Sir Charles Schultz III, a robotics and AI expert, details U.S. military advancements like Pershing II EMP software and Patriot vehicles, debunking fears of robotic soldiers while warning of 3–5 year breakthroughs in armored drones and microwave-based enemy detection. He also explores orbital solar power stations—collaborating with Gene Myers’ Space Island Group—to beam energy to Earth by 2012, leveraging $15B in "useless" satellites and China’s Great Wall Aerospace for compliance with Kyoto Accord. Discussing weather control, Schultz III confirms NASA-funded hurricane manipulation via microwave beams (2012 trials) and dismisses weaponization risks, citing moonlike energy density. Meanwhile, callers raise fringe claims like a sun-like satellite launched with explosives and Tesla’s suppressed tech, while Schultz III ties HAARP to ionospheric research and predicts near-light-speed probes for interstellar data collection within a decade, alluding to his book on Martian fossils and unpublished hurricane simulation data. [Automatically generated summary]
It's going to be the weekend, and it's going to be a very good one.
Sir Charles Schultz III will be here in the next hour, this night.
And then tomorrow night is going to be very interesting indeed.
We're going to do something I've wanted to follow up on particularly urgently in the last little while, and that would be do a show on the HARP project with a couple of experts, Dr. Joseph Rosnick and Guy Kramer.
And I have a lot of questions about what's going on with HAARP.
A lot of questions that relate to weather and relate to ionospheric radio conditions.
Baby, there's something going on up there, and perhaps tomorrow night we'll get to the bottom of it.
Although, I will warn you this.
These gentlemen are involved in some, I think, rather specific way, and there are some things referenced, some patents that I've been told they can't discuss, which are probably the ones that I really want to know about.
Joanne and Sacramento says, hey, Art, great webcam picture.
It is a good one.
Taken last night, by the way, here in Perron, right from my front porch.
And it is spectacular.
So you might take a look-see.
A sunset in Perunk, Nevada.
All right.
Here we go.
The Northeast is under siege.
Really under siege.
I mean, they are getting blasted.
Hundreds of airline flights canceled.
They're getting a blizzard.
A good old-fashioned Nor'east blizzard.
Winds up to 50 miles an hour.
Maybe up to 20 inches of snow, maybe more.
Falling, I might add, on the very stadiums where later in the day a couple of very important playoff games occur in the NFL.
Not the least of the worries, I'm sure, the millions of people right now in the Northeast.
And so if any of you are going through this right now, it might be kind of cool to hear about it.
It's been, since I was a child, since I've been in a blizzard, you know, I lived in the Northeast for a while, Connecticut, that kind of area.
And you get blizzards, and they're pretty cool.
You wake up the next day, and of course, let's see, this is occurring Saturday to Sunday, right?
So they might get all the plows out and working, and they do have a lot of them going out, by the way.
For example, in New York City, they're worried about, you know, they'll worry about paying it later.
They say this is really serious, a very serious weather event in the Northeast, and we'll do it now and figure out how to pay for it later.
So if you're going through that right now, and it's the middle of the night where you are, what, a little after one o'clock in the morning on the East Coast, and outside it is piling up like there is no tomorrow.
It's a pretty weird and quiet feeling as the snow gets deeper and deeper and deeper and deeper.
Pretty soon you open your front door and you can't get it open.
That's the kind of deep snow they're going to have, or are having right now.
So it might be interesting to hear from some people in the New York City, well, actually in the whole Northeast area up there, see what you're going through.
I remember it from a school tomorrow perspective well.
the iraqi government pledged saturday it's going to do everything in its power to protect anyone who cares to vote in the elections from insurgent attacks but i wonder how many people feel I wonder how they feel about that.
International counterterrorism authorities are looking for a Moroccan fugitive who may have attended a pivotal meeting with the September 11th plotters and is believed to have played a part, a logistical part perhaps, in the train bombings last year in Madrid, Spain.
The fugitive, somebody named Amera Azizi, appears to connect a group of terror operatives and may exemplify al-Qaeda's decentralization, a trend about which U.S. intelligence officials have warned.
In other words, they basically break up and go in all directions.
President Bush's inaugural address, with its emphasis on spreading democracy and eliminating tyranny throughout the world, was not meant to signal a new direction to any U.S. foreign policy, but to portray America as arrogant.
So the fact that that had to be said probably means that is the way some people interpreted the whole thing.
Iraq's minister on Saturday refused any comment on rumors that the top terror leader in the country, El-Zakari, has been captured.
He said, quote, let's see.
Maybe in the next few days we'll make a comment about it, end quote.
That would certainly lead one to believe that they've got him.
And if they have El Zakari, maybe they're having a real strong talk with him before they officially announce that they have him.
You know, a serious discussion.
Hey, here's the story.
You've got to love this.
Headline is, Army prepares Robo Soldier for Iraq.
Now, this is like one of the final stories in the Associated Presses.
Robo, Robo-Soldier.
The rain is turning to snow on a blustery January morning, and all the men gathered in a parking lot here surely would prefer to be inside.
But the weather simply could not matter less to the robotic sharpshooter that they are here to watch as it splashes through puddles.
Get this?
Splashes through puddles, the barrel of its machine gun pointing the way like Pinocchio's nose.
The Army is preparing to send out 18 of these remote-controlled robotic warriors to fight in Iraq beginning in March or April.
Now, they're made by a small Massachusetts company, the Swords, or short for Special Weapons Observations Reconnaissance Detection Systems, will be the first armed robotic vehicle to see combat years ahead of the future.
Combat systems currently under development, you can imagine, the Defense Department is making robots to fight our wars.
So here it goes.
But you didn't know we were that close.
We're about to turn robo-warriors loose in Iraq.
Now, this is a very interesting development, and perhaps you and I could talk a little bit about it.
You might have a comment on this.
There are people out there who would say that robots, warrior robots that can kill you, might work, but are they ethical?
Is it ethical to use machines to hunt down and kill other men, our enemies?
Think about it for a minute.
Actually?
Hell yes, it's ethical.
Sure it is.
It certainly beats our young men and women coming home in body bags by a long shot, right?
So from that point of view, if you're fighting a war, you do whatever you can, and if it's robot killers that'll do the job for you, then all the better.
Now listen, this is something I want to get this in tonight.
This is something that I have been very concerned about.
I've been talking to you about this since, oh, I don't know, what, six months ago.
Remember, we began to get stories about something called the bird flu.
Not that the bird flu existed exactly yet, but we began to get stories, and here's another one.
Vietnam on Saturday reported two more bird flu deaths, bringing the human toll to nine humans now in three weeks as leaders of the World Health Organization plan to discuss preparations for a possible global flu pandemic.
Pandemic is a very strong word.
It's like epidemic is, you know, like five on a scale of ten.
Pandemic is more like nine on a scale of ten.
It means really bad.
The United States submitted a special request to WHO's executive board asking it to discuss bird flu at its current meeting in Geneva.
It stressed the importance of strengthening outbreak surveillance.
In other words, getting these people quarantined quickly, producing a vaccine, and formulating an international plan to prepare for a possible pandemic.
This one is beginning to really scare me.
And if anything would cause me to go into a serious lockdown kind of condition, it would be if the bird flu got loose.
This is something you should all be keeping your eyes very closely glued on.
You know, the flu has the potential, as we know, to go around the world and kill at one time many, many, what, 300, how many million died?
It was hundreds of millions, just ridiculous amount of people.
