Ep. 469 dissects institutional "stupidity"—from the U.S. government’s 1898 aviation failure to Obama’s 2016 MIT speech on "different realities," framing media echo chambers as enablers of absurdity, like CNN’s mascara-guns debate. It contrasts decentralized market truth (Buffett’s hedge fund bets) with leftist monopolization of dissent, then pivots to Michio Kaku’s Future of Humanity, detailing SpaceX’s asteroid mining for Mars colonization by 2030 and speculative tech like digitizing consciousness via lasers—while dismissing alien invasion fears. The episode ends with a critique of Musk/Bezos’ space ambitions as patriarchal, clashing with Kaku’s vision of humanity’s cosmic future. [Automatically generated summary]
Here's a story from American history that's almost a parable.
In 1898, the U.S. government began funneling tens of thousands of dollars into a project to create a flying machine.
The project was run by Samuel Langley, the prestigious secretary of the Smithsonian Institution and an expert in the field of astronomy and aviation.
On December 8th, 1903, Langley's full-size piloted flying machine was brought out onto the Potomac River and launched from a gigantic floating catapult while the press and public looked on.
It went up and it went right back down again, promptly crashed into the river, and Langley was heartily ridiculed in the press.
Meanwhile, same time out on a lonely stretch of land off North Carolina called Kitty Hawk, two brothers from Ohio named Orville and Wilbur Wright were getting ready to test their first flying machine.
They were an odd pair.
They never married.
They never even left home.
They ran a bicycle shop in Dayton to support themselves, but they had become obsessed with the idea of human flight.
They took no money from the government.
And as for the experts, when it occurred to them that all the greatest aviation experts who had gone before them were simply wrong in their calculations, they scrapped the experts and ran practical experiments in their bike shop until they understood how to build a flying machine that could be controlled by the man on board.
Their first powered flight eight days after the Langley crash lasted 12 seconds and covered 120 feet, which is about half the length of a 747 jet.
All the same, it may have been the most profound advance in human civilization since Columbus stumbled on the new world.
Just to add to this parable, the story of the Wrights' first flight, one of the greatest news stories of the century, was not broken by the mainstream media of the day.
The big papers either ignored the story or ran accounts so unfactual as to make no practical difference.
The guy who first told the true story of the Wrights was an odd little beekeeper named Amos Root, who published a trade journal called Gleanings in Bee Culture.
No kidding, it was the early 20th century equivalent of a blog, and it was Root who first told the world what the Wrights had accomplished.
Even so, when the brothers attempted to sell their invention to the U.S. government a few years later, they got a form rejection slip and had to go overseas to look for buyers.
Now, it's easy to draw a moral here about the unwieldy incompetence of government and the dishonest gormlessness of the mainstream media.
But my question is this.
How do government and the media get to the point where stagnant lack of imagination rises off them like a kind of swamp gas?
And how can we avoid sinking into that kind of chronic stupidity?
Why Tripping.com Rocks00:03:17
Also, how much can we laugh at them before we hurt ourselves?
Trigger warning, I'm Andrew Clavin, and this is the Andrew Clavin Show.
I'm a hunky-dunky.
Life is tickety-boo.
Birds are wingy, also singing hunky-dunky.
Ship-shaped hipsy-topsy, the world to zippity-zing.
It's a wonderful day.
Hoorah, hooray!
It makes me want to sing.
Oh, hoorah, hooray.
Oh, hooray, hoorah.
All right, hooray-rah.
Michio Kaku is here.
He has written this just a fascinating book called The Future of Humanity.
It's a pre-taped interview.
Really, really interesting guy talking about stuff that will blow your mind.
Also, the mailbag is tomorrow.
Woohoo.
And that means get your questions in today about anything you want.
Answers are guaranteed 100% correct and will change your life on occasion for the better.
Go to thedailywire.com, press the podcast thing at the top, press the Andrew Clavin podcast, then press the mailbag, and just tape.
Tap in your questions about anything you want.
You've got to be a subscriber.
It's a lousy 10 bucks a month to be a subscriber for a lousy 100 bucks.
You can subscribe for the whole year and ask me as many questions as you want while sipping leftist tears from your leftist tears tumbler.
And you know, the thing about it is, I really do feel, a lot of us feel, I think, that the mailbag show is one of the best parts of this program, but it's only really good because of you guys, and you send in great questions, and I love hearing from you.
So, send in great questions now.
