Michio Kaku - Q&A

[Music] this week on Q&A theoretical physicist and author Michio Kaku dr. Michio Kaku here's a piece of video of you on this network in 1979 if you look at the recent government reports concerning the Three Mile Island the government now concedes that one to ten people will eventually die of cancer in the Three Mile Island area do you remember that time many many years almost 40 years ago and what have you changed in your thinking since then well yes I remember that very vividly because you see I'm a theoretical physicist and I work with the theories of Einstein in the quantum theory and so to be before a television camera is a new experience but when the Three Mile Island accident happened all the media was saying we need a scientist we need a scientist who can help to decipher this mess to the American people so they contacted me and so I said to myself well this is what I do for a living I'm a physicist and so I said to myself okay I'll get on national television get on national radio because the situation demands it not because I wanted to do it but because people had to know the dangers the positives the negatives of energy one of the big questions of the age and that's sort of how I backed into becoming a media person you say in your book that there was a teacher when you were in the second grade that had an impact on you remember I'll never forget she walked in the room one day and said God so loved the earth that he put the earth just right from the Sun not too close because the oceans will boil not too far because the oceans will freeze but just right from the Sun now I was floored I mean I was in second grade and he was a scientific principle with religious interpretation I said to myself my god that's right if we were to close the oceans are boiled if we were to far the oceans and freeze we are in the so called Goldilocks zone of the Sun now of course we have seen four thousand planets orbiting other stars and almost all of them are too close or too far from the Sun so you have two points of view either God exists and God so loves the earth that he put the earth just right from the Sun or we have a crapshoot what do you think well now that we have found so many planets four thousand of them we think that in the galaxy our own backyard there are billions upon billions of planets on average every single star you see at night has a planet going around it every single star on average that it's indisputable that most of them are outside the Goldilocks zone so you can still believe in God but that's not an argument that clinches the deal so I want to ask you about a bunch of obvious things that you write about and get you define it for a generalist what is a planet well a planet is a mud ball that goes around the star and I say mud ball because it doesn't release light of its own it's dark and it orbits around the Sun gaining energy and we think that planets are very interesting because they could have life because that's how we got started and even in our solar system we think that the planets may in fact Harbor some form of life maybe microbial life and so we look at planets we look at stars to find out where the planets are but we focus on the planets because that perhaps is the habitat for life in the universe what's a star well a star is a gigantic solar furnace it's a ball of hydrogen gas that releases energy by converting hydrogen into sunlight and so a star is in some sense a gigantic hydrogen bomb it obeys the same equations of Einstein e equals MC squared where M is hydrogen e is sunlight that comes out of the star what is a comet well a comet is piece of ice it's like a dirty ice ball that whizzes around in the solar system they're only like 10 20 miles across there they're not very big but they're basically made out of ice remnants of the original solar system which we think what's upon a time surrounded the the Sun but now orbit in a disc what's the difference between a meteor and a meteorite well that flash of light that you see whizzing across the sky is caused by a rock that burns up in the atmosphere and that's called a meteor either the rock itself or the streak of light however once it hits the ground it becomes a mineral so we call it a meteorite so meteorite is a meteor which has fallen from the sky what's a galaxy a galaxy consists of hundreds of billions of stars left over from the creation of the universe the Big Bang they look like a gigantic disc a huge simmering disk of stars our galaxy for example is the Milky Way galaxy and the nearest galaxies to us is the Andromeda galaxy and we think there are about a hundred billion galaxies in the visible universe so believe it or not that means we can actually count the number of stars in the visible universe 100 billion galaxies a hundred billion stars per galaxy and so that's the number of stars in the visible universe a hundred billion times a hundred billion what's an asteroid an asteroid is a leftover from the creation of the solar system we're talking about debris that extends from the earth extends from Mars out to Jupiter and we think it's a failed planet a planet between Mars and Jupiter that never quite condensed or maybe got too close to Jupiter and got broken up so if you had to pick another place to live outside of the earth where would you go I would go to another planet now we've looked at all the planets so far none of them are exactly earth-like Venus we once thought was tropical many science fiction stories have astronauts sunbathing on the beaches of we don't know that Venus is our evil twin just like the earth closer to the Sun but temperatures are 900 degrees Fahrenheit that's above the melting point of lead and tin if you were to walk on the surface of Venus your feet would sink sink into molten metals so you don't want to go to Venus Mars are the closest it's a rocky planet it's a frozen desert but it's the closest planet we have to the earth but further out the moons of Saturn and Jupiter look very interesting one of the moons of Jupiter is Europa it has a liquid ocean underneath the ice cover who would have thought that you could have a liquid