Art Bell welcomes listeners, including KNYE’s 6,000-watt Nevada affiliate, before introducing James Hughes, whose $9M (originally $10M) UFO artifact—indium antimonide or antimony—sparks debate over off-world origins and unresolved lab conflicts. David Brin then explores Kiln People, critiquing secretive tech tropes while arguing public empowerment via tools like drones could counter threats, citing Flight 93’s passengers as proof. Skeptical of alien myths, he dismisses Roswell’s plausibility but concedes temporary government secrecy for 10–15 years, referencing Tipler’s resurrection theories and neural mapping. Ultimately, Brin’s optimism about open science clashes with Bell’s UFO conspiracy musings, leaving the question: if humanity’s tech is advancing this fast, why aren’t we seeing more transparent breakthroughs—or alien contact? [Automatically generated summary]
From the high desert in the great American Southwest, I bid you all good evening, good morning, good afternoon, wherever in the world you may be, all 24 of its time zones covered by this program.
I'm Mark Bell, and this program is Coast Coast AM.
Should be a very, very interesting one tonight.
I would like to welcome new affiliates, First WBMQ, in Savannah, Georgia.
Good place to be.
630 on the dial, 5,000 watts, probably just goes and goes and goes.
And also, the network, this is a happy little duty.
The network never gave an official welcome to KNYE in Perump, Nevada.
I gave a big unofficial welcome, you know, before all the paperwork got done, and it bounced back to me through network channels.
Isn't that interesting?
It's bouncing back now.
KNYE, 95.1 on the dial.
That would be our radio station, as in Ramona and myself.
We both own it.
It's 95.1 megahertz, 6,000 big watts right here in Pahrump, Nevada.
And it says here, say hi to the beautiful and talented PD and GM and co-owner, Ramona Bell.
That would be my wife.
So we get to do our own welcome.
If you're anywhere near the Perump Valley, you might try tuning in.
In fact, get an antenna.
Somebody in Las Vegas should try this as an experiment.
Get an antenna in Las Vegas.
Point it toward Perump and see if you can hear 95.1.
My guess is a few will.
Now, the Arbitron surveys come out on, what is it, a quarterly basis or are there five of them?
I don't know.
I'm not even sure.
But the new survey is out, and the first market surveyed is always New York City.
And I always try to keep you informed, and so I shall.
Check this out, folks, on WABC, the radio station of my childhood.
It sure was.
I grew up with WABC, and so I'm very proud to be on there.
Persons 12, all persons 12 plus surveyed, we increased the audience there by 69.9%.
Pretty cool.
Now, if you consider persons 25 to 54 years of age, we increased the audience there by 175.8%.
Good Lord.
So we've obviously done well in the Big Apple.
Thank you all.
W ABC listeners there.
Now, we're going to do things a little different.
Oh, one more thing.
Anybody who's got any good music, I'm on a Music List Fest hunt.
You know me and New Music, right?
So what I'm looking for are lists of really good music.
The top music between, well, I don't know.
What do you say, the 1950s all the way to the 1990s or 2000 or present or whatever.
But especially the 50s, the 60s.
I'm particularly interested in those years, the 70s, a little bit in the 80s.
And, you know, it gets...
The rate of return of music from the 80s on, in my opinion, in my aged, long-toothed opinion, the harvestable music gets much less as you get into the 90s and then the 2000s.
It just whittles on down, which tells you...
Music is headed back.
There's a sort of a renaissance going on, I think, with music.
And those who perform it and those who write it and those, you know, all those people, they're beginning to realize that actually people like tunes and they like things they can understand and they like things they can tap their toe to and they really like things they can sing to.
Music, it's called.
And so there's a bit of a renaissance going on.
Anyway, anybody out there with good lists of the top music in those years, please send them to me at artbell at mindspring.com.
That's A-R-T-B-E-L-L.
All strung together.
All lowercase at mindspring.com.
Artbell at mindspring.com.
Now, this is pretty interesting stuff, what's coming up.
It seems there's a man in Florida.
In fact, he took out a classified ad which says, would you pay $9 million for a piece of a UFO drive mechanism?
It may contain the secret of anti-gravity.
Ring Back America's Greatness Call.
And I don't know if I should give the number out here nationally, but you know, of course, in Florida today, I think it was newspaper.
Yeah, Florida today is where it ran.
And they give his number.
If he wants to give it out, I don't care.
I'll let him give it out.
And we were so intrigued with his ad, we got hold of James Hughes, the man who placed the ad, to find out what this is all about.
Have James on the line.
And so in a moment, we're going to try and find out what it is all about.
Now, earlier today, I heard, and this could be wrong, I could swear I heard on USA Radio News, they reported on this ad too.
And then they said something about a $7 million and something or another offer being tendered already.
And so we'll ask about that too.
I don't know if I heard that correctly or not listening to KNYE.
I was earlier.
We have USA Radio News, and I could swear that I heard that mentioned on the news.
So, anyway, all of that coming up in a moment, you will meet James Hughes.
Stay right there.
Here we go.
The man's name is James Hughes, and I think he's in Coco, Florida.
I guess the first few times it is, and then after that it kind of wears on you.
unidentified
Yeah, well, when I say near it, and how much of disturbance it is, it's not much disturbance at my distance, but if you were over there next to it, then it'd probably be breaking your windows.
Your friend, obviously, on the motorcycle by now is probably freaked out, but nevertheless, the cigar shape, I take it, after dumping, moves on, and your friend moves toward whatever fell.
unidentified
Well, he went down and rode his cycle down and picked up some pieces.
We're not sure now if he picked up more than one piece.
And he later said that he was giving that the piece that I have, he said, I'm giving this piece to you because you can do more with it since you have a degree in physics.
Well, most people would say, but my God, if it's really a piece of a UFO, maybe a piece of the drive mechanism itself, or you wonder why they throw that out the door.
Anyway, if it is that, to hold on to that for 44 years without some further examination...
And because of your theory, you think that this layered structure may represent part of some sort of drive mechanism to...
unidentified
I used to, before observing the layers myself, I suspected strongly that it was part of the drive mechanism or part of some part of the drive to the drive mechanism.
It could have been auxiliary to the drive mechanism.
But after I saw the layered structure, now I have a great deal of confidence in the idea that this does contain the secret of anti-gravity.
They said it was pure antimony, whereas Lehigh University said it was indium antimony.
And the two of them were in vehement disagreement with each other as to, you know, like...
Meo.
As to what it was, yeah.
And the thing is, how could it be two different things?
Well, I never figured that out until somebody over the phone in the conversation told me that asked me if I had ever asked me over the phone if I had ever considered a layered structure.
And immediately, I was, I almost passed out.
Because yes, I had figured on a layered structure, but I hadn't connected with the piece.
So was there any I don't know how much testing they did, but they can actually do all kinds of interesting tests and see if there's any sort of not just radiation radiation coming from it, but whether it's got off-worldly counts in it.
I can't exactly remember what it is, but they can actually determine if something comes from Earth or elsewhere.
I was curious how you arrived at the figure of $9 million.
unidentified
Oh, well, that's funny.
