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Aug. 13, 2006 - Art Bell

02:39:51

Coast to Coast AM with Art Bell - Sir Charles Shults III - Nanotech's Dark Side - Robert Bigelow - Aerospace Projects

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	Coming to you live from the Southeast Asian capital city of the Philippines, the land of 7,107 islands, I'm Art Bell, and this is Coast to Coast AM, escorting you through the weekend.
	It is my honor and my privilege to be escorting you through the weekend, and what a weekend it is tonight, particularly so My guest this first hour, we are going to have a guest, is a very old friend of mine now.
	We've collaborated on any number of projects over the years, a few, and I knew what he was doing.
	I was sort of sworn to secrecy for a long time about Robert's project.
	I have compared Robert Bigelow over the years to the older gentleman in the Russian space capsule, you know the one, in contact, the one who issued the famous line, want to take a ride.
	That's Robert to me.
	Robert Bigelow graduated from Arizona State University with a Bachelor of Science degree in Business Admin in 1999.
	In 1999, he founded Bigelow Aerospace.
	BA, if you will, is a general contracting investment research and development company
	that concentrates on achieving economic breakthroughs in the costs, and there are plenty of those,
	associated with the design, development, and construction of habitable space stations,
	space transportation, and launch facilities to the extent that they will be affordable
	for private enterprise use.
	Robert Bigelow is active and a member in various business, scientific, and community organizations.
	He is a member of the UNLV Foundation and an associate member of the Society for Scientific Exploration.
	He has launched a spacecraft.
	We'll tell you all about it when we get back.
	Here's another little quick secret as we bring Robert on.
	Bob Bigelow, just prior, when I was getting ready to come back to the Philippines, I was really in a rush, going to embassies, doing all kinds of preparatory work to get back here to the Philippines.
	And Bob called me up one evening and said, hey Art, how about if I send a helicopter to your house and pick you up and show you Bigelow Aerospace, give you a big tour.
	Well, I was on my way, I think, to the embassy the following day, so I couldn't do it.
	But that's the kind of guy he is.
	That's why he reminds me of the man on the movie Contact.
	I'll always think of him that way.
	And then to follow it up, Bob sent flowers here.
	That was, I don't know, a couple of weeks ago now.
	And they were absolutely spectacular.
	Bob, welcome to the program.
	Hi, Art.
	How are you?
	First of all, thank you.
	Thank you so very much for the flowers.
	We took a photograph of them and put them up on the website.
	I thought for a while, you know, I'll stand in front of the flowers.
	And I thought, no, you know, standing in front of flowers that one guy sent to another just doesn't seem right.
	So I put my wife in front of them and took that photograph and put it up there for the weekend.
	Well, my good friend, we wish you the absolute very best in your new adventure.
	Well, thank you so much.
	And speaking of adventures, yikes!
	You've gone and done it, huh?
	You've launched.
	We are blessed.
	We are extremely, we feel very fortunate that so many things have gone well on this spacecraft.
	And believe me, we have many, a tremendous number, a wide variety of Hardware and software items that could have caused a significant grief.
	And up to this point in time, she's behaving perfectly.
	All right.
	Describe for everybody, and for me too, exactly what it is you've launched, what's in it, and what kind of data you're getting back.
	Well, we have launched one of a series of Pathfinder spacecraft that embodies a lot of the architectures and hardware and software items that we would intend to implement in a full-scale structure.
	None of these kinds of things have been flown before in this manner.
	In this particular case, this expandable system is Wow.
	With respect to where it is right now, I assume it's in low Earth orbit.
	It is.
	to use as a habitational structure.
	And this could be used in low Earth orbit.
	It could be used on a surface of the Moon, on a surface of Mars, or points in between.
	Wow.
	With respect to where it is right now, I assume it's in low Earth orbit.
	It is.
	At the altitude, she's at 342 miles.
	342 miles.
	And what kind of orbit does that put it in?
	I think it's about a 60-61 degree inclination.
	Okay.
	Alright, so it passes over the U.S.
	how frequently?
	In a 24 hour period it will acquire 15 orbits and roughly 100 minutes to circle the Earth.
	And so in a 24-hour period, it's about 15 orbits.
	And it's in an irregular, the parabolic path is an irregular kind of path.
	And so Las Vegas, for example, is where our Mission Control Facility is in North Las Vegas.
	And some passes might be too far to the north or the south.
	And we may miss those passes.
	We have two other antennas under construction, one in Hawaii and one in Fairbanks, Alaska, which should be online in about three or four months.
	Okay, well that'll certainly greatly expand your communication capability with it.
	Indeed it will.
	What is it made out of, Robert?
	This structure is fairly similar to what the Full scale would be, it's not as the shields that we fly, which are the materials that would protect you from radiation harm or from a penetration of the structure by space debris.
	Those shields would be more prodigious on a full scale, let's say, than they are on this scale.
	So we have shielding We start off with a beta cloth exterior for thermal control.
	We follow that with a variety of shielding kinds of layers.
	There is an air barrier membrane that is embraced by a very strong Kevlar type of material and a certain sort of structure that maintains that shape.
	And inside that is a scuff coat that you'd be hard pressed to puncture with a knife,
	the point of a knife.
	And so there are very many layers that if this were full scale, it would be about 16
	inches in thickness.
	I see.
	I see.
	All right.
	I'm curious.
	I know that there's a flying, literally a flying junkyard up there in the low Earth orbit area.
	And I wonder how concerned you all are that something is going to come along at a very high velocity and just slam into it.
	It definitely can.
	We have sufficient protection for small objects that might hit at oblique angles or if If it hits straight on, then that's about 35,000 miles an hour of impact.
	We're going about 17.5.
	And it depends on the size of those objects.
	And there are about 14,000 of those that NORAD tracks from golf ball size and above.
	And any of those would be devastating for both the International Space Station or other structures up there.
	The interesting thing about our shields is that Through a lot of our hypervelocity impact tests, we have demonstrated that those architectures are much more protective than the aluminum structures are to space debris like that.
	Do you know offhand, do you have instrumentation that would tell you if you have yet encountered anything at all?
	Oh, definitely.
	We would know the minute that that happens.
	And our profile is that the spacecraft should fly Our engineers are saying now that it could be as long as 13 years.
	Initially, I was told between three and a half and seven years.
	And so, if all goes well, and it doesn't encounter a... And by the way, the odds of hitting something are very small.
	It's a very large area at that level of altitude, and it's an awful lot of room up there.
	So the odds are, in fact, I think I remember the Mirror Space Station was calibrated to have to suffer a fairly severe hit within once in every 70 years.
	It gives you some idea.
	Of course, we're significantly smaller than the Mirror Space Station.
	Well, sure.
	I guess you have some small biological entities on board?
	We do.
	We flew some Madagascar and some American type of roaches and the Madagascar hissing beetles are extremely durable.
	Unbelievably durable little buggers.
	And then we flew some Mexican jumping beans and just kind of for fun.
	We put other things on board as well.
	Photographs of people, our own staff, and little toys and things that we put into a box so we could watch those float around.
	You've been doing that, I take it?
	We have, and we have our second flight coming up in January, and we are going to be flying a number of other little critters, scorpions and ants and other kinds of things, along with people's photographs and little personal items that they might want to fly.
	My God, that's ambitious, January, huh?
	All of this, of course, ultimately, someday, is headed toward, I think you have visions I don't know, extending your hotel-motel business to space, yes?
	Well, Art, the concept we have is actually to build a generic kind of structure that would be interpreted as a space complex that would be accommodating multiple kinds of uses.
	And so what we might do is say to the MGM Corporation or Hilton Hotels or Harrah's or Richard Branson, Look, we have a facility if you're interested in the hotel business, then we can provide you with that kind of an accommodation along with Mitsubishi wanting to set up a material science lab or perhaps Pfizer wanting to set up a pharmaceutical facility.
	Have you spoken with some of these entities already?
	No, we have not.
	We have not.
	We feel it's premature.
	We think we have a lot of things that we need to demonstrate and we've taken a really important first step that we feel blessed to have achieved thus far and now we're very focused on our second flight in January and keeping our fingers crossed that that is successful.
	My God, this is really exciting.
	I mean, it really is.
