James Gardner presents the Biocosm Hypothesis, arguing that life-friendly universes—like ours, finely tuned for carbon and intelligence—may be designed by advanced beings from prior cosmic cycles, not random evolution. He cites Fred Hoyle’s predictions of stellar nucleosynthesis and superstring theory’s vast universe possibilities, suggesting a "programmed" selection process. Gardner speculates on germline therapy boosting IQs by 300% but warns of societal divides creating new species, while dismissing crop circles as fringe. Though not supernatural, his theory aligns with Judeo-Christian faith in nature’s order, proposing intelligence stabilizes cosmic chaos rather than chaos birthing life. Skeptics challenge "bio-unfriendly" events like extinctions, but Gardner insists they may be necessary for complexity—implying humanity’s survival hinges on mastering its own evolution before cosmic architects intervene. [Automatically generated summary]
Good evening, good morning, good afternoon, wherever you may be in the world's time zones.
Covering them all is this program, Coast Coast Bam Weekend Edition.
I'm Art Bell.
It's great to be here.
truly an honor always to be with you.
Tonight in the second hour, James Gardner is going to be here, and this will be...
That's what we do here.
Food for thought.
And he is going to make the case that our universe was deliberately designed by a super intelligent being will go through that range.
Or beings, plural, in a prior cosmic cycle to life to be life-friendly.
So, in other words, that we were designed.
And that's such an interesting concept and one that I know we all wonder about how we got here, who designed us, whether it was a matter of evolution, making everything seem perfect, or in fact, everything seems perfect because it was designed to be so.
That should be quite a discussion.
That'll be in the second hour.
In the first hour, we will have open lines.
Anything you want to talk about?
Fair game.
First, a little news.
A Flujah, a fragile ceasefire held between Sunni insurgents and U.S. Marines on Sunday in the besieged city of Fluja, where Iraqis said more than 600 civilians were killed in the past week alone.
Near Baghdad, gunmen shot down a U.S. attack helicopter, killed the two crew members aboard.
Also, the military suggested it is open to a negotiated solution in its showdown with a radical Shiite cleric in the South.
Interesting.
We, of course, were not at all interested in negotiating with Saddam Hussein, but we are with the cleric.
And then the second item in this hour's news, President Bush insisted Sunday he was satisfied that federal agents were on top of the terrorist threat after reading a September 11 briefing detailing Osama bin Laden's intentions on U.S. soil.
For two years, National Security Advisor Connelisa Rice left Americans with the impression that the memo from August 6, 2001 focused on historical information dating to 1998 and that any current threats mostly involved overseas targets, yet the release under public pressure of the briefing showed that Bush had received intelligence reporting as recent as May of 2001 that most of the current information focused on possible plots inside the United States.
Nevertheless, all of this swirling around the president, I don't for one second, as much as I might be willing to believe some pretty far-out things from time to time, I don't for one second think that our president knew there was going to be an attack, and that is certainly what's, I don't know, suggested by the inquiry itself, I guess, and I don't for one second believe that.
Gas prices climbed another 2.5 cents in the past two weeks as high crude oil prices and tight capacity contributed to record prices at the pump.
According to a national survey, the nationwide average for the past two weeks it ended Friday was $182 for all grades.
A buck 82.
That was 8,000 stations surveyed across the U.S. So price gas is going up.
And you know what?
I don't think it's going to come back down.
Factional violence spread across Afghanistan on Sunday.
We've done battles in the north between militias of two powerful warlords, leaving up three fighters dead.
Rival group said Sunday forces loyal to Abdul Rashid Dostum and his rival, Hadaha Mohammed, battled overnight, an area about 100 miles northwest of the capital, Kabul.
Or Kabul.
And interestingly, you know, the fact that it is Easter apparently has caused the Passion of the Christ to return to the number one position, something movies don't very often do after falling off, 17.1 million.
All right, I'm going to read you an email that curled my hair.
It's from somebody named Bob in Silverdale, Washington.
And Bob writes, Hi, Art.
You know, I'd just like to let you know that I flew over the Arctic from Europe to Seattle.
As most of you know, the airlines now offer quite a bit of savings by flying over the North Pole.
And he says he did it on Northwest Airlines on April 8th.
He said, I was surprised to see that they showed two complete movies and encouraged the passengers to keep the window covers down.
Curious as I am, though, I looked outside.
The entire Arctic ice field is broken up, like many giant icebreakers went through it or something.
Although we were at about 34,000 feet cruising altitude, The cuts in the ice showed light blue-green waters.
Also, Greenland itself, anyway, what I remember of it, was always one block of ice and snow, but now distinct valleys and mountaintops were evident.
So I spoke with the stewardess on board, and I asked her a few questions.
You know, it was as if she was under orders not to talk about this.
She was very concerned, very agitated.
She indicated, well, she made some pantomime-like facial gestures indicating all this, and that the crew also was aware of the changes.
She indicated to me that it's just a matter of time before the, you know, what hits the fan.
She was very concerned and confirmed the reason for the back-to-back movies.
That's freaky.
Now, if any of the rest of you should happen a chance to take flights over the North Pole headed for Europe to and from, whatever, and I'm sure a lot of you will do that, then how about you too take the opportunity to at least take a few moments out from the invitation to keep those window shades down and glance down even from altitude and take a look at what you see and what the Arctic looks like.
That's about the only opportunity the average citizen would have really to look down on the Arctic, isn't it?
I mean, we're not given that opportunity except for the polar flights.
So I would suggest to my audience that you two look down and then render some reports to us.
I would like that.
The Federal Aviation Administration announced it gave a one-year license to get this Scaled Composites of Mojave, California, a company founded by aviation maverick Bert Ruttan.
His goal is public space travel within 10 years.
So he is the first person to get a license to go to space, the first private rocket.
Bert Ruttan, that's going to be fascinating to follow.
Maybe we will get to space.
Who knows?
And this is totally fascinating.
It's a Reuters story.
And I'm sure you may have heard it on CNN and other outlets last week, but I love this.
What may have been one of the earliest pet cats has been found in a richly furnished tomb in Cyprus, French, in Cyprus, France, rather.
The eight-month-old kitten appears to have been deliberately buried alongside a human in a Stone Age grave 9,500 years ago.
This is reported in the journal Science, the prestigious journal Science.
While the finding may not surprise present-day cat lovers, the researchers at the National Museum of Natural History in Paris A. It represents the earliest example of what was very likely a domesticated cat.
It is generally accepted.
The cats were first domesticated in ancient Egypt at the latest, by the 20th to 19th century BC, 3,000 to 4,000 years ago.
But this one, this one, this cat, not exactly like our present-day cats, was buried specifically and on purpose, indicating it was a pet, 9,000 years ago.
So one has to begin to wonder, 9,000 years?
9,000 years.
Now, what does that mean?
Well, Christ is, what, a couple thousand plus years, right?
We're talking about 9,000 years here.
That's a very long time.
So how long indeed have cats been around?
And when you look at the face on Mars and you see the feline aspects to one side of it, you've just got to wonder about these cats.
They're strange creatures, I'll tell you that.
All right, as promised, let's try and get to the phone early.
And I don't think for one second, despite the inquiry, that the American people feel he had any pre-knowledge.
