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Nov. 23, 2015 - Art Bell

02:24:37

Art Bell MITD - 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, wherever you may be in the world's 25 mind zones.
	It's uncold anyway.
	The rules of this program, which is called Midnight in the Desert, are very simple.
	There's only two rules, no bad language, and one call per show.
	Tonight, Professor Michio Kaku is my guest.
	He'll be coming up in a moment.
	Let's examine a little bit of news.
	Donald Trump has now a double-digit lead over Ben Carson in the Republican presidential race, and voters say they prefer change over political experience.
	Two new national polls show that.
	Trump leads Carson 32% to 22%.
	And by the way, Friday's AP story, which I gave the basics of here, said that Trump allegedly said there should be a registration of all Muslims in America.
	And that was wrong.
	What actually happened is a reporter asked the question, And then other reporters reported on the reporter's question instead of Trump's answer, so... You know, U.S.
	media.
	Security forces sealed off the streets in a Paris suburb Monday, and a bomb squad headed to the scene after investigators found a possible suicide vest, I wouldn't say possible, it was one, in a garbage can.
	Paris police said that, uh, An article found in a Paris suburb contained explosives.
	T-A-T-P is the explosive.
	Same one used by the other suicide bombers.
	So, I figure probably this guy, the one they're looking for now in Belgium, decided, you know, I'd rather not blow myself up and threw his vest into a trash can and or I tried to blow myself up, and the button didn't work.
	All of this is pretty tough on Paris, I'll tell you right now.
	The number of people going to visit the Parisians is down.
	Significantly, the museums there, ticket sales, way, way off.
	So this is going to cost Paris and the French a lot of money.
	No question about that.
	I have a very, very interesting article here from a fellow named Mark Linus on what's going to happen if we rise, the Earth that is to say, rises six degrees Celsius, and that would be indeed climate Armageddon.
	But I choose not to read it tonight, because we have Dr. Kaku here.
	Dr. Michio Kaku co-founded String Theory, the String Theory, or Field Theory, and is a theoretical physicist, best-selling author, claimed public speaker, renowned futurist, popularizer of silence, Science!
	Dr. Kaku continues Einstein's search for the theory of everything, seeking to unify the four fundamental focuses and forces of the universe.
	The strong force, the weak force, gravity, and electromagnetism.
	Dr. Kaku is author of several Ph.D.
	level textbooks, and has had more than 70 articles published in physics journals covering topics like superstring theory, Supergravity, supersymmetry, and hydronic physics.
	He has started in science programs on Discovery, Science Channel, BBC, ABC, History Channel.
	He's all over the place.
	He's all over the web, actually, with advertisements for his new show.
	I wonder if you've seen that.
	He hosts Science Fantastic and Explorations in Science, two weekly radio programs, heard on stations around the country and podcast around the world.
	And in a moment, he will be heard right... He's really something.
	Quite a listener.
	So I suggest you keep it where you've got it.
	This is Midnight in the Desert and I'm Art Bell.
	Midnight in the Desert.
	you.
	The broadcast tonight, so it's been a real circus around here.
	To now, Dr. Michio Kaku.
	Doctor, welcome back to my latest incarnation.
	Art, it's been too long.
	Glad to be on your show again.
	So happy to have you.
	The very day that the big megastructure article came out, I read it in detail to the audience.
	We talked about it.
	We've mulled it over.
	We've chewed on it.
	We had Seth Shostak come on, and he had everything refocused on that star, listened for a week, didn't hear anything, and now the press is treating it as though, oh well, can't be much.
	We didn't hear anything.
	Would you like to comment on the whole thing?
	Well, first of all, you can't trust the media.
	The media is fickle, they have to sell newspapers, they have to make deadlines, so you can't go by the media.
	You have to go with what is testable, reproducible, and falsifiable.
	In other words, science.
	And scientists are scratching their heads over this thing.
	This has caught the astronomical community with their pants down.
	Here we have a reproducible, testable, falsifiable, two events, Two events that have no logical explanation at the present time.
	Starlight dims by about 1% or so if Jupiter were to go in front of our star, but we have two events where starlight went down by 15% and 22%.
	That is humongous!
	That is off scale!
	And so astronomers are going through their encyclopedia of anomalies, trying to cook up anything.
	Anything that even comes close to a 22% diminishing of starlight.
	And so far, I have yet to see in the literature anything that can logically explain this.
	This has really caught the community with our pants down.
	Well, Tabitha Bourgeon, I guess, discovered it.
	She turned it over to Jason Wright.
	Both of them looked really, really hard at this.
	And as I've told other guests, Doctor, I would think Considered their careers, their family, their future, and said a lot of things before they ever uttered the word possible alien.
	Well, you know, we're scientists.
	We're not Hollywood producers.
	We have to look at the hard data.
	And the data right now is off scale.
	We have no reproducible, falsifiable explanation for the phenomenon right now.
	So an alien megastructure is on the table.
	Let's face it, unless someone can come up with a credible scientific reason for taking it off the table, it is on the table.
	And the fact that we haven't picked up any radio signals from that star really does not mean much of anything.
	I mean, after all, if we were looking at a distant star, Would we look for Morse code?
	No!
	We would assume that these aliens are far beyond Morse code and they wouldn't communicate that way.
	That's right.
	Well, let's assume that these structures are built by an alien civilization.
	You can count that it would be on a scale of what is called a type 2 civilization.
	And a type 2 civilization would use communication methods that we would find fantastic.
	And so I think that it's, of course, natural that we're not going to pick up any signals.
	So it's not decisive one way or the other.
	Thank you.
	The press is very lazy, and that includes some talk show hosts who just dismiss things.
	Oh, you didn't hear anything?
	Okay, well, end of that story.
	So anyway, It's still there.
	It's still every bit as much of a puzzle.
	And we need to, I guess, keep looking at it.
	If it repeats yet again, I mean, what could do that?
	The only thing I've heard running around that's possible is a comet swarm.
	Yes, all the other logical usual suspects have been ruled out.
	For example, a binary star system.
	If you have two stars going around each other, then it's conceivable one can dim the starlight of the other.
	But that doesn't fit the characteristics of this either.
	These apparently are non-periodic.
	We don't see a regular periodicity like we do with planets and things.
	And dropping a starlight by 22% is unprecedented.
	We've never seen anything like this before.
	So, either the story is as big as the discovery of fire, or the invention of the wheel, or it could be a wild goose chase.
	But either way, it's going to be a lot of fun.
	Well, I did ask Seth if, in its own way, this is as big as the wild signal was, and he went, oh yes.
	Yes, yes, yes.
	So, how long are we going to have to wait?
	Any thoughts on that before we get another opportunity to see the dimming?
	Well, the key word is reproducible.
	We scientists want to make sure that we have not just one event, but a few events to play with.
	And that means that we're just going to have to sit tight and wait for the next dropping of starlight.
	And then at that point, we're going to train our spectroscopes at it.
	We're going to try to see whether we can see the fingerprint, the signature, the signature of gas, the signature of hydrogen.
	We're going to try to pick up radiation from the starlight to try to figure out if it fits any of the known signatures and fingerprints of cosmological astronomical objects.
	For example, dust clouds.
	It would be very easy to roll out dust clouds or even comets by looking at the spectral lines of the next event.
	And so, yeah, we're going to be training our telescopes on the star, hoping that we're going to see another such event.
	We've seen two so far, so the chances of seeing another one within the next few years is pretty large.
	All right.
	For the audience who may not have heard you previously, you have sort of a sliding scale of intelligent life and how it would develop, and you have put it into types of civilizations, right?
	Could you run through that for everybody very quickly?
	Yes, when we physicists look in outer space for intelligent life forms, we don't look for little green men.
	We look for energy signatures of type 1, type 2, type 3 civilizations.
	A type 1 civilization is planetary.
	They can manipulate all the energy that falls on their planet from their star, meaning that, for example, they would control the weather, or modify the weather at will.
	Planetary phenomenon, volcanoes, earthquakes, can be modified, sort of like Buck Rogers, that kind of technology.
	Then there's type 2, because they exhaust the power of a planet, and the next energy source is the mother star.
	And so they mine the star.
	They can create what are called Dyson Spheres to surround the entire mother star.
	They can create a Death Star if they want, like the movie Star Wars.
	So a Type II civilization is like Star Trek.
	It's like the Federation of Planets.
	They can just barely manipulate stars in the Star Trek series.
	That's Type II.
	Type II, by the way, is immortal.
	Nothing known to science can destroy a Type II civilization.
	They can deflect meteors, comets, ice ages.
	Nothing known to science can destroy, even a supernova of their mother star.
	They would either leave the solar system or they would move their planet.
	Then there's Type 3, which is galactic.
	They roam the galactic space lanes like the Empire of the Empire Strikes Back series.
	And on a calculator, you can even calculate when we will attain these types.
	By the way, we on the scale, we do not manipulate the weather.
	We do not manipulate our sun, and we don't roam the galactic space lanes.
	We are a Type 0 civilization.
	Well, we're about a hundred years.
	I was going to ask, could we be possibly like a .5 or 6 or something?
	Well, if you do the calculation very carefully, we are actually at a .7.
	.7, oh.
	In fact, it was Carl Sagan who did the calculation.
	It's a very simple calculation.
	It's on an exponential scale.
	We know the energy output of the planet Earth.
	We know how much sunlight would hit the Earth in its entirety.
	And so you just divide and bingo!
	You get 0.7.
	So we're very close to being Type 1.
	And in a hundred years, the calculation shows that in a hundred years we'll be Type 1.
	Because, you know, what is the Internet?
	The Internet is a Type 1 telephone system.
	We're privileged to be alive to witness the birth of the first major Type 1 technologies, the Internet.
	That's what it is.
	And English will more than likely be the language of the Type 1 civilization.
	And we're seeing the beginning of a Type 1 economy with the NAFTA, the European Union, very large trade blocs.
	We're seeing the beginning of a Type 1 sports called the Olympics and soccer.
	We're seeing the beginning of a Type 1 music, youth culture, rock and roll.
	These are pretty much planetary kinds of things, milestones that are happening.
	Are you sure that the world sport might not be football as we know it?
	Well, football, soccer, whatever.
	Then there are some people who don't like this.
	Some people who in their gut cannot articulate this, but they don't want a scientific multicultural planetary civilization.
	They want to be not in the year 2200, They want to be in the year 1000 A.D.
	These are the terrorists.
	Terrorism is one of the birth pangs of a Type I civilization.
	And so, naturally, you're going to see forces that are against the formation of a truly enlightened, planetary, prosperous civilization.
	And these are the terrorists.
	They want to live in the year 1000 A.D., rather than in the year 2200 A.D.
	Well, it's certainly pretty bad right now, and you can imagine, I mean, if you look at the ideology of ISIS, for example, right in the very center of their ideology, their flawed ideology, is Armageddon.
	They want to precipitate Armageddon.
	They actually want that.
	So, you know, if they had some grey goo they could drop, or a bomb they could set off, they wouldn't hesitate for one second to do so.
	Yeah, we're talking about a philosophy that comes from the Middle Ages, technology and techniques that come from the Middle Ages, except they have 21st century access to weapons, and that's what makes them very dangerous.
	Well, Professor, do you think it's going to end up being a hiccup on the way to Type I, or is it going to be something more than a hiccup, going to set us back?
	Well, let's hope that it's a hiccup.
	However, there was a very influential article written by the former Prime Minister of Malaysia, an Islamic country, a few years ago.
	And he lamented the fact that the Islamic world is sort of like repeating a debate they had a thousand years ago, which led to the decline of the Islamic Empire.
	And that is the nature of truth.
	Where does truth come from?
	A thousand years ago, there were some scholars that said that truth comes from nature and experiment.
	But the other side said, no, truth comes from the Koran.
	And you see, Allah can change reality anytime he feels like.
	Therefore, there's no necessity to discover the laws of nature, because it can be changed at any point.
	Unfortunately, said the former Prime Minister of Malaysia, the religious zealots took over.
	And that began the decline, the thousand year decline of the Islamic State.
	Just remember that they had a great civilization a thousand years ago.
	The word algebra is an Arabic word.
	The names of the stars, Algol, Altair, they're Arabic names.
	And optics was first discovered by the Arabs, not by the Europeans.
	And the Islamic Empire was a net exporter of science and technology.
	When Europe was ravaged by the Inquisition, 500 to 1,000 years ago.
	And Europe was the net importer of technology.
	So, said the former Prime Minister, we could be repeating history again.
	That is, once again, this debate is emerging in the Islamic world, where does truth come from?
	And there once again is a faction that's saying that truth comes from the book, not from nature.
	And we could again be, the Muslim world could again be thrown back centuries into the past, which is a real tragedy.
	Well, they seem to want us to convert or die.
	And they pretty well, I guess, decided we're not going to convert, so they're working on the how to kill us part.
	Yeah, that's a dangerous part, because you have people that don't believe in nature.
	They believe in, you know, the mythologies and traditions coming from a book.
	And how you interpret that book, as we all know, is a matter of taste sometimes.
	And so that's why we're going to have to struggle for quite a while.
	But again, we had it a thousand years ago, and we're having it again.
	All right.
	Well, here's a question for you.
	If we could instantly eliminate religion around the world, all of it, would we have a better planet or a worse planet?
	Well, personally, I think we're genetically hardwired to be religious.
