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May 2, 2001 - Art Bell
02:54:02
Coast to Coast AM with Art Bell - Climate Change - Dr. Peter D. Ward
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Welcome to Art Bell, Somewhere in Time.
Tonight featuring Coast to Coast AM from May 2nd, 2001.
From the high desert in the great American Southwest, I bid you all good evening and or good morning wherever you may be across this great land of ours from the island of Guam.
Way out past the date line where it's another day all together.
Eastward, the Caribbean and the U.S.
Virgin Islands.
South into South America.
North all the way to the Poland worldwide on the Internet.
This is Close to Close AM.
Good morning, I'm Art Bell.
Lots and lots to do tonight.
Now, you've heard from many sort of New Age types about what may have happened on our Earth.
Millions, billions of years ago that others may have come before us.
That there may have been mass extinctions.
That life on Earth may have been snuffed out before, more or less.
But tonight, you're going to hear it from Professor Peter D. Ward, who is a professor of geologies, the geology sciences, geological sciences, at the University of Washington, Seattle.
He wrote a book called Rivers in Time.
That's my kind of title, Rivers in Time.
So we'll do that next hour.
This hour, we will do open lines.
Anything you want to talk about, it's a fair game.
There's a lot to talk about.
The Pentagon is reviewing future contracts with the Chinese military.
As a matter of fact, the Pentagon said Wednesday the future contracts with the Chinese military are under review now, but it withdrew a directive from our Defense Secretary to suspend all contracts.
They were going to just stop everything.
And maybe they should, because we're in a war right now, a cyber war with China.
I'll tell you more about that.
House passes an IRA 401k bill so you can put more money away eventually.
Mexico has fired 43 federal tax workers for corruption and inefficiency.
Headline like that here, would you?
The Mount Airy News is a newspaper in Mount Airy, North Carolina.
And somebody sent me the front page of the Mount Airy News.
And what it says in the headline is quarantines plan for foot-and-mouth so they're getting ready here's a quote from a local official if a farm is infected there will be a two-mile hot quarantine around that area every cloven hoofed animal will be put down
There will be no movement outside the home for those who live in that two-mile area, people or animals.
Four miles outside that quarantine, people will be allowed to leave by permit only.
Besides, that cloven-hoofed animals in the hot zone will be destroyed regardless of whether the owner permits it or not.
This is the only way to have a quick containment.
And it goes on.
That's front page of the Mount Airy News.
Pretty scary stuff, and I don't know why I believe this, but when you see headlines like this, you cannot help but believe it's gonna happen, and they know it's gonna happen, and so they're getting ready.
Every time we've had this kind of news, it has preceded an event.
And so I just think Both the mad cow disease that many, many now are saying already is here.
God, I hope not.
And now hoof and mouth.
Hoof and mouth.
And they're already getting all plans in place.
And I'm not saying that government shouldn't do that, because that is what government does.
It prepares, you know, to protect and serve and all that, like the side of the police cars.
And they should be getting ready, I guess, for things like this.
But that's pretty scary.
Can you imagine being on a farm where that would occur?
Well, I have a feeling it's on the way, folks.
Oh, by the way, it's going to be interesting to see.
Not that I'm expecting nor holding my breath for this event.
However, my network, at the urging of Richard C. Hoagland, is contacting NASA.
Haha, yes, NASA.
Uh, to see if we can arrange an interview with Mr. Tito.
Wouldn't that be fun to do?
Interview Mr. Tito here on the air?
I would love it.
But will NASA allow such an interview to occur through its communications equipment?
I don't know.
We'll see.
We'll see what they say.
Frankly, I'm expecting a not only no, but hell no response.
We'll see.
On Wednesday, May 9th, Over 20 military, intelligence, government, and corporate and scientific witnesses will come forward at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C.
to establish the reality of UFOs or extraterrestrial vehicles, extraterrestrial life forms, and resulting advanced energy and propulsion technologies.
We're going to finally do it, folks.
Dr. Stephen Greer is going to finally do it.
The weight of this first-hand testimony Along with supporting government documentation and other evidence, we'll establish without any doubt the reality of this phenomena, according to Dr. Greer, who will be our guest Friday night.
For years about this, those of you who know Dr. Greer, just years and years, I've got a lot of details here, and I don't want to really disclose ahead of time things that I ought not.
So I'm just going to tell you, after all these years, Dr. Greer finally really is going to do it.
It'll be at the National Press Club in Washington, and we'll get a preview with some names, I am told, on Friday night with Dr. Greer.
So I wonder how he's going to do.
It's a big event at the National Press Club.
There will be testimony from some real military heavyweights, real heavyweights, folks, about all kinds of contact and cover-up For example, you remember that big sighting by an airliner in Alaska?
Well, there's more to that story than you've heard.
There are other things that have kind of boiled under the radar.
Well, no more.
Big national press bubble affair in Washington, we'll see.
A group of astronomers using the 1.5 meter Catalina telescope report, the nucleus of comet C2001AZ Linear Has split in two.
That's right.
Two big pieces o' comet.
Only a week ago, it appeared whole.
The comet's brightness has soared 100-fold since the end of March, probably because of volatile ices in the fragmenting nucleus which now are being exposed to solar radiation.
100-fold brighter.
Wonder what's gonna happen to it.
Giant sunspot 9393 has gone, now once again, from direct view over the sun's western limb, concluding a second rare transit across the solar disk.
Rarely, rarely do you see a sunspot make it all the way around.
They develop quickly, usually go pootwocky off into space or toward Earth, whatever.
And then shrink back into nothing.
But 93-93 went all the way around.
And then all the way around again.
Somebody sent me this.
They wrote it.
And I guess I'll read it and you can consider it.
Alright?
Ken in Colorado.
Art, it seems to me the purpose of life is death.
It is unfortunate that so many are detoured by the stuff that occurs in life, but even that doesn't diminish life's ultimate goal, which is death.
I think that many are unable to see the forest because the trees are in their way.
They cannot take the time to contemplate and explore the question of death because life keeps getting in the way.
This is pretty negative stuff.
It goes on, this life is simply a state of transition that we're passing through.
This is just a part of a journey as we explore the state of being that we find ourselves in.
People must learn to embrace the journey.
They must learn not to fear the unknown or what lies ahead of them.
They must learn to let go of the temporary here and now and learn to embrace the infinite and eternal journey they are on.
So life is about death and death is simply letting go and moving on with your journey.
So you could either, I suppose, be encouraged by that or discouraged by it, but may want to comment on it.
The U.S.
Navy is asking to be exempted from a federal law that forbids the harassment or killing of whales.
Now why would the U.S.
Navy want to be exempted from a federal law that would allow harassment or killing of whales?
Well, because They're just about to begin some exercises with a powerful new sonar designed to hunt for super quiet submarines.
Well, who's making those?
I wonder.
The Russians are out there with fairly quiet subs.
The Chinese subs are not particularly quiet.
And I don't think anybody else is doing any serious work except us.
Anyway, a controversial sonar system designed to blast swaths of ocean With low frequency sound waves, will be the subject of protests in Los Angeles, and a public hearing to follow.
Dr. Pierce Brosnan joins Joe Reynolds, Senior Attorney for the Natural Resources Defense Council, as they watch a video presentation at a news conference.
Gee, that was in Santa Monica on the 26th.
Anyway, the plan ...is to blast this incredible noise, pull it to on the ground if you were listening to an airliner take off directly over your head into the ocean, and then of course use listening systems to see what kind of returns you get, so that no matter how quiet a submarine would be, the level of this blast, this new sonar, would be so strong
That even if a sub were dead quiet, it wouldn't matter because the noise would go slamming out there.
Hit and reflect off the sub and identify where it is.
I don't care if they're not making a sound inside.
If not one little thing rattles, they will find it.
But they will also find lots of whales who are going to be very upset, very disturbed.
All of this occurring.
Maybe even suicidal.
as a result of it some people believe so I guess that fight is getting ready to heat up again I interviewed somebody on that in my last incarnation and I may again so here they go again they want to be exempt from anything that would harm or harass whales we are not exempt from that nor do I wish to be But our very own military wishes to be exempt.
To go after subs.
I guess whales ain't nothing.
I guess whales ain't nothing.
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Let's talk a little bit about the shadow government.
Do you believe it's there?
Yeah, we've heard that term, you know, for so many years and I thought it was this group in the Netherlands that sit behind smoked windows and make decisions like, you know, giant players of chess.
But it isn't.
We don't have the government anymore.
What we have is a loose coalition of bureaucracies.
But we have no representation in that government.
So when I look at the Constitution, I see it as a really inspired and eternal document that has been sidestepped in almost every legal way possible.
So the process itself has been intentionally manipulated to facilitate a certain style of government.
And it's taken a while to set up.
But I think it's set up now, and it's working just the way they like it.
We need a systemic change.
In order to let the Republic be representative of the people again.
You're listening to Art Bell, Somewhere in Time.
Tonight featuring Coast to Coast AM from May 2, 2001.
to two thousand one big war going on
cyber war between the u s and China.
It is now underway.
A hacker war between the U.S.
and China heated up today, as the White House websites, the website for the main one for the White House was hit with email bombs.
Dozens of sites in both countries were defaced, said security experts.
Now wait a minute, both countries, so I guess Well, anyway, we'll talk about that.
The intensification came as Chinese hackers today began a week-long campaign of attacks targeting U.S.
government and commercial Internet sites in retaliation for what they see as assaults by pro-U.S.
hackers.
So, our hackers are going up against their hackers now.
Their hackers are government-trained.
Our hackers are Self-educated.
OJT on-the-job training, right?
They'd better not get in a hacking war with us.
We've got really good hackers.
And they are relentless.
And they are undirected.
Anarchistic bunch who will have no mercy whatsoever on the Chinese.
So my advice to the Chinese would be to quit this, because they're not in our class.
Our hackers are better than their government hackers.
So, let's see, what other sites have been targeted so far besides the White House?
Sites operated by the FBI, NASA, Congress, as well as, oh my God, media outlets like the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, CNN, and MSNBC.
Well, that's it.
Today, good luck to our hackers.
Go get them, guys.
You know what you're doing.
If it's war, then let it be war.
Our hackers are far better than their hackers.
Play this tasty little tidbit for you, with hoof and mouth getting close, apparently.
Mad Cow may be already here.
This.
London.
Reuters.
Always from London.
How come I've got to read so many stories from London Researchers have isolated and cultivated brain cells from human corpses in a scientific feat which could provide a new source of stem cells for research and developing medical treatments.
Professor Fred Gage and his colleagues at the Salk Institute in California obtain the brain cells that can grow, divide, and form specialized brain cells from tissue samples of people shortly after they have died.
Their achievement reported in the science journal Nature, very prestigious journal, on Wednesday could overcome the ethical obstacles of using stem cells derived from embryos.
In other words, actually, in a way, it's a big, even though it sounds a little morbid, it's a big advance because previously we needed, you know, when we needed brain stem cells, they would come from embryos, right?
Now, instead, they will take them from the freshly dead.
Speaking of freshly dead fighters, killer bees in Guyana have stung to death an elderly woman in the, get this, second fatal bee attack this month in the South American nation.
Relatives said Iris Lynch, 65, died after being attacked on Wednesday by a swarm of the bees While cleaning her yard in Golden Grove Village, east of the capital, Georgetown.
A 25-year-old man who tried to help her was taken to a hospital himself for treatment of multiple stings from the insects, a particularly aggressive strain of honeybee that of course, as you know, came from South Africa.
Residents said the bees had been nesting in nearby towns, She was only 47 years old, died after being engulfed by a horde of the deadly bees while working in a village just west of the capital.
These have periodically attacked people along the coast.
Over the last 20 years there, the insects were brought to Brazil in the 1950s to increase honey production.
Now, of course, they've spread throughout South and Central America into parts of the U.S.
as well.
We've got killer bees here.
Look, I'm not saying that science doesn't know what it's doing.
However, in a lot of cases, they don't know what the hell they're doing.
They really don't.
And if they can't get something like this right, then what's going to happen when they get to the grey goo stage?
Of course, the scientists say these big blasts of, you know, noise will not affect the whales, for example.
But do they really know that?
I don't think so.
They're working on an awful lot of things out there right now that, uh, I don't know.
Should we push the button, Fred?
Sure, let's do it, Jim.
We'll be right back.
I'm Art Bell.
This is Premier Networks.
That was Art Bell hosting Coast to Coast AM on this Somewhere in Time.
This is the song we gotta get right back to where we started from.
Do you remember that day?
Oh, surely you do.
When you first came my way.
I said no one could take your place.
And if you get hurt.
If you get hurt.
Little things like pain.
I can do.
You got me thinking that I'm wasting my time.
Don't bring me down.
No, no, no, no, no.
I'll tell you once more before I get up the floor.
Don't bring me down.
You wanna see us with your fancy dress.
I'm telling you it's gonna be the end.
Don't bring me down.
No, no, no, no, no.
I'll tell you once more before I get up the floor.
Don't bring me down.
What happened to the girl I used to know?
You left your mind up somewhere down the road.
You're listening to Art Bell, Somewhere in Time.
Tonight, featuring Coast to Coast AM, from May 2, 2001.
So, on a scale of 1 to 100, with total acceptance being 100 and a complete turndown being 0, what do you think the chances are of NASA letting us interview Mr. Tito while he's up there on the space shuttle?
Huh?
What was that number?
I wonder who from the network is going to get the call.
Hi, this is so-and-so.
Is this NASA?
Yes, this is so-and-so at the Arnbell Show.
Yes, the Arnbell Show.
uh... maybe they had to take that conversation you're listening to art bell somewhere in time
Tonight featuring Coast to Coast AM from May 2, 2001.
Back into the night we go.
I'm getting ready to do some really controversial shows that'll probably get me in trouble, but I don't care.
Tomorrow night, There's going to be a reverend here, Reverend Howard Storm.
And this man was an atheist.
And had a death experience.
And went to hell.
And he's going to give you actual details of hell.
That's tomorrow night.
He's going to actually tell you what hell was like.
In fact, he wrote a book called, My Descent into Death and the Message of Love, which brought me back.
It should have said my descent into hell, actually.
Because that's where he went.
Friday night, Saturday morning, I already told you Dr. Greer is going to be here.
That's big time.
Monday night, Tuesday morning, next week.
You better get ready for this guy.
Patch Adams.
The real Patch Adams.
He's going to be here.
Not the one from the movie.
No, that was the movie.
This is the real Patch Adams, and I'm not sure you're ready for the real Patch Adams, but... That'll be some show.
Get ready.
That's all I can say.
The next night, Neil Slade's here.
He believes he's found another brain in the human body.
Another brain in the human body.
Today night, Thursday, is gonna be Kent Walker.
And... I'm gonna tell you an amazing story.
He was born to a family of grifters.
You may have heard about it in the news.
