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July 10, 2002 - Art Bell
02:54:23
Coast to Coast AM with Art Bell - Douglas Mulhall - Nanotechnology
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Welcome to Art Bell, Somewhere in Time.
Tonight, featuring Coast to Coast AM, from July 10th, 2002.
From the high desert in the great American Southwest, I bid you all good evening, good morning, good afternoon, and welcome to the most listened, largest, all-night radio talk show in the world.
This is called Coast to Coast AM.
And it's actually Coast to Coast Coast to Coast AM, coming up in a moment.
Linda Moulton Howe with updates on Cuba.
Yes, there's new information on Cuba.
And of course, all the crop circles popping up in Europe.
Actually, not just England, but in Europe.
And we're in that season right now.
Hot and heavy.
Quick news.
The Dow today fell like a rock.
283.41.
283 points down to 88.1350.
283.41, 283 points down to 88.1350.
Aye, aye, aye.
The NASDAQ fell 35.11 or 2.5%.
Bad news.
Markets in trouble.
People don't trust.
That's what it's all about.
People don't trust.
They don't believe anymore.
And there's another corporation after the list of those in trouble.
It's just going to keep going.
It's going to get worse and worse and worse.
As a matter of fact, Dick Cheney is being sued.
Somebody said he did something wrong with regard to a corporation a long time ago.
Listen, there's been a big find The windblown desert of Chad has opened a new window on early human evolution.
A hominid skull that would be six to seven million years old, or at least two million years older than any skull previously discovered and found.
A stunning find unearthed by Michael Burnett at the University of Poitiers in France and his team.
He said, quote, it's a lot of emotion.
I have in my hand the beginning of the human lineage.
I've been looking for 25 years.
He said the divergence between chimp and human must be even older than we thought.
Once again, it happens.
science rethinks as it gets absolutely irrefutable facts in hand.
Now let's go back to the night of July 10, 2002, on Art Bell, Somewhere in Time.
Now let's go back to the night of July 10, 2002, And now, from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, she's done many documentaries on the ecology.
She's been, gosh, a reporter with me, both on Dreamland and then this program for more years than I think I'd rather think about right now.
She has many, many credits.
She's been a science reporter for so long, into so many interesting things, and there are so many interesting things going on in the world right now.
From Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, here is Linda Moulton-Howe.
Linda, welcome.
Thanks, Art.
You know, that was February, I think, of 92 or 93 that you and I started working on Dreamland together.
Well, thank you for reminding me of that.
Well, it was a year ago that I first reported the startling comments made by ocean engineer Paulina Zolitsky in Havana, Cuba, that she had found, quote, possibly a sunken city built in the pre-classic period and populated By an advanced civilization similar to the early Teotihuacan culture of Yucatan.
And these are quotes from that report a year ago.
Researchers using sonar equipment have discovered at a depth of about 2,200 feet.
One and a half mile, roughly.
That's right.
A huge land plateau with clear images of what appears to be urban development, partly covered by sand.
From above, the shapes resemble pyramids, roads, and buildings."
Tonight, I have a high-resolution side-scan sonar image and a video frame of a pyramidal structure that Paulina has been studying, and they are at my website report at www.earthfiles.com.
She sent you a video?
A frame of one of these pyramidal structures.
And at the top of the earthfiles.com headlines page is a link that will take people directly to this report tonight.
Okay.
Now, originally, Paulina had hoped to have a robot on the ocean floor by this summer, but its cost is about two million dollars, and it's been an obstacle.
So far, the National Geographic Society continues to express interest in adding its resources and media production efforts to the exploration But, to date, no official contract has been signed.
So, Paulina and her husband, Paul Weinzweig, have taken on other work to pay bills, and periodically they have sent remote-operated vehicles, known as ROVs, down to pick up small rocks that lay on the thick sand around these large megalithic stone structures.
Some of those samples have gone to geologist Dr. Manuel Itralde.
Who works for Cuba's Natural Museum of Science and History in Havana.
Since early spring 2002, Dr. Iteraldi has studied side-scan sonar images and videotape
from the half-mile deep site and has concluded that he cannot assign a completely natural
geological explanation for the huge rectangular-shaped rocks that stand on a kind of vast white field
of deep sand spread over 20 square kilometers.
He presented some of his research in May at the International Geophysical Meeting in London.
Now he is waiting and expects around July 19th for the first analyses of some of the
rock samples.
Until then, he is reserving opinion about the composition of the megalithic structures.
However, Paulina Zielitski says they are polished granite not indigenous to either Tuba or the
Polished granite?
Polished granite.
You mean as in the pyramids?
Well, that is yet to be determined.
Well, that's what's over there is polished granite in some cases, right?
And you will hear in this upcoming interview where Paulina says that polished granite can be found but not in the Yucatan or Cuba.
I talked with both Paulina and Dr. Iteraldi this week about their current research and theories about what might have happened off the extreme northwestern Cuba Peninsula.
Okay, here we go.
Come think perhaps Atlantis.
Samples that we recovered from ocean bottom, just beside our structure.
We call the megalithic structure.
Our granite stone, completely polished.
With some incrustations of fossils.
Fossils of organic creatures that normally live on the surface, not on ocean bottom.
Which is very interesting because it's the evidence that the whole surface sank to the depth of 700 meters.
And what we find on ocean bottom is abysmal fractures from which probably the magma and volcanic ash came out.
And from these fractures we're able to delineate our configuration of the land that sank.
Because you can see them clearly.
Land that sank is It's very obvious from our imaging of the ocean bottom, and you can see bays, like harbors, and it's all at the depth of 900, 700 meters.
Geologically, does Dr. Ideraldi and the others have any idea, volcanically, was it One large eruption or a series of eruptions that caused that?
Series of eruptions.
And as he's saying, it is still active.
It's still active.
Series of eruptions that produced tectonic movement, major tectonic movement, to such a degree that land is sinking.
And that was...
Long ago, geologically.
Now, what happened recently, recently geologically, is the plant that is showing in this Yucatan.
Islands between Yucatan and Cuba.
They sank recently.
Also, geologically and botanically, in terms of all organic life, Yucatan and Cuba, This North-East extreme of Cuba, which is the peninsula of Guanacabebas, are completely identical.
Completely identical.
It's the same stone, limestone, and the same organic life, and the same botanic and animal representative.
So, it's very obvious.
that land that was joining, what we found on ocean bottom, that this land that was joining
Yucatan and Cuba, but this land was sinking because of the ectonic movement, which were
occurring very suddenly. Right. And of course earthquakes and volcanoes were accompanying
this ectonic movement. Ectonic movement is not something, you know, that moves softly.
Right.
It's always accompanied by a dramatic volcano and earth-like activity.
Right.
And... And so, what we saw on Ocean Bottom were the great and coastal lines of the islands that sank.
And in Chile... And we think they were a series of islands.
Pardon?
A series of islands.
And until you discovered these megalithic structures a half mile down, no one had understood that there were a series of volcanic eruptions that caused a large land mass to sink straight down.
Correct.
Yes.
Yes.
That's the most fascinating part of it.
One area.
Between the fractures.
Not on the fractures.
Between the fractures.
was left undisturbed and just sank flat without structures.
And on this area we can observe those megalithic structures or constructions.
And they have completely different and independent alineation from geological fault, from geology of the sunken land, Or geology of island Cuba.
Completely independent alienation of their own.
As if they are something that was used to construct, but came from someplace else.
We don't know yet, but it obviously didn't come from Cuba.
That's one thing.
The stone that we recovered from ocean bottom is very polished granite.
And all of the peninsula of Guadalquivir, the northeast part of Cuba, all of this peninsula is limestone.
Very fractured limestone.
So it's geologically, it's totally foreign to Cuba.
Totally foreign?
It's also foreign, yes.
But it's also not known in Yucatan, because Yucatan is all alkaline, and not granite.
Granite is somewhere only in the center of Mexico.
And these granite, these polished granite megalithic structures, in the sampling you've been doing so far, they are covered with several feet of volcanic ash.
They're covered with several meters.
Meters, not feet.
Okay.
Of volcanic ash.
And it covers the whole several square kilometers that are... It covers approximately beautiful, beautiful, flat, clean area.
Nothing else in this area.
And it covers approximately 20 square kilometers of this area.
And it's, so it's flat, completely flat.
Uh, huge silicon field.
White silicon field.
And in the middle of all of that, there are these megalithic structures.
No, surfaces.
Out of it.
And this covers 20 square kilometers?
Yes, ma'am.
Does Dr. Ituraldi and other geologists, do they have a hypothesis About how 20 square kilometers could drop straight down?
The whole island sank.
And the whole thing sank.
Probably, what we think, before it really happened, that Cuba and Yucatan at one time, at one historical time, both joined, but little by little this land was fractured and sank to the ocean bottom.
What in your own mind is the very next most important thing that you could do to collect some kind of sample from the megalithic structure area?
I wouldn't be able to do any serious work without a robot that is working on ocean floor because I need stability in order to be able to make an opening Do the submersibles have the ability to drill into stone?
in order to enter. Also National Geographic were interested in investigating this site
with submersibles. Right. So that might be another good opportunity. Do the submersibles have the
ability to drill into stone? No, submersibles don't. They just have ability to observe with human eyes.
Okay, and videotape.
Not with your camera.
Yeah, and videotape, but obviously it's done by humans.
And if you can get this robot made and down there that costs about two million dollars, you would be able to photograph, and the robot would show light so that you could photograph better, but it would also be able to drill into the megalithic structure?
Oh, yes.
I would be able to make openings.
If National Geographic can get this funding together, then you might be able to go forward full-time and get the robot down there that can both photograph and collect samples?
If National Geographic can get this funding together, then you might be able to go forward
full time and get the robot down there that can both photograph and collect samples?
Yes, that's right.
And discover a completely new page in our history.
Today I was also able to talk with geologist Dr. Manuel Iralde from the Cuban Museum of
Science and Natural History in Havana.
you Dr. Iteraldi presented a scientific paper about the deep water megalithic structures a couple of months ago in London at the May 2002 International Geophysical Meeting.
Dr. Iteraldi.
I have been working with the data provided by Paulina already for three months, and I have been observing the cyclotron sonar images, also the video images, plus some samples recovered from different places within the area where the megalithic stones are, and also from An area located to the south of this region.
My impression is first that the structures that are in the megalithic area at this 600 to 700 meter depth, I cannot explain these structures by any geological means right now.
So I am not sure that I can find A geological explanation for the origin of these structures.
The structures don't fit into any natural explanation currently.
This is geologically, I mean naturally, I cannot give a logical explanation now.
So, I am not And so the mystery deepens.
Well, it really is one in which we are finally getting data in physical evidence.
by natural cause of these structures.
And so the mystery deepens.
Well, it really is one in which we are finally getting data in physical evidence.
He said for me to call him by next Thursday or Friday for the first lab reports on some
of the rocks that Paulina Zielinski has been able to get up with the ROV.
That is going to be very interesting.
But, as he pointed out to me, until they are truly able to drill into one of these rectangular, almost carved-like structures, He says he can't say definitely that he will pass off that the composition is granite or something else.
He really wants to know what the drilling is.
And he also made a very interesting point that for the last 50,000 years, they know that the island of Cuba has been under the water and has risen back up, gone back under the water, risen back up.
In this very seismic active area and he thinks that perhaps what they're also on the track of is that an island or islands or the end of the peninsula might have been shaken loose or started to fall apart maybe as long as 50,000 years ago and have slowly over millennia been settling down To this very deep, half-mile depth.
Okay, alright, we're going to break here at the bottom of the hour, and then I'm going to hit you with a theory from a guest the other night that might explain all of this.
Might explain all of this.
I'm Art Bell from the high desert.
This is Coast to Coast AM.
Stay right there.
You're listening to Art Bell, somewhere in time, on Premier Radio Networks.
Tonight, an encore presentation of Coast to Coast AM from July 10, 2002.
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You're listening to Art Bell, somewhere in time.
Tonight featuring a replay of Coast to Coast AM from July 10, 2002.
So the mystery off the coast of Cuba definitely deepens.
Polished granite.
The structure's not indigenous to the area of Cuba.
And it all sank a half mile below the ocean.
How long ago?
Well, I do have a thought about that.
♪ ...to be on the line...
♪ Let's go back to the night of July 10th, 2002, on Art Bell,
Somewhere in Time.
♪ Once again, here is Linda Moulton Howe.
And Linda, I had a man on the other night named John Kogan, a graduate of the University of Washington, who has a theory that there was a bolide 10,500 years ago that traversed of the skies over North America from Northwest to Southeast, passing over South Carolina, leaving identifying marks in the geology of South Carolina.
