Art Bell returns after six months off-air, marking his induction into the National Radio Hall of Fame on November 15, before discussing global crises: a nuclear India-Pakistan standoff with 80 and 40 warheads respectively, Iran’s potential 90% uranium enrichment within a year, and Europe’s collapsing banks. Dr. Michio Kaku warns of accidental nuclear war due to "launch-on-warning" systems, solar storms disrupting infrastructure, and nanotech’s slow progress despite breakthroughs like IBM’s quantum calculator. He dismisses doomsday fears about the Large Hadron Collider but acknowledges parallel universe theories gaining traction via string theory and satellite data. Aging research reveals parrots’ DNA resilience and crocodiles’ anti-aging traits, while caloric restriction extends primate lifespans at Bethesda—immortality may hinge on genetic or mechanical upgrades rather than natural longevity. [Automatically generated summary]
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, 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.
And then one of me, and I guess one of all three of us, really.
If you go to coasttocoastam.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, I 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 very much longshot.
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.
I mean, the money, money thing.
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, from San Diego 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 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 the 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 Aaron in 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.
Hers 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.
Well, 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 webcam, which is up at the very top.
And the second one can be enlarged.
And it's a Varin 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 A-O-L.com or Art Bell at MindSpring.com.
Art Bell at MindSpring, M-I-N-D-S-P-R-I-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 financialists.
Did 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.
I'm not sure which.
They've injected incredible amounts of cash liquidity into the markets, and credit is, albeit somewhat slowly, starting to move again.
I noticed the rates for, 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.
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 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, it's certainly an overused term, band-aid, but it kind of appears that's what they've got.
There 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.
It's going to 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 lived 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.
So, 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 gun 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 talk 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 healing 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 cabinets.
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, inviting, but very heavily secure.
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 is 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.
Got to really want to be in space.
Zheng Yellen's outdoor laboratory in the terraced hills of southern China is a virtual treasure trove of a 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, you know, 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 megatonage 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 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 say, this came from unknown country.
I'm never going to get it all in.
In the Cyprus Mail, Nathan Morley quotes British soldier Tom Clark as saying, we were all awoken about 2 a.m. 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 Hazelkin, 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 to 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.
Orley 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 it had seen, warned again not to discuss with anyone the events that occurred.
Several military communication installations are located in the Trudeau's Mountains.
They have been the setting for many UFO sighting 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.
And 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, Eric, great to hear you again.
Obama sucks.
Sorry to hear you're another Obama sucker.
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 the 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, I might be all right.
And so for and so on, a lot of really nice ones that I'm going to 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, then coming back to, I kind of switched between CNN and Fox, which we had on the ship.
I learned afresh to hate Lou Dobbs.
Oh, God, Lou Dobbs.
And Billy Mays.
You know who Billy Mays is?
He's a guy who does advertisements for all kinds of different things.
And he has got a voice that really could inspire homicide.
We'll be right back.
All right.
We're going to take unscreened open line.
Anything goes to 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.
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.
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 10.5, 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.
unidentified
Exactly.
And 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.
And, you know, they're doing everything to help the banks, it seems.
Oh, 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.
I mean, my answer is no.
I appreciate your call, but I say no.
staged either this 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, they're 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 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.
It 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 had that.
We've had that since last spring or 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, or this couldn't happen, right?
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.
In other words, anything they think below about 5 or 6%, and there'll be social unrest in China.
That's the prediction.
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 6% or 5% growth.
China has to keep growing.
Or they're looking at some serious social unrest.
That means people in the streets, tanks, and all the rest of that.
How do you think that World War III Will unwind or begin even?
unidentified
Well, it's a very good possibility that because Israel is being threatened, that Israel may, I'm not saying they will, but they may attack Iran, who's threatened to wipe him off the map.
And if they do that, then Russia being Iran's ally, that they will go, that Russia, as is predicted in Ezekiel, and Libya and Iran, and which is, you know, ancient Persia, whatever, they will attack Israel.
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. Mijio Kaku.
He's an internationally recognized authority in theoretical physics and the environment.
Holds a Henry Simmet 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 PhD-level textbooks are required reading at that top physics labs.
Dr. Kaku graduated Harvard in 68, 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 72, 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, will 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, 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, between countries that have launch-on-warning status.
Now that's very bad because even between the Soviet Union and the United States, storms, for example, would periodically set off our early warning system.
