Transcript
00:00:00 The following is a conversation with Michio Kaku.
00:00:02 He’s a theoretical physicist, futurist,
00:00:05 and professor at the City College of New York.
00:00:08 He’s the author of many fascinating books
00:00:10 that explore the nature of our reality
00:00:12 and the future of our civilization.
00:00:15 They include Einstein’s Cosmos, Physics of the Impossible,
00:00:19 Future of the Mind, Parallel Worlds,
00:00:21 and his latest, The Future of Humanity,
00:00:24 Terraforming Mars Interstellar Travel,
00:00:26 Immortality, and Our Destiny Beyond Earth.
00:00:29 I think it’s beautiful and important
00:00:32 when a scientific mind can fearlessly explore
00:00:35 through conversation subjects
00:00:37 just outside of our understanding.
00:00:40 That, to me, is where artificial intelligence is today,
00:00:43 just outside of our understanding,
00:00:45 a place we have to reach for
00:00:47 if we’re to uncover the mysteries of the human mind
00:00:50 and build human level and superhuman level AI systems
00:00:53 that transform our world for the better.
00:00:56 This is the Artificial Intelligence Podcast.
00:00:59 If you enjoy it, subscribe on YouTube,
00:01:01 give it five stars on iTunes, support it on Patreon,
00:01:04 or simply connect with me on Twitter
00:01:06 at Lex Friedman, spelled F R I D M A N.
00:01:09 And now, here’s my conversation with Michio Kaku.
00:01:14 You’ve mentioned that we just might make contact
00:01:17 with aliens or at least hear from them within this century.
00:01:21 Can you elaborate on your intuition behind that optimism?
00:01:25 Well, this is pure speculation, of course.
00:01:28 Of course.
00:01:28 Given the fact that we’ve already identified
00:01:31 4,000 exoplanets orbiting other stars,
00:01:34 and we have a census of the Milky Way galaxy
00:01:37 for the first time,
00:01:39 we know that on average, every single star, on average,
00:01:43 has a planet going around it,
00:01:45 and about one fifth or so of them
00:01:47 have Earth sized planets going around them.
00:01:51 So just do the math.
00:01:52 We’re talking about out of 100 billion stars
00:01:56 in the Milky Way galaxy,
00:01:58 we’re talking about billions
00:01:59 of potential Earth sized planets.
00:02:02 And to believe that we’re the only one
00:02:05 is, I think, rather ridiculous, given the odds.
00:02:09 And how many galaxies are there?
00:02:11 Within sight of the Hubble Space Telescope,
00:02:14 there are about 100 billion galaxies.
00:02:17 So do the math.
00:02:19 How many stars are there in the visible universe?
00:02:22 100 billion galaxies,
00:02:24 times 100 billion stars per galaxy.
00:02:29 We’re talking about a number beyond human imagination.
00:02:33 And to believe that we’re the only ones,
00:02:35 I think, is rather ridiculous.
00:02:38 So you’ve talked about different types of,
00:02:42 type zero, one, two, three, four, and five,
00:02:44 even, of the Kardashev scale
00:02:47 of the different kind of civilizations.
00:02:50 What do you think it takes,
00:02:52 if it is indeed a ridiculous notion
00:02:54 that we’re alone in the universe,
00:02:56 what do you think it takes to reach out?
00:02:58 First, to reach out through communication and connect.
00:03:02 Well, first of all, we have to understand
00:03:04 the level of sophistication of an alien life form
00:03:08 if we make contact with them.
00:03:10 I think in this century, we’ll probably pick up signals,
00:03:14 signals from an extraterrestrial civilization.
00:03:17 We’ll pick up there, I love Lucy,
00:03:19 and there, leave it to Beaver.
00:03:21 Just ordinary day to day transmissions
00:03:23 that they emit.
00:03:25 And the first thing we wanna do is to A,
00:03:28 decipher their language, of course,
00:03:30 but B, figure out at what level they are advanced
00:03:34 on the Kardashev scale.
00:03:37 I’m a physicist.
00:03:38 We rank things by two parameters, energy and information.
00:03:43 That’s how we rank black holes.
00:03:45 That’s how we rank stars.
00:03:47 That’s how we rank civilizations in outer space.
00:03:50 So a type one civilization is capable
00:03:54 of harnessing planetary power.
00:03:57 They control the weather, for example, earthquakes, volcanoes.
00:04:01 They can modify the course of geological events,
00:04:04 sort of like Flash Gordon or Buck Rogers.
00:04:08 Type two would be stellar.
00:04:12 They play with stars, entire stars.
00:04:15 They use the entire energy output of a star,
00:04:18 sort of like Star Trek.
00:04:20 The Federation of Planets have colonized the nearby stars.
00:04:24 So a type two would be somewhat similar to Star Trek.
00:04:29 Type three would be galactic.
00:04:30 They roam the galactic space lanes.
00:04:33 And type three would be like Star Wars,
00:04:37 a galactic civilization.
00:04:39 Now, one day I was giving this talk in London
00:04:42 at the planetarium there, and the little boy comes up to me
00:04:45 and he says, professor, you’re wrong.
00:04:48 You’re wrong, there’s type four.
00:04:51 And I told him, look, kid,
00:04:53 there are planets, stars, and galaxies.
00:04:57 That’s it, folks.
00:04:58 And he kept persisting and saying, no, there’s type four,
00:05:02 the power of the continuum.
00:05:05 And I thought about it for a moment.
00:05:07 And I said to myself,
00:05:08 is there an extra galactic source of energy,
00:05:12 the continuum of Star Trek?
00:05:14 And the answer is yes, there could be a type four.
00:05:18 And that’s dark energy.
00:05:20 We now know that 73% of the energy of the universe
00:05:25 is dark energy.
00:05:27 Dark matter represents maybe 23% or so,
00:05:30 and we only represent 4%.
00:05:33 We’re the oddballs.
00:05:34 And so you begin to realize that, yeah,
00:05:36 there could be type four, maybe even type five.
00:05:39 So type four, you’re saying being able to harness
00:05:43 sort of like dark energy,
00:05:45 something that permeates the entire universe.
00:05:47 So be able to plug into the entire universe
00:05:51 as a source of energy.
00:05:52 That’s right.
00:05:52 And dark energy is the energy of the Big Bang.
00:05:55 It’s why the galaxies are being pushed apart.
00:05:58 It’s the energy of nothing.
00:06:00 The more nothing you have,
00:06:02 the more dark energy that’s repulsive.
00:06:05 And so the acceleration of the universe is accelerating
00:06:08 because the more you have, the more you can have.
00:06:12 And that, of course, is by definition an exponential curve.
00:06:15 It’s called a de Sitter expansion,
00:06:17 and that’s the current state of the universe.
00:06:20 And then type five, would that be able to seek
00:06:26 energy sources somehow outside of our universe?
00:06:31 And how crazy is that idea?
00:06:33 Yeah, type five will be the multiverse.
00:06:35 Multiverse, okay.
00:06:36 I’m a quantum physicist,
00:06:37 and we quantum physicists don’t believe
00:06:40 that the Big Bang happened once.
00:06:42 That would violate the Heisenberg uncertainty principle.
00:06:45 And that means that there could be multiple bangs
00:06:47 happening all the time.
00:06:49 Even as we speak today,
00:06:52 universes are being created, and that fits the data.
00:06:56 The inflationary universe is a quantum theory.
00:06:59 So there’s a certain finite probability
00:07:02 that universes are being created all the time.
00:07:05 And for me, this is actually rather aesthetically pleasing
00:07:08 because I was raised as a Presbyterian,
00:07:13 but my parents were Buddhists.
00:07:15 And there’s two diametrically opposed ideas
00:07:19 about the universe.
00:07:21 In Buddhism, there’s only nirvana.
00:07:23 There’s no beginning, there’s no end,
00:07:25 there’s only timelessness.
