Michio Kaku: Future of Humans, Aliens, Space Travel & Physics | Artificial Intelligence (AI) Podcas

The following is a conversation with Michio Kaku. He is a futurist theoretical physicist and professor at the City College of New York. He is the author of many fascinating books that explored the nature of our reality and the

future

of our civilization. They include Einstein's

physics

of the impossible cosmos. feature of the mind parallel worlds and their ultimate the

future

of humanity terraforming Mars interstellar

travel

immortality and our destiny beyond earth I think it is beautiful and important when a scientific mind can fearlessly explore through conversation topics that are outside our understanding, that to me is where

artificial

Intelligence is today outside our understanding, a place we have to reach to discover the mysteries of the human mind and build

artificial

intelligence

systems at a human and superhuman level that transform our world for the better.

This is the AI ​​

podcas

t if you enjoy it. subscribe on YouTube give five stars on iTunes support patreon or just connect with me on Twitter Alex Friedman spelled Fri D M am and now here's my conversation with Michio Kaku. You mentioned that we could make contact with

aliens

or at least listen. From them during this century, can you explain your intuition behind that optimism? Well, this is pure speculation, of course, but given the fact that we have already identified 4,000 exoplanets orbiting other stars and we have a census of the Milky Way for the first time we know that, on average, each star has a planet around them and about 1/5 of them have Earth-sized planets around them, so let's just do the math that we're talking about a hundred billion. stars in the Milky Way, we're talking about billions of potential Earth-sized planets and believing we're the only one is pretty ridiculous, given the odds and how many galaxies there are in view of the Hubble Space Telescope. about one hundred billion galaxies, so let's do the math, how many stars there are in the visible universe, one hundred billion galaxies multiplied by one hundred billion stars per galaxy, we are talking about a number that goes beyond human imagination and believe that we are the only ones who think that it is quite ridiculous, so you have talked about different types of scale zero one two three four and five even of the automobile - of the different types of civilizations what do you think is needed if it is really a ridiculous notion that we are alone in the universe.

What do you think it takes to get there first? To reach out through communication and connect well. First of all, we have to understand the level of sophistication of an alien life form if we make contact with it. In this century we will probably pick up signals from an extraterrestrial civilization that we will pick up there. I love Lucy and her Leave It to Beaver are just ordinary day-to-day broadcasts that they put out and the first thing we want to do is to decipher her language, of course, but find out how far along they are on the scale of Kardashev.

I'm a physicist, we classify things based on two parameters, energy and information, this is how we classify black holes, this is how stars are classified, this is how they are classified. civilizations in outer

space

, so a type one civilization is able to harness planetary power control the weather, e.g. earthquakes, volcanoes, can modify the course of geological events, like Flash Gordon or Buck Rogers, type 2 It would be stellar, they play with stars, whole stars. They use all the energy output of a star like Star Trek, the Federation of Planets has colonized nearby stars, so a type 2 would be something similar to Star Trek, type 3 would be galactic, they roam the galactic

space

lanes and the type 3 would be like Star Wars, a galactic civilization, so one day I was giving this talk in London at the planetarium there and the boy came up to me and said professor, you're wrong, you're wrong, this guy 4 and I told them, look child.

They are planets, stars and galaxies, that's all, friends, and he kept insisting and saying no, there is time for the power of the continuum and I thought about it for a moment and I said to myself: is there an extra galactic source of energy, the continuum? from Star Trek and the answer is yes, there could be a type 4 and that is dark energy. We now know that 73% of the energy in the universe is dark energy. Dark matter makes up maybe 23 percent or so and we only make up 4%. We are the weirdos and so on. You start to realize that yes, they could be type 4, maybe even type 5, so type 4, you're saying being able to harness something like dark energy, something that permeates the entire universe, to be able to connect to the entire universe, it is a source. of energy, that is correct and dark energy is the energy of the Big Bang, that is why galaxies are being separated, it is the energy of nothing, the more nothing you have, the more dark energy is repulsive and therefore, the acceleration of the universe accelerates because the more you have the more you can have and that of course is by definition and exponential curve, it is called discerning expansion and that is the current state of the universe and then type 5 would be able to look for sources of energy somehow outside of our universe.

However, that idea yes, at what time five will be the multiverse multiverse. I'm a quantum physicist and we quantum physicists don't believe the Big Bang happens once, that would violate the Heisenberg uncertainty principle and that means multiple explosions could happen at all times. Right now, even as we speak today, universes are being created and that fits the data, the inflationary universe is a quantum theory, so there is some finite probability that universes are being created all the time and to me , this is quite aesthetically pleasing because you know I was raised Presbyterian but my parents were Buddhists and there are two diametrically opposed ideas about the universe in Buddhism there is only nirvana there is no beginning there is no end there is only timelessness but in the Christianity exists the instant God said let there be light in other words an instant of creation, so I have had these two mutually exclusive ideas in my head and now I realize that it is possible to merge them into a single theory, or the universe had a start or it was not good.

