they look at recent action by the british parliament. later, hillary clinton talks about her experiences during the 2016 presidential election. ♪ [captions copyright national cable satellite corp. 2018] [captioning performed by the national captioning institute, which is responsible for its caption content and accuracy. visit ncicap.org] >> this week on q&a, theoretical physicist, he discusses his book the future of humanity. terraforming mars, interstellar travel, immortality and our destiny beyond earth. >> hears it is a video of you on this network in 1979. >> if you like at the recent government reports considering

three-mile island, the government concedes that one happened while -- 10 people will -- 1 in 10 people will die of cancer in this area. brian: you remember that time and what have you changed in your thinking? i work with the theories of einstein and quantum theory. michio: when the three-mile island to happen, ever was that we needed a scientist about the site for this mess to the american people. so he contacted me and i said to myself this why i do for a living. i'm a physicist. i said to myself i will get on national television and national radio because the situation demands it. not because i want to do it but because people had to know, the dangers, the positives, the negatives of energy, one of the big questions of the age.

that is how i backed into becoming a media person. admiral rogers: you say in your book that there was a teacher in second grade that had a big impact on your. michio: she said god so loved the earth that he put the earth just right of the sun, not too far that the oceans will freeze but just right from the sun. now, i was floored. i was in second grade. this was a scientific principle with this interpretation. i said that is right. if we were to close, the oceans

would boil, if we were to close, the oceans would freeze. we are in the goldilocks zone of the sun. we have now seen 4000 other planets orbiting other stars and almost all of them are too close or too far from the sun. you have to point of view, either god exists and still loves the earth or we have a crapshoot. brian: what do you think? michio: now that we have been so many planets, 4000 of them, there are billions upon billions of planets. every single starting see at night has a plan going around it. every single star on average that it is indisputable that

most of them were outside the goldilocks on. you can still believe in god but that is not an argument that clinches the deal. brian: i wanted to ask you about a bunch of obvious things that you write about what is a planet? michio: it is a mud ball that goes around a star. it is dark, it doesn't have life of its own. it orbits around the sun gaining energy and within planets are very interesting because they could have life. that is how we got started. even our solar system we think the plans may harbor some form of life. we look at planets, we look at stars to find where the plants are but would focus on the planet because that is the habitat for life in the universe. a star is a gigantic solar furnace. it is a ball of hydrogen gas that releases energy by converting hydrogen into sunlight. it is a hydrogen bomb. it will face the same equations of isaiah. e=mc2. e is sunlight. a comet is a dirty ice ball that was around in the solar system. -- wizzes around in the solar system. they are only 10 or 20 miles across. they aren't very big.

they're basically made out of eyes, remnants of the original solar system which we think surrounded the sun now orbit in a disk. >> what is the difference between a meteor and a meteorite russian mark life that flash of -- meteorite? >> that flash of light that you see was an across the sky is caused by a rock that burns up in the atmosphere and that is called a meteor. either the block itself with a streak of light. however, once it hits the ground, it becomes a mineral. we call it a meteorite. if the meteorite is a media which has fallen from the sky, what is a galaxy? a galaxy consist of hundreds of stars october from the creation of the universe, the big bang. it looks like a gigantic desk of stars, our galaxy for example is the milky way galaxy and the nearest counts each of is the andromeda galaxy and we think there are about a hundred billion galaxies in the visible

universe. believe it or not that means we can actually count the number of stars in the visible universe. hundred billion galaxies, a hundred billion stars per galaxy so that is the number of stars in the visible universe. brian: what is an asteroid? michio: that is left over from the creation of the solid system. we are talking about mars out to jupiter.

we think it is a failed planet, a plan between mars and jupiter that never quite condensed or maybe got too close to jupiter and got broken up. brian: so if you had to pick another place to live outside of the earth, where would you go? michio: i would go to another planet. none of them are exactly earthlike, once but was tropical. many had astronauts sunbathing on the beaches of venus. we now know venus is our evil twin. just like the earth, closer to the sun, the temperatures are 900 degrees fahrenheit. if you were to walk on the service of venus, you would think into molten metals. you don't want to go to venus. mars is the closest. it is a frozen desert but it is the closest planet we have. one of the moons of jupiter is europe. it has a liquid ocean underneath the ice covered, who would have thought russian mark nasa wants to put a submarine under the eyes to look for life forms under the ice cover. >> we talked about your second-grade teacher. do you remember when you first got interested in science?