	If you were a Martian landing on the Earth for the first time, you would realize that all great civilizations have some form of religion.
	That's right.
	And you would basically conclude that there's a God gene.
	We, of course, are rational beings.
	We don't necessarily have to be slaves of our genes, but there probably is a genetic propensity to be religious.
	And so I think we're going to have these religious discussions for hundreds of years into the future.
	Wow!
	Well, I have a friend who wrote a book that everybody gets angry about called The God Part of the Brain, and it's kind of along the same lines.
	He is an atheist, but he believes that there is something hardwired in our brains to cause us to worship something.
	The sun, the moon, God, whatever.
	Allah?
	Yeah, it's hard to say.
	You know, independent of whether God exists, independent of whether religions are correct or not, we are probably genetically inclined to be religious.
	And I think it was good for our evolution, because, you know, religion holds people together.
	And, you know, in spite of all the bickering of intelligent beings, there's a glue that holds people together, and that's religion.
	But that was in the forest.
	That was in the forest thousands of years ago.
	Now we have nuclear weapons.
	And it's not clear whether this genetic propensity will get us through some of the turbulent times ahead of us.
	One of the funniest remarks I think ever made on my program was made Friday.
	Somehow the subject of nuclear war came up and a guy called him said that if it begins he's going to try to get as much as he can directly under one incoming yell or signal fair catch Do himself in that way and just be right under it.
	It was funny.
	Well, I guess that's one way to deal with it.
	Well, if you watch football, you understand fair catch.
	I remember that many of my professors built the atomic bomb and they had very definite attitudes toward their own creation.
	One of my associates even loaded the Nagasaki bomb with his bare hands.
	Oh my!
	Yeah, he was the one who, in a famous story in the farmhouse, assembled the Nagasaki bomb on a canvas, and of course there was no manual he said to
	assemble the atomic bomb.
	It was the first time it had ever been done.
	He rode with the B-29 bomber as the bomb was dropped.
	He saw the bomb drop.
	It was basically the bomb that he assembled with his bare hands.
	When you say he loaded it with his bare hands, you mean he loaded the...
	What was he...
	Which one?
	Uranium?
	The Nagasaki bomb was the plutonium bomb.
	Plutonium, okay.
	So he actually handled the plutonium?
	Yeah, with of course safety precautions.
	But plutonium is an alpha emitter and alpha particles are not long range.
	And so you can handle it, of course.
	You can handle it for very long periods of time.
	But it is not a very deadly gamma emitter.
	It basically emits in the alpha radiation range.
	Well, his attitude was that he worked on it, and he helped to build an Akasaki bomb, but then after that, enough is enough.
	He became quite anti-nuclear afterwards, realizing that war is war, you have to, you know, an all-out war, you have to create whatever you have to create, you got to do whatever you have to do, but once the war is over, you don't need these things anymore.
	Well, let's hope that Yeah, I heard that we just committed a trillion dollars to updating our nuclear stockpiles.
	Yes, well, there's some debate about how much we have to update our stockpiles.
	There ought to be a lot of debate about it.
	Yeah, our stockpile is what is called headed toward third generation.
	We're now building third generation hydrogen warheads.
	First generation hydrogen warheads were huge, gigantic things that you could just barely carry on an airplane.
	Second generation are small, MIRVs.
	You can put ten of them in the nose cone of an MX missile.
	Second generation hydrogen warheads.
	Third generation hydrogen warheads are designer warheads.
	That is warheads that can be suitcase size.
	You can detonate over the forest.
	Bunker busters, for example, that One day, God forbid, maybe used in the Middle East if there's a war over the Iranian nuclear reactor program.
	These are third generation hydrogen warheads.
	And so there's some motion within the weapons industry that they have to test some of these things, just to make sure they work.
	Personally, I hope that we don't have to go to third generation hydrogen warheads.
	Well, me too.
	And I don't want them tested out here near me.
	All the other ones were tested near me.
	And I worry enough about the groundwater as it is.
	But a whole new series of tests?
	No thank you.
	Do you think that can be prevented?
	Well, there is a treaty that bans these tests.
	And the United States has not tested underground for quite a while.
	And let's hope it stays that way.
	We have computer simulations, by the way, that are quite good, that allow us to, at least in cyberspace, test the reliability of these things.
	But let's hope that the deterrence power of these weapons is sufficient to deter any other nation from trying to use these weapons against us.
	Professor, if we make it from 0.7 to 1, do you think by 1 we are past the probability of self-destruction?
	No, I think you really have to be Type 2 before you really become immortal.
	That is, nothing known to science can destroy a Type 2 civilization, unless of course it commits suicide.
	Type 1, you know, we still have the savagery of our past.
	We still have all the sectarian, religious, fundamentalist differences that we had coming out of the swamp, and we still have it with us.
	So even in a Type 1 civilization, there are going to be conflicts.
	There will be interests.
	But I think there's good news.
	The Internet is a type one telephone system and it spreads democracy.
	Just look at the Arab Spring.
	When I was a kid, there was a concept called dictator for life.
	Remember that term?
	I do.
	If you had a patron being the Soviet Union or the United States and you were a dictator, you were a dictator for life.
	Now that term is a joke.
	You're dictator for, what, three months now?
	Well, it still ends with your life being sacrificed, probably.
	Hold on, Professor.
	We are at a break.
	It's a good one.
	The seven-minute break that I mentioned to you.
	Professor Michio Kaku is my guest.
	I'm Art Bell.
	midnight in the desert rockin' in the night.
	Oh, just my mind that tumbles down.
	Oh, just my mind that tumbles down.
	Hey, could you get my medicine?
	Cause you're the only, you're the only one.
	Thank you for watching.
	Take a walk on the wild side of midnight.
	From the Kingdom of Nigh, this is Midnight in the Desert with Art Bell.
	Please call the show at 1952-225-5278.
	That's 1952.
	Call Art.
	Honored to have Professor Michio Kaku tonight.
	Great to have him.
	He's been doing a lot of speaking, a lot of traveling, and it's nice that you would stay up with us tonight.
	Professor, I know you're probably back in New York, right?
	That's right.
	So it's really late then.
	One other quick question before we leave the megastructure thing altogether.
	If it turned out that these really were megastructures, it really was a type 2 civilization, would it behoove us To keep our heads down or to attempt to contact them.
	What would you think?
	I think it would be a very bad idea to try to contact them because we don't know what their intentions are.
	Now, personally, I think they're going to be peaceful because they will have had, according to the Kardashev scale, several thousand years in which to work out their religious sectarian differences.
	But, who knows?
	I mean, we're just a blip on their radar screen.
	And so, we don't know what their intentions are.
	For example, if you're a forest animal, who do you fear the most?
	Do you fear the hunter, who wants to kill you and eat you?
	Or, the developer, who's mild-mannered, very sweet, has a nice family, but just wants to pave over your entire forest.
	So, we don't know what their intentions are.
	And so, I think in the meantime, we should just keep our head low.
	So we don't get paved over.
	That's right, because we don't know what their intentions are.
	And even developers are peaceful people, right?
	They have no grudges against the squirrels and the deer in the forest.
	But if you're a squirrel or you're a deer in the forest, you have something to worry about.
	Now, again, chances are they're going to be peaceful.
	They're not going to want to plunder our resources, because there are a lot of other planets to plunder.
	Some people wonder, well, won't they come here and steal our gold or whatever?
	No, because there are a lot of uninhabited planets out there with plenty of natural resources and minerals without restive natives to cause problems.
	And so I think that, for the most part, they'll just probably leave us alone and treat us as a curiosity.
	Hopefully so.
	Then, the plan we had long ago, we did dispatch a signal, and we did dispatch a satellite, which contained all kinds of information about us, I believe, including our newly discovered genetic code, and so forth and so on, and a lot of things.
	It had a lot of things on it.
	Was that unwise then?
	Yes, I think it was not such a good idea.
	Even my colleague Stephen Hawking has warned against doing this because we don't really know what their intentions are.
	And we even gave a map, a location of where we are in the universe.
	That's right.
	We actually had a map of the quasars and so any intelligent civilization would know where these gigantic galactic nuclei are located.
	They would triangulate us.
	And bingo!
	We would be right there on their radar screen.
	Now, they're not going to say lunch at that point, because they're not going to want to eat us, because we're not going to be made out of the same DNA.
	And so the danger there is not that they're going to want to eat us.
	The danger is they may want to just pave us over, because we're simply not very high on the scale of civilizations.
	And we don't have much to offer.
	And as a species, we're kind of boring to them.
	And so let's just hope they don't pave us over.
	Well, let's hope they don't like places with oxygen.
	I mean, that marks us as not rare, but fairly rare, I would think, in the larger scheme of things.
	Yeah, we have liquid water.
	Liquid water is the amniotic fluid of life.
	Very rare commodity, by the way.
	In our solar system, perhaps the Earth is the only place where you find large quantities of liquid water, except maybe one of the moons of Jupiter or Saturn.
	And so, yeah, so we do have some resources here, like liquid water, and we definitely need that.
	Since you bring up liquid water, good transition to Mars, where they have just discovered that these things that look like they're gullies that water has run down, are in fact gullies that water has run down.
	Put another way, there's water on Mars.
	That's right, and even more significant, there's antifreeze on Mars.
	Why is there liquid water on Mars when Mars is frozen over?
	Mars is frozen solid.
	So how can possibly liquid water exist on a frozen planet?
	And the answer is in your car.
	It's antifreeze.
	We now know that Mars has lots of antifreeze, which changes the freezing point of water.
	That's why water can remain as a liquid even at zero degrees centigrade.
	And so since Mars has antifreeze, It means that you can be below the freezing point and still have liquid water.
	And that's a game changer, because if we put astronauts on Mars, maybe Matt Damon would love to have some liquid water to play with in order to purify and use as rocket fuel.
	Of course!
	To take water, separate out the hydrogen and oxygen, because water is H2O, and use that as rocket fuel for the return voyage.
	Okay, well I can't resist, I have to ask, did you see the Martian?
	No, I didn't see it yet, but I definitely want to see it.
	Apparently, it's a great movie, right?
	It is a great movie, and I was going to ask you how scientifically accurate you thought it was, because most people are saying, well, pretty good in that category.
	Yeah, well, you know, the physics of being an astronaut on Mars is well established.
	You know, we know what the atmospheric pressure is.
	It's one percent that of the Earth.
	We know what the atmosphere is made of.
	We know it's carbon dioxide.
	We know what the temperature is on Mars.
	It's usually below freezing.
	And so you can get a pretty realistic scenario with a Hollywood screenwriter of what it would be like to be stranded on the Red Planet, because we know so much about it.
	We put so many robots on Mars.
	We have a very good understanding of what the surface of Mars looks like.
	Now, what we don't know is what the polar ice caps are like, and what Mars is underground.
	And that's where, a long shot, that's where you might find evidence of some kind of life, maybe even microbial life.
	Because we've never really been to the polar ice gaps, and we've never really drilled underground to see if there are aquifers and underground hot springs underneath the surface of Mars.
	We haven't done that yet.
	And so there's a lot of Mars we don't know about, but the basic topology we know quite a bit about.
	All right, well there is this thing going around, I'm sure you've heard about it, with people volunteering to take a one-way Now, this is not exactly a NASA mission we're talking about here.
	If you could address those people, what would you tell them before they left?
	Well, I tell people that I personally would not want to be an astronaut to go into outer space.
	I'm not that brave.
	That 1% of the time, your rocket will probably blow up.
	In fact, the two shuttles blew up on schedule, more or less.
	One percent of the time they blew up.
	We had approximately 200 missions.
	We had two fatal accidents involving 14 astronauts.
	So, yeah, we have to worry about that.
	And then, of course, the journey to Mars would take upwards of a year.
	Coming back would be another year.
	There's no coming back.
	This is a one-way mission.
	They're going to go and they're going to colonize What they can of Mars, with no hope of returning.
	Yeah, well I think they're glamorizing it too much, because if we don't have enough oxygen and supplies to last just for a few weeks on Mars, and that's not going to be a very pleasant few weeks on Mars, knowing that your food, your water, your supplies is running out, and that it's a frozen solid outside.
	I think they're glamorizing it too much.
	You know, space is really for test pilots.
	Yes.
	For people who know that one percent of the time they're going to blow up.
	And they still want to go into outer space.
	You've got to be pretty tough to look at the odds and still want to go into outer space.
	You know, we're 50 years into the space age and still we can't reduce the failure rate of rockets anything lower than about 1%.
	All right, let's change topics a little bit.
	You mentioned Stephen Hawking and when you did, Stephen Hawking and a lot of other Scientists, and perhaps yourself, when talking about artificial intelligence, think that it may be one of the biggest dangers we face.
	That there could be some sort of, I don't know, takeover by Some artificially intelligent machine, or perhaps not the Internet.
	I'm not sure.
	I wonder sometimes about the Internet.
	But once we achieve artificial intelligence, it could be the machine would decide to get rid of us.
	That's apparently a valid fear.
	Well, yeah, the fear is that they're going to put us in zoos, and they're going to throw a penis at us behind bars and make us dance.
	Just like we do bears at zoos, right?
	That's the danger.
	But then you have to take a look at the reality.
	The reality of the inventors on the ground, who are desperately trying to build anything resembling a mechanical man, threw up their hands, because our robots are so primitive.
	They have the intelligence of a cockroach.
