Art Bell welcomes Prof. Bart Kosko, USC’s neural networks expert, to debate terrorism risks after Kosko’s op-ed dismissed overblown threats, citing 1,000 annual deaths vs. 40,000 highway fatalities and Bush-era counterterrorism spending. He proposes a "tit-for-tat" strategy—targeting terrorist camps—but notes Israel’s limited global influence. Shifting to nanotech, Kosko warns of engineered viruses (like historical Native American plagues) or "nano-garbage" contaminating water supplies, while Bell questions why U.S. recycling lags despite toxic e-waste risks. Kosko also explores brain-machine interfaces, including Air Force thought-controlled weapons and USC’s hippocampus chips, framing consciousness as mere software. The episode ends with Bell teasing Alper’s segment on "The God part of the brain," linking neuroscience to existential debates. [Automatically generated summary]
And the great American Southwest Amitabh, good evening, good morning, good afternoon, wherever you may be in the world's Plymouth time zones.
I'm our development.
This program covers all of them.
Coast to coast a.m.
And it's great to be back.
In case you were wondering why I was not here last week and you heard instead replays of former triumphs, answer is, well, I went to the dentist on Tuesday of that week thinking, well, Tuesday, even though it's for a root canal, yeah, that's right, a root canal will be, you know, just fine in terms of getting me back in action by Saturday.
But following the new canal, I got a temperature, and it lasted for quite a number of days right on through the weekend.
Hot, cold, hot, cold, hot, cold, shivering.
You know, not mentally fit to be on the radio.
God knows what I might have said.
So that's where I was.
That's why.
Looking briefly at the world, never a pleasant task.
A Baghdad, Iraq, story one.
Suicide car bombs struck Iraqi police and Kurdish militiamen in Baghdad and northern Iraq on Saturday, killed at least 16, wounding dozens, and again demonstrating the lethal reach of Iraq's insurgency just weeks ahead of crucial elections.
Do you think they will pull off the elections?
They've been saying that even imperfect elections in Iraq are better than none at all.
In other words, even though not all can vote, it's better than nothing.
Do you think that's true?
Maybe.
A former military spokesman in Iraq said on Saturday that new pictures, new ones, apparently showing abuse of Iraqi prisoners were the acts of an isolated few, but will be used by some to try and tarnish the entire U.S. military.
You know, I'm sure that there were instances where we didn't treat Iraqi prisoners totally humanely, or al-Qaeda totally humanely.
But this is, after all, a war, right?
And I know all about the Geneva Conventions, but in war, in truth, not everything always follows the rule book.
I mean, I guess that's all I'll say about that.
French police misplace explosives on jet.
Misplace.
Police at Paris's top airport lost track of a passenger's bag in which apparently plastic explosives were placed to train bomb-sniffing dogs, but it looks like the bag might have gotten on any of about 90 flights from Charles de Gaulle.
So they make a bomb to do a test and lose it.
Like everybody else's luggage.
Great.
Young people are now the savviest of the tech savvy, as likely to demand a speedy broadband connection as to download music onto an iPod or upload digital photos to their websites.
The Internet has shaped the way they work, relax, and even date.
It's created a different notion of community for them and new avenues for expression that are at best liberating and fun, but that can also become a forum for pettiness and occasionally criminal exploitation.
I give you the Nigerian letters.
You know, I get no less than, I don't know, 30 or 40 Nigerian things a day.
Really, that many.
My email addresses have been public for a very long time.
And so, you know, one time I began answering a Nigerian letter and corresponding with them just for fun.
You can try that.
You've got to be careful, but you can toy with them as they toy with you.
A woman's effort to, this is on the regular news now, we're not even to the unusual news, folks.
This is on the regular news five-minute drop.
A woman's effort to assuage her six-year-old son's fears of his grandfather's ghost by selling it on eBay has drawn more than 34 bids now with a top offer of $78.
Mary Anderson said she placed her father's ghost on the online auction site after her son Colin said that he, Colin, that he was afraid the ghost would return someday.
Anderson said Colin has avoided going anywhere in the house alone since his grandfather died last year.
So mom's solution is to auction off the ghost.
Health, and this really should have been the top story, but I held it.
Health and Human Services Secretary Tommy Thompson resigned Friday.
And as he did so, he warned of a potential global outbreak of the flu and health-related terror attacks along with that.
Quoting here, quoting as he retired, he said, why do they always say, you know, like Eisenhower, beware of the military-industrial complex?
That's as he was going out the door, right?
They all do this as they're going out the door.
Anyway, Thompson going out the door Said, quote, for the life of me, I can't understand why the terrorists have not attacked our food supply because it's so easy to do, end quote.
Thompson, the eighth member of Bush's 15-person cabinet, to turn in papers and apparently have them accepted, probably with a not-so-a genuine look of disappointment by the president.
I said he tried to leave office a year ago but stayed through Bush's re-election campaign at the request of the White House.
Doesn't look good when they leave, you know, before the president is re-elected.
But afterward, oh, give me them papers.
We'll be back with the rest of the news, as Paul would say, in a moment.
unidentified
We'll be back with the rest of the news, as Paul would say, in a moment.
But I've been pretty fortunate in looking at things in a wider scale and detecting that something is wrong.
For example, the weather and the melting of the poles, both north and south.
I mean, 40% of the north pole ice is all gone.
And, you know, the south is calving away, and they're worried about the Ross Ice Shelf and a lot of, you know, that determines the world's climate.
So I'm taking it at this point that I'm probably right about that changing things.
And so this is important.
What I'm going to tell you right now, I think, is important.
Bearing in mind, it comes only from a talk show host.
I am a ham operator.
I use the shortwave bands, and I'm telling you, there's something wrong with the ionosphere.
That's the layer around the Earth that allows us at various layers, actually, it breaks down into various layers, to bounce radio signals off the ionosphere and back down again, right?
Well, there's something wrong with it.
For two months now, and in my memory, there's no precedent for that, all of what we know as short skip on the low bands, low frequencies, just above the broadcast band, really, in fact, some cases on some nights affecting the broadcast band, so many of you will have noticed the stations you normally hear, 50, 100, 200, 300 miles away.
They're not there.
The reason for that is the ionosphere is acting very oddly.
Now, you know, in the bigger scheme of things, man has not been tracking what the ionosphere does for that many years because, you know, we haven't had radio or TV for that many years, right?
So our history with it is fairly short.
But that said, what's going on right now with the ionosphere is really weird, really weird.
I've contacted a couple of specialists, you know, retired NOAA people, people who can say what they feel and not be afraid of the government, and they don't know what's going on.
They admit it's weird, unprecedented, and they just don't know.
They don't know.
Why is the short skip disappearing for such protracted periods of time?
Nobody seems to know right now.
There was, of course, and I think I mentioned it to you a couple of weeks ago, an article from NASA about the magnetosphere having cracks in it.
That's right.
I mean, we already have the ozone holes, right?
And thinning of the ozone over the even us.
Literally none at all in the Antarctic.
Very large hole at the poles.
So we all know about that.
But now trouble with the ionosphere.
Now, it seems to me the troubles in these various layers of our atmosphere indicate that something's up.
Something is perhaps not quite right, not in balance.
You can't rule out the possibility of harp toying around with things.
But I mean, everything said, you know, we don't know.
What I do know is, and I have a very strong feeling about this, something is cattywampus.
And so I'll just leave it at that.
I don't have any answers for you other than to report to you that it ain't right.
It just ain't right.
Here's an article from Reuters.
Interesting.
Global warming could lead, they now say, to a very big chill in the North Atlantic, at least if history is anything to go by.
Now, this is all new.
You see, we didn't have records, but now all of a sudden they're discovering, well, holy smokes, you know what?
This might have happened before.
They published evidence to support a popular theory that rising temperatures caused really big polar melts, polar ice, and it happened 8,200 years ago, causing all kinds of fresh water to flood into the salty North Atlantic, even perhaps causing it to freeze in places.
This would have all changed the flow of the balmy Gulf Stream, and in just a very few years, average temperatures plummeted, ushering in a deep freeze that lasted about a century or more.
Writing in the December eleventh issue of Geophysical Research Letters, Tibor Tornquist, an assistant professor of Earth and Environmental Sciences at the University of Illinois in Chicago, said he has evidence now that this did happen.
Quote, few would argue it's the most dramatic climate change in the last 10,000 years, end quote.
Tornquist said in a statement, we're now able to show the first sea level record that corresponds to that event.
Tornquist And some graduate students found the evidence along the Gulf of Mexico off the southern U.S. coast.
They found peat deposits that would have been formed under rising sea levels.
Working with researchers in the Netherlands, they dated that material to 8,200 years ago.
