Michio Kaku: Future of Humans, Aliens, Space Travel & Physics | Lex Fridman Podcast #45

1. 0:00 – 15:00

   The following is a…

   1. LFLex Fridman0:00

      The following is a conversation with Michio Kaku. He's a theoretical physicist, futurist, and professor at the City College of New York. He's the author of many fascinating books that explore the nature of our reality and the future of our civilization. They include Einstein's Cosmos, Physics of the Impossible, Future of the Mind, Parallel Worlds, and his latest, The Future of Humanity: Terraforming Mars, Interstellar Travel, Immortality, and Our Destiny Beyond Earth. I think it's beautiful and important when a scientific mind can fearlessly explore through conversation subjects just outside of our understanding. That, to me, is where artificial intelligence is today, just outside of our understanding, a place we have to reach for if we're to uncover the mysteries of the human mind and build human-level and superhuman-level AI systems that transform our world for the better. This is the Artificial Intelligence podcast. If you enjoy it, subscribe on YouTube, give it five stars on iTunes, support it on Patreon, or simply connect with me on Twitter @lexfridman, spelled F-R-I-D-M-A-N. And now, here's my conversation with Michio Kaku. You've mentioned that we just might make contact with aliens, or at least hear from them within this century. Can you elaborate on your intuition behind that optimism?

   2. MKMichio Kaku1:25

      Well, this is pure speculation, of course.

   3. LFLex Fridman1:28

      Of course.

   4. MKMichio Kaku1:28

      But given the fact that we've already identified 4,000 exoplanets orbiting other stars, and we have a census of the Milky Way galaxy for the first time, we know that on average, every single star, on average, has a planet going around it, and about one-fifth or so of them have Earth-sized planets going around them. So just do the math. We're talking about out of 100 billion stars in the Milky Way galaxy, we're talking about billions of potential Earth-sized planets. And to believe that we're the only one is, I think, rather ridiculous-

   5. LFLex Fridman2:08

      (laughs)

   6. MKMichio Kaku2:08

      ... given the odds. And how many galaxies are there? Within sight of the Hubble Space Telescope, there are about 100 billion galaxies. So do the math. How many stars are there in the visible universe? 100 billion galaxies times 100 billion stars per galaxy, we're talking about a number beyond human imagination. And to believe that we're the only ones, I think, is, is rather ridiculous.

   7. LFLex Fridman2:38

      So you've talked about different types of, uh, Type 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5 even of the Kardashev scale, um, of the different kind of civilizations. Do... What do you think it takes, if it is indeed a ridiculous notion that we're alone in the universe, what do you think it takes to reach out, first to reach out through communication and connect?

   8. MKMichio Kaku3:02

      Well, first of all, we have to understand the level of sophistication of an alien life form if we make contact with them. I think in this century, we'll probably pick up signals, signals from an extraterrestrial civilization. We'll pick up their I Love Lucy and their Leave It To Beaver, uh, just ordinary day-to-day transmissions that, uh, they emit. And the first thing we wanna do is to, A, decipher their language, of course, but B, figure out at what level they are advanced on the Kardashev scale. I'm a physicist. We rank things by two parameters: energy and information. That's how we rank black holes. That's how we rank stars. That's how we rank civilizations in outer space. So a Type I civilization is capable of harnessing planetary power. They control the weather, for example, earthquakes, volcanoes. They can modify the course of geological events, sort of like Flash Gordon or Buck Rogers.

