Dr. Michio Kaku joins Art Bell to dissect the looming Iraq War, questioning Saddam Hussein’s alleged WMDs and the UN’s weakened authority after decades of failed resolutions. He warns of nuclear-armed Pakistan’s instability—20 Hiroshima-sized weapons—and oil-driven U.S. policy risks, advocating a solar hydrogen economy. Shifting to physics, Kaku explores negative matter for wormholes, reviving ancient microbes, and cloning’s ethical pitfalls while defending stem cell research. The conversation touches on black holes merging in distant galaxies and Earth’s future climate instability from the moon’s receding gravity. Bell’s retirement looms as Kaku cautions humanity’s slow progress toward a Type 1 civilization amid crises like nuclear proliferation and fossil fuel dependence, underscoring the fragility of global stability. [Automatically generated summary]
I think it's appropriate as we look at the world news that we talk about war because we're about to have one.
Now, I know there's a lot of people out there under the impression that we're not going to have a war because they heard that Iraq caved in and served up, you know, the 12,000 pages of information.
And so a lot of people thought, oh, gee, great, no war.
Don't kid yourself.
There's about to be a war.
There's about to be a war.
It's for sure.
Iraq is preparing to destroy its own oil fields, is the news tonight.
Water supplies, power plants blame everything on the U.S. and our bombing during the war that they also know is coming.
In fact, the stock market knows war is coming.
Everybody knows the war is coming.
So they'll blame us.
The officials briefing reporters at the Pentagon said they have evidence that Iraqi President Saddam Hussein has plans to wreck his own infrastructure to force a humanitarian crisis and turn international opinion against the U.S. and the British in advance as we advance into his territory that we are just raping and pillaging as we go.
Saddam Hussein missed his last chance to come clean with the world, according to the White House, on Wednesday.
Another key sign, war is coming.
His last chance has blown his last chance.
This is President Bush.
The president, in fact, is debating whether to formally declare Iraq in violation of a UN arms resolution that threatened war unless Saddam disarms.
In a series of meetings, President and his advisors swung back and forth on the issue of whether Iraq is in material breach of the UN or not.
So they're debating that in the White House, whether they're really in violation or holy mackerel.
You know, this is war we're talking about here.
And, you know, a lot of people understand that what we're doing with the United Nations now is just a little dance.
You know, we're doing a little political dance for the world stage so all the players can sit out there and watch us go through the formal paperwork kind of motions of getting this done.
But, all right, here's the part that I don't get and the part that I would like you to comment.
I've got more war stories.
I mean, it's coming.
It's about, you know, Britain is mobilizing their troops right now.
We're within, could be within days or more likely weeks of war.
Not very many weeks either.
it's coming pretty quick I was wondering, they haven't really, we would be going to war, I presume, to rush in and destroy the weapons of mass destruction that we must know that he has.
I mean, that's what we're saying, right?
Or we think that he has.
Which is it?
The UN they haven't found anything yet.
Well, hey, big surprise there, right?
And already they're making noises as though the report has nothing in it that is a material breach or is in fact a material breach.
And then others are apparently in the administration and saying, no, is that the best?
Is that going to be as good as it gets?
You know, what I want to know is from you, what do you think about war?
Are you willing for the United States, our country, to go to war very soon now, by the way, if you specifically don't understand why you're going to war?
That's my question.
Are you still willing to commit to war?
Are you willing to, on the word of the president who would say they are in material violation, or we have decided they're in material violation, would that be enough for you personally to send your son or your daughter to war?
Would that be enough for you to pick up a gun and kill if you had to?
You know, I'm willing to acknowledge there may be a need for this war, you know, but they haven't laid it out yet.
Not specifically.
What the hell do we know?
I think we should be told that.
I'm not saying there shouldn't be a war.
If we know he's got atomic bombs or we know he's got a virus or something or another that could go around the world, destroy the entire world, at least destroy a good part of the U.S. and millions of our citizens, and we know he's going to use it, then let's go get him.
I'm all for that.
But, you know, they haven't told us yet.
Usually you get to understand the basic reason for a war.
And I mean specifically why you're going to have a war.
In this case, we're going to go and attack them.
Or you might view it as a continuation of the last war.
I don't know.
But we are certainly going to launch great numbers of lives into the next world.
We are going to launch many dollars into the ether to send those people into the next world.
Some of the people going into the next world, they're going to be our people.
Maybe even a bunch.
I notice CNN, for example, now is beginning to have things about how the U.S. is going to attack Iraq.
You know, what our strategy is going to be.
We're going to go in and, in essence, I guess, try to behead them.
It's what you do in most wars, I suppose, right?
You take the top off.
The government put Britain - this is from the London Times online: the government put Britain's armed forces onto a war footing yesterday, telling troops, reservists, and munitions manufacturers to get ready for conflict with Iraq.
With the UN Security Council preparing to discuss President Saddam Hussein's 12,000 paid weapons declaration, the Ministry of Defense finally switched, listen to these words, from contingency planning to deployment.
Those are serious words.
That means they're beginning to move things and troops.
The British are beginning to move things and troops.
Thousands of reservists, rather, mainly in the medical field, have been approached to make sure that they'll be available for call-up if and when required.
So Britain is already on the move, tactically already on the move.
And again, this may be an impertinent question, but I'm not sure it's not one we all have a right to ask, if not demand to have answered, and that is specifically why we're going to war.
I mean, what the hell?
Let's have the answer.
What is it?
Did we give them things?
Is that why we're not being told?
Did we give them things that without question they can now use to kill millions of Americans?
Is that why we're not saying?
Or do we have intelligence, I could understand this, for example, of certain facilities located in certain places in Iraq that we wouldn't want to make public where we know exactly what they're doing.
I just would like to be told, at least as specifically as possible, why we're going to war.
And I'm not sure that I've received that information yet.
So, you know, countries, they usually know why they're going to war, right?
It's not that I'm against it necessarily, because I may well be for it, but we just haven't received the evidence, and that's my complaint right now.
It may be forthcoming.
It may be when the president responds to their 12,000 pages of fiction, you know, that he'll specifically tell us, but it hasn't happened yet, despite an awful lot of strong political pressure to cause it to occur.
So I'm watching, and I'm asking, and I'm asking you, you know, whether you're willing for you and your country to go to war and kill or be killed in order to accomplish a goal that you're not specifically aware of, only generally.
I would like your comments on war, if you get a second, how you feel about it.
I don't think it'll be a problem getting comments out there.
And I think I'd like to have you answer my critical question.
And one last time.
I think it's really simple and straightforward.
Are you willing to go to war if you specifically don't understand why?
That's my question.
That's a pretty good question, isn't it?
This is kind of interesting.
Officials at one of the nation's two main Marine Corps training centers are trying to figure out and control an outbreak of a bacteria that has now sickened more than 100 recruits, possibly killed an 18-year-old private.
My gosh, the outbreak of Strepococcus A that began at the Marine Corps recruit depot last week prompted the base to now suspend all strenuous physical activity for all 3,000 recruits until at least Thursday when the men's health will be re-evaluated.
Major General Jan Hulley, the depot's commanding officer, said Monday he ordered the training suspension rather to prevent more recruits and instructors from overexerting themselves and getting sick.
Let's give him a chance, said the general.
I'd rather err on the side of safety.
The action coming less than 24 hours after Private Miguel Zavala of Greenland died of a bacterial infection.
He had sought treatment for a rash, get this, that quickly spread over his entire body.
He died within hours.
He died within hours.
You think about that.
You get a little rash over here.
And pretty soon, in minutes, it's here.
And then pretty soon within a very short time indeed, your entire body is covered in rashes and you are dying.
That's what this thing does.
Pretty bad, huh?
Pretty bad stuff.
Oh, here's an interesting story.
Within ice that covers a salty, liquid Antarctic lake, scientists have found and revived microbes that were at least 2,800 years old.
Oh, my.
The discovery announced today points to probable life within the underground lake there and suggests at the Antarctic now, an underground lake.
