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Dec. 4, 2004 - Art Bell
02:53:40
Coast to Coast AM with Art Bell - Prof. Bart Kosko - Terrorism & Nanotechnology
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Time Text
so so
from the high desert and the great american southwest i bid you good evening good morning
good afternoon wherever you may be in the world's politic time zones
I'm Art Bell and this program covers all of them coast to coast AM.
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, um, 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 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 rulebook.
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 to Gaul.
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 him 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 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, uh... 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 and quote thompson the eighth member of bush's fifteen-person cabinet to turn in papers and barely have them accepted probably with a uh... not so uh...
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!
but we will be back with the rest of the news is paul would say uh... in a moment
i am just a talk show host that's all i am But, I've been pretty fortunate in looking at things on 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, it's 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 is 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.
And 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 of these, 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 HAARP 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 freshwater 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 11 issue of Geophysical Research Letters to Bourne 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.
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 US 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.
2,000 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 that
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 forty percent of the ice gone, you see the US 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 eighty two hundred years ago may well be occurring right now and then there is this headline strange powerful storms in the US 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 When it snows here, little kids run outside.
Look!
We've never seen snow!
And there it is!
At the same time, extraordinary rainfall across central, southern, and eastern Texas caused extensive flooding and was continuing at the time of this writing.
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, 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 under-reported.
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.
It 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's 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 ditty.
Scotsman.com news is where this comes from, directly from Scotland.
A headlined vaccine will not stop next flu epidemic, official warns.
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 two to seven 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.
I'm Art Bell.
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Y'all listen carefully.
The numbers are a little bit different on the weekend.
And here they are.
To talk with Art Bell, call the wildcard line at area code 775-727-1295.
775-727-1295. The first time caller line is area code 775-727-1222.
To talk with Art Bell from east of the Rockies, call toll-free at 800-825-5033.
From west of the Rockies, call 800-618-8255.
International callers may reach Art 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.
Indeed, and listen, please everybody, dial those numbers carefully, very carefully, write them down, and then dial them carefully.
This week I had to talk to some poor lady who lives here in Pahrump, Nevada, and called me up at the door.
What am I going to do?
I'm one digit off one of your phone numbers and people call me up at 3.30 and 4 and 4.30 in the morning and they want to talk about UFOs and stuff and they wake me up.
Well, I suggested she change her number.
it didn't sound like she was going to do that and so please please dial carefully
let us now venture into the world of well who knows what Unscreened calls, just into the night with whatever happens to be out there.
First time caller line, you are on the air.
Hello.
Hi, Art.
My name's Mark.
I'm calling from Eastern Iowa.
We're listening on KXIC.
And talking on a cell phone.
Yes.
Do you know, I read an article recently indicating that Some cell phones have actually blown up?
One doesn't.
Well, not yet.
I've noticed lately a lot of very large flights of birds and when I notice them they're just windmilling instead of traveling from place to place.
So they're acting in some confused manner?
Yes.
I have a question.
Yes?
I grew up here in Central Iowa on a farm, and I'm in my early fifties now.
It seems to me that when I look at crows now, they're between two to three times the size they were when I was a kid.
You ought to see the ones we've got out here in Pahrump.
These are monsters.
I've never seen Why does something have to be wrong just because it appears to be different from what you've become accustomed to?
Maybe this is the first time these conditions have occurred since the invention of radio.
History is long.
Why does something have to be wrong just because it appears to be different from what you've become accustomed to?
Maybe this is the first time these conditions have occurred since the invention of radio
History is long human recollection short George you're absolutely right
And again, let me stress, I'm only a talk show host.
And so I make no expert claim that anything is wrong.
I'm giving you an opinion based on my experience only.
And it may turn out to be completely wrong.
But I don't think so.
Once again, though, it's only my opinion based on observation.
Wildcard Line, you're on the air.
Hi.
This is Bill calling from North Carolina.
Did you know those things blow up sometimes, Bill?
I actually did.
Matter of fact, my battery gets hot sometimes, and I worry about that.
Yes.
Yes, and it sounds flippant to suggest, but I have nights where I wish they'd all blow up.
Of course, not in the hands of my callers, but just, you know, sitting on a table somewhere.
Boom!
Anyway, what's up, man?
Well, I was thinking about the ionosphere question there.
Ah, yes.
And a couple of weeks ago you discussed about how the U.S.
was going to use some kind of technology to stop other countries from using their satellites.
Oh yes, sure.
And I was wondering possibly if by using, turning on and off the ionosphere they could stop the... Listen, what you're suggesting I absolutely do not rule out.
We know that HAARP's main intent is to toy with the ionosphere, so they've got to be a prime suspect.
Exactly.
They're one possibility, but there's an awful lot of things that are really, you know, they're kind of out of place, and I think they're adding up to something.
I hope I'm wrong.
Well, I hope you're wrong also, but I wanted to also ask you about your antenna.
Do you see a voltage change?
Is your voltage going up or down?
Well, that's an awfully good question, and I will answer it for you, but I can't answer it right now.
I have not lately gone out and measured the voltage.
As you know, I have any number of devices on there to prevent That voltage from getting in here and ruining equipment.
And those devices remain in place.
So to test that, I would have to go out and disconnect the antenna from all of that and measure it.
And every time I do that, I get the hell shocked out of me.
But I will go out and make a measurement.
It would be interesting to know if it's varied.
East of the Rockies, you're on the air.
Hello.
Hi, this is Dave.
Hello, Dave.
Where are you?
I'm in Bryan, Texas.
Bryan, Texas.
All right.
And the reason I was calling, everybody seems to, well, so many people think that the weather is causing the ice, whereas I say that the ice is causing the weather.
That's a very scientifically sound thing to say.
As it melts, more moist air gets over the ice and makes it melt faster, because You know, the cold isn't as intense and doesn't condense the atmosphere out.
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.
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.
Well, the ice cores wouldn't bear that out, sir.
Well, there is some subjectivity there.
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, Uh, 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, you know, 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 life 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.
Hello.
Yes, hi.
Long-time listener, first-time caller, proud member of the U.S.
Air Force.
Well, all right.
That happened to be my choice as well, the U.S.
Air Force.
Well, welcome, sir.
Thank you.
And I'm a weather forecaster for the Air Force.
Oh, you are?
All right.
So I have a very interesting career field.
What I wanted to ask you, have you heard of the Baha'i Faith?
The what?
The Baha'i, it's a religion called the Baha'i Faith.
Oh, I have, yeah, sure.
Yes, I was wondering if you've had any guests or if you plan on having any guests to talk about that.
I hadn't considered it until you just now asked.
Why would it be interesting?
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 are very polarizing throughout the world.
They believe in one world government.
They believe in an auxiliary language that all of humanity can understand.
But is a one world government really a matter of religion?
According to the prophet founder of the Baha'i Faith, yes.
It is?
Alright.
And what else do they believe?
They also believe in eliminations of all forms of prejudice, eliminations of equality of men and women, and eliminations of extreme wealth and poverty.
Elimination of extreme wealth and poverty?
Extreme wealth and poverty.
So in other words, take from the rich and give to the poor?
More or less, yes.
Well, that has a parallel in the political world.
The Baha'i Faith also has an office in the U.N.
Do they?
Yes, as a matter of fact, they do.
A small office, by the way.
I can imagine the U.N.
giving them space based on some of what you just said, sure.
Right, and what's intriguing about the faith is that it was founded Uh, in Persia, in the 1850s, these ideas were considered radical.
They still are.
Yes.
But even for its day, and the place in history, and the place on the Earth, I mean... Well, I'll tell you what.
You get me a Baha'i big guy, and we'll go to town.
A what?
A Baha'i big guy.
What's that?
A big guy?
Oh, actually, there's nine of them.
Well, all right.
Just give me one of the... Actually, their headquarters is in Israel.
All right.
Well, get me one of the nine, and we'll rock and roll.
Okay.
I will send you literature.
You receive mail?
Well, of course.
Great.
Wonderful.
And I love your show, by the way.
All right.
Well, thank you very much for the call, and take care.
East of the Rockies, you're on the air.
Good morning.
Hey, Art.
How are you doing?
Quite well, sir.
This is Kevin in Roanoke, Virginia.
Roanoke, Virginia.
Yes, sir.
I've got a story about you talking about electricity, voltage spikes, like all coming off your antenna.
Yes.
My father, several years ago, he's an electrician, got a call from a strip mall here in the area and they said they had a fence that was, you know, shocking people.
Yes.
So they went up there and he checked it out and looked around, you know, to make sure there was none of the equipment, make sure there wasn't something going to ground on the equipment.
Sure, sure.
And he told him he couldn't find anything, and they called him back two or three times.
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.
Yes, that's quite common, actually.
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.
Yeah, I just thought it was kind of neat because I thought about your intent 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 one million watts and sending its Propaganda.
We do propaganda, as you know, to North Korea from Okinawa.
And it was so strong, one 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.
