Art Bell welcomes astrophysicist Jean Cavalos, who debunks 1947–1948 intervention theories despite Roswell and uranium discoveries, citing exponential scientific progress from quantum mechanics. They explore accelerating universe expansion via Einstein’s cosmological constant, engineered pathogens (now feasible with minimal resources), and longevity research like Dr. Dvori Samid’s cancer cell reprogramming. Cavalos links evolutionary triggers to climate shifts—Greenland ice cores reveal extreme fluctuations—while Bell raises concerns about Y2K risks and a proposed U.S.-Russia missile warning center. The conversation extends to parallel universes, warp drives (Alcubieri’s concept), and the "Force" as higher-dimensional physics or consciousness-driven quantum effects, ultimately questioning whether humanity’s survival hinges on overcoming biological and ecological constraints—or if evolution itself demands radical change. [Automatically generated summary]
From the high desert in the great American Southwest.
I bid you all good evening or good morning wherever you may be across this great land of ours commercially heard from the Tahitian and Hawaiian Island chains outwest.
Eastward to the Caribbean, the U.S. Virgin Islands, Talleyo and St. Thomas, south into South America, where there's pretty strange things going on.
In fact, as a matter of fact, in Buenos Aires, they're out of power.
And there's virtual anarchy underway in Buenos Aires without power.
I'll tell you about that.
North all the way to the Poland, worldwide on the internet.
Thank youbroadcast.com, broadcast.com, who will actually be here tomorrow.
And we will be attempting to install this credible project between Intel and Broadcast.com.
And if, this is a big if, if everything should go smoothly, which means that all the computers work, the phone lines work, the software works, and that's a lot to ask.
If all of that goes correct, we could actually be on tomorrow night with streaming video, but I wouldn't count the chickens before they hatch on that one if I were you.
Nevertheless, we will be making that attempt beginning tomorrow during the day when I get up.
Now, it's like our network has been taken by Agara or something.
And they'll be taking Coast and Dreamland both on Saturday and Sunday nights.
Ooh, what a treat you're going to have.
So welcome, Natchez, Mississippi.
Glad to have you.
Man found guilty in racial killing.
The white supremacist convicted of murder, the horrid dragging murder, is now convicted.
We'll have to wait and see what they are going to do to him.
It could be capital punishment.
It could never be rough enough.
And, you know, the temptation is always to say he ought to be, they ought to drag him the way he did his victim, but then society would be doing what it at least doesn't do.
And I always thought the taking of a life was sufficient and proper, not torture, tempting as it is to want to suggest.
Serbs agreed in principle Tuesday to give self-limited rule to ethnic Albanians in Kosovo, but the two sides did fail after 17 days of intense negotiations to conclude a deal for ending their year-long conflict.
We've taken a bunch of reports about that incident.
And here in a minute or two, I'd like to play an audio cut from one of the first people who reported it to us.
My suspicion, Art, is that this object was very unusual.
That's subject to confirmation as always, of course, but we have a number of reports from people who had a very good look at that object this morning.
Again, we're talking about an object at 2.30 this morning, less than 20 hours ago, that went screeching across Pomona and Laverne, perhaps to Panga Canyon, and it did a turn.
And the interesting thing about this as well is that it had a long, very razor-sharp tail to it that suddenly turned off, and people could see one, two, or three lights remaining in the head of this object.
We still don't know what it is.
A great deal of work to be done, but if anybody saw that object this morning at about 2.30 to 2.35 a.m. Pacific or preferred time over Los Angeles, we would like to hear from them over our website.
I'm traveling from the east, heading west on the 10 freeway, about east of the 215, which is near an area called Pomona, California.
In front of us, there were two of us in the car.
We looked up and we saw a very bright orange, a classic fireball, but it was very bright orange, and it was traveling from the northeast, heading to the southwest.
It appeared at kind of an angle.
Like I've seen comets before, and I've seen asteroids, and this thing was moving very slow, and it appeared to be about 12,000 feet up.
And it was about as big as my thumb.
And the tail on this fireball was so precisely sharp.
I mean, it was like the head of a pin.
There were no flickering flames.
It was moving fairly slowly.
And about 20 seconds of watching it move across in front of us, the tail just, it's like it stopped, as if it was some sort of a thruster engine that turned off.
And then you could see a couple of lights, and you could see solidity to the object, although I couldn't see it really clear because it was dark.
And it just kind of coasted across the sky as a solid patch of light.
I try to be as polite as I can when I talk to some of these skeptical scientists, people who put themselves in the ivory towers.
I'm polite as I can when I talk to them, but just this evening, actually, I sent out an e-message to a very skilled astronomer with whom I'm working closely on a certain project.
And I asked him whether an object their cameras succeeded in photographing for 45 seconds or so had a label.
Generally, the ones that Are reported to us are the longer-term fireballs because the shorter terms ones people immediately realize they're just nothing but meteors or meteorites.
We have them generally anywhere from 10 seconds to 20 to 30.
So if this gentleman is correct, and let me emphasize that an eyewitness who is looking at what he perceives to be a dramatic event is not recording facts accurately generally.
However, when I combine this report that our listeners just heard with the three or four reports that have come to us from our website, written reports from people who are standing on the ground looking at this object come directly at them and it turned to the west.
This is two and a half days ago, not 30, maybe 40 miles from where I sit, perhaps a little bit farther.
This occurred reportedly.
We have one source on this report, but they sound like good sources to me.
This occurred at 0515 hours Pacific time on Sunday, the 21st of February, two and a half days ago.
Let me just play the cut.
It's about a two-minute cut from the husband describing what went right over their farmhouse about six or eight miles west of Port Angeles.
That's right south of Victoria, British Columbia.
Here we go.
About a two-minute cut.
unidentified
I and my wife looked out the west end of our bedroom window.
And as we looked, we saw large flashing, and it was very, very, very bright.
And as it came headed east more and more, it was round.
At first, I thought it was a plane, but there was no noise, no sound.
And as we watched it, it kind of glided, glided, and hovered over, heading east, and came over my daughter's and headed east.
And if it finally came over our house, it kept heading east.
But it kind of moved slow, and it was so huge, and it had different colors, lights blinking.
It had the back of it, like a bluish lights blinking, quite a bit of blue towards the back of it.