And then he gave us a lat longitude in the Atlantic where he thinks this thing came down.
I was just thinking this would have passed just roughly over that area, a little north of that area on that trajectory.
Interesting.
Well, I did a story about the Carolina, that's what they call them, the Carolina Bays.
Earlier this, I guess it was really toward the end of 2001, and I show some of the satellite maps where these craters are all over North and South Carolina, and apparently there are one or two or three craters that extend out into the Atlantic.
A satellite photograph shows one.
That is a story at EarthFiles.com.
I think it's in the December 1st or the December 15th, 2001, EarthFiles report.
You can see quite a bit about those Carolina Bays.
And the issue, as in so much of this, is when exactly did it happen?
And there's nobody who disputes that something scattered all of these crater-like depressions
that have filled up with water in a lot of places, and that there are these craters going
out into the Atlantic.
But when exactly did it happen?
And Dr. Ideraldi has done some research into the Yucatan legends and mythologies, along
with Paulina Zielinski.
It is very true that the Mayans and some of the other natives have long had a story about
how their ancestors lived on an island off to the west that vanished beneath the waves.
There you are.
And that's the way they've talked about it.
The part I don't get is not indigenous to the area.
That really deepens the mystery significantly.
Especially coming from Dr. Interaldi.
He's an extremely respected geologist.
He worked for the Museum of Natural History in Havana.
And he may be teaching or making some presentations in a university in the United States in the next few months, and he feels that whatever these structures are, that when he said in that excerpt that he can't say definitely that they're artificial, but that he has so far not come up with any logical explanation for how these Very large and with a rectangular structure for the most part, but with a definite pyramidal shape, at least in the one that they did get on one of the ROV videotapes.
And everybody would like so much to get back down there with better light and with more videotape.
And they've tried this summer, but it is not easy.
They're not able to do this full time.
The equipment challenge is huge.
It is down a half mile.
The water is extremely cold and I understand that the current can be very rapid there.
That's why they need this robot down there.
And they have said that National Geographic really would like to see if they can pull together the resources to accelerate this investigation process.
And at earthfiles.com, at the bottom of my report tonight, I do have some contact information at the National Geographic Society for anybody who may be working in or represents or knows somebody, an individual or an organization, who might want to contact National Geographic about how to put together funding for what could be, as Paulina Zielinski said, turning truly a new leaf, a new page in our history
Because something extraordinary may be down there.
Something extraordinary is also happening in Europe.
We're well into the crop circle season and it's a doozy so far.
Anything to report?
Oh, yes.
New formations.
I talked with researchers in Holland today, in Germany today, in England today.
England is up to 22 formations.
Holland is up to 6.
Germany is up to 32, now has more than England in Germany.
Very complicated story there.
But, you know, one of the sub-themes has been the terrible weather in England.
It has been raining and raining and it's been cold.
Sounds like Texas.
And Charles Mallet stressed today that not only did this new formation that was found yesterday afternoon, and he went out into it, and this is Again at West Overton in Wiltshire, where that incredible double spiral, the coiled serpent, the two coiled serpents going in opposite directions were found.
It's actually beautiful.
Oh, it is.
So this is in the same field area of West Overton, and this new formation.
I've got a photograph at the top of my earthfiles.com headlines page tonight from Charles.
He got it to me late this afternoon.
And it's a pole shot.
We will be getting, hopefully tomorrow morning, good aerials of what it looks like from the air, but you can get a feel of it on the ground with Charles' pole shot.
And he stressed that this had to have come in what was rain, and there was no mud anywhere that he could find, but the most extraordinary of all, This is what happened at Stonehenge on July 4th.
To many people who have been investigating crop formations going back to the end of the 80s, this amazing formation that came down in young wheat and spans about 750 feet, placed very specifically between three burial mounds at one end of a field, as if this is the reason why it is there.
Came also in rain.
It is incredible when you look at it.
You look at the aerials of this extraordinary formation.
So they know for sure it was formed in rain.
It was formed in rain.
It had been raining for approximately four days before this formation and I have a wonderful insight into what this is like.
From Charles Mallet, who is a co-owner of the Silent Circle Cafe in Wiltshire now, and has been in maybe 200, 300 formations in the last decade.
And he and his wife were afraid that the farmer was going to cut this down because the farmer was so angry.
They got into the field at 6 o'clock in the morning on Friday, July 5th.
Charles Mallet.
Here we go.
Listen carefully.
When we saw it, it was like, Jesus, you know, that is something really amazing there.
In the field, you can actually see Stonehenge in a picture, it is adjacent and across the A303, and a couple of fields back, half a mile maybe, up a dirt track.
So what we were looking at was like a formation that, you know, it was 11 tramlines wide, Huge.
We've done a rough calculation and it's between 720 and 750 feet approximately.
Well, I mean, from a purely aesthetic point of view, it is absolutely stunning.
And, um, I would say something absolutely very interesting.
In fact, we only, um, determined this ourselves like 15 minutes ago, sitting around our kitchen table, which is, um, do you remember the formation from Hack Pen Hill in 1999, Linda?
Absolutely.
Hack Ben Hill 1999 happened on the 4th of July.
So essentially what we're looking at is an aesthetically amazing elaboration on the Hack Ben Hill for me.
I mean the geometry is essentially the same at the center.
So we're looking at almost like the completing of the task.
It's like an opened up version of the same thing.
Where Hack Pen Hill 99 turned in on itself and kind of finished in the dead end, a little path.
It's just folded into the main body of the design.
This one is as if the ends have been tweaked, pulled out to produce huge three-dimensional ribbons splaying out across the field, you know, going on for 800 feet or so, which is absolutely stunning.
It actually looks like it's flapping in the wind.
It's really effective.
What were your very first impressions as you moved along the soil and in the plant?
For the preceding few days, at least three or four days, it's been... I mean, the weather, a typical English summer, has been absolutely dismal.
It's been raining every day, essentially, and practically every night.
So the conditions out there on the ground are horrific.
Wet, boggy, muddy, you know, terrible conditions.
So we stepped into the formation and, you know, obviously all this mud was dropping off our boots.
Everywhere, leaving obvious and really ugly traces, you know, clearly, clearly apparent.
Two people had just stepped into the formation.
And, apart from this, okay, apart from one other person that we know that has visited the formation, as we made our way into the formation, there was no other murder.
The whole formation was absolutely clean.
And, you know, I can assure you when I say clean, I mean this was clean.
It was smooth, consistent, no, no footprints, no murder.
None of that.
It was as if the thing had just arrived there and then and we had stepped in.
So that was pretty impressive and fairly amazing in itself.
But essentially the whole formation looks as if it started in the middle as a swirl and just splayed out in six elaborate directions to create something pretty spectacular, which is absolutely beyond our comprehension in terms of construction.
Anything unusual in terms of the plants themselves?
Did you see anything in the nodes or the soil or the seeds or anything?
What would be expected of a genuine formation was present, i.e.
expansion and expulsion in the nodes, primarily in the grove nodes on the plants.
It's consistent with the unwork of Levingood.
To actually walk within that is quite staggering.
I would challenge anybody to walk in such an event and really conclude that two old farts came out of the pub and made that.
Not a chance.
I mean just its positioning alone adjacent to Stonehenge and as you would have seen from the aerial shot Actually sat amongst three um megalithic round barrows burial mounds essentially and I mean it it could have actually been positioned out in the main body of the field much much easier than it I mean just positioning that huge formation in amongst such a tight area is quite a feat of engineering in itself and I mean you know why would it happen amongst three ancient
Burial mounds, you know, so I mean it's clearly relating now the entire formation to the land in some way, you know.
Right, and what might the relationship be between those burial mounds, that particular field near Stonehenge, and the field at Hack Pen Hill?
You know, I wish I knew, but I would say that, I mean, technically this area, and the area in very close proximity, has received, you know, unbelievably sophisticated formations in the past. You'll
probably remember 1996, Julius set a highly sophisticated mathematical design of an
order, you know, barely comprehensible to the average person.
Just creating that single curve on a piece of paper is difficult,
let alone doing it six or seven hundred feet across a wheat field.
So this current formation has happened in very close proximity to that site where that formation is.
I think it's actually one field out from that particular location, but at this time it seems to have chosen to lay itself down amongst the ancient sites.
As if to say this is You know, this is part of the land as well as part of everything else.
It almost seems like a connection thing with the earth.
And does anybody archaeologically know what was buried inside of those particular round barrows?
I don't know, but it was fashionable in the 16th, 17th century for the English gentry to actually excavate these mounds in the hope of finding treasure, and more often than not, they would find fetal corpse or a skeleton in a fetal position and a few
personal treasures.
So I don't know, I mean the positioning of these sites, the positioning of these mounds
in relation to the larger landscape I feel is probably far more significant than just
having somewhere to bury a body, you know, it's like the positioning of Silbury Hill,
you know, that's regarded as a burial mound even though it's never been proven to be so.
I'm sure that's there for a very good reason and the way the crop circles appear in connection with these sites makes me think that this is very much an and sky deal you know it is not just aliens coming here and
dropping big patterns in cornfields is very much related to the human consciousness the earth
and something else I'm just not quite sure what that something else is yet but it's you
know quite possibly an interdimensional communication yes and Gerald Hawkins the mathematician is
convinced that it has to do with those that have passed on of a particular intellect coming back
to say or do something that it would be other dimensional from our point of view but from
its point of view would be interacting with the earth with great knowledge about our
past.
It's entirely possible that these are almost reflections of, of our past, if you will, or It's as if we're coming full circle, you know, and the crop circles are kind of appearing because of that almost, you know.
God, if only we could decipher, if only we could decipher all of this.
Between burial mounds, interdimensional possibly, from those who once were possibly.
What a mystery.
Yes, and isn't it ironic that this season of more than 30 formations in Germany In addition to what is happening in England and Holland, almost as if something underscoring all of you who think it's two old gentlemen down in southern England, sorry, wrong, it's a global phenomenon, that all of this should be happening just in
The same time that a Hollywood movie is about to come out using crop formations as a kind of background for a study in fear that has nothing to do with the real crop formation.
Called Signs.
Yeah, with Mel Gibson and it'll be a Friday night flick and it will have a background of fear and it seems to me just ironic and odd that the phenomena itself seems extraordinarily beautiful and very complex this year.
And in some ways doesn't deserve to be a backdrop for fear.
I know, Linda, but you know, have you ever watched a hydrogen bomb explode like a bikini to a little Bach, perhaps?
It's beautiful in a horrific way.
You see, this phenomenon is beautiful in a genuine way, and I think it's trying to provoke something that is profound.
For people like Charles and others who have been going out into the field.
And today, after a series that have been in England that have been sort of remarkable, a few have been remarkable this year.
I'm talking with Andreas Mueller down in Baden-Württemberg, one of the three hotspots in Germany now.
Baden-Württemberg is in the southwest.
Kassel is in sort of the north-central.
And a very mysterious place called the Isle of Rügen off of the northeastern coast of Germany, the largest island in Germany.
They all three have very interesting neolithic paths as well as tied into very ancient, we'll call it hermetic knowledge, having to do with sacred geometry.
These are three areas that are rich with that kind of knowledge and rich with burial mounds And what also do these three areas in Germany have in common, like England?
Lots of limestone.
The Isle of Rügen, like England, is almost solid limestone and has these great white cliffs.
What is it about perhaps magnetic field lines and interaction with something like limestone that perhaps sets up some sort of confluence of energies that I'm making it possible or are why this phenomena is focusing over and over and over again in some of the same areas in these countries.
Oh no, we just had one in Oregon, but again, simple pedestrian compared to that which now appearing in Europe.
We're running out of time, Linda.
Do you want to give out some contact info?
Yes.
Well, my email for questions, comments on these reports and anything going on in your area you think I should know about.
Contact me at earthfiles.org.
at earthfiles.com.
Again, that's earthfiles at earthfiles.com.
Right.
And come and visit my website for in-depth reports about these subjects I think that are important and are often not covered on the 6 o'clock news.
www.earthfiles.com.
Alright, Linda, as always, thank you so much.
Thank you, Art.
Yeah, have a good night.
She's right about that.
It's often not covered on the 6 o'clock news, huh?
Never covered on the 6 o'clock news.
The mystery off Cuba really deepens.
And so do the crop circles.
You're listening to Art Bell, somewhere in time.
Tonight featuring a replay of Coast to Coast AM from July 10, 2002.
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Tonight's program originally aired July 10, 2002.
You all remember the story about Pandora's Box, right?
