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April 23, 1997 - Art Bell

03:18:15

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

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	Music.
	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 in the U.S.
	Virgin Islands, south in South America, north well to the pole, Magnetic North Pole.
	And worldwide, of course, on the Internet, this is Coast to Coast AM.
	I'm Art Bell.
	Hi.
	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.
	What are crop circles?
	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 Ostrom.
	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.
	Nanothink.
	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 Nanocomputing Systems and Devices.
	Good Lord!
	That has a kind of an interesting connotation to it.
	Charles, welcome to the program.
	Thank you very much.
	Glad to be here.
	You really have your plate kind of full there, don't you?
	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've 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.
	Meaning, that's a big mouthful, I take that to mean A compression and convergence of a very wide plethora of different types of industries, scientific disciplines, and even socio-economic 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.
	Interconnected, yes.
	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, crusty fellow.
	I date back to quite a few decades ago, really, back in the National Lab System, when the Internet then was developed for the National Lab System as nothing more than a communication network.
	Correct.
	It's gone far beyond that.
	yet even back in the early days there were a few
	i would work in third perhaps uh... on the fringe kind of people that
	speculated some threshold moment in time the connectivity factor went up to about where it is now
	everything would be almost like a cliff as 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
	i would like to know how much did 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 uh...
	What are your thoughts on it?
	Oh, I have a wonderful issue to ask this, and I'll start by saying, approximately two years ago, I wrote a paper, a technical thesis, a refereed paper, called The Integrity of an Organism, which I submitted to the European Society of Artificial Intelligence and Cybernetics, and they have their annual conference in Austria.
	To my astonishment, they not only published the paper, which was no small feat in itself, 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, the former Soviet Union, all over Europe, the 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 perfectly good sense.
	And I thought, OK, here we are, a bunch of different people in different parts of the planet, but we have 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 and forth.
	And that's what you have going on in the Internet now.
	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 NTT and ATT developing neural net driven and even genetic algorithms Well, hold on, you're getting ahead of the average person out there.
	Okay, well, I'll back away.
	Back away a little bit.
	You said, with regard to the Internet, hopefully, hopefully, denying.
	Yes.
	Now, that indicates to me you're not sure.
	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.
	Under these criteria, this potential series of outcomes could arise.
	And I want to offer the following thing.
	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 controversy.
	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 socio-economic 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 away from that horizon.
	Are you familiar with Michael Crichton's theory about the Internet?
	Yes, and in fact, I understand what he's getting at.
	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.
	Very good.
	Then it will squash diversity.
	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 it would be like a flattening out of the communities of 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 leading to that node's occurrence.
	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.
	Well, tell us.
	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 VIRML, 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.
	Right.
	And they're still very primitive, very crude.
	A bunch of my friends who are part of the technical community are right at the very forefront of creating these things.
	But I see them as a blink in the eye.
	A little niche, because... I think what you're saying... Let me try and... I've got to stop you, otherwise you're going to race ahead of the audience.
	But you seem to be trying to say That there's going to be an internet, or what is going to be, whatever grows into the internet, what it's going to be, and a connection, a biological, direct connection to human beings.
	Not only biological in the physical sense, but also in the mental sense.
	Here's what I thought about the transplant, the concept of synthetic function as an engineerable, deliverable commodity.
	Oh brother.
	And as a matter of fact, We, if you want to look at socio-economic system paradigms, we are shifting, even now as we speak, away from a hard, asset-based, commodity-driven system.
	Doesn't that drive us toward a single consciousness, though, that will make us to use Star Trekism, Borg-like?
	In a sense, that is one of the possible options, and that's why this is a test.
	Every time the human species, and I think this has happened many times in many other worlds throughout the universe, I think this is 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 spectacular growth.
	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 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, not with goggles and gloves and trying to shoot at something like you'd see in an arcade.
	No, that's dumb.
	That's stupid.
	That's right.
	What I saw was the following.
	A friend of mine who unfortunately passed away, his dream was to capture the great archeological
	sites throughout the world, especially ones which are trapped in politically difficult
	circumstances like Balbek in Iraq or Angkor Wat in Cambodia and many of the sites that
	are now crumbling away because of humans and explosions and pollution and 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 matched
	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 or six years ago, actually.
	And Harry was on stage in downtown Rio.
	This fellow had dragged along his Everson Sutherland supercomputer, this huge enormous box.
	He was heading down to this place that's been called Lee's 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 in there, many of whom didn't speak English at all.
	They could put on that helmet and suddenly they were inside a 5,000 year old African
	city called Buhan, which at that time was the capital of the Nubian Empire, which is
	now the Sudan.
	In other words, unless you were a professional archeologist 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 the buildings, and the complexities of sociology and so on.
	yet you've got all of that stuff almost instantaneously in a matter of seconds.
	You see it, you hear it, you feel it.
	Right.
	You sense it, you experience it.
	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 And that's around... It's being done now, but you're stepping ahead, so forgive me.
	I'm not going to hold you back just a little bit.
	You're going in the right direction.
	I want to see this to the audience and to the general world of listening in a way that really can... There's a logical event stream that I want to make sure we don't skip a step.
	All right.
	But 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 interests.
	They are sentient.
	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.
	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.
	Alright, 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 do you mean by that?
	Okay.
	This goes back, again, I'm going to have to back out 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-R, 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 I think I better ask you to define sentient.
	Okay.
	Sentient, in its ultimate form, is self-awareness.
	You really become an autonomous entity.
	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 seconds.
	I think I better ask you to define sentient.
	Okay.
	Sentient 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 plain as
	Now, would these sentient entities be a creation, or are they going to be a by-product of just some critical mass moment that we reach with regard to the Net?
	Both.
	And thank you for having put it in that phrase.
	There's a logic to it that I have to explain.
	All right, all right.
	And explain it, you shall.
	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.
	I'm Art Bell.
	♪♪♪ Call Art Bell.
	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.
	It sounds a little like tales from the dark side.
	1-800-618-8255. East of the Rockies at 1-800-825-5033. 1-800-825-5033.
	This is the CBC Radio Network.
	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 Postman.
	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 Osterman.
	Charles, Um, I'm visualizing that quite well in my mind.
	What I guess I don't understand is, what would, 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 talk about?
	Well, this is just the problem that I'm currently working on.
	Aha!
	And, and you should bring this up, and, and, but I, 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.
	Sure.
	I want to make sure all the branches actually do hook together.
	Sure.
	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 evaluated and become a primary component in the virtual terraform-based business and economic subsystem in the near future.
	Which is why I keep harping on this idea of a 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, engineer knowledge on demand, synthetic sensing, ubiquitous computing, super-computing.
	But when you appear to be super-computing 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.
	When you say an intelligent orifice, now we have Mac computers, we have IBMs.
	Define the difference between what we have now and what you're calling an intelligent orifice.
	A typical machine has a CPU, some glue logic, some bus interface, all these sort of usual stuff that, you know, is typical to a machine if you'd actually be in there.
	Right.
	This is about to be changed.
	And the change will happen rather quickly, in my opinion, because I already know the people who are sort of inventing the tools to make it possible.
	Well, I do know that if you buy a computer today, um, it's out of date in about two or three months.
	That's exactly right.
	If one network actually reads Gardner Group, Forrester, and all the professional logistics analysis, uh, people that supply this kind of information, You're actually right.
	The aggregate average lifetime profitability window, if you will, is a piece of hardware that goes out on the shelf.
	If you don't capture your expected profit returns in three months, it doesn't justify the shelf life it occupies.
	And software is a matter of weeks.
	Talk about a rough business.
	It's a very rough business.
	So the way to accommodate that requirement, I mean, the house of cards is going to collapse in a minute or so.
	The answer is to have machines that evolve, that are soft, that are in a sense gelware.
	As opposed to being hardware and software, they are gelware.
	You have a...
	Gelware? Wait a minute, stop. Gelware.
	Yes.
	Are you talking about a biological entity now?
	Well, in its ultimate extension, yes.
	In the interim, it'll be using traditional silicon, only something called FPGAs and FPGAs,
	which are rewritable, like memory in a sense, except that you have functionality matrices that sort of
	rewrite themselves on a per instruction cycle or several instruction cycle
	spaces.
	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 out there called Korba, and Korba is a virtual state machine, or in-software, ...residing on the ubiquitous functionality fabric of all these interconnected nodes out there.
	You have a virtual bus structure.
	You have virtual code engines, if you will, that are surrounded by a prophylactic-like wall of identity tags.
	Doug, you are saying a lot of things that are blown right by me, and somehow you've got to make us understand if they're blown by me, they're blown by a lot of other people.
	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 processing would allow us to be convinced that this was real and this was the stuff we were interconnected with.
	That's about to change.
	The whole idea of the invocation of rapture, if you want to call that, as an engineerable process, It's 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 in a television set.
	Right.
	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 mono-directional broadcast
	what's called push technology where you have a orthogonal storyboard structured punctuated
	by advertising slots and if the advertisers are lucky they might get a 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 the product.
	Imagine a bi-directional, immersive environment where instead of watching cheers you become
	part of cheers.
	And you go into this virtual domain populated by, I'm not kidding, 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.
	Could I go back, like, to 90210 for a while?
	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.
	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.
	Very powerful tool, also a very dangerous tool depending on how it's misapplied.
	I want to offer an idea for instance.
	Shara Davies is the co-founder of Softimage, one of the big software houses that manufactures
	rendering software for 3D modeling and so forth.
	A very wonderful woman, extremely intelligent and I respect her work highly.
	She wanted to try and experiment.
	She wanted to find out where this threshold, this surrendering to one's belief barrier
	really occurs.
	So she developed a virtual world called the Osmos.
	Most virtual reality stuff you see today is still pretty boring and kind of like oh, 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 and 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 a replication
	of what you've already seen.
	Okay, hold on, hold on.
	We're talking about causing a person's belief system to be surrendered to whatever material
	your screen.
	And where is, how do you find that threshold, or where is that threshold?
	The invocation of rapture as an engineerable process has certain emotional and cognitive key points.
	And that's a big measure now, and I want to give you Charter's example.
	In her world called Osmos, you literally drift into a world where there is no up, down, left, and or right.
	You are a little bit like scuba diving.
	She happens to scuba dive.
	but you put on a suit of sensors and it measures your chest volumetric displacement, it 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 your physiological state.
	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 heart beat or whatever, it then will modify
	its approach.
	A little bit.
	There's no assumptions 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 this 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'd 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 that 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 ad, you see, where they really want to reach inside the skull of some 8-year-old kid who's going to rush off and press your mommy to buy the box of cereal away from you.
	That's right.
	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, but that's fake.