You see, our universe had an instant in which someone might have said there was light, but there are other bubble universes in a bubble bath of universes and that means that these universes are expanding into a larger dimension. beyond our three-dimensional understanding, in other words, is hyperspace. in other words, 11-dimensional hyperspace, so Nirvana would be this timeless 11-dimensional hyperspace where big explosions happen all the time, so now we can combine two mutually exclusive creation theories and Stephen Hawking, for example, even in his last book even said that this is an argument against the existence of God, it said that there is no God because there was not enough time for God to create the universe because the Big Bang occurred in an instant of time, therefore there was no time available to him to create the universe, but he saw the The idea of ​​the multiverse means that there was a time before time and several times each bubble has its own time, so it means that there could actually be a universe before the beginning of our universe, so that if you think about a bubble bath when two bubbles collide well. when two bubbles fission to create a baby bubble which is called Big Bang, so the Big Bang is nothing but the collision of universes or the blossoming of universes, this is a beautiful picture of our incredibly mysterious existence, so, For you, the idea of ​​multiverses is exciting.

I don't even know how to start right, you focus on quoting for me because what I do for a living is string theory, that's my day job. New York City pays me to work on string theory, yeah and You see, string theory is a theory of the multiverse, so people say, first of all, what is string theory. String theory simply says that all the particles that we see in nature, the electron, the proton, the quarks, what do you have or nothing? with vibrations on a musical string on a small A small string, you know. D. Robert Oppenheimer, the creator of the atomic bomb, was so frustrated in the 1950s with all these subatomic particles created in our atom smashers that he announced that one day he announced that the Nobel Prize in Physics should go to the physicist who did not discover a new particle that year well, today we believe that they are nothing more than musical notes on these little vibrating strings so what is

physics

?

The physics are the harmonies you can write on the vibrating strings. What is chemistry? Chemistry is the melodies you can play. these strings, what is the universe? the universe is a symphony of strings and then what is the mind of God that Albert Einstein wrote so eloquently about during the last thirty years of his life? The mind of God would be cosmic music that resonates through eleven-dimensional hyperspace. Beautifully said, what do you think is the mind of Einstein's God? Do you think there's a way to untangle this from this rope universe? Why are we here? What is the meaning of all this?

Well, Nobel Prize winner Steven Weinberg once said that the more we learned about the universe, the more we learned, that doesn't make sense, well, I don't know, I don't claim to understand the great secrets of the universe, however, let me say two things about what the Giants of physics have said about this. question Einstein believed in two types of God one was the God of the Bible the personal God the God who answers prayers walks on water while performing miracles he wounds the Philistines that is the personal God he did not believe in he believed in the God by Spinoza the God of order simplicity harmony Beauty the universe could have been ugly the universe could have been disordered random but it is wonderful you realize that on a single sheet of paper we can write all the known laws of the universe it is amazing on a single sheet of paper Einstein's equation is one inch long.

String theory is much longer, so it's a standard model, but you can put all of these equations on a piece of paper. It didn't have to be like this. It could have been complicated, so Einstein thought about Himself, when he was a child, he first entered this huge library and was overwhelmed by the simplicity, elegance and beauty of this library, but all he could do was read. the first page of the first volume. Well, that library is the universe with all kinds of magical mysteries. things that we have yet to find and then they asked Galileo about this.

Galileo said that the purpose of science the purpose of science is to determine what the heavens were like the purpose of religion is to determine how to go to heaven, in other words science is about natural law and religion is about ethics how be a good person how to go to heaven as long as we keep these two things separate we are in very good shape the problem arises when people from Natural Sciences begin to pontificate about ethics and people from religion begin to pontificate about natural law, that is where we get into big trouble. You believe that morals and ethics and our idea of ​​what is right and what is wrong are fundamentally different.

That is something that is outside the scope of string theory in physics. That's right. if you talk to a squirrel about what is right and what is wrong, yes, there is no frame of reference for a squirrel and you realize that

aliens

from space, if they ever come to visit us, will try to talk to us like we talk with the squirrels. in the forest, but eventually we get bored of talking to squirrels because they don't respond to us the same as they do with aliens from space and they come down to earth, they will be curious about us to a certain point, but after a while we just get bored because we don't have nothing to offer them, so our sense of right and wrong, what does that mean compared to a squirrel's sense of right and wrong?