ocean whose volume is larger than the oceans of the earth going around that distant planet called Jupiter NASA at some point wise will put a submarine a submarine under the ice to look for life-forms under the ice cover we talked about your second grade teacher do you remember obviously must when you first got interested in science I remember that very distinctly I was 8 years old everyone was talking about the fact that a great scientist had just died and I'll never forget they flashed a picture of his desk on the newspapers and the caption said something like this this is the unfinished manuscript from the greatest scientist of our time so I was 8 years old I said to myself why couldn't he finish it what's so hard that the greatest scientists couldn't finish it it was a homework assignment right why didn't he ask his mother what could be so hard that you cannot answer it I went to the library and I found out his name was Albert Einstein that book was the unified field theory the theory that would allow was to quote read the mind of God so I said to myself whoa that's for me I want to be part of this grand grand expedition to finish that book now today I can read that book I can actually see all the dead ends that Einstein pursued and we actually think we have it is string theory I'm one of the one of the founders of the subject co-founder of Springville theory and we think we can actually complete that book that Einstein set into motion the theory of everything there's even a Oskar movie oscar-winning movie called the theory of everything go back your childhood where were you born and what what were your parents doing at the time well my grandparents came to this country about a hundred years ago from Japan and my grandfather was actually part of the cleanup operation in San Francisco after the San Francisco earthquake so my family has a long history in California but in 1942 because they were japanese-americans they were locked up in at Tootie Lake a relocation camp for four years behind machine gun and barbed wire by the way in 1946 they finally got out but they were penniless and we settled in Palo Alto which is now ground zero for Silicon Valley but back then it was all apple orchards and alfalfa fields and that's where I grew up basically in a farm like environment in what is now called Silicon Valley what did your parents do after they got out of the camp there was nothing for them to do except menial jobs their money was confiscated they were broke however there was a certain cachet to being a Japanese gardener so my father became a rather successful gardener and he wanted me to take over the business I tried gardening for a while and after that I said no way I kind of find another way to to make a living so when I was in high school I decided I got 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 electron betatron particle accelerator and my mom kind of stared at me and said sure why not and don't forget to take out the garbage so I took out the garbage I got 400 pounds of transformer steel 22 miles of copper wire and I built the betatron at masher my mom's garage I blew out every single circuit breaker in the house every time I turned it on my poor mother 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 but that was a turning point because of the science fair projects that I did in high school I earned the attention of an atomic scientist Edward Teller an Edward Teller pretty much took me under his wing arranged for me to get a scholarship to Harvard he knew exactly what I was doing I didn't have to explain to him what antimatter was what an accelerator was what a beta Tron was he knew immediately and so he arranged for me to get a scholarship and that started my my life as a physicist how did you meet him oh well he came to Albuquerque New Mexico for the national science fair people don't know that but he was in the habit of recruiting young scientists he went to the National Science Fair where I met him I was actually on television with him in 1963 in Albuquerque at the National Science Fair now when I graduated from Harvard he interviewed me for a graduate fellowship but at that point he was very clear he said look I'm looking for people who want to design warheads hydrogen warheads your physics would be very valuable designing newer and better hydrogen warheads he offered me a scholarship he said Los Alamos Livermore MIT you name it we couldn't we can arrange for you to work there but you know my interest then began to veer off in the direction of when I was a child wondering what was Einsteins unfinished theory you see I wanted to work on an explosion bigger than a hydrogen bomb I wanted to work on the Big Bang the creation of the universe itself and for me a hydrogen bomb was just a footnote I wanted to work on the creation of the universe here's Edward Teller this video goes back to 1974 one of the decisive events was condom which convinced me to work on nuclear weapons was a speech by President Roosevelt the day after Hitler invaded the lowlands where he said it is the duty of the scientists to contribute the weapons which are needed for the defense of freedom do you agree well that's a point that he stressed to me directly he said look I'm recruiting I'm recruiting for what the New York Times later called the Star Wars scholarship this scholarship propelled the brightest young minds in America from high school and college into Los Alamos to create the Star Wars program now we know he had a checkered history many of the early designs did not work in fact for the Star Wars program but that was the vision he had he already had a very clear mission that science should be used in the interest of national security you see those times were different from today we had the Sputnik moment in 1957 when Sputnik went up it was practically your patriotic duty to use science in the interest of America because the Russians will one day orbit hydrogen bombs not just Sputnik but hydrogen bombs will orbit the earth and the homeland will be endangered so that's why a whole generation of young kids became scientists and engineers and technicians because it