You know, he said earlier today in a quote I saw on CNN, if he'd known that, he'd have moved mountains to stop it, and I believe that.
People are so quick to jump at the possibility of, I mean, history is replete with examples, and I better not give them or we'll get into fights about that.
Wild Card line, you're on the air.
Hello.
unidentified
Yeah, hi.
This is a real coincidence because this was on the History Channel tonight about 911.
The Bible Codes told about it, and it's in the Bible Code book that they were given information 30 days before 911 by Mr. Rips himself.
And he took it to Conalisa Rice, and G.W. was at Crawford, and he had a letter there for him to call him immediately.
He didn't hear from him for a week, so he called back, and she said she gave to somebody higher in the White House, Mr. Card.
I just don't believe for one second Bible Code Assange for a second.
I'm not even sure about the Bible code.
Maybe there's something to it.
Maybe there is not.
I have yet to be convinced one way or the other.
It is intriguing, certainly.
But if somebody went to, I don't know, Connolly Reiser, the president, or something, and they said, look, this is in the Bible code, I'm not sure that would immediately or should immediately engender any sort of U.S. action at all.
And I don't think they knew for one second that there were going to be a bunch of suicidal terrorists who would take airplanes en masse and drive them into buildings in this country.
I don't think they knew that, or they surely would have done something.
Incidentally, while we're on this subject, I heard earlier today that France has offered to send troops to Iraq, provided that they can have an equal say in the future of Iraq.
And you know what?
I think they can kiss our red, white, and blue butts.
That's my reaction to that.
unidentified
Well, personally, I think everybody who's there right now should just get their asses
You had Saddam Hussein effectively caged and defanged with a no-fly zone in the north and a no-fly zone in the south, and you basically gone in and upset your own apple cart, and you're up to your next in a substance that's a lot nastier than applesauce.
I wasn't in favor of going in there in the first place.
But the fact of the matter is we're there now.
And although it sounds an awful lot like psychology proffered in Vietnam, the fact of the matter is that we can't turn tail and run, nor am I suggesting we ought to now.
What we need to do is find a way to kill those who would have us dead.
I mean, we just need to mop up with them.
And if not, we're going to face another domestic horror of some sort.
We may anyway.
But we are at war.
Make no mistake.
We're at war, and we are there now, so there is very little choice.
No, I don't think we ought to turntail and run.
Thank you very much.
West of the Rockies, you are on the air.
Hello.
unidentified
Hi.
Hi.
I had my socks knocked off the other day.
I received a link for Alex Jones, PrisonPlanet.com, his interview with Colonel Don DeGrand Priest, U.S. Army retired colonel, with his symposium that he had on September 16th to the 19th, 2001, with the civilian, military, and general aviation pilots, a 72-hour nonstop symposium.
And he submitted his report, and it will totally knock your socks off.
said that the planes basically because they were all trying to pilots were trying to figure out how could those planes do what they did and he Yes, fly into buildings.
Okay.
So what happened was that they were remote controlled, but the planes that we think went into the buildings were actually drone planes.
Here a while back, a few years ago, they had a fortune hunter who was known as the greatest fortune hunter in the world.
He brought up several sunken ships in this area.
There's a rumor about Beals Gold, who was about a man who went down into Mexico and captured a lot of gold, and he brought it back up in here to a place called Bedford, Virginia, or near Bedford, Virginia, and buried it.
And once in a while, I get these little, I don't know if you call them inclinations or whatever.
But what happened Was that I was driving down the road with a friend of mine, and we were talking about something that didn't even remotely connect to this deals gold stuff.
And I just got a feeling.
I said, wait a minute, this guy that's looking for the gold is in the wrong place.
Ten after midnight under starlight's satellite skies.
A live wig digging in the cover of dark cake scarf.
Should I hear that right?
Like conversations Beaming out to the corner And the dark Real life and all of your expressions.
In the world, friends are falling apart Coast to coast To the average joy Maybe hard to take No, well, I'm the sun closed Yeah, the truth is out there Ask up and we're Area 51
Yeah, they're lazy and we're More enticed to wars and lies Right out of control Conspiracy heroes just to face.
Don't you worry, the days will end.
Long height when he's fed just right, making foes of the public friends.
Dear ass, what do you believe?
A poor man in the sky.
Croak and digger, media swagger, the writing on the wall, is it wrong, is it right?
Coast to coast, to the average, you're maybe hard to tell you.
To talk with Art Bell, call the wildcard line at area code 775-727-1295.
The first-time caller line is area code 775-727-1222.
To talk with Art Bell from East of the Rockies, call toll-free at 800-825-5033.
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dot hold on from canada and all about coast to coast a m but for My wife is in here dragging Yeti out of the room.
We call this cat extraction.
Bye.
When the door is open, this little guy, who is, by the way, in my webcam photograph right now, if you want to go and take a look, it's yet another Yeti photograph.
Just give him one instant.
He will sit out there during this show.
He wants to be in here so much that I'll hear this.
See if I can.
That's what he'll sit out there doing.
Come on, let me in, let me in, let me in.
Of course, he will sneak in the moment we have a break and he has an opportunity.
And then right in the middle of an interview or some other dramatic moment when I don't even know he's in the room, he will jump up on my lap.
And let me tell you, that'll get the adrenaline going.
Walk around, you're on here, hi.
unidentified
Hi, aren't you?
Hey, are you lucky to have someone to jump on your lap?
Actually, I am too, especially with this sort of hint that, well, he knew all this was going to happen.
unidentified
No, you know, any American that says that, I mean, they shouldn't even be called an American.
I have talked with Americans.
I have talked with Muslim people.
Many of them are so glad that the United States went in there.
It was so cruel.
I mean, we already went through this.
And listen, I can't believe how much brainwashed, I both say brainwashed, that some of these people get.
And like my dad, who's a World War II veteran, he said that America, President Bush is the America's best president that they've had in a long time.
And I think that also, too, for pulling those troops out, what about those men that went in there and died already?
I mean, isn't there any respect for what they believed and fought for?
I think that people ought to think and really take a good look and not under the whim of their hat and the synopsis that they're coming out with, oh, maybe we should pull out or this or all this.
I can't even, I wouldn't have enough time to name all of them.
But I think the American people should stop and think and really take a good look.
And again, and yet again, as far as the president is concerned, and I would attribute this to probably all of the presidents we've had, there is no American president, even Roosevelt, so don't say it, who would intentionally allow Americans to be killed in Moss.
I don't believe that.
I don't believe it at all.
And somebody writes me in, you know, the usual stuff.
Oh, come on, we all know the politicians are a bunch of crooks.
Well, I don't know about that.
I'm sure that, you know, they're politicians, but they're also Americans.
Do you really think that our president would be all that different than you or me or the guy behind the tree?
I don't think so.
We're all Americans, and if we knew an attack was about to occur to the country, we would not just let it happen, and we wouldn't ignore specific information that it was going to happen.
99.90% of the time, and since I've been listening to you, and Lynn Samuels can testify to this, she lets you off on a lot of stuff because she's so totally in love with you.
But even LBJ, and I believe that by his macromanaging the Vietnamese conflict and actual missions to North Vietnam by our pilots, got a lot of people killed.
Even that president, I wouldn't accuse of intentionally allowing a mass attack on the United States with foreknowledge.
No, no, ma'am.