You may remember all of this in the news.
The twisted tale of Sante and Kenny Kimes, the most notorious con artists in America.
A memoir by the other son.
So he watched all this happen to his brother and his mother.
And he'll talk about that.
Mike Heiser, Thursday night, Friday.
Lots of arguments with Sitchin and company.
And then, uh, Tuesday night, Wednesday, the 15th, is Bob Larson.
He'll be here on Exorcisms, and I've already had 10,000 emails on Bob Larson.
Oh no, Art, you can't do this!
You can't!
Oh, sure I can.
And Will.
Oh, that's the kind of stuff that's coming up.
Right now it's you.
First time caller of the line, you're on the air.
Hello.
Hi, this is Tim from St.
Paul.
Hey, Tim.
Yeah, I am currently in training to become the Supreme Coordinator of Earthside Operations when... Wait, wait, whoa, whoa, stop.
The Supreme Coordinator of Earthside Operations.
Right.
And this is when Commander Christ comes back for Daimont, the Divine Military Operational Takeover, also known in civilian terms as the Second Advent.
So I should address you as your Supreme Commandership.
Right, I suppose.
I haven't heard the name yet, but I wanted to give you one thing.
I know you've talked about the black holes, for example.
Black holes, yes.
Now, what they are is simply a mask for Jesus and his troops, and when he's ready, we'll see all of the masked troops at once around the world.
And I bet, I know, that's where the Christians are going to get sucked into.
Well, I'm not sure I consider myself a Christian, but I think it's the military.
Well, I know, but there's this Christian thing about getting sucked up, and What is that now?
You've never heard of that?
One of the Christians suddenly gets sucked up?
Oh, you're talking about the rapture.
I don't believe that.
The Supreme Commander's got to know about these things.
No, I know that's the rapture.
Yeah, but even if he doesn't necessarily subscribe to them, the Supreme Commander would have to deal with things like this.
He's got to be informed.
Absolutely.
I'm always on the lookout.
I know certain preachers talk about that.
Alright, then I want you to look carefully into the rapture and take it into your strategic planning as Supreme Commander.
It's your job.
Wild Card Line, you're on the air.
Ah, good evening.
Or morning, such as it may be.
Good morning.
Um, are you part of the Supreme Commander's Legion?
Oh, no.
No, all right.
I'm just part of my own Legion.
All right.
That's good enough, isn't it?
Sure.
All right, good.
Hey, thanks for the best bumper music in the business, by the way.
Oh, well, I just play what I like.
Well, I like it, too.
Fair enough.
Thank you.
Others hate it.
You know, there are some who hate it.
That's true.
Yep, that's true.
Well, you throw so much out there.
How about this Hellguys experience stacked up against Danny and Brinkley?
Why don't you bring him on the air and see if they can contrast and compare?
That might be fun.
Well, we've heard Dan's story in great detail, and I think it's fair to allow this man to tell his story in equal solitary detail.
And then, you know, if there's reason to get them together after that, we'll see.
That might be fun.
Yeah.
I think the odds on the interview might be slim and none.
Slim left out.
Oh, you mean Tito?
Yeah.
Yeah, I know.
I think it'd be... I hope they record the call.
That would be nice.
It'd be at least a memento.
Yeah.
I call because, you know, you have this healthy skepticism towards scientists and their discoveries and such in that, at least in so far as At least up until it comes to global warming.
We'll get to global warming in just a second.
We've got some other things going on right here on Earth at the moment, like hoof-and-mouth disease.
Did you hear the newspaper article I read from North Carolina?
Oh, yeah.
So, when a scientist gets up and he says to you that not to worry, mad cow disease is not in the U.S.
and we're taking every precaution it won't be here, you believe that?
Well, I believe it in the same vein that when scientists get up and say, oh, the sky is falling, the sky is falling, you know.
I know.
I can tell you're not a believer in global warming.
But, you know, here I am in Nevada.
Do you know what we've had all day long today here in Nevada?
What have we had all day long in Nevada?
Winds.
Well, steady, straight line winds between 40 and 50 miles an hour all day long.
I'm in Northwood, Colorado.
We're about to get those.
Uh-huh.
Well, batten down the hatches.
That's all I can say.
One thing is clear, sir.
Our weather is changing.
Uh-huh.
Uh-huh.
And yes, and millions of years ago, there were dinosaurs.
That's right.
And the weather changed.
And then millions of years later, there were mastodons.
The main story is the rock came down.
In fact, we're going to be talking about extinctions at the top of this hour.
And we'll certainly talk about this aspect of it.
You know, I know what school you're from, that there is no global warming.
It's all ridiculous.
We couldn't possibly try as we might harm the Earth.
And you know what?
I agree with that assessment.
Try as we might, we can't harm the Earth.
It's not the Earth I'm worried about.
It's all of us on the Earth.
Now, what's the major distinction whether we do you know i can't we're not going to destroy
the earth i agree with you but if we destroy our ability to continue to live on
the earth what's the difference
well that i i agree with that point of view the but i don't buy with the global warming and all of that
is the status ism
of the planet of life in general There's no static.
Everything is in change.
It goes from warm to hot to cold.
Everything changes.
If it's one thing that's constant, it's change.
Right or wrong?
Okay.
But in the end, if it changes so that it makes Earth uninhabitable for humans, then the argument doesn't much matter, does it?
Is there incontrovertible proof That humans are responsible for this change?
Well, I think humans have a hand in it, clearly.
For example, if you go to... I was talking to somebody, a reporter, about this earlier.
If you go to Bangkok, and I've been to Bangkok, half of the traffic cops who work in Bangkok have advanced a lung disease.
You know that?
Just from standing out in the air every day.
That's 50%, sir.
There are.
What about the people in Russia whose average life expectancy is in the low 50s just because of the terrible environmental conditions locally?
Thank you very much.
You certainly are correct.
There and in many more places.
I don't think that man is totally controlling what may happen to him.
And I don't think that man is chiefly necessarily responsible for the changes that are going on right now.
But does man have a hand in it?
Yes.
And can small percentage changes in certain areas make big percentage changes for us?
Yes.
East of the Rockies, you're on the air.
Hello.
Yeah, Chuck.
How you doing tonight?
Hi, Chuck.
Where are you?
I'm in Central Florida listening to you on 540, driving back and forth from work here.
I live in the central part of the state, work over at the Space Center.
Okay.
And I think that your 0 to 100% would be a negative 5.
I think so too.
We have to ask, you know.
Right.
I tried to go ahead and give you a call when the gentleman was on, the editor of Popular Communications.
Yes.
Yeah, to correct him on one thing that he had said about 30 MHz and below communications.
By ITU treaties and agreements, you have to have Morse code at some speed to be able to make contacts on the HF bands.
And that's been around ever since the mid-30s.
Well, you mean as a ham?
As a ham.
As a ham, yes.
Well, it's down to five words a minute for all classes now.
Roger that.
Yeah, I mean, you can learn to do five words a minute as soon as you memorize a code.
But the thing that he was talking about was someone was trying to push where there would be no codes for the more than line-of-sight communications on FM frequencies.
I mean, on HF frequencies.
And that just will not happen because it would be a violation of the treaties.
Well, alright.
I appreciate your call, but I don't know about that.
Treaties can change.
You know, they have a Geneva Convention every now and then to look at radio, and if they were to change that, my impression would be the FCC would drop the code requirement like a hot potato.
And the whole thing is a hot potato, as far as hams are concerned.
West of the Rockies, you're on the air.
Hello.
Oh, hey, Art.
Hi.
I'm calling from Salgas, California.
Yes, sir.
I've just been reading a book on the Did We Go to the Moon question, which impressed me greatly.
I wonder if you've heard of it.
It's called Dark Moon by Mary Bennett and David S. Percy.
They're English authors.
I have heard of it.
I have not read it.
It's like an encyclopedia on the subject.
It's 560 pages.
I was a photographer at Rocketdyne, oddly enough.
You know, worked on the Apollo a little.
Right.
And I will tell you, I don't know if we went to the moon or not, but I do know that those photographs are phony.
Phony photographs done in the studio, no question about it.
Well, it seems, I'll go this far, it's obvious and I think they have proven conclusively that a number of the photographs were at the very least altered.
And that's pretty serious right there.
That much I can say for sure.
That it was done on a soundstage, you know, or out here where I live.
I don't know.
Well, why would they alter them to make them look phony?
That doesn't make any sense.
Well, because the ones that went on the cover of magazines and stuff like that, they claim they wanted them to look clean without the crosshatch marks and all that stuff.
Let me give you an example of one thing that really impressed me.
You know, if you stand near a light, your shadow is huge, right?
And as you walk away from the light, your shadow becomes less extensive, right?
Well, let me show a picture.
Do you mean a light above you?
Well, let's say behind you in this case.
Okay.
This picture taken from, supposedly taken from the lamp, and you show the two astronauts.
They're maybe like 15 feet apart.
The one on the right, his shadow is very long.
The one on the left is quite short.
Now, the only way that could happen is if the one on the right was standing closer to a light source.
Yes, yes, yes.
It's a wonderful book, and maybe you could even think of him as a guest sometime.
David, that's because he's a very distinguished gentleman.
I mean, he's not schlock.
He's a producer of movie and TV and advertising.
You really don't think we went, huh?
Well, my mind isn't made up, but I'll tell you what he thinks, and I'm quite impressed with him.
He thinks that the named astronauts definitely did not go.
It would have been a public relations disaster to have them die of radiation poisoning or die on the moon.
And he thinks that perhaps some no-name sacrificial lamb types went.
Uh, you know.
No, it's a damn interesting answer.
And didn't make it back, or did?
I don't think he's clear about that.
I see.
He's not clear about that.
All right.
All right.
Well, I appreciate the call, and it is an interesting controversy.
I lean toward thinking we really did go to the moon.
You know, I watched it like zillions of other Americans on TV.
Live.
I'm that old.
I saw it.
I remember it.
It was a dramatic, incredible moment.
Could it all have been done on a soundstage?
It could have.
It probably could have.
They could have gotten away with that if they'd wanted to.
And held the secret all these years?
Well, could it be the secret is beginning to slip?
And that's why we're hearing so much about it?
I don't know.
Well, first-time caller line, you're on the air.
Hello.
Hi, Eric, how are you?
I'm well, thank you.
Well, I think you've driven the American Air Force underground because, uh, in regards to the chemtrails.
Oh?
Um, I live in Toronto, and my name is John.
Yes, sir.
I used to come over with about ten planes and just cloud the entire sky right over, you know, with the long trails and that.
Yes.
And since you've made the revelations apparent, or you've broadcast them on your show... You think they've backlashed?
Totally, because now the chemtrails are looking more like regular contrails.
They're very short.
There's probably only about three planes that fly over Toronto during the day.
Well, it would be interesting to know across the country, yours and ours, if the same thing has occurred.
In other words, is it just local to Toronto that the program has stopped, or is it true now all across both countries?
Well, I'll tell you one thing.
They've been here every day for the past two weeks.
Every day, the planes are up there flying, and they're flying well into the evening, you know, like into the darkness and that.
Yes.
So, I think your show has done a lot to curtail some of their, you know, some of their missions.
What do you think the best guess would be about what they were trying to do?
I rather thought the whole weather modification thing was pretty right on.
I think they want to keep the jet stream, which normally moves down south, I think they want to move it further south so that the Americans get more water.
But I think in the process they're going to cause a lot of disruptions with the weather.
In other words, if they keep the colder air up north in Canada and keep the air cool by a couple of degrees, let's say, that'll force the jet stream further down south and that way You'll have a lot more rain in the Midwest, you know, with the moist Gulf air, cold Canadian air.
Right.
So I think that's maybe one of the things that they want to do.
You know, it might even be a joint U.S.-Russian project, because if you could direct the jet stream here, you could certainly direct where it went over there as well, right?
Uh, that's true.
And, uh, you know, we have no idea what's going on.
So, now, if they could actually do that, who would suffer?
Now, we'd do okay, because we'd get more rain, as you said.
You'd also get more tornadoes, and you'd also get more destruction and weather.
Absolutely.
But we'd get that rain.
You'd also... And the other thing, too, is you'd get a heck of a lot more wind.
Well, boy, let me tell you about the wind.
I'm serious.
We've been getting near 50 miles an hour all day long.
That's really big wind.
And we're getting the same thing up here.
You are?
We're getting a heck of a lot of wind.
I mean, I went golfing on Sunday, and, you know, I mean, the ball was flying all over the place because of the wind.
Because of my golfing ability, obviously.
Well, listen, we're almost out of time, but what I was going to suggest is, if it would be, you could say, good for us, more rain, and or good for Russia, if they were involved, then it would have to be bad for some people In third world nations, who would be expecting either rain or dry, depending on what was at, quote, normal for them.
Well, you know the one thing you said before about the scientists?
Uh, you know, like, uh, you know, you don't have the trust in them.
Uh, I don't know if they know what they're doing when they're playing with the weather.
Do you trust them?
I don't.
Right.
Um, alright, have a good night, sir.
We certainly agree.
Coming next, mass extinctions.
They've happened before.
Will they happen again?
What do you think?
You're listening to Art Bell, Somewhere in Time.
Tonight featuring Coast to Coast AM, from May 2, 2001.
Can't stay alive, without your love.
Oh baby, don't leave me this way, no.
Don't leave me this way, no I can't accept
I'll surely miss Your tender kiss
you But don't leave me.
You're part of the world again.
Oh, it's a beauty, yes.
It's a beautiful night.
Lonely days and a lonely night.
You take a trip to the dilly light.
We take a trip to the city lights We take the long way home
We take the long way home You never see what you wanna see
We're ever playing to the gathering We take the long way home
We take the long way home When you're up on the stage
You know when to leave at home Oh, I don't care at all
I may ignore you But then you're waiting to take your blues
And your sanity Oh, so vanity
We take the long way home Oh, yeah
Yeah Yeah
Can you feel the New Mexico?
Premier Networks presents Art Bell, Somewhere in Time.
Tonight, featuring Coast to Coast AM, from the 2nd of May, 2001.
Top of the morning, or whatever time of day it is to you, I am Art Bell.
Coming up in a moment, Professor Peter D. Ward, who wrote a book with the elegant title, Rivers in Time.
Oh, I really like that title.
Rivers in Time.
The search for clues to Earth's mass extinctions.
It fits quite well, I think you'll find, into a lot of what we've talked about on this program.
The professor has traveled the Earth in search of clues to what's happened before we got here.
And may occur, if you want to think about it this way, after we're gone.
So that's what's coming up if you'll just stay exactly where you are.
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Coast to coast AM.
It's way out there.
These groups of extraterrestrials that are unfriendly, many of which are hiding down there at the bottom of the ocean, why don't they want us to know about this group?
We've lost people in wars with UFOs.
