Chip Proser argues lunar helium-3—abundant in solar wind but blocked by Earth’s magnetosphere—could power the U.S. for a year with just 25 tons ($4B per ton), addressing 2050’s projected 30-terawatt energy demand. He proposes space elevators (carbon nanotubes, $100/kg transport) and lunar solar farms ($300B investment) to slash orbital costs, despite legal hurdles like the Lunar Treaty and skepticism from groups like the Sierra Club. While callers debate decentralized solutions (biodiesel, windmills) and profit motives (Exxon, Bezos), Proser insists Earth’s carrying capacity is just 2 billion, making lunar tech essential to avoid ecological collapse. [Automatically generated summary]
The second hurricane hit, of course, and I think that I'm a little bit of a victim of watching too much of the coverage, and it really does begin to affect you.
I mean, Ramona and myself have watched virtually every second of the coverage of the building of the hurricanes, both of them, and then the damage they have done.
And we've just watched every second of it, you know, going from CNN to Fox to MSNBC to all the different, you know, services that show us what has, you know, become of the area.
And it's not good.
Not good at all.
Headline, Gulf Coast emerges from a battering by Rita.
In fact, for the storm-shattered Gulf Coast, the images were all too familiar.
In fact, one ran into the other, right?
Tiny fishing villages in splinters, refrigerators, coffins bobbing in floodwaters, helicopters, rescue boats making house-to-house searches of residents.
It's all too familiar after New Orleans.
Of course, eight feet more of water in New Orleans in the 9th.
And it's just been a very, very rough year.
I mean, a very challenging year all the way around.
Now, I have a very good friend, virtually a lifelong friend, really, as you well know.
His name is Lynn Whitlake.
And he lived in Lake Charles, Louisiana.
And I called him the night before the hurricane struck land.
And I happened to catch him at quite a dramatic moment.
He was getting stuff up off the floor, you know, equipment off the floor of his home and getting it up as high as he could.
He had his car packed up in his dog ready to go.
And he was trying to decide if he was going to leave or stay.
And I told him, uh-uh, don't stay.
Do not stay.
Do what you've done and get in the car and go.
I said, we've got a house here.
We'll, you know, put you up for as long as you need to be put up.
And so I don't know what he has done.
Communication, of course, to Lake Charles is severed.
And so, Lynn, if you're out there, please get hold of me.
Please call me.
You've got my private home number and you know you've got a place here.
The authorities there are saying they don't want people back yet.
And you can understand why.
There are no services.
There's no good water to drink.
There's no electricity.
There's no service.
The police chief.
Yeah, I know.
The police chief in Lake Charles has been on the various networks, and he's doing a bang-up job.
Lynn was worried about looters.
In fact, on the night I talked to him, he said there were some very suspicious people just going up and down his street.
And he was concerned about looting.
Well, if you are to believe the police chief in Lake Charles, and he looks very, very determined, he said, if I have to, I'll cuff people to my bathroom.
Believe me, you don't want that.
He's real serious.
They've already arrested, I believe, about 13 looters.
And there's a no-tolerance attitude, a severe, strong, no-tolerance attitude.
So Lake Charles, obviously not a place to loot, but that's something Lynn was worried about.
And I said, Lynn, it's my judgment the storm is coming at you.
We had been watching the jog of this storm, and it was reportedly jogging west, but you could see, you could actually see the storm jogging north if you were watching the radar very carefully.
It was obvious that it was moving more to the north.
And I said, I think it's going to get you.
And he agreed, and he was in a panic.
So I hope he made the correct decision and got out.
But in any case, many of you down there, of course, know him as Rob Robin.
He's a weatherman there.
Lynn and I used to chase tornadoes in Amarillo, Texas together, and he went on to become, that was his career.
He loves the weather.
And he was telling me, you know, Art, I feel like I should stay because maybe I can get up with this queen or something if the roof blows off and try and save something.
I said, uh-uh.
Your life, buddy, that's what we're talking about here, is your life.
So you just, you know, you go.
So I hope he got out.
And Lynn, wherever you are, or Rob Robin, if somebody knows him by that name, please have him call the number that I gave him or contact me by email or whatever.
He's got my private home number.
Call me Lynn.
And that's just one story in, well, millions, really.
All those people in Houston who, well, we learned another lesson here, didn't we?
And the lesson is that if you're going to call for a million or two million people to evacuate a city, then you damn well better get gas reserves out on the highways that they're going to use.
And you do have enough time to get that.
So it seems like it's the great lesson of this hurricane.
Fine, call for evacuations because it saves lives.
But prepare for what you're ordering.
And you know people are going to run out of gas when they're, you know, going four miles in nine or ten hours.
They're going to run out of gas.
So the next time this happens, and there will be a next time, by the way, the Atlantic is percolating along right now.
And I know nobody, but nobody wants to hear this, but they're watching several areas of low pressure very carefully in the Atlantic right now.
And it's storm after storm after storm.
In a way, that's what we're going to be talking about tonight, is our environment and what we Might be able to do about it.
Not as in controlling.
By the way, there's a bunch of rumors going on out there, some of them being promulgated by people I'm surprised at.
I do not for one second think that either one of these hurricanes was thrust at us.
Or more to the point that one of these hurricanes was created by our own government.
That sort of thing is starting to go around out there.
And you were telling me you were thinking about sticking around so you could put this queen over your roof or what was left of it if it got torn off.
That's where we left it.
And I said, go.
unidentified
Okay, well, eventually what I did, my best friend came up right after I talked to you, as a matter of fact, and urged me not to play a hero, you know, and at about that time, the final fog moving the projected trajectory even closer to Lake Charles than it had been before, which would have brought it up, and as it indeed happened across the Sabine River area, the border between Texas and Louisiana, I figured, well, that's too close for comfort.
And I decided to take off with my friend to Baton Rouge.
You said there were like 100-foot-plus trees all around your home.
unidentified
Yes, yes.
And one person managed to get through that forest.
And in fact, he had to park his car a third of a mile away on the four-lane road that runs into the residential street that I live on because the trees were just so strewn across the road in every direction, mixed with telephone poles, transformers, and power lines.
