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Jan. 15, 2005 - Art Bell

02:52:59

Coast to Coast AM with Art Bell - Ray Kurzweil - Life Extension

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	So, let's get started.
	From the high deserts and the great American southwest, I bid you good evening, good morning,
	good afternoon, wherever you may be in the world's very prolific time zones.
	Every single one of them covered, like it might, by this program, Coast to Coast AM.
	I'm Art Bell.
	My honor and pleasure to escort you through what's going to be a damn good weekend.
	It really is.
	This being the weekend version of the program.
	Let me see, what have we got?
	Ah, tonight we have Dr. Ray Kurzweil.
	And he's going to talk about all kinds of really cool things.
	Artificial intelligence, which I find totally fascinating because, of course, I just saw iRobot.
	Gosh, that was a good movie.
	Did you see iRobot?
	Uh-huh.
	So we'll have many questions for the good doctor.
	And then tomorrow night, a real treat, somebody I've been waiting to interview for a very long time.
	Michael Drosnin, author of The Bible code is going to be here.
	And oh, I've been waiting for this.
	And then he'll also talk about his news book, Examining the Life of Howard Hughes.
	And that's the second, that's another thing that I've been dying to talk about.
	Howard Hughes, as you know, was my neighbor here over the hill in Las Vegas.
	In fact, there are so many stories about Howard Hughes.
	Did you know the television station in Las Vegas allegedly was bought, built by Howard Hughes so that he could enjoy the movies that he liked late at night?
	That's a fact!
	And so that's why a lot of nights...
	That channel would play his favorite, that's all they'd be doing, is playing his favorite movies.
	Now, Las Vegas, of course, is a teeming city of a couple of million people, nearly, but... But then, Howard Hughes... Well, anyway, I've wanted to talk about Howard Hughes for a long time, so I'm certainly looking forward to that now.
	Before we begin with the depressing news of the world, not all of it, by the way, I might add.
	Depressing, this time, for a change?
	I would like to direct your attention to an angel.
	That would be my wife, Ramona.
	Now, you know, we've been married so long now, and she came in the other day with a photograph that I had never seen of when she was 18 years old, and it just blew my mind.
	I said, Hon, you really look angelic in this.
	I think.
	Totally angelic.
	So I scanned the photograph.
	It's an old photograph and it's up on my webcam right now.
	I thought I'd put that one up for tonight.
	A photograph I didn't see, I didn't see until just recently.
	Anyway, you ought to take a look at that.
	That's my dear beautiful wife at age 18.
	And by the way, her mom is here visiting now.
	I'll let her say hi tomorrow night.
	All right, let us now... Anyway, that's on the website.
	You go to www.coasttocoastam.com and scroll up to the top and you'll see Arts Webcam there.
	Just click on that and Ramona's little angelic face at 18 will pop up.
	All right, here we go.
	The World News.
	Grainer gets 10 years in Iraq prison abuse trial.
	Army Specialist Charles Greiner, Jr., who grinned in photographs of Iraqi prisoners being sexually humiliated, told jurors, I didn't enjoy what I did there, but he was grinning, was sentenced Saturday to 10 years behind bars in the first court-martial stemming from the prison scandal.
	Greiner labeled the leader of a band of rogue guards at the Baghdad prison in late 2003 could have received up to Fifteen years.
	Fifteen years.
	Now, here's a good story.
	You don't frequently see those in the world news, but by God, Titan.
	You all know about it by now.
	I'm sure you heard the program last night.
	They went over it, I'm sure, in great detail.
	Pictures snapped by the Titan probe and a low whooshing sound picked up by An on-board microphone drew gasps and applause from Scientist Saturday as the mission to Saturn's moon continued its breathtaking revelations for more than 900 million miles across our solar system.
	This really is something.
	Data beamed back from Titan.
	One of Saturn's moons sketched a picture of a pale orange landscape with a spongy surface topped by a thin crust.
	It sure, well, it sure did look like, well, I don't know, rivers, ravines.
	It sure did look like something had been running up there, huh?
	Almost a shoreline, if you could use your imagination.
	And by the way, so they had a microphone inside the spacecraft as this baby came down on Titan, and I've got the audio.
	I want you to hear the audio.
	This is the same exact thing that you would be hearing if you had been in that spacecraft descending toward a Titan.
	Actually in the last moments descending toward Titan there was a microphone and this is the actual sound
	You hear the level changes It's streaking toward Titan right now.
	And then, of course, it ends.
	Abruptly.
	Remarkable stuff.
	I mean, absolutely remarkable that the actual audio as the spacecraft streaked toward it.
	In other, uh, less uplifting news...
	Rescue workers spent all day Saturday digging through a massive snow pile, but they found no traces of five people feared dead in a 300-yard-wide, 500-yard-long avalanche that cascaded down a Utah mountainside days earlier.
	Exactly how many skiers might have been buried in the Friday afternoon snow slide remains unclear at this hour.
	Ayed Dallawi was handpicked by Washington as Prime Minister But to stay in office, he must get majority support in the parliament that will be elected in just two weeks now, and that's not going to be easy.
	Allawi is running on a ticket that's likely to be trumped by a rival one, supported by Iraq's most revered Shiite cleric.
	And that ticket has its own candidate for the coveted prime minister spot, a French educated finance minister whose party has managed The rather difficult task of staying on good terms with both Iran and its nemesis, the United States.
	They have walked a fine line.
	It'll be interesting to see if they can pull off the elections.
	You know, historically, occupations don't work.
	They just don't work over the long term.
	And I said it last week, and I'm going to say it again this week, though I know that it should not be uttered.
	These words ought not be uttered.
	The parallels between the situation in Iraq and Vietnam are inescapable.
	They really are inescapable, and I'll just leave it at that.
	Seepage through a dam that had stopped Saturday, but most residents of Corona remained out of their homes in a voluntary precautionary evacuation, although a mandatory evacuation was cancelled.
	People were being urged to stay away from their homes And a mobile home park until Monday afternoon while the U.S.
	Army Corps of Engineers released millions of gallons of water to relieve pressure on the 64-year-old Prudhoe Dam.
	Now, that's of course as a result of all the incredible deluge we've had here in the West.
	I mean, it was looking to be Noah time.
	The water was getting deep around town here in Pahrump, Nevada.
	And baby, it just kept coming, and kept coming, and kept coming.
	It was really something to behold.
	Alright, in a moment, we will do more.
	Alright, now the following is rumor.
	In fact, I don't think.
	I believe it, but you never know.
	It says, what's happening at Antarctica?
	Again, rumor.
	According to inside Aussie news reports, the U.S.
	has decided to evacuate its base at McMurdo in the Antarctic and has requested the Russians to also send its icebreaker to assist evacuation of a special icebreaker, the Russians.
	Now, I don't think that's true, but here's What's not rumor?
	In an event so large that the best seat in the house is going to be from space, a massive iceberg is in fact on a collision course with a floating glacier near the McMurdo Research Station in Antarctica.
	NASA scientists have witnessed the 100-mile-long B-15A iceberg moves steadily toward the ice tongue.
	Now, the ice tongue is kind of sticking out from Antarctica.
	And though the iceberg's pace has slowed in recent days, NASA scientists expect a collision to occur no later than January 15th.
	It is, they say, a clash of the titans, a radical and uncommon event.
	And if the two giant slabs of ice collide, we could see one of the best demolition derbies on the planet.
	Even just a tap from the giant can be very powerful.
	It will certainly be a blow far larger than anything else the Ice Tongue has ever experienced.
	Now, when the iceberg and the Ice Tongue collide, the impact will likely dent their bumpers.
	That's in quotes.
	The edges could crumple, and ice could pile and or drift into the raw sea, but if B-15A Iceberg should pick up enough speed before the two collide, the results could be even more spectacular.
	In fact, the entire ice tongue could break off, making the rumor at the top of the page seem at least, if not probable, somewhat more likely.
	New studies, this is a very interesting story, new studies of the giant earthquake that produced devastating tsunamis in the Indian Ocean show that its shockwaves ricocheted around the globe for hours and lifted the Earth's surface nearly an inch halfway around the world!
	Did you hear that?
	I mean, think about that.
	The whole thing ricocheted around the globe for hours and hours and hours And actually lifted the inch, the whole surface of the Earth, an inch on our side of the world.
	Rick Astor, a geologist at the New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology, compiled seismograms to measure the shock waves at increasing distances from the quake's epicenter.
	The waves were about 1,000 times the size of those that seismologists customarily measure.
	Big Mamas, in other words, the quakes.
	Of course, it occurred on December 26 off the coast of northern Sumatra, and the shockwaves radiated out through the Earth's rocky interior.
	How fast do you think they go?
	Through the Earth, they travel faster than waves do in air or water.
	The waves were eventually picked up by seismometers, which measure vibrations in the ground.
	Aster used data collected by a global network of seismometers, To run the Incorporated Research Institutions for Seismology, or IRIS, a consortium based in Washington that's financed mainly by the National Science Foundation.
	IRIS has about 150 member institutions at universities in the U.S.
	and abroad.
	The closest readings came from the Cocos Island, an Australian territory south of Sumatra, and from Sri Lanka, of course.
	The farthest from the equator, the seismic data shows the waves traveling around the Earth for six hours.
	Astro said that even in Ecuador, the shockwave displaced the Earth's surface more than two centimeters, or even measured, as we know it, about an inch.
	But the movement was slow to be perceptible to humans.
	The jolt was much sharper in Sri Lanka and shook the ground over a range of nearly four inches.
	Can you imagine that, though, on the other side of the globe?
	The Earth bulged out an inch when that happened.
	I don't know about you, I didn't feel a thing.
	And then, of course, there is this, which definitely has captured my attention, and many others.
	There are a lot of people worried about this.
	The name or headline for this story is, Earth Ready to Strike Back at Cosmos.
	NASA is set to launch a mission Wednesday, in which it plans to blow a rose-bowl-sized crater into an oncoming comet and unlock its secrets.
	Now, they made their window, their one They had a one-second window, a one-second window in which to launch this rocket, and they did it!
	Anyway, a rose-bowl-sized crater in a comet comes 65 million years too late to give the dinos payback for the asteroid that may have wiped out much of Earth.
	But the mocking term captures the spirit of the mission set to launch.
	Wednesday it has, of course, from Cape Canaveral, Florida, Instead of gently approaching alien worlds with retro rockets or parachutes, which is the normal NASA modus operandi, NASA this time has adopted the attitude of a 12-year-old with a new slingshot!
	For millennia, comets and asteroids have been hitting the Earth.
	Donald Yeomans, a comet historian and member of the Deep Impact Science Team, said, This is our chance to hit back!
	Or as one JPL official put it, Well, we're going to put a hurt on this thing.
	You don't expect to hear stuff like this from NASA, do you?
	We're going to put the hurt on this thing.
	Despite the locker room bravado, researchers insist there is serious science behind, by the way, it costs us $328 million to do this.
	What we're going to do, ...is have this spacecraft make a six-month journey into the neighborhood of Mars' orbit, and there it will meet a comet known as Tempel 1.
	When will it meet?
	Well, right on the 4th of July.
	The craft will then fire a probe at the comet.
	The resulting collision, it is hoped, will expose secrets of the solar system that have been hidden away for four and one-half billion years.
	They are going to hit this baby going 23,000 miles plus per hour, and it's going to be, it's going to be, matter of fact, it's going to be such a big explosion that there's some chance that all of you out there watching in the sky, looking, I guess, toward Mars on that 4th of July, you may see it.
	Now, you know, scientists think that comets are made up mainly of ice, right?
	But they're not absolutely positive.
	Who really knows what they're made up of?
	Are they iron?
	Steel?
	Solid ice?
	Loosely packed snow?
	Who knows?
	And so, there are people out there who have called me and have talked to me in recent days, and I certainly don't think that this will occur, but you... You hit something this hard...
	And, you know, we saw so many movies, right?
	Like Deep Impact and everything.
	Remember Deep Impact, where something was coming at Earth, and we had to stop it?
	Or we all, huh, went the way of the dinosaurs?
	Well, I must admit that a number of people in the last few days have called me sort of panicky, saying, what the hell are we doing, you know?
	We're liable to hit this thing and break it up.
	And something then could head toward Earth, something we couldn't stop.
	Now, I don't think that's very likely.
	And I think that's a very outside scenario, but people seem worried about it.
	They don't like what we're doing.
	Hitting this thing so hard.
	Kaboom!
	And I guess it's good science.
	It'll be an explosion equal to 4.4 tons of TNT.
	That's not too bad, you know.
	The probe, of course, is going to be annihilated.
	They suggest it will create a 14-story deep crater.
	And we're just going to blow the hell out of this thing.
	Now, it's pretty big.
	They're actually saying here the fireworks should provoke plenty of oohs and ahhs on Earth.
	Except the scientists, of course, are going to be... They really don't know what's going to happen.
	And I'm sure that the science is solid and whatever they think will happen will happen and they'll get little pieces that they can analyze or whatever.
	But there might be a little reason for concern, a little reason for worry.
	I don't know.
	So I've sort of told everybody who's been calling me.
	I, you know, I wouldn't get too exorcised about it, it'll probably be alright, but it is,
	it is quite an endeavor.
	Boy, I'll tell you, science just does leap out there, doesn't it?
	And sometimes some of the things, I mean, look at the propagation, for example.
	I've complained so much about this on 75 Meters in the Handmaid.
	For the last two or three months, I'm telling you, something unnatural is going on.
	Yes, I know, we, by the way, we just had a giant X class of sun flare.
	Ours, just a few hours before I have come on the air here tonight.
	And people will say it's that, but, you know, it's not.
	These conditions, these propagation conditions we've been having are certainly unaccounted for.
	There is nothing that's happening on the sun, save for at this very moment, that would cause that sort of thing.
	And it's been going on for months.
	Something is wrong with the ionosphere.
	Something is profoundly wrong with the ionosphere.
	Ham radio operators are beginning all to say it.
	You know, things like, well, I've been a ham operator for 50 years and I've never seen anything like this.
	I don't have quite 50 years under my belt yet, but I've never seen anything else like this
	and you gotta wonder if it might be hard.
	Music playing...
	Don't bring me down, don't bring me down Don't bring me down, don't bring me down
	Don't bring me down, don't bring me down You're looking good just like you're sneaking with grass
	One of these days you're gonna break and blast Don't bring me down
	No, no, no, no, no, no, no I'll tell you what's up
	Before I get lost Don't bring me down
	with our film call the wildcard line at area codes The first time caller line is area code 775-727-1222.