But all around the side and the front was different bright colors, as red, orange, and a regular car light type thing, but very bright.
Oh, gosh, there were so many different colors.
And to me, it was, I know airplane, I've seen, I know airplanes and I see airplane lines, but these made airplane bright lights look very dim.
There was no sound whatsoever.
Heading east, we ran out the front yard and watched it, and it headed towards Port Angeles, but as it got towards Port Angeles, it hung a right and kind of hovered south to the mountains.
The colors, the lights on the object were flashing intensely.
And as it was coming to them, the colors towards them, that is, the colors were different from the colors they saw as it moved away from them.
It must have been an awesome sight, Art.
Again, a single report from one couple, but it's a very rural part of the country out there, and it's not a surprise to me that other people might not have seen it at 5:15 in the morning.
And it worries me to the roots of my soul that the government that is there ostensibly to serve and protect us is trying to convince people that this is not occurring.
And an object that, in fact, two months later, seven UFOs, it appears to us, based on the evidence available to us, seven UFOs rendezvoused over Basking Ridge, New Jersey.
Excuse me, we know they were there because they were reported to Boston Air Route Traffic Control Center by about two dozen aircraft.
I'll be talking about that, about Phoenix, and about many, many other sightings.
Or, if you hear it here, prepare yourself because in about a month or two, you'll hear it in the mainstream media, and I've got one of those for you in a moment.
Anybody wonder what would happen if the power goes out?
Well, in a moment, I'll tell you what's happening right now, because the power is out and has been in Buenos Aires, Argentina, and things are not going well.
on Y2P at night, but you ever wonder what would happen if the power went out and stayed out for a little while?
You know, not just a quick power bump or even an hour without power?
Well, tempers begin to flare is what happened, and it's happening now in Buenos Aires, Argentina.
When the blackout struck, Argentina's famous tender beef spoiled in the summer heat, ice cream melted, homeless people were turned out, elevators stopped, stranding, I might add, the elderly and the handicapped in high-rise apartments, pumps failed, soldiers in fatigues doled out water in temperatures at the end of the southern hemisphere's summer.
They were somewhere into the 90s, 90 degrees.
With Buenos Aires suffering its hottest days of the year, sweaty traffic cops were left to direct the snarl in the streets once traffic lights failed.
But the streets have been anything but quiet these days in Buenos Aires, where pot-banging, entire burning protests now have begun to erupt nightly over the power outage now into its second week.
The blackout actually began February 14th with a fire at an electrical substation.
So this is not Y2K related, but it certainly tells you what's going to happen about two weeks into a power failure.
Now, you might even suggest that we would have a shorter temper, a shorter fuse here in America if that were to occur because we have come to rely on power.
And in Buenos Aires, you might imagine the power is at least somewhat spotty, though it is certainly a giant capital.
Now, why would they not tell the person why they were participating in this survey, this program by zip code?
You don't suppose it could have anything to do with comtrails, do you?
Will and Denton think so.
Will says, I believe they've now given us a marker through the usage of these jet and whatever you want to call them, chemtrails over the U.S.
I didn't get an address for the investigator you had on your show.
I'll send you this film, ASAP.
Says, by the way, Will says, by the way, Art, in the last two weeks, everybody here has been sick at work, and my 10-year-old son has been spitting as never before.
I'm concerned about what they may have done.
Well, maybe it's nothing, and maybe we're paranoid, but I too am rather curious about this flu line.
Why would they refuse to divulge why, why, why?
After almost a year of systematic investigation, a special Senate committee is warning in a report to be released within days that all segments, check this out now, all segments of the U.S. economy, from hospitals to electric power plants, remain, quote, at risk, end quote, from the year 2000 computer problem that looms less than one year away now.
The sober study, a draft was obtained by Knight Ritter newspapers, concludes, so now, that while both government and business have worked hard to correct the Y2K problem, their efforts began late, were insufficient, and consequently some incalculable level of economic disruption is inevitable.
The Senate Panel's co-chairman warns in a letter to their colleagues, make no mistake, this problem will affect us all individually and collectively in very profound ways.
It will indeed impact individual business and the global economy.
In some cases, lives could be at stake.
Are you beginning to wake up to what's really going on out there?
And then, of course, there is the know your customer profiling.
And somebody sent me an article on that entitled Rule Targeting Money Laundering has bankers and advocates in a lather.
So, ostensibly, that's what they're saying they're going to do this for.
Know your customer.
That means your bank really gets to know you intimately.
They begin keeping records of what you withdraw, what you put in the bank.
They begin keeping records of what your average habits are, so that presumably, if you do something that's a little abnormal, like putting in a lot of money, somewhere a computer goes and something gets kicked out, and your name is sitting in front of somebody who is some sort of investigator.
The U.S. has offered to set up a missile early warning center with Russia from December of 99 in order to reduce the risk of accidental war stemming from the Millennium Bug, a senior U.S. defense official said Sunday.
Edward Warner, U.S. Assistant Secretary of Defense for Strategy and Threat Reduction, outlined the suggestion in two days of military talks that ended Friday on just how the Millennium Computer Bug might affect Russia's nuclear arsenal.
So there you have it.
By the way, we're happy to be on the air.
I got a nice, very nice email from the program director of WIBC.
They're 50,000 watts in Indianapolis, right there in the middle of the country.
And a very nice sort of a welcome letter, and it's very nice to be on the monster in the Midwest.
Actually, we have several, but certainly WIBC is in the monster category.
But they don't have much tolerance for the power of being out because, you know, in America, America, the power doesn't go out, right?
Or at least we're not used to it going out.
So I would think that if anything, our tolerance in America would be somewhat less than that of Buenos Aires, where they're beginning to have tire fires and protests because the power has been out since 14th of February.
I'm Art Bell, and this is Coast to Coast AM.
unidentified
The trip back in time continues with Art Bell hosting Coast to Coast AM.
More somewhere in time coming up.
We've been traveling far.
Premier Networks presents Art Bell Somewhere in Time.
Tonight, featuring Coast to Coast AM from February 23rd, 1999.
If you didn't hear her on Dreamland, and many of you would not have, she's Jean Cavalos.
Now, who's Jean Cavallos?
She began her professional life as, get this, an astrophysicist and mathematician, taught astronomy at Michigan State University and Cornell University, worked in the astronaut training division at NASA's Johnson Space Center.
