We're Entering the 4th Great Era of Science | Dr. Michio Kaku | Google Zeitgeist

[Applause] hey there Ira Flatow back in with Mitch yo Cochran that was a great little introduction yeah after watching that video I can't wait to hear this speak of myself well after you know it's been a morning of sort of doom and gloom all right between Margaret wouldn't it general and what's goin happening to us what threats that we face give us something hopeful about the future that you work on well you know science is the engine of prosperity take a look at the Industrial Revolution which was Unleashed when we physicists worked out the laws of thermodynamics steam engines which came after that and then locomotives and factories then we worked on electricity and magnetism which unleash the electric age more recently we worked out the quantum mechanics of transistors and lasers and they gave us the Internet in high-technology and now now we're entering the fourth the fourth great era of scientific investigation prosperity wealth generation physics at the molecular level artificial intelligence nanotechnology and biotechnology are just going to blow the lid right off which one do you like first the best which one are you looking forward to the most those three well I agree with Mark Zuckerberg that artificial intelligence is going to create jobs on you industries it's gonna revolutionize the way we deal with products it's gonna make life easier more beneficial and so on and so forth but in the long term as was mentioned we have to be careful like when we harness fire when we harness the power of airplanes airplanes could be used to deliver mail airplanes can also be used to deliver bombs I think by the end of this century we have to be careful by the end of this century when robots become self-aware that's when we put a chip in their brain to shut them off if they have murderous thoughts well someone you called the rock star of science Stephen Hawking posthumously released a book of essays last week called brief answers to big questions and he talks about you know man are they entering what he calls a self design evolution and he also warns about the possibility that we've talked about this a bit here that AI robots could take us over is that not concern you those sorts of issues it does but I think by the end of the century once robots becomes self-aware see robots today do not know they're robots you talked about robot their clue that a good thing that's a good thing that they don't know what they are but by the end of the century I think they will have the intelligence of a monkey for example monkeys are self-aware now dogs on the other hand dogs are confused dogs think that we are the top dog and they're the the underdog monkeys are very clear about the fact that they are not human and once our robots become as intelligent as a monkey we should have failsafe mechanisms to shut them off to regulate them because they could turn on us we do not want to create our evolutionary successor I hate when that happens you you've been fascinated by Einstein I have actually my Einstein socks on today because I knew I was gonna talk to you about this and Einstein for the last what thirty years of his life attempted to solve the unified field theory theory of everything how everything works you're still working on that what do you think yeah what do you think you can accomplish that he didn't accomplish well first of all it all started when I was eight years old when I was eight years old my life changed completely because everyone was talking about the fact that a great scientist had died and the picture they published of his desk changed my world the caption said this is a picture of the unfinished manuscript of the greatest scientists of our time I was floored I said what why couldn't he finish it it's a homework problem right but couldn't you talk to his mother why couldn't he solve this problem I went to the library I found out the man was Albert Einstein and the unfinished work was the theory of everything an equation perhaps no more than one inch long that would allow us to quote read the mind of God so I said to my saw whoa that's what I want to work on for the rest of my life and today we actually think we have it it's not in his final form it's very difficult to test but we actually think we have the theory of everything and string theory if you watch CBS and you watch the Big Bang Theory you know that's what Sheldon works on string theory it's got to be true I was on a Big Bang Theory three times so I understand what he was working on but let me push back a little on that and science says if you have an idea and you can't gather the evidence to prove it and it's now what over 30 years string Theory's over 30 years old and as you say it's hard to do those experiments don't you have to give up on that idea after a while it becomes a religion not a scientific principle well there's a quote from Thomas Edison he said what is failure failure is getting right to the very edge of success and then quitting that is the definition of failure now the next big step is to create an atom smasher which can actually test the theory directly the Large Hadron Collider is just at the border we think of being able to create dark matter which we think is a higher octave of the