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Jan. 9, 2002 - Art Bell

02:41:21

Coast to Coast AM with Art Bell - David Brin - Technology Advances. Jim Hughes - Spacecraft Artifact

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	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 Art Bell and this program is Post 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, 5000 watts, probably just goes and goes and goes.
	All across Georgia, I bet.
	Say hi, it says, to Tim Conley.
	Hey, Tim, he's the general manager there, and the program director, Jeff Taylor.
	Really good market, Savannah, Georgia.
	6.30 on the dial too, so it, you know, down there they just go and go and go.
	And also, uh, the network, this is a happy little doody, the network never gave an official welcome to KNYE in Pahrump, 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 Pahrump 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 Pahrump and see if you can hear 95.1.
	here 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.
	All persons 12 plus surveyed, we increased the audience there by 69.9%.
	Pretty cool.
	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!
	We've obviously done well in the Big Apple.
	Thank you all, W.A.B.C.
	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 what i'm looking for are lists of really good music the top music between uh 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 uh the 50s the 60s i'm particularly interested in those years the 70s so a little bit in the 80s um 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... But you know something?
	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 artbellatmindspring.com.
	That's A-R-T-B-E-L-L, all strung together, all lowercase at mindspring.com, artbellatmindspring.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?
	and I'm going to be back in a minute.
	It may contain the secret of anti-gravity.
	Bring 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'm sure I'll let him give it out.
	And we were so intrigued with this ad, we got hold of James Hughes, the man who placed the ad, to find out what this is all about.
	I 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 Cocoa, Florida.
	Is that right, James?
	Yes, it is.
	Cocoa, Florida.
	Cocoa, that's near the launch place, right?
	Yes, it's just across the water there from Cape Canaveral launching.
	Do you get to watch them go up all the time?
	We watch from a distance of probably two miles.
	What's it like?
	Well, it depends on what they're launching.
	If it's just an ordinary rocket, it's kind of small, but if it's the shuttle, then you know it has its two external tanks, and it's quite a bit bigger than... Does it rattle windows?
	Oh, yes.
	That must be kind of cool.
	I'd like to be near one.
	Yeah, you wouldn't want to live near it.
	You don't want to live near it?
	No.
	I think it'd be kind of cool, I guess, the first few times it is, and then after that it kind of wears on you.
	Yeah, well, when I say near it and how much of a disturbance it is, it's not much disturbance at my distance, but if you were over there next to it, then you'd probably be breaking your windows.
	Uh-huh.
	Okay, well listen, anyway, the reason I've got you here is because you placed this ad In Florida today, right?
	Yes.
	This ad about asking if you pay $9 million for a piece of a UFO drive mechanism.
	Okay, where did you get what you think is maybe a piece of a UFO drive mechanism?
	That would be my first question.
	Okay, 44 years ago, a friend of mine was down at a New Jersey dump on his motorcycle, and he saw a cigar-shaped UFO come in.
	and hover over the dump. Then a door opened in the side and he could hear a banging as if on radiator pipes.
	Then the uh... You mean like the UFO then was making a deposit at the dump?
	Sort of? Uh well presumably uh they have uh no dumping laws in uh... Why?
	In outer space, you know?
	Yeah, but when is a UFO going to follow?
	Any sort of, anything about... I mean, they obviously... You said they came right over a junkyard.
	By the way, what was your friend doing in a junkyard?
	You don't often... Well, he had an intense curiosity about everything.
	And he would ride his cycle in the different places.
	Including junk?
	In other words, just sort of... Yes.
	Cruising the junk.
	Okay, well.
	Alright, so a cigar shaped something or another came over and what?
	Paws stopped at the, uh, over the... Yes, it hovered over the, over the dump and, uh, a door opened in the side and some pieces of metal were thrown out.
	Then the door closed and the UFO flew away.
	Well, it sure sounds like they were dumping.
	Yeah.
	Oh, yes.
	Something was, uh, not working, or... Or?
	I mean, we got a...
	Who knows?
	So some stuff came out.
	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.
	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 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.
	Oh, you do?
	Yes, I have a degree in physics.
	I see, well, that's one heck of a present to get from somebody.
	Why, now you've held onto this for 44 years?
	Yes.
	Ever talking to anybody about it or just always?
	Well, yes, I told people about it, a few people, maybe 10 over the period of time.
	Oh Most of the time the item was in a safety deposit box or just in a drawer.
	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... Oh, I did examine it further.
	Okay, how big is this piece?
	It's about two inches long by an inch and a half wide, and it's roughly the shape of a pyramid.
	Really?
	Yeah, not an accurate pyramid like in Egypt, but very roughly.
	What about it makes you think that it has unusual properties?
	I mean, does it look like any sort of mechanism or machine or is it smooth metal or what?
	We don't have a photograph.
	Yeah, the different sides of it have different properties.
	On one side, one side is smooth.
	Another side has a bubbly structure.
	And the bubbly structure apparently was melted.
	Another part has, looks like a stone.
	And the most interesting and important part is that part of it has a layered structure.
	And I have a theory, my own theory of the universe, and in my theory, anti-gravity has a layered structure.
	And I was really startled to find that I had been looking all these years at this piece
	and didn't notice the layers.
	Oh.
	These layers are about half a millimeter in thickness.
	When did you notice these, time-wise?
	Two days ago.
	Two days ago?
	Yeah.
	You went down to your safety deposit box and just said to yourself, you know, I haven't seen that piece of that UFO in a long time.
	I'm just going to take it out and take a look or what?
	Well, no, we had a little meeting here.
	There was about six people here who were interested in it, and we just haven't formed any formal group yet, but we wanted to see, and everybody, we passed a piece around, everybody looked at it and had an opinion, and as I say, my I have a theory that anti-gravity should have a layered structure, and when I saw that this piece actually had a layered structure, I was amazed.
	Now, the layered structure was suggested by someone on the telephone because of the ad.
	Somebody on the telephone called and said, Have you considered a layered structure?
	And I said, My God!
	My God, here I am, 44 years with this thing.
	Right.
	And I didn't realize it has a layered structure.
	And how were you able to determine that?
	Did you take out a microscope and look at it, or what?
	No, you could just look at it.
	See, with the layers about half an inch thick, half a millimeter thick, it's easy to see them.
	So, wow, first time you noticed.
	Yes, it is.
	And because of your theory, you think that this layered structure may represent Part of some sort of drive mechanism to... Yeah, I think it does.
	I used to, before observing the layers myself, I suspected strongly that it was part of the drive mechanism or part of the 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.
	That's a pretty serious secret, all right.
	Have you ever had it to a lab to determine what properties it has and what it's made out of?
	Yes, I have.
	First of all, I did my own testing and I found that the metal would not dissolve In concentrated nitric acid.
	But it turned into a white, yellowish powder.
	But it did not dissolve.
	And the chemistry books say that apparently all nitrates are soluble.
	But then we went to the professional testers and I had Lehigh University test the piece.
	And they said it was made of indium antimonide.
	What the heck is that?
	Well, indium is a metal in group 3 of the periodic table, and antimony is an element in group 5.
	And this is an alloy of indium and antimony, so it's called indium antimonide.
	Very unusual?
	Well, it seems to have been more unusual back in the days when we picked up the pieces first.
	First pick it up.
	More common perhaps today.
	Others have made this.
	Oh yeah, today is much more common.
	Alright.
	What about any measurements of radiation of any sort from the object?
	I measured radiation and I got nothing.
	But there's also one thing I should tell you is that we also had it analyzed by EMSL in Collinswood, New Jersey.
	and EMSL said it was pure antimony.
	Wait a minute, what is EMSL?
	EMSL, that's a laboratory services company.
	All right, and they said it was?
	They said it was pure antimony, whereas Lehigh University said it was indium antimonide.
	And the two of them were in vehement disagreement with each other,
	as to, you know, like...
	As to what it was?
	mail as to what it was here and the thing is we're going to be two different things
	as well. I never figured that out until somebody over the phone in the conversation told me
	that they asked me if I had ever considered a layered structure and immediately I almost
	passed down.
	Because, uh, yes, I had figured on a layered structure, but... I hadn't connected it with the piece, and, uh... Indeed, I think that... But how does that mean it morphs from one kind of metal to another?
	Oh, it morphs, you said?
	Well, I mean, you said you got two reports of it being... Uh, listen, hold on.
	We're at a break point.
	I've, uh, really got to get this straightened out in my own mind.
	How are you this morning?
	James Hughes is here.
	He wants nine million bucks.
