Instant Genius - The future of humanity

Episode Date: February 28, 2018

This week, we chat to theoretical physicist Michio Kaku about the future of humanity, how we're going to terraform Mars, why the modern space race will change life on Earth, and why aliens probably won't bother to destroy us. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Prices are dropping so much that the Indian government sent a probe to Mars at a price tag cheaper than the movie, The Martian, produced by Hollywood. So Hollywood movies actually cost more than a mission to Mars. You're listening to the Science Focus podcast from the BBC Focus magazine team. With the UK's best-selling science and technology monthly, available in print, and in several digital formats throughout the world. Find out more at ScienceFocus.com or look out for us in your app store. Hello and welcome to the Science Focus podcast.

I'm Alice Lipscomb Southwell, production editor of BBC Focus magazine. In this episode, we speak to renowned theoretical physicist Mitch Yoakku about the future of the human race. He speaks to ScienceFocus.com editor Alexander McNamara about how the human race can prepare for life on other planets, what we can expect when we get there and who else might be paying attention to our progress. You've just got your new book out, which is about the future of humanity. Why now do we need to start thinking about the future of humanity?

Well, just a few weeks ago, millions of people watched the launch of the Falcon Heavy rocket, which is actually a moon rocket, which is free for the US taxpayers. A Silicon Valley billionaire, Elon Musk, funded the Falcon Heavy. which is fully capable of going back to the moon after a 50-year gap. So some people think they were entering a new golden age of space travel. On to the moon. And the President of the United States has said, on to Mars. So this is what's happening.

We're now at a point where we are going off to Mars. So why are we doing this? Well, first of all, this is different from the 1960s when we had the Cold War, and things were really expensive. In 1966, the NASA budget was 5% of the entire U.S. budget. Now, that is unsustainable. So today, we have new wind in the sales. Prices are dropping.

Prices are dropping so much that the Indian government sent a probe to Mars at a price tag cheaper than the movie, The Martian, produced by Hollywood. So Hollywood movies actually cost more than a mission to Mars. And as I mentioned, Elon Musk of SpaceX foot the bill for the Falcon Heavy. So we're talking about a dropping in the price of space travel, plus the rocket was reusable. So Elon Musk wants to drop the cost of space travel from $10,000 a pound to put anything in orbit. That's your weight in gold, by the way, to $1,000 a pound. He wants to drop the price of space travel by a factor of 10.

And that's going to open up outer space for space tourism as well as missions to Mars. So obviously we're going to be going up when the price comes down and it is available for us to be going to the moon and to Mars. Why do we need to go there? Well, first of all, the price tag is dropping and other Silicon Valley billionaires, not to be outdone by Elon Musk from Google, they've talked about mining the asteroids. So NASA has a program called Asteroid redirect to actually capture an asteroid and bring it back to Earth. Now, it turns out that a small asteroid just maybe 100 meters across, if you could bring it back to Earth, would have about $30 billion worth of rare Earths and platinum-type metals. And so we're talking about a potential gold rush in outer space. And so with the falling price of space travel, with the fact that China and India are now jumping in the game, they have their plans to go back to the moon and plan their flag on the moon.

And given the fact that Silicon Valley billionaires are dumping their own money into going back to the moon in Mars, this is an incredibly great opportunity to go back to the moon after a 50-year gap. So are we at the sort of start of another space race? In some sense, we're actually competing against ourselves. Elon Musk is competing against NASA. NASA has its own moon rocket, believe it or not, two moon rockets, one sponsored by U.S. taxpayers called the SLS booster rocket, and then a private enterprise rocket, the Falcon Heavy, which was just launched a few weeks ago.

So we could have a traffic jam over the moon with all these competing interests, not to mention the fact at Amazon.com's, Jeff Bezos. Jeff Bezos, the richest man on Earth, has created his own spaceport in Texas, and he is now preparing his own fleet of rockets. So we have the SLS booster rocket, sponsored by NASA, the Falcon Heavy, sponsored by Elon Musk, and now we have the Blue Origins rocket sponsored by the richest man on the Earth. And so that's why I say that this is totally different from the same.

