Michio Kaku: We'll Make Contact with Aliens in This Century | AI Podcast Clips
00:00:00.000 | - You've mentioned that we just might make contact
00:00:04.400 | with aliens or at least hear from them within the century.
00:00:08.780 | Can you elaborate on your intuition behind that optimism?
00:00:12.000 | - Well, this is pure speculation, of course.
00:00:15.200 | - Of course.
00:00:16.020 | - But given the fact that we've already identified
00:00:18.240 | 4,000 exoplanets orbiting other stars,
00:00:21.760 | and we have a census of the Milky Way galaxy
00:00:24.600 | for the first time, we know that on average,
00:00:27.960 | every single star on average has a planet going around it,
00:00:32.680 | and about one fifth or so of them
00:00:34.760 | have Earth-sized planets going around them.
00:00:38.280 | So just do the math.
00:00:40.000 | We're talking about out of 100 billion stars
00:00:43.180 | in the Milky Way galaxy, we're talking about billions
00:00:46.880 | of potential Earth-sized planets.
00:00:49.960 | And to believe that we're the only one
00:00:52.800 | is, I think, rather ridiculous, given the odds.
00:00:56.200 | And how many galaxies are there?
00:00:58.640 | Within sight of the Hubble Space Telescope,
00:01:01.600 | there are about 100 billion galaxies.
00:01:04.920 | So do the math.
00:01:06.720 | How many stars are there in the visible universe?
00:01:09.520 | 100 billion galaxies times 100 billion stars per galaxy,
00:01:14.520 | we're talking about a number beyond human imagination.
00:01:20.760 | And to believe that we're the only ones,
00:01:22.520 | I think, is rather ridiculous.
00:01:25.240 | - So you've talked about different types of,
00:01:29.200 | type zero, one, two, three, four, and five,
00:01:31.520 | even, of the Kardashev scale
00:01:33.320 | of the different kind of civilizations.
00:01:36.480 | What do you think it takes, if it is indeed
00:01:40.620 | a ridiculous notion that we're alone in the universe,
00:01:43.240 | what do you think it takes to reach out,
00:01:45.760 | first to reach out through communication and connect?
00:01:49.700 | - Well, first of all, we have to understand
00:01:51.360 | the level of sophistication of an alien life form,
00:01:55.760 | if we make contact with them.
00:01:57.520 | I think in this century, we'll probably pick up signals,
00:02:01.200 | signals from an extraterrestrial civilization.
00:02:04.440 | We'll pick up their "I love Lucy"
00:02:06.300 | and their "Leave it to Beaver,"
00:02:08.320 | just ordinary day-to-day transmissions that they emit.
00:02:12.640 | And the first thing we want to do is to, A,
00:02:15.240 | decipher their language, of course,
00:02:17.280 | but B, figure out at what level they are advanced
00:02:22.000 | on the Kardashev scale.
00:02:24.120 | I'm a physicist.
00:02:25.600 | We rank things by two parameters, energy and information.
00:02:30.600 | That's how we rank black holes, that's how we rank stars,
00:02:34.360 | that's how we rank civilizations in outer space.
00:02:37.640 | So a type one civilization is capable
00:02:41.920 | of harnessing planetary power.
00:02:44.560 | They control the weather, for example.
00:02:47.000 | Earthquakes, volcanoes,
00:02:48.320 | they can modify the course of geological events,
00:02:51.640 | sort of like Flash Gordon or Buck Rogers.
00:02:55.440 | Type two would be stellar.
00:02:58.160 | They play with stars, entire stars.
00:03:02.660 | They use the entire energy output of a star,
00:03:05.480 | sort of like Star Trek.
00:03:07.600 | The Federation of Planets have colonized the nearby stars.
00:03:11.680 | So a type two would be somewhat similar to Star Trek.
00:03:16.120 | Type three would be galactic.
00:03:17.680 | They roam the galactic space lanes.
00:03:20.880 | And type three would be like Star Wars,
00:03:24.720 | a galactic civilization.
00:03:26.920 | Now, one day I was giving this talk in London
00:03:29.360 | at the planetarium there,
00:03:30.960 | and the little boy comes up to me and he says,
00:03:33.080 | "Professor, you're wrong.
00:03:35.760 | "You're wrong, there's type four."
00:03:38.040 | And I told him, "Look, kid,
00:03:40.320 | "there are planets, stars, and galaxies.
00:03:43.960 | "That's it, folks."
00:03:45.760 | And he kept persisting and saying,
00:03:47.840 | "No, there's type four, the power of the continuum."
00:03:52.840 | And I thought about it for a moment,
00:03:54.600 | and I said to myself,
00:03:55.560 | "Is there an extra galactic source of energy,
00:03:59.200 | "the continuum of Star Trek?"
00:04:01.560 | And the answer is yes, there could be a type four,
00:04:05.120 | and that's dark energy.
00:04:07.080 | We now know that 73% of the energy of the universe
00:04:12.080 | is dark energy.
00:04:14.600 | Dark matter represents maybe 23% or so,
00:04:17.680 | and we only represent 4%.
00:04:20.080 | We're the oddballs.
00:04:21.640 | And so you begin to realize that,
00:04:23.200 | yeah, there could be type four, maybe even type five.
00:04:26.800 | - So type four, you're saying being able to harness
00:04:30.320 | sort of like dark energy,
00:04:32.400 | something that permeates the entire universe.
00:04:34.200 | So be able to plug into the entire universe
00:04:38.040 | as a source of energy.
00:04:39.120 | - That's right, and dark energy
00:04:40.880 | is the energy of the Big Bang.
00:04:42.720 | It's why the galaxies are being pushed apart.
00:04:45.960 | It's the energy of nothing.
00:04:47.760 | The more nothing you have,
00:04:49.600 | the more dark energy that's repulsive.
00:04:52.420 | And so the acceleration of the universe is accelerating
00:04:55.980 | because the more you have, the more you can have.
00:04:59.600 | And that, of course, is by definition an exponential curve.
00:05:02.800 | It's called the de Sitter expansion,
00:05:04.760 | and that's the current state of the universe.
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