	You absolutely know God is smiling on you and he brings you people like James Hughes who put an ad in Florida today for anybody who wants to save America's greatness for nine million dollars because he's got peace.
	He's got the secret.
	It may be the secret of anti-gravity and that would easily, easily be worth nine million dollars.
	Probably nine billion dollars, actually.
	So, on the one hand, sounds like a lot of money.
	Definitely nothing you could do this payday, right?
	But, on the other hand, if it really was or is anti-gravity, nine million dollars would be a great bargain.
	More in a moment.
	By the way, somebody writes to me, Mark in Phoenix sends me on the computer, pure antimony is very rare on Earth.
	It must be extracted from an ore.
	here again. Hi. Hi. Okay, so by the way somebody writes to me, Mark in Phoenix,
	sends me on the computer, pure antimony is very rare on earth, it must be
	extracted from an ore. So antimony would be very rare, huh?
	Well, I really don't We were studying it, studying some of its properties, but the commonality of it, the percentage of it, I'm not, I don't know.
	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, not just radiation, radiation coming from it, but whether it's got off-worldly uh... counts in and i i can't exactly remember what it is
	but they they they can actually determine if something comes from earth or
	elsewhere did you know did you know that
	no who is that uh... you mean who can do that
	labs can do it they can actually determine if uh... if these are things
	if it's material that came from off world for example that's how they know
	when they get a you know a mars rocker Oh yeah, I know how NASA does that.
	But this was a levitating machine.
	You mean the UFO?
	Yeah, the UFO.
	And NASA does it like they took up rocks from glaciers.
	And also iron and nickel from glaciers.
	That's right?
	Yes.
	That's all correct.
	How did you, and why did you decide to try and sell this for nine million dollars?
	Well, first of all, it's worth, if it is, if it represents the science of the future, then essentially its value is infinite.
	That's certainly true, yes.
	I mean, if it's anti-gravity, I mean, there's no question about it, nine million is a pittance.
	Absolute pittance.
	Yeah, sure.
	But I was curious how you arrived at the figure of nine million dollars.
	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%.
	Oh?
	Well, so it was $10 million and reduced by 10% to $9 million.
	Oh, so you originally asked $10 million, but you had to reduce it 10%.
	Listen, I don't know how they... Pretty radical.
	I don't know how they arrived at the reduction by 10%.
	Now, is that every week they reduce it that much?
	No, they don't.
	They've been very honest so far.
	They just keep running it.
	And it's been running for how long?
	About three weeks.
	Three weeks.
	Will there come a time when it'll have to be reduced more yet to stay in?
	No.
	Well, not according to them.
	There will come a time when the offer stops.
	But they said, like yesterday or the day before, that they had no intention of dropping the offer at the present time.
	Okay, good.
	And now I heard, I'm sure, I'm sure I heard earlier on USA Radio News that you have this for sale.
	They talked about your ad and then they said, I'm sure they said, I thought they said something about you already being offered $7 million and change.
	Yes, 7.5 million.
	Oh, that's a true story then?
	No, the thing is, the man who made that up, it was on a Friday, and he must have changed his mind over the weekend.
	Oh, no.
	Yeah.
	Oh, geez.
	So, we'll see.
	Sometimes when you're selling something like this, you don't want people to, you know, get buyer's regret, and so you want to do the deal, boom, like that.
	Yes.
	And so I guess you're probably regretting not having done it right on the spot, or were you insulted?
	Well, I wanted a certified check, and he went to the bank to get a certified check.
	In fact, from the bank he accidentally dialed my house, and I heard him talking to the bank, you know?
	Right.
	And the deal should have gone through then.
	Boy, I'll tell you, life will give you ups and downs, huh?
	Well, um, so you obviously then would have cut the deal for that seven and a half million, right?
	Sure.
	Can I ask you, can I ask you what is your real rock bottom price?
	I mean, if you, if you were like one of those car dealerships that you go in where you don't, they don't have any bargaining and it's just like you get the lowest price and they don't even, there's no bargaining that goes on.
	They started doing that with car dealerships.
	I mean, you, do you have a price like that?
	Yes, I would say a million dollars 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
	layered layers which this piece has.
	Have you taken any pictures of this jewel?
	Oh yes, we have.
	There's been a lot of pictures.
	Have you released any of them?
	Well, channel 6, tomorrow, this is tomorrow now, but Florida today is going to have a
	feature article, a feature.
	And they're going to have a picture of it?
	Well they should because when they were at the house they must have taken 30 or 40 pictures.
	Oh, well, it's okay.
	It's going to be public.
	So, do you have any, like, pictures that you could send me on a computer that I could put up on a website?
	Oh.
	Do you have a computer?
	Yeah, I have a computer, but I'm not set up to easily... Well, maybe you could get a friend, or... Yeah, the friend is right here, right now.
	Oh, he is?
	Yeah, he says his name is Paul.
	Uh, hey.
	Is Paul a computer guy?
	Yeah, Paul is a computer guy.
	He's specifically a website guy.
	Oh, then he'll know exactly what... Put him on the phone for just a sec.
	Okay, I'm gonna get him here, see where he is here.
	Okay.
	Hey, Paul.
	Yeah, Paul.
	Paul?
	We need Paul.
	I want a picture of this.
	Wait, wait a minute.
	Paul's the obvious avenue to a picture.
	Uh, oh yeah.
	Here Paul, can you talk to my phone for a second?
	Yo Paul.
	Hey Art.
	Hey Paul.
	So you're a webmaster?
	Yes.
	Okay, James tells me that the TV station has been there and taken pictures and so forth and so on.
	Yeah, that was last Friday.
	I was wondering if I could talk you into a favor.
	You obviously would know how to do this.
	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?
	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... Oh no, I'm with you all the way. You
	don't happen to have a digital camera of any kind, do you? Oh yeah, yeah. What we'll do is
	take video footage off of videotape and then put it onto the computer, just capture
	it. Well, that's one way to do it, but if you actually have a digital camera, boy, you...
	A digital camera? I can find a digital camera, that's not a problem. Alright.
	Well, if you could send me a JPEG or two that I could put on the website... Sure.
	Would you?
	Yeah.
	Just send it to artbell at mindspring.com.
	Okay.
	Could you do that?
	I'll write that down right now.
	That's A-R-T-B-E-L-L, all lowercase, at mindspring.com.
	Okay.
	And then when you do, I'll put it up on the website.
	Okay.
	Would that be all right?
	Yeah.
	Actually, Art, what I'll do is I'll send you a link to that Because last night, one of the things... Even that would be alright.
	If you fire me a link, I'll get that up.
	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 it's so micro that it's like
	four atoms wide?
	You know, I have a very similar piece, which is very, very interesting, and I've had that for years.
	It is also a layered piece, and it's a whole other story.
	Anyway, if you could get me some JPEGs and get me that link, we'll get up the information on all of this.
	Okay, sure.
	No problem.
	I'll put Jim back on.
	Okay.
	Very good.
	Okay, James.
	Yeah, hi, Art.
	Hi, there.
	Okay, good.
	Well, then he knows exactly what to send me because I'm sure that everybody would like a look at this.
	Okay.
	For, again, 44 years, Jim.
	That's sure a long time.
	Did people come to you and say, look, bring it out.
	We're going to have a meeting.
	We want to see what you've got.
	I still don't quite understand how, after all this time and why, you decided to suddenly bring it out.
	Well, part of this is due to my own theory of the universe, which the establishment has never seen fit to publish a single word of it.
	And I thought, I mean, this is the country of freedom of speech and all that.
	Sure is.
	Yeah, so I thought, well, if I have to pay to have my theory noticed, then I'll pay to have it noticed.
	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, you know, the detection of of explosives of various types. So that's what you would do
	with the money? Yeah, that's what I intended to do with the money. And are you already
	independently wealthy? No, I'm not. I know I have, I'm not independent. No, I'm not. No. So, but this would,
	so this would be a sudden change in your lifestyle? Oh yes, but I think up ideas, a
	lot of ideas, and could help the country, I believe.
	Well, you say in the ad, to bring America back to its greatness.
	So you think that America should have anti-gravity technology?
	I think that we should invent it.
	We represent all of mankind.
	We have always done that.
	And I think that... America represents all of mankind?
	Sure, you have all people coming here from overseas.
	Yeah, we're a great country.
	Still a very great country.
	And having anti-gravity, that... Of course, there's always one other thing to think about, James, and that is that there are some people who think that we already have anti-gravity.
	You know, that the military has met with the people who fly the kinds of things that dump this in the dump.
	Yes, I understand.
