William R. Alschuler, a PhD astronomer, debunks UFO claims like the "Paulding Light" and Bell’s Pahrump sighting, citing physics—silent, high-speed objects would defy known aerodynamics unless exploiting exotic space warps. He highlights SETI’s struggles: pulsed radar signals may vanish in cosmic noise within 30–40 light years, while laser-based detection (Harvard’s Paul Horowitz) remains unconfirmed despite plausible carbon-based life models. Alschuler warns of asteroid threats—even a one-mile-wide rock could devastate Manhattan—and dismisses NASA’s Earth-orbit shift proposal as energy-prohibitive. Skepticism prevails unless hard evidence emerges, yet his work underscores how science, not speculation, must guide cosmic mysteries and planetary risks. [Automatically generated summary]
Great American Southwest London, good evening, good morning, good afternoon, wherever you may be in all 24 time zones of the world.
Here's this program.
How are you?
I'm Mark Bell, and this program is coast to coast 10 a.m. in the next hour.
William Al Schuler, who is Professor Al Schuler, I guess I should say, who is an astronomer, is going to be commenting on the likelihood of alien life, what it might be like, and such subjects.
Having an astronomer comment on all of this will be very, very interesting, won't it?
So, welcome.
Let's look at what's going on out there, shall we?
War news.
U.S. warplanes pounded terrorist hideouts in eastern Afghanistan on Monday and bombing raids aimed at striking Osama bin Laden's die-hard supporters, but they still don't have him.
They still don't have him.
The military is looking to cut back what it's doing over the U.S. It has been flying and flying and flying and flying at a cost of about $324 million.
The round-the-clock patrols over our skies designed to deter any terrorists may beginning to strain both the planes and the people involved in trying to do it.
So they're going to be cutting back on some of that.
Hopefully, the reason to cut back is a sound one, meaning the threat is less.
Under the category of what comes around goes around, or what goes around then comes around, I guess, a Palestinian militia leader who boasted of shooting Israelis was killed himself when a bomb exploded as he emerged from his West Bank hideout and walked along a quiet street on Monday.
So live by and die by, I guess, huh?
Enron, speaking of dying, there's another Enron story tonight, Washington.
An Enron employee warned the company chairman in August that, and this is a quote, we will implode in a wave of accounting scandals unless the company halted certain practices that eventually sent it into bankruptcy.
Our stocks down 96 points on the Dow, the Tokyo Exchange at this hour following suit and dropping like a rock.
Again, more stories.
It seems to be a sure thing now.
El Niño is on the way back.
The periodic warming of the surface of the Pacific Ocean that can trigger severe worldwide weather and environmental disasters has been observed to be building up by none less than a U.S. government agency.
The phenomena brought droughts and floods causing thousands of deaths and serious malnutrition across Latin America, southern Africa, and the Pacific region during its last appearance.
That was 97, 98.
Just millions of people losing their homes in China, while Hurricane Mitch devastated Honduras, a phenomena caused serious delays to the monsoons in India, severe flooding in Bangladesh.
It impacts the whole planet.
Scientists believe that the small rise in temperature in the Indian and Pacific Oceans was enough to also provoke a, get this folks, a severe cold wave in Europe in October of 98 and a crippling ice storm in the southern U.S. So everybody gets affected when El Niño comes around and it's coming around once again.
It just doesn't seem like it's been long enough, but I guess it has.
Didn't we just finish talking about El Niño?
I thought.
And here's a puzzle for you.
The Antarctic has cooled during the past 35 years despite worldwide temperature rises.
According to a study published today, finding challenges the belief that global warming is raising temperatures across the whole of the southern continent, but the authors accept that some Antarctic hotspots have got warmer, actually, over the past few decades.
So it's really, really weird what's going on.
They're saying overall, they now think that the Antarctic is colder, but in certain areas, specific areas, it's hotter.
So I don't know what category to put that one in.
Now, I want you to listen very carefully.
I know there are a lot of truckers in my audience.
And it doesn't matter whether you're a trucker or not, you will appreciate this story.
But if you are a trucker, I think you will appreciate it all the more.
It comes from somebody I will call Mark.
He kindly supplies his last name.
Actually, I'd love to talk to him on the air.
But he is very good at writing all of this down.
Listen to this.
My name is Mark, and I'm a truck driver from Brayman, Oklahoma.
That's B-R-A-M-A-N, Oklahoma.
I listened to your Ghost-to-Ghost program last October and have a story sure to raise the hairs on your neck, but didn't have the time to pull over and call in that night.
Not to mention some of the stories that I've heard that night were anything but scary anyway, but here it is.
It was three years ago in late January.
I was on a run from Oklahoma City to Anaheim, California.
It was 2 a.m.
Westbound on I-40, approaching Flagstaff, Arizona.
As I climbed the mountain pass, I ran into the heavy snow.
Actually, it had been snowing for some time.
The road was a solid sheet of ice.
Any trucker is nightmare.
So I had to reduce my speed to a mere crawl.
Figured I could reach the truck stop at Belmont and I'd be okay, so I kept going.
So I made my way up the mountain and reached the top at about 2.45 a.m.
The east and westbound lanes in that area are separated by a median that is heavily timbered and both east and westbound are at different elevations.
As I topped the rise, I saw heavy mist coming from the trees in the median.
As I got closer, I realized it wasn't mist, it was smoke.
I saw a dim yellow flame rise above the brush, barely visible over the edge of the drop.
When I pulled parallel to this flame, I clearly saw what it was.
It was a car upside down.
The glint of light on the still spinning rims was unmistakable.
Now, stopping a loaded semi on an ice-glazed road is one thing no trucker will do willingly or without damn good reason, because you may not get started again, and there you will stay until help comes or the road thaws.
From what I saw, I felt the risk was acceptable, so I pulled off onto the shoulder and stopped.
I made my way towards the car.
It was upside down, and other than a few dents, it seemed to be in relatively good shape.
A small flame was burning under the oil pan, releasing black smoke that was nauseating.
So I made my way closer.
I heard muffled movement and hushed, almost inaudible voices.
I ran through deep snow to the passenger side and looked in.
Two people, a man in his 30s and a younger woman were there.
At seeing me, they started shouting, help us, please.
They were both wearing their seatbelts, which kept them suspended upside down.
I tried to open both doors with no success.
I told them I was going for something to pry the door open with, and I'd be right back.
I ran to the truck, fished out my largest pry bar and some rope, returned to the car.
By now, the whole motor compartment was ablaze.
I pried with all my might, but the door wouldn't budge.
I tried to crawl into the car, ripping my coat in the process.
In the attempt to cut their seatbelts and drag them out, no luck.
The top was caved in just enough to thwart any attempts at entry.
So I told them to hold tight.
I was going to try to radio for help.
As I withdrew, I felt extreme heat on the back of my neck.
The fire was spreading rapidly along the bottom of the vehicle as I ran.
Or rather, I ran as fast as I could to the semi.
All the while, I could hear the screams coming from the couple.
I knew their time was running out.
And quickly, I tried frantically to raise someone on the CB, but all I got was static.
The flames were lighting up the clearing now.
My mind raced trying to decide what to do, and then suddenly, without any warning, the flames went out.
Puzzled and a little relieved, I made my way back to the car.
When I arrived at the spot, there was no sign of the vehicle, no smoke, nothing.
I was sure I had just ran to the wrong spot since the snow was very heavy and visibility not the greatest.
I searched for five minutes using my truck as a point of reference.
Soon I tripped over something.
It was the round plate-shaped rock I had put my knees on to look into the car.
Well, I have to tell you, I've never been so scared in my whole life.
I made a mad dash for the semi.
Once in, locked the doors, tried calling on my CB, still wasn't working.
After a few minutes, got the truck rolling, and in half an hour, I was safely at the Belmont truck stop.
A waitress I knew greeted me as I walked into the restaurant, and I'm sure I must have looked terrible because she kept asking if I was all right.
We sat and talked.
After a while, I did calm down and told her my story.
Her face went white and her eyes wide.
She told me of a couple of few years ago, a couple from a few years back.
