Ramon Lopez, a physics professor at the University of Texas, El Paso, discusses NASA’s delayed Mars imaging—including the "Face on Mars"—and the 2002 solar eruption 30 times Earth’s diameter, warning of radiation risks for astronauts and polar flights. He debunks claims linking solar events to dinosaur extinction but acknowledges solar cycles influence climate alongside human factors, criticizing the Kyoto Treaty’s economic burden without full consensus. Lopez explains Earth’s magnetic field reversals take millennia, not decades, and highlights solar storms’ threat to power grids, GPS, and radio communications, like Bell’s ham radio disruptions. The episode blends space weather science with fringe theories, underscoring humanity’s growing vulnerability to cosmic forces while questioning government transparency in extraterrestrial research. [Automatically generated summary]
From the high desert and the great American Southwest.
I bid you all good evening, good morning, and here I am again.
Welcome, everybody.
It's good to be back.
I'm Art Bell, and this is Coast to Coast AM covering 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 natural.
1110 on the Isle in Charlotte, North Carolina.
It's Doubt Wads Clear Channel going from, um, 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 FM2, WBT-FM in Chester, South Carolina, and they're 99.300 kilowatts, 100,000 watts, on 993.
The GM there, Rick Jackson, the PD Bill White.
Hey, Bob, 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.
Oh, 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.
That's right.
Richard actually talking to NASA.
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-60s, a little fog and all of that.
Then, well, then I decided the ham operators in the audience may appreciate this, 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 various short wave 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 up 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.
It's 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, the end of the week, weekend, 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.
Is 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 is on the website right now, kind of connected to my vacation.
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 a blowaway.
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 were 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 a 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, and people need to go to jail.
And real quickly, too, 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 flap go to jail, just the way any criminal needs to go to jail.
And confidence in our economy has got to be restored, and that's what they've got to do right away.
and they had better not wait.
unidentified
SHOW!
You're listening to Art Bell, Somewhere in Time, tonight featuring Coast to Coast AM, from July 1st, 2002.
this is interesting stuff as well of a little problem about a little town i live in here in the desert uh...
on this july fourth coming up about nine fifteen at night is going to have biggest fireworks uh...
uh...
display demonstration uh...
for the fourth of july in the entire state of nevada in our state of nevada we are going to have 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 Perrump, Nevada, why, you might want to make it for the 4th 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.
And it's going to be something.
I mean, can you imagine that?
I meant to ask them where they got so many fireworks for a little prompt.
But in prompt, 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 today, place today, between NASA and Richard C. Hoagland as a result of some action by Peter Gerston that I know you've been hearing about on the program, and I shall certainly miss some of it, and 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 than I care to remember, Richard C. Hoagland.
So the way we assure that things move forward is we send you on vacation and things happen.
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.
A year ago, March 16th of 2001, he had sat on behalf of this organization that he and I and David Jinks created called FACETS, the formal action committee for extraterrestrial studies.
We sent a letter to headquarters basic saying, look, you know, stop kidding around with Sidonia and the other artifact imagery.
Give us what you've got.
Particularly close-up images of the face, full face view, good lighting, et cetera, et cetera.
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.
Well, we heard some excuses like, oh, there's a dust storm, and 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 three weeks ago, Peter had sent an email followed with a phone call to headquarters basically saying, look, you guys agreed to take these pictures.
We put a lot of effort into it, spent some money, put up a website to 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 did not have access to the original memos and correspondence.
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.
Well, the first part of the call had to do with the reasons why the Mars Mobile Surveyor had not acted upon our request a year ago.
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.
And we listened because it was important background for us to have.
The bottom line is that because they have lost so many spacecraft at the last minute, because they have not had telemetry from the spacecraft to Earth, they lost Mars Observer in 93, I believe.
They lost Mars Polar Lander because there was no communication in the last few minutes of the entry and set down on Mars.
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, costing $750 million, almost $1 billion for two robot mobile labs that will rove a few miles from the landing site and do all kinds of neat stuff in 2004.
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 hundreds of millions of miles and months and months, is 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 2009.
I take 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.
They claimed it was to prevent shock to the klystron tubes in the radio amplifier that sends a signal when they had to fire pyrotechnics to the material.
And the reason they lost Mars Polar Lander is they claim 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 to maintain attitude control through January 2004.
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.
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 that we had requested from our surveyor.
The bottom line being that they're in the extended, extended mission.
They have fewer and fewer people.
They have a limited list of targets that They can turn the spacecraft and point to.
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?
It's just unbelievable.
A Bureau of Indian Affairs worker admitted starting the rodeo fire during a preliminary hearing U.S. District Court Sunday morning.
At one point, this man got up and said, I'm sorry for what I did.
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.
unidentified
*Squeak* *Squeak* *Squeak* *Squeak* *Squeak* you
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.
So 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.
