Michio Kaku: Space Travel and Colonization of Mars | AI Podcast Clips
00:00:00.000 | - When do you think the first human will step foot on Mars?
00:00:05.000 | - I think it's a good chance in the 2030s
00:00:08.760 | that we will be on Mars.
00:00:10.720 | In fact, there's no physics reason why we can't do it.
00:00:14.920 | It's an engineering problem.
00:00:16.760 | It's a very difficult and dangerous engineering problem,
00:00:19.920 | but it is an engineering problem.
00:00:22.040 | And in my book, "Future of Humanity,"
00:00:24.040 | I even speculate beyond that,
00:00:26.520 | that by the end of the century,
00:00:28.640 | we'll probably have the first starships.
00:00:31.160 | The first starships will not look like the Enterprise
00:00:33.600 | at all.
00:00:34.520 | There'll probably be small computer chips
00:00:37.080 | that are fired by laser beams with parachutes.
00:00:40.240 | And like what Stephen Hawking advocated,
00:00:43.840 | the Breakthrough Starshot program could send ships,
00:00:46.920 | ships to the nearby stars,
00:00:48.320 | traveling at 20% the speed of light,
00:00:50.840 | reaching Alpha Centauri in about 20 years' time.
00:00:54.520 | Beyond that, we should have fusion power.
00:00:58.340 | Fusion power is, in some sense,
00:01:01.120 | one of the ultimate sources of energy,
00:01:03.360 | but it's unstable.
00:01:05.160 | And we don't have fusion power today.
00:01:08.040 | Now, why is that?
00:01:09.160 | First of all, stars form almost for free.
00:01:11.640 | You get a bunch of gas large enough, it becomes a star.
00:01:15.000 | I mean, you don't even have to do anything to it,
00:01:17.360 | and it becomes a star.
00:01:18.920 | Why is fusion so difficult to put on the Earth?
00:01:22.840 | Because in outer space, stars are monopoles.
00:01:25.520 | They are poles, single poles that are spherically symmetric.
00:01:30.160 | And it's very easy to get spherically symmetric
00:01:32.800 | configurations of gas to compress into a star.
00:01:36.600 | It just happens naturally all by itself.
00:01:39.200 | The problem is magnetism is bipolar.
00:01:42.220 | You have a North Pole and a South Pole.
00:01:44.640 | And it's like trying to squeeze a long balloon.
00:01:47.720 | Take a long balloon and try to squeeze it.
00:01:50.400 | You squeeze one side, it bulges out the other side.
00:01:53.640 | Well, that's the problem with fusion machines.
00:01:56.000 | We use magnetism with a North Pole and a South Pole
00:01:58.880 | to squeeze gas.
00:02:00.920 | And all sorts of anomalies and horrible configurations
00:02:04.600 | can take place because we're not squeezing something uniformly
00:02:08.880 | like in a star.
00:02:10.360 | Stars, in some sense, are for free.
00:02:12.600 | Fusion on the Earth is very difficult.
00:02:16.560 | But I think it's inevitable.
00:02:18.400 | And it'll eventually give us unlimited power from seawater.
00:02:22.440 | So seawater will be the ultimate source
00:02:24.640 | of energy for the planet Earth.
00:02:26.600 | Why?
00:02:27.120 | What's the intuition there?
00:02:28.200 | Because we'll extract hydrogen from seawater,
00:02:30.840 | burn hydrogen in a fusion reactor
00:02:33.200 | to give us unlimited energy without the meltdown,
00:02:37.640 | without the nuclear waste.
00:02:39.400 | Why do we have meltdowns?
00:02:41.120 | We have meltdowns because in the fission reactors,
00:02:43.280 | every time you split the uranium atom, you get nuclear waste.
00:02:46.160 | Tons of it.
00:02:47.120 | 30 tons of nuclear waste per reactor per year.
00:02:52.560 | And it's hot.
00:02:53.880 | It's hot for thousands, millions of years.
00:02:56.640 | That's why we have meltdowns.
00:02:58.600 | But you see, the waste product of a fusion reactor
00:03:01.040 | is helium gas.
00:03:02.920 | Helium gas is actually commercially valuable.
00:03:05.280 | You can make money selling helium gas.
00:03:07.800 | And so the waste product of a fusion reactor
00:03:10.320 | is helium, not nuclear waste that we find
00:03:14.000 | in a commercial fission plant.
00:03:16.200 | And that controlling, mastering and controlling fusion
00:03:19.760 | allows us to convert this into a type one,
00:03:23.840 | I guess, civilization, right?