	This is like one very small sliver, however, of a much larger arena of functionality.
	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 wanted to be able to provide decision rendering under duress as an enhancement to a human being's ability to recognize and perceive threats and respond to them.
	Yeah, well, the trouble with the military is, though, they'd want to influence that decision.
	Oh, of course!
	And I'm not... I'm not completely... I'm just explaining the logic of how we're getting to where we're going.
	I understand.
	The commercial world then extracts from this some core components, some functionalities that it's become aware of, and I went, 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 at the first international conference on autonomous agents, the first international conference on multi-agent systems, the first conference on virtual humans, I'm not kidding.
	Virtual humans.
	Virtual, and 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, wispy 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 intelligence they can devise for their own purposes.
	The ability to catch up that kind of resource on demand has a valuation.
	It is against these kinds of commodities that trading will occur.
	In other words, having some physical stuff represent the value of the company will have
	less value than having access to this.
	As people begin to accept this in their course of their daily lives, whether it's for entertainment,
	educational purposes, etc., the whole idea of surrendering through your belief barriers
	into the 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.
	I understand the fascination, but doesn't this scare the hell out of you?
	Well, it's one of those things where the risk-gain ratio magnifies at every new run on this ladder.
	And that's why I wanted to go down this ladder run by run.
	But once... Alright, 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.
	On the net, it's probably happening now, but very quietly.
	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 senses things.
	The R2D2 model.
	Physical world, yes.
	We still have some very specific engineering limitations, which, by the way, nanotechnology solves.
	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.
	I said, if I had such and such, we could build a sentient engine with these behavioral qualities.
	Over the course of that 18 months, sure enough, different Alright, here's a question for you.
	Sure.
	magically out of the fabric of the outer realm and say, Charles, I read this paper and guess
	what we have?
	And so over these course of eight months, we've been able to assemble, in my belief,
	the pieces of the puzzle.
	And we're not alone.
	There's a whole collection of folks out there.
	All right.
	Here's a question for you.
	Sure.
	I have a fear that the first sentient entity on the net may well be a virus.
	Well, not exactly a virus, but something capable of spawning viruses as its own defensive mechanism.
	There you are.
	And, now listen to this.
	In other words, reactive, it would be.
	Yes.
	And actually, sorry to have my notes here in front of me, 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 policy.
	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.
	Kaboom.
	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 no value.
	We're still using coins and pieces of paper, which is about to go away, by the way.
	eCash 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 this.
	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 quickening 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 carefully 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 it at SF State, this is the moment in 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 great gain.
	Of course.
	But if this process were inverted in a negative way, well, all bets are off.
	Hence the evolutionary test.
	Alright, well it's going to depend very much on who is controlling it.
	Thank you very much.
	The issue of control is what I was worried about.
	That was around the corner.
	And we're looking at a decentralized communication grid.
	It's not like you have big giant nodes where everything branches out from the common nodes.
	Almost the exact opposite.
	It's like the cilia of a mold 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 belief to this external engine of intelligence that feeds us the conditionalized knowledge that is 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 deflattening out, if you will, is worth it?
	That could be where that occurs.
	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.
	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, has been played out, like I said, in many different worlds out there in the universe.
	A bunch of them failed before it even got this close, by the way.
	Some have gone beyond this point.
	And I want to submit to you the following thing.
	Well, no, let the following thing be submitted after the news.
	I'm sorry, I apologize.
	We're at a break.
	Charles Ostman 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.
	That's not a strange place.
	Keep listening.
	I said, when you first came my way, I said no one can take your place.
	And if you get hurt...
	I said no one can take your place.
	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.
	Close your eyes and try and imagine a world where the Internet has progressed.
	It doubles now every two 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 bleak 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 Ostman.
	He is an expert in nanotechnology, but we haven't even launched into that right now.
	we're still in the middle of this growing neural nets
	all right now who is charles austin 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 Foresight 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 Digests.
	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 Alright, once again, here he is, Charles Osman.
	Charles.
	Hello.
	Hi.
	Alright, 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.
	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 if 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 that way, this could be the result.
	I'll tell you where 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 a decent connection.
	It's much, much faster than a typical modem is now.
	Right.
	You would have, already, very fast, unbelievably fast, really, Uh, very inexpensive for their performance characteristics.
	CPU chips, we have what are called glint chips, which are these integer math rendering chips that can produce very compelling 3D graphics.
	May I ask us a question?
	Sure.
	Uh, we now have, uh, top of the line pretty much for, uh, IBM right now is a 200 megahertz chip.
	That's about right.
	Um, what is, what is technically feasible, uh, using current Engineering paradigms.
	What speed can be reasonably expected before we go biological?
	Okay, and actually you define that quite well because it's not going to be making more or faster or the same.
	It's going to be an entirely different process altogether.
	But in our current modality, you start to approach a gigahertz, let's say, and things get very funny indeed because everything looks like an antenna.
	have RF signatures which simply pollute everything up again.
	I mean, people can do gallium arsenide and other specialized materials at 2 and 5 gigahertz now,
	but those require very unusual packaging and routing techniques,
	and the whole engineering sub-science of that, which is not ever going to really get into the commercial market.
	In other words, five times the speed of the 200 megahertz.
	And a little bit smaller, but yes.
	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... Alright, 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?
	Well, only because now you have thermodynamic problems.
	You can only Actually, if we're going to go for top-down manufacturing technology, that is traditionally how chips are made, 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.
	You feed it through a series of chemical baths, 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 translucent 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 finally end up with the final construction.
	Below about 0.02 microns, though, You would be 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 and a certain amount... When an atom gets warmed up... This is just old method physics.
	The apparent volume of the outer electrons in the shell, the outer shell, occupies an ever larger and also ever fuzzier region of volumetric space, which means that its ability to accept new electrons, because semiconduction means you're passing electrons from one to the next, and 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 doesn't work at all.
	Okay, and they already actually have that thermal runaway with even 200 megahertz.
	Oh, yeah.
	No, if you don't cool these chips, they don't work.
	And this is where superconductivity comes in.
	That was my next question.
	In other words, could that be the next leap?
	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.
	Now, I feel This is your show, and I don't want to do this, but I'm just trying to make sure that we haven't left out a crucial one in this matter.
	Just to get back to the net part, and I'm trying to explain the financial and business strategy interest and why this is going to be done.
	We talked about entertainment and experiential conveyance of a new industry.
	We talked about the strategic applications of synthetic sensing and engineering rendering as 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 are 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 got 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.
	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 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 It isn't so much how much pipe space we have, it's how much fiber space there is.
	It's an enormous amount of fiber space.
	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, the Secretary of Defense, give his speech, followed by Brenda Laurel, which was a pretty interesting combination.
	All right, you said the telco companies are panicking.
	Why?
	Because they have to invest tens of billions of dollars to drastically increase the smarts, if you will, the routing and switching capacity.
	to the same sort of a gemstone of multiple facets.
	All right, you said the telco companies are panicking.
	Why?
	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've grown up, in fact, quite often.
	I know.
	I don't want to tell you this publicly, but believe me, that's what they're facing.
	All right, look, I just tried for 20 minutes to get on my own website.
	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 it.
	And yet, the phone company's response is, yes, you see, who wants to get a wire into every house and every note?
	They're saying, look, all we're going to get out of this 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.
	And how will they do that?
	Well, we'll talk about a hotbed of intrigue.
	It's wide open.
	There's all kinds of ideas floating around out there.
	Part of why Korba has become interesting is because Korba 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 in your machine, you buy the permission to activate some functionality that's out there in this ubiquitous fabric.
	And that is where the sentient engines really suddenly take off.
	Now, I want to introduce 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 NTD, which is the second largest telco in the world, certainly the largest in Japan.
	His project is, I'm not kidding, building self-replicating synthetic brains.
	What?
	I'm not kidding.
	I can send you the documents.
	Self-replicating synthetic brains.
	He wants to build a 10 billion neuron synthetic brain 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.
	Let's start at the beginning.
	How would you build a synthetic brain?
	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.
	It seems like an abandoned 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.
	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 too much.
	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 so they can anticipate peak load patterns and reconstruct themselves on the fly.
	Right.
	Through the fact of equivalent of a xenomorph.
	And they're willing to spend billions of dollars on us because they will save billions of dollars.
	All right.
	Charles?
	Yes?
	How far into this intelligence do we get before we reach... I mean, would you define that if reached as sentience or not quite?
	There's a big weak point there someplace.
	Well, if you want to design an emotional cognition, 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 and beyond speech, because it's hard to imagine, which I bowed way too much.
	His name is Stefan Grossberg, and he wrote a very well-known book that anyone who has taken your basic Ag courses would know about.
	It's called Neural Networks and Natural Intelligence.
	Buried back in the last, well, 13 chapters in, suddenly he's 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 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.
	Does emotion equal self-awareness?
	It is a primary component.
	It is a way to measure that, in other words, 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?
	Would that emotion be a benign thing in your opinion?
	Well, hopefully so, but I will submit to you that yes, there will be some unfriendly ones and some friendly ones.
	That's the whole point.
	Yeah, let's not forget jealousy, anger.
	Uh, just plain old evil.
	And when I went to this year's Economist Agents Conference, there were several emotional cognition engines in their various states of development.
	I had a chat with some of the folks there, and some of them, I read their papers, and I had a chance to shake their hands, say, hello, how are you doing?
	I could show them some of my notes, and we could chat over lunch, that kind of thing.
	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 organism-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.
	Well, that's where we get to nanotechnology.
	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 they're looking at some sort of calamity.
	And maybe these things all line up.
	You know, 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 and somebody's not.
	Probably a dot and 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.
	Yes.
	Why?
	Because we would be danger if we'd be like a toddler with a loaded gun stumbling around in their backyard.
	Into their backyard.
	Into their backyard if they didn't have a sense of security about where our state of our social and spiritual health was at.
	I'm not so sure I'm secure about it.
	Charles, hold on when we come back.
	Nanotechnology 101.
	I'm Art Bell and this is CBC.
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	the CBC Radio Network.
	We're going to try and slow him down a little bit here for you folks.
	And talk a little bit about nanotechnology.
	It is fascinating.
	Alright, 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.
	OK.
	And the two do connect to each other, and that's why we spent so much time.
	All right.
	Well, I understand that perhaps we should back away now.
	Just look at nanotechnology.
	Right.
	And it's autonomous.
	What is nanotechnology?
	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, is so enormous that it's very difficult to caption it.
	But I will try to offer a one-sentence glimpse.
	It's a branching node from which you can then extract it into the application.
	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 now.
	Otherwise said, little machines?
	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.
	Correct.
	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 semi-conductive?