00:07:26 But in Christianity, there is the instant
00:07:29 when God said, let there be light.
00:07:32 In other words, an instant of creation.
00:07:35 So I’ve had these two mutually exclusive ideas in my head,
00:07:40 and I now realize that it’s possible to meld them
00:07:42 into a single theory.
00:07:45 Either the universe had a beginning or it didn’t, right?
00:07:48 Wrong.
00:07:49 You see, our universe had a beginning.
00:07:53 Our universe had an instant where somebody might have said,
00:07:56 let there be light.
00:07:57 But there are other bubble universes out there
00:08:00 in a bubble bath of universes.
00:08:02 And that means that these universes are expanding
00:08:07 into a dimension beyond our three dimensional comprehension.
00:08:11 In other words, hyperspace.
00:08:13 In other words, 11 dimensional hyperspace.
00:08:16 So nirvana would be this timeless 11 dimensional hyperspace
00:08:21 where big bangs are happening all the time.
00:08:24 So we can now combine two mutually exclusive theories
00:08:28 of creation.
00:08:30 And Stephen Hawking, for example, even in his last book,
00:08:35 even said that this is an argument
00:08:37 against the existence of God.
00:08:39 He said there is no God because there was not enough time
00:08:42 for God to create the universe
00:08:44 because the big bang happened in an instant of time.
00:08:47 Therefore, there was no time available
00:08:50 for him to create the universe.
00:08:52 But you see, the multiverse idea
00:08:54 means that there was a time before time.
00:08:58 And there are multiple times, each bubble has its own time.
00:09:01 And so it means that there could actually be a universe
00:09:06 before the beginning of our universe.
00:09:09 So if you think of a bubble bath, when two bubbles collide,
00:09:13 or when two bubbles fission to create a baby bubble,
00:09:16 that’s called the big bang.
00:09:18 So the big bang is nothing but the collision of universes
00:09:21 or the budding of universes.
00:09:23 That’s such a beautiful picture
00:09:25 of our incredibly mysterious existence.
00:09:28 So is that humbling to you?
00:09:30 Exciting, the idea of multiverses?
00:09:32 I don’t even know how to even begin
00:09:35 to wrap my mind around it.
00:09:37 It’s exciting for me
00:09:38 because what I do for a living is string theory.
00:09:41 That’s my day job.
00:09:43 I get paid by the city of New York to work on string theory.
00:09:46 And you see, string theory is a multiverse theory.
00:09:50 So people say, first of all, what is string theory?
00:09:53 String theory simply says that all the particles
00:09:55 we see in nature, the electron, the proton,
00:09:58 the quarks, what have you,
00:09:59 are nothing but vibrations on a musical string,
00:10:03 on a tiny, tiny little string.
00:10:05 You know, G. Robert Oppenheimer,
00:10:07 the creator of the atomic bomb,
00:10:09 was so frustrated in the 1950s
00:10:12 with all these subatomic particles being created
00:10:15 in our atom smashers that he announced,
00:10:18 he announced one day that the Nobel Prize in physics
00:10:22 should go to the physicist
00:10:23 who does not discover a new particle that year.
00:10:28 Well, today we think they’re nothing but musical notes
00:10:30 on these tiny little vibrating strings.
00:10:32 So what is physics?
00:10:34 Physics is the harmonies you can write on vibrating strings.
00:10:38 What is chemistry?
00:10:40 Chemistry is the melodies you can play on these strings.
00:10:44 What is the universe?
00:10:47 The universe is a symphony of strings.
00:10:50 And then what is the mind of God
00:10:53 that Albert Einstein so eloquently wrote about
00:10:55 for the last 30 years of his life?
00:10:58 The mind of God would be cosmic music,
00:11:02 resonating through 11 dimensional hyperspace.
00:11:06 So beautifully put.
00:11:07 What do you think is the mind of Einstein’s God?
00:11:11 Do you think there’s a why that we could untangle
00:11:16 from this universe of strings?
00:11:19 Why are we here?
00:11:20 What is the meaning of it all?
00:11:23 Well, Steven Weinberg, winner of the Nobel Prize,
00:11:26 once said that the more we learn about the universe,
00:11:29 the more we learn that it’s pointless.
00:11:32 Well, I don’t know.
00:11:35 I don’t profess to understand
00:11:37 the great secrets of the universe.
00:11:39 However, let me say two things
00:11:41 about what the giants of physics
00:11:43 have said about this question.
00:11:45 Einstein believed in two types of God.
00:11:49 One was the God of the Bible, the personal God,
00:11:54 the God that answers prayers, walks on waters,
00:11:56 performs miracles, smites the Philistines.
00:12:00 That’s the personal God that he didn’t believe in.
00:12:02 He believed in the God of Spinoza,
00:12:05 the God of order, simplicity, harmony, beauty.
00:12:10 The universe could have been ugly.
00:12:12 The universe could have been messy, random,
00:12:15 but it’s gorgeous.
00:12:17 You realize that on a single sheet of paper,
00:12:19 we can write down all the known laws of the universe.
00:12:23 It’s amazing, on one sheet of paper,
00:12:25 Einstein’s equation is one inch long,
00:12:27 string theory is a lot longer,
00:12:30 and so it’s a standard model,
00:12:31 but you could put all these equations
00:12:33 on one sheet of paper.
00:12:36 It didn’t have to be that way.
00:12:38 It could have been messy.
00:12:40 And so, Einstein thought of himself as a young boy
00:12:43 entering this huge library for the first time,
00:12:47 being overwhelmed by the simplicity, elegance,
00:12:51 and beauty of this library,
00:12:53 but all he could do was read the first page
00:12:56 of the first volume.
00:12:58 Well, that library is the universe,
00:13:00 with all sorts of mysterious, magical things
00:13:03 that we have yet to find.
00:13:05 And then Galileo was asked about this.
00:13:07 Galileo said that the purpose of science,
00:13:13 the purpose of science is to determine how the heavens go.
00:13:17 The purpose of religion is to determine
00:13:20 how to go to heaven.
00:13:22 So in other words, science is about natural law,
00:13:26 and religion is about ethics,
00:13:29 how to be a good person, how to go to heaven.
00:13:32 As long as we keep these two things apart,
00:13:35 we’re in great shape.
00:13:36 The problem occurs when people from the natural sciences
00:13:41 begin to pontificate about ethics,
00:13:43 and people from religion begin to pontificate
00:13:46 about natural law.
00:13:47 That’s where we get into big trouble.
00:13:50 You think they’re fundamentally distinct,
00:13:53 morality and ethics and our idea of what is right
00:13:58 and what is wrong.
00:13:59 That’s something that’s outside the reach
00:14:02 of string theory and physics.
00:14:03 That’s right.
00:14:04 If you talk to a squirrel about what is right
00:14:08 and what is wrong, there’s no reference frame
00:14:12 for a squirrel, and realize that aliens from outer space,
00:14:16 if they ever come visit us, they’ll try to talk to us
00:14:20 like we talk to squirrels in the forest,
00:14:22 but eventually we get bored talking to the squirrels
00:14:25 because they don’t talk back to us.
00:14:28 Same thing with aliens from outer space.
00:14:30 They come down to earth, they’ll be curious about us
00:14:32 to a degree, but after a while they just get bored
00:14:35 because we have nothing to offer them.
00:14:37 So our sense of right and wrong,
00:14:40 what does that mean compared to a squirrel’s sense
00:14:43 of right and wrong?
00:14:46 Now we of course do have an ethics
00:14:48 that keeps civilizations in line,
00:14:51 enriches our life and makes civilization possible.
00:14:56 And I think that’s a good thing,
00:14:58 but it’s not mandated by a law of physics.
00:15:01 So if aliens do, alien species were to make contact,
00:15:06 forgive me for staying on aliens for a bit longer.