Now, of course, we have an ethic that keeps civilizations at bay, enriches our lives, and makes civilization possible. and I think that's a good thing, but it's not required by a law of physics, so if the aliens were to make contact, the alien species were to make contact, forgive me for staying with the aliens for a little bit longer, do you think it's more Are they likely to be friendly and become friends with us? or to destroy us, well I think they would mostly ignore us if you were a deer in the woods, who do you fear more?

Do you fear the hunter with his gigantic 16 gauge shotgun or do you fear the guy with a briefcase and glasses, well the guy with a briefcase could be a developer about to level the entire forest destroying your livelihood, so you may instinctively have fear of the hunter, but actually the problem with deer in the forest is that they should fear the developers because the developers see the deer simply as an obstacle in the way, I mean, in the war of theworld by hto wells, the aliens didn't hate us if you read the book, the aliens had no bad intentions towards him.

Not Homo sapiens, we were on the path, so I think. We have to realize that extraterrestrial civilizations made viewers very differently than science fiction novels. However, I personally believe and cannot prove any of this. Personally I think they will probably be peaceful because there is nothing they want from our world. what are they going to kick us what are they going to take us for gold there is no gold it is a useless metal for the most part it is silver I mean it is gold colored gold but that only affects Homo sapiens the squirrels do not care about gold and that is why the Gold is a pretty useless elements, rare earths can be platinum-based elements, rare earths for your electronic devices, yes, maybe, but other than that, we have nothing to offer you, I mean, think about it for a moment, the People love Shakespeare and they love the arts and poetry, but off land, they mean nothing, absolutely nothing.

I mean, when I write an equation in string theory, I expect that on the other side of the galaxy there is an alien writing that same equation in different notation, but that alien on the other side of the galaxy Shakespeare Hemingway's poetry would be nothing to him or her when you think about extraterrestrial entities, do you think they would? naturally you see something that is even recognizable to us as your life or they may be radically different, well, how did we become smart? Basically three things made us smart, one is our vision, stereo vision, we have the eyes of a hunter, stereo emissions will be blocked. - Focus on the targets and who is smarter Predator or prey Predators are smarter than prey They have eyes on the front of their faces like lions Tigers Wild rabbits have eyes on the sides of their faces Why do hunters have They have to concentrate on the target, they have to know how to lay an ambush, they have to know how to hide, camouflage, stealth, deception, which requires a lot of

intelligence

.

Rabbits, all they have to do is run, so that's the first criterion, some kind of stereo view, the second is the thumb, the opposable. Some guy's thumb could be a claw or a tentacle, so hand-eye coordination and eye coordination is how we manipulate the environment and then three languages, because you know mama bear never tells baby bear that avoid the human hunter the bears just learned for themselves. never pass information from one generation to the next, so these are the three basic ingredients of intelligence, sight of some kind, an opposable thumb or tentacle or claw of some kind, and language.

Now ask yourself a simple question: how many animals do the three of them have, just us? only we, I mean primates, have a language, yes they can learn up to 20 words, but a baby learns one word a day, several words a day, a baby learns and a typical adult knows about 5000 words, while the maximum number of words. that you can teach a gorilla in any language, including its own language, is about 20, so we see the difference in intelligence, so when we meet aliens from outer space, it is likely that they have descended from some type of predator . some way to manipulate the environment and communicate your knowledge to the next generation, that's it, people, in such a functional way, that it would be similar, that we would be able to recognize them well, not necessarily because I think even with Homo sapiens we would eventually do it. we will achieve they become part cybernetic and genetically enhanced, robots are becoming more and more intelligent right now, robots have the intelligence of a cockroach, but in the next few years our robots will be as smart as a mouse and then maybe as smart as a rabbit, if we're lucky, maybe as smart as a cat or a dog and by the end of the century, who knows for sure, our robots will probably be as smart as a monkey.

Now, at that time, of course, they could be dangerous. Monkeys are self-aware, they know they are monkeys. They may have a different agenda than us, while dogs are confused, you see, dogs think that we are a dog, that we are the best, they are the underdogs, that's why they whine, follow us and lick us all the time. to get to the top. Dog monkeys have no illusions at all, they know who we are, we are not monkeys, so I think in the future we will have to put a chip in their brains to turn them off once our robots have murderous thoughts, but that will be a hundred from now. years. 200 years from now the robots will be smart enough to remove that security chip in their brain and then be careful at that time.

I think instead of competing with our robots we should merge with them, we should become part cybernetic, so I think we will be defeated by the aliens. life from outer space can be genetically and cybernetically enhanced genetically and cybernetically enhanced Wow, so let's talk about that whole range in the short term and in 200 years how promising in the short term, in your opinion, brain-machine interfaces are that are starting to allow computers to talk directly to the brain Elon Musk is working on that with neural linking and there are other companies working on this idea. Do you see anything promising?