They were somewhere up from the northeast.
They were on their way to visit relations in California when they got caught in a snowstorm up on Flagstaff.
They lost control, crashed.
The wreck trapped them and the car caught fire.
No one was out that night.
The weather wasn't too bad.
They were found the next day burned to death.
I still drive, but I gave up long-haul driving.
I don't stray more than a few hundred miles from home.
That day, those images, it'll haunt me for the rest of my life.
And, Mark, if you would like to get hold of me and talk on the air about this, I would love to speak with you.
Actually, I've been, you're not going to believe this, I've been working on my cart rack, so I've got them on the floor.
When I work on my cart rack, The only way I can fix this thing is with glue.
Super glue.
And you all know the record I've had with super glue.
As a matter of fact, since, so I've got them all on the floor, since the horrible super glue incident, which occurred to me, I've had several others.
I do not have luck with super glue.
There is simply not a dispenser that I have found faultless.
And, you know, I've been sent some good stuff.
Somebody sent me like a little, it's sort of like a woman's nail polish thing, you know, and it dips down into the super glue.
The trouble with that is that after a while they fray a little bit and it flips the super glue into the air and you're as likely to get it on you as any other way.
And then there were some other super glue.
You know, there are lots of good ideas.
I mean, people have good ideas, but super, the very nature of super glue is that it will get you no matter what.
You know, as you're holding it, as you squirt it, as it, whatever, you're going to be picking super glue off yourself for a while.
Well, that day I super glued my lips together, and then in a frantic effort to get back on the air again, actually ripped a piece of my lip off.
It was disgusting.
But when your lip is actually glued together and you're a talk show host, you have to act quickly.
All right.
This story has been around for some time, and it comes from Siberia.
And it has been in several mainstream media.
I think it was Reuters or AP or one of the news services anyway ran this story about a group of Russian scientists that drilled a hole.
I don't know what they were drilling for or why.
I think the story made mention of it.
Actually, we've had this on the website before.
They drilled the world's deepest hole.
And somebody heard something, or for some reason, they became suspicious that they were hearing something they ought not.
So they lowered microphones into the hole.
This sound, this audio I have, is allegedly that recording.
Now, again, this was in a legitimate wire service, and I was provided this audio by an anonymous donor.
Actually, it was not anonymous, the person who sent this, as I recall, now that I think about it, we had it up there for a while.
And it was represented as being the legitimate audio that came from that microphone lowered into that hole.
And that's what the caller was talking about, and here it is.
And I'm calling regarding the sound of the microphone that was dropped into the hole that you had mentioned.
I had sent you an email last February about that.
And using the Pro Tools 5.1 software by DigiDesign and the Bruno and Echo plug-ins, it's possible to create sounds similar to that, including placing a Doppler effect on the track.
I'm sure that you can do anything with anything, sir, just like it's in fact probably more easily than fooling around with photography, you know.
unidentified
That's true.
But the point is, I've worked with that software, and for one of my musical pieces for background ambient sounds, I did do something very similar to that.
So it's fairly easy to do.
You have the control of digital, but you can get sounds that have been generated in the past by analog synthesizers.
You know, since you mentioned it, actually, if you've ever heard the market on one of their really, really bad days and covers them, you know, when the market's in sort of a crash situation, they'll always go down to the floor.
Well, yes, it does include UPS because there's nowhere to deliver to.
So yes, I'm afraid, you know, it's just, it's ruined it, and I wonder when we are going to be all feeling safe enough, particularly public people, to accept mail.
I don't know what the answer to that is, but I'll let you know.
unidentified
Well, you said you've got quite a complete song list.
How about if I tell you some of the titles, and these are ones that are picked out, they kind of fit with some of the themes on the show.
You know, I should have commented on that at the top of the hour because it was probably, in some ways, the biggest piece of news in the last day or so, and it was a shock.
Now, let me tell you something.
They don't tell us a hell of a lot about presidential medical conditions.
I think that's something that for long before I was born, there's been a tradition about, you know, if the president has a condition, they don't talk about it.
Something happens, they rarely talk about it.
Now, this they talked about.
I guess they had no choice in view of what happened to his face.
But it sounded pretty serious.
And I guess potentially fatal.
You know, it could be fatal, something like that.
So I haven't heard who was there, whether someone hindlicked him or what happened.
Just that, you know, his blood pressure went through the floor suddenly, and it would, as you were choking on something like that.
Of course, they look him over, and I guess he's okay.
But boy, that's pretty scary stuff.
And because of the presidential cloak of you only hear what they want you to hear, we may not know exactly what really did happen, may never know until someone writes a book.
Well, you know, there have been a number of scientists who have worked with things like that scientist did, molecular biology, you know, on a lot of these pretty scary things, and they've ended up dead now.
You know, what's making people nervous and a little bit suspicious is that so many people working in this area of molecular biology science have been dying in a series of rather bizarre circumstances.
unidentified
Yeah.
Well, I know the medical examiner, you know, was talking about how he had been drinking that night.
That could have easily happened from the scenarios that I've seen before.
Again, I think the heightened suspicion is that at this particular time when the nation is so concerned about it, right?
About the possibility of some sort of bug being unleashed upon us.
Naturally, when you have a bunch of people in this field that are showing up dead under rather unusual circumstances, and particularly a number of them, it makes us a little itchy.
Then you're going to want to catch that in the repeat.
Yes, thank you very much.
This whole thing about lights or plasma balls, if you will, is something to consider.
Plasma balls.
The most recent science on this is they are discovering these plasma balls are able to sustain themselves in the atmosphere and even grow in strength in the atmosphere, but at the bare minimum sustain themselves, and that defies all laws of physics.
Anything that generates something like that, you could imagine lightning doing it or something or another.
It would be a process that would slowly lessen until finally it exploded or winked out or the energy was used or whatever.
Well, I don't really have that real strong feeling, but I got a feeling something's going to happen, and it doesn't seem like it has anything to do with 9-11 terrorists, but I think it's something from outside, how do I explain it?
Like a comet or meteor or something coming towards us or something.
Because I keep having this recurring dream of it's been coming on for the last three or four years, and it keeps refining itself, you know, and you get more awareness.
All right, Dr. William R. Al Shuler has a Ph.D. in astronomy from the University of California at Santa Cruz and received his BA in astronomy at Harvard College.
Dr. Alshuler has extensive college teaching experience in the sciences, holography, Lippmann photography, energy conservation, and solar building design.
He is founder and principal of Future Museums.
That's a consulting firm specializing in the design of exhibits in museums with a science or technology content.
He's recently served as consultant to the California Science Senator, Asset Senator, Center, and the Getty Education Institute for Curriculum Development that combines art and science.
He has been author or editor on the following.
Listen to this.
The Microverse.
UFOs and Aliens.
First Contact.
The Ultimate Dinosaur.
Are We Alone in the Cosmos?
And most recently, The Science of UFOs.
He is currently a science professor at California Institute of the Arts.
Professor, it is, I suppose, I've got to ask right away, normally, and believe me, I've interviewed a lot of astronomers, people up at Griffith Observatory and a lot of different places, a lot of astronomers, really people up in your class from an academic point of view, and they generally are unwilling to pretty much discuss any of this at all.
I am because I'm really interested in discussing matters of science and things related to science with the general public.
I've devoted most of my life and education to teaching classes for non-science students.
And I got started in this at a relatively early age.
I actually got started thinking about astronomy when I was in grammar school.
I had a school principal who came around every year, and this was in the early 1950s, and lectured class annually about what was going to be the space program before there was a space program.
And by the time I graduated from eighth grade, I pretty much knew I wanted to be an astronomer.
When I was in high school, I was in a summer science program.
And I was at a college in the East where not only were high school students in a special program for students interested in science, but some grammar school teachers were in parallel programs at the same school.
And I worn my way into the good graces of a graduate student who was a teaching assistant for the teachers program and asked to see some of their exams, which probably he shouldn't have allowed me to see, but he did.
And then I discovered to my surprise that some very good teachers, one of whom was from my old grammar school and my younger brother had as a teacher and I knew was absolutely excellent, did not know as much astronomy as I did and didn't do as good a job on writing tests as I did.
