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July 1, 2002 - Art Bell
02:50:17
Coast to Coast AM with Art Bell - Ramon Lopez - Solar Maximum
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Welcome to Art Bell, Somewhere in Time.
Tonight, featuring Coast to Coast AM, from July 1st, 2002.
From the high desert in the great American Southwest, I bid you all good evening, good morning, and here I am again.
Welcome, everybody.
God, it's good to be back.
I'm Art Bell, and this is Coast to Coast AM, covering the, actually, the entire world, one way or the other.
It's great to be here.
One big part of the world now being Covered, once again, our good friends at WBT.
I mean, WBT in Charlotte.
Holy mackerel.
11.10 on the dial in Charlotte, North Carolina.
5,000 watts, clear channel, going from, I guess, Canada down to Cuba.
Actually, not guessing, it does actually cover from Canada to Cuba.
I mean, it's incredible.
They're back.
And they're not only back, they're back with their FM, too.
WBT FM.
In Chester and South Carolina, and they're 99.3, 100 kilowatts, 100,000 watts on 99.3.
The GM there, Rick Jackson, the PD, Bill White.
Hey, both of you, thank you very much.
I know you trucked up and down the highway there with WPD for about a year, and now you're back, and it's great to have you.
One monstrosity of a station.
Great to be back on WBT.
Listen, to give you some idea, just a quick idea of what we did.
Before I even say that, coming up in a moment, Richard C. Hoagland's update.
See if you can digest this.
Richard C. Hoagland and company had a telephone conference call with NASA today.
Ha!
That's right.
Richard actually talking to NASA, or NASA more likely talking to Richard.
And how likely in a world of things is that?
Not real likely.
All right.
Vacation.
We went, took, as I said I was going to do, We just took several short trips in the RV and had a blast.
Oh, God, we had a great time.
And we went to Oceano, which is just to the coast from San Luis Obispo, where it's foggy and like in the mid-60s, you know, that kind of temperature.
Here, where I am in the desert, it's been typically 108, 109.
I think I saw 111 degrees today.
Oh, it's really hot in the desert now.
That's why they call it the desert.
So it was kind of neat to get into the mid-sixties, a little fog and all of that.
And then, uh, well, then I decided, uh, the hams, the ham operators in the audience may appreciate this.
Um, and they may wonder about it and you may too.
I decided that I wanted to really get a very, very strong Shortwave signal out on all the very shortwave bands.
And so I again modified the antenna on my RV.
I don't think anybody's ever seen anything like this.
I've got the picture on the website for you to see.
It is incredible.
It's 125 feet, maybe 127 feet of wire on top of the RV.
And oh my goodness gracious does it put out a gigantic signal.
I just sort of rolled the dice, you know, and put this together, and you can see a picture of it.
This is one of those things where you've got to see it to believe it, to understand the scale of it.
And so we built that antenna, which just gets out like crazy.
And then later this week, at the end of the week, we had Bonnie Crystal.
You remember Bonnie Crystal, who goes into caves?
Who now, by the way, says she has found the deepest hole she believes in the world.
The deepest hole in the world.
In Peru.
We're going to have her back on the show again shortly.
She's going to come down.
She's a ham, too, and we're going to put a linear amplifier in at about the 500-watt level and use this antenna.
And so together, that absorbed some of my vacation, getting all this done, and yet what is to do?
But this thing is going to glow as it goes down the road.
So that picture's on the website right now, kind of connected to my vacation.
The sun today had The sun exploded today.
You've got to see this photograph.
It's absolutely blinking unbelievable what happened on the sun today.
That's going to be the subject of our second hour guest, Ramon E. Lopez.
You've got to take a look at this picture.
This just occurred today, July 1st, and we have a really good graphic photograph of you.
It's called The Sun Has Legs.
It was a huge, oh my God, it was a huge eruption on the sun.
So you're definitely going to want to see that.
And we're going to get a link to the story for you as well.
It's just, it's just a blow away.
It's absolutely one of the biggest eruptions on the sun that I've ever seen.
Fortunately, it looks like it's not aimed toward Earth.
Under spirits and ghosts, third item on the website, second photo down.
First one also, but second photo down, a paranormal researcher in Tampa Bay, Florida, had a feeling that something was following him, and somebody snapped a photograph from behind, and actually it was Kathy, not a he, but a her, and you can see this ghost, this incredible thing, Following this woman caught in a photograph.
Incredible photograph.
All of this is up on my website right now at artbell.com.
That's artbell.com.
So, just briefly, briefly looking around the world, because I need to get Richard on.
A Russian passenger jet with dozens of people aboard and a two-pilot cargo plane collided late Monday over southern Germany in a fireball.
Looks like it's killed all aboard, both.
A couple of pilots for a major airline.
Breaking news at this hour, we're just arrested for... If they weren't arrested, they were certainly prevented from getting on their planes and taking people on the appointed route because it was determined they had been imbibing alcohol.
Both of them.
That would be the pilot and the co-pilot.
And they got really belligerent when they were confronted and then they were tested and they were... And so anyway, they're...
Their history.
That's incredible.
That's absolutely incredible.
That's incredible.
U.S.
planes bombed a village in central Afghanistan Monday after the U.S.
military said that American forces came under fire.
Now, Afghans said villagers there were celebrating a wedding and that scores were killed or injured, including women and children.
We will investigate what has happened there.
Federal executions are now held to be unconstitutional.
The judge in New York said too many innocent people have been executed before they could be vindicated.
The WorldCom probe continues.
WorldCom, of course, breaking while I was gone.
You know, this WorldCom thing, this is just...
A criminal, you know, people need to go to jail.
And real quickly, too, you know, there's a loss of confidence in our entire economic system.
The Dow dived 133 today.
The Nasdaq fell 60.
God, that's awful.
Absolutely awful.
The Dow is, let me see, 9109 now.
And the Nasdaq is 1403.
And, you know, confidence is just gone.
When large companies like this conduct fraud, And they cook the books, then the public loses confidence, and I don't blame them.
And that's being reflected in what's going on in the market right now, and people need to go to jail.
I mean, they can't treat this the way they treat a lot of white-collar crime in America, and that is just a little slap on the hand, or at the worst, you know, a little vacation spot for a little while.
That just can't happen.
This is going to have to end with people in jail.
It better end with people in jail.
That's all I have to say about that.
they need to go to jail just the way any criminal uh... needs to go to jail and uh... confidence in our
economy's got to be restored that's what they've got to do right away and they
had better not
weights you're listening to art bill somewhere in time
tonight featuring Coast to Coast AM from July 1st, 2002.
Just a very quick note here, this is interesting stuff as well.
Little Pahrump, Nevada, the little town I live in here in the desert, on this July 4th, coming up, about 9.15 at night, is going to have the biggest, now this, I know it seems incredible, the biggest fireworks display, demonstration, for the 4th of July in the entire state of Nevada, in our state of Nevada.
We are going to have I have no idea where they got all these fireworks.
I don't know.
Big 16-inch shells, you know?
I mean, these are monstrous.
And it's going to be the biggest in the state of Nevada.
So if you're within driving distance of our beautiful little Pahrump, Nevada, you might want to make it for the Fourth of July.
Man, it is going to be one blowout here.
And of course, KNYE 95.1, our little radio station here, will choreograph the thing.
It's going to be something.
I mean, can you imagine that?
I meant to ask them, you know, where they got so many fireworks for little Pahrump, but in Pahrump, you don't ask those kind of questions.
You just enjoy the show.
All right, now, there was a phone conversation, a teleconference that took place today between NASA and Richard C. Hoagland.
As a result of some action by Peter Gersten that I know you've been hearing about on the program, and I certainly missed some of it, a threat to Sue or something like that, anyway, a one-time advisor to Walter C. Cronkite, one of NASA's favorite people in all the world, to be sure, the Instrum Science Award winner, the man who's been on the program with me now for More years, and I care to remember Richard C. Hoagland.
Richard, what is going on?
Good morning, Art.
Well, you're going to have to take that tongue out of your cheek when you say that.
Because I'm one of NASA's favorite people.
Because now you are?
Well, you know, every time you go on vacation... A lot happens.
A lot happens.
I know.
The way we assure that things move forward is we send you on vacation.
And things happen.
Yeah.
Last week, on Tuesday morning, the night that I was booked to be on with George, Peter got a phone call from Dr. Jim Garvin, who is the head scientist for the Mars Exploration Program at NASA Headquarters.
I said last week he was the head guy.
He's the head scientist under the head guy for Mars.
Good enough.
Yeah, I mean, he's the guy that makes the science decisions.
So he called Peter with Don Savage, who's an old friend of yours.
Of course, yes, of course.
And they wanted a conference call with Peter.
Well, Peter sent an email and said, guess who just called me?
Well, if you wouldn't mind, what's the background of that?
I mean, they wouldn't just call wanting a conference call with Peter unless Peter had been threatening some kind of lawsuit, right?
Exactly.
A year ago, March 16th of 2001, he had sent on behalf of this organization that he and I and David Jinks created called FACETS, the Formal Action Committee For Extraterrestrial Studies.
Right.
We sent a letter to Headquarters Basics saying, look, you know, stop kidding around with Cydonia and the other artifact imagery.
Give us what you've got.
Particularly close-up images of the face, full face view, good lighting, etc., etc.
Right.
And in May of 2001, May 11th to be precise, we got a three-page letter from the Associate Administrator of all of NASA, Dr. Ed Weiler, basically saying, okay guys, request heard.
We acted upon it.
The image is somewhere on the website.
And we'd like to have some more suggestions for images we could take to make your little hearts beat faster.
So they're actually asking for suggestions on what to go photograph.
That was a year plus ago.
So, naturally, you... We saw it together, collectively, and a lot of brain power went into it.
And across a week or two, we created a list of ten targets, five prime and five backup, which we submitted formally in June of 2001.
Right.
And heard nothing.
Well, we heard some excuses like, oh, there's a dust storm and, you know, we can't really point the camera now because we can't see what's down there.
Anyway, months dragged on and more months dragged on and Peter and I had basically forgotten about it.
Except a few weeks ago, a couple weeks ago, Peter had sent an email followed with a phone call to headquarters basically saying, look, you know, you guys agreed to take these pictures.
We put a lot of effort into it, spent some money.
Put up a website to, you know, publish them.
Unless you are forthcoming, I'm really thinking about a lawsuit.
And so, lo and behold, last Tuesday morning, he got a collective call from Jim Garvin and Don Savage pursuant to the letter implying strongly a suit would be forthcoming.
So he emailed me and we put our heads together and we decided that we wanted to Let him get back to Sedona so he could consult with his original files, because he works as a public defender in Holbrook, which is a little tiny town threatened by fires as much of Arizona is these days.
And he did not have access to the original memos and correspondence, so we got them to postpone the call until today.
But this morning, you got that call?
It was promptly on the dot, 11 a.m.
We got Jim Garvin on the phone, and we spent our two hours in the most remarkable and interesting and watershed conversation I have had with NASA probably in the last 20 years.
Okay.
And Peter would be with us, but he is zonked tonight.
He only had three hours sleep last night.
Apparently there's some cases he's preparing.
That's right.
If you can give me the substance.
Well, the first part of the call had to do with the reasons why the Mars Global Surveyor had not acted upon our request a year ago.
Okay.
And, you know, Garvin was very carefully prepared.
You could tell he obviously came loaded with a detailed timeline of all the things that had been done, all the people who had been contacted, all the operations carried out, and he insisted on going through them point by point by point.
Listen, because it was important background for us to have.
All right.
The bottom line is that because they have lost so many spacecraft at the last minute.
Yes.
Because they have not had telemetry from the spacecraft to Earth.
Yes.
They lost Mars Observer in 93, I believe.
The history on Mars for the Russians and the US is horrible.
Yep.
They lost Mars Polar Lander because of There was no communication in the last few minutes of the entry and set down on Mars?
Yes.
Apparently, from the White House on down, there has been issued an order that because there are these extraordinary assets going to Mars in 2004, called the Mars Explorer Reconnaissance Mission, MER.
Right.
Costing 750 million dollars.
Almost a billion dollars for two robot mobile labs.
That will row, you know, a few miles from the landing site and do all kinds of neat stuff in 2004.
Is that still in the cheaper, faster category?
No, no, no.
This is not cheaper, faster.
It doesn't seem cheap.
This is big and heavy and loaded for bear.
Okay.
Because we've invested as a country and as an agency, apparently the Bush administration does not want these suckers to fail.
And if they do fail, they want to know how.
So, acting on the recommendations that we and many others have been issuing for years, Which is not having telemetry during the last few minutes.
When you get there after you've traveled, you know, hundreds of millions of miles and months and months.
Right.
It's dumb.
They are taking every precaution to ensure that the Global Surveyor is in orbit, alive and well and healthy, so it can record and relay the telemetry from the landing rovers in January of 2004.
Alright, now I get it.
The reason we've not had telemetry previously is that there was no orbiting mothership, let's say, to relay that data so that as it entered the atmosphere, well, of course, we lose at that point the telemetry, but if you've got something in orbit directly above Mars, you get the telemetry.
Well, it's even worse.
But is that about it?
No, it isn't.
On Mars, Mars Observer, they turned off the telemetry.
Why?
They didn't really ever say.
They claimed it was to prevent shock to the Chlystron tubes in the radio amplifier that sends a signal when they had to fire pyrotechnics.
They're going to get the same physical shock whether they're on or off.
Right.
And the reason they lost Mars Polar Lander is they claimed they didn't have enough money to put a transmitter on that would beam back to Earth during those critical minutes after re-entry.
So, for whatever reason, the priority was that Mars Surveyor has got to stay alive.
And healthy.
And if it dies, we want to know why.
And to maintain out of control through January 2004.
Right.
Well, this impacts directly, as Garvin was at great pains to go through today, in excruciating detail, the reasons why they can't take all the pictures that they would otherwise have liked.
That excruciating detail, by the way, for you, Richard, in that phone call, that's karma.
Thank you!
Well, I was kind of laughing it up, and poor Peter, I could hear his eyes glazing over, you know, from Arizona.
But it was important that Garvin and I established a kind of a rapport at a technical level, among other many levels, as we'll get to as the next few minutes progress.
So, he spent about a half of the two-hour long phone call, about an hour, going through all the reasons why we did not have pictures yet.
All right, I think I get the picture there.
Hold on, Richard.
We're at the bottom of the hour.
Richard C. Hoagland is here, and he's been talking to NASA.
mission, they have fewer and fewer people, they have a limited list of targets that they
can turn the spacecraft and point to.
