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May 8, 2004 - Art Bell

02:52:12

Coast to Coast AM with Art Bell - Prof. Guillermo Gonzales - Are We Alone

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	From the high desert in the great American Southwest, I've been your host, Bill Hager.
	Welcome to the show.
	Good evening, good morning, good afternoon, wherever you may be in the world's prolific
	time zones, all of them covered like blankets by this program, Coast to Coast AM.
	It is my honor to be with you this weekend in May.
	May is going to be a very interesting month.
	In a moment, Whitley Strieber and the latest on our movie, well, Roland Emmerich's movie, Suggested in part by our book, whatever, coming up on May 28th.
	Boy, is that a hot potato!
	Looking quickly at the world, which also is a very hot potato right now, in one of the darkest weeks of his administration.
	Now that's quite a line to begin with, isn't it?
	In one of the darkest weeks of his administration, President Bush saw America's reputation sullied The U.S.
	effort in Iraq damaged, and his own campaign for re-election clouded.
	And more bad news may be on the way.
	While the world already has been horrified by pictures of American soldiers abusing Iraqi prisoners, the Pentagon warns, there are many more photos and videos out there that have not yet been disclosed.
	So what is bad is about to get worse.
	For those of you who have suffered the wrath of Sasser, you might want to, and there are many of my friends who have been Sasserized.
	Sasser is the worm, the computer worm that has infested the world, thanks apparently to a German high school student who now has confessed.
	He confessed, he created Sasser.
	that has generated chaos across the globe by infecting hundreds of thousands of computers.
	The teenager, whose name was not released, good thing for him, was arrested Friday in the northern village of Waffsensen, where he lives with his family.
	In a search of the suspect's home, German investigators confiscated his customized computer, which they found contained Sasser's source code.
	So this would be our boy.
	In a moment, we'll get you up to date with what's going on with the day after tomorrow.
	All about very rapid climate change.
	not all of course agree in a sample of that in a moment well i don't think most of you know by now that uh...
	with the street where is my co-author uh... wrote book called
	the coming global superstore and
	it's very hard not to think of the movie is my movie where it
	We're actually going to go to the premiere in New York City on May 24th.
	Yes, there will be a premiere, so we're going to go to New York and see it.
	It's very hard not to think of it as our movie, but it's not, of course.
	It's Roland Emmerich's movie, suggested in part by our book.
	And it is stirring up a hornet's nest, to say the least.
	The Union Tribune, that would be a San Diego newspaper, I guess, has a big rap on it here.
	It probably went out nationally.
	Joseph Perkins wrote it.
	This climatic Armageddon, it says in part, is the result, supposedly, of man-made global warming.
	And it all could have been avoided if political leaders had taken the necessary measures to curb carbon dioxide emissions.
	Well, you know, that's what it says in part.
	And I want to take umbrage with that.
	I've been saying for years now that it doesn't really matter.
	And you know what?
	You're going to hear this in the motion picture as well.
	What difference does it make whether it is man-made, Man Assisted or has nothing at all to do with man but is a simple cyclic change that the earth goes through every now and in fact is it's happening and so we should be preparing for it not arguing about which it is, which is what we're doing nationally.
	Whitley, welcome to the program.
	Well, I'm glad to be back Art.
	It's always exciting and I've been looking forward to it.
	Well, these are getting to be very exciting times, aren't they?
	I mean the movie is that close now, what, 20 days?
	Twenty days in the film, and you know, there's so much else, so much going on.
	Before we continue, there's something I didn't mention to you when we were talking before the program that I must bring up, that is in Linda Moulton Howe's Dreamland Report this week.
	She talks to one of the key scientists on the Mars Express program, and apparently In either July in Paris or in September at another conference, they are going to announce that there does seem to be life on Mars.
	Isn't that awesome?
	You know, I guess there was a day some years ago when I would have been quite shocked, but I mean, the discovery of water.
	The discovery of the basic building blocks for life, and I assume they're talking about small life, microscopic... Well, they don't actually know what they're talking about.
	They're talking about... You want to just let that stand right there?
	What?
	You want to just let that statement stop and stand right there?
	Well, of course, but that's what the scientific community does, is they talk about what they don't know.
	And right now, There are molecules of formaldehyde, ammonia, and benzene turning up in analysis of the atmosphere by the Mars Express spacecraft.
	And these chemicals, there really are a side effect of life processes.
	There's nothing else that causes them.
	And when you add to that methane, and also, they're very short-lived.
	In other words, they're created and then they dissipate.
	So, it just really couldn't be anything else.
	I'm not surprised.
	There's life on Mars.
	Now, this will have a great deal of meaning for a lot of people.
	It will disturb some people.
	Well, yeah.
	It will please some people, and me, I guess at this point, having done this program for so long, I'm simply I'm not surprised, it was more or less my expectation with recent discoveries, but it does, you know, look, if there's life on Mars, and there's life on Earth, that one we know for sure, then there's probably life all over the place.
	Exactly.
	All over the place.
	We have found life in the most inhospitable corners and cracks of our own planet.
	Deepest parts of the ocean with volcanic venting.
	Now we find it on Mars, which is not a nice place to live.
	There's no question whatsoever about that, and it means that you couple that with the recent discovery that there must be literally tens of billions of rocky planets like Mars and Earth in our galaxy, and you come right back to the question That I have been debating, that you and I have been talking about for years.
	I've been debating ever since I had my close encounter in 1986.
	Why is it so quiet?
	I mean, what is really going on out there?
	Well, it's why we do this program.
	Right, exactly.
	It's the basis for it.
	And I still don't know the answer to that one, but that is why we're here, to try and find the answer to that one, along with some other things.
	A few other things.
	Just a few.
	I mean, there are also many planets where there may once have been life, and there doesn't seem to be now.
	And I would rather avoid being one of those, if possible.
	Well, that's right.
	Of course, we all would.
	And, you know, we are in a position on our planet where things are happening now that we really don't have much precedent for except During other periods of mass extinction, and we really don't want to be in one of those periods, which is, for example, you were quoting that San Diego paper where they were saying, well, a movie says it's all man's fault, and I don't seem to recall that.
	I read the script before I wrote the Day After Tomorrow book, and by the way, just to everyone who's bought the book, thank you.
	Because it's going on the best-seller list.
	Oh, that's right.
	That's big news.
	Best-seller list for The Day After Tomorrow.
	Right.
	Congratulations, Whitley.
	And so that everybody understands how it worked, Whitley and I wrote The Coming Global Superstorm.
	Right.
	Then Roland Emmerich came along and began making a movie to come out the 28th called The Day After Tomorrow, based at least in part on the book.
	And then Whitley got commissioned to write a book from the movie.
	It seems a pretty turnabout process, but that's the way it happens.
	And so the day after tomorrow, even prior to the release of the movie, is already going up the bestseller list.
	That's right.
	It's going to be on the USA Today bestseller list next week.
	And incidentally, if anyone wants an autographed copy, they can get that from my website.
	I think that's the only place that you can get autographed copies.
	Oh, what you're getting yourself into.
	Well, it's available on the website in an autographed form, and I sign every single one of them, believe you me.
	Alright, well, one of the things that the critics are saying, Whitley, about the movie, or another thing they're saying about it, is that it's taking, perhaps, decades of time, and compressing it into a two-hour movie, suggesting all of this could occur within days, and scoffing at it.
	And that is a problem.
	I think that You know, in our book... For us or them?
	Well, for them.
	I think they're wrong.
	Our book says it happens over about a 30-day period.
	The movie compresses it into five days, but the movie assumes the same kind of setup we do.
	It just sort of takes place in the critical five-day period.
	Yes.
	And I have always thought and worried That there is an unknown form of storm out there that we have never seen in recorded history, but that is there.
	Now, the evidence that we used in our book was very problematic, which we say in the book.
	It's evidence of sudden freezing of animals and plants in the Arctic.
	All around ten or fifteen thousand years ago.
	But before anybody scoffs at the possibility of it occurring within a period of only a few days perhaps, you should listen very carefully to what Whitley is about to say.
	There is evidence to indicate it happened before.
	That's right.
	And some of the latest is what, Whitley?
	Well now, that evidence of the mammoth has been just Tossed aside and totally debunked and ignored by science.
	That's woolly mammoths found with greenery in their frozen mouths, right?
	Yeah.
	And why did they toss that aside?
	They tossed it aside for two reasons.
	First, a lot of the evidence was found as long ago as the 18th century.
	And second, it's just too impossible to believe.
	Too impossible?
	Because nobody has ever seen a storm that could do that.
	So therefore... It can't be.
	It can't be, but... But it is.
	It was.
	Yes, yes, yes.
	There were ice cores drilled into glaciers in Peru.
	This was reported now last September.
	The papers have been published, but it hasn't kind of We've reached the scientific consciousness, and what it is saying, essentially, is something happened.
	Now, this is 5,200 years ago, and I'll talk a little bit more about that in a minute, what that date means.
	That was abrupt and very large scale.
	what they found in these ice cores were plants
	that had been quick frozen and these are plants like
	weeds and things that you might find in your own backyard there were not there
	was nothing unusual about these plants they weren't special arctic plants in fact they were temperate zone
	plants quick frozen
	and found five thousand two hundred years later
	in that state in other words something happened
	not in days or hours but minutes minutes minutes uh... would lead
	is there any People should understand the basis of ice core science.
	An ice core is, I guess, kind of like a tree trunk, right?
	You look through the ice core, and as you do, you're literally looking back through time.
	Is there any way, for example, Whitley, that at the moment that those plants were frozen, flash frozen, and then stayed that way, for them to identify how long an event it was?
	Yes, actually, because of the fact that they were soft tissue plants, the event lasted, the event, the freezing process took only minutes.
	Yes.
	Only minutes.
	Yes, but then how long after that did the area stay frozen, I wonder?
	Still is.
	And counting the years the same way you count rings in a plant, I mean in a tree, counting down the years, what you find is that this happened 5,200 years ago.
	Now this happened in Peru.
	Something else happened.
	5,200 years ago in the Alps.
	And that was, of course, the freezing of the famous Iceman, who just was recovered after having thawed out recently.
	Yes.
	He was in an alpine meadow.
	That meadow was frozen at possibly even the same exact time, but certainly within that immediate time period.
	And this man was trapped in this snowfall.
	And died there, and it remained not in Alpine Meadow.
	It never thawed again.
	Not until recently.
	Well, I take it that these discoveries have been stored in the back room with the woolly mammoths, or... No, not at all.
	Oh, well good.
	This has been done, now this has been done by a team from Ohio State University and researchers with the Bird Polar Research Center, and this is This is simply not going to be able to be pushed into the back room, because the science is excellent.
	This is as good as it gets in terms of paleoclimactic research.
	You can't do better science than these people have done.
	Woodley, what possible premise would you explain to people would exist to create a storm of the magnitude And that we're discussing right now.
	What possible conditions could one imagine that would precipitate such a storm?
	Art, the problem is that I have to answer you with, that is unknown.
	But, as we said in the Superstorm book, years before this discovery was made, I hasten to add, this unknown Needs to be understood, because now, in fact, no matter how much scientists who are behind the times with this may be saying in the media right now in relation to this movie, and even the writers and so forth of the movie, they have always used it, thought of the movie as a kind of a warning, rather than an actual depiction of an event that could happen.
	And I think they're all wrong.
	I think it could happen.
	No matter what they may say, the fossil evidence is now incontrovertible.
	Whatever happened in Peru is so bizarre, it is so beyond our understanding of what weather is and what weather does, that we urgently need to find out, because at the time that this was happening, approximately 5,200 years ago, More or less exactly, because they've carbon dated this.
	I mean, they've dated this pretty exactly.
	At that time, there was an abrupt climate change that didn't take.
	In other words, there was a period where things got suddenly very much colder in the Northern Hemisphere, and presumably around the world, for unknown reasons, for a couple of hundred years, and then it sort of returned to the warming trend.
	Almost as if there had been something that stopped the flow of ocean currents for a couple hundred years and then it started up again.
	So the answer to my question might be ocean currents.
	Well, we don't know, but what we do know is that there is a storm that has never been observed by meteorologists because it's very rare, but it is extraordinarily devastating and it has A literally permanent effect when it hits.
	And I think I consider 5,000 years in terms of history permanent.
	Permanent enough for the two of us.
	Exactly.
	Permanent enough for all of us.
	And it's absolutely urgent at this point that they find out what is going on and what has gone on in the past.
	I would say this.
	In terms of the welfare of mankind, the single most important science right now It's paleoclimatology.
	We have got to figure out how this happened and to determine whether or not the changes that are taking place in the oceans right now will cause it again.
	That is essential.
	It is, and we understand so very little of it what the warning signs would be, if any.
	If any!
	And the process that would cause this to ensue, but there must be one, because the evidence is there that it did occur.
	So you think the latest evidence they've discovered, Whitley, will cause them to dig deeper?
	I don't know.
	In other words, proceed with the science to find out what happened, so we can understand if it'll happen again.
	Well, I don't know what's going to happen.
	National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's budget for paleoclimatology is going to be slashed next year.
	Yeah, I heard that.
	Bush Administration is thinking about slashing it, right?
	That's right.
	Uh-huh.
	Such timing.
	All right, stay right there, Whitley.
	Whitley Strieber is my guest.
	We're in Hour One from the high desert in the middle of the night.
	I'm Art Bell with those things we talk about in the middle of the night.
	Stay right where you are.
	Cause I think it's time to get ready.
	To realize just what I have found.
	I have been holding hands.
	Oh, for my ends.
	It's so clear to me now My heart is on fire
	Don't you love her badly? Don't you need her badly? Don't you love her ways? Don't you need her love?
	Don't you love her badly? Don't you need her badly? Don't you love her ways?
	Tell me what you say.
	Don't you love her badly?
	Wanna be her daddy?
	Don't you love her face?
	Don't you love her as she's walking out the door?
	Like she did one thousand times before.
	Don't you love her ways?
	Tell me what you say Don't you love her as she's walking out the door?
