Sir Charles Shults III, a space tech expert and former Martin Marietta researcher, explains helium-3 fusion’s moon-mining necessity while detailing orbital solar power satellites—Mitsubishi’s $3B project could replace 30–60 plants with 89% efficient steam turbines or fragile 20% solar cells. He predicts China/India’s $150B Mars-linked oil investment, despite Alberta tar sands already being tapped by Beijing, and dismisses ISS as vibration-prone. Cold fusion breakthroughs via thermoelectric crystals and space elevators (nanotube-based) slashing launch costs to $10/kg contrast with automated warfare risks—UAVs like DP-5X and orbiting debris threats. Microwave transmission’s negligible heat and ozone potential, paired with oil price surges from 1970s-era cracking plant shortages, underscore energy’s geopolitical and technological crossroads. [Automatically generated summary]
In the meantime, I'm taking a lot of time off and, you know, doing things that people who get time off do.
At least I will be shortly, as soon as the summer heat leaves the desert.
Now, I've got a pretty cool announcement coming up for you about a kind of a secret website that I'm going to introduce you to.
So I want you to get a pencil and a paper.
Get ready to write it down.
In the meantime, tonight's webcam photograph, I should let you know that both of the new bells, Tower Bell, our little bird, and Dusty Bell, are both doing swimmingly.
Now, Tower is a little bird that fell out of my, you know, a bird made a cage.
A couple of birds made a, not a cage, but a nest up in my tower at about 80 feet.
And this little run of a bird fell down and was in shock and would have died.
So we rescued it and got a cage.
And now the bird is growing up in a house with four cats, one of which is brand new, Dusty.
Now, Dusty, you see that photograph, that glad box there?
We have spent, I don't know how much on cat toys, but that happens to be Dusty's, by far, Dusty's favorite toy.
Dusty is about to grow out of it.
And you can see that picture taken, I think, day before yesterday.
You can see Dusty has grown to the point where she can barely fit in, but she still wiggles into that box, and it's her favorite toy, and it cost what?
Just about nothing.
Absolutely nothing.
All right, here comes my announcement.
Now, as many of you know, because I have talked about it over the years, I'm an amateur ham radio operator, and I thought as a way to get people interested in amateur radio, something we very much need to do these days, we would introduce you to how it sounds.
So what I did was I took a transceiver and put it at K-N-Y-E, and then I put an antenna about 100 feet up on the tower, and then I took the output of that transceiver and I streamed it on the web so that you can actually listen to the frequency that I operate on during the week.
You know, frequently late at night.
I'm never going to change.
I'm a night owl.
So anyway, I found this wonderful guy named Bob who runs a site called Smeter.net.
Now that is www.the letter S and then meter, M-E-T-E-R dot net.
www.smeter.net.
And Bob takes the output of my stream and then streams it out to the rest of the world.
Now there are about 100 current slots available, or slightly more, and people can actually listen to the frequency that I operate on with a whole group, a whole spectrum of people from there's very interesting people on there, ranging from people who are physicists and ham radio operators as well, to teachers, to school bus drivers, to, you name it.
I mean, there's just, you know, a whole spectrum.
And then there's some bad guys, too.
And so it's a wild, woolly, anything goes kind of frequency, kind of like this one, the one you're listening to right now.
Anyway, I thought I would open it up and give everybody an idea of what Ham Radio sounded like.
Now, Bob runs this wonderful site that streams not just my receiver located here in Perup, Nevada, but several others as well.
And it allows you to sort of listen into the world of shortwave.
And we think in that way, you may sort of build an interest and then eventually want to be on there yourself.
So once again, it is www.s, the letter S, and then meter, M-E-T-E-R dot net, www.smeter.net.
And I'll mention that again as the show continues.
But most nights, most days, matter of fact, actually what we do is we record the period between 8 o'clock at night and 4 o'clock in the morning Pacific time.
Then we play it back twice, covering the 24 hours of the day.
And that can be heard on what's called the Perump receiver.
That one I built down at the radio station, K-N-Y-E-F-M, our alma mater, wonderful little radio station here in Perump, Nevada, on 95.1, plug, plug, plug.
So by all means, you know, pick a time.
And if it's full, just wait.
You'll be able to get in later.
There's only about 100 people going to be able to get in there at any given time.
And I know they're going to get rushed.
Very quickly, oh, I do have another surprise coming up.
In fact, let me read this to you, and we'll cover the news.
JC, how many of you know of the fellow named JC?
I think this is real because I got an email from somebody calling themselves Edna Pringle.
And I don't know who Edna is.
Edna is, it may be JC's biblical partner, I don't know.
But I've had these before, and it reads real.
It says, JC demands his time.
It's been almost 10 years.
That's Y-E-E-R-S, since you let him talk to the audience.
How dareth you?
JC will grant you get that.
JC will grant you one hour to discuss his views on the new revelation, the spelling here, the war on media porn, glonal G-L-O-N-A-L, glonal warming and hell heating up.
The Canadian Declaration of War on American Values, degenerate authors, the truth about George Norrie, evil cats, and the Antichrist will be named.
Do you have the guts, Bell?
See, then there's one more here.
Mr. Bell, we have sent you the phone number.
This is a clamp safe house, whatever in the hell that is.
JC will be down from his mountain compound to take the call.
Do not harass this number.
Do not give it, G.I.B., give it out to telemarketers.
Or even worse, George Norrie or Mike Siegel.
J-C want full honors as guest.
You will play our national anthem.
And darn it, stand up.
Be warned.
Jay-Z says that he's tried to be kind, tried to be nice all these years, softly tried to, oh, please, softly tried to ply you away from sin and destroying America.
Well, Bell, no more Mr. Nice Guy.
Jay-Z knows Jay-Z knows we're going to do this the hard way.
So be ready for spiritual combat.
The gloves come off.
When, Belle, when?
So, uh.
Unless I lost the number, the paper with the number on it.
I got it.
I'll try that here in a minute.
In the news, Sunnis warn against constitutional draft.
