Art Bell

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April 23, 1997 - Art Bell

03:18:16

Coast to Coast AM with Art Bell - Nanotechnology - Charles Ostman

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45:31

charles ostman

02:06:34

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art bell ▲ ● ▼		From the high desert in the great American Southwest, I bid you all good evening and good morning, as the case may be across all these many time zones, stretching from the Tahitian and Hawaiian island chains all the way eastward to the Caribbean and the U.S. Virgin Islands, south into South America, north well to the pole, magnetic North Pole, and worldwide, of course, on the internet.
		This is Coast Coast to M. I'm Mark Bell.
		We are going to go venturing into a world this morning bigger than you could possibly imagine.
		It is kind of like outer space.
		Travel in outer space.
		Except it's not.
		It's travel into inner space.
		We're going to do a program this morning on something called nanotechnology.
		Machines, I said machines with moving parts so small that with the naked eye you could not possibly see them or discern their operation.
		My guest is a man I had on about a year and a half ago, Charles Osman, and I'll tell you more about Charles in a moment.
		And oh, by the way, guess what, folks?
		The first crop circle of the year, as you know, has already occurred.
		And guess who has a photograph?
		So if you want to go up to the website and take a look, and it really is neat.
		Because, of course, the crop is new, so it's green.
		This crop circle occurred instead of in mature wheat or something, in a green field.
		And it is beautiful.
		And of course, it's on the website, which is where you should be.
		That would be www.artbell.com.
		www.artbell.com.
		It is beginning early this year, indicating no doubt there's going to be a lot of crop circles.
unidentified		What are crop circles?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, I don't know.
		You tell me.
		A lot of people think they are fractal, particularly the more complex ones, like Stonehenge with 191 circles, and that they are either a message or have meaning.
		Nobody really knows what they are, but they certainly are, and they are not the product of Doug and Dave with the board and some chains tromping about.
		So you go take a look at the first crop circle of the year.
		It's on the website now.
		Now, nanotechnology.
		What in the world is that?
		I've got a man who knows.
		His name is Charles Austin.
		I had him on the air, I'm going to guess, about a year, year and a half ago.
		He is a member of the Science Advisory Board of NanoThink.
		Nano Think.
		A privately funded nanotechnology think tank and development research facilitation for a consulting group.
		He's also a senior fellow of the Foresight Institute.
		That's not Farsight Foresight, folks.
		A senior fellow of the Institute for Global Futures.
		Currently the science editor and author for Mondo 2000 magazine.
		I'm sure you've heard of that.
		Technical editor and author for Midnight Engineering.
		And contributing editor-author of Robotics Digest.
		He's also currently authoring a piece for the IEEE Spectrum on the topic of biomolecular nano-computing systems and devices.
		Good Lord.
		That has a kind of an interesting connotation to it.
		Charles, welcome to the program.
charles ostman ▲ ● ▼		Thank you very much.
charles ostman ▲ ● ▼		Glad to be here.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		You really have your plate kind of full there, don't you?
charles ostman ▲ ● ▼		It's brimming over, but in a way, this is a very good metaphor to symbolically represent the world we're about to be thrust into.
		Very much in kind of the same way that you depicted this process that you refer to as the quickening, or the compression in the temporal domain.
		I'm looking at compression and convergence in the functionality domain.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Meaning, that's a big mouthful.
charles ostman ▲ ● ▼		I take that to mean a compression and convergence of a very wide plethora of different types of industries, scientific disciplines, and even socioeconomic systems, which up until fairly recently were still relatively autonomous, self-contained process engines that would produce some kind of product, service, and or scientific discipline-oriented results as part of a development stream that resided within their own autonomous realm.
		That does not exist anymore.
		Everything is becoming ever more interconnected.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Interconnected, yes.
charles ostman ▲ ● ▼		That's correct.
		And this process is being driven by this connectivity grid, which we now call the Internet.
		And I date back to the very early days.
		I'm an old crafty fellow.
		I date back to quite a few decades ago, really, back in the National Lab System, when the Internet was developed for the National Lab System as nothing more than a communication network.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Correct.
charles ostman ▲ ● ▼		It's gone far beyond that.
charles ostman ▲ ● ▼		And yet, even back in those early days, there were a few, what were considered perhaps on the fringe kind of people that speculated at some threshold moment in time, when the connectivity factor went up to about where it is now, everything would be poised almost like a clip, if you will, where the rate of change and the volume of change processes would simultaneously converge so that every technology is interconnected to every other technology.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I would like to get your thoughts, if I could, on the Internet Itself, where it has gone, where it presently is, and where it's going, and what it means for society.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		What are your thoughts on that?
charles ostman ▲ ● ▼		Oh, I have wonderful you should ask this, and I'll start by saying approximately two years ago, I wrote a paper, a technical thesis, a refereed paper, called The Internet of an Organism, which I submitted to the European Society of Artificial Intelligence and Cybernetics, and they had their annual conference in Austria.
		To my astonishment, they not only published the paper, which was no small feed themselves, but when I got back to proceedings, roughly about a third of the other participants, most of whom were professors from various universities around the world, India, former Soviet Union, all over Europe, United States, Canada, etc., had very similar ideas.
		They were using terms like the global Gaia being encapsulated in this synthetic neural net engine, you know, things that really would have sounded completely off the grid to most folks, but to me it made perfect good sense.
		And I thought, okay, here we are, a bunch of different people in different parts of the planet, but we had a very, very similar vision of how this process is evolving.
		And therefore, I submit to you the following idea, that an organism in itself is self-correcting, self-modifying, it grows, it adapts, it will, at a certain point, spawn offspring of sorts.
		And that's what you have going on in the internet now.
		You have a hopefully benign, but what I see to be an involuntary symbiosis between the human species and this connectivity system, which in fact does have self-modifying, self-correcting properties.
		You already have companies like NGT and ATT developing neural net-driven and even genetic algorithm-driven routing structures to optimize performance of the peak load pattern set.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Oh, well, hold on.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		You're getting ahead of the average person out there.
charles ostman ▲ ● ▼		Okay, well, I'll back away.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Back away a little bit.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		You said, with regard to the Internet, hopefully, hopefully, denying.
unidentified		Yes.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		And that indicates to me you're not sure.
charles ostman ▲ ● ▼		Well, and no one is.
		It's all a matter of ratios of probability.
		And in the book that I'm currently working on, I study this problem rather carefully.
		I have a whole series of sort of what I call option graphs and say under these criteria, this potential series of outcomes could arrive.
		And I want to offer the following things.
		The fact that we are heading into an enormous change is, in fact, absolutely the way it is.
		Some people look at prophecy and talk about some sort of calamity due to a huge conversation.
		Some people talk about a spiritual calamity.
		Some people talk about huge weather changes and so forth.
		I actually don't focus on that at all.
		But what I do focus on is a socioeconomic upheaval on a scale never before experienced in human history.
		There's going to be a mantle of chaos that this process, this convergence and this quickening, will sort of come up against.
		It'll be like a barrier.
		It'll be like the next evolutionary test, if you will.
		And if we, as an organism, can successfully negotiate this test, we'll come through it as a more robust organism, as a more robust society as a process.
		If we fail, we'll be sort of mired in our own socioeconomic chaos.
		And we're about two, three, maybe five years and a half away from that horizon.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Are you familiar with Michael Crichton's theory about the Internet?
charles ostman ▲ ● ▼		Yes, and in fact, I understand what he's getting at.
charles ostman ▲ ● ▼		His basic theorem is that just as you have biodiversity in an ecosystem to make a more robust ecosystem, you should have behavioral diversity or cultural diversity to maintain the health of the society.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Very good.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		That it will squash diversity.
charles ostman ▲ ● ▼		And I understand this.
		I mean, before the Internet days, people would travel around the world.
		Americans would go somewhere else abroad and they'd see an Americanization of some autonomous nation state that used to have its own separate little culture.
		And there would be like a flattening out of the unique or where they had just gone to.
		That's like the organic version of what Michael is now referring to in what I call the virtual terraform.
		But that may or may not be the case.
		There are quite a few variables.
		It's like a node on a decision tree.
		And which branch gets activated, I think, relies upon a very complex set of conditions getting to that node occurs.
		But I want to offer one more thought here.
		That is that what the Internet is doing now is only a precursor to what's about to happen.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, tell us.
charles ostman ▲ ● ▼		Because I visualize a realm in where experiential conveyance becomes the methodology by which education, marketing, the interaction between other people throughout the world.
		Right now we have something called Verbal, which is a virtual reality modeling language that allows you to have interactive 3D environments come through the wire and appear on your computer screen or on your ESAN.
		And it's still very primitive, very crude.
		A bunch of my friends who are part of the technical community are probably very forefront of creating these things.
		I see it as a blink in the eye.
		It's a little niche because...
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I think what you're saying, let me try and...
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I've got to stop you, otherwise you're going to race ahead of the audience.
charles ostman ▲ ● ▼		Not only biological in the physical sense, but also in the mental sense.
charles ostman ▲ ● ▼		Here's what I was about to try to explain, is the concept of synthetic function as an engineerable, deliverable commodity.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Oh, brother.
charles ostman ▲ ● ▼		And as a matter of fact, if you want to look at socioeconomic system paradigms, we are shifting, even now as he speaks, away from a hard, asset-based commodity-driven system.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Doesn't that drive us toward a single consciousness, though, that will make us, to use Star Trekism, Borg-like?
charles ostman ▲ ● ▼		In a sense, that is one of the possible options, and that's why this is the test.
		Every time the human species, and I think this has happened many times in many other worlds throughout the universe, I think this was a very common rote series of processes that any organism would go through, an intelligent organism.
		So here we've climbed this ladder.
		As we get to these rungs, which are ever more closely spaced, by the way, the risk-gain ratio volume of that rung provides us the potential of traumatic failure or the potential of attack regrowth.
		And each one is an increment larger than the one before.
		I mean, we've already survived global warfare, global nuclear warfare.
		The coin is still being flipped as to whether or not we suppress the biosphere's capacity to support life beyond what it is now.
		And I think, you know, the bets are still off on that one.
		But racing up along this is the essence that we have the potential of utilizing this experiential conveyance engine as a methodology for enhancing one's educational potential.
		And let me see if I can communicate what I'm trying to say here.
		I first saw the most compelling version of virtual reality quite a few years ago, and not with goggles and gloves and trying to shoot at something like you've seen in an arcade.
		No, that's done as stupid as well.
		What I saw was the following.
		A friend of mine who unfortunately passed away, his dream was to capture the great archaeological sites throughout the world, especially ones which are trapped in politically difficult circumstances, like Baalbek in Iraq or Ankarawat in Cambodia, and or many of the sites that are now crumbling away because of human and exposure to pollution, that sort of thing.
		The point is that by capturing these things and making these very elaborate virtual models, you can then not only preserve them, but allow the community around the world to visit the same site and have the same experience.
		But more importantly, the efficiency by which that experience is conveyed cannot be imagined by any other medium.
		And here's the proof.
		I went to Brazil as part of an international virtual reality consortium demonstration.
		This was about five, six years ago, actually.
		And here I was on stage in downtown Rio.
		This fellow had dragged along his ever since I was in his supercomputer, this huge enormous box.
		He was heading out of his place, something called a leak helmet.
		And we had people coming up on stage from all walks of life, all genders, young kids, old folks, people that drove cabs for living college professors, many of whom didn't speak English at all.
		They could put on that helmet, and suddenly they were inside of a 5,000-year-old African city called Buhan, which at that time was the capital within the Nubian Empire, which is now the Sudan.
		In other words, unless you were a professional archaeologist that could go to some obscure library and find the right book and read about it, you would never even know this place existed, let alone have a sense for who these people were, the culture, the spectacular beauty of their buildings, and the complexity of their sociology and so on.
		And yet you've got all of that stuff almost instantaneously in a matter of seconds.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		You see it, you hear it, you feel it.
charles ostman ▲ ● ▼		Right.
charles ostman ▲ ● ▼		You sense it, you experience it.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		However, what I sense that you're talking about is a step beyond that.
		In other words, that's only delivering in a very indirect way to your senses what we're talking about.
		What you seem to be talking about is something, a direct connection to the neural...
charles ostman ▲ ● ▼		And that's around...
		Now I'm going to hold you back just a little bit, but you're going in the right direction.
		I want to see this to the audience and to the general world who's listening in a way that really can, there's a logical event stream, but I want to make sure we don't skip a step.
		So we've gotten to the point of experiential conveyance.
		We have a knowledge engine, you might say.
		And we now have things called autonomous agents.
		These are smart entities that represent your interest.
		They are sentient.
		They ply the fabric of the net, if you will, looking for things of interest, looking for things that they have learned about because they know your behaviors and how you respond.
		It becomes an extension of yourself because of the ever more rapid rate of change and the ever more increasing scale of complexity.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right, I've got to stop you now for a second.
		Now, you said you have these entities, these sentient entities, traveling the internet.
		Correct.
		What are these?
		What do you mean by that?
charles ostman ▲ ● ▼		Okay, this goes back, again, I'm going to have to back out here just ever so slightly, again, mostly financed by the military.
		There was an interest, and it still is, of course, there's a language called SOAR, S-O-A-, which is an artificial intelligence paradigm, which I won't go into details about.
		But the point is, SOAR and other protocols of this nature were deployed to create synthetic environments that could be populated with autonomous agent entities.
		This way, they could simulate the behavior of soldiers in the field in a battlefield situation, because a battlefield commander, by today's standards, the timeline between decision boundaries, where you have multiple threads of information streaming in constantly, and the decision loops are measured in a matter of some time.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I think I better ask you to define sentience.
charles ostman ▲ ● ▼		Okay.
		Sentience, in its ultimate form, is self-awareness.
		You really become an autonomous entity.
		You are now aware that you exist, and you begin to adopt the mannerisms that would determine that you, on your own, can learn, adapt, function, and decide willingly that you want to divorce yourself from whoever created you and sort of do your own thing to put it as plainly as possible.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Now, would these sentient entities be a creation, or are they going to be a byproduct of just some critical mass moment that we reach with regard to the net?
charles ostman ▲ ● ▼		Both.
charles ostman ▲ ● ▼		And that's where the, and thank you for having put it in that phrase, because there's a lot of treatment that I have to explain.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right, all right.
		And explain it, your shelf.
		We're at a break point.
		Relax.
		You're going about 100 miles an hour.
		We could use about 70.
		Stay right where you are.
		It pours forth from him, doesn't it?
		Charles Osman is an expert in something called nanotechnology.
		Sit down, put on your thinking cap, and I think you're going to be surprised at what's coming.
unidentified		I'm Art Bell.
		Call art bell toll free.
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		This is the CBC Radio Network.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		It sounds a little like Tales from the Dark Side.
		Maybe it is.
		Or maybe it's going to be our savior.
		But imagine what we just heard.
		The internet.
		Interconnected growing.
		Constantly becoming more interconnected.
		I believe the internet, they say now, is doubling in size every three or four months.
		My guest is Charles Osman.
		We're going to be talking about nanotechnology.
		But he just suggested we're close to a point now where there will be born, virtually, or created or both on the internet, individual, sentient beings, aware beings that will be part of the net.
		Try and imagine that.
		Try and imagine that.
		Back now to Charles Ossman.
		Charles, I'm visualizing that quite well in my mind.
		What I guess I don't understand is what do you think or imagine might be the critical moment in speed, storage, interconnectivity that would either begin to produce or allow to be produced the sentient beings we talked about?
charles ostman ▲ ● ▼		Well, this is just the problem that I'm currently working on.
		And that's funny you should bring this up.
		But I want to back away just a little bit because I want to make sure that we don't skip a crucial step.
		There really is a specific, like a logic tree structure.
		I want to make sure all the branches actually do hook together.
		So getting up to this point, you have to have a motivation or a fiduciary incentive, you might say, to translate this technology development into a realm in which it actually can be valuated and become a primary component in the virtual terraform-based business and economic sensor system in the near future, which is why I keep harping on this idea of the virtual asset-based commodity-driven system, where it won't be things that you can touch or sense in the normal way.
		It'll be intangibles.
		It'll be things like the quality of knowledge, engineered knowledge on demand, extensions, ubiquitous computing, supercomputing, but would appear to be supercomputing from our perspective, having a box that sits at home, is it going to be replaced by what you might call an intelligent orifice that simply hooks into the functionality fabric that's out there, and that out there keeps expanding and growing to an ever larger capacity.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		When you say an intelligent orifice, now we have Mac computers, we have IBMs.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Define the difference between what we have now and what you're calling an intelligent orifice.
charles ostman ▲ ● ▼		Okay.
charles ostman ▲ ● ▼		A typical machine has a CPU, some glue logic, some bus interface, all the sort of usual stuff that's physical in the machine, if you've got what you'd see in there.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Right.
charles ostman ▲ ● ▼		This is about to be changed.
charles ostman ▲ ● ▼		And the change will happen rather quickly, in my opinion, because I already know the people who are inventing the tools to make this possible.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, I do know that if you buy a computer today, it's out of date in about two or three months.
charles ostman ▲ ● ▼		That's exactly right.
		If one at work has you read, Gardner Group, Forrester, and all the professional logistics analysis, people that supply this kind of information, you're actually right.
		The aggregate average lifetime profitability window, if you will, a piece of hardware that goes out on a shelf, if you don't capture your expected profit returns in three months, you can just justify the shelf space it occupies.
		And software is a matter of weeks.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Talk about a rough business.
charles ostman ▲ ● ▼		It's a very rough business.
		So the way to accommodate that requirement, I mean, the business, it's a house of cards.
		It's going to collapse in on itself.
		So the answer is to have machines that evolve, that are soft, that are, in a sense, gelware.
		As opposed to being hardware and or software, they are gelware.
		You have a sweet.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Wait a minute.
charles ostman ▲ ● ▼		Stop.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Gelware.
unidentified		Yes.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Are you talking about a biological entity now or?
charles ostman ▲ ● ▼		Well, in its ultimate extension, yes.
		In the interim, it will be using traditional silicon, only something called FPGAs and FPGAs, which are rewritable, direct memory in a sense, except that you have functionality matrices that sort of rewrite themselves on a per instruction cycle or several instruction cycles basis.
		And now you have an intelligence out there.
		Right now you have Java applets and Java code that can actually go into your machine, if you will, and sort of rewrite the machine's identity, if you want to call it that, on a per function as per needed basis.
		There's another whole world up there called Corba.
		And Corba is a virtual state machine where in software residing on the ubiquitous functionality fabric of all these interconnected nodes out there, you have a virtual dust structure.
		You have virtual code engines, if you will, that are surrounded by a prophylactic-like wall of identity tags.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		John, you are saying a lot of things that are blown right by me.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		And somehow you've got to make this understand if they're blown by me, they're blown by a lot of other people.
charles ostman ▲ ● ▼		All right.
		Consider this.
		Us people, us entities, it used to be until not too long ago that we were our own self-contained units, if you will.
		Our intelligence was inside our head.
		Our bodies were just that, our bodies.
		And we had a belief barrier, you might say.
		We could commit to the believing of what our senses and our internal processes would allow us to be convinced that this was real and this was the stuff we were interconnecting with.
		That's about to change.
		The whole idea of the invocation of rapture, if you want to call that, as an engineerable process, is being done now in very subtle ways.
		I mean, it happens in a certain context when you go see a movie and you surrender into that movie for a couple of hours.
		You have a vicarious experience and you're drawn into a story that you might be watching on your television set.
		In the old days, it was glyphs on pieces of paper, you know, called writing.
		You'd surrender yourself into a book.
		Well, what's about to come around the corner, instead of the monodirectional broadcast, what's called push technology, where you have an orthogonal storyboard structure punctuated by advertising slots, and if the advertisers are lucky, they might get 3% hit rate on the return on their investment for how many people watch the show versus what kind of response they get to selling their product.
		Imagine a bi-directional, immersive environment where instead of watching cheers, you become part of cheers.
		Of cheers.
		And you go into this virtual domain, populated by, I'm not kidding now, virtual actors and actresses.
		They have a conversation.
		You get to learn about them.
		The reward for participation is the depth of emotional engagement you establish with these virtual entities.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Could I go backlog to 90210 for a while?
charles ostman ▲ ● ▼		Sure.
		Or anything you want.
		And the point is, the reward for investing in that kind of infrastructure is that now you can back annotate the psycho and socio-demographic data streams that come from the activity of you participating in that environment.
		Now all of a sudden I could perhaps have a 30% hit rate of what I can sell you as opposed to 3%.
		This is very attractive stuff.
		Virtual malls, virtual entertainment domains, where everything is connected in an intelligence fabric, this is big money.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Let's stay with commercials for a second.