You know, we spend a lot of time honoring our heroes, and we have heroes that we don't know about.
It's disturbing to that extent because we have a debt to people who've defended us, and we'll never know who they are.
You're listening to Art Bell, Somewhere in Time.
Tonight featuring Coast to Coast AM from May 2, 2001.
Here we go, folks.
Here comes the professor.
He is Professor Peter B. Ward.
He is a professor of geological sciences at the University of Washington, Seattle.
He is author of many books, including Rare Earth, In Search of Nautilus, The End of Evolution.
He was finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Award.
Methuselah's Trail, which won the Paleontological Society's Golden Trilobite Award for the best popular science book of 1992.
Here is Professor Ward.
Professor, welcome.
Hey, thanks Art.
Good to have you.
Did you get a nap?
I slept on the airplane coming back from Los Angeles, where I got to meet astrobiologists.
Astrobiologists?
Yes, this is NASA's new big thing.
It's called the NASA Astrobiology Institute.
Uh-huh.
So, yeah.
We're good friends here with NASA.
Well, I'm getting to be.
You take the position, I really like your book title, Rivers in Time.
That's really good.
Thank you.
If we look back along these rivers, we find signs of previous catastrophic occurrences in the flow of the river.
Yes?
Unbelievable catastrophes have punctuated geological time.
There's no getting around that.
Alright.
How long ago would you say the last one was?
I mean, was it the dinosaurs going belly up or what?
Well, ten minutes ago because I believe we're in such a catastrophe now and have been really For the last 15,000 years, there's been just unending catastrophe.
We had 15,000 years ago, of course, we had mammoths, mastodons, saber-toothed tigers, all the great Ice Age creatures.
And in those 15,000 years, we have lost those, as well as a significant portion of biodiversity.
So we are in a catastrophe.
We're like the lobster that is getting warmer and warmer and warmer, and just enjoying the heat and not knowing we're about to boil.
I'm quite terrified by what I see is happening in terms of climate now, yes.
That bothers me a little, too.
Our climate is... I had a fellow call in the first hour, you know, naysaying global warming, just saying, what a bunch of baloney, and I said to him, well, is it obvious to you that the climate is changing, that our weather is rapidly changing?
He said, yes.
I said, then, in the end, What difference will it make to you, whether we had a hand in it or not, if it happens and we can no longer live here?
Certainly, we can't destroy the Earth.
That's the argument that my colleague Rush and many others make, and they're right.
We can't destroy the Earth itself, but we can probably destroy our ability to continue to be on it, and they're sort of the same thing, in a way.
Well, what scares me are The most is that, as you know, there have been wonderful studies in Antarctic ice and Greenland ice.
Ice core studies, they're called.
Yes.
People are able to take little bits of that ice and run it through mass specs, mass spectroscopes, and get temperature analyses.
And any number of studies have shown that there are significant climate changes in as little as ten years.
We could go from the current day climate to a full-on ice age, where you are looking at really the freezing of Europe.
in a ten-year period.
Europe currently has 750 million people in it.
They feed themselves.
Europe is completely self-sustaining in food.
And Europe is at the same latitude as Canada, which supports about 20 million people.
Canada is... the temperature of Europe ought to be damn cold.
Now, if we start one of these ice ages, we freeze Europe.
And the prospect is 750 million Angry, well-armed Europeans should be enough to frighten anybody on this planet.
If they can't feed themselves, what are they going to do?
They're going to go after some other countries, and that is the prospect that scares me.
And you really believe that could occur?
It happened before?
It's not just me, it's a lot of people.
Alright, how cold, in other words, how much change could actually occur in Europe?
Well, let's just say we drop average temperature in Europe Only 10 to 20 degrees.
Alright.
And now we're going from, say, a nice 70 degree day in summer in England, you can get those, it rains a lot, to 50 degrees.
Right.
But we have the same change where you have an average temperature of maybe 40 degrees in Europe and it goes to 20 degrees.
Right.
Now your crop time is very much reduced.
You don't get those nice long sort of autumny days that European crops depend upon and in 10 year period you could have massive famine.
So the European situation is very, very critical.
What would cause this is a change in the Atlantic water circulation patterns.
Yes, indeed.
And Europe is warmed by the Gulf Stream.
The Gulf Stream simply has to slightly change configuration, and Europe goes into what happened, actually, in about 1200, what's called a little ice age.
And Europe got very cold.
And this is what threw all the Vikings out of Greenland.
We had one of these temperature changes, and it Greenland at that time was a wonderful, warm place.
It was warm enough to grow wine on it, because the Vikings were growing grapes.
And in 10 years, it froze.
And they were tossed out of these colonies.
Now we could go right back to that in a 10-year time period, and it is terrifying.
Well, I wrote a book with Whitley Strieber called The Coming Global Superstorm, and it actually talked about exactly what you just said as the beginning of the The Sad Affair that follows, it's a work of science fiction, but it talked about a change in the Atlantic currents, and what that would do, beginning in Europe.
Yes, yes, Europe is ground zero for this.
You betcha.
And I talked about, you know, fast climate change, and when we wrote the book, we were, oh boy, did we get in trouble.
I was on NBC and they gave me a real tough way to go, and saying, look, if any of this was really true, Wouldn't it be in the mainstream press?
And it just really gave me a rough time.
A year later, I came back on the Today Show, the NBC Today Show, and it was February 5th, the day I came back to the radio, and in U.S.
News & World Report, they had a headline, Scary Weather, and it detailed the rapid climate change that may be coming.
And that we're beginning to see signs of, and I held it up for NBC that morning and reminded them one year later, said, here, is this mainstream enough for you?
U.S.
News and World Report.
And so it seems as though we're in the middle of a change right now.
Today, where I live here in Nevada, all day long we had 50 mile per hour unrelenting winds.
It was horrible.
I mean, everywhere has their own little horror story.
to tell about how the weather is changing with respect to how it generally or normally is.
How much more violent everything is becoming.
Well, I agree with you entirely.
I'm in the midst of writing a new book with my partner Don Brownlee.
Don was my co-author on Rare Earth and Don is, he's not chopped liver as a scientist.
He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and is the project investigator on
Project Stardust, a NASA satellite that's collecting a comet and will come back to Earth
in six years.
Oh, yes.
So our book is called The Ends of the World, and we are taking the best science that we
know and predicting how the Earth and its habitability will come about, how the end
of that will occur.
So we're not, neither of us, we suspect that neither of us are crackpots, and the publishing
world actually bid this book wonderfully up for us, but it is something that no one really
has thought about.
It's not just kind of a stark, raving view of how the world will end, but what is the
best information at the end?
And we go back to climate records, we go back to geological evidence, and we have some pretty clear trends of how we will transform from this warm, benevolent world to a much worse place.
Well, if we do go back through the courtesy of ice samples caught in the Antarctic or whatever, what do we learn?
How many times has this occurred?
Has it been as drastic each time?
Are some worse than others from a percentage of change point of view?
What do we learn?
Some are worse.
Some aren't.
The most rapid, of course, is 10 years.
And some take many hundreds of years.
And I think your listeners can take hope in the fact that there's really a good chance that all of our lives will go by and nothing really drastic might happen.
Although I live in Seattle, Washington, And having just experienced a pretty major earthquake here, and knowing that I'm in one of the most riskiest places on earth, you worry.
Because I have two children, I worry about my children, and now I'm in a position where I need to worry about my children's children.
Because that's the sort of scale, time scale, we need to worry about.
Our grandkids could definitely be seeing the end of habitability as we know it, this wonderful kind of constant climate that we're in.
We're a farmer.
Can plant a crop and have a pretty good expectation that climate will stay constant enough to get a harvest.
Well, we worry a little bit about our children and hardly at all about their children.
We don't think that far ahead.
No, we do not.
Now, what do you think about this great global warming controversy?
Is the hand of man materially affecting the weather change on our planet?
What percentage of the change do you think we could have a hand in?
Well, we're certainly changing it.
The very ironic aspect of all this is that our global warming could tip us into the next ice age.
And this seems counterintuitive.
You say, well, global warming, that's the end of ice ages, right?
But we change, of course, the ocean circulation patterns are the major thermostat on the planet.
If we warm the oceans, we can begin changing these circulation patterns, causing places like Europe, paradoxically, to get colder.
And Europe, the Northern Hemisphere, is loaded with people, as we know.
We have these artificially warm places, the populations are gigantic.
And so the catastrophe is the disruption of agriculture, mass famine, And the breakdown of all the very thin treaties.
And let's look at Yugoslavia.
Those people have lived together for thousands of years.
They all hate one another.
And they're in pretty good times.
Now let's take Yugoslavia and starve them and make that all of Europe.
And you really have a recipe for catastrophe.
Would our misfortune at this latitude be somebody else's good fortune at another latitude?
Well, yes and no.
It's a little good news and a lot of really bad news.
Let's say that we get a very cool Europe, and what we're doing now is we're condensing downward to where you can grow crops.
You really need your grasslands.
Let's face it, most of the world's population lives on grain of some sort.
We eat a lot of meat, of course, but it is grain that sustains us.
And it is grain that will have to sustain us in the future.
Grain itself is really a product of the long climate constancy we've had for the last 10,000 years.
If we start perturbing climate and we begin changing these vegetation belts, then we have this ability not to feed everybody.
And I'm a parent.
I'll do anything I have to do to make sure my kids eat.
And we're all to have kids in that same boat.
And we would all go to that length, I'm sure, to feed them.
Boy, I'd sure go to any length to keep my kids alive.
Of course.
But again, my question would be, if Europe can no longer grow crops and feed itself, would the more temperate zones shift south toward northern Africa?
Or, you know, in other words, would some other areas suddenly benefit?
Some would, but the other aspect of this is that a world that goes into ice becomes a world that is drier.
The Ice Ages are really terrible times for a large human population.
Again, my co-author Brownlee and I, here's a strange thing.
During the Ice Ages, winds are faster.
You were talking about 50 mile an hour winds.
All day long.
How would you feel if there were 100 mile an hour winds every day, all day?
Well, I have a 100 foot tower above me that I put up that I'm very proud of, and I wouldn't like that at all.
Well, that's pretty much a recipe for what happens in the front of glaciers.
We get these gigantic deposits called LESS, L-O-E-S-S.
We have lots of these around the world.
This is caused by this hundred mile an hour winds pushing dust.
Brown and I calculate that jet travel will become impossible.
Just as you can no longer fly over a volcano because of all the dust coming up, it corrodes the inside of jet engines.
In these conditions, no jet travel would be possible just south of any of the glaciers because you have so much dust in the air You cannot run jet engines, so we're kicked back to propeller technology.
That's the first guess.
Wow!
Little strange things that would so disrupt the planet.
World population jumps quickly, as we know.
We're aiming towards 11 billion people in the next century.
But with a change of climate conditions, one of these 10-year changes, we could drop off to 3 billion.
One other question.
With a change like this, Right now we're seeing retreat of glaciers almost worldwide at a scary rate.
They're really retreating.
Oh, it's incredible.
Down in the Antarctic we're seeing pieces, very large pieces, beginning to break off or threaten to break off from the mainland ice pack, which of course then adds to the totality of the water in the ocean.
And so what happens at the poles?
Well, same thing, unfortunately.
Let's take the opposite case.
Now let's have Scenario two, and again, the world climate is so complicated.
Let's say the global warming does not shift that current.
Europe stays where it is, but that we start getting really much hotter much faster.
Right.
And the second scenario is just as scary as the first scenario, because instead of Europe getting colder, Europe gets warmer.
And the grain regions, because of increased heating, Have to move north instead of south.
Right.
Except if you move grain north, because the days are so short in the winter, they're long in the summer, but nevertheless you get one less cropping.
You don't get that nice mid-latitude winter wheat.
So once again we're looking at tropical regions growing, and what we get then is again a lowered grain harvest.
We are really in a perfect optimal position, where we are now, for feeding all these people.
If we get either warmer or colder, we're going to have mass starvation.
And, of course, we're getting more people.
We're getting a lot more people.
A lot more people.
You know, I travel a lot.
I'm very lucky in that my job takes me to so many places.
But I've spent, I guess, I go to Africa twice a year.
And I go to both North Africa and South Africa.
And we always think about the equatorial parts of Africa as having a huge population run-up.
In Kenya, for instance, there's Six kids per family.
Right.
But North Africa is the area with some of the highest population growth in the world.
It is the Arab countries that are just populating beyond belief.
Tunisia is bursting at the seams and so is Morocco.
And you have very marginally habitable regions as it is now.
Tunisia is really the greenbelt as it was all the way back to the Romans back to Carthage.
Any sort of climate change there and you have a gigantic population of Arabs who are starving.
And become militants.
So we're really looking at this bursting world.
Look at India, look at China.
These are areas that the population growth is just beyond belief.
Well, we like to believe that we're now, we have evolved somehow, consciousness-wise, and we won't have these big wars anymore.
Yeah, right.
But if nations began to starve, they get very dangerous.
I mean, even North Korea right now, which is starving, is considered to be a very, very dangerous place.
Uh, for the rest of the world, just because they are starving to death.
So, a professor, we're at the bottom of the hour, we'll pick this up in a moment.
He's right.
What do you think?
Have we evolved our consciousness to the point where we would starve politely?
Do you think?
Or do you think we might go to war over food?
I think we're pretty warlike, actually.
The trip back in time continues with Art Bell hosting Coast to Coast AM.
More, somewhere in time, coming up.
I have this lonely pair of one-line ears.
It's all clear to me now.
My heart is on fire.
My soul's like a wheel that's turning.
My love is alive.
My love is alive.
He said, Waterloo, I want to see you once more.
Waterloo, promise to love me forevermore.
Waterloo, couldn't escape me by Waterloo.
I want you to know it.
I'm fading to see you No, no, no, no, I won't lose you
Finally facing my war My my
I tried to hold you back but you were stronger Oh yeah
And now it seems my only chance is giving up the fight And I see I am with you
I'll see you for nothing when I lose Waterloo
I will defeat you once more Waterloo
Promise you'll love me forevermore Waterloo
Couldn't escape if I wanted to Waterloo
♪ I know we can, I know we can ♪ Now, we take you back to the past on Art Bell Somewhere in Time.
My guest is Professor Peter D. Ward, a professor of geological sciences, adjunct of professor of zoology.
Now, that's interesting.
That might fit right in, actually.
He's a professor at the University of Washington, Seattle, and we're talking about mass extinction.
Mass extinction.
And the reasons for it.
So stay right where you are.
Now we take you back to the past on Arkbell Somewhere in Time.
Arkbell Somewhere in Time.
Oh Once again, Professor Ward.
Professor, welcome back.
Thank you, Art.
Would you say that the change that is coming eventually is impossible, improbable, or inevitable?
Well, if there's anything that the history of life on this planet has shown, it's that there's nothing but change.
The one thing you can never bet on is stability.