	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 the sense that there was something that happened this way, and I don't want to detract from Dr. Chu, and or Stanford, or the others who had theorized about these non-crystalline semiconductor materials that could be superconducting.
	That's a whole long story in itself.
	It's kind of a strange and meandering path where finally it sort of worked, but it wasn't in fact a direct result of it.
	What sort of worked?
	Okay.
	Stanford and Chomsky, many years ago, this goes back to the early 70s, talked about something called the glass diode.
	It was an organic substrate that could have superconductive properties.
	And everybody laughed and thought he was wrong, and he was rejected very soundly by the government.
	He tried to get funding from the EU, they wouldn't listen to him, he went to Monsanto, etc., they wouldn't listen to him.
	Ended up in Japan. This year, by the way, I forget the company, but in Japan, they're going online with a, it's
	like a paint combo.
	You can spray it or paint it onto any surface, or using mylar, for instance. It rolls up like, like, like, like 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 working counterparts.
	You paint on a solar collector?
	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. Chew's work over at Stanford came in.
	And now there's a whole class of rare-earth-doped ceramics that are non-crystalline substrates.
	They contain little nanocrystals, if you will, that interconnect to each other, but it's still Residing in a non-crystalline substrate, and yet... You are so far out for me.
	I'm losing this.
	What is it you're saying this is?
	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's 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 and
	other configurations and so on.
	It was invented by Dr. Smalley at Rice University, but now there's a whole bunch of companies
	actually producing the 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
	or 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.
	Which would do, for example, what?
	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's 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 it's computing.
	These guys are into physics and specialized materials and all that kind of stuff.
	Yes.
	But they've got a very big chunk of their budget in nanotech.
	I don't even know myself how much there is.
	I mean, I have friends, but there's only so much I can learn about this.
	What are they trying to do?
	Well, I have no doubt molecular computing is big on our 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, and they might not like that so much, and that's why they're dropping in to visit us now.
	Well, the nanotech realm is what facilitates that.
	Why?
	because of the whole plethora of physicists and theoreticians out there
	who've come up with 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. Wait, wait, wait.
	How to contrive a gravity well?
	Yes. Or how to... What is a gravity well?
	Oh, okay. All objects have a gravitational force surrounding them.
	That's the core of that event horizon. When you come to it within a certain
	proximity, suddenly you're going to engage yourself in the
	gravitational pull of that.
	The event horizon of a black hole?
	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.
	The point I'm trying to get at is, it's mostly theory now.
	I don't know if the social experiment really did this or not.
	It's kind of a mystery.
	But the point is, I've talked to lots of people who have 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 invert that process.
	You construct the molecules and 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, you know, walk across the continent or something.
	It's just not... absolutely impractical.
	Blunderbuss.
	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 kind of stuff.
	Does this mean... you're talking about molecular manipulation?
	Yes.
	When you can begin to do that, you can then create the material of choice.
	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 of 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.
	Yes.
	Then the Finching's engine, which is vastly smarter than we are right now, sort of anticipates this and says okay here's ten or twelve
	nano options try this and the nano assembler
	used it up for me as an EGOT or a sample design
	that's what they're up for 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 but how far from that
	to these sentient beings you're talking about deciding on their own
	to create well then you have
	this work gets fuzzy I know what you're getting at I understand completely
	and my friend Dr. Davis always said we can just pull out the plug well eventually there will be no
	single plug to pull out and I know that and I saw the Forben project when I was quite young
	and it was actually filmed right here at Berkeley up at the science
	hall of science had a personal connection with all of it
	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.
	Well, I think we're actually already past the plug-pulling point with the Internet.
	We're way past that.
	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 systems and the economies of the near future and the revaluation away from hard efforts to virtual efforts and all that stuff It's because when you have this kind of a functionality being brought online and accessible to a 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 value-less.
	A very kind of clunky analogy would be, if all the diamonds that exist in the world were suddenly dumped into the marketplace, the diamonds would have the value of each diamond.
	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 evaluation system has to be established to determine what has value and by what new methodologies and measure can different kinds of business entities and Those economic systems can be established.
	We don't know that yet.
	This is where I see the failure point.
	If not so much, will the thinking machine run amok, or will we... You want to hear something else far out?
	I mean, I've only given you a couple of examples.
	Go ahead.
	Try this one.
	A quasi-viral component.
	A quasi... What the hell?
	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 skipping... I'm not a biophysicist.
	I'm skipping a lot of detail.
	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.
	That's right.
	Most cells have a unique protein wall that surrounds them, like a little, like a prophylactic source.
	It has its own particular unique topology.
	That's right.
	When the virus happens to run into the cell that it's designed to mate with, it bonds.
	I mean, physically, like hand to a glove, it bonds itself on there.
	Yep.
	The enzymatic action, it tears through the cell wall.
	A virus is a good example.
	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 school that keeps that cell functioning.
	So then, for example, you might suggest nanotechnology developed eventually could reverse or stop the aging process.
	That is exactly what I'm saying.
	And talk about a Sociopolitical, 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 cell, All bets are off 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 collective 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 and 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 plethora of these things, and a couple of them get out of hand... That's all it would take.
	That's all it would take.
	It would, you know, we might just scour the surface clean and start over.
	You know, go back to ground zero.
	So, these are the kinds of pathways that I believe other worlds have You're making it sound very tenuous, actually.
	Well, I think statistically, I'm kind of a, you know, I'm a nuts and bolts guy.
	I mean, I'm an engineer by trade, really, from beginning to square one.
	We are nothing more than an experiment.
	We are nothing more than a bunch of protein molecules that got together and after a billion
	years have gotten this far.
	You're making it sound very tenuous, actually.
	Well, I think statistically I'm kind of a nuts and bolts guy.
	I mean, I'm an engineer by trade, really, from beginning to square one.
	So I like to look at the pragmatic aspects of what statistics involve.
	Will a 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 of organisms out there in the known universe,
	some percentage gets to an intelligent threshold of X, some subset of that gets to the next
	level up, if you follow my direction, and a much smaller subset gets to the next level
	up than that.
	And by the time they get to that sort of ultimate upper level, you're talking about a very small
	You know, a half a percent or a tenth of a percent.
	I'm just guessing.
	I just had this graph in my mind.
	Based on nothing other than my own speculation.
	But, you know, I can see an ordering system like that because it really does mimic what happens in the Darwinianism that we can mimic here on our own planet.
	So why not apply that to a galactic scale or some localized region of the galaxy?
	That kind of thing.
	I mean, I can see that kind of a macro-systematic pattern that people play out amongst the stars that cluster together.
	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?
	If I saw ubiquitous nanotech suddenly being applied in a very stupid and sloppy way, At the same time, they're on the threshold of really, you know, 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.
	Are you sure?
	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 it sustainable, flyable, if you want to call it that, that's not even the right type of word, 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 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.
	But you really are suggesting, though, that we are being monitored more closely all the time because we're rapidly moving in that direction.
	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.
	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.
	Okay.
	Maybe.
	All right, Charles, stay where you are.
	All right.
	That's 702-727-1295.
	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.
	Now, here again, 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... I hope it does.
	My guest is Charles Osmond.
	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 or a trial to austin is my guest
	and uh... it has been quite a couple of hours and this should be very
	Charles, are you there?
	I sure am.
	Alright, let's try a few questions from the audience.
	Sure.
	On the wildcard line, you're on the air with Charles Ostman.
	Hi.
	Hello.
	Hello.
	Where are you?
	I'm in Davis, California.
	Okay.
	Okay, I was just wondering if you could address some class issues.
	Both in terms of virtual reality and consumers, and in terms of nanotechnology.
	Who exactly do you envision having access to this, even in the U.S.?
	This is an extraordinary... I know precisely where you're going, and I've been through this loop many times.
	There's one of two ways.
	It's either homogenized access for everyone, that would be the utopian view, or you would end up with a benign dictatorship with the select few, the elite, who are cybernetically enhanced and who have the inner access That sort of dictates policy to the rest of the population.
	Well, which of those scenarios do you consider more likely?
	That's a tough one, and today's unfortunate, not so pleasant or positive.
	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 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 that are kind of, you know, they go to the bathroom in their own
	living room, they're poisoning the planet, 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 the
	Gaia, that we should be cared for, that there should be some kind of connection.
	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.
	I remember the last time you had me on, one of the guys that called actually thought the Unabomber was on the right path.
	I recall that quite distinctly.
	And I might tell you something just anecdotally.
	Actually, his writings, if you read his writings, they're very thoughtful.
	Sure.
	I understand.
	I can appreciate... I'm not... 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 Assembler Multitude, founded by a gentleman by the name of Ted Kaler, who's a very wonderful, extraordinarily bright guy.
	Okay, well, listen, we're moving a little bit away from our question.
	Okay.
	The answer, I think, ma'am, are you still there?
	Yeah.
	Okay, I think the answer is that those who have will have a 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.
	If we go down that particular branch, yes, that would be the case.
	Does that answer your question?
	I think so, yeah.
	Okay.
	I too would, I'm afraid, view it that way.
	East of the Rockies, you're on the air with Charles Ostman.
	Hi.
	Hello.
	Hi, 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 Nanothink 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 Kansas State.
	The reason I have this, I tell fellow students, professors I have, Sure.
	I try to mention nanotechnology to them, and they just kind of blow it off.
	They kind of give it, like, the, you know, the heave-ho.
	I think the reasoning is just because it follows, and I want to be careful not to throw stones in a glass house.
	Scientific American came out... I actually read that.
	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 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, Sunday American, sadly, has kind of gotten a little fluffier in their presentation material.
	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 their website.
	You'll see their particular implementation of a diamondoid or 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.
	Well, I'll tell you what scares me.
	You know what really scares me?
	Sure.
	From the last time you were on this program to this time, Uh, what you're talking about now is such a leap from where you were that that really is frightening.
	Well, I agree, and that's why when we first talked just before I actually went on air, I said it's amazingly timely and seminal that you would release your book to Quickening because this is like the ultimate metaphor of that process actually occurring, at least in this domain.
	Caller, anything else?
	Ah, that's about it.
	All right, thank you very much, and have a good morning.
	West of the Rockies, you're on the air with Charles Osman.
	Hi.
	Hello, calling from Maui.
	Maui, yes.
	All right.
	All right, I have a question for you.
	Sure.
	Considering how that seems like the majority of the people on our planet don't seem to have the best attitude and usages for most discoveries.
	I understand.
	Sadly to say, yes, our tracker has been pretty bad.
	I'll go ahead.
	No, 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?
	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 and time-space continually.
	We really can't sort of hop around other solar systems.