	The United States Pentagon, which pioneered the Internet, it was not Al Gore, it was the Pentagon that pioneered the Internet, and also the GPS system, they created another DARPA challenge.
	They wanted to challenge the robot scientists of the world to create a robot that can clean up Fukushima.
	Here is a showcase piece.
	The whole world would be curious if you could build a robot, put it into an active nuclear accident, and clean it up.
	That would be great!
	Instead of 40 years to clean up Fukushima, which is the official number, It would only take, you know, maybe a few months if you had robots to clean it up, right?
	Sure.
	Well, the DARPA challenge is very simple.
	You have to have a robot that can drive a car, sweep the floor, turn a valve, and not much more than that, you know?
	Children can do that, right?
	Sure.
	Well, every single model robot failed, except for one from South Korea.
	And on the Internet, you can see all these robots simply falling over and tripping over themselves.
	That's how primitive we are with regards to building a mechanical man or mechanical woman.
	We've been brainwashed by Hollywood into thinking that they're around the corner.
	Now, that's not to say that at some point in the future we'll have robots smarter than a cockroach.
	Eventually, they'll be as smart as a mouse, then a rat, then a rabbit, then a cat, then a dog, and finally, maybe by the end of the century, who knows for sure, as smart as a monkey.
	At that point, I think we should put a chip in their brain to shut them off if they have murderous thoughts.
	We need a fail-safe device.
	There you have it.
	I wasn't so much worried about the robots, because I know we have not made much progress in that territory.
	But in terms of... Boy, oh boy, they're making some amazing... I read a science article the other day that scientists were able to take a mouse that had learned how to drink water out of a certain thing, They were able to remove that memory from its brain, and then it couldn't drink water, couldn't figure out how to drink water.
	But even scarier, they were able to re-inject or re-download, if you want to look at it that way, the memory back into the mouse, who could now go back and drink water again.
	Yeah, in fact, I mentioned that in my book.
	My latest book is called The Future of the Mind, where I talk about where neuroscience is going to be in the next coming decades.
	And that's going to be the next big science project on the scale of the Human Genome Project.
	It's called the Connectome Project.
	It's big.
	It's huge.
	It's going to absorb billions of dollars into the future.
	It got $1 billion this year for funding from Europe and from the United States.
	And we want a map of the brain.
	That's where the action is going to be, not necessarily in artificial intelligence, but in creating or mapping our own intelligence.
	And giving a map, neuron for neuron, of where all the neurons are connected.
	Now, the research you mentioned was done at Wake Forest University and also in Los Angeles, where they've been able to record a memory.
	Now, the memory is very short.
	As you mentioned, it's just a mouse drinking water.
	But they recorded it, and then they re-injected it months later when the mouse forgot, and it remembered.
	So, next will be primates.
	We'll tape record the hippocampus of a primate, That learns to, I don't know, eat a banana or something and then reinsert that memory.
	Now, the goal, the short-term goal of this is for Alzheimer's patients.
	We need a memory chip.
	We need a brain pacemaker for people with Alzheimer's.
	So, you push a button and the memory of who you are, where you live, who your relatives are come flooding into your hippocampus and that could be a lifesaver, a brain pacemaker for people with Alzheimer's.
	And then beyond that, beyond that, who knows?
	Maybe we'll be able to learn calculus by pushing a button and not having to go to college to learn that.
	That, of course, is still science fiction.
	But recording memories is on the table.
	On the table.
	In other words, virtually already done, and now they're moving up the chain.
	My goodness!
	That's right.
	In fact, even the United States military just recently announced, I think it was a $50 million grant, To perfect a memory chip for wounded warriors from Iraq and Afghanistan.
	The Pentagon is dumping millions of dollars to service our GIs, many of them paralyzed.
	The Pentagon is creating exoskeletons for them, like in Iron Man.
	And at the soccer games this past summer, the man who kicked the soccer ball was totally paralyzed.
	He was a quadriplegic.
	At Duke University, they put a chip in his brain.
	Connected the chip to a mechanical arm and leg, and he was able to kick the football, initiating the World Cup games.
	Hmm.
	While this is tremendous PR for the work being done, I somehow imagine, I somehow imagine, Professor, that the Pentagon may have other interests in the development of this technology.
	Well, yeah.
	I mean, you know, we pay the government to win wars.
	We don't pay them to lose wars.
	Of course, they're going to try to You know, see if this has any military applications.
	During the Cold War, we now know that the United States government engaged in all sorts of shenanigans, enlisting hypnotists and psychics and mind readers and all sorts of cockamamie schemes to beat the Russians in sci-tech warfare.
	All of that came to nothing.
	The government basically wasted hundreds of millions of dollars Chasing down every single psychic they could get their hands on, to locate Soviet submarines, to locate the position of the Soviet leadership, all of which came to nothing.
	But now, we're talking about the real thing.
	With the Connectome, we're actually now peering into the way in which the brain operates.
	And we can even extract pictures, pictures out of a living brain.
	And one day, we'll photograph a dream.
	One day, you'll wake up in the morning, push a button, and see a videotape of the dream that you had last night.
	Okay, there is something else I just heard.
	That scientists have just confirmed the ability of some people to do what's called lucid dreaming.
	That's right.
	Yeah, this is very interesting.
	Lucid dreaming was once considered to be Buddhist nonsense and psychobabble.
	And there are books about how to train yourself to control your dreams while you are dreaming.
	But we now prove that it's actually possible.
	This is done at Max Planck Institute in Germany where they took a lucid dreamer who claims to be able to control the dream.
	They put him on an MRI scan and they were able to communicate with him.
	He was able to control the direction of his dream as he was dreaming and they verified that with the MRI machine.
	So lucid dreaming is real.
	You can actually learn reading these old Buddhist texts How to control the direction of your dream.
	This is not fiction anymore.
	So, in other words, sometimes things that scientists think are woo-woo things and just silly, occasionally turn out to be real.
	That's right.
	And another thing that, you know, science fiction writers have talked about is, you know, telepathy and stuff like that.
	I personally believe that the future of the Internet will be brain net.
	That is, we'll be sending memories.
	We'll be sending emotions and feelings on the Internet.
	And we're taking the first steps now with this.
	On the Internet, you can actually send thoughts over the Internet now.
	Thoughts can be recorded, deciphered by an MRI scan, and then sent over the Internet.
	So one day, entertainment may be sent on BrainNet.
	So that instead of watching a movie, which is a two-dimensional flat screen with sound, that's all a movie is, you'd be able to feel the emotions and feel the sensations of the actors or actresses as you watch a movie.
	That would add many more dimensions to entertainment.
	And I think that's the next evolutionary step of the Internet.
	It's still, of course, you know, 15, 20 years away.
	But if we don't have a brain net, I think teenagers will go crazy.
	Can you imagine Facebook with emotions?
	You'll be able to send the memories of your senior prom, memories of your first date, and, you know, blitz the internet with it.
	Well, I can imagine good uses and, like everything else that's new, misuses of that technology.
	Yeah, well, science is a sword.
	It's a double-edged sword.
	One side can cut against disease, poverty, ignorance.
	The other side can cut against you unless you have democratic control over this technology.
	So now we're talking about the real thing.
	We're no longer talking about hypnosis and psychics and mind readers.
	We're talking about MRI scans that allow us to extract pictures from the brain, photograph dreams perhaps, allow us to control mechanical arms and legs, create exoskeletons like in Iron Man.
	And record memories.
	This is all very much possible.
	All right.
	Stay right where you are, Professor.
	Yes, laughed at it, right?
	A lot of scientists laughed at it not long ago.
	Nobody's laughing now, because they've proven lucid dreaming is the real McCoy.
	I'm Art Bell.
	This is Midnight in the Desert.
	Stay right where you are.
	This is Midnight in the Desert.
	To call the show, if you're east of midnight, call 1-952-CALL-ART.
	If you're west of midnight, call 1-952-225-5278.
	All right.
	We have Dr. Kaku with us, Professor Kaku, and it's a rare opportunity, so I have so much to ask.
	Let me get through as much as I can.
	We'll get the phones.
	I saw an article recently, Professor, which said... I mean, it was always my experience that black holes Well, I'll have to read the article more carefully as to what's coming out of the black hole, but we think the black holes are not totally black.
	We used to think that a black hole is like a Roche Motel.
	had observed something coming out of a black hole.
	Now how does that happen?
	Well, I'll have to read the article more carefully as to what's coming out of the
	black hole, but we think the black holes are not totally black.
	We used to think that a black hole is like a Roche-Montel.
	Everything checks in, nothing checks out.
	However, Stephen Hawking, my colleague, has shown that black holes radiate a
	very faint radiation, a glow, and that's called Hawking radiation, and that's because of
	the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle.
	Since you don't know the precise location and energy state of a black hole, because there's always uncertainty, something, something must leak out, and it's a very gentle radiation that we hope to find one day.
	We haven't found it yet.
	That's why Stephen has not won the Nobel Prize.
	Because we have not yet found Hawking radiation.
	But it must exist, because we believe in the quantum theory, and therefore it must radiate.
	Now this new story I didn't see.
	Was it a star?
	Was it gas coming out?
	It was visible.
	Outside of a black hole, there is interstellar gas being spewed out.
	You know, black holes will burp.
	You know, they eat stars for lunch, but it's possible that they may burp and temporarily emit a burst of radiation.
	But in general, If you fall through the event horizon, it's a one-way trip.
	It's a no-go coming out.
	So I would imagine that perhaps it was a star that got too close and was slingshotted.
	Slingshotted around the event horizon, and it appeared as if it came out of the black hole, when actually it just was flung around like a slingshot.
	I imagine that that's what happened there.
	Okay.
	By the way, did you see the movie Interstellar?
	I did, and you know, it was a little Difficult to follow.
	I stayed with it most of the way.
	There were a few questions I had about it, but I thought it was great.
	And the ending, everyone's puzzling about the ending.
	Me too.
	Anneke is hovering.
	That's string theory, basically.
	The end on what I do for a living.
	I work on string theory for a living.
	That's my day job.
	And he was like hovering.
	Remember that last scene where he's hovering, hovering over the past?
	That's like you hovering over a tea garden, a pond, where you see the fish.
	The fish in a Japanese tea garden can swim in two dimensions.
	They are two-dimensional creatures.
	They can go forward, backward, left and right.
	But the concept of up, up into hyperspace, up into the third dimension, makes no sense to a fish living in a pond.
	But you live in hyperspace.
	You live in the third dimension.
	You live in the world of up.
	Looking down on the fish, you see the fish in its entirety.
	That's what Matthew McConaughey was doing.
	He was floating in a higher dimension.
	And of course, Hollywood has to find some way of visually representing that.
	So they had him floating.
	They had him floating in that strange cubical structure.
	That cubical structure is very similar to what Salvador Dali painted in his famous painting of Jesus Christ crucified on a four-dimensional hypercube.
	You can Google it, Salvador Dali.
	It's Hypercubicus Crucifixion, one of his most famous religious paintings.
	Where Jesus Christ is crucified in the fourth dimension.
	He's crucified above a cross.
	They were trying to create that visual effect in the final scene of the movie Interstellar.
	So the movie was basically ending up on what I do for a living.
	I work in hyperspace.
	I work in the 11th dimension.
	Okay, while we're on the subject, you're a co-founder, of course, of Screen Theory.
	Yes, my producer was talking the other day to a senior scientist, a lady, I'm sorry I don't know her name, At-Cern.
	We're probably going to get to interview her.
	But my producer said to her, are you looking for other universes?
	And she said, oh no, we're looking for many.
	Maybe eleven.
	That's right.
	String theory, when I first mentioned it to you 15 years ago, was still considered the oddball, the outlaw of physics, so to speak.
	Now we're mainstream, we're center of gravity.
	We're now the rulers of the roost.
	String theory has become mainstream.
	That doesn't mean it's correct, but it means that it dominates theoretical physics.
	And at CERN, where we have this gigantic machine, we're going to test aspects of string theory.
	We're going to look for the 11th dimension.
	We're going to look for many black holes.
	We're going to look for all sorts of things that are predicted by string theory.
	And so we found the Higgs boson.
	We put a rose in our lapel.
	We found the Higgs boson.
	Next, we're going to find dark matter and evidence for string theory.
	Dark matter, as you know, is the most mysterious form of matter in the universe.
	Every high school textbook is now being rewritten.
	Every high school textbook says that the universe is made out of atoms.
	That's not true.
	Most of the universe is not made of atoms at all.
	Only 4% of the universe is made out of atoms.
	23% is made out of dark matter.
	And 73% is made out of dark energy, which is even stranger than dark matter.
	Wow.
	And we hope to produce it with the Large Hadron Collider.
	This is a $10 billion machine, the biggest machine of science ever built by the human race.
	And we're going to try to look for dark matter, which we think is the next octave of the string.
	We are the lowest octave.
	We're the lowest vibration of a tiny rubber band.
	That makes up all the neutrons and protons of the universe.
	We're the lowest octave.
	But there's a higher octave, and we hope to produce it with the Large Hadron Collider.
	And that higher octave, we think, consists of what are called sparticles.
	Sparticles are these particles that vibrate at a much faster frequency.
	And sparticles make up dark matter.
	That is the leading theory as to what dark matter is.
	It's nothing but a higher musical note on string theory.
	Well, somebody put together a video joke of the parking lot at CERN collapsing and disappearing.
	Was funny.
	Is there any danger of what they're doing at CERN?