>> i remember distinctly. i was eight years old. everyone was talking about the fact that a great scientist had just died. i will never forget they flashed a picture of his death on the newspapers and the caption says something like this. "this is the unfinished manuscript from the greatest scientist." i said to myself why couldn't he finish it? what is so hard -- it was a homework assignment. what could be so hard that he could not answer it? i would to library and found of his name was albert einstein. that book was the unified field. that would allow us to "read the mind of god."

i said to myself "that is for me. i want to be part of this grand expedition to finish that book." today, i could read that book, i could see all of the dead ends that einstein pursued. we actually think we have it, it is called string theory. i am one of the founders of the subject. we think we can complete a book that einstein set into motion, the theory of everything. there is even an oscar-winning movie called the theory of everything. brian: go back to your childhood, where were you born? what were your parents doing at the time? michio: my grandparents came to this country 100 years ago. they were from japan. my grandfather was part of the cleanup operation in san francisco at the san francisco earthquake. my family has a long history in california but in 1942, because

they were japanese-americans there are locked up at a relocation camp for four years behind machine gun and barbed wire. in 1946 they finally got out but they were penniless so they settled in palo alto which is now ground zero for silicon valley but back then it was all apple orchards and out of the fields. that is working corrupt, in a form like environment in what is now called silicon valley. >> with your parents do once they got out of the camp? michio: there was nothing for them to do but menial jobs. the money was confiscated, they were brought. however, there was a certain cachet, my father became a rather successful gardener. he wanted me to take over the business. i tried for a while and then i said no way. i have to find another way to make a living. so when i was in high school i decided i have to do something. i went to my mom and said can i

have permission to build and and smash in the garage? a 2.3 million electron both portal accelerator. i mom stared at me and said sure, why not. don't be to take out the garbage. i took out the garbage and got 22 miles of copper wire and i built the atom smasher in my mom's garage. i blew out every single circuit breaker in the house every time i turned it on. my poor mother must have said to herself wife and i have a son

who plays basketball, maybe if i buy him a baseball. and why can't he find a nice japanese girlfriend? what is he up to build is machined in the garage? but that was a turning point because of the science fair projects i did in high school, or the attention of an atomic scientist. edward took me under his wing. a way for me to get a scholarship to harvard. he did exactly what i was doing. i didn't have to is going to him when antimatter was, what an accelerator was, what a bitter try was. he knew immediately. he arranged for me for to get a scholarship so that started my life as a physicist. brian: how did you meet him? michio: he came to mexico -- our perfect, new mexico for the national science fair. he was in the habit of recruiting young scientist. i was actually on television with him. this was in 1963 in albuquerque as a national science fair. when i graduated from harvard he interviewed me for a graduate fellowship but at that point he was very clear. he said i am looking for people who want to design hydrogen warheads. it will be very valuable designing new and better hydrogen warheads. he offered me a scholarship.

he said little more, you name it, we can arrange for you to work there. my interests began to veer off in the direction of when i was a child, wondering what was einstein's unfinished theory. i wanted to work on an explosion bigger than the hydrogen bomb. i wanted to work on the big bang, the creation of the universe itself. for me, a hydrogen bomb was a footnote. i wanted to work on the creation of the universe. >> this video goes back to 1974. >> the day after hitler's invaded the low lands, he said it is the beauty of the

scientists to get the weapons that are needed for the defense of freedom. brian: do you agree? michio: that is a pointy stretched to me directly. he said i recruiting for what the new york times later calls the star wars scholarship. this propelled the brightest young minds in america from high school and college into los alamos to create the star wars program. now we know he had a checkered history, many of the early designs did not work for the star wars program but that was the vision he had, he always had a very clear mission that science should be used in the interest of national security. those times are different from today, we had a sputnik moment. when sputnik went up, it was practically your patriotic duty to use science in the interest of america because the russians will one day order -- orbit hydrogen bombs.

the homeland will be endangered. that is why a whole generation of young kids became scientists and engineers and technicians. it was the sputnik moment. brian: when you were growing up, when did you discover you have the brain to understand this stuff? michio: when i was i can, i read about einstein and my hair wrote -- quote about einstein was a theory can't be explained to a child than theory is probably worthless. meaning that every theory has a picture behind it and children can understand, newton talked about things moving in space, friction, the motion of bodies, einstein taught by meter sticks and rocketship. things that children could not understand.