Alright, I think I get the picture there.
Hold on Richard, we're at the bottom of the hour.
Richard C. Hoagland is here and he's been talking to NASA.
NASA.
I ain't got no trouble in my life.
We'll get the rest of the story coming up.
Your lonely streams make me cry.
It's come my flossily life.
I'm never frightened or worried.
I'm never afraid of the dark.
I'm never afraid of the dark.
You just go straight on ahead, folks.
This is Premier Networks.
That was Art Bell hosting Coast to Coast AM.
this somewhere in time.
I'm going to be doing a lot of research on this.
Once upon a time, once when you were mine, I remember skies reflected in your eyes.
I wonder where you are, I wonder if you are there.
Once upon a time, once when you were mine, I remember skies reflected in your eyes.
I wonder where you are, I wonder if you are there.
Once upon a time, in your wildest dreams, I remember skies reflected in your eyes.
I wonder where you are, I wonder if you are there.
Once upon a time, in your wildest dreams, I remember skies reflected in your eyes.
Once the world was you, our bodies felt the morning dew.
That beats the brand new day We couldn't tear ourselves away
I wonder if you can I wonder if you still remember
Once upon a time in your life You're listening to Art Bell, Somewhere in Time.
Tonight featuring Coast to Coast AM from July 1st, 2002.
In your wildest dreams, did you ever imagine that the big fire in Colorado and the rodeo fire, now the single fire in Arizona, all could have been started by human beings?
God, it's just unbelievable.
A Bureau of Indian Affairs worker admitted starting the rodeo fire during a preliminary hearing in the U.S.
District Court Sunday morning.
At one point, this man got up and said, I'm sorry for what I did.
The judge told him, shut up.
But, I mean, let's think about this for a moment.
We've got a weather change underway.
I mean, it's happening, folks.
The weather is changing as we watch it.
There's no question about it.
There's not enough snow on the mountains.
There's not enough rain.
There's not enough moisture.
Things are tinder dry.
It's bad enough.
And we've got humans, particularly humans who are supposed to be taking care of us, out there starting fires.
it's incredible.
You're listening to Art Bell, Somewhere in Time.
tonight featuring coast-to-coast AM from July 1st 2002.
You know whatever you think of Richard C. Hoagland, he's a wild guy I know.
You've got to give him credit for his work on Europa, and the ice planet, the water planet, or moon, Europa, and then, of course, Mars, and the water on Mars.
He was way ahead of the curve on all of that.
He was right about all of that, and so I guess I don't wonder that NASA is back speaking with him about likely targets for an upcoming mission.
Richard, you're back on the air.
We're getting to the bottom line of this phone call here.
Well, the bottom line was that he promised today, this is Dr. Garvin, that he was going to pulse Malin again about the target list.
We are in the queue.
Apparently, the images are in the computer.
They're supposed to be taken on some kind of a basis between now and 2004.
The priority is lower than the other two priorities, which are to save the spacecraft.
Because every time they turn to take a picture at an angle, Art, They use hydrazine.
They use fuel.
Right.
And if they run out of fuel before 2004, they're basically dead meat.
Sure.
So that's their priority, mandated by the excruciatingly stupid stuff they did during Mars Observer and Mars Polar Lander.
Alright, so what's on your list, Richard, priority-wise?
What do you want photos of?
Well, we wanted more stereo of Cydonia.
We wanted the tunnels.
Remember the glass tunnels I found?
Is more stereo of Cydonia justified?
In other words, Are we still arguing about whether it's artificial or whether it's, you know, a constructed artifact?
Well, a number of people are.
I mean, we aren't because we've got an enormous amount of coverage of Cydonia, but there are some lighting angles and some geometry angles that would really help nail down some questions.
The cliff, for instance.
The tetrahedral pyramid over on the rim of that crater.
So that's still the top of your list?
The top of our list, yeah.
But we have others.
We have the glass tunnels.
We have the flying saucer I found in Valles Marineris.
We have the original tetrahedral pyramids that Sagan wrote about back in Cosmos.
I forget what the others are.
It's been so long since we've looked at the list.
Well, that's alright.
You just gave me the top contenders, and they'd be some pretty big ones.
Well, the tunnels.
If we had stereos of the tunnels, We'd be able to instantly dismiss the Sandu nonsense and get to what they really are.
So that's why they were on the list, and you know, that kind of reasoning.
What was really important is after he finished telling us why we didn't have them from Surveyor, Jim went the next mile, and he said some very critical things for everybody who's listening tonight, particularly all the folks over at the Enterprise Mission Conference.
The first thing I asked was, well, where the heck is the IR and color from Odyssey?
Because we were promised that by Roger Gibbs on the 9th of May.
He said to a gal named Gwen, in response to a question from her in that audience, that they had already taken color, which this Themis camera on Odyssey can take, as well as nighttime infrared of Cydonia, which will give us stunning science, real science, for the first time to complement all the black and white stuff we've had over the years.
Garvin claimed he did not know about the existence of these images that they had been taken.
No kidding!
So he's the head science guy for Mars Exploration at headquarters.
So I gently refreshed his memory and specified it was Dr. Roger Gibbs, project manager at JPL of Odyssey, who that night in open forum said they had been taken.
I gave him the date, the event, the time, the person who asked the question, and he then promised that Peter is my witness.
To immediately send Christensen, who is the principal investigator of the FEMA's camera, an email asking him, where are these images?
And he promised he would send me copies of said email.
That's only one of several things that Dr. Garvin promised this morning.
Number two, he said that he would try to move our target list from MGS, while not removing it from the MGS list so the surveyor still will ultimately take those pictures.
To move the same targets over to the Odyssey list for both infrared and color photography.
Which even though it is a lower resolution, if we got color at 18 meters of some of these things, it would tell us so much more.
If we got infrared at 100 meters, it would tell us so much more of the nature of these objects.
And we picked them because they look like artifacts.
He then said that he would go to his colleague Who's a scientist in charge of the German camera on the ESA mission, the European Space Agency.
It's a mission leaving for Mars next year.
Right.
Which is carrying an incredible multiple use German framing camera.
You know, the cameras that are on the spacecraft and the framing camera.
Right.
The framing camera takes one picture, snap, the whole thing is there.
Right.
These cameras, you know, drag it line by line by line as the spacecraft moves.
Across the service is called a push room camera.
And the difference is night and day.
Back in the heyday of NASA, we had, you know, the Mariner missions, and even biking.
Those were framing cameras.
They would take a picture, a whole picture, at the same instant that the shutter was snapped.
You don't have to wait for the thing to read out.
With what NASA wants, and what you want, if we get all of this, are we going to be So motivated, in your opinion, by the results that we're going to announce a manned mission to Mars?
Well, I'm not done yet.
All right?
That appears to be the trend curve we're on.
But what my Bush people have been telling me, the sources that keep calling me up and kind of giving me political play-by-play behind this, they told me last week, by the way, they called again this afternoon after the call to get my debrief on what I thought went on.
Obviously, they know what went on.
So there's a comparing, you know, left and right hand business?
Yes.
They told us last week that the reason this was happening is because pursuant to Dr. Wyler's initiative in May of 2001, the system was just kind of getting around to being responsive.
And I brought this up with Garvin.
I said, we had from our administration sources word that you guys are being cooperative now because you've basically been told to be cooperative by the White House.
And?
He did not deny the statement.
But what he did do was to put a lot of interesting stuff on the table.
So in the time we've got remaining, let me run through the list very quickly, because I'm extremely encouraged by this conversation.
Yeah, go ahead.
And I don't say that lightly.
No, go ahead.
I have been at this 20 years.
I am as cynical and as, you know, angry about being stonewalled as anybody in this country.
We know, so if you're happy, something is really happening.
So if I am pleasantly surprised at what's going on... Yeah.
I have some reason to be cautiously optimistic.
Now, we've built into this dialogue points where both of us have to come across with things on the table, real stuff, action items, so we can prove each other's bona fides.
It's a matter of building trust.
Think of this as a meeting between Gorbachev and Bush.
We had our first summit today.
And we had a pretty good two-hour meeting.
That's great.
We were not given a short shrift.
Every single question that I or Peter had, he took the time to answer.
Okay, so maybe there's a sea change at NASA, you know?
Well, we were told by our Bush people there's a sea change.
Okay, great.
The proof of the pudding, of course, is in what really happens.
The first thing I'm going to look for is will we get the infrared and color that has been promised to us for months and months.
And when should we know about that?
We'll know in the next day or two.
Okay.
He's going to send the emails.
Christensen either has taken them, Or has not taken them.
You know, there'll be clarification and I'm supposed to get copies of all that correspondence.
All right, that's a big one.
I'll be beginning with the beginning of business the day tomorrow.
All right, good.
In addition to offering to go to the Germans to let us use their camera, which is a 2 meter framing camera and a 20 meter stereo camera, which he offered to act as a go-between and send me copies of the email he sent to that scientist, he then was holding out the prospect of a mission that NASA's Flying in 2005 called MRO, Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter.
He said they'll pick a sexier title when they get the school kids to come up with the right kind of name.
That one will have literally centimeter resolution art, inches resolution.
And I said, you know, kind of in a snap way, I said, oh, Jim, we'll be able to see the girders, won't we?
And he didn't say no.
In fact, what he said, and Peter again is my witness, and Peter's going to put together a kind of briefing paper where he lists what he heard.
He said, Garvin said, that when we get the MRO images, he says, your side, your perspective, your guys are going to be very, very happy.
Oh man, there's a big drop in a big one.
Of course!
The whole conversation was... Now, how would you interpret that?
What do you expect to see based on that?
The problem we've been having with this imagery, as I've said on the show again and again, is a gigi problem.
We're either standing up too close or back too far.
If you don't get in the zone where you can see the structural detail of put-together artificial stuff, it looks like a bunch of rock.
If you get back too far, people can claim it was just a trick of light and shadow.
No, no, no.
A good example is, I have a desk in front of me where, you know, it's wood grain, and you can see the grain running through the wood.
Well, if you back far enough, you see the wood grain, but it's obvious that it's a desk.
If you take a macro lens and just go in on the wood grain, you'll begin to see pictures of Jesus in there, you know?
So, it's the same kind of thing.
Now, if you go into a newspaper print and you look at the dots that make up a picture.
Right.
If you're at a medium distance, you just see the dots.
If you get super close on the dots, you see that the dots have geometry.
Yeah, that's right.
Well, we're going to get with MRO close enough to see the geometry.
Now, guess what he's offering?
He said they are reserving from the principal investigator, the chief scientist in charge of that camera, about 10 to 20 percent of the photography for NASA headquarters.
It's called director's discretion.
It's like the head of any major observatory in the world maintains a kind of a backlog of time that if he has something really hot he wants to look at, he can go and look.
Exactly.
They promised us, and again this is going to be part of the bonafide that we're going to see if it works out as the months go on, that we will have access to that 10 or 20% for targets specifically mandated by the anomalous community.
But this is not where we left it.
It was evident in that conversation that what he was doing is trying to show us that there's all kinds of tools they're trying to make available to get good data.
To resolve this with better and better data.
But I said in the second hour of the conversation, look Jim, unless we get a dialogue started, unless we can sit at the same table as you guys, and all share this information as equals, it doesn't mean diddly squat.
If we're on the outside looking in, and you're on the inside, and you're NASA and we're not, It's not gonna work.
So he then spent the second hour going through a series of recommendations to me, basically, and to the other scientists, you know, as part of the extended Enterprise family, like Carlotto, and Len Fleming, and Bob Williams, and, you know, Dr. Crater, and McDaniel, and all those people that you know, that we create a proposal, which then will come into headquarters to be reviewed.
And he indicated, as strongly as he could without saying it, that the review, as part of the publish or perish process, would this time be favorable.
Because I told him, look, you know, we've been to these conferences, we've been to LPI, we've been to the AGU, and every time you send in an abstract, it's killed.
I said, you can't very well have a dialogue with people who don't think you're in the same universe.
He admitted we had strong points.
He then suggested that he is controlling The setup in the next year or so of an international, second international Mars conference.
They did one in 99.
And he proposed, pursuant to this conversation, as it evolved in the two hours, that he set up something called a Martian Enigmas Panel.
And that our guys either be invited to present papers, or present in a live roundtable discussion, similar to what was held at Caltech back during the Mariner days, Mariner 9.
A discussion of the enigmas, the artifacts, what they look like, what they might be telling us, and how we can further pursue to resolve the issues.
This is such a sea change in content and in atmosphere from the adversarial, we're NASA and you're not, go away, stop bothering us, that we've had for the last generation, that frankly I think today was not a bad day for artifacts.
Well, Richard, if the new photos are taken, if the IRs are released, why do you suppose, having not seen them, that he would make a comment as, I don't know, provocative, I guess that would be the right word, about how happy you'll be to see them?
I mean, he knows what boils your blood, right?
Then I know what he means, and that means that Gosh, you don't suppose this all could be a political dance, do you?
That certain people have to save face by coming to this at this time in history and not earlier?
That there is a new agenda?
That we're on a timetable?
I mean, I've been told by my political guys representing the administration, the voice of the administration, that this is a preparation for a united front when the President makes the announcement, we're going!
Well, you know, Richard, America The free world, which is now most of it, really needs this.
I mean, right now, the most everybody at home has to think about when they have time to think about this kind of thing is what these bastards are going to blow up next, you know, and our war on terrorism or whatever it is.
It's horrible.
I mean, that's all we've got.
We used to have, and you remember the days because you were there, when we were going to the moon was something, you know, it was just it was a national goal.
Now, fine, let it be a world goal, but let's go To Mars, it'll give everybody something to think about other than whether their children are going to live.
Alright, what I have been told, again by the political side of this, not by Garvin, but by the political side is there needs to be a preparation, a societal preparation, and that we are viewed, meaning we as representing the anomalous community, the folks that have been looking at these images, finding amazing things, that we represent an important voice that now must be included in the dialogue Well, Richard, if what you anomalous guys say turns out to be true, you represent the main reason to go to Mars.
That's what Peter pointed out, and that was a point on which Garvin blinked.
He said, well, I'm not really prepared to talk about that today.
I came here to talk about your images and your requests and how we're trying to fulfill those.
I used it as a breakpoint to get into the politics of Brookings.
Yes.
Which he was very familiar with.
Yes.
Of the politics of how do you include us?
Did he engage you on the Brookings subject?
Only that it was not the way science should proceed.