And of course, it travels very quickly.
It's spread through the air.
Now, this has not quite happened with the bird flu yet.
They thought they might have the first human-to-human transfer of bird flu, which, of course, would be really awful.
If this thing takes to the air, you know, as most flus might, it could easily, easily reach pandemic levels.
So I'm keeping my eye very closely on this story, and you should too.
One more thing, really, one more thing combined.
We had, I think many of you who listened to the show probably know.
I'm sure they covered it, and if they didn't, they should have.
We had a gigantic X-Class flare the other day.
The sun really let go.
And it was quite something to follow on short wave, the effect of it.
It came from sunspot number 720.
And this was a real whopper of a flare.
And then this.
In an extremely rare event, a communication satellite has stopped communicating, resulting in no telephone service for 10 South Pacific countries.
The $100 million IS-804 satellite stopped relaying phone calls on Saturday, probably, they think, still in orbit, but no longer pointing its antenna toward Earth.
And they're blaming the recent solar storms.
The NOAA Space Environment Center in Boulder, Colorado, has issued a warning about a strong solar flare and radiation storm, and it looks like it just put some islands in the Pacific out of The phone business temporarily.
So there you have it.
The sun is behaving in a very peculiar way for where we are in the sunspot cycle.
They're saying that the temperature, because it was so low earlier, that is enhancing the snowfall because the amount of water, because the temperature is less, is causing the snowfall to be lighter and more inches.
And that's right where that low is slamming all this moisture into the area in just a continuous barrage that adds up to almost hurricane force winds, I guess, and snow.
That's really serious.
I know that earlier today, Michigan, for example, said to its folks that to go outside is to risk your life.
So don't stay inside.
Do not risk going out into this.
Wildcard Line, you're on the air, top of the morning.
If the United States attacked Iran, it would probably, I don't know, I guess it would do so on the basis, same basis we went into Iraq, weapons of mass destruction.
Otherwise, what would be our excuse for going in there?
unidentified
Well, yeah, but I think Israel would get to them before we would.
I have a question that I hope isn't so off topics here, but I've thought of it for so many years, I just wondered if you'd ever followed up with this man or if you'd just tell me anything, your take on him.
My take on it was that he was being sincere with us.
And I think he has much more to lose than to gain by telling the story that he's telling, and it's one of alien abduction.
And that just, you know, when you're coming from one of the nation's main newspapers, having worked in the city room, and you're pretty far up there, that's a very serious story to tell.
I wish there were more people like that, of that caliber, who would come forward.
If so, we might have a real investigation underway.
What do you think?
I'm Art Bell.
unidentified
My soul's like a wheel that's turning.
My love is my private pleasure.
Midnight fantasy.
Someone to share my wildest dreams with me.
Imaginary love.
My mind.
And it's an imaginary lover.
Oh yeah.
We're ordinary lovers.
Don't feel what you feel.
Real life situations lose their freedom.
Imaginations are real.
Imaginary love.
Imaginary love.
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 of the Rockies, call toll-free at 800-825-5033.
From west of the Rockies, call 800-618-8255.
International callers may reach Art by calling your in-country sprint access number, pressing option 5, and dialing toll-free 800-893-0903.
From coast to coast and worldwide on the internet, this is Coast to Coast AM with Art Bell.
The people that probably should be contacted is the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals.
Or if you're in Maricopa County here, Joe Arpaio tends to, the Maricopa County Sheriff tends to put a pretty good crimp on people that do those kinds of things.
If there does happen to be a lot of this going on, if that's what it is, devil worshiping, and this is how it's manifesting itself, then we really have trouble.
We really, really have trouble because this is real evil.
First of all, I called you on the subject of Nostradamus, but I have to add my two cents worth about the email that you got.
It just destroyed me inside.
I mean, you know, when you read what you read, I have a cat that I just adore, as you do.
And if anybody touched my animal, I mean, I know what you said and how you'd go to jail and everything, but the way I've felt many, many times is, you know, you hear about human tragedies such as what happened with the tsunami and all these other things, and it's really tragic, but when I hear about people that hurt animals, it just kills me inside because they're defenseless.
They have unconditional love.
And anyway, I just had to get that off my chest.
George had a gentleman on the other evening that was talking about Nostradamus.
And I fast-blasted him, but he didn't address it.
I was wondering, I'm as fascinated by time travel as you are, and I just wanted to get your take on what do you think the possibilities of Nostradamus or any of these other philosophers Exactly.
I'll tell you what, sir, I am actively considering that right now, not just with respect to Nostradamus, but with respect to the whole time question.
And in legitimate circumstances, when we have evidence so strong, for example, the Princeton study, the human consciousness study, it is so remarkable what's going on.
It implies time travel because the registering of a large event can begin 30 minutes to two hours before the event itself happens.
Now, that implies some kind of precognitive time travel.
That's what it implies.
And were some of the very best, like Nostradamus, could they have been time travelers?
I think so, sir.
It's something we've got to consider.
unidentified
Yeah, I mean, so many people, you know, have hit it right on the nose.
And what's happening in the world today and future events, you know, it seems to me that there may be some of that happening or has happened in the past that these people from the future that know what has happened to our planet, our world, have come back and made these predictions.
Well, I mean, it's one of the things that you cannot rule out.
Thank you very much for calling, and one that I've begun to recently consider very hard.
That some of it is too accurate.
And then the Princeton studies would suggest that, uh-huh, ideas, concepts, something, consciousness, travels through not just space, but time as well.
So it could be the answer for any number of things.
So what he's saying is, if you listen to the SpiritCom tapes, they are, I believe, direct evidence of communication with the other side.
That was a thing I played on Halloween.
This is going to live on for a long time.
I told everybody at the time that it was a very important program, even though people went, what are you doing playing this noise on the air for an hour and 20 minutes?
There's never been so much comment about something that's lived on so persistently long as you just heard.
So try it.
He's got a good suggestion that would sort of filter out something in the audio.
Put the lower part of your lobe over your ear, press it in, and then listen to the spiracum tapes.
And it assists, he says, in hearing the real voice.
I do like them to change, but they don't have to become radical.
unidentified
Well, they are getting radical.
We used to you know, April used to be the nicest day uh month of the year here, and it doesn't really get spring anymore now until about the end of May.
Yes, you realize, though, there will be people who will say it is not ethical to have a war, and what's honorable about sending a machine to kill a man?
Well, what's honorable about dying?
unidentified
This is true.
This is true, you know, and it's, you know, to me, it's just backfighting the way they use those scar bombs.
So I don't think we're any worse off with the robo soldier.
You know, I suppose dying honorably is better than otherwise, right?
However, not dying at all is better than both.
That's the ultimate goal, to not die at all.
I worry so about what we're doing in Iraq.
I really do.
As you know, I've worried about this for a very long time, and it's still worth lots of worry.
Now we're going to send robots in.
18, if you missed it earlier, 18 remote-controlled robotic warriors.
Now, these are armed.
They've got machine guns.
These are serious machines.
Pretty interesting news.
West of the Rockies, you're on here, hi.
unidentified
Hi, Art.
Well, I called for another reason, but I wanted to say that when my kids were little, we had four cats and a dog, and they caught every kind of creature you can think of.
And I discovered if you come upon them when they have the living creature in their mouth, if you pull on their tail, they'll drop the pull hard enough to involuntarily make them drop it.
Well, I know if somebody pulled on my tail, I'd go, ow!
unidentified
Right, right.
