Sir Charles Shults III, a knighted aerospace expert with ties to Martin Marietta and NASA’s EMP test software, warns robotic warfare could arrive in five years, citing AI-driven drones surviving human limits. He debates Mars fossil claims—like trilobite-like structures—accusing NASA of cautious misclassification due to credibility risks, while fearing Earth contamination from potential Martian life via sample return missions. Shults III also critiques the UN Space Treaty’s Cold War-era restrictions on lunar mining and proposes space-based solar power, estimating 1–5 billion watts could soon fuel cities. His frustration with NASA’s delays may push him to submit rover data to Congress, hinting at a coming shift in extraterrestrial disclosure. [Automatically generated summary]
From the high desert and the great American Southwest, I bid you all good evening, good morning, good afternoon, wherever you may be in the Earth's 25 time zones, every single one of them covered one way or the other by this program.
Post a.m.
Weekend.
It is an honor to be with you this Sunday night, Monday morning.
Next hour, we're gonna have him on somebody that was a complete utter surprise.
Last time we had him on, Sir Charles Schultz.
Really incredible interviewer.
Amazing man.
You'll hear him next hour if you didn't get the honor to hear him a month or so ago.
Well, of course, remaining the number one news item, the passing of our president, Ronald Reagan.
He was remembered with jelly beans.
He had a thing for those, you'll recall.
Flowers, American flags on Sunday at memorials in his hometown outside the mortuary, where the former president's body lay and all your hearts, I know, or most of them anyway.
Reagan will be memorialized.
And I say that because, believe it or not, I have some emails from people who rejoice at his death.
That's incredible to me.
Absolutely incredible.
But they're out there.
His remains are going to be flown to Washington on Wednesday to lie in state in the Capitol Rotunda.
The funeral, undoubtedly attended by world leaders, will be at Washington National Cathedral on Friday.
President Bush will speak at the funeral.
California wildfires are at it 6,000 acres up Govita.
The wildfire in southern California scorched more than 6,000 acres, forced evacuation of hundreds of people from a gated community nearby.
The flames quickly then spread through a line of narrow canyons and steep hillsides covered with dense old growth brush burning on both sides of Highway 101 about 27 miles north of Santa Barbara.
And here in the desert, over the next couple of days, Monday and Tuesday, the weatherman tells us we are in for it.
We get winds here.
And all day long, Monday and Tuesday, it looks like, well, Monday they're saying 40 mile an hour winds and Tuesday they're saying for a little change up 50 mile an hour winds.
In a moment, I want to address something that's brought a lot of emails my way.
Stay right there.
There are some conspiracies that I'm sure are going on.
You know, there are conspiracies.
do happen.
However, I'm not...
There's a lot of people right now who are on board with this conspiracy that the United States was complicit in, or even more than complicit in, welcoming or participating in the attack on itself on 9-11.
And they can't, this whole group of conspiracy folk can't believe that I'm just not on board with the fact that the United States attacked itself.
Oh, please.
I'm pretty cynical on a lot of things, but not that cynical.
I mean, you can be so open-minded that your brains fall out.
And it seems to me that short of evidence, I don't mean articles, and I don't mean opinions, I mean evidence that such a horrendous thing occurred, that the more likely and logical thing to believe is exactly what we saw, that a group of fundamentalists decided to do the West damage and flew into two large buildings in New York.
And to imagine our own government officials, our president, our government involved in doing itself in in New York, ostensibly, usually according to those who believe in this conspiracy theory, so they could initiate various actions here in the U.S., like, oh, I don't know, martial law, perhaps, or some great crackdown, or the Patriot Act, or whatever.
Not that I'm all in love with that at all.
But the larger question is, would the United States and our elected officials be complicit in what happened on 9-11?
No, I do not believe that.
And I'm in wonderment that Americans short of ironclad evidence that something like that actually happened would be given to believe that.
Just amazed.
Here's something, though, that is happening.
Mysterious virus killing wheat fields throughout West Kansas.
And the person sending it says, hey, Art, remember last fall when Dr. Doom, Ed Ames, remote viewed the Chinese developing some kind of virus or disease that would affect U.S. crop production, particularly in the Midwest?
Well, who knows whether this is that, but it certainly is suspicious.
Wichita, Kansas, an unidentified wheat virus has agricultural scientists in Kansas scratching their heads.
The pathogen causes wheat leaves to yellow and then just die.
But it's not caused by wheat streak mosaic head death or freeze, if you're familiar with any of that.
We're pretty sure it's a virus, says wheat breeder Joe Martin, who works at the Kansas State University Research Station at Hayes.
It shows up early, and at first glance, we thought it was what they call streak mosaic, but it's not.
It kills the oldest leaves of the plant and then finally kills the head.
Researchers have no idea what the virus is, where it came from, or how it spreads.
Martin said he's seen evidence of the virus in almost every field he's checked in western Kansas, but it hasn't taken over the crop.
He encouraged farmers to be on the lookout when checking their fields.
So something is loose in our wheat fields in America, something that we cannot identify in any way.
Looking at a little ufology for a moment, the UFO, a UFO at least, has put Portugal, the military in Portugal, on alert.
The Portuguese press has announced that the Air Force is on alert since dozens of people apparently saw a UFO on Tuesday.
So the Portuguese take their sightings very seriously, I guess.
The newspaper reports that military radar surveillance has increased.
F-16 planes are ready for takeoff.
Meanwhile, the UFO sighted in South Devon in the UK interests the media, but not the military.
Now, isn't that interesting?
You know, sit back and consider for a moment.
In third world countries where this kind of thing happens, some of them with rather first world technology on the ground, like the F-16, they respond by alerting their military, while in the United Kingdom and the United States, what do we do?
Well, we don't alert the military, where the military doesn't appear to be alerted, do they?
Now, one can imagine several reasons for that, and one of them would be the military is well aware of what they are.
But there is something surely up there.
Well, maybe that's it.
The military not only knows what's up there, but they perhaps even put it there themselves.
So naturally, they would not respond.
A lack of response is curious.
I mean, any nation is supposed to be sovereign with respect to its skies, everything right up to and including space, I suppose, will eventually argue, right?
One of my listeners wrote to SETI.
It was Michael from Dallas-Fort Worth, who wrote to SETI and asked them a question.
Basically, why, SETI, are you not transmitting to other life forms?
And SETI wrote back in the form of, let me see, Michael Smith.
Is that correct?
I believe it is.
At any rate, here we go.
Project Phoenix, like all SETI efforts, is a passive experiment, designed only to look for signals, not to send them.
However, humankind has been unintentionally transmitting signals in space, primarily high-frequency, radio, television, and radar now for more than 50 years.
Our earliest TV broadcasts have reached several thousand nearby stars, although any alien viewing would have to build a very large antenna thousands of acres in size to even detect them.
Until now, SETI researchers have not been very interested in broadcasting.
The reasons for this are several to begin with.
We are a technologically very young civilization.
We've had radio for what a hundred years or so.
But there are surely societies that have possessed the ability to send high powered signals for tens or possibly thousands, if not millions of years.
Consequently, since we are basically the new kids on the technological block, it may behoove us to listen first.
A lot of people would be well advised to take that advice.
Some have also expressed concern that broadcasting just might be dangerous, literally calling attention to our existence.
However, the evidence of technologically sophisticated life on Earth is already on its way into space, and there is no bringing back these transmissions.
Of greater import is the fact that sending signals entails a great deal of patience.
If the nearest civilization is a hundred light years away, we're going to have to wait two hundred years to get an answer.
Serious, deliberate broadcasting is a long-term endeavor and one that so far humankind has not been willing to undertake.
To date, only a few mostly symbolic, intentional messages have been sent.
The simplest picture that was transmitted in 1974 from the Arecibo Observatory described our solar system, the compounds important for life, the very structure of the DNA molecule, and the form of a human being.
The message was transmitted in the direction of the globular star cluster M13, about 21,000 light years away, so clearly any answer will be a very long time in coming.
Serious broadcasts require serious commitment.
The occasional short messages that are currently being done as commercial demo projects do not substantially contribute to the existing leakage radiation already being pumped into space by TV and radar.
Only when we are willing to commit the resources to build a powerful, long-lived radio beacon can we be said to be taking serious steps toward actively getting in touch.
Thank you for your interest in SETI.
I thought that was very, Very good.