And if you have stupid questions, keep them to yourself.
Which brings us to tripping.com.
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This is a really terrific service because when I travel, I always used to stay in hotels.
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Facts vs. Fiction00:15:14
What?
How do you spell clavin?
K-L-A-V-A-N.
You can find your perfect vacation rental, tripping.com slash clavin.
This is going to be an exciting show to just see whether I can get to the end of it.
It's going to be an amazing thing.
So I have to address this drudge headline.
Drudge had this big red headline with a siren and everything, the drudge that Trump has announced he's running in 2020.
Who didn't think he was running in 2020?
I think he's just doing this because he knows it will spread panic through the Democrats and they'll start fighting him now, wasting their energy and their time fighting a reelection campaign that they could wait for while he's basically transforming the government into what it used to look like in 1776.
But the thing I want, I wanted to call this show Stupid and How Not to Be It.
That was what, because they used to say that the demon, remember this is the Democrats are the evil party and the Republicans are the stupid party.
The Democrats want to destroy the country.
And the joke was always that if the Democrats came along and said, we have this great plan, it's going to burn the country to the ground in 90 days, the Republicans would say, hold on, hold on.
90 days is way too fast.
You know, we want six months to burn the country to the ground.
The Republicans were stupid and they were constantly getting played by the Democrats who were evil.
Now it seems to me that the Democrats have managed to become both evil and stupid.
And if you don't believe, and why?
Why has this happened?
Well, let me give you two quotes, okay?
One is from Obama.
You remember Obama, Obama?
Was it Obama, Obama, Obama?
I can't remember now that his legacy is just a smoking pile of radioactive ash blowing away on the winds of history.
But Obama gave a speech.
There was some kind of sporting gathering at MIT, and Obama gave a speech that was supposed to be super de-duper secret, right?
There was no transcripts out.
It was not supposed to be released.
They smuggled out, of course, some the audio.
You can never keep this stuff secret.
And the audio is not very good.
So let me just read you some of the stuff that he was talking about.
He's talking about social media and different ways of media.
And he has said this before, but he said, essentially, we now have entirely different realities that are being created with not just different opinions, but now different facts.
And this isn't just, by the way, Russian-inspired bots and fake news.
This is Fox News versus the New York Times editorial page.
If you look at these different sources of information, they do not describe the same thing.
In some cases, they don't even talk about the same thing.
And so it is very difficult to figure out how democracy works over the long term in those circumstances.
And he starts talking about how basically the government needs to create a playing field.
You know, the free market is good, but not until you agree on the facts.
And the thing about Barack Obama is when he makes a speech, it's not just a speech.
He used to make speeches about dark money.
Then the IRS started to slow walk conservatives to try and silence them.
Then he would make speeches about stuff we have to do.
And then basically his agents would do it in the bureaucracy.
When he is making a speech like this, he is signaling that the left, the Democrat Party, has to start thinking about how to silence those people who disagree with him.
Because when he talks about different reality, he's talking about two things.
He's talking about cable news.
He says this in the speech.
He's talking about cable TV and he's talking about talk radio.
Why?
Because they disagree with him.
That's what he means by a different reality.
Now, listen to this, another speech.
Former ABC News anchorman Charles Gibson gave a speech at Princeton's Alumni Day on Saturday.
Now listen to what he says.
We can have honest debate about the president's policies.
We can debate immigration policy, monetary policy, gun control, healthcare policy.
But what are not up for debate are American ideals and institutions that have served the country well for almost two and a half centuries.
And among the most important of those ideals is a free, independent, vigorous press charged with an oversight of government function.
So we can debate everything, but we can't debate the press because there's only one reality.
I mean, this is the same press that has become the corporate defenders of big government.
That's what they are.
And they, so, so, what you've got is you've got these guys who basically have been wrong-footed by the spread of information.
And Obama is sending signals to Facebook and to Google telling them, he says this in the speech: fix your algorithms so that basically the facts can't get out.
Basically, the people who disagree with us cannot get out.
And he says, you know, the free market is fine.
It's okay to make money, but no, So let's take a look at the reality, okay?
Let's take a look at what passes for reality.
All this week long, I'm not going to get back into the guns because I said what I have to say yesterday, which is basically that the left is creating a narrative about guns.
The story that the shooting that happened, the Valentine's Day massacre in Florida, had nothing to do.
It was not about guns.
It was about the incompetence of government.
It was just like the Wright brothers story.
