Bay Area Trip Day 9 (Michio Kaku)

I'm not going to lie, today we took a much needed slow day around the house today, and didn't accomplish much with our afternoon. Both of us are nursing sore feet from all of the walking that we've been doing. Man, it's hell getting old I tell 'ya. We did not flit the whole day away however. In the evening we had planned to head out to the UC Berkeley campus to see a lecture by the world renowned theoretical physicist, Dr. Michio Kaku.
Of all the really great events that we had booked for this trip, I was looking forward to this one the most. I can't believe what a great find this was by Ursa.

Dr. Kaku is, first and foremost, a really funny guy. That is a big part of what makes him a great lecturer and educator, he makes you laugh. He also loops his points back to popular culture, explaining physics by referencing movies that have used a similar concept, which allows the audience to not get overwhelmed by the subject matter. This is how he has managed to have two books so far on the New York Times Bestseller list with the word "physics" in the title.
In his previous books such as Physics of the Impossible, and Physics of the Future, Dr. Kaku discusses the advancement of technology and how it will conceivably work, but in his new book, The Future of the Mind, he looks inward at what makes us who we are and how we will soon be able to effect it.
Already, scientists are developing brain implants that can help the disabled to type, move robotic arms, even whole exoskeletons all with the power of their mind. Will we also have surrogate robots that we can control with our minds to do dangerous tasks like going into space, or fighting fires? Will such chips eventually allow us to connect to the internet, and communicate with each other using only our mind? The answer to these questions is, remarkably, yes.
President Obama also recently announced the BRAIN initiative to map all of the neuro pathways in the human brain. When completed, this project, like the human genome project before it, will open up an amazing world of understanding and possibilities. We will unlock the mysteries of mental illness and potentially help hundreds of millions of people. We will also be able to digitize and store a complete rendering of a person's mind, Dr. Kaku claims this means that when a person dies, their mind can live on inside a computer. So at some point in the future you will be given two disks, one containing your genome (which maps who you are physically) and one containing your connectome (which maps who you are intellectually).
All this and more will be on the horizon for mankind. Dr. Kaku is a fascinating lecturer and a great writer and I still can't believe how lucky we were to have been able to attend this event.