	All your love is gone All your love
	All your love All your love
	All your love is gone It's a single lonely song
	Of a deep blue dream You seem to be on the run.
	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.
	From west of the Rockies, call Art at 800-618-8255.
	727-1222. To talk with Art Bell from east of the Rockies, call toll-free at 800-825-5033.
	From west of the Rockies, call Art at 800-618-8255.
	International callers may reach Art Bell by calling your in-country Sprint Access number.
	number pressing option 5 and dialing toll-free 800-893-0903.
	From coast to coast and worldwide on the Internet, this is Coast to Coast
	AM with Art Bell.
	It is and I know why the day after tomorrow is such a political hot potato.
	I know why. Rush is speaking out against it.
	I know why.
	They're writing frantic articles saying, no, no, no, this just can't happen.
	It just can't happen.
	I know why.
	Science fiction has always been a pretty good predictor Not always, but generally pretty darn good, actually.
	And you see, I think the difference is that if you write about aliens invading the Earth as in Independence Day, it's accepted without comment nor concern because, well, it's science fiction of a sort of a fantasy, despite how some of us feel, a fantasy The problem with the day after tomorrow, you see, is that it's based on possible reality.
	That's why it's a hot potato that it is.
	And so, by the way, it was 10.5.
	A lot of you may have seen 10.5 the other night on TV.
	Well, I'll tell you something without giving anything away I ought not.
	The day after tomorrow is going to make 10.5 look like a Sunday picnic.
	I agree.
	It is, indeed.
	And what is, again, so worrisome about it is the fact that we have... The consensus is that the film is really an exaggeration for effect.
	It's a piece of fiction in order to point out a dangerous possibility, but one that is Going to unfold over a 10-year period, which somehow or another kind of takes the air out of it.
	It's again, you know, we can put it off, we can put it off, but the reality is this, that we need to go back to that 5,200-year period and find out what was going on.
	We know, actually, a good bit about it.
	The scientists who made this discovery He said the plant had to be captured by a very large snowfall, a snowfall and climate change that began very abruptly, fast enough to capture the plant, that is to quick freeze it, but not kill it.
	He said that is astounding.
	Now we know what happened, a lot was going on then.
	We know that there was an incredible drought all through the whole tropical belt of this planet at that period in time.
	A drought so devastating that human beings gave up their nomadic existence and began to congregate in small groups in what became cities, near places where there was still water.
	In other words, whatever it was, we're still experiencing the effects of it, because this is when we began to start living in cities.
	That's how devastating this was.
	I'm not real good at either, at suggesting what might have done this, but you do a great deal of flying, don't you?
	You've been to Europe a few times.
	Yeah, a lot.
	All over the place.
	Well, have you ever noticed when you get up there, oh, I don't know, 35, 37,000 feet, particularly on a transatlantic flight or transpacific, you can look and, you know, they give you these wonderful stats now on airplanes, and typically you can look out at 67, 74 degrees or more below zero, Where you're flying.
	I mean, it's really cold.
	Is there any mechanism that man can imagine that would get that air from there to here?
	That would be a very negative experience, of course.
	That, of course, is something that we talked about in Superstorm.
	Now, as we understand the weather now, a storm reaching that level, the atmosphere would
	be so thin that no kind of real storm structure could go above about 45 or 50,000 feet.
	But maybe that's not the case.
	Maybe it's possible for an updraft to be so strong that it literally brings its dense
	atmosphere up with it into the hyper-cold regions and then drops like a rocket.
	One of the things that's been happening persistently now, not a lot, but enough to where it's beginning to cause some scientific eyebrows to be raised, are these sudden falls of ice out of the sky, where a very large... I've been hearing about it.
	At first, it was assumed, well, these must be coming off of airplanes.
	But analysis of this ice indicates that these are, that these large pieces of ice are accreted over, from a very, a fall from a very, very high point, as if a kind of hailstone had developed.
	And sometimes they hit in clear air.
	Nobody quite knows what is going on that causes this, or, and here's the key thing, Why it's new.
	It's been only about four or five years we've been seeing these in different places in the world, not consistently in the same place, but in, you know, here and there and from Italy to California, in fact, and Spain and all over the place.
	This suggests the existence of a new weather phenomenon that we don't yet understand.
	Is it a precursor to something much bigger And much more terrible and much more extraordinary?
	I don't know.
	But again, I cannot tell you enough.
	We must find out.
	Well, we must.
	And in the meantime, how do you feel about the political brouhaha that's coming up about all of this?
	I mean, you know, almost everybody in sight has made comments, and they consider it to be an attack on the Bush administration.
	And frankly, I can see how they Well, our book, of course, as you recall, we wrote it during the Clinton administration.
	It wasn't a political book at all.
	This hadn't really become a political issue.
	There were a few people on the fringes who were saying that global warming isn't real.
	But that was a very fringe position then.
	Actually, Whitley, when I think about it, President Clinton was actually the only one that I know of Who even looked hard at the energy problem, either before or after the Clinton administration.
	He was the only one, really.
	President Clinton was not, in some respects, my favorite president, but he did pay attention.
	He did pay attention to it, but in any case, it wasn't viewed... Our book was not viewed as a political book.
	Absolutely not.
	No.
	And when they started writing their movie, I don't recall that You know, there's a vice president in the movie who is very sort of anti-global warming, etc., and so forth.
	But that was a choice that they made.
	Again, it wasn't a political choice.
	It was simply a fictional choice.
	But when the movie was being written, I don't think they were looking at it as a political statement either.
	Well, you know, I didn't tell everybody.
	I mean, this is a science fiction movie.
	It's not being proffered.
	I hope it's a science fiction movie.
	Well, I hope it is too, but I mean, as of right now, it is a science fiction movie.
	They're presenting it as saying that it's based on the reality of sudden climate change, but it's a fictional version of it.
	I think they're wrong.
	I think it's quite a real one.
	I know you do, but here's what I think.
	I think that inside a lot of people who are listening to us tonight, Whitley, there's a sort of a sixth sense that's telling these people that it could happen.
	And that's what differentiates this from aliens in large ships, you know, destroying cities and the rest of it.
	It's so implausible.
	As compared to this, that this is just a little too close to possible reality, and it really gives people the heebie-jeebies.
	Because so many people around the world, in this country, in Canada, in every country, but mainly in the countries of the temperate hemispheres, the northern and southern hemispheres, not so much in the tropics where it hasn't gotten hotter.
	It's about the only thing that's changed there.
	We've experienced Such bizarre weather.
	Like, here in South Texas, we're still in... We've just come off of what felt like a kind of an autumn.
	And it's still... Let me give you an example of how these extremes are.
	In our area, last week, we were experiencing record cold on the same... At the same time, in Los Angeles and on the West Coast, they were experiencing record heat.
	Yes.
	Just a few thousand miles apart.
	And of course what happened to Europe?
	And Europe, another thing, exactly.
	So everybody knows that the change inside, one way or the other, whether they say it because of their political beliefs or don't say it because of their political beliefs, they know something's up with Weather-Whitley and it gives you the GBs.
	That's all there is to it.
	What's changed politically is that now we have an administration that has made a commitment that nothing is changing and nothing is happening.
	Anyone can see that that's not true.
	That's basically what's happened.
	They've done it because they basically want to protect companies from having to spend money to clean up their emissions.
	That is the reason for it.
	Now, what is so incredibly ironic is that there are two things.
	First, in the movie and in our book, And throughout the whole scientific community, the fact that this is a long-term repeating cycle is no longer in dispute at all.
	The fact that we are speeding it up is also really no longer in dispute.
	In other words, our emissions are like a large volcano that never stops erupting.
	That's how the Earth reacts to it.
	And we, as individuals, Could do so much with the proper leadership to reduce emissions, big companies wouldn't even have to worry about it.
	Well, it is a leadership problem.
	It is a leadership problem.
	Primarily a leadership problem.
	And that's why it's such a hot potato.
	Yeah.
	Because, you know, if something goes haywire, all the people at the top are going to be yelling, not our fault, when actually they should have been pushing the lifestyle changes That were recommended in the Canadian Prime Minister's report back before we even published our book.
	Which, I mean, it's so small.
	You change two standard light bulbs to fluorescents.
	I know.
	You be sure you get an energy-saving refrigerator.
	You leave the car at home two days a week.
	You send out one fewer bags of garbage a week.
	This is the sort of thing the Canadian Prime Minister was recommending that sort of went nowhere.
	But I mean, Whitley's absolutely right.
	A standard 60 watt light bulb, and compare it to one of these new light bulbs, and to produce 60 watts of light, you only require 18 watts of energy.
	Well that's less than a quarter of the amount of electricity we're using.
	On top of that, you'll notice you can put your hand on one of these new ones.
	The old one would take skin away.
	That's how much difference in heat there is.
	Heat is energy.
	Switch out two of those bulbs in your house.
	Just two!
	You save a thousand pounds of CO2 a year.
	Right.
	If 20% of the people in the developed world did this, CO2 level emissions would drop to the point where the human factor would hardly be measurable.
	Which is not to say that the storm still might not happen because it might happen no matter what we do.
	Well, it will happen, no matter what we do.
	But if we could put it off for 50 or 100 or 200 years, wouldn't that be fabulous?
	Well, for us it would.
	Yes, it would.
	And I really have been asking myself some very hard questions about why we have, essentially, no energy policy.
	We don't have a government and leadership that's Providing money so that people will do the right thing, put in wind generation, solar power, even down to the light bulb changes you were talking about.
	All these things that we could be doing that would not scar in any way the quality of our life, which I, as much as anybody else, love.
	I love my quality of life.
	I don't want it radically changed, but I'm willing to do some things that make sense both for me and the world.
	Yeah, especially if they're relatively easy, which in this case they generally are.
	Alright, so then why, Whitley, do we not have the kind of leadership that is doing the obvious?
	Well, I think every single American needs to think about that very carefully because we've got some kind of a disconnect here where it's come to the point where if The political administration admits that this is a problem.
	And this is, you understand, it's not entirely the fault of a given administration.
	It works two ways.
	If the administration were to say, yes, global warming is a problem and we have to do something about it, that would then trigger a wholesale assault on the corporate community by people who want to use the need for ...for reduced emissions to impose a level of planning on society that we have rejected as non-working and something that we don't want.
	Even if they simply faced up to the reality that oil will be eventually a precious, very expensive commodity, And the more we save now, the more we put off the date when it will become a crisis that will make the 70s gas crisis look like a Sunday picnic.
	So on whichever premise they would care to act, acting makes sense.
	And I'm not talking about ripping the American way of life to shreds, I'm just talking about the simple kind of stuff that you talked about.
	There is a conservative approach to this that makes sense.
	It is to Turn to the individual for the kind of CO2 emission savings that will make a difference.
	That is number one.
	Number two is to turn to industry and encourage industry to really innovate, not just talk about things off in the far distance like hydrogen-powered cars, but to really innovate.
	And three, to come up with methods of conserving oil, which, by the way, Would also have the effect of freeing us from dependence on things like Saudi oil, which looks like it might go away at any time.
	Might even stop a war or two.
	Right.
	Now, that's a real strategy.
	And it's conservative because it conserves our way of life.
	Thank you.
	Conservative.
	Conservation.
	And it does not, you know, it has room for independent individual and free market action And it faces the problem squarely, and they're scared to do it.
	They won't do it because they're afraid that they will lose control of the situation if they admit that it's there, that the problem is real.
	Well, I guess that's what our leaders thrive on, is control, and heaven knows we wouldn't want them to lose control.
	Yeah, that's right.
	Do you agree with me, Whitley?
	I know you saw 10.5, the earthquake movie.
	Yes, I did.
	It was very bad.
	I mean, Barstow sliced right across the middle there toward the end.
	Definitely a scary movie, but I'm telling you, and I bet you'll agree indeed, that the day after tomorrow, Whitley, is going to make that look like a picnic.
	I'm serious about that.
	Oh yeah, it is.
	This is going to be the king of all disaster movies.
	It's the coolest one ever made.
	I'm sure of that.
	It is a tremendous success, and having read the script and written the book based on the script and seen some of the special effects with my own eyes.
	Which, folks, you can get an autographed copy of, if you wish.
	We're running out of time here, but on your website, unknowncountry.com, you can make your way to a place where you can actually get an autographed copy of The Day After Tomorrow from Whitley, right?
	You just click on the store, and if you subscribe to the website for a year, you get the copy, you get your book absolutely free.
	Oh, is that so?
	Which is very nice.
	Well, that's a way to go.
	Well, alright, as always, Whitley, thank you for being here, and I'm sure we'll hear from you again before the 28th.
	I would expect so, and I'll see you in New York.
	Before the big storm, yeah.
	See you in New York, buddy.
	Take care.
	You too.
	I'm Art Bell.
	This is Coast to Coast AM.
	don't move.
	I don't know.
	It don't come easy.
	You know it don't come easy.
	It don't come easy.
	You know it don't come easy.
	Got to play your tunes if you want to see the blues.
	And you know it don't come easy.
	You don't have to shout or leap or bow.
	You can even play the...
	You don't have to shout or leap about.
	You can even play them easy.
	Forget about the past and all your sorrow.
	The future won't last.
	To talk with Art Bell, call the 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.
	On the heels of the announcement coming that there's life on Mars, which frankly isn't a giant surprise to me, there should be a very interesting program scheduled.
	The author of The Privileged Planet, Guillermo Gonzalez, is about to present evidence Which shows that the same rare conditions that allow for intelligent life on Earth also make it suited for viewing and analyzing the universe.
	Guillermo Gonzalez is an assistant professor of astronomy and physics at Iowa State University.
	He received his Ph.D.
	in astronomy from the University of Washington and did his postdoctoral research at the University of Texas, Austin and the University of Washington.
	He is the author of over 60 peer-reviewed scientific papers.
	Very prolific indeed.
	He specializes in astrobiology and quantitative stellar spectroscopy.
	I'll never get it right.
	Spectroscopy, I guess it is.
	in a moment the professor will be right here here from the state of iowa where by the way uh... earlier
	in the evening they were reporting in some areas nickel-sized hail
	is uh... is our guest uh... professor gonzales uh... guillermo gonzales
	Welcome to the program.