	To talk with Art Bell from east of the Rockies, call toll free at 800-825-5033.
	line is area code 775-727-1222. To talk with Art Bell from east of the Rockies, call toll-free
	at 800-825-5033. From west of the Rockies, call 800-618-8255.
	International callers may And it's gonna be one rockin' weekend.
	How y'all doin' this evening?
	three sprint access number pressing option five and dialing toll-free eight
	hundred eight nine three zero nine zero three from coast to coast and worldwide
	on the internet this is coast to coast am with art bell and it's gonna be one
	rockin weekend how y'all doing this evening in a moment we will sort of once
	again get started we're going to open lines by the way for the next segment so
	if you've got something to say those were the numbers you
	you you
	you Thanks for watching!
	All right, let's rock, shall we?
	Wild Card Line, you're on the air, top of the morning, evening, morning.
	Good evening, Art.
	This is Blair in Sedona, Arizona.
	Yes, Blair.
	Well, I was stimulated by your Tempel 1 comment.
	Well, you know, I've been thinking about this.
	You predicted that fragments of a comet would crash to the Earth, starting fires.
	Prediction number what?
	Number 68. 68.
	In retrospect, now, you see, at the time you made that, I wasn't thinking about it, but you already knew about NASA's mission, didn't you?
	I certainly did.
	So, you're one of those people that calls me.
	You're just exactly like those people that call me, right?
	I guess.
	I'm guilty as charged.
	Don't you think it unlikely?
	I mean, this is way out near the Mars orbit.
	Don't you think it unlikely that the pieces would crash to Earth and burn homes and stuff?
	Well, we're making assumptions that it's just a ball of rock and frozen ice, but... Yeah, assumptions are bad.
	Yeah, and I mean, this has a tail to it, and if Professor McKinney says there's an electrical nature to our solar system... Yeah, this is going to be McKinney revealed, huh?
	Well, it could be.
	We could have a tiger by the tail.
	You know, what we're doing in ignorance might come back to us as a big surprise after the 4th of July.
	Well, that never happens, does it?
	Nothing ever goes wrong that we do, right?
	You know, I guess we have to stub our toes over and over again until we finally, you know, either wake up, learn the lesson, or... Well, yeah, but there's stubbing your toes, sir, and then there's being the dinosaurs.
	I worry a lot about what science does.
	I really do, and we all should.
	Sometimes, God, they just, like, do stuff and see what'll happen, you know?
	Push the button, thread, okay.
	Yeah.
	Well, you know, I'd like to say good luck with your prediction, but on behalf of everybody on Earth, I really can't.
	Well, I'm with you, too, but I'll probably be talking to you again if something does happen.
	I'm sure you will.
	Come back and claim credit.
	All right, brother.
	Bye.
	Bye.
	Doug in Pensacola, Florida, fast blasted me, which, by the way, you can do by going to the website and sending me a message.
	It says, A.R., how about going over the ionospheric changes that the hams have experienced?
	Thanks, Doug.
	Okay, sure.
	Briefly.
	Here it is, folks.
	On a frequency of 3.8.
	Let's say 3.9 megahertz, all right?
	That's a frequency in which hams talk.
	Now, for all the years that I've been a ham operator, which is since 1958, one could reliably depend on being able to talk to people that were two or three or four hundred miles away.
	Reliably on 3.9, well, say 3.84 megahertz in that portion of the band.
	You can always, always, always depend for all these years on being able to talk to people, you know, a few hundred miles away.
	It's called NVIS, Near Vertical Incidence.
	Anyway, during the last two or perhaps three months, that's gone, baby.
	Within an hour of sunset, that's gone.
	That which had been true for so many years is no longer true.
	Almost inevitably, within one hour of sunset, there is no NDIS.
	It's gone.
	There's something wrong with the damned ionosphere, I'm telling you.
	And now, more and more hams, I'm hearing them all over the bands, beginning to say, yeah, they're finally noticing.
	It takes a while.
	And I'm hearing, what the hell's going on with 75 meters?
	How can this be?
	And there is one possible answer, and I can't deny its possibility, and that's HAARP.
	One of the first stated goals of the HAARP project in Alaska is to affect communications by bombarding the ionosphere with just perhaps even a billion watts.
	One billion watts of power.
	And they're doing that now.
	They may not quite be up to a billion watts, but they're pretty much of the way there, if not all the way there.
	So something's going on with the ionosphere.
	What do you blame it on?
	Not a lot has changed otherwise.
	So one possibility has got to be HAARP.
	And we're keeping a very eagle eye on the HAARP project right now.
	East of the Rockies, you are on the air.
	Good morning.
	This is Dustin calling from Ontario.
	Ontario.
	How are you doing there?
	Pretty good.
	How are you?
	Good.
	I have a question.
	Have you ever had an experience with EVP?
	Um, here on the radio, many of them, sir.
	A personal experience?
	No.
	No?
	Have you?
	No.
	No, not a personal experience.
	In fact, you know, I'm well aware that I'm quite well equipped to take recording equipment, because I have a very great deal of it, I can assure you, into places where I might get EVPs, but I'm going to be absolutely honest with you, sir.
	If I got an EVP, a real one, It would scare the hell out of me.
	I'm serious.
	And it's, I guess, I think it's the same reason that I don't do remote viewing.
	I interview remote viewers, but I don't do remote viewing because, you know, I don't want to know.
	In life, I don't want to know what's coming next.
	So even with that chance to learn, there's something inside of me that doesn't want to know.
	Okay.
	How about you?
	You want to know?
	I mean, if you could right now go through a little course and go mentally into your head and come up with the year you're gonna die and how you're gonna die, do you want to know?
	No.
	No, huh?
	No, no.
	Yeah, me either.
	Have a good night.
	Thank you.
	Take care.
	West of the Rockies, you're on the air.
	Hello.
	Oh, hi.
	This is Andre, and I'm in Los Angeles.
	Andre, what's up with your phone?
	It's buzzing and humming.
	Well, it might be the flare or something.
	It's kind of bad, but I want to talk about Willie Nelson and his biofuel company.
	Have you heard about that?
	I've heard something about Willie Nelson and a biofuel company.
	What do you know?
	Well, it's called Bio Willie.
	That's the name of it.
	Bio Willie.
	And it's using soybean, vegetable, Oil on diesel engines in trucks mainly, and he's going to sell it throughout the country.
	That's like the idea of the guy who goes to a fast food place and gets their leave-ins and puts it in his car and motors down the street smelling like french fry, right?
	That's right, but it sounds like a good idea.
	Maybe you could get him on the air and find out about this.
	I'd love to have Lillian again.
	Okay, but you have both, Art.
	Okay, listen, your phone's so bad we can't stick this out.
	What about your phone?
	Okay, I'll make it very quick.
	Maybe.
	I'm sure they know about Art Bell and the Coast to Coast.
	Maybe you can invite him over to Burrump and have a talk sometime.
	Were you referring to Willie Nelson or?
	Both.
	To have Willie Nelson and the UFOs.
	Oh, and UFOs.
	And to invite UFOs here.
	No.
	I don't think so.
	Just like remote viewing and whatever all else.
	No.
	I don't think so.
	I had a very close encounter, as close as I ever care to have.
	If you've had a silent, anti-gravitic type vehicle pass 100 feet over your head, that's all you need.
	Trust me.
	That's all you need.
	First time caller line, you're on the air.
	Hi.
	Hi there, and greetings to you and the listening audience.
	Thank you.
	You're very welcome.
	Where are you?
	I'm in southern Manitoba, Canada.
	Wow.
	And calling for the first time ever.
	Well, no, actually, it's not the first time.
	I just happened to get through on the first time caller line.
	Oh, no, dear.
	That's a violation of all that is sacred.
	Oh, well, you'll have to forgive me, Mr. Bell.
	No, I can't.
	I have so much stuff.
	Well, I know, but your stuff is going to have to come in on a different line.
	This is a sacred thing.
	That's the first time caller line.
	That's for people who have never called before.
	So if you call that line, Having called before, you are now preventing somebody who has never called the show from calling.
	That is a sacred no-no.
	Wildcard Line, you're on the air.
	Hello.
	Hello, Art.
	Hi.
	Did you give consideration to the ionosphere problems if I'm hearing the correct show tonight, being with the possible magnetic flip?
	Listen, you could consider an awful lot of things as possible and responsible for what's going on.
	All I'm telling the audience and you Is this has never happened for this kind of protracted period of time in all the years and sunspot cycles that I've been through.
	It's never happened, sir.
	So, you know, we're always talking about different levels like the ozone layer, right?
	Well, the ionosphere is another very important level and I'm here to tell you something's up.
	Thank you very much, Art.
	You have a good night.
	Yeah, you have a good night too.
	Could it be as a result of The beginning of magnetic changes, possibly.
	Could it be incredible explosions in space as black holes collide?
	Maybe.
	Could it be the genesis power of the universe?
	Which I guess two black holes colliding would be anyway, right?
	Yeah, could be that.
	Could be a lot of things, but something's up.
	All right, let us venture one more time to the first-time caller line.
	Do we have an actual first-time caller here?
	Yeah, hello.
	Hi.
	You've never called before, right?
	I never have.
	You never have.
	All right, where are you?
	I'm in Athens, Georgia.
	Athens.
	Okay, sir.
	Yeah, just a quick thing.
	It's kind of a free-for-all tonight, right?
	So I guess I can talk about anything.
	Yeah, free-for-all, absolutely.
	Okay, I've had this weird... I've had three of these, and the only way I can describe them is I call them intruder greens.
	Yeah.
	And I consider myself, I'm 32 years old, I consider myself a fairly intelligent person and blah, blah, blah.
	Kind of coherent and rational and logical, whatever.
	We'll be the judge of that.
	Right, exactly.
	And I had three of these.
	One of the most, one of them was so significant.
	I was in Dallas, Texas and I had a dream where I was, it was more like a kind of a vision and I was woken up by someone that came onto my property.
	Like they had actually trespassed and woke me up out of this very, very, very, very strange dream.
	And I had two more where my feet actually flew off the bed.
	Like they actually, my feet like literally felt like someone literally pushed my feet up.
	And then I had another one where someone came onto my property again and tapped my window.
	And woke me up out of this dream.
	It was very, very strange.
	And I don't want to make a big deal about it.
	Do you have any scoop marks or other physical manifestations of your experience?
	No, no.
	It was just the only thing that really, really left me with is just this really ominous feeling.
	And also a fascinating feeling, too, because it was something that had never happened to me.
	And very, you know, hard to explain.
	But I guess my really only point in calling is that If anyone else had one, you should be fabulous.
	What do you mean if anybody else has had one?
	Sir, if you look at the statistics gathered by pollsters who are commissioned to do this kind of thing, the percentage of people in America who believe they have seen a UFO, the percentage of people in America who believe they have been abducted or have come into contact with alien beings is astounding!
	Absolutely astounding.
	So many people believe that has happened to them.
	East of the Rockies, uh, Cheerio, you're on the air.
	Hello.
	Hello, Art?
	Yes.
	Hi, this is Leah from Parkside, Pennsylvania.
	How you doing, Leah?
	All right, how are you?
	Great.
	Um, I was wondering tonight, you, uh, you mentioned the guest that you're going to have on, um, and, um, I was wondering if, um, I mean, tomorrow night is the guy with the Bible code?
	That would be Michael Drosnin, tomorrow night.
	Yeah, tomorrow night.
	And it reminded me of a book I just read, and I was wondering if you could have the author on sometime in the near future of The Da Vinci Code.
	Oh, The Da Vinci Code, huh?
	Yeah, it was fascinating.
	And I would like to hear from him and hear where he got his information.
	Yeah, I think he'd make a Probably.
	Let me tell you something.
	Sometimes an author, even one who writes a fascinating book, makes a lousy guest on the radio.
	They just can't talk, but they can sure write.
	And then other times, they make incredible guests.
	So, we'll check them out.
	Okay, thank you.
	Have a good night.
	West of the Rockies, you are on the air.
	Hello.
	Yes, this is Olin in Culver City.
	I've heard that name.
	Thank you.
	In the news today, 30 skiers got buried in an avalanche of snow at Park City Resort in Utah.
	Well, from time to time, someone wonders how the hairy mammoth elephants got quick-frozen with buttercup flowers still in their mouth.
	I think the mammoths got buried in an avalanche of snow and ice at the foot of the Continental Glacier in the last Ice Age.
	It's absolutely possible, isn't it?
	Well, yes, the 30 skiers got buried and quick frozen with Hall's cough drops.
	The only hitch in this is that when they do core samples, sir, you know, those nasty things that go back, I don't know, hundreds of thousands of years, they find evidence of the climate shift that did that.
	That's very worrisome.
	You know, I mean, imagining the avalanche is fine.
	And it could be an answer, certainly. But those core samples there, really worrisome.
	I mean, they indicate that we've had rapid climate change before, and so we'll probably have it again.
	Well, you've interviewed Robert Felix with his book about Not by Fire, but by Ice.
	Yes.
	And we're getting the geological evidence right now of the earthquakes and the heavy snow and rainfall.
	And if this snow doesn't melt next summer, it's going to start accumulating.
	I appreciate your call.
	In fact, just here in our little town, we had a flash flood alert the other day, not because of rain that was falling immediately upon the ground here.
	But rather from rain suddenly melting in the mountains and then just washing down into the valley.
	It was quite an incredible thing.
	First time caller line, you're on the air.
	Hello.
	Hi, this is Karina.
	I wanted to give my opinion on one of the shows that you Karina, you need to turn your radio off.
	Okay.
	I'll wait for you to actually do that.
	Anybody calling the show must immediately turn their radio off or it will be confusing beyond the ability for you to continue.
	Okay.
	All right, Karina.
	Hi, Mr. Bell.
	I'm, like, so excited that I got through to you.
	I've been listening to you for about a year now, and one of the shows that you talked about a while ago was about how you think the world is going to end.
	Oh, yes.
	And I really believe That aliens is going to come back.
	I've been looking at things that's been going on, the tsunami, the different tragedies, all the movies that I've been watching, Impact, Deep Impact, Armageddon.
	Yes.
	And I really feel like that's how this world is going to end.
	And you think it's going to be aliens?
	Yeah, I think it's like some other beings, because I believe in God.
	I believe in another source, you know, and I believe that we had come from, you know, we was brought here by someone else.
	So the beings that made us, I believe, they're going to come back and destroy the world.
	Because in the Bible it says... You mean they're going to come back?