Well, coming up, we have Pandora's Box.
We're going to be talking about nanotechnology.
And it seems like science fiction.
Problem?
It isn't.
It's happening now.
Douglas Mulhall's work examines the transformative role of nanotechnology, robotics, genetics, and artificial intelligence Then he'll explain how we might use such tools to cope with natural disasters and climate changes.
He's one of the first journalists to describe the field of nanoecology.
That would be the interface between nanotechnology and ecology.
He's also co-authored work that depicts nanobacteria, an infectious bacterium whose discovery has stunned healthcare professionals.
It may lead to cures for diseases like arteriosclerosis.
His experience In communications began with an advanced degree in journalism, progressed to documentary filmmaking, diversified into management, and he co-authored the first commercial television network in the new Republic of the Ukraine.
Wow!
He's produced a broad range of technology training manuals, contributed to media such as The Futurist.
He has recently begun co-authoring Microcommunications for Environmental Sensing.
He has in-depth experience with the technology environment interface.
He was managing director of the Hamburg Environmental Institute, a scientific assessment organization
co-founded the first Brazilian institute to be devoted exclusively to water recycling.
His hands-on work with natural disaster preparedness came from co-designing, building, and operating
water recycling and flood control facilities in China and Brazil, China and Brazil, in
cooperation with the European Commission and multinational companies.
He was a contributing author to the book Green Business.
He co-authored many related works, including the first green technology concept for the
2000 World Exposition, some of the first intelligent product guidelines for industry and guide
to tropical wastewater recycling.
Up next, Pandora's Box.
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Explore your universe with Coast to Coast AM and George Norrie.
I remember when I was 15 talking to our teachers about why I believe there were many Earth-like planets in the universe.
I mean, it doesn't take rocket science to realize that we're not alone in the universe.
Our government knows it.
They've been keeping it a secret for 60 years, and it seems to me that it's way past time to have the truth about our real relationship with other beings and intelligences in the universe.
Now, let's go back to the night of July 10th, 2002, on Art Bell, Somewhere in Time.
All right, here now is Douglas Mulholland.
Douglas, welcome to the program.
Nice to be here, Art.
I have done a number of shows on nanotechnology with various guests at various times, but what you've got to offer tonight looks like it's still nanotechnology, but it looks like it's sort of moving in a different direction.
Would you agree with that?
Well, nanotechnology has actually become the building block A lot of these other technologies.
All right, let us define nanotechnology first for those who might be new to it.
What is nanotechnology?
Is it real?
That's actually a real good place to start, Art, because there actually is no commonly accepted definition for nanotechnology, and the word has been roundly abused and misused as of late in all of the hype that people have heard about nanotech.
So if you want to just start at the basics, Nanoscale technology is the science and the art of manipulating atoms at the scale of one billionth of a meter, which is called a nanometer.
And that's why it's called nanotechnology.
Well, how would you manipulate, even see, but then manipulate anything that small?
Well, that has actually been part of the challenge in the last ten years, how to actually move these things around.
And the way they started doing it was with something called a scanning tunneling microscope that actually, at the tip of it, was just a few atoms wide and was able to sense, through an electronic field, individual atoms.
This actually allowed it initially through repulsion to move those atoms around and the technology then progressed from there to being actually able to physically take an atom and push it into place.
How do you do that?
Well, there are several different ways to do it, but the principal way that was used first was basically through A magnetic field that was used at the end of a scanning tunneling microscope that allowed them to physically push atoms around on a surface.
And this was first done by the IBM labs, actually, in Zurich, Switzerland.
And people may recall, many years ago, seeing the word IBM spelled out in xenon atoms.
And it was on the front page of a lot of the newspapers many, many years ago.
And that was the beginning of nanoscale technology.
Now since then, a lot of other technologies related to these scanning tunneling microscopes have developed that are a lot more sophisticated that allow us to move these atoms around a lot more easily.
So in other words, you're rearranging atomic structure?
In some ways, rearranging atomic structure, and in that sense, it's just like chemistry, for example, in which you rearrange atomic structure chemically.
But the fundamental importance of nanotechnology is this.
It's being able to manipulate individual atoms.
Now, that is known as nanoscale technology, but there is another much more profound technology that is known as Molecular nanotechnology.
And this was really first defined by a Stanford University graduate, Dr. Eric Drexler, who is generally referred to as the father of nanotechnology.
And he identified three prerequisites for molecular nanotechnology.
The first one is being able to push these little things around, as I just mentioned.
The second one is constructing little machines out of those atoms that can actually
replicate themselves.
And just a good example of that is DNA.
DNA can replicate itself.
So the second prerequisite for molecular nanotechnology is actually
a mechanical or a biological machine being able to make copies of itself.
The third one...
Viruses do that, don't they?
Many living organisms do that, but actually there's a fine difference here,
and this brings us to the third part, and that is assembly.
And that is these little self-replicating mechanisms being able to put themselves together into larger machines that assemble themselves.
And that is exactly, again, what DNA does with the human body.
It instructs Uh, different, uh, cells to organize themselves in different ways to create a human being or any other type of living entity, except... But, but, but, but they're imperfect machines because of a number of things from our point of view.
I mean, we get disease, uh, we die, uh, we have mortality, uh, so from our point of view in some ways, uh, it's an imperfect process.
Absolutely.
Okay, so... And the argument goes that, um, A more exact way of doing it is electronic and mechanical.
So most people when they hear about nanotechnology today, they think, oh, it's biology.
But actually, this part of it is much more directed towards computing and electronics and mechanical replication.
So although I use DNA as an example, that would be in some ways the ultimate.
of what nanotechnologists are trying to do.
Really?
At the moment what they're just trying to do is to get these little machines to replicate themselves and they haven't even gotten to the point of assembly and in fact there are a number of very well-known scientists who still don't believe that assembly is possible mechanically and electronically due to the laws of physics but many many years ago A very famous physicist, who is now well known as being really the forefather of nanotechnology, said, and he has not been contradicted yet, that according to the basic laws of physics, there is nothing to prevent us from building molecular scale machines.
And so far, he has really been proven right all along the road.
So at the moment, we really have not encountered significant barriers to moving forward.
And the interesting thing is that in the last 12 months, there has been a very significant jump in the speed at which nanotechnology is developing.
I'll just give you one example.
A year ago, the group that won the Nobel Prize for discovering Carbon nanotubes and nanorods, which are basically these little lengths of carbon that are just a few nanometers wide and have extreme strength.
They can be up to 30 times stronger than steel, for example.
Extremely high conducting capacities and extremely good computing applications.
Although they have been discovered, the discoverer said there is no way that we're going to be able to, in the foreseeable future, Well, this year, one year after that statement was made, a Japanese company is building a factory to produce 120 tons a year of the things.
That's how quickly the technology is moving along.
Alright, let's try and get a sense of what this technology could mean.
You gave, as perhaps a perfect example, our DNA structure.
And our DNA structure, again, from our point of view, is filled with flaws.
If you were able to take a nanobiological combination little machine and send it in there to, I don't know, get rid of cancer... Well, actually, let's start with the medical side, and let's talk about Some of the products that are advertised on your program talk about combating aging and the diseases of aging.
Indeed.
One of the major causes of aging is calcification.
That is calcium forming in parts of the body where it's not supposed to.
That can include everything from arteriosclerosis, that is heart disease, where you get these calcium build-ups In the body, and then in reaction to those calcium buildups, the body forms its own layer over those buildups to try and fence them off, thereby creating these blockages in arteries and veins.
Right.
Also in kidney stones, also in cataracts, for example.
These diseases all have a common denominator, and that is calcification.
Now, in the early 1990s, two scientists in Finland were investigating why some of their cell cultures were dying.
And through really a combination, as usual, of new technology and sheer luck, they discovered a nano-sized bacteria that is hundreds of times smaller than conventional bacteria and is smaller than most viruses.
And they called it nano-bacteria.
This bacteria is extremely unusual because it is one of the only known pathogens to secrete calcium to disguise itself.
And so it appears, and I have to emphasize here that the clinical studies have not yet been completed on this, but there is a lot of anecdotal evidence.
It appears that These nanobacteria are present in our bloodstream and secrete this calcium that then attaches itself to various parts of our body and causes these diseases.
Now, the reason that we haven't found it until now is because, first of all, we weren't looking for bacteria that were that small.
It was never considered reasonable that a living thing, these are the smallest living things known to humanity.
Gotcha.
They were covered with calcium, and no one thought that they were alive.
I see.
That makes sense.
Alright.
Calcium deposits were always thought to have been formed by other processes that go on in the body, and additional to that, even though you have perhaps, for example, a 20% calcium deposit, the other 80% of a blockage in an artery actually consists not of the calcium itself, but of the soft fiber cap that is created by the human immune system to wall off
that intruder what is really responsible for creating a lot of these
uh... these problems and all right is what we were to uh...
be able to prevent the creation of uh... this buildup
scott build up a what what that's why i wanted to start with this topic because
although i'm Wouldn't there be possible implications beyond, for example, the fact that we don't get clogged arteries as we did?
In other words, there might be a natural reason for that calcification that we don't know about yet.
Could that be?
The natural reason appears to be that Nanobacteria have been in the environment for some time.
It's also been discovered, for example, in volcanic vents in Iceland recently by a researcher in Regensburg in Germany, and the DNA has actually been decoded on this, and it appears to be similar in many ways to this type of nanobacteria that is found in the bloodstream, which is known as Nanobacterium sanguinum.
Now, but you hit the nail on the head, because What I haven't said yet, and what is going to sound quite remarkable, and I have to emphasize that this is anecdotal evidence at this point, although a paper was just published on it in June of this year, it appears as though a way has been found to strip the calcium coating off of these nanobacteria and get rid of them and reverse this calcification process that is going on in parts of the human body.
I know it sounds remarkable.
It does, but what I'm asking is, okay, so that might prevent a number of aging diseases of the type we just talked about, but could there be underlying a natural process that if we were to prevent this calcification, something else would show up that wouldn't be so good?
I think that you have an absolutely good point there, and that's why I emphasize that we have just begun this journey of discovery into nanobacteria.
The fascinating thing about this is that after hundreds and hundreds of years of scientific exploration of the human body, it's only been in the last 10 that we've discovered this completely new genus of bacteria that seems to underlie all of these other biological processes that are going on in our body.
So the answer is yes, we need to do a lot more research into this area because we're just beginning to uncover this.
The anecdotal evidence is that patients that have been given a combination of drugs to both strip off the calcium from the nanobacteria and then attack the nanobacteria with a very simple antibiotic have shown, in many cases, remarkable advances in the reduction of the clogging of the arteries, in the reduction of kidney stones, and in the reduction of cataracts.
And there is a company in Florida that is leading this research.
They're known as NanobacLabs.
They can be found at nanobaclabs.com.
Right.
And there's a great deal of information about nanobacteria on that site.
I would say it's probably one of the most authoritative sites.
Just to give listeners a general background on nanobacteria.
What is nanobacteria?
What does it do?
But the question you brought up is indeed a good one and indicates why we need to do a lot more research into this area.
Yes, nanobacteria causes these problems, but is it beneficial in some ways?
We don't know yet.
All right.
Hold on, Douglas.
We are at the bottom of the hour.
We'll be right back.
More nanotechnology.
This is Coast.
You're listening to Art Bell, Somewhere in Time on Premier Radio Networks.
Tonight, an encore presentation of Coaster Coast AM from July 10, 2002.
The Coaster Coast AM performance, performed by the band The Coasters, is a tribute to the late John Coasters, a former
member of the Coasters' band.
The band was formed in 1936, and the band's first concert was in 1937.
The band's first concert was in 1937, and the band's first concert was in 1937.
across the long black road to the darkened stride in its rage
but the white bird just sits in her cage, unknown white bird must fly, she will die
the end the end
.
.
Bye.
You're listening to Art Bell, somewhere in time, on Premier Radio Networks.
Tonight, an encore presentation of Coast to Coast AM, from July 10, 2002.
You know, what we're really talking about here, ultimately, through all the science, is immortality.
The ability to perhaps live forever.
And toward that end, I've got a pretty interesting question for Douglas coming up.
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I argue with people about disclosure time and time again.
I've told them governments are not going to come out willingly to tell us it's going to happen by mistake, it's going to happen by a whistleblower, but it's not going to be an organized thing.
Governments won't do that, and the reason why they won't do it is because they do not want us to know.
They think that they'll lose control of us if we know.
If you actually truly believe that we were being visited by extraterrestrials, and you had categorical proof that it was happening, do you think you would listen to some of the bull that government throws out all the time?