	In other words, one could even speculate that another universe, were we to get even short access to it, could be... I mean, what if it was made up of what we consider to be anti-matter?
	That could be troublesome.
	Well, first of all, cosmic rays from outer space have more energy, some of them, than produced at the Large Hadron Collider.
	So, the Large Hadron Collider is a peashooter.
	A peashooter compared to what Mother Nature can create when two black holes collide in outer space, giving out a burst of cosmic radiation in the form of cosmic rays.
	Now, the Earth is still here.
	We've been bombarded for four and a half billion years by these primordial black holes in outer space bumping into each other.
	And the radiation is much, much higher than that of the Large Hadron Collider, and we're still here.
	So, that's not the danger.
	The danger is not that a universe will open up.
	However, the Large Hadron Collider may give us evidence that such an event might be possible.
	Of course, we cannot do it.
	We're a Type 0 civilization.
	But if you were a Type 3 civilization, you do the math, if you were a Type 3 civilization, you would have enough energy to build A cosmic Large Hadron Collider, such that you may be able to build a gateway, a bridge, a bridge to another universe.
	So, this cannot be ruled out.
	And, in fact, in my book, Hyperspace, I even speculate that when the universe dies trillions of years from now, when it gets very cold, everything freezes to death trillions of years from now, our descendants, using technology trillions of years more advanced than us, at that point, maybe they're Type 4, Type 5 civilization.
	They'll drill a hole in space and leave our universe.
	Leave our universe and go to another universe where it's warmer and we can mess that universe up as well.
	Professor, just out of curiosity, how will they know at the Hadron Collider, if they successfully locate the presence of another universe, what will the tip-off be?
	Well, first we're going to look for the instant where the two beams of protons collide.
	At that instant, new particles are formed.
	We hope to find evidence that a sparticle formed.
	And these sparticles exist most elegantly in the 11th dimension.
	Now that's not, of course, opening up a gateway.
	That would require energies far beyond that of a Large Hadron Collider.
	But just the fact that we can create a sparticle, that is, the next octave of a vibrating string, means that the theory would be vindicated.
	Now, in the movie Interstellar, they had the same problem.
	How do you create a time machine?
	How do you create gateways to parallel universes?
	How do you create wormholes with our Type 0 technology?
	Well, you can't.
	So, in the movie, to get around this, at the very end of the movie, you realize that the wormhole was created by our descendants.
	Our descendants eventually became a Type 2 or Type 3 civilization, and they created a bridge to the past, because they knew that at one point in the history of the Earth, We were facing total extinction.
	And so our descendants of the future built a bridge to the past to save civilization in the past.
	And then the movie makes sense.
	Okay?
	So you ask yourself, how do you get enough energy to open up a gateway through time, to bend time into a pretzel?
	To do that, you would have to be probably Type 3.
	And our descendants live in a Type 3 civilization.
	They come to the rescue.
	Okay.
	Well, I was just curious whether you think they are on the verge of vindication for string theory?
	I mean, it does seem like they're close.
	Well, if we find sparticles, there are theories of sparticles without strings.
	So, it would go very far to vindicate the idea that there is something called supersymmetry, which is the symmetry of strings.
	But it's not absolute proof.
	There's always going to be some cynics who say that, well, there are models that have supersymmetry, but don't have strength.
	But strength theory is the only theory that makes sense.
	All these other theories do not have gravity in them.
	And that's ironic, because this month is the 100th anniversary of Einstein's discovery of general relativity.
	It was 100 years ago this November that he finally figured out general relativity.
	And we're celebrating it.
	in laboratories around the world this month.
	And yeah, it was a hundred years ago that he postulated general relativity, which gives us black holes and big bangs and quasars and all that kind of stuff.
	And it may take, however, a few more centuries before we can manipulate general relativity at will.
	That would require a type two or a type three civilization.
	All right.
	But it has held up, and nobody's poked any holes in it.
	That's right.
	Not a single hole so far.
	Not a single hole.
	Okay.
	That's right.
	It's amazing.
	The theory has no deviations.
	There's only two places where Einstein's theory fails.
	At the center of a black hole, and at the instant of the Big Bang.
	Other than that, it works perfectly fine as a theory of gravity.
	We see no deviations from it.
	All the bizarre predictions, like gravity waves, and gravity lenses, and stuff like that.
	We found them!
	In fact, they win Nobel Prize.
	Crumbs!
	Crumbs off the table of Albert Einstein win Nobel Prizes for other physicists.
	His brain.
	Do you have any theories, Professor, on Einstein's brain?
	Has there been another Einstein?
	There hasn't been yet, has there?
	No.
	Newton and Einstein are in a class by themselves, because they created a whole new branch of physics just by themselves.
	Hawking, of course, is a great physicist, but he's not on that scale.
	Hawking is trying to take existing theories, quantum theory and relativity, and put them together.
	But here's Newton and Einstein creating out of whole cloth an entire theory just from the power of the human mind.
	That is incredible.
	It is, and why have we not had more Einsteins?
	Well, some people say that we haven't had the problem juicy enough for the next Einstein, but, you know, the next Einstein could be the person who can unify general relativity with the quantum theory.
	The leading theory so far is string theory.
	We think we have the theory, actually, but it's not in its final form, and there are critics, because we have not yet proven the existence of 11-dimensional hyperspace.
	We hope to have experiments with the Large Hadron Collider, with sparticles, that would go a long ways toward quieting the cynics.
	But, there's always a possibility that another theory can creep in.
	So, that's why they're not handing out Nobel Prizes for a string theory.
	It's still too early.
	Okay, but if they find sparticles, I'm sure you'll have a big, at least a sample glass of champagne, huh?
	Yeah, we hope so.
	But anyway, the Large Hadron Collider is not dangerous.
	It's been turned on for several years.
	It consumes so much electricity, by the way, that they have to alternate with the city of Geneva for Christmas.
	With Christmas holidays, they actually have to turn off the machine, otherwise Geneva would be drained of electricity and would not be able to celebrate Christmas.
	That's how powerful the machine is.
	And you really perceive no danger?
	Or do you back away from that a little bit and say... No, there's no danger.
	In fact, we wanted an even bigger machine outside Dallas, Texas, you know, the Super Collider.
	I know.
	It makes the Large Hadron Collider look like a pea shooter.
	The Super Collider outside Dallas, Texas, in the town of Waxahachie, was going to be many times bigger than the Large Hadron Collider, but Congress cancelled it, you know?
	What can I say?
	You know, the fundamental question is, Is there intelligent life on the Earth?
	Probably not.
	Just look at the United States Congress.
	They gave us a billion dollars to dig a hole for the Super Collider.
	They cancelled our machine in the 90s.
	That's right.
	And they gave us a second billion dollars to fill up the hole.
	Two billion dollars wasted to dig a hole and fill it up.
	That's the intelligence level of the United States Congress.
	That's our Congress, all right.
	Don't you worry that that is a barrier to even 0.8?
	Well, hopefully, just because of private enterprise, outside of government, our gross domestic product is growing, the economy is sputtering along at a few percent growth per year, And that would keep us going.
	And like I said before, if you do the math, you find out that in the year 2200 or so, we will be planetary, we'll be producing planetary energies at that point.
	And we will be entering a type one civilization, unless of course, the atmosphere destabilizes and nuclear weapons proliferate and designer germs escape from the lab.
	There are some scenarios, doomsday scenarios, But let's hope, let's hope that cooler heads prevail and that we can control our passions so that we reach a type 1 civilization by 2200.
	And if we increase the temperature on the planet by 6 degrees centigrade?
	Well, yeah, there's the wild card, right?
	The wild card is that we never reach 2100, 2200 because of the fact that we dump so much carbon dioxide into the atmosphere You know, 100-year storms?
	We used to have 100-year storms once every 100 years.
	Now we have 100-year forest fires, 100-year floods, 100-year droughts, every few years.
	Yes.
	And every farmer, every farmer, you don't have to convince them.
	They know the earth is heating up.
	Summer is almost a week longer than normal.
	Every farmer has to know this.
	They have to know when to plant the seeds and when to harvest.
	Every glacier is receding on the planet Earth.
	Every major glacier is receding, not expanding.
	You would expect random fluctuations, right?
	No more.
	Every single glacier is receding on the planet Earth at the present time.
	These are not good signs.
	Well, there's a fellow named Mark Linus who has written an article about six degrees centigrade.
	If that should occur, he says, our subtropical areas would be uninhabitable for human beings.
	Current areas that are growing food for the world, for ourselves and the world, would be no longer able to do so.
	That would all move north.
	The world would change and, of course, the storms would get unbearable.
	Yes.
	Now, there is one potential ace in the hole that we still have questions about, and that is thermonuclear fusion.
	The French, hopefully by 2020, We'll turn on the first workable fusion machine that can reach break-even, that is, create more energy than it consumes.
	It's the ITER fusion reactor.
	The Europeans are bidding the store on it.
	The Europeans are putting $10 billion into the ITER on a scale of the Large Hadron Collider.
	And it uses seawater.
	The ultimate fuel for a fusion reactor is seawater.
	And realize that Mother Nature does not use uranium.
	We use uranium in our reactors, but uranium is dirty.
	You split the uranium atom, you get nuclear waste.
	Nuclear waste has heat, creates a meltdown, creates nuclear waste.
	As the people of Nevada, for example, know.
	And it means that Mother Nature has preferred to use a different energy source.
	Instead of uranium, Mother Nature uses hydrogen in the form of fusion.
	Clean, Has almost no waste.
	The waste is helium gas, which is commercially valuable, in fact.
	And seawater is basically a limitless supply of hydrogen.
	May I ask a question about fusion?
	What's stopping us with regard to fusion now?
	Is it containing the reaction, or is it maintaining the reaction, or both?
	Well, it's both.
	Take a balloon and try to squeeze the balloon.
	You squeeze it in one place, it bulges out in another.
	Well, that balloon is a ball of gas containing hydrogen.
	Magnetism squeezes it, but it bulges out in another direction.
	To try to stabilize that, to uniformly squeeze hydrogen gas is the $64,000 question.
	That's why the ITER is our best chance, our best chance to squeeze the balloon Without having it bulge out in other directions.
	And that's why we think that it could hit a break even, perhaps by 2020.
	However, I caution you, every 20 years, we physicists say that fusion is 20 years from now.
	20 years later, we say, whoops, we made a mistake.
	Fusion is another 20 years from now.
	So, we don't know for sure.
	We've cried wolf many times.
	But this could be it.
	The Europeans are betting the store on this.
	Russia, the United States, Korea, we're all part of the project, but it's basically a European Union project, and we hope to demonstrate that thermonuclear fusion could create energy without destabilizing the atmosphere.
	That could be a game-changer.
	We're crossing our fingers anyway.
	It certainly would be.
	Anything that would not continue to heat our atmosphere would be a game-changer if it supplied us with energy.
	Any dangers to look for in fusion, or once On the table, it looks pretty good.
	On the table, if a fusion reactor goes out of control, it simply shuts itself off.
	Now, why doesn't a uranium reactor shut itself off?
	How come it creates a meltdown?
	It creates a meltdown because of all the nuclear waste that you get by splitting the uranium atom.
	Even if you shut off a uranium reactor, the heat is enough to just keep on going to melt the whole reactor.
	And that's what happened in Fukushima.
	That's what happened at Three Mile Island.
	That's what happened at Chernobyl.
	In a fusion plant, if it goes out of control, it simply stops.
	The fusion process cannot sustain itself and it simply stops.
	There's an automatic fail-safe.
	It shuts itself off automatically.
	A nuclear waste just keeps on going for millions of years.
	So that's a plus.
	And the waste, the waste is basically helium gas after you fuse hydrogen.
	The steel, the steel of the plant does get slightly radioactive, but that's easy to deal with because we're not talking about 30 tons of nuclear waste per year, per reactor, which is what a fission plant generates.
	And so on table, on the table, it looks very good.
	The only problem is we have to demonstrate by squeezing the balloon whether or not we can contain hydrogen gas long enough to sustain fusion.
	That's the killer.
	We haven't done that yet.
	Hydrogen gas, of course, has been the the bugaboo of even, you know, the current reactors.
	Usually a hydrogen explosion is what spreads everything around.
	And so while we're on the subject of Fukushima, Professor, do you get any reports on how that's going?
	It's going very badly.
	Basically, it's stalemate.
	We're not making much progress because every time workers go in, they can only go in for a few minutes.
	It is so radioactive, it's lethal.
	There are lethal radiation fields there.
	And we have yet to put submarines into the water to take photographs of the melted core.
	We do know that the core is liquefied.
	It's never happened before, by the way.
	At Three Mile Island, the core crumbled.
	About 80% of the core was uncovered at Three Mile Island, causing it to basically collapse.
	But it didn't completely melt.
	It was a partial meltdown.
	Here at Fukushima, we had three total meltdowns.
	The core liquefied.
	And God knows what the configuration is.
	And we can't begin the cleanup operation until we remove the debris, photograph what the core looks like, and then begin to, you know, somehow remove the melted pieces.
	We can't do that yet because it's too radioactive.
	And like I said, that's why the Pentagon commissioned the DARPA challenge.
	For anybody who can create a robot that can sweep the floor, turn valves, turn screwdrivers, and all of them basically failed.
	So we're in a situation where we're in a stalemate.
	So it's sort of like hanging on a cliff with your fingernails.