It was about the FBI and the local police not doing, not answering the call.
You know, the shooter himself called up the Sheriff's Department and said, I think I'm a school shooter.
And they said absolutely no reaction.
They did nothing.
That's the story.
There's no reason for us to be talking about gun control.
Schools are now safer than they were in the 1990s.
Shootings are down.
Mass shootings are down.
But it is just the narrative is being created, so they don't care what they say.
And because they don't care what they say, they can say anything.
And because they can say anything, they say some of the stupidest stuff you have ever heard.
Like I said, I'm not going to concentrate on guns just on stupidity.
But before we talk about stupidity, let's talk about being smart, which means talking about stamps.com.
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You want it the same place everything else is.
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Stamps.com will even help you decide the best class of mail based on your needs.
I personally use it because it's just fun for me to put the envelope in and have it come out with a stamp.
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And right now, you can enjoy the stamps.com service with a special offer that includes a four-week trial plus postage and a digital scale.
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All right.
Here's the press talking about guns.
I mean, this is amazing stuff.
Lawrence O'Donnell is MSNBC, right?
Now, I don't pick on MSNBC for being liberal because they're openly liberal and that's fine, but I do pick on them for being stupid because stupid, it burns, all right?
Here is Lawrence O'Donnell explaining, you know, Trump wants to arm some teachers and they keep repeating.
It's amazing, amazing.
Trump keeps saying people who are adept with firearms who have some experience, we will train them, give a few teachers in every school a gun, and that will mean that a guy who goes in with a gun, and they keep repeating it back to him, you want to arm all the teachers?
You want to arm Miss Smith who's teaching one-year-olds, you know, whatever.
You know, I mean, just make this stuff up.
And they just say it back to him.
He says, no, that's not what I want to do.
And they keep repeating it back to him.
But now, Lawrence O'Donnell, you know what?
Before we get to Lawrence O'Donnell, let's start with this other guy on CNN, Tom Fuentes, Cut Seven.
He explains that we can't arm the teachers because they're all girls and girls wear dresses.
So where will they put their guns?
Listen to this.
One of the things that people don't talk about, a lot of these schools, Sandy Hook had an all-female faculty from principal to teachers.
And for a woman, where are you going to hide that gun during the day?
You can't put it in your desk drawer.
Somebody might steal it and you can't get to it.
You're not going to have it in a safe in the principal's office.
You can't get to it.
On your person, hiding it.
If you wear a dress, if you wear a skirt, are you going to have to wear a jacket every day with a belt and a holster the way a detective on duty would do?
It's not a real practical solution, even for a variety of reasons.
Those girls, also, also, ladies, you break your fingernails on the trigger and the gunpowder and it ruins your mascara.
So you don't want to shoot a guy while you put your makeup on.
I mean, this is CNN.
This guy is talking, but not as bad as Lawrence O'Donnell.
Lawrence O'Donnell comes in and explains that you can't go up against a guy with an AR-15 with a handgun because your bullets are slower.
Slower.
Listen.
2,182 miles per hour.
That's how fast the bullets were moving when they came out of the barrel of that AR-15 in Marjorie Stoneman Douglas High School last week.
2,182 miles per hour, 3,200 feet per second.
That's what those kids were trying to outrun.
3,200 feet per second.
That's three times faster than the speed of a bullet leaving the barrel of a nine millimeter handgun.
With a high capacity magazine, the AR-15 can fire maybe 90 or 100 bullets in a minute.
A concealable handgun can fire maybe 15 bullets in a minute.
But President Trump said today that he believes if you put that concealable handgun in the hands of White House Chief of Staff John Kelly, he could have stopped the shooter in Florida last week.
Stop the hammering!
The hammering has gotten to Lawrence, I think, because he now thinks it's a problem.
Now, wait, to be fair, to be fair, they did run tests with handguns.
CNN did run a test with a handgun, and this is how slow the bullets are.
See, if President Trump had seen that, you can dodge the bullets from a handgun.
That's the problem.
So, if teachers, so teachers can't carry guns because they have skirts, and the handguns are too slow.
Anyway, how do you get to this point where you're saying such idiotic stuff?
The answer is simple: you're not listening to anybody else.
You are surrounded by people who agree with you, which is what Obama is calling for and what Gibson is calling for.
They are angry now that other voices and other opinions have come out and started to undermine what they think of as the facts.
We talked about this Wall Street Journal piece yesterday that actually made me so angry.