Took him a good half hour to get to my house.
And when he did, he found a humongous oak tree that crashed right into the roof of my garage.
Yeah, he's got all this weather equipment, radar, and all kinds of stuff in his house.
Any idea how high the water line got?
I'm sure you asked.
unidentified
Well, certainly, because I only live about five houses from what is known as Contraband Bayou.
And, of course, we were expecting the storm surge to come into Lake Charles.
And it indeed did, but did not reach my house.
My house is quite elevated.
We have kind of a terraced area off the street, filled the street with water, did not, from what he told me, get into the house.
So that will not be an issue.
But the wind issue probably will.
And we don't know exactly how extensive yet I have some more friends expected to go over to the place tomorrow, take a look around, and see what the prospects are for me to return there, you know, and maybe get up on generator power and maybe get back on the air again.
As a matter of fact, you were telling me on the phone that scary night that they were waiting at the radio station for you to give word, you thought, you know, to shut it down and get the hell out.
unidentified
They actually stayed on a little longer after I left and eventually put it on automation, and then it shut itself off, you know, when the storm came in.
That's been on my mind because he was thinking about not leaving so that he could get up there with this screen, which seemed like a poor idea.
Well, so there it is: storm after storm after storm.
Big, bad storms.
Records for the past 35 years, and we've been keeping them for some time, but accurately for 35 years, show that hurricanes have become stronger in recent times, according to a global study.
This fits with mounting evidence, which suggests the big storms, the biggest storms actually, around the world, hurricanes, typhoons, and cyclones, are in fact intensifying.
Some U.S. scientists say that greenhouse warming might be driving the most severe events, like Katrina, though more research is needed to be sure their assessment of hurricane activity is published in the journal Science, a very reliable publication.
The idea that global warming might have an impact makes sense, in theory at least, since tropical storms need warm ocean water to build up strength.
That is their fuel.
The warmer the water, the better the fuel.
But most scientists believe there is currently insufficient evidence to make such claim, partly because of the lack of reliable long-term data.
Now scientists at Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, Georgia, and the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado have analyzed global tropical cyclone statistics since satellite records began.
And Dr. Peter Webster plainly says, quote, I think probably the sea surface temperature increase is a manifestation of global warming.
Now, whether it's man's hand, all the fossil fuels were, you know, burning, or just a plain cyclical event, long ago I decided it's not worth the fight.
Whether it's a natural cycle or man's hand, let's get over it and start to do something about it because it is happening.
In fact, the Earth's magnetic field is fading away.
As a matter of fact, today it is about 10% weaker than when the German mathematician Carl Gauss started keeping tabs on it back in 1845.
And if the trend continues, our field may collapse altogether and then reverse.
Compasses would point south instead of north.
That would take a little adjustment, wouldn't it?
Not surprisingly, Hollywood has already seized on the twist in the natural disaster genre.
Last year, of course, Tinseltown released The Core, actually a very good movie, I thought, in which the collapse of the Earth's magnetic field leads to massive electrical storms, blasts of solar radiation, and birds incapable of navigation.
Now, it was very entertaining, but that is not what they think is going to occur if we get a field reversal.
In fact, the field has reversed quite some number of times in the past.
Of course, not in our lives.
North has always been north, right?
Well, that may change.
Now, I'm going to have to put the following in rumor category because I don't know that it's true.
I have no way of knowing, but Tamara passes on to me reports she's heard of quite a few bird deaths in Toronto.
She says one park in the city was reporting quite a few hundred, if not a few thousand.
Yesterday, there was a report of 30 more on a golf course.
I can't seem to find anything on it, so I'm just passing it on to you, as I am passing it on to all of you.
Something else to worry about.
Like we need something else.
The initial outbreak of what could explode into a bird flu pandemic may affect only a few people, but the world will have, at that point, just a few weeks to contain the deadly virus before it spreads and kills millions.
This is from Reuters.
Chances of containment are very limited because the potentially catastrophic infection may not be detected until it's already spread to several countries like SARS did in 2003, but they're saying SARS was a relatively easily contained disease, and this one will not be.
It will take scientists four to six months to develop a vaccine that protects against the pandemic virus, by which time thousands could have died.
There is little likelihood a vaccine will even reach the country where the pandemic begins.
Now, all of this is a worry that doesn't have a trigger pulled yet.
In other words, the avian virus has killed human beings, but very few.
And as of yet, it is not transmissible through the air, you know, from human to human, but they're worried that it's going to be.
I don't know why they are so fixated on the fact that it's going to be transmissible, that some form of it is going to come along very shortly that is going to be like the flu or maybe even combine with the flu, but they seem absolutely sure that it's not if, but when.
And so this is something you're going to want to keep your eye on.
The contagious H5N1 virus, which thus far has killed 64 in Asian countries since first detected in 03, might not be the one trigger the pandemic, but instead a genetically different strain that could develop that passes between humans.
So there you have it.
They're thinking there's going to be some genetic modification.
Now, there's a million diseases out there, and I don't fully understand medically why they are so concerned about this particular one, why They feel this tiny genetic change that'll make it a disaster for human beings is going to occur in this particular case.
i just have no idea so
As I said, my guest, at the top of the hour, virtually things, what's going on right now, sort of just a warm-up to an event that is going to have us looking to the moon or looking to other planets, certainly looking to space, because we may need that help.
It's going to be an interesting interview at the top of the hour.
In the meantime, on the international line, you are on the air.
And you want to know exactly why this is going on because, you know, like the parakeet down in the mine, if the smaller animals start dying, well, you want to know why.
Let's put it that way.
unidentified
Absolutely.
Yeah.
And as of right now, they're just assuming that they were poisoned.
But until they get the results, we can't really confirm anything.
Whenever you hear of small animals dying in mass like that, you want to know why.
And usually there is a reason.
It's kind of the state of the world right now, though, where something like that has to be examined very quickly.
You want to get it examined very quickly and make sure there is a logical reason that doesn't have bad news, contain bad news for us.