Baghdad, Iraq, a day before the deadline for the new constitution.
Sunni Arabs appealed Sunday to the U.S. and UN to prevent Shiites and Kurds from pushing through a draft parliament without their consent.
Warning that if they do, it's only going to worsen the crisis in Iraq.
Leaders of the Sunni, Arab, Shiite, and Kurdish factions planned final talks on Monday, according to the officials of all three of those groups.
Said, one, I'm not optimistic at all.
So we'll see what happens there.
Senator, actually, this is pretty interesting.
A Republican senator that I very, very, very much, I'd frankly have loved to have seen him become president, McCain, is warning that Iraq is starting to look an awful lot like Vietnam.
And I guess we were all wondering when somebody of substance would stand up and say that.
Also, he said that, well, actually, the senator took a trip up to Alaska and came back with the impression that it's melting.
And he says, anyone doubting the effects of human activity on global climate change ought to talk to the people of Alaska and the Yukon, said McCain yesterday.
Fresh from a trip to Barrow, America's northernmost city, the Arizona senator said, anecdotes from Alaskans and residents of the Yukon Territory confirm scientific evidence of global warming.
We are convinced, this is a quote, that the overwhelming scientific evidence indicates that climate change is taking place and human activities play a very large role.
End quote.
That is Senator McCain.
In a moment, if this is real, if Edna Pringle's communique to me is real, JC is just around the corner.
The End It probably has been 10 years since I granted JC the honor of, I don't know, spending an hour or so with the audience.
So it appears to be real.
Guess who, JC?
unidentified
It is I, J.C. Webster III, and you did not introduce me correctly, Mr. Bale.
Okay, well, let's find out exactly what this new revelation is.
What do you mean?
unidentified
God is angry.
That is the new revelation.
He has begun to me to bring forth in the fight against media pornography because, you see, what has happened to our country, God built this nation as his house, and his house has been overrun with media pornographers.
Degenerates, when our founding fathers fled those crazies in Europe because they wanted to get away from their decadent evil ways, they came here and God built a place in the wilderness for them.
about the pornography and i don't want people standing for our theater anymore because you're corrupting her so we have a new if it is And we have a new email, and it's boilingpitsofsewage at yahoo.com.
So you send your filth to the boiling pitsofsewage at yahoo.com, and I will send the new commandment to you.
Global warming is a very important topic to me, so let's hear it.
What exactly...
unidentified
And this is what's happening, Mr. Bell, is the dirtier the souls are getting, the more corrupted they're getting, the more they're being pornographized by the media pornographers, they burn hotter.
They burn hotter in hell.
You see, a good person who does one bad thing and goes to hell doesn't burn as hot as a degenerate that has been degeneratized by the media pornographers.
Their souls are burning hotter and hotter in hell.
So you believe then that the particularly evil souls are burning at an ever hotter rate, causing some of the heat to irradiate around the world into the atmosphere, and that's why it's getting warmer.
unidentified
Heat, the throbbing heat of hell is radiating out, and people can feel it.
And that's why volcanoes are going off.
And that's why the hot spots you're talking about are going off.
And tsunamis and earthquakes and plagues and floods and fires.
It's because those evil, corrupted souls that the devil wants so badly, it's of the filthier the sinner, the hotter the burn.
You really feel all of this comes to you directly from God and not the devil?
unidentified
There you go, revealing your true self.
I am not being influenced by the devil, Mr. Bale.
You are the one.
You are the one creating the intellectual tower of Babel.
Your voice, Jay-Z, has a certain tone to it that we all wonder about.
I want everyone out there in the audience right now to listen to this.
This is the true voice of the man that you have been listening to for these years.
He is the one trying to drag your soul down to Satan so that you will be thrown into the boiling pits of sewage, skinned alive, dipped in salt, and eaten and devoured over and over again.
Because anytime you've got a man who's putting his hands on the backside of another man like that, and what that is, is a simulation of the homosexual consummation.
And the ball, the football represents the birth.
It's the mockery of birth.
It represents the homosexual self, which is then given to the quarterback, who is usually the best-looking one on the team.
And then he takes that.
He takes that homosexual self, and he looks out among the field of other men who will receive and take his homosexuality, and he sends it to him.
And with the intention of taking it into sacred ground, the sacred space of America and the family and values.
And who among you, listening out there right now, cannot imagine that JC was indeed under the influence of something or another?
He sounded rather hyper to me.
How about you?
He's always sounded hyper to me.
And I think that probably he had at least, I don't know, 10 cups of coffee, wouldn't you say?
Something like that?
Who worked at Martin Marietta, Aerospace Division, for about 10 years on weapons systems and computer-based automated test equipment?
He wrote, get this, he wrote the nuclear EMP test software for the Pershing II missile system, worked on the Patriot, the Copperhead Tank Killer, and advanced attack helicopter systems.
Charles has performed research under grant on nuclear fusion, was knighted, and received a long-term grant for his present research in robotics and artificial intelligence.
He has written many technical publications and magazine articles on space, astronomy, the atmosphere, and space resource development.
In addition, Charles has also appeared on several television and radio programs over the years.
He's a very, very bright guy, and he's made some discoveries about Mars.
Actually, you know, the instance in which they have the fusion occurring are still pretty brief, but what they're doing to overcome that is they're going to be firing it very rapidly.
So you will have it being done repetitively, and overall you'll get a large amount of energy on average.
We discovered that there was a definite effect and that fusion did appear to be occurring in the cells.
We were getting a lot more energy out than we were putting in.
However, that has now changed gears.
And, you know, we talked momentarily about sonoluminescence, where they use ultrasound to create fusion through cavitation.
That was studied, but it didn't really seem to go very far.
Recently, a new advance in cold fusion is they're using something called a crystal, a thermoelectric crystal, and it creates extremely intense voltage fields that can confine the protons and make them fuse.
You know, it's interesting because one of the things we've often discussed is orbital solar power.