was the so-called Sputnik moment so when you were growing up when did you discover that you had the brain to understand this stuff well when I was a kid I read about Einstein and my favorite quote from Einstein was if a theory cannot be explained to a child then the theory is probably worthless meaning that every great theory has a picture behind it that children can understand Newton talked about you know things moving in space friction the motion of bodies Einstein talked about clocks and meter sticks and rocket ships things that children can understand and yeah there are books trying to explain space time to children and I said to myself wow if the great ideas are all based on pictures and you understand those pictures then mathematics is bookkeeping it's complicated bookkeeping you have to learn how to do the bookkeeping of course but it's bookkeeping it's the physical principle the concept that makes everything move now when I sign was 16 when he was 16 he found that principle when he was 16 years old he asked himself a question can you outrace a light beam now we would say well that's a stupid question I mean outrace a light B what are you talking about it took him 10 years from the age of 16 to 26 and he finally found the answer and he changed world history he found out that you cannot outrace a light beam that's a children's question and I said to myself I can understand these children's questions I just have to of course at some point learn the mathematics but it's the principle that's involved and today we know of course the speed of light is the ultimate velocity in the universe Einstein is a cop on the block and he figured that out starting at the age of 16 so all great theories have a physical principle behind it that children can visualize yeah but go back to them as you went through that process what were the milestones where you began to gather the knowledge and you had people that said if you want to do this you got to go here who else had an impact on you well to be very frank a lot of people tried to give me advice when I was in high school but I knew that most of the advice was wrong you see I tell kids today that you have to have a role model because the wheels been invented already why do you have to reinvent the wheel if you want to become a sports figure or a movie star though heels been invented find somebody you admire look at their life history follow the path so I said to myself I want to become a physicist a theoretical physicist I read about Einsteins life so I knew exactly what I had to do what age in my life when do I have to get a PhD when do I have to become a professor when do I have to start to work on some big physical concept it was no mystery to me and so many young kids come up to me because they get bum advice from their high school teacher who simply wants to end a little trade school or learn something that that he's a little bit better than pumping gas so I say to myself tell the kids find a role model the wheels been invented already so was teller your role model I know it was Einstein because teller made a very big pitch for me to design weapons and for me at that point of my life I realized that it's engineering the basic physics of hydrogen warheads is well known well established as you know China and and developing nations got the hydrogen bomb practically in the first try and so it was an engineering problem I'm a physicist I wanted to look at the physical concept of new undiscovered things like why did the Big Bang take place what was the energy source of the Big Bang why did it bang to begin with these are questions of cosmic importance that are far beyond the engineering of the simply assembling a hydrogen warhead but again why were you able to figure it out and most people are drowning all this language and everything when there would be back in high school well I think unfortunately we have a high school system that stresses memorization stretches drudgery and does not encourage the bright students to come up for example in Asia they have the expression the nail that sticks out gets hammered down so if you're the oddball if you're Steve Jobs if you're Bill Gates you get hammered down but in America we have the expression the squeaky wheel gets the grease now I was the squeaky wheel I wanted to get the attention of my teachers in high school that's why I built the atom smasher as I found out most of my teachers couldn't help me but I wanted to do it because I said to myself this is something that is doable I just have to get the basic equipment the basic physics I understood and so it was not such a big deal for me to build an atom smasher what'd you do with it well I turned it on ma the goal was to create antimatter that was the whole thrust of the science fair project I photographed antimatter antimatter comes naturally from a radioactive source called sodium 22 that in a cloud chamber put in a magnetic field of 600 Gauss and the beautiful tracks of antielectrons bent in the wrong direction electrons been this way antimatter bends the opposite way in a magnetic field and I took beautiful pictures cloud chamber pictures pictures that are research quality in fact they tell me and I went grand prize at the National Science Fair and so I'll never regret doing a science or experiment because that took me from a gardeners kid to getting a scholarship to Harvard and then beginning to work on the unified field theory that's how it started what did the rest of the kids think of you uh well they thought it was nuts of course the teachers that I had to work with I simply told them that I had to cut transformer steel I have to glue copper wire and they helped me but they didn't know what was what I was doing I mean they just knew that here's this young kid who needs to cut four hundred pounds of transformer steel why in 22 miles of copper wire and I did it on the high school football field how big was this atom smasher that you had well it was about this big consumed six kilowatts of power the capacitor bank was huge because they had to store their six kilowatts of power and it gave us his tremendous crackling sound