strength we are the lowest octave of a vibrating string the next octave up we think is going to be dark matter which we hope to create with the Large Hadron Collider well not guaranteed but if we do that could clinch the whole thing now let's talk about that because that's one of my favorite subjects if you listen to science Friday you always know I'm trying to sneak in the dark side here that the most amazing part about the universe now is everything that we can see in visible light is only 4% of what the universe is made out of the rest 96% is dark energy and dark matter and here we are in the 21st century and we have no idea what that stuff is that's embarrassing I realize that every high school textbook is now being rewritten every high school textbook says the universe is mainly made out of atoms wrong as you mentioned 96% is made out of dark matter dark energy which are invisible if I held dark matter in my hand or right now it would actually drift right my fingers go right through the floor penetrate the floor go right to the core of the earth go to China reverse direction in China and then come back all the way to my hand but it's here everywhere but it should be that we in other words we don't see it he's actually in your hand as we speak we think it's in outer space that's why we have the Hubble Space Telescope giving us maps we have maps now of this invisible matter in outer space and how do you how do you photographing the visible matter well take a look at your glasses how do you know that there's glass inside your glasses because light bends when it goes to your glass bingo you don't know this glass inside your glasses though glass is invisible same thing with the Hubble Space Telescope by looking at the bending of starlight through galaxies we can prove the existence of an invisible matter and then to make matters worse there's something called arc energy which makes up 73% of the universe and that is blowing the universe apart that's how the universe will eventually die we think because of the rapid expansion due to dark energy which is repulsive so it's like an antigravity thing it's like an anti-gravity you think right it's pushing and we only discovered this a few years ago right dark energy that's right if you want to win a Nobel Prize if you want to win a Nobel Prize in Physics find out what dark matter is find out what dark energy is and tell me first we'll share the Nobel Prize okay tell yourself first if you want to win it second let's talk about the multiverse we saw in a little video that that string theory would predict that there are multi universes around us that's right tell us what that means well Stephen Hawking in his latest book says god bah humbug he can prove the non-existence of God because there was no time for God to create the universe at the instant of the Big Bang he says time started with the Big Bang therefore there was no time for God to create a universe ie there's no God I think there's a flaw in that argument because Einstein's theory of gravity breaks down at the instant of the Big Bang that's why he spent 30 years of his life chasing after a higher theory and what the string theories well Einstein says universe is a bubble we live on the skin of the bubble and the bubble is expanding that's called the Big Bang Theory string theory says there are other bubbles up there there's a bubble bath of universes and universes are being formed all the time big bangs are happening even as we speak so we have this bubble bath of universes so there was something before Genesis chapter 1 verse 1 there was something before the Big Bang and we're going to detect gravity waves from the instant of creation with gravity wave detectors you're not a space one day we should find evidence we should find baby pictures of the instant of the Big Bang and maybe we'll find evidence of an umbilical cord an umbilical cord connecting our baby universe to a parent unit so our universe is just one bubble and a lot of different like it's like a foam of bubbles that's right we're just one of those bubbles that's right and for me that's good because you say I was raised as a Buddhist and in Buddhism there's no such thing as God there's only nirvana timelessness but my parents wanted me to be as American as possible because they were in a concentration camp during World War two so they sent me to a Presbyterian Sunday School where he learned all about Genesis and all about the parables so I've had these two conflicting ideas in my head for years but now we can meld them together into a single theory our universe had a Genesis our universe had a Big Bang there was an explosion but these explosions take place all the time universes keep budding off other universes and what is the universe expanding into expanding into another bigger arena the arena of 11 dimensional hyperspace therefore our bubble is expanding in Nirvana and so here we have a beautiful melding of Buddhism with the Presbyterian religion so nirvana moment it's uh I thought I hadn't thought about that deep where do you get your ideas from I mean this is I probably talked to I've talked to a lot of physicists over the years I've never heard this kind of take on that I mean this does do you do you take a shower and think about these things well the water it's coming down