By the way, on the website, I want to point out a picture.
Denise sent this to me during the week.
I thought it was quite good.
Two reasons really to go to the website.
One, my webcam, it says Arts Webcam.
At least it north.
Yeah, there it is.
Arts Webcam.
If you look at that, those are our two latest additions to the house.
In the foreground would be Abby Dos, and behind Abby is Dusty.
Beautiful kittens, both of them.
We're having a blast with them.
Our large cat, Yeti, isn't too wild about them, but nevertheless, I share that photo with you.
And Denise shares a photo on the front page of the website that I think is pretty compelling.
I think it's very compelling.
It's a photo of her departed cat, or that's what she believes it is.
And certainly the photograph itself would seem to show a cat ghost, if you will.
I mean, clearly, that's a cat.
I don't think anybody would argue that.
Moreover, I see a little crinkle through it, so it looks like instead of some Photoshop creation or something, that this is an actual photograph that was scanned, making it all the more impressive.
But that certainly does look like...
I would not argue that.
And I thought it was good enough.
You know, I pass up a lot of these in the course of doing this show, but every now and then one hits me and I go, hmm, you know, that's pretty good.
And you just never know about this sort of thing.
But this is definitely under the category of, hmm, that's pretty good.
Right there on the front page.
And oh, one other thing to promote.
Don't forget, take a stroll by a place called Smeter.net.
On the nights when I'm not here, many times I can be heard on what we call the perump receiver in the evenings.
So if you want to peek into the world of shortwave and you want to hear me chatting with some of my friends, then that can be done through a site called Smeter.net.
That's S M E T E R dot net.
Matter of fact, if you didn't get it right, just look at the picture of my two little kittens and you'll see www.smeter.net right above it.
When it was suggested that the hot water caused the hurricane to grow in strength, he went berserk.
unidentified
Yeah.
He says what causes the hurricanes not to form is if the Nino warms up the upper atmosphere, you got warm on the bottom and warm on the top, and it just can't form.
Well, sir, there seem to be as many theories as there are belly buttons.
So thanks for passing that along, but I'm not surprised.
Now, clearly, in my mind, anyway, the amount of heat in the water clearly, clearly will tell you how vicious a hurricane is going to get, how bad a hurricane is going to get.
And the warmer the water.
In fact, I thought the meteorologist on CNN was very good.
He's the one during the first hurricane who got kind of testy at one of the anchors, and I don't blame him, by the way, and threw the papers on the floor and said, if you'll just let me talk.
He is excellent, really, really good at explaining the scientific dynamics of what's going on with the storm and exactly where the warmer waters are and why the hurricane at one point increased drastically, almost mystically and magically in strength as it went through a very warm portion of water and then why it degraded as it went through the cooler water.
He really had it together all the way through.
Kudos to that guy.
Wildcard line, you're on the air.
unidentified
Art, they discharge that guy in the next couple of days from CNN.
Well, I keep it, but I've noticed I don't take it out.
I actually took The Day After Tomorrow out the other day and watched it.
I have a DVD copy of that.
But Testament is so bad.
By degrees, it's several degrees worse, and it's really depressing.
On the other hand, it's wonderful that they made those movies, because maybe even on the other side of the world, some people who count in the Soviet Union decided they weren't that crazy.
unidentified
Well, one thing that impressed me was the little stand where they were selling batteries like gold.
Mankind had exchanged all we had in megatonnage, and it was the end of the world.
There were several of those made.
And, you know, I think Hollywood did us a favor because, of course, those movies make it around the world.
And I'm sure many of our enemy watched that.
And, you know, back then, at least, the assumption was made that most people were ultimately rational, that they were not suicidal.
They would not push a button that would result in their own death.
I'm not sure that that kind of thinking remains in totality around the world today.
I think there are people Who would indeed push that button at the expense of their lives and their families' lives?
That's the kind of world we live in today.
It was almost easier, wasn't it, in the Cold War, when your enemies were certainly your sworn deadly enemies, but at least you could credit them with not being suicidal.
Well, in fact, a rocket hitting Israel for the first time recently in a very long time, not necessarily the end of the world, thank you, but continuing to point at a very difficult part of the world.
And certainly it's true that while we have our eyes on our domestic problems, which, by the way, is kind of nice for a change, I'm glad to see the country focusing on itself for a change.
You just never know what might kind of pop up elsewhere when you least expect it.
And, you know, last night I had my kids over the weekend and I said, you know, let's go to church, let's pray for Grandpa Soul or whatever.
And, you know, last night I was listening to Coast to Coast, and I'm thinking, recently Sylvia Brown, is that the woman that she talks about the afterlife?
I was thinking, you know, these things that she talked about people coming and telephoning you and leaving signs that they're there with you, you know.
And these things would never happen to me and that sort of thing.
But like about 8 o'clock this morning, there was a ring at my doorbell.
My doorbell is not electronical, and you know, it's one that you have to physically push in.
Well, I've got a timeline for you, and it's less than a minute.
We're coming to the top of the hour.
unidentified
It was 30 years ago that many of the things that you covered that we're experiencing now, such as the weather, et cetera, that I was going through and seeing and things.
It was 26 years ago that I moved to an area that was supposed to be a safety land.
Just something to jot down insofar as a timeline is concerned.
Well, there are many, many people, sir, who are seeing and have seen what we appear to be experiencing right now with the strength of storms, that sort of thing.
In fact, I would urge many of you to go back and look at the predictions made with me by Evelyn Paglini.
Of all the people that we've had on the air here, Evelyn and perhaps one or two others have simply been dead on the market.
Researching several key developments such as global warming and peak oil, we talk a lot about those things here, Chip was moved to come up with some solutions.
Actual solutions to the dire road we're otherwise headed down if we don't start planning accordingly.
He has written and directed a film called Gaia Selene, which illustrates why space exploration is, in his view, crucial to the economic and overall survival of humans on the edge of crisis here on Earth.
Certainly science fiction writers have predicted the future very accurately.
Arthur C. Clarke, for example, the Clark Belt that we now have to thank for geosynchronous satellites that we so depend on for things, by the way, like tracking these monster hurricanes that we've been talking about.