   9. LFLex Fridman4:07

      (laughs)

   10. MKMichio Kaku4:08

       Type II would be stellar. They play with stars, entire stars. They use the entire energy output of a star, sort of like Star Trek. The federation of planets have colonized the nearby stars. So a Type II would be som- somewhat similar to Star Trek. Type III would be galactic. They roam the galactic space lanes. And Type III would be like Star Wars, a galactic civilization. Now, one day, I was giving this talk in London at the planetarium there, and a little boy comes up to me, and he says, "Professor, you're wrong. You're wrong. There's Type IV." And I told him, "Look, kid-"

   11. LFLex Fridman4:53

       (laughs)

   12. MKMichio Kaku4:53

       "... there are planets, stars, and galaxies. That's it, folks." And he kept persisting and saying, "No, there's Type IV, the power of the continuum." And I thought about it for a moment, and I said to myself, "Is there an extra galactic source of energy, the continuum of Star Trek?" And the answer is yes. There could be a Type IV, and that's dark energy. We now know that 73% of the energy of the universe is dark energy. Dark matter represent maybe 23% or so, and we only represent 4%. We're the oddballs. And so you begin to realize that, yeah, there could be Type IV, maybe even Type V.

   13. LFLex Fridman5:39

       So Type IV, you're saying, being able to harness sort of, like, dark energy, something that permeates the entire universe. So being able to plug into the (laughs) entire, entire universe as a source of energy?

   14. MKMichio Kaku5:52

       That's right. And dark energy is the energy of the Big Bang.

   15. LFLex Fridman5:55

       Yeah.

   16. MKMichio Kaku5:55

       It's why the galaxies are being pushed apart. It's the energy of nothing.... the more nothing you have, the more dark energy that's repulsive. And so the acceleration of the universe is accelerating because the more you have, the more you can have, and that of course is by definition an exponential curve. It's called the De Sitter expansion, and that's the current state of the universe.

   17. LFLex Fridman6:20

       And then type five, would that be ... Would that be able to, uh, seek energy sources somehow outside of our universe?

   18. MKMichio Kaku6:31

       That would be-

   19. LFLex Fridman6:31

       How crazy is that an idea? (laughs)

   20. MKMichio Kaku6:33

       Yeah. Uh, type five would be the multiverse. Um-

   21. LFLex Fridman6:35

       Multiverse. Okay.

   22. MKMichio Kaku6:36

       I'm a quantum physicist, and we quantum physicists don't believe that the Big Bang happened once. That would violate the Heisenberg uncertainty principle. And that means that there could be multiple bangs happening all the time. Even as we speak today, universes are being created. That fits the data. Uh, the inflationary universe is a quantum theory, so there's a certain finite probability that universes are being created all the time. And for me, this is actually rather aesthetically pleasing-

   23. LFLex Fridman7:08

       (laughs)

   24. MKMichio Kaku7:08

       ... because, you know, I was raised as a Presbyterian. But my parents were Buddhists, and there's two diametrically opposed ideas about the universe. In Buddhism, there's only nirvana. There's no beginning, there's no end, there's only timelessness. But in Christianity, there is the instant when God said, "Let there be light." In other words, an instant of creation. So I have these two mutually exclusive ideas in my head, and I now realize that it's possible to meld them into a single theory.

   25. LFLex Fridman7:44

       Mm-hmm.

   26. MKMichio Kaku7:45

       Either the universe had a beginning or it didn't, right? Wrong.

   27. LFLex Fridman7:49

       (laughs)

   28. MKMichio Kaku7:49

       You see, our universe had a beginning. Our universe had an instant where somebody (laughs) might have said, "Let there be light." But there are other bubble universes out there in a bubble bath of universes, and that means that these universes are expanding into a dimension beyond our three-dimensional comprehension. In other words, hyperspace. In other words, 11-dimensional hyperspace. So nirvana would be this timeless, 11-dimensional hyperspace where Big Bangs are happening all the time. So we can now combine two mutually exclusive theories of creation. And Stephen Hawking, for example, even in his last book, even said that this is an argument against the existence of God.

   29. LFLex Fridman8:39

       Hmm.

   30. MKMichio Kaku8:39

       He said there is no God because there was not enough time for God to create the universe, because the Big Bang happened in an instant of time. Therefore, there was no time available for him to create the universe. But you see, the multiverse idea means that there was a time before time, and there are multiple times. Each bubble has its own time. And so it means that there could actually be a universe before the beginning of our universe. So if you think of a bubble bath, when two bubbles collide, or when two bubbles fission to create a baby bubble, that's called the Big Bang. So the Big Bang is nothing but the collision of universes or the budding of universes.
2. 15:00 – 30:00

   So if aliens do,…

   1. MKMichio Kaku15:00

      of physics.

