will not have the ability to reach us from deep space because the stars will be so far apart.
And this means that we can see how the universe will die.
The universe will probably die in ice rather than fire.
We'll probably freeze to death trillions of years from now.
And it's not a pleasant sight, but the laws of physics seem to be a death warrant for intelligent life on Earth.
Now, in my last book, Parallel Worlds, I lay out perhaps the only way to avoid this catastrophe, the ultimate death of all intelligent life in the universe.
And my own point of view is that when that point is reached trillions of years from now, we may have to leave the universe.
If the universe becomes too cold to support life because dark energy is blowing the universe apart, then we may have to drill a hole in the universe, create a lifeboat, and sail away in hyperspace to another parallel universe.
Now, if you get the latest issue of Scientific American, okay, the latest issue of Scientific American, they take parallel universes very seriously.
You know, when I first came on your show and I talked about parallel universes, right, some people were like flipped out and said, this is nonsense.
Since I came on your show, there have been a lot of papers published on parallel universes, so much now that it's mainstream.
And the latest Scientific American has a whole article devoted to parallel universes.
So the point is that if our universe is a bubble and it's expanding out of control so that the surface of the bubble is going to get colder and colder and colder in the future, we may have to leave our bubble.
We may have to create a little baby bubble, which Stephen Hawking calls a baby universe, leave our universe and attach ourselves to a younger universe and perhaps start all over again.
So this may seem far-fetched, but again, a technology trillions of years from now may have the ability to punch a hole in space, leap through 11-dimensional hyperspace into another parallel universe to start all over again.
Well, that's all very interesting, but actually, having listened to you over the years, I know that the chances of our making it that far are, well, there was a lady here in Peru, Nevada, who not very long ago hit $18 million on a penny slot machine.
But the truth is, given our propensity for self-destruction, given the current state of the world with all the ice melting and all the rest of it, I mean, really, given Element 92, what do you really calculate our chances to get out to the new bubble place?
The projections given by, you know, the United Nations and other organizations show that the Earth is changing much more rapidly than anyone ever expected.
That all the estimates done 10 years ago, if you were to go back 10 years ago, look at the estimates made then.
Every single one missed the mark by failing to predict the actual change in temperature, the actual slow breakup of the Arctic and huge chunks of the Antarctic breaking off.
You realize that the North Pole is going to be completely free of ice in summertime in the coming decades.
And I was just speaking of Switzerland last year.
And in the Alps, the Alps were melting.
There was almost no snow.
It was a disaster for the ski season.
And now the economies are being disrupted because, of course, tourism is a huge business in the Alps.
But we may just have to get used to it.
You know, droughts, melting of glaciers, recession of the glaciers, and the spreading of disease north.
All these dire predictions are coming to pass much faster than anyone expected.
I think that just like the frog that's in a frying pan and you slowly turn up the heat, some frogs will realize that they're going to fry to death, even though it's a slow burn, and they will jump out of the frying pan.
My only hope is that we wake up in time to jump out of the frying pan, even though the temperature is slowly being ratcheted up, so slow that governments would like to tend to ignore the fact.
Well, the marketplace, I think, will lead on this because we are hitting what is called Hubbard's peak with respect to oil.
Now, let me explain.
Back in the 60s, Hubbard was the Shell oil engineer who predicted that we will hit the 50% mark for American oil and that we will then become a net importer of oil.
Well, everyone in the 60s thought Hubbard was nuts to talk about a bell-shaped curve and us hitting the top of the bell-shaped curve where we took out 50% of the oil from the ground.
Well, lo and behold, we hit Hubbard's peak, and America imports oil now.
Everybody knows that.
We import oil.
We are addicted to oil, as the president has said.
Now, we are hitting Hubbard's peak for the planet Earth.
We have taken about 50% of the world's oil out of the ground, and we will continue to find new deposits, of course, but you would have to discover a new Middle East, a new Saudi Arabia, every 10 years in order to meet the rising demands of China, India, and the rising middle class.
Now, no one says we're going to discover a new Saudi Arabia every 10 years, right?
That's out of the question.
So what this means is we're hitting probably the top of Hubbard's peak now.
And as we go down this bell-shaped curve, prices are going to continue to rise, not fall.
And I think that's going to create more instability around the world.
But the silver lining is that this is also going to create more incentives for us to get rid of our addiction to oil.
So I would say within 15, 20 years, we'll go to a solar hydrogen economy.
And then 30 to 40 years, fusion will probably come online.
The French government is baiting the house on the ITER experimental fusion reactor to be based in southern France.
And a lot of European governments are also backing them.
And we may eventually use seawater as our fuel supply 30 to 40 years from now.
I know that because my mentor in high school was Edward Teller, and he even offered me a job designing hydrogen warheads for the United States Pentagon.
But on the other hand, you know, he was the darling of the Pentagon and had access to billions of dollars worth of funds.
You know, he created the Livermore National Laboratory just on the basis of his own reputation, basically, and convinced the government to fund the Livermore National Laboratory, which designs hydrogen warheads.
I'm Art Bell for George Norrie, and we'll be right back.
In this night, filling in, that is, for George Nori, taking the night off.
My guest is Dr. Michio Kaku, and we're about to discuss what in the world it's going to take, or perhaps outside this world, to contain a process that goes on constantly on our sun, and we can so far only duplicate by dropping big hydrogen bombs.
That would be the answer for energy if we can figure out how to contain it in a moment.
Professor, if containing such a field is virtually impossible, like as I think you put it, trying to grab a balloon and then watching it bulge out here and there and everywhere as you grab it, what do you imagine that might contain such a process?
Would it be magnetic, giant electromagnetic fields or what?
Well, that's our best bet to create what is called the magnetic bottle.
You take a doughnut, a donut, and put coils of wire around the donut.
Okay, so you have basically a coil of wire wound in the shape of a donut.