Do you see hope for a short-term impact? Well, each technology has advantages and disadvantages, we can now be central. memories I have a book about the future of mine or I detail some of these advances now we can record simple memories of mice and send these memories to the Internet eventually we will do this with primates at Wake Forest University and also in Los Angeles and after that we will have a memory chip for Alzheimer's patients, we will test it on Alzheimer's patients because of course when Alzheimer's patients lose their memory, they wander, they create all kinds of havoc by wandering around unaware of their surroundings and they have a chip, they will press the button and the memories will flood their hippocampus and the chip will tell them where they live and who they are, so there is definitely a memory chip in the cards and I think this will eventually affect human civilization. is the future of the Internet the future of the Internet is Brain Net Brain Net is when we send emotions, feelings, sensations on the Internet and we will communicate telepathically with other

humans

in this way, this will affect everything, watch entertainment, remember silent movies, Charlie.

Chaplin was very famous during the silent film era, but when the talkies arrived, no one wanted to see Charlie Chaplin anymore because he never spoke in the movies, so a whole generation of actors lost their jobs and then a new series of actors came along. . We are going to replace movies with Rain Net because in the future people will say who wants to see a screen with images, that is, sound, an image called movies, yes, our entertainment industry, this multi-billion dollar industry is based on screens with motion. images and sound, but what happens when emotions, feelings, sensations and memories can be transmitted over the Internet?

This will change everything. Human relationships will change because you will be able to empathize and feel the suffering of other people, you will be able to communicate telepathically and this is This comes, describes the brain, in a characteristic of the mind, this is an interesting concept, do you think he mentioned entertainment, but What kind of effect would it have on our personal relationships? Hopefully you dig deeper, you realize that for most of human history, In over 90% of human history we only met about 20 or a hundred people, yeah that's it folks, that was your tribe , everyone they knew in the universe, was only maybe 50 or a hundred, with the arrival of cities of course it expanded to a few thousand.

With the advent of the telephone, suddenly you could reach thousands of people with a telephone and now with the Internet you can reach the entire population of planet Earth, so I think this is a normal progression and you think that that kind of a kind of connection with the rest of the world and then adding sensations like being able to telepathically share emotions, etc., that would further deepen our connection with our fellow human beings. Yes, right, in fact, I don't agree with many scientists on this question, most scientists would say. that technology is neutral a double-edged sword a sword one side of the sword can cut against people the other side of the sword can cut against ignorance and disease I disagree I believe that technology has a moral direction look at the Internet The Internet spreads knowledge, consciousness and that creates empowerment.

People act based on knowledge when they begin to realize that they do not have to live that way, they do not have to suffer under a dictatorship, that there are other ways to live freely, then they begin to take the things. power and that spreads democracy and democracies do not make war with other democracies I am a scientist I believe in data so let's take a sheet of paper and write down every war you had to learn since you were a primary school every war hundreds of Kings, queens, emperors, dictators, all of these wars were between kings, queens, emperors and dictators, never between two major democracies, so I think that with the spread of this technology, which would accelerate with the arrival of Brain Net, it means that we still We will have wars, wars of course, like politics by other means, but they will be less intense and less frequent.

Do you have concerns about the long-term existential risk of AI technology? So I think it's a wonderful vision of a future where war is a distant memory but now there's another one. agent, there is someone else who can create a conflict that can harm the AI ​​systems, so are you worried about those AI systems? Well, yes, that is an existential risk, but again I think that an existential risk is not for this century. I think our grandchildren are. We will have to confront this question as robots gradually approach the intelligence of a dog, a cat, and finally that of a monkey.

However, I believe that we will also digitize ourselves, we will not only merge with our technology, but we will also digitize our personality, our memories. feelings, you realize who did it during the Middle Ages there was something called dualism dualism meant that the soul was separated from the body when the body died the soul went to heaven that's dualism then in the 20th century neuroscience came in and said bah bullshit every time you look at the brain, it's just neurons, that's all folks, period, end of story, a bunch of neurons firing, now we're back to dualism, now we realize we can digitize human memories, feelings , sensations and creating a digital copy of ourselves and that is called the connectome project.

Billions of dollars are currently being spent not only on the genome project to sequence the genes in our body, but also on the connectome project, which consists of mapping all the connections of the human brain, and even before that in Silicon Valley , today at this very moment You can contact companies in Silicon Valley that are willing to digitize your family members because some people want to talk to their parents. There are unresolved issues with their parents and one day, yes, companies will digitize people and you will be able to talk to them over a reasonable fax.

