Michio Kaku - Starships & Listener Questions

science fantastic the professor Michio Kaku this is science fantastic with Professor Michio Kaku and science fantastic we profile the amazing jaw-dropping scientific discoveries which are revolutionizing our world and touching our lives and in this hour we're going to go past Mars past Jupiter past sadder we're going to go past Pluto we're going to go to the nearby stars that's right we're going to talk about starships because that's what we physicists are talking about Engineers of course talked about going to Mars the we physicists are dreamers and we want to know well is it physically possible to send people to Alpha Centauri the closest star to the planet Earth only a hop skip and a jump of 24 trillion miles a Saturn rocket well a Saturn rocket would take 70,000 years 70,000 years to reach Alpha Centauri so obviously we need to go beyond chemical rockets we have to go to atomic rockets antimatter rocket warp drive you name it we physicists have looked at the physics behind some of these speculative designs and if you saw the movie passengers it starts off on a starship the distances are so great that you have to go under suspended animation to reach a new home orbiting another star in the universe and already we scientists have identified 3,600 planets orbiting other stars systems in the Milky Way galaxy and so we know they're out there and in the movie passengers well a list Hollywood actors go to the nearest star go to a star with an earth-like planet going around it and if you saw Matthew McConaughey in the movie interstellar we go even past that we go to the other side of the galaxy going through a wormhole and so in this hour we're going to talk about wormholes we're going to talk about different kinds of rocket designs and my colleague Stephen Hawking has our idea that may take us to the stars in maybe quarter of a century 25 years and that is why not send tiny computer ships put a sail a parachute around each computer chip blast a parachute with a laser beam and because it's so small and compact you could send it to a fraction of the speed of light within just a few minutes think about that thousands of these little tiny chips being blasted by laser beams to the nearest star and in 20 years they would reach Alpha Centauri and if you've been following the newspaper as you know that there is a planet a planet orbiting one of the stars in the Alpha Centauri system if it weighs about 30 percent more than the planet Earth it is earth-like think about that one day we may be able to make contact with an earth-like planet orbiting around the nearest star in the heavens this is a dream from science fiction taking place not in the 23rd century taking place maybe in 25 years or so well let's talk about the science behind all these things with us today dr. James Benford he and his brother Gregory Benford are physicists and science fiction writers that's right they write award-winning science fiction tales and there are also authors of an anthology an anthology called starships century where they invite the leaders in this field both in fiction and in fact to write articles about what it would take to journey to the nearby stars and again this is something that we cannot do we won't be able to do for a few more decades but hey we're thinking about it now so we're sort of like in the 1950s when people were thinking about going to the moon but the whole idea was so preposterous and outlandish well we went to the moon now our sights are set on the nearest star in the heavens welcome back to science fantastic with professor Michio Kaku with us today is dr. James Benford and he and his twin brother are experts in physics and starship propulsion systems and science fiction they're the co-authors of a book that I highly recommend called starships sensory it's an anthology consisting of articles written by physicists my friends in fact as well as science fiction writers so if you were interested in exploring the universe the book to get is starship century once again our special guest today dr. James Benford a twin brother of Gregory Benford and they are they hail from Alabama and he studied physics at the University of Oklahoma in 1969 he got his PhD in physics from the University of California at San Diego he's worked for 26 years at physics International in 1996 he founded microwave sciences and he's an expert on high-powered microwaves systems and in this hour we'll talk about science fiction and science fact and how to get to the stars so a dr. Benford glad you could be on science fantastic so I'm happy to be here okay well let's just jump right in you are a physicist however most physicists well their eyes kind of like rolled into the heavens when you talk about starships and and Star Trek and science fiction and stuff like that so let me ask you the first question as they youth when you were a kid how did you first get interested in science I got interested in science through science fiction I started reading Robert Heinlein Juvenal novels the first of which was a space cadet and eventually I read all of them they're a wonderful set of encouraging positive books and that got that going so interested in space that I realized as if I really wanted to participate in that which I saw is the thing that would happen in the near future then I had to learn science I had to study mathematics and I had to get serious in life at the age of about 10 okay and then what steered you in the direction of physics as well as science fiction well physics is the hardest thing in many ways and I figured if I could do the hardest thing I can do the others as well okay so I just you figured that it had a good physics background that would allow you to then explore the realm of science fiction right in the end of other Sciences I mean is physics is is a is a harsh discipline in a way you have to change the way you think and once you've done that you can think about anything practically okay now I've gone through your book starship century which i think is a great book it's a great primer for those people who are serious about looking into the possibility of one day going to the Stars so what was the genesis of that book that you and your twin brother decided to put together well there was I participated in organizing capacity of a meeting in 2011 called a 100 year starship conference in Florida and it made me realize that this is a coming thing that the starships were finally beginning to be taken seriously and so I suggested to my brother that we produce an anthology of both science and science fiction about starship with the many people we know in the field and put together something that would advocate that we take this matter seriously and to encourage people to get interested enough to get educated enough and to and to make something happen in this direction okay now let's talk about what it would take to build a starship most people of course have heard about the plans to go to Mars and we've sent space probes out to Pluto but what would it take if I had a Saturn rocket how long would it take roughly for a Saturn rocket to reach the nearest star Alpha Centauri Oh like ruffler magnitude is about a hundred thousand years long about as long as the human beings have been a speech so in other words we can rule out chemical rockets right that's a no-go forget about it okay so no Saturn rocket is going to take this beyond Pluto into deep interstellar space and onto Alpha Centauri which is only what twenty four trillion miles from the planet Earth yeah right next door okay now a few years ago Stephen Hawking my colleague had a press conference where he advocated a new way of going to the stars not with the Starship Enterprise a gigantic sleek starship that has hundreds of crew members but having posted Stan's chips that are propelled by laser beams that would take maybe twenty years to go to Alpha Centauri so could you explain what's the motivation of sending posted Stan's chips to the nearest stars propelled by laser beams for that to be of haloed means a great deal of miniaturization compared to today's probes but the downsizing of electronics and various things like cameras is proceeding at a tremendous pace and it is credible to make a postage stamp one gram payload credible in fact I have a few prototypes here in my in my office the they were fabricated largely by Cornell and Harvard so that we think we can get a limited amount of diagnostics onto such a probe such a payload but then you can send many of them the idea of using a laser beam to drive them is it you can launch one today and another one tomorrow and keep on going so they don't have to all get there they don't you can take risks with them but and once they get there they can report on specific things back to earth you don't put everything on one on one platform so to speak such as our Voyager probes or our new horizon probe where all the Diagnostics are in one probe and it it's the major investment so this is a kind of a fire-and-forget system in the sense that you launch it and then it's on its trajectory with a little bit of maneuvering on the way and does a flyby and so it doesn't have to decelerate at the other end the project is called star shot and it's been under way this is its second year and I should say that I'm one of the principal participants in star shot I we didn't mentioned that what what the laser beam propels is actually a sail with the payload on it by a sail I mean a fairly large area some metres in diameter which is diaphanous that is extremely lightweight on the order of a gram and is accelerated tremendous tremendous rate to very high velocities in just a matter of minutes so the numbers fit together and it's a very challenging project but the key elements are the sail the payload and the laser and my responsibility is the sail okay well when you start to look at the details you realize that the Bank of laser beams has to generate 800 gigawatts of power that's the power of well 800 nuclear