	You said the beings that made us, they're going to come back and look down at what we have done and they're going to be, well, let's keep it for the family, extremely disappointed?
	Well, I think they're angry with how us of being is running
	the world you know like how put on i'm i'm not a bush fan like it like being that going on how they destroy in the
	earth and so these aliens are going to be anti-bush aliens
	no i'm not paying and how quickly alien What I'm saying is that... They would be so unhappy with Bush administration policies that they would destroy the entire world!
	No, not... No, not that.
	Not that they're gonna... I'm cutting through what I hear here.
	And I can tell you are not a President Bush fan.
	And you also feel the aliens wouldn't be.
	And you are saying the world would be wiped out.
	So let's cut straight to the quick here.
	That is what you're saying.
	I'm actually saying that the beings that made us, made humans, are upset with how the things are.
	And right now, I live in New York, and right now, the way the President is running our country, I feel that it's wrong.
	You know, he's not thinking about the people.
	Well, then they'll probably come down in blue saucers.
	Listen, I gotta go!
	Okay.
	Alright, thank you very much.
	Have a good morning.
	All right, we're going to take a break here at the top of the hour, and then we're going to talk to Ray Kurzweil.
	It's going to be a very interesting interview.
	We're going to be talking about artificial intelligence and robotics and a lot of very cool things.
	I just saw I, Robot, and if you haven't seen that movie yet, trust me, the effects in I,
	Robot are over the top.
	🎵Music🎵 🎵Music🎵
	🎵Music🎵 Be it sight, sound, smell, touch, there's something, inside
	that we need so much.
	Okay.
	The sight of a touch, or the scent of a sound, or the strength of an arc when it loops deep in the ground.
	The wonder of flowers to be covered and then to burst up through tarmac to the sun again.
	Or to fly to the sun without burning a wing?
	To lie in a meadow and hear the grass sing?
	To have all these things in our memories whole?
	And they use them to help us to fly Fly, fly my sea-soul
	Take this place on a strip Just for me
	I'm back!
	To talk with Art Bell, call the wildcard line at area code 775-727-1295.
	The first time caller line is area code 775-727-1222.
	To talk with Art Bell, call the wildcard line at area code 775-727-1295.
	The first time caller line is area code 775-727-1222.
	To talk with Art Bell from east to the Rockies, call toll free 800-825-5000.
	This is going to be fascinating.
	From west of the Rockies, call 800-618-8255.
	International callers may reach ARC 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 ARC
	back.
	About to jump straight into the abyss.
	This is going to be fascinating.
	Ray Kurzweil is an inventor, entrepreneur, author, and futurist.
	He has successfully founded and then developed nine businesses in OCR, music synthesis, speech recognition, reading technology, virtual reality, financial investments, cybernetic art, and other areas of artificial intelligence.
	Now Ray was inducted In 2002, into the National Inventors Hall of Fame, he received the $500,000 Lemelson-MIT Prize, my gosh, and the 1999 National Medal of Technology from President Clinton, among scores of other national and international awards.
	Kurzweil is a widely sought speaker.
	Has given keynote presentations at many leading venues.
	His presentations to diverse audiences combine wit and keen insight into contemporary issues of technology, its impact on society.
	His lectures often include appearances by Ramona.
	Ramona, yet, his virtual female alter ego.
	And, of course, the name of my wife.
	And other engaging demonstrations of cutting-edge technologies that Kurzweil and his teams have developed.
	It promises to be a whale of a night.
	stay right there rakers law it is an honor to have you on the program
	Great, great to be with you, Ryan.
	Where are you actually now?
	I'm actually in Los Angeles, although usually I'm in the Boston area.
	Uh-huh.
	Well, welcome to the West.
	You got here, hopefully, after the deluge of rain.
	Just flew in, actually.
	You missed it then.
	Good.
	All right, well, you know, just before, just before, The program got started.
	I had about two seconds to talk to you, and I said, do you see iRobot?
	Because obviously we're going to be talking about artificial intelligence, robots, and all that sort of thing.
	And you said yes.
	It's an interesting movie, but it's separate from the same thing that a lot of futurist movies do, which is it took one change, in this case human-level cyborgs, and put it on today's world as if nothing else is going to change.
	The reality is that There's going to be lots of changes.
	Well, they had cool cars.
	Well, in fact, the cars were just like today's.
	I mean, they had slightly cool designs, but basically it was today's designs, today's cars, today's coffee makers.
	Lots of things are going to change.
	We're going to have radical life extension.
	We're going to have full immersion virtual reality.
	We're not just going to have one change put on today's world.
	I mean, that's a mistake that a lot of people make when they consider changes.
	You know, we were just talking about our book about radical life extension, Fantastic Voyage, Live Long Enough to Live Forever, and a lot of people ask, well, if people live a long time, are we going to have overpopulation?
	But other changes, for example, nanotechnology, will enable us to have very dramatic economic growth.
	We'll be able to make virtually any physical product, including food, from Very inexpensive materials and just information.
	If it pans out.
	Now, the only reason I say that is because, again, returning to robots, Ray, when I was a child, I'm 59 years old now, the promise was, oh boy, we'd have the kind of robots we saw in iRobot that would do all the nasty chores for us and all the rest of it.
	That was the promise and almost an absolute promise from science.
	Not a promise from me, actually.
	Well, I mean, there are a lot of bad Predictions about the future and you can you can find embarrassing predictions They go back many decades and even centuries But it's important to have a sound methodology for anticipating The technological trends I mean in your book the quickening which you which came out in 1997 you talked about how Technology was accelerating
	Yes.
	And the impact of technology, such as economic change, is also accelerating.
	Yes.
	But what I've done is actually create mathematical models of that acceleration.
	And this really stemmed from my interest in being an inventor.
	I realized that my inventions had to make sense when I finished the project.
	And so most inventions fail, actually, because the timing is wrong.
	So I became an ardent student of technology trends and have developed mathematical models of how technology evolves.
	This has actually taken on a life of its own.
	I have a group of 10 people now that gathers data about technology in many different areas and develop mathematical models.
	I've been actually doing this for 25 years.
	A book I wrote in the 1980s had hundreds of predictions about the 1990s and the early 2000s, which I've tracked very accurately.
	So you did well?
	Right, but it's based... because it's based on a sound methodology.
	I mean, some things are actually hard to predict, and if you ask me Will Google stock be higher or lower in three years from now?
	That's very hard to predict.
	But if you ask me, how much will it cost to sequence a base pair of DNA?
	Or what will the spatial resolution of brain scanning be in 2010?
	Those things turn out to be very predictable.
	Why?
	Well, I have a whole theory about that, called the Law of Accelerating Returns, which technology evolves in an exponential fashion because we're always using the latest generation of tools To create the next.
	And for that reason, the power of the tools and the effect that technology has on the world accelerates and its impact grows exponentially.
	And you can take, for example, the price performance of computing and put it on a logarithmic graph and it forms a very smooth progression for the last hundred years.
	Same thing is true of telecommunications.
	In our book, Fantastic Voyage, we talk about this whole biotechnology revolution where
	we're now understanding our biology in terms of information and that is growing exponentially.
	The amount of genetic data that we're sequencing is actually doubling every year.
	The cost of sequencing a base pair of DNA comes down by half every year.
	So two-thirds through the Genome Project, we had actually only collected 2% of the genome
	and the skeptics are saying, well, there's no way you're going to finish the project
	And they finished ahead of time.
	They finished ahead, because it's the last few doublings that go from just a few percent to 100%.
	That's a sort of explosive power of exponential growth.
	It took us 15 years to sequence HIV.
	We sequenced SARS.
	It was a pretty comparable project in 31 days.
	And a few years from now we'll be able to sequence a new virus in one day, and then a few hours.
	So these technologies are really exploding exponentially in speed, the price performance, the capacity, the bandwidth, the amount of data.
	Anything that has anything to do with information, almost no matter how you look at it, is growing exponentially.
	So in those areas you feel as though you can make predictions that are going to be pretty definitely right on.
	Right.
	I mean, we have these curves, these graphs of many different measures of information.
	Lately, I've been focusing on biology and how it affects our health and longevity.
	Yeah, I see that.
	In your book it says, live long enough to live forever.
	Live long enough to live forever.
	Right.
	This is a book that I co-authored with Dr. Terry Grossman, who also was a guest.
	That's right.
	No.
	I met him about five years ago.
	He actually was my doctor, and I had a very thorough evaluation at his longevity clinic, which was a great experience, and we developed... I was kind of not the usual patient.
	We had lots of emails back and forth, and dozens of emails became hundreds, became thousands.
	We actually estimated recently 10,000 emails between us.
	Wow.
	We're really collaborating very intensely on what we call these three bridges.
	It's a radical life extension.
	And Bridge 1, which is about two-thirds of the book, is what you can do today to stay healthy.
	And you can really slow down the aging and disease process a lot more than people realize.
	And I mean, Dr. Gross and myself do that ourselves.
	I had an extensive biological aging test at his clinic, which showed that I'm about 40, even though I'll be 57 in a few weeks.
	I'm really not, I would say, haven't aged very much in the last 15 years.
	Do you want to live forever?
	Well, I don't want to die, and I don't think I'll get to the point where I want to die, but I would say that if everything stayed the same, and if our experiences stayed the same, and we're not able to expand our minds and our experiences, All of us, including myself, would ultimately get sort of profoundly bored.
	We'd develop a profound ennui.
	Profoundly bored?
	I wonder how long?
	But that's not going to be the case.
	I mean, in addition to radical life extension, technologies such as nanorobots in the brain, which will interact intimately with our biological neurons, will enable us to greatly expand Our experiences and our mental functions will be able to have full immersion virtual reality from within the nervous system.
	These are some of the things we talk about in the third bridge of our book.
	This first bridge of staying healthy and doing things today with nutrition and supplements and exercise to slow down the aging process will keep even baby boomers like you and I and Dr. Grossman not only alive but in good shape until the full blossoming of this biotechnology revolution That will give us more time to the third bridge, which is the nanotechnology revolution, where we can really go beyond the limitations of biology.
	Many people look backwards, and you'll hear various statistics.
	If you stop smoking, you'll add a few years to your life.
	If you exercise, you'll add some time.
	That's looking backwards.
	It's very important to look forward, because of the exponential nature of these technologies, In a fairly short amount of time, we're going to have dramatically more powerful tools to enhance our health.
	We are unraveling the 10 or 12 different causes of aging.
	Aging is not one thing.
	There's a dozen different processes.
	So what are you doing to extend your life now to get to the magic point where other things begin to happen?
	Well, in this book, Fantastic Voyage, Dr. Grossman and I describe a practical program Uh, nutrition, and I can describe some of the details of that, aggressive supplementation, finding out what your specific issues are, so we give you the guidance to really develop a customized program, and find out what your issues are.
	Is your homocysteine high?
	If it is, then take folic acid and B vitamins and TMG and some other things and get it into a healthy range.
	Is your cholesterol high?
	Just in the papers last week, there was a lot of discussion of C-reactive protein,
	that that's as important a risk factor as cholesterol, because it's a measure of inflammation, and we're learning
	that inflammation underlies many of these very important disease processes, like heart
	disease and diabetes.
	I want to ask a question at this point.
	There's a couple of, is it myox and then it's still on the market, cousin, that are anti-inflammatories.
	There's been a little trouble lately for them.
	I just wanted to ask if anti-inflammatories would be part of a regimen.
	Well, we do recommend things like EPA, DHA, omega-3 fats, which are anti-inflammatory, or curcumin, which is anti-inflammatory.
	And these don't have the downsides of these drugs.
	When I would draw a distinction between old drugs, which were discovered, and new drugs, which are being designed, drug development used to be called drug discovery.
	It literally was a matter of finding some substance It seemed to have some positive effect.
	They would find something that lowered blood pressure.
	And we didn't really understand how it works.
	It seemed to work, but it would have a lot of side effects.
	It's kind of similar to when primitive man or woman, you know, thousands of years ago would find a tool like, okay, here's a stone.
	This would make a good hammer.
	And we couldn't really shape tools to do a job.
	Now we're actually learning the precise biochemical steps underlying these disease processes.
	And we describe in the book You know, each key step, there's seven or eight different key steps in the progression of atherosclerosis, which causes heart disease.
	And new drug developers are actually able to create very precise chemical weapons that will go and interfere with a very specific step and stop these disease processes without side effects or much fewer side effects.
	So, these old drugs like Vioxx, they do have certain benefits.
	They're anti-inflammatory, but they have side effects.
	Because they were not designed to do a very specific job in a precise way.
	Celebrex, for example, is still on the market now.
	These are all old drugs.
	Well, I take Celebrex, and so I'm asking for a personal reason.
	I mean, the little risk, but I have a very bad back, so Celebrex helps my back now.
	You say there are some positive aspects to the anti-inflammatory.
	Is that so?
	Well, yes.
	I mean, it's good to slow down these inflammatory processes, because inflammation and over-activation of the immune system underlies, fundamentally, gout and sclerosis.
	Each step in the progression towards a heart attack is fueled by this inflammation process.
	This particular class of drugs, though, have side effects, which in many cases may do more harm than good.
	There are new drugs being developed that will much more precisely undercut these processes without the side effects.
	And that's our second bridge that we talk about in Fantastic Voyage.
	It is really being able to understand the information processes underlying biology and developing key tools that can then change those processes.
	For example, we're We have tools now that can actually change the expression of your genes.
	Something called RNA interference, which we talk about in the book, can actually turn a gene off.
	In fact, we send in this little RNA fragments that latch onto the messenger RNA from a gene, which destroys it and actually prevents a gene from being expressed.
	What would be a practical application of that?
	Well, let me give you a very exciting one.
	We have all these genes inside us.
	One gene These things are actually little software programs, and one of them is called the fat insulin receptor gene.
	It says, hold on to every calorie because the next hunting season may not work out so well.
	These genes evolved tens of thousands of years ago.
	Right.
	So, what would happen if you turned that particular gene off?
	There was a trial at the Johnson Diabetes Center on rats.
	They turned off the fat insulin receptor gene in the fat cells.
	And?
	Mice ate ravenously and remained slim and got the health benefits of being slim.
	They didn't get diabetes.
	They didn't get heart disease.
	They actually lived 20% longer.
	Oh my god.
	They got the health benefits of caloric restriction, which is something we know extends life and provides good health, while doing the opposite of caloric restriction.
	So, that'd be a pretty cool drug if people could eat as much as they want and remain slim and actually get the health benefits of being slim.
	Anybody tried on a human yet?
