Charles Ostman reveals nanotechnology’s leap from sci-fi to reality, with energy-efficient solar paints (like Nano Solar’s) and carbon nanofibers slashing fuel consumption via lighter vehicles. Self-assembling molecular systems could soon replace lead-acid batteries, while smart materials—from pregnancy-detecting fabric to impact-hardening military gear—prove viable. Yet risks loom: proteomic targeting might weaponize genetic traits, and China’s unregulated advancements could accelerate dangerous applications like antimatter or self-dissolving nanites. Ostman warns of dual-edged potential—medical miracles and energy breakthroughs—if oversight fails, hinting at hidden military and climate-modification projects. The future may hinge on balancing innovation with unseen dangers. [Automatically generated summary]
And he weighs, I'd guess 16, 17, 18 pounds somewhere in there.
Fat and sassy.
That's Comet, for those of you that remember.
Now, a little lesson.
Last night I told you about a new radio toy that I had.
I put a picture of it up on the website.
It was delivered by UPS, and this is how stories get out of control.
Last night I told you, UPS, no doubt, I mean, this is an $11,500 radio, right?
That came early.
And so I didn't have the gate open.
I had no idea it was supposed to be delivered on Monday, but they brought it Friday to my chagrin.
And the UPS person, whoever that would be, kindly grabbed the box and slid it down the gate.
Now, by the time the story had made it around the handbands today, they had lobbed it over the gate, thrown it over the gate where it tumbled several times, coming to rest, you know, like one day catapult or something.
This is what happens to stories.
You tell a story, and by the next day, after it's been told to, I don't know how many other people, it's grown and it's become bigger and bigger and bigger.
That happened.
One day catapult.
At any rate, there is one sad note about my radio.
I spent, well, there's got to be a thousand knobs on that thing.
I spent, embarrassingly, about, well, I don't know how long.
It's got a picture of a globe on the front, you know, and Tokyo is spotlighted because that's where the radio came from.
So I had to change that.
Quite an affair, believe me, to perump.
And proudly I had perump there, along with local perump time.
And that's what appeared on the front of the radio on the globe, and it was a proud moment.
And then I turned the radio off and turned it back on, and it went back to Tokyo.
unidentified
Tokyo is highlighted on the map, and it has Tokyo Time.
So I probably forgot to press some kind of save something.
But I mean, it was like an hour, an hour of getting out the manual and bringing it all the way from Tokyo to Prom.
Well, anyway, having fun.
All right, so let's look at the world news.
Finally, at rest, after years of crippling disease, Pope John Paul II's body lay in state Sunday, his hands clutching a rosary, his pastoral staff under his arm.
Millions prayed and wept at services across the globe as the Vatican prepared for the ritual-filled funeral and conclave that is going to choose a successor.
And I'm telling those of you who have never been through this, you're in for a real treat.
There is this strange ritual at the Vatican, and a whole generation of young people has never seen this happen.
So pay attention.
You're going to see something kind of interesting.
There's a lot of ritual, and the Catholic Church is very interesting.
And when they finally pick a new Pope, there will be white smoke coming out of the Vatican as the ballots are burned.
It's an amazing, amazing process, and many of you will never have seen it.
So watch the nightly news as this process continues.
For all his inspiring qualities, personal charm, deep spirituality, acceptance of other faiths, Pope Paul, John Paul's tight grip on church leadership and unwillingness to change unpopular teachings, of course, clashed with the more democratic approach that many of the 65 million U.S. Catholics, of course, favor.
So this is the other thing you're going to want to watch.
There is going to be, my wife is a Catholic, as you know, and she tells me there's going to be a big fight.
It may, it'll probably, knowing the Vatican, be well behind the scenes.
But a big fight between the traditionalists, the conservatives, and the American Catholics.
And we would be certainly considered to be more progressive, liberal.
And so there's going to be a giant fight between these two factions.
And that may well determine whether.
Lawmakers broke days of rancorous stalemate Sunday and reached out to Iraq's Sunni Muslim minority for their Parliament speaker, cutting through ethnic and sectarian barriers that have held up selection of a new government for more than two months now, so hopefully they're somewhat satisfied.
The arguments surrounding Terry Shaivo are going to live on in state house debate and new laws if an emerging coalition of disability rights activists and right-to-lifers succeed in turning the national agony over our case into a re-examination of when and how our lives come to an end.
So far, only a few legislators in a handful of states have sought significant changes to any of their laws which define the fundamental elements at stake, how a person, for example, can set limits on their medical care, who gets to decide what their wishes are, what evidence is needed to prove any claim.
Those looking for the market to make a substantial move higher will likely have a very frustrating week ahead.
Chronic fears of inflation, spurred by record oil prices and reports of higher prices for consumer goods and services, have sent the major indexes to their lowest points of 2005.
Are you surprised at that?
As goes energy, so goes America.
And as this energy goes up, and baby, it's going up fast, really fast.
In fact, here, since 2000, this is from, what's it from?
I don't know what it's from.
I guess it's from Yahoo.
Since 2000, the average price of a gallon of self-served regular gas has gone up 39% from $1.51 to $210.
With record-breaking oil costs and seasonal summer price hikes, experts see no relief, no relief, no light at the end of the tunnel at all.
The price at the pump is going to jump and it's going to more than offset any increase in Saudi production.
And some experts predict, take a deep breath, gas is going to hit $3 a gallon in some parts of the country within a few months, no doubt.
Some people are going to write to me and say it already has where I am.
I found nothing in a quick search to verify what this person writes, Pat in Tucson, but should it be true, it's going to definitely bear some examination.
I'm not saying it is.
Pat says, I'm so angry I could spit nails.
First, this CAV spacecraft that's going to militarize space, and now Bush slips it in, while people are thinking about Terry Shiva and the Pope that he's going to cancel the space shuttle program.
Now, I know there are problems with the program and that the usefulness of the International Space Station can be debated, but this leaves a terrible void.
Not only will thousands of jobs be lost, but dreams will also be lost.
When we look to the stars now, all we're going to see is an incredible capability to provide a warfighter with a global reach capability against high payoff targets.
Oh, goody.
Whatever happened to, we come in peace for all of mankind.
Yeah.
Well, so I can't verify all of that.
I don't know that there was some recent announcement about the cancellation of the shuttle program.
And I don't know about CAV spacecraft.
And so, you know, obviously this is a troublesome email if there's some basis to it more.
As a matter of fact, we're going to do open line.
So if you have something to say, reach for your telephone now.
Music Top of the hour, Charles Ossman, he is an expert on nanotechnology.
And I'll tell you something.
There are a lot of topics that we talk about on Coast to Coast AM that are sort of, you know, science fiction that may well become science reality.
The thing about nanotechnology, and the reason we're revisiting this so often, is because this is not way out there.
This is now.
I was blown away a couple of weeks ago.
We did this show on energy, and we had somebody on nanotechnology who had said, hey, Art, you can already go out and buy a paint that nanotechnology has produced, a paint, and you paint your house with it, and it supplies energy for your house.
And you can get that now, not 100 years from now, now.
So nanotechnology went from something we did, in fact, talk about on this program as sort of science fiction, tomorrow's news, now, now it's today's news.
So it's a very, very exciting technology that is going to change our lives in our lifetime, even in my lifetime.
As I crawl towards 60 years of age, I can look forward, even in my limited time left on Earth, whatever that may be, to a incredible change in the clothing we wear that will adapt itself to us, to the paint that goes on the house that creates the energy.
Nanotechnology is exploding.
And Mr. Ossman will tell you all about it.
We'll see if we can keep him down to 110 miles an hour or so.
In other words, you go up and down the dial day and night, and we've got politics, politics, politics, politics, politics, politics.
And then all of a sudden you get to one spot and it's not.
So, bingo.
Anything else?
unidentified
What would you say to someone who thinks the material discussed on Coast to Coast is superstition or silly or unscientific or just doesn't take it seriously?
Yes, I think I would describe it as a kind of a community, sure.
And it's a community that, believe me, doesn't always agree on anything.
Yes, it's a community.
The people who listen to this program comprise a community.
But people of such varying belief systems and I think that's the biggest thing about Coast is the demographic spread, the variety is just absolutely astounding.
I think that we're all Peter Pan in that category.
We don't ever grow up.
When does the wonder end?
Well, wonder is not over for me, and I'm almost 60.
I mean, I still find wonder in all the things that we talk about on this program.