So, in other words, 8,200 years ago, what I think is beginning to go on right now, and that, of course, is something the scientists won't say.
They'll say, well, we don't know.
But I think I do.
I mean, when you look at the North Pole and you see 40% of the ice gone, you see the U.S. Navy planning to navigate where there had only previously been ice in our lifetimes, then I don't think it's a big reach to suggest what happened 8,200 years ago may well be occurring right now.
And then there is this headline, strange, powerful storms in the U.S. A highly unusual snowstorm blanketed southern California mountains here recently with up to three feet of snow, even dusted desert areas like, for example, right here.
At the same time, extraordinary rainfall across central, southern, and eastern Texas caused extensive flooding and was continuing at the time of this writing.
Now, that's true, and it's not getting a lot of media reports, frankly, but the situation is pretty serious.
On November 21st, 20 inches of rain fell on El Campo in southeast Texas.
20 inches of rain.
Extraordinary rainfalls also took place farther west from Austin south into Mexico.
At least one person known to have been killed in the deluge and hundreds more evacuated.
Many South Texas residents are saying they've never seen rainfall, anything like they're getting now.
The Southern California storm began in British Columbia, moved through Nevada, certainly did, before arriving in California.
Its track into Southern California was almost unprecedented.
Such storms normally move off into the Pacific Ocean.
Additional storms, also generated by the same system that has dumped rain on Texas, were expected to develop overnight across the U.S. Southeast.
Indeed, they did that.
So maybe we're like the proverbial frog, all right?
In that water that's just getting pleasantly warm and then warmer and warmer until finally it's boiling and we never saw it coming.
So there are changes afoot, I'm here to tell you.
And again, bearing in mind, I'm a talk show host, ham operator, not an expert in any of this by any means, but I can feel it in my bones.
Something is wrong, something has changed.
There is change underway.
Natural, man-made.
Who knows?
I'm just observing there is change, and it's being vastly underreported.
80 whales, big whales, 80 of them, dolphins too, die on Australian island is the headline.
Canberra, again, Reuters reporting what many don't, at least 80 whales and dolphins have died after deciding to kill themselves, beaching themselves on a remote island between the Australian mainland and the country's island state of Tasmania.
The number of deaths on King Island could be higher as some bodies might not have been washed up, but rather indeed washed back instead to sea, according to Warwick Brennan, a spokesperson for Tasmania's Department of Primary Industry, Water and Environment.
You see, these things that happen around the world, folks, are really important.
Even though you don't hear about them on the CBS evening news or whatever, it's part of a picture.
Brennan said on Monday, what we found at first light this morning was 80 animals strewn across several hundred meters of beach, all of the animals, all of them dead.
There was a mixture of adults and juvenile animals, so it was a very grim sight.
He said there were 55 dead long finned pilot whales, 25 dead bottlenosed dolphins on King Island around 250 kilometers south of the Victorian state capital Melbourne.
A further 17 whales were swimming around one kilometer offshore.
The immediate focus of the rescue team will be to ensure that the group we see out there doesn't get any closer to shore.
Now, there is probably something up when you hear a lot of stories like this.
Again, I'm not declaring anything because I don't know.
I'm just putting pieces together for you.
Now, here's another interesting little diddy.
Scotsman.com news is where this comes from, directly from Scotland.
A headline, vaccine will not stop next flu epidemic.
Official warrants.
Drug companies will not be able to make enough vaccine, according to a World Health Organization official.
They're not going to be able to make enough to prevent the next global flu pandemic.
Now, pandemic is a very important word.
Pandemic is defined very differently than epidemic.
You go look it up.
Pandemic is bad.
Anyway, they're suggesting that we're going to have a new flu virus triggered by a viral strain originating in birds.
Countries should plan measures other than vaccinations to deal with a possible pandemic.
According to the WHO Western Regional Director, no matter how much they manufacture, he said, expand production.
I don't think the vaccines are going to be able to meet the requirement.
WHO experts believe bird flu is the most likely candidate to combine with a human virus, creating new strains that could trigger a worldwide pandemic and kill an estimated 2 to 7 million people.
The spokesperson called that a, quote, most conservative, end quote, estimate.
Another problem is that a vaccine would not be mass produced until it is tailored to the specific flu strain causing the pandemic after it breaks out, meaning a delay of five or six months, perhaps, before the vaccines could possibly be available.
So there you have it.
Those are little pieces, and I suggest to you that those little pieces go together and all meet very precisely in a puzzle called, What's Going On on Mother Earth?
I'm Art Bell.
unidentified
I'm Art Bell.
Get it in writing with the Afterdark newsletter.
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Music Can you hear my heartbeat in this corner?
Do you know that behind all this cold?
Light set it desired and away.
Make me money for her and me.
My life seems to be open My life seems to be open Don't you love her badly?
And the reason I was calling, everybody seems to, well, so many people think that the ice is causing that the weather is causing the ice, whereas I say that the ice is causing the weather.
Actually, there are several effects that really cascade.
One is the sun reflects off the snow and ice, and that has a profound effect on things, that reflection.
Number two is the ocean, which goes under the ice shelves, for example, in the Antarctic, is profoundly affected from a temperature point of view, and those temperatures then become currents that sort of, I don't know, it's kind of like the world's air conditioner.
unidentified
What I believe is that the ice has only been there since Noah's flood, which is about 4,700 years ago, somewhere in that neighborhood.
I know you're familiar with the Dead Sea, and the reason that it's so salty is it does not drain.
Every time it rains, mineral salts wash into the oceans as well as into all the lakes, and it makes the oceans saltier.
The rate of increase of saltiness has been measured for many, many decades, and it's been fairly constant.
If you have over 10,000 years of rain system, as we have observed in recent times, in the last 100, 200, 300 years, the oceans would be so salty that they would be as salty or saltier than the Dead Sea, where nothing lives.
The natural order of the Earth, I believe, is to have a greenhouse which protects us from excessive heat, provides temperate climate, and the ice is not normal under a greenhouse because it would cause the greenhouse to condense.
I believe the ice came from outer space and possibly some of the effects from the fountains of the deep that the Bible talks about.
And possibly Mars almost hit the Earth and lost some of its ice and picked up some of our oceans.
Any of that could be, but if you'll look into what's going on on Mars right now, if anything, the Martian caps are melting away much faster than ours.
And that's another under-reported item.
Now, could that be an increased output from the sun?
Probably.
I don't know.
There are people who think that planets generate their own heat from within.
Or you could look at an increased output from the sun.
But if you view both Mars and the Earth going through what we're going through right now, I think that you'd probably tip toward the Sun's increased output or some change there.
West of the Rockies, you are on the air.
Hello.
unidentified
Hello?
Hello.
Yes.
Hi.
Long-time listener, first-time caller, proud member of the U.S. Air Force.
Because it's one of the fastest-growing religions in the world, and they believe what's interesting is that they believe in a lot of things that is very polarizing throughout the world.
They believe in one-world government.
They believe in an auxiliary language that all of humanity can understand.
They also believe in eliminations of all forms of prejudice, eliminations of equality of men and women, and eliminations of extreme wealth and poverty.
So they went up there, and he checked it out and looked around to make sure there was none of the equipment, make sure there wasn't something going aground on the equipment.
Well, eventually, he got to looking around and noticed that there was a microwave tower nearby.
And what eventually happened was they had some people come down from Virginia Tech, and they checked, and what it was, whenever the tower was emitting, the fence was becoming electrified.
Around broadcast facilities, AM and FM stations, fences are regularly grounded very carefully to prevent exactly that occurrence because even a commercial AM or FM station could electrify a fence with its radiation.
It's pretty common.
unidentified
Yeah, I just thought it was kind of neat because I thought about your antenna and I thought it was kind of a cool story to tell.
In fact, to build on your cool story, I lived on the island of Okinawa for 10 years, and there was a transmitter at the northern end of the island of Okinawa which was running 1 million watts and sending its propaganda, we do propaganda, as you know, to North Korea from Okinawa.
And it was so strong, 1 million watts.
And there was one little Okinawan slash Japanese village between the antennas and the ocean.
And let me tell you, just about everything in that village lit up.
All the fences were electrified.
You could hold a bulb in the air, and it would light up with a lot of radiation.
And from what I understand from the technicians and the engineers is they resonate these sounds off the atmosphere and anything leaving the planet or entering the atmosphere vice versa, we would know first.
Well, they probably would not have told you in programs like that, like that man says he worked in, everything is pretty much compartmentalized so that a person working on one aspect of circuitry doesn't know what another is doing, and they certainly don't have the big picture of what the goals are.
HARP is a very interesting, very, very interesting project and could account for some of what we're seeing.
