Michio Kaku: Humanity in Space

[Applause] well after such a great introduction I can't wait to hear the speaker myself first of all I have a confession to make you see sometimes these honors can backfire on you recently New York Magazine had a contest who are the 100 smartest people in New York so I'm proud to say I made the list I'm officially one of New York's 100 smartest people however in all fairness in all fairness I have to admit that Madonna also made that same list and next year they tell me that Lady Gaga is going to push me off the list entirely now today I want to talk about the future of humanity the future as we explore the universe now of course it's very dangerous to make predictions let me quote from that great philosopher of the Western world Yogi Berra Yogi Berra once said quote prediction is awfully hard to do especially if it's about the future and of course he was famous for saying on the road to the future if you encounter a fork in the road then be sure to take it well we were gonna take that fork in the road you see I've interviewed over 300 of the world's top scientists for the Discovery Channel BBC television the Science Channel and every time I interview these top scientists I asked them the key question the question of all questions the question that has haunted scientists and philosophers and that question is is there intelligent life on the earth well I was watching the Kardashians on TV last night and I'm convinced nope nope not this planet no intelligent life on this planet however sometimes people come up to me and they say professor you're a physicist what does a physicist do anyway what do you guys do well we are the people who invent the future we invented the transistor which makes possible the computer revolution we invented the laser which makes possible the internet we wrote the world wide web which was written by a physicist to keep track of subatomic particles in your living room we invented television we invented radio microwaves for your oven in the hospital we invented the x-ray machine we invented the MRI scan and don't forget we invented the space program they're all physicists who did that and whenever we invent something we make a prediction when we help to invent the Internet one physicist predicted that the internet would become a forum of high culture high art and high society well today we know that 5% of the Internet is pornography but that's because teenage boys log on to the Internet just wait until the grandmas and grandpas log on to the Internet then maybe 50% of the internet could become for nog Rafi well I've had the privilege of writing for New York Times bestsellers my latest is the future of humanity did you know that prices for rockets have dropped incredibly opening up the heavens for tourists even for example let me ask you guys a question breeze your hand how many of you have seen the movie the Martian starring Matt Damon raise your hand wow most of you well that Hollywood movie cost a hundred million dollars but the Indian government send a probe to Mars for 70 million dollars a Hollywood movie about going to Mars cost more than actually going to Mars and of course if you've been reading the headlines well I was on CBS last night talking about the fact that hey there is a new discovery that has rocked the foundations of science we have now photographed for the first time in history a black hole it took us 100 years to do this in 1916 Einstein's equation revealed a monster a monster in outer space and we finally photographed it and it's made the front page of every newspaper and what is a black hole well a black hole is an object so massive that even light itself cannot escape think of it as a cosmic roach motel everything checks in nothing checks out and in my book physics of the future I talked about how we will live in the next 100 years if you're looking for a job if you're deciding on a major in college if you want to encourage your young person to be part of the future read the book I have a whole set of chapters about jobs of the future and in physics of the impossible I talk about the world 500 years in the future but we might have time travel we might have starships you might have teleportation and I answer the question what happens if you go backwards in time and meet your teenage mother before you were born and she falls in love with you well if your teenage mother falls in love with you before you're born you're in deep doo-doo if that happens and then in my latest before the present volume the future of the mind another bestseller I talk about the fact that we physicists can now probe the blood flowing inside the brain with MRIs we can actually see thoughts thoughts as they are generated inside the living brain this is amazing we can now prove or disprove many old wives tales for example there's an old wives tale that everyone believes but no one can prove until now that old wives tale is when a man talks to a pretty girl he starts to act stupid absolutely true we can show that when a man talks to a pretty girl blood drains from the prefrontal cortex and he starts to act mentally we can quantify this effect now it's an amazing discovery we could also by the way upload memories we've done it in mice monkeys and next we'll upload simple memories in Alzheimer's