power plants that's a lot of power in a lot of money right what do you thoughts it's the major driver in the cost of the system is the later laser and it's radiating aperture I think you're awful bit on the number there it's on the order of about to between 10 and 100 gigawatts power down 10 mils very large number right and and that's hard to do you can't do it with a single laser you will need millions of lasers and that is I think the very basic challenge to the program is how to coordinate that many small laser devices which will all be fabricated by should essentially chip techniques and micro electronics they won't be large structures but small ones and replicated in vast numbers but the laser is a really big challenge for the project okay now the laser sails of course are going to cost a lot of money and we need banks of these lasers so we have a billionaires that are backing this program right I mean a hundred million dollars has already been pledged to this project it'll cost ten billion dollars to make it into fruition and I understand that Mark Zuckerberg the founder of Facebook is behind this project as well so you have some billionaires out there right that's true there are at least two billionaires associated with the project Yuri Milner and Mark Zuckerberg okay and what about NASA funding is NASA going to get behind this thing too because ten billion dollars is a lot of money the masses not directly involved now although some people who are work with NASA have attended some meetings and NASA has just very recently started a small half million dollar project to think about where to go with interstellar and I think that probably is because of the publicity having to do with star shot some people in Congress are saying hey why aren't we doing something this is a good idea okay now also when you want to aim something all the way out to Alpha Centauri the nearest star 24 trillion miles away that's a lot of aiming technology right do we have the technology to aim something so precisely that it would travel four light-years to the nearest star first of all it would require the very state-of-the-art the very best we've ever done in pointing accuracy on the order of 10 nano radians or secondly you're going to have to have some ability to to tack this sail so to speak to maneuver it so that it goes where it's supposed to do you've always got to do advocate building of having a so to speak a mid-course correction to the trajectory then and let's face it sometimes you're going to miss but on the way you'll get data about the interstellar medium and cosmic dusts and things like that but that is tracking pointing and tracking is an extremely big challenge to the project in fact we're going to go to this if we go through this completely I can list for you five or 10 major challenges for the project it's a very audacious and ambitious project now when the laser beam goes through the air and you lose about 90 percent of the energy so some people are saying that because this project will come to fruition in a few decades why not put it on the moon of course that's very expensive but if you have all these lasers on the moon you would have ten times the power without having the the atmosphere absorb so much energy but what are your thoughts is that is that for the next project are the what we plan to do is to locate the laser at very high altitude probably the Atacama Desert in Chile where most of the atmosphere are certainly most of the water in the atmosphere which is an absorbing medium that is far below you it's a very is the driest place in the planet and therefore the losses are down to a much lower level and indeed the laser is the dominant cost in the system at and so the once you've built it you use it many times and you putting it in space would make it cost orders of magnitude more and therefore make it unaffordable okay and I think we the appealing thing about this idea is the phrase off-the-shelf technology I mean we're not talking about inventing new laws of physics here right we're taking we're talking about simply throwing money at systems that have already been shown to to work right that's exactly right there are really three kinds of issues in any major project of this kind the first is is is the science that is the physics in this case the physics is known we're not talking about anything new the next challenge is engineering and that's where the bulk of the of the challenge lies and we have many many issues to deal with in engineering and the final decider is cost how much can we afford to spend and in fact if you take the engineering challenges plus the challenges of cost control and getting cost down by mass production those are sufficient to make it a very challenging project but we require no new physics here okay and you were involved with the 100 year starship idea that you mentioned earlier however with off-the-shelf technology we might be able to have this system up and running perhaps in a few decades right we don't have to wait a hundred years maybe two or three decades so what are your thoughts then precisely I think we are likely to be able to deal with these engineering problems within a timescale of a decade and at that time to be building a demonstrator which will show the basic features of the system working together and then having success in that we will move on to the big system the full system which will take 10 to 20 years to get into place fully and therefore I expect that we will be launching probes toward the stars within somewhere about something or the quarter of a century from now and therefore a probes will reach their stars in this century and when mother nature wants to send something from A to B like seeds she sends thousands of seeds hoping that a few of them germinate so in this situation here because we're talking about small little chips being sent to the nearest near light velocity you could send thousands of them right yes that's why we're gonna launch frequently and in many many that's that's what you do once you build the launcher you paid the price so you may as well send as many as you can well let's take a short commercial break and after the break we're going to continue a discussion of starships with dr. James Benford he and his twin brother are co-authors of a delightful book called starships century tour the grandest horizon [Music] [Music] welcome back to science fantastic with Professor Michio Kaku we're very delighted to have with us today dr. James Benford a physicist who also dabbles in science fiction and he and his twin brother are authors of a book starship century because that's what we're talking about today what are the chances that we might be able to not just go to Pluto I mean we're talking about going way past Pluto we're talking about going to the nearest star Alpha Centauri is over four light-years from the planet Earth and recently astronomers have found an earth-like planet going around one of the stars in the Centauri system it's called Proxima Centauri B it is earth-like just a little bit bigger than the planet Earth and who knows maybe there are people on Proxima Centauri B who are wondering whether or not there's any life on this planet so the possibility of a starship a starship within let's say 25 years or so is a real possibility so a dr. Benford let's continue a discussion about this laser system isn't it true that this is part of a larger set of starships the the laser of the sails the photon sails that can reach a fraction of the speed of light so not just laser beams but some people have thought about maybe the Sun as a source of energy but probably not enough to go to the stars but isn't it true that there's a whole variety of the sail systems yes some of them are quite large and go more slowly have bigger payloads and in fact we should look at the entire class of being driven sails to to think about how we could use this technology to get around the solar system much faster than we do now because in interplanetary travel we have reached the limits of chemical rockets quite a long time ago and what we need now is both faster ships but also ships that are have a much bigger payloads and in the first category of faster ships the being driven sails will top anything they can be driven to very high velocities in the question of heavier payloads we probably need to go to nuclear rockets either efficient rockets or fusion rockets and only the former the fishing rocket has been demonstrated in a very practical way Fusion is still a long way off okay well let's talk about those nuclear rockets it's several decades ago physicists like Ted Taylor proposed the project Orion using small mini nuclear bombs you eject them from the rear of your starship you essentially ride on the shock wave created by a nuclear detonation underneath your starship and by golly it could work right I mean at least on paper at least on paper it is possible to create a starship using many hydrogen bombs dropped out the rear end right way back in the 60s in San Diego propelling an object up to some altitude not very high but showed that in principle this won't work well in practice it was using just high explosives now with the nuclear explosives it's a pretty inefficient use of nuclear explosives but I can't think of a better use and it's not probably the way I would go I think that picking up a tourniquet using an atomic pile which heat hydrogen into a exhaust nozzle is a much more efficient way to use nuclear energy and by the way Ted Taylor the man who was behind project Orion was actually an acquaintance of mine and I asked him why he finally gave up on the idea of using pulse hydrogen bombs to propel a starship and he said without basically two reasons for there was a limited test ban treaty so you couldn't test these things and second of all he was worried that nuclear weapons would get so tiny and so versatile and so hidden that terrorists could get ahold of these things and caused tremendous damage and so he decided not to work on these