This content is a lecture by theoretical physicist Michio Kaku, who explores the trajectory of future technological advancements and their potential impact on society, drawing parallels between science fiction and scientific possibility.
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- I am delighted, really delighted,
that we have such a wonderful turnout
on this miserable day that will mark
the Yankees' win of the first game of the Series!
(audience cheers and applauds)
For those of you who are new to the event,
let me tell you a little bit
about the Presidential Lecture Series.
We started this series in the year 2001
and the purpose of the lecture series
is to showcase the tremendous talent of the faculty
of the City University of New York
and the formula is very simple,
in the fall semester,
we invite one of the distinguished professors
of the City University of New York
or some national figure that has something to do
with the City University of New York,
and in the spring, we invite one of our own
to be the Presidential Lecture speaker.
We have a committee of faculty
which is composed of Dr. Shina Gillespie,
Dr. Peter Gray, Dr. Kenneth Pearl,
and Dr. Sasan Karimi, and if they're here,
please stand up so we can recognize you,
those of you who are here.
I know Sasan is here.
(audience applauds)
These are the individuals who bear the brunt
of the consequences of asking the wrong speaker
to come and speak to you,
but they haven't missed yet,
and frankly, I think that today,
we have one of the most popular,
the first time that we have a television star
among our midst and the first time,
well, maybe not the first time
because every Academic Senate,
you have one of those, but the first time
we have one of the recognized 100 brightest people
in New York City by New York Magazine.
This is Professor Kaku
who is Distinguished Professor at City College
and he is a theoretical physicist
and the Henry Semat Professor
at the City College of New York
and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.
He has taught for over 30 years,
and he's a graduate of community College of Harvard.
(audience laughing and chattering)
(audience applauds) You got it now, right?
And now he's at the Harvard of community colleges,
Queensburough, and he's earned his doctorate
obviously in Physics from the University
of California at Berkeley.
He's one of the founders of the string field theory.
Now you know about string theory.
Maybe some of you may know some about it,
but I know that all of you know about Star Trek
and all of you know about beam me up, Scotty,
and all of you know about energy fields,
so you all know a little bit about string theory.
I really personally believe that Dr. Kaku
is a contender and eventually
will be a winner of the Nobel Prize in Physics
because of his work, and I hope that that happens.
(audience applauds)
You wanna have the pleasure of seeing him
in person today, but if you wanna see him on television,
on December 1st, he starts a new series
on the Syfy Channel called, I'm sorry,
I don't know the title of the series,
but he starts a series on December 1st on the Syfy Channel
and I hope that you will see it.
I was very interested in looking over the book,
The Physics of the Impossible,
because it addresses how science fiction technology
will be something real in the future
and you can think about the possibilities.
Think about somebody in the year 1901
thinking about going from New York
to Europe in five hours.
Think about the impact of technology,
and I'm certain he's gonna talk about all of that,
but use a little bit extrapolation
and look at what can happen in the future,
and then a little bit to the Star Treks
of the world and see how somebody
has imagined what can happen in the future,
but that's all in our imagination.
Let's talk to an expert,
let's talk to somebody who knows the theory
behind all of that technology.
Please, please help me welcome
Dr. Kaku, please.
(audience applauds)
- Thank you very much.
(audience applauds)
(faint speaking)
Thank you very much.
After such a great introduction,
I can't wait to hear the speaker myself.
(audience laughs)
Let me also say, I have an admission to make.
I have to confess that yeah, New York Magazine
voted me as one of the most 100 Smartest People
in New York, however, in all fairness,
I have to say that Madonna also made that same list,
(audience laughs)
so how accurate could that list be?
Now today, I'm gonna talk about the future,
20, 30, 40 years into the future.
I've had the privilege to interview
300 of the world's top scientists.
Now I'm a physicist.
We're the ones who invented the laser,
we invented the transistor,
we created the electronic computer,
we created television, radio, microwaves, MRI,
we created the internet,
we wrote the World Wide Web,
and whenever we create something,
we predict how our creation
is gonna proliferate through society.
When we helped to invent the internet,
one physicist made a prediction.
He said that the internet will become a forum
of high culture, high art, and high society.