	But the thing is, I decided years ago that nobody was going to provide this secret for me.
	I was going to have to discover it myself.
	My father asked me for his, in my entire life, well, for many years my father asked me to invent anti-gravity and that became part of my soul.
	That's a big charge to lay on a sun.
	Oh, yeah.
	So I'm going to go out there and invent anti-gravity.
	Yeah, well, I have a theory which I can explain gravity to the average person in three minutes.
	Well, we've got that long, just about, so let's hear it.
	Okay.
	First of all, do you agree that everything is infinitely complex?
	Yes.
	Okay.
	Now, then, Do you believe that all things have to eat and that they have to absorb specialists?
	Specialists, because they're infinitely complex, daily activities require special things, you know.
	Therefore, they have to eat.
	Everything has to eat.
	Everything has to eat.
	You mean like inanimate objects, they eat something as well?
	Oh yeah, there are no inanimate objects.
	Everything is alive.
	What we regard as inanimate objects.
	Well, we do.
	The desk in front of me, the good old rotten telephone here, these kinds of things.
	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.
	And they're all eating something?
	Actually, they eat something.
	They eat a thing called MAS, but their activity is for soul growth.
	They're searching through the spatial lattice for elements which will be added to the external souls of plants and animals and people.
	And people.
	So you believe plants, animals, and people have souls?
	Yes.
	Organic living things, but my telephone doesn't have a soul, right?
	Uh, I think... It's hard to accept, but I believe it does, yes.
	Really?
	That's something that I don't theorize much about because it is... It's kind of too subtle for the theory at present.
	In other words, people aren't exactly ready to accept that.
	So... Yeah, I would say that's true.
	This phone might have a soul.
	But anyway... Yes?
	You see, the Knits...
	Okay, the electron.
	The electron eats something, and I call it MAS for Metabolic Action Substance.
	Okay.
	If you put an electron near the sun, then the parts of the, let's say the electron is vibrating.
	Yes.
	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.
	If it, as it depletes the MAS, its vibrations slow down.
	Now we have the obvious, 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...
	If you think about it, you'll probably be able to see this yourself.
	The wave is moving toward the sun, and that's gravity.
	And this took only three minutes.
	OK.
	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?
	Yes, I want to give it out.
	You do?
	If worse comes to worse, I just won't answer the phone, but... I see, all right.
	The thing is, you know, anti-gravity belongs to everybody.
	Well, I've got that.
	Let's give out the number, all right?
	Okay.
	In Florida, then, the number is 321-504-3089.
	Is that correct?
	That's correct.
	I've got it in the ad here.
	Let me give that again so everybody gets it.
	And you answer that phone personally, or do you have a... I answer it personally.
	Personally, all right.
	Area 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
	before I buy.
	Well, what we want to do is, having a good relation with this potential buyer, I will go, or maybe Paul will go,
	and we will kind of safeguard the- But you're willing, you are willing, though, even though-
	Yes, but you know what you can do.
	Listen, we're ending up without any more time.
	I've got to go.
	So, James, I'm going to say thank you and wish you well.
	And listen, when you sell it, call me, will you?
	Yes.
	All right.
	Take care, James.
	That's James Hughes in Florida.
	They just opened the door, dumped it out 44 years ago.
	He's got it.
	He'd like nine million for it.
	In a moment.
	In ze 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.
	In a 1998 movie, directed by Kevin Costner, 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.
	Bryn's 98 non-fiction 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 Asimov's famed Foundation Universe.
	So this is an interesting man.
	David Brin is his name and in a moment he will be here.
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	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 percent 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.
	Rough, huh?
	Gold during the same period of time has risen 30 percent.
	So, if you'd taken my advice a long time ago, where would you be now?
	You'd be happier, right?
	Because you should never have all your eggs in one basket, and gold is a good balance to anybody's portfolio.
	Nobody in their right mind would go spend all their money on gold, and I'm not suggesting you do that.
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	Use my name, Art Bell.
	Say, I want the free stuff.
	At 1-800-474-4259.
	That's 1-800-474-4259.
	And now we enter the world of David Brin.
	David, welcome to the program.
	Great to be here, Art.
	Hello, everybody.
	1-800-474-4259 And now we enter the world of David Brin. David, welcome to
	the program.
	Great to be here, Art. Hello, everybody.
	Where are you, David?
	San Diego, California.
	Oh, San Diego.
	Okay, that's COGO country for us.
	Yes, beautiful COGO.
	Um, alright, so, uh, you've got quite a history.
	You've been writing for how many years?
	Oh, off and on since I was a kid, but it was a hobby, and I always advise bright, young, aspiring writers to keep it a hobby.
	If they were meant to become writers, it'll eventually take over.
	It's something, though, that more people, I take it, starve at than do well at?
	Well, the arts are all pyramidal shaped, like all the old societies were.
	Our society is the first society that's shaped like a diamond, where the middle class outnumbers the poor.
	And engineering is like that.
	A lot of the professions are like that, where if you're a decent engineer, you're pretty sure to be in the middle.
	But the arts are like old-fashioned societies, a few at the top, I think it should be on our flag.
	at the next layer down and a few more the next layer down.
	But it's no diamond.
	It's no diamond.
	That's a very interesting analogy about our society versus others.
	Most are certainly pyramids and ours is more like a diamond.
	You're absolutely right.
	I'm going to remember that one.
	That's very good.
	I think it should be on our flag.
	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.
	That's very insightful.
	I'm going to remember that forever and steal it from you.
	You're welcome to it.
	If we pass through that, you're welcome to it.
	Alright, we're going to sort of work backwards I guess.
	You've written a really, what I think is a really cool novel called The Killing People
	or Killing People.
	And what is the scenario behind Killing People?
	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, extrapolating to where destiny might take us.
	This is kind of in that middle ground.
	In other words, you get way out there like an Edgar Cayce sort of.
	You don't have to write it in some sort of mysterious way.
	You can just lay it right out.
	I try to make my novels as accessible as possible so people can enjoy them.
	This comes under the category then of near future.
	Intermediate future where there's one big change in our world.
	And the big change is, well, look at it this way.
	The last couple of generations, the last three generations, Americans have made ancient dreams come true.
	Our ancestors dreamed of being able to go places fast and conveniently.
	We can now do that, at least on the earth.
	They dreamed of knowing a lot, and now you can get on the internet and get access to whatever information you want.
	It's amazing.
	We've made dreams come true.
	Well, this is another dream.
	How many times have you wished to yourself, I wish I could be in two places at once.
	I've got stuff to do in lots of different places.
	Well, in the future, people have solved the notion of the home copier, and it's not just copying a document.
	You lay your head on the copier in the morning and out comes a temporary clay copy of yourself.
	Clay, that leads to the title kiln, because they're baked in a little automatic kiln everybody has at home.
	You can send these golems, because it's based on the old myth of the golem.
	They're not clones, because they have no rights.
	They're not organic.
	At the end of the day, they dissolve.
	But they have your personality and your memories.
	So they're only good for one day?
	They're good for one day.
	And their only hope of continuing to survive is, before they dissolve, at the end of the day, they come home and they download the day's memories back into you.
	And so, if it works right, you've essentially been two places.
	And you don't care about the death or the dissolving of the golem's body.
	So they have a volatile memory then?
	That's right.
	And at the end of the day, you simply download the golem's memory and you've been in two places.
	Or three or four.
	Does the resulting short-term memory have self-awareness?
	Oh yes, as a matter of fact in the novel I take the detective, it's a detective story, it has all the rhythms of a noir murder mystery.
	I love those.
	The detective basically makes three or four copies at the beginning of the day and I follow
	several of them.
	He notes wryly that a number of his dittos have been shot, killed and drowned over the
	years and he takes it with a lot more aplomb than one of Raymond Chandler's characters
	would.
	I'm able to follow the conventions of the murder mystery a little more rigorously instead
	of the character being beaten up several times, he's killed several times.
	This is set then in a time where creating killing people is a regular thing.
	Well actually that's a very good point Art.
	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.
	Let the decapitations proceed.
	Yeah, of course.
	You know, a cokehead Hollywood screenwriter can write what happens next. You don't need to have any imagination.
	Well yes, the large busted young teenager goes to the basement of course.
	Yes, and the fundamental rule in Hollywood movies today is thou shalt never show any Americans with any brains
	or any American institutions functioning.
	And she's usually undressed just prior to being dismembered.
	Absolutely.
	Have you ever seen anybody in a modern Hollywood movie dial 911 and have skilled professionals leap to their aid?
	No.
	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.
	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.
	It's part of society.
	Bottle it!