patients think about that we'll have a brain memory chip a brain pacemaker you'll push the button and simple memories come flooding into your hippocampus you'll know where you live what your name is who your relatives are and that could be it from men this benefit for those people who have Alzheimers and some people think that maybe one day we'll have something like the matrix you know in the movie The Matrix reality itself was uploaded into your mind let me ask you a question let me ask you a rather strange question how many of you late at night just before you go to sleep how many of you had that weird sensation that maybe just maybe life is an illusion maybe you're the only real person everything else is fake raise your hand come on be honest raise you how many of you ever had that strange feeling oh my god you're all crazy so many crazy people in the audience how can you be the only one in the world when I'm the only one in the world you know that I'm in New York right now I'm just about to go to sleep dreaming dreaming that I'm here in front of this great audience here in Chicago come on give me a brain but anyway let me talk about the space program in the early days we had great pioneers like Robert garter but people laughed at him the idea that you could go to the moon that you could go to Mars was considered preposterous in fact the New York Times would continually make fun of him they denounced him they called him a fraud they said he should be fired from his professorship why because the New York Times said Rockets cannot move in outer space oh really well in 1969 when two men walked on the moon years after Robert Carter died the New York Times finally wrote an apology oops it is possible to move in outer space yes so why did Robert Goddard endure the criticism the jokes the snickering the humiliation why why do we have all these visionaries dreaming about something even though other people laugh it's because when Robert Goddard the father of rocketry when he was a young child he read a book a book that changed his life it was called War of the Worlds and he dreamed he dreamed that one day his rockets would take us to Mars and he was correct the ballistic missile creative uproar Goddard has indeed sent robots to Mars and then we had another young boy who read Edgar Rice Burroughs John Carter of Mars series that young boy was Carl Sagan and he decided to become an astronomer because he read about Mars the fact that it was something that captured the imagination of young people and then when I was a kid there was also a book that captured my imagination also the imagination of a young boy called Elon Musk the book was called the foundation the foundation trilogy about establishing a Galactic Empire and Elon Musk goes on to start SpaceX to create his own moon rockets think about that a private individual financing a new generation of rockets in fact you may know this next year we're going back to the moon that's right after a 50-year gap we're going back to the moon nASA has the SLS booster rocket Elon Musk just today test-fired his rocket again the Falcon Heavy it is fully capable of going to the moon with astronauts and then the richest man in the world Jeff Bezos well the former richest man in the world he has created the Blue Origin rocket program the new Armstrong will also go to the moon and the Chinese have the long march mark mark long march rocket so we have four four programs to go back to the moon we're gonna have a traffic jam around the moon and in fact I personally believe that one day our grandkids will honeymoon on the moon now some people say but why why bother to leave the earth anyway it's expensive yeah but prices are dropping Rockets are now going to be reusable the Falcon Heavy which was just test-fired the Falcon Heavy it all three rockets came back safely back to the planet Earth let's do a science experiment let's get into your car in the morning drive to work and then throw your car into the garbage that would bankrupt America if every time you use the car you junk it but that's what we do with rockets we jump rockets after one use and this is gonna change the economics of space travel but we also have to worry about the earth you see we face several threats one of them of course is global warming this is a problem that we Earthlings have to solve on the earth we cannot go to Mars to escape global warming and look at this every glacier is receding summer time is a week longer than normal think about it sea levels are rising around the world not to mention the fact that two weeks ago two weeks ago a rock from space went barreling into the atmosphere broke up over the Bering Sea not too far from Russia it had the energy of 10 Hiroshima bombs think about that the energy of 10 Hiroshima bombs blowing up in the atmosphere just to two weeks ago we are defenseless defenseless against meteor impacts like this we cannot depend on Bruce Willis to save us with the Space Shuttle because first of all there is no Space Shuttle the Space Shuttle was cancelled second of all the Space Shuttle cannot go into deep space and why am I making such a big thing about it because you know the dinosaurs the dinosaurs did not have a space program and that's why they're not here today how come we don't have dinosaurs here