many many nuclear weapons these micro nuclear weapons because of the possibility of proliferation well let's now move away from fission that is the power of uranium to the power of fusion and fusion of course is what makes the Sun Shine it's what makes the stars shine and well if we have to take a short commercial break but after the break I'll ask you about fusion engines and then antimatter engines we don't have them yet but one day perhaps in a 23rd century when Star Trek Star Trek using the 23rd century will have antimatter Rockets as well let's take a short commercial break in the next segment we're going to go to the Stars perhaps writing on antimatter [Music] welcome back to science fantastic with professor Michio Kaku with us today is dr. James Benford he and his twin brother are authors of the book starships century and we're talking about starships we let off by talking about laser sails that is riding on the power of a laser beam to propel a small chip out to the nearby stars maybe within 25 years there's also an older idea using nuclear weapons and writing on the shockwave of nuclear weapons super fellow starship then there are fusion nuclear power plants and use the power of hydrogen and then there's antimatter rockets well a few things dr. Benford tell us a few things about anti matter rockets and why we're not going to have them anytime soon but at least on paper an antimatter rocket would take us near the speed of light right true on paper but there's a complexity to it basically the rocket works by the annihilation of an SI antiproton on a proton but it does not produce gamma rays immediately okay doesn't result in gammas flying out behind the rocket instead the annihilation produces several short-lived elementary particles called time a signs or pi ons and they produce about about three per annihilation and they can this be captured by a magnetic field of a magnetic nozzle and that is their paths can be bent into curves by strong magnetic field and they have to be obtained and controlled and directed by these fields as towards only exhaust but that means that they the charged clients can heat up a liquid for example like a liquid hydrogen so that the hydrogen receives energy and I you have a hydrogen exhaust that doesn't give you such a high speed though because it's just heated hydrogen and the we have that therefore the magnetic nozzle has to be long enough for that conversion to take place which is if you want to get all the particles and all the energy out you've got to have magnetic bottles or it's on the order of a mile in length now if you just want to get the first generation of Pi ons you can cut it down to perhaps on the order of 100 meters but it's still a big magnetic structure and that's therefore the scale of such rockets it's going to be quite large in fact all these rockets that were talking about the nuclear rocket decision decision and the antimatter rocket they are huge right they're not simple things they're gigantic objects in out of space for first of all I should make sure that fish in rockets which use the fissioning of plutonium or uranium are not going to give us starships because the exhaust velocity is just not high enough but they are on the other hand not much larger than Saturn fives and they are a good way to get a lot of pay Road around the solar system in fact we developed them completely and so did the Soviets back in the sixties and seventies to the point where they were really ready for Mars missions but then got mothballed because anti-nuclear sentiment and various other political forces in the early 70s but they're still there store in storage out in Nevada but we could take that technology up again since it was really quite well developed back almost fifty years ago that's the fishing Rock now the fusion Rockets will certainly be very large there's been a very recent study called the Icarus project which is looked at how to build a fusion reactor that it can propel a starship and how to do that with 21st century technologies they turn out to be very very large on the order of the largest ocean vessels and we think about it on the order of a kilometer in size and therefore massive and expensive and with an awful lot of fuel because Rockets the rocket equation dictates that in order to get to high speeds you've got to have tremendous amounts of fuel and that most of the volume goes to fuel storage and most of the mass goes to the fuel and then of course you can put some serious payloads out to the stars on the timescales of several decades so fusion markets are possibility if we can get fusion to work now I spent about 20 years of my life working on fusion and I know it's a very hard problem and until we really get that problem solved to the extent that we can use it in rockets those concepts are not going to be realized ok let us take another short commercial break the subject for today is starships well it's even watching the movies you know that we're way past Pluto if you saw the movie passengers yes we're going to another star in the universe in that movie starting some a-list Hollywood stars and if you thought the movie interstellar with Matthew McConaughey you know that perhaps one day we'll be going through a wormhole and zipping across to the other side of the galaxy well let's get back down to earth now with us today dr. James Benford he and his twin brother both physicists and both science-fiction buffs have co-authored a book starship century about what it would take to go to the nearest stars so we talked about laser sails riding on a laser beam we talked about fission Rockets writing on a hail of nuclear weapons we talked about fusion rockets antimatter rockets and now let's talk about ramjet engines when you take a look at a jet a jet does not have that much oxidizer because it scoops up air from the outside saving space on the jet well why not have a rocket ship that scoops of hydrogen in interstellar space then fuses a hydrogen to create fuel then you're simply getting hydrogen for free there's a lot of free hydrogen out there why not scoop it up use it inside your chamber and use that for exhaust well tell us about the pros and cons of ramjet fusion engines that don't need any external or any fuel source whatsoever well there there certainly are pros and cons the great thing about the Bussard ramjet and bob lazar was a friend of mine for many decades and i did work with him is that you don't have to bring your fuel with you you collect it in the interstellar medium now Bob assuming that the the density of interstellar matter would be that of globular clusters turns out that we're in a rather vacant area of the galaxy where the density is far smaller and therefore interstellar ramjets don't think since for amenity but they certainly would make more sense if one were in a much more density regions such as towards the center of the galaxy or globular clusters but given that if you have a very big web of magnetic field that will capture these hydrogen atoms as they come in ionizing and push them down the throat of a fusion engine then you have a way of accelerating and accelerating and accelerating and you don't run out of fuel so you just get faster and faster and my friend Cole Anderson what a wonderful book called tau zero about what happens if you get into a runaway situation and you can't switch it off and you just get going so fast you're really relativistic I recommend everybody read that book because it's really one of the great science fiction novels that's tau zero by Poul Anderson written some 40 years ago yeah and at the end of the book as I recall the starship wine sub trillions of years into the future by in one person's lifetime of course because of relativistic effects and they actually go go to the Domesday they go to the end of the universe when the universe goes were a Big Crunch and then they witnessed the next Big Bang they witness the creation of a baby universe well let me ask you another question dr. Robert Zubrin who we've actually had several times on science fantastic also critique the ramjet engine he thought they would be dragged too much drag on the starship and the starship therefore could never attain light-like velocities what are your thoughts about how fast you can go on a ramjet engine are there problems with drag there are blobs right about that there are other constraints such as the strength of materials oh and how much magnetic field you can generate and so it's problematical but the Bussard ramjet could credibly get to velocities that are a fraction of the speed of light of perhaps half the speed of light which is pretty adequate for getting around the local part of the galaxy ok now let's go to the big one every Star Trek Star Trek fan to talk about warp drive and we've actually had discussions about warp drive on science fantastic but other physicists but first of all what are your thoughts you think that one day far in the future we may have energies comparable to that of a black hole by which we can either create an al Kabeer Drive who I've interviewed or perhaps one day create a hole in space called a wormhole what are your thoughts because that was the basis of the movie interstellar that are really the furthest out we can imagine at the present it requires a civilization which would have energy densities which are far greater than those that exist in the stars and far greater than we can imagine doing it also requires some physics to work out right that the world wormhole can be held open and you can get through it there's an awful lot of things have to happen right and frankly I think that's beyond our horizon that is we're not anywhere near being as a civilization advanced enough to seriously contemplate that so it may start Star Trek may have happened in the 23rd century but I don't think we're going to get there that soon okay well when I interviewed on Miguel Alcubierre about his drive he envisions having a warp bubble that is a bubble inside the bubble you can zap faster than