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Aug. 21, 1996 - Art Bell
02:54:43
Coast to Coast AM with Art Bell - Harold Levison - Possible life on Mars
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Welcome to Art Bell's Somewhere in Time, tonight featuring Coast to Coast AM from August 21,
1996.
From the high desert and the great American Southwest, I bid you all good evening, good morning as the case may be, and welcome to another edition of Who Knows What?
That's live talk radio, all night long, from the Tahitian and Hawaiian Islands in the West, East to the Caribbean and the U.S.
Virgin Islands, South into South America, North to the pole and worldwide on the internet, this is Coast to Coast AM.
I'm Art Bell.
Great to be here again this morning.
Great to be back in general.
And we've got what's going to be a very interesting program this evening, because I've got a lot of questions, and I'm sure you do too.
You all know that while I was gone on vacation, as occurs when I'm gone on vacation, because that's the way it is, I have no other answer.
Big things break.
NASA suddenly announced that, lo and behold, they have a meteorite recovered which they thought contained the, uh, contained light.
Fossilized samples of light from the planet Mars.
And that was followed up, uh, on the heels of that.
We got other news about Europa.
And the possibility of a watery center to Europa, and that there might be life there, too.
Non-trivial revelations, indeed.
And I have many questions, and I'm sure you do, and we've got a man this morning who may be able to answer some of them, Dr. Harold Levinson.
He is a Senior Research Fellow, Department of Space Sciences, Instrumentation in Space Research Division and works for the Southwest Research Institute.
He has an A.B.
in Physics, Franklin and Marshall College in 81, M.S.
in Astronomy, University of Michigan, 83, and a Ph.D.
in Astronomy, University of Michigan, 1986.
His principal research Interest lies in the area of the dynamics of astronomical objects.
In particular, he focuses on the long-term behavior of the solar system and its bodies, though he has undertaken both observational and theoretical projects in the pursuit of these interests.
Most of his research involves the development of large-scale numerical experiments.
So, if he researches the dynamics of astronomical bodies and objects, He'd be a perfect person to ask how a meteorite gets from there, Mars, to here, the third rock from the Sun.
His work on the solar system includes studies of the long-term dynamic behavior of comets, the dynamics of objects in the Kuiper belt, I believe it is, the stability of Trojan asteroids, and the origins of Pluto.
He has recently performed a numerical integration of the orbits of thousands of the belt objects for the entire age of the solar system, about four billion years.
In addition, he has performed the largest CCD search to date for slow-moving objects in our solar system.
He is also a member of the team that used the Hubble Space Telescope to find objects the size of Halley's Comet In the belt, four billion miles from the sun.
And he has a professional chronology as long as your arm.
He's a member of the American Astronomical Society, Division of Planetary Science, and Division of Dynamic Astronomy.
So we have a heavy weight on our hands here.
and in a moment we will ask him about all the recent revelations now we take you back to the night of august twenty first
nineteen ninety six on our bills somewhere in time
and It also, by the way, is fortunate we have the doctor here this morning because the following just cleared the wire.
Scientists later this year will head back to the Antarctic, the ice fields, where the famed Martian meteorite was found, in the hopes of finding up to 1,000 more.
Ralph Harvey, who will lead the search, funded by the National Science Foundation, has disputed NASA's claim that the meteorite, known as ALH84001, indicated possible Martian life But, he says, more study of the rock and others is needed.
He says it's just a coincidence that his team is going back to the same area where the famed meteorite was found.
He says the trip was planned a long time ago.
Almost sounds like an announcement from the White House.
Every time they get ready to do something, well, we have this scheduled for the last year and a half.
At any rate, let's go to Colorado.
I think Boulder, Colorado.
And here is Dr. Harold F. Levison.
Dr. Levison, are you there?
Good morning.
Well, good morning.
First of all, thank you for coming on the program.
Oh, it's my pleasure.
I was out of the country in Europe and Scandinavia when all of this news broke.
Never fails, I go on vacation, something big happens.
And so, the big news that broke that I got on the ship, here I was in the middle of the ocean and suddenly the lead story is life on Mars.
Uh, yeah.
So, I hardly know where to start except, do you recall the essence of the news release, the way it first was released?
Uh, yeah.
I actually came home the day of the press conference and spent two hours sitting in front of my TV watching the press conference and trying to understand exactly what these guys were claiming.
The actual article didn't come out until this week.
I actually only read it this morning.
I see.
So it was a two-hour press conference.
Did you sit there watching all that with your jaw hanging open?
Were you surprised?
I was surprised.
I also had a great deal of skepticism, and I still do.
As a matter of fact, I think the scientists involved also are skeptical.
I don't think anybody's really claiming Alright, let's try it from this point of view.
response to the full marks what they're saying is if there's a line of evidence
four different points in their argument actually which all leads them to
conclude that the simplest explanation
to call the simple is that life on mars
uh... created what we think alright uh... let's try it from this point of view
if you have been the lead scientist team leader uh... who's looking into all of this
With the evidence they had, would you have gone public at that time?
I think so.
I think so.
They were very clever in what they did, and they were also very careful.
They wrote a paper, and they submitted it to one of the leading scientific publications in the world, Science Magazine.
They had it refereed by their peers.
They got comments back, and it wasn't until the paper was actually Accepted for publication that they held the news conference.
I think that's sort of rare in science.
When the big news breaks, the people that usually hear about it first are the media.
Sure.
In this case, they were very, very careful and didn't tell the media until after they had the paper accepted for publication.
So they had peer review.
That's right.
All right.
Now, I must point out, that's only two referees in the whole world.
The rest of the community, I think, is fairly skeptical.
Although it's flighted.
All right.
Had you been a referee, I take it you would have agreed to go ahead and go public?
Maybe, maybe.
You have to realize that the lines of evidence that they use come from very different fields in the astronomical community.
The astronomical community is not this big monolith type thing where everybody, all astronomers have the same expertise in various areas.
This particular work required people who were experts on fossils on Earth, geologists, something about atmospheric science.
All that needed to be wrapped together in order to produce what they produced.
I'm an astronomer, so I only know something about one area of this whole piece of work.
And as you said, that's the actual dynamics, or the orbital evolution of the rock once it left Mars.
To the point where it hit Earth.
All right, well we'll get to that in a second.
When was this found, this meteorite?
I believe it was found in 1984.
84.
So in other words, 12 years ago.
That's right.
That's a long time.
Any idea why they just now Are you concluding that, gee, it's from Mars and, gee, it shows that there was life there perhaps millions or billions of years ago, whatever?
Well, really, what happened is a lot of pieces of evidence came together.
The idea that this particular rock came from Mars is actually quite old.
People have understood that about this particular rock for many, many years.
The other aspect of this problem is that it's a technological breakthrough.
That allowed them to actually measure what they were trying to measure.
Alright, what is the scientific basis for concluding that it came from Mars?
It has to do with the chemical makeup of the rock.
Each planet we have found, that we've visited at least, has its own unique fingerprint, chemical fingerprint.
And when you study this rock, and the other rocks like it, this is not the only known Martian meteorite.
All right, they all have the signature that's identical to Mars, and it's not consistent with it coming from Earth.
That distinctive, it is so distinctively different from something that would be from Earth.
That's right.
Okay, how many samples do we have from different planets?
Do we have just Mars, or do we have Mars and I know we've been to the Moon, or do we have to have physical samples to To get these signatures, or can it be done with satellites?
Well, we have to go and actually sniff the atmosphere and dig into the rocks.
The only places we really have this information for are the Earth, the Moon, and Mars.
And Mars, right.
The next obvious question is, how something gets from Mars to the Earth?
I talked to a scientist the other day, and Obviously, it has to be blasted from the surface of Mars, which means there must be some sort of impact on Mars.
That's right.
And this rock shows evidence of having such an impact, by the way.
Oh, it does?
Yes.
There are fractures through it that indicate that it was probably involved in an impact.
Okay.
The scientists I talked to the other day, and you can confirm or take issue with this, said, I said, look, wouldn't it have to be something about signs of a K-T event?
That which wiped out the dinosaurs here on Earth.
And he said, no, more like MT.
Would you take issue, in other words, with a gigantic explosion of some sort?
Absolutely.
Well, the KT event is an impact that occurred 26 million years ago.
Pretty much changed the atmospheric dynamics of the Earth.
It made it a lot colder.
And we believe that led to the extinction of the dinosaurs.
This impact would have to probably be a lot larger than that.
That's right.
Did the KT event that occurred on Earth throw things out of Earth orbit or even into Earth orbit?
Would it have done that?
Or has it simply been something that screwed up the atmosphere?
It turns out that our studies show that it's a lot easier to get stuff from Mars to the Earth.
than it is to get things from the Earth to Mars.
Lesser gravity?
Less gravity, and also a thicker atmosphere.
So, you know, it's interesting.
One of the questions I had when I saw all this stuff was that the life that they seem to be finding on Mars, that this is indeed what they're doing, is very similar to the life that we find on Earth.
That's how they're making all their arguments.
And I thought that was a little odd.
But I thought about it a little bit, and it could be That what we're seeing is not an independent, it's not independent life.
That maybe Mars and Earth were swapping spit, as a friend of mine put it, over the entire history of when life was forming.
And it could be that these two instances of finding life, if indeed Mars does have life, is not an independent occurrence.
If that's the case, and this is all really idle speculation, okay, if that's the case, Our study shows that it's a lot easier to get stuff from Mars to the Earth than the other way around.
That maybe the place that life actually formed was on Mars.
And we're all Martians.
That's an interesting speculation.
It is indeed.
And it validates the research of a lot of people like Graham Hancock.
And others.
Or are you talking about a microbial... Oh, I'm talking about entirely a microbial level.
Uh-huh.
Okay.
Right?
I mean, the way that life got from one planet to another, probably in the form of little bacterial-like spores.
Right?
If indeed this did occur.
What about asteroids and comets?
Could they be the spit-swappers for larger...
Larger areas than, say, Mars and Earth?
Well, asteroids and comets, particularly comets, probably came from regions where life didn't have a chance to form.
They both contain a lot of organic material.
Actually, very similar to the organic material found in the Martian meteorite.
But they probably formed in an environment that was just too cold for life to form.
And it's probably because it wasn't on the surface of a planet and didn't have a thick atmosphere.
There probably wasn't liquid water.
With the asteroids and comets formed.
And so the likelihood of asteroids or comets having anything that any kind of life at all is quite small.
And indeed, most of the meteorites that we know about come from the asteroid belt and are chunks of asteroids.
And they show absolutely no sign of having life on them.
Okay.
As a matter of fact, that's one of the tests that these guys ran when they were looking at the Martian meteorites.
They took meteorites that are believed to come from the asteroid belt and ran similar tests, and they were all negative.
As a control?
Yes.
Good.
How long ago do you feature this little chunk of Mars was blown from Mars toward us?
It was on the order of millions of years ago.
I think the number that was quoted was something around 13 million years ago.
But only a couple tens of thousands of years ago did it actually hit the Earth.
It spent a long period of time floating between the planets.
What then can we speculate with regard to those millions of years ago to conditions on Mars versus what they are today?
Again, this is not my expertise, right?
Understood.
But it's my understanding that there's been a lot of discussion in the literature recently That suggested that Mars had a much warmer environment in the distant past.
There's clearly signs of running water, that there was running water on Mars, and there's now a lot of evidence in the atmosphere, due to the chemical makeup of the atmosphere, that's leading people to conclude that the atmosphere was much thicker.
But that was billions of years ago, not tens of millions of years ago.
Probably tens of millions of years ago, the environment on Mars probably wasn't very much different than the environment that we see there today.
Mars lost most of its atmosphere because of its low mass.
And that didn't take a very long time.
We got back, and my space history here I guess is weak, but we did get back samples gathered on Mars, didn't we?
No, we did not.
We did not?
No.
The only spacecraft that ever landed on Mars Oh, that's right.
Analyzed and then radioed back.
That's right.
And again, that's the basis for concluding that this meteorite came from Mars.
The comparison of that data to what they discovered in this meteorite.
Yes, but let me point out that that data indicated that there wasn't life on Mars.
Right?
Or at least, well, there's some controversy there.
But what was really striking about the information that Vikings found Was that there was no organic material on the surface of Mars.
That's what I recall, yes.
And so we're finding organic material in this rock.
If our Mars lander had analyzed this rock, would it have found what our scientists now claim they found in this meteorite?
Well, I mean, there's two answers to that.
The first answer to that is it couldn't analyze this rock.
It could only analyze dirt.
And so that's one of the fundamental issues about what Viking found.
First of all, Viking, because it was the first spacecraft ever to land on another planet, they were very careful.
And they chose the safest place for it to land, not necessarily the scientifically most interesting place for it to land.
So it's like sending us what now, technologically, is a very primitive spacecraft.
After all, it landed ten years ago.
Excuse me, 20 years ago.
Landing of a very relatively primitive spacecraft in Antarctica, right on an ice sheet, and trying to figure out what the environment of Earth is like.
So it's not a very good measure, I think, of where the more interesting places on Mars, the river valleys and the low points where we see, sometimes we see fogs in the photographs indicating that there may be Some kind of condensation water.
And so, that's really where we need to go study.
And so far, that hasn't been done.
Why the Antarctic?
They're talking now, I read you the story from Reuters here, that's clearing this hour, and they're talking about going back to the Antarctic, where they expect or hope to find up to a thousand more meteorites from Mars.
And why the Antarctic?
Why not North Dakota?
Or anywhere else?
It's easier to find these rocks in Antarctica.
After all, if you... a rock... I don't know if you've seen a picture of this thing, but it looks like a rock.