	You're not falling into the cliff yet, but you're certainly not out of the woods either.
	And so right now it's basically a stalemate at Fukushima.
	That's why you don't get headlines.
	But it creates lots of radioactive water.
	There's a loop that cools a nuclear power plant.
	Therefore, the same water can be used indefinitely to cool a plant.
	The loop is broken at Fukushima.
	Therefore, you constantly have to add fresh water from the outside, creating radioactive wastewater at the other end, because the loop is not closed.
	And that's why they're just piling up with swimming pools, huge numbers of swimming pools of radioactive water, and some of it gets dumped into the bay.
	And so, yeah, it's not a good situation at all.
	The situation is not stable yet.
	I have heard, and this could be wrong, but I have heard that there have been flashes of radiation as this stuff mixes, you know, and you mentioned like a soup down there, horrible soup, that there have been occasional flashes of radiation.
	I'm not saying that Something is going to go into a chain reaction, but even if you get close, you seem to get these flashes of radiation.
	Do you know anything about that?
	No, but it is possible that once in a while I can get accidental criticality.
	Exactly, exactly.
	It happened in nuclear accidents at Oak Ridge, Tennessee.
	We have the Y reactor where the plutonium that was in the walls in a pipe actually went supercritical.
	So we have situations where Supercriticality, of course, is what set off the Hiroshima bomb and what set off the Nagasaki bomb.
	On a small scale, you can get supercriticality accidents like at Oak Ridge and Los Alamos.
	There have also been several supercriticality accidents at Oak Ridge, Tennessee, at the Los Alamos National Laboratories in New Mexico, where workers were actually mixing plutonium, and the plutonium went supercritical.
	There was a flash of light, a blue flash of light, caused by Cerenkov radiation.
	And it killed the workers.
	The radiation was so intense that the workers got a lethal dose of radiation mixing plutonium at Los Alamos.
	So yeah, these flashes of light, I'm not sure whether the Fukushima flashes have anything to do with this, but at weapons laboratories, these flashes of light are very much a problem.
	They have to be looked at.
	They don't create a Hiroshima bomb, but the flash of light will give you a lethal dose of radiation.
	And quite a few American workers have been killed Uh, by being flooded with radiation from the supercriticality flashes.
	Okay, well, my wife is Filipino, and in the Philippines, they're very concerned about the fish and the effect on the Pacific Ocean from all that radiation.
	Anything you can tell me about that?
	Well, in the industry, they have an expression, the solution to pollution is dilution.
	Well, it all depends on how much dilution you have and how much pollution there is.
	Yes, dilution for the most part will take radioactive waste and disperse it over a large area.
	But how much?
	After a certain point, levels begin to rise.
	For example, all of us have a piece of the nuclear fallout created by nuclear testing in the 50s and early 60s.
	If I take a Geiger counter or a scintillation counter, I can actually put it right next to your body and show you that you are carrying radiation from Fukushima, from Chernobyl, from the Three Mile Island accident.
	These isotopes have a fingerprint.
	And by looking at the radiation in your body, you can see that, yes, you do have radiation from these reactors.
	Now, it's been diluted, of course.
	That's why you don't have to go to the hospital.
	But we do have to keep track of these things.
	And sometimes the nuclear operators are very lax.
	At keeping track of how much pollution comes out of a reactor.
	But again, it's case by case.
	You have to look at the case to see how much radiation is coming out.
	In Japan, for example, there was some concern about the fish off the coast of Fukushima.
	Yes.
	Because they were dumping radioactive water.
	Now we've been able to measure the amount of radiation that went out, and it's pretty low, so we don't raise health concerns.
	But it does have to be monitored.
	All right.
	Definitely.
	Hold it right there, Professor.
	We'll be right back. I'm Mark Dallin.
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	Then we will go to the phones.
	And 15 years ago, you were on the air with me, Professor, and made some predictions.
	And unlike most of the people who make predictions on this show, you virtually smacked it right in the head.
	You talked about Information on glasses.
	We have Google glasses now, of course, if you want them.
	So many of the things you said 15 years ago, with reference to the Internet and so forth, all of this came true.
	So, I'm kind of curious, I can't resist.
	If you were to look 15 or 20 years ahead, what do you see?
	Well, first of all, I think the Internet will mutate into the next level, which is BrainNet.
	There's an enormous amount of resources now being put into teasing apart the secrets of the brain called the Connectome Project, or the Brain Initiative of President Barack Obama.
	And that means that we will record memories, we will send memories on the Internet, we'll be able to understand mental illness, We'll be able to photograph dreams.
	We'll be able to send emotions and feelings on the Internet.
	And I think that the Internet will explode, because a whole new dimension can be added to entertainment, to family get-togethers, to chit-chat with their friends.
	We'll be able to do it mentally.
	So, in the future, when you walk into a room, you won't mentally control the Internet.
	You'll control the lights.
	You'll call for your car.
	You'll be like a magician.
	Somebody walking into the room will think you're Harry Potter.
	A magician that simply mentally thinks about things and rearranges objects like telekinesis, calls for your car, even drives your car mentally, communicates with other people emotionally.
	The movies are going to be changed totally because we'll have the extra dimension of feeling added to that.
	And this will be a boon for people who are paralyzed.
	We'll be able to make them walk again.
	Alzheimer's patients will be able to have memories uploaded into their mind.
	And hopefully, we'll be able to maybe have a handle on certain forms of mental illness.
	Schizophrenia, for example, afflicts about 1% of the human race.
	And when you scan their brain, the left part of your brain talks to yourself, and it lights up.
	We do it all the time.
	You're doing it right now.
	The left part of your brain is talking to itself.
	But in schizophrenics, that left part of the brain lights up without their permission.
	So they are literally talking to themselves without their knowledge of it.
	And you can actually see that now in brain scans.
	It doesn't mean that we have a cure for it.
	We're not going to have that anytime soon.
	But at least now we're beginning to understand that some mental illnesses are caused by miswiring of the human brain.
	Not that certain parts are blown out And we have to replace whole parts of the brain.
	No, they're miswired.
	And it means that maybe in the future we'll be able to figure out ways to perhaps repair some of the wiring that is miswired in the brains of people who are afflicted with things like schizophrenia.
	So I think that's going to be one big set of predictions that we're going to have.
	Another set of predictions is that, well, we're not going to have mechanical men and women like in the movies.
	But we will have artificial intelligence as software distributed throughout the environment.
	So that ships will cost about a penny.
	So when you want to talk to the doctor, you simply talk to the wall.
	RoboDoc appears in the wall.
	RoboDoc is artificially intelligent, accesses the entire internet for medical advice, gives you sound medical advice almost for free.
	RoboLawyer will be in your wristwatch.
	You'll simply talk to your wristwatch and get Superb legal advice almost for free.
	Robo-engineer will take care of problems in your house, your plumbing.
	This does not mean that these workers are going to be put out of business.
	We're still going to have lawyers and doctors and engineers in the future.
	But the day-to-day work, the drudgery of medicine, the drudgery of the law, will be taken care of using artificial intelligence.
	These are called expert systems.
	IBM and others are pioneering these expert systems.
	That's where artificial intelligence is going to impact on our life, rather than having mechanical maids and mechanical butlers.
	We're not going to have them anytime soon.
	Okay, but there is this concern about artificial intelligence possibly getting out of control quite quickly, and even you said a little while ago that once you get to the stage, I think you said, of monkey, you're going to want some serious controls.
	That's right.
	Monkeys are self-aware and they have their own agenda.
	And at that point, perhaps late in the century, I don't know when, I don't have a crystal ball, but perhaps late in the century, we will have robots as smart as monkeys that can have their own agenda and their own sense of self-awareness.
	At that point, they could be potentially dangerous because they're going to be stronger than us, faster than us.
	And, you know, we should put fail-safe systems in them to shut them off if they have murderous thoughts or they get out of control.
	It should be very easy for us to give a verbal command to stop any artificially intelligent entity if it starts to have self-awareness.
	Now, in my book, The Future of the Mind, I even give a definition of self-awareness.
	I give a definition of consciousness, and I even rank levels of consciousness, and robots at the present time are at the lowest level of consciousness.
	The lowest level of consciousness, by the way, is that of alligators and crocodiles.
	They understand space very well.
	That's the reptilian brain in the back of your head.
	The back of your head governs balance, territoriality.
	That's the reptilian brain.
	Then, as the brain evolves in the forward direction, the center of the brain is the monkey brain.
	The brain of emotions, the brain of social hierarchy, manners, deference, The brain of social organisms.
	That's the center part of the brain.
	That's the consciousness of social hierarchy.
	We are separate from the animals for one reason.
	We do have the reptilian brain that governs position in space.
	We do have the monkey brain at the center of the brain, the limbic system, that governs social hierarchies.
	But we also have the prefrontal cortex, and that governs time.
	That's where we differ from animals.
	Let's do an experiment.
	Take your dog or cat tonight and teach it the concept of tomorrow.
	Right.
	You'll find you cannot.
	No.
	Animals live in the present.
	They do not live in the future.
	We live in the future.
	We constantly scheme and plan and schedule.
	We're constantly thinking about the future, retirement and saving of money.
	Animals don't do any of that.
	When they hibernate, it's all instinct when they hibernate.
	So that's why we have a prefrontal cortex.
	That runs simulations into the future.
	Now, how smart are robots compared to the three scales that I gave you?
	Type 1 would be that of an alligator.
	Type 2 would be that of a wolf or a mouse.
	Type 3 would be us.
	We have time.
	It turns out that robots of today are as stuck at Type 1 level.
	They barely understand their position in space.
	They have no conception of manners, no conception of social hierarchies, And they certainly do not run simulations into the future and plan for college and plan for saving money.
	Robots don't do any of that.
	They're lucky just to get out of their cubbyhole and walk across the room.
	So they're stuck at level one, that is the level of a crocodile.
	So they have a long ways to go before they have our ability, which is the ability to simulate the future.
	That's the hallmark, I think, of intelligence.
	When you talk about IQ, for example, I don't think that IQs predict Success in life, there are many people with high IQs that wind up as very marginal people.
	However, people that have delayed gratification, plan for the future, constantly run simulations of the future, plan, scheme, these are the people who are successful, right?
	They don't take shortcuts, they take the long point of view, and that's what I call Level 3 consciousness, the consciousness of time, rather than the consciousness of space, like alligators, And the consciousness of social hierarchies like monkeys.
	So, can you shorten it?
	You define, you mentioned you define consciousness in your book as what?
	I define consciousness as creating a model, a model of yourself in space with regards to others in society and time.
	That is my definition of consciousness and I can even make a scale and numerically assign a number to levels of consciousness.
	So, a numerical ranking is based on the numbers of simulations that you can run.
	Alligators run many simulations in space.
	That's how they're able to eat and trap a victim.
	Monkeys run many simulations to understand where they are in the social hierarchy, the picking order, how to defer to your elders, and so on and so forth.
	I think that human intelligence is not IQ at all.
	I think human intelligence is the complexity of our simulations into the future.
	That even safecrackers and robbers are intelligent because they know how to plan a bank robbery much better than the police.
	So, IEIQ is useless if you're going to become a bank robber as your career path.
	But simulating the future, able to look at all sorts of contingencies and what could go wrong in planning contingencies, that's the hallmark of a master criminal.
	And that, to me, is the hallmark of intelligence.
	And you talked about Einstein's brain.
	I was recently on the History Channel documentary on Einstein's brain this month.
	And we see actually nothing that abnormal with Einstein's brain.
	Einstein's brain was actually slightly smaller than normal, but it was thicker in an area where there is like mental concentration.
	For example, mathematicians and musicians have certain areas of the brain that are thickened because they use abstract thought so much.
	But what is abstract thought used for?
	It's for planning the future.
	And so to me, that's where Einstein's intelligence came in.
	He was able to see the future of physics, to run simulations of equations, so that he could then throw out some equations as being incorrect, and see that certain equations panned out correctly.
	Constantly scheming and thinking.
	That, to me, is a hallmark of intelligence.
	not IQ, which basically measures clerical skills.
	You become a good trivia pursuit person if you have a high IQ, because you can memorize trivial
	pieces of useless information.
	Well, once we define perhaps what made Einstein who he is, if we were able to genetically
	tinker with and modify, oh I don't know, You know, a human before they were born, to head them in that direction, would that be a good thing for humanity, or questionable?
	We have the brain.
	It's in formaldehyde, so much of its DNA is probably degraded, but it's always conceivable that some DNA may be extracted from Einstein's brain.
	However, I personally think that the 10,000 hour rule is more important than, quote, being a genius.
	The 10,000 hour rule, you probably know, is when you take musicians and you calculate how many hours they've been practicing the violin per day, per month, per year, over 10 years, you find out that the concert pianists and violinists have spent about 10,000 hours by the time they're in their 20s.
	About 10,000 hours.
	Every day, so many hours per month, per year, just added up, because it has to be about 10,000.
	When you talk about music teachers, Music teachers should be on the level of, you know, maybe 3,000 or 4,000 hours, but not the 10,000 hours necessary to become a concert pianist.
	I think with Einstein, he probably had a 10,000 hour rule because he was constantly thinking about physics.
	When he was 16 years old, he thought about a thought problem that took him 10 years to crack.
	And when he cracked it, he changed world history.
	And of course, the atomic bomb is a byproduct of that idea.
	He wanted to know whether you could outrace a light beam.
