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Nov. 6, 2002 - Art Bell

02:46:31

Coast to Coast AM with Art Bell - Time Travel and Cosmology - Lawrence Krauss

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52:43

lawrence krauss

01:17:53

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Speaker	Time	Text
unidentified		Hi, Dr. Edmund, great American Southwest Method.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Good evening, good morning, good afternoon, wherever you may be in the middle of your first time.
unidentified		This is post-coach, post-coach, happy to be here.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Happy to be here.
		Hope that everything works okay.
		We'll see about that pretty quickly, actually.
unidentified		Let me roll over a few events of the day.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, it's the election afternoon.
		Uh, Missouri Representative Jethro intends to announce Thursday that he is going to step down as House Democratic leader after eight years.
		According to senior aid, one day after his party suffered historic losses, midterm elections, the expected announcement would clear the way for a succession struggle between Representatives Mancy Blue City of California and Martin Frost of Texas, right second and third in party leadership.
unidentified		So there'll be a bit of a wrangle in there.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		President Bush and his party savored sweeping midterm election victories.
		It was pretty good stuff for the Republicans.
		And they began to sketch an agenda for a new Republican-controlled Congress.
		The leader of the defeated House Democrats Representative Gephardt signaled he would step down, said he's excited.
		This is a Republican trend lot who said, I'm excited to be on the offense for a change.
		Everybody can't help but using football metaphors.
		And really, there isn't that much difference, is there?
		The Fed surprised the whole world today and cut interest rates a half point.
		Just slashed interest rates another half point.
		This is incredible.
		And it surprised everybody in the market.
		They weren't ready for it.
		Nobody thought that the Fed would do it again.
		But if you have savings out there, CDs, whatever, you're probably going, oh man, this isn't worth it.
		And it isn't.
		But they want to get the economy, which has sputtered, that's the kindest word for it, sputtered.
		They want to get it back cooking again, so they cut interest rates half point, and that might do it.
		A jury on Wednesday found Renona Ryder guilty of stealing more than $5,500 worth of merchandise during a shoplifting spree at a Saks Fifth Avenue last year.
		But the actress probably isn't going to go to the pokey.
		Prosecutor said that she would not try to put the 31-year-old two-time Academy Award nominee behind bars.
		So she'll have something lesser happen to her, you know, probation, community service, restitution, that sort of thing.
		Not probable for the former Enron Corporation chief financial officer, that is the same thing happened to Winona Ryder there.
		andrew fasto pleaded innocent wednesday to seventy eight federal counts of indictment charging him with masterminding complex financial schemes that enriched him and helped doom the energy trading company now uh...
		if he's convicted of seventy eight counts The Dow kind of hiccuped.
		It didn't expect what happened at all.
		Usually the Dow is anticipating what the Fed is going to do one way or the other and is either happy or sad, but they got surprised today.
		Really surprised.
		So they couldn't decide whether it was a sign of economic trouble or a positive step worth going out and buying some stock over.
		Now, I understand that.
		Usually there's a reckoning behind what the Fed does.
		I mean, they have biases, and they'll kind of indicate their bias.
		You know, we're thinking of lowering it because, or we're thinking of raising interest rates because.
		Nothing here.
		Just boom, they did it.
		And so the market was up, took a big dive, came back up again.
		Pretty interesting.
		Rose sharply in the final hour.
		I guess they decided it was okay.
		Well, here's something that a lot of you, perhaps for good reason, fear.
		The maker of an implantable human ID chip, that's a human chip, folks, has launched a national campaign to promote the device, offering $50 discounts to the first 100,000 of you who registered to get embedded with the microchip applied digital solutions has coined the tagline, get chipped to market its product, Parachip.
		The right-sized device costs about $200.
		Those implanted must also pay for the doctor's injection fee and a monthly $10 database maintenance charge, according to the ADS spokesperson Matthew Casaloto.
		Now, I wonder what happens if after you're implanted, you don't pay your $10 database maintenance charge.
		Does a group of guys rush in in the middle of the night, slice yourself open, and take back their chip, or what?
		The Verichip emits a 125 kilohertz radio frequency signal.
		That's very low frequency.
		125 kilohertz.
		Oh, that's very interesting.
		I can hear 125 kilohertz.
		It transmits its unique ID number to a scanner.
		The number then accesses a computer database containing the client's file.
		Customers fill out a form detailing the information they want linked to their chip when they undergo the procedure.
		Earlier this week, listen to this.
		ADS announced that the FDA had ruled that the VeriChip was not a regulated device when used for, quote, security, financial, and personal identification safety applications, end quote.
unidentified		Hmm.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		The agency's sudden approval of the microchip came despite an FDA investigator's report about the potential health effects of the device in humans.
		Well, let's rush right out and get one.
		Microchips have been used now to track animals for years.
		As you know, the company is marketing a device for a variety of security applications, including controlling access to physical structures like government or private sector offices or nuclear power plants.
		Instead of swiping a smart card, employees could swipe the arm containing the chip.
		Reducing financial fraud.
		Should have been some chips over at Enron.
		In this scenario, people could use their chip to withdraw money from ATMs.
		Oh my God.
		Their accounts could not be accessed unless they were physically present.
		Decreasing identity theft.
		People could use a chip as a password to access their computer at home.
		For example, Cozolodo says that ADS has gotten hundreds of inquiries from people interested in being implanted.
		Meanwhile, privacy advocates, as you might imagine, are wondering about the specter of forced chips.
		Actually, they call it forced chippings.
		Chips are a form of electronic leashes, a form of digital control, according to Mark Rottenberg, Executive Director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center.
		I mean, what happens if an employer makes it a condition of employment for a person to be implanted with a chip?
		It could easily become a condition of release or parolees or a requirement for welfare.
		And I suppose the applications go on endlessly.
		What about child, convicted, child molesters?
		Shouldn't they be implanted?
		Obviously, many Christians fear this as the biblical mark of the beast.
		Maybe it is.
unidentified		Maybe it is.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		So that's something to really think about.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		And you can rush and get your discount now.
unidentified		The first 100,000 people.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		You could be one of them.
		Get a $50 discount on your chip.
		Just remember, keep paying that $10 database fee.
		or actually we don't know what well i want to have a little cheer in the middle of what otherwise is not a very cheery open uh...
		with regard to that We're going to have to talk.
		In fact, I'd like to get your comments about that chip.
		I mean, how do you feel about it?
		It's the real McCoy.
		It's the real thing.
		What the Bible has been talking about, what people have feared and talked about since I was a baby and old enough to understand what people were talking about when they talked about the beast and all the rest of it.
		I mean, here it is.
		Here it is.
		Would you get one of these?
		Do you think they have application?
		I mean, nearly everybody would agree that a convicted child molester, for example, you wouldn't have any problem keeping track of them, right?
		But in order to do your banking business, maybe buy gasoline, whatever you're going to do, kind of rub your arm, put your arm up there, your hand, whatever.
		Have it register the code.
		Well, anyway, let's take a second out because I have something I want you to hear.
		Every now and then, I run into a piece of music.
		We were talking about music last week or the week before.
		I don't know now.
		And the effect it has on your brain.
		And this is going to be a little shocking to you because it's pretty new stuff.
		These are three young ladies from Spain.
		And to me, what you're about to hear is reminiscent of ABBA.
		The incredible, never going to be duplicated, never going to be exceeded ABBA.
		You know how I feel about the group ABBA, right?
		I love Girls' Harmony.
		These are three sisters from Spain who have named themselves Las Cacha.
		And I've got two copies of the song you're about to hear.
		One is sort of a little bit in English, a little bit in Spanish.
		The other is entirely in Spanish.
		It's number one in Spain right now.
		And this is one of those records that caught me, infected me.
		You know, you've got to hear it a few times, like anything.
		And oh my, do I love this hunk of music.
		Listen very, you want to talk about a beat.
		You want to talk about harmony.
		You want to talk about three girls who have got it together.
		Here they are.
		Listen very carefully.
		From the high desert, this is Coast to Coast AM.
		I'm Art Bell.
unidentified		Friday night, it's party time.
		Feeling ready, looking fine.
		Being in a room, be I know.
		With the magic in his eyes, checking every girl in black.
		Proving like he does the mambo.
		And he's an ally in la disco, playing sexy, feeling hard.
		He's a king, bailando, primo, la gata, gata.
		And the DJ that he knows, well, on the spot.
		Always around to play the mix.
		And they go, let's go, let's go, let's go.
		And the DJ that he knows, well, on the spot.
		And the DJ that he knows, well, on the spot.
		And the DJ that he knows, well, on the spot.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Check out some of their harmony.
		I mean, it's unbelievable.
		And their optimal changes.
		Optive changes.
		Always got me.
unidentified		Oh OK Oh Oh
		Oh
		I'll see you next time.
		Tell you what.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I think you're listening to the next hop-up.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		That's going to be a big hit.
unidentified		I think it's going to be a really big hit.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		That's just me.
		obviously you think that you've heard it uh...
		a few times that's what it takes with any record is here at a few times all right uh...
		back to all Number one, just up before airtime tonight, as usual, there is a UFO film that merits your attention.
		This may be one of the best made.
		It was made from a helicopter in Great Britain.
		And it's making headlines on the BBC.
		Of course, they treat it, you know, the BBC, of course, treats it just like every other media with kind of a slight chuckle.
		The trouble with this is here, when you click on the link, when you get over to the BBC, you're going to actually see the video from the helicopter.
		And they tracked this damn thing for a long time, this UFO.
		And they had it on camera for a long, long time.
		And you can hear the pilots talking back and forth with ground control.
		You can't really make out what they're saying.
		It's kind of hard to understand the audio.
		But it doesn't matter.
		You can see the video quite clearly.
		And at times, this thing looks like, well, it's an oblong shape.
		And at other moments, it's a sphere.
		And it's just moving like a bat out of hell.
		And they've got it on camera for a long time.
		So take a look at it.
		Second item under what's new called UFO Film Sparks Fresh E.T. Debate.
		That's the second item.
		The first item I found just before airtime, and it may be Total Baloney.
		It's a link to a website, and there's a long story there about something that this man, and perhaps we ought to try and find, you know what, I ought to try and find this man and interview him now that I think about it.
		This 8th of March thing, a global public announcement.
		And it's either really something cool, it says something that will shock you, something that could have global implications, something that could have something that will make you want to rethink your future.
		And then this guy's story, and he's got this long story.
		He was out in the woods, and he found this little shiny piece of glass.
		It was part of a camera lens.
		And then he found the camera, which was smashed into a gazillion pieces.
		And he's got a photo of the camera here, too.
		And then he got inside the camera.
		He happened to be a photographer and got inside the camera, took it into a dark room, and developed negatives.
		And they're damaged negatives.
		But he says that what he found on this film will shake the foundations of society.
		That he is going to make it all public.
		Remember the date he says, the 8th of March 2000 for you?
		The day an astounding discovery will be revealed.
		It says.
		Now, this could be another bunch of hooey.
		Or it could be real.
		I have no idea, but I was certainly intrigued enough when I read it myself to put it up here for all of you and for you to decide yourself.
		Go ahead, read the story.
		I mean, for all I know, it's some guy's hype for a movie or something like that.
		But it doesn't read like that.
		It doesn't look like that.
		It looks like it's got a hint of the real McCoy about it.
		Now, I guess I would like to interview the guy who put this site up.
		ever the soccer right Definitely intrigued enough to want to interview this guy, I think.
		So we'll pursue that.
		In the meantime, headed toward the bottom of the hour.
unidentified		just a little more of these three little cute Spanish girls who have a way with singing real fast in harmony.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Open lines coming up next.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Unscreened open lines.
unidentified		You'll just stay right where you are.
		will die Call Arkbell in the Kingdom of Nye from west of the Rockies at 1-800-618-8255 East of the Rockies 1-800-825-5033 First-time callers may reach out at 1-775-727-1222 And the Wildcard line is open at 1-775-727-1295 To reach out on the toll-free international line,
		call your AT ⁇ T operator and have them dial 800-893-0903.
		This is Coast to Coast AM with Arfel from the Kingdom of Nye.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		It certainly is.
		Good morning, everybody.
		About to launch into unscreened open lines coming up next.
		You'll stay right where you are.
		Anything goes as usual.
		Into the night we now go.
		First time caller line, you're on the air.
		Hello there.
		Hello?
		Yes, hello.
unidentified		Yes, I wanted to comment on the thing you said earlier about the chips being implanted into people.
		Yes.
		I'm a devout Christian.
		Ever since I was young, I went to Bible college, and I grew up around these things and heard very much about the mark of the beast, etc.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		You're speaking now on the mark of the beast itself, aren't you?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		A cell phone.
unidentified		Yes.
unidentified		Yes.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		So you think it's for real?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		And if you do believe in that, and I know that maybe even a majority of the audience out there does, does this sound like it to you?
unidentified		This sounds very much, very much like it.
		If this is not it, I would say this would have to be the predecessor to what it's going to be.
		My father is a zone manager for a grocery company, the Crover Company.
		And he can recall when the scan bars first came out, and he ran and raved about how this was going to revolutionize everything?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		The barcodes, yeah, the barcodes, of course.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		And it did revolutionize the way you check out at the grocery store, right?
unidentified		Oh, yes.
unidentified		It sure did.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, this will revolutionize the way you check out of everywhere, sir.
unidentified		Well, you know, they for a long time have been wanting to get rid of currency as we know it.
		I mean, they've been working to this forever.
		And I really think, like you said earlier, you know, you'd be able to go to an ATM machine and take out money with this chip.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		It says so, right here.
unidentified		And the Bible says that it would be implanted in your hand or your forehead, or the mark would be in your hand or your forehead.
		And what do you know they're doing in your hand or wherever?
		Then to most people, it probably sounds strange that you would want to put it in your forehead.
		But to be really honest with you, what I think, and this is just my personal opinion, why I think they would put it in your forehead is because I think they'll probably come to a place in time where people will be so desperate that they would cut off somebody's hand.
		Hey, you know, I don't have to hack into a computer to transfer funds in somebody's name.
		You know, I could just, you know, cut the chip out of somebody's hand.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, they can still abduct you and take you to the ATM just the way they do now, right?
		They make you go to the ATM and draw out funds.
		They abduct people and do that kind of thing.
		So they would just take you and your hand.
		Or perhaps, as he suggested more ominously, just your hand.
		Hmm.
		This is, uh...
		You can tell this is going to be a problem.
		It's going to be a problem for a lot of people out there.
		Wildcard line, you're on air.
		Hello.
unidentified		Hi, Art.
		You know, Greenspan cut the rate today because he wasn't happy with the election results.
		He wanted to send a message to people with money that the globalists are still in control regardless how they vote.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		You think so?
		You think it was a message after the election.
		But I mean, really, you don't think Greenspan liked the way it came out of Republicans taking power?
unidentified		Yeah, I don't think so.
unidentified		And I think that was the message that the globalists want to send a message that, hey, we're still number one regardless what you do.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, we got the purse strings.
		Elect whoever you want.
		Have these silly elections, but we're the ones who really control the dollar.
unidentified		Exactly.
		As far as the chip goes, you know, the Bible prophecy is getting All its ducks in the row before the final act starts.
		Israel's getting ready to start work on the third temple.
		The Middle East is in trouble.
		Europe is growing ever stronger.
		The internet has made it possible for a cashless society.
		I mean, who would doubt if anybody goes back and reads Hal Lindsay's book, The Late Great Planet Earth, he wrote that in the mid-70s, and it reads like today's newspaper.