the speed of light but he said he was quite honest but he said there's a problem and that is first you need fantastic amounts of positive energy to create the warp bubble and then enormous amounts of negative energy to stabilize it so it doesn't crush you so he kind of like lost interest in it quite frankly so what are your thoughts when you talk to people do they take it seriously or do they roll their eyes in the heavens and say it's all science fiction how seriously do you think people are taking the idea of a warp engine some people take it seriously they are in a distinct minority it is a bit of a rolling circumstance with positive and negative energies because we don't really know how to produce and manipulate such energies the let's put it this way for most people think of it as wantem physics not quantum physics but if the physics of what you'd want to have because they want to believe you can quickly get to the star okay in a manner that is essentially like surfing space okay well unfortunately we have run out of time for this interview once again our special guest today has been dr. James Benford he and his twin brother have written a delightful anthology called starship century you are listening to science fantastic with professor Michio Kaku [Music] science fantastic with professor Michio Kaku this is science fantastic with Professor Michio Kaku on science fantastic we profile the amazing jaw-dropping scientific discoveries which are revolutionizing our world and touching our lives and once again in this hour is Open Mic we're going to throw the lines open because this hour is your hour okay well let's take the first listen air phone call hey professor my name is Jeremy from battleground Washington I listen to you on Karen one comm and I've been reading lately some books by Robert Schoch and Graham Hancock about the theory that civilization may be a lot older than we before thought and I was wondering with the find of Gobekli Tepe and Turkey if you have any comment on that or how you feel about that well yes and no it turns out that every year archaeologists discover more and more about the ancient civilizations of the past and we realize that a lot of our time frames have to be readjusted to compensate for that for example many of the things mentioned in the Bible things mention in German mythology like for example the Trojan Wars and the city of Troy turned out to be true we actually found the city of Troy and however you can't put some boundaries on this and that is the ice age the ice age ended roughly 10,000 years ago and before then it was quite difficult to have what is called modern civilization we were basically nomads we were chasing after the deer in the Buffalo and if a deer and the Buffalo left and left you behind you starve to death so you had to chase after the deer you were migrants you were permanently on the road because your food was also on the road as well therefore cities as we know them were not possible there were isolated settlements of course but you had to have a source of food after the Ice Age ended then the Age of Agriculture's started and then you could have the first stationary villages even if the Buffalo and even if the deer left you didn't start the death because you could plant apple seeds and harvest them in your own backyard and with the discovery of Agriculture came the first villages then the first cities then the first empires begin to rise out of the desert and the jungle so when we look at ancient civilizations recorded history goes back roughly 5000 years and beyond that things get very very fuzzy but yeah many of the things mentioned in the Bible you can begin the process of dating some of these things and you realize that yes you can date history going back recorded history going back 5,000 years now beyond that things start to get very fuzzy because of course writing was not invented back in those days and so is it possible that there could have been new civilizations between let's say 5,000 to 10,000 years ago that haven't yet been discovered and the answer is well yes because as long as it was a food supply for these people like agriculture and then you could have stationary cities without having to chase after the deer in the Buffalo like a bunch of nomads but beyond ten thousand years well North America was under a half a mile of ice and so it was quite difficult to create a sustaining civilization when your food basically left and if they left without you you starve to death okay well let's move right along to the next listener phone call hi dr. Kaku this is Carlos from listening in LA on Talk video network comm I wanted to ask I was watching this whole TV show called revolution and the basic premise is the planet loses the ability to create electricity so I wanted to see if that was even possible seems a little far-fetched to me but what do you think Thanks well you mentioned something very important we take electricity for granted but if you look at history be going back we've had three great revolutions in science the first was the steam engine and the steam engine made possible the Industrial Revolution and factories and created a modern industrial working class the second great revolution was the electric revolution that you mentioned they gave us radio television automobiles it gave us many of the wonders of the modern electric age then the third great revolution is the high-tech revolution with lasers and computers a fourth wave is also coming the fourth wave is artificial intelligence biotechnology and especially nanotechnology now you mentioned what happens if all one of these revolutions is Spy meat or caught right in the middle well the electric revolution depends upon our ability to harness the power of electrons and there are ways in which you can conceive of where electricity may not be possible for example if the air becomes very humid electricity does not work well under certain different atmospheric conditions so yes it is possible you can conceive of certain scenarios where electricity is not possible but then some of these in areas are so severe that people wouldn't be possible as well so the premise of the TV show is that somehow you can simply turn off electricity and still keep humans breathing and operating normally in our atmosphere now this of course affects perhaps life and out of space some scientists think that if life and out of space existed well they must be able to harness electricity and computers to build rocket ships but that means their atmosphere has to be similar to our atmosphere which can sustain lightning bolts without short-circuiting things for example if you have a water world out there that is an aquatic species you might be able to have intelligence up to a point so if you have fish light or octopus light creatures in outer space yes they would be able to invent machines but then to for example the steam engine they would have a problem because the steam engine requires oxidation it requires fire and in an aquatic world you cannot light a match then electricity would be short-circuited because electricity goes right through water and so those are two revolutions which may not exist in a water world in outer space so we are fortunate enough to be on a planet where it is possible to have fire that is oxidation it is possible to have an industrial revolution and the electric revolution because our atmosphere will support electricity without short-circuiting them so it answer your question well yes it is possible to create a world without electricity but that world probably wouldn't have humans either so to have humans like in a Hollywood movie and have no electricity is quite difficult but yes we scientists have looked at that because in on a space there could be civilizations that do not have electricity and their progress would be stunted as a consequence okay moving right along let's take the next listener phone call hi my name is Ryan from Spokane my question is how many people would go to the Mars base once it's constructed well you ask a very practical question that billionaires are asking now specifically Elon Musk the billionaire behind Tesla PayPal and SpaceX and also Jeff Bezos the brains behind Amazon and blue origins well first of all yes people are taking volunteers for real Elon Musk pioneer of SpaceX will launch the first unmanned probe to the moon in many a decade starting later this year if all goes well and next year he wants to send two volunteers circling around the moon in the first manned mission to the moon in 40 years the cost well yes you can be one of these two volunteers to go around the moon for a paltry sum of 80 million dollars so if you are a fellow billionaire yes you too can join Elon Musk and explore the universe 80 million dollars to be the one of the first people to go back to the moon then what about Mars well you have to be careful now because there are some well shady bogus operations that claim that one day they'll create the first settlements on Mars in a few years there's a there's a program called Mars one and it has enlisted many volunteers to be part of the first mission to Mars there's a problem a big problem and that is money it has no major benefactors so if you sign up for Mars one you're not going to go to fires anytime soon and that's my personal opinion but yes already they have many people volunteering for a one-way mission to Mars now personally I think we should offer a - a mission to Mars so they can come back and talk about it and that again is where Elon Musk comes in 2024 that is the time when we may have the first manned mission to Mars and yes probably you can buy a seat on that just go to the SpaceX's website and perhaps there's a place where you can begin the process of signing up however I should also point out some of the politics involved President Donald Trump has now weighed in because of the fact that if we have the first manned mission back to the moon by 2020 let's say that would be quite a feather in the cap of President