And I didn't think I was such a hot shot in any of that, just very interested.
And I was really rather surprised and at that point decided that really someone should take on the job of making sure that the people who weren't going into the sciences had some real grasp on what the sciences were about.
It seems as though those who succeed in any area of professional endeavor almost always, not always, but almost always, know where they're headed at a very early age and almost are consumed by it.
And those seem to be the people that succeed in their various areas of endeavor, I have noticed.
The rule seems to be that people are just consumed suddenly by it at a very young age, and it never stops.
Okay, lots and lots to talk about.
Before we do that, I want to ask you, last Monday, the Earth had a pretty close encounter with some rock that came within a couple of moon lengths or something of Earth, and I suppose in astronomical terms, pretty close.
The ones that are coming right at us represent a pretty difficult detection problem because since they're headed straight down our throats, generally the clue is you see a star in a location you didn't expect which is getting brighter and brighter.
If it's headed across us then you see something moving across the background stars and it's a much easier task to detect it.
Yeah, I mean there are different degrees of this and of course if we're talking about two things in quite different orbits, it might in fact move slowly across the background stars.
But it's really headed straight for us.
That's not usually going to be a huge motion across the sky.
There is a patrol going on right now trying to find and catalog all of the objects in the solar system which have orbits that cross the orbit of Earth.
Well, it'll be one of the harder ones, but remember that if it's on an orbit which intersects us in the future but not immediately, it may represent an easier detection problem.
Yes, of course, but if it's just coming around for the first time or we see it for the first time, but it's not going to hit us this time around, but the orbit shows up as, you know, the next pass or two passes from now, it's going to come real close.
We might not have a difficult time getting it this time around.
There's somewhat of a debate about how big a danger it is.
People have estimated how many objects are floating around in the solar system that are really possible dangers and how many we've catalogued out of this.
I'm not sure I want to commit myself on that, but I think the number of planetoids that have been cataloged is now getting in the range of a couple of thousand.
And the total number is up maybe five times that by estimate.
I forget only like 300 meters or something like that.
But they said that it would have made a hole a couple of miles deep and taken out a good medium-sized city and, you know, totally would have been a mess.
Would have been a mess, yeah.
So it doesn't take a five-mile rock to ruin our day.
Back in my misspent youth, one summer when I was working for the Adler Planetarium in Chicago, I walked out the door of the planetarium at dusk at the end of my working day.
And as I usually did, I sort of looked around, and it's in a beautiful sight right at the shore of Lake Michigan, just sort of outboard of the Museum of Natural History.
And you look back towards the west, and you see all of the water, all of the skyline, all the beautiful buildings, and you look east and you're looking out over Lake Michigan.
And I happen to look east, and hanging in the sky towards the southeast was a rather bright white disk with no features and no real shadowing.
Absolutely discernibly a disk, something that was not too different in diameter, apparent diameter from a full moon.
And it was silent, and it wasn't really moving.
And I stood there and looked at it for a while and sort of ran through my head the catalog of things that might be, and no obvious answer popped up.
Then I decided that if I was seeing this, then a good chunk of Chicago was seeing it.
And it was a good chance that someone had called the planetarium switchboard and someone inside, who was not me, had figured out what it was.
So I went back in, and sure enough, somebody had done a little bit of work, and it turned out it was a balloon below which was hanging, though I couldn't see it, a gondola which held a good cosmic ray experiment launched by the University of Chicago.
The whole thing hung there silently, and of course it slowly drifted along, very slowly, and a few days later I read in the paper that it had come down in Texas, which was pretty much what they were expecting.
So if you'd been an average Joe and you could not have walked back into the planetarium, most people can't just walk into a planetarium, you might have, to this very day, you might have imagined that you saw a flying saucer.
When you look out into the sky and you look at all those stars, and now I hear we're discovering increasing numbers of planets about the stars, makes life more likely, or the possibility of life, you would think, more likely.
I understand we're only spotting the biggest planets, but that would figure that our ability to first see them would include the biggest ones, and then later we'll see the smaller ones, all probability.
And in fact, we've already got a couple of cases where there are smaller planets detectable around other stars, and in at least one case, there's really good evidence that there's more than one planet traveling around a particular star.
In those cases, you can see that the first planet discovered was the biggest, generally the one that was closest into its sun, for a reason which I can explain, and then the next ones which followed were smaller and or further away.
You look at the spectrum of a star, and you can see generally lots and lots of line features, dark absorption from the elements of the star's atmosphere.
And you can see this in the sun.
In fact, in the sun, there are thousands and thousands of them.
And if you have a big enough spectroscope, you can easily see these when you spread the spectrum out.
If you have an extremely high-precision spectrograph, and this is the advance which has allowed the detection of these planets, of which I believe there are around now 70 announced.
Yeah, I just looked at the planetary encyclopedia on the web, and people can easily go check this if they want to do a search.
Just do a search on extrasolar planets, and you can see the catalog.
And they're mostly pretty well confirmed in that there's years of observations on them, and in some cases, more than one observer has seen them.
And with a spectroscope of really high precision, if the star you're looking at is moving in a cyclical fashion, for example, in response to something like a Jupiter traveling around it, then its lines shift to the blue and the red back and forth with every orbit.
And if there are two planets, then you see two periods in the shifts, and it's a little more complicated.
Based then on what they have already found, is it possible to mathematically make a fair guess, you know, if you extend it to all we see in terms of stars, and then can we make a fair guess on how likely planets are and how likely it would be that there would be one that could be Earth-like?
And the first one is now in much better shape than it was a decade ago before we knew any of this.
Okay.
It looks like from the statistics that there are so many discovered among the stars near us, and all of the discoveries have been for stars near us because we're not sensitive.
We don't have instruments sensitive enough to look at things much, much further away that are much fainter.
That probably two-thirds of the stars near us, which are reasonably like the Sun, have planets, something like that.
It's a really high percentage.
And it's possible it's higher because in the case where a planetary system around another star isn't set edge onto us, so that we're looking at the orbits sort of edge-on, but face-on, so we're looking down on or up at this system, in that case you can't detect the motion by the technique I described.
So we're missing some would be a way of saying it.
There's some out there we can't detect just because of that.
The likelihood then of the nearby stars two-thirds of those could be reasonably expected to have planets and of those now your second question is much harder.
We don't really know of a single case that I'm aware of, not in the catalog of stuff that I've looked at, where there's anything which is really the same mass as the Earth.
And the great majority of them are much heavier because they're easier to detect and are presumed to be like Jupiter.
Yes, but if we can't see the smaller ones yet, the ones that more likely would have a possibility of being like Earth, it's just because they're small that we can't see them.
I don't know how to calculate the likelihood, though I feel much more confident about saying this now than I did before we knew about these 70 planets.
I think my own opinion is, yes, they're almost certainly there.
I think you'd find a divergence of opinion in the astronomical community, but I think a large number of people would say, yeah, we're likely to eventually find Earth-like planets.
So that if we imagine planets at somewhat equal distances from those suns as a strong possibility, then isn't the likelihood of life, although I know this is a big jump, but isn't the likelihood of life rather high?
I would think so, because when you look at these suns, the great majority of them have chemical compositions that are like our sun, and for that reason one would think, since our sun has basically all the elements we find on Earth, though in different proportions, that it's pretty likely planets around other similarly composed stars will also, some of them have compositions like the Earth, and therefore have all the elements for life.
And presumably at some moment, we're going to see some of these planets using new technology we don't have up yet, but on the drawing boards there is a range of techniques people are thinking about, mainly for space-based telescopes, successors to the Hubble, for example, with more specialized equipment.
One of the things that you can get away from when you get up above the Earth's surface is the absorption of the atmosphere of many different colors of radiation, most of which we can't see, but nonetheless important for detecting things around other stars.
And the other thing is that you can get away from the twinkling of the stars.
Now, it turns out that there was a rather major step in this direction.
I don't know if you're familiar with this, something that in the trade is sometimes called the rubber mirror technique.