60s. This is now a new golden age for space exploration. So presumably, you know, people like Bezos, he wants to launch rockets so that can get to the moon. Presumably he's not delivering Amazon packages there. What is on the moon for us to really want to get there? Well, first of all, let me say that each of these people have a vision. Musk's vision is to create a multi-planet species because we need an insurance policy because life is quite dangerous to put on just one planet. The dinosaurs, after all, had no space program.

And because the dinosaurs had no space program, they're not here today. A meteor or a comet wiped them out 65 million years ago. They didn't know what hit them. However, we too have a potential danger from out of space, but we do have a space program.

And so that's one threat that we have to face. Plus, of course, we have the threat of self-inflicted disasters like global warming, nuclear warfare, germ warfare. And so we have to have a backup plan, says Elon Musk. Now, Jeff Bezos of Amazon has a slightly different vision. He wants to make the Earth a park so that heavy industries that are polluting are put into outer space.

And he envisions Amazon being a delivery system for Earth to the Moon traffic. And so he already has his sights set on creating a whole world in outer space, a world out there where we have heavy industry, which is polluting, but the earth becomes a park. So we have new vision, new energy, and new enthusiasm for this space exploration. So are we relying on these billionaires like Musk and Bezos? Are they the ones really driving things forward? or is there still a role for governments like NASA or for other space programs like ESA? What's their goal out of it?

Well, they're complementary. The SLS booster rocket sponsored by NASA is actually bigger than the Falcon Heavy, but it costs more. It costs about a billion dollars per launch. That's an incredible amount of money per launch. The Falcon Heavy goes for about 90 million. That is 10%.

10% of the cost of the SLR. So some people are saying that they can complement each other. The SLS booster rocket of NASA is used for really big heavy missions to lift gigantic payloads into outer space. But if you want a quick and dirty access to the moon, that's where the Falcon Heavy comes in. It can't carry as much weight. However, it's only 10% the cost of the SLS booster rocket. So that's just being, you know, we're getting to the moon. the moon is the obvious sort of starting point because it's closer.

So what about further afield with Mars? What's the efforts to get there? Well, believe it or not, NASA has now fleshed out a timetable by which we might go to Mars. First of all, next year, December 2019, we're going to go back to the moon with an unmanned SLS booster rocket. So after a 50-year gap, we're going to fire a moon rocket with a space capsule on December. December 2019. Then, 2023, astronauts, perhaps four astronauts, will go into the Orion Space capsule, and they'll be fired around the moon. By 26, we want to have a lunar space station. That's right, a space station, not around the Earth, a space station around the moon by

26. And then by 2030, or thereabouts, the first mission to Mars will take place. probably fired up from the lunar space station. So we now have a tentative roadmap by which we can reach the planet Mars. So the moon is sort of a launch pad, a sort of service station between the Earth and Mars? That's right. So we're not going to really put emphasis on a lunar base. We're going to have a lunar orbiter going around the moon. So we'll have a permanent presence on the moon, but we're not necessarily going to build a base on the moon,

because the real objective is go on to Mars. And then once we're in Mars, obviously, you mentioned earlier that we need to protect ourselves from both what happened to the dinosaurs and also sort of man-made problems here on our planet. That's right. We're talking about a settlement on Mars. We're not talking about moving the population of the Earth to Mars

because that would cost too much money. But Musk has already laid out a plan whereby his rocket could eventually take you know, maybe a thousand settlers per launch to create a settlement of maybe a million people on Mars. Now, of course, this is still science fiction, but he's dreaming about it and working out the details of what it would take to build a settlement on Mars of about a million people. I mean, you say it's still science fiction, but you'd look back a hundred years ago and words that were being written maybe a bit more by people like HD Wells, that's sort of coming