You put the gas inside the donut, and you turn on the magnetic field, and the magnetic field contains the plasma, the super hot gas inside, and then you send a spark inside to heat it up.
And so far, they've been able to hit tens of millions of degrees centigrade with devices like this.
You have to do what is called attained Lawson's criterion.
Lawson's criterion is attained in the center of stars.
It's also attained in hydrogen warheads.
And we're not quite there yet with Lawson's criterion in a fusion reactor.
We're about one-tenth of Lawson's criterion.
You need to contain the gas for about one full second.
So far, we can do it for a fraction of a second before the plasma disintegrates.
Because, you know, you're squeezing this balloon.
Every time you squeeze the gas at one point, it bolts out someplace else.
The gas is unstable.
That's the reason why we still rely upon oil and coal.
Because magnets have a dipole charge, plus and minus, I mean, north and south.
And it's quite difficult.
It's quite difficult to squeeze gas using dipoles.
And the best we can do is use donuts to squeeze the gas.
But the French, as I mentioned, and the European Union and the United States and Japan and Korea, are investing hundreds of millions of dollars on the ITER, the international thermonuclear experimental reactor, to be based in southern France.
And it has the best hope, the best hope of attaining fusion perhaps by 2030.
And if that takes place, then commercialization will take place around 2040.
What happened is if it spins out of control, unlike a fission reactor like Three Mile Island or Chernobyl, once it starts to melt itself and devour itself, like in a science fiction movie, then Lawson's criterion is no longer satisfied, and the thing turns itself off.
50,000 square miles you can pretty easily wipe out if you loft 30 tons of nuclear waste into the atmosphere in a typical fission reactor.
And these are just average numbers I'm giving you.
You can wipe out a huge amount of real estate.
If Indian Point north of where I'm standing, if Indian Point north of New York City were to have been hit by the terrorists, and the terrorists at 9-11 thought about targeting Indian Point, they even have said so in a video, if they had hit Indian Point, I wouldn't be here right now.
Manhattan would be radioactive.
They would have to have evacuated all of the Northeast Corridor if they had hit Indian Point and released 30 tons of high-level nuclear waste into the atmosphere.
If you take a look at the original design specifications for design basis accident at Indian Nuclear Power Plant, they said that only a small 707 jet plane, it would have to withstand an attack from a 707 without jet fuel.
And this, of course, was back in the 70s when these estimates were done.
Now, nobody flies 707s, and everybody knows that they're fully laden with fuel, especially on takeoff.
And that's an enormous amount of fuselage and engine parts and metal with a tremendous amount of fuel plowing into a building.
And I really doubt that the Indian Point nuclear power plant containment would have handled anything close to a 747, let's say, jumbo jet, fuely laden.
Okay, so for these reasons then and others, including waste, storage, they want to put very close to me out here, I take it that you do not support continued or renewed building of fission plants.
Well, to make a dent in global warming, you would have to increase the number of fission plants by a factor of 10.
Now, we have about 100 right now.
Can you imagine 1,000 nuclear power plants?
That would make very inviting targets for terrorists, given the fact that security at nuclear power plants is not the best.
There have been a number of scandals involving security at nuclear power plants.
One nuclear power plant was found to have actually given the answers to the workers for a test that the workers are supposed to have passed.
The NRC once put a gun encased in plastic and put it in a suitcase so that NOMA could fire the gun and see how far they could go into a nuclear power plant.
They went all the way into the control room with a gun sealed in plastic in a suitcase.
So I don't trust the security that we have in nuclear power plants, especially if a 747 jumbo jet is coming at you from five miles up.
There's really not much a nuclear power plant could do.
It's a sitting duck, basically, and we would have 1,000 of them scattered around the 50 states.
I think we should go for a solar hydrogen economy.
Again, a mix of energy for the next 10, 15 years.
But when the two curves cross, the rising price of oil, the falling price of solar, when they cross about 15 or so years from now, that will give enormous incentive to go to a solar hydrogen economy.
You know, when Henry Ford and Thomas Edison had that famous contest about 100 years ago, Henry Ford was backing electricity and Henry Ford was backing gasoline internal combustion engines.
People criticized Ford and said, you're stupid.
There's going to be a gas refueling station in every block.
Cars are going to crash.
People are going to die, die in flames when your gasoline-fired car crashes.
Well, both predictions turned out to be true.
50,000 Americans die, 40,000 Americans die every year in car accidents and horrible Deaths.
And we have a gasoline pump in every block.
So it came to pass.
Now people are saying that hydrogen will kill you, and that we'll have to have hydrogen refueling stations every block.
There was a group, the Global Business Network, that did a study for the Pentagon about worst-case scenarios and populations and stuff.
And their conclusion shocked everybody.
It made the front page of a lot of newspapers.
Their report to the Pentagon said that populations will begin to migrate if we have massive droughts and national borders disintegrate.
And mass migrations will threaten the integrity of nation states, and they will use nuclear weapons.
They'll use nuclear weapons to preserve their national borders.
Now, that scared the pants off a lot of people when that report came out.
But if you think about it, that's a logical thing for the Pentagon to do.
If they have nuclear weapons, borders start to disintegrate because of droughts, mass famine, food riots.
Again, this is not anytime soon.
We're talking 30, 50 years from now.
But if it gets to the point where mass migrations take place of starving people by the millions, nations will use nuclear weapons to preserve their national borders.
And that's, of course, a worst-case scenario.
But it's a scenario that the Pentagon has considered.
If you want to know what the weather is going to be like in the coming decades, look south, okay?
So the Canadians are probably looking at us and saying, gee, what a mild climate the Americans have for now and thinking what the climate we're going to have in the future.
Is there any possibility in your mind, Professor, that as in the movie The Day After Tomorrow, it wouldn't happen in the span of two hours, but a whole lot faster, much faster than we imagine?