I wrote them a letter where they started saying, you know, women are staying home in Germany.
They're not going to work because they believe that they have to take care of their children, that their children might need moms at home.
And they reported this as if this were a problem instead of maybe a good thing.
Maybe it was a positive thing because they don't hear any conflicting voices.
You know, Donald Trump said something really dopey yesterday, too.
And they've been picking on him.
He had this really good thing where he actually just talked to the governors and listened to people of different ideas about gun control.
And he actually listens to them while all they do is attack him.
But he did go out and he said, this is cut number five, where he said if he'd been there, he was criticizing the sheriff's department because at least one, maybe four of their deputies, stood outside and didn't rush into the building.
And this is what he said.
You know, I really believe, you don't know until you test it, but I think I really believe I'd run in there even if I didn't have a weapon.
And I think most of the people in this room would have done that too, because I know most of you.
But the way they performed was really a disgrace.
So that's not the stupidest thing.
People talk like this, and you know Trump, he's not careful with his language.
I'm not making excuses for him.
It's a dopey thing to say because nobody knows what he would do.
The point is that if you're a police officer, that's your job.
If you're not the sort of person, you don't, you know, if you don't call a poet to go into the building, you call a cop.
And if you're not the sort of person who is going to go in the building, if you're not the sort of person who's going to confront a gunman with your gun, don't join the police.
I mean, that's the way it is.
Don't become a soldier if you don't want to fight in a war.
So this kind of stupidity, you know, here's a really interesting piece from the Weekly Standard.
I just love this piece, and it basically says everything that I'm trying to say.
2007, Warren Buffett, right, the billionaire, he took a $1 million bet on an investment.
And he said, this is his investment.
He said, over a 10-year period commencing on January 1st, 2008, and ending on December 31st, 2017, the SP 500 will outperform a portfolio of funds of hedge funds when performance is measured on a basic basis net of fees, costs, and expenses.
So in other words, the market, the top performing stocks, will outperform experts picking stocks.
So Tom Shields of the Protégé Partners took the bet and Buffett won hugely, right?
Over a 10-year period, the five hedge funds gained an average of 2.96% over the same period.
The S ⁇ P 500 gained an average of 8.5%, a huge, huge difference.
The difference was that, first of all, the fees that the experts charged for picking the stocks obliterated some of the profits, and they weren't worth the difference in even the best experts picking the stocks.
So that was the best experts.
But the other thing was most of the experts, almost all of the experts, couldn't beat the market.
The market was smarter because the market is not an expert.
The market doesn't have a formed set of opinions that solidify over time and are impervious to facts.
The market is always talking to itself.
It is always disagreeing with itself.
It doesn't care what Barack Obama thinks.
It doesn't care what Charles Gibson thinks.
It doesn't care what the left knows to be true.
It simply is going off the facts.
The market is the best way to determine the facts.
In other words, freedom and the market is wiser than the experts.
Now, I want to just point out this one thing.
And some of you are not going to like what I'm going to say next, but it is worth saying.
Next week, Rob, are we going to have Mona Charon on next week?
All right.
Next week, we're going to have Mona Sharon on.
Mona Sharon is a delightful, wonderful person who is a woman of courage and integrity and intelligence.
She said something at CPAC that really made people ticked off.
Mona At CPAC00:03:57
I mean, first of all, CPAC had this woman, I believe it's Marion Le Pen.
It's not Maureen Le Pen as the younger one who's kind of calmed down some of the Le Pen rhetoric, which has been anti-Semitic and anti-kind of nativist and bigoted in the past.
But they had Marian Le Pen who still clings to some of that.
And she at CPAC said, shame on you for having these people there and also attacked them for hypocrisy on supporting Trump and Roy, what was his name now?
I've lost his name.
Roy Moore in spite of their sexual malfeasance.
But let's just hear the part about Le Pen.
Let's play cut number 11.
This is Mona at CPAC talking about inviting Le Pen.
There was quite an interesting person who was on this stage the other day.
Her name is Marion Le Pen.
Now, why was she here?
Why was she here?
She's a young, no longer in office politician from France.
I think the only reason she was here is because she's named Le Pen.
And the Le Pen name is a disgrace.
Her grandfather is a racist and a Nazi.
She claims that she stands for him.
And the fact that CPAC invited her is a disgrace.
So they're shouting her down and they're chasing her, you know, basically chasing her out of the building.
And she's been very, very hard.