Absolutely not!
You'd look toward the heavens, you'd say there's gotta be a better way, and you would start doing your own thing.
And you would forget all about government control and everything else.
So, the bottom line is, government will never, ever disclose the true facts of UFOs.
You're listening to Art Bell, somewhere in time, on Premier Radio Networks.
Tonight, an encore presentation of Coaster Coast AM, from July 10th, 2002.
That's an example from the last hour.
I mean, they really do mess up.
You would think, and you would hope, and you would imagine, that a computer, you know, a nice Pentium 4 processor would perform precisely as instructed.
You would think that, wouldn't you?
And 99.999% of the time, you would be right.
And most of the mistakes that a computer would exhibit would be at the, you know, cockpit error, they call it, right?
At the hand of the human.
But that's incorrect.
Computers do occasionally screw up on their own.
I mean, they simply do.
Blue screen of death.
And so when we're talking about this Pandora's box of nanotechnology, and as we mate it with biology, some pretty interesting things could conceivably occur.
And here's what I want to ask you, Douglas.
There are some scientists now who say, they're speculating, that human evolution has essentially halted That the old maxim of, you know, the strong survive and the weak die, and so we continue to enhance the gene pool and the strong genes predominate, and we progress, we have evolution in that manner, but in modern America, for example,
We've changed that.
We keep people alive past the time when they ought to be alive, perhaps.
We take the weak who would have otherwise died and we maintain them and keep them alive.
And I'm not saying all that's wrong.
I'm just saying that it may have slowed or even halted the process of evolution.
And I wonder if nanotechnology, mated with biology, puts the process of evolution In this century, or beginning in this century, or just about now, into our own hands?
Or the hands of an artificially intelligent machine that is either part of us or one of our creations.
So, yes, it's an excellent question, Art, and here's the way that some people are answering it.
A few weeks ago, Stephen Jay Gould, who is a One of the world's best-known evolutionary biologists died and he was famous for shocking the Darwinian world by saying that evolution actually occurs in a series of catastrophic jumps rather than in a nice gradual evolutionary way.
Right.
And I think that he also argues that Species tend to become optimized, and just as they reach an optimal state, then you see these catastrophic jumps that either cause that species to mutate or leave an opening for other species that are more able to survive in the changed environment to take over.
Witness the death of dinosaurs and the ascendancy of mammals, for example.
Now, alongside Gould's argument is a very interesting argument being posed by Ray Kurzweil, who I know that you know, and just for your listeners, Ray Kurzweil is one of the inventors of scanning technology.
When you put a document on a scanner, for example, he has brought a lot of voice recognition technology to the marketplace, and he's won a lot of scientific awards doing it.
Ray Kurzweil argues that human technology is merely the continuation of nature's processes by other means.
That nature is actually using us to develop technologies which will concentrate the use of information even further than it has been in the past.
Some might regard that as a sort of egotistical position to take.
Well, yes, except that when you combine Gould's position about punctuated equilibrium, where you have these catastrophic jumps, and Kurzweil's position, you could come to the conclusion that actually we are in the process of creating the next catastrophic jump with our technology.
Yes, that's exactly where I was going, actually.
The next catastrophic jump.
Right.
Could be by our own hands.
Could be by our own hands.
And the real question is, are we going to enhance ourselves as homo sapiens, or are we going to allow our machines to carry on by themselves?
There are a number of technologists who argue today that within the next 20 to 40 years, and I don't want to put a time span on it because that's always dangerous, but within our lifetimes, The ability to process information is proceeding at such a logarithmic rate, in other words, it's not 1, 2, 3, 4, it's 2, 4, 8, 6, 7, etc., that our machines currently are about as smart as a spider.
But at this rate of progress, The ability to reach the computing capacity of the human mind will probably be reached sometime, they say, around the year 2030 or so.
2030.
But it won't just stop there.
It'll keep going.
It'll keep going.
So the very next leap after 2030, if that date is roughly accurate, the very next leap would be smarter than human.
And then from that point on, it would be very much smarter than human.
So then the obvious question is, Are we simply preparing the evolution of the machine?
In other words, humans will eventually be... Will we be superseded or not?
That's the question.
Well, I wonder, and don't you, how that process actually would occur, where human beings become superfluous.
The point is this.
What I have been researching and investigating in this book is what are the possible futures, because that is only one possible future.
Another possible future is what you've written about, for example, in The Coming Global Superstorm, and that is that for one reason or another, Our climate becomes destabilized to the point where our technological and industrial base starts to move backwards.
I'm sure you've looked very carefully at this since you're in partially that business.
Now, do you think that our climate presently is in the process of being destabilized?
Sir, your question this way.
The last ten years has shown, without a doubt, that over the past hundred thousand years, The Earth's climate has undergone some very severe and sudden shifts without human intervention.
That's important because regardless of whether or not we are causing a shift in the climate, it is clear from the historical record, which I'll explain in a little more detail later, that these shifts happen as a natural process and they can happen sometimes very quickly.
For example, Richard Alley wrote a book called Two Miles High Machine, in which he went to Greenland and dug down two miles into the ice to get a record of the climate changes that went on.
And what he found was that at the end of the last ice age, the climate didn't just gradually change, it flipped in a period of about 7 to 15 years.
Now, concurrent with that, there have been a number of records Dozens and dozens of locations around the world have been located, and I'll just give you another example, through dendrochronology, which is the study of tree rings.
And there's a scientist by the name of Mike Bailey who has done investigation of tree rings in very old trees that are thousands of years old.
What he discovered was that in 536 AD, trees around the Northern Hemisphere just stopped growing.
They just virtually stopped growing for a period of two or three years.
And there's been a lot of controversy over what happened, but there is no doubt from the other sediment and ice core records that there was a very severe change in the climate during that period.
Now, these changes obviously were not caused by humans.
So, these records suggest, and there is a group of scientists now who are arguing in the climate change community, Regardless of whether or not we are causing climate change, regardless of whether the climate is warming prior to a sudden cooling again, or any of these alternatives, the key thing that we need to focus on is getting ready to adapt to it, rather than arguing about, is it happening, is it not happening.
Boy, do I agree with that.
Yeah, you know, like not, oh how can we prevent it?
We don't know how to prevent it yet and our models are a long way off from doing that.
Although, you know, there are a lot of environmental scientists who would argue that there are certain things such as CO2 reductions that could be done, but there are also a lot of factors that mitigate against that which I can explain later.
There's this very small group of scientists.
There are some at Environment Canada, oddly enough, who work with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
Are you in Canada?
I forgot to ask.
Right now, I'm on a little island in the middle of the Gulf Islands, about 100 meters away from the U.S.
border, so I'm kind of sitting on the border.
I'll be darned, all right.
And the other group is actually based in the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration, two scientists actually, Roger Pilkey and David Starowicz wrote an article in the Atlantic Magazine just a few years ago arguing, they called it breaking The Global Warming Gridlock, and they basically argue, hey, let's stop spending so much money on trying to predict what's going to happen, and let's start spending a little more money on getting ready to adapt.
And that brings us back to how can we use these technologies that are emerging now, what I call the grain technologies, genetics, robotics, artificial intelligence, and nanotechnology, to adapt To these extreme environments, and it doesn't just have to be climate change, it can also be surviving a hurricane off of Florida, or surviving an earthquake in Los Angeles, or surviving a tornado in the Midwest.
We still don't have the tools to do this, and these grain technologies for the first time are giving us a realistic possibility to do that, and that is really exciting and positive, and in some ways can help to offset Some of the dangers and downsides and Pandora box aspects of the technology.
Alright, imagine for me how nanotechnology, in combination with some sort of biological aspect, I don't know, would for example go to work, could you create a machine or machines that would self-replicate and then go to work on climate modification?
That is number one a relatively long way off and number two probably I would start in another place and I can give you an example that was actually just announced in June.
Please do.
And on your show there's been a lot of discussion and I applaud your show constantly bringing this up about Why do we have an energy crisis?
Why are we still depending on fossil fuels in the 21st century?
And that was brought up on your show again last night, and there have been a lot of explanations brought up as to why, but one of them, of course, is the resistance of vested interests who want to see fossil fuels continue.
Now, let's have a look at what I talked about earlier, these little carbon nanorods and nanotubes.
Last month, it was announced That a team at the University of California at Berkeley has created solar cells made of these little nanorods and embedded them in plastic.
Now, the important thing about this is it means, in a nutshell, that for the first time, we may be able to spray paint surfaces with solar cells.
So, even if their efficiency is relatively low, which it still is because this discovery has just been made, You can paint such large surfaces, and with nanotechnology the surfaces can communicate with each other so you don't need the wiring.
It doesn't have to be nearly as complicated as it is today.
Yeah, but the output has to be somewhere.
Well, the output can actually be ubiquitous.
It can go in many different directions because you actually have a flat sheet that is capable of putting the electricity out through a grid.
And directed in different directions.
And the reason for that is because at the same time that you have these solar cells painted on, because of nanoscale computing, you can actually put the computing capacity right in those solar cells to direct the energy to the grid.
I'll just give you an example.
If you paint a building, With solar cells, there's no reason why the energy from those solar cells just can't be used to run everything in the building.
I'm trying to picture in my mind how the energy transfers specifically from the painted building, and I understand that aspect of it, to some sort of grid.
In other words, how does that transference occur?
How do you finally get Well, look at the way that solar cells work today.
Everyone has seen these solar panels consisting of these silicone wafers.
Yes.
All you're basically doing, although I don't want to oversimplify it, is shrinking those things down by about a thousand fold.
The principles of how you transmit the energy from one cell to the other into the grid basically remain the same.
It's just happening at a lot smaller level so that you can put these things on surfaces that don't have to be inflexible
solar wafers.
The problem right now is that most solar cells, although some of the newer ones don't have this constraint,
but most solar cells have to go on a flat surface.
That's right.
And that's a real problem because you have to put them on these panels and mount them on roofs
and there's costs of infrastructure and everything else.
We're talking about solar cells that are a thousand times thinner than the cells that exist today
and therefore can be just put on to, for example, the road surface.
I get that picture.
Roads, houses, whatever you would paint.
It wouldn't matter.
What I don't understand is where are the two wires that emerge from some point in the totality of that structure that carry the current that does the job you want it to do.
Theoretically, you could have thousands of wires coming out, and the computer network that is embedded in the cells would determine which direction the current goes.
Aye, aye, aye.
All right.
Hold on, Douglas.
We're here at the top of the hour.
Well, paint the world red, huh?
Or something.
That energy would come virtually from everything painted.
And the computers would decide when to send it to your washer, dryer, refrigerator, that kind of thing.
You're listening to Art Bell, somewhere in time.
Tonight, featuring a replay of Coast to Coast AM, from July 10th, 2002.
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You know they don't call me there.
You don't have to shout or bleep about it.
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The End Thank you for watching. Please subscribe to my channel.
Riders on the storm Riders on the storm Into this house we're born Into this world we're thrown Like a dog without a bone And Hector out of law Riders on the storm There's a killer on the road
His brain is squirming like a toad Take a long holiday
Let your children play If you give this man a ride
Sweet Mammal, he will die Killer on the road
Yeah www.arkbell.com
You're listening to Art Bell, somewhere in time.
Tonight featuring a replay of Coast to Coast AM from July 10, 2002.
With Douglas Mulhall, we'll continue to talk about the little things.
The little things.
You know, like immortality.
The human race perhaps being entirely replaced by machines or aided by machines.
It's kind of hard right now at this junction to know where it's going.
That's certainly one possibility.
Stay right where you are.
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Now, let's go back to the night of July 10th, 2002, on Art Bell, Somewhere in Time.
I want to return for a second to the possibility of machines actually being the next evolutionary step.
How do you imagine, Douglas, that that might occur?
How could humans Well, there's a very basic and interesting graph that has been done by Hans Moravec, who is the Director of the Robotics Center at Carnegie Mellon University.
He tracks the development of information processing in millions of instructions per second.
And that goes from the year 1900 through until today.
And of course, in the year 1900, we weren't anywhere near doing millions of instructions per second, so we were actually down to the instructions per hour of information.
But while he tracks this up through the invention of manual calculators, electronic calculators, through to the computing that we have today, he clearly shows that there is a logarithmic growth Especially in relationship to the cost of the ability to process this information.
So we're not just seeing a linear growth of our ability to, our machine's ability to process information, but rather a logarithmic growth, which means that right now it's going straight off the scale.
Now, if that is the case, as I said a little earlier, it looks like sometime by the year around 2030, These machines will at least have the computing capability to rival the computing capacity of the human brain.
