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Nov. 30, 2008 - Art Bell

02:36:45

Coast to Coast AM with Art Bell - Future Technology and Parallel Worlds - Dr. Michio Kaku

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	From the high desert and the great American Southwest, I bid you all good evening, good morning, good afternoon, whatever the case may be in whatever time zone you reside in worldwide.
	This is the Sunday night, Monday morning edition of Coast to Coast AM, and I'm Art Bell.
	And do you know that it has been since May 24th of this year since I've been on the air?
	That's absolutely incredible.
	A lot has happened in that time, and we'll try and cover some of that.
	It's a little difficult, it really is a lot.
	All the Art Bells, all the Art Bells, all the ABs are well in our family.
	I'm Art Bell, that's AB.
	Aaron Bell, AB.
	And of course, Asia Bell, AB, who today is 18 months old.
	18 months old, and you may see a picture of the beautiful Aaron or the beautiful Asia.
	The girls.
	Actually, a couple of photos, and then one of me, and I guess one of all three of us, really.
	If you go to coast2coastam.com, at the very top of the page is a little thing you can click on.
	My webcam.
	And that will display a really kind of pretty picture, I think, of the three of us.
	That was taken on the stairwell of the MS Zondam.
	About halfway between here and the Hawaiian Islands.
	Well, I'll tell you what, that's a long trip.
	When you board the ship in San Diego, and you go all the way to Hawaii and then Island Hop, and then all the way back to San Diego, that's a long time at sea in the Pacific, I'll tell you what.
	But as of last, that was taken right in the middle of a stairwell, as you can clearly see on the ship.
	Big ship.
	So, we've been doing a lot of traveling.
	That's one of the reasons that I've not been on the air.
	Gosh, a lot's happened.
	We have a new President-Elect.
	As you know, well, maybe you know, maybe you remember, I was a big supporter of President-Elect Obama when he was a very much long shot.
	And so I guess I'm pretty well satisfied and I think the days since his being voted our next president have gone pretty well.
	I mean the cabinet that he's putting together, the people he's putting together are certainly reassuring and have been so to the financial markets and that's another topic we've got to talk about.
	Money.
	Money thing.
	Um, I guess it was on the way back from Hawaii, and of course, actually what happened was we went to Hawaii, we had parked our car in San Diego, we came all the way back on the ship, got off the ship, went directly to our car, changed suitcases, and flew to Chicago.
	Leaving the car there in San Diego.
	And there I was inducted into the National Radio Hall of Fame.
	As a radio pioneer, and I am deeply honored by this induction into the National Radio Hall of Fame.
	If you ever get interested in the Hall of Fame, it is a very interesting thing.
	You know, go onto the web and just go to Google and put in National Radio Hall of Fame.
	There's only one.
	It's in Chicago, and I certainly am in a very good company.
	And it was quite a night in Chicago, you know, everybody in black tie.
	And that's not normal for me.
	I had to go out and buy.
	Appropriate clothing for that whole thing.
	So it was pretty wild.
	And it was very moving.
	My mom actually did a video recorded piece.
	I actually went from Chicago after the induction to see my mom.
	And I took Erin and Asia to see my mom for the first time in person ever.
	And that was quite a moment.
	That sure was, that sure was quite a moment, I'll tell you.
	My mom is ill now with cancer.
	And her days are, as all our days are, numbered.
	Her's perhaps a bit shorter, so we took the time to go to North Carolina and visited with her.
	And then back here, back home, and by then of course, we had the obligatory cold that one gets when traveling endless airline and sea miles.
	And so that's been kind of what's kept us busy.
	I do want to talk a little more about the financial crisis, and a lot more, so stay right where you are.
	All right, just to finish up with the photographs here, there are actually two of them on the website.
	One of them will be on my, you know, my webcam, which is up at the very top, and the second one can be enlarged, and it's over in Asia, now 18 months old, as of today.
	And so you can click on that and get a bigger version of it.
	Let's see.
	I want to get my email address out.
	It hasn't been out in about six months or something, so if you'd like to get a hold of me by email, I'm artbell at AOL.com or artbell at MindSpring.com.
	Artbell at MindSpring, M-I-N-D-S-P-R-A-N-G.com.
	Now I want to talk a little bit about the financial crisis.
	You know, I don't know how I feel about this.
	I've been watching, I've turned into a financial junkie.
	You know, when I wake up in the morning, the first thing I turn on is Fox Financial, which is in high definition.
	Kind of nice.
	I don't like Fox News.
	They say they're fair and balanced.
	They're not even in high def.
	They're financial analysts.
	Do you watch Fox during the election?
	Good God, how can they call that fair and balanced?
	Or even fair, or even balanced, or anything.
	They were just, you know, pro-Republican all the way.
	So, but Fox Financial is an entirely different story.
	And I must say, it really looked like financial Armageddon to me.
	Who would have thought?
	Who would have believed, not me certainly, that it could all unwind so quickly?
	Now it does look as though our federal government has postponed or possibly eliminated the worst possibility.
	You know, I'm not sure which.
	They've injected incredible amounts of cash liquidity into the markets and, you know, Credit is, albeit somewhat slowly, starting to move again.
	I noticed the rates for, you know, if you're trying to get a house, they've come down and things are beginning to move a little bit again in the financial world.
	But it's scary out there.
	It's really scary out there.
	And in the beginning, I thought it was the end.
	I really thought it was the end.
	You know, some of the financial experts were making remarks saying, well, if we don't do this, the $750 billion, whatever, it is the end.
	And it may be the end anyway.
	We may not be able to save it.
	And to save it, we've got to have this.
	So, it was an interesting, perfect financial storm.
	With the housing market collapsing, the credit market freezing, and the way they're fixing this is by going to the printing presses, essentially.
	And so I'm not sure, if you look back on the, you know, on the crash, the Great Depression, things kind of like what just happened, happened.
	Then things got a little better and then kaboom!
	It all blew up.
	Well, I'm not sure.
	I'm not sure if it's fixed.
	I think it's got a Band-Aid on it.
	That's an overly, certainly an overused term, Band-Aid, but it kind of appears that's what they've got is a Band-Aid on it and they're printing money.
	And so if it doesn't go one way, if they overdo it, then we're going to inflate and go kaboom the other way.
	They're going to print too much money and kill the dollar.
	This is really, sincerely scary stuff, in my opinion.
	I mean, really scary stuff.
	And I'm not at all convinced, I must tell you, that we're going to get out of it without hitting rock bottom.
	And I don't even know if I can describe what that means in modern times.
	Certainly, a depression in modern times would not mean what it meant then.
	It would be bad, but perhaps bad in a different way.
	I'm not sure.
	It is interesting.
	I spent some time in the Philippines recently.
	You know, we kind of live between two countries.
	That's what we've been doing.
	And the Philippines, to a large degree, is not affected by what's happening in the rest of the world.
	And one of the reasons for that, of course, is that it's not been involved that much with the rest of the world in the first place.
	So it cannot be that much affected.
	And it has not been.
	Their banks had very little exposure, maybe a tiny bit, and that's it.
	Otherwise, everything goes on pretty much as normal.
	In fact, even not as exposed as the rest of Asia was.
	So, I guess that's a good and rare thing.
	But back here, I just don't know.
	And they tell me that what has happened here in the U.S., bad as it is, is going to be nothing compared to what happens in Europe.
	Now, you don't know who to believe, what to believe.
	You don't know if it's true.
	But if that is true, it's going to be really, really rough in Europe.
	They were kind of sitting back laughing at us for a while, huh?
	There goes capitalism!
	Well, there goes everything, pretty much.
	And the European banks are in as big, if not worse, mess than we're in.
	So, I don't know.
	I would be interested in what some of you think.
	Some of you who have been following this very closely, as I have.
	It is certainly fascinating and frightening, but it is something to see in your lifetime.
	Many have been predicting this for a very, very long time.
	You know, if you're one of those who has been watching this closely as I have been, I'd be very, very interested in your opinion as we open up the lines.
	What I'm going to do is take unscreened open line calls.
	When I give out the numbers here after a while, in a few minutes actually, we will simply start plowing through unscreened calls.
	So if you have something to say about this, I really, really would like to hear it.
	Meantime, of course, I also write on through Thanksgiving.
	Boy, oh boy, oh boy.
	What a mess, huh, in India?
	There is one gunman alive.
	They say he's tied to a Pakistani group.
	What happened in Mumbai, now, the story of who did it may be told by one Man.
	One man.
	And what he says may determine what happens between two nuclear-armed nations, India and Pakistan.
	And that's frightening, isn't it?
	Could there be a nuclear... Could it deteriorate quickly to a nuclear exchange?
	Sure it could.
	Of course it could.
	Listen, I would have said that what happened financially, how the United States and its financial allies came unwound And I must say, some of our enemies as well.
	You know, whether you're talking about the Saudis or Hugo down there, or any of the people who don't like us all that much, you know, they were really heel-hawn until the price of oil went from, what, $150 to about $50?
	They're crying the blues now.
	Anyway, this one man that they have, If he says the Pakistani government was involved, to any great degree, could be the catalyst for a nuclear exchange.
	And you've got to say these days, after what's going on financially, what's happened financially, that anything is possible.
	So keep your eye on that very closely.
	President Bush has sent Condoleezza Rice to New Delhi just in support of India.
	I don't know what she's going to say.
	Sorry it happened.
	Whatever.
	As I mentioned, Obama continues.
	Oh, there'll be a news conference later today.
	He'll announce more of his cabinet.
	It's really been wise choice after wise choice so far.
	Very good people.
	Consider how a city Like Mumbai.
	Looks to a terrorist who's looking for a target.
	You've got the airport.
	Mm-hmm, inviting.
	But very heavily secured.
	Then there's the U.S.
	Embassy.
	Not good.
	You know, crack local forces, U.S.
	Marines, not good.
	And then you've got the easy targets, the hotels.
	Open to anybody who looks good, got a suit on, money for a cup of coffee, and you're in, right?
	So I guess that's going to have to change.
	Period.
	Space Shuttle's back.
	Space Shuttle Endeavor finished with a 16-day mission.
	It was kind of remodeling up there.
	It was 16 days, you know.
	And in that 16 days, they've got a new bathroom, a kitchenette, an exercise machine, two sleeping quarters, and a recycling system.
	This is a doozy.
	It is designed to convert astronauts.
	You see, they're tired of carrying water up there.
	Water's heavy.
	And so it takes the urine and the sweat of the astronauts and converts it into drinking water.
	And I don't care how good and how pure it is.
	As you're drinking, you've got to be thinking about where it came from.
	Your own donation.
	You've got to really want to be in space.
	Zheng Yaowen's outdoor laboratory in the terraced hills of southern China is a virtual treasure trove of genetic potential rice.
	He has rice there that thrives in unusually cool temperatures.
	Normally you need to be very warm for rice, right?
	Also in high altitudes, dry soil, rice rich in calcium, vitamins, iron.
	Rice that'll grow in dry soil?
	Really?
	Now this is all done by, you know, fooling around with genetics.
	I must tell you, the guest we're going to have on in the next hour, probably, I don't know, the brightest guy, the smartest guy in the U.S.?
	Could that be said?
	Yes, it certainly could.
	Dr. Michio Kaku.
	And I'm going to talk to him a little bit about genetics and a lot of the other things.
	He's written a book called The Physics of the Impossible.
	Nothing really is impossible.
	I wonder what he thinks would happen in a war between India and Pakistan, a nuclear exchange.
	I don't know how much megatonnage the two of them have, and what the consequences for Asia would be, what the consequences for the world would be, if they began to exchange that stuff, but I suppose it's a An appropriate moment to be asking about that, huh?
	So, we will.
	I have a lot of stories that are somewhat related to the world news, but not really, more or less the kind of thing we talk about on the show, mostly in the... Let's see, this came from unknown country.
	I'm never going to get it all in.
	In the Cyprus Mail, Nathan Morley quotes British soldier Tom Clarke as saying, we were all awoken about 2am by a brilliant, bluish, dazzling bright light in the sky.
	What happened next is very hard to explain.
	There was not an explosion, but We were all hit by a shockwave and fell flat to the ground.
	The light just disappeared or went out.
	British UFO researcher Gary Haseltine, who edits a monthly UFO magazine in the UK, says that he's got some of the debris.
	He's actually physically got some of the debris that was collected by the soldiers who saw the UFO slam into the Trudeau's mountain range in Cyprus all the way back in 1973.
	Physical evidence, folks!
	They were ordered to collect the debris and put it into black plastic bags, but our friend Clark managed to confiscate some small pieces of golden tinted foil, similar, very similar he says, to the debris found at Roswell.
	Morley quotes Clark as saying, after what seemed like hours, a halt was called and we were all lined up and told under no circumstances were we going to talk about anything we'd been doing and that we were forbidden to take anything from the site under the threat of court-martial.
	But he did.
	We were then all taken from the area by helicopter and flown to a military base where we were interviewed separately.
	I was asked to describe exactly what I'd seen.
	Warned again not to discuss with anyone the events that occurred.
	Several military communication installations are located in the Trudeau Mountains.
	They have been the setting for many UFO sightings over the last 50 years.
	So there you have it.
	I mean, when are we going to get somebody like this who has collected a piece of physical evidence To submit it for testing.
	As you know, I had something called Arts Parts that were sent to me.
	And indeed, we did a great deal of physical testing on these pieces.
	And they proved part of them, at least, to be not of this earth.
	Fascinating story.
	I'd love to tell it all again.
	We'll be right back.
	Morning everybody.
	I've got a number of questions, comments on the Fast Blast.
	That is a way you can fire a question at me.
	Let me look at a couple of them just before we do a break.
	Eric from Inglewood, Ohio says, Hey Art, I forgot how much I truly missed hearing you and how much I truly hate your politics.
	That aside, you're great.
	Or let's see here.
	Hey Art, great to hear you again.
	Obama sucks.
	Sorry to hear you're another Obama sucker.
	Um, let's see.
	Have I really quit smoking?
	Yes!
	Yes, I'm not smoking.
	No cigarettes for me.
	Nice to hear your voice again.
	Congrats on Hall of Fame.
	Let's see.
	I'm more out of touch with world events than the first time I went to the Philippines.
	You know, that might be alright.
	And so forth and so on, a lot of really nice ones that I won't read.
	So we're going to, and by the way, one more comment on the fair and balanced people at Fox.
