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It's Humbling To Realise That The Developmental Gulf Between A Miniscule Ant Colony And Our Modern Human Civilisation Is Only A Tiny Fraction Of The Distance Between A Type 0 And A Type Iii Civilisation - A Factor Of 100 Billion Billion, In Fact. Yet We Have Such A Highly Regarded View Of Ourselves, We Believe A Type Iii Civilisation Would Find Us Irresistible And Would Rush To Make Contact With Us. The Truth Is, However, They May Be As Interested In Communicating With Humans As We Are Keen To Communicate With Ants.

-Michio Kaku

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It's Humbling To Realise

Michio Kaku

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It's Humbling To Realise That The Developmental Gulf Between A Miniscule Ant Colony And Our Modern Human Civilisation Is Only A Tiny Fraction Of The Distance Between A Type 0 And A Type Iii Civilisation - A Factor Of 100 Billion Billion, In Fact. Yet We Have Such A Highly Regarded View Of Ourselves, We Believe A Type Iii Civilisation Would Find Us Irresistible And Would Rush To Make Contact With Us. The Truth Is, However, They May Be As Interested In Communicating With Humans As We Are Keen To Communicate With Ants.

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Science Is About Principles. It's About Concepts. It's Not About Memorizing The Parts Of A Flower. It Helps To Know Some Of These Things, But If That's All You Do That's Not Science, Science Is About Principles And Concepts.

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‎by 2100, Our Destiny Is To Become Like The Gods We Once Worshipped And Feared. But Our Tools Will Not Be Magic Wands And Potions But The Science Of Computers, Nanotechnology, Artificial Intelligence, Biotechnology, And Most Of All, The Quantum Theory.

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Mathematical Equations

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The Best Theory Comes From String Theory, Which States That Dark Matter Is Nothing But A Higher Vibration Of The String. We Are, In Some Sense, The Lowest Octave Of A Vibrating String.

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Impossible Is Relative.

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We Physicists Know That The Brain Is A Milliwatt Transmitter Of Radio. We Have Computers That Can Decipher Much Of This Gibberish Coming From Our Brain And We Could Then Use That To Control Computers.

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Common Sense Has No Place In Quantum Mechanics.

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Our Grandkids Will Lead The Lives Of The Gods Of Mythology. Zeus Could Think And Move Objects Around. We'll Have That Power. Venus Had A Perfect, Timeless Body. We'll Have That, Too. Pegasus Was A Flying Horse. We'll Be Able To Modify Life In The Future.

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In Fact, All Of Us Have A Piece Of Chernobyl In Our Bodies Going Back To 1986.

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I Used To Watch The Old 'flash Gordon' Series On Tv, And It Was Thrilling To Rocket To The Planet Mongo Every Week. But After A While, I Figured Out That Although Flash Got The Girl And All The Accolades, It Was Really Dr. Zarkov Who Made The Series Work. Without Dr. Zarkov, There Could Be No Flash Gordon.

In The Future We'll Be Able To Mentally Contact Anybody We Want, See Whatever Image We Want. And When We Don't Like It, We'll Just Turn It Off.

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Hover Boards, Unfortunately, Currently Violate The Laws Of Physics. Supermagnets Exist, But They Have To Be Cooled To Near Absolute Zero, And They Are Extremely Expensive. So Michael J. Fox's Hover Boards Are Not Possible Until We Invent Room Temperature Super Conductors.

The Brain Weighs Only Three Pounds, Yet It Is The Most Complex Object In The Solar System.

Chemistry Is The Melodies You Can Play On Vibrating Strings.

I Believe We Exist In A Multiverse Of Universes.

Math Is Discovered. To Be Invented Requires An Inventor, But Math Exists Outside Of Humanity. But Ultimately, The Laws Of The Universe Will Be Reduced Down To A Single Equation, Perhaps No More Than One Inch Long. But Leaves The Final Question, Where Did That One Inch Equation Come From?

This Is A Huge Step Toward Unraveling Genesis Chapter 1, Verse 1-what Happened In The Beginning. This Is A Genesis Machine. It'll Help To Recreate The Most Glorious Event In The History Of The Universe.

Even If We Mortgage The Next 100 Years Of Generations Of Human Beings, We Would Not Have Enough Energy To Build A Death Star.

