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Nov. 30, 2007 - Art Bell

02:36:06

Coast to Coast AM with Art Bell - Universe, Energy, and SETI - Michio Kaku

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	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 coast2coastam.com, it says Arts Webcam up toward the top of the page there.
	Just click on that.
	And that is a picture taken by Erin, I think, about a week ago.
	So that picture is about a week old.
	And our precious little one, Asia Rainbell, is now, as of today, six months old.
	So it is her six-month birthday today.
	All else well in the AB household.
	Yeti, Abby, Dolly.
	Boy, Dolly is something.
	She's a little Filipino 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 all together 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 Coast2CoastAM.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.
	Alright, 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 and 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 he, 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 percent. 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.
	Evel Knievel's gone, folks.
	An icon.
	I think for most of us, my age certainly, Evel 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 boxcar under its wheels Friday had injured dozens, some seriously.
	And then finally, looking at the depressing world, get this, the Bush administration intends to slash counter-terrorism 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.
	We're going to slash counter-terrorism 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 in 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 swat 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.
	Yikes.
	Japan!
	Now if you're going to Japan you might want to listen up.
	They've got a fingerprint and photographed 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 It's going to save the dolphin slaughter.
	Anyway, we'll 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 hour, Dr. Michio Kaku, who is one of Earth's greatest minds, theoretical physicist, been on the show many times, brilliant.
	That 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 scientists, new scientists 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 You'd think of our universe as being in a box, like a can.
	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 three and a half billion years ago.
	In the absence of hard evidence of what came before, there's plenty of scope for disagreement.
	Thirty 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 Monod, 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 Project's unmanned aerial vehicle can actually soar high in the air, hover, bank, fly over any terrain, making it ideal for military surveillance.
	It's 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 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 asked, 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 nanobots, nanorobots 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.
	Came from Whitley Streber's Unknown Country.
	Whether 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, any time 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, as 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.
	It 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.
	818-825-5East of the Rockies, 800-825-5033.
	First-time callers, 818, Area Code 818-501-4721.
	And finally, the wildcard line, not quite finally, at Area Code 818-501-4109,
	internationally outside the country, 800-825-5033.
	Get a hold of the international operator, tell them 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 Art Bell, in for George Norrie, and we'll be right back.
	Indeed, this evening in for George Norrie, and he's not the only one.
	The weekend has any number of hosts, one of which I've got on the line with me right now, Ian Punnett.
	You want your Saturday night back yet?
	Is that what this is about?
	I want it back, no.
	No, it's all yours, buddy, and what do you have planned?
	Well, first of all, let me just say it's always a pleasure to hear you on, and secondly, I thought I'd get this to you.
	A friend of mine named David Mack, who writes Daredevil and a couple of other comics, has written a children's book.
	He sent me a copy of it to give to you for Asia Reign, about a little girl who wants to be the vet For Bigfoot, Yeti, and the Loch Ness Monster, and other shy creatures.
	I know she wants to get to my Yeti.
	She keeps reaching out for him.
	Soon she'll be able to do it, and then my cats will learn real fear.
	So I'll have to get a copy of this to you, autographed.
	Contact me privately.
	I'll give you an address, Ian.
	It's super cute.
	Hey, 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's going to be, he's going to be, 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.
	Really?
	Can you imagine a moment in your life now or future, Ian, when you get so lonely or so whatever that you take up relations with a robot?
	He would argue... No, I'm asking you.
	Oh, not me.
	No, I... Not you.
	No, but what he says is we may get to a place Where wives will want their husband to have a robot.
	A love robot.
	Stepford Robots.
	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 men, as it were.
	But also true for women, too.
	That should be a hell of a show.
	Tomorrow night.
	Yeah, that should be a hell of a show.
	Alright, well that's enough.
	Believe me, that'll get people tuning in, buddy.
	Well, Mitch Yukaku's going to be great tonight.
	It's always good to hear him back on.
	He will be, indeed.
	He'd only do it for you, Art.
	Alright, Ian.
	Tomorrow night, Robots, Sex, and You!
	Good night, Ian.
	We'll be right back.
	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, take me, take me!
	First time caller on the line, you are on the air.
	Good morning.
	Hey, good morning Art.
	This is Ted down in Florida, South Florida.
	It's amazing that I get to talk with you.
	I was listening to Ian 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... Excuse me, what affliction?
	Oh, I'm sorry.
	Oh, I'm sorry.
	The Morgellons disease.
	Oh, yes.
	The mysterious Morgellons.
	Yeah, 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 sores, you know, oregano.
	Maybe.
	And then just a couple other things I just want to mention real quick.
	Two big, one big foot sighting in my life at about nine years of age.
	Where?
	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 I made up a lean-to.
	I got up real early in the morning because a squirrel woke me up.
	Anyway, I make a long story short, I got up real quiet, stood up, I looked across the turtle pond, that's where all the Boy Scouts used to do their thing, the Girl Scouts, and I looked out, and I saw this huge, reddish-brown, mannish-postured thing walking, and it was just like so slow, and I saw it for like, you know, maybe like 30 frames or something, like maybe like 2 or 3 seconds, I saw this image.
	And then another time in the same area, but maybe about...
	Fifteen 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.
	In other words, where are the bodies?
	The proof of Bigfoot.
	Surely by now.
	I think there was a recent controversy about a chupacabra, right?
	And in the end it turned out to be some sort of coyote or something.
	So, in other words, where are the bodies?
	You know, I'm certainly intrigued by and willing to investigate and look into all of this.
	But we need proof.
	Wester the Rockies, you're on the air.
	Howdy.
	Hi, how are you?
	Just spiffy, sir.
	How are you?
	Good.
	Is this our bell?
	It is.
	What's up?
	I just wanted to let you know that I talked to, my name is Larry, and I talked to George Norrie last week when Christian Wild was on there, on the show.
	Yes.
	And he, 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. Wild And he said there's, he said there's, he don'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 give me a new heart.
	Well, that's wonderful news.
	I guess you've got to get on a list, right?
	I believe you've got to get on a list if you want a new heart or new, other new body part.
	And you've got to wait and hope and pray.
	East of the Rockies, you're on the air.
	Good morning.
	Hello, my name's Eric from Gardner.
	From where?
	Gardner, Massachusetts.
	Welcome to the program.
	Turn your radio all the way off, please.
	All right, one second.
	It's very important, because we get you on here live without a screener, so we can't have the echo.
	I can't believe I'm on the air, sir.
	You are.
	Yes.
	Oh, hello, Eric.
	It's great to talk to you.
	Today I saw a triangular-shaped aircraft in the air about 8 o'clock today.
	They're out there, all right.
	It was hovering over me, a little bit over the trees, for about a minute or so.
	And I was working at a ski resort at the time, and to my amazement, nobody else saw it, even though I kind of pointed it out.
	You mean you talked, you yelled at other people, look at that, and they didn't see it?
	No, no, I kept on looking up.
	I was running the ski lift at the time, and I couldn't really stop it at the time.
	And I just kept on looking up at the sky, and to my amazement, nobody else really looked up.
	And I mentioned the one person, but he didn't really, uh, really look up.
	Well, why didn't you turn around and say, what the hell's the matter with you?
	Look at that!
	Yeah, I really should have, but, um, yeah, it was really amazing.
	It was so strange.
	Uh, well, they're up there.
	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...
	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.
	So, what the hell are they?
	On the wild card line, you are on the air.
	Hello.
	Hello, Art.
	Yes.
	This is Mary Michael Sampson from Salt Lake.
	Okay, you're not allowed to actually give your full... Oh, I'm sorry.
	...name, so let's begin again.
	And your name is Mary?
	Yes.
	Okay, Mary, what's up?
