Physicist Michio Kaku dissects the Pentagon’s 2017 UAP revelations—objects moving at Mach 5-20, underwater without exhaust—and argues the burden of proof now rests on debunkers, citing decades of sensor data. He explores BrainNet (2021 Duke demo), memory transfer in mice/monkeys, and risks of AI surpassing human control, warning military-driven tech may lack cooperative safeguards. Speculating on future humans with larger brains but weaker bodies, Kaku links alien depictions to evolutionary fears, not pop culture, while dismissing psychic claims like Cold War remote viewing failures. Rogan highlights UAP near nuclear sites (e.g., 1967 Malmstrom incident) and Bob Lazar’s disputed 115-element claims, but Kaku insists only Type III civilizations—mastering Planck energy—could defy physics, demanding observable proof. Ultimately, they agree humanity’s unmatched innovation may set us apart in the cosmos, but contact risks chaos without protocols. [Automatically generated summary]
When a person like yourself, you're in this documentary, A Tear in the Sky, and for a person like yourself, who is a very well-respected scientist, to be discussing the subject of UFOs, to me it signifies that there's been a shift in the way our culture perceives these things.
It used to be the third rail of a scientific establishment that if you talk about UFOs, you are pretty much relegated to being a nutcase and the giggle factor kicks in, right?
But things have changed then, you know, because of the fact that the military is now basically releasing hours of videotapes of things that defy the normal laws of physics.
And the military has admitted that, quote, they're not ours.
Before there was always that ambiguity that maybe it's a new stealth bomber or a new fantastic device being prepared by the military.
Yeah, the 2017 New York Times article, in my mind, that was a big shift because when the New York Times is reporting about it and saying that this is major news and this is real and there's video evidence that they can't ignore,
when you talk to high-level people at the government and people like Commander David Fravor who had that infamous spotting off of the coast of San Diego, when you hear about people like that, that are very reputable, It starts to change the conversation in a lot of people's eyes.
Do you think that this is something that maybe another government from another country has created that far surpasses our abilities or do you think that this is coming from somewhere else?
Well, the Pentagon has listed, I think, five different options.
One option, of course, is that they're weather balloons or something that's an artifact of our space program.
Maybe a piece of rocket that is plunging back into the Earth's atmosphere.
That's one category.
Another category is anomalous weather events.
They happen and they have to be looked at very carefully.
But the last option, the last option is other.
That is not just the Russians or the Chinese, because these objects apparently can gyrate faster than what the Chinese and the Russians can muster, but it opened the door to the possibility of other.
They didn't specify what other was, but you can fill in the dots yourself.
Now, one possibility for other is hypersonic drones.
We see that in warfare now.
The Russians in the Battle of Ukraine is actually using hypersonic drones to hit targets inside Ukraine.
To be hypersonic, you have to go faster than Mach 5. Anything faster than five times the speed of sound is called hypersonic.
And so the Russians are now fielding hypersonic drones in warfare.
But you see, this is something just in the last few months.
These sightings, they go back decades into the past with objects executing these gyrations decades ago.
So the Commander David Fravor event that we talked about off the Nimitz, that was 2004. Do we have an accurate understanding about military capability in terms of, like, drones and propulsion systems from 2004?
Or are there things that are classified that we are not going to have access to?
Like, is it possible That, you know, 18 years ago they had the capability to have a vehicle or a drone move this way that just that information has just not been released.
So that's why the Russians have put a priority on this and they've now fielding in warfare.
We actually see them as a military weapon.
Two years ago, the United States military stopped its program.
They're too unstable.
They were not reliable and it was not worth the amount of money to put into it because the military was invested in the Star Wars program, not the anti-Star Wars program.
But because Vladimir Putin announced the hypersonic drones, then the United States military said, oops, nope, we have to get into the game too.
So now the United States is also working on hypersonic drones as well as the Chinese.
So the Chinese, the Russians, and the Americans are all working on these things, but you can see how primitive they are.
We're talking about objects that defy the known laws of aerodynamics with a technology beyond what we have today.
And so that's why people are scratching their heads.
Whose are these things, if they're not the Chinese, the Russians, or the United States?
Not only that, these objects create no sonic booms.
When you exceed the sound barrier, you create a gigantic boom that is then shatters windows and can be heard miles around.
These objects can effortlessly break the sound barrier and not create a sonic boom.
And they don't create any exhaust.
We don't see any exhaust trail from these objects.
So either they're an optical illusion of some sort, or they have a set of laws of physics beyond what we can muster.
Now, if they are a optical illusion, If an object were to move in front of your eyes traveling at a very slow velocity, but you don't know how far they are away, you may think that object is very far away from you traveling at enormous velocities.
So a weather balloon drifting in front of your eyes Can simulate an object traveling at hypersonic velocities if you think that weather balloon is far away from you.
So how do you tell the difference?
Well, you look at wind patterns.
It turns out that many of these sightings, these objects, defy the direction of the wind.
If they are weather balloons that you can fuse with a flying saucer, then they would be moving with the direction of the wind.
But these objects do not do that.
These objects can go against the direction of the wind.
Not only that, but we have multiple sightings.
If an object is very, very far away, I mean, if an object is close to you but you think it's far away, then it's traveling at an enormous velocity while it's actually just drifting in front of your eyes.
How do you tell the difference?
By having multiple sensors, radar, infrared sensors, visual sighting.
Then you can tell how far this object is away from you, and then you can say that, nope, it's an optical illusion.
Well, we do that now.
We have multiple sightings of these objects.
By radar, we know how the velocity, the distance, each time it comes out to be real.
Is there anything that's theoretical that you're aware of that could be applied, like from some other planet or some other galaxy or whatever, something that maybe we have theorized that could be responsible for the way these things are able to move?
Well, you know, when I talk to my friends who are physicists like myself about these things, they sort of like laugh, giggle, their eyes roll up to the heavens, and they say something very simple, that a rocket using conventional means would take 70,000 years to reach us from the nearest star.
Therefore, these objects cannot exist.
70,000 years for a Saturn rocket traveling at 25,000 miles per hour to go from a nearest star to the planet Earth.
That's why most scientists disregard these sightings, because they defy the laws of Einstein.
And that's why I say that that assumes that these aliens or whatever are maybe a hundred years more advanced than us.
But open your mind to the possibility that they are a thousand years more advanced than us.
A thousand years is nothing compared to the age of the universe.
The universe is about 13 billion plus years old.
That's how the age of the universe And so the age of a civilization, just a few thousand years ahead of us, that is just a blink of an eye to the universe itself.
And once you go to higher energies, the laws of physics begin to break down.
The laws of Einstein and the laws of the quantum theory break down at something called the Planck energy.
Why is that important?
That's what I do for a living.
I work on something called string theory, which lives at the Planck energy.
The Planck energy is 10 to the 19 billion electron volts.
That is a quadrillion times more powerful than our most powerful atom smasher outside Geneva, Switzerland.
Any civilization that could harness the Planck energy would be able to become masters of space and time.
Space and time, as we know it, become unstable at the Planck energy, which is far beyond anything that we can muster here on the planet Earth.
So, we physicists theorize how advanced do you have to be to access the Planck energy.
Well, we rank them.
The Kardashev scale says that there could be Type I, Type II, or Type III civilizations.
A Type I civilization is maybe a hundred years more advanced than us to maybe a thousand years, sort of like Buck Rogers or Flash Gordon.
They control the weather.
Volcanoes, earthquakes, anything planetary they control.
That's type 1. Then there's type 2. Type 2 is stellar.
They harness the power of an entire star.
Like Star Trek.
Star Trek would be a typical type 2 civilization where they manipulate entire stars.
Then there's type 3. Type III is galactic.
They roam the galactic space lanes.
They play with black holes, like the Empire of the Star Wars series would be a typical Type III civilization.
Then the next question is, what type do you have to be to harness the Planck energy?
The energy at which space and time become unstable.
Where wormholes may develop, gateways through space and time, portholes through empty space.
You have to be type 2 or most likely type 3. Then the next question is, how long will it take before you become Type 3?