and you drive or yeah well you know if you're a physicist working on the creation of the universe where the universe came from all these cosmological questions right it forces you to ask yourself questions that the average person doesn't think about right is there a universe beyond time are there two times can time be double times and in string theory yes string theory we have double time universes where University could have two clocks whenever you measure an event and where there was a time before time and that is of course as I mentioned the time when the before the universe collided with another universe giving birth to our baby universe so string theory forces you to think about hyperspace higher dimensions time travel that's what string theory forces you to think about so for me a wormhole is not something you see on Star Trek a wormhole to me is something that could actually exist in outer space and one day we might be able to create one and manipulate one to go backwards in time to meet your teenage mother before you're born now when that happens you're in big trouble find out what I did with those comic books your current book the future of humanity talks about the disaster that might overtake the earth we have to leave the earth and go some other places Mars is Mars an option to go yeah well you saw in the video the dinosaurs did not have a space program that's why they're not here today they're not here to argue the fact because they didn't have a space program and if you dig right beneath your feet right now right now a drill right into the soil here you'll pick up fossils of extinct life-forms 99.9 percent of which go extinct extinction is the norm for mother nature we think of one the nature being war in cuddly and cute yes mother nature is that too but Mother Nature can also have super volcanoes and cosmic collisions and that's that's what happened to the dinosaurs so we need an insurance policy we need plan B just in case something bad happens to the planet earth we need to become at least a two-planet species yeah it's Stephen Hawking fund other other physicists have talking to talked about that also but it's an incredibly expensive and long term project right it's long term but prices are dropping you know how many people here have seen seeing the movie the Martian shoppers how many people have seen the movie the Martian with Matt Damon that movie costs a hundred million dollars but the Indian government sent a probe past Mars for seventy million dollars so a Hollywood movie about going to Mars cost more than actually going to Mars well it's like anybody who's shopped for real estate it's one thing to find the empty lot and I can buy the property or land it but then it's then it's another thing to build the colony or or a habitat and that would be pretty expensive also yeah however we could so-called use the terrain for example ice can be mined for drinking purposes oxygen hydrogen can be used for breathing and rocket fuel just from the ice there are lava tubes where you can dig into the soil with a tube already there waiting for you to create the first Mars port and park crops genetically modified algae can thrive because the atmosphere is carbon dioxide and so it might be able to create an agriculture for a self self-perpetuating colony on Mars and then longer-term we have to melt the polar ice caps that would require solar satellites beaming sun's energy to the polar ice caps so that water flows freely on the surface of Mars for the first time in 3 billion years do you think this that some government is gonna get there first or some private entity Elon Musk somebody like that I think it's a good chance that private enterprise will get there first in fact they asked Elon Musk would you go into a your own rocket ship to go to Mars and he said yes but not on impact and so I think yeah I think a lot of us would go to Mars if it's safe and if there's no danger of an impact but but there are people who have said that a trip to Mars is a one-way trip that no one's gonna be coming back due to radiation sickness they might get on the way over or just that it's so dangerous you have a band there are a lot of volunteers who said I would do that thousands of people said I with you yeah but I think that's an example of fake news when we signed his proposed a one-way ticket to Mars that's not the whole truth first we sent an unmanned probe to Mars with robots that then collect the ice melt it to create rocket fuel so you have an automatic rocket that creates rocket fuel on its own right second the astronauts come on a one-way ticket they used a rocket fuel that was created by the first ship to refuel the second ship and then there's plenty of rocket fuel that's the one-way ticket it's actually not the way the media presented it because they sell more newspapers that way to make it sound terrific that's what we're here for is do away with fake news there are a couple of microphones available if you want to ask but you a question about the future what's but what's happening in the future you have talked about how you have a front-row seat to the future because you've interviewed every top scientist in the world I've interviewed I've interviewed over 300 of the world's top scientists for the Discovery Channel the Science Channel my own