She's a dedicated fan of the X-Files, Star Wars, and I guess actually science fiction, no doubt, in general.
And she can tell you how a lot of science, real science, applies to what you see in those programs.
Of course, she can just tell you a whole lot about real science as well.
She's really something, and she's coming up next.
An astrophysicist, a mathematician, somebody who taught astronomy at Michigan State University in Cornell.
That's quite a serious background for anybody, but...
You were on Dreamland, and you so blew me away that I couldn't resist having you back.
There will be many people here who have not heard you before.
And so I'm going to ask you the same somewhat impertinent question that I began the last show with, and that is no offense, I hope, but you have a man's background, astrophysicist, mathematician, astronomy, teaching astronomy.
You've got a very, very heavy-duty science background.
If the universe is in fact expanding, and I guess there's good evidence that it is, or pretty good evidence, and it were to begin to contract, what would we notice?
Any idea?
I've heard people speak about this before, and they say that basic laws of physics could begin to change.
I don't believe that basic laws of physics would change.
We don't really know what would happen, but we would notice that the galaxies around us are now, first of all, they would start moving away from us more slowly, because right now we measure all the galaxies moving away from us.
And the farther they are, the quicker they're moving away from us.
So we notice that they start moving slower away from us, and then, of course, that they would start moving toward us, which would be kind of a bizarre and frightening experience, I think.
Yes, well it's it's the complete opposite of what we've been experiencing for our whole lifespan, which is pretty tiny, but the entire lifespan of the planet, this has been going on.
I mean the entire lifespan of the universe, as far as we know, this expansion has been going on.
And the conditions in the universe have changed radically.
Scientists talk about phase changes that have occurred since the Big Bang.
What that means is that things were really hot when we had the Big Bang.
And so it's like a gas that's really hot.
And then as it cools, it condenses into a liquid.
And then as it cools further, it freezes into a solid.
So we've had these phase changes as the universe has expanded.
If it begins to contract, we could then have the opposite phase changes.
Some scientists believe that there is just one superforce, they call it, in the universe.
When we measure physical forces like gravity, electromagnetism, that sort of thing, physicists have found four forces in the universe.
We now think that maybe in the early days of the universe there was just one, and that as the universe went through these phase changes, that the forces, little pieces of it broke off, like when ice cracks, when it's melting.
And so the forces, this one force broke into four different pieces.
If we started contracting and we went backwards through those phase changes, the forces might reunite into a single superforce that we can't really understand as we can.
No matter whether you believe in a creator, you know, as in God with a beard or whoever she is, or you believe that it's a natural cycle of events that simply occurs randomly and that we are I take it you believe that we have evolved Gene, do you believe that, that we've evolved?
Well, we've measured very distant galaxies, the movement of them from pulsars and other astronomical objects, supernova in those galaxies.
And we have found that it seems anyway, and this is recent, so it could still be disproven, but it seems to be that those galaxies are moving away from us faster than they used to.
Scientists are just pretty much in shock over this discovery.
Because as you say, with the Big Bang, we are shot out with a certain velocity.
All these galaxies shot out in different directions.
You would imagine that they would continue traveling at the same speed unless some force acts on them.
So the force of gravity is tending to draw us back together, which is why some scientists believe we'll eventually slow down, start to contract, and go back into another Big Bang situation.
And he put a little factor in his equations to represent this.
And then he said, oh, no, it was a mistake.
Ignore that factor.
He called it the cosmological constant.
And what he intended with that was that it would counteract the effect of gravity because he didn't want the galaxy, the universe, to be collapsing again.
So he thought maybe there'd be a factor that exactly worked opposite and equal to gravity so that we wouldn't collapse.
That's one of the things that frustrated me in my science career is just that when you are learning this sort of thing or teaching it, we talk about the Big Bang, we talk about galaxies, we talk about stars, but we don't talk about the big questions.
And I think in education, we tend too much to, you know, teach facts and have students repeat back facts rather than learning, teaching how to think and how to critically examine issues like this.
With regard to our evolution, there are some holes in evolution science that are difficult to explain.
And there are, even in our fairly recent history, some areas of high suspicion.
For example, if you look at the technological advancement made by mankind over the years we've got available to study, it seems like right around 1947, Gene, something popped technologically.
And boy, I'll tell you, since then, it's really been a race.
It's been absolutely incredible.
Right around 47, 48, somewhere in there, it seems like something happened.
If they are out there, I say they, and if they have been out there for a long time, and if they have been watching us, imagine they're watching prior to 1947-48.
They watch a bunch of ants down here walk around bashing each other's head in, having world wars, doing all kinds of nasty things.
World War II had just ended.
It was brutal.
They probably observed all that and said, they're not ready.
But then all of a sudden, there was a bright flash.
There was a mushroom cloud.
There was radiation.
We discovered Element 92.
Now, if you were them, what would you have done at that point?
Just to sort of a question.
And then, of course, there was Roswell.
Surely after that bright flash, there was Roswell, the 509th Bomb Group headquarters, the very place from which the first bombs that were ever dropped came.
509th at Roswell.
And then, of course, there was that thing at Roswell.
Then all of a sudden, there was the transistor and all that has come since.
As far as technology and how fast it's progressing these days and since 1947, I agree with you completely that things have been moving very, very fast.
I see it more as part of a larger pattern, which is that it seems scientific progress and technology are progressing exponentially.
So while we started out very, very slow, we are getting faster and faster and faster.
At the turn of the century, we had two big discoveries, which were the theory of quantum mechanics and Einstein's theory of relativity.
Around the time you talk about, we're finally starting to understand what those two theories actually mean and to take advantage of some of the information they provide to us.
What we're finding is that the ingredients for life, organic molecules, and even amino acids, which are the building blocks of proteins, exist on comets, on asteroids, on tiny grains of interstellar dust.
And there's tons of this stuff raining down on our planet every day.
Well, we just launch now NASA just launched a rocket, which will be on a, I forget how many-year mission, to get right into the tail of a comet and collect comet stuff, whatever is coming off the the comet, and then return it to Earth.
And I was kind of curious about that.
Could it be that we would go out there and gather something up from the tail of a comet that we might not want once we got it here?
I mean, when we send astronauts to the moon, we're very careful to have no contamination, you know, to decontaminate everything when it comes back.
