Peter Ward, paleontologist and author of Rare Earth, argues complex life—like humans or even garden worms—is rare due to Earth’s unique conditions: stable plate tectonics regulating CO₂, a galactic location avoiding asteroid threats, and a 64% rise in CO₂ (now at 379 ppm) over the past decade. He dismisses claims of extraterrestrial origins tied to gold mining or biblical "angels," citing sterile Martian soil and NASA’s contamination risks. While methane hydrates could trigger catastrophic warming, Ward warns humanity’s short-termism—especially with U.S. oil consumption at 23 barrels/person/year—makes global climate control unlikely, risking famines and resource wars in fertile regions like California’s Central Valley or the Nile Delta. His skepticism clashes with SETI’s Seth Shostak, setting up future debate on life’s rarity beyond Earth. [Automatically generated summary]
We're going to be talking about hours a lot tonight.
According to the first guest hour, Peter Ward will be here, who wrote a book called Rare Earth.
And it's going to be an awful lot of fun and interesting, I think, to examine what you have to view as equally possible.
I mean, we're always saying, as Jody Foster did, right, in contact, when you look up at the suns and the stars, they have to be out there.
They have to be out there.
Those are billions and billions of suns, right?
And around them revolve more billions of planets we now know.
And so life, life has to be out there.
It's a very compelling argument, and one I will make to Peter Ward, who wrote Rare Earth, why complex life, that would be us, is uncommon in the universe.
Very good reviews on the book, to be sure.
Reviews from Science, the Associated Press.
Very good reviews.
In other words, maybe we are alone.
And maybe complex life is...
We're always looking at the other side of it, and I suppose in a way we will.
But it should be most interesting to hear the case for the fact that man is alone.
All of that out there?
Giant waste of space.
So we'll do that tonight.
Now, a couple of things right off the bat.
First of all, OG, my webcam photo.
More than my webcam photo.
Someone, good friend of mine, a ham radio operator, sent these photographs to me earlier today.
She was sent the photographs by the captain of this boat.
Actually, it's the Los Angeles-class fast attack submarine, nuclear submarine, USS Honolulu.
And what we have here in this photograph, actually several of them, is totally incredible.
You'll want to save this.
It shows the USS Honolulu coming up just a few miles short of the exact North Pole, you know, bo-whoom through the ice.
And here are these polar bears.
It is such a remarkable set of photographs.
And so I've got one on my webcam and then the full higher resolution versions up on the website, thanks to our webmaster.
So go take a look.
Coast2coastam.com, of course, it'll hit you right in the eye.
You can't miss it.
Now, I do a semi-yearly rant, because you can't call it anything else, about what is coming up tonight.
Yes, by all means, folks, go and check your smoke detectors and then prepare to spring forward.
God help us all spring forward.
You know, this year I think maybe I'll call for civil disobedience.
I am not suggesting that we all do not spring forward because springing forward is, well, it's okay.
unidentified
But let's stay there.
When this fall comes around, you know, after going through the misery, the unspeakable misery of having to go around, I'm going to be changing clocks for two days.
I saw a thing on Channel 13, our local ABC affiliate in Las Vegas the other day that said that it was Benjamin Franklin's idea.
Something about, I don't know, World War and saving energy or something.
Whatever.
You know, you hear about the farmers, some people tell that story, and then there's others that talk about school children and bus stops, and I don't know.
You hear a million different reasons why we change the clocks, but none of them are worth two cents.
Obviously, talking to you about this twice a year is insufficient because we continue to mindlessly follow along like sheep changing our clocks, except for the smart states, you know, like Hawaii and Arizona, and there's some others that refuse to go along with the herd.
I say it's time for civil disobedience.
I have preached year in and year out about the insanity of this, and now I say we refuse to fall back.
I say we all spring forward and stay that way.
I want you to think about it.
I mean it.
I know.
making people in trouble with their bosses in knows what it could do but maybe that that that we could send a message by I work for a network.
Time is rather important to the network.
So can I follow along and keep my job?
I'm sure you're saying that too.
Could you do it and just refuse to be part of the herd?
Probably not.
But I'm calling for it anyway.
And I might even join in, which would be the end of me.
Ah, gee.
all right let's uh...
well in a moment will look around the world and see what what sort of standard news is out there Actually, before moving on to the news of the day, I've talked to you for the last couple of weeks about BPL.
That's the broadband over power lines thing, you know, where they can bring everybody in the nation, they say, broadband over power lines, and you'll have internet in every single wall socket in your home.
Well, it's big brother-ish to the max, and it will destroy the shortwave bands.
It'll just destroy the shortwave bands.
Now, many countries, knowing they need emergency communications because of terrorism, which we're about to talk about in a moment, tried BPL and kicked it the hell out of a country.
One of those countries, not exactly a technical slouch, would be Japan.
They had this broadband over the internet over the power lines, baloney, BPL, and they kicked it out of the country.
And I have right here a recording made at 7 megahertz, which is right sort of in the middle of the shortwave band.
Well, not quite, but a very important part of the shortwave band.
One that hams happen to use, but it wouldn't matter.
It applies to hams, CBers, broadcasters, people who listen to news from other countries on the shortwave bands.
They're going to take that away from us if this BPL goes through and you don't write to your congressman or your senator.
And I thought you might like to hear what BPL will actually sound like.
This recording was made in Japan.
All right?
A deployed BPL system in Japan before they kicked it the hell out.
Can you imagine trying to conduct emergency communications through that?
Whether it's a ham operator, a CB operator, the U.S. government, FEMA, or any of the other, our own U.S. military, anybody who would need to conduct emergency communications, imagine them trying to do it.
Or maybe you're trying to listen to the BBC on shortwave.
unidentified
do you think you could listen through this Thank you.
Please stop this forward motion of the Federal Communications Commission and these power industries before this spreads all over the nation and there's no going back.
There's not going to be anybody talking through that, folks.
Write to your senator and congressman and ask them to please take it slow and examine BPL before allowing it to go forward.
This would be, if innocent had not been killed and wounded, this would be actually, in a lot of ways, very laudable action.
At least three suspects in the Madrid railway bombings blew themselves to smithereens.
Police had them cornered, and so they blew themselves up.
And gee, it sure saves everybody a lot of trial money and all the rest of it.
If only others so disposed would take same way out, we'd have a better world.
Unfortunately, however, one Special Forces agent was killed.
15 police officers were wounded when this occurred.
Now, our Secretary of State, Colin Powell, has conceded.
He says, it would appear that the evidence that he presented with the CIA chief at his side to justify the Iraq war in the first place may have been bogus.
The main reason we went to war was weapons of mass destruction, as you all know, and Secretary of State Powell now saying, well, yeah, maybe the whole thing was wrong, leaving it to the CIA to try and explain, I suppose.
President Bush sought Saturday to squeeze more political mileage out of the news that Americans have more jobs, actually added the most workers in four years.
Good numbers for the president, no doubt about it.
Israel is threatening to kill Arafat.
They're threatening to actually kill Arafat.
And he's responding to that.
That's fascinating.
Publicly saying, well, we might take you out.
Hundreds of technophiles, that's not bad stuff.
These are people, technophiles would be people who enjoy technical stuff.
It just sounds bad.
Wired all of their computers.
Hundreds of computers actually together, you know, standard computers like we have at home, to see if they could achieve.