	That one question he dwelled on for 10 years non-stop, can you outrace a light beam?
	The answer is no.
	But when he finally got the answer, it led to E equals MC squared, which changed world history.
	And so again, I think it's being able to run constantly thinking about simulations of the future.
	That's the essence of genius.
	If Einstein had not done what he did when he did, as special as he was, do you think today we would have the atomic bomb?
	Well, I think it would have been delayed.
	I think there were other people like Lorentz and Poincaré who were onto it, but they didn't have the whole package.
	Lorentz and Poincaré, for example, thought that if you run faster and faster, you tend to shrink, and the shrinking was basically wind, the ether wind compressing the atoms of your body.
	Einstein said no.
	He said space itself is shrinking, And time is slowing down.
	Now, his competitors wouldn't go that far.
	They had the mathematics.
	They came very close to getting Einstein's Theory of Relativity.
	But they couldn't make the last step.
	And that is that time itself and space itself are distorted.
	Not just atoms being compressed, like what Lorentz and Poincaré thought.
	It's not just a physical effect.
	They thought it was a mechanical effect of atoms being compressed.
	No!
	It's space itself that is being compressed.
	And in that sense, Einstein was way ahead of his competitors.
	Now, General Relativity, which he got 100 years ago this month, General Relativity, I mean, that is just from outer space.
	I mean, people who look at it, their jaws hit the floor.
	And they say, how can the human mind in 1915, okay, come up with a theory that even today dazzles science fiction writers and Hollywood script writers with all its wondrous complexities?
	It's amazing how that theory could come out of the human brain.
	When Einstein released that, when he said, I have done it, here it is, if we went back in time and we could really read what scientists were saying, read the debate that then, I'm sure, was raging, were they all saying, incredible, great, correct, or was there a great controversy?
	Neither.
	It was a great silence.
	Really?
	When Einstein came out with his theory, the first one in 1905, he was looking at his mailbox every day, looking for comments from other physicists.
	I wrote a biography of Einstein, Einstein Cosmos, where I had to go through the magic year of 1905, when he first got relativity, special relativity, and basically there was thundering silence.
	Nothing.
	There was no reaction.
	Everyone ignored his work, except one person.
	One person understood what Einstein did, and that was Max Planck.
	And he was in Berlin.
	He was the most famous quantum physicist of his time.
	And he was the one who said, look, this guy is on to something, okay?
	And then the whole thing broke open.
	Because all of a sudden, Einstein had a champion, someone who was willing to promote his work in scientific conferences, right?
	And that changed everything.
	And then, of course, people began to wonder, gee, could you make a bomb out of this?
	And at first, Einstein said, no, because atoms are very tiny, they're isolated, you cannot magnify the power of an atom to create an atomic bomb.
	Right.
	But then, Leo Szilard came up with the chain reaction.
	In fact, he patented the chain reaction.
	And that changed everything.
	Then all of a sudden, E equals mc squared was no longer just a curiosity.
	It was the stuff of superpowers with Hitler, setting up a huge gigantic industrial complex to build the Nazi atomic bomb.
	So yeah, it all came from one question.
	Can you outrace the light beam?
	That's where it all started.
	When a 16 year old boy asked that question, and he solved it 10 years later and changed world history.
	And we still can't outrace the light beam, right?
	No, we still cannot, unless you use general relativity, which has loopholes.
	General relativity is a theory of gravity, much more sophisticated than the 1905 theory, and it has loopholes, like wormholes.
	If time is a river, then the river of time can bend, curve, speed up, and string theory says that maybe, just maybe, it'll also be able to have forks in the road, so the river of time can fork into two rivers, which means that time travel cannot be ruled out totally.
	Of course, it's still a long shot, but there are physicists who All right, we have to get to the phones.
	Right now we have to take a break, so stay right there.
	But I have sort of hogged you with so many questions, and I could just keep going and going.
	Nevertheless, I have to turn you over to the audience. So if you all are ready, Dr. Kanku will take calls.
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	All right, Dr. Michio Kaku is here, and I'm sorry, there are two extremely brief questions I have, and then it's all going to be turned over to you.
	Professor, recently I have seen news That NASA is examining what appears to be an EM engine, a drive.
	And they believe that it actually works.
	Have you heard about it?
	Yes, it's basically an ion engine in plasma form, or a plasma ion engine.
	And engines of this type, on a more primitive scale, have been looked at for decades.
	It's an ion engine, similar to the inside of your old TV set.
	There's an electron gun in these old vacuum tube TV sets, and it shoots out a beam of electrons.
	Now, that's not like the exhaust that comes out of the Saturn booster rocket.
	That exhaust, of course, is thrilling and sets your heart aflutter.
	However, the ion engine can be turned on for years, while the Saturn rocket can only be turned on for a few minutes.
	So, in a race between the tortoise and the hare, the hare being the Saturn rocket that has its burst of energy for five minutes, Versus the ion engine that is slow and steady like a tortoise for years at a time.
	The tortoise eventually wins.
	Now the latest variation is the plasma engine where you get a very steady stream of electrons and protons much greater than previously thought.
	And so that has more of a thrust than the old ion engines.
	And eventually we hope that they'll take us to Mars.
	I think that in the future When we have interplanetary long-haul missions that are standard, that they'll be ion engines.
	That time is not the most important thing.
	If it arrives there a year late, it's not so important.
	So, for those things that are not time-urgent, we'll have ion engines take us between the planets.
	But, you know, there is this problem.
	Going to Mars takes about a year with a standard chemical rocket.
	And in a year, a lot could happen.
	You could have accidents.
	The astronauts will lose A tremendous amount of calcium and other vital minerals.
	And people might go crazy cramped up in a capsule for a year at a time.
	And weightlessness and micrometeorites, radiation, you name it.
	There's all these problems out there.
	And so I think that's why NASA is seriously looking at a new generation of ion engines that generate more thrust in the form of a plasma.
	A plasma, for example, is what the sun is made out of.
	It's ionized hot gas.
	And using that to go to Mars.
	But at the present time, you know, we're still wedded to chemical rockets.
	Right now, NASA is looking at a heavy booster, and we'll test a heavy booster in a few years, in fact, and we'll marry it with the Orion space capsule, and that'll be the basic skeleton of the rocket that'll take us to Mars, perhaps in 20 years.
	20 years is now the new time frame that NASA has set for itself.
	All right.
	One more quick question, then I promise I've got to go to the phones.
	And that is entanglement.
	I've been saving these up for you, Professor.
	We all sort of know, I think, what quantum entanglement means.
	Flip, flop, flip, flop, and once together, and, you know, joined, then separated, they will continue to Operate as one.
	Recently, in a science article, I've seen something about quantum twisting.
	Now, that's very interesting.
	It's a sort of an in-between thing that would suggest, scientists think, that with quantum twisting, you might be able to engineer some sort of communication or quantum communication.
	Have you heard about this?
	No, but you see, originally, Einstein Einstein wanted to disprove quantum mechanics by creating what is called the EPR experiment, the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen experiment.
	You have Siamese twins, two electrons that vibrate simultaneously, they're touching each other, like two Siamese twins.
	Then you separate the two Siamese twins, you separate the two electrons, and the two electrons can communicate with each other.
	Now, Einstein thought this was stupid, because the communication takes place instantly, faster than the speed of light.
	Therefore, Einstein used this idea to disprove the quantum theory.
	Okay?
	Well, we've done the experiment, and it turns out that Einstein was wrong.
	We've done the experiment.
	It turns out that communication is possible, but it's a very special type of communication between the Siamese twins that have been separated.
	It turns out that signals between these two are random, and Einstein, in some sense, has the last laugh.
	Einstein was wrong when he said that nothing goes faster than the speed of light.
	Quantum entanglement goes faster than the speed of light.
	So you jiggle one Siamese twin, and the other one instantly is somehow aware of that presence.
	However, you cannot send usable information, like Morse code, that way.
	Okay?
	If you know that one twin, for example, is spinning up, the other twin is spinning down.
	You know that's faster than the speed of light, but that's useless information.
	And so it turns out that Einstein was wrong in the question of can information travel faster than light.
	The answer is it can.
	But is it usable information like Morse code?
	Can you send a cookbook?
	Can you send the Britannica?
	Can you send usable information this way?
	And the answer is no.
	So in Star Trek, they have something called subspace communicators, which use a form of quantum entanglement to talk to each other.
	Because how can you talk to a Starfleet if Starfleet is 10 light years away?
	How do you talk to them?
	Well, quantum entanglement.
	But there's a catch.
	And the catch is that you cannot send usable information using the EPR experiment.
	Sorry about that.
	Einstein has the last laugh here.
	To the phones we go.
	Actually Skype.
	Roxanne, hello.
	Hi Art.
	Hi.
	It's a real pleasure to be talking with Dr. Kaku.
	I have a question.
	It's very interesting.
	It's about DNA.
	Okay.
	I've had a theory for quite a few years.
	Oh, and by the way, I'm with the group Art Bell Time Travelers and we're having a discussion right now about all this and it's really interesting and it's fun on Facebook.
	But the thing I wanted to discuss was, I'm so nervous, I'm sorry.
	DNA, I think, has memory, not only to make our bodies, but I think it holds the memory of every human being's life and experiences and everything.
	And I think that through hypnosis, there's a type of a key that can unblock a veil, say, a very small one, where people can experience their past lives and such.
	And I was just wondering, Dr. Kaku, if you thought that maybe Nanotechnology has more nanotechnology than we realize, and I don't know how to explain it because I'm not a scientist, but I was wondering if that is the possibility to hold all that memory in those strands of DNA that we know nothing about, that we don't have a clue what they're for.
	Okay, well that is a good question about our DNA, whether it actually holds memory, that's what she's asking.
	Well, you can calculate how many combinations are possible with DNA.
	DNA has three billion base pairs, and there are four nucleic acids per base pair.
	So you can calculate mathematically how much information you can store on DNA.
	But then if you take a look at memory, there's 100 billion neurons in the human brain, and each neuron is connected to 10,000 other neurons.
	So, you can even calculate how much brain power is required to store a memory, for example, and it's humongous.
	So, there's simply not enough room in the DNA.
	However, there's a lot of junk DNA, which seems to have no purpose, and only a small fraction of the DNA is actually used to create proteins, and create the proteins of our body.
	And so people have wondered, well, what is the junk DNA for?
	It must have some purpose.
	Well, as the years go by, we begin to find more and more purposes for the junk DNA.
	And some people have even claimed that they can put codes, codes in the DNA.
	In fact, there are reputable scientists who can actually put their name, type their name on the DNA.
	So one day it's conjectured that even high school kids will have a typewriter.
	And the typewriter, they'll be able to type A-T-C-G, the four letters of DNA, and create, you know, very primitive strands of DNA for a high school science fair project.
	That is almost possible today.
	Kind of scary if you think about it.
	High school kids controlling the power of life.
	But if so, then why not have a high school kid put a code in it?
	And so this is something that, well, has been taken rather seriously.
	Is there a code?
	Is there regularity?
	in the junk part of DNA that we simply are not smart enough to decipher.
	And this is where, of course, conspiracy people and people who speculate about these things can go wild, because it's very difficult to extract codes from seemingly random pieces of information.
	So, at the present time, I could say that most scientists would say that there's simply not enough room on the DNA to store memories, which are stored in 10 billion neurons in our body, each neuron connected to 10,000 other neurons.
	However, who knows what's in the junk DNA?
	It's a big mystery.
	So-called junk.
	Some people even said that aliens would want to send evidence of their presence through the DNA and then scatter the DNA to the wind.
	Wow.
	And that would be the best way to announce their presence.
	All right.
	So over there in Washington, I believe you're on the air with Dr. Kaku.
	Yeah.
	Hello, Art.
	Hi.
	This is Tom.
	Good evening, Dr. Kaku.
	In fact, you're taking a telephone call.
	Dr. Kaku, given three sets of conditions, which I'll give you here, one is zero-point energy, free energy, unlimited, the second is quantum computing, and the military-industrial complex, what do you think the outcome will be?
	Well, first of all, Moore's Law, which is the foundation of our modern industrial complex, We said the computer power doubles every 18 months is now slowing down.
	So we're used to every Christmas having computers about twice as powerful as the previous Christmas.
	That will keep on going for maybe another 10-15 years.
	But we can see the end now.
	And therefore we were going to enter the post silicon era.
	And if we don't negotiate it correctly, Silicon Valley could become a rust belt, just like you know, parts of a The steel belt in Pennsylvania today is part of the rust belt.
	Now, therefore, we physicists are desperately looking at the next generation beyond silicon.
	We're looking at quantum computers, quantum dot computers, optical computers, DNA computers, molecular computers, you name it, we're looking at it.
	But none of them are ready for prime time.
	Now, what's wrong with quantum computers?
	First of all, they exist.
	But it's very difficult to compute on individual atoms.
	Your laptop in front of you, your cell phone, computes on clusters of silicon molecules.
	Large clusters of silicon molecules.
	They make up a transistor.
	But to compute on individual atoms means that the tiniest vibration, somebody sneezing a mile away, could in principle ruin the coherence that exists in electrons that are vibrating in unison.
	Just like an army troop, you want the army troop to all march in unison.
	That's a quantum computer.
	However, the slightest vibration on these atoms can dislodge one atom, so that you get nonsense, and the whole thing falls apart.
	Now, the world's record for a quantum computer calculation, the world's record is 3 times 5 is 15.