And, you know, we would have to investigate storms and other atmospheric disturbances.
One time, the moon, this is years, decades ago, the moon actually set off our radar system.
When we first turned on one of our early warning systems, it was over the horizon radar.
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.
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 the way it is.
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 and 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.
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 are called 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.
Well, again, the winds will carry it 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.
I think Obama would ask the Iranians as a last-ditch measure to give up their 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 3 or so percent enriched, and decide to enrich it all the way up to 90%.
And we know that, by the way, because a man named Mordecai Van Nunu actually worked at the Demono site in the Negev Desert, photographed the plutonium pits, and then gave the pictures to the Assendon London Times, which then published them.
And he then was later arrested.
He's still 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-save doomsday device.
Worst 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.
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.
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 their 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 or 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.
We have talked many times about whether this planet of Iris and all the nations on it will take the next step and 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 time now.
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.
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 wildcard that makes a lot of people very uneasy, realizing that the tundra is gradually thawing out.
And that means that more methane gas could be released in the atmosphere, creating a feedback loop with unknown consequences.
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.
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, well, it would cause some atmospheric instability to have all that gas, hot gas on the bottom, suddenly rise up and causes atmospheric disturbances, which may disturb the airplanes.
All right, I've got a story here, 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, 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.
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 only would 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.
Now, it would be unethical probably to use a human, that is a woman, to carry the embryo of 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.
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 bubblegum.
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.
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 a T-Rex or Neanderthals or anything else.
They're going to do what they can do, aren't they?
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.
Well, the holy grail of genetic engineering and 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.
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 honeybees, 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 honeybees, 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.
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 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 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 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?
Yeah, I think it's useless to talk to the terrorists themselves.
They 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 encounter other civilizations.
And their 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.
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 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.
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 to, 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 is 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, Dr. 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.
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?
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 microsensors that are very, very tiny.
And 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 are called 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.
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, 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?
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.
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 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.
They're gates, gates for electric current.
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.
I mean, this is 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 when we can do straight lines are difficult?
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.
Well, the main spring 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 boy, yong, yong, yong, yong, and then the North Pole and the South Pole flip, releasing a shockwave which hits the Earth every 11 years.
And 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.
And one of our astronauts in 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.
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 the Americans all go back to the moon by 2020.
Yeah, it's going to be phased out in 2010, and then we're going to be without a dependable access to space for about five years until around 2015 when the Orion and the Aries 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 a decade or so.
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 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 for the space shuttle.
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 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 looked exactly like our space shuttle and it was fully automatic.
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.
You know, 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.
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.
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.
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 reinhabit, you know, there'd be life once again on Earth, but this would be millions or billions of years from impact.
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?
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?
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 where he saw 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 hydrogen bombs, small little things like firecrackers that have enormous power.
And you coast on the shock wave of these things.
He realized that any terrorists that had access to these things could blow up whole cities.
Just like a big layer kick 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.
That 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 Dawn in Salem, Oregon.
You're on the air with Professor Kaku.
Good morning.
unidentified
Hi, gentlemen.
My wife can give my Christmas presents to Charity now because this is the best one I probably ever get.
It's a pleasure to talk to both of you.
Dr. Kaku, I've been 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 finished watching your program.
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.
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 were 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.
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.
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 now 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 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 coexist 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 coexist 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 tune 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.
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 out of 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?
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.
And the reporters said to ask 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.
They spilled about six tons of liquid helium on the floor.
There was electrical 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.
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.
unidentified
I mean, 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.
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 lobotomized cockroach who, I believe, tried to get a hug from a panda there.
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.
unidentified
Good morning, gentlemen.
Both myself and my friends do a lot of field study of interdimensional 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 simple branch breaks.
And I wanted to see whether Michio can validate our field studies.
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 in 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 2 times 2, or 4.
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 hypersphere 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, and 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.
I guess I want to get your opinion or take on, I suppose, chaos and disorder.
But 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 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?
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.
Thinking that I'm enjoying my own image, or is she thinking I've found another one like myself?
And I don't know if that's interesting anyway.
I don't know when we attain that magic consciousness.
I don't know if that's what I'm seeing when she does that as a reflection of that or not.
And I guess maybe we'll never know.
Brooklyn brings jam.
Hi, you're on the director.
unidentified
Howdy, thanks so much, John, 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, 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 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 they don't get enough food.
But in the zoo, alligators and crocodiles don't die.
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?