Albert Harrison, UC Davis psychology professor and author of After Contact, explores humanity’s potential reaction to extraterrestrial life, citing NASA’s space reproduction studies (rats, Frank Tipler’s "emulated people" concept) and dismissing fears of demonic interpretations as fringe. He argues advanced civilizations—likely Type 1 per Michio Kaku’s theory—would prioritize science over secrecy, with robotic probes (à la 2001) as plausible first contact methods. While acknowledging listener claims like coded messages in ancient texts or Area 51 collaborations, Harrison insists replicable evidence is critical. The episode ends with Bell teasing future "real zingers," leaving unresolved whether covert surveillance or inevitable discovery awaits humanity’s cosmic awakening. [Automatically generated summary]
From the high desert in the great American Southwest, I bid you all good evening, or good morning, as the case may be, across all these many very prolific time zones stretching from the Hawaiian and East Islands outwest eastward to the Caribbean and the U.S. Virgin Islands.
Good morning there in St. Thomas and elsewhere.
South into South America, north all the way to the Pole, and worldwide on the internet.
This is Coast Ghost a.m.
I'm Mark Bell.
And what a night we've got for you tonight.
As a matter of fact, I'll give you a rundown of this night and what's coming up the remainder of the week and on into next week.
Let me first say, as I have said I would do, I will continually keep you informed on how we are doing.
These surveys are coming out, and every day we'll be getting more of them.
Today we received two.
One in Philadelphia, our affiliate in Philadelphia, WPHT.
Now WPHT is not well known as WPHT because for most of their life as a radio station they were WCAU originally.
And that of course is a great mother of all radio stations in the country.
WCAU is indeed a great radio station.
They changed their call letters to WPHT some time ago and we achieved, though we're not yet number one there, we achieved the most astounding, the most astounding increases, just unheard of increases in the survey.
And they amount to, in some cases, as much as 2,400%.
Can you imagine that?
Those of you in radio will know what that means, a 2,400% increase.
It's like the people in Philadelphia went, aha.
So here you are.
An astounding survey in Philadelphia.
And that 2,000 plus percent increase in just about every category was absolutely amazing.
And we got the survey in for, so thank you in Philadelphia for beginning to discover us.
In San Diego, the survey has come in.
And we are number one on K-O-G-O, COGO, radio in San Diego.
We are so, our number oneness in San Diego is we are so number one in every demographic that the next radio station down from us, in other words, number two, is number two by about 50 to 100% less, about 100% less.
And then there's about 30 or 40 stations that go on down from there.
In other words, we're about twice the rating of number two.
We are so number one that you'd need field glasses from number two to even see our ratings.
Astounding.
Thank you, everybody in San Diego.
And I will continue to keep everybody informed as the ratings march on.
Now, in about an hour, in the next hour, we are going to have a very, very interesting guest.
He is Al Harrison, a professor at the University of California, Davis, who wrote a book called After Contact, The Human Response to Extraterrestrial Life.
Now, this is very interesting.
Most of the programs we have done contemplate contact, talk about contact, talk about sightings and so forth and so on, but this presumes that it already has happened.
After contact, the human response to extraterrestrial life should be very, very interesting indeed.
That'll be coming up next hour.
Then, tomorrow night, Dr. Stephen Greer of CSETI is going to be here, along with Steve Bassett, who is, as far as I know, the nation's only UFO lobbyist in Washington, D.C. So we'll find out what's up with Stephen Greer.
Always a very riveting program.
Stephen Greer is a very focused, fascinating, intelligent individual, and CSET, a very interesting organization.
Then on Friday night, remember I told you that I was going to have an expert on satellites on?
Somebody who had actually done work on our spy satellites?
Remember that?
Well, Friday night, here he comes.
Ronald Regier.
Regier, I guess, I hope I'm saying that correctly, is going to be our guest, along with Daryl Sims.
Now, that should be interesting.
That should be quite a pair, and that'll be coming up Friday night.
Then Monday night, Tuesday morning, it'll be Father Malachi Martin back again.
I know a lot of you have been waiting a long time for this, and he's got quite a bit to say about extraterrestrial life as well in the Vatican.
Monday night, Tuesday morning.
Then on Tuesday night, Wednesday morning, Harry Brown, the probable candidate for the Libertarian Party, is going to be here, and I'm not going to say any more about that right now.
And then Friday of next week, Lori Toy of I Am America.
Lori is a prophet, and she has some very disturbing prophecy to convey to you.
She is A fascinating woman.
Just wait till you hear from Lori Toy.
So that's what I've kind of got booked for the immediate future.
ABC World News tonight with Peter Jennings ran a story on head transplants.
Can you imagine that?
It ran, I guess, yesterday, and I didn't get to see it.
But I would be very, very interested in any of you who did.
Head transplants.
Well, I did a story on that with Dr. White.
Remember?
People said, you're crazy as a loon.
Head transplants, what are you talking about?
And how, let's see, it was be what, two or three weeks, four weeks later?
It's on ABC World News tonight.
I rest my case.
Now, a couple of things for you to note.
One, on our website right now, tonight, as of about an hour ago, a very, very extensive story on MSNBC about the entire Kent affair.
That's right, Kent, our confessed non-JPL employee, MSNBC ran a big story about it.
And of course, yes, you can go to my website right now and jump across.
You'll see it right there.
MSNBC.
It's called A Tale from the Sidonia Sideshow.
Pretty good title, huh?
And it lays out the whole thing, chronicles the entire affair.
So that's on my website now, A Tale from the Sidonia Sideshow.
In addition, late yesterday, not all of you will have heard it, but a man claiming to be the Area 51 caller confessed on the air.
This must be Confession Week, huh?
And we've got the real audio version of that, and I know a lot of you would not have heard it because it was at the end of the program, so that is on the website.
In addition, I got a little note here from Michael Hemingson.
Michael Hemingson is the fellow who wrote the article suggesting that I might be on somebody's black ops payroll.
And somebody called the program last night and said, Art, you are black ops.
It's obvious because you took that article down, didn't you?
Accusing you of being black ops.
My God, we had it up there forever.
Yes, we took it down, but upon hearing that, Keith put it right back up again.
And so the author of this article, Michael Hemingson, wrote me the following, Dear Art Bell, I noticed recently on your website in the links that my article about you and Black Ops payroll is back up.
I also hear almost every other night something mentioned to that effect.
Will it never end?
Anyway, I was wondering, did the Washington Post article ever come in?
Oh, yes, it did.
And it did mention that, by the way.
Michael, so yeah, you made it into the Washington Post story.
So that's back up.
Otherwise, news-wise, there's not much.
A federal judge has ruled that Monica Lewinsky does not have immunity from prosecution in the investigation into whether President Clinton had a sexual relationship with her and sought to cover it up.
The Associated Press has learned the decision by U.S. District Judge Norma Holloway.
Johnson is under seal, but was confirmed to the Associated Press and is reported here on Reuters.
At a breakfast Thursday with American business leaders, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright tried to coax China into lowering its trade barriers that contributed to a $50 billion trade deficit in 1997.
The bait she offered was an easing of sanctions imposed after China brutalized the democracy movement in 1989, mostly ran over it with tanks, if you'll recall.
We are going to have to deal with China, and if you ever get an opportunity to go to China, it will scare the you-know-what out of you, the amount of economic activity going on there.
I sat and just watched it.
It was...
Pessimism spreading in Japan's business community despite a massive stimulus package announced by the government there.
More than 90%, 90% of 200 major Japanese companies surveyed believe Japan won't come anywhere near its 1.9% gross domestic growth target for this fiscal year.
Yeah, between that, between that and ABC doing a story on head transplants, I'm going to have to get further out on the edge, huh?
unidentified
Oh, yeah.
Or another thing, too, on the sounds from hell.
Yes.
You know, I've listened to a lot of preachers, and all the people that have talked, said that it couldn't be hell because you have to have judgment before you go to hell.
