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Michio Kaku is a theoretical physicist, futurist, and professor at the City College of New York. He is the author of many fascinating books on the nature of our reality and the future of our civilization.

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And so I think that we are going to digitize ourselves and give us digital immortality.

We'll not only have biologic genetic immortality of some sort, but also digital immortality.

I think we should send it into outer space.

If you digitize the human brain and put it on a laser beam and shoot it to the moon, you're on the moon in 1 second.

Shoot it to Mars, you're on Mars in 20 minutes.

Shoot it to Pluto, you're on Pluto in 8 hours.

You can have breakfast in New York and for a morning snack, vacation on the moon, then zap your way to Mars by noontime, journey to the asteroid belt in the afternoon, and then come back for dinner in New York at night.

All in a day's work at the speed of light.

Now this means that you don't need booster rockets, you don't need weightlessness problems, You don't need to worry about meteorites.

On the moon, there is a mainframe that downloads your laser beam's information.

And where does it download the information into?

You could be Superman, superwoman on the moon, on Mars, traveling throughout the universe at the speed of light, Downloading your personality into any vehicle you want now, let me stick my neck out so far Everything I've been saying is well within the laws of physics well within the laws of physics now Let me go outside the laws of physics.

I think outside the Earth there could be a superhighway, a laser highway, of laser porting, with billions of souls of aliens zapping their way across the galaxy.

Are we smart enough to determine whether such a thing exists or not?

This could exist right outside the orbit of the planet Earth.

And we're too stupid in our technology to even prove it or disprove it.

the aliens on this laser superhighway to help us out, to send us a human interpretable signal.

I mean, it ultimately boils down to the language of communication.

But that's an exciting possibility that actually the sky is filled

And we're just so oblivious that we're too stupid to know it.

See, they don't have to be in alien form with little green men.

They can be in any form they want, in an avatar of their creation.

You know, in the zoo, did you know that we sometimes have zookeepers that imitate animals?

We create a fake animal and we put it in so that the animal is not afraid of this fake animal.

And of course, these animals' brains, their brain is about as big as a walnut.

They accept these dummies as if they were real.

So an alien civilization in outer space would say, oh yeah, human brains are so tiny, we could put a dummy on their world, an avatar, and they'd never know it.

That would be an entertaining thing to watch from the alien perspective.


Speaker 0: And so I think that we are going to digitize ourselves and give us digital immortality. We'll not only have biologic genetic immortality of some sort, but also digital immortality. And what are we going to do with it? I think we should send it into outer space. If you digitize the human brain and put it on a laser beam and shoot it to the moon, you're on the moon in 1 second.

Shoot it to Mars, you're on Mars in 20 minutes. Shoot it to Pluto, you're on Pluto in 8 hours. Think about it for a moment. You can have breakfast in New York and for a morning snack, vacation on the moon, then zap your way to Mars by noontime, journey to the asteroid belt in the afternoon, and then come back for dinner in New York at night. All in a day's work at the speed of light.

Now this means that you don't need booster rockets, you don't need weightlessness problems, You don't need to worry about meteorites. And what's on the moon? On the moon, there is a mainframe that downloads your laser beam's information. And where does it download the information into? An avatar.

And what does that avatar look like? Anything you want. Think about it for a moment. You could be Superman, superwoman on the moon, on Mars, traveling throughout the universe at the speed of light, Downloading your personality into any vehicle you want now, let me stick my neck out so far Everything I've been saying is well within the laws of physics well within the laws of physics now Let me go outside the laws of physics.

Speaker 1: Here we go.

Speaker 0: I think this already exists. I think outside the Earth there could be a superhighway, a laser highway, of laser porting, with billions of souls of aliens zapping their way across the galaxy. Now Let me ask you a question. Are we smart enough to determine whether such a thing exists or not? No.

This could exist right outside the orbit of the planet Earth. And we're too stupid in our technology to even prove it or disprove it. We would need

Speaker 1: the aliens on this laser superhighway to help us out, to send us a human interpretable signal. I mean, it ultimately boils down to the language of communication. But that's an exciting possibility that actually the sky is filled

Speaker 0: with aliens. The aliens could already be here. And we're just so oblivious that we're too stupid to know it. See, they don't have to be in alien form with little green men. They can be in any form they want, in an avatar of their creation.

Speaker 1: Well, in fact, they could very well be-

Speaker 0: They could even

Speaker 1: look like us. Exactly. We'd never know. 1 of us could be an alien.

Speaker 0: You know, in the zoo, did you know that we sometimes have zookeepers that imitate animals? We create a fake animal and we put it in so that the animal is not afraid of this fake animal. And of course, these animals' brains, their brain is about as big as a walnut. They accept these dummies as if they were real. So an alien civilization in outer space would say, oh yeah, human brains are so tiny, we could put a dummy on their world, an avatar, and they'd never know it.

Speaker 1: That would be an entertaining thing to watch from the alien perspective. You

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Michio Kaku: Alien Laser Superhighway and Digital Immortality | AI Podcast Clips