Donald Trump so Donald Trump is actually asked NASA for an accelerated timeframe NASA's time frame is much slower than Elon Musk's time frame nASA has the SLS booster rocket and Orion space module they're their first unmanned mission to the moon would be around 2020 and perhaps a manned mission to the moon sometime in the 2030s well president Donald Trump has asked NASA can you accelerate that so that by the end of President Trump's first term that is 2020 we would have a manned mission that goes around the moon and then 2024 at the end of a hypothetical second trump term there would be the first manned mission all the way to Mars so to answer the question right now we do not have an official list of volunteers to go on SpaceX's mission to Mars by 2024 but hey go to the website and maybe one day we'll see a column whereby you can sign up but watch out for well shady operations that promise you a seat on Mars but in reality I don't think they're the way to go right now we have three serious proposals to go into outer space one of course is NASA with the SLS booster rocket some people criticize their time frame for being too slow that's why the president has asked for an accelerated program then we have Elon Musk with the Falcon Heavy booster rocket and they've already made history by reducing the cost of space travel rather dramatically and then we have Jeff Bezos of Amazon he wants to create a moon base first perhaps a colony of astronauts that will be part of a permanent presence on the moon and after that on to Mars in other words we may have a traffic jam around Mars who knows for sure but we have not one not two but three proposals to go to Mars okay well let's move right along and take the next listener phone call hi professor this is Josh what do you think about the double slit experiment Wow well you are asking one of the big questions in all of physics and philosophy and that is the reasoning behind the double slit experiment well let me explain if I have a sheet of paper and punch a hole in it and then shoot a bunch of electrons at that hole and then you ask yourself what comes out the other end most people would say well the answer is obvious you'd have a steady stream of particles called electrons that come out the other end because electrons are made out of particles right well that's a naive answer when you actually do the experiment with one or two holes it turns out that at the other end you do not get an image of just one hole or two holes what you do is you get a wave-like pattern an interference pattern in other words the electron has wave-like properties and it's not simply a dot it's not simply a particle somehow it also has wave-like properties now the double slit experiments is bizarre because in order to have an interference pattern from two slits you have to have waves from two slits interfere with each other two waves from the top hole and the bottom hole interfering with each other now here is the killer shoot one electron not two one electron add two holes and look at what you see at the other end if you do this repeatedly you get a pattern of dots on the other side and the pattern of dots once you shoot millions of particles through the double holes when you get you get a wave-like pattern as if the electron went through both holes now at this point your brain starts to explode because I said that the electron is a particle and it goes through two holes leaving a pattern that is a pattern of a wave that went through two holes in other words the electron is two places at the same time how can that be your brain goes berserk thinking about this and after the break I'll answer the question how can one electron go through two holes simultaneously how can you be two places at the same time this is not an academic question because our computer revolution and laser revolution depends upon this end [Music] welcome back to science fantastic with professor Michio Kaku and science fantastic we profile some of the most amazing developments in science and we had a call that came in just before the break and that is explain the doubles of experiment well the double slit experiment simply says that one electron that is a particle can go through two holes simultaneously creating an interference pattern on the other side as if the electron were a wave now at this point your brain starts to explode because this means that a particle is not really a dot like Einstein thought that a particle can go through two holes at the same time in other words there is uncertainty with regards to the position of the electron and this goes to the uncertainty principle which is the foundation of all of modern electronics why do laser beams exist why the transistors exist why can you hear the sound of my voice going to the ether is because of relativity and the quantum theory so how do we resolve this question well one theory which is rather unorthodox but is gradually being accepted by most Nobel Prize winners that is my friends they say that the universe splits in half this is called the many worlds theory the universe splits in half such that in one universe the electron went through one hole in another universe the electron went through another hole because of course one electron cannot go through two holes simultaneously that's one way to resolve the question this means that perhaps the universe has parallel universes perhaps there's an infinite number of these parallel universes splitting off from each other each time an electron has to go through a hole or each time on measurement is made now Einstein of course hated this idea but hey what can I say Einstein was wrong on the question of quantum mechanics quantum mechanics is at the foundation of all of modern electronics all of lasers all the wonders of modern technology why are they so wondrous they violate common sense Isaac Newton would go crazy looking at transistors and lasers because Isaac Newton would say that the electron is a point particle period end of story move on no the electron is not just a point particle this point particle can split universes this is called a many worlds theory and it is the leading theory in quantum mechanics today now just to be fair there are other theories the Copenhagen interpretation you can go to any modern library and have your your Blaine's your brains blown out trying to read all the literature on this but hey what can I say we physicists have to confront the fact that the electron in some sense can be two places at the same time and the way to resolve it is if the universe itself splits in half okay well let's move right along to the next listener phone call hi this is Mike McGee from Duluth Minnesota and my question is how have human beings affected the 100 thousand year Ice Age cycles and has global warming actually postponed the next inevitable glacial maximum thank you well you asked a very hot question first of all what is the ice age cycle ice ages do not occur regularly like on time however ice ages are separated by hundreds of thousands to millions of years and we think it corresponds to the slight wobbling of the Earth's axis a very slight wobbling of the Earth's axis can build up over hundreds of thousands of years to change the temperature on the planet Earth and then the question is what is the link between that and the next ice age yes ice ages do come roughly periodically every few hundred thousand a few million years right now we are between ice ages ten thousand years ago we were under a half a mile of ice in North America in another ten to twenty thousand years we'll have a repeat of that so right now we're in what is called an interglacial period now what does that have to do with global warming well not much because of course we're talking about the earth itself with cycle times of hundreds of thousands of years now if you take a look at the fact that the earth has been heating up since the end of the lysate last ice age yes the earth has been warming up slowly and gradually however within the last 50 to 100 years there's been a dramatic spike a dramatic increase in carbon dioxide and also with regards to the temperature of the earth now the fact of the earth is warming up and as accelerated is not disputed by hardly anyone because we see that in the satellite data we see that in all the ways that we can measure temperature on the planet Earth where people would differ is where this comes from now again can this delay the coming of the ice age no we're talking about a small spike we're talking about when you talk about ice ages cycles going back tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of years so the warming of the earth as far as we can tell will not affect the coming of the next ice age in a hundred thousand ten thousand to twenty thousand years from now however I should point out that with 95% confidence most scientists looking at the computer programs would say that the recent spike in temperature is not part of the global warming cycle that it's man-made but that statement is a statement with only 95 percent confidence okay let us move right along to the next listening phone call my name is Ricardo I'm calling from Detroit what's the point in going to Mars it's a long time ago and wiped out all living things I don't get what the big to go to Mars would be thank you well you asked a very important question because right now NASA is planning to go to Mars sometime after 2030 and as I mentioned Elon Musk's SpaceX wants to do that even quicker by 2024 what's the rush well to be very honest there's no reason for a rush at all we had the rush during the 60s to go to the moon because of course there was superpower rivalry between the old Soviet Union and the US of A and we spent roughly 5% of our gross domestic output on the moon program now think about that for a moment 5% of the entire industrial activity of the United States of America went into the space program then of course once we went to the moon and came back we lost interest and then it fell down below 1% NASA's