Read, our ancestors left a digital trail, right? Our ancestors were lucky if they had one line, just one line in a church book that said the day they were baptized and the day they died, that's it, that was their entire digital memory, I mean all of it. your digital memory. existence summarized in a few letters of the alphabet an entire life now we digitize everything every time you sneeze you digitize it you put it on the Internet and then I think we are going to digitize ourselves and give us digital immortality not only will it have biological genetic immortality of some kind, but also immortality digital and what we are going to do with it.

I think we should send it to outer space if you digitize the human brain, put it in a laser beam and shoot it to the moon. on the moon in one second shoot to Mars you're on Mars in 20 minutes shoot to Pluto you're on Pluto in eight hours think about it for a moment you can have breakfast in New York and have a morning snack on vacation on the moon then head to Mars at noon,

travel

through the asteroid belt in the afternoon and return to New York for dinner at night, all in one day's work, it's at the speed of light, now this means you don't need backup. rockets you don't need weightlessness problems you don't need to worry about meteorites and what's on the moon on the moon there is a central computer that downloads the information from your laser beams and where it downloads the information into an avatar now what does it do? try to look however you want, yes, think about it for a moment, you could be Superman, the superwoman on the moon, on Mars, traveling around the universe at the speed of light, downloading your personality into any vehicle you want, now let me take a chance on all.

I been saying that he's infrom the laws of physics, within the laws of physics, now let me out of the laws of physics, here we go. I think this already exists. I think that outside of Earth there could be a superhighway, a laser highway. aiming with billions of alien souls making their way through the galaxy now let me ask you a question: are we smart enough to determine whether such a thing exists or not? No, this could exist just outside the orbit of planet Earth and so can we. stupid in our technology, to even prove or disprove it, we would need the aliens on this laser superhighway to help us just to send us a human interpretable signal.

I mean, ultimately it comes down to the language of communication, but that's an exciting possibility that actually the sky is full of aliens who should already be here and we're so unaware that we're too stupid to know. Look, they don't have to be some alien shape with little green men, they could be any shape they want. into an avatar of his creation or, in fact, they could very well be look like us exactly, he would never know that one of us could be an alien, you know, in a zoo, did you know that sometimes we have keepers who imitate the animals, we create a fake animal and put it so that the animal is not afraid of this fake animal and of course the brain of these animals is as big as a walnut, they accept these dolls as if they were real, so a extraterrestrial civilization in outer space would.

Say, oh yeah, human brains are so small that we could put a doll in their world and their avatar and they never know it. It would be entertaining to see it from an alien perspective, so you kind of hinted that there was a digital form of our being. but also biologically, do you think technology will one day allow individual human beings to become immortal beyond simply the ability to digitize our essence? Yes, I believe that artificial intelligence will give us the key to the genetic immortality that we will see in the coming decades. They have their genetic sequence, they will have billions of genomes from older people, billions of genomes from young people, and what are we going to do with that?

We will meet an artificial intelligence machine that has a pattern recognition to search for aging genes, in other words, the Fountain of Youth that the Emperor's kings and queens wanted to see about the Fountain of Youth will be found by artificial intelligence. Artificial intelligence will identify where these aging genes are located, what aging is in the first place. Now we know what aging is, aging is the accumulation of errors, that's all aging is the accumulation of genetic errors, this means that cells eventually slow down if they go into senescence and die, in fact, that's why that we die, we die due to accumulation of errors in our genome in our cellular activity, but you have already seen that in the future we will be able to fix those genes with CRISPR type technologies and maybe even live forever, so let me ask you a question, we are simply getting old.

In a car, given a car, where does aging occur? It is obvious that the engine is true. That's where there are a lot of moving parts. B. That is where combustion occurs. In what part of the cell do we have combustion? Mitochondria, we know where aging occurs. place and if we cure many of the errors that accumulate in the mitochondria of the cell we could become immortal. Let me ask you if you yourself could become immortal. Could you be honest? Now I think about it for a moment because, of course, if the term depends on how you become immortal, you know that there is a famous myth of Tiffany's.

It turns out that years ago in Greek mythology there was the saga of Tiffany's and Aurora Aurora was the goddess of dawn and fell in love with a mortal A human named Athena and Aurora begged the great Zeus to grant her the gift of immortality to give to her lover, then Zeus took pity on Aurora and made Tiffany immortal, but you will see that Aurora made a mistake, A big mistake, he asked for immortality but forgot to do it. He asks for eternal youth, so Port Athena grows older and older every year, decrepit like a bag of bones, but he could never die.

Quality of life is important, so I think immortality is a great idea, as long as you also have immortal youth. Now I personally believe and I can't prove this, but I personally believe that our grandchildren may have the option to make it to age 30 and then stop doing it. Maybe they like being 30 years old. If you have wisdom, you have all the benefits of age and maturity. We still live forever with a healthy body. Our descendants may like to be 30 years old for several centuries. Is there some aspect of human existence that is significant just because we are mortal?