So that's one common thing.
But then the community occasionally gets divisive and fights a little bit.
I mean, it seems like I believe, and I hope I'm wrong.
I think they were great, wondrous things for President Bush to have said, but I don't think he thought for one second that any of it was going to get funded.
unidentified
And as for the coast-to-coast community being a community, it's definitely a community.
That's just my take, and it's a sad take, but it's a good, it's a nice thing for a president to say, we're going to the moon.
We're going to Mars.
And I hope it's true.
But, you know, a lot of presidents can say things that are going to sound good to the public that the president darn well knows aren't going to get funded.
In order to earn a dollar or create wealth, it ultimately must start by turning over the soil, digging for oil, digging out the gold, in order to create wealth.
Now, the most money I ever made in a year was about 25,000 Canadian, which is about 20,000 American.
And when I made that much money, I was able to eat good.
I was able to go out on the weekend.
I had a decent Car to drive.
You know, life wasn't too bad.
You know, I couldn't go kangaroo hunting in Australia today and then skiing in the Swiss Alps tomorrow.
People are turning over the earth to create wealth in which they put away for some period 50 years down the road and then have to turn over more earth to feed themselves now.
And you people talk of a three-day supply of food.
The funny thing is, you know, General Jameson, he's real.
unidentified
Right.
Oh, and one more quick thing with George.
Last week, towards the end of the week, everybody's making a big deal about this weird guy that called in named Oscar with this silly little voice, you know, and I don't understand why they're giving that guy attention.
He was calling and saying that he was a devil and he was possessing a body and he was calling and making this little weird voice that was very unconvincing.
And all these people are like, hey, that guy was really freaky, you know, giving him attention.
I could not find anything along the lines of what you were mentioning, but on CNN.com, they had an article that the launch of the Discovery, which they're aiming for on May 19th, it may be delayed because NASA apparently has been either delaying purposely or just caught up in the chaos, I guess you could say, with paperwork.
And so the launch that they were hoping for may be delayed.
And if they do not get it within a certain window after that, they're going to have to wait, I think, maybe until July before they can get the program back up and running.
Well, clearly, our space program is not in a good place right now.
I mean, we are at the end of the shuttle's useful life.
They're getting pretty old.
I don't see anything really immediately online to replace it.
And as far as Mars goes, it might as well be in another universe right now.
unidentified
That's about right.
That is.
And also about the Oscar that was mentioned, I tried to call in the other night and do my own impression of him and claim that he was from my family and that we were all a bunch of interior decorators and that he just got to take his medicine.
If we had someone, or if we had capital punishment where the person from death row was tied down to a table for two weeks with no food and no water until they expired, what would we call that?
Well, if it's cruel and unusual punishment for someone who has murdered someone, why is it any less cruel and unusual punishment for an innocent person?
And World War II hotspots would be awesome to try, as well as any other battlefield hotspots.
No question about it.
But I mean, listen, these are people who do this voluntarily, you know, mostly their own money up in Utah.
And they're not out to make a buck on it.
They're just doing it.
So, you know, they'd have a hard time getting there.
But I'm sure somebody out on one of the islands will do it.
unidentified
Yeah, and it just has such good quality.
I was also thinking that maybe the psychics, because I think that there's some kind of connection there, that maybe they should keep a voice recorder in their pocket when they're doing their work.
Okay, well, I think that's kind of like the shale oil thing.
And it is a supply of energy, but I should tell you that it's kind of a secondary supply.
It's the kind of oil you go after when the first half of the oil, that's what they're talking about when they're talking about peak oil, it's a bell curve.
They say we're at the top of that curve worldwide now.
And when you get there, you've taken half of all there is to take.
And the thing about the second half that's left, which is a lot of oil, admittedly, still a lot of oil, it's not so cheap to get.
It's not so easy to get.
It's going to be a whole lot more expensive to get.
And that's going to have ramifications worldwide for the world's economy.
As goes the U.S., goes the world right now, and China, and the rest of the world.
So we're entering an interesting time.
One of the things that might save our butts, that might, and I don't want to offer false hope, but nanotechnology actually does have the promise to perhaps answer some otherwise unanswerable questions.
First-time caller line, you're on the air.
Hello.
unidentified
Hi, this is Brian in HoustonArt.
I'm a very long-time listener and first-time caller.
Okay, I'm sorry, but could it possibly be that after seven years and he finally came to the realization that his wife was dying that he decided he'd fulfill his wife's wish and spent 15 years trying to do the one thing, the last thing that he could do for his wife, what she wanted done.
It was called The Long Emergency, published in Rolling Stone.
And we're in it now.
Can't you feel it?
Come on, think about it.
When you go to the gas pump, it's shock.
When we get a gas hike, a gas increase, which is very frequently, we take two or three steps forward, one back, two or three forward, one back, and so forth and so on.
That's the pace at which it is moving right now.
You're going to want to watch the cost of a barrel of oil, which is astronomical right now, and some predict could go to $100 a barrel.
So the long emergency really already has begun.
If there is any savior out there, it may come with a technology that we are going to discuss next.
And I'm not saying that it will, but I'm saying that if anything that's in sight right now might do it, it might be this.
Charles Hoffman on Nanotechnology coming up next on Art Bell in the Nighttime.
unidentified
Oh, the night is my world.
City lights, painted good.
In the day, nothing matters.
It's the night, time doesn't matter.
In the night, where we walk and go walking down the street, up and home, You take yourself, you take my time.
You take yourself, you take your time.
You take yourself, you take your time.
Want to take a ride?
To talk with Art Bell.
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From coast to coast and worldwide on the internet, this is Coast to Coast AM with Art Bell.
The second half, a lot left, is going to be real hard and very expensive to get.
And as we dig for it, the price is going to go up and up and up and up.
And our economy, if we're not careful, is going to go down and down and down and down.
One of the saviors, one of the realistic possible saviors, is something called nanotechnology.
My guest coming up is going to tell us all about it.
His name is Charles Osman.
Charles Osman is a senior fellow at the Institute for Global Futures and serves with the management team of Forth Venture.
Charles is also chair of the Nanoelectronics and Photonics Forum of NanoSig, senior consultant with Silicon Valley Nano Ventures, and he serves on the scientific advisory board of Legendary Pharmaceuticals.
He is an active participant with the Millennium Project for Global Futures Studies and Research of the American Council for the United Nations University.
He has authored numerous technical papers and published articles, lectures frequently around the country and abroad, has contributed content featured in a number of books.
He has been a featured guest and speaker in a diverse variety of nationally broadcast TV and radio programs.
Charles has 25 plus years experience in the fields of electronics, material science, computing, artificial intelligence, including eight years at Lawrence Berkeley Labs and the University of California, Berkeley, and Los Alamos National Laboratory.
In a moment, subject nanotechnology guest, Charles Osman.
Music This man really knows what he's talking about, really knows what he's talking about.
Now, I have a brain that operates, you know, like in a 50-mile per hour school zone type deal.
Charles has a mouth driven by a brain that operates, you know, at 100 miles an hour.
So we're going to have to slow him down every now and then.
That's my recollection of the Charles Ossman of old.
Listen, Charles, since in the years that I was saying this earlier in the first hour, that when we first did the program, it was like a lot of other shows we do, things that are probably, very likely going to happen, but very far in the future.
You know, we are a forward-looking program.
And it was kind of in the future when you were on last.
But my God, since you've been on last, nanotechnology has exploded at the end of the day.
But one way to measure this process, in other words, there's different, you know, many, many different people now have a vision of nanotech in their own particular realm of familiarity.
But from my vantage point, I work with a lot of patent attorneys and also a lot of these are ventilator capitalists.
And so I have to wear a very specific kind of hat.
I have to measure technologies, not from a, gee, whiz, how interesting, but rather, will it make money and is it legally definable as a patentable item?
So this is my version of how I see nanotechnology to be.
The simplest possible sort of Occam's razor approach would be it's the precise manipulation of matter at the molecular scale of interaction.
And what that means is our attempt or our hope is to be able to get molecules, individual molecules, to sort of move about and assemble themselves in some kind of useful way.
And in fact, nature's been doing this for billions of years.
We're just trying to, in a sense, copy a little bit from what nature has been doing all along and see if we can do a...
Okay, that's a good question.
Well, let me explain how nature does it.
It might be helpful.
If one were to, say, open up a living cell, most cells at least anyway, what you'll find inside those cells are these little machine-like objects called organelles.