But anyway, the reason I called, I think you might suspect what it is.
Okay, I'll carry the water and I'll save the thing I'm sure lots of other people are thinking.
During the run-up to the election, the 2000 election, there were all kinds of rumors, and indeed, I'm almost positive that there was an allusion in one major magazine that I subscribed to, you know, very cryptic and vague, to the stories of animal cruelty perpetrated by the man who is now our president.
And I heard rumors, first I heard rumors about his lifting up garbage can lids and throwing cats in with a lit firecracker.
But first of all, I mean, every single president we've ever had, all these wild rumors are started around the presidency and whoever happens to be in there.
You know, they did this or that.
And sometimes they did.
I mean, you know, presidents had affairs.
Apparently, quite a number of them, actually.
And they did weird things.
Jimmy Carter's an example.
Not Jimmy Carter.
He's the one who's not an example.
Jimmy Carter was clean as a whistle from that perspective.
It was Bill Clinton I was thinking of.
I mean, so presidents have done pretty weird things, but, you know, I don't think it's fair to lay these kinds of totally unsubstantiated rumors on them.
I think instead we should be looking for anybody, and I mean anybody who actually is committing this kind of crime.
And we need to find out what it's all about really quickly.
It's so evil, so totally evil, that I almost can't contemplate it.
From the high desert?
Nice voices are there.
unidentified
I'm Art Bell.
To talk with Art Bell, call the wildcard line at area code 775-727-1295.
The first-time caller line is Area Code 775-727-1222.
To talk with Art Bell from East to the Rockies, call toll-free at 800-825-5033.
From West 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.
Now, I really wanted desperately last week to talk about this, but the guest I had on, who I thought would talk about this, was selling his book more than he was answering questions.
You will not find that to be the case with Sir Charles Schultz.
I mean, how often do you get served up one this good?
You've got somebody who worked on robotics, artificial intelligence, weapons, systems, and you get a story like this.
Well, I was knighted by a Scottish Baron by the name of Dr. Nelson Ying, and the terms of the knighting include a five-year grant to pay for my research.
And basically, I'm in his service for that period of time, and he pays for all my research.
They say here, let's see, future combat systems currently under development by big defense contractors such as Lockheed Martin and General Dynamics, but we're sending in 18 armed robots right now.
Well, one of the things that I wanted to talk about last week were the three laws.
And iRobot, I'm sure you've seen it.
You have seen it, Robot.
It was based a lot on the three laws and the fact that they're not sacrosanct exactly.
In other words, the three laws could be interpreted by artificial intelligence as protecting human beings by forcing us to do that which is, you know, I mean, if we're killing ourselves slowly, they might take one of the laws with liberal interpretation and turn against us so that we do the best thing for ourselves.
If you have a system that's smart enough to understand what those laws mean and how to enforce them, if the system is free to act on its own, it's going to eventually arrive at the conclusion we do a lot of things that are harmful and they shouldn't be allowed.
In other words, they can be subsumed into one greater or zeroth law of the first order that says the protection of the human species overrides the protection of an individual.
When you ever hand over control to a system such as this, or even when you hand over control to other people, such as a government or a group who act in your behalf, you always run the risk of losing a great deal of your freedom to act.
And that's one of the trade-offs we make in any civilization.
I mean, civilization is a joint effort, and we have to remember that.
We trade off some of our freedoms in order to live in comfort and in safety with others.
If you send in a robot that cannot be easily taken out, and you're the man who's controlling the robot as a soldier, you have more of the most precious asset on your side, and it is time to examine the situation and make a decision about who you should and should not act against.
In other words, they're not sending the robots in to do indiscriminate mass killing.
If they simply wanted to kill everybody there, they'd drop a bomb and be done with it.
The fact that they're sending in a robot means that they are morally responsible in the first place, and they're trying to be very, very careful about who the target is.
Number one, we have very, very good video resolution, and we can send a great deal of very reliable information that way.
And if you're using color, stereo, video sensors, they can be not quite as good as your own vision, but quite good indeed.
The other thing is, when you are operating it through a human being, obviously the final decision of whether to shoot or not rests in the mind of a human being and not in the hands of the robot.
Could a robot conceivably be so good that it could transmit an image of a face and have a computer go through a facial recognition program, issue a that's the guy, and then fire type job?
And right now, we have a lot of systems that they're placing in cities for monitoring people and scanning the faces and doing recognition.
There are systems in place, for instance, in the United Kingdom where they have video cameras stationed around the town and they're able to see the people who pass by and they match them automatically to a database of known criminals.
And this gives them an opportunity to apprehend those people.
Of course, there's always the possibility of misidentification, but if you know where this person is, you can go in, do a personal identification, and see if it's the right person to arrest or not.
Now, in the case of these robots, you would most likely have your operator with a computer terminal by the side, and he would be able to see whether the robot actually recognizes the face or not before making the decision to pull the trigger.
So the robot itself wouldn't be making the decision.
The software and the computer at the operator's terminal would be doing that.
So they must feel they have this down that far, or they would never, ever put it in the field because of the possibility of, you know, the killing of the innocent or the killing of our own people.
There are many things that you can imagine from this simple starting scenario that lead you to feel that within a very short time, we'll have the equivalent of a General Motors or a Ford Motor Company turning out thousands or millions of warriors for us.
Do you know, I know I'm going to get you in trouble, and I don't want to, so just be careful what you answer, but do you know how far they've gone in artificial intelligence?
And is that an application being used in the system that we're sending to Iraq right now?
In a broader sense, there is a good deal of artificial intelligence in it.
Most of it is in motion control, in feature recognition, and the systems, not the sort of systems that you would actually be able to sit down and have a conversation with, not intelligent in that sense, but intelligence in the sense that they're very, very good at the specific task, far better than a human would be, in the same way that sorting mail is done at the post office by an artificial intelligence system that recognizes handwriting in some of the context.
So there are artificial intelligence systems in the field, in these machines, but they do not perform the way we imagine they would based on what we know from the science fiction movies.
And if our soldiers were equipped with these types of machines and recognize that right now they already have guns with a video camera and an eyepiece on the helmet, so the man can hold the gun around the corner, see his target, and shoot while he remains safely around the corner.
Well, we have some pretty good armor, and if you keep in mind that the essential systems that keep the machines running can be encased in very heavy armor, then you can imagine that they could probably stand anything right up to a grenade, a direct grenade hit.
Of course, that's just imagining based on the known technology.
I think it is going to go in two directions simultaneously.
We're going to probably see smarter, intelligent, armored vehicle type robots within, let's say, three to five years.
And we're also going to see much smaller, stealthier robots that may even be smart enough to go into a very tight situation and develop intelligence information for us and maybe even deliver offensive hardware such as explosives.
Is there going to come a day when the American people are going to see the first domestic robot, one that'll do the dishes, I don't know, clean the cat box would be good, whatever.
You know, Joe Engelberger, who is one of the primary developers very early in robotics, he's the fellow who developed some of our earliest industrial robots.
He has been working for a number of years on robotic helpers for the infirm, particularly the elderly or those who are restricted to hospitals.
And he spoke at a meeting that I attended on artificial intelligence and human-form robotics.
And he is putting a lot of his effort into machinery that will be able to help people who are amputees or quadriplegics or elderly.
Well, we're getting around to some of those earliest functions right now.
And this is just a very early beginning, of course.
But people have seen some of the vacuum cleaners and the lawnmowers.