Well, we are maybe a hundred years away from being Type 1. We're maybe a few thousand years from being from Type 2. And we're maybe a hundred thousand years from being Type 3. And a hundred thousand years is nothing.
Nothing on a galactic scale.
The age of the universe is, as I said, over 13 billion years old.
And so once a civilization reaches the Planck energy, that is a Type III civilization, space and time become your playground.
By looking at the gross national product of nations.
We know that most nations grow at the rate of maybe 2 or 3 percent per year in energy consumption.
Given that number, 2 to 3 percent per year, We then calculate how much energy they would have in a hundred years, a thousand years.
Now, we are about a civilization about 0.7.
Carl Sagan did the calculation.
We're not a Type I civilization yet.
We're Type 0.7.
But that means that by the year 2100, At the turn of the century, we'll probably be Type 1. And you can see that everywhere you go.
What is the Internet?
The Internet is the beginning of a Type 1 communication system.
We're privileged to be alive to see the first Type 1 technology fall into our era.
What about sports and culture?
The Olympics, the beginning of a Type 1 sports.
Soccer.
The beginning of a type 1 fashion with Gucci and Chanel.
The beginning of a type 1 language.
The number 1 and 2 languages on the internet are English and Chinese.
So we're seeing the beginning of a type 1 language.
So in other words, the greatest transition in human history is maybe a hundred years from now when we become Type 1, a planetary civilization harnessing planetary forces.
That is perhaps the greatest transition in modern history, and we're about a hundred years from becoming Type 1. So the Type 1, we would be able to control weather events and we'd be able to control planetary events.
When you think of technologies that could potentially change the pattern of progression, meaning that we're on this sort of exponential rate of increase in technology, what about something along the lines of what Elon Musk is proposing with Neuralink?
Something that would change the way a human being's brain interfaces with information and with each other?
First of all, when you look at the history of science and technology, the first phase was the Industrial Revolution of 1800, when we physicists worked out the laws of steam engines and thermodynamics.
That was the first great transition in human society.
The second great transition was when we physicists worked out electricity and magnetism.
They give us the electric age with dynamos and generators and radio and television.
The third great transition was the computer revolution when we physicists worked out the quantum mechanics of transistors.
So all of a sudden we have lasers, transistors, and the internet.
Now we're entering stage four.
Stage four is physics at the molecular level, meaning artificial intelligence, nanotechnology, and biotechnology.
You are now talking about the fifth wave, the fifth force, and that is physics at the atomic level, meaning Brain net.
Brain net is when we harness the power of the brain connected to the internet.
Also, quantum computers.
When we start to use individual atoms to compute with, not simply transistors, but no, atomic transistors.
These are called quantum computers.
They're coming.
And third is fusion power.
We're going to have the power of the sun in a bottle in the fourth stage of technology.
So Elon Musk, I think, is ahead of his time, but it's going to take time to develop the brain hooked up to the computer, hooked up to the Internet.
So the future of the Internet, Internet 2.0, Is BrainNet.
When we mentally control the internet, you simply think and all your commands or your wishes are fulfilled.
We put a chip in the brain.
This has already been done.
The chip in the brain is then connected to a laptop.
The laptop deciphers the electrical impulses of the brain and then operates the internet.
Operates a typewriter.
Operates a wheelchair.
Operates the lights.
So that a person who is totally paralyzed can now live a reasonable approximation to a normal life.
We can actually connect a human to an exoskeleton and have them kick a football to initiate the soccer games in Sao Paulo, Brazil.
Two years ago in Sao Paulo, Brazil, it made headlines when a paralyzed man was hooked up to an exoskeleton designed at Duke University, and he kicked the football, initiating the soccer game, international soccer games in Sao Paulo, Brazil.
You can see him walk up to the ball and kick the soccer ball.
And so eventually we're going to connect the human mind to the Internet.
So this means that emotions, feelings, sensations can be sent on the Internet, not just digital signals.
And that means that entertainment is going to be totally revolutionized.
You know, Charlie Chaplin used to be this great actor.
dominated the movies until the talkies came.
And when the talkies came, nobody wanted to see Charlie Chaplin anymore.
You wanted to see actors talk.
That lasted for 50 years.
And once we have BrainNet, then the actors of today could be put out of business because people will want to know what actors are feeling, their emotional state, their sensations.
And that's then going to be the internet of the future.
If we do develop some sort of a method where human beings can communicate through technology with our brains, via Neuralink or some similar technology, would the bottleneck be language?
And if so, would there be a way to create a universal language?
Like, are we married to the languages that we currently have because of our region?
Because of, you know, you live in America, you speak English or Spanish, or whatever you speak, but it's primarily English and Spanish.
But if you live in Chinese, you speak the various dialects, you know, obviously, there's a lot of languages.
And that is an impediment to understanding each other.
Do you think that it's possible that a universal language could be created?
And if so, would it be created in a way that is very different than any language that's ever existed before?
First of all, the impulses of the brain are digital signals, little blips on a computer screen, and then a computer simply tries to interpret what these little blips are, and then tries to construct, for example, an alphabet so that you can type.
You can type by thinking about it.
But that requires you to take the signals from the brain and then have a computer decipher it through the English language into text.
What about a visual language, like a hieroglyphics, like something along those lines, like where you could have a universal visual language that everyone learns at a young age?
Well, we already at the University of California at Berkeley been able to put the human brain into an MRI machine which calculates blood flow at thousands of points inside the living brain.
Once you know the blood flow at thousands of points on the human brain, you feed that into a computer and the computer prints out a picture, a picture of what you are thinking.
Now, I've seen these pictures.
They're not very clear.
But the very fact that we can extract a picture from a living brain is incredible.
Remember, this is the first time in history that someone with an exoskeleton has been able to, on national television, execute something that we just take for granted.
And that's today.
Can you imagine what's going to happen in the future?
Well, one of the things that Elon has said is that one of the first uses of this Neuralink technology will be to help people that have damaged spinal cords and help them regain full motion of their body.
You know, the human brain, we can have a map of the human brain where the arm, the leg, the tongue are attached.
So this creates what is called the homunculus.
The homunculus is an image of a human body superimposed on the surface of the brain.
So when you want to activate your leg, you simply know what part of the brain is connected to the leg, and you simply put a chip there, and by thinking through that chip, you can then move your leg.
Well, obviously, by putting many chips throughout the surface of the brain, you can control the entire human body.
And stick that into an exoskeleton and become Iron Man.
And Iron Man can fly, but of course we can put jet packs with hydrogen peroxide fuel inside a jet pack and you can start to fly just like Iron Man.
Now we're not there yet, but I'm just saying that in principle it is possible.
One is you can talk to your great-great-great-great-great-grandkids long after you're gone.
You can talk to them because all your thoughts, your feelings, your history, your dreams have been recorded and you can impart your knowledge, your wisdom to your great-great-great-great-great-grandkids long after you're gone.
Another application is then to take this digitized human Put it on a laser beam and shoot it throughout the universe.
At the speed of light.
I call this laser porting.
So you digitize the human, so all the responses of the human are on a digital signal.
You put it on a laser beam and shoot it to the moon.
In one second, your digital brain is on the moon.
In 20 minutes, you're on Mars.
And in four years, you're on Alpha Centauri, the nearest star.
And so what do you do when you're on the moon?
On the Moon, you download your digital information that codes who you are onto an avatar.
And the avatar then can roam the Moon and not have to suffer from weightlessness, cosmic rays, accidents, loss of oxygen.
No, you are an avatar controlling all the movements on the Moon.
In other words, you can explore the galaxy this way.
At the speed of light, the fastest known velocity in the universe, your digital brain waves and information about your brain and thinking can be shot throughout the universe.
Now, this is all well within the laws of physics, and this is something that could easily be done within the next 50 to 100 years.
However, I'll stick my neck out.
I think this already exists.
Really?
I think that aliens in outer space don't use rocket ships.
They don't use rocket ships because they crash, they have problems with gamma rays, radiation, food, whatever.