	I just wanted to... I don't know if you know Jeffrey Seelman or not.
	I do not.
	He's been on the program for about the last five years.
	He's an exorcist and a healer and a friend of mine.
	And he is in the hospital.
	And he may die and I just wondered if perhaps the people on this program might say a prayer for him, that's all.
	Of course, I'm sure anybody so stricken deserves a prayer.
	Thank you very much and I wish him well.
	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.
	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.
	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 KDWN Radio.
	He worked for, at that time, KVEG, both 50,000 watt radio stations.
	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.
	Wild Card Line, you're on the air.
	Hello.
	Hi.
	Turn your radio off, please.
	Yeah, it's off.
	Good.
	Good for you.
	Where are you, and who are you?
	I'm in Tennessee, and my name is Wade.
	Okay, Wade.
	Welcome.
	Thank you.
	Proceed.
	You're on the air.
	Oh, sorry.
	All right.
	I'm sorry.
	This is a fantastic show.
	Michio Kaku is the best.
	Profund.
	Yes, indeed.
	Very impressive.
	I wanted to tell you on the air about a very large triangular craft that I saw a long time ago when I was in my early teens.
	They're real.
	Yeah, it was unbelievable.
	I pointed it out to my father and he said, weather balloon.
	How old are you now?
	I'm 55 now.
	This was in your teens.
	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?
	No, I didn't think so.
	He said, weather balloon.
	And I said, no, it's going against the trade winds.
	Well, did he wait?
	Did he see it?
	Yes, he did.
	So what to you was a triangle to him was weather balloon.
	Yeah.
	Yeah, exactly.
	It was it was so high up that it was reflecting sunlight.
	It was nighttime.
	I see.
	And it was triangular shaped.
	And you could see the reflection of the sunlight because the sun had gone down maybe a couple of hours before.
	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.
	Wild Card Line, you're on the air.
	Hi.
	Hello, yes.
	All right.
	This is Kevin from Iroquois Falls, Ontario.
	Hey there.
	Hey, how's it going?
	Yes.
	First of all, let's say hi to my pals on Pal Talk.
	And second of all, you're talking about SETI that's going to be the talk about SETI with Actually, Dr. Cuckoo wants to talk about SETI, which is something of a surprise to me.
	Yes, well, if you want to talk about SETI, I think you don't have to look any further than the archival reply.
	Do you remember the archival reply back in 2001?
	No.
	Well, do you remember the archival message that we sent back?
	Oh, yes, you're talking about from Arecibo.
	Yeah, Arecibo, sorry, my pronunciation is not all that great.
	But the Arecibo message that we sent out back in 1974, do you remember the reply we got back in 2001?
	You're talking about the crop circle?
	Yes, the crop circle itself.
	We got the reply from the Greys themselves.
	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.
	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.
	Well, okay, that's your opinion.
	I don't necessarily share it with you.
	I guess amazing things have been done in one night by large groups of people.
	Although, you know, I'm kind of with you on the other hand.
	It seems impossible.
	Yes, it does.
	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.
	East of the Rockies, you're on the air.
	Hello.
	Hello.
	Turn your radio off, please.
	Hello?
	I turn your radio off, please.
	Oh, okay, I did.
	I'm very sorry, Art.
	I just thank you for taking my call.
	You folks have really inspired me to the heavens, 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 evil.
	Well, that's very charitable of you.
	As far as I'm concerned, they're idiots.
	Um, they are.
	They're very idiots, and they're not knowing what's really going on on the after, on the other side of the...
	After we pass on.
	Can you imagine not being able to give a child, I mean giving a child a little swan 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!
	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 swatted a few times on the butt.
	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.
	This country is great because we have voices.
	Alright, look, we can't let the country become overrun by idiots.
	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!
	I am filling in for George Norey 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 Smut 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 Ph.D.
	level textbooks are required reading at many of the top physics laboratories.
	Dr. Kaku graduated from Harvard In 1968, Summa Cum Laude No.
	1 in his physics class received a Ph.D.
	from the University of California, Berkeley Radiation Lab.
	In 1972, held a lectureship at Princeton University.
	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 AM, my friend.
	Glad to be back on the show, Art.
	It's been too long.
	It has been.
	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 Den 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 the cat situation, may actually mean nudging our universe closer to its own demise, just by observing it.
	Well, that particular article I haven't seen.
	I write for New Scientist magazine.
	I have an article in the, I think, the October issue of New Scientist.
	I haven't seen that particular article, but for your listeners, let me sort of give you some background.
	Dark energy makes up about 73% of the total matter energy content of the universe.
	You and me, okay, the higher elements, like lithium, helium, nitrogen, we make up 0.03% of the universe.
	So, the universe is overwhelmingly dark, okay?
	The stars you see in the heavens, they only make up about 4%.
	And also undetectable, right?
	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 decider 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 might 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, this is science fiction, right?
	That's right.
	Well, not anymore.
	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 the 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, you know, 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 Pahrump, Nevada who not very long ago hit 18 million dollars on a penny slot machine.
	Uh-huh.
	And I think our chances of making it out that far are about, well, not as good as that lady's who hit the 18 mil.
	Uh-huh.
	So she may never live to spend all that money, huh?
	Well, I don't know.
	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?
	Well, you know, it's a race against time.
	If you take a look at not the universe now, but just the planet Earth, right?
	It's a race against time whether we're going to make it to the end of the century.
	One of my friends, Sir Martin Rees, who is the Royal Astronomer of England, he reports to the Queen.
	He gives it 50-50 that either will unleash a germ, will unleash element 92, uranium,
	or perhaps will fry ourselves with global warming.
	He gives it 50-50 odds that we'll reach 2100, which are not very good odds.
	No, and based on what I've heard you say in the past, that would be very, very optimistic.
	That would be optimistic, right.
	Because, you know, you don't have to be a weatherman to know which way the weather's blowing, as Bob Dylan once said.
	Now maybe you've changed your worldview, and maybe you're more optimistic than you once were.
	Well, there's a small ray of optimism in the sense that the world seems to be more galvanized than before.
	It's on people's agenda.
	You know, mom and dad are talking about it.
	It's not something that, you know, climatologists discuss in hushed tones.
	It's something that is now being talked about seriously by governments around the world.
	The question is, is it too little too late?
	That's another problem, right?
	And, you know, when you came out with The Day After Tomorrow, right?
	The movie?
	People laughed, yeah.
	Yeah?
	People thought that, well, this is Star Trek, it's science fiction, right?
	Well, they're not laughing anymore, you know?
	No, I know.
	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.
	They were conservative.
	Everything that went was conservative.
	Everything that went 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 the Alps.
	The Alps are 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 you know, the spreading of disease north.
	All these dire predictions are coming to pass much faster than anyone expected.
	Professor, come back to too little too late, is it?
	Well, I'm an optimist there.
	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.
	Yeah, but I don't get it.
	I'm just a little frog and I don't see how I get out of this pan.
	I mean, we're all like in the same pan, aren't we?
	Yeah, well, there's a little glimmer of hope.
	I mean, take a look at the automobile industry, for example, right?
	General Motors and Ford going bankrupt.
	No one is crying a tear because everyone believes deep down in their soul that they deserve it.
	They ignored all these warnings.
	And now foreign cars.
	Foreign cars are coming out with hybrids.
	Honda is just coming out with a fuel cell car.
	I mean, that was considered science fiction just a few years ago.
	Science fiction.
	And already they're marketing it on TV now.
	Yeah, I don't get it, Professor.
	I mean, if you go back to the 70s, we had the oil shortage.
	I was part of that, where we all stood in lines, you know, waiting for gas.
	It was horrible.
	Fistfights broke out.
	It was, you know, disruptive.
	Right.