budget today is roughly less than 1% which is probably normal for a science budget of NASA what's the rest today well if you think about it the rush is between billionaires billionaires and NASA Elon Musk of SpaceX and Tesla Motors Jeff Bezos of Amazon and of course NASA and Boeing aircraft Boeing is the creator of their SLS booster rocket for NASA now I was interviewed Carl Sagan the late Carl Sagan I asked him that question what's the rush going into outer space and he said well there's no rush per se but in the long term we have to do it because the long term life on Earth will be extinguished either we'll have giant meteor impacts like when knocked out the dinosaurs gigantic volcanic explosions and eruptions or another Ice Age or perhaps the ending of the earth itself as the earth goes back into the Sun 5 billion years from now so Carl Sagan said let's be a two planet a multi-planet species because is an insurance policy not that there's a race to go to Mars but an insurance policy is one day we have no choice let's move right along to the next listener phone call this is Big Al for Chattanooga Tennessee and my question that is was actually happening physically that causes a black hole to have actual gravitational pull thank you well you asked a question that has bedeviled scientists going even before Isaac Newton what creates gravity and gravitational attraction well Newton didn't know he just postulated the fact that objects attract other objects by a gravitational pull okay he had no idea as to why because usually objects move because they're pushed not because they're pulled well along comes Einstein who says I know the answer gravity doesn't pull space pushes and that summarizes Einstein's theory in one phrase you see why are you sitting in your chair today you're sitting in your chair not because gravity is pulling you to the ground it's because the earth warps the space around you and the warp space pushes you pushes you into the chair that's why you're sitting in your chair right now gravity does not pull because there is no such thing as gravitational pull it's an optical illusion mind science says that the earth warps the space around you and pushes pushes you down and then you can ask it another question and why is that like a black hole a black hole would have objects being attracted to it why is it well at that point I'm science equations don't tell us Einstein simply says that if you have mass if you have energy you have a black hole then it will create a warping according to his equations why we don't know okay just the way it is it's postulated in Einstein's equations but once you postulate that it works fine it satisfies all the data that's why we give Nobel Prizes now to people who can verify Einstein's predictions about black holes but why does gravity create this pole well we don't know it's just postulated by Einstein's theory and once you're partially learn sign theory you can mathematically calculate with very great accuracy the motion of particles as they enter a black hole okay well let's move right along to the next listener phone call hi my name is Ron and I'm calling from Gardner Massachusetts I'm listening WG aw 1340 AM radio my question is about Martian gravity I read some material about the International Space Station and how this bone loss and other other para types of low gravity well is Martian gravity high enough at heathrow 130 is it high enough to prevent that bone loss and other other deleterious effects of zero gravity thank you well the short answer is no first of all you're absolutely right astronauts in weightlessness on the space station basically lose calcium phosphorus many vital elements of the muscles and the bone in fact professor Commander Paul rieckhoff the Russian astronaut who set the world's record for being in out of space for over a year when he came back down to the planet Earth as a motion picture of him getting out of his space capsule he crawled like a worm he crawled like a word there was so much atrophy in his muscles and bone that he could not even come out of his own space capsule and walk so our astronauts suffer bon mots some of it permanent by the way I repeat some of it is permanent bone loss so we have to have our astronauts exercise all the time we have treadmills in outer space with a rubber band so that you have tension on that jet mill and you have to exercise several hours of the day because you will have bone loss now as you correctly pointed out Mars has a weaker gravity than the earth roughly 40 percent the gravitational pull of the planet Earth they will suffer bone loss not as much as out on the space station where there is no gravitational pull at all however yes there will be bone loss even on Mars because of the fact that Mars has a lower gravity in other words our body is fine-tuned to live on the earth if the Earth's gravity were a little bit stronger our limit weaker our architecture of our body would not be adequate to live in that environment and flourish that's why we had to do things like exercise that's all we have to do things like well eventually maybe even genetic engineering so that we can survive on planets with different gravitational pull one solution to the problem is to spin our spacecraft like a ball on a string that's very expensive but yeah you can create artificial gravity and quote-unquote solve the problem of weightlessness but it would add a tremendous cost to our space program ok well let's move right along to the next listener phone call and my question is about dark energy if dark energy as we know is the continual expansion and acceleration of the expansion of the universe how do we know if this mysterious energy and not the gravitational attraction some sort of huge amount of mass beyond our range detection outside of the known universe and in reality that instead of it everything is standing that everything within our known universe is actually falling and accelerating towards this unknown mass that's the ungalik detection and it's really just gravity falls in law thank you well you asked an interesting question Einstein tells us that the universe is expanding and expanding very uniformly by the way but then you ask other question maybe it's an optical illusion maybe it's not expanding no but going toward an attractor well that would be non-uniform now it turns out there is a great attractor it turns out our galaxy is moving toward an object asymmetrically called the Great Attractor but that's not the universe itself the universe itself is uniformly expanding as we see in the microwave background radiation that's what we don't believe that the attractor can have enough uniform force to make the universe appear to expand so in other words the universe is expanding ok well that's for science fantastic once again you've been listening to science fantastic with professor Michio Kaku science fantastic the professor Michio Kaku this is science fantastic with professor Michio Kaku and science fantastic we profile the amazing jaw-dropping scientific discoveries which are revolutionizing our world and touching our lives well in this hour we're going to throw the lines open because this hour is your hour ok well let's move right on to the next listener phone call the name is William calling from bountiful utah and would like to know how the atomic energy plants get started up after they get charged with nuclear energy so that they can operate what actually starts up up and keeps them going that's my question thank you ok whether the simple answer the core of a nuclear power plant consists of rods two kinds of rods one are the fuel rods containing the uranium that's what heats up the core and creates boiling water which creates electricity but there's a second set of rods which absorb the neutrons there for quenching the chain reaction stopping the reactor the second set of rods is made out of cadmium zirconium and boron these rods absorb neutrons so they stop the reaction so how do you stop under clear power plant how do you start a nuclear power plant to start it you insert the fuel rods are there you remove the control rods by removing the second set of rods the neutron count rapidly Rises and you've now turned on the nuclear power plant to shut it off you reinsert the control rods thereby absorbing neutrons and the chain reaction stops now the name for inserting the control rods to stop being the chain reaction it's called scramming now when you hear about screaming the reactor that means you turn off the reactor where did that word come from it comes from World War two in Chicago when Enrico Fermi was creating the first nuclear reactor he had graduate students graduate students sit on top of the fuel rods with buckets of bull rated water if it looked as if the reactor was about to explode or get out of control he would tell the grad students scram at that point the grad students would dump the boron and get the hell out well that word stuck so when you want to turn on a nuclear power plant you turn off a nuclear power plant I'm sorry but you want to turn it off you scram it and that plunges control rods into the core quenching the chain reaction to start it up you do the opposite you unscrew it you remove the control rods and the neutron count Rises and the chain reaction starts up all over again so that's where we start and stop a nuclear chain reaction okay well moving right along let's take them next listener phone call Dave Seattle I wanted to ask a question how do you know that the universe is shaped like a bubble when we're talking about such large distances that what we actually see in the night sky is billions of years old because the light you know is that old and we don't actually see the universe as it existed billions of years ago so how do we know what the shape of the universe is well first of all we're not really sure what the shape of the universe is but let me tell you how we know what we have first of all it was Edwin Hubble back in the around the 1930s or so who turned one of