(audience laughs) Well today, we know
that 5% of the internet is pornography,
but that's because teenage boys log on to the internet,
not anyone here.
Just wait till the grandmas and grandpas
log on to the internet.
Then 50% of the internet will be pornography.
(audience laughs)
Let me also say that when I was just a little bit younger
than you guys, I was fascinated by physics.
For me, physics was the way to go,
so when I was in high school, I went into my mom
and I said, "Mom, can I have permission
"to build an at atom smasher in the garage,
"A 2.3 million electron volt,
"electron particle accelerator?"
And my mom looked at me and said, "Sure, why not?
"And don't forget to take out the garbage."
So, I took out the garbage and I went to Westinghouse
and I got 400 pounds of transformer steel,
22 miles of copper wire,
and I built a 2.3 million electron volt
electron accelerator in my garage.
The magnetic field was 10,000 gauss.
If you walked by the magnets,
it was powerful enough to pull the fillings
out of your teeth if you got too close to my magnets.
Finally, it was ready.
I plugged it into the wall socket.
It consumed six kilowatts of raw, electrical power,
I can hear the crackling of all the capacitors,
and then I heard this pop, pop, pop sound
and the whole house was plunged in darkness.
I had blown out every single fuse in the house.
My poor mom.
She come home from a hard day's work,
the lights would flicker and die,
and then she'd say, "Where is the fusebox?"
And then she'd say, "Why couldn't I have a son
"who plays baseball?
(audience laughs) "Maybe if I buy him
"a basketball and for God's sake,
"why does he have to build these machines in the garage?
"And hey, why can't he find a nice Japanese girlfriend?
"Why does he build these machines in the garage?"
Well, that machine got me into Harvard
and began my career as a physicist.
So today, I'm gonna give you a guided tour of the future.
However, there is a danger that sometimes
we physicists know too much.
Let me tell you a story, and then I'll begin.
Over 200 years ago,
we had the great French Revolution,
and one day, there were three gentlemen
about to lose their head to the guillotine.
There was a priest, a lawyer,
and a theoretical physicist just like me
about to have our heads cut off.
Well, they put the priest's head on the chopping block.
Now they asked him, "Do you have any last words
"before we cut your priestly head off?"
And the priest said, "Yes, yes."
He said, "God, God from above,
"He shall certainly set me free."
While all eyes were on the blade,
they raised the blade.
The blade came down, swish!
And it stopped right before it hit
the neck of the priest.
Well, the mob had never seen this before.
They were shocked!
They said, "God has spoken, let the priest go.
"And now let's see about the lawyer."
Yes, the lawyer.
Now the bloodlust was starting.
Yes, the lawyer.
They put the lawyer's head in the chopping block
and they asked him, "Do you have any last words
"before we cut your lawyerly head off?"
And he said, "Yes!"
He said, "Maybe the spirit of justice,
"yes, justice and mercy, she shall set me free."
Well, they raised the blade.
The blade came down, swish!
And it stopped right before it hit the neck of the lawyer.
Well, this time, the crowed went crazy.
They said, "Let there be a national holiday.
"Today, God has spoken.
"Justice, mercy have spoken today!
"And now let's see about that theoretical physicist."
(audience laughs)
Well, they put the physicist's head on the chopping block
and they asked him, "Do you have any last words
"before we cut your head off?"
And he said, "Yeah, yeah, I got some last words."
And he said, "I don't now too much about God
"and I know even less about the law,
"but I do know one thing,
"if you look up, you'll see that the rope
"is stuck on the pulley."
(audience laughs)
And then he said, "If you remove the rope,
"the blade should come down real good!"
Big mistake, big mistake.
Well, the rope came down, the blade came down,
and the poor physicist's head came down
and the moral of the story is,
sometimes we physicists have to know
when to keep our mouths shut, okay?
(audience laughs)
But nonetheless, let me give you a guided tour
through the future because I've had a chance
to interview over 300 of the world's top scientists.
These are the people inventing the future.
First of all, let me say that if you get cable television,
you get the Science Channel.