into reality? That's right. And remember, real scientists and engineers are working out the details of what it would take to actually reform Mars so that Mars becomes more Earth-like, and so Mars would become a tourist destination for people who want to go into outer space and visit a new planet. This is called terraforming. Terraforming, of course, would take many, many decades into the future, but the object of terraforming is to make Mars more Earth-like. For example, If we had solar satellites going around Mars, we could heat up the polar ice caps. Mars has plenty of ice. If you can melt the ice because you have solar satellites in outer space,

beaming sunlight to the polar ice caps, then liquid water could create rivers and even seas and maybe even oceans. Mars once had a great ocean, an ocean about the size of the US of A, that big. So we're talking about the fact that Mars had rivers, seas, and oceans, but lost all that water. And it froze. But if we unfreeze it, perhaps we can recreate a garden on Mars. So is there sort of potentially an ethical problem with maybe melting the ice caps on Mars, even at this time on planet Earth that we've got a big problem with melting ice caps? Right.

In fact, the greenhouse effect could cut both ways. On the Earth, of course, we have to worry about the greenhouse effect because we are terraforming the Earth. We are actually changing the climate of the planet Earth. Now, on Mars, we actually want to induce a greenhouse effect because if you could raise the surface temperature of Mars by six degrees, just by six degrees, that would set off a chain reaction that would begin the process of reheating Mars and making Mars more tropical, like it was billions of years ago. So if we could heat the surface of Mars by six degrees, it would mean that

more carbon dioxide and water vapor is released into the atmosphere and there are greenhouse gases. So we have a spiraling greenhouse effect on Mars to heat up the planet. And then, of course, the ice caps would be melted to create rivers and seas and oceans once again. It sounds idyllic, sort of a lovely place to be. And say, you know, we are able to get a million people to Mars. It's still quite a long way into the future, presumably, before we have that. What's the incentive for the people both on Earth and on the planet Mars for this to happen? Well, let's be blunt about this.

We're not talking about finding gold on Mars. We're not talking about immediate riches. We don't know what we're going to find on Mars. but the motivation for billionaires like Elon Musk is that we want an insurance policy. We don't want to move the population of the Earth to Mars, but we want to make sure that if something does happen to the Earth, we are not going to go the way of the dinosaurs. So we want to make sure that supervolcanoes, asteroid impacts, ice ages,

will not wipe out Homo sapiens on the planet Earth. And so that's the motivation, or one main motivation. Another motivation is the following. Because of the first space race in the 1960s, computers had to be miniaturized. And that created the microchips of today, which energized a multi-trillion dollar world economy. So the world economy today owes much to the fact that the space race forced us to create new technologies of telecommunications, satellites, and lasers, and small microchips. Many people think that another race into space, this time competing against ourselves, will also stimulate basic research to create quantum computers and the next generation of computer technology. So these quantum computers, can you just explain quantum computers a little bit for us so that we, a bit of understanding us to what is the goal here? Well, your silicon chip computer will eventually become obsolete. We're used to having computers

twice as powerful as they were the previous Christmas, but that can't go on forever. Sooner later, transistors become the size of atoms. And at that point, you get short circuits, you get leakages, you get heat generation, and the age of silicon ends. So Silicon Valley could become a rust belt. I mean, think about that.

Unemployment in Silicon Valley because of the fact that Moore's Law, that computer power doubles every 18 months, has a finite lifespan. We see the end now. Moore's Law is slowing down. In the future, your upgrade will not make your computer twice as powerful as it was the previous year. So let me ask you a question.

Would you buy a new computer? Would you upgrade, knowing that computer power is not increasing at all? That's where we need a new generation of computers or else the computer industry could collapse. It could become a rust belt. That's why we physicists are working on molecular computers and quantum computers, so we compute on molecules and we compute on atoms. So this sort of space space that we've got will help with the global technological prowess of the civilizations that we have at the moment. That's right. Every time we had a crash program to advance some project, practical project, it spun off all sorts of consumer devices that energize the economy.