today it's because they do not have a space program and sometimes when I see pictures like this I wonder what's going on in this dinosaurs mind he's probably saying to himself oh yes 65 million years ago they got wiped out and just last week just last week paleontologists unveiled a fossil bed of bones of the fish and dinosaurs who died on that very day this day that day 65 million years ago when that asteroid plowed into the Yucatan in Mexico remnants of that a whole bed of fossils has been discovered dating back to that exact day when that object hit the earth so yes it's something that we have to worry about because if a rock of that size history earth it'll really ruin your day not to mention the fact that when you go to Yellowstone yes we all know about Yogi Bear but did you know that underneath Yellowstone there's a monster a supervolcano and if it were to explode it would tear the guts out of the United States of America now you may say to yourself well that's pretty rare right well no you see it turns out that 75 thousand years ago in Indonesia the Toba volcano erupted the greatest eruption in a hundred million years why is that important because it turns out that 75 thousand years ago for reasons that we don't quite understand humanity almost died we almost face total extinction 75 thousand years ago how many of us survived a few hundred maybe a few thousand I think about this late at night a few hundred people maybe a thousand escaped a cataclysm 75 thousand years ago what was it we're not sure but we think it could have been the Toba volcano which wipe almost wiped out humanity itself literally we are all brothers and sisters only a few hundred of us repopulated the entire planet Earth amazing story but as I said before the dinosaurs did not have a space program and you know extinction is the norm 99.9% of all life-forms eventually go extinct now when we think of Mother Nature we think mother nature is warm cuddly cute yeah mother nature is that way but mother nature is also merciless 99.9% of all life-forms eventually go extinct if you don't believe me dig right under your feet that's right right under your feet dig and you'll find the bones the fossils of 99.9% of all life-forms that walked once walk on the surface of the earth but now we're entering the second golden age of space travel you know the first golden age was rather primitive you know that your cell phone your cell phone today has more computer power than all of NASA in 1969 when they put two men on the moon every see these old video tapes they had 64 K processors you only find them in museums and that's what NASA was using to shoot astronauts in space in fact I think it was criminal criminal what NASA was doing shooting astronauts into outer space backed up by one cellphone huh criminal but now Silicon Valley billionaires a new energy has come into play we had the Falcon Heavy rocket and it's going to be replaced by an even bigger rocket the biggest rocket on the books is being pioneered by SpaceX the biggest rocket capable of going to Mars is called the B F R B stands for big R stands for rocket f stands for your imagination and NASA not to be outdone has its rocket it is called the SLS booster with the Orion space capsule next year sometime in 2020 we hope to send it to the moon and realize that we now are talking about a fleet of these Rockets not just NASA not just SpaceX but blue horizons sponsored by the guy who created Amazon the Chinese maybe even the Russians so we're talking about a traffic jam traffic jam around the moon you know to go to the moon is a hop skip in a job three days just three days you're on the moon I think eventually the moon will become a tourist destination people will vacation on the moon have honeymoons on the moon people will realize that yes the moon is in our backyard and beyond that a more ambitious program is to go to Mars this was the dream of Goddard this was the dream of Von Braun the guy who built the v2 rocket and created the Saturn rocket now of course going to Mars is no picnic it takes about two years two years for a round-trip mission to Mars and once you're on Mars the goal is to create a self-sustainable colony that's not going to be a drain on the planet Earth you know the Apollo space program cost five percent of the federal budget in 1969 that is unsustainable in 19 in 1960s the Apollo space program consumed 5% of every tax dollar that taxpayers pay to the government that's unsustainable we want a self-sufficient settlement on Mars for example ice can be melted ice plenty of ice on Mars ice can be melted for drinking water separate out for oxygen for breathing and hydrogen for rocket fuel so ice is the first thing to be mined and then an artificial farm could be created using genetically modified algae algae plants have already been modified so they can thrive in the Martian conditions it's awfully cold on Mars very little carbon dioxide but plants love carbon dioxide and then beyond that this is now into the next century we want to melt the polar ice caps you see if you can raise the temperature of Mars by six degrees that's right just six degrees you can create a runaway greenhouse effect the polar ice caps will melt and it'll be possible to have agriculture and we'll terraform Mars now some people think that