This is a short transcript excerpt from a YouTube clip of Michio Kaku speaking with Lex Fridman (AI Podcast clip). Kaku outlines a speculative scenario where human minds are digitized and transmitted at light speed via lasers to remote sites (the Moon, Mars, Pluto), enabling "digital immortality" and instantaneous interplanetary travel by downloading personalities into avatars. He extends the idea to speculate that an extraterrestrial "laser superhighway" of uploaded minds could already exist undetected, and that aliens might use avatars indistinguishable from humans.
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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. 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, and you're on the moon in one second. Shoot it to Mars. You're on Mars in 20 minutes. Shoot it to Pluto. You're on Pluto in eight 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 through the asteroid belt in the afternoon, and then come back for dinner in New York at night. All in a day's work. So 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 beams information. And where does it download the information? Into an avatar. And what does that avatar look like? Anything you want. Yeah. 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 again.
Here we go.
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. And to even prove it or disprove.
It, we would need 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 with 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.
Well, in fact, they could very well be.
They could even look like us. Exactly.
We'd never know one of us could be an alien.
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.