00:15:10 Do you think they’re more likely to be friendly,
00:15:15 to befriend us or to destroy us?
00:15:18 Well, I think for the most part,
00:15:20 they’ll pretty much ignore us.
00:15:22 If you’re a deer in the forest, who do you fear the most?
00:15:25 Do you fear the hunter with his gigantic 16 gauge shotgun?
00:15:30 Or do you fear the guy with a briefcase and glasses?
00:15:35 Well, the guy with the briefcase could be a developer
00:15:39 about to basically flatten the entire forest,
00:15:42 destroying your livelihood.
00:15:44 So instinctively you may be afraid of the hunter,
00:15:47 but actually the problem with deers in the forest
00:15:51 is that they should fear developers
00:15:54 because developers look at deer as simply
00:15:57 getting in the way.
00:15:59 I mean, in War of the Worlds by H.G. Wells,
00:16:02 the aliens did not hate us.
00:16:04 If you read the book,
00:16:05 the aliens did not have evil intentions toward homo sapiens.
00:16:11 No, we were in the way.
00:16:13 So I think we have to realize that alien civilizations
00:16:18 may view us quite differently than in science fiction novels.
00:16:21 However, I personally believe,
00:16:22 and I cannot prove any of this,
00:16:24 I personally believe that they’re probably gonna be peaceful
00:16:27 because there’s nothing that they want from our world.
00:16:31 I mean, what are they gonna take us?
00:16:33 What are they gonna take us for, gold?
00:16:35 No, gold is a useless metal for the most part.
00:16:39 It’s silver, I mean, it’s gold in color,
00:16:43 but that only affects homo sapiens.
00:16:45 Squirrels don’t care about gold.
00:16:47 And so gold is a rather useless element.
00:16:50 Rare earths maybe, platinum based elements,
00:16:53 rare earths for the electronics, yeah, maybe.
00:16:55 But other than that, we have nothing to offer them.
00:16:59 I mean, think about it for a moment.
00:17:01 People love Shakespeare and they love the arts and poetry,
00:17:06 but outside of the earth, they mean nothing,
00:17:10 absolutely nothing.
00:17:12 I mean, when I write down an equation in string theory,
00:17:15 I would hope that on the other side of the galaxy,
00:17:19 there’s an alien writing down that very same equation
00:17:22 in different notation,
00:17:24 but that alien on the other side of the galaxy,
00:17:27 Shakespeare, poetry, Hemingway,
00:17:30 it would mean nothing to him or her or it.
00:17:33 When you think about entities that’s out there,
00:17:38 extraterrestrial, do you think they would naturally look
00:17:43 something that even is recognizable to us as life?
00:17:48 Or would they be radically different?
00:17:50 Well, how did we become intelligent?
00:17:52 Basically three things made us intelligent.
00:17:56 One is our eyesight, stereo eyesight.
00:17:59 We have the eyes of a hunter,
00:18:01 stereo vision so we lock in on targets.
00:18:04 And who is smarter, predator or prey?
00:18:09 Predators are smarter than prey.
00:18:11 They have their eyes at the front of their face,
00:18:13 like lions, tigers,
00:18:15 while rabbits have eyes to the side of their face.
00:18:18 Why is that?
00:18:19 Hunters have to zero in on the target.
00:18:22 They have to know how to ambush.
00:18:24 They have to know how to hide, camouflage,
00:18:27 sneak up, stealth, deceit.
00:18:30 That takes a lot of intelligence.
00:18:31 Rabbits, all they have to do is run.
00:18:35 So that’s the first criterion, stereo eyesight of some sort.
00:18:39 Second is the thumb.
00:18:42 The opposable thumb of some sort
00:18:44 could be a claw or a tentacle.
00:18:46 So hand eye coordination.
00:18:48 Hand eye coordination is the way
00:18:50 we manipulate the environment.
00:18:52 And then three, language.
00:18:55 Because mama bear never tells baby bear
00:18:58 to avoid the human hunter.
00:19:00 Bears just learn by themselves.
00:19:02 They never hand out information
00:19:04 from one generation to the next.
00:19:06 So these are the three basic ingredients of intelligence.
00:19:10 Eyesight of some sort, an opposable thumb
00:19:12 or tentacle or claw of some sort, and language.
00:19:16 Now ask yourself a simple question.
00:19:19 How many animals have all three?
00:19:22 Just us.
00:19:23 It’s just us.
00:19:25 I mean, the primates, they have a language, yeah,
00:19:28 they may get up to maybe 20 words,
00:19:30 but a baby learns a word a day,
00:19:32 several words a day a baby learns.
00:19:35 And a typical adult knows about almost 5,000 words.
00:19:41 While the maximum number of words
00:19:42 that you can teach a gorilla in any language,
00:19:46 including their own language, is about 20 or so.
00:19:49 And so we see the difference in intelligence.
00:19:53 So when we meet aliens from outer space,
00:19:55 chances are they will have been descended
00:19:58 from predators of some sort.
00:20:01 They’ll have some way to manipulate the environment
00:20:03 and communicate their knowledge to the next generation.
00:20:07 That’s it, folks.
00:20:09 So functionally, that would be similar.
00:20:12 That would, we would be able to recognize them.
00:20:15 Well, not necessarily, because I think
00:20:17 even with Homo sapiens, we are eventually
00:20:20 going to perhaps become part cybernetic
00:20:24 and genetically enhanced.
00:20:27 Already, robots are getting smarter and smarter.
00:20:31 Right now, robots have the intelligence of a cockroach.
00:20:35 But in the coming years,
00:20:37 our robots will be as smart as a mouse,
00:20:40 then maybe as smart as a rabbit.
00:20:42 If we’re lucky, maybe as smart as a cat or a dog.
00:20:47 And by the end of the century, who knows for sure,
00:20:50 our robots will be probably as smart as a monkey.
00:20:53 Now, at that point, of course, they could be dangerous.
00:20:56 You see, monkeys are self aware.
00:20:59 They know they are monkeys.
00:21:03 They may have a different agenda than us.
00:21:06 While dogs, dogs are confused.
00:21:10 You see, dogs think that we are a dog,
00:21:14 that we’re the top dog.
00:21:16 They’re the underdog.
00:21:17 That’s why they whimper and follow us and lick us
00:21:20 all the time.
00:21:21 We’re the top dog.
00:21:22 Monkeys have no illusion at all.
00:21:25 They know we are not monkeys.
00:21:28 And so I think that in the future,
00:21:29 we’ll have to put a chip in their brain to shut them off
00:21:32 once our robots have murderous thoughts.
00:21:35 But that’s in a hundred years.
00:21:37 In 200 years, the robots will be smart enough
00:21:41 to remove that fail safe chip in their brain
00:21:44 and then watch out.
00:21:46 At that point, I think rather than compete with our robots,
00:21:52 we should merge with them.
00:21:54 We should become part cybernetic.
00:21:56 So I think when we meet alien life from outer space,
00:21:59 they may be genetically and cybernetically enhanced.
00:22:05 Genetically and cybernetically enhanced.
00:22:07 Wow, so let’s talk about that full range.
00:22:11 In the near term and 200 years from now,
00:22:13 how promising in the near term in your view
00:22:16 is brain machine interfaces?
00:22:18 So starting to allow computers to talk directly
00:22:22 to the brains, Elon Musk is working on that with Neuralink
00:22:26 and there’s other companies working on this idea.
00:22:29 Do you see promise there?
00:22:30 Do you see hope for near term impact?
00:22:32 Well, every technology has pluses and minuses.
00:22:36 Already we can record memories.
00:22:38 I have a book, The Future of the Mind,
00:22:40 where I detail some of these breakthroughs.
00:22:42 We can now record simple memories of mice
00:22:46 and send these memories on the internet.
00:22:49 Eventually, we’re gonna do this with primates
00:22:52 at Wake Forest University and also in Los Angeles.