So, personally, I suspect that all kinds of nasty changes are confronting this.
So, inevitable?
Inevitable, but that said, also I'm almost alone among my colleagues and friends in thinking that of all the species on Earth, we are the least susceptible to extinction.
I tend to view humans as a good pair of Levi's, kind of extinction-proof, you can't bust us.
And I'd be happy to debate that with almost anybody.
Alright, there already have been a number of species that in our lifetimes we have seen Just go away.
Oh, very, very quickly.
And it's happening at an increasing pace.
I have the sad, sad duty of going to Hawaii this past year.
I was filming, actually, an adaptation of one of my books about mass extinction for a PBS series.
Right.
And one of my friends there has been trying to keep Hawaiian land snails alive.
And this sounds like, gee, why bother keeping snails alive?
Hawaii is the home to many thousands of species of snails found nowhere else on Earth.
We humans, very stupidly in the 1940s and 1950s, introduced a number of new predators on the island.
And in a refrigerator, this one man is keeping the last three or four specimens of many of these species alive.
And he can't get them to breed in captivity.
There's none left in the wild.
And so he presides over the death of species, and these things one by one drop off the earth.
That's an amazing thing to have to go through.
And we all lose loved ones, and it's hard to love a snail when you realize you're seeing something that has been on the planet for millions of years.
All right, answer me this.
Why is this snail important?
One way or the other.
Well, let's put it this way.
If we were to go back 64 million years ago and see a little, tiny rat-like creature that had survived the giant, catastrophic death of the dinosaurs via impact, who would say that that little rat would someday be us?
And who could say that that snail, that humble little snail itself, through odd evolutionary scenarios, does not also lead to intelligence?
Very true.
Um, but what about, I guess, I was about to say the natural selection of nature, because extinctions do occur naturally, man around or not.
Oh, sure.
Some go, some come, right?
Yes.
However, maybe a lot of them are not so natural, the extinctions, I mean.
Well, certainly the rate of extinction now is higher than any time Since 65 million years ago.
I mean, soon after that impact.
Oh, no kidding?
Oh, yeah.
We are in a time that is approaching the rate of extinction.
If we prorate it now over the next several thousand years, we kill off about half of the species on the planet, which is exactly what happened with the death of the dinosaurs.
It wasn't just dinosaurs that went out.
It was 50 to 60 percent of all species.
So much of what I do, my research, is tracking these mass extinctions, trying to compare what happens now to what happened in the past.
When the dinosaurs bit it, what was left?
You say about half of everything got zapped.
What tended to survive the big rock?
Well, you know, it's really interesting.
Three weeks ago, I was lecturing in Los Alamos, where we build all our nuclear weapons, and the same question was asked me.
And I told them, and I got a great laugh, is that those that could produced bomb shelters survived.
These people in Los Alamos thought it was a great joke.
That's the reality.
Anything that could burrow.
And anything that could excavate or get underground.
That's Los Alamos type humor.
Oh, they loved it.
So anything that could go underground, and that might be true of the next mass extinction as well.
Yeah, I think things that can get through really bad times will survive.
The trouble is big animals can never get underground.
So really big stuff like dinosaurs, they couldn't get away from all the nasty environmental effects of this impact.
Now what has to happen is animals and plants that can escape us, our presence, will be okay.
So I think most of the oceans, deep sea creatures, we have yet to really penetrate the deepest parts of the oceans in any meaningful way.
And the deep sea is okay.
But stuff on land isn't.
So, life would continue, even another catastrophic event of even that magnitude.
Life would continue at some level, and eventually, no doubt, if you believe in evolution, crawl back up on land and begin again.
Oh, yeah.
I think it would be very difficult.
Even these almost, say, planet-sterilizing impact events, which there have been a handful in the last 500 billion years, things survive.
Things get through.
There's always little refuges.
But we are the meteor now, and this is more than just metaphor in the sense that we so affect ecological habitats that we're pretty pervasive.
We're like a big impact.
Well, you can't even rule out the rock scenario.
I think we've identified one out of ten Earth-crossing asteroids.
Oh, there's plenty out there, and certainly I have a lot of friends in that business, and it is enough to Really be sobering you talk to these people and I was I had
the privilege of knowing the late gene shoemaker Who spent a lot of his time peering out through telescopes
trying to find these things does his wife? Oh, yes, and Mr Labby their compatriots and these people are as we're doing
art spending time not sleeping looking out for humanity
I've noticed and maybe you have to that when Astronomers report a near miss for Earth.
Usually, you read an AP story that starts out, uh, Earth had a really close call yesterday, uh, or the day before, and, you know, for some reason, it's not, you never see, well, gee, this one looks, or you rarely see, this one looks like it's really gonna come close, folks.
They see them after they've passed, or as they're passing.
Which would lead one to believe that the one that gets you, you won't see coming.
Well, that's completely correct.
And we had one of these that almost got us in 1908 in Siberia, of course, the famous Tunguska effect.
Oh, yes.
And this was an airburst.
The way telescopes work, you can see the big ones, you can see the moderately big ones, but things that are 50 meters in diameter, 150 feet in diameter or less, we can't see.
Anything that's 150 feet, a meteor 150 feet in diameter, strangely enough, doesn't have enough oomph to go directly to the ground.
It explodes several miles up.
This is called an airburst.
And this is what happened in 1908.
But that airburst has enough energy to duplicate several Hiroshima bombs.
Now let's take that Tunguska and just change, by several minutes, the impact of that on the atmosphere either way and if you're over Moscow or you're over London then you would have killed in either case a million people instantly in 1908 now the world is so much more populated we have such an event every hundred years we can expect a Tunguska type event and with the world being as populated as it is over the next several centuries to several thousand years there will be
Million people deaths from meteor explosion.
Well, as a matter of curiosity, since you talked to the fellows in government, obviously, if something were to detonate over Washington or Moscow or even one of the lesser cities in either country, do we have enough safeguards in place that we would immediately understand We were not just attacked atomically and begin a retaliation, do you think?
Are there plenty of safe things in place for that?
Things are much less safe than we imagine.
They are?
I don't have access to the military so much.
I don't travel in those circles.
I talk to the scientists, I talk to the military.
And I had the most wonderful lunch talking to Dr. Edward Teller, the man who invented the hydrogen bomb, at a conference dealing just with this topic.
And how safe are we?
Should we have a meteor defense?
And Teller, at the time, was trying to talk the Russians into not scrapping some of their intercontinental missiles that were scheduled to be scrapped through one of the treaties and save them as a meteor defense shield.
United States at the same time was thinking of doing the same thing, that we should have on call
several missiles, and of course we've had these films, Armageddon, The Deep Impact, where we do just that,
where we attempt to launch missions.
However, in the movies they're manned missions, in reality, we are working on launching nuclear-tipped missiles, to try
to just deflect these bodies.
You can't blow them up, you can just deflect them.
Well, I'm an expert to the degree that I've watched Armageddon several times,
and what I remember is, you have to hit it out far enough, so that if you break it apart,
the pieces actually miss the atmosphere of Earth.
And if you don't get it far enough out, then you might just make it angry,
in the sense that you get several big pieces that are going to still come down on the world's cities.
Well, there's a good news in this though, too, Art, in that same airburst scenario.
If you can break up the pieces to 150 feet or less, They don't hit the planet.
No, they burst.
And if they burst over a city, you're in deep trouble.
But nevertheless, much less energy.
When it hits the Earth, there's a hell of a lot more energy that's expanded.
So you want to break them up if you can.
So instead of an ELE, you have something much less.
Much less.
Much, much less.
That's the best-case scenario.
A better-case scenario is just move out of the way so they miss.
Could you really do that with an atomic weapon?
Or would you have to go up there and literally put rockets on the thing and move it?
No, you don't have to put rockets on it.
You simply have your nuclear weapon detonate right next to it as it goes past.
You have to have precise timing, but we can do that.
But the scary thing is, and I was at this table, it was one of the most wonderful conversations, a Canadian journalist asked Dr. Teller, what is the largest nuclear bomb that humans can build?
And Teller began to answer him, and the security guy next to him said, Dr. Teller, sir, you can't answer that.
And Teller said, shut up.
So anyway, they started answering together, and they gagged him.
He knows we don't, but there is a finite limit to the bomb size, of course.
Well, apparently, but I wonder, and I'm sure you do, how big that really is.
Maybe it's so big that the answer would have... What do you suppose?
Well, we know the Russians blew up a 100-megaton bomb.
I was a little boy.
This was 1960.
I lived in Seattle, Washington, and for several weeks afterward, we couldn't drink the milk because of strontium-90 coming down.
This seems like a faraway nightmare now, but that was the case.
And remember the early 60s?
I'm sure you do.
I certainly do.
These big bombs were being blown up.
But think of the expansion of the technology since then.
Again, it's so classified, we don't know.
There's certainly, there gets to be a point where you can no longer build, I don't think it's theoretically possible to make a 500 megaton bomb, because you get, just the whole physics of uranium isn't going to blow up.
The hydrogen weapon does not completely explode.
So there is an upper limit to this, but certainly the people who are worried about planetary defense are thinking seriously about this.
What about these newer style weapons that I understand will detonate and kill all living things while leaving structures basically intact?
This is hard radiation weapons and these again are such visions of nightmare and again Los Alamos and other places are working on these.
Our military never sleeps for better and for worse and certainly there are lots of visions of how to do this.
My fear, and Teller's comment when we were talking about how big a bomb could go up to defloat the meteor, Teller's point in the address that he made to us was that if one of these bombs went up, but somehow it didn't get out of the atmosphere and exploded on the way out, and we know that NASA isn't perfect, even a 100 megaton bomb exploded in the upper atmosphere could potentially cause 1% of the entire atmosphere to be blown off into space.
Now that leaves you another 99%, but the effects of that would be very catastrophic on world climate.
100 megatons could cause 1% of the atmosphere to go?
According to Teller's calculation, this would be exploded much higher than the Russians were doing in these air tests.
These are upper parts of the atmosphere.
The effects are far more severe.
And if we lost 1% of the atmosphere, what would happen?
Well, I don't know, because again, the calculations of this are secrets.
But nevertheless, Teller seemed to intimate that this would be fairly catastrophic.
And when this particular man is talking about something being fairly catastrophic, I expect really bad.
Really bad.
This is a good point.
Do you think that Mr. Teller knows that there is such a thing as a doomsday weapon?
Something so horrendous that it would kill everybody involved, including its makers?
I have no idea.
I was only lucky enough to spend, I guess, two parts of two days with him, and they were very memorable moments.
The funny thing is, I kept thinking this is Bela Lugosi's brother.
The physical similarity between the two is amazing.
Same accent, same face.
Uh, what was he like?
I mean, this man who created this bomb that so changed our planet, and could you expel the end of it?
I mean, what was he like?
When you meet people whose brain power is obviously going at different speeds, and I think we all have this sense that, go back now to some of those very primitive early computers, compared to the nice Pentiums you have now, you just see such amazing difference.
Talking to some of these Nobel Prize winners is like that.
I feel like I'm a fairly intelligent human, but when I talk to some of these Nobel Prize winners, it's like playing basketball with a professional basketball player.
Sure.
We can all throw a ball in the hoop, but they are just so qualitatively different than us.
And in brain power, there are people like that.
Teller was that way.
Stephen Jay Gould was that way.
Well, did Teller strike you as an optimist generally, or something of a pessimist?
Keller simply scared me.
He scared me because he is so willing and ready to promote the use of nuclear weapons on the planet.
For peaceful purposes, he said.
This was his dream come true, meteor defense.
This was the man who was going to build a big canal in Alaska in the 60s with hydrogen bombs.
Actually, I think they also were going to go through A part of Central America, if I recall correctly, and create a second Panama Canal with nuclear devices.
That's correct.
Oh yes.
What happened to these projects?
Well, wiser heads also realized that the amount of radiation that would be released would make Chernobyl and Three Mile Island look very pitiful.
The Grim Reapers still Getting his pull from Chernobyl.
Well, they do have cleaner weapons, don't they?
Well, they certainly didn't back then when Teller was trying to advocate this in the 60s.
But clean is a relative term.
Ah, true.
Relative term.
And they also have incredibly intentionally dirty weapons.
Oh, yes.
We don't talk a lot about that, but those are the doomsday scenarios, aren't they?
In other words, if there were an exchange of nuclear weapons and they were the really rotten, dirty ones, Then you're not habitable for a long, long time.
No, you're not.
But if you want to get really nasty, you simply do what Larry Nevin and Jerry Pornell fantasized about in one of the great science fiction novels, Footfall.
These were the authors who the Moat and God saw a couple of wonderful science fiction stories.
I read both.
And they correctly stated that really the ultimate weapon is to direct asteroids into Earth-crossing orbit and then simply let them fall in a rogue country.
Much more effective than a nuclear bomb.
Or even a rogue world, if you're considering it from the perspective of a non-human.
Well, I think it would be very difficult to move an asteroid from one planetary system to another, and again, we're the only habitable world in this particular solar system.
If you want to have aliens coming in the spaceships, I guess that could be done, and I think in that novel they certainly show that's the best way to do it.
You don't bombard a planet with Well, how do you know that that is not exactly what happened?
a mess, you simply drop a rock on it, let the climate do its work, and come back, say,
20 years later.
That's what happened to the dinosaurs.
The world was actually reconstituted fairly quickly, but there's no more dinosaurs.
Well, how do you know that that is not exactly what happened?
That some intelligent race directed a rock here, said, look at those nasty things down
there.
Here you go, rock, boom.
And then came back, you know, some period of time later and the obelisk was there.
Professor, hold on, we'll be right back.
Professor Peter D. Ward is my guest.
I'm Art Bell.
You're listening to Art Bell, Somewhere in Time.
tonight featuring coast to coast a m from may two two thousand one
mom's dancing baby on the shoulder the sun is setting like my life is in the sky
what is happening, what's happening, everything always wanting more, giving you longing for
black velvet and that little boy's smile black velvet, black clothes, yellow style
a new religion that'll bring us to meet black velvet
music playing...
music playing...
singing the still time of day when the tree is crowned with hay
when the ash and oak and the birch and yew and dragon ribbons tear
when all will be calm and the red moon in the blue veil of the night
the shadow of the sun and the dreams appear and beat the lantern light
the beat of melody over the night and the sun's light on the day
and as we turn into sun again we breathe the sun again music playing...
you're listening to Art Bell, somewhere in time Tonight featuring Coast to Coast AM from May 2, 2001.
My guest is Professor Peter D. Ward, Professor of Geological Sciences at the University of Washington, Seattle.
Also an adjunct professor in zoology.
So, you know, we can talk about animals like us.
I mean, you could think of us as... His book, I think it's a great title, Incredible title, actually.
Rivers in Time.
Rivers in Time.