So, for quite a number of understandable reasons, we do not transmit into space.
One of them being we might not like the answer we get or the landing that comes forth.
Even the idea of sending basic information about humanity to include our genetic makeup might give a potential adversary too much information about us.
I mean, if they did turn out to be an adversary, one of the last things you would want to have would be to give them a complete blueprint of our genetic structure, which would also give them, if they were sufficiently technologically advanced, the perfect plan for getting rid of us like a bunch of infestations that some say we are.
From the University of Toronto, a very interesting article.
It seems a devastating meteorite collision caused part of the Earth's crust to flip inside out.
Can you believe that?
Inside out, billions of years ago, and left a dusting of a very rare metal scattered on top of the crater that was left.
But I mean, something hitting hard enough to turn the Earth's crust inside out.
The study published, can you imagine something like that?
Published in the June 3rd issue of Nature, so it's just out, examines the devastating effects of meteorite impacts on the Earth's evolution.
Researchers from the University of Toronto and the Geological Survey of Canada studied the remains of a 250-kilometer-wide crater in Sudbury, Ontario, known as the Sudbury Complex, caused by a collision with a Mount Everest-sized meteorite.
Mount Everest-sized.
That was 1.8 billion years ago.
And when that baby hit, the crust of the Earth got turned inside out.
Now, that's something to contemplate, isn't it?
All right, this is an open line radio program for the balance of this hour.
And on, I believe it was May 11th, we took a picture and we were taking pictures of the sunset.
As we took a picture of the sunset, we didn't realize that we also photographed three craft that were shooting down beams and either putting something down or sucking something up.
I'm looking at it as, we've saved it as a screensaver.
It looks like it could be either two or three craft, and they have beams shooting down, and you can actually physically see something being sucked up into the craft or either being put down on the ground.
Email it to Art Bell, A-R-T-B-E-L-L, that's me, at mindspring.com, or Art Bell, A-R-T-B-E-L-L, at A-O-L.com.
Either one.
You send it along to me, and if these are indeed three saucer-like craft, either picking something up or dropping something off, I can assure you it'll be posted for all to see.
unidentified
Okay, well, I'm also going to attach a little note.
I don't want to speak about what my question was because I wanted to ask it privately on the air.
But before all that goes down, I'm going to add that to the email before you post it.
And if anybody out there gets a photograph of that sort, those are the email addresses where you may send them.
I'm very interested indeed.
Unfortunately, of course, the majority of photographs we get of this sort of thing are insufficiently detailed to really decide if you're seeing something truly anomalous or you're.
We really have been in Iraq for quite a while now.
And in fact, so long that even those in government who were pretty sure we'd find weapons of mass destruction are throwing up their hands and saying, well, maybe not.
Maybe it was an intelligence goof.
Even people in government are admitting that.
Listen, you hold on, and we'll do a little more of this after the break, all right?
In fact, those are the numbers, and at the top of the hour, Sir Charles Schultz III will be here.
What a guest he is.
Just wait.
In between, though, if you've got anything you want to talk about, unscreened, probably somewhat unsafe, and certainly surprising open lines are directly ahead.
Music All right, back to the gentleman who was on hold, West of the Rockies, and we were talking about the Iraq War and weapons of mass destruction, right?
Yeah, so anyway, maybe they moved them all, but you know, we've got these really good satellites now.
Maybe they managed to move them at night without our satellites noticing, but boy, I'll tell you that, that would have been an awful lot according to the figures, for example, that you just gave me.
unidentified
That's why I think a lot of them are still in the country.
I don't know a lot about it, but it, well, of course, I'm familiar with the story, and it sure looks like it's going to be a good movie.
unidentified
Why does Disney not want to touch it?
And Disney was, you know, just want to ever want to distribute the thing.
I don't know.
Are you familiar with the ties that Mr. Moore alleges between the Bush family and the bin Laden family and the Carlisle group and going way, way, way back?
And the thing that I love my country very, very much.
I'm scared of a lot of the things that the government does, but I love my country very much, and I really hope with all my heart and soul that all of this stuff is wrong.
All right, you're going to have to yell it at me because you're not too loud with it.
unidentified
This is kind of an opinion question for you.
Okay.
Do you believe the pyramid being built in India, the center building, I guess it could be called, would that coincide with the destruction of this society, in your opinion?
I mean, depending on what you believe about pyramids and what other civilizations might have known and messages they might have left, I've been reeling since I heard last night's show or participated in it, I guess.
And I thought it was incredibly well-presented.
unidentified
I had one further question for you.
Yes.
Our perception of what media tells us is skewed in that we cannot find a common thread through what all of them are trying to portray.
There's a bunch of different media groups that basically put off what they want to hear.
What I'm driving at, I suppose, is who at this point in our evolutionary state are we supposed to be listening to?
And somebody sent me an email and said, you know, it's interesting.
Even if you're getting BS, if it comes with a British accent, it adds authenticity to it somehow, credibility.
And I thought about it.
That's really true.
And it's not at all saying that it was BS because I thought it was absolutely fascinating.
The whole concept of civilizations eventually coming to an understanding that they're doomed and then believing in reincarnation, leaving a message for themselves.
God, fascinating stuff.
unidentified
Well, I thought it was, too, and he is very well researched in what he does.
Now, there is some criticism that could be offered from a philosophical standpoint.
His attempt to kind of blend together Christianity and reincarnation.
You know, it's my understanding that in the early days, in early Christian days, that is to say, until the Council of Nicaea, was it, that it was fully believed and understood that our souls did go round and round and round and round.
And that was part of the early Christian religion, wasn't it?
unidentified
Well, actually, no, that came from the Greeks.
But more to Maurice Last night.
Here are just a few technical things that you would have to look at.
Christ himself said that all that came before him were robbers.
And he said that there would be many false Christs coming after him.
And so the whole central point, I'm just looking at this neutrally now.
The whole central point of the New Testament Christian message is that this is the one man, the one body who incorporates the whole Godhead in him.
Yeah, I know.
And that resurrection is very different from reincarnation.
Just the economy of it is different because you're not dependent on this going around and around and around through lifetime after lifetime to trying to earn your way.
Your earnings comes by this one door, this one way.
I mean, they're completely incompatible.
So just from that standpoint is a criticism.
But the positive side is he does bring a lot of technical assumption.
I say assumption because we can only assume that he's correct since we don't have the world's largest computer at our disposal.
And that's where I, too, would have to say, look, if I really want to delve into this, I'm going to have to come meet with you, look at the questions that were posed to the computer and the very software itself, and decide if the whole thing has scientific legitimacy.
So that's where I, too, I mean, there was no way I could ask on the radio and, you know, go into that kind of detailed explanation about what was behind it all.
So you're right.
unidentified
One word of tribute on the 500th program of our good friend.
I thought that was really well done, the way you all came out and supported him.
And, you know, we do owe him a great debt of gratitude because if this program would have gone under in your absence, there would be a great intellectual hole in the universe right now.
And indeed, it was eating the seals of the space station and all sorts of things.
And there was some concern as it plunged into the sea because you don't know what sort of fungus or virus or whatever it is and how it would react to the warm, moist Pacific or Atlantic waters.
Well, in the middle of the night, one night, sir, something with large teeth will come and take a chunk out of your leg, and then you'll know it's here.
unidentified
I don't know.
And then I'm a musician, and last night I was playing, and three times through the night, I noticed what was a little, almost seemed like a skip in time, you know, and the shadow people and all that kind of stuff, you know, that people see out of the corner of their eyes.
I've noticed blinks, but last night it seemed to hit right at the time when we were playing.
So I caught a little bit of a glitch, you know, like something skipped, but it couldn't have been electronic or anything else.
And it was almost as if time stopped and started again really, really fast, or I just happened to be aware of something that was right at the time.
Maybe time did take a skip or a hop, and that, of course, is one of my favorite things to investigate.
And that is time and the nature of time.
And perhaps its linear progressive movement is not precise.
And maybe very occasionally there's a little hitch in time and something happens.
Or you get a glimpse of something you should not, or a vibratory rate changes.
Perhaps from nothing any more ominous than viewing a computer screen, which has a certain refresh rate, which then puts your brain in a slightly different gear.
And all of a sudden you see something you would not otherwise have seen.
Well, actually, that does make some sense, doesn't it?
Because your ability to know things, everything's on a need-to-know basis, right?