		I mean, all the ducks are in a row.
		How can you be delusional to think that there isn't something to Bible prophecy?
		People are focused in this narrow tunnel vision that they just can't see outside of it.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, let's see.
		Right now, sir, there's a $50 savings if you want to jump into the chip or have the chip jump into you, I guess, more accurately.
		So for that $50 to save now versus later, what do you say?
unidentified		This is the test market for people because you're introducing it to people.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Okay, so we're offering you this $50 discount right now.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		You going for it?
unidentified		Oh, no, I won't do it.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		No?
unidentified		And the mark in the forehead.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		How about a $100 discount?
unidentified		No, I wouldn't do it for any price because it's a precursor to the mark of the beast.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Oh, yeah, but what if you get hungry?
unidentified		Well, I'm going to starve.
		There's no reason to take the chip.
		People better.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		You would starve to death first.
unidentified		Yes, I would.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, my only comment to that is, easy to say with a full belly.
unidentified		Easy to say with a full belly.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Right?
		Easy to say with a full belly.
		You would be surprised what people will do when they're really hungry.
		You don't ever want to find out.
		You don't ever want to find out.
		But I'm sure you've seen movies, right?
		East of the Rockies, you're on the air.
		Hello.
lawrence krauss ▲ ● ▼		Hi, Art.
unidentified		How are you doing?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I'm doing all right, sir.
unidentified		I'm Steve from Fayette, Iowa.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yes, Steve.
lawrence krauss ▲ ● ▼		And I was sitting at my computer and filtering out email, deleting stuff, finding ones to block, you know, the nasty stuff that people try to send.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yes.
lawrence krauss ▲ ● ▼		And I opened up this email and it said, hello.
		If you are a time traveler, I am going to need the following.
		One, a modified mind-warping warp-dimensional generator number, 52 Space 4359A series wristwatch with memory adapter.
		Two, a reliable carbon-based or silicon-based time-transducing capacitor.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I see.
lawrence krauss ▲ ● ▼		I mean, I just got this randomly as part of a, I think, a bulk emailing.
lawrence krauss ▲ ● ▼		They were trying to find someone.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, who was in the address line?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Millions of people?
lawrence krauss ▲ ● ▼		As two, it was anybody that had simple.
lawrence krauss ▲ ● ▼		It like had simple city, simple name, simple this, simple land.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I see, I see.
unidentified		It's like they were searching for someone because it started out.
lawrence krauss ▲ ● ▼		It said, if you're a time traveler, I'm looking for a reliable.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Oh, I understand.
		I just wondered how it was addressed.
		Apparently, to some mass, in other words, like he had part of somebody's email address and was going to just blitz everybody.
lawrence krauss ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, that's what it seems to be.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		It's like getting the first three numbers of a driver's license or a plate number or something.
lawrence krauss ▲ ● ▼		So I was curious if anybody else had gotten something like this.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Oh, that's a good question.
lawrence krauss ▲ ● ▼		I forward a copy to George of the email.
		If you'd like it, I can forward it to you.
		I know you get a lot of.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I do, but feel free to send it on.
unidentified		Okay, well, thank you.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right, thank you.
		Take care.
		Well, who knows?
		I mean, if there are time travelers, and by the way, tonight's guest is going to talk about exactly that question along with a lot of other things.
		We've got a real heavyweight for you tonight.
		Professor Lawrence M. Krauss is Ambrose Swassey, Professor of Physics, Professor of Astronomy, and Chair of the Physics Department of Case Western Reserve University.
		This is a heavyweight.
		Somebody like Michiu Kaku, really.
		Professor of Physics.
		And one of the first questions we'll ask is about time travel.
		It's really pretty interesting.
		The physicists are beginning to feel more comfortable answering questions about something like time travel.
		These theoretical physicists are really getting to the point where they're beginning to talk openly about it, even the very best of them.
		So let's think for a second.
		If time travel is theoretically possible, as the best minds would seem to agree that it may be, then where are the time travelers?
		Well, maybe that was one.
		Maybe that man just heard from one who would be in some way stranded or passing through this time and like a 57 Chevy, you know, having carburetor troubles or something here in 2002.
		West of the Rockies, you're on the air.
		Hello.
unidentified		Hello, how are you doing?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I'm doing okay, sir.
unidentified		I'm ready to talk about the trip.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		The trip?
unidentified		The chip?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Oh, the chip.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		The chip, the chip.
unidentified		Absolutely.
unidentified		I definitely have opinions about this.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Okay, we've got a hum on these lines, but we'll proceed.
unidentified		Okay.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Okay, so what do you think about this chip?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I mean, you heard a pretty accurate, straightforward description of it here.
unidentified		I did.
		And I think a lot of the people that are coming out talking about the chip, saying that it's the mark of the beast and stuff like that, are just delusional.
		You can't stop the advancement of society.
		I don't think the chip is necessarily a good thing, but at the same token, I mean, let's not get all biblical on it.
		I think that's a little ridiculous.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Is it, though?
unidentified		I think it is.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I mean, that really is what the Bible says.
unidentified		Yep, but I mean, the Bible says a lot of things that aren't true and very contradictory at the same time.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, perhaps contradictory or not true from your perspective or not true yet, perhaps.
unidentified		Well, maybe through my interpretation, because everyone interprets everything differently as it comes in.
unidentified		And I mean, I'm not.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Okay, so obviously you're not afraid of the chip, are you?
unidentified		No, I'm not afraid of the chip.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right, so then for a $50 initial discount.
unidentified		Maybe if they send me some information in the mail, I might consider it.
unidentified		And I'd want to see a little bit more information on what kind of luck they've had with the test experiment so far.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		But what would concern you the most?
unidentified		Basically, robbers cutting my arm off and bringing it to the ATM.
		How many, I mean, within five years, we could have an entire society of one-armed people walking around before they realized this chip wasn't working out.
		So I think it definitely increases the chances of a lot of crime and easy access to crime because I'm sure if you have the chip implanted, it's going to be pretty noticeable.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		So you don't think people who want to steal from you would even think twice about, you know, at gunpoint having you lay your arm across a wood board and the big old axe comes down?
unidentified		Absolutely not at all.
unidentified		If you look at the 80s and what people did to get raw cocaine, I think they did a lot worse than that for simply pennies of baking soda and cheap coke.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well said.
		All right, sir, thank you very much for the call.
		Yeah, well said.
		He's right, isn't he?
		People have done a lot more for a lot less.
		A society of one-armed people.
		First time caller line, you're on the air.
		Hello.
lawrence krauss ▲ ● ▼		Hello, Art.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yes.
unidentified		Hey, this is Ross from California.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Hello, Ross.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		How are you doing?
unidentified		Not too bad.
		Hey, you know, Art, this whole ghost phenomenon thing is way out of control.
		I think it has really reached epidemic proportions.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, but maybe that's telling you something.
unidentified		Well, I think there's something we could do.
		I mean, I've heard so many accounts that I am willing to buy the fact that the phenomenon.
		But I don't hear anybody talking about what you can do about it yourself.
		I mean, like, how can you not become a ghost?
		And then, I'm a little nervous right now.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		How can you not become a ghost?
unidentified		And then how can you help other tortured souls who are ghosts?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Okay, well, on the first one there, I don't think you have an option.
lawrence krauss ▲ ● ▼		I think you do.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, how?
		I mean, you're eventually going to expire, right?
		We're all mortal.
unidentified		Well, I think sometimes people's emotions tie them in to somehow to other people, and they stay stuck.
		And also, you know, the Buddhists, they figure something out.
		I think as a group of people, they've really looked into the phenomena.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		You think they've managed so that when they die, that Buddhists never become ghosts?
unidentified		Well, have you heard of the Tibetan Book of the Dead?
		Yeah.
		Well, the Buddhists refer to the phenomena as the hungry ghost phenomena, and they think that...
art bell ▲ ● ▼		You know, who else knew a lot about the dead would be the Egyptians.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		They know a lot more than we've figured out yet.
unidentified		Right.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		So you could have a pretty good point.
		You might have some way, if you knew what you were doing, to avoid becoming a ghost.
		That's pretty interesting.
unidentified		Yeah, I think it also has something to do with your interpretation of your dreams.
		So, like, you know, there's a fine line between when you fall asleep and when you're awake.
		And the Tibetan Book of the Dead refers to these as, like, when you breathe your final breath, you go into a bardo state.
		And they describe each state.
		And so they kind of give you, like, an idea of what to look for.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Okay, but what about the children, sir?
		There are so many children, and surely you could not expect a child of two or three or four or five years old, for example, to be sufficiently advanced spiritually to avoid ghostom.
		And as a matter of fact, when I have these EVP people on, which I will at the end of the week, you will hear more times than not the voice of a child.
unidentified		Well, they are probably karmically, somehow they get stuck.
unidentified		But I think also we can help these people out because a lot of times I don't think people know that they're ghosts.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		By what means?
unidentified		Somehow connecting with them and telling them it's okay to move on.
		Because, I mean, you know what the Buddhists do also, I think, I'm not a Buddhist, but I've read a little bit.
		What they do is they set up altars for all their departed family members.
		And what they do is they treat that altar like that family member is still there.
		Like if your kid goes to college and the grandfather is acknowledged.
		So that way, they're kind of feeding the hungry ghosts.
		And I don't think you want, I think there's a lot of ghosts cruising around, and you don't want to invite other ghosts into, but you want to, sir, but sir, then maybe they just have well-fed ghosts, and ours are hungry.
		Well, there's a bunch of hungry ghosts cruising around, but that doesn't mean they avoided ghost them.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		They're just over there well-fed.
unidentified		That's true, but if everyone fed their families hungry ghosts, then the phenomenon would be kind of taken care of.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, either that, or on the other hand, you would have a bunch of well-fed ghosts over there, spiritually well-fed.
		Because you put up their pictures, the pictures of departed loved ones.
		And the Buddhists do do that, of course.
		They have shrines to the relatives.
		In fact, in a lot of the Orient, ancestor worship is the religion.
		Ancestor worship is, in fact, the religion.
		So, you never know.
		You could be onto something there.
		Wildcard line, you're on the air.
		Hello.
unidentified		Yes, good evening, Art.
		This is Don Scotsdale.
		How are you?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Okay, I'm all right.
unidentified		Oh, wonderful, wonderful.
		We're privileged to talk to you.
		Just back to the chip topic.
		I personally think that if the powers that be were to decide to try to shove this down our throats, I think that they would underestimate the resistance that would take place.
		And the level of information that has been attained by the public, including through media such as shows as yours, about the subject is underestimated.
		I think people would resist it very strongly, and I think it would fail if they tried it right now.
		Well, I'm trying to encourage people.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Maybe.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Maybe.
unidentified		Well, I think there's a significant amount of the population that is ready, willing, and able to accept anything that you foist upon them.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Would that be you?
		No, no, no, no, no.
		Just let's consider the population of The U.S., what, 260 million, whatever we are now?
unidentified		At least.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Of that number, what percentage do you think would, on first blush almost, go for it?
unidentified		20%, maybe.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		That's one in five.
unidentified		Yeah, maybe.
unidentified		I think that's generous.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		And then would they be the haves?
		In other words, that's the way to eventually convert everybody, isn't it?
		You've got the haves and the have-nots.
unidentified		Well, I think there's also a misperception on the part of who the haves are.
		I think the people who have the most wealth in this country actually are the people who are free thinkers and who appreciate their freedom the most.
		I think they've made the most of it.
		And I think they would resent it a lot.
		I think it's the people in the middle that you need to be concerned about.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I agree with that.
unidentified		Middle class, upper middle class.
unidentified		But I think the truly knowledgeable, wealthy people in this country who do control something after all would be greatly resistant to it.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Unless it would make their money more secure.
unidentified		Well, yeah, you got it.
		That's very true.
		And, of course, you know who will figure that one out as well.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, you know, I've always been kind of a doubting Thomas on these big, there are certain people who control the entire financial structure of the world and all the rest of it kind of thing.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		But I'm not so sure I know anymore.
unidentified		Well, that's the thing.
		You know, if it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it's a duck.
		And if the world acts and functions as though such a conspiracy or such a structure were in place, then it may as well be true, even if in fact, technically, it isn't.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right.
		I appreciate your call, sir.
		It's an interesting, immediate future we all face, isn't it?
		Absolutely.
unidentified		All right.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Thanks for the call.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Take care.
unidentified		My pleasure.
		Good night.
		Good night.
		All right.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Off to Case Western and Dr. Lawrence M. Krause, who is a professor of physics and a professor of astronomy as well.
		In fact, chair of the physics department, Case Western Reserve University.
		It's going to be a very, very interesting night.
		Riding up the storm.
		Riding up the storm.
unidentified		Into this house we're born.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Into this world we're throwing.
unidentified		Like a dog without a bone.
		And we're alone Right?
		Right?
		Thank you.
		Thank you.
		Wanna take a ride?
		Well, call Art Bell from west of the Rockies at 1-800-618-8255.
		East of the Rockies at 1-800-825-5033.
		First-time callers may rechart at 1-775-727-1222.
		The wildcard line is open at 1-775-727-1295.
		And to rechart on the toll-free international line, call your AT ⁇ T operator and have them dial 800-893-0903.
		This is Coast to Coast AM with Arpelle on the Premier Radio Networks.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Why are you ever in for a ride tonight?
		No question about it.
		Professor Lawrence M. Krause is Ambrose Swayze Professor of Physics, Professor of Astronomy, and Chair of the Physics Department at Case Western Reserve University.
		He's an internationally known theoretical physicist with wide research interests, including the interface between elementary particle physics and cosmology, where his studies include the early universe, the nature of dark matter, general relativity, and neutrino astrophysics.
		He received his Ph.D. in physics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, MIT in 1982, then joined the Harvard Society of Fellows.
		In 1985, he joined the Faculty of Physics at Yale University and moved to take his current appointment in 1993 as a fellow of the American Physical Society and of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
		Professor Kraus is the author of over 180 scientific publications as well as numerous popular articles on physics and astronomy.
		In addition, listen to this now.
		He's the author of six popular books, including the national bestseller, The Physics of Star Trek, and his most recent book, Adam, An Odyssey from the Big Bang to Life on Earth and Beyond.
		He is the recipient of numerous awards for his research, writing, and lecturing.
		These include the Presidential Investigator Award given by President Reagan in 1986, the American Association for the Advancement of Sciences 1999-2000 Award for Public Understanding of Science and Technology, joining previous awardees,
		Carl Sagan, Edward O. Wilson, and the 2001 Andrew Gamont Award given annually to a person who's made significant contribution to the cultural, artistic, or humanistic dimensions of physics.
		Previous awardees include Freeman Dyson, Stephen Weinberg, and Stephen Hawking.
		In 2002, Krauss was awarded the American Institute of Physics, Science and Writing Award for his book, Atom.
		professor lawrence m cross coming up the moments And now, Professor Lawrence M. Krauss.
		Professor, welcome to the program.
lawrence krauss ▲ ● ▼		That's nice to be here.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I understand you're here under somewhat unusual circumstances over on your end, huh?
lawrence krauss ▲ ● ▼		Yes, yes.
		Every time I hear the lightning, it makes it very appropriate because I'm here in the dark.
