c-span3, he will answer questions during a joint senate judiciary and commerce committee hearing. and on wednesday at 10:00 a.m., he will appear before the house energy and commerce committee. watch live coverage on c-span3 and online at c-span.org, and listen live with the free c-span radio app. ♪ announcer: this week on q&a, theoretical physicist michio kaku. he discusses his book, "the future of humanity: terraforming mars, interstellar travel, immortality, and our destiny beyond earth." michio kaku, here's a

picture of you on this network in 1979. >> if you like at the recent government reports considering the island, the government concedes that one happened while people willto ten eventually die of cancer in the area. brian: you remember that time and what have you changed in your thinking? >> i remember that very vividly. i'm a theoretical physicist. i work with the theories of einstein and quantum theory. to be before a television camera is a new mix arians. all the media was saying was we need a scientist who can help to decipher this mess to the american people. so they 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. >> you say in your book that there was a teacher when you were in the second grade that had an impact on you. >> i will never forget. he walked in the world one day, and 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's a hydrogen bomb. it obeys the same equal asians of einstein -- e=mc2. m is hydrogen, e is sunlight. >> what is a comet? et is a dirty ice ball

that was around in the solar system. they are only 10 or 20 miles across. they aren't very big. they're basically made out of ice, remnants of the original solar system which we think once upon a time surrounded the sun now orbit in a disk. >> what is the difference between a meteor and a meteorite ? >> the flash of white you see 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, wanted his the ground, it becomes a mineral. we called a meteorite. a meteorite is a meteor 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 disk 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 planet 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 rocky planet, a frozen desert but it is the closest planet we have. but further out, the moons of saturn and jupiter look very interesting. one of the moons of jupiter is europa. it has a liquid ocean underneath the ice cover. 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 that very distinctly. i was eight years old. everyone is 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 of our time. i was eight years old. 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 went to the library and i've found out his name was albert einstein. that book was the unified field. the theory 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 they were 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. -- and alfalfa fields. >> what did your parents do after 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 running 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. [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] a 2.3 million electron particle 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, why can't i have a son who plays basketball, maybe if i buy him a baseball. why can't he find a nice japanese girlfriend?

what is he up to build is machined in the garage? 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 aa light dream -- 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. >> kobach as he 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 bang 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 didn't 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. 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 9097 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 thought this -- 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 nonferrous and that you are downloading the kardashians. today you have to have a microwave tower next amount averaged -- mount everest to do that. so just what are the 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 your strategy. he also liked sailing. for me, i am a professor and i realize that i like to teach. i get bored 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 test the minds of young people. whenever i interviewed a nobel prize when a scientist, i asked them when it was that that's part of science began to germinate. they always say when i was 10, 10 is that magic year, you have that epiphany, he 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 at stays with you for the rest of your life.

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 decade. 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 to watch figures getting on tv but to do something like that, that is complicated. but i realize as an adult that 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. if you see me spinning and jumping at rockefeller center you know it is me on the eyes. 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 it smart -- find you? how hard would it be? michio: at this time i teased to graduate students. we are talking about a phd program. you are talking about only five or 10 students. these people are going to go and they're doing phd level work. the city university of new york has so many young people at the freshman level, unwashed, raw students at the freshman level that they say you have to teach freshman. so i decided to teach astronomy. i was shocked. i look at the astronomy final and it was memorize all the moons of saturn. 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 it start -- where start -- where stars come from. i decided to import videotapes. we were talking about plans of in certain basic laws. they are born, they mature, they die. you can't use these concepts because you can't use vegetables to children, especially take our principles. 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, it is presented well. people gravitate toward him. people said that science doesn't so on tv. i said that can't be right, a million people describe to discover magazine and when it 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 sunshine's. >> how often have you been involved in a television special? >> i worked at bbc, the discovery channel, the science channel host a special for them. of course, i regularly do talking heads for different science specials.

brian: where can people find your radio shows? michio: i am on a baby week. they can go to my website where facebook, we are to 3 million fans on facebook. on twitter we are up to 600,000 on twitter and they can finally ready a schedule, the radio program airs in about 60 cities across the united states and it is commercial radio. think about it for a moment, commercially we are not talking commercial radio. it is that it presented well, people have a thirst, a real thirst to understand what is happening in the world. it is never presented well. it is always presented as memorization and learning stupid facts and figures you can forget the next day. brian: here is some video of talking about life inspect and see. i want to hear your input on this. >> 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. that is not far away.

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. how many pills that he take a day? michio: it is a considerable number. he talks about to conduct immortality. one is digital immortality which is coming very fast. silicon valley, the companies are already offering a version of that. then it 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 ones you like to buy, what countries you visit, your videos, your pictures, your audio tapes, if grace 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, he will talk to winston churchill.

he will talk to a hologram and that hologram will have all the mannerisms and knowledge, anecdotes, story, everything known about winston churchill and he will talk to him. i would mind talking to understand. i would love to have an opportunity to talk to an einstein based on everything that is known about the man. he could be digitized, there is a silicon valley company already offering to do this. our great great great great granddaughter may want to find out who was there great great great great grandfather because we have been digitized. to paraphrase bill clinton -- is this really you? if we define you as a biological entity, is a tape recorder, very sophisticated. 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 the 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 you compare artificial intelligence to animals, her most advanced robot has the abilities of a cop roach. a retarded, lobotomized, slow, cockroach. you can barely sweep the floor or terminal. but i foresee a time when they will be as smart as ms, being able to run around and find them really quick, eventually as smart as a cat or a dog but by the time they reach the level of a monkey that could become dangerous. that is at the end of the century because monkeys have a self-awareness, they know they are not human. they know their 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. dogs are confused about who they are. 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 up and they wanted us to be successful. brian: what does your mother do? michio: my father was a gardener michio: my father was a gardener and my mother was a maid. we were always stressed for

money. i remember my parents arguing about money and where should the money go because we were flat broke during that. i still remember my mother talking about college and college is the key to everything. i have 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. that is the way my mother put it. she realized that she was onto something and she said 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 in scholarships? michio: i got accepted to harvard and harvard and also the hurt engineering college. i was a beneficiary of that. then my phd program, there was

money for the national science foundation. so, likely, even though struggling artists have a longtime scraping together the next meal, and 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. she is asking a professor -- actually a professor now. the other one followed a different road.