	See, I watched them during, the reason I'm so fired up about this is I watched them during the election, coming back from Hawaii.
	Actually, on the way to Hawaii, and then coming back too, I kind of switched between CNN and Fox, which we had on the show.
	I learned afresh to hate Lou Dobbs, oh God, and Billy Mays.
	You know who Billy Mays is?
	This guy does advertisements for all kinds of different things and he has got a voice that really could inspire homicide.
	We'll be right back.
	Alright, we're going to take unscreened open line.
	Anything goes, call.
	So, let's do it.
	They don't have them marked down, so I'm just going to take calls here.
	I think it may be the first time caller line.
	I'm not, frankly, altogether sure.
	And actually, I appear to be unable to even pick it up.
	I can see it ringing, but for some reason I can't pick it up.
	Oh, maybe you're on the air.
	Oh, hello.
	Hi there.
	Yes.
	Oh, it's so great to hear your voice.
	Let me kill my radio here.
	Wonderful.
	I wanted to talk about the current financial situation.
	Oh, yes, please.
	I was wondering what your opinion was on if our system wasn't the fiat system, if we were backed by gold or still backed by silver, if that would make an incredible amount of difference if we couldn't, absolutely couldn't, just pump money into the system, print it from nothing.
	Well, look, if our system, thank you, were still based on gold, the bottom line is, We wouldn't be in this mess to start with, but of course then also our economy would not have grown to anywhere near the size that it is right now.
	It simply could not have.
	We had to go off the gold standard.
	We simply had to.
	If the economy at some point, at one point, was going to continue to build, we had to go off the gold standard.
	It's just that simple.
	So I know a lot of people have sort of a nostalgic wish to go backwards, but I don't think we can.
	I really don't think that we can go backwards.
	Let me try the west of the Rockies line.
	And, you know, we're having some difficulty actually pressing these and having them go west of the Rockies.
	You might be on the air.
	Hello.
	Hello, Art.
	This is Nick from all cover.
	Hi, Nick.
	I also wanted to talk to you about the financial situation.
	Good.
	A couple of points.
	You know how gas is down now a bit?
	And I have a theory that they're trying to kind of run off the biofuel people by making, putting gas down to the point where the biofuel isn't competitive anymore.
	Okay, yeah, but what happened, of course, and it really was kind of a shame, there were some biofuel companies that were up around 90 bucks.
	I mean, they were just riding high when the oil was up around a hundred and a half, something like that, and it's just such a shame.
	They were ready to take off, and oil dropped back now to the 50s.
	And, you know, when that happened, those $90 stocks damn near became penny stocks.
	Yeah, exactly.
	I had another point, and that was about the money that they're pumping into the system.
	I think they're pumping it into the wrong hole.
	I think that, so far, I've heard nobody talk about these poor people that are already in foreclosure, and what's going to happen to them, and where are they going to go.
	They're doing everything to help the banks, it seems.
	In other words, they're bailing out the banks.
	That is what they're doing.
	The banks aren't lending the money yet.
	They're sitting on it like it was something they're going to hatch.
	Well, it is in a way, exactly that.
	Right now, there's not a whole lot of people approaching banks for loans in the first place, so it's not entirely the bank's fault, but banks tend to do that.
	Until they really feel that warm, in the pit of your stomach warmth that you want to loan money out again, it's just not going to happen.
	And there's a large chunk of money gone somewhere and nobody can account for it out of this first uh... hundred and fifty some billion that was
	was put out i don't know if you're aware that you probably are
	huge chunk of money that gone someplace and make it nobody's gonna come and i was
	the other thing was kind of scary when they pass this bill you know there is no
	recourse of op-op and doesn't have to answer to anybody apparently
	All right.
	No, I know.
	And there's going to be a lot of voices that are going to be asking exactly where the money went.
	And as you point out, and every penny, and there are pieces of it that we don't know about.
	I guess you can do that when you've got such a dire emergency.
	You can just throw money where you think it needs to go.
	I don't know.
	He's got that authority.
	But without any, I mean, without any accountability, that's pretty scary.
	By the way, it is awfully nice to hear you again, sir.
	Well, it's nice to be here.
	Thank you very, very much for calling, and take care.
	Every day, like clockwork, I am so intrigued with what's going on.
	God, I wasn't in the market.
	Got out of the market some time ago.
	So I wasn't in the market.
	Oh, thank goodness.
	And I have a lot of sympathy for those who are in the market.
	I talked to friends who were, you know, losing $40,000 and $50,000 a day.
	Can you imagine that?
	Can you imagine that?
	$40,000 and $50,000 a day just gone.
	Gone.
	So much wealth, gone.
	And Aaron, my wife, kept asking me a question that I really, really couldn't answer.
	And it was, well, where does the money go?
	You know, you'll hear on, for example, Fox Financial, which I do enjoy, you know, $700 billion in wealth disappeared today.
	Where'd it go?
	You know, of course, it did in effect disappear.
	If a stock, if the various stocks on the market drop that much, then those people have simply lost that money and that money has, that wealth has virtually disappeared.
	But it's very difficult to explain to somebody not familiar with the system, or maybe I'm not sufficiently familiar with it to explain it myself, but that money is just gone.
	It's invisible.
	Let's go to the first wildcard line and say top of the morning.
	You might be on the air.
	Hello?
	I've got an answer.
	Hello.
	Hi.
	Hi.
	I've got an answer for your last caller and for you.
	The money went straight down Mel's hole and it's capped off and we'll never see it again.
	You know, it is kind of like it went down Mel's hole, really.
	In a way, hopefully it'll come back out in the form of some kind of new, great, wonderful thing.
	But I have my doubts about that.
	It's just as invisible as if it had gone with Mel.
	I guess that's probably true.
	But I have a question for you.
	It got me thinking, oh, here a while back when those two guys from Georgia and the whole Bigfoot hoax thing was going on.
	Oh, well, I'm not sure which Bigfoot thing are you speaking of now?
	Um, there was a couple of guys in Georgia that gave tours for, I guess, Bigfoot tours or something.
	Okay, that was not, I guess that was with George, perhaps?
	Yeah, well, this has happened since you were last on in May, I think.
	Okay, alright.
	Yeah, and they claimed to have shot a Bigfoot, and they had it in a freezer, and they released some photographs.
	Yeah, and it turned out to all be a big hoax, of course.
	So it got me thinking, a long time ago, I've been listening to your show forever, but a long time ago, I guess a guy in Texas or somewhere sent you a map of where he supposedly buried a... Yeah, that'd be Bugs.
	Bugs, yeah.
	So are you still in possession of the map and all that?
	Yes, I am.
	And I shouldn't have said that.
	Listen, thank you very, very much for the call.
	To answer your question, I am in possession of Matt.
	But it is in a place where nobody will find it.
	Bugs took a weekend and talked to his wife.
	You know, I think that was absolutely the real deal.
	And he took a weekend and spoke to his wife.
	And she didn't want him to do it.
	And I, you know what, I don't blame her.
	And so that map will remain where it will not be found ever unless Buggs wishes it so.
	I mean, the man may have faced some sort of legal problem.
	He may have faced, who knows what, a charge of murder.
	He pretty clearly said he thought they were not human, but you know, it really is that to consider when you get really right down to it.
	Do you really want to do that to yourself?
	Let me try East of the Rockies.
	You are on the air.
	Good morning.
	Morning.
	Yes, sir.
	Where are you?
	I'm in Ohio, Dainesville, Ohio, sir.
	All right.
	Congratulations on being inducted into Hall of Fame.
	Boy, that really is an honor, a gigantic honor.
	Thank you.
	And thanks to all the people who voted for me and made it happen.
	I have a question.
	I want to know your opinion on what you think about the financial situation possibly being staged for a setup for the rise of the Antichrist.
	No.
	Until you got to the very end there, I would have considered the question.
	I don't think it was set up so the Antichrist can rise.
	No, I would say no.
	My answer is no.
	I appreciate your call, but I say no.
	Not staged either.
	This really has to do with these things called, and I'm not going to try and explain them all to you right now, I'm not even sure I understand them properly, but called credit default swaps.
	And all of this was hidden, sort of hidden away in these credit default swaps that went between banks and lending institutions and all of this bad debt was sort of hidden away so everybody could have a good next quarter.
	And then, of course, the weight of it all became too much when the price of houses started to drop like a rock.
	And it all came crashing, and crashing is the right word, came crashing down.
	It was a frightening scenario, and I'm not sure it's over yet at all.
	We're getting kind of a respite.
	We had five up days on Wall Street.
	Five in a row.
	I don't think we've had that since last spring.
	Before.
	In fact, I think it's a full year.
	The whole thing is really, truly scary.
	And again, to me, the fact that it could unwind as... I mean, we're a big country.
	And I know it's an overused phrase, but, you know, basically, America's fundamentals have, like most of us thought, were in pretty good shape.
	I know you can get in trouble for saying that, but wobbly as we might be, this still is America.
	It's a big country.
	Financial leader of the world.
	The fact that it could come tumbling down this quickly Is astounding.
	I mean, it is silly to say the fundamentals are good, because obviously they're not.
	This couldn't have happened, right?
	That's part of the fundamentals.
	So I shouldn't have said that.
	But, you know, we're so big.
	We're the leader of the free world.
	We are, right?
	Big, beautiful America.
	Freedom.
	Freedom to do what you want and maybe too much freedom.
	I don't know.
	Maybe that's what caused it.
	Let's go to Los Angeles.
	Daniel in Los Angeles.
	You're on the air, Daniel.
	Now you will be as soon as we get the button pushed here.
	Wildcard Line 5, Daniel in L.A.
	Let's try that.
	Hello, Art.
	Hi, Daniel.
	The E.T.
	has left us a book that predicts the future.
	It's called The Bible.
	The book of Daniel Chapter 14 talks about the robbers In the Hebrew, the word sounds like pirates, which is skull and bones.
	It talks about a vision, which is PMAC, the People for a New American Century.
	In verse 18, it says that the war is going to escalate now.
	The Bush will stay in office a little longer?
	Nah.
	That's what it says in verse 18.
	If it was possible, I think that America would have him go out early, and Obama in as soon as possible.
	He'll retreat to the Crawford compound, which is called the fort of his own land.
	Says he'll stumble and fall, and then will go into hiding.
	Then a razor of taxes, Barack Obama, will take over the White House.
	But he'll have a very short presidency before he's replaced by the Antichrist, Bill Clinton.
	Daniel Chapter 11.
	Bill Clinton is the Antichrist!
	I think if we could get a... Never mind, let's just keep going.
	Richard, just over the hill from me in Las Vegas.
	Richard, you're on the air.
	I want to wish you the best of all for you and your family for the coming season and Thanksgiving, and I wish you all the best with your kid who is born five days after me of the year, and it's a pleasure to talk with you.
	I wanted to talk about this financial crisis.
	Yes, please.
	To me, it just looks like we're one big mouth.
	We're whores, we're eating up everything and in 10 or 15 years this is going to be passed on to our kids and they're going to have to deal with the Russians and the Chinese in a way that we can't even imagine.
	That could be.
	Everybody is suggesting now, listen, thank you very much for the call, that with regard to China, It's all a question of how far the growth of China will fall in this next year.
	Anything they think below about five or six percent and there'll be social unrest in China.
	That's the prediction.
	I'm not saying that's going to be the reality, but that's the prediction.
	So how much China will be affected by the current financial crisis is yet to be seen.
	But the conventional wisdom is anything below about six percent or five percent growth.
	China has to keep growing or they're looking at some pretty serious Be serious.
	Social unrest.
	That means people in the streets, tanks, and all the rest of that.
	Let's go to Farmington, Missouri.
	I think it is.
	Wildcard line 4.
	Hello, you're on the air.
	Hello, Art.
	Hi.
	Thank you for taking my call.
	Yeah, you're very welcome.
	I would be taking these myself on the screen, but something has gone askew with my ability to actually punch up the call myself.
	So we've got to do this, or I wouldn't have you on the air.
	Anyway, welcome.
	Well, thank you.
	Well, I just wanted to say, you know, opinions are like noses.
	Everybody's got one.
	I wanted to give my opinion.
	Which?
	I believe that in a little over seven years, that Jesus Christ will return physically.
	I believe the world is on the brink of World War III, and this financial crisis is just a part of the big picture.
	How do you think that World War III will unwind or begin even?
	Well, it's a very good possibility because Israel's been threatened that Israel may, I'm not saying that they will, but they may attack Iran who's threatened to wipe them off the map.
	And if they do that, then Russia being Iran's I get the picture.
	And so it unwinds.
	Has to happen in the Middle East, right?
	and Libya and Iran and which is you know ancient Persia whatever they will attack
	Israel and I get the picture and and so it unwinds has to happen in Middle East
	right we will be back Oh sure I am
	I suppose I ought to clarify a little bit on Fox News.
	I really did hit them pretty hard, didn't I?
	But I just thought that, you know, when the election was going on, they kept saying fair and balanced, fair and balanced, and it didn't seem fair and balanced to me.
	It seemed clearly biased, which, you know, would be all right if you weren't saying fair and balanced.
	Mostly, you know, so that shows you I was watching.
	I mean, I really do watch.
	For example, when we were over in the Philippines, we watched Geraldo Rivera walk right under that water.
	You remember that when the hurricane was coming in?
	Crazy as can be!
	My wife was laughing at him.
	She asked, what's wrong with our reporters?
	And I said, well, you know, at least we report on hurricanes.
	In the Philippines, you know when a typhoon is coming?
	You know how you know when a typhoon is coming?
	The wind starts blowing.
	It starts raining sideways!
	You know a typhoon is coming, so that's how much warning you get.
	Here we get a rotor running right under all the water above, you know, with the dam about or the whole thing about to break down and... Crazy.
	So it's really mostly... It's mostly Lou Dobbs.
	I hate.
	And, uh...
	And that guy, that guy who does those commercials, Billy Mays, oh, let me out his neck!
	Incredible.
	All right, coming up, probably, you know, you don't want to say the brightest, you don't want to put him in that position, but clearly one of the brightest minds in the world, Dr. Michio Kaku.
	He's an internationally recognized authority in theoretical physics and the environment, holds a Henry Semet professorship in theoretical physics at the City College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.
	He's lectured around the world.
	His Ph.D.
	level textbooks are required reading.
	That's required reading, folks, at many of the top physics labs.
	Dr. Taku graduated Harvard in 1968, summa cum laude, number one, number one in his physics class.