	Hello, good evening.
	Good evening.
	Has the weather really nasty stuff passed you by, or is it still in the area?
	Actually, there's still...
	Thunderstorms passing through, so I hope we don't get our line disconnected.
	We've really been getting our share of supercells across the midsection of the country this spring.
	It's really been quite something.
	Professor, alright, so what is the privileged planet hypothesis?
	Well, basically our hypothesis is that those same rare places that can host complex life, intelligent life in the universe, also allow That life to make scientific discoveries very efficiently.
	So the prerequisites for scientific discovery are available in much greater abundance in those places that can host life compared to other places.
	Earth obviously being one of them.
	That's right, and Earth being the privileged planet.
	Now we don't argue that Earth is unique.
	But we do take the rare Earth position.
	I think you probably had either Brownlee or Ward on before.
	How rare do you imagine the Earth environment to be?
	I mean, that's always changing.
	I mean, here we are, NASA's about to announce they found life on Mars.
	I haven't heard of that.
	We'll hear it now then.
	They're very close to announcing, you know, they've got methane and other things that they just discovered that are apparently going to add up to their announcing that there's life of some form on Mars now.
	What would that do to your hypothesis?
	Actually, we do discuss briefly Mars in an appendix B about panspermia.
	And there's two versions of panspermia, I'm sure you know.
	Interplanetary panspermia, the transfer of life between planets, and then interstellar panspermia, the transfer of life between stellar systems or planetary systems.
	I've done some work on this, and other astrobiologists have been doing work, and now it's pretty convincing that it's likely that the Earth probably seeded Mars early on.
	That some of Earth's microbes actually made it to Mars intact, Now, whether or not they made it is another question.
	How conceivably would that have occurred, Professor?
	Yeah, there's two mechanisms.
	One is called lithopanspermia.
	That's the transport of life on rocks.
	And that happens when you have a large body of an asteroid or comet hitting the Earth, for example.
	And then lots of ejecta are blasted off the surface of the Earth.
	So, you're saying it would hit hard enough to blow rocks into space, basically, and some of those would take a trajectory toward Mars.
	That's right.
	And the transfer times to Mars, on average, the average rock is on the order of a few million years, which is too long for the life to survive, but a very small fraction of the fragments would make it much faster.
	Statistically, just their lucky hits.
	Is there any way, perhaps in your profession, you can tell me what it is that would hit us so hard as to throw rock into the air with a velocity that would achieve escape velocity and go to space?
	There are two main sources of these impactors.
	One is asteroids from the asteroid belt, and they would hit with velocities typically of 14 to 15 kilometers a second.
	And some of them could be quite large.
	And we see the effects of some of the early impacts on the surface of the moon that formed the Maurya, or the seas.
	And then, yeah, there are comets that can hit much faster, 30 or even up to 40 kilometers a second.
	Producing a big enough bang to actually throw something into space.
	Oh, yes.
	And the escape velocity of the Earth is 11 kilometers a second.
	And there would be sufficient energy and the impact to blast stuff off the surface.
	And the stuff right at the surface of the Earth Will be the stuff that's least shocked.
	And so it's the stuff that will be most likely to survive.
	And of course, it's the stuff at the surface that would contain the life.
	And another thing is that when the impactor is slicing through the atmosphere, and then it hits the surface, it moves so fast through the atmosphere, it actually makes a hole in the atmosphere.
	And some of the ejecta then go right through this hole in the atmosphere after they're blasted off the surface.
	Oh, that's remarkable.
	Yeah.
	So they create the path that allows The rocks to escape the atmosphere?
	Yes.
	Or AIDS in that process?
	That's right, AIDS in that process.
	Some will be shocked as they travel through the atmosphere, but some will travel through the whole.
	And so, a small fraction of these ejecta will make it to other planets, to the Moon, to Venus, and to Mars, the second nearest planetary neighbor.
	Or, of course, the other way around.
	Or, yes, and in fact, we have meteorites from Mars and meteorites from the Moon that are being found even today.
	And so, in fact, astronomers were skeptical at first that intact pieces of a planet's surface could make it from one planet to another, because they thought that the shock of the impact would completely melt and vaporize a rock.
	But some of these Martian meteorites that we've obtained, and of course the famous one, Alan Hill's 84001, are quite intact.
	They were not melted on impact, and so there apparently is a mechanism that can launch Rocks from the surface of the planet without completely melting them.
	All right, there was great controversy about that rock, wasn't there?
	Yes.
	And where do we stand for that?
	It was announced in August 1996 by NASA scientists, and they had something like eight or ten independent lines of evidence arguing for ancient life on Mars.
	And those have been contested and have been debated, and those lines of argumentation have been knocked down one by one.
	The last one that's being debated are the magnetite crystals.
	These small, tiny microscopic crystals, which are susceptible to magnetic orientation, and they look like the kind of crystals that are present in some bacteria, magnetotactic bacteria.
	That would indicate life.
	So you're saying every other so-called proof of life within that rock has been knocked down, save this one that you're discussing now?
	No, this one is still being debated.
	I don't know if it's been knocked down yet, but there are scientists who say they claim that, given the size and shape of the crystals, they claim that non-biological prophecies could have formed them, and other scientists dispute that.
	So it's still being debated.
	So it would be your belief that if there's life on Mars, either we put it there, as in Earth put it there, through this ejecta, or there was one other possibility?
	My view is that Earth put it there.
	Now we can test that, of course, by comparing, if we find something, the DNA.
	Yes, to see if the DNA is a match, so to speak.
	That's right, of the Earth.
	So my current working hypothesis is that if we do find evidence of life on Mars, it will be a surviving remnant from earlier Earth life.
	How do you discount the possibility, Professor, that perhaps all life, when it's found, will be somewhat similar in structure?
	Now, that's a possibility, because life may only be possible in one way.
	And so DNA, no matter where, if it arises independently on other planets, would be the same kind of DNA, no matter where it arose.
	And that's also a possibility.
	We would have to see just how similar it is.
	So then, I guess from your point of view, bringing back samples from Mars, if they contained microscopic life, wouldn't conceivably be a danger to Earth because it would be a similar DNA structure?
	There are scientists who worry that bringing back a sample from Mars might not be a brilliant thing to do.
	Now, that's been separated from Earth life for a long time because Most of the transfer from Earth occurred over three billion years ago.
	In the more recent history, there have been far fewer impacts on the Earth.
	And so far fewer fragments have been blasted off the Earth in recent history.
	And so there's been a quarantine, so to speak.
	So you're agreeing there could be a danger?
	There could be a danger, yes.
	And by the way, another thing that we advocate in the book is going back to the Moon to learn about the origin of life on Earth.
	Because the moon is a repository for ejecta blasted off the Earth's surface.
	And the moon is even a better place than Mars to look because it has no atmosphere and no water.
	And if we find that ejecta from Earth, what would it tell us?
	Well, it might actually contain fossils, microfossils.
	And there's a lot of controversy as to when life began on Earth and how it began.
	Scientists are pretty much at an impasse.
	There's so many competing theories as to how life began on Earth.
	And even when it began, some say 3.8 billion years ago, but some dispute that evidence.
	The evidence is probably most widely accepted up to about 3.5 billion years ago.
	Do you accept the conventional theory of, oh, I don't know how life began and how we have changed, and you know, evolution basically.
	Are you on the side of evolution?
	I'm skeptical of Neo-Darwinism as a complete explanation.
	For everything about life on Earth.
	Oh, really?
	Yes.
	And in what manner do you imagine it different?
	Well, I don't know.
	I try to keep an open mind to all explanations.
	But, for example, there's the origin of life, which is a complete mystery.
	How to get from inorganic, non-life, to soft replicating molecules.
	And the simplest replicators are already very complicated.
	How do you get Over that enormous hurdle that seems to be an almost insurmountable problem, and there are no solutions that I've seen that are convincing.
	Do you have some hypothesis, though, that might work, or that you believe?
	Not at the moment, no.
	So just a mystery?
	It's a complete mystery.
	And that's one reason I advocate going back to the moon.
	In my opinion, that That's the best hope right now to get real empirical data on the earliest life on Earth.
	The Earth has erased its earliest history of life.
	But even if we did prove some sort of early cellular life by finding something on the moon, that would mean what to you?
	Well, it would eliminate certain options.
	There are certain theories that posit that there are certain precursor molecules that You know, deposit primordial soup of a certain type at a certain time, and if we find that there's no such kind of biochemicals as are expected, that would throw out lots of theories.
	If we find that cells are found complete at the very earliest stages, with no precursors, that would throw out a lot of theories also.
	So yeah, there are certain I'm not ready to say that we're alone in the entire universe.
	I don't know if it would positively narrow it down to one possible explanation.
	I can't predict that, but it would certainly narrow down the range of explanations.
	Professor, do you imagine us to be so rare and so privileged as to actually be, with
	respect to intelligent life, alone?
	Now, I'm not ready to say that we're alone in the entire universe.
	I just don't think we know the probabilities well enough yet.
	We actually give a new version of the Drake equation in the appendix A of our book.
	A new version?
	Yes, we have 20 factors.
	If you remember the original version that Frank Drake produced around 1960 had 7 factors.
	It was okay?
	No, I didn't know there were actually 7 factors.
	So you add that many more to get to how many?
	20?
	20.
	20 factors.
	And that does what to the math?
	If you give a conservative 10% to each of the first 13, which are primarily astrophysical, then 10 to the... or 0.1 to the 13th power is 10 to the minus 13.
	Multiply that by the number of stars in the galaxy, 10 to the 11th, that gives you 10 to the minus 1.
	If you just assume 10% for each one.
	So, I think some of them are much less than 10%.
	So, in my personal opinion, we're alone in the galaxy, at least as far as an intelligent civilization is concerned.
	But I can't say that for the entire universe.
	I can't say that we're alone.
	You went through the numbers very quickly.
	What does that mean?
	Break it down for me.
	Yeah, so the factors include such things as Being in the right distance from the host star so you can have liquid water on the surface of the planet.
	Right.
	You need a planet of sufficient size so it can retain its atmosphere, and so it can retain a magnetic field.
	You need to be at the right place in the galaxy, something called the Galactic Habitable Zone.
	It's a region of the galaxy, and this is something I've worked on with Peter Ward and Don Bromley to develop this idea, is where you need to be in the galaxy.
	Does that have to do with how many objects are likely to impact in a certain area of the galaxy, or what?
	That's part of it.
	In other words, life killers.
	Yeah, there are two types of life killers.
	Radiation events, such as produced by supernovae, or gamma ray bursts, or the black hole at the center of the galaxy, whenever it accretes matter, it'll form an accretion disk and emit lots of radiation.
	And the other type of threat are, as you say, impacts.
	And comets are indeed a threat that depends on location in the galaxy.
	Because most comets reside in the Oort Cloud, very far from the Sun.
	They're very weakly held to the Sun by the Sun's gravity because they're so far away.
	So they're very sensitive to perturbations from nearby stars.
	Alright, again, the difference with Drake, Professor, in other words... We have many more factors.
	Yeah, you've told me about the factors, but I mean, in numbers that the average person can understand, what then are the probabilities of intelligent life out there, with your calculation?
	Yeah, we don't actually put a firm number, because, so, we give what we think is an upper limit, based on very optimistic of numbers for each of the factors of about 10%.
	And so just for the galaxy, we'd say there's less than a 1% chance of another civilization in the galaxy.
	Just our galaxy.
	That makes us pretty rare.
	In my opinion, that's an upper limit.
	Okay.
	That's an upper limit.
	And the universe?
	And the universe.
	Well, there are about 100 billion or a few hundred billion galaxies in the observable universe.
	So roughly as many galaxies as there are Stars in our galaxy, which is a large number.
	Okay.
	And so, from my upper limit, multiply 0.01 by 10 to the 11th, about a billion or so civilizations in the universe have an upper limit.
	You're saying an upper limit of a billion could have life?
	Yeah, I would say habitable Earth-like planets.
	Right.
	That's still a lot.
	That's still a lot, but I think it's an upper limit.
	And my personal view is the real number is probably smaller than that.
	Yes, you seem very much on that side.
	Perhaps in a private moment you might even suggest you have a fair belief that we are alone.
	That's my current personal belief, is that we're probably alone in the universe as a civilization.
	How did you come to terms with that?
	I mean, that's such a...
	A serious foreboding thought that we're totally alone.
	It is.
	In fact, up until my 20s, I was a strong supporter of the SETI program.
	And I was a strong believer that there was life.
	It was common.
	In fact, I was somewhat of a UFO believer also up until my 20s.
	I was a very strong believer in extraterrestrial civilization.
	I grew up with Star Trek and with the Apollo Lunar Program.
	So I've been very interested in space.
	From a very young age, and I was an amateur astronomer.
	But then when I became a graduate student, I just started studying it on my own, all the requirements you need for a habitable planet.
	And I just became more skeptical over time.
	Oh, that's... I started studying it on my own.
	That's like going from being a liberal to an arch-conservative, or whatever.
	Alright, Professor, hold on.
	Professor Guillermo Gonzalez is my guest.
	He wrote a book called Privileged Planets.
	And how about the rest of you?
	How would you feel if you came to the personal conclusion that we were totally alone?
	In all the rest of the universe and all you can see out there
	We are the only ones the only intelligent ones You
	the inside The sight of a touch, or the scent of a sound, or the strength of an oak when it loops deep in the ground.
	The wonder of flowers to be covered and then to burst up through tarmac to the sun again.
	Or to fly to the sun without burning a wing?
	To lie in a meadow and hear the grass sing?
	To have all these things in our memories?
	And they use them to help us survive Ride, ride like she's old
	Take this place, on this trip Just call me
	I'm not your slave to be torn!
	Ride, take a pillow, take my purse, up by the sea.
	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.
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	pressing option 5 and dialing toll free 800-893-0903.
	From coast to coast and worldwide on the Internet, this is Coast to Coast AM with Art Bell.