In other words, there could be a kind of a trigger effect that begins to occur as the melting continues, and it could be sudden, relatively sudden.
If you take a look at the archaeological record, you know, ice cores, you dig right into the North Pole and you take out ice that's been there for up to 600,000 years.
That's the world's record.
We're almost approaching a million years into the past.
And then take a look at lake sediments, and that even takes you even beyond that.
You realize that millions of years ago, at one point, the North Pole was completely melted over, and that millions of years ago, it was actually tropical in the North Pole.
Sea levels were much higher Back then, and a lot of the coastlines of the earth would be unrecognizable back then.
Again, we're talking tens of millions of years ago, but that's when we did have tremendous heat, and glaciers almost totally receded, and the earth was totally different than it is now, and had different life forms.
And it's not clear that humans would survive in New York.
We can, but it also creates carbon dioxide when it burns.
And so, in fact, you know, anything that undergoes combustion will release carbon dioxide.
So that's the basic problem.
We have to get away from burning.
If you think about it, you know, burning is the central core of modern civilization.
That's why we have to get away from thinking about things that produce large quantities of carbon dioxide.
And remember, carbon dioxide stays in the atmosphere a lot longer than methane.
Methane is more potent than carbon dioxide as a greenhouse gas, but methane doesn't stay in the atmosphere as long.
So anyway, for doomsday scenarios where you could literally collapse the atmosphere in a relatively short period of time, methane is one, methane from Siberia, when Siberia thaws out from the bottom of the oceans.
And the third doomsday scenario is actually mentioned in your movie, Day After Tomorrow, where Greenland melts and fresh water is injected into the Atlantic, which destabilizes the Gulf Stream, and that could cause Europe to freeze over.
It was Benjamin Franklin who first figured out 200 years ago the role of the Gulf Stream when he was crossing the Atlantic centuries ago.
And anything that disrupts that Gulf Stream could have serious repercussions on the weather and could have a catastrophic implication for especially Northern Europe.
England, as you know, if you take a globe, England has the same latitude as parts of Canada.
Except for the ocean currents, which could be disrupted by fresh water.
And this has happened in the past, by the way.
It's not science fiction.
It's already happened in the past.
And we don't know how fast it took place, but we think that in just a few years, the Gulf Stream was disrupted in the past, which caused many ice ages.
Worrisome, because if you take a look at the salinity content, that is the salt content of the North Atlantic, it's thinning out because of the influx of large amounts of fresh water from Greenland coming down.
And that could disrupt the thermohaline cycle, of which the Gulf Stream is part.
And that's happened in the past.
In the past, the thermohaline cycles have been disrupted, causing catastrophic changes of the weather in a very short period of time, just a few years, we think.
And so then we're no longer talking about decades and decades.
We're talking about tipping points.
And once the tipping point is reached, we're talking about catastrophic collapse of the weather in a very short period of time.
And there's no point piddling with equipment that is too primitive and too cheap not to pick up anything.
You mean like arecibo?
The equipment that we have today is old, it's out of date, and we only use it part-time.
Now, last month, and this hit the newspapers, last month the Allen Telescope Array went online.
Paul Allen is the co-founder of Microsoft.
he's a billionaire, and he has funded to the tune of $25 million the Allen Telescope Array to jumpstart the SETI project to create the Manhattan Project, the Manhattan Project of SETI.
We're talking about up to 350, count them, 350 radio telescope dishes exclusively, exclusively designed to look for extraterrestrial intelligence in outer space.
42 went online just last month, and eventually 350 will go online.
And that should increase the sensitivity and search scans by about a factor of 1,000.
So we're talking about 1,000 times more than all the accumulated steady searches of the past.
Well, I'm not sure they're going to find anything.
However, this is the best bet in a generation.
In a generation.
Once in a generation, we get an opportunity like this, right?
When a billionaire decides to throw 25 million away to create 350 gigantic radio telescopes, this could set the gold standard for the search for extraterrestrial intelligence.
Well, if you had been the one trying to get the money and you had been in front of Paul Allen trying to make the case for however many million to look for intelligent life out there, how would you have made the case?
His name would be in every single newspaper in the world because it was his telescope, his telescope that found it.
And second of all, most scientists, when they look at the numbers, believe they're out there.
There are over 100 billion stars in the Milky Way galaxy, and we've only scanned about 1,000 of them.
Get this.
We've only scanned in detail about 1,000 stars in 100 billion stars in our own backyard.
And there are 100 billion galaxies within the range of our telescopes.
So altogether, we even know how many stars there are in the visible universe.
100 billion times 100 billion.
That's how many stars there are total in the visible universe.
And we've only scanned 1,000 of them.
And of course, we're going to snicker at SETI.
Of course, we're going to say this is kind of like a useless project because, you know, there's so many stars to scan, and we've only scanned 1,000 of them.
And we might even be scanning in the wrong frequency using wrong methods.
What are the odds that a transmission, an incidental transmission, or many incidental transmissions, I mean, let's take Earth as a case, the electromagnetic radiation that we emit right now at all kinds of frequencies, microwave and otherwise.
What are the odds that would make it out 10, 20, 50, 100, 1,000 light years?
In other words, um...
It could only be, I guess, back to, as in contact, the first German transmission, perhaps.
Yeah, well, assuming that these civilizations are old, and assuming that they've been broadcasting at the electromagnetic spectrum for a while.
Good point.
We would expect to have made contact with some of them that are a few thousand light years from Earth.
But like I said, we've only scanned 1,000 nearby stars.
And even then, we've only looked at one frequency, which is the hydrogen frequency.
And we're like ants in an anthill trying to scan for intelligent life in outer space when there are huge construction crews working around you, and you are totally oblivious to the existence of humans because you're looking for other ants.
I think a minority says that the Earth is quite rare and that life is so precious that it probably has only sprung up a few times in the history of the galaxy.
First of all, there are 100 billion galaxies, and our own galaxy has 100 billion stars.