It's a way of actively deforming a telescope mirror system so that it compensates for the twinkling of the stars and focuses the image much better than you could otherwise.
Yeah, the defense version of it, which was done in an observatory in New Mexico, if I remember correctly, first, was for quite a time classified, and it had to do with missile detection, I think, more than astronomy originally.
But the people who worked on it always knew that it had an application for astronomy.
The people in Canada had no such other goal.
They were simply interested in trying to get sharper images of everything, and they devised a technique which relied only on the light coming from the sky.
The defense group actually used a laser to create an artificial star, in effect, by bouncing the beam off the upper atmosphere.
As a matter of interest, if ground-based telescopes can be essentially made to ignore the adverse effects of the atmosphere while looking into space...
Wouldn't it seem logical that a spy satellite going around the Earth, positioned where they want it, would find the same technology really useful looking down through the Earth's atmosphere at the Earth?
And I imagine that somebody's probably done work on that.
It probably would require the laser system in that case to create some sort of artificial reference point because the advantage you have when you look out at the stars is you actually have point-like things to look at.
And you know what a point should look like.
It should look like a point.
Any distortion of that is information you can correct the system with to make the point.
Every once in a while I have an idea that potentially could be classified, I suppose, but I've chosen not to do much with that.
And most of what I know about classified stuff comes out unclassified when I find out about it.
I have a few friends who've worked in the defense industry for a number of years, and every once in a while I shoot the breeze with them, but I've never heard much which I could say really sort of caught my attention.
I think that until we get a sort of smoking gun, until somebody steps up to the mark and says, okay, I'm here and provides some technological proof that they came from somewhere else or biological proof or both, that I'm going to choose to be skeptical of the accounts that I hear.
An astronomer would be not at all very likely to necessarily see a UFO, would they?
In other words, they're not really looking at things traversing close in.
and Okay, so, for example, if a spaceship were something the size of a spaceship, I don't know what that would be, bigger, say, than the space station or as big as the space station, just as a reference,
were coming toward Earth, how long would it take to see it?
No, but it's far enough, depending on the speed, to give you either hours' warning or days' warning, or maybe just minutes' warning, depending on what it's doing.
You know, if you're looking for radio signals and the thing is broadcasting, then presumably lots of people can see it from a long distance out, much further away than that.
If it's somehow radar-stealthed, it's relying on sub-technology either related to or not, you know, like what we've used to conceal certain kinds of aircraft.
So it's really hard to say, but there are a lot of people with different purposes in mind looking at the sky all the time.
You know, with detectors from the naked eye up through very large telescopes, very large radio detectors.
There are big radar systems always looking at the sky.
In fact, probably the thing that we send out to the stars that's most powerful is the radar pulses, which are part of the defense systems of our country and the former Soviet Union and some other countries.
And if there's anything out there at all that's detectable by radar, we should see it.
But if you imagine life is relatively common, although you certainly can imagine it might not develop along the exact same lines ours has, if you imagine that every now and then one invents radar or something like it that would emit some sort of recognizable signal, then shouldn't we have heard something by now?
And without sophisticated signal processing, which of course any civilization, presumably further along than ours, will have, your ability to hear that shrinks and shrinks.
With advanced signal processing and some guess about the kind of signals the chances of hearing go up.
But we have several people, several programs going on now around the world, most of them in the United States, specifically to detect radio signals, which so far haven't had any real success.
In other words, with the noise floor being what it is from all the stars and planets and everything up there making its radio noise, how far would that effectively limit our pulsed radar, for example, from being audible as something intelligent?
I can't pin it down exactly, but I can give you an example, which is suppose you take the largest radio telescope in the world, which is our telescope at Arecibo, Puerto Rico, which is built into the mountains.
It's 1,000 feet in diameter.
Right.
And you used it as an antenna to broadcast a signal across outer space.
If the signal were sent across the galaxy, towards the other edge of the galaxy on the far diameter of the galaxy, And a telescope the same size as Arecibo were pointed at us and listening, it would hear our signal.
So in principle we can broadcast clear across the galaxy, but who would know it to look at us and the travel time for that signal is about 100,000 years.
That's true, though I think there is now consensus in the community that most concerned with this, that we all hew to a protocol, which has actually been spelled out that says if we get real signals from someplace else, we get confirmation by having several different groups observe them, we announce them to the world, and then we decide what we're going to reply, if anything, to these signals.
And so far as I know, there is not any large crew that anticipates doing anything else.
And of course, there are occasionally questions, would anyone reveal such a discovery if it were made?
And we've had really spirited, interesting discussions about exactly that.
So I would like to ask you, in your discipline as an astronomer, if such information came to you and you were either a confirming party or the discovering party and then had it confirmed.
Either way, in your honest opinion, Professor, what would happen to that information?
I'd do my very best to see it published as soon as possible with my name attached to it.
And as far as I know, everyone else who's professionally involved with it would do the same.
I've thought about this one a lot, actually.
And I have this feeling since we've played through the scenario of alien invasion and all kinds of interactions with aliens in science fiction books and movies, sort of gone through this again and again, if we haven't frightened ourselves to death, I just can't see any reason not to say something about the fact that we're here.
And I would want to announce this to the world and make sure that they understood what had been found as much as possible, as much as the discoverers understood of it, and get the world's reaction.
And I kind of think the world would want to reply.
There might have been a time when that wasn't true, but my sense is there just isn't a great interest.
I've tried to think of what the political interest would be in keeping something like this classified.
Depending, I suppose, on what it was we heard, there might be some justification for it in the minds of some people, but I doubt it.
I think that this would be sort of the news of the millennium, and everyone would want to have a piece of it.
I think many politicians would want to find a way to acquire some piece of it for their political use and to be involved in what was implied, and I think it would be an incredible event, obviously.
It's just that most of all that science fiction you've talked about, even some of the recent pretty good stuff like contact and movies like that, have always shown, you know, the Defense Department and the military rushing in and taking quick control of the situation.
For any military advantage there might be, perhaps because of a worry about what the population would do and managing the information.
And, you know, I mean, our government, after all, is made up of lots of secrets, and they hold secrets, maybe not well sometimes, but they try and hold them.
I wouldn't say I'm absolutely convinced, but I think the probability is it would be open.
I think the interest of science and scientists would be so overwhelmingly in the direction of being open, that would have a major influence.
I've tried to think about what scenario it would be that the Defense Department would really be interested in keeping this classified.
I can't quite see why the mere fact of contact would be worth classifying.
If you think that perhaps schematics for some set of weapon systems, or, I don't know, some amazing energy generation system, appeared out of the ether, so to speak, that they might have an interest in classifying it.
Well, they would certainly conclude that any race of beings or aliens that would have technology that would get here would at the very least have, for example, a drive system, a system of powering their craft that would be, you know, like a 747 compared to what the Wright brothers...
But also think about the difficulty of the problem of keeping this secret, because the signals arriving to blanket all of Earth unless something very strange happens.
You know, it's going to be a radio signal from a great distance.
It will blanket the Earth.
Or if it's a light signal, possibly the same thing is true.
So what do you do?
Shut down the radio receivers all around the world?
It seems like a rather unlikely thing, and there are astronomers all over.
I would say that a decade ago people would have said no, but now I think things have swung the other way, and I would say the majority opinion is that it's quite possibly kids.
William Oschuler, our doctor, professor, is with us.
He's an astronomer, and we're talking about things really out of this world.
A tight line, I know, but that is the case, and we've got a lot of territory to cover here, so stay right where you are.
All right, once again, Professor Alshuler.
Professor, I think a lot of my audience understands that in the radio world, you know, Showstack has been on, and he's explained how we have a favorite place to look, which is near the hydrogen frequency.
It's kind of a marker where we expect aliens might send a signal.
Right.
If, on the other hand, we expect it to come, by some means, by light instead, where do we look and what kind of light emission would one expect?
I don't think there's a favored frequency in the light range as there is in the radio range because there isn't a sort of similar extremely sharp single line from a single element that would be so favored that it's just obvious that that's the one to look at for.