In fact, in my film, I predicted the super hurricanes.
Not that that was a great prediction, but we see two category fives in a row, and we look at the temperature in the Gulf, which is 82 degrees, which is hotter than a lot of swimming pools out here.
Now, I'm kind of sick of human beings engaging in the argument about whether it's man's presence, the burning of fossil fuels, or just some sort of cycle.
Well, the central idea is we've got to stop burning this fossil fuel as soon as possible, because in a number of places we're reaching the tipping point where there's a feedback, a positive feedback loop, and things get out of hand.
But most worrisome to me is the North Pole at the moment, though the South is also worrisome.
But boy, you look at the North over 40 years, which is about how long we've been able to take those kind of photographs, it seems like about, I don't know, what would you say, 40, 50% of the ice is gone?
So the main problem is we've got to find alternate forms of energy.
And right now, fossil fuel is around 85% of our energy.
The big problem that, you know, when I started doing this documentary, I started doing, just to go back a little while, I was a Hollywood screenwriter and I started off writing a science fiction type of thing, high-tech science fiction.
So of course I got offered then to rewrite every, just about every science fiction known to man.
And they were all so dumb that it just got to me.
And I started researching into what really we should be thinking about the next hundred years in near-Earth space rather than in a galaxy far away with pointy years and bad makeup.
Looking into this, you know, I started wanting to do a documentary, just saying technically, why we aren't on the moon, which we all expected to be, and what it would take to get there.
I started filming or videotaping a documentary.
While I was doing it, it all changed because I read a paper by Marty Hoffert and about 30 other of the top scientists who looked at global climate change from a totally technological Point of view.
In other words, forget politics, forget taking congressmen to lunch to try to get them to do something.
Look at it from a purely technological point of view.
What if we decided tomorrow to do this?
What would we need to do?
Their finding was very scary, and they found out that all of our earthly technologies put together would not be able to produce enough energy, primary energy, that we're going to need in 50 years.
And so I started looking for other means to get energy.
So they are, China and India and a lot of Asia, Vietnam, et cetera, everybody's trying to change over from bicycles and rickshaws and things to private cars.
And on a scale, people have to understand the scale, for example, in China is so gigantic that there's no comparison to be made in the U.S. I mean, they're so big with so many people that if they really do achieve everything that we have, maybe that 30 forecast is accurate or even low.
So, you know, we can get cleaner cars, we can put windmills in, we can put more photovoltaics all over the desert and so forth, but we're not going to catch up with the tremendous new demand in energy and in primary energy.
So we're going to have to get it from somewhere.
If we get it from fossil fuels, and if we just go completely ape and burn everything we can, we won't be able to breathe.
I mean, you know, kids are getting asthma now.
Yes.
The coal is putting mercury into the atmosphere.
We can't eat tuna fish.
We can't eat any of the large predators of the sea.
So, you know, in other parts of the world, this is very, very, very serious and getting worse at a rate that what you're saying is we're not going to be able to keep up with it.
We're going to have to have energy from elsewhere.
Just before we move there, Chip, what about oil?
I mean, there's great arguments that go on about how much is left, whether we're at peak oil, getting as much as we're ever going to get right now, whether it's downhill from here.
My take on that is it's taken 4.5 billion years for us to get the oil that we have, and we've used more than, or nearly half, probably more than half, since the Industrial Revolution, so in less than 200 years.
Whether you argue it's going to end next Tuesday or 20 years from now, it's not really relevant.
It's going to end.
It takes an extremely long time to build up oil reserves.
And as we use them, you know, every mile that you drive in your car on oil today is a mile nobody else will ever drive.
There just is no more.
It's a finite resource.
Nobody knows how much is really there.
The Saudis, you know, you cannot trust what they say because they project different things for different political reasons.
People have described the earth as a pincushion and that we've drilled in every possible place.
We've gotten all the low-hanging fruit.
We're resorting to exotic technologies to get the rest of the oil out and so forth.
And no matter whether, you know, it's not like we turn off the tap tomorrow.
As it goes on a downward slope, it gets more and more expensive, which has all kinds of ramifications.
For instance, you know, everybody thinks that, well, if we, we won't be able to drive as much.
Well, just as an experiment, look around the room where you're sitting right now and look at everything.
See if you can find anything that was made totally with human muscle power or animal muscle power.
I'm a very bad case chip, and the answer is clearly no.
Everything I have around me, and I have a lot in the way of electronics, is all silicone and metal and plastics and every form of everything you can imagine that was originally petroleum for the most part.
Selene is the moon goddess from ancient Greek mythology.
So Gaia Selene, I'm trying to get across the idea that we should look at the Earth and Moon as a two-planet system.
You know, not as a dead thing that affects us only in tides and things, but as part of an integral part of where we live, which it's pretty unique, certainly in the solar system, possibly in many solar systems, to have this type of planet, large moon, that close that we could use and we should be using.
He collected a few rocks that are now quite precious, brought them home, and then we packed up and stopped the whole idea of going to the moon and sort of withdrew generally from space to the point where these days we're worried about keeping the space station in orbit.
I mean, that's so we've really, in these years, withdrawn severely from space.
Obviously, you feel that we should be back on the moon and we should be doing things on the moon and that the moon somehow will save the earth.
Once again, Chip Frozer.
And Chip, I think that people, at least a very great number of the people who listen to Coast to Coast AM, they've had enough death, destruction, and predictions of more of the same.
I think that most of us kind of agree we're in rough shape.
Whether you want to look at the oil, the energy, the amount of population coming to the planet, all the climate, all these things that we've detailed, I think the majority of this audience probably agrees.
What they're looking for now is any light at the end of the tunnel.
Any light at all?
Anything positive?
Anything in the form of a solution?
And sure enough, science fiction has detailed many of the things that we now use.
What is it about the moon that might save and be a solution for Earth?
And if you look at it as a new frontier and look at it as analogous to the American frontier, Europe was in terrible trouble.
Europe was overcrowded, polluted, had all kinds of old political forms.
