Art Bell replays a 2001 episode featuring Dr. Peter D. Ward, who warns climate instability could trigger Europe’s rapid 10-year ice age, threatening 750M people and sparking conflict, while paradoxically heating shifts crop zones northward, risking mass starvation. He highlights humanity’s role as an extinction accelerator—99.99% likely to cause collapse via nuclear/biological weapons or geoengineering misfires like iron seeding oceans—while questioning whether evolution benefits from human decline. Ward also ties past events (Tunguska airburst, 1960 Soviet nuclear fallout) to modern vulnerabilities, suggesting civilization’s survival hinges on unpredictable ecological and cosmic threats. [Automatically generated summary]
From the high desert and 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 altogether eastward to the Caribbean and the U.S. Virgin Islands, south into South America, north, all the way to the Poland worldwide on the internet.
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 geology, 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, fair game.
There's a lot to talk about.
The Pentagon is reviewing future contracts with the Chinese military.
As a matter of fact, Pentagon said Wednesday, the future contract 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, 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.
Size 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 going to happen, and they know it's going to 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.
To see if it 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 resolving advanced energy and propulsion technologies.
It's 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, will 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.
We'll 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 were other things that have kind of boiled under the radar.
Well, no more.
Big national press club 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.
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 going to 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 pu-twocky 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, all right?
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.
He 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 Reynolds, we'll get it, 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 to on the ground if you were listening to an airline or 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.
unidentified
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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.
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.
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 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.
Say 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.
And 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 gray goo stage?
Of course, the scientists say these big blasts of noise will not affect the whales, for example.
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.
Is this so-and-so at the Art Bell Shop?
Yes, the Art Bell Shop.
maybe they had to take that conversation.
unidentified
*sad music*
You're listening to Art Bell, Somewhere in Time.
Tonight featuring Coast to Coast AM from May 2, 2001.
I call because you have this healthy skepticism towards scientists and their discoveries and such and that, at least insofar as, at least up until it comes to global warming.
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.
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?
unidentified
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.
Yeah, I mean, you can learn to do five words a minute as soon as you memorize the code.
unidentified
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'd be a violation of the treaties.
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 I'm, you know, as far as hams are concerned.
I was a photographer at Rocketdyne, oddly enough, and worked on the Apollo little.
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, or done in a studio, no question about it.
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 cross-hatch marks and all that.
unidentified
Let me give you an example of one of the things 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?
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.
unidentified
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 northern Canada and keep the air cool by a couple of degrees let's say that'll force the Gulf Stream further down south and that way you'll have a lot more rain in the Midwest with the meeting of the moist Gulf air cold Canadian air.
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?
We've been getting near 50 miles an hour all day long.
That's really big wind.
unidentified
And we're getting the same thing up here.
You are.
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.
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, quote, normal for them.
unidentified
Well, you know the one thing you said before about the scientists, you know, like, you know, you don't have the trust in them.
I don't know if they know what they're doing when they're playing.
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.
unidentified
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These groups of extraterrestrials that are unfriendly, many of which are hiding down there in the bottom of the ocean, why don't they want us to know about this?
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.
See, 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.
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.
I was finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Award, and Methuselah's Trail, which won the Paleontological Society's Golden Trilobite Award for the Best Popular Science Book of 1992.
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.
Well, what scares me the most is that, as you know, there have been wonderful studies in Antarctic ice and Greenland ice, ice core studies they're called.
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 10 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 10-year period.
Europe currently has 750 million people in it.
They feed themselves.
Europe is completely self-sustaining in food.
And yet Europe is at the same latitude as Canada, which supports about 20 million people.
Canada is the temperature Europe ought to be, damn cold.
Now, if we start one of these ice ages, we freeze Europe.
And the prospect of 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?
The Gulf Stream simply has to slightly change configuration, and Europe goes into what happened actually in about 1200, was 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 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 the 10-year time period.