People think there's a conspiracy or something, but what actually happened here, you can actually learn what, a presumed conspiracy or something, how it happened.
The Florida Today, the newspaper, said that they would run your ad forever or until you sold your item.
But after two weeks, you had to reduce the price by 10%.
And now I heard, I'm sure, I'm sure I heard earlier on USA Radio News that you had this for sale.
They talked about your ad, and then they said, I'm sure they said, I thought they said something about you're already being offered $7 million and change.
So, well, see, sometimes when you're selling something like this, you don't want people to get buyers' regret, and so you want to do the deal, boom, like that.
Well, so you obviously then would have cut the deal for that $7.5 million.
Can I ask you what is your real rock-bottom price?
I mean, if you were like one of those car dealerships that you go in where they don't have any bargaining, and it's just like you get the lowest price, and there's no bargaining that goes on, they've started doing that with car dealerships.
I mean, do you have a price like that?
unidentified
Yes, I would say a million dollars or more.
Or more, because some, let's suppose some company in Germany realizes that if they get this piece, they will be able to analyze the effect of the structures, whereas they can't do that unless they have the particular structures, the particular layers which this piece has.
If you already have any, what I'd like to do is get a couple of JPEGs sent to me of this item.
Would that be something you could do?
unidentified
Sure.
As a matter of fact, if you like, the video footage that we took the day that we met with Jim, that didn't turn out as well as we would have liked to.
I guess the lighting in the place that we took the pictures wasn't sufficient.
What we'd like to do is retake those video shots, and I could even send a video because really the piece itself, the thing that's unusual about it is that each of the sides does show different colors.
Yeah, the link that I'm talking about has to do with indium antimonide.
And one of the uses that I looked up yesterday on the internet talks about using it for semiconductors.
But the article that I was reading about today talks about using it in layers.
And that's what caught my attention in the article was that they're talking about nanotechnology and layering to such a degree that's so micro that it's like four atoms wide.
Yeah, so I thought, well, if I have to pay to have my theory noticed, then I'll pay to have it noticed.
And I mean, I had gotten tired of being ignored, so I put the ad in the paper.
Now, I didn't expect this big response, you know.
But I just put that in there because I thought, well, for one thing, with the price tag which I placed on it, I would be able to get involved in airport security and different types of security, the detection of explosives of various types.
The desk, the desk in front of me, the good old rotten telephone here, these kinds of things.
unidentified
Yeah, but the electrons of which those things are composed, the electrons, in my theory, are themselves composed of little tiny creatures which I call kinetes for their kinetic motion.
But anyway, you see, the kinetes, okay, the electron, the electron eats something, and I call it MAS for metabolic action substance.
If you put an electron near the sun, then the parts of the, then the electron, let's say the electron is vibrating, but it's vibrating all in phase, and then you bring the electron up near the sun, and the sun is eating the MAS, so therefore it's depleting it.
And as it depletes the MAS, its vibrations slow down.
Now we have the obvious conversion of an in-phase sinusoidal vibration into a wave, a wave.
And the wave is either moving toward the sun or away from the sun.
Now, if you think about it, and I don't want to go...
The wave is moving toward the sun, and that's gravity.
Listen, you gave out your phone number in the Florida Today ad, but you've got to realize now we're on national radio with well over 500 affiliates listening.
So do you want to give out your phone number here?
unidentified
Yes, I want to give it out.
I do.
If worst comes to worst, I just won't answer the phone.
let me give that again so everybody gets it and you answer that phone personally or do you have a Personally.
All right.
Are you going to code 321-504-3089?
Now, suppose somebody calls you and says, look, I might have the money or part of the money for you, at least some millions, if you're willing to allow me to do this test or that test on it, you know, before I buy.
unidentified
well what we want to do is uh...
having a good relation with this the potential buyer i will go or maybe paul will go and we will uh...
kind of safeguard Yes, but you know what you can do?
They just opened the door, dumped it out 44 years ago.
He's got it.
He's gots it.
He's got it.
He'd like $9 million for it.
In a moment.
In the moment, David Brin, a scientist, public speaker, and author.
Several of his novels have been New York Times bestsellers, winning multiple Hugo, Nebula, and other awards.
His 89 ecological thriller, Earth, foreshadowed global warming, cyber warfare, and near-future trends like World Wide Web.
A 1998 movie directed by Kevin Kostner was loosely based on The Postman.
His 15 novels have been translated into more than 20 languages.
Several studio-finance screenplays under pre-development consideration right now.
Brin's 98 nonfiction book, The Transplant Society, Will Technology Force Us to Choose Between Freedom and Privacy, deals with a wide range of threats and opportunities facing our wired society during this incredible information age.
We live in.
His papers in scientific journals cover an eclectic range of topics from astronautics, astronomy, and optics to alternative dispute resolution, and it just goes on and on.
His latest novel is called Kiln People.
Kiln People.
That's K-I-L-N, Kiln People, released by Tor Books in December of 2001.
We'll talk about that.
He's also recently completed two major science fiction trilogies with Heaven's Reach and Foundation's Triumph, the latter bringing to a grand finale Isaac Azimunoff's famed Foundation Universe.
So this is an interesting man.
David Brin is his name, and in a moment, he will be here.
The End Would you like to lose a few pounds around the middle?
It's a worthy goal to have, and you really can do it.
I have done it, so you can do it.
And if I can do it, I am the world's most sedentary individual.
All I do for a living is sit and talk.
It doesn't get any more sedentary than that, does it?
I intersperse just sitting and talking with sometimes leaning back and sitting and talking.
So I don't move around a lot, and that's why Ultimate Slim is good for me, and for a lot of the same reasons, it's probably good for you, too.
Listen, here's what it does.
It gets your metabolic rate going faster, even though you're not.
So everything is moving faster.
You're feeling better.
You know, you're more alert.
You're sort of right there.
And it burns away fat.
That metabolic increase burns away fat, sitting or not.
It reduces water weight.
So you actually see yourself beginning to get thinner.
It helps reduce sugar cravings.
So you don't want that candy you might have otherwise craved.
It even reduces the appetite.
So not only do you lose weight, but you do it fairly painlessly.
How does that sound?
Want to try it?
Well, here's a number.
Great American Products has it at 1-800-557-4627.
That's 1-800-557-4627.
Now, here is a fact to consider.
The stock market over a recently fairly substantial measured period of time, I mean, I'm sure you've seen it, has dropped anywhere from 15 to 25% on average.
Now, maybe there's a miracle child out there who's done well in this market, but that's an average.
So that means the average person out there is down 15 to 25 percent.
I think it's a symbol of the thing that we have the most to be proud of, and it has nothing to do with the day-to-day agendas of Democrats and Republicans.
Well, this is another of my near-future experiments.
I try to alternate in my novels between things that are very near future and plausible, intermediate future and a little bit crazy, and then far future, you know, extrapolating to where destiny might take us.
One of the things that you have in an awful lot of fiction, whether it's science fiction or murder mysteries or whatever, is a tendency to go with a cliché that's really started bugging me.
And that is you take whatever's different, whatever's unusual, and you give it to some conspiratorial secret cabal.
You give it to some secret government agency, you give it to some dark corporation, you give it to some rich guy or some mad scientist.