Chances Are, The Aliens Will Not Want To Land On Our Backyard, Or Even The White House Lawn, With Their Flying Saucers. They May Have Tiny, Robotic Self-replicating Probes Which Can Reach Near Light Speed And Can Proliferate Around The Galaxy. So Instead Of The Enterprise And Huge Star Ships, The Aliens Might Actually Send Tiny Probes To Explore The Universe. One Might Land On Our Lawn And We Won't Even Know.

Cesium, Iodine From The Chernobyl Reactor Accident Went Around The World Many Times And Everyone On The Earth Has A Piece Of Chernobyl In Their Bodies, But It's Very Tiny - Too Small To Cause Much Damage.

What We Usually Consider As Impossible Are Simply Engineering Problems... There's No Law Of Physics Preventing Them.

Scientists Are Embarrassed By Science Fiction; They Want To Distance Themselves As Much As Possible. ... I Think There's Nothing To Be Ashamed Of [and That] We Should Take Science Fiction Seriously.

You Can Mass-produce Hardware; You Cannot Mass-produce Software - You Cannot Mass-produce The Human Mind.

In The Beginning God Said, The Four-dimensional Divergence Of An Antisymmetric, Second Rank Tensor Equals Zero, And There Was Light, And It Was Good. And On The Seventh Day He Rested.

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Science Is The Engine Of Prosperity. But You'd Never Know It, Listening To Some Of The Politicians. They're Lawyers And Businessmen, Not Scientists. Lawyers And Businessmen Massage Wealth; They Don't Create It.

There Are Dangers, But Only Dangers If People Don't Understand Where Technology Is Taking Us.

I Often Think That We Are Like The Carp Swimming Contentedly In That Pond. We Live Out Our Lives In Our Own "pond," Confident That Our Universe Consists Of Only The Familiar And The Visible. We Smugly Refuse To Admit That Parallel Universes Or Dimensions Can Exist Next To Ours, Just Beyond Our Grasp. If Our Scientists Invent Concepts Like Forces, It Is Only Because They Cannot Visualize The Invisible Vibrations That Fill The Empty Space Around Us. Some Scientists Sneer At The Mention Of Higher Dimensions Because They Cannot Be Conveniently Measured In The Laboratory.

The Universe Is A Symphony Of Strings, And The Mind Of God That Einstein Eloquently Wrote About For Thirty Years Would Be Cosmic Music Resonating Through Eleven-dimensional Hyper Space.

Scientists Who Have Dedicated Their Lives To Building Machines That Think, Feel That It's Only A Matter Of Time Before Some Form Of Consciousness Is Captured In The Laboratory.

We Have Learned More About The Brain In The Last Fifteen Years Than In All Prior Human History, And The Mind, Once Considered Out Of Reach, Is Finally Assuming Center Stage.

Faust Was This Mythical Figure Who Sold His Soul To The Devil For Unlimited Power. The Japanese Have Made That Faustian Bargain Because They Don't Have Coal, Oil Or Hydro Power.

What Do Oil Company Executives, Vampires And Nasa Bureaucrats All Have In Common? They Fear Solar Energy.

I Hope We Find Evidence Of Dark Matter In The Lab And In Outer Space. This Would Go A Long Way To Proving The Correctness Of String Theory, Which Is What I Do For A Living. That Is My Day Job. So String Theory Is A Potentially Experimentally Verifiable Theory.

One Day When I Was 8 Years Old, Everyone Was Talking In Hushed Tones About A Great Scientist That Had Just Died. His Name Was Albert Einstein.

Some Advice: Keep The Flame Of Curiosity And Wonderment Alive, Even When Studying For Boring Exams. That Is The Well From Which We Scientists Draw Our Nourishment And Energy. And Also, Learn The Math. Math Is The Language Of Nature, So We Have To Learn This Language.

What Is The Universe? The Universe Is A Symphony Of Vibrating Strings...we Are Nothing But Melodies. We Are Nothing But Cosmic Music Played Out On Vibrating Strings And Membranes.

To Understand The Difficulty Of Predicting The Next 100 Years, We Have To Appreciate The Difficulty That The People Of 1900 Had In Predicting The World Of 2000.