A lot of radiation.
Wild Card Line, you're on the air.
Hello.
Mr. Bell?
Yes.
My name is Tad from Kansas.
Hey there.
And I used to work on a defense plant down in Alabama.
Excuse me.
We worked on HAARP.
Oh?
And I was a quality control guy and I had to sit there and watch the engineers test these systems out.
You worked on HAARP.
Now was this the early research before HAARP became centered up in Alaska or what?
This was back in the late 80s early 90s.
So the early research before it was deployed.
Yes.
Okay.
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.
Could be.
There could be unstated goals of HAARP?
I don't know, sir.
You know, they don't tell us these things.
They give little public pronouncements that you have to look deeper.
The real goals of these programs, who knows?
Yeah, I was a quality control guy and had to witness the tests and the engineers and stuff explained it to me.
What is it that you were controlling the quality of?
They were using gyroscopes and we were testing a lot of the circuit cards and stuff that was going into the system.
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, you know, 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.
First time caller line, you are on the air.
Hello.
Yes, Art?
Yes, turn your radio off, please.
I just did.
My name is Axel.
I'm calling from Reno, Nevada.
Axel?
Yes.
Normally I listen to you on 780 KOH radio, but tonight I'm listening to you on the XM satellite radio.
Okay.
On 165.
Yes.
Maybe a little off the subject, but We live here in Reno, Nevada in a gated community.
Now, I don't know if you want me to give the name out of the gate.
No, there's no need.
Okay, there's not too many, but this is the one that we live in.
And it seems that we have a group of people, Homeowners Association, you know, with CC&Rs and things like that.
Yes.
Just to let people know that, you know, if you have the wrong people in there, they kind of rule the way, you know, they see fit.
You know, I know we have more and more of our rights Being taken away?
No, no, no, no, sir.
You signed those away.
You signed your rights away.
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.
You've got to read the fine print.
That's true, but there are state laws that, you know, 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's probably what it's coming to.
You should have read the damn contract in the first place.
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.
Alright, 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 fast 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 Kosko is going to be here.
He's quite something.
So stay right where you are.
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It is, and quite an adventure lies directly ahead.
Professor Bart Costco.
Actually, a professor of Electrical Engineering at the University of Southern California is just ahead.
That's, by the way, where he teaches courses on Information Science, Neural Networks, Fuzzy Logic, and Statistics Signal Processing.
Dr. Kosko holds degrees in Philosophy, Economics, Mathematics, Electrical Engineering.
he's an elected governor of the economics of the international rather
neural network society has chaired and co-chaired several international
conferences on neural and fuzzy
systems conferences
he is on the editorial board of several scientific and mathematical journals he
has published well over a hundred scientific papers
so he has not perished has published several popular essays in venues from
scientific american to the new york times is a
frequent contributor to the opinion pages of the l a times he's also author
of He currently holds one of the first National Science Foundation research contracts on the new field of noise processing.
In addition, he is a former consultant to the Tomahawk cruise missile and other smart weapons systems.
He's written books entitled Fuzzy Engineering, Intelligent Signal Processing, and Heaven, of course, in a Chip.
Heaven in a Chip.
That is an absolutely fascinating concept, and one, perhaps, that may not be that far away.
way in a moment professor costco
all right uh... professor costco welcome back to the program
Good to be with you, Art.
You have been here quite some number of times now.
Always a real, really a big pleasure to have you on, because we can range all over the place.
You have done so much, and of course tonight you'll be giving the details of the guidance system for some of our best missiles, right?
No, then I would have to kill you.
But we will cover a lot of topics.
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 LA Times recently suggesting we grossly have overestimated the threat of terrorism.
Is that correct?
That's correct.
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, just an hour ago I read it, less than an hour ago.
Health and Human Services Secretary Tommy Thompson, as you know, resigned.
Left 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?
I think it is overblown, Art.
The trouble with this is we're trying to prove a negative here.
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 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 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.
All of that has happened.
All of that.
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.
Yes, it was.
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... Very well respected, by the way.
Indeed.
It's not about terrorism.
It's about the U.S.
maybe losing its The status of 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.
But 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.
And they actually competed about who would fight terrorism best.
Exactly.
Yeah, absolutely.
True.
And the dollar count of that is substantial, 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, I found out that there's been really no major increase in the worldwide deaths due to terrorism.
Merely a thousand.
Not even quite a thousand 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 when, in the end, when we didn't have a bombing at the Olympics this summer, We didn't have a bombing at the convention, so 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 discussions with 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 have five days left after this tape, the conditional probability that we'll have an attack?
Almost everyone thought it was more than 50%.
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 have 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 that if you search something and you don't find anything, it's evidence that there is nothing.
I like to use the example of your, go shopping at a store, 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 a library, that's a reasonably well-defined search space.
But 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 sweep there.
It's easier to sonar sweep the Loch Ness, the Loch there, than it is to search the mountainous forests of California.
Sure.
When you get to the SETI level, and realize that we have 400 billion or so stars in this galaxy, with only at least 4 to 1, that well over a trillion galaxies, we can tell the entire universe, Just the enormity of that search space.
I wouldn't say 30 years, but maybe 300.
I think we don't 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.
That still is debatable.
I don't think 30 years, but at some point you would say, look, we've largely searched the library.
The book is not in there.
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.
I'm not sure when that will begin to change, if nothing continues to happen, but I suppose at some point it will.
We're just not there yet.
The trouble here, Art, is estimating the probability.
There's no question we'll be attacked.
We were attacked, we'll be attacked again.
The question is, with what frequency, and what will be the magnitude of the attack?
And the hysteria that followed 9-11, I think all of us thought that there were going to be sleeper cells popping up, and first it was anthrax.
That has passed now to a sense that, at least a couple years ago, that there may be a few residual sleeper cells here.
That idea has largely gone, kind of vanished, frankly, with the Concept of Sodom and Thane having those weapons of mass destruction.
Another case where we have pretty powerful negative evidence that they're not there.
They may still be, but the evidence so far, as we search that big country, is that they're not.
The other problem, Art, is all these psychological studies show that when we come to estimate tiny probabilities, we're just not good at it.
We're not real good at it.
I teach probability.
I just lectured on it yesterday.
We're not real good at it, even when it's the kind of probability involved in a casino, after all.
You're going to lose money in all probability, and we continue to play there.
But when it comes to really obscure events, a particular type of terrorist threat, you mentioned the food supply, or the water.
Well, Tommy Thompson did, you know, his outgoing words.
I was kind of commenting the first hour, I 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.
Well, you never know.
So, you feel very strongly that we're We're over-committing resources.
Yes.
I think the other thing, to be a good scientist, if you make a prediction, Art, and it comes up wrong, you've got to make an adjustment.
We predicted, all of us, I think, really believed that there were weapons of mass destruction.
And I don't know about all of us.
I think most of us were, when we saw Colin Powell get up, we gave him the benefit of the doubt, in February of 2003 in front of the United Nations.
I'll grant you, yes.
And it looked pretty powerful.
And they have a lot of stuff.
You and I don't have the other thing, Art, That was powerful and persuading to me, was what we call the digital eye in the sky.
We have put more digital surveillance assets over Iraq than over anything in the history of mankind, with all that intense scrutiny and ground search.
Not only did we subsequently find nothing, but before, we thought we had found it.
We made a big mistake there, and the rationalization was, better safe than sorry.
You take that rationalization to its logical conclusion, you're going to build an airplane wing that will never fly, if you're safe than sorry.
And this is my concern here, and you bring it up with Tommy Thompson, that a bureaucrat has an incentive to make very sure that nothing bad happens on his or her watch.
And that is not necessarily a rational way to balance the odds.
Well, since you're a mathematician, I assume that you have played with the actual numbers.
What are the odds, Professor?
That we will have another major terrorist attack.
Something as big or bigger than 9-11.
Perhaps a biological release.
I don't know.
A dirty bomb.
Something.
Arthur, something impromptuly called the Burrell-Cantelli Lemma.
And it tells us for certain events over time that they occur with virtual certainty.
And the only question is how long do we have to wait?
If we wait long enough, there will be a nuclear mishap.
Wait long enough, of course, a bunch of monkeys on typewriters will type out all Shakespeare's play.
Yes, that said, though... An easy cop-out answer, though, is, virtual certainty, there'll be some bad, at least one bad strike in 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 at America and other countries.
The question, the hard one that we can't really answer, 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.
There's really no evidence of that.
In fact, it's really to the contrary.
Well, one little brief note here.
In Iraq right now, uh... they certainly are managing on a daily basis to blow up uh... have people uh... give their lives and that's a kind of a scary thing to think about i mean so many people willing to give their own life to push the button to kill others in this case many times iraqi police and american soldiers so that there's no shortage of people willing to kill themselves
To do these deeds in Iraq.
What makes you think that couldn't be transported here?
Well, two distinctions.
First, our ironclad borders we have, right?
That's the second thing.