We write in the Bible, I've heard them read it, it says, at the judgment, the grave shall give up at the dead, and hell shall give up at the dead to be judged.
There's no reason to call about on our Lord here in that way when we're just talking about a barbecue.
But it was an experiment.
You know, I just left the camera during the day on this construction project out there, and I asked people what it was.
And it kind of proves a point.
I mean, people said it was a garage.
People said it was an underground bomb bunker.
People said everything in the world.
And yet you could see during the day people bringing bricks and slowly building the barbecue.
And there was no question in my mind that it was a barbecue, but everybody thought it was everything else until the very end.
unidentified
I'll be darned.
Well, I was just taking a shot in the dark, and I thought that you would utilize the space and the clear skies and the desert to create a mini observatory.
Well, once again, I do seem to be here constantly surprising myself on that score.
And by the way, while we're on that subject, you may recall, those of you who read the Wave Rider communication, that one of the things that it said in the Wave Rider communication was that Robert O'Dean He's a fellow who went to Area as a child, built a rocket.
And Robert went to Area 51.
They actually took him up to Area 51.
It's a remarkable story.
And in fact, he writes, Bob Dean writes, because a lot of people took that to be present tense instead of some sort of prediction like they always do, of course.
Dear Art, as you well know, the rumor of my demise has been slightly exaggerated.
I am alive and well and as honored as ever.
Take care and keep up the good work.
Bob Dean.
Had he sent me a phone number where I could have actually contacted him, I'd have called him on the phone and you could hear his voice and you would know he is well.
And that was a prediction.
And every famous person has predictions made about them.
Hell, they've had me dead two or three times now.
Usually it was the flu, but whenever any of my detractors hear me off the air for a period of more than about one day, they write my obit, which flies around the internet.
Hey, by the way, that brings up another topic.
There is flying around the internet a story about somebody whose kidneys have been taken.
Well, it's pure BS.
I called Florida, and they said those poor people at that medical facility in Florida are receiving about 150, 200 calls a day, suggesting, asking about this horrible kidney thing.
It's called a reason not to party anymore.
You know, the guy wakes up after being seduced by this beautiful girl in a bathtub full of ice.
And a little note says, call 911 or you'll die, and his kidneys are gone.
It's total BS.
And these poor people in Florida have been putting up with this for I don't know how long.
So don't send me any more copies of that.
Please don't.
I've got a million copies.
It's total baloney.
Absolutely untrue.
Somebody concocted the whole thing and worse yet put at the bottom a legitimate medical facility phone number.
And it's just not true.
All right, back to open lines in a moment.
Anyway, they do that all the time.
You know, they've killed me off several times.
Robert O'Dean was not killed off, though he was predicted to be.
Nevertheless, Robert O'Dean is alive and well and still kicking.
And dear Art, I just finished watching the UPN 10 o'clock news, and they had an excellent report on the controversy about the face and images on Mars.
They showed the images that Richard Hoagland had taken and interviewed him as well.
They then presented the evidence to Dr. Arden Alby of JPL, and he laughed it off.
UPN compared the quality of the other photos taken hours before on Mars and showed their clarity, then compared them to the incredibly poor quality of the Sidonia region.
All this was laughed off by NASA while Richard presented a logical, cogent argument that NASA is indeed hiding something.
It looks as though the whole thing is heating up, Art.
And yes, Art, Peter Jennings showed the monkeys with switched heads the other night.
He had a mini-interview with a scientist.
Don't know if it was Dr. White.
Scientists said that it could be done with humans.
Easier, in fact, because humans have larger necks.
And, of course, we are more familiar with human surgery.
They have some kind of spinal brace to hold things together until things healed or fused.
Well, I don't know about that.
I think that is one thing, according to Dr. White, they have not been able to conquer.
But can you imagine that?
Now, depending on how you feel about an afterlife, it might not be a bad option if you were going to go to have your head transplanted.
I'm just surprised that it was barely a month after I did the story with Dr. White, who was very gracious, that ABC World News Tonight glommed onto it.
Yeah, and also, yeah, and also, by the way, I've got sooner or later I'm going to be downloading onto the Art Bell news group, I've got the reversals of the March 26-27 with me, Dave Oates, Richard Hoagland, and you that famous night.
And it's about five and a half pages.
And tonight I'm going to download it.
What you said, what Richard Hoagland said, and what Dave Oates said.
Thank you very much, and good luck with the reversals on the potential confession.
I'm not all together sure.
It sure did sound like him.
He did a very good job of it, but whether it was him or not, I'm getting mail that's running about 50-50.
You tell me.
Now, I guess I'm going to read this to you.
There is a film crew, a documentary team, that came into Perump, Nevada, my little town last week.
And they came here because I'm going to explain this to you.
It was a full television documentary team.
And they believe there is about to be a UFO incident here in Perump, a serious one.
And they have done this previously.
Somehow they find out where these things are going to occur and they go to the town and do, check this out, pre-interviews with people.
Now, I did not meet with them while they were here.
I was aware they were coming, but I didn't meet with them.
And here is a letter copied to me from this documentary team that was here last week.
We all feel as though our initial visit to Prompt was a success.
We've established good contacts, introduced ourselves to appropriate people, observed a very interesting town and its residents, have gotten to know each other a little better and have developed a better understanding of our project's wonderful potential.
Phil has informed me that partly based on our success of documenting a before picture, activity is now on the increase.
He informed me that flying balls of colored light observed earlier this week over Colorado are headed toward Perump.
They've been reported flying in the sky as blue, green, and red in color and are reminiscent of the lights in the movie Close Encounters.
As they approach Perump, they will be observed as red, white, and occasionally orange in color.
The lights will be preceded by an electrical buzzing-like interference picked up by electronics in the Perump area.
The humming may already have commenced.
Anyway, I won't read the rest of it.
He says, I've copied this memo to Art Bell in the spirit of openness.
He may be suspicious of our intentions, but hopefully he'll understand that we are just documenting journalists with a willingness to share information as we learn about it.
We shall see.
There was, in fact, another occasion on which they somehow knew that an incident was going to occur and actually went into a town and interviewed people prior to the incident.
You were talking about the heads of the monkeys being switched?
Yes.
I heard that they interviewed some monkeys the other day and asked them if they wanted to experiment with that procedure, and they all had the same answer.
Well, if they had that kind of sense of humor, my dear, that would mean they would be sentient, and it would indicate that we should not fool them at all.
Otherwise, it sounds corny.
But if they really did have that kind of sense of humor, then you couldn't do it.
I did hours with Dr. White on the subject.
It was absolutely fascinating.
And in fact, it could be done.
They could keep a human head alive.
In fact, perhaps with more ease than they have kept a monkey's head alive.
And they did that years ago.
Now, the ethics and morality of it, that's another question.
Some very interesting reversals from an audio tape of a woman videotaping an unusual light source in the sky and when she played it back the next day she heard an unusual sound on the audio tape and asked us to analyze it.
And it does appear to say you are programmed and when you reverse it it says grey's control you or grey's control.
Whatever we're going to do we better do it quick because we're near the top of the L. Okay just stand by and I'll run it.
Okay here it's only a couple of seconds so just listen very carefully.
Sounded like a machine to me now I couldn't hear it very well.
unidentified
There was a lot of background noise.
I do have another one where a fellow called Harry Mason is talking about some scientists breaking ranks in the United States and telling people that they're working on Townsend and Brown's electrogravitic systems.
And when he says importance for the use of civil aircraft, which was their statement saying they broke ranks because of the importance for the use of civil aircraft, when that's reversed, he actually says, oh, hell, this is to be used in war.
Well, in a moment, we're going to check on the health of Bob Dean, Robert O'Dean, who I managed to confuse with David Adair here a little while ago.
But what I didn't confuse is the fact that he has been predicted to be passing on to the other side shortly.