And it turns out that Mitsubishi Corporation is promoting a scheme to place a microwave satellite in orbit, powered by sunlight, to beam the microwaves down into city areas and to use the beam to power cell phones and laptops and PDAs.
Well, of course, they've looked at the same problems that we've investigated, such as how it will interact with the atmosphere and other things on the ground.
And they've concluded that they can easily get it to pass through the atmosphere and Have almost no effect on the environment, and that only a tuned receiver will pick up any significant amount of the power.
Well, what I wanted to point out, and I think he wasn't truly aware of the amount of energy involved, if you have a piece of, let's say, a steak in the microwave or a piece of meat in the microwave, it would be barbaric to do a steak, but let's say some piece of meat.
You generally get an energy level of about five watts per square centimeter cooking the meat.
There is a thin piece of perforated metal stuck in the glass window of your microwave.
And that little piece of perforated metal blocks the signal, and you don't get cooked.
It takes very little to block that signal.
Of course, you always see the signs that say, you know, users of pacemakers, stay away from the microwave.
But personally, I've never seen anybody have any difficulty.
I've never certainly seen anybody drop dead from having a pacemaker around the microwave.
In fact, you know, I had talked to you about Gene Myers and his efforts to put a system up for his launch system and how we were cooperating about orbital power stations.
And he was speaking in terms of $10 billion for the project over seven years, but that includes the development of the entire launch system.
If you were simply putting up a demonstrator power satellite, you could probably do it for as low as $3 billion if you weren't using reusable hardware.
So we're talking about something that's actually quite doable.
When you consider what it costs to build power plants or gasoline cracking plants to produce fuel, then you're not far off.
In fact, I live in Orlando and Universal is down here, the theme park, and they spent over $3 billion on their expansion just a few years ago.
So if you're looking at $3 billion and you look at a theme park or an orbital power system, you know, the choice is clear if you're trying to make money on energy where you're going to be able to.
I would be very interested to know, for example, how much power an orbital station could collect, and then I'd be also very interested in how much it could actually deliver.
If you had a station, and typically they quote one the size of Manhattan Island, it would collect roughly enough to be equivalent to about 120 large power plants.
And by the time you converted it to electrical power and beamed it to the ground in the full of microwaves, you could collect between 30 and 60 billion watts, depending on your efficiency.
So you could replace between 30 and 60 power plants at the bottom line.
Solar cells, or photovoltaics that convert sunlight directly into electricity, actually are a little delicate and a little expensive to make, and they have a limited lifespan.
They have about a 20% conversion efficiency.
So in my mind, solar cells really wouldn't be your best bet.
If you went to a mechanical system where you actually had steam boilers, collected the sunlight with reflectors and lenses, really, and made steam in space in boilers.
And run it through a turbine.
That's correct.
And you can get about 89% conversion efficiency there.
Not only that, your generators can use some of the new generations of supermagnets, which are extremely lightweight, and get very good efficiencies out of them.
So a lot of your mass of copper and iron can be removed by using very intense magnetic fields generated by the new rare earth magnets.
And if you wanted to, you could even go to superconductors, Which could outperform them even further.
So, when you come down to it, I did a mass calculation, and typically, for the mass of material that you'd have to orbit for solar cells, you could get about four times the power for the equivalent mass in generators and turbines.
Well, basically what you would do is you'd put like the same sort of cryogenic insulation you use on Earth.
You'd have a silver reflector on the front that was opaque to their sunlight, and you'd have a reflector on the back that would keep any Earth shine from hitting the thing as well.
And once the things had been chilled down, by letting them be exposed to blackness of space, which is basically about three degrees Kelvin, extremely cold, then they would reach their operating point and remain there.
And where do you think such a beam would come back to Earth?
If you were in charge of such a project and you had to designate a place where you'd bring it back, now, remember, you've got to keep it fairly near an entrance point for the grid, right?
the myers group is working on cutting that way down and he has been working very closely with a number of investors groups from insurance companies and states as well By the way, Bob has put a picture of me.
You notice I've chosen to put my furry little friends up on my web slot, but Bob at smeter.net has put a picture of me up there, front page, taken yesterday.
So another reason to go to www.smeter.net.
S-M-E-T-E-R.net.
And a picture of me taken yesterday by Ramona.
So now, once again, here is Sir Charles.
And again, I don't mean to co-opt this interview into energy, but I'm telling you, my friends and I on Short Wave, and people everywhere are talking about the price of gasoline.
It's leading a lot of the news stories.
The barrel of oil keeps going up every day.
It's getting a little frightening.
And you're saying that economically, technically, this idea of putting a power collector in space is viable.
Now, we all know the launch costs are high.
And I want to ask you about something that when I, well, when I heard about it, I laughed, and a lot of people did, this space elevator thing.
The idea of creating an elevator into space, into a geosynchronous point which is, what, 22,300 miles up?
Well, actually, the materials are now being made and experimented with that will make it all possible.
Basically, it's a new type of carbon called nanofibers or nanotubes.
And this material is so strong that a length of it that was not tapered, just like a standard rope, a length of it 3,400 kilometers long could support its own weight.
To give you a comparison, if you had a sisal fiber rope, which is standard rope, it could support a length of itself about 6 kilometers long.
And polyethylene rope, the plastic, could support about 18 kilometers of itself.
Actually, you'd start from orbit because you'd put a factory or a manufacturing facility and an assembly plant up in orbit, and then you would start building the cable and extending it toward the ground.
And if you just manufactured four or five kilometers a day, well, in no time at all, the thing would be scraping on the ground.
And then you'd anchor it down, and you'd send up your first cable car.
Okay, actually, it's much simpler than people might imagine.
It's actually in orbit.
So the hub of this whole assembly is in orbit, just as any satellite would be.
And if we place it in orbit above the equator at the geostationary point, and that is, as you said, 22,300 miles up, then it would not move with relation to the ground.
And so as you start extending the cable, one length of cable would go downward toward the Earth, another length would go outward, holding a counterweight.
So between the two, the tensions would remain equal, and it would not move.
But you probably would see it as being a light color unless something was changed in the technology.