When we developed the new American frontier, first of all, everybody got rich and a new land of opportunity opened up.
The moon is the same place right now.
In fact, we're far ahead because technically we know how to go there and get there and do what we need to do.
We know how to build out lunar bases.
And they say it's not rocket science anymore.
It's just engineering.
We've been there.
And when you look at how we got there 40 years ago with the equivalent of a Dodge Dart and look at the technology you have in your cars today, it's amazing that we haven't been there all along.
What it gives us is hope in a great number of Areas and mainly in natural resources.
When we get off the planet, suddenly all the natural resources of space are open to us.
Very little landed on Earth, and I'll explain because helium-3 is propagated from the Sun.
The Sun is a giant fusion reactor.
And as it fuses, it propagates all kinds of electromagnetic spectrum, plus helium-3 in a solar wind.
Now, when they were looking for developing these reactions, and by the way, the third reaction is helium-3-helium-3 reaction, and that's the one that eventually gives you just water as waste.
So in other words, to have, are we sure that with helium-3 available in quite large quantity, I guess, on the moon, that we will come up with a practical fusion reactor to produce energy here on Earth?
The Moon has neither a magnetosphere or an atmosphere.
So it has washed over the Moon since the beginning of the solar system.
And the moon dust, or the regolith, is what it's called, is a very sharp crystalline structure.
It has been trapped in there to a depth of like eight feet.
And it was going back to the moon rocks.
So Gerald Kuczynski and the other people at the university in doing the research and saying, we believe this fusion is possible.
We don't have a good fuel.
We can't find any helium-3.
Then suddenly they realized that the Apollo astronauts had brought back moon rocks.
So they went down, they flew down to the Johnson Space Center, they walked in, they talked to the scientists about the moon rocks, and they said, you know, do they have any trace of helium-3?
And the big gas planets are made a lot of helium-3.
So eventually we'll be going to the big gas planet and scooping it up for free.
But meanwhile, it's right in our neighborhood at the moon.
And it's held in very loose chemical bonds.
In other words, you can scrape up the helium-3, boil it off using solar-powered ovens, collect it as a liquid, and ship it back to Earth.
Now, for a ton of helium-3, or basically is worth, at the time when I started filming this, with $28 a barrel, it would be worth $4 billion equivalent in oil.
Is it a stable element that is safe to transport, assuming that you mine it, you purify it, or do whatever you're going to do, and you've got helium-3?
I really do, but it's sort of inevitable because our leaders make these decisions for us.
They either foresee a great danger, a fuel crunch, the world in trouble, and they do something about it, or they don't.
And one would think at today's juncture with these giant storms and all the other things that are going wrong, we would be thinking along these lines, Chip, but we don't seem to be.
Any comments on that without getting in political trouble?
Or do we more than ever, though, there's a force working in the other direction.
In other words, with all the troubles that we have here on Earth, including, for example, the cost to rebuild New Orleans, whether or not that's a good idea, the cost to rebuild New Orleans, The cost to rebuild the damage now in western Louisiana, East Texas.
You know, people are going to say, space, the moon, come on, we've got troubles right here at home.
And right now, it's a pretty powerful argument, isn't it?
Not to me, because the UN did research on these climate change-controlled catastrophes.
And their research says that on average, it costs us $60 billion a year for these things like the heat wave in Europe, so forth, growing at a rate of 10%.
Now, that is in my show, which has just got blown out because now we're looking at $200 billion for the first hurricane.
You know, I'm not sure that I agree at all with our Fast Blaster who suggests that somebody told us something like, all these planetary bodies are yours, but stay off the moon, you know, or something similar.
Not that I believe that, mind you, but we have done so very little since we did go to the moon.
It's almost like you could leave something like that.
And I know a lot of people do.
Chip, you're probably not one of them, are you?
You don't suppose we were greeted by somebody who said, don't you come back here now.
And then the military said, well, then we don't have to go there.
Then we had beaten the Russians.
Kennedy was dead.
We were in a tremendously costly war in Vietnam that took everything that we had.
It did.
And the main Russian, who was the father of the Russian space initiative, Korolev, also suddenly died.
Khrushchev was deposed, and the Russians' space initiative went dormant.
So there was no real reason to keep beating the Russians.
We had beaten them, we'd shown the flag, and people basically lost interest, although NASA went on at $13 billion a year for the last 40 years, trying to come up with some other reasons to exist, which they successfully did.
But colonizing the moon and having a base there, a continual base, was seen as too expensive, and there was no real reason to do it at that time.
In fact, there's a very intelligent scientist, David Criswell at the University of Houston, who's been working on the problem for the last 20 years or so, has done all the engineering data and has come up with a very compelling paper, which is included both on my site and in the DVD.
And you're making the case, what, that solar power in orbit in the long run is not economically nor scientifically feasible because things would hit it.
The amount of junk after a while that we'd have up there would be overwhelming to the point that it would make it not practical?
Bucky balls expressed as long carbon tubes put together in a ribbon, and then you send a mechanical climber up and down, adding more ribbons as you go until you can...
So you're not taking a big tank full of fuel, and you're getting power from the ground by hitting it with lasers that are transformed into kinetic energy and drive the mechanical shuttles up and down the elevator.
So using this, you can bring cost to orbit down to something closer to $100 a kilo to orbit.
Now things start getting doable as far as putting a lot of stuff up into space, including people.
I love the idea of a space elevator or a freight elevator in essence to take things up at a very inexpensive price.
But how realistic is it?
I've interviewed people in the nano world and they seem to really feel that not only is it possible, but it's in the near term that we could come up with this substance in the near term.
But this would be a true jack-and-the-beanstalk kind of actual physical elevator all the way through the atmosphere to the other's hide, all the way up potentially to geosync locations and beyond.
Okay, so this elevator would be built from geosynchronous, 22,300 miles or so up, and it would be built down to the Earth, dropping through the atmosphere, dropping through whatever storms might be there, and eventually touching ground.
And being anchored, and then using lasers to power these mechanical devices up and down, adding more layers to it to make it stronger, and sending massive amounts of material up, and bringing things back.