the biggest telescopes on the earth toward the heavens and he measured their color when yellow light moves away from you it turns reddish because light waves expand when they move away from you when the light waves move toward you the light beams are compressed like an accordion and then they turn bluish so when he turned the telescope to the heavens what did he find he found a redshift not a blue shift the redder the shift the faster it goes so therefore he knew that the universe was expanding well let's take a short commercial break and after the break we'll say a few things about the shape of the universe so how do we know that the universe is a bubble of some sort well we're not sure because of course we're talking about the universe itself but here's what we do know we do know that no matter where you point a telescope in the heavens on average you get a red shift yellow light is slightly reddish this means that all the stars are moving away from us now at first you may say to yourself what does that mean that the earth is at the center of the universe no it means that the universe is expanding and the simplest way to visualize that is to assume that the universe is a sphere is it really a sphere we're not sure but if the universe is a sphere and you put dots dots on the surface of the sphere corresponding to the galaxies and then you blow up the balloon all the galaxies move away from you in fact the closer they are to you the slower they move the farther they are away the faster they move that's called Hubble's law when we actually make the measurements we find bingo Hubble's law is correct therefore the simplest way to visualize it is a sphere however other people have said that well what about negative curvature maybe it's really shaped like a trumpet or for that matter shaped like a saddle on a horse they would have negative curvature so who is right well the answer is we're not sure who is right because of course we're talking about the universe itself but at the present time it does seem as if the universe is open that is it seems to be infinite for all we can measure but again we're not sure so we use models the model of the bubble is the simplest to use so we use it but hey we're not positive that the universe is a bubble okay let's move right along to the next listener phone call Cornell we're here in Massachusetts my question what exactly is hyperspace well that's a hot topic today to find out more about it get a copy of my book hyperspace it was also a best-seller when it first came out well to be very simple hyperspace simply means a space of higher dimensions dimensions beyond three we know that there are three dimensions of space in order to describe the size of a book or the location of a building you have to have at least three numbers length width and height but think about it for a moment why three there's nothing magical about three at all in mathematics two other numbers that are much more magical but three is not one of them so why to the universe three dimensional why should it be three dimensional well we have the ability to visualize perhaps a fourth dimension or a fifth dimension using mathematics now using common sense you cannot visualize the fourth dimension our brain evolved in three dimensions where saber-toothed Tigers lunged at us in three dimensions so we're very good at that we can manipulate objects in three dimensions we're awful at four dimensions and yet your computer your PC manipulates four dimensional objects all the time and so it is possible to visualize the fourth dimension we cannot do it now I work in eleven to mention eleven dimensional hyperspace the space of vibrating strings but when I work in eleven dimensional hybrid space it's all equations I don't have to visualize it because the equations track it for me now what would it be like to live in hyperspace well let's see on a table talk you have people that look like a cookie men living on a table which is flat this is called flatland you are in three dimensions looking down on flatlander you have superpowers compared to the flatlander you can for example stick your finger anywhere in that world and grab things so things would literally disappear from flatland or you could put things back down on flatland like a coin it would simply all of a sudden appear out of magic or you could perform surgery on the inside of a flatlander without cutting the skin you can reach inside a closed object and pull out the guts if you want and perform surgery that's the power of a higher dimension looking down on the second dimension now when I was a kid I used to go to the Japanese tea garden in San Francisco and look at the carp I used to spend hours looking at the fish wondering what would it be like to be a fish now think about it if your fish your eyes point to the side you can only see in two dimensions forward backwards and that's about it you live in a 2-dimensional world and then I imagine that a three-dimensional person ie me could reach down and grab a two-dimensional fish what would the fish see the fish would first of all see strange beings that can move without sins beings that breathe without water magical beings that could perform surgery without cutting their skin think about this and I put the fish back into the pond what a tail the fish would have to say at the turn of the century many people were fascinated by this idea that there could be beings living in hyperspace and that's where the idea of ghosts comes in because some people think that maybe ghosts live in the fourth dimension and theologians used to write about that theologians at the turn of the last century would ask you write monographs saying that when people die maybe their souls go to hyperspace well today we don't know where the hyperspace exists or not the theories that I work on string theory exists in 11 dimensional hyperspace but that doesn't prove it so we can visualize it mathematically but proving its existence has not yet been done however at the Large Hadron Collider outside Geneva Switzerland it the machine got the Nobel Prize for several physicists for working on the Higgs boson but not only that we hope to find sparticles sparticles are super particles particles predicted by string theory they represent a higher octave of vibrating strings but we've never seen one but we think that's what makes up dark matter dark matter is invisible fills up most of the universe much more plentiful than ordinary matter and sparticles could be dark matter so in other words the next vibration of the string could explain dark matter we are the lowest vibration of the string things we can touch but there are other dimensions out there so in other words the question of hyperspace is no longer academic most of the universe may live in hyperspace ok well let's move right along and take the next listener phone call my name is Elizabeth and I'm calling from Boulder City Nevada these why they make hexagons to store the honey and why the six-sided shape is at the most efficient shape well yes it could be the most efficient shape realize that if I blow soap bubbles what determines the shape of a soap bubble believe it or not it is a shape with the minimum area so when you get all sorts of crazy configurations of soap balls why it's because it's a configuration of minimum area and same thing with hexagons it's one of the shapes that allow you to maximize the amount of honey produced with the minimum of Wax pretty good for evolution I think ok let's take another short commercial break once again you are listening to science fantastic especially Theo Kaku [Music] [Music] the lines are open give us a call and maybe you can get on science fantastic okay well let's move right along now and take the next listeners phone call my name is Michael we're in Mobile Alabama what is the name of the core of the planet Earth we know that the equator is considered the center we want to know if there is a geographical name of the core of the earth thank you well there's no formal name for the core however the court has many shelves and each shell has a name attached to it but there's no one named for the core of the earth and then you may ask yourself a simple question well how do you know that one's ever been down there how do you know what the center of the earth looks like the way that we scientists do this is by listening to earthquakes every time there's an earthquake we have sensors all over the globe and earthquake started one point just beneath the surface and creates a shockwave that shockwave goes through the center of the earth and slows down and speeds up depending upon what kind of dirt that it went through if it went through dirt of a higher density then at that point we probably have the most Distortion anyway but looking at echoes echoes that are created by the original shockwave going through all these layers we can then reconstruct a map of the inside of the earth it's not perfect of course in fact I've seen pictures of it the center of the earth looks more like an onion a large blob with things coming out like dendrites or tentacles coming out of the core so that's what the core looks like now we think that that in turn is partially responsible for the earthquakes that we get but as far as the name is concerned we don't have names other than the scientific name for the various layers inside the core okay well let's take the next listener phone call I want to no is there an infinite space does it keep going or does it have a drop-off just stops thank you well you asked a question for which we physicists are not quite certain right now most physicists are leaning toward the idea that the universe is infinite but if it's infinite where did it come from it had to come from a point right well realize that this is a very hot topic and if it was 400 years ago about 400 years ago there was a former Jesuit priest who was burned alive in the streets of Rome for simply saying that there could be aliens it could be other star systems out there just like our