On the Science Channel, starting December 1st,
as it was mentioned, my book,
Physics of the Impossible is gonna be appearing
as a weekly TV series that I'll be hosting.
Watch for it December 1st every week after that.
They call is Sci Fi Science,
colon, Physics of the Impossible.
- It looks awesome! - So, let's talk about that.
First of all, how do we scientists know
what's gonna happen 10, 20 years in the future?
How could we be so confident?
Well, first of all, this is Moore's Law.
On a log chart, you see that computer power
doubles every 18 months.
Now what does that mean?
This means that when you get a birthday card
in the mail, you open it up and it's a chip in it
and the chip sings.
♪ Happy birthday to you ♪
Well, that chip has more computer power
than all the Allied forces of 1945.
Hitler, Eisenhower, Churchill would've killed
to get that chip, and what do you do with that chip?
You throw it away in the garbage.
Or look at this chart.
You'll see that way back in the 1960s,
NASA had almost no computer power.
Your cellphone today, one cellphone today,
has more computer power, according to this chart,
than all of NASA when they put two men on the moon.
This means that if cars obeyed Moore's Law,
cars today would cost 10 cents.
This means that when you park the car,
you wouldn't even bother to put a quarter in the meter.
The meter costs more than the car,
so you just park the car and walk away from it.
So, what does this mean?
This means that by 2020,
computer chips will cost about a penny.
That is the cost of scrap paper,
so we now know the future of the computer.
The future of the computer will be everywhere and nowhere,
hidden in the walls, hidden in the fabric of our life
just like electricity is, everywhere and nowhere.
And this is the internet.
We wrote the World Wide Web.
The World Wide Web was written by a physicist
to keep track of subatomic particles
and you can see here that the internet
corresponds to prosperity.
Where there is the internet,
there is prosperity, there's commerce, science, finance.
Where there's no internet, there is poverty.
So, one thing that we physicists do
is we create something
and then we simply give it away for free.
So, how will you communicate
with the internet in the future?
These are glasses that have full internet capability.
You can download any website, any movie,
do emails from these things,
and they will also recognize people's faces.
How many times have you bumped into somebody
on the street and you say to yourself,
who is this person?
Jim, John, Jake, I know this person.
In the future, your glasses will say,
it's Jim, stupid, remember?
(audience laughs)
You met him last week!
Do you wanna see his entire biography for you
in your glasses?
And let's say you're at a cocktail party.
You're looking for a job
and you don't know who the heavy hitters are.
In the future, you will know exactly
who to suck up to at any cocktail party.
(audience laughs)
Well, let's say you don't wanna look
like a refugee from Star Trek.
In the future, glasses will be fashionable
with full internet capability.
They can be flashed directly
into the retina of your eye,
they could be flashed right onto the screen of your glasses
or used as a jeweler's lens
as an attachment to your glasses.
Fashion models will be wearing these things.
Young people will demand to have full internet capability,
any video, any movie, any website, any music
downloaded via your glasses.
Now you may say to yourself, wait a minute.
Maybe I don't wear glasses.
No problem.
In the future, they'll be in your contact lenses.
These are internet contact lenses
that we physicists are trying to build.
Imagine taking a final examination.
(audience laughs)
Ha!
Immediately, the light bulbs begin to flash, right?
Think of taking a final examination.
Do you realize that in the future,
professors are gonna have to throw out
their final exam because you can't simply record
memorization on a final exam anymore?
You'll have to convey concepts, principles,
rather than memorizing the names of the crystals
or the shapes of the minerals or whatever.
Imagine full internet capability in your glasses.
Well, we physicists are working on this
even as we speak.
Imagine, for example, going to a foreign country.
You bump into somebody
and they start to talk to you in a foreign language.
No problem.
In the future, you will see subtitles.
(audience laughs)
Subtitles of a foreign language in your contact lens.
And let's say you visit the ruins of Rome.
It's such a big disappointment.
You read about the great Roman Empire,
and then you see all that's left,
almost nothing left of the empire.
You go to the Roman Forum and you wanna use imagination
thinking of Julius Caesar and Mark Antony
at the Roman Forum.
No problem, your contact lens
will recreate the full animation
of the height of the Roman Empire
as you walk through the ruins.