In other words, now we spend a lot of money.
Once a satellite runs out of fuel, it's useless.
It's space junk.
We have to send another one up.
Well, you could go up, grab them, bring them back down, fix them, fill them up with fuel, send them back up again.
Now, just a very few years ago, it was one of those articles that they use as a tag to a newscast or something for a good laugh at the end, ha ha ha space elevator.
Well, that was a very few years ago, and now all of a sudden we're getting very serious about it.
Well, Brad Edwards started out at, I think, Las Sandia Labs, and then went to, got a grant from the NASA NIAC, Special Projects, developed it there, and now he's taking it into the commercial area.
And people are struggling to figure out what type of structure is going to do this.
And my feeling is that when people realize how profitable it could be, in other words, you know, Queen Isabella may have launched the first ship over, but after that it was the Merchant Adventures, the Hudson Bay Company, people who thought that the future was in beaver pelts.
If we built successfully a space elevator from Earth right into geosync orbit, and it now looks like it might be done, what would happen if some damn fool hit it with an airplane?
Do we really know the long-term effects of elevator music on the human brain?
Can you imagine two days of muskrat love?
Music The whole idea of the space elevator is really wonderful in so many ways.
One, because it appears to be actually realistic.
In other words, we're not touting something that can't be.
I've had guest after guest after guest, particularly from the nanoworld, who claim not only is it possible, but we're almost there.
I know it seems incredible to imagine that, but we're almost there.
I guess that's a relative term, but we are almost there.
The nano world is going to produce what's needed to do this whole space elevator thing, literally from 22,300 miles right down to Earth, anchored on Earth, and then an elevator that would go up, transport people and things to orbit and beyond.
So you really, you do feel this is realistic, right, Chip?
Well, NASA has announced that we're going back there for an extended stay.
If you look at the moon, to get into this idea of inhospitable moon, if you look at the moon and you see the dark areas, those are the lunar, the Maria, the lunar seas.
It's not water, it's lava.
There were giant impacts that then filled up with molten lava and solidified.
In the molten lava, there are lava tubes where the lava runs down and then crusts over and then evacuates as the flow diminishes.
These are called rills.
It's what the Apollo astronauts went and discovered.
They find that some of these rills are not collapsed.
In other words, there are complete lava domes and rills which have lava roofs.
You could burrow into them and you have an enclosed environment.
They believe and they've shown, and both Lunar Prospector and the previous mission have shown evidence of water in the craters at the South Pole which never get light.
In other words, the light is going to boil off any water or ice that's there.
And there is also, it's also salted in the regolith very thinly, hydrogen and hydrogen radicals.
So since the moon is 40% oxygen, which is a whole other positive thing, water is good for both breathing, drinking, growing things, and as rocket fuel.
In fact, it's the best chemical rocket fuel known.
So the other thing that the moon does is if you start collecting the oxygen, then you can, again, refuel all your things in orbit without having to go back down the gravity well of Earth.
If I'm the President of the United States, Chip, but I'm not.
Were I, however, and you were trying to talk me, especially when I have domestic expenditures and I have a war going on, I've got a lot of very expensive things going on, actually, Chip.
And you're going to come to me and try to talk me into the kind of money it's going to take to go to the moon and perhaps even establish a full-time presence on the moon.
How are you going to convince me?
Because I've got my jaw locked pretty hard right now in terms of the money I've got to spend for all this stuff we've got going wrong around here.
So project that out in the future and see what you're going to be spending.
Look at going to the moon and bringing back helium-3, projecting back, microwaving back clean solar power everywhere.
Now, problems with the power is you can't store it, you can't transmit it without a cost, but if you microwave it back from the moon or from orbit, it's on time on target.
In other words, you could have a rectenna field in a small village in Africa.
You don't need a grid.
You don't need anything.
You need rectennas.
And it's power right there when you need it.
And you can bounce it off reflectors and get it to anywhere on Earth at any time.
And you don't have to store it, which is the big problem.
Because you're not sending the mass of material, you're sending factories.
In other words, you're sending just the engineering you need to take the in-situ resources, the stuff that's actually on the moon, and build out of that stuff what you need.
In other words, you're not taking silicon or iron up there.
It's there.
You don't need to take it.
So you're just taking the fact, and probably, hopefully, my kid will be one of the kids now training in these video games, these plays night and day, that's going to be running the robotics and building these factories from the Earth because we don't need as many humans as you might think.
You're saying that the kind of technology you're talking about putting on the moon right now, we could do right now, even with the clumsy, expensive rockets we have?
In fact, Alan Binder, who is principal investigator of the Lunar Prospector mission, which was a mission that went for $63 million and returned to profit, which embarrassed NASA, but he suggests that we could have a lunar base in 10 years for $10 billion.
Now, Criswell, who is a proponent of lunar solar power, said that to return lunar solar power and make it profitable, to get it up and profitable and making money, would cost in total $300 billion.
That sounds like an enormous amount until you realize we just lost $200 billion in one hurricane.
Well, when people are doing things like this, many times they're required to put together a business plan.
In other words, can you show me that for that $300 billion or whatever, we're going to end up with something that's going to be profitable in the end, that it's going to make a profit.
I mean, every business model has, at the end of the day, got to show you how it's going to make money.
And he says, not only is it profitable, but it will make a change on the earth comparable to the change that America went through when we got rural electricity.
In other words, all of a sudden, clean solar power will up the gross national product by a tremendous amount.
And I'll leave the exact figures to him.
But it has tremendous effect on everything we do here.
I think that we have an antagonistic view of things now, and we're mired in old arguments.
In other words, we have these scientists and space visionaries who are capable of doing all this and want to do it, and they're tremendously frustrated because for 40 years they thought they were working towards something and they've been frustrated and we haven't been going back.
On the other hand, we have the large corporations and administration who can't see the forest for the trees particularly.
And we have the ecologists who you would think would embrace this, but in my experience do not.
Why not?
All I can tell you is the Sierra Club had a big convention a couple weeks ago.
I offered to go up there and have my documentary available, and the answer I got back was, no, we don't want you there.