And I said this was the red flag that basically got everybody upset, you know, several years ago when McDaniel made a big issue of it.
Because if you're telling scientists what they can or cannot talk about before they even find it, By a bureaucracy that's paid by the American taxpayer, it has a chilling effect on the entire process.
He agreed.
That's where we got into the discussion, which lasted another hour, of how we could be invited into these meetings and conferences and present papers and be part of the dialogue that would bring in the mainstream guys and make them look at this evidence for the first time ever.
Richard, did you get the sense in the brief conversation about Brookings that while he disagreed with the concept and the conclusions of Brookings, uh... it was there behind that somewhere but was there a but back there but you know we've been hamstrung by it and i also get that from my political sources they say that is the main reason this is moving on a slow curve as opposed to a presidential announcement tomorrow so we're doing the political dance so folks basically brookings saying that uh... the the american public the world would not be ready uh... for uh... evidence that uh...
uh... there were a teaser that were eps or that you know the the god that
created is an easy or whatever that's what brookings said and that's
been for years years years the operable
i guess if what we just heard is true uh... the the the way they've been
operating not to tell us because we can handle the info several times garvin
made reference to our constituency meaning basically the people in this audience art
Alright.
The people at Enterprise Mission.
Alright, look brother, thank you for the update.
Airtime for you anytime you've got something like this.
Congratulations on getting back in touch with NASA.
Something is in the wind and I don't think it's a bad thing.
Good luck to us all.
Thanks, Art.
Later, Richard.
That's Richard C. Hoagland.
Alright, coming up, the biggest explosion I've seen, anybody seen in a long, long time, occurred on the sun today.
You want to see photos of it, it's at artbell.com, on my website right now, artbell.com.
This is one monstrous explosion on the sun, and the sun is what we're going to be talking about coming up next, with my guest Ramon E. Lopez.
From the high desert, I'm Art Bell, and this is Coast.
The trip back in time continues, with Art Bell hosting Coast to Coast AM.
more somewhere in time coming up the
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I'm gonna open up your gate and maybe tell you about Phaedra and how she gave me life and how she made Premier Networks presents Art Bell, Somewhere in Time.
Tonight featuring Coast to Coast AF from July 1st, 2002.
There has been a massive explosion on the sun.
It occurred today, July 1st.
We've got the photos on my website just prior to air time, got them off.
The website moved its server locations and several of the functions of the website are not yet Restored Keith managed to get it up there.
Anyway, and you've got to see this photograph.
You've got to see it We don't have a webcam up there yet because the FTP is still in the dumper But I assume and I hope that the people responsible for this are working on it hard.
So we should have that shortly for you hopefully now this image Of our son is a pretty sobering thing to look at Again, this occurred today July 1st.
You're gonna want to see this absolutely incredible It's at Artbell.com under What's New.
Actually, we've got a couple of slightly different photographs up there.
One says the sun has legs?
The other image shows huge eruption on sun, and that's going to be the subject.
I understand George interviewed my guest coming up some previous time on the show, but here he comes again.
Ramon E. Lopez is a distinguished professor in the Department of Physics, University of Texas, El Paso.
Received his B.S.
degree in physics in 1980 from the University of Illinois and his M.S.
Ph.D.
in space physics in 82 and 86 respectively from Rice.
His current research focuses on dynamics of the space environment and comparisons between global computer simulations of the magnetosphere and observations.
He has authored and or co-authored 68 scientific publications, 17 non-scientific publications, including the popular science book, Storms from the Sun.
He is a fellow of the American Physical Society, a member of the Committee on Undergraduate Science, Education of the National Research Council, has served as a chair of, or member of, several committees of the American Geophysical Union and the American Physical Society.
From 1994 through 1999 was Director of Education and outreach programs of the American Physical Society.
Dr. Lopez is active in science education reform, both locally and nationally.
That's interesting.
He has served as an educational consultant for a number of school districts around the country, state education agencies in California, Maryland, North Carolina, and Texas, and for organizations including Discovery Communications, Inc., the National Science Resources Center, and various government agencies.
In a moment, we're going to talk about the sun.
You're listening to Art Bell, somewhere in time.
Tonight featuring Coast to Coast AM from July 1st, 2002.
Music Now here is Dr. Lopez.
Doctor, welcome to the program.
Good evening, Art.
Good evening.
Well, you come on the program on an interesting evening, you know, as we have this incredible photograph of a gigantic explosion of the sun.
It's my understanding, fortunately, it's not aimed at Earth, but kind of like a recent asteroid pass that, I guess, as usual, they found out about, you know, these asteroids that zip by Earth Two days after the fact, a day or two after the fact, they always say, well, we had a really close call, and the really close calls are never known about until after the fact.
With the sun, we get a little bit of warning.
I mean, we've got this satellite out there that looks at the sun, and it sees the kind of, takes the kind of photographs that we've got up on our website tonight, and we get a little bit of warning, but is this one spectacular photograph, or what?
It's a really marvelous prominence, and I hope that all of your listeners go and check out your website.
The picture was taken by a satellite called SOHO, which sits a million miles upstream of the Earth at the point where the Earth's gravity and the Sun's gravity balance, and so it sits there and looks at the Sun and takes pictures and is beaming these pictures back constantly.
So, along with Attitude Control, no doubt, SOHO, they keep it there by having it at that, and now the Sun is how far?
It's 93 million miles.
93 million miles.
And they only have the satellite a million miles out.
And at a million miles out, you're saying the Sun's gravity and the Earth's gravity are equal enough to about hold it there, right?
That's right.
It's what we call a local gravitational minimum.
So you can set something there and it'll more or less stay there.
That's incredible.
So then the Sun's mass is that much... As a matter of fact, the explosion today, they say that was 30 times... 30 times the diameter of the Earth.
That's right.
It was pretty huge.
That's a pretty large fraction of the sun, because the sun is about a hundred Earths across.
So that's a very, very large prominence.
And it is really quite spectacular.
Now, if that fiery extrusion that we're looking at right there had been aimed Instead of where it is, just a few more days had gone by and it had been aimed at Earth.
Just presume that had been aimed at Earth.
What would we experience?
Well, it would depend on really whether there was a large coronal mass ejection, whether a large amount of hot gas, electrically charged gas was thrown out of the sun.
It would also depend on how fast it was traveling and how strong the magnetic field is.
You could have Everything from nothing happening to a major magnetic storm.
So it's really hard to tell.
Okay.
I read, you know, talking about airline passengers, people flying in airplanes, as bad as it is today from a lot of points of view, there is something that, when I read it, it sent little chills down my spine.
And I know the sun.
I'm a HAL operator.
I depend on these sun cycles for really good communication or really bad communication, depending on what the sun does.
But there's a chart.
Dr. Lopez, that will show the effect on airline passengers at high altitude at varying degrees of sun eruption.
Now there is a very high degree, I forget what they call it, a super flare or something like that.
We had one of those a couple years ago, a super flare.
And when you read the effect on passengers, should there be a super flare at altitude, It said you would take something like a hundred chest x-rays instantly.
That is a possibility.
It's a pretty extreme possibility, but you know, extreme events do happen.
Did happen.
Yeah, in fact, there was one, the flare you're talking about was March 31st of 2001, I believe, and that's the one that reset the whole flare scale.
It was off scale, so they had to recalibrate the flare.
It actually went off scale?
Yeah.
And we know that in historical times, there have been even larger flares.
In 1859, there was a doozy of a flare.
It's kind of hard to say exactly how big it was because we didn't have the kind of instruments we have now, but we do know that that was one of the hugest events in history because that produced a tremendous magnetic storm with Aurora seen down in Havana, Cuba.
Well, this is a very controversial thing, but airline passengers, that's one thing.
They may have risk for one of those super flares, a very small risk, but what about pilots, co-pilots, and what about flight stewardesses and people who work on the airlines and spend all their time at altitude?
When they go through a solar maximum and they're going from New York to Los Angeles and back a couple few times every day, whatever, I would think that their exposure would be in a different category, wouldn't it?
It is.
And, in fact, there is increasing attention given to this.
The European Union has passed regulations, in fact, that limit the amount of exposure that pilots and flight attendants can have in a given year.
Really?
Yeah.
And how do they... It's the same thing with radiation workers.
You have to limit the exposure.
Uh-huh.
And what sort of scale is that?
I mean, do they, you know, after 50 flights, do they say, We're in a period of high activity from the sun and you have now exceeded your exposure limit.
You're grounded or what?
They do have ways of calculating the exposure and it's really something that in general is not going to affect most people in the airline industry unless they're going over the poles and they get caught by some of these large flares in the polar regions where the magnetic field is open to the interplanetary magnetic field and these energetic particles from the sun can get to More directly into the upper atmosphere.
Yes, but they just started these brand new over-the-pole routes.
I mean, it's much cheaper to fly over the pole than not.
Now, since the walls came down and all the rest of it, we can now regularly fly over the pole.
And so, it would be a new concern, wouldn't it?
That's right.
And this is something that airlines are very concerned about.
Not only from the standpoint of radiation, but also from the standpoint of communications.
When they're flying on these polar routes, and when you go from New York to Tokyo or to Beijing, you take a pretty high latitude cut across the Earth.
You bet.
And during one of these big storms, not only is there the radiation hazard, but more importantly, actually, from the airline point of view, is the disruption to radio communication.
They do not like to be out of comm with their aircraft.
They divert their airplanes.
Oh, they actually divert airplanes?
Yes.
It costs them millions of dollars a year.
We have a 22-year solar cycle, or an 11-year cycle, depending on how you look at it, the Hampstead 11 years, where you have a solar maximum and then a solar minimum, then 11 years later you have a solar maximum again.
This latest solar maximum we just went through has been really weird.
Really weird.
We all thought it was over, and there was a dip, and then all of a sudden there was a second peak in the solar cycle, and it just went berserk again.
Is that unusual?
Double-peaked solar cycles are unusual, but not unknown.
Predicting the solar cycle is very much an art.
There are no real physics models, and people have all kinds of ways of reading the tea leaves, and it's sort of like Groundhog Day.
No.
And it fooled a lot of the forecasters.
Could there be a triple peak?
I'm not sure that a triple peak is ever observed.
But you know, we really don't understand the solar cycle in many ways.
There are pieces of it that we do understand, but we don't know why it has an 11-year period Why the sunspot number is a particular value?
Why sometimes it shuts off altogether?
Yes.
That also has happened in historical times.
Let's understand a few basics.
Give me Sun 101.
That's a hydrogen reaction going on up there, yes?
That's right.
It's a fusion of hydrogen and helium in the core.
And so a small amount of mass is being converted into energy.
Well, small by solar standards, huge by our standards.
Very large amount of energy is being released.
How does a sun get to be a sun?
I mean, we all understand what a planet is.
I don't think we understand a lot about suns.
How does a sun get to be a sun?
Stars are formed when there's enough material as it collapses that the temperatures and pressures in the center become high enough so that the hydrogen can be fused together to make helium.
And in that process, a certain amount of mass Okay, so take Jupiter for example, which is pretty massive.
equals mc squared that tells you how much energy is produced for a given amount of mass and
actually we understand pretty well how the sun works how it how it creates its energy and how
stars form and evolve there's really quite a lot that's that's known about that in the broad sense
okay so take jupiter for example which is pretty massive how does that compare in size to the sun
um jupiter is is a by far the largest planet more massive than all of the planets right but still
the sun is is orders of magnitude greater greater in mass than jupiter and
And Jupiter does actually produce more energy than it receives in sunlight, but it's still not a star.
Not even a failed star.
So in order to be a star, it would have to be orders of magnitude yet larger?
That's right.
You'd have to have a hundred sized Jupiters, and then maybe you could get a small star.
So then, is it correct that it's the actual mass of the object, and when it's finally massive enough, and there's enough pressure, then this hydrogen, this fusion process, automatically begins?
That's right.
That's right.
And in fact, depending on how massive the star is, We have a pretty good idea of what the life cycle of the star is.
Extremely supermassive stars, stars that are a hundred or a thousand times the mass of our sun, don't live for very long.
They go through their life cycle fairly quickly by even Earth standards.
In other words, tens of millions of years.
The bigger they are, the faster they burn?
The faster they burn.
And the bigger the bang when they go out.
And the bigger the bang.
In other words, supernova.
That's right, and that's how we got here, because all of the heavy elements, like all of the carbon, the gold in my wedding ring, that was formed in a supernova explosion.
That gold, at one point, was sitting in the center of a star somewhere.
It was blown into space, into a huge cloud of dust, which then eventually collapsed into our own solar system, and some of that dust collapsed into the Earth.
That's where the gold came from.
All the minerals then?
Everything.
Well, everything except the hydrogen and the helium, basically.
A little bit of lithium, beryllium, but basically everything else was formed in the center of a star, blown out into space, and then came back together again to form our solar system.
We're all stardust.
Dr. Lopez, our scientists, and you're one of them, have always thought that our sun was sort of a A middle or small, relatively smaller sun that was extremely stable.
In other words, we didn't have to worry about it going one day berserk in one form or another.
But then a couple, few years ago, I began to hear that scientists were finding other suns that they thought were stable, just like ours, that suddenly would go kind of berserk and belch out into space.
And obviously, if there were planets, they would be Consumed?
Destroyed?
Suns just like ours?
Sun-like stars, actually people have been studying them for about 30 or so years, looking at stars of similar mass and luminosity as our sun, and there are variations in behaviors, and we do know that some are more variable than our own star.
Our star is a fairly stable star, but even our own sun is Variable.
I mean it does change over time.
It does have these eruptions like that prominence and the coronal mass ejections that go out into space.
They're not powerful enough to cause any serious damage to planets unless you of course you've got humans with technology that could be damaged.
That's a different story.
But we do know that other stars like our sun do have variable output and our own sun has a variable output.
But it's fairly stable.
Right, but I read the story about fairly stable suns that suddenly really do something, from
our point of view, that would be really awful.
It has been observed.
Is that true?
There are observations of stars that are not too dissimilar from our sun that do have more
variability than our sun.
I'm not sure if they're dissimilar enough that that's really the cause.
We also don't know about any other companions for some of these stars.
Some of them we do know about companions and that has something to do with stellar evolution
as well.
Does it?
In other words, other mass, major mass?
Most stars are actually binary systems and so our sun is not a binary star.
When a large comet comes by, there are a lot of people who believe it creates disturbance on the sun when a comet passes by, and you wouldn't think that would be true.
Have you heard of that theory?