terraforming is too difficult well realize that we are terraforming the earth right now for worse not for better we are now terraforming the earth we're changing the atmosphere of the earth if we could also do that to Mars so we have one billionaire pushing SpaceX another billionaire from Amazon pushing his fleet of rockets and now we have Google billionaires and they're pushing mining the asteroid belt they want to pay for the exploration of outer space by mining platinum and rare earth elements in asteroids to make money to create a gold rush in outer space you know for example that when Thomas Jefferson 200 years ago when Thomas Jefferson signed the Louisiana Purchase and bought a huge chunk of land from Napoleon Thomas Jefferson in his notes said that it would take a thousand years a thousand years to settle the Louisiana Purchase wrong we did it in 50 years why was this gigantic barren land suddenly colonized because in 1848 they discovered gold gold in California and that accelerated the colonization of the West same thing could happen with the asteroid belt and then how do we refuel our Rockets in deep space it turns out that one of the moons of Saturn Titan has an atmosphere made of methane and ethane in other words gas we have a gas station in outer space believe it or not a gas station in outer space who would have thought that but that's what the atmosphere of Titan is all about and then beyond that there are 4000 exoplanets that some of them look very much like the earth in fact tonight just go outside tonight look in the sky we now know that on average on average every single star you see at night has a planet going around it amazing and maybe one day we'll leave an encounter other spacefaring civilizations alien civilizations in outer space well I'm on radio and sometimes people call me on the telephone and they say professor you're wrong you're totally wrong the aliens are not just out there the aliens are here they were on the earth and so I asked them on radio I asked them how do you know that the aliens are here and they tell me they've been kidnapped they've been kidnapped by aliens from out of space and I tell them a word of advice the next time you are kidnapped by a flying saucer for God's sake steal something a microchip an alien scissors an alien paperclip anything there's no law against stealing from an extraterrestrial civilization no law whatsoever you're not gonna go to jail if you steal from an alien from outer space and you'll have bragging rights bragging rights now some people say ha then what about these strange things at the military military pilots have been tracking things that go zig zagging in the atmosphere traveling faster than any known jet what are they well there's a theory it was pretty much reinforced last year when Vladimir Putin of Russia announced the fact that they're testing a new generation of weapons called hyper sonic drones they go 5 to 20 times the speed of sound and they zigzag why do they zigzag because they can evade a Star Wars defensive shield by confusing the radar by zigzagging maybe that's what's causing this flurry of flying saucer sighting we should also point out that there's another theory one theory is that well maybe these UFOs stories are real but there's another theory and that is that about 10% of the human race suffers from sleep paralysis now when you dream at night you are paralyzed that's right you're paralyzed that night otherwise you would act out your dream you would sleepwalk and you could hurt yourself that's why we are paralyzed when we dream at night but 10% of us when we wake up in the morning like this we're still paralyzed we think that there is a gremlin sitting on our chest staring down on us and we cannot move we're trapped by this gremlin that during the Victorian era they didn't know about aliens but they all knew about gremlins there all these paintings during the Victorian era all these paintings of people in a dream state thinking that there is a gremlin sitting on their chest about 10% of us have that in fact I asked my students to raise their hand and yeah well 10% raise their hand that when they wake up in the morning they are paralyzed let me ask you how many of you ever had an episode of sleep paralysis well yeah there you go about 10% so some people think that that's the origin of the abduction from alien syndrome but anyway my colleague Stephen Hawking would like to send a chip to the stars the first starship the chip would be hooked up to a parachute the parachute would be hooked up to a laser beam the laser beam shoots its energy inflates the sail and sends a chip to the nearby stars that could be done in this century the first starship can you imagine somebody from outer space sending that starship to you you what you go out sign your gardening one day and a little parachute comes down with a microchip this big and it is somebody from the Stars trying to communicate with us well we have bigger plans this is a ramjet fusion engine it scoops up hydrogen in the forward direction it's like an ice-cream cone think of an ice-cream cone it sucks in hydrogen from the forward direction fuses it burns it and then creates rocket thrust forever this rocket can go into outer space forever these are called ramjet fusion engines they could reach