	Sell it!
	Give it to everybody, so everybody can make these copies.
	I know that before it existed, you wrote about something like the Internet as fiction, and I wonder if you did it then.
	You sort of just dropped us into a society where there was this incredible connection between everybody.
	Same thing.
	I saw the Internet because I was a scientist, so I saw it early.
	I didn't invent it.
	I didn't Al Gore it.
	But what I did do is I said, what if this thing that scientists are all using, what if everybody had it?
	So my novel Earth had webpages.
	So why aren't I rich?
	Why aren't you rich?
	And also, why didn't you bitch at Al Gore?
	Hey, I invented it.
	No, the webpages in Earth, not one of them had a banner ad, because it just never occurred to me.
	No banner ads.
	No banner ads.
	Uh, this was done, uh, how long ago?
	This was around, well, I started the novel in 88.
	Well, Bannerhead shouldn't have been too hard to imagine.
	Well, no, it shouldn't have been.
	I guess I was naive.
	But the thing is, you see, you ask science fiction authors to brag about their predictions.
	And you know what we're really good at?
	What?
	Is not so much predicting stuff, although there's some pretty good things.
	You know, I'm on record, uh, back in, um, Back in about 84, 85, predicting the fall of the Berlin Wall.
	But what we're really good at is preventing futures.
	The self-preventing prophecy is by far the most powerful form of science fiction.
	Take a look at... Scaring the hell out of people.
	That's right!
	For instance, Dr. Strangelove and On the Beach, scaring people into re-examining potential waste that You know, I just saw on the beach, they're running it now, I think, is it Showtime?
	I'm not sure.
	Whoever it is running it is running it now, and I just happened to catch it the other day.
	That end scene, you may recall, when they give the baby the injection, they take two pills and they all go away right at the very end.
	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 us ourselves as citizens to never let that particular failure mode happen.
	And we won't.
	I hate to just jump to it, but you mentioned it, so it occurs to me.
	I have webcams all over the place.
	I have them all around me, and I use them.
	I turn them on when I want to smile at the camera and tell the audience, yo.
	And there's a webcam photo that'll stay up there for 24 hours, or I can change it every minute.
	But 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.
	Well, that is a scenario.
	That's a technological scenario, 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 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 libertarian 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, the fact though that you don't like the choice doesn't make it go away.
	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.
	That's the American way.
	Well, there was a congressman or a senator the other day, I forget which, who said, you
	know, he went to the airport and he was forced to strip and then felled up like a prized
	bull I think he said or something like that.
	You know, there's a lot of that going on now at the airports.
	Oh, sure.
	These things are happening to some degree, and they will always happen, and then there will be excessive overreactions.
	But take a look at how people feel about it.
	They don't like that.
	And we Americans have a tendency to get what we want over the course, not of one year or two years, but over the course of ten years.
	You betcha.
	We tend to get what we want.
	So what do you think we want in this regard?
	For example, with air safety.
	What do you think we want?
	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.
	Well then you wish to have your cake and eat it too.
	Unlikely.
	But that's my point.
	We have always, as Americans, had our cake, eaten it too, watched it grow bigger, and shared it aggressively.
	It's always been the case for me.
	It's always been a pretty case for most of you listeners.
	But this was the case when we, David, when we could fight wars on foreign lands and when nobody really worried about anything happening here.
	That was the case then.
	That was then.
	This is now.
	There is a changed circumstance.
	Of course there are changed circumstances.
	I'm a science fiction author.
	We all live with changed circumstances and maybe some of the illusions are going away.
	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 causes for worry.
	We are at a new kind of war, one that requires networked skills, new types of agility, but let me just point out one of 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.
	What is that?
	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.
	United Airlines.
	I know, I understand.
	Oh, I want to talk about that, Flight 93, indeed.
	That was American 93, right?
	No, I think it was the United Flight.
	Was it UAL?
	All right.
	Yeah.
	All right, anyway, we'll talk about that when we get back.
	An amazing, amazing, amazing story, Flight 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 Art Bell, and this is Coast to Coast AM.
	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, and we interviewed him the first hour, holding his nine million dollar baby.
	Keith is at the Consumer Electronics Show, so if I can get hold of him, we'll get that link up pronto, and you 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, anyway, Flight 93, the one that probably would have crashed into the White House or the Capitol building.
	It was obvious the people on the aircraft knew exactly what was up because they had received cell phone calls.
	And the passengers decided to go get these bastards, and they 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 deserve the Congressional Medal of Honor, or its equivalent, whatever.
	David?
	I totally agree.
	It's too bad that somebody there wasn't there to give them just a couple of pieces of advice.
	Have 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.
	What would that be?
	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.
	At that time, box cutters.
	And in fact, with proper doctrine, Could not have enabled them to do what they did.
	The thing that was wrong that day was doctrine.
	In other words, the official policy that pilots were trained to hand over planes filled with 100,000 gallons of jet fuel to people with box cutters.
	Well, they were trained to hand over airplanes.
	Actually, up until that point, we'd never had anything like that.
	It was always a hijacking, and you knew pretty well that if you cooperated, you'd have a pretty good chance of staying alive and getting on the ground.
	At that point, that doctrine would make sense, right?
	Yes.
	There were several science fiction novels, and also L.L.
	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'll plow the plane into 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.
	That's right.
	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.
	That's fair.
	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.
	You bet.
	They didn't have to wait for the FAA, they didn't wait for the government,
	because they were trained with something that you might find...
	I remember this line from Dr. Strangelove, Americans are trained, our teenagers are trained,
	to have initiative. It's just about the only thing teenagers learn. They take initiative.
	They sure do. That's what these people did. The interesting thing is you keep running into Luddites 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 are developing for the squad commanders
	and things like that and platoon commanders, little hand held 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?
	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.
	But you do understand the need, at least right now, for increased security at airports, that kind of thing?
	Oh, I totally agree with that.
	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.
	A natural product of an increasingly technological society.
	Up until a point.
	And 9-11 pointed out something very interesting.
	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.
	Oh yes.
	I predict this is going to happen more and more and more.
	In this century, the average citizen is going to be armed and empowered, and gunpowder will be obsolete.
	We're going to be armed with knowledge.
	Some of this is going to come at a price, and you just killed people in the real world right now.
	We have doctors who say they are about to clone a human being.
	They will clone a human being.
	And they will do so whether we pass a law against it or not.
	And if we do, then they will go to Europe and they will clone babies to order for American citizens who have the bucks and want them.
	So, you know, the road to the kiln people is, they've broken 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.
	Twin.
	Identical twins.
	Now, an awful lot of the scenarios, when I ask people to get specific, they say, well, alright, some rich guy may make a clone of himself, he's 60 years old, he has this 12 year old clone of himself in the basement and he's He's cutting him open for spare parts that will fit in perfectly without any rejection.
	Let's forget that horror scenario.
	Let's make it easy.
	We know that that's already illegal.
	It's already been ruled by identical twins that a clone is a living, breathing person with all the rights of a person.
	But let's back up from that.
	Let's just say a rich person wants a clone of himself or herself.
	Do you have any problem with somebody being able to order such and pay for it?
	Well, it all depends.
	I am in favor of any child who is born being born into a loving family and I'm not in favor of manipulative people treating a child like chattel property.
	Now, if a husband and a wife want to give birth to a to the husband's twin which is in effect what's going
	on yeah that's right well it sounds a little weird it sounds a little kinky we certainly should
	go into discussions about it i don't particularly like it but you know what you don't
	see a big problem i would like to ask people to actually parse out what the harm is um well maybe
	there's none i i I don't know.
	I was just curious how you felt about it.
	Well, I would like to make sure that that child is loved.
	I'd like to make sure, first off, that there's not a huge expectation that this is going to be a duplicate of this person because he's not.
	He's going to be raised differently and that he deserves to run his own life.
	All right.
	What about the prospect then taking another leap, 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, again, we have to make decisions ourselves in ways that, well, it goes back to what we were talking about before.
	The ideal set of laws for Americans is a set of laws that lets us have our cake and eat it.
	In other words, we're used to trying our best to get the good and eliminate the bad.
	And we've been very, very good at it.
	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.
	And I would love to see what percentage of the population actually ascribes to that. I'll bet it's about .0001
	percent.
	You'd be really surprised. 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, have 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?
	We're talking about a shmoo.
	And you would be, well whatever, and you would be surprised how many people A high percentage said hell yes.
	Well, you might recall Little Abner had the shmoos.
	These were creatures from lower Celebovia.
	They did not look like people.