00:22:55 And then after that,
00:22:57 we’ll have a memory chip for Alzheimer’s patients.
00:23:00 We’ll test it out in Alzheimer’s patients
00:23:02 because of course, when Alzheimer’s patients
00:23:05 lose their memory, they wander.
00:23:07 They create all sorts of havoc, wandering around,
00:23:11 oblivious to their surroundings and they’ll have a chip.
00:23:15 They’ll push the button and memories,
00:23:18 memories will come flooding into their hippocampus
00:23:21 and the chip telling them where they live and who they are.
00:23:26 And so a memory chip is definitely in the cards.
00:23:29 And I think this will eventually affect human civilization.
00:23:33 What is the future of the internet?
00:23:35 The future of the internet is brain net.
00:23:37 Brain net is when we send emotions, feelings,
00:23:41 sensations on the internet.
00:23:44 And we will telepathically communicate
00:23:46 with other humans this way.
00:23:49 This is gonna affect everything.
00:23:51 Look at entertainment.
00:23:52 Remember the silent movies?
00:23:54 Charlie Chaplin was very famous
00:23:56 during the era of silent movies.
00:23:58 But when the talkies came in,
00:23:59 nobody wanted to see Charlie Chaplin anymore
00:24:03 because he never talked in the movies.
00:24:05 And so a whole generation of actors lost their job
00:24:08 and a new series of actors came in.
00:24:11 Next, we’re gonna have the movies replaced by brain net
00:24:16 because in the future, people will say,
00:24:19 who wants to see a screen with images?
00:24:23 That’s it.
00:24:23 Sound and image, that’s called the movies.
00:24:27 In our entertainment industry,
00:24:28 this multi billion dollar industry is based on screens
00:24:32 with moving images and sound.
00:24:34 But what happens when emotions, feelings, sensations,
00:24:39 memories can be conveyed on the internet?
00:24:43 It’s gonna change everything.
00:24:44 Human relations will change
00:24:46 because you’ll be able to empathize
00:24:47 and feel the suffering of other people.
00:24:50 We’ll be able to communicate telepathically.
00:24:53 And this is coming.
00:24:55 You described brain net and future of the mind.
00:24:58 This is an interesting concept.
00:25:00 Do you think, so you mentioned entertainment,
00:25:03 but what kind of effect would it have
00:25:06 on our personal relationships?
00:25:08 Hopefully it will deepen it.
00:25:10 You realize that for most of human history,
00:25:13 for over 90% of human history,
00:25:16 we only knew maybe 20, 100 people.
00:25:22 That’s it, folks.
00:25:23 That was your tribe.
00:25:25 That was everybody you knew in the universe
00:25:28 was only maybe 50 or 100.
00:25:31 With the coming of towns,
00:25:33 of course it expanded to a few thousand.
00:25:35 With the coming of the telephone,
00:25:37 all of a sudden you could reach thousands of people
00:25:40 with a telephone.
00:25:41 And now with the internet,
00:25:42 you can reach the entire population of the planet Earth.
00:25:45 And so I think this is a normal progression.
00:25:48 And you think that kind of sort of connection
00:25:52 to the rest of the world,
00:25:53 and then adding sensations
00:25:55 like being able to share telepathically emotions and so on
00:25:58 that would just further deepen our connection
00:26:01 to our fellow humans.
00:26:02 That’s right.
00:26:03 In fact, I disagree with many scientists on this question.
00:26:07 Most scientists would say that technology is neutral.
00:26:11 A double edged sword,
00:26:12 one side of the sword can cut against people.
00:26:15 The other side of the sword
00:26:17 can cut against ignorance and disease.
00:26:20 I disagree.
00:26:22 I think technology does have a moral direction.
00:26:25 Look at the internet.
00:26:27 The internet spreads knowledge, awareness,
00:26:30 and that creates empowerment.
00:26:33 People act on knowledge.
00:26:35 When they begin to realize
00:26:36 that they don’t have to live that way,
00:26:38 they don’t have to suffer under a dictatorship,
00:26:41 that there are other ways of living under freedom,
00:26:44 then they begin to take things, take power.
00:26:47 And that spreads democracy.
00:26:49 And democracies do not war with other democracies.
00:26:54 I’m a scientist.
00:26:55 I believe in data.
00:26:57 So let’s take a sheet of paper
00:26:59 and write down every single war you had to learn
00:27:03 since you were in elementary school.
00:27:05 Every single war, hundreds of them.
00:27:07 Kings, queens, emperors, dictators.
00:27:11 All these wars were between kings, queens,
00:27:13 emperors, and dictators.
00:27:15 Never between two major democracies.
00:27:19 And so I think with the spread of this technology
00:27:22 and which would accelerate with the coming of brain net,
00:27:26 it means that, well, we will still have wars.
00:27:28 Wars, of course, is politics by other means,
00:27:31 but they’ll be less intense and less frequent.
00:27:35 Do you have worries of longer term existential risk
00:27:40 from technology, from AI?
00:27:43 So I think that’s a wonderful vision of a future
00:27:48 where war is a distant memory,
00:27:51 but now there’s another agent.
00:27:53 There’s somebody else that’s able to create conflict,
00:27:57 that’s able to create harm, AI systems.
00:28:00 So do you have worry about such AI systems?
00:28:03 Well, yes, that is an existential risk,
00:28:05 but again, I think an existential risk,
00:28:07 not for this century.
00:28:09 I think our grandkids are gonna have to confront
00:28:12 this question as robots gradually approach
00:28:15 the intelligence of a dog, a cat,
00:28:17 and finally that of a monkey.
00:28:20 However, I think we will digitize ourselves as well.
00:28:23 Not only are we gonna merge with our technology,
00:28:26 we’ll also digitize our personality,
00:28:28 our memories, our feelings.
00:28:30 You realize during the Middle Ages,
00:28:32 there was something called dualism.
00:28:34 Dualism meant that the soul was separate from the body.
00:28:38 When the body died, the soul went to heaven.
00:28:40 That’s dualism.
00:28:42 Then in the 20th century, neuroscience came in
00:28:45 and said, bah, humbug.
00:28:47 Every time we look at the brain, it’s just neurons.
00:28:50 That’s it, folks, period, end of story.
00:28:54 Bunch of neurons firing.
00:28:56 Now we’re going back to dualism.
00:28:59 Now we realize that we can digitize human memories,
00:29:03 feelings, sensations, and create a digital copy of ourselves,
00:29:09 and that’s called the Connectome Project.
00:29:11 Billions of dollars are now being spent
00:29:14 to do not just the genome project
00:29:17 of sequencing the genes of our body,
00:29:19 but the Connectome Project,
00:29:21 which is to map the entire connections of the human brain.
00:29:26 And even before then, already in Silicon Valley,
00:29:28 today, at this very moment,
00:29:31 you can contact Silicon Valley companies
00:29:33 that are willing to digitize your relatives
00:29:36 because some people want to talk to their parents.
00:29:39 There are unresolved issues with their parents,
00:29:42 and one day, yes, firms will digitize people,
00:29:45 and you’ll be able to talk to them a reasonable facsimile.
00:29:49 We leave a digital trail.
00:29:52 Our ancestors did not.
00:29:54 Our ancestors were lucky if they had one line,
00:29:57 just one line in a church book,
00:30:00 saying the date they were baptized and the date they died.
00:30:04 That’s it.
00:30:05 That was their entire digital memory.
00:30:08 I mean, their entire digital existence summarized
00:30:11 in just a few letters of the alphabet, a whole life.
00:30:15 Now we digitize everything.
00:30:17 Every time you sneeze, you digitize it.
00:30:20 You put it on the internet.
00:30:22 And so I think that we are gonna digitize ourselves
00:30:25 and give us digital immortality.
00:30:28 We’ll not only have biologic genetic immortality
00:30:31 of some sort, but also digital immortality.
