The City University of New York and this is exploration everybody can exploit race and we discuss the fascinating world of science and its impact on society and today leading off we're going to bring on 2 figures in science who are leaders in their respective fields the 1st scientists it says Shaw stack he is the director of the search for extraterrestrial intelligence now you're probably seen on t.v. a Number of specials about aliens from outer space the aliens are going to invade us the aliens are right next door watching as with their flying saucers but what about how science views the whole question of intelligent life in the universe Dr says Shostak is a Ph d. In physics he's a colleague of mine and instead of teaching graduate students that prestigious universities all the intricacies of astrophysics and quantum mechanics he instead has decided to devote his life to the surge for alien civilizations in outer space Now at 1st you may say it is self Wow that sounds like a waste of time or wow maybe he's on the cutting edge maybe his name will go down in the history books when they make contact with aliens from outer space who knows but that's what he does for a living as a director for the search for extraterrestrial intelligence in Mountain View California he is the man eavesdropping eavesdropping on radio emissions from alien civilizations if there are any and then in the 2nd half of exploration we're going to bring on another set Seth Lloyd he's a professor of physics at mit and he believes in quantum computers in other words the Eventually the silicon computers you have on your desk will be exhausted instead of computing on tiny bits of silicon it will have to be computing on Adams and that means that the c. . Yeah he is interested in this because these are very powerful computers that in principle could break any code and so on the 2nd half of exploration will talk about quantum computers and so once again in the 1st half of exploration we're going to leap into the unknown with the search for extraterrestrial intelligence our special guest Dr Seth Shostak director of The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence who has devoted his life to eavesdropping eavesdropping on radio emissions from aliens in outer space maybe one day he will pick up the equivalent of I Love Lucy being broadcast from an alien civilization thousands of light years in the Heavens Who knows and then the next big question is What do you do what do you do if you actually make contact with an alien civilization We'll talk to Dr Shaw stack about that and then in the 2nd half of the exploration we're going to talk to another South Dr Seth Lloyd of mit he is one of the world's leading figures in something called quantum computers Well the 1st guest today is Dr Seth Shostak and he's following in the footsteps of astronomer Frank Drake back in the fifty's and sixty's astronomer Frank Drake had the idea of searching for radio signals from intelligent life in outer space intelligent enough to use radio to broadcast on but the question is there are so many frequencies out there which frequency do you dial in to if you want to listen in on a conversation between aliens. But that's actually a good point because of course you know the aliens haven't found us a fact telling us where on the dial they might be broadcasting the sort of 2nd guess what what frequencies what part of the tile makes sense and that idea had already been explored even though Frank Drake did know that by a couple of guys who at that point were at Cornell University couple of those was hit by Ivan name of chip company and started Cook County because Cody and Philip Morris and Anyhow these 2 guys had already fought about what frequencies make sense if you're going to send messages between the stars and they said well look there's kind of a natural answer to that because there's one frequency everybody will know and it turns out to be $1420.00 megahertz on the donkey might think well what special about that it turns out that hydrogen which is by far the overwhelmingly most common element in the universe I do can naturally emit some radio a mission at 1420 record so all astronomers you know of any sophistication in the universe will know about this request because if it looked at the natural frequency everybody will have it marked on the radio dial Let's try listening their great and get the same conclusion rather independently and so the 1st experiments were done usually with it with a receiver that only had one channel and only listen to one channel it on just like your auto radio. And set that frequency somewhere near this 1420 megahertz magic you can give it up now as time went on this kind of experiment became much more sophisticated today the receivers that are used for SETI listen simultaneously to parents of millions of channels at once because you know you don't know exactly which which require it might be the one they're using but they tend to look at skill at that part of the dollar around 1420 make or it's not always sometimes they'll do experiments where they're looking elsewhere but usually you're covering maybe a 1000 or 2000 megahertz around that frequency so you know it's a small fraction of the dial but it seems to be pretty good. No but if no one's ever come up with a better argument about where to whom it's Ok Now let's talk about Drake's Equation which is taught in every elementary astronomy course as scientists try to get a reasonable scientific estimate of the probability of intelligent races throughout the galaxy So tell us a little about Drake's equation. The question actually has an interesting history early for me and. I think it done that 1st listening experiment in the spring of 1960 to 45 years ago it was going to provide I think the end you know so that I can read a lot of interest and you didn't find the aliens but it generates a heck of a lot of interest and so the next year he had a meeting also in West Virginia at the observatory in which he invited all the kind of professional scientists who were interested in this work that total was like an earth over something fairly small number and as an agenda he would say you know we think around think oh it's meaning to come up coming up in a couple of weeks I need an agenda so as an agenda for this meeting he wrote down this very simple equation which is subsequently become known as the Drake equation and all it does is try to estimate something called an Ann is the number of the number of