	They were squat little, little, little, lumpy, Pillsbury Doughboy-like creatures.
	You know, whatever.
	And they would clean your house and then chop themselves up and jump into the frying pan.
	And they were, they were, the Little Abner strip was wonderful in that regard.
	And they were very convenient, and Douglas Adams did something like that in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.
	Okay, well this is what I'm talking about.
	I wonder how you feel about that.
	Well, look, we are heading into a world in which there are going to be a lot of ambiguities.
	And as modern, sophisticated citizens, we're going to be asked to debate, argue, and regulate.
	Things that are ambiguous.
	It's like the whole argument over abortion, and I know I'm setting a fire started here, but the tendency is, when you're scared, to demand very, very simple criteria and simple rules.
	But God didn't make a simple digital on-off world.
	The world is filled with analog type things that are murky, that are ambiguous.
	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.
	They're so fantastic.
	Well, I agree with you there, 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.
	Isn't it worthy trying to figure out when it does begin?
	Oh, it's worthy to argue the point.
	No, no, no, no.
	Forget arguing.
	Oh, it's fun.
	I was thinking, isn't it worthy to pursue the knowledge of when it actually does begin?
	But we honestly don't know.
	There is a huge ambiguity during gestation, during the development of the fetus.
	For instance, two-thirds of embryos that are created by fertilization inside a human woman self-abort.
	I mean, you know, if this was such a terrible thing, why would that be allowed to happen?
	It's because there's an editing process that goes on during the first three months in any event.
	There's a choice that the mother makes.
	Well, this one's not working out.
	I don't want this.
	It's kind of a natural quality control process.
	That's right.
	And so the objection isn't to this sort of thing happening.
	The objection is to bringing the conscious mind into the process.
	Well, it's a process that's already happening.
	It's already taking place.
	Let me give you another example of ambiguity.
	One of my most popular science fiction novels, Star Tide Rising, won the Hugo Award, all that sort of thing.
	It's about dolphins in the future.
	Oh, dolphins.
	We can talk about dolphins.
	I'd like to.
	It's quite fascinating.
	The notion is that perhaps in two or three hundred years we will have genetically engineered dolphins to give them speech.
	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 Fruit of the Gods.
	Pierre Boullée 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.
	We give them the vote.
	The vote.
	And we try our best to treat them nicely.
	In other words, the opposite of the cliché, the mad scientist, the enslaving them cliché, And then I ask the question, wouldn't these creatures, wouldn't these people, these new people, have interesting problems anyway?
	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.
	Oh yes, of course.
	And you'd need the dolphin vote.
	Well, of course.
	And this is just an extension of the process of inclusion.
	That we've been engaged in, Republican and Democrat, for the last 40 years.
	And that's one of the philosophical underpinnings deep underneath science fiction.
	But here's why the Dolphins would never get the vote, because they would generally tend toward the Democrat.
	Of course.
	I don't know.
	How do you know they won't be great entrepreneurs?
	Or, you balance by uplifting chimpanzees.
	Well, I'm just sort of presuming the obvious, that they'd be really ecologically concerned, so they'd tend to other Democrats, and Republicans would never let them have the vote because they'd know exactly where that vote was going to go.
	Well, you know, making assumptions about that, people made the same assumptions about Catholics and Hispanics.
	Yeah, you've got a good point.
	And they're drifting.
	All you have to do is work hard to make an entrepreneurial gene while you're uplifting these dolphins.
	Right, oh, okay.
	Sneak one of those in there.
	And now they're concerned about their businesses.
	And suddenly, instead of Republicans and Democrats, they're libertarians.
	Ha ha ha.
	Libertarians in space.
	Ha ha ha.
	Or you counterbalance them, as I do in my series, by also uplifting chimpanzees.
	Are we within thinking distance of uplifting an animal, like a dolphin, for example,
	to the point where it could achieve speech?
	Is that something we could work on and do?
	Is it possible?
	Well, it's fascinating.
	We can't do it now.
	We can't even design the project.
	I know, but it's thinkable.
	It is definitely thinkable.
	Some of my friends who are engaged in dolphin research They say something very interesting.
	Listen, hold it.
	We're right at the top of the hour.
	Okay.
	So hold on.
	You can take a woman for example and uplift her by putting her in a beautiful...
	Good morning, everybody.
	How are you?
	Incidentally, another author that we're going to have on very soon, I think, is Dean Koontz.
	Dean Koontz has kindly mentioned me in one of his latest novels.
	So, I thought, why not?
	Wouldn't he be an interesting person out on the program?
	Dean Kuntz, coming up soon.
	All 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, uh, they probably already have self-awareness, uh, 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're 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?
	Well, first off, while it's on my mind, say hi to Dean Kuntz when he's on the air.
	I sure will.
	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 other 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.
	This didn't used to be the case.
	Back in the older civilizations, the priesthoods were the ones who said, ìWe 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, will be 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.
	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 Lewis Herman, for instance, at the Koala 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.
	Yes.
	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.
	Projecting into a future where we've actually given them this hand.
	Well, we've actually lifted them up.
	An awful lot of the cliched movies that we've seen, science fiction movies, show us as the young upstarts in 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 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.
	we've given speech and whatever 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 non-fiction 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.
	So, they might go wrong and that would be part of the risk, but I don't know when that's
	ever stopped us if we have the technological ability.
	Well, yes, but there's a book out there by a guy named Edward Tenor called Why Things
	Bite Back, The Tragedy of Unintended Consequences.
	And he talks about many, many situations in which the smart guys came up with a scheme,
	a technological scheme, a military scheme, and things surprised them.
	Thank you.
	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 neck of any theater 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 be 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, okay, you're not coming up with anything new now.
	Go ahead and build your pipeline.
	And he said, now we have oil and caribou.
	Well, you know, that's a pretty interesting point, I've got to say.
	Listen, you've written a lot about aliens, contact with aliens.
	Let's take you into the area that you suggest you can speak on easily.
	Not that you seem to have any difficulty speaking on any of these areas, but you've done a lot
	with aliens, right?
	So I've done a lot with aliens and I have a feeling that we may be at opposite ends
	of this spectrum.
	You are actually a participant in SETI, aren't you?
	Yes, I've been on the International Astronomical Union 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.
	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.
	Oh, I'd like to talk about all of that.
	Anyway, since your interview frequently, I interviewed Seth Shostak.
	You must know him.
	He's a very nice fellow and very bright.
	It certainly is.
	We don't agree on everything because I'm more neutral in the SETI question.
	I raise a lot of questions and he's a member of Joe Carter's community of people who are very optimistic about making radio contact.
	You're not as optimistic.
	Oh, no.
	No, I'm not.
	I believe that there are a lot of reasons to think that life, that intelligent life appears to be very rare in the cosmos.
	That's not to say that I don't believe it's out there.
	Of course it's out there.
	Just very rare, not common.
	Well, it pretty much has to be.
	For one thing, take a look at time.
	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... 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 like ours at all?
	Well, actually, the oxygen atmosphere, the chlorophyll way of building up sugars, Yeah, we think of it as the best, of course.
	Well, the amino acids that we use in our DNA happen to be C20 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 has energy
	coming into it and some kind of carbon and nitrogen in it will make the 20 amino acids
	that we use.
	So then I guess you would speculate then that any life that was found would be in some way
	familiar or similar to ours?
	Well, it's likely.
	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 scientist 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 two 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.
	Oh, taunts them?
	Yeah, you know what he says?
	Well, in fact, I'm going to say this, since this is beaming out.
	Ah, go ahead.
	All right, all right.
	Uh, listen, you, um, aren't, these guys are pretty smart, aren't they, right?
	Right.
	Um, are technologies child's play to them?
	Many say.
	Yes, all right.
	And, uh, they've probably been monitoring our broadcasts and stuff like that, right?
	Good guess.
	Which means that there's a good chance that they're listening to my voice right now.
	Well over 500 affiliates, you bet.
	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's 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, you know, doing all sorts of probes on them is really unimpressive.
	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.
	Landing sites, he'll arrange visas of both kinds.
	He'll arrange, uh, 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 gonna keep doing what we've been doing.
	We're gonna snub you, And we're going to spend more money on the Air Force and hope they shoot you down.
	There you go, you silver guys.
	So, a taunt?
	A taunt.
	Because that's all they deserve.
	If any UFO sightings are true... Yes?
	And I don't believe they are, but if any of them are true... You don't believe any of them are true?
	Well, I... I bet they're not true, but listen, I've... Aliens are my stock in trade, both in science and in science fiction.
	I'm on the committees to meet them.
	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?