All I can think of, and this is just my personal opinion, is that it threatens them because they are doing stuff in a microcosm, and the problem may be bigger than their solutions.
And that may be a threat to them.
I mean, the study that I keep pointing out to, Marty Hofford's study, said the problem is much bigger than people are dealing with.
It's so big that passing a law, taking a congressman to lunch, trying to do something political is not going to have that much effect.
We have to do something technological.
And all I can think of is that the ecological people that have these Sierra clubs and things like that don't want to look at a larger problem and don't want to look at a macro solution rather than a micro solution.
How much more of a technical feat do we need demonstrated to begin to have faith that the private sector will do what the government apparently is unwilling to do?
That's a question that I think, you know, I'm trying to get the word out.
I think if people just realize that there is hope and there is a positive thing to do, it's not a question of demonstrating any technology.
I think when we go there and show that we can be on the moon again and get kids more excited about taking science and being scientists rather than being celebrities, that it will happen.
Now that's going to be, they're looking at it to 2018.
So if you can prove that even with today's rocketry hardware, we can get the kind of hardware on the moon we need with robots or whatever to beam power back to Earth and make a profit, then you're going to be able to sell this idea.
I'm wondering why the giant energy companies, knowing that they're going to run out of product, aren't the ones leading the charge.
Why isn't Bechtel, why isn't Halliburton, why isn't these people who have such a bad rap now, Exxon and so forth, why aren't they looking for alternate energy and why aren't they going there and doing this?
So secondly, I'd like to ask your guest, now that, to put it mildly, I'm having a little trouble in trusting the federal government to provide for our best interest.
I'd like to ask him what he thinks about any sort of decentralized production like biodiesel, windmills, anything a municipality could put together.
From what I have read and from the scientists that I've talked to, you know, they're all valuable in themselves, but again, it's the size of the problem.
Bio is very low efficiency, 1 to 2%, 8% maximum.
All of these things together right now are less than 15% of the total primary energy.
As fossil fuel runs out, it'll grow to a greater percentage, but we'll have less primary power unless we do something else.
So, you know, what I'm saying, if you look at things like hydroelectric, well, all the rivers practically that can be dammed have been dammed.
Some of them we're trying to blow up now to get fish back in them.
You know, you talk about making corn into, you know, ethanol and stuff.
You're using fossil fuel to grow the corn, to plant it, to harvest it.
You know, it's not terribly efficient.
And so the studies that they've done, and they've looked at all the efficiencies of these various things, and they aren't efficient and they can't become, you know, 85% fossil fuel is a tremendous amount to make up.
So you're saying the solution is going to have to be far grander.
There's nothing wrong with these ideas, and they all help in the short term, but you're saying there's going to have to be something on a far grander scale, and I'm prepared to accept that notion.
You know, I think it doesn't matter whether it is us or whether it's a natural cycle that has come upon us.
You know, the fact is it's happening.
If we could just get together and agree on that fact, then we could proceed with something like Chip's talking about.
unidentified
Okay, well, the next thing that we're going to, though, is if, say, we're getting cold fusion and each person has their own portable cold fusion generator, or even that we're microwaving it from the moon in huge amounts, and now everybody's got 10,000, 1,000 times more energy at their disposal, which is great for personal power.
However, the planet is going to, I think we're going to all see the planet significantly warming up when we have a population of 10 billion, and each person has maybe 100 times more energy.
No matter how we get the energy, even if it came from the moon, there's going to be some sort of effect on the environment with all of these billions of people doing these billions of things that people love to do, like barbecuing and driving around and going on vacations and flying in jet aircraft and all the things human beings do.
And what that means is people are, lots of people are hungry, are going to bed hungry.
Lots of people don't have the energy, you know, not personal energy, but primary energy to do anything, to develop.
People live, you know, lots of people live miserable lives because of this.
As we develop, and we see it in the developing countries, we aren't producing as many human beings, and that's a major thing.
And the other thing is it might be wise to have an escape route for the masses of people that we are bringing into the world, because what is our future?
Is our future totally tied to this one little planet?
Or can we go to the moon, to Mars, to other solar systems, and propagate out?
And I believe that that is our destiny if we have the brains and willpower to do it.
Well, there is a certain sense, Chip, that if really too many people are on the planet, eventually if we don't do something about it ourselves, Mother Nature will.
Well, if you look at the Earth as Gaia, as an organism, you might consider us to be an infection.
And it's not the infection that kills, it's the toxins the infection throws off that finally kills the host.
We are now throwing off toxins at an alarming rate, especially those of us in the most developed countries where we are using more energy than people in undeveloped countries.
I just want to get to the other point is as we have energy, you know, the problem with energy is not that it heats up things.
The problem is the atmosphere traps the heat.
In fact, if we had a clean atmosphere, there's many ways to radiate the heat back out into space so that we do have a balance.
And in fact, that's what the ice caps are doing for us.
So we could have clean energy, electric energy, not polluting the atmosphere, not making a cap in the atmosphere that traps everything in.
And we could find easy ways to radiate the excess back into space.
Bottom line, as you make people rich, in quotes, with inexpensive, plentiful energy, they tend to reduce their own numbers, and you come up with zero population growth.
Do you think the $6 billion we now have, all moving into the modern age, is sustainable, Chip?
We know that the population, that since World War II, it's been this tremendous spike, and that matches the spike in pollution, matches the spike in the damage to the environment.
So I suspect that it is too many.
But we certainly don't need people in developed nations with massive families because the kids are going to die because they figure you have 10 kids, three will live till you're an old man and take care of you.
If we're talking about an excursion into space, the moon, and then ultimately beyond, Chip, do you ever consider the possibility that there is an awful lot out there?
And as the movie said, what a great waste of space it would be if they weren't there.
So likely there is life out there, and we might encounter it once we begin to venture forth.
I think that if we are smart enough and evolved enough to get there without destroying ourselves, that maybe we will have graduated from our childhood and be able to meet them on more or less equal terms.
We do know that this next step is uninhabited.
It's not like we're going to America and displacing the natives.