	You hear a lot of talk, but here you've gone and actually done it.
	You know, I guess I had my mind on so many other things, Bob, that when I heard that the launch had happened, I went into shock.
	I kind of went into shock for a little while.
	Well, we kind of kept a low profile for the last year and a half, and that was a conscious effort to not to distract ourselves or to prematurely discuss things
	perhaps.
	And of course, Art, you and I have that other commonality, that other interest in UFOs,
	and we know how extraordinarily behind our species is compared to that other phenomena.
	We certainly are.
	Um...
	By the way, what kind of video capability is on board the spacecraft since we're going to touch on that subject?
	And anything external, Bob?
	We have.
	Yes, we do.
	We have 13 cameras on this one, on Genesis 1.
	Seven of those are outside and six are interior.
	All the interior is lit, of course, so that we can have good quality resolution.
	And we've, at our Genesis 2 in January, we will have 18 cameras.
	So we are ramping up.
	The video, of course, is terribly important.
	What kind of quality are you getting, Bob?
	And I ask this because, you know, NASA, of course, has made most of the STS video available, but there have been any number of things during a number of the STS missions that are more than mildly interesting that they caught on camera.
	So I wonder if you have yet caught anything on camera that made you go, what the hell is that?
	Not as yet.
	A long time in which to make these observations.
	We, for the first three weeks or so, the spacecraft was in a slow six-minute roll, tumble, and it was causing us to lose, or to have signals that were interrupted on the north and south airlocks from those antennae.
	And now we've stabilized the spacecraft in over the last week, so we expect to, which is the orientation that we wanted to do, to have a It's a constant signal feed, and with the other antennas coming up on board in Hawaii and Fairbanks, as you know, it's all about the quantity of throughput that you have through the transmission.
	And even though we have captured 1,000 or 1,500 images, a lot of those are internal images.
	And so we are just again starting to understand how to administer the behavior of the spacecraft,
	how to function as a mission control facility.
	We've never been here before.
	We've never done this before.
	And in a short time we will have hopefully two spacecraft that we can monitor simultaneously
	and be able to maybe capture something external to the spacecraft that would be fun to look
	at.
	Well, Bob, how recently did you get the spacecraft oriented properly with respect to the Earth?
	When did you actually get it done?
	We use torsion bars and magnetic attitude control equipment, and we've been using that over the last several, two, three weeks, and finally last week.
	The calibration was correct and accurate, and now we achieved that sometime around last Tuesday or Wednesday.
	Very recent, so that would dramatically increase the quality of the video you're getting back.
	It does, it does.
	At least it prevents the signal from being interrupted, and the pictures are amazingly clear, both external and internal, and now we're getting How are the bugs doing?
	We don't know.
	We don't have an answer on that.
	I've not been given enough data about that.
	Some folks think that they may have not survived.
	Other folks think that they may have.
	We don't have an answer on that.
	I've not been given enough data about that.
	Some folks think that they may have not survived and other folks think that they may have.
	So we kind of have a difference of hope in our organization about them, but we don't know.
	If they are surviving, is there enough nutrition scattered about one way or the other to keep them going?
	Oh, definitely.
	Definitely.
	We supply them with enough nutrients and water to last actually several multi-generations, not just for the one generation of those bugs but if they haven't had a chance
	to produce any offspring it would handle those as well. I suppose
	something like that could ultimately get out of control and you could you could have
	reproducing bugs that would infest the spacecraft entirely. Well they're in
	a closed The spacecraft's avionics systems and other kinds of hardware are, of course, protected from anything that could cause a contamination.
	So all those little critters are in sealed containers.
	They have their own little environment there.
	With respect again to the bugs, if they did not survive, what stage of the mission probably would have done them in?
	Possibly the stage prior to launch, because we had to package a spacecraft up a month before shipping to Russia, and then it sat for a month before launch.
	So actually, and actually it was more than that.
	So in the order of about 70 or 75 days from the time that they were actually packaged into the spacecraft and that payload integration occurred until launch is what they had to endure.
	And launch is no fun in this case either.
	It's an 8G situation, very violent shaking.
	But we tested a lot of these things terrestrially first.
	And they survived that, and they survived a complete vacuum, which was amazing for one little bug, Madagascar hissing beetle survived a two-hour vacuum and then came back to life, which just blew us all away.
	We couldn't believe it.
	Actually survived a vacuum?
	I'm not sure how that's possible.
	We didn't think so either.
	We don't know.
	We don't know.
	That's absolutely amazing, actually.
	Maybe you just learned something new about them.
	I'm told they would inherit the Earth after any sort of nuclear conflict.
	So maybe you've just underscored that whole theory.
	Bob, I know this is leading to a lot more, but it sure is a gigantic first step.
	The fact that you Had to send all of this to Russia to be launched as opposed to being able to launch it here in the good old, or there in the good old USA, I should recall where I am.
	How sad is that for you?
	It's a tremendous story all by itself.
	That was a significant effort and it's also a sad story about the state of our situation here in America.
	It certainly is.
	All right.
	Hold tight, Bob.
	We're going to take a break here at the bottom of the air, and when we get back, we'll talk about exactly that.
	A man wants to launch a spacecraft, and he can't do it from here, or from there, I should say, in America, or anywhere else.
	He has to go to Russia, where the Russians have every bit of that capability, apparently at the drop of a good old U.S.
	dollar.
	From Manila in the Philippines, with Bob Bigelow as my guest, I'm Art Bell.
	From my old stomping grounds in the Las Vegas area, I've got Bob Bigelow on the phone and he is not just talk, the man has gone and done it.
	The spacecraft that he's launched is called Genesis and it swings by about every hundred minutes or so and it is a precursor to what ultimately is going to be accommodations that who knows you or your child may be able to take advantage of and go to space and spend a little time in space looking Well, toward the moon and stars and then, of course, back toward Earth, which that spacecraft right now is doing with cameras.
	We've got several questions associated with that and why she had to launch from Russia instead of the U.S.
	coming up in a moment.
	Once again, Bob Bigelow.
	Bob, Chris in Lakeland, Florida fast-blasts me the following question.
	Art, if Mr. Bigelow does spot a UFO, is he going to release those photographs to the public when it happens?
	Absolutely.
	We would have no motivation not to.
	A lot of our program has to do with trying to connect with the public and we're a grassroots Small organization that's trying to do a variety of things that run against the current of national programs.
	All right.
	I will avoid any questions about NASA and UFOs because I know you're working to some degree with NASA and I don't want to disrupt that relationship in any way.
	With respect to the fact that you had to launch in Russia and could not launch in the USA, is there liable to be any change in that launch structure as the program continues?
	Do you hope there'll be a change or what?
	Oh boy.
	Yeah, we sure do hope there's going to be a change and we're trying to, we have been for some time, trying to keep a foot in that domain in the transportation area and another foot in the destination and so on.
	But we can't fight a two-front war at one time.
	So we have a strategy and we have been doing and will continue to do different things to stimulate domestic uh... transportation uh... abilities and and launch uh... more economical launch abilities but but as as of the moment uh... this country's in a terrible situation for anything that would be remotely economical list just that uh... unless you were launching a a high revenue uh... producing uh... commercial uh... communication uh... satellite
	There probably isn't anything else that would remotely pay for the launch.
	How much difference is there in launch costs, for example, right now between Russia and the U.S.?
	Well, it's not only many times.
	It's not only many times a factor of quite a significant number of times, but it's worse than that.
	It's a matter of availability.
	The menu just isn't there.
	So we don't have the kind of choices in this country of launch vehicles and apparently that's going to shrink even further because of the new partnership that Boeing and Lockheed are consummating and so the expendable launch vehicle family is going to probably reduce even further.
	Remember back a while, a number of years ago when the shuttle was first Under way back in the 80s, it was mandated that the shuttle carry all satellites to launch, and they did away with the expendable launch vehicles, the rockets, and of course the Challenger disaster occurred.
	And they realized, boy, you have to have more than one line in the water to be able to function a space program for a nation, especially communication-wise.
	Well, we're kind of headed back to that same kind of single fault failure position again.
	When you look ahead and beyond the shuttle with respect to America's current space program, are you saddened by what you see?
	In other words, once we're done with the shuttle, which may be earlier than we imagine, is what is coming next viable or just not well thought out?