And an odd thing was we left a camera on the moon for a couple of years, and some bacteria had gotten onto the camera just on Earth, because bacteria are all around.
And when we brought the camera back from the moon, we found that those bacteria were still alive on there.
Bacteria are apparently a lot tougher than we thought.
And these are, you know, bacteria used to a very friendly, cushy Earth environment, not the tough, you know, environment on Mars with no atmosphere and no shelter from the moon.
With no atmosphere, no shelter from destructive particles and radiation.
I mean, in water that is hotter than boiling, we find lots of life.
And actually, scientists believe that those locations where this superheated water comes up out of the ocean floor, those may be the locations where life originated.
Those odd organisms that love heat may have been the precursor of all life.
Well, then, Gene, it's the big question, but if life is so common and so tough and so profoundly common, then when you look out at all the stars, with now we know planets almost always seen when they can be seen to be around SARS, planets now appear common.
Doesn't there have to be life out there?
And don't the numbers say there has to be actually quite quite a bit of intelligent life out there?
In other words, we look at a planet and we say, there's no way life could be there.
Well, there might be no way we could be there, but isn't it possible that life, even in intensely the gravity of Jupiter, for example, we can't imagine that anything would survive.
So if you think that all these people are our close relatives, aliens are going to be so much different that it's really hard to imagine.
And I think you're right that what we're going to find is that they can survive under conditions that we just simply cannot imagine any life forms surviving.
So anyway, coming back to my original premise, if there was intelligent life elsewhere and it had found a way to traverse the light years necessary, and it was around somewhere watching us, you've got to sort of sit back and wonder what it would have concluded as it saw us discover element 92 and saw the bright flashes going off and all the rest of that.
And they're certainly not more intelligent than us.
Whether they've gotten any more intelligent over the millions of years they've been around, I'm not sure, because I don't know if anyone's tested them for intelligence.
That's the only problem I've ever had with the whole concept of evolution.
Shouldn't we be able to observe at least macro changes in the evolutionary pattern of all the creatures of Earth moving toward more intelligence always?
Other scientists say, you know, intelligence is going to make us better equipped to find food, to reproduce, you know, in cases except maybe humans where intelligent people might not reproduce out of choice, but among animals, and so that intelligence would be a natural outgrowth of evolution.
And they say, look, of all the different branches of life on our planet, intelligence has arisen in all these different branches.
You know, nobody's as intelligent as man, but still, animals have different degrees of intelligence.
I could read you a million stories of people who have been drowning in the water and saved by dolphins who literally circled people, protected them against predators, and kept them afloat.
Now, that would seem to be an intelligent endeavor.
Well, I think, I mean, they are intelligent, and I think we don't really have a good sense of how intelligent, and so it's hard to say whether they've gotten more intelligent in the time that we've been around to study them.
The other aspect of this is that maybe an individual species doesn't get terribly more intelligent, but new species get progressively more intelligent.
So we are far more intelligent than the bacteria that began life on this planet.
And with each stage of evolution, new species evolve that are ever more intelligent.
But as we become, human beings, more intelligent, we seem to grow closer to extinguishing ourselves, whether you want to consider it from an environmental point of view or whether you want to look at the probability of the unleashing of some sort of horrible virus that would take us out as human beings, take us off the planet, wouldn't end the world, but we wouldn't be on it anymore.
And despite the fact that a lot of people say Cold War is over and we don't have to worry anymore, the fact of the matter is we still aim at them and they still aim at us, and it could still occur.
We're talking now about exchanging representatives so that when Y2K Day comes, we don't blow ourselves to smithereens.
So, there you have it.
We'll pick up on this when we get back.
Top of the hour.
From the high desert, I'm Art Bell, my guest, Gene Cavallos, who wrote a book called The Science of the X-Files.
We'll tell you more about that.
unidentified
The trip back in time continues with Art Bell hosting Coast to Coast AM.
more somewhere in time coming up now we take you back to the past on art bell somewhere in time
Gene Cavalos, who is my guest, began her life, her science life, as an astrophysicist and mathematician, taught astronomy at Michigan State and Cornell, and worked in the astronaut training division at NASA's Johnson Space Center.
That's what she's done.
She's authored a book called The Science of the X-Files, and she's working on a new book.
We'll ask her about that as well, and we're going to get to phones pretty quickly.
So hang loose.
I'm sure you've got questions for somebody of this caliber.
Gene, we were talking, or I was talking a little bit as we went into the top of the hour about our environmental situation and our biological warfare situation and our nuclear situation and so forth and so on.
What do you think the chances are that we will safely get through all of this and over to the other side where we are no longer in danger of extinguishing our own ability to remain on the planet?
You know, I don't think there is a safely to the other side of this.
I think as we get more technologically advanced, our abilities on the constructive side are equal to our abilities on the destructive side, and they keep getting greater and greater and greater.
So I agree that we're in a very dangerous time right now, and we have been pretty much since we learned how to create the bomb.
The dangers keep going up and up as our abilities get greater.
Yes, and the scale on which we can kill ourselves is getting easier.
You know, it takes less money, less lab space to create something that could kill everybody than it used to.
And this is going to get easier and easier until, you know, most of us at home could put this together.
Great.
And I think as long as we remain human beings and we don't, you know, evolve into something else, that we're going to have this danger because human beings, by nature, you know, are hunters, we're violent people, we're competitors, And so that danger, I think, is never going to go away as long as we are who we are.
And that has helped us beat out all the other animals on this planet and to take it over and dominate it the way we have.
And so I kind of have some faith in our desire to survive to keep us from doing this stuff, to keep us from doing anything that would destroy everyone.
Of course, at this point, it only takes a couple of people to be destructive, to do this.
But I do believe that we desire to survive and that that's going to help us.
And probably chances are we're more resilient than we think.
So even if there is some bug that's released that kills many people, that there will be survivors.
And also the bug is going to mutate probably pretty quickly and hopefully then won't be dangerous to us after a period.
And what had happened is, I guess the Ebola virus had become airborne and was killing monkeys in this monkey house in Reston.
And they sealed it off.
They thought at first that it was contagious to human beings and that it was airborne.
And all kinds of strange, terrible things happened.
Like a man ran out of the building, threw up on the lawn out there who was sick, and they thought, oh my God, it's out.