They plan on coating it with a thin layer of metal so that oxygen erosion will not eat the cable.
talking about the ability to lift twenty times at a time and atmospheric troubles like hurricanes and things like that would with it Well, consider that this cable, like a guitar string, would have a resonant frequency, but its resonant frequency would be about 7.2 hours.
And that way you can grab it with a pair of rollers and run up and down it, and you have a lot more surface tension or surface area to contact it, so you can't slip.
Actually, if you're not orbiting the Earth in a rocket, if you were to stand stationary over the Earth, you'd find that you'd still fall toward the ground, but the force of gravity gets weaker as you leave the surface.
So as you go up the cable, you don't have to worry about orbital motion because you're suspended on a solid object.
So if something like that existed, I suppose then that the solar station you talk about and Resupply and all the rest of it working on it would all be a piece of cake.
It's just been such an interesting place, and there were so many things I learned as a kid about the solar system that just kept me wanting to learn.
And in technology, particularly in aerospace and in science, the more things you learn, the more tools you have in your arsenal to solve problems with.
And it just sort of naturally was an outgrowth for me.
Being in aerospace, everything you learn about space in general tends to have a relationship to what you're doing.
So Mars has always been a fascinating place to me.
It must have undergone ice ages as well as our world.
And so at this point, the areas that the two rovers are looking at presently, Gusev Crater and Meridiani Planum, were both estimated to be at least a meter deep in water.
They're about the same elevation.
And Mars doesn't have its continents moving around.
There's no tectonic activity.
So we know the altitudes of those areas must have remained constant for many millions of years, possibly billions.
So the sedimentary rocks, and they have admitted there are sedimentary rocks, were formed by water.
So minerals were being eroded in the weather and deposited in this water.
And now as you look at those areas, you see all of these huge polygons and all these spherules.
The water was lost because of its weaker gravity and thin atmosphere, but there's still water underground.
By the way, skipping backward for one second, I've received, I don't know, a lot of emails from people.
And first, they've seemed laughable, Sir Charles, but they said, you know, every time we launch a spacecraft, we lose something.
I mean, it's like, you know, bursting through a balloon or something temporarily, and we lose a little of our own atmosphere or lose something or another.
Well, there's a little bit of material loss, but it is absolutely minuscule.
There's material falling to Earth just as well.
But our atmosphere is being replenished, and this is a very interesting thing that you brought this up, and this is very interesting for people to know.
Volcanoes replenish our atmosphere and our water.
Did you know that the material that comes out of volcanoes is average about 70% water?
You know, I've been looking at the situation with petroleum and China and India, this whole energy picture.
And it turns out that China and India between them have invested, or promised to invest over the next 30 years, a total of $150 billion in the development of new petroleum resources.
And that's from drilling into the ground, processing, pumping, running to the sea, and shipping it home.
Now, half of the world's oil supply resides in Alberta, Canada, of all places, and it's in the form, unfortunately, of tar sands.
That's 1.3 trillion barrels there.
So it's been uneconomical up to now to do anything with it.
Well, I knew as the price went up, all of a sudden, all sorts of things that were not particularly interesting, you know, a dollar or two ago for gas now are.
And will continue to be as it goes up.
I don't know where the breakpoint is, but one of these wonderful things has got to come along before the American economy just, you know, grinds to a halt.
Well, I think a lot of people don't realize that the price of gasoline or the price of oil affects everything in the economy because you have to pay for shipping to get things places, and that takes diesel fuel.
I've heard rumors, Sir Charles, that the environment in China right now, maybe you can confirm this, is much like it was during the 70s oil shortage in the U.S. And that was a pretty severe climate.
Possibly helium-3, but think about all the minerals that nobody claims.
They're right on the surface for anyone who wishes to mine them.
But it also could be a national prestige issue as well.
If you develop the technology to get a spaceship to the moon with people in it safely and return them to Earth, you also have developed a lot of other technologies that other countries will not sell you.
I guess it is not proven to the American people nor the lawmakers that allocate the money for this sort of thing because we don't seem inclined to go back to the moon, do we?
Well, and you know, it all is going to depend on if we start building power stations, the moon would be the best place for the materials, because it would be things we wouldn't have to launch from Earth.
It's economically feasible right now to make most of the power station in the form of mirrors and generators and heat exchangers from lunar materials, then to ship it up from the planet.
And, you know, when I look at it, I realize that most of the people who work with NASA are just like anybody else.
They're just in there doing their job to the best of their abilities.
But clearly, whoever's in charge of the flow of information really doesn't want to share.
They tend to be very tight-lipped about things, and it's things that you don't imagine would have any direct influence.
I don't understand why anybody would be unhappy about revealing the fact that there are fossils on Mars.
And I know you've seen them, and many other people have seen them, and I talked to people in NASA, in the Jet Propulsion Lab, quite often, and every one of them has given me at least some confirmation that my findings are correct.
And some have said, yes, what you found is exactly right.
Not one placed official that could make any official statements for NASA has come forward and said, yes, there were fossils on Mars or there was life on Mars.
So, you know, at this point, we have just an overwhelming amount of data, and it doesn't take a great deal of searching to find things like that organism I just mentioned that's got a five-pointed star on it.
And as anyone who knows anything about minerals or crystals or erosion and biology would tell you, a five-pointed star that is regular like that doesn't form in nature unless it's formed by biological means.
I'm not certain if it really would be in keeping with what they want to do.
Some people have expressed to me that if it was discovered that there was life on Mars, that they would lose funding for the presently planned exploratory mission.
And to me, that's the only thing that I can think of that even comes near a rational explanation.
I was asked if I was interested in attending a conference in October by the Logos Institute.
And at that conference, it was going to be in Bellingham, Washington, they were going to discuss different viewpoints about life in the universe and the religious take on it in particular.
And so I was asked if I was interested in participating, and I said, yes, I'd love to, you know.
And the fellow that I spoke with has actually been a guest on your show before, Dr. Michael Heiser.
I mean, you've produced actual solid evidence that there certainly was life on Mars.