		I'm at the University of California right now, and all of the power is out because of a fire.
unidentified		But remarkably, the phones still work.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		The phones work.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		So in other words, you're sitting at the university in pitch blackness?
lawrence krauss ▲ ● ▼		You got it.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		When did that occur?
lawrence krauss ▲ ● ▼		About an hour and a half ago.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Where is the fire?
lawrence krauss ▲ ● ▼		It's some well, I phoned the police.
lawrence krauss ▲ ● ▼		It's somewhere in a parking lot, but somehow that seems to affect the power at the university, or maybe they turn it out for safety reasons.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		At any rate, you're not in imminent danger of turning on a trench fly.
lawrence krauss ▲ ● ▼		If you hear me scream and run away.
lawrence krauss ▲ ● ▼		I don't think so.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right, good.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, then it'll give you a nice, relaxed atmosphere to sit there and just sort of tell us everything you know in.
unidentified		Yes.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right.
		Professor, it's rare indeed and an honor to get somebody on the air with your kind of credentials, and so I've got a lot of very interesting questions for you, beginning with time.
		For me personally, time travel has always been probably, I don't know, the most intriguing thing I could even consider doing if I had anything I named that I wanted to do before my life ended.
		Traveling in time definitely would be up there at the head of the list.
lawrence krauss ▲ ● ▼		Sure.
		Well, you're not alone.
		I think everyone would love to go back in time and either correct the errors of their youth or relive them depending on their mood.
unidentified		Huh.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		You know, I'm actually not sure that would be what I would do.
lawrence krauss ▲ ● ▼		You'd go back and meet your favorite heroes from history.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		You know, the possibilities are absolutely endless, actually.
		So we've got a lot to talk about.
		In your opinion, is time travel ever going to be possible in either direction?
lawrence krauss ▲ ● ▼		Well, what is fascinating about time travel, and it truly is fascinating, I mean, everyone's excited by the prospects, is that given the laws of physics as we now understand them, we cannot say it's impossible.
		And that alone is a remarkable statement because there are lots of the minute you allow for time travel, you produce a host of paradoxes, most famous being the grandmother paradox.
		What happens if you go back in time and kill your grandmother before your mother was born?
		Well, then, of course, you couldn't exist, right?
		But if you couldn't exist, how did you go back In time and kill your grandmother.
		And that would give you a headache if you think about it long enough.
		And it gives physicists headaches.
		And so that's one of the many reasons why many physicists have presumed that a sensible universe shouldn't allow time travel.
		In fact, Stephen Hawking was, when the physics of Star Trek came out, it actually caused a big stir in England because Stephen had come out and said time travel is impossible earlier.
		And then in the forewords of that book, as I argued in that book, given the laws of physics and we don't understand them, you couldn't say it was impossible.
		And the London Times had a front-page story saying Stephen Hawking changes his mind.
		I mean, he actually gave a very good argument for why he thought time travel was impossible.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Why did he thought it was impossible because of what you just described, because of the paradox?
lawrence krauss ▲ ● ▼		Well actually he even said something more that maybe resonates with your listeners even more.
		He said, questions.
		And so if you're going to allow for a universal time travel, you have to try and address those things.
		But the law of general relativity as a theory allows in principle for time travel.
		However, we know that in order for time travel to occur, then there must be very exotic types of energy that you have to be able to create, totally different than anything we know of normally on Earth or in stars.
		Because in fact, relativity tells us that space and time, in fact, respond to the presence of matter and energy.
		That's the aspect that space occurs in the presence of matter.
		And time and clocks change the rate at which they tick in the presence of matter.
		In fact, a clock on the first floor of a building actually ticks at a slightly different rate than a clock at the top floor.
		That was one of the predictions of general relativity.
		It's a very, very small difference.
		But in fact, it was measured in the 1940s and 50s for the first time with atomic clocks.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		What about with respect to motion?
		I mean, those are two clocks that are not in relative motion.
		However, I understand they've taken two clocks and put them on jet planes going in opposite directions and measured a pretty significant difference.
lawrence krauss ▲ ● ▼		Well, a measurable difference.
		I don't know, you'd say pretty significant.
		You may notice it on your watch at home, but atomic clocks you can measure.
		Yes, indeed.
		Clocks, that was one of the first predictions of special relativity.
		And in fact, it's not a science fiction thing at all.
		We can measure it in undergraduate physics laboratories every single day.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Okay, let me stop you and just ask.
		Would the two clocks you described, one on the bottom floor and one on the top floor, would the delta or the difference be greater with two jet planes going in the opposite direction?
		If so, why?
lawrence krauss ▲ ● ▼		Well, they're both very small.
		They're both about less than a part in a million in terms of the change.
		So that when one clock ticks a second, another clock is going to tick one second plus a millionth of a second.
		They're extremely small because you have to, in order to get measurable time differences, I mean significant, you either have to be traveling at very close to the speed of light, which is 186,000 miles per second, far faster than any jet planes, or you have to be in a gravitational field that's so strong, well, that it would kill you before.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Like a black hole.
lawrence krauss ▲ ● ▼		Like a black hole.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		But again, going back to my question, the clock in the top of the building versus the one on the first floor and the two airplanes, would there be a difference between those two measurements of difference?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Would the jet planes achieve a slightly greater difference?
lawrence krauss ▲ ● ▼		I actually think the jet planes traveling as they are at only maybe 600 miles per hour would actually have a smaller difference than planes.
		Really?
		Yes, because the actual relative difference is actually related to the velocity of the plane over the velocity of light squared.
		And that's a very small number.
		I mean, light goes very fast.
		186,000 miles a second is pretty darn fast.
		That's two seconds to the moon and back, basically.
		And a jet plane at 600 miles per hour is much, much slower.
		And the square of that is very small.
		So that's why, in fact, it took a while before that hypothesis of Einstein's was directly verified.
		But now it's amazing.
		We can verify it.
		In fact, anyone in your, and I imagine among your listeners, there may be some people who indeed have Geiger counters.
unidentified		Oh, yeah.
lawrence krauss ▲ ● ▼		We're just talking about radiation early on.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I have one.
lawrence krauss ▲ ● ▼		Okay, and if you turn your Geiger counter on and move away from your walls, of course there's radiation coming from walls and people and everything else.
		But if you go out in the middle of a field and turn your Geiger counter on, it will click.
		And one of the reasons it clicks is that there are cosmic rays coming from outer space that hit the atmosphere of the Earth and produce lots of charged particles that come down and make your Geiger counter click.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Because your mind clicks inside.
		Every now and then I get a click from it.
		Now, should that be or should the roof be stopping the surface?
lawrence krauss ▲ ● ▼		Well, in fact, the roof does not stop some of these very energetic particles.
		In fact, there's one type of particle, an elementary particle called a muon, which is a lot like an electron, but about 100 times heavier, that makes it generally not just through your roof of your house, but actually deep underground before it actually stops.
		And the interesting thing about muons is we can create them in elementary particle accelerators on Earth, and we do it all the time.
		And we know exactly how long they live.
		They're actually unstable particles.
		They live one millionth of a second on average.
		About one millionth of a second.
		But we can measure that.
		Now the interesting thing is, these objects are created about 10 miles up at the top of the atmosphere when cosmic rays bang into the atmosphere.
		Now you can calculate that a particle traveling very close to the speed of light in a millionth of a second will actually travel much less than 10 miles.
		Okay, it will travel probably only a few hundred yards, maybe less than a mile.
		But these things make it all the way down to the Earth.
		How is that possible?
		Well, in fact, because they're going so fast, their internal clocks are ticking slowly, and they don't know they should decay.
		And so they make it down to the Earth.
		And so almost every time your Geiger counter clicks, you're proving special relativity.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		No kidding.
lawrence krauss ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, because literally those particles, it's what we call time dilation.
lawrence krauss ▲ ● ▼		Their lifetime when they're moving very fast is much longer than their lifetime when they're standing still, precisely because their internal clocks have slowed down.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		So these particles should decay.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I mean, in the world of physics, they should decay, but explain to me what you mean by they don't know they should decay and they're going so quickly.
lawrence krauss ▲ ● ▼		Okay, what Einstein told us, let's take it back to something that's a little more personal.
		You and a spaceship.
		Einstein told us that if you travel out in a spaceship and you're going very close to the speed of light, then if I'm watching you, your clocks appear to be slow compared to mine.
		So when my clock ticks, you know, goes for an hour, your clock may only tick for a second.
		Okay?
		That's what it looked like.
		It looked to me like, oh, your clock is running very slowly.
		My clock has clicked 3,600 seconds and yours has only clicked one.
		There's something wrong with your clock.
		But what it really means is, in fact, that time is relative.
		That in your frame, for example, if you went to the center of the galaxy, which is about 40,000 light years away and very close to the speed of light, if I were watching you, it would take 40,000 years.
		Okay, it'd be pretty boring.
		But it would take 40,000 years for you to get there.
		But in your frame, if you're traveling very fast, that whole trip could just take two weeks.
		And it really would.
		It's not science fiction.
		If you were traveling close enough to the speed of light, that trip for you would literally just take two weeks.
		And whereas obviously for someone on the ground or a civilization on the ground, it would take 40,000 years.
		And it's absolutely true that that's what would happen.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		And so for these muon, You could take a two-week trip, and now you're back, and 40,000 years have elapsed on Earth.
lawrence krauss ▲ ● ▼		Yes.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		But you have only grown two weeks older.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Two weeks older.
lawrence krauss ▲ ● ▼		Absolutely.
		That's the gist.
		That's been used by many science fiction writers for lots of good stories.
		Planet of the apes.
		Lots of famous science fiction stories are based on that idea.
		But it's not science fiction.
		It's really true.
		Of course, you have to be traveling very, very, very close to the speed of light in order to do that.
		And there's the rub, because to travel very, very close to the speed of light requires unbelievable amounts of energy.
		Einstein also, unfortunately, told us that.
		That the faster you're going, the closer you're getting to the speed of light, as you get closer and closer, not only do your clocks slow down, but something else happens.
		You act like you're heavier and heavier.
		Your mass actually appears to increase.
		And again, we measure that for elementary particles.
		Those muons, when they're traveling very, very close to the speed of light, act much heavier than muons that are at rest.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		But, Professor, wouldn't it be possible, for example, with an atomic rocket to build toward the speed of light, come pretty doggone close to the speed of light in continued acceleration?
lawrence krauss ▲ ● ▼		Well, in fact, it's not impossible, but it would be very difficult.
		In fact, in the physics of Star Trek, I actually did a calculation that kind of surprised me.
		Even if we had fusion reactors, which we don't have on Earth, but fusion is the stuff that powers the process that powers the sun and thermonuclear weapons.
		It's obviously, as my friends at Los Alamos like to say, you get more bang for your buck from a fusion reaction than a simple explosion.
		A million times more power.
		So we can't control fusion right now.
		We have uncontrolled explosions.
		But let's imagine we had a fusion reactor and we used it to power a spacecraft.
		Well, every time you wanted to just do the following simple maneuver, start out at rest, go to say just half the speed of light.
		Not 99% of the speed of light, but just half the speed of light.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Okay.
lawrence krauss ▲ ● ▼		And stop again.
lawrence krauss ▲ ● ▼		Every time we wanted to start, go to half the speed of light and stop.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Stopping is as much trouble as starting.
lawrence krauss ▲ ● ▼		Exactly.
		Every time you did that, you would need to find 7,000 times the mass of the spacecraft in fuel.
		And that's if you had a fusion reactor.
		If you used the conventional rocket fuel, I did a calculation which even amazed me, to take a single atom and accelerate it using conventional rocket fuel to half the speed of light would require more fuel than there is mass in the entire visible universe.
		So it's not, I mean, while we like to talk about this, it's really, it's not easy.
		Because even if we have fusion, you'd have to take 7,000 times the mass of the ship every time you want to start and stop if you powered the ship with fuel on board.
		And we can talk about that later.
		One of the ways around this may be not to carry the fuel with you, but be powered from somewhere else.
		Even if you use matter and antimatter, which give you the most bang for the buck in the universe, when antimatter, antimatter exists in nature, and when a particle of matter encounters a particle of antimatter, the two annihilate, producing pure radiation, and that turns mass into energy with 100% efficiency, and you can never do better than that.
		Even if you did that, the amount of fuel required would be amazing.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, but a jet aircraft, for example, operating within the atmosphere, takes in air and blows it out real quick, right?
		That's what a jet does.
		So why not imagine some sort of craft that takes in dark matter and spits it out real fast?
lawrence krauss ▲ ● ▼		Well, real fast is the issue.
lawrence krauss ▲ ● ▼		The point is that a jet aircraft cannot travel a lot faster than the air that it spits out.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Right.
lawrence krauss ▲ ● ▼		And in a fusion reaction, for example, the constituents after the reaction are moving about 3% of the speed of light.
		gotcha and so if you want to move faster than three percent of the speed of light then you Right, exactly.
		You need to spit faster.
		And of course, the fastest you can spit is spitting things out at the speed of light.
		So like shining a laser beam.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Sure.
lawrence krauss ▲ ● ▼		So in principle, you'd say, okay, well, let's just shine a laser beam behind us and we'll start speeding up.
		And the point is, you will, but it takes a long time because light, you know, doesn't carry a lot of oomph.
		And so eventually, it's the most efficient way of going fast.
		Just shining light behind you, basically.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Professor, we've got a pause here at the bottom of the hour.
		This is fascinating, and we will resume with it in a moment.
		I'm Art Bell from the High Desert.
		This is Coast to Coast AM.
unidentified		I've been where the eagle flies, rode his wings across all the skies, kissed the sun, touched the moon, but he left me much too soon, his ladybird.
		He left his ladybird.
		Ladybird, come on down.
		I'm here waiting on the ground.
		Ladybird, I'll treat you good.
		Ladybird, I wish you would.
		All our times have come.
		I'm here, but now they're gone.
		Seasons don't feel the record, nor do the wind, the sun, or the rain.
		We can be like a day.
		Come on, baby.
		Don't feel the record.
		Baby, take my hand.
		Don't feel the record.
		We'll be able to fly.
		Don't feel the record.
		Baby, I'm your man.
		Don't feel the record.
		Call our bell in the Kingdom of Nigh from West of the Rockies at 1-800-618-8255.
		East of the Rockies, 1-800-825-5033.
		First-time callers may recharge at 1-775-727-1222.
		And the Wildcard line is open at 1-775-727-1295.
		To rechart on the toll-free international line, call your AT ⁇ T operator and have them dial 800-893-0903.
		This is Coast to Coast AM with Art Bell from the Kingdom of Nigh.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Professor Lawrence M. Krauss is my guest, and I'm sure you can already tell you're in for quite a ride.
		Stay right where you are.
		Once again, Professor Lawrence M. Krauss, and when you hear a little beep, if you can hear it, a little tiny beep here, let's see if you can hear one.
		Of course, when you want one, it never comes.
		There's one.
		I've got a Geiger counter here, and that beep you hear is the occasional little particle that comes crashing down.
		There was another one.
		You heard them two in a row.
		So if you have a sensitive Geiger counter, you can do that.
		Pretty strange sitting here and listening to that and knowing where it's coming from and how it made it here and all the rest of it.
		Professor, you're back on again.
lawrence krauss ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, it's one of those fascinating things.
lawrence krauss ▲ ● ▼		It's nice to see a simple demonstration of such an exotic piece of physics.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yes, and of course, these are handy little instruments to have around just in case of, oh, I don't know, whatever might happen these days, huh?
lawrence krauss ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		So time travel then, it seems to me like the bottom line of all this is you're saying, yeah, you know, maybe it is possible with enough power.
lawrence krauss ▲ ● ▼		Well, yes, we haven't even, I mean, the kind of time, the kind of effects we've been talking about, clocks slowing down and speeding up, are exotic and in fact require lots of power, but they still don't address your original question.
		They don't allow time travel backwards.