		You're suggesting that you would be so immersed in this material that you would understand without being told or being told in a very special way precisely why you should need and want this product.
		It would be a real straight-on piece of communication that you could not ignore.
		Very powerful tool.
charles ostman ▲ ● ▼		Very powerful tool, also a very dangerous tool, depending upon how it's misapplied.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yes.
charles ostman ▲ ● ▼		I wanted to offer an idea, for instance.
		Char Davies is the co-founder of Saft Dimage, one of the big software houses that manufactures rendering software for 3D modeling and so forth.
		A very wonderful woman, very extremely intelligent, and I respect her work highly.
		She wanted to try and experiment.
		She wanted to find out where this threshold of surrendering for one's belief period really occurs.
		So she developed a virtual world called the Osmos.
		And most virtual reality stuff you see today is still pretty boring and kind of like Holheim.
		I said it's just a model of something you would see in the real world, a street, a house, a building, or something.
		Very mundane stuff.
		I submit that virtual worlds are infinite.
		You could be inside of an atom or sitting inside of an entire universe.
		In other words, the idea of limiting this conveyance engine to something that's mundane as a replication of what you've already seen.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, hold on, hold on.
		We're talking about causing a person's belief system to be surrendered to whatever material you're streaming towards.
		Correct.
		And how do you find that threshold, or where is that threshold?
charles ostman ▲ ● ▼		The invocation of rapture as an engineerable process has certain emotional and cognitive cue points, and that's what's being measured now.
		And I want to give Ishardi as an example.
		In her world called Osmos, you really drift into a world where there is no up, down, left, and or right.
		You look like scuba diving.
		She happens to scuba dive, so she's never had it for it.
		But you put on a suit of sensors in a sense.
		It measures your chest volumetric displacement, measures your heart rate, GSR and other biokinetic data and so forth.
		In other words, every essence of your bioprocessing activities are sort of fed into this environment that corresponds to your state of mind and physiological state.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		This is done, Charles, so it understands how it is affecting you and therefore if it is not affecting you in a certain way, with respiration or heartbeat or whatever, it then will modify its approach?
charles ostman ▲ ● ▼		A little bit.
		There's no sanctions with this system.
		All she was wanting to do was measure to what extent a person would sort of become immersed and sort of establish themselves as part of the environment.
		After about 45 minutes or so of this kind of interactive exposure, most people were so interconnected in all ways, both subliminal and consciously, that when they disconnected themselves from the environment, they really had to go through a recovery period.
		They would sort of stumble around and kind of have to readapt to the real world.
		And this was a very benign, very pleasant, aesthetically soft, you might say, experiment.
		My vision is if this kind of technology were applied in a much harsher way, I mean, if you look, for instance, at Saturday morning television and you see the incredible production work that goes into the TV ads, you see, where they really want to reach inside the skull of some eight-year-old kid who's going to rush off and test your mommy to buy the box with zero weapons.
		Imagine if you magnify that by an order of magnitude, I can see some very serious, you know, there's cause for trepidation.
		And as a person who develops this kind of stuff, I understand what's at stake.
		And so this is like one very small sliver, however, of a much larger arena of functionality.
		So I'm going to take the next step, which is, as life becomes ever more quickened, as you would say it, and as functional complexity goes up, the ability for a single human being to render mission-critical decisions on the fly and meet those temporal and functional requirements simply goes beyond human capacity.
		This was the military's interest.
		They want to be able to provide decision rendering under duress as an enhancement to a human being's ability to recognize and perceive threats and responses.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, well, the trouble with the military is, though, they'd want to influence that decision.
charles ostman ▲ ● ▼		Oh, of course.
		And I'm not completing it.
		I'm just explaining the logic of how we're getting to where we're going.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I understand.
charles ostman ▲ ● ▼		The commercial world then extracts from this some core components, some functionalities that it's become aware of.
		And I've gone, over the past 18 months, I've been to over 30 different technical and academic as well as commercial symposia, conferences, trade shows.
		I've talked at a few of them, submitted papers here and there.
		But I mean, I've gone to events like, here we are, the first international conference on autonomous agents, the first international conference on multi-agent systems, the first conference on virtual humans.
		Virtual humans.
		Virtual, in fact, the second conference comes up in about a month and a half, and I'll be there, of course.
		And here's the point I'm trying to get across, that these are no longer theoretical ideas or some kind of tangential with the thrills of science fiction writers' imagination.
		No, there's teams of engineers figuring out how to optimize these processes and put them online as a resource, as a strategic resource, as a competitive resource, and potentially a predatory resource.
		My agents are smarter than yours.
		Therefore, I will crush you in the open field of battle on the virtual terraform.
		Wow.
		And people who are strategizing how to position themselves as strategic entities in this virtual terraform, they're arming themselves now with the smartest intelligent agents they can devise for their own purposes.
		The ability to fetch up that kind of resource on demand has a valued added, it has a valuation.
		It is against these kinds of commodities that trading will occur.
		In other words, having some physical stuff that represents the value of your company will have less value than having access to this.
		And as people begin to accept this in their course of their daily life, whether it's their entertainment, through educational processes, etc., the whole idea of surrendering through your belief area into this external realm, where the decision-making process, knowledge conditioning, and the acceptance of other alternative forms of reasoning, you might say, becomes the norm rather than the exception.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I understand the fascination, but doesn't this scare the hell out of you?
charles ostman ▲ ● ▼		Well, it's one of those things where the risk-gain ratio magnifies at every new run on this ladder.
charles ostman ▲ ● ▼		And that's why I wanted to go down this ladder run by run.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		But once, you, all right, I'm going to ask again, how far away do you think we might be from the first sentient entities created or self-creation on the Internet?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		On this?
charles ostman ▲ ● ▼		On the net, it's probably happening now, but very quietly.
		In terms of, if you go to any of these conferences, there's like a dividing line.
		You have the autonomous robot world where they try to cram a bunch of intelligence into an actual physical thing that walks around and censors things and does the R2D2 model.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Physical world, yes.
charles ostman ▲ ● ▼		Physical world.
		But that's still, we still have some very specific engineering limitations, which, by the way, nanotechnology solves.
		I mean, that's the subject I'm going to go to next.
		But as far as where we're at now and how to engineer this kind of stuff, I wrote a paper about a year and a half ago where I recited the requirements, like a laundry list.
		And I said, if I had such and such, we could build a sension changer with these behavioral qualities.
		Over the course of that 18 months, sure enough, different individuals or groups would appear magically out of the fabric of the outer realm and say, Charles, you read this paper?
		And guess what we have?
		And so over these course of these months, we've been able to assemble, in my belief, the pieces of the puzzle.
		And we're not alone in this.
		There's a whole collection of folks out there.
unidentified		All right.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Here's a question for you.
charles ostman ▲ ● ▼		Sure.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I have a fear that the first sentient entity on the net may well be a virus.
charles ostman ▲ ● ▼		Well, not exactly a virus, but something capable of spawning viruses as its own defensive mechanism.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		There you are.
charles ostman ▲ ● ▼		And now listen to this.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		In other words, reactive.
charles ostman ▲ ● ▼		Yes.
		And actually, sorry to have my notes here in front of me.
		It's rather clumsy because I have such a plethora of different kinds of material I have to have.
		In the world of security, in fact, I'm addressing a visiting group of Japanese dignitaries on this exact topic.
		Right now, there are a handful of folks here in this country finally, after many, many years of sort of not getting around to it, they finally are beginning to recognize this as a strategic implementation of power.
		It's not going to be a bomb that blows up or even a biohazard or some other physical anomaly that's going to cause real harm to this country.
		But heaven help us, should the electronic infrastructure, our banking systems, our transactional processes, all of our database, if that were to be in some way, even in a fairly minor way, put on hold even for a short amount of time, you would have absolute anarchy in the streets.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Kaboom.
charles ostman ▲ ● ▼		Kaboom.
		I mean, eight, ten days max, it would be free for all.
		It would be wild panic.
		All of your electronic currency would have nobody.
		We're still using coins and pieces of paper, which is about to go away, by the way.
		E-Cash is right around the corner.
		There's a whole other agenda about that, which probably I shouldn't get into because it would be too complex for the moment.
		But I'm trying to get at it.
		You have this convergence, as I say, of all these different forces, socioeconomic, political, even, as well as technology in a big way, all focusing on a common target.
		And the timeline of that target, here's where your clicking comes in.
		Like I said, it's a matter of a very small handful of years.
		And it will be fed to the outside world, to the general public, in layers that will be ever more temporarily compressed together.
		And what will happen is people will be sort of indoctrinated into accepting these things as the norm of their world.
		So right now, which is why I'm teaching a course I'm teaching at SS State, this is the moment and time to try to at least gain some sense of awareness of how these things are happening, in what form will they be presented to you, most likely as an entertainment product per se at first, and knowing how to adapt and therefore empower yourself to use.
		These tools can be useful.
		As an educational system, I see spectacular potential for a great game.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Of course.
charles ostman ▲ ● ▼		But if this process were inverted in a negative way, well, all bets are off.
charles ostman ▲ ● ▼		Hence the evolutionary test.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right, well, it's going to depend very much on who is controlling it.
charles ostman ▲ ● ▼		Thank you very much.
		The issue of control was what I was around the corner.
		And we're looking at a decentralized communication rib.
		It's not like you have big giant nodes where everything branches out from the corner of a node.
		Almost the exact opposite.
		It's like the cilia of a mole growing over the face of an orange.
		That in itself is its own protectionary mechanism.
		That is an evolving structure which is self-preserving, in its own contextual interplay with the human symbiotic relationship with this thing we call the Internet.
		And talking about belief barriers one more time.
		Imagine now we get to a realm where we accept the idea that we're going to surrender our beliefs to this external engine of intelligence that sees us to conditionalized knowledge streams as part of our daily life.
		We now take that with us to every aspect of even our culture, let's say.
		Now, is it at that threshold that Michael Crichton's vision of the flattening out, if you will, of civic diversity, that could be where that note occurs.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Oh, I would think that Michael Crichton's model could occur significantly before the dangers that you're talking about when you really get this surrendering of one's belief system.
		Then at that point, you have more than Michael Crichton was talking about.
		You have the beginning of the board.
charles ostman ▲ ● ▼		Possibly.
		But this is an evolutionary test.
		The fact that these things will coagulate together into a common fabric of functionality is unavoidable.
		How the fabric is woven, I think this has been played out, like I said, of many different worlds out there in the known universe.
		A bunch of them failed before they even got this post, by the way.
		Some have gone beyond this point.
		And I want to submit to you the following thing.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, no, let the following thing be submitted after the news.
charles ostman ▲ ● ▼		Oh, okay.
charles ostman ▲ ● ▼		Sorry.
unidentified		I apologize.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Where to break?
		Charles Osman is my guest, and we will be right back.
		Are we going to ever go back to where we started from?
		Keep listening.
		Not a chance, folks.
		So you might as well sit back and see where it is we're headed.
		I'll tell you, it's a strange place.
unidentified		Keep listening.
		Art Bell is taking calls on the wildcard line at 702-727-1295.
		That's 702-727-1295.
		First-time callers can reach Art Bell at 702-727-1222.
		702-727-1222.
		Now, here again, Art Bell.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Close your eyes and try and imagine a world where the internet has progressed.
		It doubles now every three or four months, whatever it is in size, up to the point where it is delivering virtual reality to you, even in a non-direct connection to your brain.
		Something like a virtual world.
		It's right around the corner.
		To the degree that they now know that a human being surrenders their bleep system to a virtual world.
		Are you grasping that?
		Well, we'll try and make it a little clearer for you, if possible, in a moment.
		My guest is Charles Osman.
		He is an expert in nanotechnology, but we haven't even launched into that right now.
		We're still into the middle of this growing neural net.
unidentified		Thank you.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right, now, who is Charles Osman, for those of you joining us at this hour?
		He's a member of the Science Advisory Board of NanoThink, a privately funded nanotechnology think tank and development research facilitation and consulting group.
		Also a senior fellow of the 4Sight Institute, a senior fellow of the Institute for Global Futures, currently the science editor and author for Mondo 2000 magazine, technical editor, author for Midnight Engineering, and contributing editor and author of Robotics Digest.
		He's also currently authoring a piece for IEEE Spectrum on the topic of, get this, biomolecular nanocomputing systems and devices.
		And the first hour of conversation concerned virtual reality, the net, and the fact that we are virtually right now on the very edge of sentient beings being born on the internet or created sentient beings,
		sentient entities, independent thinking aware entities that are in this giant neural network.
		It's incredible to even consider.
		Listen, we have got the first crop circle of the year on our website.
		You're going to want to see it.
		It's incredible.
		It's in a brand new crop of green, and it is beautiful.
		It comes to us from England, and we were waiting for the air photo.
		We've got it.
		It's on my website, www.artbell.com.
		www.artbell.com.
		All right, once again, here he is, Charles Osman.
		Charles.
charles ostman ▲ ● ▼		Hello.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Hi.
		All right, so you really think that we're not all that far from the virtual world that we can deliver through the net to people that will cause them to begin to surrender their belief system.
		When that occurs, then we are at the point where there will be sentient awareness beings traveling that net.
charles ostman ▲ ● ▼		Is that?
		You're pretty close.
		In other words, all the components are sort of there waiting to be interconnected.
		I have studied this to a depth now where I feel that it's no longer this impossible barrier.
		Certainly there are some serious engineering difficulties that will have to be addressed, but it's not like this impossible concept.
		There are enough viable working functional prototypes in their various stages of development.
		So yes, combined in X-Way, this could be the result.
		I'll tell you what the failure point is right now.
		It's not even so much, can we have a faster throughput, can the novel size be faster at the home?
		Yes, it can.
		I mean, if you have a cable provider interconnect to your smart digital TV box, if you will, that looks like an Ethernet connection.
		It's much, much faster than typical modems now.
		You would have already very fast, unbelievably fast, really, very inexpensive for performance characteristics.
		CPU chips, you have what are called Glint chips, which are these integer math rendering chips that can produce very compelling 3D graphics in this world.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		May I ask a question?
charles ostman ▲ ● ▼		Sure.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		We now have, top of the line pretty much for IBM right now, is a 200 megahertz chip.
		That's about right.
		What is technically feasible using current engineering paradigms?
		What speed can be reasonably expected before we go biological?
charles ostman ▲ ● ▼		Okay, and actually you define that quite well because it's not going to be making more or faster the same.
		It's going to an entirely different process altogether.
		But in our current modality, you start to approach a gigahertz, let's say, then things get very funny indeed because everything looks like an antenna.
		You have R signatures which simply pollute everything up to get into a store.
		I mean, people can do gallium arsenide and other specialized materials at 2 plus gigahertz now, but those require very unusual packaging and routing techniques to make a whole engineering subscience of that, which is not ever going to really get into the commercial.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		In other words, five times the speed of the 200 megahertz.
charles ostman ▲ ● ▼		And a little bit smaller, but yes.
charles ostman ▲ ● ▼		The problem with silicon and any of its derivative alloys that are used to make the chips now, and I guess we can get into nanotech now, but I just wanted to say.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right, we will, but yeah, let us do it.
		Let's say you get past a million.
		You said things begin to get strange.
		What do you mean by that?
charles ostman ▲ ● ▼		Well, only because now you have thermodynamic problems.
		You can only, gosh, if you're going to go for top-down manufacturing technology, that is traditionally how chips are made, is for those that aren't familiar, you grow a rod of silicon called a rutile, which you then slice into little thin wafers.
		Those wafers are then coated with a photoresist material onto which you then project a wiring pattern that represents the topographical features of what you're about to create etched into that silicon.
		And you feed it through a series of chemical beds, the end result being you end up with this bumpy surface.
		It has a bunch of little troughs and valleys and little wire-like connections that allow the different transistor devices that have been etched into the surface of the material to be interconnected.
		And what happens is you go through a series of these stages where you go through an etch run, then you deposit a layer of molecules of the next material, then you etch that.
		And then you go through that sandwiching process several times, and you find out with the final construction.
		Below about 0.02 microns, though, the roughness of the features, the atomic precision by which you can control how well those features are constructed via this kind of top-down assembly process, it simply doesn't work anymore.
		And at the same time, if you're trying to cram electrons through a very, very small junction size where the actual number of atoms you have to have a statistical population that says you can have a certain amount of thermal noise.
		because semiconduction means you're passing electrons from one bomb to the next, that process goes down.
		You have interstitial molecular friction going up, and therefore you get even more heat.
		And it's a self-fulfilling prophecy of sorts, but there's a thermal need called the thermal runaway effect, where it simply doesn't work at all.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Okay, and they already actually have that thermal runaway with even 200 megahertz.
charles ostman ▲ ● ▼		Oh, yeah.
		No, if you don't cool these chips, they don't work.
		And this is where superconductivity comes in.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		That was my next question.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		In other words, could that be the next leap?
charles ostman ▲ ● ▼		That is an intermediary step.
		And it's already being done now, and this is where nanotechnology comes in, by the way.
		But once again, we're getting ahead of ourselves.
		Forgive me.
		I feel this is your show, and I don't want to do this.
		I'm just trying to make sure that we haven't left out a crucial rung in this ladder.
		Because just to get back to the net part, and I'm trying to explain the financial and sort of business strategy interest and why this is going to be done.
		We talked about entertainment and experiential conveyance of a sort of a new industry.
		We talked about the strategic applications of synthetic extensions and engineering rendering of a process that I would pay money to have access to because it makes me a more powerful player in the new competitive business arena of the virtual terraform.
		We talked about a virtual asset-based commodity socioeconomic system where the things that have the highest valuation, actually, or the intangibles, if you will, the components of this virtual terraform.
		And then you asked me, you said, well, Charles, what about how fast or how smart of a box do I have at home?
		This is where it gets interesting.
		Because I submit to you, this is what I thought to say before the break came on, that the boundary between what you have at your home and the much larger intelligence out there, that becomes ever more transparent.
		What you really end up with is, as I said earlier, an intelligent orifice.
		The local orifice has its local intelligence that can handle very compelling delivery mechanisms like that.
		You have wonderful graphics and wonderful sound and very smart sensory systems and all the kind of stuff that allows the interface between you and it much more compelling.
		But the reality is that you have this huge, and I mean infinitely scalable, functionality matrix out there and all you really want to do is connect to it.
		And so the stuff that makes that connection process is what's being solved now.
		And the failure point that I was trying to explain earlier isn't so much how much pipe space we have, it is how much fiberspace there is.
		It's an enormous amount of fibers.
		It's beyond ridiculous how much is unused even right now.
		It's the routers and the switchers.
		The telcos are panicking.
		I just went to a conference called the ACM 97 conference a few weeks ago.
		And in fact, there I saw William Perry, Secretary of Defense, give his speech, followed by Brenda Laurel, which was a pretty interesting combination, followed by a fellow by the name of Dr. Maurice, who's a very well-known educational specialist, followed by the commissioner of the SEC, all who's giving very compelling but completely different perspective viewpoints of the same, sort of like a gemstone with multiple facets.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right, you said the telco companies are panicking.
		Why?
		Why?
charles ostman ▲ ● ▼		Because they have to invest tens of billions of dollars to drastically increase the smarts, if you will, the routing and switching capacity.
		The hubs are already running at maximum throughput now.
		They brown out, in fact, quite often.
		I won't tell you this publicly, but believe me, that's what they're facing.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Hi, look, I just tried for 20 minutes to get on my own website.
charles ostman ▲ ● ▼		Well, there you go.
		That's a small example.
		The point being that if the entire country is wired this way, and virtually all aspects of commerce and daily life are suddenly embedded in this fabric, we can't have this.
		And yet, The phone companies respond to the SUC who wants to get a wire into every house and every note, they're saying, look, all we're going to get out is local access fees.
		We have to have some way of attaching a value-added enumeration system to access requests so that we can recapture our investment.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		And how will they do that?
charles ostman ▲ ● ▼		Well, there's a talk about a hotbed of intrigue.
		It's wide open.
		There's all kinds of ideas floating around out there.
		Part of why Corba is becoming interesting is because Corba is more than just smart data packets.
		These are function packets.
		And if I have function packets that represent stuff that I've created or stuff that I want or things that I have access to or could have access to under certain conditions, every time I activate one of these entities, there's a fee.
		It's like, okay, instead of going to the store and buying a disk that you put into your machine, you buy the permission to activate some functionality that's out there in this ubiquitous fabric.
		And that is where the sentence engines really suddenly take off.
		Now, I want to give you some factual information.
		There's a guy by the name of Dr. Hugh Garris.
		I've spoken with him a few times.
		I'm quite familiar with his work.
		He's being financed by NTV, which is the second largest telco in the world, certainly the largest in the 10.