When you moved in, you had to sign a little thing that agreed to all of that stuff that you're now complaining about.
Well, let me explain a little bit.
You've got to read the fine print.
unidentified
That's true, but there are state laws that the Homeowners Association can only go so far.
Now, what this situation is that they've allowed one product in, and then they've let certain people have it, but then they decided that they don't want to let anybody else have it.
So there's a state law about being arbitrary and capricious, which they are violating.
Well, you'll have to take them to court, and you'll have a big, long battle on your hands.
Yeah, I think that shows a red contract in the first place.
unidentified
I just warn people that please make sure that when you do have people in the CCNRs, to make sure that they're people that will follow the rules and not make up their own rules.
Well, I would also caution people to read the CCNRs.
Look, you're signing a private contract.
And yeah, you may think it violates this or that, and you can't, then let's put up an antenna.
Or, you know, your grass has to be cut at a certain level or whatever.
These are CCNRs.
These are things that you sign, and it's your fault if you don't read it.
Make sure that you read it.
All the fine little print.
I know when you go to a closing on something, it's very easy to be in a hurry and just, you know, they throw documents in front of you.
Here, sign this, sign this, sign this.
And you're signing along, right?
And you're not paying attention to what you're signing.
Well, that will come back and bite you probably in the rear end.
So pay attention to what you're reading.
I listen to a lot of people like that man complaining about some new regulation or rule or something in the CCNRs that they just got in trouble for and they didn't even know that they had agreed to.
Well, you did agree to it.
And that's all on you.
People, you're in the pass lane and you're in a hurry and I know you just keep signing those papers, right?
And then later you find out that you have agreed to some totally egregious Nazi-like something or another that some of these places have.
Well, again, really, it's on you.
Coming up in a moment, we've got a very interesting program ahead.
Professor Bart Cosco is going to be here.
He's quite something.
So stay right where you are.
First time caller line.
You are on the air.
unidentified
As it passed overhead, the stars and the evil moon in time went away.
This is going to be something want of time travel.
Live conversations Beaming out to us all in the dark Real life online All near experts All in the world things are falling apart Coast to coast To the average joy Maybe hard to tell Oh well, Alice, I'm close Yeah, the truth Music
Why do we celebrate Christmas with pine trees flying reindeers?
Christmas with pine trees.
Christmas with pine trees.
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From coast to coast and worldwide on the internet, this is Coast to Coast AM with Art Bell.
Beginning, I think with this one, you know, I get sort of a magnum of questions here that would be good to ask you, and we're going to cover terrorism almost right away.
And I guess you wrote something in the L.A. Times recently suggesting we grossly have overestimated the threat of terrorism.
Okay, well, before we get into that in detail, I want to remind you, because you may not have heard it, so I guess telling you for the first time in the audience, reminding them, and just an hour ago I read it less than an hour ago.
Health and Human Services Secretary Tommy Thompson, as you know, resigned, left at the President's cabinet.
I wanted to do it a year ago, but they wouldn't let him go.
Now he's gone.
And as he has gone, he has said that there's a potential global outbreak of the flu ahead of us.
He also said, quote, for the life of me, for the life of me, I can't understand why the terrorists have not attacked our food supply because it's so easy to do, end quote.
And I thought that would relate to your first question.
You know, that's all we talk about almost in a lot of the news, terrorism, terrorism, terrorism, terrorism.
And you're thinking the whole thing may be overblown, huh?
The trouble with this is we're trying to prove a negative here.
There's not enough, there are not that many terrorists.
It's very difficult to do, and it requires a very sophisticated form of reasoning called negative evidence.
Now, positive evidence we all understand.
If you see a tape of bin Laden bragging about having brought down the towers and see the towers blowing up and so forth, that's pretty clear evidence that we have terrorist activity.
But to argue that since there have been no terrorist events for three years now, that there may not be that many terrorists is a harder point to argue.
It also can be very dangerous if it's false.
It's a touchy subject.
So there's no question, Art, that there's a threat, a substantial threat of terrorism in this country and abroad.
The question is kind of a fuzzy degree thing.
Is it that big of a threat?
Is it such a big threat that you're willing to devote lots of blood and treasure, for example, going abroad and fighting wars and giving up lots of civil liberties in little ways and in big ways, semi-almost harassment in some cases at airport checkout lines or handing over greatly increased search powers, digital search powers, to police departments, the FBI and so forth.
And then we had this really tight presidential election, which instead of in many ways being an election on the merits of the Republican versus Democrat views of the economy and more U.S. issues, it was pretty much a debate about terrorism.
And if it's not the case that terrorism is as big as that suggests, then I think we have a problem.
Just to take a sense of proportion here, if you look at the current issue, the cover of The Economist magazine out of England.
Indeed, it's not about terrorism.
It's about the U.S. maybe losing its status as having the dollar as the currency of choice in the world, which is going to hurt you and me a lot more than an increase in terrorism, as bad as that terrorism is.
Interest rates can soar, economies can collapse, a lot of people can be out of work, real social unrest, and a variety of other things.
That was ignored.
And I would further say that if you look at the two candidates who ran ART, both of them proposed very big increases in the size of government and basically in the debt, the very thing undermining the value of the dollar.
So it may well be that that was justified, but I don't see the evidence of it.
And as I dug deeper into it, as the years passed, I found no evidence to support it.
And when I went to the U.S. State Department's website and got its annual Pattern on Global Terrorism Report and found out that there's been really no major increase in the worldwide deaths due to terrorism, merely 1,000, not even quite 1,000 recently.
It went up this summer because of the Russian terrorist event.
Compare that, for example, to 40,000 people killed each year on the highways here or 15,000 murdered, or the problems with, for example, the flu, which could be much greater than any terrorist threat, it raises a question.
But In the end, when we didn't have a bombing at the Olympics this summer, we didn't have a bombing at the conventions, we got right up on the election, a lot of us thought something was going to happen, it's going to happen then.
The Friday before the election, Bin Laden came out in a new hat, new video, and we all thought that was it.
I had a discussion with some of my graduate students who are very skeptical of the claims of terrorism.
And I said, all right, what's the probability that before the election's over, you've got five days left after this tape, the conditional probability that we'll have an attack?
And almost everyone thought it was more than 50 percent.
I didn't.
And of course, there was an attack.
In fact, it really suggests, doesn't prove, merely suggests that we may have broken the back of that particular terrorist organization.
After all, we've spent billions of dollars and cooperated with governments who've done likewise.
Well, at some point, Professor, certainly it will indicate that.
It's kind of like, you know, SETI has been searching the skies now for alien talk for a lot of years.
And even the people at SETI are now admitting, look, given another, I don't know, 30, 40 years, whatever, if nothing is found, they're going to have to step forward and say, nothing has been found.
We've searched a lot of the sky, and sorry, nothing's found.
That's a great point, Art, and it brings up the subtlety involved in negative evidence, which is the size of the search space.
Negative evidence says if you search something and you don't find anything, it's evidence that there is nothing.
I like to use the example if you go shopping at a store and you leave the store and say, oh, my God, I left my keys in the store.
How much of the store will you have to search before you say, no, I was wrong, I didn't?
Or if you think a particular book is in the library, that's a reasonably well-defined search space.
And we go to other things like the Loch Ness looking for Nessie.
And, for example, to compare that to the northern California forest where Bigfoot might be roaming.
And whatever the merits of the hypothesis that there's a Loch Ness monster or Bigfoot, we have stronger negative evidence that there's not a Loch Ness, not conclusive, just because of the sonar sweeps there.
It's easier to sonar sweep the Loch Ness, the Loch there, than it is to search the mountainous forests of California.
When you get to the SETI level and realize we have 400 billion or so stars in this galaxy, we've only really explored one, that well over a trillion galaxies we can tell in the entire universe.
Just the enormity of that search space, I wouldn't say 30 years, but maybe 300, I think we then would have to say there's no pattern of emissions floating around out there that we can conclude that there's any kind of intelligent life.
And that still is debatable.
I don't think 30 years, but at some point you would say, look, we've largely searched the library.
I don't think we're at that point with terrorism yet, though.
I'm willing to accept your hypothesis as absolutely possible, but I think there's enough people who still think we're going to be attacked to say it's a very, very popular opinion.
And I'm not sure when that will begin to change if nothing continues to happen.
Tomorrow Thompson did, you know, his outgoing words.
I was kind of commenting the first hour.
You remember President Eisenhower warning about the military-industrial complex as he left office?
Seems like all these guys do it just as they're leaving office where such a controversial statement, well, it won't matter that much because they're going out the door.
And it might help the book deal, too.
Well, you never know.
So you feel very strongly that we're overcommitting resources.