	Received a Ph.D.
	from the University of California at Berkeley Radiation Lab in 1972.
	Held a lectureship at Princeton University in 1973.
	Joined the faculty At the City University of New York, where he has been a professor of theoretical physics for 25 years.
	His latest book, Physics of the Impossible, we'll talk a great deal about that in a moment.
	Professor Kaku.
	Well, first of all, Professor Kaku, welcome back to Coast to Coast AM.
	Well, glad to be back, Art.
	Gosh, it's good to have you.
	Yeah, glad to hear your voice again.
	It's good to be heard.
	All right.
	Listen, I just got a very interesting, you know this India-Pakistan thing?
	Yeah?
	A very interesting fast blast that just came in from Vicky in Muncie, Indiana.
	She says, your discussion potential of the dreadful attacks on India ending in a possible nuclear exchange could come true.
	The surviving gunman, they have this one gunman, admits he is a member of the Wahhabist group linked To Pakistani intelligence, frightening and dangerous.
	Now, I don't have confirmation of what Vicky is telling me here, but I suspect she's telling me the real thing.
	And I'm curious, Professor, I know that you had an option to go to work on nuclear weapons early in your career and didn't.
	That's right.
	But suppose that... What do you know about the nuclear capability of India and Pakistan?
	What if they did?
	Well, I think it would be horrible for several reasons.
	India has perhaps on the order of maybe 80 atomic bombs, and Pakistan has perhaps on the order of maybe about 40 atomic bombs, and they have missiles that can reach each other's capital within a matter of minutes.
	It's like playing chicken with two people with guns right next to each other's skull, With almost no warning time, and the missiles apparently are on something called launch on warning, meaning that as soon as you detect what you think is a missile from the other side, you cannot wait for that missile to land, because one minute later you're vapor in the ionosphere, but you have to launch your missiles.
	So a large bird, for example, could conceivably set off a nuclear war, a tripwire, Uh, between countries that have launched on warning status.
	Now, that's very bad because even between the Soviet Union and the United States, uh, storms, for example, would periodically set off our early warning system.
	And, uh, you know, we would have to investigate, uh, storms and other atmospheric disturbances.
	Uh, one time the moon, uh, this is years, decades ago, the moon actually set off our radar system.
	When we first turned on one of our early warning system, it was over the horizon radar.
	Right.
	And it locked onto an object that you could not see with the naked eye at all, because it was over the horizon radar.
	And we put our missiles and bombers on alert, and then a few minutes later, the moon came up.
	We actually locked onto the moon by accident.
	So, and again, India and Pakistan have a system that is much more primitive than what we had with the Soviet Union.
	We had 30 minute warning.
	Right, exactly right.
	We had what, 25-30 minutes I believe before anything would actually detonate.
	That's right.
	So we had a little time to try and reason and look into and make sure it really was, make sure it was a real thing.
	So there is not that there.
	That's right.
	They're virtually right next to each other.
	Right, they're eyeball to eyeball, and they have nuclear weapons, and they are on launch on warning tripwire status, and a bird, a thunderstorm, an itchy finger could literally set off one of the hot zones on the planet Earth right now, and it's horrible to contemplate this, but that's just the way it is.
	Wow.
	You know, I'm obviously watching the last several days, what, 19 million people in its environs.
	That's a lot of people.
	And then when you imagine a nuclear device, it's truly unthinkable.
	Wouldn't it be virtual suicide for one to begin lobbing big nukes at the other?
	Yeah, well see, it's suicide if you wait too long, and that flip on the radar screen happens to be a full-fledged attack.
	So it's suicide either way.
	So that's why launch on warning is so dangerous, because you get so little warning, and you're a dead man if you make a mistake and you guess wrong, and that big bird that you see on the radar screen is actually a full-fledged nuclear attack.
	And they came very close to a nuclear exchange several years ago.
	In fact, the U.S.
	ambassador apparently, according to the rumors, the United States ambassador had to personally plead with both sides to get them to back down because of the tensions between the two sides.
	So, you know, luckily cooler heads prevailed this time, but they're hotheads.
	And if it does come to a nuclear exchange, you know that China may come involved and Russia may come involved.
	Pretty soon, some of the big powers may get involved, just like the way World War I was set off by the assassination of an Austrian Archduke or something like that.
	Yes.
	And a tripwire was set off and World War I got started.
	Here, hopefully, China and Russia won't get drawn in if there's an exchange between those two countries.
	Well, let's look at the best of the worst possibility, and that would be that the two did have a full nuclear exchange.
	If Russia and China don't get involved, what would the repercussions be of a full nuclear exchange?
	Aside from the millions and millions that would be dead for the rest of the world, for the region and for the world, what would the repercussions be?
	Well, first you have an enormous amount of fallout coming out.
	Our military tries to reduce the amount of fallout to a degree.
	We can tune our bombs.
	Our bombs are what I call second and third generation hydrogen warheads, so that we can tune them To decrease the amount of fallout that comes out.
	What they have are basically first generation bombs.
	Very dirty, very clumsy, very large.
	And the amount of fallout that's created is going to be enormous.
	And a huge cloud.
	A huge cloud will come up over the Indian subcontinent and then start to go around the Earth.
	And within a day or so, that cloud will be traveling over Europe and the United States.
	So it's not going to be pleasant if something happens.
	Even if the exchange is contained, the fallout is going to spread around the world.
	Wow.
	So do we know, I guess, how the upper level winds, the jet stream, is what would carry it?
	Or how would it propagate?
	Oh yeah, we would know exactly how it's done.
	I mean, there have been like volcanic eruptions and, you know, we follow the wind patterns pretty carefully.
	We can predict Uh, with great accuracy, exactly what the wind, how the wind patterns are going to take the winds around the world.
	So the winds are probably more or less going a westerly direction.
	Uh, and, um, it, uh, again, within a day or so, uh, a lot of it will be traveling, uh, over Europe and eventually the United States.
	Uh, the world is not that big.
	After Chernobyl, after that accident back in 1986, Alarms were going off over Europe within a matter of hours, and then a day later, milk in New York City began to register a certain amount of iodine-131.
	So even New York City was hit with a teeny amount of radiation from Chernobyl as the winds were carried around the world, and iodine-131 is water-soluble, so it got into the milk.
	Well, it looks to me like Northern Africa, Europe would be first hit, and then, as you mentioned, eventually, of course, North America.
	How bad could it be for Europe?
	Well, again, the winds will carry in a known way, and it'll diminish to a degree.
	For example, if it rains, like it rained during the Chernobyl accident, A lot of these fission products are water-soluble.
	Cesium and strontium will wash into the soil, in which case the cabbages and vegetables grown in the Kiev region became quite radioactive.
	And so vegetables sold from Kiev had large levels of radiation because of the fact that it rained and a lot of the fission products washed into the soil.
	So it's a grave danger that we have to worry about.
	And speaking about grave dangers, President-elect Obama is going to have to deal with the fact that Iran, just this month, almost everyone who's analyzed the situation has acknowledged that they now have enough uranium, unenriched uranium, to build an atomic bomb if they were to enrich it all the way to 90%.
	Environmental groups, peace groups, the Pentagon has been monitoring the situation very carefully and we do believe they have enough unenriched uranium that has to then be enriched all the way to 90% in order to create one atomic bomb.
	So I think we have to realize that the bomb has proliferated.
	Are they going to be allowed to finish the job?
	Well, it's not clear.
	That was, of course, one of the sticking points in the presidential debate between McCain and Obama, as to exactly what line do we draw in the sand.
	And personally, I think that they should jawbone and negotiate as much as they can.
	But push comes to shove.
	Obama's going to have to make the final decision as to what to do if the Iranians step over the line.
	So you think, I was calling for a political conclusion, but do you suppose President Obama would tell the Israelis to sit tight and we would do it?
	Well, it's not clear.
	I think Obama would ask the Iranians, as a last-ditch measure, to give up the nuclear ambitions.
	They have hardened underground sites, which are going to be very hard to take out if it comes to war.
	This is not just the conventional civilian nuclear facilities we're talking about.
	They're hardened, they're underground, and they're spread out over Iran.
	So this is not what a commercial nuclear program looks like at all, if you photograph it from outer space.
	So the moment of decision is going to come probably within a year.
	So perhaps one of the first major crises that Obama will face is if the iranians take this unenriched uranium which is maybe
	three or so percent enriched
	and decide to enrich it all the way up to ninety percent uh... and that of course is bomb grade uranium
	and uh...
	you think uh... you know nuclear weapons are they're not much of you use them
	I mean, just having one and threatening the world, or in this case, probably Israel and the region, is generally what you do.
	It's more of a political tool than it is a real tool because of the consequences.
	Now, we all know Israel has Oh, they've just got them buried all over the desert, right?
	Well, Israel has, at minimum, about 200 nuclear bombs.
	There you go.
	And we know that, by the way, because a man named Mordecai Vanunu actually worked at the Dimono site in the Negev Desert, photographed the plutonium pits, and then gave the pictures to the Ascendant London Times, which then published them.
	And he then was later arrested.
	He's still in jail, by the way, in Israel.
	But scientists at Los Alamos were asked to analyze these photographs.
	And given the photographs that were given to the press, most physicists would put that number at around 200 atomic bombs, and maybe even neutron bombs, we're not sure, that Israel possesses.
	So that is basically their fail-safe doomsday device.
	Worse, you know, worse comes to worse if they feel that their integrity, their very existence is at stake, they may be tempted to tap into that nuclear stockpile that they have amassed.
	Sure.
	Is that what it's going to take?
	I mean, do we have conventional bunker buster ability, do you know offhand, I don't want to ask you anything that's classified, that would take out What you described a little while ago as very deeply buried facilities in Iran?
	Well, we have both conventional and nuclear bunker busters.
	Bunker busters are like missiles.
	They look like missiles, except you drop them from an airplane and they penetrate the earth and then they detonate underground.
	So if you have a hardened bunker, there are two things you can do.
	One is you can drop fine droplets of gasoline material over it, ignite the gasoline, and then you get what is called a fuel air bomb, which creates a pressure wave second only to an atomic bomb.
	So the Russians have tested one.
	We've tested one.
	In fact, we tested it on Saddam Hussein.
	Many times the United States military would launch these fuel air bombs, which is like a gigantic giant pounding the desert.
	Which then collapses any underground bunker positions that you can't even see.
	Anyone underneath it would be crushed by millions of tons of sand that simply come down on them.
	And you think we could do that?
	You think it's sufficient to take these, they're hardened to the degree that fuel air would take them out?
	Well, first of all, let's hope that it doesn't come to that.
	Let's hope that Obama uses his miraculous oratorical skills to Convince the Iranians to back down.
	However, the Iranians have stated that under no circumstance are they going to back down in creating a nuclear arsenal.
	What that means, who knows, right?
	Maybe it's a peaceful arsenal of unenriched uranium.
	Or maybe it's weapons-grade uranium, we don't know.
	But if push comes to shove, then yeah, I think the military would be tempted to use bunker busters, either nuclear or non-nuclear, to take out hardened underground positions.
	By the way, if you're a farmer in the Midwest, you know about silo explosions, which take place because wheat dust has lots of surface area per given gram, and people working near silos sometimes light a match to smoke a cigarette, and they wind up killing themselves.
	They wind up blowing themselves to pieces, because wheat dust is highly flammable, in the same way that gasoline dust gasoline droplets is also highly flammable. It has a large
	amount of surface area for a given weight because it's a droplet of
	water or a droplet of gas or a small little particle of wheat. And we now know
	that these fuel-air bombs are second only to an atomic bomb in terms of the
	energy that they pack.
	And the Russians just tested one last year. We have talked many times about
	whether this planet of ours and all the nations on it will take the next step
	and you know become the next to the next point whatever that is kind of away from
	the self-destructive mode that we seem to be in that we've been in for some
	It just doesn't seem like we're taking that step yet, Professor.
	Yes, well, there is something called a point of no return.
	Right.
	But I think we passed one point of no return recently, and that is the North Pole.
	I think there's probably enough carbon dioxide already in the atmosphere so that no matter what we do, the North Pole will probably completely melt by mid-century or late in this century.
	So I think one point of no return, we've already passed.
	So I think our children and grandchildren will live to see an Earth that is different, that looks different than the Earth that we're accustomed to seeing.
	Right, but that doesn't mean the end of the Earth.
	That is not.
	There's many points of no return, but one of them I think has been passed.
	The big one, of course, is if the South Pole completely melts.
	But that point of no return is further down the line.
	Right, and way underwater.
	Yeah, but I think one point of no return for the North Pole has been passed.
	So, there will be no more ice.
	The North Pole is gone.
	Point of no return.
	All right, Professor, hold it right there.
	We'll be right back.
	So, very much to talk about other points of no return directly ahead.
	Stay right there.
	Think about it a little bit.
	The North Pole is gone.
	What the professor said is, it's a point of no return.
	It's gone.
	It's just going to be gone.
	Completely gone.
	I'm sure you've seen the ads on TV.
	Actually, I guess PSA is Public Service Announcements, showing the polar bears, and it's all very touching.
	The mama polar bear on a little chunk of floating ice, and the baby behind, and boy, that'll bring a tear.
	But it is sad.
	It really is sad.
	And mama gets off the ice and you wonder, will baby go?
	And baby goes.
	And they talk about in our lifetime, or your children's lifetime, there's going to be the end for them.
	And it's going to be the end for the whole North Pole.
	It's going to be, you know, navigation time.
	In fact, they're already setting up ways to navigate that sea.
	It's going to be a sea.
	Not ice, but that sea.
	So the world is changing, and you know, we would normally expect these sort of changes to occur.
	We know we have cyclical climate events, but they don't occur in one single lifetime.
	They just don't.
	These kinds of things occur over hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands of years, at least.
	Not in one single human's lifetime.
	This is very troubling.
	We'll be right back.
	All right, once again, Professor Kaku.
	Professor, so, you know, the North Pole's gone, or going, going, gone.
	What are the, I guess, the practical... Are there things that we don't know about that make this more serious than it would appear to be?
	Well, one thing that is sort of like a wild card is what happens when the tundra of Siberia and Alaska melt releasing methane gas.
	Oh yes!
	Methane is much worse than carbon dioxide in terms of generating a greenhouse effect.
	So as the tundra melts vegetation and animal life that's been frozen for tens of thousands of years during the last glaciation then begin to rot releasing enormous amounts of methane into the air which then causes the atmosphere to heat up even more causing more tundra to be heated up and this causes a
	positive feedback loop.