Right?
A rock is a rock.
So you walk out on a field in the middle of South Dakota, and it's going to look like any other rock.
But what's going on in Antarctica is these things landed on ice.
Got embedded in the ice, and as the ice is melting, they come to the surface.
I've got you.
So any rocks sort of look... if you see a rock there, it's probably a meteorite.
Aha!
Very, very interesting.
That makes it easier to find these guys.
So it's not that these meteorites are particularly attracted to the Antarctic, it's just that it's a good field of dreams in which to search.
Alright, Doctor, hold on, we'll be right back to you.
You're listening to Art Bell, somewhere in time, on Premier Radio Networks.
Tonight, an encore presentation of Costa Cosa from August 21st, 1996.
This is a presentation of the Costa Cosa National Park.
Tonight featuring a replay of Coast to Coast AM from August 21st, 1996.
We're talking about the Mars story.
The Mars meteorite.
Are we all Martians?
We might be.
My guest is Dr. Harold F. Levinson, Senior Research Fellow, Department of Space Sciences.
For the Southwest Research Institute, we'll ask him a little bit about the Southwest Research Institute in a
moment.
And get back to him in a moment.
Now we take you back to the night of August 21st, 1996, on Art Bell's Somewhere in Time.
you you
Now, back to Dr. Levinson.
Doctor, are you there?
I am.
Good.
Alright, let's approach it this way.
Somebody just sent me a fax from a place called South Lyon, Michigan, and says this rock is much more likely from Earth.
Says, come on Art, a rock from Mars 50 million years ago?
Isn't it more likely that it came from Earth?
How about Hudson Bear, Guatemala, after an asteroid hit this hole?
topic is not observable so it is not science but religious faith signed Ron in uh... in Michigan so it sounds to me like perhaps a religious objection very thinly veiled uh... but he's saying it is uh... on the part of science a kind of a religious uh... faith doctor how would you respond to that?
To be honest with you I don't know what that means it seems to me that This isotopic dating or fingerprinting that we've done on this rock is very, very convincing to me.
I was, for a long time, very skeptical.
The early work done on this subject, worked 20 years ago, argued that you couldn't get the rocks off the planets in order to get them to move between the planets, and that all the asteroids or all the meteorites we'd be finding Would all be from the asteroid belt, which is this rubble pile of rocks that exist between Mars and Jupiter.
Right.
But I think that this fingerprinting that they've been able to do on these rocks is very convincing.
These isotropic ratios are exactly what we see on Mars.
And so I don't see Really any scientific conclusion other than it came from Mars.
Alright.
There's one exception to that.
It's an interesting story.
Okay.
Okay?
The place where it doesn't match what normally we see on Mars is in carbon.
And this was noticed a couple years ago by a group at the University of Arizona.
That this rock looked like every other Martian meteorite except for the carbon.
And They were sort of scratching their heads about that, but they actually pointed out that the way you could change the carbon fingerprint is by life.
And so life can change that ratio.
All right.
This idea has been around for a while.
It never really was put forth in such a coherent way as they've done in this paper, in the science paper.
But there were sort of inklings that date back a couple of years.
That this rock may be special.
Okay.
What is to say that life at a higher form than microbial, all those millions, is it millions of years ago?
Millions of years ago that the life existed or that the rock got knocked off of Mars?
That the microbial life existed.
Billions of years ago.
Billions of years ago.
Alright, so then That was during a time when you admitted a little while ago the atmosphere on Mars and the makeup might have been very, very different.
What's to say... That's the current thinking, anyway.
Okay.
What would argue against even a higher life form having evolved from this microbial point?
Depends on what you mean by a higher form.
if you mean people, I think the evidence is that we just don't see any evidence of it
on the surface of Mars, through our photographs.
Something like worms, I don't think there is any evidence one way or another.
If all life on Earth right now were to be extinguished, and billions of years were to
pass, and you were to look at Earth from space, would you know that man had been here?
No, I don't think so.
The fundamental difference between the Earth and Mars is what would cover up the signs of life on Earth is the tectonic activity.
Yes.
Volcanic eruption.
Yes.
That kind of thing.
That doesn't exist on Mars today.
However, if we look at your earlier model of Mars, the one you talked about earlier, there must have been some sort of catastrophic Either short-term or long-term change in the atmosphere and the situation on Mars to make it what it is today.
Yes, but the surface of Mars is a lot older than the surface of Earth.
And we can date surfaces in the solar system by counting craters.
If you look at the moon, for example, there are two types of terrain you can see on the moon.
There's the highlands, which have been pulverized by meteorites.
And there are these craters all over the place, and they're overlapping.
And that argues that the highlands on the moon are very old.
As a matter of fact, probably dating back to the formation of the solar system four and a half billion years ago.
Right?
The seas on the moon, the dark areas, don't have a lot of craters on them.
That argues that it's relatively young.
The Earth has very, very, very few craters.
A handful.
If you look at Mars, there's quite a few craters.
Indicating that the surface of Mars actually probably dates back A very long time, probably billions of years.
So it's much easier to hide things on the Earth than it will be on Mars.
Do we know anything about how long it might take for microbial life to become early primitive life?
I don't know, pollywogs?
Something that would crawl from the oceans that were once there?
Well, you're asking... I'm certainly not an expert on that.
Right.
You have to ask a biologist, really, what happened on Earth.
My recollection from college biology, going back a bit, is that it took billions of years on Earth for single-celled organisms to evolve to multiple-celled organisms.
It was a very hard step for life to take.
Yet there were some fast steps also in evolution where there are some steps that to this day really cannot be fully accounted for.
Uh, the leap between the very simpler life forms, uh, yes, past microbial, to, uh, to human beings.
Nobody still quite understands that particular leap, do they?
Uh, well, we understand, again, this is not my expertise, but my understanding is that we understand bits and parts of it, and the whole story isn't told.
But then again, the study of this field is, you know, less than a century old, right?
So, people haven't been thinking about it.
And the evidence is buried under rocks and we can only really start gleaning what happens when areas are eroding away and we find these fossils.
It's a very hard problem.
I have no doubt that in the centuries or years to come, we will be able to put the pieces together.
So it is possible this meteorite or ones like it Seeded microbial life on Earth that has, over these billions of years, resulted in us?
It's speculation, but I think it's possible.
There are a lot of questions that need to be answered if you want to try to believe that.
Can a microbe survive an impact that would throw the rock into space?
Can it survive millions of years in cold storage, essentially, floating between the planets.
Can it survive the impacts of the rock back onto the Earth?
All these questions need to be answered.
So this is very, very speculative, this idea.
But it's certainly possible.
Let me just say, I don't know anything yet that makes it impossible.
OK.
Does the finding of life on Mars make life throughout the solar system, the whole cosmos,
much more likely?
I mean, here we've got Earth teeming with life, and Mars, which apparently once had life, and these are but the two planets that we've had a look to yet.
So, doesn't that make life ever more likely?
It depends.
It depends on whether life formed on Earth and Mars independently of one another.
If it formed independently of one another, then I think that's Very strong evidence that anywhere life can form, it will.
And that the universe is probably teeming with life, at least on some level.
Alright?
But remember, we've been discussing this whole fascinating idea that life on Mars and Earth didn't form independently of one another.
And if that's the case, then the fact that we find life on Mars, if we do, doesn't really tell us anything about how common life is in the universe.
Right now it's a tricky question.
So we're going to have to go to many more places before we can begin to answer that question.
Or study what we see a little bit better.
Remember I asked you all these, when you asked me about the idea of things moving back and forth, I looked at all these questions we would have to answer before I would call it a viable scientific theory.
Alright?
And if any one of those questions ends up being no, that you know, a microbe could not have survived the impact
but threw the rock in the space or survived, you know, in transit.
Then I think we have strong evidence that life evolves on each planet independently.
Are we able, Doctor, to take microbial life in any form into space with the shuttle and or otherwise?
And does it survive even limited times in the vacuum of, in the cold of space?
No, I don't know the answer to that question.
I don't know if the experiment's ever been done.
I would have to look at the details of what they were planning to do.
And I would have to know a lot more about where you find life on Earth.
And whether it can be stored effectively, let's say deep inside rocks, or so that it would be safe from the hostile environment in space.
Space is incredibly hostile.
UV, radiation, gamma rays, it's a mess.
So you really have to ask the question of whether things could survive.
Alright, my next question is, where in this rock did they find it?
Because an obvious An obvious question is, when this rock slammed into Earth, could it not have acquired this fossilized life from Earth, from the crash into Earth?
Well, the authors of this paper think not.
And rather than going through arguments of why that could happen, I think the simplest explanation is, again, they had these control samples.
These meteorites that came from the asteroid belt, and none of them showed anything similar to what we see in this rock.
Even though they crashed into Earth?
That's right.
In a very similar way, in a very similar place to this particular rock.
Oh, that's fascinating.
And matter of fact, they studied asteroids of many different ages in order to make sure that there was something special about this particular rock.
When it landed, all the rocks of all the ages that they studied, all were negative.
If they go back to the Antarctic, would you expect they would be able to find many, many more rocks that were from Mars?
I think that's likely.
There haven't been that many expeditions down there, and so there's undoubtedly more sitting on the surface.
Again, it had to be a pretty big bang.
I think we agree on Mars.
The dinosaurs were extinguished with, we think, the KT event.
How likely is it that something will hit Earth and more or less erase all of our progress to date?
The answer to that is that probably something On that level, it hits the Earth once every tens of millions of years or so.
And so, the issue you have to ask yourself is whether it's worth worrying about that.
That's a political issue, not a scientific issue.
But undoubtedly, an impact will happen on the Earth that will cause global changes in the Sometime in the future.
I think that it has to happen.
But the timescales are so long compared to even the history of the human race that I don't know if it's worth worrying about or not.
Except that we might be nothing more than the future seeds for life elsewhere in the cosmos.
I mean, you've got to pick a daisy and you can go... and it just scatters and creates new daisies and I wonder if that's not what eventually occurs nearly all life everywhere.
It flourishes and then something bangs into it, virtually extinguishing life, but seeding life elsewhere.
Is that possibly the process that goes on?
That, again, is really speculative.
And there are, I know, people who have argued that that may actually be the case.
It's very hard for me to believe that these rocks There will be a lot of people, religious people, who will be angry at what you have already said.
find another source and hit another part i find that
very very hard to believe the probability of that happened i would
think not zero
it's quite small and no one's really done the calculation there will be a lot
of people uh... religious people who will be angry at what you've
already said you know they will say hogwash
we know how life got here and it was only a few thousand years ago
because the bible tells us that What kind of answer do you offer to people like that, when you encounter that?
My answer is that science, the scientific method, is a philosophy of life, just like any other philosophy of life.
And it has rules that you apply when you live your life.
Rules on how to collect data.
Rules on how to, how to, your thought processes should move in order to arrive at conclusions.
I tend to believe in that philosophy, and I'm living my life by that philosophy, but there's certainly other philosophies.
And all I can tell you is by applying that particular philosophy, which by the way has been very successful, our entire technological civilization is based on The writing, if you will, to put it in a religious context, of the scientific method.
But it's still just a philosophy of life, and there are other people that could have different philosophies that are just as valid.
I don't believe them, but they have as much right to believe that, I guess, as I have to believe mine.
I'm rather surprised that you would refer to the process of science that you're talking about as a philosophy, rather than... I mean, science is the ability, is repeatability, the ability to demonstrate something again and again and again as a law, virtually, is it not?
Yes, that's one of the tenets, right?
That the only thing that you can set down as being true Are things that are repeatable over and over and over again.
You do the same thing, and you get the same result.
But that's part of the philosophy.
Right?
Sure.
Well, that's true, in that sense, yes.
Right?
And so, while I firmly believe in this, it, you know, I mean, after all, it was Descartes who said, I think, and therefore I am.
And the argument was that the only thing he really knows is that he exists.
Right?
Correct.
If we are able to repeat, go to the Antarctic, Find more rocks that are arguably from Mars that contain fossilized remains of microbial life.
Where do we go from there?
In other words, once you have established that, and more rocks, no doubt, will establish it, then what?
Are you asking me scientifically what we should do?
Lines of investigation, yes.
It seems to me that the real One of the real missing pieces of evidence in this whole exercise, if you read the paper, is the inability for them to actually chemically analyze one of these tiny fossils.
We have yet, as far as I understand, we do not have the technology to analyze, chemically analyze, something that small.
It seems to me that what the next ... I think from the point of view of the people that
actually wrote the proposal, I mean wrote the paper, and the people that are doing this
particular line of research, is not only to collect more meteorites, but to develop the
technology necessary to analyze those very small samples.
Because it seems to me, again, from what I understand, I'm not an expert, that they can
do that with the fossils of bacteria that we find on the Earth.
These guys are 100 times smaller, and therefore they can't do it with these guys.
And I think they may be able to make a much more convincing case if they can do that.
All right.
Doctor, relax.
We've got a top of the hour break.
We'll come back, talk of a couple of more things, ask about your work a little bit, and then open the lines and let the people ask some questions.
Sure.
All right, great.
My guest is Dr. Harold Levison, a senior research fellow with the Southwest Research Institute.
We're talking about Mars, and we'll talk a little bit about Europa, and get to your calls.
You're listening to Art Bell, Somewhere in Time.
Tonight featuring a replay of Coast to Coast AM from August 21st, 1996.
This is a remastered version of the original.
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Tonight's program originally aired August 21st, 1996.
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Tonight's program originally aired August 21st, 1996.
Didn't ask enough about Dr. Levinson's work and the organization he works for, Southwest Research Institute, and we'll get to all of that and more about the meteorite, Mars, and the fact that we all may be Martians.