		His project is, I'm not kidding, building self-replicating synthetic brains.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		What?
charles ostman ▲ ● ▼		I am not kidding.
charles ostman ▲ ● ▼		I can send you the documentation.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Self-replicating synthetic brains.
charles ostman ▲ ● ▼		He wants to build a 10 billion neuron synthetic brains by the year 25.
		And they're well on their way.
		And he's one of a whole plethora of people who are looking at this process.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		How do you, let's start at the beginning.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		How would you build a synthetic brain?
charles ostman ▲ ● ▼		Well, in his world, he's implementing the logic in silicon, but he obviously is looking towards molecular as the next transition.
		To me, silicon is nothing more than a clumsy container for a functionality set.
		As soon as I can abandon silicon, the happier I am, and I understand exactly where this guy is going, and there's other people I know who are doing the same thing with him.
		But in his literature, he talks about growing dendritic structures, growing structures that can be influenced by input stimuli, but then reorganize their branching structures so they become optimized to respond to a certain kind of stimulus set, you might say.
		And why does the Telco want to invest in this?
		Because rather than just building more switches and routers, they want to make their routers and switches intelligent.
		They want to have them use a process called adaptive resonance where they can anticipate peak load pattern sets and reconstruct themselves on the fly to be the fact of equivalent of a xenomorph.
		And they're willing to spend billions of dollars on this because they will save billions of dollars on it.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right, Charles.
charles ostman ▲ ● ▼		Yes.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		How far into this intelligence do we get before we reach, I mean, would you define that if reached as sentience or not quite?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		There's a big weak point there someplace.
charles ostman ▲ ● ▼		Well, if you want to design an emotional cognition engine, you can go as far back as the early 80s.
		One of the great minds that I bowed before, and if I ever had a chance to talk with a gentleman, I would be just in awe beyond speech, which is hard to imagine, which I bought away so much.
		His name is Stefan Grossberg, and he wrote a very well-known book that anyone who's taken your basic ag courses would know about.
		It's called Neural Networks and Natural Intelligence.
		Buried back in the last 12, you know, 13 chapters in, suddenly you stumbled into a really, really interesting, compelling model.
		He's got his version of an emotional cognition image, and it's one of several I've studied, by the way, which back in his day would have been very difficult indeed to implement, and it certainly would have gone far beyond the computational capacity of quote-unquote traditional computers and or traditional computing languages.
		Those things have changed a lot.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Does emotion equal self-awareness?
charles ostman ▲ ● ▼		It is a primary component.
		It is a way to measure that.
		You have to have some kind of external reference point to say, does it care?
		Does it feel?
		Does it want to feel?
		Does it have desires?
		Does it respond to something that it would not otherwise respond to unless it had been conditionalized by some sort of behavior that it had found an affection for?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Would that emotion be a benign thing in your behavior?
charles ostman ▲ ● ▼		Hopefully so, but I will submit to you that, yes, there will be some unfriendly ones and some friendly ones.
charles ostman ▲ ● ▼		That's the whole point.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, let's not forget jealousy, anger.
		Sure.
		Just plain old evil.
charles ostman ▲ ● ▼		And when I went to this year's Autonomous Agents Conference, there were several emotional cognition engines in their various states of development.
		Had a chat with some of the folks there.
		Some of them I read their papers and finally had a chance to shake their hands and say, hello, how are you doing?
		I could show them some of my notes and we could chat them lunch at the conference.
		But the whole point is, this is no longer like some way out there fringe thing.
		This is like people in labs saying, well, here's our version of how to do such and such.
		Now, I submit to you the following thing.
		I look at the whole process of computing, quote unquote, giving way to what I call a functionality matrix, where you have the de facto equivalent of object-oriented organelle components that can reorganize themselves to fulfill a certain kind of task or class of tasks, not that dissimilar from an actual xenomorphic organism.
		You take that a step further and you suggest, look, the human body has got organs that are specialized in what they do.
		They work together to form the entire being, but they all have their localized metabolisms and their symbiotic codependencies on one another to maintain the functionality of that organism.
		A complete engine that's going to become an organistic-like process system would be constructed the same way.
		It will involve both optical, electrical, and electro-optical components, which eventually will operate at the molecular scale.
		And the stuff to make this possible is being solved now.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, that's where we get to nanotechnology.
charles ostman ▲ ● ▼		Thank you very much.
		That was the whole point.
		And now, the fact that we are being fed into this unbelievably huge transitional change, like I said, some people have attached religious paradigms or philosophical paradigms or some sort of calamity.
		And maybe these things all line up.
		I'm willing to entertain, by the way.
		I don't think we're alone at all.
		I think, like I said, we're a dot in somebody's not, probably a dot in a whole bunch of folks is not.
		Would they be interested to see us right now as we're about to cross into this next domain?
		Yes.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yes.
charles ostman ▲ ● ▼		Why?
		Because we would be dangerous.
		We'd be like a toddler with a loaded gun stumbling around in their backyard.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Into their backyard.
charles ostman ▲ ● ▼		Into their backyard if they didn't have a sense of security about where our state of our social and spiritual health was at.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I'm not so sure.
		I'm secure about it.
		Charles, hold on when we come back.
		Nanotechnology 101.
		I'm Arbel, and this is CBC.
unidentified		CBC.
		Oh, my God.
		Call Art Bell, toll-free.
		West of the Rockies at 1-800-618-8255.
		1-800-618-8255.
		East of the Rockies at 1-800-825-5033.
		1-800-825-5033.
		This is the CBC Radio Network.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		It is, and I feel a little like a 386 trying to listen to a pinion.
		Charles Osman, races right ahead.
		We're going to try and slow him down a little bit here for you folks and talk a little bit about nanotechnology.
		He is fascinating.
unidentified		The End.
unidentified		End.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right, back now to Charles Osman.
		Charles, let's try and slow it down and let's give them an idea of what nanotechnology is.
		We've been through a pretty heavy duty session here on where the net may be going.
charles ostman ▲ ● ▼		Okay, and the two do connect to each other, and that's why we've spent a lot of time.
charles ostman ▲ ● ▼		All right, well, I understand that perhaps we should back away now just look at nanotechnology in its autonomous way.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		What is nanotechnology?
charles ostman ▲ ● ▼		It's probably one of the most misunderstood, I'm being a little poyer, but it's probably one of the most misunderstood terms and probably most poorly connected to the reality of what it actually is, because it is such a diffuse and broad-ranged concept.
		It's not just a single science or a single thing to do.
		It covers almost every aspect of chemistry, physics, computing, material science, medicine.
		It's so enormous that it's very difficult to capsulize.
		But I will try to offer a one-sentence glimpse as a branching node from which you can then extract the different applications.
		It's the mechanical manipulation of atoms or molecules to perform some kind of a process or to assemble into something or to become something that it is not currently known.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Wow.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Otherwise said, little machines?
charles ostman ▲ ● ▼		A little machine is one of many implementations.
		Let me give you an example.
		In the previous, before the break, we had talked about how fast can we make a processor device.
		My answer was, well, if we could go to superconductivity, all of a sudden you've just bought yourself an order of magnitude, or better.
		The problem is, how do you make superconductive semiconductors?
		Sounds like a mouthful, but that's what it means.
		Well, by current-day solution-based chemistry standards, you're not going to.
		Now, the most recent discoveries, and they were kind of almost like alchemy in a sense, there was something of an affinity to say.
		And I don't want to detract from Dr. Chu and or Stanford Devshinsky and the others who had theorized about these non-crystalline semiconductor materials that could be superconducting.
		That's a whole long story in itself.
		But it's kind of a strange and meandering path where finally it sort of works, but it wasn't exactly the direct result of it.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		What sort of works?
charles ostman ▲ ● ▼		Okay.
		Stanford Davchinsky, many years ago, this goes back to early 70s, talked about something called the glass diode.
		It was an organic substrate that could have semiconductive properties.
		And everybody laughed and thought he was wrong, and he was rejected very soundly by the government.
		He tried to get funding from DUE.
		They wouldn't listen to him.
		He went to Lonsanto, et cetera, they wouldn't listen to him.
		Ended up in Japan.
		This year, by the way, I forget the company, but it's in Japan.
		They're going online with a, it's like a paint almost.
		You can spray it or paint it onto any surface.
		We're using mylar, for instance.
		It rolls up like a saran wrap or something.
		You can put this material on any surface, and it acts like a very effective solar collector.
		Very inexpensive, less than a tenth of the cost of its smoking counterparts.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		You paint on a solar collector?
charles ostman ▲ ● ▼		In a sense, yes.
		In other words, you buy the material prefabricated.
		It comes in a roll, but it's a gel-like material that can be applied to a surface.
		And it is, in a sense, a fluid before it's applied.
		Now, he proved that a non-crystalline material could behave like a semiconductor.
		From that sort of first step, it was also theorized that perhaps there could be non-crystalline superconductors.
		And this is where Dr. Truzwork over here at Stanford came in.
		And now there's a whole class of rare earth-dote ceramics that are non-crystalline substrates.
		They contain little nanocrystals, if you will, that interconnect to each other, but still residing in a non-crystalline substrate.
		And yet they're very substantial.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		You are so far out from me.
		I'm losing this.
		Oh, what is it you're saying this is?
charles ostman ▲ ● ▼		What I'm saying is that using nanotechnology, one can invent a material to respond to an engineering requirement.
		And I'll give you an example.
		There is a new class of material called fullerenes.
		Fullerenes are cages of carbon.
		They look like little balls, little soccer balls, although they come in tubes now in other configurations around it and so on.
		It was invented by Dr. Smalley at Rice University, but now there's a whole bunch of companies actually producing it as a commercial product.
		Why would you want to do this?
		Because once you have these little cages of carbon, you can then put elements and or molecules of other materials inside the cages of carbon.
		And then you can bind these cages together and invent a new matrix of material that would never form under natural conditions or with traditional solutions.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Which would do, for example, what?
charles ostman ▲ ● ▼		Well, I want to fabricate a superconductor that can operate at the temperature range of my choosing.
		And this is one really, really narrow example.
		So think of just what that alone does.
		And people are trying to solve this problem now.
		I'll offer an example, for instance.
		There is a company called Mitra.
		They're huge.
		They're all over the world.
		They've got 40,000 employees, roughly, and they have labs in different countries as well as here.
		Most of their budget, by the way, is black, i.e.
		what e-systems is to computing, these guys are to physics and specialized materials and all that kind of stuff.
		But they've got a very big chunk of their budget in nanotech.
		I don't even know myself how much there's.
		I mean, I have friends, but there's only so much I can learn about this.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		What are they trying to do?
charles ostman ▲ ● ▼		Well, I have no doubt molecular computing is big on their list, but specialized Materials in general.
		And I want to jump ahead just a little bit because, see, we talked just earlier about the idea that if we suddenly get off this planetary surface, we're going to be in somebody else's backyard.
		They might not like that so much, and that's why they're dropping the visitors now.
		Well, the nanotech realm is what facilitates that.
		Why?
		Because there's a whole plethora of physicists and theoreticians out there who've come up with some very nice, very doable, in my belief, models, mathematical models of how to contrive a gravity well or how to do a time-space manipulation.
unidentified		How wait, wait, wait.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		How to contrive a gravity well?
charles ostman ▲ ● ▼		Yes.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		What is a gravity well?
charles ostman ▲ ● ▼		Oh, okay.
		All objects have a gravitational force surrounding them.
		That's the core of that there's an event horizon.
		So when you come to within a certain proximity, suddenly you're going to engage yourself in the gravitational pull of that.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		The event horizon of a black hole.
charles ostman ▲ ● ▼		Yes, but all things have an event horizon.
		Correct.
		The point being that if you could contrive that as an event, it would, in a sense, allow you to neutralize the gravitational field around you.
		You could float.
		In other words, it's one of several different implementations of an anti-gravity device.
		And lots of folks have been talking about this.
		And supposedly these guys in Pinman claim they've done it.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		They're talking about creating an artificial event horizon, is that?
charles ostman ▲ ● ▼		Yes.
		But the point I'm trying to get at is, it's mostly theory now.
		I don't know if the folks in Pinman really did this or not.
		It's kind of a mystery.
		But the point is, I've talked to lots of people that have, you know, just very elaborately worked out theories.
		If only we could have the materials by which to construct the device that would have the energy densities required to make this thing happen.
		With nanotechnology, in today's world, engineering is confined to the materials and manufacturing processes currently available.
		In the nano world, you can invert that process.
		You construct the molecules or the materials with the properties to suit the design.
		The design drives the material, not the other way around.
		Therefore, I mean, chemical-based rockets and all that kind of stuff, totally ridiculous.
		That's like trying to walk across the continent or something.
		It's just not absolutely impractical.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Blunderbuss.
charles ostman ▲ ● ▼		Blunderbuss.
		The minute you cross into the gravity realm, suddenly it's wide open.
		You can go almost anywhere and do what you want, because I think that the laws of physics are much more flexible.
		I don't want to get into like hyperdimensional physics and all that.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		But does this mean you're talking about molecular manipulation?
unidentified		Correct.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		When you can begin to do that, you can then create the material choice.
charles ostman ▲ ● ▼		You specify.
		Imagine this.
		Now, here we're going to go ahead a couple of decades.
		I'm in an engineering lab.
		Instead of pulling up my AutoCAD, three-dimensional drawing with some machine I'm trying to contrive, I fetch up a series of equations that represent some kind of a property that I wish I could invent a material to match.
		Then the fenshing engine, which is vastly smarter than we are right now, sort of anticipates this and says, okay, here's 10 or 12 nano options.
		Try this.
		And the nano assembler spews it out for me as an inkot or a sample tool or anything connected by design.
		That's what they're on the point.
		That's why there'd be folks out there looking at us now saying, well, we're getting kind of close.
		We want to have a second look.
		Now, this is one slice of a big pie.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		But how far from that to the sentient beings you're talking about deciding on their own to create?
charles ostman ▲ ● ▼		Well, this is where it gets fuzzy.
		I know what you're getting at.
		I understand completely.
		And my friend Dr. Davis always said, well, you can just pull out the plug.
		Well, eventually there will be no single plug to pull out.
		And I know that.
		I saw the Foreben project when I was quite young.
		And it was actually filmed right here at Berkeley up at the Hall of Science.
		I had a personal connection to the Holy Ghost.
		But the point I'm trying to get at is these are different types of implementations coming from the same common strata.
		They don't have to go that way, but yes, there is that potential.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, I think we're actually already past the plug-pulling point for the Internet.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		We're way past it.
charles ostman ▲ ● ▼		Oh, yeah, no, I completely understand what you're saying.
		What I'm trying to get across here, though, is as follows.
		The reason I was so bent on socioeconomic focus and the economies of the near future and the revaluation away from hard ethics to virtual ethics and all that stuff is because when you have this kind of a functionality being brought online and accessible to the general audience, or supposedly so, how do you establish the valuation of commodities and goods?
		In a sense, the software is the thing that has the value.
		The stuff that it creates is valueless.
		A very kind of clunky analogy would be if all the diamonds that exist in the world are suddenly dumped into the marketplace, the diamonds would have the value of each of them.
		Okay, so you apply the sort of nano domain to that same logic form.
		Well, gee whiz, folks, guess what?
		So in this short-term interim sort of this chaos manifold that we're about to be thrust through, something's going to have to be sorted out where a whole new paradigm of valuation systems has to be established to determine what has value and by what new methodologies of measure can different kinds of business entities and socioeconomic systems can be established.
		We don't know that yet.
		this is a rise to the failure point.
		If not so much, will the thinking machine run amok or will the...
		I mean, I've only given you a couple examples.
		Do I hear?
		Fly this one.
		A quasi-viral component.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		A quasi-what, what the hell is that?
charles ostman ▲ ● ▼		A quasi-viral.
		What the hell is that?
		Okay, here's an answer.
		Think just for a minute.
		This is a very simple explanation.
		I'm not a biophysicist.
		I'm skipping a lot of details.
		But the general idea is as follows.
		What a virus does is it has a chemical and also topographical feature set externally that is designed to mate with a specific kind of protein.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		That's right.
charles ostman ▲ ● ▼		Most cells have a unique protein wall that surrounds them, like a little, like a prophylactic resource, that has its own particular unique topologies.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		That's right.
charles ostman ▲ ● ▼		When the virus happens to run into the cell that it's designed to mate with, it bonds.
		I mean, it physically, like hand to a glove, glonds itself on there.
		When zymic action, it tears through the cell wall.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		The AIDS virus is a good example.
charles ostman ▲ ● ▼		Exactly.
		It goes to the cytoplasm, finds those ribosomes.
		And What the ribosomes do is they're like the chemical foundry for the cell.
		They spit out more RNA and they sort of maintain a metabolistic process engine of sorts.
		And in fact, most all diseases, including aging itself, is the result of those metabolisms failing for some reason.
		They cannot supply some missing ingredient as part of the chemical spool that keeps that cell functioning.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		So then, for example, you might suggest nanotechnology developed eventually could reverse or stop the aging process.
charles ostman ▲ ● ▼		That is exactly what I'm saying.
		And talk about a socio-political, philosophical, spiritual dilemma.
		How do you solve for X on that one?
		And even if you were not to get that far, even if you were just to say, okay, all known diseases go away, because now if you can target a cell, you see, the first half of the process is wonderful.
		It's a precise mechanism for delivering something to a cell that can go inside of it and then manipulate its internal chemistry.
		It's only the second half, where the ribosome is forced to create more viral components at the expense of the host itself, that's all that throws and the organism dies eventually.
		Fine.
		Well, there are those biophysicists out there who look at a virus as a machine component of sorts.
		And if one were to go as far as being able to engineer viral-like devices which can perform the essential equivalent of intracellular corrective chemistry, yes, that's a lock and a key.
		But, but, as I said earlier, every new run on this ladder carries with it a magnified, a larger risk versus gain ratio, volume, you might say.
		In this particular example, if we got this far, we could either buy life and happiness or eradicate life as we know it to be.
		Why?
		Viruses tend to be kind of fragile.
		They mutate rather readily.
		They mutate extremely often, as a matter of fact.
		Mutational velocity is the inverse of organism complexity.
		Therefore, since the virus is the simplest thing that exists, really, in terms of its total molecular structure and so on, it's the thing that will be like most xenomorphic in its activities, how it interprets its surrounding environment.
		And if we hatched a cluster of these things and a couple of them get out of hand, that's all it would take.
		We might as well scoured the surface clean.
		It's far over.
		We're back at ground zero.
		So these are the kinds of pathways that I believe other worlds have stumbled into the wrong fork, the decision trees.
		They get to node number such and such and they pick the wrong node.
		Well, okay.
		We are nothing more than an experiment.
		We are nothing more than a bunch of protein molecules that got together and after billions of years got this far.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		You're making it sound very tenuous, actually.
charles ostman ▲ ● ▼		Well, I think statistically, I'm kind of a, you know, I'm not some bolts guy.
		I mean, I'm an engineer by trade, really, from beginning square one.
		So I like to look at the pragmatic aspects of, you know, what statistics involved, will the machine survive under these trauma-induced conditions and so on.
		I would submit to you, just as a guess, that statistically, there is a rising rate of no return.
		In other words, you start off with an aggregate C of organisms out there in the known universe, some percentage gets an intelligence threshold of X, some subset of that gets to the next level up, if you follow my drift, and then a much smaller subset gets to the next level up than that.
		And by the time you get to that sort of ultimate upper level, you're talking about a very small percentage, you know, a half a percent or a tenth of percent.
		I'm just guessing.
		I just have this graph in my mind based on nothing other than my own speculation.
		But I can see an ordering system like that because it really does mimic what happens in the Berlinianism that we can witness here on our own planet.
		But why not apply that to a galactic scale or some localized region with that galaxy, that kind of thing?
		I mean, I can see that kind of a macro systematic patterning effect, if you will, play it out amongst the stars that cluster together.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Charles, if you were one of them and you were watching our development, at what stage that you've speculated about tonight would you say, okay, we need to get involved now.
		These people have reached point X. We can't wait any longer.
		Prime Directive out the window.
		Time to talk?
charles ostman ▲ ● ▼		If I saw ubiquitous nanotech suddenly being applied in a very stupid and sloppy way, and at the same time they were on the threshold of really turning on anti-gravity devices and kind of clumsily stumbling around other solar systems, yes.
		I mean, when I saw the fringe of that technology being crossed, yeah, I'd step in.
		However, we haven't gotten there yet.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Are you sure?
charles ostman ▲ ● ▼		I think that perhaps some very interesting sort of quasi-successes have been demonstrated as a trajectory towards a design goal.
		I think that under very tightly controlled conditions, for a very brief moment in time, yes, some kind of contrived gravity event probably has been done.