00:30:34 And what are we gonna do with it?
00:30:37 I think we should send it into outer space.
00:30:40 If you digitize the human brain
00:30:43 and put it on a laser beam and shoot it to the moon,
00:30:46 you’re on the moon in one second.
00:30:48 Shoot it to Mars, you’re on Mars in 20 minutes.
00:30:51 Shoot it to Pluto, you’re on Pluto in eight hours.
00:30:54 Think about it for a moment.
00:30:56 You can have breakfast in New York
00:30:58 and for a morning snack, vacation on the moon,
00:31:02 then zap your way to Mars by noontime,
00:31:05 journey through the asteroid belt of the afternoon,
00:31:08 and then come back for dinner in New York at night.
00:31:11 All in a day’s work at the speed of light.
00:31:16 Now, this means that you don’t need booster rockets.
00:31:19 You don’t need weightlessness problems.
00:31:21 You don’t need to worry about meteorites.
00:31:23 And what’s on the moon?
00:31:25 On the moon, there is a mainframe
00:31:27 that downloads your laser beam’s information.
00:31:31 And where does it download the information into?
00:31:34 An avatar.
00:31:35 Now, what does that avatar look like?
00:31:37 Anything you want.
00:31:40 Think about it for a moment.
00:31:41 You could be Superman, Superwoman, on the moon, on Mars,
00:31:47 traveling throughout the universe at the speed of light,
00:31:50 downloading your personality into any vehicle you want.
00:31:55 Now, let me stick my neck out.
00:31:57 So far, everything I’ve been saying
00:31:58 is well within the laws of physics.
00:32:00 Well within the laws of physics.
00:32:02 Now, let me go outside the laws of physics again.
00:32:04 Here we go.
00:32:05 I think this already exists.
00:32:08 I think outside the Earth, there could be a super highway
00:32:11 a laser highway of laser porting
00:32:14 with billions of souls of aliens
00:32:17 zapping their way across the galaxy.
00:32:20 Now, let me ask you a question.
00:32:22 Are we smart enough to determine
00:32:25 whether such a thing exists or not?
00:32:28 No, this could exist right outside
00:32:31 the orbit of the planet Earth.
00:32:32 And we’re too stupid in our technology
00:32:35 to even prove it or disprove it.
00:32:38 We would need the aliens on this laser super highway
00:32:43 to help us out, to send us a human interpretable signal.
00:32:50 I mean, it ultimately boils down
00:32:51 to the language of communication,
00:32:53 but that’s an exciting possibility
00:32:55 that actually the sky is filled with aliens.
00:32:59 The aliens could already be here.
00:33:00 And we’re just so oblivious that we’re too stupid to know it.
00:33:05 See, they don’t have to be in alien form
00:33:07 with little green men.
00:33:09 They can be in any form they want
00:33:11 in an avatar of their creation.
00:33:13 Well, in fact, they could very well be.
00:33:16 They can even look like us.
00:33:17 Exactly.
00:33:18 We’d never know.
00:33:19 One of us could be an alien.
00:33:21 You know, in the zoo, did you know
00:33:22 that we sometimes have zookeepers that imitate animals?
00:33:26 We create a fake animal and we put it in
00:33:29 so that the animal is not afraid of this fake animal.
00:33:33 And of course, these animals brains,
00:33:35 their brain is about as big as a walnut.
00:33:37 They accept these dummies as if they were real.
00:33:41 So an alien civilization in outer space would say,
00:33:44 oh yeah, human brains are so tiny.
00:33:46 We could put a dummy on their world, an avatar,
00:33:49 and they’d never know it.
00:33:51 That would be an entertaining thing to watch
00:33:53 from the alien perspective.
00:33:55 So you kind of implied that with a digital form
00:33:58 of our being, but also biologically,
00:34:02 do you think one day technology will allow
00:34:04 individual human beings to become immortal
00:34:07 besides just through the ability to digitize our essence?
00:34:11 Yeah, I think that artificial intelligence
00:34:13 will give us the key to genetic immortality.
00:34:17 You see, in the coming decades,
00:34:18 everyone’s gonna have their gene sequence.
00:34:21 We’ll have billions of genomes of old people,
00:34:24 billions of genomes of young people.
00:34:26 And what are we gonna do with it?
00:34:28 We’re gonna run it through an AI machine,
00:34:30 which has pattern recognition, to look for the age genes.
00:34:35 In other words, the fountain of youth that emperors,
00:34:38 kings, and queens lusted over.
00:34:41 The fountain of youth will be found
00:34:44 by artificial intelligence.
00:34:46 Artificial intelligence will identify
00:34:48 where these age genes are located.
00:34:52 First of all, what is aging?
00:34:53 We now know what aging is.
00:34:55 Aging is the buildup of errors.
00:34:59 That’s all aging is, the buildup of genetic errors.
00:35:03 This means that cells eventually become slower, sluggish,
00:35:07 they go into senescence, and they die.
00:35:10 In fact, that’s why we die.
00:35:13 We die because of the buildup of mistakes
00:35:16 in our genome, in our cellular activity.
00:35:20 But you see, in the future, we’ll be able to fix those genes
00:35:23 with CRISPR type technologies,
00:35:25 and perhaps even live forever.
00:35:27 So let me ask you a question.
00:35:29 Where does aging take place in a car?
00:35:32 Given a car, where does aging take place?
00:35:34 Well, it’s obvious, the engine, right?
00:35:37 A, that’s where you have a lot of moving parts.
00:35:39 B, that’s where you have combustion.
00:35:41 Well, where in the cell do we have combustion?
00:35:47 The mitochondria.
00:35:48 We now know where aging takes place.
00:35:52 And if we cure many of the mistakes that build up
00:35:55 in the mitochondria of the cell, we could become immortal.
00:35:59 Let me ask you, if you yourself could become immortal,
00:36:03 would you?
00:36:06 Damn straight.
00:36:07 No, I think about it for a while,
00:36:10 because of course, it depends on how you become immortal.
00:36:14 You know, there’s a famous myth of Tithonus.
00:36:17 It turns out that years ago, in the Greek mythology,
00:36:21 there was the saga of Tithonus and Aurora.
00:36:25 Aurora was the goddess of the dawn,
00:36:28 and she fell in love with a mortal, a human called Tithonus.
00:36:32 And so Aurora begged Zeus to grant her
00:36:37 the gift of immortality to give to her lover.
00:36:42 So Zeus took pity on Aurora and made Tithonus immortal.
00:36:47 But you see, Aurora made a mistake,
00:36:49 a huge mistake.
00:36:52 She asked for immortality,
00:36:54 but she forgot to ask for eternal youth.
00:36:59 So poor Tithonus got older and older and older every year,
00:37:03 decrepit, a bag of bones, but he could never die.
00:37:08 Never die.
00:37:09 Quality of life is important.
00:37:11 So I think immortality is a great idea,
00:37:14 as long as you also have immortal youth as well.
00:37:18 Now, I personally believe, and I cannot prove this,
00:37:20 but I personally believe that our grandkids
00:37:22 may have the option of reaching the age of 30
00:37:26 and then stopping.
00:37:28 They may like being age 30,
00:37:30 because you have wisdom,
00:37:32 you have all the benefits of age and maturity,
00:37:35 and you still live forever with a healthy body.
00:37:39 Our descendants may like being 30 for several centuries.
00:37:43 Is there an aspect of human existence
00:37:45 that is meaningful only because we’re mortal?
00:37:49 Well, every waking moment,
00:37:52 we don’t think about it this way,
00:37:53 but every waking moment,
00:37:55 actually, we are aware of our death and our mortality.
00:38:00 Think about it for a moment.
00:38:01 When you go to college,
00:38:03 you realize that you are in a period of time
00:38:05 where soon you will reach middle age and have a career.
00:38:10 And after that, you’ll retire and then you’ll die.