   2. LFLex Fridman15:01

      So if aliens do, alien species were to make contact, forgive me for, uh, staying on aliens for a bit longer, uh, do you think they're more likely to be friendly, to befriend us, or to destroy us?

   3. MKMichio Kaku15:18

      Well, I think for the most part, uh, they'll pretty much ignore us.

   4. LFLex Fridman15:22

      (laughs)

   5. MKMichio Kaku15:22

      If you were a deer in the forest, who do you fear the most? Do you fear the hunter with his gigantic, uh, 16-gauge shotgun or do you fear the guy with a briefcase and glasses? Well, the guy with the briefcase could be a developer about to basically flatten (laughs) the entire forest, destroying your livelihood.

   6. LFLex Fridman15:43

      Mm-hmm.

   7. MKMichio Kaku15:44

      So instinctively, you may be afraid of the hunter, but actually (laughs) , the problem with deers in the forest is that they should fear developers-

   8. LFLex Fridman15:53

      Developers.

   9. MKMichio Kaku15:54

      ... 'cause developers look at deer as simply getting in the way. I mean, in War of the Worlds by H.G. Wells, the aliens did not hate us. If you read the book, the aliens did not have evil intentions toward homo- homo sapiens. No. We were in the way.

   10. LFLex Fridman16:14

       And-

   11. MKMichio Kaku16:15

       So I think we have to realize (laughs) that alien civilizations may view us quite differently than in science fiction novels.

   12. LFLex Fridman16:22

       Yeah.

   13. MKMichio Kaku16:22

       However, I personally believe, and I cannot prove any of this, I personally believe that they're probably gonna be peaceful because there's nothing that they want from our world. I mean, what are they gonna take us, what are they gonna take us for? Gold? No. Gold is a useless m- metal for the most part. It's silver, I mean, it's go- gold in color, but that only affects homo sapiens. Squirrels don't care about gold. And so gold is a rather useless element. Rare earths maybe, platinum-based elements, rare earths for their electronics, yeah, maybe. But other than that, we have nothing to offer them. I mean, think about it for a moment, people love Shakespeare and they love the arts and poetry, but outside of the earth, they mean nothing. Absolutely nothing. I mean, when I write down a- an equation in string theory, I would hope that on the other side of the galaxy there's an alien writing down that very same equation in different notation, but that alien (laughs) on the other side of the galaxy, Shakespeare, poetry, Hemingway, it would mean nothing to him.

   14. LFLex Fridman17:32

       (laughs)

   15. MKMichio Kaku17:32

       Or her. Or it.

   16. LFLex Fridman17:35

       W- when you think about entities that's out there, extraterrestrial, do you think they would naturally look something that even is recognizable to us as, uh, as life? Or can it, would they be radically different?

   17. MKMichio Kaku17:50

       Well, how did we become intelligent? Basically three things made us intelligent. One is our eyesight, stereo eyesight. We have the eyes of a hunter, stereo vision so we lock in on targets, and, and, uh, who is smarter, predator or prey?Predators are smarter than prey. They have their eyes at the front of their face, like lions, tigers, while rabbits have eyes to the side of their face. Why is that? Hunters have to zero in on the target, they have to know how to ambush, they have to know how to hide, camouflage, sneak up, stealth, deceit. That takes a lot of intelligence. Rabbits, all they have to do is run.

   18. LFLex Fridman18:35

       (laughs)

   19. MKMichio Kaku18:35

       So that's the first criterion, stereo eyesight of some sort. Second is the thumb. The opposable thumb of some sort, could be a claw or tentacle, so hand-eye coordination. Hand-eye coordination is the way we manipulate the environment. And then three, language, because you know, mama bear never tells baby bear to avoid the human hunter. Bears just learn (laughs) by themselves. They never hand out information from one generation to the next. So these are the three basic ingredients of intelligence: eyesight of some sort, an opposable thumb or tentacle or claw of some sort, and language. Now ask yourself a simple question: how many animals have all three?