		But to make a sustainable, flyable, if you want to call it, that's not even the right choice of words, you know, deployable, self-contained entity that could simply, at will, cruise about and do its own thing, we were not even close to having the kind of power supplies and the kind of specialized materials and all the stuff, the physical stuff that it would take to implement it.
		I think we have some pretty close models as to how it could be done, but like I said, we don't quite have the nanotechnology available to create those materials on the fly.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		But you really are suggesting, though, that we are being monitored more closely all the time because we're rapidly moving in that direction.
charles ostman ▲ ● ▼		And when you talk about the quickening, that quickening is being matched by the rate of interest, you might say, that these folks are taking a closer eye.
		The scrutiny factor goes up.
		Yes, absolutely.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Speaking of scrutiny factor, what we're going to do here in a minute is I'm going to open up the lines and I'm going to see if my audience has been getting this and if they have logical questions for you.
		I want you to answer some questions from the audience.
		That'll slow you down a little bit.
unidentified		Okay.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Maybe.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right, Joe, stay where you are.
unidentified		All right, Joe, stay where you are.
		Art Bell is taking calls on the wildcard Line at 702-727-1295.
		That's 702-727-1295.
		First time callers can reach Art Bell at 702-727-1222.
		702-727-1222.
		Now, here again, Art Bell.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Once again, here I am.
		This is going to be very interesting.
		I want to see how the audience reacts to what they've been hearing.
		I'll tell you, I can give you my reaction right now.
		I feel like a child listening to somebody who has about 100 million miles of knowledge more than I do, knowing only enough to know that I think he knows what he's talking about.
		It's like listening to Einstein and not getting it, but knowing that it's right.
		Does that come across about...
		My guest is Charles Osman.
		He's here talking about nanotechnology.
		It is a world and a realm that you've got to sit down and adjust to before you can even begin to think about.
		Because it has literally, it's molecular manipulation.
		And when you can do that, you can do anything.
		It's a world that's hard to even contemplate.
		So coming up in a moment, your questions for him, if you have one, if you understood enough of this to form one, then come on ahead.
		It's going to be very, very interesting.
		Music by Ben Thede All right, Charles Ossman is my guest, and it has been quite a couple of hours, and this should be very interesting.
		Charles, are you there?
unidentified		I surely am.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right, let's try a few questions from the audience.
		Sure.
		On the wildcard line, you're on the air with Charles Ossman.
		Hi.
unidentified		Hello.
charles ostman ▲ ● ▼		Hello.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Where are you?
unidentified		I'm in Davis, California.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Okay.
unidentified		Okay, I was just wondering if you could address some class issues, both in terms of this virtual reality and consumers and in terms of nanotechnology.
unidentified		Who exactly do you envision having access to this?
charles ostman ▲ ● ▼		Even in the class.
		I know precisely where you're going, and I've been through this loop many times.
		You can go one of two ways.
		It could either homogenize access for everyone, that would be the utopian view, or you would end up with a benign dictatorship with the select few, the techno-elite, who are cybernetically enhanced and who have the inner access that sort of dictate policy to the rest of the planetary population.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, which of those scenarios do you consider more likely?
charles ostman ▲ ● ▼		That's a tough one.
		And today's unfortunate, not-so-pleasant repository, I mean, if you look at the kind of the dark side of the quickening and you see social degradation plummeting the way it is, you'd have to sort of lean towards the maybe the benevolent dictatorship rule only because it's the one that might work.
		I see much of humanity, and this is going to sound very rude and I'm sorry, as being spoiled little brats.
		They're kind of, you know, they go to the bathroom in their own living room.
		They're poisoning the planet and they're acting stupidly and selfishly and they just have no, they just don't get it.
		They don't comprehend that we're living inside of a living organism, the thing called Magaiah, that it should be cared for, that there should be some kind of thing.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I certainly agree with that, but based on your obvious answer reading between the lines, ma'am, maybe we ought to have Charles disposed of.
charles ostman ▲ ● ▼		I remember the last time you had me on, one of the guys that called actually thought the Unibomber was on the right path.
		I recall that quite distinctly.
		And I might tell you something, just anecdotally.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Actually, his writings, if you read his writings, they're very thoughtful.
charles ostman ▲ ● ▼		Sure.
		I understand.
		I can appreciate.
		I'm not putting someone down for having an alternative perspective, quite the opposite.
		And I might point out as well that up until recently, or some time ago actually, there was a group called the Assembly Multitude, founded by a gentleman by the name of Ted Kayler, who's a very wonderful, extraordinarily bright guy.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Okay, well, listen, we're moving a little bit away from her question.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		The answer, I think, ma'am, are you still there?
charles ostman ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Okay, I think the answer is that those who have will have it, and those who don't will not, and there will be bigger, more important class distinctions that make today's class distinctions look like nothing.
charles ostman ▲ ● ▼		If we go down that particular branch, yes, that would be the case.
charles ostman ▲ ● ▼		Does that answer?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Does that answer your question?
unidentified		I think so, yeah.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Okay.
		I too would, I'm afraid, view it that way.
		East of the Rockies, you're on the air with Charles Ossman.
unidentified		Hi.
charles ostman ▲ ● ▼		Hello.
unidentified		Hello.
unidentified		Hi.
charles ostman ▲ ● ▼		I want to ask a question about what would be the best way to disseminate information about nanotechnology currently.
		Well, this is precisely what I'm trying to do.
		That's why I'm on the science advisory board of NanoSync Now.
		That's why I write all the writings I do, and I go to various conferences, and that's why I'm teaching a course at San Francisco State.
		Well, the reason I ask is I tell fellow students, professors I have, I try to mention nanotechnology to them, and they just kind of blow it off.
		They kind of give it like the he-vo.
		I think the reasoning is just because as follows, and I want to be careful not to throw stones in a glass house.
		Scientific American came out, actually, I don't know if I was.
		I actually read it.
		Yeah, it was very stupid, and I thought, why are they doing this?
		And I'm sad to see Scientific American stumbling around trying to find a new Denny for itself.
		It's like they're trying to become a sort of a popular science magazine, which is very sad, because at one point they had extraordinarily high standards.
		Unlike the journal Nature, which is a very solid, serious scientific journal, Scientific American Stadium has kind of gotten a little fluffier in their presentation of the journal.
		The thing is, nanotechnology is not a singularity.
		You can go to the Foresight Institute and talk with Eric Drexler and Ralph Markle and all those folks or visit the website, and you'll see their particular implementation of a diamond order silicon-based nanomechanical machine system, which is probably like the classical vision that most people theorize about nanotech.
		That's only one really small, no pun intended, little side note of a much larger plethora of both biological and non-biological systems.
		Some of which are self-assembling, some of which are self-organizing, some of which involve machine-like systems, others which involve more evolutionary aspects or like controlled organisms, if you want to look at it from that perspective.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, I'll tell you what scares me.
		You know what really scares me?
		From the last Time you were on this program to this time, what you are talking about now is such a leap from where you were that that really is frightening.
charles ostman ▲ ● ▼		Well, I agree.
charles ostman ▲ ● ▼		And that's why when we first talked, just before I actually went on the air, I said it's amazingly timely and seminal that you would release your book, The Quickening, because this is like the ultimate metaphor of that process actually occurring, at least in this domain.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Caller, anything else?
charles ostman ▲ ● ▼		That's about it.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right, thank you very much, and have a good morning.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		West of the Rockies, you're on the air with Charles Osman.
unidentified		Hi.
unidentified		Hello, calling from Maui.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Maui, yes, Maui.
charles ostman ▲ ● ▼		All right.
unidentified		All right.
		I have a question for you.
		Considering how that seems like the majority of the people on our planet don't seem to have the best attitudes and usages for most discoveries, sadly to say, yes, our track record has been pretty bad.
		That was actually putting down the fact that most of us are pretty morally corrupt.
		My question was, do you think that those monitoring us, as you had mentioned, might decide that perhaps they would want to stop us from progressing to a point where we would be in their backyard and become a problem to them?
charles ostman ▲ ● ▼		Well, this is what we had discussed before the break.
		I do, you know, and Art had specifically said, well, Charles, what do you think the horizon line would be?
		Where's point X for that sort of stepping in and right?
		Okay, enough of this.
		I think in my own personal opinion, we get to a certain point where, okay, we suddenly have nanotech right there.
		We're doing it.
		We're suddenly building devices and systems that really allow us to manipulate gravity in time space continuum.
		We really can't sort of hop around other solar systems.
		It's like watching Syria as they tried to sneakily build a reactor, and then the Israeli synthetic neutralized reactor.
		I think if we were getting to the point where we were about to start building that kind of stuff, they would take a real serious look at this.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		You're almost giving us the first contact scenario.
		It could be, yeah.
		In other words, the moment a warp drive is achieved, oh, gee, look at that.
		Warp drive, we better stop here.
charles ostman ▲ ● ▼		I would say that would be a very, in my opinion, if I were in their shoes, and this is how I try to evaluate that, if I had to make that decision, that's where I would step in.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Answer to your question, Color?
unidentified		Yeah, very good.
unidentified		Just makes us keep doing it and showing that we have good intentions, I guess.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		As you listen to what Charles says, how much of it do you absorb?
unidentified		I think I can understand realistically probably 70 to 80 percent, but he really jumps ahead quite fast.
unidentified		Uh-huh.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right, thank you very much.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		First time caller line, you're on the air with Charles Ossman.
unidentified		Hi.
unidentified		Hello?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Hello?
unidentified		Yes.
		My question was that in listening to Charles, he said when we get to a certain point, we come to ground zero.
		My question is this, with human adaptability and the way that humans adapt to new situations and whatnot, what do you see the next step, if we do reach a level of point where it becomes so chaotic that we can't understand it, yet we adapt to it and we meld?
charles ostman ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, no, I see what you're going for.
		The woman who first came on talking about separation of clashes, this could be one of those separation strata.
		In other words, per like Gibson's Blade Runner or something, you have this kind of street level of everybody's just rushing around trying to survive and it's this really strange world where you've got sort of like organo-nanotech on demand as per synthetic organisms running around and all this kind of sort of garden variety stuff is as common as buying a loaf of bread.
		And in fact that, in my mind, in fact, how it will play out.
		I think synthetic organisms and biobots and quasi-organic entities are going to become as common as something you buy at the hardware store.
		That, to me, is like the first round.
		Well, that's what's being done now.
		I mean, if you want to talk about if somebody's been learning to do X, that's where it's going.
		But to get back to your question, if we have to go to the scenario where, okay, you've got this ever more fluidic kind of quasi-chaotic socioeconomic system substrate where there's no permanence in anything and everything is always in a state of flux, there would be a layer above that where that would be sort of like the grid of order, if you will.
		And who would occupy that grid of order?
		Would it be the autonomous geographically defined nation-state of today?
		No.
		I don't think so.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I don't think so.
charles ostman ▲ ● ▼		Here's my model about how things are and where they're going.
		And I spend an awful lot of time digesting this.
		I mean, I've read every conceivable social economic science literature you can imagine.
		And this is why I just a lot of this kind of stuff.
		I see three layers.
		I see the general population, then a layer above that called government, quote unquote, then a layer above that, which are the real power brokers, the major families, the major corporate entities, like this sort of dark layer above that we don't really see, but we know they're there.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, you're describing today's situation.
charles ostman ▲ ● ▼		Today's situation, exactly.
		Now that layer called government becomes an ever-thinner veneer.
		It's almost like a membrane, which is kind of quasi-porous.
		And the power brokers from above simply say, okay, to maintain a certain range of order that we can control to suit our own purposes, we'll allow a certain degree of porosity.
		We'll simply plug and play the political components.
		We'll buy the candidates we want.
		We'll sort of contrive whatever event is necessary to maintain the status quo.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		So they become the new power brokers.
charles ostman ▲ ● ▼		They become the new power brokers.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right.
		Could you ask Charles, please, Arch, this is by facts, if nanotech could be applied to alter basic matter and shape, for example, to produce fictionalized food replicators, as in Star Trek.
		In other words, you're manipulating at the molecular level, so you create, you have a machine, well, I don't know if machine is the right word.
		You have a technology that allows creation of food out of biomass.
charles ostman ▲ ● ▼		And here's, and it's a wonderful question, and this is one of the better answers, or have been better visions that I try to, in my, because everybody wants to talk about the dark side, darkness sells.
charles ostman ▲ ● ▼		I want to try to offer something that's, at least a picture.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		No, I want to look at both sides.
charles ostman ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, so here we go.
		Okay, fine.
		Right now, and look, I'm not an environmental nut by any means, but I just look at hard facts.
		And hard facts saying I've been to Brazil.
		I've actually seen what's happened down there.
		I've actually traveled down there.
		I don't believe this whole scenario.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I know.
charles ostman ▲ ● ▼		It takes, you know, 10 times or 12 times to buy a mess to feed a cow from what you actually extract from in terms of nutrition value.
		It would make a whole heck of a lot more sense if it was growing the cow as an animal than killing it if you could simply fabricate the stuff that resembles its flesh blackly.
		In other words, if I could just grow a steak, now whether that's done with cloning technology or with an actual nano assembly, okay, there could be some arguments about the technology, but that's the kind of thing I'm looking for.
		i.e., you have a generic sort of peptide stew, if you will, out of which you can contrive the food substantive choice.
		That's a great application.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		A peptide stew.
		Correct.
		What is that?
charles ostman ▲ ● ▼		Well, you simply, I mean, all cells are nothing more than a bunch of proteins and peptides and some other what I call organic glue logic that really represents the software of what that cell consists of.
		Fine.
		We are all nothing more than software.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right, well then, so that my mind can grasp this, does that mean you could take a pile of dirt and throw it in a machine, and it would convert the molecules in the dirt to become steak or whatever else you want?
charles ostman ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, no, I know what you're trying to get at.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Is that what we're saying?
charles ostman ▲ ● ▼		Sort of.
		Not exactly, but sort of.
		In other words, if there was enough of the stuff you wanted present in that kind of soil, it depends on the kind of soil you're dealing with, per se.
		But I visualize sort of a generic organic gray goo of stars, if you want to call that.
		It was like genetic.
		You know, you might have like 10 different variations that has a high percentage of protein so you can actually get a meat-like substance out of it, and then you can flavor the meat certain ways.
		You know, all these different things, but these are all chemistry processes.
		Therefore, once you've mapped in the software of that molecular nature, theoretically, yeah, you can have whatever steak with whatever flavor of something or other.
		And you can invent things that don't exist now.
		This, to me, is the real boundary.
		I'm a good deal.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		You can invent things that do not now exist.
charles ostman ▲ ● ▼		Right.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		New materials.
charles ostman ▲ ● ▼		New materials, new biologicals.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Like the paint you described, that you would paint, say, your roof with and turn it into an energy collector.
charles ostman ▲ ● ▼		Exactly.
		And I want to toss in one last little, this is just an Art Bell kind of thing.
		Sure.
		Since, you know, Area 51 and Roswell and all that kind of stuff, you know, I'm on the fence about it.
		I think it could be possible somebody dropped in and they shot a probe down, but that's what they shot down with a probe.
		What was in that capsule, if they actually had one, was not the aliens themselves.
		No, they're not going to send themselves.
		That's dumb.
		I mean, forgive me.
		But they would send down, though, engineered biobots.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Engineered biobots, yeah.
		Well, I've heard the grays referred to exactly that way by some.
		Wildcard line, you're on the air with Charles Osman.
		Hi.
		Do the wild thing at 702-727-1295.
		Yes, you're not allowed to give your last name on the air, sir.
		Okay, Mike from San Diego, California.
		Mike from San Diego will have to do, all right?
unidentified		Okay.
		Listen, this guy sounds very interesting, but he's going off in a thousand different directions.
		Yep.
		It's really hard to understand where he's coming from and where he's going.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, I think I do sort of grasp it.
		I, like you, though, am missing parts of it, but I'm smart enough to know that what I'm hearing is right.
		What is your understanding?
		Let me ask you that.
unidentified		Probably about 10%.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right, but I've got a college degree.
		That 10%.
		What does that 10% tell you you've just heard?
charles ostman ▲ ● ▼		Something out of this world.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		No.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		There's something inside this world.
charles ostman ▲ ● ▼		That's true.
		And that person who just called, and thank you, actually has highlighted the very essence of what I do today.
		Corporate CEO types, guys that have gone to the most expensive business, you know, brown school business or whatever, the most, you know, any, you name it, top school, they've gone there, they're parked on a desk, they've got all the, you know, sort of quasi-corporate power one can dream of, and yet they don't know what's going on.
		They're pleading for some way to have a crystal ball.
		They come to people like me, you know, if you saw me, it'd be quite twice because I have a bunch of hair and a beard going, and they think I'm going to have the answer.
		Well, this is the stuff that the future is going to be made of.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, you're saying that the answer to our question, space travel, does not lie with solid fuel rockets or liquid rockets or any blunder must-bust method like that.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		The answer to our disease control, to our longevity, even immortality, to our food supply problems, to everything you can imagine lies not out there, but in here.
charles ostman ▲ ● ▼		And knowing how to cross-synergize, I will submit to you that these are all vectors on a synergy grid.
charles ostman ▲ ● ▼		That synergy grid is where the value is, not the points in the vector, not the vector points, but how you connect the dots, if I can say it that way.
unidentified		You can.
charles ostman ▲ ● ▼		What has the value?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Makes you sound a little like Richard, but.
charles ostman ▲ ● ▼		Well, actually, on my business card, it says strategic synergists.
		And I actually, when I, the Global Futures group that I'm part of, that's what we do.
		People come to us from around the world and say, we have this incredibly complex problem.
		We didn't realize it was going to require 14 different threads of information.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		It's really hard to imagine a whole room of people like you together surviving.
charles ostman ▲ ● ▼		Well, it's a new type of techno-scientific discipline where social, science, economics, and 10 or 12 different set of disciplines have to actually be cross-correlated to come up with one contiguous information stream.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right, Charles, hold on.
		We're at the bottom of the hour.
		It is tomorrow's world today.
		And you've got to kind of get in this to understand what it is he's talking about.
		But what he's really saying is, it's all here now.
		It's just learning to use it.
		We'll be right back.
unidentified		We'll be right back.
		Call our bell toll free.
		West of the Rockies at 1-800-618-8255.
		1-800-618-8255.
		East of the Rockies at 1-800-825-5033.
		1-800-825-5033.
		This is the CBC Radio Network.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Stretch your mind with us a little bit this morning.
		What we're talking about is a whole different world.
		And I'll illustrate that in a moment.
		All right, my guest is Charles Osman.
		The subject is nanotechnology.
		And first I'm going to give him a very simple question, and then I'm going to give him a question he thoroughly deserves, one I don't even understand myself.
		Charles, if I understand what you've been saying correctly, the manipulation of molecules would allow, for example, you to set a nanotechnological army into the task of making gold bars.
charles ostman ▲ ● ▼		Well, not exactly.
charles ostman ▲ ● ▼		Now you're mixing up, and I don't mean, forgive me, I want to make more.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, if I can create food.
charles ostman ▲ ● ▼		Okay, in a food substance, you're creating a molecular matrix of existing proteins and peptides and other biomolecular sort of building blocks.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right, so I couldn't create gold.
charles ostman ▲ ● ▼		Well, you can create gold, but not this way directly.
		But let me explain.
		In Lawrence Laboratory, where I spent many years in my life when they were, we did make gold.
		It was an accelerator.
		But it cost tens of thousands of dollars to make one gram.
		Why?
		Because of the energy it took to propel particles towards a target.
		We were breaking apart and rebuilding the nuclei of atoms so that we eventually end up with a resultant atom that had the atomic structure of gold.
		Now, with a superconductive accelerator, where the cost of the energy drops to virtually zero, and those superconductors are fabricated with materials that were nanotechnology-created substances, you see how that works?
		You wouldn't use the nanotechnology to directly make it.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I understand.
charles ostman ▲ ● ▼		But you use the nanotech to make the superconductive power supply that would drive the machine that makes it.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		So energy to accomplish the goal would no longer be part of the equation.
charles ostman ▲ ● ▼		That's correct.
		Then all of a sudden gold would be like beats.
		You got it.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, gold worthless.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		So the entire monetary system changes.
charles ostman ▲ ● ▼		That's what I was trying to allude to before.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right, here's a question I don't understand.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I'm going to ask you because you deserve a question.
unidentified		By all means.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right, here it comes.
		The Pauli exclusion principle claims no two electrons in an atom may possess the same four quantum numbers.
		Since these numbers determine the behavior of electrons in an atom, the principle is used to establish the number of arrangements of electrons in the atomic structure.
		Good God.
		Are the event horizons going to be connected to said atomic structure, since scalar propulsion technology can fold or flip magnetic fields inside out, unfolding a space-time structure?
charles ostman ▲ ● ▼		Well, I'm going to say that this is not the area of physics I could claim to be a specialist.