when I turned it on the magnetic field was so powerful that in principle it would pull the fillings out of your teeth if you got too close to it yet to be careful if there was a hammer or anything like that in principle if I ran it on DC it would literally grab a hammer from across the room and fling it toward you that happens that MRI machines today because they too have a magnetic field of about 10,000 Gauss now today we have a big one a real big one outside Geneva Switzerland that's huge that's a Large Hadron Collider that is basically my little machine scaled up to the size of a city and that is the leading scientific instrument in the world today outside Geneva why didn't we build it well we had designs for the super collider to be built outside Dallas Texas in the 1990s but then of the last day of hearings costs were rising and Congress wanted to know should they keep on budgeting the super collider and they cancelled it they gave us a billion dollars to dig the hole a second billion dollars to fill up the hole that's two billion dollars to dig a hole and fill it up that's the wisdom of the United States Congress two billion dollars to dig and feel a hole fell a hole now why do they cancel it in the last day of hearings when congressman ask a physicist quote will we find God with your machine if so I will vote for it so that physicist was paralyzed here was a question are we gonna find God with your machine so he said something like well we'll find the Higgs boson well you could hear all the jaws hit the floor of the United States Congress ten billion dollars for another god thor in subatomic particle the vote was taken and the next day it was cancelled since then we physicists have bat our heads against the wall wondering how should we have answered that question will we find God with this machine what would you say I would have said this I would have said God about whatever signs or symbols you ascribe to the deity this machine the super collider will take us as close as humanly possible to his greatest creation Genesis this is a Genesis machine it will recreate on a microscopic scale the most glorious event in the history of the universe its birth did that turn out to be the same thing that happens what's one that's right that very same machine is now in Switzerland and it the Higgs boson and we hope to find what it's called dark matter which is the next form of matter beyond ordinary matter but our machine was cancelled because we didn't know how to talk the language of the average taxpayer that was a real lesson we have to understand where the tax payer is because in the old days we would go to Congress and say one word Russia Congress would then whip out their checkbook and say how much how much for the next atom smasher those days are gone you can't do that anymore I want to show some video of you in 1997 saying some strong things about NASA I'm here to try to save the space program from NASA bureaucrats NASA bureaucrats are trying to fabricate new laws of physics that I've never seen before in any of my textbooks in any of the books that I have published or PhD students in fact if any of these engineers were to submit that report to me for a course I would flunk them why did you feel so strongly I believe in the space program but I think we have to do it safely because why will the taxpayers turn against the space program when we lost the Space Shuttle we came within a hair's breadth of losing the space program the American people were saying enough is enough seven beautiful astronauts perishing because some bureaucrat authorized the launching of that missile and NASA wanted to launch the Cassini mission a great mission by the way which gave us gorgeous amounts of information about Saturn with 72 pounds of plutonium and this split the scientific community because on one hand we wanted Cassini to orbit Saturn give us those great photographs but the other hand if that rocket were to blow up NASA's own computer program estimated that some of the plutonium could go to Disneyworld now think about that for a moment if you were taxpayer and you realize that this rocket to Saturn all of a sudden caused the evacuation of Disneyworld and you have to cancel your vacations and cross Orlando Florida off the tourist map you get really angry right and so I said to myself it's not worth it chances are it'll be a success chances are we'll go to Saturn and get glorious photographs which is what happened actually but I said to myself it's a gamble do we want to take that gamble and perhaps lose the space program I love the space program so much that you have to save it from the NASA bureaucrats and their attitude was launched the sucker you say in your book that 544 humans have been in space and that 18 of those have died what do those numbers mean to you it means that one percent of the time it's Russian Roulette one percent of the time you don't come back one percent of the time that people ask me what I want to go into space knowing that one percent of the time I'm not going to come back you see these people are test pilots they are experienced astronauts they go through the training they taken courses they know the odds it's 1% we're 60 years into the Space Age and we have not got that number down below 1% misfire in fact tomorr is it's even worse 30% 30% of our space probes never reach it to Mars and so well as Elon Musk said himself he would love to be the first person on Mars but he doesn't want to be there on impact so I agree with that we forget space is not a Sunday picnic 1% of the time our rockets blow up arthur c clarke this is from 1964 and i want you to put him into context a little bit of video what about the city of the day after tomorrow say the year 2000 it will be possible in that age perhaps only 50 years from now for a man to conduct his business from to Haiti or Bali just as well as he could from London I am perfectly serious when I suggest that one day we may have brain surgeons in Edinburgh operating on patients in New Zealand how's he doing on his predictions well he's right on the money now we have internet we have telemedicine doctors in