I certainly see it that way.
Now, there are others with other theories.
Richard C. Hoagland is one of them.
And he thinks that there is some great darker matter to all of this, that NASA is well aware of not only life on Mars, but the fact that at one time there was intelligent life on Mars.
Now that we know there's life on Mars as well as on the Earth, or was at least, we're certain of that, it would tell you that there should be life throughout our universe, and there could be billions of worlds with life.
And, you know, intelligence is another question.
We don't know how common intelligence is.
We've only got the examples of humanity on Earth and some other near-misses in the terms of other animals such as chimpanzees and dolphins.
But intelligence on other planets is another question entirely.
I mean, we've got SETI, and some of the SETI officials will frankly tell you if in another, you know, at least 50 years, and I think it could be sooner than that, they don't find something, then, you know, there's a legitimate question there about whether there is something.
And spread spectrum, folks, means that a frequency is hopping around at what would seem like a random rate, making it totally impossible to track the signal and therefore extract any intelligence from it.
And Sir Charles is talking about the fact that actually the signals could be, and it could be, all around us right now, and we simply don't have the key.
Wouldn't that be a reasonable pursuit for some of the computers at SETI?
And Fourier analysis, which is a special type of mathematical analysis dealing with frequencies and time and energy, might be able to tell us whether or not this is the case, but understand that they're only looking at a very narrow band of frequencies and not at these other signals.
But we've got a disadvantage as well.
Our environment around us is very, very noisy.
So it would be next to impossible to sort out what was being generated by our machinery and technology versus what was actually coming from space.
Some of the regulars, and I wasn't going to name names, but I think I'm going to do that now.
Some of the regulars who visit my site are Lockheed Martin Corporation, Boeing, Lear, Virgin, NASA, JPL, Orbital Sciences, Rocketdyne, and Vandenberg Air Force Base, for instance.
I get regular hits from the Department of Defense, and not just in this country, from Canada, the Department of National Defense, D ⁇ D, and the Australian Department of Defense, the Department of Defense Information Systems Center, the National Security Agency, Foreign Technologies Division, Army, Air Force, Navy, Defense Mapping Agencies, Naval Warfare Centers, Army Special Ops Commands.
The Centers for Disease Control, the MyoClinic, Johns Hopkins, and the National Institute of Health each spent roughly a week on my page looking at every single organism that I had posted on my site.
But now there's an interesting byproduct of this.
We had some hits from Berkeley, after which Dr. Seth Szostak, the chief administrator of SETI, published an article warning of the dangers of a Mars sample return.
The Mars sample return mission has been pushed back to 2011.
The obvious point being that organisms might still be there, and do we really wish to bring them back to planet Earth?
And then there's also an interesting reverse of that, Sir Charles.
I've heard that a number of the probes, the early probes, that we sent to Mars, we didn't spend a great deal of contamination time, decontamination time on them.
Well, you know, whenever you try to sterilize an organism, you Also, subject the hardware to the same sort of conditions that can destroy electronics and sensors.
And so they have to be very careful about how they go about the sterilization business.
Early spacecraft typically weren't sterilized very well, and it wasn't just a budgetary matter, but it was also a rather Earth-centric belief that there really wasn't life anywhere and there was no risk.
So we've got a lot of dirty hardware floating around out there.
I think that it's in the presentation of the data.
The fact is, a lot of the stuff is very difficult for people to spot without looking through masses of data.
And on my site, well, we spent a great deal of time finding the most obvious fossils and presenting them and the information about them in a very concise manner.
And you can find everything right there.
If you go to the NASA site, all of the information is there, but you can't find it.
Think about an encyclopedia and the index required for it.
But we had a number of interesting hits just a couple of days ago from the Justice Department, and they were looking at over the State Department as well.
Yes, and you know, it's interesting because the State Department has been looking at whether technology transfer would be involved in, let's say, the orbital power concepts.
And different parts of the government are probably looking at some of this information and some of the other things that I'm doing.
And it's all public knowledge.
And I don't know exactly what they're putting together, but obviously everything they need, they can find right there.
I mean, the fossils are there.
The information on what I'm working on is there.
And I hope they find everything they want.
And I hope even more clearly that I'm telling them, call me.
You know, we've been told for years that Mars is dry.
And on the links that I gave you for the site, there is a picture of a crater that they found on Mars, and it's about 70 degrees north latitude near the North Pole.
So, yes, and it may be spray from a geyser, and it may be actual fog of water droplets.
The rovers leave tracks, and we're told that the erosion on Mars is very slow.
I think it was Dr. Stephen Squires, the principal investigator for the Mir project, who said, we found some craters four to six inches in diameter, and they could be up to 100 million years old.
Well, these little potholes are on the sides of sand dunes, and when you consider there are dust storms and sandstorms and dust devils, it doesn't seem even possibly or remotely possible that a pothole four inches across could last 100 million years.
But now we know that it's impossible.
When the rover opportunity was stuck in that dune for a while, it left its tracks behind it, and then they backed out over the tracks later.
They turned the cameras and the microscopic imager on those tracks.
Now, instead of being clean and sharp and pristine as they were, they were eroded, and they were eroded into the pattern identical to that that raindrops make in sand.
And this happened over the space of one to two weeks.
But more important, if you've ever seen rocks on a sandpile, when the rain falls, the rocks are left on pillars of sand.
Well, for one thing, there is a great deal of material available on Mars in the forms of metals and chemicals and minerals that we cannot easily get to in those quantities on the Earth.
So industrial development and living space would be very easy to manufacture on Mars using the available materials.
Another is it provides a whole biological laboratory for us to study the development of life.
And this is a very important question.
Where do we come from?
Who are we?
Where are we going?
What is life in the universe like?
And how common is it?
And we could discover a lot of that just from looking at Mars.
And, of course, the climate issue, as we discussed earlier, the global warming points.
So there are many things we can learn from Mars.
And anytime you have a place where people can go, if it's possible for them to live there, they'll make a frontier of it and they'll move there.