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 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 and 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.
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 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.
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 this stark, raving view of how the world we're in, but what is the best information?
And we go back to climate record and 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.
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 is 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, is our grandkids could definitely be seeing the end of habitability as we know it, this wonderful kind of constant climate that we're in where a farmer can plant a crop and have a pretty good expectation that climate will stay constant enough to get a harvest.
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 are condensing downward to where you can grow crops, that 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, 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.
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?
Well, that's pretty much a recipe for what happens in the front of glaciers.
We get these gigantic deposits called Lus, L-O-E-S-S.
We have lots of these around the world.
This is caused by this 100-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 propeller technology, is the first guess.
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.
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 for the rest of the world, just because they are starving to death.
So, 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.
unidentified
The trip back in time continues, with Art Bell hosting Coast to Coast AM.
More Somewhere in Time coming up.
More Somewhere in Time coming up.
All three to meet you.
Your heart is on fire.
My gold like a wheel that's turning.
My love is alive.
My love is alive, yes, yes.
Wallaloo, I'll defeat you all the more.
Wallaloo, promise you'll love me forevermore.
Wallaloo, goodness gave me my Wallaloo.
Wallaloo, knowing I'm waiting to see you.
Oh, oh, oh, Wallaloo, finally crazy, my Wallaloo.
I tried to hold you back when you were stronger, oh yeah.
And now it's been my only chance, it's been in love, so far.
If I see I am with you, I'll be like a thing when I lose.
Wallaloo, I'll defeat you all the more.
Wallaloo, promise you'll love me forevermore.
Wallaloo, goodness gave me my Wallaloo.
All we got to do, we know we got to do Now, we take you back to the past on Art Bell Somewhere in Time.
Well, if there's anything that the history of life on this planet has shown is 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 us.
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, as kind of extinction-proof.
You can't bust us.
And I'd be happy to debate that with almost anybody.
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?
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.
Three weeks ago I was lecturing in Los Alamos where we build all our nuclear weapons, and that same question was asked me, and I told them, and I got a great laugh, is that those that could produce bomb shelters survived.
And these people in Los Alamos thought it was a great joke.
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 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.
I've noticed, and maybe you have too, that when astronomers report a near miss for Earth, usually you read an AP story that starts out, Earth had a really close call yesterday or the day before, and for some reason, you never see, well, gee, this one looks, or you rarely see, this one looks like it's really going to 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 hardly, you won't see coming.
The way telescopes work, you can see the big ones, and 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.
Now, 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 were 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 could 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 explosions.
Well as a matter of just curiosity, since you talk 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, would we 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?
I talk to the scientists who 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.
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.
The 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-tip missiles to try to just deflect these bodies.
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 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 Well, we know the Russians blew up a 100-megaton bomb.
There is 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 the 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.
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 deflect a 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.
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?
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 pandiums 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 to professional basketball players.
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.
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.
But if you want to get really nasty, you simply do what Larry Niven and Jerry Pornell fantasized about in one of the great science fiction novels, Footfall.
These were the authors who the Moat and Godzilla, a couple wonderful science fiction stories.
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.
The ice scores 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, oh, 10 or 15 truly catastrophic and scary rapid climate changes of ice ages coming and going back and forth between glacial and interglacial.
Again, from this 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.
So 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.
Well, one of the things that people, one of the straws that is grasped is that, gee, if you scientists know so much, how can you not be able to predict if it's going to get hot or get colder?
The climate is so complex.
We think of all the money we spend 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 can 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.
Well, anyway, if we were to imagine that we are headed towards something of this magnitude, would we see exactly the kinds of changes that we're seeing now in the environment?
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, but they pay me to do something I would probably do anyway.
Looking at fossils, again, talk about the extended childhood.
It's something I loved as a child, and I just never grew out of it.
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.
And just when you figure out how to be a good scientist, along comes the need to do other stuff.
But I have temper tantrums every once in a while.