maybe about 50 percent the speed of light but wouldn't you want to go even faster than that this of course requires yet another leap in technology and this requires the energy of a wormhole as I said before in 1916 in 1916 over a hundred years ago physicists analyzed Einstein's equation and said there is a monster there is a monster in your equations because of a star or a galaxy were to collapse it would collapse warp the fabric of time what the fabric of space rip it and create a black hole so a black hole is an object that is so powerful that it rips to shreds anything that comes too close in fact as you get closer and closer to a black hole your legs are attracted faster than your head and you start to become spaghetti you were spaghettified as you get closer and closer to the black hole not a very pleasant sensation turning into spaghetti as you get closer but next once we identify these black holes in space what's next next is we want to know what's on the other side of forever it turns out that if you take Einstein's equations seriously and you then begin to look on the other side of a black hole the equations say that there is a white hole on the other side of a black hole how does it work well it turns out that when you squeeze a star and the star is spinning it's a spinning star it collapses not to a dot that's the old-fashioned picture no not a dot it collapses to a ring shown here a ring and if you fall through the ring you do not die you go all the way through the ring to a parallel universe called a white hole and where have you seen that before it turns out that over a hundred years ago there was a mathematician in Oxford University who talked about this he couldn't write it for other adults so he wrote it as a children's book and he had to use another name because he was a professor of mathematics at Oxford he called himself Lewis Carroll the novel he wrote was called through the looking-glass and his true name was Charles Dodgson Charles Dodgson was the first one in the English language to entertain the idea that on the other side of the looking glass there is another universe another universe on the other side of the black hole now let me try to rind up because I want to sign your book by the way after I sign your book you can go to eBay and auction them off for money yes you can actually make money on today's talk so let me quickly wrap up and by saying the following when I was a child when I was eight years old something happened which changed my life I still remember when I was 8 years old the newspapers all blurred the fact that a great scientist had just died and they put a picture a picture that evening a picture that mesmerised me it was just a picture of his desk with a book an unfinished book opened up and the caption said this is the unfinished manuscript of the greatest scientist of our time so I said to myself why couldn't he finish that book what's so hard it's a homework question right why didn't he ask his mother what could be so hard that the greatest scientists of our time couldn't finish it I went to the library and I found out that this man's name was Albert Einstein and that he was trying to write an equation perhaps no more than one inch long that would unify all the laws of physics and all and allow him to quote read the mind of God and he said to myself wow that's for me this is greater than any murder mystery I had to know what was in that book today I can read that book that's what I work on that's my day job that's what I do for a living working on something called string theory string theory you probably know is what they talk about on the Big Bang Theory on CBS TV but it's a real theory string theory simply says that all matter consists of tiny tiny little vibrating strings each vibration is a particle so this would be an electron this will be neutrino this would be a quark it's the same string but when it vibrates in a different way it turns into a different particle that's what we have so many of them so what is a particle a particle is a vibration on a tiny string what is physics physics is the harmonies you right on a string what is chemistry chemistry is the melodies you can play on vibrating strings what is the universe the universe is a symphony of strings and then what is the mind of God the mind of God is cosmic music cosmic music resonating through hyperspace that is the mind of God and then when I was in high school I decided to put some of this knowledge to use to do something so I went to my mom and I said mom can I have permission to build an atom smasher in the garage a 2.3 million electron volt betatron particle accelerator in the garage my mother stared at me and she said sure why not and don't forget to take out the garbage well it took out the garbage I got 400 pounds of Transformers steal from my Singh house 22 miles of copper wire from Berrien and I built a six kilowatt 2.3 million electron volt particle accelerator in the garage every time I plugged it in I heard this pop pop pop song as I blew out every single circuit breaker in the house the whole house would be plunged in darkness my poor mom she must have said to herself why couldn't I have a son who plays basketball maybe if I buy my baseball and for God's sake why can't you find a nice Japanese girlfriend why