And the organelles come in many different types and flavors, and I won't go into all the detail, but there's generally ribosomes and mitochondria and proteasomes and a bunch of other devices, if you will.
And their purpose is to, in a sense, Build molecules as the cell's physiology needs them.
And they get the instructions from this from what are called messenger proteins.
And these proteins come in many different types as well.
But the basic idea is it's kind of like a software routine that then instructs these little assembly units how to build molecules as they're needed.
So, in a very rough analogy kind of way, we're hoping to either instigate controlled assembly by using organic means, and I can explain a lot about that, and there are other material systems which are just beginning to be developed where molecules can be sort of instigated to cooperate based on some kind of combination of chemistry, physics, a bit of material science.
But the general idea is you can attract molecules or repel molecules, either with electrical charge, water, different compounds, or a series of different stimulus events, you might say.
The end result being some kind of a structure that comes from the molecules having been told what to do.
Well, for instance, I'll skip over the chemistry because it is a little complex.
But the basic idea is this.
In traditional solar cells, they're made with silicon.
You have to grow silicon crystals, what's called monocrystalline silicon, which is kind of expensive, and it's a tricky thing to do.
It's not ever going to really be used on a mass basis, although it is in some areas.
However, using organic materials, that again can be instigated to, in a sense, self-organize, and depending upon how the molecules are arranged in certain layers and so forth, you can now create either a paint or, through what's called roll-to-roll manufacturing, it's kind of like printing, if you will, it's printing chemistry on the surface, you can create very inexpensive both solar and thermal vote.
That could be roofing tiles, it could be paint on the surface.
Okay, so you really then can't answer my question, because I was trying to figure out how do you actually collect the voltage and current from this painted house?
Do you have some place on the house where you have some sort of electrode sticking out and then you go to ground or what?
Well, it depends on which chemistry you're looking at and what the durability is.
And this is where it gets a little more complicated, so forgive me.
In fact, if you go to companies like Mio Soleil or Canarka is another one, there's a handful of these companies, by the way, which are going commercial as we speak.
They all have somewhat different chemistries.
In fact, there's actually a company here in the Bay Area called Nanosys.
I'm actually interested in how much voltage and how much current could I produce from a house or even a giant anything painted with this stuff or laminated with this stuff.
Eventually, if you had enough surface area, sorry, you could produce thousands of watts.
There's no reason you couldn't.
And let me tell you where the next step is going, just to kind of get into this a little further.
In the realm of what are called quantum dots, and I'm sorry to have to toss this word at you, but quantum dots are sort of nanoscale particles, and the particle size actually determines the bandwidth of light or the spectral signature of how they respond.
Now, why is it interesting?
Well, the reason that's interesting is because, excuse me, if you can coat the outer surface with a layer of quantum dots, and there's a special trick for doing that, then all of a sudden you can dramatically increase the efficiency because you can fine-tune the exact Characteristic of light that's reaching into the layers that's actually doing the conversion.
And so there are several companies now, including one in Canada that I'm working with, or I'm familiar with, that's actually perfecting this process.
And you'll see patents in the next year or two where you have the quantum dot enhanced version.
You know, there are those saying that as desperate as the world's energy situation is, these patents ought not be allowed, that all of this should be given to the world free of charge.
I have spent many years working in government institutions, Lawrence Lab in Los Alamos and that kind of thing, and I work with government institutions even to this very day in some contexts.
And there's a good place for that.
And having the public sector being the primary catalyst to get the initial research funded, I understand that's a good thing to do.
However, it has a flip side to that, COIN.
The flip side says when you allow the governments to get monopolized, monopolize a certain technical spectrum of interest, like the space programs, for instance, since you were mentioning NASA earlier, what happens is these things often get mired in politics and take much longer than they need to take and much more expense and so on.
When I saw Spaceship One get launched, which to me was really cool because I actually met Berbertan many years ago, this signified something special to me.
It wasn't just that a small private company with a little bit of outside help got a spacecraft into orbit.
What was really interesting was that this was done via the private sector.
It was like an end run around the much larger, sometimes rather Byzantine kind of enterprises that control these things.
And so I suggest to you, and I offer this to your audience as well, that maybe we're at a point in time where the government bureaucracies are simply too slow, and I use that kind of cautiously, to really match in synchronicity the requirement to get things off the ground.
And so if the private sector, through venture capital and through small startup companies, can sort of burst on the scene with their breakthrough versions of whatever energy technology is.
I do know that there is a long-standing practice of people buying up patents and then putting the patents on the shelf to prevent them from getting into the public arena.
And this is a very dicey area, so I don't want to step into a boiling pit of controversy at the very first five minutes of your program, although I'm sure that's going to happen anyway.
Wouldn't bother.
But it is kind of a mixed bag, and we have to take a balanced approach.
Let me give you a different perspective, if I might.
You remember when Craig Ventner launched the company Solera?
And for those that are not familiar, perhaps, when the Human Genome Project was ongoing, there was a huge battle between the NSF, headed by Francis Collins, and then the private version called Solera.
And Francis Collins and Craig Ventner were kind of like blood enemies at one point because Francis Collins said it was going to take billions of dollars and 12 years or whatever it was to get the human genome cracked.
And Craig Ventner said, I'll do it in three years for half a billion.
So, I mean, clearly this was kind of a direct challenge to the traditional sort of government way of doing things.
But the point is it was a dramatic indicator of how differently the same goal can be met through two completely different parallel agendas.
And just as an aside, by the way, you might be interested in this.
Craig Ventner's current ambition right now is to search the open oceans for microbes that can produce high amounts of methane.
Why is that interesting?
The reason is that if we can use microbes, albeit maybe genetically modified, to produce methane, which produces hydrogen, then all of a sudden we have a way of growing hydrogen, literally as a farm, as a farmable commodity, as opposed to digging holes in the ground and getting oil.
This is something I think is very valuable, and he's willing to finance this for his own private company.
In fact, to give you kind of a snapshot, I've been to many, many meetings, some of which I probably won't talk about in the air, but one which I will.
I was at the Wood Willisen Institute in Washington, D.C. about a year ago, and I happened to share the stage with Richard Smalley, who actually won the Nobel Prize for his work in fulline chemistry.
And a lot of other people were there.
But the whole context of the meeting was, we know energy is a problem.
We see peak oil.
We know it loud and clear.
Even military people were there, and they believe me, they all saw the same thing.
Where the nano part comes in, by the way, think of it like this.
If one can make materials that have specialized properties, like for instance that would be used in fuel cells, as an example, where the current manufacturing is kind of expensive and kind of tricky and requires a lot of complicated manufacturing steps, especially for the membranes and that kind of thing, if that could be optimized by a much less costly way to make the fuel cells, then all of a sudden it looks like a much more commercially viable concept.
Yeah, we are talking about biofuels, I guess, but nanotechnology, and he mentioned biofuels as we're talking about things that might help to slow down the long emergency and, you know, the ultimate crisis point.
And we're going to try and lay those things out for you, if they really do exist, or will shortly, in a moment.
Remember the old thing about spinning straw into gold or lead into gold or, I don't know, water into oil or whatever.
I guess what I'm really asking, and you mentioned bio, is whether nanotechnology holds the promise of ordering materials at a molecular level to get together and become oil or become some other combustible energy to change their nature and become combustible and usable as an energy source.
It's not so much that you're going to play a wonderful game of tennis, which you will, but what I'm hoping to point to is that if we could eventually make cars, for instance.
Well, again, if you have nano-components or nanostructure materials which are perfect in their size and shape and sort of distribution over a given surface, and there's a lot being done on that, then all of a sudden you need a much thinner coating of the material which would last much longer, not need to be replaced, and the engine itself would run much smoother using less energy.
It would be a complete change of the current way of looking at how these engines run.
But let me walk a little bit further, if I may.
I mean, right now we're looking at hybrid cars, and hybrid cars are kind of a combination between traditional combustion engines and using batteries, and when the car slows down or breaks, you actually capture that energy and then refeed that back into the batteries and so on, which is, I think, a very good idea.
I think this is a very good intermediate step.
So, let's talk about batteries for a moment.
The battery technology world is also going to be changed by nanotechnology because, once again, you can have a much higher charge density and a much longer lifetime, if you will, for the materials.
But the problem is if you try to fill up an entire car with these things, which some of the earlier electric vehicles did, it's very bad if, A, the car crashes and you have battery acid everywhere, and B, the batteries don't last very long.