	Well, there are pharmaceutical companies Rushing to bring, you know, something that would inhibit the expression of this gene to the human market.
	That has to go through development and testing, but I would say in five to eight years we will see that.
	But it exists now in the lab.
	Well, they used a particular method to knock out this particular gene in mice.
	And of course it's easy to experiment on mice, and mice develop very quickly, so determining, for example, a 20% extension of their life Sure.
	It doesn't take that long.
	And they can look at future generations quite quickly, comparatively.
	So there are many genes that play a role in disease.
	There are genes that play a role in aging.
	And we have a tool now, actually just emerged in the last couple years, RNA Interference, which allows us to turn genes off.
	Gene therapy, which allows us to actually insert new genes, is also making progress.
	There are exciting new ways of being able to place Genes at the right place on a chromosome, which has been one of the problems with gene therapy.
	We also have the means of inhibiting enzymes.
	I mean, for example, one drug which we talk about in Fantastic Voyage called Torsotropy, which is actually now in Phase III trials.
	It turns off a very specific enzyme that destroys the good HDL, the good cholesterol called HDL in the blood.
	By simply inhibiting that enzyme, People's HDL levels, the good cholesterol, soars.
	And that has a beneficial effect on slowing down or stopping atherosclerosis, which is the cause of heart attacks.
	So, I mean, without hanging our hats on any one specific drug, you know, we need to let these trials continue.
	There are hundreds of these developments in process, because we now have the tools to Turn off an enzyme, or add an enzyme, turn off a gene.
	So for now, you pursue it all.
	I wonder, we've got to take a break here with the bottom of the hour, I wonder if there is, though, the possibility in the near future of that magic bullet, that one moment when a genetic scientist actually manages to turn off the aging process, literally just turn off the aging process, and that's it, baby, you don't get any older.
	Huh, think how that would change the world.
	and that could happen in your lifetime to realize just what I have found
	I have been only half of what I am it's all clear to me now
	my heart is on fire my soul's like a wheel that's turning
	I can play it too if you wanna see it don't come easy
	no, it don't come easy it don't come easy
	you know it don't come easy I can play it too if you wanna see
	and you know it don't come easy you don't have to shout or leap the loud
	you can even play them easy get up out the pad
	and hold your sorrow in the future or the past
	it will soon be your tomorrow Do talk with Art Bell. Call the wildcard line at area code
	7.
	The first time caller line is area code 775-727-1222.
	To talk with Art Bell from east to the Rockies, call toll free at 800-825-5033.
	line is area code 775-727-1222. To talk with Art Bell from east of the Rockies, call toll-free
	at 800-825-5033. From west of the Rockies, call Art at 800-618-8255.
	International callers may reach Art Bell by calling your in-country Sprint Access
	number, 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.
	And Ray Kurzweil.
	His book, along with Dr. Terry Grossman, is Fantastic Voyage, Live Long Enough to Live Forever.
	And that's what they mean.
	Live long enough to live forever.
	And as the song says, your tomorrows get here very quickly.
	So it's something to consider.
	How about you?
	wanna live forever alright ryan stand that uh... your book it uh... reasonably
	illustrates to a person how to get to the point where something
	some big breakthrough uh... may occur how to live long enough to get to that
	Right, I mean the title I think is instructive, live long enough to live forever.
	To live forever, yeah.
	To live long enough is our bridge one, and we do describe in a lot of detail how you can do that.
	I mean you can really slow down aging disease processes much more than people realize and
	so we provide a practical program for doing that it's not a Single silver bullet or one trick pony. I mean we have a
	number of ideas here about nutrition and supplements and exercise
	But it's quite a doable program Ray what would happen if?
	This magic bullet dip here. I mean Maybe it could appear too soon.
	At the rate technology is moving, I'm curious what you think would happen if they suddenly found something to turn on or off genetically that would stop aging.
	Could that magic bullet come too soon for the world?
	Well, I mean, these are our second and third bridges.
	I mean, we feel that biotechnology, which will Give us very powerful new tools to really
	Master biology will be here in 10 to 15 years I mean many of these things already in the testing pipeline
	that's pretty soon And then that'll be a bridge to the third bridge of the nanotechnology
	revolution and that really will enable us to rebuild our bodies
	And brains at the molecular level and you know then there's really no limit to I've got long we could live
	Right, but could it come too soon?
	And by that I mean, is society, the world, ready for that kind of incredible leap of technology?
	I don't think it's going to come too soon.
	I think it's going to come in a couple of decades.
	And that's why it's very important, particularly people our age, in their 40s, 50s, 60s, 70s, uh... really be aggressive and take care of our health so
	that we'll be in good shape when these things
	happen. We'll have other developments that will enable us to provide
	uh... for a larger population. Nanotechnology, artificial intelligence,
	these developments will provide for very substantial economic growth.
	Right, to get to the point where somebody who just barely makes it, let's say, and they're 90 years old, and along comes a magic bullet, would they then probably be frozen at 90, or would regression be possible?
	Depends on when we're talking about.
	I think within about 20 years we'll be able to essentially arrest The aging process, which is not one thing.
	There's a dozen different processes, but we're learning them.
	We don't understand them fully today, but within 20 years we'll not only understand them, but we'll have the tools to stop them.
	If you go out further, say 30 years or more, then we actually will be able to reverse these processes and get younger.
	Okay, so the answer is even if you just barely made it, you would at that point arrest your aging process and you would make it to the next level.
	That's correct, but it's good not to cause excessive damage to our biological bodies, because some things are hard to reverse.
	And a lot of these disease processes, they're silent.
	People don't notice that the very first indication that they have a problem might be a heart attack, and a third of first heart attacks are fatal.
	Another third cause permanent damage to the heart muscle.
	Now it's true that eventually with cell therapies like stem cell therapies or cell regeneration, we can undo that damage, but it's a lot better and a lot easier and a lot less painful to avoid that damage in the first place.
	How damaging are our policies prohibiting some lines of stem cell research?
	Well, you know, I'm very opposed to the The prohibitions and restrictions of, I think, stem cell research is very important.
	Ultimately, the holy grail of sort of cell therapies is something called transdifferentiation.
	Rather than taking stem cells, which has somebody else's DNA, you know, what would really be beneficial is to take my own skin cells and turn them into other types of cells, heart cells, pancreatic, gallic cells that have my DNA.
	And in the process, actually pick ones that don't have any DNA errors, so they'll be DNA-corrected.
	Extend what are called the telomeres, which are indications of how old those cells are.
	Yes.
	And create basically youthful, regenerated, DNA-corrected cells of my own DNA.
	Now, that's actually been done in a Petri dish.
	Scientists, just in the past couple years, have actually taken human skin cells and turned them into immune system cells and nerve system cells.
	You know, what is the difference between different types of cells?
	They all have the same DNA.
	Different genes are expressed.
	And we're actually learning how to control that gene expression process.
	So these are some of the technologies that are in development now that we're learning to master in this second bridge of biotechnology, which is in the early stages.
	But it's going to progress a lot more quickly than people realize.
	As we talked about earlier, the power of these technologies is doubling every year.
	Ten years from now, it'll be quite phenomenal.
	And is there any Moore's Law involved ahead for this technology?
	You know, with computer technology, we've got Moore's Law and it says eventually we're going to hit a brick wall.
	Moore's Law is really just one example of what I call the Law of Accelerating Returns, which is that all information technologies grow exponentially, basically doubling their power every year.
	And Moore's Law With regard to computers, it means the shrinking of transistors on any great circuit.
	That will hit a wall, but then we'll go to another paradigm, which is three-dimensional molecular computing, which will continue that progression.
	And Moore's Law was not the first, but actually the fifth paradigm to bring exponential growth to computing.
	But we also see it in any other area, not just computing.
	I mean, for example, in biological technology.
	That's what I'm asking about, whether there's the equivalent.
	It took us 15 years to sequence HIV.
	We sequenced SARS in 31 days.
	That's because we have a Moore's Law for biology.
	The amount of genetic data they were collecting and understanding, the price performance of genetic sequencing is doubling every year.
	We can now, I mean, we're not that far from being able to do a whole human genome for a thousand dollars.
	That'll be feasible in a number of years.
	So we're really gaining power over Our genes.
	We've, in some simpler animals, we've identified some aging genes in a particular worm.
	We manipulated these aging genes and they lived five times longer, the equivalent of a 500-year lifespan for a human.
	Right.
	Now that's a simpler animal than humans.
	Actually, the number of genes it has is not that much lower than humans.
	It's a fairly modest Doctor, now obviously these things will take some time to translate into human therapies, and humans have aging processes that these worms don't have, but we're learning to reverse engineer them and master them.
	Okay, well you're a big optimist then about this technology, there's no question about it, but there are, it seems to me, with every giant gain the world has made technologically, there's been the good and the bad.
	There's been the upside to it, like nuclear power, And then the downside to it, like nuclear power gone wrong, and so forth.
	I've actually articulated the downsides as well.
	You're probably familiar with Bill Joy's arguments about the downsides of some of these technologies, but he actually got those ideas from my book, The Age of Spiritual Machines.
	Having considered it, what do you really consider to be the things to watch out for?
	Well, I mean, take this whole biotechnology Revolution.
	We've talked about some of the great benefits of understanding the disease and aging processes, overcoming heart disease and cancer and extending aging.
	The downside is it also provides a set of tools that a bioterrorist could use to create a new virus that was spread easily, was deadly and stealthy.
	I mean, that's the downside and the knowledge to do that and the tools to do that are actually more widespread than the tools to create an attack, you know, an atom bomb.
	It could actually go after an individual like the white race, or the black race, or the Mexicans.
	It could target that way too, couldn't it?
	Yeah, I mean, these are all feasible scenarios if you have a pathological individual.
	And we know that there are groups and ideologies out there who are bent on destruction.
	So that's a Grave concern.
	I mean, the answer to that, though, is not to relinquish these technologies, but to actually accelerate the defensive side of the equation.
	But that's, Ray, why I asked you about, well, let me ask you about, for example, the Chinese.
	We've got this prohibition right now on stem cell research, and I asked you how damaging it really Potentially is.
	Have you looked at the particular lines that are banned?
	How much are we losing by these laws against this research?
	Well, first of all, in my view, these kinds of prohibitions end up being like stones in a stream.
	The flow of progress just goes around them.
	Stem cell research itself has continued despite, it's not actually a ban on stem cells, it's a ban on government funding.
	It's continued in this country and certainly overseas.
	Embryonic stem cell research is not the only type of cell therapy, and cell therapy itself is only one type of biotechnology.
	I mean, in our book, Fantastic Voyage, we talk about a dozen different, very exciting ideas about biotechnology.
	Stem cells is one part of one of those ideas.
	So it's not, I mean, I think, I'm certainly opposed to the The prohibitions and the restrictions, and I think it's important research, and we're learning about gene expression through stem cell research, and I think you will see some changes.
	In fact, there's some very creative ideas that actually create stem cells without the involvement of embryos, which we'll get around the ethical issues.
	I think we will see this type of research continue.
	I'm sure we will, but specifically with the lines that are banned, how much are we missing out on?
	How much of a jump might the Chinese, for example, be getting on the United States by having no such prohibitions?
	I think it's a legitimate issue.
	Overseas, the research is continuing at a faster pace than the United States.
	Exactly.
	I think it's something we should change.
	And I'm not saying we shouldn't trust the Chinese, Ray, but with some of the cautions that you just talked about, and the Chinese working like crazy on this, gee, the average person would say to themselves, maybe the Chinese aren't our best friends at some point.
	Well, I think a key issue is the one I referred to before.
	We're actually pretty close to developing drugs that could combat viruses in general and broad spectrum antiviral medications.
	We need to really accelerate that work.
	I testified before Congress recently suggesting that we spend tens of billions of dollars to finish that job quickly.
	We have those tools before we need them.
	We don't want to... What kind of attitude did you get back?
	Nobody was interested, but that doesn't seem to be the political motivation to do it.
	I mean, we want to have those solutions in hand before some bioterrorist challenges us.
	Yes.
	And so the feeling you got from those you testified before was that they weren't all that fired up about it, huh?
	That's scary.
	Well, they were interested, but it takes more than one testimony to change things.
	But these technologies are accelerating.
	And I think my own view, though, is that the benefits of these technologies do ultimately outweigh the perils.
	But if you look back at the history of technology, We've come a long way.
	Human lifespan was 37 in 1800.
	Human life was extremely hard.
	Disease was rampant.
	We didn't have antibiotics.
	We didn't have sanitation.
	Only 200 years ago.
	On the other hand, technology facilitated great deals of destruction in the 20th century.
	You don't have to look further than The recent past to see the promise and peril of these technologies.
	Other hand, when the lifespan was, what did you say, 37 years?
	In 1800, it was 37.
	In 1900, it was 55.
	Okay, well, so when lifespan was 37 years, I bet there wasn't near the amount of Alzheimer's we have now.
	That's right.
	I mean, most people died of infectious disease and accidents.
	Now people are mostly surviving those, for the most part.
	So now we're confronting degenerative diseases, things like heart disease, cancer, diabetes, stroke, and these are things that you don't catch just walking down the street one day.
	They're actually, even in somebody 20 or 30, these processes have started and they're picking up speed.
	And what we talk about in Fantastic Voyage is to really see where are you in the progression of these How advanced is your atherosclerosis?
	Do you have early precursors of cancer?
	Do you have early insulin resistance that could lead to diabetes?
	We provide information on tests that you can easily do by yourself or with your physician to really find out where you are so that you can do something about it before you take that last step off the cliff.
	Which is what you did.
	You went through that exact process, right Ray?
	Twenty years ago, I was diagnosed with type 2 diabetes.
	I did the conventional treatment, made things worse.
	I came up with a program that overcame my diabetes.
	About five years ago, I met Dr. Grossman and actually went through a very extensive two-day executive evaluation at his Frontier Medical Clinic, Frontier Medical Institute in Denver.
	And really was able to refine that program and then working together with him, you know, we've refined ideas and put it in this book, Fantastic Voyage.
	So, I mean, I would recommend people, you know, follow our program.
	We provide a very easy to understand program to find out your own issues and develop a personalized program.
	If somebody wants a really intensive understanding of their own health and how to Optimize it.
	I would suggest they do what I did and actually go out to Frontier Medical which is fmiclinic.com and have this two-day executive evaluation and get a personalized program that you can then follow at home.
	It's a very important thing to do.
	All right.
	You talk a lot about technology and I want to talk about artificial intelligence a little bit.
	When do you think we might see machines Right now we're in the era of what I call narrow AI.