   20. LFLex Fridman19:22

       Just us.

   21. MKMichio Kaku19:23

       It's just us. I mean, the primates, they have a language. Yeah, they may get up to maybe 20 words, but a baby learns a word a day. Several words a day, a baby learns, and a typical adult knows about, uh, almost 5,000 words, while the maximum number of words that you can teach a gorilla, in any language, including their own language, is about 20 or so. And so we see the difference in intelligence. So when we meet aliens from outer space, chances are they will have been descended from predators of some sort, they'll have some way to manipulate the environment, and communicate their knowledge to the next generation. That's it, folks.

   22. LFLex Fridman20:09

       So functionally, that would ha- w- that would be similar, that would, we would be able to recognize them?

   23. MKMichio Kaku20:16

       Well, not necessarily because I think even with homo sapiens, we are eventually going to perhaps, uh, become part cybernetic and-

   24. LFLex Fridman20:25

       Mm-hmm.

   25. MKMichio Kaku20:25

       ... genetically enhanced. Already, uh, robots are getting smarter and smarter. Uh, right now robots have the intelligence of a cockroach, but in the coming years our robots will be as smart as a mouse, then maybe as smart as a rabbit. If we're lucky, maybe as smart as a cat or a dog. And by the end of this century, who knows for sure, our robots will be probably as smart as a monkey. Now at that point, of course, they could be dangerous. You see, monkeys are self-aware. They know they are monkeys. They may have a different agenda than us. While dogs, dogs are confused. You see, dogs think that we are a dog, that we're the top dog. They're the underdog, that's why they whimper and follow us and lick us all the time. We're the top dog. Monkeys have no illusion at all. They know we are not monkeys. And so I think that in the future, we'll have to put a chip in their brain to shut them off once our robots have murderous thoughts. But that's in a hundred years. In 200 years, the robots will be smart enough to remove that fail-safe chip in their brain, and then watch out. At that point, I think rather than compete with our robots, we should merge with them. We should become part cybernetic. So I think when we meet alien life from outer space, they may be genetically and c- and, uh, cybernetically enhanced.

   26. LFLex Fridman22:05

       Genetically and cybernetically enhanced. Wow. So let's talk about that full range in the near term and 200 years from now. How promising in the near term, in your view, is brain-machine interfaces? So s- g- starting to allow computers to talk directly to the brains. Elon Musk is working on that with Neuralink, and there's other companies working on this idea. Do you see promise there? Do you see hope for near-term impact?

   27. MKMichio Kaku22:33

       Well, every technology has pluses and minuses. Uh, already, we can record memories. Uh, I have a book, The Future of the Mind-

   28. LFLex Fridman22:40

       Yes.

   29. MKMichio Kaku22:40

       ... where I detail some of these breakthroughs. We can now record simple memories of mice and send these memories on the internet. Eventually, we're gonna do this with primates at Wake Forest University and also in Los Angeles, and then after that, we'll have a memory chip for Alzheimer's patients. We'll test it out on Alzheimer's patients because of course, when Alzheimer's patients lose their memory, they wander. They create all sorts of havoc wandering around, uh, oblivious to their surroundings, and they'll have a chip. They'll push the button, and memories, memories will come flooding into their hippocampus and the chip, telling them where they live and who they are. And so a memory chip is definitely in the cards, and I think this will eventually affect human civilization. What is the future of the internet? The future of the internet is BrainNet. BrainNet is w- when we send emotions, feelings, sensations on the internet, and we will telepathically communicate with other humans this way. This is gonna affect everything. Look at entertainment. Remember the silent movies? Charlie Chaplin was very famous during the era of silent movies, but when the talkies came in, nobody wanted to see Charlie Chaplin (laughs) anymore because he never talked in the movies. And so a whole generation of actors lost their job, and a new series of actors came in. Next, we're gonna have the movies replaced by BrainNet.... because in the future people will say, "Who wants to see a screen with images?" That's it. Sound and image? That's called the movies. Y- our entertainment industry, this multi-billion dollar industry is based on screens with moving images, and sound. But what happens when emotions, feelings, sensations, memories can be conveyed on the internet? It's gonna change everything. Human relations will change 'cause you'll be able to empathize and feel the suffering of other people, we'll be able to t- communicate telepathically, and, uh, this is, this is coming.