And they're, I mean, on the one hand, here we're having trouble with all kinds of new diseases and weird stuff in this country right now.
God knows enough is going on, right?
and so we're drilling down in the ice to great depths at the bottom of a frozen lake in the antarctic and we're dragging things up and melting them and he's been back to life uh...
that guy kind of a Because if we're not there, it wouldn't matter anyway.
Headline in the science journal Nature is record melt in Arctic and Greenland.
So you see, even if we don't go up there and hurry the thing along with our little stoves, it's going to melt all on its own anyhow.
Ice covering the Arctic Ocean and Greenland shrank by record amounts this summer, new research shows.
The rise, and I shouldn't left, the rise in seasonal melting has led some experts to estimate that 20% of the Arctic Sea could be lost, gone, gone, gone by 2050.
2050, that means that a lot of you alive right now may well see the Arctic, you know, all the ice in the Arctic start to melt, and there we will have a brand new sea.
Now, you know, so that's the kind of change that's, you know, they now know is underway.
It's melting.
So if these little things aren't freed by those who are going up to dig them up right now, it might not matter.
Because it looks like Mother Nature is going to uncover them and melt them anyway.
That will have meaning for us, folks.
All right, listen.
There are a number of things that you should see on the website tonight.
The first one is funny.
And it's under More Fun Photos.
And this is one sent to me this week.
Somebody sent me this.
I thought it was a riot.
The question is, what exactly is a son of a bitch?
And the answer actually is here.
As they say in the little heading here, a picture is worth a thousand words.
In this case, it absolutely is.
You've got to really see this picture.
And I'm sure you would agree with that extreme character, right?
Son of a bitch.
That's a bad thing to call somebody, right?
But it just, it applies here.
And when you see the photograph, you will know that's at artbell.com.
No question about it.
So that's up there.
Keith has written a farewell message to all, and I think that's worth the read.
He's been with me, as you know, for years.
Again, a little plug for the CD of the website.
The website's going away forever.
And as the program ends, as I retire December 31st, going into, I might add, the new year, I will be broadcasting into the new year by hours at least.
2003 on the way.
unidentified
So I'll carry you right on through the end of this year.
Anyway, the website's going away, and there is a commemorative CD that you can check out available of this website and all its years of really fine service to this program.
And so I suggest you read the message.
Then there's also the next item down.
What I've been doing lately with ham radio here is pretty cool and pretty fun.
And I just started fooling with it the other day.
And it's called Slow Scan TV.
And we're playing with it on 75 meters, usually around for you hams out there, usually around 3845, something like that, which is the designated frequency for that kind of thing there.
The other day I got on 20 meters, and I was just beginning with this.
What it allows you to do is send still pictures of a sort over radio, over radio.
And so here I was sitting on the 20-meter band in the middle of the day, actually toward afternoon, to be totally honest, toward afternoon, late afternoon, and this fellow comes on frequency and says, let me send you a picture.
That's right.
Again, we can send pictures now over hem radio.
And I said, okay, what's your call?
Where are you?
He said, let it be a surprise.
You know, I said, okay, fire away.
So he cranked up and let her go.
And this picture is up there.
It was a fellow named Gerald in South Africa, in Johannesburg, South Africa.
And he said hi to me with the picture.
And conditions weren't great.
So there's a little noise there in the picture, which you will see.
But that came to me by radio, not over the internet, by radio, straight from Johannesburg, South Africa.
And I thought that was pretty cool.
So I put that picture up on the website.
You can go take a look if you would like.
There's a whole bunch of things up at the website to see right now at artbell.com.
There's also a new ghost photograph up there.
And, you know, I've just been getting, I don't know why, I honestly don't know why I've been getting so many good ghost photographs, but I have.
They just, they come rolling in, and I mean high-quality ones.
So you want to take a look up there.
This, I think, is, in view of the war and what's going on with the scientists who are digging up the bacterial life and all the rest.
This just goes right down that alley.
Are you ready?
Several scientists got together and decided they could do anything that God could do.
Oh, they could change weather and create life and so forth.
They met with God, the scientists did, and told him he could leave.
We didn't need him anymore.
God said, well then, okay, let's have a contest.
The one that makes man first wins.
If I win, I stay.
if you win, I'll leave.
The scientists all agreed.
God reached down and picked up a handful of dirt.
The scientists reached down and picked up a handful of dirt.
I despise, cause it means the structure of this life.
What do you tell about the love that I have?
When I'm going to fight and lose their life?
I said, what?
It don't come easy You know it don't come easy It don't come easy You know it don't come easy I'll just leave you if you want to see the blue Like you know it don't come easy You don't have to shout I'll just leave you if
I can't even play them easy Forget about the past And all your sorrow If the future will last It will soon be over tomorrow Call Art Bell 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 rechart 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 Dai.
About a month ago, somebody called in, and it really shook me to the core when he said it's very possible Saddam Hussein is playing a game that years ago he moved all his weapons, the big ones, to Sudan, to safe havens and he can bring them back anytime he wants.
And that has, asking anyone in the audience, please call in about this.
Has anybody in our leadership, the military, our country or our allies, taken this into account and planning to reverse the proliferation in Iraq?
You know, I think my point was that none of us know for sure.
We don't know.
They haven't told us yet exactly what he's got or what we know that's causing us to go to war.
And that's a pretty serious thing.
We don't know why we're going to war.
unidentified
Make us so much like Saddam Hussein to play this trick and take us where sucker and we're doing all these dance with him to find the weapons and there's just absolutely nothing there.
It's all out of the country and he has any number of ways but Sunday to bring him back in when he needs them.
there's no use denying it in the world when you look around at the various nations we're actually Would you say we're at the head of the class?
Would you say we're just behind others who make war more frequently?
We make quite a bit of war.
unidentified
Well, you know, I don't know if you heard Nelson Mandela say maybe a month or two ago that he thought that the United States was the greatest threat to peace in the world today.
that.
Yeah, well, you know, I'm not saying I agree or disagree.
Well, actually, I probably do agree.
But I think you're being fed a line.
You're being fed a line.
The same kind of hooey that Lyndon Johnson sent you back in 1964 over the Gulf of Tonkin incident, which was hardly an incident at all.
I think you're being fed by W. When we are told that one of our major assets, as in an aircraft carrier or a large ship, you know, like a prime asset of this country, was fired on by another nation, that's definitely war.
On the other hand, when you crash airplanes into big buildings and kill thousands, that's war, too.
unidentified
Yeah, but you have no proof that Iraq had anything to do with that.
Yeah, my father once called our Prime Minister, former Prime Minister Brian Mulroney, a Lick Spittle in terms of the way he did Liz Little Dance with Ronald Reagan.
If it is proven to your satisfaction that they have big-time weapons of mass destruction, and I said proven to your satisfaction, does that then justify the war ahead at that point?
unidentified
Well, you know, what if North Korea's got them, too?
Well, okay, but you do at least admit that in your case, even if the answer were that they had these horrible weapons, you still wouldn't justify them.
unidentified
Well, I think he's more likely to use them if you invade Iraq.
He hasn't done anything in over 10 years now.
He's basically been effectively caged in.
And so why all of a sudden now is he this big threat?
Well, all I can say is that there is people up there that know things that we don't know.
And damn it, I do agree, you know, see, I'm not against the war.
Not if they have weapons of mass destruction and the will to use them.
And that'd be stuff our CIA would know about.
History is he has used them.
So he really hates us a lot.
And so the odds are he would use them.
Now, Cohner points out, you know, in the case of a war, he's definitely going to use what he's got, whatever it is.
that's a good point.
Other side of the coin, if they definitely know he would use some terrible weapon against us as soon as he's able to then they try the nine eleven situation back to iraq in any way to all you know financing whatever we see this is information i think everybody But this is information that I think everybody has a right to know.
I guess my question was, first of all, I think you did make a really valid point in that something that they know that they don't want to tell us because they think that we supplied it to them.