Question being that the moon ecologically, you know, it regulates our tides.
I mean, women's menses.
I mean, I can't tell you how many things the moon regulates.
What do you think about the general balance that the moon gives us as far As all that, and we start interrupting the moon, wouldn't it have some kind of magnetic imbalance in concern with the planet?
The moon is as big as North and South America combined.
You know, we can certainly inhabit it without, you know, we're not going to change the weight of it.
We're not going to, it has no magnetosphere anyway because it's all light material.
It has no iron core.
There's nothing, unless we, you know, we're just as likely to ruin this planet.
We're more likely to ruin this planet than the moon because when we get there, we'll have to be very careful.
We'll have to recycle everything.
It's not like here where we can pollute everything and let our grandchildren worry about it.
When we go to the moon, everything will have to be in balance.
We'll have to recycle everything.
unidentified
And my comment being, I'm just a mechanic's daughter.
I'm not a scientist or anything, but I did learn that combustion engines, when you burn a car for one hour, the air that you consume in one hour burns up the air that a man breathes in a lifetime.
In other words, the combustion engine pulls that oxygen out of the air and it burns oxygen as well as burning the oil.
By the way, Scott McGee in Anchorage, Alaska reminds us both that to go, say, 22,500 miles into space in two days, you would be traveling at 468.75 miles per hour, kind of like just about the same speed as a typical passenger jet.
And if you examine this a little bit, let's see what he's saying here.
Your sick analysis.
In other words, I guess he's saying the number of people on Earth and the fact that you're saying perhaps, oh, I don't know, we're, what, three times what we ought to be, two or three times what's sustainable on Earth right now in terms of the number of people.
And when they do, there are going to be certain consequences.
All right, let's continue.
West of the Rockies, you're on the air with Chip Prozer.
unidentified
Hi, Art.
Hi, Chip.
I want to say, first off, Art, I love your show.
I've listened for years, and I think you're doing a great service for the whole planet.
I'm serious.
Chip, I think you have a great idea.
I'd like to take it one step further and combine what you're doing now with what art has done in the past.
I participated in your consciousness experiment a while back.
I thought it was a great step.
Let's bring that into the real world, to the here and now, and say, let's collectively, as the listeners of this great show, all around the world, let's put together the efforts of this and make it a reality.
Chip, I challenge you, put together a small corporation, just a corporate entity, and make an initial public offering available.
And I am sure that you will be amazed at the number of people that will step forward to make this a reality.
And these are the same people looking towards space and saying there is tremendous amount of money there.
And in fact, I wanted to mention space tourism as well, because there's a person, Patrick Collins, who teaches in Japan, who feels that that is the engine that's going to get everybody into space.
How much breathable, sustainable air do we have left is probably a better question.
There's a lot of air up there.
unidentified
So I've been thinking about this for years now, Art, after 10 years of listening pretty much every night.
I see these big cones going from each country, each wealthy country, up into outer space to their own base, to their own hotels, to their own colonies.
I also see us in the oceans growing our food on the water since that's more surface and putting solar desalination and hydrogen plants around the coastlines of all the continents to pipe in not only hydrogen for fuel, but to get it from solar means out in the ocean and pipe in clean, desalinized water for consumption at the same time.
And unfortunately, the people in current control of the power, the oil companies and the banks, they'll have to have a large investment in such a project for it to even be passed.
Well, if they don't start now, they may be the companies that fall behind.
It may be the Jeff Bezos and Paul Allen's and startup companies that go.
I remember when the Internet came in and everybody is trying, and Hollywood is trying to figure out how to do it, and they had no idea, and they couldn't do it.
And outsiders and people with new ideas did it.
And one of the big problems people feel is that there's a treaty, a lunar treaty, which says you can't own anything on the moon.
And that has to be, it was never ratified, but it's still there on paper.
People have to have the ability to own a piece of property on the moon so that they can develop it.
He's starting, he has precedence, he says, in other land Situations like when they gave the Homestead Act and so forth, and people could go and occupy it and own it.
I've got a couple questions, and you brought up a good point earlier, and that is, you know, why aren't the oil companies investing in this type of thing?
And I guess my first question slash point is, Chip, that, you know, I don't know that I believe that we're actually that close to running out of oil.
I mean, is it impossible to believe that there's another 500 or maybe 1,000 ANWARs out there?
From what I've read, there's a guy named Colin Campbell who used to work for the oil companies and has done a major study, and you can Google him online.
They have found, you know, the oil companies have been very aggressive in searching out new fields and stuff, but in the last few decades, they have cut back.
In fact, they aren't spending the money right now.
I think out-of-the-box thinking is great, and we should go to the moon, and we should have bases, and blah, blah, blah.
But there are two reasons why your scenario might fail.
Number one is it's not that we don't have oil.
There's plenty of oil.
There's plenty of oil to take us probably in the next thousand years.
The problem is it's not cheap enough to take it out.
But if nanotubes can make an elevator ribbon that can go from the Earth to 61,000 miles into space, then surely technology can make nano drills that could drill much deeper than they can right now, and therefore the cost would go down.
I think that's one of the main reasons why oil companies, they know they have an ace in the hole, because if the technology can exist for an elevator, hell, a lot of other stuff could be made to make their drilling even cheaper.
Well, I can imagine, for example, nano-drills, but that's not the question at all.
The question is whether the resource will continue to be there in abundance to drill for economically.
And I think there's an awful lot of evidence to indicate that the answer is no.
East of the Rockies, you're on the air with Chip Prozer.
Hi.
unidentified
Yes.
Hi, Art.
Hi, Chip.
Anyway, I was wondering, maybe this question has already been answered, but the cost of oxygen, because it would take quite a bit of oxygen, I imagine.
That's really what needs to be focused on is really stopping this poisoning from carbon-based fuels, whether it's there or not.
Even if we get it, that's where the Earth has given us the warning.
We've got to look someplace else.
What really surprises me in all of this discussion is that we don't hear on coast to coast, and I listen quite regularly, and incidentally, I will say dittoes to everyone else who gives you such compliments.