yes they are trying to find best time to children and i said to myself well, it is a great idea but if they are all based on pictures and you understand those pictures then mathematics is bookkeeping. it is compensated bookkeeping, you have to learn how to do the bookkeeping of course but it is bookkeeping, it is the physical principle, the concept that makes everything moves. when einstein was 16, when he was 16 he found that principle. when he was 16 years old he asked himself the question, can you outrace a light game? we would say that is a stupid question. what he talking about, it's been 10 years to 16 to 26 and he finally found the answers and he changed world history. he found that you cannot outrace a light beam.

that is a children's question. i said i can understand his children's questions. i just have to than the mathematics. it is the principle that is involved. today we know the speed of light is the ultimate velocity in the universe. einstein figured that out starting at the age of 16. so all grifters have a physical principle behind it. children can visualize it. >> go back to as you went through that process, what with the milestones where you began to gather the knowledge and you have people that said 80 want to do this you have to go here, who else had an impact on you?

>> a lot of people try to give bid was when i was in high school but i knew that most of the advice was wrong. i tell kids today that you have to have a role model. why would you have to reinvent the wheel if you have to become a sports figure or a movie star, find somebody you admire, look at their life history, follow the path, i said to myself, i want to become a physicist. a theoretical physicist, i read about einstein's life so i knew what i had to do and at what age of my life. when glad to get a phd? when do i have to become a professor? when do i have to work on big physical concepts? it was no mystery to me. kids come up here and have bum advice from their high school advisor. i said to myself, tell the kids, find a role model.

the wheel has been amended already. brian: was telling your role model? michio: no, it was einstein. tele-made a big page for me to design weapons and for me, at that point in my life i realized that the basic physics of hydrogen warheads is well known, well-established, as you know, china and developing nations that the hydrogen bomb on the first try. so, it was an engineering

problem. i'm a physicist. i wanted to look at the physical concept of new undiscovered things like why the big bang took place, what was the energy source of the big bang, why did it bring to begin with? these are questions of cosmic importance that are far beyond engineering of simply assembling a hydrogen were had. >> but why were you able to figure it out and most people are drowning in all this language when they would be back in high school? michio: i think we had a high school system that stresses memorization, drudgery and does not encourage the bright students to come up. for example, in asia they had the expression the now that sticks out gets hammered down. here is the oddball, if you are steve jobs or bill gates, you get hammered down. in america we had the expression -- the squeaky wheel gets the grease. now, i was the squeaky wheel. i want to get the attention of my teachers in high school. that is why i built the end smashing. most of my teachers could not help me but i wanted to do it because i said to myself this is something that is doable. i does have to get the basic equipment. the basic physics i understood. it was not such a big deal for me to build an atom smasher. i turned it on. the goal was to create antimatter. that was the whole thrust of the science fair project. i photographed antimatter. it comes naturally from a source called sodium 22. i put that in a cloud chamber and put it in a magnetic yield and the good of a tract of anti-electrons bent in the wrong direction. electrons bent this way, antimatter bends the opposite way and a magnetic field.

i took beautiful pictures, pictures that our research quality they tell me. i won a grand prize at the national science fair. i will never regret doing a science experiment because they took me from a gardener's kid to getting a scholarship to harvard and then beginning to work on the unified field terry. that is how it started. brian: what did the rest of the kids think of you? michio: they thought i was nuts. the teachers that i had to work with -- i told them i had to cut transformers still. i had to glue copper wire and they helped me but that in no what i was doing. they just did that here is this young kid that needs to cut 400 pounds of steel and line 22 miles of copper wire and i did it on the field. >> how big was atom smasher? michio: it was about this big, it consumed six kilowatts of power. it was used because they had the store the kick -- six kilowatts of power and the give us this tremendous crackling sound when i turned it on. it was so powerful that in principle, it would pull the films out of your teeth if you got too close to it. you have to be careful, it was a hammer anything like that. it would literally ran a hammer from across the room and flinging toward you. that him haven't an mri machines today because they too have the magnetic field of about 10,000. now today, we have a big one. a big one outside geneva, switzerland. that is huge. that is basically my little machine scaled up to the size of

a city. that is the leading scientific instrument in the world today. outside geneva. brian: why did we build it? michio: we had designed for the supercollider to be dealt outside of dallas, texas in the 1990's. then, on the last day of hearing, costs were rising and congress wanted to know if they

should keep on budgeting the supercollider and they canceled it. they give us a billion dollars, a secondary dollars to fill up the whole and that is $2 million to dig a hole and fill it up. that is the wisdom of the united states congress. $2 billion to dig and fill a whole. now why did he cancel it? when congress is asking physics if we will find god with your machine, if so, i will vote for it. so, that physicist was paralyzed, he was a question -- would we find god russian mark they said something like we will find the higgs boson. but you could hear all the jaws hit the floor of the united states congress. $10 billion for another subatomic particle. the was taken and the next day