This is called augmented reality, not virtual reality,
a mixture of reality with animation,
with subtitles, with translations.
Let's say you're driving a car.
Your contact lens will give you exactly how fast
you're moving, how much gas you have,
and will even point out landmarks
as you are driving, GPS, all of that,
without ever having to leave
the steering wheel of your car.
So, this is what happens with Moore's Law.
The computer chips will cost a penny.
Like electricity, they'll be everywhere and nowhere.
When you walk in a room today,
what do you do?
You look for the light switch, right?
The first thing you do is you look for the light switch.
You assume the walls have electricity,
even though it's invisible.
In the future, when you walk into the room,
the first thing you will do
is look for the internet portal.
You will assume the room is intelligent.
So, this is your cellphone of the future.
This is how you will communicate with others.
One screen for any video, one screen for any website,
one screen for any movie that's ever been done.
You'll access the entire database
of the planet Earth almost for free,
and let's say you have a Blackberry.
You know how tiny that Blackberry typewriter is?
Well, in the future, we'll have e-paper.
You'll simply scroll out,
scroll out paper which is intelligent,
and you'll type on that sheet of paper.
So, your cellphone is an entire PC.
In fact, it has more power than a supercomputer of today.
In fact, wallpaper will be so cheap
that when you put up wallpaper, it'll be intelligent.
Wallpaper will be as intelligent
as your computer today.
This is your living room of the future.
This is how you will communicate with people.
Let's say you're on a college campus
and let's say it's Friday night
and you do not have a date.
We all know what you do, you get stone drunk.
(audience laughs) In the future,
you'll go up to the wall screen
and you'll say, mirror, mirror on the wall,
who's available tonight?
(audience laughs)
The wall screen will then contact
all the other wall screens that are out there.
The wall screen knows exactly the kind of person you like,
physical characteristics, age, whatever,
and hook you up to whoever else
is looking at their magic mirror
and saying mirror, mirror on the wall.
Then you'll go out and have some fun,
come back to your apartment,
and then you wanna see a movie.
So, you'll say to the wall screen,
mirror, mirror on the wall,
we wanna see Casablanca,
except remove Humphry Bogart's face
and put my face instead,
(audience laughs)
and remove Ingrid Bergman's face
and put my date's face instead.
Now some people are a little bit afraid of this,
but realize that when the internet
was first created by we physicists,
it was male, it was hierarchical,
it was to dominate over the Soviet Union.
Why did the Pentagon give us millions of dollars
to create the internet?
It wasn't so that you could email your friends.
That's not why we physicists created the internet.
It was created to dominate a nuclear war
with Russia so we can communicate
and rebuild America after New York City is in ruins,
Los Angeles, Chicago are vaporized.
That's how we're gonna recreate America after World War III.
Today, the internet is female.
51% of the users of the internet are women
and they use it to touch people.
That's what it's all about.
Technology looks frightening when you don't know it,
but then you realize the whole purpose of the technology
is to be female, to touch people, make contact with people,
so the internet has flipped,
flipped from being a war-fighting device
to be a device that allows you
to communicate to all your friends.
That dog, for example, on the left,
is a cyber dog.
It doesn't really exist.
It babysits your kids, runs, barks.
That dogs does everything except pee on your carpet.
(audience laughs)
Let's say it's Thanksgiving time and you're lonely
'cause one son's in Australia, another one's in Russia,
another one's on the South Pole.
No problem, you'll all gather around
your own wall screens, you'll put on your contact lenses
and you will see everybody around the dinner table
as you carve up the turkey in cyberspace.
Also, we're putting chips everywhere.
Chips are going into toys now.
Toys are becoming intelligent.
This is causing a problem for the English language,
a contradiction in terms called smart Barbie dolls.
Another contradiction in terms is Microsoft Works.
(audience laughs)
That is also a contradiction in terms.
So again, any technology looks frightening
when you first see it, and then you realize, hey,
the whole purpose of this technology is to touch someone,
to reach out and to touch people.
This is your office of the future.
Today of course, your office is built
around the PC, but why should that be?
The PC of the future will disappear.