	At that point, Detroit began to make smaller cars, copying the Japanese, but the moment Oil eased, there was nobody looking ahead another 10 or 20 years, 30 years, nobody.
	Nobody.
	And so we went right back to making big cars again, SUVs, all the rest of it.
	And now, here we are again, same deal.
	Yeah, and this time there's no bailout for General Motors or for Ford because two reasons.
	One, people know that high-tech is huge and we don't necessarily rely on automobiles to keep the economy going anymore, right?
	And second of all, like I said, they bungled it.
	I mean, General Motors and Ford, they made the mess, right?
	They're to blame for the fact that they ignored all these warning signals.
	They ignored all the moods of the consumer.
	They have the least energy efficient cars of any large automobile maker.
	They hold the rear on every single Every single measure of safety, quality, and especially fuel efficiency.
	And that's just to take a small example.
	So anyway, plug-in hybrids, okay, give us some ray of hope.
	Plug-in hybrids, for example, can run for 60 miles on one charge of electricity before you turn on the gasoline engine.
	Now, most people do all their chores in the first 60 miles, which means you could be 100% electric with the plug-in hybrid.
	And now with fuel cell cars slowly hitting the market, the only thing they admit is water vapor.
	Think about it.
	You don't have to choke on the smog coming out of somebody's rear end in a car.
	Just water vapor comes out of these fuel cell cars.
	So these are small little things, and I'm not sure it's enough, but I think it's a ray of hope.
	Now, my point of view is as follows.
	In the next several decades, there's going to be a mix.
	Energy mix, okay, with different renewables competing with oil and coal.
	Oil prices are continuing to rise into the coming decade, but solar hydrogen costs are continuing to drop.
	At a certain point, they will cross.
	When the rising price of oil crosses with the falling price of solar hydrogen, at that point, we may gradually go to a solar hydrogen economy.
	And that's going to be within 15-20 years.
	Will the rest of the world follow or lead?
	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 three to forty years from now.
	In fusion reactors?
	That's right, fusion reactors.
	In other words, a piece of the sun on the earth.
	But nobody has really successfully sustained a fusion reaction yet, have they?
	Well, only in a hydrogen bomb.
	An uncontrolled fusion process is what we find in a hydrogen bomb.
	That would cure the problem as well.
	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 that's another story.
	That must have been tempting.
	Well, it would be a guarantee of an income.
	You know, he made a big pitch.
	Well, not just that.
	I mean, but look at the reputation of Teller.
	I mean, there had to be a sort of an academic, oh God, I kind of like to do this kind of draw.
	Yeah, well, you know, I went in eyes wide open.
	I knew his reputation, right?
	A lot of physicists hated his guts.
	They wouldn't shake his hand.
	But on the other hand, you know, he was the darling of the Pentagon.
	Oh, yes.
	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.
	Well, there you have it.
	So there must have been at least a bit of temptation professionally and from an economic point of view.
	Yeah, it was tempting.
	It would be, you know, a lifetime job if I was designing hydrogen warheads, but... You'd still be doing it now, wouldn't you?
	That's right.
	I'd still be doing it now.
	I might even be unemployed.
	But my point of view was that I'd rather not work on little bangs.
	I wanted to work on big bangs.
	I wanted to work on the biggest explosion there was, and that is the creation of the universe itself.
	I mean, that's real fireworks there.
	It certainly is.
	And that's what I wanted to work on.
	And that's what I do for a living, is to tease apart what happened at the instant of creation.
	So how long did you struggle with that offer?
	Well, for about a year, I graduated from Harvard, and I was looking for fellowships, and he sort of dangled that offer, and he said he would pay everything.
	The Earth Engineering Scholarship would pay all bills.
	I would work in one of three places, Los Alamos, Livermore, or MIT, and basically work on fission and fusion weapons.
	But, like I said, you know, my heart was really in trying to figure out, you know, what makes the universe tick, rather than trying to figure out what makes uranium tick.
	Well, all right.
	Why, in your best guess, have we not been able to sustain a controlled fission reaction?
	Yeah, well, it's very simple.
	The Sun contracts by gravity, because gravity is based on what are called monopoles, you know, single poles.
	Every rock, every piece of garbage on the Earth, the Earth itself is a monopole.
	And gravity squeezes evenly.
	That's why the Earth is round.
	That's why the Sun is round.
	But you see, magnetism has a North Pole and a South Pole.
	It's not a monopole at all.
	It's a dipole.
	And dipoles are horrible in shape.
	They look like spiders.
	If you ever put a bar magnet and iron filings, You see the iron filings form a spider web of field lines around the North Pole and the South Pole.
	Well, try squeezing hydrogen gas with a dipole.
	It's really hard.
	We have to use donuts and all sorts of bizarre configurations in order to squeeze hydrogen with a magnetic field, because it's a dipole.
	It's like squeezing a balloon, you know, you squeeze one part of it and... Alright, doctor, hold it right there.
	Professor Michio Kaku is my guest.
	I'm Art Bell for George Norrie and we'll be right back.
	In this night, filling in that is, for George Norrie, taking the night off, my guest is Dr. Michio Kaku.
	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 donut, 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, that 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.
	For what period of time?
	Well, less than a second.
	You have to do what it's called, attain 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 pulls it 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.
	Well, a couple of questions.
	You suggest if it can go for a second, it can then keep going.
	So is that a process that once it's going for a second or so, will then be self-sustaining?
	Well, once we hit a full second, you will then attain Lawson's Criterion.
	It'll be generating lots of heat.
	That heat then in turn can be channeled to keep the magnetic field going.
	So it's self-perpetuating.
	It creates heat.
	The heat is then used to make electricity, which then is used to create the magnetic field, which in turn is used to squeeze the gas.
	And that's why each cycle you get more energy coming out.
	And that's why this is called hot fusion.
	We think that hot fusion may in fact be attained within a few decades.
	Now, of course, there's also cold fusion.
	Uh, there's some people who still hold out for it, but we have yet to have any reliable source of energy from coal fusion.
	Uh, fusion in a glass of water.
	Uh, so most physicists would say hot fusion is the way to go.
	All right.
	Okay.
	Well, I'm still working on hot fusion in my mind.
	Now, let's say we get it going for a second and it becomes self-sustaining.
	It's a kind of thing that ratchets up.
	Right.
	Right.
	You said reaction equals heat equals more electricity for the magnetic field to hold it in.
	Right.
	How do we know that it just doesn't simply ratchet up past the hardware's ability to keep it contained?
	Okay, 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.
	So it doesn't kaboom.
	Doesn't kaboom, right.
	It doesn't release enormous amounts of dirty stuff.
	A fission reactor has nuclear waste inside.
	Tremendous amounts of nuclear waste.
	So about 30 tons of nuclear waste inside a typical fission reactor.
	A fusion reactor has basically just hydrogen gas.
	And so you're not talking about hardly any waste products at all, except the steel.
	But, you know, after 30 years, you have to decommission the steel.
	There's no nuclear waste like what you find in a meltdown.
	If you have a class 9 meltdown, which is the maximum scenario for a fission reactor, you could wipe out the state of Pennsylvania.
	Oh, sure.
	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.
	This whole 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.
	Do you think that if one of those airplanes had indeed been targeted on Indian Point, that it would have breached the containment?
	Ah, that's a $64,000 question.
	If you take a look at the original design specifications for a design basis accident at a nuclear power plant, they said that only a small 707 jet plane would have to withstand an attack from a 707 without jet fuel.
	Okay.
	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, that's a jumbo jet, fuel-laden, it would have breached the containment, and it would have caused an evacuation of the plant.
	Well, okay, then why, Professor, do you think they did not do it?
	If you listen to the videotape very carefully, okay, they simply say they scouted out targets in the Northeast.