These are our first, I would say, experimental entries into the market.
And they're not entirely wonderful machines just yet.
This is just the very beginning.
But imagine the first PCs and how expensive they were and how few people really had them.
Now they're everywhere and they're infinitely better than they were then and they're very cheap.
And we're going to see the same sort of explosion in robotics.
And here's why.
People who are, for instance, hobbyists or have a wonderful interest in robotics and tinker a lot are going to look at what's out there and a lot of them are going to say, you know, I think I could do a much better job myself.
And they're going to try it.
And it's going to be a very fertile development ground.
And some of them will be successful.
And like anything, there's a force of evolution in industry and in sales.
Well, I assure you, the house painting 2,000 or the cat box cleaning 5,000 or one that would even do all of it, are we 50 years away, 20 years away, 100 years away?
And once again, I'm going to quote a very simple fact.
We seem to exponentially grow in our knowledge, just as you related earlier.
And one of the most interesting things is we seem to develop double the computer power every 18 months.
But we're also developing much better software.
We're at a threshold right now.
I think what's going to happen is the people who have come up around computers all their lives, and we've got a couple of generations of people like this now, these people are going to have, out of their midst, emerge a number of them who are very good at algorithms and understanding how things are done.
The reason we haven't really seen a lot of it right yet is because it's much easier to make a specialty or a targeted machine for a certain task.
Just like you have a drill to make holes and you have a blender to mix foods.
Well, one of the things that we do have in place in our country is a pretty serious system of geologing hardware, seismographs, geophones, and other devices that can detect seismic events and give us plenty of advance warning.
And our government did issue a statement that there was no warning of any danger or magnitude for our coasts.
I don't know what sort of information might have been sent to the other countries who were in the path of this danger.
I do know that some people had stated that there was a warning, and people actually went to look at the wave that was coming in.
You know, a lot of people feel that if a warning was not issued properly to the people who were in charge of warning the populations of those areas, then the people who did not issue those warnings are morally responsible for the death and the destruction.
And I would have to agree, if somebody had the capability to make that warning and didn't pick up the phone and say, you know, you've got a real problem on your way, you've got an hour or 20 minutes or something to get out of the way.
If that wasn't done, then the individual who was responsible for that is morally responsible for those deaths.
I know there was just an agreement by 200 and some odd nations to improve things.
I don't know what that means, and I don't really know what happened.
I know this.
If you were a terrorist and you had just one atomic bomb, you would apply it appropriately in a place called La Pama, and when you did, the entire East Coast would be swamped.
There may be, but I think that the technical hurdles to get that sort of thing done would be immense.
Just drilling an oil well is a major job in a lot of cases.
Now, imagine having to drill something that's going to go precisely to the location you need to inject the water, and imagine the amount of power it would take to do the job.
And I know that there's a great deal of concern about a landslide of that magnitude, that we've never really observed anything of that sort in historic times.
And yes, it would be a disaster.
But I think that if you really look at it, finding the right place to do it, finding the right forces to do it, and getting it all done secretly.
Well, of course, the circumstances are quite different.
September 11th didn't require a huge amount of industry.
Everything was already in place.
All it really took was a decision by a number of human beings.
In the case where you want to cause a disaster using La Palma, for instance, you would have to have the right types of explosives, the right hardware to deliver it.
If you had a typical reactor fuel rod that was exhausted, actually, it's not going to be the optimum material, and here's why.
An exhausted fuel rod is really still mostly viable nuclear fuel, but it's just below optimum generating capacity.
So it's pulled out and it's cooled in the water pool, immersed for a while, or set aside somewhere until the day that it can either be stored permanently or reprocessed.
Now, what you would want to use is not this rod ground up into dust, because most of the material in it is not that hot.
Only about 1 to 2% of the mass of an exhausted reactor rod, as it turns out, is the dangerous stuff, the stuff with medium lifespans and moderately hot outputs.
The most available things that would be the hottest are the things that burn out the fastest.
It would have to be manufactured hours or just bare days before it was used.
And that would mean you'd have to have a reactor available for that.
Instead, what you would settle for is the mid-range materials that could be extracted from a rod.
But it would be a very dirty, dangerous process, fortunately.
This works to our favor.
So the most destructive material that they would use would be exactly the toughest stuff for them to extract from a used fuel rod.
Other alternatives would be from exhausted medical devices.
There are many machines used in medical treatment, for instance, cancer, radiation treatment, that use isotopes that have moderate lifespans and fairly heavy output.
Recycled medical machinery, I think, would be a real problem.
I know there has recently been a real crackdown on what happens to these older machines.
I think, though, the governments of the world are trying to get the word out that a dirty bomb, awful as it would sound, wouldn't be as bad casualty, death-wise, as many other things.
Actually, the detection capability is very simple.
The real obstacle is deployment of those detectors.
If you really wanted to protect the city from the sort of damage that a dirty bomb could do, you'd have to implement a series of sensors placed all throughout the city and wired to some sort of central computer, for instance, to monitor them.
That is an expensive proposition, and right now I'm sure that somebody is sitting down with their calculator and figuring out whether it's cheaper to put sensors and a computer system in or just do the cleanup.
At this point, it's an economic proposition.
What's easiest, what's simplest?
But once it becomes obvious that people are concerned about it, they will probably go to the point where they'll put detectors in secret everywhere and wire them into a detection system and then say, yes, we do have a system in place.
And that is one of the most important things I have to talk about.
This is a very hopeful message here.
Good.
There was an article published in Scientific American October last year.
And it was written by a fellow who's done a great deal of research in hurricanes, Dr. Ross Hoffman.
And in the article, what he pointed out was they took the data from the hurricanes, various hurricanes, ran simulations in the computer to see how they would play out, and then they altered some of the conditions, such as ocean temperature, evaporation, and so on.
What they were searching for was the smallest change that would deflect or defuse the hurricane.
Now, there are three strategies that have seriously been proposed at this point.
One of them is, as you know, contrails from airplanes decrease the amount of sunlight, fall in an area slightly.
And one of the proposals was to fly scheduled flights with enhanced contrails over portions of the hurricane's path where the sunlight would be cut out slightly, and it would alter the ocean temperature.
Well, just before you go on to whatever's next, there are lots of people all across this country and now all across the world, Sir Charles, who are somewhat suspicious of what they call chemtrails.
I mean, it's still releasing something into the atmosphere either way, right, for a specific effect to try and trails are nothing but water vapor that condenses.
Well, chemtrails actually, if they are what we've been told, they would actually have a very different target, a very different purpose, and they would be generated with a completely different means, injecting something into a jet's exhaust other than what just happens to go through the turbines.
If you're going to do hurricane modification, then you certainly wouldn't want to inject anything in the exhaust.
You'd simply want a lot of contrail content or bulk to reflect your sunlight.
You would use modified jets that had water injectors at the exhaust portion of their jet engines, and you would create artificial cloud cover to slow the hurricane's growth.
And that's only one of three really interesting scenarios.
Spread a material on the surface of the water that would break down in two or three days naturally, but for that period of time would retard the amount of evaporation and therefore modify the structure and strength of your hurricane.
How much of a factor is evaporation versus heat, say, if you're looking at these various well the heat is conducted through the methods of evaporation, through the mechanism, because when water evaporates, it carries the latent heat energy with it.
Basically, we would put a solar collector in high Earth orbit that would gather sunlight, focus it on a generator of some sort, and convert it to electrical or microwave power and beam it to the Earth for our use.