	We have hundreds of systems that are as good as people for narrow tasks, like detecting credit card fraud, or diagnosing an electrocardiogram, or blood cell images, or flying an airplane, landing an airplane, making financial investment decisions.
	I mean, I could list a hundred things, which people used to do, And which computers now routinely do actually at better, equal or better performance to humans.
	My date for when computers will have the full range of human intelligence in which you could interview like you're interviewing me and really be convinced that you're dealing with a human-like intelligence, which is the Turing Test, that's 2029.
	By that time we'll have computers that equal or exceed the basic computational capacity of the
	human brain we will have completed the reverse engineering of the brain
	it's one thing we'll have nanobots nanorobots that can go inside the capillaries of the brain
	and scan the brain from inside we'll actually understand the principles of operation of
	how the brain works you're telling me... we'll be able to apply that to these
	very powerful computers... that there could be something that
	i could be interviewing just the way i'm interviewing you right now getting the
	kinds of responses or even better than you're giving me right now
	from a machine and i wouldn't know the difference The voice would be... Right, I mean, that is like the classical test for how to determine human-level intelligence in a machine.
	That's what Alan Turing came up with in 19... And I'm sorry, what year would that be by again? 2029.
	2029.
	All right.
	Hold tight.
	We're at the top now.
	By 2029.
	I wonder if I'll make it to my first machine interview.
	That'd be so cool, wouldn't it?
	And now, well, he doesn't have a name, but he'll be fascinating for the next three hours.
	I give you R32.
	Or, I'll think.
	I don't know.
	I'm Art Bell from the high desert.
	This is Coast to Coast AM.
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	on the internet, this is Coast to Coast AM with Art Bell.
	In the dark, that's where we do business this night with Ray Kurzweil. And he co-authored a book with another guest
	we've had on called Dr. Terry Grossman called Fantastic Voyage.
	And they mean what they say, live longer, live long enough actually to live forever. Live long enough to live forever.
	Now, human beings are traditionally not interested in things that are going to occur long after they're gone.
	But listen carefully. What they're saying is, you don't have to be gone if you don't want to be.
	There are ways, even now, to begin the process to slow that down, and if you do enough, to
	then bring it to a complete halt in your lifetime.
	You know, during the break I was thinking of interviewing a machine bad enough, right?
	But maybe by 2029, you'll be listening to your new host, the Talkmaster 2500.
	The talk show host that really is a machine, not a human being at all.
	And I hadn't considered that.
	Now I think I'm not as happy.
	Anyway.
	Actually, what's really going to happen is we're going to merge with our machines.
	In Phantastic Voyage, we talk about the third bridge, which is nanotechnology, and the killer app is nanobots or nanorobots.
	We'll be able to send millions of them into the capillaries of your brain.
	They'll keep you healthy from inside your body by killing pathogens and so forth, but they'll also communicate with your biological neurons and actually extend our intelligence so that even biological humans like you and I We'll be enhancing our technology through this very intimate integration with our technology.
	It's the nature of non-biological intelligence that it basically doubles in power every year, whereas our biological intelligence is fixed.
	So, ultimately, we get to the 2030s, it's going to be the non-biological portion of our intelligence that predominates.
	The non-biological portion.
	In other words, by then we're more... That's another way of saying we're more machine than man.
	Right.
	But it's also important to understand that the nature of machine is going to be different.
	Right now, when you say machine, you think of something that's much less sophisticated, less complicated, less subtle, less supple than, say, a human being.
	The nature of a machine is going to change.
	Machines will actually be as subtle and as intelligent and as complex and deep and funny as humans.
	And funny, did you say?
	Yes, I mean, that's part of human intelligence.
	That's something that human beings do.
	We have a sense of humor.
	We have emotions.
	In fact, it's our emotional intelligence and things like getting the joke or having spiritual experiences or relationships.
	Yeah, but funny.
	It's the cutting edge of human intelligence.
	It certainly is.
	Funny is really out there.
	I mean, you would have to be an author.
	That is the ultimate in human It really requires all of our mental faculties to be funny.
	Let's say we achieve that, and I understand the implications of what you're saying.
	Go back to iRobot and look at the premise presented, you know, the three laws of robotics.
	By the way, do you think those three laws are reasonable?
	Is it reasonable that if you had something of that intelligence, that much intelligence, that you would lay down those three laws as, you know, the basic premise operating system?
	Well, they're reasonable laws, except that they overlook the extent to which our biological and non-biological intelligence is going to merge.
	It's not going to be clear-cut.
	You can say, okay, robots on the right side of the room, human beings on the left.
	They're going to be all mixed up.
	It's not going to be a clear distinction.
	In fact, biological people like you and I are going to be, in large measure, non-biological also.
	So, it's not going to be humans against machines, it's going to be the humans are the machines.
	And we're already enhancing our experiences for our machines.
	I mean, talk to one woman who said her Son's computer might as well be in his brain because he walks around with it all the time.
	It's an extension of his communication with the world.
	I mean, I feel that way.
	I mean, you know, the Internet is an extension of our nervous system and ultimately will really integrate with our nervous system.
	We're already expanding human intelligence as a species.
	You know, our civilization does intellectual feeds that we certainly could not do without our technology already today.
	I've actually interviewed scientists on this show, Ray, who connected themselves to computers.
	They did it through a nervous system in the arm.
	I mean, it's pretty strange, freaky stuff, but they were going to actually allow communication directly to their brain through some nerves.
	I mean, that was the idea.
	Well, we actually have practical applications of that.
	I mean, there's an FDA approved implant that we talked about in Fantastic Voyage, and this exists today, that replaces the neurons that are destroyed by Parkinson's disease.
	And the latest version of this neural implant actually allows you to upgrade the software for your neural implant from outside the patient.
	Oh, brother.
	And the biological neurons, you know, near this computer, that are placed in people's brains, receive signals from their computer.
	Yes.
	Just as they used to get signals from the biological neurons that used to be there before they were destroyed by Parkinson's, they're perfectly happy to get signals from an electronic device.
	Which enables them to... So we already have examples of people walking around who have computers in their brains and their intelligence is now a function of both biological and non-biological intelligence.
	The threshold today is that We're overcoming certain diseases, but ultimately we will actually go beyond our biological capabilities through this sort of intimate merger with our technology.
	It's hard to even imagine, I mean, at that time, when we actually are at that point, what is our society going to be like?
	It's going to be very different than now, is it not?
	Well, it's going to still be fundamentally a human society and even the non-biological portion in my view is
	going to be human because it's going to be based on the reverse engineering of human brains. It's
	going to be patterned on human intelligence.
	It's going to be an extension of our human civilization and expansion of it and we've
	already expanded our human civilization through our technology.
	Well, you're almost calling it a natural evolution.
	You're almost calling this evolution, aren't you?
	You're saying it will be human, it will be part of the human civilization.
	Well, it is interesting.
	We actually, when we talk about this in Fantastic Voyage, how our technology actually Is a continuation of the evolutionary process that led to the technology creating species in the first place.
	Well, that's almost like a religion then.
	Or it could be.
	And by the way, we haven't even... It's an observation about evolution.
	Evolution accelerates.
	The first step, the evolution of DNA, took billions of years.
	And it's the nature of evolution that it works through in direction.
	It creates something and then it uses that something to create the next stage.
	So then it used DNA The Cambrian explosion, you know, went a hundred times faster and biological evolution kept speeding up.
	Then our species, Homo sapiens, evolved in only a few hundred thousand years.
	Then the next step, which was the first steps of technology, went a little bit faster, took only tens of thousands of years for fire, the wheel, stone tools.
	And then we always used the latest generation of technology to create the next Stage of technology today. We use the most advanced
	computers to design new ones the next generation of computers
	It only takes you know a few months to do that major paradigm shifts like the World Wide Web
	Which have really transformed things only took a few years to come into being
	I You know, I I don't know how I feel about what you're
	describing as possible future where man will take as an evolutionary step
	a sort of I Don't know a meeting with machines and and it will seem
	natural But I can tell you right now right for example
	You're being heard, you know throughout the entire nation, but
	just fine right on through the Bible Belt, right and And there's a whole bunch of people there that would have a lot to say about some of the things you've talked about, for example, chips, implanted chips, that sort of thing.
	They have incredible, I can tell you right now, you give out your email address if you have the cojones to do that, and you'll get some email and you'll see what I mean.
	I've been, actually, I've dialogued with people from many different kinds of backgrounds, and there actually is not religious Opposition or opposition from conservative religious folks, for example, to this FCA implant for people with Parkinson's disease.
	And there isn't... There isn't really opposition to providing... You're saying among those who have... For people who, through stroke, are paralyzed and can't control their environment.
	So you're saying once they have some disabling disease like this, everything else gets wiped away and they jump for it?
	Well, I think we do have a consensus in our society to alleviate human suffering, overcome disease.
	We have been pushing back our longevity.
	In Fantastic Voyage, we talk about how longevity has been progressing through technological innovation.
	We now have this technological innovation going on through biotechnology where we're mastering the information processes underlying biology.
	There are people who would say that the whole thing is not natural, Ray.
	And you must talk to people like that.
	You know, we're not... We're not... Human beings are not just fruit hanging from the tree vine to fall on the ground.
	I mean, we are the species that seeks to solve problems, that seeks to go beyond our limitations.
	We didn't stay on the ground.
	We didn't stay on the planet.
	We have not stayed with the limitations of biology.
	We've been pushing human life expectancy That's really why we sort of express in Fantastic Voyage this urgency to use today's knowledge to stay in good shape, because you don't want to be the last person on the line to the theater to not get in.
	Yeah, that's right.
	Health, which biotechnology and nanotechnology are going to bring to us.
	So you think the opposition to this whole idea, and I'm talking about life extension, the possibility of living forever, toying with genetics, I mean, there are a bunch of people out there, Ray, that think it's all unnatural and wrong.
	We've been toying with genetics through breeding and so on for 200 years.
	In much more of a natural manner, though.
	You know, we use all kinds of means that are not natural.
	I mean, drugs, surgery are not natural.
	We have augmentations and replacements for many of the different parts of our body.
	I mean, we're not just living a natural life like plants and animals.
	I mean, we are the species that has created technology to, you know, better our lot in life.
	And if you compare life today to even a few hundred years ago, Tremendous difference.
	People live lives of tremendous poverty, hard work, disease, and misfortune.
	Right.
	I'm just saying there are a group of people that don't agree with you.
	You realize that?
	Right.
	Or do you think it's all money?
	It's important to understand that if I describe the world in 2020 or 2030, it's not as if we're going to wake up one day and take this huge leap to that world.
	We're going to get there day to time.
	And there are new developments, and they may seem Controversial at first.
	I mean, consider new reproductive technologies like test tube babies.
	That was very controversial for six months.
	But then people got used to it, and now it's just part of the landscape.
	I mean, these new ideas occur.
	We get used to them.
	Some ideas we decide are not a good idea.
	They don't succeed in the marketplace, or they don't make sense, and they don't stay with us.
	So through our own experience with it, the marketplace, testing, The FDA and so on, certain things will work and some won't.
	We'll sort out what really enhances human life.
	There's a big, you mentioned the FDA, there's a big controversy now about whether the FDA is in fact testing stringently enough.
	What is your view?
	My view is that the FDA really slows down these innovations.
	And what we're not giving enough weight is what is the cost of delaying life-saving If you have a drug that could really reduce heart attacks, and the FDA, because it's getting all this pressure to be careful, delays it an extra year, two years, three years, how many people are going to die as a result of that?
	But that seems to get no political pressure, because people have been dying from these diseases for a long time, and nobody blames the FDA for dying from a disease, whereas a few people die of a drug that's approved, and then there's congressional hearings and all kinds of political fallout.
	So they're under tremendous pressure not to approve things.
	And if they don't approve something, nobody gives them a hard time for failing to approve something.
	They approve something, and then some people die.
	A few people die in gene therapy trials in their congressional hearings, and all the research was stopped for six months.
	I mean, how many?
	You could make a strong case that hundreds of thousands of people ultimately will die as a result of that delay, but you can't name them because it's a very diffuse phenomenon.
	So, in my view, we need to balance the cost of delay, and nothing is risk-free.
	And God knows these diseases, like heart disease and cancer, which we're gaining the tools to make progress against, are not free of risk.
	I mean, you know, millions of people die.
	uh... each year across the world and from these diseases uh... general interest that the you know this pressure for the fda to slow things down and they're going to react like a bureaucracy and just slow everything down and that's going to ultimately uh... extend human suffering if if all If all limitations were removed on stem cell research, of all the different lines, including the ones that are now forbidden and all other, if the FDA just virtually wasn't there and people could turn out things and just put them directly into human consumption, would that speed all this up tremendously?
	Well, I think we need to reconsider How we balance risks.
	I'm not saying we shouldn't do testing and know that we should not have regulation.
	I think that the emphasis should be on safety.
	I think we can let the marketplace and sort out efficacy.
	I think the emphasis should be on safety and I think we need to balance the risks of delay and realize that there are risks in interventions.
	But it's not as if doing nothing is risk-free.
	If you heard, and you followed all of this, obviously, you've been through the regiment and so forth.
	If you heard, Ray, that the Chinese had developed something incredible.
	I'll just use the Chinese as an example.
	It could be the French or anybody else.
	And they had a radical life extension.
	Would you be so motivated as to and get so excited as to go to China and get this treatment if it was available and to hell with the FDA and whatever all else?
	Well, I mean, we have to evaluate each situation.
	I mean, in general, these technologies and companies, whether they're Chinese, French or American companies, are worldwide companies and serve the worldwide market.
	Certainly, China, their whole business model is to export You know, there are technologies and capabilities around the world, so generally you don't have to go to another country, you know, unless something is banned here.
	That's a regulatory problem.
	That's not because it was invented.
	What I'm saying is if there was some magic bullet that the FDA hadn't proved, therefore wasn't available in America and you could travel to get it, you seem to be pursuing very hard life extension.
	I would assume you would get on a plane if you had to and go.
	I mean, in the hypothetical situation that I had some You know, fatal disease, and the only treatment was available somewhere else, and I'm actually convinced that that was a good thing.
	Yes.
	Well, sure, I would consider that.
	But I think the really important thing, and what we talk about in Fantastic Voyage, is to avoid getting into those quandaries.
	Right.
	These things, heart disease, cancer, they don't strike you out of the blue, and you can actually find out where you are.
	We talk about how you can test yourself to see where you are in the progression of these diseases, and stop those processes.
	before they get to a critical point.