I wouldn't say that.
unidentified
But we still have a right to question all, and there are like a little 500 questions around, why did you sit there so long?
You can see plenty of receding in Alaska, believe me, but the real trip, I mean, I know a lot of my listeners do take from the West Coast, the Over the Poles trip to Europe.
And so I really am urging everybody to keep your camera with you, keep your eyes open, at least take a few moments out from the movies, and let's see what we can come up with.
And you're still allowed to open your window for now and take photographs.
It's just that the average American, the average person in the world doesn't get an opportunity to go over the pole except for these new interesting routes the airlines take in order to conserve on fuel and everything.
I can't understand why people would question the honor of your presidence.
I support you people to the nth degree.
I'm proud to have served with your men many years ago.
I'm hitting 64 now.
But I wanted to comment on that.
But I have a very humorous story to tell you about our origins.
My wife always said there's no way we came from the monkeys or an ape.
And after listening to your show for many, many years, you know, the conversations would come up time and again about the Martians and the disaster on their planet.
So I told my wife Carol, I said, dear, you have nothing to worry about.
I think we were Martians.
We came from the Martians.
They had to get out of there pretty quick.
And the closest planet to them was Earth, and perhaps that's where we came from.
As you know, my guest is going to be talking about the fact that he has concluded that we were designed, that everything for us was designed by a super intelligent being or beings.
One, that we were intelligently designed, and every little detail designed for our comfort and pleasure here on Earth, or it seems that way, or that we did come from the mud puddle, wiggled our way out, began to breathe, and came forth.
And that everything around us is simply, it appears to be perfect, it looks to be perfect, put here for our very existence.
But another argument certainly would be that evolution itself, the process of evolution, ensured that everything was perfect.
And would it not have evolved in this manner?
We wouldn't be here.
Did I say what I wanted to say?
Not really.
It's really hard to put into words.
I guess that the process of evolution would make it appear as though everything were perfectly placed, because it could be no other way.
I had a comment about your show a while back on the parties over and our oil consumption and so forth and war in Iraq.
First of all, I just want to say I consider what I had to say an opinion, and I value everyone else's opinion a lot as well.
But I agree with the gentleman.
I think we are facing a crisis as far as oil goes.
But as far as the war in Iraq is concerned, I think we should give President Bush every benefit of the doubt that he's doing the right thing for our country and fighting terrorism.
Now, my reasoning behind that, being a student of economics, is that when OPEC sets quotas for each country as to how much oil they can export, they all cheat.
And they all say this country can export so many billion barrels of oil, and this country can export so many barrels of oil.
But when they all adjourn from their meeting and they all go home, they like U.S. dollars.
In this day and age, I guess you could say they like Euros, but they all cheat and they cheat very badly.
They say we will hold production to the following figures, and then they always overproduce, looking for, as he said, the dollars or the euros or whatever.
If what was said last weekend about oil and the party being over is accurate, then you can pretty much imagine that prices are going to go up and they're going to keep going up, and it's going to eventually precipitate in a crisis that is going to result in what?
Well, the answer to that question will depend on what we do between right now and when that moment arrives.
We had better start looking into alternative fuels, and we better do it quick.
Anyway, about that new speed record, the plane, I was always under the understanding that the Blackbird SR-71, there was two different engines made for that plane.
And the high-altitude one, when they used that one, it would fly so high and so fast that even if you rocked on to that plane with over-the-horizon radar and then spun it around 180 degrees, you couldn't shoot it out of the air.
And it would come along with a lot of other intelligence.
I mean, that he had designs on doing damage inside the U.S. Not a big surprise.
But how do you jump from that conclusion?
Hindsight is 2020.
But back then, how do you jump from that to he's going to drive airplanes into the buildings in the Pentagon and stuff?
You can't.
unidentified
Well, yeah, of course you can't.
But I mean, if they had the threat there and they just didn't see it as a major threat, you know, I think they could have taken the threat a little bit more seriously, maybe prevented it.
But the other comment I had about people saying that people questioning the president are not patriots, I don't think, understand what patriotism is.
It's basically you're patriot to the Constitution and our country, not to our government.
You can be a critic of the United States government, of the president, of what we do.
All of that is perfectly patriotic.
However, that doesn't stop some of it from being labeled as ridiculous.
Ridiculous.
Nevertheless, allowed under the Constitution, but ridiculous.
And I have seen nothing, nothing whatsoever that would indicate to me that there was any specific pre-knowledge about what was going to occur.
There had been no precedent for anything like that in the past.
Yes, we had hijackings and people would take planes to Cuba and that sort of thing, right?
But never even a hint beforehand of the concept of people en masse giving up their lives and driving airplanes into buildings.
Not even a clue.
And so, in my opinion, people shouting that from the rooftops, though constitutionally certainly protected in doing so, will sound a little wacky to me.
All right, we're going to take a break, and then when we get back, we're going to talk with a man who believes that all of this, all of us, everything you see, feel, touch, sense, all that is, was designed, perhaps, by others, beings from elsewhere.
It'd be interesting to listen to that argument, see if we all get convinced.
from the high desert in the middle of the night on mark bell this coast coast a_m_ the Thank you.
unidentified
Oh, man, he's in the storm.
What do Mel Gibson and the coral...
Hey ya hey ya oh...
Hey ya oh...
Thank you.
To talk with Art Bell.
Form a wildcard line at area code 775-727-1295.
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From coast to coast and worldwide on the internet, this is Coast to Coast AM with Art Bell.
Yeah, that's putting some sticks together, isn't it?
All right.
This is going to be fun.
I really suspect this is going to be fun.
How do you think we got here?
James Gardner is an accomplished science essayist and complexity theorist whose articles on cosmology and evolution have been published in prestigious scientific journals.
Gardner's a former U.S. Supreme Court law clerk, a former Oregon state senator, author of Biocosm, a new scientific theory of evolution, intelligent life, is the architect of the universe.
Biocosm is stirring up a lot of controversy, you might imagine.
Gardner claims that our universe was deliberately designed by a super intelligent being or beings in a prior cosmic cycle to be life-friendly.
So, the big question, and it is the big one, is how did we get here and who put us here?
And that is, from the scientific perspective, that's a pretty radical idea because most mainstream scientists view life and intelligent life as essentially accidents, accidental outcomes, one lucky roll of the dice.
And I think they're essentially looking through the wrong end of the telescope.
I think that life and intelligence are the primary cosmic phenomena, and everything else is a secondary result of that.
Though, James, why, for example, let's assume for a second that evolution and occurred exactly as the scientists theorize it occurred.
From our present day stance, wherever you and I sit, wouldn't everything look as though it were planned?
In other words, from our perspectives, it would look as though, God, you know, this place, the trees, the ocean, the air, just the right combination for us to breathe, aside from what we foul up, and the water, same thing.
All of this seems just too perfect.
And wouldn't it seem that way to us if through a long process of evolution, I mean, here we are alive and enjoying all this, so it would seem that way to us, no matter how we got here, wouldn't it?
And in fact, that was the situation that confronted Darwin.
That was the famous argument from design that William Paley offered.
And Darwin's great achievement was to say that that appearance could, in fact, be the outcome of naturalistic forces.
And what I'm trying to do is to extend that one step further and say that there are naturalistic scenarios which could create that same phenomenon, that same perfect fit, if you will, but at a cosmic scale.