And a lot of people read that, of course, as meaning he has already gone, and he has not.
Or I've got a ghost on the line, one of the two, so we'll say hello to him and maybe surprise him a little bit.
There's a whole lot of stuff.
You've got to get up to the website.
MSNBC wrote a big story on the entire Kent affair.
And if you'll go to my website, it's, I don't know, about six pages long.
Big, long story on MSNBC.
It's the first item on my website this night.
So go check it out at www.artbell.com.
The entire cast of characters is there.
Richard Hoagland, Champs.
I'm sure they mentioned Linda Howe, myself.
the entire cast of characters In the spirit of continuing to keep you informed, the survey out in San Diego, California, number one, folks, about double over the next closest competitor.
We are so far number one on Cogo, KOGO in San Diego, that the next closest competitor is down by about 100%.
It is astounding.
And then there's about 30 or 40 stations below that.
Also in Philadelphia, FWPHT, up like 2,400%.
It is the most astounding rise in one survey period that I have ever seen, about 2,400% Philadelphia.
Now, I told you there's an MSNBC article.
You've got to read it.
It's called A Tale from the Zidonia Sideshow, and it's about the whole thing with Kent.
The audio from the satellite outage caller who confessed, maybe, is up there.
And of course, the black ops thing is up there again, too, much to the distress of the fellow who wrote it.
Now, coming to us from the other side, here is Robert O'Dean.
Robert, how is it over there?
Are you the clouds and angels and stuff like that?
unidentified
Got a great sense of humor, you know.
No, it's about 70 degrees here in Scottsdale right at the moment, and I'm staying with some lovely friends, and I'm feeling pretty sassy, Art.
It was the time, the wave rider, it was a time traveler who mentioned in passing in one of his communications, in passing, mind you, that you had passed.
And this was, of course, years into the future.
But, Robert, people read, they sort of half-read things, you know.
And so it's my understanding that after this went up, and heck, we put that up in February, people concluded that you were dead as a doornail, huh?
unidentified
Listen, my friend, I'm as ornery as ever.
I'm feeling pretty sassy, and I'm looking forward to going home one day, but I didn't have plans to get up a load to go tonight.
All right, then if you would, Robert, do me a big favor and put together a short bio.
It's what I tell all my guests.
I rarely do booking here on the air.
But put together a short bio that I can introduce you with on the air and the phone number where I can reach you at 11 o'clock Pacific time next Wednesday and consider yourself booked.
And in fact, we'll be doing a program with this next Wednesday.
See, that shows you how people misread things.
All right, now I've got a real treat for you.
We normally examine sightings, fast walkers, things traversing our atmosphere at 24,000 miles an hour, that sort of thing.
All sorts of areas in the paranormal.
We anticipate the possibility of extraterrestrial contact, but rarely, rarely, in fact, never have we interviewed somebody like we're about to interview Albert A. Harrison, who has written a book called After Contact, The Human Response to Extraterrestrial Life.
Al Harrison received his BA and MA in psychology from the University of California, Santa Barbara, and his Ph.D. in social psychology from the University of Michigan.
He is currently a professor of psychology and director of the Internship and Career Center at the University of California, Davis.
He is co-author of, Check This Out, Living Aloft, Human Requirements for Extended Spaceflight.
As well, from Antarctica to Outer Space, Life in Isolation and Confinement.
His articles on space exploration have appeared in such different publications as The American Psychologist, The Journal of the British Interplanetary Society, the Journal of Spacecraft and Rockets, The Case for Mars, Aha!
and Behavioral Sciences.
A member of the American Psychological Association and the American Psychological Society, Al is currently Deputy U.S. Editor for Systems Research and Behavioral Science.
He is also a member of the SETI Committee Of the International Academy of Astronautics, I guess it is, astronautics.
I could spend a lot of time, actually, and I should, talking to you about even your other books here, Living Aloft, Human Requirements for Extended Spaceflight.
You know, Doctor, there are many people who believe that we never went to the moon.
And one of the things they cite as a reason why we never went to the moon is because they say there would have been too much radiation and it would have killed any sort of sunflare or anything, would have killed everybody on board a spacecraft going to the moon.
Do we know whether or not it would be possible for a human man and woman to conceive in space, to have sex, and then to conceive a child in space?
This is a very non-trivial question when you get a little deeper than the obvious titillation with respect to the question, because if we're going to have long space flights and we cannot go faster than the speed of light, we are going to have to have literal generations in space.
But of course, you know, in terms of the radiation problem, there are some very imaginative kinds of ideas, such as Frank Tipler's suggestion that we can send emulated people that don't know that they're different from the real things back on Earth.
Well, what he suggests in his book, The Physics of Immortality, is that it would be possible to essentially duplicate people by means of these very mammoth, continually running computer programs.
And so consequently, what you would do is you would convey electronic representations of people rather than people themselves from one part of the solar system to another.
It may be that we're, if I remember correctly, Dr. Tipler estimated that this would occur within the next 20 to 50 years.
It's quite possible that we would have the immense computer capacity.
I have some philosophical problems with the idea that computer emulations of people are essentially people themselves and almost indistinguishable from the real thing.
But it is an interesting point, and it is one thing that's been suggested to try to deal with some of the problems of traveling through high radiation areas.
Oh, boy, there's all kinds of physical and psychological things that can happen.
One of the major things is decalcification of the bones, loss of calcium under conditions of weightlessness, muscular deconditioning because it takes less effort to do certain kinds of things.
Cardiovascular deconditioning is another kind of problem.
One other thing that seems to happen, aside from the physical problems, I've noticed and the controllers have noticed that the longer the cosmonauts or astronauts stay up there, the more testy they tend to become.
In fact, downright rebellious at times, defying orders from the ground, that kind of thing.
One of the things that happens, Art, when you have a group that's isolated like that, is that tensions can build up under those kinds of situations.
We've got to remember, you know, it's very hard work in a lot of ways.
There's a tremendous amount of risk and stress and danger.
And what happens sometimes is that the tensions within a group get expressed to outside groups.
It's a little bit safer.
In other words, that rather than, say, showing tensions in a direct way to one another, if I were in space, I might take it out on the ground control or something like that.
It's relatively safe as compared to getting into some kind of an altercation with somebody that I'm traveling with.
It's the people at the SETI Institute, people like Dr. Seth Szostek, I believe you're referring to, that provided much of the inspiration for my own work that have encouraged me in a lot of ways.
And John Billingham of the SETI Institute was instrumental in getting me to go to the International Astronautical Federation committee meetings and ultimately getting a hitch on the SETI committee.
So I think it's the rationale to me, the rationale for SETI makes a lot of sense.
I believe that the terms in the Drake equation, which indicate the probability of extraterrestrial intelligence, I think they're quite favorable.
That with each discovery, we're getting more and more circumstantial evidence.
And that the search is conducted not only at the SETI Institute, but by many other radio astronomers, could very easily yield results.
I do think that it's a very conservative kind of enterprise.
I think that, you know, with people like Phil Morrison at MIT, Frank Drake, formerly of Santa Cruz and of many other places, Carl Sagan, I think the giggle factor is what we refer to it.
And I think that's been reduced substantially.
My understanding is that if you pick up an introductory astronomy book these days, you're quite likely to find a whole chapter on SETI.
But yes, I suspect compared to some physicists it's seen as fringy.
And I certainly, when I've talked about it to some of my physicist friends on campus, I certainly got different reactions from different physicists, ranging from enthusiasm to wouldn't we rather talk about golf?
Well, one of the reasons for that, I suspect, is that if extraterrestrial life was actually confirmed, it would thoroughly upset.
You and I talked, and I know that you have never read the Brookings report.
It was done at the behest of the government.
But basically, the Brookings report concluded that the first group and the biggest group to become more upset than any other over the discovery of extraterrestrial life would be, guess who, scientists.