I think it's that combined with it is a personal vendetta.
And I don't think that can be completely overlooked.
You really are saying that after everything else, part of the reason we're about to have a war is because Bush hates Saddam.
Now, you can't really mean that, can you?
unidentified
Well, I think Saddam played a part in ending his father's political career, although his points were high.
If you look at how those points went, the fact that he didn't oust Saddam after the victory of the war set in for a while in the United States, I think after we looked at the dust settled, we went, he's still in power.
And I do make a prediction, Art, and I'm not happy about this, but I think he's going to outlast another Bush.
So the implication, if what you and others are saying is true, and you are admittedly an awfully small sample so far, there would be a big anti-war contingent suddenly, wouldn't there?
If it's not laid out for us, there'd be a whole big anti-war thing out there, huh?
unidentified
I think there is an anti-war sentiment, but I think that we know that we have two energy people in leading our government.
I'm just agreeing with everything everybody else has said so far.
It's kind of interesting.
We're kind of anti-war, but we would probably rather see some individual beef snuck into the country and take out the old Saddam Hussein and not get anybody else involved.
Well, as a matter of fact, I think the other day the president saw something saying, if you can find, you know, whoever blew up the buildings in New York and Pagan, why go ahead and kill them.
You know, though other columns mentioned the Gulf of Tonkin.
It's true, it never happened.
You know, the whole Gulf of Tonkin thing was made up to start the war.
Everybody's certainly known that.
But maybe they're finally going to end the facade, and they're going to just go ahead and go to war for no reason at all.
Or at least no real true given reason.
even if it's a lie.
unidentified
Yeah, that sounds like...
You know, I mean, we try to elect presidents to sort of look after the interest of the common man, and all our common men are over there getting ready to get themselves killed, and we're sort of not even knowing what we're going for.
I was there in the 60s and I was wondering what we were going to Vietnam for today.
So it would be your opinion that there would be a big...
unidentified
Well, yes.
I don't know that anybody cares to listen, and I think there are a lot of people in this country that'll go along with whatever they're told to go along with, and that scares me because the 60s weren't like that.
You know, people were not afraid to speak up, and now if you speak up, you're in trouble.
You're about to have an encounter with one of the best minds in the world, that of Dr. Michiu Kaku.
Dr. Kaku is an internationally recognized authority in theoretical physics, also the environment.
He holds the Henry Summit, I believe it's not, a professorship in theoretical physics at City College and the Graduate Center of the City of University New York.
His goal is to help complete Einstein's dream of a theory of everything, a single question, perhaps no longer than one inch, that'll unify all the fundamental forces in the universe.
He's lectured around the world.
His PhD-level textbooks are required reading many of the top physics labs across the world.
He's written nine books now.
Last two books, Hyperspace and Visions.
They became international bestsellers.
They're widely translated into all kinds of different languages.
He hosts a weekly one-hour-long radio program on science on several big stations about the country.
His commentaries on science can be heard on 60 radio stations nationwide.
He graduated from Harvard, 68, Summa Kum Laut, number one in his physics class.
Number one, received his Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley Radiation Lab in 72, held a lectureship at Princeton in 73, joined the faculty at City University of New York, where he's been a professor of theoretical physics for 25 years.
He's been a visiting professor at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton and also New York University.
In a moment, you know, he didn't hear the first hour we just did, so I thought we'd ask him the same question y'all just tried to answer.
All right, I'm going to lay it out for you, and I'm going to ask you just the way I ask the audience.
Right now, if you read tonight's news, let's see, there's a story about Iraq planning to destroy all its oil fields, food supplies, power plants, kill a bunch of civilians, and then blame the whole damn thing on the U.S. bombing should a war begin.
There is another story about our president who says now Saddam has missed his last chance to come clean with the world, and they're saying that there may be a material breach.
You know, in the 12,000-page document turned over, they found a material, or they're arguing about whether there's a material breach.
It looks like president's going to war.
Gold just went higher than it's been in a whole long time.
The economy is in very tough shape, anticipating the war.
Seems like war is absolutely inevitable.
We're doing this little dance with the UN.
But, you know, Britain is actually beginning to mobilize their troops now.
It looks certainly like war to me.
And so I was asking my audience the following question.
I think it's a really good one.
So far, I've heard it said that Saddam has weapons of mass destruction or might have them or something.
But we haven't been shown the proof of that specifically yet.
I sort of feel that if he's got them and we know he's got the intent to use them, then there might be justification for us to be going to war.
But if people aren't told actually why they're going to war, I don't know that they'll like that.
And history has shown that the American people don't like it when we go to war and we don't understand fully why we're doing it.
That's a pretty good precedent back there in Vietnam.
So my question to you is, are you willing to support this country, America, going to war against Iraq, even though you do not specifically understand why we're doing it?
In other words, we know what they've got, even if we gave it to them or some stupid thing like that, whatever.
Do you have enough information now to say we should be going to war?
You know, as Winston Churchill once said, if you're about to go to war, you have to understand the full consequences of what you're unleashing on the world.
Two things.
First of all, there could be a backlash against us throughout the Middle East, even bigger than the one that already exists.
And just remember that Pakistan is just barely holding on right now with the pro-Western government.
And if the government of Pakistan is ever toppled, just remember that they have about 20 nuclear weapons in Pakistan.
You can stop talking about half-assembled or quarter-assembled atomic bombs or pieces of atomic bombs.
Pakistan has about 20 fully assembled atomic bombs that could fall into the wrong hands.
About five of them or so were detonated several years ago in the face of India's nuclear weapons just to prove to the world that Pakistan can, in fact, detonate Hiroshima-sized atomic bombs.
And so far, it's been relatively stable for the West.
So I think we have to look at the second big issue, not just the consequences of what happened to Jordan, Egypt, and Pakistan get destabilized.
We also have to look at the 800-pound guerrilla in the room.
Let's not dance around this or that.
Let's talk about what's really at stake, and that is oil.
That's how we got into this mess when Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait to take control of the oil supplies in that area.
It's really about oil.
That is the architecture of our U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East.
That's what it's all about.
And my particular point of view is that we should gradually wean ourselves away from oil.
Oil gets us into big trouble.
Oil exacerbates the greenhouse effect with global warming.
Oil also puts us in bed with dictatorships like the one in Egypt and feudal monarchies like the one in Saudi Arabia.
Oil gets us into big trouble because that's what this whole war is really all about when Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait about 10 years ago.
And that's why I think that what we really ought to do, if we're really serious about this, we really ought to embark upon a national program to start to get into a solar hydrogen economy.
A solar hydrogen economy would make us less dependent on the most unstable regions of the world.
I can't think of a region of the world more unstable than the Middle East.
Yeah, however, that's because it has to be jump-started by mass production.
Take a look at nuclear energy.
The only reason why nuclear energy got off the ground is because the U.S. federal government subsidized, to the tune of about $100 billion, research and reactor safety, the nuclear fuel cycle, and jump-started nuclear.
The same thing with solar hydrogen.
If you give tax credits and research and you jump-start this technology, then you could begin to create a mass-produced technology which would reduce the cost by about 50% and make solar hydrogen competitive with electricity coming from the Middle East.
In other words, I think that we will go into a solar hydrogen era, not because we want to, but because there's going to be massive instability in the world, which will force us to go to a solar hydrogen economy.
I think there could be massive disruptions in oil, and it could be a real wake-up call when we realize that the feudal monarchies of the Middle East that have been reasonably stable in terms of giving us the oil, they may begin to listen to the angry voices out there in the mosques.
And when that happens, they may decide to turn off that spigot for a while just to see us squirm.
And at that point, we're going to say to ourselves, oh my God, we should really think about the solar hydrogen alternative rather than being so dependent on oil from the most unstable region of the world.
All right, well, let me just circle back to the question so it doesn't get lost because we're going down a lot of good places, but I really do want to get an answer to you.
And that is, do you, either publicly or through private channels, know enough so that you would say are going to war against Saddam Hussein to go In and ostensibly destroy whatever weapons of mass destruction he has, whatever it is we're going to do in Iraq.