00:03:25.600 | Yeah, probably the backbone of a type one civilization
00:03:28.720 | will be fusion power.
00:03:31.160 | We, by the way, are type zero.
00:03:33.160 | We don't even rate on this scale.
00:03:35.000 | We get our energy from dead plants, for God's sake,
00:03:37.480 | oil and coal.
00:03:39.000 | But we are about 100 years from being type one.
00:03:41.720 | Get a calculator.
00:03:43.160 | In fact, Carl Sagan calculated that we
00:03:45.360 | are about 0.7, fairly close to a 1.0.
00:03:51.040 | For example, what is the internet?
00:03:54.120 | The internet is the beginning of the first type one technology
00:03:57.680 | to enter into our century.
00:03:59.480 | The first planetary technology is the internet.
00:04:02.800 | What is the language of type one?
00:04:05.240 | On the internet already, English and Mandarin Chinese
00:04:08.800 | are the most dominant languages on the internet.
00:04:12.280 | And what about the culture?
00:04:14.760 | We're seeing a type one sports, soccer, the Olympics,
00:04:20.120 | type one music, youth culture, rock and roll, rap music,
00:04:24.280 | type one fashion, Gucci, Chanel, a type one economy,
00:04:28.240 | the European Union, NAFTA, what have you.
00:04:30.960 | So we're beginning to see the beginnings of a type one
00:04:34.600 | culture and a type one civilization.
00:04:37.640 | And inevitably, it will spread beyond this planet.
00:04:41.400 | So you talked about sending at 20% the speed of light
00:04:46.120 | on a chip into Alpha Centauri.
00:04:50.200 | But in a slightly nearer term, what
00:04:53.320 | do you think about the idea when we still have to send
00:04:55.680 | biological, our biological bodies,
00:04:58.480 | the colonization of planets, colonization of Mars?
00:05:01.960 | Do you see us becoming a two planet species ever
00:05:06.800 | or anytime soon?
00:05:08.520 | Well, just remember the dinosaurs
00:05:11.720 | did not have a space program.
00:05:14.160 | And that's why they're not here today.
00:05:15.840 | How come there are no dinosaurs in this room today?
00:05:19.000 | Because they didn't have a space program.
00:05:21.320 | We do have a space program, which means that we
00:05:24.400 | have an insurance policy.
00:05:26.160 | Now, I don't think we should bankrupt the Earth
00:05:28.480 | or deplete the Earth to go to Mars.
00:05:30.240 | That's too expensive and not practical.
00:05:32.760 | But we need a settlement, a settlement on Mars
00:05:35.960 | in case something bad happens to the planet Earth.
00:05:39.120 | And that means we have to terraform Mars.
00:05:41.840 | Now, to terraform Mars, if we could raise the temperature
00:05:44.760 | of Mars by 6 degrees, 6 degrees, then the polar ice caps
00:05:50.560 | begin to melt, releasing water vapor.
00:05:53.920 | Water vapor is the greenhouse gas.
00:05:56.080 | It causes even more melting of the ice caps.
00:05:58.840 | So it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.
00:06:02.600 | It feeds on itself.
00:06:04.360 | It becomes autocatalytic.
00:06:06.760 | And so once you hit 6 degrees, rising of the temperature
00:06:10.040 | on Mars by 6 degrees, it takes off.
00:06:12.680 | And we melt the polar ice caps.
00:06:14.760 | And liquid water once again flows
00:06:18.000 | in the rivers, the canals, the channels,
00:06:21.280 | and the oceans of Mars.
00:06:23.880 | Mars once had an ocean, we think,
00:06:25.320 | about the size of the United States.
00:06:27.600 | And so that is a possibility.
00:06:29.720 | Now, how do we get there?
00:06:31.520 | How do we raise the temperature of Mars by 6 degrees?
00:06:34.440 | Elon Musk would like to detonate hydrogen warheads
00:06:37.080 | on the polar ice caps.
00:06:38.320 | Yes.
00:06:39.080 | Well, I'm not sure about that, because we
00:06:42.800 | don't know that much about the effects of detonating
00:06:46.200 | hydrogen warheads to melt the polar ice caps.
00:06:48.920 | And who wants to glow in the dark at night
00:06:50.960 | reading the newspaper?
00:06:52.640 | So I think there are other ways to do it with solar satellites.
00:06:57.400 | You can have satellites orbiting Mars
00:06:59.280 | that beam sunlight onto the polar ice caps,
00:07:03.080 | melting the polar ice caps.
00:07:04.880 | Mars has plenty of water.
00:07:06.840 | It's just frozen.
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