We have the oceans and we have, look, we paid a high price with the Patriot Act and the billions we spent on security, but we got something for it.
We have much more secure borders than we did before.
Not secure enough, maybe.
We don't search containers like we ought to and things like that.
But it's not like it used to be before 2001.
So, coming into this country, sneaking in weapons and other things is substantially more difficult than it was a few years ago.
And we have the oceans.
The second point is, we have to be careful here with our terms, I think.
These are insurgents fighting what has become an occupier.
Yes.
And that's very different than terrorists, who have linen-like cells, and there's lots of terrorists on the planet.
There's 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, or anything more, Then, local resistors may be brainwashed.
A lot of things could account for that, but I don't think, mind if the handfuls are cowed, that most of the people engaged in combat right now on the other side are terrorists.
Alright, let me trail back to the question I asked.
Mathematically, let's say in the next ten years, what are the odds, within the next decade, of a major 9-11 or greater incident?
I would bet at least 90%.
90%?
Sure, 90%.
As someone who writes science fiction and speculative fiction, you have a novel, Nano Time, about World War III, you could trigger that kind of thing.
If you start looking at 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.
Having, you know, will the annual deaths from terrorism rise substantially above 1,000 per year?
Maybe it'll go up to 10,000.
Maybe it'll go up to 100,000.
But that's a far cry, I think, from the kind of picture that we heard during the three presidential debates.
Yes, 100,000 would get a lot of attention.
No question about that.
That's a lot of... Well, okay.
Some sort of attack at that level in the next five years, Professor.
How likely is that?
I'm a skeptical sort, aren't I?
I think that we're such a porous country in the sense of our border, despite our recent improvements.
Our security, there's a lot of people here who, so many, I don't even have to say a few things on the radio just 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.
I'm trying to decide, based on your answers, how much weight.
In other words, if it's probable we'll have something of that scale in the next five years, then maybe we aren't overreacting, because that's... But the distinction is, yes, it's probable.
A lot of people out there don't like it.
But the question is whether we can do anything reasonably to stop that kind of thing.
You're going to get hit in some unforeseen way.
I seriously doubt the next attack will be By commandeering airplanes and smashing them into buildings, at least in this country.
Agreed.
And if you try to allocate resources to deal with all the possible modes of attack, you're in this bad, game-threatening 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.
So if I use one more example, if you look at the kind of controls on the Patriot Act... Hold on, we're at the bottom of the hour, so hold tight, and we'll pick right back up on that.
I know the Patriot Act, and a lot of things we're doing are pretty...
Extreme and the fight we're fighting but then listening to the professor It is likely that something is going to happen.
I guess that would be Despite our best efforts.
There's nothing we can do about it's going to happen I don't know.
That's a very good question.
Isn't it in the middle of the night in the dark?
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Absolutely nothing.
Well, I don't know about that.
War has its upside for some.
Those who make bullets, guns, and tomahawk missiles.
I mean, I guess you can find a little something in it for a few.
white certainly is an interesting premise that
professor has that were totally overreacting uh... to this year's threat on the one hand but on the
other hand acknowledging that uh... something big and bad awful will happen
So, I do understand what you're saying, professor.
You do, however, feel that there is a possibility, for example, of a nuclear device, even a dirty bomb, getting in on a container ship, right?
Absolutely.
But that's a big difference, too.
The dirty bomb, as you know, is really not a nuclear bomb.
It's not a thermonuclear or fissionable bomb.
It wouldn't matter, though.
I realize for a day or two, the stock markets would crash.
There'd be total panic.
Food would be stripped from the shelves and so on.
But it's ordinary radiation taken out of a hospital or food processing plant, wrapped around some plastic explosive or TNT, and set off.
It will make the Geiger counters go off.
So easy to do.
Very easy to do.
And such a panic terrorist kind of thing to do.
By the time we explain to the U.S.
and world public that it's not a nuclear bomb, a great psychological damage will have taken place and laws might have passed as quickly as they passed with the Patriot Act.
Oh, yes.
But the other one is the bigger issue.
Could somebody get in some real weapons-grade plutonium or other elements through our fairly porous border in the South or on a container ship?
Possibly art, 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 Pakistan, as Dr. Khan worked with Libya, perhaps North Korea and other countries, and Iran is busily beavering away.
They are, and then there's North Korea.
Exactly, which puts us in a very awkward spot, since we went to war, in effect, 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.
That's right.
But the probability still, though, of bringing in a real thermonuclear-type bomb or fissional bomb, fortunately, is very small.
And it's worth taking great... Why is it small?
It's just not readily available, the kind of processed uranium and plutonium you'd need to get.
We can track that and have fairly good controls on it.
The big fear, of course, it leaks 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 in the food supply, or blowing up a chemical plant, or maybe simultaneously blowing up six casinos.
Things like that, I think, are much more likely to happen.
There's very little we can do to stop that.
When you think about what he said, maybe it's as simple as he wants to sell books or something.
Maybe not.
I don't know.
I mean, what he said is incredible.
You wouldn't think that he would say something like that, would you?
I think he probably knows a lot more than he's telling.
You have to take orders when you're in a cabinet like that.
Also, Art, if I 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.
Maybe I can publish it right here.
After 9-11, a lot of questions which 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 of terrorists.
We just can't do that.
What we can do, though, Art, is Think about this more like B.F.
Skinner would have, and trying to condition our enemies.
And tell them that if you hit us, in any way that we define, or our friends in a treaty, any way that we define as being a terrorist strike, then we know where your main camps are.
We know who you are and where you live, and we'll kill you.
But I thought we were already... No, no, not quite so.
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 a game theory point of view, okay, here's a relatively innocent group like Hezbollah with respect to attack on us, say, and if they know that if we get hit and the next building blows up in the U.S., we're going to not, 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.
Well, well then how come Israel hasn't done it yet?
Israel, I think, would love to be able to get Ebola out of Lebanon, but it withdrew from Lebanon.
But that was just one example.
I guess I'm asking, what threat can we make that hasn't passed through the thoughts and the possibilities of Israel doing something like that?
I would think that they would have already done something like that.
They don't have the clout that we have to pull it off.
I don't think they could.
There are so many parts of the world that we could do.
If you had a list of, for example, you had a 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, pick two of them, and obliterate them.
Now, if that were done with reasonable certainty among terrorists, they would have an interesting incentive among themselves Not just not to hit us.
Okay, well let me get this straight.
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 earth, whether they were responsible.
Well, there's a point.
In all likelihood, you're never going to catch Now something's going to happen to you.
Well, you know, that's what the Russians do.
And it's rather effective, actually.
But somehow I just don't see an American president or any administration publicly saying what you're just talking about.
you are something i have a new well you know that's what the russians do
and it's rather effective actually somehow i just don't see an american president
uh... or any administration publicly saying what you're just talking about i just don't
see it i don't either at this point but should we get
the kind of hits that so many fear i don't think it likely to should there
be a lot of bombing going off
If we suffered anything, like the Israelis suffer from the suicide bombers, unfortunately, you would see that, I think.
I wonder.
I wonder.
I don't think we'd ever say it, though.
I don't think we'd say, look, we're going to take out two groups that we don't like, whether or not they're responsible for what happened.
It just doesn't seem like something we might do it.
It seems like an awfully good place to start when you're undertaking the redress of a problem like that.
Again, what you're essentially saying is the cost of striking us on average.
Yes.
We'll exceed whatever benefits you think you get from it.
I'm not against your idea at all.
I just don't think it's politically, you know, it has any coinage.
And I hope we'll never have to use that.
But do you honestly believe that we could get to that point?
If it turns out, and I hope it does, that 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.
Let us have you use your imagination, since you know a lot about nanotechnology, for example.
those great oceans protect us and our military might protect us. Let us have you use your
imagination since you know a lot about nanotechnology for example. Describe for me how somebody
might make a nanotechnological bomb and what that bomb could do. Obviously when 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 into 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 not.
Maybe it won't be poisonous, but it can contain particles that can be released that with a certain probability will get a brain tumor.
And things like that are quite worrisome.
So you're telling me they could, just bear with me as I use the phrase, set something off that would destroy all life in the oceans near our shores.
It wouldn't destroy all life in all of the oceans?
So it could be a surgical ocean strike like that?
People who do this would worry about that distinction.
Would there be a distinction, is what I'm asking?
There could be.
There could be, in theory.
That would wipe out certain kinds of carbon-type forms and not others.
Here's what's bad about it.
There's something programmable about nanotechnology.
We could use it, hopefully, for great things, but you could also program it in the bounds of physics and chemistry to hit some things and not others.
Could you cause all the white people to die?
I don't know if you could do that, Art, 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, Nano Time, I extrapolated the current smart assets that we have to assets that were programmed to disassemble or tear up or corrode very special things like metal-lead oil, and it leads to, in one case, an oil carrier off the coast of Florida, In effect, melting in a period of minutes is leaving a big, massive puddle of oil.
That'll still take a lot of work, unfortunately.