Well, one of the, and that's another great question.
If you look at the fundamental laws of nature and the dimensionless constants of physics, and I'll give you some, hopefully some examples that won't be too esoteric.
Let's take the process by which carbon is manufactured in the hearts of giant stars, giant supernovas.
And, you know, carbon was not there at the moment of the Big Bang.
It had to be manufactured when giant stars exploded.
Well, the process by which that carbon is made is exquisitely sensitive to the fine-tuning of certain energy levels in the precursor atoms to carbon.
And so you have to have copious quantities of carbon in the universe to create life as we know it, and probably to create any kind of life that can essentially get started.
But you have to, for that to happen, you have to have some carefully designed speed bumps in the process by which carbon is created in giant stars.
And the British astronomer Fred Hoyle, long before these were discovered, predicted that those atomic speed bumps essentially existed.
And lo and behold, they were discovered.
That's one of the most famous examples of fine-tuning in the laws of nature in a way that renders the universe life-friendly.
Well, I think that what, let me back up just a moment and say what I think is going on is that the universe is essentially in the process of coming to life.
That the ability of the cosmos to give birth to life and into intelligent life is encoded as a kind of secret message, if you will, a subtext to the laws of physics.
And that intelligent life is bound on a course of further evolution to acquire capabilities that we could only think of as godlike in the distant future.
And that its destiny is essentially to reproduce this universe and to create a successor universe, a baby universe, if you will, that itself will be endowed with the same kind of life-giving physical constants of nature.
One of the most important and very recent pieces of evidence comes from a theory of physics that the author Brian Green has made famous called super string theory.
And what the string theorists have discovered very, very recently is that there are literally zillions of different kinds of universes that are allowed by that fundamental theory, none of which appear to be mathematically favored, let alone mathematically inevitable.
And what the theorists have been forced to say is, well, the only way we can explain that is to say that there are lots and lots of new universes being created all the time, only a tiny fraction of which have the qualities that are necessary to make them life-friendly.
Now, what I add to that is to say, but wait a minute, isn't there some possibility that there is a process going on?
Think of it as evolution really large, whereby those laws and constants of nature are in effect being shaped by life and intelligence in what would be our distant future.
And one of the implications of the theory is that the arising of life should be a relatively robust phenomenon in our cosmos.
It is a life-friendly cosmos, and it should yield life and eventually intelligence in a fairly routine way, which we will eventually be able to discover.
Yeah, but I think Seth would agree, and certainly I think there's a lot of looking to do.
For one thing, we've only just begun to look at what is called optical SETI, which is the flashes of laser light that might be the preferred mode of communication.
We've not looked in large segments of the electromagnetic spectrum, and we haven't explored more exotic possibilities.
For instance, that neutrino transmissions might be the preferred transmission method, or even other means of communication.
So I think we're just at the beginning of that search process.
In fact, I wouldn't consider myself religious at all.
But when you look at the sheer weight of the evidence of how life-friendly this cosmos really is, I'm just compelled by the implication, as was Einstein, that there's evidence of design and of the work of intellect of such superiority that we're just the palest reflections of it.
I think it might reflect some deep sense of truth the origin of which we're Not really, with our earthly minds, able to fathom.
But the one thing I can tell you for sure is, and this is discussed in the book, is that the Judeo-Christian tradition and its kind of its historical antecedents in Greek philosophy were absolutely essential to the birth of Western science.
It's the reason Western science only emerged in Western Europe through the Enlightenment.
And that's because what the long tradition of religion did was instill a faith in the rationality of nature, the ultimate order of nature.
And that was the essential precondition for the beginning of modern science.
It is a response to the same sense of wonder and awe that strikes anyone who thinks deeply about the very fact that this universe exists and that it exists in such miraculous complexity.
I think it had a hugely important impact on the birth of science itself.
Right.
It created the habit, the instinct of thought that made science possible.
That's the great irony.
I mean, people think of science and religion as being at war, and it's exactly the opposite.
It was only because of the long imprint of theology, particularly during the Middle Ages, that was the only thing, that was what made science possible.
Do you believe that the various sightings that are worldwide and have been occurring since I've been alive pretty much and continue on a daily basis and perhaps some other things, crop circles, mutilations, all these things that go on that suggest there may be alien visitation, would it be your view that any of them, or even some small percentage, because it only takes that, would be real and represent those who perhaps are monitoring us now, those who created us?
I haven't seen and I know there's a lot of evidence that's been looked at, continues to be looked at.
I haven't seen evidence myself that convinces me.
That being said, I think as with the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, the radio and optical search, it is terribly important to continue to be open-minded because nature has this strange and wonderful way of surprising us.
For instance, there is a scientist in Canada right now by the name of Alan Tuck, who is a respected SETI researcher, who thinks that maybe the preferred way of communication by an extraterrestrial intelligence would be not by sending a signal that said,
hello there, but by sending very sophisticated computer programs, essentially smart viruses, and that they might already be here on the internet.
Even more basic than that, I believe that our universe, the physical constants of nature, the gravitational constant, the laws of physics were essentially tailor-made to speed the cosmos on a pathway toward the emergence of life and intelligence.
And that was done in a prior cosmic cycle that essentially terminated with what's known in astrophysics as a big crunch, and which began again in a renewed cycle with the Big Bang.
What I say is that the laws of physics have a secondary function, that they are equivalent, they're essentially the cosmic counterpart of DNA, that they encode a program which is designed to yield life and ever greater intelligence.
Okay, then our creators so specifically understood the laws that they were laying down with the environment they presented here that they knew what would become of it.
With maybe not all the specific details, but certainly in the same way that, if you will, DNA knows that it's going to create a dinosaur or a person or a monkey, that the program that was written into the laws of physics essentially knew that it would yield life and ever greater intelligence.
Well, I'm interested, another way of putting it is I'm interested in pursuing and pushing the envelope on speculative naturalistic science as hard and as far as I can push it.
But I think it is, I have many times had people say, you know, just as the Pope, for instance, embraced the Big Bang theory because of its similarity to the Genesis event, I've had many people say that exact comment that you offered, which is that this certainly resembles some basic parts of theology and of Judeo-Christian tradition.
Okay, there are several implications of it which I think are testable.
One of the most important is that it implies that the origin of life and intelligence is a relatively robust phenomenon, that we're going to find independent origins elsewhere in the universe.
Well, I'm now describing a testable implication of my theory, which is that life should arise independently with relative frequence throughout the universe.
A second testable implication is that we're not the end product of evolution.
That through either artificial intelligence, computer intelligence, genetic enhancement, we're not the last word in terms of the sophisticated intelligence.
That greater and more capable intelligence is going to come after us or alongside us.
Okay, so then the testing of your theory would occur when we created an intellect perhaps greater than our own, whether it would be machine, computer, biological, or a combination thereof, whatever.
There's a new book coming out by Ray Kurzweil, a computer theorist.
It's called The Singularity is Near.
And that singularity means when intelligence achieves a level of sophistication that we simply can't understand, when it stands to us as we stand to a butterfly or an ant.
And Ray thinks that point is near.
And by near, I think he means decades, not centuries.
It's kind of Moore's law, you know, the law of the computer capacity doubles every 18 months.
It's that concept writ large.