Do you know enough that you would say a war is just fine?
Well, I've been reading everything I can about what's there.
So far, there is unanimous agreement among nuclear experts that Saddam Hussein does not have a nuclear infrastructure.
It was pretty much dismantled during the last Gulf War of 91.
Whether or not he has chemical or biological weapons, it's much more difficult because, of course, you could put a lot inside a vial of liquid, and the infrastructure is much smaller.
Yeah, that's pretty much a universal consensus between hawks and doves that he just does not have a nuclear infrastructure because, of course, it require billions of dollars to maintain this, to enrich uranium and process plutonium.
Chemical and biological weapons, you get into a gray area.
And I personally, to answer your question, I personally am not totally convinced that we have the smoking gun.
In other words, we don't need a lot of bluster.
We need just one solid fact.
One solid fact to convince the man in the street, especially the men in the mosques, to convince these people that Saddam Hussein has been cheating his pets off.
And I haven't seen it yet.
Now, that doesn't mean that he hasn't been cheating.
No, he cheated before.
All I'm saying is that I haven't yet seen the smoking gun.
She was on the news that we were on here at the top of the hour saying, you know, how, well, you know, I wouldn't hesitate for a second to get my children's smallpox vaccines.
And so when the First Lady says something like that, that probably means something.
Yes, I think we're paying the price in some sense for the excesses of the Cold War.
The only place where Saddam Hussein might have gotten some smallpox is from a renegade doctor in the Soviet Union.
And I think that's one of the prices we now pay for all the scientific devilry that was cooked up during the Cold War between the Soviet Union and the United States.
With the Soviet Union breaking apart, A lot of that technology is slowly leaking out.
And I think that let's hope that we can contain some of these renegade scientists and materials from leaking out of the Soviet Union anymore.
And we had this outbreak years ago that was contained by a massive, absolutely massive vaccination program.
It was initiated almost immediately.
And it shows that, yes, if you have the will and you have the dollars and you're willing to vaccinate hundreds of thousands of people almost instantly, then perhaps you can contain an outbreak.
However, if someone were to deliberately infect a nation that is unprotected, it could be a problem.
Well, you know, I mean, if you were Saddam Hussein, or if I were Saddam Hussein, right, the thinking is that he probably has sleeper agents around the world to unleash all sorts of devilry just to spite the United States and get back at the United States when he's cornered.
I mean, a cornered rat will do all sorts of strange things if it's not.
As Winston Terschall said, when you go to war, you have to know the consequences of the forces that you are unleashing.
And Saddam Hussein, if he's cornered, well, during the last war, we now know that he did not unleash a lot of the chemical weapons and biological weapons that he had because, of course, that would be the coup de grace and that would be the end of Saddam Hussein.
So he held back.
This time, knowing that he's going to die, knowing that he's going to go down, he's not going to hold back.
And we have to understand the consequences of this, both politically, in terms of the stability of Pakistan and Jordan and Egypt and Saudi Arabia, but also militarily in terms of the fact that this corner dictator could at least lots of stuff if he knows that he's going to go down too.
On December 15th, CNN reported a large triangular object hovering over Baghdad, I am told.
Now, that's very interesting.
Isn't that interesting?
In fact, I actually managed to get a camera shot, I understand, of something triangular hovering over Baghdad.
Not to be confused with the green tracers that were fired at it, but somebody saw something just hovering, described as looking like the Phoenix lights over Baghdad.
I thought that was pretty interesting stuff.
You've got to wonder about the kind of craft we have.
I don't wonder.
i saw one of these things close up myself you know it either was divine gravity or I saw one of them out here, though, and they put something over Baghdad.
I mean, is there little question in your mind, Professor, that war, in fact, war is coming?
Well, the biggest change between now and what happened in 91 is the fact that our munitions, rather cheaply, $20,000 a piece, can be outfitted with GPS positioning devices.
Back in 91, things were done by lasers, and if it was smoky or it was foggy, the cloud cover would disperse the laser beam.
Lasers don't go very well through fog.
However, radio does, and GPS systems can walk onto satellites.
And these GPS devices are very cheap.
They only cost about $20,000.
And you could take a dumb bomb and, quote, make them smart by inserting one of these portable GPS positioning devices on them.
And so about 10% of our munitions dropped during the Gulf War were smart, and 90% were dumb.
In this war, it could be the reverse.
It could be that most of the munitions will be smart, that is, GPS guided.
But I think that, well, there could be potential danger there.
We could begin to believe that our weapons are so smart that they work all the time.
And of course, that's not true.
We see bombs falling into schoolyards and hospitals all the time.
If he's a cornered rat and he knows he's going to go down with the ship, he wants to take as many of us as he possibly can to make his mark on the history books.
I think he's sort of resigned himself now that he's going to go down.
And if so, he wants to take as many Americans with him as he possibly can.
Well, in the two great oceans, in the case, though, of these bugs that might get released, you know damn well New York, Washington, Los Angeles, Chicago, and then on down the list from there, I suppose.
You can be like New York is going to be like first.
Yes, unfortunately, that's one of the prices of living in the great metropolitan center of New York City, and that is that it's one of the most densely populated areas of the entire country.
8 million people lie within the boundaries of New York City.
And even if you chop up Brooklyn, Brooklyn would be, I think, America's second largest city if you just chop up New York City.
I just, you know, I haven't, I feel like I haven't been given enough information yet to make that judgment about whether it's worth it or not.
I mean, for sure, if we knew he had some awful thing and he absolutely had the will, in fact, the intention to let loose on it, then by all means, kick his butt first.
But I don't think we're anywhere close to that standard of proof yet, or at least not publicly.
And again, this is one of the prices we paid for the Cold War when we allowed this technology to escape because they would be anti-communist weapons.
And now we see that they're falling into all sorts of different kinds of hands.
For example, North Korea, we now know, got most of its uranium technology from Pakistan.
And Pakistan, in turn, was allowed to get this technology because Pakistan was against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan during the Reagan years.
And so a lot of nuclear technology flowed into Pakistan during the 80s under Ronald Reagan, which now is flowed into North Korea, all in the name of anti-communism.
The big problem is that today's friend almost always turns out to be tomorrow's enemy.
I mean, it just happens again and again and again.
So if we allow some country for political reasons, because we're friendly, to get weapons now or did then, well, then it may well be that in a few years they won't like us.
And that's why we have to worry about what happens when our own weapons eventually fall into the hands of terrorists.
That's why during the Afghan war just last year, that's why our jets had to fly so high.
You could barely see them up there.
And the reason is they were fearful of U.S.-made Stinger missiles taking them out.
And I think this is a tragedy that's not told to the American people, that our own military is absolutely frightened of U.S.-made weapons, blood Stingers.
Yes, but we have to realize now we're pushing nuclear.
Now we're pushing the fact that Pakistan got the bomb mainly because we essentially allowed them to get the bomb, and then Pakistan sold it to North Korea.
And it's no surprise that North Korea is looking at uranium enrichment technology because it came from indirectly the United States.
That's why I say that instead of the UN issuing these toothless proclamations that are useless and a laughingstock of the world, it should be built up because we're going to have to face Iran.
We're going to have to face North Korea.
We're going to have to face God knows how many countries that want to beat their chest and say that they have the next bomb because their mortal enemy on the other side of the border has the bomb.
And this is the price we're going to pay unless we begin to strengthen the United Nations and diplomacy and negotiations, or else we're going to have to take on all these small nations aspiring to become the next superpower in their region.
Well, how likely is the scenario, I'm sure this has been kicked around plenty, that if there would be a nuke or two or four or ten used, India, Pakistan, whatever started it, that then it would be a sort of a join-hands thing and people would align and take sides and other bombs would start to go off and before you know it,
oh gosh, before you know it, we're back to that scenario, that nuclear annihilation scenario.
Let's say China gets involved, because China is India's big rival.