place can do surgery using robots in fact even beyond what he said handle robots instruct the robots on the other side of the planet Earth we have robots at Duke University that communicate with robots in Kyoto for example and different operations that you can do in Duke University we can also do in Kyoto University so if anything I think he underestimated the the power of the Internet and he mentioned you know being able to communicate anywhere in the planet Earth guess what Elon Musk just last week unveiled a plan to create a planetary internet thousands of mini satellites thousands of mini satellites so that you're on the top of Mount Everest and there you are downloading the Kardashians and so today you have to have a microwave tower next to mine ever is to do that but if satellites thousands of mini satellites orbit the Earth then yeah exactly what our to see Clarke said could become a reality what is it theoretical physicists do and he has free time well for Einstein it was like playing the violin it was a time for him to think back at his work and to to rethink his strategy he also likes sailing okay now for me well I'm a professor and I realized that I like to teach but I can board twenty kids teaching a course but if I'm a radio or television I could bore twenty million kids so I said to myself wow that's an opportunity to touch the minds of young people because whenever I interview a Nobel Prize winning scientist I asked them when was it that that spark of of science began to germinate and they always say when I was ten ten is that magic year you have that epiphany you went to the planetarium you saw your first telescope you saw the moon for the first time in the rings of Saturn you saw a microbe in a microscope that epiphany stays with you for the rest of your life so when you're an elderly scientist and you're tired and you all these obligations it's like a well you draw water from that well continually over the decades because you remember you remember that epiphany you had when you were 10 years old and that keeps you going do you play the violin I know personally I like to do figure skating how long have you done that well for the last 15 years one was a kid I always liked to watch figure skating on TV but to do something like that that's why they're complicated but I realized as an adult that is nothing but no Tony in physics and if you aren't a physicist you understand center of gravity moment of inertia you understand the basics of figure skating so I said to myself I can learn that and so yeah if you see me spinning and jumping at Rockefeller Center you know that it's me on the ice so if I were 19 years old and I wanted to see you in a classroom for America see now my age but if I wanted to starting out and I was interested where would I find you and what would why would I be in your classroom and how large would that classroom be today well normally I teach two graduate students and at that level we're talking about a ph.d program you're we talking about maybe five ten students because these people are raring to go and they're doing PhD level work but the University the City University of New York has so many young people at the freshman level unwashed raw students at the freshman level that they said look you got to teach freshmen so I decided to teach astronomy and I was shocked I looked at the astronomy final and it was memorized all the moons of Saturn and memorized all the moons of Jupiter that was the final exam and I said to myself I don't even know the moons of Saturn I don't even know the moons of Jupiter this is a worthless exam you simply look it up in a book I wanted to know planetary evolution where stars come from how they die how they mature so I threw out the curriculum and it decided to import NASA video tapes about going to the planets and begin to talk about planetary evolution planets obey certain basic laws they're born they mature and they die you can teach these concepts because as Einstein said you can teach principles to children especially pictorial principles and so that's why I decided to take this small little astronomy course and make it modern now we're up to like 500 kids the course is bursting at the seams because people have a thirst it presented well people will gravitate toward it you know when I first did television people said that quote science doesn't sell on TV but I said to myself well that can't be right because a million people subscribe to Scientific American another million people described to Discover Magazine and when there's a science special well you can actually get 5 million people to tune into that so there's an untapped audience there and then when cable took off we found it yes there really are 5 to 10 million people out there that will tune into a science program if and only if is presented well with special effects with a very cogent storytelling people will gravitate toward it because we're born scientists we're born wondering why the Sun shines how often have you been involved in a television special well I work with BBC Discovery Channel the Science Channel hosting specials for them sometimes and of course Talking Heads I regularly do Talking Heads for different science specials you talk about Ray Kurzweil in your book here is some video of him talking about life expectancy and I want your input on this people say you take all these supplements and other pills that's gonna enable you to live hundreds of years and the answer is no that's just to get to bridge to and bridge to is not far away according to my models 10 to 15 years from now we'll be adding more than a year every year to your remaining life expectancy but Ray Kurzweil in the context and he has a plan for himself I think any pills he take a day I think he takes up several hundred I talked to him once in is it's a considerable number he also talks about two kinds of immortality one is digital immortality which is coming very fast by the way Silicon Valley companies are already offering a version of that now and then there's biological immortality now digital immortality takes everything known about you on the internet your