So it may well be that you're cleared to a top-secret level for one particular function, but it doesn't mean you're cleared to know everything about everything that has that classification.
So that it would be compartmentalized in that fashion does make some sense to me.
Well, we've been teaming together to try to get through.
Wow, I can't believe it.
I see.
Okay, I want to run this by you and see if you've heard any information.
This general was talking on this talk show, and he said that the public will be soon to hear a recent, most recent national security threat will be that they have intelligence that he has heard,
they have intelligence, our U.S. government has intelligence, that al-Qaeda has been sending in feelers into the United States to see what gets through and that they're going to use container ships with nukes, 20 megaton nukes that have been missing from the Soviet stockpile when the Soviet Union demised.
Okay, and that they were going to try to get them into our major ports.
Seattle wasn't mentioned, but New York and California, I believe Chicago.
Well, no, not directly regarding a specific plan, but I certainly have heard that there are missing nuclear weapons.
And I do not have a security clearance in that area, and I don't know the truth of that.
But the rumor, of course, is that there are missing nuclear weapons from the one-time Soviet arsenal and that they could be in the hands of al-Qaeda.
Well, certainly they could be.
You absolutely cannot rule that out.
That one of our cities or even many of our cities could come under some sort of nuclear attack, I guess, is just a fact of modern-day life.
And in a lot of ways, it makes the use of a nuclear weapon by somebody in anger a much more likely, much more likely than it ever was during the Great Cold War that our beloved President Reagan definitely ended.
That wall was torn down, but it had a few after-effects.
When that wall came down, a few things came leaking through that should not have.
And so we're going to have to remain ever vigilant because, believe it, there are people out there who want nothing other than for us to be dead.
Coming up in a moment, Sir Charles Schultz III.
You're listening to Coast to Coast AM.
unidentified
Coast to Coast AM.
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 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.
He worked at Martin Marietta Aerospace for 10 years on weapons systems and computer-based automated test equipment.
He wrote, Get this, the nuclear EMP test software for the Pershing II missile system, worked on the Patriot, the Copperhead Tank Killer, and Advanced Attack Helicopter Systems.
Charles has performed research under grant on nuclear fusion.
He was knighted and received a long-term grant for his present research in robotics and artificial intelligence.
He has written many technical publications and magazine articles on space, Astronomy, the atmosphere, and space resource development.
In addition, Charles has also appeared on several TV and radio programs, and his big consuming interest right now is Mars.
He is a remarkable man, and of course we're going to talk about Mars, but there are many other questions that I have, as I did last time for Sir Charles.
He's just a remarkable interview.
And if you'll just stay right there, it's coming right up.
And before we launch into Mars, I read a lot of, you know, like military action novels, you know, fiction, but based on current military technological capabilities.
You know, the Dale Browns and, you know, on and on and on.
I just love that kind of stuff.
I eat it up.
And in most of these newer novels that claim to be based on currently understood technology or technology that's just around the corner, it really seems like we're headed toward robot wars.
We're headed toward a time when things that fly through the air and bomb or do whatever they're going to do or just spy, it's all going to be robotic.
The human being is going to be eliminated from aerial warfare, if I'm reading these right.
Well, it certainly seems that way because consider that a robotically piloted aircraft, for instance, can undergo maneuvers that a human being couldn't even survive.
Yes, it does, because many times you have to make systems that if something goes wrong, they have to be just sharp enough to be able to handle it on their own.
Because in most of these circumstances, things are happening far faster than the human mind could even begin to digest the information.
And a perfect example is many of the planes today are fly-by-wire.
The surfaces of the planes are being adjusted dynamically thousands of times per second because the plane normally would be so unstable under manual flight that it'd be impossible to fly.
But the payoff is adjusting the plane this way allows you to make maneuvers that are otherwise impossible with a very stable airplane.
And then I even read that there will be people operating these planes, perhaps, from, I don't know, a mountain maybe under some mountain in Colorado where they'll be virtually on a joystick flying this plane on the other side of the world and killing people.
I mean, armies of robots that the whole thing is incredible to consider a war perhaps against who knows what nation where they've got people and guns and we've got robots.
I mean, think about how children are being raised on video games these days and how the reflexes that they develop under those circumstances are just phenomenal sometimes.
And it makes a very natural coupling between man and machine when you can put an interface in that's as simple as point and click or like a video game.
There are people, Sir Charles, who would complain about the morality of that, that our nation would have machines not be risking flesh and the other nation having to risk flesh.
Well, it's sure going to be interesting to see where it's headed.
And I suppose if you were to look very carefully into what happened in Iraq, it was probably a little bit of both, or a lot of both, perhaps, were used.
Well, it is, but understand that the cities that are most vulnerable are first world cities that have a lot of technology and electronics in the first place.
One of the things that people didn't realize is, and this became a very effective weapon accidentally, we release chaff sometimes from aircraft as a shield for attack.
For instance, a missile may be homing on a plane or a radar tracking it.
And recently the chaff has been made as fibers of carbon, for instance, or strings of metal tinsel.
The carbon filaments that they have tried have turned out to have a secondary effect that became very useful.
And that is that they will short out power wires and bring generators down.
And, of course, we also have to consider some of the no-goes, like the DARPA vehicle challenge, and that's going to have another run next year.
But we will see where that goes.
That was a very ambitious project, and I think a lot of the people who got into that really discovered how hard it is to make your wonderful idea fly in the real world.
Well, I think it's interesting overall because the things that you try as solutions to your small technical problems sometimes turn out to have unexpected or radically different applications.
And the space program is a perfect example of many, many spin-offs we generated, not even thinking about those things to start with.
Well, of course, we have a couple of brick walls in our way.
And one of those things is to go much further, we really need outside mineral resources and energy resources.
And so if we really wanted to see development, we'd have to get out into space with industry, you know, heavy industry and development and go from that angle, because that will be a self-funding effort once it gets underway.
Is there well, I'm trying to think, is there anything valuable enough on the moon or on Mars or on any other planet we could conceivably get to to make it worth our while?
Well, yes, there is, but it's in an indirect manner at first.
And that is we certainly wouldn't mine mineral resources and send them back to Earth.
We wouldn't manufacture stuff and ship it to Earth.
That would be prohibitive and ridiculous.
But what we would do is we would use those resources to build systems that we need in space.
And one example of that would be orbital power stations or manufacturing stations.
And I can think of a very simple application we could use right away.
One of the problems we have today is shielding satellites and spacecraft, for instance, humans in orbit.
Most of our space stations that we've put up, in fact all of them, have been in very low orbit because that close to the Earth, they gain a great deal of shielding from the Earth's magnetic field.
So the radiation hazards are greatly reduced.
If we were to make, let's say, lunar sandbags and ship them back to low Earth orbit, we could shield stations there and people could stay in them for extended periods of time regardless of radiation hazards.
We could even move them to higher orbits and do research from much higher vantage points.
So it would be relatively very inexpensive to pick up virtual sandbags on the moon and bring them back to even low, well, not low Earth orbit, perhaps.
I was, of course, alive and aware as we touched down, put foot on the moon, and then as we, I don't know, stop it all, except for low Earth orbit, we have just sworn the rest of it off.
No moon.
We haven't gone back.
No Mars.
We haven't really gone there.
We don't have any concrete plans to go there.
They've talked about it.
Do you have any theory on why all of that happened?
It's so illogical to go to the moon and then stop.
And, you know, I was one of the strongest proponents.
I wanted to see us go on, build lunar colonies, build hotels in orbit, and just keep going from there.
And I think that the biggest thing was, and I know there are a lot of people who dislike this thought, but the race to the moon was really a Cold War challenge.
We wanted to get there first and to show that we were the better man.
It was a race, and it didn't have a practical payoff.
And it is only because we had some people who were able to influence decisions to get some science done and to get some real research done on the way that we were able to actually pull something useful and beneficial out of it.
So even though we went in peace for all mankind, it was really a Cold War challenge.
And once the money dried up and the challenge was met, that seemed to be the end of it.
Understand that you would have unlimited material, mineral resources, and energy resources to deal with.
So once established, you could build like mad and nobody could touch you.
But if you Really want a quick response for a military reason, your biggest bet would be to put those defense stations in low or medium height orbit because you can respond in minutes or hours.
Whereas something from the moon is going to take, if it's on a ballistic trajectory, three days to get here.