Yeah, towards the red would get farther than the blue.
The material between the stars consists of thin gas and some dust, and the dust scatters blue light more than it scatters red and infrared.
From that point of view, you can see further through the fog in the infrared than you can in the visible.
But the people who started to work on this basically have said, well, it's not such a complicated problem to build a detector that looks at the whole spectrum, so that's what we'll do.
And the chap who's leading in this, I think, is Paul Horowitz at Harvard.
I don't know if you've had him on, but he's very interesting.
He started off doing major radio searches, and as far as I know, those are continuing, but he's also constructed a very high-speed search engine using photoelectric detectors, attaching that to the Harvard Telescope in Harvard, Massachusetts, which I believe has just been refurbished, and he's starting up a mat, but maybe you could put in a word for me.
Yeah, basically the light of the star around which the planet is circling that has the lasers.
And it was for a while thought that you really couldn't beat that, that the starlight would simply drown out the laser light.
But as time has gone on and lasers have gotten more powerful, it's been realized that in fact if you know how to look in lots of little itsy-bitsy frequency bands in the light spectrum, the same thing works for you that does in the radio.
A very narrow band signal will stand out against the background of the starlight.
So, you know, you're looking for a narrow spike just sticking up out of the starlight spectrum.
And it's not out of the question that we could have recorded these already in some of the long exposure spectra we've taken of stars.
And there is actually a group of people, I believe actually among the crew in California who've been discovering planets right and left using this high precision spectroscopy technique.
They're looking back over old records and trying to find out if anything appears in any of those.
But it would be anomalous enough, I think, that anyone who saw a bright spike at a laser frequency would suddenly say, hmm, that's not a natural frequency you see in stars generally.
What's that?
And would have already glommed onto it and tried to make something of it.
I asked Horowitz this question about a year ago and he had just started looking with one piece of equipment and was taking the telescope apart and he'd said no, but he just started.
There are others, by the way, who are doing this, and I thought I'd mention, I don't know if, I'm sure that Mr. Shostak has also mentioned this, but there are amateur efforts connected to some of the professional ones in the radio region.
I know that one of the people who is associated with them wrote an article about light detection more than a decade ago and actually abdicated amateur look programs for this a long time ago.
If we were to err on the side of believing there is life out there, probably life more advanced than our own, that's not too hard to believe if you start with the premise there is life.
I suppose it could be very different, but I'm going to make an argument that it probably will be reasonably similar to something we've seen on Earth, with the caveat that some of the things we've seen on Earth, we've seen in the fossil record, they're no longer with us, and they're very distinctively different than stuff that's running around now.
My argument goes like this.
I think that the chances are that all life that we'll ever find is carbon-based.
And that if it's going to be anything else, it's silicon-based.
And we would have seen that on Earth since there's so much silicon lying Around in the form of rocks and minerals.
And though there are a few things on Earth that make silicon skeletons, silicate skeletons, for example, there's this wonderful thing called a glass sponge.
I don't know if you've ever seen one, but it's highly valued in Japan.
It looks like a tube of open lattice crystal.
In fact, it's glass.
It's silicate.
And they grow very slowly over time.
They're anchored by what look exactly like fiberglass threads, which is what they are, to the sea bottom.
And the living part is a sort of soft tunic mounted on this silicate skeleton.
But the life of it, that is the genetic code, is like ours, DNA, based on carbon.
And since the Earth's been around for a long time, four and a half billion years, and all sorts of life have evolved, which has evolved, which is carbon-based, and we just don't find any silicon-based, and the fossil record doesn't show anything that looks like it might have been, I would say that carbon-base is what we're going to find.
And they live in environments which are as diverse as the bottom of the sea and the hot vents where lava is coming up to the plateau of Antarctica where it's very cold and very dry.
And the shapes and sizes and the things that they eat and what they need to breathe vary greatly.
Based on that, I would say what we're going to run into will fall within that range, but it may not look like anything we've seen.
I think it's very unlikely, for the reasons we already talked about.
But there are so many stars like the Sun, that the composition of these stars is like the Sun, that it's observable that they have planetary systems, and among those we'll find planets with the right distance and the right composition and roughly the same size.
Though, of course, there's no law that says a rocky planet has to be Earth-sized as far as we know.
Though it turns out our examples in this solar system are all roughly the size of the Earth.
You look at Mercury, it's considerably smaller and Mars is, but Venus is almost a duplicate in size.
And so, you know, there could be something larger, for example, though we haven't seen it here.
And a different surface gravity could have an effect on the way life evolves.
But if it's the same composition and it's at the right distance, the chances are good it will have liquid water, and that's key.
And if it has liquid water, I think the chances it'll have life are excellent.
And if time enough is allowed, there will be evolution and you will get intelligent life.
I think it's myself, I think it's a virtual certainty.
I find that if I, you know, in my discussion with you, if I get skeptical enough, then that forces you over on the other side, which is really interesting.
So, you know, occasionally I have considered the concept that we could be totally alone.
That, you know, the biblical folks could be right.
I think that argument rests on an idea, something like the evolution of life and further the evolution of intelligence is somehow extremely accidental.
That the chain of events is so unlikely that it's just not duplicated.
And I would say, even if it's quite unlikely, there are so many possible places for it to happen that it did happen.
And there seems now to be a population of microbes that live in the rocks in general, perhaps with more mass than all of the other living things on Earth.
And, you know, there's a single-celled algae sort of thing living in the forests up near the Canadian border, partly in Minnesota and partly in Canada.
A single-cell thing which covers the ground in wetlands, which is something like 100 miles in extent.
I did see a story about a very vigorous algae which has been discovered in the Mediterranean out of its original environment, which was imported By one of the oceanographic labs, I believe, in Monaco, and which escaped and has made a colony which is spreading fairly rapidly along the Mediterranean coast.
Here's an interesting article in Nature, and I don't know whether you've heard about this either.
It's brand new.
It says, the headline is, Cosmic Rays Could Find Holes in Standard Model of Particle Physics.
The Pierre Auger Observatory, currently being constructed in Argentina to study cosmic rays, could examine the structure of space-time itself.
According to physicists here in the U.S., if, as some suspect, the universe contains invisible extra dimensions, then cosmic rays that hit the atmosphere will produce tiny black holes.
These black holes should be numerous enough for the observatory to detect.
This is according to Jonathan Fang of MIT in Cambridge and Alfred Shapiro of the University of Kentucky at Lexington.
I'm curious to know what they think the signature of the black holes would be, and one assumes that whatever they are, they must not grow, or we'd know about them in some very drastic way.
Stephen Hawking predicted some years ago that if you got a small enough black hole, contrary to the behavior of larger ones, they would be so small that quantum physics would get into the act in a way in which allowed material at the black hole's surface to evaporate.
And in effect, the black hole itself would lose mass, the surface would shrink, the effect would get larger, and the thing would evaporate catastrophically and go off sort of like a firecracker.
So that micro-black holes or mini-black holes would have a finite lifetime and would eventually disappear.
I don't think anyone's seen evidence for that yet, though.
Maybe this is an example of something like that, created by a process that Hawking did not anticipate, as far as I know.
How does somebody with your skeptical attitude about whether we've even been visited yet, either in our history or now, and you do have a skeptical attitude about that, examine the ships and the aliens who pilot them, just as a matter of curiosity?
And left over from my, as I already said, misspent youth when I was reading a lot of science fiction and actually a fair amount of sort of first contact literature came out in the 50s, I sort of hang on to a remnant of the interest.
And besides that, just thinking about the physics and technology which would be involved if you could look at a spaceship of the sort of observed properties people have claimed, at least some of them, is a problem that interests me.
So I thought about it and thought it was worth talking about.
I tried to look at what people had reported in the UFO sightings that I could get my hands on, and people had discussed about this, and then thought about some of the science fictional proposals people had made.
You look at Star Trek, for example, and there's some wonderful books out about the physics of Star Trek.
And I thought, well, if you could think about what these different phenomena were people have reported and assign to them some idea of maybe some common phenomena that flow through the different kinds of reports, what do those mean?
You know, what are they?