		They just mean that different people in different places can have their clocks move forward at a different rate.
		But to actually go backwards in time is even more exotic.
		And that not only requires lots of energy, but energy of a totally different type.
		It turns out that just speeding up or slowing down isn't good enough.
		You need something far more exotic, something that has what's called negative energy, in fact.
		And it's right now it's to some extent the stuff of science fiction.
		People have proposed, given general relativity, weird things called wormholes and shortcuts through space-time that might allow you to create a time machine.
		But in order to build these objects and actually use them, you'd have to have something that was gravitationally repulsive.
		And as all of your listeners know, who's taken physics, you know, gravity sucks.
		It tends to always pull.
		It never pushes.
		And in order to build a time machine, you'd have to have something that's gravitationally repulsive.
		We know that in general relativity.
		And the question is, is such material possible to create and build and use at least.
		We don't know the answer.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Wayne, gravitationally repulsive.
		All right, fine.
		Why does that allow time travel in reverse?
lawrence krauss ▲ ● ▼		Well, let's see.
lawrence krauss ▲ ● ▼		Well, in order to explain that, I'd have to give you an example of a time machine, which I'm happy to do if you want to work with me here.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I'm working with you.
lawrence krauss ▲ ● ▼		Okay.
		So one good example of a time machine is something called a wormhole, which is a shortcut through space in the following way.
		Imagine a sort of a balloon.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Alla Jody Foster.
lawrence krauss ▲ ● ▼		Allah Jody Foster in contact.
		Exactly.
		But the idea is general relativity says, well, space can be curved, right?
		So imagine a curved balloon.
		And if you were an ant living on that curved balloon, if you wanted to go from one end of the balloon to the other, you'd have to walk around the balloon, right?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Right.
lawrence krauss ▲ ● ▼		Okay.
		Unless you're an intelligent ant who's taken general relativity.
		And then you know, if you push down in the balloon, if you produce a lot of curvature in one place, and you push down in the opposite hemisphere, you push really hard, those two points can meet, and we could cut a little hole and sew it together and make a little tunnel, literally a shortcut from one place to another.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I've come to observe, Professor, that people of your sort work with ants a lot in analogies.
lawrence krauss ▲ ● ▼		They really are anti-trades.
unidentified		Oldies but goodies, what's what I say?
lawrence krauss ▲ ● ▼		In any case, that two-dimensional wormhole is sort of an analogy to what might exist in principle in the real universe.
		It's put a lot of energy and matter in one place.
		You'd curve space tremendously.
		And you might imagine somewhere ostensibly very far away, a similar thing happens, and somehow this shortcut connects these two places, like Jody Foster's wormhole in contact.
		Now, it sounds nice.
		Now, the question is, could you actually build a wormhole?
		Well, the answer is we know you cannot if normal matter and energy are all there is.
		In fact, calculations have been done to show that the problem is if you put a lot of matter and energy at one place, it's gravitationally attractive and it will collapse to form a black hole.
		We know that.
		Gravitationally will collapse.
		And we can prove that at either end of the wormhole, the mouth of the wormhole will collapse into a black hole out of which nothing can escape in a time shorter than it takes to go through the wormhole.
		So there are no traversable wormholes in nature unless you have gravitationally repulsive material.
		if you had that, you could fill the wormhole up with that kind of energy, and it would hold the mouth of the wormhole open.
		So you could create stable wormholes if you had gravitationally repulsive material.
		Now what does all this have to do with time travel?
		Well, it turns out if you had a wormhole, you could have a time machine if you had a traversable wormhole.
		And here's the way.
		It's going to sound like a used car salesman, so just bear with me here.
		If you're at one end of the wormhole and you're just sitting there, and you have a friend at the other end of the wormhole on the other side of the galaxy somewhere, and you look at a telescope with a telescope and you see her there at the other end of the wormhole, but her end of the wormhole is moving very fast.
		It's doing a big circle, say five light years around.
		Pretty quickly.
		And let's say that end of the wormhole is moving at near the speed of light.
		So it takes her five years to go around in that big circle.
		So you watch her.
		It takes five years for her to do that.
		Of course, she's at the end of the wormhole moving through space very fast.
		So her clock is traveling slowly.
		So for her, that takes, let's say, one week.
		So now, she is five years minus one week behind you in time.
		And all you have to do is walk through the wormhole, and you come out the other end, and you're five years earlier.
		And so the idea is if you had stable wormholes, you could, in principle, have a time machine.
		But as you can see, the problem is we know you cannot have stable wormholes with normal matter and energy.
		We know it.
		It's been proved mathematically.
		There's no doubt.
		So if you want to do it, you have to come up with some weird, very weird kind of energy, which is not like anything we create on Earth.
		And we don't know.
unidentified		Yes.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		i want to question the army is the creation or even a sort of a replication of what they think might be the big bang and all that sort of exotic uh...
art bell ▲ ● ▼		sort of stuff now is if they would have some success with this and they would have created a stable um...
lawrence krauss ▲ ● ▼		Well, you know, unfortunately, a lot of that is hype in the sense that we use those words to try and explain to people what we're trying to do and make it seem interesting.
		In elementary particle physics accelerators, we are in a sense trying to recreate conditions that were very similar to the conditions in the earliest moments of the Big Bang explosion.
		But it's wrong to say we're trying to recreate the Big Bang because we're not.
		The energies involved are minuscule in these accelerators.
		And therefore, the regions over which you would create any kind of conditions that are comparable to the early universe are so small and the energy is so small that they're irrelevant.
		The thing about our Big Bang was that the earliest moments of the Big Bang, and it is amazing but true, all of the mass and energy in our entire visible universe was contained in a region smaller than a baseball.
		Everything, all the mass and all the stars and galaxies.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		You do understand, don't you?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		The average person really has a hard time with this.
lawrence krauss ▲ ● ▼		Of course.
		And not just the average person, but everyone does.
		It's hard, it's impossible to imagine how you could compress everything we see into such a small region.
		And it amazes me when I think about it.
		In fact, my book, Atom, in a sense, was a way to try and personalize that, because it's a history of an individual oxygen atom in a glass of water that you're drinking tonight.
		A history of that atom from the beginning of the universe to the end.
		And I tried to sort of personalize it and make that atom the hero because it's very hard in an abstract sense to try and imagine those configurations.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Are there words you could give us that would attempt to describe how something the size of a baseball becomes all that is and can be seen?
lawrence krauss ▲ ● ▼		Well, I can we can we can try and follow it back step by step and see and see what happens.
		I mean, the configurations you have to achieve are kind of amazing.
		For example, if you took the mass of our sun and compressed it down to, say, the size of Manhattan, then you could show that just a teaspoonful of material will weigh about 100 billion tons.
		And you might say, that's just crazy.
		I can never imagine doing that.
		But nature does it all the time.
		When stars explode, the inside of a star the size of our sun collapses into an object the size of Manhattan in a period of a second.
		And we see it.
		When a star explodes and forms a supernova explosion, it happens about once every 100 years per galaxy.
		But we see it.
		The inside of the star collapses to form something called a neutron star, which is so dense that all of the atomic nuclei and all of the atoms in that star are actually touching.
		And the whole star collapses from the size of larger than the Earth to the size of Manhattan in a second.
		And the amazing thing is we can see it happen.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right, but you've still got a long way to go.
lawrence krauss ▲ ● ▼		Exactly.
		We've still got a long way to go before we work backwards.
		But let me say why we believe this fantastical story, why it's not science fiction.
		The point is, if we assume the early universe was in that kind of crazy, intense, hot, very dense configuration, then we can use the known laws of physics as we explore them in elementary particle physics accelerators and in nuclear reactors, etc., to try and predict what we would see.
		And the amazing thing is we can say, well, when the universe was one second old, it have a temperature of about 10 billion degrees, if this idea is correct.
		And that happens to be at a temperature where nuclear reactions will take place.
		We can actually calculate, if you start out with all this hot, dense configuration with quarks and protons and electrons all flying around, and you let it cool down to 10 billion degrees, how much, as nuclear reactions happen, how much of the light elements would be produced, starting out with hydrogen and then helium and then lithium, etc.
		And the amazing thing is we predict, on the basis of things we measure in the laboratory, we predict that roughly 25% of the universe should end up as helium, whereas only one part in 10 billion or so of the universe should be lithium, The next lightest element.
		When we go out and measure with telescopes the abundance of light elements in the universe, what do we find?
		25% of the universe is helium.
unidentified		One part in 10 to the 10th is lithium.
lawrence krauss ▲ ● ▼		Predictions that vary by 10 orders of magnitude are bang on with observations.
		We also predict there should be a hot afterglow of the Big Bang.
		In 1965, it was discovered of all places in New Jersey.
		And every single prediction we can make on the basis of that idea is in agreement, an exact agreement, with every observation we make about the universe.
		And so, therefore, if it quacks like a duck, it walks like a duck, it's a duck.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well.
lawrence krauss ▲ ● ▼		I mean, and you can say, well, maybe it's not.
		And the point is, one of the biggest misconceptions about science is that people think science can prove something to be true.
		It can't.
		It can only prove something to be false.
		And it's false if it disagrees with experiments.
		Even if a theory agrees with every observation you can make, there could always be a new observation down the line that would require you to revise your theory somewhat.
		It wouldn't make it wrong.
		Newton's laws are not wrong.
		They still apply today, just like they were when Newton developed them.
		But at the extremes of scale and the extremes of speed, we've had to revise them a little bit.
		Einstein had to revise them at one scale and quantum mechanics at another.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Let's say that you physicists, theoretical physicists, can get us back to a baseball and to one second after the bang, you know, about the temperatures and everything.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		But then just leaping across that one second, then you get like to the God second, don't you?
lawrence krauss ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, well, exactly.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Or do you?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		In other words, is there a point where you say, sorry, this doesn't have explanation?
lawrence krauss ▲ ● ▼		Absolutely.
		I mean, that's what makes science interesting.
		We don't understand everything.
		And so we know, we fully know that the laws of physics as we now understand them cannot be applied before a certain time.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		They began at that instant.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		The present laws of physics began at that instant.
lawrence krauss ▲ ● ▼		Well, they began at that instant, but we don't know.
		In fact, we don't even know if they began at that instant.
		We know that they break down.
		They begin to make predictions that are nonsensical before a certain time.
		And we know that we'll need some new theory that will allow us to extrapolate back earlier.
		So we have many ideas of what that theory might be and what the predictions might be, but we really don't know.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Would you want to give me your best guesses?
lawrence krauss ▲ ● ▼		Well, one thing that I think is quite reasonable, although it sounds like a cop-out, and here I agree with my friend Stephen Hawking, that if you ask sort of what happened before the Big Bang, the answer is that's not a good question.
lawrence krauss ▲ ● ▼		Because what general relativ tells us is that space and time are tied together, and they're tied together with matter.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, that's not a good question for you.
lawrence krauss ▲ ● ▼		Oh, yeah, no, hold on.
		Okay, yeah, exactly.
		But the point is, when things get very, very dense, it could be that what we mean by time, the whole notion of time breaks down.
		And time itself may have begun in the Big Bang.
		And so there was no sense of time before the Big Bang.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, how could there be?
		Must there not be two objects with relative velocity to each other to have the beginning of measurement?
		So if there was nothing, there could not be time.
lawrence krauss ▲ ● ▼		Well, no, you see, the problem is let's step back and think.
		What does it mean to have relative velocity?
		That means they're moving apart in space, right?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, how do we measure time?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		The way the sun goes around the earth goes around the sun, or the moon goes around the earth or whatever.
lawrence krauss ▲ ● ▼		Motion is the way we measure it.
		Exactly.
		But motion requires moving through space.
		But it could be at very, very earliest instance when all of the mass of the universe was in a region smaller than the size of an atom, that space itself, the concept of space itself breaks down.
		It's not a good quantity.
		We don't know.
		We know that if we take the classical notions of space and time and try and apply them back then, then you get nonsensical predictions.
		And so it could just be that a better theory of space and time would give us better predictions.
		Or it could be that space and time themselves actually grew out of the Big Bang.
		And therefore, the classical notions that we use to describe the reality we experience don't apply back then.
		Just like at quantum mechanical level, just like at the level of individual atoms, many of the classical notions that are associated with motions of a baseball when a batter hits it don't apply anymore when you're talking about electrons and atoms.
		We've had to learn that our myopia, our cosmic myopia is revived.
		It's one of the greatest things about science.
		It forces us to realize that the way we view the world and what we think is sensible need not always be right.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, Professor, do you contemplate the probability of a giant nothingness prior to that instant, a giant waiting theater for the paints to be applied?
lawrence krauss ▲ ● ▼		Well, actually, my favorite picture is probably that, in fact, that our visible universe is really just part of what might be called a multiverse, where there are regions where there are big bangs happening right now, an infinite universe where there are big bangs happening,
		there are big crunches, the universe is collapsing down to singularities, and in this multiverse, we happen to live in an infinite region, by the way, an infinitely large region, which happened to have a big bang 12 to 15 billion years ago.
		But there are other regions of this multiverse that are just now experiencing Big Bang.
		And I think that the laws of physics, we understand them, suggest that that's the most likely possibility.
		But really, right now, we're talking about metaphysics.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Okay, while we're on the subject of multiverse, let's consider time travel and that nasty problem with grandma.
		Well, in a multiverse, we go back and we kill grandma, and in one timeline, in one universe, you pop out of existence as grandma dies.
		Now, in the other instantly created universe, it's a different story altogether.
lawrence krauss ▲ ● ▼		You're right.
lawrence krauss ▲ ● ▼		I mean, that has been proposed as one of the ways around this paradox.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Is it, do you think?
lawrence krauss ▲ ● ▼		Well, it's nice words.
		The problem is, as far as I know, there's no physics behind it.
		I mean, for example, we know, people talk about the many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics that when you go back and that whenever you measure something, you sort of have a lot of different levels of reality.
		It's all nice words.
		But one of the things that is important about quantum mechanics is it never allows you to jump from one to the other.
		So it's one possibility, but right now there's no concrete physics that allows for such a possibility.
		And therefore, it's a nice idea, but there's no basis to that idea.
		That doesn't mean it's wrong.
		But right now, it's just talk.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Okay, well, then let's say we take our little stroll through the wormhole and we do, in fact, kill grandma.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Then that's a big problem, then.
lawrence krauss ▲ ● ▼		It is a big problem.
		And here's another.
		It is a big problem.
		People have come up with another solution.
		And that is that you're doomed to repeat the events of the past.
		Namely, that, you know, say you want to go back in time and kill Hitler before he did all his things.
		Well, you go back in a wormhole and you do it, but just when you're about to pull the trigger, you trip.
		And that you're doomed, that the laws of physics are such that whenever you go back in time, you cannot change the future.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right, Professor, hold on, hold it right there.
		We'll be right back.
		You're doomed to just keep repeating it time after time after time after time.
		Isn't it something, the world we live in?
unidentified		But then hear the clock tick and think of you All up in circles, confusion is There's nothing new.
		Clash back one night, almost eleven.
		Suicide time and stop.
		Well, the night we're seven hours guilty and mine.
		Let's fall from the borderline.
		The headman comes, knows him well.
		He has been cheated Have you seen us?
		Now I'm stepping into the twilight zone This isn't that house Feels like being gone I've become in moon Under moon and star Where am I to go Now that I've gone too far Now I'm stepping into the twilight zone This isn't that house Feels like being gone I've become in moon Under moon and star Where am I to go
		Now that I've gone too far So you were gone to go When I'm going as a boy So you were gone to go Now that I've gone too far When the ball has a fall, when the ball has a fall to reach art bell in the Kingdom of Nye from west of the Rockies, dial 1-800-618-8255.