And that's actually getting to be a bit tedious because what it is, it's the idiot plot.
It's the most extreme example of the idiot plot is a dozen spoiled white teenagers enter a haunted house, the lights go out, somebody screams, and then someone says, I know, let's split up.
Yes, and the fundamental rule in Hollywood movies today is thou shalt never show any Americans with any brains or any American institutions functioning.
If they show up, if the cops show up on time and they look effective, then they're in the hands of the bad guy.
If they show up late and stumble around, then they're honest.
So I got sick of all that.
And so my trademark in my novels is if there's something new, instead of it being monopolized by some secret government agency or some cliched corporation or mad scientist, instead do with it what we do as a civilization.
That scary, horrifying view of a possible future, or Soylent Green, or the best of all the self-preventing prophecies, George Orwell's 1984, which armed us all with not only the vocabulary,
big brother, and watch out for telescreens that only look one way, which I think we'll talk about later when we talk about transparency, but also just basically girding ourselves as citizens to never let that particular failure mode happen.
You know, I hate to just jump to it, but you mentioned to it and mentioned it, so it occurs to me.
I have webcams all over the place.
I have them all around me, and I use them.
You know, I turn them on when I want to smile at the camera and tell the audience, yo.
And there's a webcam photo that will stay up there for 24 hours, or I can change it every minute.
But, you know, when it's off, it's off, and I relax.
I heard the other day that it's possible to get inside somebody else's computer, and if they have a webcam hooked up to their computer, once you're in, you can turn it on and watch them, and they'll never even know you turned it on.
They're sitting a thousand miles away watching everything you do.
And under the right circumstances, of course, it can happen.
The question that we have to face when we're looking at all these things that are rushing toward us is, A, how are you going to stop the advance of technology?
And B, what's the best approach for preserving the core privacy and freedom that you need?
The thing that's angered me the most since 9-11 has been the rift, the cross-rift that we've seen between the security pundits and the civil liberties pundits on all these talk shows.
They're like pro-wrestlers screaming at each other.
One says, we must be prepared to sacrifice some freedom for security, and the civil libertarians screaming, we must be prepared to put up with some insecurity in order to protect precious liberty.
And what they are both pushing is an underlying assumption that I despise, and that is the notion that I must choose between freedom or security for my children.
Well, it sure does make it go away because I am capable of looking at it and seeing what a stupid choice it is.
I'm an American, excuse me.
I was raised to believe that I can not only have my cake, I can eat it, I can watch it grow bigger, and aggressively shove pieces of cake in the face of the poor.
Well, there was a congressman or a senator the other day, I forget which, who said he went to the airport, and he was forced to strip and then felt up like a prized bull, I think he said, or something like that, as a quote.
And, you know, there's a lot of that going on now at the airports.
I think we want safety, and I think we want convenience, and I think we want freedom, and I think we will not put up with it if we don't get all of them.
The fact is that statistically, the number of people who died on 9-11 was not a huge number in the losses that a great nation experiences over the year.
So the types of ways that we worry change from year to year.
And I'm not saying we have no causes for worry.
We have plenty of cause for worry.
We are at a new kind of war, one that requires network skills, new types of agility.
But let me just point out one basic fact that happened on 9-11.
And to the best of my knowledge, my little web thing about this is the only thing that's pointed this out.
On that day, the only effective actions that were taken to palliate the damage, to combat the terror, to record it, to document it, to prepare for the fight were taken by private individuals.
Now, people do know the one big example of that, and that's UA-93.
And it's the best part of America I've seen in a long, long time.
My guest is David Britton.
We're going to cover all kinds of ground.
So tell me, would you like a kiln person from the high desert?
I'm Mark Bell, and this is Coast to Coast, A.M. Well, I'm trying to reach Keith Rowan because I've got the link.
I've got the Florida Today article, and in it, there's a picture of James Hughes, the man we interviewed the first hour, holding his $9 million baby.
Keith is at the Consumer Electronics Show.
So if I can get hold of him, we'll get that link up.
Pronto, we can all take a look.
And when you see James, you will, I think, understand that he looks exactly like he sounds.
But the item he's holding is certainly extremely interesting.
So we'll work on that for you.
We will get that link up, I promise.
In a moment, David Brin will be right back.
Yes, the case of UAL, or I think it was UAL 93, anyway, Flight 93, the one that probably would have crashed into the White House or the Capitol building, you know, it was obvious the people on the aircraft knew exactly what was up because they had received cell phone calls.
And the passengers decided, go get these bastards, and they weren't going to, damn well weren't going to let that airplane do what it was going to do.
They decided if we're going to die, and they discussed it.
Then we're going to die right now, our way, not their way.
And they took that plane into the ground.
They deserved the Congressional Medal of Honor, or its equivalent, whatever.
It's too bad that somebody there wasn't there to give them.
Just a couple of pieces of advice.
I would have had the football player go past everybody and sit on the control panel and just hold the stick and push the throttle and then let everybody else do the fighting.
Instead, they probably had him be in charge of the fighting and nobody else had the strength to hold the stick.
But, you know, one can't fault them.
The fact of the matter is that they did something magnificent that's an example to us all.
And yet, I think there's an aspect to what happened there that the pundits have not been talking about.
Well, for one thing, security as such did not let us down that day.
It was not security.
The fact of the matter is that the only thing those people were able to carry aboard that plane were things that were legal to carry aboard that plane.
There were several science fiction novels, and also LL Airlines had been warning about this.
But the point is, you see, that what's very interesting is that the doctrine said, don't resist, you plow the plane in the ground.
That's right.
The old doctrine was right.
They did resist, and the airplane plowed into the ground.
But the new doctrine is that it's better to have an airplane plowed into the ground than have it plowed into a giant skyscraper.
Now, what's very interesting to me is all this emphasis on security breakdowns, and mind you, I think we should spend billions on learning how to get more security at airports, but I think we're overreacting to the actual event.
Specifically, 9-11, there were almost no failures of security.
It was a failure of doctrine.
And here's the interesting thing.
The interesting thing is that using their own means of communication, their own technologies, the people aboard that plane not only found out what was going on, they held a committee meeting and changed the doctrine within 20 minutes.
They didn't wait for the government because they were trained with something that you might find, remember this line, Dr. Strangelove, you know, Americans are trained, our teenagers are trained, to have initiative.
And the interesting thing is you keep running into Muddites who say that these new technologies are threatening our freedom and threatening to bring us Big Brother when every day the cell phones, the cameras, everything pervades more into the hands of the people than it is into the hands of corporations and government.
Every day we become more agile with this technology quicker than the government is getting.
I mean, pretty soon, all these airplanes that they're developing for the squad commanders and things like that and the platoon commanders to little handhelds that will go behind a bush and see where the sniper is.
Well, that's going to be very valuable, but how many more years before that's in Radio Shack?
And we're going to have to adjust as a people, but there ain't no way we're going to have a dictatorship under those circumstances.
We may be slaughtering each other over these spy planes, but there's no way that Big Brother is going to have a monopoly on sea.
I just don't agree with the panic over it and the incredible excesses that we're seeing, you know, shutting down the whole eastern seaboard when somebody makes a threat, that sort of thing.