	They seriously considered looking at, quote, nuclear installations, according to one translation that I've seen.
	They didn't say Indian Point specifically, but 2 plus 2 is 4.
	Indian Point is the only large nuclear installation in this area, and they don't say in the tape why they went for World Trade Center.
	I suspect that it was an easier target.
	Indian Point is a very small reactor from 5 miles up, while the World Trade Center is visible from 5 miles up.
	And so I think, probably logistically, it was easier for these pilots to zero in on the World Trade Center rather than Indian Point.
	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 ten.
	Now, we have about a hundred right now.
	Can you mention a thousand 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 no one could fire the gun and to 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 five miles up.
	There's really not much a nuclear power plant can do.
	It's a sitting duck, basically.
	And we would have a thousand of them, scattered around the 50 states.
	Well, based on what you've just said, we already have enough.
	I think we have enough.
	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.
	I wonder if our economy can make it through all of this, make it through what you just described as basically a stopgap measure without crashing?
	Well, I think the marketplace is going to dictate that.
	Prices are going to continue to rise.
	They'll oscillate, of course, but the average will continue to rise.
	We are at the top of Hubbard's Peak, the top of this bell-shaped curve.
	We have exhausted about 50% of the entire Earth's oil supply, and even if there are The hidden deposits elsewhere.
	We're certainly not going to find a new Saudi Arabia every 10 years.
	So I think the marketplace will dictate it.
	We'll always have oil, but prices will continue to rise to the point where it becomes, well, you know, people in America complain about oil.
	You should go to Europe.
	Well, I did.
	I saw it several years ago.
	Gas costs many times that amount in the United States.
	Get used to it.
	OK, we're going to be like the Europeans.
	The Europeans don't drive small cars because they like small cars.
	They drive small cars because they have to drive small cars.
	We're going to have to get used to it if we're at the top of Hubbard's Peak and we start to slide down the curve.
	The question is, though, again, we are all geared up for the distribution of petrol and oil-based products.
	Can we really redo everything and have the economy survive that redo?
	Well, retooling is not going to be easy.
	You know, when Henry Ford and Thomas Edison had that famous contest about a hundred 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.
	Okay?
	Cars are going to crash.
	People are going to die.
	Die in flames when your gasoline-fired car crashes.
	Well, both predictions turn out to be true.
	50,000 Americans die, 40,000 Americans die every year in car accidents and horrible deaths.
	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.
	Well, that may come to pass too.
	But again, what you're describing is simply a stop-gap measure, and that's going to be a hard political argument at best.
	Now, maybe it's the only thing you can argue, but that's what it is, kind of a stop-gap, right?
	Yeah, but I think the marketplace will dictate it.
	The atmosphere will continue to scare the pants off people, and the marketplace will scare the pants off people at the gas pump.
	And remember, people don't change because they want to change.
	People change because they have to change.
	Absolutely true.
	And it could come down to that.
	If people are not willing to make changes, the marketplace and the weather will force them to make changes.
	Okay?
	And like I said, if you travel in Europe, you know that Europeans have a quite different lifestyle than us.
	They don't have huge suburbs because they can't afford cheap gasoline to go to the suburbs.
	Right.
	But we do.
	Yeah.
	So we may have to learn to live more like Europeans in the future, especially if gas prices continue to accelerate.
	Well, would you go so far as to imagine that we would begin re-centralizing our population?
	Well, you know, that's a tricky question.
	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 famines, riots.
	Again, this is not anytime soon.
	We're talking, you know, 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.
	There's some conservatives probably almost ready to suggest it on our southern border right now, from what I've been hearing.
	Yeah, in fact, it could go the other way.
	The irony is, as reported in the report by the Global Business Network, we may be going to Canada!
	And the Canadians may be saying, oh, these illegal aliens from America, and these illegal aliens from Chicago, we should send them back to Chicago.
	Well, I guess if global warming continues as it is forecast to, then Canada would be the new farm bill.
	It could be.
	It would move north.
	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 think about the climate we're going to have in the future.
	Yes.
	Well, that is fairly... I mean, if we're talking about nation-states using nuclear weapons to preserve their borders, and we're talking about nations that are basically, right now, friends, how are we ever going to make it to the next bubble?
	Yeah, it really gives you pause.
	I mean, when you consider that, you know, banks will have to be placed around Manhattan, where I'm standing right now.
	We may have to have dikes around Manhattan so that Wall Street is not inundated as sea levels start to rise.
	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.
	Yeah, there are two doomsday scenarios.
	Again, you have to take this with a certain grain of salt, right?
	One doomsday scenario is Siberia.
	If Siberia starts to thaw out, as Alaska is already thawing out, the tundra will release methane gas.
	Methane gas locked inside the decaying tundra for tens of thousands of years since the last ice age.
	That methane gas is about 20 times worse than carbon dioxide for trapping heat, and that sudden release of methane could trigger a collapse of the atmosphere.
	It would cause a spiraling out of control.
	As things get hotter, the tundra melts even more and releases more methane gas.
	More methane gas heats up the atmosphere and melts more tundra, which releases more methane gas.
	And you have a vicious cycle taking place.
	And that vicious cycle could take place pretty rapidly.
	And that's something that we have to worry about.
	We also have to worry about methane compounds in the bottom of the ocean.
	Yes, that's the one I'd heard about, that there's a lot of methane trapped at the bottom.
	A lot of methane down there, right.
	And if temperatures reach a certain point, you may have a bubbling, a bubbling of enormous amount of methane gas coming out of the oceans.
	And that could happen, again, very abruptly.
	And if that triggers, you aren't talking about, you know, Chicken Little talking about the sky is falling.
	You're talking about doomsday scenarios now.
	What would actually occur?
	If either one of these scenarios you just described actually came to be, what would we, in North America, what would we experience?
	Well, you know, it's happened before.
	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 that environment.
	Well, you're in New York City.
	You're in New York City.
	What would happen there?
	Well, where I'm standing would be underwater.
	Underwater, right.
	Hold it right there.
	Professor Michio Kaku is my guest, and we're discussing various possibilities it could be in our fairly near future.
	I'm Art Bell.
	Don't fear the methane, baby.
	Don't fear the methane.
	Just take my hand, and remember, God wouldn't let that happen.
	Dr. Michio Kaku is my guest, and believe it or not, he was actually advertised to be on here tonight and coming up shortly will, in fact, be talking about SETI.
	Now, that's the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, and Well, I always thought people like Dr. Kaku kind of winked and said, I don't know, if we get some extra money that might be all right, but kind of a wink and a nod and maybe it's wasting money and they're not out there and that kind of stuff, but he wants to talk about it, so we will in a moment.
	Professor Kaku, just before we move towards SETI, Jerry in San Diego says, well, then Art, why can't we use methane gas as fuel?
	It burns.
	We can, but it also creates carbon dioxide when it burns.
	In fact, 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, 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.
	So England, by rights, should be frozen over.
	England has no right to be as warm as it is.
	Except for the ocean currents.
	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.
	Interestingly, Professor, even recently they've noticed a slowing They've noticed a splintering of the Gulf Stream, worrisome, not yet catastrophic, but worrisome.
	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 thermal hailing 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.
	So, we should watch, and if you begin setting up shop somewhere in the Rockies, it's time to worry.
	It's time to worry in the sense that there could be extremes of weather.
	You know, farmers, for example, who snicker at all of this, they have to confront droughts.
	The Midwest could become a dust bowl in the future.
	We already are being beset with droughts near Georgia and places like that.
	We could have even more massive droughts.
	So in some areas we could have flooding, in the other areas we could have droughts because Global warming predicts swings, swings in the climate, not simply a uniform heating of the Earth, but we're talking about larger and larger violent swings of the atmosphere and the climate of the Earth as the temperature begins to rise.