They've digitized themselves, placed their consciousness on a laser beam, and there's a laser highway.
A laser highway that could be right next to the earth, for all we know, carrying the digitized souls of civilizations and we're totally clueless.
We're so stupid, we don't even know that that's how the aliens move from place to place.
I mean, isn't there an option of, with a lack of better words, folding space-time and generating enough power where you can move from one point to another point almost instantaneously?
First of all, in 1935, Einstein with his student, Nathan Rosen, wrote a paper about wormholes.
So, a black hole is like a funnel.
Take two funnels, stick them back to back, nose to nose.
That is a wormhole that connects one funneled universe to another funneled universe.
So I have two universes connected by a gateway which is called the Einstein-Rosen bridge, otherwise known as a wormhole.
That's one way to do it.
The second way to do it was done by Michael Bier, a friend of mine, who was watching Star Trek one day and noticed how the Enterprise zapped across space by contracting the space in front of you and expanding the space behind you.
So that you do not go to the stars.
The stars come to you.
So think of walking across a carpet.
You can walk across the carpet, which is the long way, or you can contract and compress the carpet in front of you, expand the carpet behind you, and then simply hop, hop over to the other side of the carpet.
That is called the Al-Khabir drive.
Now, then the next question is, what's the catch?
There's always a catch someplace, right?
Otherwise, we'd be zapping across the universe today.
And that is energy.
You would probably have to have energy comparable to that of a black hole.
In other words, a Type III civilization would have the power, perhaps, to utilize wormholes or compress space to go across galactic distances.
This, of course, is science fiction, but it's well within the known laws of physics that wormholes and Alcabierre drives that are possible within the laws of physics.
Well, in Star Trek, of course, they talk about the dilithium crystals.
Of course, there's no such thing as dilithium crystals, but there is something that could energize this machine, and that's called negative energy.
Now, energy, as we know, is positive.
But there is a situation where energy can become negative and that's called the Casimir effect, which is actually measurable.
We've actually measured in the laboratory.
The Casimir effect is negative energy and that's the fuel for a wormhole.
Wormholes are stabilized by negative energy.
In fact, it was Stephen Hawking who actually created a theorem using Einstein's equations to show that all possible wormholes, all of them, are based on negative energy.
That's Hawking's theorem.
Well, he proved that mathematically.
Which means that if you have enough negative energy, then in principle, you could rocket to the stars.
So when you have these encounters like they had with that tic-tac-shaped object that went from, I believe it was 60,000 feet above sea level to 50 feet above sea level.
Seconds.
Yeah.
So when you're talking about that kind of speed, possibly that's what you're looking at.
So we're doing a lot of looking at the potential for the future.
And we're looking at, you know, what we think human beings are capable of doing thousands of years from now.
What about, are we looking at the potential different kinds of life forms?
Like, we're the only intelligent life form on Earth that manipulates its environment in the sense of, like, what humans do?
We build houses and planes and things along those lines.
We have other intelligent life, like orcas and whales, but they don't have the same capabilities that we have.
Is it possible that there's something that exists that evolved in a way far different than us that has access to intelligence beyond what we think is possible?
Do you think that one of the impediments is what we were talking about earlier, that the languages are so different?
Like, in order for us to share knowledge with people in China, we have to learn their language.
Share knowledge with Germany.
We have to learn the language.
There's got to be some sort of communication.
What if a species developed where they didn't have a language barrier or perhaps they communicate in a method that we don't understand yet or that we're not capable of because we live in a completely different environment than them.
Like maybe they communicate from the jump telepathically.
However, it would be very difficult because our brain has not developed a universal language that allows us to communicate with other brains.
Now, we do have what is called synthetic telepathy.
Synthetic telepathy already exists, but that's mediated by a laptop computer.
You take two people who are paraplegics or have problems with their brain, you can connect the two brains together, but the language these two brains speak is still English.
But we do know that there's some species that communicate without language, like bees.
You know, I remember we were filming this television show on Sphere Factor, and one of the things we did was we had this stunt that these people had to get covered in bees.
So this beekeeper who was hired to cover these people in bees had to stop the production down because a neighboring beehive had come over to investigate.
And so these bees flew up into the air to visit with the neighboring bees, and they communicated.
And I said, well, what do you have to do?
And he goes, we just have to let them work it out.
He goes, they're going to figure it out.
It'll take a little while though, so everybody should just move away.
So we all moved away, and he watched his bees communicate with these other bees.
I go, what are they doing?
He goes, we don't really know.
We really don't know.
We think they use pheromones.
But somehow or another, they're going to relay that they are not moving in, that they're just temporarily here, and that will be enough for the neighboring bees to say, well, enjoy your time here and take care.
And that's what happened.
I mean, obviously I'm simplifying it in the language, but something happened where they've worked out that these bees somehow or another knew that these other bees were not from there.
Well, when you look at ants in your own house, for example, or in the forest, you notice that when two ants meet, they exchange chemicals, invisible chemicals, and they move on to the next ant, and they bump into them, and then they exchange chemicals, right?
So we've tried to decipher that language.
And it turns out there's only a handful of chemicals that we've identified that are exchanged between ants.
And then, at MIT, they tried to construct artificial ants, robot ants.
So when two robot ants meet, they exchange a limited vocabulary.
Just like what ants do in real life, a limited vocabulary.
And then the next question is, with these mechanical ants, can you reconstruct ant society?
All of ant society, given a primitive language that exists between two ants.
And the verdict is still out, but the answer seems to be yes, that given a limited vocabulary between two ants, it's possible to construct ant society on the basis of a rather primitive language.
Yeah, but unfortunately, we humans are stuck with language, and these languages are embedded to a society that created that language, and there's no universal language, unfortunately.
And it would be very difficult to extract a mental language using electrodes because the language that we get from the brain is interpreted through English, and so it would be very difficult to have two brains communicate telepathically without having to go through English.
Have you ever stopped and thought about, like, the technology involved in the creation of all these labyrinths and these colonies and the fact that they're able to do this repeatedly?
Well, figure for the moment that they have a language, a language that is chemical, and they're able to exchange maybe 10 to 100 different chemicals.
What kind of society can you create with 100 words?
Well, if you think about it, we humans do pretty well with just a few hundred words to take a look at the evolution of human society.
A few hundred words is enough to create a semblance of human society.
A few thousand words, and then of course you're talking about accumulating new knowledge and new strategies, but just to have a society that operates, a few hundred words is probably enough.
When people gossip, how many words do people use when they gossip?
Just a few hundred words.
And we know that because we have robots now that try to communicate by gossip.
You may have seen the impressive spectacle of leafcutter ant highway full of millions of bugs carrying cut sections of leaves, grass, or flowers back to their homes, but did you know that leafcutter ants don't eat the leaves that they harvest?
So they use this to...
Okay, here it is.
Leafcutter ants use leaves as their fertilizer to grow their crop.
Fungus.
They cultivate their fungal gardens by providing them with freshly cut leaves, protecting them from pests and molds, and clearing them of decayed material and garbage.
In return, the fungus acts as a food source for the ants' larvae.
So that's really interesting, right?
Because we know that...
Fungi and mycelium allows plants to communicate back and forth with each other through the soil.
Are we limiting our ability to theorize by saying words, by thinking of words?
Is it possible that instead of words, they have an understanding of the tasks at hand without defining them with sounds or with symbols?
And that this allows them a freedom of communication without all of the baggage that comes with words, enunciation, context, all those different things.
Yeah, but any feat that they learn, okay, can in principle be encoded in the hippocampus, and then the hippocampus in turn, its memory can then be encoded into another hippocampus.
That's the point, that memories in some sense can be recorded.
Wasn't there an experiment where they took a mouse, or they took mice or rats, and they put them through a maze on the East Coast, and because of that, the mice or rats, I forget which rodent it was, on the West Coast was able to go through this maze quicker?
Well, it turns out that with monkeys, it's possible to train monkeys to do certain very simple tasks and hook that by the internet to another monkey in Japan, and that these memories can be transferred via the internet.
And so that is something that's been done with monkeys, not just with mice.