00:38:13 And so even as a youth, even as a child,
00:38:17 without even thinking about it,
00:38:19 you are aware of your own death,
00:38:21 because it sets limits to your lifespan.
00:38:24 I gotta graduate from high school.
00:38:26 I gotta graduate from college.
00:38:27 Why?
00:38:28 Because you’re gonna die.
00:38:30 Because unless you graduate from high school,
00:38:32 unless you graduate from college,
00:38:34 you’re not gonna enter old age with enough money
00:38:37 to retire and then die.
00:38:39 And so, yeah, people think about it unconsciously,
00:38:42 because it affects every aspect of your being.
00:38:46 The fact that you go to high school, college,
00:38:49 get married, have kids, there’s a clock,
00:38:52 a clock ticking even without your permission.
00:38:56 It gives a sense of urgency.
00:38:58 Do you yourself, I mean,
00:39:01 there’s so much excitement and passion
00:39:03 in the way you talk about physics
00:39:04 and the way you talk about technology in the future.
00:39:07 Do you yourself meditate on your own mortality?
00:39:11 Do you think about this clock that’s ticking?
00:39:14 Well, I try not to,
00:39:15 because it then begins to affect your behavior.
00:39:19 You begin to alter your behavior
00:39:21 to match your expectation of when you’re gonna die.
00:39:26 So let’s talk about youth,
00:39:27 and then let’s talk about death, okay?
00:39:31 When I interview scientists on radio,
00:39:34 I often ask them, what made the difference?
00:39:37 How old were you?
00:39:39 What changed your life?
00:39:41 And they always say more or less the same thing.
00:39:44 No, these are Nobel Prize winners,
00:39:45 directors of major laboratories,
00:39:47 very distinguished scientists.
00:39:48 They always say, when I was 10,
00:39:52 when I was 10, something happened.
00:39:55 It was a visit to the planetarium.
00:39:57 It was a telescope.
00:39:59 For Steven Weinberg, winner of the Nobel Prize,
00:40:01 it was the chemistry kit.
00:40:03 For Heinz Pagels, it was a visit to the planetarium.
00:40:07 For Isidor Rabi, it was a book about the planets.
00:40:10 For Albert Einstein, it was a compass.
00:40:14 Something happened,
00:40:15 which gives them this existential shock.
00:40:18 Because you see, before the age of 10,
00:40:20 everything is mommy and daddy, mommy and dad.
00:40:22 That’s your universe, mommy and daddy.
00:40:25 Around the age of 10, you begin to wonder,
00:40:27 what’s beyond mommy and daddy?
00:40:30 And that’s when you have this epiphany,
00:40:33 when you realize, oh my God, there’s a universe out there,
00:40:38 a universe of discovery.
00:40:40 And that sensation stays with you for the rest of your life.
00:40:45 You still remember that shock
00:40:47 that you felt gazing at the universe.
00:40:50 And then you hit the greatest destroyer of scientists
00:40:55 known to science.
00:40:57 The greatest destroyer of scientists known to science
00:41:02 is junior high school.
00:41:05 When you hit junior high school, folks, it’s all over.
00:41:08 It’s all over.
00:41:10 Because in junior high school, people say, hey, stupid.
00:41:14 I mean, you like that nerdy stuff.
00:41:17 And your friends shun you.
00:41:19 All of a sudden, people think you’re a weirdo.
00:41:22 And scientists made boring.
00:41:25 Richard Feynman, the Nobel Prize winner,
00:41:27 when he was a child,
00:41:29 his father would take him into the forest.
00:41:31 And the father would teach him everything about birds,
00:41:35 why they’re shaped the way they are,
00:41:36 their wings, the coloration, the shape of their beak,
00:41:40 everything about birds.
00:41:43 So one day, a bully comes up
00:41:44 to the future Nobel Prize winner and says,
00:41:47 hey, Dick, what’s the name of that bird over there?
00:41:51 Well, he didn’t know.
00:41:53 He knew everything about that bird except its name.
00:41:58 So he said, I don’t know.
00:42:00 And then the bully said, what’s the matter, Dick?
00:42:03 You stupid or something?
00:42:05 And then in that instant, he got it.
00:42:08 He got it.
00:42:09 He realized that for most people,
00:42:12 science is giving names to birds.
00:42:15 That’s what science is.
00:42:17 You know lots of names of obscure things.
00:42:19 Hey, people say, you’re smart.
00:42:21 You’re smart.
00:42:22 You know all the names of the dinosaurs.
00:42:24 You know all the names of the plants.
00:42:26 No, that’s not science at all.
00:42:29 Science is about principles, concepts, physical pictures.
00:42:36 That’s what science is all about.
00:42:38 My favorite quote from Einstein is that,
00:42:41 unless you can explain the theory to a child,
00:42:44 the theory is probably worthless.
00:42:47 Meaning that all great theories are not big words.
00:42:52 All great theories are simple concepts, principles,
00:42:57 basic physical pictures.
00:43:00 Relativity is all about clocks, meter sticks,
00:43:04 rocket ships and locomotives.
00:43:07 Newton’s laws of gravity are all about balls
00:43:10 and spinning wheels and things like that.
00:43:13 That’s what physics and science is all about,
00:43:15 not memorizing things.
00:43:17 And that stays with you for the rest of your life.
00:43:20 So even in old age, I’ve noticed that these scientists,
00:43:24 when they sit back, they still remember.
00:43:28 They still remember that flush,
00:43:30 that flush of excitement they felt with that first telescope,
00:43:34 that first moment when they encountered the universe.
00:43:38 That keeps them going.
00:43:40 That keeps them going.
00:43:42 By the way, I should point out that when I was eight,
00:43:46 something happened to me as well.
00:43:49 When I was eight years old, it was in all the papers
00:43:53 that a great scientist had just died.
00:43:56 And they put a picture of his desk on the front page.
00:44:00 That’s it, just a simple picture of the front page
00:44:03 of the newspapers of his desk.
00:44:06 That desk had a book on it, which was opened.
00:44:09 And the caption said more or less,
00:44:11 this is the unfinished manuscript
00:44:14 from the greatest scientists of our time.
00:44:17 So I said to myself, well, why couldn’t he finish it?
00:44:22 What’s so hard that you can’t finish it
00:44:25 if you’re a great scientist?
00:44:26 It’s a homework problem, right?
00:44:28 You go home, you solve it, or you ask your mom,
00:44:32 why couldn’t he solve it?
00:44:33 So to me, this was a murder mystery.
00:44:35 This was greater than any adventure story.
00:44:37 I had to know why the greatest scientists of our time
00:44:41 couldn’t finish something.
00:44:43 And then over the years, I found out the guy had a name,
00:44:46 Albert Einstein, and that book was The Theory of Everything.
00:44:51 It was unfinished.
00:44:53 Well, today I can read that book.
00:44:55 I can see all the dead ends and false starts that he made.
00:44:59 And I began to realize that he lost his way
00:45:02 because he didn’t have a physical picture
00:45:05 to guide him on the third try.
00:45:09 On the first try, he talked about clocks
00:45:12 and lightning bolts and meter sticks,
00:45:15 and that gave us special relativity,
00:45:17 which gave us the atomic bomb.
00:45:19 The second great picture was gravity
00:45:23 with balls rolling on curved surfaces.
00:45:26 And that gave us the Big Bang,
00:45:28 creation of the universe, black holes.
00:45:30 On the third try, he missed it.
00:45:34 He had no picture at all to guide him.
00:45:38 In fact, there’s a quote I have where he said,
00:45:40 I’m still looking.
00:45:41 I’m still looking for that picture.
00:45:44 He never found it.
00:45:45 Well, today we think that picture is strength theory.
00:45:49 The strength theory can unify gravity
00:45:52 and this mysterious thing that Einstein didn’t like,
00:45:54 which is quantum mechanics,
00:45:55 or couldn’t quite pin down and make sense of.