And there's a lot of reasons why it's not so good.
Well, you would expect a battery that could be recharged many, many times over again, hold the charge much longer, and not degrade over time.
That would be the ultimate goal.
And again, the reason is because you can now force the particles or the substrates within the battery to much more precisely align themselves.
Think of it like this.
In traditional chemistry, you're trying to mix together a couple of solutions, the catalyzed reaction out, the other end comes another solution.
But that's only with a bulk of material, and then all the molecules are still kind of loosely flopping around inside that material.
What you're hoping to do is create a much more structured, much more precise way to get all the molecules in question to form up into a pattern or to form into layers or whatever the target goal might be.
But, you know, since we're talking about energy, I was hoping to try to sort of focus on that.
And the basic idea is that if we could ever get to the point where the package that would power a car, even if it was only partially powered by electricity, would not have to use lead-acid batteries, but instead would use one of these new solid-state layered materials, the weight would be much smaller.
You could recharge the battery many, many times over again, and you would actually have a very commercially compatible solution to the current sort of attempt at hybrid cars.
I would say realistically five to seven years roughly.
And again, especially in cars, and this may be a difficult answer, but to try to implement any kind of a major change in an automotive assembly line process, it takes about 10 years to go from prototype to field test to market survey to eventually putting it.
There are several companies working on them as we speak.
I'm probably going to be a little bit hesitant to give you an exact answer, but I would say from what I can understand, it's probably about five to seven years when you start seeing commercial prototypes.
But the basic concept of smart fibers has been around for several years.
In fact, there was a company called Molecular Geodesics, which was doing some work for DARPA, and their interest was in a smart fabric that could filter out certain kinds of microbes or viruses and then actually tell the soldier that he was being attacked by the microbe in question, by a response from the cloth.
So, I mean, a lot of the stuff is kind of hidden away in the military, but as is the case with any other technology paradigm, it usually takes about a decade or so between the first prototypes, usually which are in the military domain, and then they eventually filter into the commercial world.
Could there become something as lightweight as, oh, say, your average Marine Corps uniform that when it detected a bullet was coming at it, toughened up and became something that would bounce the bullet?
In fact, there's something at MIT called the Soldier of the Future Project, which it's on public domain, so you can download the website yourself.
But basically, the tip of the iceberg of this kind of stuff you can find there, examples of it.
And I, in fact, personally have spoken to a number of sort of DARPA-oriented conferences, and they ask specific questions about certain areas, and I've given answers.
But, I mean, there's a lot of this going on.
I think the homeland security concept being presented to the general public may hasten, actually, a lot of this stuff getting out into the general world, which I think would be a good thing.
I mean, in terms of things that can detect biohazards, smart clothing that could be protective, and things of that nature.
I can see this moving in the fast path pretty quickly.
Well, that's a tricky question, and I will try to answer it to the best of my ability.
The reason Black Project Money goes so far and does so quickly is because, and this is the double-edged sword, it's not under the auspices of congressional control.
There's no oversight committee that says spend money on this and do not spend money on that.
So they have kind of the freedom to go exploring all kinds of wild things, many of which don't work, by the way, but those that do get into the fast track of deployment.
And so, yes, out of the black project's world, the timeline could be anything from a handful of years to maybe a decade or so.
It depends on really what it is and what the motives are.
I mean, they have really decided that there's something interesting here.
And nanotechnology, I have to make this point, is a very, very broad range of different kinds of scientific disciplines all sort of merged together.
It's not exactly like a narrow single tangent of scientific research.
It's a much broader realm.
So it's kind of hard to answer the question to say, well, how much nanotechnology is the military involved with?
Because actually, if you were to take the broader view, just about everything from aerospace to the next generation of aircraft to armored vehicles to smart garments and just a whole lot of other things, all of which have some aspect of nanotechnology connected to them as we speak.
I remember someone telling me, for example, about windows or even walls that could, for example, on your wish or your command, and I don't know how that would be made, but they would suddenly go from a wall that nobody could see through to something completely clear like a perfect window virtually disappearing before your eyes.
That is, if you have, think back a few years ago, there used to be these, I think you can still buy them, there were glasses that you could buy that would sort of change color over time in the light.
So now imagine dramatically accelerating that process, where it goes from completely clear to totally opaque in a millisecond or two.
And so again, this was dramatically increased because the efficiency or the effectiveness, I should say, was increased because of the precision with the different layers of the material could be formed up on the surface of the plate or the carrier material.
And that's really what makes a lot of this come to pass, is the way that you can get a bunch of molecules to suddenly behave themselves.
Well, one more caveat, if I could throw that in, because you're tapping into something since we were talking about energy, another big piece of this puzzle is in the power grid, you know, home energy supplies and industry and that kind of thing.
An enormous amount of effort is being spent on how to make buildings and houses much more efficient using materials kind of like this in a way.
In other words, if we can, how can I say this, capture both waste heat and waste light and convert it into something useful, that's an enormous breakthrough.
And I would suggest there are dozens of companies now who are pushing at this because they see the dollar is waiting for them, and so they're going for it.
Now, just to tell the audience how this works, usually when venture capital groups say we like something, let's have a look at it, the first thing they want to know is what's the patent status?
I'm just saying this is how that particular process works.
But to kind of carry on a step further, I think that there are many people now who are much more willing to recognize that we have to sort of turn a corner in terms of our energy policy, not just with cars, but with everything, electrical grids and the whole nine yards.
So the acceptance of looking at new things is much greater than it was before, and therefore the motivation to invest in these things is much more than it once was.
Running with the night, playing in the shadows, kind of work we do here at Coast to Coast AM.
Charles Ostman is my guest.
We're talking about nanotechnology, and coming up in just a second, the possible dark side of the little stuff.
The End You know, success, success, and history forgive a lot of things.
And the world just barely remembers that when we were about to harness the power of the atom, applied first, I might add, to a bomb, of course, we were in a world war, and there were perhaps a million lives at stake.
Nevertheless, there was a very strong body of scientific feeling at the time that if we exploded an atomic bomb in the atmosphere, there was a pretty significant possibility that the entire atmosphere, according to the scientists at the time, might virtually explode in a chain reaction.
That we might start a chain reaction that would envelop the entire world and destroy all of us.
That really was a strong scientific opinion at the time.
Nevertheless, with the pressure of the war and all the rest of it, and for whatever reason, we pressed the button.
And it's not the only example of that kind of science that we've done.
We have virtually erased people's immune systems with AIDS and introduced the immune system of other animals into that human being with potentially deadly results for all of humanity.
Not that it happened, nor did the entire atmosphere explode.
But with nanotechnology, grey goo, and no doubt endless other possibilities, there comes that moment when a scientist, Charles, has a choice of pressing a button with perhaps unknown, unpredictable results.
And yet he also recognized that this is a two-edged sword, as with all technologies.
And I might just offer a little caveat before I mention the ones that I'm most afraid of.
I tend to view evolution as a kind of a trauma-induced process.
And that sounds a little weird, but my explanation is that given that the periodicity and amplitude of the trauma cycles don't exceed the system's capacity to respond, it will come back more robust.
I think what you're saying to me right now is, look, if something awful happens, it just might be a wonderful evolutionary leap, even though it kills millions of people.
And the challenge is to either have the spiritual wisdom, and I use those words carefully, to understand what we're dealing with and use it wisely, or we will perish at our own folly.
In fact, when the movie Andromeda Strain came out many years ago, which I thought was kind of a cool film, it was a little bit ahead of its time, but it had the right idea.
If you remember, the very first scene in the film, they show a jet pilot flying around up in the upper atmosphere, and all of a sudden his gear starts to dissolve.
I mean, like his face mask, his oxygen mask, the windshield of the aircraft starts falling apart and he dies.
And so that was actually a particularly interesting snapshot of this concept, even though this film came out, I believe, in the mid-60s.
It was kind of leaning in that direction.
So now we actually have, I think within a handful of years perhaps, the ability to begin to unravel how this could actually be done.
And I think that the target goal could be, and I'm not saying it's going to be done, but I'm saying that there are people looking at this.
What if a weapon system could be developed that could, say, target mission-critical materials and vehicles, could disable a tank or disable a truck or maybe even bring an aircraft down?
Because you could target specific chemistries within that structure and then dissolve them on the spot using some kind of nano device, if you will, or a nanite system.
The more complex the system, the more fragile it becomes.