Right, but with the mice, I don't think there was an exchange of information in a traditional sense.
I think this was, if I'm remembering it correctly, this is Rupert Sheldrake's concept.
He had this concept of morphic resonance, and the idea was that you could somehow or another bestow information, like in a primitive sense, through a species, where one member of the species learns it, And that information somehow through some unknown method becomes more readily available to other members of that species that are not directly connected.
It's encoded as impulses, electrical impulses that go across the hippocampus that you simply tape-recorded.
In other words, there's no translator, there's no intermediary that translates into English and back into electrical signals.
We're talking about raw electrical signals, the raw signals that you don't process at all, simply being tape-recorded and then shot into the same person months later, and they recall the memory that they forgot.
Well, what happened was they taught the mouse some tricks, and then they actually gave it a chemical which allowed the mouse to forget the trick, okay?
And then later, months later, after the mouse forgot the trick, They then shot the same electrical impulses into the hippocampus, and the mouse immediately remembered the trick.
That what you can do with a mouse, they think they can perhaps do with a primate.
And eventually, the goal is...
Alzheimer's patients.
A memory chip.
They want to create a memory chip that you push a button and then memories come flooding into the hippocampus of an Alzheimer's person so they know where they live.
If they get lost, they know how to get back home.
They know who to call, telephone numbers and things like that.
That's the ultimate goal is to create a memory chip for people that have fading memories like Alzheimer's patients.
What do you think about Ray's ideas that we're going to eventually be able to download consciousness into some sort of a computer or something and you will essentially inhabit that rather than be a biological entity like that?
Do we know enough about consciousness that that's even possible?
Like you're sitting here across from this table with me.
It's not just your voice.
It's not just your information that you have.
It's you.
Like if I smile, you smile back.
We laugh.
This is two human beings interacting with each other.
If it's just your digital memory, and just your voice in this digital, that's great for other people to experience, but you won't experience it at all.
How far do you think we are, or is it even possible, To make you exist inside some sort of a computer or some sort of an electronic entity.
This gets us into the connectome project, which I mentioned in my book, The Future of the Mind.
The connectome project is to locate the connections of every single neuron in your brain.
So far, the connectome project has been able to take a fruit fly, Slice up the brain of a fruit fly, put it in an MRI scan, and then map exactly all the neural connection of 100,000 neurons inside the brain of a fruit fly.
That's today.
Now that's 100,000 neurons.
The brain has 100 billion neurons.
So you see how far we have to go before we have the connectome project, being able to create a digital copy of your brain.
And then, of course, you would live forever.
All your thoughts, memories, personality quirks, everything would live forever.
We vary depending upon whether or not you got good sleep, whether or not your heart is broken, whether or not you got fired from your job, whether or not you've had a great success in what you do for a living or what your hobbies are.
You change your mood.
You change the way you interact with people.
That's what a person is.
Are we...
The romantic idea of what a person is is something that creates and interacts and there's so much more to a person than just your digital memory and the amount of information that you've accumulated and the standard patterns that you've expressed throughout your life up until now.
You can have some sort of a profound life-changing experience tomorrow and decide that you're going to change your ways and essentially be a different person than you were prior to that experience.
When we're talking about a digital identity or a digital life, we're really talking about this sort of static thing that you are now, existing forever.
But isn't what being a person is, one of the more interesting things about it, Is that we evolve and that with adversity and new information and relationships and the way we interact with each other, it changes.
We vary depending upon our company.
We vary depending upon the climate that we live in, the community that we find ourselves in.
There's so many variables that we could think of as just data points, but there's something more complex about being a person.
Okay, now there are two approaches to this question.
The first approach is the top-down approach.
The top-down approach says that we're nothing but a bunch of neurons and you duplicate all the neurons and you feed all the information necessary for these neurons to calculate and voila, we have a human.
Yeah.
Now, the top-down approach met a lot of problems because, of course, the sophistication of the robot you created was extremely primitive.
People were not satisfied with that.
The thing couldn't learn, couldn't adapt, couldn't evolve, as you said.
That's the top-down approach.
Now, we're looking at the bottom-up approach.
Bottom-up approach is when you bump into things.
You learn.
Every neuron has to be changed every time you learn a new task.
And so the bottom-up approach is successful in doing things that we didn't think were possible.
For example, a walking robot.
It takes a lot of effort to make a robot walk because every single motion you have to include Newton's laws of motion, mechanics, leverage, and so on and so forth.
That's a lot of work.
However, bugs Bugs can walk instantly as soon as they're born.
How do bugs do it when our most advanced military robot cannot do it?
You take our most advanced military robot, put it in the forest, and ask them to move around, what happens?
They fall over.
They're upside down like a turtle that's upside down.
How does nature do it?
Nature does it by neural networks, by rewiring itself after it learns every new task.
So you make a mistake, well, you learn from that mistake.
You make another mistake, you learn from that mistake.
It's like what every mother says to their child taking music lessons.
How do you go to Carnegie Hall?
Practice, practice, practice.
That's a bottom-up approach.
So we now realize that human beings are both.
We have the bottom-up approach when we're children and infants.
We learn by bumping into things.
That's why babies bite their toes.
Why do babies bite their toes?
Because they don't realize that their toes is connected to their body.
Their toe, they think, is just an alien thing.
They have to bite it in order to convince themselves that the toe is connected to the brain.
That's the bottom-up approach.
The top-down approach is when we go to college.
When we go to college, we take courses on literature, philosophy.
That's the top-down approach.
We now realize you have to have both.
You have to have both.
One is the bottom-up approach, which is called the neural network approach, and the other one is the top-down approach, which is what most people think robotics is.
One of the things that we were talking about with the nurse outside before we came into this podcast is that I think that what we are now is not long for this world.
I think that this thing, this romantic thing that creates music that can...
That can create a Jimi Hendrix or that can make comedy, create a Richard Pryor.
That thing is emotions.
That thing is illogical sometimes, impulsive.
But it creates these brilliant, moving works of art that affect us.
It doesn't affect other creatures.
I mean, I'm sure if you played a Jimi Hendrix song to a giraffe, it wouldn't give a shit.
But to us, it's something incredibly magical.
But I think that if you looked at what's possible in the future, that might be more of an impediment than it is an asset.
And I wonder if with our integration, if we have this symbiotic integration with technology, that that might be one of the bottlenecks that we have to lose.
And that our future selves, whatever we become, like if we used to be a single-celled organism, we became multi-celled organisms, we became ancient primitive primates, we become modern humans, we become symbiotic with some sort of an electronic thing.
We intertwine with this.
And one of the problems, if we look at all the things that are going on in the world If we look at the greed that makes people become corrupt politicians, if we look at the horrors of war, we look at some of the more terrible things that people are capable of, how many of those things are attached to our ancient primate minds and our ancient primate instincts?
And wouldn't it be far simpler and far easier to evolve if we left all those behind?
But in doing so, We're going to lose everything.
We're going to lose art.
We're going to lose love.
We're going to lose creativity and chaos and laughter and music, literature.
We're going to lose it all because we're not going to be people anymore.
We're going to be more efficient thinking machines.
Well, some people ask yet another question, which is collary to what you said, and that is, at what point do the machines become dangerous and turn on us?
Yeah, because imprinting, when you're very young as a puppy, you imprint immediately on who's the top dog, who's the mother dog, and you're very early in your stage of growing up, you know your pecking order.
Very, very clear because they are pack animals, unlike cats.
Cats are not pack animals.
They're hunter, lone hunters.
That's why cats are very mysterious.
While dogs are pack animals, they understand the hierarchy and they understand that you are the top dog.
So when you say that they could have murderous intentions...
Aren't murderous intentions attached to all the things that we discussed earlier, like ego, like the need to breed, to control territory, all those things, all these biological functions that make competition a necessity for human beings in order to perpetuate the survival of the fittest?
All those things exist because human beings are these complicated animals that are trying to advance.
But why would an artificially intelligent thing that's been created have any instincts to advance or to get better?