		Now we're crossing the so-called hyperdimensional domains, and we're talking about, now I have friends that do this concept.
		They're theoreticians, and this is their cup of tea.
		And they'll talk about things like, right now, us creatures, as of here in the domain that we're familiar with, we are equipped cognitively in a sort of interstitial fabric of awareness.
		We can see three spatial and one temporal dimension.
		That's what we know about.
		That's what we're designed to interact with.
		It doesn't mean that there aren't others out there.
		And in fact, right here at UC Berkeley, every year a bunch of physicists get together.
		They're the kind of physicists that probably would answer this question.
		And they say, well, have we resolved special relativity yet?
		No, we're getting closer, though.
		Let's throw another dimension at it.
		So right now they're up to 23 or 24 spatial dimensions and some number of temporal ones.
		I don't think we can track this method.
		But that's the kind of problem we would solve that way.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Anyway, I feel I owed you that question.
charles ostman ▲ ● ▼		Thank you very much.
charles ostman ▲ ● ▼		I like it.
unidentified		You're welcome.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		East of the Rockies, you're on the air with Charles Osman.
charles ostman ▲ ● ▼		Hi.
		Yes.
		Hi.
unidentified		This is Jason from Wisconsin.
unidentified		Hi.
charles ostman ▲ ● ▼		My question is, if this technology was released into the public right now, what kind of effect would it have?
		Well, that's a very good question, and it's just the kind of question I try to answer fairly often.
		The one thing I can start with is saying it's not going to be a one-sing.
		This is a really hard thing to get across because unlike, say, nuclear power or some other horrible, poisonous thing that we created because of some manufacturing process, it's not a one-sing issue.
		It's going to be a gradation of a whole bunch of things that synergistically interact with each other.
		Probably the biologicals are going to be first, followed by competing, changing in a way that can only begin to sort of get the essence of now, which is what I tried to communicate with you earlier.
		Material science is suddenly going to have a whole cluster of changes, and they'll come across in very subtle ways.
		You know, smart materials, things that learn about you and mold themselves.
		Something really simple.
		There's a class of materials called polyochlamide gels.
		It's something that came out of Japan.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		So in other words, we're going to be like slowly boiling frauds.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		The technology is going to come and we're going to accept it as it comes.
charles ostman ▲ ● ▼		That's correct.
		And there will always be a three-tiered system, sort of with the same political model I offered before, only the technology model.
		Right now you have the consumer level, stuff that you and I or anyone can have claim in our career button by.
		You have the military level, which is like supposedly it's always been around 10 to 12 years out from where the consumer level is.
		Then above that you have the sort of the black level, which is stuff that only a few key people really know about and is fed under extremely controlled conditions for certain key homes.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, they're the ones that I'm worried about.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		First time caller line, you're on the air with Charles Osman.
unidentified		Hi.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I can barely hear you, sir.
unidentified		Can you hear me out?
charles ostman ▲ ● ▼		That's better.
charles ostman ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, a little bit.
unidentified		This is Tom from Denver.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yes.
unidentified		And I don't know.
		I'm a serving new listener.
		I've only been this for about two months now, and I think this is the best program you've had on.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Glad you enjoyed it.
unidentified		That is wonderful.
unidentified		My question is listening to you to, or as Carl, I think, expanded your reality concepts and all of our reality concepts is that I just wondered, have you ever thought maybe this is a natural evolvement, if this has happened before, that we can't really believe that, yes.
charles ostman ▲ ● ▼		This is a completely common model.
		This is as broad as building blocks, and a whole bunch of critters out there throughout the known universe got sort of close to this and failed.
		A few went beyond this point.
		But this is like one of the great test marker points in a continuum of evolutionary steps that we go through.
		Other organs to go through as well.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		West of the Rockies, you're on the air with Charles Osman.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Hi.
unidentified		Hi, Mrs. Catherine from Portland.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Catherine, speak right into your phone.
charles ostman ▲ ● ▼		A little hard to hear.
charles ostman ▲ ● ▼		Very good.
unidentified		All right.
unidentified		How's that?
charles ostman ▲ ● ▼		A little better.
unidentified		That's fair.
unidentified		Well, I was wondering if we could use the nanotechnology to help clean up the mess we've already made, like little critters that could munch up oil spills.
charles ostman ▲ ● ▼		Absolutely.
		Thank you.
		That's a very good question.
		And in fact, I have a, I've got to confess to Art because he warned me about this.
		I've got a whole bunch of friends out there who are listening right now, many of them who are serious web developers.
		For instance, let me just throw a plug in, long-term friendly minds.
		A guy by the name of Bruce Namer started a thing called the Biota Project, of which I'm a member.
		We're actually growing plants online.
		We have this entire environment.
		In fact, there's going to be this huge trade show called Seagrass, and you'll be able to see it.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Wait a minute, wait a minute.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		You're growing plants online?
charles ostman ▲ ● ▼		That's right.
unidentified		You got it.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		You mean what kind of plants?
charles ostman ▲ ● ▼		These are, well, it uses a process called L-system for apples, and I won't bore you with a bunch of math talks.
		But the point is, we have, Bruce actually invented this language called NERV, which is a hybrid of vermal, and it has special little hooks in it so you can embed neural net and genetic algorithms within the vermal script.
		And you go in, you plant a seed, and this thing sprouts.
		There is a world out there.
		Listen to this.
		There's a world out there right now.
		I talk about the virtual terraform.
		I'm not kidding.
		There's Alpha World populated with over 100,000 people.
		I'm one of them.
		You can visit me anytime you like.
		You can drop into Avatar, say, hi, Charles.
		I've got a house called the Temple of Chaos.
		There are whole cities.
		There's actually a guy that did a satellite, and you can log into the website and see from 50,000 feet up, there's a 5 trillion square meter virtual terraform.
		There's cities and there's roads and there's rivers, and people go there.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I already forgot this poor lady's question.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		What was it, ma'am?
charles ostman ▲ ● ▼		Well, you talked about Nanite chewing up oil and this kind of thing.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, yeah, oh, that's exactly.
charles ostman ▲ ● ▼		And so one of my friends who's online right now, I've got about 10 windows going here, he's asked me about K-Nante deal with nuclear waste.
charles ostman ▲ ● ▼		This is just the kind of stuff that I think could be done if the desire, if the dollars and the focus were put in that direction.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, you know, thank you, ma'am.
		A very good question.
		You know, right now they want to haul all this high-level nuclear waste out to near me.
charles ostman ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, I know.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Here in the desert.
charles ostman ▲ ● ▼		I know.
charles ostman ▲ ● ▼		I have some friends out there who live in the area as well, and I know the whole story.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		And this nuclear waste will last for tens of thousands of years.
charles ostman ▲ ● ▼		That's right.
		I helped make some of that stuff, I have to confess.
		I worked at the very lab where some of the stuff came from.
		So here's the point.
		We tried to solve this problem many years.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Wait a minute.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Do you want to apologize for that?
charles ostman ▲ ● ▼		No, because I wasn't creating the stuff.
		We were trying to create the solution.
		And they brought the stuff to us and said, okay, what do you think about this?
		And we go, well, the best solution we come up with at the time was taking these rods and breaking them up and making little pellets out of them, and then encapsulating them in a special kind of borosloak of glass that would last as long as a half-life of the material.
		And then you put these pellets of glass inside of a steel container that doesn't line them up.
		And then you bury these pellets.
		Well, that's the best we could do at the time.
		That's 20 years ago.
		And that's probably the solution we're going to go with for a while.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		However, if you could manipulate at the molecular level, what could you do?
charles ostman ▲ ● ▼		Well, here, and I don't want to get into a physics lecture, but the point is, besides the table of elements, there's a table of nuclides.
		These are called the daughter elements.
		And when you go into a decay pattern, the reason you're giving off radiation is because there's an imbalance between the number of protons and neutrons in the atom's core.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		So you would restore that balance.
charles ostman ▲ ● ▼		Correct.
		You could synthetically, I mean, this has never been done that I know of, but I think, again, it's because of energy limitations.
		In other words, if you had sort of an infinite energy bandwidth to work with, then you could just break the nuclei apart and put them to where they would decay to the rest form.
		Yeah, you could accelerate.
		Right now, they're decaying at a natural rate.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		And you would simply speed up the decay rate until it became neutral or safe.
charles ostman ▲ ● ▼		That's pretty much correct.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Wildcard Line, you're on the air with Charles Ossman.
unidentified		Hi.
		Hi, yes.
		Good evening.
		Thanks for taking my call.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yes, sir.
unidentified		Where are you?
		This is JC.
		I'm calling from inside the Beltway, just across the river from our nation's capital.
		Okay.
		I've been a regular listener for about two months now.
		I guess I'm an Art Bell junkie, and I've heard you talk about some scary stuff, but this is one of the scariest things I've ever heard for a couple of reasons.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, when it begins dawning on you what you're hearing.
unidentified		Yeah, and Dr. Osmond, I really don't find, I'm not a scientist at all, but I don't find the physics and the science of this all that difficult to follow the way you've explained it tonight.
charles ostman ▲ ● ▼		Well, thank you.
		That's what I intend.
		I'm sorry?
unidentified		Thank you.
charles ostman ▲ ● ▼		I mean, I appreciate that because that's what I try to do.
unidentified		Yeah.
		The thing is that two things really struck me about this discussion tonight.
		The first one is that how quickly the excitement of discovery overwhelms the very great need for reflection about what all this means and what its implication is for us, for the race.
charles ostman ▲ ● ▼		Well, and how quickly that happens.
unidentified		I mean, the beginning of the hour, I think the first question was, you know, how do we control this?
		Who, if and how do we regulate it?
		And very quickly we were into, you know, the replicators on Star Trek.
		And I can, you know, it's easy to understand why that happens.
		But it seems to me that like there's got to be some way for us as the users of this to find a way to control it.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right, that is the genesis then of the question.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		And is there really a way, or once you begin to go down this path, Charles, are you going down that path wherever it may lead?
charles ostman ▲ ● ▼		Well, this is why I brought up the Sumber multitude that was found by Ted Kayler, because this was the reason, this was on the Stanford campus.
		This is why we did this.
		We'd get together every few weeks, and it was mostly biophysics guys and people from JINTEC and Chiron from all the different islands.
		And we'd sort of sit around and have coffee and these kinds of talks.
		It wasn't G with we discovered some new protein or something.
unidentified		No.
charles ostman ▲ ● ▼		It was, what are the implications?
		We are about to rewrite every conceivable asset of history that's ever been understood to be, and all rules are going to be inverted.
		What do we do with this?
		And these are the guys who are in the web inventing this stuff.
		So the fact that they would be at least trying to negotiate these kinds of complicated things.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I'm not sure that you guys are the right ones to answer that question.
		I mean, in a sense, I might look at you as the military of science, and I might suggest that there needs to be a civilian ethical moral control over you.
		How do you respond to that?
		That you are not the right ones to be the judge of the ethical control.
charles ostman ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, no, I understand.
		As a matter of fact, the course I'm teaching at SF State, which starts in about a month, or not a couple months actually, sort of looks at this.
		As I said before, I'm writing this book called Age of Convergence, and this is part of that whole scenario.
		In other words, if we do not match a social, philosophical, and even spiritual growth and empowerment grid, if you want to call it, or a fabric that matches the rate at which the technology is growing, then yes, that represents in and itself a failure point of this evolutionary test.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, but see, I guess I'm suggesting, again, that you are not the right guys to do it because you guys, for the most part, if it can be done, you're going to do it.
charles ostman ▲ ● ▼		Well, yes and no.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		But much more yes than no.
charles ostman ▲ ● ▼		Personally, I have walked away from things that I thought were too disagreeable.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Like what?
charles ostman ▲ ● ▼		Well, some of which I honestly can't even say at this moment.
		But there are some folks out there who blindly, in fact, will just fly ahead, and I understand the mentality real well.
		I've seen it myself personally.
		And is there any methodology of control?
		See, for me, there's a membrane here.
		The membrane, the porosity of which is controlled by the following things.
		If you have too much control where the people that have no scientific knowledge at all makes policy, and I think we're seeing some of that now, some very bad decisions get made and a whole bunch of nonsense occurs that you can't possibly unravel.
		On the other hand, if you leave it only to the citadel of technology and they sort of, like the model I described earlier, the corporate power burgers kind of filter it through this little single government and the rest of us sort of subject to it, that could be a nightmare as well.
		That gets a void around or cube.
		So how do you find this sort of middle ground somewhere?
		Pretty tricky question.
		I don't claim to have an exact answer, but I think some kind of a governing board where you have a good representation from both sides where they can really agree to find policy that makes good technical sense but has a certain level of ethical quality to it.
		You know, what would that governing body look like?
		Who would actually create this thing?
		What kind of a new bureaucratic structure would arise from?
		These are what really, I don't have the answer, but I understand the question.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right.
		Hi there.
		Wild Hardline, you're on the air with Charles Osman.
unidentified		Yes, this is Hector.
charles ostman ▲ ● ▼		Hector, where are you?
unidentified		Here in LAX.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Los Angeles Airport, huh?
		Okay.
		If you're listening, do you have a question?
unidentified		Yes, well, I understand that what you are considering is new metaphors that take into consideration self-organization demands.
charles ostman ▲ ● ▼		What I'm hearing is a decentralization of standard centralized industrial manufacturing distribution patterns.
charles ostman ▲ ● ▼		Is that kind of what you're saying?
unidentified		And what I'm saying is metaphors that consider self-organization by itself.
unidentified		They self-produced.
charles ostman ▲ ● ▼		Well, a major portion of the current biomolecular nano projects that I'm currently aware of are just that.
		They are self-induced, self-organizing, self-reconstructing materials that perform very specific tasks.
		That really is a story.
		There's a whole branch of science of that.
unidentified		And my question has to do with, is there any way of implying or putting into place some organic sort of feeling into it?
charles ostman ▲ ● ▼		Well, I know what you're getting at.
		I wrote a paper once which had to do with I wanted to come up with a theoretical logical lexicon that described layers of complexity.
		Imagine this.
		And I think I can answer the question the following way.
		There is a whole paradigm of what are called foglets and also Legos.
		And they're going to go, well, no, no, please.
		I'm not kidding.
		Dr. Paul Stoddard, who's a professor of chemistry from Oxford, who I met, actually, a great privilege.
		And also another fellow by the name of Dr. Shores Hall, who's the guy that invented the term foglet.
		These are folks that have come up with these ideas about these ubiquitous nanites, like species of a multitude of species types that at the lowest possible, most highly granular level, can cross-connect and sort of form little clumplets.
		And those clumps, as they become more specialized, the cross-compatibility goes down, the specialization goes up.
		Those clumplets become macroclumps, which eventually become organelles.
		The organelles have very specific functionality and very limited cross-species compatibility.
		Those organelles then become sub-organ types, if you will, and you keep going up this ladder of complexity until at some point you reach a quasi-tension threshold, if you will, because you've really constructed the whole organism.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, but at some point this thing begins to tell you what to do.
charles ostman ▲ ● ▼		Well, I mean, yes, this is a theoretical model.
		And in fact, after having written up this paper and sort of specified could a language, could a computer language actually be devised, and I actually specified what some of the characters would have to be, I got a phone call from a guy in NanIT of all places that said, I've got this thing called nano assembly, some nano script or something, and he actually sent me some samples of the code, and that's what he was doing.
		He was actually writing this code to sort of make that possible.
		Now, as it turns out, the reason I got involved with synthetic sensions as an internal process is because of my interest in self-assembly layers of complexity nanomodeling.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Where this goes, Charles, sorry to interrupt.
		Where it goes is it's the end of farmers.
		It's the end of animals for food.
		It's the end of, I guess I could construct a whole list.
		And we would have a society at some point in the future where people didn't multiply, people didn't die, people had everything they needed at their fingertips.
		And is that a good place that we will reach, or is it a horror?
charles ostman ▲ ● ▼		And that's the $150 quintillion dollar question.
		And I know precisely, believe me, this is the stuff that keeps me awake at night.
		So I want to toss out kind of a parallel thought.
		Back in 1956 or 7 or somewhere, I saw one of the great movies of all time, Forbidden Planet.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Oh, yes, of course.
charles ostman ▲ ● ▼		And of course, what killed them was Monsters of the Edge.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		That's pretty.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		That's right.
charles ostman ▲ ● ▼		They had invented this giant machine that was 20 cubic miles that could fetch up anything on demand that you could think of.
		Giant thoughts.
		And what happened was the subliminal conscious came out with all these horrible monsters, and everybody got eaten alive by these creatures.
		Okay, fine.
		Now, I'm not saying that's exactly what's going to happen here, but...
		We could.
		But it could.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		In other words, we could literally create monsters from the Ed.
		Charles, hold on.
		You good for another hour?
unidentified		Oh, absolutely.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right.
		I don't know if I am, but we'll try it.
		Monsters from the Ed.
		In other words, once you can manipulate at the molecular level anything you want, imagine our minds conceive of things sometimes that are not so good.
		suppose one of those got killed.
unidentified		The End
		Art Bell is taking calls on the wildcard line at 702-727-1295.
		That's 702-727-1295.
		First time callers can reach Art Bell at 702-727-1222.
		702-727-1222.
		Now, here again, Art Bell.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Good morning.
		Charles Ostman is my guest, the subject nanotechnology, the world inside.
		The world that only a few are exploring right now.
		Not the one that blasts rockets into space using solid fuel, but a world where you would manipulate molecules, create an artificial event horizon, and defy gravity.
		A world where on the internet, organisms will begin to live and function.
		Sentient organisms.
		Organism?
		Maybe the wrong word.
		I don't know.
		I'm way over my head, but it's fun.
		A world in which farmers would be out of business because food would simply be ordered to be created from a sort of molecular soup.
		A very different world indeed.
		All right, once again, here is Charles Osman.
		Charles, I'm going to ask you a question that must be asked.
		Somebody sent it, Margaret sent it from Riverside, California, and it's almost a threat, but it's one that I understand.
		She says, what your guess, I mean, you're talking about the manipulation of molecules, and you're talking about the creation of sentient life.
		You're talking about God stuff.
charles ostman ▲ ● ▼		I know.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right, so here it is.
		Okay, so hold on.
		Here it comes.
		Let me get it out.
		What your guest is forgetting is that the moment such a threat is felt, the millions of Christians and others who believe in the supremacy of God are going to unite, and that's going to be the end of any such threat as your guest is forecasting.
charles ostman ▲ ● ▼		Wrong.
		It'll simply widen the dividing line.
		From the previous era, the woman who first talked about the stratification of classes, that'll harden that separation.
		Do you think that the folks who really are at the inner core of these realms of development could care less about a bunch of a horde of religious, you know, whatever's out there causing some sort of mayhem?
		Of course not.
		Come on, wake up.
		This is what makes this stuff what it is.
		It's not a single box or a machine or even a single building.
		It's a fabric.
		just like the mycelia of a mold growing throughout the skin of an orange, there is no one thing that you're going to uproot and turn off the flesh and say, oops, we just turned it off.
		We have a...
		What is being spawned out there goes far beyond the connectivity of what happens inside of a kingdom human brain.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right, I want you to stay good and close to your phone for me, okay?
		Oh, okay, I'm sorry.
		Look, here's somebody who says, who asks, I guess, we could in fact end all disease.
		We could manufacture artificial skin, muscle, bone, we could manufacture organs.
charles ostman ▲ ● ▼		That's right.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Or we could grow monsters.
charles ostman ▲ ● ▼		Well, both are, I mean, with the cloning thing being what it is.
		And by the way, just as a little aside for the sake of anecdotal humor, I guess, I don't think that sheep was the first clone.
		I think that was just the public being allowed to see it for the first time.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Oh, boy, do I agree with you.
charles ostman ▲ ● ▼		I mean, this has been around for a year.
		This is a military slash industrial kind of speaker that just, well, okay, time release and they can filter out in the general works are fine.
		No big deal.
		I mean, all of these things, nothing comes to us clean.
		That's the point.
		Everything is a series of trauma-induced tests.
		Collectively as an organism, if we can negotiate the test correctly, we deserve the chance to go the next one.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Okay, but using the model that you just used with cloning, and I happen to absolutely agree with you, it's just simply the first we were shown.
		Right.
		You talked to me about people with black budgets of the size of a planet, nearly.
charles ostman ▲ ● ▼		Bottomless pit, sort of thing.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Bottomless pit, and they've certainly been working on this, and we can only guess and wonder how far down the road they are.
charles ostman ▲ ● ▼		Well, this was the model I was trying to come up with a little while ago.
		And again, because I'm working on convergence, you're working on quickening, you know, I'm looking at knowledge space or function space, and you're looking at time space.