	It's not going to be uniform at all, okay?
	Okay, so swings and radical weather, and we're certainly getting a lot of that.
	All right, Professor?
	When I saw that you actually wanted to come on the air tonight and talk about SETI, I went, wow, really?
	Because I had always thought that your attitude about SETI was kind of, well, you know, okay, if we have extra money, maybe, but it might be a waste and kind of like that.
	Well, I like to look at the big picture.
	And there's no point piddling with equipment that is too primitive and too cheap not to pick up anything.
	You mean like a receival?
	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 a thousand.
	So we're talking about a thousand times more than all the accumulated steady searches of the past.
	So that's enough to get you excited?
	Well, I'm not sure they're going to find anything.
	However, this is the best bet in a generation.
	In a generation.
	You know, once in a generation we get an opportunity like this, right?
	When a billionaire decides to, you know, throw 25 million away to create 350 gigantic radio telescopes.
	This could set the gold standard for the search for extraterrestrial intelligence.
	What do you think talked him into that kind of donation?
	Well, I think, you know, he's interested in science, you know, being a co-founder of Microsoft, he's interested in computers and rockets and stuff like that.
	He helped to back the XPRIZE, the The SpaceShipOne, which won the X Prize for blasting off into outer space on a commercial flight.
	And he wants to jumpstart commercial exploration of space.
	And he wants to jumpstart SETI where his billions will make a difference, okay?
	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?
	I would have said that the scientific community snickers and laughs at SETI because everybody knows that the equipment is out of date, we only can use it part-time, most of it is used for pure science, and of course we can't find aliens because we're not looking hard enough.
	And it would take a massive influx of funds.
	The government ain't doing it.
	And you could do it.
	You could be part of world history.
	If we make contact with alien life in outer space, that would be the biggest event in the history of Homo sapiens since we left the trees.
	Well, if I were Paul Engel and I would say, okay, that's fine and well, but make the case that you think they're there.
	Well, first, his name would be on it.
	His name would be on every single newspaper in the world, because it was his telescope, the telescope that found it.
	And second of all, most scientists, when they look at the numbers, believe they're out there.
	There are over a hundred billion stars in the Milky Way Galaxy, and we've only scanned about a thousand of them.
	Get this, we've only scanned in detail about a thousand stars in one hundred billion stars in our own backyard.
	And there are 100 billion galaxies within the range of our telescopes.
	So all together 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.
	We might.
	So my attitude is, think big.
	Look at the big picture.
	You have to jumpstart this.
	And this is precisely where a billionaire can make a difference.
	He made a difference with the X Prize.
	Now the commercialization of outer space is not out of the question.
	And he could make a difference with regards to making contact or eavesdropping on conversations of E.T.
	in outer space.
	It's not out of the question anymore.
	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, 1000 light years.
	In other words, well actually it couldn't be that many light years.
	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, you know, a few thousand light years from Earth.
	But, like I said, we've only scanned a thousand nearby stars, and even then we've only looked at one frequency, which is the hydrogen frequency.
	And, you know, we're like ants in an anthill trying to scan for intelligent life in outer space.
	When there are, you know, huge construction crews working around you, And you're totally oblivious to the existence of humans because you're looking for other ants.
	You said there are many scientists who believe that there is life out there, that it's abundant life.
	Are you one of them?
	Yeah, I think so.
	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.
	Okay?
	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 100 years.
	Okay, let me ask this again.
	What are the chances that incidental transmissions of the kind that we're making, perhaps the one transmission from Arecibo side, it 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.
	Okay, it depends on which estimate you choose, okay?
	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, okay?
	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 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, okay?
	It's no longer .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.
	A thousand times more efficiently.
	Okay, let's just take the numbers and the numbers of Earth-like planets that now are considered possible with what we know versus a thousand 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 for signals, right?
	Right.
	So in other words, we're entering the golden age of SETI.
	Before, it was, you know, a bunch of amateurs, you know, puttering around in their basement.
	We're entering the Golden Age, where A, we have the Allen Telescope Array going online.
	B, Kepler goes up in orbit.
	We'll know precisely where these Earth-like planets are.
	We'll look for evidence of liquid water on these planets and amino acids and oxygen.
	We'll focus the SETI project on precisely these Earth-like twins in outer space.
	And we could very well hit the jackpot.
	Well, again, I'm gonna come right back to this question.
	What are the odds of detecting relatively incidental transmissions?
	I would give it a few percent.
	Okay?
	Given the fact that there are a lot of stars to look for, I would say that for the first time, we have a shot now.
	The probability is no longer .0001 of finding evidence of intelligent life.
	I think it's a few percent.
	That doesn't mean we're going to find it.
	Right.
	Even looking at our own incidental transmissions, how far out do you suppose it's realistic to imagine somebody could be receiving signals from Earth?
	Well, our transmissions are only 50 light years away from us.
	There's a sphere 50 light years in radius, expanding at the speed of light.
	Theoretically, they could be out that far, right?
	Right.
	However, these intelligent life forms may be centuries, millennia, millions of years old.
	They could be quite ancient, and they could be much wiser than us.
	They may have access to tremendous amounts of energy that can be detected over thousands of light years.
	Or, even if they disintegrated and killed themselves, their radiation would live on, even after their death, and that would be picked up by our radio telescopes.
	So, my only point is not that we're going to find Evidence of extraterrestrial intelligence, but we have the best shot in a generation.
	The best, you know, the convergence of two technologies.
	Kepler going up next year in orbit.
	The French already have a satellite in orbit, by the way, the Kouros satellite.
	It's smaller and the Kouros satellite is already looking for Earth-like twins in outer space.
	And also this massive influx of energy, massive influx of money From Paul Allen.
	These two factors are beginning to mean that we're entering the golden age of possibly making contact with intelligent life.
	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?
	Well, there's no friction in outer space.
	There's gas in outer space to absorb electromagnetic radiation.
	The radiation would damp roughly as the inverse square law.
	Similar to a lightbulb, if you go away from the lightbulb, the energy from the lightbulb drops as the inverse square.
	So if you double your distance, the amount of light hitting you went down by a factor of four.
	So it does damp.
	However, these radio telescopes are extremely sensitive.
	In principle, you could pick up an emission from a transistor radio billions of miles from the Earth.
	That's how sensitive these things are.
	And we're going to have 350 of them.
	That's an enormous amount of firepower.
	And we're not going to have to share the time with pure scientists.
	This is a dedicated system of 350 radio telescopes exclusively for the search for extraterrestrial intelligence.
	Well, that certainly is encouraging.
	Very encouraging.
	This is the best shot we've had in a generation.
	And again, I'm not saying that we're going to make contact.
	But I'm saying that this is the best shot we've ever had.
	The convergence of these two technologies, looking for extrasolar planets, and... Professor, hold it, hold it, hold it.
	Giant telescopes.
	Hold it right there.
	Now don't get me wrong, I'm just a questioning son of a gun, but if Dr. Professor Kaku is getting excited about SETI, then I'm going to get excited about SETI.
	If we have 350 dishes pointed In directions looking with a thousand 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 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.
	Oh, it'd be all over the internet, it'd be everywhere, it'd be out right away.
	Do you agree with that?
	No.
	I think that, well, there are protocols being drafted about what happens if, you know, the Allen Telescope Array does pick up, you know, unmistakable signals from intelligent life in outer space.
	And, of course, you know, you're going to get a lot of techies saying freedom of speech, freedom of speech, but let's be real about this, okay?
	It could set off a panic.
	It could set off all sorts of bizarre shenanigans on the part of, you know, crazies out there, as well as, you know, well-meaning people confronted with the existence of other people that are maybe even superior to us, right?