We're headed toward creating machines that are smarter and smarter, and eventually they'll realize self-awareness.
Now, robots do not know they are robots.
You go up to a robot and congratulate it for doing a fantastic feat, it thinks you're crazy.
Robots have no self-awareness.
However, by the time they're as smart as a monkey, I think they will start to have self-awareness.
At that point, I think they're potentially dangerous because they realize that we are not part of the self.
We're not part of the tribe.
And why should they take orders from us when they're not part of the tribe?
So I think as an interim measure, we should put a chip in their brain that simply shuts them off once they start to question who they are with respect to humanity.
What I'm saying is what happens when they're so smart that they can remove that chip.
But what I'm saying is all those feelings Of wanting to do bad things, of not trusting people, of wanting to dominate people and take over.
Aren't all those things biological?
And aren't all those thoughts and all the negative aspects of human beings, aren't they related to our biological need to reproduce and to control territory?
And the idea of war itself isn't the problem that human beings have these primitive primate minds that are accustomed to tribal warfare, so we scale that up when we can control entire continents and perhaps even control the entire world.
So some people have postulated that what we need is a new philosophy toward AI, good AI, friendly AI as they call it, rather than having robots being created to kill other robots and kill humans, which is the driving force behind this technology, to create robots that want to help.
That want to nurture, that want to be cooperative.
And of course, there has to be money involved because who's going to pay for all this?
This is not cheap, right?
But that's ideally where you want to go.
This is called friendly AI, where AI does not necessarily go in the direction of survival of the fittest.
Right, but wouldn't there be money involved in cooperative interaction with all people?
Our economies are based on interactions, they're based on exchanges.
Wouldn't more cooperation and more exchanging of resources and more Cooperation in terms of intellectual properties, wouldn't that be better for everyone overall?
Because we would advance better.
We would be able to solve some of our problems like climate change, pollution, things along those lines.
But we live in a practical world, a world where sometimes idealistic notions don't get anywhere because there's no funding, there's no impetus, there's no desire in that direction.
So we have to create one.
We have to create a situation where we want to create robots, want to create entities that want cooperation and to build rather than to destroy.
And wouldn't it be more intuitive for people to sort of accept those ideas if we slowly but surely abandoned a lot of our biological instincts?
Like, one of the things that freaks me out about aliens is that they're so uniform.
And, like, when people have these visions of these greys...
Now, I don't know if they're real or not.
I have no opinion on that.
But it's fascinating to me that they all take on the same sort of image.
It's like this spindly thing with no muscle.
It has a big giant head and it seems to have no sexual organs.
And when I think about humans and all the things that trip us up and all the things that cause so many of the problems you experience as civilizations, It's ancient primate stuff.
Like if we didn't have sexual desire, if we didn't have ego, if we didn't have all the biological necessities of breeding and controlling property and territory, all the things that make war and violence, if all that stuff is eliminated...
Through technology and through the advancement of the species, we would look like that.
That, to me, is almost like a window into the future.
If we go back from ancient hominids, Australopithecus, and look at what we hypothesized, what we theorized they looked like.
They were very muscular, like chimpanzee-like, you know, some sort of hairy creature.
And then we look at what we are now.
We're losing our hair.
We're losing our muscles.
Our brains are much larger.
The doubling of the human brain size over a period of two million years.
Gigantic mystery.
What are we doing?
Well, we're becoming more like what we imagine those aliens to be.
Well, if you go back a few hundred years into the past, back then they didn't talk about aliens.
They talked about gremlins and they talked about all sorts of forest creatures and things like that.
And then you look at pictures, pictures created by people that were fearful of gremlins and leprechauns and stuff like that.
You say to yourself, oh my God, they look just like the aliens of today.
So in other words, there's a subconscious fear in our brains that these objects are going to be dangerous to us, and it's been with us for hundreds of years.
Now, there's something called sleep paralysis.
Sleep paralysis afflicts about 5% of the human race.
When you wake up in the morning, you are paralyzed.
Now, of course, when you dream, you are paralyzed.
Otherwise, you would act out your dream, which is very dangerous.
So when you dream, you are paralyzed.
And these people are, the 5%, these people are still paralyzed when they wake up.
They can't move.
And they have an image, an image of something sitting on their chest, staring down on them.
And if you don't believe me, Google it.
There are several paintings done during the Victorian era.
So it's part of our subconscious mind that we fear this image of a dwarf-like creature's weak, big eyes, and that's the aliens that we see in the movies.
But the gremlins, the images of the gremlins were always grotesque and terrifying.
It's more nightmarish visions.
It seems like it's more connected to the animal world than it is to some sort of a futuristic advanced civilization type thing.
I wonder if we know when human beings started seeing that very specific iconic image, the image of the gray.
Because that's the, like, I mean, how much of it is through pop culture, we don't know, but I know Betty and Barney Hill were one of the first people that experienced this You know, ironically, it always happens at night, right?
So it always happens when people are sleepy.
And the problem that I have with that is that we know that when people are asleep, when they're dreaming, the brain releases all sorts of psychoactive chemicals.
And that's responsible for these hallucinations and all these wild, vivid imageries.
And I wonder how much of what's happening when people see these aliens is just because it's permeated pop culture from Close Encounters of the Third Kind, which is the quintessential alien encounter movie.
Yeah, well, I agree with you that there's a canonical alien that big eyes and a dwarfish body and spindly arms and legs and so on and so forth.
But that may have nothing to do with the aliens that actually do exist in outer space.
I believe they are out there.
I believe that there are intelligent life forms in the galaxy.
Galaxy has 100 billion stars.
And we know that 100% of them have planets on average.
100% of the stars you see at night have planets going around them.
Therefore, they probably have life forms on them, but they don't have to look like us.
As I said before, all you need is eyesight, an appendage to manipulate the environment, and language.
Beyond that, like an octopus, I believe you could take an octopus, breed it, breed it for a few thousand years, and perhaps it'll become intelligent.
Because it has eyesight, which is kind of feeble, but it has eyesight, it has tentacles by which to manipulate the environment, but it has no language.
But I think it is possible that we could, if we could orchestrate this, grow an intelligent species from the earth that don't look anything like us.
So the fact that we see these alien creatures look just like a dwarfish version of us is imprinted in our hippocampus and our amygdala of our brain.
And we know they're intelligent because if you tape record their signals and run it through a computer program, the computer program looks for the repetition of certain sounds, like the letter E. The letter E is the most common sound in the English language, and you can rank them in terms of how often you use these symbols, and then run Shakespeare through it, and you can actually tell whether two works of art were written by the same person.
Whether Shakespeare really did invent and write all these plays by running them through a computer program.
You do that with the dolphin now, and sure enough, there's intelligence there.
You can actually see the intelligence in a tape recording of the sounds made by a dolphin.
How much of an effort is underway to try to decipher what they're doing and to maybe even communicate with them somehow or another by recreating those sounds?
John Lilly is a pioneer of interspecies communication who developed a...
He tried to come up with methods to communicate with dolphins and they had this one study that they were running that got shut down because this woman was living with a dolphin, essentially.
It filled a tank up and had it waist high in water and gave her a bed so she would climb out of the water into the bed and she would live with this dolphin and communicate with it but the dolphin was always sexually aroused and it wouldn't communicate and it wouldn't participate in any of the things while it was horny essentially.
So she, for lack of a better phrase, manually manipulated the dolphin to climax.
And they found out about that and they shut down the study because they thought it was disgusting that this woman was masturbating a dolphin.
But what he was trying to do, he was trying to come up with a bunch of different ways to interact with dolphins, but he was trying to get the dolphins to communicate with human language, like get the dolphins to say human things and teach them.
I don't think they ever really got anywhere with it, unfortunately, but he was a wild guy.
He was also the guy that invented the sensory deprivation tank.
Also, back then I still remember that the pleasure center of the human brain was isolated, and that by pushing a button you can stimulate your own pleasure center.
You take a mouse and you stick a mouse to a telegraph key, and the telegraph key stimulates the pleasure center of the mouse until the mouse dies of starvation.