own star system well the Catholic Church was not happy at all not happy at all because here was this renegade priest a vagabond priest of a go from capital to apon a capital claiming that there could be other stars out there with different kinds of planets and then he said the universe is infinite he was perhaps the first person ever to entertain the fact that the universe could be infinite why is that dangerous to the church because an infant universe has no center therefore our universe our earth and our Bible cannot be the center because the universe has no center is the universe really infinite well some people say it cannot be infinite because if it were infinite sooner or later you would perhaps find an and then someplace and then you have to ask yourself a question what is beyond the end of the universe the mind goes spinning thinking about an universe of infinite length well which is it is our universe infinite or closed the short answer is we don't know the data is not yet precise enough to answer that question however most scientists would lean toward the idea that the universe is open it would open toward a another another DEATH in the universe first we have the Big Bang then the universe is accelerating writing then we thought it was slowing down we thought it might even reverse itself and contract nope the universe is speeding up it's accelerating this caught everyone by surprise because we thought that sooner or later you would reach rock bottom no there's another layer beneath the quarks now let me explain on a large scale we have galaxies below that we have stars below that we have planets below that we have animals like you and me so we have a hierarchy a hierarchy from the very top all the way down to the very bottom but if people like Bruno has their way perhaps the universe has no center at all that was a horrible idea for the Catholic Church because the church said that the earth is the center of everything and if not the earth well at least the Sun the Sun would be the center of the universe and here comes Bruno who says no there's no center at all the universe could be infinite ok well let's move right along to take the next listener phone call my name is Rudy I'm calling from Eureka California if our moon now controls tight and you know that's up to the ocean how was it back then before the the moon was the moon what was going on on earth with tides well you ask a very interesting question if you actually look at the numbers it turns out that the earth is about 4.6 billion years old you got that 4.6 billion years now how old is the moon because you ask yourself a simple question what would it be like for the tides without the moon first of all without the moon there's no tides the tides are caused by a combination of the sun's gravity and the Earth's gravity but most of it coming from the moon because it is so close so the tides are thereby closely linked to the moon but at one point there was no moon and that is roughly 4.1 billion years ago the dates of course slightly change depending upon how recent your book is but most people would say that the moon is about 4.1 billion years old so what was the earth like back then well realize that the earth way back then it was probably molten it was cooling down they were probably asteroid collisions all the time taking place and as a consequence it was a very rocky environment and at that point there were no tides because the moon hadn't been created yet 4.1 billion years ago the moon was created an object the size of Mars plows into the earth blows out the center of the earth allowing the center of the earth to condense into our companion here on the planet Earth and so we see therefore that it is possible to visualize the earth without a moon however we think that these tides are very important because not only do they give us the tides they also give us the rings of Saturn they also give us the fact that the earth once upon a time had a ring that's right when the moon was blown out of the earth computer programs show that a ring of debris formed around the planet Earth so rings are caused by tides we think we're not certain because no one was there to watch it happen but yeah we think the tides actually created the ocean the influence the oceans so ties are extremely important not only that but the earth creates tides on the moment the moon is not exactly round believe it or not moon is actually slightly football-shaped why because the earth tugs on the moon and that's why only one side faces the earth you've never seen the backside of the moon unless you see in a photograph from the Russian and American space program [Music] welcome back to science fantastic with Professor Michio Kaku the lines are open okay well let's move right along and take the next listener phone call my name is Steve and I'm calling from Denver how far does the gravitation of the earth reach into the space and does it have anything to do with the object fallen such as you know meteors and comets and smashing into the earth well us comparing this in question where do meteors and comets come from they come from outer space but how does the earth grab them the earth has gravity as you pointed out and the gravitational tug of the earth will grab on to meteors and comets and maybe one of these days god forbid it will actually hit the earth the question is how far does gravity extend and the answer actually is infinite the gravity of the earth penetrates deep space now you may say do you solve well I saw a movie I saw a movie where that wasn't true well those movies are wrong the Sun holds the solar system together by gravity and the earth has gravity also which holds the moon in orbit but comets and meteors they get too close to the earth could be pulled in striking the earth as a consequence so we think therefore that the dinosaurs themselves were wiped out as a consequence of such a collision 24 billion to 36 billion years ago we're not exactly sure precisely what happen but it just goes to show you that a the reach of gravity is infinite oh by the way some people say how can that be when there's weightlessness doesn't gravity stop in outer space how come our astronauts can wave at us upside down unless there's no gravity in space well that's wrong outer space has plenty of gravity but even though it has plenty of gravity weight can go to zero now how is that possible because the moon for example is in freefall it doesn't hit the earth because you're it's a circular but the moon is actually in freefall going around the planet earth now there for rocket ships are also in freefall and according to Galileo everything falls are the same rate therefore in a rocket ship you are falling at the same rate that the hull of the rocket ship is falling and that gives you the illusion that you are weightless you've actually have plenty of weight except it's all blurred together because your body tells you though that no no no it has been weightless he's floating no you can float even in the presence of gravity so gravity in some sense plays tricks on you it's invisible but the more the mass you have the more gravity you have and even though the earth has plenty of gravity you can still be weightless if you fall at the same rate now I do this experiment for my students in astronomy I get a small marble and I get a very large ball and I drop it but before I drop it I ask the students which will land first the big ball was a little ball well almost everyone says the big ball will falls first because it's bigger and races to the ground bigger wrong you can do the experiment in your own living room it turns out they both hit the ground at the same time now if one hand is your space capsule the other hand is your spaceship you notice that both your hands fall at the same rate therefore that's why gravity can play tricks aya okay well let's move right along to the next listener phone call this is Lane calling from Alabama and I had a question on consciousness what is it and what are the thoughts behind it well you asked a $64,000 question of which there is no consensus in the scientific community so I decided to quantify consciousness myself in my book the teacher of the mind I claim that animals are conscious in fact I say that the unit of consciousness one unit the smallest unit of consciousness is a feedback loop like in the thermostat that's right I say that even a thermostat has a certain form of consciousness one unit now take a look at a plant a plant may have ten units of consciousness because it has to know where the Sun is located it has to know where gravity is pointed it has know about moisture it has know about all these things which requires a little bit amount of intelligence therefore I would say that animals are also conscious because they also have feedback loops they have three kinds of feedback loops one is the back of the brain that's the brain of the crocodile reptilian brain the brain of passion territoriality fighting that's the back of the brain the center of the brain is your limbic system emotions emotions are in the center part of your brain that's the monkey brain because monkeys are very sociable and smarter than rabbits so the brain grows from the back to the front then the question is what is in the front and what do we humans look like compared to the animals well we have the prefrontal cortex and most animals don't have much of a prefrontal cortex we know what time it is we know how weight it is we know what's going to happen in the future a decade from now animals haven't the foggiest clue about the future so in other words I claim that it is our understanding not of position because alligators can do that none of our social rank because monkeys can do that but projecting into the future our brain is a simulation machine is constantly predicting the future [Music] [Music]

Channel: Cuckoo for Kaku

Views: 46,416

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Id: AzWI7BMDGIo

Length: 98min 48sec (5928 seconds)

Published: Sat May 27 2017