They networked them together, trying to muster enough power to process the most complex research problems that man faces right now, and no report on how successful or not the effort was.
Listen to this one.
This comes from the Independent in Great Britain.
Levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere have jumped abruptly, raising fears that global warming may be accelerating out of control.
Measurements by the U.S. government show that concentrations of the gas, main cause of the climate exchange, rose by a record amount over the past 12 months.
It is now the third successive year in which they have increased sharply, making an unprecedented triennial surge.
Scientists are at a loss to explain why the rapid rise has taken place, but they do fear it could show the first signs, listen carefully, that global warming has now begun to feed upon itself, with rising temperatures causing increases in carbon dioxide, which then go on to drive the thermometer even higher.
This is pretty scary stuff, actually.
And they go on to show the measurements taken at the 14,000-foot summit of Hawaii's Mount Loa.
I guess they're saying that it may already be too late.
It could be a remarkable and weird blip in the, you know, just some totally weird thing three years in a row like this, but the prospect that global warming now has begun to feed on itself is pretty frightening.
But when you read stories like this one, maybe you can believe.
An 80-mile-an-hour windstorm hit the upper Mackenzie River like a hammer, right out of the blue Friday morning, this last Friday, leaving trees scattered, power lines down, the river closed to boating at least until next week or so.
Daniel Fisher, manager of the lodge in Hot Springs there, said, I've never, it's the craziest thing I've seen in a long time.
But it wasn't a whisper.
I mean, it was dead quiet, and then out of nowhere, 80 miles an hour.
The sneaker wind dropped a three-foot-diameter Douglas fir tree, bank to bank, right across the river.
The U.S. Forest Service closed the boat launches upstream from the tree, strongly advised all boaters to stay off the river's upper stretches.
Quote, there aren't too many places an experienced boater would put in besides these two particular boat launches, said he.
Point is, though, don't put in above that log.
Anytime you've got a log or any kind of barrier across the river, it's dangerous.
You don't want to run into something like that.
Meteorologist, this is the interesting part.
Mark O'Malley with the National Weather Service in Portland said that the wind apparently was the result of a deep easterly flow in the atmosphere that has caused, this is in quotes, listen carefully, that has caused, quote, gravity waves, end quote, to form over the Cascade range.
It's like clear air turbulence when you're flying, O'Malley said.
In fact, we've had several reports today from pilots of occasional moderate turbulence and severe turbulence, generally over the Cascades.
But gravity, gravity waves, that certainly caught my attention.
Gravity waves.
So 80 miles an hour from zero to 80, like that.
Just like that.
Gravity waves.
From a meteorologist.
Okay.
And then this.
I'm sure you've heard about this, probably earlier in the week from George.
Scientists predict major Southern California quake within five months.
A state earthquake council has given a qualified endorsement to a prediction by a group of scientists who believe that an earthquake magnitude 6.4 or greater will occur in the Southern California desert sometime in the next five months.
Now, that could include me.
We had a 7.3 here about five years ago that shook us up pretty well, I'll tell you.
But here, these are scientists, legitimate scientists, who are making this prediction.
It's not a revelation that came to somebody in the middle of the night or that was channeled down from whoever.
A team of scientists, actually, at the University of California, LA, predict the quake will occur within a 12,000 square mile area east of Los Angeles by September 5th.
The zone includes a large swath of the Mojave Desert, the Coachella Valley, the Imperial Valley, and eastern San Diego County.
The area was the location of a magnitude 7.3 Landers earthquake in 1992.
That's the exact one that I referred to.
And the 7.1 Hector mine quake in 1999.
My wife and I were standing in our living room when the quake I just referred to, the 7.3, occurred.
And here in Prump, Nevada, we got hit really hard.
I mean, it was rock and roll time.
It was early in the morning, and we were wide awake being the night creatures we are.
And the house began to, well, sort of ride in waves.
Everything began to move.
Things started to fall off the shelf, all the normal earthquake things.
And I, of course, considered the 3,000 pounds of antenna tower up above me and wondered if it would come down and visit.
It would have cut through the house like a hot knife through butter.
I have mentioned feral people a few times on the show, and somebody sent me this from Chuck Shepard's News of the Weird, whatever that is.
In February, social workers Found a feral family of six.
Only the father spoke any kind of recognizable language.
Others used hand signs and noises, living in a shed on a farm.
In Free State North Africa, none of the kids aged 14 to 26 had ever met anyone outside the family and simply ran into the woods anytime any visitors ever approached.
One boy only moved around only in a kind of a frog-like manner.
In other words, he didn't even walk.
The father said the kids were born normal, and he assumed their poor development and was punishment because he could not afford the ceremonial sacraments of their tribe.
So they grew up being completely feral.
Truly feral.
Well, yes, humans.
But not humans who had ever touched any part of society ever, but rather wild humans.
As you would have a wild cat or a wild dog.
Truly feral human beings.
Kind of an oddity in the modern world, but there you are.
It does happen.
I'm Art Bell and this is Coast to Coast AM in the Nighttime.
unidentified
A Bumma, A Bumma, A Bumma.
Want a time travel?
Go back to past shows on Streamlink.
Sign up online at coasttocoastam.com.
I don't know where we are.
Can you hear my heart beating in?
Do you know that behind all the gone?
Like the teacher and the city of the city.
I was born with sun for a long span I was put my mind with a gun in my hand And I lied to you I'm just here to ride like a wind And I've got such a long way to go I'm just here to ride like a wind I'm
just here to ride like a wind I'm just here to ride like a wind Everybody, please listen very carefully.
Rather than have you tell your story, if you don't mind, I'm just going to go ahead and do what I meant to do anyway, ma'am.
So there's so much to what that lady was about to do.
Look, all right, here it is.
Last week, I began to understand that in the world of the paranormal, that which we deal with so much on this program, there was something that I had obviously missed.
I mean, we began to get calls here, more and more of them, people willing to talk about sexual encounters, the paranormal and sexual encounters.
Now, this is a very, very difficult subject.
So last weekend, I invited anybody with either an interest or an experience in this area to send me an email.
Well, let me tell you what happened.
I got thousands and thousands of emails.
So many thousands that every time I would download my email, it would be clogged with them.
Thousands of stories of sexual attacks, some appreciated, most Not appreciated.
I can't even begin to relate to you the incredible number of honest, obviously told-from-the-heart stories that I have.
So many that I have come to realize this is a monstrous topic.
It's just absolutely monstrous, but it's incredibly difficult to talk about without appearing salacious.
It's just impossible.
I mean, that lady was about to lay a story on us of, I understand, of something that happened to her.
And so I have begun to look into this.
I have a medical professional who is very much aware of this topic long before I was, who has written to me.
I'm considering putting her on the air.
I just can't tell you how big this is.
And I've also received a lot of emails from people saying, look, Art, you know what the FCC is doing?
They're cracking down.
And they are.
And so I have to be very careful how I even think about presenting this topic to you.
But I also, on the other hand, can't not present it to you.
And there may be as much sexual content to paranormal experiences as there is with anything else.
It's that big.
And since we do that on this program, talk about the paranormal, we have a responsibility to do something with this, and I will.
I just don't know the right way to approach it exactly, particularly in the rather poisonous atmosphere right now with regard to what can and can't be done on the radio or television.
And besides that, I do have a responsibility to the larger audience out there as well.