does he have to build these machines in the garage well that string theory but let me now tell you my favorite Einsteins story and then it will wind up and take questions from the audience my favorite Einstein story is what Einstein was an old man he was tired I'm giving the same talk over and over again so one day his chauffeur came up to him and the chauffeur said professor really a part-time actor I've heard your speech so many times I've memorized it so why don't we switch places I will put on a mustache I will put on a wig I will be the great Einstein and you can take a rest and be my chauffeur well Einstein loved the joke so they switched places this one along famously until one day a mathematician in the back asked a very difficult question and Einstein thought oh the game is up but then the chauffeur said that question is so Elementary that even my chauffeur here can answer it for you thank you very much you've been a great audience and we'll open it up to questions thank you thank you I folks thank you very very much we're gonna bring up the lights here and if everyone who has a question we've got a mic on either aisle if you don't mind lining up and we'll go alternating back and forth with our questions okay so are we all set to go for the first question okay professor thanks for a very enlightening speech today which do you think is more likely time travel or breaking down the molecular structure like they did in Star Trek 2 to travel so traveling instead of using Rockets so and what time frame which do you think is more plausible time travel or breaking down the molecular structure to travel like they did in Star Trek and what time frame okay you asked a very difficult question let's break it down one by one first of all teleportation we can teleport atoms we've teleported atoms of cesium and strontium we've teleported photons of light one day we will teleport atoms to the moon that's definitely in the cars teleporting to the moon but a human a human consists of trillions upon trillions upon trillions of atoms so it'll take centuries before we can teleport Captain Kirk across a room second you're talking about time travel it turns out that Stein's equations do allow for time travel however you have to open up the gateway shown here the gateway requires the energy of a black hole we are far far away from harnessing the energy of a black hole the black hole will open up a gateway shown here but then you have to have negative energy to stabilize it a negative energy is very exotic and also quite difficult together so it may take millennia before we have the energy necessary to play with black holes to open up a gateway through space and time but remember that star trek takes place in what it 23rd century so we still have a few hundred years to go but don't hold your breath we're talking about an energy scale beyond human comprehension the energy of a black hole necessary to rip the fabric of space and time shown here to give us a way to go through space and time but again time travel is a solution of Einstein's equations many books get this wrong because they don't understand the whole theory Einstein himself realized that wormholes are possible in 1935 Einstein himself wrote the first paper on wormholes introducing that concept in the 1949 his office made her girdle found the first time travel solution of Einstein's equations okay let's go for the next question yeah ok thank you for your presentation recently nASA has been able to show people through their website all the satellites we have in space with all the pollution that's out there and recently Neil deGrasse Tyson also mentioned that we're causing a lot of pollution not just on earth but also in space what is your take on how you know that's gonna evolve in the future and you know how we should clean all that up if we're also polluting space and making space garbage yes we are definitely polluting everywhere we go and yes it is a problem but it's a problem that is solvable it takes will political will will through democratic vote we have to vote for candidates who will then try to clean up our mess and just remember that when we go to the moon and go to Mars we'll have a whole nother planet to mess up so we have to be careful about that you're absolutely right to make sure that we don't corrupt other planets the first thing is we may corrupt Mars with our life forms we have to make sure that Mars is sterile that Mars does not have his own DNA that would then interfere with our DNA and so we have we have to worry about that yes that wherever we go we take our garbage with us but the solution that is political and that is we have to vote for candidates who want to clean up the mess that we create okay next Thank You professor what do you think is going to have the greater impact on humanity artificial intelligence or gene editing through CRISPR the question is what's going to have the biggest impact ai or CRISPR genetic modification of the human species I think both of them are going to change everything I think that first of all science is the engine of prosperity and wealth all the wealth we see around us is a consequence of Science and Technology but science comes in waves the first wave was the steam engine which gave us the Industrial Revolution locomotives cars the