And all of a sudden, we're talking about big powers suddenly being sucked into something and taking sides.
Look at World War I. World War I started with the assassination of an obscure Archduke of Yugoslavia, for God's sake.
And it touched off one thing, touched off another, ricocheted across the corridors of power.
And all of a sudden, the entire world was engulfed in World War I. And I think with so many loose nukes around and with the nuclear weapons proliferating into the most dangerous areas of the world, like between India, Pakistan, and the Middle East, I think it's not going to be a very pleasant place to be.
All sorts of reports have stated That they're loosely guarded, and the Russians, of course, as a matter of national pride, keep saying that they can keep track of these damn things.
But it only takes one to fall through the cracks.
And these things are very powerful weapons, enough to wipe out the greater New York metropolitan area from Connecticut all the way down to New Jersey.
Well, I mean, everybody should at least bear in mind, shouldn't they, that if we begin a war, which seems a sure thing now, that it always has at least a potential, perhaps albeit hopefully a small one, of ending up that way.
And there's no way you can think right now that charging into Iraq full bore, which we're getting ready to do, is justified by what we know so far about what might or might not be there, because it could absolutely result in more harm than safety for the world.
You know, it's a very delicate balance of power in the Middle East.
And God knows where all the Chinaware is going to fall if the bull starts some kind of big war in the area.
If you look at the last Persian Gulf War, the big victor of that war was in some sense not the United States, because, of course, Saddam Hussein survived.
The big victor in that war was Islamic fundamentalism.
That's where Islamic fundamentalism got its big start, was in the 1991 war, a war fought in the backyard of these fundamentalists.
And that was their big shot in the arm when that war took place.
And so the winners of war are often not who you think they are.
World War I and II were fought between the great German Empire and the Great British Empire.
But who won those wars was not either Britain or Germany, but it was the United States and Russia.
So the people who win these wars sometimes are totally different than the people who started these wars.
And I think the big winner of the last Persian Gulf War was not the United States at all.
But I think we have to look at the next war afterwards.
And unless we begin to put a lid on all these weapons of mass destruction through negotiations, we're going to have to put a lid on these weapons of mass negotiations through war.
And what I'm saying is, if these UN proclamations meant something, for God's sake, if the international body politic, nations upon nations, were to say, yes, let's believe in these resolutions and make them have teeth rather than being these teeth resolutions, then perhaps we wouldn't try to curate the favor of the United Nations when we need it.
Hold on, hold on, hold on, do what you got Hold on, hold on, hold on Do what you got.
Do what you got.
Be inside the sand, smell your touch.
For the something inside that we need so much.
The sight of the touch, or the scent of the sand, or the strength of an oak leaves deep in the ground.
The wonder of flowers to be covered and then to burst up through tarmac to the sun again.
Or to fly to the sun without burning a wing, to lie in a meadow and hear the grass sing, and all these things in our memories are, and they use them to help us.
Ha!
Ha!
Yeah!
But I, right by the store, take this place, off that strip, just for me.
Wanna take a ride?
Call Art Bell from West of the Rockies at 1-800-618-8255.
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Well, now, with regard to war, you've had quite a number of opinions laid upon you.
That would be the opinion of several of you out there, and then one of the greatest minds in our country about war.
So, there you are.
Plenty to think about, far from the majority, certainly, on this issue, but at least he certainly answered the question.
Professor Michu Kaku is my guest, and he'll be right back.
All right, hard as all of this is to segue from, I wanted to get the answer to that question from the professor, and I feel like I definitely got it.
Now, on to some more interesting things in many ways.
As a suggestion for the show, the professor said, you know, we might discuss some of the Christmas movies, you know, Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings, Star Trek, and so forth.
Whether civilizations in space might be able to master these technologies, you know, as exemplified in these movies.
And so we have a number of them here, and I'm not necessarily going to take them in order.
Now, I said there was just a big sighting, in fact, CNN had it, of a triangular craft above Baghdad, just like the one that was above Phoenix.
Now, let's ask about levitation of machines, the ability of something to seemingly defy gravity.
In fact, let's even start there.
Professor, I have the hardest, hardest time, and I still don't understand what the hell gravity is.
Gravity holds us here.
It gives us weight.
It makes things drop onto the table when we drop them.
But I just, I don't, I've never properly understood what gravity really is.
Is it because the Earth has mass and so we're pulled to it?
Right, well, that's because we think that we are the ants.
Well, the ants would say that it's impossible to walk in a straight line on a crumpled sheet of paper because there are forces, invisible forces, pulling you to the left, pulling you to the right.
Now, we know there's no pull at all.
It's just the crumpled sheet of paper that pushes, pushes the ant to the left, pushes the ant to the right.
Now this crumpled sheet of paper is space.
Space is invisible.
That's why we can't see this force of gravity, but it's caused by the curvature of space-time.
So believe it or not, the reason why you're sitting in your chair in your living room is not because gravity pulls you to the floor, but because the Earth has worked the space around you, and the space around you pushes you down to the floor.
Well, we now have satellites that have tested Einstein's general theory of relativity to, with an experimental error, 1%.
Now, remember, back in the 1920s, when Einstein's theory was first verified, there were a lot of error bars, and people could still quibble about whether Einstein was really right or wrong with the deflection of sunlight.
And of course, for small gravitational fields, this approximates Newton's old theory, but for black holes, okay, we see that Newton's theory has to be thrown out the window.
For black holes, we really do see that spinning black holes behave as if you have a spinning bed sheet.
If you have a spinning bed sheet with a depression inside, it looks as if you have like molasses being dragged around the black hole, right, around the bed sheet.
We see this now.
We actually have photographed this with the Hubble Space Telescope.
You can actually see space, like molasses, being whipped around by the black hole, eating up star systems and clouds of stellar material.
You can actually see what is called frame dragging.
And again, for a low gravitational field, it's really hard to see the difference between Newton's theory and Einstein's theory.
You need stars before you can see the difference.
But with black holes, it stares at you in the face.
You can really see that space-time looks like molasses.
That's being turned around by a spinning black hole.
And we photographed this now with the Hubble Space Telescope.
So we now have visual confirmation of Einstein's theory, not just experiments with satellites and laser beams, but visually, you can see it.
All right, if we absolutely then understand what the force gravity is, wouldn't that be the first step in the first step in,
yeah, eventually defying it or finding a way to neutralize it, or in other words, coming up with something that will be anti-gravity or some understanding of the force that is gravity that would allow us to circumnavigate it or to manage it or to use it as a propulsive device or you get the idea.
No, if there was negative matter in the Earth, this is not antimatter, by the way.
Antimatter, we think, falls down.
Antimatter has positive energy.
It falls down.
Negative matter, okay, different from antimatter, would actually fall up.
if there was negative matter when the earth was very young it would have fallen up billions of years ago and would be in outer space almost by definition so even even deep within the bowels of the earth there wouldn't be Now recently we've gotten a lot of interest in negative matter because negative matter can be used to drive a time machine.
All the recent work of the last decade or so in time machines is because we think that negative matter is so exotic, so bizarre, that you can actually use it as a gasoline for time machines.
Now, negative energy, on the other hand, we have duplicated in the laboratory.
This is the famous Casimir effect.
We have actually duplicated negative energy in the laboratory.
Some people have claimed that you can use that for a time machine, but it would be a very, very feeble time machine.
You wouldn't be able to teleport anything more than a tiny subatomic particle backwards in time.
But the Casimir effect already exists.
We measured it in the laboratory several decades ago, in fact.
It's very tiny, but it gives you negative energy.
If you had negative matter, you could manipulate it, and you could then begin to warp space and time so that this molasses that I talked about, right, would actually bend on itself, and you would get wormholes opening up.
Okay, so negative matter almost immediately opens up a wormhole in space and time.
Now, negative matter, we don't know too much about it.
We just plug this into Einstein's equations, and all of a sudden a space warp and, in fact, a wormhole opens up whenever you put a piece of negative matter into Einstein's equations.