So I'm trying to figure out how to approach this in an appropriate, tasteful way so that you understand the magnitude of it because it's absolutely gigantic, folks.
Wildcard line, you're on the air.
unidentified
Hi.
You know what I think is going on, what you just said?
What?
I think because the time that we're in, I believe that we're being attacked because we're in the very last days.
And I'm going to tell somebody that maybe they need to go see the passion.
And then get a hold of the ancientmanuscript.com website, get information that Glenn Kimball has, and it'll change their whole life.
Okay, yeah, I was wanting to tell you about an experience I'd had with what I believe to be a Sasquatch, and I was just going to ask you if you had heard of any other sightings or whatnot in this region.
And what had happened is I was walking in snow, and it was probably around May, the snow was starting to melt, and I ran into a patch where there was some dryness.
But I had seen a figurine, and what I had seen was I was on its hind legs running.
I couldn't, you know, I'd seen bear many a time, but just didn't run like a bear or whatnot, and that's why I was wanting to contact you, and, you know, I believe that's what it was in my mind, but, you know, that's why I was wanting to contact you.
I just know that many people recently have been copying to the fact that they faked Sasquatch movies, that they've faked tracks and all kinds of other things.
But on the other hand, a lot of people have seen creatures.
Now, these creatures, in other words, both could be true.
There could be plenty of fakes out there.
We humans do that sort of thing, right?
And there could also be real creatures out there.
I mean, think about this.
If there can be feral people, and that means people who have never encountered society at all, ever.
They've grown as human animals, mammals.
I don't know.
As it said in this story I read earlier tonight, one little boy who moved on all fours.
On all fours.
Just like an animal, never learned to walk.
They didn't communicate with any known language.
They just made hand signs.
So if there can be feral humans, there certainly can be creatures that we have not yet fully identified or are aware of on this planet.
I want to thank you for being ahead of the event horizon as you've been on so many topics and letting us know way before the general media got a hold of it, but aren't they picking up on it?
And they mentioned that Peter Schwartz from the Monitor Group and Global Focus, who worked on Deep Impact and Armageddon and a few others, he said he turned down work on the day after tomorrow.
He said it was pure entertainment.
However, Daniel Schrag from the Harvard School of Earth and Planetary Science said that the day after tomorrow he gets a kick out of using the trailer to show that it's talk.
Well, only you know that for sure, but it sounds suspiciously like you, yes.
unidentified
Okay.
My mother lived in Las Vegas, and her third husband left every morning at 5 o'clock and came home at 7, never told her what he did.
And he went missing, and three years later, they found his body in the desert.
Well, going through his things, she came upon a document from one of those old type machines that had the dotted, it's like one long piece of paper, but they have dots on each side of it.
Don't send originals because I don't wish to be responsible for them.
And there have been A number of incidents where people sent one-of-a-kind things and expected them to be returned.
And, you know, you just never know about the mails, you never know about the security of anything these days.
So copy me on something important, but for heaven's sake, hold on to your original.
Easy to rock easy on the air.
unidentified
Hello.
Yes, sir.
You and Mr. Argates and Mr. Allen get a fiber optics line into every president in the United States.
That would cure the whole problem, wouldn't it?
It would take care of your original thing you talked about tonight.
You could have a true internet discussion of subjects you're not allowed to put on the radio.
You could take it, say, power beyond anything you can imagine by allowing people to see what it'll cost to start the dryer or to take a day off and do something and so on.
If we get fiber, and that originally was the intent, I mean, if you want to deliver real bandwidth, you don't screw around with trying to put, you know, RF onto that's radio frequency onto the power lines, interfere with destroy shortwave.
That is not the way to get broadband to the American people.
As a matter of fact, it won't even be that broad, to be honest with you.
Nor will it be delivered as promised to the rural folk right away.
Just like cable, it will go into the cities, follow the money.
That's where the people are.
That's where the money is.
That's where it'll be deployed.
The real way to do it is, as this gentleman said, get fiber optic cable into every house in America.
And that's the end of the story.
You can then deliver everything you want.
There'll be enough bandwidth to literally change the entire world.
And in fact, there are some places in the United States, parts of LA and other cities across America, where gunshots are thought of as the norm, and they're just ignored.
Call the police?
No, most people would never call the police, just another gunshot.
Consider the state of society when we think that.
unidentified
Sweet Jesus, where am I to desire me?
I travel the world and the seven sea.
Everybody's looking for something.
Some of them want to know.
What do Mel Gibson and the choral...
Ooh, and it's all right.
And it's coming on.
We gotta get right back to where we started from.
Nothing good.
Nothing good.
We gotta get right back to where we started from.
Oh, come on.
Do you remember that day, when you first came my way?
I said no one could take your place.
If you get hurt, by the little things I think, I can put that smile back on to your face.
Ooh, and it's all right.
And it's coming on.
We gotta get right back to where we started from.
Nothing good.
Love can be strong.
We gotta get right back to where we started from.
Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh.
to talk with Art Bell.
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All right, coming up in a moment, this is going to be fascinating.
Absolutely fascinating.
Peter Ward is here.
He is a professor of biology, a professor of Earth and space sciences.
He's an adjunct professor of astronomy at the University of Washington at Seattle.
He's a principal investigator of the University of City of Washington node of the NASA Astrobiology Institute that involves the leadership of over 25 scientists studying the possibility of finding life beyond Earth.
He has published more than 100 scientific papers dealing with paleontology.
I knew I was going to blow this.
Paleontological, thank you, zoological and astronomical topics.
In addition, he's published 12 books and appeared in numerous television documentaries, senior counselor of the Paleontological Society, and was awarded an affiliate professorship at the California Institute of Technology.
So big-time credentials.
His book is Rare Earth, Why Complex Life is Uncommon in the Universe.
In fact, the New York Times concluded of his book, maybe we are alone in the universe, after all.
That's quite something to think about, that we would be alone in the universe that Jodi Foster in contact when she looked into the heavens and said it would be such a great waste if there was nothing else up there.
I mean, the entire concept is as it as probable or even more probable than there's life everywhere, that life is common, that given the right mud puddle and lightning strike, it's going to occur all over the place.
All those billions of suns and billions more planets going around and there's not life.
It doesn't seem logical, does it?
but in a moment Peter Ward I think is going to perhaps make that exact argument.
I was talking to a good friend of mine who is the co-author, Don Brownlee, and Don is the principal investigator of the just recently almost finished Stardust mission.
This was the NASA spacecraft which scooped up a bit of comet and is coming back to land in, I think it's a Utah desert in about three years from now.
So if you ever wanted a real Andromeda to strain scenario, it's on its way.
So we started asking ourselves, we come at this not as straight astronomers, but as people who study how planets should work if they have life.
The Earth is the only example we know of a life-giving planet.
And our sense was that most planets die early.
And coming from geological sides of planetary geology, you really get a sense that most planets have a very narrow window where life can occur before it is snuffed out.
Well, again, we're geologists and we think in millions of years, but we think that a billion years is a very long time for a planet to be able to have liquid water on its surface.
You know, our planet's already 4.6 billion years in age.
Because, again, in this book that I also wrote called The Life and Death of Planet Earth, we look at just the scenario, as you did, as a matter of fact, and try to get a sense of what a catastrophe a new ice age ought to be.
But my problem with the script, and maybe I shouldn't say this, is that it all happens too quickly.