	Now some climatologists argue that that's the reason why 90% of all life forms died
	hundreds of millions of years ago, even before the dinosaurs, during the Permian era, when
	even the trilobites died.
	90% of all life forms died and some people think it was methane gas that did them in,
	that global warming is not new.
	That the greatest extinction cycle known to science, bigger than the one that killed the dinosaurs 65 millions of years ago, was perhaps initiated by methane.
	Perhaps methane from the oceans, we're not sure.
	But methane will create this positive feedback loop.
	That's a wild card that makes a lot of people very uneasy, realizing that the tundra Is gradually thawing out, and that means that more methane gas can be released in the atmosphere, creating a feedback loop with unknown consequences.
	Unintended consequences.
	Yes.
	There's also a great deal of methane at the bottom, isn't there, of the oceans, actually?
	That's right.
	In fact, that's why we think, that's one major theory as to what killed off 90% of all life forms hundreds of millions of years ago was The methane came from the bottom of the oceans.
	A heating effect took place and then, for reasons not well understood, the methane then began to boil up and then cause the atmosphere to heat up enormously.
	So nobody knows what the trigger event was?
	No one knows for sure, but we think that perhaps the heating up of the Earth stimulated the methane gas.
	If you look in the Caribbean, there's methane down there and sometimes it boils up.
	And some people even think that may explain the Bermuda Triangle effect in the sense that if you are sailing in the Caribbean, sometimes these bubbles can be like up to a mile across.
	And if you're caught in a bubble that's like a mile across made out of methane, you will suffocate.
	Sure.
	And you know, you will die and not leave a trace of what happened.
	So some people think that that's one theory of the Bermuda Triangle.
	And a very interesting one indeed, although you wouldn't think that it would affect, for example, a flight of planes where you've got the pilots using oxygen.
	Yeah, and well it would cause some atmospheric instability to have all that gas, hot gas from the bottom, suddenly rise up and cause atmospheric disturbances which may disturb the airplanes, but who knows for sure.
	That's just my theory.
	All right, I've got a story here, a very interesting story.
	A team of researchers claim They can create a mammoth, this is not a joke now, a mammoth from ancient DNA for 10 million dollars, and they'd be willing to do so, actually, and begin to sell them to zoos around the world.
	The price seems high, but it's around the same amount that museums have recently paid for dinosaur fossils.
	But they're talking here about an actual recreated mammoth.
	Yeah, the story, I think, is probably bogus, but the idea itself is now being seriously considered by reputable scientists.
	We've mapped roughly 80% now of the mammoth genome, and this is something that was once thought to be impossible.
	That's what it says here, 80%.
	And, you know, in Jurassic Park, I think they filled in with frog DNA, correct?
	That's right.
	Here it turns out that we previously were looking at the bones of mammoths, But now we found that most of the DNA is in the hair.
	So looking at the hair of the mammoth, they've been able to reconstruct huge chunks of the DNA of the mammoth.
	In the past, they would only get a letter here, a letter there.
	It's like trying to reconstruct Shakespeare, knowing only to be or not to be.
	But now we have, you know, chapter and verse of Shakespeare pouring out of the hair DNA from the mammoth.
	And that has tempted some people to claim that at some point they may be able to construct enough of it to inject it into the cell of an ordinary elephant, remove the nucleus, put this DNA in instead, and then have an ordinary elephant give birth to a baby mammoth.
	That's the logic there.
	And it's not as far-fetched as it sounds because of the fact that a breakthrough was made by analyzing the hair of the mammoth and extracting huge chunks of their genome.
	In fact, the Neanderthal now, large portions of the Neanderthal DNA have now also been reconstructed using similar techniques.
	And some people are seriously thinking about resurrecting the Neanderthal.
	Really?
	Now, it would be unethical probably to use a human, that is a woman, to carry the embryo of a Neanderthal.
	But some people have suggested maybe a chimpanzee.
	Because the apes, of course, are very close to us genetically.
	We're about 98% equivalent to a chimpanzee, our closest evolutionary neighbor.
	And so, some people have even suggested that perhaps using an ape to gestate an egg created from Neanderthal DNA.
	So, it's not as far-fetched as it was just five years ago.
	A breakthrough has been made just recently in terms of reconstructing the genome.
	Now for dinosaurs, by the way, the breakthrough there is that soft tissue, this is unbelievable, soft tissue has been extracted from like the thigh bones of T-Rexes and things.
	Really?
	It turns out that if you crack open these fossilized bones, bones fossilized over 65 million years ago, soft Tissue has been extracted.
	This is unbelievable.
	Now, that would contain a pretty good sample of DNA, right?
	Well, so far, no DNA has been extracted.
	So far, proteins have been extracted.
	And if you compare the proteins in the soft tissue, they correspond to the proteins that are very similar to turtles and frogs and also chickens.
	It turns out that chicken DNA is quite similar to the DNA of Hadrosaurus and T-Rexes.
	So this was very interesting that proteins seem to be very similar between reptiles, chickens and T-Rexes.
	Should there be a law before it begins?
	Well, there's no law regulating any of this.
	This is wild and woolly country right now.
	This is the edge of science.
	But sooner or later, maybe somebody will extract some usable DNA from the soft tissue.
	But at the present time, it's only proteins.
	And again, it's degraded, but it is soft.
	It sort of looks like bubble gum.
	And it's definitely not fossilized.
	And we now know that in our museums, there could be large quantities of soft tissue lurking inside the bone marrow of these fossilized dinosaurs, which, again, is mind-boggling if you think about it.
	Soft tissue left over from an era over 65 million years ago.
	My God, I mean, if an ape gave birth to a Neanderthal, it would rock the world!
	That's right!
	Our closest evolutionary neighbor would give birth to something that's even closer, evolutionary speaking.
	You know, the Neanderthals died out tens of thousands of years ago, during the last glaciation, and we have no evidence for it except just these bones.
	But again, using these techniques now, scientists hope to have the complete genome, the complete genome within a few years now.
	Within a few years they hope to have the complete Neanderthal genome.
	Do we want them back?
	Really?
	I don't know.
	That's a moral question.
	I suppose it is.
	But again, with respect to laws, somebody better start doing something because I have a feeling they're just going to plow ahead with this and do whatever they can do.
	Whether it's bringing back T-Rex or Neanderthals or anything else, they're going to do what they can do, aren't they?
	Well, in some sense, yeah, there's going to be demand for it.
	I mean, monetary demand, like as this article indicates, zoos will pay top dollar, just like in the movie, right, for an amusement park.
	People will pay, zoos will pay top dollar to get this because the public will pay.
	The public will pay to see a baby mammoth.
	The public will pay to see a Neanderthal brought back to life.
	And the baby mammoth idea is not as crazy as it sounds anymore.
	I can just see it now.
	A full display showing each and every living step of evolution.
	Well, yeah.
	Well, with this new breakthrough, you know, analyzing hair DNA rather than bone DNA, as long as you have tissue left over from that period, it's conceivable to resurrect the animal.
	Again, this is mind-boggling stuff, but maybe Michael Crichton wasn't too far off.
	Maybe he wasn't.
	And so they're going to do it.
	And even some of the milder stuff I worry about.
	I mean, I've got a story this morning about rice.
	Have you seen that?
	No, I didn't see that.
	They've got rice now that DNA has been tampered with or something.
	And it'll grow in dry dirt.
	It'll grow in dry dirt.
	Well, the holy grail of genetic engineering in agriculture is super rice.
	Super rice is a form of rice that will grow anywhere with little water, little fertilizer, and still yield large crops.
	That could affect the demographics of the entire planet Earth if someone were to create super rice, because you'd be able to feed people in very, very harsh environments with very little fertilizer, very little water, And feed people that normally would perish because of the unavailability of good rice.
	So this could affect a lot of things if we get super rice.
	Again though, is it fair to ask whether there could be unintended consequences with this sort of thing?
	I mean, in the tampering they've done thus far, there have been several Possibilities of unintended consequences.
	I'm talking about bees, for example.
	Yeah, the killer bees.
	It turns out that a colony of Africanized bees was taken to, I think, Brazil in the 50s.
	Yes.
	And several queens were accidentally released.
	And they have since colonized all of Latin America, most of Mexico, and they're now entering Texas.
	So killer bees are a problem.
	But they are apparently mating with ordinary honey bees, so they're not quite as virulent as they were when they first surfaced.
	But the original Africanized bees were quite vicious and would attack anything in sight.
	They were not like the honey bees, which were much, much milder.
	So the key thing there is you cannot recall a life form.
	Once the life form is created, as Michael Crichton mentioned in Jurassic Park, it wants to break free.
	So it's very hard to recall a life form that has jumped out of the test tube and gone into the wild.
	Life is very robust.
	It wants to live and it's going to do everything in its power to survive and replicate, right?
	And that's why tampering with these things is in some sense inevitable.
	But on the other hand, you have to just make sure that it doesn't get out of the test tube because it can compete with indigenous life forms and overwhelm them.
	Just like, you know, kudzu in the South.
	And other different kinds of life forms that are taken by airplane by accident.
	And insects go from continent to continent, hitchhiking off airplanes.
	And when they land, they can devastate the agriculture of another area.
	Well, I notice sometimes when I interview you, Professor, you seem kind of, you know, up on the world and mankind.
	And then there are other times when you seem very concerned and not quite as up on things.
	I guess like everybody else, you know, you have your moods and depending on what we're doing at the moment, how do you feel right now about all the things that are going on when you look around the world?
	Are we going to make the next step or?
	Well, as I see it, there are two competing trends in the world.
	One trend is toward, you know, enlightenment, progress, new breakthroughs in medicine, technology, and to make our lives healthier and more connected.
	That's one tendency, you know, the tendency toward a Type 1 planetary civilization.
	But we have this other tendency, the tendency toward chaos.
	And there are people who are very uncomfortable living in a type one civilization,
	and these are the terrorists.
	Terrorism, I think, is a reaction against the march toward type one.
	These terrorists, of course, cannot articulate that.
	If you were to interview one, you're not gonna find anything close to what I just said.
	But that's what's happening.
	I think terrorists instinctively know that a type one civilization is gonna be multicultural,
	it's gonna cut across borders, it's gonna be scientific, it's gonna be progressive, it's gonna be liberating,
	and that's exactly what they don't want.
	We are in a type zero civilization.
	We get our energy from dead plants, oil, and coal.
	But these people feel more comfortable in a type minus one civilization
	where you get energy from firewood.
	Well, I would hope that we could sit down and reason and talk to them, but basically they want us to convert or die.
	And there seems to be so little space to have a conversation with somebody who spouts that, you know, convert or die.
	Yeah, I think it's useless to talk to the terrorists themselves.
	They've brainwashed themselves to the point where it's beyond hope.
	However, I think it is important to reach out to the billions of people around the world who have an open mind, and especially young people that are very susceptible to all sorts of extremist ideologies, and tell them that this is not the way to go.
	You know, if you were a Martian coming to Earth 500 years ago, around the time of Columbus, And you were to ask the Martian which civilization would dominate the Earth centuries later.
	You would say probably the Muslims or probably the Chinese.
	That's where algebra comes from, because al means the, you know, algebra.
	Mathematics, optics, science, paper, they came from China and the Muslim world.
	And the Europeans were bogged down with religious warfare.
	The Christian Taliban, in some sense, were persecuting people, killing them with their witch trials.
	And you would say that Europe is the least likely to develop.
	So what happened 500 years ago?
	What happened was that, first of all, the Chinese assembled one of the greatest fleets ever known to ancient history.
	One of their boats was even bigger than the Nina Pinta Santa Maria put together, and they sent this huge fleet from China to, you know, encounter other civilizations.
	And there were woodcuts of giraffes being paraded in Beijing.
	They brought back all sorts of exotic creatures that had never been seen before from Africa.
	So we know the fleet went to Africa.
	But then the emperor said, is that all?
	Is that all there is?
	We're number one?
	And so, after the Emperor died, the eunuchs burned the boats.
	The entire fleet was burned to the ground.
	And then China turned inward and stagnated for 500 years.
	Kind of like what happened after we went to the moon.
	Yeah, and the Muslim world, the same thing happened there.
	They turned to fundamentalism.
	So, the Chinese stagnated, the Muslim world turned to fundamentalism, and the Europeans, meanwhile, had the Enlightenment.
	And the Industrial Revolution, with the coming of steam power.
	And that changed the demographics of the entire Earth.
	So what happened 500 years ago was that some great empires decided to reject progress, science, technology, and to turn inward.
	While the West turned outward, and you know, why are we speaking in English today rather than Chinese or Arabic?
	We're speaking in English today, precisely because of events that happened 500 years ago.
	For the moment.
	For the moment.
	And I hope it remains so.
	But I don't know, Professor.
	So, on balance, you'd rate yourself optimistic or no?
	Well, I don't know.
	Current trends are not very good with the... No, no.
	They're not.
	I'm sorry.
	I've got to hold it right there.
	We'll be right back.
	Morning, everybody.
	My guest is one of the best minds, one of the brightest minds in the world, Dr. Michio Kaku, and his new book, newest book, I guess, is Physics of the Impossible, which is an awful lot of fun.
	Some of what you're hearing this morning and some of what we have yet to touch on certainly is laid out.
	in a very articulate manner in this book.
	I suggest you go out and get it if you like listening to Professor Kaku.
	He explains things in a way that, well, you can understand.
	You know, physics that you can understand.
	And we'll get back to him in a moment.
	I've had, you know, he said he's perhaps not quite as optimistic as he's been as he looks around the world and looks at what's currently going on in the world and certainly I've had to reorder some of my thinking.
	Watching this financial crisis unwind recently worldwide has been Astounding to me.
	I just, it's just mind-boggling to me that the United States, now of course the rest of the world as well, Asia, Europe, all of us could go down the drain, the proverbial drain, so quickly.
	You know, a couple of weeks, a couple of months, and what has taken so long to build, You know, appeared to be virtually disintegrating.
	Really disintegrating.
	It's been one of the most frightening things that I think I've ever seen.
	Day by day by day, watching it happen, watching those experts comment on how could this be happening?
	How could our financial world be ending?
	What took so long to build could end so quickly, so abruptly.
	Just absolutely amazing.
	Back to Dr. Kaku in a moment.
	And once again, Dr. Kaku, welcome back.