national radio program and every time I interview these people I asked them the fundamental question the key question I asked them is there intelligent life on the earth well I was watching the Kardashians on TV last night and I've concluded that there's no intelligent life on this planet sorry about that another planet maybe but not this one mm-hmm what do you think about all the the discovery of these exoplanets planets are way out there and and even one that we discovered there was only 40 light years away that's a game-changer four thousand planets have been discovered in fact tonight when you look in the night sky you'll see the Milky Way galaxies in a way that I cannot see in New York spectacular and on average every single star I repeat on average every single star has a planet going around it that is astounding when I was a kid we used to dream about what's happening out there now we realize that they're there they're there all throughout the night sky there are planets perhaps just like the earth unfortunately it's full moon tonight you're not going to see the Milky Way Oh unfortunate what about science education I know you like to talk about the problem the problems we have in teaching kids are keeping them interested in science I mean don't kids start out as natural scientists they're doing little experiments the parents got upset back in the day when I was a kid you'd put it tried to put a pop-tart in the VCR and you got slapped for doing that it looks like it should fit in there right we are born scientists we want to know why this sunshine we want to know where we came from and then around 10:00 that's the magic year whenever I interview these Nobel Prize winners that's the magic year when something happens you have this epiphany this existential shock reading an astronomy book going to the planetarium getting it so let's go then after that then they hit the greatest destroyer of scientists known to science it destroys millions of scientists and that is junior high school they discover the opposite sex and junior science is made into memorization you have to memorize the parts of a flower scientists made boring you're taught by the gym teacher who can't answer your questions anyway so our students scored dead last dead last almost consistently for 20 years in every UN test taken of people overseas yes you mentioned something about wormholes and time travel and I wanted to know what your thoughts were on time travel and if you believe in time travel travel do you believe in chaos theory and how that impact for time travel well first of all the first time travel solution was introduced in 1949 by Einsteins roommate Kirk girdled the greatest mathematician of the last thousand years and he found that if the universe rotated and you rotate it around the universe you could come back yesterday you could come back before you left so scientists were immediately paralyzed by this fact they were looking for rotating universes now I should tell you right now the universe does not rotate it expands it's called the Big Bang Theory but if it did rotate then perhaps time travel would be commonplace then since then we have discovered hundreds of solutions of Einstein's equations which allow for time travel so what's the catch there's two catches first catches you need the energy of a black hole to open up the Gateway you need positive energy like the looking-glass of Alice the looking-glass of Alice is the wormhole connecting Oxford to the countryside of Alice second you need negative energy to stabilize it like an Star Trek they bump into where malls all the time but the first thing they ask is how stable is that wormhole these two things are the killers now we as a primitive civilization cannot play with black holes and we cannot play with negative matter but that means that a civilization far more advanced in us may just may have the capability of bending time into a pretzel but it's not for us and Stephen Hawking in his latest book we just came out last week changed his mind and said yes time-travel probably is possible but you have to have those two basic ingredients positive energy to open the gateway negative energy to stabilize it you said something very important in passing and just in a few minutes we have left I know I don't want to you know miss out what you said and you talked about growing up very poor and your parents were in a Japanese internment camp and your life history is pretty incredible how do you go from being in an internment camp to being motivated to study physics and become a futurist like that well I became a physicist because I was enamored of this idea of trying to complete Einstein's dream I know but what was it your parents that right that motivated you right but see my parents didn't the grievance they just said look you learn from your mistakes you pick up the pieces and you move on and for me I realized that hey this was this was a really great opportunity to become part of the cutting edge of science Sputnik had just gone up all of a sudden we had the Sputnik generation all of a sudden in which our patriotic duty to become a physicist or a chemist or an astronomer or an astronaut there were magazine articles written about the glories of science for the first time and so I said to myself well that's one way