That's exactly right.
And so imagine now, especially organic materials, the rubbers and the plastics and all the special materials for the gaskets and all that kind of stuff.
Of course.
If you let loose the right kind of sort of quasi-viral component-like nanodevices, I'll just throw it out as a word, that could instantaneously begin to dissolve these or break these things down to the point where they rupture or fail, yes, that would be exactly the target goal.
The problem with this idea, and I'm sure many people are thinking, is, well, wait a second, that might sound good for a theoretical battlefield concept, but what other stuff sort of gets loose or just...
Exactly right.
And this is precisely where I have had some particularly heated discussions saying this is not an area we want to be going in.
But, you know, I mean, what can I say?
I'm just one voice amongst many.
But that is an area where I think if there was...
However, elsewhere in the world, maybe like in China, for instance, where they don't really have environmental regulations or health or safety codes or any of this stuff at all, not that we would recognize them anyway, they don't have limitations, if I use that word kind of carefully, on how they judge the efficacy of these concepts.
And in fact, you know, I live right just down the street from the University of California in Berkeley, and I can tell you just from personal knowledge, I would say probably 15% of the population there, at least, if not more, is from Asia.
And the vast majority of these students are in chemistry, physics, and sort of different tangential areas of nanotechnology.
And if you look at the publications of papers, if you look at the technical documents that come out of the various trade journals and scientific journals, an ever-increasing number are coming right out of China, or certainly out of Chinese nationals who, of course, will go back to China once they finish their education here.
And this is exactly where they're going.
They see this.
Now, China, for a lot of different, we could spend hours talking about China, but I mean, they clearly are the most aggressive industrialization ramp up in history that we know of.
And clearly, they see nanotechnology as their pathway to getting into, let's say, alternative energy, different kinds of manufacturing domains, you know, etc.
I mean, they see it as a commercial venture, obviously, but I have no doubt there's a military side to this.
Well, there's a military side to it, and there's also a private sector side that's not going to be nearly as careful as we are, and I'm not convinced we're that careful.
Okay, well, this is more of a nanobiology world, but the two sort of overlap.
And proteomic targeting, this is one of those interesting examples where it could be a spectacular medical breakthrough.
It could be a horrible weapon.
It both come at the same time.
So here's how this really works.
And in fact, oddly enough, just to give you some background, I spoke with Dr. Ken Alibeck, who I think you've had in your show before.
He was the Supreme Director of Bioweapon Development for the Soviet Union before he defected in 94.
And he wrote a book called Biohazard, which goes into great detail about the Soviet program at the time.
But to kind of give a background, the original theme of biowarfare was to create horrible microbes that could do awful things, basically by modifying existing microbes that would be released into a general population.
Proteomic targeting says that you make a much more selective microorganism that goes for specific genetic traits.
Like a racial trait, people of a certain racial proclivity.
You could key on anything that could be genetically mapped could be theoretically targeted by the right kind of designer.
I'll call it a quasiviral component for a better choice of words.
And a virus, just to let the audience kind of get a picture of this, what a virus does really, like a hand to a glove, it has a proteomic surface.
It's like a chemical coating that specifically matches, because of the RNA structure involved, with the exact kind of cell that you're looking for.
Now, the reason this is interesting is because in medicine, for instance, the real problem with today's medicine, for the most part, is that you have to put into the bloodstream or you put into the body a compound that hopefully will correct some kind of physiological problem.
Usually, though, the end result of that is it causes other problems that you either have to correct for more drugs to counteract the results of the first drugs and so on.
With proteomic targeting, you could very precisely say just go to that one kind of cell and, in fact, go into that cell and only affect one part of the cell and then do something that's interesting.
This is a huge medical breakthrough.
This could completely revolutionize healthcare as we know it to be.
But the flip side is if you weaponize this and you said, I don't like people of, I don't know, Arab descent or African origin or something, whatever.
I mean, you could just pick a racial proclivity that you don't like and then look for those genetic markers.
Yes, it could be really, really bad.
And the really awful part is microbes, especially viruses, tend to mutate on their own.
You were talking about unexpected consequences.
Well, this is just the kind of unexpected consequence that could really be the worst of all possible things.
Because if you begin to build these kinds of designer delivery systems where you're hoping to kill off a population and then sort of step in and take over their territory, who's to say that that thing you just hatched wouldn't mutate into something else that you didn't expect?
This could be, you know, the human race could find its ultimate demise rather quickly if a kind of a nanobiological weaponry approach were taken by somebody that we didn't even know were developing it, as an example.
Well, I know that there are Islamic fundamentalists right now who, if they did have something that would target white people or something, you know, white people, they wouldn't hesitate for a second.
What I do know is this, that many people are extremely worried about this.
And so we're trying to come up with remedies, that is, ways to predictively sense or detect things that we don't know exist yet.
This is the problem with biowarfare in general.
It's one thing to have a genetic library of the bad microbes you're hoping to detect and therefore somehow protect against or have some kind of remedy for it.
But if it was an airborne solution that was extremely virulent, it could be weeks or a month or two.
I mean, it could be pretty quick.
And here's one of the other, if you look at epidemiological trends in today's world.
There was a woman named Laurie Garrett who wrote a very good book about this a few years ago, and she went into exhaustive detail to map up precisely the acceleration of epidemic trends as we see them.
And it's a combination of changing climate, changing population densities, people traveling much more than they used to in times past.
In other words, in a previous era, if something broke out, it would sort of stay in that one area for a length of time.
Nowadays, it could be overnight because somebody could be on a plane that wouldn't even know that they had the thing in question.
And the problem is that if you don't know what you're looking for, if there's no genetic signature to say this is the bad microbe and therefore we need to come up with a vaccine or some way to kill it, then you don't know what you're dealing with until it's already too late.
I understand that you want to build protections against these things, but they're going to be so specifically technologically detailed that it's going to be all over by the time we come up.
Or is there some sort of general antibiotic for this sort of thing that you can do?
Look, I'm not a specialist, by the way, in biopathogens from this perspective.
That's not my background.
But I will say this much.
One thing that might be interesting to your audience, and in fact, George Norrie has made this point several times, I find it extremely interesting that over the past couple, three years, a number of microbiologists and people who specialize in precisely this area of science have all been killed in kind of strange ways.
I'm not a conspiracy guy, but I say looking at this from the service, I go, hmm, this is interesting.
And if one were to take this a step further and say, well, why would somebody be organizing the murder or disposing of all these specialists, it would be with this kind of objective in mind, in my opinion.
Concern about this, or more importantly, the flip side is if somebody were planning something that is a release of something horrible, the first step would be to remove those people who could invent an antidote.
Well, of course, whenever a microbiologist or somebody in one of these fields is in some strange way leaving this earth, it's widely flashed around the internet.
So I'm not sure if it's a disproportionate number of people who are coming to disagreeable ends or not, or whether we just hear about it a lot on the Internet.
We keep coming upon these incredible things that can either save us or kill us.
And we keep having these choices.
Well, nanotechnology is the newest in this category of things that may save us or kill us.
At the moment, we're sort of talking about the dark side.
Now, that's perhaps not something we should spend a whole lot of time on.
It is a very, very dark side.
I'm sure you'll see movies made and all the rest about the dark side.
The upside is very, very optimistic.
mean it could do incredible things for mankind and we're going to talk about those too so All right, in a few moments, I'm going to invite you all to ask questions of Charles Ossman.
That's one good way to slow him down, is to let you all ask him specific questions.
This is a really fascinating topic because it's now.
Nanotechnology is breaking out all over the place, and it's for real.
It's not science fiction.
Some aspects of it perhaps are, but it's really underway.
I mean, it's not just written about, thought about, imagined.
It's actually underway right now, and it may change our world if it doesn't destroy it.
Well, this is the way of things, and you had it exactly right with your previous comment.
This is just another step in our potential evolution.
But we have to somehow, and this may be impossible, but in my way of looking at it, we need to have a kind of a spiritual evolution in sync with our technical evolution.
This may be a challenge that is seen in many other worlds, and we're just one of many worlds that goes through this trial and error process.
And in fact, if you want to see a good example of how bad things can go, just try visiting Chernobyl because I have friends that actually have been to the Ukraine and they've gone there for that very reason.
Chernobyl is a kind of a very unfortunate but very viable sort of a test bed, like a Petri just to show what can happen when a lot of nuclear waste suddenly gets dumped into the water table.