civilizations in our galaxy. It's going to find ourselves to our galaxy that are broadcasting right now the number of star systems if you will that are producing signals now that we could. Now clearly that depends on how many stars are there in the galaxy and what fraction of those that have planets and what fraction of those planets have produced the life and what fraction of those that are produced life have produced intelligent life and what fraction of those a producer technology and what fraction of those are actually the air right now it's a whole string of terms there's actually 7 terms of the equation you can find in almost any textbook on astronomy and that's the Drake equation and it would be great because it would tell you you know what are your chances of success you know and it's only using the chances that you'll find these guys pretty small but if enter thousands or millions or some very large you know Carl Sagan thought that the value of n. Was several 1000000 and well if that's true then you know you have a pretty good chance of creeping across the signal sooner or later so unfortunately because we don't know what it is there are a bunch of terms in the equation that we simply don't know so it's more of it a talking point kind of thing that it is an equation that you can actually solve or use. Other scientists say. We had a professor Brownlee on our airwaves about a year and a half ago and he said that Drake's Equation is flawed flawed because there are new astronomical bits of information that show that well to get life is more difficult than we thought he mentions for example that you need a large moon without a large moon the Earth would eventually tumble in its orbit and to over hundreds of millions of years and that would make d.n.a. Impossible he also mentioned the fact that at one point the entire earth was frozen over we were snowball earth and I guess d.n.a. Would be very hard to get off the ground under those circumstances he mentioned you have to have a large Jupiter in order to clean out the debris of the solar system he also mentioned you have to be a certain distance from the center of the black hole at the center of the galaxy Otherwise you get fried by being too close to this very radioactive core at the center of the galaxy but if you're too far out then they're not enough heavy elements to create the d.n.a. And higher molecules so well what are your thoughts is the earth in some sense unique as Professor Brownlee was hinting at or do you think it is quite large as Carl Sagan believe well of course nobody knows so everything I'm going to tell you my own I think to get it out if we do the answer we would be discussing it but it's true John Brownlee and a colleague Peter Ward of the University of Washington open yet wrote this book about 5 years ago called rare earth which they had indeed as you indicated kind of a laundry list. You know reasons why Earth might not be just a run of the mill problem planet Earth might be very very special so special that in fact although there might be some other life out there it's not going to be very sophisticated life it isn't going to be and how to live and so our SETI experiments are kind of a way the time that that was there and this was reviewed by the way in the New York Times. This book a lot of play and but if you actually look at this laundry list you find that the items on it are not terribly convincing Let's take a couple of the ones you name for example the fact that the Earth has a large moon which kind of stabilizes the spin of the earth Ok now if we didn't have that large movement the way a large moon is kind of a rare thing you know Mercury doesn't have a large moon and if no moon Venus doesn't have a large moon as no moon Mars as a couple of moons you can walk around in an afternoon I mean you know. On the other hand among the rocky planets is the only one to have a have a large moon Ok and Keurig stabilize the earth in but if you took that moon away Yes well the earth wouldn't you know just go completely nuts every now and again the North Pole would come down to you know Connecticut or a plate. But it would take hundreds of thousands maybe millions of years to do that right so it's such a slow movement that even you know even for complicated life like freshwater auditors or whatever I think you can just walk away from that problem if you've got a 100000 years you know before the North Pole gets to you you have plenty of time to move I mean that isn't fatal to lie. And might be an inconvenience you know if you had a society with a lot of cities you might not want to happen but it's almost it's not fatal Now there's another thing in your list there you mentioned we're fortunate to have Jupiter because Jupiter as cleaned out the inner solar system of all these big rocks that otherwise might you know slam on your planet and ruin the whole day just the way it happened 65000000 years ago taken out the dinosaurs 75 percent of all other species Well sure but on the other hand big Jupiter's are not rare we know that in fact all the planets we found around other stars are like Jupiter are bigger planets are not rare but even even a time in that you could argue that maybe life on earth would have gotten a little bit farther had we not had such a big planet and Jupiter out there because in fact you know that guy knows they've been wiped out 50000000 years earlier we would be 50000000 years ahead of where we are today we have to cure for deaf. But I guess. It would be better off that I don't find out a very convincing argument if you can look at each one of these arguments and the snowball or yes there's some evidence although it's somewhat controversial but there's some evidence it was a time you 1000000000 years ago when you heard was impressed that would die but there was life on Earth and that life wasn't wiped out by snowball or they just you know had to sit there and you know live at the bottom of the ocean for a while but you know a lot of life well all life was bad in the ocean very Now you know didn't wipe out or it wasn't fatal Ok so all these things yes it might be an inconvenience All right that might not be but in any case none of them stopped life on Earth number 500 so I really don't think that Earth is really all that special Well Professor Brownlee goes on in fact on and on and on as I thought interviewing him he also says that microbial life could in fact be quite common throughout the universe but intelligent life well take a look at