	Because the medical profession, the trillion dollars we spent or more on medical care,
	is really after clinical expression of these diseases.
	I mean, that's what the medical profession is trained to do.
	And very often that's too late.
	It's like waiting until you fall off the cliff.
	It's a lot easier to deal with these things early on.
	Yeah, early on.
	Before they've really manifested themselves in disease.
	All right.
	Uh, Ray, we're at the bottom of the hour.
	Hold on.
	Ray Kurzweil is my guest.
	We're going to open the lines and let you ask questions here shortly.
	Any of these areas would work fine?
	Artificial intelligence?
	Longevity?
	Which currently is directly ahead of us.
	That's really incredible.
	Can you imagine living long enough?
	Living long enough to live forever?
	Would you want to live forever?
	I think it's an important question.
	What will you do when you're lonely?
	Oh, I'm waiting by your side You may know I've watched you all the time
	You always just kept doing what you had to Yeah
	Got me on my knees The World Was On Fire
	The world was on fire No one could save me but you
	Strange what desire Make foolish people
	I never dreamed that I'd meet somebody like you I never dreamed that I'd lose somebody like you
	No, I don't want a moment of love No, I don't want a moment of love
	To talk with Art Bell, call the wildcard line at area code 775-727-1295.
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	You know me, I'm kinda geeky, so I don't think it's a, I don't know,
	evil thing or a wicked thing at all.
	Even turning man, ultimately, into a man-machine.
	Might be okay.
	But I know a lot of people out there think it's wicked indeed.
	They see these chips and they attach numbers to them.
	Like three sixes.
	A lot of people like that.
	Wonder if that might be you.
	We're going to open the lines for Ray Kurzweil in a moment.
	Well, when you talk about artificial intelligence, again, because I just saw it and because I
	was so impressed by the, I don't know, the incredible animations in iRobot.
	Nevertheless, there I am with iRobot again as we talk about this.
	And, of course, ultimately, and this is a good question for Ray, ultimately, The robots decided that all the three laws, considered the three laws of robotics, that would be the perfect circle of protection for human beings.
	The robots decided, within the context of those laws, that human beings were doing things that were basically so harmful and so detrimental to continued human existence, that for our own benefit and our own, well, safety, that everything would have to change, that the way we do
	biz here on earth, you know, the polluting, the wars that we have, all those things that might put a
	big old dandy in life extension, no matter what you do, that these things were so dangerous
	that they would have to take over and make it right. Ray, why is there reason to believe that
	wouldn't happen?
	Well, I don't think it's going to be two different civilizations. We are extending our intelligence
	already with our machines, and the machines we're creating are really an extension of our own
	They're going to be based on human intelligence.
	They're going to be created by human beings.
	So you don't even see... We're going to merge with our technology.
	The biggest impact is we're going to extend Our biological intelligence through this intimate merger with non-biological.
	Right.
	So you don't even see the kind of robots that they portrayed there at all.
	You see more of a meshing of the human and the machine.
	Well, I think we will see both.
	I mean, there will be systems, machines that are just non-biological that also are as intelligent as humans.
	But I think the most important phenomenon is that it's not going to be a clear distinction.
	And it's going to be one civilization.
	We're already a human technology civilization.
	We do things that routinely we couldn't do without our technology.
	But, Ray, if we can create machines, you said, as intelligent as people, by 2029, then one would imagine by 2059 we'll be well into the area of much more intelligent than people.
	And there are some considerations there, are there not?
	Well, much sooner than that.
	I mean, but 2030 is, I think, the non-biological A portion of our intelligence as a species will predominate, but in my view that's still human.
	I think the problem stems from a misconception about the idea of a machine.
	We have an idea that a machine is something much less valuable than a human being, much less subtle.
	Much less intelligent.
	And you think it will be as valuable as, intellectually and in every other way we can measure?
	Yeah, including emotionally.
	I mean, we should really come up with a new word because these are not any kind of machine that we've ever met.
	But that's really the key message.
	We talk about that to some extent in Fantastic Voyage and the Third Bridge.
	That's what we're really trying to get to, to this era of nanotechnology and artificial intelligence.
	We will have these very powerful technologies enabling us to radically extend our longevity.
	It's just one implication.
	We're also going to greatly be able to expand our experiences, for example, through full immersion virtual reality and also expand our intelligence.
	Well, again, Ray, how would we protect against a greater intelligence than ourselves, deciding that we're indulging in self-destructive behavior and then changing that?
	As I say, I mean right now our computer technology is not a world apart.
	It's very integrated into our civilization.
	We have conflicts within our civilization, but it's not a conflict between humans and machines.
	We probably will have conflicts between different factions within our civilization as we do now, but I don't think that our conflict is going to go away necessarily.
	But it's not going to be a conflict between humans and machines, because humans and machines are actually getting closer and closer.
	In fact, you know, when I was a kid, machines were behind glass walls and very remote, and then we had the first computing revolution, and then we had notebook computers under our arms, and then now we have computers in our pockets, and in a few years, it'll be woven in our clothing, and it's going to make its way into our bodies and brains.
	That's the third bridge we talked about in Fantastic Voyage.
	We'll have computers, little robots, In our bloodstream, they will go inside our bloodstream and actually keep us healthy.
	They'll destroy pathogens, reverse atherosclerosis, kill cancer cells.
	So I say we're part human, we're part machine.
	You would say no.
	We're just an evolved human.
	That's right.
	I think that's the nature of our species.
	Our species seeks to improve ourselves, improve our world.
	I mean, the idea that natural is good.
	I mean, the tsunami was natural.
	You know, we try to improve human existence and human experience and avoid some of the harshness of nature.
	I mean, nature was very harsh.
	People lived in caves thousands of years ago.
	Even 200 years ago, life was extremely hard.
	I mean, you know, read Dickens of what life was like a few hundred years ago.
	Just, you know, for 99% of the human population, it was extremely harsh.
	So we've liberated ourselves to some extent from that harshness.
	We've extended human longevity from 37 to now almost 80 in 200 years.
	And I think we're going to see human longevity take a huge, very rapid rise as we master the processes underlying biology and we're developing the tools to actually change those processes to overcome disease and the processes underlying aging.
	All right, Ray, I'd like to go to the lines.
	We have a lot of people who want to ask something or contribute something.
	First time caller on the line, you're on the air with Ray Carvalho.
	Hello.
	Hi, Art.
	Hi.
	It's Andy calling.
	Where are you, Andy?
	I'm in Ontario, Canada.
	OK, excellent.
	And I'm at the base of the Bruce Peninsula that separates Lake Huron from Georgian Bay.
	Yes, OK.
	And I have a chance here maybe to ask you guys a question.
	That I've never had the answer to, but it ties into what you guys are talking about tonight.
	Okay.
	Now, I'm going to maybe just tie a couple of things together here.
	I've noticed in my experience in life and other people's comments that, you know, as you get older, time seems to come at you faster.
	Right.
	And here's a comparison here.
	As you turn your conventional radio dial up from a lower frequency, As you turn it at the same rate, the frequency comes at you faster.
	Now, in the movie 2001 A Space Odyssey, the apes were using the tool, the bone, to attack the other apes.
	Right.
	And they tossed the bone up and that bone became the rib of that orbiting space station.
	Okay, you're going to have to rush to it here.
	Okay, yep.
	Now, what I'm getting at here is You know, as time goes on, technology exponentiates.
	That seems to be, you know, that's a given.
	Now, in the movie 2001, where they've sped up in the craft, and they're going light speed, and the guy winds up in the room with his grandfather, or that grandfatherly being of himself, himself and that child offspring.
	The three of them were in the room, in that room together, as if time had sped up.
	Like, everything I understand in the cosmos is circular.
	And how you're relating all of that to all of this?
	And as time speeds up like that, it's 4.30 in the morning here and I was on my way to bed and... Alright, well, anyway, how do you relate that to this?
	Well, I could give it a shot.
	Alright, go ahead, Ray.
	You're giving different examples of exponentials, and exponential growth is seductive.
	It seems like things are moving very slowly, and then suddenly they explode.
	You alluded to the fact that technology does that, and you said that was obvious.
	I agree with you, but not everybody understands that.
	One of the main themes that we articulate in this book that Dr. Grossman and I wrote, Fantastic Voyage, is that These technologies grow exponentially, and a lot of, even sophisticated scientists, even Nobel Prize winners, don't get that.
	I've had arguments about, because they feel they've solved 1% of a problem over the last year, and it'll take 100 years to solve the problem.
	Our understanding of biology is growing exponentially.
	We're doubling our knowledge of biology, doubling the amount of genetic data we're sequencing, doubling our knowledge of the brain every year.
	So, you know, 10 years from now, We'll be a very different world, we'll have very powerful tools, because of this exponential growth.
	And that really should provide the motivation to stay healthy today, so that we're in good shape when we have those more powerful technologies.
	But again, does it shock you to know that not everybody agrees with you?
	Not everybody thinks that what you envision coming, or even being inevitable, is a good thing.
	They think it's not a good thing, and that it's not natural.
	And what do you say to those people?
	Well, you know, people look back idyllically at the wonderful natural life we had 200 years ago, unencumbered by technology, but if you do any reading about what life was really like 200 years ago, you realize that a single misfortune could put a family into desperation.
	There were no social safety nets.
	Misfortune was all around you because a simple infection was Yes.
	Got all that, and it's better now.
	I agree with you, but there are still people who say this is not natural.
	It would take six hours to cook the evening meal.
	Life was extremely hard and brutal.
	Got all that, and it's better now.
	I agree with you, but there are still people who say, this is not natural.
	Frankly, let's just cut right to it that you live your natural life, right?
	And then you die.
	And then you progress.
	You go to heaven.
	Your soul moves out of its physical body.
	And something very natural occurs.
	They have great faith in that.
	And so... Well, no.
	We've had no alternative but to try to describe how death is really a good thing.
	But I think everyone would agree that if we have the means Stay healthy and alive.
	That's what we should do.
	None of the major religions say that we should fail in helping people who are sick.
	And it's not a question that people just suddenly die.
	There's a tremendous amount of suffering involved with these diseases.
	Cancer, heart disease, these are very difficult conditions.
	We have the knowledge right now, which we talk about in the book, Uh, to really prevent these diseases in 95% of the cases.
	I appreciate that.
	But I mean there are people who say that nevertheless these diseases and the suffering is part of life that they accept or even Look forward to end stage as much as middle stage and beginning stage.
	I mean, do you think that if there really was an alternative, those views would change very quickly and those people that believe that, and there are a lot of them, Ray, would just suddenly say, oh, I don't believe that stuff anymore.
	Keep me alive, baby.
	Well, you know, I mean, how many people really are willing to relinquish all of medical science And technology altogether.
	I mean, in general, if somebody has a disease, most people, whether they're of faith or not, will seek the most sophisticated treatment that they have access to, to alleviate suffering.
	And I think there's a general consensus in the idea of progress, of overcoming what afflicts us.
	And that has support.
	Well, of course it has support, and it has my support.
	I'm just saying there are those of different belief systems.
	Wild Card Line, you're on the air with Ray Kurzweil.
	Hi.
	Good evening, Ray.
	Good evening, Art.
	Hi.
	Where are you, sir?
	I'm calling from Hilo, Hawaii.
	Hawaii.
	All right.
	Welcome to the program.
	Thank you.
	My name is Paul.
	Ray, I have a question regarding the stem cell issue.
	Are you familiar with whether it's They're working on being able to, for instance, create joints, human joints, either using a template and using stem cells in that direction and or directly injecting stem cells to improve joints.
	I have severe degenerative joints and I sure would like to be able to stick around but sticking around is kind of a painful option at this point and I was kind of hoping that there's an option out there using the stem cell research.
	You know, to replace cartilage and stuff like that.
	I bet that's a yes.
	Let's find out, Ray.
	Well, I mean, there is experimentation with using stem cells to regrow all kinds of tissues, even nervous system tissue.
	And there are successful experiments in animals.
	I think we're quite a ways from practical therapies in human beings.
	I think we're going to circumvent the whole embryonic issue.
	There's some very interesting proposals for being able to actually create stem cells without embryos, or at least without destroying embryos.
	The most interesting thing is to actually be able to harness your own cells.
	Either use adult stem cells in your own body that have your DNA, or even turn your skin cells into other types of cells, like cartilage or whatever.
	Anything into anything, virtually.
	Right, and we've actually done some preliminary experiments, we, I mean the medical scientific community, in a Petri dish of taking skin cells and turning them into several other types of cells by controlling the gene expression.
	So, these are the kinds of things that will come to pass, I believe, in the next 10 to 15 years.
	And some of the early fruits of this are actually already in the testing We're learning the means of actually directly controlling the information processes, blocking a key enzyme or blocking a gene.
	We talk about probably 50 different projects like that in Fantastic Voyage.
	Well, and when you get to this Fantastic Voyage point, haven't you put evolution in your own hands?
	I think it's no question that human technology has trumped evolution.
	We are already making dramatic changes in the nature of human life.
	Biological evolution works on such a slow scale that we will be vastly changing the nature of human life long before the extremely slow pace of biological evolution could possibly affect human beings.
	The cutting edge of the evolutionary process is not biological evolution now, it's technological evolution.
	Could they put something together that ultimately would grow a new human appendage, for example?
	Appendage?
	Yes, a new appendage.
	You know, like we have an arm now, right?
	A left and a right arm.
	Suppose we had an arm in the middle of our back.
	I don't know.
	It doesn't matter.
	I'm asking if they might get to the technological stage where such a thing would be possible.
	You know, when we fully reverse engineer biology, which I believe we will do over the next couple of decades, we will have the means of modifying biology and changing it any way we want.
	I mean, adding another appendage is probably not something that we'd want to do, but what we will want to do is overcome disease, take the 10 or 12 processes underlying aging and stop them and reverse them, enhance Our mental functioning, our emotional capabilities.
	This is what's coming, and that's why in Fantastic Voyage, we spent two-thirds of the book on how to take care of yourself now.
	Sending our IQ through the roof?
	Well, sure.
	We'll be able to expand human intelligence.
	I mean, right now, we do all our thinking on interneuronal connections.
	That process at electrochemical speeds, chemical switching speeds of a few hundred feet per second, that's a million times slower than electronic speeds.
	All right, Ray, hold it right there.
	We're at the top of the hour.
	I once heard when you could turn brown eyes blue, then you'd be able to cure AIDS.
	And that was all wrapped up in the genetic world, I believe.
	Don't know when I've been so blue.
	Don't know what's Never you.