We've got to, as the President said, live our lives while asking our skilled professionals to come up with new solutions.
But let me make a point about that.
The 20th century was one long increase, year after year after year, in the degree to which the average American relied on professionals to handle things.
From the growing of food to transportation to protecting us, to raising our kids, and so on and so on and so on.
Actually, I kind of predicted this in the Transparent Society where I talk about something called the century of amateurs.
I predict that the 21st century will see a reversal of this trend.
As each of us gets more and more powered by high technological gadgets and instant access to information, each of us is going to become more and more empowered to argue with the professionals.
You're already seeing it as these support groups for each disease.
Every disease under the sun starts getting its internet support group and people start arguing with their doctors and studying the disease.
Well, I have a tendency when we're talking about things that are going to change in the future to always ask people to be very specific about what harm they're talking about.
People get the shudders when they talk about clones, and they don't realize that one out of every thousand human beings born is a clone.
I am in favor of any child who's born being born into a loving family, and I'm not in favor of manipulative people treating a child like childhood property.
Now, if a person, if a husband and a wife want to give birth to the husband's twin, which is in effect what's going on.
And that is it would be possible to have designer people.
For example, you could certainly in the cloning process ensure that some functions of the brain are essentially disabled and that this being is and would be a very nice, happy, fulfilled, willing slave.
Well, there's one school of thought that would say that such a generation of happy, working slaves would raise the living standard of the American people immeasurably.
I asked one night on this program if you could have something that would not really, as we understand it, be human, but would be very happy to be doing what it's doing, fulfilled in its life doing what it's doing, having no other wants nor needs other than making you happy.
We're talking essentially about a biological robot engineered genetically.
It could be done.
Would you have such, would you buy and pay for such a being?
Well, there's nothing ambiguous about the fact that stem cells, which are retrieved from very early fetuses, could save your life, could prolong life, could change humanity in so many ways that we can only begin to even imagine them.
And the point that I'm getting at is that the instinct, the general trend to want to protect human life, to want to protect innocent life, is a good one.
But the tendency to believe that we must regulate, find some on-off switch and say that there is where human life begins.
Look, some of my science fiction deals with this issue.
And the notion is that perhaps in 200-300 years we will have genetically engineered dolphins to give them speech, to give them the skills that they might need to become co-citizens in our civilization.
Now, previous authors have talked about what I call the uplift, and one of my novels is called The Uplift War.
The uplifting of animals, but every single one of them went for that idiot plot that we talked about before.
In other words, giving it to some mad scientist.
H.G. Wells did it in The Food of the Gods.
Pierre Boulet did it in Planet of the Apes.
The notion that the animals are upraised and made to be slaves and treated horribly and then rebel.
And I got a little bit sick of the cliché.
So in my future history, we all do it openly.
We help the dolphins along.
And as soon as they're smart enough to vote, we give them the vote.
Well, it would be really interesting because it would absolutely ensure in every presidential election that there would be a gigantic debate about environmental issues as they impact the dolphin world.
Wouldn't he be an interesting person out of the program?
Dean Koos, coming up soon.
Right, tonight we've got David Brin with us.
Right now, we're talking about the uplifting of dolphins.
Now, there's a concept for you, simply modifying them so they would.
They probably already have self-awareness, intelligence.
We just need to give them the ability to have speech.
Maybe a little more, who knows?
We may be toying around with all kinds of things as time goes on.
That's the kind of thing we were talking about.
Be right back.
Once again, here is David Brin.
Welcome back, David.
So, you think mankind within the foreseeable future might have the ability to manipulate genetics, and probably we would begin on animals before we would human beings, hopefully.
What am I saying?
I already know that may not be true, but you would think we would, and uplifting dolphins would be perhaps a worthy thing to do, or would it?
The interesting thing about all of these daring things is, of course, that I'm not trained as a biologist.
I simply, as a science fiction author, I get used to the notion that I can go out and make friends with people in any walk of life or any area of expertise that I want.
And people out there listening should understand that as well.
In any of these fields, it's possible to subscribe to a magazine or get videos or watch PBS or learn more about any field that you like.
And this didn't used to be the case.
Back in the older civilizations, the priesthoods, who were the ones who said, we know how the world works, we know the rules of this cosmos, they would pat the common man on the head and say, you wouldn't understand.
Today's high priests of knowledge, scientists, well, the very best of them, maybe a lot of the average ones may be smug, but the very best of them compete with each other to get on PBS or to write magazine articles, to write popular books.
So whatever your interest is, there is some level at which you can find something at Amazon.com.
You can find a magazine like Science News or Discover Magazine is a very good one.
Well, in any event, my training was as a physicist, as an astronomer.
So when I talk about aliens and things like that and astronomical things, I sometimes know what I'm talking about.
When it comes to biology and uplifting dolphins and uplifting chimpanzees and genetic engineering on people, I have to rely on what I can learn by studying.
And getting to know Louis Herman, for instance, at the Kuala Basin Marine Lab in Hawaii and Jack Gonzalez here in San Diego studying the Navy dolphins, I've come to understand that these people who care a lot about their dolphins, but they don't mythologize them.
They don't make up fancy stories, wish fulfillment stories, they come to realize one thing, that the dolphins, like the chimpanzees, are at an edge.
They're sort of at a threshold.
And when they work with the dolphins and the chimps, the experts in these fields tell me again and again that they feel as if the creatures they're dealing with are frustrated.
As if they know that humans know stuff that they don't.
And they try very, very hard.
And they can do stuff.
They can parse out simple sentence grammars, for instance.
With the dolphins, it's by making squeak tones and pressing buttons.
With the chimps, it's with sign language.
But again and again, I hear this from the people who work with them.
That they feel as if these creatures are frustrated, that they are almost as if they're asking for help.
So that's one of the reasons why I wrote some of these books like Star Tide Rising and The Uplift War and projecting into a future where we've actually given them this hand, where we've actually lifted them up.
An awful lot of the clichéd movies that we've seen, science fiction movies, show us as the young upstarts and some other race like the Vulcans being the old guys helping us out.
But in fact, it looks as if the universe may be the other way around.
We may be the first ones to show up and help others.
So it's a concept that you find potentially agreeable.
In other words, you think there could be a positive outcome to this and that dolphins, for example, if given speech and whatever all else we could bestow upon them, would be great fellow citizens.
Well, I like to think so, but I would hate for anybody like me to make such a decision all by his own opinion and his own impression of what to do.
That's why we have this wonderful civilization based on argument.
That's why you, Art Bell, have the job you have of mediating open discussions among free citizens.
The whole objective of my nonfiction book, The Transparent Society, is to describe how this openness that we have is precious.
It enables us to have our cake and eat it too, to have both freedom and more safety and more wealth than any other civilization has ever had.
So I wouldn't want to embark on genetically engineering dolphins or chimpanzees, and especially not changing, genetically meddling in human beings, without an awful lot of discussion, an awful lot of investigation of the ways things might go wrong.
Well, yes, but there's a book out there by a guy named Edward Tenner called Why Things Bite Back, The Tragedy of Unintended Consequences.