		Both of which are being compressed, and therefore, the traditional orthogonal models of this three-layered process where you have the consumer-grade technology followed by 10-tilers out from there, you've got this military domain, then 10-tilers from that, you've got this sort of black domain.
		Well, that timeline may still be the same, but the complexity of functionality may exactly going up.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yes, sir.
		Well, what's going to happen, though, Charles, is there is going to be a war.
		Because we're talking here about control.
charles ostman ▲ ● ▼		Oh, I agree.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Right now, the politicians, you can imagine, have the control.
charles ostman ▲ ● ▼		They think they do.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		They think they do.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right.
charles ostman ▲ ● ▼		There is an argument there.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		That's right.
		If you begin doing what you're talking about, you would threaten their domain.
		You would threaten their control.
		You would threaten their power.
		you would just be a flat out threat, period.
charles ostman ▲ ● ▼		Well, even now, I mean, everything from the Clipper chip to all kinds of nonsense.
		And I can't tell you the content, I'm sorry.
		But they came to me and said, well, Charles, we know you know a lot about, oh, and by the way, you talked earlier about what was that guy's name Kramer, the guy who was doing the fractal compression stuff.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yes, sir.
charles ostman ▲ ● ▼		Well, there's a lot more to fractal compression than just compressing an image.
		Converting something to a fractal set actually allows you to store a series of equations which themselves can be examined for certain types of key points without actually looking at the image itself.
		Therefore, it's an encrypting as well as a content-addressable data streaming process.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Absolutely.
charles ostman ▲ ● ▼		and it has very interesting properties.
charles ostman ▲ ● ▼		So the point being...
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Anyway, they came to you and asked.
charles ostman ▲ ● ▼		They had their own backbone within the country.
		It was a sort of a nationwide backbone.
		Could we prophylasticize our backbone?
		And I said, well, there are technologies that have been designed that can fulfill this process, and it would cost X dollars, and I'd have to have some other engineers and so on.
		But in other words, I've actually been asked these kinds of questions.
		So people even now are looking at...
		China being a spectacular example.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		A spectacular example.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yes, and so you would then create a machine, and I'm going to simplify this, that would look for key words, key phrases, key this, key that.
charles ostman ▲ ● ▼		Absolutely.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Find it, eliminate it automatically as a robot.
charles ostman ▲ ● ▼		Exactly right.
		And this is one of the low levels, by the way.
		If you want to go up a step from this, I call it the ubiquitous data grid.
		To me, the scariest thing for the micromoment is the national ID card that also becomes the electronic currency card into which you have then embedded your entire genetic code, your history of your family, any physiological and or even mental things that are part of your family's history.
		That immediately gets fed into the matrix of the insurance process.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Oh, well, that's going to come soon.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		That's actually already just about here, and that's going to come ahead of the ability to manipulate those things.
charles ostman ▲ ● ▼		Exactly correct.
		And so this is the test of I have friends who really are at the very heart of this kind of world, and we have had these discussions.
		And so this is kind of just the training wheels leading up to the next level of the emerging interactive environment.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right.
		West of the Rockies.
		You're on there with Charles Osman.
		Hi.
charles ostman ▲ ● ▼		Yes.
		Good morning, Mark.
		Good morning, Charles.
		Good.
		This is Pat from Burbank, California.
		I have a very profound abstract and question.
		I understand fully what you're talking about.
		And we're starting from the bottom to build up with some ideas of what we can do with this technology.
		And from there, we figure out more things what we can do.
		Let's start from the top down.
		I think as a human race, which hasn't caught up morally or socially with the technology, I think that we have to start asking ourselves, in a universal sense, what does the universe want from all its beings scattered around its space?
		I have an answer for you.
		And okay, and with this abstract, let me finish.
		The idea of starting, okay, what is the main thing that we as the cosmos, becoming conscious of itself, looking back at itself, what do we need to do with this technology based on where we need to go to and then back engineer what our capabilities are on a molecular and atomic level to give us some sort of meaning in that sense.
		In other words, give us guidance to go towards something.
		I have spent many hours pondering this very question.
		Yeah, so here's an answer that I'm going to offer just me, Charles, the guy, saying this is what I thought of.
		And I have a friend of mine who's kind of my counterpart.
		We're developing these self-evolving machines, and so we've gone for a lot of this kind of argumentation.
		My thought was, why do we exist?
		We have to have a purpose.
		I mean, a bunch of matter came together, you know, this cloud of dust formed a star and some planetoids, and these light forms appeared and gray.
		I mean, there's a reason for this process.
		I do believe there's a macro intelligence.
		I think we are, on a solar system level, like a cell within a much larger body.
		And maybe that's what God is, this sort of macro superentity.
		Fine.
		We are the sensory organs of that God creature.
		There is joy and sorrow extracted from the multitudinous experiences that we vicariously absorb and pass on to this sort of higher entity.
		But the significance of this entire planet and all the comets and other parts of the ecosystem, it's a blink of the eye, a grain of sand in the beast.
		If the entire planet stops tomorrow, okay, it'd be like a momentary loss.
		Well, so I've got an order of experimental right.
		However, I don't place that much importance, frankly.
		If we fail as an organism, it's like a Petri dish where the formula wasn't quite right.
		That's why this profound question has to be figured out before we do anything.
		We know that we're on the brink of being able to do anything we want conceptually.
		We need to be able to, and this is where Art's book comes in and the UFO question and everything else, we need either guidance or some information to know what is the most important thing this universe has to go toward and then figure out how we can be part of that in order to maintain our existence and not get ahead of ourselves.
		Well, I wish that such a utopian thing were possible.
		I must say that statistically I think it's a fairly slim, I think, you know, out there in the Gaussian curve, we're still like in the middle somewhere, and I think it's a lot few that kind of get past the filter as well.
		However, the question that Art and I were debating back and forth previous hour about, well, if we were a dog to my map, what would be the point if they decided to drop in and say, okay, nothing authority, they could go one of two ways.
		They could either in a very dictatorial fashion simply illuminate whatever the problem is, including us, and say, okay, that's that, we're done.
		Or perhaps if they think it's enough here worth salvaging, and that's a good question mark, they might give us a little pra and say, okay, well, here's the purpose and why, and blah, blah, blah.
		I think, though, that we're designed, that as part of the macro design, we're supposed to kind of swobble amongst ourselves and sort of make a mess and then see if we can clean up the mess and go, you know, clumsily, if you will.
		There is, you know, I'm sorry to say.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		May I ask a question?
unidentified		Sure.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		What is the process of evolution, do you think?
		What does it bring?
		Does it bring benevolence as you proceed, or does it bring a simple, cold, hard logic?
		And I speak now as one who would be looking at our development.
charles ostman ▲ ● ▼		I think both examples exist out there in the universe, and each flavors.
charles ostman ▲ ● ▼		It's a series of branching structures, like I was saying at the very beginning of all this.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		So then it depends on who arrives.
charles ostman ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, yeah, I think it does.
		And at the same time, it depends on what we can learn within a very short amount of time versus the learning tools that are being allowed to be fed into the public world now.
		I mean, the school I'm teaching at, FF State, they've got this wonderful media lab there.
		And the guy who runs it, a very nice fellow by the name of Terry Tommy, by the way, he's the technology director there.
		He and I have a very similar focus on how he wants to use these conveyance tools, you know, 3D interactive environments and verbal and all these wonderful kind of content-based ways of delivering experiential content as a knowledge conveyance process that couldn't be had any other way.
		You know, he heard me talking, he said, wow, you know, like, this is me.
		We just had this sort of instantaneous recognition that this was the value.
		If enough folks like that are in positions of academic interest, let's say, and they can open the doors to enough people that are the movers and shakers that are going to sort of construct the fabric of the virtual terraform, yeah, there is a potential where the benign aspects of this really can be brought to play.
		I would at least like to be one of the participants on that benign side of the fence.
		But from the hard, cold reality, as you put it, statistically, are we above the 50% mark?
		No, probably not.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Probably not.
charles ostman ▲ ● ▼		But we still deserve the chance to try it.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		First time caller line, you're on the air with Charles Osman.
unidentified		Hi.
		Hi, Larry.
		Thanks for taking my call.
charles ostman ▲ ● ▼		It's a pleasure to be on the air with two such learned gentlemen.
		Well, the delusion of learnedness, perhaps.
		I think everybody's learning the best they can.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, there is everything you've said, but there's also, you might be wrong.
charles ostman ▲ ● ▼		That's exactly right.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Anyway, caller, go ahead.
unidentified		Well, look, I'd really like to make a couple comments to start off.
unidentified		And one of them is I think that it is really very important that we use our technology to enrich the quality of our lives.
charles ostman ▲ ● ▼		I couldn't agree more.
unidentified		And not let it run us around.
unidentified		As far as Art's question to you about how far down the line do you think that this sentient being is going to come into existence, I think probably five years back.
charles ostman ▲ ● ▼		Actually, depending upon the particular qualifiers you would add to the form and to say this qualifies with a threshold, yeah, you're probably right.
		And I can tell you why.
		Because enhanced decision rendering under duress is a very, very specific target goal that a number of development teams was being paid a bottom-up pit budget to solve.
		I can give you one example and others I can't because they're classified, but one that I sort of can allude to just tangentially.
		At the ICS down in Los Angeles, I saw an example of a synthetic environment populated with, get this now, 10,000 synthetic sentient entities.
		These were little dots on the screen, but they represented individual soldiers who, acting as autonomous agents, you know, were dealing with real battlefield-like conditions.
		They had little squadrons with the commanders and the little groups that were running around and do things.
		The model they're going for this year, 50,000.
		That's a computational problem.
		That's a real eyeball scratcher, but they're doing it.
unidentified		And can I ask, since you have such extensive scientific background, your opinion on someone, say like at the home brew level, for example, being able to access technology just from an electronic store?
charles ostman ▲ ● ▼		The home brew level is going to be as follows.
		It's going to be a functionality matrix that you connect to with a box that's smarter than the one that you've got now.
		But the intelligence at the box size is only going to be to sort of facilitate the interface in the localized process engine that connects to an easily scalable process engine out there.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		But what bothers me about all this now, if you project the present state of this growing web of the internet that we've got, and you were to project even a fraction of the number of troublemakers out there.
unidentified		Oh, yeah.
charles ostman ▲ ● ▼		I understand this.
charles ostman ▲ ● ▼		I addressed a crowd of visiting Japanese dignitaries at a facility called the World Internet Center about half a year ago in San Francisco.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Can we pick up on this after the bottom of the hour?
charles ostman ▲ ● ▼		Sure, of course.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right, Charles Ossman is my guest.
		Stay right where you are.
		This is CBC and I'm Art Bell.
unidentified		I see trees of green, red and blue.
		I see them blue, but we knew.
		And I think to myself, what a wonderful world.
		I see skies of blue, clouds of white, the bright red to see.
		Dark sleeping night, and I think to myself, what a wonderful world.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		and what sounds like science fiction, but I can assure you is not, except perhaps in the minds of those who are hearing it projected to its natural future course.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Charles Ostman will be right back.
unidentified		The End.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		We're going to come full circle, I think, in this last half hour with Charles.
		And Charles, the question is: would you please rephrase what you discussed earlier about changing human belief systems?
		In other words, with input given to a person through virtual reality at its highest state right now.
		Okay, well, that you can actually destroy or change a person's belief system in a relatively short amount of time.
charles ostman ▲ ● ▼		Well, I call them belief barriers, and different types of belief barriers are driven by different types of cognitive cues.
		So yes, a lot of work's gone under this.
		I mean, there are some very serious efforts and then more light-hearted efforts in terms of game developers and people who want to create interactive remote environments in entertainment specifically.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Oh, you're drifting away from the phone again.
charles ostman ▲ ● ▼		But the general idea is that certain types of cues can get your attention or enrapture you in some way so that you abandon other cues.
		Here's, gosh, I'm trying to cram a very complicated answer into a couple of sentences.
		Reality as you see it to be is like an ear that wraps around you.
		You look with your eyes or hear with your ears, you have other sensory inputs that collectively says, this is the stuff I believe to be here.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Here's where I am, here's what's going on.
charles ostman ▲ ● ▼		Right.
		When you go into an immersive environment, you go in there willingly, already sort of predetermined to want to sort of engage yourself with this other stuff that's out there.
		And depending upon how well that environment was designed, it doesn't have to be photorealistic or anything like this.
		It just depends on how your attention is drawn to a particular event.
		And I suggest, even though the majority of interactive entertainment products up until recently have all been more or less for the adolescent male whose primary interest in life was, can I blow something up or can I drive the fast car or can I fly my airplane, the reward for participation was based upon some kind of score-driven, very rapid, very biokinetically-oriented strategy with a sort of a military overtone to it.
		You know, can I kill them before they kill me?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		That kind of thing.
charles ostman ▲ ● ▼		And I'm suggesting to you that in the very near future, the reward for participation is going to be the depth of emotional engagement with the other entities that are in this world that you've now decided to become part of.
		And with that kind of a cue, believe me, the invocational rapture, as I put it, has a far more compelling, you know, it's like layers of an energy.
		It reaches right inside of you, and you actually become really enamored to what's going on there.
		This is the hope.
		This is the kind of design strategy that people have in mind.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Do you ever worry about getting burned at the stake?
charles ostman ▲ ● ▼		I'm not suggesting.
		Well, if you want to hear the really sort of sleazy bottom feeders end of this whole thing, there are people out there that whose whole enterprises, how can we make a virtual shopping mall where the agent slash avatar entity uses very,
		very clever sort of Roshar chart sort of psychographic measurement processes to kind of steer you through the store, get you to buy all this stuff, especially if you've got an online interactive real-time credit card transactional exchange movement, which is what they have in mind.
		And people who are addicted to credit cards now are just out there in the physical world.
		This is like heroin or something.
		This is like pumping the needle right into the vein.
		And do I like what I'm seeing coming along these lines?
		No.
		I mean, I agree that how does one craft some kind of content regulatory set of rules?
		I cringe when I think about First Right Amendments being violated and so on, and yet I do understand all too well what this website of this coin could look like.
		So I don't have an exact answer, but I think over time this is one of the tests that we are being collectively forced to endure.
unidentified		All right.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Wild Cardline, you're on the air with Charles Oswin.
unidentified		Hi.
		Good evening, Art.
		This is by far one of the best guests in Arthur Malachir Martin.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, glad you're enjoying.
unidentified		It is just phenomenal.
		I want to ask Dr. Osgood what he thinks the timeline is before these.
		I'm sure many of these things are already occurring clandestinely.
		What does he think the timeline is on something like the ability to spray one's roof with a substance that would be a photovoltic cell?
		And what would happen to the power structure of the power companies, et cetera?
		The amount of, the horrible amount of, they would be absolutely against this, the oil companies.
		And I'm just wondering if the way to do it would be to put it out on the net like you have Microsoft Word, you download it, and you pay a certain amount, and that way we cut these buggers out of the picture.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right.
		The first question, one thing at a time here.
		The timeline to something like you described, that pays.
charles ostman ▲ ● ▼		Well, that material already exists.
		I mean, in fact, it has existed for some time.
		They keep producing better versions of it because the lifetime of the material, it's UV sensitive and so on, degrades, rippley seasons of exposure, and it essentially falls apart, but it's so cheap that you can just replace it and throw the old ones away.
		So that's just a matter of degree.
		In terms of the larger picture, the decentralization of these control systems, and I think that's what the guest is.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		You're the guest.
charles ostman ▲ ● ▼		He's the guest.
		It's a little bit like yes.
		The point being that there will be no absolutes.
		I see it all as a series of gradients, that depending upon the type of commodity in question, there will be a certain surrendering to a less centralized process of distribution.
		Now, the oil companies aren't necessarily going to be so bent on the photovoltaic paint, if you want to call it that.
		Although it's not exactly the right term of words, the polymer really.
		That's fine.
		But the thing that might get their ire a little more on Edge, if superconductive motors could be made cheaply and effectively to the point where a very small couple of batteries like you would have in a car now, see the electric cars you have now are hopeless.
		They're completely out of the picture.
		They take 3,000 pounds of batteries and the motors are very inefficient and you get 100 miles of radius and that's about it.
		It's completely stupid.
		But if you had a motor with superconductive windings in it, hey, then all of a sudden a solar panel and a couple of batteries, you're in business.
		Now that, that would really get the attention of a whole bunch of folks whose power base and status phone, yes, would be turned upside down.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, they probably wouldn't hesitate to turn you upside down in a more physical sense.
charles ostman ▲ ● ▼		Yes, and I can tell you specifically that one of my students in the National Ad System was with DOE, Department of Energy.
		Back in the late 70s, we had been playing around with a material called nitinol.
		It's a shape-changing alloy.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		What does that do?
charles ostman ▲ ● ▼		Well, it performed the process of being a thermal to kinetic converter, i.e.
		the crystals in the metal could be cycled between a hot phase and a cold phase and would perform work in both directions.
		We built solar-powered motors.
		I have one here in my basement.
		It's one of the few that still exists.
		We proved, you know, through a series of experiments that were quite valid, that given enough resource and a few more engineers and so on, we could essentially build engines that could run off of hot and cold water.
		The thermal grating between a black body collector and, say, well water worked quite effectively.
		But, I was there.
		I physically was there.
		I did it.
		I actually have one since here in my house now, just a little small model of one.
		They not only terminated the project, this is DLE mind you, they not only terminated the project, all records of its existence were scoured clean.
		I mean, this was from this building called Special Projects, and they just, you know, the file counts were taken away, all the night and all stuff was taken away.
		My friend who directed the project actually went off and started a company called China Alloy, where they now make, you were asking earlier some time ago, about the devices that go through the bloodstream and scour out plaque and that sort of thing.
		Well, they make little micromotors and things of that size using the shape-changing alloy as the actuator component.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, you see, their actions imply that they understand clearly the implications of that technology, which implies to me that they already have that technology and they saw you coming up on something that they weren't ready for you to come up on.
charles ostman ▲ ● ▼		Well, and I'm not suggesting you're wrong about that.
charles ostman ▲ ● ▼		And to the caller's credit, I think what he's trying to get at is could the Internet be used as a kind of a liberation tool so that you don't have these controls.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Absolutely correct.
charles ostman ▲ ● ▼		And I'm saying I'm with you on that one.
		I would very much like to support that way of thinking.
		Can we protect the autonomy of the net long enough to maintain it?
		That's a question mark.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, I think we may be past the point of no return.
		I hope we are.
		First time caller line, you're on the air with Charles Osman.
		Hi.
unidentified		Paul from Phoenix.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yes, sir.
unidentified		Yes.
		Bless you for having people like Dr. Charles on that the intellectual flow.
		If only we had friends around more that we could talk with.
		There's a couple things here, and then I have a question for him.
		But it's interesting.
		About three years ago, I was talking with somebody that was talking about organic rug.
		Rugs that if you dropped food on it, it would gobble it up.
		Coming in the future sometime when we can get this whole thing more together, you see, it would gobble up dust, just small particles that wouldn't nibble your toes or anything.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Is that possible, Joe?
charles ostman ▲ ● ▼		Well, this is what Shor Hall's thing was all about.
		Shore Hall, I'm sorry.
		He has this thing called the foglet theory, and he has this whole paradigm, these little nanomechanical gases that are like dust particles themselves.
		They just drift around, and they're designed to sort of like encounter something and neutralize it.
		It could be microbes, it could be dust particles, it could be any number of things that these foglets are sort of designed to encounter and then in some way make them less harmful than they currently are.
		He also, of course, has gone into quite a bit of theoretical concepts about how to have foglets that assemble on queue to a macro object that can sort of, you know, in a benign way do something, neutralize something else that's undesirable.
		Nobody has done this yet, but at least the thinking has gone to the direction.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		In that direction.
		The only problem with that, of course, and the thing that worries me is, here it is, ladies and gentlemen, the rug that eats food that gets spilled, little particles of dust and all the rest of it.
		But then somehow, ten years later, something horribly goes wrong with the rug and it kills every living thing on it.
charles ostman ▲ ● ▼		Well, this is the whole point.
		And I mean, that might be kind of a comical example, but I can see where things like, and I've had people come to me with all kinds of ideas.
		They want to have clothes where the cloth changes color like it's million.
		I mean, in the nano world, sure, why not?
		What the heck?
		You could have shape-changing dinnerware that, you know, instead of a cup, it becomes a saucer or something.
		Well, I don't know.
		I mean, it's just completely ridiculous.
		But you cross a certain threshold, and it's like, well, anything goes.
		But as I said at the very beginning of the program, every time you encounter another one's increments, just remember, there's always a risk value, and the size of the gain usually is matched rather exactly by the size of the risk value.