Now, the question is, you know, how... Minus the distraction of the human brain.
Minus... well, it depends, because... and that's something that really has to do with how such intelligence might evolve.
There's a retired computer scientist at UCLA his name is Werner Vinge
Or Vinge as some people pronounce it who has actually talked exactly about this is how?
superior intelligence might arise and What he says basically is that it could arise in several
ways the first one is It could actually
come about spontaneously through networks that the
The big advantage that computers have that humans don't have is that they can communicate with each other in
This means that you can have enormous computing power over thousands and thousands of square miles.
You mean like the Internet?
Like the Internet, but you can have a very powerful supercomputer in Tokyo talking to one in Beijing and Washington and everywhere else.
And even now we have thousands and thousands of computers that are linked this way.
So one way that superintelligence, in other words, A computer that is aware of its own existence.
This is the real first measure of superior intelligence.
One way that that might arise is simply by accident, spontaneously, where the computing power gets strong enough that these networks are actually able to develop enough power to say, I am, therefore I think.
So you would be developing, in essence, so many neural connections Just like our brain has neural connections, everything talking to everything, that it would evolve at some unknown point, and we just really wouldn't know, would we?
And it would suddenly, suddenly become aware.
Yeah, for example, the supercomputer at the NSA might ask its operator, why am I spying on people?
But that's only one of two or three possible ways.
The second one, which has to do with human beings, is that we may actually be able to enhance our own intelligence internally, either biologically through biomedical enhancements, or by attaching our own neural passages to mechanized and electronic neural pathways.
I recently interviewed a professor in England who's doing exactly that.
I'm sure you read about it, or did you not?
He's been attaching computers to the neural network in his wrist, actually, in his arm.
In his arm, yeah.
He's had this operation.
Well, and you know, Art, there's a superb example.
In the last three years, artificial retinas The reason I mention this is because it's another good example of when we have this fear of this Pandora's box that we may be opening up, we also have to look at how we can do things for people that actually indicate positive results that don't make people so afraid of these technologies.
Artificial retinas are a good example because the prime cause of blindness in seniors today is macular degeneration.
A group called Optobionics in the United States succeeded to put a chip with about a thousand tiny little computers on it in the back of the retina and attach it to the optical nerve.
So what happens is that the light comes in through the lens, is interpreted by these thousand or so computers on a chip that is just sitting on the back of your eye, and those Interpret the signal and send it directly through the optical nerve to the brain.
And these people have been able to actually see where they could not see before.
Begin to see?
Well, take Rush Limbaugh, the cochlear implant.
He can hear where he could not hear previously.
These are amazing things.
There's absolutely no question about it.
And these are examples where we are becoming transhuman or advanced humans, enhanced humans, all of these terms that are applied.
And it is the flip side.
Of being taken over by your machines.
Maybe, maybe not.
Maybe and maybe not.
Maybe as that aspect progresses, we finally become so integrated with machines that we are machines.
Well, also, you have to start talking about what is the definition of a species.
Because, I'll give you an example.
When some of these machines start to use DNA replication to create replicas of themselves, Is that a new species?
How do you define that?
It becomes quite complex in terms of the definition of species.
So it could be that what we will see is some sort of explosion of different super-intelligent species.
Some of them being enhanced humans, some of them being enhanced machines, and some of them being combinations thereof.
So we won't just have One form of higher intelligence anymore, but in fact we may have three or five or dozens or hundreds that go on to create quite a diverse society here on Earth and that allows us to populate the solar system in ways that currently we would not have thought to be imaginable.
All right.
You know, all of this is incredible and I'm well aware of this ongoing group of sciences, I guess we would call them.
All of these companies, and this may be out of your field entirely, but these companies that are doing these things have absolutely been getting slammed, hammered, destroyed.
They've been mostly on the NASDAQ.
The company is doing these incredible developments.
And they took this giant rise, and boy, the world was in front of us.
Technology was going to be the white horse riding into the future for the good old U.S.
of A. And right now, as you watch, yesterday was a perfect example.
The Nasdaq, which was up there around 5,000 or over 5,000, was at 13-something or another, took another hard hit.
I mean, these technology companies are getting murdered.
And the interesting thing is that the greatest advances take place in the worst of times.
If you look at the 1930s, that was when television was developed.
And what I see happening is actually a replay of that right now, because despite the tech investing implosion, government support for science has increased via nanotechnology initiatives.
In fact, the largest single increase in basic science funding in the last 25 years occurred last year with the funding of the National Nanotechnology Initiative and it is not alone.
The state of California has of course just built the nanosciences facility at the University of Santa Barbara and UCLA and about seven other states have developed their own initiatives and the United States is far from alone.
Japan has been pouring several billion dollars into nanotechnology initiatives as has the European Commission and for the first time really Uh, since, uh, possibly World War II.
The Europeans and the Americans have actually entered their science, uh, institutions have entered into a joint venture to develop nanotechnology.
And this is virtually unprecedented because for many years they've been regarded as competing with each other.
But what has happened now in the scientific field is that governments have begun to realize that this genie is out of the bottle and that there's an international network of scientists that are developing it.
And so they've said, OK, let's recognize that, which, of course, has large implications for national security, because the whole concept of nanotechnology being confined to certain institutions in the United States is breaking down very quickly because of the international cooperation.
And it's also interesting that DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency in the United States, is one of the principal funders of
nanotechnology and the grain technologies again genetics robotics artificial intelligence and nanotechnology
That I mentioned before well, no, so why is the private sector in effect?
Rejecting this revolution while the government and we need to be concerned about our government always is embracing it
Well first of all behind the meltdown in the tech sector the nanotechnology startup firms are not suffering for
uh... for what is called angel funding or for venture capital
There is a lot of venture capital going in to these startup companies.
And that's the interesting point.
While you're reading about these huge disasters, there's a small but very rapidly growing group of startup companies that are receiving a lot of venture capital funding.
And in fact, Eric Drexler and the Foresight Institute, which are based in San Francisco, and it's foresight.org, who are real leaders in the field of looking at the social impacts of nanotechnology, have clearly identified that one of the concerns is that nanotechnology will be overblown, will have another bubble, and then there will be this disheartening of investors, and they're warning about it right now.
But I think There is a danger of that happening, yes.
But the hard fact of the matter is, is that every country on Earth, with any science funding, is putting major money into these grain technologies.
And that's why I don't think it's going to be like the Internet.
It's a much more profound and integrated development, of which the Internet is playing a very important part, despite all of the problems that they're having with their companies.
Can I ask you about a grey area of all this?
Go ahead.
All right.
Computers can make mistakes.
Humans programming computers can make mistakes.
Perhaps more frequently, but when you're talking about making machines at the molecular level that replicate themselves, You've got to be talking at least about the possibility of one of the machines getting out of control.
I'm bringing up the topic of grey goo.
Grey goo.
Grey goo.
Grey area.
Now, it doesn't seem so outlandish, really.
I mean, if all you're telling me... It's not outlandish at all, because actually, the development of machines that are computers that are beginning to think for themselves is already occurring right now.
Yes, yes.
Well, you want to explain to everybody what grey goo is?
Sure.
Grey goo is simply a machine getting out of hand and treating every carbon source as food, including us.
Using everything in its path to replicate.
Using everything in its path to replicate and ultimately converting everything on earth to grey goo.
And it was brought up as long as 15 years ago by Eric Drexler in his There's been a huge discussion about it.
great foresight written about nanotechnology for which he was roundly criticized for so
many years and now of course it's being proven right.
So yes, and there's been a huge discussion about it.
For example, Bill Joy, who is the founder of the Unix Language and the co-founder of
Sun Microsystems has made a very public and very helpful argument about the dangers associated
with this.
he wrote a piece in Wired Magazine that you know about, you know, why the future doesn't
All right.
OK.
Help me out here.
Suppose a scientist develops this self-replicating machine.
He drops the test tube.
Oops!
On the floor.
The grey goo begins.
Right.
Theoretically, what would be the progressive speed of the grey goo as it progressed?
Theoretically, it could be logarithmic, and some people have argued that you could consume the world within a matter of weeks.
However... Consume the world within a matter of weeks?
Yes, at the theoretical level.
And I emphasize the word theoretical, because at the practical level, other nanotechnologists, such as Robert Freitas, who specializes in nanomedicine and nanobiology, has written a very convincing paper that argues that This will be the same as happens in biological systems.
In fact, if you get a grey goo monster out there, you're also going to have a biological reaction to it.
You'll have, in fact, environmental resistance, just as you have environmental resistance to overpopulation by all sorts of species, where you get this tremendous bloom, for example an algae bloom, and then everything dies off because the local environment won't support it.
So, the counter-arguments to the grey goo argument is that our biological systems are
a lot more sophisticated than we might give them credit for and that the possibility of a grey goo
monster getting completely out of hand is in fact a lot lower than it was initially thought to be
so that's the counter argument where the truth lies remains to be seen remains to be seen
well we i think we know that in the deep dark recesses of government uh level four labs i mean
they can design things that uh for viruses
could not he stopped if they were let loose i mean they would go
around the world like regular killing uh... biological entities by the good zillion
yeah and i think that's why we need to come back
the issue of artificial intelligence and i just want to give you an example of where we're at
right now and by so doing
indicate what a possible response this problem might be
Okay.
New Scientist, I just have an article from them, they've been covering the issue of stock market investing using something known as genetic programming.
Now genetic programming really has nothing to do with genetics.
It has to do with giving a self-directing program to a computer so the computer can actually make decisions on its own.
This method, the computer basically runs through trial and error design decisions on a certain problem until it reaches an optimal result.
And it's already been used, for example, to design thermostats that are much more efficient than their human designers have been able to reach.
But put simply, it would do your investing for you, it would make decisions about your money, right?
It does already.
Hold on, we're at the bottom of the hour here.
Computers making decisions on investment capital.
Hmm.
Couldn't do a lot worse than we've done so far, right?
Might be all right to have one of those machines.
If you were the only one that had, of course, as soon as they're out, everybody's going to have one of them, right?
Then it's going to be the battle of the machines, and he who has the smartest machine will be the richest.
I have all the gold, right?
I'm Art Bell, and this is Coast to Coast AM.
You're listening to Art Bell, Somewhere in Time, on Premier Radio Networks.
Tonight, an encore presentation of Coast to Coast AM, from July 10th, 2002.
2002.
I.
Thank you.
I.
Jesus don't feel the river, not till the wind or sun or rain He can be like the ocean, come on baby
Don't feel the river, baby take my hand Don't feel the river, we'll be able to fly
Don't feel the river, baby I'm your man La la la la la
La la la la la La la la la la
La la la la la La la la la la
La la la la la you
Premier Radio Networks presents Art Bell's Somewhere in Time.
Tonight's program originally aired July 10, 2002.
I cannot substantiate this.
I've got a couple of reports and so I'm going to just give it to you and we'll see where it goes.
I want more information on this.
Reports late Tuesday or early Wednesday of a strange pencil-shaped craft that crashed near Henrietta, Oklahoma.
Nothing on local news, only on local radio.
Said it shook the ground several miles away for over 30 seconds upon impact.
If you get this, if you can follow up, I heard it on KYIS-80, that make that 98.9 FM radio, so... And I've got another report, so I don't know if there's anything more to this, if it's a real report, but some cylindrical kind of object crashing somewhere near Henrietta, Oklahoma.
Any assistance on all this would be appreciated.
back to our guest Douglas Maul in a moment.
Now let's go back to the night of July 10, 2002 on Art Bell, Somewhere in Time.
Art Bell, Somewhere in Time.
Once again, into the night with Douglas Maul.
Douglas, you know, you mentioned earlier extreme phenomena like hurricanes, like tornadoes, like earthquakes.
how might there be any future nano technological application
toward uh...
uh... uh... help helping out uh... these kinds of disasters i mean what could
They're so extreme.
What approach could even be used?
Art, one of your callers last night said, you know, there's nothing we can do about meteorites.
And that's the common wisdom these days.
There's nothing we can do with an asteroid.
There's been some talk about trying to bomb them with nukes and all of this, but we know that won't work.
That's right.
If it's big enough, forget it.
The concept is molecular disassembly.
Just as we talk about DNA type machines assembling things, you can also disassemble things.
Turn it into grey goo?
Well, actually you can turn it into resources, not just grey goo.
You can convert one type of molecule into another.
And the example that I give in the book, as far as I know, This has not been considered by any of the experts who have talked about how we should deal with near-Earth objects.