And I think we are close, and that's one of the most because for my theory to hold any water, intelligence has to evolve far beyond the human level of intelligence.
Let's say that life is rare, but it's out there, much as we were seated, or however you view it.
There are many who think that planets like ours come and, this is the important part, also go on a somewhat regularly scheduled basis.
And it's kind of a race to see whether we develop technologically to the point that we can control our own fate or one of the many things that could get us, gets us.
And There was a wonderful, you know, the fact that I believe the universe is endowed with a life-giving principle doesn't mean that we as humans on planet Earth will necessarily survive.
You know, if there's any practical lesson to be gleaned from the historical record of life on Earth, it's that evolution is a wastrel, a careless spendthrift.
And think of the countless species that have perished for every species that's privileged to survive or leave successors.
And why shouldn't the same not be true on a cosmic scale?
Why should the catastrophe of entire worlds, as one medieval philosopher put it, not be as commonplace in the vast universe as the casual extermination of a single species or even a single organism on planet Earth?
If SETI finishes their survey and or surveys, including the new laser stuff they're looking for, and they find nothing, what does that do to your theory?
I think it tends to it, but it tends to weaken it.
Because my basic notion is that life will arise relatively routinely as a matter of kind of the laws of chemistry that are programmed into our universe.
That, you know, that the creatures of Australia tend to look a lot like creatures of Europe or North America, even though they are from very different lineages, very different origins, but that there's only so many ecological niches to be occupied, and nature tends to use the same solutions over and over again.
That would suggest that look something like us.
Now, I think a lot of that depends on your assumption about at what level of evolution they are.
If they're considerably ahead of us, life might have migrated, at least the most intelligent aspects of it, might have migrated to a software environment.
They might be what computer scientists call infomorphs.
And when you think about it, that has a lot of advantages in terms of immortality, or at least functional immortality, also in terms of interstellar travel.
I have a new paper that's going to present the argument that if you're a smart extraterrestrial, a really smart one, what you might want to do is send not a hello signal, but essentially an instruction set for replicating yourself and your entire civilization.
Because that signal can travel at the speed of light.
If it is a race, James, how do you think we're doing right now?
As you look around the world and you look at all that's going on in every venue, you know, politically, socially, environmentally, especially environmentally, and with the wars and all the rest of it, if it's a race, how are we doing?
I think that there is a growing awareness that in some sense we're all in it together.
Whether it is confronting the scourge of AIDS, whether it is an awareness of the fact that the planetary environment is basically one ecosystem,
and whether it is one of the miracles of modern communication is that we can experience empathy with people who suffer and who are in need elsewhere in the world in a way that we never could before.
I think, you know, I think of the great stuff that Bill Gates is doing with his wealth of trying to deal with the AIDS problem and the malaria problem in Africa and India.
I mean, I like to, I'm an optimist, so I like to seize upon those elements that give an optimist hope.
Well, you know, it's again, getting back to the point that we were discussing a little bit earlier about how important the Judeo-Christian tradition was for the birth of science, in some ways you have to, to make progress, you have to have an irrational faith in the possibility of progress.
I had written an article for the journal Complexity, which is the scientific journal of the Santa Fe Institute.
And it was about the topic of genetic engineering and human germline therapy and how that was really going to maybe create a speed up in the process of human evolution.
Well, I think that the thing that we have to think through very carefully is how it might be used to essentially discriminate against less people that aren't kind of artificially manipulated.
We probably should take a moment and explain to the audience, germline therapy is the ability to vector with otherwise what would be germs genetic changes into the human being that could do all sorts of things, right?
And if that's the case, then there's the real possibility that that could be what biologists call a speciation event that we could essentially diverge into two species.
I guess that would be the haves and the have-nots, right?
As usual.
From the high desert in the middle of the night, I'm Mark Bell, and this is Coast to Coast A.M. What do Mel Gibson in the Coral Cask?
unidentified
so
Don't know where I've been so blue Don't know what's come over you You found someone new And don't wanna make my breath blue I'll be fine when you're gone I'll just cry
all night long Say it is untrue I'm gonna make my ride Wanna take a ride?
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I am particularly intrigued with germline therapy, and you should be too, if you have done any reading, whether it's science or science fiction, on the subject.
It's really something to digest.
And I think we were talking about the haves and the have-nots.
And I guess whether social progress would, at that point, you think, be consistent with the technological pace of achievement that we seem to be on.
Do you suppose that when we get to that moment where we can modify, for example, the intelligence of a baby before it's born to be hundreds of percent higher?
You think we'd move forward with that?
I mean, after all, that would be, if it worked out, that would be the culmination and the, I guess, the stamp of approval on your theory.
We don't know how that kind of development, what kinds of social cross-currents it might create, what kind of who knows what the Muslim world, for instance, would think of something like that.
We don't know how it will interact with the kind of emotional set of responses that nature has endowed us with.
Is a person of that level of intelligence going to think of themselves still as a human being?
Since you, though, could not possibly understand the result of an action of that sort, there is going to be that moment whether you, you know, once you've achieved the technological capability to do it, we may not be that far from it.
Well, we choose the next step on the evolutionary ladder, and I think that next step is the first in a set of steps that will, at least under my theory, will endow our distant successors with what can only be described as godlike powers.
But that's going to take a number of additional, you know, millions of years of additional evolution.
And I'm curious, just sort of, I guess, about what you think.
If you take today's organized religion and project it through, oh, I don't know, a couple of those kinds of choices, what do you think would happen to it?
Well, I'm in the process right now of attempting to develop other possible tests in addition to those that we talked about earlier, about the search for extraterrestrial intelligence and the prediction of the emergence of transhuman intelligence.
For instance, I want to see if it is in fact true that, and to what degree it is true, that the physical universe, the laws and constants of nature, optimized for the emergence of life?
Well, I think that's a very interesting possibility because once it got started, what we have learned on Earth is that life Can survive in extraordinarily extreme environments.
The so-called extremophiles don't use oxygen, that don't photosynthesize, they live off of heat at the bottom of the ocean, they ingest sulfur, metabolize, and those kinds of organisms could exist a whole lot of places in the solar system, including deep underground and Mars, and essentially live off of geothermal heat.
They could possibly exist on the giant gas planet.
Given, then do you think that that kind of life is extremely common and that complex life, like human beings, is extremely or even fairly rare, or how rare would you?
If everything that you're saying is so in the manner in which we evolved and came to be here, then if you were to write up a set of rules, ten of them say, and they were to replace, say, the Ten Commandments, in what way would they be different than the tablets?
And, you know, in science, every theory, every truth is inherently provisional.
It's never, ever fully satisfied because it can always be refuted.
But what I think that I have been able to articulate is a kind of new way of looking at the relationship of life and the physical universe.
You know, you think of the Gaia principle on Earth, that the whole Earth is essentially a bias system and that life has modified the atmosphere, the geography, the oceans, has physically changed it.
And what I'm suggesting is that sufficiently evolved life could actually re-engineer and change the physical cosmos and, in fact, acquire the ability to reproduce it.
Wouldn't that mean then that, for example, some American natives and other religions around the world that basically worship the environment, the Earth itself, the north, south, east, and west, winds, the sun, the environment, that they'd be closer to the mark than we are?