	So you're not so optimistic and I don't, obviously you're not a financial expert, but I wonder what it's been like for you watching this incredible period of, you know, the last month or two.
	Well, you know, in hindsight, things are very predictable in the sense that every time you have a wave of technology, It eventually creates a bubble, which then bursts, creating a massive depression.
	It first happened, by the way, in 1850.
	The coming of the steam power and the locomotive created a speculative bubble with regards to locomotive stocks on the London Stock Exchange, leading to a huge crash around 1850 when the bubble burst.
	But the lesson here is that the railing of Europe took place in the 1870s and 1880s.
	So the first wave of technology was steam power.
	The second wave of technology was electrification and the internal combustion engine, the work of Henry Ford and Thomas Edison.
	That created a huge amount of speculation in the 1920s in automobile stocks and utility stocks, partially leading to the collapse of 1929.
	But the paving of America took place in the 1950s and 60s.
	Now we have the accumulation of wealth from high technology.
	Computers, the Internet, radio, television.
	We have all this high-tech gizmos, which creates enormous wealth.
	The wealth has to go someplace.
	It doesn't, of course, just sit there in somebody's bank.
	It goes someplace, into tulips, real estate, Internet stocks.
	This time it went into real estate, and it crashed.
	But the lesson there is that the wiring of the world will continue to take place even after the current crash.
	So that's the third wave of technology.
	The big question that we scientists are asking now is, what's the fourth wave?
	There could be a fourth wave that 70 years from now, our grandchildren will experience the next big crash when it crashes.
	But the fourth wave could be nanotechnology, biotechnology, and artificial intelligence.
	They could be the next wave, which is just beginning to get off the ground now.
	Let me ask you about nanotechnology.
	Good, you went exactly where I was hoping you would go, and I bet that is the next wave, the next bubble, if you will, and it's going to be very exciting.
	Is it At this point, Professor, living up to its billing, or is it going to be like the robots, which never quite materialized as we wanted them to, or forecast they would?
	Well, it turned out that robots are much more difficult than we expected because the human brain is really not a computer.
	There's no windows in our brain.
	There's no Pentium chip.
	There's no software.
	There's no programming.
	Our brain is not an adding machine.
	Our brain is a learning machine.
	It's a neural network.
	It rewires itself every time it learns something, and a computer can't do that.
	A computer cannot rewire itself.
	That's beyond the capability of any computer.
	That's why our brain requires no Pentium chip or requires no programming.
	Nanotechnology, however, is somewhat similar in the sense that it's been overhyped, but the potential is there.
	Many people are worried that nanotechnology will destroy the world.
	Prince Charles has railed against nanotechnology.
	Nanotechnology is very primitive at the present time.
	Commercially, it's only used to make coatings on different materials and nanosensors.
	Your airbag in your car uses nanotechnology.
	There's an accelerometer that's very tiny, the width of a hair, that detects sudden abrupt motion and that's what saves people's lives inside your airbag.
	How does an airbag, just since you brought it up, know the difference between slamming on the brake, which is very abrupt, and actually hitting another vehicle or crashing into a tree or something like that?
	In other words, how does it discern the difference between those two?
	Or doesn't it?
	Not really.
	It's a matter of degree.
	So some people who hit their brakes really hard sometimes inflate their airbag.
	So, the airbag is nothing but an accelerometer.
	That's all it is.
	It just measures abrupt, rapid changes in acceleration.
	And you can do that with nanotechnology.
	You have these micro-sensors that are very, very tiny.
	However, the true promise of nanotechnology is, if you're a Star Trek fan, to create the replicator.
	That is a device where you simply ask for something, and then the device releases what are called nanobots, or tiny little miniature atomic robots.
	That molecule for molecule assemble the object that you want.
	Now this replicator may sound fantastic and it is science fiction, but it actually exists in nature.
	Every time a baby is born, a baby is essentially replicated in nine months.
	So it is possible molecule for molecule to recreate a baby in nine months.
	Nature does it.
	So we scientists are trying to figure out how does nature do that?
	How does nature rearrange the molecules Cut and splice the molecules, molecule for molecule to create a baby.
	And the body does it with what I call ribosomes, which have a blueprint.
	The blueprint is given by DNA, but the ribosomes allow you to cut and splice the proteins to create a baby in nine months.
	So we know it's possible.
	It's just that we scientists have not been able to create such a replicator in the laboratory.
	It'll take many, many decades.
	That's a biological process.
	Do you think that a replicator, if it ever came to be, which could virtually replicate anything, you could tell it you wanted to, I don't know, it doesn't matter, anything, and it would create it.
	Dial it up and create it.
	Would that be similar to a biological process, similar to the way a baby becomes a baby in nine months?
	Yeah, right now nanotechnology is kind of stalled, so people are trying to learn from nature.
	They're trying to, quote, reverse engineer Mother Nature.
	So they're trying to see how Mother Nature can take a molecule, cut it, splice it with an instruction, and then create an object totally different.
	So these nanobots, that is these microscopic robots, are ribosomes.
	They actually exist.
	So we're trying to reverse engineer Mother Nature in terms of how Mother Nature uses nanotechnology to create living things.
	So you can see that nanotechnology is very primitive.
	The benefits of it are enormous to be able to create a replicator or a space elevator.
	That is yet another application of nanotechnology.
	Where are we stalled?
	It's very difficult to manipulate these molecules if you can't see them.
	For example, sooner or later, modern computers based on silicon power will exhaust their power.
	By about 2020, we could have a collapse of what is called Moore's Law, which says that computer power doubles every 18 months.
	And we could have another depression around 2020 when computer power finally seals off and Moore's Law collapses.
	Silicon Valley could become a Rust Belt after 2020.
	So we have to go to quantum computers.
	We have to go to nanotechnology.
	We have to go to molecular transistors.
	We have to go to the atomic level to create the next generation of computers beyond 2020.
	So it is, I know there have been some, you know, kind of crude molecular manipulation that has been done, very crude, compared to what would have to be for that science to take off.
	And I'm just wondering how they eventually even imagine they could achieve that and what it would require.
	Well, a molecular transistor has already been made.
	Hewlett-Packard, Motorola, several companies have created molecular transistors, but wiring them up when you don't have molecular tweezers is a huge problem.
	Also, quantum computers already exist.
	We've actually created a quantum computer.
	IBM created one, and the world's record, by the way, for a quantum computer calculation is 3 times 5 is 15.
	That's a world record for a quantum computer calculation.
	It's very primitive.
	But the CIA is very interested in this, because if you could get a full-blown quantum computer, you could crack any code known on the planet Earth.
	Absolutely.
	How, Professor, do you even imagine that you would order these molecules to arrange themselves in a favorable fashion for whatever it is you wished done?
	In other words, can we even guess at this point how we might control such a process?
	Ah, well if I knew, I would be the next Thomas Edison.
	Nobody knows.
	Nobody knows how to order these molecular sized transistors in a usable fashion to do meaningful calculations.
	We only create one-of-a-kind type molecular transistors and we shoot electricity through them so we know that they are really transistors.
	Right.
	They're gates.
	Gates for electric current.
	Sure.
	But to wire them up, to have them do meaningful calculations, that's way beyond anything that we can do at the present time.
	So after 2020, your Christmas presents may no longer be twice as powerful as the previous Christmas, and people may no longer want to buy upgrades for computers, because computers are not going to be any more powerful.
	So that would be the end of computers for a while?
	The end of progress.
	Now, there is one escape valve.
	Microsoft and Intel understand this problem.
	Finally, we physicists have been haranguing them for like 20 years, telling them that it's coming.
	They finally acknowledge the fact that, yes, they see it now.
	They can actually see the end.
	Their solution is parallel processing.
	That chips horizontally in parallel, but that requires very sophisticated software.
	You have to take a software package, cut it up, and have it run in parallel.
	That's their temporary stopgap measure that Intel and Microsoft are experimenting with.
	Actually, I've already got a computer that's got a pair of 2.4s.
	So, you know, this is already occurring.
	I don't know, where are we?
	What is the fastest, you know, offhand computer that you can get right now?
	Or that... Oh, that you can buy commercially?
	That is reasonably available, yes.
	Oh, gee, I'm not sure.
	I haven't kept up.
	But, you know, as soon as you buy it, then, you know, next year, you know, another one that's almost twice as powerful.
	But sooner or later you've got to get on the escalator, right?
	Sooner or later you've got to jump in and get one of these things.
	Professor, what about AI, artificial intelligence?
	How might we decide that we've achieved it?
	How would we know?
	Well, right now our most advanced robots have the collective intelligence of a cockroach.
	A retarded cockroach.
	A lobotomized, stupid, retarded cockroach.
	They can barely scan a room.
	They can barely move around.
	It takes them hours to simply walk around a room.
	And they can only recognize straight lines, circles, and squares.
	You put a beach ball or you put a table or a chair in front of it and it goes berserk.
	Cockroaches understand tables and chairs and hide underneath the cracks, right?
	Our most advanced robots can't do that.
	We put them on Mars.
	The Mars Rover are actually true robots.
	They're automatons.
	They think for themselves.
	They can make decisions for themselves.
	But they take hours to make decisions.
	So it'll be decades, I think, before we have one that's smart as a dog.
	That's kind of depressing.
	I mean, you're laying this out in sort of a depressing way.
	I mean, if we're that far behind, what's it going to take, computer power-wise, to get to anywhere near artificial intelligence?
	Straight lines are difficult?
	Well, that's where perhaps quantum computers come in.
	Quantum computers would be infinitely More sophisticated than ordinary computers.
	They would compute in a totally different way using the laws of quantum mechanics.
	And some people think that true robots may one day walk the Earth when we have quantum computers that we just put on a tabletop.
	We don't have that yet.
	The quantum computers that we have are very bulky.
	They're the size of a desk.
	And they only compute on like two or three molecules at a time.
	Exactly.
	So they're pretty dumb.
	However, you know, one day they'll be as smart as a monkey.
	And in that case, they could be potentially dangerous.
	In which case, I think we should put a chip in their brain to shut them off if they get murderous thoughts.
	We'll have plenty of time, though.
	I think we'll have plenty of warning before they hit the intelligence of a monkey.
	But in your view, we don't get anywhere near AI until we get to quantum computers, and we have no idea how to get there.
	Well, we do build quantum computers.
	I have friends of mine who build them.
	But a meaningful one.
	But a usable one that can compete with a PC.
	There you go.
	No way.
	3 times 5 is 15.
	It's about as far as you go with these quantum computers.
	And that was done by IBM.
	And it's all going to depend on a meaningful way to order... Atoms.
	Atoms about.
	And in a very meaningful way.
	In other words, you're going to have to say, build yourself and do this.
	And it will have to sort of do it itself, correct?
	Right.
	Because we can't do it.
	Right.
	That's what automatons do.
	That is, they think for themselves rather than having a remote control device Most of our so-called robots are not really robots at all.
	They're remote control devices where a human has a little device and he pushes buttons and manipulates the object.
	So that's why we don't have robots.
	That's the answer to why robots never happen, because we don't have the computing power necessary or actually, according to you, anywhere near it.
	That's right, at the present time.
	The fundamental problem is the common sense problem.
	The reason why we don't have robots is the common sense problem.
	We know that water is wet.
	We know that when you die, you don't come back the next day.
	We know that mothers are older than their daughters.
	We know that strings can pull, strings cannot push, and sticks can push, but sticks cannot pull.
	Now, how did you know that?
	How did you know that strings can pull, but strings cannot push?
	How did you know that animals do not like pain?
	Well, we've seen string.
	Any idiot knows that animals do not like pain, but robots do not.
	Robots have not interacted with string.
	There's no line of mathematics that says that animals do not like pain.
	There's no line of computer science that says that when you die, you don't come back the next day.
	These have to be learned.
	You have to bump into reality.
	And so, this is a common sense problem.
	A three-year-old child has more common sense than our most advanced computers, because our children bump into reality.
	They pull string, they see animals, they see things die, they don't come back the next day.
	But robots do not, and there's no law of logic that is programmed into them.
	And we've tried to program the laws of common sense, but it takes hundreds of millions of lines of common sense to approach the common sense of a three, four-year-old child.
	Professor, could it be that artificial intelligence will essentially be a biological advance instead of Oh, I don't know.
	We were just talking about what's going to be necessary for a quantum computer to ever really happen.
	In the biological area, it might happen faster?
	Possibly.
	The top-down approach, which is the current approach, has been stalled.
	The top-down approach is to have a CD-ROM with all the lines of common sense.
	You stick it into your PC, and the PC all of a sudden says, I think, I am conscious, I am aware, I'm intelligent, right?
	That's a top-down approach.
	We have failed.
	We have failed to put all the lines of common sense on a CD-ROM.
	The bottom-up approach is Mother Nature.
	Repeating evolution, starting with bugs, going up to lizards, going up to mammals, and going up to rabbits.
	That's the path that many scientists are taking now to create insect-like robots.
	They're called the insectoids, or bug bots.
	And that may eventually work, mimicking Mother Nature and evolution.
	Exactly.
	Instead of trying to get molecules to line up in the way we wish, it seems like such an insurmountable job.
	Perhaps the biological path, even if it has to follow some evolutionary line, is the way to get there.
	Who knows?
	All right.
	Professor, stay right there.
	We'll be right back.
	This is Coast to Coast AM.
	A lobotomized cockroach.
	I somehow thought of my computers as more than that, but I guess not.
	Not really, not when it comes down to, for example, a decision, the decision-making process.
	So it may turn out in the end to be biological.
	All right, in a moment we'll try and switch gears.
	There are so many paths we could take this day.
	Dr. Michio Kaku is my guest and he'll be right back.
	Professor Kaku, our sun, our sun, is now in the quietest phase of its 11-year activity cycle.
	Actually, what's going on right now is just downright weird.
	We've had, I believe, 200 days thus far this year with zero observed sunspots.
	And I mean zero.
	When you look at the x-ray monitors and so forth, they look like a patient who has died.
	They're just flat lines.
	I've been through a few sun cycles, so I can't claim to have a great deal of experience with our cycles, but this one is amazing.
	I've never seen anything quite like this.
	Any idea what might be going on with the sun and why it is so incredibly quiet?
	There's nothing at all.
	Well, every 11 years, the North Pole and the South Pole of the sun flip.
	That's right.
	And it's like winding the clock's mainspring.
	If you wind the mainspring of a clock too much, it goes boing, boing, boing, and it comes out at you, right?