	We've been very close to the CEV, the Crew Exploration Vehicle and Crew Launch Vehicle program.
	And as you know, those awards are going to be granted in September.
	By September 7th, the companies are going to be nominated as to who wins those awards, whether it's Northrop Grumman or it's Lockheed Martin.
	And as you alluded to, the shuttle program is really on its last legs.
	We only have two out of the five, out of the fleet of five that this country started with.
	We only have the Atlantis and Discovery that are left.
	And yet they've got 16 more missions facing them between now and 010.
	And that's a very dangerous risk that's being played on these machines.
	They're very complicated.
	They have a lot of points of failure.
	And even though they've been refurbished, there are a lot of folks that are not comfortable with that kind of number of flights, 16 flights as a demand.
	So, beyond O-10, this country will not have a transportation system.
	It will cease to exist when the shuttle fleet is finished by O-10.
	Then we will have nothing until at least O-14 if the Crew Exploration Vehicle Program is successful, and a lot of folks think it will not be successful.
	Right.
	And even if it were, the costs are so prodigious that That there is no way that we can forecast and others that we deal with that there's going to be a knockoff of that kind of propulsion system and module that the private sector could ever afford.
	So again, we look to overseas more than likely as to the future.
	Well, that's going to be one hell of a window of opportunity for you, isn't it?
	Well, there's a wild card to that.
	One of the wild cards, at least.
	There might be more than one, but one wild card is what SpaceX might do.
	And over in El Segundo, Elon Musk runs that company.
	He's trying to perfect the Falcon 1, and he's starting to initiate a second launch in a few months, in November.
	And he wants to work his way up to larger launch vehicles.
	Now if he succeeds, he could wind up being this country's answer to competitive launch, expendable launch vehicles, and possibly a transportation system that might be competitive to what Russia and other countries are going to have.
	Are you in close communication with him?
	Well, we are.
	We are the best friend that a launch company can have because we don't go anywhere without them.
	And we are very co-dependent upon transportation for people and robotic autonomous rendezvous and docking systems like the Progress and the Soyuz for cargo.
	We're very much plugged into what's going on in this country and overseas, of course, as well.
	It's a very serious game that we're involved in.
	Yes, it is.
	Robert, I'd like to suggest on behalf of all the amateur radio operators in the world, I've had a million messages on this already in this hour, and that is that on some future flight, you might want to consider putting an amateur radio repeater on board.
	Had anybody brought that up?
	No, no.
	I would like to hear more about that.
	Well, it's a simple, small, weight-efficient little thing that would allow amateur radio operators to communicate worldwide and certainly would bring an incredible amount of attention to your spacecraft.
	So it's just an idea I thought I'd toss out there.
	I am making a note as we speak, and I will bring this up Monday to my folks and see what we might be able to do.
	Bless you.
	We just haven't been able to really get much space.
	Occasionally there's been a little activity on the space station with ham radio, but not all that much, and we'd love to have something up there.
	Anyway, this is as exciting as it gets, Robert, and I can only imagine the amount of excitement You felt coming up toward and then finally seeing the launch go and succeed.
	It just it must have been an amazing moment.
	Do you recall it?
	Oh, yeah.
	I'm walking around saying, is this us?
	I mean, I'm looking at our screen.
	I can see that.
	You know, the trajectory, and here's this object going along, and I see the data start to come down, and I'm saying, is this for real?
	I mean, this isn't, you know, when somebody's playing a joke on me, are you?
	So, it was a time when we're walking around pinching ourselves, because I personally thought, oh, well, you know, there are a number of things.
	Just so long as it's not a silver bullet, not a major item, I was prepared mentally for a number of different points of failure.
	It has exceeded all of our hopes.
	Robert, is there any way that anybody has yet managed a visual on the spacecraft on a nice clear day in the desert or something?
	You know, actually, yes.
	In the first, after the first couple of days at reach orbit, somebody had captured on a telescope and they took a picture of it streaking by.
	And that was emailed to us, and then we publish on our website, there is a, I think a website called Heaven Above, and they project out all different orbiting kinds of structures, and ours is one of the ones on their menu, and we publish, I believe, orbiting times, or we have a map that people can refer to, As to when it might be crossing over Las Vegas, or Los Angeles, or Manila, or wherever.
	Where is that map available?
	It's on our, I think it's on our website, www.bigelowaerospace.com.
	And again, I could also mention the Heaven Above website.
	I've been told does a very good job of mapping all these ourselves and other spacecraft as well.
	But so on a clear night, if you don't have any ambient contamination because of a large city flashlight kind of projection, you know, you have to get it way out beyond that to where you can see things.
	We, I saw it a couple weeks ago.
	And just by getting way out in the desert and being at the right place at the right time.
	Must be exciting.
	Have you tried it yourself yet?
	What, to observe it?
	Yes.
	I did, yes.
	I took my wife out and we went way out on the peripheral of the valley and we did see it.
	Oh my God, to look out and see your own spacecraft orbiting, what a feeling that must be.
	Well, it feels like a little baby, although it feels like you've given birth to something and God, she's up there and it's a funny kind of feeling like that.
	I don't think I'm going to have any luck here in Manila.
	We have a great deal of humidity, and therefore our skies are not as they are in the desert, particularly in Manila.
	But God, I'd love to see it, maybe from a mountaintop here or something.
	Well, you said you were going to go see that volcano, if I'm not mistaken, maybe, huh?
	Actually, yes.
	I'm considering a trip down to the Mayan volcano, which, by the way, is really getting ready to blow its top here.
	It's really cooking.
	That's all I understand.
	So, what is the flight schedule?
	Where does it go from here?
	How far out are you booked, as it were?
	We can produce a schedule for a week in advance.
	I can supply you with, you give me the coordinates or where you would like to know where the spacecraft would be, and I can supply you with the times of day that it would cross over.
	Oh, no, that's great.
	Now, what I really meant was, with respect to future launches, how much has panned out?
	Oh, we're out fairly well for the next five years.
	We have an agenda that we're fairly comfortable with for the next five years.
	And, of course, in the more immediate future, we're very focused on the second one.
	We're trying not to be a one-hit wonder.
	So we desperately are hoping that our second flight is successful.
	You are putting, it's just here, you're putting about $500 million of your own money in.
	Is that roughly accurate?
	It is, yeah, over a period of years.
	Boy, that's a lot of money, Bob.
	Are you getting any help with this?
	Are you beginning to get any help?
	Is there beginning to be any interest shown in what you're doing that goes beyond vocal support?
	No, I think the area of this is so dangerous financially that it has broken so many people and busted so many companies.
	I remember that Kistler Aerospace went through $800 million.
	So it's a very lethal kind of business.
	Now, they've been reorganized and they're on a new program, so hopefully they'll be successful maybe.
	Probably wiser, because this is somewhere between crazy and philanthropic.
	So it's probably wiser, you know, in all honesty, for people to stand back and wait to see that somebody is successful and produces a revenue stream that actually makes sense.
	So we've had people say, well, gee, can we invest the company?
	And I say, no.
	I say, well, they say, why not?
	I say, well, How in all good conscience could we do that when there's no revenue stream?
	We haven't validated what's mandatory with any kind of company that you'd want to buy into.
	I think we're going to have to probably go it alone for a long time and try to validate those revenue streams and we may get beat up a little bit in the process.
	Well, Bob, I'd like to know, even having the kind of money you have, how do you come to the decision to invest, and you just told us how poor an investment it probably is, how do you come to a decision to spend that kind of money?
	How do you get there?
	Well, the decision actually was to try to acquire a sufficient capital base to supply the earning power.
	Who can guess the future?
	But up to this point in time, what we've done is we've spent net income.
	We haven't spent capital.
	Okay.
	when all is said and done and if it keeps going as well as it is now is a
	day going to come bob and when might that day be
	when the first space tourists can plunk down however much money it's going to be
	take a ride well
	i think uh... well
	it's got first of all i think that uh... are are our intent is probably to validate the uh...
	the functionality of the systems with with professional astronauts on board
	for a period of time And first they would be functioning robotically, then when we think that they're maintaining their life support systems are functioning and other signals tell us that the spacecraft is healthy, and if,
	You have the transportation system and autonomous docking rendezvous capabilities, which this country, by the way, does not have at the moment.