Fascinating, fascinating stuff.
Thank you.
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Looking for the truth?
You'll find it on Coast to Coast AM with George Norrie.
Let me ask you this.
What is going on to necessitate this so quickly?
There seems to be a deadline in their brains and they need to get this done.
They know their whole new world order is inches from going up in flames.
So they're afraid of the awakening and they know that their collapse is about to take place because we've been asleep at the switch and we've let incredibly corrupt interests take control of our society.
Now we take you back to the night of August 21st, 1996, on Art Bell's Somewhere in Time.
Dr. Levison's principal research interests lie in the area of the dynamics of astronomical objects,
so that makes him a great person.
To ask about how a meteorite got from there to here.
He has an A.D.
in Physics, Franklin and Marshall College, 1981, an M.S.
in Astronomy, the University of Michigan, 1983, and a Ph.D.
in Astronomy, the University of Michigan, 1986.
His professional chronology is entirely too long to read.
He's a member of the American Astronomical Society, Division of Planetary Science and Division of Dynamic Astronomy, and works for the Southwest Research Institute.
And Doctor, I want to ask you about that, because I should have in the beginning of the program.
What is the Southwest Research Institute?
The Southwest Research Institute is centered in San Antonio, Texas.
It's a huge place.
It's got about, I think, 2,700 employees.
And it's essentially, you could think of it as a think tank.
They will do research into just about any field of physical sciences.
Um, that people are interested in funding.
It gets about half its funding from the government and about half its funding from private industry.
Most of the work probably goes into the automotive group that's there.
I don't know if you remember, but at the time of the Gulf War, there was a problem with getting sand in the oil.
Oh, I remember, yes.
And they sent Southwest Research Institute employees to work on that.
Oh.
Out there.
It's automotive, computer science, There's petroleum storage, alternative oils, a wide range of different things.
There's a space science division, an instrumentation division.
Most of the people in our division are actually engineers, and they build instruments for spacecraft.
Most of the spacecraft actually study the Earth, but some of the spacecraft have been sent to other planets, and we actually have A big instrument on Cassini, which is a spacecraft that's going to go to Saturn.
We just got awarded an instrument for Rosetta, which is a spacecraft that's going to go to a comet.
So it's a very active place.
I was centered in San Antonio for a couple years while I worked there.
They decided to try to open up a branch office in Boulder to have a closer relationship with the University of Colorado and the astronomers here.
And I took the opportunity to move up here to work with them.
Okay, so how do you personally then fit into this?
What does your day-to-day work generally consist of?
My day-to-day work consists of sitting in front of a computer terminal and writing computer codes.
Remember that the solar system, human beings have only been around for a very short period of time.
History is thousands of years.
But the solar system itself has been around for four and a half billion years.
And in order to try to understand how the solar system formed, which is my primary interest, the way we do that is we run experiments on the computer.
We actually write computer code that allows us to form planets or follow the evolution of planets over long periods of time.
And then we can look at what comes out of the computer code and compare it to what we see and try to get an understanding for what the physical conditions were back At the time the solar system formed.
At least that's one way of trying to figure out how the solar system formed.
And that's really my expertise, is following the behavior of objects and the orbits of objects for very, very long periods of time.
All right, this may interest you.
It just cleared my fax machine for immediate release, it says, press release from Dr. Nadine Barlow.
Do you know that name?
I think I do, yes.
Department of Physics, University of Central Florida.
It reads, two possible source craters for the Martian meteorite ALH84001 have now been identified through an extensive search of impact craters on Mars.
The 1.9 kg, 4.2 pound meteorite recently identified as showing possible evidence of past Martian life was formed about 4.5 billion years ago ...and was blasted off Mars during a meteorite impact about 16 million years ago.
Dr. Nadine Barlow, a planetary scientist at the University of Central Florida, identified two likely source craters through a search of a crater catalog she compiled while doing graduate work at the University of Arizona in the mid-80s.
A number of characteristics of the meteorite helped Dr. Barlow narrow the search for possible source craters.
So, she believes she has identified the actual crater on Mars from which this meteorite came.
Well, I'm not surprised.
I mean, I would have to look at the evidence that you would present, obviously.
You know, scientists are natural skeptics.
But it certainly doesn't surprise me if this turns out to be the case.
As you and I were discussing earlier, the surface of Mars is very old.
We see all these impact craters all over the place.
And this type of impact Like I said tens of millions of years ago, that's fairly recent in the timescales that we think about when we think about impacts.
And for example, like I said, the highlands on Mars are four billion years old, or three and a half billion years old.
So it certainly doesn't surprise me that such a recent event as the one that probably knocks this meteor off Mars will be... I'm not surprised it would be possible to identify that crater.
All right.
Some of these, no doubt, will be silly questions, but they're interesting.
They're coming by facts now.
Gerard, please ask the doctor, if Mars does not have enough mass to retain an atmosphere, how did it ever have an atmosphere in the first place?
Because the things of which it was made had the materials in it that would form an atmosphere.
Comets, for example, have a lot of gases in it.
Matter of fact, the oceans on Earth probably, I mean, one of the theories is that the oceans on Earth actually came in in the forms of comets hitting the Earth way back in the early beginning when the Earth was forming.
So what happens is that it slowly leaks away.
You can imagine, for example, a balloon with a small hole in it, right?
If you're pumping air in faster than the air can get out, then you'll get a lot of air pressure.
That's what happened early on in the history of Mars.
But then, as the impact rate on Mars went down, as it did throughout the entire solar system, very shortly after the major planets formed, that leak is continuing, and continuing, so that the atmosphere slowly leaks away.
Is that process underway on Earth now?
To a lesser extent, but it does happen.
The Earth does lose part of its atmosphere.
That's unsettling.
Not fast enough.
I wouldn't worry about it.
Okay.
Here are three questions about the Mars rock from a man in Alhambra that he doesn't think can be answered.
Let's try them.
How large a mark would be made on the surface of Mars to eject rocks at Martian escape velocity?
Rocks large enough to survive the upward journey through a Martian atmosphere, space travel for many years, then a fiery re-entry into the Earth's atmosphere, And why do we not see such a huge impact area on barren Mars?
Well, I guess we answered that one already.
Apparently, we do.
What evidence of scorching from re-entry through Earth's atmosphere would be found on the outer surface of the rocks, and what kind of microbes could survive such a scorching?
Well, indeed, that's how they identify these things as meteorites, is that the outer surface has a crust that's been burned.
And, matter of fact, one of the interesting The fact about this rock is when they found the organic material on it, one of the questions that they asked is whether that could be contamination.
And what they found is that the burned surface of the rock didn't have any of these materials on it.
Because it was probably, they were probably destroyed during the entry process into the earth.
It was only when they got deep inside that they saw the organic material.
Alright, so the answer is they have been deep inside.
In other words, they've sawed the sucker in half or something.
Oh, there are pieces of it all over the place.
All right, what kind of orbital plane would allow rocks ejected from Mars at a non-polar location to strike Earth near a pole, and what implication does this have as to where on Mars to look for such a mark from the original ejection, namely, at the Martian poles?
Oh, well, the tilt... The planet and the solar system pretty much lie in a plane, right?
But there's small tilts of a few degrees.
But that few degrees since the planets are so far from the sun actually are huge linear distances.
So that the plane that the Earth sits in and the plane that the Mars sits in are slightly different.
And the target of the Earth and the target of the Mars is so small compared to the thickness of that plane that I don't think you can say anything about where the launch points actually were.
Or anything about the coincidence that it hit the pole.
It just happened to be that way.
Could this rock, millions of years ago or one like it, have actually seeded life?
In other words, the rock hits earth, breaks open, the microbes are set free and begin to proliferate and multiply and so forth and so on.
Is that the theory?
Well, it's a speculation.
It's not a theory.
Okay?
But that's sort of the idea that people have been throwing around.
It needs a lot more work and a lot more critical thinking.
It's very easy to sit down when something like this is announced and think of a large number of what may end up in the long run being crazy ideas.
Right?
Scientists are notorious for that kind of thing.
And the real work is to weed out which of these are sort of nutty ideas and which of them actually can stand up to the mustard.
And it seems to me that we're, I wouldn't call it a theory, I would call it a Speculation.
Let's say that something as complex as the human being never occurred, never formed on Mars.
What about, again, something in between, something greater than microbial life and lesser than human life?
Is that possible?
I don't... Yes, I think it's possible.
I don't think we have any evidence one way or the other.
Fascinating.
We haven't really... Again, the only place we've visited is Antarctica.
We haven't been to where Things would be happening.
Does all of this add great argument to continuing our space program?
In fact, for going to Mars, taking human beings to Mars?
I don't think it increases... Well, let me take a step back.
I think that's a very premature position to take.
I think there's a lot more work to be done on the...
The Martian meteorites that we have, as I was explaining, trying to do a chemical analysis of the fossils themselves.
I don't know if you're aware, but three Mars missions are being launched this year.
Yes.
And we're going to learn a tremendous amount about Mars.
What will they do?
There's the Martian Global Surveyor, which is an instrument with essentially an orbiter, which will study the atmosphere of Mars and Take high-resolution photographs of the surface in many wavelengths.
There is a lander that has a little robot that's fairly small.
It's, I guess, I've seen people, a model of it.
I guess it's a couple feet by a couple feet, which will go around and sort of poke under rocks and that kind of thing.
And I really think we need to, and then there's a Russian spacecraft, which essentially has both aspects of that.
I think our policy really needs to be driven by the science.
And I think, although this is a very fascinating result, and maybe one of the most important scientific discoveries of the century, if it turns out to be right, I think it's very much premature for us to start changing our scientific goals in our space program in order to meet You know, this result.
All right.
Art, an interesting point.
If there was higher life forms on Mars, like people or elephants, or what have you, it was destroyed, was it not, when the comet that knocked that rock into orbit hit the surface, similar to the destruction of the dinosaurs, but much worse.
Would that be possible?
I still think there would be evidence of that on the surface.
Let me point out that although the impact that killed off the dinosaurs was catastrophic, to say the least, it did not destroy all life on Earth.
It didn't even come close to destroying all life on Earth.
It would take an impact much, much, much, much larger than something like the K-T boundary impact to destroy all life on Earth.
Alright, out on a limb here for a second, there are many people doing work That has looked at the Cydonia region of Mars.
They have found what they think are artifacts that are not natural.
They've done mathematical studies that seem to show that these objects are not natural.
What is your view of this?
You know, the face on Mars, the so-called pyramids and so forth and so on.
Have you looked at that?
Well, not at... I mean, I'm obviously curious about it, and I've read Some things about it and although my research, it's not my research area.
My feeling about it is that the pyramids, as far as I understand it, can be explained by the wind patterns we see on Mars and as erosion artifacts.
The state of Mars is, I think, just a coincidence.
And I think the story I can tell is that, I don't know if you recall, A little, about a year and a half, two years ago, Galileo flew by an asteroid called Ida.
Yes.
And it sent back a picture.
And the first picture it sent back looked remarkably like an Easter Island statue.
Everybody that was standing around me when I first saw that picture all agreed it looked remarkably like it.
But none of the other photographs of it looked anything like it.
Right, and I think before you can really... I've seen a lot, you know, this picture of the face of Mars, and it is intriguing, right?
But before you really can answer, you know, that... There's a quote by Carl Sagan, which essentially says that incredible claims require incredible proof.
Indeed.
And one photograph does not convince me, especially since you see things like this, like I said, the face on Ida.
Right, until we go back and take more images of that particular feature, and the Mars Global Surveyor will do that.
I certainly agree with you, but there are many people who are saying that NASA, for some reason, seems very disinclined, almost amazingly disinclined, to want to go back and re-photograph it at all.
It's in the plan to re-photograph.
NASA really needs to... I'm not a representative of NASA in any way.
So you have to take that into account what I'm going to say.
They have a very fine line they need to balance.
That they have to give the impression, and it's a true impression, that their interest is the scientific interest.
And so this idea that there's a faithful Mars is viewed with Skepticism, to say the least, by the scientific community.
And therefore, as a representative of the scientific community, they can't put too much faith in it.
They can't make the faith on Mars the driving reason why they have to go back to Mars.
Alright, well, if you look at Mars, and you were to set a list of priorities of scientific interest, in terms of what to go look at first, second, third, and fourth, where would Cydonia fit in?
I don't know the answer to that question.
The driving force, really, behind the imaging of Mars is the geology of Mars.
And I'm not a geologist, so I really can't answer what their priority should be.
All right.
But let me assure you, it will be imaged again.
It will be imaged again.
If that image comes back and tends to confirm with even greater detail, Or it begins to suggest with a heavier weight that this object or these objects are not natural.
What evolution of thinking would that put you through?
That's a hard question and we're coming to a break here so I'm going to let you think about that during the break.
We'll come right back and we'll also ask about what Galileo found regarding the watery undersurface of Europa.
You're listening to Art Bell, somewhere in time, on Premier Radio Networks.
harold leveson from boulder colorado and we'll be right back you're listening to
our bills somewhere in time on premier radio networks tonight's on-board presentation
of coast to coast a m from august twenty first
nineteen ninety six the
the the
the I'm about to loose control, and I think I like it
I'm about to loose control, and I just can't hide it I'm about to loose control, and I think I like it
and...
And, uh, he's here commenting on the Martian meteorite found, uh, that broke in the news here a couple of weeks ago.
Boy, what a news story, huh?
Thanks.
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You're listening to Art Bell's Somewhere in Time on Premier Radio Networks.
Tonight, an encore presentation of Coast to Coast AM from August 21st, 1996.