So the mouse would rather die of starvation than stop stimulating his pleasure center.
Well, you know, those dolphins or the mice, when they did that with mice and rats, the problem with that was they had put these things in a very unnatural environment, like the same thing they did with cocaine and heroin with rats.
And that when they tried to recreate the study, but they gave them a much larger, more natural environment, they stopped doing it.
They stopped taking cocaine until they died.
They stopped taking heroin until they died.
They didn't self-stimulate the same way they did before.
They essentially were doing it to medicate themselves because they were in a very unnatural laboratory environment of being in a cage and bright lights and the whole deal.
When they gave them an environment that's much more normal and natural, they didn't do that.
They would, you know, occasionally dabble with whatever drugs they were stimulating them with, but they went on to live normal rat lives.
There was a woman in the 1970s, I actually have a joke about it in my act, where she was allergic to pain medication.
So they drilled holes in her head and they stuck wires into various parts of her brain and gave her an electrical device.
And when she felt discomfort, she could hit this button and a surge of electricity would go into the pleasure centers of her brain and she would orgasm.
And she orgasmed all day long.
She stopped communicating with her family.
She stopped personal hygiene.
It was a very complicated study because they were trying to figure out what to do about this.
She begged them to take it away, and then she fought them when they tried to take it away from her.
She developed an ulcer on the finger she used to manipulate the thing.
I'll read it for you because it's very fascinating.
I saved this study because it's so crazy because it tells you so much about human nature.
See if you can find it, Jamie.
It's somewhere in the 1970s, but this is from the study.
At its most frequent, the patient self-stimulated throughout the day, neglecting her personal hygiene and family commitments.
A chronic ulceration developed on the tip of the finger used to adjust the amplitude dial, and she frequently tampered with the device in an effort to increase the stimulation amplitude.
At times, she implored her family to limit her access to the stimulator, and each time demanding its return after a short hiatus.
fascinating book called chaos uh written by a guy named tom o'neill who wrote about the uh 1960s and the charles manson murders and uh he connects it all to mk ultra that charles manson was one of the really yeah it was he was one of the test subjects of uh this guy named jolly west who was one of the head guys of mk ultra and
And they directly connect Jolly West to visiting Charles Manson in jail, supplying him with LSD, teaching him these sort of manipulative methods of controlling people with these psychedelic drugs.
It's very, very convincing.
It's detailed and researched over 20 years.
It's an amazing book because of the Freedom of Information Act and because of what we know about MKUltra, they did some wild stuff.
They would set up these brothels, and they had them in San Francisco and one other place, I forget.
But they would have these two-way mirrors, and they would have these Johns go in there with the ladies, and the ladies would give the man a drink, and the guy would drink it, and there was LSD in the drink.
And so then they would observe them.
So these guys were unwitting test subjects, and they figured, they're not going to say anything, because why were you in a brothel?
Why were you hanging out with prostitutes?
And so they just experimented on people, and they did it for years.
Well, they were doing a lot of wild stuff with soldiers, too.
And not just the United States.
There's a video from, I believe it's the late 50s, where these soldiers in England, and they dosed them and then filmed them.
And it's this black, see if you can find that, black and white LSD studies from these soldiers.
You know, they were trying to figure out how to control people with LSD. They knew it had a profound effect on consciousness, but they didn't exactly know what the dosage were, or Operation Moneybags.
So this is the British Army, and I want to say this is like, 56?
Does it say what year it is?
I feel like I remember it being in the 1950s, but it's really wild to watch.
So these guys are stumbling around, 64, okay.
So put the, scroll it ahead a little bit so you could see how these guys are behaving.
So they had all these different ways of controlling it and so these guys are all on LSD just wandering through the woods laughing.
And ultimately, they gave up on it.
Like, they thought that it was going to be a way of controlling people's minds, and then they thought, no, it's not that, but it might be a way of extracting the truth, because they would abandon all their cultural ideas and all of these preconceived notions, and ultimately proved to be too blunt of an object to get surgical results.
They also did experiments on remote viewing and they would put people in front of a map of the world and ask them to identify the location of Soviet submarines.
Put pins in a map locating all the Soviet submarines.
I mean, but people want to believe that there is some, either whether it's an emerging phenomenon or some ability that human beings innately have to understand things that you can't weigh, you can't measure, that they're not exactly the standard, you know, we have the standard understandings of what people are able to do with their mind.
But we always want to believe that there's someone out there that has just a little extra.
Do you think that that might be an emerging aspect of human beings like we were talking about before, that like ants have a way of communicating, bees have a way of communicating, that it's not outside the realm of possibility that one day human beings could develop an ability to see things or to communicate without words, and that maybe that's what we're grasping for?
Well, as I mentioned, there could be a universal language, a language of neurons.
So far, we take the language from the hippocampus, run it to our laptop, a laptop that converts these impulses into letters of the alphabet, let's say, and you learn how to type.
You can type this way.
What about bypassing the laptop and being able to communicate directly through these impulses so you can put two people together and they exchange impulses to each other?
So that's an area that has not been explored, but it's a possibility because that would give you a universal language by which you could talk to people, not just exchange memories, but exchange words and communicate with each other.
What do you make of the idea that people have a connection to other people and that maybe you're thinking about that person and then they call you?
And it could just be random, it could be luck, but there's a lot of people out there that are really married to the idea that there's some unknown phenomenon that's taking place.
Well, synchronicity is probably evolutionarily programmed into the brain because if you think about Jane and the phone rings and Jane is not there, you forget about it.
It's useless information.
Then when Jane does call you, you freak out and you say, I'm psychic.
I'm psychic.
Think about Jane and she calls.
Why did the brain immediately forget all the attempts previously When Jane did not call because the brain has to get rid of garbage.
The brain has to get rid of all the extraneous information because we'd be flooded.
We'd be flooded with extraneous memories.
So the hits, we remember the hits.
We forget all the thousands of memories because it's good for evolution.
Evolution does not want us to be cluttered when a tiger approaches us.
We want to be alert.
And that means forgetting all the useless nonsense that goes through our brain.
And that's synchronicity.
The synchronicity is you remember the hits, you don't remember the misses.
Well, if you take a brain scan of the dog's brain, you realize that it looks very different from our brain.
For example, smells.
The area of the brain of the dog, I think, is about 100 times larger than the counterpart in the human brain.
And so the brain, as soon as it sniffs the presence of its master, even though the master is quite a distance away, The dog will immediately sense that.
And that's been used for COVID-19 detection at Helsinki Airport, for example.
The dogs can be trained to recognize with 95% accuracy the presence of COVID-19.
Also cancer.
Dogs can be trained to recognize cancer better than most cancer tests because their olfactory area of the brain is much, much larger than the olfactory counterpart in human beings.
So if you were to read the mind of a dog, You would not see the world as we see it.
You would see a world of smells, a world swirling with hundreds of different kinds of smells that you are completely oblivious to.
So the mind of a dog and the daydreams of a dog are quite different from the daydreams of a human being.
Well, I can attest to that because my dog has a What's the best way to describe this?
He's got a fox friend.
The fox friend visits the yard and shits in the yard, and my dog loves to roll around in the fox shit.
So the other day, I let him out in the yard, and he's in the house, and I don't think anything of it, but my wife goes, what is on his neck?
And I look, and he's just smeared all over his chest and his neck, and I go, oh, gee, I know what it is before I even smell it.
So I go over to him and smell it.
It's horrible.
He's rolled in fox shit.
So not only is his sense of smell far superior to ours, but it's very different because he liked that smell and he wanted to get it all over him for some strange reason.
I don't understand what that does.
Maybe it hides his smell, he thinks, from other animals.
Maybe it's so strong that he can sneak up on squirrels because they don't smell him.
Right, but didn't we evolve that way because of the brain and tools and our ability to cook food and all these different things that sort of slowly but surely weakened our physical body?
This is what I was talking about when I said that if you go back to look at ancient hominids and then you extrapolate and you think about what we're going to look like in a million years, don't you think we would probably look like those aliens?