And we're sort of... Humanity is kind of like a... A little tipsy canoe going down the rivers of time.
Oh, wait a minute.
What's that directly ahead?
at Rapid.
You're listening to Art Bell, Somewhere in Time.
Tonight featuring Coast to Coast AM from May 2, 2001.
You think it's reasonable, Professor, to think of ourselves as sort of in a little tipsy-doo canoe going down the rivers of time?
I think it's a great analogy.
And the canoe does tip every once in a while.
Yes, every now and then.
So, Professor, how many times can we document, how far back can we go with these ice cores?
How many times can we document there has been a change sufficient to put water in the canoe?
The ice cores are only good back to about 200,000 years.
Listen to me, only 200,000 years.
But with the age of the Earth being as old as it is, this really is just a really quick drop in the bucket.
We wish we could get back further.
We just don't have ice thick enough.
We can't go back any further than that.
So 200,000 years is about the resolution that we have.
And in that time, there have been, what, 10 or 15 truly catastrophic and scary rapid climate changes.
of i'd pages coming and going back and forth relational and intercalational
Uh-huh.
ten or fifteen times in that period that would be sufficient worthy to happen now to create i
think major chaos within
civilization as we know it uh... there are more and more people who think that we are
approaching or on the could maybe on the cusp right now
of such a change Would you venture forth your opinion for us on that idea?
I was lucky enough to be in Hawaii this last year at the observatory that monitors for the world the amount of carbon dioxide.
It's at about 12,000 feet on the Big Island volcano.
The amount of oxygen there is so low, it's so high at such altitude you're gasping up there.
But to look at this graph It's a straight upward graph of increasing carbon dioxide.
So yes, I think that we are approaching a crisis point.
And how will we begin to see it manifest itself, or are we already seeing that right now?
You've already alluded to it, Art, in the previous segment.
You mentioned that ice caps are melting in Antarctica.
Yes.
That is unprecedented.
Again, from those ice cores, we know that such a rapid warming as we're seeing, and again, that rapid warming, paradoxically, could create all of a sudden rapid cooling.
But that change is as rapid as anything that's happened on the planet in the last 200,000 years.
Well, a lot of people who are real antagonists about global warming don't seem to grasp the concept that global warming could suddenly turn into a very cold place to be.
They don't get how that can happen.
They say, well, it's getting colder.
What would you say to them?
I mean, how do you get them to understand that global warming doesn't automatically mean everything gets hotter?
It might mean that, but it doesn't automatically mean that.
It could mean the opposite, and they just can't grasp it.
Well, one of the things that people, one of the straws that is grasped is that, gee, if you scientists know so much, how could you not be able to predict if it's going to get hotter or get colder?
The climate is so complex.
We look, we think of all the money we spend on On meteorology and trying to predict the weather and how poorly we do, even with this giant expenditure, because the Earth is so complex.
But the simple answer is that global warming puts more water in the atmosphere.
I mean, this is clear.
It gets hotter, you evaporate more.
And a lot of that water gets transported north, where it comes back down as snow.
Glaciers form when more snow is accumulated in the winter that can melt back in the summer.
The high amount of precipitation that is being produced by this tropical global warming could lead to more snowpack up north and you start growing glaciers.
The thing about glaciers is, because they're white, they reflect sunlight back into space.
There's a feedback mechanism.
Growing glaciers make the planet colder.
You get temporarily warmer and then plunge into a really bad ice age.
Let us imagine that scientists have more or less informed government the climate is changing and it will not be a good thing for us.
I would imagine our government might try, if it thought it knew how, to change that.
To have an effect on it, in some manner, some way.
And Edward Teller Also is involved with an interesting project right now and I wonder if you've heard about it.
It's called the HAARP project in Alaska.
It is but one of many such facilities actually throughout the world.
But one of the things that they claim about it, maybe, is weather modification.
And I wonder if you are aware that there may be weather modification attempts going on.
In other words, they may see it coming.
And they may be quietly doing something, trying to do something about it.
What do you think?
Again, I'm not aware of this project.
I'm not privy.
I have no military clearance.
I've never been in the military, so I'm not aware of this.
But I do read, and I certainly talk to my fellow scientists.
I do know of other such projects, such as seeding iron into the Pacific Ocean.
And there's many ways that we try to change the amount of CO2 by causing for instance we try to get more phytoplankton to
grow but if you can get more plants on the on the planet they
Can pull carbon dioxide over the atmosphere and you can do this by seeding iron onto the surface this acts as a
fertilizer It creates more growth of plankton so a lot of people are
worrying about it and well they should Well, I worry a little bit about attempts to modify things
and it's not that I don't trust in science, but actually i don't trust him to cut back on the food
Well, to tell you the truth, I think you're probably wise in that point of view.
Starting at Los Alamos in 1945, we scientists have had a pretty spotty track record, haven't we?
Well, if the question is, I think I said it in the first hour comically, well, Fred, should we push the button or not?
You know they're going to push the button.
See what happens.
And eventually we're going to get to push a button on something so significant and profound that it is, they're going to go, oops.
Well, the funny thing about scientists is we never believe that this generation, that the politicians will take it away from us.
Oh, that was the last bullet, they're better now.
They're better now.
They won't take our toys away.
Oh, right.
Scientists are really people who have had a really long, extended childhood, and it is that aspect that lets you have that imagination, which makes a good scientist.
Sure.
But it isn't always the best training for practicality.
Yes.
There goes the button.
All right.
Well, anyway, if we were to imagine that we are headed toward something of this magnitude Would we see exactly the kinds of changes that we're seeing now in the environment?
Would we begin to see Earth changes?
What about earthquakes?
What about volcanoes?
What about all manner of natural things?
Would they begin to, in some way, intensify?
Not necessarily.
Again, the Earth really deeply ingrained tectonic systems, plate tectonics or continental drift, is Pretty much unaffected by weather.
And yet, I am told that if a volcano went off, it could certainly be part of the equation.
Oh, yes.
You're completely right on that one.
Again, the weather isn't going to affect the volcanoes.
The volcanoes are definitely going to affect the weather.
Uh-huh.
So, do you think that we could begin looking for very serious change in the next 10 years, 20 years, 50 years, 100 years?
What's the likelihood?
Well, I would say there's a certainty of it in the next 100 years.
There's a high probability of it in the next 50 years, and there's a good chance of it in the next 10 years.
That's really soon.
I think so.
In Rivers in Time, how do you go about setting out your case?
Well, I've been lucky enough to be a paleontologist.
I think it's one of the really... I'm constantly amazed, maybe I shouldn't say this on nationwide radio, They pay me to do something I'll probably do anyway.
Looking at fossils again, talking about the extent of childhood is something I loved as a child and I just never grew out of it.
Are you a tenured?
Oh yes, I'm old.
I've been tenured for a long time.
No problem.
Well, that leads to other problems because as you get tenured and further along and this hair turns gray, universities try to turn you into an administrator.
Just when you figure out how to be a good scientist, along comes the need to do other stuff.
I have temper tantrums every once in a while. My colleagues realize I'm a terrible administrator.
Good. Keep doing it.
At any rate, I was asking how you actually lay out your case in that book.
I am looking at the big mass extinctions.
and I begin to start to ask...
Again, you were talking about Cape Town.
I think it has to be one of my two or three favorite cities on Earth.
I started work in Cape Town in 1990 because the biggest of all mass extinctions, which happened 250 million years ago, is best laid out in the desert just north of Cape Town, the Karoo Desert.
There, at that time, we know that about 90% of all species disappeared.
Holy smokes!
Yeah, there was a real interesting report in Science Magazine about buckyballs.
You may have seen this.
Actually, a researcher at my university discovered comet impact material in C60, big molecules of carbon called buckyballs, because they look like these Buckminster Fuller geodesic domes.
That report is now under great attack, because We cannot replicate those results.
The first blush is, however, that we were hit by a really big comet 250 million years ago, and that this caused the most gigantic of mass extinctions.
Personally, I don't believe it.
Personally, I think that greatest of all mass extinctions was caused by global warming.
Now, that would have been completely au naturel, or do you imagine going back millions and then billions of years, if we could do that?
Professor, that we might have seen other intelligent life of some sort previously come and go, possibly even some technological civilization that could have been here two billion years ago.
You said our records only go back a couple hundred million years, so if you look back in the billions of years, what could have been?
Good point, and although I hate to tout books, I wrote a book Last year called Rare Earth, which made it all the way to number six on Amazon for maybe a matter of ten minutes and then languished back.
But it was my one brief moment of bestseller-dom.
And in this book, I was characterized as becoming the anti-Sagan, because I took on Carl Sagan and his millions and billions of civilizations for a number of reasons, including these mass extinctions.
I think that the probability of many intelligent races, as many as Carl thought, is That's not quite untrue.
But I never said that we're on a unique Earth.
I said a rare Earth.
And I would bet my life that there are other intelligent civilizations out there.
The universe is just too vast to think we're the only place.
But you rather think rare.
And actually, if you look at all the work done by SETI so far, you could say their lack of success underlines your theory.
SETI absolutely hates me.
I bet.
I've been loving it.
I actually got to go on Nightline And debate them, and their case is that there are many civilizations out there, but you know, they've spent a lot of money, about $200 million to date, and have found Zip.
And the setting line is, they walk a very fine line, is that, look, you gotta give us money, we just started looking, but the reality is they've searched about a quarter of the galaxy, and have found Zip.
So, the first result to run is that there isn't a million civilizations in our galaxy that Carl... Carl Sagan suggested.
He thought there were a million civilizations in our milky way right now.
But that study has disproven that.
Maybe there's ten.
So, intelligent life is rare.
Very rare.
What do I know?
And you think that mass extinctions play a big part in that, or do you think that the ingredients that have to be present for the beginning of intelligent life, as we understand it anyway, Are rare themselves.
Can I try out a real crackpot idea on you and your listeners?
Come on, on my show?
A crackpot idea?
I'd love to do that.
My colleagues and I have just published a paper, and it's going to come out in Scientific American.
It's already out in the technical literature.
We are proposing something we call the Galactic Habitable Zone.
That in any galaxy, there's a fairly narrow region, a geographic region, where you should expect to find intelligent life.
And that the centers of galaxies ...are terrible places to look for alien civilizations, as are the edges of galaxies.
You need to be in a fairly narrow space in the middle, and that's just where our sun is.
Why?
Well, the centers of galaxies have so many supernovae, and so many stars, that the star-to-star interaction causes comets to fall on the planet.
Lots of violence.
You get more of these impact extinctions.
Good point.
And the outer edges of galaxies, it turns out, there aren't enough supernovas to build metal.
You have to have metal on a planet.
You and I are having this conversation because we have iron in our blood.
That iron was made in a supernova.
Right.
We now have measurements of metallicity across the galaxy.
The outer edges of the galaxy don't have enough metal to build Earth-like planets.
So I'm seeing a balance between mass extinction and metal as defining a region, a narrow region, where you should expect to look for intelligence.
That sounds logical.
At least intelligence of the sort that we Well, you just hit the quotient point, because I'm talking about life as we know it, not life as we don't know it, and there may be all kinds of varieties that we have not the inkling about.
I'm talking about we carbon-based life forms.
Now, I do have friends in SETI, and I know the people, in fact, who run SETI, so I have to be a little careful here, but you think basically they're full of it.
It's ridiculous, and you're saying it's a waste of money?
Would you go that far?
Here's the fly on the wall.
Jill Tartar listens to me down at Arecibo.
I got to see Jill Tartar and Paul Allen side-by-side.
I handed Paul Allen a copy of my book, Rare Earth, and Jill Tartar looked at me like she was I was the Antichrist.
Like the Stare of Death.
Oh!
Oh!
And in a public forum about a month later, she stood up in front of 200 astronomers and just completely lost it, castigating me in front of these scientists, not knowing what the hell I was doing.
So I obviously touched her nerve.
Well, I mean, the fact of the matter is, hopeful as they are, they have not yet found anything, and they have been looking for a while.
Now, of course, They claim, as you know, that the new computer equipment will enable them to look exponentially at greater numbers of possible areas for life.
I mean, just tremendous listening capability compared to what they have had.
What about that?
Well, I think it's great.
I think the new Paul Allen Observatory, because there will be collateral scientific information being gained, you know, Paul just gave them 11 million bucks.
I mean, that's a wonderful thing.
We are going to get A lot of good information.
My complaint about SETI is that SETI research looks for signals and nothing else comes in.
So you either find signals or the money's wasted.
I kind of want to see it coupled together where you could look for signals and at the same time get a scientific return.
That's a lot of money spent for nothing.
Well, all you need is one.
That's true.
I mean, they point that out a lot.
All you need is one.
And I hope they find it.
I hope they find it tomorrow and stand up and say, Peter Ward, ha ha ha, in your face.
But that's okay.
I love that.
All right.
Back to extinctions for a second.
There are a lot of people who think that, yes, there are extinctions, but it is the natural course of things and will promote the next evolutionary jump.
That, you know, from the next mass extinction will come a being superior to humans in nearly every way you can imagine.
That only that produces real evolutionary jumps.
That there's no such thing as this slow evolution that many scientists talk about.
We'll pick up on this point when we get back.
No, no, that's not what I want.
What I want is number three, thank you.
It's far eerier.
I kind of like it.
Yeah!
Have you ever listened to this?
It's kind of Egyptian.
Actually, it's very Egyptian.
And Egyptology is something I suppose we ought to talk a little bit about, huh?
you Because, you know, they're not exactly sure when the Sphinx was really put there.
Might have been a whole lot longer than they say.
And there was this thing about water out there in the desert.
I'm Art Bell.
This is Premier Networks.
That was Art Bell hosting Coast to Coast AM on this Somewhere in Time.
I'm going to be singing a little bit of the song.
Hey-yi-yo, hey-yi-yo, hey-yi-yi-yo.
I'm going to be singing a little bit of the song.
Tonight featuring Coast to Coast AM from the 2nd of May, 2001.
Well, do you think extinctions equal evolution?
And if so, should we welcome the big rock?
I could talk it in, you know.
I've been talking about that for years.
Right from my front yard.
Right from my front rocks.
I could talk it in.
Here it comes.
Looks big as a house from here now.
Glowing red.
See the sparks?
Should we welcome it?
In other words, if evolution is a product of extinction, then, hey, we should be clapping for the cockroaches!
Because they're going to inherit and they're going to get intelligence and they're going to go a lot further than we
ever could You're listening to art Bell somewhere in time
Tonight featuring Coast to Coast AM from May 2, 2001.
Once again, Professor Peter D. Ward, professor at the University of Washington, Seattle.
Professor, does extinction probably equal the jumps that we have such a hard time finding otherwise in evolution?
Well, that's one of the most interesting questions, and one of the hardest to get at.
Surely, clearly after the dinosaurs die out, all the mammals diversify.
They evolve very quickly.
Right.