		East of the Rockies, 1-800-825-5033.
		First-time callers may rechart at 1-775-727-1222.
		Or use the wildcard line at 1-775-727-1295.
		To rechart on the toll-free international line, call your AT ⁇ T operator and have them dial 800-893-0903.
		This is Coast to Coast AM with our bell on the Premier Radio Network.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Professor Lawrence M. Krauss is my guest, very distinguished, lots of credentials, a theoretical physicist, and much more.
		He's also a professor of astronomy.
		And so we've got a million miles to travel here, not enough time to do it.
		We're going to get right on.
		Right.
		Back to it we go.
		Professor Lawrence M. Krauss once again.
		Professor, you were saying there might be another way to avoid the grandmother problem.
		I threw up the multiverse idea, or the new universe idea, I guess, instantly when you pervert what was supposed to happen.
		What other way might there be?
lawrence krauss ▲ ● ▼		Well, it's the boring way.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		There's a boring way?
lawrence krauss ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, as they call it in Star Trek a causality loop.
		I like that.
		It's better than the way the physicists call it.
		But basically, it's that every time you go back in time, you just repeat the same features, sort of like Roundhog Day.
		And you just repeat.
		You can go back in time, but you have to repeat exactly the same events the second time around.
		And then it's sort of not like it's not very much fun.
		But I mean, those are the only two solutions of that grandmother paradox that I know of.
		Of course, the great thing about nature is if there is time travel, if it is possible, and we don't know, and that doesn't mean it is possible, it may be impossible.
		What it really means is we don't know.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Okay, I'm still not grasping, though.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		You said you would endlessly be repeating that action.
lawrence krauss ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		How would that work with respect to the linear time that's going on in the world and the events that are going on in the world?
lawrence krauss ▲ ● ▼		Well, it doesn't be circular instead of linear.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Circular.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		It would become circular only for you or it would become circular for all?
lawrence krauss ▲ ● ▼		Presumably for all.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Oh, my God.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		You mean so one person going back and blowing it in time could put the whole world in this circular, repetitive, and never-ending loop.
lawrence krauss ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, well, at least the world of that person's experience.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Oh, my.
lawrence krauss ▲ ● ▼		It would mean that nature itself, because remember, space and time are both dynamical in general relativity.
		And so you can go through a circle in space.
		And in principle, you might imagine you go through a circle in time.
		But if space-time is circular, then it's a property of space-time.
		And so it allows time travel, but it's very specific about how it allows it.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, they do say history repeats itself, right?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		So maybe somebody already blew it for us.
lawrence krauss ▲ ● ▼		Exactly, maybe.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		But that really, that's a kind of a pathetic ending for the world, isn't it?
lawrence krauss ▲ ● ▼		Well, it's not what you'd like with time travel.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		That's right.
lawrence krauss ▲ ● ▼		And as I was about to say, if time travel is possible, the real solution to the grandmother paradox is probably something we haven't thought of at all.
		And that's what I always find fascinating about nature is it tends to surprise us.
		And so, you know, I find...
		I had to bet, I'm betting time travel isn't possible because it just seems so difficult to imagine resolving this issue.
		And I'm talking about it in principle.
		I mean, even if it were possible in principle, I have to say that we know that we've already been able to calculate how much energy would be required to make a wormhole or do that kind of thing if it were possible.
		And even if it were possible, the energy required would be so immense, it would be more than the mass of our galaxy.
		And so we're talking hypothetical here.
		And that's what people should realize.
		I always worry when one talks about this, that people think that a NASA is spending money trying to build warp drives, but it's kind of a waste of money because we're talking issues that are hypothetical right now, not things that you can have an engineer sort of develop a new kind of box to do right now.
		And so these are fascinating questions, I happen to think, and I hope your listeners do.
		But they're issues that involve questions of principle that are not right now or in the foreseeable future practical.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		What would be required would be an unimaginable new power source.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		But don't we have a habit of running into these unimaginable new power sources?
lawrence krauss ▲ ● ▼		Well, we do have a habit of being surprised.
		We have a habit of running into new things in the universe.
		That's right.
		It would have to be an unimaginable new power source, but not just of regular power, of a kind of energy that is different than any kind of energy that we see anywhere in the universe except in one place.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yes, but if you go back to the early days of dynamite, let's say, in actual years, it wouldn't be that long ago, right?
		And you were to demonstrate nuclear power to those folks, it would be unimaginable.
		It would be magic.
lawrence krauss ▲ ● ▼		Absolutely.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		It would be alien, perhaps to them.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		As unimaginable as this new power source we're speculating about.
lawrence krauss ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, yeah.
		That's true.
		And so that doesn't mean such things can't exist.
		However, it is important to realize that we have, with our telescopes and other apparatus, probably, that we have in our laboratories, been able to explore the universe, in fact, observe the universe out to distances of billions of light years away.
		And the amazing thing that we happen to have discovered is that the laws of physics are the same everywhere.
		And we understand how stars work.
		And so if there were incredible new power sources, we should be able to see them, if you wish.
		And the nice thing about the universe is it's big and it's old.
		So no matter how crazy something is, if it's not impossible, it happens all the time.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		How does this let's slide right into the question of whether there's probably life out there or not?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Statistically, with what we know about the known universe and the physics of everything, you said appears to be the same, wouldn't that make it pretty, in fact more likely than not, when you crunch the numbers, that there is going to be life out there, almost definitely, in fact?
lawrence krauss ▲ ● ▼		Well, I don't know whether almost definitely is, but I'd say if you asked me, I'd bet that there's life out there, yes.
		I would say, given the fact that we know from our own experience that all you need to have life is water, solar power, and organic materials, I mean, on Earth, life originated about as soon as the laws of physics would have allowed it to.
		Within 100 million years of the time the Earth cooled down enough to be stable for organic reactions to occur, life formed.
		And so it seems to be fairly ubiquitous on Earth.
		And one of the things we do know about space is that all of those things exist.
		We know there's lots of water, we know there's lots of starlight, and we even know there's lots of organic materials.
		One of the things we learned from the Haleboph comet was not that there was a spacecraft behind it, but rather when we looked at the spectrum of it, it actually had complex organic materials, the basis of amino acids.
		And so all of those things exist throughout space.
		And so I have a hard time believing there isn't life elsewhere in the universe.
		Now, the question is, is there intelligent life?
		That's a much more difficult question because we don't know that intelligence is an evolutionary imperative.
		I mean, we're here by a series of sort of cosmic accidents.
		An asteroid that just killed the dinosaurs 65 million years ago made room for mammals.
		And we happen to be mammals.
		Now, maybe that there are other ways to intelligence.
		We don't know how it works.
		So it could be that there's loss of life in the universe, but hardly any of it is intelligent.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Maybe the dinosaurs weren't just given a long enough run.
unidentified		Exactly.
lawrence krauss ▲ ● ▼		That's true.
		We don't know.
		It could have been that if they had been, they'd be watching I Love Lucy now.
		But we don't know.
		And so I'm willing to believe, even if intelligence, however, is very, very rare, that there's still intelligent civilizations out there.
		I think that's not unlikely.
		What, however, is extremely unlikely, in fact, so unlikely as to be virtually impossible to imagine, is that those intelligent civilizations are coming here right now or have in the time we've been cognizant of.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Why is that hard to imagine?
lawrence krauss ▲ ● ▼		Well, the point, there's lots of reasons, but let's work through them.
		First of all, as I've tried to explain earlier, to go at anywhere near the speed of light requires an incredible amount of energy.
		So you'd have to basically harness the power of a star to take a spacecraft that would take people or any beings that are sort of our size and move them from one place to another at near the speed of light.
		Now, that's not impossible.
		You could imagine some civilization that's incredibly advanced could harness the power of a star and do that.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, let's think about that for a second.
		In other words, is that likely that there would be such a civilization, such an advanced civilization?
		The Big Bang occurred, what, 15 billion or so years ago?
lawrence krauss ▲ ● ▼		Exactly.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Now, that's a lot of time relative to that 15 billion year mark.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		There's a lot of material way the hell out there that's been around for a lot longer than we have.
lawrence krauss ▲ ● ▼		Exactly.
lawrence krauss ▲ ● ▼		our son is only five billion years old and we're newcomers.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		So there would have been lots of time for...
lawrence krauss ▲ ● ▼		Do intelligent civilizations survive for billions of years?
		And that's a, you know, and you talk about your Geiger counters and other things.
		You've got to ask the question, do intelligent civilizations kill themselves off before they ever get to the point of being able to do that?
		A lot of people think that's quite likely.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		More than likely.
lawrence krauss ▲ ● ▼		But maybe they do.
		And maybe there are intelligent civilizations that have been around for billions of years and are presumably, therefore, incredibly advanced.
		But even if they could harness the power of a star, it would be hard to imagine why they would do that.
		Take all of that incredible energy and resources that would be required.
		I mean, whether it's money or whatever else, fuel is money.
		The incredible resources it would take to basically demolish a star and use it for space travel and come all the way here just to do cake experiments on psychiatric patients of some Harvard psychiatrists.
		It just hardly seems an appropriate use of resources.
		First of all.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Have you had any good heart-to-hearts with Dr. Mack?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Have you?
lawrence krauss ▲ ● ▼		Oh, very brief ones.
		I've talked to people more than Dr. Mack, with people who have either claimed to have seen UFOs or been abducted.
		And I think the point is that, and this is hard to say and hard to explain appropriately.
		It's not that I can say that those things are impossible or they didn't happen because God knows I wasn't there.
		But you can ask, what is more likely?
		Is it more likely that basically the laws of physics are being twisted and distorted and aliens abducting people?
		Or is it more likely that people are in one way or another imagining that or dreaming or whatever?
		And you have to say at some level, when you look at the implausibility of first, interstellar travel being incredibly expensive and incredibly energy consumptive is one problem.
		But the second problem is the distances are huge.
		And even if you were traveling at the speed of light from a star system and the nearest stars that might house civilizations that are probably tens of light years away, well, in 1947 when this famous Roswell incident was supposed to happen, there would have been no way that they would have known there was intelligent life on Earth.
		Right?
		Because we hadn't been broadcasting signals long enough to get there, even at the speed of light, and for them to hop on a spacecraft at the speed of light and get back here in time to be here for 1947, much less the fact that we're one of 100 billion stars in a galaxy that's 100,000 light years across.
		And even if they were able to detect our signals, well, it's pretty hard because in Cleveland, where I live, there's 200 stations on TV.
		I can never find what I want before the program's over.
		In the real universe, there are an infinite number of frequencies to broadcast at.
		And so the likelihood, I believe it's worthwhile listening for a signal for extraterrestrials.
		The likelihood of detecting it is very small.
		But if you think about it, by the way, if you want to somehow discover life elsewhere, it's a lot easier to send out signals, radio signals, than it is to send out spacecraft.
		So by far the most likely way of making first contact is not by sending out spacecraft.
		So it's very inefficient.
		First of all, it takes a lot of energy.
		Secondly, to explore even the nearest star systems would take hundreds of hundreds of years.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Agreed.
lawrence krauss ▲ ● ▼		With a radio signal, as you know from the fact that you can broadcast so effectively throughout the United States, with a single signal going out in all directions, you can reach all of those stars.
		And so it's a much more efficient way of trying to communicate.
		But even that, even there, the odds are so stacked against us that while I'm fully supportive of SETI, I think it's interesting, the likelihood that even if there are civilizations out there that will detect them is extremely small.
		Let me give you an example that hopefully will bring this home.
		Say you lived on a star somewhere else in our galaxy, and someone told you where to look for us.
		Someone said, look at that star over there in the corner, and look at the third rock from that star.
		And you'll find life.
		And then even if you were told exactly where to look among those 100 billion stars, even then the likelihood of finding life on Earth at any given time is almost zero.
		Why?
		Well, if you've been a civilization that's been around billions of years longer than us, you could have watched the Earth from the time it formed to now, 4.5 billion years, and you could have been listening.
		And only during the last 30 or 40 years at most would you have had the possibility of hearing a signal.
		So even if you knew exactly where to look and exactly what to listen for and exactly what channel to listen to, you have a probability of 30 years out of 4.5 billion, which is less than the chance of 1 in 100 million of detecting life on Earth when you know what to look at.
		We don't even know where to look or what to listen for.
		So it's a huge long shot to even communicate, much less travel to the Earth.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, as I know, the SETI group was looking very near mostly the hydrogen frequency.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Now, SETI has begun to move toward optical SETI.
lawrence krauss ▲ ● ▼		And a lot of people think that's a good idea.
		Are you one of them?
		Well, I think to the extent that you can explore a lot of different frequencies, that's the way to do it.
		I mean, you want to have every window you can.
		The problem is it costs money.
		But I think that's a good idea.
		I think hydrogen is also a good idea because the reason for your listeners who haven't thought of this, and probably most of them have heard this before, but the reason you want to look near hydrogen is that hydrogen is the most abundant element in the universe, and any technological civilization knows that.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		And so it's a big marker.
lawrence krauss ▲ ● ▼		It's a big marker.
		And so it's a very sensible idea, but it may be wrong.
		It may be that other civilizations want to have a searchlight or like a lighthouse or something.
		But what you have to realize is that all of this is worth looking for, but the odds are very small.
		And as small as the odds are of communicating, they're almost infinitely smaller of actually traversing in a realistic time.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		When you look at our present civilization and the direction we're moving right now, for how much longer do you think we will be emitting immense amounts of electromagnetic radiation?
		In other words, radio, television.
		100 years from now?
		200 years from now?
		Will we still be in the old mode of broadcasting in the air?
		Are we going to have radars running?
		Or in another 100 or 200 years, will we have moved totally past all that?
lawrence krauss ▲ ● ▼		Well, of course, the great thing about the future is one doesn't know what's going to happen.
		But I think that, actually, I think it's reasonable to assume that we will continue to broadcast and use electromagnetic radiation to communicate.
		It's the most efficient way to do that.
		But what we'll find probably is we have the power outputs we need to generate are smaller because we'll find more, you know, we'll be able to develop more efficient receivers.
		But, I mean, radiation, we can detect electromagnetic radiation very efficiently.
		With the Arecibo Radio Telescope, if we wanted, if there was a light bulb on Jupiter emitting radiation with the 100-watt light bulb, we could easily detect it with the Arecibo Radio Telescope.
		It's not, I mean, electromagnetic radiation is incredibly easy to detect.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yes, but what I'm saying is the human race may not stick with it for that long, relatively.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I mean, it's only a few hundred years, maybe.
unidentified		Maybe.
lawrence krauss ▲ ● ▼		And if that were the case, then, of course, it makes the situation even harder.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, unless we learn to look at some other frequency or something.
		Hold on, Professor.
		We're at the bottom of the hour.
		I'm Art Bell.
		This is Coast.
unidentified		Time, time, time.
		See what's become of me.
		See what's become of me.
		Alright, for the channel game.
		Interrupt the cat She doesn't give you time for questions As she locks up your arm in hers And you follow to your sense Of which direction
		completely disappears By the blue-tied walls near the market stalls There's a hint that she leads you to These places I feel my life Just like a river running through The year of the cat Thank you.
		Call Art Bell in the Kingdom of Nye from West of the Rockies at 1-800-618-8255.
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		This is Coast to Coast A.M. with Art Bell from the Kingdom of Nine.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I'm still stuck on the concept of Lucy with scales.
		The I Love Lucy Show.