   30. LFLex Fridman24:56

       You described BrainNet in Future of the Mind. This is an interesting concept. Do you think, uh, so you mentioned entertainment, but what kind of effect would it have on our personal relationships?
3. 30:00 – 45:00

   (laughs) …

   1. MKMichio Kaku30:00

      saying the date they were baptized and the date they died. That's it. That was their entire digital memory. I mean, their entire digital existence (laughs) summarized in just a few letters of the alphabet. A whole life. Now we digitize everything. Everything you sneeze, you digitize it.

   2. LFLex Fridman30:20

      (laughs)

   3. MKMichio Kaku30:20

      You put it on the internet.

   4. LFLex Fridman30:21

      (laughs)

   5. MKMichio Kaku30:22

      And so I think that we are gonna digitize ourselves and give us digital immortality.

   6. LFLex Fridman30:27

      Hmm.

   7. MKMichio Kaku30:28

      We'll not only have biologic genetic immortality of some sort, but also digital immortality. And what are we gonna do with it? I think we should send it into outer space. If you digitize the human brain and put it on a laser beam and shoot it to the moon, you're on the moon in one second. Shoot it to Mars, you're on Mars in 20 minutes. Shoot it to Pluto, you're on Pluto in eight hours. Think about it for a moment. You can have breakfast in New York and for a morning snack, vacation on the moon, then zap your way to Mars by noontime, journey through the asteroid belt in the afternoon and then come back for dinner in New York at night-

   8. LFLex Fridman31:12

      (laughs)

   9. MKMichio Kaku31:12

      ... all in a day's work-

   10. LFLex Fridman31:13

       That's cool.

   11. MKMichio Kaku31:13

       ... at the speed of light. Now this means that you don't need booster rockets, you don't need weightlessness problems, you don't need to worry about meteorites. And what's on the moon? On the moon, there is a mainframe that downloads your laser beam's information. And where does it download the information into? An avatar.

   12. LFLex Fridman31:35

       (laughs)

   13. MKMichio Kaku31:35

       And what does that avatar look like? Anything you want.

   14. LFLex Fridman31:40

       Yeah.

   15. MKMichio Kaku31:41

       Think about it for a moment. You could be Superman, Superwoman on the moon, on Mars, traveling throughout the universe at the speed of light, downloading your personality into any vehicle you want. Now, let me stick my neck out. So far, everything I've been saying is well within the laws of physics, well within the laws of physics. Now, (laughs) let me go outside the laws of physics again.

   16. LFLex Fridman32:04

       Here we go. (laughs)

   17. MKMichio Kaku32:06

       I think this already exists. I think outside the earth, there could be a super highway, a laser highway of laser porting with billions of souls of aliens zapping their way across the galaxy. Now let me ask you a question. Are we smart enough to determine whether such a thing exists or not? No. This could exist right outside the orbit of the planet Earth and we're too stupid in our technology to even prove it or disprove it.

   18. LFLex Fridman32:38

       We would need the aliens on this laser super highway to help us out.

   19. MKMichio Kaku32:44

       (laughs)

   20. LFLex Fridman32:45

       To, to, to send us a, uh, human interpretable signal. I mean, it ultimately boils down to the language of communication, but that's an exciting possibility that actually the sky is filled (laughs) with, with aliens-

   21. MKMichio Kaku32:59

       The aliens could already be here-

   22. LFLex Fridman33:00

       (laughs)

   23. MKMichio Kaku33:01

       ... and we're just so oblivious that we're too stupid to know it. (laughs) See, they don't have to be in alien form with, with, uh, little green men. They can be in any form they want, in an avatar of their creation.