Professor, tell me, when you wrote a book like this called After Contact, After Contact, The Human Response to Extraterrestrial Life, the presumption is there is going to be contact.
The way I answer that is that I think that the probability is high enough that I was willing to write the book.
I personally, as a matter of personal belief, not scientific knowledge, do believe that there's many inhabited worlds out there and that eventually we will be able to make contact with one or more of them.
Do you think that with all, you mentioned the UFO buffs, with all of the anecdotal evidence of things traversing our atmosphere at incredible speeds, all the sightings that cannot be explained, and most of them can, but there are many that cannot, do you consider it possible that we have or are being visited or observed?
I think it's possible, but I think it's quite unlikely.
I want to back up on that one a little bit.
Sure.
And I've been following UFOs since 1947.
I wasn't very old, but I was excited when the first reports came in.
And the problem that I have personally is that we don't seem to have learned a great deal, at least not the kind of stuff that we can convince people with.
And I do believe that a very large proportion of UFO sightings are either hoaxes or misperceptions of natural objects.
One gets down to the problem of is there a residual?
Is there some sort of tiny core there that something else, whether it be spaceships or time machines or expressions of consciousness, who knows?
I really don't know.
But what I do know is that I'm not going to end up being convinced until somebody comes up with some kind of procedure so that if in fact there is something going on in that sense, that we can verify it and turn it into public knowledge.
And I see that's the big difference between SETI and some of the UFO kinds of activities in that SETI is built on the premise that we have to replicate the findings.
We have to repeat them.
And that until that's happened, there is no proof.
And of course, now there's a problem there, isn't there?
Because if it happens to be a one-shot signal, you're going to discard it, and it's sort of too bad.
But you really have no choice.
If you're going to try to make some sort of momentous discovery, some sort of announcement on something like that, you've really got to be pretty sure about what you're talking about.
And it's quite possible that science has changed a lot since then.
I personally know a lot of scientists who I think would be absolutely thrilled and delighted if SETI managed to have a bingo or if we discovered extraterrestrial life in some other way.
I think where the problem might be would be if somehow accompanying contact, there was a lot of new knowledge that came to us from our new associates.
And it could be very frustrating, for example, in the case of a scientist who had been working on a problem all of his life or her life to discover that it had been solved a million years ago in some other civilization.
But what I like to think is that whereas these kinds of episodes could occur, that on the whole we'd be opening up new vistas and new opportunities for human scientists, and that in fact it would reinvigorate the whole scientific enterprise.
So maybe the Brookings report is correct, maybe I'm correct, but maybe the truth is somewhere in between.
But I think it could have a very, very positive kind of effect on scientists, except for those who steadfastly maintain that intelligent life could not arise elsewhere.
You mentioned a great transfer, the possibility of a transfer of very advanced technology.
If one, and I'm going back to the social issues now, I think, examines contact between advanced industrial societies like ours and societies and tribal societies that have never somehow had contact with the outside world previously, inevitably we really, really screw them up.
Now, why couldn't you transfer that, use that as a parallel, and suggest that a whole bunch of new advanced technology just dumped on us would foul us up?
Well, see, my presumption is it wouldn't necessarily be just dumped on us.
First of all, Art, you're a very astute observer, and indeed that does seem to be what happens.
That is the dominant historical pattern, and I can't evade that.
But I'm not convinced that it would necessarily be a situation where this information was all gleaned at once.
Remember, under a SETI microwave search kind of scenario, what's going to happen is we're going to intercept these signals.
They're going to be hard to decipher.
The civilization will be a long way away.
There will be time delays and so forth.
So it may be that rather than a flood, under the most common kind of SETI scenario, it's going to be a trickle, and then more information will be received over time.
Actually, the movie Contact with Jodi Foster was fairly intriguing in terms of the manner in which it would be found.
You would find a marker signal of some sort, which SETI would locate, and then you would find some sort of sub-carrier or adjacent signal, which would then give you more information.
And presumably, all of that would be transmitted simultaneously.
And the movie sure makes it look good, but it may also be that we intercept something that we have to really work to get the information.
But there's another part to my answer, and that is, it seems to me that there would be a good likelihood that we would not be the first society that this other society contacted.
That it would just be too large a coincidence for two neophytes to encounter each other for the first time.
And one possibility here, it's a convenient possibility, I admit, one possibility here is that this other society is going to have had a lot of experience in dealing with new cultures.
And that whereas we can't just sort of sit back and take what they offer us, that the process will be eased by virtue of their experience.
In the book, After Contact, as a matter of fact, I have the better part of a chapter talking about some of the dangers of technology transfer and some of the social consequences.
For instance, suppose that we had the medical skills to keep everybody alive and healthy for a thousand years.
At first, that sounds really good.
Well, start thinking about it.
How long you've been able to go without having a divorce?
Do you think you can make another 700 years?
Can you remember your grandchildren's names now?
These are meant to be humorous examples, but in fact, there can be unintended consequences, things that we do not foresee when we receive advanced technology that we don't really understand.
Yes, but now see here, I'll put on my other hat and look forward to mining asteroids and moving out into space.
I think that within a thousand years, there will be firmly nobody's going to be around to prove me wrong, and I won't be around to bear the consequences, but within a thousand years, I think there's an excellent chance that there will be something reminiscent of a galactic civilization or sub-galactic civilization, and that people will be scattered far and wide, and that we will no longer be constrained by the limited resources that our planet has.
Well, I'm a Star Trek fan, and in Star Trek there is something called the Prime Directive, which prevents any galactic federation from tampering with any new emerging civilization based on exactly what we've been talking about, that it would disrupt them terribly, and until they reach a certain stage of development, they are not contacted.
I would imagine that we have not yet quite reached that stage, or I would guess that anyway.
Well, one of the things you might look for is the fact that they have discovered, mined, conquered element 92 without threatening to destroy each other.
Well, a bit better, but in a lot of ways, since the decline of the Soviet Union and the emergence of the individual Russian Confederation, there's still an awful lot of danger out there, and some people would argue more than there was when we had a good, solid Cold War underway.
Another is, and I'm going to say this to you, and you can deal with it the way you want.
I get thousands of letters every week dealing with these topics.
And fully, 20% of them, Professor, are from religious fundamentalists.
And these folks, about that number of them by percentage, if they were to encounter extraterrestrial life, would view it as of the devil.
And if a saucer landed somewhere, just theoretically, and a little guy was walking down the ramp, he would be so full of lead before he hit the bottom of the ramp that they'd need two wheelbarrows to carry him away.
So there are a lot of people who would view any extraterrestrial life as of the devil, and there'd be real trouble.
Yes, I think, and I'm not sure if it was from the Brookings report, but in addition to scientists, they mentioned, somebody's mentioned politicians would have a lot to lose, that it could cause problems for people with mental illness.
And then people with certain kinds of religious beliefs.
Those were the four big groups.
I think that first, what I'd like to point to is a number of studies suggesting that whereas this percentage may be out there, that many people would see detection of extraterrestrial intelligence as not only consistent with their religious views,
but sort of very supportive Of that, in a sense, providing further testimony, you might say, to God's power and wonder.
Yes, I have heard this about people that have a very specific set of beliefs that could be challenged if life had evolved elsewhere, where, for instance, Christ might not have been.
But Zee Whiz, we can't let, in my opinion, 20% of the people shouldn't be allowed to call the tune on this.
There might be some way to, well, first of all, the SETI presumption is it's going to be radio contact, but if at some future point of visitation, quote, occurred, certainly there could be some way to engineer it to be safe.
I mean, for instance, one possibility, and this is sheer speculation, way off in the future, would be to meet on the moon.
Another possibility could be some type of sea landing where you had to have vessels and things.
In fact, if you recall back, I think you're exactly right, incidentally.
You certainly couldn't have it anywhere within the continental United States unless you picked, say, a very isolated area of Wyoming and got everybody out of the way like close encounters.