And the easy cop-out answer, though, is virtual certainty there'll be some bad, at least one bad strike, and almost surely I think in our lifetime.
But we know that.
That was the case before 9-11.
That's the case with or without bin Laden.
There's a lot of people out wanting to throw stones on America and other countries.
The question, the hard one that we can't really answer because we don't have the data, we're just speculating about very tiny probabilities, is what about a very high frequency, almost like the Red Scare days a few decades ago, a very high probability, high frequency of lots of terrorist events, lots of buildings coming down, lots of casinos blowing up, lots of water supplies being poisoned.
And that's very different than terrorists who have Lenin-like cells, and there's lots of terrorists on the planet.
There are probably going to be a lot more in the future.
But I don't think it's fair to say that the people who are necessarily blowing themselves up are anything more than local resistors, maybe brainwashed, maybe a lot of things could account for that.
But I don't think, fine, there's a handful, Zarkowi, that most of the people engaged in combat right now on the other side are terrorists.
I mean, as someone who writes science fiction and speculative fiction, you have a novel Nanotime by World War III, how you could trigger that kind of thing.
If you start looking how easy it is to do so many unanticipated things from poisons and bombings and a lot of other ways, cyber attacks, those things will come.
In some sense, though, Art, that's sort of the price of doing business.
We're an open society and most of the rest of the world is not.
The real question is, have we gone to some different mode here, this so-called war on terrorism, where the attacks are a lot higher than we thought?
That's what I don't see.
Will the annual deaths from terrorism rise substantially above 1,000 per year?
Maybe it will go up to 10,000.
Maybe it goes up to 100,000, Art, but that's a far cry, I think, from the kind of picture that we heard during the three presidential debates.
I think that we're such a porous country in the sense of our border, despite our recent improvements.
Border security, there's a lot of people here who hasn't to say a few things on the radio to possibly trigger something, but I think within five years, there's so many people who want to take a shot at the giant that you have to assume that's going to happen.
With or without, again, a war on terrorism.
And you've got to make reasonable efforts to stop it.
But the question is whether the kind of efforts we have now are disproportionate.
Exactly.
Especially given the heightened political season and this bizarre neck-to-neck race that we had for president, where both candidates neither one could in any way suggest they weren't not cold warriors, but terrorist warriors.
And if you try to allocate resources to deal with all the possible modes of attack, you're in this bad game-threaten situation where your opponent, like the burglar, has the element of surprise.
And you just have to fight a generalized opponent.
And that means you've got to allocate your budget according to some probabilities and some costs.
And I think they're doing a pretty good job.
I think they were doing a reasonable job beforehand.
So I don't think with the efforts they've made, that'll make a substantial difference.
It certainly is an interesting premise that the professor has that we're totally overreacting to this terrorist threat on the one hand, but on the other hand, acknowledging that something big and bad and awful will happen.
I do understand what you're saying, Professor.
You do, however, feel that there is the possibility, for example, of a nuclear device, even a dirty bomb, getting in on a container ship.
By the time we explain to the U.S. and world public that it's not a nuclear bomb, a great psychologic damage will have taken place and laws might have passed as quickly as they passed with the Patriot Act.
Could somebody get in some real weapons-grade plutonium or other elements through our fairly poorest border in the south or on a container ship?
Possibly aren't, but the only good thing about that is we do have, we and the Russians, fairly good, not total, but fairly good control over that.
That may not always be that way.
Pakistan's a wild card, and we're finding out more and more how Pakistanist Dr. Khan worked with Libya, perhaps North Korea and other countries, and Iran is busily beavering away from Korea.
Exactly, which puts us in a very awkward spot since we went to war, in fact, next door on the claim of weapons of mass destruction weren't there, and suddenly next door, weapons of mass production are likely to be produced as we speak.
The kind of processed uranium and plutonium you'd need to get, we can track that, have fairly good controls on it.
The big fear, of course, at least out of Russia or the former republics, they still have their nuclear arsenal by and large.
But it's not totally unmanageable.
And I think it's very unlikely that that's how the attack would come.
Tommy Thompson mentioned food poisoning, for example, or something the food supply or blowing up a chemical plant or maybe simultaneously blowing up six casinos in Vegas.
Things like that, I think, are much more likely to happen.
I think he probably knows a lot more than he's telling.
You've got a lot of orders when you're in a cabinet like that.
Also, Art, I just could throw this out.
I proposed as an op-ed once that was set up in type at the Washington Post and got bumped for whatever reason.
So maybe I can publish it right here.
After 9-11, a lot of questions, what should we do about worldwide terrorist threats?
And my answer was based on game theory, on tit-for-tat.
I don't think it's unique with me, but it is something I think we need to think about.
What we can't do, Art, is trade away the very good things about a free society trying to fight a probable specter terrorist.
We just can't do that.
What we can do, though, Art, is think about this more like B.F. Skinner would have in trying to condition our enemies and tell them that if you hit us in any way that we define or our friends in the treaties, any way that we define as being a terrorist strike, We know where your main camps are.
We know who you are and where you live, and we'll kill you.
I mean, think we haven't come down, for example, on Hezbollah, which is Sitting in the Lebanese parliament and a lot of places like that.
If you were to say, just consider this model, though, from the game theory point of view, okay, here's a relatively innocent group like Hezbollah with respect to attack on Essay.
And if they know that if we get hit and the next building blows up in the U.S., there's a reasonable chance we will come and kill you, then they have an incentive to make sure their terrorist colleagues don't do that.
And they don't have the clout that we have to pull it off.
They could threaten.
I don't think they could as easily so many parts of the world that we could do if you had a list of, for example, the top ten list of terrorist countries or big cells, and we're not waging, in effect, a small war, should we get hit of a certain magnitude, we'll run a random number generator and pick two of them and obliterate them.
Now, if that were known with reasonable certainty among terrorists, they would have an interesting incentive among themselves not just not to hit us.
You're saying we issue a sort of a general proclamation that if we get hit hard biologically with nuclear weapons, whatever, that our response would be to spin a bottle and pick two terror organizations' names and just wipe them off the face of the corporation.
But should we get the kind of hits that so many fear, I don't think it's likely, but should there be a lot of bombings going off, if we suffered anything, like the Israelis suffer from the suicide bombers proportionally, you would see that, I think.
If it turns out, and I hope it doesn't, if nanotechnology and things like that are such that it's relatively easy to make bombs that we can't even conceive of now or poisonous devices or other things, if it's so hard to defend, this is the trouble with modern warfare, against these unforeseen attacks, that you might have to.
Unfortunately, at the moment, no, and those great oceans protect us, and our military might protect us.
Well, that's obviously you think of a bomb, you think of an explosion, but it doesn't have to be an explosion, Art.
It could be something that weaves its way into the Missouri River, Mississippi River, and to the Gulf, and wipes out the fishing industry off the coast of America for the next hundred years.
Or all creatures or building structures in a city have maybe won't be poisonous, but can contain particles that can be released that with a certain probability you'll get a brain tumor.
There could be, in theory, that would wipe out certain kinds of carbon-type forms and not others.
Here's what's bad about this.
There's something programmable about nanotechnology.
We can use it, hopefully, for great things, but you could also program it within the bounds of physics and chemistry to hit some things and not others.
But in theory, the trouble, I think, is getting exposure to all the white people there.
But I think in theory, you could develop something that if you sprayed it into a crowd, it might have that effect.
In my novel, Nanotime, I extrapolated the current smart acids that we have to acids that were programmed to disassemble or tear up or corrode very special things like metal leaf oil.
And it leads to, in one case, an oil carrier off the coast of Florida, in effect melting in a period of minutes, and it's leaving a big, massive puddle of oil.
That would still take a lot of work.
Unfortunately, that's not in the realms of foreseeable technology.
But there could be things like that.
I mean, I'm very worried in the nano world about what I call nano-garbage.
I mean, right now, there's a lot of mercury in those computers.
There's a lot of things, cadmium things that ought not be there.
And that's again an unintentional consequence of our marvelous computer industry.
And if it's the case, as it almost surely will be soon, that these computers come studded with elaborate nanotube array technologies and many, many other things, where the chemical nature is, these are radically new things that nature has never seen before.
We can't predict how they'll react and how over a period of weeks, years, or decades, it affects soils and water supplies.
And if there are things like that, there may be two or three of them that are really bad that we haven't foreseen.
And some clever hacker-like terrorist seizes on a way to mass produce it and spread it around.
And it's not an exact parallel, but you're suggesting even today's computers thrown away in landfills contain enough bad stuff to have unforeseen results?
On the water supply and effects of that can be to increase the probability of getting a variety of diseases and cancers and who knows what else and the like.