	It is indeed.
	Professor Guillermo Gonzales is my guest.
	He wrote a book called Privileged Planet.
	That would be us, of course.
	And he mentioned SETI a little while ago, that he was actually a SETI kind of guy at one point.
	Even investigated UFOs.
	We'll have to find out about that.
	And along those lines, earlier this week, and I'm not saying it is anything, I'm just going to give you this and tell you what I have noticed, and ask you perhaps for observations.
	But I received an email that kind of set off a chain reaction, and I'll read you what I What I've got.
	It says, strong radio signal at 1400 megahertz emanating from a location off the planet.
	Exclamation mark.
	Well, right away, you've got to be in doubt, but I read on.
	It says, a strong radio signal at 1420 megahertz emanating from a location off the planet.
	This small bit came from another board.
	This is obviously a conversation.
	Could this be an attempted contact beginning this evening?
	A strong radio signal was present on 1420 MHz and has been detected by a variety of radio operators.
	This signal appears to be emanating from a location off the planet.
	The signal is constant and quite strong.
	S9+.
	Related.
	In the protected band at 1420 MHz, through international agreement, several special frequency bands have been reserved for radio astronomy.
	Perhaps the most important of these bands include the emissions from hydrogen atoms at 1420 MHz.
	at 1420 megahertz, the protected band extends from 1400 to 1427 in order to allow observations
	of hydrogen gas moving at a range of velocities.
	Well, when I received this, I was curious enough, I'm fortunate to be blessed with a
	receiver that will cover that frequency.
	1420 megahertz and so I dialed it up and I talk about surprise sure as hell
	there was a signal that I could hear at 1420 megahertz Took the antenna off, it went away.
	Real signal.
	And checked to make sure there were no birdies emanating or any of the rest of it, and then got on the air, talked to some of my friends, said, my God, I hear...
	A signal on 1420.
	Well, next thing you know, reports come zooming in.
	Another ham operator in the state of Washington picks up a signal on 1420.
	S8, S9 in the state of Washington.
	Well, I got really curious and I called Seth Shostak from SETI.
	We had mentioned him a moment ago, and Seth began to do some checking, called me earlier this evening.
	As a matter of fact, I talked to Seth just a number of hours ago, and he said he's been calling everybody in sight.
	They haven't been looking at 1420 lately, and why everybody was off having lunch or taking Friday off, and I said, my God, Seth, you know, they could be on their way in from the cosmos, and they're all at lunch!
	I was kidding with him.
	He said, yeah.
	So he's still checking into it.
	But just in case any of you can listen to 1420, that's not the broadcast band 1420, folks.
	That's 1420 megahertz up, not all that far from microwave.
	So up near the hydrogen frequency.
	So you know, just sort of dropping that on.
	Probably nothing.
	Probably has a perfectly proper explanation.
	But it is very interesting.
	All right, so when you get right down to it, Professor Gonzales does believe we are now alone.
	And that's quite a trip from having been involved perhaps with SETI and at one time having researched ufology.
	I am curious, Professor, what sort of research into ufology, you know, the possibility that they might actually be here and visiting right now, did you do, and when was that in your life?
	I didn't investigate it deeply.
	I mean, I wasn't someone who went out and And you found nothing within to cause you to be sufficiently curious to go further?
	field of the issue but with the casually okay i i i used to subscribe to official ufo and
	you'll for the movement
	because one or two other thing is being back in the late seventy and you found
	uh... nothing within to cause you to be sufficiently uh... curious uh... to go
	further well i was going to the time of the certainly paid
	attention to reports and roswell
	uh... paid attention paid attention to the
	but uh... you know i i i was also an amateur astronomer movement
	Bye.
	And I still spend much time, you know, looking outside.
	And I've seen lots of rare atmospheric phenomena and other things, but I never saw anything that I could say is unidentifiable.
	I've seen a lot of weird things, but I can never say I saw anything that was definitely a UFO.
	So that was another reason I grew more skeptical.
	I personally haven't seen something.
	So, there could be a number of shocks to your system.
	The Brookings Institute did a now very famous study on who would be affected and in what way should there be extraterrestrial contact.
	And one of the conclusions they made was that one of the groups most deeply and profoundly affected would be people like yourself.
	And I assume that's, from what I've heard this morning, would probably be right, wouldn't it?
	In other words, if we were suddenly contacted by an extraterrestrial race, that would be quite a shock to your system and your hypothesis.
	It certainly would, because I've come to the opposite side now that I believe that we're alone.
	And so, yeah, it would certainly be a shock.
	Are you, Professor, a religious person?
	Oh, yes.
	I'm a Christian, and I was a Christian when I believed in UFOs, so my religious views haven't changed.
	I see, so you believe in God, the God of the Bible?
	Yes.
	That in itself, Professor, is, as you must know, fairly rare for people in your profession.
	Oh yeah, I know that, yeah.
	I would imagine that would lead to a number of interesting discussions with other people in science, your colleagues.
	Oh yeah.
	there are a few of your very famous point of view religious
	uh... but generally i'm not uh...
	not many tolerated very much moment apart of the community
	were appointed to to be religiously is
	we've got yes uh... even though
	uh... as you pointed out that the some pains earlier we we can't really explain
	how life got here That's right.
	Yet, scientifically.
	Yeah.
	And I just keep an open mind.
	Maybe science will find an answer through a natural process.
	Maybe not.
	And we should just be open to the possibility that maybe science cannot find an answer to it.
	Maybe not.
	But again, should there be sudden contact, how do you think you would process that information?
	Um, that's actually one thing we briefly mentioned in the book towards the end.
	Yes?
	Um, you know, we say that if the universe really is designed as a result of a creator, and we, in fact, in the book we present evidence that we argue is evidence that the universe is designed, that would actually increase the probability of there being other life in the following way.
	The calculations that I give in the book in Appendix A With the new version of the Drake Equation, it's based completely on naturalistic assumptions.
	Assumptions that natural processes are responsible for each of these factors.
	Say that again please, I'm sorry.
	The Drake Equation that we produced is based completely just on straight mainstream science without any kind of religious assumptions whatsoever.
	And using those assumptions we came to the conclusion That life is extremely rare, and civilizations, we may be the only one, or they may be extremely rare in the universe.
	Okay, that's based on just assuming that the universe is just material.
	And there is no design.
	But if it is designed, if the universe really is designed, then that increases the odds for life.
	Because then the designer could have created the conditions for life on other planets.
	But wouldn't we as Earthlings, Professor, be inclined to view it that way no matter what?
	In other words, conditions obviously are ideal for life.
	I'll certainly give you that and agree with you on the rare A rareness of Earth, and that we are certainly privileged, but that doesn't necessarily all add up to creation.
	Our view of how neat and perfect everything is right now could be a simple function of evolution getting us here.
	Yeah, well that's the position that my colleagues Don Bromley and Peter Ward take, that we're the recipients of the cosmic lottery.
	Yes.
	We're just the chance recipients of this habitable planet, because You know, it's a self-selection effect.
	We only find ourselves living on the planet that's compatible with our existence.
	Precisely.
	And then the explanation is just chance.
	Well, what's wrong with that?
	Well, that could be the explanation.
	Again, we say that we can't say for sure, just based on probabilities, that we're completely alone in the universe.
	So just based on rarity alone, we don't argue that the universe is designed.
	It's on this particular privileged planet hypothesis that I stated at the very beginning of the show.
	That's evidence of design, that the universe is designed not only for life, but that life be able to discover the universe around it.
	So the universe is designed for discovery, for scientific discovery.
	And that's the evidence of design.
	Now, that evidence by itself doesn't say that, OK, God created other planets with life.
	But it does open it up to that possibility.
	If the universe is designed so it could contain life, and so that life could discover
	things about the universe, then the possibility is opened up that it's designed for
	life to be in other places as well, not just for one planet.
	So we think if you're open to the possibility of the universe being designed,
	it greatly increases the chances for there being other civilizations,
	as compared to just a purely materialistic view of the universe, like the rare earth hypothesis.
	Well, I thought for a moment perhaps you were going to say, I have no particular religious views, in which I'd have
	asked you, then what in the world do you hang on to if you think we
	may well be alone?
	You don't have God, then you have, well, I don't know what you have.
	I would have asked, but you have God.
	You are religious.
	That's right.
	Yeah, if you don't have God, and you're like Peter Ward, for example, who is an atheist, then there's nothing else to hang on to, frankly.
	It's a pretty lonely place, and it's a pretty depressing thought.
	You're alone in the universe, and there's no purpose to the universe.
	But as long as God's there for you, Then alone or not, it all makes sense and you have lots to hang on to.
	There's more to hang on to.
	It's kind of an important thing to have an understanding that there's a purpose that exists.
	I interviewed a very interesting gentleman named Matthew Alper, doubt you've ever heard of him, but his hypothesis is that there is virtually a God part of the brain, of our brains, that we are predisposed To believe in a creator, in a higher force, and this is a function of the brain which refuses to accept the possibility of mortality with not a thing, but the worms crawl in and the worms crawl out, and so our brain in its own self-defense cooks up this need to worship.
	And indeed they find, you know, natives in the jungles who've not been around anybody, and they're worshipping the sun or something, or doing sacrifices.
	They've, you know, cooked up something.
	Well, that's the naturalist interpretation of the human felt need for religious worship.
	It's a survival mechanism.
	And so that evolution concocted to try to project this image of a higher god.
	Well, I certainly don't buy into that interpretation.
	In fact, I think the evidence from neurosciences points strongly to the non-materiality of the mind.
	Now, I'm getting far away from my question.
	You know what?
	That's just fine, because I want to ask you about things metaphysical a little bit.
	Besides ufology, Professor, and SETI's search, which we should talk more about, there are these seeming imponderables having to do with the human mind and what it perceives and some of the amazing things that it seems capable of.
	And so, how about that sort of side of it?
	Well, I do think there's pretty good evidence that the mind is a material.
	John Eccles, a neurologist, believes that the mind cannot be equated with brain processes and that it's something immaterial.
	In fact, many neurologists are coming to this conclusion from neurological experiments.
	Stimulating the brain, for example, while a patient is conscious.
	Yes.
	And the patient is made to move his arm because a certain part of his brain is stimulated, but the patient says, I didn't do that.
	That came from the outside, and so it was not equivalent to the... Just stimulating the brain like this externally, physically, is not equivalent to affecting the eye of a person.
	So they haven't stuck a wire into the eye part yet.
	Yeah, that's right.
	That's interesting.
	Very interesting, actually.
	They've never reached what we would call... What would we call it?
	Our consciousness?
	Our... Yeah, consciousness, self-awareness, our beliefs, Free will, free choices.
	I never thought about it that way before.
	I'd recommend somebody, a philosopher, J.P.
	Moreland, who's written about this, if you could maybe have him on one day, he would be a good one.
	But are there metaphysical aspects to your research, any at all, that you've run into?
	In terms of the particular hypothesis that we present, It does have metaphysical implications.
	In what sense?
	In that we argue that this unusual or surprising pattern, that life, where it exists, has the opportunity to make discoveries about the universe around it, implies that that life was intended, was created with the intention to discover things around it, to learn about the universe.
	That science itself was built into the laws of the universe.
	From the beginning.
	The science was predetermined.
	There are those, Professor, who believe that ultimately we will, ourselves, in effect, become gods.
	We will.
	Yes.
	I wonder if you would be one of those, that we will learn to manipulate our own genetic code and therefore control our own futures, perhaps immortality, perhaps designer children, perhaps a lot of things.
	I don't think we'll become gods, because I don't think we'll have the wisdom to modify ourselves in such a way that we will be successful.
	In fact, I think we may end up destroying ourselves if we go along that dangerous path of, for example, downloading ourselves to a floppy disk.
	Well, floppy would definitely be out.
	That's right.
	You'd have to update from that.
	I don't know, some other form of memory.
	But we are getting pretty close.
	I mean, Ray Kurzweil, for example, the futurist and computer expert, argues that According to, by using Moore's Law of Advancement in Computer Technology, within only a few decades, we will be able to transfer our minds into machines, into computers.
	Well, if that, should that occur, Professor, would you imagine that it all would be, I mean we talked about the eye a little while ago.
	If you were to transfer or download the contents of a human brain into an artificial hard drive, would you also be sending the eye along with it?
	That's a central question.
	Yes.
	And I don't think we would, because consciousness, or intelligence, is not the same as artificial intelligence.
	The operative word is artificial.
	There's something about self-awareness, about consciousness, I don't think it could be replicated by a computer program, no matter how sophisticated a computer program is, because it doesn't have self-awareness.
	It doesn't know that it's thinking.
	You believe then that no matter how far we go, and we are moving very quickly along Moore's Law's highway there, that one day there will be a machine that becomes self-aware.
	You just don't think that's going to happen.
	I don't care how fast the processing or how good the storage, you don't think we'll ever get there.
	That's interesting.
	All right, Professor Guillermo Gonzalez is my guest.
	He apparently looked at SETI and looked at the numbers out there, came up with his own hypothesis, and basically has decided that we're rare, privileged, and probably all alone.
	All those suns, all those planets, everything we can see and so much more beyond what we can see And we are the only ones.
	Think about it.
	You're gonna help me through the night The lights you put in my heart, but there's
	no reason to make it without you Cause I love you, love you
	Who's gonna love you?
	Who's gonna love you, love you, gonna love you.
	To talk with Art Bell, call the wildcard line at area code 7.
	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.
	line is area code 775-727-1222. To talk with Art Bell from east of the Rockies, call toll-free
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	From coast to coast, and worldwide on the Internet, this is Coast to Coast AM, with Art Bell.
	Well, looky here, would you, from the Associated Press, just breaking.
	May 8th, Lubbock, Texas.
	More than 70 years after the Dust Bowl days, A NASA scientist studying moisture and air patterns in the atmosphere believes that he may have stumbled upon why the drought occurred in the first place.
	Remember the big dust bowl drought in the United States, right?
	Siegfried Schubert, a meteorologist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, wrote in a study That slight changes in the surface temperatures of two of the two oceans created atmospheric conditions that caused the Dust Bowl from 1931 to 1939.