So the removal of the dinosaurs opens up the evolutionary taps, and you get all this new stuff.
And so if that's the case, maybe you could say, well, gee, just because we're losing so many species today, that's a good thing.
Maybe we can have a new age with a better, cooler set of organisms.
That's the logical conclusion.
Yet there's a number of people, myself included, who think that humans have changed the rules.
And this is why I named one of my books, The End of Evolution.
It's not that evolution ends.
It's just that the way things will evolve and what will evolve might be totally different than has gone on before.
That's super concrete.
Oh, yes.
You see, there are a lot of, for example, Native Americans that I've interviewed, and they say, it's a common.
And then I talk to the New Age types, and they say, yeah, it's a common, but it's going to be wonderful!
We're all going to be transformed into energy beings who are going to have a much better way to go.
No more physical body to contend with.
It's going to be wonderful.
And then, you know, I stop them.
And I say, well, you know, I might agree with you, it's a common, but in this transformation, this wonderful transformation you're talking about, doesn't it actually mean that most humans, if not all, die?
And there's usually a long pause, because they don't like that part of it, and they say, well, actually, yes.
You know, but they're looking at sort of the bright side of the spiritual thing on the other side.
They just don't talk much about the physical death part.
Well, my prediction, Art, is that humans don't die and that the new things that do evolve are mostly weeds.
Weeds?
Weeds.
And the most potent force going on now is genetic splicing in agricultural fields.
We're making all these genetic crops.
I know.
It is ludicrous to think that those genes don't escape into the wild population.
And so what you're now looking at will be many many types of insects, rodents, small animals, and weeds with new genetically controlled genes within them.
Stuff that we did.
Stuff that we... Now this would come from genetically engineered crops you're saying?
Yeah, first is what we're doing now is we're producing genes that can make certain crop species intolerant to insects.
You want to have crops that don't have insects.
We also are building, the scariest one is we're building crops that don't, the crop
itself is not affected by herbicides.
So you can dump huge amounts of herbicide in the field, your corn with this new gene
in it is not affected by the chemicals, but all the weeds die off.
But unfortunately these genes jump and we are going to build both weeds that are now
invulnerable to herbicide and insects which are invulnerable to insecticide from escaping
genes.
And that's the new generation of evolution.
I bet you're not a big proponent of the Terminator seed, are you?
No, I'm not.
That's one of the worst.
That was a wild guess there.
One of the absolute worst.
Have we seen any signs yet of this gene jumping?
Oh, we're seeing it all over the place.
Oh, we are?
Things are already escaping.
And the scary thing to me is what we all want is we all want a new age of something.
We had an age of dinosaurs and now we're supposedly in an age of mammals.
Well, the reality is it's really an age of bacteria.
But we want some new age of something big and glorious.
But the reality is that with all the fields and roads and fences That it's almost improbable that anything big will ever evolve again.
Because you need a lot of space to evolve a big animal.
We don't have that.
We don't have any space.
We have carved the earth into millions of tiny islands.
Most of the big animals are actually more or less disappearing at our hand, or naturally, aren't they?
Oh, completely.
Whales and the elephants and... Completely.
We have big animals in parks, but you know from Africa that most of Africa is fields now.
That's right.
You've got big, big parks.
But that's it.
There's no place for big animals to evolve.
That's interesting.
And eventually, when the big ones are gone, then it'll be the next biggest ones.
That's right.
What's left is a world of rat-sized mammals and a lot of insects.
Now, the other thing that I guess I should ask you about, because it kind of fits right in, we're seeing a lot of emerging jumping species, jumping-type Things come along here, worrisome things, that, for example, right now, would I go to Europe and eat beef?
Not a chance.
Me neither.
Not a chance.
And I'm even recalling some beef that I tried to down in Europe a few years ago and wondering about that.
Me too.
They're lousy cooks.
Boy, I'll tell you, but especially the French, they have no idea how to cook meat.
You don't want to eat there.
They just pour enough brown sauce on it so you don't know what's underneath.
They don't cook meat.
You don't really want to know what's underneath, believe me.
And so, yeah, that's right, they don't cook meat.
But what's going on in Europe right now, when you think about it, is horrifying.
And will it come here?
Is it maybe, is it perhaps already here?
I think it's almost inevitable it's going to get here, no matter what they say.
I agree with you.
You do?
Oh, yes.
Alright, well this could have a lot to do with extinction itself.
I mean, if you have a disease, That's going to spread among first cows and then humans.
That is going to kill cows and humans by virtually eating their brains alive.
And it really is what it does.
That could be one good road to possible extinction, couldn't it?
Yeah, that's a good point.
Although where I differ slightly in that is that quite often things still get old enough to breed.
Uh, as you know, the Mad Cow Disease, the prions of the Mad Cow Disease do kill, and they don't care how old you are when they kill.
That's right.
But all it takes is to get that next generation out, and because we humans breed at such an early age, what these things may do is vastly reduce our lifespan, but I don't think they threaten our species.
Just like HIV, so many people are capable of breathing before they die.
What happens is you continue the species, but boy, it makes life miserable.
Oh, yes, but we've come so close.
Do you remember the, I think it was Reston Monkey House incident with regard to Ebola?
Well, I watched on 60 Minutes as a scientist.
I was sitting outside that center and he said, you know, he said, we came that Close.
In other words, it was out.
And he said, if just one little, I forget what he said, chromosome or gene had been just ever so slightly different, it would have been airborne and human, would have infected humans.
And he's, at the end of 60 minutes, he said, we're that close.
So is it, do we get that close a lot of times with something like that?
Probably.
Again, I don't know a lot about diseases, but from what I do understand, we know of no case where disease has ever caused a species to go extinct.
Interesting.
It makes them drop in number, and then they come back.
And the best case is penicillin and penicillin-resistant bacteria.
Because we've done that, really.
We've unleashed the Ebola equivalent on the bacteria with our penicillins.
And in many cases, they're dropped down to very small numbers of these bacteria, but the ones that are left are the disease-resistant.
And now they're coming back with, of course, vengeance.
That's right.
And now we have in our arsenal very few ultimate weapons against them, right?
Exactly.
I know sound like one or two.
I've read a number of stories about that.
But a mass extinction, you think, is more likely to come from a weather change?
A rock?
What else might cause a mass extinction?
Oh, I've got one for you.
Do you know that there's a group of Israeli scientists, Professor, that believe that a rock did not kill all the dinosaurs?
They think that an intense blast of radiation from our sun might have killed them.
Now, astronomers lately have been saying that They've noticed that a lot of suns out there, that they observe, or quite a few, that are normal, stable, similar suns to our sun, occasionally go berserk for no discernible reason, and will emit a radiation that would sterilize a planet.
Yeah, that happens.
It turns out that stars, the bigger they are, the more well-behaved they are.
When I grew up, one of the misnomers was that I was always taught our sun is this insignificant, sniveling little star.
But we're very stable.
Very stable.
But it turns out our sun is gigantic.
That we're in the upper 10% of mass for the whole galaxy.
That 90% of all stars are smaller than the sun.
The sun is not a normal star.
It's a huge star.
Well, there's many huger yet.
I mean, obviously the big red giants and Rigel and you've got things like Vega.
Gigantic stars.
But nevertheless, if you take all the stars in our Milky Way galaxy, there's 400 billion.
I didn't know that.
Yeah, yeah, we're a very rare star.
And we're not a common, ordinary star, in the least.
Not in the least.
And the smaller you get, the more unstable you are.
The little stars, which make up the majority, brown dwarfs they're called, are very unstable.
They're always spitting out nasty radiation.
This is why our calculations suggest that we are rare as an intelligent species, because 90% of the stars will be so unstable, for the reasons you just said, you can't get intelligent civilizations.
Well, is it possible that there have been extinctions by our sun previously?
Sure.
The other aspect that you're missing that might be equivalent to that are supernovae.
You know, there's stars every once in a while blow up.
And we are going around our galaxy like a big merry-go-round.
We go round and round and round.
But we don't stay in the same positions like merry-go-round horses.
They pass.
Stars pass close one to another.
And if one passes near enough to us and blows up, in the bad manners to blow up, that could have caused mass extinction on the planet.
We are now looking for evidence that it has happened.
Sometimes I just think that three times in the last 500 million years, there could have been supernovas that eliminated, created these big mass extinctions.
Wow!
And they leave no evidence.
That's the thing.
It's not like a rock from space.
Which leaves iridium, this platinum group element discovered by the Alvarez's.
It leaves no evidence.
The only place we could go to find this out is the moon.
The lunar soil would record isotopes that would be removed from the Earth's surface, showing a supernova.
And a lot of us are asking the government, let's go back.
Well, don't we have some moon rocks?
Can't we look at the ones we brought back?
We've got moon rocks, but we want to go back and drill it.
We want to take drill cores, which they never did, and actually get a core sample down into the really deep regolith, as the moon is called, and look for these past supernovas.
Are you dismayed, or are you a proponent of cutting back on... How do you feel about space travel?
In other words, we went to the moon.
But we haven't been even back to the moon with man.
Not in all these years.
We've disassembled the big rockets that could do it.
I'm not sure how long it would take us to get to the moon with a man if we had to.
But I don't think we have the capability anymore.
We've kind of given up on it.
They talk about going to Mars, where there's all kinds of interesting stuff to look at, but boy, that seems a long way off, too.
We've kind of regressed with regard to our trying to move off planet.
Is that a good thing, or a really bad thing?
I think it's neither good nor bad.
I have two minds about it.
The scientist in me really wants us to go to Mars, and I want us to go to Europa.
These are obviously the two places we could find life outside of the Earth, in our solar system.
I think Mars life will be fossil life, and this is why I want to be the first off the rocket, to tell you the truth, Art.
I'd love to go to Mars.
I'd love to core that planet and look for fossil bacteria.
Europa, with its deep ocean, might be the place where we find extant life.
Well, you know, they were actually drilling in practice down at Vostok, in the Antarctic, so that they could see if they would be able to drill when they got to Europa.
But for some reason, they stopped all the drilling at Vostok.
We don't know why.
We're wondering about that.
I'd like to know.
I know that the NASA group, of which I'm associated, has just brought in a group from Rhode Island who is looking at bacteria and ice.
The only reason they're doing that is to test ways of finding bacteria on Europa.
The most wonderful thing, of course, would be to find these extraterrestrials in Europa and find out if they have DNA or if there's something else at their core.
Is DNA one way or the only way?
There's another science I'd be interested in having you comment on and that's nanotechnology.
I've had some experts On the air, on nanotechnology, who say some things that are really, really scary.
You have Bill Joy on?
I beg your pardon?
Bill Joy, the head of Sun Microsystems, wrote a cautionary tale about nanotechnology that scared the bejesus out of me.
Did you read about Grey Goo?
Yes, I did.
Oh, you read about Grey Goo?
Oh, yeah.
We heard about that the other night.
Certainly instructing a little machine to duplicate itself and just Letting it go.
And runs away.
It's a very spooky, spooky scenario.
But not impossible at all.
Not impossible in the least.
And in an upcoming book I have called The Future of Evolution, in which I think about what could cause extinction, what might be the next evolutionary products.
I talk about Grey Goo as one of the viable means of human extinction.
I said earlier that there's not many ways I think that we could go extinct, but that's one of them.
Actually, Grey Goo would sterilize everything.
That's right.
That's why I'm so spooked by it.
Grey Goo is one of the really scary things.
I think it's a much worse danger than nuclear war.
The Holocaust we've always thought about is the way that humans might end.
I think Grey Goo is much scarier.
It is.
If you balance the two, if you believe there's an extinction coming, what percentage of probability would you assign to the fact that it would be by man's hand versus a natural event?
Oh, I'd say about 99.99% it's going to happen by man's hand.
Really?
Yeah.
Now, see, I thought you were pretty much a proponent of it happens every so often.
We've documented it with ice cores and all the rest of it.
And yet, you think it's more likely by our own hand?
I think the natural forces start it, but then I think we, in our wisdom, because we are hungry, really create the chaos.
I just think, again, we have way too many people on this planet, and that we start a natural process, a sudden climate change, and that's the scenario where we unloose biological weapons or nuclear weapons that kill off so much.
If we went sliding, weather-wise or environmentally, toward a violent extinction, you think there would be plenty of biological and nuclear and chemical warfare that would come along with it as that was occurring?
Well, there's a guy in Seattle named Bill Calvin, who's a really smart, wise man, and his point is that the natural disasters that affect humanity, like an earthquake, take place in a day.
And then people build things back in the years so things get back up.
Or things are really slow, like some of the paces of technology.
But what humans, he thinks, can't deal with are decade-long breaks.
He thinks civilization is just very poorly equipped to deal with it.
Like an earthquake doesn't last for decades.
Let's imagine an earthquake just keeps going on and on and on and on.
You just can't get enough resources to fix it.
And a climate change is these decade-long events.
The breakdown of agriculture that ensues are things we just can't fix.
Pretty pessimistic, huh?
That's what my wife says.
Is that what your wife says?
Well, she just says, come on, you know, it's not that bad, but when you really think hard about it, there's some pretty scary stuff happening.
Well, unfortunately, you're talking to all the people who are doing all This work, and so you know a lot more about it than we do, and probably your wife does, and so forced to grasp one opinion or the other, I'd be inclined toward yours because I feel it myself.
You good to go for another hour here?
Sure.
All right.
I don't have to work tomorrow.
I just have to lecture undergraduates, and they'll laugh at me anyway, so.
So, hahaha.
Alright, hold on.
Oh, boy.
Oh, we forgot Egypt.
We'll get to that.
We're gonna get to your calls, too.
What a fascinating man.
I'm Art Bell.
You're listening to Art Bell, Somewhere in Time.
tonight between coast to coast a m from may two two thousand one
the the
the the
you I see them bloom for me and you.
And I think to myself, what a wonderful world I see skies of blue and clouds of white
The bright blessed day, the dark sacred night And I think to myself, what a wonderful world
I see skies of blue and clouds of white The colors of the rainbow, so pretty in the sky,
are also on the faces of people going by.
I see friends shaking hands, saying how do you do.
They're really saying, I love you, I hear you.
Somewhere in time, with Art Bell, continues, courtesy of Premier Networks.
Professor Peter D. Ward had a rough day yesterday and has more to do today.
Professor of Geological Sciences at the University of Washington, Seattle is our guest.
And he'll be right back for at least another segment.
Stay right where you are.
Welcome back, Professor.
of premier networks right now to professor ward welcome back professor
record i'd just uh... there are so many questions uh... but uh...
i'm going to try and stick with the phones in this last segment if we
can't East of the Rockies, you're on the air with Professor Ward.
Hello.
Yes, thanks for taking my call.
Boy, I can barely hear you, sir.
Yes, thanks for taking my call.
That's better.
And good morning, Professor.
Good morning.