That's not in the realms of foreseeable technology.
But there could be things like that.
I'm very worried in the nano world about what I call nano-garbage.
What is that?
Just the unforeseen... The knowledge I'd give is we throw away about 30 computers a year in this country.
Most are not recycled.
And most of us throw them away illegally, technically.
And those computers contain about half the periodic table.
There's all kinds of poisons that can leach into the water supply, into soils.
And it's going to get worse.
What's happening to our computers?
I mean, you're right.
People throw them away.
Of course they do.
And they go to landfills and dumps and stuff like that.
So what are you saying might be the result?
We're not sure.
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.
Some clever hacker-like terrorist seizes on a way to mass-produce it and spread it around.
That's what I would worry about.
Nano-garbage.
You heard it here first.
Nano-garbage.
So, 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?
Absolutely.
the water supply and the effects of that can be to increase the probability of getting
a variety of diseases and cancers and who knows what else.
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.
Most of us just take a computer and throw it in the trash can.
All right, 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.
That is a concern, isn't it?
It's a concern.
One of the reasons is Distinctions there come down to proteins.
And we already have nanotubes and other devices that detect, recently there was an example at Harvard, nanowires that could detect certain viruses.
The protein, there's something waiting to catch the ball when the virus ball lands.
You catch it, it emits an electrical charge.
So you can imagine devices or systems in the future programmed for certain parts of the genome and saying these pass and these don't pass.
In theory, you could do that because of our protein-based nature.
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, that's a How much higher on the terror-level scale can you get?
I don't know.
It's pretty high.
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.
But those incredible benefits have to be equally unforeseen costs that we have not yet thought through.
And actually, the nano-garbage is a good idea because it gives us a huge statistical I mean, that's pretty scary, Professor.
something will emerge out of that over the next decade and it may be very easy for someone to seize on that and
extrapolate from it make a better form of the
the body of the world she is another good thing uh... 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?
Not for a second.
I think you're right.
I think once you're willing to give up your life, very likely you'll help others give up theirs.
And then, of course, perhaps all of this is academic if we have some terrible financial crisis which brings America to her knees anyway.
There seem to be worrisome signs out there right now.
Gold going up.
The dollar is going down every day.
I see new records.
Dollar low against the euro and everything.
What's going on there?
Well, I think if you put your finger on it, the dollar, if you measure it against the euro, it's fallen in the last three years by about 20% in value.
And if you measure it, as economists do, going back using the Deutschmark in Germany, 40 years or so, it's fallen two-thirds in value.
But I think there's a bigger problem here.
If the U.S.
takes it On the chin, because it can't control and affect his 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.
That is true, yes.
And so I don't think the, even if the U.S.
gave up science tomorrow, of course, Won't.
I don't think that would make, in the long run, a big difference, which will work out the pros and cons of nanotechnology.
It's just who will own the patents and who will most profit from it, is the question.
Well, I guess the developers of nanotechnology, if they make great leaps and strides, would own the world, wouldn't they?
I mean, wouldn't they?
I don't know about owning the world, Art, but it's a lot of power.
Well, what do most people do with power?
I realize that.
And there's 192 countries signed up at the UN, and it's like a high school or grade school playground at times.
It's a slug-out.
Every country wants to get ahead, and most are kind of locked in a stalemate with their neighbors and ancient grudges and all sorts of things that we really, unfortunately, 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 of simply transferring the technological advantage abroad.
The Chinese are doing very well, you have to give them credit.
They don't have all these laws and prohibitions against the kind of experimentation that we won't let happen here, right?
Even if they did, they don't seem to be very good at enforcing them.
How big a deal is it?
I mean, that was one of the things in the presidential debates.
You know, the president was arguing basically that we already have enough lines of stem cell research.
And it was argued on the other side that, oh no, we don't.
And you're suggesting that the Chinese don't have these restrictions and they're proceeding without barrier.
And I'm asking you how big a deal that is.
On the issue of cloning, I'm not sure.
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.
It's difficult to get the funding for it.
Now, 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 have come out of Congress against the different kinds
of cloning, and other countries say you don't have that, and they simply, they do have it,
they don't enforce it.
And you're saying it could be a really big deal.
Professor, hold tight.
We're at the top of the hour.
Yes, we have all these laws.
We prohibit so much in research in these areas, and the Chinese are not so prohibited.
What happens if they get it all together first?
Maybe that'd be a good question for the professor.
what would we face if they filed all the patents?
The heart of the city street is beating Right from the neon to turn to dawn today
Why do we celebrate Christmas with pine trees?
The warnings on them beer cans gonna be buried in them landfills No deposit, no set songs and no return
Yeah, it's only gonna take about a minute or so Till the factories blot the sun out
And you're gonna have to turn your lights on just to see And then the lights are gonna be neon, sayin' fly our jets to paradise, and the whole damn world's gonna be made of styrene.
So listen well my brothers, when you hear the night wind sigh,
and you see the wagons flying through the grey polluted sky, there won't be no country music, there won't be no rock and
roll, cause when they take away our country, they'll take away
our soul.
To talk with Art Bell, call the wildcard line at area code 7-7-8.
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Professor Bart Kosko is my guest.
Thomas in Marietta, Georgia, just simply fast blasted me the following.
toll-free 800-893-0903. From coast to coast and worldwide on the Internet, this is Coast to Coast AM with Art Bell.
Good morning everybody. Professor Bart Cosco is my guest.
Thomas in Marietta, Georgia, just simply fast-blast me the following.
He just, Thomas, just says, 12 monkeys. Right on, Thomas.
Exactly.
Exactly what we're talking about.
12 months.
Did you see that movie?
Maybe not.
It was about somebody with a biological, well, end of the world, basically, and, you know, the movie started out with a scene at the, well, anyway, in the movie there was a scene at the airport where they inspected this stuff, and it was clear, and it was odorless, and they opened it up, And it was basically the end of the world.
Customs did it for him, opened it up, went, what's this?
That was the beginning of the end of the world.
The only way it could be altered would be to travel back in time.
Something, by the way, that scientists say is rather improbable.
Traveling back in time, most of them anyway.
So, short of that, 12 Monkeys, that scenario, is unfortunately fairly likely or not.
We'll ask Professor Cosco.
Professor, did you ever see 12 monkeys?
I I didn't see the whole thing, Art.
No, but you got the idea.
You saw enough to to know what it was about?
Yeah, but it's been a while.
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.
Something, some agent or something so deadly that it could race around and kill a great deal of the human races, 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.
Yes.
Make an AIDS virus, say, that would not just mutate faster, but that would be... Airborne.
Could be carried, yeah, airborne or carried by mosquitoes, for example.
Sure.
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 wiped them out.
Yes.
That's always possible.
So something like that is possible?
Absolutely.
I don't think it's likely, but it's possible.
Okay.
With nanotechnology and stem cell research, if we don't do it, if we, well, if they win and we don't, what do we lose?
The engine of creation, as Eric Drexler called it, the fountain of technology that drives the world economy.
It's really come out of America.
I mean, it's really hard to point to innovations, art, that have come from other than the U.S.
and Europe in the past hundred years.
You're correct.
And in that sense, we issue about 170,000 patents a year right now at the Patent and 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 contests, 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.
Oh gosh, Professor, that's happening all over the federal government.
The FCC, a lot of agencies that had been rather genuine, you know, fairly genuine, We've been very generous with them in the past, but I mean that's just dried up, and so there's a lot of suffering agencies, right?
That's true, but this one's unique because it's the gatekeeper of those engines of creation.
So not just foreigners, or I don't think on foreigners, they help the global economy too, but just our own competitors.
You get patents, a lot of patents are approved now for what are called business methods that are overly broad.
And that's not what Thomas Jefferson had in mind when he added that famous clause in Article 1, Section 8, Clause 8 of the Constitution.
And likewise, some patents that really ought to get quicker treatment simply don't.
And in the business world, two years can be a lifetime.
Sure.
Engines of creation.
That's a pretty interesting phrase to use for this area of advancement.
That was the title that Eric Dressler used in his book Called Engines of Creation, the coming era of nanotechnology, when he coined a phrase.
Yes.
Does that still hold up as being that dramatically true today?
Is that what we're looking at?
Engines of Creation?
I mean, that's pretty dramatic.
I think so.
I think most people would agree, Art, that the great advance has come in the last 20, 30, 40 years from the microprocessor.
Oh, yes.
And we're coming, as you know, on the ends of that.
Intel's getting right up on the molecular limit, as is everybody else, and that means we've got to get over How close are we, Professor, to the molecular limit now?
You know, we keep hearing kind of a scarce sense that we're going to hit it in the next five years, and we've been hearing that for about 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.
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, Art, 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.
Yes.
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.
Well, we should be able to project, shouldn't we?
Fairly reasonably, when we get to the molecular stopping point.
What's your best guess?
It's a fuzzy boundary.
I think we will have surmounted it within ten years.
But here's what we can do.
