Guillermo Gonzales, author of The Privileged Planet, argues Earth’s unique conditions for life and discovery suggest we may be alone in the galaxy, with his updated Drake equation estimating less than 1% chance of other civilizations. A Christian skeptic of panspermia and UFO claims, he dismisses SETI funding due to low odds but supports private efforts like the Paul Allen array. While open to evidence, he rejects abduction testimonies and Ray Kurzweil’s AI "god" theories, favoring fusion energy and safer nuclear plants over suppressed alternatives. His work blends astrobiology with design arguments, leaving room for a creator if probabilities fail—yet sales of his book on Amazon reflect growing interest in these rare-earth and cosmic-scale debates. [Automatically generated summary]
From the high desert in the great American Southwest, I bid you all good evening, good morning, good afternoon, wherever you may be in the world's prolific time zones, all of them covered like a blanket 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, would be streamer in the latest on our movie, well, Roland Emerick's movie is judged in part by our book, Whatever, coming up on May 28th.
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...
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 Wassenson, 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.
a sample of that in a moment.
Well, all right, I think most of you know by now that Whitley Streeber is my co-author, wrote the book called The Coming Global Superstorm.
And it's very hard not to think of the movie as my movie.
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 wrap 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 hombrage 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 then?
In fact, it's happening.
And so we should be preparing for it, not arguing about which it is, which is what we're doing nationally.
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.
And me, I guess at this point, having done this program for so long, I'm simply 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 is probably life all over the place.
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 have been debating ever since I had my close encounter in 1986.
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 the 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 bestseller list.
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.
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.
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.
In time, yes.
Is there any way, for example, Whitley, 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?
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 recovered after having thawed out recently.
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 an alpine meadow.
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 hastened to add that 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 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, or more or less exactly, because they've carbon dated this, and I mean, they've dated this pretty exactly.
At the time, 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 of hundred years, and then it started up again.
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 literally permanent effect when it hits.
I think I consider 5,000 years, in terms of history, Permanent.
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 is 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.
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.
unidentified
I think it's time to get ready To realize just what I have found I have been only half of what I am It's all clear to me now My heart is on fire I have been only
half of what I have found Don't you love her badly?
Don't you need her badly?
Don't you love her, face?
Tell me what you say.
Don't you love her badly?
Wanna be her badly.
Don't you love her face?
Don't you love her?
She's open out the door that you did one thousand and before Don't you love her face and tell me what you say Don't you love her?
As she's walking out the door All your love All your love All your love All your love All your love is wrong To sing a lonely song Of a deep-loved dream Seven horses
sing Jumping on the mark 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 to 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.
Science fiction has always been a pretty good predictor of the future, 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 or concern because, well, it's science fiction of a sort of a fantasy, despite how some of us feel, a fantasy aspect.
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.
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, 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 scientist who made this discovery 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.
Well, have you ever noticed when you get up there, oh, I don't know, 35,000, 37,000 feet, particularly on a transatlantic flight or trans-Pacific, 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 would 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 rock.
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, that these sudden falls of ice out of the sky, where a very large piece of ice.
At first, it was assumed, well, these must be coming off of airplanes.
But analysis of this ice indicates that these large pieces of ice are accreted over from a very 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.
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 here and there from Italy to California, in fact, in 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?
Well, 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.
And when they started writing their movie, I don't recall that there's a vice president in the movie who is very sort of anti-global warming, et cetera, 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.
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 beaming at, you know, destroying cities and the rest of it.
That'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 is 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 at the same time in Los Angeles and on the West Coast.
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 Weatherwhitley and it gives you the GBs.
What's changed politically is that now we have an administration that has made a commitment that nothing is changing and nothing is happening when anyone can see that that's not true.
That's basically what's happened.
And 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 them.
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.
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 fluorescence.
This is the sort of thing the Canadian Prime Minister was recommending that sort of went nowhere.
But I mean, Whitley's absolutely right.
You take 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.
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.
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 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 emissions 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.