If we can develop molecular assembly and disassembly, we have in our hands the possibility, and this was clearly demonstrated when the NEAR satellite landed on Eros last year, we can deposit a package of molecular disassemblers that can turn an asteroid into a factory and convert it into resources, or at the very worst, small projectiles that will burn up in Earth's atmosphere instead of causing us a lot of trouble.
And again, with the exponential replication rates of molecular assemblers in theory, we Have the possibility to intercept these asteroids at a much closer range than the current 10 year deflection scenario that has been touted for so many years now.
So we may be able to intercept one that's just entering the solar system, for example, and by the time it reaches Earth, it can either be Put into orbit as resources to be brought in a controlled way, or simply burn up in the atmosphere.
Well, Douglas, before we do that, we're going to have to learn how to see them, because the one that missed us just a couple weeks ago, we didn't even notice that it had just barely missed us until two days after.
And the reason for that is that it's still too expensive to put thousands and thousands of small satellites into space.
Carbon nanotubes may allow us to do that in several ways.
The first one is that because carbon nanotubes are up to 30 times stronger than steel, NASA, who I know is not the favorite of a lot of your guests on the show, but NASA and a number of other space organizations have started to do the engineering feasibility studies On building a space elevator or a space cable, which I know you've discussed before.
Oh, there's a new story about that out of Seattle.
There's going to be a conference up in Seattle on this space elevator.
Now, what is driving that is the discovery and fabrication of nanotubes that have this tremendous structural strength.
In the story it says, the idea for this elevator, which is really a narrow ribbon of carbon Yes.
Here's the work of Brad Edwards, used to work as a scientist for Los Alamos.
Now, so that's option A, is you can then, you can bring thousands of tons of materials up from the equator into geosynchronous order and shoot them out into space so that they can be our eyes to search in ways that we couldn't even conceive now because of the cost of launching so many uh... vehicles uh... out into the the distant solar system
where we have trouble watching one or two years now but but but again uh...
that was is it possible
that our evolutionary leaps have been produced by these every now and then big rocks
that slam in there actually correct
uh... so that's actually correct and not only that uh... but that
actually brings up
the next issue and that is you know for
many years uh... the environmental
sciences have always uh... described her
as a closed ecosystem That is, it's closed off and it's separate from space.
What science is showing us, and again I just catalogued some of the discoveries in the book that describe what is happening, but they are basically concluding that the Earth is not a closed ecosystem, that it in fact is very open to the solar system and open to space.
And I can just give a few examples.
Magnetic field variations have clearly made us vulnerable to mutations caused by the solar wind.
That's correct.
Asteroids, water from comets has quite often been theorized as filling the oceans and very recently a lot of evidence has emerged to support that theory and we are still being bombarded by Yes.
water containing and ice containing meteorites every day?
Yes. And most of that is in the form of micrometeorites that no one detects.
90 percent of all the material that comes here we never see it
shooting across the sky. Too small. The moon's gravity has always been there and drives our tides
and is one of the major environmental impacts on Earth today. Not only that, but the Earth's
atmosphere expels a certain amount of gases out into space with the variation in the Earth's
magnetic field, which not many people are aware of, but we actually expel
some of our atmosphere as well.
Not to mention that there's uncountable trillions and trillions of neutrinos every moment penetrating us and everything on Earth.
And finally, you have the influence of the planets.
As you mentioned earlier, Jupiter, for example, Hauling in and deflecting asteroids and comets either into Earth's path or out of Earth's path.
So these scientific discoveries of the last 10 years have really shown that Earth is not
a closed system.
And the idea of it being a closed system has, I think, given us a very narrow view of our
relationship with the rest of the solar system and the galaxy, and has contributed to this
concept of limited resources.
When in fact, with the sciences that we're developing, and I want to emphasize that I
am by no means ascribed to science solving everything, I want to be clear on that, but
with the sciences that we're developing, we may have the potential to bring resources
from asteroids to Earth, which will increase the in and out flow of materials and energy
to and from this planet.
So, we are really entering into a phase of discovering that Earth is not a closed system, that it's an open ecosystem, and this has fundamental implications for the whole concept of environmentalism and what it means.
Alright, well the World Wildlife Federation the other day issued a very interesting report that said that based on current trends and usage of petrochemicals and all the rest of it, With what they can see and document, and they give quite a few examples, that by the year 2050, humans had better have at least two more planets, good friendly planets, to migrate to, because our planet will be about done.
Now, what you're talking about would argue with that, from a scientific point of view, I would suppose, the year 2050... Well, Ian Burton is also quoted in that article, and Dr. Burton is from this adaptation group of scientists that I was speaking about earlier, who basically say, hey, you know, we better stop worrying about who's causing this problem and start learning to adapt to it.
Burton says in that same article, all things being equal, but we don't know that all things are going to be equal because a lot of things could change.
And that's what I call the elephant in the room of environmentalism.
In fact, I think there's a herd of elephants in the room of environmentalism right now, and they're going to come to the fore sometime after this 10-year anniversary Earth Summit that's taking place in Johannesburg this year.
Remember, 10 years ago, they had this big Earth conference, the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, where all the world leaders came and said that they were going to now defend the planet.
Yes.
There's been a whole league of scientific discoveries that in some ways support what the World Wildlife Federation report is saying.
There's no question about that.
There is this risk.
But alongside that, we need to consider... Alongside the risk, the documented risk, we have a hope.
We have a hope.
And the convergence of these molecular scale technologies, and I can just give you an example because we talked about grey goo.
These technologies are going to be able to very quickly convert one resource to another.
So, for example, if you're in the desert, you may be able to have a molecular assembler that pulls enough oxygen out of the air to be able to manufacture water.
Now imagine if you have massive water manufacturing going on in the desertified regions of the world, and what impact that would have on our ecology.
What we may be faced with are, and again... But it may be the deserts are here for a very good reason, and that they provide some sort of balance.
And that's part of the problem, so clearly we're going to need an international regime to govern that, but the key point is we may be We may be heading for overabundance rather than scarcity.
Our molecular machines may, in the next generation, give us the capacity to massively, cheaply manufacture basic products and basic things such as water in very large quantities which will have enormous environmental impacts.
Or anything, for that matter.
In other words, you could instruct at the nanotechnological level some sort of machine to construct a computer, which it would do, and then another computer, and you'd have a little computer factory, right?
Yeah, and the problem that I have, having worked in the environmental sciences and with scientists for the better part of my working life, is that I came to the conclusion some years ago that the environmental movement is not paying enough attention to this.
We need to not only look at the potential threats, as the environmental movement is now waking up to, of these grain technologies, but also what is the potential that they have for solving some of the problems that we have.
But maybe their concern is, Douglas, that it won't come soon enough.
I mean, for example, when I was a child, I was told by all the science fiction writers and even the legit scientists that by the time I'm the age I am now, I'd have robots, and they would be doing most of the daily drudgery type work for me.
They'd be everywhere.
They'd be in your house, cleaning your house, and none of that came true.
Well, actually, a lot of it did come true.
I'll give you an example.
Well, actually, you know, I'll give you an example.
It's Sony's robot, the pet robot, AIBO.
Yeah, I know.
I've seen it.
And they've just come on the market.
And you have to forgive these guys for being out by 10 or 20 years.
But there is one beautiful example.
The Wall Street Journal, when we came to the Millennium, talked about bad predictions.
And they quoted Isaac Asimov, who said that at the turn of the Millennium, we would be manufacturing factories.
Uh, uh, solar factories that would be, that would be manufacturing energy, uh, for our use.
And they said, gee, that was wrong.
Well, actually it was right.
There is a solar factory.
It's up there in space and it's being used to fuel the space station.
Yes.
So the way that our robots are working for us may not have been exactly the way that we envisaged them.
But if you look at, for example, the computerized systems that are running our economy right now, uh, these are very close to the types of Uh, service robots that people were talking about, but they're not in exactly the same form as they were predicted to be.
Well, if they missed it by 20 or 30 years, um, you know, in other words, it seems to me you've got to be well grounded enough to see what's going on around you with regard to our ecology, uh, and, and not depend on the fact that by the year 2020, I totally agree with you.
uh... nanotechnology will be so well developed uh... the machines will be so
good that they're going to save us from otherwise what's going
to occur by about that year
i totally agree with you i think they'll with there's uh... a very
uh... but there's also a very big danger we will
by being fearful of these technologies
uh...
delay or kill off
some of the ones that actually could help us a lot so what we need to do especially with the environmental
sciences need to do go into a crash course
to understand are the implications of these technologies
Alright, now let me take you back to where I began in this half hour.
We talked about, for example, a tornado.
How might nanotechnology, combined with anything, have any effect on the conditions that produce a tornado?
Yeah, if you look at a hurricane or tornado and an earthquake, it's always the same argument.
It's that these things don't kill people, buildings do.
That's what all the disaster experts say.
A tornado doesn't kill someone, the building does when it falls apart.
Now, the advantage of a nanotube-reinforced building, and we talked about this earlier in terms of its strength and the possibilities we have to construct, for example, a space cable up in space, Is that you could paint a thin, super strong skin on all of the existing buildings so we wouldn't have to build new buildings all over the place.
And you could reinforce our existing structures, especially what usually happens in a tornado or hurricane is that the windows blow out and that then destabilizes the rest of the superstructure.
That's right.
So if you can have a transparent, super strong, nanofiber reinforced coating on our windows, for example, and on the rest of the structures that effectively act as a mesh to hold it together, which you can do now, you can build reinforced concrete structures, it's just that the cost is too great.
We have the technologies to prevent destruction from tornadoes and earthquakes and volcanoes and hurricanes, it's just that it costs too much.
And the key thing that these nanoscale structural technologies may be able to do
is to reduce the cost of protecting these structures.
And so, realistically speaking, hurricane evacuations could be a thing of the past.
You would simply go into the buildings that would be strong enough to withstand whatever would be thrown at them.
That's correct. And it could be most buildings, because if you have self-assembling nanoscale materials,
their construction costs are very, very low.
It's It's the impact on the cost of construction that is going to be one of the revolutionary impacts of nanoscale technology.
So, in that world, who makes the money?
Well, you know, that's a very good question.
That is really an open question.
The people who are really going to control the situation and make the money are the software engineers because it's all going to be software.
Software determines, in order to build a molecular machine you have to give it software instructions and that's what DNA does.
DNA issues software instructions in the form of chemicals to other organisms to construct
themselves in certain ways.
We are developing similar types of software that will instruct these types of materials
to self-assemble.
Therefore, and we'll be able to send this material over the internet.
For example, you'll have a desktop fabricator on your desk here and if you want to produce
a toy for your child.
Just like Star Trek.
Exactly, the replicators that they talk about in Star Trek.
And we have the enabling mechanisms to do it.
We'll need super broadband that is much more powerful than it is today.
And we'll need much more powerful computers, but they are coming along.
It's more a question of when, rather than if.
So then, the money would be in the hands of those who write the software, enabling this?
Yes, and that is why, you know, the whole issue of, you mentioned earlier, why do computers sometimes not work properly?
A lot of it has to do with intellectual property.
Uh, you know, who, I mean, why, why does everyone have Windows, uh, all of the arguments about, uh, how strong, uh, the control is over software today?
Doug, Douglas, we're, we're, we're at a break point.
Uh, hold on, we'll come back to that, uh, after the news.
I'm Art Bell.
Douglas Maugham is my guest.
You're listening to Art Bell, Somewhere in Time.
Tonight featuring a replay of Coast to Coast AM from July 10, 2002.
You gave me a world worth for you all I've.
Darling if I was a dream, I never thought I'd go.
But it's time to let you go.
Dina Del.
The.
I gave you love I thought that we Had made it to the top I gave you all I have to give Why did it have to stop?
You've blown it all sky high By telling me a lie Without a reason why
You've blown it all sky high You've blown it all sky high
Our love had wings to fly We could have touched the sky
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Radio Networks.
I don't know.
Both are, no doubt, possibilities.
of Coaster Coast AM from July 10, 2002.
Well, is it a brave new exciting world ahead of us with nanotechnology, or the frightening possible end of the world?
I don't know.
Both are, no doubt, possibilities.
If you have questions for my guest, Douglas Maul, then now would be a good time to get on the phone and
propose your question.
We'll get into that and questions for Douglas in a moment.
Thank you.
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Explore your universe with Coast to Coast AM and George Norrie.
I remember when I was 15 talking to our teachers about why I believe there were many Earth-like planets in the universe.
I mean, it doesn't take rocket science to realize that we're not alone in the universe.
Our government knows it.
They've been keeping it a secret for 60 years, and it seems to me that it's way past time to have the truth about our real relationship with other beings and intelligences in the universe.