And he talks about many, many situations in which smart guys came up with a scheme, a technological scheme, a military scheme, and things surprised them.
And I want to write a book called Just in Time, describing all the situations in which, so many situations that didn't make the news or didn't make big news stories, because the open civilization caught mistakes in time.
I have a friend who worked for ARCO during the building of the, he helped design the Alaska Pipeline, and he said, thank God for the Sierra Club.
And I said, what?
They made your life hell for three years.
And he said, yep.
If I had had my hands on the necks of any Sierra Club member during those three years, I would have throttled them to death.
But looking back on it now, I realize that they put my feet to the fire.
And had I been allowed to go ahead and make the pipeline that I originally was so proud of designing, I would have been known today as Hazelwood.
But because they looked for every excuse to try to stop my pipeline, they found an awful lot of my mistakes.
And then civilization was wise enough to say, keep on criticizing, keep on criticizing, keep on criticizing.
Yes, I've been on the International Astronomical Union's committee, Committee 51 on the search for extraterrestrial life.
I'm a member of one of the NASA groups on exobiology, the study of the possibility of life.
And I have a paper that people can download from my website, davidbrin.com, that was one of the main review articles about the whole idea of why we don't seem to be in contact and the list of maybe about 40 or 50 possible explanations.
There's about two billion years, a window of about two billion years, during which the Earth had an oxygen atmosphere and life in the oceans, and yet, and nobody on the planet who would object to a colony.
I mean, we've only been around for half a million years.
That's two billion years during which anybody who came along would have found a beautiful virgin world and could have put an industrial civilization here.
We would see signs of that in the rocks.
There's absolutely no trace of anything like that.
And during those two billion years, during the first one and a half billion of those two bars.
But how do you know we are considered an idyllic atmosphere by somebody who may live on a planet that has life based on an entirely different, you know, not life hours at all?
Well, the amino acids that we use in our DNA happen to be V20 amino acids that show up in every laboratory trial with every type of reducing atmosphere, zapping it with electricity, zapping it with lightning, zapping it with ultraviolet rays.
All of these experiments show that almost every type of watery environment that has energy coming into it and some kind of carbon and nitrogen in it will make the 20 amino acids that we use.
Look, in my science fiction, I wear two hats when I talk about the alien.
In my science fiction I roam freely and talk about other kinds of energy using a life that might exist.
But wearing my science hat, I have to say that the...
Well, no, I believe it's possible.
I believe they may be out there.
But the life forms that we're likely to bump into are the life forms that like Earth-like planets.
And that think roughly the way we do.
They make radios, that sort of thing.
Look, this is a complicated subject, and I don't mean to say that just because the Earth doesn't seem to have ever been touched in 2 billion years, that that means automatically that we're the first.
But there are about 40 or 50 explanations for the obvious fact that most of us aren't aware of being in contact right now.
And I go through a bunch of them, and I illustrate some with some short stories, some very entertaining short stories.
One of the short stories is about a late-night talk radio host who taunts UFO aliens on the air.
So, if you'll forgive me, Art, I'm going to do a little riff here.
I'm going to stop talking to your human listeners, and I'm going to talk to the little silver guys monitoring this broadcast.
You who silver guys, it's me again.
I know I'm the last guy you ever wanted to hear again, but I'm going to taunt you again.
I'm going to tell you that this whole business of disemboweling cattle, twirling wheat, grabbing farm guys out of their pickup trucks, doing all sorts of probes on them, is really unimpressive.
That there's not a single UFO sighting that anybody has talked about that, if it were true, represents the behavior of adults.
The behavior portrayed in every single UFO reported UFO sighting is the behavior of nincompoops and really lousy visitors, very, very rude people.
So, I'm going to tell you again, alien guys, call the Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
My friend Dr. Michael Klein there will ask you to put some kind of proof on the moon the next day.
That's to differentiate you from all the human jerks who will call after hearing my voice.
And if you do something to the crater Aristarchus tomorrow night, he will be waiting for your call.
And he'll arrange landing sites, he'll arrange visas of both kinds.
He'll arrange Leno, Letterman, anything you want.
You want to date Madonna?
You got it.
We'll throw a party like you've never seen.
You write a list of things that will make you feel secure and safe, and we'll do it.
And we will throw the biggest party you ever saw.
That's if you come to us openly.
If you keep on doing what you have been, we're going to keep doing what we've been doing.
We're going to snub you, and we're going to spend more money on the Air Force and hope they shoot you down.
Well, but why would you not then, as a science fiction writer, easily imagine that having observed us and continuing to observe us, they don't want to have contact.
In other words, what makes you think that promises of a big party, Madonna's body, or anything else, would suddenly entice them to, you know, throw some dye on a crater on the moon or something?
Every human culture, any human culture that we know of, and they've been pretty darn different from each other, would consider the behavior portrayed by UFO stories to be obnoxious.
It says don't touch, and the aliens certainly aren't living by that.
Otherwise, we wouldn't know about them there.
On my website, people can click over to a very interesting thing that a guy named Alan Tuff has done at the University of Toronto.
He looked at the outline of possibilities.
And among the things that I've written some stories people can download from DavidBryn.com dealing with the notion that aliens might not come in person because the space between the stars is so huge that biological life forms aren't really suited for it.
And you generally, you say you're even more conservative than Seth, who also, by the way, doesn't believe we're being visited right now, so you really share that point of view.
But you're even more conservative than Seth by a bit, huh?
And at night during the summer, it is deathly quiet.
I mean, it's so quiet that you can hear crickets at a quarter mile away.
It's wonderful.
It's a great place to live.
And so we got out of the car, and you could hear the crickets at a quarter mile away.
But coming up behind us, David, was this monstrous triangular craft.
I'd estimate it to be no more than about 150 feet in the air.
It felt like if I had a rock and I hadn't been so much in shock at the time, I could have picked it up and thrown it at the damn thing.
It didn't fly, David.
It floated.
It was maybe doing 30 miles an hour, you know, nothing that would support aerodynamic flight.
It was, David, defying gravity.
It was really, really big.
Big enough so that when it came over our head, and it came directly over us, David, it blotted out the stars and the moon, you know, just like in a classic movie or something.
And we stood there with our mouths open and watched it float out across the valley, headed in the direction of Area 51 over the mountains from us here.
And, David, that happened.
Period.
That happened.
It was, I don't know how close an encounter you would call that, but real close.
I am perfectly willing to concede that the government can keep some secrets temporarily.
We saw this with stealth, with stealth fighters, with stealth bombers.
But as I talk about in the transparent society, we're entering into a civilization in which it's going to be more and more difficult to keep secrets that anyone has a strong reason to blow the whistle on.
One of the things that I predict in the next few years is, for instance, the henchmen's law that will draw henchmen from all over the world to blow the whistle on their masters.
Let me take the extreme example, and then we'll get to the business of governments, keeping technology secret.
The extreme example is UFO's Roswell in particular.
50 years ago, a spacecraft crashed, and since then, at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Hangar 18, they have been analyzing this thing for, I guess now it is 52 years.
I assume that you saw the Air Force several years ago, the Air Force had a press conference in which they actually decided they were going to try and debunk Roswell once and for all.