	Or even probably superior to us.
	Probably they will be, because our technology is only 300 years old.
	You know, 300 years ago we didn't have much technology to talk about at all.
	And in outer space, 300 years is nothing.
	Even a million years is nothing when you look at the age of the galaxy.
	You know, the galaxy is about 10 billion years old.
	So, the chances are that these civilizations could be a million years ahead of us.
	How much do you know about the Protocols?
	Well, some have been drafted, but again, no one takes them seriously because we used to all snicker at SETI.
	We used to always say that these are just exercises in futility.
	Now that billionaires are beginning to put up money, and NSF and the government is backing these billionaires with extra funds, now it's serious.
	Now we're in the big leagues.
	We're no longer in the minor leagues now.
	Now we're in the big leagues with big equipment, the kind of equipment that they always dreamed about is now being built and now the protocols I think are going to have to be revised and I think it would be downright stupid to simply say that if we make contact we'll put it on the internet and leave it as that, right?
	How do you imagine, well first of all I guess I should ask, do you really know what the protocols are and if you do are you unable to discuss them?
	Well, several versions of protocols exist, okay?
	And I've seen versions of some, and they're all laughable, okay?
	In the sense that no one takes them seriously.
	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?
	Yeah, I think they would have to take protocols seriously.
	They're going to have to get rid of this freedom of speech Kind of attitude that, you know, everything's on the internet, everything should be free, because, you know, people could be hurt.
	People could be hurt if they realize, as Arthur C. Clarke once said, either there is intelligent life in outer space or there isn't.
	Either thought is frightening.
	Yes, it is.
	So I think that they should put a lid on it, if they ever do pick up an unmistakable signal, and it should be a matter of national security.
	All those science fiction movies that we've seen ever since we were kids, there's some truth to that.
	Well, of course there is.
	There would be religious disruption, there would be disruption of other establishments and infrastructure, you know, it would be disturbing, there's no question about it.
	So, you think that, well, even in contact, you remember the military came marching in.
	And so you imagine it might not occur that way, but that it would become a national security issue, it would go to the highest levels and stay there.
	Right, and given the fact that the government is, you know, putting up the other half of the bill, you know, Paul Allen is not putting up 100%.
	Oh, that insures.
	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, you know, all sorts of things could happen.
	Plus, you know, 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, you know, 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, you know, make a dialogue with these aliens from outer space.
	Dialogue is a little difficult, considering the distance is probably involved.
	Well, you never know.
	If they want to come visit us, if they know where we are.
	Oh, by the way, the other thing is, I don't think that we should advertise our presence to them until we know their intentions.
	Oh, excellent.
	You know, chances are they are carnivorous.
	You know, predators are smarter than prey.
	You know, foxes are smarter than rabbits.
	Rabbits are not too smart.
	All they have to do is know how to run.
	But predators, tigers, lions, cats, foxes, are all smarter than prey.
	And chances are intelligent life in outer space descend from predators just like us.
	Our eyes are to the front, right?
	Really?
	You don't imagine that a race of beings millions of years ahead of us would have evolved into peaceful, benevolent, technology-sharing folk?
	There's a good chance that they have, but you know, it's not 100%.
	Well, first of all, they're not going to want to eat us because our DNA is going to be totally different from their DNA.
	It's too far to travel for food.
	I don't imagine that either.
	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 natural resources.
	There are plenty of uninhabited planets.
	So what evil intent do you imagine is possible?
	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 Sagan and others who sent a disk containing our location with respect to the quasars in outer space, advertising our existence to alien life forms, is premature.
	I don't think we should do that at all.
	Even our DNA, I think, was involved.
	Well, what they did was they had this disk 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.
	Wouldn't you imagine that?
	Well, it's hard to say.
	You know, we do have the second law of thermodynamics, which says that anytime you have, you know, 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 you know, that's what the SETI 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.
	By the way, is that going to change with this new setup?
	No, that's why I still give it a few percent in the sense that there are a lot of frequencies out there and 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.
	Well, yeah, we've got the whole VHF, UHF, and then microwave region to be looking at, even up into light for that matter.
	Yeah.
	And, you know, the hydrogen frequency is but one, and kept fairly clear for the purposes we're discussing right now.
	But my gosh, it could be virtually anywhere.
	So even these 350 telescopes are going to be looking at or near the hydrogen frequency.
	That's right.
	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'll 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?
	I think it's pretty stupid.
	However, it's the only thing we have.
	Hydrogen is universal, so the SETI people say, why not?
	Pretty stupid?
	I think it's a pretty stupid idea.
	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 they 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, okay?
	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 0.001%.
	It's very exciting, actually, yes.
	So that's why, you know, it's something to write home about.
	You know, it's something that has changed the complexion, the terrain, the landscape.
	And like I said, Kepler is going to even focus the search even more.
	The needle in the haystack.
	We'll find the needles.
	We'll know where the needles are in the haystack.
	Okay, let's say we find a needle or some needles and then we essentially...
	Keep it secret, and what do we do?
	We of course try to understand what we're hearing, I suppose, but I mean, how would you progress?
	Let's say you were called in and we had found an intelligent signal.
	How would you suggest proceeding from that point?
	Well, first we need a Rosetta Stone.
	First we have to translate what comes in.
	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, you know, second law of thermodynamics, waste heat, I Love Lucy that leaked out from outer space, or, you know, 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?
	That's right.
	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 setting off panic and, you know, because we don't know what their intentions are.
	Once we figure out that they're peaceful people, That they don't, you know, 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.
	Okay?
	If we understand their history, you know, if some of their, you know, 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 You know, temper their, you know, aggressive tendencies that came out of the forest.
	I think all aliens will 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?
	Well, I would say, you know, stay away.
	They're basically, you know, they're an emerging, they're a type 0 civilization.
	They haven't even reached type 1 status yet, and it's not clear they will reach type 1 status, that is planetary status.
	And these intelligent beings, if they are, you know, millions of years ahead of us, They could be Type 3, they could be galactic at that point, listening in on, you know, feeble signals of a Type 0 civilization that just came out of the swamp a few centuries, a few thousand years earlier, right?
	Sure.
	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, Yes.
	And if they saw, you know, I Love Lucy and all the soap operas, they would probably say, you know, leave these guys alone.
	I mean, even if they got the recent stuff, which of course they wouldn't, they'd see us in Iraq.
	They'd see how we're handling the energy situation and what's likely to occur with the energy situation.
	That is, say, wars.
	And I suppose they'd say, Fred, it's another one.
	Zap.
	Push the button.
	Well, that's also possible too.
	I mean, if we're ants in an anthill, what we have to worry about is being paved over by the workers next door.
	Paved over.
	And we may be paved over without even knowing that we're about to be paved over.
	That's why I say let's try to find out their intentions before we advertise our existence and say, here we are.
	We are located in this sector of the Milky Way Galaxy.
	I don't think we should do that yet.
	I think we should, you know, keep it under wraps.
	And if, you know, we do make contact with it, unfortunately, it'll come down to looking at military considerations first.
	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?
	That's right.
	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 send a signal to these people and say, hi, here we are.
	We picked up your transmissions, right?
	I think that'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.
	I think that's H5N1, right?
	And it's been published!
	It's part of the public domain now.
	You know, I never really considered that.
	You're absolutely right.
	All right, Professor, hold it right there.
	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.
	Telling in for George Norrie, I am Art Bell.
	Hi, everybody.
	If you want to email me, that's easy.
	I'm Artbell, A-R-T-B-E-L-L at MindSpring.com, M-I-N-D-S-P-R-I-N-G.com, Artbell at MindSpring.com
	or Artbell at A-O-L.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
	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 Tenth 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 I think things like, you know, 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 naive when it comes to this.