	You found someone new.
	And don't make my breath blue.
	I'll be fine when you go.
	I'll just cry all night long.
	Say it is all true.
	I'm gonna make my brown eyes blue I'm gonna make my brown eyes blue
	I'm gonna make my brown eyes blue I'm gonna make my brown eyes blue
	Somewhere along this little road that you guys thought you realized later
	And okay, this is where the skies are clear So what do you do?
	You said it and the air is on.
	It's 2 a.m.
	and the sun is still warm.
	It's 2 a.m.
	and the air is on.
	It's 2 a.m.
	and the air is on.
	It's 2 a.m.
	and the air is on.
	It's 2 a.m.
	and the air is on.
	It's 2 a.m.
	and the air is on.
	It's 2 a.m.
	and the air is on.
	It's 2 a.m.
	and the air is on.
	It's 2 a.m.
	and the air is on.
	It's 2 a.m.
	and the air is on.
	It's 2 a.m.
	and the air is on.
	It's 2 a.m.
	and the air is on.
	It's 2 a.m.
	and the air is on.
	It's 2 a.m.
	and the air is on.
	It's 2 a.m.
	and the air is on.
	It's 2 a.m.
	and the air is on.
	And I'm out.
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	From coast to coast and worldwide on the internet, this is Coast to Coast AM with Art Bell.
	Maybe the big robotic revolution isn't going to happen.
	Not exactly the way we thought it might in science fiction.
	Maybe, as Ray Kurzweil is suggesting, I believe, we are simply going to take a natural evolutionary leap With machines.
	We're going to join together with machines, and they will be as human, I guess, as we are, in a way.
	I mean, they will be part of us, so they will be the evolved human being, and that all of this will be a natural, if not inevitable, process ahead of us.
	I can assure you though, not everybody agrees with that concept.
	And I guess it will all be just as natural as maw and apple pie as it happens.
	As easily as we have adapted to computers and now the internet, we will simply continue to adapt until man meets machine.
	And I guess, falls in love.
	I have several questions for you, Ray.
	One is with respect to the regimen in Fantastic Voyage, if one were to follow that all the way through, how much money would somebody spend?
	It's a legit question.
	I mean, can you... Well, actually, it's not very expensive.
	No?
	We do provide a comprehensive program.
	I mean, first you start with our book, Fantastic Voyage, Live Long Enough to Live Forever, which isn't very expensive, and really provides a comprehensive guide.
	Nutrition, I mean, the mainstay of the nutritional program is vegetables and Small amount of fruit and so on, and that's not very expensive.
	No, no.
	But there's a medical side to this, right?
	You have a meeting, you know, walk there rather than take a taxi that will actually save you money.
	Uh-huh.
	We do have a website, fantastic-voyage.net, that actually has a whole summary of the recommendations on there.
	And then we have a site, rayandterry.com, where we actually provide the basic supplements It actually costs well under a thousand dollars a year for the whole supplement program.
	Now that's for a basic program.
	One of the key messages in the book that we describe in detail is to find out what your issues are to develop a personalized program.
	So if, for example, you have, let's say, a high C-reactive protein that was in the news last week, you'd want to get that down and take more omega-3 fats, We have a supplement for that.
	Ray, what about the wilder stuff?
	And by that I mean I've had doctors on the show who are saying that injections of hormone growth and things at that level also now are a legitimate part of this and they get a little pricey.
	Well, we don't support human growth hormone.
	That actually has shown Not to be consistent with life extension may actually do the opposite.
	In the absence of clear medical, certain medical diseases, in general, human growth hormone is not something that Dr. Grossman or I recommend.
	That's interesting.
	Very interesting.
	In general, it's not that expensive, but if you have a serious problem, say your cholesterol is very high, Then you would want to take action and there are supplements that we describe on RayandTerry.com that can lower your cholesterol.
	Again, these are not that expensive and the cost of not doing these things is far higher.
	Can these supplements do as much as going to a physician and getting, now there are a certain number of drugs that are FDA approved now, right Ray, that will lower your cholesterol?
	We certainly recommend that you work with your doctor.
	We give you guidance actually to find a doctor who For example, it's nutritionally aware.
	So this is not in lieu of, this is along with?
	Yeah.
	In fact, statin drugs are beneficial.
	They not only lower cholesterol, but they actually appear to lower inflammation, which is also an independent cause of heart disease and other diseases.
	But if you take statin drugs, it's important to supplement with coenzyme Q10, because statin drugs deplete the body of coenzyme Q10.
	Something we talk about in Fantastic Voyage that is generally not well-known, and a lot of doctors don't tell their patients to do that, and it's a very... A lot of the side effects that you get from certain drugs are because of this depletion, and it's easily rectified by supplementing with conjunctivitis.
	So this is the kind of thing we talk about.
	All right.
	Here we go.
	East of the Rockies, you're on the air with Ray Kurzweiler.
	Hi.
	Hi.
	Kurzweiler, I should say.
	I'm sorry about that.
	Go ahead, caller.
	Have you read the book Warp Speed A+.
	No.
	The book discusses the separation of soft and regenerative biochemistry from hard chemistry.
	And the name of the book again please?
	Warp Speed A+.
	Warp Speed A+.
	And also discusses how socialized automation shall fund socialized biochemistry.
	as automationism shall fund biochemistryism.
	Ray, does that make any sense to you?
	I'm not familiar with the book, but I'm not sure what the question is.
	I'm not either.
	Have you read the book?
	No, the answer is no.
	Oh.
	It's a good read.
	Okay.
	Bye.
	All right, take care.
	Sorry.
	We haven't read the book.
	I guess you can't tell us, and so we can't comment.
	What's to the Rockies?
	You're on the air with Ray Kurzweil.
	Hi.
	Hello.
	It is like 1 a.m.
	my time.
	I'm going to be on the air for a little bit.
	Anyway, I don't see why people would have a problem with religion, as far as religion,
	and automating the brain and all this kind of stuff.
	You don't think so, huh?
	I read the Bible a long time ago.
	I had a fascination with it.
	As soon as I had kids, I noticed it looked more like a parental magazine to me.
	Don't put your hand in the cookie jar.
	The kid puts his hand in the cookie jar.
	God says, smack, don't do it again.
	Okay, I won't.
	I won't.
	I'm sorry.
	I'm sorry.
	Yes.
	And he does it again and again and again.
	And there's stories over and over again about that happening.
	And like I said, as soon as I had kids, I see that same thing.
	You know, don't run in the hall.
	Don't run down the stairs.
	They keep doing it.
	You tell them, no, they do it again.
	And your point being?
	The point being that what do you want from your kids?
	You want your kids to better themselves.
	You want them to be better than you are.
	And I mean, not to say we should go out and become gods, but people have a problem saying that that's what you're doing, you're playing God, you're trying to create life, you're trying to... And isn't that what... I want my kids to be better than I am.
	Go to college.
	I didn't.
	Go to, you know, get a three-figure job, whatever it is.
	Get a bigger house, better family.
	And I did.
	And I don't see how that would be a problem.
	I mean, the Protestant ethic is...
	Uh, support the idea of work, creative work, uh, bettering the world.
	Uh, the Puritans and the Shakers were actually very inventive, uh, people and created, you know, inventions that bettered society.
	I think, uh, you know, a lot of the thinking that emerges from, uh, religious thought is supportive of the idea of progress and, you know, bettering the world that we live in.
	Not just being subject to bettering by nature without, you know, seeking to improve or overcome human suffering.
	Well, I guess what some would say, Ray, is that we are, in the sense that we understood a god, about to become gods.
	That is, creatoris.
	And that's an interesting argument.
	The technological advances that you're describing do lead to the point where many would say we would be able to do God-like things, right?
	Well, you know, our technology and our reach as humans through our technology is expanding exponentially.
	It may seem from today's perspective What will be feasible many decades from now may seem, from today's perspective, to be infinite, but actually, when we get there, it won't be infinite, it'll just be a lot more capable than today.
	Our conception of God, at least, God is described as being infinite in knowledge and creativity and intelligence.
	So, I would say that evolution, particularly technological evolution today, And you're a positive guy, Ray, but there's a race on.
	because it moves towards greater intelligence and greater creativity, greater beauty,
	and that's a positive direction to move in. And you're a positive guy, Ray, but there's a race
	on. On the one side, there's the Ray Kurzweils and Dr.
	Grossmans who are trying to do good things, prolong life, and make the world a better place for
	all of us.
	And on the other side, this is the race part, we have people who wish us dead.
	They don't want to make deals with us, Ray.
	They've given up on that part.
	They just want to blow us up or extinguish us or whatever.
	The world is a really dangerous place, Ray.
	And so there's a race on.
	And I suppose you're optimistic about who's going to win it.
	Well, I mean, actually in In Fantastic Voyage, we talk about promise versus peril, and I've talked about that in some of my other writings.
	And technology does empower our destructive side.
	I mean, even 9-11 was the misapplication of technologies.
	Yes, it was.
	Airplanes and buildings and so on.
	Right, right.
	And some of these new technologies, biotechnology, which can cure cancer, ultimately will also empower a bioterrorist.
	To cause cancer.
	Right.
	Now, you know, a good example, actually, of this promise versus peril, look at the Internet.
	We get wonderful things from the Internet, but we also have software viruses.
	Yes.
	However, I think to a degree that, you know, the benefit outweighs the danger.
	You know, very few people, if any, are calling, are saying, let's do away with the Internet.
	No, that's why I have it here, because it's expensive.
	We do keep, we do have a technological immune system that has emerged Well, it doesn't save us from all of the destruction of sulfur viruses.
	It does protect us from a lot of it.
	And I think we'll see the same thing in these other technologies.
	We need to accelerate the development of, for example, broad antiviral technologies so that we can protect ourselves from a malevolent use of this technology.
	Uh-huh.
	That's why I'm so darn worried about the ban on certain cell lines.
	Because, believe it or not, we do have enemies in this world, and some of them are working in areas that we're not working in.
	Well, that's a good argument for continuing stem cell research, because these technologies will enable us to protect our cells, and it is a race.
	It is feasible to create a bioengineered I don't think we'll see that very soon, but ultimately we probably will encounter that, and we'd better have the defenses ready for when that happens.
	See, Ray, the kind of world that you say we're on the edge of is the kind of world that Dr. Michio Kaku describes as Stage 1, for example.
	We're Type 0 now, and we'd be Type 1.
	that leap.
	Recently he's up the odds and he's a little more optimistic but for years he told me the chance of our getting you know he looks at all the stars and all the planets that we can see and those we can't even see and imagines one of the reasons we might not have had contact yet from anywhere else is because a lot of civilizations have come to the point where we are now or near that point And instead of making the leap to type one, the optimistic scenario, the more likely scenario is that they kill themselves.
	Yeah, I don't agree with that.
	I think it's possible that a civilization might destroy itself when it gets to a particularly powerful stage, but it's hard to... You know, the assumption underlying the search for extraterrestrial intelligence is that there must be Since there are trillions of planets out there, there must be millions of civilizations.
	Yes.
	Many of them would be ahead of us.
	Yes.
	And if they're ahead of us, they're going to be ahead of... You know, since technology moves so quickly when it gets to our stage, many of them would be vastly more powerful than us.
	It's not credible to believe that every single one of them, you know, blew themselves up.
	There is some risk, but I mean... Let me go back to this Internet example.
	You know, when surfer viruses first emerged, there were predictions that ultimately surfer viruses would be so destructive it would destroy the Internet.
	But, I mean, that hasn't happened.
	They're still around.
	They're a nuisance.
	Sometimes they're more than a nuisance.
	Yes.
	But they haven't destroyed the Internet.
	Not yet.
	And they haven't destroyed the effectiveness of it.
	And we live with both the promise and the peril.
	And I'd say, if you look at the Internet, the promise outweighs the peril, and it hasn't destroyed I think it's actually unlikely.
	It's possible, you know, some of these technologies could conceivably destroy us.
	I mean, we have that already with nuclear weapons.
	Right, nuclear weapons.
	That's definitely a category.
	But that aside for a moment, you referred to the fact that I've written a book or two or four, actually, and one of them I'm very concerned about, Ray, and that is If you look at the environmental state of the world, I'm actually far more concerned about that than, you know, an irrational act of destruction, but you can't rule that out.
	I'm concerned about, I don't know, the melting of the North Pole and the changes that are going on right now on our globe.
	I'm very concerned about that.
	That's part of the race, you know?
	All of that is industrial error, pollution, The third stage that we talk about in Fantastic Voyage, nanotechnology, will actually enable us to reverse a lot of that.
	For example, we'll be able to create solar panels that can actually create all of the energy we need.
	If we converted 0.07% of the sunlight that falls on the Earth, we could meet all of our energy needs.
	We can't do that today because solar panels are heavy, expensive, and inefficient.
	Nanotechnology will enable us to create very inexpensive, very efficient Solar panels.
	We were able to store the energy in nano-engineered fuel cells and actually meet our energy needs in a renewable way without pollution.
	There are ways that we can use nanotechnology to reverse the pollution that industrialization has created.
	And Ray, do you think this will occur?
	I hope nanotechnology can reverse the pollution inside our bodies.
	Quickly enough?
	Oh, we have many people saying we are now at peak oil.
	That may or may not be.
	But there is going to come a time when we're not going to be able to get as much oil, or the price of it is going to be prohibitive.
	That's where we're headed.
	And so do you see nanotechnology arriving in time to prevent an otherwise catastrophic strike on the economy and more?
	Well, we may be past peak oil in terms of very inexpensive Access to oil.
	I mean, we do have, actually, a lot of fossil fuels.
	Oh, yes.
	And there's many different types, and it's a long discussion, but, you know, there are types that are, you know, a hundred times greater than the oil we've been using, but they're more expensive to get at, like shale oil and so on.
	So, energy may... Energy from fossil fuels will get more expensive gradually, possibly over the next decade or so, but that's actually going to create more pressure To accelerate these new technologies that are renewable.
	Well, that's what I'm asking.
	Do you see them coming along in time?
	I think so.
	I mean, we may have some short-term economic pressures.
	I really see the golden era of nanotechnology-based energy.
	Also nanotechnology in the body that we talk about in Fantastic Voyage.
	Nanotechnology for manufacturing is probably the 2020s.
	it's the 2020s. So we do have to, you know, use some other technologies like fossil fuels
	in the meantime.
	There are some new technologies there as well that will enable us to access some of these more plentiful technologies.
	For example, coal can be converted into energy without pollution.
	And there's some demonstration plants to do exactly that.