	That here again comes in the Russians, you know.
	So, I think we're looking at the very earliest, in terms of time frame, perhaps around 2011 time frame.
	In terms of dollars, it's going to be frightfully expensive.
	It's going to be terrible.
	As the first things usually are in something of this sort, but eventually through volume.
	Volume, transportation with enough launches that those costs can really drop down.
	Also, I would think if the people that are going can contribute a value-added service of some sort.
	Let's suppose they are a movie actor or actress.
	Let's suppose they are a scientist.
	Let's suppose that they have some function that they can bring to the complex, the space complex, then it may not be just money alone that is the factor.
	Okay, well, this is absolutely as exciting as it gets.
	If you could say anything, and you can right now, to the American aerospace industry and to our own government, what would it be?
	Be willing to take a risk that may not be all that popular with your board of directors and your shareholders.
	Move out as a leader.
	Move out instead of feeding from the government trough, as has been the case for the last number of decades.
	Take a risk because this country stands a really good chance of falling behind quite soon.
	If transportation isn't solved, then we're going to be traveling at the behest of the Russians or some other foreign provider.
	And of course, taking that risk and taking that jump is exactly what you have done.
	Robert, congratulations, big time, congratulations.
	You're out front, you really did it.
	Again, thank you for the flowers and we'll follow this step by step and I hope you'll come back as number two launches.
	Thank you Art, my friend, anytime.
	Okay, ladies and gentlemen, that's Bob Bigelow, who again is a very good friend of mine, has been for a number of years, and I knew all of this was coming, but I was sort of, I don't know, sworn to secrecy.
	I'm pretty good at keeping secrets, and I've tracked this over the years, but the actual launch caught me as much by surprise as I'm sure it did many of you.
	There you've got it.
	One single individual dedicated with the resources and the vision to do what Bob Bigelow has done.
	From a high rise in Manila, the Philippines, I'm Art Bell.
	Wanna take a ride?
	Boy, I'll tell you what.
	Congratulations, Bob Bigelow.
	What a story.
	He's got his own spacecraft in orbit.
	One man.
	With a big staff, of course.
	But one man, dedicated with the money, the resources, the will, to do what he did.
	It's just an astounding story.
	Hi everybody, I'm Art Bell, coming to you from the other side of the globe.
	If you doubt that, get it out, take a look.
	It's indeed the other side, about 7,700 some odd miles from my previous home, and one I still maintain, I might add, in the high desert.
	Coming up in a moment, Sir Charles Schultz.
	We're going to be talking about nanotechnology, which happens to be one of my favorite topics.
	Sir Charles Schultz worked at Martin Marietta.
	Uh, the aerospace company, of course, for 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 Patriot, the Copperhead tank killer, and advanced attack helicopter systems.
	Charles has performed research under grants 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.
	coming up in just a moment Sir Charles Schultz III.
	All right, definitely one of my favorite topics in all the world.
	Sir Charles Schultz III, welcome back to the program.
	Well thank you Art, it's always a pleasure.
	It's great to have you here and I suppose we need to begin, of course we've talked a great deal about Mars and you've had an awful lot of information on Mars and I know you've got a little more and we'll get on to that but let's begin at the beginning.
	A lot of people have really no idea what nanotechnology is.
	This is a fairly well-educated audience to be sure in this kind of thing but nevertheless a 101 on nanotechnology would be a great way to begin.
	What is it?
	Well, basically it's the ability to manipulate things at the level of the atom.
	Now, nanotechnology takes its name from the scale, and a nanometer is one billionth of a meter.
	So, anything as small as a nanometer or a few nanometers of scale would be considered nanotechnology if you were to manipulate the parts at that scale.
	Toward what ends, Sir Charles?
	The ability to construct anything from atoms all the way up.
	For instance, we could construct new materials that have never existed before.
	We could do repairs on things that are too small to even handle.
	We could learn so much just from the ability to manipulate the atom individually, just as a building block.
	And this is the basis of nanotechnology.
	Okay.
	When you say small, give everybody an idea of how small you really mean when you say atoms.
	You build sort of atoms into, if my understanding is correct, into kind of a machine, and possibly even a self-replicating machine.
	Is that fair?
	Well, yes.
	That's one of the places it's going.
	To give you an example, if you had 10 atoms in a row, That would be about one nanometer, one billionth of a meter.
	So an atom is an extremely tiny thing.
	A red blood cell, for instance, is just under 10 microns, or 10,000 nanometers in size.
	So these things are much smaller than a red blood cell, and many of the nanodevices that we will be constructing in the near term will probably be on the order of scale of a virus.
	Very, very tiny indeed.
	Virus, is this something that you can readily see with an appropriate microscope or what?
	Well, unfortunately no.
	Most of the devices we're talking about would be so tiny they could only be seen with special hardware such as a scanning electron microscope or something called an atomic force microscope.
	Devices of this type can allow us to see individual atoms as they're assembled in things and they look very much like Legos or building blocks when they go together to form structures.
	And most of the structures we'll be putting together in the beginning will be modified enzymes and protein structures and chemicals for very specific tasks.
	But unbelievably, small particles of metal have figured very highly in the earliest nanotechnology and I'll get to the details on that very shortly.
	I can't even imagine how you would begin, you can barely see something like this with a scanning electron microscope as you point out, so how in God's name would you manipulate something like that?
	Well, the very first nanomanipulation could arguably be called chemistry, but of course that's done on a very large bulk scale, so we don't really have a fine control over it.
	The first manipulation of atoms that was really done intentionally was done by IBM using something called a scanning tunneling microscope.
	And in this type of device, they have an extremely tiny needle that is made of a fractured piece of diamond.
	And on its tip, they change an electric charge and it allows them to pick up and drop simple I recall that, yes.
	or tiny bits of a protein or a chemical and they were able to use atoms to
	arrange as dots or pixels to write the letters IBM on a piece of chilled metal.
	I recall that, yes. So that was the beginning and the future is... I'll tell
	you what, I think scientists, Sir Charles, rarely talk to each other because I have
	some very reputable scientists who are on the show and I asked them about
	whether nanotechnology has some bearing, for example, on what they're doing and
	they they seem to know very little or almost nothing about it and so I worry
	whether scientists in this country and other countries are actually talking to
	each other about...
	What may be possible and how it may bear on their science?
	Well unfortunately there doesn't seem to be a great deal of communication because when you're doing research of this type it can be very intellectually exhausting to have to concentrate on the details and as a result Because of the difficulties, they tend to congregate among themselves in small groups, two, three, or four people, and focus on specific parts of the technology.
	So there's very little communication sometimes between these groups, because nobody wants to give away their secrets as they're working.
	Fortunately, there's a great deal of information being exchanged by an unlikely source, and it's scientists who become science fiction writers.
	And they share ideas with each other and they spread them around so the public gets a taste of what's going on.
	In many cases, these ideas feed right back into the development of nanotechnology.
	So it's an odd thing that science fiction actually becomes a driving force in scientific development in many cases.
	So a lot of scientists would be well served to be reading science fiction.
	Well, this is true.
	I'll give you an example.
	Many people are familiar with a science fiction author by the name of Larry Niven, and one of the gadgets that he came up with in his future history stories that he writes is something called an impact armor.
	And essentially, it's a garment that looks very much like any other, but any time it's struck by a projectile over a certain speed, it hardens.
	So it protects the wearer from damage, just like a bulletproof vest.
	Recent developments in nanotechnology were made, and of all places, in the field of a lubricant.
	They were converting molecules into tiny nanoparticles to make a lubricant out of them, and they discovered that when they suspended this lubricant into Kevlar and tiny particles of glass or ceramic, it became a type of impact armor, so that when something strikes it, the material, which is generally a liquid, Becomes hard, and it becomes five times stronger than steel.
	So you have a garment now that they're developing that weighs about as much as a thick t-shirt, and it has the ability to stop bullets.
	And to give you an example of the hardness of this material, they found that it can take an impact of up to 250 tons per square centimeter.
	That's like dropping four diesel locomotives on an area the size of your fingernail.
	Now, wait a minute.
	Back up.
	You said this thing is about the thickness of a thick t-shirt, and it would resist a bullet?
	That's correct.