So I think the probability of intelligent life being in outer space is almost 100%.
I think it's a no-brainer.
The question, of course, is the distance.
The distance between these stars is vast.
Our own galaxy is 100,000 light years across.
It takes 100,000 years for a telegram going at the speed of light from one end of the galaxy to the other end of the galaxy.
But again, the universe is quite old.
The universe is 13.7 billion years.
We know that number now To within 1% accuracy.
Let me say that again.
The universe is 13.7 billion years old.
And for us, it only took us 100,000 years since modern humans walked the surface of the Earth to create all this technology that we have today.
Most of it created just within the last hundred years.
What are the chances that incidental transmissions of the kind that we're making, perhaps the one transmission from Arecibo aside, was very short, what are the chances of those incidental transmissions being detected out many, many, many, many light years?
I'm only asking this so that I can imagine the reverse.
Frank Drake, the astronomer who created this whole scenario, estimated that there are 10,000 planets in our galaxy harboring intelligent life forms.
Carl Sagan was even more optimistic and said maybe a million.
Since then, astronomers have scaled down these numbers a bit because we do realize that the Earth is quite different from the 250 planets that we've discovered orbiting other stars.
So far, we've only found Jupiter-sized stars, Jupiter-sized planets orbiting other stars, and they have quite eccentric orbits, highly elliptical or very, very close to the mother sun, in which case there's no Goldilocks zone where you are not too far, not too close to the Sun.
And you're just in the right zone to have liquid water, which is the universal solvent, which is the amniotic fluid of life, liquid water, which is quite rare in the universe.
So given these numbers, and now given the fact that our ability to scan the stars will be increased by a factor of a thousand, a factor of a thousand, okay, we're now in the ballpark.
It's no longer 0.0001% probability of finding something.
Now I think we have a few percent probability.
We're on the radar screen now.
Before we were not even on the radar screen.
Now I think we have enough, quote, radar ability to scan 1,000 times more efficiently than we can.
Okay, let's just take the numbers and the numbers of Earth-like planets that now are considered possible with what we know versus 1,000 times better listening capacity.
What do you suppose that makes it percentage-wise?
The odds are going to be even better next year when Kepler goes up in orbit.
Kepler is the first American satellite to be able to detect Earth-like planets orbiting other star systems up to 600.
And that's next year now.
We're not talking 20 years in the future.
We're talking next year.
The Kepler satellite will be launched by NASA.
It will detect perhaps up to 600 Earth-like planets in outer space.
And we will have an existential shock looking at the night sky, realizing that many of the familiar constellations have twins of the Earth on them.
That will direct the SETI project.
Once we identify hundreds of Earth-like twins in outer space, we will then focus all these radio telescopes on these planets, searching for liquid water, searching for evidence of oxygen, searching for evidence of amino acids.
That will focus the search rather than looking for a needle in the haystack and searching where needles are.
You remember the beginning of contact when the signal got weaker and weaker and weaker and weaker the further out you got?
Okay, I guess that's what I'm asking in a way.
In other words, once out of the atmosphere, would the signal go on indefinitely without becoming weaker, or would there be forces that would slowly make it weaker and harder and harder to detect until finally, however many light years out, it would be essentially Gone?
But if Professor Kaku is getting excited about SETI, then I'm going to get excited about SETI.
If we have three 150 dishes pointed in directions looking with 1,000 times the look or listening power that we previously had, and there's really a significant chance, as compared to what we had, of detecting life elsewhere, there could not be anybody more for it than myself, and I'm sure many of you will be right back.
Dr. Kaku, I've had the pleasure to interview people from SETI previously, and I've always asked, you know, if we got a signal, if we actually received something that was unambiguously alien, would we, honestly, I would ask, would we hear about it right away?
Or would it be some sort of national security issue right away?
And they always say, oh, no, you'd hear about it right away.
I think that, well, there are protocols being drafted about what happens if the Allen telescope array does pick up unmistakable signals from intelligent life in outer space.
And of course, you're going to get a lot of techies saying freedom of speech, freedom of speech.
But let's be real about this.
It could set off a panic.
It could set off all sorts of bizarre shenanigans on the part of crazies out there, as well as well-meaning people, confronted with the existence of other people that are maybe even superior to us.
Well, for the sake of this discussion, which you seem to be taking seriously based on the advances, then they better take the protocols seriously, huh?
And given the fact that the government is putting up the other half of the bill, Paul Allen is not putting up 100%.
Well, that ensures.
The government is putting up a lot, and other private donors are putting up a lot, they're going to have some say in this matter.
And all sorts of things could happen.
Plus, unscrupulous private individuals will probably want to jump in on it, and they want to make contact with intelligent life for their own private gain.
And the aliens are not going to know who these humans are.
And they can get all sorts of signals from entrepreneurs trying to make a quick buck out of being the first to make contact, make a dialogue with these aliens from outer space.
Yeah, and they're not going to come looking for natural resources like in the movies because there are plenty of uninhabited planets where there are no natives, where they have plenty of raw materials.
So they're not going to want to plunder us for national resources.
There are plenty of uninhabited planets with...
I think they might come out of curiosity.
However, as I said before, we don't know their intentions.
They will have been descended from predators because predators are smarter than prey.
And we shouldn't take the chance because, you know, there's only one Earth.
So we shouldn't take the chance.
So I think we should listen.
And I think Carl Stagen and others who sent a disc containing our location with respect to the quasars in outer space, advertising our existence to alien life forms, is premature.
Well, what they did was they had this disc that was sent in space, triangulating the location of the planet Earth with regards to the distant quasars in outer space, giving pictures of what we look like, giving scenes of the planet Earth.
Today, of course, that disk would be considered barbarically primitive, but it's enough for aliens to get a pretty good sense of who we are.
And I think that it's premature to advertise our existence.