00:45:59 That’s right.
00:46:00 Mother nature has two hands, a left hand and a right hand.
00:46:02 The left hand is a theory of the small.
00:46:05 The right hand is a theory of the big.
00:46:07 The theory of the small is the quantum theory,
00:46:09 the theory of atoms and quarks.
00:46:11 The theory of the big is relativity,
00:46:13 the theory of black holes, big bangs.
00:46:16 The problem is the left hand does not talk to the right hand.
00:46:22 They hate each other.
00:46:24 The left hand is based on discrete particles.
00:46:27 The right hand is based on smooth surfaces.
00:46:31 How do you put these two things together
00:46:33 into a single theory?
00:46:34 They hate each other.
00:46:35 The greatest minds of our time,
00:46:38 the greatest minds of our time
00:46:40 worked on this problem and failed.
00:46:43 Today, the only theory that has survived
00:46:46 every challenge so far is string theory.
00:46:49 That doesn’t mean string theory is correct.
00:46:51 It could very well be wrong,
00:46:53 but right now it’s the only game in town.
00:46:56 Some people come up to me and say,
00:46:57 ‘‘Professor, I don’t believe in string theory.
00:47:00 Give me an alternative.’’
00:47:02 And I tell them there is none.
00:47:05 Get used to it.
00:47:07 It’s the best theory we got.
00:47:09 It’s the only theory we have.
00:47:10 It’s the only theory we have.
00:47:13 Do you see, you know,
00:47:16 the strings kind of inspire a view,
00:47:20 as did atoms and particles and quarks,
00:47:23 but especially strings inspire a view of a universe
00:47:26 as a kind of information processing system,
00:47:29 as a computer of sorts.
00:47:31 Do you see the universe in this way?
00:47:33 No.
00:47:34 Some people think, in fact,
00:47:36 the whole universe is a computer of some sort.
00:47:39 And they believe that perhaps everything,
00:47:42 therefore, is a simulation.
00:47:44 Yes.
00:47:45 I don’t think so.
00:47:46 I don’t think that there is a super video game
00:47:49 where we are nothing but puppets dancing on the screen
00:47:52 and somebody hit the play button
00:47:54 and here we are talking about simulations.
00:47:57 No.
00:47:58 Even Newtonian mechanics says that the weather,
00:48:02 the simple weather is so complicated
00:48:04 with trillions upon trillions of atoms
00:48:07 that it cannot be simulated in a finite amount of time.
00:48:10 In other words, the smallest object
00:48:13 which can describe the weather
00:48:17 and simulate the weather is the weather itself.
00:48:21 The smallest object that can simulate a human
00:48:24 is the human itself.
00:48:26 And if you had quantum mechanics,
00:48:28 it becomes almost impossible
00:48:31 to simulate it with a conventional computer.
00:48:34 This quantum mechanics deals with all possible universes,
00:48:38 parallel universes, a multiverse of universes.
00:48:42 And so the calculation just spirals out of control.
00:48:46 Now, so far, there’s only one way
00:48:49 where you might be able to argue
00:48:52 that the universe is a simulation.
00:48:54 And this is still being debated by quantum physicists.
00:48:58 It turns out that if you throw the encyclopedia
00:49:00 into a black hole, the information is not lost.
00:49:04 Eventually it winds up on the surface of the black hole.
00:49:07 Now, the surface of the black hole is finite.
00:49:09 In fact, you can calculate
00:49:11 the maximum amount of information
00:49:13 you can store in a black hole.
00:49:15 It’s a finite number.
00:49:17 It’s a calculable number, believe it or not.
00:49:19 Now, if the universe were made out of black holes,
00:49:21 which is the maximum universe you can conceive of,
00:49:25 each universe, each black hole
00:49:27 has a finite amount of information.
00:49:29 Therefore, ergo, da da!
00:49:32 Ergo, the total amount of information in a universe
00:49:37 is finite.
00:49:38 This is mind boggling.
00:49:40 This, I consider mind boggling,
00:49:42 that all possible universes are countable
00:49:46 and all possible universes can be summarized in a number,
00:49:50 a number you can write on a sheet of paper,
00:49:52 all possible universes, and it’s a finite number.
00:49:55 Now, it’s huge.
00:49:56 It’s a number beyond human imagination.
00:49:59 It’s a number based on what is called a Planck length,
00:50:01 but it’s a number.
00:50:03 And so if a computer could ever simulate that number,
00:50:07 then the universe would be a simulation.
00:50:10 So theoretically, because the amount of information
00:50:13 is finite, well, there necessarily must be able
00:50:18 to exist a computer.
00:50:19 It’s just, from an engineering perspective,
00:50:21 maybe impossible to build.
00:50:24 Yes, no computer can build a universe
00:50:26 capable of simulating the entire universe,
00:50:29 except the universe itself.
00:50:31 So that’s your intuition, that our universe
00:50:34 is very efficient, and so there’s no shortcuts.
00:50:37 Right, two reasons why I believe the universe
00:50:40 is not a simulation.
00:50:41 First, the calculational numbers are just incredible.
00:50:44 No finite Turing machine can simulate the universe.
00:50:48 And second, why would any super intelligent being
00:50:52 simulate humans?
00:50:54 If you think about it, most humans are kind of stupid.
00:50:57 I mean, we do all sorts of crazy, stupid things, right?
00:51:01 And we call it art, we call it humor.
00:51:03 We call it human civilization.
00:51:06 So why should an advanced civilization
00:51:08 go through all that effort just to simulate Saturday Night
00:51:12 Live?
00:51:14 Well, that’s a funny idea, but it’s also,
00:51:16 do you think it’s possible that the act of creation
00:51:20 cannot anticipate humans?
00:51:22 You simply set the initial conditions
00:51:23 and set a bunch of physical laws,
00:51:26 and just for the fun of it, see what happens.
00:51:28 You launch the thing, so you’re not necessarily
00:51:30 simulating everything.
00:51:31 You’re not simulating every little bit in the sense
00:51:35 that you could predict what’s going to happen,
00:51:37 but you set the initial conditions, set the laws,
00:51:40 and see what kind of fun stuff happens.
00:51:43 Well, in some sense, that’s how life got started.
00:51:46 In the 1950s, Stanley did what is called
00:51:50 the Miller experiment.
00:51:51 He put a bunch of hydrogen gas, methane, toxic gases
00:51:57 with liquid and a spark in a small glass beaker.
00:52:02 And then he just walked away for a few weeks,
00:52:05 came back a few weeks later, and bingo.
00:52:08 Out of nothing and chaos came amino acids.
00:52:12 If he had left it there for a few years,
00:52:14 he might have gotten protein, protein molecules for free.
00:52:19 That’s probably how life got started, as a accident.
00:52:23 And if he had left it there for perhaps a few million years,
00:52:26 DNA might have formed in that beaker.
00:52:30 And so we think that, yeah, DNA, life, all that
00:52:34 could have been an accident if you wait long enough.
00:52:38 And remember, our universe is roughly 13.8 billion years old.
00:52:42 That’s plenty of time for lots of random things
00:52:45 to happen, including life itself.
00:52:51 Yeah, we could be just a beautiful little random moment.
00:52:56 And there could be an infinite number
00:52:59 of those throughout the history of the universe,
00:53:02 many creatures like us.
00:53:04 We perhaps are not the epitome of what
00:53:06 the universe is created for.
00:53:07 Thank God.
00:53:09 Let’s hope not.
00:53:11 Just look around.
00:53:12 Yeah.
00:53:13 Look to your left, look to your right.
00:53:16 When do you think the first human will step foot on Mars?
00:53:20 I think it’s a good chance in the 2030s
00:53:23 that we will be on Mars.
00:53:25 In fact, there’s no physics reason why we can’t do it.