	It's like watching Syria as they try to sneakily build a reactor and then the Israelis send a jet in this 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.
	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'd better stop here.
	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 it, if I had to make that decision, that's where I would step in.
	Answer to your question, Caller?
	Yeah, very good.
	Keep doing it and showing that we have good intentions, I guess.
	As you listen to what Charles says, how much of it do you absorb?
	I think I can understand realistically probably 70 to 80 percent, but he really jumps ahead quite fast.
	Uh-huh.
	All right, thank you very much.
	First time caller on the line, you're on the air with Charles Osman.
	Hi.
	Hello.
	Hello.
	Yes, my question was that in And listen 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 what not, what do you see the next step if we do reach a level of, to a point where it becomes so chaotic that we can't understand it yet we adapt to it and we meld yet i i think you're going for it
	i've heard the woman who first came on top of the separation of classes this
	could be one of those separation strata in other words it per like gibson's uh... blade runner or something you
	have this kind of street level of
	everybody's just rushing around trying to survive and it's really strange where we've got
	organic nanotech on demand as per synthetic organisms running around and all this
	kind of sort of garden variety stuff that's as common as buying a loaf of bread
	And in fact that, in my mind, is 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 one.
	Well, that's what's being done now.
	I mean, if you want to talk about somebody spending money 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 socio-economic system substrate where there's no permanence in anything and everything's 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.
	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 discuss 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 that sort of, like this sort of dark layer above That we don't really see, but we know they're there.
	Well, you're describing today's situation.
	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 will allow a certain degree of porosity.
	So they become the new power brokers?
	They become the new power brokers.
	Alright, could you ask Charles please?
	Alright, this is by fax.
	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, is it?
	Well, I don't know if machine is the right word.
	You have a technology that allows creation of food.
	Yes.
	Out of, out of... Biomass.
	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, dark, darkness cells.
	I want to try to offer something that's at least... No, I want to look at both sides.
	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, and I've been to Brazil, I've actually seen what's happened down there.
	I know.
	I know.
	It takes, you know, ten times or twelve times the biomass to, like, feed a cow from what you actually extract in terms of nutritional value.
	It would make a whole heck of a lot more sense if it was growing the cow as an animal than sowing it, if you could simply fabricate the stuff that resembles its flesh, roughly.
	In other words, if I could just grow a steak, Now, whether that's done with a cloning technology or with an actual nano thing, but 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 try the food of your choice.
	That's a great application.
	A peptide stew?
	Correct.
	What is that?
	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.
	Alright, 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.
	Yeah, no, I know what you're trying to get at.
	Is that what we're saying?
	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.
	Right.
	But I visualize sort of a generic, organic, gray goo of sorts, if you want to call it that.
	You know, you might have like ten 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 a certain way.
	You know, all these different... but these are all chemistry processes.
	Therefore, once you've mapped in the software of that molecular matrix,
	theoretically, yeah, you can have whatever steak with whatever flavor or something else,
	and you can invent things that don't exist now.
	This, to me, is the real boundary. I'm interested in it.
	You can invent things that do not now exist.
	Right.
	New materials, like the paint.
	New materials, new biologicals.
	Like the paint you described, that you would paint, say, your roof with, and turn it into an energy collector.
	Exactly.
	And I want to toss in one last little, this is just an Art Bell kind of thing.
	Sure.
	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 that somebody dropped in and they shot a probe down, but that's what they shot down was a probe.
	Within that capsule, if they actually had one, was not the aliens themselves.
	No, they're not going to send themselves down.
	That's dumb.
	I mean, forgive me, but they would send down, though, engineered biobots.
	Engineered biobots, yeah.
	Exactly.
	Well, I've heard the Greys referred to exactly that way by some wildcard line.
	You're on the air with Charles Osterman.
	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, alright?
	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.
	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 That is right.
	What is your understanding?
	Let me ask you.
	Probably about ten percent.
	I've got a college degree.
	That ten percent.
	What does that ten percent tell you you've just heard?
	Something out of this world.
	No.
	It's something inside this world.
	That's true.
	And that person you 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 things, you know, Brownsville things or whatever, you name a top school, they've gone there, they're parked on a desk, they've got all the 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, and if you saw me, you'd go, why?
	Because I have a bunch of hair and a beard and so on.
	And they think I'm going to have the answer.
	Well, this is the stuff that the future is going to be made of.
	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.
	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.
	In here.
	And knowing how to cross-synergize, I will submit to you that these are all vectors on a synergy grid.
	That synergy grid is where the value is, not the point in the vector.
	Not the vector point.
	How you connect the dots, if I can say it that way.
	You can.
	What has the value.
	Makes you sound a little like Richard, but... Well, actually, on my business card it says strategic synergist.
	And I actually, when I did 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.
	It's really hard to imagine a whole room of people like you together, surviving.
	It's all here now.
	It's just learning to use it.
	financial, science, economics, and 10 or 12 different set of disciplines have to actually
	be cross correlated to come up with one contiguous information stream.
	Alright, 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.
	Alright.
	Thank you.
	Thank you.
	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.
	Stretch your mind with us a little bit this morning.
	East 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.
	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.
	Well, not exactly.
	Now you're mixing up and I don't mean... forgive me, I want to make... Well, if I can create food.
	Oh, okay.
	In a food substance.
	You're creating a molecular matrix of existing proteins and peptides and other biomolecular sort of building blocks.
	All right.
	So I couldn't create gold?
	Well, you can create gold, but not this way directly.
	But let me explain.
	At Lawrence Laboratory, where I spent many years of my life and many days of work, 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 We were breaking apart and rebuilding the nuclei of atoms so that we would 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 link works?
	So you wouldn't use the nanotech to directly make the goal.
	I understand.
	You'd use nanotech to make the superconductive power supply that would drive the machine that makes the goal.
	So energy to accomplish the goal would no longer be part of the equation.
	That's correct.
	Then all of a sudden gold would be like before.
	Yeah, gold worthless, so the entire monetary system changes.
	That's what I was trying to allude to before.
	Here's a question I don't understand.
	I'm going to ask you because you deserve a question.
	Follow me.
	Alright, 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.
	Well, I'm going to say that this is not the area of physics I could claim to be a specialist in.
	Now we're crossing the so-called hyperdimensional domains that we're talking about.
	Now, I have friends that do this kind of stuff.
	They're theoreticians, and this is their cup of tea.
	And we'll talk about things like, right now, us creatures, as folks here in the domain that we're familiar with, we are equipped cognitively on 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.
	Doesn't mean 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 folks 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 it.
	But that's the kind of problem we could solve that way.
	Anyway, I feel I owed you that question.
	Thank you very much.
	I like it.
	You're welcome.
	News to the Rockies.
	You're on the air with Charles Osman.
	Hi.
	Yes.
	Hi.
	This is Jason from Wisconsin.
	Hi.
	My question is, if this kind of technology was released into the public right now, what kind of Well, it'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 thing.
	This is a really hard thing to get across, because unlike, say, nuclear power or some other horrible, poisonous thing that we've created because of some manufacturing process, it's not a one thing 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 get the essence of knowledge, which is what I tried to communicate with
	you earlier.
	Material science is said to have a whole plethora 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 classroom show called Polyacrylamide Gels.
	It's something that came out of Japan.
	So in other words, we're going to be like slowly boiling frogs.
	The technology is going to come and we're going to accept it as it comes.
	That's correct.
	And there will always be a three-tiered system.
	Sort of with the same political model we offered before, only with a technology model.
	Right now you have the consumer level, stuff that you and I or anyone can have
	claims about and buy.
	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, the third key almost. Yeah, they're the ones that I'm
	worried about. First time caller on the line, you're on the air with Charles Osman. Hi.
	I can barely hear you, sir. Can you hear me now?
	That's better.
	Yeah, a little bit.
	This is Tom from Denver.
	Yes.
	And, uh, I don't know, I'm, uh, serving in West Nevada for about two months now, and I think this is the best program you've had on.
	Glad you enjoyed it.
	It's wonderful.
	Uh, my question is, uh, I've been listening to you, uh, as Charles, uh, I think, uh, expanded your reality concepts, and all of our reality concepts, is that, uh, I just wondered, have you ever thought that this is a natural evolvement?
	That this has happened before?
	Oh, I'm sure he believes that, yes.
	This is a completely common model.
	This was wrote 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.
	West of the Rockies, you're on the air with Charles Osman.
	Hi.
	Hi, this is Catherine from Portland.
	Catherine, speak right into your phone.
	It's a little hard to hear.
	All right, how's that?
	Much better.
	Much better.
	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.
	Absolutely.
	Thank you.
	That's a very good question.
	In fact, I have a, I should, I've got to confess to our cookie, warn me about this.
	I've got a whole bunch of friends out there who are listening right now.
	Many of them are serious web developers.
	For instance, let me just throw a plug in.
	A long time friend of mine, a guy by the name of Bruce Nehmer, started a thing called the Biotic 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.
	Wait a minute, wait a minute.
	You're growing plants online?
	That's right.
	You got it.
	You mean, what kind of plants?
	These are, well, it uses a process called L-system frapples, and I won't bore you with a bunch of math talk, 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 strip.
	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 in through 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 log free from 50,000 feet up.
	There's, you know, 5 trillion square meter virtual terraformers.
	Cities, and there's roads, and there's rivers, and people go there.
	I already forgot this poor lady's question.
	What was it, ma'am?
	What are you talking about?
	Ma'am, I'm chewing up oil in this camera.
	You're bad.
	Oh, that's a bad one.
	And so one of my friends who's online right now, I've got about ten windows going here, he's asked me about can I deal with nuclear waste.
	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.
	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.
	Yeah, I know.
	You're in the desert.
	I know.
	I have some friends up there with me as well, and I know the whole story.
	And this nuclear waste will last for tens of thousands of years.
	That's right.
	I helped make some of that stuff, I have to confess.
	I worked at the very lab where some of that stuff came from.
	So here's the point.
	We tried to solve this problem.
	Wait a minute.
	Do you want to apologize for that?
	No, because I wasn't creating the stuff.
	We were trying to create the solution.
	And they brought the stuff to us and said, OK, what do you think about this?
	And we go, well...
	The best solution we could come up with at the time was taking these rods and breaking them up, making little pellets out of them, and then encapsulating them in a special kind of borosilicate glass that has a glass as long as the half-life of the material, and then you put these pellets of glass inside of a steel container, double-winded, and then you bury it in the soil.
	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.
	However, if you could manipulate at the molecular level, what could you do?
	Well, here, and I don't want to get into a civic 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.
	So you would restore that balance?
	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, And you could just break the nuclei apart.
	Right.
	This is where they would decay to the rest form.