You know, that's the big argument, of course, against it is that it's just too expensive, and we have a lot of urgent things to do here on Earth, like spend hundreds of billions of dollars on Iraq.
There are space elevators on the drawing board, and they've been around for ages.
And they are a viable concept, and we are now developing materials that would make them a viable method to literally hoist something off the planet with a cable.
And there are numerous designs that can do this.
And I don't know if any of the listeners are familiar with such things as rotavators or sky hooks, but there are probably a half dozen really good designs that could be carried out given slight advances in our material technologies.
Well, I've had a couple of guys discussing nanotechnology who said that there is some technology in the nano world now that would apply to perhaps building a real space elevator.
That's probably fullerene whiskers, which have a higher tensile strength than diamond.
And if we could learn to bulk manufacture that and build cables out of it, a length of cable made out of fullerene whisker, which is a carbon product, would be able to support a 3,400 kilometer-long length of itself before breaking.
Well, that actually is not as difficult as many have led us to believe.
And over the last couple of years, in fact, investigations have led to the conclusion that it may be more feasible, technically right now, to use infrared laser light rather than microwave transmission.
Now, either one could be used, and microwave is a wonderful venue because it's low-tech and it's easy to do, but we may end up using infrared lasers instead.
And as long as our collectors are aligned in such a way that it cannot lay until it's aimed at the collector, then you've got an absolutely safe system.
And the moving of the focus of your beam does not become an issue at that point.
So if you make it so that your receiver on the ground is one half of the circuit, then you can't just aim the other half somewhere because it won't work.
It just depends on the size and density of your beam.
If we use a solar power station, and this is a typical figure, the size of Manhattan Island, that's about 24 square miles, if I'm not mistaken.
The sunlight falling on something that size is equivalent to something like 85 billion watts or 85 gigawatts.
And if we were to convert that from sunlight into electricity and we got, let's say, 70% of that as useful electrical power, now we're talking almost 60 gigawatts of power.
And that could be beamed down in the form of laser light and collected to the ground.
And if ultimately at the end, we only got 80% of that recovered, and that's a high figure.
It may be considerably less, we'd be talking about 47 gigawatts.
From coast to coast and worldwide on the internet, this is Coast to Coast A.M. with Art Bell and Sir Charles Schultz III, and we're discussing right now the concept of collecting energy in space and then beaming it back to Earth as a viable, profitable, even important thing to do in this current day and age.
And when you think about it, a lot of times it seems like the government wants to keep the realm of space all to itself, doesn't it?
Well, we don't talk about it as the reason, but we all know it's the reason.
I mean, it's like the biggest thing the world is facing right now is the energy problem.
And so, Sir Charles, if it would be a profitable venture and it would be so friendly to the Earth, and it's something we actually have the technological capability to do right now, and I'm talking about the power plants in space, then why the heck aren't we doing it?
And in a 1997 statement by John C. Mankins, who is the director of the Advanced Concepts Study Office of Space Flight with NASA, what he basically boiled it down to was people would be willing to do it if it was under $1 billion to get it started and operating.
And that's what we really come to, the cost.
I feel that we'd probably be a lot closer to the $3 billion line right now today with the economics the way they are.
And if it really became a priority for our nation for power, we could find the money for it, and we'd find it fast.
I mean, if you look at the defense budget in 93, it was estimated at $281 billion.
And for 2005, the defense budget was estimated at about $347 billion.
Some people put it much higher.
But if you just took $5 billion of that, that's only 1.4%.
Unless you want to imagine, as many people do, that they want to pump the last little bit of oil supporting the current infrastructure for its refinement and distribution and profitably do it and not do this space thing or whatever other energy might come along until they've squeezed the last drop of profit out of oil.
Well, a wise leadership would see to it that it dovetailed with the development of another resource, such as solar in orbit.
And you have to consider the concept is really, it's not a new concept.
I mean, it was invented back in 1968 by Dr. Peter Glacier.
And since then, it's been touted as a solution to our problems many times, including by Gerard K. O'Neill from Princeton University, who developed the mass driver, which is an electromagnetic catapult of sorts that launches things into space without the use of rockets.
Now, it only works on places like the moon without an atmosphere.
But they would allow you to launch payloads without the use of rocket engines and to get things into space very cheaply and powered strictly by electricity.
And this is an integral part of manufacturing orbital solar power stations.
Well, imagine if your collectors, and we're not talking about using solar cells as collectors, which are fragile and have a limited lifespan and efficiency.
And so our reaction fluid, our water, would be one of our points that we'd have to address.
It is possible that there may be, and this is just an outside shot, there may be natural gas deposits on the moon.
And if so, we could manufacture our water from them directly because they contain hydrogen.
There also are deposits of polar lunar ice which we could use as a starter.
But realize, once we got this thing started, there's no reason why we couldn't use this same orbital power technology to provide power to lift payloads off the Earth, such as water as a working fluid, or to launch missions to recover water ice from other places in our solar system to fuel them.
I've talked to a number of scientists, and I've had people call and say, you know, every time we launch, for example, the shuttle, we do some sort of damage in the upper atmosphere.
And I always thought, oh, pooey, it couldn't be enough damage to really be meaningful.
Well, there's still a lot of debate about that, but understand that the engines, like the solid rocket boosters on the shuttle, have aluminum and a rubber-based sort of material and perchlorates.
And the aluminum and the chlorine in it is what people are concerned about.
If we made a lot of launches, obviously there would be a detrimental effect.
We don't make very many launches.
So overall, I think the effect is probably very negligible at this point.
But if we get to the point where we're launching five, six, ten missions a year, twenty missions a year, fifty missions, I would be very concerned about it.
And that's one of the major stumbling blocks at this point.
There have been many things suggested, but nobody has yet said this is what we are going to do.
There have been projects, for instance, the Shuttle C was proposed long ago, and it was never carried out.
And that was basically a carrier.
It was a heavy cargo carrier that would launch with no people on board, but just take heavy loads into orbit and leave them there.
Realize every time we launch a shuttle, we're bringing back a huge piece of hardware.
And if we were smart about it, we'd be leaving a huge piece of hardware in orbit for the cost of the launch and bringing back just the people and experiments.
I did a program with a man who thought that the external tanks at a relatively small cost in additional fuel could be, instead of dumped into the ocean or whatever, go ahead and take them up into space, and there are endless uses.
In fact, you could build a space station out of the damn things if you wanted to.
I do agree with that, except for a couple of caveats.
First of all, understand that when they separate the external tank, the pipes that run the lines, you know, the lines that run the fuel and oxidizer are about 17 inches in diameter, and they have something like 5,400 pounds of hydrogen and oxygen in them when they ditch it.
I mean, that's a lot of fuel and oxygen.
There is often also quite a bit of hydrogen and oxygen still in the tank itself.
If they were instead to build that, they could loft it into a higher orbit and stabilize it.
And so that really isn't a big issue.
It can be done.
But then the next thing is different launches don't necessarily have orbits that coincide, and so you'd have to corral these things somehow and bring them together.
So that's your first big obstacle, getting them all in the same orbit or in two or three well-defined orbits and getting them to meet up.
The second big obstacle is the foam on the outside of the tank decays badly in solar ultraviolet.
So you end up with a lot of trash in orbit, outgassing little particles of stuff, and they are all very hazardous if they strike another spacecraft at high velocity.
And so you'd need something, a coating or something that would keep that from happening.
And then the next objection is, well, once it's there, you don't just rip out the bulkhead and throw bunk beds in it.
There's a lot of work that's necessary to convert it into a useful station.
They are designing presently capsules, just like the old-time space capsules, that can carry four, five, seven people and some cargo.
And this sort of capsule could be launched on a standard Atlas IV or whatever's available and taken into orbit just like the old spacecraft were done.
And you would send up on a different launch vehicle, a space lab module or something to the space station, and this capsule would rendezvous with the station and then come back down pretty much as other capsules have done in the past.
There are also designs that include gliders that can come back in that are much smaller than the shuttle that carry basically just passengers and a small amount of supplies.
And one of the things that concerns me is I haven't seen any real proposals put forward at this point.
Now, of course, we've got our commission report, the Aldrich Commission report, which happens on June 10th at 11 a.m., and that should outline and address a lot of these issues.
It should.
We will see where it goes from there.
We have to wait until Thursday to find out what they have to say.