	Now, kids can do that.
	But here's the homework problem.
	Take 5 atoms, and tonight, compute 3 times 5 is 15 on 5 atoms.
	And then you begin to realize, oh my God, this is a hard problem.
	This is a really hard problem.
	Now, as you pointed out, the CIA is very much interested in this, because if you had a quantum computer, you could break any code in the world.
	You can break any encrypted code in the world if you had a quantum computer.
	The catch is, we don't have them, except on a very primitive level.
	You need to have perhaps millions of atoms vibrating just like an army troop, in unison, to have this work.
	At the present time, we can only do it with about five atoms.
	But it's probably, it's probably coming.
	Alright, Manoj, outside the country somewhere, where are you?
	Hello, Arto.
	Hello.
	Where are you calling from, sir?
	Delhi, India.
	Delhi, India, okay.
	Yep, great show, Art.
	I think you're my first caller from India, so that's great.
	Go ahead and ask a question if you have one.
	My question is to Sir Michio Kaku.
	I heard this thing on Discovery Channel that the reason gravity is so slow is because most of it just drains down into some other dimension.
	How correct is that?
	Well, we think that gravity travels at the speed of light.
	If you were to vibrate the sun, for example, blow up the sun, The shockwave from the explosion, not just the light shockwave, but the gravity shockwave, would take about 8 minutes to hit the Earth.
	We wouldn't even know that the Sun has disappeared for 8 minutes, because that's the time that it takes for gravity.
	However, you mention the latest theories of gravity, and we think that in the multiverse of universes, that is, if our universe is a bubble, and the bubble is expanding, that's called the Big Bang Theory, Then there are other bubbles out there, predicted by string theory, and that gravity can go between these bubbles.
	And therefore, communication between parallel universes might be possible, because gravity works not just on our bubble, but works between bubbles.
	Now, we're stuck on our universe.
	We're stuck on our bubble.
	It's been expanding for 13.8 billion years.
	That's the Big Bang theory.
	But, you know, string theory says there could be other bubbles out there, and Gravity can travel between these bubbles.
	Now, think about it for a moment.
	If there's another bubble next to our universe, and there is a galaxy there, it would be invisible to us, because light does not go between bubbles.
	But we feel its gravity.
	That, we think, could be dark matter.
	Dark matter could be a higher vibration of the string, or it could be gravity from another dimension.
	That if there is another gravity hovering above us, then we could feel its gravity.
	That's the basis of the novel, The Invisible Man, by H.G.
	Wells.
	The Invisible Man became invisible by hovering above us in the fourth dimension.
	He's invisible because light passes beneath him, but he can see us.
	And so we do think this new theory of gravity is that gravity does go between universes, in which case, maybe, just maybe, we'll be able to measure, measure the presence of another universe.
	And some people think we already have.
	Some people think that dark matter could be gravity from another dimension.
	All right.
	Magus, where are you calling from, please?
	Good evening.
	I'm calling from Romania.
	Romania.
	Okay.
	You have a question?
	I believe it was My first question, when I first called on your new show, when will Dr. Kaku be on?
	And you said somewhere in the future, so I'm very glad to see you made this happen.
	Now, what I want to know is, do you think, Dr. Kaku, that maybe somewhere hundreds of years into the future, string theory, and what scientists work on proving now, could be obsolete?
	Maybe we could learn that The universe functions very, very differently than what we think happens now.
	And my second question is, regarding to the terrorists and their impact on scientific discoveries, do you think that maybe it's not just them, like you said, also the US Congress and maybe countries in general or even big companies, no one wants scientific Achievements because everything is about money.
	I mean, you need, if you discover a new energy source, who's to say that that will be free?
	All right.
	All right.
	It's a pleasure there.
	So string theory, obsolete.
	Okay, well let's take those two questions.
	First of all, politics.
	Politicians are former lawyers.
	And in law, you sue Peter to pay Paul.
	It's a zero-sum game.
	You sue Peter to pay Paul.
	When a lawyer becomes a politician, you tax Peter to pay Paul.
	It's also a zero-sum game.
	You simply rearrange money.
	You massage money a different way.
	But you see, science is about getting a bigger piece of the pie.
	Making a bigger pie, creating something out of nothing.
	The transistor, the laser, came out of the minds of quantum physicists, and they created tremendous wealth as a consequence.
	That's what science does, from the steam engine, to the light bulb, the generators, to computers, the internet, the space program.
	Science generates wealth, but politicians don't understand that.
	They rearrange wealth in the form of taxation and lawsuits.
	Well, we physicists create wealth.
	In fact, the engine of prosperity is science.
	Now, science does say that if a theory violates one experiment, it should be thrown out.
	You know, the Nazis were responsible for a book, 100 Experts Against Albert Einstein.
	And Albert Einstein was asked about that.
	The Nazi Party was saying that they have 100 scientists who disagree with you, and they were asked, Einstein, won't your theories become obsolete, or are they wrong?
	And Einstein said, you don't need a hundred scientists to prove me wrong.
	You just need one fact.
	That's true with any theory.
	One fact will disprove Einstein.
	So far, we have not found any.
	At the present time, we're looking for that one fact that may disprove string theory.
	So far, we have not.
	It is the only theory so far that has withstood every single challenge, except one, to experimentally prove it.
	All the other theories have been proven to be wrong.
	You can take any of the hundreds of unified field theories that have been proposed.
	Every single one is wrong, except one.
	And, of course, we still have yet to find that one experiment that will either clinch it or disprove it.
	It may come from the Large Hadron Collider.
	I'm curious.
	You're a co-founder of String Theory.
	When you did that, you were what age?
	Well, I was a young professor here at the City University of New York.
	It was in 1974.
	It was 1974 when String Theory was just getting off the ground.
	There were hundreds of different formulas you had to memorize to use it, rules of thumb.
	I wanted one equation.
	One equation, one inch long.
	That would summarize all of string theory.
	That's my equation.
	That's string field theory.
	Now, my equation is one inch long, and it summarizes all the physical laws of the universe so far.
	However, I should point out, in all fairness, that we now believe there could be membranes, as well as strings.
	This is called M-theory, with M for membrane, and membranes are extremely hard to work with.
	Strings are quite easy, actually.
	Even 11-dimensional strings are quite easy to work with, but But membranes are quite difficult, and we're stuck right now.
	So we do not yet have a field theory of membranes.
	But we do have a field theory of strings.
	That's my theory.
	Field theory allows you to summarize all string theory and all of physical law into an equation one inch long.
	That's my equation.
	So you did that when you were younger, it's fair to say, and I think we've talked about this before, but young physicists tend to come up with their best work in a certain kind of age range.
	Now, I guess it's not exclusive, but it's pretty much true, right?
	Yeah, Einstein was 26 when he came out with special relativity.
	One reason I think that very, very young people are sometimes the path breakers is a they have no distractions.
	No committee meetings, no prizes to pontificate about, no distractions.
	They're poor, they're lean, they're hungry, they shut off the telephone, they shut off the cell phone, and off they go to win a Nobel Prize.
	And second, they don't have to curtsy to the powers that be.
	They can thumb their nose in the face of the powers that be, because they're after the big prize.
	They're not after, you know, politeness and decorum and, you know, making sure your elders feel appreciated and stroking feathers.
	They're not interested in that.
	They're interested in the big prize, the big brass ring.
	That's why I think that very young people come up with these fantastic ideas.
	But, you know, even older physicists like Erwin Schrodinger, he was in his late 30s when he came up with the quantum theory.
	And so, you know, different theories can come out of different people from different ages, mainly when you're young, but it does help to have a world with no distractions and no awards and dinner party speeches to give.
	Talk shows to do.
	Talk shows to do, right.
	All right, Chris on Sky Pie.
	Hello Art and Dr. Kagu.
	Hi.
	Since this was brought up earlier, I have a question relating to the people calling themselves the Islamic State.
	Alright.
	One of the greatest recruitment factors for this group and many others is the almost hopeless political and economic situation that they find themselves in, and the trauma that many of these people have experienced, all of which has been blamed on the West.
	So my question to you is, what changes do you think could be made to convince these people that the next hundred years will be significantly different and significantly better for them and for their families than the past 60 years have been?
	Pretty good question.
	Thank you very much.
	You're welcome.
	I'll take my answer off the air, and Happy Thanksgiving!
	Right, thank you.
	Actually, it is a good question.
	I don't know the answer.
	Professor?
	Well, it's a hard question to answer, because for these young people, there's a lot of romanticism going on.
	They think they're building a new world.
	They're building a world of a thousand years ago, when the Caliphate, of course, ruled supreme in that area of the world.
	And they'll justify medieval torture techniques and rules of warfare.
	It's like going back a thousand years into the past, and they glamorize that.
	They think that that was the golden age of their religion.
	But as I pointed out earlier, the real golden age of the Caliphate was an empire based on science, technology, learning, universities.
	Many of the great milestones in science were done by Arab scientists.
	As I mentioned, algebra is an Arabic word.
	The names of the stars, many of them are Arabic.
	Algal, Altair, they're all Arabic names.
	But a thousand years ago there was a debate about where does truth come from?
	And the religious people won that debate, unfortunately.
	And they turned inward.
	They said truth comes from the Koran, not from scientific experiment.
	So if you were a young person, maybe it's not romantic, maybe it's not glamorous, but rebuilding an economy, Rebuilding an infrastructure.
	That's how China, that's how India industrialized.
	They realized that science was their meal ticket.
	You don't have to tell a Chinese young person that science and technology is going to make their career.
	You don't have to tell them.
	They know.
	They'll say to you, you stupid or something.
	You don't know that engineering and science will create a new world.
	But unfortunately, these young romanticized Muslims go back a thousand years, they romanticize that period of time, but they missed the point!
	And that the Islamic Empire was based not just on savagery, but it was also based on learning, know-how, engineering, economics.
	It was a prosperous empire.
	Unfortunately, they don't read that part.
	They just read the glamorous part where they had so many victories against the infidels and so on and so forth.
	So what's going to happen is they'll repeat history.
	And that is, if they create any state at all, it will be a state of decay, of internal divisions, Uh, no prosperity, no better life, just misery and persecution is what empire they're going to be building.
	On the phone, uh, let's go to you.
	You're on the air with Dr. Kaku.
	Hi.
	Hello?
	Going once, twice, gone.
	Uh, let's go to the first time caller line.
	You're on the air.
	Hi there.
	Hi.
	Hi, Art.
	Hi, uh, doctor.
	Um.
	Hi.
	You know, we, we talked, uh, briefly.
	For just a few moments about Fukushima.
	Yes.
	You know, you've confirmed it's beyond containment.
	Totally.
	But... One second here.
	I can't even see my own writing.
	Pardon me.
	But any reasonable control and as such, if it remains so, it will change the world as we know it.
	Especially here on the Pacific Coast.
	I'm asking you, Doctor, why not use your position to be the man who actually stands up to create the awareness and action that may give us a chance at survival?
	Well, you see, there are no easy solutions to this problem because it's, unfortunately, a gigantic science experiment.
	We've never done this before in the history of nuclear energy.
	We've never been faced with three simultaneous liquefied nuclear power plants.
	Now, at Three Mile Island, the container held, even though inside the container, they tell me it was like granola.
	All the fuel rods were corroded, melted, collapsed on itself, but it did not melt through the cylinder.
	It did not melt through the containment structure.
	Now, at Chernobyl, it blew up.
	It literally exploded, and a good chunk of the core went into the atmosphere, but it dissipated, and so they were able to put out the fires at Chernobyl.
	At Fukushima, you have the worst of all worlds.
	The core went right through the containment structure, melted through carbon steel, and then plunged onto the floor of the reactor where you have a large swimming pool.
	That's where the liquefied fuel is today.
	It is still ongoing.
	It's still quite radioactive.
	And, however, we don't know what to do with it.
	We can't even send submarines down there, tiny little miniature subs, to photograph it.
	We don't know what the physical configuration looks like of the melted core.
	So you say, well, why can't critics of the industry do something?
	Well, we don't know either.
	All right.
	Because robots can't fix it.
	We're at a point where we're making it up as we go along.
	All right, Professor.
	so am i and will be right back the
	This is Midnight in the Desert.
	To call the show, if you're east of midnight, call 1-952-CALL-ART.
	If you're west of midnight, call 1-952-225-5278.
	Professor Michio Kaku is my guest.
	I'm Art Bell.
	Glad you could join us, and here we go into the final All Too Short segment.
	Professor?
	Yes.
	Okay, here it comes.
	Twin Cities, I believe you're on the air with Dr. Kaku.
	Hello, Doctor.
	It's an honor and a privilege to speak to you.
	Regarding quantum entanglement, I'm not sure if this can be explained succinctly for layman's ears such as my own, but I was wondering how exactly particles become entangled, and is it something that we can do manually?
	Well, you can do it manually if you have an MRI machine.
	It turns out that quantum computers do exist, they're not science fiction.
	An MRI machine can be modified to create a quantum computer.
	Now, to create the entanglement, like Siamese twins, You have to have two electrons that are very close and vibrate together.
	Everything vibrates.
	Everything is a wave that is described by the quantum theory.
	And so when two electrons are very, very close to each other, you can manually put them close together such that they vibrate in unison.
	And when you separate the Siamese twins, when you separate them, there's an umbilical cord.