Well, I'm not sure that they would ever have contemplated the possibility that the ongoing process of evolution could give our distant successors, our distant progeny, the ability to actually reshape that environment.
I think they would have kind of rested with a more mystical vision that this is the way it's always been.
In a way, and I think that's a fair statement, but they never had a scientific perspective.
They never sort of thought of the possibility that the ongoing process of evolution could actually give our successors, our progeny, the ability to reshape the laws of nature.
If you were giving Las Vegas odds on our making it to that prior to self-destruction, you know, when we're dealing with money here, you've got to be realistic as opposed to optimistic or hopeful.
Yeah, but I don't think I can rationally speculate beyond that, but I think that a lot of it will depend upon, as you put it, that race between technological capacity to self-destruct and a sense of responsibility for our planet and those who live on it.
Based on, you know, kind of the way that, at least under, from my limited study of the subject, I think those concepts tend to get reinterpreted and reincorporated one way or another in a kind of new version of a religion.
They tend to get recycled.
For instance, we were talking about the Ten Commandments earlier.
I can't imagine those becoming obsolete.
No, nor can I. But I can imagine them being, you know, sort of reborn as elements of a reinterpretation or of a new religious vision.
So in the way you think of things, if we were to get really cranking with germline therapy and we created virtually a new being superior in many ways to the current human being, wouldn't that be the end of us?
why would we have not at that moment fulfilled our destiny and simply you know the next spark in evolution well i think you know i don't right i don't think it kind of
There's still plenty of bacteria and fishes and mammals and mice and all kinds of other critters running around, even though we are arguably the apex of evolution in terms of intellectual capacity.
So I think it's, and hopefully, we wouldn't be swept aside, but would live alongside whatever comes next.
I'm curious, James, in previous encounters with this audience, since you've been on twice previously, what kind of reception do you usually get to your presentation?
I have a lot of folks who love the science, the edgy science of it, and then I have a lot of folks who ask me, why are you resisting the religious implications?
I guess basically what I said before, which is that I'm intent upon exploring this as a scientific hypothesis.
And that means using the methods of science, sticking within the framework of science, because I think there's something terribly exciting from purely a scientific perspective to be learned here.
This is what Brian Green, the physicist and superstring theory, he calls it the deepest problem in all of science.
Why is the universe life-friendly?
And I'm determined to push the frontier and try to explore that.
If what you're saying is true, James, then surely we, at some level, must be observing monkeys turning into something else or some of that sort of in-process kind of stuff.
So then if we could get some sort of life established in some soup that we would create in some sort of biodome, then we could conceivably attempt to prove that theory.
We could shock that environment in some credibly crippling manner and see if there was an evolutionary answer?
And my point of view is that he's kind of got it upside down.
He's trying to perfect man when he's already perfect and he doesn't have very far to go.
I, for example, was the one that discovered that you can take neural nets And put them into a computer, and they work similar to what the human brain works.
And the thing that I learned the most was that there is no, there's all of these little creatures, the microbes, the animals, and so forth, are all communicating with each other.
And you'll find that I agree with your extremophiles that there's probably life all over the whole universe scattered in bioplace, all over the place.
So these things could actually have evolved to the point where they're extremely intelligent, even as microbes.
Well, that's an interesting idea, that in fact, that if you view a human being as a communal organism, a set of cooperating single-celled organisms, which in a way it is, yeah, you could have, and that's similar to an idea that Fred Hoyle advanced of the sort of the black cloud, that there could be intelligence in the form of an interstellar gas cloud.
We just don't know.
We're just at the beginning of understanding what forms intelligence could take.
So I think what this caller is suggesting is certainly an area worth investigating.
And it's going to be, you know, I think we're talking maybe 50, 60, 100 years, not multiple centuries, though.
And it's an interesting question because Stephen Hawking, the Cambridge astrophysicist, Stephen Hawking advocates human germline therapy so that we can keep ahead of the machines.
unidentified
He says if we don't do that, we're going to be outclassed and fast.
Well, it's just been concerned with, you know, how to improve humanity, but I think that humanity is at a point at which it can do whatever it wants as long as it looks inside itself and not necessarily outside itself.
And that I think that, like, you know, everything is basically perfect at every level of creation throughout the universe, like as below, so above, and no microcosm, macrocosm, everything being equal at all levels type of thing.
And I was wondering what James had to say about reaching ascension or maybe our next level through what utilities we already have that are perhaps undiscovered within ourselves now as opposed to utilizing left-brain technology to implement our next stage of development and perhaps putting us in maybe the line to go into a direction to go into that.
In fact, I think that one of the but I think the two aspects work together.
I think one of the great things about contemplating these mysteries about how and why the universe is bio-friendly is that it forces us to think about our relationship with the cosmos.
It almost requires us to look inward as well as outward.
And to think that there was a wonderful way of putting it that Freeman Dyson, the Princeton physicist, and also a very spiritually oriented individual, he said, you have to think of us as atoms in God's mind.
That was the way he put it.
I thought that was a very eloquent way of expressing that view.
And first of all, I do believe that we've been visited since the beginning of time, and I do believe that we've had assistance in being an evolvement of man.
But basically, my question, and you have several guests on there that talk about SETI.
Well, right now, we have the technology to fly over any part of airspace, any country, without being detected.
Well, I feel that an alien, you know, and their craft could be out in the middle of the desert right above those radio telescopes, and they wouldn't even know that they're there.
There was a famous statement, I can't remember what scientists made it, but a very serious scientist who said that any sufficiently evolved technology is, from our perspective, indistinguishable from magic.
So I mean, in the scheme of things, wouldn't the odds be pretty good that the force that created the environment that allowed us would check back on the environment from time to time?
Or even if we get very open-minded about this, you would think that the creative force, whatever it might be, would want to see how it was going at some point.
My question is, I suppose part question, part statement, but it relates to religion again, pointing the way to science.
I know that Dr. Hugh Ross, he's a believer, when looking at Revelation, notes that, or he advances that, there are certain specific physics involved that reshape the world during the second coming.
And when referring to those that are risen in Christ, he also advances that because the physical changes in the world have to advance or enlarge, that our bodies will also have to.
And in keeping with the notion of evolution, for lack of a better definition, I wonder if perhaps this is again information pointing to something prophesied about.
And just with respect to the beginning of God, St. Anselm's definition that anything that you can conceive of more than ultimately goes back to what God is.
So I was wondering if, in keeping with the Pope connecting the Big Bang with Genesis, if perhaps your guest's information connects with what's prophesied in Revelation?
I don't know the answer to that question because I guess I'm not as familiar with the specific author that made the connections that he was describing.
But I think that you see a lot of the themes of creation and destruction echoed in science and religion.
And the connection is often accidental or fortuitous, but in some cases, as I said at the very beginning, the very irrational faith in the rationality of nature, that connection is what made science possible.
Well, I guess other than to say that, you know, that when we talk about the end point of the evolutionary process that I'm hypothesizing, I think you're talking about a state of development,
sophistication, intelligence that the ultra-skeptic Michael Shermer said, just as the old saying goes with regard to sufficiently advanced technology being indistinguishable from magic, sufficiently evolved mind is indistinguishable from the traditional notion of divinity, of God.
Have you devoted in your studies very much time to religion?
i mean i you must have taken moments in and look really hard at at the bible and looked at it literally and compared it with what you think might be so and you just had to have done that you know i i i i i haven't Are you?