Well, all right, then let me leap ahead and ask you something way out on the edge.
And I know you're it's going to be interesting to ask.
And it is the following.
Having just reviewed the fact that we haven't gone back after the moon for whatever reason, we're not even building anything to replace a shuttle, and that all of this is mostly in government, not private hands, at least at the moment, the ability to go to space, I mean.
are a certain number of people out there who believe that there are artifacts possibly on the moon and artifacts on certainly Mars that would tell the world's public a story that a government doesn't want told, that there are secrets being held, that there is or was life on Mars, intelligent, large life, or something else.
I'm not really sure how I'm trying to put this to you, but there are secrets out there that they don't want the world to know about yet.
A lot of people believe this.
And with all the research you've done on Mars, do you wonder?
It's not out of the question that some other race might have visited our solar system in the past, but it would speak volumes if they had, because it would mean that they had technologies beyond what we have, far beyond perhaps, in order to go from star to star, or it would mean they were very, very patient in order to take the long journey at light speed or slower, or it would mean that they were probably machines and it didn't matter how long it took.
There are a lot of ways you can interpret it.
I won't even put my foot into the arena about whether or not there are artifacts made by other intelligences on other bodies in our solar system.
I know that the issue has been talked about extensively.
And one of the earliest people to really address it seriously was Enrico Fermi, who basically did very, very early nuclear research and got us going on the right path back in the beginning of the atomic age.
And it's called the Fermi paradox.
If a civilization were to build spacecraft and send them from system to system and begin spreading out, even if they only got there at one-tenth of the speed of light over the course of history, in just a million years or so, they would have covered the entire galaxy.
And where are they?
And we don't see any such artifacts, or at least we're not aware of them.
Maybe they are there, maybe they aren't.
I don't know.
I think we would have to do a lot more looking, serious research and studying before we'd be able to say for certain.
If they are there, it'd be a wonderful find.
It would tell us a lot.
And we would expect that such an artifact would probably be very, very old.
On the other hand, like I said, I haven't seen any evidence of anything of the sort.
Would you agree that NASA is suspiciously slow to acknowledge what appear to be finds on Mars that are extremely suggestive of lots of things that most people don't believe to be true right now?
Well, they are slow to make an acknowledgement in some cases.
But, you know, they have themselves in a precarious sort of situation.
If they were to declare that a thing were so and then found out later that it was not, they'd lose face and they'd lose funding.
And if they were to declare that a thing were not so and later it was found out not to be what they said, once again, they're going to lose face and funding.
They find themselves really between a rock and a hard place in a lot of ways.
On the other hand, a lot of the things that we have found lately, in particular the research I've been doing, it indicates clearly that the conditions on Mars, for instance, are very different from what we've been told all along.
And I expected before now to have heard some sort of positive response.
And the only response I've gotten basically has been from people who are not connected with NASA.
And they have given me verifications right and left.
As I said before, the facts are here and it will come out in the end.
And some reckoning of it has to be made.
And I don't know if that's going to be happening on the 10th with the Aldridge report or not.
I don't know if that's going to be happening later or at all.
It seems that the best way to deal with an issue that's controversial these days is to ignore it to death.
And I know that this is something that really shakes up a lot of people's fundamental beliefs about Mars.
For instance, the findings of liquid water.
But it really isn't that controversial when you come right down to it.
Because Gil Evan, who did work on the labeled release experiment on Viking and was sure that he had found signs of microbial activity on Mars back in 1975 or 76, 76, was doing some work on spacesuits in a vacuum chamber under Mars-like conditions.
And he and his son were working on a project, and they discovered that liquid water could indeed exist in that vacuum chamber under Mars-type conditions.
And what's interesting here is no amount of theory, no matter how wonderful it is, can stand up to a single empirical observation.
They could see water in the chamber at the pressures and temperatures that exist on the surface of Mars.
And now, with these pictures of the geysers and other things that I've got on my webpage, how long a duration experiment was that?
I'm not really familiar with too many of the details of it, except that they tested suits under various conditions for proposed Mars missions in the future.
I've been drifting on the sea of heartbreak Trying to get myself ashore For so long For so long Listening to the stranger stories Wondering where it all went wrong For so
long For so long This is Coast.
But hold on, hold on, hold on To what you got
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 morning when I'm straight Flowers growing on a hill Dried and
flies and taffodils Learn from us very much Look at us Look at us But do not touch Phaedra is my name D
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From coast to coast and worldwide on the internet, this is Coast to Coast AM with Art Bell.
Just before we launch, why would somebody with your background of missiles, attack helicopter systems, artificial intelligence, it seems a million miles away from Mars, you know, the kind of Richard Hoagland work on Mars.
As soon as the original lander data came in from the rover's Spirit, it got me immediately.
I had to see what they were seeing.
I had to look at the microscopic images and see.
And we're building a simulator here that would have a small rover on it that school kids can log into over the Internet and run a simulated mission.
And so there was a lot of impetus to see just exactly what they were doing and how, because we wanted it as realistic as possible.
Well, February 15th was the day when I really knew from the opportunity data that these were fossils.
The 14th I was almost convinced, the 15th I knew without a shadow of a doubt.
And I recognized some of the forms that I had seen.
And a lot of the forms are not things that you'll see every day because they're extinct life forms and some of them are not the way you expect them to look in life.
A sea urchin has spines when it's alive and it's a bald little cue ball when it's dead with certain markings on it.
And so examination of these markings and further images absolutely convinced me in a very short period of time.
And not just because of what they looked like, but because they were all in context.
Every fossil we found was a marine organism.
And the information they were bringing back was that these were once watery environments.
And if you've got oceans and they go away, the salts don't necessarily go away.
You should find salts in the soils.
And indeed they did.
So this helped to confirm that this was once a marine planet.
In fact, Mars probably was covered with oceans at one point, and now it's basically a fossil planet.
And you have shown us rocks with clear fossil imprints on them.
May I ask this?
Is it possible to detect what kind of life, is there enough evidence at all from any of the fossils you've seen that you could put together and understand the nature Of the life that you're sort of viewing the history of?
Well, sure, it's not so different from what happened to our world in times past.
And the latest findings support that even more clearly.
If you imagine our world 300 or 400 million years ago, before there were dinosaurs and before there were any really complicated organisms out there, you'd get a pretty good snapshot of what Mars was like.
The most complex things we found fossils of so far have been shark's teeth and some squid.
So as far as development of intelligence goes, there's no reason to bet on that just yet.
The squids and sharks aren't very smart.
But we do have things that advanced, and that happened roughly 410 million years ago on the Earth.
Well, if you've got that much, that's still incredible.
I mean, that means that there was early life on Mars, just like there was early life here.
That's exactly what it means.
Now, that means really a lot more, Sir Charles, because that news would rock lots and lots of very religious boats out there who think that the life created here on earth is unique, singular.
There is no life anywhere else.
God only did it here because it says that in the Bible, virtually.
And that's what makes it so interesting, because people are going to be driven to find out the truth or to completely run and scream and turn their back on it.
I mean, there's basically not much middle ground if it comes to something that challenges your most fundamental beliefs.
Well, it's interesting that you mentioned that because in many cultures in the world, in many religions, there is a firm belief that there are beings on other worlds.
So, you know, it really depends on who you talk to and what their beliefs are.
And clearly, you can see what it is.
It doesn't take a rocket scientist, so to speak, to know that we're looking at seashells and squids and stromatolites.
And that's very, very interesting.
And the stromatolites are a point I need to touch on for just a moment.
Spirit Rover, which doesn't seem to have turned a lot of fossils in, has a couple of really big hits.
And one of them is the stromatolite organism.
And a stromatolite basically is an extremely primitive thing.
It's the first multicellular organism that lived on the Earth, for instance.
And it basically is a colony of blue-green algae.
The difference is it grows in layers like the leaves of a cabbage, and it precipitates calcium carbonate in itself.
It grows a shell more or less, just like a seashell.
And so the remains of it look like concentric eggshells nested in each other.
And I've got some extremely clear, full-color, and three-dimensional images of the stromatolites that Spirit found on my webpage.
And I also have images of terrestrial ones as well.
Now, what's interesting about it is this.
Many stromatolites lived in hypersaline or very, very salty brines.
And we know that the last water on Mars was hypersaline.
Also, the organism, the stromatolite, was often known to produce, and some of them today do, to produce a natural sunblocker that shields them from ultraviolet light.