   24. LFLex Fridman33:13

       Or, in fact, they could very well be, uh-

   25. MKMichio Kaku33:16

       They could even look like us.

   26. LFLex Fridman33:17

       Exactly.

   27. MKMichio Kaku33:17

       (laughs) And we'd never know.

   28. LFLex Fridman33:19

       Uh, o- one of us could be an, uh, an alien.

   29. MKMichio Kaku33:21

       You know, in the zoo, did you know that we, we sometimes have zookeepers that imitate animals?

   30. LFLex Fridman33:26

       Mm-hmm.
4. 45:00 – 1:00:00

   So string theory can…

   1. MKMichio Kaku45:00

      began to realize that he lost his way because he didn't have a physical picture to guide him on the third try. On the first try, he talked about clocks and lightning bolts and meter sticks, and that gave us special relativity, which gave us the atomic bomb. The second great picture was gravity, with balls rolling on curved surfaces, and that gave us the Big Bang, creation of the universe, black holes. On the third try, he missed it. He had no picture at all to guide him. In fact, there's a quote I have where he said, "I'm still looking. I'm still looking for that picture." He never found it. Well, today we think that picture is string theory.

   2. LFLex Fridman45:49

      So string theory can unify gravity and this mysterious thing that Einstein didn't like, which is quantum mechanics, or couldn't, couldn't quite pin down and make sense of?

   3. MKMichio Kaku45:59

      That's right. Mother Nature has two hands, a left hand and a right hand. The left hand is the theory of the small, the right hand is the theory of the big. The theory of the small is the quantum theory, the theory of atoms and quarks, the theory of the big is relativity, the theory of black holes, big bangs. The problem is the left hand does not talk to the right hand.

   4. LFLex Fridman46:22

      (laughs)

   5. MKMichio Kaku46:22

      They hate each other.

   6. LFLex Fridman46:24

      (laughs)

   7. MKMichio Kaku46:24

      The left hand is based on discrete particles. The right hand is based on fl- smooth surfaces. How do you put these two things together (laughs) into a single theory? They hate each other. The greatest minds of our time, the greatest minds of our time worked on this problem and failed. Today, the only one, the only theory that has survived every challenge so far is string theory. That doesn't mean string theory is correct. It could very well be wrong, but right now, it's the only game in town. Some people come up to me and say, "Professor, I don't believe in string theory. Give me an alternative." And I tell them, "There is none. Get used to it."

   8. LFLex Fridman47:06

      (laughs) It's the best theory we got.

   9. MKMichio Kaku47:09

      It's the only theory we have.

   10. LFLex Fridman47:10

       It's the only theory we have. Do you see... You know, w- the strings kind of inspire a view, as did atoms and particles and quarks, but especially strings inspire a view of a universe, uh, as a kind of information processing system, as a, as a computer of sorts. Do you see the universe in this way?

   11. MKMichio Kaku47:34

       No. Some people think, in fact, the whole universe is a computer of some sort-

   12. LFLex Fridman47:39

       Yes.

   13. MKMichio Kaku47:39

       ... and they believe that perhaps everything, therefore, is a simulation.

   14. LFLex Fridman47:44

       Yes.

   15. MKMichio Kaku47:45

       I don't think so. I don't think that there is a super video game where we are nothing but puppets dancing on the screen, and somebody hit the play button, and here we are talking (laughs) about simulations.

   16. LFLex Fridman47:57

       Yeah.