Well, it turned out it was airborne, and it was infectious to monkeys, but not human beings.
But then a scientist went on 60 Minutes and he said it was that close.
And he held his fingers right together.
He said, if one little end of one little gene, I forget how he put it, was switched one other way, it would have been airborne, and it would have been infectious to human beings.
But we never before have been manipulating genetic structures ourselves.
Now we have begun to manipulate genetic material ourselves.
And we've begun to, for example, they tell me it is now possible to take a woman's egg and fertilize it with her own genetic material and have her essentially duplicate herself.
Yes, and we can, I think, we can virtually clone humans.
So we have the constructive ability to possibly beat diseases like AIDS or like Ebola, but we also have the ability to create our own diseases, which are even worse than those.
Well, you have obviously, you cannot have done what you have done, taught at those universities, been an astrophysicist, mathematician, without knowing, at least to some degree, the nature of how our government, in fact, probably all governments at one level or another, proceed with science.
And I don't know how much cancer and Alzheimer's biological warfare research creating more terrible bugs.
Now, of course, we say we're not doing that, but I don't believe it, do you?
Along the way, we're going to do some interesting things.
We're on the edge now, I think, of people being able to live a lot longer.
They might even be on the edge scientifically of some form of immortality.
You and I talked about this a little bit on Dreamland when we did it, but cancer is sort of an immortal thing until it kills its host.
If you could control these seemingly out-of-control cancer cells or the growth of cells, if you could begin to get a hand on that and control new cellular growth, then you would be approaching immortality, wouldn't you?
There's a limit to how many times a cell can divide.
It just gets old and it stops doing that.
Cancer cells, on the other hand, divide like crazy.
As we discussed on Dreamlands, there is a scientist who is working to make cancer cells behave.
Her name is Dr. Dvori Samid.
And her technique is rather than trying to get rid of the cancer, you know, cutting it out, and of course a lot of times you can't get it all and it comes back, is to alter the cancer cells so that they behave rather like regular cells.
This is a little bit like what's going on in an episode of the X-Files called Leonard Betts, where there's a guy who's every cell in his body is cancerous, yet he doesn't look like a giant tumor.
He looks like a human being.
His cancer cells are behaving.
And what this scientist does is she finds that not only does genetic damage create cancerous cells, but sometimes the cells may be okay genetically, but they have chemicals sitting on top of the genes suppressing them, preventing them from acting normally.
And that creates cancerous activity.
She has found that treatment with certain drugs clears away those chemicals from the genes so they can then operate normally again.
And so this cancerous activity will slow down.
You'll see a tumor shrinking up and beginning to behave, to not go out of control within the body.
Well, how far is it from achieving that, if that's achievable, to learning how to control the growth of all of our cells so that instead of slowly degenerating, we simply maintain our status quo.
In the 70s, two scientists, Stephen Jay Gould and Niles Eldritch, were very troubled by the fact that in the fossil record, what they would find is not the slow, gradual evolution from one species to another over tens of thousands of years, which is what the standards theory of Darwin tells us.
Instead, they would find a species whose bones seem to remain the same for a long, long period of time, and then in a very short period of time, maybe about a thousand years, would suddenly evolve into a new species.
meaning that there are these long periods of equilibrium where a species will remain unchanged through evolution and then there are these punctuated moments where a change in climate or some other change in conditions will drive a rapid evolution, a change in the species or a change from one species into another.
And at this moment it may well be, we should be blunt with what we're saying to people here, that a lot of people would not make it through the change.
Some would survive and adapt and that would create this punctuated change you're talking about.
Well you're really talking about two different things.
A person adapting during his lifetime is something called developmental plasticity.
And that means, you know, say the climate got colder, we could all put on 10 pounds of fat or more to help us insulate ourselves against a change in climate.
But we're very limited in how much we can change within our lifetimes.
What we're talking about here is a change over, say, 10 or 20 generations or more where people are selected for a certain trait.
So if you have a particular trait and maybe it wasn't particularly useful in our conditions, but if it, you know, say it gets much colder and you have, I don't know, a particular set of genes that helps you survive better in the cold, then you will survive long enough to have offspring and say, I won't, because I hate the cold, and maybe I don't cope too well in it, and so your genes will be passed off.
And over generations, then the human species will become better able to live in colder conditions.
Yes, the best example of that was in an ice core that was drilled in Greenland.
And they found that major, major changes in the climate could occur in the space of only a few years.
For example, in one case, I think it was in just three years, the level of snowfall in Greenland doubled.
And the temperature changed by 12 degrees in just three years.
The average temperature changed by that much.
So when we look at the changes that we're going through, they're actually quite minor compared to that.
And something major like this could occur at any time.
It seems like pretty regularly we've had these major fluctuations in the climate, you know, much more than just these big ice ages that come and go, and that's what most people worry about.
But on a very small time scale, we can have some pretty serious climate changes.
Well, yeah, it doesn't take many degrees change one way or the other to turn what was a moderate climate with a great growing belt, an area, you know, our breadbasket in the U.S., could suddenly not be such a breadbasket anymore with a very few degrees of change.
Yes, and there's a lot of factors that control what the temperature and the climate are.
One factor is the tilt of the Earth's axis, which puts the northern hemisphere closer to the sun in the summer and the southern hemisphere closer in our winter and their summer.
That changes constantly, very slowly, but it does change, and they think that's one of the causes of the ice ages.
And actually, they now believe that if we didn't have the moon, that the tilt of the axis would change much more radically and much more quickly.
Well, you're correct in saying that gravity decreases as the distance increases.
That's true.
It falls off pretty rapidly, you know, which is why we aren't being sucked toward the sun or toward Jupiter out of control or anything.
But we would still feel a collective tug from all the other matter in the universe drawing us back together.
Admittedly, you know, each star is pulling on us a very, very tiny amount because we are so far away from it.
But collectively, it's a huge mass, and it is attracting us back toward the center, toward that big bang.
However, that's the amazing thing about this discovery that the universe is expanding ever more rapidly, is that there must be a force greater than that tending to push us apart.
unidentified
And also, gravity is the weakest of the four forces, correct?
Well, antimatter does not have anti-gravitation, although they both have the word anti-antimatter is just matter that's put together the opposite of the way we're used to.
So, for example, we're used to most people being right-handed.
So, if we came on a planet with most people being left-handed, that would sort of be like antimatter.
