Here are some more than interesting excerpts from Phyllis Galde's Interview with Michio Kaku
PG: Do you believe it’s possible to make a time machine? MK: It may be possible. It seems to be consistent with the laws of physics. You need fabulous amounts of energy, comparable to a black hole. Michael J. Fox with his DeLorean cannot do it. Einstein said that time is a river, a meandering river. We measure that with our satellites. A GPS satellite slows down in outer space. We measure that every day. Your GPS would fail without Einstein. But the new wrinkle is the river of time may have forks. If the river of time forks, then perhaps you can go backwards in time without a time paradox. So, you go backwards in time and meet your teenage mother before you are born and she falls in love with you; you’re in deep trouble. But if you hop stream, if the universe opens up a parallel universe, then you’ve basically met somebody else’s teenage mother who looks like your teenaged mother but is not. There are no time paradoxes involved.
These are solutions of Einstein’s equations. This is not just somebody dreaming a science-fiction story. We have mathematical realizations of all these things. Many, many designs have been proposed, all of them consistent with Einstein. The problem is energy. You need fabulous amounts of energy to do this.
It takes a lot of energy to keep me on the floor. It takes the earth just to keep me on the floor. So, it would take a star to bend the fabric of space and time. And that’s what you need to create a time ma- chine. Anyway, in my book I give a design. PG: Do you ever read science fiction? MK: Yes, I used to read the Asimov series. PG: I taught science-fiction in high school. You’ve read A Wrinkle in Time, by Madeleine L’Engle? MK: Right. In fact, in that book, it was a tesseract that was the gateway. A tesser- act is a four-dimensional unraveled hypercube.
That One Percent
PG: Are there any UFO researchers’ arguments you find compelling? MK: I get a lot of sightings, but 99 percent of them can be dismissed as radar echoes, swamp gas, the planet Venus, weather satellites, meteorites, atmospheric anomalies...it’s that one percent that gives you the willies. It’s that one percent that is multiple sightings by multiple modes. They are the hardest to debunk, the fa- mous one being the JAL sightings where you had an object off a JAL airline. The hardest to dismiss are those that involve radar sighting, visual sighting, by not just one person but a whole crew on an airplane. What we need...see, this will go on forever. Forever and ever people will say, “I saw something.” And then people will say, “Well, what did you see?” What we need is more direct, tangible proof. That is, alien DNA. If we had alien DNA that would end it right there. But so far, no alien DNA. Second of all, an alien ship. That would also end it. Any sign that there’s an alien culture, information that is differ- ent from our information. That would end it right there. But some people say well, maybe our technology came from aliens. Well, it’s not a testable theory. PG: Reverse engineering? MK: It’s not testable. I can say that it’s not reverse engineering because I know the people who developed this transistor or that thing, and it was done by hard work and patience, not by mind reading. But when you talk about visitation, you need hard proof. That requires either alien DNA or an alien ship. Until that happens, this is going to go on forever. People will argue forever, whether that was a meteor or a flying saucer.
PG: Some say that the aliens can cloak themselves. MK: Well, we’re going to be able to cloak ourselves very soon. We will be able to cloak an object under visible light in a few decades. It’s in my book. I have a whole chapter on invisibility. Maybe they’re here. Maybe they are invisible. We would never know. But my personal attitude is that we may not be very interesting to them. They may come and visit us once in a while, but would you engage in a conversation with ants? You may not. We think we’re so great that they’re going to want to come down and give us all the fruits of their technology. Why would they do that? We’re not that inter- esting to them. If they can go from star to star, they are automatically 2,000 years ahead of us, meaning that we may not be that interesting to them.
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