		Now, if the dinosaurs lived, perhaps it would have been...
		Professor Lawrence M. Krauss is my guest.
		He's a theoretical physicist, and he is a professor of astronomy as well.
		An absolutely fascinating interview, which will continue right after the Saks.
		You've got to have reverence for that sax.
		We'll be right back.
		And say, Professor Krauss, welcome back.
		Since you're an astronomer and a theoretical physicist as well, it seems to me appropriate to ask you about this.
		Lately, the new theory is that not only is the Big Bang did the Big Bang occur, but everything is now beginning to actually accelerate away from everything else so that in the end, it's going to be kind of a thing where I actually read a story where the light from distant stars will begin to blink out.
		The night sky will begin to save that which is really close to us.
		The night sky will begin to be devoid of stars.
		Everything will move away from everything else until we finally freeze to death in the darkness.
lawrence krauss ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, I think I wrote that.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		You wrote that.
		That was you that wrote that, huh?
		That's pretty graphic stuff, Professor.
lawrence krauss ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, the future.
		Well, it is indeed one of the biggest surprises in the last century that when we look out, it looks like the expansion of the universe is indeed accelerating, which is crazy.
		It's insane, right?
		Because gravity, as I said before, is supposed to be attractive.
		It's supposed to slow down that expansion.
		But there does seem on a large of a scale, to be some kind of cosmic anti-gravity, something that's causing the universe to accelerate.
		And we know what kind of stuff will do that.
		It's crazy.
		If you give empty space energy, if you associate with energy with empty space, and by empty space I mean nothing, no particles, no nothing, nada.
		But empty space, if you give it energy, then that energy, according to general relativity, is gravitationally repulsive.
		And it will cause the universe to accelerate.
		In fact, Einstein postulated such stuff early on when he, in fact, he called it his biggest blunder.
		He invented something he called the cosmological constant.
		Because originally, when he developed general relativity, we didn't know the universe was expanding at that time in 1916.
		And his theory was the same as Newton's theory.
		Gravity sucked.
		It said that you couldn't have stuff just sitting out there.
		Gravity would be universally attractive, and therefore everything would collapse together.
		And in his universe, at the time, it looked like the universe was just sitting out there.
		And so he said, well, let's add a little repulsive force.
		Empty space this kind of energy.
		And it'll balance on large enough scales the gravitational attraction of distant stars and galaxies.
		Everything will just sit there.
		And then we discovered the universe was expanding, and he didn't need that extra force.
		Because if the universe is expanding, well, gravity can be universally attractive and simply slow the expansion.
		So if Einstein said, gee, I wish I hadn't invented that thing with my biggest blunder.
		Well, his biggest blunder may have been saying he was blundering.
		Because, in fact, it looks like what we're seeing today is it looks like the universe really is, has exactly the kind of stuff that Einstein first postulated.
		And we don't understand what it could be or how it got there.
		And in fact, we don't understand anything about it.
		It's the biggest mystery in physics and astronomy.
		And that is incredibly exciting.
		I mean, because, again, what people seem to think of is scientists like to understand things.
		Actually, scientists like to not understand things because it gives us something to do.
		And this is the biggest mystery in nature.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		So it means there's a force out there throwing everything apart that we don't even begin to understand, put succinctly.
lawrence krauss ▲ ● ▼		You got it.
		It involves very little energy.
		Let me point that out.
		Even though it's taking the whole universe expand, the density of energy that would be required to make that happen is so small that it would not be noticeable on Earth.
		I mean, empty space would have an energy which is like the equivalent of a mass of 10 to the minus 30 grams per cubic centimeter in energy.
		And that's very small.
		That's the equivalent of having one proton per every cubic meter of material.
		It's almost nothing.
		So on our scale, it's not noticeable, which is why it escaped our notice for so long.
		But when you build it up on large enough scales, there's lots of empty space out there, then it begins to have an effect.
		And the effect is, but there's one thing that you said, lest your listeners get too depressed.
		If the universe is indeed accelerating, it is true that stars and galaxies that are far away from us now will be eventually moving away from us faster than the speed of light.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yes.
lawrence krauss ▲ ● ▼		Because that's allowed, by the way, in general relativity.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		And so when that begins to occur, we can't see it anymore.
lawrence krauss ▲ ● ▼		We won't be able to see them.
		That's absolutely right.
		But the stars in our galaxy will never do that.
		I mean, until they burn out.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, I know, but that's going to be relatively close by.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All that nice, full sky that we get now, the Milky Way and all the rest of it.
lawrence krauss ▲ ● ▼		Exactly.
		I mean, so the stars in our night sky are not moving away from us.
		They're trapped in our galaxy.
		But of course, the point is they're going to burn out anyway.
		So the sky will get dark in our galaxy because the stars will burn out.
		But it is really amazing that in a period, in a cosmic sense, and people like me who worry about cosmic time, have thought a lot about this.
		In fact, I've written scientific papers on this.
		That in a relatively short time frame, in the period of 10 to 100 billion years, which may sound like it's not worth thinking about, but in fact, stars will still be burning.
		Astronomers could still be around.
		Civilizations, much like our own, could still be around 10 to 100 billion years from now because there'll be stars just like our sun burning.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Pretty optimistic.
lawrence krauss ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, well, maybe it's optimistic.
		But in that time frame, in 100 billion years, most of the rest of the universe will disappear.
		And in fact, the longer we look, we used to think the longer we looked, the more we'd see.
		We now know in 100 billion years from now, astronomers will be out of business in the sense that they won't be able to see anything outside of our own galaxy.
		That's the bad news.
		The good news is, of course, I've tried to argue to Congress that we should fund astronomy now while we have a chance to do it.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Using that argument, huh?
lawrence krauss ▲ ● ▼		It doesn't work, of course, because for a Congressperson, the long-term future is two years.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, I know.
		I know.
		Well, all right.
		There is a rumor going around, and there are people going around saying that there is a planet out there just beyond what we can generally see, which they're calling this mysterious planet X. And it's supposed to be some large planet or perhaps a dying sun, which some believe comes swinging by Earth every now and then, causing varying degrees of trouble depending on how close it gets.
		But actually, there have been stories, ABC ran one, that they did indeed spot something out there that does kind of look like a dwarf burnout sun or something or another.
		You know anything about that?
lawrence krauss ▲ ● ▼		Well, I've heard rumors about various things.
		I do know that, in fact, I mean, there can be lots of, I mean, as you probably know, what we define by a planet is changing all the time.
		Some people like to call Pluto a planet.
		Some people, in New York City, for example, they don't call Pluto a planet anymore.
		It's a planetarium there, much to the chagrin of people.
		There are lots of objects farther and farther out.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Do you think they have any right to strip Pluto of its planetary status?
lawrence krauss ▲ ● ▼		I don't think so.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		It seems raw to me.
lawrence krauss ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, I'm Totally against it.
		I like Pluto, in fact.
		Yeah, I do too.
		But there are lots of other objects out there further than Pluto in our solar system, and what you call planets, and what you, you know, if they're smaller than Pluto, are they a planet?
		So as our telescopes become more sensitive, we can find dimmer and dimmer objects.
		But a star has a lot of mass and whether it's faint or not, it produces a significant gravitational effect.
		And therefore, nearby in our solar system, there are no other stars because the gravitational effect would be just huge.
		Now, we are detecting farther away, we are beginning to be able to detect objects that are very dim, that may be failed stars, but they're not affecting the dynamics of our solar system.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, let me ask you this.
		Is there such a thing as a rogue planet or a rogue star?
		In other words, something that is traveling independent of other immediate objects that it's been affected by.
lawrence krauss ▲ ● ▼		Well, in a sense, yes, we all are.
		I mean, in our galaxy, this is another thing that's kind of interesting for people to realize is that we're moving relative to background stars because we're all moving around the galaxy, but we're moving independent of each other.
		So, in fact, stars that are nearby us now will in 100 million years be on the other side of the galaxy.
		So, we're moving apart from other solar systems, and there are stars that are moving close to us, and there are stars that will be moving far away.
		A fairly close call has fairly profoundly approached even 50 times the size of our solar system, it could perturb the dynamics of our solar system and kick out some planets.
		And people have done calculations of what would happen if a stellar encounter occurred.
		And of course, what generally happens is things get kicked out, and planets get thrown out, and orbits that are now stable become unstable.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Unstable.
		Yeah, a very profound effect.
		So would we see this coming, or could it come to be a surprise for astronomers?
		Are we watching the relative velocity or relative to us of everything out there so that we're so sure this wouldn't surprise us one day?
lawrence krauss ▲ ● ▼		Well, with stars, it's not a worry.
		I mean, at least in a cosmic time, we don't have to worry.
		But smaller objects, we certainly have to worry about.
		There are a thousand objects, small, I'm talking about asteroid-size objects, ten kilometers and larger, that are known to exist that are on potential Earth-crossing orbits.
		And with absolute certainty we can say that we're going to be hit at some point in the future.
		Because on average, an asteroid that's 10 kilometers or larger hits the Earth about once every 100 million years.
		And the last big one we know of was about 65 million years ago.
		So depending upon whether you're a betting man or not.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, but suppose there were something as large as a planet.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		And, you know, we haven't seen it all yet.
lawrence krauss ▲ ● ▼		Yes, but we can in fact, but we know for certain that in the region, within the distance of Neptune to us, there are no other planets.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yes.
lawrence krauss ▲ ● ▼		And no other objects as massive as Pluto or larger.
		And what's amazing is with our telescopes we can actually see objects that are much, much smaller than Pluto.
		as I say, asteroid-like objects that are extremely distant.
		therefore it's hard to imagine that something with the mass of planet that's close enough to have impact to impact upon us in in in a kind of century time scale or two uh would have escaped our notice but there are many objects that that might have I mean you know just a 10 kilometer size object is pretty bad.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		What about something with a return time of, say, 3,600 years?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I mean, that is possible, isn't it?
lawrence krauss ▲ ● ▼		Well, it would be possible, except if it were massive enough to impact upon us in 3,600 years, the last cycle around, it would have been massive enough to cause, to, you know, dramatically perturb the Earth's orbit.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Oh, yes.
lawrence krauss ▲ ● ▼		And we know that it didn't because of the fact that life and many other forms of many other tests we can do tell us that the climate on the Earth has changed, but not that radically.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, yes, but what I'm saying is perhaps this 3,600 years, it would be a bit closer than it was last 3,600 years.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		That would change, would it not, to some degree past, pass?
lawrence krauss ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, I mean, it's not impossible.
lawrence krauss ▲ ● ▼		It's highly unlikely, but it's not impossible.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I see.
lawrence krauss ▲ ● ▼		Because, I mean, you have to have it change dramatically from one over to the next.
		And you could always imagine things get perturbed by something else that you don't know about and their orbit changes dramatically and suddenly they come a lot closer.
		So it's impossible to rule such things out.
		It's highly unlikely.
		It's much more likely that we'll get zapped by something smaller, which would still be pretty darn bad.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Oh, sure.
		Something the size of what happened to the dinosaurs would do nicely.
		I'm sure.
		Are we prepared to stop something like that now if we saw it coming?
lawrence krauss ▲ ● ▼		That's an interesting question.
		I mean, there have been those movies and and and uh if we had it's not impossible for me to imagine that we would be able to to to do something i if we had enough lead time.
		Because i uh you know, you di you need ten years lead time probably.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Like what?
lawrence krauss ▲ ● ▼		Uh how to how to che how to stop it?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yes.
lawrence krauss ▲ ● ▼		Well, I don't think Hollywood got it that wrong.
		I mean, if you have enough lead time, you could imagine having a spacecraft have an encounter with the object and do one of many things.
		Either, of course, have nuclear explosions and somehow break it up, or perhaps that slowly divert its trajectory just enough so that it misses the Earth.
		But you need a lot of lead time, and six months ain't going to do.
		And that's why it's important, and by the way, we are doing it, we have a network of telescopes looking at such a lot of things.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Indeed, yes, but more times than not, Professor, I read the news stories here on the air, so I know.
		The news stories read, yesterday Earth had a close encounter.
		Or they read, last week, astronomers now tell us Earth had a very close encounter.
		And so, you know, you're saying if we had 10 years, a lot of times we don't even know we've had a close encounter until I know.
lawrence krauss ▲ ● ▼		I think what the news stories say is that yesterday someone discovered an object that might have a close encounter with us.
		And by close encounter means pretty far away, by the way.
		The good news is that we're a pretty small target in a pretty big space.
		And that's why these things on average don't happen very often, fortunately, for life on Earth.
		And what is true is that we already have found a thousand objects that we can monitor and know their trajectories.
		And with a good deep space telescope network, we could probably pretty effectively monitor most almost everything that is likely to impact upon us in ten years.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, how come mostly amateurs discover all this?
lawrence krauss ▲ ● ▼		Well, the nice thing about it is it doesn't, well, it takes patience, but it doesn't take huge telescopes.
lawrence krauss ▲ ● ▼		You don't need the Keck telescope to do this.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, I know, but by the time you're the size for Frank's telescope, you don't have ten years.
lawrence krauss ▲ ● ▼		Um, well, you actually, for m for most of these objects, you you probably do.
		Uh if you if but what you only have ten years if you if you get all of them.
		That's the point.
		For any given object, it's unlikely it will hit us within ten years.
		But if you want to be certain that you're safe and that you're not missing anything, you have to scan the whole sky, and that's what an amateur can't do.
		Because you have to have a network that constantly scans the whole sky, and therefore you have to have a coordinated network of lots of amateurs, if you wish, or a bunch of professionals.
		And so people have said we should have a coordinated deep space network, and it's not that expensive, and it's happening, and I think it's obviously useful that it happened.
		But the good news is the likelihood is extremely, extremely small because the average impact time is 100 million years, and that means in any given century, you've got a chance of one in a million of getting hit.
unidentified		And so, you know, that's pretty small.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Those are good odds for us, but cosmically, they're pretty bad odds.
lawrence krauss ▲ ● ▼		Well, they're pretty bad in the sense that we will definitely be hit in the future.
		And there's going to be a lot of things in the future that are going to be challenges for life.
		And an impact by a comet or an asteroid is certainly one of the long-term potential disasters.
		There are a lot more, if you actually think about it.
		In one of my books, I sort of start thinking about all those things.
		And it's kind of amazing we're still around with all the different disasters that are going to happen.
		If we escape that one, and if you're willing to wait, oh, just a mere two billion years, then we're in for a much worse experience because the sun will be 15% hotter and we will experience a runaway greenhouse effect and look like Venus and have a temperature of 1,000 degrees.
		Unless, of course, we can figure some way out of the matter.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		That'll definitely produce changes.
		Professor, hold on.
		We're at the top of the hour once again.
		Professor Lawrence M. Krauss is my guest.
		We'll explore some scenarios when we get back.
unidentified		It don't come easy.
		You know it don't come easy.
		It don't come easy.
		You know it don't come easy.
		But the way it's used if you want to see the blues.
		And you know it don't come easy.
		You don't have to shout or leave the vows.
		You can even play them easy.
		Forget about the past.
		I know you're a good one.
		Where are those happy days?
		They seem so hard to find.
		I tried to reach for you, but you have lost too much.
		Whatever happened to our love, I wish I understood it just the face of us.
		It just could face the face of us, it just could face the company bell
		in the Kingdom of Nye.
		From west of the Rockies, dial 1-800-618-8255.
		East of the Rockies, 1-800-825-5033.
		First time callers may rechart at 1-775-727-1222.