But our point is that almost no planet, very few planets, get enough time, and you need time for evolution to work, to build intelligence.
Intelligence, I think, is going to be a really rare deal.
And the other aspect we're coming at, we're trying to really refute Carl Sagan.
And much of the book, although dedicated to him, is kind of a backslap.
And I can say this now.
Sagan had the view that if you look outside at the stars, you're going to see inevitably some of those stars will have intelligence.
His estimate was there are more than a million intelligent species in the Milky Way.
That means you or I looking out, you've got to see them.
This is a pretty interesting estimate, and it's based on a whole number of scientific aspects, which are much better known now than were known when Sagan made that estimate.
And if there were 10 more intelligences in the Milky Way, I'd be happy.
But that's 500 billion stars, Art.
So I think my sense is that we're not particularly alone, but we may be so geographically separated that, in fact, we are alone.
Most civilizations lose the race, and not many creatures, I think, make it the civilization.
We only have to look at Venus and Mars to see what happens when planets go bad, because both of these were, early in the game, easily habitable planets.
When you read the news right now about the changing weather patterns, the increasing temperatures, runaway global warming, and all the rest of it, it really doesn't look very good.
But see, on the other side of the coin, Peter, we have all these people who say, either from a religious perspective, look, God put all of the animals and the trees and the things that crawl and live on the planet for the use of mankind, and we are supposed to go ahead and use them as we will.
There is that point of view, and then there's the conservative economic point of view, and all of these great political pressures that keep the ball rolling toward the, let's keep doing what we're doing right now until the last drop of oil, tomorrow night's subject is gone, or whatever.
And so those are very powerful forces out there, Peter.
It nevertheless forms a very popular current attitude that's shared by a certain political side of the fence that wants to keep the economic ball rolling right up into the last drop of oil, petroleum.
And if we compound that with what I think both you and I believe is going to happen, certainly in the next 50 years of sudden and catastrophic climate change, you're looking at a world where it's problematical for having a continuation of this very easy, wonderful culture that we live in.
I just think the last great years, the civilization as we know it.
I think we as a species, I don't think we are to be eradicated unless we have a really large asteroid coming in.
But I was finally heartened to see that the military establishment, the United States, is for the first time taking sudden global climate change seriously as a military threat.
And in a way, this makes that particular problem, as foreseen in the movie, much easier to solve.
There's a very wonderful scientist named Bill Calvin who did a paper, or actually an article in Atlantic Monthly about three, four years ago called The Great Climate Flip-Flop, in which he looked at the same scenario that the movie posits.
We get a change in these thermal haline salt currents.
And hence we produce a sudden global warming, or in this particular case of the movie, a sudden cooling.
And the thing about that particular type of climate change is that from looking at ice core records from Antarctica and Greenland, we know that that has happened in the past, but at a minimum of 10 and more usually 20 and sometimes 50 years.
And the point is, the point I made to popular science is that a 10-year event is far more dangerous and difficult to solve than a one-year event.
A one-year event is like an earthquake.
The earthquake shatters a city, people come to the aid, everything's backed hunky-dory, and you fix it.
No matter how bad the earthquake, within a year or two, you're fixing it.
When you have a long-term climate, a 10-year climate change, it's not a 100-year climate change.
That's pretty easy to deal with too.
That's slow enough.
10 years is just fast enough to really ruin your civilization, yet so slow that there's no way that you can fix it with sudden aid from many different sources.
Peter, do you think that you could describe to this audience what a 10-year change would be like for everybody in the United States and then for the rest of the world as well?
I mean, do you think you could kind of put together what might be a realistic scenario based on a 10-year flip-flop?
I think the thing we have to deal with is what keeps us going.
And what I had tonight was the most wonderful dinner.
And in that dinner, I had noodles, we had beef stroganoff, I had friends over, we had salad, we had stuff that came from California, stuff that comes from the Midwest, things that grow because farmers have an enormous predictability.
It's April in Seattle.
I'm just starting to set out the first of my little vegetable gardens.
All right, listen, we're here at the bottom of the hour.
So during this, consider that, please, if you would, Peter, a sort of an overview of what the United States could expect, what changes would happen to us, and then to the rest of the world as well.
Peter Ward is my guest.
I'm Art Bell.
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Almost a million to one, have to be a million to one.
Even the critics of the concept of fast climate change, rapid climate change, are beginning to yield to the inevitable fact that it's happening right now.
Actually, we're having one weird, bizarre weather story after another.
The inexplicable continues to happen.
You know, hurricanes forming where they've not formed previously bizarre weather all over the place, real changes.
You were telling me about your garden, and I hope you kind of lay out a 10-year kind of thing.
In other words, what do you think, Peter, we can expect if we get this 10-year flip?
Well, just as we were discussing that, interestingly enough, I have the TV on, too, and CNN has just reported that the president's science advisor denies that the science policy of the White House is driven by a conservative agenda, including studies of climate change.
So it is the perfect storm because I think people are now just waking up to the fact that we do have a big problem with climate change.
There has to be a reason why all of a sudden so much of science is beginning to embrace this as not only possible, but probably inevitable and possibly even occurring right now.
That we're actually in it, the beginnings of it right now.
As you know, for the last 10 years at least, scientists have been going to the great ice sheets.
There's one in Antarctica, there's one in Greenland, and the ice piled layer upon layer preserves excellent record of the ancient climate.
All you need to do is core it.
You take a big drill, you take the cores back in a cold lab, you analyze them for the nature of the isotopes of oxygen, and you can get ancient temperatures.
Now, we've been realizing over the last five years that the rather sudden shifts happen very quickly, because you need two things.
You need to know what the temperature change was and how long it took.
So you need to do a radiocarbon date on it, as well as understanding the magnitude of the temperature change.
And it's very clear that the Earth's climate, at least since the ice ages began, has been flipping back and forth and back and forth.
I mean, I want to know the simple stuff, like how this will affect my daily life, whether I'm going to live through this or whether it's going to kill me.
And if I live through it, what changes can I expect in my life?
The scariest scenario is not so much America's climate change because it will, but we're a very large continent.
It's quite well insulated.
The biggest problem is Europe.
Europe has about 500 million very cranky People.
Happily for us and the rest of the world, Europe totally feeds itself.
It is self-sufficient in food because European agriculture is fabulous.
But if you look at the latitude of Europe, you have to realize that all those beautiful wine-growing areas in France and Italy are really at the same latitude as parts of southern Canada.
Southern Canada doesn't grow wine grapes because it has a very cold winter climate.
Yeah, and Europe is anomalously warm because of these thermohaline circulation patterns.
These are these big ocean currents that keep Europe warm.
If these currents are perturbed, Europe gets the temperature it should have, which is cold.
And so over a 10-year period then, you have 500 million Europeans who are no longer self-sufficient in food and yet have an industrial civilization and an armament ability and armies sufficient to conquer areas that do make food.
And that, I think, is the inevitable consequence of war.
So in other words, you're saying that a nation faced with possibly even simply being erased, I mean, being destroyed, prior to allowing itself to be destroyed under those conditions, would absolutely go and grab the land where they could grow food.
This is a political question, but I was actually wondering about the same thing, and I was suggesting the very same outcome.
I really was.
I mentioned the probability under those conditions of war.
And, gosh, Peter, I just don't want to say.
I mean, that could be the end of the world in the next decade, should that occur.
That's virtually the end of the world, because I don't think there are any small wars.