it was answered. since then, physicists have better heads against the wall wondering how we should have answered that question. when we find god with this machine? brian: how would you answer? michio: i would have said, whatever signs and some as you ascribed to the supercollider will take us as close as humanly possible to his greatest creation, genesis. this is a genesis machine. it will re-create on a microscope -- microscopic scale the most glorious in the history of the universe, his birth. brian: did that turn out to be dissenting to have in switzerland? michio: that same machine is in switzerland and we are hoping to find dark matter beyond ordinary

matter, but our machine was canceled because we didn't know how to talk the language of the average taxpayer. that was a real lesson. we have to understand where the taxpayer is because in the old days we would go to congress and say one word, russia. congress with them without their checkbook and say how much? how much for the next and smasher? those days are gone. you can't do that anymore. brian: i want to show you in 1997 saying some strong things to nasa. michio: i am here to try to save the space program from nasa bureaucrats. they are trying to fabricate new laws of physics that i've never seen before. in any of these engineers would submit that report to me, would flunk them. brian: why did you feel so strongly? michio: i believe in the space program but i think we have to

do it safely because why will the tech -- taxpayers turned against the space program? we can within a his breath of losing the space program, the american people were saying enough is enough, seven deal astronauts perishing because some bureaucrat authorized the launching of that missile. nasa wanted to launch a great mission by the way, they were gorgeous amount of information with 72 pounds of plutonium. this split the scientific community because on one hand, we wanted him to give us those with photographs, on the other hand, if that were to blow up, nasa's own computer program estimated that some of the plutonium could go to disney world. think about that for a moment. if you are a taxpayer and you realize that this rocket to saturn all the sun caused the evacuation of disney world and you had to cancel your

vacations" -- across orlando florida off the taurus map, you would get really angry. i said to myself it is not worth it. the chances are it will be a success. chances are we will go to saturn and get glorious photographs. i said to myself it is a gamble. we want to take that gamble and perhaps lose the space program. i love the space program so much that you have to save it from the nasa bureaucrats. their attitude was launch the software. >> you said it is 544 humans who have been in space and 18 of those have died. what do those numbers mean to you? michio: 1% of the time it is russian roulette, 1% of the time you don't come back.

people asked me if i would want to go to space knowing that 1% of the time i'm not going to come back, these people are test pilots. they are experienced astronauts, they go to the train, they know the odds. it is 1%. we have 60 years into the space age and we have not got that number down below 1% misfire. to mars is even worse, 30%, 30% ofbrothers never reach it to mars. as elon musk said himself, he would look to be the first person on mars but he doesn't want to be there on impact. i agree with that. we forget that space is not a sunday picnic. 1% of the time our rough blowup. brian: back in 2010, you are here on our program called in depth which is a three-hour program. it is available to our audience to go back and listen to three hours of you going into some detail of the things were talking about and it would at information if they want to find out more about your thinking. arthur c. clark, this is from 1964.

this put him in context. arthur: say the year 2000, it will be possible in that age only 50 years from now for a man to conduct his business from tahiti or bali just designate from london. i am totally serious when i suggest that one day we may have brain surgeons in edinburgh operating on patients in new zealand. >> how is he doing on his productions? christ is right on the money. we have telemedicine. doctors in one place and his surgery using robots, even beyond what he said, and the robots and instruct robots from the other side of the planet earth. we have robots at duke university that communicate with robots in soho.

if anything, i think he underestimated the power of the internet. he mentioned being able to communicate anywhere on the planet earth. elon musk and just revealed a plan to create a planetary internet, thousands of many satellites, thousands of many satellites so that you're on the top of mount everest and there you are downloading the kardashians. today you have to have a microwave tower next to mount everest to do that. but if thousands of miniature satellites orbit the earth, exactly what arthur c clarke said could become a reality. brian: what does a theoretical physicist do when he has free time? michio: for einstein it was playing the violin. it was a time for him to think back at his work and rethink his strategy. he also liked sailing. for me, i am a professor and i realize that i like to teach.

i can bore 20 kids teaching a course, but if i am on radio and television, i can bore 20 million kids. i said to myself wow, that is an opportunity to touch the minds of young people. because whenever i interviewed a nobel prize-winning scientist i ask them when it was that that's spark of science began to germinate. they always say when i was 10, 10 is that magic year, you have that epiphany. you went to the planetarium, you saw your first telescope, you saw the moon for the first time and the rings of saturn. you saw a microbe in a microscope. that epiphany stays with you for the rest of your life. so when you are an elderly scientist and you are tired and you have all of these obligations, it is like a well, you draw water from that well continually over the decades.