Well, that may very well be, Art, but here's the quandary that both Phil and guys like I face.
If you do investigate one of these cases and you work your way through it and work your way through it and work your way through it and solve it, in the end, the guys you're talking to will say, oh, fine, here's another.
Well, sure.
And so what I've done is I've backed off and I've talked about, for instance, the execrably stupid behavior that these UFOs suppose.
If any of these sightings are true, the behavior described is stupid.
And the whole business of Roswell, three generations of our very best people, these, if you've ever known the very best engineers and scientists, they're the most libertarian people you've ever met.
They might keep something secret if there's a good reason.
But like those people on United Airlines 93, they're Americans who believe, show me a reason.
I believe that there may possibly, you know, if we had anti-gravitic technology and it was in a very early prototype phase, I believe that these engineers and scientists would be willing to keep that secret.
So if they have a different level, my doubt about that is at a different level, it doesn't totally defy human nature or especially American nature to believe that the Air Force might have a fancy new technology and that nobody's blown the whistle on it yet because they're afraid, because they're a little concerned about other people getting it.
All right, let's move back to SETI because you know something about that.
SETI has been spending a great deal of time looking near the hydrogen frequency for some sort of signal because it's a pretty good marker out there, right?
What's happening is that technologies are becoming so inexpensive that the natural American Western tendency to want to be special at something is affecting all the people who are interested in SETI.
So while the older groups are staying at the hydrogen line, people who are new in the field, who want to make a name for themselves, who want to strike out and do something new are trying new things.
Today, an amateur astronomer can have in his backyard a telescope that will automatically check the weather, automatically open up, and automatically start scouting for comets to name after its master.
Sure.
So this is going to be very useful in finding asteroids that might threaten us.
And again, look, I'm a science fiction kind of guy.
I'm a scientific kind of guy.
I'm all in favor of everything that involves getting cameras in the hands of people, getting telescopes in the hands of people, getting computers and cell phones into the hands of people.
Because the more that happens, the more educated and savvy we are, the brighter our kids are, the more technologically savvy.
Number one thing is we'll never get Big Brother.
And that's what I talk about in the Transparent Society.
And the number two thing is that we'll answer these questions.
We'll find out if the UFOs, if I'm wrong or if I'm right.
Because the interesting thing about UFOs is that as more and more cameras, every five or six years, the number of cameras quadruples.
As the cameras get better and the number of them spread around, the distance of the spotted UFOs doubles at the same speed that the number of cameras does.
Oh, no, I know the people who would be first on the committee.
There's a former diplomat named Michael Michaud who's written in to show how open-minded our civilization is getting.
Ten years ago, the Foreign Service Journal would never have published this article that it just published by my friend, a former Foreign Service officer, about the diplomatic implications of contact with alien life.
So we're becoming a far more easygoing and far more interested and interesting people.
Brookings report, briefly, you know, the Brookings Institute was commissioned to study some time ago what the sociological reaction would be if there was contact.
And it actually concluded that it would be better kept secret.
I grew up in California, and I know what Californians would do if an alien spaceship landed in a parking mall.
The closest science fiction story to depict what we would really do was a movie called Alien Nation, which portrayed a ship taken over by 250,000 escaped alien slaves.
They land in the Mojave Desert.
They're put in camps.
The ACLU gets them sprung, and they become the latest ethnic group in L.A. That's what we would do.
That's what Americans would do.
You see, what the Brookings Institute did was the same old idiot thought.
We get off on thinking that our fellow citizens are jerks.
If you're a Republican, you think all Democrats are idiots.
If you're a Democrat, you think all Republicans are idiots.
Well, you still think, Art, that you'll handle the information well.
Your pals will, but the average citizen will go crazy.
Well, you know what?
I think the average citizen, you know, the stereotype is the alien spaceship lands, the National Guard surrounds it shaking in their boots and people run and scream.
Well that's exactly what would happen only the National Guard would be facing outwards trying to protect the aliens from people running and screaming take me for a ride expand my consciousness and have you got any new cuisine?
Well, there would also, though, be another group they'd have to be protected against.
And those would be the ones who would be the religious fundamentalists who, David, I guarantee you, would regard these not as aliens at all, but as representatives of the lower hierarchy.
And they would think that it would be their duty to eradicate these little guys.
And I've always had the theory before he could ever get to the bottom of the ramp, he'd be full of so much lead, he'd never make it to the bottom of the ramp.
The mechanical zoom lenses and the digital ones, they're getting so good.
I mean, they're just going to have to go right back to their own planet.
Pretty soon, we're going to be able to get them wherever they are.
From the high desert?
This is coast-to-coast AM.
All right, David, before we go to the phones, I really want to ask you about this, because it was in a list of questions that they had you prepare, I guess, to do the show.
The thing about the Postman, your experience with the Postman movie, I would like to ask why you are, are you soured on Hollywood, and if so, why?
Costner's movie is a great, big, somewhat dumb, somewhat lobotomized, but truly faithful version of the book in that it had the heart.
It had the basic message that we're in it together, that we should love our civilization, and give it a little loyalty.
The interesting thing is that the critics all slammed the Postman for its patriotism four years ago when it came out, and for the ludicrous notion that postal workers would be a symbol of courage in a post-bio-terror world.
to be most interested in what the audience has to say to you you might imagine that some of them will not necessarily be in agreement with you with regard to the fact that we may or may not be visited right now so prepare yourself for that I am prepared you sound like you are so here we go first time caller line you're on the air with David Bryn hi this is Devin in Maui Maui Hawaii yes doing it mr. Bryn I'm a big fan of yours I'm
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I'm very familiar with the Earth series as well as the Uplift series, and I just want you to know that you're one of the best science fiction writers out there.
As far as your comments on the UFO situation and as to whether or not we're being visited, I don't think you've considered the full mythological and cosmological evidence as folklore.
For example, every religion in the world has a sense of the supernatural that can date back thousands of years
of years and specifically in the last oh I'd say 300 400 years we've had similar alien concepts that can be attributed to things like leprechauns and demons and things that today in the 21st century we see as aliens and I wanted to know what your comments on the folk aspect of this and whether or not that could be another angle for you.
And it really latches onto something that my wife noticed one day when she picked up a book, Whitley Strybert's book on aliens, and it had one of these grays on it.
And she said, huh, when I first glanced at this out the corner of my eye, I thought it was about elves.
And it suddenly occurred to me that that's exactly what they are.
They fit exactly the same profile.
Meddlesome, long-fingered creatures that sneak in and snatch people and give them something exciting in exchange for a viscerally fearful experience.
That's exactly what happened at the rim of the firelight.
Only our ancestors always glimpsed these people just beyond the fire at the mouth of the cave.
Then when they had towns, it was always the woods nearby that they warned the children not to go into.
Today, Cub Scouts go running through the same woods with flashlights and middle-class Americans go up into the Himalayas screaming, Yeti, Yeti.
So I decided to write a story called Those Eyes, which is the one that I cribbed for my little haunting rant.
And you can download it from DavidBrin.com.
And art in particular will get a giggle out of it because it's about a late-night talk show host.