Well, maybe there are, but it seems like almost any war that would be for just taking land or taking something on the part of Europe would lead to something much wider and perhaps dangerous on a global scale.
If I were we, I would certainly be making nice with the Canadians.
Because, again, if we certainly have an episode of global warming, southern Canada becomes the grain area of choice, whereas much of the grain area now in the United States is too hot.
You asked me earlier in the conversation why I had the temerity to write a book that suggests that complex life is fairly rare.
And part of that is based on studies that we have done and other colleagues, we examine the galaxy as a whole, and we ask the question, are there better and worse neighborhoods in the galaxy?
And one of these relates to asteroid impact.
It turns out that there are regions of the galaxy where you would have a lower asteroid impact and regions where you'd have a much higher impact.
The farther away from the center you are, the safer you are.
These gamma-ray bursts are directed, and we can imagine them wiping out thousands of planets, just eliminating life from thousands of planets in their way.
But the good news is the majority of gamma-ray bursts and the directionality are from the center of the galaxy.
We are a long way.
We are in the galactic outposts.
And again, that's a very favorable place.
I've had this argument with SETI.
You know, you talked about contact in the movie, and they've got the beautiful Jodi Foster.
It turns out that Ellie, the heroine of that movie, is a real person.
Well, only because, as we all know, Seth I've also interviewed many, many times, and he actually is extremely optimistic that they will find life.
However, he's also faced with the indisputable fact that they have surveyed a great deal of the sky already, and so far, other than a few moments of regrettable excitement because it didn't come true, they haven't found a damn thing.
Well, interestingly, Seth gave a public lecture that I was at, and he has now stated for the first time that if they don't find some contact, and I think he said by about 2050, then the odds of their finding a contact are going to lessen dramatically.
So what they're saying is, give us another 50 years of your money, and we'll give you a better sense of whether or not.
So that I thought was interesting.
That was the first time that I've heard any of the SETI people publicly admit that, yes, there is a limit to our searching.
So, for instance, an awful lot of the really good astrobiology that's being taken place is by SETI scientists, but it just underscores the fact they need a lot of money.
They have a huge overhead because they have so many people on staff.
Well, suppose you were in charge of everything and you were a dictator, and based on the scientific knowledge you now have, you could dictate what would begin to happen right now.
Well, the first thing I would do, I think, one of the most dangerous things that we're doing is I would demand that Detroit start building hybrids.
I mean, it's just a tragedy, I think, that the only two reasonable hybrid cars to be bought in America, one comes from Toyota and one comes from Honda.
Now, you can't tell me that Detroit can't equally build a hybrid car.
The amount of carbon dioxide and emissions coming out of every one of our automobiles is part of the crisis.
And once we start getting disruptions in climate, we are certainly going to find that transportation systems, fuel, everything is going to be in the whole new world.
And if I were in charge, I would certainly start mobilizing for a lower oil economy than we have in the present day.
I'm Art Bell, and in the nighttime, this is Coast to Coast AM.
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From coast to coast and worldwide on the internet, this is Coast to Coast AM with Art Bell.
Since we're touching on SETI Peter, Peter Ward is my guest.
But Rare Earth, his book, Why Complex Life is Uncommon in the University.
He's tangled with Seth's showstack a few times.
And while we're talking for a second about SETI, I've always sort of tangled with Seth over whether SETI would immediately release the information or whether there's actually a behind-the-scenes protocol that would, if they actually found life, that would take precedence and it would remain secret for I don't know how long a period of time, but we wouldn't get the information right away.
And I found out that there is something called a planetary protection officer.
And this might relate right to that.
It turns out that NASA has someone on staff who is the planetary protection officer for planet Earth.
And this is no joke.
I mean, this guy's making civil servant wages.
The aspects that are most interesting, I touched earlier that my friend Don Brownley has comet stuff coming back to Earth.
Well, when we start doing sample return missions from Mars, we are going to be bringing back alien samples to Earth as well.
I'm just wondering if a first signal would also be, let's face it, if the aliens know that we're here, although we've seen enough bad science fiction movies, all of this, there is a potential for danger as well.
And by the way, while you're on the subject of the comet and contamination, I read a fascinating story the other day that suggested short of the two rovers that we just sent to Mars, everything preceding them was not sterilized before it was sent to Mars.
So there's a lot of scientists now saying, yeah, we're going to find life on Mars all right.
And believe me, a whole lot of people are very, very, very worried about that.
And here's an analogous case.
Because the Bush administration wants to go to Mars and because there's going to be a lunar aspect to it, I was sent to Houston last week, along with, I guess, 10 or 15 other scientists, to try to put together on short notice A scientific rationale for going back to the moon.
What would be a reasonable and valid scientific sort of impetus to, if we're going to go there anyway and the military is going to run it, couldn't we get in some science on the side?
And it turns out one of the more really interesting projects that could be done on the moon is finding fossils.
And you say, ah, fossils on the moon, that's nonsense.
Indeed, and you're very close, because we think early in Earth history there was a heavy bombardment.
There may be more pristine early earth rock on the moon than on the earth, because all the old rocks on the earth have been affected by metamorphism and volcanism.
But that pristine early earth rock has been blasted into space.
And we've done calculations showing that actually quite a bit has landed on the moon.
And we may have a better insight into how life first formed on Earth by going to the moon than by studying it on the Earth.
It just shows that microbes and rocks and material can go from planet to planet.
This old concept of panspermia, the idea that life, Fred Hoyle, that life originated elsewhere and was seeded here.
Well, there's something even more important than even being out on the edge.
And this is where the geologists and geology, I think, the greatest contribution that we have made to this whole concept of how many life forms are out there comes from the insight that not only do you have to have a planet in a safe part of the galaxy, you have to have a planet with plate tectonics or continental drift.
And this was totally unforeseen.
Turns out that the same process that caused our continents to slide around is the global thermostat.
Well, let's just get one quick look like plate tectonics.
I mean, this is a what the hell does plate tectonics have to do with anything?
It was found out that is our thermostat.
It turns out that we have carbon dioxide, as we all know.
That is the problem with global warming and greenhouse gases.
Any planet that has too much carbon dioxide becomes Venus.
So how do you get it out of an atmosphere?
It's always being pumped in there by your volcanoes.
So there's a constant stream of it.
If you don't have a system to scrub it out of your atmosphere, you're dead in a short period of time, which is what happened to Venus.
Venus did not have plate tectonics.
Every time we have a mountain go up, we get granite being formed.
And once you expose granite to air, the silicate minerals, as they weather, take carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere as part of the weathering product.
This little simple concept totally escaped the astronomers.
And this was the contribution that was made by geology.
And in rare earth for the first time, we suggested this was why Earth has maintained this extremely long stable temperature, building on the work of Jim Casting and others at Penn State who discovered this originally.
So it just seems so simple.
And yet, if you don't find plate tectonics, and we only know one place in the solar system that has it, Earth, Mars had it and it stopped, Venus had it and it stopped.
As soon as they lost it, they lost any ability to have life.
No, I think we'll certainly see population crashes.
I think the history of the next thousand years is going to be one or more enormous sort of corrections to the human population on planet Earth.
And none of that will be very happy.
We really, I think, are going to see famine, or simply if we get these 10-year global changes in climate, I could see a case where a billion people die.
We're really looking at a major correction on the planet.