And then what kind of physics might explain these things?
What are they most attached to?
And if someone says, can we travel between different dimensions or are there more than the usual three spatial dimensions, what does physics have to say about that?
Hold it right there, and we'll examine all of that when we get back.
A million good questions already asked on Mark Bell.
Dr. William Schler is my guest, and we're talking about his book right now.
And what we're talking about specifically is, given the kinds of UFO reports that we get, in other words, their behavior taken into consideration, then what is it that we'd likely be dealing with in reality?
What kind of physics?
What kind of drive?
What kind of everything can we imagine scientifically would support such a sighting?
Once again, Professor Altshuler, Professor Altshuler, Then take me through one.
Take a good sighting or a group of sightings where certain things were agreed on, and then tell me what you thought about it.
Well, there are a lot of sightings of disks which seem to be able to fly at very high speeds, make sharp turns, so very high accelerations, travel silently, leave no visible flame, smoke, or wake, and in some cases seem to disappear sort of on the spot, and others disappear in the distance.
They get smaller and smaller and get farther and farther away.
And there are certain things about this one can speculate on, but some of this bears with it certain problems.
But what might drive them?
Well, there's a whole slew of possibilities.
Probably something that has to do either with space warps or wormhole technology of one sort or another would be worth thinking about.
And in either of those cases, you're basically playing with the shape of space.
You're figuring out a way to warp space or curve space.
And with that device, you have some way of either creating a hole in effect in front of you or a wormhole in front of you which you can jump into or travel into or which can drag you along.
Or some way in which you create a curvature of space which pulls you in and perhaps one behind you which pushes you along.
And in either case of this sort, it's possible to think of seeing the ship move extremely quickly.
In the case of something in which you basically create your own warp and encapsulate the ship, the problems of extreme acceleration for the inhabitants of the ship, the crew, go away.
But in most other cases, just the accelerations themselves for the inhabitants are very difficult to deal with.
If you look at some of the reports, the accelerations are up in the range of hundreds of Gs.
I believe the record for the strongest acceleration any human has undergone is 17 Gs for about four minutes.
Above that, you start to think about turning into jelly.
There are various techniques you can think of for cushioning human bodies and other living things against the rapid accelerations.
But eventually, even if you get into injecting some sort of fluid into every part of everybody's body cavities, internal body cavities, to cushion the motion of their organs, it still gets to be a very difficult problem.
And you either have to have a particular kind of enclosed warp or you have to have control over inertia.
If, Professor, we were to see a craft capable of a kind of warp that would avoid the problems we talk about with regard to our own biology, what do you think an observer might see on the ground?
It depends what the particular kind of thing is, but let's say, for example, that it's some sort of a warp which enfolds the ship, then presumably the region just outside the surface of the ship, up to some distance, is severely curved or distorted space in a way which we're not used to.
And what you would see, I think, is, depending on what time of day or night it was, if it was against the night sky, it would be most distinctive, because then you might see stars in the same direction sort of drawn in to the side of the ship in a way which would create at least a somewhat luminous rim to the ship.
The ship itself might not show much, but this immediate ring around the ship might in fact become rather bright at least briefly.
And then if the ship were accelerating away from us, presumably it would both get fainter and redder as it went and then fade out.
If we're coming towards us, I would expect to see something somewhat the opposite.
That is blue shift.
And again, you'd see luminous ring, which got maybe a luminous dot to start with, which got brighter, and the closer it got to us for a bit, the bluer it would get.
Then it would slow down, and everything would become normal.
I haven't actually seen records of UFO reports that look like that, I have to say.
I've seen, as I said, lots of reports of ships which accelerate or decelerate extremely quickly, but not quite with what I've described.
I live out here in Prump, Nevada, near Death Valley.
Very quiet area, desert.
Beautiful area if you love the desert.
Some people don't.
But I do, and it's barren, but it's beautiful, and it's really not barren when you get down to the minutiae of it all.
It is, however, at night, exceptionally quiet.
I mean, it's wonderful to walk outside my house and just hear absolutely nothing.
You know, the humming in your own ears.
It's a great experience.
And this is where I live.
And some number of years ago, my wife and I were on the way home from Las Vegas, and nobody on the road but us.
And my wife said, what the hell's that?
And she saw something coming from behind us.
She just happened to catch a glimpse of something movement behind.
And she did look back, and she said, what's that?
I said, I don't know.
Pulled the car over, got out of the car, looked up, and coming up on us, I would guess at about 150 feet above us, was this gigantic triangle.
And I mean, a precise triangle, just rounded slightly at the edges, but a triangle.
And it was doing, oh, no more than about 30 miles an hour.
I mean, this thing was, you would describe it as floating, not flying.
I was in the Air Force, I know what aerodynamic flight takes, and this was not flying, trust me.
In addition, you could hear crickets about a quarter mile away.
Well, this thing passed so close to us, up above us, Professor, that I could have, if I hadn't been in shock, which I was, I could have taken a rock and tried to throw it at it.
You know, I mean, it felt that close.
Stars went away, almost full moon went away, everything disappeared.
This thing passed directly above us and just kept on going right out across the valley toward Area 51, which is close by.
I would have thought that something would have stirred.
I mean, among other things, gravity drives, which work on the basis of some sort of space distortion, should create really major effects in their local vicinity.
You shouldn't have been left standing there if the thing passed 30 feet over you and it was a gravity drive.
What you're talking about is something which, to support itself, assuming that it was tenanted or it had significant instrumentation, and you didn't tell me exactly how big it was, but I'm assuming it was something like 30 or 40 feet long.
And then I can't tell you what the explanation is.
And the biggest problem, as I say, is I can't conceive of what would allow it to pass not only silently but windlessly past you, even at 30 miles an hour.
Nor have I. But again, sorry, folks, for the burden, but I knew that I would not have been the only person who would have seen this.
And I was not.
In fact, in the next week, our local newspaper here ran a story indicating that many, many people had seen this object over the Perump Valley.
And the newspaper had made an inquiry of Nellis Air Force Base, which is outside Las Vegas.
And Nellis Air Force Base, interestingly, responded to the inquiry and said that, yes, indeed, there had been a secret mission that may have overflown the Perump Valley at the time and night in question, but that it was a C-130 aircraft.
Now, Professor, I flew in C-130s in the Air Force, and I can assure you, had that flown over my head at 150 feet, it would have rattled my teeth.
Once I worked for a camera company taking cameras out of the assembly line, movie cameras, and testing them by taking them outdoors and shooting airplanes that were just taking off from O'Hare Field.
Yeah, I don't know where I read this, but somewhere I read that a major advance in our stealth program came as a result of an openly published article by some physicists in the former Soviet Union.
That their ideas that had to do with special coatings, if I remember correctly, were important to the coatings that were developed to put on the stealth fighter and stealth bomber.
And as far as I know, the Russians have not to this day succeeded in building anything really comparable to what we've got.
Now, in the case of the Aurora, there actually were, there was some tracking that went on regarding sonic booms coming in from the Pacific toward this area.
And I guess they can, sonic boom leaves sort of a trail that one can somewhat discern, doesn't it?
And that, I think, allowed someone to suggest that they were seeing an aircraft that was traveling at much higher speeds than announced aircraft that have entered chains, catalogs, and things like that.
But beyond that, I haven't seen any reports of it recently, of you.
No, no, which would indicate to me that perhaps they either solved that problem or they're just on to yet the next generation.
I mean, who knows?
But surely they are doing things that we don't know about, and so we have to imagine, puzzle out some number of these UFO contacts to the possibility that it's our own secret projects.
But as I said, the physical explanation for something which can fly over that's that size, even at 30 miles an hour, without causing at least a slight breeze.
If this is a big if, but if you had experienced what I just described personally, if you had experienced it yourself, how would you process that information?
If everything I said were true and you knew it to be true because you personally experienced it, how would you process that?
If I possibly could, I'd try to find out what it was.
I would, you know, keep it on the shelf and if I couldn't find out at a given time, I'd go back to the problem periodically, try and find out.
I might go back to the same location every once in a while and see if it repeated itself.