the dinosaurs he says you know we've had life forms with us spinal cords and nervous systems for hundreds of millions of years on the earth but humans only humans on the earth even on the earth with such ideal conditions it took a hundreds of millions of years for that for humans to get off the ground and even then there were many times when humanity may have been wiped out there were only a few 1000 of us you know 100000 years ago to create the entire human race the human race could have been wiped out many times during certain bottlenecks in our evolution so he was basically saying that intelligent life is extremely rare even if you have microbial life being common What do you thoughts Well he's right in that it's a controversial area I think more controversy open ended question whether you can get complex life on a lot of planets I don't think that's a con contribution but just because I give you a 1000000 planets with life right and you let them cook for a few 1000000000 years there is a legitimate question but fraction of them will ever cook up something as clever as you know as we are. And we are clever compared to the most critters around. As debatable but it is. But it any case I mean you know we don't know because we don't we still don't understand fully how or even partially really how intelligent evolved on Earth what was it that produced intelligence on Earth it's a mechanism that was just very rare in the sense of being accidental or contingent upon a lot of special circumstances and maybe he's right maybe you've got a lot a lot of life out there maybe Captain Kirk thinks the Starship Enterprise out of the space in fact lots and lots of life in the government is all stupid that's one possibility but on the other hand all the studies that have been done about how intelligence the growth on Earth suggest that well what drove it was nothing that you wouldn't expect elsewhere and sure it took a long time before you got this far but you needed some pre-conditions you needed warm blooded animal with a high metabolic rate you know you need you need to all sorts of sort of biological elements and then in the last 50000000 years which of course is fairly short in the history of the planet but in the last 50000000 years a lot of species have gotten smarter it's you know obviously Homo sapiens but you know and obviously our simian relatives right chimps are pretty clever but you know herds are pretty clever even even octopi are fairly clever a way open dolphins are fairly clever there there's been an increase in intelligence among you know handful a couple of handfuls of species in the past 50000000 years it isn't just one species that got smarter and we got smarter than they did but I think you know if you were to visit Earth 2000000 years ago you would have found that the smartest things on the planet were not our simian ancestors but some white playing golf and they had the highest i.q. And that they didn't leave a lot of literature but they were to smarter think so it does seem that intelligence is actually kind of a fairly natural product of evolution once you get to a certain level of complexity this is the traversal but at least. Indications are that intelligence is not some sort of fear Ok Well shifting gears a little bit we also had a professor Dan Werth Heimer from the University of California at Berkeley on our airwaves a few years ago talking about SETI at home that is on your home p.c. You can get a trunk or a chunk of this radio data and have your p.c. Via its screensaver basically crunch some of the numbers to look for intelligence agents What's been the progress for a city at home in the last several years well 30 at home was intended ritually just a few very short lived projects maybe for your 2 but it was so popular that it's continue to expect it you know maybe 50000 people paid 50 people would download this free bit of software so that when they walk away from their computer you know it's still humming away that it would it would the process the certain amount of study data that it would download from the servers at the University of California Berkeley Well more than 5000000 people have doubt about it that you know so that you know that the 100 times as many as they expected and about a 3rd of them use that any given time what they do is they distribute a little bit of the data they collect on the radio telescope on the way to Rico to receive both radio telescope it's a lot of a lot of listeners may have been in the movie Contact movie Goldeneye you know the great movie star and they think it's stupid about one or 2 percent of the data they collect there on the the web or people using the screen but the point is that there are so many people doing this with their home computers that it is by far the largest computer project of the largest computer if you will in the world right now and those data are looked at Ex ordinarily carefully so you know that it's really a very very fine tooth comb a look at all the rest of their data right there at Berkeley using you know the local Berkeley computers but they can't look as carefully as they can and at this small fraction of the data which you know are the prime data if you will now as anybody found something but people find stuff all the time of course if you do these sorts of were this sort of work and you're using a began 10 to like I want to put it because you find signals all the time I got you got this huge antenna it's called connected to it and receiver that is not only in the channel of course you pick up things. But of course the question is is that on the line or is that 18 feet on the line is that just interference from a telecommunications ballot like that now what the guys at Berkeley do is they look at all the signals that have been found by people using the computers at home and they look for those cases where a signal has been found more than once and fact more than twice if a signal has been found 3 different times I just by 3 different people that doesn't count but you know it 3 different times in other words the telescope was pointing at some spot on the sky and they kind of signal and then you know 3 months later comes back to that thing point somebody else finds it again at that same frequency at that thing if that happens to be a more time then they say hey look that's you know kind of interesting from a statistical point to get that to get it's not just the noise spike at. You know looks like a real thing and they will go down to the