And if they run out of fuel before 2004, they're basically dead meat.
So that's their priority, mandated by the excruciatingly stupid stuff they did during Mars Observer and Mars Polar Lander.
I mean, we aren't because we've got an enormous amount of coverage of Sidonia, 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.
The tunnels, if we had stereos of the tunnels, we'd be able to instantly dismiss the sand dune nonsense and get to what they really are.
So that's why they were on the list.
And 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 famous camera on Odyssey can take, as well as nighttime infrared of Sidonia, 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.
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, with Peter as my witness, to immediately send Christensen, who is the principal investigator of the Themis 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 of 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 was a scientist in charge of the German camera on the ESSA mission, the European Space Agency, as a mission leaving for Mars next year, which is carrying an incredible multiple-use German framing camera.
There's no difference between the cameras that are on these spacecraft and the framing camera.
The framing camera takes one picture, snap.
The whole thing is there.
These cameras drag it line by line by line as the spacecraft moves across the surface.
It's called a push-room camera.
And the difference is night and day.
Back in the heyday of NASA, we had the Mariner missions and even Viking.
Those were framing cameras.
They would take a whole picture at the same instant that the shutter was snapped.
And 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?
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.
They told us last week that the reason this was happening is because pursuant to Dr. Weiler'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.
So if I am pleasantly surprised at what's going on, 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.
In addition to offering to go to the Germans to let us use their camera, which is a two-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 a 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.
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% 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, that he can present on his own.
They promised us, and again, this is going to be part of the bona fide, so we're going to see if it works out as the months go on, that we will have access to that 10 or 20 percent 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 going to 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 Land 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, 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, and 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, as that, about how happy you'll be to see them?
I mean, he knows what boils your blood, right?
So then I know what he means, and that means that...
That certain people have to save faith 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.
It 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.
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 and finding amazing things, that we represent an important voice that now must be included in the dialogue, and the problem has been how to bell the cat.
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, was there behind that somewhere but?
So folks, basically Brookings saying that the American public, the world, would not be ready for evidence that there were ETs or that we're ETs or that the God that created is an ET or whatever.
That's what Brookings said.
And that's been for years and years and years the operable, I guess, if what we just heard is true, the way they've been operating, not to tell us because we can't handle the info.
All right, coming up, the biggest explosion I've seen, anybody's seen in a long, long time occurred on the sun today.
If 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.
unidentified
The trip back in Time continues with Art Bell hosting Coast to Coast AM.
more somewhere in time coming up Juga look around, they win, win a win flow.
With a little girl in a Hollywood bungalow.
With a little girl in a Hollywood bungalow.
Some velvet morning when I'm straight I'm gonna open up your gate And maybe tell you about Phaedra And how she gave me life
And how she made it in Some velvet morning when I'm straight Flowers growing on a hill Driving flies and duffel dills
Learn from us very much Look at us but do not touch Phaedra is my name Some velvet morning when I'm straight
when I'm straight I'm gonna open up your gate And maybe tell you about Phedra and how she gave me life And how she made it in.
Premier Networks presents Arcelle Somewhere in time tonight featuring Coast to Coast AM from July 1st, 2002.
We've got the photos on my website just prior to airtime.
Got them up.
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 the 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 sun is a pretty sobering thing to look at.
Again, this occurred today, July 1st.
You're going to 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, question mark.
The other image shows huge eruption on sun, and that's going to be the subject.
I understand George interviewed my guest coming up at 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 99 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 are going to talk about the sun.
unidentified
The End.
Thank you.
Thank you.
You're listening to Art Bell, Somewhere in Time, tonight featuring Coast to Coast AM, from July 1st, 2002.
You come on the program on an interesting evening, you know, as we have this incredible photograph of a gigantic explosion at 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 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.
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.
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.
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 HAM 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, 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 100 chest x-rays instantly.
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 risked 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, a few times every day, whatever, I would think that their exposure would be in a different category, wouldn't it?
I mean, do they, you know, after 50 flights, do they say, look, 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 more directly into the upper atmosphere.
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.
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 calm with their aircraft.
This has been we have a 22-year solar cycle, or an 11-year cycle, depending on how you look at it, the ham say 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.
I mean, 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.
I'm not sure that a triple peak has been observed.
But 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.
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 is converted into energy through essentially E 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 creates its energy, and how stars form and evolve.
There's really quite a lot that's known about that in the broad sense.
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?
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.
Dr. Lopez, our scientists, and you're one of them, have always thought that our sun was sort of a middle Or small, relatively smaller sun that was extremely stable.
In other words, that 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.
But I read the story about fairly stable suns that suddenly really do something from our point of view that would be really awful, that it has been observed.
We're contemplating, in fact, we're talking about in the first hour with Richard C. Oglin, 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 probable biological effect on men?
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.