And we expect that Mars really didn't have an ozone layer, so this would have been a necessity.
So this is an organism that could very easily have survived under those conditions.
And we have multiple copies of these things all over the spirit site.
And I showed it to a number of people who knew fossils and a number of people who didn't know fossils and a number of people who were just run-of-the-mill people.
And almost universally, I came up with the same answers that I had arrived at myself.
And so I had the ability to bounce this off other people and see what they saw.
And it was confirmed.
So number one, right there, I know I'm not the only one seeing this.
And that's a very important thing because, you know, it's very easy for people to fall into the trap of thinking they're seeing something.
They lived typically between about 500 million and 200 million years ago on the Earth, and they became extinct.
There were over 10,000 different species of trilobite, and they were a segmented animal with three lobes: a central lobe and a left and a right lobe.
They were considered like the butterflies of the sea.
They were everywhere, and their sizes were from as small as a pinhead to as large as a couple of feet long.
They were basically arthropods, jointed-leg animals like a lobster or an insect, only much more primitive.
And it's interesting because the forms on Mars, while somewhat different from terrestrial trilobites, and that's to be expected, are close enough that we can recognize them as being such.
And the first sign is they have segments like a roach or an insect.
And you can see the individual segments on some of them.
And second, they have a head in many cases that's called the pygidium.
And it is a, oh, it's different shapes.
Many of them are rounded, somewhat horseshoe-shaped or lozenge-shaped, but they have each a unique, and for each species, different shape of head.
Many of them could roll up into a ball, just like a pill bug or a roly-poly that any kid is familiar with.
And so in times of stress, that was how they would respond.
Now, the bulk of the trilobites that we have found have been rolled up, as if they were subjected to some sort of a shock, such as being dumped out of the water or something.
And some of them are clearly simply plastered on the surface of a rock and then worn away.
And so it really depends on how familiar you are with a lot of these things, because some of them are difficult to see unless you are familiar with fossils.
They're fairly common, actually, and most of them are very small.
We found a couple of larger ones that would measure probably half an inch to a couple of inches in length.
And the most prominent one is located on Bounce Rock.
And many people have seen it and said, wow, that looks like a trilobite.
Well, the interesting thing was NASA announced that Bounce Rock is an igneous rock, a volcanic rock.
And so immediately they said, oh, well, then it can't be a trilobite because that's an igneous rock.
And you can't make a fossil in molten lava.
Well, I take issue with this, and that is we've been told that it's an igneous rock based on the readings of their instrumentation.
But my theory is, and it's very simple and it has gained support as well, bounced rock is not necessarily an igneous rock.
There's two mechanisms that can put a fossil on that thing very simply.
Number one, the organism and the mud and the water it lived in could be splashed over an igneous rock and dry on it in the near vacuum.
They could fossilize or mummify in the near vacuum.
And they would be sedimentary while the core of the rock itself would be igneous.
Then when you go to grind it with a rock abrasion tool, you're taking off the sediment and you're reading the interior of the rock, which might be igneous.
And here is the other method.
The rock itself could have been numerous small particles like sand that were igneous in origin, deposited by water as a sediment, and then show up as a whole rock again.
When you read the mineral content, it looks like an igneous rock.
And the interesting thing about this is that after I had put this on my webpage and stated my theory about it, there is a scientist by the name of Professor Phil Christensen of Arizona State University, and he is the head, the lead scientist for the Mini TES, or the Thermal Emission Spectroscopy Machine that they use to look at the emissions and identify minerals.
And this article that was published in the BBC News on May 18th supported my contention, and it is, and this is a quote from it, he said, the most exciting is the basalt signature in the layered cliffs, and he's talking about Endurance Crater.
And he says, basalt is volcanic in origin, but the thinness of the layers visible in the cliffs suggests that they were in place some way other than as flow of lavas.
Our working hypothesis is that volcanically erupted rock was broken down into particles that were then transported and redeposited by wind or by liquid water.
In other words, the igneous rock was broken down into little pieces, carried by wind or water, deposited as a sedimentary rock.
And their instrument cannot tell the difference between an igneous rock or millions of little pieces of igneous rock laid down in a layer.
They still read as an igneous rock.
So the readings that bounce rock is igneous can be absolutely false.
It's a matter of interpretation of the instruments.
Absolutely, because we now have found liquid water on the surface of Mars, and we know that there was life in the past, and I absolutely doubt that everything died.
And I do feel that there are still live organisms on the planet.
After all, we know there's liquid water there now, and you can see the pictures of the geysers on my site as well.
And this is the thing.
Anybody who's ever been to Yellowstone knows what a geyser or a fumarol looks like.
And you can look at the images, and you can see what is very clearly a wash area.
I understand you live in the desert, right?
And you've seen wash areas where it's rained and it's flashed over and it's sorted the materials and left the wash behind.
And we can see these in many of the images very clearly.
We also have what appears to be ice in the bottom of Endurance Crater.
And that makes perfect sense if you assume that whatever impact created Endurance Crater broke open the aquifer.
The water table flooded in and froze the ice block in the bottom of the crater.
I feel that the risks involved are great enough that we shouldn't take the risk.
If we want to study this hardware, if we want to study anything we bring back, if we want to study organisms from Mars, there are two ways we can do it in safety.
Number one is to put a base on the moon and do it there, where it's in utter isolation.
And the other is to send a biological laboratory to Mars, much like the rover, but far more advanced with the ability to work with biological materials and do some sort of an assay on them.
By the way, everybody, we will be opening phone lines into the next hour, or as the next hour begins.
And you can ask about anything, whether it be artificial intelligence, this man is an expert in so much, or robots, or robotic warfare, or ways to put power or collect power, I should say, in space and beam it back to Earth, or any of the great territory that we have covered.
I would appreciate those questions.
In the meantime, we are talking about Mars.
And if you want to satisfy yourself that there is life on Mars, go right ahead.
The fossils should do it for the average person, would be my opinion.
And I really am curious, Sir Charles.
You know, it's a huge risk, apparently, because I hear so much caution in your voice and so much dedication to the probability that these things are dangerous.
I'm curious about why they'd be so potentially dangerous.
Is there some kind of special genetic concern about something from Mars or a concern that a virus would land that we couldn't possibly battle?
The things that do concern me are organisms like funguses or slime molds.
And the reason they concern me is because we have an organism that, if it is alive, it has survived in a near vacuum for millions of years, and it doesn't seem to kill it.
And hard ultraviolet from the sun is striking it, and that doesn't seem to kill it.
It seems to have a defense for that.
And it lives in temperatures of extreme cold and conditions of extreme salt.
So if that doesn't kill an organism and it reaches the Earth, it might love this place.
The conditions here might be ideal for it, and it might flourish.
And we have a very tough time with many fungus organisms here on Earth, such as mildew.
And, you know, I thought about that when it re-entered and landed and popped into the ocean.
Wow, this is something that they speculate it might have come from the sweat of the astronauts, cosmonauts, while they were up there or any number of things, but it was something new.
We have no idea what a Martian organism would be like or what conditions it would like.
It may be that as soon as it hits the air, it'll shrivel up and die.
We don't know.
But we cannot take the chance because it may find this a very wonderful place to be, and it may live very well on the Earth.
And I wouldn't want to take the risk.
I certainly wouldn't want to take my family through, let's say, a smallpox ward 200 years ago or through the bubonic plague in the Dark Ages.
I mean, the exposure to those simple organisms wiped out millions of people, and now we're talking about something entirely new, and we don't know anything about it.
You know, if something like that were to break out on the Earth, and once again, it's sheer speculation, but we dare not take the risk at this point.
There's a lot of things that I would never open and look in.
And, you know, and I'm not talking about just the bachelor's refrigerator, but we have a whole planet here of unknowns, and we have to proceed very cautiously.
We've had some near scares just in some of the biological research areas.
And just recently, a woman working in Russia was working on an Ebola strain, and she pricked her finger through the suit, and she was dead within a matter of days.
And they know what they were dealing with, and the risks were very high, but they feel that the research may have payoffs, and so they continue with the research.
So they take the risk.
But Ebola is something we know, and it's something that we have at least some methods of dealing with.
We try to keep it contained.
Here, once again, we're talking about an organism from another world, but maybe radically different from anything we've ever seen before.