This is to be expected.
People will be going.
And there's some support from the government, actually, in a small form.
In a recent discussion between Mike Griffin, the new chief administrator of NASA, and Gene Myers, they spoke for a couple of hours on the phone.
One of the things that Mike Griffin told him was that they really supported shuttle-derived launch vehicles.
But he also admitted that he and the president were very keen on turning over the development of low-Earth orbit space to industry and commerce.
So apparently some wheels are getting moving, and they see that because private individuals and small companies can indeed afford to make workable spacecraft, that maybe it's time to begin turning these things over to the small guy.
Now, there's one thing that will help us greatly in space development.
Presently, anything that's launched has to have the approval of the government.
If you live in this country, the government has to approve whatever you launch.
And that's because the government takes responsibility for anything you launch, if it were to hit somebody's city or home or something.
If we did, it would be impossible to have air travel.
Clearly, if you want to have space become a commercial and a viable commercial venture, you have to turn the responsibility for launched vehicles over to the individuals or companies doing the launching.
I'm aware personally, Sir Charles, of some projects underway right now to make cheap launch vehicles, not just the Myers Group, although they're certainly at top of the heap.
You know, I don't know if the Chinese go back to the moon, whether that will cause us to sort of enter another race or not.
I have my doubts.
Even if they were to go to Mars, but if they were to do as you just suggested, oh, yes, I think we'd be embarrassed kind of the way when the Russians put up the first Sputnik and it beeped its way around The world.
Well, I don't know if they're directly working on orbital power in China, but they do know the concept exists.
It has been touted as a solution instead of using hydrocarbon fuels and coal.
I know that Condoleezza Rice and her secretary have been to China, India, and Japan and other nations in an effort to try and sell them on other technologies besides the petroleum industry or the coal industry.
And so far, there have been no takers.
And, you know, you've heard the huge amount of money that China and India are going to be investing in petroleum.
One other area, we're going to go to the phone lines here in the last hour, but I want to ask you about, you and I have talked before about artificial intelligence and about robots and about robots even going to war, for example, in Iraq.
The cover story of the July popular science was exactly that.
I know of at least six unmanned autonomous vehicles that are under development or actual testing that will be used very shortly in warfare.
For instance, they have one called the DP-5X, and it's an 11-foot-long helicopter, and it is unmanned, and it has about a five-and-a-half-hour endurance in flight.
It's mostly sensors and recon hardware right now, and it can also be used as a communications relay, like a satellite.
You hover it over a point, and you use it to relay your communications around.
I don't see why it couldn't carry weapons.
They have another one called Long Gun.
It's about a 12-foot-long craft, and it's an automated missile.
This one you'll like.
It has about 30 hours of flight time.
You send it out after targets, and it locates the targets using infrared and other parts of the spectrum, and it decides on whether it's a target it should hit.
If it finds a target, it will hit it automatically.
Some small of the vehicles, some of the smaller models are in test right now as to whether they're in the field or not.
I know that there are some autonomous vehicles in the field, but I don't know how effective they are at this point.
But they even have one in development that will fit in a backpack, and it's like a hover platform so that the soldiers can carry it out, throw the thing out in the field, and take off with a video camera or whatever.
And I don't think I have any compunction about that.
I mean, war is hell, and war is bad, and war is killing, and if you don't have to have your own people die while at the task, I can't find fault with it.
And if he were to put a sack of BBs in that payload and fire it in the opposite direction that satellites orbit, let's say the geosynchronous orbit, that sack of BBs could spread out and destroy many of the satellites in that orbit and make it uninhabitable for satellites for thousands of years.
So Despite some very dire predictions that were made, thank God the space shuttle returned to Earth safely recently, as you all recall.
However, there was, while they were up there, much consternation about this damage or that damage, and frankly, it seemed like they spent the better part of the mission worrying, justifiably so, I guess, about the damage that might or might not have been done to the spacecraft on launch and the safety of a return.
They really did spend a hell of a lot of time on that.
And I wanted you to comment, Sir Charles.
The space shuttle seems like it's nearing the end of its life.
It really does, one way or the other, grounded yet again, I guess, and, you know, old.
Well, as you know, the Space Island Group has a design for a vehicle that would replace the shuttle easily, and most of the components will be directly from the shuttle manufacturing facilities with minor modifications.
Well, if we're lucky, it will be an outside group and not the government, because typically when you get a situation where you have private industry in competition, they'll make it a lot cheaper.
I mean, imagine if your family car was made by the government instead of Ford Motor Company or Chevy or whoever.
Well, there is time because many systems have already been designed, and even NASA on their own website has a number of vehicles that are derivatives of the shuttle.
And their new administrator, you know, Mike Griffin states he is strongly in support of shuttle-derived vehicles.
And the reason for that is those components are knowns.
They're manufactured now.
There are lines that can be turned on in an instant to start manufacturing them.
And they've been tested, so we know that they're reliable.
But we need to change the heat shielding, the foam on the tanks.
A couple of issues can be resolved that will end any debate about the safety of the system.
And if you're sending things up that never come back to Earth, you don't need to worry about the heat shielding on it.
I don't think we're going to see a completion of the space station.
And at this point, looking at the results of the research done in the station, I really don't see that we're getting our money's worth out of it.
There are a lot of experiments you can't do on the space station.
In fact, there are many experiments that cannot be done on a manned station at all, because human beings and the machines to keep them alive produce a lot of vibrations, and it's a dirty environment.
I want to take some calls, and they certainly are here.
First time caller line, you're on the air with Sir Charles Schultz.
unidentified
Hi.
Hi.
This is Sharon in L.A. Hello, Sharon.
Hi.
Earlier, you stated that it was a fallacy that microwave ovens can bring about negative biological effects.
And I have seen many studies, for example, showing that microwaves that happen to be leaking at eye level cause eye damage.
And they had quite a lot of opportunity to study this in people who worked in fast food places, and they could see where they were standing.
And you also stated that the microwave technology that would be beaming down the equivalent of a quarter of what's produced in a microwave oven, excuse me, would not produce any negative biological effects.