	Yeah, you could accelerate.
	Right now, they're decaying at a natural rate.
	And you would simply speed up the decay rate.
	That's right.
	Until it became neutral or safe.
	That's pretty much correct, yeah.
	All right.
	Wild Card Line, you're on the air with Charles Osman.
	Hi.
	I've been a regular listener for about two months now.
	I guess I'm an Art Bell junkie.
	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.
	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.
	Yeah, when it begins dawning on you what you're hearing.
	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.
	Thank you.
	That's my intent.
	I'm sorry?
	No, but thank you.
	I appreciate that, because that's what I try to do.
	Yeah.
	The thing is, 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.
	Yeah.
	And how quickly that happens.
	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 it's easy to understand why that happens, but it seems to me that there's got to be some way for us as the users of this to find a way to control it.
	All right, that is the genesis then of the question.
	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?
	Well, this is why I brought up the December multitude that was found by Ted Kaler, 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 Genentech and Chiron and from all the different labs.
	We'd sort of sit around and have coffee and do these kinds of talks.
	It wasn't, gee, what if we discovered some new protein or something.
	No.
	It was, what are the implications?
	We are about to rewrite every conceivable aspect of history that's ever been understood to be an old rule that's going to be inverted.
	What do we do with this?
	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 No, I understand.
	As a matter of fact, the course I'm teaching at FFA, which starts in about a month, or in a couple of months actually, sort of looks at this.
	As I said before, I'm writing a book called Age of Convergence, and this is part of that whole scenario.
	In other words, if we do not match a sociophilosophical 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 of itself a
	failure point of this evolutionary test.
	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.
	Well, yes and no.
	Personally, I have walked away from things that I thought were too disagreeable.
	Like what?
	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 plow 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.
	Remembering the porosity of which is controlled by the following thing.
	If you have too much control, where the people that have no scientific knowledge at all... I understand.
	...make 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 described earlier, the corporate power brokers, kind of filter through this little veneer called government, and the rest of us are subject to it, That could be a nightmare as well.
	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 you like?
	These are really tough.
	I don't have the answer, but I understand the question.
	All right.
	Hi there, Wildcard Line.
	You're on the air with Charles Osman.
	Yes, this is Hector.
	Hector, where are you?
	I'm here in LAX.
	Los Angeles Airport, huh?
	Okay.
	If you're listening, do you have a question?
	Yes, I understand that what you are considering is new metaphors that take into consideration What I'm hearing is a decentralization of centralized industrial manufacturing distribution patterns.
	Is that kind of what you're saying?
	And what I'm saying is metaphors that are considered self-organization, self-reproduce.
	Well, a major portion of the current biomolecular nanoprojects that I'm currently aware of are just that.
	Self-induced, self-organizing, self-reconstructing materials that perform very specific tasks.
	There's a whole branch of science of that.
	And my question has to do, is there any way of implying or putting into place some organic sort of feeling into it?
	Well, 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 you're going to go, Laura, now what?
	No, please.
	I'm not kidding.
	Dr. Paul Stotter, who's a professor of chemistry from Oxford, who I've met, actually.
	It's a great privilege.
	And also another fellow by the name of Dr. Shores Hall, who's the guy that invented the term Foglets.
	These are folks that have come up with ideas about these ubiquitous nanites of multiple species types that, at the lowest possible, most highly granular level, can cross-connect and sort of form little clumpets.
	And those clumpets, as they become more specialized, the cross-compatibility goes down as specialization goes up.
	Those clumpets become macro-clumpets, 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 to the ladder of complexity, so at some point you reach a quasi-extension threshold, if you will, because you've really constructed the whole organism.
	Yeah, but at some point this thing begins to tell you what to do.
	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 MIT, of all places, and I said, I've got this thing called nano, something for nanoscripters, and he actually sent me some samples of code, and that's what he was doing.
	He was actually writing this code to sort of make that possible.
	As it turns out, the reason I got involved with synthetic sanctions as an internal process is because of my interest in self-assembling layers of complexity nanomodels.
	All right, but see, where this goes, Charles, sorry to interrupt, but 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?
	And that's the $150 quintillion dollar question.
	And I know precisely, and 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.
	Oh yes, of course.
	And of course, what killed them was Monsters of the Is.
	That's right.
	That's right.
	They had invented this giant machine that was 20 cubic miles.
	It could fetch up anything on demand that you could think of.
	That's right.
	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... But it could.
	But it could.
	In other words, we could literally create monsters from the... Charles, hold on.
	You good for another hour?
	Oh, absolutely.
	Alright.
	I don't know if I am, but we'll try it.
	Monsters from the... 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 and you were to do the same thing to them.
	What would you do?
	Thank you.
	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.
	Good morning.
	Charles Ostman is my guest.
	727-1295. First-time callers can reach Art Bell at 702-727-1222.
	702-727-1222. Now, here again, 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.
	Alright, once again, here is Charles Osman.
	all right once again here is charles osmond charles uh...
	i am going to uh... i'm going to ask you a question that uh...
	must be asked Margaret sent it from Riverside, California, and it's almost a threat, but it's one that I understand.
	She says, you're talking about the manipulation of molecules and you're talking about the creation of sentient life.
	You're talking about God stuff.
	I know.
	Alright, 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.
	Wrong.
	It'll simply widen the dividing line.
	From the previous hour, the woman who first talked about the stratification of classes, that was heartening, 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.
	It's not like that.
	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 and say, oops, we just turned it off.
	We have a, inside the human brain, you've got two and a half, three billion dendrites, roughly, that interconnect to each other via these clusters called endocannabinoids.
	What is being spawned out there goes far beyond the connectivity of what happens inside of a single human brain.
	All right, I want you to stay good and close to your phone for me, okay?
	Okay, I'm sorry.
	Um, look, uh, here's somebody who says, who asks, I guess.
	We could, in fact, end all disease.
	We could manufacture artificial skin, muscle, bone.
	Um, we could manufacture organs.
	That's right.
	Or, we could grow monsters.
	Well, both are, I mean, with the cloning thing being one of those.
	And by the way, just as a little aside for the sake of anecdotal humor, I guess.
	Uh huh.
	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.
	Oh boy, do I agree with you.
	I mean, this has been around for years.
	This is a military-slash-industrial kind of secret.
	Well, okay, time release.
	It may still be out in the general public, so 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.
	All right, well using... Selectively as an organism, if we can negotiate the test correctly, we deserve the chance to go to the next one.
	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.
	Bottomless pit, sort of thing.
	Bottomless pit, and they've certainly been working on this, and we can only guess and wonder how far down the road they are.
	Well, this is the model I was trying to come up with a little while ago, and again, because of, you know, 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, 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.
	will result from there military domain and
	employers and that you got the film blackman that timeline may still be the same
	but the complexity of functionality insert what what's going to happen though charles is very
	is going to be a war
	uh... we're talking here about control however right now
	the politicians value can imagine have the control
	They think they do.
	They think they do.
	Alright, so if you... There's an argument there.
	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.
	Well, even now, I mean, everything from the clipper chip to all kinds of nonsense.
	I can expose you to one project which is not classified, but it was from a foreign client.
	And I can't tell you the contract, 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 one of the guys named Kramer, the guy who was doing the fractal compressions.
	Yes.
	Well, there's a lot more to fractal compression than just compressing an image.
	convert them into a fractal set actually allows you to
	or 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 a encrypting as well as a content addressable data stringing process. Absolutely. And it has
	very interesting properties.
	So the point being, anyway they came to you and asked you.
	They came and said could you design a kind of a nationwide firewall to keep
	certain religious and or sexual connotations that could be buried in somebody's
	webpage from getting inside.
	They had their own backbone within the country. It was sort of a nationwide
	backbone.
	Could we prophylacticize 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 nations that don't want certain materials
	uh... entering their domain China being a spectacular example.
	A spectacular example, 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.
	Absolutely.
	Find it, eliminate it, automatically, as a robot.
	That's exactly right.
	And this is one of the low-level, by the way.
	You want to go up a step from this, I call it the ubiquitous data grid.
	For me, the scariest thing from the micro-moment is 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, you know, things that are part of your family's history.
	That immediately gets fed into the matrix of the insurance company.
	Oh, that's going to come soon.
	That's actually already just about here, and that's going to come ahead of the ability to manipulate
	those things.
	Exactly correct.
	And so this is the kind of stuff 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 immersive interactive environment.
	All right.
	Wes to the Rockies.
	You're on the air with Charles Osman.
	Hi.
	Yes.
	Good morning, Mark.
	Good morning, Charles.
	Good morning.
	This is Pat from Burbank, California.
	Okay.
	I have a very profound, abstracting question.
	I understand fully what you're talking about.
	And we're talking, we're starting from the bottom to build up and 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 agree with you.
	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 put 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.
	Here's an answer that I'm going to offer just me, Charles, the guy, saying this is what I thought of.
	I have a friend of mine who's kind of my counterpart.
	We're developing these self-evolving machines.
	We've gone through a lot of this kind of architecture.
	My thought was, why do we exist?
	We have to have a purpose.
	I mean, a bunch of matter came together.
	We are the sensory organs of that God creature.
	in these life forms appeared and great. There is a reason for this process. I do believe
	there is a macro intelligence. I think we are on a solar system level like a cell within
	a much larger body and maybe that is what God is. It is a macro super entity. 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 higher entity. But the significance
	of this entire planet and all the other parts of the ecosystem is a blink of the eye, a
	greyness on the beach. If the entire planet stopped tomorrow, it would be like a momentary
	process. However, I don't place that much importance frankly if we fail at this.
	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 sort of like in the middle somewhere, and I think it's the select few that kind of get past the filter as well.
	The question that Art and I were debating back and forth the previous hour about, well, if we were to adopt somebody's map, what would be the point at which they'd decide to drop in and say, OK, enough of this already.
	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, OK, 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 prod and say, OK, 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 squabble 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... May I ask a question?
	Sure.
	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 developments.
	I think both examples exist out there in the universe, and each flavor.
	It's a series of branching structures, like I was saying at the very beginning of all this.
	So then it depends on who arrives.
	Yeah, yeah, in a sense it does.
	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 is 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 in any other way.
	You know, he heard me talking and said, wow, you know, like, this is neat.
	I mean, 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.
	From the hard, cold reality, as you put it, statistically, are we, you know, above the 50% mark?
	No, probably not.
	Probably not.
	But we still deserve the chance to try.
	All right.
	First time caller on the line, you're on the air with Charles Osman.
	Hi.
	Hi there.
	Thanks for taking my call.
	It's a pleasure to be on the air with two such learned gentlemen.