I have not heard of that, and I would be very surprised if there was any effect, because comets, there's just not enough gravity to perturb a star.
No, you wouldn't think so.
A very, very small effect.
All right, Doctor, hold tight.
We're at the bottom of the hour.
We'll be right back.
Dr. Ramon E. Lopez is my guest, and we're talking about what else?
The sun up there.
You ought to see this photo.
Yikes!
This is Premier Networks.
That was Art Bell hosting Coast to Coast AM on this Somewhere in Time.
Pretty soon all my troubles will pass, cause I'm in shoo, shoo, shoo, shoo, shoo, shoo, shoo, shoo, shoo, shoo, shoo, shoo, sugar town.
I never had a dog that liked me some Never had a friend that wanted one
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Let's quit living on his guilty mind.
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My people can move like the moon and star.
Now, we take you back to the past on Art Bell Somewhere in Time.
Dr. Ramon López is here.
He's a distinguished professor in the Department of Physics, University of Texas, El Paso.
And we're talking about the sun.
And one of the reasons we're talking about the sun is what happened today.
You can go take a look.
We've got it on the website right now.
There was an eruption on the sun 30 times the size of Earth.
Fortunately, it doesn't look like it was aimed at us, but it could as easily have been.
It's like letting a gun fall on the floor and a bullet just goes, you know, wherever it goes, right?
Hopefully it won't be into you, but you never know that for sure.
Sure, it's kinda a little like that.
Now, we take you back to the past, on Arkbell Somewhere in Time.
Alright, eruptions like the one we had today, July 1st, Generally, if they'd been aimed at Earth, there'd been trouble.
You know, a Japanese satellite was killed, I think in May, by an eruption from the sun.
Are you familiar with that story, by the way, Doctor?
Yes, I am.
That was a Japanese space science satellite that was on its way to Mars.
It's popularly known as Planet B, the name of the satellite.
Nozomi is the actual name.
It was launched by the equivalent of Japan's NASA.
but it didn't die completely it just got wounded. It got wounded, it lost its
communications and uh... some of its scientific instruments were short-circuited
but uh... they have been able to restore communication and some functioning of that particular probe
But that got zapped by a solar flare that went off on the sun.
Oh, well, then here's an interesting question.
We're contemplating, in fact, we're talking about in the first hour of Richard C. Hoagland, the possibility of a manned mission to Mars.
Now, if there had been men in a rocket on the way to Mars, and they had been roughly where that Japanese satellite was, what would be the biological, probable biological effect On men.
Very nasty.
Unless you've got a good storm shelter.
That's something that you're going to have to have if you go to Mars.
You're going to have to have some place to hide out with thick walls that will stop the radiation.
Well, nobody can hear you scream in space, and thick walls are heavy.
How do you get them into space?
That's going to add to the cost, because every pound you lift into space is a lot of dollars.
A real challenge of any manned mission to Mars is keeping them alive from radiation.
And it's not just in space.
It's also on Mars.
Well, that was going to be my next question.
Here on Earth, we are protected by this magnetic field we have to some degree, right?
That's right.
We have magnetic field and then we also have the atmosphere.
And that gives us pretty good protection against cosmic rays and solar energetic particles.
On Mars, you don't have any of that.
You are really just hanging out there.
And we're going to have to have very good space weather prediction to be able to tell them something is coming, and they're going to have to have storm shelters.
They're going to have to dig down into the Martian dirt and be able to hide out.
Oh, really?
Really?
How much less protection will there be on Mars than on Earth?
Well, on Mars, you're almost like you were out in space.
The Martian atmosphere is very thin, and again, there's essentially no magnetic field on Mars.
So you've got very, very little protection.
Why is there no... I thought a magnetic field was a function of mass, and Mars has some mass, not arguably as much as we do, right?
But it does have some mass, so should it not have an equivalent magnetic field?
Mars is about a fourth or so the size of Earth, and... Sorry, no, it's bigger than that, but... Say a third.
Yeah, but it's...
There's a lot about planetary magnetism we don't understand.
Venus does not have a magnetic field, and it's the same size as Earth.
It doesn't?
No.
It doesn't?
Well then, now wait a minute here.
And Mercury does have a magnetic field.
Oh, whoa.
Whoa.
This is all confusing me.
I thought that a magnetic field was absolutely a function of the mass.
No.
No, magnetic fields are set up by currents that are flowing internal in the planet, and Mars doesn't have a magnetic field, so it must not have a liquid core like the Earth.
Now, why Mercury might still have that, maybe because it's so close to the Sun, the tidal forces still keep it molten inside.
But Venus is about the same size as the Earth.
Venus, in many ways, is very much like the Earth, and in other ways, is surprisingly different from the Earth.
Well, now, wait a minute.
If it doesn't have, if these planets don't have a magnetic field, then presumably you could not launch a satellite No, you don't need a magnetic field to navigate.
You can navigate with a star tracker that keeps a particular star in a field of view.
to, there would be no, there would be nothing to orbit around. There would be no magnetic
field from which you could fix a satellite at a certain distance to orbit.
No, you don't need a magnetic field to navigate. You can navigate with a star tracker that
keeps a particular star in a field of view. And magnetic fields really have no impact
on orbital dynamics, on the physics of the motion of the satellite.
They don't?
They don't?
No.
No.
Oh, okay.
Because the forces are much, much smaller than the gravity forces on a large object.
The magnetic fields control objects that are electrically charged, like the electrically charged gases, the plasmas, that are out in space.
But they're not going to have much of an effect on A large spacecraft, which is essentially charge neutral, might have a little bit of charge imbalance, but very little.
And the speeds at which it's moving are relatively small.
And the force is the electric charge times the speed times the magnetic field.
So, magnetic fields really don't have an effect on satellites and their trajectories.
But they do on our protection from the sun.
That's correct.
Alright, now, a few things.
There.
Our magnetic field has been doing some interesting wandering lately.
I mean, serious wandering.
In fact, I saw a story that said if it continues to wander as it is now, it's going to be well into Russia in the next 50 or 100 years or so.
That could very well be.
I haven't kept track of exactly where the North Magnetic Pole is these days, but I do know that it is wandering, and the Earth's field is also weakening.
Yeah, that's right.
There are even scientists who say it's possible that we could go through a pole reversal, or we could go into a period where there would be no magnetic field prior to some sort of reversal or change.
That's possible?
Yes.
And if we were to go into neutral and we didn't have a magnetic field, then we had a big flare from the sun, what would happen?
Earth would get a lot more radiation.
We would still have the atmosphere that would protect us, because the atmosphere is just a lot of material.
I mean, it's a pretty thick blanket, and it absorbs a lot of radiation.
But yes, we would get more than normal.
It's not something we have to be particularly concerned about, because even if you estimate that the Earth's field is reducing very quickly, it would be thousands of years before there would be a field reversal.
But yes, there will be a field reversal.
I mean, it's happened lots and lots of times.
And we've got evidence of this.
In fact, we can even time how fast the seafloor is spreading.
Actually, we use the seafloor spreading to time when the field reversals happen, because as the seafloor comes up, volcanic ridges like the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, as the lava comes out, the magnetic field of the Earth gets frozen into it.
The hot lava tries to line up like a compass needle, or at least a little pieces of iron within the lava line up like compass needles
along the field and then when the
the lava solidifies that is frozen in and you can go with a magnetometer make
measurements and you see these magnetic stripes pointing one way and then the other way
then the other way that's because the earth's field does flip back and forth
I've had a lot of guests on who have talked about flips and
there's a lot there's very, believe me, diversified opinion on what would happen
to us you know in Philadelphia, New York, Los Angeles, Chicago
Bangladesh, whatever What would happen to the world if there was a reversal?
Do you have any thoughts on what the effects would be if the magnetic pole flipped?
There would be some increase in cancer rates, because there would be more radiation that would hit the Earth.
But other than that, there probably wouldn't be too huge of an effect.
It would affect our technology, because our technology would be more vulnerable to storms from the sun without that magnetic shield.
But, you have to remember that flips have occurred in the time that humans have been on this planet, and we're still around.
So, we're not going to go extinct, and there's no evidence that other animals have had a problem because of that either.
Well, now there are, there's a group of Israeli scientists who think that The big dinosaurs that were roaming about Earth were not killed by some big rock that slammed into Earth, but rather from an event on the Sun that they were literally irradiated instantly to death.
And there's a fairly reputable group of scientists who seem to believe that.
Could that be?
I would find that highly unlikely.
If there was that kind of a radiation burst, you would find evidence of that in the layer
that separates the Cretaceous from the Tertiary period.
What you find at that boundary is this thin layer of clay with a lot of iridium that's
associated with extraterrestrial impacts.
We have found and dated the crater in Yucatan, at Chicxulub.
Right.
That was associated with that.
And you find all of the glass beads coming from the eruption and everything.
So we know that something about the size of Manhattan slammed into the earth at 65 million years ago.
We know that below that layer, there's lots of dinosaurs.
And after that layer, there's not a single dinosaur fossil.
That's right.
So I think the evidence is pretty clear that this big impact
had a lot to do with the end of the dinosaurs there
there are other ideas i mean there are people who say the disease is actually wiping out
the dinosaurs that's right for the climate change
maybe those things had something to do with it maybe the dinosaurs were having
a rough time but we do know that this very large object
whacked the earth and that must have been very bad indeed
uh... in indeed must have been
the uh...
the climate uh... here on earth i think most people now are agreed
we seem to be going through a really big climate change at the moment
I mean, whether you want to argue, and there's a great argument about whether it's man's hand and greenhouse gases, or whether it's a normal cyclical event, You know, that argument is, you know, I put it over there on the shelf and I say, look, our climate is changing.
We're not getting as much snow in the mountains.
We're not getting as much rain where it ought to be.
It's all moving north.
Higher temperatures are moving north.
We're beginning to get all kinds of changes in climate right now.
And do you think that some of that could be attributed to our sun?
I think it's very likely.
Yes, the Earth is getting warmer.
The data are very clear on that.
And yes, humans have been pumping a lot of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, and that will warm up the Earth.
But the sun also changes.
And that's something that we don't have any control over.
We can just watch and see what happens.
Throughout this century, the peak in the number of sunspots, because the number goes up and down with this 11-year cycle that you mentioned earlier, that peak has been pretty much going up.
As it's been going up, the Earth has been also warming up.
Now, there was a time in the 1600s, a period of 80 years, called the Maunder Minimum, when almost no sunspots were seen.
And it wasn't because people weren't looking.
They actually were looking for sunspots.
They just weren't happening.
They weren't happening.
And at that time, temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere were very cold.
And in fact, it's referred to as the Little Ice Age.
So there is some kind of link And there are some ideas of what might be the physical mechanism that connects solar magnetic activity and Earth's climate through cosmic rays and the amount of clouds that are produced.
There is some evidence that, yes, when the sun is more magnetically active, we get less clouds on Earth and more sunlight hits the Earth and the Earth warms up.
So part of global warming, I suspect, Part is due to the sun and part is due to human activity.
That's fair.
I don't think, you know, I just don't think those arguments matter much anymore.
At least they shouldn't because it's obvious we are going through, you know, a change and from my point of view we just need to adjust to that change with regard to where we grow certain crops and all the rest of it and adjust the best we can because as you pointed out, there's not a damn thing we can do about it.
We're just going to have to sit here on earth and put up with whatever It happens.
Basically, right?
There are changes going on that would be very hard for us to control.
That's right.
We should have more scientific study to see if there are things that we can do that can help not make the problem worse, but at the same time, we have to recognize that the sun does vary in its output.
Not only sunlight, but also magnetic fields and plasma and all the other stuff that the sun produces.
And we're going to have to live with those variations.
Can I ask you a question?
If you can't answer this, that's fine, but I'm going to ask it anyway.
There are some people who believe that our government, other governments, are very well aware that there are changes underway right now, and that they are as a result of perhaps more sunlight reaching Earth, and there are concocted plans out there I haven't heard anything about that.
That would be a pretty huge project.
on reaching Earth and therefore modify our weather that our government has and is considering
possibly even doing experiments in this area now.
Do you have any comments on that?
I haven't heard anything about that and that would be a pretty huge project.
Oh yes.
I would consider it to be highly unlikely, but certainly there's no one in the scientific
community that i am aware of discussing anything like that
Actually, Dr. NASA, NASA had a proposal, pretty wild stuff, to move the Earth.
No.
I don't know whether you heard about that or not.
No, I didn't hear about that one.
I would love to see where they're going to put the lever.
Well, here's what they said.
They said that what you would do is get a big rock that is not headed toward Earth, but in our general direction, and find a way to redirect it in our general direction, and not have it hit Earth, but have it instead make a very close pass, you know, brazing the atmosphere.
Something so massive that it would literally throw us out of orbit and take us a little further away from the sun, they said, until things had cooled off a bit, so to speak, and then you would do the reverse process and bring us back.
Now, I didn't think a whole lot of the proposal when I read it, but it was a real proposal in front of NASA, or in NASA.
I can believe that some people might You know, throw out a crazy idea like that, I doubt that we'll get much of an audience.
We do have a very large rock near us, of course.
It's called the moon.
Oh, yes.
And the moon is pulling on us all the time.
We're also pulling on the moon.
No, it's not very likely that you could, even just from theoretically, you could move a rock in a way that you could get it to graze Earth.
You could move Earth's orbit very much at all.
Because Earth would pull on the rock.
Rock would pull on earth.
The forces would be the same, but the accelerations would be divided by the mass, the force divided by the mass.
And so the acceleration on the earth, then the change in the earth's velocity would be very, very tiny unless the rock was of comparable size to the earth.
So you would have to move Well, I didn't think much of the idea at the time myself.
and swing it by the earth before you would get much of an effect on earth's soil. Well, I didn't think
much of the idea at the time myself.
I thought, you know, just a little small miscalculation one way or the other anyway.
Yeah, that thing also, yeah, you know, you just miss a little bit and you're in deep trouble.
You could have another moon.
Because actually, the best theories for the creation of the moon is that
early in earth's history, an object about the size of Mars slammed into the earth
and threw off a bunch of material which coalesced into the moon.
Coalesced into the moon.
Actually, aren't there people who say that the moon, if you fit it in a certain way, would fit right in, that the moon was, in fact, blown off Earth, that somehow it fits into, you know, The hole?
Well, no, there's no hole.
I mean, when this thing hit, when this Mars-like object hit the Earth, the Earth completely remelted.
And so it was just totally molten again.
It just threw off this huge cloud of material.