Yeah, yeah, it's a good question because it's very complicated.
The politics is very complicated, and I'm not qualified to go into detail about Ukrainian politics, but there's a lot of concern about panic and about the Ukrainian economy has had a really tough time, and so the last thing they want to do is broadcast how serious the circumstance really is because they've tried to attract investment.
Can it also repair a little bit further, if I may?
I actually testified to the FDA last year on exactly this topic, and what I testified about was the following.
And hopefully I can answer the question directly, but here's what I'm leading up to.
In current regulatory or compliancy codes, as the FDA dictates, there's two very distinct but separate areas of medicine.
One is to do with chemistry, that is drugs, which you inoculate to hopefully change a condition.
The other is machines or devices.
Where now technology comes in, it's sort of combining the two.
We're now looking at very specifically sort of molecule-sized things, like little machines almost, that really can go in and, in fact, correct for a situation before it even happens.
I'm curious, Charles, if such a thing, a little machine, existed, would that little machine be classified as a pharmaceutical, or would it be classified?
Well, I'm going to steer you towards one area of chemistry that might be sort of interesting.
There's something called dendromers, and these are large molecules which look like a large branching structure.
That's why they're called dendromers.
But the reason they're interesting is because they can be packed up with lots of other materials inside them.
They have an unbelievable capacity for holding other materials.
And yet, because of the chemistry involved, they're biologically friendly.
So they look like a protein in a way.
And in fact, you can cope the outside with very specific enzymes and protein materials so that you can go after something like an aneurysm or some other targeted region within the body and say, okay, go there and then do something interesting.
So whether it's to open up a cell and stop it like a cancer cell, or to change, say, blood flow at a certain region, or to modify the behavior of some physiological process.
That's exactly what they're doing as we speak.
In fact, there's a couple of companies who are now beginning to produce these dendromer systems as a delivery mechanism for these kinds of problems.
It's not necessarily a mess, but it's a very strange new area of science.
And I'll give you an example.
One of the companies I happen to know of quite well, they went to Australia because Australia said, well, we're not quite so finicky about how we're going to regulate this.
We would like to see if this is even possible.
So as a kind of an end run around the somewhat slower process that we have here, they went to Australia so they could start human trials within about three or four years.
Exactly.
This is what's happening.
In other words, the idea of medicine just being a chemical is quickly being replaced by sort of a combination of chemomechanical, I guess you might say, solutions.
A, commercially, if the biotech world, and I use that word kind of carefully, but this sort of nanobiology, medicine, biotech arena, they sort of all merge together, people are going to start going to where they can find medical solutions.
I'm not going to allow you to put it on the air, but okay.
unidentified
Okay, I won't do that.
I won't put it on the air.
But I will say this.
Seems like there seems to be a heavy proclivity for the ACE virus to affect black people other than other races because we are no more promiscuous than anybody else.
And it seems to have been, according to this website, seems to have been manufactured to affect a particular race.
And there's a person named Roulette Smith who I've known for many years.
I met him at Stanford many years ago who's an African person himself.
He's one of the leading specialists in sort of unusual epidemiological situations.
And he's looked at AIDS, and he's also looked at prions very carefully.
Now, whether AIDS was a manufactured virus specifically could be a debate, but it did somehow get from monkeys, which is where it was originally thought to have originated, and into the human population.
And there were a lot of people who kind of theorized that going back about 20 years or so, there were a number of countries, U.S., France, Russia, you name it, who were kind of tinkering with biowarfare possibilities.
West of the Rockies, you're on the air with Charles Osman.
unidentified
Hello.
Hi, Art.
Hi, Charles.
This is Lori.
How are you?
Okay.
I guess you guys kind of covered my question a couple callers ago, but I just going back to the positive biological implications of this.
It was explained to me that it's like people are working on microscopic robot type things that can be introduced into the body almost as an army to fight cancer cells.
It's getting fuzzy because, you know, define life.
Well, this is not such an easy thing to do.
People like Craig Ventner, for instance, can invent life on the fly just as a program, as a software routine.
So, I mean, we are at the - let me try a different approach.
This may be a little bit far out, but forgive me.
If one looks at what, you know, insurance companies, for instance, talk about acts of God, you know, weather, natural cause of death, that kind of thing.
Well, the acts of God are becoming ever further and further away from what we used to define as something belonging to out there, because now we can synthetically contrive these things at will.
And contriving new life forms is becoming a roach kind of science.
So, you know, define life.
So the theory is, if we can sort of come up with a quasi-life form-like thing, I'll just put it that way, that can interact with the body's immune system or in some way interact with other systems within the body to help correct for something, that's kind of where it's going.
Now, how far that will go and in what context, I can only speak from the perspective of the folks I work with here in this country.
Well, the nanotechnology scientists love you, baby.
Right?
Because you're a consumer.
We'll be right back.
I remember, now I could be wrong about this, but I remember I had a, you know, a VIC-20 computer.
Then I had a Commodore 64 and so forth and so on, until today we're up in the 3 gigahertz range someplace or another, 3.6, 3.5, I don't know where we are right now.
I have begun to note that it's slowing down.
It doesn't seem to me that we're making the same kind of leaps in computer speed.
Certainly in storage, we are.
It's getting cheaper and bigger and better.
But in terms of speed, I think we're slowing down.
Now, somebody may call and correct me on that and say it's not true, but it doesn't seem like we're making quite the same doubling leaps that we were making.
So we may be approaching some sort of wall.
And there are many people who believe that nanotechnology may hold a future.
In other words, when it gets too Thin and too hard to do with traditional materials, it may be nanotechnology that makes our next computer.
In fact, a lot of the people who present at my conferences and people I work with in the venture community, this is precisely what they're doing as we speak.
I mean, people like Intel, for instance, have a huge investment stake in their current infrastructure in terms of traditional CMOS manufacturing, but even they get it.
They know quite well that, and let me give you an insight.
It's not so much the loss of physics.
I mean, there's a so-called Moore's Law that says we're going to be doubling computer speed every six months or whatever.
What is relevant, though, is the cost of the manufacturer.
That is, every time you push to a new scale of integration, as we call it, the cost of the FA setup keeps going up exponentially.
And so it's really an economic factor rather than a physics factor.
So what's being done as we speak?
Well, once again, biology comes into the picture quite prominently because we can now use things like viruses to actually move bits of metal around on the surface and essentially grow a circuit as opposed to having to etch one into a piece of silicon.
And I've known the co-founder, Angie Belcher, for many years.
And this is exactly what they're doing.
They're using a biological approach to, in a sense, grow complex circuits.
But let me give you one other insight, if I may, which might help to get a better sense of this.
It's not how fast the machine runs, it's how much in parallel it can operate the real breakthrough.
So there's a realm of computing called reconfigurable computing, and I won't bore with a lot of technical stuff, but the basic idea is think of it like this.
In a way that memory stores data, a reconfigurable platform can temporarily store function.
Now, why is that interesting?
Here's the reason.
Because like in a Pentium, you have to hardwire all the logic into the system.
It's basically software turned into hardware.
But if you go into reconfigurable architectures, now all of a sudden you're not confined by the way the system is wired up.
And this kind of computing has been around for many years.
People like Xilinx and Altera and so forth have been manufacturing silicon chips to do this for quite some time.
The problem, though, is that to make enough gates on a piece of silicon so that you can truly hit this plateau of parallelism that really breaks open this realm of computing has still been kind of expensive.
So if you go to places like Hewlett-Packard, for instance, where they've been working on this very, very hard for a handful of years, they're probably going to be the first company to come out with the kind of nano approach, if you will, to a reconfigurable architecture that happens to use, by the way, organic molecules as the switches.
A sea of gates, where you, by a factor of many words of man or two, have many more gates sort of compressed under the same surface.
And the reason this is a big deal is because, unlike a Pentium or something like it, where even a tiny percentage of gate failure means that the whole device is useless.
In other words, we're beginning to talk about sort of something almost not a machine, something more or at least maybe halfway organic and halfway machine.
Well, actually, there is an entire genre of science called artificial life.
I've been a part of this community for many, many years.
There's actually a conference every year called GECCO, which is the Genetic and Evolutionary Computing Conference, and that's exactly what this is about.
It's about using reconfigurable platforms to, in a sense, mimic life-like processes.
And if I were to go so far as to say in the near future, when you're going to see neural networks and things like this much more commonplace than they have been in the past, the thing that makes that possible is this kind of reconfigurable computing.