digital footprint your credit card records what movies you see what wines you like to buy what countries you visit your videos your pictures your audio tapes and creates a profile that's digitized which will last forever so when you go to the library of the future you will not take out a book about Winston Churchill you'll talk to Winston Churchill you'll talk to a hologram and that hologram will have all the mannerisms all the knowledge anecdotes story everything known about Winston Churchill and you'll talk to him I wouldn't mind talking to Einstein I would love to have an opportunity to talk to an Einstein based on everything that is known about the man we could be digitized there's a Silicon Valley company already offering to do this and our great-great great-great-great-great granddaughter may want to find out who was there a great great great great great grandfather because we've all been digitized now to to paraphrase Bill Clinton is this really you well it all depends on how you define you if we define you as a biological entity then this is a tape recorder very sophisticated but if you are the sum total of all your memories emotions feelings if that is you then yeah in some sense you could live forever because you've been digitized what is I want your definition please for artificial intelligence artificial intelligence a machine that can do anything that a human can do and let's be blunt about this right now if you compare artificial intelligence to animals our most advanced robot ASIMO has the abilities of a cockroach a retarded lobotomize slow cockroach our robots today can barely walk across the room they can barely sweep the floor or eval but I foresee a time in the future when they'll be as smart as a mouse being able to run around find mates really quick and smart as a rat a rabbit eventually as smart as a cat or a dog but by the time they reach the level of a monkey they could become dangerous that's at the end of the century I think because monkeys have a self-awareness they know they are not human they know they're monkeys now dogs are confused you see dogs think that we are the top dog and they're the underdog and they're part we're part of the same dog tribe the dog pack so those are confused about who they are but monkeys they know they're not human once robots become as smart as monkeys then I think we should put a chip in their brain to shut them off if they have murderous thoughts but that's not for many decades to come your own life did you have brothers and sisters yes mm-hmm how many I had one older brother and one younger brother and what did they end up doing well they're retired my younger brother is a cardiologist and he's still in private practice and yeah so we all went to college and we all did what our parents dreamed of and they wanted us to be successful what did your mother do we talked about your father what did she do well they passed away my father was a gardener and my mother was a maid because you know we were always strapped for money I still remember my parents arguing about money and where should the money go because you know we were flat broke during that period of time and I still remember my mother talking about college that college is the key to everything and I had this vision that college was this city in the sky I still have that vision that there's this there's a city in the sky called college because that's the way my mother put it and so now I realized that she was on to something and that is yes College is a gateway a gateway to success in in modern society how much of all of your education and where did you get it all was paid for in scholarships that you go that's right I got to Harvard and Harvard and also the Hearst engineering scholarship that Edward Teller founded so I was a beneficiary of that and then in my ph.d program there was money from the National Science Foundation so luckily even though struggling artists have a hard time scraping together the next the next meal in sciences there is funding the Natural Science Foundation the Department of Energy will fund enterprising young PhD students and so that I think is is a good thing you know there's a brain drain into the United States because there is funding both private entrepreneurs Silicon Valley billionaires will sponsor startups and there is a National Science Foundation in the Department of Energy for more speculative and cutting-edge kinds of research so there is a brain drain into the United States at the present time go back to your ten year old example by the way do you have children yes I mean huh - and what kind of work are they in the older daughter is a brain doctor she's a neurologist and she's actually a professor now professor at Boston University and in the other the other one followed a different road she is a French pastry cook she went to an exclusive school where they trained in a credit French pastry cooks and she's done very well in Manhattan your mother said she wanted you to find a nice Japanese woman is that who you found well your wife my second wife is Japanese and so she my mother honey got her dream however I should point out that my mother eventually came down with Alzheimer's and says very unfortunate that she could not even recognize me toward the very end she could not even recognize herself and so I thought that life in some sense is so unfair you struggle so hard when you're young and you're always poor always wondering where the next check is gonna come from and then you lose your memories you lose your sense of who you are who your children are you know sometimes life can be very unfair well what are you thinking at this age get it that you're 71 yeah mm-hmm I mean what are you thinking about how long you going to teach and what happens to the brain you must know a lot about that the brain as you get older well I realized that the body does of course decay but the brain decays much slower you could be sharp as a whistle even in your old age Einstein was publishing very important papers even to the the last days of his life now when you get older you say to yourself do I want to write lots of papers that will