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 know that the heart of this force It don't count
me, you know It don't count me, you know It don't count me, you know It don't count
me, you know But to pay your dues, you wanna see the blues And you know it don't count me You don't have to shout or leave the vows You can't even play them easy Forget about the past And all your sorrow The future will last
It will soon be your tomorrow To target 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 target 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.
On the heels of the announcement coming that there's life on Mars, which frankly isn't a giant surprise to me, it 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.
The Professor Here from the state of Iowa, where, by the way, earlier in the evening they were reporting in some areas nickel-sized hail, is our guest, Professor Gonzalez.
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.
They're very close to announce, 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.
Actually, we do discuss briefly Mars in an appendix B about panspermia.
And there's two versions of panspermia, I'm sure you know.
Local interplanetary panspermia, the transfer of life between planets, and then interstellar panspermia, the transfer of life between solar 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, some of the question...
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?
And the escape velocity of the Earth is 11 kilometers a second, and there would be sufficient energy on the impact to blast 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 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.
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 Hills 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.
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 has 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.
So that's I don't know if it's been knocked down yet, but there are scientists that say they claim that given the sizes and shapes of the crystals, they claim that non-biological processes could have formed them.
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?
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.
Well, 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.
What the blight out of the number of stars in the galaxy, 10 to the 11, 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 are alone in the galaxy, at least as far as an intelligent civilization is concerned.
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.
All right, 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 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.
It is indeed Professor Guillermo Gonzalez 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'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 MHz emanating from a location off the planet.
This small bit came from another board.
This is obviously a conversation.
Could this be an attempt at contact?
Beginning this evening, a strong radio signal was present on 1,420 megahertz 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 plus.
Related.
In the protected band at 1420 MHz, through international agreements, several special frequency bands have been reserved for radio astronomy.
Perhaps the most important of these bands include the emissions from hydrogen atoms at 1,420 megahertz.
The protected band extends from 1,400 to 1,427 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, 1,420 megahertz.
And so I dialed it up, and talk about surprise.
Sure as hell, there was a signal that I could hear at 1,420 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 and 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.
Music All right, so when you get right down to it, Professor Gonzalez 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, and the possibility they might actually be here and visiting right now did you do?
There are a few very famous scientists who are religious, but it's generally not tolerated very much in the scientific community for a scientist to religious views.
You know, we say that if the universe really is designed, if it's a result of a creator, and in fact, in the book, we present evidence that we argue as 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 is based completely on naturalistic assumptions, right?
Assumptions that natural processes are responsible for each of these factors.
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.
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 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.
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 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, okay, 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 and you don't have God, then you have, well, I don't know what you have.
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 and 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 natives in the jungles who've not been around anybody and they're worshiping the sun or something or doing sacrifices.
Because I want to ask you about things metaphysical a little bit.
Besides ufology, Professor, and Asseti'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.
Well, I do think there's pretty good evidence that the mind is immaterial.
John Eckley's 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.
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.
There are those, Professor, who believe that ultimately we will ourselves, in effect, become gods.
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 design our children, perhaps a lot of things.
I mean, Ray Kurzweil, for example, the futurist and computer expert, argues that 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.
And I don't think we would, because consciousness is not, or intelligence is not the same as artificial intelligence.
The operative word is artificial.
There's something about self-awareness, about consciousness, that I don't think could be replicated by a computer program, no matter how sophisticated its computer program is, because it doesn't have self-awareness.
You believe then that no matter how far we go, and we are moving very quickly along Moore's laws, the highway there, that one day there will be a machine that becomes self-aware.
You just don't think that's, and I don't care how fast the processing or how good the storage, you don't think we'll ever get there.
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.
unidentified
Think about it.
Think about it.
Think about it.
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.
Well, lookie here with you from the Associated Press just breaking May, 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.
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.
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.
And, you know, they have been making observations since the early 1960s.
And in fact, that's an empirical source of information.
And they've surveyed a certain volume of space up to a certain sensitivity.
And as you say, they can say we haven't detected anything up to this distance.