because you remember that epiphany you had when you were 10 years old. that keeps you going. >> do you play the violin? michio: no, i like to do figure skating. brian: how long have you done that? michio: for the last 15 years. when i was a kid, i always like d to watch figure skating on tv but to do something like that, that is complicated. but i realize as an adult that it is nothing but newtonian physics, and if you're a physicist, you understand center of gravity, moment of inertia. you understand the basics of figure skating. i said to myself i can learn , that. so if you see me spinning and jumping at rockefeller center you know it is me on the ice. brian: if i were 19 years old and i wanted to see you in a classroom -- i'm starting out and i'm interested, where would i find you, why would i be in

your classroom, how large would that classroom be today? michio: normally i teach to graduate students. we are talking about a phd program. you are talking about only five or 10 students. these people are raring to go, doing phd level work. but the city university of new york has so many young people at the freshman level, unwashed, raw students at the freshman level, that they said, look, you have to teach freshmen. so i decided to teach astronomy. i was shocked. i look at the astronomy final and it was memorize all the moons of saturn. memorize all the moons of jupiter. that was the final exam. i said to myself i don't even know the moons of saturn. i don't even know the moons of jupiter. this is a worthless exam. you simply look it up in a book. i wanted to know planetary evolution, where stars come from, how they die, how they mature. the curriculum and

decided to import nasa videotapes. we talked about planetary evolution. planets are born, they mature, they die. concepts,ach these because as einstein said, you ,an teach to children especially pictorial concepts. that is why i decided to take this small little astronomy course and make it modern. now we up to about 500 kids. the course is bursting at the seams because people have a thirst. if it is presented well, people will gravitate toward. when i first did television, people said that science doesn't sell on tv. i said that can't be right, a million people describe to scientific american, another million people to discover magazine, and when there is a science special, you can actually get 5 million people to tune into that. there is an untapped audience there and so when cable took

off, we found it, yes, there really are five or 10 million people out there that will tune into a science program if and only if it is presented well with special effects, very cogent storytelling. people gravitate toward it because we are born scientists. we are born wondering why the sun shines. >> how often have you been involved in a television special? >> i worked at bbc, the discovery channel, the science channel hosting specials for them sometimes. of course, talking heads, i regularly do talking heads for different science specials. brian: where can people find your radio shows? michio: i am on every week. they can go to mkaku.org, or facebook, where we have 3 million fans. on twitter we are up to 600,000

and you can find my radio schedule airing in 60 cities across the united states. and it is commercial radio. think about it for a moment, commercially we are not talking public radio. we are talking commercial radio. the program has been a big success. it means that if presented well people have a thirst, a real , thirst to understand what is happening in the world. but it is never presented well. it is always presented as memorization and learning stupid facts and figures you are going to forget the next day. brian: you talk about ray kurz weil. here is video of him talking about life expectancy. >> people say take all the supplements and other pills and that will enable you to live hundreds of years and the answer is no, that is just to get to bridge two. bridge two is not far away. according to my models, 10 or 15 years from now we will be adding more than a year every year to your remaining life expectancy. brian: put that in context. he has a plan for himself, i

think. how many pills does he take a day? michio: i think several it is a hundred. considerable number. he talks about two kinds of immortality. one is digital immortality, which is coming very fast. silicon valley, the companies are already offering a version of that. then there is biological immortality. digital immortality takes everything known about you on the internet. your digital footprint, your credit card records, what movies you see, what wines you like, what countries you visit your , videos, your pictures, your audiotapes, it creates this profile which is digitized which will last forever. when you go to the library of the future you will not take out , a book about winston churchill, you will talk to winston churchill. you will talk to a hologram and that hologram will have all the mannerisms and knowledge, anecdotes, story, everything known about winston churchill , and you will talk to him. i would not mind talking to einstein. i would love to have an

opportunity to talk to an einstein based on everything that is known about the man. we could be digitized. there is a silicon valley company already offering to do this. and our great great great great granddaughter may want to find out who was their great great great grandfather because we have been digitized. to paraphrase bill clinton -- is this really you? it all depends on how you define you. if we define you as a biological entity, then this is a tape recorder, very sophisticated. but if you are the sum total of all of your memories and emotions and feelings, if that is you then, yes, in some sense you can live forever because you have been digitized. brian: i want your definition for artificial intelligence. michio: artificial intelligence is a machine that can do anything a human can do. let's be blunt about this, if