get published but are worthless that you know they're nothing but dotting the the i's and crossing the t's I'd rather work on big problems now of course there's a danger that nothing is going to come out of these big problems but I would rather work on a big problem and fail then work on a lot of little problems and and succeed from a standpoint of financial accomplishments what categories have been the most lucrative for you in other words teaching documentaries radios programs speaking books well when I first started to write books people told me you're never going to get rich writing a book because of the fact there is this cutthroat competition out there and as Bill Clinton knows you can make more money doing speaking at events and keynoting conferences and stuff like that and that's something that I enjoy is something that I enjoy because you get to engage people and talk about things that are on their mind things that are troubling them and so I get invited to keynote conferences for example is that's the best economically they are speaking probably and if you take a look at Bill Clinton and George W Bush and people there on the circuit in fact I bump into them regularly I've been on several programs speaking with Bill Clinton and how often do you teach your class with 500 kids in it well the university said look whenever I teach I mean whenever I have to go out and keno at a conference or something I disrupt the university I have to find a substitute teacher I have to make sure that the grad students can can grade the papers and stuff like that rather disruptive and so they made a deal with me they said look if you if we cut cut your slack so that you have more time for for speaking and stuff you can spread the good name of the University the University benefits you benefit because you don't have to run back to the college every time there's a speaking engagement and that was a win-win situation so they reduced my teaching load now which is I think the ideal situation how big is your University it's one of the biggest on the planet Earth the City University of New York has a quarter of a million students it is huge the State University of New York of course services the entire state the City University of New York services well eight million people altogether that's the population of New York Brooklyn alone would be the third largest city in the United States if you were to cut up New York City so CUNY the City University of New York is gigantic it is absolutely humongous here's some you read a lot about this in your book you talk about going to Mars and but here's a motion picture star trek 1979 it's not very long I just want to show it and have you put the movies that we see in this country again in context with learning science accelerating to warp 1 sir or what Seth point-8 or what have you seen all these movies oh I love them I'm a science-fiction junkie so I watch all the Star Trek films and all the Star Trek stuff when I was a kid I just really loved a gorged on this stuff today however I do a lot of cringing because I realize oh they got that law of physics wrong oh they got that wrong so a lot of times I have to suspend what I know about physics and just let my imagination roam and that's the way to enjoy these films so I love these films 1951 The Day the Earth Stood Still let's watch this one there is no concern of ours how you run your own planet but if you threaten to extend your violence this earth of yours will be reduced to a burned-out cinder your choice is simple join us and live in peace or pursue your present course and face obliteration did you see this movie yes that movie was very important because up to then the paradigm was war the worlds the bad guys versus the good guys were the underdog were the good guys that flipped it totally a hundred eighty degrees the other way all of a sudden we became the enemy we were the enemy of ourselves we are were our worst enemy and so that movie was was incredibly important as it shifted the entire focus away from Martians invading the earth to looking inward to looking at our own problem that if we explore artist space if we mess up the earth we don't want to mess up Mars we have to get our own act together and so I thought that motion picture was pivotal because it shifted the center of gravity of science fiction what's specific and this is book number nine for you I think 14 I think yeah they listed eight in their front part of everyone's our PhD level textbooks but this one's called the future of humanity and what was your goal in this book versus the others well the other words I talk about the future like a hundred two hundred three hundred years in the future but what's the pot of gold out there what's the ultimate destiny of all these things and so I said to myself well you know as Carl Sagan once told me we should become a two-planet species we should become we should join other civilizations in some kind of galactic galactic civilization if it exists and so as people pointed out to me the dinosaurs did not have a space program and the destiny of the dinosaurs was to go extinct that was their destiny our destiny is unwritten but 99% of all life-forms their destiny is extinction the norm for mother nature is extinction if you don't dig right under our feet right now you will see the bones of the 99.9% that no longer walk the surface of the earth now we're different we have self-awareness we can see the future we plot we scheme we plan and so perhaps we're gonna evade this conundrum and maybe survive but we need an insurance policy that's why this book is different from the other books because you're the books talk about the steps but what is the goal what's the pot of gold up there and I'm saying is that one pot of gold would be to have an insurance policy a plan B in case a supervolcano an asteroid and other Ice Age wipes out humanity on the earth are severely dense our history so 20 this is 20 years from now you'll be 91 he'll still be teaching and speaking and you look back at what we've done in these twenty years what will it be and what will have been responsible for it well in some