	And this exists right now?
	They're working on it right now.
	What's happening is, it was an Israeli company called Appnano, and they found that when they were working on their lubricant, by suspending these particles in the lubricant, when you strike it, the particles stick together in clusters and make the lubricant become a solid momentarily.
	So it's an unusual material that becomes stiff when you apply a force to it and then becomes liquid again when you remove the force.
	Okay, what I can't grasp in my mind is how this material, I mean we're talking about a speeding bullet here, and obviously the nanomaterial cannot decide that it's being impacted by something until it's actually impacted.
	So the decision made by the nanomaterial has to be More than just instantaneous.
	I mean, it has to be virtually instant, right?
	Well, the key is the fact that particles are so tiny that the reaction times of the particles can be down on the billionth of a second.
	So, it's a nanosecond range.
	So, we're down to the nano in both scales, size and time.
	The material itself is made of some fairly common materials.
	They were originally using fullerenes, the buckyballs that everybody's heard about.
	But they turned out to be a little more difficult to work with than they expected, and they moved to a material called tungsten disulfide.
	And so now they have this liquid that, when struck by a bullet, dissipates the force over its entire surface by rendering the whole surface solid.
	Now, this is in contrast to Kevlar.
	Kevlar can pretty much stop bullets, but not a steel bullet or, you know, an armor-piercing bullet.
	This material actually dissipates the force over a very large area, and Kevlar technically isn't capable of doing that very well.
	Well, no.
	Now, I've never been hit by a bullet wearing Kevlar, but it still knocks you back and disables you for a while, I'm sure.
	If what I see on television is halfway accurate, and that's the only place I've really seen it, people look like, you know, they've been shot, and they act like they've been shot, and then finally, of course, they get up and they're alive.
	This material that you're talking about would dissipate the The impact over a larger area, so there would not be as much of a force applied, or would there be, to the person on the receiving end?
	That's right.
	It spreads the trauma out over a much larger area.
	You don't end up with as much force concentrated in a tiny area, so instead of being alive with a huge number of bruises on your chest, you'll end up with a much larger, spread out impact.
	It'll still knock you down, of course, but yes, it won't hurt you.
	That's absolutely amazing.
	And how far are we from this being something that, you know, a police officer or somebody in the military can go and buy and use?
	Well, let's see.
	They're scaling up the production of their materials right now so that they can go into mass production.
	They can only make a few kilograms of material a day right now with the existing facilities, but they're installing new hardware in their laboratories so they can scale up the full production.
	And they've also found new materials that stand up to 350 tons per square centimeter.
	And they found even lighter materials that should be even four times lighter than this.
	So pretty soon we could expect to see literally bulletproof t-shirts.
	Bulletproof t-shirts.
	What an amazing time we truly live in.
	And then that's only the beginning of nanotech.
	Nanotech, I guess if it lives up to its promise, Sir Charles, It will utterly transform the world we're in, won't it?
	Well, it certainly will, and what I see mostly is everything we've looked at so far looks like the very beneficial side of it, and we definitely want to cover the beneficial side, but I also want to point out, as we had discussed previously, that there is also a dark side to some of this, and so we'll get around to how some of these things could also be misused as well.
	And it's not to alarm people, but it's to let people know that for everything we do, there's always the potential for misuse, and so this will allow people to be sort of on their guard.
	Well, there is an announcement running on Manila television today, which is sort of a bounce from what happened in the Middle East.
	But as of today, we are not allowed to carry any kind of liquid, including water, on any form of mass transit here in Manila.
	Now, this is happening around the world.
	I suppose.
	And I, you know, that's liquid.
	Whatever.
	Creams, all the rest of it, you can't take on aircraft anymore.
	I just can't even begin to imagine, Sir Charles, what kind of world we're going to have when somebody has a nanotech weapon in their possession.
	For one thing, it would not be seen, would it?
	Well, for the most part, no it wouldn't.
	On the positive side now, they do have new detectors that also use nanotechnology that might be able to find some of those things.
	But a nanotech weapon could be hidden very effectively and be extremely difficult to locate.
	So we would have to probably turn to newer technologies to try and design systems that could locate and disarm those things.
	And it could be extremely difficult because There are methods of producing materials using nanotechnology that are presently under investigation, where you could take raw materials and convert them to a finished product in a matter of seconds or minutes, and the raw materials themselves might be harmless.
	Unfortunately, right now, we're up against the limit of energy.
	You can't make an explosive out of something without a source of energy.
	So, it would probably be something other than an explosive.
	a toxin or something that could eat metal.
	And you know you could actually literally make a metal eating virus type
	machine out of nanotechnology. Great.
	There is a pretty gigantic downside to the development of this technology isn't there? Well
	there is.
	Sure.
	I've heard about the grey goo, I've heard about some of the other possibilities.
	Do you want to go ahead and explain to everybody what grey goo is?
	Might as well scare the hell out of them right away.
	Okay, sure I will.
	There was a fellow by the name of K. Eric Drexler who wrote one of the seminal books on nanotechnology and one of the things that he warned about was called the grey goo syndrome.
	Nanotechnology would depend on tiny machines that effectively could take things apart, make new things out of them, and you could also program those machines to make copies of themselves.
	If you made nano disassemblers that ate everything around them and turned it into more nano disassemblers, You would have a self-propagating system that would eat everything in its path and convert it into more nano.
	And eventually you'd have, if the stuff ran amok, you could turn everything into this grey goo, and it would just consume everything.
	On the upside, the energetics of it and the supplies of the proper materials to build more assemblers or disassemblers might be the limiting factor.
	You know, there's the argument that, well, viruses and germs can replicate like mad and they haven't consumed the world.
	But one of the advantages that nanotechnology would have is it might not use organic materials.
	It might use the dirt itself.
	Exactly.
	That was my concern.
	You can construct a virus that'll be terribly lethal, but one of the things, of course, that has stopped these lethal viruses, like Ebola, for example, is the fact that once it gets loose, it kills all of its hosts too quickly, and then it's got nowhere else to jump, nowhere else to go.
	And so it's been small brush fires, typically in Africa, And it'll kill a village or two and then burn out, kind of like a brush fire.
	In the case of a nanotechnological weapon of the sort you just talked about, if it could convert dirt or metal or plastic or anything else into other disassemblers, there is nothing that would stop it.
	That's right, it could eat everything.
	You know, one of the advantages with biological weapons is that most of them are quite fragile.
	They don't exist well in the real world, and so when they're exposed to air and dry conditions, they tend to insist or die.
	And so in the end, they're self-limiting in many respects.
	I mean, otherwise, there'd be no carriers for them, and they'd kill themselves out.
	So nature somehow has built a limiting factor into many germs.
	With nanotechnology, they're effectively like little robots, and they can lie dormant for incredible periods of time.
	Sir Charles, who is doing most of the nanowork right now?
	Is it mainly in the private sector?
	Is it in little labs?
	Is the government doing it?
	Are there controls over it?
	Where are they?
	There is some going on in the private sector, mostly for specific materials like carbon nanofibers for high tensile strength materials.
	Most of the research that I've come across has been done in laboratories and universities, and a great deal of it is government-funded.
	So I would say that, by and large, most of the research is being done in universities under government funding.
	Under government funding?
	That's correct.
	Do you know offhand who is doing most of the funding within the government?
	What kind of agency?
	Well, it really depends on the application.
	Some is being done under Department of Defense grants.
	Particularly, Defense is interested in finding explosives.
	For instance, there's a group in Israel that has come up with something they call the Nanodog.
	And this device is capable of sniffing out explosives at the one part per trillion level, and they're looking at a version that could be pocket-sized.
	So this actually would lighten up our restrictions on air travel, because you'd be able to detect most explosives very easily with a pocket-sized device.
	On the other hand, in this country particularly, in the United States, a lot of it is basically new materials such as the liquid armor stuff, Materials that are capable of carrying drugs into a cell, which is being done mostly under grant from medical companies.
	But a lot of it comes down to devices for detecting explosives, or devices for carrying information, devices for storing information, new computer devices.
	Some of it's by electronics.
	By and large, a lot of it is material science at this point, because we're really very, very early in the game.
	Okay, well IBM spelled out IBM.