We really don't know, but we haven't come to grips, and most cities haven't come to grips with setting up recycling centers for computers.
It's not like throwing away the rest of your trash.
So most of us just take a computer and throw it in the trash can.
Well, again, circling back, I had heard that there were people worried that there could be specific targeted groups of people, whether it be white people, black people, Hispanic people, American natives, that there would be something specific enough about the genome to attack one group.
Well, man has never been short of periods of history where genocide went on.
It still goes on.
It's always gone on.
So if there was a newer, better, more efficient way to kill off a whole group of people who believe something or are the wrong color for your taste, my God, how much higher on the terror level scale can you get?
Unfortunately, we're not there, but the darn thing about nanotechnology is with the massive promise, I mean, NSF itself thinks we'll be up to a trillion dollars in economic benefits in a decade or two from this.
With those incredible benefits, have to be equally unforeseen costs that we have not yet thought through.
And actually, the nano garbage, I think, is a good idea because it gives us a huge statistical tank in which to work, and something will emerge out of that over the next decades.
And it may be very easy for someone to seize on that and extrapolate from it, make a better form of the barbarity.
Well, gee, isn't it a good thing that we don't live in a world today where we actually have people saying, you know, the non-believers should all die.
I mean, that's pretty scary, Professor.
Pretty scary.
We do have that, of course.
And in two seconds, if they had it in their hands, do you think they'd hesitate to find somebody willing to give their life to set it all off, if necessary?
The dollar, if you measure it against the euro, it's fallen in the last three years by about 20 percent in value.
And if you measure it, as economists do going back using the Deutschmark from Germany, 40 years ago, it's fallen two-thirds in value.
But Art, I think there's a bigger problem here.
If the U.S. takes it on the chin because it can't control and affect its government's credit card spending, the technology of nanotech will still proceed.
We just may not be the center of it.
And one thing I would point out, just scanning hundreds of journal articles as I do, the Chinese are making great contributions in this.
And it's the Chinese who own an awful lot of U.S. debt and actually help stabilize our trade imbalances.
And so I don't think the even if the U.S. gave up science tomorrow, of course, it won't, I don't think that would make, in the long run, a big difference.
We'll still work out the pros and cons of nanotechnology.
It's just who will own the patents and who will most profit from it is a question.
And there's 192 countries signed up at the UN, and it's like the high school or grade school playground at times, a slug out.
Every country wants to get ahead, and most are kind of locked in as a stalemate with their neighbors and ancient grudges and all sorts of things that we really fortunately don't have over here, at least to the extent that other countries do.
It's a big concern.
But I do want to point out also that a lot of the efforts recently in Congress to limit studies on cloning, for example, and stem cell research have the net effect art of simply transferring the technological advantage abroad.
On the issue of stem cell research and things like that, that may be a very big deal, who gets in there first.
And given the nature, the way we tie our hands rightly or wrongly with the World Trade Organization, the patent agreements, the real question is who files first.
And if somebody comes up in order to file a patent on something like that, you pretty much have to demonstrate its utility somewhere.
It's rather hard to do that when that's a federal crime or stem cell research is not, but it's difficult to get the funding for it.
We've passed a measure in California that Governor Schwarzenegger backed and passed overwhelmingly to ultimately put up $3 to $6 billion of taxpayer money to provide additional stem cell lines and encourage that kind of research.
But these heavy-handed prohibitions that have come out of Congress against the different kinds of cloning and other countries you say don't have that and they simply they do have it.
Well, you know, the way I remember it, and it's been a while, you're right.
But, you know, there were some vials of things that this guy had in a container.
And he got up to customs, and customs did what they do.
You know, they said, what the hell is this?
And they opened it and sniffed it.
And that was like the end of the world.
So without going any further, it seems to me that nanotechnology, stem cell research, all of these things that are being worked on one day will result in vials like that, some agent or something so deadly that it could race around and kill a great deal of the human race.
Is that within the realm of possibility in these areas of technology?
One thing I think you could do is if you could take a virus and make it really nasty, make an aged virus, say, that would not just mutate faster, but that would be carried, yeah, airborne or carried by mosquitoes, for example.
And since we work so much with viruses now and gene replacement therapy and a variety of other places, in theory you could do that.
It might be a lot like what happened when the Spanish conquistadors arrived, a handful of them and millions of Native American Indians, and it was the viruses and bacteria that they wiped them out.
And in that sense, we issue about 170,000 patents a year right now, the Patent Trademark Office.
Half of those go to foreign applicants.
So ironically, not only will we stand by, perhaps, and watch a certain amount of competitive edge go, but we'll have to enforce the laws that make sure that happens.
And I might also point out, just as an aside, the ABA, the American Bar Association, has recently, and I think quite wisely, asked Congress to stop a practice that goes on, the PTO.
The PTO, the Patent and Trademark Office, a lot of smart people there, but they're overworked.
And they're not carefully evaluating patent applications like they should or contest.
And what has happened is up to $800 million of the patent revenue monies they get have been diverted just to the general congressional budget rather than to go back to the PTO and hire more staff and get more people in to more judiciously look at patent applications.
You're not going to have Albert Einstein working there.
And you call that was the title that Eric Tressler used in his book called Engines of Creation, the Coming Era of Nanotechnology, when he coined a phrase.
You know, we keep hearing kind of a scare sense that we're going to hit it in the next five years, and we've been hearing that for 20 years.
It's very much like coming upon the year 2000.
There was that window.
We would think about it the year 1990, and we think about it sort of the same way in 95.
But it does seem now really, truly, as if we're coming up on it where the devices, the lithography, the ways of carving the little patterns for the electrons to flow can't be taken that much further.
It doesn't mean, though, you can't squeeze a lot more efficiency out of the current designs, and that's really what the chip makers have been doing.
But in some sense, a lot of what happens is a kind of a stenciling program.
You have a design for the circuit, and you shrink it, for example, intuitively on a copy machine.
Then you shrink it again and shrink it again and shrink it again.
Then you enshrine that.
You burn that in somehow.
That whole technique is going to have to change.
And one way it looks promising is with polymer-type chips, plastic chips.
They don't have the electrical capability of the current devices.
My problem with that, Art, is there's a sense of the pending slowdown.
It may be, and it's stimulated an immense amount of creativity, which you have to view as a kind of speedup.
People are thinking now, like, for example, Polymer-based chips, they just weren't doing that like they were a few years ago, doing that now, and a variety of other things.
So the actual device that will be in your next computer that you order from Dell or whatever, you're not going to see that for a while.
That may seem to be that.
But at the research level, it's just the opposite.
It's an explosion.
It's an exponentiation.
As you also see, by the way, in the filing of nanotech and nanotype patents.
Where might Africa be as a beneficiary of all this research in the developed world?
How long will it take the average sub-Saharan African country, I don't mean South Africa here, to be comparable to our economy?
If it went at its current pace, I think quite a while would be the answer, and not in our lifetimes, but the potential of nanotechnology to give extraordinary economies of scale, of reducing costs of many manufacturing processes and other things by orders of magnitude and the like, hopefully within our lifetime, the kind of worst off on the planet will be like those of us now who are best off.
And if we continue this reasoning, if he then turns out to be someone who wants to stick a knife in you or your shirt or a bullet, that when they attempt to do that, that the fibers lock up like what's often called nano chain, like the old armor chains, and he can't penetrate that.
Or you get shot.
I mentioned on the show before, we've worked on smart vests and are still working on that.
But when they, some of the devices for smart vests, or armor, are such that when the bullet impacts, it triggers lots of chemical, electrochemical reactions.
And when that message hits, there has to be a lot of processing.
So the real answer to your question, again, is the signal processing will be extensive in each clock cycle.
Not just registering the event, but at each, you can picture like frames in a movie, the bullet.
And in the first few frames, when it hits the vest, that will trigger massive computational responses.
For example, drawing resources from the backside of your shirt to the front and doing lots of analyses on that.
And as the energy hits, hopefully opening up different kind of creases and cracks and other things that the nonlinear physicists have worked out that the way that energy disperses.
By the way, a lot of the beginning was simply observing what happens when you crumple up a piece of paper.
And further, with some optical capability, because these things will process light quite well, we already use what's called Raman spectroscopy to look at nanotubes.
You could also match the environment to have a really good camouflage, sort of like the Terminator 2 creature who became part of the floor.
It wouldn't be that, but you might look like the floor.
Like an octopus, you might look like your immediate surroundings.
That kind of easy computation, cheap computation, would be available.
Now, whether it would be practical, it may not be, but if you're in the downtown battles in Fallujah, it could be of great benefit.
Those kinds of things aren't the ability to talk out loud and search in real-time databases to answer your questions and those sorts of things that we're really limited now only by the cost of computation.