And I do feel that it's such a great risk that we need to be extremely careful about how we proceed next.
And, you know, access to something like Mars is the only thing that keeps us in isolation from it right now.
And once we bridge that gap, it's a no-turning back situation.
You know, once we've inoculated the planet with this culture, there's no way to turn back.
Well, and that's another thing to be concerned about.
I expect as soon as NASA makes their admission that, yes, there is life on Mars, there was life, there is water, and there's fossils, as soon as that happens, you can expect that some sort of green movement will pop up that says, well, you know, we don't want to mess with Mars.
We'll destroy its environment.
And that's to be expected.
People will, and, you know, to a degree, rightly so, be concerned about preserving the Martian Environment.
And the reason is everybody had always been told, well, the place is bone-dry, desert, vacuum.
Nothing could ever possibly live there.
And so there was no real serious consideration of the ramifications of sending an earthly organism to Mars.
It's probably covered with earthly bacteria that just managed to survive in the soil.
We've discovered probably a dozen new strains within the last year that could live on Mars that are capable of consuming methane and can live in those cold conditions.
I know the issue has been brought up and it's been labored over quite a bit.
And in fact, there was great concern about the Cassini space probe and the Huygens space probe, which is being sent to Saturn.
In fact, it's there now.
What they're going to be doing is dropping a space probe on Titan to explore it.
The concerns are that with something the size of a spacecraft, the ability to sterilize it becomes very difficult.
And doing so often produces conditions that can destroy the electronics or the sensors in the spacecraft.
And so it becomes impractical.
And so once again, you're at a point of trade-off.
What is it going to cost?
What do we think the damage could be?
And somebody somewhere makes a decision, and with a stroke of a pen, it's a done deal.
One of the things that we must very carefully consider is a mission to Europa, because there is a great deal of speculation about whether there could be life under the ice of Europa.
Now, Europa, of course, as you know, is a moon of Jupiter.
And in fact, this is one of the things that Richard Hoagland had mentioned, that, and as I understand it, he was the one who first theorized seriously that there could be life inside Europa.
And it may be that at that point, a book would be the way to spread the information more fully and perhaps be able to finance a move to get something done.
But I'm seriously not in this to make any money.
My research, as you know, is funded already.
So, you know, anything that comes of this is purely from the intellectual standpoint.
I'm simply delivering the facts, and, you know, people may not like it, but don't kill the messenger.
I get a grant from Dr. Nelson Ying, who is the Baron of Balquain, and he underwrites all of my research, and it's a long-term grant, and he takes care of all the expenses involved.
So I'm basically free to do this and not worry about the day-to-day making a living sort of thing.
You have to be able to see that there's some sort of eventual benefit or something's got to come out of it for the good overall, either a profit or a good for humanity or something.
And his big push is for education and benefits for the human race.
It could have happened either way, like a flip of a coin.
But it's interesting to see that Martian seashells are backwards.
It doesn't probably mean anything, but it's just an interesting observation.
Another interesting thing, people have often wondered where the oceans came from.
Where did all the water come from?
And there have been theories of all comets hit the Earth and so forth.
I believe I've found the answer to that question, and it has to do with the formation of the planets.
And I know you're familiar with Dr. Thomas Gold and the Gold hypothesis that petroleum formed due to methane inside the bulk of the Earth when the planet formed.
Well, I've done the numbers and the chemistry on it, and it turns out that as the petroleum is forming, you evolve hydrogen, which reacts with the molten rock and produces water vapor.
So the process that produces petroleum and natural gas also produces water.
And if the reduction, chemical reduction continues from very high temperatures, you even get deposits of carbon, from which you can get graphite or diamond, depending on how it's formed.
And you also can generate large quantities of carbon dioxide.
So the gold hypothesis, which is an excellent piece of work, shows also the origins of our atmosphere, which had large amounts of carbon dioxide, and our water in our oceans.
If as little as one part per thousand methane existed in the original material, we'd have 10 times the bulk of water we have in the oceans, if only a fourth of the hydrogen it reacted.
So it explains all the water, and it shows that it does come up out of the mantle of the earth and is shot into the air with volcanoes, and that's where our oceans came from.
And it stands to reason that both Venus and Mars would have had the same sorts of circumstances.
And that's not enough to hold an atmosphere for a significant period of time.
Number two, its volcanic activity ended very early because it has a small core.
And volcanoes replace our atmosphere and to some degree our oceans these days.
And so without that, there was no way to replace the missing air.
And the third process, which I've arrived at recently, is that the organisms in the ocean themselves, in forming their shells out of calcium carbonate, consumed the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and thinned it out.
In a sense, they actually led to the destruction of their own environment.
One fellow who sent me some fossil sand dollars and a wonderful book called Florida's Fossils, he's a Jacksonville, Florida fellow by the name of Pete Towner, and I have to thank him for the book and the fossils.
They are excellent references, and I'm going to be posting images of those to use in comparison on my site as well.
Realistically, I do expect to hear something by the time the Aldrich Commission makes its report.
And if not, then no more than two to three months.
Because we've reached a point now where enough people have seen the information, and it's very clear, and enough people know the facts at this point, that NASA's got to say something.
It is we're about to go to the phone with Sir Charles Schultz, and he's a brilliant fellow.
Those are the phone numbers.
If you have questions about any of his areas of interest, you know, artificial intelligence, robotics, life on Mars, maybe even weapon systems, hell, you can ask.
You never know.
He probably won't give you the answer, but you can ask.
He's worked in all of these areas.
Space travel, any of these areas.
So if you have questions in any of them, pick up the phone and join us.
Okay, first of all, most of the heat inside our planet reaches the outside through something called convection currents.
The mantle is like magma.
It's a plastic or flexible state of rock.
And as the heat heats the magma, it rises in plumes just like boiling water does in a pot, only very, very slowly.
So the radiator system for our planet is really molten rock or magma.
The bulk of oil in comparison to the bulk of rock is so extremely tiny that it wouldn't have any significant effect on the heating overall or the cooling.
And as for your second question, how much oil is there?
There are people who talk peak oil, and they say that in terms of what we can recover, we may already have peaked, and we're producing as much as we can produce, which would be, if true, extremely worrisome.
And my question to Mr. Schultz is, you were talking earlier about a possible organism coming from Mars, would you find that more dangerous that coming from Mars or the human race dabbling in artificial intelligence and possibly making another competitive sentient life form here on Earth?
You know, it doesn't matter how dangerous something is if it kills you.
If it's an organism or if it's another person with a gun or if it's a wild rogue machine, I can't evaluate the dangers of a rogue artificial intelligence or one that is out to kill all humans because we don't yet have any examples to work with, but I do know that it could be something very difficult to stop.
I would far rather have to deal with an organism than a machine because a machine can transport its program somewhere else and you cannot see it.
And it can happen by wire or at the speed of light by radio waves.
I don't have a great deal of concern because I think as it stands right now, our entry into the artificial intelligence field is still very tentative at this point.
We have so many pieces that we have to create to put in place to make a working artificial intelligence of any use at this point.
Consider how many reflexes there are in the human body.
Consider how many drives and goals we're wired with genetically and those that we learn.
And you're just scratching the surface because those are the only ones you can think of right off the bat.
The question I had was about the alternate energy source from space.
I was wondering, maybe one of the reasons that we're not dabbing into this as much as we should is, especially with the current administration here in the U.S., high-level government officials might just be making too much profit from the current fossil fuel and nuclear energy systems to even consider alternatives.
Well, I wouldn't say that it's too conspiratorial because there are a lot of people involved in money and they want to keep things the way they are.
And so you have to imagine that human will being what it is, people are going to try and make as much as they can off of it.
The other thing is you know that the energy is there.
It's how many people are willing to put the money up to get it started.
And we're talking billions of dollars, you know, like building a few nuclear plants.
But then there's another thing to consider.
And it's not just really the economics of it.
When you start bringing energy in from other places, you run the risk of making such huge social changes at a very fundamental level that you're not really sure how the system is going to perform.
Is it going to make it all come down like a house of cards?
I think a lot of people are concerned about that.
And finally, the UN Space Treaty.
That is the one big stumbling block.
We would have to break the UN Space Treaty in order to develop these energy resources.
I think that it was a bargain we made to keep the peace with the then Soviet Union.
At the time, there were concerns that if we went uncontrolled into growth in space, that there would be a huge imbalance in global power.