We can kind of stop in front of it and spend a lot of time improving the efficiency of the chips we have in the software.
Well, we might have to do that if we're not ready for the leap.
That's right.
And how that leap will come in some unforeseen way in some journal paper of the hundreds or thousands that get published, we really don't know.
There are many, many attempts, and it's the big game to play, and everybody's in it.
And there's no question in your mind that's a game that can be played?
Absolutely.
I mean, what's Intel going to do?
Well, I don't know.
It's got to keep making chips, and it's doing its best.
It's bringing out the Pentium V next year, as I understand it.
Right.
It's getting right up on gate lengths of about 25 nanometers, or just about 100 atoms across.
Well, it does seem to me, and again, this is just a talk show host observation, but they've been hovering in the 3.4 gig range For quite a while.
In other words, it actually seems like it's slowed up.
Now, am I right about that or wrong?
If you stand back far enough and smooth the graph, you're probably right.
And if you zoomed in close enough, you can probably find sections where you're not.
But I agree with you, it doesn't seem to be the leap pace.
It's more of a step pace.
Not a crawl yet, but we're stepping instead of running.
And we're trying to figure out how to cross this very important qualitative... Is it fair to say we're at a molecular slowdown?
My problem with that, Art, is there's a sense of a pending slowdown.
It may be, and it's stimulated an immense amount of creativity, which you have to view as a kind of speed-up.
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 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.
How much of a... If we manage to develop nanotechnology and put it into computer applications, Can you project for us how big a leap that would be?
Can you conceptualize for us, somehow or another, in words, as compared to today's top-line computer, where we'd be?
Here's the way I might think about it.
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, and I mean South Africa here, to be comparable to our economy?
If it would at this current pace, I think quite a while would be the answer, 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, or best off.
But what I'm asking though is, describe for me the abilities of a computer that would be based on nanotechnology.
What would that computer be able to do?
Potentially, how do you see it integrated in our society?
How would we encounter it in our daily lives, in all the things we use, all the electronics that we use?
How would it fit in?
Describe the kind of life we'd have.
I think it starts with the sensor processing, the signal processing.
That when you throw away a shirt, you're throwing away probably, in the future, a massive amount of computing by today's standards.
A shirt that would, for example, signal you in a variety of ways if the person near you has put a cold virus on you or... Really?
Yeah, that's within grasp right now.
A lot of work has gone into detection of bad microbes with nanotime devices.
So my own shirt could tell me that the guy approaching me with his glad hand out is a... Don't shake it.
...is an absolute river of disease.
Provided some of those molecules hit the shirt.
I think absolutely.
And so, if we continue this reasoning, if he then turns out to be someone who Once they stick a knife in you, or in 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 worked on smart vests and are still working on that.
Before the bullet could get there?
No, no, no, no.
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.
Wow!
In a brief moment, tighten up to something called shear thickening fluid.
Wait a minute, so you're telling me the shirt, or the whatever it is I'm wearing, would react as the bullet made its impact?
Right, I think about that.
It's traveling... Holy smokes!
It's traveling fast in terms of your time and my time.
Yes.
A few thousand feet per second.
But at the nano level, it's ending still.
And when that message hits, there's going to have 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, a 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 in 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.
That'd be like Superman's suit.
Could be.
And further, with some optical capability, because these things are processed light quite well, we already use what's called Raman spectroscopy to look at nanotubes.
You could also Match the environment to have 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.
The weather 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 are 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.
Those are going to be effectively free.
Well, Professor, very quickly, if we were in the age you're talking about now, we wouldn't be in the battle we're in in Fluja.
We simply would have created something to kill all the Al-Qaeda guys.
I'm not sure about that.
Besides the fact that we might not want to do that for the reasons you mentioned earlier, that we are usually the good guys.
And it may be difficult to reach those people, but just to have the kind of armory, there's great efforts.
MIT has a dedicated institute on smart soldier type stuff, and all the armed forces have poured millions and have poured a lot more into this.
So what we'll have first, one of the first things to get out of the nanoworld are things like protective armory.
It's like right now we've got Nano-tube-based tennis balls, 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 a slice and hook a ball, and there's a new ball coming out from a company called Nano Dynamics, maybe selling for as much as $7 or $8 per ball.
Nano-ball!
Nano-balls, in fact, that if they get approved by the U.S.
Golf League.
Yes.
It's illegal for the golf course.
Yes.
Supposedly, based on some secret technology, I don't know whether it's patent or 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.
Why wouldn't the moral hazard be getting a ball so damn smart it goes into the hole no matter where you shoot it?
Well, that takes a propulsion system.
I suppose.
These are in hand now, quite literally.
Are they really?
Yeah.
I have a PhD student, Ian Lee, who's graduated with a nanotech degree.
He has a pair of nanopants, and you can get those from Eddie Bauer, spill something on it, and the water beads off.
Presumably there's some Teflon-type structure woven into the pan fibers, and those things, or the bowling ball, they won't nick, depending on how you kick it or drop it.
Really?
Yeah, those are kind of dumb devices, but they're just improved in terms of the mechanical parts.
But it's the beginning of the nano revolution.
And so it's going to be, it would be almost an entirely different world and life we'd lead.
And the person who leads, or the nation, I guess, that leads all of this, well, is it going to be the U.S., or is it going to be China, or who do you imagine it's going to be?
You know, I would have in the past said definitely the United States, because we have the most science and the most market-oriented economy, but other countries aren't stupid.
They have a lot of science, they focus on this, and increasingly are moving towards market-oriented economies.
I think that's a wide open question mark.
It really is.
The Chinese are making wonderful strides in nanotechnology, as are the Japanese and the Europeans.
So, the nanostuff could be coming from the Orient.
Well, that wouldn't be a big surprise, would it?
Considering what the Japanese have done in the decades since the Second World War, right?
That's right.
And the Chinese, I think, really need a competitive advantage.
The Japanese took it in terms of consumer electronics, and they maintain that.
And, of course, they're working on nanotechnology.
Nanotubes were discovered by the Japanese.
Can we afford such a nano-gap?
so that it would be a natural thing really in a lot of ways i think so i
think the government's rightly or wrongly depending on your views of
government investments in the economy though it or appoint great deals of
money and the industrial consortium and supporting massive patent effort such a japan trying to
grab up as many patents possible can we afford such a nano gap
question can we
you know i i'm a market-oriented person
One of my degrees is in economics, so I think that kind of global competition is a good thing.
I think we, in America, can get a little too fat and happy sometimes here.
So I think it will spur innovation here.
And the patents filed?
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 weight.
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 competitors to go off and do something else.
And so you're suggesting the United States may be put in the position of enforcing its own stupidity?
Well, its own laws.
And it certainly is.
It's more than that.
It's just the one going around telling the world that it better start enforcing them, too.
Well, exactly.
It's got to set the example.
All right.
Hold it right there.
We're at the bottom of the hour.
Professor Bart Kosko is my guest.
I'm Mark Bell.
I'm a guy who's had his fun, needles and pins.
Watching that clock, till you return.
Biking that horse, and watching it burn.
Till you return Lighting that torch
And watching it burn Now it begins
La la la la la la La la la la la la la
La la la la la la la Valentine was born
Here but now they're gone Romeo and Juliet
Are together in eternity Romeo and Juliet
Forty thousand men and women every day Romeo and Juliet
Forty thousand men and women every day Every forty thousand coming every day
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From coast to coast, and worldwide on the Internet, this is Coast to Coast AM, with Art Bell.
If you want to remind yourself of how it could happen, Just go back sometime, I'm sure you taped it or saved it or something, or if you didn't get hold of the TV version of The Stand.
Do you remember The Stand?
just go back and watch the first ten minutes of this day my guess this uh... this night is professor bart costco
and we're talking about all kinds of 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 nanopants and the nanogolf balls and what have you.
It's already here.
That one's well underway.
All kind of Just 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.
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.
There's a story about cell phones blowing up.
Have you read that?
No, I have not.
You don't think that's where what doesn't matter?
You don't think that's where the danger is with regard to cell phones anyway?
No, I don't.
But you do think they're dangerous, don't you?
You know, the Swedes dropped a bomb on us last month, so to speak.
Use that terminology tonight.
A new study out of Stockholm, a well-done study in the journal Epidemiology, came out hard, saying that if you listen to a cell phone for 10 years, and these were analog cell phones, because they're 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 ears, nerve fiber there, the acoustical neuroma, it's called.
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.
What happens if you get this tumor?
You said it was benign.
It is benign and what apparently happens is there's a chromosome, it's called chromosome
22, that controls a gene, that controls something called the Schwann cells that provide a kind
of cable or insulation, onion-like skin insulation of nerve fiber, and it starts to replicate.
It may just be a bump, it 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, I mean 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, that'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?
Alright, so you're suggesting at least with analog phones that we were all slow cooking our brains, possibly?
Something like that, but I I have recently published, myself, 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 this 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, that 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, and 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, 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 asbestosis.