	Could be.
	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 Arecibo radio telescope.
	Now with the Allen Telescope Array, there's going to be so much data from 350 radio telescopes that they're going to have to, you know, call out the cavalry 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.
	And even though if they called in and said, I found one, And it really was the real thing.
	They would be, of course, told that it was a test.
	That's right.
	Exactly.
	You got it.
	All right.
	CNN the other day did an interesting survey.
	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.
	Surprised?
	No.
	I mean, it's a free country.
	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, you know, 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.
	Well, that said, of course in religion you have these Ten Commandment things and all these precepts that dictate that, even though they're not followed all the time, that evil not be done.
	What similar precepts are in science ensuring that evil not be done?
	Well, doctors, for example, have to take the Hippocratic Oath and the first The principle of Hippocratic Oath is do no harm, right?
	Well, that would be doctors, but what about the guys working on, well, I don't know, nanotechnology, for example?
	Well, what motivates people is, you know, fame, government grants, possibility 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 codes, 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.
	They 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, you know, 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, you know, the state of humanity.
	Politicians come in that they want to build atomic bombs and designer germs.
	Yes, but the scientists do make it possible.
	They definitely make it possible.
	I want to touch on the Hadron Collider.
	I know it's getting close now.
	That's right.
	And I guess we're going to get a lot of really big questions answered by this collider, right?
	Well, we hope so.
	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.
	So we'll be able to learn what the conditions were essentially a fraction of a second or a second after the Big Bang?
	Is that realistic?
	That's right.
	That's the modest goal.
	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, Music Magazine run 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.
	One also has to imagine the Hadron Collider will go on and the string theory will come apart like a giant ball of twine.
	Well, we hope that the universe doesn't unwind if we build the Large Hadron Collider.
	We hope to find sparticles.
	Sparticles are super particles.
	They are higher octaves of the super string.
	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.
	Was he speaking of a God of creation?
	He called it the Old One.
	That is a harmony that existed at the instant of creation that then governs all physical law.
	He called it the Old One, God in other words.
	This is not a personal God, he was very careful to say.
	It's the God of Spinoza.
	It's the God of Leibniz.
	It's the God of reason, logic, harmony, unification, and beauty.
	That's what Einstein considered God.
	And he wanted to crack the code.
	Today we think we've done it.
	We have to test it.
	People are going to laugh at us unless we can find evidence of this theory.
	This theory is very difficult to test because it is a theory of the incident of creation.
	It's a theory of parallel universes.
	It's a theory of hyperdimensions, up to 11 dimensions now.
	And we hope to find the first clues to this theory by finding Spartacles.
	And, well, we're taking bets right now.
	As to whether or not the Large Hadron Collider is powerful enough to produce particles.
	And your bet would be?
	Well, I'd say 50-50.
	Our machine was called the Super Collider to be built outside Dallas, Texas.
	People are wondering, how come it's a European machine?
	How come it's not an American machine?
	Well, Congress cancelled our machine.
	The Congress gave us a billion dollars back in the 90s to dig a hole for this machine.
	Congress cancelled 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, cancelling it, and giving us a second billion dollars to fill up that hole.
	Isn't that what we do with most of our money?
	Throw it in holes?
	That's right, literally!
	Literally, that's what we did outside Dallas, Texas.
	A huge hole was dug.
	To build a machine, but then the Congress got cold feet.
	You know, $11 billion was too much for Congress.
	Now, of course, we spend half a trillion dollars in Iraq, but $10 billion was considered too much.
	Well, the Europeans Are not shy about this.
	They spent ten billion dollars building their machine and it's going to go online in just a few more months now.
	It is exciting.
	Is it possible, Professor, that we will be able to figure out what happened to antimatter?
	Where antimatter?
	I mean, did it?
	It's got to be somewhere.
	Yeah, that's the famous CP violation problem.
	It was Andrei Sakharov, the counterpart of Edward Teller, the man who built the Russian hydrogen bomb.
	It was Andrei Sakharov who asked that question, where did the antimatter go?
	And he said there was an imbalance, a slight imbalance called symmetry breaking, that existed at the instant of creation, and we are the leftovers.
	We are the leftovers of this slight imbalance.
	Because matter and antimatter collide and release energy, tremendous amounts of energy.
	Somewhere there's a positron, right?
	Somewhere.
	The positron would be an anti-electron, right.
	In fact, when I was in high school, I played with positrons and went to the National Science Fair taking pictures of antimatter.
	But that's another story.
	The point here is that the incident 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.
	But instead, antimatter disappeared.
	Yeah, annihilated with matter, and we're the leftovers of that titanic collision between matter and antimatter.
	But it can't really disappear, can it?
	It turns to energy.
	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 lightbulb.
	So it just wouldn't be practical.
	That's right.
	But we know it exists, and one day if we can harvest it...
	It may take us to the stars, you know, just like on Star Trek.
	Or it may blow us to the stars.
	Is it possible that the Hadron Collider will essentially tell us where to find antimatter, and if we do find it, will we do the right thing with it, whatever that is?
	Well, the Large Hadron Collider will produce copious quantities of antiprotons, and if you then hit antiprotons with positrons, as you mentioned before, antielectrons, Then you get anti-atoms.
	And we have, in fact, made anti-atoms.
	Not very many.
	You can probably count them on your hand.
	But we've actually made anti-hydrogen, anti-atoms.
	And sooner or later we'll make anti-helium.
	And sooner or later we'll have anti-chemistry.
	But that's, of course, far away.
	It takes an enormous amount of energy to create these things.
	But the Large Hadron Collider will create large quantities of anti-matter.
	And may lead us down, you know, start us down the path.
	Yeah, of understanding why the Big Bang banged.
	You know, what set off the bang, what lit the fuse that created the universe.
	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, okay?
	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.
	That's probably where our universe came from.
	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?
	Well, my attitude is, you know, let the cards fall where they may.
	You know, nature will dictate reality, not pencil and paper.
	That's true.
	We physicists can come up with all sorts of cockamamie 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.
	Even that said, are you a bit on pins and needles, this beginning to get so close?
	Yeah, we're taking bets.
	It was supposed to be turned on this year, but there was a problem with the magnets, so it got delayed a few months.
	So the christening won't take place for a few more months.
	And when it's turned on, we're very anxious to find what new particles or what new physics could come out.
	Physics has been pretty much at a standstill for the last 30 years, high energy physics, because we've had no new machine in 30 years.
	This is our first big machine.
	Truly exciting, then.
	Truly exciting, right?
	And some people, of course, ask, is it dangerous?
	And the answer is, not really.
	It's underground for the most part.
	It does not have enough energy to open up a hole in space, so don't worry that a black hole is going to emerge out of Geneva, Switzerland.
	Cosmic rays from outer space have more energy.
	No big bangs.
	There'll be no big bangs coming out of Geneva, Switzerland.
	All right.
	Professor, hold it right there.
	A lot of people want to talk on the phone.
	We'll get to that coming up in a moment.
	I'm Art Bell.
	For George Norey on this Friday night, Saturday morning, headlines if I were to write them would be, Dr. Michio Kaku gets excited about SETI.
	And then below that, and suggests of any signal received not be made public.
	Those would be the headlines.
	In a moment, we'll get to all of you.
	It certainly is a rush to be on radio again and be able to share some time with you, particularly with somebody the caliber of Dr. Michio Kaku.
	All right, Doctor, if you're ready, we're going to... Okay.
	Here we go.
	Charles in Kauai, Hawaii.
	You're on with Dr. Kaku.
	Hi.
	Hello, Dr. Kaku.
	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 washed waste configuration with a divergent and convergent section, so they narrow towards the middle of it, and these hoops are independently powered, and the centralmost 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 what, you have a combination of electric and magnetic fields, so the plasma is repelled from the outridges electrically, but it can't get anywhere in the center because of the magnetic field squeezing it tightly.