	Uh, you know, we need to invest more in these new technologies.
	Uh, which I think will, you know, have very substantial payoff.
	But it's such a race, Ray.
	I mean, the Chinese now and the rest of the world rightfully want the kind of comforts and technological level that we have here in the U.S.
	and they're quickly moving in that direction.
	The problem is, of course, that with that, they're running into all of the things that we have, like emissions from vehicles and all the rest of it.
	So it is indeed a race.
	And it's going to be interesting to see how that race turns out.
	Anyway, hold tight, Ray.
	We're at the bottom of the hour.
	Ray Kurzweil is my guest.
	And we're talking about where technology is taking us.
	And it's really an interesting place, according to Ray.
	Depending on how you feel about it.
	It's not a world where robots run everything and do everything for us like many of us imagined.
	Not that world.
	But a world instead where the machines and mankind, in a very natural kind of way, merge.
	And that is our evolution.
	Evolution is in our hands.
	Think about that.
	We will be our own gods.
	I can feel it coming in the air tonight.
	Hold on one more night and wait for his love.
	And how she gave me life.
	And how she gave me life.
	Some velvet morning when I'm straight I'm gonna open up your gate
	And maybe tell you about Phaedra And how she gave me life
	And how she made it in Some velvet morning when I'm straight
	Flowers growing on a hill Driving flies and daffodils
	Learn from us very much Look at us but do not touch
	Phaedra is my name Do talk with Art Bell. Call the wildcard line at area code
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	From coast to coast and worldwide on the Internet, this is Coast to Coast AM with Art Bell.
	It is.
	Good morning.
	And here's a kind of an interesting question.
	Are the designs of nature optimal?
	Are the designs of nature optimal?
	Isn't nature perfect?
	Nature is given to us by God, right?
	Many believe that.
	And is it not perfect?
	Every leaf detailed beyond imagination, everything just right for the human race to be here.
	Isn't nature absolutely optimal?
	Well, in a way, what Ray Kurzweil is saying is no.
	I think.
	we will ask in a moment.
	Not sure what an optimal design would be but probably not one that includes
	heart attacks and cancer and all the other things that kill us and or make us sick
	You would say, I suppose, that nature's design is not optimal if it includes all of those things.
	Ray, did you agree with that?
	That it's not optimal?
	That nature is not dying?
	I mean, nature is remarkable.
	It's not optimal.
	I mean, this is an issue that actually Dr. Grossman and I discussed at great length in our book, Fantastic Voyage, Live Long Enough to Live Forever.
	One of the key issues is that, you know, when our genes evolved tens of thousands of years ago, a lot of things were different.
	It was not in the interest of the species for you and I to live much past child-rearing age, because we didn't really contribute anything.
	We just used up the precious resources.
	There was no selection for long longevity.
	species for our bodies to hold on to every calorie.
	We talked about this before.
	We'd like to actually change that program.
	We've now identified that it's one gene, the fat insulin receptor gene, that controls that.
	If we could block that in the fat cells, we could eat as much as we want and remain slim.
	And that's been demonstrated in mice.
	We talk about that experiment in Fantastic Voyage.
	There's a lot of things we'd like to change in our genes.
	And we're actually getting the tools now to change our genes.
	So the biotechnology revolution, which is in its early stages already, will reach its
	full fruition 10 to 15 years from now.
	We'll have the means of actually changing these ancient genetic programs to be optimal, so that we don't have heart attacks, we don't have cancer, diabetes.
	There's actually a lot more we can do already right now, with today's knowledge.
	This is what we call Bridge 1 in Fantastic Voyage.
	To really dramatically slow down these disease and aging processes.
	Very few people really need to get a heart attack.
	We can avoid the vast majority of these degenerative diseases through nutrition, through a sensible supplement program, exercise and so on.
	We describe that in a lot of detail in the book.
	All right.
	A lot of people want to speak.
	So, East of the Rockies, you're on air with Ray Kurzweil.
	Hi.
	Oh, yes, Lord.
	Hi.
	Turn your radio off, please.
	Yes, I did, sir.
	This is Keith in Hamilton, Ontario.
	Fire away, Keith.
	Okay, it's always good to talk to you.
	Two things for your guest.
	I don't know whether I'd like to live forever, but I'd like to live to a ripe old age of 200 without the aging.
	First, I was wondering how you feel about cryogenics.
	Oh, that's a good question.
	Well, you know, the argument Cryogenics is a good insurance policy.
	The alternative is to have no hope if you die.
	I find it hard enough to advance my interests when I'm alive and kicking.
	I find it fairly daunting to consider advancing my interests if I'm frozen.
	I think that's a personal decision.
	I wouldn't try to influence people's decisions.
	Really, what Dr. Grossman and I advocate is that you do everything possible to achieve radical life extension, not by being frozen, but by being healthy today, so that we can be healthy 10-15 years from now.
	Do you have these very powerful news?
	Yes, but assuming the worst, perhaps.
	It sounds as though you might make the decision not to do that personally.
	Well, I really would leave it to people's own judgment.
	You know, it's not the attractive way to go.
	Okay.
	Staying healthy is really the attractive way to go.
	All right.
	And the second thing, caller?
	Okay, it was critically panned, and I don't think many of the audience liked it, but I was wondering what he thought of Spielberg's movie, AI.
	Okay.
	Thank you.
	Well, I mean, AI had some positive Elements of it.
	The problem I had with the movie, and I have this with most features movies, is it took one change, in that case human level cyborgs, and put it on today's world as if nothing else is going to change.
	There was no virtual reality.
	The cars were the same.
	There was no merging of human and machine.
	Humans were just like they were today.
	There's no advances in... So your answer, then, to the boredom that would otherwise ensue is that all areas will advance, and you'll have virtual entertainment by the time you've meshed with a machine somewhere down the line, and you can live vicariously anything you want.
	I mean, our third bridge in Fantastic Voyage is this nanotechnology AI revolution, and we're going to be able to, for example, have full immersion virtual reality from within the nervous system.
	So you want to go to virtual reality, then add about Shut down the signals coming from your real senses, replace them with the signals that you would be receiving in the virtual environment, and it feels just like you're in that environment.
	You can choose from thousands of different environments to be with.
	You can be in, you can go there with other people.
	I mean, you and I right now are in auditory virtual reality, but we'll be able to add all of the other senses.
	Have experiences with people in these virtual environments.
	So that's one way in which we will expand our experiences.
	Yes, and is there not a danger that it would be so virtually, excuse me, irresistible, that it would be like today's drugs?
	Virtual reality is still reality, and you're having real experiences with real people in virtual environments.
	I mean, consider the telephone.
	You don't say, well, I had a telephone conversation, but that wasn't a real conversation.
	Those weren't real agreements, even though the telephone is a virtual reality environment for the auditory sense.
	So it's really a communication medium.
	You can think of it as a telephone where we add all of the human senses so that we can be together even if we're not physically proximate.
	Yes, but doesn't that lead away from the physical?
	And like in the song, in the year 2525, eventually we're just...
	Vegetative intellectual entities that are now part of machines and we're operating fabulously, but not in any way physically particularly.
	We've evolved into a complete mental being with our machines.
	We'll also be physical and we'll be enhancing ourselves physically as well.
	In fact, all three bridges that we talk about in Fantastic Voyage enhance ourselves physically.
	We can certainly do that with our health immediately Bridge one, and then with biotechnology we can perfect our biology and keep our physical bodies going so they don't catastrophically collapse from heart attacks and cancer and so on.
	And then with nanotechnology we can actually extend ourselves physically and make ourselves stronger, more capable, more resilient.
	And you think that we would choose that?
	I mean, what if there was a bridge four where everything did become intellectual, where the physical virtually no longer Mattered.
	Isn't that one possible future scenario as everything virtual becomes the new reality?
	Well, you know, a lot of people look at these future scenarios and think we're losing something.
	I really see them as supersets of what we have today.
	We're going to keep our physical reality, but we're going to be able to do a lot more with it.
	OK, here we go.
	Short on time.
	What's for the Rockies?
	On the air with Ray Kurzweil.
	Hello.
	Yeah, my name is Joel San Diego.
	I just want to start off saying that I love the show.
	I get to listen as much as I like to, but the problem I could see with all of this nanotechnology and such would be that once individual control of our lives is given up to, you know, pretty much the internet, what degree of free will do we have anymore?
	A reasonable question, Ray.
	I don't think we consider the internet today is actually a very democratizing force.
	I wrote in the 1980s that the decentralized communication that was coming would probably destroy the Soviet Union, and we did see that.
	We saw a great move towards democracy through the 1990s, and even at other levels.
	I mean, for example, we talked about in Fantastic Voyage how patients go into their doctor's office armed With knowledge from the Internet, they're not just dependent on their doctors for all wisdom and knowledge.
	If somebody has a chronic disease, they join discussion groups of people around the world and really learn a great deal about that.
	So the Internet is very democratizing.
	It's liberating.
	It can really enhance our freedom and our individual power.
	And because it's decentralized, I actually see it as something that supports individual initiative
	okay uh... international liner on the air with rick rosswell uh... whoops i didn't respond international and sorry you're
	on the air now
	hello there international line speak hello
	happy you are there okay uh... i recently read an article about
	uh... how aid uh... there could be a cure for aids on the horizon within
	the next couple years
	and my grandfather wrote a story a couple years back
	uh... novel about how
	aids will uh... there's a group within the catholic church that were
	conspiring to uh... eliminate aids researching
	doctors to hold back
	the vaccine Because it was God's way of eliminating the gays.
	What types of groups do you think are there like this out there?
	Okay, without commenting on that specific allegation, Ray, surely he's right about one thing.
	There will be radical groups as these new technologies unfold that will be truly radically opposed to their implementation.
	And so how do you comment on that?
	How do you feel about that?
	We have a long history of medical progress.
	And controversy.
	We've extended our lives tremendously and we've overcome many diseases.
	The second bridge we talk about in Fantastic Voices is really understanding very precisely each step in diseases like AIDS or heart disease and so on and being able to detect them With very precise, smart weapons that are not indiscriminate.
	I mean, these old drugs that we're finding now that have these problems were not designed that way.
	They're really very blunt instruments that may have some benefit, but as we're finding out, have many side effects.
	These new drugs, done through rational drug design, where we can attack one precise enzyme or one antigen on the surface of a cancer cell and so on, are much more precise.
	Well, it doesn't mean that every one of these will work.
	These are very powerful tools that will enable us to make very substantial progress.
	I mean, there are luddite and reactionary fundamentalist reactions to progress in general.
	I mean, we can see that in the world today.
	You know, the biggest danger is, you know, fundamentalism in general trying to oppose progress and use technology against us.
	Using sort of asymmetric warfare.
	Yes, it is, I guess.
	And I think the way to combat that, aside from fostering our democratic values in general, is to really hasten the development of the defensive technologies.
	Right now, that would mean trying to develop anti-viral technologies, medications that can combat viral diseases, because that's the biggest Danger, you know, over the next decade.
	Are we devoting sufficient resources right now to that effort, in your opinion?
	Well, we should be devoting more.
	I've given testimony to Congress on that.
	We're actually fairly close to developing some very powerful tools against viral diseases.
	A side effect of that, a side benefit of doing this, would be making tremendous progress in general against viral diseases.
	So I think we should accelerate that, because it is a race, as you pointed out.
	Okay, first time caller on the line, you're on the air with Ray Kurzweil.
	Hello.
	Yes, how are you doing?
	I'm doing fine, sir.
	Where are you?
	I'm in La Vida, Colorado.
	Okay, far away.
	Yes, my question for the caller is, is that I understand where you're going with all of this, you know, these technologies to help us, but, you know, it seems like That all of these technologies are really just kind of treating the symptoms and not the cause.
	So what my question is to you is, you know, with us constantly giving our power away to technology, don't you think we need to kind of go back to looking at why these things are happening, these illnesses in our life, that they're asking us to look deeper In our lives and what kind of problems we're having in our own lives.
	If you read our book, Fantastic Voyage, you'll find we actually describe fundamentally how these diseases come about.
	We even talk about things like balance in life and stress management.
	We talk about nutrition and exercise and so on.
	Trying to address the fundamental causes of heart disease and cancer and so on, which are actually nutritional diseases caused by decades of the wrong diet.
	So we do talk about that.
	And as we actually understand and increasingly reverse engineer the processes underlying these diseases, as well as aging, ultimately we'll have from biotechnology There are much more powerful tools to actually stop and reverse these diseases and conditions and aging.
	Out of curiosity, Ray, these dietary changes that you talk about, and the nutritional supplements that you talk about, are they palatable?
	Or is the kind of life that you've got to lead nearly a cloistered life?
	I mean, are you suddenly eating... Actually, it's a very moderate This program is not radically low carb, it's not radically low fat.
	We talk about healthy carbs, like vegetables, legumes, beans, lentils, and avoiding sugars and simple starches.
	We talk about healthy fats like fish, olive oil, nuts, omega-3 fats, and avoiding unhealthy fats like trans fatty acids, excessive saturated fat.
	It's really a balanced program.
	I love to eat, and I eat a lot.
	We'll remain slim because I eat the right foods, and I eat a very diverse diet, and we really provide principles here.
	We don't say, okay, this is what you're going to have for breakfast on Wednesday, because people have different tastes, different cuisines, and food, it does play a very important part in our lives and our ceremonies and in our satisfaction every day.
	So we provide a set of, you know, Guidelines and really understanding of the role that nutrition plays in health.
	Okay, Ray, we're at the end.
	It's a very powerful book.
	I understand, and it's a fantastic voyage.
	Live long enough to live forever.
	Ray, thank you for being here.
	We're out of show time.
	My pleasure.
	Take care, my friend.
	That's Ray Kurzweil, and that's the book.
	And the voyage, the fantastic voyage that is, is Purely up to you.
	If you want to make it, then I guess the book is the way to pursue it.
	Now, tomorrow night, tomorrow night, Michael Drosnin is going to be here.
	I've actually wanted to interview Mr. Drosnin for, oh, I don't know, years.
	He wrote the Bible Code, and tomorrow night, we're going to find out about the Bible Code.
	This one has been really sort of eating at me for a long time.
	The Bible Code.
	Would God write secret messages encoded mathematically in the Bible?
	Messages that we could only interpret way later with computers, with the aid of computers and machines?
	Well, you know what?
	I bet Ray Kurzweil would say, sure, because we're headed toward becoming As the machines.
	Anyway, the Bible code is tomorrow night along with the life of Howard Hughes.
	It should be a fascinating night for this night.

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