These sorts of things are going to take a long time to see.
There will be lots of long-term studies, but we're in very new ground as of last month.
As of last month?
Alright, you seem to inject a caveat with the switch to digital now.
Why do you imagine there may perhaps be less chance that digital will be slow-cooking our brains?
I'm sorry to keep it at the basics, but...
Well, just because the frequency structure can be so different, the processing going on inside, the heat dissipation can be different.
And, you know, 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 that 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.
It may not be a noise boost at all.
No, no, you're right.
In fact, are you familiar with HAARP at all?
It's a project up in Alaska that's throwing immense amounts of RF up to the ionosphere, literally capable of burning a hole in the ionosphere, and they're modulating HAARP, this tremendous signal, with Different tones, and they're coming up with a sum and a difference of those beats against each other to achieve a magnified effect in the ionosphere.
And it sounds a little like what you're talking about right now with the combination of tones, right?
It is like that.
Another case that's in controversy has to do with Navy's use of special sonar.
And that seems to be killing porpoises.
And maybe some whales.
For example, we bounce 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 oddly enough, someone conjectured, that the porpoises and sea creatures died of the bins.
People think that would be possible, but a lot of them washed up on shore a couple hours after the experiments.
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 a resonant state that could be damaging.
We just don't know.
I gotta say, as a researcher, it's quite interesting.
Do you own a cell phone?
I have a cell phone connector, yes.
But I think at this point I would switch gears occasionally.
Have you begun doing that?
No, I have not.
Oh, so this report is so recent.
A month old, you said.
As I say this, I'm smoking a cigar.
I'd be better off if I did not do that.
Right, right, right.
We all do a lot of things.
I guess we know we ought not.
I mean, let's put it this way.
Do you consider, and I hate to even give these cell phones a break because I hate the damn things.
Would you say it's okay for the average person, it's a calculated, reasonable risk to take to enjoy 21st century communications?
Being a student of the law, I'm going to hedge this answer.
First off, the studies only show a finding for substantial use over a 10-year period.
No evidence whatsoever, and there have been many other studies, for short-term use.
So short-term is likely.
But you know, if you were a company manufacturing a new cell phone gadget, and you're looking at the potential product liability toward litigation, I think you'd really have to take this quite seriously.
It has that potential to lead to product recalls.
I think a lot of people will be spooked, maybe wrongly, and after all, it's a quadrupling of the risk, but the risk itself is kind of tiny.
But it is a measurable risk.
Do you think the risk for the manufacturers in the next decades rivals that of, say, the fixed tobaccos in right now?
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.
Yes.
Yes.
I think you will see that.
Just again, the depth of the pocket.
But it does sound as though, even knowing all you know, and you've known this for a month longer than most of us, you're still, you're proceeding, so I guess you've got to hedge your answer a little bit.
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 without it, but if you're a manufacturer dealing with potential hundreds of thousands or millions of users, small risks can have very human impacts on large numbers of people.
Do you think the manufacturers and distributors and so on of cell phones are aware of this Very aware of this risk.
I know there's certainly been studies done and all the rest of it.
Are they aware of it?
Scared of it?
Yes, they are.
There are a lot of countries about that.
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 it's not quite the way you'd like to get access to people who randomly contact them.
But still, statistically speaking, it seems to be a perfectly valid study as these things go.
Yeah, they're looking at everything as they would.
I mean, after all, the tobacco companies, until quite recently, maintained that cigarettes were not addictive.
Well, that's true.
And then there's electric lines.
Now, there's been a big controversy about that.
Now, electric lines, hell, they run all over the place.
There has been, and IEEE Spectrum recently summarized several of the major studies on that, and so far on that, that appears to have not caused any problems.
Also, you can kind of move away from that, and the energy falls off with inverse square distance.
It's a very different art than holding a device directly to your skull.
That potentially is asking for trouble.
Well, I suppose you could put it on a belt clip and use a headphone microphone setup, right?
Would that lighten the risk, or are we going to get something orange and purple growing on our hip?
You know, if it turns out that the causal agent is more tied to the battery source, which 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.
Well, but not for health reasons.
Well, I guess you could stretch it to that.
I mean, if you get into an accident, that's health, but sort of from a different point of view.
I mean, they're not really worried about the radiation.
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 you're caused by the current cell phone technology.
So you're going to be watching this very closely?
Watching very closely.
Will nanotubes and artificial atoms give us computer chips powerful enough to achieve what you've called in your book, heaven in a chip?
That's such an attractive idea.
Heaven in a chip.
It's my best bet.
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.
Yes.
Millions of times faster than we want to create worlds, destroy worlds, replay memories at 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 nanodevices are the best bet we have, now maybe something very different 10, 15 years.
I answer yes to that.
Yes, with high confidence.
Wouldn't heaven in a chip be illegal?
Given the way we outlaw the pure pursuit of euphoria... Yes, yes, that's my point.
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.
Yep.
And if you have really good simulations of a high school kid uh... have violent images of killing his football opponent
or something and if the study show that they probably would
that the incidents of high school violence increases by people who listen
at the right to go to the laws limiting or or eliminating eliminating that of course of
course you are or even on the other side i mean if something
the government does not like addictive things
And the government does not like addictive things because it acts, rightly or wrongly, it thinks, on behalf of all society.
I mean, if you are addicted to something, you are then non-productive within society.
Even if you don't go and rob banks and go crazy and rape and pillage, you're still not productive.
And from society's point of view, That's something that it can't tolerate, and so it passes laws against having too much pleasure.
That's true, and this would tend to make you the ultimate couch potato.
On the other hand, though, Art, I think you could argue that we are, as a society, addicted to television.
We watch several hours a day.
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 submerged in an entirely new, pleasurable, heavenly world that could not possibly be legal.
Yeah, I think it would be difficult.
I think the arguments against it would be ones based on security, based on the consequences of third parties, if you did this.
And you're right, it would be like combining the best movies many times over with the best drugs many times over, and the like.
Yes.
Religious experiences many times over.
All that wound up into a very potent cognitive cocktail.
Yes.
It couldn't possibly be legal.
Not possibly.
It would be probably the death penalty for dealers and such.
But I think the argument on the other side is supply and demand.
If there will be some technology like that, somebody to demand for it from you and me, it would be so great.
Well, look at how the drugs work in supply and demand now.
Supply and demand absolutely works over our best efforts.
Yeah, but the drugs aren't that good.
I mean, for example, some countries, you know, outlaw alcohol.
We don't.
You could argue, in large part, that the demand was just so great that in 1932 they repealed.
Well, imagine the demand for heaven.
Huh?
It would undercut the tax base if we didn't go out and work.
It would.
I mean, people would turn away entirely, many of them anyway, from the physical, the real world.
They would take the world of their own choosing, their own heaven.
It would be different for everybody.
And no doubt, because of the supplied man, certainly supplied by somebody, that's going to be a weird world.
Here's another way to view that.
Because timescales are different, that would occur at 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.
In other words, you could live years of nanotime.
It would seem like years to the person experiencing it, but in reality you're suggesting it would only be minutes.
And that's because the time it takes electrical signals to flow from your big toe to your brain is relatively slow.
It's terribly slow compared to chip time today, let alone chip time 10, 20, 30 years from now.
Wow.
Wow.
How are we doing, even in the rudimentary most way, Professor, with interfacing humans to machines?
I'm aware of some experimental programs the Air Force might be doing.
We have them at USC.
I beg your pardon?
We have them at USC.
My colleagues have a hippocampus chip and other devices that interface directly with neurons Well, or in a fighter plane, for example, using thought to control weapons systems and the flight characteristics of the airplane, Professor?
I think you're referring to, of using focused thought to make decisions and trying those
out with people who are fully disabled.
Well, or in a fighter plane, for example, using thought to control weapons systems and
the flight characteristics of the airplane, Professor.
That's within the realm of possibility.
In other words, a fighter jet controlled at the speed of thought.
pfft That's what we're talking about.
My guest is Professor Costco.
And when we come back, we're going to begin to go to the phones and allow you to ask some questions.
But this is really fascinating stuff.
And you know what?
It's not very far away.
In fact, some of it has already begun.
So if you think you're hearing science fiction, Well, maybe you are a little bit, but we are racing toward it right now.
from the high desert the middle of the night on market and the desert is the center of the world.
The desert is the center of the world.
It's in the cage, rolling on.
When the birds fly, oh, she will die.
Whitebird must fly, or she will die.
The sun sets come, the sun sets go.
The sun sets go, the clouds go by, the earth turns to snow, and the earth's islands do always grow.
And she must fly, she must fly, she must fly.
Do talk with Art Bell. Call the wildcard line at area code 7.
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Heaven in a chip, oh yes.
Even if, you know, I've 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.
Now, I think, uh, I think they'd be illegal as heck.
They'd be imported from some, probably from China.
Having in a chip, trips from China.
Could be, huh?
We'll be right back.
I'll say.