Besides the fact that we might not want to do that for the reasons you mentioned earlier, that we are usually the good guys with our hands.
And it may be difficult to reach those people.
But just to have the kind of armor, there's great efforts.
MIT has a dedicated institute on smart soldier type stuff, and all the armed forces that have poured millions are going to pour a lot more into this.
So what we'll have first, one of the first things we've got out of the nano world, are things like protective armor.
Just like right now, we've got nano-tube-based tennis balls and bowling balls and nano-pans, very simple things where you can weave some nano stuff into the current fibers.
I don't know how good your golf swing is, but most of us slice and hook a ball, and there's a new ball coming out from a company called Nanodynamics, maybe selling for as much as $7 or $8 per ball.
Nano balls, in effect, that if they get approved by the U.S. Golf League, if they're legal for the golf course, supposedly based on some secret technology, I don't know whether it's a patent or a trade secret, will substantially reduce slices and hooks and have the effect of most golf gear of creating what's called a moral hazard and kind of making us all sloppier with a golf swing.
And I think the governments, rightly or wrongly, depending on your views of government investments in the economy, though, are pouring great deals of money in the industrial consortium and supporting a massive patent effort, especially Japan, and trying to grab up as many patents as possible.
The one thing about filing patents, though, is you can, as they say, innovate around them.
And by the way, one of the things that has been proposed to modify our patent procedure is that as soon as you file it, you should be really forced to disclose the technology, not wait.
The whole point of granting that exquisite monopoly up to 20 years that the patent gives is to get it out into the public domain as fast as possible.
And that allows editors to go off and do something else.
Well, its own laws, and it certainly is that it's more than that since it's the one going around telling the world that it better start enforcing them, too.
My guest this night is Professor Bart Cosco, and we're talking about all kinds of, well, kind of scary things, stem cell research, where it's going, nanotechnology, where it is now, and it's already upon us, really, as he demonstrated with the nano-pants and the nano-golf balls and what have you.
It's already here.
That one's well underway.
All kind of scary stuff, really.
Professor, welcome back.
I want to change gears very quickly because I know you want to say something about cell phones.
And cell phones are actually one of my favorite topics, Professor.
I hate them.
However, I do note that I read a story earlier that some of them have begun to blow up.
You know, the Swedes dropped a bomb on us last month, so to speak.
I'm using that terminology tonight.
A new study out of Stockholm, a well-done study in the journal Epidemiology, came out, saying that if you listen to a cell phone for 10 years, now these were analog cell phones, because the only ones we've been listening to for 10 years, the Swedes have been doing that, if you do that, you've got twice the likelihood of developing a kind of benign tumor on your inner ear's nerve fiber there, the acoustical neuroma, it's called.
And if you look at the study and what happens if you look at the ear to which you hold the phone, you're four times as likely to get the tumor on that side and you're normal on the other side.
So it looks like there is now, this is a new study, has not been replicated.
It is benign, and what apparently happens is there's a chromosome called chromosome 22 that controls a gene that controls something called the Schwann cells that provide a kind of cable, insulation, onion-like skin insulation of the nerve fiber, and it starts to replicate.
It may just be a bump, may be harmless, but it opens the door, something a lot of people have worried about for a long time.
What's the effect of all this extra electromagnetic energy bombarding our heads?
In some very crude sense, it's like sticking your head in a very low, very low-power microwave oven for a long time.
Would that have some effect on heat-wise, but just on the brain?
And we don't know what will happen with the digital phones, but it is the first really well-done study that shows that over a period of time, something can go wrong here.
If it goes wrong with that, it's just what they look for.
What else might be going wrong and how might that affect digital design and devices deep into the future?
But I have recently published myself in the last month in a journal, Physical Review, a mathematical characterization of something called stochastic resonance or noise processing.
And though we usually try to get rid of noise, because it obscures and interferes with our signals, there are cases where noise really helps and it enhances signal processing.
But they have to be non-linear kinds of things.
And my conjecture, and I've discussed with some of my colleagues in the noise processing field, my conjecture is it's just a conjecture, but that the effect of noise here, they have free energy from the phone or other devices, could amplify this and maybe other things that are there.
Not just a straight exposure.
To turn it around, if you take a very small amount of electrical noise, like one milliamp, and put it on your fingertip, kind of shock your finger, you actually can discriminate things better with touch.
And there's an effort underway at Boston University and elsewhere to use that to help blind people read Braille.
But there's a potential here, a kind of a frightening one, that there may be noise effects in the brain.
And we've demonstrated conclusively, mathematically, that given the main models of how neurons work, you've got about 400 billion of those in your brain and, of course, throughout your body, that noise does affect that, usually in a positive way, if it's a very faint amount of noise, as it would be with the electromagnetic radiation from your cell phone.
And it may not be like asbestos, but these are the sorts of things.
It's going to take a long time to see.
I'm sure there'll be lots of long-term studies, but we're in very new ground as of last month.
Well, just because the frequency structure can be so different, the processing going on inside, the heat dissipation can be different.
And the first study you'd want to conduct would be to compare 10 years of analog listening with 10 years of digital and just see if there's an observed effect.
Then we would guess at hundreds, maybe thousands of possible reasons.
There are all sorts of things that can happen with frequencies and harmonic overtones and things like that that in the mathematical literature suggest lead to a noise boost.
And that seems to be killing porpoises and maybe some whales.
For example, we bound signals off here in California to Hawaii to measure the structure of the surface of the bottom of the ocean, to measure the temperatures, current structures, and things like that.
But the sonic effect on the inner ear and brain of a whale probably is damaging.
So one of the studies that's come out in nature is that whale songs have increased about 25%, presumably to deal with the increased acoustical clutter in their world.
And in the case of different porpoises and sea creatures like that, where there have been Navy experiments off of, I believe it was the Canary Islands in that neck of the woods, it seemed as if, oddly enough, someone conjectured, that the porpoises and sea creatures died of the bends.
And people think that would be possible, but a lot of them washed up on shore a couple hours after the experiments.
So the brains are exquisitely timed in terms of their local frequency responses and so forth.
And if you hit it with some external signal, you may set up resonant states that could be damaging.
We just don't know.
I've got to say, as a researcher, it's quite interesting.
Being a student of the law, I'm going to head to this answer.
First off, the studies only show a finding for substantial use over a 10-year period.
No evidence whatsoever.
There have been many other studies for short-term use.
So short-term is likely.
But if you were a company manufacturing a new cell phone gadget and you're looking at the potential of product liability tort litigation, I think you'd really have to take this quite seriously.
It has that potential to lead to product recalls.
And I think a lot of people will be spooked, maybe wrongly.
After all, it's a quadrupling of the risk, but the risk itself is kind of tiny.
Well, it certainly could, just because of the depth of the pocket.
I mean, the trouble with those kind of tort cases, as you know, is there's just a high incidence of people getting diseases anyway who also use the product or have the breast implant or smoke the cigarette and so forth.
And if you or a loved one dies or starts to die from that, it's a very natural human response to sign up as part of a class action.
Again, I wear extended wear contacts longer than you're supposed to.
And I take that personal risk, and I don't tend to sue anybody if I scratch my cornea.
But it is a calculated risk.
It's a small one.
I'm willing to take it.
But you should be aware it's out there.
But if you're a manufacturer and dealing with potential hundreds of thousands or millions of users, small risks can have very human impacts on large numbers of people.
They've been quite rightly first in line to criticize the study.
For example, the study had people, in effect, tell the nurse that they've had this problem, and that's not quite the way you'd like to get access to people to randomly contact them.
But still, statistically speaking, it seems to be a perfectly valid study as these things go.
But yeah, they're looking at it as they would.
I mean, after all, the tobacco companies, until quite recently, maintained that cigarettes were not addictive.
You know, if it turns out that the causal agent is more tied to the battery source, which it may be the power source, rather than the signal structure, that would make a big difference.
And as you know, a lot of states are entertaining laws or legislation that would lead to laws that would preclude you from using a cell phone while driving, for example.
I believe most of those attempts will still allow you some kind of headset structure, which may very well minimize or eliminate entirely the risk here caused by the current cell phone technology.
And the reason is that what we need to achieve heaven in a chip, a world where we get everything we want just by thinking about it millions of times faster than want to create worlds, destroy worlds, replay memories that will.
That just depends on speeding up really existing signal processing algorithms and detecting the signals.
And given that, and given that nanotubes and their cousins, the so-called artificial atoms, and those kind of nano devices are the best bet we have.
Yeah, I think if you presented it that way, it may well be.
And there could be lots of other things.