So there's no, there's no hole left because it just, it re-coalesced.
I mean, that was very early in the history in the solar system when there were very large impacts.
But the theory is that the Moon did come from the Earth.
Yes.
That would have been some big bang.
All right.
Hold on, Doctor.
We're at the top of the hour.
We will be right back.
The trip back in time continues with Art Bell hosting Coast to Coast AM.
More somewhere in time coming up.
Walk through, yeah.
What is it good for?
Absolutely nothing.
Say it again, y'all.
Walk through, look out.
What is it good for?
Absolutely nothing.
Listen to me.
I walk.
I despise.
Costing me the structure of this life.
War me in tears to thousands of mothers.
When their sons go to fight and lose their lives.
I say walk.
Walk.
Good God.
Walk.
Time, time, time See what's become of me
Time, time, time See what's become of me
While I looked around For my possibilities
I was so hard to please The ground is a brown, and the sky is a hazy shade of winter.
Is this salvation only planned?
A town by your side is bound to be a better ride than what you've got planned.
You're listening to Art Bell, Somewhere in Time.
Tonight featuring Coast to Coast AM from July 1st, 2002.
You're listening to Art Bell, Somewhere in Time.
Tonight featuring Coast to Coast AM from July 1st, 2002.
Good morning.
We're talking about the sun with my guest, Dr. Ramon E.
Lopez.
It's the springtime of my life He's written a book.
If you'd like to read it, I'll go on up to my website.
Besides looking at the photograph of what happened on the sun July 1st, now yesterday, you can check out his book.
Obviously go to my website under tonight's guest info.
His book is simply called Storms from the Sun.
Storms from the Sun.
And we've got a link to the book.
And believe me, there are storms coming from the sun.
And they may be getting a little hotter.
I wonder if that would be the right way to put it.
Certainly, our weather is getting a little bit hotter.
In fact, there was a story about Mars the other day, and then the polar caps melting.
I wonder if anybody saw that one.
Let's see they're further away than we are.
So what about us?
There's a patch of snow on the ground You're listening to Art Bell, somewhere in time.
tonight featuring Coast to Coast AM from July 1st 2002.
Once again, Dr. Lopez and doctor I'm going to ask you a question that's probably non,
very non-scientific but I've been getting all these emails from people who say the same
I think we had somebody come on the show, oh God, I don't know, some time ago, and they said, Art, I've noticed something weird about the sun lately.
It has a lot more, it's a lot brighter, and it has a lot more white content in the sunlight, that as I remember it when I was younger, there was a lot more yellow content in the light from the sun, and you wouldn't believe, after that phone call, doctor, I had all this landslide of emails saying, yes, I've noticed the same thing, a lot more white content in the sun.
Now, is that sort of mass hallucination, or could there be something to it?
I don't know, to tell you the truth.
I can't say that I've noticed anything, and I haven't seen anyone in the scientific community report anything along those lines, that the sun is brighter somehow, or that there's more... I mean, after all, white light is just a combination of all of the colors.
Right.
So... But the sun used to... I know it's very unscientific, but the sun used to just seem more yellow than it is now.
Perhaps.
Again, I can't really say.
Remember also that the color that we see of the sun is not just what the sun is producing.
It's also filtered through our atmosphere.
That's a good point.
At sunset, the sun is very red because as the light is coming to us, the blue light gets all knocked out, leaving mostly the red and orange hues to come to us.
So it depends on You know, what time of day you see the sun.
It depends if there's a lot of dust in the air.
You know, after Mount Pinatubo went off, we had spectacular sunsets because of the scattering of sunlight in the atmosphere from the dust from that particular volcanic eruption.
I've had people on my program, Doctor, debating our trip to the moon.
You know, we went to the moon.
And, of course, haven't been back since, but we did go to the moon.
So they say.
There's a certain group out there that says, oh, no, we didn't.
We never did go to the moon.
It's all a bunch of baloney.
It was all faked.
I'm sure you've heard of all that stuff going on.
Oh, yeah.
And one of the pieces of evidence they cite for the fact that we never could have gone to the moon is the amount of radiation that the astronauts would have been exposed to going and coming from the moon, and they say they'd been killed.
That's not true.
Not true.
Not even close.
Not even close.
You fly through the Van Allen Radiation Belt pretty quickly.
You don't get much of an exposure.
Yes, you're out in space and, you know, the dash mounts reported they would close their eyes.
They'd see little flashes of light.
These are cosmic rays coming through their eyes.
Yeah, they got some radiation, but not nearly enough to do them any damage.
There was, however, back in August 1972, a huge solar flare in between two Apollo missions.
And when the NASA scientists started looking at that, they realized that if there had been an Apollo mission during one of those flares, those astronauts would have been in real trouble.
How much trouble?
Some estimates indicate a 30% fatality rate from acute radiation poisoning.
30%?
Yeah, so one of the three guys might have died in two weeks.
The other two would have been very sick.
I probably would have gotten some kind of cancer not too long after that, I would guess, or I would have had some problems to be sure because it would have gotten a pretty nasty dose of radiation.
So it was a little bit of the roll of the dice?
It was.
And NASA didn't realize it until they looked at this August 1972 flare.
We've got a whole chapter on that in our book, Storms from the Sun.
What made you decide to write this book anyway?
Well, I have always been interested in communicating this kind of science to the public at large.
There's a tremendous fascination with space, and that's how I got into this business.
I mean, I was a kid when the Apollo missions were going on and the moon landings made a huge impact on me,
and that's why I went into space science.
I think it's the responsibility of scientists to communicate to the public
because people want to know.
How old are you now?
42.
I'm now 57, and I remember those moon shots really, really well,
and I wonder really, really hard why we haven't done anything since.
I mean, why we haven't gone back to the moon, we haven't gone to Mars.
We're just talking about Mars, and it seems like we retreated from space, from the whole idea of going into space, and now the biggest thing the United States has to worry about is what's going to blow up next.
You know, it used to be we had something to think about.
So I'm hoping for a Mars mission.
But from what you told me, a Mars mission would be somewhat difficult, based on what the Sun would do.
That's right.
And there are a lot of other difficulties as well.
How do you keep these people from going crazy, being locked up in a small group, you know, in confined quarters for such a long time?
How do you keep them alive?
I mean, there are just so many problems.
I would also love to see a Mars mission.
I think that we will go there and I think that when we get there we're going to find evidence of early life on Mars.
There was water on Mars.
The conditions were right.
I think we're going to find some evidence and it's going to be a huge discovery.
There are, yeah, there's a lot of people think there's evidence of the fact that there was life on Mars and that we're seeing that now in satellite photography which is getting better and better and better with more missions, non-man missions to Mars and of course we have some wonderful controversies going but you really do think we will find that there was life or is life?
Was or is, yeah, bacterial life.
I would be surprised if there was Anything that would leave large fossils, but bacteria leave their own kind of fossils.
And I think that we will find that there was bacterial life on Mars and there may still be bacterial life on Mars.
I think that when we go to Europa, one of the moons of Jupiter that has an ocean, a layer of ice, we are going to go there.
We are going to get something to drill through the ice or melt its way through the ice and explore that ocean.
I think we're going to find life there, too.
There was this story about, I don't know, three weeks, a month ago, Doctor, that said that it's possible that Mars ice caps are going to melt.
And I was thinking about that.
And did you happen to see that story?
No, I didn't.
But the Martian ice caps do go through phases where they really shrink dramatically.
Now, wouldn't that relate back to the Sun, perhaps?
Yes and no.
I mean, it's just the Martian seasons.
The Martian seasons are more accentuated than ours.
But I don't think it's because of any significant change in the Sun.
Well, that's what the story seemed to attribute it to.
And I thought, gee whiz, if that much change is going to occur on Mars, what's going to happen here?
They didn't mention that in the story.
I think it's just the normal seasonal changes on Mars.
I don't know that anybody has any evidence for any significant global warming on Mars.
A lot of people, in fact more than ought to be, are using cell phones now.
I mentioned to you I'm a ham operator.
A very interesting thing occurred the other day.
I just built a new antenna that I put on my RV when I was on vacation.
I spent most of my time with this antenna.
And I got to build this monstrous antenna on top of my RV and I sat in my driveway in the RV talking to this guy in Belfast, Northern Ireland at high noon here.
Incredibly good conditions on 21 megahertz.
Courtesy of the sun, of course, and the way it was affecting the ionosphere that day.
Next day it was deader than a doornail.
I mean just deader than a doornail.
And it was just a sea flare.
But this sea flare was this long, drawn out sea flare.
I've never seen anything quite like it.
Usually, you know, you look at a graph and it's up and down.
Pretty sharply up and down.
But this sea flare just continued and kept on going and going and going.
And it really apparently affected the ionosphere.
So even people, not just hams, but people using cell phones can have effects from a really bad day from the sun, can't they?
That's right.
And there are other effects which wouldn't affect ham operators, but do affect cell phones, namely radio noise from the sun.
If you're, say, at sunset, and you've got your cell phone, and the tower that's closest to your phone happens to be due west of you, well, that's also the direction of the sun.
Right.
And so there's a lot of background radio noise in that direction as well.
Actually, it would be the other way around, because you want to be pointing, have the sun pointing at the tower.
So, actually, you'd want the tower to be east of you, but you wouldn't, I should say, because the tower is going to have a hard time sorting out your signal from the radio noise from the sun.
There was a paper published just some months ago by colleagues of mine, actually, that looked at historical data of solar radio noise and compared it to what cell phones are using in terms of their power and how much signal-to-noise you're going to have to be able to To get a clear signal from the towers.
And they determined that, in fact, a lot of times that our cell phones just don't seem to be working right, it's probably radio noise.
And in fact, during solar maximum, when there's more radio noise and radio noise bursts from the sun, it could be, you know, every few days that there would be significant cell phone problems depending on Where the sun was, where you are, where the tower is.
Yeah, I had never thought of that.
Now, I've been a big satellite dish aficionado.
I've got about six satellite dishes here at home.
And I know that at Equinox, when the sun lines up with the low noise amplifier at the focal point of the dish, and it lines up, everything goes dead.
I mean, the sun takes over.
And there's so much noise that the satellite is just simply, it doesn't exist while it's lined up.
And so it's really sort of the same thing with cell phones, isn't it?
Absolutely.
Same principle.
Yeah.
And it happens with all of our communication satellites.
When they ride along the line with the Earth and the Sun, they get swamped by the solar radio noise.
The same thing will happen with cell phones.
I've become very dependent on my cell phone.
Both my wife and I have one and we use it to communicate all the time.
Who's going to pick up the kids?
I take it you're not worried it's rotting your brain away?
No, I'm not worried about that.
I've got other things that will rot my brain away first.
We've become more and more dependent on these kinds of things and we don't see behind the technology.
When somebody goes to buy gas and they slip their credit card into the machine there, that machine is taking that information from the magnetic strip and communicating with a bank somewhere.
That's right.
So that signal may be routed by a spacecraft at some point along the way.
And that spacecraft is vulnerable to space weather.
So if that spacecraft goes down, you may not be able to buy your gas.
These things really affect us on a very daily basis.
Oh, they do.
In fact, a satellite, I can't remember which one just now, went down a couple of years ago, and doctors were not being paged, and bank machines weren't working, and oh, it was horrible.
Yeah, that was Galaxy 4.
Galaxy 4, thank you.
And that went down in May of 1998.
It was carrying somewhere between 80 and 90 percent of the pager traffic in the United States, and all those pagers went down.
It was also carrying a lot of live feeds for NPR and PBS and other television and radio shows.
I wouldn't be surprised if your show, in part, is distributed over a satellite network.
Well, it's on many satellites.
Fortunately, not Galaxy 4.
Listen, now we have something called space weather.
And I can go to a site, in fact, off my site, there's a link.
That's the forecast for July 1st.
says solar activity forecast, let's see, solar activity expected to be low to moderate, region
17 and 19 both have potential for an isolated M class flare.
Your physical activity forecast, the geomagnetic field expected to continue at quite active
levels with isolated minor storm conditions at high latitudes.
These disturbed conditions are likely to subside by day three.
Now, that's the forecast for July 1st.
We get a weather forecast every day on local TV and radio stations and so forth.
Do you think the day will come when we will get a daily solar forecast?
It's possible, but it'll be more of a curiosity.
I think, you know, on TV you look to see what the weather is to decide how you're going to dress, are you going to take an umbrella with you, those kinds of things.
The space weather stuff is not something that you can do something about.
Well, no, but either is the weather, for that matter, to some degree.
I mean, is it the kind of thing where, do I want to fly over the pole today?
That is right.
That is where people will start to look for space weather as there's more and more of these flights.
In fact, I would advise people who are taking a flight from New York to Beijing to take a look and see if there's any expected activity, because they may find themselves Grounded in Tokyo for 10 hours while, you know, because the plane had to divert.
How frequently does that happen now?
I'm not really sure.
And do they actually tell the people that's the reason?
No, they don't tell them that.
They say that they give them some other reason.
Oh really?
They put down in Tokyo, yeah.
Again, they're not so much worried about the radiation, they're worried about the communications difficulties.
But they don't tell the public that?
They don't say because of activity on the sun?
I have never heard of a case where they announce that that's the issue.
I've heard of cases where they put down, say, in Tokyo or other places at lower latitudes, saying, well, we're experiencing technical difficulties.
And you know how the airlines are, whenever there's a problem.
I mean, just the other day, I sat in the plane for an hour, not really knowing what was going on.
And then the captain shows up.
His other flight was delayed.
And so we weren't really told what the story was.
We just knew that we were going to be delayed for a while.
Do you think they don't want the public to understand something of that magnitude?
I mean, why wouldn't they tell the public the truth?
Do they think it would panic the public?
Or do they think it would scare the public?
Or it's just something the public doesn't need to know?
I think, certainly from the point of view of an airline executive, they would probably say, well, they don't really need to know that.
And the last thing you want to do in public communications is to use the R word, you know, radiation.
That really just frightens people because it's something that's, you know, unknowable and nasty and has, you know, unexpected consequences.
Yeah, I know, but they have, like, on booze and cigarettes and things like that, they have all these warnings for pregnant women, right?
Right, and I wouldn't be surprised if over time we start to see more of that in the airline industry, like in Europe, that the European Union has adopted these kinds of guidelines And those guidelines have not been adopted here in the states yet, but the airlines are aware of this and they're already dealing with some of these.
So you think they're coming?
Yeah, they're coming.
And the airlines, they are responsible organizations and they're aware of these things.