	Now, since that time, I wonder if IBM has proceeded in the world of nanotechnology.
	I know they're kind of up against Some law or another that suggests eventually the chips that are being made to power the computers that we so greedily snap up.
	You know, we're going to run into a brick wall eventually and nanotechnology, I guess, promises much faster processors, right?
	Well, that's right, yes.
	The law you refer to is called Moore's Law and basically it states that every 18 months we tend to double the amount of processing power we have available.
	And that's held very well over the last few decades, and it's amazing how well the law has held up.
	So every 18 months, we expect things are going to double in speed.
	Nanotechnology has allowed us to do some research in materials that have produced single-atom transistors, for instance.
	Oh my God.
	Listen, hold on, Sir Charles.
	We're here at the bottom of the hour from Manila in the Philippines.
	I'm Mark Bell.
	We'll be right back.
	Manila, where the rain is coming down just about sideways, we're currently experiencing Tropical Storm Katring, K-A-T-R-I-N-G.
	They name tropical storms here and typhoons a little differently than they do in the States, and I've yet to figure that one out.
	It seems like a name ought to be a name, but they do that.
	My guest is Sir Charles Schultz III.
	We're talking about nanotechnology, and we just touched on Moore's Law.
	Moore's Law really does suggest that every 18 months we will double our computer speeds.
	Now, it's just me, or maybe I haven't been out looking at new computers sufficiently, but I don't think that we've been holding up to that lately.
	Seems to me that we got to the 3, 3.5 gigahertz computer and we kind of slowed down at about that point.
	I'll ask Sir Charles about that in a moment.
	Alright, well I'm going to go ahead and get going.
	Alright, well I'm going to go ahead and get going.
	Well, alright.
	Once again, Sir Charles Schultz III.
	Sir Charles, you know, I'm not so sure about Moore's Law.
	Moore's Law, certainly, I watched it go along quite readily for a lot of years.
	It seems to me, in the last two or perhaps three years, I'm not sure that I've really seen the kind of doubling that we had previously.
	Do you know anything about that?
	Well, yes.
	Some of the fastest chips right now are a little over 4 GHz, but instead of making the chips faster, what they're doing now is putting multiple cores on the chip, so that, for instance, the cell processor can do 10 instructions simultaneously.
	So, you are still getting more speed, more processing in a unit of time, than you were, you know, like, 18 months ago.
	You don't see the clock speed go up, because more devices are working simultaneously, but what you do see is an increase in the number of instructions that get performed.
	But yes, we're getting very close to the limit of what we can do.
	I mean, even with the cell processor, they can move something like a hundred gigabytes of data every second, which is an incredible amount of information.
	But we do seem to be running up into the limits, and so with nanotechnology, we now are reaching a point where we're going to be using molecular scale devices and atomic scale devices.
	Now, there's an interesting difference in the way a nanocomputer would work versus a typical microprocessor, and it's very simple.
	Nanocomputing Basically will be a mechanical device, almost like rods and beads.
	Think of an abacus.
	The fact is, the materials are so tiny and can move so rapidly that a processor measuring less than half a micron on a side, a tiny cube, half of a millionth of a meter on a side, could produce a billion instructions per second.
	Well, it's still nothing more than a yes, no, yes, no, yes, no, all the way through, right?
	Well, that's correct.
	And some systems have been suggested that would use more than binary, that would use multiple state logic, and they would move faster.
	But it makes the design far more complicated.
	So, binary seems to be the rule for now, and probably will be for quite a long time.
	Yes and no all the way from top to bottom.
	But the ability to make them smaller and faster and even more powerful by putting more in parallel is what we're going to gain.
	After all, the human brain doesn't use very fast units.
	They switch on the scale of milliseconds, thousands of a second, whereas processors are generally running in the billionths of a second.
	And yet we don't see processors running around shaking your hand and ordering things online and eating lunch with you.
	Will we someday?
	I certainly do expect that we will.
	And the reason is, we're going to be doing things differently.
	Not just switching things on and off, but doing it in a massively parallel fashion.
	And so nanotechnology gives you the ability to create thousands or millions or billions of processors that work in parallel.
	And each of them would be very simple, but all together, as an aggregate, they can outperform the human brain, certainly.
	Okay, Sir Charles, I know that you have your fingers into artificial intelligence and this is a question I've always wanted to have somebody answer and I guess there's probably not an answer to it, but as a processor becomes faster and storage becomes cheaper and more abundant, at some And I wonder if you would like to make a guess where that point is.
	Isn't a processor, a computer, perhaps a nanotechnological computer, going to achieve some kind of consciousness?
	Well, that's going to occur due to organization of software and hardware, not just due to the hardware itself.
	You see, part of what makes us conscious, apparently, is not just how our hardware is arranged, But a lot of what we learn and how we experience things, we have an internal theater in our minds that allows us a picture of reality.
	And that theater is a piece of hardware, but it's got a lot of software running in it too.
	And how you learn to perceive things changes how you think.
	We're going to have to really put a great deal of work into the discipline of software in order to make the hardware reach a state where we could call it conscious.
	Do you think we ought to do that?
	Well, you know, that's like saying, should we invent fire?
	It's going to be an inevitable thing.
	It's going to happen whether we should or not.
	My feeling is we could benefit from having another set of minds to consult on many problems.
	But the question is, what are we going to do with them other than that?
	So it's got an upside and a downside.
	There literally is a case where you could argue that an intelligent machine society could decide to take over the world for our own benefit.
	That's right.
	That's the exact argument.
	And, you know, if you look around the world right now and there were, if we were in possession of such a machine and it had the ability to project force in some manner, it might well decide that for our own benefit it would project force, for example, to the Middle East and simply eradicate everything that's going on over there right now for our own benefit so it wouldn't lead to World War III and the end of the human race.
	And that's a distinct possibility.
	It's very hard to say exactly where it will lead, because we can't even predict what a group of human beings will do.
	Now you talk about a system that is intelligent or better in terms of functionality than a human being, and you get a group of them together, what are they going to do?
	We can't predict what a society will do, much less what an intelligent machine would do.
	Well, wouldn't we almost have to inculcate into such a machine what we know of the three laws of robotics?
	I mean, wouldn't that have to be almost first before you allowed such a machine to attain consciousness and decision-making and put power in its hands?
	Well, it would, but understand that a machine that's capable of understanding what those laws mean might decide not to follow them.
	I think that the only safe way to do it is to incorporate some sort of a dead man switch in it, where you literally can Deactivated remotely.
	But of course, such a machine would be perhaps so bright that it would have a way around that.
	I mean, it's just it's a really scary proposition of putting that kind of power in a machine's hands.
	Yes, it is.
	But you know, it's like many of the things we do, they creep up on us.
	We accept a little here and a little there.
	And before you know it, the full blown problem is sitting in our laps.
	Yeah, well, there's a lot of full-blown problems that are potentially attached to nanotechnology.
	And one of them, for example, would be, I mean, in the medical field, there are endless possibilities, aren't there, for nanotechnology?
	Oh, absolutely, absolutely.
	There are some amazing developments in the medical fields in nanotechnology.
	One of the things that they've found is that For instance, we were talking about AI and medical applications and nanotechnology.
	They can make arrays of nanotubes.
	They're like little dots on a substrate and they can put neurons on the substrate and they grow essentially an artificial brain and the spacings between the cells are just right for them to reach to each other and form the synapses and connections that they need.
	Another thing they can do now is they have found ways of using the flagella, the little moving parts that stick out of tiny bacteria or cells, And use them to move things around.
	And in the developments that they've come up with, they've found ways to make devices that can carry drugs directly into tumor cells and kill them.
	They found out how to work on Alzheimer's using particles of gold that are only a few atoms across.
	I think this is one of the more interesting ones.
	By making nanoparticles of gold metal, they have infused them into brain tissue and they form Gatherings where the clumps of Alzheimer's plaques are.
	And then by exposing them to low-level radio waves, about half or a fifth of the energy in a cell phone, over the course of a few hours the plaques break up and die.
	And so they've actually found a way to treat the plaques in Alzheimer's patients by using gold nanoparticles.
	Well that's amazing!
	They've actually done this?
	Yes, they have.
	Most of the work was done on the University of Chile in Santiago by Marcelo Kogan.