For example, if you have really good pre-heaven, just virtual reality style chips or simulations, you know it's going to involve a lot of sex and violence.
And if you have really good simulations of a high school kid have violent images of killing his football opponents or something, and if the studies show, as they probably would, that the incidence of high school violence increases by people who listen to that, then I think you're going to see laws limiting or eliminating that type of simulation.
Well, yeah, but imagine if you could live somebody else's life, a virtual heaven, if you will, then that's a million times more addictive than the best TV we've ever seen because you'd be living it.
It would be your reality.
And after all, isn't that what drugs do?
They alter reality?
Well, this would be a complete switch of reality.
This would be submersed in an entirely new, pleasurable, heavenly world that could not possibly be legal.
Because time scales are different, that would occur in what I call nano-time, millions of times faster than our current neural time.
Maybe it would turn out, Art, that you're allowed to do 20 minutes of our time per day, which would be many, many years, maybe centuries, if the chips were powerful enough inside that chip or on that program.
My colleagues have a hippocampus chip and other devices that interface directly with neurons.
There's an increasing number of implants from retinal implants and chips and even into cortex.
And the beginnings of experiments, I think you're referring to, of using focused thought to make decisions and trying those out with people who are fully disabled.
Even if, you know, I got to think about it, even if it was really short little trips, nano trips, so to speak, and you were back fairly rapidly, well, who wouldn't want another shot of that right away, huh?
Oh, no.
No, I think they'd be illegal as heck.
They'd be imported from some, probably from China.
Brandy in Niagara on the lake writes, heaven chips.
What you're describing has been explored in science fiction.
There's an episode called Better Than Life in the TV show Red Dwarf.
I think they have a book by that name, too.
So my position is it would be absolutely illegal.
No doubt it's coming, and probably from China.
They'd probably be the center of it, you know, the way the Golden Triangle is for dope or whatever.
Professor, one other thing before we get to the phones, the big question, and that is, do you feel, and this was a question I was entitled to ask you, there is more to the self or soul than memory and signal processing?
Now, you work in those fields, and you're a scientist, and I wonder how hardcore you are.
I mean, is the human brain nothing more than an extremely complex, oh yes, indeed, but nothing more than signal processing and memory and speed and computation?
Is there a soul beyond all of that, do you think, Professor?
Not necessarily no to God, Art, but I'm not convinced of that.
I think God's too big a thing for a little three pounds of meat we call a brain.
But the evidence so far is what we call mind is, in effect, a software-like processing of mechanics of the brain, and we understand a lot about that now.
We know how groups of neurons, neural networks work.
Something about how networks of networks work, we can hook you up and take a functional magnetic resonance image while you're talking and watch different portions of your brain light up and so forth.
Tomorrow night I'm going to have a fellow on named Matthew Alper.
He's a brilliant guy that a lot of my audience hates.
And you know why they hate him?
He wrote a book called The God Part of the Brain.
And actually, there's now some pretty hard science to validate what for him years ago on my radio program, he's been on for years, is it was only a theory, and that is that there's a part of our brains, all of our brains, that genetically genetically dictates we will worship something that we will worship,
the God part of the brain, some part of the brain that demands, perhaps because of the fear of our own mortality, the horrible fear of just knowing that, well, as you said, Professor, it's all over.
I would argue the case a little differently in the history of evolution.
It would go like this, that we are genetically predisposed to take Orders and to follow authority.
And we're manipulated that way all the time.
But it starts out as children, it gets reinforced.
But it didn't make sense in any battles in the past or attempts to throw a spear at a tiger or something to stop and ask a lot of difficult existential questions.
You do your duty, and you're more likely if you do your duty under those circumstances, hierarchies are stable, to pass on your genes.
And we have, over hundreds of thousands of years of shaping that neural chassis, we have those kind of genes that favor, I hate to say it, but as a first-cut, blind obedience to authority.
Point number one.
Point number two, the way that the classical religions have cast God is just like a big dictator.
It's like I'm the big tyrant and the big government in the sky.
And so if there are genes to obey authority, it's quite natural they'd be projected up to the full extent.
Yeah, on that model, the person or the thing throwing the lightning bolts or controlling the weather, and it's quite natural to see how we would have believed that in earlier times.
So without any question, if Professor Costco were drawing his near to last breath and somebody said, Professor, you wouldn't believe it.
We've got this new computer.
Microsoft just came out with this new chip, and we can actually take the contents of your brain, every last neural activity, and we can download it into Microsoft's latest just before you're going to die.
How much of a chance, since you're a mathematician, you compute odds all the time, have you computed the odds of your being frozen and then successfully continued in some manner?
I've looked at that in a variety of calculations, and my good friend and colleague, Professor Greg Benford at UC Irvine, just published an article on that in the current issue of Skeptical Inquire.
And he does it in the back-of-the-napkin kind of way, like the Drake equation for estimating the probability of life in the universe besides ours.
And he comes up with an estimate between being able to pull off, for example, a cryonic-style resurrection.
just that, which is, I think, a different question, on the order of 10% likely at this point.
It's not bad.
And the reason, it may be higher, maybe lower, but the main point with cryonics, such as it is, is that when you're really frozen deeply in liquid nitrogen, nothing's changing.
So you can wait hundreds or, in theory, thousands of years until technology is so advanced and so cheap that you can come out and do what you can do.
Greg says that if you go further, and Greg wrote a book about cryonics, by the way, under pseudonym.
He's an award-winning author in science fiction.
He also is an advisor to NASA and other places.
He said if you take the typical American earns a million plus in his lifetime, multiply that by that expectancy, you get an expected payoff of this activity on the order of $100,000, which is more than the cost of signing up.
And that was his way of ballparking the odds of doing this.
But that's a backup technology, the freezing part, because those of us who are not so sure will be around when the chip technology is, as you say, whether chip technology, sensor technology, digital signal processing technology will get to the point that we can have human-brain interface and replacements, that's a virtual certainty.
Now, whether it happens in our lifetime, I don't know, but I've got to say it looks that way, Arch.
But in a wink of a digital eye, we are at a point where the powers of computers that cost a nickel greatly outstrip anything the human brain can do, and the porting technology gets better.
Again, whether we can upload into that, that's a tougher proposition.
I think we'll do it in fuzzy little steps.
We already have the pulmonary implants underway, and there'll be many, many more of those, primarily with people suffering maladies from near blindness or deafness and things like that.
But it's not a big step from that, technologically speaking, to supplement the brain.
If you can really supplement it, and eventually, why not back it up and frankly replace it outright?
And it might have, like everything else, some drawbacks.
I mean, in the thousandth year, you might be begging for the release of nothingness.
I don't know.
There's always some catch, though.
Anyway, let's take some phone calls.
First time caller line, you're on the air with Professor Costco.
unidentified
Hi.
Yeah, I was wondering, earlier in the conversation, you mentioned that we are more dangerous of disease rather than terrorism.
And there's devices called the Raymond Royal Life invented a frequency generator that kills bacteria and viruses.
And I was wondering if you could tell me how effective you think those are, and also if frequencies or harmonics would possibly stop nanotechnology or make it inert in some way.
Yeah, so there is a case where harmonics and frequencies facilitate nanotechnology and vice versa.
I don't think that's a problem.
Other devices, like you said, to detect bad proteins like viruses and other microbes like that, I think there's a lot of work already underway, already experimental demonstrations of that.
Whether it will wipe out disease, I don't know, but I do think it'll be much better protected in the very near term.
The book is called Heaven and a Chip from Random House.
It's available at Amazon.com and other fine bookstores near you.
But the book contains, in its final chapter, 15, the title essay, a chapter called That, and a lot of the underlying technology is spread out in 100 pages of very fine end notes in case you're interested.
With all the problems the cell phone's going to be having in the years to come with possible tumors, don't you think these companies that put them out would want to change it before all the lawsuits start to happen?
They probably are scrambling to do that right now.
The trouble is we don't have 10 years' worth of data of a lot of people using digital cell phones.
And again, the study we cited, the one from Sweden in the Journal of Epidemiology, just came out.
Of course, it hasn't been replicated yet, but it was a good study.
I mean, its findings, as far as standard statistical techniques go, were not due to chance.
Given that, it would be negligent or worse on the part of a manufacturer not to look very hard to see what the cause might be and to try to innovate around that.
The trouble is, right now, all we have is the sheer empirical finding of these benign tumors.
We just don't know the mechanism that causes that.
Well, it's a technology that is written about, and Rife is known to many people, and so just do a little reading about him, and maybe you can answer it next time around.
This is a concern a lot of people thought about, I think, beginning with the smallpox issue right after 9-11.