	That's right, yes.
	Well, the mainspring are like the magnetic field lines of the sun, which are being wound up as the sun rotates.
	So the field lines themselves are pretty static, but the sun itself rotates beneath them, and it's like winding up the mainspring of a clock.
	However, after 11 years, It's wound up so much, it goes boing, boing, boing, and then the North Pole and the South Pole flip, releasing a shockwave which hits the Earth every 11 years.
	And in one day, it's going to wipe out many of our satellites.
	We are still very early in the space age.
	So far, we've not had to bite the bullet.
	But it is dangerous for our astronauts who are in space during the 11-year cycle.
	One of our astronauts said the space station had to go into a hardened area of the space station during one of these cycles because of the radiation.
	And these sunspots are sort of like rifles.
	They shoot, they eject magnetically charged particles in one direction like a rifle, and one of them almost hit the Earth.
	So it's inevitable that one day one of these rifles will hit the Earth and cause an enormous amount of damage to the Internet to telecommunications and probably wipe out some of our satellites.
	So the sunspot activity, which used to be not so important, we have to look at very carefully now because the future of the Internet, future of the space age, could depend on this, especially if we're going to go to the moon by 2020.
	We're going to have to monitor the sunspot cycle very carefully in the future.
	Do you think we are going to go to the moon, by the way, back to the moon?
	Well, the Chinese have announced that around 2020 they expect to put Chinese astronauts on the moon.
	And given the friendly competition between great powers, this will probably stimulate NASA to also put men on the moon.
	And the Indians put a space probe on the moon just a few weeks ago, a robot probe.
	And so I think there could be a traffic jam around the moon.
	around 2020 as the Chinese, the Indians and Americans all go back to the moon by 2020.
	Well, I hope we do.
	I'm worried.
	I'm just worried about our relative inactivity.
	I mean, we barely have anything to replace the shuttle, which is coming to the end of its useful life.
	Yeah, it can be phased out in 2010.
	And then we're going to be without a dependable access to space for about five years.
	Till around 2015 when the Orion and the Ares booster rocket come online.
	So that's causing a lot of people to get nervous that we're going to be depending on the Russians and the Europeans and their good graces.
	Somebody recently said that it's going to be like we're throwing the Russians the keys to the International Space Station and just saying we'll be out of it for, you know, a decade or so.
	Yeah, for five years.
	That's why they want to speed it up to 2014.
	But that's just taking one year off and making a four year gap.
	But it is a problem.
	The old space shuttle is really nearing the end of its useful life.
	And we've had, you know, two major accidents with regards to the space shuttle.
	And I personally think it was a mistake to go to the space shuttle.
	We should have gone to the space plane instead.
	The space plane was a sleek device which would allow you access to outer space within a matter of a few days, rather than six months, you know, for the space shuttle.
	Was it a matter of, you know, the ability to lift?
	How much we could lift?
	That was part of it, but a lot of the heavy lifting could be done by unmanned rockets.
	You don't need pilots to lift a lot of that stuff into outer space.
	Scientists wanted a space plane.
	Sort of like the old X-15, except you can go all the way into outer space, and you would get rapid, rapid access to outer space within a matter of days.
	So as soon as you know that a satellite is in trouble, you boom!
	You know, you launch a space plane, and up you go.
	And the heavy lifting would be done by heavy booster rockets that are unmanned.
	So that was what scientists wanted, but you know, the Russians were building heavy, heavy lifters, and there was competition between the Russians and the United States.
	The Russians eventually built a carbon copy of the space shuttle called the Buran.
	It looks exactly like our space shuttle, and it was fully automatic.
	No pilots at all.
	Totally automatic.
	I remember that.
	It did look identical, as a matter of fact, to our space shuttle.
	I don't think it ever flew, did it?
	It flew once, and then it was mothballed as the Soviet Union broke up.
	But it just goes to show that we don't really need humans up there.
	The Buran was fully automatic.
	With no pilots whatsoever and for a complete mission with no pilots on it.
	It was fully automatic.
	Okay, let me come back for a moment to the Sun.
	Again, we've had this period of absolute inactivity.
	200 days with no sunspots is absolutely astounding.
	It's amazing.
	And yet there have been Some incredible solar winds that have come from elsewhere, not from our sun.
	They've come from elsewhere.
	And I guess when our sun is so quiet, we notice these other external events more easily.
	You once talked about the possibility of a sun, or some other disturbance that could occur, creating essentially the death of everything in its path.
	Yes?
	Well, if the Sun were to ever, quote, lose its temper, unquote, we would be in big trouble.
	Oh, sure.
	That would be awesome.
	But I mean, even another Sun elsewhere could go, or a black hole could collide, or I forget exactly what it was, but it would create a gamma-ray burst that could extinguish virtually all life?
	Well, a gamma-ray burster is second only to the Big Bang in terms of ferocity of energy.
	We think.
	We're not positive.
	We think that a gamma ray burster is caused by something called a hypernova, a gigantic exploding star that rapidly collapses to a black hole.
	So we think there are essentially black holes in formation, baby black holes being formed right before our eyes.
	In the center of our galaxy, there's a huge black hole.
	It's quiet right now.
	It's in the constellation Sagittarius.
	You can see it tonight.
	Just go outside, look in the direction of Sagittarius, and there is a black hole.
	Right there, which is the center of the Milky Way galaxy.
	So, the Moon goes around the Earth, the Earth goes around the Sun.
	How do you see that?
	Do you see a lack of background stars in one location?
	Is that it?
	Well, there's dust, unfortunately, because we are in the disk of the galaxy.
	The galaxy is quite dusty, and that's why the galactic center should, by rights, outshine the Moon.
	By rights, we should see this fireball come out every night that is as bright as the Moon, That is the center of our galaxy, where there's a black hole.
	But our galaxy is quite dusty.
	And that's where we come from, by the way.
	We are made out of galactic dust.
	We're condensed galactic dust.
	And that's why we cannot see the black hole at the center of the Milky Way galaxy.
	But there are black holes that are wandering.
	This is no longer science fiction.
	We've actually tracked one now.
	And these wandering black holes could one day sneak up on you and give you no warning.
	No warning whatsoever, because they're totally invisible.
	And they could sneak up on you, and one day just gobble you up, and the black hole wouldn't even burp, gobbling up the sun and gobbling up the Earth.
	Dust to dust.
	Yes.
	That's a nightmare scenario, where something could sneak up on you, and you wouldn't even know what hit you.
	It would wipe out not just the Earth, but the entire solar system.
	You know, I wonder, would it be so bad?
	I mean, you wouldn't see it coming?
	Or would you?
	Well, what happened is, Pluto, you would notice that Pluto would be flung into outer space, Neptune would be wobbling, you'd notice that the outer planets, their orbits were being disturbed.
	And as it got closer to the Earth, the Earth may be flung into outer space, in which case we'd freeze to death, or we'd be attracted to the black hole, in which case we'd be eaten up.
	And the black hole would even gobble up our sun.
	Our solar system wouldn't have a chance if we were to encounter a wandering black hole.
	And we've tracked these things now.
	We track them because starlight is bent as it goes around the black hole.
	Even though the black hole itself is invisible, it distorts the background light.
	And you can actually see this distortion as it arcs across the night sky.
	That's how we track these things.
	So how would you tell six billion people that it's the end of the world?
	The answer is you wouldn't.
	You probably wouldn't, right?
	There's nothing you can do.
	Even a comet could conceivably whip around the Sun.
	A virgin comet on its first pass so that it's covered with soot and has no tail whatsoever.
	As it whips around the Sun, the Sun burns off the soot and then it has a tail.
	But then you would get about two weeks warning.
	Once you see the tail, In a worst-case scenario, a comet could sneak up from behind the Sun with no tail, sprout a tail, and then you have two weeks warning before it clobbers the Earth.
	So that's something to think about.
	That's a worst-case scenario for a cometary impact.
	Two weeks warning.
	I've actually seen depictions of what would occur, and I'm told that all life on Earth would be gone, right down to the lowest level possible, and that if there ever was to be life on Earth again after a hit like that, it would come from sort of a middle place under the Earth.
	In other words, far enough below the Earth so that the fire would not consume it.
	And yet, not so far into the Earth that the heat would kill it.
	So, eventually, microbes would crawl back up from this center location and re-inhabit, you know, there'd be life once again on Earth, but this would be millions or billions of years from impact.
	Yeah, well, the object would have to be bigger than six miles across.
	That's the size of the object that hit Mexico 65 million years ago, right beyond the dinosaurs.
	But, you know, six miles is nothing compared to gigantic asteroids that are out there.
	So, if you have a large object, maybe 10-15 miles across, that could definitely wipe out 95% of all life forms, leaving microbial life alive.
	And microbial life is pretty hardy.
	We know that in the ice, if you thaw out ice, sometimes you get germs that are Literally, millions of years old.
	The oldest living things that have been brought back to life were germs by thawing out ice.
	So we do know it's possible that life can survive, but it's microbial life that is kind of boring, not very interesting.
	Well, you know, it is interesting, Professor, because we don't have the kind of power that it would take to have a war of the worlds.
	In other words, we don't have a way of destroying Another world.
	Let's say we were at war with one, and yet we really do.
	If we could manipulate the long-period orbit of something 10 to 15 miles in diameter, we do have a method then of ending life on another world, don't we?
	Yeah, in principle.
	Also, the force of a hydrogen bomb is unlimited.
	Many people don't know this.
	But there's no limit to how much energy you can pack into a hydrogen bomb.
	You could crack the Earth apart with hydrogen bombs.
	No, see, I didn't know that.
	I've never heard that.
	Yeah, there's a ceiling with regards to uranium bombs.
	There's only so much energy you can get out of a uranium bomb like Hiroshima or Nagasaki.
	But a hydrogen bomb has no limit.
	And hydrogen bombs are based on stages.
	And you simply pack stages one after the other and you could blow the whole planet apart.
	Of course, the Pentagon is not interested in doing this.
	The Russians set the world's record by detonating a bomb that was about something like 80 megatons.
	80 or 100 megatons.
	I remember that.
	Yeah, that's right.
	That was the biggest bomb ever detonated.
	And then the question came, you know, how far could they go?
	And the answer is they could go on forever.
	It's unlimited.
	However, militarily, it's useless because you'd simply make a big hole and lost the fallout.
	And it has no military advantage.
	It's just basically a threat to beat your chest and to scare the enemy.
	But it has no practical application.
	But yeah, the hydrogen bombs have basically no limit to their power.
	No limit?
	No limit.
	I don't know a lot about how to construct a hydrogen bomb, but without giving away anything important, what is it you do to continually make it larger?
	You said you add stages.
	That's right.
	A hydrogen bomb is built like a watch these days.
	Many stages are put together where you have fission, fusion, fission, setting off each other in different stages.
	And we have computer programs that track the shockwave microsecond by microsecond as it evolves.
	And then lithium deuteride is the active ingredient that you want to detonate.
	That's what makes hydrogen bombs go.
	And then you stack it in stages so that one sets off the next sets off the next.
	And you can do this so that you can get large quantities of lithium deuteride to detonate.
	And in principle, create a bomb of unlimited power that could, in principle, crack the crust of the Earth.
	Unlimited power?
	Mm-hmm.
	When Star Wars came out, some critics said, ha, you can't get a planet buster.
	Planet busters are not possible when Alderaan was blown up.
	Actually, I laughed when the critics criticized Star Wars, because it is possible.
	I've never heard anybody say this about hydrogen bombs before, but it did occur to me that we actually probably, if we had to, we have the technology to change the orbit of something and throw a rock at somebody.
	And in fact, an acquaintance of mine who recently passed away was Ted Taylor.
	He used to design many of America's nuclear weapons.
	He designed the largest fission bomb ever detonated in the history of the world.
	Comparable to a hydrogen bomb, that was his design.
	And I asked Ted once why he quit.
	He wanted to use hydrogen bombs to go to the stars, you know, coast on the shockwave of hydrogen bombs.
	And it was called Operation Daedalus, Orion, many names.
	So I asked him why he quit.
	He was America's premier bomb designer.
	And he quit, realizing that we are so good at making these bombs That we can create designer bombs that are miniature and can be put in a suitcase and, you know, a terrorist could get access to this.
	And this was so frightening to him that he quit.
	He quit the United States military and decided never again would he design these things because that's what he thought things were headed for was nuclear terrorism.
	So he realized that Operation Daedalus and Orion, which coast on the shockwave of a hydrogen bomb, Would be miniature, miniature hydrogen bombs, small little things, like firecrackers that have enormous power, and you coast on the shockwave of these things.
	He realized that any terrorist that had access to these things could blow up whole cities.
	These are not dirty bombs, these are real hydrogen bombs now.
	Do we have a miniature suitcase?
	Well, we have suitcase atomic bombs.
	The Davy Crockett, for example, which was built in the 1950s, can be fired from an artillery shell.
	So the Davy Crockett is the size of an artillery shell.
	Why do they call it the Davy Crockett?
	That's just the code name that the military gave these things.
	That'll be a reason.
	I'm not sure.
	I guess Davy Crockett was popular in the 50s.
	And there's even a film, a film of GIs loading the thing and firing it from a cannon.
	Two seconds later, this mushroom cloud emerges over the desert.
	So we've detonated these things before, and they're very small.
	These are fission bombs, like a small Hiroshima bomb.
	A hydrogen bomb can also be done, which would wipe out the greater metropolitan New York area, much greater than the firecracker that was detonated as an atomic bomb.
	And that's what Ted Taylor drove Ted Taylor to quit.
	So you're saying that a hydrogen bomb could be made that small as well?
	Well, that's where it was headed, he said.
	The original, the first hydrogen bomb was the size of like a railroad car.
	They were huge devices.
	They couldn't even be put in the bomb bay of an aircraft.
	They had to be put by ship.
	So the early hydrogen bombs were ship detonated.
	Now, they can be almost suitcase-sized.
	That's where he saw it going, and that's why he decided to quit.
	Wow.
	That's just incredible to even think about.
	So, as far as you know, it never got to that point.
	As far as I know, it didn't get to that point.
	Atomic bombs can be suitcase-sized, but to my knowledge, hydrogen bombs are multi-stage devices.
	Not yet.
	All right.
	We'll be right back.
	Stay right there.
	Just like a big layer cake celebrating mankind's last day, a hydrogen bomb that's virtually unlimited, you simply keep adding layers.