Certainly, you couldn't allow the general public to have access to such an event, which brings me to the following question.
With regard to SETI, let us, for the sake of conversation, assume that SETI receives an unambiguous signal.
Now, in the perfect world, you would imagine there would be a public announcement and that SETI would do a big press release and why we'd all be told that suddenly we had been, lo and behold, thank God, we've got a signal, we're not alone, and we'd all hear about it.
But I don't believe for one second that's what would occur.
Even as much as I respect SETI, I think that there would be, and I bet there are, protocols for this, that the American public or the world would not be the first to hear about it, that contact would be reported to a government agency first.
The goal is to bring everybody in on it and then work together to decide who replies.
How you make this work in the day of emails, government eavesdropping, what have you, nobody's for sure.
So we recognize that it's the goal.
I think there's quite a bit of suspicion, a concern on some people's parts that if a signal were detected, then perhaps governmental agencies would take over and rather than being an achievement of science, it would sort of become one more governmental kind of operation.
Now, nobody can prove it one way or another, but I will say that I think that the official protocols have a long way to go.
And whenever you're trying to get, who knows, 300 nations together and marching to the same drummer, you're guaranteed to have a lot of difficulties.
And this, of course, requires international cooperation.
Now, I believe the chain of command is to report to various scientific societies either before or about the same time that the announcement is made to governments.
But the idea is that scientists are supposed to have precedence in this.
Whether or not that could be achieved is another matter.
Yes, and then there's concerns that one government might try to make unfair use of it or make use of it in ways that are contrary to another government.
I'll tell you, we spend a lot of time worrying about this, and there's very few academic social scientists that are looking at this, maybe six or seven people.
And frankly, we need some help from political scientists and some other people that have strong expertise in this area to try to deal with these issues.
So if there's any political scientists out there that might be interested, we'd love to hear from you.
So then we would have to imagine there would be a government notification and that they would put the clamps on for a little while until they figured out how to deal with it or how to take advantage of it or how to turn it to military advantage.
Well, when I interviewed Seth, he suggested that because of all the email and the internet and all the rest of it, there would quickly be leaks and it would be known all over the place.
And I suppose that is possible, but if the government stepped in, they could certainly keep it at the rumor stage.
I mean, there's lots of rumors that flash across the internet.
Professor, hold on.
We're at the top of the hour.
We'll be right back.
My guest is Professor Albert A. Harrison, a professor of psychology.
His book is After Contact: The Human Response to Extraterrestrial Life.
And he'll be back in a moment, as will I, from the high desert.
This is Coast to Coast AM.
unidentified
You're listening to Art Bell's Somewhere in Time.
Tonight featuring a replay of Coast to Coast AM from April 29, 1998.
The End
Thank you.
Thank you.
You're listening to Art Bell Somewhere in Time, tonight featuring a replay of Coast to Coast AM from April 29th, 1998.
But one could again hope for other types of scenarios.
Now, I hasten to add that as a SETI person, of course, I'm looking forward to a nice, remote, sanitary, safe exchange of radio waves and things.
But there's all kinds of interesting things that if somebody landed, there's some else.
I mean, is it a matter for the local cops?
Is it a state matter?
Is it a federal matter?
Is it an international matter?
There's questions in terms of which bureaucracies would swing into play.
Customs and Immigration have something to say about it.
If they look like food would...
The Food and Drug Administration, only kidding on that one.
But the...
Seriously...
Yeah, yeah.
But my belief on that one is that they're going to be extremely prosperous and well-fed, so I'm not too worried about it.
Seriously, my guess is that any society that had the means to flit about the universe could find abundant resources on uninhabited planets or planets that did not have higher life forms on them.
One of the concerns and something which I certainly spend a bit of time on in my book is the ways that various bureaucracies might respond.
And I think that the government bureaucracy, typically they're not good at dealing with fast-moving events and events that require novel kinds of activities and solutions.
And my guess is that under any kind of contact scenario, they're going to have to respond quickly and they're going to have to think creatively.
And my guess is that very few agencies, if any, have given any serious thought to this, that the giggle factor is too high.
And also that it's unthinkable, like the Titanic sinking.
And one of the things I hope to see happen is for some intelligent discussion about how we really would react and what kinds of steps agencies might take now so that when contact occurs, if it occurs, that things can move smoothly.
Professor, we assume, perhaps incorrectly, that with evolution, mankind will slowly be less and less of a warrior species.
But there is the possibility that that assessment is incorrect, And it may be incorrect with regard to another civilization that may be very much more advanced than we are.
So, to send out signals, in effect saying where we are, to send out spacecraft with a little disk containing the human genome and all the rest of it, could be argued to possibly be a mistake.
The movie Independence Day comes to mind where they arrived, and they had really no interest in bargaining with us, didn't want to give us anything, simply wanted to kill us.
So if you imagine the scenario that the nature of war and the nature of warriors does not really change with time, you just get better weapons, then isn't there some worry that an independence day-type scenario could occur?
And my conclusion is probably not, looking at what's going on on Earth.
Now, it's a fairly complicated set of arguments, but there's several prongs to it.
One is that there's a shift towards democratic forms of government on Earth, and we know that democratic forms of government tend not to go to war, at least with other democratic forms of government.
That usually there's some sort of authoritarian state there.
So as the world is becoming democratized, you might say, the risks of war is going down.
The second is that the British military historian John Keegan has argued very convincingly in one of his recent books, and unfortunately the title escapes me right now, that in fact the world is turning from war and that within a couple hundred years war will be obsolete.
A man by the name of Mueller makes the same argument saying, look, lots of nations have already turned away from war.
He calls it the process of Hollandization.
More nations are turning away, the defeated nations in World War II being a good example.
And he said that there's wide-scale recognition now that war is both methodologically ineffective and morally repugnant.
As if this isn't enough, friends, there's mathematical studies of the survivability of nation-states.
And basically, the very simple kind of explanation here is that countries that go around looking for trouble get themselves put out of business primarily by coalitions of other countries.
Now, admittedly, this is based on human experience.
We think that physical principles apply throughout the universe.
We're starting to think that certain biological principles apply throughout the universe.
I'm probably one of a very limited number of people who thinks that certain psychological and sociological principles may apply beyond our planet.
But in my opinion, what that boils down to is I think you're saying that there is a great likelihood that if we do meet them, whoever they are, they will resemble us.
You know, one could argue that that would certainly be a possibility.
And I've heard it suggested, for instance, that our ability to contain nuclear arms might be something that would be a definite sign of maturity in the eyes of another civilization.
He has a fascinating theory regarding the state of civilizations, that there would be a Type Zero, which we would be utilizing fossil fuels and the more base things that we can get from our own planet.
Then there would be a Type 1, which would utilize the power of, oh, for example, zero-point energy, would begin to harness these other types of powers, and then other types of civilizations even further on harnessing the power of the sun and so forth and so on.
But he gives the chance of a Type Zero, us, making it to a Type 1, in other words, not blowing itself to smithereens or ecologically destroying itself, to be a very small chance indeed.
Should we begin our government agencies, should they be now not chuckling, but putting into place procedures for contact so that it would not be fouled up, I'll say fouled up, and result in our extinction or some horrible mistake, that contact would be smooth, whether it was somebody coming here or the receipt of a sudden signal.
That would certainly be something that I would encourage.
But I would add, you know, this wouldn't necessarily involve a cast of thousands and a budget of millions, but to get some people thinking about it, talking about it, considering various possibilities and likelihoods, the reason being is that if and when contact occurs, it's going to be very quick, and that will be too late to think it through and to put procedures in place.
It'll be a responsive rather than a proactive kind of mode, and it'll be a lot of mopping up.
So I think that to me it makes sense to have some people, not everybody, but some people and key agencies thinking about this as a possibility and not simply laughing and scratching their head.