So we would have a system that would gather sunlight in space.
The rest of the story, as Paul would say, coming up after the break from the high desert in the middle of the darkness, where we operate best, this is Coast to Coast AM.
unidentified
Sailing away from the crest of a wave, it's like magic Oh, rolling and riding, it's infinite, it's magic
Anyway, Sir Charles is talking about something that would gather energy in the quiet, silent, frozen atmosphere of space.
The satellite with great big wings would silently just sort of collect the sun, oh, very efficiently.
Lots of sun up there, never-ending sun.
And then, through a microwave system, yeah, you'd fire up microwave tubes and you'd microwave the energy back to ground, to a collection point on the ground of antennas that then would distribute it to the grid.
But where we're going here, folks, is this all seems wrapped into the third method of controlling, let's say, something like a hurricane.
So in a moment, we'll ask Sir Charles exactly how you would then take this device and use it to control a hurricane or a weather front or possibly even prevent some disastrous, some other disastrous weather occurrence.
unidentified
apparently that's what he's talking about Sir Charles, we just had a very large flare.
Somebody named Ray in Burbank, California says, hey, what would a, well, I don't know, a mega flare, for example, and we do have these big, giant, incredible flares lately, do to a power station of the sort Sir Charles is talking about?
Actually, We could shield the power station quite adequately from solar flares.
The problem with most satellites is we're running a race between how light we can make it and how effective we can make it versus the amount of shielding we can afford to put on the thing.
Weight is money when you come down to space travel.
The station would be large enough and bulky enough, and shielding once it's up there would be cheap enough because of where we're going to be getting a lot of our resources from to build the stations.
By using the beam of microwaves to change the temperature of the ocean water around the hurricane, we can direct the hurricane to follow a path that we set.
Direct the hurricane out to open sea, colder waters, where it dies away naturally.
And I don't know what the technical details of their system are, but they certainly don't have a solar power satellite or anything of that magnitude in place to do it.
I understand that the satellites I'm talking about would be putting down billions of watts.
And typically the beam is much weaker than sunlight.
In fact, the collector for such a beam to put into the power grid would be about 500 acres or a little less than a square mile in area.
So it isn't something you can focus down to a point or do a great deal of damage with.
However, you can tune the microwaves to penetrate to the surface of the water and heat just the upper layer of it.
And it's a very simple plan, and mathematically and simulation-wise, it's been shown to work.
And so we now get to the next phase.
We know that there was no funding available for building solar-power satellites, and it's been kicked around for many years, and it sounds like a very good plan.
How in the world will we get funding and a launch vehicle to put this system in place?
And of course, there were not a lot of things I could say on the last show until I had discussed everything with everyone and made certain that I could speak of this.
Well, as it stands, there are already agreements in place for stretch solid boosters from Thiokol and stretch liquid fuel tanks from Lockheed.
And you know, the DCX or the Delta Clipper experimental rocket that landed, powered, and moved sideways through the air under control.
And this system is going to be the re-entry vehicle.
So now, instead of being a single stage to orbit, it becomes the vehicle that's carried every time this shuttle is launched, this shuttle replacement, and it becomes a vehicle that can carry your people back down once you're done.
Understand that all of this is going to be done by private industry.
The government actually stands to gain from this.
And I'll back up a little and tell you why.
There was an article written by Gene Myers, and it was for an insurance publication.
In fact, he also wrote one for the Tallahassee Democratic op-ed article.
And in these articles, he discussed the benefits of setting this industry up because there would be a great deal of money in the aerospace industry to be made.
But not only that, consider who stands to gain the most.
If you control hurricanes and look at the fact that we're at the beginning of a 30-year cycle of hurricanes from all indications, the insurance industry has a pool of something like $400 billion.
And they pay all, and this is all from premiums, and they have to pay out every time there's a disaster.
What we're going to do, and we've made This proposal, and so far it sounds good, and we're going to have a lot of negotiating to do, but it appears that we will be able to obtain funding from the insurance industry to put this vehicle in orbit and get hardware flying.
And we expect the first orbital power satellite, which can be used to produce power as well as steer the hurricane, to be in orbit by 2012.
Whenever there is a disaster of this magnitude and the insurance payouts are made, the government often pays out more than the insurance industry does.
The insurance industry has a number of reasons to back this program, one of which is the control of hurricanes and the lessening of damage that will result.
The other is the fact that they presently own $15 billion worth of satellites in useless orbits.
Sir Charles, let's say that we were actually able to control the course of hurricanes and we began diverting hurricanes away from the U.S. mainland entirely, which I guess would be our goal.
for the atmosphere and and i i just wonder Well, understand that if we direct a hurricane into colder northern waters where it dies away on its own, the amount of air circulation that takes place in that hurricane is still going to happen just as it does.
If we're worried about removing an amount of rain that normally would have hit the land, we actually, I see the possibility of actually starting or seeding small tropical fronts using the same methods.
I don't see why we couldn't induce rainfall in areas using the same techniques.
I do know that some people in the forestry aspect would be quite interested in knowing how it's going to affect old-growth trees and forest replacement.
Because there's a lot of culling that's done by storms.
I don't see any real environmental problems.
The same amount of evaporation and rain is going to take place.
It's just going to happen in a different area.
If we need to control the amount of rain we get, there are a number of ways we can increase the moisture or the humidity in the atmosphere.
This would be just one of those methods, and an easy one, a very simple one, and one we can attain in just a number of like six or seven years.
Now, out of curiosity, with today's technology, assuming that we could launch today, tomorrow, or next year, the next few years, what could we launch and how much power could it reasonably, honestly transfer?
China is going to be one of the world's leaders in the development of orbital solar power.
One of the deals that we're trying to work through the Space Island Group is a means of leasing the power satellites and their production capability to China.
It appears that China and India will be the leaders in consumption, followed by the rest of the developed world, such as the United States and Great Britain.
Can you compare the output of one of those satellites and its counterpart collection grid on the ground to, say, the output of a typical coal-fired or nuclear reactor or any kind of reactor we can associate with so we understand the scale of this?
And that's a lot of power plants you'd be replacing.
And is there any estimation of the cost of construction and launching and then of the whole ball of wax, the satellite, getting it up there, the cost of the ground station, and then whatever?
basically, right now, we're targeting, trying to raise a pool of $10 billion to fund this over the next few years.
And all of it is basically available through private industry.
And we're certain of that.
And the insurance industry, of course, would be a large part of it.
But another thing is, if we could work a deal with the government of China, for instance, a donation based on the population of a province, and that's one of the things that's been in the works, then that would mean that they would have a real toehold in getting those stations set up that much faster.
And for just as a point of interest, there was a meeting between the Space Island Group and the Chinese aerospace group, Great Wall Aerospace.
You know, I believe it's because we have it so easy here compared to the rest of the world that we don't see the problems as readily as people who are really with their nose to the grindstone.
And with regard to China, I'm telling you, folks, it would just fill your senses and you'd go into overload if you saw what was going on in China right now.
The miles and miles and unending miles of factories the way it used to be in the industrial U.S. I mean, it's unbelievable what's going on.
So you think they'd buy very quickly into this power aspect of this?
Okay, the most obvious error there is that the density of the energy of this beam is less than the energy of sunlight.
And in many cases, microwave energy has been used for very low-level heating in some places with little or no biological effect.