We're used to matter coming in electrons and protons, basically.
Electrons are teeny tiny things with negative charges.
Protons are bigger things with positive charges.
Antimatter is the opposite of that.
So, an anti-proton is the same size as a proton, but it has a negative charge.
And an anti-electron, which is also called a positron, has the same teeny tiny mass as an electron, but a positive charge.
They still undergo gravity.
They still attract other matter, just like regular matter does.
But there is something called exotic matter, which is much stranger than antimatter.
And it still only theoretically exists, but we have seen indirect evidence of it.
And this exotic matter actually has negative energy.
And if you remember Einstein's equation, E equals Mc squared, if it has negative energy, that means, in essence, it has negative mass, which means it would have a repulsive gravitational force.
How do you have negative, I mean, mass is a, there is either no mass or there is mass, but how do you explain to somebody like me what negative mass is?
At least that's what we believe and we have evidence of it.
Quantum mechanics tells us that when you get to very, very tiny levels, you can't really know what's going on.
It's so tiny that you can't measure it.
So fluctuations can occur that are unmeasurable, that happen so fast and on such a tiny level that they are undetectable.
So scientists now believe that empty space all around us is filled with these tiny fluctuations.
They consider it like a bubbling, foaming mass of activity.
But so, so tiny and so, so fast that it's very difficult to detect it.
Now, what happens theoretically is that particles will pop up out of nothingness, say a pair, a particle and an antiparticle, just like we were talking about antimatter.
They'll pop into existence.
They will then annihilate each other and disappear.
There is, but it's so tiny, and we've kind of stolen energy by having the particles appear out of nothing.
So it all sort of averages out.
But there is energy, and some scientists believe we might be able to tap this energy of this vacuum, the vacuum energy, in order to power spaceships or do all sorts of things.
Anyway, if this particle and antiparticle pop into existence near a black hole, we can imagine that one particle will get sucked into the black hole and the other one might escape.
And so then it wouldn't be annihilated.
It wouldn't disappear.
And then physics has a big problem because now we've gotten a particle that appeared out of nothing and that violates the conservation of energy.
Like you said, the only way we get out of that is if it happens so fast we can't measure it.
But now we can measure it.
That particle that's out in space has a positive energy.
So the only way that scientists can make sense of this and preserve their theories is to say the particle that got sucked into the black hole, that must have had negative energy.
Well, the one thing that people, I think, fail to realize with black holes is that if you are not within that event horizon, if you're not within that distance, close enough to the black hole that everything is sucked in, then it pretty much acts like a regular star.
You know, it's got a gravitational attraction, but you can fight it and you can fly away.
Its gravity is really no stronger than the star that created it.
Black holes are created by huge stars when they collapse.
Very quickly, somebody writes an email to me the following.
Art, listening to your show with Gene, you mentioned of the sudden burst of man's discoveries in the late 40s.
I did.
It brought to mind the story for me of a young Midwestern farm boy named Philo T. Farnsworth, who, when plowing his father's field back in his early teens, suddenly had an idea for an electronic device flash into his head that later became known as television.
He had been advanced in math and science anyway, but to suddenly have, virtually have this schematic suddenly pop into his head from nowhere has always confounded and fascinated me.
I would kind of prefer to think that humans have the capability to have these moments of genius and bursts of inspiration than to think that it was planted there.
Um but hey, it is it is odd.
I mean plenty of odd things happen in the human brain.
Well it's certainly one of the bodies that scientists believe may have life on it.
I did hear that that the that the probe went through some heavy, heavy magnetic field activity near Jupiter recently being bombarded with charged particles that are trapped in the magnetic field.
Now that's something that we have on Earth.
We have the a magnetic field and we have the Van Ellen radiation belts.
The magnetic field basically traps these high energy charged particles that are all in space all around us and keeps them away from Earth, which is a very good thing.
But if you travel through them, you get this blast of radiation from those particles.
And Jupiter's radiation is much, much stronger and more destructive.
And many of its moons actually go through those radiation belts, which could cause some interesting activity.
This is Joe on listening on KHVH out here in Hawaii.
I'd like to go back over that theory of small black holes.
That's really got me thinking here.
And how that would really affect a planet if they did come in contact with it.
I I have a theory that it might actually change the gravitational pull, maybe the effect of sucking some of the gravity or atmosphere out, reducing the gravity of the planet.
It's hard to imagine what this would cause as it went through.
I think if it's going through our planet and it's inside of our planet, then it's going to add to the mass of the planet and the gravity because it has a positive mass and positive gravitational attraction.
So that's going to just add.
Now, because we're talking about something that's so, so, so tiny, though, we have to be careful in considering its effects.
Remember earlier we talked about how gravity decreases as the distance increases.
And this is something that's so, so, so tiny that even being an inch away from it could, you know, seem to be like the equivalent of 100 million miles from the sun.
So I think it would have very strong effects, but just probably over a very tiny area.
My favorite episode of Star Trek was when they got thrown into the parallel universe and they had the evil spock, or not bad spock with a beard, and Kirk was the evil, I guess, other person, whatever.
What it says is in quantum mechanics, when things are very, very, very tiny, as I said earlier, we can't really know what's going on.
So a particle actually isn't in any particular position until we measure it.
This is the bizarre thing about quantum mechanics.
It goes against everything we understand.
So instead of, you know, we think of like an electron circling the nucleus of an atom, like a planet circles the sun.
But that's not the case.
The electron is somewhere around the nucleus, but it's in no one spot until we actually measure it.
The action of measuring it makes it manifest itself as a particle in a particular spot.
Before that, it's what's called a wave function or a wave packet that just has a probability of being in different spots around the nucleus.
What this many worlds theory says is: okay, if we measure this electron's position and we find it, say, you know, in position A, then our universe is the one in which the electron is in position A. Equally well, we could have measured it to be in position B.
And so instantaneously, when we make that measurement, our universe will split.
We will believe that the particle had position A and will continue into the future.
But there'll be a parallel universe in which the particle was found to be in position B.
And they'll go off on their own way.
And the two universes will never meet.
And so we can't really test this hypothesis to see if the other universe exists.
But theoretically, that's what some scientists believe happens whenever we ever make any kind of measurement like that.
And it's not only position A and B, but there's like a million different positions the electron could be in.