Maybe we can do it as in the case of sort of outsourcing.
You retire a lot of them before you send the rest of the way.
But my worry is that we just as a civilization are not yet ready to deal with, again, this tenure event.
Well, it's rare that I get a guest who can do more doom and gloom than I can.
You're really doing pretty well here.
All right, let me try this from an optimistic point of view.
The United States, and I think you said this earlier, probably is uniquely positioned to make it through with less pain than most of the rest of the world.
Yeah, the worst case scenario is, you know, or I guess I'm just preaching and converted here because you know all this stuff, but the worst case scenario is with global warming, you get a rise in sea level.
Now, it isn't going to be bad like the movies where you have this gigantic sort of tidal wave aspect coming in, but the rise in sea level injects salt into deltas and near shore, very productive farmlands.
It turns out that, oh, a huge percentage of the world's crops come from deltas right now, the Mississippi Delta, the Nile Delta, the Bamaputra.
It goes on and on.
These are flat, very, very rich soils, almost at sea level.
If you rise or create a rise in sea level of even a meter or so, you inject salt water into the groundwater systems in these places, and you lose crops.
It is the loss of the deltas that is going to be as catastrophic as almost anything.
And this is where the U.S. will really suffer, because we do have lowland areas.
The whole Mississippi area, the Gulf Coast, there's an awful lot of productive farmland which become non-productive.
And personally, the most productive place on the United States of all is the Sacramento and the Imperial and the San Joaquin Valleys.
And we know that because the sea level is going to change, the Sacramento Delta region, it injects salt into the San Joaquin.
And once you do that, all these beautiful winter vegetables we get.
I mean, the San Joaquin is definitely as productive as any place on this planet for groceries.
And that would certainly eclipse in terms of a challenge for mankind in the most immediate future anything else we're thinking of, including terrorism and, I don't know, whatever other threats might be looming, even the remote asteroid possibility.
All the rest of it is dwarfed by this if it's underway.
No, it's going to have to be done country by country by trading emissions.
I mean, this is the whole name of the game.
But we have this huge new middle class in both China and India.
And I think this is something that we Americans just don't quite understand, is that China and India are in the same position that the U.S. was in 1950, 1955, with this huge emerging middle class based on many cases, either jobs we've sent in the case of India or the products that are produced in the Shanghai region in China.
And so you've got a middle class.
Middle class wants cars, and they want refrigerators, and they want metal things.
To do that industrially, you've got to increase your energy, which is either oil or, in the case of China, it's coal.
And so what we're looking at is even with the best efforts of Western Europe and America, and we're not doing our best efforts, the Chinese and the Indians, in a large sense, hold the key to the planet's climatic future.
I think, unfortunately, we are so threatened by different cultures, and because of the political realities that we hire politicians for four years, and a politician, there's no politician on the planet with the current mandates that can think about a 10-year event because they're not in office long enough.
That's what makes it really, really difficult, the cultural and also just the political systems that have evolved by humankind.
But again, the players in this business are those with Industry.
And I think that in Russia, for instance, Putin is president for life.
I don't see him ever giving up that power.
So there you have someone with a longer-term view.
But unfortunately, he's got such huge problems.
I mean, they teeter on going from a European country to really a backwater third world nation.
I've been to Russia several times.
I've just been struck by, boy, you know, my whole life as a child and from the 50s, I was scared, scared of Russia and all the Cold War.
And when I finally saw the industrial sort of ineptitude of the place, it just was funny and really, really sad.
I still think that Southeast Asia is one of the big players, but boy, I think India and China are the name of the game for understanding the next century of climate change.
Do you think that out on the other side of all of this pain that almost seems inevitable, there will come this great, wonderful technological society where man has benefited himself and perhaps lives now a longer life, has extended his life through genetic manipulation or whatever?
Alexis Rockman, the great New York artist, was the illustrator and sent through Times Books.
And in it, you know, I've been contacted by many movie makers over and over and over, and once they found out what my sense of it is, they just hang up because it's not a very sexy view.
I don't think humans will change in an evolutionary sense.
I do think the one chance at producing a new human species is genetically engineering into the germline the ability to live to 150 years old.
So let's imagine that we have a 150-year person, and that person can say, because they lived to 150, they can have children for 100 years of it.
I mean, all of a sudden, the social structure is radically different.
I love getting computer messages during the program.
That's a lot of fun.
Laura, in Hell's Canyon, Washington, there's names for it, Hell's Canyon.
Says Art, yes, When Planets Go Bad would be a great title for a book or a movie.
You want to write it or should I?
When Planets Go Bad.
but that's what we're talking about.
Well, here's something interesting.
Peter mentions specifically, as he did a little while ago, the scenario of the Andromeda Strain connected with the cometary material that we're going to bring back to Earth, and we are doing that.
I'm curious, though, Peter, why would you reference the possibility of an Andromeda Strain type of horrible whatever.
With respect to bringing back cometary material.
I mean, after all, things are smashing into the earth all the time, perhaps with all sorts of seeds.
Or would you postulate that they're virtually sterilized as they enter the atmosphere, and therefore bringing back something unmolested from a comet might be a really poor idea?
Sure, a byproduct of living organisms and volcanoes.
No volcanoes.
It really does look like there might be life there.
It doesn't seem like, though, to be honest with you, Peter, that whatever life we might have put there with our earlier probes could have evolved quickly enough to be producing methane at those levels.
Even a couple bacteria, given the correct conditions, can easily, in 25 years, produce sufficient populations that you could easily do it.
I think methanogens, archaeans, are just the type of bacteria that we could expect to make it across in a spaceship, crash on the land.
We had two enormous landers plus all the others going down.
It is not impossible.
And at this stage, the best solution to the whole business, if we find life and it's non-DNA life, then we say, aha, this is independently arisen on Mars.
But the scary scenario for the NASA people, of which I'm one, is that it will be DNA life.
And then we can never quite say that we didn't put it there.
Ours was pretty much the same conversation and the same outline as in Rare Earth.
We at the university are looking for the factors that would allow complex life to arise and what are the kind of biotic systems of a planet that would keep them alive.
Well, NASA is certainly in the let's go find life business, but they're also in the more physical aspects.
One of the specialties that we bring them from the University of Washington and the team that I put together is looking at past planetary catastrophes.
Again, we look at the past mass extinctions and ask, could these be a commonality in other worlds?
What is it about the Earth that caused these great periods of mass death?
And what might we expect in other planets to be the Fate of life, should we find it elsewhere?
Again, this idea that there are various areas in a galaxy that are better and worse for life is a very, very productive way to go.
Peter, if we could travel in space much better than the speed of light, and we could go visit right now many worlds with, I don't know, the probability of life based on water and all the things that we're familiar with,
and we could zoom around and visit these planets, would it be your view that what we would find is a bunch of perhaps signs of ancient civilizations that have self-immolated or been destroyed one way or the other?
Well, it's my guess that if we could go to the hundred nearest stars, and we now know that virtually every star has planets, so this is much more optimistic than in Sagan's day.
So let's go to the hundred nearest stars and go star system by star system by star system.
The vast majority of them are not going to have Earth-like planets that are habitable.
They may have had Earth-like planets, but we now know that the vast majority of systems we've seen have Jupiters, hot Jupiters, that are present in the highly elliptical orbits.
Well, you're going to find a lot of Jupiters, and where the Earth-like planets used to be, they're no longer there.