Well, every waking moment we don't think of it this way, but really every waking moment. We are aware of our death and our mortality, think about it for a moment, when you go to college you realize that you are in a period of time where you will soon reach middle age and have a career and after that you will retire and then you will die and so, even when you were young, even when you were a child, without even thinking about it, you are aware of your own death because it sets limits to your life expectancy.

I graduated from high school. I graduated from university. Why because you? You're going to die because unless you graduate from high school unless you graduate from college you're not going to reach old age with enough money to retire and then die, and yes, people think about it subconsciously because it affects every aspects of your being. that you go to high school, college, get married, have children, lose a watch, a watch that runs even without your permission, gives a sense of urgency, do you do it yourself? I mean, there's so much emotion and passion in the way you talk about physics and we talk. about technology in the future, do you yourself meditate on your own mortality?

Do you think of this watch that runs well? I try not to do it because it starts to affect your behavior. you begin to alter your behavior to match your expectations of when you are going to do it. dies so let's talk about youth and then let's talk about death, okay, when I interview scientists on the radio, I often ask them what made the difference, how old were you, what changed your life and they always say more or less the same thing, no, These are Nobel Prize winners. winners directors of important laboratories very distinguished scientists always say when I was 10 when I was 10 something happened it was a visit to the planetarium it was Steven Weinberg's telescope Nobel Prize winner it was Heinz Piggles' chemistry boy it was a visitor to the planetarium for Isidor Rabi It was a book, what the planets for Albert Einstein were a compass, something happened that gives them this existential shock because you see before the age of 10, everything is mommy and daddy, mommy and daddy, that's your universe, nice Dad and I, around the age of 10, you start to wonder what lies beyond dad and me and that's when you have this epiphany when you realize that, my God, there is a universe out there, a universe of discovery, that feeling stays with you for the rest of your life.

You still remember that shock you felt when you looked at the universe and then hit the greatest destroyer of scientists known to science. The biggest destroyer of scientists known to science is high school. We knew he hit people at the high school. It's over, yes, it's over. because in high school people say "hey, stupid", I mean, you like that nerdy stuff and your friends reject you, suddenly you think you're a weirdo and scientists bore you. You know Richard Feynman, the Nobel Prize winner when he was a child. his father would take him to the forest and the father would teach him everything about birds why you shape them the way their wings are the color the shape of their beak everything about birds so one day a bully approaches the future winner of the Nobel Prize and says hey idiot, what's the name of that bird over there?

Well, I didn't know he knew everything about that bird except his name, so he said, I don't know and then the bully said, what's wrong with you, you idiot, stupid or something? At that moment he understood it, he understood it and he realized that for most people science consists of giving names to birds, that is science, you know many names of obscure things. Hey, people say you're smart, you're smart, you know all the names of the dinosaurs you know all the names of the plants no, that's not science at all science is about principles concepts physical images that's what science is about my Einstein's favorite quote is that unless you can explain a theory to a child, the theory is probably worthless which means all great theories are not big words all great theories are simple concepts principles images basic physics our relativity has to to do with clocks, meters, rockets and locomotives, Newton's laws of gravity have to do with balls, spinning wheels and things like that, that's what physics does and science is about not memorizing things and that stays with you for the rest of your life, so even in old age I have noticed that these scientists when they sit down they still remember that blush, that flush of emotion that they felt with that. first telescope that first moment when they found the universe that keeps them going that keeps them going by the way I should point out that when I was 8 years old something happened to me also when I was 8 years old it was in all the newspapers that a great scientist had just published die and they put a photo of his desk on the cover.

That's just a simple photo of the front page of the newspapers on his desk. That desk had a book on it that was opened and the title said something like that. This is the unfinished manuscript of the greatest scientists of our time so I said to myself, well, why couldn't you finish it? It's so hard that you can't finish it if you're a great scientist, it's a homework problem, okay? You solve it or you ask your mom why she couldn't solve it, so to me this was a murder mystery, this was bigger than any adventure story.

I had to know why the best scientists of our time couldn't finish something and then, over the years I discovered that the guy's name was Albert Einstein and that book was the theory of everything, it was unfinished, well, today I can read that book, I can See all the dead ends and false starts he made and I started to realize that he lost. in his own way because he did not have a physical image to guide him on the third attempt, on the first attempt he talked about clocks, lightning and meters and they gave us the special relativity that the atomic bomb gave us.