telescope and will deliberately look at that spot on the sky for funky to time a few minutes whatever it takes until they can to verify whether the signal still there they have done that on several occasions so far no dice but on the other hand it is quite possible that somebody running 30 at home could in fact find a signal that would entitle them to pick up a prize in Stockholm and have dinner with the king and that of course would be perhaps one of the pivotal events in human evolution on the planet Earth I think so well let me ask you now the $64000.00 question what do you as an individual think and is and being the number of intelligent planetary systems out there and where are they yes well Ok I don't know what any of dire but I can to agree with Frank Drake who still works here at the Fed you know the dude is often down the hall from mine and you crank it now and I get will be 75 in another month or so but he still is active as ever was and he's pretty smart guy one of the cleverest guys I've I've known and if you ask Frank look you know this is your equation what do you think it is they well I think it's probably around 10000 but it's kind of a conservative number compared to Carl Sagan about it with a few 1000000 I think Isaac Asimov thought it was 2 thirds of a 1000000 you know so right good thing about and that's a well if it's anywhere between 1000 and well bigger number if it's more than a 1000 then that the nearest aliens are within on the order of a 1000 light years Ok Now keep in mind that if you look at the whole Milky Way galaxy about 100000 light years across that this is you know only like one percent of the way across the galaxy 1000 light years that's far if you're trying to drive it in your Honda but it isn't so far for radio telescope if that's the case and it really is you know it is up for grabs obviously we don't but if if that's. Been our experiment should find this signal within the next 20 years because within the next 20 years we will have kind of searched start out to that yes so that's my bet but on the other hand we're not going to know the answer until we know the at the. And what are your thoughts about well where are they said he so far has picked up nothing is that just a question of the lack of sensitivity of this us to said he intended as a lack of the tech there is or is it because they're shy out there in how to space or maybe they don't exist or well what are your thoughts about the why we haven't picked up any messages yet Yeah well you know I think that the answer is very simple I think it's simply because we've we've we've not come to nothing but a galactic real estate yet but you know there are people who say no no no the fact that you haven't heard anything yet means something it means that they're not out there because any society that was more advanced than ours and most of them are going to be more advanced I mean if intelligence really does occur on planet in a fashion that not explored nearly rare in most of the societies out there will be much older than ours because after all you know we're the new kid on the block the earth has only been here for 4 to half 1000000000 years that the Galaxy has been around for like 3 times that like the time most of the stars out there are older. So if they're really advanced than they should have been able by now to maybe calm eyes big chunks of the galaxy to know that they should have been able to spread out around they should have you know remote transmitter transmitters they should be very easy to find. And the fact that we haven't found them this sounds like some sort of paradox in fact that this little argument is often called the paradox because Enrico Fermi the physicist the valued American that this was the 1st to point to found over a lunch I think it was the Los Alamos and I think if he put in any case that it's argument I don't think I'd buy into that I don't think it's a matter of them being shy being coy maybe some of them are shy maybe most of them are shy but if only one society has a powerful transmitter out there then we have a chance to that I think the reason we haven't found them yet is that we haven't looked very carefully and all of that is going to change in the next few decades mostly because of the arch of technology. Well my personal point of view is that if there's an ant hill in the country and you're walking down this country road and you bump into this ant hill do you go down to the Ensign say I bring your trinkets I bring you beads I bring a nuclear energy and d.n.a. Technology or perhaps maybe you step on a few of them probably you know I get phone calls just about every other day from people who have their own explanation of why we haven't heard anything and if usually because the aliens are put off by our environmental degradation in our you know threatening one another with war and all that sort of that but indeed I think that from their point of view none of that matters terribly much anymore than whatever wars the answer getting into concern me they don't. Now another stream of thought says that we're looking in the wrong place for example take a look at the e-mail e-mail is compressed e-mail is broken up and goes through many cities and then recombined at the other end so if an alien civilization had even a primitive even a primitive e-mail system and we were eavesdropping on it we wouldn't hear much at all the signals would be compressed in a way that we don't understand they'd be fragmented and redistributed and reassembled someplace else in a Coby don't understand so we could be listening into messages that are teeming with intelligent things in it but we are simply too primitive to understand it what your thoughts about that well I'm sure there's a lot of truth in that I don't expect that we are going to understand any of the messages even to the point of being able to sort of break them up into the bit that they you know that make them up and it's also true that you know there are all sorts of methods for coding information if any bit around that are fairly sophisticated that we use that with your cell phone and you sort of spread spectrum technology with the signal spread all over the dial instead of being concentrated in one very hard to find with a radio receiver unless you know all the details of their communications schemes so yeah there are lots and lots of ways they could make the signal hard to find but you know. And it comes out of this if they have a transmitter on that puts a certain