So yes, you are right.
The boundary between living and non-living things is becoming ever more diffuse.
And if I may tap back into the bit just before the break with the neural interface, the man with the chip in the brain.
Yes, in fact, that company is called CyberKinetics, and they actually have a website you can go to if you wish.
But the point I was hoping to make was it's not just being able to put a chip in the brain.
The next step is to read the brain's signatures from outside the brain.
And this has been done for years, actually, using something called a superconductive quantum interference device.
That sounds like a mouthful, but it's called SQUID detectors for short.
The problem with the SQUIDS in the past was they had to be cryogenically cooled in liquid helium to make them useful.
And when Wright-Patterson Air Force Base was testing these ideas, probably at the same time the Russians were, you know, you had a device the size of a large trash can full of liquid helium with his pilot strapped beneath it so they could read his thoughts.
Well, technically it sort of worked, but I mean nobody's going to put that into an aircraft.
But you had the idea right that if a pilot could think faster than he could move his hands and feet around, the problem being that the performance of the aircrafts physically exceed the physical ability of the pilot to sustain those kind of g-forces.
So if they could buy a few milliseconds of extra time, or shorten the time, rather, between the responses of a perceived threat and response, that sort of thing, then all of a sudden they buy themselves another half a gee of force exerted on a pilot.
And if you saw the film Brainstorm, there were some technical weaknesses, but the concept was kind of there.
Imagine nanotechnology now creating a new kind of superconductive material that does not require cryogenic cooling, and that's exactly where this is going.
I haven't seen the film, but I can appreciate the concept.
But let me give you one quick snapshot that kind of parallels this.
I was actually part of something called the Ubiquitous Computing Forum a couple of years ago near the Stanford campus.
They have this event every so often.
And one of my friends, Jim Hurd, who runs something called the Nanosinnings Exchange, he was making kind of a joke in a way, but it wasn't that much of a joke.
He said, Well, Charles, at some point, we're going to be able to read people's conscience in real time and tie that to their income stream so that every thought that you make can be referenced to whoever is owed that effort, if you will.
And that'll become the kind of socioeconomic structure of the future.
Well, a bunch of people laughed, but some of them weren't laughing because the technology is sort of halfway there.
I'd just like a little glimpse of that kind of thinking.
As per Nicola Tesla, I think Tesla was right on the mark, and I think that he was horribly mistreated.
His records were seized by the government, and a lot of controversy exists about what he had done or not done.
There's a huge potential miss.
And as a kind of a quick snapshot of that idea, you recall when the space shuttle had the tether experiment, they towed a a large line a couple of miles long behind the space shuttle, and it collected so much electricity, they were astonished.
It was way beyond what they expected.
In fact, the line kind of blew up because it had too much current.
Well, you know, in your own experience with your giant 13-tower array or however many towers you have there, and you were getting all this voltage that you couldn't understand, I think you tapped into something interesting.
And I would just let it hang at that, that there's a lot to be said for this yet to be publicly made available.
Wildcardline, you're on the air with Charles Osman.
unidentified
Hello.
Good evening.
Thanks, Mr. Bell, for another really interesting program.
My question is this.
At the start of the program, there was a comment about tying this to last week's program, which was dealing with the decline of oil production and the impact on society of not cheap energy.
And I've not heard any reference to what kind of energy it takes to do this nanotechnology.
Sure, that's a great question, and I think I might be able to provide an answer.
The theory is that unlike traditional manufacturing systems where you have to do a lot of effort to carve and shape and mold and sort of squeeze into some kind of a usable form, you know, chunks of metal or ceramics or whatever it is, now it takes sort of the other direction.
You're actually getting molecules to assemble themselves into something hopefully useful.
So interestingly enough, the amount of energy it takes to get that kind of a process to work is a tiny fraction of the process that it takes to whittle something down to a smaller size.
So, I mean, it's a good question, but the answer is, in fact, it's remarkably energy efficient.
That's why it's so interesting.
That's why so many people are looking at it as we speak.
Not directly, but certainly in terms of being able to harvest energy from otherwise unharvestable circumstances, I think that's really where the target goal would eventually go.
My question is, with the nanotechnology that he's talking about as far as medical use goes, I'm wondering if sometime down the line whether or not surgeries won't even be possible or even be needed.
In other words, if you look at the cost of health care, not to sound too, you know, sort of, I don't know, economical or financially oriented, but I mean, that's kind of the motivation.
The theory is that right now, surgery is kind of a sloppy process.
And I mean that with great respect to everybody in surgery.
I just came out of surgery myself, as a matter of fact, a few days ago.
But it's kind of a sloppy process.
You probably have to sort of cut things open and dig around and pull out the bad stuff or whatever it is.
I went to dental surgery where that saw my jaw open.
So, I mean, I know this process.
So the point is, obviously, could we want to get at the damaged area or the area to be changed through some kind of means that has to do with not cutting the body open, but simply putting something in the body that can sort of do the repair and then leave again?
And of course, that would be the ultimate target goal.
Now, how close are we to this obviously depends on the kind of surgery and the kind of operation, but certainly people are talking about it.
And a lot of the companies who are kind of migrating this direction, I'm just going to throw a guess out there.
Maybe 10, 12 years, some of that, you might see something along these lines that would begin to appear.
As a matter of fact, Rutgers University has an animation you can download where they show this exact procedure being done as a sort of a nanobiological procedure.
In fact, this is exactly why the FDA is struggling with how to define medicine, because medicine, like I said, will become more of a chemomechanical process.
Now, whether it's like little metal machines or little cutters or something, or whether it's more of a biologically assisted process, that could be a debate.
But certainly that's the ultimate goal.
And clearing plaque of arteries is considered one of the major financially interesting targets of the current genre of pharmaceuticals.
First time caller line, you're on the air with Charles Osman.
Good morning.
unidentified
Thank you very much for taking my call, Art, and thank you for having this wonderful program.
My question relates to, has there been any thought given to utilizing one's own human energy, whether it be electrical or vibrational, to assist with, for example, body temperature regulation in environments in place of consuming fossil fuels?
Well, I'm not sure I can address that question, but I would like to address a sort of a parallel area of interest that I'm personally fascinated by, and that is the use of consciousness as an instrument of influence.
Elizabeth Targ, as you probably know, recently passed away, which is very sad, but she was a medical doctor at a PhD who spent many years of her life researching this exact phenomenon in a very technical kind of way.
She's the daughter of Russell Targ, who's quite well known as well.
The point being that a lot of folks are now beginning to unravel the connection between what I might call biophysical processes and perhaps quantum physical processes.
Do we have the ability to focus our intentionality of a healing instrument?
And the answer is maybe.
There's a lot of evidence to support this concept.
So I'm not sure I want to go as far as saying do we need to not use heat because we can change our own body temperature.
Well, one of her questions, if I heard it correctly, I guess could we use, for example, we know that there are very tiny electrical impulses in the body that are generated and passed on in various ways, nerves and the rest of it to the brain.
Could some of that energy be used to power nanotechnological machines?
Well, in a sense, yes, because even though the amount of current involved is very tiny, if you're working at the nanoscale, the amount of current required is also very tiny.
I heard a show that George did actually about a month ago.
Okay.
And over-the-counter spy equipment is very effective and very advanced.
And I was wondering how that might affect this kind of thing.
But not only that, I mean, I'd like to reference Michael Crichton again by saying sometimes we're so enamored by what we can accomplish, and we just don't think about whether we should or not.
Well, and by that I mean by hackers and by not only by hackers and how that might be involved, but also by nature, be it massive power storms and referencing your show on climate change and all that, and if magnetism might have a part to play in that as well.
The Department of the Army particularly was very interested in mimicking biological behavior in creating kind of like artificial bugs, you know, flying things.
And their earlier versions were like a large dragonfly, so they could fly around, it would have sensors, they would pick up things like biological things, for instance, that we can't, but also have other kinds of detectors.
And here you see Berkeley, there was the RoboFly Project, sort of like a smaller version of this.
Now, it got taken away and sent to Southern California, and I won't necessarily go into where it's gone to.
In the middle of the night, in the darkness, this is Coast to Coast AM.
Charles Osman is here, and we're talking about nanotechnology.
unidentified
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we're talking about nanotechnology, the pluses and minuses, and there's plenty of both, and they're happening right now.