to be part of the cutting-edge to be part of this great this great endeavor to understand the secrets of nature is there anything equivalent now because I was a child a child of that era with Sputnik and going to school and studying engineering is there any equivalent event or time going on now that could spur people to say hey I want to go study science well President Barack Obama talked about the Sputnik moment to recreate the Sputnik moment that's a little bit difficult because he of course partially canceled Sputnik he cancelled the space shuttle however the Space Shuttle is up and running and we hope to have launched it next year in fact to go around the moon the SLS booster rocket will have an unmanned test probably in December of 2019 as it goes around the moon so they could be renewed interest in this but I think it's the educational program in America that has to be revamped we have a great educational program that trains young people to live in 1950 the only problem is we don't live in 1950 anymore but our educational system is frozen frozen and we have to revamp it for the modern age I teach physics to pre-med sometimes and I have to teach physics of tweeting Forex levers and pulleys let's high school something yeah and meanwhile and when they become a doctor they're gonna use MRI machines they're in use cat-scans they can use radioisotopes and there I am teaching friction and and the pulleys to incoming a medical students it's great they say this is this is crazy the book is 300 years too late we're way PS way past pulleys and we don't teach them what they have to know about the modern-day eras era we don't teach them about what what's inside is cellphone because we don't teach them how to appreciate science we teach music appreciation we might teach art appreciation we don't expect people to be Picasso or yo-yo ma but we never teach students why science is important why they should know about it who the great Giants of science we're out science even worse right now science I know failure in scientists more times than than success but who remembers the failures in law in life we don't teach how important that is right we should teach them that science is the engine of prosperity all the wealth that we see around you is a byproduct of science physicists invented the transistor in the laser that's why we're here today that's why Google exists because we physicists invented the transistor if we also invented television and that's why we have TV people here we invented radio microwaves radar we created the space program but the average kid doesn't know that the average kid thinks that well to be very frank a lot of people call me on radio and say that it's they're aliens from outer space they gave us the microchip that we reverse engineered well I tell them the next time you're kidnapped by UFO steal something I don't care what it is an alien ship alien hammer steal something there's no law against stealing from an extraterrestrial no law whatsoever so you have bragging rights we can prove once and for all that intelligent life exists on the earth I mean if I can get the last question in here yes oh thank you hi so the search for intelligent life in outer space how do you see that playing out when do you see it playing out what do you see there I'd love to hear you speak more about that well I'll stick my neck out I think that sometime in this century we will make contact with another civilization in outer space but we have to throw away all the prejudices that we have for example we think there can have UFOs and land on the White House lawn no I personally believe that alien civilization will digitize their mind and they become digitally immortal and they're going to shoot their consciousness on laser beams throughout the universe at the speed of light I call this laser porting forget UFOs and accidents and and radiation and weightlessness forget all that you can digitize yourself put the knowledge of your consciousness on a laser beam shoot it to the moon you're in one second you're on the moon 20 minutes you're on Mars for years you're on the nearest star traveling at the speed of light none of this 20th century Flying Saucer stuff so I think yeah I think they're out there you think but you think like Star Trek type transport is possible well I think that if we digitized ourselves and we shoot ourselves put ourselves on a laser beam we can travel at the speed of light and at the other end the we mainframe that then downloads our consciousness and puts us into an avatar that is perfectly formed superhuman powers is handsome is is pretty is whatever you want to be and you can walk on the moon you can walk on mars and explore the solar system in an afternoon at the speed of light in the morning you have more breakfast in New York a tan at noontime you have they have lunch on Mars and then you go to the asteroid belt and the evening ain't come back for the same night traveling at the speed of light dr. Michio Kaku thank you very much [Applause]

Channel: Google Zeitgeist

Views: 45,798

Keywords: zeitgeist, ted talks, conferences, tech, business, arts, google, Science, Artificial Intelligence, Education, Physics, We're Entering the 4th Great Era of Science

Id: TwiI-dgupfI

Length: 27min 43sec (1663 seconds)

Published: Tue Oct 23 2018