Back now to Dr. Levison.org.
Doctor, are you there?
Yes.
And, uh, I'm sorry, where were we?
I had just posed a question to you, I know.
Yes.
You wanted me to speculate how my thought processes would change if these objects from Mars actually ended up being artificial.
That's right.
And you asked me to contemplate that question, and I've been contemplating that question.
It's a very difficult question, because if that did turn out to be the case, or indeed we found evidence of intelligent life elsewhere, with the SETI programs looking for radio waves, It would represent such a fundamental change in how we view ourselves that I couldn't even begin to speculate how my thinking would change.
The analogy I came up with while I was waiting is that I have a young baby girl.
She's two years old.
It's my first little girl, first baby.
Somebody asked me about a month before she was born.
Well, how do you think it's going to feel to be a father?
Right?
And I could have tried to answer that question, but it wouldn't even have compared to the change that actually occurred.
And I really think it's on that kind of level.
It would shake my view of the universe down to such a fundamental level, I don't know how I would respond.
It's an interesting point, and actually it's a good answer.
There was something called the Brookings Report.
Are you familiar with that?
No, I'm not.
All right.
Well, basically it was a study done that said if intelligent life were discovered, it would thoroughly upset the general public, but it would particularly upset scientists as a group more than any other.
Would you think that would be true?
I'm sort of surprised.
Why did they say that?
I don't know.
I guess that a lot of scientific paradigms would be Suddenly turned upside down, and careers that have been built on preaching about those paradigms would go up in smoke.
Well, but that happens all the time in the sciences.
I mean, it's very fast.
I work in a field that didn't even exist five years ago.
The reason why I'm surprised is, of course this is a biased view because I'm a scientist, but I would tend to think that scientists are the most agile.
Well, maybe not BEMOS, but a very agile group when it comes to adjusting their thinking to what we actually observe.
So I'm sort of surprised about that result.
All right, please ask your guest, Art, what kind of escape velocity it would take for a chunk of Mars, liquid or not, to leave that area, and how much of that velocity would remain upon re-entry in the Earth's atmosphere?
That would be in your category of Yes, and I must admit, I don't know off the top of my head the escape velocity from the surface of Mars.
So I'm going to disappoint your listener a little bit.
As for their second question, the escape velocity from Mars is small compared to the orbital velocities that are involved as the planets orbit the Sun.
So really, what would define the impact velocity on the Earth?
Would have something to do with really Mars' orbital velocity and the Earth's orbital velocity, and not actually the velocity at which the rock left the surface of Mars.
All right.
He then wants to know how much volume or mass would make it through our atmosphere at those speeds, whatever it would be, escape velocity from Mars and then impact on Earth.
In other words, how much mass would likely make it through to crash into Antarctica?
I, you know, I don't really know.
The answer to that question is a function of how big the rock originally was.
All right?
And I really don't know the answer to that for this particular meteorite.
It could be that most of it survived.
Little things like the things that cause meteors are very small.
They can be as small as a dust grain or something about the size of your thumbnail.
And they don't make it through the atmosphere at all.
So, it depends on really how big the initial object was.
Would an object have, in effect, left Mars as a rock, or would it have left it more or less in liquid form?
It would have to.
This particular object would have had to have left Mars in a solid form.
All evidence of the fossils would have been obliterated if the rock had melted.
But, like I said, the rock shows Definite evidence of it being shocked, okay?
That is much older than the impact date on the Earth.
So, whether that was actually the event that shot it up into orbit around the Sun or not, I don't know.
But clearly, the structures that we see in the rock survived that event.
So, it did have to leave as a rock.
If it left in liquid, all of that evidence would have certainly been destroyed.
That's right.
Uh, now let's skip very quickly, before I open the lines, I've been promising to do that.
Uh, Europa, uh, I mean, right on the heels of the Mars news, suddenly they release information about new photographs of Europa, or photographs of Europa, that would seem to indicate it may have a watery interior, leading again to speculation that where there is water, there very well may be life.
What can you tell us about that?
I think that Europa is one of the most interesting objects in the solar system.
The idea that it may have a liquid center, or a liquid ocean.
Actually, it's rock in the center.
So the structure of Europa would actually be sort of a rock-like planet or moon, covered with a liquid ocean, covered with a solid ice surface.
If it really does indeed have a liquid ocean, that would be the structure.
So it's not down in the core where the That idea actually dates back, I think, to about 1978 or 1979, and actually predates Voyager's visit to the Jovian system by a few months.
The images that Galileo has recently taken of Europa is only really slightly better.
Then the images that the Voyager actually took, because Galileo hasn't really gotten very close to Europa yet.
And there's some tantalizing things that we see, which tend to indicate that at one time the core of Europa must have been liquid.
And again, it has to do, one of the primary things is the lack of craters.
We talked about that earlier.
You can date the surfaces of these objects.
By actually counting the number of craters, and there are very few craters on Europa.
So that leads us to think that it's young, and it looks sort of like, if you look at pictures of Europa, Antarctica, with these ice floes, chunks of ice floating off and running into other chunks of ice, and that kind of thing.
And whether that kind of geology is forming now, or whether it formed millions of years
ago and has since solidified and now is solid ice, no one really knows the answer to that
yet.
I'm not sure if Galileo will ever be able to answer that question.
But remember, the last...
Galileo is on a very eccentric orbit, so it spends most of its time very far from Jupiter.
And every once in a while, every couple months or so, it goes screaming through the satellite
system of Jupiter so that it goes by one of the main moons of Jupiter.
It hasn't yet done that for Europa.
And the kind of images we've been getting of Ganymede, for example, which is the one
it really flew by, has been spectacular.
And I think we're going to learn a lot about Europa when Galileo actually does the really
close flyby.
If they were...
Again, coming back to the likelihood of life.
If, hypothesis, if we were to discover there is indeed microbial or even greater life under the surface of this moon, would a discovery like that on Europa Then suggest that life is very likely or would you again suggest we've been spit trading with Europa and everything else close by?
I find it very hard to believe that we've been trading material with Europa.
If we didn't find indeed find life on Europa and let me just say I think it's the most likely place in the solar system to find life.
Arguments for a notion, I think, are very compelling.
It's right on the hairy edge.
Some models show it could be warm ice, and some models show it would be liquid.
But if it indeed turns out to be liquid, then I think Europa is the place to really go look for life.
But it's going to be tough, because Europa is covered by a sheet of ice, a crust of ice, How thick do you think it would be?
The estimates I've heard are tens of miles.
Tens of miles.
And it's going to be very hard to probe that.
We can't even do that on the Earth.
Well, ice, though, has another interesting effect, doesn't it?
It also shields.
In other words, I believe it's possible in the cold climes to build, in essence, an igloo.
And inside the igloo, it's possible for it to be warmer than it is outside, yes?
That's right.
That's why we think there may be an ocean on Europa.
Right?
But you need a... If you just built an igloo out of ice, and you crawled inside of it, the temperature inside is going to be the same as the temperature outside.
Not only do you need the ice to act as a blanket, but you also need a heat source.
A heat source, yes.
Well, that was where I was going.
There are a lot of people that speculate there could be a heat source within Europa.
Is that possible?
That's exactly what the argument is, and no one knows how hot that fire is.
The main heat source inside of Europa is the tidal effects due to Jupiter.
Just like the Earth has tides in the ocean that are several feet Some places even more, where the gravitational tug of the Moon lifts the water sort of away from the Earth, and there's a bulge.
Well, everybody's familiar with that, with the water.
They may be less familiar with that with the land.
It turns out this was land-tied, that the shape of the Earth itself, the rock, is deformed by the Moon.
It's about nine inches, I think, is the number that comes to mind.
All right, and as the Earth turns, The rocks are moving around because of this tide, and that's actually slowing the Earth down, so the day is getting slightly longer as time goes on.
And what it's also doing, and that energy from the rotation of the Earth is being turned into heat in the interior of the Earth.
Now it turns out that's not very important for the Earth, but it turns out to be very important for Europa.
Okay, so Europa might have a heat source, it's got a big Covering of tens of miles of ice.
Right.
And this giant liquid ocean beneath.
Now, is there some reason to believe that if all these conditions are as we believe they might be, that life could have evolved and be there, in fact, now well beyond the microbial stage?
It is indeed possible.
And I ask that because there has been, I believe, recent research At very, very, very deep ocean levels here on Earth.
Places where sunlight virtually never ever reaches.
I mean, it's totally pitch black.
Probably very much the way it is on Europa.
And there is indeed life down there.
That's right.
And it feeds off the volcanic vent.
Correct.
Exactly what it would do on Europa if it were there.
Fascinating.
Arthur C. Clark, I believe, the man who speculated about the Clark Belt and then had it named after him, wrote in a science fiction book, as I'm sure you're well aware, something to the effect of, you may go anywhere, you may do anything, but hands off Europa.
Do you suppose that he was thinking about exactly what we're discussing right now when he wrote that?
Absolutely.
The book, 2010, which is the book you're referring to, was written after the 1979 or 8 work suggesting that Europa may have a liquid ocean.
So he was very much intrigued by that idea, and he wrote the book based on that.
As a scientist, if we had an opportunity to go to Europa and begin to find out whether life in fact existed there or not, what would be your cautions about doing that?
Even with respect to Mars, as we begin to extend out and look for life elsewhere, should we be so tampering?
I don't know what you mean by tampering.
NASA and the Soviet Union have taken very extreme measures for Viking, for example.
They boiled it.
They got it very hot.
They wanted to make sure that it was sterile when it went to Mars and not to contaminate Mars.
And as far as I am aware, the programs by Russia now and the U.S., which are going to be launched at the end of the year, they're both taking very Very careful precautions about contaminating Mars with life.
And I think that is a very smart idea.
Europa is a totally different issue.
I don't see, although there has been talk within the scientific community of actually sending a spacecraft, a lander, to Europa.
That, with the current technology, all that really will be able to answer, I think.
is whether there is a liquid ocean on the rover or not.
Right, using, you know, seismographs, similar to what we do to study the interior of the
Earth.
I, you know, a couple, tens of miles worth of ice is awful hard to get through.
And I don't think you'll find evidence...
Yes, but let me ask you, this tens of miles of ice seems to be crisscrossed with fissures
and I've got some of these photographs, these very apparently deep fissures.
Now, I have no way of knowing how deep they really are, but that, I guess, is also evidence, they feel, of what lies beneath.
How deep do you think these fissures might be?
Well, they're sort of like fissures that we see, let's say, on Hawaiian Islands.
If you've ever seen... I was there about a year ago, and there are these Linear fissures in the ground with lava streaming up in sort of a wall.
Yes.
Okay, and that's sort of the current model of what these fissures look like.
Now, the lava that's coming up from that comes from way deep inside the Earth, and the fissures aren't very wide.
I don't think anybody would suggest that we try to study the center of the Earth by going down through one of these fissures.
And I think the same is probably true with Europa.
But there's another problem with these things.
At least in Hawaii, we know these things are currently active.
Right.
Right?
In Europa, that activity may have been extinct for millions of years.
We have no way of knowing.
And so these fissures may be sealed.
Do you think that many of these questions will be answered in your lifetime, my lifetime?
Which specific questions?
Well, for example, Europa.
Whether there is life beyond the microbial stage.
Might we answer that in our lifetimes, or is that a generation or two or five away?
It's hard to extrapolate.
I mean, if you would have asked somebody in 1958 whether we were going to go to the moon in the next decade, I think the answer would probably have been, I don't believe that.
Right?
The wonderful and exciting thing about science is it goes in directions very quickly that we can't even imagine.
As in the announcement about the meteorite, it's absolutely true.
If you go back and look at your textbooks, you'll learn the structure of the solar system is that there are four rocky planets on the inside, and then there's an asteroid belt, which is a bubble pile, and then there are four giant planets, and then there was Pluto.
And that's sort of the structure of the solar system as we understood it, let's say, five years ago or so.
All right, listen, I've got to break it off here.
We'll come back, finish this line of thought, and then we will go to the phones, I promise everybody.
Stay right there, Doctor.
Okay.
Fascinating stuff.
Dr. Harold Levinson is my guest.
You're listening to Art Bell, Somewhere in Time.
Tonight featuring a replay of Coast to Coast AM from August 21st, 1996.
The Coast to Coast American Film Festival, and the Coast to Coast American Television Festival.
Coast to Coast American Film Festival, and the Coast to Coast American Television Festival.
Coast to Coast American Television Festival, and the Coast to Coast American Television Festival.
you So, I'm going to go ahead and get started. So, I'm going to
go ahead and get started.
You're listening to Art Bell, Somewhere in Time.
Tonight featuring a replay of Coast to Coast AM from August 21st, 1996.
We're talking about discoveries on Mars.
We're talking about the possibility of life elsewhere.
Europa, for example, with an ocean under tens of miles of ice.
We're talking with Dr. Harold Levison in Boulder, Colorado.
He is a Senior Research Fellow, Department of Space Sciences, for Southwest Research Institute.
He has an A.B.
in Physics, Franklin and Marshall College, 1981, an M.S.
in Astronomy, University of Michigan, 1983, and a Ph.D.
in Astronomy from the University of Michigan, 1986.
He is a member of the American Astronomical Society, Division of Planetary Science and Division of Dynamic Astronomy.
He was with the Ames Research Center.
He was with the U.S.
Naval Observatory, the Orbital Mechanics Department, and so many more places that I don't have time to go through them all.
He's the guy to ask questions about this sort of thing.
And I promise I'm about to open the lines.
So if you want to get a question in, get on the phone.
Looking for the truth?
You'll find it on Coast to Coast AM with George Norrie.