And it's the notion that every culture has these myths for a reason, and that is grandpas.
Grandpas can be counted on to be curmudgeons and say that things were better when they were kids.
Every previous civilization believed in the look backward notion towards a golden age, that there was a golden age from which we fell because of arrogance or because of some sin or something.
We're the first civilization in all of human history that has reversed the direction to which we look to a golden age, and science fiction is part of this.
We tend to see a golden age as something that we will eventually, with hard work and goodwill, build for our grandchildren, or maybe that they'll build, having learned from our mistakes.
Yeah, but what that man really was asking was, why aren't you willing to consider all of this mythology over all these years as bolstering the possibility that we've been visited all along?
Oh, well, one of them might be a prime directive, but you have to take apart the prime directive into some of the reasons why they would have one.
And some of them aren't so nice.
Like, for instance, stealing our culture without having to pay for it.
Because we're putting our encyclopedias, our art forms, our music all on the web.
What would an impresario best be able to do?
You saw this in the 1950s during the folk song era.
Producers used to go up into the Appalachians and record folk songs for free just by flattering old-timers and then take them down and make millions off them.
So it's the intergalactic version of Payola.
So, you know, the thing is, you see, I am not skeptical about UFOs because of closed-mindedness.
I'm skeptical about UFOs because of open-mindedness.
What I said was that I'm willing to concede that a certain fraction of these might be little silver guys and spaceships, but isn't it funny how they're always at the edge of vision and their behavior is always what we would call deeply despicable?
Well, no, maybe they don't think of it that way.
I'm perfectly willing to admit that.
One of the great advances of our culture has been to accept the possibility of cultural differences.
That's why Star Trek has been preaching the politically correct stuff that it's been preaching, unlike all the previous science fiction.
We're working our way towards trying to figure out a more empathic, a more listening to the points of view of others way of looking at things.
That's part of what I'm talking about in my nonfiction book, The Transparent Society.
And it's also why I do thought experiments, like in my new novel, Killing People.
The point is, though, that I have yet to see anybody come up with a reasonable reason why UFOs should be forgiven if they are behaving that way.
Well, I mean, there are many stories of apparent genetic interest based on the kind of experiments that are reportedly done on abductees and that sort of thing.
Well, listen, whoever said that they're going to be friendly, there have been lots of people who have written that, you know, all of that is silly myth itself, and it's silly supposition that they would be friendly.
After all, we're not friendly to a lot of remote societies that we encounter.
I was wondering, Mr. Brin, it seemed like you would like to explain that a lot of UFOs are government technology that we are just keeping on the shelf.
So I would just like to know a few scenarios for when that technology would be taken off the shelf.
I mean, after all, David, you did take apart the whole secrecy question that we just for three generations would not be possible to keep secret, but then did allude to the fact that we could keep secrets about, say, anti-gravity.
Well, no, I didn't say that I believed it, but what I say is that it's much more plausible that instead of three generations, that you might get 10 or 15 years of a small number of engineers saying, this is dangerous stuff, we don't want the Russians to have it, or the Chinese or somebody else.
Or this is dangerous stuff, we don't want people burning their fingers with it until we figure out how to keep it from exploding in our faces.
That I consider to be much more plausible.
I didn't say that I believe that UFOs are strange ships over Area 51, but your story art is highly plausible.
I've heard several like that.
And I would find it thrilling to suddenly find out that we can get past this awful, awful drudgery of having to put things on top of these gigantic, horrible Roman candles that we can do.
Well, if you had been in my place and you had seen this, would it have made any sort of attitude adjustment, do you think, in the way your presentation is unfolding tonight?
I am open-minded enough to say that your own testimony about this has tweaked my opinion.
I have probably this evening notched up a couple of notches my belief that there's stuff going on in Area, that there's some very interesting new developments waiting to come out of Area 51.
I urge all engineers and scientists within hearing range of this to always consider whether or not this is the year to blow the whistle on whatever secret you've got.
Because the rest of us will defend you.
We're out here.
Our bill will drum up the public opinion.
So that all leads into what I talk about in the Transparent Society, where the only secrets that can be kept or should be kept are temporary ones, not ones that stand in the way of governments or corporations or anybody being held accountable.
Well, surely this kind of secret, anti-gravity, would fit well within that category, one that shouldn't be kept.
You could make a million military good reasons, I suppose, for keeping it secret, but it would be technology that would free us from the environmental nightmare that we're in right now.
It would do so many things to change the world that it's hard for me to believe that a majority of scientists would agree to keep such a massive secret.
Don't challenge a science fiction author not to come up with possible ways, reasons why legitimate scientists might believe that it's in our best interest.
For instance, what if this anti-gravity technology used micro-black holes?
And that if people were using them willy-nilly, some would drop into the Earth.
My novel, Earth, was about such a scenario being the ultimate pollution.
So if you're going to challenge me, Art, I could take the devil's advocate.
I could swing right around and come up with some reasons why decent, libertarian American scientists might decide that something is too dangerous.
But what I'm saying right now out there, to the listening audience out there, is all people, consider whether your secrets really are in the best interest or whether you're just rationalizing some excuse.
It seems that there's a lot of evidence there as far as radar, witnesses, documentation, and a lieutenant colonel, who's the deputy commander, actually puts out a report.
What's the take on that?
I mean, what was the Air Force thinking or why, you know, where's the angle on that?
Plus, it's not went anywhere.
It seems like it just they popped it up, they put all this stuff up, and then, you know, nobody's stirred it or, you know, done anything with it.
You know, we really can't take the time right now to lay out the whole Bentwater affair for him.
We just can't do it.
But there were people like the Lieutenant Colonel that he spoke of.
They have this close encounter in the woods, I mean, with beings and the whole ball of acts and witnesses and the lieutenant colonel and all the rest of it.
Look, the thing that I can do in this short time is, and the thing that I can do with both my fiction and the nonfiction is not to answer specifics, but to try to provoke looking at things from a different angle.
Here's another, here's a metaphor that I think may help.
Take a look at the movie E.T. Now, you are manipulated throughout that movie to worry about the dark government because the music is set that way.
But when you finally meet the guy with the keys, he's Elliot grown up.
He's the guy qualified to make contact.
Take that movie E.T. and go through that whole first scene in which the music and the tension is set up so that you're fearful for E.T. and you're fearful and you're all intense about the humans chasing through the forest.
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I know my child, my daughter.
My son.
unidentified
She's just like me.
He knows exactly when to lead his girlfriends to beat curfew.
Actually, that's a pretty intriguing question in a lot of ways because cloning brings with it one other possibility that we didn't discuss with David, and that is the cloning of the dead.
Well, actually, it's a fascinating notion that's been a lot in the literature lately in several different ways.
For instance, a physicist, one of the best physicists in the world named Frank Tipler, wrote a book called The Physics of Immortality about five years ago in which he suggested the possibility that physics itself predicts that at the end of the universe,
all the intelligent life forms would have so much energy and computing power available to them that they'd be able to take all the infrared radiation in space and use it to see the people who stood outside and radiated it from their bodies into space and therefore know who they were and compute, simulate, bring them back.
That's sort of, it's a fascinating notion that is sort of very, very much in many ways parallels some of the religious notions of resurrection of the dead.