Somebody could say, I have an incurable disease like a new strain of smallpox or something, and I'm just going to run around crowded cities breathing on as many people as I can and sitting in water supplies or anything like that, that has potential.
And we really do have an example of that in the case when, as I mentioned before, when the Spanish arrived here with bodies full of antibodies and a few people carrying smallpox in particular and other viral agents, they infected villages and some of the villagers would run to warn the other or to inform the other villages about what was happening, apparently all the way into North America.
And upon arrival of that messenger, it spread and millions were wiped out that way.
One concern, though, is that has the potential for great blowback to go right around the planet and back to the original population that started it.
Well, I'm afraid that a lot of people on this earth today don't care about blowback.
The other thing that I wanted to mention to you, since we're on this subject, is that I'm reading all these stories now about scientists becoming extremely concerned about what they're calling the bird flu.
It's almost as if it's getting to the point where I'm expecting any minute to hear about, Oh my god, bird something or another has jumped species and now we've got a flu virus that is mutated with something that a bird had that's going to kill humans by the millions and millions and millions.
I'm hearing so many stories about scientists looking at this right now.
I'm starting to think it's going to happen soon, like they know something I don't.
First, there is a real risk of that happening, and there's a big viral population always growing, pretty much on the pig and duck farms in southern China.
One of the issues, and we worry about this at USC, where we have the largest international student population in the country, is if you look at a plot of how long it used to take the flu, for example, or bugs like that to spread around the world, 100 years ago it could be 40 days or much longer.
Now it's about one day.
You're on the airplane.
One effects of the global economy is a rapid diffusion of viral and bacterial agents.
So whether it jumps out of the duck population or wherever it happens to be.
Yeah, they're saying ducks are more likely than any other common.
But they're saying this almost as though they know it's going to happen.
I know it's eerie to think of it that way, but when you read these stories after stories after story, it's like it's never happened, but they're saying, hey, it's going to happen.
And they think it's going to happen soon.
There must be a reason that they think it's going to happen soon.
Professor, hold it right there.
I mean, are they suddenly observing a lot of things jumping from species to species, or is it the experimentation we're doing in labs, putting human genes into animals and stuff like that?
unidentified
What we do is make it lonely Go one way and by your side Thank you.
You do have to do it.
Thank you.
Wanna take a ride?
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You know, sometimes there's something that you have, and the time is so ripe for it.
I was going to hold this for tomorrow night, but really I can't, in all good conscience.
It's an article by Rick Weiss in the Washington Post.
It's called Scientists Debate Blending Species.
November 21st, 2004, Washington Post.
In Minnesota, pigs are being born with human blood in their veins.
In Nevada, there are sheep whose livers and hearts are largely human.
In California, mice peer from their cages with human brain cells firing in their skulls.
These aren't outcasts from the island of Dr. Moreau, the 1986 novel by H.G. Wells, which a rogue doctor develops creatures that are part animal and part human.
These are real creations of real scientists.
Biologists call these hybrids chimeras, after the mythical Greek creature with a lion's head, a goat's body, and a serpent's tail.
They are products of experiments in which human stem cells were added to developing animal bodies.
Chimeras are allowing scientists to watch for the first time how human cells and organs mature and interact, not in the cold isolation of laboratory dishes, mind you, but inside the bodies of living creatures.
Some are already revealing deep secrets of human biology and perhaps pointing the way toward new medical treatments.
But with no federal guidelines in place, an awkward question hovers above the work: how human must a Chimera be before stringent research rules ought to kick in.
The National Academy of Sciences, which advises the federal government, has been studying that issue and hopes to make some recommendations by perhaps February.
They say we need to establish some kind of guidelines as to what the scientific community ought not to do, said James Beatty, chairman of the National Institutes of Healthcare Stem Cell Task Force.
I'll have more of that tomorrow night, but in view of what we're talking about, I couldn't resist this one in the Washington Post.
Pretty freaky stuff.
And it reminds me, you know, I get these calls every now and then, and people saw creatures that looked God, half human and half something else.
And it's always you saw what?
Well, maybe you weren't seeing things after all.
you saw one of these things that we've produced is the only word you can use.
Hey, Professor, you know, one of the weirdest things I ever saw, and this was now, oh, at least two or three years ago, I saw this picture of a mouse with a human ear growing out of its back.
And I would ask you to imagine clamping a cell phone on that ear as a natural way art to do what we're talking about, to test for these acoustical neuromas in the auditory nerve.
It's a great thing, subject to reasonable controls.
How else are we going to do that?
We can't set a bunch of humans down, and we can get Arnold the pig and...
Isn't it possible, Professor, or even more than possible, that as we begin to cross-contaminate human genetics with other mammal genetics, eventually we're going to now, see, I was worried about why they were talking about the bird flu so much.
Well, now, here's one reason why they might be talking about it.
I'm not saying it's a reason, but, you know, something awful is going to happen, maybe.
I read the science on that a little differently, Art.
I think they realize that the potential is big on the one hand, so they have to watch it carefully.
And, two, again, the reason I mentioned that things spread so quickly in the global economy, especially in the major cities, that it'd be irresponsible not to.
The probability of it, though, when you multiply that by the downside payoff, I think fortunately is still small, and that could change.
I think we don't have as many as the movies suggest, but we do have mistakes, and there will always be carelessness, and we have a lot more negligence than recklessness.
Something related we didn't touch on that came out a few years ago.
A lot of cops sitting at speedway speed traps, male cops keeping the handheld radar in their lap, irradiated their testicles and had a much higher incidence of testicular cancer than the general population.
I was going to ask a professor there in his macro-micro science world that what would be the explanation of people that have extraordinary perceptions of future events, deja vu, that are way, way beyond any statistical analysis?
Some of my best friends, scientists' friends have said, you know, this is going to sound hard to believe, but I just can't explain this type of precognition that I've had.
And let's grant the perception as being accurate and accurately relayed.
I'm just taking a first order their description of the event, and I'll offer an explanation of it.
So I offer this in my earlier book, Fuzzy Thinking, and in my textbooks, in some of the papers you can download online.
I developed something called the BAM, or the bidirectional associative memory, in a whole family of math models.
So have a lot of other researchers.
We know a lot about how we store patterns in memory.
We are pattern recognition creatures.
And so it can well be that your brain, which is doing a lot for you in its unconscious mode, is taking similar events, triggering events that you may not be fully aware of, and maybe for survival type reasons, associating those with patterns that may assist you.
And it can cause a flash.
In particular, I've used this to explain the effect of your life flashing before your eyes when you're about to die.
I mean, that makes perfect evolutionary sense.
You have a massive associative memory search.
It would be in parallel, not in serial.
And those creatures who had associative memories that search such a way would have outlived on the margin those who did not.
So I think we can account for the mechanism for those kinds of things.
My argument against it, Art, if there really is in your brain, in the meat, in the neurons, an ability, a precognition, that would convey such incredible selective pressure in the evolutionary arms race to pass on your genes that everybody should have it.
And unless it's just starting to break now, which is technically possible, the fact that it's not here is powerful negative evidence that it's not there.
With regard to our behavior, any incredible new technology that comes along is going to be first developed into something probably destructive because we're still we haven't changed that much, Professor, or have we?
Well, I think our basic human nature has not changed.
We are, statistically, commonsensically speaking, a very aggressive species.
Half of our time in the past 10,000 years has been in some state of war, as it's been measured.
And we can blame the endocrine system and the competition to pass on our genes and all those kind of things.
We have to be honest about that.
But I think, especially in this country, in theory, we've deviated.
We are the good guys, but we live in a world with a lot of bad guys, so we really have to think hard about how they will try to kill us, even though we should all try to get alone.
But that is so far removed from any foreseeable reality.
They were leaving their young and beaching themselves.
What I wanted to ask was in populated cities like where I am now in Orange County and L.A., don't these radio frequencies that we're talking about with cell phones and all that, aren't we being bombarded anyway, even if we're not using the cell phone?
In the first chapter of my novel, Nanotime, which is about World War III, The bad guy, in effect, has a chip in the brain and pauses for a moment, and you get to see all those thousands of signals bombarding it.
Now, they're very faint, so it doesn't cause a problem in terms of the intensity of the electromagnetic field or anything like that.
But you're right.
Right now, if you really had the signal processing capability, you could watch thousands of hundreds of TV programs in effect and listen to thousands of conversations.
It's all passing through in a very faint but detectable way.
So in the spirit of combining of things, perhaps amplifying things, is it unreasonable to ask if there might not be sort of an overall effect of modern society's electromagnetic, specific electromagnetic radiation combining in some strange way, even at very weak levels, and affecting us?
At some future date, some cell phone executive may sit in front of a Senate committee and say, some cell phones had to explode for this industry to advance.