I think now, as we look back, we can probably say with pretty good certainty that some people in government might have been aware of what was going on and they turned their cheek.
The other way.
Just to let it happen.
I also believe that some bigger groups got involved with Al-Qaeda to do what they did on that horrible day.
This wasn't just a small group of people who came in and did their thing.
There was a much bigger picture there.
And if you see the events that have unfolded since this tragedy occurred, how we've lost rights, how we used it to go into Afghanistan and Iraq, and how it has really not stopped.
Because it's going to continue.
We're going to have more and more episodes, and more and more involvement in other countries.
And just mark my word, this planet is going through an incredible change.
And thank God we've got you here to talk with us about it.
Now, we take you back to the night of August 21st, 1996, on Art Bell's Somewhere in Time.
Now, I promise we'll go to the phones, and we will in just one second.
Dr. Levinson, you were suggesting you're doing a lot of computer modeling work on the outer planets.
It's actually more distant than the outer planets.
More distant?
What has been discovered in the last few years is a belt of comets, very similar to the asteroid belt, that surrounds the planetary system.
Pluto is actually Rather than thinking of it as this lone thing sitting out at the end of the solar system, which is the view that astronomy has traditionally had, turns out to be the largest member of perhaps the most populous part of the planetary system.
It's a ring of debris left over from the formation of the planets, just like the asteroid belt is a debris field.
But this is where a large fraction of the comets That we know about and have named, have come from.
And this region of the solar system was actually suggested about 50 years ago by Kuiper, who you mentioned at the beginning of the show.
Right.
Who was a very famous American, actually was Dutch, but he spent his professional career in the U.S.
A planetary scientist.
He suggested this ring may have been there 50 years ago.
And that idea sort of faded away from favor, mainly because no one would have a chance to be able to observe this thing.
And it was sort of forgotten about, and pretty much rediscovered.
The idea was rediscovered about 10 or 15 years ago, but the first proof that it was there was actually only gotten in 1992.
So here's a whole new region of the solar system, previously unguessed, that we're currently studying.
All right.
Very good.
I promised we'll go to the phone, so let's do a little bit of that.
First time caller line, you're on the air with Dr. Levinson.
Where are you calling from, please?
Arlington, Texas.
Yes, sir?
Yes, sir.
I'd like to ask your guest if anyone has ever done a computer model based upon the planetary dynamics of the theories proposed by Immanuel Velikovsky concerning the, you know, The Venusian comet, Martian, being pulled out from an inner orbit and how that might be related to the Martian meteorite thing.
The answer to that question is that, as we currently understand how dynamics work, that whole thing could not work.
It is a very stable orbit, and when we study Venus's orbit, go forward and backward and integrate its orbit for billions of years, it stays exactly where it is.
Velikovsky's ideas, I believe, state that this whole event must have happened around 2,000 years ago, if I remember what he thinks correctly.
And that clearly could not have happened.
Venus really needs to be there.
In order to keep the Earth stable.
The Earth's orbit being stable really depends on Venus being where it is.
And so the fact that the Earth is even here indicates that Venus was there since the formation of the planets.
And so I think that any serious modeling of Velikovsky's ideas seem to indicate that they're not right.
All right.
Back to you, Roper, for just one second.
You admitted That it's possible that life might exist under the surface of Europa in that ocean at something past the microbial level.
Is there any reason to say, no, it could not be, when I would suggest to you that something as complex, for example, as Earth's dolphin might exist below the surface?
There is no reason to discount that idea.
Let's put it that way.
I don't think we have evidence one way or another.
Is it unreasonable to conjecture that something intelligent might exist below the surface?
Well, I think you can argue that there is not a technological society on the order of our society.
Oh, well, it would be statistical to presume that something like that would develop necessarily, would it not?
Intelligence is not necessarily measured by buildings and concrete.
Oh, I absolutely agree with that.
But I'm just saying, a society that develops a technology, particularly radio waves and the like, probably, you know, I think that could be ruled out.
To be honest with you, I don't think anything else can be ruled out yet.
Is it not possible that intelligent life could certainly develop along an entirely different plane which wouldn't
depend on technology for advancement, or would it automatically depend on technological
advancement to be measured as we understand it?
I think the answer to that question, and I think I'm going to punt like I've punted
on several of these questions.
That's fine.
The answer is I'm representing the scientific community on this program, I guess.
The response to that is that we only have one sample of what life looks like.
If you just count this Martian stuff.
Right.
And so it's hard to extrapolate one example.
For example, you can read science fiction stories where it turns out that life on a planet is rare.
That life usually happens in molecular clouds.
Or in some environment that looks nothing like a planet.
And all that, you know, there's nothing to discount any of that.
And it's very hard to develop an idea of what different life forms will look like in general by just studying one example.
So as a scientist, I think the answer is we can't answer that question.
You're cautious until you get another model.
That's right.
Or another example.
Sure, example.
East of the Rockies, you're on the air with Dr. Levinson.
Where are you calling from, please?
Hi, this is Steve from South Dakota.
Hi, Steve.
I have a comment and then a question.
Sure.
One of the pieces of evidence put forward for the idea that the meteorites in question did in fact come from Mars originally is that the composition of the meteorites matches a distinctive signature of gases that were present in the Martian atmosphere.
And indeed here is a criterion matched by the Sidonian research proposed by Horace Crater, Stanley McDaniel.
and you know Richard Hoagland.
The geometry of the mound configuration and the face is unquestionably a distinctive signature.
My question is, why isn't the geometry of the mounds that are proposed by Dr. Horace
Creter and the appearance of the face enough of a distinctive signature of possible intelligent
origin to raise NASA's priorities in investigating those objects?
All right, let me add to that a little bit before you respond, Doctor, with this fax.
Art, respectively, I think it should be pointed out to the Doctor that there are, in fact, two known NASA Viking photographs showing the phase on Mars.
Frame 07A, 13, 035A, 72, taken from differing perspectives and differing sun angles.
I was not aware of that.
I've only seen one photograph of the face.
No, there are apparently two.
Would that change your thinking?
I would have to see them and find out and see how they differ from one another.
All right.
West of the Rockies, you're on the air with Dr. Levison.
Hello.
Hello.
Where are you, sir?
Albuquerque, New Mexico.
All right.
My name is Jason, and I was concerned.
I actually had a question, first of all.
Can compression of very thick land masses cause heating of a core?
Good question.
The answer to that is, initially, that's exactly what happens.
So could Europa have a heat source?
Based on the compression of the thickness of the ice?
But that's very short-lived, right?
It only occurs during the formation of the satellite.
So as far as I understand it, the only sources for heat right now are radioactive decay, which is probably the most important thing in the Earth, for example, and the tidal effects due to Jupiter.
There's also, in Saturn, for example, the planet itself, There's a heat source that has to do with differentiation.
Originally, for example, when Europa was made, all the rock and the ice was mixed together.
But as the rock settled out, that also heated the planet.
But again, that's a process that has come to completion.
These systems are old enough that a lot of these initial things have probably gone away.
Right, but if the surface is flexing because of the gravitational forces from Jupiter, Could it be altering the pressures enough, you know, through the watery surface and into the core?
Oh, well that's exactly what's going on.
I'm sorry, I misunderstood your question.
That's exactly what's going on.
It's the grinding of the rock as the shape of the satellite changes as it goes around Jupiter and Jupiter's tide.
That's exactly what's heating things up.
So then the water could be very warm and the fissures could be a result of Escaping gases from the rock source.
All right, let's ask about a specific.
Imagine this tens of miles of ice below the water.
What kind of temperature could you speculate?
And I know it's speculation, Doctor.
What kind of temperature of the water might we imagine?
I'm not exactly sure what the limits of the models predict for what temperatures there could be.
There could be volcanic activity, so it could get actually very hot in some places at the place where the rock meets the water.
But clearly we're talking about temperatures that are conducive, if it's liquid water, to the existence of life.
Let me just give you another piece of information.
As Galileo went past Canaan recently, it discovered a magnetic field.
Which was certainly not expected.
And magnetic fields are usually associated with having liquid rock cores.
Right.
Alright, and I, my, again my understanding of it was they did not expect Ganymede to have a core that was liquid.
And so that these, these cores may actually be warmer than what our models currently predict.
What do we even understand about our own core?
I have heard recent scientific discussion of the Earth not having a liquid core, but having a solid iron core.
Have you heard that?
I think it's very hard.
When you're talking about temperatures and pressures as high as we think about in the core, it's very hard to make an analog of what is solid and what is liquid.
And I think that's where the dispute in that area is coming in.
Um, the fact that we have a very strong magnetic field to me indicates that stuff must be moving around in the core.
And, um, in order to produce the magnetic field.
And if that's the case, then it's not really a solid the way that you would think of a rock.
Right?
Because things aren't moving around in a rock.
Right.
But the densities are very high.
So it's not also like liquid.
So it's someplace in between.
I've also heard talk that our core is... the Earth, of course, is rotating, but that the core is rotating at an ever so slightly faster rate.
Have you heard that?
Yeah, I have.
It's a recently new result, and I'm not a geophysicist, so again, it's not my expertise, but I have heard claims that there's evidence that that is indeed the case.
Well, of course, we know... Yes, we know that our Magnetic North does shift.
And that might account for that shift?
Is that reasonable to conclude?
I haven't heard anybody make that claim.
But it is true that no one really understands the mechanism for that switch.
And so it could have something to do with it.
Again, I don't know enough to speculate.
All right.
Well, very good.
East of the Rockies, you're on the air with Dr. Levison in Boulder, Colorado.
Hello.
Yeah, Art.
How are you doing?
I'm fine.
Where are you?
I'm in Bourbon, Missouri.
All right.
I'm glad to see that you survived the Russia trip.
Yes, I did.
You didn't... I assume you didn't fly over Chestnya.
Well, no.
To my knowledge, I did not.
No, I came from a different direction.
Do you have a question for my guest?
Yes, I do.
I want to know about carbonaceous dichondrites.
They have organic chemicals in them.
And they are meteorites or meteors that flow around through the system and I'd like to hear what he has to say about them and what is the difference between this meteor that we've found in the Antarctic and the carbonaceous dichondrites that commonly occur and have organic chemicals in them.
Well, the fact that this meteorite has organic material in it is indeed not a rare occurrence.
Meteorites from the asteroid belt, which is where most meteorites are believed to come from, including the ones that the caller is asking about, do have a lot of organic material in it.
Matter of fact, everywhere we look, we see organic material.
It's believed that Pluto has a significant amount of organic material.
Comets are very dark.
And they believe that that's because their surfaces are coated with sort of a tarry glock.
When we look at interstellar space and look at the dust grains between the interstellar, in between stars, we see a lot of organic material.
The organic material itself is not necessarily a sign of life.
What is special about this particular meteorite is it comes from Mars, and Martian meteorites And indeed Viking data show that they usually do not have organic material associated with it.
And the fact that this particular Martian meteorite does is very intriguing.
How much of this microbial evidence did they actually find?
How much of a quantity?
Did they find a great deal of it or was it very rare within or very plentiful?
The organic material itself?
I don't remember the numbers.
It's on the order of what's found in the asteroid belt meteorites.
It's not a lot of material.
It's not that you would pick this thing up and think it's a chunk of coal or something like that.
Right.
But it is plentiful enough to measure.
The other thing you have to realize is they only measured a very small part of the meteorite.
This is a very valuable rock, and they've cut it into lots of small pieces, and these guys only had a fairly small flake.
And they only really measured a very small region.
And so I'm not sure that they even have an understanding of how the organics vary as a function of place to place within the rock.
But again, and I found this interesting, the Antarctic is a place where when they find rocks, in all likelihood, they are not from Earth, but they are from elsewhere, meteorites or at least from elsewhere, correct?
I wouldn't... I can't say for certain that they're most likely from elsewhere.
It's just much more likely for them to be from elsewhere.
So it's a good... And the most common place is the asteroid belt.
Just a good place to be searching.
Yes.
This is all fascinating.
All right, Doctor, hold on.
We'll be right back.
Bottom of the hour coming up.
My guest is Dr. Harold F. Levison from Boulder, Colorado.
And he's talking about the Mars meteorite.
And we're talking about many other things.
Including Europa, where there may be who knows what lying beneath tens of miles of frozen ice.
You're listening to Art Bell's Somewhere in Time on Premier Radio Networks.
Tonight, an encore presentation of Coast to Coast AM from August 21st, 1996.
This is a presentation of the Coast to Coast AM concert.
I WS you, what's going on?
I WS you, please don't ignore me.
Oh, and it's alright, and it's coming home We gotta get right back where we started from
I WS you, what's going on?
I WS you, please don't ignore me.
Love is good, love can be strong We gotta get right back where we started from
You remember that day, and surely you'll remember When you first came my way
I said no one could take your place And if you get hurt, if you get hurt By the little things I
say I can set a fire back on in your face
Oh, and it's alright, and it's coming home We gotta get right back where we started from
Networks presents Art Bell, Somewhere in Time.
Tonight's program originally aired August 21st, 1996.
Yikes!
I'm so hung up on this record after all these years.
How do you figure?
Anyway, good morning everybody.
Now we take you back to the night of August 21st, 1996, on Art Bell, Somewhere in Time.
August 21st, 1996, on Art Bell, Somewhere in Time.
you you
Back now to Dr. Levinson, who has been kind enough to be with us.
I know it's getting late for you, doctor.
Probably coming up on 3 o'clock in the morning there.
That's right.
So, we'll try and wrap it up in this half hour if we can.
Here's a question.
Dear Art, ask the doctor if he thinks chlorophyll is on Europa, like in the movie 2010.