right now you compare artificial intelligence to animals, our most advanced robot has the abilities of a cockroach. a retarded, lobotomized, slow, cockroach. our robots can barely walk across the room, can barely sweep the floor or turnaround. but i foresee a time when they will be as smart as a mouse, able to run around, as smart as a rabbit, eventually as smart as a cat or dog, but by the time they reached the level of a monkey, they could become dangerous. that is at the end of the century, i think. because monkeys have a self-awareness, they know they are not human. they know they are monkeys. dogs are confused. dogs think that we are the top dog and they are the underdog and we are part of the same dog tribe, the dog pack.

so dogs are confused about who they are. but monkeys know they are not human. once robots become as smart as monkeys, then i think we should put a chip in their brain to shut them off if they have murderous thoughts. but that is not for many decades to come. brian: did you have brothers and sisters? michio: yes, one older and one younger brother. brian: what did they do? michio: they are retired. my younger brother is a cardiologist and he is still in private practice. we all went to college and we all did what our parents dreamed of and they wanted us to be , successful. brian: what does your mother do? we talked about your father. michio: my father was a gardener and my mother was a maid. we were always strapped for money. i remember my parents arguing about money and where should the money go because we were flat

broke during that period of time. i still remember my mother talking about college and college is the key to everything. i had this vision that college was the city in the sky. i still have that vision that there is a city in the sky called college. because that is the way my mother put it. i realized that she was onto something, that yes college is a , gateway to success in modern society. brian: how much of all of your education and where did you get it all was paid for in scholarships? michio: i got accepted to harvard and harvard and also the hurt engineering college. that edward teller founded. i was a beneficiary of that. then my phd program, there was money for the national science foundation. so luckily even though , struggling artists have a hard time scraping together the next meal, in science there is funding, the national science foundation, the department of energy will fund enterprising young phd students.

that i think is a good thing. there is a brain drain into the united states because there is funding, both private silicon valley billionaires will sponsor startups and there is a national science foundation in the department of energy for more speculative and cutting edge kinds of research. there is a brain drain into the united states at the present time. brian: back to your 10-year-old example -- do you have children? michio: yes, two. brian: what kind of work are they in? michio: the older daughter is a brain doctor. she is a neurologist. actually a professor now. at boston university. the other one followed a different road. she is a french pastry cook. she went to an exclusive school where they train and accredit french pastry cooks, and she has

done very well in manhattan. brian: your mother said she wanted you to find a nice japanese woman, is that who you found? michio: my second wife is japanese. so my mother finally got her dream. however i should point out that my mother eventually came down with alzheimer's. it was very unfortunate that she could not even recognize me. toward the very end, she could not even recognize herself. i thought that life in some sense is so unfair. you struggle so hard when you are young and you are always poor, always wondering the next check is going to come from. then you lose your memories. you lose your sense of who you are, who your children are. sometimes life can be very unfair. brian: what are you thinking at this age? you are 71? what are you thinking about how long you're going to teach and what happens to the brain -- you must know a lot about the brain as you get older. michio: i realize the body does

decay, but the brain decays much slower. you could be sharp as a whistle even in your old age. einstein was publishing very important papers even to the last days of his life. now when you get older, you say too yourself, do i want write a lot of papers that are going to get published but are worthless. that you know are nothing but 's.ting i's, crossing to i would rather work on big problems now. of course there is a danger that nothing will come out of these big problems. i would rather work on a big problem and fail than work on a lot of little problems and succeed. brian: from the standpoint of financial accomplishments what categories have been the most lucrative for you? teaching, documentaries, radios, speaking, books? michio: when i first started to write books, people told me you will never get rich writing a book.

because there is this cutthroat competition out there. as bill clinton knows, you can make more money doing speaking at events and keynoting conferences and stuff like that. and that is something that i enjoy. it is something i enjoy because you get to engage people. and talk about things that are on their mind, things that are troubling them. so i get invited to keynote conferences, for example. brian: is that the best economically speaking? >> probably. if you look at bill clinton and george w. bush and people, they are on the circuit. in fact i bump into them , regularly. i've been on several programs speaking with bill clinton. brian: how often do you teach your class with 500 kids in it? michio: the university said whenever i have to go keynote a conference or something, i disrupt the university. i had to find a substitute teacher, i have to make sure that the grad students can read