She dislikes Trump.
We've had her on before.
I've kind of debated it with her.
She does not give Trump any credit at all.
And I'm going to talk to her about that.
Now, I didn't disagree with this.
I didn't see why the Le Pen woman should be there.
I really didn't.
But I did disagree with her about the sexual hypocrisy.
I'm untouchable on this because I didn't think Clinton should be impeached for what he was doing either.
I thought he was a dirtbag, but I didn't mean he was a bad president.
And as I would say about Trump today, I said about Clinton then, he's just there to be the president.
If he's doing a bad job, throw him out.
If he's doing a good job, if he's being honest in the presidency, he should stay there.
I said that about Clinton then.
I did attack people for hypocrisy, like feminists, for their hypocrisy.
But whether she's right or wrong, if you're not listening to people within your movement who are honest, I mean, there are people who have crossed the line, guys like Bill Kristol, when he said he would rather have the deep state than the Trump state.
I just thought, I'm not listening to you anymore.
Nothing you say means anything to me anymore, because if you would rather be run by a secret, unaccountable bureaucracy than Donald Trump, you don't know what you're talking about.
We're not after anything that is like the same.
But that's not true of Mona.
Mona's actually trying to say something that she doesn't want the movement to slip away into mindless Trumpism, into following Trump wherever he goes.
Trump the other day was making comments where he was starting to indicate that maybe he would be in favor of some kind of gun control, like raising the age at which a person can purchase guns to 21.
That's just wrong.
It's wrong.
It's not going to do anything.
It is falling for the narrative of the left.
It's appeasing the left when they shouldn't be appeased.
It's wrong.
If we fall into mindless Trumpism and follow him anywhere, we don't know where he's going to go.
He is not always a very predictable person.
If we don't keep listening, if we don't keep disagreeing with one another, if we don't keep listening to the voices that disagree with us, we are going to turn into the left, which has now managed to monopolize stupidity and monopoly.
It has already monopolized evil.
It is now monopolized stupidity.
We don't want to win that back.
We want to stay an open party of people who disagree with some kind of civility.
We can disagree intensely, but we want to disagree with civility and listen to the honest people in our party and on our side, or else we're going to turn into them.
I mean, that would be the worst outcome of Donald Trump's election because there's so much good that's come out of it and so much that could come out of it that's not so good.
We have to be careful.
New Golden Age of Space Travel00:14:32
All right, we're going to go in.
We're going to listen to the interview with Michio Kaku, but I got to say goodbye to YouTube and Facebook.
Before I go, let me remind you: the mailbag is tomorrow.
Hit the podcast button on thedailywire.com.
If you're a subscriber, hit the Andrew Clavin podcast, hit the mailbag, and ask your questions.
Meanwhile, come on over to TheDailyWire.com and you can listen to the rest of the show.
All right.
This is a really interesting interview.
Michio Kaku has written a book called The Future of Humanity: Terraforming Mars, Interstellar Travel, Immortality, and Our Destiny Beyond Earth.
And it sounds like crackpot stuff, but I actually happen to know a lot about the stuff.
And everything he says in the book is actually possible.
Some of it may fail.
Some of it may not turn out to happen the way they think it's going to happen, but it is all absolutely possible.
Michio Kaku is a theoretical physicist, futurist, and best-selling author.
He's been featured on just about everywhere.
He's on CBS and the History Channel, all the different channels in physics.
He is a co-founder of Stringfield Theory, a theory he says carries on Einstein's quest to create a single, grand, unified theory of everything.
Let's listen to this interview about his new book, The Future of Humanity.
First of all, Michio Kaku, thank you very much for coming on.
I appreciate it.
Glad to be on the show.
You know, a few years ago, I was reading a book on fake science, and it was talking about, you know, various kinds of homeopathic medicine and magnets that control tennis elbow.
And the last chapter was on space travel to Mars and how it will never be done.
It'll never be accomplished.
The difficulties are too great.
Your book, The Future of Humanity, takes the exact opposite tack.
You think it's coming, it's on the way.
Is that right?
That's right.
I think we're entering a new golden age of space travel.
Just three weeks ago, a private individual, Elon Musk, bankrolled a moon rocket, a moon rocket that is physically capable of going to the moon on private funds.
And the month before in December, the President of the United States had an executive order.
Yes, we're going to the moon, Mars, and beyond.
This is not science fiction or fantasy anymore.