	Well, the delusion of learned is perhaps just enough.
	I think everybody's learning the best they can.
	Yeah, there is everything you've said, but there's also, you might be wrong.
	That's exactly right.
	Anyway, caller, go ahead.
	Well, look, I'd really like to make a couple comments to start off.
	And one of them is I think it is really very important that we use our technology to enrich the quality of our lives.
	I couldn't agree more.
	And not let it run us around.
	As far as Art's question to you about You know, how far down the line do you think that this sentient being is going to come into existence?
	I think probably five years back.
	Actually, depending upon the particular qualifiers you would add to the formula to say this qualifies as 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 were being paid a bottom of the pit budget to solve.
	I can give you one example, and others I can't because they're classified, but one that I 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 are 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 little groups that are 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 thrasher, but they're doing it.
	And can I ask, since you have such an extensive scientific background,
	your opinion on someone, say, like at the home brew level, for example, being able to access technology just from an
	electronics store?
	The homebrew 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 side is only going to be to sort of facilitate the interface and the localized process engine that connects to an easily scalable process engine out there.
	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 a Even a fraction of the number of troublemakers out there.
	Oh yeah.
	I understand it.
	I addressed a crowd of visiting Japanese dignitaries at a facility called the World Internet Center about half a year ago in San Francisco.
	Can we pick up on this after the bottom of the hour?
	Sure, absolutely.
	Alright, Charles Osman is my guest.
	Stay right where you are.
	This is CBC and I'm Art Bell.
	I've seen trees of green, red and blue.
	I've seen them bloom for me and you.
	The trees are green, red and blue I see them bloom for me and you
	And I think to myself, what a wonderful world The skies are blue, clouds are white
	The bright red day, dark sacred night And I think to myself, what a wonderful world
	The skies are blue, clouds are white 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.
	Charles Ostman will be right back.
	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, that you can actually destroy or change a person's belief system in a relatively short amount of time.
	Well, I call them belief barriers, and different types of belief barriers are driven by different types of cognitive cues.
	But yes, a lot of work has gone into this.
	I mean, there are some very serious efforts, and more light-hearted efforts, in terms of game developers and people who want to create interactive immersive environments for entertainment purposes.
	All right, you're drifting away from the phone again.
	OK, I'm sorry.
	But the general idea is that certain types of cues can get your attention or interrupt you in some way so that you abandon other cues.
	Gosh, I'm trying to cram a very complicated answer into a couple sentences.
	In reality, as you see it to be, it's like an ear that wraps around you.
	You look with your eyes, you hear with your ears, you have other sensory inputs.
	That collectively says, this is the stuff I believe to be here.
	Here's where I am.
	Here's what's going on.
	Right.
	When you go into an immersive environment, you go in there willingly, already determined to want to engage yourself with this other stuff that's out there.
	Depending upon how well that environment was designed, it doesn't have to be photorealistic or anything like that.
	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 a fast car, or can I fly an airplane, Gary Warb's participation was based upon some kind of score-driven Very rapid, very biokinetically oriented strategy with a sort of military overtone to it.
	You know, can I kill them before they kill me?
	That kind of thing.
	That's right.
	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, As a far more compelling, you know, it's like layers of an entity.
	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.
	Do you ever worry about getting burned at the stake?
	I'm not suggesting... Well, if you want to hear the really sort of squeezy, bottom-feeders end of this whole thing, There are people out there whose whole enterprise is, how can we make a virtual shopping mall where the agent slash avatar entity, you know, uses very, very clever sort of Roshark 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, which is what they have in mind.
	And, you know, people are addicted to credit cards now, just out there in the physical world.
	This is like heroin or something pumping the needle right into the vein.
	Do I like what I'm seeing coming along these lines?
	No.
	I agree.
	How does one craft some kind of content regulatory set of rules?
	I cringe when I think about First Right Amendment being violent and so on, and yet I do understand all too well what this website is going to look like.
	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.
	Good evening, Art.
	This is by far one of the best guests since Father Malachai Martin.
	Well, glad you're enjoying it.
	It is just phenomenal.
	I want to ask you, Dr. Osgood, what do you think the timeline is before these, I'm sure many of these things are already occurring clandestinely, what do you think the timeline is of something like the ability to spray one's roof With a substance that would be a photovoltaic cell, and what would happen to the power structure of the power companies, etc.
	The amount of, the horrible amount of, they would be absolutely against it.
	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, you pay a certain amount, And that way we cut these buggers out of the picture.
	All right.
	The first question.
	One thing at a time here.
	The timeline to something like you described.
	Well, that material already exists.
	I mean, in fact, it has existed for some time.
	They keep producing better versions of it because the lifetimes of the material, it's UV sensitive and so on.
	It degrades through a few seasons of exposure and it actually 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... You're the guest, he's the client.
	It's a little bit like that.
	The point being that there'll be no absolute.
	I see it all as a series of gradients, that depending upon the type of commodity in question, there'll be a certain surrendering to a less centralized process of distribution.
	Now, the oil testers 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.
	It's a polymer, really.
	That's fine.
	But, the thing that might get their ire a little more, you know, 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, you know, a hundred miles 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 quo, yes, would be turned upside down.
	Well, they probably wouldn't hesitate to turn you upside down in a more physical sense.
	Yes, and I can tell you specifically that one of my stints in the National Lab System was with DOE, the Department of Energy.
	Back in the late 70s, we had been playing around with a material called Nitinol.
	It's a shape-changing alloy.
	What does that do?
	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.
	Wow.
	We built solar-powered motors.
	I have one here in my basement.
	It's one of the few that still exist.
	We proved, 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 blackbody collector and, say, a well water worked quite effectively.
	But... But... I'm not... I was there.
	I physically was there.
	I did it.
	I actually have them in front of my house now.
	Just a little small model of one.
	They not only terminated the project.
	This is really mind-boggling.
	They not only terminated the project.
	All records of existence were scoured clean.
	I mean, this was in a building called Special Projects.
	Just, you know, the file counts were taken away.
	All the night and all the 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 of Skyrock plaque and that sort of thing.
	Well, they make little micromotors and things of that size using the shape-changing alloy at the actuator component.
	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.
	Well, and I'm not suggesting you're wrong about that.
	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?
	Absolutely correct.
	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 the question.
	Well, I think we may be past the point of no return.
	I hope we are.
	First time caller on the line, you're on the air with Charles Osman.
	Hi.
	Paul from Phoenix.
	Yes, sir.
	Yes, bless you for having people like Dr. Charles on that 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 drop food on it, it would gobble it up.
	Coming in the future sometime, when we can get this whole thing more together, you see, would gobble up dust, just small particles that wouldn't nibble your toes or anything.
	Is that possible, Charles?
	Well, this is what Shore Hall's thing is all about.
	Shore Hall, I'm sorry.
	He has this thing called the foglet theory, and he has this whole paradigm.
	These little nanomechanical gadgets 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 cue to a macro object that can sort of, you know, in a benign way, do something, utilize something else that's undesirable.
	Nobody has done this yet, but at least the thinking has gone 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.
	Well, this is the whole point, and I mean, that might be kind of a comical example, but I can see where things like... I've had people come to me with all kinds of ideas.
	They want to have clothes where the cloth changes color like a chameleon.
	Right.
	Or an animal, sure, why not?
	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 of these increments, just remember, there's always a risk value, and the size of the gain usually isn't matched, rather, exactly by the size of the risk.
	All right.
	Used to the Rockies, you're on the air with Charles Osman.
	Hi.
	Good morning, gentlemen.
	Good morning.
	Not 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 Jeanne 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.
	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, and 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 from really completely seemingly unrelated aspects of life, from serious scientists to Social workers to people that, you know, 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 cart being upset, yes, this could be the implementation task.
	But this is kind of where the yin and yang 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's a bit of an argument for war, and that could be a little strong, but yes.
	I don't think so.
	It could be a serious one, yes.
	All right.
	West of the Rockies, you're on the air with Charles Osman.
	Hi.
	Hi, I'm calling from the Weimar, uh, the Willamette up here in Portland.
	Yes.
	My name is Sandra.
	Yes, Sandra.
	Yes, uh, judging from what's come out of Berkeley in the past, like, um, you know, the nuclear testing, the plutonium you stuck up the Black Porter's leg, um, you know, that he had to live with.
	You didn't even check up on him for, you know, 25 years he lived with it and finally died.
	We had this ice lady from Lawrence Livermore Lab on Hazel O'Leary'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, to be sure, was a hero of the Cold War.
	This is what you people do.
	Nothing good has ever come out of Berkeley or Stanford.
	If you look into the background of who those institutions are named for, your new spiritualism is sickening.
	The curriculums that have come out of Stanford I think you've got a lot out.
	Let him respond.
	I don't know what...
	Ma'am, hold on.
	Ma'am, ma'am.
	You think you're new little god.
	Ma'am, ma'am.
	Nuclear religion.
	Ma'am, ma'am.
	Ma'am, ma'am.
	Ma'am, this is art.
	This is art.
	Ma'am, would you...
	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?
	Yes.
	All right.
	I think you got a lot out.
	Let him respond.
	Well, I'm very sorry.
	I mean, in a very, very broad, general sense, I can sort of get the sense of the emotional
	sort of off the edge kind of ethic.
	Oh, yes.
	Off the edge, right.
	But you have no idea who I am personally.
	You have no idea what I've done.
	Well, I mean, you're not going to...
	You're not going to conditionalize my work.
	...the Rockefeller Institute or Lytton.
	Lytton's the one that popularized that synergism crap to prove that two and two is five.
	I'm reading it right here in the sovereign state of ITT.
	I'm reading all these books.
	I missed out on the 60s.
	I was blissed out or something.
	But I'm going over this whole Earth Catalog, this Millennium Edition, and every horrible facilitator and groupthink and everything is Is this whole religion you're putting out?
	You're never going to save the world.
	You're never going to save the world.
	You're not going to do it.
	I'm not putting out anything.
	The whole earth is fascist.
	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.
	I can only 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.
	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... You are so intelligent.
	You are the virus.
	You are the cancer.
	Well, now, there she said something.
	Charles, have you thought about that?
	Actually, my response might be a fault, and I can't talk if she's going to blast through my ears.
	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?
	I think that people, because they see a symbol of something, they glom onto this entire world and say, okay, that's the orifice through which all of this evil comes.
	The reality is as follows, and I'm going to do the best I can.
	Where do you get your money?
	You get your money from politicians and these corporate foundations.
	Actually... Where do you get your money to do this horrible research?
	Actually, the research that is being done that I'm part of... And you'll probably cause toxicology... Well, now, hold on.
	He's trying to answer your question.