she is a french pastry cook. she went to an exclusive school where they train and a credit french pastry cups and she has done very well in manhattan. brian: your mother said she wanted you divide a nice japanese woman, is that you found? michio: my second wife is japanese. my mother finally got her dream. i should point out that i mother eventually came down with alzheimer's. it was very unfortunate that she cannot even recognize me. with a very and she didn't 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, i was wondering the next check is going to come from. then you lose your memories. you lose your sense of who you are, your children are. sometimes life can be very and. brian: what are you thinking at this age? you're 71? what are you thinking about how long you're going to teach and

what happens to the brain -- you must know what happens to the brain as you get older. michio: i realize the body does decay but the brain decays much lower. 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. when you get older, you say to yourself -- you could write a lot of papers that are worthless. you know that is nothing but. 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 then work on a lot of little problems and succeed. brian: from financial, spence, 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 about. 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. that is something that i enjoy. it is something i enjoy because you get to engage people. you can talk about things that are on their mind, things that are troubling them. so i get invited to quito conferences. brian: is that the best economically speaking? >> if you look at bill clinton and george w. bush and people, they are on the circuit. i bump into them regularly. i've been on several programs speaking with bill clinton. brian: how often do teacher class with 500 kids in it? michio: the university said

i teach i disrupt the university. i had to find a substitute teacher, i have to make sure that the grad students can read the papers and stuff like that. those are disruptive. 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. they reduced my teaching load. brian: how big is your university? michio: it is one of the based on the planet earth. it has a court of in the instance. it is huge. the state university of new york 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 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. less is to the movies in this country again in context with learning science. >> accelerating. brian: you've seen all of his 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 love physics wrong, they got that 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 debut of stood still, let's watch this one. >> it is no concern of ours how you run your own planet that if you threaten to extend your violence, this earth of euros 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 one of the worlds, the guys versus the good guys where the underdogs were 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 entire focus away from martians to looking inward, looking at her own program -- problem. 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: this was 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 their? what is the ultimate destiny of all of these things? i said to myself, as cross-section was 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 walked the surface of the earth. we are different, we are self-awareness, we can see the future, we pot, we scheme, we plan. so, perhaps we are going to invade this conundrum -- is aid

-- evade this conundrum. the other books talk about the steps. but what is the pot of gold? one would be to have an insurance policy, a plan b in case they super volcano, an asteroid, another ice age wipes out humanity on the earth for severely dance our history. brian: this is 20 years from now, you will be 91, teaching you will get what we did in these 20 years. what will it be? 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. stellar control stars and plays with stars like star trek.

star trek would be a type to civilization. is this type three, collected, 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 lives in this one. we have the same sectarianism, nationalism, all the backwardness of our lives from the swamp. but i see that by 2100 we will become a planetary civilization. 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 other two dominant languages.

the internet itself is the first type on technology that fell into our lap as we are still type zero. we see the beginning of a type one planetary civilization. we may not make it. elon musk said that last month, why don't the aliens visit us? this should be a lot of type one civilizations out there. they don't visit us because perhaps they did 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 answer some day? 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 on monsters for example. but i have advice for people that claim to have met these aliens. many people he met me and say

they have been abducted by aliens from outer space. 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 check, and alien pen, steal something. there is no luck against stealing from a nexus restaurant. there is no loss and you can steal from an extraterrestrial. brian: has there been exit test -- extraterrestrial life on this planet? michio: you can't rule it out. there has been a possibility possibility that we may have been visited. it can't be ruled out. >> 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 set in the earth at 80 miles per hour? >> they are out of this world.

this is really quite an investment 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. >> would you like to take if it's in the moon? >> no. brian: major john glenn was a test pilot. he had not gone to space. how have we done since 1957? michio: i think nasa became the agency to nowhere. it's fun wheels, went around the planet earth, the space station was supposed to be the gateway for mars and their 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 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? no, elon musk paid for a moon rocket and gave it to the american people for free. this is unheard of, i were 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. it actually happened. we are in a new ballgame now. and you 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 spatial as they come india, china will plan to their flag on the moon, it is a national goal for the chinese

people. things have changed, i see change from the 1960's, prices have dropped. private funders 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: what would you tell an eight-year-old today watching you right now? 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 the statue in that direction. for me it was trying to follow the work so einstein. whatever it is, follow that star. that will keep you going. there has to be a northstar that inspires you. 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. ♪ >> for free transcripts or to give us your comments about this program, visit us at qanda.org. q&a programs are also available as c-span podcasts. ♪

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communicators," cyber security and the internet's impact on democracy and voting. >> with respect to the electorate, what we have seen as there are targets, but you also see a commitment from ceos of utilities across the country to address that in partnership with the department of energy and dhs. >> we have documented a significant decline in internet freedom, in particular this year we have spoken on the increasing numbers that are manipulating the internet to their advantage. >> when it comes to the implementation of china's cyber security law, we have severe concerns that it might be very onerous, requiring inspection of hardware and source code that are not typical of the regulatory regime we see in many places currently. announcer: watch "the communicators" tonight at 8:00