The.
Ha ha.
Pretty interesting.
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, you know, 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?
Two questions there.
The first question is, is it just memory and signal processing?
Answer, yes.
Is there more?
No.
No.
That's a big no.
No, which I could say otherwise.
That's a really big no.
That's no to God, no to the afterlife, no to all that.
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.
Well, a fair amount.
I don't know how much we actually know We don't know about the brain yet.
It's still a pretty big frontier, isn't it?
Big frontier.
We don't know about the microcircuitry.
We know how neurons work.
We know how groups of neurons and 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.
But the activity is there.
It's not in your leg.
It's not in your spine.
It's not somewhere else.
And if we look at what it's really doing, it's receiving signals from Your sense organs from your skin, from your eyes, from your mouth.
But you don't think there's any soul there?
You don't think, in other words, when the heart is no longer pumping the blood, feeding the oxygen to the brain and the cells die, that's it?
Exactly.
In the same way that when your watch stops, when the energy and gears stop, it doesn't make sense to say, where did the motion go?
It's a figure of speech, it's a pre-scientific way of thinking, and it's a good shorthand, I agree, but ask the question the way you've asked it.
No, it's strange.
Tomorrow night I'm going to have a fellow named Matthew Alper.
He's a brilliant guy that a lot of my audience hates.
And you know why they hate him?
Why?
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, 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.
Not just that, Art.
I think that thesis is correct.
I am familiar with some of the research on it.
Some folks do it at USC.
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 to 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, 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.
I think that makes all too much sense.
I don't think that eliminates notions of God.
It's just an authority part of the brain.
Not a God part of the brain.
I don't think it's a part, but there's that genetic... Well, that's what you just said.
Authority.
The ultimate authority is God, right?
Yeah, on that model, the person or the thing throwing the lightning bolts or controlling the weather, it's quite natural to see how We would have believed that earlier times.
So without any question, if Professor Kosko 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 And to Microsoft's latest, just before you're going to die, you'd obviously then opt for that, just like that, right?
Yeah, and I want my copyright protection.
Yes, I would.
In a heartbeat.
I am a cryonicist, too, in case I likely I won't see that day.
I want to keep the rough synaptic structure intact as best I can.
Not a great way to do it, but we can do that.
But absolutely, Art.
I understand there's a better chance to do that if you have your head lopped off.
Do you have that in your contract?
I'm an all-body patient.
You're an all-body patient.
Let's see, does that make you an optimist or a pessimist?
I'm a sentimentalist.
I like to take all the parts.
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 of UC Irvine, just published an article on that in the current issue of Skeptical Inquirer.
Uh-huh.
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.
Yes.
Besides ours.
And he comes up with an estimate between being able to pull off, for example, a cryonic-style resurrection.
Yes.
Just that, which is, I think, a different question.
On the order of 10% likely at this point.
And the reason... Oh, that's not bad.
It's not bad.
And the reason, maybe 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.
Well, if that's true, 90% is a pretty low figure, isn't it?
I mean, 10%.
And he argues further.
I'm sorry, 10%.
90% is a very high figure.
I would think it would be much better than 10%.
Well, but he gave a conservative estimate.
His argument continues.
Greg says that if you go further, and Greg wrote a book about cryonics, by the way, under Superman.
He's an award-winning author and 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, weather chip technology, sensor technology, digital signal processing technology will get to the point that we can have human brain interface replacements.
That's a virtual certainty.
Now, whether it happens in our lifetime, I don't know, but I gotta say it looks that way.
It kind of, it almost does look like we could be there.
I mean, science, it's advancing so quickly now.
Seems like exponential jumps, or am I being too optimistic?
No, this is literally Moore's Law, the doubling of chip density every 18 months, which still continues roughly.
That's what we're talking about.
Well, but we're also talking about a slight slowing lately.
Right, so it doubles every three years.
But in a wink of a digital eye, Art, we're at a point where 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.
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?
You play the music on many different instruments.
Wouldn't immortality frighten you?
No.
It would not?
If you look back to Greek mythology, I think I'd rather be a Greek god than someone on the ground who lives and dies.
I don't think we're talking real immortality, but a kind of digital engineering approximation of it.
You think you'd make a good Greek god?
I think it'd be a lot of fun.
It might.
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 Kosko.
Hi.
Yeah, I was wondering, earlier in the conversation, you mentioned that we are more danger of disease rather than terrorism.
Oh, yes.
And there's devices called Raymond Royal Rifle, invented a frequency generator that kills bacteria and viruses.
And I was wondering if you could tell me How effective do you think those are, and also if frequencies or harmonics would possibly stop nanotechnology, or make it inert in some way?
Alright.
The latter question first.
Frequencies and harmonics, now that's part of the way we do digital business.
You can use them for good purposes, or for bad.
But by the way, Art, we have recently gotten a nanotube to be clamped at both ends and to vibrate like a violin string.
And so you can get it to In theory, resonate in appropriate ways with new modulation, and you can download your show in time on that.
Really?
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 will be much better protected.
Very near term.
What a world it's going to be.
It's almost hard to imagine.
But yet, that's what you've done in your books.
Now, what would you most recommend people read as a first step?
I mean, if they've enjoyed what they've heard tonight, I know a lot of them have, how should they follow up by reading what that you have written?
The book is called Heaven in 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, as the chapter called that, and a lot of the underlying technology is spread out in a hundred pages of very fine endnotes, in case you're interested.
Okay, I have seen it at various bookstores, so I know it's all over the place, correct?
Maybe not as much as it once was, it came out in 2000, but it's digitally always available.
Okay.
Most of the Rockies, you're on the air with Professor Kosko, hi.
Yes, hello.
My name's Kerry and I'm calling from Tucson.
Yes, Kerry.
I had a question and then I'd like to ask you something, Art.
Okay.
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?
Okay, that's a very good question.
We're living in a sue-me-sue-you world now, you know?
Yep, yep, yep.
Professor?
I think you're absolutely right.
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.
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 the 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.
And you had a question for me, Colin?
Yes, on George's show a caller called up and he was asking a question that you guys ought to consider.
He was asking maybe If you and George would get together some night and do a show with you guys interviewing each other and call it Host to Host.
Host to Host, all right, yeah.
Thank you.
I've never been big on doing that kind of thing, ever.
I don't know why, but I never have.
There was also the question, the Rife question, Professor.
You've heard about Rife.
Would it be effective in some way against... Brief me, Art.
The Rife microscope?
Do you know anything about that?
Oh, you don't?
It's at my fingertips.
All right, 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.
Okay.
All right.
Wildcard Line, you're on the air with Professor Bart Cusco.
Hi.
Hi, my name's Tom.
I'm from New Jersey.
Yo.
I had a question.
Would it be feasible if a terrorist came over with a walking petri dish and infected everyone he could?
Yeah, okay, your question is exceedingly clear, Professor.
In other words, infect a terrorist with something so that he is the weapon Himself.
It's something new.
He's got it.
He's going to expire from it, but before he does, he's going to pass it on.
Right.
This is a concern a lot of people thought about, I think, beginning with the smallpox issue right after 9-11.
Yes.
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 out 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.
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.
Yes.
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 the 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 they're... 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 has 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.
What?
Well, two things.
First, there's 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, Spread around the world a hundred years ago, it could be forty days or much longer.
Now it's about one day.
You're on the airplane.
One effect of the global economy is a rapid diffusion of viral and bacterial agents.
Uh-huh.
So... 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... Yeah, 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 stories, 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?
What do we do when we get lonely?
Oh Oh
Your Oh
Oh Oh
Oh Uh huh.
Hey, yeah.
Hey, Wanna take a ride?
To talk with Art Bell, call the wildcard line at area code 775-727-1295.
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From coast to coast and worldwide on the internet, this is Coast to Coast AM.
Why it is.
You know, sometimes there's something that you have and the time is so right 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 rogue doctor develops creatures that are part animal and part human?
These are real, 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 fetuses.
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 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 in 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 Health Care 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 of people saw creatures that looked, God, half human and half something else.
And it's always, you saw what?
Well, maybe, maybe you weren't seeing things after all.
Maybe you saw one of these things that we've produced is the only word you can use
Are you sure
This isn't the future, this is now.
Professor, you know, one of the weirdest things I ever saw, and this was now at least two or three years ago, I saw this picture of a mouse.
With an ear.
With a human ear growing out of its back.
You obviously saw that too.
I did, and I would ask you to imagine clamping a cell phone on that ear.
how about the natural way or who were talking about the test for these
acoustical the role of y'all in the auditory nerve it's a great thing subject to
reasonable control yes how we're going to do that we can't have a human down and
we can get our little pagan but but but but but
uh... isn't it possible professor
Even more than possible, that as we begin to cross-contaminate human genetics with other mammal genetics, eventually we're going to get... 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 think 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 it's still small, and that could change.
Well, it sure is a good thing we don't have reckless scientists around, huh?
That is a good thing.