grade papers and stuff like that. those are disruptive. so they made a deal with me. they said if we cut your slack so that you have more time for speaking and stuff, you can spread the good name of the university, the university benefits, you benefit because you don't have to run back to the college every time there is a speaking engagement. that was a win-win situation. so they reduced my teaching load. which is i think the ideal situation. brian: how big is your university? michio: it is one of the based biggest on the planet earth. the city university of new york has a quarter of a million students. it is huge. the state university of new york of course services the entire state. the city university of new york services 8 million people altogether. that is the population of new york. brooklyn alone would be the third-largest city in the united states if you were to cut of new up new york city. so the city university of new york is gigantic, it is

absolutely humongous. >> you read a lot about this in your book, you talked about going to mars and it is a motion picture, star trek, 1979, it is not very long. movieswanted to show it, in the context of learning science. >> accelerating to warp one, sir. 0.7. 0.8 brian: you've seen all of his these movies? michio: i'm a science fiction junkie. i was all the star trek films and other star trek stuff. when i was a kid, i loved and gorged on that stuff. today i do a lot of cringing because i realized they got that

law of physics wrong. a lot of times i have to suspend what i know about physics and just let my imagination roam. that is the way to enjoy these films. i love these films. brian: 1951, the day the earth stood still. let's watch this one. >> it is no concern of ours how you run your own planet. but if you threaten to extend your violence, this earth of yours will be reduced to a burned-out cinder. your choice is simple. join us and live in peace or pursue your present course and face obliteration. michio: that movie was very important. up until then, the paradigm was war of the worlds. the bad guys versus the good guys. we are the underdogs, the good guys. that put it at 180 degrees the other way. all of a sudden we became the enemy.

we were the enemy of ourselves. we were our worst enemy. that movie was incredibly important because it shifted the entire focus away from martians invading the earth to looking inward, at our own problems. if we mess up the earth, we don't want to mess up mars. we have to get our own act together. i think that motion picture was pivotal because it shifted the center of gravity of science fiction. >> this is book number nine? michio: 14. brian: the listed eight -- this one is called "the future of humanity." what was your goal in this book versus the others? michio: i talked about the future like the 200 300 years in the future. but what is the pot of gold at -- out there? what is the ultimate destiny of all of these things? i said to myself, as carl sagan once told me, we

should become a two planet species. we should become -- we should join other civilizations in some kind of galactic civilization as it exists. so, as people pointed out to me, the dinosaurs did not have a space program. the destiny of the dinosaurs was to go extinct. that was their destiny. our destiny is unwritten but 99% of all life forms, their destiny is extinction. the norm from mother nature is extinction. if you dig deep under our feet right now, you will see the bones of the 99.9% that no longer walk the surface of the earth. we are different, we are have self-awareness, we can see the future, we plot we scheme, , we plan. so, perhaps we are going to evade this conundrum. maybe survive. but we need an insurance policy. >> the other books talk about

the steps, but what is the goal, what is the pot of gold out there? i am saying one would be to have insurance policy, a plan b in case a super volcano, an asteroid, another ice age wipes out humanity on the earth for or severely dents our history. brian: this is 20 years from now, you will be 91, teaching and speaking, and you look back at what we have done in these 20 years. what will it be? who will have been responsible? michio: in some sense, my goal in life, that is what i want to do, we physicists like to rank civilizations by energy, type one, type two, type three. type one is planetary, they control the weather. type two, stellar, they control stars and play with stars like star trek. star trek would be a type to civilization.

type three, they are galactic. they play with black holes and roam the galactic space length like star wars. where are we on this scale? we are type zero. we get energy from dead plants. but we concede that in 100 years we will be type one. what it is not guaranteed. we still have all the savagery of our rise from the swamp just a few hundred years ago. we have the same sectarianism, fundamentalism nationalism, all , the backwardness of our lives from the swamp. but i see that by 2100 we will become a planetary civilization. so i want to help speed up the process to make sure that we don't let the savagery of our lives in the swamp overwhelmed our destiny which is to become type one. for example, what language will this type one civilization speak? already on the internet, english and mandarin chinese are the two dominant languages. the internet itself is the first type technology that fell into one our lap as we are still type zero.