They've been either sent into the Sun or ejected.
When we find Earth-like planets, I think we're going to find an awful lot of planets like Mars or like Venus, Earth-like planets, planets that went bad.
If we find two or three Earth-like planets that have life in the nearest hundred stars, I think that would be a very positive outcome.
I would think that the chance of finding a civilization, although you can't say, I mean, lightning always strikes twice, you could always have two planets like the Earth maybe side by side, but I think the odds are that in 100 planets around us, we would find nothing that was Earth-like in the sense of having so much light.
His sense is that we're always trapped in this particular system.
So whether, unless, of course, you ask, you can sign multi-generations of humans to live and breathe in a tin can spaceship that would go for hundreds and hundreds of years.
And perhaps, coming out at the other end, you have a crew which, has been brought up ten generations away from the one who launched it to know how to smow the rocket down.
But then your chances are you're going to enter a system which has been totally dead and devoid.
Now, can we send out hundreds of such endeavors with no possibility of ever coming back?
Well, a lot of what has been suggested couldn't be has already come to pass.
So I don't rule that possibility out, but I am willing to certainly consider that even if we got it, what we would find out there, according to you, seems to be either always dead or planets that were at one point harboring some sort of life, but now are dead again.
And existing life would be nil and maybe even zero.
But NASA, again, getting back to NASA, I mean, you've had to present this hypothesis to NASA, and there must have been some notable reaction.
I mean, are they sort of displeased by its consideration, or are they so scientific that they're willing to consider it right along with everything else?
Well, NASA has a new mission and a mission statement.
And one of the aspects of that mission statement is try to make our world better.
Certainly to understand the fates of worlds that didn't do well may at least give us the wisdom and understanding of how not to screw up this particular planet.
There are many people who believe that NASA knows things that it has not told us.
There's a great group of people out there who feel that things were seen on the moon, things have been seen on Mars and elsewhere, that NASA is well aware of and hasn't said a word about.
That's exactly the point, why all of a sudden there's this sort of renewed interest in going back to the moon.
Why NASA had a crash group of us try to put together scientific reasons to, at least if they go, take some scientists along, because the Bush directive up till now is we're going to the moon and we may not have time to do any science as we go.
Boy, certainly this idea to get to Mars was a bold initiative by the President, and it was met by an awful lot of sort of ho-hum, where's the money going to come from?
But to get to the Mars, we have to springboard to the moon first.
At least that's his directive.
And we're in early stages of planning.
So maybe I'll be more diplomatic.
Let's just say that at this stage, the planning is going so quickly that it may have outstripped the scientific sort of rationale to go.
So scientists are now trying to put together a possible series of very interesting experiments to do if we do go.
And there are some very interesting things that can be done on the moon.
You're saying that short of this, though, it was only a political they're doing it, so let's go, I don't know, do it again, show them we can do it again.
so if you have questions now would be a good time Thank you.
unidentified
Nights in white satin, never reaching the end.
Letters unwritten, never meaning to send beauty out of this with these eyes before just what the truth is.
What do Mel Gibson and the Coral Castle do?
What do you think about me?
What's a part of a time in your wildest dreams?
To talk with Art Bell.
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From coast to coast and worldwide on the internet, this is Coast to Coast Again with Art Bell and my guest Peter Ward, who wrote Rare Earth, Why Complex Life is Uncommon in the Universe.
And I think I'll give him a couple of minutes to think about this one.
It's a typical critical email of anybody who talks about global warming and all the rest of it.
And it's very typical, and it's typical of the Klan.
So I thought I would read it and give him a couple of minutes and think about a response.
But here it is.
Hobwash Art.
Does your guest deny that Mount Pinatubo erupting in the Philippines put more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere than all the activity of man since the dawn of time?
So there you go.
in a moment so we'll get a response To be fair, the author of this email, Bill in Santa Ana, California, he actually said Pinatubo put more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere than any of the activity of man since the dawn of man.
Not the dawn of time, the dawn of man.
But even that is a very powerful argument, suggesting that nature does things that dwarf anything man could do with regard to the atmosphere anyway.
This one came from the Independent in the UK, where we get a lot of news we don't get here.
But yes, that's exactly Where they went to Hawaii.
And they're saying this was actually the story that I read in the first hour, which suggests, in the body of the story, that it may be now feeding upon itself, that we may have actually tipped past the point where it's simply increasing,
but now it has begun the process that ends up with boiling, roiling planets of death, like a Venus.
I don't think we're going to go that far from all the, hopefully not, from everything I've seen.
Hopefully not.
The best estimate that I've seen comes from a climatologist, and this is scary in itself, suggesting that in 100 years we will have carbon dioxide levels of 1,000 parts per million.
We now have about 360 ppm.
But what's interesting to a geologist such as myself is we can calculate from rock nodules what past carbon dioxide levels have been.
The last time we had a global forest, really a tropical forest that covered the whole planet was the Eocene epoch.
This was 60 million years ago when the first horses evolved.
It was a planet-wide jungle.
CO2 levels were 1,000 parts per million then.
So this guy at the University of Washington, David Battisti, has suggested that within 100 years we will have a return to the same levels of CO2 that we had in the Eocene, which was an entire planet of warmth.
I realize that my view may be a bit ahead of time, but with just our galaxy alone, approximately 100 million light years across, and there's billions of galaxies in our known universe, doesn't it seem kind of a small mindset to think that there isn't or was not some form of life out there at one point?
In other words, wouldn't we be looked on by anybody who has made it, Peter, as one of the much more likely going to blow themselves up any second here?
Peter, I'm certain you're aware of the work of Zachariah Sitchin and the theory that we were designed, we're designer beings, and that we were brought here to mine gold.
And there is this other planet, and there are these other people.
East of the Rockies, you're on there with Peter Ward.
unidentified
Hi.
Hi, Park.
Yes.
Hi.
Yeah, I'm not one of these people who thinks it's terribly likely that we've been visited by extraterrestrials with advanced civilizations.
But I guess I was under the impression that you thought that there might not be much out there in the way of any kind of life.
But it sounded like what you said a few minutes ago.
Maybe I was mistaken in that impression.
But I was just going to say that given that we have already witnessed the propensity for some rather strange forms of life to be able to survive in very hostile environments on our own planet.
You know, if you go like very deep down into the bottom of, you know, very deep oceans on our planet, we've seen some pretty strange life forms down there surviving without sunlight.
Absolutely.
And, you know, and I guess there's like, you know, various caves and such where there's no sunlight and what have you.
Well, basically I wanted to say that, you know, it would seem to me that there could at least be some form of life, even if it's not, you know, technologically advanced life.
I mean, in various places, you know, in other solar systems, even if the planets in those solar systems have very hostile environments.
I'd certainly like to see what's underneath the ice flows of Europa, given that it is covered, seems to be covered in water.
And, you know, may in fact, well, we don't know for sure, but, you know, because there's some sort of a possibility that there could be life underneath the ice crust there.
So if that's a possibility, then I would say that there's at least a possibility for some form of life in solar systems, even if they do have, you know, planets that have rather...
And it's interesting you talk about the subsurface life, because I begin my book, Rare Earth, talking about subsurface life and extreme life as the reason why we should believe that life is going to be very common.
Okay, but even a critical evaluation might include the following.