Now, on a more near-term basis, there's a notion of potentially cloning, but that only brings back the body, not the mind.
There are people who talk about freezing, who sign up to have their head frozen.
I know several of them.
Until some future time when the exact location of every synapse and every neuron in the brain could be, and every chemical in the brain could be mapped, and then the personality could be recreated in a computer and then maybe in a real person.
Science fiction has covered a number of these things, and I can recommend on my website, I'll try to post the names of a number of science fiction stories by very prominent and excellent writers who have done their homework that deal with many of the parameters and many of the interesting thought experiments that have been done on human immortality.
I've noticed something very interesting, though.
Often when I'm at a supermarket or something like that, somebody will say, the cashier will say, that'll be 3092.
And I've started doing a little survey by saying, may you live until that year.
Somebody says, 3940.
May you live until that year.
And I find an interesting difference between men and women.
Men who are behind the cash register say, huh, another 2,000 years.
I'd have to go back to school a few times, I guess.
Trade in the old body.
Sounds good.
Thanks.
Women, except for the women who work at Home Depot, women universally say, God, I hope not.
In a sense, my new novel, Kiln People, and again, let's emphasize that's K-I-L-N, that's about making clay duplicates of people.
In a sense, this is a kind of immortality, only instead of extending the human lifespan linearly in the number of years you get, it's about extending the human lifespan in parallel, where each day you can live the same day with three bodies, then bring them together, get the memory back, be in two places, three places at once at the same time.
Well, I mean, once you can download memory into something and have the conscious, self-aware being, then you don't have to limit it to a short-term volatile memory.
I've read your books ever since I was in high school.
And Stark Eyed Rising had me so engrossed I nearly flunked a communications class.
Do you know that that is the kindest thing you can possibly say to an author?
To come up to them and curse them and say, you made me late for class, late to work, late to study, late to feed the cats, and especially you made me miss making love.
What's your question?
Well, I've tried to limit it down to two.
I won't even mention, well, limit it to what as a kid, I grew up on a ranch and caught a fledgling sparrow hawk, and since it's a falcon, tried to train it.
And I always thought how wonderful it would be if it was smart enough through some surgery to be smart.
And after raising a lot of pigs and hogs, one of our hogs was so intelligent he knew how to short out the electric fence to escape.
And if we get to the point where we can uplift animals and someone goes and starts uplifting produce animals like cows or hogs, what kind of repercussions would that have for the produce industry?
And also the probability of when we actually do or if we actually do get into space, will it be, do you think it could be possible that it'd be more like Star Trek meets Call of Cthulhu?
In other words, there'd be hideous intelligence out there that their minds are so strange and psychology is so foreign that it would just short-circuit our ability to comprehend them.
All right, well, the first one is the moral aspect of the possibility of eating animals or misusing animals who might have descendants who might sue us for it.
I mean, dolphins and chimpanzees clearly are candidates for uplift, and my novel Star Tide Rising and the Uplift War portray this in the future.
Pigs are probably on, and parrots and sea lions are probably on the upper, are probably over the line in having this potential.
And one could make an moral argument of drawing the line on what you can eat at what might potentially be uplifted someday.
I cannot picture cows and chickens piloting starships.
For some reason, I can picture pigs.
But your other question has to do whether or not if we meet aliens, could we conceivably understand them?
And my problem is that I get the heebie-jeebies over any cliché.
Anytime somebody tells me I can't do something, I'm tempted to think about a way that I might be able to.
And we hear this cliché again and again and again.
The alien is going to be incomprehensible to us.
And the reason why I don't think this will happen is because, again, I'm a Californian.
If you send a spaceship of Californians out into outer space, we met some strange, cosmic, weird Kthulu alien, cosmic space muffin, weird thing, I believe we'll be able to talk to them because 1% of Californians would try to date them.
What makes you think that if Californians were, in fact, the unintended ambassadors of the entire human race, that we simply would not be sterilized as a planet immediately?
Yes, well, you know, this is one of the problems with dealing with a guy who does not want to just write one series, is that you have to wait for me to get around to telling some of the stories.
There is an additional uplift story that I've given free on my website that you can download.
It's davidbrin.com.
Right next to the stories about UFOs and some of the possibilities there, you can also download one called Temptation, which is an extension, sort of a freebie extension of my uplift universe.
But my problem as an author is I get bored.
Even something as interesting as Uplift and Dolphins in Space and things like that, I have to alternate.
I have to do that far future stuff.
Then I have to do something very near-term and realistic, like The Postman and Earth.
And then I go to something intermediate like my new novel, Kiln People.
So you're just going to have to be patient and hope that we all live a real long time.
Great.
Thank you again.
Postman was also a good book.
And the libertarian streak in me always comes out when reading something like that.
Well, my biggest question about aliens, I guess, would be if they're so well known by our government and our government knows or is believed to know so much about them, why are they not more known to the general public?
Well, actually, that's something we only sort of covered a little bit or maybe didn't cover at all, and that is how much knowledge you think the government might have about aliens.
I guess your answer would be none at all because they aren't here and they haven't made contact with us or them, meaning the government.
Even though I'm on the official committees for contact, my guess is that if something really sneaky and secret is going on, that they would not include me because of the philosophy that I talk about in the Transparent Society that's in all my works.
And that is that we're more likely to be a wise civilization if we openly discuss stuff.
So, you know, I'm not saying that some secret group is not in contact with aliens as we speak.
As a matter of fact, if you look at DavidBren.com, that is one of the possibilities that's listed in that discussion of alien life.
It's just that, as I said about Hangar 18, it's kind of implausible that such a secret would last for three generations.
And it's kind of implausible that sooner or later, because they would have to assign our best human minds to this.
They'd have to assign our best scientists, our best engineers.
And these people have a tendency to be the most American of Americans.
Sooner or later, they're going to say, enough of this.
Well, actually, you know, the Brookings report, which you did pretty much dismiss, suggests that the group impacted the most by the realization of alien presence would be, believe it or not, scientists.
I think that's an utterly fascinating subject, an utterly fascinating possibility.
Two of my short stories, one of which won a Hugo Award to toot my own horn, but that's just to give it some credibility there, deal with the notion that maybe we might be the lonely ones.
We may be the first to go out there, and there may be something that's systematically winnowing and chaffing, just cutting down the numbers, cutting down new life forms as they make it up.
Now, we used to think that it would be nuclear war, but we seem to have at least proved that it's possible to get past it.
Even if we fry ourselves in the nuclear war, we proved that we could have not done it.
Maybe it's ecological self-destruction.
But you know what?
Each time we run into one of these things, we turn out to be a little smarter than we thought we were.
Just as we're proving to be a little nicer and a little wiser than we thought we were a few years ago.
Now, I may be known as this freaking optimist, but it may be that we will be the first intelligent life form to evade all of these traps and get out there and teach the others.
In other words, instead of like the Earth stood still, aliens coming down and lecturing to us, maybe we'll be the ones to get out there and rescue Not only dolphins and chimps from their frustration here on Earth, but to go out there and rescue everybody else who might get trapped or might get destroyed by their own self-indulgences.