	The particles clump with the cells that are degenerating, and on the application of radio waves, they apparently move around and destroy the cells.
	The particles appear to vibrate or induce heat in the cells and kill them.
	Wow, that's simply amazing.
	It's a wonderful thing.
	But then you can look at the downside.
	Somebody who was, let's say, interested in destroying things using this sort of technology, Could tag the particles so that they would attach to crops.
	And then on command could send a low-level radio signal that would destroy all the crops.
	That would be the downside of that sort of technology.
	I've also heard that nanotechnology, for example, might be used to construct what would seem to be or would be very much like a virus that, for example, might go out and kill one specific race of people, that it could be that... That's the targeted virus scenario, yes, indeed.
	Making machinery that has some processing power on that scale You literally could make it go out identify specific markers and cells like specific types of traits such as red hair or whatever you can imagine and kill those people and a targeted virus is a very real threat and it's something that you have to know they've got to be working on.
	Are they working on it?
	I don't have any personal knowledge of research being done in the field but it is such a tempting thing you can imagine that a lot of people are looking at it at least eyeing it and thinking Man, this would be something we could use.
	And something probably we would use.
	It's hard to imagine a scenario where they wouldn't.
	I can think of some terrible things that people have done.
	Is all of this technology, Sir Charles, racing ahead too quickly?
	I mean, our social development is not moving nearly as quickly, obviously, looking at recent world events, as is this kind of technology.
	Would you agree?
	I think that's probably true.
	Socially, most of humanity seems to have a structure on par with the caveman.
	And it's hard to say, but most people seem to be just about functional enough to get to the next meal.
	And when we are confronted with issues of this depth, of this complexity, a lot of times people simply shut down.
	They turn away and say, I'm not interested, or I don't want to hear about it, or I don't want another thing to worry about.
	And so the problem is, there is no vigilance because people who should know about the things simply shut down and turn away when they hear about it.
	It's just another big problem for them.
	Well, I can understand that attitude.
	I'm not one of those people, but I can certainly understand it with everything that's going on right now.
	And people seemingly... I mean, we are a warrior-like people.
	You know, human beings are definitely warrior people.
	And you can prove that on any given day looking around the world.
	So, if there was a little nano kind of virus that would kill a specific people, you know damn well It would be used, and I wonder if there's any way to find out if anybody is working on this.
	Surely they are, and who it is, and whether, and hopefully we're first on the block, but I worry about these things that perhaps we're not.
	Well, I can think of a lot of ways it could be done, and I'm not even going to mention them.
	I can think of a lot of things that you could do that could be used to tag or locate specific genotypes.
	But, you know, I'm not even going to go there.
	And I do expect that somebody would try it.
	I can only hope that our positive developments will help us along to the point where we're able to circumvent a lot of those problems.
	I wish that I believed that you're correct, but let's go back to one of the positive applications.
	One of the things that everybody would like to see improve is the battery, the ability to store Energy.
	I mean already our computers, our laptops are getting lighter, the batteries are lasting longer, they've made some strides, but we still don't have a really cool battery.
	Would nanotech provide one?
	Yes it can.
	There are two very interesting developments that have happened in energy storage using nanotechnology.
	One of them came from bacteria that have the ability to consume metals and produce
	a husk when they die that has metal in it.
	Researchers were finding that they could make wires using bacteria. The bacteria form what they call nanowires.
	The bacteria consume metal-containing food.
	They produce a shell around themselves that is conductive and then when they die they make clumps of these wires, tubular
	structures.
	Then these structures are electroplated, and they're used as battery electrodes.
	And the reason this is a positive thing is because it induces a huge amount of surface area in the electrode.
	And one of the tricks of the battery is, the more surface area you have, the more current you can deliver.
	So, nanowire electrodes are already being made and experimented with, using bacteria to produce them.
	So that's one of them.
	The other development is the use of carbon materials to produce an extremely fluffy material, similar to an aerogel.
	It's a material that is mostly empty space, made out of carbon, and to use it to make a new type of capacitor.
	Everybody's seen the supercapacitors, which are getting pretty close to batteries in storage density, and they charge very rapidly.
	Well, these are a whole new level of capacitive storage.
	They can be recharged in seconds.
	A lot of the work is being done at MIT.
	They have a laboratory for electromagnetic and electronic systems, and they're working out the first real new breakthrough in battery technology in two centuries.
	And there's a scientist there by the name of Joey Schindel, and he's a professor of electrical engineering and computer science, and he's been working on this for a while.
	With some other people as well.
	And they've come up with a nanotube structure that makes an ultracapacitor.
	A nanotube supercap, right?
	That's right.
	A ultracapacitor.
	Much more dense than the supercapacitor.
	And it would actually be capable of acting as a battery instead of just a plain capacitor.
	So we're getting to the point where we'll have very lightweight, very dense storage systems that we can grow on a ship.
	And those are coming along very, very soon.
	Again, other aspects of science seem to be roundly ignoring nanotechnology, or they don't believe that it can live up to the kind of billing that you're giving it here tonight.
	But, I mean, here you are telling me that we've already got these super caps.
	Now, normally a capacitor uh... the kind of composers we have in using uh... radio
	and television electronics
	they charge and then they very rapidly discharge and it's hard to see how there
	would be an application to use one as battery except for perhaps an extremely low current application of some sort
	yeah most capacitors uh... typically charge and discharge of the order of
	thousands or millions of the second and i don't know the reasons are very useful
	in circuits Oscillators, tuned circuits, time delays, that sort of thing.
	But when you get to this new type of capacitance, you're actually looking at something that competes with batteries, and possibly even with fuels.
	So, this is a really new development, and it could mean that we could have an electric vehicle that could be recharged in a minute or so, and would carry you for a couple hundred miles on that charge, and the storage system itself Could be comparable to five or six lead-acid batteries in volume, but way far less.
	Wow.
	There still, I take it, would not be a bottom-line difference in the energy used, even though you could charge it, for example, in a couple of minutes, as you point out.
	The bottom-line energy used would still be what it is today, or would the efficiency be so much better that that would not be true?
	Well, when you consider you're not lugging around the weight of lead-acid batteries like typical electric vehicles, then your efficiency does improve because you don't have so much dead weight you're hauling around.
	The overall efficiency of your motors is pretty much as it's been.
	You're going to have AC motors to drive the wheels, and you get pretty good efficiency out of AC motors.
	Still, when you come right down to it, you still have to consume some fuel somewhere else to charge your batteries up, and I think a lot of people miss this about electric vehicles.
	When you run an electric vehicle, you may be spending three or four times as much in energy to go a mile than you do out of an internal combustion engine.
	The only difference is the pollution is over at the power plant and not out of your tailpipe.
	So people don't see it.
	And there are losses in transmission.
	When you transmit electrical power from the generator at the power plant, you may get better efficiency generating the electricity.
	But by the time it's gone through the wires, through the transformers, through the charger, through the battery charge, you know, into the batteries and then back to your wheels, you could have lost so much of it that you're now burning three to four times as much energy just to get somewhere.
	Right, well, there's also an application, is there not, in the actual distribution of electricity.
	In other words, right now, the transmission charges you get that are part of your electrical bill are rather substantial.
	It costs a lot of money to send electricity from point A to point B because there are losses in delivery of electricity through copper or any other metal you can name right now, right?
	That's true.
	You know, there's quite a bit of loss in transmission lines, but there's also the cost of maintaining those lines.
	And that's something that, you know, that's one of those invisible costs we don't really think about.
	Somebody's got to go out there and keep those lines repaired and maintained, and it costs quite a bit of money.
	One of the things that we're looking at with nanotechnology in the new future is the possibility of coming up with some sort of superconductor that works at room temperature.
	And this is We're getting into a whole new area here where nanotechnology creates something called metamaterials.
	These are materials that have properties that don't exist in the natural world in any bulk material we've seen.
	All right, Sir Charles, hold it right there.
	In fact, we'll pick up on this when we get back.
	Sir Charles Schultz III is my guest.
	We're talking about nanotechnology and this is well worth a listen.
	From Manila in the Philippines where the rain is just coming down and coming down and coming down, I'm Art Bell.
	Worldwide, actually.
	When you consider a world where we can do a radio program from Southeast Asia, the other side of the world, that literally goes around the world, we're already at a pretty wild point.