Okay, if we received a signal, in all likelihood, I doubt that it would be incidental transmissions.
I would imagine it would be an intended transmission.
And that's just me saying that, but I would think an intended transmission would have a far better chance of making it here and being deciphered than would just incidental television, microwave, and what have you.
You know, we do have the second law of thermodynamics, which says that anytime you have energy being produced in a certain place, you have energy loss, meaning that energy will seep out.
You cannot hide your presence.
According to the laws of thermodynamics, you always create waste heat so that there will be waste electromagnetic waste radiation coming from a planet, no matter how they try to keep their presence a secret.
It will broadcast.
And that's what the steady people are hoping.
They're hoping that it's going to be in the hydrogen frequencies because that's the only frequency that they look at right now.
But if that – No, that's why I still give it a few percent in the sense that there are a lot of frequencies out there, and there are a lot of ways to massage frequencies.
You can split up speed frequencies.
You can transform these frequencies.
Even your email is compressed and is transformed when your email is sent.
So there's a good chance that their email, their transmissions will also be compressed and transformed.
So it's not going to be simple.
It's not going to be just the hydrogen frequencies.
And they're not going to look for laser frequencies, for example.
You know, instead of having these radiations spread out as the inverse square law, you can have laser beams concentrate energy much more efficiently than electromagnetic spectrum.
What they're looking for is waste heat, that is the second law of thermodynamics, waste electromagnetic radiation that leaks out.
They're looking for the I Love Lucy transmissions that accidentally seep out into outer space, and you have no control over them, right?
If these aliens communicate by laser beams, they'll be directed, and it'd be much more difficult to eavesdrop on their conversations if they use directed energy, like lasers.
But of course, you know, our equipment is not sensitive to those frequencies.
So that's why I only give it a few percent.
But it's the best shot we've had since the beginning of this whole process back in the post-war era.
How likely is it, Professor, that another civilization would recognize hydrogen, the hydrogen marker, as a pretty spiffy place to send an intentional signal?
However, they have a point, and that is they only have so much money.
There are a lot of frequencies to look at, and they don't have the money to scan all frequencies.
So they look at what I call the watering hole frequencies that any civilization in outer space would know, the hydrogen frequencies.
But, you know, it's like the Pony Express.
Today, we don't think that the Pony Express is the most efficient way to communicate, right?
There are more efficient ways than the Pony Express.
So we keep on assuming that they're as primitive as us.
We assume that they have radio telescopes, that they are primitive just like us, that they're not that sophisticated, which I think is kind of silly.
That's why I think still, even with this massive influx of funds, it's still a few percent chance that we'll actually receive signals from outer space.
But hey, a few percent is a lot better than 0.0001%.
We don't know in what form this message will be, maybe binary, but then we have to translate it, you know, translate it into something that is recognizable.
So we're going to have to bring in cryptographers.
You know, the Pentagon employs teams of these people to crack codes.
We're going to have to bring in code breakers to simply decipher what is happening.
Once these codes are deciphered, then we'll have to figure out whether it's just nothing but a second law of thermodynamics, waste heat, I Love Lucy that leaked out from outer space, or transmissions that are directed at us, as you pointed out.
Chances are that there's going to be random emissions that escape from their planet.
We'll listen in on soap operas, soap operas from these intelligent beings, and we'll begin to understand maybe a little bit about their culture.
So until we understood something or a lot about their culture, you would not be in favor of releasing any information to the general public of the world.
You know, it's kind of a bad thing to say, but I think if you think about it, it's probably the wisest thing, given the fact that all sorts of people are going to jump off on this, making all sorts of different kinds of theories and sitting off panic, because we don't know what their intentions are.
Once we figure out that they're peaceful people, that they don't conquer planets for the hell of it, then I think we can release it to the people that there are peaceful intelligent beings out there that we've made contact with and that we have nothing to fear from them.
If we understand their history, if they have a history channel and we eavesdrop on their history channel and we begin to understand their history, we'll begin to understand whether or not they can temper their aggressive tendencies that came out of the forest.
I think all aliens have essentially come from predator origins, very aggressive predator origins.
And we'll see whether or not they've been able to tame these instincts, given the fact that we humans certainly have not been able to tame our aggressive instincts at all.
Well, I was just about to say, let's turn it around, Professor.
Imagine you're on another planet light years away.
You begin detecting our signals, beginning, I suppose, with Hitler.
But let's move it on and say that you essentially get to wait around, keep it secret, and you watch our history channel, you watch the Discovery Channel, you watch a whole bunch of channels.
You decode it.
You begin to learn what our society is currently doing and what we're all about.
What kind of recommendations would you make to your superiors regarding the prospects of contact with Earth?
They're basically, you know, they're an emerging, they're a type zero civilization.
They haven't even reached type one status yet, and it's not clear they will reach type one status, that is planetary status.
And these intelligent beings, if they are, you know, millions of years ahead of us, they could be type three.
They could be galactic at that point, listening in on, you know, feeble signals of a type zero civilization that just came out of the swamp a few thousand years earlier, right?
You know, 100,000 years ago, modern humans didn't even exist.
So I would figure that if they listened, if they eavesdropped on our history channel and saw all the footage from World War II, and if they saw, you know, I Love Lucy and all the soap operas, they would probably say, you know, leave these guys alone.
There would be a terrible temptation, wouldn't there, to aim a gigantic dish with lots of power at whatever it was and send an intentional transmission?
I'm sure science would just love to proceed with that, wouldn't they?
And that's why I think it would be a very bad idea.
The first thing is we're going to get scientists trying to be the first to make, you know, send a signal to these people and say, hi, here we are.
We picked up your transmissions, right?
I think it's a bad idea.
You know, for example, the DNA and RNA of the bird flu, I mean, the Spanish flu virus was published in a medical journal, which I think is not wise at all because any terrorist could then monkey with the greatest killer of modern times.