	Again, a slight change in the surface temperatures of the two oceans.
	again, a slight change in the surface temperatures of the two oceans.
	The 1930s drought was the major climatic event in the nation's history, he said.
	Just beginning to understand what occurred is really critical to understanding future droughts and the link to global climate change issues we're experiencing today.
	That news, just breaking.
	back to our guest in a moment in the last few years on
	i've sort of undergone a change i i i'm I'm now aware of the possibility that we could be alone.
	I don't dismiss it.
	And there's a few reasons for that.
	Now, as you know, I've had one very close-up, serious sighting of a triangular craft that was floating or defying gravity, but not flying.
	My wife and I saw that.
	And you would think, Well, Heckard, if you've seen that, then you know there that... No, I don't.
	And even at the time that this occurred, I didn't claim that I saw an extraterrestrial vehicle.
	I claimed that I saw something that either had to be that, or a creation of that area adjacent to me, known as Area 51.
	In other words, man's creation.
	So, that fact alone doesn't cause me to indisputably believe.
	I mean, even having seen a craft, I can't identify.
	And I have seen one of those, Professor.
	I can't indisputably say I saw a craft from another world.
	I don't know that to be true.
	And, gee whiz, there's another thing.
	Seth Shostak's a good friend of mine.
	He's involved, as you know, with SETI.
	Yeah, I know him, too.
	And, you know, eventually, Professor, SETI, in another, oh, I don't know, 10, 20, 30, 40 years, whatever, they're going to be forced to say, look, we have now surveyed the following portion of the sky and we've been looking for signals now optically and by radio for X number of years and well, you know, we've got to say that so far there's nothing.
	Nothing.
	And they will be forced eventually to make that statement if things continue as they are right now.
	That's right.
	You know, they have been making observations since the early 1960s.
	In fact, that's an empirical source of information.
	And they've surveyed a certain volume of space out to a certain sensitivity.
	And as you say, they can say, we haven't detected anything up to this distance.
	Right.
	But it's not completely falsifiable, though, because there will always be some corner where you can say that they haven't searched for, at the right sensitivity, And perhaps at the right frequency at the right time.
	Well, Professor, if you were on a committee that would vote to either fund or not fund continuing SETI operation, how would you vote?
	It's funny you should ask that, because I actually had to make that decision in this publication called CQ Quarterly.
	CQ Researcher, actually.
	CQ, Congressional Quarterly Researcher.
	Yes.
	It's published for The Congress, and you can order a copy.
	And they had an issue, I think it was early March issue, which was on extraterrestrial life.
	Uh-huh.
	Special issue.
	And they interviewed me for that, and they also asked me to write a little op-ed as to whether or not the government should fund FETI.
	Oh.
	And so then they had another person take the opposite position from me.
	So, I took the con position, and I took it because of my personal conviction that we're alone in the galaxy, but also because there's lots of private funding being directed into study research, so there's no need for government funding.
	The Paul Allen Array, for example.
	And so, the person that took the opposite point of view from me was Jill Tarter, of course.
	I can imagine.
	Yes, so I have had to answer that question recently.
	Yes, but if you were to have to base your argument, not on private funding available, but just base your argument on, look, do we, with taxpayer money, support looking for life or not?
	You would still argue, I presume, against that funding.
	Specifically with radio telescopes, at this time I would say... Give it up?
	I would say give it up.
	Radiotelescope time is expensive, and there are lots of scientists who submit proposals for grants to get time on telescopes, and so there's a lot of competition for it, and there's a lot of good science, especially with pulsar timing, to be done with radiotelescopes, and the probability of success of the study is extremely small.
	I'd say small to extremely small, depending on how you take the probabilities.
	So I think It's just, it's not a good use of limited resources at this time.
	I wouldn't have said that a few years ago.
	Because I think, at least I'm more confident in the probabilities, we've been learning more about more factors that you need for life.
	I know that's probably an extreme position, even among skeptics of SETI, in saying that the government shouldn't even be funding SETI searches.
	But I take that position because of the present situation, that there is private funding And my own personal conviction of the probabilities.
	I wouldn't have said that probably five or six years ago.
	Five, just five or six years, what a difference.
	Yeah.
	I'm willing to consider the possibility that we're not alone, but I don't know, certainly I can't prove that any more than I can prove that they are there.
	I still allow for that possibility, though.
	A strong possibility, even, that they are there, or that they have even been here.
	I mean, there is some pretty impressive... I mean, for example, how did you process the information about Roswell?
	Roswell.
	Yes.
	Yeah.
	But I was convinced for a time.
	But then I started reading on it, and I learned about Project Mogul, the government project, this balloon project, To do various top secret experiments and they did lose a balloon in that area.
	Yes.
	And then there have been more recently declassified documents.
	I saw a History Channel special recently.
	I don't know if you saw it, where they declassified documents for the first time?
	Yes.
	And they had actual Roswell experts come in and look at the documents.
	And I don't think they found anything there, any smoking gun on that.
	Are you at all curious about the fact that Congressman Schiff, when he was alive, actually tried to get all of the documents relating to Roswell, and gone.
	It's just a doggone thing, Professor, but every last one of them relating to that period of time in Roswell, it's just, I guess, like accidentally destroyed or misplaced.
	Whatever, but... I haven't been following it in detail, I guess, so I can't comment as an expert.
	Only as a distant observer.
	But, I mean, if they produced a craft, or pieces of a craft, or alien bodies, that would be convincing to me.
	That's a big convincing to me.
	So you just don't think they're there?
	Not in the galaxy, like I said.
	Well, David in Portland, Oregon writes, if your guest is a Christian, and, if I read correctly, the probability of life in the universe increases with the theory of a creator, then how is it that you came to the conclusion that we are alone?
	Yeah.
	Well, it's just based on the probabilities.
	Now, I didn't say we are.
	In the book, that we are alone.
	Well, I understand.
	But it is your personal belief, so... My personal belief, because even though there could be, if the universe is designed, and again, it's because I haven't seen any empirical evidence that is convincing to me that there are other civilizations.
	And so, like you said, if there's a radio transmission detected tomorrow that was definitely shown to be outside the solar system, that would be convincing to me.
	If it was definitely an encoded message signal.
	Let's, for a second, just imagine that we do receive such a signal.
	What conclusions might you begin to jump to on the basis of that?
	Would we be facing a civilization that is very much more likely to be much more advanced than we are, scientifically, and perhaps in every way?
	I would say yes, because civilization on Earth has only existed about eight or nine thousand years, and the ability to build radio telescopes has only existed for about a hundred years.
	And the probability of another civilization, if it's out there, is that it would be considerably older than us.
	And it got the signal to us.
	But again, that would, of course, shock you and cause you to begin to examine your own belief system.
	Oh, all my assumptions, of course, and I think everybody would.
	Though, like I said, it wouldn't be that much of a problem for me, because I am convinced the universe was designed.
	And so, there's always the possibility, then, that it was designed so that there would be other civilizations out there.
	There's no empirical evidence that I find convincing.
	I find Fermi's paradox a very powerful argument, for example.
	Well, what are the main objections to your thesis?
	Okay.
	My thesis is that the best places for life in the universe offer the best overall opportunities for scientific discovery.
	We actually have an entire chapter on objections, possible objections.
	We list 15 possible objections.
	Okay.
	And, for example, One of them is that it's just a selection effect.
	No matter what planet we found ourselves living on, we would say, well, it's obviously habitable, because there we are.
	And secondly, we would be able to point to things that we can measure there and discover.
	Say, oh look, we can measure this and that and this.
	And therefore, life correlates with scientific discovery, because here we are, we exist on this planet, and we can make these scientific discoveries.
	So maybe it's just a simple selection effect.
	Well, argument is more than just pointing out that we can make certain scientific discoveries here.
	It's actually a comparative argument.
	We compare the kinds of scientific measurements we can make on Earth to other environments and other times and places.
	So it's comparative.
	And we argue that those places that are more hostile to life or less habitable would offer fewer opportunities for scientific discovery than the Earth does.
	So it's actually being able to compare the Earth to other planets, empirically and theoretically to a planet that we can imagine just based on the laws of physics applied elsewhere.
	Okay.
	Amy in California says, how can you be so sure your guest isn't biased in his findings due to his biblical beliefs?
	I'm kind of troubled by this.
	There's always a possibility.
	And that's true, of course.
	And in fact, every scientist, no matter what their beliefs are, Every scientist has a metaphysical or philosophical set of beliefs.
	Including the atheists.
	Especially the atheists.
	Especially the atheists.
	Peter Ward, my colleague, has a very strong atheistic bias.
	But the best we could do as human beings is acknowledge our biases, put them on the table, and just present the evidence and hope that you're not fooling yourself and fooling others.
	And so we do note, for example, that there are some other scientists who have hinted at parts of our argument.
	And so that makes it more likely that we haven't just kind of invented it out of thin air and kind of fooled ourselves and that other people have seen bits and pieces of it before us.
	But we just say, well, read the book and decide for yourself whether or not you think We're biased, but the first ten chapters of the book are just empirical.
	They're just based on mainstream science.
	There's no religious or metaphysical assumptions anywhere in the first half of the book, where we just present the evidence.
	And then in the second half, we just discuss its implications.
	If Jill Turner was here, what do you think she'd be saying to you, or perhaps Seth?
	What would she be saying to me?
	Yes.
	She would be disagreeing with me, first of all, of course, that I should have such confidence that we're alone in the galaxy, and that we just need to look and find out.
	And, well, if she believes that strongly, that's fine.
	That's the mission she's taken in life, to search for extraterrestrial life.
	But I just... I have a different view on this, based on my own studies.
	Clearly.
	I respect her for her work.
	That's what she believes.
	More power to her.
	Again, coming back to the evidence that there has been on Earth.
	I mean, with, well, I don't know, thousands, tens of thousands, maybe millions of sightings across the face of the globe.
	How do you categorize those in your mind?
	I mean, we all know that a vast number of them might be Venus or whatever all, but then there's really a hardcore percentage that are inexplicable.
	Yes.
	And what do you say about those?
	Yeah, I understand that there's a small percentage that you just don't have an explanation for.
	And I just keep an open mind, but I would say that I would need Some hard evidence.
	Kind of like life, no explanation.
	Yeah, I mean, I acknowledge that those exist, a small percentage of unexplained observations, but I would say, and most scientists that I talk to on an everyday basis would say, show me a piece of the spacecraft, show me the alien body, or multiple witnesses with I mean video footage inside the saucer as this person is
	walking around or something like that.
	Something really hot.
	In this day and age, I can assure you, Professor...
	That could be fake though, I can assure you.
	But there you are.
	Yeah.
	You see, we live in this wonderful digital age where anything can be created.
	So I'm not sure anything short of that...
	I would have to say that it would have to be very credible witnesses
	would present that data, that evidence.
	Do you get asked to speak frequently in front of groups like PSYCOP and...
	No, I haven't.
	You don't?
	The skeptics group?
	Yeah, I've heard of Skycop.
	As a matter of fact, they just awarded Larry King the latest Skycop award.
	I was given one a few years ago myself.
	I have it on the wall.
	I have it up there proudly, actually.
	Because they seem to be on, you know, the opposite spectrum, the exact opposite, almost to the debunker stage, in my opinion, where they're actively You know, trying to throw monkey wrenches into anything anybody brings forward that would indicate otherwise.
	I'm not a big fan of Psycop and the Skeptical Enquirer.
	I used to subscribe to their magazine about ten years ago.
	But in my opinion, they're one-sided skeptics.
	In my personal opinion.
	OK.
	Is there anything else that we should be getting in here before we go to some phone calls with respect to what you believe and your book?
	Well, I mean, there's lots of examples we can go into.
	Maybe it's better if we can have the callers just bring out some of the details.
	They'll bring out lots of things.
	All right.
	In fact, very likely you'll be challenged on, I would think, a number of scores.
	That's fine.
	I'm ready.
	You're ready for that, huh?
	Oh yeah, we've been challenged and that's why we wrote this objections chapter with 15 different objections to our book.
	Well, you noted the objections.
	Did you answer each and every one?
	Oh yeah, they're all answers.
	We have long answers to the objections.
	I see.
	Alright, well in that case, you'll probably get an opportunity coming up here in a moment to recite some of those objections.
	Professor, stay right where you are.
	I want to remind everybody coming up tomorrow night We've got Bud Hopkins here, so it'll be kind of the opposite, in effect, of what we're doing right now.
	The good professor believes that we are, in all probability, his personal belief that we are alone.
	His professional belief that, at the very least, we are extremely rare and privileged.
	But his personal belief that we're alone.
	Tomorrow night, Bud Hopkins, who will guarantee you that we're not alone.
	And in fact, Those who are here are in the business of grabbing us occasionally and giving us exam 101.
	From the high desert, in the middle of the night, we're about to go to the phones with Professor Guillermo Gonzalez.
	I'm Art Bell.
	don't touch that dial do
	do do
	Every time I think about it, I want to cry.
	With bombs in the depot, little kids keep coming.
	No way that we'd be easy in time.
	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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	From coast to coast, and worldwide on the Internet, this is Coast to Coast AM with Art Bell.
	There is one more theory of life that I need to ask the professor about, and then we'll toss him to the fishes, all of you out there.
	We've got ourselves a non-believer on our hands, and as it should, this program examines every angle, every possibility, and every theory, and you have to admit, at least as likely, perhaps not in your mind, but in all probability, at least as likely, that there are aliens and that they are straining to
	contact us and will in fact, or already have contacted us, at least as likely, the possibility that we're all alone.
	Once again, Professor Guillermo Gonzalez, who is an assistant professor of astronomy,
	you ought to know who you're listening to, assistant professor of astronomy and physics at Iowa State
	University, received his PhD in astronomy from the University of
	Washington, and did all his postdoctoral research at the University of
	Texas, Austin, and the University of Washington.
	So, here we go.
	Professor, are you there?
	Alright, there is one other possibility with respect to the Cummins and Goins, or not so, of life.