And I wonder if you all get the same sense I do as we talk about this with Charles: that there's an awful lot he knows, and there's an awful lot he, I think, suspects that he doesn't talk about.
so Back now to the Nano World with Charles Ossman, my guest.
Well, maybe not exactly, but the ad you just had on talking about the LED light bulbs, it's a perfect example of how we can improve our energy consumption profile because the next generation of LEDs will be, in a sense, nano-enabled.
I mean, LEDs have come, oh my God, they have come so far in our lifetime, and now they have these versions, as were advertised, that plug into a 110-volt socket.
And the amount of current you use is almost, you almost can't calculate it.
I'm currently studying chemistry and biology, and I plan to enter medical school in 2006.
But in addition to studying for medical school, I want to conduct research one day as well.
I am currently conducting research in nanoscience and nanotechnology and its possible application into biological entities as an undergraduate student.
And I just thought it might be interesting to get Mr. Osman's reaction to the fact that even people as young and inexperienced as undergraduate students are working in this field and working to become experts in this area that y'all have been discussing all night.
In fact, the NNI, the National Nanotechnology Initiative, which in a very tiny way I sort of participated In through the Super Global Futures, if you submitted some of the policy statements, this is exactly where they're going.
They want to, in a very progressive and positive way, influence as many of the major schools as possible to include this in their curriculum.
This is absolutely a government directive, and big universities are getting government support to make this possible.
In other words, students working on this in universities, gosh, I remember an old TV show where a ninth grader built a perfect atomic bomb minus the actual plutonium that would have to be in there.
Otherwise, perfect.
And the comment at the time, kind of comical, was, you know, think what seniors can do.
But the point being, and I'm just trying to hopefully point in a direction here, that if we could use nanotechnology to sort of alleviate a lot of the stress that we are now encountering because of access to energy and also things like food and water, access and climate, and a whole variety of things, which I think could have at least the possibility of being affected in a positive way, then the need for things like aggressive warfare-oriented policies would not be so much prevalent.
charles osman high good morning this is joe in michigan basically i want to shoot out two questions and then catch the answer off the air basically uh...
sounds to me like maybe the uh...
he one thousand from terminator two would be possible and And also, perhaps even a, he's talking about bulletproof suits.
How about an armored suit that gives you super strength flying the whole nine yards straight out of the comic books?
Well, actually, going back to the Super Soldier project at MIT, the whole idea of smart exoskeletons is in fact really on the drawing boards.
That is one of the things they're looking at.
I don't know about flying necessarily, but certainly one that would be ultra-tough, would enhance human strength, would be bio and chemical weapon resistant.
That is genre thinking, yeah, absolutely, that's kind of where things are going.
You know, how far this gets into the area of like the Terminator cyborg stuff.
I suppose in the extreme outer frontier where humans are seen as ever less important in the role of warfare and machines replace them, you know, I mean, yeah, there is a logical path towards that.
I'm not sure I'm even able to comment on how far it would go or not go, but it's within the role of possibility.
Well, I don't know about the paint specifically because I haven't interacted with the company that produces it, but I have interacted with companies who are producing the printed foils or the laminates that are organic material-based solar voltaics.
I was just wondering if there was any possibility that maybe nanotechnology could be used to create some kind of a container for nuclear waste, maybe like a seamless, non-porous- Right.
Well, actually, I have sort of a quasi-answer, and I'll go as follows.
Back in the mid-70s, when Carl Gustav actually came to, he's the king of Sweden, he actually came to Lawrence Laboratory and said, whatever it costs, I'll spend the money, but I want you guys to invent a solution for this, because they were concerned even then, and they were burying their nuclear waste in iron mines at the time.
We said the best solution we have to date was borosilicate glass and making little sort of glass pellets, and they would encapsulize bits and pieces of the spent fuel rods and then put those inside of steel drums.
But even with the borosilicate glass, it still has a degrades over time.
And so we were concerned about could we invent a better material?
Well, theoretically, I think that would be a direction to go.
And I don't know of any projects where that's actually being done, but I think the theory is worthy of consideration, sure.
I mean, it would make a stronger, harder, longer-lasting, self-repairing container, one where we could be certain that a woman in high heels couldn't walk up and kick it and have a nuclear spill.
But yes, the whole idea of having a material that would hold up under the bombardment of nuclear fission over time, that's exactly what you're looking for.
Yes, I'd like to ask about using nanotechnology to make billions of diodes in consistent alignment parallel, which would rectify Johnson noise, the thermal radiostatic, so you'd turn background ambient uniform heat into electricity.
And in fact, if this is the person who I think it is, I would like to invite them to present it at our next conference, because that's exactly the kind of stuff we're looking for.
And if this is the nanodiod array person who has a small company, and I think I saw some information on this earlier, and wants to present at our conference, please send information.
I was wondering, well, geez, nature kind of finds its way all the time.
So I was kind of wondering if even the most minute polar shift or an incredible, like, climactile electrical storm might have an effect on even just one of the little nanobites.
Because I understand that it's going to take millions to basically do what everyone has said it's going to do, and they're always going to be grouped.
So even if one has a flaw, what's going to happen with the rest of them?
Little machines are like one very small, sorry for the choice of words, very narrow aspect of a much wider technical domain of what falls into the category of sort of nanosciences.
So I think a lot of people read the book Prager, kind of think it's a bunch of nanites running around causing harm.
It's not that at all.
Yes, there will be, I think, a segment of the nano-research community who will be looking into controllable nano devices to manufacture certain kinds of materials and that sort of thing.
But this is actually a very small minority of the entire genre of applied nanotechnology.
In fact, I'm glad the color called because I think this is a concern a lot of people have.
The vast majority of nanotechnology related companies and projects have nothing to do at all with nanites or anything like this at all.
It's just a very small segment of the larger population.
And as I was saying earlier, my biggest fear would be in this sort of combined arena of either proteomic targeting and or some kind of selective disassembly experiment that wasn't meant to get out, but somehow it does, or gets smuggled out or something.
That, in my mind, would be the worst of all the possibilities.
I have a story for you, and you'll appreciate this.
In 1976, at Lawrence Laboratory, we changed lead into gold.
I'm not making this up.
This really happened.
However, this is a small caveat.
In order to do this, we had to accelerate, well, it's a long story, but we had to use a combination of a linear accelerator and a cyclotron to pre-accelerate particles so they could sort of smash open the nuclei of the lead atoms to make them into gold.
The problem with that process is that the energy expended was about $30,000 per gram, or roughly there.
However, if one went to a superconductive acceleration platform, which is very much the possibility of today's world, there could come a time where you really could reconstruct elements to suit a desired goal.
And certainly, maybe not so much gold, that's sort of a class by itself, but other materials which are much rarer, specialized metals that are used for all kinds of alloys and so forth, excuse me.
Could there be a way, I mean, right now our only choice is to dig holes in the ground and smell metal.
And that's kind of a damaging process, and it's also very limited.
If you think oil is a problem, wait until we run out of other more precious materials like vanadium or cobalt, et cetera, which is very important for a number of reasons.
So could we, in a sense, fabricate these elements by manipulating the nuclei of atoms?
Yes, we could, if we could get the energy cost down.
Charles, let me ask you kind of an overall question, and I was sort of joking at the bottom of the hour, but it's really not a joke.
I want an absolute honest guess here.
Across the private sector and across the government sector, what percentage of nanotechnology development is public information versus secret information?
Well, actually, there's something to be said for this.
A couple of quick thoughts.
I'm sorry.
CO2 scrubbing is one of many different pathways to figure out a better way to clean out the harmful residue of coal-burning.
Another are interesting ways to use coal, and where now technology comes in really well, as a matter of fact, is in making nanoparticles of coal to make new kinds of cleaner burning fuels.
There's actually a program going on to create sort of coal-generated diesel fuel, which is very interesting indeed.
And there's a much larger arena of projects, actually one in China, which I'm quite familiar with, which is actually trying to perfect a way to grind coal into very perfectly sized nanogranules so that the coal burns extremely cleanly and becomes a much more usable fuel as opposed to how it is now.
Well, I would think that on the sort of dark side, if you want to call it that, the whole HAARP idea, if we could, I want to say this carefully, if one dramatically changed the power density of these transmitters, oh, all kinds of things could happen.
And I mean, HAARP is not the only machine like this.
There's a number of HARPs out there in the world.
The fact that the Russians wanted to offer as a commercial service, the business of changing the storm paths of typhoons, that kind of thing, kind of suggests where that's going.