00:53:29 It’s an engineering problem.
00:53:31 It’s a very difficult and dangerous engineering problem,
00:53:34 but it is an engineering problem.
00:53:36 And in my book, Future of Humanity,
00:53:38 I even speculate beyond that, that by the end
00:53:41 of this century, we’ll probably have the first starships.
00:53:45 The first starships will not look
00:53:47 like the Enterprise at all.
00:53:49 They’ll probably be small computer chips
00:53:51 that are fired by laser beams with parachutes.
00:53:54 And like what Stephen Hawking advocated,
00:53:58 the Breakthrough Starshot program
00:54:00 could send ships to the nearby stars,
00:54:02 traveling at 20% the speed of light,
00:54:05 reaching Alpha Centauri in about 20 years time.
00:54:09 Beyond that, we should have fusion power.
00:54:12 Fusion power is, in some sense, one
00:54:15 of the ultimate sources of energy, but it’s unstable.
00:54:19 And we don’t have fusion power today.
00:54:22 Now, why is that?
00:54:23 First of all, stars form almost for free.
00:54:26 You get a bunch of gas large enough, it becomes a star.
00:54:29 I mean, you don’t even have to do anything to it,
00:54:31 and it becomes a star.
00:54:33 Why is fusion so difficult to put on the Earth?
00:54:37 Because in outer space, stars are monopoles.
00:54:40 They are pole, single poles that are spherically symmetric.
00:54:44 And it’s very easy to get spherically symmetric
00:54:47 configurations of gas to compress into a star.
00:54:51 It just happens naturally all by itself.
00:54:53 The problem is magnetism is bipolar.
00:54:56 You have a North Pole and a South Pole.
00:54:59 And it’s like trying to squeeze a long balloon.
00:55:02 Take a long balloon and try to squeeze it.
00:55:04 You squeeze one side, it bulges out the other side.
00:55:08 Well, that’s the problem with fusion machines.
00:55:10 We use magnetism with a North Pole and a South Pole
00:55:13 to squeeze gas, and all sorts of anomalies
00:55:17 and horrible configurations can take place
00:55:20 because we’re not squeezing something uniformly
00:55:23 like in a star.
00:55:24 Stars, in some sense, are for free.
00:55:27 Fusion on the Earth is very difficult.
00:55:31 But I think it’s inevitable.
00:55:32 And it’ll eventually give us unlimited power from seawater.
00:55:37 So seawater will be the ultimate source of energy
00:55:39 for the planet Earth.
00:55:41 Why?
00:55:41 What’s the intuition there?
00:55:42 Because we’ll extract hydrogen from seawater,
00:55:45 burn hydrogen in a fusion reactor
00:55:47 to give us unlimited energy without the meltdown,
00:55:52 without the nuclear waste.
00:55:53 Why do we have meltdowns?
00:55:55 We have meltdowns because in the fusion reactors,
00:55:57 every time you split the uranium atom, you get nuclear waste.
00:56:00 Tons of it.
00:56:01 30 tons of nuclear waste per reactor per year.
00:56:07 And it’s hot.
00:56:08 It’s hot for thousands, millions of years.
00:56:11 That’s why we have meltdowns.
00:56:13 But you see, the waste product of a fusion reactor
00:56:15 is helium gas.
00:56:17 Helium gas is actually commercially valuable.
00:56:19 You can make money selling helium gas.
00:56:22 And so the waste product of a fusion reactor
00:56:24 is helium, not nuclear waste that we find
00:56:28 in a commercial fission plant.
00:56:30 And that controlling, mastering and controlling fusion
00:56:34 allows us to, converts us into a type one,
00:56:38 I guess, civilization, right?
00:56:40 Yeah, probably the backbone of a type one civilization
00:56:43 will be fusion power.
00:56:45 We, by the way, are type zero.
00:56:47 We don’t even rate on this scale.
00:56:49 We get our energy from dead plants, for God’s sake,
00:56:52 oil and coal.
00:56:53 But we are about 100 years from being type one.
00:56:56 Get a calculator.
00:56:57 In fact, Carl Sagan calculated that we
00:56:59 are about 0.7, fairly close to a 1.0.
00:57:05 For example, what is the internet?
00:57:08 The internet is the beginning of the first type one technology
00:57:12 to enter into our century.
00:57:14 The first planetary technology is the internet.
00:57:17 What is the language of type one?
00:57:19 On the internet already, English and Mandarin Chinese
00:57:23 are the most dominant languages on the internet.
00:57:26 And what about the culture?
00:57:29 We’re seeing a type one sports, soccer, the Olympics,
00:57:34 a type one music, youth culture, rock and roll, rap music,
00:57:38 type one fashion, Gucci, Chanel, a type one economy,
00:57:42 the European Union, NAFTA, what have you.
00:57:45 So we’re beginning to see the beginnings of a type one
00:57:49 culture in a type one civilization.
00:57:52 And inevitably, it will spread beyond this planet.
00:57:56 So you talked about sending at 20% the speed of light
00:58:00 on a chip into Alpha Centauri.
00:58:04 But in a slightly nearer term, what
00:58:07 do you think about the idea when we still have to send
00:58:11 our biological bodies the colonization of planets,
00:58:15 colonization of Mars?
00:58:16 Do you see us becoming a two planet species ever
00:58:21 or anytime soon?
00:58:23 Well, just remember the dinosaurs
00:58:26 did not have a space program.
00:58:28 And that’s why they’re not here today.
00:58:30 How come there are no dinosaurs in this room today?
00:58:33 Because they didn’t have a space program.
00:58:35 We do have a space program, which
00:58:38 means that we have an insurance policy.
00:58:40 Now, I don’t think we should bankrupt the Earth
00:58:43 or deplete the Earth to go to Mars.
00:58:44 That’s too expensive and not practical.
00:58:47 But we need a settlement, a settlement on Mars
00:58:50 in case something bad happens to the planet Earth.
00:58:53 And that means we have to terraform Mars.
00:58:56 Now, to terraform Mars, if we could
00:58:58 raise the temperature of Mars by six degrees, six degrees,
00:59:03 then the polar ice caps begin to melt, releasing water vapor.
00:59:08 Water vapor is a greenhouse gas.
00:59:10 It causes even more melting of the ice caps.
00:59:13 So it becomes a self fulfilling prophecy.
00:59:17 It feeds on itself.
00:59:18 It becomes autocatalytic.
00:59:21 And so once you hit six degrees, rising
00:59:24 of the temperature on Mars by six degrees, it takes off.
00:59:27 And we melt the polar ice caps.
00:59:29 And liquid water once again flows
00:59:32 in the rivers, the canals, the channels,
00:59:35 and the oceans of Mars.
00:59:38 Mars once had an ocean, we think,
00:59:39 about the size of the United States.
00:59:42 And so that is a possibility.
00:59:44 Now, how do we get there?
00:59:46 How do we raise the temperature of Mars by six degrees?
00:59:49 Elon Musk would like to detonate hydrogen warheads
00:59:51 on the polar ice caps.
00:59:53 Well, I’m not sure about that.
00:59:56 Because we don’t know that much about the effects
00:59:59 of detonating hydrogen warheads to melt the polar ice caps.
01:00:03 And who wants to glow in the dark at night reading
01:00:05 the newspaper?
01:00:07 So I think there are other ways to do it
01:00:09 with solar satellites.
01:00:12 You can have satellites orbiting Mars that beam sunlight
01:00:16 onto the polar ice caps, melting the polar ice caps.
01:00:19 Mars has plenty of water.
01:00:21 It’s just frozen.
01:00:24 I think you paint an inspiring and a wonderful picture
01:00:27 of the future.
01:00:29 I think you’ve inspired and educated thousands,
01:00:35 if not millions.
01:00:36 Michio, it’s been an honor.
01:00:37 Thank you so much for talking today.
01:00:39 My pleasure.