		All right.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		East of the Rockies, you're on the air with Charles Osman.
unidentified		Hi.
charles ostman ▲ ● ▼		Good morning, gentlemen.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Good morning.
charles ostman ▲ ● ▼		All right.
		About an hour ago, you had a caller from Inside the Beltway who was just gloom and doom.
		He was frightened to death by these things.
		I think that's a reflection of where he's located and possibly his job.
		You know, a lot of these concepts have been covered in science fiction previously.
		The Stardance trilogy by Spider and Jeannie Robinson comes clearly to mind.
		The opposite of a terrorist is a rapturist.
		The opposite of someone who would use these technologies for destruction is someone who would blithely use them to make everybody rich and make everybody happy.
		And that's a sign of higher intelligence as far as I'm seeing.
		Well, in a sense, I think you're right.
		And the people that come to my class, I've given a number of lectures, and I've traveled or I've gone to other conferences and so on.
		And when I give one of my talks, what interests me is this really broad and diverse range of people that come in from really completely seemingly unrelated aspects of life, from serious scientists to social workers to people that just do ordinary daily work, but they have a particular philosophy that seems to match and connect well with this vision.
		And what you're saying kind of makes sense, i.e., if we weren't interfered with by powers that be that don't like their apple cartoning etc, yes, this could be the implementation task.
		But this is kind of where the un and the end of this whole process comes in.
		Technically, is it possible to enrich the daily life of the average person via this technology matrix?
		Absolutely.
		I'd love to do that.
		But will we be allowed to?
		Well, there is a bit of an already used the word war.
		That could be a little strong, but yes, I kind of.
		I don't think so.
		It could be a serious one, yes.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		West of the Rockies, you're on the air with Charles Osman.
unidentified		Hi.
		Hi.
		I'm calling from the Weimar on the Lamet up here in Portland.
		My name is Sandra.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yes, sir.
unidentified		Cassandra.
		Yes, judging from what's coming out of Berkeley in the past, like, you know, the nuclear testing, the plutonium you stuck up to the black porter's leg, you know, that he had to live with.
		He didn't even check up on him for, you know, 25 years he lived with it and finally died.
		And then this ice lady from Lawrence Livermore lab on Hazel O'Barry's hearing.
		You know, the black lady, his daughter was on there saying, you know, she doesn't want to hear how this guy was a hero for the Cold War.
		And then her exiting statement there was, he sure was a hero of the Cold War.
		This is what you people do.
		Nothing is ever good has ever come out of Berkeley or Stanford.
		If you look into the background of who those people, who those institutions are named for, your new spiritualism is sickening.
		The curriculums that have come out of Stanford are totally sickening.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right.
unidentified		I don't know.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Ma'am, hold on.
unidentified		You think you're a new little god, but nuclear religion.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Ma'am, ma'am.
		Ma'am, this is art.
		This is art.
		Ma'am, would you pause?
		Ma'am, I'm going to turn you down until you pause.
		I don't want to hang up on you.
		Will you pause for a moment, please?
unidentified		Yes.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right.
		I think you've got a lot out.
		Let them respond.
charles ostman ▲ ● ▼		Well, I'm very sorry.
charles ostman ▲ ● ▼		I mean, in a very, very broad, generalized sense, I can sort of get the sense of the emotional sort of off-the-edge kind of affect it.
unidentified		Oh, yes, I'm not sure.
unidentified		Off the edge, right?
charles ostman ▲ ● ▼		But you have no idea who I am personally.
charles ostman ▲ ● ▼		You have no idea what I've done.
unidentified		You have to conditionalize my work.
		Are you at Rockville Institute or Litton?
		more Lytton's the one that popularized that synergism craft.
		It proves that 2 and 2 is 5.
		I'm reading it right here in the sovereign state of ITT.
		I'm reading all these books.
		You know, I missed out on the 60s.
		I was blissed out or something.
		But I'm going over this whole Earth catalog, this new Millennium edition, and every horrible, you know, this facilitator and group think and everything is this whole religion you're putting out.
		Like if you're going to save the world, you never saved the world.
		You're not going to do it.
charles ostman ▲ ● ▼		I'm not putting out anything.
unidentified		The whole earth fashion.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Ma'am, look, I'm leaving you on.
		At least let it be a conversation.
		Please let it be a conversation, ma'am.
		I don't want to have to hang up on you.
		Pause every now and then.
charles ostman ▲ ● ▼		I can always say that I feel sorry for the caller because I think that she's been so overwhelmed, perhaps, by an incredibly diverse range of stuff that she's suddenly absorbed.
charles ostman ▲ ● ▼		In other words, it's difficult to argue with anyone if, A, there's a lack of cohesive logic, if you will, and B, people have to be able to do that.
unidentified		And you are so intelligent.
		You are the virus.
		You are the cancer.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, now, there she said something.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Charles, have you thought about that?
charles ostman ▲ ● ▼		Actually, my response might be a fault, and I can't talk if she's going to blast from my ears.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		No, I'm not going to let her do that, but she said something significant.
		She said, you are the virus.
		You are the cancer.
		Have you ever thought that maybe you are?
charles ostman ▲ ● ▼		I think that people, because they see a symbol of something, they blom onto this entire world and say, oh, okay, that's the orifice to which all this evil comes.
charles ostman ▲ ● ▼		The reality is, I'll follow, and I'm going to do the best I can.
unidentified		Where do you get your money?
		You get your money from politicians and these corporate foundations.
		Where do you get your money to do this horrible research?
charles ostman ▲ ● ▼		Actually, the research that is being done that I'm part of.
unidentified		And you'll probably cause talk to topic.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, now hold on.
		He's trying to answer your question.
		The money that you do your work with comes from.
charles ostman ▲ ● ▼		Okay.
charles ostman ▲ ● ▼		It usually is trying to be oriented towards solving a problem of some kind.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		No, it comes from.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Where does the money come from?
charles ostman ▲ ● ▼		In today's world, it comes mostly from consortia.
unidentified		The Rockefeller Foundation.
unidentified		The Carnegie Foundation, the Ford Foundation.
charles ostman ▲ ● ▼		No, I haven't gotten money from the Ford Foundation.
unidentified		The Kettering Foundation.
unidentified		How did they put that money toward the national debt and get us out of debt for paying for this kind of research?
charles ostman ▲ ● ▼		Well, all I can say is that...
unidentified		And then you come, you have the gar to stand down there and have your sex orgies in public and you're saving the world.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Sex orgies.
charles ostman ▲ ● ▼		I really can't respond to any of these.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, sex orgies went too far.
charles ostman ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
		But, you know, I can sense a frustration.
		I know how it is when people are sort of in an isolated world and they just see this huge plethora of something they kind of go like they can't grapple on.
		They had an easy point of reference.
		And the thing I might want to share, just to respond in the best way possible.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, she, look, she went off the deep end, but the one comment that I really thought was a relevant question, and one that you probably ought to think about yourself, was whether you are, in fact, the cancer, the virus.
charles ostman ▲ ● ▼		I'll respond the following way.
		When I was doing some work at Livermore and people that I knew from that environment, and we were designing components for some of the SEI switches, the thought was, oh, God, we're the death mongeres.
		We're causing all this horrible stuff to occur.
		And especially if somebody lives a bomb in the park.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		What she was saying.
charles ostman ▲ ● ▼		Okay, fine.
		The response is that no, we were the surgeons who were trying to create the best precise machines to neutralize the other machines that could be pressed upon it, that would, in fact, cause death.
		Are you sure?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, are you sure?
charles ostman ▲ ● ▼		That was the car and golf.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Okay, but Charles, are you sure that that was not the delusional psychology that was delivered to you in order that you might do what you were doing, justify in your own mind what you were doing?
		Listen, I guess we're not done.
		You want to hold on?
charles ostman ▲ ● ▼		Oh, sure, I'll hang.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right, all right.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Charles Ostman is my guest, and we're talking about nanotechnology and more.
unidentified		Star Wars.
		Star Wars.
		Art Bell is taking calls on the wildcard line at 702-727-1295.
		That's 702-727-1295.
		First-time callers can reach Art Bell at 702-727-1222.
		702-727-1222.
		Now, here again, Art Bell.
		Art Bell.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right, we're now going back to Charles Osman.
		On the part of that lady, again, Charles, is there, do you acknowledge the possibility that the route you've been talking about, the science route, the one she complained bitterly about and finally lost it altogether, might be the wrong route and that the right route, the one we're supposed to be on, is not a scientific route.
		It's not one that leads to molecular manipulation, but one that is spiritual instead.
charles ostman ▲ ● ▼		I think it should be both.
		And that's, I think, where that woman sailor from was.
		She was so completely overwhelmed and just absolutely, you know, everything was this horrible thing.
		Nothing is an absolute.
		Things are always taken and balanced.
		And I think that if you try to go down one path to the extreme exclusion of another, that in and of itself is a flaw, that's sort of like a design flaw, if you will, and that's the failure point of the organism.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Here's kind of an interesting question for you, and then we're back to the phones.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Dear Art, could you please ask Charles how soon, if ever, he could envision time travel through the use of nanotechnology?
charles ostman ▲ ● ▼		Well, that's a very obtuse question, but I appreciate what the person's going after.
charles ostman ▲ ● ▼		I think I said back in the first hour that one of the real attributes of nanotechnology is the idea that you can build materials you can't build now.
unidentified		Right.
charles ostman ▲ ● ▼		And the whole idea of being able to contrive gravity well events, et cetera.
		Well, I think in general, although again, this is not the area physics I'm familiar with, the theory being that once you've crossed into this other domain where you can sort of bend gravity and bend time, yeah, at that point, time and gravity are sort of interchangeable.
		I wouldn't rule it out, but I'm not qualified to get it.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		That's right.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I think mainstream science has determined that at the event horizon of a black hole, for example, time travel would indeed be possible.
charles ostman ▲ ● ▼		I think the interpretation that I'm willing to accept, and I've heard a whole handful of them, is that a black hole is sort of like a perforation into another dimension, or another dimension set, you might say.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yes.
charles ostman ▲ ● ▼		And there all of a sudden time becomes a singularity.
charles ostman ▲ ● ▼		You know, a million light years suddenly happens with a blink of an eye.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		So if you could create then an artificial event horizon...
charles ostman ▲ ● ▼		at the And who knows?
		I mean, wormholes and all these kind of things?
		Absolutely.
		I think it's another one of those sort of no-holes bars where once you cross a certain threshold and suck a Pandora spot, all these things happen on the side.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right.
		Wildcard Line, you're on there with Charles Osman.
		Good morning.
unidentified		Hello, Charles.
charles ostman ▲ ● ▼		Hello, Art.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I'm Doug, the G-Man from Clovis, California.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yes, sir.
charles ostman ▲ ● ▼		I was kind of a little upset, especially the way that one caller, whatever her name was, lost control, because I really know what she's talking about.
unidentified		I don't, well, forget about all that.
charles ostman ▲ ● ▼		I have a question.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		See, because I believe that nanotechnology is a reality.
charles ostman ▲ ● ▼		In some flavors, it's already being done, yes.
charles ostman ▲ ● ▼		So, considering if that is a reality, do you realize what we have done?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, I think he does.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Or what we do.
unidentified		That's why she got so upset.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, I know.
charles ostman ▲ ● ▼		It's your book, Art, The Quickening.
unidentified		Let's get ding, ding, ding.
charles ostman ▲ ● ▼		I know.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Your book is the horn, Art, because, well, if you want to comment, though, or if you want me to, if you just comment, I'll ask you to ask me.
		No, I'll ask another question.
		Oh, I'm glad to comment.
		No, my book is the horn.
		I know that.
		But I don't know what it is that we're blowing to warn about.
		I'm not sure whether it's this or something else.
		I don't come to those conclusions.
		I'm just a talk show host.
		So, yeah, that's what my book is.
		But I don't have the answers.
		I'm smart enough to know I don't have the answers.
		Anyway, you've got another question?
charles ostman ▲ ● ▼		Well, I would just comment on that to say that it's a call to reality, no matter what you believe.
		My purpose for trying to communicate this stuff at all, because I'll tell you flat out, most of the people I work with and or have become familiar with, they don't talk at all.
		They see me as being kind of out there because I mean, willingly try.
		I feel compelled to want to try because I feel it's an obligation to do so.
		I feel like I'm coming from other worlds, almost like Marco Polo or something, or some other domain, and I bring little trinkets back and say, well, look at this little thing that I catch up as a kind of a symbolic reference to this other realm out there that you might want to know about.
		I don't necessarily have to do this, but I feel if I've been allowed the privilege to have been experienced all these different parallel development streams, and there's a handful of folks that sort of have this kind of broad-based, multi-threaded technical background, but at the same time feel the desire and perhaps have the, I don't know, the sense of articulating to bring it out into the outside world.
		If I've been allowed that gift, or whatever you want to call it, then I feel like it's my obligation to try to use it in some kind of way.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, I'm glad you're here, if that's what it comes down to.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		East in the Rockies, you're on the air with Charles Osman.
charles ostman ▲ ● ▼		Hi.
unidentified		Hello.
charles ostman ▲ ● ▼		This is Joe from Sunday Bay, Canada.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Hi, Joe.
unidentified		Hi, yeah.
charles ostman ▲ ● ▼		Well, I'd like to make two comments, if I may first.
charles ostman ▲ ● ▼		Sure.
unidentified		Okay, well, it goes with the other callers.
		Well, the one part is what I believe is that if Charles wasn't doing this and the people with Charles, there would be the other people, and everybody's looking at the bad things.
		Well, they could use those bad things against us.
		If you look at the power, do you follow me?
charles ostman ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, no, I follow that what we're saying.
		And I think that the folks that I hang around with her, try to hang around with her if possible, are the benign side, if you want to call it that.
		I can say to the, on behalf of the woman who was granting raving, yeah, there is a really dark side out there.
		I completely understand this.
		And what made it so sad was that she was so blinded by that sense that she was completely incapable of trying to sort out that there are individual human beings that, God help us all, at least there's a handful of them in there, who do see that we have to correctly manage this arena that we're about to be thrust into.
		Otherwise, all bets are off.
		And so for all, you know, I try to encourage as many people as possible who might take an interest in some of this to become informed, underline the word informed, participants.
unidentified		And my other comment was, well, just sort of in defense or whatever of what I believe, that pretty much everything, and I don't mean this to offend anybody, but even religion, you know, can be scary.
unidentified		Oh, yeah, it's used the wrong way.
charles ostman ▲ ● ▼		It's used the wrong way.
unidentified		Absolutely.
charles ostman ▲ ● ▼		I agree with that completely.
unidentified		Everything.
		But my question is, with the technology, what do you think?
		What do you see for, say, with disabilities and whatnot for people?
charles ostman ▲ ● ▼		Oh, I think it's tremendously possible.
		I mean, I'll give you a good example of this.
		Spinal injuries.
		You were asking some time ago about binding neural tissue to artificial devices.
		This has been done for years now.
		Gregory Pozak over here at Stanford at the Integrated System Development Group has been doing this for several years.
		There's a person by the name of Peter Fromhert, the Maxwell Science Institute in Germany, who's doing this.
		There's a company actually called, what's simply BCI Inspire, both as a service can now provide, if you walk in the door and say, here's a silicon device or some other device that has microscale features and I want to entice neural fibers to actually bond to these items and have them useful in some kind of sensory prosthesis or neural repair kind of capacity, you know, you just tell them the spec and they essentially manufacture the device for you on demand.
		In fact, IEEE Spectrum published a piece about three and a half, four months ago on retinal implants.
		That's an area I've been looking to myself for some time.
		The University of Utah tried a teacher several years ago.
		In fact, the NIH has been financing or supporting neural prosthesis systems going back 12, 13, 14 years.
		The problems that are most often encountered, in fact, I just gave a talk in Texas along with a couple of other fellows, including the developer of the copier implant.
		And we had a very long chat afterwards.
		The talk was over, Dr. Robert Shannon is the name.
		And the idea is not so much can we get the right biocompatibility interface between device X and tissue X. Usually, particularly with nerve bundles, can we find the right nerves and quickly get them to hook up in the right way?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Right, but when we get really down to manipulation at the molecular level.
charles ostman ▲ ● ▼		Oh, that's a whole different story.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Then, for example.
		Sure.
		If somebody were to lose an arm, could we grow an arm?
charles ostman ▲ ● ▼		Theoretically, that would be the thought, yeah.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		West of the Rockies, you're on the air with Charles Osman, hi.
unidentified		Yeah, this is Andrew, calling from Fresno, California.
unidentified		I would just like to comment to Charles that I believe that it's possible that such a device may already exist in outer space.
charles ostman ▲ ● ▼		What kind of a device?
unidentified		The intelligent molecular interdimensional machine.
charles ostman ▲ ● ▼		I couldn't really say.
unidentified		Well, I feel that in the first chapter of Ezekiel that he described something very similar to this.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Wheels within wheels, eh?
unidentified		Wheels within wheels.
unidentified		I read it in the Hebrew Chaldee Dictionary and it came across.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, but it's a matter, sir, thank you, of interpretation, which is exactly what it is, interpretation.
		Wheels within wheels, maybe.
		Maybe it refers to that.
		Maybe it refers to something completely different.
		First time call our line.
		You're on the air with Charles Ossman.
unidentified		Hi.
		Hi, Art.
		This is Don in Austin, Texas.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Hi, Don.
charles ostman ▲ ● ▼		And I've noticed the last few months, ever since I first heard the term the quickening, I guess my first thought was that it was something out of Highlander the movie or something.
		But once, I mean, since the months have passed on, I do definitely see what you're talking about.
		First, with the discovery, well, I won't call it a discovery, but the whole deal with cloning and everything and the whole ethical issue behind cloning.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Oh, my, yes.
charles ostman ▲ ● ▼		I wonder how quickly someone would say, no, it's wrong, it's bad.
		Speaking of nanotechnology, if they were faced with some kind of deathly illness, you know, something that could kill them, and maybe they've lost an arm or something like that.
		What you're trying to say is it's very easy to armchair and say, okay, because of these high moral standards, you have to obey law expert for me personally, well, I want that arm.
		You know, obviously.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, let me give you a very good example.
		There was a public service announcement that was running not very long ago, folks, that said, and I'm going to have to paraphrase it, but it was a guy who needed a heart transplant.
		And he was discussing, so I bet you heard this.
		He was discussing with his doctor about the heart transplant.
		And he said, oh, just, Doc, one thing.
		I don't want a heart from a Jew.
		I don't want a heart from a black guy.
		I don't want a heart from an American native.
		You know, it's got to be a white guy's heart.
		And the doc said, well, then you're going to die.
		And he immediately did a little rethinking on the subject.
		So there you are.
		Anyway, Charles, onward.
charles ostman ▲ ● ▼		Sure.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Wildcard line, you're on the air with Charles Osmond.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Hello.
unidentified		Hi, this is Kim, the trucker from Las Vegas.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yes, sir.
unidentified		Yeah, I just want to ask, Mr. Osmond, have you ever met the Andromeda strain or spear?
charles ostman ▲ ● ▼		Well, I've been quite.
		I've read Andromeda's strain.
		I think I know where you're going with this.
		You're saying, my gosh, if we hatch a clasybrow component for intracellular corrective chemistry, could the thing mutate and suddenly end life as you know?
unidentified		Sure.
charles ostman ▲ ● ▼		Those are the risks versus, and I'm not saying we should do that.
		I'm just saying in the ruminations of theoretical considerations as to how things could be done, viruses do provide an interesting framework with which to build some kind of molecular scale machine that could perform tests.
		But has anyone done this yet?
unidentified		Okay, but would we even want to try?
charles ostman ▲ ● ▼		Probably not.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Okay, but suppose you were doing that kind of work.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Wouldn't you literally have to be inside a level four type in the middle?
charles ostman ▲ ● ▼		Oh, absolutely.
		You're not kidding.
		This is at the extreme outer frontier of biohazard standards.
		Absolutely.
		No question about it.
		And I would, you know, I myself would not want to encourage this.
		I'm only saying that in the, you know, we have to understand, you're looking at such an enormous range of options.
		You go, okay, well, here's problem X. Could this be a solution worth considering?
		What's the potential risk exposure?
		Okay, does the risk exposure outweigh the gain exposure?
		And or, you know, in what context could the risk exposure be managed?
		Chances are they'll probably never do this.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, I don't know about that.
		Suppose, for example, you're working on a manipulation that would turn a switch that would stop cancer cells from growing.
		Well, that's the upside.
		That's the upside.
		The possible downside could be something that would race around the globe in a day or two and literally knock everybody off.
		So do you go to work into a level four environment and begin work on that kind of thing?
		Or do you say, no, I don't want anything to do with that?
charles ostman ▲ ● ▼		I'll tell you what scares me about that kind of a scenario.
		And that's not that far off from the kind of scenario I personally have kind of trepidations about.