Also, what does he think of the possibility of life on the moon Titan?
That's from Salt Lake.
I'll answer the second part first.
Sure.
Titan is an interesting object.
It's got a very thick atmosphere, especially for a satellite.
And there is some arguments that have been put forward that there are actually small seas of liquid nitrogen on the surface.
So it may be the only other place in the solar system where an actual liquid exists on the surface.
There's been a lot of argument that there may be a lot of organic material there.
If I understand what the people who study biology are telling us, it's that it's probably just too cold, and that probably all the building blocks are there, but that it's unlikely that we'll find life there.
All right, here's a really hard one for you.
Well, let's get to the chlorophyll business first, I guess, on Europa.
There's no evidence for chlorophyll.
No evidence, all right.
If we ever get to the point where we can... I'm sure you're familiar with the term terraforming.
Would it be possible, in your opinion, to take one of these likely places for life and eventually have the technology To make it a habitable location for human beings.
There's been a lot of speculation on that, and people have actually been working on that question.
Reputable scientists have been working on the question of terraforming Mars.
And it seems, although it's not within our technology today, it certainly may be in the near future.
Not meaning our lifetime, but within A few generations.
What would be required?
You need to warm Mars, and you need to increase its atmosphere somehow.
Like I said, the details have not been worked out on that.
There's a lot of issue, actually, as to what is actually there.
There's been speculation that there's a large amount of water stored underneath the surface of Mars as a permafrost.
If that's there, it would be a lot easier than if it's not there.
We just don't know.
And so, if you're interested in doing something like that, you really need to do the scientific, basic work to find out actually what the raw materials, which raw materials are there.
And I would say NASA's in the process of doing that.
Slowly, and too slowly from a lot of people's point of view.
But they are attempting to evaluate Whether that's indeed possible or not.
Do you subscribe to the global warming scenario?
The models that I've seen, and again, I'm not an atmospheric scientist, but a good friend of mine actually is, and he works on this particular topic, tend to point to the fact that the atmosphere will warm due to the carbon dioxide that we're pumping into the atmosphere.
Models show that.
There's now, I think, beginning to be evidence that the atmosphere actually really is warming.
And that's sort of an alarming trend.
It is.
I think, and this is more of a policy discussion than a scientific one in many ways, but getting in discussion with friends of mine who are not scientists, my argument is that we should not be running the experiment.
By the time, the atmosphere is very... I don't know if you are familiar with the word chaotic.
I am, yes.
Okay.
Well, the atmosphere, as a matter of fact, the study of the atmosphere is one of the places where chaos was first discovered.
And it seems to me that what chaos means is that very small stimuli can have very huge effects, and global effects.
And from my perspective, It's just a very dangerous experiment to run.
All right.
Well, since we're on the subject of dangerous experiments, I can't resist.
There is a project ongoing in Alaska right now called HAARP.
Are you familiar with that at all?
No.
HAARP is a project.
It's an oral heater.
They intend to bombard the ionosphere with tremendous amounts of energy to actually heat it.
And there are a lot of people, and I'm one of them, who's fairly concerned about this process.
I mean, tremendous amounts of RF that are going to be concentrated on a very small, specific portion of the ionosphere to produce heating.
For what purpose?
The stated purposes of this are two.
One, to study the effect it will have on communications, because we use the ionosphere for long-distance communications.
And two, strangely, to map underground caverns and caves.
In other words, some sort of return bounce, a very strong return bounce that would somehow map subterranean caves and so forth.
It's very strange, but since you brought up the subject of chaos and small effects, small energies or something having large effects, I thought I would run that past you, but if you're not familiar with it, it's going to be very hard for you to comment on.
Yeah, I'm sorry, I can't comment on that.
Alright, first time caller on the line.
You're on the air with Dr. Levinson.
Where are you calling from, please?
Houston, Texas.
Yes, sir.
How are you?
Fine.
It's a pleasure.
This may not pertain to Dr. Levinson's field of expertise, but my question is, with the speculation of long-term effects of meteor Well, the answer to that is very simple, I think.
The answer is probably not a lot.
right play considering the number that bombard the atmosphere every year on the deterioration
of the atmosphere?
Well, the answer to that is very simple, I think.
The answer is probably not a lot.
After all...
Even considering the composition of them?
Yes.
First of all, they mainly rain out.
Okay.
But on top of that, the reason why I'm answering that so certainly is, without knowing a lot about the models, is because we have core samples of ice sheets which can date back the atmosphere for a very long period of time.
And even more than that, we have deposits on ocean floors that are now above ground because they've been pushed up.
And the indication is that the Earth's atmosphere hasn't changed appreciably in that regard over the times we've been able to measure.
Okay.
So I think there's observational evidence that the raining in of stuff is... doesn't have a global effect.
Yeah, not a big effect.
All right.
Let me turn the question around on you then.
What about, conversely, what would a great deal of space travel That is to say, objects like the shuttle and so forth, leaving the atmosphere with great force, would that possibly have an effect?
No, I mean, well, what we consider great force, the Earth doesn't consider great force.
And none of these things, like the shuttle or rockets going off, really have much of an effect on anything in the atmosphere.
All right.
Well, I've had a lot of people ask about that, so I thought I'd throw it at you.
East of the Rockies, you're on the air with Dr. Levinson.
Where are you calling from, please?
Hello.
This is Virgil from Houston.
Houston again.
All right.
Hi, Virgil.
Yeah, Houston people get around, don't they?
Yes, you do.
A couple of questions for the doctor.
Concerning Mars, I know that the diameter of Mars is about half that of the Earth.
Would that therefore mean that the escape velocity would be about half that of the Earth?
It's actually a lot less than that.
Not exactly half, huh?
No, because the escape velocity has to do with, essentially, the mass.
I see.
And the mass goes as the volume, not the radius.
So although Mars is about half the Earth, It's almost a tenth of its mass.
So it's much less than that.
Oh, and another question concerning the impact on Mars of a meteor.
Would the amount of ejected material be equivalent to the mass of the object hitting it, or would that be dependent on the speed of the object?
It depends on the speed of the object, and it also depends a lot On the actual dynamics of the impact, but in general, the amount of stuff leaving is going to be very small compared to the mass of the impactor.
Like if the angle was a certain amount, that would also affect the... It turns out the angle doesn't have a large effect.
Oh, interesting.
If you look at craters on the moon, for example, go out with a pair of binoculars and look at craters on the moon, they're all round.
Right?
Independent of the angle it came in.
The angle really doesn't play a role.
I see.
And one more question, Doctor.
Maybe out of your particular line of study, but I have an idea from the recent discoveries from the shuttle photographs of storms on the Earth, the sprites that extend way up into the ionosphere.
Do you think it might be possible that ozone is created By lightning storms and therefore replenishes the ozone layer constantly.
Right.
That's a good question.
It has always been thought that storms would not replenish ozone.
But as he pointed out, there's recent evidence of these incredible spikes from storms that extend way into space.
So is that possible?
Again, it's so far out of my expertise, I hesitate to even guess to an answer of that.
I'm sorry.
All right.
No, that's fine.
And I appreciate when it's out of your field that you don't tackle it anyway.
West of the Rockies, you're on the air with Dr. Levinson.
Hello.
Good morning, gentlemen.
This is John from Los Angeles.
Hi, John.
I have an interesting hypothetical situation that I thought about that I haven't heard any discussion about in regard to the rock from Mars and the, I suppose, the plant material that was That was on or inside the rock.
Was it plant material?
No, it was bacteria.
Bacteria.
Microbacteria.
Do you think it might be possible for a meteor to strike Mars and then come and strike the Earth and there would be a splashing effect from the heat generated that that could be something that would be both a combination of Mars and Earth That it splashed up into the atmosphere, or up above the atmosphere, and then gone for a thousand years around the Earth, and eventually landed and was found.
I'm not exactly sure exactly what you're asking.
In other words, sir, there is sufficient evidence, apparently, so that it is not ambiguous.
In other words, this did come from Mars, they have determined.
There's no question that it couldn't be.
Something compiled from the strike generating heat so that they would merge?
No, because if it got that hot, all evidence of the fossils and all evidence of the organic material would have been destroyed.
That makes sense.
Right?
So the impact itself, although it was very violent, probably didn't heat the rock very hard.
Although that is a controversy on all this.
And there's some people that are questioning the whole result.
Because they believed that the rock at one point was very hot.
I understand that the impacts, wherever they would occur, would generate a tremendous amount of heat.
Well, a tremendous amount of energy.
Right.
But whether things just break, or whether they actually melt, is an issue I don't think anybody understands.
Right.
Thank you very much.
Alright, thank you.
Doctor, in the Antarctic, are these rocks, which generally could be meteorites, that are found.
Are they prolific?
Are there many, many, many of them in the Antarctic to be found within the ice?
Or are they rare?
I'm not exactly sure, again, of that answer.
They certainly have found thousands of objects in these expeditions which are meteorites.
Fairly prolific, then.
So they are not rare.
Martian meteorites are a small fraction of those.
Right, but there are large number of meteorites, from the asteroid belt in particular, that are found in Antarctica.
So, Mars meteorites, at least, are fairly rare?
Mm-hmm.
Okay.
They number in the few to tens, right?
I'm not exactly sure of the number, but they're certainly not in the thousands.
Okay, first time caller line, you're on the air with Dr. Levison.
Good evening.
Morning, actually.
Hello?
Hello.
Art Bell?
Yes, I have a question for your guest there.
There was mention about the Mars expedition.
My question is, when are we going to have that?
Does he have a guess?
And if we do, about how How fast will the spacecraft be traveling, and how long, you know, will the travel be?
Before we get the answers, I suspect he has more than a guess.
You know about the coming shots, Doctor?
Are you talking about the ones that are being launched?
Right.
Now, yes.
The objects, the launches, actually, I can give you the dates.
I actually brought a little pamphlet home with me, which are going to tell us.
The Mars Global Surveyor, which is the orbital orbiter, That will be imaging the surface as of January 23rd, so this is getting a little out of date already.
It was supposed to be launched on November 5th.
The Mars 96, which is the Russian spacecraft, is supposed to be launched on November 16th.
Again, these dates are quite a bit out of date, so I don't know how accurate they are.
And the Mars Pathfinder, which is the micro rover and lander, is supposed to be launched in December.
December.
And it'll take about a year to get there.
I take it that these are all fairly close together.
Does that represent some sort of opportunistic window?
Yeah, the launches, there's something called a Least Energy Orbit, which indicates when you should launch.
That restricts when you can launch in the configuration of the planet.
And so they have to come fairly close together or you miss the chance For, I think it's a year and a half.
I've got you.
All right.
West of the Rockies, you're on the air with Dr. Levinson.
Good morning.
Good morning.
Tim in Denver.
Yes, sir.
KO Country.
I have a question for Dr. Levinson.
Sure.
Are you familiar with the telescope or observatory they're putting up on Mount Evans?
I heard a little bit about it.
They say that the pictures may rival the Hubble pictures.
In certain wavelengths, that's probably true.
It's an infrared telescope, which means it doesn't Observe the kind of light that we see.
It observes light that is more like heat.
And so it's specifically set up for observing in the infrared.
And in that regard, it may actually get images as good as Hubble.
But Hubble is really good at is the shorter wavelength, like what we see, or ultraviolet.
And that, the telescope will not be able to compete with.
Do you know when that will be operational?
They're building the dome now.
I don't know when first light on that telescope is.
My guess is it's within the next six to eight months, but that's just speculation.
All righty.
Thank you.
All right.
Thank you very much.
Let's try and squeeze one more in.
First time caller line, you're on the air with Dr. Levinson.
Hi, this is Rich in Upper One, Anchorage, Alaska.
Yes, hi, Rich.
I've got a question for the doctor.
Sure.
And we've been having some power outages up here in relation to that HAARP situation.
But my question is this.
Could Europa be experiencing an ice age as the Earth did?
Or might the Earth experience an ice age as Europa appears to be now?
Well, no, I think that's very unlikely.
There's a fundamental difference between the energy sources on the Earth and the energy sources in Europa.
The Earth, at least the surface of the Earth, gets most of its energy from the Sun.
The Europa is five times further away, which means it gets 25 times less energy, which makes the Sun not a very important source of energy for Europa.
So Europa is being heated from the inside out, while the Earth is being heated from the outside in.
There's no thick atmosphere On Europa.
Remember, the Earth, it's got such a nice, comfortable place to live with regard to temperature because it's got this thick blanket of gas.
Right.
That's holding all the light in.
The moon, for example, if you get in the shadow of the moon, it's very cold.
Doctor, stop for a second.
We're at the end of this hour.
Now, if you've got another hour to give me, I'll sure hold you.
If you want to get to bed, I sure understand.
It's up to you.
I could go for another hour, whatever you want to do.
Never say that to me.
Alright, stay right where you are then, and we will come back and concentrate again on the phones when we get back.
My guest is Dr. Harold Levison, and we are discussing things out beyond.
Come back and join us.
You're listening to Art Bell, Somewhere in Time.
Tonight featuring a replay of Coast to Coast AM from August 21st, 1996.
I hear the drums echoing tonight, but she has only whispers of some quiet conversation.
She's coming in 12-13 flights, the moonlit wings reflect the stars that guide her towards salvation.
The Moonlighting of the Sun The Moonlighting of the Sun
The Moonlighting of the Sun You're listening to Art Bell, Somewhere in Time, on Premier
Radio Networks.
Tonight, an encore presentation of Coast to Coast AM from August 21st, 1996.
Dr. Harold Levison is my guest.