	I had no idea.
	I knew a few things about these bombs, but I had no idea that a hydrogen bomb was virtually unlimited.
	Simply adding layers would eventually reach the point where it cracked the earth.
	And so knowing that, And knowing they could be made to be small, one of the scientists mentioned a little while ago quit, just up and quit, because, well, he could see where it would end up.
	We'll be right back.
	Once again, Dr. Michio Kaku and Dr. Kaku, we're going to go to the phones.
	I think I've gained control over my lobotomized cockroach software that allows me to bring callers on and off, so we'll give it a try if you're ready.
	Okay, let's try Don in Salem, Oregon.
	You're on the air with Professor Kaku.
	Good morning.
	Hi, gentlemen.
	My wife can give my Christmas presents to charity now because this is the best one I'll probably ever get.
	It's a pleasure to talk to both of you.
	Dr. Kaku, I'm just a major fan of yours.
	Every television program you've ever done, like I was telling the screener, the house could be burning down, but it could burn until I finish watching your program.
	Well, thank you.
	Another question.
	I wondered if you'd ever seen the movie Sound of Thunder.
	No I haven't.
	What's the plot?
	It's basically some people go back in time to the prehistoric era and they do something and they come back to the present and they get these what they call time waves that changes or starts with the lower forms of life and they keep Trying to rectify the situation.
	I won't give the plot out, but I... Actually, if I remember correctly, I might have seen it.
	Were there time quakes?
	Is that what they were called?
	Exactly.
	Right.
	I thought that was a very provocative program.
	And if you get a chance, Dr. Kaku, you know, give it a look-see and see what you think of it.
	And once again, guys, thank you for letting me talk to you both.
	Oh, you're very welcome.
	Professor, I wonder if that is...
	Reasonable.
	In other words, if you went back in time and you did something disagreeable to the future, that there could be, in essence, a time quake.
	Something that would just sort of roll forward like a tsunami in time.
	Well, if you go backwards in time and kill your parents before you're born, you're in deep doo-doo because you cannot be born because you just killed your parents before you're born.
	The way around these paradoxes, the modern interpretation, is to look at Einstein's picture of time as a river.
	Einstein showed that time can speed up and slow down, and it's like Old Man River that meanders its way around the universe.
	And we measure this every day with our GPS system, by the way.
	Your GPS system would fail unless we include Einstein's theory of relativity.
	The new twist on all of this is that we think the river of time can fork into two rivers.
	Or the River of Time may have whirlpools.
	If the River of Time forks into two rivers and you jump stream, you go from one stream to another stream, then you enter a parallel universe where you see your mother, and she definitely looks like your mother, genetically equivalent to your mother, but she's not.
	She's in a parallel world where if you do any damage to that parallel world, you've altered their timeline, but your timeline is intact.
	So you were born.
	Your parents gave birth to you.
	You cannot reverse that fact.
	But in this parallel universe, you've killed somebody else's parents, who look like your parents, genetically equivalent, same memories as your parents, but they're really not your parents.
	So if you have parallel universes, then you can resolve all these paradoxes very simply.
	If time has whirlpools, then perhaps you can go backwards in time, But then you may simply complete the past.
	It was meant to be that way.
	Or, Professor Novikov in Russia believes that perhaps there is a force preventing you from pulling the trigger aimed at your parents before you're born.
	Now, the Novikov interpretation, I tend to doubt.
	I tend to doubt that if you go backwards in time, there's a force that prevents you from pulling the trigger.
	I would share that doubt with you.
	Yeah, he says that there's a law of physics that prevents you from walking on the ceiling, and that law of physics is called the law of gravity.
	So he would like to create a law of causality that prevents you from pulling the trigger.
	But I don't see it.
	I prefer to go to this other interpretation where quantum universes, quantum universes peel off from our universe whenever you go backwards in time, and you simply enter a different time stream.
	In which case, you monkey with somebody else's past.
	I was going to say, I'd rather shoot somebody else's parents and see what happened to them.
	Rather than your own parents.
	In the past.
	Sorry.
	Or if you have your mother fall in love with you right before your birth.
	Oh, please.
	Yes.
	Oh, my.
	So, could there be small things that you could go back and do that would not affect the world at large?
	There might be a little ripple and perhaps something in the future wouldn't be as it was, but nothing major happened.
	And then, of course, perhaps you could go back and Do something really major, like preventing President Kennedy from being killed, and that would have then, there would be a time quake, as it were.
	Well, the time quake, according to this picture, would happen in the other time stream.
	That is, if you go back to the time of Queen Elizabeth I, and you scare her armada, and the Spanish armada defeats the British, We're not speaking Spanish right now over this telephone, because the Spanish won that battle, and the British declined as a superpower.
	So then the time quake is nothing but a sequence of events rippling through a parallel universe, and it affects that universe.
	So in one universe, they're speaking Spanish over the telephone.
	In this universe, we're speaking English.
	But the two universes have, quote, decohered from each other.
	We're no longer in contact with each other.
	So, those people who believe in what is called the Many Worlds Theory of Quantum Mechanics, which is pretty dominant now.
	Most of my friends believe in the Many Worlds Theory.
	It means that we co-exist with all sorts of parallel universes.
	So, in your living room, there is a universe where everyone is speaking German, because the Germans won World War II, or Spanish, because the British were defeated during the reign of Queen Elizabeth I. And we co-exist with these universes.
	They're right in your living room.
	But we no longer interact with them because we're no longer in phase with them.
	We don't vibrate in phase with these other universes.
	Just like radio, you're no longer in phase with another radio station because you tuned the radio dial to one frequency.
	So you coexist with many frequencies in your living room, but you only dial into one.
	In the same way, your living room is full of different parallel universes, but our universe is tuned tuned to the universe that we're familiar with.
	So, believe it or not, I have my friends who believe that Elvis Presley is probably still alive in one of these other parallel universes.
	You said many of your friends believe this.
	Do you join them or argue with them?
	Well, I tend to agree with them.
	They're Nobel laureates.
	Many of my friends have won the Nobel Prize.
	One of them just won the Nobel Prize last month.
	Many of my friends are Nobel Prize winners, and they believe in the many-worlds interpretation, and write about it, and believe that this is the foundation of reality, that we coexist with alternate realities simultaneously, right in your living room.
	We're not talking about outer space.
	We're not talking about somewhere far, far away in another galaxy.
	We're talking about right in your living room, just like you coexist with Radio Moscow and Radio Havana, right in your living room.
	Except we have decohered.
	We're no longer vibrating in phase with these other universes.
	If we were in phase, then we could of course enter these other universes, but we are out of phase with them, so we cannot.
	So our reality is quite different from their reality.
	And I get this question asked to me frequently, the loved ones that have passed away, are they alive in these other universes?
	And the answer is, in principle, possibly yes.
	And, or, will we enter one of those other universes when we also pass on?
	Well, if this picture is correct, and it's called Many Worlds, and it is the dominant picture that we teach in our quantum mechanics courses now in PhD programs.
	If this picture is correct, that means we coexist with many, many different kinds of parallel worlds.
	Bizarre worlds, very strange worlds where the dinosaurs are still alive.
	And there are dinosaur battles happening right in your living room right now, even as we speak.
	But the probability of us entering this other universe is astronomically small.
	It goes as 1 over n, where n is the number of molecules in your room.
	There are a lot of molecules in your room, and 1 over n is a very small number.
	So the probability that you would enter one of these other parallel universes is extremely small, given to you by the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle.
	So it's not going to happen in my lifetime.
	But we give this problem to our PhD students.
	We ask them to calculate the probability that you'll disintegrate and rematerialize on the other side of a brick wall.
	And we ask them to calculate that number.
	You would have to wait longer than the lifetime of the universe for your body to disintegrate and rematerialize on the other side of a brick wall.
	But you can't rule it out.
	It's a calculable probability.
	But there's so much you can't really rule out, isn't there?
	Yeah, but you would have to wait longer than the known lifetime of the universe, which is 13.7 billion years, for such an event to happen.
	And in the same way, you would wait long enough, then sooner or later you would enter a parallel universe.
	So when I hear you talk about these things, I need to bear these probabilities or possibilities in mind, right?
	That's right.
	We physicists have all these probabilities in our head.
	For example, the Large Hadron Collider, Which unfortunately had an accident in Geneva, Switzerland.
	I meant to ask you about that.
	Yeah, many people thought maybe a black hole will be created that will eat up the Earth.
	That's right.
	And the reporters said to physicists, asked physicists, well, isn't there a probability that something will happen like a black hole emerging from the Large Hadron Collider?
	And the correct answer is that you would have to wait longer than the lifetime of the universe for such an event to happen.
	So it's not going to happen in our universe's time.
	The energy of the Large Hadron Collider is less than that of a mosquito.
	What was the accident?
	They spilled about six tons of liquid helium on the floor.
	There was a problem with the electrical circuit in the transformers.
	They spilled six tons of liquid helium.
	It was so cold that the workers would freeze to death if they went down.
	So they had to seal the tube for many a week before they could allow the workers in.
	And now it's Christmas time, the machine consumes so much electricity that it would drain the city of Geneva and the Genevians would not be able to celebrate Christmas.
	So they signed an agreement with the Large Hadron Collider that the Large Hadron Collider cannot work during Christmas time because they compete for electricity.
	It consumes that much power, the power of an entire city.
	So to get some of the answers that we were hoping to get will be into the new year, I take it?
	Probably summer of 2009.
	That's the latest word from Geneva, Switzerland.
	A real shame.
	I was just there in Geneva last month and when the whole thing was falling apart with this story that was hitting the wire services.
	So you had gone over?
	I was in Geneva.
	I was also in Geneva filming with BBC two years ago.
	I touched the tube, which actually will contain the beam.
	I actually touched it for the TV camera.
	And the tube itself is only about four inches or so in diameter, but it is 27 kilometers in circumference, or about 17 miles in circumference.
	And we hope to recreate a mini, mini, mini, mini Big Bang, a teensy, weensy little Bang Bang, which has less energy, by the way, than a firecracker.
	If you actually calculate the energy of the collision, you couldn't even light a light bulb with the energy.
	But of course, the media never covered that.
	Absolutely harmless.
	In fact, it'll just be a nothing, right?
	Yeah, it'll be a nothing.
	It'll be less than a firecracker.
	However, people look at the energy necessary to create the beam, and they're amazed.
	But Mother Nature creates particles that are much more energetic and ferocious than the pea shooter called the Large Hadron Collider.
	Mother Nature creates cosmic rays from roaring black hole collisions that are much more powerful.
	And we get hit by them every day.
	And we're still here to talk about it.
	So, there's absolutely no possibility.
	Yeah, again, you would have to wait long enough in the lifetime of the universe for anything dangerous to come out of that, and that's why I don't foresee any problem.
	Even longer than manifesting on the other side of that brick wall?
	Well, it's comparable to that.
	So, not completely impossible.
	Yeah, not completely impossible.
	And that's what the press quotes, right?
	The press always quotes the physicists saying you cannot totally rule it out.
	You can't rule it out.
	Yeah, but next year, by the way, Dan Brown's new movie, Angels and Demons, comes out next year.
	It's a prequel to The Da Vinci Code, and the center of Angels and Demons is the Large Hadron Collider in So, starting next May, when Ron Howard's new film gets released, it'll create yet another media sensation, and in that novel, Dan Brown has the Large Hadron Collider creating antimatter sufficient to blow up the Vatican.
	Now, to use the Large Hadron Collider to create antimatter is possible, but it is a very inefficient way to blow up the Vatican.
	As many physicists have pointed out to Dan Brown, dynamite and a simple hydrogen bomb would do the trick.
	You don't need the Large Hadron Collider.
	It's rather small, actually.
	Yeah, the amount of antimatter created by the Large Hadron Collider is extremely tiny.
	Again, you couldn't light a light bulb with the antimatter coming out of the Large Hadron Collider.
	It's a very thin beam of antimatter that'll be produced.
	All right, Ed, in Porter, Texas, you have arrived with Professor Kaku.
	Yes, this is Ed.
	I talked to you one other time on Ham Radio, and the doctor there, he's one of my heroes, other than Admiral Ricker, which I studied under in the 60s.
	I've got a question for the doctor.
	Sure.
	Fire away.
	Okay.
	My theory on the ice melting is the magnetic fields of Any planet creates the ice caps.
	And when the pole moves, the ice caps are going to move.
	So you're going to have a new ice cap over in Siberia, and the one down in the south one is going to be moving up into open water.
	That's an interesting theory.
	We do know the ice caps move.
	Yes, that's right.
	They do.
	If you go to Hawaii and simply drill into the lava, The lava freezes when it gets cold, and it freezes with the north polar direction in the lava.
	So as you dig, as you dig into the lava, you see the direction of the north pole flipping.
	But the flip is on the order of hundreds of thousands to millions of years.
	However, we could be due for another flip because of the fact that the magnetic field of the Earth is weakening, even as we speak.
	We do know that the magnetic field of the Earth is weakening.
	Eventually, it'll go to zero again on a scale of thousands of years.
	But when that happens, the Earth could be hit with lots of cosmic rays.
	I was going to ask, Professor, there's actually quite a bit of controversy about what would occur if we had a polar flip.
	What do you believe might occur?
	People talk about big winds and all kinds of things that might happen and shifting.
	Well, the winds would be solar winds.
	We would be hit with much more cosmic rays and solar winds than in the past.
	And there'd be much more radiation as a consequence.
	And again, we're talking about these slips happening on a scale of hundreds of thousands of years, but it turns out that we are due for one.
	The magnetic field is weakening around the Earth.
	Again, very slowly.
	We're talking about centuries to millennia before we have to worry about this.
	But our descendants will have to worry about the fact they may have to go underground temporarily when this happens.
	Yes, would leave us wide open to a blast from the sun, would it not?
	That's right.
	And every 11 years we get hit with the sunspot cycle when its magnetic field flips every 11 years.
	That's right.
	And so the flipping of the sun's magnetic field and the wobbling of our magnetic poles could create problems.
	And we may have to temporarily live underground or in safe structures, live indoors, because of the ultraviolet radiation from the sun.
	Our ozone layer helps to protect us and our magnetic field protects us.
	But when the magnetic field drops to zero, it's going to be rough for us for a while.
	Well, I know when we get hit with a big sunspot blast, it depresses the magnetic field.
	And if the field on top of that is weakening or going to zero, then you're right.