When we get back, I think we'll ask whether policy, national policy, world policy, would be better determined by science than politics.
I'm Art Bell.
Chilling in for George Nori, I am Art Bell.
Hi, everybody.
If you want to email me, that's easy.
I'm Art Bell, A-R-T-B-E-L-L at MindSpring.com.
M-I-N-D-S-P-R-I-N-G dot com.
Artbell at mindspring.com or Art Bell at A-O-L dot com.
But the Mindspring account's a bit larger, and you'll probably have better luck there.
So artbell at mindspring.com.
In a moment, Dr. Michio Kaku, right back.
All right, if you have a physics-related question for Dr. Kaku, we'll try and get to it this hour.
And by the way, he's got a lot of books you might want to look into.
Parallel Worlds, A Journey Through Creation, Higher Dimensions, and the Future of the Cosmos.
Hyperspace, that's a big one.
A scientific odyssey through parallel universes.
Time warps, and the 10th dimension.
And so, you know, if you were interested by what, you know, teased by what you've heard tonight, then certainly further investigation in the way of going and grabbing one of those books would be in order.
Doctor, do you think that policy, national or world, would be better determined by science than politicians?
Well, I think for basic things like stem cell research, global warming, I think scientists should at least present the best case for investigation.
And then an ethics panel, an ethics panel would then advise politicians.
However, if it comes to making contact with extraterrestrial intelligence in outer space, I think at this point we would have to trust the military and the politicians not to blow it.
And because the inclination of scientists is to publish everything and to spread the word out, just like we decoded the Spanish flu virus of 1918, which killed something like 40 million people, and made it possible for anybody, including terrorists, to monkey with the genome of the greatest killer of modern history.
So I think that scientists tend to be a little bit naïve when it comes to this.
And oh, by the way, your listeners, if they want to be part of this whole search for extraterrestrial intelligence, there's something called SETI at Home.
There's so much data coming in, even from Arecibo, that they take this data, chop it up, and then they farm it out to individuals, private individuals, who download the software of SETI at Home at Berkeley.
And your screensaver, even while you're asleep, your screensaver will chug and chug and actually analyze data from the Aerosiba Radio Telescope.
Now with the Allen telescope arrays, there's going to be so much data from 350 radio telescopes that they're going to have to call out the Calvary and ask everybody with a PC if they wouldn't mind putting on a screensaver that will chug and chug and chug even while you're asleep and analyze for signals from outer space.
Now, the security issue is kind of interesting.
If your screensaver does analyze this data and finds a signal from an intelligent being in outer space, chances are it was deliberately planted by the designers of the software just to test that it works.
So they do want people to call in saying, yes, yes, I found signals from Intelligent Life, even though it was planted there.
They found that 60-plus percentage of people surveyed, in this case, Republicans, think that they want a president who is religious, a president who worships the same God they do, and such a president would make a far better leader.
People are definitely allowed to have opinions like this.
My only point of view is that as a scientist, I always believe that scientific investigation presents us with the best options, the best options, and the best possible hope for cures for diseases and solutions for problems.
But then the taxpayer, then the taxpayer has to look at this data and make up their own mind as to what they want to do about it.
Okay, well, that said, of course, in religion you have these Ten Commandment things and all these precepts that dictate that even though it's not followed all the time, that evil not be done.
What precepts, similar precepts are in science ensuring that evil not be done?
Well, what motivates people is, you know, Fame, government grants, possibilities of tenure, and not necessarily the loftiest motivation, but it's worked very well for the last several hundred years.
Scientists want to get recognition, they want to crack open code, solve mysteries, and look at what we've gotten.
We've gotten the modern industrial age, as well as hydrogen bombs, as well as designer germs, as well as all the other things that go along with it.
But just remember that it's governments.
It's governments meddling with the pure science that gave us the atomic bomb.
It wasn't scientists themselves who said, oh, let's make an atomic bomb today.
Oh, no, it was the government who jump-started it with the Manhattan Project.
Same thing with designer germs.
Scientists were very happy to crack the DNA code back in the 1950s.
But it was governments who said, okay, you cracked the code.
Now let's make some designer germs to fight the next war.
So scientists left to themselves do not build atomic bombs.
They don't build gas chambers.
They don't build designer germs.
Scientists left to themselves simply want to investigate what makes the universe tick.
And a lot of them do it for very altruistic reasons.
They could make a lot more money on Wall Street.
But instead, they want to pursue knowledge for the sake of knowledge and also for the sake of uplifting the state of humanity.
Politicians come in that they want to build atomic bombs and designer germs.
Outside Geneva, Switzerland, next year, we're counting down the months now, the biggest machine of science ever built in the history of Homo sapiens will be turned on.
It's 27 kilometers in circumference.
You could put the city of Geneva inside the machine.
That's how big this machine is.
It would wrap around the entire city of Geneva if you put Geneva inside.
And it's going to recreate conditions not seen since the Big Bang.
The modest goal is we want to recreate some of the conditions that existed at the instant of creation itself.
But the more ambitious goal, and this is where I come in, this is what my friends do, this is what I do for a living, is that we want to crack the biggest code of all, and that is the theory of everything.
What I do for a living is I work on something called string theory.
In fact, I'm the co-founder of string field theory, which is one of the main branches of string theory.
And string theory, we think, is the theory that Einstein failed to find for 30 years of his life.
Einstein wanted a theory of everything.
He wanted an equation one inch long that would allow him to summarize all the physical laws of the universe and allow him to, quote, read the mind of God.
That was Einstein's goal.
He failed.
Well, today we think we have it.
The theory is so fantastic that many scientists just threw up their hands and their eyes went into the heavens contemplating the implications of this theory.
String theory implies that the universe is hyperdimensional, that there could be other universes out there, and this was simply too much for the old guard.
For years and years, string theory existed because scientists, you know, to the detriment of their careers, worked on the theory.
But recently, it's become, you know, the raging fashion.