Or just sort of a general reference with everything you think you now believe and sort of a general look at all the religions.
Because we're racing toward it.
And one of these days, we're going to get there.
unidentified
We're going to create a living thing.
Never.
Yeah.
What do Mel Gibson and the Coral Castle have in mind?
Black velvet in the peace Up in Memphis, the music was like a heat wave White lightning,
round and bright and wild Mother's babies in the heart of every schoolgirl Loving tender, even crying in the hour, so sweet and true Always wanting more Eating love and more Blackbell's mind Black Bell
and I thought some time To talk with Art Bell, call the wildcard line at area code 775-727-1295.
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I guess I'm just a really, really tough customer because so far, you know, I don't think I see any reason to believe in one more than the other.
Well, maybe there is, but maybe it's not James Si that I agree with.
I don't know.
I'm still mulling all this over, and I guess that's what we're meant to do.
That's what it's all about.
biocosm the new scientific theory of evolution intelligent life is the architect of the universe yeah i I guess I'm a pretty tough customer, and it's not that you haven't made a good case, James.
It's just that I don't know that I believe any more at this moment as a result of what you've said, that it might have happened the way you described than I do otherwise, which leaves me out in the cold.
So at least you've got something to hold on to, eh?
I mean, if, for example, you could prove to your own satisfaction that a soul continues to exist on any level at all after physical death, that would be, well, it would be somewhat crushing to your theory, wouldn't it?
I guess I disagree, though I think that there are aspects of traditional evolutionary theory that are less than satisfactory.
For instance, my book actually attempts to reconceptualize terrestrial evolution as a minor subroutine in a cosmological process by which the universe essentially comes to life and gains ever greater intelligence.
So, I view it not as the sort of blind, undirected process that a lot of the traditional evolutionary theorists do.
I think it's much more in the nature of a program, much more in the nature of the way that DNA creates an organism.
It's much more end-directed.
But that doesn't mean that I don't think it's - I think it's a science, not a religion, but it's not the same kind of science that the traditional ultra-Darwinists conceive of it as.
If mankind got a message from out there, James, how do you think that would change his view of let's imagine what kind of message we well just the mere existence of other intelligent life the message finally comes through perhaps light impossible light years away in terms of contact and you know that would be very probable but nevertheless boom we get the message there
is life out there how would that do I mean with the would there be a new religion at that point early it would tend to confirm my theory of course it would but you'd get a lot of converted folks I think so but I think it's I mean I will honestly I will tell you I will really be surprised if we don't get that kind of evidence in in it may take another century but
but may not I'd be extremely surprised if if the SETI research project does not succeed ultimately I'm really quite surprised that you're so skeptical about that evidence that already exists with regard to having been visited and so many things and I haven't studied it obviously as as much as a lot of people have but maybe I'll do that for the next book you've got so much to write about wild card line you're on there with James Gardner hi hi I just I got to
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close to the Phil Henry show uh well I I don't know um Phil's a great guy I have no problem with Phil he does me very well and so I I think it's uh hilarious art it's a pleasure talking to you hey listen I'm there's so many things I want to say but let me just let me just say this one thing I'll consider the caterpillar caterpillar it's a it's a furry little creature with a hundred legs and and and now with a brain the size of a grain of salt that's able to
coordinate and control these hundred legs and that thing builds a cocoon for itself and crawls in there and emerges as this beautiful butterfly and flies away.
And it's not that evolution hasn't been demonstrated.
I mean, look at the statues in Rome when the man wore open-toed shoes.
Yeah, but the butterfly is still flying away with a brain the size of the end of your pencil, you know.
unidentified
Right.
And this is a miraculous thing that can only be explained by creation.
And the thing is, is the more degrees and worldly degrees that people have, the more they become spiritually retarded.
And so it's the lowly People like myself that have this great opportunity to call in and say, give the Bible more weight because therein lies all truth in one book because it's simple.
Simple truth, all contained in one book.
And if you want to get into complicity, there's a lot of books you can go out there and read, all of which are a bunch of nonsense.
So I think, you know, really, you should take a look at, for example, metaphysical experiences and try and determine whether there's any validity to them.
That would be one legitimate avenue for you to follow, as well as, you know, looking at what SETI's coming up with.
And, of course, the Bible.
I mean, you really do have to look into that and other religions and where they might or might not fit in.
I mean, there might already be a religion out there, for all you know, that virtually believes as you do.
Well, and it's, you know, again, as I, my project has been to push the envelope on speculative science.
And, you know, I, I, I, I, I, I, I completely agree, as I said at the very beginning, I don't think science would exist if it were not for the mindset that the Judeo-Christian tradition created in Europe in particular.
East of the Rockies, you're on there with James Gardner.
Hello.
unidentified
Yes, sir.
The person was describing the Ten Commandments and then the recent political debates on these freedoms of religion and having different things in city buildings and that.
I was taught that there are as many as 17 commandments and each religion picks their ten.
And essentially, if you don't promote all 17, you're promoting just your religion.
And in the Golden Rule, there's like a dozen of those, the Islamic being the most difficult, Christianity being presumptuous, and the Hindu ask that they be given the wisdom to do what's good for the other person.
And if you'd listen to Bill Gates, the real problem is to find a way to incorporate the universal language of mathematics in line after line so you don't have to use millions of lines of English to accomplish the same thing.
Or one of my frequent guests, Dr. Michio Kaku, he is fond of saying that the theory of everything, that which brings it all together, that magic moment, may be an equation no longer than your thumb.
It would be interesting when you have him on next time to ask him what he thinks about the possibility that superstring theory, which is his field of expertise, seems to allow millions and zillions of different kinds of universes with no one of them mathematically favored and only a tiny fraction of which would be life-friendly.
And I would ask of Dr. Kaku and yourself, because you're really sort of in the same, I don't know, you're over there standing there with Dr. Kaku in a lot of the ways you believe, but you may not share exactly the same beliefs.
And why are you so dismissive so quickly of these other things?
It seems like they're so important, whether it's religion in the Bible, the real Bible, or it's the possible visits we've had, or it's people's abilities that would suggest that there can be communication with those who have passed on.
I mean, any of these things would be very impactful on your theory.
And I think that one of the jobs of somebody who proclaims themselves to be scientifically focused is to always keep an open mind on topics that might seem very outlandish from the point of view of traditional science, because often those are the very areas that have been the most fruitful.
I mean, it is not so wild as to imagine that if we had a creator that was an intelligence that's capable of eclipsing light years and interdimensionally traveling or who knows what, that they would check back on there.
One of the things I've been curious about is I'm surprised you haven't taken a look at secular humanism and the way they look at the world, because although the precept you're coming at is that this is some sort of intellectually driven kind of like creation of the singularity from the very beginning, it's kind of like we've gone full circle.
We've gotten to the point where our intellect has completely reversed entropy.
We've realized how to reverse it.
We go, boom, let there be light.
And we started a whole new universe with our intellect directing that evolutional basis in the cosmology.
Or whether or not it's simply that's the most stable probable outcome of the string theory.
And if it's that stable, out of the infinite number of possible universes that make it likely that we have life, an intelligent life, or maybe just a few, but out of the infinite number that are possible, those are the only ones that are stable.