amount of energy somewhere in the radio dial somewhere in the radio spectrum and we don't worry about how it's in coded or what the message is or anything like that we don't worry about the message when we do our said spirits we're just trying to determine it's a transmitter on we're looking for narrowband components to the. A. Little you know a lot x. That energy if you will it sort of on the radio about we find that we of course don't know what they're saying whether it's something profound or whether it's trivial like you are right we don't care about any of that we're simply looking for evidence that they're transmitters are wrong because after all that that's the group that we're after Ok Now let's talk about flying saucers of course the distances between stars are enormous it would take the voidness base craft thousands and thousands of years to reach the nearest star but that's because you know we're kind of primitive on this scale that we're talking about another civilization could easily be a 1000000 years ahead of us and so the next question is is there a law of physics preventing a civilization millions of years ahead of us from making contact with us is there any brick wall that prevents an advanced civilization for making contact well. If you're going to feel this and you know that there isn't there is no conflict. Now there may be something big that makes it very hard not an invention of physics if you use you know the rockets in the normal sense but the problem there is the rockets of course don't go after half but you know they're more advanced they can build better rockets but when you get up to very high speed then you really do need to be that are comparable to be light if you want to get from one part of the next in less than a century which don't be like something you might want to do no matter where you are well Seth we have to take a short break now. We're . Well I'm afraid that's it for the 1st part of exploration and once again our special guest has been Dr Seth Shostak of the search for extraterrestrial intelligence based in Mountain View California and if you want a copy of today's program call the Pacifica program Service Act 180-735-0230 That's 187-350-2300 extension 48 copy of today's program and in the 2nd half of exploration we bring on another sat Dr Seth Lloyd of mit talking about quantum computers perhaps the most mysterious form of computation and eventually it may change the course of human civilization as we run out of silicon power so once again stay tuned for the 2nd half of exploration as we talk about the world of quantum computers and is the universe a quantum computer. Welcome once again this is Dr Michio Kaku professor of theoretical physics at the City College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York and this is the 2nd half of exploration in the 1st half of exploration we explore the world of alien life in outer space with Dr Seth Shostak of the psyche Institute in Mountain View California in the 2nd half of exploration we're going to bring on another Seth Dr Seth Lloyd of mit who's going to talk about quantum computers perhaps the most exotic form of computation ever conceived by 2020 or so we will gradually begin to exhaust the power of silicon because transistors will be so tiny that electrons will leak out of the silicon chip and we need a replacement and quantum computers maybe it however even the CIA is interested in quantum computers they are in principle so powerful that they could crack any computer code and you'll be able to eavesdrop on any conversation via a quantum computer and Dr Seth Lloyd also entertains the possibility that maybe the universe itself is one gigantic quantum computer so once again our special guest today is Dr Seth Lloyd of mit and we're talking about the world beyond 2020 what happens when Silicon Valley becomes a Rust Belt and we have to go to quantum computers. To. And I would like to introduce our special guest for today we're very delighted to have with us Professor Seth Lloyd of mit author of a new controversy old book called Programming the Universe and the question is is the universe a quantum computer Now let me explain we all know that computers that energize modern society are based on so it can and the silicon chip that you have in your Pentium crams literally millions upon millions of tiny transistors into something that's a little bit bigger than your thumbnail and the question is how far can you go until the tiniest transistor becomes the size of an atom well that time is coming perhaps in 2030 years we don't know precisely when but we do know that someday transistors will be so tiny that atoms of silicon simply won't do what have to go to atomic computers otherwise known as quantum computers and Professor Lloyd is an expert in this area called quantum computation and he thinks maybe even the universe is a quantum computer Now let me also note that Adam spin like a spinning top and you all know that spinning tops have an arrow the axis of spin that could point up or down if it points up that's a 0 if it points down that's a one and you get binary but Adams are more than just binary atoms can also point sideways and everywhere in between a superposition of and down. And that's where we get into the bizarre world of the quantum theory where you don't really know quite where this arrow is pointing but you have much more freedom than simply zeros and ones you have zeros and ones and in between these are called cubits are quantum bits and Dr Seth Lloyd is one of the world's experts in this new area and of course many people are interested in this modern technocrats our decision because one day quantum computers may have the internet on it and as well as banking records in your credit card records not to mention the fact of the CIA wants to get their handle on quantum computers because with it you can crack any code with a quantum computer but you see Dr Lloyd goes even farther than that because you see everything around us is governed by atoms atoms in turn obey quantum mechanics and therefore he claims that the universe the universe is one gigantic quantum computer and if that's true then what is the computing What's the program who wrote the software God I mean your mind starts to go crazy thinking about the possibility that maybe the universe is a quantum computer so once again our special guest today is Dr Seth Lloyd author of the new book Programming the Universe. Professor Lloyd tell us a little bit about your