All of a sudden, New York Times, Time Magazine, UZIC Magazine feature stories on string theory, which is quite different from the way it was when I was a graduate student writing articles on string theory.
We hope that the universe doesn't unwind if we build the large Hadron Collider.
We hope to find sparticles.
Spartacles are super particles.
They are higher octaves of the superstring.
We are the lowest set of vibrations of the string.
The string being a tiny rubber band that gives you the vibrations of electrons, protons, neutrons, and what have you.
And we think that physics is reduced to nothing but harmonies of the string.
Chemistry is nothing but melodies you can play on these colliding strings.
The universe is a symphony of strings.
And we think that the mind of God, the mind of God that Einstein eloquently wrote about in the last decades of his life, the mind of God, we think, is cosmic music resonating through 11-dimensional hyperspace.
Congress gave us a billion dollars back in the 90s to dig a hole for this machine.
Congress canceled our machine and gave us a second billion dollars to fill up the hole.
I can't think of anything more stupid than giving scientists a billion dollars to dig a hole, canceling it, and giving it a second billion dollars to fill up that hole.
The point here is that the instant of creation had an asymmetry.
We are the leftovers of that asymmetry.
Otherwise, we wouldn't be here.
If it was purely a balance between matter and antimatter, then just like in Star Trek, there would have been a huge explosion and nothing would have been left.
There would be no Earth, no planets, no stars.
We are the leftover from that asymmetry.
But the origin of that asymmetry, no one knows.
And we hope that string theory may eventually answer that question.
Why are we here?
In some sense, we have no right to be here.
We should have been annihilated by antimatter at the instant of creation.
If you read Dan Brown's book about the Vatican, he postulates that this secret society of anti-Catholics created an antimatter bomb to blow up the Vatican.
Well, it would bankrupt the United States of America to build an antimatter bomb.
We could do it, but it would bankrupt the world, basically, to create enough antimatter to do any damage.
All the antimatter in the world that we've built so far can barely light up a light bulb.
That's what we hope this Large Hadron Collider will answer.
String theory right now is so mathematically difficult that we can't get a definitive yes or no from it.
So we're hoping that the Large Hadron Collider will tell us why it banged.
I mean, what set it off.
We have our own opinions.
We physicists.
String theory seems to indicate that what set it off was that the universe peeled off from a parent universe.
That our universe is nothing but a baby universe that peeled off from a mother universe.
And that just like budding and sprouting of plants that you have in your garden, that universes can sprout from other universes, just like soap bubbles can break in half and create baby soap bubbles.
Are you at all concerned, Professor, that it will in fact lead us not further into string theory, but whatever answers we get may lead us in another direction?
We physicists can come up with all sorts of cockami ideas, but ultimately nature has to verify the theory.
However, that said, string theory is the only theory that allows us to combine Einstein's theory of gravity with the quantum theory, the quantum theory being basically atomic physics.
And it's the only theory, it's the only game in town that allows us to unify gravity with the nuclear force.
I'd like you to see if you could visualize a fusion confinement vessel and tell me if you think it'll work or not.
So imagine a row of hoops in a wasp-waist configuration with a divergent and convergent section.
So they narrow towards the middle of it.
And these hoops are independently powered.
And the central most one has the heaviest current, so it's the highest magnetic field.
And as you go along it, actually, you impose electric field along it.
So you have a combination of electric and magnetic fields.
So the plasma is repelled from the outer edges electrically, but it can't get anywhere in the center because of the magnetic field squeezing it tightly.
The problem there is that leakage is the main problem, and it would probably leak out of the top and the bottom.
That's why the electric.
Well, okay, see, the Tokamak design, which is the design that came out of Russia, takes your hourglass, makes it into a cylinder, and then wraps it into a donut so that when it leaks out of one end, it leaks into itself, itself leaking.
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I think I've heard of a polygon of solenoids too that did that around in a racetrack.
Yeah, well, believe me, a lot of designs were tried.
Even the threads of a baseball, believe it or not, in the 60s, people actually tried to make a plasma machine out of the threads, the threads of a baseball.
So they can find solution inside the plasma inside.
Many designs have been tried.
The problem is leakage.
Even if you have electric fields on the top and the bottom of the hourglass, you're going to get leakage coming out because of the fact that the plasma itself has its own magnetic field.
That's the problem.
It's like squeezing a balloon, except the air inside the balloon itself has magnetic properties and goes every which way when you try to squeeze it.
You take ordinary water, you apply electric current to it, and that breaks up H2O into H and O. And then when the H and O combine again inside a car, you create waste water, but you release energy in the process.
It's called electrolysis.
And Honda is even marketing a fuel cell car now.
It's being advertised on television, for God's sake.
So we know that fuel cells work.
In outer space, NASA pioneered the use of these fuel cells, extracting energy from combining hydrogen with oxygen.
And we know that they work, except they're very expensive.
That's why we don't have fuel cell cars right now.
But as I see it, the marketplace will make oil very expensive and will reduce the cost of fuel cells.
And at some point, the two curves will cross.
And when that crossing takes place, then there'll be a mad rush to create solar hydrogen cars.
In other words, if you play a harmonic with a long short or a long sound wave and a harmonic of a short sound wave, a higher pitched note, the lower pitched note sustains itself off of the higher pitched note, but the higher pitched note goes away quicker.
Yeah, well, waves don't necessarily consume other waves.
Waves add.
That's called superposition.
And when they add, they can then appear as if they're consuming another wave.
But waves basically add on top of each other.
I play the trumpet and the guitar, for example.
And when I blow notes or twang a guitar, notes may appear to gobble up other notes, but they're actually superimposed upon each other.
And you get what are called harmonics when you play a guitar.
But string theory is precisely based on harmonics.
String theory says that a proton and an electron are tiny little rubber bands, and these rubber bands vibrate, and when they vibrate at different frequencies in different ways, they turn into different particles.