Of course they exist.
Because in that instant existence and singularity, those are the only things that are left behind.
Yeah, I think there's something to that that's very, very interesting, which is that, and I would take it one step further and say that in a sense,
the role of life and intelligence is to, in a way, to stabilize the cycle that string theory contemplates so that you have not a random chaotic process of cosmic reproduction,
which is sort of the traditional theory of astrophysicists around a field called eternal chaotic inflation, but that in fact you have a kind of stabilizing role of life and intelligence in that process, which makes the life-friendly cosmos the most likely to persist and reproduce itself over an extended period of time.
I think we're well, I think in terms of we're about to ratchet up the capabilities of intelligence in a very significant way through the emergence either through germline therapy or through artificial intelligence or both, we're about to ratchet it up to a transhuman level.
but at the same time you're very honor i caught quite a bit of hesitancy in your voice advocating you know some leap i mean science for They always have this moment where they can either push the button or not push the button.
And I'll tell you something.
It's been my observation that they almost always push the button.
Well, safe in the limited sense that you can reliably, for instance, edit out the gene that might predispose you to Alzheimer's or edit in the gene that might tend to give your progeny greater intellectual capability.
I don't think that's safe at all necessarily in a long-term sense, in a more basic sense, but safe simply in the limited sense of having a predictable outcome in terms of the kid.
Well, once the real manipulation begins, the span of time between curing some early diseases and doing godlike things, oh, that's going to be small, relatively small.
And that's, you know, that's, I wrote in one of my papers for complexity that, you know, conceivably that could be an evolutionary watershed as profound as the Cambrian explosion, which is when multicellular animals first developed.
Yes, but you know, if this were common, and even ruling out those who would blow themselves to smithereens before they made it, dog on it, James, there ought to be, numerically, quite a number out there.
I've heard that if I believe that SETI, was it Seth who made the comment?
believe seth is quoted or somebody from said he is quoted as saying that if they don't get somewhere in the next i can't remember forty or maybe fifty years or something like that there's going to have to be a statement made You would.
Okay, we're here at the bottom of the hour, so hold on, James.
Fascinating to think about all this, isn't it?
James Gardner is my guest.
I'm Mark Bell, and this is Coast to Coast AM.
that thing that tries to make you think in the nighttime.
unidentified
I'm on a full garden.
And I want you all return by time You go scrolling through the crowd like Keeps alarming, cultivating her friends.
She comes out of the fun in a film dress, crying like a woman of color.
Oh, life is bigger.
It's bigger than you and you are not me.
The links that I will go to, the distance in your eyes.
Oh, no, I've said too much.
I set it up.
That's me in the corner.
That's me in the spot.
Life is losing my religion.
Trying to keep up the heat.
And I don't know if I can do it.
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My friends call me Alien, Mike, because every time they have a question about aliens or paranoia, they come and ask me.
And I tell them there's no such thing as aliens.
And they say, why?
I said, just neighbors.
There you go.
But I think Whitley could straighten this all out if he was up tonight because when he asked the Grays what the deal was, they turned to him and said, God's dream is reality.
And that pretty much sums up what your guest is trying to put across to us viewers out here tonight.
And he also had another comment that is applicable.
He said that perhaps our role in this universe is not to worship God, but to create him.
And a lot of your ideas sound like Frank Tipler's ideas on philanthropic principle and Edward Harrison and the old Russian cosmism philosophy.
But let me put my skeptic hat on to you.
And here's my challenge to you.
How come most of the universe seems to be bio-unfriendly, that it seems to be inhospitable to life?
If you look at things like mass extinction events, ice ages, meteor bombardments, diseases, it seems to be that there's a lot of bad design, a lot of contingent events in the universe.
Like the Neanderthals and the dinosaurs probably would say that it wasn't very well designed for them.
So how about all the evidence that points, that disconfirms your theory?
And I think that you can look at that same evidence and infer from it that those events, or at least patterns of events like those, may be in fact essential for the process of the continued emergence of ever greater intelligence.
Anyway, I try to have an open mind with all your topics.
But, you know, with all the prejudices and the biasness in this world we live in, for example, could you imagine if George Bush stood up and said he was an atheist?
And the other thing I want to add is that, as I said from the very beginning, there wouldn't be science as we know it except for the Judeo-Christian heritage.
I believe, I wanted to ask him, I believe that when you try to look at things intellectually sometimes, and I'm not saying that you think this way, but I feel that some people who are not certain about the existence of God are concerned about thinking there may be something greater than themselves.
And so they want to just have scientific achievements to become greater without thinking there may be a being greater than themselves.
And I don't have a problem with thinking there's a being greater than myself.
I think that there is certainly intelligence and an intelligence that will emerge that's vastly greater than our own, and that that kind of intelligence existed in the very distant past, in a prior cosmic cycle.
Well, because I think that the nature of the cycle that I'm hypothesizing is that you have essentially one cosmic cycle that occurs that ends with a kind of a big crunch,
and that the next step is a new big bang, and that what is capable of surviving that transition is really the set of laws of nature that are kind of like the cosmic DNA.
I think that's all that can survive, all that does survive.
East of the Rockies, you're on the air with James Gardner.
Hi.
unidentified
Hello?
Hello.
Yes, I don't want to argue with your guest one way or the other.
It's an interesting concept he has.
And what I'd like to know is, how does he think an intelligent alien life form would look at us politically since we've been involved in more modern warlike factions and situations than any other country in the world?
Color has certainly in general, not necessarily the United States, because I don't think that an alien intelligence would necessarily differentiate us, but I think that they would look at us as a sort of a risky outshoot of the tree of evolution,
one that might face the hazard of falling off in the not-too-distant future.
Well, okay, then maybe he's making the case, James, that this change that you're expecting, maybe is there a possibility that we'll be surprised, that it will not come from manipulation of our genetic structure.
It will not come from anything we do by digging inside our own psyches, but rather the change will just be some natural evolutionary surprise.
I mean, you have, for instance, you have every three or four hundred years, you have an individual like Isaac Newton or Albert Einstein who suddenly appears that an individual like that can only be characterized as a mutant.
Oh, yeah, I think that that level of intelligence has to be viewed as a mutation.
Now, so it is possible that a level of intelligence will emerge spontaneously, but I think it's more likely that germline manipulation is what's going to get us there.
So again, as a way to end this, I really would suggest that there are these other incredible areas that you could look at and certainly should look at.
It was published first in September, and it was just selected last, recently, as one of the top 10 science books published in 2003 by Amazon's editors.
You know, it is as possible as many other things, isn't it?
But it's always fascinating to even contemplate one's origins and imagine for the intellectual fun of it, if nothing else, all of the various possibilities.
Well, as always, it has been a pleasure to be with you this weekend, and I look forward to next.
Weekends are kind of nice in the sense that by the time the weekend gets here, I've got all of the week's news to digest, pour through, and sort of form my own comments about.
So doing weekends is pretty cool.
But coming up tomorrow night, we turn the radio back to George.
And that's, I guess, the last thing in that process coming up right now.
Crystal Gale, none other than, she sang it just for me, here it is for you.
unidentified
Night in the desert, shooting stars across the sky.
This magical journey will take us on a ride.
Filled with the longing, searching for the truth.
Will we make it to tomorrow with the sun shine on you?