We're talking about money on the table from the private sector and the government.
We are committed to go into outer space.
Has something changed?
Have there been developments in the past?
I mean, it's been years since we went back to the moon.
It's been decades now.
What has changed that's made this possible?
The change is, first of all, economics.
You realize that the movie The Martian with Matt Damon costs more than an actual moon rocket sent by the Indian government to Mars.
It costs $70 million to go to Mars, and the movie costs over $100 million.
So Hollywood itself bankroll a Mars ship.
That's how cheap things have come.
And of course, Elon Musk, without taxpayers' money, without a dime of taxpayers' money, created the Falcon Heavy rocket fully capable of putting the dragon capsule around the moon.
And he wants to bankroll a mission to Mars as well.
And so prices have dropped.
Also, rockets are now reusable.
That didn't exist before.
That's going to drop down the cost of space travel by a factor of 10.
It costs $10,000 a pound to put anything in near-Earth orbit.
That's your way in gold.
Think of your body made out of gold.
That's what it costs to put you in orbit.
Now with the Falcon Heavy, we expect prices to drop by a factor of 10, $1,000 a pound to put you in orbit.
Wow.
Now, so you basically, in your book, The Future of Humanity, you basically say that this is a good thing that the private sector has gotten involved.
You're happy about this.
It's a good thing because I think a combination of private funds and government money is called for.
And that's what's energizing this whole thing.
Not just Elon Musk of SpaceX, but Jeff Bezos, the richest man in the world, the man behind Amazon, has created a private spaceport in Texas.
He has his own fleet of rockets called Blue Origin, and he wants to set up an Amazon-like transport system between the Earth and the moon.
So we're talking not just about one individual who dreams about going to the stars.
We're talking about a fleet of Silicon Valley billionaires, including those from Google who want to mine the asteroid belt.
None of that happened back in the 1960s.
So it's not deja vu all over again.
It's a whole new ballgame.
Jeff Bezos of Amazon, by the way, most of his wealth comes from me directly buying his books.
But what is it?
You just talked about mining asteroid belts.
What's in it for businessmen?
Is that what it is?
Do they expect to find new kinds of ore or old kinds of ore?
What are they looking for?
Well, in the short term, it is profit.
Let's be blunt about this.
They're capitalists.
They're not humanitarians.
They're not missionaries.
They hope to mine the asteroid belt for rare earths that are crucial for the computer program.
And so with rare earths, they hope to have a way to bankroll space exploration.
However, they also have a mission, a vision for Elon Musk is to become a multi-planet species because life is too precious to place on one planet.
After all, the dinosaurs did not have a space program.
And that's why the dinosaurs are not here today to talk about it.
I mean, this is, you know, it is funny to hear you talk about this because I can remember when if a politician got up at a debate and said, we need to get off this planet, that was kind of, he was just considered a loon.
I mean, he would lose votes over that.
I think now most of us feel that way.
What are the challenges?
You're talking about traveling through space for a long time to get to Mars.
What are the challenges that they're facing?
What are the problems they have to solve?
Well, the go to the moon was like a Sunday picnic.
It takes three days to go to the moon.
You could go to the moon on Monday and come back on Friday.
However, Mars is different.
Mars is a new home.
It takes two years to get to Mars and back.
Nine months to get there, and then nine months to get back and a few months to do scientific experiments.
Two years.
And of course, there are dangers like weightlessness.
And Mars is very cold as a consequence.
I mean, because of the fact that Mars is cold, it means that we have to have spacesuits designed to work in a cold atmosphere.
That's why engineers and scientists have debated what would it take?
What would it take to terraform Mars that has turned Mars into a garden of Eden?
For example, if you could have satellites, solar satellites, that melt the polar ice caps of Mars, you could have rivers, rivers, oceans, and seas on Mars once again.
Mars used to have an ocean the size of the United States of America.
That's how big that ocean was.
We could recreate it by melting the polar ice caps, and then by having vegetation, genetically engineered vegetation that can thrive in that atmosphere, you could recreate an agriculture on Mars.
Now, remember, that's still many decades away.
However, starting next year, it starts.
Next year, December 2019, NASA will send the first automatic unmanned probe back to the moon.
2023, astronauts are going to go back to the moon.
2030, it's on to Mars.
Wow, wow.
We're talking about your book, Michio Kaku, The Future of Humanity, Terraforming Mars, Interstellar Travel, Immortality, and Our Destiny Beyond Earth.