I might ask, as I guess you did, for other people to contact me to find out what they had seen on any problem.
And I probably would have put the question, as you did, to a number of different places and probably received just as unsatisfactory an answer as you did.
One would want to know, you know, if that exists, what are its limitations?
How much energy would it take to drive it to the moon or, you know, some other more distant location?
And the answer to that depends on knowing what it's all about.
But generally speaking, the farther and faster you want to go, the more energy you're going to need, and somewhere, somehow, you've got to get a hold of it.
I think that one of our detection efforts is going to succeed in hearing or seeing something.
And after that, I really don't know.
I'm not totally convinced that if we get in contact with others, we'll ever actually shake hands because I'm not sure there's any feasible way to travel between the stars.
And there is now some real theoretical work that's gone on that examines the possibility of making wormholes, and it's not forbidden by physics in the sense that it violates one or another principle such as relativity.
In fact, relativity gives rise to the idea of wormholes.
But the material requirements for it, you could say the engineering requirements.
The amount of energy is one thing, and another is simply how do you open a wormhole, and once you've opened it, how do you keep it open and preventing it from collapsing in on itself?
And the theory says to do that, at least one way of doing it, is to find a kind of matter we've never seen, which has an energy of a sign opposite to the normal energy that we associate with the matter that we're made of.
This is Coast to Coast A.M. in the night time on the Premier Radio Network Wanna Take a Ride.
That, of course, came from my love of movie contact.
I absolutely fell in love with that movie, and Russ Mitchell cut me in a hey, wanna take a ride kind of intro bumper.
It probably is my favorite movie of all time.
I'm Mark Bell, and in a moment, the journey continues.
The End I would imagine this would be something that a professor would have discovered very early in his career, because he's been looking up for a long, long time.
But Professor, for the average adult who has not made a career of astronomy, to get a really good telescope, a really decent telescope, and to spend some time with it changes your whole outlook on life.
And at a certain level, I suppose I have a rather different view of what goes on on Earth than a large number of other people.
And I think most astronomers do, because we routinely consider extraordinarily large distances and extraordinarily great sweeps of time.
And the things that occur quickly on an astronomical or cosmological scale, with maybe just a few exceptions, look like either zero change or glacially slow change to an ordinary human being.
In fact, just the mere fact of looking up, the mere act of looking up, is too little engaged in by most of the world, I think.
Probably especially those people who live in cities who, if they look up, look up one story and see the very brightly illuminated signs that are in front of them.
And I love the fact that you're advertising telescopes, and I hope that the people out there who are listening, if they don't have one, think seriously about getting one because it's a wonderful thing to have.
I think if they had, they would have come to light by hook or by crook in the time interval between the time they most likely are thought to have arrived and now.
I just don't think, as good as we are at keeping some secrets, that this one would have stayed secret and someone would have succeeded in coming out with a photograph or a small sample of whatever it was and made it convincingly public.
The government commissioned Brookings Institute to a study some time ago that I bet you've heard of regarding what the sociological impact of contact would be.
And their conclusions were very, very interesting.
They suggested that the most negative impact would occur on a very unlikely group, or maybe a likely group, and that would be the scientists.
I think there's an argument to be made that people in the sciences could be demoralized by sort of the arrival of greatly advanced science.
But I think there's a counterargument to that, which is that many scientists would be delighted and spend a lot of time, even if they didn't think they could leap from where we are to where the visitors were in one jump, that it would be worthwhile spending the time to try to make progress in that direction.
Well, if a fellow operating that giant UNIVAC computer that we used to have that took up rooms and rooms were to encounter somebody who walked in with a Pentium 4 2 gig machine, he'd be demoralized.
Well, the best guess about the size of the thing that is thought to have impacted 65 million years ago and perhaps wiped the dinosaurs out is something like 10 miles across, which it turns out is about the size of the nucleus of Halley's Comet, as we measured it the last time around.
Let's say we detected something like this and we said to ourselves, okay, next time around, in three years, three years, next time around, it's going to hit us.
It would seem like a high probability, you know, we can get the numbers crunched better when it gets closer, but a high probability it's going to hit us.
I think the best bet would probably be to try to divert it.
There is an argument going on about this, but if we tried to blow it up, something that was, say, 10 miles in diameter disintegrated into things which were a mile in diameter, which sprayed us, then maybe some would miss us, but some would still hit.
So it might be a wiser course to try to implant rocket motors on the thing, or maybe to somehow put up shielded bomb explosions, which forced it to take a slightly different path and miss us altogether.
There's a crew of people also who might be interested in actually putting it into orbit around the Earth, capturing it as a new moon, and if it were a rocky item, it probably would have a reasonable proportion of metals and might form a sort of orbital mine where extraction of the metals would allow you to do major construction in space, either build space stations or ships without having to leave Earth to do it.
Well, I think there would be a good strong argument, but if you had a pretty reliable way of controlling where it was going to go and could put it into orbit, aside from the mining idea, a lot of people would presumably want to go up and just take samples to see what the composition was and considered that as a sort of commentary like samples from Mars on the origin of the asteroids and the origin of the solar system.
It sounds to me like something we can't technically do and for which the energy expenditure would be the sort of major problem.
And it would be much cheaper and easier, I think, to provide some shade for ourselves than to do that.
Put into orbit something which constitutes a shadow caster.
It might be big sheets of reflective material.
Oh, gee, you might even put something into the atmosphere that would do that because when volcanoes go off, you could, for example, put balloons up which distribute large sheets or perhaps one of these newfangled solar-powered airplanes which could drag behind it a big reflector or a set of reflectors.
But you could also, in orbit, you could, I suppose, disintegrate one of the asteroids and create a cloud of particles which would reflect a lot of the incoming light.
And if they did that, that would be a whole lot less difficult, I think, than trying to move the Earth, which sounds really out of the question, even if NASA examined it.
For one thing, concerning the range of life in the cosmos and what it might be consisted of, I would think that in view that life as we know it is so narrow on Earth,
the conditions for it, much like our perceptions of the entire spectrum, the visible electromagnetic spectrum, that there would be a much vaster range of possibilities in space.
For an example, we have bacteria on Earth that can feed on glass, radioactivity, various types of toxic materials, and under tremendously high pressures and temperatures above that of boiling water.
All of that I agree with entirely, but my comment is that every one of those things you've named is carbon-based and has a genetic code that's DNA, or maybe possibly in a few cases, some viruses have RNA.
But DNA is universal, based on carbon, hydrogen, phosphorus, and a number of other things.
And I think it unlikely we're going to find a differently constituted genetic code.
We might find some place where it's not exactly the same four components of DNA that we've got, but it'll be a molecule with the same kind of structure, I think, and carbon will be at the heart of it.
Quite possible that there are civilizations out there that do very great genetic manipulation.
And I'm not saying it's totally impossible to create an organism which could withstand hundreds of Gs, but if you think about the design requirements, it's not obvious that they could.
And I think that if we sort of play the probabilities, it's kind of unlikely that that's happened.
I would like to actually add also that I'm not trying to claim that the possibilities out there are so narrow that they could only be encompassed by what's here, but we have a very wide range here, and it seems to me fairly likely that what we will see out there is somewhere within the range.
It probably won't look exactly like anything we've got here, but somewhere within the range.
Well, it could be a total monster, but a carbon-based total monster, one which either likes to breathe oxygen or possibly consumes sulfur in its place, as the things that live at the bottom of the sea do, which live in the trenches, the hot trenches.
And anybody can participate as long as you've got a handy PC.
You go find SETI at Home on the Internet, which is actually spelled out SETI and then A-T-H-O-M-E dot SSL.berkeley.edu.
And it sends you, when you sign up, a routine which looks like a screensaver, but hidden behind that is a number cruncher which will acquire periodically a batch of information taken from the radio telescope somewhere in the world which was running to do an astronomical project,
but for which the data was swiped for this project and cataloged on big storage capacity disks at Berkeley and sent out for processing using this sophisticated number cruncher.
And when it gets through doing the batch that you've been sent, it gives the results both to you on the screensaver and sends them back to Berkeley.