I think we don't have as many as the movies suggest, but we do have mistakes.
There'll always be carelessness, and we have a lot more negligence than recklessness.
Well, yes.
Absolutely true.
But there is recklessness, right?
And when you start talking about it at the levels, you know, of the consequences that might happen here when we start mixing it up... Well, let's go back to the thoughts.
First time caller online, you're on the air with Professor Kosko.
Hello.
I'm a long-time listener, and I absolutely love your show.
Well, thank you.
I'm so glad I got through.
I have a question about cell phone technology for the professor.
Sure.
About four years ago, I began to use a cell phone with my work.
It required me to use a phone, and I noticed I could feel the phone not only charging, but I could feel the phone in my head when I used it.
After a while, it began to affect me in the way of anxiety, panic, and sleeplessness and everything else.
I had never thought the cell phone towers would ever be a problem.
Since then, I've had to move to this country.
I really have to stop you and ask you a question, and that is, how do you know that you can attribute what you felt to the cell phone?
Well, I can feel it in my head.
If I turn it off, it goes away.
And if I turn it on, it comes back.
Professor?
I think you raise a point, Art.
You have to distinguish the perception one has, which we'll take as you described it, from your hypothesis about the causal relationship.
And it's a pretty big leap to go from any, I think, cell phone functioning or malfunctioning to anxiety and things like that.
But it may well be that you felt the vibrations, and when you press it to your head, just like when you speak, your whole skull vibrates.
Have that effect, but we'll be very careful here.
I mean, after all, most people who come down with any kind of melody, the first day or two, they describe it to what they ate the day before.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah, they're right.
But even looking at the bigger picture, you do suggest there, well, may be a problem.
Maybe a problem.
A real problem.
A real problem with those devices.
Something related we didn't touch on that came out a few years ago.
A lot of cops hitting it at speedway speed traps.
Male cops are keeping the handheld radar in their lap irradiated their testicles and had a much higher incidence of testicular cancer than the general population.
You have to be careful with that.
That's true.
And I'm sure downtown at the precinct they probably used that information to say, keep the damn thing pointed at the speeders!
We need money!
You mentioned recklessness and negligence.
Wild Card Line, you're on the air.
Hello.
Hello, Art.
Hi.
I was going to ask a professor there in his macro-micro-science world, what would be the explanation of people that have extraordinary perceptions of future events, deja vu, that are way, way beyond any statistical analysis?
Uh, well, that's a good question, if the premise is accurate, and I'm sure the professor would argue it isn't, right?
Not necessarily, Art.
Some of my best scientific friends have said, you know, Art, 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.
Wait a minute, you believe it because some of your scientific friends... No, no, no.
I'm just taking a first order of their description of the event, and I'll offer an explanation of it, of course.
And I offer this in my earlier book, Fuzzy Thinking, and in my textbooks and the papers you can download online.
I developed something called the BAM, or the Bidirectional Associative Memory, and 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, 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.
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.
Well, I kind of thought that's what you'd say.
In the first place.
That it just isn't there.
And you did say that.
But I said, I don't think you're really seeing the future in a crystal ball sense, but I do think your brain may be giving you a good prediction.
Yes.
And that's a slightly different thing.
And we're just simply... Misreading it.
Yes.
Alright, East of the Rockies, you're on the air with Professor Kosko.
Hi.
Hi, George in Hollywood, Florida?
Yes, George.
I had a question.
It bothers me that we're constantly thinking about who we're going to be killing next, or attacking next, or who might attack us, and I don't see how we can progress with our technology if we can't get rid of our aggressive instincts.
How can technology help us to get along better?
Okay, well, really good question.
Why can't we all just get along?
He's right.
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 best has 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 along.
But that is so far removed from any foreseeable reality.
Do you really think we're the good guys?
I do think we're the good guys.
If you look back at the founding of the country, think of the year 1776.
It was a remarkable year.
Scientifically, because that's when economics began.
That's when Adam Smith published The Wealth of Nations.
Here is really the first country in history that was able to set up Deliberate constitutional government based on about 500 years.
Oh, I wouldn't argue that for a second.
But the other countries out there, by and large, are still in this pre-scientific mode, so their economies haven't caught up.
The concepts of personal liberty and justice, we did that with slavery for a while.
You're right on all that, but I mean, 1776, fine, a shining moment indeed, but have we Have we grown from there, or is it fair to say, even today, that we are still... I say this every few weeks and people get real angry.
I say, we're a war-like people.
Well, we are a war-like people.
There's just no getting away from it.
The evidence is overwhelming.
You can point to testosterone and just the sheer blood count and body count of recent and distant history.
But this country, that's about the good guys.
Is a country unlike the others.
Think about that.
Built literally on principle of liberty and justice.
It's been real rough working that out.
A long way to go.
That's unprecedented.
And the remarkable thing for me, as an optimist, is that it's largely worked.
And the other systems have all failed.
And that's extremely good news.
I sure hope you're right.
All right.
Once for the Rockies, you're on the air with Professor Kosko.
Hi.
Okay, thank you.
Proceed.
When I say you're on the air, sir, that means something.
Okay.
Proceed.
Thank you.
Okay, this is Reggie.
Yes, Reggie.
Reggie, this is Art.
Yes, this is Art, Reggie.
Art, I feel real honored to be able to talk to you.
Thank you.
I've listened to you since you started, and George and Nori from Hawaii.
Now I'm back in L.A.
Okay.
What I wanted to mention was the 30 years that I spent in Hawaii, they were doing sonar tests.
Between Lanai and the other islands and Maui.
That's right.
And it was disorientating all of the whales.
They were leaving their young and beaching themselves.
That's right.
What I wanted to ask was, in populated cities like where I am now in Orange County in 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?
It's actually a very good question.
In the modern world, Professor, if you could see into the electromagnetic spectrum, it would scare the holy you-know-what out of you.
It really would.
I mean, there would be rays going everywhere, passing through you.
And so his question, in the larger scheme of things, is a good one.
It is in, in art, the first chapter of my novel, Nano Time, 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, and 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 could, 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.
Yes.
Yes, 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?
It's a good question, but again, the field strengths are so weak, you're okay.
But what it does pose a different question of, as we mentioned earlier, is noise.
What we call cross-talk and that kind of clutter.
Yes.
And at some point may say, look, I don't want your electromagnetic junk entering my body.
We're not there.
Our systems of communication are very wastefully broadcast out in big spheres of electricity and other electromagnetic phenomena.
But it's not enough to hurt you, as far as we know.
As far as we know.
Right now.
Right now, with the laws of physics and biology, as we understand them, it's just too intense.
I'm sorry, it's just not intense enough to trigger... Got it.
Wildcard Line, you're on the air with Professor Kosko, hello.
Hello?
Hello.
This is Thomas from San Diego.
Yes, Thomas.
Two quick things about the magnetic stuff going to your brain with the cell phone.
They got those little shields that you can put over the speaker.
Oh, yes.
It doesn't do anything.
That's a very good first question.
They offer these little... They're advertised.
Professor, have you seen them?
I've seen that, yes.
Yeah, okay.
Do you think that does anything to protect you?
It should, if it's the strength of the electromagnetic field.
And if you want to get that mouse you saw with the ear, we can tape it on there for ten years and see what happens.
But it's hard to... If that's the issue of power strength, yeah.
If it's not that, if it's a frequency, a resonant frequency thing, then maybe not.
As in maybe not.
Uh, so life is sort of one big ongoing experiment, but I'm not sure how you change that, are you?
No.
I mean, there are certain things you just don't know about until the effects are realized.
Yeah, most things, I think.
East of the Rockies, you're on the air with Professor Kosko.
Not a lot of time, hello.
Oh, hello, Art.
This is Keith in Hamilton, Ontario.
Yes, Keith.
I've seen a lot of these stories of these cell phones exploding and picture phones, you know, put them in the wrong hands.
Yes.
There's a lot of lawsuits.
Everybody wants a top-of-the-line computer and upgrade it so much it'll fix us a sandwich.
Do you think the more we upgrade technology, the more we're doing ourselves in?
You know what that is?
It's a great final question.
Are we doing ourselves in, Professor?
No.
We learn from our mistakes.
We learn from the explosions.
We make better products, better devices.
But we do have to have some data to do it, and that data means there will be accidents.
But the plus side of those accidents are we improve our products.
So...
So, the threat of litigation is important to achieve that.
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.
They may try that argument.
Well, alright, as always, it's been absolutely fascinating having you here.
Kevin Innochip is a professor.
Thanks for being here.
Thank you.
Good night.
That's how quickly it goes.
It just races, doesn't it?
All right, everybody.
Tomorrow night, Matthew Alper will no doubt make a lot of people angry, but it's an absolutely fascinating topic!
The God part of the brain, and I'll tell you what... Tomorrow night, Matthew's gonna be bragging a little bit, because the scientific community appears to have caught up with him.
From the high desert, in the middle of the night, until tomorrow night.
Good night!
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