He is a Senior Research Fellow, Department of Space Sciences, Instrumentation and Space Research Division with the Southwest Research Institute.
We're talking about the Mars meteorite that apparently harbors light.
We're talking about Europa and beyond.
And we'll get back to the good doctor in just a moment.
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You're listening to Art Bell's Somewhere in Time on Premier Radio Networks.
Tonight, an encore presentation of Coast to Coast AM from August 21st, 1996.
21st 1996 Dr. Levinson, on a scale of 1 to 10, how exciting is this
uh... meteorite uh...
signs of life or life within the meteorite How exciting a scientific discovery is it?
It's cautiously a 10.
Wow.
The reason why I think it's one of the most important scientific discoveries, if it's right, in this century.
The idea that there's life elsewhere than on the Earth is really a spectacular Discovery.
Now that's not what this is, but it really is sort of leading in that direction.
So I cautiously give it a 10.
If in the next few years they recover a lot more meteorites or some more meteorites and also discover fossilized life of varying sorts or even something more exciting like plant life or small animal fossils or something like that, I take it then the excitement level would go through the roof.
Absolutely.
Alright, first time caller on the line.
You're on the air with Dr. Levinson.
Hi.
Hello, Dr. Levinson.
I'm graduating from Texas A&M in the spring with two degrees in physics and meteorology.
I'm extremely interested in planetary atmospheres.
In fact, I'm applying to the University of Colorado Astrophysical Planetary and Atmospheric Sciences Department.
I would like to know your outlook for As far as jobs are concerned, can a PhD expect to find a job?
Or does he have to do a lot of post-doctoral work?
Where do you see it going?
I know it's highly political.
It's highly political.
The field is shrinking drastically due to budget cuts by the federal government.
My feeling is that the field will be something like a third smaller in five years.
It's not a very good outlook, and the people it's going to hurt the most are the young people, especially when it comes to situations like post-docs or a situation that I'm in.
I'm in what's called a soft money position.
That is, I have to raise my salary from grants, which I write.
I've got four or five of them to various federal agencies.
And it's very hard to break into those programs.
And as the money tightens up on those programs, the tendency is going to be to fund people who they know will produce, who are the people that are already established, rather than newcomers.
I think it's great.
You should go to graduate school.
It's going to be the best few years of your life.
I feel that way.
It's an investment in just The activity of actually doing science.
And you have to look at it that way.
It's going to be very tough to get a job at the end.
Well, not what you wanted to hear, but the straight stuff.
There you go, Collin.
Thank you.
Good luck.
Good luck.
Doctor, why... I mean, I understand that times are tough.
Money is tough to come by.
Aren't we really going the wrong way at a time when discoveries like this are increasing, it's very exciting, and we're going the wrong way?
Well, I certainly think so, but I think a politician would answer, you can only pay for certain things, and society has to decide what is more important to it.
I think that astronomy, although the numbers sound large when you look at it, In just, you know, in terms of what our salaries are, for example, is actually a fairly small amount compared to other things in the federal budget.
And I think that it, this is again my personal belief, is that it's short-sighted.
That science has a lot of very positive, does a lot of very positive things on many levels in our society.
And by, I'm not destroying too strong a word, By decreasing the scientific output, I think it has very negative long-term effects on society.
Doctor, if you had your way, and money was no object, and you could direct the priorities of the U.S.
manned space program, and you could say, all right, let's go to the moon, or let's go to Mars, or let's go to Europa, or, you know, we just really were pouring the bucks in, and you could set the priorities, What would you want to go look at first?
With the M.A.N.
program?
Yes, sir.
The M.A.N.
program is not really a scientific endeavor.
I mean, there are many reasons to do a M.A.N.
program beyond science.
And so, the best way, I think, of trying to make the most important scientific discoveries is by unmanned missions.
Well, again, that's a...
Okay, I guess that is a scientific and an economic judgment?
Yes, I think.
And a technological judgment.
Really?
We do not have the technology currently to get a man to Mars.
But we have the technology of getting... Machines?
Machines to Mars.
And on top of that, if you try to take a man to Mars, you have to move all the food and water and all the air And that is a lot of mass to get to Mars that you could fill up with instruments if you were just sending robots.
It's true.
So your first target of interest, with all the money around that you would need, would still be Mars?
I'm not sure about that.
I think we need to get the answers that the current crops of spacecraft are going to give us.
This is a step-by-step process.
You learn a little and then you try to make a judgment about what the next thing to do.
If your goal is to find life, for example, or understand the formation of the solar system, you would send spacecraft to different places.
Do you subscribe to the Big Bang Theory?
Yeah, I think that's accepted by most scientists.
I had a lady who called me up not long ago with a simple but interesting question.
She said, why are the planets basically round?
And when you consider the Big Bang, she asked, well, were all of these planets, in essence, thrown out from the Big Bang in a liquid form, much as a drop of liquid would be thrown out if you were to just toss a glass of water up into the air?
Well, those are very, very, very different questions, okay?
The solar system, which is the sun and the planets, formed about 4 billion years ago.
The Big Bang is believed to have occurred something like 15 billion years ago.
The number is debated by a factor of 2, right?
It can be, you know, half as much or twice as much, depending on who you talk to.
The creation of the universe, what was believed to be created, was just a plasma.
Very, very hot gas.
And that all the stars and the planets formed through evolutionary processes that occurred in planet stars over that 10 billion years in order to set up the situation where the solar system could form.
So the planets are, the sun is believed to be something like 3rd or 4th generation after the Big Bang.
Most of the stuff for which the rocky planets are made of actually was made inside of large stars early on.
That process continues now, does it not?
In other words, the Hubble took recent photographs of these incredible, gaseous pillars that seem to be birthing stars.
Absolutely!
It's an ongoing process.
Stars are being formed and they're dying all the time.
And the big stars, when they die, they blow up.
And they spew out all this processed material.
And it's that that we're made of.
And the stars that are forming now have a slightly different chemical makeup than the solar system has when it formed, because the process has been continuing.
It's an ongoing... You could look at the galaxy as a living organism, where this process of birth and death of stars is going on and on.
All right, the $64 million question.
What was it that existed one second before the Big Bang?
The standard answer to that question is that the theories of physics, if we understand it, can't go that far back.
They fall apart, if I remember the number correctly, something like... It's a very small number.
10 to the minus 43 seconds, I think, is the actual number.
That's 0.4301 of a second after the Big Bang.
Before that time, our physics can't explain what happened.
We just don't have the theory set.
That's off into creation country.
Well, I mean... As one working theory.
Maybe.
I would like to think that As we get to understand physics a little bit better, that we will be able to try to explain what happened.
You know, there are two modern branches of physics, and they don't necessarily agree with one another.
General relativity and Einstein, and quantum mechanics.
And there are regimes where each of these theories are valid, and regimes where they're not.
And the Big Bang, right after the Big Bang, is where they overlap so closely.
That we don't have a theory that unifies those two yet.
But I think it's within, I mean, maybe within our lifetime we may have an answer.
That would be nice.
Wild Card Line, you're on the air with Dr. Levinson in Boulder, Colorado.
Hi.
This is Walton Reno.
Is there a particular reason why our solar system lies in a relatively flat plane?
Why it couldn't be planets circling in all sorts of planes relative to the sun and relative to each other?
Yeah, that's actually fairly well understood.
And what happened is that the Sun and the planets, but most of the mass in the solar system is in the Sun, they formed by a collapsing gas cloud that was much, much bigger than the size of the solar system.
And that cloud had what's called angular momentum.
Imagine what it is.
It's sort of a rotation.
And as Um, you know, as a dancer or a skater, their arms are out.
They bring their arms in, they spin faster and faster and faster, right?
That happens when the solar system is formed.
As this cloud, which wasn't rotating very fast to begin with, collapsed down to something the size of the solar system, it started rotating very fast.
And what happens in that situation is that there's so much of this angle of momentum, this rotation, That the Sun, in order to form, needed to spew out, well, spew out is not exactly the right word, needed to create this disk around it that had most of that angular momentum because the Sun itself could not get all that angular momentum in it.
And the planets formed from that disk.
So there's really very good understanding of the physics that formed the disk from which the planets formed.
So theoretically it could not be in any other way?
That's right.
Great show, Art.
Okay, thank you very much for the call.
I hope that was a coherent answer.
Yes, it was.
There's also a lot of recent evidence finally confirming the fact that planets are common things about Suns, rather than uncommon.
Is that so?
That seems to be the case, yes.
There's about, I think the number is now eight, suspected planets around other Suns.
And that's just on an initial look-see.
So the odds are, then, that planets are very common things.
Yeah, I think that's probably right.
Adding to the probability that life, if it evolves commonly, is all over the place.
If it evolves commonly.
So where in the world are the radio signals and the I-love-Lucys from elsewhere?
Well, that's a good question.
Maybe it doesn't form commonly.
The, or maybe in very sophisticated societies don't.
It turns out that my ideas on this subject actually have been changing significantly over the last few years.
You know, I grew up during the era of Star Trek, right?
Sure.
The first Star Trek.
The real Star Trek.
The real Star Trek.
That's right, yes.
And, you know, that whole idea that you enter a solar system and you're going to find a planet with life is sort of my mindset.
When I got into astronomy, it really influenced my thinking a lot.
And also the work of Carl Sagan and Frank Drake sort of suggested that that may be the case, that there may be a lot of life.
But it turns out there's been some recent work that has suggested that life, at least the complex civilization, may not be as common as we think.
For example, there's work that's recently been done on Mars.
Which shows that it's obliquity, that's the tilt of its axis with respect to the orbital plane.
The Earth right now is at 23 degrees, and Mars is very close to that.
But according to recent models, that tilt of Mars' orbit turns out to be chaotic, just like the chaos in the atmosphere, and swings wildly all over the place.
My friends who do atmospheric modeling of the Earth, Tell me that if that were to happen to the Earth, that we'd be in a perpetual ice age.
And we would not have... human beings wouldn't be trotting about right now.
That's right.
So you have to ask, well, why doesn't it happen to the Earth?
And the reason it doesn't happen to the Earth is because we have a large moon.
Right?
And the moon stabilizes the obliquity of the Earth.
That's what these models have shown.
Well, large moons are rare, right?
Of all the major planets, if you know Pluto for a moment.
The Earth has the largest moon compared to its own mass of any other planet in the solar system.
So we have to consider at least the possibility that we are alone.
Well, not alone, but that it's a lot rarer than you would think.
You may find a lot of places where there are microbes or low-level life.
Well, that's still pretty lonely.
Yep, I think so.
And again, remember this whole idea, we talked about it a little earlier, Of trying to get an idea of what is the norm by studying one example is very dangerous.
Sure.
Exactly.
East of the Rockies, you're on the air with Dr. Levinson.
Good morning.
Good morning.
This is Carl from Murfreesboro, Tennessee.
Yes, sir.
My question is about the impact that happened on the Earth just not too long ago in the Siberian forest in Russia.
What have we learned about it and what it might have been?
There was just a meeting on that.
I didn't go to it.
About a month ago, actually.
I think the current belief and scientific thinking on that is that it was a comet that hit the atmosphere and it was so small enough, Comet, that it couldn't penetrate the atmosphere.
Shrieking through the Earth's atmosphere, it blew up.
And so the actual explosion, which occurred above the atmosphere, was very violent, knocked down all those trees, but yet did not leave a crater.
Hmm.
So, because I was reading that they could not find any kind of, you know, any kind of debris or whatsoever that a meteorite might have hit it, or an asteroid of some sort.
Well, he just answered that.
If it blew up before it hit the Earth, then it would have about that effect.
Yeah, then no, no thing.
Well, thank you very much.
Art, it's great to...
I'm glad you made it, sir.
Thank you very much for the call.
And let's see, one more before the bottom of the hour, maybe.
West of the Rockies, you're on the air with Dr. Levinson.
Hi.
Yeah, this is Stephen Portland.
Hi, Steve.
I was just wondering...
When the comet Hayakazaki passed by Earth, they noted that it was emanating x-rays.
That's right.
And if Dr. Levinson had any information on the source of these x-rays, or do all comets do this?
The answer to your question is that now that we're looking in detail, other comets show x-rays.
Oh, they do?
Yes, and there's been a couple measured.
And no one has any idea why.
So, there are speculations floating around, but no one's been able to understand why these things exist.
You work in a very frustrating field in many ways, don't you?
In other words, we have so many things that we are now beginning to discover for which there is simply no answer.
But there will be.
That's my job.
Right?
I find it very exciting.
Oh, of course.
Right?
It's the chase that's interesting.
Right?
I mean, the answers are interesting, but it's actually the process.
And the challenge of figuring these things out, which is what I love and why I do this.
So astronomy, in other words, is a lot like women.
You could say that.
Doctor, thank you, and hold on a moment.
We'll be right back to you.
You're listening to Art Bell, Somewhere in Time, on Premier Radio Networks.
Tonight, an encore presentation of Coast to Coast AM from August 21st, 1996.
This is a presentation of Coast to Coast AM from August 21st, 1996.
♪♪ ♪♪
♪♪ ♪♪
♪♪ You're listening to Art Bell, Somewhere in Time.
Tonight featuring a replay of Coast to Coast AM from August 21st, 1996.
Well, if this kind of stuff doesn't fascinate you, you better check yourself for a pulse.
I'm from Boulder, Colorado, and he's staying up really late.
We'll get back to him in just a moment.
♪♪ Now we take you back to the night of August 21st, 1996, on
Art Bell's Somewhere in Time.
Here is a fax, Doctor, from Long Beach, California, Al.
Is it conceivable, doctor, that at one time Mars may have had a life-supporting atmosphere which was, in effect, stolen or sucked away by a large comet passing by at a great speed.