The second big image was gravity. with balls rolling on curved surfaces and they gave us the creation of the big bang of the black holes of the universe on the third try he failed he didn't have any image to guide him in fact there is a quote I have where he said I'm still looking I'm still looking for that image, he never found it right today we believe that image is string theory, string theory can unify gravity and this mysterious thing that the ice tide didn't like, which is mechanics, Oh, I couldn't, no I was able to fix it. down and make sense of that is correct mother nature has two hands the left hand and a right hand the left hand is a theory of the small the right hand is a theory of the large the theory the small is the quantum theory the theory of atoms and quarks the theory of big relativity the theory of black holes big bangs the problem is that the left hand does not talk to the right hand they hate each other the left hand is based on discrete particles the right hand is based on surfaces smooth as flutes how do you put these two things together in a single theory?

They hate each other. The greatest minds of our time. The greatest minds of our time worked on this problem and failed today. The only theory that has survived all the challenges so far is string theory. That doesn't mean string theory is right, it could very well be wrong, but right now it's the only game available, some people come up to me and say, professor, I don't believe in string theory, give me an alternative and I'll tell them. . There is no one who gets used to it. It's the best theory we have. It's the only theory we have.

It's the only theory we have. a universe as a kind of information processing system as a kind of computer. Do you see the universe this way? No, some people think that, in fact, the entire universe is some kind of computer, yes, and they think that maybe, therefore, everything is a simulation. If I don't believe it, I don't believe there is a super video game where we are nothing more than puppets dancing on the screen and someone hits the play button and here we are talking about simulations, not even Newtonian mechanics says that the weather, simple weather is so complicated. with billions and billions of atoms that cannot be simulated in a given period of time;

In other words, the smallest object that can describe the weather and simulate it is the weather itself, the smallest objectWhat a human being can simulate is the human being itself and if you had quantum mechanics it becomes almost impossible to simulate it with a conventional computer. Quantum mechanics deals with all possible universes, parallel universes, a multiverse of universes, so the calculation just gets out of hand now that they're at it. So far there is only one way to argue that the universe is a simulation and this is still debated by quantum physicists. It turns out that if you throw the Encyclopedia into a black hole, the information is not lost, it eventually runs out. up on the surface of the black hole now the surface of what I call is finite in fact you can calculate the maximum amount of information that you can store in a black hole it is a finite number it is a calculable number believe it or not now if the The universe It was made of black holes, which is the maximum universe you can conceive of each universe.

Each black hole has a finite amount of information, therefore our going, our going, the total amount of information in a universe is finite, this is mind-blowing. I find it amazing that all possible universes are countable and that all possible universes can be summarized in a number a number that you can write on a piece of paper all the possible universes and it is a finite number now it is enormous it is a number beyond the human imagination is a number based on what is called Planck length, but it is a number and therefore if a computer could ever simulate that number, then the universe would be a simulation theoretically because the amount of information is finite there , well, it must necessarily be possible. existing a computer is just from an engineering perspective, maybe impossible to be, so no computer can build a universe capable of simulating the entire universe except the universe itself, so that's your intuition that our universe is very efficient and So there are no shortcuts, right?

Two reasons why I believe the universe is not a simulation, firstly the calculation numbers are simply incredible, they are not finite, the Turing machine can simulate the universe and secondly why would any super being intelligent would simulate

humans

? If you think about it, most humans are a little stupid, I mean, us. getting all kinds of crazy and stupid things right and we call it art we call it humor we call it human civilization so why should an advanced civilization go to all that effort just to simulate Saturday Night Live? Well, that's a fun idea, do you think so too?

The act of creation may not be able to anticipate humans. You just set the initial conditions and set up a bunch of physics laws and just for fun, see what happens, throw the thing around so you're not necessarily simulating everything that you're not. simulating every little bit the same thing in the sense that you can predict what is going to happen, but you set the initial conditions, you set the laws and you see what kind of fun things happen well, in a sense, that's how life began in the 1950s. Stanley Did what is called the Miller experiment, put a bunch of hydrogen gas, methane, toxic gases with liquid and a spark in a small glass beaker and then walked away for a few weeks came back a few weeks later and bingo out of nowhere in the chaos came amino acids if I had left it there for a few years I could have gotten free protein molecules That's probably how life started as an accident and if I had left it there for maybe a few million years the DNA could have formed in that glass, so we think yes, DNA, life, all of that could have been an accident if you wait long enough and remember our universe is about 13.8 billion years old, that's time enough for many random things to happen, including life itself.

Yes, we could just be a beautiful little random moment and there could be a nearly infinite number of those throughout the history of the universe. many, many creatures like us, maybe we are not the epitome of what the universe was created to be, thank goodness, let's hope we don't just look around us, yes you are right, what do you think the first human will set foot on Mars? I think it's a good opportunity. in 2030 we will be on Mars, in fact, there is no physical reason why we can't do it, it is an engineering problem, it is a very difficult and dangerous engineering problem, but it is an engineering problem and in my book The future of humanity even speculated further. that by the end of the century we will probably have the first spaceships the first spaceships will not look like the company at all, they will probably be small computer chips that are fired by laser beams with parachutes and like what Stephen Hawking advocated: The innovative Starshot program could send ships to nearby stars traveling at 20% of the speed of light and reaching Alpha Centauri in approximately 20 years.