youth where there are any kinds of incidences or stories you like to tell about what set you off in a career in mathematics computational physics and physics Well I've always loved moving around with numbers and where game can think in Vulcan geometry when I was a kid I played a lot with block and would build huge geometric constructions those wells building with them. And then when I went to school I was amazed to find out that there was a subject called physics where with relatively simple data if you could discover a huge amount about the way the world works of course but I went to graduate school and found it was really the opposite there's a huge amount of complicated about that you only understand a little tiny bit about the way the world works but by then it was too late I was I was like Great into the field and you also mention in your book that as a graduate student everyone seemed to be doing string theory but you saw your destiny going in a slightly different direction could you elaborate sure what I. What I was at Cambridge University I did it. And fill in History and Philosophy of Science and started working on ideas of information in quantum mechanics I also studied Quantum Gravity with Stephen Hawking and it struck me that there was a connection between these 2 things the 2 ideas of quantum information and quantum gravity so when I went to Rockefeller University to work with my pickle to do a Ph d. In physics I started off working on ideas. Quantum Information and quantum gravity basically the same thing that I'm doing today oh of course I didn't like that very much at Rockefeller University about halfway through they told me I better cut it out and work on something more conventional like elementary particle physics or string theory. Well I guess reality intrudes. And Hines pagans I should also mention was one of the early guests on exploration speaking about elementary particle physics and now let's talk about things that are very practical the average American of course says What's In It For Me numero uno am I going to get better Internet reception Oh my God he had better computer power so let's talk about computer power computer games and what we have for Christmas Everybody knows that it Christmas time your computer is almost twice as part of fall as the computers of the previous Christmas and that's called Moore's Law So some people say well Moore's Law is going to go on forever however you think otherwise so tell us a little bit about Moore's law and why you think Moore's Law is going to break down so by Christmas time we're not going to get Christmas presents that are almost twice as partial as the previous Christmas Well it's dangerous to predict that Moore's Law will break down people have been predicting an imminent demise for decades starting and to the late 1960 s. And every time some clever engineer managed to find a way around whatever the problem seemed to be standing in the way of progress and in fact if you look at Moore's Law It's not just one technology that made computers get more powerful by a factor of 2 every year and a half or so it's a whole series of technology that have kicked in from vacuum tube to transistor to integrated circuit and these technologies rely on. The improvement the rapid improvement of other kinds of methods like machining materials time so Moore's Law is kind of the tip of the iceberg of this rapid improvement however it can't actually go on forever for a simple reason that is that computers are governed by. The laws of physics and the laws of physics tell you how small you can make thing how fast you can do things and. So if you actually took all the energy in the universe and turned it into a gigantic computer possibility and in visits by I cast off in a story the last question. I was able to calculate using the physics of information processing how big such a computer would be and well the computer this universal computer if you like Up till now it could have performed about 10 to 120 elementary operations or about 10 to the 90 bit and if you actually look at the exponential progress of course on ask when at what point could the whole universe become a computer it's only 250 or 400 years away so even if we managed to take every elementary particle in the universe and turn it a computer into how to protect it made in a computation then Moore's Law couldn't last for more than a few more century Ok well let's be very practical on your desk is a laptop with a Pentium chip let's say and that Pentium chip has a layer layer of chemicals the smallest layer being 20 atoms across 20 atoms across the smallest layer in a Pentium chip on your desk in 20 years in fact in less than 20 years that layer will be 5 Haddam to cross at the rate at which we're going 5 atoms are crossed. And in 5 Adams We have to introduce something called the Heisenberg uncertainty principle which says you don't really know precisely where that electron is in which case if electrons leak out of the layer your Pentium chip just short circuited and your laptop is now useless and so the question is how small can you make a transistor before you bump up against atoms and at the atomic level everything's uncertain Yeah well that certainly is something to worry about and indeed if Intel starts making chips where the electrons are just leaking out all over the place chips wouldn't work so they clearly can't make them by exactly the same to time. However it's certainly there's certainly nothing wrong with or nothing against the laws of physics to actually store the information at the atomic scale do you want to Atom one. And. The components of computers get smaller indeed Autumn Effect like the Heisenberg Uncertainty can but maybe we can actually. Take advantage of these effects like the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle maybe we can turn it from being a body into a feature and indeed that's what my colleagues and I do when we try to build computers whose. Features scale the size of the Bit are down to the level of individual atoms. Ok now let's talk again a very practical things when people say What's In It For Me Well the government of course would ask the same question what's in it for us and let's not talk about the CIA the CIA of course is very much interested breaking codes they love to break the codes of other nations but many times to break a code you have to have a key and sometimes this key is a problem the ability to factorize a huge number let's say I have a number with 