And it basically does this whenever you leave your machine on, but you're not using it.
And last time I looked, there were a million and a half participants in this.
It's the single largest number cruncher in the world, and other people are looking at it as sort of a model for weather processing, weather prediction, and other really big projects.
It is, and we are honored to have Professor William R. Alschuller.
Alschuller or Al Schuller.
I guess either one works, he suggests, and I've probably been slaughtering it all night long.
He is an astronomer, and we're talking about, believe it or not, UFOs, propulsion systems, what's likely, and what might happen in all kinds of circumstances, ranging from extraterrestrial life to big rocks that might come visit us.
We'll get more of it in a moment.
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unidentified
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It would, but the amount, it strikes me, would be unlikely to be anywhere near the amount that you'd like to do the trick that you're talking about.
That's a sort of gravity assist slingshot effect type idea, which we've used very successfully to send some of our space probes out to the outer planets, principally using Jupiter as the slingshot.
I mean, it's a great deal of effort to move the Earth either in or away from the Sun, and a mistake in either direction would have noticeable climate consequences, which would be probably much less reversible than the ones that we're currently worried about.
And, you know, all sorts of other schemes with less import, it seems to me.
And by the way, have you noticed that the mainstream scientific community now seems to be suddenly making an awful lot of noise about rapid climate change?
And there's been a big argument going on about what sets an ice age off for a number of years.
And the arguments have tended recently to be that the trigger is something which might involve major ocean currents.
And that if you get, say, a certain amount of ice cap melting and the amount of fresh water that enters the oceans at the North Pole, for example, changes by a noticeable amount.
The current changes its location.
The temperature distribution changes.
And everything happens very quickly, as in a decade, or two decades, or three decades, as opposed to thousands of years.
Well, the public, the general public, is very curious about why there's so much noise about it all of a sudden, because we observe that at the same time, we seem to be in the middle of some sort of climate change.
Many have observed that anyway, and so some are a little concerned that this could be the beginning of the decade of change.
There's a great deal that we don't know and a great deal of uncertainty around this.
The kind of data that we can most easily get from geology tends to smooth over very short-term events.
And so it's difficult to see to resolve really rapid changes and be sure that that's what we're seeing.
There are always issues of how complete the geologic record is and things like that.
But you can make models which suggest that this could happen very quickly.
And there are some parts of the record which suggest now that there were rapid fluctuations sort of going into and out of the last several ice ages, which took place in the time scale literally of decades, not of hundreds or thousands of years.
And that's disturbing because the fluctuations look like they're large enough to wreak havoc with agriculture and sort of change everything that we think about as normal to something else.
It would no doubt then create warmer places where it had been cool, perhaps, and then places like Europe, for example, no longer influenced by warmer ocean currents, could become roughly like Alaska.
I don't know if you've ever seen a portrayal of this, but for a while there was on display at the old Statehouse in Boston an oil painting of the Boston Harbor in revolutionary times, and the whole harbor was frozen over to the extent that big sledges could go out and pull freight off the ships that were frozen into the ice a mile out.
And that simply doesn't happen now.
You see the Boston harbor get iced, but it's chunks of ice floating around in the water.
I wouldn't say he proved any theory of other dimensions, but he and a number of other people certainly think that Einstein had something when he talked about four dimensions, three of space and one of time.
And the work that's going on now in this area has really sort of jumped things up to the point where there are a number of people who think there's a possibility that there are ten dimensions and one of time and that the seven we don't see are basically too small to encounter easily, but they're there everywhere.
That every part of what we normally experience in three dimensions is connected to tiny seven additional dimensions.
And there are some people who believe that a quantum computer would have the ability to discern or draw information from more than the dimensions that we presently.
And my question for the professor is, and I jumped in a little late, so if you've already spoken about this, I apologize.
But brown dwarfs and if they would possibly be heading in our direction, what damage they could pose, and any satellites or planets they might have orbiting around them, if that's a possibility, and if life could possibly be on those?
And yes, and they could have planets, though it's only very recently, and actually some of the same programs that are detecting extrasolar planets are also finding some of the brown dwarfs that we've begun to see brown dwarfs at all.
And they are, by and large, the ones we found confined to areas where there's lots of star formation going on, which are not nearby.
And as such, anything which is more or less star-like generally will share in the motion of the stars in the galaxy rotating around the galactic center.
And though there could always be deviants and they could come our way, it's a relatively unlikely scenario.
It would certainly be possible that a brown dwarf could have a retinue of planets.
And if a brown dwarf headed into the solar system with its retinue, depending on just who passed close to whom, it could be severely disruptive or absolutely fatal.
However, I'm unaware of any comet anybody's ever seen which has a mass anywhere near the mass of the moon, our moon, which is what it would take.
I think it would really take something like that.
A comet could easily have the mass of a significant asteroid, but the biggest asteroids are hundreds of miles in diameter, and if a really near pass was made by one of those, you could get an effect which might possibly fall in the useful range.
But a comet, the largest ones I know of, have masses that are much smaller than that.
First time caller line, you're on the air with Professor Al Schuler.
unidentified
Hi.
Yeah, hi.
If I guess we had four or five of those comets coming this way, we could get pulled really far away from the degree, huh?
Yes.
No, my question was, if we hooked up a meteorite and had it going around to mine at 300 miles, how long would it last and how big would it be to see it from Earth at night time?
But how long would it last before it degraded?
And if it degraded, how would you get it back up in the air?
If you're much below that, you're starting to encounter the outer fringes of the Earth's atmosphere, and then the atmospheric drag gets significant, and the thing's orbit will decay, and it could come down in a matter of years.
As to How long it would last?
Well, that depends on its actual size and the rate at which you're mining it.
And so I can't really give a single answer to that.
But anything which is a couple of miles in diameter of fairly rich, say, iron and nickel, which some of the asteroids certainly are, would be a gigantic mine in Earth standards.
Gigantic.
So many, many, many years.
unidentified
Why do you think we haven't gone back to the moon?
Yeah, I guess I would say first, I hope we go back to the moon soon, and I hope we do go to Mars.
And why we haven't, I think earthly politics and the intervention of concerns about the environment to some extent has caused us to sort of look away from doing that scale of project.
Yeah, I think people, I mean, there's a whole issue about national priorities, and I think the political judgment was made that space was not really the top of the list for most people, that something else, say education, social equity, environmental amelioration, you know, any of those things comes ahead.
I think, you know, this is space programs are programs which cry out for international cooperation, and I don't see any reason why we can't have that, too.
Yes, although if you look at the space station, for example, it cried out for international cooperation, and a lot of the international cooperation was pretty slow in coming, and we picked up a lot of the bill.
Now, if I understand this, this took place during what's been called the Little Ice Age.
Right, exactly.
Now, I've read that during that same period of time, there was a period of our sun cycle called the Maunder minimum during a 60, 70-year period where there was virtually no sunspots.
And I think one of the sort of additional parts of the puzzle about climate change and global climate change is the influence of variations in the sun's brightness.
It seems pretty likely now that the sun is at some level a variable star.
And though it's counterintuitive, the more spots there are on the surface of the sun, apparently the brighter the sun is in total.
And the reason is that with the spots come flares.
So the total amount of energy the sun sends us when it's at the top of its sunspot cycle is actually greater, though you would think the opposite, than it is when there are no spots or few spots.
Actually, there's something rather interesting going on right now, Professor, and that is that we really, according to, you know, I'm a ham operator, so I watch the cycle pretty closely, and we're supposed to be past the peak of the cycle, but gosh, the sun has been going totally berserk.
Yep, I'm very aware of this because I like to show my students the surface of the sun through a filter telescope, and we look at the sunspots, and also I'm very much interested in the northern lights, the aurora, and they've been extremely active.
I think the effects may be rather subtle, and they may be something sort of built into us by evolution, and it may not be something which we respond to very directly, but the atmosphere has tides just as much as the water does, and so there are atmospheric pressure changes that go along with all the water tidal changes, and there are even very subtle land tides.
And there's some reason to think that people's moods are affected by pressure changes.