we see the beginning of a type one planetary civilization. but we may not make it. elon musk said that last month, why don't the aliens visit us? there should be a lot of type one civilizations out there. they don't visit us because perhaps because they did not make the transition to type one. brian: do you have any idea why over the years -- it has been the case since we were aware of it, why do we refer to aliens as little green men that will land here someday? why are they little green men? michio: i think it is part of our subconscious. hollywood gives us these images as children and as grown-ups, we access these ancient memories of bug-eyed monsters, for example. i have advice for people that claim to have met these aliens. many people email me and say they have been abducted by aliens from outer space. so they know they are out there. my attitude is the next time you're abducted by an alien, steal something. i don't care whether there is an

alien paperweight or an alien chip, an alien pen, steal something. because there is no law on the books that says you can't steal from an extraterrestrial. is your guess that there has been extraterrestrials land on this planet? michio: you can't rule it out. there is no hard evidence either way. there is a possibility that in the past we might have been visited. it can't be ruled out. brian: the last video, you were alive, you were eight or 10 years old. this is 1957, october the fourth, somebody named major john glenn on a program called name that tune. >> what do you think of the russian satellite which is circling the earth at miles per 18,000 hour? >> to say the least they are out , of this world. this is really quite an advancement for not only russians but for international science, i think we all agree on that.

it is the first time anybody has been able to get anything out that far in space or keep it there for any length of time. this is probably the first step toward space travel or moon travel, something they will probably run into in eddie's lifetime at least. >> would you like to take a trip to the moon? >> i like it here. brian: major john glenn was a test pilot. he had not gone to space. in your opinion how have we done , since 1957? michio: i think nasa became the agency to nowhere. it just spun wheels, went around the planet earth, the space station was supposed to be the gateway for mars and other planets and that became a big , turkey in outer space. i think we have been spinning wheels for 50 years. but last month, last month there was this excitement, this electricity when the falcon heavy rocket blasted off because that was the moon rocket, the first moon rocket in 50 years, the blast off from cape

canaveral. guess who paid for? our taxpayer money? a private individual elon musk , paid for a moon rocket and basically gave it to the american people for free. this is unheard of. five years 10 years ago, if you , were to say that a private individual would create his own personal moon rocket and give it to the people of the world, people would think you were nuts. but it actually happened. so we are in a new ballgame now. a new ballgame where prices have been dropping dramatically, where the movie the martian cost $100 million but to go to mars only costs $70 million. so a hollywood movie about mars actually costs more than going to mars. that is how cheap travel has become. india, china will plant their flag on the moon, it is a national goal for the chinese people. so things have changed. a sea change from the prices

1960's. have dropped. private entrepreneurs from silicon valley are funding a lot of this. china, india, everyone is jumping in. we will have a traffic jam around the moon. brian: we have 30 seconds. what would you tell an eight-year-old today watching you right now? i am sure they have seen you in the audiences when you speak. what should they do to prepare to become a theoretical physicist or a scientist? michio: i tell them to keep the flame alive, keep that spark of inspiration. whatever it was that sent you off in that direction. for me it was trying to follow the works of einstein, to complete einstein's dream. whatever it is follow that star. , that will keep you going. there has to be a northstar that inspires you. because there's a lot of math you have to know. you have to pay your dues but ultimately it is that spark of creativity and innovation that keeps you going in spite of all the obstacles. brian: our guest has been michio kaku and the title of the book

is the future of humanity. thank you for joining us. michio: my pleasure. ♪ [captions copyright national cable satellite corp. 2018] [captioning performed by the national captioning institute, which is responsible for its caption content and accuracy. visit ncicap.org] ♪ >> for free transcripts or to give us your comments about this program, visit us at q&a.org. q&a programs are also available at c-span podcasts. >> next sunday on q&a, neil ferguson, senior fellow at the hoover institute, talks about his book, the square and the

tower, networks and power from the freemasons to facebook. next sunday on c-span. c-span's washington journal, live every day with news and policy issues that impact you. coming up monday morning, discussing the week ahead in washington, and talking about amazon's impact on the u.s. postal service. we are live in boise, idaho for the next up on the c-span bus 50 capitals tour with idaho republican governor butch otter, on to talk about top policy issues in his state. watch washington journal live at 7:00 eastern monday morning. join the discussion. facebook ceo mark zuckerberg will testify before senate and house committees on facebook's handling of user information and data privacy.

tuesday at 2:15 p.m. eastern on c-span three, he will answer questions during a joint senate judiciary and commerce committee. he will also appear before the house energy and commerce committee. watch live coverage on c-span 3, and live on www.c-span.org, and listen live with the free c-span radio app. >> the british parliament is in recess, so prime minister's questions will not be seen this week. bbc parliament looks back at the major events that have happened over the last few months, including brexit negotiations and the nerve agent attack against a former russian spy and his daughter on british soil. this is 30 minutes. ♪ ♪ >> welcome to mi