Well, I tend to think that all those science fiction stories of humans having gigantic heads and small, spindly bodies is wrong, because we have stopped evolving.
There's no evolutionary pressure on us anymore.
You can have kids anywhere on the planet Earth.
There used to be bottlenecks, like Australia.
There used to be bottlenecks where evolution speeded up.
That's why evolution speeded up in Australia, because they were cut off from the mainstream evolution in Eurasia.
I think we're stuck because there's no evolutionary pressure, perhaps at the molecular level, to be healthy.
Nobody wants to marry a sick person.
So there's always an evolutionary pressure not to mate with a sick person.
But if the person is reasonably healthy and, you know, makes a moderate good living, then you want to mate with that person and keep evolution going, and there's no evolutionary pressure.
There was evolutionary pressure for us to have a big brain because we have nothing else going for us, right?
So that's why we have a big brain.
But there's no evolutionary pressure to do anything else with the body.
And that's why I think that in the main, gross anatomical features have stopped evolving.
Chemically, we're still evolving because we don't mate with sick people.
But other than that, I think that for the most part, evolution has stopped.
And as time goes on, and as we continue this mating with beautiful people that are healthy, don't you think there's at least some members of the human race that are experiencing some form of evolution?
And maybe that will all be radically accelerated by technology when we integrate.
When and if we decide to integrate via Neuralink or something along those lines, will that change the course of our advancement?
Because when we're thinking about evolution, we're thinking about some sort of an improvement and a better adapting to our circumstances and environment.
That's the difference between us as we are now versus ancient hominids with no language.
I think on a scale of, let's say, 200 years, It may be possible for us to mentally enhance ourselves, increase our memory, our capabilities, live on other planets, for example, by enhancing the human being because that's what we do.
So do you think that that would be the solution to the bottleneck?
So if we are right now sort of stagnant in the terms of natural evolution, That's some sort of a technological evolution, whether it's through things like gene manipulation, like CRISPR or the like, or some new, not yet invented technology that will be able to design a better human being.
You know, in science fiction stories that I used to read as a kid, the human of the future has a gigantic head and very, very spindly organs of the body with a huge head to support.
But you see, there's no evolutionary pressure in that direction.
People do not want to mate with somebody with a gigantic head.
There's no pressure in that direction.
I think in the future, on the other hand, when we have artificial enhancement of the human body, we will enhance ourselves to look better looking.
Not ugly like gigantic heads, but stronger supermen and superwomen rather than these deformed creatures from science fiction.
But isn't that because we have this biological imperative to breed naturally, the way humans Animals do.
The survival of the fittest aspect of it.
The fact that the bigger, stronger animals breed before the weaker ones.
And that we are sort of trapped in that dynamic by our biology, but we could escape that.
If we are willing to abandon that method of reproduction and that would make us look like the aliens, that we would be these genderless, you know, almost like, you know, muscle-less things and that by integrating with technology And by having the satisfaction,
being able to satisfy all of those biological imperatives, like the need for breeding, sex, all those things, if all those things are eliminated and we come up with something that's far superior than that, and it exists technologically or electronically or whatever it is, wouldn't that be a way to solve that issue?
In other words, they can get rid of embryos that have to be implanted.
This is through, you know, the insemination takes place outside the body.
You can analyze the genes and discard the ones that you don't like.
And that's today.
This has been going on for decades in the Jewish community.
Now it's pretty much available commercially.
And I think in the future, then you're talking about evolution being changed at the chemical level, that genetic diseases like hemophilia and cystic fibrosis for Europeans and sickle cell anemia for African Americans.
These genetic diseases could deliberately be eliminated by choice.
However, the trick is to find which genes correlate with which things, okay?
Behavior is very complicated because every behavior probably has many genetic links.
If you take two twins...
Come here.
If you take two twins and take a look at their life history and so on and so forth, you realize that about 50% of their behavior is genetically programmed and 50% is not genetically programmed.
So even with two identical twins, behavior is actually quite difficult.
It's a combination of many factors.
But in the future, if we get better at this, Then that opens the possibility of people choosing which traits they want in their own family tree to propagate.
So this is called gene therapy, and there's two kinds of gene therapy, somatic gene therapy and the gene therapy where you can actually change the genetic heritage of your lineage so that that gene that's afflicted your family for centuries can now be totally eliminated.
But when you extrapolate that kind of technology and that kind of ability, ultimately, if you look at 100 years from now or 500 years from now, where do you think this goes?
I mean, maybe we'll put some restrictions on it in this country, but I would imagine that there'd be other countries if they had access to that technology and they wanted to create a superior version of a human being.
I mean, think about the horrors that Hitler created in Germany because he was trying to create the Aryan race.
Wasn't there, there was an attempt at one point in time to combine human beings with chimpanzees to create like a super soldier?
Or at least there was, if it wasn't experimental, it was theoretical, they were trying to see if it was possible.
See if we can find anything about that.
I want to say that was scientific ethics and Stalin's ape-man super wars.
That's what it was.
It was Stalin.
So there was some sort of, at least an attempt, I mean I don't think, obviously it never worked, but I think he was trying to figure out a way if he could combine humans and apes and create a superior soldier.
By the way, when you take a look at the movie Planet of the Apes, the recent versions of the movie are actually becoming possible in the sense that we know the complete genome of chimpanzees, we know the complete genome of humans, and we look where they're different.
And they're only different in a very few select places.
We are genetically very close to the chimpanzee with our genes.
We separated from the chimpanzees six million years ago.
And we have many of the same genes.
The genes that differ are the genes for manual dexterity, which we have and chimpanzees don't have very much, vocal cords, and of course, the size of the brain.
But we've located them.
We know which genes created, in some sense, the big brain, better vocalization, and manual dexterity.
So it is conceivable, though we can't do it today, conceivable that something like Planet of the Apes may be possible.
So like what Stalin theorized could be something that we could introduce human specific characteristics into apes and they could create like a super soldier.
We're not there yet, but sooner or later we will be at the point where we have to look at the ethics of what happens when we transfer genes between species.
Well, I mean, we need to look at the ethics of what happens when we experiment with makeup on, you know, animals, because we're still doing things along those lines.
They're still doing all sorts of weird animal studies that may or may not be necessary.
Well, the good aspect is that you can take certain organs of pigs that are compatible with humans and therefore extend the lifespan of people that have fatal diseases.
You're a really great science communicator, and I know you've been doing this for a long time, but is it just a natural thing that you maintain this enthusiasm for all this new information?
Have you always been a person, though, that has not just been interested in these ideas, but also been interested in illustrating them to other people in a way that's comprehensible?
And so this idea of explaining the mind of God, do you think that we're going to ever come to a point as human beings where we can understand the creative force of the universe of everything?
And that certainly exists with the human race, but it seems to exist with just the creation of the universe itself, from the Big Bang Theory to stars exploding, creating carbon, which is the source of all carbon-based life forms like us.
All these things are constantly becoming more and more complex.
Well, one of the fundamental paradoxes of the universe is the universe is based on a simple number of constants, like the speed of light, the mass of a proton.
But where do these numbers come from?
These numbers are tuned, tuned like a radio, to be exactly those frequencies and energies which make life possible.
If the nuclear force were a little bit stronger, the sun would have burnt out billions of years ago, and we wouldn't be here talking about this.
If the nuclear force were a little bit weaker, the sun would never ignite it at all, and we still wouldn't be here.
Everything is just right to be tuned to allow for life.
So when I was in second grade, I'll never forget my elementary school teacher said, Quote, God so loved the earth that he put the earth just right from the sun.
Not too close, oceans would boil.
Not too far, the oceans would freeze.
And I said to myself, my God, that's right.
The earth is tuned, tuned just right to allow for life.
The nuclear force is tuned just right.
If gravity were stronger, the universe would have been blown apart billions of years ago.
The universe is tuned just right to allow for life.
So, my elementary school teacher said, therefore, God exists.
Well, now we have discovered thousands of planets which are too close.
Which are too far from the Mother Sun, and there's no life as we know it on these planets.