100 digits Take a sheet of paper and write a random set of integers 100 digits long would fill up many many sheets of paper and then you are asked to factorize it as the product of 2 numbers well how would you do that it would exhaust most computers and some people therefore think that certain codes are safe that is beyond the ability of most ordinary computers to crack the factorization of a number that is 100 it is long but now let's talk about computing on atoms is it possible that this new generation of computers this quantum computers that you are pioneering could be able to crack codes that even the CIA cannot crack Well it is possible and indeed. If we could build a quantum computer a computer that stored bits of information on individual atoms one with only a few. Tens of 1000 quite a bit and one able to perform a few 100000000 operation which is to say something quite to the link compared with the laptop on my lap right now if we could build a very credible quite a computer then we could use these kind of weird Beacher like the Heisenberg uncertainty principle to compute in a different way and indeed 1904 Peter shore that 18000 now at mit showed that in fact you could exploit quantum weirdness to factor large numbers and break these codes but even a rather small quad a computer. Ok now let's talk about computers themselves everyone talks about the digital age everything is digital but what does digital mean and what is this 00100 one's that simple sometimes we see in the press and like if you saw the movie The Matrix you saw a bunch of zeros and ones arose and ones what are the zeros and ones and what is the so-called digital age of. A 0 or one of what's called a bit up it is the the smallest possible chunk of information and it doesn't have to be through and one famous bit there are yes turned all had to a tale of true or false. Black or White essentially any any thing that can take on 2 different states 2 different distinguishable states register that and that's the smallest chunk of information and the way that digital computers work is they break up information and to fit into it smallest chunks and then process it that way. Ok so if modern society the Wealth of Nations everything we see around us is governed by zeros and ones then let's now talk about cubits quantum bits where Adam's don't have to be in zeros in one states they could be zeros and ones and in between so tell us about about how atoms can be in between 0 and one yeah so so well you know one starts talking about quantum mechanics then things start to get weird you know Niels Bohr famously said that anyone who can contemplate quantum mechanics without getting dizzy how to properly understood it. But let's go on anyway a pack of such a little more than 100 years ago. Physicists including back Planck I'm done you know support others realize that there was an essential chunky ness to nature a kind of a digital quality that things that people thought of as being wave like like print the flight was found came in little chunks like a middle chunk called photon a little particle of light down came a little chunk called opponent a little particle of sound and so at this quantum level things that look continuous actually are so much digital print that you could have no protons in a spot or one photon of or you could have one of the electron over here or one electron over there and indeed that's how a conventional computer registers that so with a lot more electrons so you know bucket empty lots of electrons out electrons out of the bucket that 0 up at full lots of electrons in the bucket that want. Now in quantum mechanics so quantum mechanics to the bottom of the world has a digital feature which is good because that means we can use the digital nature of the world of quantum nature to store digital of prevention but there's another weird feature of quantum mechanics that goes under the name wave particle duality so just a wave like right are made up of particles so things like particle like electrons grip and have waves of those fitted with the wave it electrons wave tells you something about where the electron air so get a digital world an ordinary back if you could I don't have an electron here hero or there one but in the quantum world the electrons wave can be both here and there at the same time so a quantum that electron here and there at the same time is a bit that can register in some funky quantum foam that nobody really understands you know and want at the same time you get are not either 0 or one they can be 0 and $1.00 Ok so let's take an analogy of a top spinning top everyone's play with them as children and Adam spin and therefore atoms are also like spinning tops and Adams can spend either up or down when they're placed in a magnetic field or at least until the quantum theory came in and so now we can have pops that spin up tops that spin down and pop says spin in between now these cubits these quantum bits can be between 0 and one and they consist of atoms now not molecules of silicon that you see on a transistor so how would you actually now build a quantum computer let's say that you were an inventor have access to laser beings and magnetic fields and the ability to play with atoms. Individual atoms How would you build a quantum computer. So. I guess in fact of a little more than 10 years ago I was in that position because quantum computers the I do you could compute at the level that I'm using quantum mechanics have been proposed by Paul Benioff and Richard climbing back in 1900. And tool by the early 1900 nobody knew how to build one nobody had a clue and. Around 1993 I realized that with off the shelf elements like lasers in my career generator you could take out a and make them compute and the way the type of computing I suggested was in fact just what you suggested will take spin as Arbet so spinning or if we can call that clockwise is 0 it's been down to the one and then spinning sideways is this funky state of a cubit 0 and one at the same time so now if you take such an atom the spin of the nucleus of an atom if you put the item in a magnetic field and then used to happen with microwave you can make that bit flip this is called. Magnetic president it's the same technique that you use to image your knee when you blow it out while skiing. So if you put on light for bikeways at just the right frequency it will tickle the nucleus and cause the nucleus to flip 1st it will start of a face start of a fade 0 or spin and then it gradually