If it doesn't have, if these planets don't have a magnetic field, then presumably you could not launch a satellite which would orbit around one of those planets minus a magnetic field because there would be nothing 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.
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.
So 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.
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.
And in fact, we can even time how fast the seafloor is spreading.
Or actually, we use the seafloor spreading to time when the field reversals happen.
Because as the seafloor covers up at volcanic ridges, like say in 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 the little pieces of iron within the lava line up like compass needles along the field.
And then when the lava solidifies, that is frozen in.
And you can go with a magnetometer and make measurements, and you see these magnetic stripes pointing one way, and then the other way, then the other way.
unidentified
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 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?
Well, now 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 as a fairly reputable group of scientists who seem to believe that, could that be?
The climate here on Earth, I think most people now are agreed that 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?
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.
And 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 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, is due to the sun, and part is due to human activity.
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 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 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 of 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.
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 to modify, essentially, the amount of sun reaching Earth and therefore modify our weather that our government has and is considering possibly even doing experiments in this area now.
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 hash, you know, brazing the atmos.
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.
No, it's not very likely that you could, even just from theoretically, if you could move a rock in a way that you could get it to graze Earth, that you could move Earth's orbit very much at all.
Because Earth would pull on the rock, the 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 something, like, say, the size of Venus and swing it by the Earth before you would get much of an effect on Earth's orbit.
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.
The trip back in time continues with Art Bell hosting Coast to Coast AM.
More Somewhere in Time coming up.
What is it good for?
Absolutely not Say again, yeah What is it good for?
Absolutely not Listen to me, I want to I despise Cause it means the structure of this life Wore me in tears To thousands of mothers When their sons go out to fight And lose their lives I said war!
Good God!
*music*
Time, time, time.
See what's become, time, time to see what's become of me.
While I looked around for my possibilities, I was so hard to be the ground in the ground.
It's a hazy day of winter.
In the starvation, I'll be back.
Down by the sky, feel fast.
And what you've got planned Carrie is brown and the sky.
It's a hazy day.
Hey all to your home, my friend.
You're listening to Art Bell, Somewhere in Time, tonight featuring Coast to Coast AM, from July 1st, 2002.
And Doctor, I'm going to ask you a question that's probably very non-scientific, but I've been getting all these emails from people who say the same thing.
I think we had somebody come on the show, oh, God, I don't know, some time ago, and they said, I've noticed something weird about the sun lately, that it has a lot more, it's a lot brighter, and it has a lot more white content in the sunlight.
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 email 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 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 light.
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.
You know, 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 the orange hues to come to us.
So it depends on what time of day you see the sun.
It depends if there's a lot of dust in the air.
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 fake.
I'm sure you've heard of all that stuff going on.
And one of the things, 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.
You fly through the Van Allen radiation belts very quickly.
You don't get much of an exposure.
Yes, you're out in space, and the astronauts reported they would close their eyes.
They 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 if there had been an Apollo mission during one of those flares, those astronauts would have been in real trouble.
Yeah, so one of the three guys might have died in two weeks.
The other two would have been very sick and probably would have gotten some kind of cancer not too long after that, I would guess, or they would have had some problems, to be sure, because they would have gotten a pretty nasty dose of radiation.
There are, yeah, there's a lot of people who 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-manned 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?
And there are other effects which wouldn't affect ham operators that do affect cell phones, namely radio noise from the sun.
If you're, say, at sunset and you get 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.
And so there's a lot of background radio noise in that direction as well.
Actually, it'd 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've got to have to be able 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 every few days that there would be significant cell phone problems depending on where the sun was, where you are, where the tower is.
I've got other things that will rot my brain away first.
But 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 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.
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.
That is where people will start to look for space weather as there's more and more of these flights.
And, you know, 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 the plane had to divert.
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 issues.
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'll 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'll show you on a daily basis what is going on.
You can read the space weather for any 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 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?
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.
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?
Or do you not want to answer that?
unidentified
Well, yeah, I mean, questions 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, it's not such a bad thing to point at.
After all, the first monotheist in history worshipped the sun god, the pharaoh Hakhenaten 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?
Yeah, 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 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 something that's going to happen, and as a result of that association, it does happen.
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 earliest 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.
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, aha, you see, the stars were right, and so we had a war.
Remember that certain cycles, such as the lunar cycle and the diurnal cycle, day-night cycle, those things have been pretty hardwired 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, the roughly lunar cycle for women and ovulation.
There are some deep physiological links between these kinds of cycles and our evolution that have been there for millions of years.
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.
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 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 a boat sails on the ocean, simply attack.
And there are even more fantastic ideas where you don't use actual fabric for the sail, but you use a magnetic field.
There are colleagues up at University of Washington in Seattle, their idea is to have an object that produces a magnetic field and then inflate the magnetic field with plasma to make a magnetic sail to catch the solar wind.