But it's not completely falsifiable, though, because there will always be some corner that you can say that they haven't searched for at the right sensitivity and perhaps at the right frequency at the right time.
It's funny you should ask that because I actually had to make that decision in this publication called CQ Quarterly, or CQ Researcher, actually, CQ Congressional Quarterly Researcher.
It's published for the Congress, and you can order a copy.
And they had an issue, I think it was March of it, or early March issue, which is on extraterrestrial life, 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.
And so 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 SETI 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 Joe Tarter, of course.
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.
But then I started reading on it, and then 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.
Are you at all curious about the fact that Congressman Schiff, when he was live, actually tried to get all of the documents relating to Roswell?
And dog gone.
It's just a dog gonda sing, Professor, but every last one of them relating to that period of time in Roswell, they were just, I guess, like accidentally destroyed or misplaced or whatever.
Well, David in Portland, Oregon writes, if your guest is a Christian, and if I heard 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?
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 it's 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.
My thesis that the best places for life in the universe offer the best overall opportunities for scientific discovery, we actually have a chapter, an entire chapter, on objections, possible objections.
And for example, one of them is that the stiposelection 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, our 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, both empirically and theoretically, to planets that we can imagine just based on the laws of physics applied elsewhere.
Especially 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 yeah, we just say that, 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.
Well, 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 have a different view on this, and based on my own studies, I've come to a different conclusion than she has.
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.
I mean, I acknowledge that those exist, those 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 these person's walking around, or something like that.
As a matter of fact, they just awarded Larry King the latest PsyCOP 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 the opposite spectrum, the exact opposite, almost to the debunker stage, in my opinion, where they're actively trying to throw monkey wrenches into anything anybody brings forward that would indicate otherwise.
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 to 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.
unidentified
Don't touch that dial.
What do you find?
Every time I leave about it, I won't cry.
But all the people keep on.
Go with easy and beyond.
To talk with Art Bell, call the wildcard line at area code 775-727-1295.
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There is one more theory of life that I need to ask the professor about, and then we'll toss them 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 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, 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 Ph.D. in astronomy from the University of Washington and did all his postdoctoral research at the University of Texas, Austin, and the University of Washington.
Yes, 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.
At least he expressed it in his Cosmos series.
Civilizations may not last very long.
That's the last factor in the Drake equation, by the way, is a lifetime of a civilization.
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, that's true, but I don't know if that would make the thought prophecy of a person with his finger on the red button say, well, there's people on Mars, so I'll push the button.
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.
Well, some of those little recorders you speak about, and I'm talking about ice cores now that we recently found in Peru, have some very troubling stories to tell about some plants that were flash-frozen some time ago.
But the last very big global change in climate occurred during the Younger Dryass 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, to reconstruct the past climate changes so that we can predict changes in the future with some confidence.
So it actually improves our survival chances 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 the generally accepted hypothesis of how things happened, it gets put away in a dark closet somewhere.
Well, because careers come and go very quickly when certain hypothesis explodes with a fact, then you can understand why scientists, being human beings, are reluctant to accept the end of their career.
Okay, the comment is, how come your guest being an individual who has gone from both sides of the spectrum being a ufologist and now a scientist, he was very quick, or should I say, was determined to advise the government into removing the funding from the SETI programs and all that?
And the quick question is that how come is it, 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, ask them if they're 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 is passed down for so long that they're not bothering to revise the new theories?
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.
unidentified
Okay, so Professor Gonzalez, 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, who is a book on time travel, but he's also infamous for his doomsday argument based on the Copernican principle that we humans are not special.
And what he does, Art, is he kind of, I'm sure, Art, you had him on your shell 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 kind of push forward into the future based on those past statistics like impacts from craters on the moon, et cetera, and human extinction, which he puts at about 8.1 million years, et cetera.
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 Bayesian conditionalization.
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 an 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 as you see these basic elements find their natural places.
And so we have Earth at the center, and then water, air, and fire.
And then quintessence formed these perfect celestial spheres.
But 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 Nicholas 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, so the history on which the Copernican principle is based is actually fictionalized in its modern retelling.