The Most Complex Object In The Known Universe: Brain, Only Uses 20 Watts Of Power. It Would Require A Nuclear Power Plant To Energize A Computer The Size Of A City Block To Mimic Your Brain, And Your Brain Does It With Just 20 Watts. So If Someone Calls You A Dim Bulb, That's A Compliment.

Growing New Organs Of The Body As They Wear Out, Extending The Human Lifespan? What's Not To Like? Then In The Last Phase Of This Transition People Begin To Realize, Hey, I Thought Of It Already - This Is Something That Everyone Can Enjoy.

When I Get Bored, Or Get Stuck On An Equation, I Like To Go Ice Skating, But It Makes You Forget Your Problem. Then You Can Tackle The Problem With A Fresh New Insight. Einstein Liked To Play The Violin To Relax. Every Physicist Likes To Have A Past Time. Mine Is Ice Skating.

Reality Has Always Proved To Be Much More Sophisticated And Subtle Than Any Preconceived Philosophy.

Until Computers And Robots Make Quantum Advances, They Basically Remain Adding Machines: Capable Only Of Doing Things In Which All The Variables Are Controlled And Predictable. Robots Are Bad At Pattern Recognition And Certainly At Common Sense. That's Why Computers Can Beat Humans In Chess But Can't Have Even A Basic Conversation With A Six-year-old.

Physics Is Often Stranger Than Science Fiction, And I Think Science Fiction Takes Its Cues From Physics: Higher Dimensions, Wormholes, The Warping Of Space And Time, Stuff Like That.

Some People Are A Little Bit Afraid About The Future Because They See All These Gadgets And Gizmos Coming Down The Pike And They Think They're Too Old To Learn All This New Stuff. But Eventually They Begin To Realize, 'hey, Some Of This Stuff Is Useful.'

The Next Big Accelerator Might Be The Ilc In Japan, A Linear Collider Which Might Be Able To Probe The Boundaries Of String Theory. So We Physicists Have To Learn How To Engage The Public So That Taxpayers Money Is Used To Explore The Nature Of The Universe.

Think Of All The Nonsense You Had To Learn In Psychology Courses. None Of Which Was Testable. None Of Which Was Measurable. We Had Behaviorism, Freudian Psychology, All Of These Theories That You Learn In Psychology. Totally Untestable. Now, We Can Test It, Because Physics Allows Us To Calculate Energy Flows In The Brain.

After That Cancellation [of The Superconducting Super Collider In Texas, After $2 Billion Had Been Spent On It], We Physicists Learned That We Have To Sing For Our Supper. ... The Cold War Is Over. You Can't Simply Say "russia!" To Congress, And They Whip Out Their Checkbook And Say, "how Much?" We Have To Tell The People Why This Atom-smasher Is Going To Benefit Their Lives.

It Would Be Great If We Had Our Own Personal Force Fields. Just Imagine Creating Your Own Architecture In Your Room. Buildings. You Wouldn't Have To Spend All That Time Saving Your Money For That Second House. You'd Simply Push A Button And Have As Many Houses As You Want.

I Would Like To Believe That Crop Circles Are Evidence Of Visitation. But There Have Been Too Many People Who Have Admitted To Creating These Crop Circles, And Too Many People Who Have Shown How To Make One On Tv Programs, So I Have My Doubts.

Once Again, My Colleague Stephen Hawking Has Upset The Apple Cart. The Event Horizon Surrounding A Black Hole Was Once Though To Be An Imaginary Sphere. But Recent Theories Indicate That It May Actually Be Physical, Maybe Even A Sphere Of Fire. But I Don't Trust Any Of These Calculations Until We Have A Full-blown String Theory Calculation, Since Einstein's Theory By Itself Is Incomplete.

In General, The Larger The Breeding Population, The Slower The Rate Of Evolution.

I Want To See Us To Explore Outer Space. But I Want To Do It Safely, Without The Loss Of Human Life, And Democratically: Where Is The Free-wheeling Debate On This Question? Only One Force Can Stop This Mission: The Will Of The American People. They Have Not Been Asked. Do They Want To Endanger Their Loved Ones, Their Industry With This Launch? One Force Is More Powerful Than Plutonium, The Spirit Of The American People United.