And I would be interested in what references there are to support that statement.
Actually, what I stated was that I'd never seen anybody with a pacemaker die in exposure to a microwave oven.
It's true that a leaky oven can have negative biological effects.
We know that.
It can harm you.
But the figure you quoted, one quarter the density of what's in a microwave oven, actually is incorrect.
What I quoted was one quarter the density of sunlight.
And the microwave oven energy is about 50 times more intense.
So what we would be dealing with in the power beam would be one two hundredth, or just half a percent of the power density of a microwave oven, not one fourth.
Well, you know, the studies that have shown that microwaves in very low doses over a long period of time don't seem to have any effects don't seem to be getting as much airtime as the ones that claim gloom and doom.
I mean, that's the same situation with people saying, oh, I live near a power wire.
Wildcard line, you're on the air with Sir Charles.
Good morning.
unidentified
Yes, good morning, Art, and good morning, Sir Charles.
Well, Art, first a pleasure.
Thank you very much for taking my call.
You're very welcome.
And I'm very fascinated by the space-based microwave because I'm kind of mindful of the pharmaceutical companies who want to hear about that, in that well people don't need drugs, so there's no impetus for them to proceed.
And I'm wondering what kind of an impedance you're finding from industries such as oil as far as developing not only just this, but wind and solar and those kinds of things.
And one other thing, Art, if you wouldn't mind repeating the website for the short wave, I would certainly appreciate that.
Yes, we don't seem to be having any impediments because right now everybody is feeling the cost of generating power.
And people, you know, man on the street, he's going to be very concerned.
And already people are very concerned about the cost of petroleum because of what it's doing at the gas pump, for instance.
And what is it going to do to our power bills when the winter comes and we have to start heating?
I don't see, and I certainly haven't seen, any problems with power companies.
Big oil, as you know, depends on the ability to produce petroleum.
When the costs get this high, it costs more than a barrel to produce four barrels of oil, then they realize they're not going to make as much profit because at some point people are just going to stop paying for it.
They're going to choke on it.
So it is in everybody's best interest, including oil companies, to begin to diversify.
I thought maybe it's just coincidental, but 23 milliwatts is also the optimum operating current for the nation's telecommunications network, the landline network.
Sir Jarles, out of curiosity, though it seemed like an interesting scheme you talked about to supply, I don't know, you know, cell phones and small devices.
Wouldn't it be equally possible and a big problem that this power would be pirated?
But I don't think they're really so much worried about that.
It's possible to use a signal that has a specific frequency that's tuned to a specific filter that would be a little difficult for somebody to duplicate, and that could reduce some of the piracy.
But yes, somebody's going to figure out how to crack it, and somebody's going to be using it.
Well, given the fact that there is a supposedly non-lethal weapon, which we are constantly testing, God knows why, using electromagnetic pulse radiation, I would like to ask both of you whether you know for sure whether or not this is being used on any satellite.
I know it's been referred to, but in sort of a vague way when I've heard about it.
And I'm going to reveal my ignorance in how satellites work by asking whether satellites would always be sort of tuned or set and backed up or working in tandem so that if the people who are testing this out on the populace or using it to control the populace or whatever they're doing are shooting down a beam of this,
can they have a constant beam or would it be that it would come around at certain times in a predictable pattern?
Well, actually, that sort of power would spread out on a small antenna.
You need a large antenna, such as you would have on a power satellite, to make a beam that's going to be dense enough and stay together well enough to reach the ground in one piece.
If you've shown it out of a satellite with a small antenna, the same thing is going to happen that happens with a flashlight.
It'll spread out so much that by the time it reaches the ground, it'll barely be detectable except as a little radio wave signal.
If you imagine that you have one flashlight and you shine it at a distant wall, it spreads out into a very large spot, no matter how you try to focus it, because of the nature of the light waves themselves.
However, even though you can't focus a single one down to a spot, if you had many of them working in concert shining on the same area, then the average power level would go up to a significant level.
So in this case, your beam doesn't seem to spread out.
It is spreading out, but they're overlapped so that they reinforce each other.
Well, now it's interesting because somebody has even suggested that by using tuned microwaves or laser beams, we could use them to break down compounds that affect the ozone before they get to that layer.
Bin Laden just got religious Approval from the clerics to set off a nuclear device.
People wonder why it hasn't happened yet.
He's a very religious man in that religion, and he wanted approval for the American Hiroshima.
Paul Williams says that there's already 20 nuclear weapons planted here.
Whether or not you believe they're here with a border absolutely wide open and with the recent attacks that they've just discovered in London, 40 million radical Muslims in the world ready to do a kamikaze.
That's why we had such a hard time in World War II when a man is willing to give up his own life to kill you.
It's very, very hard to stop.
And our border is wide open.
Why, under God's green earth, is this president committing this country to an American Hiroshima, whether it be nuclear, biological, or chemical, the red carpet is rolled out, and he keeps saying, well, we're taking the war to them.
How under God's green earth do you run strictly an offense with no defense and the red carpet rolled out to come say, come take out America?
I would say don't be so concerned about his permission to do this as any story that would indicate that he actually has come into possession of a nuclear weapon.
Then I would be very concerned because there's always going to be somebody willing to extinguish their own life for the cause and set it off.
There may be one question you could attempt to answer for me.
If there were nuclear weapons in place in the U.S., as some suggest, or there would be one en route to us, do we have sufficient detection equipment in place to know about that?
There is pretty good detection equipment, and you know that most of it ended up in strategic places where they expect things to come through.
Nuclear weapons do have specific signatures, lots of neutrons, for instance.
And neutron detectors aren't really plentiful right now, but there is a big push to make many more of them.
As for the detectors being in place, I would say at this point they probably have a lot more than I'm aware of, and they probably wouldn't say anything about it.
Sometimes the stealth that you use in detecting these things is your strongest ally.
Fiber optics is basically a fiber made of either glass or plastics or other clear materials, and it has two different types of material, an interior material and a cladding material.