There is another kind of contact or sudden realization that would be in a lot of ways every bit as disturbing as contact with an alien race, and that is right now we have a spacecraft taking very interesting photographs of Mars.
And I noticed that you wrote a book called The Journal of Spacecraft and Rockets, The Case for Mars.
Now, I'm sure this is not your area of expertise, but in the Sidonia region of Mars, we are taking photographs of things that people are arguing like crazy about that may turn out not to be natural.
I have interviewed a number of astronomers who would stake their reputation on the fact they're not natural.
That would indicate that a long time ago, there was intelligent life on Mars.
If we should suddenly be able to confirm that fact, wouldn't this social stress and all the rest of it be much the same as if we were having contact?
I'm not sure that it would be because, well, first of all, yes, it would be a momentous, sensational event, and it would certainly transform science.
It would show that intelligent life wasn't unique to our planet.
But in this particular case, you're dealing with a long-dead or remote civilization.
And so, for instance, the chances of getting a lot of advanced technology from this civilization, the chance of them invading whatever.
These things are not there.
So I think that contact with what you might call live or sentient or active beings would be much more dramatic.
As a psychologist, of course, I'm aware of a lot of factors in perception.
You know, we're, not me, but some of us use inkbots and ask the people to look for things.
I think that the face on Mars is fascinating because it is arguable.
The problem is that if people believe it was created by conscious beings, they're not going to be convinced it was a natural formation and vice versa.
And it's infuriating, of course, because it's sort of so close and so far away that the sort of the definitive kinds of looks that could put it to rest one way or the other are just a little bit beyond our reach, so it would seem.
If news of that sort or a signal were actually received by SETI, Do you think there would be a single blunt announcement, or do you think that it would be the information would be kind of slowly given to the public in small doses, kind of like a time-release capsule, so as not to shock?
My understanding of the desired way to go if SETI detects something is to understand what it is, verify it, and verify what it is, and then get the information to the public fairly quickly, trying to really minimize the risk of mistakes, keep those down really, really low.
I have heard, of course, the hypothesis that there's conditioning going on, that pieces of news are being released to people, that there's movies and shows.
And my only comment on that is that if, in fact, that's occurring, I don't think it's being done particularly skillfully.
I think that people need to be educated, that agencies need to be educated, and that there needs to be some thought given to an action plan.
Let me stress that the different contact scenarios or versions of contact that people have in mind have very different kinds of implications.
It's one thing to simply bluntly announce, gee, we found a radio signal and we know it's extraterrestrial and we think it's intelligent, is compared to an announcement such as, well, gee, you know, 50 years ago a flying saucer crashed and we've been carrying on negotiations with this government for 50 years and they have a base in the New Mexico desert or whatever.
These are very, very different kinds of situations.
And in the second situation, then some kind of gradual release of information or conditioning might make some sense actually.
My guest is Professor Albert A. Harrison, a professor of psychology, director, internship, and career center, University of California, Davis.
His book, After Contact, The Human Response to Extraterrestrial Life.
and we'll get back to him in a moment.
Well, all right.
If you have a question for Professor Harrison, then now would be a good time.
You've got the numbers, and we're going to go to the phones for the professor here in a moment and see what it is that you would ask of somebody imagining contact after contact, actually.
Professor, welcome back.
Hey.
I've got a couple of faxes here I'd like you to deal with.
One says, hi, Art, imagine this scenario.
You're a powerful alien society that knows us from static, filled with I Love Lucy episodes.
And you have decided long ago that Earth is a planet full of idiots.
Your warships just happen to be in our end of the galaxy.
Oh, look, there's that planet of idiots.
Boom, boom, out go the lights.
Indeed, they would have seen early episodes of I Love Lucy and, I suppose, a lot of the other early kind of nonsensical comedies.
But you wouldn't imagine they'd do that, would you?
I hope that we wouldn't go around popping one another off because we didn't like their taste in comedy shows.
I thought they were sort of dippy or something like that.
I think that the facts makes a really good point, and that is that some of the material that's out there in terms of radio signals coming from Earth would not paint a very positive picture if, in fact, they were strong enough to make it to some destination where it could be interpreted.
So I do accept that point.
But, gee, if we kill people for being ding bats and stuff, it wouldn't be a very populous planet.
Boy, now there's a, I hate multiple choice guys of exams.
If we could go to the following Sunday, my guess is they would be packed.
I think for many people, there have been, Victoria Alexander did an interesting study of clergy from many different faiths.
And what she found was that they believed that their congregations, the parishes, whatever, would be delighted and see it as a very positive kind of thing.
I think, though, it might be kind of difficult running a church service if there was live coverage at home on TV.
So if I have to pick, I would go that people would be home watching the breaking news.
This one says, Art, you mentioned the historic precedent of technologically advanced cultures encountering and consequently decimating less technical cultures.
The crucial question here is whether this is a problem inherent in and directly caused by the technological disparity, or is this more a matter of human failings, of power, lust, and cultural clashes?
And I think that one of the reasons is that there has been a problem when technologically advanced cultures have encountered other cultures is that the technologically advanced cultures have confused technology with advancement and superiority and had plenty of arrogance to go along with it.
So if you can have the technology and not necessarily downgrade people who do not have the technology, then maybe it's not an inevitable consequence.
It seems to me, Professor, that at the rate we are advancing right now, if you look at our technological society, that in any society's development, the period of time during which they would communicate by electromagnetic means would be a very, very, very short period in the larger picture.
In other words, already we are beginning to wire the nation with cables that will carry immense amounts of bandwidth and it will not have to be broadcast through the air.
And I can imagine that it would go from there.
And so why should we imagine that any civilization, except for a very short period of time, would even transmit radio or television or even in the electromagnetic spectrum?
What do you think of the concept of an Neumann probes?
In other words, that a very advanced civilization might seed a moon or nearby planetary body with some sort of robotic device designed to sit there and just wait and wait and wait, like in the movie 2001, until this society that they had observed managed to go from point A to point B,
and then it would suddenly come alive and notify the robotic owners of the presence of intelligent beings.
That's certainly an interesting and plausible scenario.
I think that with respect to probes in general, that because we have gotten so good at miniaturization and other kinds of things, that we're more willing now to recognize that other societies may have sent out huge numbers of very small probes, some of which could be in our solar system at present.
And there's a little bit of controversy over this.
Is this being too daring and forward, or is it acceptable?
But my personal position is that I think, yeah, we have to be open to the possibility of some kind of probes.
With the original sightings, I'm not sure that I recall the Roswell crash, but I certainly do recall, as a child, the discussions of UFOs and the many sightings in the late 40s and early 50s.
Well, we still argue about what occurred at Roswell.
And of course, the Air Force, you will recall, I think about a year ago, held a news conference and tried to explain away what occurred at Roswell, and I thought did a terrible, terrible job of it.
Do you think it possible that something indeed did occur at Roswell and we still don't know the truth?
I think something occurred at Roswell because I think some of the military events are unquestionable.
What it was, what it had to do with, I really got to say, I've read some of the books.
I have no idea.
I am certainly not willing to concede that it was a flying saucer crash, and yet sometimes I'm not entirely convinced by Project Mogul and some of these other explanations.
My guess is that Roswell will forever be a mystery.
Okay, first of all, today I went on a field trip to the Alder Planetarium in Chicago, and we've seen a movie on Mars, and they talked about Sidonia and said that the faith on Mars was caused by an illusion of light.
And this really upset me because I listened to your show, Art, and I felt that the person giving this speech and giving the tour was very ignorant and wasn't looking at all the evidence.
Yes, I think, but this could also be true on everybody's part, that once we form an impression of something, we tend to process additional information to bolster our initial opinion.
It can be shaken, it can be changed, but my hunch is that, yes, there is a bias in science against this interpretation, but there may also be a bias in some quarters against an illusion of light interpretation.
Well, we all approach this, I think, in slightly different ways, but there are certain elements.