Compared to the duration of civilization so far, a civilized society, yes, the technology is very young.
But again, if time is eternal into the future, or at least very, very, very, very long, then 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.
East of the Rockies, you're on the air with Professor Gonzalez.
Hello.
Hello.
unidentified
Yes.
That's Clyde and Robinson Landing, Oklahoma.
I was wondering if, according to the Big Bang theory, the ever-expanding universe, and astronomers 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?
In the Big Bang, a boom 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.
Yeah, 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.
It took a certain amount of time to reach us.
The 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.
And 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 elements hadn't been built up enough yet from supernovae like planets.
And you can't look too far into the future because in particular the radioactive elements that drive geology on the Earth, uranium and thorium and potassium-40, are declining as the universe ages.
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.
I think, Professor, that you may have confused the audience with a couple of things you said, because I keep getting questions like this one from Sean in Daytona, Florida, Daytona Beach.
Why does the chance for intelligent life in the universe increase 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 believe it seems like opposing things.
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.
So the universal design 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 it was intended by an intelligent creator.
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 intent 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, et cetera.
But I guess I would, that does leave me open, though.
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 Eckles, and also the quantum physicists who are convinced about the non-materiality of the soul or of the mind based on quantum physics, on the Copenhagen interpretation.
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 argument for decreasing.
unidentified
Well, again, there are 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.
Like, for example, the heliocentric model of the solar system has only been getting stronger as we have accumulated more evidence that 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 has no competitors today.
I mean, ever since the steady-state theory was dead, it may be overturned tomorrow, but it's only getting stronger as new evidence.
unidentified
I'm not trying to challenge you in a negative way.
I just find your argument very compelling and very interesting, and I want to read your book.
You were talking briefly about things relating to the Earth and global changes and so forth, and a couple of things that concern me, not only the global changes, but also the negative potential of artificial intelligence.
Yeah, Professor Gonzalez, 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.
A radio telescope put out in space.
Right, exactly.
Exactly.
I have one more question, Professor.
You mentioned before some of the radioactive elements that are 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.
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.
Maybe this is too terra-centric 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?
We argue in the book that, well, it provides an arena for discovery, to discover things about the universe, the origin of the universe, and discover an arena for our discovery about.
Well, it would happen very slowly, and we 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.
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 have one question for Dr. Gonzalez and one question for you, Mr. Bill.
Okay.
For Dr. Gonzalez, I have a question about you.
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.
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.
I'm going to say the same thing the professor did.
I can't possibly explain the psychology of our leadership or anybody who 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.
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 forests, unfortunately, just before they found the first coal reserves and figured out how to use them to fuel their fires.
But 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.
It depends on the design and what fuel you used, whether you use deuterium 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.
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?
Professor Gonzalez says, just wondering, if you're familiar, you said that possibly this universe from a deistic argument was given the vastness of space might have been given us for discovery.
For just one inhabited planet to come into existence the way ours came into existence with our particular laws of physics, yes, you do need a universe as a university.
I don't know if there's a specific name that's attached to that, but that's just a consensus.
unidentified
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 trends, 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 a gates and 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 bowel 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.
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.
Oh, and then there's another passage 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.S. Lewis, believed it was perfectly compatible with Christianity to have life on other planets.
And he wrote some science fiction books, in fact, with that premise with other beings on other planets.
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 civilizations that would contradict anything in Christian scriptures.
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 you go up that scale of complexity, the probability gets lower and lower.
So the probability for technological life would be the lowest.
unidentified
Right.
But, okay, well, I'll just continue.
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, your faith and your assumptions based on your whatever, religion or science or whatever.
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, cats, as whatever.
That's the only empirical evidence we have right now.
unidentified
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.
And the likelihood of just one star, and there's probabilities, I'm sure you've got all the numbers for all this going on.
But the extrapolation just is, in my mind, I don't know, overwhelming.
There's smaller, you know, another life, another civilization get as far as we can, and you touched on, you know, that there's 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 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 it may be 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 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 is exist 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.
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.