	Is it not possible that life, although perhaps fairly common, simply does away with itself, or is done away with, on a regularly scheduled basis?
	And by that I mean the discovery and implementation of Element 92, perhaps at the top of the list, followed by Our own proliferation, and we're certainly doing that.
	And then, of course, rocks.
	So, I mean, any of the above really could make life not only tenuous, but rather cyclical.
	Yeah, if life, if civilizations have a tendency to annihilate themselves shortly after they reach a certain level of technology, I think that's a position that Carl Sagan toyed with for a while.
	that we've expressed in this Cosmos series, that civilizations may not last very long.
	That's the last factor in the Drake equation, by the way, the lifetime of a civilization.
	We have to figure out what's the probability of having a radio-communicating civilization in the galaxy at any given
	time.
	Even a wonderfully optimistic person like Dr. Michio Kaku, who I frequently interview, from the City of New York
	University, when all is said and done about the various levels of
	civilization that he describes, with us being more or less at the bottom of the ladder, but
	on the cusp of perhaps taking the next step, And you really pin the man to the wall, he will tell you the chances of our evolving to the next step without destroying ourselves are... Well, you just don't even want to talk about the numbers.
	I actually take a somewhat more optimistic view on that, although we can't really predict it.
	And that has to do with the fact that the nuclear age arrived At about the same time as the space age, meaning that we have the ability to put people on another planet, a planetary body, Mars for example, with a base that can sustain itself in the not-too-distant future, in a few decades perhaps, a biosphere type of environment on Mars.
	And so pretty soon we're going to be able to spread ourselves out.
	And so that will Protect us from a possible self-destruction on the Earth, from a nuclear war, so to speak.
	Well, wouldn't that, in a twisted way though, Professor, wouldn't that perhaps make nuclear war more probable than it is now?
	In other words, now, I suppose the leadership of any given country, considering it, would say, well, it would be the end of humans.
	Yeah.
	Right?
	Well, that's true, but I don't think, I don't know if that would make The thought processes of a person with his finger on the red button say, well, there's people on Mars, so I'll push the button.
	Well, I don't know.
	I'm skeptical that that would make it that much more probable that they would push the button and therefore decide to annihilate ourselves.
	But yeah, there are other threats besides nuclear war and biological warfare.
	And then there's also this interesting recent research, Professor, about our climate.
	And the possibility of a rapid, perhaps very rapid, climate change.
	And there's all those old troubling things about woolly mammoths with the leaves frozen there in their mouths and digestive tracts.
	We have actually a chapter on discerning past climate in our book, Paleoclimatology.
	Yes.
	And how the Earth is a remarkable system in being able to preserve, record and preserve the state of its environment at every instant.
	You can think of the Earth as containing literally millions of little data recorders going on all at the same time.
	Natural data recorders.
	Well, some of those little recorders you speak about, and I'm talking about ice cores now, recently found in Peru, have some very troubling stories to tell about some plants that were flash frozen some time ago.
	Have you been reading about that?
	I haven't heard about that one in particular, but the last very big global Change in climate occurred during the Younger Dryas around 12,000 years ago.
	Over a period of about 10 years, the Earth entered a very short-lived ice age at that time and then came out of it very quickly also.
	But the important thing about the Earth's data records, tree rings and ice cores and corals and marine sediments, is that they allow us to develop and refine our climate models.
	Reconstruct the past climate changes so that we can predict changes in the future with some confidence.
	So it actually improves our survival chances.
	Well, because we have this important record.
	One complaint that many of us have, Professor, about science is that a lot of times when it meets up with something that doesn't necessarily agree with, you know, the generally accepted hypothesis of how things happened, it gets put away in a dark closet somewhere.
	Yeah, and that's a difficult issue to deal with in science, is how the orthodoxy deals with contradictory evidence.
	Not very well, usually.
	That's right.
	Sometimes the evidence does just turn out to be erroneous, but other times the evidence is reliable and it needs to be taken into account, and it sometimes causes a paradigm shift in science.
	Sometimes only a slight modification of the orthodoxy is necessary, but at rare times it does require a paradigm shift.
	Well, because careers come and go very quickly, when a certain hypothesis explodes with a fact, then you can understand why scientists, being human beings, are reluctant to accept the end of their career.
	That's right.
	Many careers are at stake.
	When a scientific paradigm has shifted, so there's a lot of incentive to keep the explanation within the dominant paradigm.
	It's rare to hear one admit that.
	First time caller line, you're on the air with Professor Gonzales.
	Hello.
	Hello.
	Hi.
	Hi Art, how are you?
	Okay.
	My name is George, a long time listener.
	Yes, George.
	I have a small comment and a question for your guest.
	Okay, go ahead.
	Okay, the comment is, how come, you guess, being an individual who has gone from both sides of the spectrum, being a ufologist and not a scientist, he was very quick, or should I say, was determined to, you know, advise the government into removing the funding from the SETI programs.
	Okay, hold on a second.
	First of all, he didn't say he was a ufologist.
	So much, as he said he looked at ufology for a while.
	Isn't that correct, Professor?
	That's correct.
	He's still asking, though, why you would vote against funding SETI, other than the private sector aspect of it.
	Again, it's because I personally am convinced, because of my calculations and my studies, that we're probably alone in the galaxy.
	I can't say the same for other people, because they haven't studied the same degree that I have.
	And I may sound a little arrogant, but, well, that's the way it is.
	And resources are limited.
	Radio telescope time is very limited.
	And so I think, because I don't have to compete for telescope time.
	I mean, I have to submit proposals to, I use optical telescopes, not radio ones.
	But I have to compete with other scientists, and sometimes I don't get my time on telescopes.
	And Jill gets her time.
	Okay, and a quick question.
	Isn't it the word scientist supposed to mean someone who is open-minded into research, into things which they have no answer to?
	And how come is it that the scientific community tends to be biased in the sense that for some reason once they become scientists, they stop believing everything.
	They just go into this direct line asking if their way and their way only And there's no other explanation?
	Is it because they're afraid to lose credibility?
	Or because of the doctrine which they've been taught over the years?
	It's passed down for so long that they don't bother to revise the new theories?
	Well, I think in a way we just answered that.
	It's a career question, but... Actually, I should say that I'm being rather unorthodox in writing this book.
	And I am taking some flack from my colleagues.
	Do you think real hard before you wrote it?
	Oh yeah.
	We took three years to write this, and I knew that I was taking a risk.
	But I believe in the evidence, and I believe that the argument holds up.
	So I was willing to take a risk writing this book.
	That's interesting.
	I mean, it's strange that we're in a time where you're taking a risk writing a book saying we're alone.
	I've got to give that some thought.
	Wild Card Line, you're on the air with Professor Gonzales.
	Hello.
	Hello, Art.
	Hi.
	Hey, Art.
	Hello, Professor Gonzales.
	Hello.
	Before I ask a question to you, I have to say, Art, listening to your show is like floating through the vast cosmos of dark matter, dead space, and sleep deprivation, which is overnight radio while being hooked up to an IV of espresso coffee.
	I've never had quite that description, but I appreciate it.
	Okay, so Professor Gonzales, I want to ask you about a friend of mine, a very bold, humorous, and yet highly esteemed astrophysicist at Princeton, who I'm sure you know about, Professor Richard Gott.
	Oh yeah.
	He has a book on time travel, but he's also infamous for his Doomsday Argument.
	Yeah, based on the Copernican principle that we humans are not special.
	And what he does, Art, is he kind of... Art, you had him on your show one time, I think, and he might have mentioned it, but he back-engineers predictions based on known statistics, and then he sort of uses that to extrapolate and then push forward into the future based on those past statistics, like impacts from craters on the moon, etc., and human extinction, which he puts at about 8.1 million years, etc.
	And I was wondering, some people are now saying, from what research I've done, that his argument is a little bit shoddy because it doesn't conform to the Baselian conditionalization.
	I was wondering what you thought about that.
	Well, I know his argument vaguely, and we do mention it briefly in our book.
	We do criticize the Copernican principle in the book, and so that aspect of it we believe is weak.
	But also, we believe that another weak part of his argument is that See, the argument goes that we shouldn't be living near the beginning of civilization.
	If civilization should be lasting a long time, then we shouldn't find ourselves living right at the very beginning of it.
	Therefore, the probability is that civilization will end in the relatively near future, because we shouldn't be living in a special time.
	That's actually a fairly compelling argument in a lot of ways.
	Well, it assumes that the future is finite.
	Because if the future were infinite in the extent of the future, then any time would be the same as any other time.
	There wouldn't be any quote, beginning.
	Compared to the eternity of the future, any time you're living in would look like it's near the beginning anyway.
	So he assumes that the future is finite.
	If you assume it's infinite, then the argument breaks down.
	Yeah, one more thing.
	Alright, well, that's fine and well, but in a word, without getting too much into detail, can you elaborate a little bit on why you think the Copernican Principle specifically is not a good way to reason?
	We have, in fact, two chapters in the book where we dedicate specifically to the Copernican Principle.
	Number one, it's based on historical fiction.
	It's based on the argument that Copernicus dethroned the Earth by moving it from the center of the solar system into And orbit around the Earth, and therefore, by doing so, demoted its status from centrality to something away from the center.
	That's the story on which the Copernican principle is based.
	Actually, that's false.
	The ancients believed that the Earth was at the center, not because they thought it was a place of importance, but because they had this understanding of the four basic elements, Earth, Air, Fire, and Water.
	And Earth, being the heaviest, naturally sunk to the center, and found that these basic elements find their natural places.
	So we have Earth, At the center, and then water, air, and fire.
	And then quintessence formed these perfect celestial spheres.
	So, actually, the Earth was at the center, but it was also at the bottom.
	You see?
	Because that's the place where the heavy thing, the Earth, naturally sunk to.
	And this was the prevailing idea at the time of Nicolaus Copernicus when he published his famous book in 1543.
	And he actually argued that he was elevating the status of the Earth.
	By moving it from the center, from the sump of the universe, from the place where there was change, where the four basic elements interacted, and there was death and decay.
	And he actually argued that he was elevating the status of the Earth, as did Galileo later, and Kepler, also Copernicans.
	And so, actually, the history on which the Copernican principle is based is actually fictionalized in its modern retelling.
	Well, aren't we... I mean, arguably, we are at the beginning, aren't we, Professor?
	At the beginning of civilization?
	Well, of the beginning of technological civilization.
	Compared to the duration of civilization, so far, of civilized society, yes, technology is very young.
	But again, if time is eternal, into the future, or at least very, very, very, very long, And compared to that, if you're living now or a thousand or a million years from now, it would still look like you're right at the beginning.
	I'm not sure that I can grasp that, but okay.
	East of the Rockies, you're on the air with Professor Gonzales.
	Hello.
	Hello?
	Yes, that's Clyde in Robinson Landing, Oklahoma.
	I was wondering if, according to the Big Bang Theory, the ever-expanding universe and, you know, Stronger said they've seen the edge of the universe.
	If there's going to be life out there, wouldn't it be really close to us?
	Because everything's expanding away from us.
	Aren't they behind us in any type of evolution or anything like that since they're younger than we are?
	We've been around longer.
	How's that work?
	All right.
	In the Big Bang.
	Kaboom from something smaller than a quark into all that now is.
	And the things that would be closer to the middle of that bang would be younger than we are, he's suggesting, and the things further out, older than we are.
	As we look back, as we look through a telescope at distant galaxies, we actually see them as they were, not as they are because it takes light a certain amount of time to reach us.
	Andromeda Galaxy, the nearest big galaxy to ours, is 2.2 million light years away.
	So when we look at it in the night sky with a small telescope, we're actually seeing as it was 2.2 million years ago.
	So astronomers only have the past.
	And so when we see these different distant galaxies in the Hubble fields, for example, the deep field that the Hubble Space Telescope took, we're seeing galaxies when they were very, very young.
	In fact, I argue that there's a cosmic habitable age.
	There's an age range of the universe where Life is optimum.
	The habitability is optimized.
	It can't be too early on, because there are too many supernovae, too many radiation events, and the heavy element hadn't been built up enough yet from supernovae, like planets.
	And you can't live too far into the future, because, in particular, the radioactive elements that drive geology on the Earth, uranium and thorium and potassium-40, And this is a stupid question, but help me understand it.
	because the star formation rate is declining and these elements are produced in supernovae
	and so in the distant future, history of the universe, these radioactive elements will
	simply have decayed away and they won't be available to drive the internal motions of
	a planet that forms in the distant future and provide plate tectonics.
	And this is a stupid question, but help me understand it.
	Everything that we look at is in the past, right?
	Yes.
	And essentially further out from that place where the Big Bang took place than are we.
	Wouldn't there be a way of looking at those things that are closer to the Big Bang in a way than we are?
	They are closer to the Big Bang in time.
	In time.
	So that they would, in effect, be younger, right?
	Yes.
	Okay, hold on, Professor.
	We're going to be right back.
	Professor Guillermo Gonzalez is my guest.
	I'm Art Bell.
	Some velvet morning when I'm straight I'm gonna open up your gate And maybe tell you about Phaedra
	And how she gave me life And how she made it in
	Some velvet mornin' when I was dreaming Flowers growin' on a hill
	Dragonflies and daffodils Learn from us very much
	Look at us but do not touch Phaedra is my name
	To talk with Art Bell, call the wildcard line at area code 833-933-9333
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	line is area code 775-727-1222. To talk with Art Bell from east of the Rockies, call toll-free
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	pressing option 5, and dialing toll-free 800-893-0903.
	From coast to coast, and worldwide on the Internet, this is Coast to Coast AM, with Art Bell.
	Such a world of diverse opinions.
	Have you ever thought about it?
	We have the Jill Tarters of the world, Seth Shostaks, who would do anything nearly to get funding to keep looking because they believe they're out there.
	Intelligent Life is out there, wanting to contact us.
	And then we have the professor, Professor Guillermo Gonzalez, who doesn't believe they're out there at all.
	They're not there, folks.
	We're Yes.