I was wondering if you had generated maybe any data or statistical facts that would have to do with methane, ice, Yeah, that's a very good question.
The stuff you're talking about is called clathrate.
Funny word.
Clathrates are frozen methane ice.
within the last 20 years at probably a rate of 11 to 12 percent and what effect that may
have on our ozone layer.
Yeah, that's a very good question.
The stuff you're talking about is called clathrate.
Funny word.
Clathrates are frozen methane ice.
One of the aspects that we worry about, of course, is if we have drops in sea level,
it exposes methane ice, which can thereby melt.
I'm not an expert on it.
I know people who worry about it a lot.
It looks as if that particular stuff has been more involved in past global warming than what is going on now.
But once again, I just I know about it.
I know that it is of a concern, but Industrial release is far more dangerous and problematical than the clathrates are.
Professor, you know so much about what may well happen, what's happened in the past and will happen again, that I'm surprised... I wonder if you've considered doing, in essence, what Preston did, and that is taking your knowledge of science and applying it to a scenario and writing a sort of a pseudoscience or a Maybe that's a bad phrase.
A science fiction novel based on, based in reality.
Well, how about this?
I'll come down to your trailer.
We'll spend a month together.
How about co-operative?
I'd love to spend some time with you.
I would love, I'd absolutely love to do that.
Look at me on the show again.
You know where I am and I'm happy to, anytime you want me I'll be here.
I'll actually consider that.
I've been swearing off writing another book.
I've got four under my belt.
Three more than anybody's supposed to have.
You know that swearing off is impossible.
You and I are these... Once it's there, you can't stop.
I know, and the pressure to keep going is really intense.
Well, you do it because you love it, don't you?
Yeah, that's right.
Wes for the Rockies, you're on the air with Professor Ward.
Hello.
Professor Ward?
Yes, how are you, sir?
My brother was an exploration geologist out of McGill University.
He spent 40 years traveling Newfoundland, Peru, Colombia, Puerto Rico, and so on.
And his center was British Columbia.
Yes.
And he said that he believed that there was more oil up in the north slope of Alaska than there was in all the Middle East.
Did he?
And he believed that The whole North Pole was a rainforest before the moon was blown into orbit.
Well, that's probably not true.
I don't think it's true that there's more oil there than the Middle East.
The Saudi Arabian oil fields are just so stupendous.
But nevertheless, there is a hell of a lot of oil on the North Slope.
But it looks like the moon effect happened long before there were forests.
There weren't forests before the Silurian, which was 400 billion years ago.
And that moon was caused, as we know now, by the impact of a Mars-sized object with the Earth at 4.6 billion years ago.
Now that effect, you know, a lot of us are wondering, if there were no moon, what would be happening to the Earth?
Right.
It really looks as if the moon is our flywheel that keeps us from flopping around.
Other planets change their obliquity, which is the angle of the spin.
By calculations, by a number of French people, Scientists, it looks as if without our moon, we would be changing obliquities, so the equator becomes the North Pole and vice versa, over time spans of hundreds of thousands of years or less.
That's catastrophic.
Indeed.
Our goodness for the moon.
Wild Card Line, you're on the air with Professor Ward.
Good morning.
Good morning.
Hello, gentlemen.
Another great show.
This is Will Madison, Wisconsin, listening to WIBA, 1310 AM.
Thank you, Will.
Ten years ago, I was with the Department of Geology, University of Helsinki in Finland.
When I was young, in the 60s, I worked with Nobel Prize-winning geneticist, Dr. Joshua Lederberg.
I coined the term mutator race for creating, via hypermutation, the binding sites in antibodies.
Also coined the term fish and wildlife for the Federal Fish and Wildlife Service.
Well, it's a pleasure to speak to you, sir.
Oh, I'm just honored that Art will allow me to speak with a great scientist like you.
I went to Russia in the 60s and 70s and found people having to survive living under the earth.
They gathered leaves and grass and made soup in the wintertime just to survive.
It was hideous over there.
Will, do you have a question?
Yeah.
You were talking about art.
I don't know why you use the term.
It's fantastic.
Ice ball earth.
I have that in my book, How to Know Our Origins and Hidden History to Save Our Future.
Or can we?
But here's my question.
To get through ice ball earth, early human may have been semi-aquatic, an aquatic ape.
Now my question is, are you, Professor Ward, aware of The Laos deposits, the stratigraphists have searched them, looked at them in high Asia, and that they've been gathering from a wind-blown dust for over 2.4 million years.
And that these layers predict that we will have continued slow, creeping warming from the current 48 degrees Fahrenheit up to 72 degrees Fahrenheit in the next 8,000 years before the next downturn.
Are you aware of that, sir?
Well, I certainly know about the list you're talking about.
In some areas in China, it's hundreds of feet thick.
However, everybody that I All right, let's try this one from Steve in Eureka.
understands that much of the ice ages are based on, as you know, on Milankovitch,
Mr. Milankovitch and his orbital parameters, and no one that I know predicts that it's going to get that warm.
That sort of warmth was reserved not for what's going on naturally, but what's going on through man-made fossil
fuels in the atmosphere.
All right, let's try this one from Steve in Eureka.
It is my understanding, Professor, that regular magnetic pole shifts are recorded in the geologic record.
Can you explain the activity and tell us more or less what happens or what would happen to us should the shift occur?
Great, great, great, great question.
I know intimately about these things because part of my work is involved in measuring these shifts.
These things happen regularly, but it's a long, slow regularity.
It's about every hundred thousand to several millions of years, there's magnetic pole shifts.
Nobody knows We don't know exactly why it happens, but we certainly know how it happens.
The magnetic field is produced by the dynamo.
It is the liquid core up against a solid part of the inner earth.
That liquid-to-solid interface by spinning produces a magnetic field.
There are irregularities in the liquid, and those irregularities are sufficient that they cause the field to flip.
Somehow that liquid changes slightly in composition, Or maybe whirlpools or eddies in it, but it causes the magnet to go north to south, south to north.
The question is, when they turn over, we have no magnetic field for a brief period of time.
Magnetic field protects us from cosmic rays.
It could be that in the next shift, we could experience a higher rate of mutation.
However, there have been so many of these that we've not seen really catastrophes.
Or a really piece of bad luck would be Now, it was about a month ago, I guess, Professor, when our sun let loose with an eruption that was so severe that had it been pointed toward Earth, it would have taken out most of our satellites.
It would have taken down power grids.
It was, by magnitudes, the biggest one actually they've ever recorded.
I talked to a scientist about it who was watching this and recording it.
He said their instruments saturated.
Now fortunately it was not pointed toward Earth, but if you were to have a shift of the field occurring, and one of these unfortunately gigantic mega-flares occur, which was coming at Earth, you'd have some changes.
Yes, I agree, and Art, I was able to observe that solar flare in the sense that our astronomy department pointed out on the day that that happened, they actually had a darkened piece of glass The only time in my life that I've been able to see a sunspot with the naked eye.
With the naked eye, I know.
Naked eye sunspots.
That was in 93-93, and it went all the way around the sun.
It actually maintained itself.
It was incredible.
It was incredible, and yes, you're right.
Thank God it wasn't pointed directly at us, and were that to happen during one of these field reversals, you would probably have... Well, we don't know what would happen.
I know there's a lot of estimates, but it would not be a happy thing.
All electronic communications would be snuffed out on the planet through the pulse.
How much biological damage remains to be seen?
There would be considerable damage.
Well, they say that even with the magnetic field fully intact, and all the protection we have right now, if something of that size would hit, it would produce in excess of, for example, somebody on an airliner would get in excess of 100 instant chest x-rays.
Now, now, if you remove the protection, imagine what it would be.
Well, it's probably still awful lot of cancer.
At least, at the very least, yes indeed.
East of the Rockies, you're on the air with Professor Ward.
Hi.
Hi, this is me.
Yeah, well, only you know that for certain, but it sounds like you.
Excellent.
Professor Ward, I read your book, End of Evolution, a few years ago, and it was most excellent.
Thank you very much.
My question is about resources.
And that if we came to a situation where our civilization collapses, and I tend to agree that we'd probably survive as a species, we would, when we start coming back out of the caves again, we're going to have a situation where most of the good oil has been taken out of the ground, and the coal, and as I understand it, a lot of the species that were domesticated, the wild ancestor is now extinct.
Yes.
This leads to the question of how long would it take for us to redevelop a civilization, or even if it's possible, and we could be looking at the total loss of our cultural heritage here.
That's a great question.
Personally, I think that because we have such great record keeping now, unlike other crashes of civilizations in the past when writing skills were just beginning, It wasn't so much the lack of writing, it was the lack of material to write on that had any sort of permanence.
Papyrus, because it could rot so easily, is a miserable material to keep stuff on.
I mean, now we're able to inscribe enormous amounts of information, simply not just on chips, because if we lose civilization, we're going to lose the computers to run the chips.
But we can scratch letters on things.
I think we crash, but we don't thoroughly crash.
I don't see us going back to caves.
I see things changing radically in ways that are unforeseen now, but I think we bounce back up pretty quickly.
This is because, in spite of my being a horrible pessimist, I'm a wonderful optimist.
That's my guess.
I think we will have enough written record of how to build things again that we get back on our feet.
So you would say then that we would probably have isolated pockets that would survive and Maintain a reasonable level of technology then?
I think so.
That's my guess.
All right.
Sounds good.
Thanks a lot.
Thank you.
Are you, Professor, familiar with Professor Kaku?
Yes.
He talks about levels of civilization.
Type 0, Type 1, Type 2, Type 3.
I'm sure you've heard it.
He suggests that we are, I guess, a zero.
And he thinks we're on the cusp of perhaps being a type one, a zero using all the coal and the oil and whatever you can dredge up from the planet itself.
But he says the odds of our making it from zero to one, well, you don't want to hear about the odds, because they're just not good at all.
And he thinks it possible that civilizations do, perhaps are even common, But they are snuffed out very quickly indeed, and almost no zeros make it to Type 1, much less Type 2.
Agree with that, or?
I do, and actually SETI thinks a lot about these levels of civilization, because they need to have civilizations obviously able to transmit electronically, and some of those electronic transmissions require huge amounts of energy.
Power, sure.
Power.
And so the levels of civilization mentioned there go into their thinking Again, as the optimist, I'm hoping that what we do is we avoid major climatic shifts to the point that civilization crashes and that we can work ourselves into very practical lower population levels with renewable resources.
Whether we can pull it off or not, I don't know.
So then you might go so far as to say dispassionately, very dispassionately, that a partial extinction could be a good thing?
Boy, but I love humans, you know, and partial extinction translates to kids dying.
How can one face that?
Well, again, totally pragmatically, in the long run, from an evolutionary point of view.
I'm giving you as much cover as I can here.
Yeah, it is.
We have to reduce population somehow.
A partial removal of All the humans that we have on this planet would certainly benefit other species.
Okay.
West of the Rockies, you're on the air with Professor Ward.
Hi.
Hello.
Hello.
This is not so much a question, but a little bit of a story on Antarctica.
Yes.
I was stationed in Antarctica in 1967.
I went over with Operation Defreeze at Bird Station, Antarctica, in Maria Birdland, which is between McMurdo Sound and the South Pole.
Right.
And during one of the Summer projects there, they had an ice core griller brought in to drill down to ground, which was about 5,000 feet of solid ice, and they were going to take these ice cores back
And, you know, melt them down and study the air that was trapped in them and so forth.
Exactly.
But the funny thing is, is that while I was there, they had a VIP that was visiting McMurdo Sound and was coming to take a look at the ice core drilling machine, spend a day there, and then go off to the South Pole and spend a day and then come back.
And could you imagine who this VIP was?
Well, wasn't George Bush with it?
Walter Von Brauner?
Space rocket scientist.
He was a very widely interested fellow, and I'm not surprised.
Yeah, I just thought that would be an interesting thing to be thinking about.
Why do you suppose he was there?
They said he was just there for a vacation.
Well, it's possible, I suppose.
My question about this coring in that area, my question, Professor, would be, isn't it possible that they would drill down And bring up some organism that's been basically existing but dormant and unknown to us for millions of years or billions of years even.
Something that we might not like when we get it up here.
Well that just happened actually.
Someone brought back to life a bacterium from The Permian Period, 250 million years ago.
This happened in the last year.
Really?
Yeah, a lot of scientists thought that was... You know, the hard part about any of these such analyses is that how do you differentiate between bringing back the dead bug and contamination?
Bacteria code everything in this world.
It's very tough.
I mean, that could be the hard problem with the Mars rocks, isn't it?
On our sample return from Mars, how do we know the bacteria, if we find them, weren't just contaminants?
So you've really got a big problem.
If life is radically different on Mars, it's no problem.
But if life is DNA, say DNA evolves independently on both planets, it might be really tough to tell.
So this is the contamination problem.
Your question It's really valid.
Not just valid simply for drilling down and picking up stuff, which could happen.
We're also going to dead bodies from the killer flu and trying to resurrect that so we don't miss it.
Completely.
You know, there's just a lot of people produce these projects that think of a good idea at the time, and sometimes things aren't really thought through.
All the way.
NASA really is interested.
They have a planetary protection program, and they are very worried about Infectious agents coming back from wherever they're going to.
So there's a lot of protocols.
They have addressed this.
Good.
I hope they keep doing that.
Professor, it's the bottom of the hour.
You promised 30.
That's 30.
Well, you tell me.
Are we going to do one more 30?
Should I go to bed?
My wife is up there.
Oh, you're saying you're asking me?
Yeah.
Well, how are we doing?
Stay right where you are.
I'll do one more shot.
Yeah.
All right, Professor.
Hold on.
Think what a killer book we could write.
I mean, he really planted the seed in my mind with what he's had to say and what I can imagine.
This is how these things get started, and it's kind of a sickness, actually.
I'm Mark Bell.
This is Coast to Coast AM.
Don't touch that dog.
The trip back in time continues with Art Bell hosting Coast to Coast AM.
more somewhere in time coming up.
I'm going to be a little bit more.
Oh I hear rivers overflowing.
I hear the voice of rage and ruin.
Don't go around denying it.
Well, it's gonna take your life.
I feel the river overflowing I hear the voice of wreckage and ruin
Don't go around tonight, who looks upon the picture die Tell the fat moon on the right, you're right
You're listening to Art Bell, Somewhere in Time.
Tonight featuring Coast to Coast AM from May 2, 2001.
Professor Peter D. Ward, Professor of Geological Sciences at the University of Washington, Seattle.
We'll get back to him in a moment with your questions and one last segment.
Tonight featuring Coast to Coast AM, from May 2, 2001.
Alright, I know two things.
Sharon at the north side of our valley here in Trump saying she's getting blown away over there.
Yes, we've had fierce winds here in the desert.
Really fierce.
Forty to fifty mile an hour straight line, sustained winds all day long.
It's been incredible.