So think of the molasses again, or our bed sheet.
All of a sudden, you have two regions of the bed sheet connected by a tunnel.
And that tunnel would be then held open by negative matter.
Well, it's too early to speculate because we have no theory of negative matter other than just putting it into Einstein's equations.
If you put it into Einstein's equations, all of a sudden magic happens, and all of a sudden the bed sheet twists and turns and bends on itself.
This has been well known for decades, but only within the last decade has been a lot of research because, of course, these wormholes would be time machines.
Well, if, for example, our astronauts in the International Space Station were to encounter negative matter, which I suppose is more possible there than it is here on Earth since all ours has already fallen up, it probably wouldn't be a very, or possibly at least wouldn't be an agreeable meeting, would it?
Yes, it wouldn't be too agreeable because if you got too close to it, you may not be able to get back very quickly.
You may wind up in a different time era.
The negative matter opens up what are called transversible wormholes.
Now let me explain.
An ordinary black hole also opens up a wormhole, but it's a one-way ticket.
It's a one-way trip through the black hole, and you never come back.
The black hole has an event horizon.
Negative matter does not have an event horizon.
There's no point of no return.
They are transversible.
You can go back and forth, back and forth between them.
That's why they've engendered so much interest ever since the group at Caltech showed, you know, about 10 years ago, the first solutions using negative energy and negative matter, showing that they would create wormholes that are quite nice.
I mean, normally you've said that time travel would require such immense amounts of energy, perhaps the management of the energy of the sun or better, that we couldn't do it.
But if we were to get our hands on some negative matter, all of a sudden we've got a swinging door.
If negative matter were out there, let's say there was a ball of negative matter out there and it was traveling along, would we observe anything about space or the space it was traversing that would give it away?
Well, it would warp gravity in a highly unorthodox way.
But it would take probably a large chunk of negative matter before it became optically visible.
That is, starlight would bend around such an object in a bizarre way.
And then you can start to infer that there's something out there.
Now, this is how, by the way, we detect dark matter.
Dark matter is ordinary matter, but it's invisible, and it makes up most of the universe.
We know that dark matter is out there because the Hubble Space Telescope has seen light deflected, light deflected around galaxies as if galaxies were surrounded by dark matter.
And here we have something that's actually invisible, dark matter, which makes up 90% of the matter of the universe, bending starlight, and we now use that to create maps of dark matter which surround different galaxies.
The group in Teletech were experimenting in their minds, of course, with theory, saying that if I had a little bit of negative energy, which of course already exists, we could open up a wormhole, but the size of that wormhole would be less than that of a subatomic particle.
So it's kind of a useless device because it's a time machine, but only if it's smaller than a subatomic particle.
Well, yeah, the way to do it is to look for deflection of starlight.
That's how we find the existence of passing black holes and dark matter, by looking at the distortion of starlight as measured by telescopes and the Hubble.
Suppose some authorities came to you and said, my God, Dr. Kaku, we have found a region or a small segment of dark matter, and we're going to take a spacecraft to try and retrieve it.
And they asked you for advice on how you would get and bring back this dark matter.
After all the talk we've had on the near impossibility of time travel because of the obstacles we'd have to overcome power-wise, we now learn something called negative matter would allow a stable portal back and forth.
It would be a time machine.
Negative matter.
It's just a matter of finding some negative matter which might be in space.
And my question still stands for the good professor, and that is, if he was consulted on how to go get it and contain it and then bring it back home, what suggestions, I wonder, would he have?
All right, then.
Just like in a science fiction novel, all of a sudden, scientists find, through whatever spacecraft we have monitoring such things, that there is some negative matter traversing an area between, say, our moon and the Earth, an eminently available kind of area, you know, so we could get a robot, a spacecraft, up there and scoop up some of this negative matter, or at least have the opportunity to do so.
If they were to come to you and say, well, Professor, what do we do?
I mean, do we scurry it into a lead box?
Do we have electromagnetic force fields holding it in place?
What would you suggest we do with the negative matter?
Well, because it is repulsive with respect to ordinary matter, all we have to do is put a net around it.
The net would repel the negative matter, but if the net were symmetrical, it would repel negative matter evenly, and you could trap negative matter with an ordinary net.
And however, like I said before, we've never seen any.
We don't know its properties.
You would have to send probes into it to test its nature because it could be quite dangerous and it could warp space and time in totally unpredicted ways.
So I think that a lot of caution would be if at some point in the future we ever got one of these damn things.
Possibly, or simply kept in outer space, because it is repulsive.
It would not want to land on the moon.
It would want to be in outer space.
And we would, of course, want to see whether we could machine it.
And the ideal configuration might be a ring, in which case In which case, if you go through the bullseye of the ring, you may find yourself on a different piece of space and time than when you first started.
Not just a different time, but a different space as well.
In other words, if I theoretically went through this ring, Professor, I wouldn't just be, I don't know, back or forward a few years or many years, but I would actually be in a different place as well.
You would be distorted both in displace, both in space and time simultaneously, if you were to go through a wormhole or what we physicists call a multiply connected space.
Think of sheets of paper that are parallel that are joined at different spots.
And these two sheets of paper may exist in parallel with each other, except once in a while they intersect.
Well, if you have a large enough, a massive enough object with a large enough wormhole, Then you may be able to walk through it.
Yeah, we've calculated the tidal forces when you walk through one of these things.
It's possible that if you have enough of this matter, you could walk through it and not feel anything more than simply being on an airline, an airline slight through one of these things.
Well, it depends on how you solve Einstein's equations.
Einstein's equations do allow for space to be bent back in on itself.
And, of course, before we walk into one of these things, we should calculate the geometry of it and estimate to our best degree of accuracy what's on the other side.
Which you have really always answered by suggesting that we live in a bubble, and essentially another bubble would be created as you killed your grandfather, and there would be then two infinitely continuing timelines that would break off.
Well, I would disagree with the science fiction writers who say that your memory is going to change and your whole being is going to change if you create what is called a time quake.
That is, go backwards in time and create a time paradox which then ripples back on you into the future, right?
I think a much simpler solution to the problem is that time forks.
Time simply forks into two rivers.
And then you don't have any paradoxes.
The quantum theory has within it the ability to bifurcate universes.
And if the universe splits off, then basically you've altered somebody else's path.
However, in principle, if you knew the location of all the stars, if you knew the location of all the objects in the universe, you could just plug that into Einstein's equations, and then Einstein's equations would tell you at what point in the past or the future you wound up.
In other words, would the amount of negative matter always reliably determine that you were going to go back to 1967, for example, every time you walked through?
And only an adjustment of the amount of energy or the amount of negative matter would change that?
Well, of course, it would take a supercomputer to do this calculation, but in principle, if you knew the location of the stars, the location of the distribution of negative matter, you could plug this into Einstein's equation and it would predict where you are going to wind up when you go through the ring.
Now, whether it's tunable or not, that's another question.
Whether you can fine-tune it so that you wind up on yesterday, exactly 24 hours previous to where you are, that would require an enormous amount of tuning.
And I tend to doubt that you could tune it that much.
But all I'm saying is it's probably predictable as to where you're going to wind up.
If you know the geometry of these configurations, Einstein's equations are quite explicit.
You will wind up at a certain point in space and time that's calculable.
It's a first step, a f first really small little baby step, but doesn't that put us pretty close to understanding, to take, you know, an understanding that will allow bigger step, much bigger steps?
I said in the first hour, I also noted then that, you know, even if we don't have scientists going up there with their drills and their little heaters, then we've got stories like this.
Record melt in Arctic and Greenland.
Mother Nature is busily doing it for the scientists.
I mean, you know, things are melting like crazy, and eventually one of these little guys is going to melt and warm up all on its own.
And in the story, they said that, well, yeah, there might be some danger, but they said we're specifically hobbling these little guys so that should they jump out of the petri dish, they wouldn't be able to survive in our atmosphere.
We're intentionally, in some way, designing them, design their little lives, so that they can't survive in our environment.