	And then everything else in between that you can imagine, but just so completely divergent on the subject.
	we'll be right back i think uh... professor that you may have confused the
	audience with a couple of things uh... you said because uh... i keep getting
	questions like this one from sean in daytona florida daytona beach
	uh... why does the chance For intelligent life in the universe increased greatly if the universe was designed.
	So, on the one hand, you're saying you don't think there are any others, but if there are, it's by design, I guess, or you know, you believe, it seems like opposing things.
	Yeah, so let me clarify.
	So, if the only allowed explanation is materialism or naturalism, then I think the odds are extremely low that there are other civilizations in the universe.
	Now, if you believe the universe is designed, and that we are the result of some sort of design of the universe, a design of law of physics that gave rise to us, or a more direct design, however you want to have it.
	Let's go with the Creator.
	Okay.
	So, the universe was designed to have life.
	Then, that allows a new type of explanation.
	A new type of reason to have other planets in the universe, namely that there could be an intent in the designer to create other habitable worlds.
	Now, we don't know that that intent actually exists, but the possibility exists that that intent is there.
	And therefore, compared to just the only option being naturalism or materialism, we have this new option for there being other planets with intelligent life.
	Namely, that was intended by an intelligent creator.
	Why are you not predisposed to that thesis?
	Right.
	Now, I'm not because I would need some empirical evidence to show me that they're out there communicating, that's convincing to me.
	And secondly, I would prefer to have evidence that that intent is there.
	Where do you have empirical evidence of God?
	No, not of God.
	Empirical evidence that they're out there.
	Oh, I understand.
	But you have stated a belief in God, said you're a Christian.
	Yes.
	Now, our book doesn't presuppose that, but my personal belief in God, I think... I mean, you do have to reconcile them, right?
	These beliefs?
	The belief in God and the belief in the possibility of extraterrestrials?
	Well, I guess the belief in God and then also the belief that, your personal one, that there's no one else.
	Because I don't have any argument or any evidence that that is, in fact, one of the designs of the designer, or one of the intents of the designer, to make other worlds that are inhabited with intelligent beings.
	And I don't have any actual empirical evidence that they're there.
	You know, convincing communications from extraterrestrials, etc.
	But I guess I would... That does leave me open, though.
	It does.
	To some extent, believing that there might be other civilizations out there.
	Yes.
	Is this a belief in the design of the universe?
	I would say it leaves me more open than it would if I were somebody like Peter Ward, who only has one mode of explanation.
	Sure.
	Got it.
	And that's naturalism.
	Got it.
	East of the Rockies, you're on the air with Professor Gonzales.
	Hello.
	Good morning, Art.
	Good morning.
	Good morning, Professor.
	My name is George from Foster, Ohio.
	Hi, George.
	And I respect all of your opinions, and I do believe in God myself, and I believe a creator God wouldn't create life on one planet only.
	But I find myself in a quandary.
	I'm one of millions of people on this planet who have been abducted since childhood, and I'm age 57 now, and it continues.
	There's no question in my mind That these great beings that take me from time to time exist and are there and leave marks and scars.
	What's your take on the millions of us that have to live with it?
	There you go, Professor.
	Yeah, I mean, I don't have anything to say because I haven't personally experienced it.
	And, you know, I just don't find personally the testimonies convincing enough For me to believe that there are extraterrestrials who are doing this.
	Again, I'm not an expert on this, so I don't feel qualified to discuss it, certainly not the level you've discussed it on your show.
	Alright, fair enough.
	I'm not an expert on this area.
	Alright, there are a couple of things more than a little puzzling to the scientific community right now.
	And they would include animal mutilations that have gone on, and crop circles.
	We well understand some were done by humans, and we also seem to understand that some were not formed by humans, without question.
	So it's some kind of natural phenomena, or something else, but nothing that's been explained.
	I remain skeptical of those.
	I mean, I've heard of them, certainly.
	Read about them and heard about cattle mutilations and crop circles.
	But again, I remain unconvinced.
	All right.
	West of the Rockies, you're on the air with Professor Gonzales.
	Hello.
	Hello.
	Hi.
	Oh, hi.
	Yes, hello, Mr. Bill and Professor Gonzales.
	Hello.
	Hi.
	Hi.
	Okay, first I want to tell you the question was asked a couple weeks ago on the show.
	Would you be afraid if you found out you were alone in the universe or the galaxy?
	I'm not sure which word was used.
	And the question had never been asked to me and I immediately felt no.
	I had absolutely no fear whatsoever.
	I happen to be an atheist.
	I don't know if that had any, if that played into it at all.
	I didn't I wasn't thinking about that at the time, but I didn't feel any fear about that at all.
	And the second question comes up just in relation to what you were just talking about.
	You said that you are Christian, but yet you were ruling out the fact that you were ruling out the potential of there being any life on other planets, and I'm wondering if that would play into the notion that there would not be any life on other planets.
	I mean, Christians tend not to believe that there is life on other planets.
	I mean, let's face it, there is no empirical evidence that God exists.
	You want to take that one on?
	Well, there are other civilizations... And there is no empirical evidence that God exists.
	And there is no empirical evidence... Well, as an atheist, I would expect you to say that.
	No, no, no, no, but see, I'm really open-minded.
	I love having these discussions with people.
	Well, perhaps as a man who believes in God, you'd like to answer.
	Yeah, well, first of all, let me say with regard to whether we should be more afraid or afraid if we were alone in the galaxy, I'd say we might be more afraid if we weren't alone.
	First of all.
	But, I'd say, look at the evidence for the non-materiality of the soul, or, sorry, of the mind, say, work by philosopher J.P.
	Moreland, and neuroscientist Eccles, and also the quantum physicists who are convinced about the non-materiality of the soul, or of the mind, based on quantum physics.
	They talk a lot about non-locality.
	Right.
	Well, I have a... Not a non-locality, but just a Copenhagen interpretation.
	They're convinced that the observer must have a non-material explanation for the mind.
	And then, of course, there's explanations from the cosmological argument, argument from the beginning of the universe.
	And so I would explore that area, too.
	Okay.
	And the Kalam cosmological argument, which is a philosophical argument for the impossibility of an eternal past.
	Namely, there had to be a beginning.
	There had to be a non-contingent entity.
	That made the first cause.
	I think the arguments there are very strong today, in the cosmological arguments.
	Well, again, they're arguments, and I guess what frustrates me, and I do have a doctorate from the University of Chicago in psychology, and I was at the Divinity School there as well, so it's psychology and religious studies.
	And I guess what frustrates me is that over the years, Scientific explanations seem to change over and over and over again.
	They're revised over and over and over again.
	And some of them become much stronger and strengthened.
	That's true.
	That's very, very true.
	Like, for example, the heliocentric model of the solar system has only been getting stronger as we have accumulated more evidence that the earth orbits around the sun.
	Now, that's a trivial example, but there are other examples where Theories are getting stronger.
	The Big Bang Theory is getting stronger with time.
	And it has no competitors today, ever since the Steady State Theory was dead.
	It may be overturned tomorrow, but it's only getting stronger as new evidence comes around.
	I'm not trying to challenge you in a negative way.
	I find your argument very compelling and very interesting, and I want to read your book.
	Great.
	Second of all, can I bring up something else?
	Sure.
	I'm sorry?
	Yes.
	Okay.
	You were talking briefly about things relating to the Earth and global changes and so forth.
	A couple things that concern me, not only are the global changes, but also the negative potential of artificial intelligence.
	Well, if you were listening earlier, he doesn't think that artificial intelligence will ever gain awareness.
	Okay, see, I didn't catch the early part of the show.
	I probably missed that.
	Okay, that would be your belief, right, Professor?
	That's right, and I would recommend a book written or edited by my co-author, Jay Richards, called Are We Spiritual Machines?, which is a debate between Ray Kurzweil and several critics, including scientists and philosophers, of the strong artificial intelligence position.
	So, therefore, the mind is a divine?
	I would say it's immaterial and it's the closest thing we have to an analogy to the divine mind in that it has free will and it is not reducible to the collisions and motions of atomic particles.
	It is something separate from just material.
	Boy, you really do have some collisions with modern science, don't you?
	Well, actually, there's quite a few neuroscientists who are coming to the conclusion that the mind can't be reduced to brain.
	Really?
	Yeah.
	I guess I should talk to one of them.
	It would be very interesting.
	International Line, you're on the air with Professor Gonzales.
	Hello.
	Hello.
	Yes, sir.
	Yes, hi.
	Professor Gonzales, I don't necessarily disagree with your assertion that SETI, as it exists now on Earth here, is kind of a waste of money.
	It's a lot of money for relatively no results, as it is.
	But a space-based system, considering the results that the Hubble has gotten in the optical field, Might attain some useful results.
	You know, a radio telescope put out in space.
	On the far side of the moon in particular.
	Right, exactly.
	I have one more question, Professor.
	You mentioned before some of the radioactive elements that are a part of the Earth and plate tectonics and that sort of thing.
	I wonder if you're familiar with The production of, I saw a show about the production of synthetic diamonds over in, some technicians or scientists working on this over in Russia someplace.
	I've seen a documentary about that.
	Right.
	Yes, threatening to put the big diamond companies, mining companies, out of business.
	Yes, sir.
	De Beers and all the rest of them?
	Oh yes, De Beers was very, they were very concerned.
	Well, I had a thought that, what if, you know, they start with a lump of pure carbon, I assume,
	to produce these artificial diamonds, but what if you started with one or another forms
	of radioactive carbon, you know, carbon-14, carbon-28, or artificially irradiated carbon?
	What would, if you could do it and not, you know, blow up half the countryside, what would
	be the result, perhaps?
	Well, if you use radioactive carbon-14, you would still produce a diamond because the
	chemical crystalline structure of a crystal like a diamond is not dependent on the number
	of neutrons in the nucleus.
	It's very insensitive to that.
	So it would still look like a diamond.
	Would it be radioactive?
	Yeah.
	Got it.
	First time caller on the line, you're on the air with Professor Gonzales.
	Hello.
	Yes.
	Yes, hi.
	Hello?
	Yes.
	This is Larry from Los Altos.
	This is KVEC Country.
	Yes, Larry.
	Maybe this is too paracentric for the doctor, but is it outside the realm of him being able to imagine that the Earth might be the genesis point for life to spread to the entire universe?
	Well, the Earth could be the beginning point of life.
	Uh, the first planet with, uh, life.
	Uh, and then, uh, actually, I'm a believer in interstellar travel.
	I think it will be possible in a few centuries.
	And so we will, uh, spread ourselves out.
	So you believe that we may be the start of life for the entire universe?
	I think we're the start of life for the galaxy.
	Okay.
	I think that's a good position, but the galaxies are too far apart.
	Uh, and that would make travel between galaxies really impractical.
	The distances are just too vast.
	Again, millions of light years separating.
	Okay, so scientifically, as we understand it right now, we could never get there.
	So it's silly to ask you, Professor, what's in the mind of a Creator who would create all of that, and if we are to be the sole point of Genesis, He has not given us a way to get to it.
	Well, if that was His intent, which we don't know.
	Well, no, we can't read the mind of God, but still.
	Maybe.
	There's on average one civilization per large galaxy.
	Or every 10 or 100 galaxies.
	That's a possibility, given the numbers that I give in the book.
	Again, in the book we don't say that.
	We're definitely alone in the universe.
	But another related question is why all this space?
	Why all these galaxies?
	It seems like an awful lot of waste.
	Just for one inhabited planet.
	It does.
	We argue in the book that, well, it provides an arena for discovery.
	To discover things about the origin of the universe.
	It's an arena for our discovery.
	But it's not an arena that we can play in.
	I mean, from everything we understand, I mean, real hard science here, there's no way.
	We couldn't get there.
	Yeah, but in a sense, the information from there does come here.
	By the light that we receive in our telescopes, so we do learn about other places to a surprising degree.
	And at the very least, in my opinion, we will be able to colonize the galaxy, which has a lot of stars and a lot of interesting stuff to explore.
	Over 100 billion stars in the galaxy.
	Well, how do you imagine us traversing these impossible light years?
	Well, it would happen very slowly, and we'd start star hopping.
	With the nearest stars and it would spread out.
	We'd send ships in different directions to the nearest best candidates for planets we might terraform.
	Or maybe colonize the asteroid belts first.
	And gradually work our way outward.
	And I've seen calculations as to how long the colonization wave would take to reach the other side of the galaxy.
	And the numbers range from about 5 million to 50 million years.
	So it's actually a short time compared to the age of the galaxy.
	I suppose so.
	All right, Professor, hold tight.
	We're at the bottom of the hour, and it's a pleasure having you all aboard.
	Professor Guillermo Gonzalez is my guest, and he thinks, as if, folks, we're it.
	There's nothing else out there.
	Nobody else out there.
	Not at 2 a.m.
	or any other time of day, actually.
	It's 2AM and the air is dark. I can't see nowhere right now.
	The sun is still warm.
	I feel like an angel, just trying to take a chance.
	I'm not that bad at taking chances.
	Yeah, there's a storm on the loose.
	Yeah, there's a storm on the loose. Sirens in my head.
	Sirens in my head.
	I've silenced all circuits to death.
	Where I've been silenced, all circuits are dead.
	I'm scared I'll be cold.
	Where I've been cold, my whole life spins in circles.
	My whole life spins in circles.
	I've got hey-ya, hey-ya, ho.
	I'm just a man, I'm just a man.
	Hey yo Hey yo lidda because I was still warm.
	Hey-ya, hey-ya, ho.
	♪ ♪
	♪ ♪
	♪ To talk with Art Bell, call the wildcard line at area code
	7.
	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.
	line is area code 775-727-1222. To talk with Art Bell from east to the Rockies, call toll-free
	at 800-825-5033. From west to the Rockies, call Art at 800-618-8255.
	International callers may reach Art Bell by calling your in-country Sprint Access
	number, pressing Option 5, and dialing toll-free 800-893-0903.
	From coast to coast and worldwide on the Internet, this is Coast to Coast AM with Art Bell.
	Professor Guillermo Gonzalez is my guest.