	The money that you do your work with comes from... Okay.
	It usually is trying to be Oriented towards solving a problem.
	No, comes from.
	Where does the money come from?
	In today's world, it comes mostly from consortia.
	The Rockefeller Foundation.
	The Carnegie Foundation.
	The Ford Foundation.
	No, I haven't got money from the Ford Foundation.
	The Ron Kettering Foundation.
	Well... Why would they put that money toward the national debt?
	And get us out of debt for paying for this kind of research?
	Well, all I can say is that... That blew up Hiroshima.
	And then you come, you have the gall to stand down there and have your sex orgies in public to save your face and the world!
	Sex orgies?
	I really can't respond to any of this.
	Yeah, sex orgies went too far.
	Yeah, but you know, I can sense the frustration.
	I know how it is when people are sort of in an isolated world and they just see this huge plethora of stuff and they kind of go, like they can't grapple on, they need some sort of reference.
	The thing I might want to share, just to respond in the best way possible.
	Well, 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.
	I'll respond the following way.
	When I was doing some work at Livermore, and people that I knew from that environment, we were designing components for some of the FBI stuff.
	The thought was, oh God, we're the death-mongers, we're causing all this horrible stuff to occur, and we've actually committed a blip-a-bomb on the party.
	That's what she was saying.
	Okay, fine.
	The response is that, no, we were the surgeons who were trying to create the best, precise machine to neutralize the other machine that could be trusted on it, that would in fact cause death.
	Are you sure?
	That was our target goal.
	Yeah, are you sure?
	At least in the part that I worked on, that was the target goal.
	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, just try in your own mind what you were doing.
	Listen, I guess we're not done.
	You want to hold on?
	Oh sure, I'll hang.
	Alright, alright.
	Charles Ostman is my guest and we're talking about nanotechnology and more.
	So, let's get started.
	Art Bell is taking calls on the wild card line at 7 a.m.
	That's 702-727-1295.
	First-time callers can reach Art Bell at 702-727-1222.
	That's 702-727-1295.
	702-727-1222.
	First-time callers can reach Art Bell at 702-727-1222.
	702-727-1222.
	Now, here again, Art Bell.
	All right, we're now going back to Charles Osman.
	On the part of that lady, again Charles, 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 all together, might be the wrong route, and that the right route, the one we're supposed to be on, It's not a scientific route.
	It's not one that leads to molecular manipulation, but one that is spiritual instead.
	I think it should be both.
	And that's, I think, where that woman's failure point was.
	She was so completely overwhelmed and just absolutely, you know, everything was this horrible thing.
	Nothing is an absolute.
	Things are always taken in balance.
	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 like a design flaw, if you will, and that's a failure point of the organism.
	Here's a kind of an interesting question for you, and then we're back to the phones.
	Gerard, could you please ask Charles how soon, if ever, he could envision time travel through the use of nanotechnology?
	Well, that's a very obtuse question, but I appreciate what the person is going after.
	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.
	Right.
	And the whole idea of being able to contrive gravity, well events, etc.
	Well, I think in general, although, again, this is not the area of physics I'm most familiar with, the theory being that once you've crossed into this other domain where you can sort of bend gravity and bend time systems, and yeah, at that point, time and gravity are sort of interchangeable.
	I wouldn't rule it out, but I'm not qualified to do it.
	That's right.
	I think mainstream science has determined that at the event horizon of a black hole, for example, time travel would indeed be possible.
	I think the interpretation that I'm willing to accept, and I've heard of a whole handful of them, is that a black hole is sort of like a perforation into another dimension.
	Yes, yes.
	And there all of a sudden time becomes singularity.
	You know, a million light years suddenly happens with a blink of an eye.
	So if you could create, then, an artificial event horizon... At the edge of theory, yes.
	And who knows?
	I mean, wormholes and all these kind of things?
	Absolutely.
	I think it's another one of those sort of no-holds-barred, where once you cross a certain threshold, it's like a Pandora's box.
	All these things happen.
	All right.
	Wild Card Line, you're on the air with Charles Osman.
	Good morning.
	Hello, Charles.
	Hello, Art.
	I'm Doug, the G-Man from Clovis, California.
	Yes, sir.
	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, and I... I don't... Well, forget about all that.
	I have a question.
	Sure.
	Because I believe that nanotechnology is a reality.
	In some flavors, it's already being done, yes?
	So, considering if that is a reality, do you realize what we have done?
	Yeah, I think he does, or what we can do.
	That's why she got so upset!
	Yeah, I know.
	It's your book, Art, the quickening, let's get ding, ding, ding.
	I know.
	Your book is the horn, Art, because, well, if you want to comment, or if you want me to, if you just Well, 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, 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?
	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 just, I mean, they see me as being kind of out there because, I mean, won't you 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.
	Sure.
	Some other domain, and I bring little trinkets back and say, well, look at this little thing that I've patched 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 mechanical background, 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 I call it, then I feel like it's my obligation to try to use it.
	Well, I'm glad you're here, if that's what it comes down to.
	East of the Rockies, you're on the air with Charles Osmond.
	Hi.
	Hello, this is Joe from Thunder Bay, Canada.
	Hi, Joe.
	Hi, yeah, well, I would like to make two comments, if I may first.
	Sure.
	Okay, well, uh, it goes with the other callers.
	Well, uh, the one part is, what I believe, is that if Charles wasn't doing this, and the people with Charles, there'd 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 it that way, do you follow me?
	Yeah, no, I follow exactly what you're saying, and I think that the folks that I hang around with, or try to hang around with, if possible, uh, are the benign side, if you want to call it that.
	I can say to the, on behalf of the woman who was branding and raping, 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 are about to be thrust into.
	Otherwise all bets are off.
	I try to encourage as many people as possible who might take an interest in some of this
	to become informed participants.
	My other comment was, sort of in defense of what I believe, that pretty much everything
	and I don't mean this to offend anybody, but even religion can be scary.
	Oh, yeah.
	It's used the wrong way.
	It's used the wrong way, absolutely.
	I agree with that completely.
	Everything.
	But my question is, with the technology, what do you think, what do you see for, say, with disabilities and whatnot for people?
	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 bonding neural tissue to artificial devices.
	This has been done for years now.
	Gregory Kodak over here at Stanford at the Integrated Systems Development Group has been doing this for several years.
	There's a person named Peter Frommert at the National Science Institute in Germany.
	There's a company actually called BCI Inspire both at the service can now provide if you walk in the door and say here's a silicon device or some other device that has micro-scale 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 to spec and they essentially manufacture the device for you on demand.
	In fact, IEEE Spectrum published a piece about, oh, three and a half, four months ago on retinal implants.
	In fact, that's an area I've been looking to myself for some time.
	The University of Utah had a feature 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 cochlear implant, and
	we had a very long chat after the talk was over, Dr. Robert Shannon is his 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 nerve
	to get them to hook up in the right way.
	Right, but when we get really down to manipulation of the molecular level... Oh, that's a whole different story, actually.
	Then, for example, if somebody were to lose an arm, could we grow an arm?
	Theoretically, that would be the thought, yes.
	West of the Rockies, you're on the air with Charles Osman.
	Hi.
	Yeah, this is Andrew, calling from Fresno, California.
	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.
	I'm sorry, what kind of a device?
	The Intelligent Molecular Interdimensional Machine.
	I couldn't really say.
	Well, I feel that in the first chapter of Ezekiel that he describes something very similar to this.
	Wheels within wheels, eh?
	Wheels within wheels.
	I read it in the Hebrew Child Dictionary and it came across 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 caller on the line, you're on the air with Charles Osman, hi.
	Hi Art, this is Don in Austin, Texas.
	Hi Don.
	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.
	No.
	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.
	Oh my, yes.
	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 to that effect... 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.
	But for me personally, well, I want that arm, you know, obviously.
	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 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.
	Sure.
	A wild card line, you're on the air with Carl Osmond.
	Hello.
	Hi, this is Ken, a trucker from Las Vegas.
	Yes, sir.
	Yeah, I just wanted to ask, Mr. Osmond, have you ever been to Andromeda Strain or Spear?
	Well, I've read Andromeda Strain.
	I think I know where you're going with this.
	You're saying, my gosh, if we hatch a quasi-viral component for intracellular corrective chemistry, could this thing mutate and suddenly end life?
	Would you know it?
	Sure.
	Those are the risks.
	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 tasks, but has anyone done this yet?
	No.
	We wouldn't even want to try.
	Probably not.
	Okay, but suppose you were doing that kind of work.
	Wouldn't you literally have to be inside a level four type environment?
	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, 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.
	could the risk exposure be managed? Chances are they'll probably never do this.
	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?
	Do you go 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?
	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 my trepidations about.
	Here in this country or let's say in most sort of stabilized western countries where
	you have some modicum of everyone within the community sort of knows each other and 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,
	the interstitial bureaucracy that deals with this kind of stuff.
	Iraq, for example.
	Yeah, 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.
	You know, 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... Here, you'd want to get scared about something.
	Right now, we have from the former Soviet bloc, especially from the Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan, areas of that nature, There's this unbelievable flood of nuclear components and former nuclear scientists.
	I mean, the Pandora's box.
	We've gone way beyond that edge.
	And this is really frightening.
	And I think that we have any number of tin horn dictators and or their cohorts that even now, you know, they've got some stuff smashed away.
	If they were in to make a bomb, they probably could under duress.
	And a lot of biologicals.
	Bad guys with oil money.
	Bad guys with oil money.
	And so you kind of think biologicals in that picture.
	That's where something really bad can happen.
	That's my personal take on it.
	What about treaties?
	Useless, huh?
	They're talking about a chemical ban right now.
	It's ridiculous.
	It's so ridiculous.
	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.
	You're exactly right.
	First Time Caller line, you're on the air with Charles Osman.
	Hi.
	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.
	My heart's a-thumpin' and I got goosebumps.
	I'm really enjoying this and I just enjoy your show all the pieces.
	Well, thank you.
	I'll accept that, thank you, and I guess no question.
	Wild Card Line, you're on the air with Charles Osman.
	Hi.
	Hi, good morning, Art.
	Morning.
	This is Bob in Las Vegas.
	Hello, Bob.
	Charles, I've been interested in nanotechnology for four or five years now, and 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 Uh, you know, at that level, that you can't see them, uh, what kind of... It's a very good question, and I have an answer for you.
	Alright, alright.
	This is Manatech 101, and it's very understandable, and it's very answerable.
	Alright, hold on, hold on.
	Both of you, hold on.
	We will, uh, I'm gonna hold you both over until after the break.
	Is that satisfactory?
	Yeah, that's fine, sure.