Beyond that, we should have fusion energy. Energy use is, in a sense, one of the main sources of energy, but it is unstable. and today we don't have fusion power, why are mammalian stars free in the first place? You get a bunch of gas big enough to become a star. I mean, you didn't have to do anything to him and he becomes a star. Why is fusion so difficult to place on Earth? Because you're not a space star. Our mana poles are unipolar poles. That sphere has spherical symmetry and it is very easy to obtain spherically symmetrical configurations of gas to compress them into a star. it just happens naturally on its own the problem is magnetism is bipolar you have a north pole and a south pole and its like trying to squeeze a long balloon you take a long balloon and try to squeeze it you squeeze one side and the other sticks out good.

That's the problem with fusion machines, we use magnetism with the North Pole at the South Pole to squeeze out gas and all sorts of horrible anomalies and configurations can happen because we're not squeezing something evenly like in a star, in some sense or shape. free. Fusion on Earth is very difficult, but I think it is inevitable and will eventually give us unlimited energy from seawater, so seawater will be the main source of energy for planet Earth. Why what is the intuition there? Because we will extract hydrogen from seawater. hydrogen in the fusion reactor to give us unlimited energy without fusion without nuclear waste why do we have fusions? we have fusions because in fission reactors every time the uranium atom is split, tons of nuclear waste is obtained 30 tons of nuclear waste per reactor per year and it is hot for billions of years, that is why we have fusions, but the product waste from a fusion reactor is helium gas.

Helium gas actually has commercial value. You can make money by selling helium gas, so the waste product. of a fusion reactor is helium, not nuclear waste that we find in a commercial fission plant, since controlling, dominating, controlling fusion allows us to become a type 1 civilization. I suppose civilization, yes, probably the backbone of a type one civilization will be the fusion power. by the way, we're type zero, we don't even rate on this scale, we get our energy from dead plants, for God's sake, oil and coal, but we're about a hundred years away from being type one, you know, get a calculator In fact, Carl Sagan calculated that. we are around 0.7, pretty close to 1.0, for example, what is the Internet?

The Internet is the beginning of the first type one technology that entered our century. The first planetary technology is the Internet. What is the language of type 1 on the Internet? It's already English. and Mandarin Chinese are the most dominant languages ​​on the Internet and what about the culture we are seeing? Sports type 1, football, Olympic Games, music type 1, youth culture, rock and roll, rap music, fashion type 1, Gucci Chanel, economy type 1, Europe. Union NAFTA, what do you have? So we're starting to see the beginnings of a type 1 culture in a type one civilization and it will inevitably spread beyond this planet, so you talked about sending 20% ​​the speed of light on a chip to Alpha.

Centauri, but in a little bit closer term, what do you think about the idea that we still have to send our biological bodies to the colonization of planets, the colonization of Mars? DC is becoming a two planet species sometime or anytime soon, just remember the dinosaurs did it. we don't have a space program now and that's why they're not here today how come there are no dinosaurs in this room today because they didn't have a space program? We do have a space program, which means we now have an insurance policy. I don't think we should ruin or deplete the Earth to go to Mars, that's too expensive and impractical, but we need an agreement, an agreement on Mars in case something bad happens to planet Earth and that means we have to terraform Mars now. to terraform Mars if we increase the temperature of Mars by 6 degrees 6 degrees, then the polar caps begin to melt releasing water vapor.

Water vapor is the greenhouse gas. It causes even more melting of the polar caps, so it becomes self-fulfilling. it feeds on itself, it becomes autocatalytic and so once you reach six degrees, the temperature on Mars rises by six degrees, it takes off and we melt the polar caps and liquid water flows again in the rivers, the canals They are the canals and the oceans. of Mars Mars once had an ocean, we think about the size of the United States, so now it's a possibility, how do we get there? How do we raise the temperature of Mars by six degrees?

Elon Musk would like it to not have hydrogen warheads. on the polar caps yeah well I'm not sure about that because we don't know much about the effects of detonating hydrogen warheads to melt the polar caps and who wants to glow in the dark at night reading the newspaper so I think there are other ways to do it with solar satellites. You can have satellites orbiting Mars that radiate sunlight onto the polar caps. Melting the polar caps. Mars has a lot of water. It's just frozen. I think you paint and inspire a wonderful picture of the future.

I think you have inspired and educated thousands, if not millions, Michio, it has been an honor. Thank you very much for speaking today. It's a pleasure.