And so that's why we think that putting more emphasis on going to Mars and colonizing Mars and stuff like that will force us to create new technologies, artificial intelligence, quantum computers, that will enrich society here on the planet Earth. Sometimes we need a jumpstart. For example, if you take a look at the big government projects in the past, the genome project, the Manhattan Project, they were funded by governments. but the spinoffs are enormous from these projects. Such as? Well, as I mentioned, the genome project revolutionize all of medicine. You cannot go to a doctor anymore without the doctor talking about your genome. It's the number one thing that a doctor looks at when the doctor wants to find out what's wrong with you or what's good with you.

And so that was a byproduct of a crash program that cost $3 billion. 3 billion U.S. dollars were dumped into the genome project, and now the benefits of that are about a factor of 100. So we think now that the return on the genome project was a factor of 100, compared to what it was before the genome project when it took literally months to sequence one gene. Now we can sequence your entire profile within a matter of days. That has revolutionized all of biology, all of medicine, and it was a government crash program that did it. And presumably that sort of information is going to feed back into something like a space program to Mars. Yeah, that's why, for example, artificial intelligence, robotics, and quantum computers could all benefit by this jumpstart because governments will begin to fund projects that are big and have immediate practical applications, for example,

space exploration. But in the long term, the basic science that we do exploring out of space will enrich our society and our economy as well. So your background is the theoretical physicist, am I right? That's right. So, you know, say, for example, we get to Mars and we build this society there, which has both enriched life there and on our planet. Do we then need to go further? Do we need to go further out into our solar system or the universe, and how far can we push these boundaries of physics? Well, yet more Silicon Valley billionaires are backing yet another project, and this is to go to the stars. We're not talking about the starship enterprise beaming astronauts into out of space. No, we're talking about sending tiny chips energized by 100 megawatts, billion

watts of laser power and shooting them at 20% of speed of light to the nearest star, Proxima Centauri. It would take about 20 years for these tiny little computer chips energized by huge gigantic laser beams on the earth to reach the nearby stars. I mean, think about it. We're building the first starship. Already $100 million in private funding, a lot of it from Silicon Valley, has already been pledge for the breakthrough star shot program, which my colleague, Stephen Hawking, has even backed. And even beyond that, there are some plans, basically on the drawing board, of course,

to build fusion rockets that may one day take us to the stars with rockets that do resemble what you see in science fiction. And of course, this is still into the next century, but we physicists are already doing the mathematics of what it would take to build a starship, perhaps in 100 years. That sounds incredible that we could have potential starships that would take us from one place. But you say right now there's a very real sort of project going to send these tiny computers out to the next star.

So what do we get from that? How will they be able to communicate back to us? And what will we learn? Well, first of all, we're going to have to send thousands of them into outer space. Each one costing maybe a few pennies. You realize that Mother Nature sends seeds by the millions into our forests so that only a handful, only a handful can germinate. So these chips are going to be cheap, plentiful.

We'll send thousands of them into outer space, and a few of them may actually reach Alpha Centauri and then radio back the information. Now remember that we have now discovered 4,000 planets orbiting other stars in our backyard, our Milky Way galaxy. A handful of them, about 20, are actually Earth-sized planets in, outer space. Now, this means that we can have a census of the galaxy. In the galaxy, on average, every single star has a planet going around it. Let me repeat that. On average, every single star you see at night has a planet going around it. And about 1 in 20 has an Earth-like planet going

around it. It's just incredible. And I guess the future would be to say, okay, we've done our solar system, we'll go to the next one and find these Earth-like planets. That's right. So we're talking now about leaving the solar system, going to the nearby planets, where we find extra solar planets that are Earth-like. It may even have liquid oceans like what we have on the planet Earth. So your book is titled The Future of Humanity. Is that where you see us eventually at some point being on other planets and other universes, well, maybe other universes, I don't know. Well, yeah, in the back of the the book, I do talk about other universes. I'm a physicist. I work in Einstein's theory of general