So the case studies that have been done indicate that very low-level exposures to microwave on this concentration will pose little or no health hazard.
So to be used as a weapon, this is really a very impractical weapon.
Well, I think they were just talking more like an accident.
Not so much a weapon, but I'm sure there are applications there.
I was thinking more of just an accident where the satellite begins to drift and stays hot.
We'll address that when we get back.
We're at the bottom of the hour.
Sir Charles Schultz III is my guest, and we're talking about power from the sun, from space to Earth, courtesy of a microwave beam.
We'll be right back.
unidentified
What will you do when you get lonely?
No one waiting by your side.
You've been loved, and I've rushed you up.
You know it's just your foolish man.
Yeah.
Got me on my knees.
Got me on my knees.
Let's see, I think it's the dancing queen.
Friday night and the night's alone.
Looking out for a place to go.
We're the big white music, getting in the spring.
Here comes the love that I am.
Anybody could be that guy.
Night is young and music's high.
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worldwide on the this is coast to coast a m with art bell i'm certainly honored that sir charles schultz and gene myers and Company would all choose this program to make this announcement on.
I must admit, if you had the insurance companies, a mighty force, as well as the government of the United States, and not to mention China, on your side, you really might get something like this done.
And I am honored that you would choose this program to make the announcement on.
And understand, once again, that the energy level that's coming out of this, while overall it's a huge amount of energy, the density of it is so low that it's not going to be harmful.
It's very hard to make a weapon out of sunlight if it's just plain sunlight.
And the microwave energy being as diffuse as it is is just a convenient package to carry the energy in for the electrical grid or for making hydrogen or for controlling the hurricane.
I mean, there would be people with questions about this technology.
And, you know, to be fair, the government might have interest and even more interest because of the possibility of weaponizing something like that because it'd be a great cover for a weapon in space.
And the thing to keep in mind is if you have a body that is interested in, like a controlling or regulating body, that is interested in maintaining the peace, because that's the only way you're going to sell your product, is maintaining the peace, then they're going to oversee and be very, very circumspect about what they do with that system.
So how much of an application change would it take from supplying power to a grid, say in China, and then getting it over to warm up the waters ahead of a location you'd like a hurricane to go?
And this would be, even in the case of an accident of some sort, and you've got to always imagine they could happen, you're suggesting it would be far less traumatic than a nuclear accident.
I mean, at any time, somebody can just throw the switch and turn it off.
And understand, these are going to be manned stations, because with the building of this new launch vehicle, there's a very important difference between it and the traditional space shuttle.
This launch vehicle is designed to use the external tanks as laboratories and working spaces, manufacturing spaces.
It won't be 100%, but the estimates show that the amount of energy that's transferred from the beam, if it's properly tuned to a frequency that passes through our atmosphere, the amount of energy, the heating that occurs, would be less than the heating from the light of the full moon.
They'd be absolutely wrong, because to generate the power in space, none of the processed heat is radiated on the planet, only the power itself.
So per kilowatt hour, an orbital solar station will generate far less heat than a power plant would on the ground.
And of course, there's no pollution being exhausted in the atmosphere.
So we're way ahead on both counts.
what would the life of the sunlight being i mean you you would virtually have microwave generating power tubes big power tubes right there would be that And they would be modular and easy to replace and recondition right on orbit.
So the lifetime of the station is, well, how quickly can your crew replace a part that burns out?
You'd have constant maintenance going on, and part of it would be automated or robotic, and part of it would be by human beings.
And that raises another interesting question about why the insurance companies would fund this.
I mentioned earlier that they own $15 billion of useless satellites in orbit.
One of the tasks that we are going to offer is the ability to recondition those satellites and refuel them so the insurance companies can sell them back as services to the ground.
In other words, they'll recover that $15 billion that they've invested as a write-off.
The collectors themselves are coated silver plastic.
And if a meteorite were to go through a meteor, a grain of sand, or a piece of hardware, it'd punch a little hole in it and it'd keep going.
It wouldn't affect the operation at all.
And the generators are so that they work in tandem.
If you're using turbines, for instance, you have one spinning clockwise and one spinning counterclockwise right next to each other.
This would eliminate torque forces that make your satellite tend to twist around.
So we've tried to cover if one of those generators fails, what happens?
Well, there's a whole network of generators spread out over the surface of this generator, of this system, and one of them being hit or destroyed would simply mean that one got shut down immediately, and the rest of the grid would pick up the slack.
Everything would be modular, everything compartmentalized, and everything backed up.
Multiple redundancy is the key, just like all the cells in your body being redundant.
So you think that the governments would be you don't think there's going to be any resistance, for example, on the part of the U.S. government when China becomes a government.
becomes the first real customer well they have a choice they can China burn fossil fuels and create substantially more pollution than even we're generating now yes or they can go along this with this plan and the Kyoto Accord, and they can allow everyone to be in compliance and use clean energy.
One of them is the negotiations that are going on.
A response is expected next month, as a matter of fact, because if they commit by April, they are planning on announcing at the next Kyoto meeting, which I think is mid-May, what they are planning to do, and that would be orbital solar power.
Once they've made that announcement, you know what's going to happen.
You know, understand that there is one advantage to this, and that is that any of the technology we develop and put into these stations remains in our hands.
We sell them power and they gain the benefits, but we don't run into any technical export problems.
And once again, as soon as somebody is ready to invest in a power station, we will have the facilities in place to put one up for them and sell them power.
So once anybody sees it working, once the first one goes up and people see it working, they'll be far more willing to invest in it.
And I see that there's going to be a real explosion of investment once the first one is in operation in 2012.
I think it's because people see just how serious the situation with energy and pollution is becoming.
And there's also the impetus once again about natural disasters controlling the hurricanes.
People don't want to face the sort of weather and destruction they've seen just this year.
And when we look back over the previous years, things like Hurricane Andrew, I know that the amount of devastation just from a simple storm that could be prevented more than justifies this course of action.
And people are seeing right now, we have the technical know-how to do it.
All we need is somebody to sign the check, step aside, and let it get done.
Well, weather modification is a serious matter, and there are a lot of people, Sir Charles, who feel that it's kind of playing God, that there could be unintended consequences to the manipulation of such large natural forces.
It's just that sometimes, for example, drugs get released to the American people after a very supposedly careful review by a government agency that's supposed to be sure everything is safe for us.
And then a few years later, we find out, oops, recall them.
Well, I have a solution to a couple of these problems already worked out.
In fact, worked out a number of years ago.
On my site, I've placed some articles outlining how to control global warming, how to reduce the amount of energy reaching a globe if it becomes necessary.
And those are under my space articles on the homepage.
If somebody said, you've got to stop global warming, I would say the easiest way to do it, if you're going to do a project in space, is to place large reflectors that can be opened or closed like Venetian blinds in orbit.
Then you can modulate a tiny percentage of the sunlight reaching the ground just enough to alter the total input of energy to the globe.
It would only take a tiny fraction of a percent of the energy reaching the ground to have a sizable effect.
So with these two systems in place, we gain the ability to raise or lower the temperature locally or globally in any combination that we need to bring about the desired effect that we have to have.
You see, although we could place it farther out from the Earth toward the Sun, and it would be somewhat more effective, the problem we run into is how do you keep it on station?
One of the solutions is to put the system in an orbit, in sort of a fake orbit.
It's in an orbit that is just inside the Earth's orbit, toward the Sun, but at a point where the Earth's gravitation drags it back so it doesn't move ahead in the orbit.