And I'm told now by the professor that's what I can expect in the future for our desert area.
One very likely scenario.
Welcome back, Professor.
Did your students know you were going to be doing the show tonight?
Well, some did.
I was off again in L.A.
yesterday.
I may hear about this tomorrow, yes.
It's today, actually, yes.
Indeed.
Also, let me note for the Internet audience, our new streaming partner, Akamai, apparently dropped the streaming at about 1.52 Pacific Time.
Unfortunately.
Sorry about that.
Work in progress.
First Time Caller line, you're on the air with Professor Ward.
Hello.
Hello.
First time caller calling from Phoenix, KFYI, 550 AM.
You bet.
My question is, and this is kind of vague, I wish I had more details on this, but apparently there's another theory out there.
Some scientists believe that somehow, I guess, three, four hundred thousand years ago, maybe longer, somehow the Earth went topsy-turvy.
Somehow, like what we call North and South Pole now, It used to, I guess, be more along the equator and somehow there was like a shift in the planet.
Have you heard anything about this kind of theory or anything?
There apparently was a special about it on TV, I want to say, four years ago.
Like I said, I'm real vague about this.
I'm sorry I don't have more details.
It's a very legitimate question.
We sit in this world we've been watching for some thousands of years with written language and assume the way we see it now is the way it's always been.
Three or four hundred thousand years ago, perhaps obliquity changed, but I think the chances are pretty small.
From what we know of the physics of the Earth-Moon system, it would be extremely difficult for the Earth to shake out of its 23.5 degree obliquity that we now have.
Physically, it would be very tough to do.
I have seen so many theories that seem crackpot turn out to be correct, but I'm just not going to say it's impossible.
i would just suspect improbable all right are all thank you very much thank you for taking
care of wildcard line you're on the air with professor ward hello
uh... good morning or good morning professor warden when you were calling
from the hot spot of of the earth hawaii listening to you from cage ph the big eight thirty cancer
well man Art, you've had some of the greatest shows lately.
Your shows are getting better and better.
Thank you.
They're even more cutting edge.
In fact, I should say more bleeding edge.
Beyond cutting edge.
Yes.
Professor Ward, you astound me.
I'm blinded by your science.
You're a brilliant man.
Well, I've just been alive a long time and you just start seeing a long time after a while.
Well, how long is that?
Gosh, I'm not going to tell you.
I've got another birthday coming up.
Oh, well, you couldn't be too much older than me or Art.
We're about the same age.
I'm coming to you guys, though.
The University of Hawaii is bringing me out in November for a week of lectures in Honolulu.
Oh, well, you've got to... When's that?
November.
Third week in November.
You'll see it.
Oh, great.
I'll be there.
I'm going to be talking in several auditoriums.
Okay.
I'm there.
I've got to hear this.
You know, the guy just talked about the earth wobble.
More likely it was something like an asteroid strike that even created the 23.5 degree shift in the first place.
But the reason I called, and it was a couple of callers ago, mentioned about trying to survive this underwater, under the sea, in growing gills or something.
And I think it's far more reasonable, since we're on the verge of... I'm a diver.
Me too.
I'd say, in fact, I majored in marine biology.
That was my major in college, and my minor was astronomy.
And I love diving.
And the thing that I'm really excited about is the new technology for rebreathing.
And the ability to take your air, scrub it, and bring it back.
And in the next hundred years, we'll probably develop to the point where we can stay underwater indefinitely.
Within a certain extent, I mean, we can't go too far down.
The pressure will be too great.
I also have heard that.
Well, I mean, that's a scenario.
Now, the problem is... Now, here's the question I want to pose to you.
And when I'm done, I'll get off and listen off-air.
So hopefully you can squeeze another caller in.
You know, the problem is motivating the government.
Now, we have had big projects before, going to the moon and everything else.
We somehow got motivated to get to the moon.
And I believe we went to the moon.
And I'm not even going to touch that argument about whether we went there or not.
The fact of the matter is we spent billions of dollars and we went to the moon.
And we met there several times.
Somehow, the wind was knocked out of us.
As a culture, as a society, everything's deteriorated a bit.
We need the same kind of command decision like Bush is the next fighter pilot.
I can imagine him having dreamed of going into space, you know, being an astronaut.
I wish he would have the kind of vision we need as a leader.
to make the hard decisions that need to be made because like you said we can't put all our eggs
in one basket. We need space stations with permanent inhabitants. We need a moon base with a
permanent inhabitant. We need a Mars base, maybe even asteroids with people on them. And we need
to do it right away. And the other side of it is, you know, we can terraform the earth to a certain
We can bring seawater into places until and where there used to be seawater.
I know the environmentalists would hate that, because there would be certain kinds of insects that might be lost, or, you know, oh, what a shame that the boll weevil in this area is going to be gone, but hey, we can terraform it, bring back seawater, cause climate change in the area, bring it back so that it's usable.
You know, we're going to have to start doing that, reclaiming land that we lost, because human beings over centuries have destroyed Well, every change creates a change somewhere else.
And again, we have to have the wisdom of Solomon if we do such events, just to be sure that our change doesn't create more havoc than just a physical act.
all right then a good question would be can we make enough change professor
by in the matter he just described to uh... head off what may be coming
well every change creates change somewhere else and again we have to have the wisdom of solomon if we do
such events just to be sure that our change doesn't create more havoc
and just the physical act uh... i'd just think
if you want to go to mars and that was one of your questions yes you should
pray that the chinese go to mars because i was around when we decided to go to
the moon and i was hoping because the russians were going to do it
If the Russians hadn't been threatening, we would have never gone.
I agree.
And I think if you see a Chinese threat to go into space in a big way, then the U.S.
will respond.
Things are done on that scale because of politics.
Unfortunately.
David asks, Art, please ask the professor to comment on What he might imagine an explanation to be for the magnetic anomaly in Lake Vostok in the Antarctic.
They do indeed have a big magnetic anomaly there.
You see, I'm not familiar with this and I can't really address that.
The most interesting thing that I did hear from, we're going back to the earlier part of the conversation, Edward Teller.
Edward Teller thinks that these magnetic anomalies are caused by meteor strikes.
Oh, his point was, and he was born, I think, the same day that that Tunguska event took place in 1908.
There is a record that when that Tunguska meteorite hit the atmosphere, it caused a momentary perturbation in the Earth's magnetic field.
And this is because the speed of the meteor is so fast, it affects dust grains in the atmosphere.
And this causes, there's enough magnetite in dust grains to affect the Earth's magnetic poles.
So his point is a big meteor strike would have a gigantic effect on the Earth's magnetic field for short periods of time.
Hmm.
If you have an anomaly in Vostok, perhaps it is an age where we had, two or three or four hundred thousand years ago, a large-scale meteor bombardment of the planet.
Actually, that might be the reason the lake is there.
It could be.
I thought it was craters, guys.
Yeah, that's right.
East of the Rockies, you're on the air with Professor Ward.
Hello.
First of all, great show.
I appreciate it.
Thank you.
Where are you?
This is Glenn calling from South Texas.
Okay.
It seems to me I saw a show.
It was either on vulcanism or human ancestry, but I think the human population was narrowed to just a few thousand individuals sometime in the past.
That's correct, sir.
Was that you I saw?
No, it certainly wasn't me, but it was one of my colleagues, Mike Rampino, from a university in New York, and Rampino's point is that 78,000 or 80,000 years ago, there was a gigantic explosion of a volcano around Africa.
It was called Mount Toba.
A caldera explosion?
Yes, a huge caldera explosion, and that Homo sapiens sapiens, our particular group at that time, Was of a very small population size.
We haven't really expanded and taken over the earth yet.
And that the theory is that that explosion created climate change so catastrophic that the population on the African plains dwindled to very low numbers.
That's very interesting.
It's just a theory, but nevertheless is very provocative and very interesting and I find it quite compelling.
Well, I think You have to remove yourself from your humanity for a moment, and you might say that the Eskimos and the Wanamis and the jungle, and it might be a good thing for a little of people.
It might be.
You know, there's a lot of Native American lore that suggests the kind of calamities In the past, and the future, that you've talked about tonight, Professor, have you looked into that at all as possible supporting evidence, even though it's lore?
Yeah, there's a couple of really interesting recent books, again dealing with the flood and going back to just, I guess, cultural lore that is dealing with times of flood and other times of catastrophe.
Exactly.
And a lot of people Over time has dismissed that, of course, as nonsense.
You need to come at all these things with healthy skepticism, but not dismissal, because there's a hell of a lot of information out there that is relevant.
I think any time you have such a cultural record, you want to get physical scientific support from geology or biology.
There might be ancillary data, but I think cultural information is ignored at our peril.
Yes.
West of the Rockies.
You're on the air with Professor Ward.
Hello.
Oh, no.
I didn't push the button.
Now we'll do it.
Hello.
West of the Rockies line.
You're on the air.
Mr. Bell?
Yes, sir.
Oh, good.
You can hear me, sir.
First of all, I'd like to say to you personally, after all these years of listening to you and the fact that knowing you as I do, that this is more than a job for you.
A passion.
Sure.
And caring about us, the listeners.
I appeal to all of the millions of people that care, love you as I do, to please always send their love and their energy, their prayers for you and your family, sir.
Very kind.
Thank you.
Yes, sir.
And Professor Ward, it's really very nice to hear you this evening, sir.
I want to ask two quick questions.
I'll listen to you on the air.
The first one being a few years ago on Mr. Bell's show, Sean David Morton, Prophet.
I had mentioned to him that I heard from other scientists that the Earth had been slowing down at the rate of approximately 24 seconds over about 20 years.
Prior to that, they thought that the Earth had only slowed down one second per millennium.
My second question, sir, is that I'm quite concerned China made the announcement they're going to be testing hydrogen or or nuclear explosives below ground and I've heard that when this does occur within less than 30 days on other parts of the earth it creates earthquakes and I was just wondering sir and I'll listen to you on the air if you care to address that if you know anything about those.
All right China has already begun testing actually they've they conducted one recently to have an effect in Taiwan I believe Psychological effect.
Professor, the earth slowing, there are people who have had theories about dams and all kinds of things regarding the slowing of the earth.
Anything on that?
I don't know about this more rapid slowing.
Certainly the earth has been slowing, but it's a very slow rate of slowing over long periods of time.
If you go back to the Paleozoic era, say 400 billion years ago, we could look at fossil corals, and we certainly see that there were, the day Was shorter because you're spinning faster back then we know that we have more days in the month we can count growth rates and we know this from this you can pretty well and pretty accurately calculate the rate of slowing I don't know what offhand with regard to the Chinese of course every nuclear explosion is going to create an earthquake but not a catastrophic one we're dealing again with a point source and it's a pretty big world and even though nuclear bombs are big things when they're encased in dirt
Uh, they create seismic effects, but not anything that would create, say, a catastrophic earthquake.
You wouldn't want to drop one down the Hayward Fault and let it go.
Well, no, that's definitely the case.
You definitely wouldn't.
And to my understanding, the Chinese at least have a sense of doing this in highly stable areas.
Uh-huh.
But, again, how much sense is it to blow up bombs anyway?
That's right.
These are the Rockies.
You're on the air with Professor Ward.
Not a lot of time.
Hello.
Hi, this is Pat in Fort Worth.
Well, I don't know.
I don't know about the wobble.
book and i'll be coming about the art that was going to get the planet earth
was going to get back to the fact that united in the a day to repay their other profit that pretty
well take it for granted now
and one of them said they got that because the people he got to rearrange it like a
really cute because the people are congregating in certain painted in a plot with
well uh... i don't know uh... i don't know about the wobble of there is a wobble
the chandler wobble i think it's called right professor
uh... i don't think people are massive enough to do it although
geosystem los angeles and so on and after well-fed people down there
yeah Of more interest is the position of continents, because when continents move around through continental drift, when they accumulate in places, it affects the Earth.
Markedly.
I may be able to fit one in here.
First time caller line, you're on the air with Professor Ward.
Hello.
Hello, this is Joe over in Albuquerque.
Yes, Joe.
Yeah, I have a question for you.
Before you were talking about the pyramids and the water erosion.
Yes.
And then you were talking about the core samples and bacteria.
Yes.
I'm wondering If it's possible for, with all the excavation being done, like in Egypt, that a bacteria could live long enough that it could open up like another Pandora's box?
Well, it could in a way, and I think what scares us about bacteria is that not the individual bacterium can't live long periods of time, but many bacteria can produce spores, and they go into these almost like seeds, and the spores themselves live great periods of time.
and then can be reactivated.
There's maybe a way to send bacteria from planet to planet.
There's a whole theory that life was brought into our system
by something called panspermia.
With regard to one of these things becoming activated and creating a disease, I think anything's possible.
How concerned about this whole prion thing should we be?
I think pretty concerned.
I personally am concerned enough by it, and I think we really need to change
agricultural practices.
And what in the world are we doing feeding a herbivore ground up meat?
And what's that about?
And that's because of the prion mad cow disease.
And I understand that when they burn these carcasses, they do burn the carcasses, but the prions don't get destroyed until you get to far higher temperatures.
And so they sort of drift about in the atmosphere.
Well, they do, but I think at very low concentrations.
Again, a prion isn't something that multiplies in a way a virus does.
It doesn't get in you and start multiplying like crazy.
You have to ingest large quantities of them.
So I think airborne isn't the problem.
The problem is when you eat meat that is huge concentrations of these prions.
Yes.
And that's when you get it.
Well, I kind of worried earlier tonight with the news from Europe.
I got this front page from the Mount Airy News in North Carolina, and they're talking about their plan to isolate farms and people and kill every cloven-hoofed animal within two-mile radius of any breakout.
And they're getting this all set now for North Carolina.
That was on the front page of their news there, and it's just discomforting.
What a pleasure it has been to have you on the program tonight, Professor.
We'll obviously have to do it again.
You held up incredibly well through all of this.
I thought you'd be dimming out like an hour and a half ago, but somehow, there you are.
Well, thank you for the opportunity.
Let's do it again, Art.
We shall, and I'm going to be thinking about that book.
You know where to get hold of it.
Yeah, I do.
In the meantime, your book is available on Amazon.com.
How about bookstores?
Yes, it's in bookstores, too.
Again, the science section of the bookstores are pretty minimal, but most bookstores will have it, indeed.
All right.
Professor, thank you, my friend, and good night.
Good.
Thank you, Art.
Till next time.
His book is Rivers in Time.
And you can get it.
You can go get it at Amazon.com.
After hearing the professor tonight, I cannot imagine that you would not want to read this book and others.
And of course, when you go to Amazon, it will list the others that he has written.
But rivers and time.
Now that's a book title.
Anyway, this river has got to float away right now.
We'll do this again tomorrow night.
And by the way, tomorrow night, we're going to all take a trip To hell.
And back, I'm Art Bell.
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