	He's a professor of astronomy and physics who believes that we're all alone.
	That's what he believes, that we're it, we're all alone, that we can adventure, that science is, well, it's the prospect of doing just that, and I guess that's our mission, to populate, perhaps, the closer planets first, and then on out.
	but basically that we're all alone, that we are the ones, we, we are the genesis for all that will be.
	Once again, Professor Guillermo Gonzales, and he wrote a book called The Privileged Planet.
	That's what we're talking about, really.
	And you can get in-depth with all of this by getting his book, which I presume is in, you know, all the usual suspected places, Amazon.com and so forth.
	Yes.
	Yes.
	All right.
	How long has it been out, Professor?
	It was released in early March.
	In early March.
	So it is but a baby.
	That's right.
	How's it going?
	Oh, it's selling well, I checked the Amazon rankings.
	Pretty frequently, and it's currently in the low thousands, and it got to 414 at its lowest point.
	I see.
	Well, somebody referring to me as King Arthur, which is improper, I'm not.
	Don in Fort Worth says, King Arthur, with plenty of money and a month to do it, why don't you take your guest to the hotspots in American South America for UFOs in the deep dark night, deep into the morning at these spots, and the professor will be crying for his mama.
	I haven't heard about this one.
	Is this a hot spot in South America?
	Well, there are hot spots all over the place.
	I've been to the Andes, though, to observe.
	You have?
	Yeah.
	Beautiful place.
	And what is it you were observing in the Andes?
	Oh, I was using a large telescope, a four-meter telescope, to observe stars and globular clusters.
	And in all the telescope hours that you've spent, Professor, you've never seen anything Your brain was not able to quickly explain to you?
	If not quickly, at least with a little research, I was able to explain it, yeah.
	All right.
	And I understand you have a cold.
	Yeah, I'm a cough got through, unfortunately.
	Oh, well, that's all right.
	Coughs are allowed.
	Colds are allowed.
	Wild Card Line, you're on the air with Professor Gonzalez.
	Hello.
	Good evening, gentlemen.
	Howdy.
	I have one question for Dr. Gonzales and one question for you, Mr. Bell.
	Okay.
	For Dr. Gonzales, I have a question about, you seem to think, and correct me if I'm wrong here, but you seem to think that the fact that a civilization might be able to establish footing on Mars or the Moon or somewhat might not necessarily increase their likelihood to press the red button and blow Earth away.
	Is that correct?
	Well, that's just a speculation.
	I really have no idea how that affects the probability of making the Earth more or less likely to be self-destructed.
	But I think it improves the odds for survival of the human race if we spread ourselves out.
	Okay, well my question specifically is, how does that stand given the precedent that's already here for countries at war to focus on survival, meaning if they If we can survive by retreating, then they should do it.
	So if we can't hold land here on Earth, but we could hold it on Mars, then why wouldn't we go ahead and blow it up and defeat our enemy?
	I don't know if we can find definite answers to these psychology questions as to what a country might or might not do.
	I don't want to speculate on that.
	You have a question for me?
	Yes, sir.
	This is about the ongoing discussion on the energy crisis.
	I was wondering if you had any information about higher powers that be and their influence on our government and leaders and whatnot in prohibiting The development or implication of alternative fuel vehicles and my reasoning behind that is pretty simple.
	Sir, you know what?
	I'm going to say the same thing the professor did.
	I can't possibly explain the psychology of our leadership or anybody would be even leading them around by the nose or anybody else for not proceeding with The obvious, and that is exploring other energy avenues.
	You know, that's almost an interesting question for you, Professor.
	We do seem to be on the cusp of a crisis, and that crisis would be in energy.
	There is, of course, only so many groups of, I guess, puddles of oil under there, and we're going to eventually need something else.
	We don't seem to be moving in that direction, and that might weave back into sort of the survival question for mankind.
	I do think, yeah, it's a valid question.
	We will run out of petroleum and fossil fuels in general eventually, and We've managed to discover new, more efficient sources of energy at just the right time.
	First, it was wood burning and England cut down its forest, unfortunately, just before they found the first coal reserves and figured out how to use them to fuel their fires.
	But, you know, we've developed petroleum and then nuclear energy.
	So we gradually have more and more advanced sources of energy.
	And I'm hopeful that the next major source of energy will be fusion.
	In fact, I have a good friend who is a fusion engineer at the Princeton Tokamak.
	And I'm hopeful that maybe within a few decades we'll have a workable solution.
	And fusion, if it were a reality, would not produce the deadly byproducts that we presently get from the reactors we're running?
	Well, not in the same quantities.
	You know, there is this, there will be this, it depends on the design and what fuel you used, whether you used deuterium, or whether you go from the oceans, heavy water, or whether
	you use helium-3 in the moon's regolith, which has actually a cleaner form of fusion. But
	it would produce less overall waste product because fusion is much more efficient. It
	produces more energy with a smaller amount.
	We have, in the United States, virtually come to a halt in terms of production of new nuclear
	facilities.
	Yes.
	Yes.
	If you were in a position, as I put you in with SETI, to vote for funding or not, would you vote to continue to produce new nuclear power plants, or are you against that?
	I'm actually in favor of building new plants.
	There's been much new technology that's been developed over the last 20 years, and we haven't built anything.
	We're trying to keep the very old plants alive and maintained and working.
	There are safer designs in the books.
	But that sticky question of the waste, do you believe, Professor, that mankind is sufficiently socially evolved to be the guardians of this poison for tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of years or whatever?
	A long time?
	Well, I can't answer that question.
	The only answer I can give is that we have to.
	Well, yeah, we have to.
	That's right.
	And we have to store it and safeguard Yes.
	The fuel, and just put the effort that's needed into it, into doing it.
	It's something we have to do.
	Yes, we have to do it, you're right, but... But again, I'm hopeful that the present energy reserves will be more than sufficient for the time that we need to develop fusion.
	Okay.
	East of the Rockies, you're on the...
	Do the wild thing at 775-727-1295.
	Paul, I've got to stop you there.
	We don't allow last names on the air.
	So, we're going to start fresh here.
	Your name is Paul, only, and you're where in Maryland?
	Gaithersburg, Maryland.
	Okay.
	And a long-time listener.
	Love your show, Art.
	Thank you.
	Professor Gonzales, I was just wondering if you're familiar, you said that possibly this universe from a deistic argument was Given, you know, the vastness of space was sort of a, given, might have been given us to, you know, for discovery.
	Yes, that's one possibility.
	Uh, what, I'm not familiar exactly with the name of this argument, but what about the argument that for the Earth to be possible, it's kind of like a nexus.
	We'd have to have something like our sun.
	That's right.
	And then a galaxy, and then we'd need galaxies, and then we'd need the local group, and then that's right.
	But for that to be possible, we'd need something like the universe.
	That's correct.
	And for just one inhabited planet to come into existence the way our, Ours came into existence.
	With our particular laws of physics, yes, we do need a universe.
	Is there a formal name for that line of argument?
	I don't know if there's a specific name that's attached to that, but that's just a consensus.
	I find that compelling, just from a thermodynamic and space conservation point of view.
	Also about your AI question about imbuing silicon with human consciousness and awareness.
	If we continue along our current Moore's trend, as it were, and with quantum computing, then there's a possibility now that we could develop an artificial silicon quantum entity that could pass the Turing Test.
	If we could do that, then possibly the discussion as to whether we've imbued silicon with awareness and consciousness is moot.
	Well, it's a question of, can you reduce Consciousness and self-awareness to states, physical states, whether they be quantum states or gates in a silicon array.
	And that's the position taken by physicalism, the philosophical position of physicalism, is that yes, the mind is an excretion of the brain like bile is an excretion of the liver.
	And I think the philosophical arguments against that are very strong.
	And again, I would recommend philosopher J.P.
	Moreland And his writings, he's written in philosophy journals on this.
	J.P.
	Moreland.
	Last crazy, way out there point.
	Possibility, if it served, from a theistic point of view, if it served a God's purpose, communicating with other civilizations out there via the speed of intercessory prayer, which could be instantaneous.
	Okay, well, you're right.
	That's way out there.
	I don't know.
	I want to speculate on that one.
	Okay.
	We were working on Speed of Gravity here a couple weeks ago now.
	Speed of Prayer.
	West of the Rockies, you're on the air with Professor Gonzales.
	Hello.
	Hi Art.
	Hi.
	How are you?
	Okay.
	Ann in New Mexico, KKLB.
	Hey Ann.
	770, good signal.
	Thank you.
	And hello Professor Gonzales.
	Well, I agree with you.
	I believe that Yahweh created the heavens and the earth.
	Okay.
	But there's a scripture in Revelation that's very intriguing.
	It's Revelation 12, 12 and it says, Therefore rejoice, ye heavens, and ye that dwell in them.
	Well, and that catches my, you know, attention.
	You like the plural part of it, right?
	The heavens?
	Yeah, there's somebody in the heavens.
	How about that, Professor?
	Well, and then there's another passage.
	Yes, and?
	About other sheep.
	I forget which book that's in.
	There has been discussion among Christians for centuries as to whether or not the Christian theology is compatible with other intelligent beings on other planets.
	And Christians have taken both sides of this.
	Perhaps the most famous Christian of the 20th century, C.F.
	Lewis, believed it was perfectly compatible.
	And then there are Christians, Professor, who believe that there is no such thing, and if they do appear, they're devils.
	Yes, they're demonic deceptions.
	That's another position I've heard.
	So there's a variety of positions in the Christian community.
	My view is similar to that of C.S.
	Lewis, that there's nothing about the possibility of extraterrestrial life extraterrestrial civilization that would contradict
	anything and and christian scriptures
	first-time caller line you're on the air with professor gonzales hello
	i have a couple comments on uh... probability and empirical evidence that you've been talking about yes um...
	i are hyper-factor uh...
	uh...
	first of all i i think the argument turned a little analogous to
	yes son revolving around the earth and on that but
	uh... i think you can talk all you want about the lack of empirical evidence
	other civilizations are life at all out there I don't know exactly to what end you define us being the only people.
	Do you define us as being the only life or the only intelligent life?
	No, we in fact separate between three types of life in the book.
	Simple life, complex life, which would be oxygen breathing, largish, metazoan, creatures and then technological life
	and so i argue that the probability as we go up that scale complexity
	the probability gets lower and lower so the probability for technological life
	would be the lowest right
	but ok well i'll just pause i just think that the only
	i would offer that the only empirical i mean both of these are faith based
	things whether you're atheist or whatever faith and your assumptions based on your
	religion or science or whatever
	Yes.
	But I think I would offer that the only empirical evidence that exists for any of it is our existence here as people, as life, as dogs, as cats, as whatever.
	That's true.
	That's the only empirical evidence we have right now.
	And the only way that you can really found anything is if you extrapolate based on empirical evidence in the same sense that we are on this planet under these conditions.
	Life is here.
	It exists.
	It arose.
	It evolved.
	In the likelihood of just, you know, one star, and again, this is probabilities, I'm sure you've got all the numbers for all this going on, but the only, the extrapolation just is, in my mind, I don't know, overwhelming.
	You know, there's smaller, you know, another life, another civilization, get as far as we can, and you touched on, you know, maybe just a brief amount of time where they could be radio-friendly, could be for annihilation, or who knows, or whatever, but, I mean, it's, It's so astounding, the possibility that we could get in touch with another one.
	I think that is very unlikely, personally.
	But to rule it out, I think it's absolute that they exist out there.
	So you're saying that maybe a small probability, but the gain that you would have from a deposit detection would compensate the small probability, so it's worth searching.
	I guess that's what he's saying, yeah.
	Yeah, that's probably the strongest argument.
	In favor of continuing to search and listen, even if the probability is very, very small.
	And you would simply argue, I guess, it's so small that it's economically folly?
	I'd say at an official federal level.
	I mean, I don't have a problem with people spending private money on this.
	That's fine.
	If they're convinced personally that they're out there and it's only a matter of time before we find them, that's fine.
	There are lots of programs that That receive private funding that, you know, only a few people believe in or support, and that's fine.
	There's lots of things the government doesn't support.
	And I perfectly accept that people can disagree on this and be reasonable.
	I think Joe Tarter's being very reasonable in asking for money from the federal government to fund it.
	It's just that you wouldn't give it to her if you were... I wouldn't give it to her.
	We may be able to squeeze one in.
	East of the Rockies, you're on the air with Professor Gonzales.
	Hello.
	Good morning, Art.
	Good morning, sir.
	Real quick, we don't have a lot of time, sir.
	Okay, my name's Frank.
	I'm listening to XM Radio.
	Okay.
	Professor, let's go back to the Big Bang.
	You know that happened, right?
	Yeah.
	Something I've been postulating for a while.
	We've been watching the Big Bang go away, but we don't know what happened prior to that.
	That's right.
	I've come up with something.
	Well, we know black holes exist.
	We know what happens on this side of the black hole.
	But we don't know what happens on the other side.
	Right.
	What if our universe that we know, that we see right now, has actually been spit out from the other side of a black hole?
	And that's the backside of it, is what we know as the Big Bang.
	Well, maybe.
	I mean, there's all sorts of speculative theories that cosmologists are putting forward now to try to account for the cause of the Big Bang.
	including bubble universes and chaotic inflation and all sorts of other things.
	But you can't push it back indefinitely.
	Eventually you need a non-contingent cause, a cause that exists in itself.
	It doesn't require something else to cause it.
	So I think the strongest argument for something other than just material causes is a philosophical one.
	That'd be God.
	Yeah.
	Professor, thank you for being here.
	I enjoyed it.
	It's been an absolute pleasure.
	Absolute pleasure.
	And we'll have you back again.
	Take care.
	Thank you.
	All right.
	Professor Guillermo Gonzalez, ladies and gentlemen.
	Tomorrow night, we will do a 180.
	From the man who doesn't believe, didn't believe, no, did believe actually one time, or at least investigated, to a man who doesn't believe, to a man tomorrow night who talks to those who talk to aliens.
	Boyd Hopkins, from the high desert, good night!

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