	An invisible umbilical cord that connects these two, that cannot be seen, But, if you do an experiment on one Siamese twin, so you know that it's spinning up, for example, like an electron, then the other Siamese twin, you know, faster than the speed of light, that it is spinning down.
	Okay?
	So, information, in some sense, has traveled faster than the speed of light.
	If you know that one twin spins up, The other twin spins down.
	However, as I mentioned before, you cannot send useful information this way.
	You cannot send Morse code.
	There's no usable code that you can send from one twin to the other twin.
	But to answer your question, yes, you manually bring these atoms together, make them vibrate in unison like we do on an MRI machine, and that's where the magic occurs.
	These experiments have been done in the laboratory, And, I hate to say it, but, you know, Einstein was wrong on this.
	The quantum theory is correct, that information, even if it's random, does travel faster than the speed of light.
	All right, on Skype, for the professor.
	Hello?
	Hello on Skype?
	Yes?
	Hi.
	It's a good pleasure to talk with you, Dr. Michio Kaku.
	I have a couple of questions for you.
	The first one, at the beginning of the show, you and Art were talking about How memories can be taken away from mice and given back.
	Yes.
	And I know that right now we can do quite a few neat things with DNA and embryos and that kind of stuff.
	Do you think that in the future those memories might be able to be altered before given back to mice?
	Like say maybe you make the mouse afraid of water?
	Well the answer is yes.
	At MIT the first false memory was actually put into a mouse And so this has ethical implications.
	Let's say that a criminal records the memory of a gun being fired and somehow inserts it into an innocent person.
	So the innocent person thinks, Oh my God, I fired a gun.
	I have a memory of that taking place.
	But yeah, so there's safeguards that have to be put into place.
	I personally think we may have to in the future label memories.
	That when you have the memory of a vacation that you never had, It should say, this vacation you never had, so you don't think you had that vacation.
	Of course, that's way in the future.
	Right now we can only record snippets of memory in the hippocampus of a mouse, but it's doable.
	The proof of principle has been done.
	Snippets of memories can in fact be inserted, and even false memories can be inserted, and so at some point this could raise ethical questions as well.
	Oh wow!
	And my second question relates to dark matter.
	Do you think that in the future when we understand dark matter more fully, do you think that might alter the way we see the current laws of physics?
	Like maybe that's something that we don't understand.
	Well, we think that dark matter will alter the laws of physics in the sense that it's a new state of matter.
	We don't see anything even resembling dark matter.
	Among the periodic chart of elements.
	But we hope to have a theory of it.
	And we hope to have the theory, a string theory, that dark matter is nothing but a higher vibration or a higher octave of the string.
	But if you think about it, neutrons are very similar to dark matter.
	Neutrons are invisible.
	Neutrons have gravity.
	Neutrons will go right through you because they have no electromagnetic interaction.
	But the difference is that neutrons are unstable.
	They disintegrate after several minutes.
	Dark matter, as far as we can tell, is cosmologically stable.
	It's been stable even before the dinosaurs.
	It's been stable since the Big Bang.
	And so, this is obviously a new state of matter.
	But to visualize dark matter, you just have to look at neutrons.
	Neutrons also have gravity.
	They're also invisible.
	They would act physically very much like dark matter, except that they're unstable and they decay into a proton.
	You're right.
	It would force us to revise all the physics textbooks once we capture dark matter in a test tube.
	Professor, going back to the mind for a moment, if we proceed as you have suggested we will, and entertainment, for example, could be virtually injected directly into us, Right now we have a problem with people, it was suggested to me in an email not long ago, who never look up.
	They never see the sky because they're always looking down at their iPhone or Android or whatever their latest little gadget is.
	All eyes are glued on these little screens.
	If we get to the kind of entertainment you're talking about, what is now a problem of technological addiction could get way out of control, couldn't it?
	Well, yes and no.
	There is an upside to it.
	There is a dark side, as you mentioned, right?
	But there's an upside, too, and that is the people staring at their screens are people suffering under a dictatorship, and they see that people outside the dictatorship don't have to live like that.
	That there could be prosperous, free societies if they could only get rid of their dictator.
	And that's why dictators are being thrown out the window.
	The term dictator for life is an anachronism.
	You're a dictator for a few months before your people demonstrate against you and kick you out.
	I think it's a good thing.
	Because that spreads democracies, and democracies do not war with other democracies.
	Write down every single war you had to memorize since you were in grade school.
	They've always been between kings, dictators, emperors, never between two major democracies.
	And so as the Internet spreads knowledge, as knowledge creates democracies, as people overthrow their dictators, then people will say, we don't need wars.
	Why should we have wars to glorify the dictator when we just kicked him out?
	And so I think people will then concentrate on having a better life, raising children, getting educated, rather than trying to engage in warfare all the time.
	And so I think that the spread of democracy, even though we are glued to our screens a lot, the spread of democracy is a good thing, because the people who are most affected are dictators, who are now an endangered species.
	And that means we'll have less wars in the future.
	Okay, let's go to the phone.
	You're on the air with the professor.
	Hi, thank you for taking my call.
	I've called a couple times in the past about this.
	I just have two brief questions and then one comment.
	My first question is, Professor, if you're familiar with simulation theory, and if you have any thoughts particularly about that, Well, simulation theory is a huge area.
	Specifically, what kind of simulation are you talking about?
	I guess the idea that our universe could possibly be the creation of some other entity, similar to the Sims or something like that.
	And I think, obviously it's a bit beyond me, but broad evidence would be Quasar alignment on large elements in our universe, or the kind of way that physics seems to break down on the massive scale in that sense, or in the incredibly, you know, small scale when you get down to, like, Planck length.
	Yeah, okay, I understand.
	What you're saying is that somewhere, God has a cosmic laptop, he pushes the play button, and boom, there you are asking the question on the Art Bell Show.
	So that the universe itself is nothing but somebody hitting the play button on a laptop, and the laptop then proceeds according to the laws of physics, and so on and so forth.
	Well, there's some problems with that, in the sense that in quantum mechanics, there's a probability that the universe will split and go a different direction.
	So that you, instead of going to college, decide to pump gas at a gas station.
	So quantum theory says there's a certain probability that A, you'll go to college, or B, you'll decide to pump gas.
	So the universe splits, constantly splitting apart into different universes with different probabilities.
	So your laptop, that God or somebody pushes the play button to start in motion, would have to be huge!
	It would have to have not just the world as it is, but all possible worlds, That might exist, because that's what the quantum theory makes possible, because everything is reduced to probability.
	So that's why I personally think that the world is not a simulation.
	If the world were Newtonian, that is, everything were made out of little billiard balls called atoms, if the world were deterministic and Newtonian, then you could be right.
	Then perhaps somebody hit the play button, and here we are answering questions on the Art Bell Show.
	But I personally think that quantum theory is so sophisticated, so complicated, that no laptop can possibly enumerate all possible universes.
	That's uncountable, and therefore outside the range of any simulation.
	It's uncountable.
	No computer can keep track of all these things.
	By the way, there's a new TV series called The Man in the High Castle.
	It's about an alternate universe which splits from our universe, and the Nazis win World War II.
	It's on, I think, Amazon Channel now?
	It's getting quite a bit of play, The Man in the High Castle.
	That's based on the quantum theory.
	Philip K. Dick apparently understood that the universe can fission into two universes.
	One universe where the Nazis win.
	The other universe is where the Nazis don't win.
	And in the TV series, there's even communication between the two universes.
	And so that quantum principle that I just mentioned of the multiverse is now a TV series.
	All right.
	Thank you.
	We're so short on time.
	I'm not going to be able to get to another question.
	Professor, practical question for you.
	Do you think we'll ever be able to upload new skills to a person?
	Well, I think muscle memory may be difficult because muscle memory is encoded, not just in the cerebral cortex.
	However, the hippocampus, which is the gateway to memory, located dead center inside your skull, the hippocampus, you can in fact record signals that go ricocheting across the hippocampus.
	You can record them like a tape recorder.
	And when you play them back into the hippocampus months later, you remember.
	So this is how memories have been recorded.
	Now, it doesn't mean that you'll become a champion football player, because there are some memories stored in the spinal cord and who knows where else.
	But as far as the hippocampus is concerned, yeah, there is a distinct possibility we'll be able to record whole sequences of memories, like your memory of your taking a vacation, and then storing it, like you store a CD-ROM, and then at some point in the future, play it back, and have the vacation that you never had.
	So this is a distinct possibility.
	Not possible today.
	Today we can only record snippets of memory.
	But something like The Matrix, you cannot rule it out.
	Okay.
	On the phone, you're on the air with Professor Kalkuline.
	Hi, good evening, gentlemen.
	This is Miranda calling from Oregon.
	Hey there.
	Hi, my question is for Dr. Cox.
	I listened to a few, you know, audio things with him on it, and I'm wondering, does he have any personal theories or insights with his scientific knowledge regarding paranormal activity?
	Like, is it linked to entanglement or string theory or, you know, us vibrating on certain waves that are, you know, Could there be a connection with that, or do you have any personal opinions regarding that?
	Molly just validated lucid dreaming a little while ago.
	That's quite a step for science.
	Anything else, Professor?
	Right.
	Well, when you take a look at not just paranormal, but science fiction, when you have telepathy, you have telekinesis, the ability to move objects with your mind, we're beginning to have these capabilities today.
	You don't have to go to a psychic.
	We'll have them in the laboratory because we can now connect the brain to a computer and the computer in turn can transmit our signals.
	And so you can even have two people communicate with each other mentally over the Internet.
	This is possible today.
	And the military is even funding a lot of this research because we have so many wounded warriors from Iraq and Afghanistan with injured spinal cords.
	So when it comes to things like psychics doing telepathy and telekinesis, these two things are definitely possible.
	And at a certain level, we can do some of these things even today.
	Photographing dreams, we'll be able to do that very soon.
	The first dreams, they're very primitive.
	I saw a copy of them.
	We're very primitive.
	But the very fact that we can even talk about recording dreams is phenomenal.
	And this is all being done at Berkeley at the University of California.
	So, these things are possible today.
	And when you go to science fiction, you even have Star Trek with teleporters and warp drive, time travel.
	This is where string theory comes in.
	Because Einstein's equations allow for time travel.
	They allow for wormholes and higher dimensional travel.
	That's within the province of Einstein's theory.
	But you don't know how stable they are.
	You don't know whether quantum corrections will close the time machine.
	You don't know whether the time machine will blow up or not.
	For that, you need a quantum theory.
	And that's where string theory comes in.
	You can actually calculate quantum corrections to a time machine, and therefore determine whether it's stable or not.
	So it's still a matter of debate.
	But the very fact that we can even talk about this is remarkable.
	So, you know, 20 years ago, most people would have said, nah, come on, give me a break.
	You know, the psychics, the paranormal, that's one thing, and physics is another.
	Now we're realizing that in the physics laboratory, we can actually duplicate telepathy, telekinesis,
	record memories as a byproduct of physics instruments.
	And in the future, who knows, perhaps even warp drive in time machines.
	They are being looked at by professional physicists at the present time.
	OK.
	Interesting.
	I was thinking more along, like, ghosts, or when you get recorded sounds from people saying things, like, this kind of correlates to, like, you know, frequencies and waves.
	Does Dr. Cochran think that these messages could be tracks from dead people?
	Well, you know, people do ask the question, if there are parallel universes, is Elvis Presley still alive in a parallel universe?
	Well, actually, you can't rule it out, because it could have been a quantum transition between, A, him taking a pill, and him deciding not to take a pill, which killed him.
	And the vibrations inside his brain of taking that pill are electrical, and these electrical transmissions, in turn, are subject to quantum mechanics.
	Now, does that mean you can communicate with dead people?
	Quantum theory says that dead people, in some sense, do survive in another quantum universe.
	You could be dead in one universe and alive in another.
	This is the famous cat problem of Erwin Schrodinger, the founder of the quantum theory, that could have two universes, one with a dead cat, one with a live cat.
	So, in principle, dead people could still be alive in another universe.
	The question is, can you go between universes?
	That is the killer question.
	You would have to be coherent with the other universe.
	We have decohered from these other universes.
	So, at one point, we were vibrating in unison with Ellis Presley.
	But now he's vibrating at a different frequency.
	And it's very difficult, extremely difficult to re-establish those frequencies.
	So, to answer your question, is Elvis Presley still alive?
	Yeah, perhaps, in another universe.
	But can you talk to him?
	So Elvis, Elvis basically is on another frequency.
	That's right.
	All right.
	Doctor, it has been such a pleasure to have you on.
	It always is.
	What an interesting night.
	I hope we can do it again sometime, but you're my guy.
	Okay.
	Well, it's been a real pleasure and a lot of fun being on your show once again.
	Thank you.
	And your show, by the way, when is it?
	Oh, yeah.
	My show goes on the weekends at different times.
	Go to my website, mkaku.org.
	M-K-A-K-U dot org.
	And it gives the times when you can listen to my show on the weekends.
	Excellent.
	And it's also a talk show.
	You can also give me a call and rant on about anything you want.
	Take care, Professor.
	Good night.
	Okay, good night. All right there. You have it professor Michio Kaku
	And like I said what what a guy My guy had him for years and years and years that's for Taku
	and I go back a fair Number of years now. He's doing his own show
	I'm art Bell And I wish you across all the time zones out there a good
	night I've been looking for the answer all my life. I felt you
	there Are we eating all the time?
	Have we lost our intuition?

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