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		To rechart on the toll-free international line, call your AT ⁇ T operator and have them dial 800-893-0903.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Good morning, everybody.
		Professor Lawrence M. Krause is my guest.
		Very distinguished, very well-credentialed, extremely well-credentialed.
		He's an astronomer.
		He's a theoretical physicist at the top of his game.
		And with respect to the expanding everything and the finally ending up in the cold, dark, dank, neighborless world with no stars in the heavens.
		He's the guy who wrote that.
		Found out about halfway through the show.
		He's the one who actually wrote that, along with a lot of other things.
		As a matter of fact, we'll tell you what he's written in a moment.
		We'll be right back.
unidentified		We'll be right back.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Once again, here's Professor Lawrence M. Krauss.
		What are the most likely scenarios, Professor, for man doing himself in?
		Aside, and I mean by that, I guess man doing himself in or the extinction.
		No, no, I don't mean that.
		I mean the extinction of man, whether by his own hand or by another hand, you know, a hammer from space, whatever.
		We've already talked about it.
		You know, what are the most likely scenarios?
lawrence krauss ▲ ● ▼		Well, I think it's hard to imagine in order to completely get rid of, I mean, life is very robust.
		And that's one of things people should realize is that in the history of the Earth, there have been many mass extinctions.
		But none of them, as far as we know, have ever extinguished all life on Earth.
		It's amazing.
		When you look at the, there have been times where there have been dramatic overhauls, but even there, some life forms have survived.
		So it's very robust.
		And now we're, of course, there are a lot of life forms that are more robust than us, like cockroaches.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, I've been asking about us, though.
lawrence krauss ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, us.
		So what I was going to say is it's hard for me to imagine anything that we would do that would completely exterminate us as a species.
		I mean, I can imagine getting rid of a civilization, but some humans would exist.
		So I think the things that are likely to exterminate us as a species are likely cosmic in origin.
		And the one we've talked about, I think the most likely significant event will be, in fact, an impact from a large meteor asteroid.
		And if one that was a size 10 kilometers or so, maybe 100 kilometers across, if a 100 kilometer across meteorite hit the Earth, it would essentially evaporate all of the oceans.
		And it's hard to imagine much life surviving after that.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right, now let's look at our own hand.
		We are deep into the human genome now.
		We're modifying.
		I heard the other day we actually created a virus for the first time.
		We actually created a virus.
		And of course, people in the war labs are working on, you know, viruses to vector things that, you know, if somebody went oops and it got out, it could go raging around the world like a wildfire, you know, just extinguishing life everywhere it went and would go everywhere.
lawrence krauss ▲ ● ▼		Well, one could imagine biological accidents that do huge damage.
		But again, if you look at any past examples of such things, they usually don't completely eradicate things.
		I mean, the plague killed many people from Europe, but there were people who were immune to it, because there are mutations.
		And so you're right.
		I mean, I think biological damage is a huge threat.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		That was Mother Nature, though.
		I mean, if man puts his hand in and actually designs something to be aggressive enough and deadly enough to really do the job, I mean, Mother Nature leaves a little hole in there.
		But, gee, we're getting pretty bright.
lawrence krauss ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, we are.
		And I think we are likely to certainly create great changes.
		I like to be more optimistic and I think that we will essentially redefine what we mean by life over the next century.
		We will, as we understand the genome, be able to end And a lot of people find that terrifying, but I think it's inevitable.
		And you're right, in the process we might destroy it as well.
		I think, as I said, if anything, we've learned that life is incredibly robust.
		I mean, it's been around continuously for 4.5 billion years, not quite 4.5 billion, 4 billion years on the Earth, in spite of lots of disasters, and biological ones included.
		And so I'm less pessimistic about that, but I am certainly prepared to recognize that what we now think of as our present life form and what we now think of, we tend to think of ourselves as the top of the evolutionary ladder.
		But of course, that's not true at all.
		We're just a branch.
		And what's next, well, we'll affect it ourselves.
		And I actually expect, when I think of the science fiction future, that we will combine self-aware computers with biology to make new life forms.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Didn't we just succeed?
		I think it was IBM that succeeded in teleporting a bit of light from here to there.
		So then did they really do that?
lawrence krauss ▲ ● ▼		Well, yes.
		They did.
		Yes, they did.
		I mean, they picked a good word, right?
		Because when you talk about a transporter or a teleportation, everyone gets excited.
		And what they did is an interesting application of the laws of quantum mechanics to destroy a single elementary particle, in this case a photon, a piece of light in one place, and instantaneously produce the exact same configuration somewhere else.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Boy, that sounds just like Star Trek.
lawrence krauss ▲ ● ▼		It does, doesn't it?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, it does.
lawrence krauss ▲ ● ▼		The problem, there are lots of problems with that, however.
		First of all, it was a single piece of light, not a human being, or a bowl of oatmeal.
		And in fact, The reason they were able to do that is they exploited the laws of quantum mechanics which apply on elementary particle scales.
		And in this case, they used the fact that this particle was very carefully created and monitored and controlled throughout the experiment as an individual particle so that it didn't interact with other particles, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
		Well, unfortunately, of course, we are not so carefully prepared and things of macroscopic scales, human scales, are not carefully prepared quantum mechanical configurations.
		The particles in our body are colliding them against other particles every second and with the air and all sorts of stuff.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		So all of the weird aspects of quantum mechanics that were exploited in that experiment, which are to transport a human being with that technology, you'd be jelly on the other end.
lawrence krauss ▲ ● ▼		You wouldn't be able to do it.
lawrence krauss ▲ ● ▼		Because you are exploiting at that scale phenomena that we can't experience at human scale.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Indeed, so.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		But my question is, is that not perhaps the first step that will result one day, long from now, perhaps, though in teleportation for real?
lawrence krauss ▲ ● ▼		I would argue no.
		And the reason is that quantum mechanics is the weirdest thing.
		It's weirder than anything we've talked about.
		It's so weird, even if we know the mathematics of it, you can never truly understand it.
		Because it's just particles behave so crazily on ultra-small scales that everything you think is sensible goes out the window.
		For example, a baseball, I throw a baseball to you.
		If you're at the other end of the baseball field, well, of course, it follows some trajectory from me to you.
		You told us what the trajectory is.
		An electron that goes from one place to another.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yes.
lawrence krauss ▲ ● ▼		Well, you can show that in no sense does it follow any, if you don't measure it in between, if you just measure it where it started, where it ended, there's no sense in which it followed a single trajectory from one place to another.
		In fact, it traveled on many trajectories at the same time.
		That's insane, but it's true.
		Like it or not, that's the way the world behaves on small scales.
		Now, we can exploit that craziness, and that's exactly what this kind of experiment was doing, was exploiting that quantum mechanical craziness.
		But you can only exploit it on the scale where quantum mechanics is, where quantum mechanical phenomena are manifest, which is either very small scales or particles or configurations that are isolated from every other because the minute you tap a particle, the minute you observe it or the minute you affect it, you screw up all that quantum mechanical phenomena.
		It just goes out the window.
		And so in order to have that neat thing, that teleportation, you have to have something that's completely isolated and completely controlled.
		And therefore, I think the likelihood of transporting humans that way is the same as the likelihood of humans being able to walk through walls.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		But you know, a quantum computer might straighten all that out.
lawrence krauss ▲ ● ▼		A quantum computer, by the way, this might help us make a quantum computer.
lawrence krauss ▲ ● ▼		A quantum computer is a basic computer that does many, many calculations at the same time.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Right.
lawrence krauss ▲ ● ▼		And that's exactly what elementary particles allow you to do, because remember they take many paths at the same time.
		So that is realistic, or at least you could imagine it.
		I think there's been a lot of hype, but I think it's worth working on.
		That is realistic, but I think the idea that a transporter is electrons, by the way, tunnel through something else particles do.
		If I take a ball and I throw it at a wall, it does one of two things.
		It bounces off.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Is it possible, Professor, that a quantum computer would lead us toward, if not movement between dimensions, at least perhaps communication or the extraction of information from other dimensions?
lawrence krauss ▲ ● ▼		Well, first of all, other dimensions would have to exist, and we have no evidence that they do.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, you suggested the possibility.
lawrence krauss ▲ ● ▼		Well, one of the things that physicists are considering is the possibility they're extra dimensions.
		It's an interesting idea, but I do want to stress that we have no evidence whatsoever that they exist.
		But the quantum computer would operate in our universe using our laws of physics.
		And therefore, one of the aspects of quantum mechanics is as weird as it is, it never takes you out of your own reality.
		And so there's limits to the weirdness of quantum mechanics as we understand it and as we contest it.
		And so a quantum computer would allow us to do many things in the sense of potentially, well, unfortunately, it would allow us to break codes.
		And that means that a lot of the codes that store money in banks and other things would be breakable.
		And we'd have to figure out new ways of keeping information safe.
		But it's not likely it would.
		It certainly wouldn't be able to obviate the laws of physics as we know them.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right.
		A lot of people want to talk to you.
		Much as I would like to continue.
		I've got to go to the phones a little bit here.
		On the International Line, you're on the air with Professor Lawrence Kraus.
		Where are you calling from, please?
unidentified		I'm calling from London in the UK.
unidentified		My name's Jeff.
lawrence krauss ▲ ● ▼		I called before.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Okay, Jeff, welcome.
unidentified		Okay, thank you.
unidentified		Yeah, I had some questions for Professor Krauss.
lawrence krauss ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
unidentified		Okay, first of all, the idea of life transporting around not so much intergalactically but within our galactic has actually been proposed by Marshall T. Savage.
		He reckons it could be done with about 1,000 years.
		Well, maybe yes, maybe no, but I certainly believe that we could travel to somewhere like Alpha Centauri fairly quickly because it would only take us about a year to reach light speed if we accelerated at 1G.
lawrence krauss ▲ ● ▼		If you accelerate continuously at 1G, it would take a year or two to reach light speed.
lawrence krauss ▲ ● ▼		That's a true statement.
unidentified		Right.
lawrence krauss ▲ ● ▼		But of course you have to have fuel that would continue to do it.
lawrence krauss ▲ ● ▼		That's the problem.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well Alpha Centauri though, oh I see the fuel problem again, yes.
lawrence krauss ▲ ● ▼		The fuel problem.
lawrence krauss ▲ ● ▼		I mean you still got to have something that's accelerating you at 1G continuously for a year.
unidentified		Try.
		Yeah, but that makes an assumption that you're going to be accelerating the mass of something like a space shuttle.
		But what if you could reduce the mass and inertia that was required?
lawrence krauss ▲ ● ▼		Oh, absolutely.
		There's no doubt that the only sensible way to imagine sending things outside of our solar system to explore beyond it, it seems to me, especially if you want to do it in a reasonable time, is to have micro objects.
		You know, to to imagine intelligent ships that are minuscule in size.
		Because when it comes to interstellar travel, mass is the villain.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Nanotechnology, man.
lawrence krauss ▲ ● ▼		Nanotechnology is the only sensible way to consider doing that.
lawrence krauss ▲ ● ▼		I agree with you there completely.
unidentified		And the other one was teleportation.
		Now, I always heard that maybe the biggest problem with teleportation, apart from the amount of energy, was that the breaching of Heisenberg's uncertainty theory.
		But I'm not so sure that would happen, provided that you didn't actually extract the information of either location or direction of the things that have been teleported.
lawrence krauss ▲ ● ▼		Well, in fact, you were correct in the sense that it's not that they get around the Heisenberg.
		For your listeners, by the way, Heisenberg's uncertainty principle says I can never know where an atom is and what it's doing at the same time, basically.
		I can know one or the other exactly, but I can never know both exactly.
		And you'd kind of think if I want to reproduce something, I would have to know both exactly, right, at the atomic level.
		But in fact, these kind of teleportation experiments get around that by actually never measuring the configuration that they're trying to reproduce.
		At any point in the process, they never actually make a measurement.
		And therefore, the laws of nature allow it to be reconfigured exactly without you ever having had to measure it in the process.
		It seems like, again, a swindle, but it's a swindle that works.
		So I agree that that does not make teleportation of individual quantum states impossible because we've been able to do it.
		But unfortunately, all of my problems with transporting human-size objects continue to be existing.
unidentified		I agree with you.
unidentified		I mean, it's very, very difficult to imagine it scaled up to human size.
lawrence krauss ▲ ● ▼		Or anything beyond a very carefully prepared quantum mechanical system, which is generally of order atomic size.
unidentified		Sure.
		Thanks so much.
		And I have read your book.
lawrence krauss ▲ ● ▼		It's a very good book.
lawrence krauss ▲ ● ▼		Thank you.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Okay, take care.
		Speaking of books, you've written quite a few.
		Let's see.
		Let's see.
		Adam, a single oxygen atom's journey from the Big Bang to Life on Earth and Beyond.
		That would be your latest or your latest.
		Your latest, okay.
		And before that, Beyond Star Trek, Physics from Alien Invasions to the End of Time.
		Boy, you're good with titles.
		The Physics of Star Trek.
		So you were a Trekkie, huh?
lawrence krauss ▲ ● ▼		Well, I never dressed up, but I certainly watched it.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Quintessence, The Mystery of the Missing Mass, The Fifth Essence, The Search for Dark Matter in the Universe, and Fear of Physics, A Guide for the Perplexed.
		Very interesting.
		Star Trek was more than just another television show, wasn't it?
		I mean, somebody obviously had an awful lot of insight into that.
lawrence krauss ▲ ● ▼		You'd think so, but they really didn't.
		I mean, Gene Rodmury used to know a little bit, and they used to talk to people at JPL every now and then.
		And some of the people I've talked to, some of the writers, some of the art directors, like to read Scientific American.
		It's kind of amazing how often their intuition was very close to the real world, even when I think they really didn't know what they were doing.
		It's kind of amazing.
		One of my favorite examples is an early episode of Star Trek, one of the, I think the third episode, they go too close to the gravitational field of something that they call a black star, and they get sent back in time.
		And I remember looking at that and saying, well, that's okay.
		The writers didn't know the word is black hole, but they came pretty close.
		Then I checked the air date of the episode, and it aired about six months before the physicist John Wheeler invented the term black hole.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Isn't that interesting?
unidentified		So, you know, they almost invented the term.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		What about the replicator?
lawrence krauss ▲ ● ▼		Well, you know, the replicator is a version of the transporter that just works on omelets and that sort of thing.
lawrence krauss ▲ ● ▼		And it takes...
art bell ▲ ● ▼		That's right.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Hopefully accurately.
lawrence krauss ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, exactly.
lawrence krauss ▲ ● ▼		So why bother If I can take your pattern, I might as well just store a pattern and use some atoms from something else to recreate it, and I can make a cup of coffee or an omelette.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		There's something to think about.
		All right.
		Breakfast.
		We're going to take a break here at the bottom of the hour.
		We'll be right back with Professor Lawrence M. Krause.
		I'm Art Bell.
unidentified		I have been only fair of what I am.
		It's all clear to me now.
		Go, go, run by the wind.
		Throw time in a spin.
		I gave you love.
		I thought that we had made it to the top.
		I gave you all.
		I had to give.
		Why did 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.
		I'm not.
		Call our fell in the Kingdom of Nigh from West of the Rockies at 1-800-618-8255.
		East of the Rockies, 1-800-825-5033.
		First-time callers may recharge at 1-775-727-1222.
		And the wildcard line is open at 1-775-727-1295.
		To recharge on the toll-free international line, call your AT ⁇ T operator and have them dial 800-893-0903.
		This is Coast to Coast A.M. with Arpell from the Kingdom of God.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Lawrence M. Smith.