The future of the computer is to disappear.
Electricity has disappeared.
We no longer see electricity.
Intelligence will also disappear
into the fabric of our lives.
These are scrap computers.
This is your office of the future.
You'll scribble on a sheet
that has full word processing capability,
Paint capability, and then you'll throw it away,
and as you go from room to room,
the files move with you.
Your files are more important than the computer.
The computer only cost a few pennies, after all.
In fact, when you go shopping,
today you have a barcode whenever you buy something.
In the future, instead of having a barcode,
it'll have a chip.
The chip will cost less than the barcode of the future.
And so, this is how you will move from office to car,
car to home, home to office.
The software follows you seamlessly everywhere you go.
This is your cubicle of the future.
This is how you will operate.
And like I said before, if you don't like
to be in a cubicle, you just talk to the wallpaper.
The wallpaper is fully intelligent with a screen,
what have you.
This is the car of the future.
I had a chance to drive this car.
This car has no driver.
It is a driverless car.
These cars have now driven hundreds of miles
in the Mojave Desert without a driver.
GPS is the secret to allow this car to drive,
and for the Discovery Channel,
they put me in the driver's seat.
I started to drive the car
and then I went like this.
Try to drive like this next time.
This means that traffic accidents
could disappear from the English language.
Traffic jams, traffic accidents could disappear
as the cars literally drive themselves.
And let's talk about health.
Health is gonna be turned upside down.
First of all, when you go to the doctor,
your doctor will be in your toilet.
You'll go to the doctor three times a day.
The doctor will analyze your body fluids
and it will tell you that you eat too much,
too much animal fat, too much salt,
too much sugar in your diet.
Isn't the future wonderful?
Even your toilet will tell you
that you have an unhealthy diet.
Well, ladies and gentlemen,
this could be the cure for cancer
because today, if you feel something in your breast,
it's too late, it's really too late.
You have 10 billion cancer cells growing inside your breast.
Surgery is required almost immediately.
In the future, when you go to the toilet,
your toilet will analyze proteins
emitted from cancer, colonies of maybe a hundred
cancer cells, not 10 billion, but a hundred,
and tell you oh, by the way,
you'll have breast cancer in 10 years.
Well, watch out, but no rush.
And there'll be chips scattered
throughout your bathroom which'll analyze DNA.
How do we know this?
'Cause my friends are building these chips!
They're called DNA chips.
Chips that allow you to scan DNA
within a matter of minutes,
so even as you're going to the bathroom,
combing your hair, what have you,
your bathroom is giving you
a complete medical examination.
And we now know that DNA is computer tape.
Instead of zeros and ones, zeros and ones,
zeros, and ones, we have ATCG, ATCG,
and we could read computer tape
just like we read DNA.
So how will we do it?
Every time you blow on a glass,
you blow on a glass, you leave DNA there.
It will sample the DNA and scan for all your genes.
I had my genome scanned.
Most of my genes have been scanned, put on a CD-ROM,
which I then showed to the camera.
Realize that you will have this very soon.
To have all your genes read today costs $50,000.
Within a few years, it'll be down to $1,000
and perhaps in 10 years, it'll be maybe a hundred bucks.
This is your owner's manual.
In your home, you have an owner's manual for your VCR,
your iPod, your computer, your TV set.
You have an owner's manual for everything
except one thing, your body.
This will be your owner's manual.
In fact, when they scanned my DNA,
they even told me
where my ancestors came from 20,000 years ago.
- Wow! - So I now know
my family lineage now to 20,000 years.
So, what will it be like to go
to the doctor's office?
We will not only scan your DNA,
if we find something wrong with an organ,
we will replace it and grow another one.
This is an ear, except it's made out of plastic,
plastic sponge that dissolves with time.
We take some cells from your ears,
seed it into this ear, and it grows.
It grows, leaving a perfect ear.
Then the plastic dissolves with time
because it is biodegradable.
Here's bone on the left, ears on the right.
Today, we can grow bone,
blood, skin, cartilage.
We can grow noses, ears, blood vessels, heart valves.
The first bladder was grown three years ago.