So how many different frequencies can you put on a violin string or a rubber band?
The answer is infinite, right?
That's why we have infinite number of particles.
And when these two particles collide, then these two vibrations can, in fact, consume each other, as you say, to give you a third vibration.
And that's what we call chemistry.
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One other thing I'd like to ask you, if you don't mind, I know the time is short.
When I put a tuning fork into water, the sound waves go outward.
But just before the tuning fork completely dies vibrations, it seems to attract sound waves back to it and give one last tone after it is dead.
And the same is true with a harmonic on a guitar.
You can hit a harmonic on a guitar, and it'll play through, and it deadens, and then quickly it comes back as if it's retracting.
Now, could that be conceived as the long waves stretching the short waves until they can no longer stretch, and then it snaps back, so to speak?
Real quickly, I just was curious, why haven't the utilities, any utility that I've heard of anywhere, why aren't they putting solar panels on every southern exposure building that they can get their hands on, that people will let them, rather than waiting for the individual homeowner to pay, you know, like 30 grand to do it themselves.
It just seems like they're not really serious about global warming.
If a utility can buy solar panels, I'm sure, you know, when you're buying a million of them, you're going to get them a lot cheaper than when you're going to buy 30.
So I don't understand why they expect, or they're trying to urge with a very minimal federal tax credit and you get some money back.
Well, you're right that if you mass produce these things and you buy them in bulk, you can get it a lot cheaper.
And, for example, some utilities are going into wind power because they see the benefits of wind parks.
And in Europe, you know, you see wind parks everywhere you go in Europe.
However, solar is still a little bit on the expensive side.
Homeowners who do this, of course, are multi-millionaires.
They're Hollywood celebrities who can afford to put solar panels on their house.
It's not something for the average person unless you know what you're doing.
And utilities look at the economics.
The bottom line is a dollar.
And they see that solar is still more expensive, even with mass production.
My attitude is we should jumpstart the technology.
The federal government should subsidize research in this thing.
There should be tax credits.
Mass production of these things will reduce the cost, and then we can bring down the cost where it is competitive, where you don't have to be a Hollywood millionaire to put one of these things on your rooftop.
But right now, it is still a little bit on the expensive side, and the two curves have not yet met yet.
Wow, what a privilege to speak with you and Dr. Kaku.
And my gosh, what a sensationally educational show.
I've been so greatly impressed by, gosh, each and every one of your topics that you and Dr. Kaku have been discussing, including the global energy problem we're all faced with.
Now, I wrote a book about power beaming solar energy space via high-intensity microwaves to Earth called Sunstroke.
Now, I've followed your scientific works, including parallel universes and strength theory for many years.
Now, regarding the solar-hydrogen mix you spoke about, would you include power beaming solar energy to Earth via microwaves as presently being proposed by the U.S. Pentagon, even if it means utilizing it as a space-based weapons system?
Well, I'm in favor of looking at all different kinds of power alternatives into the coming decades because of the threat of global warming, even though I have my doubts about commercial nuclear energy.
Looking at outer space, cost has always been a big problem.
Recently, the Pentagon did come out with a report that I've looked at saying that perhaps power can be beamed from outer space to the troops where price is not as essential.
Just getting energy to them at all would be a great thing.
So they've looked at the question of beaming power from outer space.
I've looked at it.
And again, there are many logistical problems.
You know, stationary satellites are 22,000 miles away, and there's a lot of attenuation of the energy from 22,000 miles away.
If a satellite is simply overhead, then they go around the Earth every 90 minutes, in which case you'd have to have hundreds, hundreds of these things orbiting at any given point.
And then aiming is a problem.
If you miss, you may scorch a certain area of the Earth.
But these are technical problems.
And in principle, as you point out, they can be solved, except the price has to come down.
Now, on the other hand, the Pentagon also looks at the other possibility of using these things as weapons.
In outer space, we forget that there are no wall sockets in outer space.
Power is a premium in outer space.
And so what do you do for energy?
You may build these gigantic solar panels, convert the energy to microwaves, and then knock out other satellites with them.
My attitude is very simple.
As the Chinese say, never pick up a rock only to drop it on your own feet.
Who is the most vulnerable to killer satellite warfare in outer space?
And if we open up, if we open up the militarization of space, it's like putting sand in our own eyes.
If you're going to be in a fight, you don't want to pick up a bunch of sand and put it in your own eyeball, right?
That's a stupid thing to do.
So I would say that we don't get into killer satellite warfare, even though the Chinese, of course, recently, a few months ago, blew up one of their satellites.
I don't think we should get into this because we have the most to lose in the opening shots of a war.
Gunfighters always throw a sand in the other guy's eyeball, right?
Well, we shouldn't be blowing up satellites because we're the most vulnerable.
We could be blinded so easily because our satellites are unshielded, totally unshielded.
We don't shield our satellites in outer space.
That's why solar flares, for example, and sunspot cycles can definitely injure our communication.
No, but I bet we've got a lot of very secret backup satellites just sitting there in the blackness of space, black themselves, waiting for the eventuality you just discussed.
I wouldn't put it past the Pentagon to have launched satellites with the capability of doing that.
However, the Pentagon has not ever carried out such a test of what is called ASAT or anti-satellite device, while the Chinese have, and they've got roundly condemned by everybody, created an enormous amount of space debris and out of space by blowing up a satellite.
You know, we track 10,000 pieces of debris, screwdrivers, pieces of old satellite booster rockets, screwdrivers and tools.
We track 10,000 pieces of debris orbiting the Earth left over from the space program.
The Chinese simply polluted a lot more debris when they smashed one of their satellites.
You can imagine what's going to happen if there's a killer satellite war in outer space.
There'll be hundreds of thousands of pieces of debris in outer space.
That's the end of the space program.
Satellites will not, you know, people will not be able to go through this belt of junk.