		And as I two months ago told you, he's written a large number of books.
		Very good, very interesting books.
		For the average person, obviously, when you title something Fear of Physics, A Guide for the Perplexed, you're writing it to the general public.
		So if you have an unnatural fear of physics, or even an unnatural interest, either way, it sounds to me like you want to begin there.
		If it's still in front of, I don't know, well ask Fear of Physics, A Guide for the Perplexed.
		I love the title.
		The Mysteries of the Universe.
		Occasionally when things just stop.
		We've had these audio gremlins around here for a while, and one of them just manifested its little ugly head.
		The audio just like stops.
		There's a guy named Murphy responsible for that sort of thing.
		Professor, you're back on the air once again.
lawrence krauss ▲ ● ▼		Nice to be there again.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		And it is nice to be back on.
		And I would like to, if I, you know, I ran a very interesting story in the first hour.
		There's a company.
		This may just be totally out of your field, but maybe you'd comment on it.
		It's called Applied Digital Solutions.
		And they've come along with the first implantable chip in human beings that will be used for, they say, security, going in and out of buildings and all sorts of applications in the private sector, even nuclear power plant security there and that kind of thing.
		You have a chip.
		In fact, they say you can even buy and sell things with it.
lawrence krauss ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, well, certainly I can imagine.
		I mean, we already sort of used chips for dogs, right?
		I mean, in a lot of places, it's a kind of identification for animals.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, but now they're offering a $50 discount to the first 100,000 people who go for the chip here.
lawrence krauss ▲ ● ▼		What's in it for the people?
		I shouldn't be an eternal skeptic.
		What's in it for the people?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, I don't know.
		Ease of payment.
		I mean, you don't have to carry credit cards or something.
		And then you pay a monthly $10 database maintenance charge.
		God knows what happens if you get it.
lawrence krauss ▲ ● ▼		I think you stop paying monthly fees.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Come back and get the chip.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		You know, society is moving in an interesting direction, isn't it?
lawrence krauss ▲ ● ▼		Well, yeah, I think it, well, I hope on good days, I think it is, yeah.
lawrence krauss ▲ ● ▼		I think the future, you know, there's going to be the next century is going to be full of incredible things, and it's also scary, too.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		So I interview a very interesting man like yourself named Dr. Michio Kaku.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I'm sure you know him.
lawrence krauss ▲ ● ▼		I know him.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I'm sure you know him.
		And he maintains that when you really press him to the wall, I mean, everybody tries to be an optimist, but he maintains when you press him to the wall that the odds of mankind surviving the discovery of element 92 and then on from there are really terrible.
		What do you think?
lawrence krauss ▲ ● ▼		Well, I think in order to imagine surviving and maintaining the kind of society we live in for any length of time is going to require a kind of concerted organization that I've never seen in human history before.
		I mean, we can't even get our act together and in response to global warming.
		We have an administration that can't even look beyond the next few years.
		And as a civilization, we're going to have to deal with, in 100 years, a loss of fossil fuels.
		And so it's hard to I hope that humanity will be able to coordinate itself, but it's easy to imagine many ways that it won't.
unidentified		And so, yeah, it's easy to be pessimistic.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right.
		Back to the lions.
		Wildcard line.
		Hello, you're on the air with Professor Krause.
unidentified		Yes.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Where are you?
unidentified		Carson City.
		Okay.
		Castle in your state.
		Yes, sir.
lawrence krauss ▲ ● ▼		I have a question about the theory of relativity.
unidentified		Okay.
		Now, everybody, when they explain it, they explain it as the ship leaving the Earth.
		And when it goes away, time slows down for the ship.
		What about when the ship one thing, what about when the ship returns?
		That's a good question.
lawrence krauss ▲ ● ▼		Well, it's a very good question.
		In fact, what I'm going to tell you is even more strange, okay?
		So be prepared.
		So when the ship's moving away, you look at it, and indeed it looks like that clock is slowing down compared to you.
		But you know, if you're sitting on the ship and you're looking back at the Earth, guess what you see?
		It looks like the clock on the Earth is traveling slow compared to your clock.
		It's completely reciprocal.
		So you might say, well, if that's the case, how can anyone age faster or slower than anyone else?
		It turns out that when the ship is traveling in one direction, it's completely reciprocal.
		When it's traveling back, it's again completely reciprocal.
		But it turns out all of the aging happens when it turns around.
		So, you know, it is absolutely true that if you traveled out at near the speed of light for 100 years and then came back for 100 years, the person on the ground would have aged 200 years, and you wouldn't have aged hardly at all.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, but you just said the aging occurs as you're turning around.
		Why?
		Why?
lawrence krauss ▲ ● ▼		Well, you have to take my physics class for me to tell you that.
		It's a little complicated to explain the radio, but it turns out that the actual ..
		Well, here's the way to sort of understand it.
		Galileo and Einstein told us that two objects moving relative to one another, you can never prove who's moving and who's standing still.
		If you've ever been on a train track and you look at the one nearby, you know, sometimes you don't know you're in a subway train whether you're moving or it's the one on the other side.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Right, of course.
lawrence krauss ▲ ● ▼		And it's absolutely true.
		The laws of physics tell us you cannot prove that you're absolutely standing still and someone else is moving.
		You're just moving relative to one another.
		so the two observers are exactly identical as long as they're moving in uniform velocity.
		But the time when they become different is when the other observer slows down and turns around.
		Because when you slow down, you experience a force, g-forces.
		You get pushed up against the steering wheel or you get pushed back into your seat when you speed up.
		And that's when you are different than the person on the ground.
		And that's therefore the time when all of the action happens.
		So that's what separates the two observers is one had to slow down and speed back up again in order to make the round trip.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		That's incredible.
		All right.
		East of the Rockies, you're on the air with Professor.
		Hello.
		Yes.
unidentified		Big fan, Ryan here in Kansas City.
unidentified		Kansas City.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Okay.
unidentified		I'm hoping to hear the doctor's thoughts on some really interesting issues.
		He's touched on one already.
		Maybe he can quickly go a little more in-depth on the uncertainty principle and talk about the role that observation itself plays in affecting the motion of particles, but also ambient energy and how that might eliminate the need for taking fuel along on some trip that we take through space, but also here at home, you know, eliminate the need for fuel here as well.
lawrence krauss ▲ ● ▼		Well, those are all interesting questions.
		Let me see.
		Well, let me hit the Heisenberg one first.
		It is absolutely true within quantum mechanics, when you observe a system, when you measure it, you change it.
		And again, it's absolutely crazy.
		Take that electron I was talking about earlier.
		Remember I said if you just measured at the beginning and the end, it didn't take just one trajectory between them.
		It took many.
		But if you actually observe it all the way along, you'll observe it to take only one.
		So you're actually changing things by observing it.
		And again, this isn't science fiction.
		We can measure it with real elementary particles.
		They behave differently if you measure them when they're going from one place to another than if you don't measure them.
		And it is strange indeed.
		Now, as far as the ambient energy issue, in terms of interstellar travel or even travel within our solar system, you're absolutely right that not having the fuel on board a spacecraft saves you tremendously.
		Because if you carry the fuel on board, then you need yet more fuel because the fuel weighs stuff.
		You need more fuel to transport the fuel, right?
		And it's a vicious cycle.
		So if you can somehow beam energy or use energy from cosmic magnetic fields or something else to help power a spacecraft or solar sails, it is a much more efficient way of traveling throughout space.
		Now as far as ambient energy on Earth, well, the best kind of ambient energy, of course, is the sun.
		And it's kind of sad and strange that we don't utilize that more.
		We do indirectly with our fossil fuels.
		It was solar energy that stored all those years in the fossil fuels.
		But one of the most sensible things to do would be, in fact, to recognize that the sun is a great source of energy and to try and utilize solar energy a lot more effectively than we are.
		And the amount of energy we would save by using solar energy would cost much less than the amount of energy required to build new power plants.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		And Professor, why do you think we're not right now on a mad scramble to utilize solar energy before it's too late?
		Why are we not doing that now?
		Why haven't we been doing that for quite some time?
lawrence krauss ▲ ● ▼		Well, I guess I would have to say part of it is due to the fact that people like the President of the United States ran an oil company and there's a lot of money to be made in oil.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		No.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		It couldn't be that, could it?
lawrence krauss ▲ ● ▼		I'm afraid money runs the world in science fiction and in reality as well.
unidentified		Well, hey, speaking of the solar energy, it's brought up another question.
		Really quickly, how much did it cost for you to outfit your home with the solar panels, I understand you have, too?
		Yes, sir.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, too much.
		It costs about $50,000.
		I did.
		I actually got off the grid, Professor.
		I put up solar panels and wind generators and all the rest of it.
		And the problem with it is, of course, that it's a nice thing to do, but it's not practical.
		In order for me to ever see a return on what I did, I'd grow old and gray and dead, and my children would have something of a life, and they still wouldn't see a recovery.
lawrence krauss ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, it's not practical now, but of course, if there was a market for everyone to do it, you can be bet the cost would be a lot less, right?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, I guess the market doesn't get generated until the price goes way up.
lawrence krauss ▲ ● ▼		Well, you know, I think it's a cycle.
		I think if there was, first of all, obviously more R ⁇ D being put in, the cost would be less.
		But I also think if there was a potential to sell to a huge market, you'd see the cost for there.
		Oh, yes.
		But on the other hand, there are a lot of people who don't outfit their whole house, but for a reasonable price, certainly reduce their fuel bills.
		One of my colleagues has, even in Cleveland, which certainly doesn't see the sun like you see the sun where you are, even there, still ends up reducing his power bill.
		And his cost is more like $2,000 to $5,000.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		West of the Rockies, you're on the air with Professor Lawrence M. Kraus.
lawrence krauss ▲ ● ▼		Hello.
unidentified		Hi, Dr. Krauss.
lawrence krauss ▲ ● ▼		Hi.
unidentified		Hi.
		I have a question about another one of Einstein's theories that's called frame dragging.
		It has to do with that Frank Tipler, who I think was a mathematician.
		Yeah, he had a solution to Einstein's frame dragging that if you were to travel around supposedly three lined-up neutron stars that were traveling, spinning extremely fast, that you'd, in a sense, have a time machine.
		But my, you know, I know that you said that it would be really hard to go out and build wormholes and these sorts of devices because you had energy involved, right?
		So what about instead of an actual Machine traveling in these four-dimensional spirals instead of sending radio signals, suppose like bouncing it around the event horizon of a nearby black hole.
		Does that make any sense?
		Well, no.
lawrence krauss ▲ ● ▼		In the sense that, I mean, a black hole alone is not exotic enough to allow, I mean, it's a very exotic object.
		But a black hole alone is certainly not exotic enough within the context of general relativity to allow time travel.
		Certainly not outside the black hole.
		What happens when you get inside the black hole, eventually all bets are off because near the singularity, the center, again, the laws of physics break down, so I can't say what happens.
		But you don't want to fall in a black hole if you're, you know, if you care about the future.
		You probably want to stay outside of it.
		And there we can solve the equations and a single black hole, nothing you do around a single black hole will allow time travel.
		You need really exotic configurations.
		And people have thought of them and imagined the possibilities, and maybe those possibilities do exist in the universe.
		We don't know.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		And in our lifetimes, we likely will not know, will we?
lawrence krauss ▲ ● ▼		Yes, I think that's a true statement.
		We likely will not know.
		But of course, you never know what's around the corner.
		I mean, that's why people like me go into work every day.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Is it possible, Professor?
		I've been told that the so-called theory of everything might be, I don't know, short as your thumb.
		Might be some short little equation that will suddenly open all the doors.
lawrence krauss ▲ ● ▼		Well, what's remarkable about physics is that eventually something that appears to be complicated, when you understand it correctly, is usually can be understood pretty simply.
		And so there may be a theory of everything that is, you know, you could put on a t-shirt.
		Maybe.
		We'll see.
		I'm not going to bet on it, but it's a possibility.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Wildcard line, you're on the air with Professor Kraus.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Hello.
unidentified		Hi, yeah, my name's Claudia.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Claudia, I can barely hear you.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		You're going to have to yell at us, huh?
unidentified		I'm from South Lake Tahoe.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		South Lake Tahoe.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right, I can barely hear you, so go ahead.
unidentified		Oh, okay.
		I have kind of a theory, but it's in a spiritual sense to get through that wormhole.
		If the universe can be traveled by out-of-body, you know, experience like astral traveling, which is when the body is like returning to the spirit body, say the matter turns into energy, which then turns into the light body with consciousness, right?
		And then the light body with consciousness could endure the speed of light through the lighthouse, right?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right.
		Well, let's boil all this down to a broader question, and that is, Professor, isn't it possible with the directions that we're moving that one day science will, in effect, meet religion in some way?
		In the sense that we are, of course, energy.
		We have energy, and that energy does not, of course, cease to exist.
		It continues in some form or another, in some way or another.
		And is it not plausible that there's some sort of conscious continuance?
unidentified		Well, it's a bad question here.
lawrence krauss ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, as the other question was, I think I have to say that this astral stuff doesn't hold water when it comes to the laws of physics as we know it.
		But the idea of whether consciousness could exist, again, there's no if you if you're it is a reasonable postulate, although we don't know for sure, but it is not unreasonable to imagine that we are nothing other than the sum of our electrons and protons and that our thoughts are, you know, it's all chemistry.
		And if that's the case, when the chemistry ceases, we cease, just like when you unplug the computer, just like all the computers that are sitting around me dead right now because I have no power here.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		You still have no power.
lawrence krauss ▲ ● ▼		I still have no power.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Through the entire program.
lawrence krauss ▲ ● ▼		No power.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		That's amazing.
lawrence krauss ▲ ● ▼		That's amazing.
lawrence krauss ▲ ● ▼		And so I would bet that that's the case, that you turn off the power and the consciousness goes just like the computers do.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		So if you had been the scientist sitting in the seat that Jodie Foster sat in, getting the question that was going to get you the ride, you'd be staying home.
lawrence krauss ▲ ● ▼		Well, yeah, I guess I would, yeah.
		I guess I'd be, yeah.
		Carl Sagan and I kind of shared that, I think.
		And I think it's just, well, it's the I what amazes me about the world is that we can understand so much of it and it's miraculously interesting with simple laws of physics.
		And I have not yet seen any evidence to go beyond the laws of physics into anything supernatural to understand anything I've ever studied in my life.
		That doesn't mean it doesn't exist.
		It just doesn't mean that I haven't seen any evidence for anything.
		And so therefore unless there's some evidence, I'm the eternal skeptic, I think.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, there are some very legitimate scientists that have suggested that the evidence of UFOs, while shaky in its bulk, at some point, at some small percentage, justifies a very scientific inquiry, perhaps even demands one.
lawrence krauss ▲ ● ▼		Well, I think scientific inquiry into anything is a good thing.
		I think what I understand of this situation is that people say there are some things that, I mean, many things can be easily explained away.
		Other things cannot be so easily explained away.
		But that doesn't make them likely.
		It just means that no obvious explanation, and you have to look for less obvious explanations.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Which is what science does.
		Yeah.
		We're at the end of the interview.
		Professor, it has been an absolute pleasure.
		I hope everybody goes and researches on the web and buys your books.
lawrence krauss ▲ ● ▼		It's been a pleasure for me.
unidentified		Go to it.
lawrence krauss ▲ ● ▼		even here in the dark, professor.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Go to the light.
		Go to the light.
		Good night.
lawrence krauss ▲ ● ▼		Good night.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I guess that's it for tonight.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		From the high desert, I'm Art Bell.

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