The first windpipe was grown just a few months ago,
and we will grow the first liver,
perhaps, in five more years.
So for you alcoholics in the audience, there's hope.
If you can hold on for five more years,
you may be able to have your own liver.
So let's now have the first DVD
where we're now gonna go into the hospital of the future.
What'll it be like if we can grow organs
by seeding it with cells?
What'll it be like if surgery is done in three dimension?
So, let's have the first video
from the Discovery Channel, a program that I hosted
called 2057, 50 Years From Now.
So, as computer power doubles every 18 months,
it means that every aspect of our life,
finance, commerce, health, is gonna be turned upside down
as we begin to realize that computer power
can enrich our lives.
This is the world's first bladder, a human bladder,
that was grown from a young girl's own cells
and implanted into that young woman.
That was three years ago,
a development at Wake Forest University,
where we taped changed history
and within five years, we hope to have the first pancreas,
the first liver, perhaps even the first kidney.
These are the frontier organs
that are now being looked at
to be grown in the laboratory.
The first windpipe was grown just three months ago,
and in mice, we actually grew an entire heart.
An entire mouse heart was grown just last year,
and how is it possible?
Because computer power means
that we can sequence genes,
we can put doctors in touch with each other.
It has accelerated medical advances.
And now, let me say
a few things about artificial intelligence.
Well, one day will we have robots,
the robots that well, we see in science fiction?
Well, this is ASIMO.
ASIMO is the world's most advanced robot.
ASIMO can run, ASIMO can walk, climb up stairs,
ASIMO can dance.
In fact, ASIMO can dance better than me.
I had a chance to meet ASIMO,
and the question is how smart is our most advanced robot,
and can these robots even have emotions
so that we can bond with them?
Let's have now the second video
where we will now go to Tokyo.
We're now gonna go to Tokyo
and meet the world's most advanced robot,
and the question is well, one day,
will they become smarter than us?
Will one day they put us in zoos
and throw peanuts at us and make us dance behind bars?
Well, let's-- - Conceive robots.
- The question is, how smart are our robots?
Well, one day, will they be smarter than us
and put us in zoos?
Well first of all,
here is the governor of California in a very bad mood.
(audience laughs)
So one day, will we have to deal
with mad governors?
Well, let's take a look at ASIMO.
So you ASIMO, the world's most advanced robot.
How smart is ASIMO?
Well, let me tell you.
ASIMO as as smart as a cockroach, a retarded cockroach,
a stupid, lobotomized, retarded cockroach.
ASIMO takes about six hours to walk across the room,
every movement pre-programmed.
That scene that you saw took three hours,
took three hours for us to program
every single move of that robot.
So, why is Japan spending so much time on these robots?
Well, let me tell you a secret.
Japan's population is the fastest
aging population on Earth.
They have very few young people,
they have a lot of old people.
These are future robot nurses.
That's why Japan is spending
so much money building robot.
That's the future of nursing,
not the future of human intelligence.
However, in the coming decades, as robots get smarter,
perhaps they'll be as smart as a mouse,
eventually as smart as a dog or a cat,
and then decades after that,
maybe as smart as a monkey.
At that point, I think we should put a chip
in their brain to shut them off
if they start to get murderous thoughts,
but that's not for a while.
That's decades into the future.
We'll have plenty of warning,
and in fact, for the Science Channel special
that I'm hosting on December 1st,
we went to all the world's leading
artificial intelligence laboratory,
and you can see how primitive our robots really are.
Well, I'll say a few more things the that we discuss
in the Science Channel documentary, invisibility.
Believe it or not, we physicists believe
that invisibility is possible.
We flew down to Duke University
and we filmed the world's first
microwave invisibility device.
It'll make an object invisible to microwaves
and we went to Berkeley,
where they can actually now do it for visible light.
Now there is a problem.
If you are inside an invisibility cloak,
you cannot see outside.
It's only a one-way trip.
Therefore, if you are inside the invisibility cloak,
ya need to punch two eyeballs
so you can see outside, so from the outside,
you see two floating eyeballs,
or here, a floating head.
So remember that metamaterials
allows us to bend microwave radiations
around an object just like water flows around a boulder.