There have to be stars.
We know there's stars.
There have to be planets.
Now we know there's planets.
There has to be life.
We're now starting to think that life is relatively easy to form rather than requiring a monstrously improbable series of events.
There has to be intelligence.
And my personal belief is there's lots of different ways that intelligence can arise, not just necessarily the pattern on Earth.
So when you put it all together, I come up with my personal estimate for me is that there's a very high probability of life elsewhere and a very high probability that some of this life will be intelligent.
That's not the same as saying that we found them or that they're visiting us at present.
Suppose we were to turn the tables and suppose instead of us being contacted by some other, by life elsewhere, we were to advance and be able to travel faster than light and we were to encounter a civilization much lesser developed than our own, but nevertheless intelligent.
Do you think we would have the wisdom, say within the next half century or so, to be able to make contact with it without destroying it?
I like to think that as we do develop morally and socially as well as technologically, at meetings I've been to where this type of thing has been discussed, the figure that comes up is, gee, we may be ready in about 200 years.
So I don't know how one manufactures that, but the fact that we're talking about this right now, that you brought it up, that we're worried about it, maybe shows that we're on the right track.
My question is, if, let's say for the argument that these are fallen angelic beings, wouldn't it be safe to say that these beings have been around since the creation of time and have had this plan to infiltrate the earth with whatever agenda they have and they would not make contact until it was safe to do so.
You know, that they have knowledge of the people who know of their true identity and could harm their plan ultimately.
My only point in suggesting the kind of communications I've had, and about 20%, 15 to 20% easily, is that it would be a totally unacceptable scenario and they would be thought of as devils and they'd be shot.
unidentified
I think something too that Western culture, the idea of maybe devils as being little red guys with pitchforks and horns and angels, the good guys being white with little wings, I think that's something that Western culture has kind of made up in their minds.
I personally believe that angelic beings are actually created.
I think that there were probably several races created and that some actually fell.
So I believe in actually more than one race of angelic being.
My guess is how they went about it would be extremely important that the thought of showing up in a remote rural neighborhood if you look something like a bear or something would not be the way to go about it.
But again, presumably there would be if such a thing were to occur, it were possible there would be ways to communicate and arrange things in advance and not simply go through with the landing on the White House one.
What I found is that some of the smaller bookstores, the bookstores that feature paperbacks, don't necessarily have it, but the larger bookstores seem to have it, have reasonable supplies.
In that case, we will, as a matter of fact, we have a new little feature on our website that will take people directly over to my guests' amazon.com website, and they can just buy the book right there so you guys can do that.
I've got something I want to read you, Professor.
This says, Pellegrino, Powell, and Asimov's three laws of alien behavior.
Law one, their survival will be more important than our survival.
If an alien species has to choose between them and us, they won't choose us.
It is difficult to imagine a contrary case.
Species don't survive by being self-sacrificing.
Law two.
Wimps don't become top dogs.
No species makes it to the top by being passive.
The species in charge of any given planet will be highly intelligent, alert, aggressive, and ruthless when necessary.
Law 3.
They will assume, I repeat, they will assume, that the first two laws apply to us.
As I understand it now, at the rate that we are burning fossil fuels, the world's main resources of these will be nearly completely exhausted in about an estimated 40 to 45 years.
Now, while I understand that we are some form of representative democracy here and we like to think of ourselves as not being warlike, if it gets down to the point where we have to have oil, how convinced are you that we will not go and, if necessary, take it?
That's always a possibility, but I would mention two things.
Number one is that if you go back 500, 400, 300, 200, 100 years and compare it with now, I think, Art, that you'd be pretty happy with where you are now in terms of the quality of your life, the kinds of things that are going on, the longevity, security, those kinds of things.
The second thing, and as I'm sure you're aware, is that there's a whole big pile of people out there that have some great ideas about how to bring in resources from off of our planet.
And my personal belief is that if we just sort of hunker down and keep doing what we're always doing, yes, there is a significant risk.
However, if we're willing to bite the bullet and get a really decent space program going with some economic motives as well as adventure and science, we may be able to deal with some of these problems.
Now, you notice I didn't categorically say no, we won't go to war over oil, but I would like to see some of these other possibilities rise to the fore.
Before we, just before the hour, we had a caller on here.
Are you still there, caller?
Yes, I am.
All right.
You began to ask questions about the environment.
We barely even covered that.
I could sit here, and I won't bore everybody with it, but from the Antarctic, which is beginning to break up, the ice shelf is breaking up, to our air, to organisms being born in our water, to new diseases, to all these things that we are presently doing to our environment, is a pretty good question, Professor.
Do you think that we'll be around long enough, make it through all of this, to even meet anybody else?
We've talked about war.
Let's now talk about what we're doing just to stay alive, our environment.
I do want to backtrack for a second because Hans had two really excellent questions.
We do have to keep our guard up, in the sense that one of the first things we have to do is guarantee our safety and security.
That doesn't necessarily mean blowing the other party off the face of the earth.
That's really important, Kate.
But yeah, Hans's point is an extremely good one.
With respect to the environmental issues, yeah, there is a lot of problems out there, but I'm hoping that with the assist of technology, not by thinking small, but by thinking big, we're going to be able to address these.
For instance, there's a project underway right now that is directed by, I believe, William Webster, who was former director of the FBI, to relocate the world's nuclear waste to a Pacific island where it's less likely to cause trouble or fall into the hands of people who might want to make bombs and things.
there's a million things out there that we've got to deal with, and I hope that we will be able to do that.
What I would like to say is let's look at some of the positive accomplishments we've made as well as castigating ourselves for things we could do better.
I mean, there's a lot that we have done to make our world better.
Unfortunately, there's a lot that let's face it, I'm a pessimist.
I look at the world and I see a half-empty glass, unfortunately.
You know, the media focuses on everything that's bad.
You mentioned, you know, when is a good time for the aliens to land?
Definitely not after ID4 came out.
That would have been absolutely horrendous.
I mean, look at the number of, you know, good alien movies, you know, E.T., compared to the ones where they come and eat your face, you know, aliens, ID4, you know, what have you.
It's as if someone out there wants us to feel that everyone out there is out to get us.
And the person, you know, the normal person, you know, me, you know, everybody else out there, they basically get our information from the media, we get our information from the movies.
We get scared out of our pants at the theaters.
Oh my god, the aliens are coming.
And hopefully that's not the only place that we get our information, but a lot of it is.
And it worries me to think that that's the kind of mindset that we've got.
But the media focuses in on the bad part of us, and it shows us all the violence in our lives, and it plays on that, and it inures us to that violence in its own way, creating more.
There is a lot of conviction that media portrayals shape people's responses and that the comments that the caller made are basically correct.
Landing after ID4 would not have been the best choice of time.
One person had observed that science fiction movies have become more positive towards aliens and all of a sudden here was this big rash of these horror kinds of things.
I think we have to look at what entertains and what involves people and we also have to look at the pressures on the media.
Media coverage is going to be extremely important because after all most of us will not be there.
Even if it landed in downtown L.A. most of us would not be there.
We're going to learn about it from the media and the way they portray things and the way they handle it is going to be crucial in determining world reaction.
I'm not sure, but if it was up to me, if I was trying to make contact with another society, I would send plenty of advance warning and it would be a very slow and gradual process with an accumulation of unmistakable, not ambiguous, unmistakable signs starting with something which just gives evidence of intelligence and nothing else and followed by increasing cues as to my identity, should we say.
And I would take my time.
There would be absolutely no reason to rush something as important as that.
well that certainly won't be our lifetimes but professor uh...
he asked about god and i'm gonna remember the movie uh...
contact again with uh...
You remember when Jodi Foster was in front of the committee trying to decide who was going to get the seat to ride?
Yes.