Yeah, I think that nature is much more clever than most scientists give her credit for.
And there's always a chance that a mutation could re-arm or re-enable this microbe to exist at room temperature in a normal atmosphere, in which case, God knows what we've unleashed on the world.
And again, we're talking about a very small probability, of course, of this happening, but you cannot recall a genetically modified organism.
You can recall a Ford car that has a defect in it, but you cannot recall a germ that has mutated so that it can survive in our atmosphere and under normal conditions, and it will multiply.
Well, is this enough of a danger, Professor, that somebody ought to go to these scientists and say, hey, guys, listen, you might be, of course they really know, but I mean, there is this possibility, and other controls really ought to be in place before we gene mix anything else to life here.
Like in the Arctic, for example, they're digging up corpses of individuals that died during the last flu epidemic of the 1920s.
It was one of the greatest flu epidemics of all time.
We have no traces of this flu that we can look at with our DNA analysis.
So we're digging up corpses that are buried in the ice for many decades.
And this is being done under extreme conditions, security conditions, because we don't want this flu to get out because it devastated tens of millions of people last time it got out.
It killed more people than World War I. So you don't think there's any possibility that they would dig it up and then it would be turned over instead of to the scientists you would hope it would go to, but it might get turned over to our biowarfare people who would try and figure out how to make it even more dangerous than it is now.
At Fort Dietrich, outside Washington, D.C., they have the whole rogues gallery of different kinds of designer germs, one of which, by the way, almost escaped several years ago.
Really?
It was actually in the newspapers.
And, of course, people said that if it wiped out Washington, D.C., we would, of course, not have any big effect on the nation's politics anyway.
But the point is that it is outside Washington, D.C. And we are experimenting with designer germs right outside the nation's capital.
i wonder how close whatever it is came to getting out the When the motherfucker, she will lie.
unidentified
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This is Coast to Coast AM with Art Bell from the Kingdom of Nye.
And I should caution that initially we are talking about tiny microbes that you can't even see, and the chances of this happening are very close to zero.
However, you can't rule it out because, of course, mutations happen quite rapidly in the microbial world.
And again, this is an extreme case, but it shows you that life will prevail, that life forms will struggle to survive, and that organisms will mutate to survive in the environment.
And even though they can't survive now, perhaps a mutation will make one of these things survive in the future.
I've got a story right here that says that, let's see, the race to clone the first human appears to have intensified after claims that a second team is about to begin experiments to clone babies for seven infertile couples.
An announcement that the first human baby clone will be born within a few weeks, made last week by controversial Italian fertility expert Dr. Servino Antori was greeted with a mixture of skepticism and contempt.
But now his former partner, Dr. Zavos, has dismissed Dr. Antori's claims and announced that, well, instead, he is pursuing his own program with a specialist in animal cloning, a professor at a European university.
And he says he is just about to clone himself, a human, and then store it in nitrogen at an undisclosed location where that it already is, I'm sorry, and is about to be used.
And we've now genetically looked at the genes of cloned animals, and we find hundreds, hundreds of mutations.
And of course, you can't see them visibly when you look at a cloned sheep or a cloned pet.
However, we know at the genetic level that hundreds of mutations are introduced.
So this is unethical.
We are creating, if you clone a human, you would have to create hundreds of deformed embryos.
And the human that is born is going to have hundreds of mutations in them.
And it is totally unethical.
And just because some idiot scientist wants to have their name in the newspaper, we're going to be performing, we're going to See these scientists perform unethical experiments, and I personally think it may take decades before we iron out this hit-or-miss process by which the cloning process takes place.
Now, in the recent Star Trek movie, that's also based on cloning when Jean-Luc Picard's DNA gets cloned.
But that's in the 23rd century, okay, where they have plenty of time, hundreds of years, to iron out the defects in the cloning process.
However, at Stanford University, I think they've taken a more measured approach.
All they want to do is clone stem cells, embryonic stem cells, and that in turn can open up a cornucopia of new therapies to cure diabetes, cure heart disease, cure diseases of the kidneys, spinal cord injuries.
Well, why should we believe that stem cells could be cloned safely without serious mutation if your thought is to use these stem cells in research and cures, which I'm sure it is, why should we imagine they would be cloned any more safely than Dolly or Harry or Antonio in this case, I guess.
Well, to take an adult cell that's already differentiated into skin, for example, and you have to do violence to it so that it reverts back to its embryonic state and then it starts to reproduce.
You have to do a tremendous amount of genetic violence to an adult cell to do this.
Embryonic stem cells are embryonic.
They naturally, practically naturally want to develop into different kinds of tissues of the body.
And so we're not talking about the genetic violence that is done to adult cells that have already differentiated.
We're talking about stem cells that naturally want to become kidneys and pancreas cells and lung cells.
And so I think that within 10, 20 years, we will see the beginning of a human body shop.
Already we can begin the process of cloning skin, bone marrow to a degree.
And I think within 10 years or so, perhaps the first liver or portions of liver will be grown in the laboratory, unless, of course, the Bush administration puts a halt to these tests.
And the most or the strongest argument that you could muster that we should not do that would be that we're talking about a new generation of medicine.
Medicine that simply doesn't try to stimulate the immune system, but medicine based on replaceable human body parts to extend the human lifespan, to increase longevity, to make the human life more fulfilling.
Look at Christopher Reeve.
Here's a vital individual that's just sitting there immobilized because his spinal cord is severed near the top.
We can grow new kinds of nerve cells with embryonic stem cells if the government will provide funding for this new technology.
This is proven in the petri dish.
We want to then prove it with animals and eventually with humans.
And it's a technology that's sitting there unless ideologues get their hands on it, in which case we're going to have a brain drain, not a brain drain to America, a brain drain away from America.
Scientists are going to go where the funds are, and the funds are going to be in Europe.
And the funds are going to be in different countries which do not have ideologues that are deciding science policy.
I also understand the precious nature of human life.
And why should we condone suffering?
Why should we condone human suffering when it's needless?
I mean, within our own family tree, I mean, think of our relatives who are suffering from debilitating diseases.
In fact, for example, diabetes will be an epidemic as baby boomers start to age.
They have, of course, an awful lifestyle.
They're overweight.
They load themselves with sugar.
We're going to see a massive explosion of diabetes, which is going to strain our Medicare system.
And it could break the bank when baby boomers start to age.
Wouldn't it be better to simply grow new Isles of Langerhans for the pancreas of these individuals so it doesn't break the treasury of the United States?
Look at the cost of medical care in this country.
It is skyrocketing.
It's going to get worse as baby boomers start to age and as their pancreas wears out and they become diabetic and they become blind and they have to have their toes and fingers amputated.
Look at Mary Tyler Moore.
She's diabetic.
She may go blind very soon and she's worried about that possibility.
Because, of course, some individuals will be tempted to bring one of these clones to maturity, in which case you have all the ethical problems of human cloning, and you have all the ethical debates with regards to whether or not somebody will steal a piece of your skin and cone another individual that looks just like you without your permission.
So, you know, two art dolls because somebody stole some of your hair follicles.
Trust, you know, how people say, well, look, if God had meant us to regrow an arm, if we lose one, then we'd damn well have more stem cells in our body and our bodies would do it.
The ultimate question is, where did the laws of physics themselves come from?
And at that point, well, of course, you can argue the Big Bang, you can argue inflation and different kinds of cosmological scenarios, but that all occurs within the framework of physical law.
And then when you ask the question, where does physical law come from?
Then you have big problems.
And that's where some scientists invoke God.
Now, Einstein got around the question by saying that God had no choice in creating the universe.
The universe is unique.
There was no other way to create a universe.
And in fact, we think that basic philosophy is correct.
It is extremely difficult to create a universe.
We try to do this with our equations.
99.99% of the time, our equations fall apart when we try to create a stable universe.
And the only thing which seems to work is string theory.
It's the only game in town.
And it seems to be this unique theory that gives us a universe.
And then, of course, you may ask the key question.