	Well, there is basic decency.
	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.
	What about the Prime Directive?
	That's exactly my point!
	You're trying to taunt them in here, disregarding the Prime Directive, screwing us up.
	The Prime Directive is an example of how mature we're trying to become.
	But we have, well, whether we talk, fine, we talk about it and we have it on Star Trek, but we don't do it in real life.
	Every remote society that we've touched and found and infiltrated, we've more or less ruined, screwed up totally.
	So, we don't follow the Prime Directive.
	The Prime Directive is very primitive.
	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, David Brin.
	David, you've never, I take it, seen a UFO close up?
	No.
	Flying saucer or anything like that?
	But 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.
	But they may be sent...
	All right, all right.
	Listen, we're at the bottom there.
	Hold the quote right there and we'll pick up on that point when we get back.
	Be right back.
	Once again, David Brin.
	David, you've never, I take it, seen a UFO close up.
	No.
	Blindsauce or anything like that?
	Nothing like it.
	And you generally, as you say, you're even more conceptual.
	I mean, you're more conceptual than I am.
	Well, I wouldn't call myself too conservative in that regard.
	After all, I write stories that are considered to be at the hard, cutting edge scientifically.
	I'm perfectly willing to discuss just about everything.
	Though in the same breath, you seem to be a little bit of a debunker.
	I'll tell you why.
	I'll tell you why.
	I find the universe so much more interesting than the dumb UFO fantasies.
	Right.
	Do you think that the United States possesses anti-gravitic technology?
	Let me tell you why I don't believe any of that stuff.
	But just if you would... No, I don't believe that.
	I don't believe in Roswell.
	I don't believe in Area 51.
	You don't believe in Area 51?
	No, I don't believe in the flying saucer aspect.
	I live near Area 51.
	I believe there are all sorts of funny things going on there.
	I want to just tell you a little story, and you can make of it what you will, alright?
	Several years ago, my wife and I were on the way home from Las Vegas, a quarter mile from
	our house.
	My wife, who was in the passenger seat, I used to have to commute back and forth, so
	I did this every day.
	She saw something over her shoulder at the back of the car and said, what the hell is
	that?
	And we stopped the car and we both got out in a little Geo Metro.
	We both got out and stood on the street.
	We live in a very rural area near Death Valley, a little town called Prom, Nevada.
	I was just there a week ago.
	You were, then you know.
	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, Um, 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, um, 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, uh, it, uh, floated.
	It would be, 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.
	David, that happened.
	Period.
	That happened.
	I don't know how close an encounter you would call that, but real close.
	Let me tell you why I find that more plausible than UFOs.
	But that was a UFO, David.
	Well, of course it was a UFO in the classic sense of it being unidentified and being flying.
	Well, floating.
	Floating.
	I am perfectly willing to concede that the government can keep some secrets temporarily.
	We saw this with stealth fighters and stealth bombers.
	But as I talk about in the transparent society, we are entering into a civilization in which
	it is 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 henchman'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 government keeping
	technology secret.
	The extreme example is UFOs Roswell in particular.
	Fifty 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, 53 years.
	Yeah, the story goes back to engineering, technology and so forth.
	53 years, that is three generations.
	Now, if you were going to study this stuff, you put a high priority to it, right?
	You assign your best people, as many as it took.
	Now, I know a guy who works at Wright-Patterson and he says that no part of the base has been black for that entire
	time.
	It's all shifted around, but that's beside the point.
	It is, because he might not know.
	Well, yeah, of course.
	But he stuck out his lower lip, and he said, I thought I was the best.
	You know, he said, if they've been studying this thing, why was he left out?
	Of course, he could be lying to me.
	Well, okay, how far into it have you looked?
	All right, let me talk about the fundamental sense of this.
	Three generations of our very best people.
	Now, what happens when they turn 65, 70 years old, they move to Arizona, they got a rifle on the back above the window behind their heads in their pickup truck, they are Americans.
	Do you know any scientists, any engineers?
	They are among the most libertarian people around.
	I do know some people that at the end of their life decided to tell the truth, like Colonel Corso.
	I interviewed him some number of times, David.
	Oh, yes, and you know what?
	You know what?
	He doesn't qualify into the category that I'm talking about.
	I interviewed Jesse Marcel's son, who held some of this stuff in his hand.
	I've interviewed a lot of people.
	And not one of them.
	Not Roswell.
	Not one of them comes into the category of the people who would have blown the whistle by now.
	Three generations.
	Three generations, Art, of our very, very best.
	And we would have had to throw hundreds of them at this.
	Hundreds of our very best.
	You're a bright guy.
	I assume that you saw the Air Force several years ago.
	The Air Force had a A press conference in which they actually decided they were going to try and debunk Roswell once and for all.
	Did you see that?
	Yeah.
	You did?
	Yeah.
	Did you see... Let's ask it this way.
	What was your impression of the presentation?
	I found it depressing.
	Depressing?
	Yeah, they certainly didn't put their first team forward.
	They were a bunch of publicity hacks.
	They were excruciatingly dumb and boring to listen to, and I wonder if it was on purpose.
	You do?
	Well, of course.
	Look, I'm not going to say there's no such thing as any conspiracy.
	Oh, really?
	Okay.
	What I am going to say is that the universe is so interesting.
	Real aliens would be so interesting.
	The kinds of things that we're talking about in most of these UFO stories You are tediously dumb and unimaginative.
	It's 1954, schlock science fiction.
	It's not at all like the universe is.
	Show me something that's interesting and my imagination might have something to feed on.
	As it is, I'm going to look at these UFO stories and I'm going to pick them apart.
	And they're so easy to pick apart.
	Phil Klass has been doing it for years.
	Oh, please, Art, show me something.
	No, wait a minute.
	Phil Klass is right up in there with the fellows who did the Air Force presentation.
	I've had Phil Klass on the air several times.
	It's far above.
	Well... Oh, come on.
	The UFO guys try their best to impress Phil Klass.
	He attends all their gatherings.
	They like him.
	Well, of course they like him.
	Don't you know why they like him?
	Go on.
	Well, actually, I just told you why they like him when I made the analogy to the Air Force presentation.
	Well, perhaps.
	I know the guy to be very, very smart.
	Well, of course he's a bright guy, but he takes off on some tangents that have those who would believe smirking.
	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.
	So what I've done is I've backed off and I've talked about, for instance, the excruciatingly stupid behavior that these UFOs, 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, 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.
	This thing that flew over myself and my wife soundlessly, I might add.
	I mean what do you believe about that?
	You don't believe that we have anti-gravitic technology.
	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, Art, my doubt about that is at a different level.
	It doesn't totally defy a 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?
	And it's very quiet.
	Radio waves can convey a great distance.
	Yeah, it seems like a good place for a message from people who would be like us, which you imagine they would be if they're out there at all.
	And who don't consider radio to be like TomTom.
	SETI, I notice now, is moving in a new direction toward some sort of light.
	Isn't that 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.
	This is going to be very useful in finding asteroids that might threaten us.
	One of those just zoomed by us.
	It wasn't that interesting.
	Yes, for a change we heard about it a little bit ahead of time.
	Normally you hear about it after...
	Actually, most of the public did after it happened anyway.
	I heard the stories today.
	Well, we had a very close encounter on Monday.
	We did, on this show, know about it a little ahead of time.
	But the mass public didn't know about it until after it had passed by.
	Now, had it hit... If you subscribe to the right websites nowadays... Yeah, you'd have known.
	But it would have created a hole about two miles in diameter and ruined Earth's day totally.
	Well, it would have ruined Earth today, it would have ruined Earth's year, but it wouldn't have destroyed our civilization.
	That's right.
	A thousand feet is considerably smaller than a thousand meters, which would blast us to the stone age.
	Still, it would have been a bad event.
	Oh, yeah!
	You know, making 911 look like...
	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.
	That's what I talk about in the Transparent Society.
	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.
	And we're going to be getting better and better photographs.
	No, no, no, no, no.
	You don't understand, Art.
	The distance of the reported sightings It's always increasing to the blurry limit of the camera.
	A blurry limit.
	What if we start getting better photographs?
	I'd love it.
	Would you?
	You don't get it.
	I'm on the committees.
	I would love nothing better.
	I would just refuse to be the guy who steps forward with the flag.
	I've seen that movie too many times.
	But I'm on these committees.
	Are you kidding?
	I'd be on people?
	I'd be one of the guys assigned to meet these guys?
	I'd be the first to taste their cuisine!
	I'm Californian!
	Oh, would you actually be first on a committee to meet them, do you think?