second revolution was the electric revolution which gave us electricity television gave us dynamos and generators the third revolution was high-tech transistors lasers coming from the quantum theory but now we're entering the fourth wave the fourth wave of wealth generation beyond steam power beyond electricity beyond computers the fourth wave is physics at the molecular level that means artificial intelligence that means nanotechnology and biotechnology so they're gonna change everything even our bodies our cells the job market everything is going to change with the coming of artificial intelligence and the coming of biotechnology now then the next question is well are the robots gonna take over let me just say a few things about that Elon Musk says that yes the danger is the robots are going to take over we are creating our evolutionary successors however Mark Zuckerberg a facebook says artificial intelligence is going to give us prosperity jobs new economic forms of wealth generation I think both are correct I think in the short term musk is correct for decades to come artificial intelligence will create new job opportunities new industries new potentials but by late in this century let's not fool ourselves late in this century robots could become self-aware at that point they could be dangerous now our most advanced robot today is called as Amol you've seen him on television he runs walks dances Klein's upstairs I interviewed the creator of Asimov for BBC television and I asked the inventor how smart is the world's smartest robot and he was honest he said as ammo' has the intelligence of a cockroach a cockroach a lobotomized stupid cockroach he can barely walk across the room but eventually robots will be as smart as a mouse then as smart as a rat then as smart as a rabbit then as smart as a dog or a cat and then finally as smart as a monkey and that is potentially dangerous by the end of the century because you see monkeys are self-aware monkeys know they are not human now dogs dogs are confused dogs think that we are a dog they think we're the top dog and they're the underdog so monkeys have no illusions monkeys know who they are monkeys and they're not humans and so we should when robots become that smart I think we should put a chip in their brain to shut them off if they have murderous thoughts we need a fail-safe system for that now biotechnology also promises us such tremendous advances but there's no simple solution in fact it's gonna get worse in the future a high school kid will get on a typewriter type atcg atcg and create a virus in his living room that is a real danger the CRISPR technology will become so advanced that will create genetic typewriters that can simply type and create new forms of life for example if you take the AIDS virus and make it airborne airborne aids would kill 98% of the human race so there is a danger there so CRISPR technology has to be looked at very carefully not because we have to wait a hundred years but because in the coming decades high school kids will have the potential to create life okay next this is gonna be our last question this question after we are done we are having a book signing out in the lounge book signing in the lounge thank you okay last question Thank You professor what do you believe the impact of colonization of space and other planets will be in terms of the conflicts that we see on planet Earth do you believe that conflicts geopolitical conflicts in the future will be worse because we have colonies and other places or do you think we will wisdom up and have less conflict on our home planet well unfortunately conflict is part of our evolutionary makeup okay but let me let me say this for many decades to come maybe even a century or two centuries we're simply talking about settlement a self-sufficient settlement on Mars now beyond that then we can talk about a civilization perhaps springing up on Mars but that is way beyond the projections that we're talking about today we're talking about the fact of a self-sufficient settlement maybe a few thousand people must talks about maybe a million people but again there are technical financial obstacles to that now if you were to fast forward centuries into the future now then perhaps a new branch of civilization could get started but that is way beyond our projections right now the people that are doing the planning for this simply want an insurance policy a back-up plan Plan B just in case an asteroid ruins your day just in case a nuclear proliferation the greenhouse effect spin out of control we want to be at least a two-planet species because otherwise we're putting all our eggs in one basket now what would that mean in the far future I don't know but I think for centuries to come we're simply talking about a settlement a self-sufficient settlement on Mars okay well thank you so much it's been a great honor to be here today and I will find your books and then you go to Ebay [Applause]

Channel: Chicago Humanities Festival

Views: 456,598

Rating: 4.7959375 out of 5

Keywords: chicago humanities festival, chf, humanities, chicago, festival, science, physics, string theory, michio kaku, space, future of humanity, humanity, future, mars, rockets

Id: 1gk9iGo0LCg

Length: 53min 28sec (3208 seconds)

Published: Wed May 15 2019