Sooner Or Later, We Will Face A Catastrophic Threat From Space. Of All The Possible Threats, Only A Gigantic Asteroid Hit Can Destroy The Entire Planet. If We Prepare Now, We Better Our Odds Of Survival. The Dinosaurs Never Knew What Hit Them.

If All Our Common-sense Notions About The Universe Were Correct, Then Science Would Have Solved The Secrets Of The Universe Thousands Of Years Ago. The Purpose Of Science Is To Peel Back The Layer Of The Appearance Of The Objects To Reveal Their Underlying Nature. In Fact, If Appearance And Essence Were The Same Thing, There Would Be No Need For Science.

Our Best Shot At Finding Life In Our Solar System Might Be To Look At The Moons Of Jupiter And Saturn. Mars, Increasingly, Looks Like A Dead Planet. But The Oceans Beneath The Ice Cover Of The Moons Of Jupiter And Saturn May Actually Have More Liquid Water Than The Oceans Of Earth.

Computer Chips Will Cost About A Penny. That's The Cost Of Scrap Paper. The Internet Will Be Basically For Free And It Will Be Inside Our Contact Lens. When We Blink, We Will Go Online. When We See Somebody That We Don't Recognize, Our Contact Lens Will Identify Who They Are, Print Out Their Biography In Your Contact Lens And Translate, If They're Speaking Chinese, Into English With Subtitles As They Speak.

I Believe That Science Is The Engine Of Prosperity, That If You Look Around At The Wealth Of Civilization Today, It's The Wealth That Comes From Science.

I Would Hope That The Publicity Around The Higgs Boson Would Increase The Public Awareness Of Physics And Cosmology.

I Got A Four Year Scholarship To Harvard, And While I Was There They Wanted To Groom Me For Work In The Star Wars Program Designing Weapons Ignited By Hydrogen Bombs. I Didn't Want To Do That. I Thought About How Many Scientists Had Died In World War Ii.

The Media, Of Course, Loves To Make Claims About The Fountain Of Youth. Don't Believe It. No One Has It. But We're Getting Close.

We're Headed For What Is Called Type 1 Civilization, Planetary Civilization. Type 2 Would Be Stellar Civilization, Like Star Trek. Type 3 Civilization Would Be Galactic, Like Star Wars. We Are Type 0. We Get Our Energy From Dead Plants, Oil And Coal. But The Question Is: Will We Make It? Will We Make The Transition From Type 0 To Type 1? It's Not Clear.

No One Knows When A Robot Will Approach Human Intelligence, But I Suspect It Will Be Late In The 21st Century. Will They Be Dangerous? Possibly. So I Suggest We Put A Chip In Their Brain To Shut Them Off If They Have Murderous Thoughts.

Combining Quantum Entanglement With Wormholes Yields Mind Boggling Results About Black Holes. But I Don't Trust Them Until We Have A Theory Of Everything Which Can Combine Quantum Effects With General Relativity. I.e. We Need To Have A Full Blown String Theory Resolve This Sticky Question.

"did God Have A Mother?" Children, When Told That God Made The Heavens And The Earth, Innocently Ask Whether God Had A Mother. This Deceptively Simple Question Has Stumped The Elders Of The Church And Embarrassed The Finest Theologians, Precipitating Some Of The Thorniest Theological Debates Over The Centuries. All The Great Religions Have Elaborate Mythologies Surrounding The Divine Act Of Creation, But None Of Them Adequately Confronts The Logical Paradoxes Inherent In The Question That Even Children Ask.

In The 1950s, We Had All These B-grade Science-fiction Movies. The Point Was To Scare The Public And Get Them To Buy Popcorn. No Attempt Was Made To Create Movies That Were Somewhat Inherent To The Truth.

Already From Your Own Cells Scientists Can Grow Skin, Cartilage, Noses, Blood Vessels, Bladders And Windpipes. In The Future, Scientists Will Grow More Complex Organs, Like Livers And Kidneys. The Phrase 'organ Failure' Will Disappear.

String Theory Is Based On The Simple Idea That All The Four Forces Of The Universe: Gravity, The Electromagnetic Force And The Two Nuclear Forces, Can Be Viewed, As Music.