So I have to ask you about some of the, I'll call them more far out things you talk about this as you get beyond what is what you're talking about 2030 is not that far away.
But then you start talking about some really interesting things.
One of them is transferring consciousness itself into machines, creating consciousness.
You have a theory that you call the space-time theory of consciousness, where you basically think machines can be made conscious like us.
Is that fair to say?
Yeah, I think that digital immortality is a real possibility.
As far as biologic immortality, of course, we're beginning to find the genes that control the aging process.
We are now understanding why we die, something that we did not understand 10, 15 years ago.
But also because computer technology is getting so advanced, it may be possible to digitize the soul.
Think about it for a moment.
All your credit card transactions, all your Instagrams, everything electronic that is known about you today can be codified to create a reasonable facsimile of you.
And that's commercially available via Silicon Valley.
There are Silicon Valley entrepreneurs offering to digitize what is known about you today.
In the future, you'll go to the library and you'll have a nice conversation with Winston Churchill.
I wouldn't mind talking to Albert Einstein, a holographic image of Einstein with all his memories and everything known about his theories digitized.
In fact, you may one day have a conversation with your great, grandkids who want to know who their great great grandfather was because you've been digitized.
Now, then the question is, who is you on the other side of that holographic screen?
Well, to paraphrase Bill Clinton, it all depends on how you define you.
If you define you as your biological entity, then of course it's a tape recorder you're talking to.
But if you define you as all your memories, your personalities, your sensations, all of that combined together, then yeah, you've now digitized the soul.
The soul has now been reduced to information.
If you were talking to that digitalized reconstruction of Einstein, could he come up with a new theory?
Or would he only be able to do what he had already done?
Well, new theories, we think, are a combination of what you know in the past, that is your some of knowledge, plus chance, random connections that you make.
So in that sense, yeah, a computer would be able to make original contributions, not because they're original, but because they can put two and two together from different points of view and come up with something new.
Now, I personally believe that one day we'll take the connectome, that is the complete map of the human brain, and shoot it into outer space on a laser beam, so that you'll reach the moon in one second, Mars in 20 minutes, and the stars in a few years.
I call this laser porting, laser porting your consciousness throughout the universe at the speed of light without booster rockets, without accidents, without weightlessness, without radiation problems.
And believe it or not, I personally believe that this could already exist.
This is the most efficient way for aliens to shoot their consciousness across the universe without those stupid flying saucers and stupid UFOs.
They do it with laser beams shot at the speed of light.
There could be a superhighway right next to the Earth carrying billions of souls as they laser port across the universe, all consistent with the laws of physics.
And we are too stupid to know it.
You know, I know that some of the people listening to this are going to think that you're like just making this stuff up, but I have read about this.
This is real, not just in your book, The Future of Humanity, but this is really stuff that people are talking about.
Now, we have to talk just briefly about the idea of aliens as you bring them up.
You know, first of all, where is, what is the state right now of our search for alien life?
Well, it used to be that we had the giggle factor that we scientists would giggle anytime mentioned flying saucer people and aliens.
We don't giggle anymore.
We've taken a census of the Milky Way galaxy.
We now know there could be billions, billions of Earth-like twins in outer space, perhaps with liquid water oceans, perhaps with microbial life, perhaps even with people of some sort.
We no longer laugh at that possibility.
A whole branch of science called exobiology is now being created.
And then, of course, everyone wants to know, how come they don't land on the White House lawn and advertise their existence?
Well, I like to look at it this way.
If you're walking in a forest and you meet squirrels and deer, do you try to talk to them?
Do you try to meet deer and squirrels?
Well, for a while, yeah, but eventually you get bored because they don't talk back to you because they have nothing to offer you.
No insights, no stories to tell you.
In the same way, I think alien civilizations will look at us as squirrels and deers, nice, kind of cute little animals, but not worth messing with because we're simply too primitive.
That's a vaguely insulting, but probably true.
I mean, it always does seem silly to me when I watch a movie and the aliens come in there hostile.
It seems to me that if they could reach our planet, they would be so far beyond hostility that they'd have left the entire concept behind, but maybe that's untrue.
Right.
And then the movies, they say, what do they want?
They want resources.
They want to steal minerals from the Earth.
But you see, there are a lot of uninhabited planets that have nobody on them that also have riches.
So why should they bother with the rest of natives on the planet with people?
They could plunder planets without people just as easily.