The ultimate question they asked her, I would ask you, and you can refuse to answer on the fifth or any other grounds you wish to refuse to answer, and that is, if we were going to have one candidate, one person like they did in that movie, descend as a representative of the human species, Would it be a reasonable question to ask, do you believe in God?
I think that it's appropriate to ask a question about a person's spirituality or their belief or their sense that there's something greater than themselves.
I might not personalize it in terms of a God, which frequently conjures up a human-like image.
And the second thing is for me personally, I realized I was at church.
My brother was singing in a special Easter thing, and I realized that the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, my thinking about the universe, the idea that there's other things out there that for me, it almost serves a religious or spiritual purpose.
And these are very personal answers and not to be confused with the papers I try to publish on SETI.
Well, in that movie, that's the kind of answer Jodi Foster tried to give at first, but then, of course, they pinned her down and said, no, the God of the Bible, the specific God that we worship in church, as exactly prescribed in the Bible, do you believe in that God?
I believe that these beings are both warriors and spiritual warriors.
And as you see, that is best represented in the Tibetan people and not very many others.
You mentioned about contact and the message that was being sent by these beings for many years, and it only took somebody to find it.
Now, that type of codes or messages have been around on this planet for a very long time, and you could see that in the Hebrew alphabet, in the cuneiform tablets, in Sanskrit, I mean the woven codes in the Hebrew alphabet.
I mean, you're very familiar with that art.
The type of contact that you are expecting and talking about, I don't believe is going to happen for a long time.
But beings have been contacting us for a very long time.
It happens in a very particular and a very selected type of way.
That certainly comes up, and it comes up in my book and many other places, too, that a lot of people are not going to be particularly shocked because they believe that we've been visited already.
It gets back, though, to, I think, the other part is it gets back to your comment, Art, and that is the problem of definitive proof, that we have belief, but we have to convince other people.
And it gets into some really interesting kinds of problems.
Half the people believe this is occurring, half believe that there's no evidence.
And normally you can find something to show things one way or the other.
His book is After Contact, The Human Response to Extraterrestrial Life.
Aren't you curious?
He is Professor Albert A. Harrison of UC Davis, and he'll be right back.
All right, back now to Professor Harrison.
Professor, here's a really interesting fact, and I have never thought of this, but I guess I'm thinking of it now.
Arn, I am convinced that if aliens did land in, say, Times Square, New York City, Hollywood and Vine in L.A., or North Beach in San Francisco on, say, a Friday or Saturday night, and walked among the people there, they wouldn't even rate a raised eyebrow.
But I am sure, he goes on, the aliens would be shocked by the humans inhabiting these particular areas.
Actually, that's really true, isn't it?
In other words, it wouldn't even rate a raised eyebrow.
Well, I guess it would depend a lot on exactly what the aliens look like and the extent to which they could be confused with humans.
But I think there's a really poignant point there, and that is that there's a lot of, if I understand the facts, that there is a lot of poverty and misery, and indeed we need to look at those problems.
I think an important thing to keep in mind about SETI is that it's privately funded at this point, and it uses a very small amount of the gross national product.
No, I think the point might have been not so much poverty and all the rest of it as weirdness.
In other words, if you came down at Hollywood and Vine on a Friday night and you didn't look any weirder than, let us say, Mr. Spock on Star Trek, this factor is correct.
If aliens ever did come to our planet, I think that how they'd have to do it is they'd have to land a ship that would be so grand in size that no government would be able to hide it.
That's, in effect, what we have been toying with and discussing, and that is if the landing was unambiguous, unplanned, and we were unprepared, the odds of it turning out poorly, I'm afraid, would be pretty big.
My question is, I think that with so much talk about aliens and with people starting to believe maybe more firmly that aliens may possibly land if they haven't already, people are afraid maybe that we'll be enslaved by a more intelligent race or a more powerful race.
I think it's just as probable maybe even in the future if we encountered another race, if we were more powerful than they are, wouldn't we do the exact same thing?
Unless perhaps you are a race that has, for example, evolved beyond the physical somehow and you require physical work done.
I'm trying to imagine, in other words, Professor A. I think it is naive to believe that any race sufficiently advanced will automatically be socially advanced or will have an agenda that we project, you know, we as humans think that they will meet our expectations and be peaceful space brothers.
What I do mean to say is I think that the odds are favorable that we will not come up against an evil empire or a group that's interested in enslaving us.
That does not mean that everything throughout the universe is peace and harmony.
But what we get tired of is people pointing to the War of the Worlds Scenario and assuming that there's an evil empire out there that's going to take over everything.
We think that the argument's stronger the other way.
Actually, the one thing that I, Independence Day, the movie, I thought the first half of it was stupendous, and the last half was awful.
The first half I enjoyed for a perhaps very twisted reason.
The aliens in that really had a very clear agenda.
They didn't want to bargain.
They had no use for us in any way whatsoever.
And when we finally captured one and managed to interrogate it, its only thought was to eliminate and kill us.
Period.
That was it.
Very sweet, straightforward agenda, kill.
And then, of course, later on, it had to get into some other sort of story.
But I really thought that that was interesting.
And it is, after all, perhaps less possible, but nevertheless possible, that you would meet up with a very dominating, war-like species that conquered and enslaved.
But again, the point that I try to make in the book is that these kinds of customers tend to put themselves out of business in a variety of different ways.
I certainly would not make any 100% assumptions about any individual E.T. that I happen to bump into.
But we're talking about relative likelihoods here.
That's how professors and social scientists like to do it.
And is that more likely or less likely that we would get lizards or something even weirder?
Well, I mean, after all, development on a planet would depend on gravity, the environment, so very many things that the odds of having a very similar environment and gravity and all the rest of it are actually rather slim, aren't they?
So it would produce a very different sort of creature?
However, I do have several chapters in my book where I try to argue that there are certain kinds of qualities, attributes that we could expect.
And I draw on something called living systems theory, which is a general theory of life.
And the point that I make is not that we can sort of guess what they'll look like and things, but that we can have some expectations that are better than totally wild guesses.
Now, this is one of the most controversial aspects of the book because most people wouldn't touch this kind of problem with a 10-foot pole, but I've enjoyed working on it.
I approach this with, you know, the humans in space, that's okay.
People can take it.
I approach this with great nervousness, and most of my colleagues think it's wonderful.
One of the things I did, Art, because this is such a complex area and I tried to cover so many topics, is I got six or seven of my friends to read either the whole book or chapters so as not to make too big a fool of myself when the book came out.
And this kind of review, you know, a political scientist, a minister, other psychologist, sociologist, historian, what have you, you know, really helps you develop the product.
And there are a couple of people, I suspect, that there's a giggle factor.
Are you concerned about some of the intolerance on some other campuses?
For example, at Harvard, Dr. Mack, who has done a lot of interesting work, was raked over the intellectual coals and very nearly burned to death academically over what he has done.
And my personal view is I've done university administration and things, and that I think academic freedom is absolutely crucial because if we constrain people, if we don't let them look at the topics that they want to look at and do it in the best possible way, we're wasting our money.
So I don't know the details of that case, but I have very strong support for academic freedom and for allowing people to pursue interests and that there needs to be some productivity and you can't run roughshod over people and things.
But I was sort of disturbed by that, again, without knowing all of the details.
Anyway, I appreciate it, but do you have a question?
unidentified
Yes, I do.
In fact, the question to the professor, Professor, do you think it's inevitable around 2000 there was a, you know, I mean, since I was a kid, 2000 was a big number, like 2003, 2002, about contact.
Our search technology is improving, and we'll try new search procedures so that as each year goes by, the chances that, again, putting on my conservative SETI hat rather than talking about landings and things, that it's going to become more and more likely, increasingly likely, as time passes by.
And one of the phrases I think I use in the book is that we're not necessarily going to be the leaders in the dance, and that there may be civilizations out there that are very well experienced at finding new civilizations and inducting them into the galactic club.
And Carla, Bob, I really appreciate your comments.