There's a meeting that happens at the Space Environment Center in Boulder, Colorado.
Doctor, we're at the bottom of the air, so we'll be right back.
Dr. Ramon E. Lopez on the sun.
I'm Art Bell.
The trip back in time continues with Art Bell hosting Coast to Coast AM.
More Somewhere in Time coming up.
In the heat of a summer night, in the land of the dollar bill, When the town of Chicago died
And they talk about it still When a man named Al Capone
Tried to make that town his own And he called his gang to war
With the voices of the law I heard my mama cry
I heard her pray the night Chicago died Brother what a night it really was
Brother what a fight it really was Glory be
I heard my mama cry I heard her pray the night Chicago died
Oh oh oh oh oh oh You don't have to go
Oh oh oh oh oh You don't have to go
Oh oh oh oh You don't have to go
Oh oh oh oh oh oh All those tears I cried
Oh oh oh oh oh All those tears I cried
Oh oh oh oh oh Baby please don't go
When I read the letters you wrote me You made me mad, mad, mad
But when I read the words that you told me You made me sad, sad, sad
But I still love you so I can't let you go
I love you Oh baby I love you
Oh, oh, oh, oh Premier Networks presents Art Bell, Somewhere in Time.
Tonight featuring Coast to Coast AM from July 1st, 2002.
My guest is Dr. Ramone Lopez.
His book is Storms from the Sun.
If you want to know more about it, it's on my website.
You can make your way to his book at Amazon.com or you can get it.
The sun, how important is it?
Well, gee, an awful lot of remote civilizations and little tiny untouched areas of the
world where people are found still worship the sun and I wonder maybe they just didn't
have it that wrong you're listening to Art Bell somewhere in time
Tonight featuring Coast to Coast AM from July 1st, 2002.
Music.
I'll tell you something.
If you go to my website and over on the left-hand side, down at the bottom where it says Home is the last item on
the left, on the front of the website there, it says Home, and then
you just hold your cursor over that and you go to Active.
There you will go to current solar data from NOAA, and there you can go to today's space weather.
There will be a bunch of charts there showing what's going on in the sun.
It's nice and quiet, I see, at the moment, but it will show you on a daily basis what is going on.
You can read the space weather for any day.
Given day, it's really, really, really interesting to be able to see what's going on as a ham operator.
Of course, it affects me enough that I check that all the time.
Doctor, welcome back to the program.
Thanks, Art.
So, do you ever see a day when the American public, other than, say, those who are going to fly with the pole, will be concerned enough or will get technological enough that we'll be so concerned with the space weather that we might get it Almost like a weather forecast.
Some people might.
It depends on what they're doing.
You know, we think about the weather forecast, and there are these prediction centers within the National Weather Service.
One of them is the Space Environment Center in Boulder.
Space weather is already part of the National Weather Service, and they issue reports, and people whose business or livelihoods or activity in some way depend on space weather are already paying attention to those reports.
It's like here, living in Texas, I don't really pay attention to the predictions from the National Hurricane Prediction Center.
But if I lived in Florida, I would pay attention.
Well, I rely heavily on atomic clocks.
For example, you know, I've got to be exacting, because it is a network operation.
If you don't do things at the right time, they cut you right off.
And so, you've got to do it exactly right.
And so, my clocks have to be dead on, so I use these atomic clocks that get a signal from Boulder, Colorado.
At 18 minutes past the hour, I believe it is, they give current solar conditions on 2.5, 5, 10, 15, 20 megahertz.
And you can listen on a shortwave radio and get those current conditions, or you can get it on the net now.
But I've noticed that when things are really bad, the atomic clocks, you know, sort of can lose their mind.
And the signals just stop coming through the way they ought to.
There might be some radio interference.
I assume that they're transmitting those signals by radio.
That's correct.
Yeah, sure.
You know, space weather has made the news.
Back in January of 1997, there was a fairly significant space weather event that was implicated in the loss of a satellite, AT&T's Telstar 401.
Right.
And that event actually made CBS Evening News.
I know, and you know though, they're very reluctant to ever admit that that happens.
How come?
Well, it's really hard to determine, first of all, why a satellite fails unless you can go out and grab it and bring it back.
The scientific community is fairly convinced that Telstar 401 and Galaxy 4 and a few of these others are space weather related.
Insurance companies often have a clause about acts of God and things like that.
Is the weather still considered to be an act of God?
it's a lot safer to claim it's engineering issues rather than the environment, because
you want your insurance company to pay up.
I see.
Speaking of God, as I sort of mentioned coming out of the break, when we find these isolated
little pockets that have never been touched by modern civilization, a lot of times we
find they worship the sun.
Now as much effect as the sun has on the earth and its inhabitants, they might not be too
far off the mark, huh?
Bye.
Or do you not want to answer that?
Well, yeah, I mean, the question's of religion.
The sun is the giver of life and, you know, if you're looking for some way to express spirituality and you don't have a sophisticated understanding of nature, Not such a bad thing to point at.
After all, the first monotheist in history worshipped the sun god, the pharaoh Akhenaten in Egypt.
Is it reasonable to speculate, and I know you probably hate that word in your business, but isn't it possible that the sun actually affects human activity, human attitudes, human behavior?
I suspect that that's true, but it's probably very much psychological and conditioned through our cultures.
We know, for example, that light affects people's moods.
People become much more depressed during wintertime.
When you go up to the northern countries, one feature of northern European countries is a lot of strong drinking.
They all have some kind of clear liquor, you know, be it Aquavit or vodka or whatever.
Hey, listen, I lived in Anchorage, Alaska for three years, and trust me when I tell you, Alaska parties all winter long.
I mean, the booze flows, there's nothing but parties all winter long.
And there are studies that have shown that exposing people during those long, dark days to sunlamps and things like that does improve their mood and their physiology.
We evolved as tropical animals.
So yeah, there are so many connections and so many of them are so subtle, it's really hard to say what's causing what and what the real links are.
But yes, sunlight does affect our mood and our well-being and the link between mind and body is very strong.
There are even those who would suggest that it affects overall behavior.
In other words, that under certain conditions we have wars.
I mean, not just individual behavior, but collective behavior.
Now, I realize that's a big reach, but if it affects an individual, it affects all individuals.
If it affects all individuals, then you could speculate, I suppose, that large events like war and or peace or whatever might be some direct or indirect effect from the sun.
Well, there are some things, such as on very hot days, people get very irritable and you can have a lot of That's right.
More serious violent crimes in big cities and things like that.
Also remember that there are a lot of self-fulfilling prophecies in history.
People see a comet and they associate that with an event, something that's going to happen, and as a result of that association, it does happen.
But how do you know it's self-fulfilling, Doctor?
In other words, people associate, as you mentioned, comets with impending events.
You know, as warnings of impending events.
But isn't it possible that at the nucleus of that myth there's some truth?
I suspect not.
I suspect that people have always been in search of explanations.
Of course.
And the heavens were there and I'm sure that from the very early times people looked up and wondered What this was, and did it have some effect on us, or was there a way of telling the future?
Chinese astrologers used to observe sunspots as part of their regimen of astronomical data collection.
Not for science, as we know it, but for casting the horoscope for the emperor.
So, people are always in search of explanation.
Well, there you go.
That goes to behavior, right?
Or, let's see, maybe behavior is the right word.
predicted effect on behavior.
But, here again, where does, you know, the role of self-fulfilling prophecy, if you tell people,
now is the time that you should launch an attack on the neighboring kingdom because the stars are right,
well then, the king might actually do it.
And then people say, ah-ha, you see, the stars were right, and so we had a war.
Well, we don't have kings, but we have Ronald Reagan, and he and his wife used to regularly consult an astrologer.
I'm sure you're aware of that.
Yes, I'm aware of that.
So, you know, maybe it's all bunk.
Maybe it's all baloney, but maybe there's also some... I would say that there is no scientific basis in astrology.
The motion of these heavenly bodies do not influence us.
In the way astrology would argue.
I would say that yes, there's a lot of cultural and psychological impact of things all around us in our environment.
But cause and effect, that's a different story.
Well, then okay, fine.
Let's move on to the moon, then.
Because there's something a little closer we can talk about.
Now, I've been in talk radio all my adult life.
30, 40 years, but I don't even want to think about it right now.
35 years?
God, long time.
I can tell you.
That when there's a full moon?
There's no question.
I can plan on it, Doctor.
I can plan on it.
If I want to do a wild, outrageous, open-line show, all I've got to do is plan it around a full moon.
And I do.
And it works.
And emergency rooms can tell you.
And police forces, police, cops on the beat can tell you.
Dispatchers, I was one of those for a while, can tell you.
Anybody who deals with the public, in fact, can tell you when there's a full moon, people act differently.
Now, you're going to say, There's no scientific basis for something like that, right?
Not necessarily.
Wow, really?
Remember that certain cycles, such as the lunar cycle and the diurnal cycle, day-night cycle, those things have been pretty hard-wired through millions and millions of years of evolution into a variety of species.
I mean, you just have to look at various cycles in nature.
I mean, our day-night sleep cycle, I do not know of any clear statistical evidence that that is the case.
in ovulation, there are some deep physiological links between these kinds of cycles and our
evolution that have been there for millions of years.
So then you don't dispute things like when people say there are more babies born at full
moons, you don't dispute that sort of thing?
I do not know of any clear statistical evidence that that is the case.
I would not dismiss that out of hand, however, without evidence to the contrary.
Well, then with respect to what the police would tell you, the cop on the beat would tell you, you say there probably is something to that.
I don't know.
I've heard a lot of these anecdotes and many people have said yes, in my experience, but as one researcher, actually an education researcher, said that Statistics is not the plural of anecdote.
I don't know whether anyone has done a serious study to really establish what are correlations here.
And then, if you get a correlation, have you got some kind of mechanism?
Well, how much anecdotal evidence do you need to create a statistic?
Hard to say.
Very hard to say.
Maybe it's just one of those things that people know and they don't go out and try and prove.
I don't know why.
Yeah, I have heard of people who have looked at... In fact, there was some study in Moscow looking at things like suicide rates and the lunar cycle.
Right.
So, maybe there's something there, but what do you mean by something is there?
That's the real question.
Is there cause and effect?
Are there other things that are playing out that cause these two things to operate in cycles?
You know, the sunspot number is a very good example of that.
People try to correlate that with everything from the stock market to whatever you can think of.
They try to look at is there a correlation between sunspot numbers and human behavior or whatever.
The most famous correlation with the sunspot cycle was the level of lake in Tanzania.
And for a couple of decades, the data were very clear.
I mean, it was very closely tied to the sunspot cycle.
And so the researchers published a paper saying, you know, we've got 20 some years of data and this looks really good.
And people looked at it and said, yeah, this looks really good.
And shortly after that paper was published, the correlation went away.
For 20 years, it had been in cycle, in phase.
At a very high confidence level, it just went away.
Something else was happening.
Well, maybe there is a relationship between the sun cycle, for example, or what the sun's doing, and the stock market.
In which case, the Enron and Worldcom execs could point to the sun.
That's exactly right.
I wouldn't want to give him that out.
No, I guess I wouldn't either.
I want to talk to you a little bit about using the sun or using solar winds To travel in space.
There are solar winds, aren't there?
These particles that are just washing along like ocean waves.
That's right.
Just a million miles an hour, generally blowing out.
A million miles an hour.
So I've read lots of good science fiction where they put up these giant solar sails and they catch these waves and pretty soon before you know it they're doing darn near the speed of light.
Well, you won't Yeah, you can in principle go quite fast, and it's not just science fiction, it's science fact.
You can do the calculations, and people are actually working on this.
There is an effort within NASA to explore, shall we say, alternative propulsion technologies, and solar sails are definitely one of those.
No satellite has used solar sail in any significant way yet, but there have been plenty of these things on the drawing boards.
There was a Soviet, back in the days of the Soviet Union, right at the time of the collapse, a Russian space mission called Regatta, which was going to use solar sails for station keeping.
I saw a mock-up of the satellite in their clean room in the Space Research Institute in Moscow.
The only reason it didn't fly is because the Soviet Union had collapsed and so did the economy.
So that would mean that satellites, instead of having a finite amount of fuel in which to do their station-keeping, could, like boat sails on the ocean, simply attack... Essentially, yes.
In principle, it's doable.
And there are even more fantastic ideas where you don't use actual fabric for the sail, but you use a magnetic field.
Their colleagues up at the University of Washington in Seattle, their idea is to have an object that produces a magnetic field and then inflate that magnetic field with plasma to make a magnetic sail to catch the solar wind.
Great idea!
And you could use solar power?
To power it?
Exactly.
So create enough of a magnetic field and you create kind of an invisible sail?
Is that the idea?
That's the idea.
Wow!
Don't know if it'll work, but it's a great idea.
Well, is NASA looking at this now?
Oh yeah, he got funded.
He got a good deal of money to explore the feasibility of this.
Dr. Robert Wingley at the University of Washington in Seattle.
Are there any active plans to put up a satellite that would utilize that technology?
No, because it's still in, you know, doing the basic theoretical analysis.
I mean, can this thing actually work?
What are the stability issues?
I mean, there's a lot of stuff that you would have to consider before you would try to fly.
But NASA does have a technology demonstration program called the Deep Space Program.
Yes.
And they've flown a couple of spacecraft with that, including satellites that use electric propulsion rather than chemical propulsion.
Wow.
Electricity to accelerate the gas.
Because with normal chemical propulsion, burning stuff, you can only get about eight kilometers per second or so in thrust.
But with electric propulsion, in principle, you could get hundreds of kilometers per second of thrust.
So a very small amount of propellant will push you a lot further.
So there are all kinds of ideas for interesting and novel ways to To move spacecraft around and solar sails are one of them.
I think solar sails will fly.
You do?
At some point, yeah.
And do you think we could use solar sails for manned missions ultimately?
I'm not sure because the thing with a solar sail is that the propulsion is essentially free But it's going to be a very slow acceleration.
If you're going far distances across the solar system, then you can reach pretty high speeds.
It's probably more useful for unmanned spacecraft than for manned missions.
Because of the time element?
Because of the time, right.
So if you're a man, you need a speedboat?
You'd want to go faster, yeah.
Faster, quicker?
Yeah, you'd want to be able to accelerate more quickly.
All right, well listen, if it's all right with you, doctor, when we get back, I would like to open up the telephone lines and let people ask questions about all of what we've been talking about.
Sounds great.
All right, good.
Let's do that.