You're listening to Art Bell, Somewhere in Time, on Premier Radio Networks.
Tonight, an encore presentation of Coast to Coast AM from July 10, 2002.
All right, back now to Douglas Mulhall, and in a moment we'll begin to take some calls
A lot of people are intensely curious about this coming emerging technology.
You talk about a collision of futures, and is that collision the one we've already really discussed, the collision between the possibility of ecological disaster and the possibility of Yes, we have talked about it, and that is to say that in my book, I'm very clear that we don't face just one future.
There are many potential futures that we face, and they are racing towards each other.
One is this tremendous convergence of technologies that some people call the
singularity, beyond which it becomes impossible to predict the future.
Well, wait a minute.
Singularity.
What do you mean by that?
Well, the singularity is touted by some scientists as the point at which technology converges
so quickly that it becomes impossible to predict the future.
And some of them claim that we are rapidly approaching this point because of the logarithmic development of information technology that I mentioned earlier.
So that is one potential future.
The other potential future has to do with what you have talked about and written about quite frequently, and that is not worrying so much about what we're doing to nature, but what nature might do to us, and that we get thrown back.
And there's a whole group.
Nick Bostrom at Yale University has produced a list of possibilities, about 15 of them, that show what could throw us backwards.
So it is this Um, race between these two trends that will determine which way we go.
And that's why I always emphasize that.
And just before I go on with this art, I wanted to say that one of the things I try and do in the book is give people a clear piece of information on where they can find The information on each of these topics, because we're just touching on some very vast territory.
Yeah, and we actually talked about your book.
What is the name of your book?
It's called Our Molecular Future.
How nanotechnology, robotics, genetics, and artificial intelligence will transform our world.
That's correct.
And we have the website by the same name, which is www.ourmolecularfuture.com.
And on the website, there is a links page that gives people a link to a lot of these areas, some of the areas, because there are so many.
There are thousands and thousands and thousands of websites on this, so we have tried to pick ones that will give people a proper guide.
And also, in the book itself, rather than referring to a bunch of obscure scientific papers that no one can really understand, what I did was I went another step and went to Science magazines such as the new scientist or the science
division of the New York Times and referred to those websites
So that people can refer from the book through to websites that they can actually
Understand and we spent a lot of time on that. We did more than 700 end notes
So that for every chapter you can go and look and check a lot of these web pages to educate yourself instead of just
Having to you know go to a bunch of scientific papers that most people wouldn't understand Douglas
I'm gonna lay a hot potato in your lap and see how you handle it. All right
Fire away.
If you take nanotechnology and you combine it with biological sciences, would it not be possible, theoretically, to let loose something that would kill all the Muslims in the world?
You mean a Muslim-specific pathogen?
That's what I mean, yeah.
Or in anything specific, pathogen for that matter.
I'd pick that for obvious reasons.
Or one that would kill Caucasian males, or Caucasian females, or Blacks, or Native Americans.
You get the drift, right?
In other words, something that would target specific racial characteristics and then do its job.
Yes, there is that danger.
There is that risk of being able to target individual groups.
And again, I know there's been this discussion on the show before, but in the early 1900s, when the machine gun was first brought into play in warfare, there was a statistic given that if you lined everyone up in the world and shot them with a machine gun, that in a period of days, everyone on Earth would be dead.
There has been this concern, and it is not an unjustified concern, because we proceeded to go on and kill 25 million people, so it was a justified concern.
There is absolutely this concern that is being brought up about the tremendous selective dangers of these technologies, and that, Art, is precisely why we have to adopt a doctrine of mass survival when we are approaching these new technologies.
We cannot... Well, that'll be new.
Right.
Precisely.
It's nothing new and it sounds like old hat, but the reality is that in the beginning, as these technologies start to take off, one of the most beneficial things that we can do would be to do things that Show benefits for large populations and this would help to overcome a lot of these fears now in terms of Dealing with this threat that you're talking about there is an upside to it and the upside is If we have artificially intelligent Machines that can search this stuff out it means that we can also develop a defense against it and let's just go back to the World Trade Center for a second because
If you look at how nanotechnology could have benefited the World Trade Center, there are a number of ways that we could have used it.
First thing is, if we had had nanostructured reinforced buildings, the towers never would have fallen.
The second thing is that if the towers had been coated with materials that allowed communication between the buildings and the airplanes, You could have in place a anti-collision network that would actually operate remotely.
Now, there is no question that these things could always be circumvented by an evil mind, but you can see how, on one hand, you have the evil of selective annihilation of a group of people, but on the other hand, you can also have artificially intelligent systems That can be used to defend against that.
Yes, but I would ask, in the real world here, what weapon is it that we've developed?
And most weapons have positive aspects to them.
I mean, nuclear power has a positive aspect to it.
Nuclear energy.
What weapon is it we've developed on earth so far and haven't used?
You're absolutely correct.
And you can say the same thing about nature.
For example, nature has hit the planet relatively infrequently, but certainly With asteroids that have caused a lot of damage here, and as you mentioned earlier, have also opened the window for other species to go ahead.
The reason I'm saying that is because we're not the only ones with those kinds of weapons, and we still face this reality out there that there are some natural threats that are just as nasty as we are.
Well, yes, perhaps so, but for the very first time, we are approaching an area and a time in science when Our hand can do what nature previously only has been able to do, and that is provide such a giant kaboom that it makes an evolutionary leap.
Absolutely correct.
And that's precisely why organizations such as the Foresight Institute and groups that ascribe to Isaac Asimov's law of robotics and the group that developed the Genome Project have all Is it not possible that Isaac's Law simply might not be operable?
And a code of development for these technologies now these are just in their very primary states
They are full of mistakes and faults. There's no question about it. Is it not possible that
Isaac's law Simply might not be operable in other words once you get an
intelligent machine the machine might decide That it is in the best interest of
the machine or the planet That we do not proceed as we wish to but rather must
proceed as the machine wishes us to And that would be to our best benefit.
Now, we might not agree with that at the time, and it might seem like it's breaking the law.
Yeah, and also if you imbue the machine, quite right, if you imbue the machine with those values, the first thing it might do is look at us and ask, Well, if I was given these values by this human species, why do they keep contravening those rules?
Yes.
And that is, I think, a very good question to ask, because you hit the nail on the head once again.
This is the real issue.
If we are going to create machines that are more intelligent than us, and I want to emphasize, I don't think it's going to just be machines that are more intelligent than us.
I believe that at the same time, We are going to be and are already enhancing our own capabilities.
Sure.
So that these paths will move along parallelly and I can't overemphasize that enough because there's always a lot of discussion about the machines being smarter than us but in fact it may go along in parallel that humans will become enhanced at similar rates that machines become intelligent and hopefully this may lead us to a place where The machines don't have to look at it and say, why are they contravening their own rules all the time?
So the way to combat this very serious problem and this potential that you have brought up of these evil things occurring is to look at ways that we can also enhance ourselves as humans and we can move into a new era.
And one of the things I say in the book over and over again is I certainly don't have the answers, but it's time we started asking the right questions.
And there is a chapter in the book called, The Right Questions.
Well, one of the right questions would be, in your view, if Al-Qaeda had in their hands something that, should they release it, that would kill all the Caucasians in the world, would they release it?
Release it?
Would you think they'd release it?
I think that over time you've seen that any fanatical group that believes in their cause will go to any length possible, and I think that your guest last night said that clearly.
Yeah, he did, and so when do you expect that to change?
I don't think that's going to change.
I think that what you have to do is to be able to develop defenses against that to contain it.
All right, I want to get to some calls.
We've got a lot of people waiting.
Wes for the Rockies, you're on the air with Douglas Mahalo.
Hello?
Hello?
Yes, you're on the air, sir.
Thank you, Art.
I would like to ask Douglas if he thinks that nanotechnology would help probe the surface of Mars without risking the lives of astronauts and cosmonauts to actually physically go up there.
Good question.
In other words, we're always debating, Douglas, manned, very expensive manned missions versus robotic And so, what place might nanotechnology have in unmanned missions to Mars and elsewhere?
Nanotechnology has a huge role to place on it, and that is precisely why NASA is so interested in it.
First of all, because nanobacteria tend to apparently get out of control and replicate inside astronauts when they're in weightlessness for a prolonged period of time.
And that's why NASA is so interested in nanobacteria.
In terms of reducing the risks, there are two ways to do that.
The first thing is, as we mentioned earlier, if you can get these vehicles into outer space in a space elevator or launch them from the moon or somewhere else, then you're going to be able to deliver much larger payloads.
You don't even have to do that because you can deliver a very small programmed payload to the surface of Mars and it will use the resources on the planet to self-assemble according to a predetermined program.
So you can actually develop, you know, you can basically go out and forage and you can use robotic, artificially intelligent machines to explore the surface.
I think it's going to happen in parallel.
I think what's going to happen is that You're going to see these artificially intelligent machines, you're going to see molecular assemblers going to the surface of Mars, and Robert Zubrin, who you have interviewed, Art, has talked frequently about manufacturing fuel from the resources on the face of the planet.
Alright, well let's take it even a step further.
Mars is there, and Mars is semi-habitable.
I mean, it would be very difficult, but suppose You know, a lot of people in science fiction have talked about terraforming, and it seems to me that nanotechnology might just be the answer to terraforming a planet.
In other words, you set something loose that's going to begin to modify the climate.
I call it the difference, the choice between being the 10 trillion ton gorilla and living lightly on the earth.
The difference being that you're absolutely right, you can use these technologies to terraform, but in the beginning, especially in the beginning, we may not have to do that because we can use these technologies to create artificial environments that go with us no matter where we are.
And this is really the remarkable power of these technologies.
So instead of Terraforming the whole environment in the beginning to, you know, suit what we think our human needs.
Just create our own environment.
We can travel around with our own environment, first of all, through exoskeletal suits that are much more sophisticated than spacesuits that exist today and much more comfortable to move around in.
But secondly, to create, for example, domed environments that can give us a very livable environment without terraforming The whole planet.
So we will have these choices.
We'll have the choice between doing, you know, taking all of the water out of the frozen subsurface and creating an atmosphere, or saying, okay, wait a minute, before we do that, let's just create our own livable environment and then gather as much knowledge as we can about how this planet actually works, and then we'll make some decisions.
That would be the wise way to go, and I think that Dr. Zubrin is going along those lines as well.
Well, if the World Wildlife Federation is right, then I guess we better be working on one of the two, huh?
Well, yes.
And again, coming back to this report... Well, we can't because after the break we can.
Who loves you, baby?
Science loves you, baby.
That's it.
Science loves you.
You're listening to Art Bell's Somewhere in Time on Premier Radio Networks.
Tonight, an encore presentation of Coast to Coast AM from July 10, 2002.
Who loves you, baby?
I'm gonna love you, mama.
Who loves you, baby?
When tears are in your eyes and you can't find a way.
It's hard to make believe you're happy when you're gray.
And baby, it makes you feel alive.
Never sleep at morning light.
Come to me, baby, you'll see.
Who loves you, baby?
We're gonna help you through the night.
Who loves you, baby?
Who loves you, baby?
Be it sight, sound, smell, touch, there's something inside that we need so much.
The sight of a touch, or the scent of a sound, or the strength of an oak when it's deep in the ground.
The wonder of flowers to be covered and then to burst up through tarmac and the sun again.
Or to fly to the sun without burning a wing?
To lie in a meadow and hear the grass sing?
To have all these things in our memories whole?
And the useless?
We found the house of the...
...Five!
Five!
Yeah!
Five!
Five, let's get it on!
This is pain, on this trip, just for me Why, they could be right
Take the place, I've seen, in my dreams I've worked for twenty years
Worked so hard just to end my fears Have to end my life, for the rest
But by now, I know who I am Why, they could be right
Why, they could be right You're listening to Art Bell, somewhere in time.
Tonight featuring a replay of Coast to Coast AM from July 10, 2002.
And the discussion tonight is about nanotechnology and actually combining that science with biology and what it holds for us, the promise and the threat.
And that's really what it is, a promise and a hope and a threat.
My guest is Douglas Maul and we'll get right back to him.
Let's go back to the night of July 10, 2002 on Art Bell, Somewhere in Time.
Art Bell, Somewhere in Time.
All right, we were briefly discussing this report, very controversial report.
Earth will expire by 2050, is the WWF report.
Our planet is running out of room and resources.
Modern Man has plundered so much.
A damning report claims this week that outer space will have to be colonized, I guess, or else.
Douglas?
I think that as a long-time ecologist, I share Some of these concerns.
But one of the reasons that I stopped working for a little while on environmental technologies in order to write this book was to really look at the reality of what's happening with our technologies and where they might be taking us.