And each one has a different rate of allowing light to pass through it.
The index of refraction is different.
So what happens in fiber optics is the light is actually confined to a pathway inside the fiber so that it emerges pretty much as it was when it entered the fiber.
The nanotubes are entirely different materials.
They're made of carbon atoms, and the carbon atoms are put together in a sort of a spiral that forms a tiny tube about one billionth of a meter across, one nanometer in size.
But they can be very long, just as a hair is tiny in size, but very long.
The nanofibers aren't actually related to fiber optics at all.
They're intended to be a very high strength, high tensile strength material and could end up replacing a lot of things in, let's say, bulletproof vests as well as making space elevators.
Wildcard line, you're on the air with Sir Charles.
Hi.
unidentified
Hi, Arthur.
Hi, Sir Charles.
I was curious about the so-called phenomenon of the Cambrian explosion, how all the modern phyla of animals seem to appear all at once without gradually evolving from a common ancestor.
And I'm wondering if this Cambrian explosion might have occurred more slowly on Mars.
And then as the Martian climate became periodically a desert and then wet again and the deserts got longer and longer in duration and time, the cysts got better at handling harsh conditions and then survived an asteroid splash and they got planted here on Earth.
And that's why there's a Cambrian explosion here because the common ancestors occurred on Mars.
And If that's true, then maybe we could still find cysts that could hatch into trilobites on Mars or places where they're still existing in little puddles, and we could get to see living trilobites.
Well, understand that when the Cambrian explosion occurred, and this is a period early in Earth's history, about 500 million years ago, when all of a sudden life became very complex.
There were huge changes in our atmosphere, lots of free oxygen, and small organisms showed up that began becoming all different sorts of life forms.
Now, most of these don't show up in the fossil record because they are such delicate and small objects.
However, enough has shown up to show us that suddenly there was a huge amount of diversity in life on Earth.
Similar processes appear to have occurred on Mars, and whether they occurred more quickly or more slowly is hard to say.
But the thought of an asteroid impact carrying all these organisms from one planet to the other has some problems.
Some bacteria could probably make it very easily, but larger organisms are much more fragile than bacteria, and they stand a far worse chance of surviving such a transfer.
So if organisms were carried from one planet to the other by asteroid or meteor impacts, it probably would be nothing much larger than spores or bacteria.
Why should we be any more concerned about NASA returning a sample from Mars than we are about a Mars rock re-entering our atmosphere, or no, I'm sorry, entering our atmosphere and then coming down and cracking open on the ground and spreading something?
When a Mars rock is removed from the planet, it's typically blasted off the planet by an impact, such as an asteroid or a meteor.
When this happens, the rock is subjected to a great deal of stress and heat.
It has to rip through the atmosphere very rapidly in order to escape from the planet.
And it may be incandescent when that happens.
When it travels through space, it typically takes many millions to tens of millions of years to reach the Earth.
And organisms don't tend to survive for tens of millions of years.
As it is right now, it takes special conditions such as being frozen or stuck in a salt crystal for an organism to last from thousands to millions of years.
So by the time it reaches the Earth, now it's gone through our atmosphere as well.
And it's been pretty thoroughly sterilized and quarantined.
So we don't really have many things to worry about for Martian.
You would certainly be uniquely qualified to answer this, Sir Charles.
If a Martian sample came back after all you've seen and demonstrated on your website about Mars and we had a Martian sample sitting in front of us, would you be in the same room when they opened it?
I am extremely concerned about the possibility of organisms still extant or still living on the Martian surface because it is proven to be wet.
And in fact, you can see proof that it's wet and it's been right under their noses all along.
When you look at Meridiani, the surface of the plain is covered with trillions of identical little fossil spherules and rocks as well.
So the question is, why are all the rocks and spherules on the surface?
Any farmer knows the answer.
If you plow a field and you remove the rocks preparatory to planting and there's a freeze, the next day you come out and there's rocks in the field again.
And this happens because of a process called frost heave.
When there's moisture in the soil and it freezes, ice pillars form and thrust all the rocks to the surface.
Now, if this is true, we should see evidence of that on Mars.
And we do.
Where the heat shield crashed, the soil underneath it that it dug the trench in shows no rocks or spherules underneath it.
So if all the spherules and rocks are on the surface, some process put them there, and it is my theory that frost heaved did it, and it's another confirmation that there's moisture in the soil.
So if you were on a board making a decision about bringing a sample back from Mars, you would urge caution or you would want the project scrapped altogether or what?
And that's about the only thing they can buy into because there's so many companies buying up around the world here that they just can't get their foot in the door anywhere else.
So just letting you know, Sir Charles, they're already up here.
First time call our line, you're on the air with Sir Charles.
Hello.
unidentified
Hello.
I'd like to start this brief conversation here by saying everyone across the planet has heard the common saying of think globally, act locally.
Well, I just wanted to say that I believe it's time.
I also have a question, but I believe it's time for us to start saying think universally, act globally.
And it's time for us to step up.
And one thing that has been the common thread in all the things that Sir Charles talks about is the centralization of everything that has to do with energy.
So we're not able to provide for ourselves.
And my question for you, Sir Charles, is I believe decentralization would help people to be able to contribute and act globally or locally Or, however, you want to say it.
But a question is: there's devices, I'd just like to hear your comment and tell me that this is not possible.
If you take a regenerative solid oxide fuel cell that's taken hydrogen in and is also regenerating some of that hydrogen back out as fuel and then is outputting its heat, which is significant,
to a Stirling engine device, which is a heat engine, which is capable of working on a free piston type system and turning the heat into energy, taking the energy from the solid oxide fuel cell, as well as taking the hydrogen that comes back out from the regenerative fuel cell.
Is it not possible that we have the technology right now, right here on Earth, to deploy to people, just to make it commercially viable and available through just common plastics?
Well, I think the kind of world that you describe cannot be far off, or put another way, had better not be very far off, looking at current conditions.
Sir Charles, it has been a pleasure having you here tonight.