I Think A Colony In Space Will Take Much Longer Than Sci Fiction Writers Think. It Costs $10,000 To Put A Pound Of Anything Into Near Earth Orbit. That Is Your Weight In Gold. It Costs About $100,000 A Pound To Put You On The Moon. And It Costs $1,000,000 A Pound To Put You On Mars.

You Cannot Create New Science Unless You Realise Where The Old Science Leaves Off And New Science Begins, And Science Fiction Forces Us To Confront This.

Science Fiction

We Have The Media, Which Is Such A Waste In The Sense That You Can Actually Feel Your Iq Get Lower As You Watch Tv.

Scientific Revolutions, Almost By Definition, Defy Common Sense.

In Physics, One Of The Most Exciting Areas Is In Nanotech. With Computers Exhausting The Power Of Silicon, Silicon Valley Could Become A Rust Belt, Unless We Can Find Replacements, Such As Quantum Computers And Molecular Computers. To Be A Leader In Any Field, One Has To Have A Great Imagination. Sure, We Have To Know The Basics And Fundamentals. But Beyond That, We Have To Let Our Imagination Soar.

The Strength And Weakness Of Physicists Is That We Believe In What We Can Measure. And If We Can't Measure It, Then We Say It Probably Doesn't Exist. And That Closes Us Off To An Enormous Amount Of Phenomena That We May Not Be Able To Measure Because They Only Happened Once. For Example, The Big Bang. ... That's One Reason Why They Scoffed At Higher Dimensions For So Many Years. Now We Realize That There's No Alternative.

Beyond Work And Love, I Would Add Two Other Ingredients That Give Meaning To Life. First, To Fulfill Whatever Talents We Are Born With. However Blessed We Are By Fate With Different Abilities And Strengths, We Should Try To Develop Them To The Fullest, Rather Than Allow Them To Atrophy And Decay. ... Second, We Should Try To Leave The World A Better Place Than When We Entered It.

A Soul Might Very Well Exist, But We, As Physicists, Try To Measure And Quantify Everything. So Far, No One Has Been Able To Create An Experiment To Do This For The Soul. Efforts Have Been Made To Weigh The Body After Death, But Each Time We Find No Evidence Of A Soul. So A Soul May Very Well Exist, But It Is Not A Testable Theory.

The Energy Necessary To Create A Wormhole Or To Wrap Time Into Nuts Is Incredible. It's Not For Us. It's Maybe For Our Descendants Who Have Mastered The Energy Of This Technology. So If One Day, Somebody Knocks On Your Door And Claims To Be Your Great Great Great Great Granddaughter, Don't Slam The Door.

I'm A Physicist, And We Have Something Called Moore's Law, Which Says Computer Power Doubles Every 18 Months. So Every Christmas, We More Or Less Assume That Our Toys And Appliances Are More Or Less Twice As Powerful As The Previous Christmas.

Futurism Today Is Led By Science-fiction Writers, By Sociologists, By Historians. Now, I Have Nothing Against Them. I'm Sure They Do Great Work. But They're Not Scientists. They're Clueless.

When You Come Up With A Theory, You Fall In Love With The Beauty The Simplicity And Elegance Of It. But Then You Have To Get A Sheet Of Paper And Pencil And Crack Out All The Details. Hundreds And Hundreds Of Pages. Because You Have To Prove It.

Falling In Love

There Are Many Examples Of Old, Incorrect Theories That Stubbornly Persisted, Sustained Only By The Prestige Of Foolish But Well-connected Scientists... Many Of These Theories Have Been Killed Off Only When Some Decisive Experiment Exposed Their Incorrectness... Thus The Yeoman Work In Any Science, And Especially Physics, Is Done By The Experimentalist, Who Must Keep The Theoreticians Honest.

Today, Your Cell Phone Has More Computer Power Than All Of Nasa Back In 1969, When It Placed Two Astronauts On The Moon. Video Games, Which Consume Enormous Amounts Of Computer Power To Simulate 3-d Situations, Use More Computer Power Than Mainframe Computers Of The Previous Decade. The Sony Playstation Of Today, Which Costs $300, Has The Power Of A Military Supercomputer Of 1997, Which Cost Millions Of Dollars.

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