	The only way to survive it, and it would be survivable, I guess, would be in a cave or underground or maybe in a bank hole somewhere.
	Permanently indoors someplace, right.
	It may come to that, again, on a scale of millennia.
	But we can see it happening.
	All right.
	We'll be right back.
	Here I am, my guest, of course, Professor Michio Kaku, one of the brightest minds in the world right now.
	His latest book is Physics of the Impossible, and it really is a fascinating read.
	I've got it right in front of me.
	Actually, I've been through it now twice.
	Dr. Kaku, back in a flash.
	All right, once again, Professor Kaku, and let's go all the way to Walter, all the way to Shenzhen, China.
	And Walter, Walter, are you really in China?
	Yeah, I teach English here in Shenzhen, which is right across the border from Hong Kong.
	Literally, the subways connect to Hong Kong.
	Been there, I know where it is.
	And I bet it's really grown since I was there.
	It's been about eight or nine years.
	I've only came here this year, but they say that it changes so much every year that if you come back even five years from now, I wouldn't even be able to tell the difference.
	Yeah, so I'm told.
	Well, anyway, what's up?
	Well thank you for bringing Dr. Kaku on again.
	Last time I was so moved that I bought his book and I read it and I just got to say Physics of the Impossible was just a terrific book that really made some really complicated things accessible for me.
	There you go.
	And my question is regarding the Neanderthals and the mammoths we spoke about earlier.
	And I've become interested in cheetahs lately and I found out that they have become so unbred that it's kind of hard to maintain their population.
	If we were able to resurrect mammoths or Neanderthals in the lab, we're talking about an extremely small population.
	And would it be possible for them to create a breeding population or would we have to make all of our mammoths in the lab?
	Well, it's inevitable that many creatures that we grow up with as children, we are not going to be able to hand down those memories to our children because they will go extinct and they will only be found in zoos.
	And you can even count the population of many of the animals that we draw in our picture books as children.
	And we realize that our children will probably find that many of them are extinct.
	So some people have already claimed that perhaps we should preserve their DNA.
	And as you point out, when the breeding population gets low enough, they begin to inbreed.
	And in which case, recessive genes begin to come out.
	Inbreeding does bring out certain defects.
	For example, if you look at the Habsburg family of Austria that governed much of Central Europe for about 400 years, you see defects in the mouth structure of the king, which was handed down from generation to generation.
	It was so bad that he could barely chew.
	He was deformed as a consequence of all the inbreeding within the Habsburg royal family of Austria.
	Or another example, closer to home perhaps for this caller, would be the Chinese fellow with a brain smaller than that of a bottomized cockroach, who I believe tried to get a hug from a panda there.
	Oh, that's right.
	Some idiot tried to bond with a panda.
	These are wild animals, right?
	And they're territorial.
	Yeah, really bit him.
	Okay, well we really appreciate your call all the way from China.
	Thank you very much.
	Let's go, oh I don't know, let's go to Oregon and Neil.
	Good morning.
	Good morning, gentlemen.
	Both myself and my friends do a lot of field study of Inter-dimensional people that appear to exist in sub-dimensions of man's dimensions, so where they can see us and touch us and hear us, and we can interact with them, ask them questions and get them to reply with, you know, simple branch breaks.
	And I wanted to see whether Michio can validate our field studies.
	I have a feeling probably not, but I mean, we can ask.
	Well, look at it this way.
	If another being were very advanced, in principle they could become invisible, in which case you would not know they were present.
	We're getting to that capability very quickly ourselves.
	A major breakthrough was made just a few months ago at the University of California at Berkeley, where I got my PhD years ago, showing that visible light can now bend in a way consistent to make an object invisible like Harry Potter.
	So some people think that if aliens from outer space or beings from another dimension came, We wouldn't even know because they would have the option of becoming invisible.
	Second of all, we do believe that there are other dimensions.
	Dimensions beyond length, width, and height.
	And we hope to prove that with the Large Hadron Collider.
	We hope to actually pick up evidence of 11 dimensions coming from the Large Hadron Collider, but it's temporarily shut down right now.
	We hope to prove something called string theory, which is what I do for a living.
	I'm the co-founder of String Field Theory, one of the main branches of String Theory.
	And all the subatomic particles are nothing but vibrations on a tiny little rubber band.
	And as the rubber band changes frequency, it becomes a different subatomic particle.
	The twist of String Theory is that these strings can only vibrate in hyperspace.
	These strings cannot vibrate in four dimensions or three dimensions.
	They have to vibrate in 10, 11 dimensions, which means that there could be these other dimensions out there.
	And we physicists are constructing experiments to prove that these other dimensions exist.
	The Large Hadron Collider is one device.
	Another way is to look for slight deviations of the inverse square law.
	When we were children, we learned that gravity diminishes as the square of the distance.
	You double the distance, gravity goes down by two times two, or four.
	But why the square?
	Why not the cube?
	Why not the quartic or the quintic?
	It's because our universe is in three dimensions.
	In a three-dimensional universe, the surface of a sphere is 4 pi r-squared.
	If you live in a hyper-universe, the volume of a hyper-sphere is not 4 pi r-squared, it would go as r-cubed, or r to the fourth.
	Therefore, Newton's laws of gravity would be slightly wrong at small distances.
	So we're now beginning to measure Newton's laws of gravity not over the solar system, but in your backyard, in a laboratory.
	We're looking for tiny little deviations from the inverse square law.
	This experiment was done at the University of Colorado.
	It turns out that no deviation was found, which just means that there's no parallel universe in Colorado.
	But maybe there are parallel universes elsewhere.
	So we're still continuing that experiment.
	So you cannot rule out the fact that other dimensions exist, and they exist on the scale of maybe a few inches.
	There are those who think that string theory is in trouble now.
	Mark writes from Maine, from Fort Fairfield, Maine.
	He says it's in trouble because it just doesn't seem plausible because there simply are too many solutions to verify in any way at all.
	How do you respond to that?
	Yeah, well, the multiverse is the conclusion that many cosmologists are coming to as to the nature of the origin of the universe.
	String theory has the weird feature that it predicts a multiverse of universes.
	If our universe is a soap bubble, there are other soap bubbles out there, other bubble universes that are expanding and contracting.
	And so string theory does seem to predict a multiverse.
	And that's where cosmology is also going.
	Cosmologists are becoming more and more familiar and comfortable with the fact that our universe is not alone.
	And the Big Bang was caused probably because two soap bubbles collided, or perhaps a soap bubble butted into two smaller soap bubbles, and the multiverse theory is getting more and more experimental verification from our satellite data.
	That doesn't prove it, but more and more cosmologists and physicists are warming up to the idea of the multiverse of universes.
	And that's why this gentleman refers to these many solutions of string theory.
	String theory does seem to predict an infinite number of universes, and I'm comfortable with that.
	Okay.
	To Vancouver, British Columbia, and Vinny, you're on with Dr. Kaku.
	Hi.
	Yes, hi gentlemen.
	It's an honor to speak with you both.
	I guess I wanted to get your opinion or take on, I suppose, chaos and disorder.
	Before I do so, I wanted to say it was good to hear you talk about the common sense problem.
	It reminds me of that Star Trek episode where Data is being judged on, what was it, whether he had rights.
	I guess it was based on whether he was intelligent or sentient.
	There was that sort of difference.
	I thought that was always interesting.
	But when it comes to Applying technology and science to human needs, when you start getting below the atomic level and you start dealing with relativistic approaches or effects or, you know, random behavior, do you feel that there is usable technology at that level?
	Or are we always going to have that question as to whether the results are accurate?
	Oh, well, at the subatomic level, we do have the uncertainty principle.
	So things become uncertain.
	And that's the reason why your Pentium chip will be useless around 2020.
	Your Pentium chip has a layer about 20 atoms across.
	That's the Pentium chip in your laptop today.
	By 2020, it'll be five atoms across.
	And then, as you point out, you don't know where things are anymore when you have a layer five atoms across, and electrons leak out.
	And as a consequence, we're going to have a big, big problem around 2020.
	When we have heat problems, leakage problems, Pentium chips will not function and become twice as powerful every 18 months at around 2020.
	So we're going to be in trouble.
	But as far as the usefulness of these technologies, the potential is enormous.
	Nanotechnology could give us a space elevator, whereby you push a button and you go into outer space in the comfort of an elevator.
	It could revolutionize, you know, The way we manufacture things.
	It could revolutionize medicine.
	We could have tiny little nanobots inside our bodies, you know, killing cancer cells.
	But that's a dream.
	All of this is a dream at the present time.
	At the present time, the only use for nanotechnology is coatings.
	Coatings and microsensors.
	So we're a long ways from the full potential of exploiting the atomic world.
	Right.
	And do you feel that at some point, Scientists have to address just the, basically, consciousness?
	Like, is there any attempt to resolve that aspect and physics?
	Well, that's the big one, consciousness.
	It turns out that we scientists don't even have a definition of consciousness.
	Try to go home tonight, take out a sheet of paper, and define consciousness.
	Yeah, exactly.
	And you begin to realize that no two scientists have the same definition, or any universally accepted definition of consciousness.
	There's a book that has the title, Consciousness Explained, which I think is an overstatement of the problem.
	But I personally, by the way, I personally believe that consciousness exists even with machines, that even a thermostat monitors its surroundings and is aware of its surroundings.
	Even a lowly thermostat has some intelligence, I believe.
	It's very low.
	But consciousness has quite a reach.
	Well, it depends on how you define it.
	If you define consciousness as self-awareness, self-awareness, let's take a definition, then there are levels of self-awareness.
	But if you take different definitions of consciousness, then of course you can narrow it down to just humans.
	It depends on how you define it, okay?
	If I define consciousness as being self-awareness, then even machines can monitor their environment and be aware of things.
	And even animals have a certain amount of self-awareness.
	You put an animal in front of a mirror and dogs and cats understand that they are looking at a mirror, but lower organisms do not.
	They will actually fight with the mirror image of themselves because they don't understand the concept of self, right?
	They're aware of their surroundings, but understanding of self is not there.
	But then there's also the consciousness problem in quantum mechanics.
	Some people think that quantum mechanics requires cosmic consciousness, or God, in order to make observations.
	So it depends on how you define consciousness.
	Interesting.
	I have an 18-month-old professor, and when she looks in the mirror, she She rushes to the mirror and kisses herself.
	I see.
	I wonder what she's thinking when she does that.
	Is she thinking that I'm enjoying my own image or is she thinking I've found another one like myself?
	I don't know.
	Interesting anyway.
	I don't know when we attain that Magic consciousness.
	I don't know if what I'm seeing when she does that is a reflection of that, or not.
	And I guess maybe we'll never know.
	Brooklyn brings Jan.
	Hi, you're on with Dr. Godfrey.
	Howdy.
	Thanks so much, John, for making Coast to Coast so great.
	Thank you so much.
	My question is this.
	Have you ever checked the DNA of like a parrot?
	Like parrots can talk?
	And like caterpillars turn into butterflies and they even took, well, you probably didn't do this, but reptilians are supposed to become humans and vice versa.
	Have you ever done, have there been experiments done with the DNA of these things?
	Yeah.
	In fact, most living organisms are being tested right now for their DNA because each animal has a very unique way in which expressing themselves.
	Birds, for example, some species of birds live much longer than they should by rights.
	Some birds live to be older than humans.
	And we're beginning to understand that by looking at the genome of these birds.
	They have repair mechanisms for DNA damage that are quite interesting and much more efficient than human repair mechanisms.
	And that's why some birds regularly outlive humans, including parrots, as I understand.
	People sometimes have a household parrot that outlives the whole family.
	And we now understand more or less why.
	Because they have repair mechanisms.
	So aging, for example, is one thing that we study with animals.
	And different animals have different lifespans.
	And by analyzing their DNA, we're getting a better understanding of that.
	For example, crocodiles have no known finite lifespan.
	No one has ever seen a crocodile die of old age.
	Textbooks say that they only live to be 70 years of age.
	That's because the zookeeper died at age 70.
	And they just They apparently live forever.
	They never age.
	They simply get bigger.
	And you don't see gigantic alligators in the wild because, of course, accidents and you don't get enough food.
	But in the zoo, alligators and crocodiles don't die.
	They never age.
	Why?
	Do we know why?
	We don't know why.
	However, we do think we know what aging is now.
	We have a unified theory of aging.
	Aging is error.
	Error in our DNA that accumulates over time and makes ourselves get sluggish and perform less and that is the essence of aging.
	The way to reverse that is to accelerate DNA repair because DNA can repair itself of course and so we know that certain organisms like birds can repair themselves much better than us And crocodiles are just as vigorous at 70 as they are when they're very young.
	And so we now realize that animals have a much different aging process than we humans.
	We used to think that we were normal, but now we realize that nature manifests itself with the aging process in quite different ways.
	Actually, crocodiles are very interesting.
	Many times they're not at all active.
	They just lay there without moving so much as, well, you'd think they were dead.
	Mm-hmm.
	And I wonder if that might have something to do with it.
	Maybe.
	Caloric restriction is one way in which you can almost double the lifespan of every organism that we've ever tested.
	So I've heard.
	From yeast, to spiders, insects, to birds, to rabbits, dogs, cats.
	Now primates are being looked at for the first time at Desde, Maryland.
	So there is already an elixir of youth.
	However, it has a side effect.
	These animals which are starved to death live longer, they have fewer tumors, less heart disease, less incidence of diabetes and stuff, but they also are very sluggish and they lose all interest in sex and the joie de vivre starts to disappear.
	So, I don't think too many humans would want to sacrifice for that.
	However, we're beginning to look at the genetics of that now, the molecular mechanisms of why caloric restriction works and there's a rather interesting work done in that direction at the molecular level now.
	Is immortality in our scientific sights?
	I think there's a distinct chance that our descendants may have the option of immortality.
	Not the elixir of youth that you see in science fiction stories.
	But, you know, if you have a choice of watching your body get older and rotting and eventually dying, or waking up the next day in an enhanced body that's mechanically and genetically enhanced, you're beautiful, you're handsome, what choice would you take?
	Easy choice, doctor.
	Professor, we're done.
	We're out of time.
	We've got to go.
	It has been wonderful, as always, and I will look forward to doing it again.
	Okay, well, thank you, Art.
	Take care, my friend.
	Good night.
	Alright folks, that's it.
	We are simply out of time.
	From the high desert, I'm Art Bell.

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