So imagine normally if things are orbiting freely, something closer to the sun would orbit more quickly than something farther away from the sun.
Well, if you place it at just the right distance, the force pulling it ahead in its orbit and the force of the Earth's gravity pulling it back will balance, and that's one possibility.
Another possibility is to actually use the Earth's magnetic field as a sort of a tethering system to help keep it in place.
Because if you put this thing in orbit and it's going around the Earth, then it's only going to work when it's eclipsing the Sun.
So you only get its effect for a tiny fraction of the time that it's in space, and that's not very good.
You have to have a station-keeping system to keep the blinds in place.
Well, and there's an interesting thing in the article that I point out.
Using this same system, we could raise or lower the amount of sunlight on an entire planet.
For instance, I've got a scheme for terraforming Venus and giving it a day and a night cycle, very similar to the Earth's, that uses little more than that technology.
And once you understand how it works, it's very simple to see how it could be done.
Engineering-wise, it's an entirely, intensely huge task, but it could be done.
now as tight orbit pattern of ser charles i'm sorry i've got to cut off your and you know instead of And as it plowed through the atmosphere toward Titan, this is what it heard.
unidentified
Titan, this is what it heard.
Titan, this is what it heard.
Baby, I'm going to be a little bit more.
We were too hot to think of sleeping We had to get out before the magic got away We were born with the night We were in the shadows I'll thank you at night Till the morning light
we're going to talk a little bit about fighting and then we're going to open the lines for all of you.
We're going to talk a little bit about Titan and then we're going to open the lines for I thought the microphone on the vehicle headed through the atmosphere was incredible, didn't you?
Sir Charles?
No.
oh, look at that.
Would you look at that?
We lost Sir Charles.
I thought that he was a little slow to answer a provocative question like that.
Let's get him back.
I'll tell you.
It's probably another satellite or something.
Let's see.
This happens all the time on talk radio.
Why, I don't know, but it does.
Let's see.
There, that.
And then you press that button, and then you say, Sir Charles.
That was the backup cell number that I just called.
And the first one I called obviously met up with somebody's answering machine.
This is bad juju.
Bad stuff.
All right, let's just take some calls.
What the heck?
You've heard the proposition, right?
That we're going to put up a spacecraft.
In fact, in concert with Gene Myers and others who have these talents and abilities, we're going to put up a spacecraft to collect energy, transform it into electricity, and then beam it to the Earth via microwave to a receiving station.
And as the old saying goes, Sir Charles virtually is telling us that nothing can go wrong.
And you wrote about my uncle in one of your books because my uncle discovered a bridge that appeared to be man-made on the moon, and you put it in your book.
But anyway, to get to the question, when he comes back on, Nikola Tesla was working on a project.
Him and Edison set up the electrical grid in New York.
I guess the end of the 1890s or 1900s, and J.P. Morgan financed it.
But anyway, Nikola Tesla, after that, wanted to give the world free electricity.
So he was working on it, and it was to put something in the sky and to collect it and beam it down.
And my question for Sir Charles is, was that the same thing?
moving your concern a little bit about the weapon in space and about amateurs I hope the two aren't related, actually.
But yes, I'm concerned about weapons in space.
unidentified
Yeah, because, well, I guess I'm kind of invulnerable in the action, but I launched a satellite illegally just a few years ago using a hydrogen balloon.
Okay, I understand how you floated it through what we know is the atmosphere, but how did you then go through those other layers and escape to an entirely airless environment?
So you have launched yourself a satellite by putting it, by floating it up to the virtual edge of space and then blowing it like a trash can when we're kids with fireworks into space.
unidentified
Yeah, pretty much.
Well, just to show you how vulnerable it is, you know, for anybody to get into space, I was going to ask your guest, because I know he's in the NASA industry.
I didn't have anything to do with him.
I should have in order to get access, but I didn't.
I just put it up there.
I didn't want to deal with the red tape.
I believe on prediction number 86 or 5, I can't remember.
If we would make the fuel tanks and a doer flask, in his project we could wrap the reflective foil about the inner flask.
And on the Earth, we could pull a vacuum, making it a perfect doer flask so we wouldn't need insulation on the outside to pummel this space shovel.
And we could even, when I got an outer space with a vacuum on both sides, you could slip the outer shell off and unfurl this plastic membrane at your desire when he was talking about making the thing to control the amount of sunlight that goes through it.
In this case, you could even just wrap it back up.
And of course, you could have two of these to take care of the gyroscope effects he was talking about.
Okay, well, you know, I think the whole thing is fascinating.
I mean, the idea of being able to control the weather is compelling, interesting, and a little worrisome.
I'm not totally clear on the fact that there would not be unintended consequences with either heating or cooling parts of the planet that would not normally, by our seemingly random weather system, be heated or cooled.
I'm not convinced there wouldn't be.
But on the other hand, you can never stop progress, can you?
I'm a little upset he's gone, but I would say, sir, it is suspicious that he is suddenly gone and that both the primary and backup numbers are now something entirely different, wouldn't you?
unidentified
Yes, I would say.
I know that he had mentioned that it was very highly unlucky that we couldn't use the power light as a weapon, but what per se that he aimed that at a snowy mountaintop to cause a large avalanche or a flooding to wipe out a town.
I don't know, sir, but I also wonder what it is that makes us imagine we could deliver power from space reliably to Earth when we can't even deliver a caller's voice reliably over this new technology we laughingly call cellular phone.
I mean, did you hear how awful that audio was?
Did you?
Do we deserve that in this century?
No.
We deserve better.
I would like to petition the cellular industry.
And, you know, I'm going to do what I threaten to do.
You remember I threatened, I said, you know, from now on, when I get a really lousy, lousy cellular connection, I'm going to have people begin to name the company that produces or carries their cellular signal.
Now, perhaps these cell companies out there would take that as an invitation to improve the quality of the audio.
If not, that's all right, I guess.
East of the Rockies, you're on the air.
unidentified
Yes, Art.
I'd like to, if you get Charles Swift back on tonight.
one of our what a superb question answer charles what i really they feel pretty Electric companies would not have to maintain generating stations if they were buying the utility power from the grid where we broadcast it in.
We would sell it at one rate to the electric company, and they would charge a different rate to the customers because they maintain the lines and distribution system.
So as far as they're concerned, this is no different from them buying power from another utility over the grid today.
And even low-grade forms of methane can be useful.
You know that in a lot of third world countries particularly, where energy is in short supply, they often will use biomass, such as manure, fermented to produce methane.
And they'll burn that methane to produce their electricity or to cook with it or whatever.
Methane itself is an excellent fuel.
Now, here's the catch.
The methane on Titan is just as good as any methane anywhere.
But number one, it's a huge distance away from us.
And number two, it takes oxygen to burn the methane.
So you're not going to be making any power with it.
Titan turns out to be a geologically active world, almost as active as Earth or Mars, and it looks very similar.
One of the most important discoveries is this.
Even though Titan has an exotic chemistry and there is no water acting as a fluid in its environment under most conditions, it still has rivers, erosion, precipitation, and a hydrological.
We're talking about an announcement that's been made tonight that we're going to put an orbiting power station combast into orbit and we're going to return power to the Earth.
That project underway as announced tonight.
Otherwise, we're talking about Titan, energy, all kinds of things.
If you have a question for Sir Charles, now would be the time.
Stay right where you are.
All right, let us see if the Magic That's our phone company has maintained Sir Charles on the line.