		Here in this country, or let's say in most sort of stabilized Western countries where you have some motto of everyone within the community sort of knows each other, there's a sense of community sort of, more or less, in that domain, probably not.
		It would definitely be something where somebody might be playing inside of a secure facility, but they would just play and get that far.
		But in some other country, perhaps, where the standards weren't quite that tightly maintained, where the interstitial bureaucracy that deals with this kind of stuff.
		Iraq, or whatever.
		God help us.
		In that environment, I could see a biohazard suddenly popping up where they don't particularly care if the results are benign or not.
		They just kind of want to make a go of it and see how it turns out.
		That to me is really, you know, we have enough, you want to get scared about something.
		Right now we have from the former Soviet bloc, especially from Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan, areas of that nature, this unbelievable flood of nuclear components and former nuclear scientists.
		I mean, the Pandora, talk about Pandora's blocks, we've gone way beyond that edge.
		And this is really frightening.
		And I think that we have any number of Tinhorn dictators and or their cohorts that even now, you know, they've got some stuff bashed away.
		If they wanted to make a bomb, they probably could under duress.
		Biologicals.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Bad guys with oil money.
charles ostman ▲ ● ▼		Bad guys with oil money.
		And so you translate biologicals in that picture.
		That's where something really bad could happen.
		That's my personal take on that.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		What about treaties?
		Useless, huh?
		They're talking about a chemical ban on.
		It's ridiculous.
charles ostman ▲ ● ▼		It's so ridiculous.
charles ostman ▲ ● ▼		I mean, it's not only ridiculous, but it kind of, how am I going to phrase this carefully, it shows how inept we are in even understanding what's at stake.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, you're exactly right.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		First time caller line, you're on the air with Charles Osman.
unidentified		Hi.
charles ostman ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, this is Freeman out in the middle of the South Dakota Prairie.
		Yes, sir.
		I am so fascinated with this.
		I had premonitions about this about 25 years ago, what a person could do with a computer.
		And I am enjoying this.
		I only get to listen to you when I'm on the road because I'm self-employed and I make garbage dumpsters out here in the middle of nowhere.
		And I am so fascinated that some of these premonitions that I've had such a long time ago are coming true.
unidentified		My heart's a thumping and I got goosebumps.
unidentified		I'm really enjoying this, and I just enjoy your show, all the pieces.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, thank you.
		I'll accept that.
		Thank you.
		And I guess no question.
		Wildcard line, you're on the air with Charles Osman.
		Hi.
unidentified		Well, hi, good morning, Art.
		Good morning.
		This is Bob in Las Vegas.
		Hello, Bob.
		Charles, I've been interested in nanotechnology for four or five years now.
		The one question that I don't think you've answered yet tonight, and I'm really curious about, is how do you go about manipulating the molecules and the atoms at that level that you can't see them?
		What kind of answer is that you can't come up with a very good question that I have to answer for you.
charles ostman ▲ ● ▼		All right, this is a nanotech 101, and it's very understandable, and it's unanswerable.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right, hold on, hold on.
		Both of you, hold on.
		I'm going to hold you both over until after the break.
		Is that satisfactory?
charles ostman ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, that's fine, sure.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right.
		It's going to take a pretty good answer, I suspect.
		How do you do that?
		How do you, how do you manipulate something you can't see?
		But something so important, something so small, so important, that when you do manipulate it, you have a machine of creation.
		I can about hear that lady's answer to that right now, can't you?
		From the high desert, I'm Ardell, and this is the Independent American CBC Radio Network.
		Thank you.
unidentified		The subject, well, it's kind of varied.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		From the Internet, growing into what it's going to be shortly, to nanotechnology, which would seem to have no limit in terms of discussion about what we can do.
		The question is, what should we do?
		And there it will go.
		Caller, are you still there?
charles ostman ▲ ● ▼		I'm still there.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right.
		I want to be sure your question is laid out again.
		And you really did ask, how in the world can you manipulate something you can't even see?
		Is that about right?
unidentified		Yeah.
		Well, you know, atoms and molecules.
		You know, I can visualize it happening, but with the technology that I'm aware of, how do you go about it?
		Is it chemical process, electrical?
charles ostman ▲ ● ▼		Actually, you not only mentioned both, but this is kind of a riddle.
		I don't need to be a toy, but in fact, the answer is more simple than you might imagine.
		The same device that looks at the molecules also can use them.
		And this is where it gets really interesting.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		What is the device that looks at it?
charles ostman ▲ ● ▼		Okay.
		There's two different flavors, if you will.
		There's the STM and the AFM.
		The AFM is an atomic force microscope, and the STM is a scanning tunneling electron microscope.
		In both cases, well, okay, I have to differentiate now.
		In the case of the STM, imagine, if you will, a conical-shaped tip, almost like a needle that you use for playing on a phonograph record, or vinyl record, Yes.
		Only on a much smaller scale.
		Now, as it turns out, electron flow, or electrostatic charge, if it's a better choice of words, through open space...
		has an extremely linear relationship between the distance between the two conductive surfaces and that charge surface therefore if you have a feedback loop that controls a device that can move this tip up and down in extremely precise increments by keeping the charge constant you really can draw a topographical feature map of whatever it is that the thing is standing across up down to the molecular and atomic level.
		Now by changing the charge status ever so carefully you suddenly can pick up the molecule in question and sort of rest it out of its little mess that's embedded in it.
		That's how this is done.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Does that help Color?
unidentified		Yeah I'm wondering another step then.
unidentified		Is it science fiction or fact that once you have built some machines, some nanomachines, that you can then program those machines to build others?
charles ostman ▲ ● ▼		This is the direction it's going in.
		There's a company called Manoscript that actually manufactures this as a piece of personable equipment.
		You can go out and buy one tomorrow if you like.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		You can.
charles ostman ▲ ● ▼		Yes.
		Now where things get a little bit fuzzy is one tip at a time, that's a real slow way to do things.
		But if you have an array of tips, thousands, perhaps millions, all actuated simultaneously, the problem there has been up until recently, I underlined the word until recently, maintaining atomic precision on a tip-to-tip basis.
		In other words, each tip has to have almost identical features, topologies, size, volumetric displacement, et cetera.
		But recent discoveries at Caltech and elsewhere have made the commonality of feature sets between tips much more manageable.
		Even now, as we talk, we're talking about arrays where they have hundreds of tips, and I happen to have a personal friend who's right in the very middle of all of his work.
		Now that's the STM.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Would it be too simplistic to suggest that nothing can better manipulate a molecule than another molecule?
charles ostman ▲ ● ▼		Well, you've just answered the riddle of the atomic force microscope because the ASM, instead of measuring charge status as a control feedback process, it instead uses a little, this is hard to explain, but it uses a very, very small, and I do mean small, bendable cantilever at the end of which you can attach the molecule of choice.
		That molecule will then have an attractor-like effect upon the other molecules they're interacting with, and particularly for biological procedures, this is a wonderful way to go.
		You can use peptides and enzymes and all kinds of things.
		Now, there's a third sort of in-between stage.
		There's a company called Cellular Robotics, Los Alamos.
		I just happened to know the folks that started the company.
		And they're using laser light to perform molecular scale, sort of like what you might call sezzing and reattachment.
		It used to be that if you're going to do gene splicing, you've selected enzymes to sort of break apart the gene pair of choice and reconnect it again.
		But it's kind of sloppy and kind of messy.
		It's a solution-based process.
		It's a laser light, you really, on an almost a mechanical basis, shine light at the right molecular junction site, and you really do either take it apart or put it back together.
		So all three of these processes can work together depending upon the assembly process.
		And the point I think that the caller really exposed, and this is appropriate, is that we're right at the very threshold of being able to build machines that build the other components of the machine.
		And yes, when we cross that threshold, yes.
		That's where the real velocity, the quickening occurs.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right.
		Wildcard line, you're on the air with Charles Osman.
		Good morning.
unidentified		Hello, it's good to be on the air with you guys today.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Where are you, sir?
unidentified		I'm in Salt Lake.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Salt Lake, all right.
unidentified		I just have a quick question or a comment, actually, form of either one.
		What is it that with this new, it's almost a new take on reality or a new absolute.
		And one of the questions I wanted to ask you, you've said quite a few times that there are no absolutes.
charles ostman ▲ ● ▼		That's what it's both right.
unidentified		But if you say there are no absolutes, well, that's one absolute, that there's no absolutes.
charles ostman ▲ ● ▼		If I had been sharper, I would have probably caught onto that.
unidentified		Yeah, but also, you know, it's like there's it's not I can't think of how and it's not a personal thing at all, but I don't understand how you can use reality to disprove reality.
unidentified		You know, just and I guess in a sense, I'm just trying to understand, is this technology the people who are in charge or in control of this technology, are they going to be respectful of the individual's rights on the earth or is it going to be dropped away for the better of this science?
charles ostman ▲ ● ▼		Nothing like a quick, simple question, anything.
unidentified		We're both tired.
unidentified		We're all tired.
charles ostman ▲ ● ▼		And again, this is sort of like the obvious question of question is because, again, we're not talking about a single thing or a single, you know, like one company made this gadget and suddenly changed the world.
		It's not like that at all.
		It's the extreme opposite.
		It's an incredibly diverse plethora of different technologies which converge, hence that's why I'm writing the book, Agent Convergence, because that's the process I'm trying to describe.
		And the rate of convergence is an acceleration record, just like Art harps upon the time factor.
		I harp upon the convergence factor, and the two synergistically interact, by the way.
		But the point is that it's this synergy grid that allows a bunch of different laboratories using 12 different types of technologies to sort of like invent a technology matrix that could not have existed even, say, five years ago.
		There is no single authority or body.
		Now, what may come out of this, potentially, is certain classes of technologies, which have unusually far-reaching implications, may end up being, you know, sort of taken over by some entity that says we want to now control such.
		But the way that this is evolving, as I see it to be, the Internet is kind of like a model, it's like a training session, if you will.
		We're being trained because of the fact that we're being drawn to this Internet in the essence with the human species.
		And it is such a decentralized, interconnected series of functionalities that the nano domain is kind of like that as well.
		In other words, you're not going to see, as in the case of oil, these giant, you know, huge, multi-billion dollar facilities that have to drain oil out of the ground to refine it.
		No, it's the exact opposite.
		I could have a nano foundry sitting here in my living room the size of a shoebox or less.
		And there could be endless numbers of them in all different types.
		Well, that's the essence of how I see this being played out.
unidentified		I understand, and that makes sense.
		And I'll tell you, I and a lot of people that I know stand, I can speak for a lot of people listening right now, we stand very firmly with our bell as individuals, but also in step with our bell.
		And if you can prove to us the same thing that you will respect the rights or respect humanity and not be above it or below it, we'll stand by you too, because it's an incredible science and art.
		You're going in the greatest directions.
		I'm so glad that the way things are going.
		And I'm not going to ask you how you're doing either.
charles ostman ▲ ● ▼		All right.
charles ostman ▲ ● ▼		Well, thank you.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Thank you very much for that.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		East of the Rockies, you're on the air with Charles Ostman.
unidentified		Hi.
		Hello.
		Hello.
		This is Tracy from Kansas City.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Tracy, you're a little hard to hear.
charles ostman ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, I'm just going to say it's a little hard to hear this.
unidentified		Is this any better?
charles ostman ▲ ● ▼		That's better, yeah, sure.
		Okay.
		I just have some questions about what kind of safeguards would there be to avoid people from using the darker purposes.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		That's like asking, well, maybe it isn't.
charles ostman ▲ ● ▼		It's still a very broad question.
		You have, I mean, certain categories of stuff I could say, well, in the biological range, sure.
		I mean, there should be some way of registering.
		For instance, just the one slim little area of synthetic organisms, should there be a regulatory, like the FDA or something, that says if you're going to invent an organ that has to be registered, and is it some sort of codified classification process?
		Yeah, sure.
		I mean, obviously, I think that we, clearly in the realm of the biologicals, there's a lot of, I think, pretty standard sorts of regulatory practices that could be deployed.
		Where it gets a little fuzzier, of course, is when we start inventing things that are really, really different than the kinds of things we're normally used to now.
		And this is kind of the area that I was trying to allude to some time ago.
		It's not just that we can replicate something or kind of make a somewhat different version of something that we currently have.
		It's when we start inventing things that just don't exist at all, you know, new classes of materials, you know, very, very complex machines that are partly organic and partly inorganic, and they have self-propagating properties and, you know, whatever.
		I mean, it's just a wide puffer of things.
		How you invent a bureaucracy system that tracks along with the evolution.
		I mean, right now, even with the most mundane technologies, It's taken years for, say, the patent office to sort of catch up with the current day world of things.
		We've had tremendous problems with the State Department being bright enough to sort of understand what a supercomputer is versus what a desktop computer is.
		I remember earlier times, and this seems laughable.
		But these are mundanely simple things compared to the kind of stuff that will be inventable in the near future.
		Should there be some kind of nano-authority registration system that you could define if it had X amount of nano-related processes in its manufacturing cycle, it therefore qualifies as a nano thing that therefore has to be subject to this bureaucracy?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, the problem is ultimately Newt Gingrich is not the most powerful man in the world, nor is Bill Clinton or anybody else.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		The most powerful man in the world will ultimately be the man with the most powerful program.
charles ostman ▲ ● ▼		With the most powerful software and or the people that know how to apply the software in the most functional way.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Exactly.
		West of the Rockies, you're on the air with Charles Ostman.
		Hi.
unidentified		Hello, this is Chris.
		I'm calling from Tacoma.
		Hi, Chris.
		Sorry, this is all kind of overwhelming information.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yes.
unidentified		And being somewhat computer illiterate, it even is more so.
unidentified		But, you know, I was just wondering, being able to replicate a lot of things, like he was talking about, meat, for instance, wouldn't that make a lot of things obsolete?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yes.
charles ostman ▲ ● ▼		I mean, we could discuss that earlier, if that's true.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yes, it would make, actually, it would make eventually, and it's ultimate, the entire industrialized society.
unidentified		That would create a whole nother problem, I would say.
unidentified		Well, I would agree, wouldn't it?
charles ostman ▲ ● ▼		I had alluded to earlier that as we transition into what I refer to as the virtual asset-based commodity economic system, which will be spawned from the virtual terraform, and I don't know how far, how many hours ago, I've been on the air now for five hours.
charles ostman ▲ ● ▼		I think in hour number two, I was kind of coming about it.
unidentified		Okay, well, I missed that.
charles ostman ▲ ● ▼		Okay, well, again, I'm kind of fading away, so I can't go through the detail of it all.
		But the point is that, yes, there will be, in my opinion, a layer of chaos.
		We're going to be transitioning away from these orthogonal, hard asset-based, geographically defined, autonomous nation-state-based economy systems and going into a completely different realm.
		But that transitional layer, and it may be chaos.
		And there will be a lot of fallout.
		It will be a lot of restructuring by it.
		I already accept that to be the case.
		And I know that this coincides with, just interestingly not, with the same time limit all the other prophecy folks are talking about with the European North Carolina.
		Who knows what these things are going to coincide with?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Just a big coincidence.
charles ostman ▲ ● ▼		But at least in my world, from the stuff that I'm aware of that I can theorize and draw charts and say, this I can prove because of these theorems, this is the world I'm familiar with.
		And it is interesting that it does coincide.
		I must admit, I hear these things and I go, well, is there a macro pattern to all this?
unidentified		Well, you know, as it is, I think people are bombarded with so much information these days that it's hard for people to process it all.
charles ostman ▲ ● ▼		And that's what I was talking about in the middle.
unidentified		It's very overwhelming.
charles ostman ▲ ● ▼		Well, this is what I was talking about in hour number three, about the concept of synthetic sentience becoming a common resource, a strategically necessary resource, because the volume and complexity of knowledge processing will go beyond human capacity.
charles ostman ▲ ● ▼		That's precisely why we'll be drawn into a human Internet synthesis.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, in a lot of technical fields, Charles, that has already occurred.
charles ostman ▲ ● ▼		That has already occurred.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		There are people who repair things not by understanding how they actually function, but by just pulling out modules and putting in the new modules.
charles ostman ▲ ● ▼		And that's kind of a real minimal way of looking, but you're right.
charles ostman ▲ ● ▼		That is kind of the first one of that problem.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, first time caller line.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		You're on there with Charles Osman.
unidentified		Hi.
unidentified		Hello.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Hello.
charles ostman ▲ ● ▼		Art.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yes.
charles ostman ▲ ● ▼		Art, this is Jamie.
charles ostman ▲ ● ▼		I'm calling from Lake Tahoe.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yes, sir.
charles ostman ▲ ● ▼		My hat's off to you.
		I've listened to your show for years and made a difference in my life.
		My compliments to the guest tonight, Charles.
unidentified		You've attracted quite a few interesting callers, some very interesting people.
charles ostman ▲ ● ▼		Yes, it has been a very favorite collection of folks, I'm not saying.
		It is very.
		I'm sort of a guest technology-based guy.
		I started reading Scientific American when I was 10 years old, back in 66.
		It blows my mind to this day that, I mean, a Scientific American used to be relevant for a good two or three years, so anybody who bought them saved them forever.
		And now I look at the Scientific Americans that I get in the mail, and after a few months, they're sort of like, why bother?
		It's obviously nothing.
		I call it knowledge velocity.
		Exactly.
		This is part of the quickening.
		I've got a question to pose to you.
		It sounds a couple times you've made a sort of tangential reference to being somewhat ostracized in your own scientific community for taking a stand other than the majority.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		No, not so much the way I heard it.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Not for taking a stand, but by talking about it.
charles ostman ▲ ● ▼		Exactly.
		Thank you.
		That's pretty much it.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Okay, so then no, you haven't taken a stand then?
charles ostman ▲ ● ▼		Well, I do have certain, what I would call, ethical or moral criteria that I think should be rules that everyone would want to abide by.
		But to the extent that a lot of folks, I mean, for instance, a lot of the folks that I work with or run into at various symposiums don't know that I write for magazines like Mondo and so forth.
		And if they did, they'd be horrified.
		So I really have to kind of play this rather careful, delicate game where I don't want to lie to anybody.
		I never want to misrepresent anything.
		But I might be careful about how I reveal what I'm doing just because it's the only way I can get access to the world that they are embedded in.
		I understand.
		I am in somewhat in the same realm where I deal in construction and law and technology and very comfortable in this year.
		I understand the protocol that you're talking about.
		But as I get older, I'm now 41, I realize that the technology I don't have to worry about because I can, if you sneeze today, the technology passes you by, but it doesn't take more than a few weeks to catch up on every week lost.
		It's pretty simple that way if anybody's willing to study enough.
		So I don't worry about that.
		But I know one thing, that the moral, ethical, spiritual questions sit there silently and they will wait there until I'm done with my folly to address the real issue.
		And this is perhaps part of the test that we're about to be tried by, i.e., and if you want to go into the...
		I'm not a religious person by nature per se.
		I mean I have my own personal internal spiritual belief system.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		No, it's generally come true.
charles ostman ▲ ● ▼		I have read the Upanishad just briefly.
		I've read the Bible.
		I've looked at the Talmud and the Quran.
		Just to kind of get an overview to see, you know, what were these things all about?
		I noticed that there are certain common features.
		No matter how divergent or culturally different by what lens their particular interpretation of the general rule system was, the rule systems themselves had certain common features, certain moral codes and ethics that were common to all cultures.
		And, interestingly enough, almost without exception, even the Mayan books and so forth, they talk about this test point we're about to come to, which happens to be right about now, as a matter of fact, where this enormous global-scale change is about to occur.
		And I look at all this and I go, just as an empirical data set, it's interesting.
		There should be something to this.
		What did they see?
		How did they see this?
		And under what context was this conclusion drawn?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, I know that clearly you don't feel that you're the virus.
charles ostman ▲ ● ▼		Well, I try to be as benevolent in this process as possible.
		I could pretend it does not exist and simply exclude myself from this entire loop.
		I think it's my obligation, however, rather to be a participant in it, but try to be a positive person.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Charles, believe it or not, we've chewed up five hours.
charles ostman ▲ ● ▼		Unbelievable.
		But it's been fun.
		And it's been good.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		It's been good, yes.
		It's been very good.
		Good for me, certainly.
		So I think I'm going to close this down for the night and say, Charles, thank you.
		Thank you for being here, and we will have you back again.
charles ostman ▲ ● ▼		Sounds great.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Take care.
		That's Charles Osman, folks, on nanotechnology, the internet, and much more.
		And we will have him back again.
		And I suspect we had better not wait a year and a half to do so, or we're not going to understand a word he says.
		Anyway, that's it for tonight.
		Sorry, we're out of time.
		From the high desert, I'm Mark Bell.

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