And I don't know if that's true, but it sounds at least plausible that we would be willing to bargain such a thing away at the time, because we didn't really see at that moment that it was economically viable.
Back in January, I told Art that I was sure that I was buzzed by one of these bird-sized UAVs.
And I was just wondering if you knew how far the technology has come along in that type of thing and whether it is possible that I could have seen something like that.
And understand that anyone who understands RC or remote control airplanes, RC hobbyists of any type with a little bit of computer or electronic skill could put one together.
It's not something that costs thousands and thousands of dollars.
For probably $400 or $500, you could put a UAV together.
And depending on your devotion and your knowledge of the technology, you could make it do pretty much anything you want.
So it doesn't surprise me in the least.
I'm sure there are UAVs of all types around under research and even under the hobbyists.
And, of course, with our constellation of satellites, we can control anything like that, just sort of joystick from thousands of miles away if need be.
In fact, I've taught robotics classes to children in middle school and had them producing machines with the ability to explore and send infrared data and work under command by remote.
I would imagine that almost all of them are either misidentification Of natural or hardware that we have.
And it's a very common thing these days.
There's such an ingrained belief in UFOs and in aliens that anything you see that's unusual, it's very easy to jump the gun and say, hey, this has got to be an alien craft or something.
And I would imagine 99% of it could be very easily explained as small remote vehicles or radio control vehicles, or even one of these remote-controlled helium balloons that they've got on the market now.
You can go to the Sharper Image and buy one, and they're amazingly weird-looking, and you can fly them around under remote control on a still day, and they look exactly like a UFO.
I do wonder, and personally, I reserve my judgment on it because I don't have enough information either way, but I will admit that it certainly is possible.
My question is, I have a degree in appropriate technologies like solar power and all that stuff.
And I was very fascinated by the talk of Sir Charles' talk of collecting solar power from outer space and transmitting it down.
I just recently started studying really heavily into Tesla and Tesla's theories on transmission and stuff like that.
And I mean, we were still using those transmission technologies to this day, and we're talking early 1900s.
But I was wondering, you were talking infrared laser and a couple other ways to get it down from outer space.
The collectors up there, then you would have, so you'd have your solar collector, then you would have some kind of transmitter that would transmit it down to what kind of station down below?
Would something that a beam width that small, a footprint that small on the ground, be realistic in terms of control of the spacecraft, what we can do today, for example, we control spacecraft within Windows, right?
That's correct.
And so I assume there'd be some technology for focusing it even as the satellite moved, right?
Some people who are into astronomy may know what an active mirror is.
You have a mirror or a light collector that has dozens or hundreds of tiny actuators under it that dynamically adjust the shape of the mirror to perfect the focus.
And in this case, we would be using a number of mirrors to reflect and aim each of the individual laser beams.
You would actually have many hundreds or thousands of lasers working in parallel, and all of their beams would be focused on your different receiving stations.
And each of them would be locked onto the station with a specific fingerprint or signature so it couldn't wander off target.
If you would simply like to satisfy yourself, and it's a very non-trivial question, that there is in fact life on Mars, that there is life on Mars, then I would say a review of the material contained in the websites that we have linked right now on the site to Sir Charles' websites, will do the trick for you.
So it's really worth the effort to get out of bed, trudge over to the computer, go to coasttocoastam.com, and sort of make your way through some of the exhibited fossils.
And I think you'll decide very quickly, wow, that is life.
Sir Charles Joel in Alberta, Canada asks the following, I've looked at your guest's pictures on his website, and something that's bothering me about his geyser images, there's no scale there.
For all we know, they could be microscopic features.
Well, I haven't found any evidence of anything more advanced than marine life at this time.
And considering the types of conditions that existed at that time, I don't imagine that very much ever would have gotten out of the oceans because the air was extremely thin then.
It's a huge planet and we've only looked at a couple of very small samples.
There could be immense fossils, but we haven't turned them up yet.
And it's going to take a lot of exploring to find them.
If you were to look, let's say, at the beach, you'd probably find shells and sharks' teeth, but you wouldn't find a whale unless you actually went where the whales would be.
Sir Charles, you mentioned earlier the lunar-based magnetic launching system.
Yes.
I was wondering, I was thinking perhaps that that system might be expanded upon in that it could become more than just a launching system.
Let's say you had on the dark side of the moon, in the very center of it, your initial launching platform where you would have similar polarity magnets repelling each other away from each other.
But then at a distance straight up, perhaps at the vertex where the Earth's gravity and the moon's gravity cut out altogether, you would have more or less a receiving secondary, not a stop like a subway stop, but the opposite of a stop, an acceleration point.
In other words, you want to stack a number of accelerators together.
unidentified
Yeah, a ring, more or less, like a giant, one of those, like in the 50s when they envisioned what space bases would look like.
They had these ring satellites and things like that with like outriggers on it, I guess, east, west, north, and south.
Could be rotating, could change the direction of rotation when the ship went through it.
You'd have to shut the magnetism off when the ship approached the point at which it would go through, but then you'd turn it back on again, you know, pushing it from the moon, pulling it towards the secondary receptor, and then once it goes through, likening the polarity once again and essentially kicking it in the behind and sending it further and further and faster and faster.
There'd be a major drawback to that, and that is the station that you had in orbit above the moon or located above the moon would move every time it pushed something, action and reaction.
So if you used it to thrust something, you would have to find some way of keeping that station that was doing the thrusting in place.
And then you'd need another system to do that.
So you're really best off by putting a series of linear launch rings or magnetic rings anchored to the moon to fire the device out into space.
It's a nice idea, but you're not going to gain anything by having a free-floating station doing it unless you're willing to keep moving that station back to where it belongs.
Well, we haven't any chance of getting anywhere near a black hole at this point unless we make one, and they're trying that in some of the accelerator experiments now.
Any black hole that we know of is many, many light years away.
So before we could even begin thinking about such a system, we'd have to find a way to get there first.
Believe it or not, the lifetime of such a tiny black hole would be so short that it would not have a chance of swallowing enough mass to become larger.
A black hole can radiate away its own mass, and it's called Hawking radiation.
That's a name for Stephen Hawking, of course.
And in doing so, it produces some very specific signatures.
But the consequence of it is the smaller the hole is, the more violently it flies apart.
The more violently it destroys itself.
The black holes that they are making are as small as they can possibly be and still be a black hole.
One time I heard that there is a large circular escarpment on one side of Mars.
That's like a crater.
Do you think a large asteroid bashed away a big chunk of Mars and farmed the 10-mile diameter moon Phobos, which orbits 3,700 miles above the surface one time every 7 hours and 39 minutes?
I think that Phobos is a captured asteroid and that other asteroids have struck the surface.
There's no doubt that asteroids and meteors have struck Mars in the past and left all the cratering that we see.
We see a record of that on our own moon and in some places even on our Earth.
The only difference is on the Earth, erosion has erased most of these signs.
In the Moon, that erosion doesn't occur.
Mars has very little erosion compared to the Earth, and so many of its craters and basins that have been created by impacts are still very visible today.
I have a very strange kind of question, but I'm going to ask it anyway.
And that question is, outside of atmospheric or environmental destruction, do we have the technology to so destabilize our planet as to lead to its destruction?
And I guess I'm saying by somehow affecting its orbit, tearing it apart, making it blow up?
And the answer is we would select a frequency of light that passes easily through our atmosphere to minimize the interaction.
So that overall, let me give you an example.
Did you know that the light reflected from the full moon, which is sunlight, raises the temperature of the atmosphere about one hundredth of one degree centigrade?
The energy that we would transfer from these microwave stations would be about on that order of magnitude because we'd pick a frequency that the atmosphere is transparent to at that.
But I think that one of the problems is not that the technologies themselves are misunderstood, because most all of this is very well known and characterized already.
I think the big issue is integrating all of it into one whole package.
And it takes multidisciplinary people to do that.
And there are very few people who step very far out of their discipline or have two or three disciplines that they're very comfortable in.
And so it makes it difficult.
It's like a committee designing a hat rack or something.
And I'm always behind the curve, but I'm running as fast as I can.
So I don't imagine I'm going to run out of good material for quite a while yet, some number of months.
However, if there is no response made at this point, I think it may be prudent for me to put packages of this information and all the linkages and references together and perhaps send them to some congressmen to see if we can get some interest up, to get some sort of a response.