	Oh no, I know the people who would be first on the committee.
	There's a former diplomat named Michael Michaud, who's written 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 in interesting people, and the proof of that is you and I, Art Bell.
	You are familiar, are you not, with Brookings Report?
	I'm sorry, which one is that?
	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.
	Yes, I'm familiar with that.
	It's the biggest pile of lard I ever saw.
	Lard.
	Oh, it's awful.
	Lard is a euphemism for what I really mean.
	We have been hearing this... Now, are you saying that based on your own reaction should there be contact or based on what you really believe a society as a whole would do?
	Oh, of course.
	I grew up in California and I know what Californians would do if an alien spaceship landed in a parking mall.
	The closest alien... 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 plot.
	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.
	No, not jerks, but people do, after all, have belief systems.
	That doesn't cause them to be jerks, in my mind, that would be threatened, depending on the nature of what landed.
	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.
	Right.
	Well, that's exactly what would happen, only the National Guard would be facing outward, trying to protect the... The aliens.
	The aliens from people running and screaming, um, 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.
	You know, the devil.
	Some would.
	Lucifer.
	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.
	I have more faith in my fellow Americans.
	Well, good.
	Stay right there.
	there. We're up to 5 megapixels now, so those UFOs are going to really have to get out there.
	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?
	Well, no author is completely soured on Hollywood.
	They can always sweeten a deal with money.
	As far as The Postman is concerned, when they make a movie of one of your books, you want five things.
	You want it to at least be morally related to what you were trying to say.
	Sure.
	You want it to be exactly what you were trying to say.
	Of course.
	You want it to be a huge success as a movie.
	You want it to make a lot of money, and you want it to be treated well by those Hollywood people.
	I got one out of five.
	Which one was that?
	It was the most important one.
	It was the only one that really mattered.
	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-bioterror world.
	Which, you know, he was just four years early.
	Yeah, he sure was.
	But the thing that he absolutely nailed was the basic decency and the basic moral heart of what I was trying to say.
	He didn't capture very much of the intelligence of the book.
	But it's visually a gorgeous movie.
	Almost as beautiful visually as Dances with Wolves, and I think it should have been treated better.
	Were you present while it was unfolded?
	I showed up for about two days, and they treated me with minimal courtesy.
	They never consulted me.
	So they were fools in that regard.
	But, you know, people tend to take themselves too seriously.
	And people tend to have too high expectations.
	And I try to be...
	I try to be a grown-up about this.
	After all, how many people get a movie?
	True.
	Well, I hope the money part turned out right.
	It turned out all right.
	The main thing is that a lot more people got to enjoy the book itself and send me messages saying that the book's better.
	I'm always glad to hear that.
	All right.
	I'm going to be most interested in what the audience has to say to you.
	Uh, you might imagine that some of them, uh, will not necessarily be in agreement with you, with regard to the fact that we may or may not be, uh, visited right now.
	So, prepare yourself for that.
	I am prepared.
	Yeah, you sound like you are.
	So, uh, here we go.
	First time caller online, you're on the air with David Britt.
	Hi, this is, uh, Devin in Maui.
	Maui, Hawaii.
	Hi, Devin in Hawaii.
	Yes.
	Doing it.
	Mr. Brigham, a big fan of yours.
	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.
	Well, thank you very much.
	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 this supernatural That can date back thousands 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.
	Excellent, excellent question, and it really latches onto something that my wife noticed one day when she picked up a book, Whitley Stryber's book on aliens, and it had one of these greys on it, and she said, huh, when I just 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.
	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 taunting rant.
	You can download it from DavidBrin.com.
	Art in particular will get a giggle out of it because it's about a late night talk show host.
	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 the 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.
	It's a sea change.
	It's a total change in our direction.
	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.
	Because every culture believed it, and every culture wasn't visited.
	Every culture believes in a golden age, and they can point to no physical evidence.
	It's zero.
	So, the combination of this tends to make one believe... That's because they're good!
	Well, if they're good, fine.
	Then leave us alone, is what I say.
	And people who go to davidbrin.com can see something else very interesting.
	A guy named Alan Tuff at the University of Toronto figured out that there was one kind of study that hadn't been tried.
	And that is the notion that they or their machine emissaries might already be in the solar system, lurking and reading our internet right now.
	So he set up an internet site saying, hello aliens.
	This is for you.
	This is a discussion group.
	We invite you to join.
	Instead of having to beam the message into outer space, it simply says, here's a website.
	And he invited me to join.
	And I put on a web my contribution to this site that lists 11 reasons why aliens might be lurking and reading our websites but not talking to us and discussing those 11 reasons.
	And what are some of the reasons?
	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 Paola.
	The thing is, you see, I am not skeptical about UFOs because of closed-mindedness.
	I'm skeptical about UFOs because of open-mindedness.
	There are so many possibilities And one of them has to be that some of these sightings are real.
	And I've never denied that.
	I have never said.
	Well, you sort of said, but they can all be just explained away.
	No, I never said that.
	I never said that.
	What I said was that I'm willing to concede that a certain fraction of these might be little silver guys in 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.
	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 non-fiction 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.
	Because they behave like jerks.
	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, that's unfriendly.
	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 Uh, remote societies that we encounter.
	In which case, somebody needs to taunt them, and I just did.
	Well, uh, you did taunt them, yes.
	Wildcard Line, you're on the air with David Brin.
	Hello.
	Good evening, gentlemen.
	This is Brad the Paperboy.
	And where are you?
	Morton, Illinois, listening on 1470 WMBD.
	Yes, sir.
	I, I was wondering, Mr. Brin, it seemed like, um, 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.
	It's a good question.
	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 a secret, but then did allude to the fact that we could keep secrets about, say, anti-gravity.
	Well, no, I didn't 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.
	Yes, 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, as of 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.
	Art Bell 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.
	That's a better, I like that taunt better.
	East of the Rockies, you're on air with David Brin, hello.
	Hey, how you doing?
	My name's Ken.
	I'm calling from Lexington.
	Yes, sir.
	And my question to your guest and to you, R2, has to do with vent waters.
	Ah, yes.
	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, uh, 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.
	He's referring to the Bentwaters case, and I'll bet you know all about it.
	Well, actually, you're gonna have to inform me about this, Hart.
	Oh.
	My goodness.
	So it might be that I know it under a different name, but... No, no, no, no.
	Bent Waters is correct.
	You know, we really can't take the time right now to lay out the whole Bent Water 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 wax and witnesses and the Lieutenant Colonel and all the rest of it.
	And it's a very famous case.
	It's a...
	The thing that I can do in this short time is, and the thing that I can do with both my fiction and the non-fiction, 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, you are manipulated throughout that movie to worry about the dark government because the music is set that way.
	Yes.
	But when you finally meet the guy with the keys, he's Elliot, grown up.
	He's the guy qualified to make contact.
	Right.
	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... Well, you fall in love with E.T.
	Well, yeah, and you're all intense about the humans chasing through the forest.
	We're on a break here.
	All right.
	See if you can find any guns.
	There are no guns.
	Humans are just using flashlights trying to find out what's going on.
	Hold it right there.
	David Brin is my guest.
	I'm Mark Bell.
	This, of course, is Coast to Coast AM.
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	This is Coast to Coast with Art Bell.
	Afternoons at 3.
	It's the Dan York Show on WPRO.
	Give him a week and you'll be hooked.
	On AM 630 WPRO.
	This is Coast to Coast AM with Art Bell on the Premier Radio Network.
	It certainly is.
	We're taking calls for David Brin.
	Very, very interesting program in so many ways.
	Stimulating.
	Should make you all think out there, and I'm sure you're doing that, aren't you?
	So, stay right where you are.
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	I know my time.
	My daughter.
	My son.
	She's just like me.
	He knows exactly when to leave his girlfriends to beat curfew.
	He tells her friends he gets to see when he knows he gets naked.
	She thinks her thighs are too big.
	He sits in that same pizza place every day after school with the same guys.
	No, my daughter.
	This kind of street, he's just...
	She spits when she talks.
	She breaks her neck for every grade she gets.
	I know he hates me sometimes.
	He knows kids.
	He knows punks.
	Who take drugs and it scares me to death.
	But I know she doesn't do them.
	How do I know?
	I know because I ask.
	Every day.
	Kids with involved parents are less likely to try drugs.
	So ask them.
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	Where?
	Every day.
	It's not festering.
	It's parenting.
	Questions.
	They're the anti-drug.
	Call 1-800-788-2800 for more information.
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	America.