Dr. Ramon E. Lopez is my guest.
If you have questions in the areas, any of the areas that we've been discussing, we're as close as your telephone.
And we'll get those numbers out to you right after the news at the top of the hour.
Fascinating stuff, our son.
I think it has much more effect than the scientists have yet realized.
I'm Art Bell.
You're listening to Art Bell, Somewhere in Time.
Tonight featuring Coast to Coast AM from July 1st, 2002.
2002. I can feel it coming in the air tonight, what I want.
And I've been waiting for this moment for all my life.
All my life.
The.
Good morning, everybody.
Dr. Ramone Lopez is my guest.
And he's got a book.
You might want to check into it.
You can do so on my website.
It's all about our sun.
And if you sit down and really think about it hard, our sun would probably have more effect on us than anything else in our environment.
It is the biggest, brightest, closest energy mass to us.
And so without a question, it affects us.
If you want to know more, his book would be the path.
Sound of thunder.
Somewhere in Time with Art Bell continues, courtesy of Premier Networks.
Music.
Alright, back to my guest now, Dr. Ramon E. Lopez.
We're talking about The Sun.
And its effect on Earth, its effects on us and solar winds and all kinds of things.
If you have questions, we're about to go to the phone and take your questions and see what's on your mind out there.
So Dr. Lopez, oh, one more thing.
Dr. Lopez, scientists like yourself, not all that long ago really in human history terms, established something called the Internet.
Yeah.
Really interesting thing that I found when I went out here recently.
I can't do without, so I'm putting in a portable internet.
I just can't live without it.
That's how important it is to me, and I know to a lot of other people.
Not as important to a lot of people, but to me, I've got to have it.
Period.
Now, you know, for business, I've got to have it.
And they say nothing can kill the internet.
Nothing can kill it, because it's like a big spider web That, you know, if you were to squish one part of it, another part of it would continue, and the Internet would never die.
Nothing could ever kill the Internet.
Now, there might be one exception to that rule.
If, for example, the Earth's magnetic field, which is, as you told us, it's lessening right now, and it could even go, at some point, into neutral.
Now, we never know exactly what's going to happen, nor when it's going to happen.
If that were to happen, and then we got a big old burst from the sun, It seems to me that could be the flash that kills the internet.
Could that be true?
Probably not.
The internet was designed originally as a project for communicating during nuclear war.
It had to be able to survive multiple nuclear blasts.
Right.
Now more and more internet signals are being carried by spacecraft, so one could imagine a catastrophic event that knocks out a whole bunch of communication satellites, but you would still have landlines That would be functioning.
And the way that the internet works is something called packet switching.
As long as you've got a way, doesn't matter how secure it is, circuitous, for one place to get to another, you can still send messages.
Because it really is like this squishy thing, with everybody just sort of squirting stuff out, and then the message is being reassembled at the other end with this transfer control protocol.
So you think the fiber connections and so forth would hold us together?
Yeah, they would.
Okay.
The internet is like a cockroach, you can't kill it.
Alright, yeah, we might all be gone, the humans, but the internet will still be there.
First time caller on the line, you're on the air with Dr. Lopez.
Hello.
Yeah, this is Gil in Lockhart, Texas.
Get you on TLBJ and out of Austin.
Yes, sir.
I've got a question for Dr. Lopez.
Considering the sun, earth and space as a heating system, Uh, and trying to keep the heat constant on Earth, uh, we have to receive the same amount as we radiate into space.
So, uh, is there any way that, uh, we can measure at the present time, uh, the amount of heat that we're receiving from the sun so that we can say that, uh, uh, yes, it's, uh, solar heat, or our global warming is, uh, due to, uh, all these greenhouse gases, or, uh, Is it the heat from the sun?
That's a good question.
In other words, Doctor, can we actually measure the amount of, does that satellite out there a million miles, does it measure how much heating effect we're getting from the sun?
There are other spacecraft that do that.
We can measure pretty precisely what's called the solar constant, which isn't really constant, it does vary over the solar cycle, how much light is coming out of the sun.
But it's a very complicated problem.
We don't know exactly how much is being reflected.
And then the light that comes in will get absorbed, and then part of it will be radiated back into space, but at a different frequency.
It goes out as infrared.
And so that's where the greenhouse effect comes into play, is that certain gases will block the infrared from being radiated out.
We're still not exactly sure, you know, how all of these terms work together.
So, in fact, there was some really interesting work just done in the past year Looking at something called earthshine, the light that's reflected off the earth is reflected off the moon back to earth.
Even during a new moon, you can see sometimes a little bit of the moon, or if you go out during a crescent moon, there's the lit part, but then there's the part that's dark, but it's not completely dark.
It's a little bit of light, and that's actually light that's reflecting off the earth.
So, there have been studies of that, showing that actually, the amount of light that Earth reflects changes a lot more than we previously thought.
Doctor, there were also plans, the Russians had the plans, and I know we've thought of it too, of putting up gigantic mirrors, gigantic reflecting devices that could, from space, turn either specific areas or large areas of Earth from uh... virtually from from night into day uh... it could be
done uh...
in principle you could reflect sunlight
onto earth onto uh... the nightside yeah and light up light up areas
i don't know of any uh... u s projects to do that too there was some research that was done in the late seventies
and early eighties of putting up
big manhattan sized like the island of manhattan
by satellite to collect up solar energy converted into electricity and beam it
by microwaves back to earth Yes.
But I don't know of any U.S.
project that looked at just reflecting light back to Earth.
What do you think of that idea?
I read a book called Sunstroke, and I've never been real happy with the idea since.
In other words, if the microwave beam should begin wandering, as in the satellite begins to wander a little bit, Uh, you could begin cooking things along the ground.
No, the idea was to keep the power densities in the center of the beam to be about the same as what leaks out of your microwave oven.
So... Oh, okay.
So that, that... So you wouldn't do that.
...the bird flying through would not get roasted, stuff like that.
Or people.
Or people, yeah.
So the power densities would be very low, but...
But these antenna farms would be very large, and the conversion efficiency would be high, so that you could actually transmit the power.
Well, listen, we're having big controversies now about electric power lines, so if they were doing something like that, even though you just stated the density would be very low, I guarantee you there would be a controversy that would be real big.
Oh, you're not kidding!
You're not kidding.
Yeah, that power line thing keeps on popping up, although all of the studies indicate that there's no connection.
Wild Card Line, you're on the air with Dr. Lopez.
Hello.
Hi Art.
Hi Dr. Lopez.
I want to share with you an observation that I made.
I've been observing carpenter bee behavior and I'm particularly interested in the initiation of new nests as well as behavior within the nests since the mid-60s.
And I've noticed that they go through cycles when they found the nest and more or less exposed to the sun pieces of wood.
It's still somewhat sheltered, but they get more sun on them.
And then other times they really go underneath the wood and really try to get in the shade away from the sun.
And this tends to occur during the periods of solar maximum, as if there's certain radiation they're trying to avoid during the solar maximum.
But on the north side of the building where there's Uh, less solar radiation at all times.
In fact, they get most of the radiation in the site where I observe, reflecting off of the Space Sciences building at Cornell University, which is almost all glass, like the UN building.
And the sun that reflects off that illuminates the north side of the structure, and they're, they pretty much are much less sensitive to the cycles, and just, you know, because they get much less attenuated radiation.
And also, inside the nest, when I have the plexiglass nest, I noticed how they attach the mesh partitions to the plexiglass tends to be different in El Nino years than other years and it might be very useful in fact to use animals in general as indicators to know where we are in these cycles.
Doctor?
Well, I don't know very much about bees although I have read that some bees do use the sun for navigation.
The easiest way to know where you are in the solar cycle is to directly observe the sun, and that's probably the best thing to do.
The amount of radiation change in solar radiation over the solar cycle, in terms of the total solar output, is actually pretty small.
So, it's just that during solar maximum, you have more of these larger magnetic storms.
And that's the real change in space weather.
Let's talk ozone for a second.
I have a lot of friends in Australia, New Zealand, and I'm told that the children there are required to wear head cover.
They're actually required to wear head cover because, of course, toward the Antarctic, getting closer and closer, there's not as much ozone, and so radiation is just blasting through to the degree that it becomes dangerous for people on the ground.
Doctor?
Yeah, anytime you're getting a lot of sunlight, actually, you have to be careful.
And I always put on sunscreen when I go to the beach and stuff like that.
Yeah, but the ozone hole has actually made it to above you.
Then you're even in more danger from the bad ultraviolet.
The whole question of the ozone hole is still that we know that there's some solar cycle effect.
And we also know that there was clearly a man-made effect with the chlorofluorocarbons, and I don't know where current research on that stands at this point.
You know, whether the hole is continuing to grow, and when people expect that the man-made effect will clear out, because we have discontinued the use of that particular class of chemicals, these ones that destroyed the ozone.
So eventually they'll cycle out of the atmosphere.
But I don't know where we stand with predictions of when that's going to happen.
Well, we don't make changes that affect economics very frequently.
We just don't do it at that magnitude.
So science must have been pretty damn sure that we were contributing to the size of the ozone hole, or it must have been a good enough bet to cause the economic A dislocation that the change in not using a Freon anymore, you know, and all the rest of it caused.
Yeah, the scientific community was pretty sure.
In fact, the guys who pioneered that work won the Nobel Prize.
Mario Molina.
Mexican-American, by the way.
Very good.
How long, as a matter of curiosity, do the scientists, do you fellows feel that we have to wait?
Before the turnaround begins to occur, and if it's all true, how big is that hole going to get before it starts getting smaller?
I don't know.
Not my area of expertise.
I have read some things about it that say that the Freon and those things will cycle out of the atmosphere, but I don't remember the timescales by which that would happen.
But that is independent of any solar cycle effect.
And again, as the sunspot That would depend on whether you're under one of these holes.
I mean, if the solar cycle is very, very active, and you happen to be under one of these holes, wouldn't there be a possibility of getting an increased amount of radiation?
I mean, even above and beyond what you're getting because you're under the hole?
Well, you will get an increased amount of ultraviolet radiation, and that translates directly into increased skin cancer rates.
Which have been?
How much?
I don't know.
I don't know.
The increase in skin cancer rates are probably, overall, pretty small in terms of total number of additional incidences.
It's not something that's acute.
It's not immediately threatening.
It's there, though, and people do have to be aware of it.
Well, I can't remember the stat, but there was a stat saying that for every percentile of loss of ozone above even North America, where we are, there would be X number of additional cancers per year.
I think, right?
Yeah, probably somebody's done that kind of a calculation, but I'm not aware what those numbers are.
Is the ozone above North America still thinning as we speak, or has it begun to cyclically get better?
Sorry, Art, you're outside of my expertise.
I had read some stuff about the Antarctic ozone hole, but I really don't know about the Northern Hemisphere observations, so I can't really answer that.
Well, yes, there has been a depletion, I know, across North America, but I'll I'll ask around about that one.
And again, going back to, we were discussing, remember, gravity and magnetic field.
There's no relationship, as far as you know, between gravity and the magnetic field of a given planet.
That's correct.
Now, how should... Well, although... The reason I ask this... Other planets have got bigger magnetic fields.
The reason I ask this, Doctor, is because we don't seem to understand everything about what gravity is.
Is that fair to say?
That's definitely fair to say.
If it is fair to say, then how can we know for sure that there's no relationship to the magnetic field?
Well, if you take the four rocky planets, the four inner planets, and look at those, there's no relationship between planetary magnetism and no nuclear relationship between planetary magnetism and the size of the planet.
You've got Earth and Mercury with magnetic fields.
You've got Venus and Mars without.
So, there's something else that's going on.
Magnetism is generated by electric current, and it's not generated by mass, which creates gravity, as we understand it.
But there are many who feel that the planetary mechanics, in other words, the bodies going about each other, create that That energy, that the motion itself, the motion itself creates that energy.
No, magnetic fields are produced by electric charges in motion.
Right, but isn't that... Or changing electric fields in space and time.
And that is independent of the size of the object.
I mean, Earth, for all practical purposes, is neutrally charged.
There are equal number of positive and And negative charges.
And the same thing with Jupiter and the other planets.
It's motions of conducting material inside these planets.
And that's driven more by the history of the planet.
Is the center of the planet still molten?
So that metals and other conductors can flow around and create electric currents.
Those are really the questions of how planetary magnetism is generated.
Okay.
East of the Rockies, you're on the air with Dr. Lopez.
Hello.
Hi Mark.
Hello.
How are you?
Okay, go right ahead sir.
I'm in St.
Louis.
Yes.
Hi Dr. Lopez.
I wondered if it's true that it takes a million years for energy to go from the core before it leaves the surface of the sun.
And I had another question.
Yeah, the million year number is probably the most widely accepted number.
There was a paper a few years ago that argued that it was much shorter, like maybe 50 or 100,000 years, but I think that That most solar scientists are sticking with the million-year number at this point.
That's kind of amazing.
It is.
Your other question?
If they know why, if the surface is only 8,000 degrees, why the corona is a million degrees or whatever it is.
Good.
If you hadn't asked that, I would have called her.
Thank you.
Yes, I've been... That just puzzles the heck out of me too, Doctor.
Oh, it did.
Puzzled scientists for a long time.
In fact, when the first coronal observations were made, suggesting that the corona was really that hot, people didn't believe it.
Because how can you start, you know, get the atmosphere to a million degrees, and the surface is only 6,000 degrees, and this is all in Kelvin.
Exactly.
What's happening is that it's not thermal transmission of energy.
It's mechanical.
The surface of the sun is churning and churning away, and it's dragging and twisting the magnetic field of the sun with it.
And those twists represent energy, stored energy.
Just like if you take a rubber band and twist it up, that's stored energy.
And when that rubber band snaps, it releases that stored energy.
Right.
Things like that are happening continuously in the surface and in the atmosphere of the sun, transmitting essentially mechanical motion in the upper layers of the sun into energy into the atmosphere of the sun.
So it's not a thermal process.
So all of the energy then is released in the atmosphere of the sun?
Or in the outer, the corona of the sun?
A lot of it is.
But the corona is so thin that the first amount of energy heats it up.
Hold tight, we're at the bottom of the hour.
We'll be right back.
Dr. Ramoni Lopez is my guest.
I'm Art Bell and this is Coast.
This is Premier Networks.
That was Art Bell hosting Coast to Coast AM on this Somewhere in Time.
I'm going to be talking about the first song I wrote.
It's called Who Loves You Baby.
It's a song about a man who loves his wife and who loves his family.