If you were downstream from a boulder,
you don't know that there is a boulder upstream.
That works for microwaves and at Berkeley
and Caltech, on a microscopic scale,
they showed that it works for visible light as well,
so this means that in the coming years, coming decades,
we may be able to attain full invisibility
just like you see in the movies,
but we don't have it yet.
Also, teleportation.
Wouldn't it be great to simply zap yourself
across the room, just like they do in Star Trek?
Well, this is called quantum teleportation,
and for the Science Channel TV series,
we went down to Maryland,
to the University of Maryland,
where we actually photographed with a TV camera,
actually photographed an atom being zapped
across the room.
A TV screen lit up every time an atom was teleported
from one chamber to the next chamber.
Now this, of course, creates problems
'cause if you're Captain Kirk,
you have to die, you have to dissolve in the process
in creating a copy of Captain Kirk over there,
so who is that imposter over there?
That imposter over there looks like Captain Kirk.
He sells Priceline just like Captain Kirk, okay?
So, who is that person over there?
You just saw him die and there he is,
selling Priceline over there.
It really makes you wonder, who are we?
Are we just information, that information can be zapped
from one place to another?
And believe it or not,
telepathy is coming faster than you think.
We taped this again for the Science Channel special,
12 episodes, 30 minutes apiece starting December 1st.
Here's how it works.
This is Brown University,
where with have a stroke victim on the lower right.
He is paralyzed.
He cannot move, he cannot communicate
with his loved ones, he is a quadriplegic,
a stroke victim.
On the upper left is a chip.
They put the chip in his brain,
shown on the lower left.
You can see the dot where the chip is placed.
You hook up that chip to a laptop.
That person, who is now totally paralyzed
can now read emails, surf the web, answer emails,
do crossword puzzles, do everything you can do
on a computer, except this person happens to be paralyzed.
This means that in the future,
you may want to simply communicate with the web
by thinking about it.
We can also use this technology, by the way,
this is how it works, by the way.
He's allowed to see the laptop.
You see the connection on the right,
an electrode that hooks up to a laptop computer,
the world's first direct link between the human mind
and a computer.
And also, in Japan, they very tediously map images
of the brain onto an MRI scan
and had a computer recognize them.
We can actually see the outlines now,
the decoded outlines of an object
that you are looking at with your eyeballs.
This means that when you are asleep and are dreaming,
we may be able to photograph some of the dreams
that you have.
This has already been done at Kyoto University,
not with dreams, but with the person
looking at an object.
A computer decodes the images on an MRI scan.
We can now recognize.
The first thing that was done was a horseshoe.
You can actually see the horseshoe,
the person's horseshoe that he's looking at
via an MRI scan, but in the article,
it says that the next target is dreams.
Maybe one day we'll be able to record your dreams.
This is how it looks like.
You have to put this thing on top of your head,
but in the future, it may be invisible.
It may be painless and invisible
and you'll be able to surf the web all by yourself.
Also, we should point out,
we should also point out that we can actually use this
for a lie detector test.
When you tell a lie, your brain scan
lights up like a Christmas tree.
That's because first, you have to know the truth.
Second, you have to create the lie.
Third, you have the create the coverup of the lie,
and fourth, you have to analyze the consistency
of the coverup with all the other lies
you've been telling all these years.
That's a lotta brainpower,
and you can actually see that on an MRI scan.
Now let me say a few things about the far future.
So far, everything I've talked about
is the near future.
We're talking about 10, 20, 50 years in the future.
Now let's look even farther.
We went to NASA and we visited the scientists
who dream of one day building a star ship.
This, of course, is far beyond anything
we can muster with today's technology.
However, we actually interviewed scientists
who believed that it may be possible
to bend the fabric of space and time
so that we can leap forwards across enormous distances,
perhaps using Einstein's theory.
This is a black hole.
Black holes are not science fiction anymore.
We photographed the accretion disk of black holes.
This black hole lies at the center
of a gigantic galaxy, NGC 4258.
That dot you see at the very center
is about one light year across.
In the inside of the dot is a raging black hole.
In fact, if you wanna see a black hole tonight,
go outside, look in the direction of Sagittarius.