So the universe would split into a million universes.
And the splitting would occur constantly.
So if that's the case, then there are many, many, many parallel universes that are existing independent of each other and which are undetectable by each other.
So that could be similar to what they're showing us in Star Trek.
Of course, they travel between the universes, which is supposed to be impossible according to this theory.
Now, that's just one theory.
Some scientists don't like it because, of course, it leaves you with so many universes, it's hard to imagine.
But that's one possible way of explaining that quantum mechanical situation.
You know, what we see every day is fairly straightforward.
We see a cause, it has an effect, you know, that sort of thing.
When we get to these extreme conditions of the very, very tiny or the very cosmic or traveling near the speed of light, things don't happen at all like we think they do.
They just don't make sense to us because our common sense is developed in these conditions.
Is that not entirely possible that our expectations of how things will occur are framed by our knowledge of the way things are for us, and we can't really work outside that box very easily.
That's very true, and I think we find that just in our discussions tonight.
We've had that.
I agree that alien life is probably stranger than we can imagine, and so who knows what sort of technology they might develop and how it might appear to us.
On the other hand, we believe that the laws of physics are universal, and so they would have to face the same problems that we face.
They might come up with vastly different solutions to those problems, but they still would face time and space separating us from them, and they'd have to somehow bridge that gap.
I agree they could bridge it with some completely bizarre method that we wouldn't even think of.
And so they could, you know, use other dimensions to travel to us, vastly different methods.
It's hard to imagine what they might use.
But certainly it could appear completely bizarre to us and even something that we just simply can't can't process even.
The question I had for Jean was if she had considered or had heard of anybody else applying those higher dimensional mathematical formulas to motion in terms of cosmology, in terms of expanding universes and so forth.
I guess what I'm getting at, is it possible that in a higher dimensional state the universe is actually not expanding?
Most scientists think of our universe as a four-dimensional sphere, which is one of those things that's impossible for us to imagine.
So it's easier for us to think of it actually in a kind of a two-dimensional sense, like the surface of a balloon.
And if we think of drawing little galaxies on this balloon and then blowing up the balloon so that it's expanding, you see the galaxies moving apart from each other like two points on a balloon.
And that thing in four dimensions is what scientists believe the universe is.
Now, superstring theory, what you're talking about that Dr. Kaku has worked on very extensively, is now theorizing that there may be ten or more dimensions in the universe and that we only experience three of space and one of time because the others have collapsed in some way or have split off from ours.
How the universe might appear in those ten dimensions is what they're trying to figure out now.
And it's very, very difficult to try to understand it.
I think the universe would still be expanding no matter how many dimensions you put it in, but we might view it differently.
If you think about, say you're out on the desert and you're lost and you're walking along and it's all flat and you can't figure out which direction civilization or water might be in, you're limited to two dimensions, Sarah, this flat surface.
But if you come to a little mountain outcropping and you climb up onto that outcropping, you can then see quite easily for a great distance and you can see, oh, there's water over there, and it puts everything into perspective.
That's because you now have a new dimension, the third dimension.
Looking at the universe with ten dimensions changes the way we see it, but it's very hard to figure out exactly how it changes it and what those extra dimensions mean to us.
So I'm not sure is, I guess, the answer to your question.
I guess what I was considering is that if I got what Dr. Kaku had in his book right, he was saying that it's hard to conceptualize, but mathematically things become simpler in higher dimensions in terms of describing the physical universe.
If we took that a step farther instead of just describing the physical universe as observed, but applying equations of motion to it, things might become more simple instead of more difficult.
Well, that's how they're trying to unite these four different forces that I mentioned that are in the universe, is that by looking at them from this higher perspective of like standing on the rocky outcropping, you can see how they fit together, like puzzle pieces of this single super force that once existed in the universe.
So it does simplify things, and you see that, you know, maybe electromagnetism is one aspect of the super force, and under other conditions, gravity is another aspect of the superforce like that, so that it all fits together, whereas in three or four dimensions, it doesn't fit together.
You know, everybody's familiar with how that goes.
The guy that travels away from his twin and then returns later, it assumes that the stationary, if you call them that, the stationary twin is the reference point.
But who's to say what the reference point is?
They could as easily be traveling away from each other at equal speeds, couldn't they?
Well, you know, that always bothered me because Einstein said, oh, everything's relative.
We can't tell who's at rest.
One's moving with respect to the other.
The paradox is that if you have two twins and you send one off to, say, Alpha Centauri, the next star over, and then he comes back and he's traveling at near the speed of light, as we discussed earlier, he's going to experience time moving more slowly.
He's going to age more slowly.
So he's going to return.
Say they split up when they were 20.
He'll return and be 22 years old.
And the twin that remained will be like 50 years old.
Because they feel that, you know, while that would be a miracle that that their theory is actually practical and can occur without any sort of miraculous mutation, just random mutations occurring very often.
I think what their theory reflects really is that mutations occur much more often than we think and much more radically than we think.
And so if the new environment is favorable to those mutations, that those organisms will survive and reproduce.
Try and imagine socially, just for the fun of it, what would occur if I mean right now on Earth we kill each other because of differences in religion, skin color, ethnicity, whatever, we kill each other for all these reasons because my God's better than your God or whatever.
If humans were to begin to mutate, wouldn't we surely kill each other off in the process?
What would you suppose that an aware computer dealing in pure logic would say about the planet today?
In other words, looking around at the environmental degradation that's going on, the number of human beings that are on the planet, the general condition of things, if a machine was making a purely logical choice about what to do, what would it do?
Well, it seems clear to me that it would find there's too much human life on this planet.
It seems as if we are barely able to feed the people that we have because of technology we've come up with that allows us to grow food faster and more efficiently and larger.
But really, I think we're putting a horrible stress on the planet with all of us.
And I imagine that a computer would find that and would find that other animals, that other creatures on this planet that share it with us, are suffering greatly because they don't have the habitat that they need to have.
They don't have the food and the space that they need.
What it would do about it, I guess, depends on how we programmed it.
I mean, I don't want our planet to become restrictive, like, you know, you can have only one child and that's it.
And if, you know, if the child doesn't survive, tough luck.
On the other hand, I wish that everyone would be responsible and would say, look, we only have this amount of resources.
We should only use the minimum we need and we should be responsible about reproducing.