relativity and the quantum theory. I'm the co-founder of string field theory, which is one of the main branches of string theory. And string theory does open the possibility of wormholes, wormholes that could connect our universe with other universes. It was Einstein himself in 1935, who first introduced the concept of a gateway, a gateway through space and time. In fact, a gateway that could even create a time machine. And of course, to manipulate space and time so we can rip the fabric of space and time would require the energy of a black hole. So this is not for us. However, it's conceivable that in out of space, alien civilizations much more advanced than us have already harnessed this kind of power. The universe, of course, is over 13 billion years old.

That's plenty of time. Plenty of time for an extraterrestrial civilization to have. risen from the swamp and begin to harness these cosmic energies, energies at which space and time are turned into a pretzel. So do you think that these alien civilizations, do you think that they would be more likely to contact us, or would we be the ones who will finally get to that point and then we can get out there? Well, my colleague, Stephen Hawking, has warned us about encountering aliens in outer space that are more advanced. Look what happened to the Aztecs, when they encountered Cortez. They thought that Cortez was a god.

Actually, he was a bloodthirsty plunderer of gold, and he basically destroyed the Aztec civilization in a matter of months. And so, yeah, I personally think we should keep our identity a secret when we explore outer space and encounter extraterrestrial civilizations. But in the main, I think they're going to be peaceful because they're probably thousands of years more advanced than us, if they're capable of reaching us from out of space, in which case there's really nothing that we can offer them.

They're not going to want to plunder the earth because there are plenty of planets that are uninhabited that have plenty of minerals and riches to plunder. And so I think for the most part it's going to be beneficial for us if we make contact with them, or for the most part, they'll leave us alone. After all, if you're in the forest, do you talk to the squirrels and the dears?

No. Eventually you get bored because they don't talk back to you. In the same way, we have nothing to offer them. If they're that advanced that they can reach us from thousands of light years, they are thousands of years ahead of us, in which case we have very little to offer them. So I think for the most part, they'll leave us alone. It sort of reminds me of Star Trek and the way how,

I don't know how much of a fan of Star Trek you are, but the way how the Vulcans are only interested in us once we achieved light speed, as it were. do you think that there's some sort of mark in our future the sort of scientific point that we can get that would actually make other civilizations go hey that now they're interesting yeah we physicists actually catalog extraterrestrial civilizations by type 1 type 2 and type 3 a type 1 civilization is planetary

they control the weather they control volcanoes earthquakes like flash Gordon or Buck Rogers would be a typical type 1 civilization type 2 is Star Trek. They can harness the power of an entire star. They play with stars. They've colonized the nearby planet. That's type 2. Type 3 is galactic. They roam the galactic space lanes. They play with black holes. Now, what are we on this cosmic scale? Do we control the weather? Do we play with the sun? Do we roam the galactic space lanes? No. We are type 0. We get our energy from dead plants, oil and coal. But we are about 100 years. If you do the math, we are about 100 years away from becoming a type 1 civilization. At that point, we become interesting. At that point, the aliens

may actually want to make contact with us. If you saw the movie 2001, it shows that when we reach the moon and make contact with their probes, then the aliens get interested in us because we become type 1. Now, how long before we can be a type 1 civilization that could create a moon base? Maybe in 100 years. So we are about 100 years away from becoming a planetary civilization that other civilizations and space would want to contact, because we're too primitive for them to be interested in us. For example, what is the internet? The internet is the beginning of a type 1 telephone system. That's why the internet is so novel and so parable. It's a type one technology.

English will probably be the language of a type one civilization. Already on the internet, Mandarin Chinese and English are the two dominant languages. And we're seeing the beginning with type one sports. Olympics, soccer, beginning of type one sports, beginning of type one music. Look at rock and roll and rap music. The beginning of type one fashion. Take a look at Chanel and Gucci. And so we're seeing the beginning of a type one civilization right here on the earth.