And I come to the conclusion that we have a chance to use these technologies to correct some of the environmental mistakes that we've
made, but beyond that, environmentalists everywhere really need to take a serious
look at both the upsides and downsides of these technologies
because of their tremendous power.
My concern is that that isn't being done enough right now, and if it is, it's more from a fearful point of view
rather than what can we do to improve our situation, because I think that the potential will be there to avoid a
lot of these problems that are being predicted.
Well, Douglas, a lot of the things that you're talking about, you know, the paint-on solar panels,
the buildings that are indestructible with material coating them, and all the rest of that,
is all going to collide head-on with all of the present financial interests, like oil,
and like our present energy.
System, which is bound to use up like every last drop and prevent anything that will stop that from happening.
I'm glad you brought that up, Art, because here's where I think we're approaching a quantum leap.
There is so much government investment going into the supporting, again, these grain technologies, genetics, robotics, artificial intelligence, and nanotechnology.
It's the convergence that is driving this tremendous development.
And what's interesting is that Unwittingly, at the same time, they are establishing such a broad base worldwide for development of energy efficient technologies.
It's going to be very hard to contain.
If there has been an effort to contain it now, it's going to be extremely difficult to contain because it's going to break out all over the place.
The solar cells are going to become so cheap and ubiquitous, they'll be everywhere, that it's going to be very hard for vested interests To prevent them from coming to market.
It's the cost factor that is really going to drive this revolution.
So you're absolutely correct to say there's a lot of vested interests out there who don't want to see some of this stuff come to market because some of these technologies are actually very liberating.
The way that they might try to control it is through the software.
Again, and we talked about this earlier, that the people that control the software And there's been a book written about it called Owning the Future about the struggle over control over patents.
But again, if we come back to the issue of genetic programming, this is very important because genetic programming is developing at such a rate that computers are designing things so fast that the patents regime may rapidly become out of date.
If you have computers all over the world designing their own designs, And submitting them, the Patents Office is going to be totally overwhelmed within the next 10 to 15 years simply because of the volume of material.
So we could indeed see a collapse of the patents regime, which in turn may result in some rather serious changes to the way that industry works.
It certainly would.
And one of the results might be a liberation of these very inexpensive Um, energy technologies.
And that's why I say that we may rapidly move from having a scarcity of energy or the wrong kind of energy to having an overabundance of energy and an overabundance of materials that are created by these very cheap machines.
And even today... Well, we might, Douglas, but where's my robot?
Well, your robot is sitting in Sony's store right now.
If you go into any Sony store, you'll find... I know.
Ibo the robot.
I know.
I know, but I meant the predicted... You know what I meant.
And I think that that day is rapidly coming, Art, and I also believe that the robots are around us everywhere.
They just don't have hands, legs, and feet.
They are here.
Okay, all right.
Look, a lot of people want to talk to you, so we've got very little time.
First time caller line, you're on the air with Douglas Maul.
Hi.
Hello.
Hello.
Oh, hey there, Douglas.
Hello, Art.
Hi.
Hi.
I had a couple of questions.
My first one is, Douglas, I had a question.
Is it true, this is what I heard, is it true that only humans use 10% of their brain?
What do you think about that?
Well, first of all, I'm not a psychologist or a neurologist, but there are a lot of theories floating around, I think supported by a lot of evidence, that we certainly don't use all of our brain capacity and I think that's a good point that you have brought up because One of the arguments that is made by neurologists today is that we could use drugs and nanobots and neural connectivity to enhance the capacity of the human brain.
And that is one of the ways that superhuman intelligence may evolve.
So that's an excellent point that you've brought up.
And your next question?
Oh, my next question is, Douglas, have you ever heard, do you know what a gestopedia is?
I'm sorry?
Uh, it's called a Suggestopedia.
Never heard of it.
Okay, well, it's, um...
It's this book I'm reading, it's called Super Learning, and this person who wrote it, they're saying to a dystopia, if you do it, you can make, like, you can increase 50% of your memory.
Oh yes, okay, I think I know what he's talking about.
There are these various disciplines that will allow you to read at 10 or 20 or 30 or 100 times faster, or remember things that you cannot remember otherwise with certain disciplines.
In other words, Other ways to increase your memory capacity, that sort of thing.
Yeah, and as we learn more about the human brain, we may be able to leapfrog from those methodologies into other methodologies that are enhanced by the methods we talked about earlier.
So nanotechnology might provide neural connection that doesn't presently exist.
Yeah, and again, nanotechnology doesn't come from nowhere.
It comes from a whole bunch of technologies and methodologies that exist now, and so it's just the next step.
Kind of like the Krell learning machine.
For example.
Oh, wildcard line, you're on the air, hello.
Hi, you were talking about calcification and I think you said nanobacteria or something that are causing problems like that and that it may be eliminated.
This may be a, you know, a cure found for it.
Do you think there really will be or if so, when?
I think you should go to the NanoBak Labs website and read about it because they are
the authority on it.
The short answer to your question is, a study has just been published that definitively
shows that tetracycline can inhibit the development of nanobacteria.
For further information, I suggest that you go to their website and they have a lot of
really good data on it.
Also, there's a good article in Nanotechnology Magazine, which is nanozine.com.
have another number of other articles on on similar topics.
So those are the two sources that I would go to.
All right.
East of the Rockies, you're on the air with Douglas Mulhall.
Hi.
Hello?
Yes, Art?
Yes.
Oh, I'm sorry.
I didn't mean to say East.
I didn't catch that.
This is Robert from Jacksonville for Listen to You on WOKV.
Yes, sir.
I'd like to preference my statement, but first of all, I am totally blind.
I lost both natural eyes to an automobile accident 36 years ago.
And I've always, when I started hearing about nanotechnology and genetic engineering and that type of stuff, my prediction is that hopefully within 100 years a man has not destroyed ourselves.
That situations like myself or people with spinal cord and these type of disabilities will no longer be in existence.
But I'm also curious Myself being, I have now just turned 62, and I'm wondering myself, is there some way that I might be able to contribute to a leap forward by being a human guinea pig or genetic engineering?
Is it possible I have growing eyes back again or something like that?
Alright, well, I don't know about growing eyes back.
I don't think they're at that stage yet.
Corneas can be, yes, corneal problems can be addressed with technology we now have.
Now, if you've lost your eyes entirely, Douglas, is there anything on the horizon for somebody like that, or is it pretty much over the horizon for that man in his 60s?
Art, as with many of these things, I am not the expert, but rather am reflecting the overview of the experts, and I would suggest Contacting Octobionics Corporation, because they're the ones who have developed the artificial retina.
And they will certainly be able to fill you in on the most recent advances in these areas.
And his other question was whether he could actually volunteer and be of some use to an organization of that sort experimentally.
There actually are a lot of volunteers.
For example, there were seven original volunteers that did the artificial retina program in the last three years, and so that type of thing is very, very active in the medical community.
So yes, the answer is yes, there are things that can be done.
And that would be the path you would follow?
That would be the path you can follow, but I would suggest to do or someone do for you or to use voice recognition to surf
the net and find out as much as you can about the pros and cons of volunteering for these
various experiments.
There are naturally risks associated with them and I would suggest you familiarize yourself
with them.
Alright, well for the Rockies, you're on there with Douglas Mulholl.
Hello.
Hello.
Yes sir.
I have a couple of questions.
First of all, do you think that some of the new environmental groups such as the WSF might
actually be the Amish of the 21st century and that their political solutions like the
Cayogo Treaty and so forth are actually going to paralyze our ability to be able to respond
to the changes that are taking place?
My concern is, there's a major conference being held in Johannesburg, the 10 year anniversary of, and it's called the World Sustainability Summit.
And my concern is that we're not looking enough at these new technologies and new solutions.
And there is a danger, not that these organizations will be the Amish and somehow block things, but that they will not reach their full potential in helping us to understand our relationship with the ecology.
Until the environmental movement learns more about how these technologies work, and that is what I would encourage them to do.
That's exactly the way I feel.
All right, sir.
I appreciate the time.
I have one other question, though, with respect to artificial intelligence.
Yes?
One of the most important things, of course, is going to be the establishment and development reliability of a strict moral code.
How important is that going to be?
That moral code is being examined, as I mentioned earlier with Art, by organizations such as the Foresight Institute out of San Francisco.
It's foresight.org, and they have the foresight principles that are listed at the end of my book, but also you can find them online.
And there are a number of other organizations that have developed these guidelines, but they need a lot more work.
Well, here's my concern.
We have a certain set of moral principles that we consider to be the right ones and the proper ones and the golden rule and all the rest of that.
Now, if we were to inculcate these moral principles into an extremely intelligent computer and allow it to, in essence, run things, We might not at all like the results, because, you know, in everyday life, while we preach, we rarely practice what we preach, and that's kind of how the world runs, but the computer would take it quite literally and apply that sort of morality quite literally, and we might not like that at all.
It'd be like a world where you couldn't tell a lie.
Yeah, Arden, I think that's a great point, and I think that that's why it will be interesting to see if the enhanced human develops quickly enough, or if these machines will develop past our capacities and make those judgments for us.
That'd be my bet.
I'd be laying my money on that one.
First time caller on the line, you're on the air with Douglas Mulhall.
Hi.
Hello, Art.
Hello, honored guest.
I've been trying to call you for years and years, and I used to listen to you back in 92 up in Anchorage, Alaska.
I'm currently in Krivitz, Wisconsin.
Yes, sir.
And I grew up with reading science fiction and watching science fiction programs, and my poison of choice when it came to science fiction has always been Star Trek Next Generation and the continuing stories thereon.
And one of the things that they really focused on ...was Nanite technology, and the fact that it's getting to the point now where we can actually see it possibly happening is really exciting.
My question for the guest is, does he really believe that these things will be possible?
I mean, I know he's saying this, but does he really, really believe this deep inside?
Alright, well it's kind of like, where's my robot?
Yeah, I know, the Sony.
But, in other words, some of these things, they're incredible, they're amazing to imagine, as this caller just said, but do you really, really believe they will manifest as you hope?
Art, one of the main points I make in the book is this collision of futures that we face.
Nothing is certain.
And that is really the conclusion that I have come to, is that it is dangerous to predict the future.
You can certainly prognosticate and you can make suppositions about it.
But to say that one future or the other is going to take place is very dangerous.
And I think that there's just as equal a possibility that due to cultural limitations or climate changes or other natural occurrences, we may not reach this point.
It is definitely a race that we're in right now.
Yes.
And so the answer is I don't know, but I do know that we again need to start asking the right questions in order to determine more accurately where it is that we're going, and that's what the book is about.
Sometimes I don't know is an okay answer.
One more.
Wild Card Line, you're on the air with Douglas Mulholland.
Yes, Doug.
I'm calling from Omaha, Nebraska here with FRETCOM and what will be the new Space Command will be moving in here too.
So I've heard.
Yeah, we're going to be shooting at That heart rocks, I guess.
Anyway, my question was, are you aware of, or did you include it in your book, about the optical neural nets that we're working on to use?
We're using it for cryptography, but I was wondering if you were aware of them.
The optical, the whole issue, the whole area of optics is enormous.
And what I've done in the book, again, is to refer people to information sources where they can then get more information about it, because these areas are so vast.
So, the answer is no, I did not explicitly mention that particular area, but I did refer readers to sources where they can find out about that.
Alright, and we, speaking of referring, we've got a link, of course, on my website that will take people to Amazon.com and your book.
And I presume your book is available by ordering in bookstores, or is it generally in bookstores, or what?
It's generally available, and it has actually just hit bookstores in the last week or so, Art, but people can definitely get it through Amazon.com, Barnes & Noble, Buy.com, and a number of other sources, and they can go to our website as well and order directly from the publisher.
Is it the kind of thing the average person can read and understand?
I wrote this book for everybody.
I did not write this book for technologists.
It is designed for the lay person, and I can't overemphasize that enough.
That's really important, and I think based on that, a lot of people will go and take a look-see, because that certainly looks like our future.
Alright, well, Douglas, it has been an absolute pleasure to have you on the program.
This is one of my favorite topics, and we'll have you back again.
Let's do it again, Art.
There's lots more to talk about.
Oh, I know.
Good night, Douglas.
Good night to you.
All right, Douglas Mulholland.
The topic was nanotechnology.
Nanotechnology meets biology.
It is a brave, scary, kind of strange new world out there, isn't it?
And people like Douglas may come along and save us all.
Or he may point to those who are going to save us all.
But, I guess we've got to ask ourselves.
Do we feel lucky?
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