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, let people ask questions about all of what we've been talking about.
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.
unidentified
You are listening to Art Bell Somewhere in Time.
Tonight featuring Coast to Coast AM from July 1st, 2002.
I can feel it coming in the air tonight for the more nightwear solar for my life.
I'm going to be a little bit.
I did love about the weep and made it to the top.
I gave you all I have to give.
I didn't have to stop.
You go without time.
I tell you why.
You don't belong to me.
You've gone about time.
I love the things to find.
You're the double time.
You've blown it all, Scott.
You've blown it all, Scott.
Somewhere in time with Art Bell continues courtesy of Premier Networks.
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.
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.
I mean, the internet was designed originally as a project for communicating during nuclear war.
It had to be able to survive multiple nuclear blasts.
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 with something called packet switching, as long as you've got a way, it doesn't matter how secure it is, it's circuitous from 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 messages being reassembled at the other end with this transfer control protocol.
Considering the sun, earth, and space as a heating system and trying to keep the heat constant on Earth, we have to receive the same amount as we radiate into space.
So is there any way that we can measure at the present time the amount of heat that we're receiving from the sun so that we can say that, yes, it's solar heat, or our global warming is due to all these greenhouse gases or is it heat from the sun?
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?
In principle, you could reflect sunlight onto Earth, onto the nightside, and light up areas.
I don't know of any U.S. projects to do that.
There was some research that was done in the late 70s and early 80s of putting up big Manhattan-sized, you know, like the island of Manhattan-sized satellites to collect up solar energy, convert it into electricity, and beam it by microwaves down.
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, you could begin cooking things along the ground.
So the power densities would be very low, 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.
I wanted to share with you an observation that I've 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 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 pretty much are much less sensitive to the cycles and just, you know, because they gain much less attenuated radiation.
And also inside the nests, when I have the plexiglass nest, I notice how they attach the nest partitions to the plexiglass tends to be different in El Niño years than other years.
And it might be very useful, in fact, to use animals in general as indicators to know, you know, where we are in these cycles.
Let's talk ozone for a second, Because 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?
Then you're even in more danger from the bad ultraviolet.
The whole question of the ozone hole is still, 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 of 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 dislocation that the change in not using a Freon anymore and all the rest of it caused.
I have read some things about it that the Freon and those things will cycle out of the atmosphere, but I don't remember the time scales by which that would happen.
but that is independent of of any solar cycle effect and again at the fun spot number increases it seems that there's some kind of effect on 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, 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?
I had read some stuff about the Antarctic ozone hole, but I really don't know about the Northern Hemisphere observation, so I can't really answer that.
Well, yes, there has been a depletion, I know, across North America, but 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.
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 clear relationship between planetary magnetism and the size of the planet, because you've got Earth and Mercury with magnetic fields, and 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.
There are many who feel that the planetary mechanics, in other words, the bodies going about each other, create that energy, that the motion itself, the motion itself, creates that energy.
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 when 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.
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.
That was Art Bell hosting Coast to Coast AM on this Somewhere in Time.
Who loved you, baby?
Don't love me, mama.
Who loved you, baby?
Oh, oh, oh.
When tears are in your eyes, and you can't find the way to sleep, you're happy with your face.
And when you're feeling like you'll never see the morning light Come to me, baby, you'll see me But I'm too pretty, baby, let me go and I'll help you through the night Whenever, when it's with your love, and I'll never, never love you I can still hear you
say, you'll never break the chains Listen to the words 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.
unidentified
Thank you.
You're listening to Art Bell, Somewhere in Time.
Tonight featuring Coast to Coast AM from July 1st, 2002.
Dr. 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 six-meter beam at 100 feet pointed, of course, horizontally, but even at that, you can listen to the noise level at 50 megahertz, just 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.
When something goes off on the sun, the first thing that's going to happen is that the electromagnetic radiation will hit the Earth's X-rays and the radio noise.
Well, the thing goes off on 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.
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, 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 doesn't 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 is making it difficult to get a good fix on it.
Yeah, they get an electric current running in the oil pipeline, and you get corrosion.
I never thought about that.
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.
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 went berserk, said it came from his own bureaucracy, and he didn't agree with the report at all.
And 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.
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 to do some kind of remediation to deal with what do you say to the people who say yes, but by the time we conclusively prove it scientifically, it will be too late.
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 a wonderful 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.
We know roughly how fast Europe and North America are moving away from each other.
Right.
And then using that 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.
Doctor, when I was young, I remember reading about Will and Kowski's, what was it, Worlton collision where he postulated that Venus was captured as an outside body by our sun.
I know he even predicted the temperature that would be found on the surface, and I've never heard the scientific word on yay or nay and how close he was on his 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.
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've 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.
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 for particle is large.
But that really doesn't change the basic structure of the sun.
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.
we attempt to control it for example the magnetic field 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.