Yeah. So that's obviously, you know, we're getting there. Yeah. So I think by the end of this century, we will become type one. We'll have an operating moon base, just like in the movie 2001. We'll have a tiny settlement on Mars. And we'll begin the process of being a two-planet species. So we've got a two-planet species.

How is it that we'll be able to take ourselves? I'll just say like with these small computers that we were sending down to Centauri. How long was it before we're able to go there ourselves? Well, let's be very clear about the timetable. We're talking about the 2030s before the first astronauts go to Mars. By the end of this century, we're talking about a self-sustaining base on Mars with agriculture, with the beginnings of rivers and some seas on Mars. and then in the next century we're talking about the first starships,

that is these tiny chips that go to Alpha Centauri, and perhaps next century fusion rockets, ramjet fusion rockets that can take passengers to the nearby stars, that's into the next century. And so we have a long ways to go, because of course we are a type zero civilization. Physically, you obviously talk about us being in other places, but is there something else that we can do with our minds and our bodies

Like, for instance, you say that there are quantum computing and everything. Is there anything that we can do to sort of transport ourselves to different places, as it were? That's right. I call this laser porting. We're talking about sending our consciousness at the speed of light into outer space. Within this century, we're going to have the connectome project finished. That is a complete map of the human brain. And once we map the entire human brain, we can put the coating of the brain on a laser beam

and shoot it to the moon. In one second, your consciousness will be on the moon. In 20 minutes, you could be on Mars. In four years, you'll be on the nearest star, traveling at the speed of light, no booster rockets, no accidents, no radiation, no weightlessness to worry about. No, you're riding on a light beam,

and on the moon, for example, there would be a receiving station that downloads your consciousness onto the moon, and then allows you to control an avatar. An avatar would be a robot so that you would have a superhuman body on the moon that could thrive on the moon, you would be conscious and control a superhuman body on other planets. Now, even though this sounds fantastic, by the end of the century, we might have this technology in place, and personally, I think it may already exist.

After all, alien civilizations probably don't use flying saucers and UFOs because they're too crude. They would probably use laser porting. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if there's a gigantic superhighway outside the planet Earth where billions of souls are being laser ported across the galaxy, and we humans are too stupid and too primitive to even know the fact that there is such a superhighway right next to the planet Earth. So laser porting could be the preferred way of exploring the galaxy for a civilization, perhaps type 2 or type 3, that do look at the galaxy as their backyard. That's just such a, well, a mind-boggling thing to think about, the fact that they could be out there just streaming their consciences around. That's right.

And ask yourself a simple question. Knowing what we know about the laws of physics, are we capable? Are we capable of tapping into it? And you begin to realize, no, we're children when it comes to being able to laser port, to contemplate interstellar travel, to even contemplate what an extraterrestrial civilization would look like. We always look at science fiction movies where the aliens are just maybe a hundred years more advanced than us, and they use these clumsy flying saucers to go from one point to another. That's because we project our world onto them, except we fast forward maybe just 100 years.

But now fast forward a million years. And then you can begin to realize that a whole new vista opens up. So sort of like bearing in mind like our understanding of physics and what we know that could be completely different in a million years time. That's right. Like I said, it may be possible to look at the stability. of space time itself, we think that the next energy scale is called the Planck Energy, where space and time become unstable. And holes and bubbles and tears form at the Plank energy. We, of course, are far away from being able to harness the plank energy, but it is

the energy of the Big Bang. It is the energy of the black hole. It is the energy at which space and time itself become unstable. Now, why is that important? Because in the far, future, the universe itself may die. That is, we talked about the death of the earth by self-inflicted means and by natural disasters, but the universe itself has a death warrant. We know that the universe is accelerating now, not slowing down as we once thought, and it could be headed for the big rip. That is the point at which temperatures in the universe go to absolute zero, near absolute zero, all intelligent life in the universe will necessarily die when temperatures reach near absolute zero.