rotates down to the states been washed sideways 0 and one of the famed time to the state has been down for one. You know if you have lots of data about the think we are you can address them with different frequency you can think in fact of these different Adams's essentially listening to different radio station so you know if I have one atom that listens to. 89.7 figure Hertz g.b.h. Or in Boston then a 2nd one day the 1st one to compensate effect upon a hydrogen will listen to w c r b 102.5. So when I dressed to Adam with my Chris a different frequency radio is a different frequency then if I shine a light at 89.7 The carbon atom which Listen stated I put them in will flip and if I shine a light for a microwave at 102.5 then the hydrogen atom which listens to The View Ferebee will flip so I can address out of the individual and then if you're sensitive to the interaction between the atoms you can massage those interactions to make up. Logical operation for instance causing the hydrogen atom to flip if and only if the carbon atom spin down to one. And at the bottom computation is nothing more than making Adam making plans and making one bit of slip if another better another or several other bit very beat want that any computation could be broken down into the simple operation thinking that making them interact with each other and the atoms you know molecule the carbon in the hydrogen can perform a simple computation simply by addressing them with light our case so let's back up a bit you have a bunch of Adams let's say in a line and you place it in a magnetic field saw the spins are either up or down or perhaps sideways a mixture of up and down and once you have these Adams aligned then you hit it with microwaves and at certain frequencies the atom will absorb the radiation and flip That's right and he's flipping process represents a calculation now because the atom is neither up nor down but a mixture of up and down you have much more flexibility then in zeros and ones Ok Now then the question is what kind of computation can you perform on this can you do the calculations of the laptop can you do one plus one is 2 what's the world's record for computing on these atoms. So you can certainly take. These Adam and make them do anything that an ordinary digital computer could do though at the moment because atoms are various ball and even if you extrapolate Moore's Law into the future depending on how you you calculate size. Then you will take 25 to 40 years to for us to get computers where the components are Tomic even if Moore's Law continues that it prints breakneck pace but the quantum computers we've built can do anything apart a computer that an ordinary computer say with 7 to 10 bits can do because that's the size of the computers for the camp right now. However. So as beautiful classical computers just doing ordinary operating like one plus one equals 2 then they're they're pretty weak Qana computers not only are they small in actual size you know the size of. A few of a small molecule but they're small terms of power however if we start to take advantage of the ability the ability of Adam to read his hero and one of the same time then quantum computers can do things that classical computers can't and and that the secret comes probably looking what it can do in a computer so it can store data. But they also can be instruction so if you look at Mean do this right and one is going to structure meaning do that now if I take a quantum bit to get that to be your 0 and one of the same time and I feed it into a quantum computer as an instruction then the Quite a computer will do this and it will do that at the same time so quantum computers can altie task or do parallel computation in a way that classical computer can't and that's why if we could build a quantum computer with a with a few tens of thousands of quite a bit which team but it's a difficult but certainly not impossible then we might be able to start striking fear into the hearts of the CIA The n.s.a. And other 3 letter agencies now the reality and correct me if I'm wrong the reality is that the world's record for a quantum computation is that drumbeat 3 times 5 equals 15 and I understand that that calculation was done on something like $5.00 to $7.00 atoms so correct me if I'm wrong but at the present time we're still at doing calculations that even children can do. Tiny steps for tiny bit that show. But you've got to start from somewhere and then indeed as you pointed out the whole notion that quantum effects might come into play strike spirit of the heart of Intel So we have to figure out how to make atom compute and before we start to make a god or a number of atoms computers so you know starting about 6 or 7 years ago we started to do the 1st quantum computation and we've been gradually making them bigger. It takes a tough engineer to handle it tender add up. Atoms are small and sensitive and they say we're not even due to make atomic scale computers for another 25 to 40 years by Moore's Law So it's hard to do but we do have some progress for instance if we're not looking at general purpose propagation like you know all the planning 3 times 5 to get 15. If we look at special purpose computation like trying to stimulate other quantum system then I've been pointed out into the $983.00 quantum computers might be very good at that and indeed we've built special purpose on a computer to contain more bits then any prosecutor on earth a BB fit and we've used these to simulate effects like quantum chaos fault or the pavior of. Electrons hopping around again and fight battles that you could never ever do even with the world's largest supercomputer so you know well computers are small for. We're only factoring very small numbers right now so I think the CIA can rest in peace for a decade or 2 but we can still do something that even the largest cost of classical supercomputers can't do. Well I'm afraid that's it for exploration once again our 1st question guest was Dr Seth Shostak of the search for extraterrestrial intelligence based in Mountain View California and the 2nd special guest was Dr Seth Lloyd of mit an expert on quantum computers and if you want to copy of today's program called the Pacifica program service at 180-735-0230 That's 187-350-2300 extension 48 copy of today's program once again this is Dr Michio Kaku professor of theoretical physics inviting you to join us every week for our discussion of science and its impact on society today. I. Come From.