	A friend of mine always waited for airline tickets to go on sale before she planned a
	vacation until I told her denial isn't just the name of a river in Egypt.
	Now I'm going to tell you why.
	No matter how big those travel sales are, they won't beat the name-your-own-price prices of Priceline.com.
	Sale shmale!
	It's time to pack up, log on, and take off!
	Priceline.com.
	Find out for yourself what millions of seasoned travelers already know.
	Back into the night once again. David Brin is my guest and we're going to continue on the telephones with him.
	There's been plenty of setup here, so if you don't have questions, and you're just not thinking, are you?
	All right, David, once again, are you ready?
	Ready.
	All right, here they come.
	East of the Rockies, you're on the air with David Brin.
	Good morning.
	How are you guys tonight?
	We're all right, sir.
	Where are you?
	Tuscaloosa, Alabama.
	I was going to put this question to you guys and you might have to stretch your imagination a little bit here now.
	That's what we're here for.
	Okay.
	Did you ever consider the possibility that the dead may be waiting to be rescued by the living?
	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.
	You thought about that one, David?
	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 parallel some of the religious notions of resurrection of
	the dead.
	Now on a more near-term basis, there is the 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 heads frozen.
	I've interviewed many of those people.
	I know several of them.
	Until some future time when the exact location of every synapse and every neuron in the brain
	could be mapped, 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.
	The 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 will be $30.92 and I've started doing a little survey by saying, may you live until that year.
	Somebody says $39.40, may you live until that year.
	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.
	This is very, very interesting because it's one of the few cases in which I'm rendered completely speechless.
	I have no theory to explain why men and women give this different answer.
	I met a lot.
	Well, I'm more interested in the Home Depot people.
	Oh, because they hang around men.
	Oh, I see.
	I hope I at least abused the color.
	In a sense, my new novel, Kiln People, and again, let's emphasize that's K-I-L-N.
	It'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.
	But doesn't killing people, fascinating as it is, fall short of the application of the technology at that point?
	Oh, well, I explore lots of different possibilities of that.
	Oh, you do?
	All sorts of possibilities.
	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.
	Well for one thing, what about being able to download your mind into different kinds
	of bodies, animal bodies, dolphin bodies, the opposite sex.
	Why would we have more empathy with each other?
	If you could spend a couple of days with the opposite sex, you'd sure learn a thing or
	two.
	You would.
	West of the Rockies, you're on the air with David Brin.
	Hello.
	Hello.
	This is Steve in Idaho.
	Yes, Steve.
	I'm listening to KDIO.
	K-I-D-O, actually, I think.
	K-I-D-O, yes.
	Yes, sir.
	Yes, and I'm a long time fan of both of you.
	I'm a long time fan of both of you.
	Thank you.
	I've read your books ever since I was in high school and Star Tide 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?
	I tried to limit it down to two.
	As a kid, I grew up on a ranch and caught a fledgling sparrow hawk.
	Since it's a falcon, I tried to train it.
	I always thought how wonderful it would be if it was smart enough through some surgery to be smart.
	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.
	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?
	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 so foreign that it would just short circuit our ability to comprehend them.
	Two excellent questions.
	Boy, you have great listeners, Art.
	Oh, I do, sure.
	All right, well, the first one is the moral aspect of the possibility of eating animals or misusing animals that 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 and parrots and sea lions are probably over the line in having this potential.
	One could make a 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 with whether or not, if we meet aliens, could we conceivably understand them?
	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.
	We hear this cliché again and again and again.
	The alien is going to be incomprehensible to us.
	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, and we met some strange cosmic weird Cthulhu 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.
	Easily.
	Easily, 2-3%.
	What makes you think that if Californians were in fact Uh, the unintended ambassadors of the entire human race that we simply would not be sterilized as a planet immediately.
	It would depend on which Californians and how tolerant they were.
	The point is, I use Californians as a metaphor for Americans, which is a metaphor for Western civilization.
	Sure.
	Um, I think that we would hunger for the alien.
	It shows in all of our movies.
	If we met somebody we didn't understand, we'd keep trying.
	Caller, anything else?
	Well, yes, if I may ask one more question.
	It's regarding the, I believe the mummy's name was Harvey?
	Herbie.
	Herbie, yes.
	Yes, well, you know, this is one of the problems with dealing with a guy who does not want to just write one series.
	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, Killing 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.
	All right, my friend.
	Thank you very much.
	Best of luck.
	Take care.
	First Time Caller line, you're on the air with David Brin.
	Hi.
	Hello, Art.
	Hello.
	Hey, uh, I'm kind of confused.
	I listen to you on, uh, I've got that XM satellite radio now?
	Yes.
	And you're carried by Clear Channel International, I believe?
	That's correct.
	Or something like that.
	No, that's XM.
	Anyway.
	You've got it.
	Okay, I'm having a time lag.
	The show that I'm listening to is you with David Hoagland?
	Richard Hoagland.
	Richard Hoagland, yes.
	I'm sorry.
	It's Time Travel.
	I know Richard.
	Uh, there you are.
	Uh, Time Travel, indeed.
	Yes, they are not carrying it live yet, sir, so, uh, I don't know what to tell you.
	It's just not happened yet.
	Okay.
	I apologize.
	The reason I called mainly is just to thank you for such a quality program.
	I drive a truck for a living and I work the night shift mostly.
	Okay.
	It's really just a great thing to be able to listen and keep your mind focused on something other than driving all the time.
	I really enjoy your show and your You're very kind.
	I agree with you.
	Driving all night is the only way to do it.
	Music will never cut it.
	You'll fall asleep eventually.
	Do you have a question for David?
	Well, my biggest question about aliens, I guess, would be if they're so well-known by our government and our government is believed to know so much about them, why Are they not more known to the general public?
	All right, 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.
	Well, I have a sliding scale of what I believe.
	I don't believe anything absolutely.
	I've got an open mind even though I'm on the official committee 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
	in all my works, and that is that we are more likely to be a wise civilization if we openly
	discuss stuff.
	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 DavidBrenn.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.
	Well, of course, scientists would be Well, they'd be thrown, they would feel it intensely.
	They would be fantastically thrilled, they'd be curious, some of them would be deeply worried
	that all of their knowledge would be made obsolete overnight.
	The best scientists would be instantly thrilled and want whatever, they hunger to find out
	As a matter of curiosity, what percentage would you make that out to be?
	It's a sliding scale.
	One goes into the other.
	When I was at Caltech, I knew some of the best in the world.
	They all had artistic hobbies.
	They were all irascibly independent.
	You read the stories of Richard Feynman.
	During the Manhattan Project, he couldn't keep a secret.
	He broke into all the states.
	They had to let him go.
	Because he was too valuable.
	Well, again, though, the question was, what percentage would you guess would be in the thrilled category?
	I would say that at least half of all the scientists in the world and engineers would at least feel some thrill.
	OK.
	And I'd say that the top 20% would bend heaven and earth to meet an alien.
	Oh, OK.
	Let's see.
	Wild Card Line, you're on the air with David Brin.
	Hello, where are you, please?
	I'm Craig from Peoria.
	Hello, Craig.
	Good morning, gentlemen.
	Well, I've got a question and maybe kind of a comment.
	You mentioned earlier about how the pixelation and these UFOs seem to be getting further and further out from our cameras.
	As the cameras get better, they get further out, he said, yes.
	My question is, he doesn't really believe, or you don't believe, that we have been technically contacted by aliens.
	What's the possibility of us being the first?
	Someone or something has to have been the first somewhere.
	Maybe that might be the reason why we're always trying to search for our God or our gods or whatever.
	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 the 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.
	Well, and or even going a step further, there is no other life.
	In other words, we are alone.
	In which case, what we'll do is what Americans dream of doing in science fiction.
	We'll create the alien.
	We'll create the alien by creating artificial intelligence and computers.
	We'll create the alien by uplifting dolphins and chimpanzees and other animals.
	We'll create the alien culturally as we're doing right now as we speak in every high school, every community in America.
	Maybe we'll just uplift the Pentium 34 chip.
	There you go.
	Because we hunger for the alien.
	Listen, you know what?
	We're out of time.
	I mean it like the show's over.
	So what a pleasure it has been to interview you.
	You're a lot of fun, David, and I would like to have you back sometime.
	You're a treasure, and people can look up any of these things that they want on davidbrin.com.
	Thank you, my friend.
	Good luck.
	Good luck.
	Good luck, indeed.
	Luck we all need.
	All right, folks, that's it.
	For tonight, anyway.
	Tomorrow we continue the trek through the nights.
	From the high desert, I'm Art Bell.

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