sense my goal in life that is what I want to do is we physicists like to rank civilizations by energy type 1 type 2 type 3 a type 1 is planetary they control the weather type 2 is stellar they control stars and play with stars like Star Trek Star Trek would be a type two civilization then this type 3 Galactic they play with black holes they roam the Galactic space lanes like star wars now what are we on this scale we are type zero we get our energy from dead plants but we can see that in a hundred years we will be type 1 but it's not guaranteed because we still have all the savagery of our rise from the swamp just a few hundred years ago we have the same sectarianism fundamentalism nationalism all the backwardness of our rise from the swamp but I see that by 2100 we will become a planetary civilization and so I want to help speed up that process to make sure that we don't let the savagery of our rights from the swamp overwhelm our destiny which is to become type 1 for example what language will this type one civilization speak already on the internet English and Mandarin Chinese are the two dominant languages and the Internet itself is the first type one technology that fell into our lap as as we're still type zero so we see the beginning of a type 1 planetary civilization but we may not make it Elon Musk just said that last month why don't the aliens visit us there should be a lot of type 1 civilizations out there they don't visit us perhaps because they didn't make the transition to type 1 you have any idea why over the years and it's been that case since I was even aware of it that we refer to aliens as little green men that are going to land here someday why is it why are they little green men well I think it's part of our subconscious because Hollywood gives us these images as children and as grown-ups we we access these ancient memories of bug-eyed monsters for example by the way I have some advice for people that claim to have met these aliens many people email me and say they've been abducted by aliens from outer space so they know they're out there my attitude is the next time you're abducted by an alien steal something I don't care what this an alien paperweight an alien ship an alien pen steal something because there is no law against stealing from an extraterrestrial there's no longer books that said you can't steal from an extraterrestrial guess has there been extraterrestrials land on this planet you can't rule it out I don't think so but if you ask for hard evidence there's no hard evidence either way and so there is that possibility that in the past we might have been visited they can't be ruled out last video you were alive you were young you were 8 to 10 years old this is 1957 October the 4th somebody named Major John Glenn on a program called name that tune what do you think of the Russian satellite which is circling the Earth at 18,000 miles per hour well to say the least George they're out of this world this is really quite an advancement for not only the Russians but for international science I think we'd all agree on that it's the first time anybody has ever been able to get anything out that far in space and keep it there for any length of time and this is probably the first step toward space travel or moon travel something will probably run into maybe in Eddie's lifetime here at least Eddie would you like to take a trip to the moon no sir I like it sign right here Major John Glenn was a test pilot then and he had not gone to space how in your opinion how we done since 1957 well I think NASA unfortunately became the agency to nowhere it does spun wheels went around the planet Earth the space station was supposed to be the Gateway for Mars and the planets and that became a big turkey in outer space so I think we've been basically spinning wheels for 50 years but last month just last month there was this excitement that's electricity when the Falcon heavy rocket blasted off because that was a moon rocket the first moon rocket in 50 years to blast off from Cape Canaveral and guess who paid for it our taxpayers money no a private individual Elon Musk paid for a moon rocket and basically gave it to the American people for free this is unheard of five years ago ten years ago if you were to say that a private individual would create his own moon personal moon rocket and give it to the people of the world people would think you were nuts but it actually happened so we're in a new ballgame now a new ballgame where prices have been dropping dramatically where the we the Martian cost 100 million but to go to Mars only costs 70 million dollars so Hollywood movies about Mars actually cost more than actually going to Mars that's how cheap space travel has become India China China's gonna plant their flag on the moon it's a national goal for the Chinese people so things have changed a sea change from the 1960s prices have dropped private entrepreneurs from Silicon Valley are funding a lot of this stuff and China in the everyone's jumping into the game we're gonna have a traffic jam around the moon just got 30 seconds if you what would you tell an eight-year-old today watching you right now and I'm sure they've seen you in the audience's when you speak what should they do to prepare to become a theoretical physicist or a scientist well I tell them keep that flame alive that is keep that spark that inspiration whatever it was that set you off in the direction for me it was trying to follow the works of Einstein to complete Einsteins dream whatever it is follow that star because that's going to keep you going because there has to be a North Star that inspires you because yeah there's a lot of math you have to know yeah you got to pay your dues but ultimately it's that spark of creativity and innovation that keeps you going in spite of all the obstacles our guess is Ben Michio Kaku and the title of the book is the future of humanity thank you very much for joining us my pleasure [Music]

Channel: Cuckoo for Kaku

Views: 442,596

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Id: MeJpMaqGe1k

Length: 56min 54sec (3414 seconds)

Published: Sun Apr 08 2018