   17. MKMichio Kaku47:57

       No. Even Newtonian mechanics says that the weather, the simple weather is so complicated with trillions upon trillions of atoms that it cannot be simulated in any finite amount of time. In other words, the smallest object which can describe the weather and simulate the weather is the weather itself. The smallest object that can simulate a human is the human itself. And if you add quantum mechanics, (laughs) it becomes almost impossible to simulate it with a conventional computer. 'Cause quantum mechanics deals with all possible universes.... parallel universes, a multiverse of universes. And so the calculation just spirals out of control.

   18. LFLex Fridman48:46

       Mm-hmm.

   19. MKMichio Kaku48:46

       Now, there- at so far, there's only one way where you might be able to argue that the universe is a simulation, and this is still being debated by quantum physicists. It turns out that if you throw the encyclopedia into a black hole, the information is not lost. Eventually, it winds up on the surface of the black hole. Now, the surface of the black hole is finite. In fact, you can calculate the maximum amount of information you can store in a black hole. It's a finite number. It's a calculable number, believe it or not. Now if the universe is made out of black holes, which is the maximum universe you can conceive of, each universe, each black hole has a finite amount of information. Therefore, ergo, da-da, ergo, the total amount of information in a universe is finite. This is mind-boggling. This, I consider mind-boggling, that all possible universes are countable and all possible universes can be summarized in a number, a number you can write on a sheet of paper, all possible universes, and it's a finite number. Now, it's huge. It's, it's a number beyond human imagination. It's a number based on what is called a Planck length. But it's a number.

   20. LFLex Fridman50:03

       (laughs)

   21. MKMichio Kaku50:03

       And so if a computer could ever simulate that number, then it would- the universe would be a simulation.

   22. LFLex Fridman50:10

       So theoretically, because it's- uh, because the amount of information is finite, there- while there necessarily must be able to exist a computer, it just e- from an engineering perspective may be impossible to build.

   23. MKMichio Kaku50:23

       (laughs) Yes.

   24. LFLex Fridman50:24

       So...

   25. MKMichio Kaku50:24

       No, no computer can build a universe capable of simulating the entire universe except the universe itself.

   26. LFLex Fridman50:31

       So that's your intuition, uh, uh, that our universe is very efficient and so there's no shortcuts.

   27. MKMichio Kaku50:38

       Right. Two, two reasons why I believe the universe is not a simulation. First, uh, the calculational numbers are just incredible. No finite, uh, Turing machine can simulate the universe. And second, why would any super intelligent being simulate humans? (laughs) If you think about it, most humans are kinda stupid. I mean, we do all sorts of crazy, stupid things, right?

   28. LFLex Fridman51:00

       Mm-hmm.

   29. MKMichio Kaku51:01

       And we call it art, we call it humor, we call it human civilization. So why should an advanced civilization go through all that effort just to simulate, uh, Saturday Night Live?

   30. LFLex Fridman51:13

       (laughs) Well, that's a funny idea, but it's also ... Do you think it's possible that the act of creation cannot anticipate humans? You simply set the initial conditions and set a bunch of physical laws, and just for the fun of it see what happens. You launch the thing, so you're not necessarily simulating everything, you're not simulating every little bit in, in the same- in the sense that you could predict what's going to happen, but you set the initial conditions, set the laws, and see what kind of fun stuff happens.
5. 1:00:00 – 1:01:06

   (laughs) …

   1. MKMichio Kaku1:00:00

      detonating hydrogen warheads to melt the polar icecaps. And who wants to glow in the dark at night reading the newspaper?

   2. LFLex Fridman1:00:06

      (laughs)

   3. MKMichio Kaku1:00:07

      So I think there are other ways to do it with solar satellites. You can have satellites orbiting Mars that beam sunlight onto the polar icecaps, melting the polar icecaps. Mars has plenty of water, it's just frozen.

   4. LFLex Fridman1:00:24

      I think you, uh, paint an inspiring and a wonderful picture of the future. It's, uh, I think you've inspired and, uh, educated thousands, if not millions. Michio, it's been an honor. Thank you so much for talking today.

   5. MKMichio Kaku1:00:39

      My pleasure.

Episode duration: 1:00:59