So in other words, it's a crapshoot that there are probably billions and billions of planets out there, but only a handful of them have things just right from where they should be.
Probably not, because on average, well, first of all, we've discovered 5,000 planets orbiting other stars, and of the 5,000 planets, maybe 20% of them are Earth-like, and our galaxy contains 100 billion stars, each one on average with one planet or more going around it.
So the probability of life in the galaxy is almost 100%.
Yeah, that's what I was getting to, because all the bottlenecks, all the issues that keep all the other animals on this planet besides us from being the intelligent, manipulative creatures that we are, the way we manipulate our environment, I mean, and our constant thirst for innovation, that doesn't seem to exist in other animals.
But there's enough planets out there that it's most likely common in the universe for some sort of an intelligent, innovative species to exist in not just one planet, but maybe an infinite number of planets.
Either before you get hit with an asteroid or become one of those societies, what is it, level one, where you're able to do something about supervolcanoes.
And then we need to eventually become interstellar so that we can escape.
If our star burns out, if there's a supernova in a nearby galaxy, if there's something that happens that kills us all, we at least can propagate the universe.
How do you think the human race would handle it if we were confronted with just complete absolute evidence that intelligent life exists on another planet and they have the capability of coming here?
Well, everyone thinks that when a flying saucer lands on the White House lawn and the aliens come out promising advanced technology for all of us, that there are protocols.
Protocols.
Who's going to be contacted first?
Secretary of Defense, the Vice President, so on and so forth, the United Nations?
Nope.
There's nothing.
There's no protocol for us to confront what happens when an extraterrestrial civilization lands on the planet Earth and announces its existence.
If anything, there'll be chaos.
Different planets will try to angle for an advantage.
They'll try to be friendly with the aliens to the exclusion of their enemies.
Don't you think that the technological advantage that Cortez had over the Aztecs is also—there's a biological similarity.
They were not much different from each other.
They were the same species.
We would be dealing with something that would be akin to us observing ant colonies or us observing some sort of primitive life form.
It would be far superior.
It wouldn't be like other dolphins cruising in on a new pod of dolphins that didn't know any better and taking all their stuff, which is essentially what happened when Cortez met Montezuma.
What do you make of the stories and reports of nuclear weapons facilities being shut down when there was a sighting and that these things hovered over these nuclear facilities and they shut them down?
And in the presence of a glowing ball in the air, so people put two and two together and said, maybe the aliens want to neutralize our ICBMs for the hell of it.
We don't know.
All we know is that these are military men, these are military-grade equipment, there's plenty of documentation, and I think there's 120 military men over the years who've said that there are things like this at other missile bases.
So it could be random that the machines and that all the ICBMs shut down at the same time that they're being visited by an unexplained aerial phenomenon.
But if you were an intelligent species that had an eye on Earth and you're like...
They're coming along, but they're kind of crazy.
They're wild, territorial apes with thermonuclear weapons, and they get jealous and greedy, and some of them are evil sociopaths, and they lack moral intelligence, and they do crazy stuff.
We have to just make sure that they don't destroy themselves.
Because one of the things about UFO lore that I find fascinating is the uptick, the generally agreed upon uptick that happened after the bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Like that those bombs were dropped and that once they realized that we not only had nuclear capability but that we were willing to murder hundreds of thousands of people.
Nothing known to science can completely destroy a type 1 civilization unless there's a virus of some sort because they have no weapons that can do that.
Once you're type 1, you have nuclear weapons, you discover element 92. As a Type 0 civilization, you discover element 1, 2, 3, 4. What is element 92?
So once you go up the scale and you're Type 1, you eventually, inevitably, hit element 92, which is uranium, which has a finite critical mass, about 20 pounds, and you're able to create a nuclear weapon.
And that's at the instant that you have become a Type 1 civilization.
So if I was an alien with an advanced civilization, I would monitor those planets that are on the verge of becoming Type 1 because those are the planets that have the capability of discovering element 92. And once they did discover element 92 and implemented it in warfare, then I would think if you were really concerned, that would be the time to step in.
But there is a logical basis to thinking about that because we are about to make the greatest transition in human history from Type 0 to Type 1. Are you aware of the story of Bob Lazar?
He's the guy that supposedly worked at Area S-4, and he worked on back engineering spacecrafts.
And this was in the late 1980s, and George Knapp had him on television, and he discussed it because he was concerned that they were going to...
Possibly have him killed because he had access to this information.
He worked at Los Alamos labs and he was a propulsions expert and they brought him on board to try to back-engineer this craft.
It's one of the most famous stories in UFO folklore because there's a lot of chicanery involved.
It's hard to know what's true and what's not true.
But one of the things that he said was that this alien civilization that created the spacecraft had harnessed a stable version of Element 115. And he talked about this in the late 80s.
And I don't believe they isolated Element 115 outside of it being theoretical.
I don't think they isolated it until somewhere in the 2000s.
The only thing that they have pointed to as evidence is, and it's not from this particular situation with Bob Lazar, but they've found objects that are made in a very sophisticated manner, some sort of a form of metallurgy.
No, I've heard that some people claim that they've been able to get globs of melted metal when a flying saucer landed, and among the debris they saw some pieces of melted metal.
But these have never been analyzed to my degree.
We should put them through a spectroscope to see what they're made of.
And it tends to be unstable, and it does not seem to have any magical properties, but it's actually been created very briefly with our particle accelerators.
I see people have looked for what are called metastable states that are transuranic, that is beyond uranium.
Some people have theorized that way beyond uranium, there's an island of stability so that these elements are stable and you can make maybe bombs out of them.
So the military was interested in that concept.
But so far, no one's ever seen this island of stability that's way out there.
What he was trying to say is that this extraterrestrial civilization had either developed or was in possession of a stable version of 115 and through that stable version of 115 they were able to distort gravity and that that's how that thing manipulated the environment around it to move at insane rates of speed.
And what's interesting is, what he described, they actually observed on one of the videos that the government had gotten from fighter jets.
This is it right here.
This thing right here on this table, that is a recreation of what Bob Lazar had.
This is a guy named...
It's designed by Perry.
The E in Perry is like a 3, I believe.
And he's created this artistic version that is a recreation of what Bob Lazar described as seeing at Area S4. And what Bob Lazar says is this thing...
Turns sideways, or turns like, instead of being perpendicular, or parallel rather, it goes up and down, and then moves at insane rates of speed.
And it uses this element, obviously this sounds like crazy talk, He uses this element to bend gravity around it.
And the way he described it was as if you were taking a bowling ball and placing it in the center of a mattress, that the weight of the bowling ball would push down and make everything else come around it.
All I know is that in gravity theory, there's something called the equivalence principle, and that pieces of matter of the same weight are basically, operate the same under gravity.
Everything falls at the same rate.
If I have a piece of metal here, a gigantic piece of metal or a small piece of metal, they both fall at 32 feet per second squared.
Right.
So if he claimed to have a new element, it would also fall at 32 feet per second squared.
However, if it's possible that you are a Type III civilization, It's possible to have energy on a scale that is incomprehensible by our standards, and then you can start to manipulate gravity at will, okay?
One of the things that I'm really interested in is supposedly there is evidence that hasn't been released.
There's video evidence and photographic evidence that the government is in possession of.
Christopher Mellon, who formerly of the Department of Defense, he discussed it, that there's some really high resolution, fascinating videos and photographs And that what we've seen is just a drop in the bucket and that the government is in possession of much more of this stuff.
Well, no, but the military now admits that there is much more data out there that they have not been released.
And their pilots many times shut off their cameras because no one would believe them, but they would report it verbally, but there's no record of it because they realized people would laugh at them.
So the military has now issued a statement saying that pilots should report these things rather than simply erase these things.
So there's a lot of stuff out there.
In fact, there's one report that said that these would go on for days.
For days, these objects would be flying around, not just one second or whatever.
So, yeah, there's a lot of stuff that's been not released to the public.
And to me, it means a lot that someone like yourself, who is a very respected physicist, is willing to entertain these thoughts and discuss it with people.
And I'm glad we're in a new era where that's possible.