And so I think for the most part, they are going to be peaceful.
However, you can't rule out the possibility that they could be warlike.
Men and Their Interests00:05:39
So I think that we should basically keep our presence a mystery.
We should not advertise our existence just in case these aliens simply are evil or simply don't care and they just pave us over.
One last question.
You know, some of the things that you talk about, and I do hear a lot of people starting to talk about these things, they almost seem like they go beyond humanity itself.
So in other words, you have a fairly optimistic view in your book, The Future of Humanity.
But at the same time, is it humanity if it's a connectome?
Is it humanity if we're broadcasting just ideas across space?
Are we going to lose ourselves?
When you look into the future, do you see human beings disappearing as human beings?
Well, if you were to take someone from the Middle Ages who was just finished burning witches and dismembering heretics, and you suddenly transport them into our present day era and they read the tabloid newspapers, they would think that all of civilization is going to be doomed to hell, right?
So I think when we look at the future, we cannot necessarily morally judge future people by our standards in the same way that someone from the Middle Ages cannot judge us today.
We're much more tolerant of things.
And as I said in my book, I also believe in something called a caveman principle or cave women principle.
We haven't changed in 100,000 years.
Our personalities are the same.
But what do we want?
We want to look good.
We want to have the respect of our peers and people of the opposite sex.
And so that's why I think that we're going to retain our humanness.
We're not going to have electrodes coming out of our head.
We're not going to be brains in a vat of liquid.
No, we want to look good to the opposite sex.
We want to look good to our peers.
I think 100 years from now, we'll look very similar to ourselves today, except we will have robotic and cyber powers comparable to that of maybe a Superman.
But we'll still look pretty much the same and act pretty much the same because our personalities haven't changed at all.
Michio Kaku, author of The Future of Humanity, Terraforming Mars, Interstellar Travel, Immortality, and Our Destiny Beyond Earth.
Thank you very much for coming on.
Really fascinating, fascinating book and fascinating interview.
Thanks a lot.
My pleasure.
Bye-bye.
That is interesting stuff.
And I do take issue with him on one thing.
I personally am going to be a brain in a vat.
That's my ambition.
That's what I always wanted to be as a brain in a vat.
That way my body can run free, you know.
All right, sexual follies.
So this has been a particularly stupid week or stretch of time in this incredible mission that the left is on to prove that there is no difference between men and women when maybe the first thing everybody learns in life is that there is a difference between men and women.
I think that maybe like when you're three or four, that's when you start to think like, oh, I get this.
There's a difference between men and women, but they want to convince us that we shouldn't, that it's wrong to pay attention to this.
There was a meeting with that guy, James Dammore.
Where was he speaking?
But anyway, he was speaking and they protest.
He's the guy who said that at Portland State University.
And he's the guy who said that possibly there were non-sexist reasons why women don't excel in tech, that they may not be all that interested in it.
They may be more interested in people than in things.
He was speaking on a panel at Portland University, Portland State University.
They're trying to pull out the plug.
There is this, I just find this incredibly unfair, this transgender wrestler who is taking testosterone.
He's transitioning from a woman into a make-believe man.
And so he's beating all these women in wrestling because he's got testosterone being pumped into him, which is absurd.
But one person got the difference between men and women exactly right.
And that is at NBCNews.com.
They have a little column called Think.
And I believe the author's name is Marcy Bianco.
And she says the patriarchal race to colonize Mars is just another example of male entitlement.
It's just like men to go off and colonize Mars.
Damn it, you try to, you know, you tell them to take out the garbage, and instead they colonize Mars.
What the?
She starts out, she's talking about Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos going into space.
And she says, you know, these men, particularly Musk, are not only heavily invested in who can get their rocket into space first, but in colonizing Mars.
The desire to colonize, to have unquestioned, unchallenged, and automatic access to something, to any type of body, and to use it at will is a patriarchal one.
Indeed, there is no ethical consideration among these billionaires about whether this should be done.
Rather, the conversation is when it will be done, because in the eyes of these intrepid explorers, this is the only way to save humanity.
It's the same instinctual and cultural force that teaches men that everything and everyone in their line of vision is theirs for the taking.
You know, it's just like walking up to a woman and grabbing her by the crotch.
It's there, so just grab it because you can.
And that is absolutely right.
Run for your lives because we are coming after you, ladies, and then we're colonizing Mars.
Supervising Producer Mathis Glover00:00:42
I'm Andrew Clavin.
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