That is the center of the Milky Way Galaxy.
There's a black hole there which, in some sense,
lies at the center of our galaxy.
So kids ask the question,
if the moon goes around the Earth,
the Earth goes around the sun,
then what does the sun go around?
Well, we know the answer to that.
The sun goes around a black hole
in the constellation Sagittarius
at the center of the Milky Way Galaxy.
Now if you look at that black hole,
it's rather disappointing.
Dust clouds obscure the galactic nuclei.
If you could somehow remove the dust clouds,
then you would see a fireball,
a fireball rise every night,
perhaps rivaling the moon in brightness
with a raging black hole at the center.
Unfortunately, dust clouds prevent us
from seeing this huge fireball
that by rights, should be illuminating the night sky.
And, if you have wormholes, perhaps one day
you may be able to even bend the fabric of time itself.
This of course, takes us into science fiction,
but actually, we do have a theory of time travel.
Now some of you may say to yourself,
well, I've seen these time travel movies.
I know what happens if you of backwards in time.
You meet your teenage mother before you're born
and your teenage mother falls in love with you.
Well, you're in deep doo-doo
if your teenage mother just fell in love with you
before you are born.
Now if you think you're so smart,
let me give you the mother of all time travel stories
and see whether you can figure this out.
Let's see whether you're smart enough
to figure this one out.
The year is 1945, a stranger comes in from the darkness,
carrying a baby girl that he leaves at an orphanage.
Well, the nuns find this baby girl.
They don't know where the baby girl came from,
so the nuns call her Jane
and Jane grows up as an orphan, wondering who is my mother,
who is my father?
Well, when Jane is 17 years old,
she's a beautiful young woman
and then she has her first boyfriend.
A drifter comes drifting into her life,
but it was not meant to be.
They quarrel, she argues with her boyfriend,
and it's a very sad story.
First, she finds out that she's pregnant.
Her boyfriend has left her, she's abandoned and pregnant,
she's rushed to the hospital nine months later,
she delivers a beautiful baby girl,
but somebody that night breaks open the window
of the hospital, kidnaps Jane's baby girl,
and leaves in the darkness.
Well, it's even worse than this.
Jane is bleeding very rapidly.
She's gonna die.
The doctors have to perform
an emergency experimental operation.
They have to change Jane into Jim.
Well, Jim wakes up the next day
with this huge headache, and he's told the bad news.
First, the boyfriend left her pregnant,
somebody stole her baby,
and now she's not even Jane anymore, she's Jim.
Well, Jim grows up and becomes a barroom drunk.
Every time someone says,
who are you Jim?
Where did you come from?
Who was your mother or your father?
Well, finally Jim one day is once again stone drunk
at the bottom of a bar after a bar fight,
but the bartender comes up to him and says,
"Jim, Jim, wake up!
"You see, I'm not really a bartender,
"I'm a time traveler.
"Come into my machine and let us find out
"who is this Jim slash Jane."
So, they go back, back, way back into the past.
So poor Jim, he doesn't quite know
where he is in the past, but suddenly he meets
this beautiful 17-year-old girl
and it's love at first sight,
but it was not meant to be.
They quarrel and then Jim finds out
that his girlfriend is pregnant,
and then Jim says to himself,
"Oh my God, history is repeating itself.
"This happened to me!
"Well, I wanna make sure that my baby
"gets the best education possible."
That night, nine months later, Jim goes to the hospital,
breaks open the window, kidnaps his own precious baby girl
and then Jim and his baby girl go back
into the time machine again, back, way back
into the past until it is 1945.
It is a dark and stormy night.
Jim comes in from the darkness carrying
his precious baby girl that he drops off
at an orphanage.
Well, the nuns don't know what to do
with this baby girl they found the next day,
so the nuns call her Jane,
and Jane grows up wondering who is my mother?
(audience laughs) Who is my father?
I was left as a foundling on the doorstep
of this orphanage.
Well, Jim finally gets it together.
Jim says, "I don't wanna be a drunk all my life.
"I'm gonna join the time travelers corps."
So, Jim has many heroic exploits in the annals of time.