What sort of, I don't know if I should say this, but it sort of seems like these days a lot of the more intelligent people are realizing that and are not reproducing, or not so much.
Whereas people who are less educated or less intelligent are going great guns.
If it wasn't for you, people would not have known about it.
It may have been torn up by now.
I think it would be dust.
I've got a couple theories that I'd like your guests to answer on.
When I was in high school, my science teacher would tell us about Einstein.
One of his theories would say if you went in a perfectly straight line and not make a turn from point to point, you would eventually end up in the same place.
Now, I'm thinking when the universe is expanding, now it's getting faster and faster, expanding and expanding faster.
The idea that if you go in a straight line, you're going to come back to where you are makes a lot of sense if you think of the universe as a balloon again.
And so we're on the surface of the balloon are all the galaxies of the universe.
And so if we start out at one point on the balloon and we go and we go and we go, we're going to go all the way around the balloon and we're going to end up back where we were.
And it would account, wouldn't it, for the apparent acceleration that seems unaccountable otherwise, unless you come up, as you pointed out, with some force that we don't quite fully understand just yet that would be repelling us.
If, in fact, everything was true as science originally thought, then we would be accelerating back toward a center.
Put your pencil on the paper, and I just think whoever's going to do damage to this world in Y2K, they will get a hold of it.
And I believe in evolution, and I think evolution, there's too many people on the planet, and it's like when I lived in Colorado, there are too many aspen trees in the forest that were smothering the pine trees, and there was a disease that wiped them out.
It's the same thing.
There's too many people on the planet, and it's going to be the computers that is going to start wiping us out.
That's what we were discussing a little while ago.
And it may be that if one of them actually obtained some sort of consciousness and some sort of emotion, which would be hardly discernible then from a human being except as it thought logically.
Although I suppose then a computer might develop same problems a human has with conflicting emotions.
What scientists are really finding now is that emotions are part of our decision-making process, that they're not, they don't intrude on a rational behavior.
They are part of it.
And there are certain humans with brain disorders that make them unemotional, like Mr. Spock.
And so they can be very logical and intelligent at times, but it also kind of at times make them be very irrational, that they can't make decisions.
They can't set priorities.
They can't understand when they've made a bad decision and so avoid making that in the future because all of those things are dependent upon emotions.
So we almost are forced to give our computers emotions to allow them to make decisions well, set priorities, be independent, those sort of things.
And of course, you know, the emotions can have negative effects as well.
But right now we're thinking that the positive effects make it worthwhile.
Well, some scientists would argue that the speed of sound or other barriers before the speed of light were more practical, that there was a feeling that we simply couldn't create the machinery to do it, whereas the speed of light is a more absolute physical barrier.
Now, that said, we already have ways of getting around that theoretical ways.
which are through the warping of space by creating wormholes and such so that we're not going faster than the speed of light, but we're creating shortcuts through space so that we can get to somewhere very far away very quickly in a matter of a couple of days or something to get 100 light years away.
What we need to be able to do is to control space, to be able to warp it, to expand it, to contract it.
There's a fascinating theory by Dr. Miguel Alcubieri about how we could warp space, kind of like the Star Trek warp drive, to travel.
And what he says is, if you think of the balloon again as the universe and how the balloon expands when we fill it with air, he proposes that we say we have a spaceship in orbit around Earth.
We warp the space between the spaceship and Earth to expand it, like the balloon expands.
And we take the space between the spaceship and, say, Alpha Centauri, the next star over, four and a half light years away, and we contract it, okay, like taking air out of the balloon.
So as we expand the space behind the ship, that we contract the space in front of the ship, the ship virtually is riding this wave of expansion toward its destination.
So it can get there arbitrarily quickly is how scientists put it, but that means like as fast as we want, we could get there if we could do this to space.
And the ship actually is not moving at all.
Just like the galaxies drawn on the balloon, it's just sitting there.
But space itself is moving in order to bring the ship to the star, which would be really great.
So we might find other ways in the future of breaking that speed of light barrier also.
But actually traveling at the speed of light is going to be something that would require a huge, huge innovation of some kind.
Well, I spent about 100 pages in my book about it, but let me try to give you the short version.
Sure.
The short version is there's two possible ways of that we might consider the force being actually around us.
There's a theory that everything in the universe is connected, as I mentioned earlier.
And this is basically the work of Dr. David Bohm, who was a protege of Einstein's, and he just died a couple of years ago.
But he theorized that everything was connected.
There was a force that operated in a higher dimension, an additional dimension like we've been talking about, that controlled everything that we see.
And so everything is connected through this force.
We could instantaneously sense something going on across the universe like they do in Star Wars, Obi-Wan Kenobi senses when this planet Alduran is destroyed light years away, that that could happen.
The problem if we have that is that we can't control the universe.
We couldn't levitate objects like they do in Star Wars because everything's controlled by this force, not by us.
So we could have a unified universe, but we can't have control over it.
The other theory allows us to have control over things, but not to have everything be unified.
We kind of have to choose.
And so the second theory believes that the mind can control the outcome of tiny, tiny quantum-level events.
So remember when I was discussing earlier how we might measure the location of an electron?
And we might find it in position A or in position B.
The established theory states that there's no way we can control whether we find it in position A or B.
And there's actually no reason to find it in either place.
There's just a 50% chance we'll find it in position A and a 50% chance in B.
And it's kind of like rolling the dice.
Who knows?
Half the time it'll come up one, half the time the other.
Some scientists are not comfortable with this idea that existence is kind of based on these random events.
And they believe that since it's the act of observing or measuring the particle that makes it localize itself in one spot, that actually the conscious mind that is observing the particle is controlling whether it shows up at A or B.
And so if we focus our minds and we say, okay, we want it to appear at A, that we can make it appear at A.
And if we then use that ability to translate into larger scale effects, that we could potentially be able to communicate telepathically, levitate objects, affect the weather, do all sorts of things.
We're going to have to call a halt for it tonight, and we'll pick it up again tomorrow night at just about this same time.
How does that sound?
And tomorrow night should be rather interesting.
Again, we return to the Y2K subject, but this time with a gal, Leah Danks, author of the book, Building Your Ark, Your Personal Survival Guide to the Year 2000 Crisis.
By the way, have you noticed how the networks are now beginning to really pay attention to Y2K?