My colleagues realize I'd be a terrible administrator.
I am looking at the big mass extinctions, and I begin in South Africa.
And again, you were talking about Cape Town.
I think it has to be one of my two or three favorite cities on Earth.
And 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.
Yeah, there was a real interesting report in Science Magazine about buckyballs.
You may have seen this, that 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 this 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.
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?
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 bestsellardom.
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 just 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.
Oh, oh, actually, a public forum about a month later, she stood up in front of 200 astronomers and just completely lost it, castigated me in front of these scientists, not knowing what the hell I was doing.
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.
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 is no such thing as this slow evolution that many scientists talk about.
In other words, if evolution is a product of extinction, then, hey, we should be clapping to the cockroaches because they're going to inherit, then they're going to get intelligent, and they're going to go a lot further than we ever could.
unidentified
You You're listening to Art Bell, Somewhere in Time.
Tonight featuring Coast to Coast AM from May 2, 2001.
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.
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?
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?
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.
I think, just like HIV, so many people are capable of breeding before they die that what happens is you continue the species, but boy, it makes life miserable.
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 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 at the end of 60 minutes, he said, we hit him that close.
So is it, do we get that close a lot of times with something like that?
And now we have in our arsenal very few ultimate weapons against them, right?
Exactly.
I know it's down to 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 radiation that would sterilize a planet.
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.
The other aspect that you're missing that might be equivalent to that are supernova.
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, has the bad manners to blow up, that could have caused mass extinction on the planet.
We are now looking for evidence that has happened.
Some scientists think that three times in the last 500 million years, there could have been supernova that eliminated, created these big mass extinctions.
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 in the moon it's called, and look for these past supernovas.
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.
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.
And 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 is there something else at their core?
And in an upcoming book I have called The Future of Evolution, in which I think about what could cause extinction and 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.
Now, 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?
If we went sliding, weather-wise or environmentally, toward 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, 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.
I was wondering if you had generated maybe any data or statistical facts that would have to do with methane ice in a solid form on vast ocean floors in the world and the release of such gas within the last 20 years at probably a rate of 11 to 12 percent and what effect that may have on our ozone layer.
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 in reality.
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 is 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?
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 obliquity, so the equator becomes the North Pole and vice versa over time spans of hundreds of thousands of years or less.
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 Iceball Earth, early human may have been semi-aquatic, an aquatic ape.
Now my question is, are you, Professor Ward, aware of the LAS deposits?
The stratigraphists have searched them, looked at them in high Asia, and that they've been gathering from a windblown 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.
Well, I certainly know about the mist you're talking about.
In some areas in China, it's hundreds of feet thick.
However, everybody that I know about who thinks about climate change understands that much of the ice ages are based, as you know, on Milankovitch, Mr. Milankovich 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.
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.
And 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.
Well, even 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, if you remove the protection, imagine what it would be.
Yeah, well, only you know that for certain, but it sounds like you.
unidentified
Excellent.
Professor Ward, I read your book, End of Evolution, a few years ago.
That was most excellent, very minute.
You already did.
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, 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.
And this leads to the question of how long would it take for us to redevelop a civilization or even if it's possible, and that we could be looking at the total loss of our cultural heritage here.
Firstly, 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, and 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, the miserable material to keep stuff on.
I mean, now we are 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.
I can't explain it either.
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.
unidentified
So you would say then that we would probably have isolated pockets that would survive and maintain a reasonable level of technology then?
And he thinks we're on the cusp of perhaps being a type 1, 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 that they are snuffed out very quickly indeed, and almost no zeros make it to type one, much less type two.
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.
But the funny thing is, is that while I was there, they had a VIP that was visiting McVirdo 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.
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.
And, you know, 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 Art Bell.
This is Coast to Coast A.M. Don't touch that dot.
unidentified
The trip back in time continues with Art Bell hosting Coast to Coast AM.