Any life sufficiently advanced to get here might well only study us, accounting for the sightings, the mutilations, the abductions, the sorts of things that we do hear about.
It might account for that.
I mean, they wouldn't necessarily make connect with us.
They might only sort of monitor us and consider that we're going to blow ourselves to pieces more than likely, or, you know, the climate will get us, or whatever, that we won't make it.
Now, to see something that is between us and the moon, that's a long distance away, that's only 30 meters across, indicates that our ability and our looking in space is unbelievable.
Spaceships smaller than 30 meters, it's hard for me to imagine tiny little spaceships.
In other words, if they were out there, we would see them.
There would be record of this.
So to get around that, you almost have to invoke really far out energy-wise.
The question about, or the comment about climate change, if, I mean, if it's taken us this long to build up all the CO2, and now we're seeing the climate change, how can we change it so that it stops happening?
I think it's a little too far progress to help anything.
Like the USA right now per person is 23 barrels of oil a day, or 23 barrels of oil per person per year.
And like the rest of the world, like China is a barrel and a half.
So how can we change that so we actually can stay on this earth?
And if we ever get anywhere else, your caller or your guest was saying that it's impossible to go like light speed or maximum light speed or faster than light speed.
but what if this earth as the whole universe is moving around what if we're actually actually moving somewhere to where we're supposed to be going but don't even know because we think the universe is Spinning around us?
What if we're spinning towards something?
And that was my comment.
And if you could comment, just let me know how he can, or what his plan for the future is with global warming and a little comment on Earth moving around to meet the people.
You know, I ask this of all men of science, nearly, that I interview.
And it's a very hard question to ask, so usually I just use the movie Contact.
And I remember that really critical scene where he was sitting in the seat with a review board, and it was to be decided who would go and make contact with these incredible beings who had provided the sketch for the machine of how to get there.
And the critical question the group wanted to know of the scientist was, will you spread, will you tell them that you believe, do you believe in God, and will you take the word of God to them?
And what a moment, what an incredible moment.
And the scientist just had to sort of sit there and finally honestly answer, no, I can't do that.
To be specific, actually, carbon dioxide has just been measured at the highest point in Hawaii at 379 parts per million, up from about 376 a year before.
Now, these last three years of measurement represent actually the largest on record.
They had up to about a 64% rise Over the average rate of growth over the past decade of 1.8 parts per million per year.
So there you have it.
Those are the hard numbers.
current measurement of carbon dioxide at the highest point in Hawaii, 379 parts per million.
Well, you're right on one of the most interesting questions of all, and I'm surprised it hasn't come up in this debate.
We'd like very much to know if DNA is one way to make life or the only way to make life.
And you say, Patrick, that's absurd.
Surely with all the chemical elements we have, you could have a whole variety of types of life.
And yet, when you start looking at what life is and the definition that we use, it can reproduce, it can metabolize, and it can evolve, there's not a whole lot of ways that you can actually build it and have information and have proteins made or whatever structure you use.
So some of the smartest people I know on the planet, and one of these is named Steve Benner down in Florida, is trying to figure out if not DNA what.
And he's really following up on your question.
Is there another way to do it that is not DNA?
And we don't know yet.
unidentified
Okay, and the reason I ask, I'm not a big Bible guy myself.
Creation can be created by using a battery or it can be by an entity.
In the theory of the Big Bang, creating our universe and so on, it took a long time after coalescing of the universe for life to form.
Was there a catalyst, i.e.
a meteor, natural volcanism occurring as the Earth evolved, that caused the gases that we needed to create the atmosphere to give us the filters and the possibilities for the evolution of a catalyzed DNA deposited by meteors, whatever.
And if that's possible, would it not be possible to catalyze Mars, being as it already has DNA, although we don't know what its activity, its status is, kind of like the Genesis program, to create a planet for us to, in the future, inhabit?
And it turns out that borax, while it's a pretty good soap, is a natural occurring product.
And it has been found now to be the first step in building RNA, which is half of DNA.
So parts, the most important parts of RNA have now been synthesized by a natural process where you take RNA, you run water over it, you throw in some amino acids.
And this may be really the most critical and interesting step into eventually producing artificial DNA.
And there's another crew in San Diego, again, part of the NASA Astrobiology Institute, that built five-stranded DNA instead of the two-stranded that we have.
And it remained stable for some time before it then fell apart.
You remember when the two Vikings landed, they worked perfectly.
And up till that time, Carl Sagan was really the top of the heap.
We were really expecting to find life on Mars, and two of the experiments done by Viking, each of the Vikings, showed that not only was the soil sterile, essentially, but it had chemicals within it that would inhibit life from growing in it.
This was such a depressing finding that it really set back astrobiology for about 20 years.
Viking convinced most scientists that the soil of Mars is dead.
And one of the things that has troubled me for a long time with this, with the ozone layer and the chlorofluorocarbons, and how supposedly the chlorofluorocarbons were damaging the ozone layer when even helium won't go to the altitude that the ozone layer is.
But methane is also an even more effective greenhouse gas.
Now, the big spooky concern for an awful lot of us are things called gas hydrates, which is frozen methane.
It is methane that is frozen into soils in the Arctic and the Antarctic.
How you can get a runaway greenhouse is if you warm up the atmosphere sufficient to allow the release of that frozen methane, it doesn't act as anything when it's frozen.
It goes up into the atmosphere.
In 20 years, it converts to CO2, and you have a very much hotter climate.
And this is the scariest scenario of global warming, is that we warm the planet warm enough that the Arctic regions get a temperature that releases the methane.
I flew back from Alaska this summer just charting and examining the glaciers by airplane.
And that's pretty phenomenal, too.
And the glacier recession that's taking place all over this planet is so amazing.
And you're totally right, Art, about what is going on up there and the thinning of the ice sheets and the fact that we are losing an enormous amount of the Arctic.
There were six of us here that seen them, and I'm quite amazed after 70 years of living that there are still a lot of people, supposedly educated people, who have never seen them or not can't believe in them when I've been aboard seven times myself and I have five implants.
Well, I'm appreciative of that point of view, and it may well be, Peter, I know where he was headed, that all of this perhaps cannot be done with science.
All of this perhaps cannot be done by going faster than light.
But it may well be that our salvation in meeting others who may exist anywhere will exist within the mind.
And as a result of that hypothesis, they actually scoff at such suggestions.
It's pretty much of a, well, show us.
And, you know, it's a fair position to take.
I mean, they, too, will say, well, I've got an open mind, but I really don't see the evidence.
And despite this last caller's claim about documents, and I'm certainly as well familiar with any of them as, most of them as anybody, it's not irrefutable evidence.
Not yet.
I don't think.
It's close.
I've had sightings myself, Peter, so I'm teetering in a strange place here, but it's still not, in my mind, irrefutable.
I think the best we're going to get out of you on that subject.
East of the Rockies, you're on here with Peter Ward.
Not a lot of time.
unidentified
Hello?
Yes, this is Will from Madison, Wisconsin.
You know, there have been societies that have educated less intelligent societies, and in turn, these people have, yes, defeated the more intelligent societies in human history.
That's why intelligent human beings, if they exist in outer space, do not want to give us their education.
Well, we certainly see a cater in American society that seems less educated, that seems to be afraid of what more educated groups seem to want to come up with.
So that fear is certainly real.
Maybe they have a reason to be afraid.
I think we should be a little more liberal, but what do I know?