You're listening to Art Bell, somewhere in time.
Tonight, featuring Coast to Coast AM, from July 1st, 2002.
My guest is Dr. Ramon E. Lopez, who wrote a book called Storms from the Sun.
And you can read much more about it by going to my website.
Under tonight's guest info, you'll be led right to the right place to grab up Storms from the Sun.
And I personally think the sun has a whole lot to do with a whole lot of things that
a lot of people think of as myth like the stock market, human behavior, you know, that kind of stuff.
You're listening to Art Bell, somewhere in time.
Tonight featuring Coast to Coast AM from July 1st, 2002.
Music.
Alright, a couple of observations for me.
Doctor, again, I'm a ham operator, and one of the things I do, I'm a six meter fanatic.
I like six meters, which is 50 megahertz, roughly.
And I found something very interesting, that you can go to the Space Weather website, and you can look at the chart, and as a sun eruption begins, you can see the chart begin to climb.
And what I found is, you can take I've got a 6 meter beam at 100 feet, pointed, of course, horizontally, but even at that, you can listen to the noise level at 50 megahertz, just, you know, simply listening to the noise, and even before the chart will begin to rise on the internet, you can see a 6 to a 10 dB rise in the base noise level at 50 megahertz as the eruption begins.
It's really fascinating.
Very interesting.
Were you aware that you could hear that kind of rise in noise level?
No, but it doesn't surprise me.
When something goes off on the sun, the first thing that's going to happen is that the electromagnetic radiation will hit the Earth.
X-rays and the radio noise.
How quickly?
Eight minutes.
We're eight light minutes from the sun.
Eight light minutes.
So the first of what hits us, the fast stuff, gets here in eight minutes.
Right.
If there was a gigantic event on the sun, just one of those gigantic solar flares that was headed directly to Earth, how much warning would we have?
Would that be eight minutes?
Eight minutes?
Well, the thing goes off in the sun, and we don't know that it's happened yet, because the speed of light is the fastest that information or anything can travel.
So eight minutes later, we get the first rise in the x-rays and everything else.
That would tell us that something big has gone off.
As far as the cloud of plasma and magnetic field that would come and hit the Earth's magnetic field and create one of these magnetic storms, that might take a day or two.
So we've got some warning to protect our technology.
Okay, very interesting.
So a day or two.
Well, what we've noticed is that, Hams, that is, that from, you know, you see that event as it occurs on the Sun, and you can actually then watch the chart on the Internet start up.
That's really interesting.
But then, two or three days later, the ionosphere begins to absorb, and all of a sudden, signals aren't going anywhere anymore in the shortwave spectrum.
Very interesting.
In fact, as you're listening, It can just suddenly go dead.
I mean, the signals you were hearing are totally gone.
The noise floor is quiet.
Everything is being absorbed.
It's gone.
I've even seen it bad enough.
You know, I'm on a whole bunch of 50,000 watt radio stations on AM, right?
And they depend on bouncing off the ionosphere and coming back to Earth.
And back when I was on just one 50,000-watt radio station doing an all-night show just like I am now, I would watch the solar forecast.
This was back some years ago, a couple of solar cycles ago, Doctor, and it was depressing because I would see this giant solar flare.
No one saw the numbers, the A-count beginning to go up, and I would know that that night I wouldn't be getting calls from out of state because our signal wouldn't be going out of state.
Yeah, that makes perfect sense because the ionosphere does get disturbed by these magnetic storms and then it can't be used, as you described it, as a nice mirror type of surface to bounce radio signals off and to increase your range.
And it's not only just the bouncing of radio signals, it's any radio signal that's got to go through the ionosphere can be distorted.
So, for example, if you depend on GPS, You may have some trouble getting a GPS lock during one of these periods of ionospheric disturbance because the scintillation of the radio signals through the ionosphere are making it difficult to get a good fix.
Then aren't we kind of making an interesting transition?
Isn't humanity making an interesting transition in the sense that early man frequently worshipped the sun?
Then we moved away from all of that as we became civilized.
Now we're in, even passing the industrial age into the information age.
And in our future, the sun is going to be more important the way it once was.
Oh, absolutely.
The sun is going to be more important to our daily lives because we are wrapping ourselves up in so much technology.
For the past 150 years, humans have been using electricity and magnetism for all kinds of things.
And as soon as we started doing that, we started running into space weather.
Because the telegraphs back in the 1800s, they were vulnerable to space weather events.
As are the long lines of the electric grids in the U.S., right?
That's right.
And not only power transmission lines, but transatlantic cables, even oil pipelines.
Really?
Because there's one I'd never heard of oil pipelines.
Yeah, they get an electric current running in the oil pipeline and you get corrosion.
So oil companies also pay attention to space weather forecasts and they are monitoring their pipelines and they'll bias the voltages and try to keep currents from running through those pipes because if you do have current running through the pipe then You get like electroplating in reverse, you get corrosion, and the lifetime of the pipes drop dramatically.
Oh, isn't that interesting?
You know, I'd heard about all the rest of it, but never oil pipelines.
But that, you know, on reflection, that makes absolute sense, of course.
Yeah.
Any big piece of metal is vulnerable.
All right.
Wildcard Line, you're on the air with Dr. Lopez.
Hello.
Hey, Mr. R. Yes, hello.
Where are you, sir?
Down here in South Carolina.
Yes.
Yeah, buddy.
This is a dynamite show.
Hi, Dr. Raymond.
Hi.
Hi, Gomez.
Hey, you're killing me.
That's Lopez, sir.
What couldn't we do for you?
Do you have a question?
Oh, Lopez, is it?
Yes.
Well, hey, the propagation on my radio is terrible out here.
Yeah, sorry.
Hey, you guys, look.
I agree.
I'm three days older than you are.
Are actually contributing to global warming, but prior to the use of oil and electricity, or the implementation of, we all burn wood.
Doesn't that contribute to the greenhouse effect?
Oh, it absolutely does, yes.
Burning of wood is banned many times when we have real bad pollution problems and air inversions and all the rest of it.
We ban the burning of wood, so man, as long as he's been around burning wood and having fire, he's been doing that, contributing it to some degree, right, Doctor?
That's correct.
The difference is one of scale.
You know, in the past, humans have affected the climate generally locally.
There are cases of civilizations that have had serious problems because of over-farming in the Middle East, what used to be the fertile crescent, there are many areas
that are desert now, and in part because of human farming and getting a lot of salt
into the land through irrigation.
But those are always local effects.
The difference is that we've got to the point where we're making global impact because we
are now so numerous and so prolific.
It's just a different scale of the kind of thing that we can do.
Well, you sound as though you're leaning toward believing a pretty big hand of man effect
on our environment, yes?
Thank you.
As far as the global warming issue goes, I don't know which is more important, to tell you the truth.
I believe that both the sun and human activity are contributing.
I'm not sure which is the biggest contributor.
My suspicion is that Now, at the beginning of the 21st century, it might very well be humans.
Well, I hate to inject politics, but it's unavoidable.
I mean, we are not implementing the Kyoto Treaty.
There was a big brouhaha here recently where the president's, he said, bureaucracy released a report Saying that indeed, man's hand is responsible for what's going on, all the rest of it.
The President, when berserk, said it came from his own bureaucracy and he didn't agree with the report at all.
We're not going to really take any action, it looks as though, other than what we did with respect to the ozone, but with respect to global warming, we are not going to implement any change that will affect our economy, which is already highly affected right now anyway.
Any comments on all that?
Well, my personal view is that it would not be a smart thing to impose essentially hundreds of billions of dollars worth of taxes on our economy to deal with an issue that still scientifically we have not worked through completely.
I think that additional study is needed and eventually we might have to try What do you say to the people who say, yes, but by the time we conclusively prove it scientifically, it will be too late?
My personal feeling is that right now, it's not necessarily the time to have a major restructuring of our economy to deal with this issue.
See, now I've stepped away from myself as a scientist.
Now I'm talking as just an ordinary citizen with political views.
And to some degree, they're based in science.
But like all of us, you know, we all have our own point of view around politics and what we think we should be doing.
And I tend to be a supporter of the administration in general.
Okay.
All right.
So, so you, you sort of, you may disagree uh... scientifically if it's just to do that a man's hand has no effect on what's going on right now i i would disagree scientifically yes uh... but politically that's interesting you would agree with the administration with regard to not doing anything about it right now uh... i'm not sure that the kyoto treaty is the best way to deal with the problem right now but that uh... is uh...
That's right, that's a political point.
Oh no, I appreciate your expressing that.
East of the Rockies, you're on the air with Dr. Ramone Lopez.
Hello.
Hi Art, how you doing?
Okay, sir.
I got a question for your guest.
Yes.
Dr. Lopez, I was wondering, you were talking about B4 spreading and the polls shifting, or the polls completely flipping over.
Yes.
I was wondering, can you estimate the time when they did shift in the past?
The last reversal... I'm sorry.
The last reversal, I believe, took place, I don't know, somewhere around 700,000 years ago.
The evidence seems to be that over the last couple hundred million years, it's been roughly half million year intervals, although that's highly variable, the amount of time it takes.
Wait a minute, wait a minute.
You said the last reversal was about 700,000 years ago, right?
And then you said reversals take place roughly how frequently?
About every half a million years or so, every 500,000 years, roughly.
But then we're overdue.
Yes and no.
I mean, when you look at the record, sometimes it's a million years or more in a reversal.
Sometimes it's much quicker.
But like the big one for California, it could occur any time.
In other words, half a million has already passed, and we're headed toward three quarters of a million right now, so you couldn't definitively say that it won't happen next year?
Well, at any time means at any time in geological history, and these reversals take a few thousand years.
We may be in the beginning of a reversal right now.
Oh, well, you have the wandering?
Earth's dipole magnetic field weakens over time.
And maybe in a couple of thousand years, we will be at a point where the main part of the Earth's magnetic field has disappeared.
How quickly is it weakening?
With some small percentage or fraction of a percent per year.
Even if you extrapolate from the last 50 or 100 years of data and then draw a line still a long ways away, it's not something that's going to happen.
In our lifetime or our grandchildren's lifetime.
The reversals are estimated to occur over the course of a few thousand years.
The geologic records somehow confirm... How do we know that?
Well, it's this issue of the seafloor spreading.
You can... We know roughly how fast Europe and North America are moving away from each other.
Right.
And then using that as a As a time marker, you can say, well, how long did it take for these alternating strips of magnetic field to appear on the seafloor?
So you can tell that way by actually going and measuring one strip that's pointing one direction and one strip that's pointing the other direction.
And how big is the space at the boundary?
Well, we could be in the beginning of a reversal now.
Yes.
Okay.
West of the Rockies, you're on the air with Dr. Lopez.
Hello.
Well, good evening.
Good evening.
Dave in Phoenix, KFYI 550.
Yes, sir.
You have a red star on that west of the line, but we missed a round.
Doctor, when I was young, I remember reading about Bill and Catherine's, what was it, Worlton Collision, where he postulated that Venus was captured as an outside body by our son. Yes. And I've never heard the final vote
on that. I know he even predicted the temperature that would be found on the surface and I've
never heard the scientific word on yeah, your name and how close he was on the temperature
prediction and so forth.
Well, I don't know about his temperature prediction, but the view of the scientific
community of that whole idea is that it's wonderful science fiction.
There's absolutely no support.
How do we know what the temperature is at the core of the Sun?
Just out of curiosity?
One way is through physical modeling.
Another way is by actually looking at motions on the Sun in the same way that we figure out the interior structure of the Earth by listening to earthquakes and looking at the pattern of the waves as they pass through the earth, and that's how we figured out the structure of the inside of the earth.
We've done the same thing, actually, with the sun.
By carefully measuring motions on the surface of the sun, we found that the sun is actually ringing like a bell, or to be more accurately, like many bells, many, many different frequencies.
And by looking at these frequencies, there's a whole new field that's arisen in the past decade called helioseismology.
Where they're using these oscillations of the surface of the sun to probe the interior structure of the sun.
And you're able to determine things like densities and things like that.
And then you can use that to calculate temperatures.
Well, previous to this, it would have been, science would have thought, would it not, that the core of the sun would have been the hottest and that the corona of the sun Would have been, by degree, less.
In other words, as you radiate out from the center of the energy, it becomes less and less.
That was the traditional view, wasn't it?
Yeah, and that still pretty much holds.
The corona is a lot hotter because it's so very thin and a lot of energy gets dumped there, and so you just get a higher temperature because the amount of heat per particle is large.
But that really doesn't Change the basic structure of the sun.
The core is much hotter than the corona.
If we ever are able to get them, Doctor, would that be true of a fusion reactor?
Yeah.
It would?
Well, we would have temperatures similar to the core of the sun in a fusion reactor.
And actually, we have achieved those kinds of temperatures already with No, not likely.
In fact, that's part of the problem with fusion reactors is keeping the magnetic field stable and not having it transmit the energy and in that way lose the energy and lose the trapping of the plasma.
So, a fusion reactor would have a very hot plasma that would be Contained in some way, and we have made devices like that.
What we haven't been able to do is make a device that makes more energy than we have to put into it.
Wouldn't we attempt to control it, for example, with a magnetic field?
Yes, that's how.
Well, actually, there are two ways of making fusion that people are experimenting with.
One is using a magnetic field to trap the plasma and to hold it in a magnetic bottle.
The other way is to take a little pellet with deuterium and tritium and drop it into a chamber and blast it on all sides with lasers and then the lasers create a shockwave to compress this tiny little pellet to temperatures and densities similar to that of the center of the sun and cause fusion.
If a fusion reaction were not contained suddenly, what would be the result?
It would die out quickly.
It would die out quickly.
So it wouldn't be dangerous?
You wouldn't get a big explosion?
No.
That sort of thing?
All right, boy, I've just got five million questions I could still ask you, doctor.
It has been such a pleasure having you on the program.
It's gone like that.
We're out of time.
Boy, it has gone quickly, but I've enjoyed myself also.
All right.
Thanks very much.
All right, my friend.
Storms from the Sun is your book.
It's up on my website.
Make your way to Amazon.com, where they give great discounts.
And I hope you sell lots of books, Doctor.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Good night, my friend.
Good night.
All right.
There you have it.
That's Dr. Ramon E. Lopez.
And some night we'll talk about that.
I really do believe that the sun Affects almost every aspect of everything we do here on Earth, including human behavior.
Even though I know that's not scientific.
From the high desert, I'm Art Bell, where the sun's a big factor every day in the summer.
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