If yes, could this happen to the Earth?
That is, in effect, our atmosphere being sucked away or burned up by a large celestial body passing near Earth.
I know of no such mechanism that would do that.
It is true that impacts can Can blow off an atmosphere, and that the erosion of Mars' atmosphere may have been somewhat affected by things hitting Mars and blowing the atmosphere off.
But I know of no way for a comet passing by to suck an atmosphere off a planet.
Okay, good.
So a near miss wouldn't do it.
No.
Alright, first time caller on the line, you're on the air with Dr. Levinson.
Where are you calling from, please?
St.
Petersburg.
Florida?
Yes, St.
Petersburg, Florida.
Not Russia.
I understand.
I have, you pushed a button a while ago when you mentioned a creator.
I noticed that they haven't been mentioned during the whole program.
It's been very interesting.
But I'm wondering if the doctor is familiar with Sir Fred Hoyle in England, the astronomer.
You know, he has studied the laws of probability.
And I think the last statistic I read was the probability of any form of a well-approaching molecule as a matter of
fact that the different molecule
arising by chance is ten to the power of two hundred forty nine
which is a tremendous number and uh... if you make a creation of a creator altogether
then i don't think i can have any answers to anything well i'm surprised we didn't get this one along time ago
and i think i'm actually alright doctor uh... how about it
uh... well i'm gonna go back to argument i made a little while ago about
the fact that are is that the
a philosophy of life and uh...
and it doesn't preclude religion i I know some very religious scientists, and I know some scientists who are not religious.
So I don't think the one really impinges on the other very strongly.
I know arguments in both directions.
To answer a question about Fred Hoyle's statistics on the formation of molecules, I'm not personally familiar with his work in that regard.
I do know that experiments as far back as the 60s and 70s show that it's very easy to get organic material.
out of inorganic material, by putting in some energy source.
There's this work by Stanley Miller, I think, I think in the 50s or 60s, where he took ammonia and methane, common gases that are found in the atmospheres of Jupiter and Saturn, and put sparks through it to simulate... Lightning?
Lightning, and he ended up with simple proteins and And amino acids in the basic building blocks of life.
I don't think that it's hard to get the basic chemicals from which life forms.
Alright.
Wild Card Line, you're on the air with Dr. Levinson.
Hello.
Yes, I wanted to mention to the doctor that I found a really interesting website at Penn State University by a physicist named Jerry Smith.
He had several designs It's for an antimatter rocket to Mars that would launch in 2005, take 45 days to get there, and have 30 days on the surface, and take 45 days to get back.
Where are you calling from, sir?
I'm Tony.
I'm calling from Seattle.
The question I have is, why do they think these small creatures that are 100 times smaller than microbes on Earth Uh, why do they, why do they think they're first of all, why did they think this comet or this asteroid is from Mars?
And I've heard they, uh, meteorite and why this meteorite is from Mars.
I've heard they've got, got it down to two specific, uh, There's only a couple of places on Mars that it could have possibly come from.
That's what I read about an hour ago, that's right.
Well, again, I think this was answered earlier, but Doctor, it's fairly unambiguous, correct?
In other words... That's my opinion, that there are chemical signatures in the rocks which make it unique to Mars.
And so I don't think there's much of a chance that it came from anywhere else.
All right.
East of the Rockies, you're on the air with Dr. Levinson.
Hi.
Well, hello, Art.
Hello.
Where are you?
I'm out in Milwaukee here.
This is Scott.
Hi, Scott.
I was just going to ask the doctor if he himself actually had a chance to examine any pieces of the rock.
I'm not a meteorist, so I have seen and I've held Martian meteorites at meetings, but I have not seen this particular Martian meteorite.
And I have not done any work on it, no.
Okay.
By the way, you do have a picture of it up on your webpage, don't you?
I do?
Okay, I'll have to... Well, no, that was a question.
Have you seen it?
Have you seen it?
I have not seen it yet.
I've seen pictures just flicking through the channels on the news and stuff, but I haven't had a real chance to, you know... Alright, let me do this.
If somebody will send me a photograph of it, be assured I'll get it up there.
Oh, okay.
That would be great.
And they will if I make the request.
If somebody has it, they'll send it to me.
Thank you very much, and I'll look forward to getting that photograph.
West of the Rockies, you're on the air with Dr. Levinson.
Hi.
Hi, good morning, Mr. Bell and Dr. Levinson.
Where are you, sir?
I'm calling from Morgan Hill, California.
Okay.
And I understand that our artificial human intelligence, you know, computerized, hasn't really evolved that far.
And I also understand that the Hubble telescope was repaired by astronauts, and so is the lunar rover, and numerous satellites, and that a lot of the experiments conducted onboard Skylab could not feasibly be achieved at this level of technology we have through robotics exclusively.
And there was a lot of sort of impromptu resourceful inventing, you know, to not underestimate the The human mind's capability.
I feel it would be to our interest if we could have a manned Mars mission for this particular purpose.
Also, one other thing I wanted to add is somewhere on the polar regions of Mars, if you could set down a soft landing, sort of like a nuclear furnace that could melt a shaft down to the hard packed ground underneath, No tellings would remain.
It would all gasify, the CO2.
You'd end up with it setting on the ground, forming a huge cavern, a nice archaeological excavation site, because if they do find any high-tech there from a previous civilization, that's where you'll find it, where time and space sort of come to a freeze.
As your earlier remarks indicated, over a million or so years, even a Coca-Cola bottle would disintegrate, but not Under that ice path.
All right.
He first argued for manned spaceflight, and you seem to argue the other way.
It's just a matter of expense.
I agree.
I use the Hubble Space Telescope, and we've done a remarkable job fixing it.
It works.
It is an amazing instrument.
We detected things with that telescope that are about as bright as a 100-watt light bulb I've seen 20 times further away than the moon.
Wow.
It is an amazing piece of equipment.
However, the cost of getting a man to the space telescope was less than building another space telescope.
And that's probably not true for Mars.
And so you have to look at the economics of it.
And the other issue, of course, is that technology does not yet exist.
to get people to Mars, but yet we can certainly send spacecraft there.
The thing that people have to be more aware of, and I think it's sort of a problem in the PR machine at NASA, is that exploration of space is a risky business.
And things like the Mars Explorer, we're going to lose spacecraft every once in a while.
It's a very risky thing to do.
And if you're willing to take that risk, then I think robotics Are the way to do it.
It's also a lot safer.
No one's going to die sending a robot to Mars.
That's true.
Wildcard Line, you're on the air with Dr. Levinson.
Good morning.
Good morning, Art.
Where are you, sir?
I'm in Salt Lake.
Salt Lake, all right.
The Salt Flats out here, would that be a good place to look for meteors?
That's a good question.
The Salt Flats of near Salt Lake City, Doctor, would it be an equally good location to look for Uh, errant rocks that might be meteorites?
I would have to think about that.
One advantage of looking at Antarctica is not only do you have these ice sheets, but the runoff from large areas as ice moves around and it melts a little bit down there tends to concentrate all the rocks in one place.
So there's a much higher density than just the average density.
that you would expect over the year.
I see.
And, uh, which I should have mentioned earlier.
So it's sort of a funneling effect.
That's right.
That's exactly right.
And I'm not sure that would be true with Salt Lake, but it's an interesting idea.
I'd have to think about it a little bit more.
All right.
Uh, West of the Rockies, you're on the air with Dr. Levinson.
Where are you calling from, please?
Uh, I'm Dan from Gardena.
Yes, sir.
Yes, good morning, gentlemen.
Good morning.
Good morning.
I have, uh, two questions.
Uh, first, Dr., uh, real interesting show.
And, uh, I'd like to know that would the polar regions of Mars, would that be a good place to check for some kind of life that might be a little bit more upper in the stages of evolution?
Well, I would think that the best place would be to look is actually dig down and try to get to the permafrost lower down in Mars.
The polar regions of Mars are very volatile.
A large fraction of them, the sublime, and they're these large, that's what causes the dust storms on Mars, is that the carbon dioxide, which is a major component of the polar caps of Mars, actually melt away, turn into atmosphere, and then blow to the other side and condense out.
And so it's a very vulnerable place.
I would think that perhaps the best place to look would be to dig a big hole.
And see what you see far beneath the surface.
What about that giant, what is it, like a giant hole there on Mars?
Well, there's a big runoff basin, which is clearly caused by water.
And that would be, if I were going to design an experiment to look for life on Mars, I would go into that runoff basin and I would dig a hole.
One of the problems with finding life near the surface of Mars Is that the UV radiation from the sun is very strong there, and it destroys organic material.
That's why we don't find organic material on the surface.
That's why Vikings didn't find organic material.
Can I ask another question?
Sure.
Do you believe in the Big Bang?
He already said so, yes.
The answer is yes.
I was wondering, because a lot of scientists think that during the Big Bang, that time and space didn't exist.
But if that was the case, then what contained Well, that's a complicated question.
I'm not a cosmologist.
And that's not exactly a correct thing, right?
That time during the Big Bang, time and space didn't exist.
It's before the Big Bang.
That it would not have existed.
That's right.
Possibly.
And the typical answer that I hear cosmologists give to that question That's hard to contemplate.
It is, but infinity is hard to contemplate either.
It certainly is.
And so, that's usually the way people describe it.
And the way it's normally described is, imagine a sphere, like the Earth, and you go north on the Earth, and you hit the North Pole.
You can't go any further north.
Right?
Okay, and that's what they say.
Now imagine time being one of the dimensions of the Earth.
You get to the center, which is, let's say, the North Pole, there is no way you can't go in that direction anymore.
That's sort of the analogy that I've been told.
Not bad, but it's still hard to... It's very hard to comprehend.
...digest, you know.
First time caller on the line, you're on the air with Dr. Levinson.
Hello.
Is this our fellow show?
It is, yes.
Where are you?
I'm from Fresno.
My name is Jim.
Okay, Jim.
About a year ago, I think it was NASA revealed that they found some pyramids that were on Mars.
And I have a rock here called Moltovite.
It was supposed to be a meteor that was... It came here millions of years ago.
Is that a piece of the Mars that... Meteorite from Mars that broke off?
Well, there are quite a few meteors from Mars around, and like I said, the one that they're talking about in all the press releases, the LIFE, is a very special one.
It's a particular rock that is very different from the other rocks that we think we've found from Mars.
You could have a Martian meteorite, I don't know.
What is the new technology?
That allowed them, after being in possession of this rock for so long, to suddenly come out and say what they have said with regard to it.
There's a lot of things, and again you're asking, my expertise is not in this area.
Part of it is there's been a lot of advance in the last few years in the study of microfossils on the Earth.
So previous to this time, we really didn't have a good feel for what microfossils look like.
Even compared to the Martian Meteor.
Oh.
You know, there's technology being able to do chemicals, chemical analyses of smaller bits, and that kind of thing.
So there's sort of been a lot of advances on a lot of fronts that allow them to be able to do this.
All right.
A gentleman earlier mentioned antimatter.
There is matter.
Is there antimatter?
Yes.
Would that be something that eventually you would imagine could be harnessed as a source of power?
I recall that when we detonated the first atomic bomb, there were a lot of scientists who thought it might set off a chain reaction in the air and that we might burn up our own atmosphere.
Are there similar worries when we get to experimenting with matter and antimatter?
Well, on some level we are beginning to experiment with antimatter.
Antimatter, I mean, it's certainly not known whether antimatter exists in nature as something like a rock of antimatter.
Yes.
The theory, before the development of a new... The Big Bang has gone through many revisions in its history, and before the latest one, which is called the Inflationary Universe, Many people thought that there may be as much antimatter as matter in the universe, and there may be stars and galaxies made out of antimatter.
The current thinking on that is that if this new inflationary model of the universe is right, that's probably not true.
It's possible to make antimatter in these big particle physics accelerators, and indeed No one has yet been able to make an atom, let's say a hydrogen atom, of antimatter.
But they've been able to get close.
And it's my understanding, again this is not my expertise, that we may have one atom within the next few years of antimatter.
Okay?
Won't last very long, but we'll be able to create it.
So we are a long way away from being able to create a large amount of antimatter.
Large enough to, let's say, pilot a spacecraft.
But when we do, if we do eventually get it, it would be quite a power to harness.
That's right.
A lot of energy packed into a very little amount of mass, which is exactly what you want to do for spacecraft.
After all, to get something into orbit, a little, let's say, you know, something that weighs a few pounds, most of the energy goes into transporting half the fuel half the way.
Sure.
And so if you could find a more efficient way to pack the fuel, So that the amount of energy you get out per gram, let's say, is a lot higher, then you're much more efficient.
So I can see, you know, I mean, in a sort of a very tenuous way, that we'll be able to make use of that.
There's still a lot of, you know, huge amount of technical questions, and we're nowhere near being able to be able to do that.
Even so, best case, the speed of light, more or less, keeps us near home, doesn't it?
If our current understanding of physics is right.
That's a good place, I guess, to leave it hanging.
If?
I guess there is a possibility it may turn out not to be?
You never know, right?
A hundred years ago, a famous physicist said, all we have to do is explain two small problems in physics and all physics will be solved.
And those two small problems have led us into the modern age of physics.
And so you never know when a whole new area of physics is going to open up because of a small discovery site.
Like a meteorite.
Something like that.
Doctor, it has been a great pleasure and honor to have you on the program.
Thank you very much.
I've had a great time.
And get yourself some sleep.
I will.
Dr. Levinson, thank you.
Thank you.
Bye-bye.
Bye-bye.
From the high desert, I'm Art Bell.
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