More Somewhere in Time coming up.
The trip back in time continues with Art Bell.
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Happy birthday, Happy Happy.
Earth, wake the lightning I feel bad Time today Don't go around tonight But if I will take your light There's a bad moon on the right I hear hurricanes Are blowing I know the end Is coming soon I
feel rivers Overflowing I hear the voice Of rays of ruin Don't go around tonight But if I will take your light There's a bad moon on the right All right I feel like I'm going to
be a star-spoken man on the right You're listening to Art Bell Somewhere in Time, tonight featuring Coast to Coast A.M. from May 2, 2001.
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.
unidentified
Hello.
First time caller, calling from Phoenix, KFYI, 5.50 a.m.
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 3,000, 400,000 years ago, maybe longer, somehow the Earth went topsy-turvy.
Somehow, like what we call North and South Pole now used, I guess, to be more along the equator.
And somehow there was 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.
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, 300,000 or 400,000 years ago, perhaps obliquity changed.
But I think the chances are pretty small.
We know of the physics of the Earth-Moon system, it'd be extremely difficult for the Earth to shake out of its 23.5 degree obliquity that we now have.
It's just physically, it'd be very tough to do.
I have seen so many theories that seem crackpot turn out to be correct that I'm just not going to say it's impossible.
Listen, 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, and growing gills or something.
And I think it's far more, you know, reasonable, since we're on the verge of...
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 went there several times.
Somehow the wind was knocked out of us.
As a culture, as a society, everything's deteriorated.
But 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 habitants.
We need a moon base with a permanent habitant.
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 extent too.
We can bring seawater into places and fill them 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 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 the earth wherever they've been.
They build cities, they cut down the trees.
Pretty soon there's a desert, they move on to the next place.
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.
I just think if you want to go to Mars, and that was one of your questions, you just prayed that the Chinese go to Mars because I was around when we decided to go to the moon, and that was simply because the Russians were going to do it.
If the Russians hadn't been threatening, we would have never gone.
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.
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.
If you have an anomaly in Vostok, perhaps it is an age where we had two or three or 400,000 years ago a large-scale meteor bombardment of the planet.
And that Homo sapiens sapiens, our particular group at that time, was of a very small population size.
We hadn'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 slow numbers.
It's just a theory, but nevertheless it's very provocative and very interesting, and I find it quite compelling.
unidentified
Well, I think you have to remove yourself from your humanity for a moment, and you might say that the Eskimos and the Wenamis in the jungle, and it might be a good thing for a little people.
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.
A lot of people over time have dismissed that, of course, as nonsense.
You need to come to 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.
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 in 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.
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 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 things.
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 of, say, 400 billion years ago, we can look at fossil corals, and we certainly see that the day was shorter because the Earth was spinning faster back then.
We know that we had 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 it 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, they create seismic effects, but not anything that would create, say, a catastrophic earthquake.
East of the Rockies, you're on the air with Professor Ward.
Not a lot of time.
Hello.
unidentified
Hi, this is Pat in Fort Worth.
In the 80s, just before God blew up Chernobyl, he told me about the earth that was going to shift, when the Earth was going to shift on its axis, but he didn't give me a date or anything.
And there are other prophets that pretty well take it for granted now.
And one of them said that God said it's because of people.
He's got to rearrange it like a Rubik's Cube because people are congregating in certain spaces and it's wobbling.
I don't think people are massive enough to do it, although, gee, I was just down in Los Angeles and I saw a lot of really massive, well-fed people down there.
Yes.
Of more interest is the position of continents, because when continents, they move around through continental drift, when they accumulate in places, it affects the Earth markedly.
Before you were talking about the pyramids and the water erosion, and then you were talking about the core samples and bacteria.
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 can open up like another Pandora's box.
Well, it could in a way, and I think what scares us about bacteria is that not that the individual bacterium can't live long periods of times, 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.
This may be 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.
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, 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.