And so we think the only way to avoid the death of our universe is to perhaps leave the universe. Now this, of course, is trillions of years into the future. But imagine a civilization trillions of years into the future that can reach the plonk energy, the energy at which space and time starts to become unstable, bubbles form, and, and And these bubbles could be gateways to other universes. And so instead of simply finding a civilization that has two planets, maybe we can find a civilization that has two universes. And so that's sort of whether the future of everything that we know and don't know,

like all existence goes. So where does that leave us as humans? What can we do about that or should we be worried about that? Well, Bertrand Russell, the great British mathematician and philosopher, once wrote one of the most depressing passages in the English language when he talked about the death of the sun, that it's inevitable, he said, the sun will expire and the earth will inevitably die. And all the yearnings, all the tears, all the frustrations and blood that we have shed on the earth are for nothing. Absolutely nothing. Well, he didn't foresee the coming of space travel, and so the death of the sun is not such a big deal anymore, because we can leave the solar system at some point in rocket ships, which of course didn't exist during the time of Birch and Russell. But now we're talking about the death of the universe itself.

And at that point, you may despair, saying that the death of the universe means the death of everything there is when we hit the big freeze. But my point of view is that even within the known laws of physics, we can entertain the possibility of perhaps even leaving our universe. I work in string theory where we have a multiverse of universes. In Einstein's theory, we have a bubble. The bubble is expanding. We live on the skin of the bubble. And that's called the Big Bang Theory. String theory says that there could be other bubbles out there creating a multiverse of universes.

And so we're not talking about a universe anymore, one world. We're talking about many worlds, each one consistent with the laws of physics given to us by string theory. So this, of course, is still a theory untested, but it does leave the possibility that there could be other universes out there. And if our universe gets too cold, trillions of years into the future, perhaps we may have to leave the universe. So at that point, I guess it's sort of like, it might not work out for us, but out there somewhere, it's going to be all right in the end. That's right. If you saw the movie Interstellar where Matthew McConaughey goes to a wormhole and visits another part of the universe, realized that the man who helped to do consulting for that universe was Kip Thorne, and he just won the Nobel Prize in Physics. So we have a Nobel Prize winner that has run computer simulation.

of what it would take to go through a wormhole, through a black hole, to enter another part of the universe. Now, of course, there's a lot of speculation here. Let's be clear. This is not proven fact yet. No one's ever gone through a black hole. However, it does leave open the possibility that the physics that we have today

leaves open the possibility of things like the movie interstellar where we go through the gateway to another part of the universe. Now, when I saw the movie, I said to myself, wait a minute. How is Matthew McConaughey going to get the energy of a black hole when we earthlings can barely go to the moon, let alone harness the energy of a black hole? Well, at the end of the movie, they give you the answer. And that is, who created the wormhole? And it was our descendants. Our descendants, millions of years into the future are very advanced. They realized that at one point in their evolution, life was almost extinguished on the earth. So they build a gateway to the

past, and they give us the instructions. So in other words, it's a very clever way of getting around the fact that we type zero civilization people do not have the energy to create a black hole, but maybe our descendants can give us the instructions from the future. And then, of course, they would have enough energy to play with black holes. I thought that was rather a clever device. That was Mitchi Okaku talking about the modern space race, our plans to colonise Mars and making contact with alien civilizations. His book, The Future of Humanity, is out now. Thanks for listening to The Science Focus podcast. In our March issue, which is on sale now, we look at the effects of loneliness on our mental health, investigate the ways you can stress proof your life, and find out

if we can ever prevent natural disasters. And of course, there's much more inside. Thank you for listening to the Science Focus podcast from the BBC Focus magazine team. We're the UK's best-selling science and technology monthly, available in print and in several digital formats throughout the world. Find out more at ScienceFocus.com or look out for us in your app store. This podcast is sponsored by Name, Audio and Focal. The texture and emotional depth of music can be lost through digital sources or poor signal. Name audio believes you can have digital precision with analogue warmth.

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