Well, if you're so smart, then, you scientists, where did these string equations come from?
And at that point, we just throw up our hands and say, we don't know.
We just know that perhaps they are unique.
They are the only game in town.
You cannot create a universe in any other way.
But why not have nothing?
Why not have nothing instead of something?
Well, the very fact that we are here discussing this question means that something has occurred, that is intelligent life exists, which means that the universe was set into motion.
We do have stable protons and stable DNA, stable enough to create life and consciousness.
And that, to me, means that a universe must have enormous constraints on it.
When we, scientists play God, I think that in terms of theory, like the Big Bang, the unified field theory, string theory, it's okay for scientists to imagine being God to create a universe out of our equations.
However, equations can be recalled.
Organisms cannot.
And I think that if we create new life forms, most of the time they're going to be harmless.
They will not survive.
And so there's no big problem.
But they mutate.
And I think we have to be extremely careful that one of these days, just like the killer bees that escaped from this bee station in the 50s in Rio de Janeiro, I think that something could get loose.
We just know that at Fort Dietrich, outside Washington, D.C., which of course houses much of the designer germs that we've been playing with, even in spite of the 1972 biowarfare treaty that we signed with the Soviet Union, that there was an incident that took place years ago where it almost escaped.
And we have many biosafety levels there.
The people there look like people from a space movie with all these gloves and spacesuits to protect themselves from germs.
And it only takes one mistake, one careless mistake for some germ to escape from that laboratory.
And that's the price we pay for plain tinkering with germs like Ebola and Rift Valley fever, dengue fever, and different kinds of germs for which we largely don't have cures.
Well, apparently, as little as 100 particles of the virus are enough to set off this Norwalk-like illness.
And you can't even see 100 viruses.
And that's all it takes to be placed in the nose of a test subject to induce the symptoms or to ingest it into your stomach.
So I think we're talking about something that is very common.
It's one of the most common illnesses in the United States, but it doesn't propagate very far because most people don't spend weeks at a time in a cruise ship.
A cruise ship is the ideal incubator for these things.
In fact, you know, when European cities got off the ground, you know, 5,000 years ago, that provided an ideal environment for ancient illnesses that we've always lived with.
These diseases are millions of years old, to propagate in cities because of the close contact that we've had.
The nearest galaxy to ours is only 2 million light-years away.
And we think that galaxy that you mentioned is a byproduct of two colliding galaxies.
When two galaxies collide, their black holes begin to dance around each other.
And if you take a look at Andromeda, actually, our closest neighbor, you actually see two blips in the center, which means that Andromeda probably ate up another smaller galaxy years ago.
And by the way, our galaxy may be on a collision course with Andromeda, and the future of our own Milky Way galaxy may be to have a hostile takeover.
And the atoms of our body may very well wind up in the center of Andromeda, orbiting around the black hole at the center.
So Andromeda apparently has eaten other objects in the past, and we see that in the belly of the galaxy with our radio X-ray telescopes.
And that's where we may wind up eventually if in 10 billion years we actually collide with Andromeda, which is about twice as big as our galaxy.
Our sun will probably turn into a red giant in five billion years.
And so way before that, way before we get eaten up by Andromeda, our sun will actually begin to get larger and the sky will be on fire.
So it's not going to be pleasant when the oceans boil, the mountains melt, and the sky's on fire.
And even within a scale of one billion years, the nearest astronomical catastrophe is when the Earth's wobble around the sun starts to get larger and larger.
You see, the moon is leaving us slowly but surely, and the moon helps to stabilize the spin of the earth.
If it wasn't for the moon, the earth would have spun like a gyroscope.
Well, the moon will always be influenced by the gravity of the Earth.
However, it'll get farther and farther away from the Earth, and it will cease to stabilize the Earth, and the Earth could begin to wobble quite dramatically in a billion years.
And we think that Mars, by the way, is entering that phase, is already in that phase.
And we think that the polar caps of Mars weren't always the polar caps of Mars.
And this could be done with supercomputer calculations.
They can calculate what the Earth is going to look like billions of years from now.
And we know that after about a billion years, the Moon will be so far from the Earth that the 23-degree tilt of the Earth, that gives us summer, fall, winter, spring, could wobble.
We would notice that the Earth's orbit was gradually being perturbed, that 365 and a quarter days was no longer the span of the year, and we would have very little notice.
Now, of course, scientists have also found a wandering black hole in our galaxy.
That is more noticeable because it warps starlight.
And that's how we identify this wandering black hole by looking at the bending of starlight as it moved.
So the gravitational tug, which is very small from a gram of matter, would equal the equivalent energy, which is the energy of several hydrogen bonds, I think, that would be released.
And again, it would be very small, but according to Einstein, the gravitational effects are indistinguishable from a distance between matter and energy.
They both enter in the equations in the same way.
And so in Einstein's equations, matter and energy are almost interchangeable.
So the gravitational effects will be identical.
So when we look at the Sun, this actually becomes a practical question.
How much of the energy of the Sun contributes to the gravitational tug of the Sun?
And there we have to factor in the energy and the matter when we calculate the gravitational pull coming from the Sun.
unidentified
Well, what about this force known as quintessence?
Does that have anything to do with this or is that an entirely different thing?
Well, there have been many theories of dark matter, and it makes up 90% of the matter of the universe, we think.
And quintessence is one possible candidate.
We don't know for sure what dark matter is made out of.
We just know that it's invisible.
It surrounds the Milky Way galaxy.
It makes up most of the universe in terms of matter.
And different theories have been proposed, among them quintessence and other theories.
My own personal point of view is that string theory has higher harmonics, higher octaves, and a higher octave of the string would be invisible.
And that probably makes up most of dark matter because there's stable.
The Potino, for example, is the leading candidate for dark matter right now.
It's stable, it's invisible, it's predicted by the theory, and it could make up most of the visible universe.
But again, all bets are off because we simply don't know what dark matter is made out of.
We know it's out there.
We can photograph its effects with the Hubble Space Telescope, but we simply don't know what it's made out of, which is very embarrassing that most of the universe is made out of something we don't have the slightest clue as to what it is.
But that probably holds for us then a very bright future, or at least a possible bright future, because when we do discover the nature of it, then, of course, we'll be on our way to ultimate control of it, right?
Well, yes, in the far future, once we understand the mechanisms that make all these things work, that is the unified field theory, in the same way that we manipulated Newton's laws of gravity to give us machines.
You and I have been talking for years now, and you know I'm about to retire December 31st.
And I just wonder, we've had so many talks about type 0, type 1, type 2 planets.
As you observe the state of the world today, are you more or less encouraged or even discouraged, perhaps, that we are going to graduate to type 1 or blow ourselves to smithereens before making the leap?
I think I'm a little bit more pessimistic than before.
However, I think there are two competing trends.
One trend is negative.
That is the greenhouse effect, the fact that we're not going to a solar hydrogen economy, the fact that nuclear weapons are proliferating.
But the positive effect is that we are gradually having an internet which is creating a global connection between all peoples of the earth.
And we are seeing the birth of a type 1 economy, a type 1 culture, a type 1 language, which will be English, and the beginnings of a type 1 civilization.
So I think it's glorious that we could see the beginnings of a type 1 civilization right before our eyes with the internet, with the European Union, with globalization.
However, there's a downside of globalization.
There's a downside of the greenhouse effect.
And there's a downside of not going to a solar hydrogen economy.
My question was, given the current state of the world and the direction that we can all see that we're going in, you think in all probability we're going to lose the race?
Well, I think it's going to get worse before it gets better.
And I think it'll get so bad at a certain point that we're going to have to rein in these weapons, we're going to have to rein in the greenhouse effect, we're going to have to eliminate oil, but only when it gets so bad that the average taxpayer, the average voter says enough is enough.
But I think it's not, we haven't reached that point yet.
The average person is not so frustrated that they're going to get out there and vote with their pocketbook to rein in the greenhouse effect and rein in these weapons and bring on a solar hydrogen economy.