	Alright, uh, it's gonna take a pretty good answer, I suspect.
	Um, 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 art bill
	and this is the independent americans cbc radio network
	the the
	the the
	the I am.
	Heaven's cold and our hair's blue.
	Time is just for us.
	Let's trip off to a sand dune.
	Really soon.
	Kick up a little dance, come on, catch this old friend.
	Call Art Battle Toll Free.
	West of the Rockies at 1-800-618-8255.
	1-800-618-8255.
	East of the Rockies at 1-800-825-5033.
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	That's what it is.
	618-8255. East of the Rockies at 1-800-825-5033. 1-800-825-5033.
	This is the CBC Radio Network.
	That's what it is. I'm Art Bell and my guest, the entire five hours, obviously,
	is Charles Austin. The subject, well, it's kind of buried.
	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?
	I'm still here.
	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?
	Yeah.
	Atoms and molecules.
	I can visualize It's happening, but I, with the technology that I'm aware of, you know, how do you go about it?
	Is it a chemical process?
	Electrical?
	Actually, you not only mentioned both, but, this is kind of a riddle, I don't mean to be coy, 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.
	What is the device that looks at them?
	Okay, there's two different flavors, if you want.
	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'd use for playing a phonograph record, an old vinyl record, only on a much smaller scale.
	Now, as it turns out, Electron flow, or electrostatic charge, for the better choice of words, through open space has an extremely linear relationship between the distance between the two conductive surfaces and the charge states.
	Therefore, if you have a feedback loop that controls a device that can move this tip up and down in extremely precise increments, Yes.
	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 wrap it out of its little nest that's embedded in it.
	That's how this is done.
	Does that help, Caller?
	Yeah, I'm wondering another step then.
	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?
	That's precisely the direction it's going in.
	There's a company called Manuscript that actually manufactures this as a piece of personal equipment.
	You can buy one tomorrow if you like.
	You can?
	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 actuating simultaneously, the problem there has been up until recently, I underline 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, etc.
	But, recent discoveries at Caltech and elsewhere Well, you've just answered the riddle of the atomic force microscope.
	between tips much more manageable.
	Even now, as we talk, they'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 this work.
	Now, that's the STM.
	Would it be too simplistic to suggest that nothing can better manipulate a molecule
	than another molecule?
	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 in Los Alamos.
	I just have another post as far as the company.
	And they're using laser light to perform molecular-scale, what you might call, severing and reattachment.
	Laser light?
	A laser light, precisely correct.
	That if you're going to do gene splicing, you've selected enzymes to sort of break apart the gene pair of choice and use this method again.
	But it's kind of sloppy and kind of messy, and it's a solution-based process.
	With the laser light, you really, on 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 here.
	And the point, I think, that the collar really exposed, and this is appropriate, We're right at the very threshold of being able to build machines that build the other components of the machine, and yes, we've crossed that threshold.
	Yes, that's where the real velocity, the quickening occurs.
	All right.
	Wild Card Line, you're on the air with Charles Osterman.
	Good morning.
	Hello, it's good to be on the air with you guys today.
	Where are you, sir?
	I'm in Salt Lake.
	Salt Lake, all right.
	I just have a quick question, or a comment, actually, in the form of either one.
	What is it that Now 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.
	That's what it sounds like.
	But if you're to say there are no absolutes, well that's one absolute, that there's no absolutes.
	And then you're using... Okay, well, I've been on the phone for almost five hours.
	I'll grant you that.
	If you were sharper, I would have probably caught on to that.
	Yeah, but also, you know, it's like there's... I can't figure out how And it's not a personal thing at all, but I don't understand how you can use reality to disprove reality.
	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?
	Which is the point?
	Nothing like a quick, simple question, do you think?
	Um, no.
	We're both tired.
	We're all tired.
	And again, this is sort of like the obvious question of questions because, again, we're not talking about a single thing or a single, you know, like one company made this gadget and it 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, and that's why I read the book, Age of Convergence, because that's the process I'm trying to describe.
	And the rate of conversion is an acceleration vector, just like, as, as, arts, arts upon the time factor, I heart upon the convergence factor, and the two do synergistically interact that way.
	But the point is that it's this synergy grid that allows a bunch of different laboratories using twelve different types of technologies to select, 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.
	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 today, 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 the Internet, to the essence of the human species, and it is such a decentralized, I understand, and that makes sense.
	functionality 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 and 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.
	I understand.
	And that makes sense.
	So 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
	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 you're going in the greatest directions.
	I'm so glad with the way things are going, and I'm not going to ask you how you're doing either.
	All right.
	Well, thank you.
	Thank you very much for that.
	East of the Rockies, you're on the air with Charles Ostman.
	Hi.
	Hello.
	Hello.
	This is Tracy from Kansas City.
	Tracy, you're a little hard to hear.
	Yeah, it's a little hard to hear.
	Does that sound better?
	That's a better answer.
	Okay.
	I just have some questions about what kind of safeguards would there be to avoid people
	from using the darker purposes.
	All right, that's like asking, well, maybe it isn't.
	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 organism, it has to be registered with some sort of codified classification processes.
	Yeah, sure, I mean, obviously.
	I think that we really, in the realm of the biological, there's a lot of, I think, pretty standard sorts of
	regulatory practices that can 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
	than we currently have.
	When you 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 plethora of things.
	How you invent a bureaucracy system That tracks along with the evolution.
	Right now, even with the most mundane technology, 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 when they just seemed laughable.
	But, you know, 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 The problem is, ultimately, Newt Gingrich is not the most powerful man in the world, nor is Bill Clinton or anybody else.
	in its manufacturing cycle, it therefore qualifies as a nano thing that therefore has to be subject
	to this bureaucracy.
	The problem is ultimately Newt Gingrich is not the most powerful man in the world, nor
	is Bill Clinton or anybody else.
	The most powerful man in the world will ultimately be the man with the most powerful program.
	With the most powerful software and or the people that know how to apply the software
	in the most functional way.
	Uh, exactly.
	West of the Rockies, you're on the air with Charles Osterman.
	Hi.
	Hello, this is Chris.
	I'm calling from Tacoma.
	Hi, Chris.
	Um, well, this is all kind of overwhelming information.
	Yes.
	And, uh, being somewhat computer illiterate, it even is more so, but, um, you know, I'm just wondering, uh, being able to replicate A lot of things.
	Like he was talking about meat.
	Yes.
	For instance.
	Wouldn't that make a lot of things obsolete?
	Yes.
	We had discussed that earlier.
	That's true.
	Yes, it would make... Actually, it would make, eventually, at its ultimate, the entire industrialized society obsolete.
	That would create a whole other problem, I would say.
	Well, I had alluded to earlier that as we transition to what I refer to as the virtual asset-based commodity Yes, there will be, in my opinion, a layer of chaos.
	I don't know how many hours ago, I've been on the air now for five hours.
	I think an hour and a half ago I was kind of commenting about this stuff.
	Okay, well I missed that.
	Okay, well again I'm kind of fading away so I can't go through the details at 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 acid based,
	geographically defined, autonomous nation state based economy systems
	and going to a completely different realm.
	But that transitional layer, and it may be chaotic, it'll be chaos.
	It'll be a lot of fallout, it'll be a lot of restructuring.
	I already accept that to be the case.
	And I know that this coincides with just the same timeline that all the other prophecy folks are talking about
	with the earth and the earth planets.
	Who knows what these things are going to be like.
	Just a big coincidence, right?
	At least in my world, from the stuff that I'm aware of that I can theorize and draw charts and graphies,
	this I can prove because of these theorems.
	This is the world I'm familiar with.
	And it is interesting that this is coinciding.
	I must admit, I hear these things and I go, well, is there a macro pattern to all this?
	Well, you know, as it is, I think people are...
	It's bombarded with so much information these days that it's hard for people to process it all.
	Yes.
	And that's what I was talking about earlier.
	It's very overwhelming.
	Well, this is what I was talking about in hour number three, about the concept of synthetic tensions becoming a common resource, a strategically necessary resource, because the volume and complexity of knowledge processing will go beyond human capacity.
	That's precisely why we'll be drawn into a human...
	Well, in a lot of technical fields, Charles, that has already occurred.
	That has already occurred.
	There are people who repair things not by understanding how they actually function, but by just pulling out modules and putting in the new module.
	And that's kind of a real minimal way of looking, but you're right.
	That is kind of the first one of that kind.
	Yeah.
	First time caller line, you're on the air with Charles Ostman.
	Hi.
	Hello.
	Hello.
	Art?
	Yes.
	Art, this is Jamie.
	I'm calling from Lake Tahoe.
	Yes, sir.
	My hat's off to you.
	I've listened to your show for years, and you've made a difference in my life.
	My compliments to the guest tonight, Charles.
	You've attracted quite a few interesting callers, some very interesting people.
	Yes, it has been a very diverse collection of folks, I must say.
	It is very.
	I'm sort of like a technology-based guy.
	I started reading Scientific American when I was 10 years old, back in 1966.
	It blows my mind to this day.
	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?
	I call it knowledge velocity.
	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?
	No, not so much.
	The way I heard it, not for taking a stand, but by talking about it.
	Exactly.
	Thank you.
	That's precisely... Okay, so then, no, he hasn't taken a stand, then.
	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... 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.
	But I really have to 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 You know 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 the same realm where I deal in construction and law and technology, and very comfortable in that field.
	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 if you sneeze today, the technology passes you by, but it doesn't take more than You know, a few weeks to catch up on every week lost.
	It's pretty simple that way, if anybody's willing to study enough.
	Right.
	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 religious... You know, one thing I will say about the prophecy and all this thing, I'm not a religious person by nature per se.
	I mean, I have my own personal and internal spiritual belief system.
	No, it's generally come true.
	I have read the Upanishad just briefly.
	I've read the Bible.
	I've looked at the Talmud and the Koran, just to kind of get an overview to see, you know, what were these things all about.
	I know that there are certain common features, no matter how divergent or culturally different by what lens their particular interpretation of the general rule system were.
	The rule system 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 a bit
	point we're about to come to which happens to be right about now the matter
	of fact that the president norman's global still changes about to occur and
	i i look at all of them go that i've ever been terrible data that the congressman and
	there should be something to do
	you know what did they you can't be treated
	and under what context would be conclusions on well i know that clearly
	you don't feel that you're the virus
	well i i i tried to be a 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 than try to be a part of it.
	All right.
	Charles, believe it or not, we've chewed up five hours.
	Unbelievable, but it's been fun.
	It's been good.
	It's been good, yes.
	It's been very good.
	Good for me, certainly.
	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.
	Sounds great.
	Take care.
	You too.
	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 Art Bell.

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