But one of the most important and interesting things that I found relates to a mystery that I've found and worked out on Mars.
And it's something I call moat rocks, just like the moat around a castle.
Spirit Rover in Gusev Crater has reached an area of the ground where it's changed substantially.
And one of the things that has shown up is here and there there are rocks that have a ring in the sand around them.
Now normally the sand is blown up around the rocks in all directions and it covers their bases.
But these rocks look as if something has blown the sand away from them.
What I've found is the most likely explanation is steam is venting from underground.
Water is boiling away forming a fumarol like a little geyser vent, but water doesn't emerge, steam does.
And the steam is blowing away the sand and the rock is tapping off the vent of the steam.
Now in the very first ground image that we see on Titan where Huygens is sitting on the ground, you will see in the middle distance a moat rock identical in every respect to the ones that are on Mars.
Now we know that liquid water is not very likely to exist on Titan because of the extreme cold.
What it implies, however, is some fluid underground is evaporating and causing vapor to fend up from under the rocks.
So there's a hydrological system just like there is on Mars, only it's probably methane.
Well, I doubt seriously there's ever going to be any sort of monetary profit, but knowledge-wise, what we've learned is the forces of erosion appear to be identical no matter what planet you're on.
As long as there's some sort of a fluid, whether it's water or methane or whatever it might be, whatever erodes rocks and minerals will work there.
And all it takes is a little bit of energy.
An interesting thing is about the geothermal aspect.
You know, Io, the moon of Jupiter with the volcanoes, is heated by geothermal energy.
Jupiter's gravity flexes it due to tides.
The same process apparently is occurring with Titan, and Saturn's gravitational pull is flexing it through tidal force and heating its interior so that water might be the volcanic fluid on Titan.
My question is, basically, if this machine was put up there, is there any chance that if it had a decayed orbit, it would cause any danger to the people on the Earth?
See, everybody is, I don't know If it's the Sunstroke book, I don't know if it's the genre of science fiction in our country, or just the fact that we've seen things go wrong so much.
And so something in an orbit that high, if it for whatever reason began to drift, it could be up there for thousands of years before coming to the ground.
The amount of energy needed to change its orbit enough to bring it back to Earth is very substantial.
It's not going to happen by accident.
If something collided with it of sizable mass, then it's a possibility.
But even at that point, at the velocity it would be moving, it would burn up in the atmosphere.
Notice that even though this thing is many square miles in area, most of it would be a material like very thin silvered plastic, similar to a candy bar wrapper.
Well, and the thing here is the beam has to be steered actively to keep it on target.
Movement of the satellite is not going to affect where the beam goes because it's being aimed all the time.
Imagine yourself holding a pocket mirror outside and walking around your yard while aiming a spot of sunlight using that mirror at a certain target.
And it doesn't matter where you walk in the yard, you can always aim the spot where you want it to be as long as there's sunlight falling on your mirror.
Clearly, if you could import enough water, you could make a desert into arable farmland.
The problem here is the natural barrier, mountain ranges.
Convection and flow are the thing.
No matter how much moisture you put in the atmosphere, if you can't get that moisture-carrying air to the area where you need rain to fall, it won't matter.
So even though you could use this system to create large storms, most likely, the difficulty is getting that moisture-laden water or the clouds to pass over natural barriers such as mountains to get it to your deserts.
The reason you have deserts there is because there's a barrier that keeps moisture from getting there.
I wanted to hear your thoughts of what hurdles might have to be overcome for the viability of a company that's about to bring to the global market a highly innovative, extremely low-cost, actually an answer to a near 50-year-old technology called, it's basically replacement satellite technology.
It's going to replace satellites by utilizing high-altitude airships positioned in the stratosphere, in a geostationary position using technology of GPS tracking, et cetera, and the concept of UAV vehicles.
Sir Charles, he's talking about, and there have been a number of people who have talked about it would actually be cheaper with the cost of satellites to orbit a high-altitude aircraft or a lighter-than-air craft of some sort at a very high-altitude.
In fact, there have been a number of experiments about that.
One of them, of course, involves typical helium balloons designed to operate at high altitudes.
And the station-keeping technology for it isn't exactly where we want it to be because there are some very high-velocity winds, even in that environment.
However, it could be done.
The other answer to that would be the type of airplanes that can fly for many hours or days without refueling.
And an electric airplane, similar to the ones that NASA has been working on, is not a bad solution to it.
The only problem they found is sudden changes in the wind would break the wings and the thing would die.
And I imagine that in the near future, we are going to see the equivalent of a microsatellite that can be more or less placed at a very high altitude and used for communication.
And it should be fairly cheap.
So it really depends.
What it comes down to is what is your application and what's the cost?
Tomorrow night, Sir Charles, I'm going to have a couple of guests who are going to be here talking to the degree they can because I know they have classified information and about patents and so forth.
But with respect to the HAARP project, now I'm sure that it has crossed your desk one way or another, or at least your mind.
There are people talking about HAARP with respect to the possibility of weather modification and all kinds of pretty exotic things.
Well, at this point, some of the rumors have said, you know, it could be used for submarine communications.
Some have said we're going to be modifying ions in the upper atmosphere.
There are many people who do research who are using the hardware for various sorts of tests depending on magnetic or ion conditions in the upper atmosphere.
And those are fairly common knowledge.
As to the target, the goal of the whole project, you know, when you compare what's been said in rumors and what's been said officially, you really sometimes wonder just what would bring about the construction of this project, what did they have in mind.
And I know that people in the general public often have questions about hardware of this type because it's so mysterious.
Bottom line that I've been able to determine so far is it's basically research both in communications and in the Earth's magnetic field and its influence on ion particles and that sort of thing.
There are many things that occur in our upper atmosphere that are absolute mysteries.
Some of those were spotted by shuttle astronauts, for instance.
As a matter of fact, I collect these stories, you know, and I've got a very interesting story here someplace about the fact.
Yeah, here it is.
A fact that wasn't released.
Columbia crew saw a new atmospheric phenomenon.
A new atmospheric phenomenon was caught on video by the crew of the space shuttle Columbia just days before the shuttle broke apart.
Astronauts relayed the video to NASA in real time during their 16-day flight.
What it amounts to, apparently, is a light, a single frame of the video representing 33 milliseconds, shows a mysterious reddish glow in the night sky on 20 January 2003.
And he says, the scientists involved, we're not sure what we saw.
It was something extraordinary.
The glow occurred about 150 kilometers from the ocean near Madagascar and does not appear to be linked with any thunderstorms.
This was some kind of display of light that they can't explain.
So, yes, there are still many, many mysteries about the world, things we have no idea about, and we're just beginning to look in the right places to find them and ask the questions.
see that's again this is going to be your public relations nightmare when you talk about sending power to earth or you talk about shielding the earth from the sun's rays and creating cooler spots and atmosphere You place a number of machines on the ground that transmit a signal that the blinds must receive in order to remain in operation.
If something catastrophic happens that brings down, let's say, the power lines, the power system, they stop transmitting, and the blinds go into a safe position by opening.
The technology in orbit, as she pointed out, could well remain in operation, and we would have people in orbit still in operation.
This same technology could be used to help the planet recover because of this.
If we had the sort of catastrophe that raised a lot of global dust and dropped the temperature greatly, we could move a set of these blinds to the side or the rear of the planet and actually direct more sunlight to the ground to compensate for the effect of global cooling.