	Do you think that would work?
	Okay, let's see.
	You have a bunch of hoops.
	Each hoop, of course, would be an electromagnet creating a magnetic field.
	Yes.
	What is the overall configuration of these hoops?
	That's the key.
	These hoops make what kind of envelope, as we say?
	Well, it makes a overall A wasp-waste magnetic field.
	It's like a solenoid, only it's more intensely pinched in the center, wasp-waste-wise.
	Like an hourglass?
	Yes.
	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 field's there.
	The Tokamak design, which is a 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.
	It's self-leaking.
	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 of a baseball.
	Yeah, that makes some sense.
	Many, 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, you know, squeezing a balloon, except the air inside the balloon itself has magnetic properties and goes every which way when you try to squeeze it.
	And then how do the French or the Europeans imagine they're going to tackle this?
	Okay, they also take a tokamak design, that is a donut.
	So when gas leaks out one end of the donut, it basically leaks into itself.
	It goes in a circle.
	So, there is leakage in the ITER, but it leaks into itself, and that minimizes the overall leakage.
	Got it.
	So, it's the Soviet design.
	They came out with it first.
	That's why it's called a tokamak.
	But it is a design of choice.
	It is a design that every physicist uses when we talk about hot fusion.
	Okay.
	All right.
	John in rain-starved Atlanta, you're on with Professor Kaku.
	Doctor, this is John in Atlanta.
	Sometimes as a young man going to Georgia Tech, I dreamed up ideas to try to break hydrogen out of water.
	Tell me what your idea is.
	Will that ever be done, or is science working on that?
	It seems like it's solved our problems for energy forever.
	Well, this is a fuel cell.
	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 it'll be a mad rush to create solar hydrogen cars.
	Okay, Professor, just out of idle curiosity, At how many dollars per gallon do you imagine the intersection of those lines?
	Okay, well take a look at Europe.
	People complain about three dollars a gallon in the United States.
	You go to Europe and they say, oh my god, that's so cheap!
	I mean, how come you guys have such free energy in America?
	Well, most of that's taxation in Europe, of course.
	And also, yeah, a lot of it is taxation and, well, there are other reasons, you know, they don't have the supply lines, blah, blah, blah.
	But the point is that the crossing of these curves could take place within, let's say, 15 years.
	10, 15, 20 years.
	We don't know for sure.
	It depends on how efficient solar cells come.
	Solar cells right now are several times more expensive than oil-fired or coal-fired plants.
	Several times more expensive.
	But with the two curves gradually converging, every year solar cells become more efficient.
	Every year this hydrogen technology gets more advanced.
	I see a crossing taking place.
	Right.
	Again, though, let me try and rephrase it.
	At that crossing point, what would you imagine the cost per barrel of oil to be?
	Okay, in U.S.
	dollars right now, I would imagine it would have to hit, let's say, maybe seven or eight dollars a gallon.
	Right now, okay.
	Oh, we're back to the gallon.
	Okay, seven or eight bucks a gallon in the U.S.
	In the U.S., before it becomes economical to go to solar hydrogen.
	In other words, it's not economical at all.
	Right.
	Between here and there, there's a lot of pain.
	There's gonna be a lot of pain, right.
	But again, every year, solar hydrogen becomes more efficient, more advanced, and with mass production tax credits, You could jumpstart this technology, just the way nuclear was jumpstarted by the Pentagon.
	Sure.
	Nuclear energy would not be economical unless the taxpayer had funded research in nuclear energy back in the 50s.
	There's another taxpayer.
	Harry in Texas.
	You're on with Dr. Kaku.
	Thank you, thank you.
	I'm an amateur astronomer, and I just have a craving for books, and let me run a scenario by you.
	I'd like your comments on it.
	To me, the question of is there life out there is not a matter of logistics or finding luck or whatever.
	It's more a matter of timing, since we all originated, apparently, from a Big Bang.
	All the ingredients are there elsewhere.
	It's a matter of timing.
	When does it evolve into something that can sustain life?
	So, what I think about is, well, what is the universe for?
	What is it doing?
	What is it trying to accomplish?
	And it seems to always fall back to motion.
	Vibration.
	Frequency.
	Every solar system is a giant armature.
	Every galaxy a giant armature.
	Sounds a lot like string theory to me.
	Yeah, so here's my question.
	I play around with sound waves because I can see them.
	And I play guitar.
	And it seems to me that long sound waves consume short sound waves.
	Is that a true statement?
	Long waves do what with short waves?
	Consume short 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 pitch note the lower pitch note Sustains itself off of the higher pitch note, but the higher pitch note goes away quicker You follow what I'm saying?
	Yeah, well waves don't necessarily consume other waves waves add That's called superposition Okay.
	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, you know, what I call harmonics when you play guitar.
	But string theory is precisely based on harmonics.
	String theory says that, you know, a proton and 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 an 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.
	That's why we have chemistry.
	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?
	Well, I'm not sure.
	I've never seen that effect.
	You know, I've played with musical instruments all my life.
	You know, maybe you can email me.
	My website is mkaku.org, m-k-a-k-u dot org, and my email address is on, and maybe you can email me this effect, and I can then duplicate it.
	But right now, it's kind of hard for me to visualize that.
	Okay.
	All right.
	Susie in Orange, California, Orange County, you're on with Dr. Kaku.
	Oh, hi!
	Gosh, I can't believe I've got on the radio.
	Real quickly, I just was curious, why haven't the utilities Any utility that I've heard of anywhere, why aren't they like putting solar panels on every Southern Exposure building that they can get their hands on, that people will let them?
	Rather than, I mean, rather than waiting for the individual homeowner to pay, you know, like 30 grand, you know, 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, for, 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, you know, they're trying to urge with a very minimal federal tax credit, and you get so many back, well, you can get free, actually free energy, but that doesn't, it's so expensive for the homeowner to do it.
	I don't know why the utilities aren't doing it.
	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, you know, 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.
	But they are closing.
	They're closing very fast, right?
	All right, David in Mesa, Arizona, good morning.
	You're on with Dr. Kaku.
	Thank you, Mr. Bell.
	Wow, what a privilege to speak with you and Dr. Kaku, and my gosh, what a sensationally educational show.
	I've been so gravely 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 from space via high-intensity microwaves to Earth.
	It's called Sunstroke.
	Right.
	David Kagan.
	Oh, Mr. Bell, what a great pleasure.
	Good memory.
	Look, super congratulations for Asia.
	Thank you.
	Anyway, your question?
	Yes, sir.
	I do have a question for the esteemed Professor Cox.
	And that is?
	This is indeed a grand honor for me, sir.
	Now, I've followed your scientific works, including parallel universe and string 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 weapon?
	I think that'll perhaps change the answer.
	Okay.
	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 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?
	We are.
	Who has the most satellites?
	Who has the most communication networks?
	Who is most vulnerable if somebody decides to blow up satellites in outer space?
	That would be us.
	It's us, hands down.
	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 sand in the other guy's eyeball, right?
	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 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.
	Yeah, these are called dark satellites.
	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 a, what is called ASAT, or anti-satellite device.
	Well, the Chinese have, and they've got roundly condemned by everybody, created an enormous amount of space debris in outer 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.
	And you can't put up signs, adopt a geosynchronous orbit.
	Right, exactly.
	All right, well, Professor, as always, it has been such a pleasure being on the air with you.
	Thank you, and we will definitely do it again one day.
	You're just really fun to talk to.
	Take care.
	Anytime.
	Good night, Professor.
	That's it, folks.
	Professor Michio Kaku from the high desert.
	I'm Art Bell.

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