	But in context with tonight's subject and nanotechnology, we're talking now about things like supercaps.
	Somebody suggests that we could do a whole show on supercaps.
	We probably could.
	They're really here right now.
	It is an amazing world we live in, no question about it.
	it's her Charles Schultz the third back in a moment to tell us more about it
	at home where that is to say in the US when I would get an electric bill the
	The electric bill would just, it would give you whatever the charge is for the current
	Here in the Philippines, they do it a little differently and they actually break down for you each part of your electric bill.
	And part of that electric bill is the actual transmission loss charge.
	And the amount of transmission loss is astounding.
	I don't have one in front of me.
	My wife is here.
	She's at the market right now.
	But if she was here, I'd bring one in and read it to you.
	But the transmission loss charge is quite significant.
	Sir Charles, would that be changed to a great degree if nanotechnology got involved in the transmission of electricity?
	Well, I certainly expect so.
	Right now they're already doing experiments with materials that are made of the nanofibers, the carbon nanotubes, that show them to have conductivities that are equal to metals at this point and this means that
	they're very close to bringing them into
	production as a wire. To give you an example of some of the the properties they have, just very odd things,
	you know the best conductor of heat known for instance was diamond.
	This stuff is twice as good but it has a very odd property.
	If you feel the ends of it, it feels cold like metal but if you feel the sides it
	feels like wood because it conducts heat better in one direction than the
	other. Wow.
	And it also is a very good electrical conductor because the electrons move through it ballistically like little
	bullets instead of being
	swerved back and forth as they conduct.
	And so it's quite possible that with a little more nanotech we could conduct, we could have lossless conduction, like a superconductor, using carbon as the bulk of the material.
	So they're very close to having some very new, very odd materials made out of nothing but carbon.
	Thank God.
	Stacey from Frederick, Maryland, this one is made for you, Sir Charles, says, hey, could we use nanotechnology to perhaps terraform another planet, well, like Mars, using their replication to copy DNA from Earth and start vegetation and a nitrogen cycle on Mars?
	Absolutely.
	In fact, nanotechnology has some amazing possibilities for space exploration and colonization.
	I'll give you an example.
	Suppose we have nanomachines about the size of dust particles that have whole factories programmed into them.
	The ability to produce everything you need.
	Metals, plastics, food.
	And we launch these particles, like dust, out of a linear accelerator near the speed of light.
	They get scattered to all the planets and stars In a very short period of time, and when they arrived, just like a spore, they would begin to grow.
	You would end up with whole factories and colonies out of nothing more than something as small as a dust particle.
	That's like the Genesis bomb from Star Trek.
	Exactly.
	You see, this is one of the things that has... it's like a two-edged sword.
	If you use that sort of an effect, not only could you destroy a world, but you could also reconstruct it, and there'd be no trace of what you had done.
	You would effectively have erased and started over.
	That's kind of God-like, actually.
	Well, yes it is.
	Yes it is indeed.
	And as you can understand, there is going to be a lot of yelling about those possibilities when general nano-assembly becomes available.
	Now, of course, on the other side, we have to admit that the gray goose syndrome we spoke about earlier is less likely Because the types of control it would take to produce a scenario of that sort means you're probably going to have a manufacturing cell that has certain strict laws imposed on it, or rules.
	Well, speaking of that, I guess nanotechnological research is going on within government and in universities, and who knows, perhaps labs that we don't know about right now.
	What kind of oversight, I mean we've discussed a little bit of the upside and certainly the downside of this, what kind of oversight is in place right now for those doing this work?
	There really aren't any laws involved because nanotech itself really doesn't, it isn't a recognized entity at this point, not really.
	There's been no sort of law or oversight put in place to control what would happen and at this point you couldn't really know If what you were leading to would be a weapon or something very dangerous or something very beneficial.
	So there is none.
	Well, what do you suggest?
	I wouldn't even have the faintest idea where to begin because the complexity of the question is so immense.
	I think that an oversight would be very difficult.
	It would mean having somebody review what you were doing On a daily basis, and backing everything up, but you run into the same problem with any company developing something.
	The people who are doing the overseeing typically don't understand what's happening, only the researchers do.
	Exactly.
	So, the heart of the matter is, what's being developed is something nobody knows about yet.
	The researcher has that moment of glory where he discovers something new and nobody else knows it, and he'd be hard-pressed to explain it, perhaps.
	Um, you know, that sounds awfully dangerous to me.
	I mean, when you're talking about, for example, Grey Goo, or something that could accidentally become Grey Goo, all it takes is one oops, and boy, that'd be some oops.
	Well, fortunately we can follow some of the same parameters we do for antivirus software in computers.
	Because we have people actively developing viruses for computers all the time, there's a big antivirus industry.
	And so we've learned a lot of things from that that might have direct applications to nanotechnology.
	And, of course, in the beginning it's going to be very hard for someone to develop something that is, you know, intentionally dangerous out of nanotech.
	And if we were to have a world where nanotech is common, we would expect that there would be some generally released anti-nanotech cells in the atmosphere all around everywhere that patrolled and watched out for what was happening and might circumvent problems.
	Okay, well I can imagine Grey Goo being like a, I don't know, a forest fire, for example.
	Let me begin by asking, if Grey Goo were released and it was efficient, how fast would it be?
	How quickly would it begin virtually eating everything in front of it up?
	I think that you would probably not be able to see it happen because of the energy constraints.
	It takes a certain amount of energy to transform things from one form to another.
	I would say that it would probably take something on the order of days or weeks to spread all over the world, not a matter of hours or minutes.
	But even at that, that's very little time to do something about it.
	That's right.
	And so my next question would be, we fight a forest fire sometimes with fire breaks.
	Occasionally we will start a backfire to stop a fire or there are various methods, dump retardant and all the rest of it.
	But if a gray goo fire started, how can you imagine that we might stop it?
	Well, actually there is a method of doing it.
	X-ray lasers, X-ray radiation in dense bursts can stop nanotechnology because it will disrupt the operation of it.
	It will destroy it internally just as it does biological organisms.
	So it could very well be that large X-ray guns would be the tool of choice for stopping a nano escape of that sort.
	Nanotechnological advances in the area of medicine may eventually lead to immortality.
	In other words, I guess it might.
	It might allow us to either fix and or replace virtually everything within our body including our brains and that would be a kind of immortality, wouldn't it?
	Yes, it would.
	If we could have full control over what happens at the atomic level We'd have the ability to repair any damage, regrow a lost limb or, you know, recover from any sort of an illness very, very rapidly.
	So it could effectively allow us to reverse the aging process and live technically forever.
	That's almost hard to imagine, to live forever.
	I wonder, have you given that much thought to whether that would be actually a good thing, whether, I suppose, given that final choice, just about everybody would want to go on living, I guess?
	There would be a price, and I think it would be, we would have to build in limits so that people could not reproduce.
	Because one of our problems we have right now is population growth versus the resources that are available.
	I think if anybody agreed, you know, if anybody wanted to take the nanotechnological treatment and effectively become immortal, they would have to agree to become sterile.
	And that would limit the growth of the population so we didn't overrun the planet in just a few short years.
	Because there actually, you know, there can be real downsides to being immortal.
	And believe it or not, that can be abused.
	And imagine if you were, in fact, immortal and could recover from any sort of damage, effectively resurrecting if you were killed, and then how would you go about using that in a terrible way?
	Well, I can think of a very simple way.
	You torture someone to death, and then they resurrect and you do it again.
	So, in that case, you really wouldn't want to live forever.
	You could actually abuse the ability to be immortal.
	Oh my God.
	This brings up so many possibilities that I've never even considered.
	That's certainly one of them, being tortured to death and then brought back and tortured to death yet again.
	It's incredible.
	Where do we go from where we are right now?
	I mean, already there are applications, as you mentioned earlier, that are in the real world.
	Paint, for example, nanotechnological paint that I think is being produced up in Canada.
	You can paint a house and then it begins producing electricity.
	Is that still going on?
	Yes, it is.
	By using short lengths of fibers that are tuned to specific frequencies of light, it can produce electricity from sunlight.
	So you can effectively paint this on a surface and it becomes a solar cell.
	It's got a very good efficiency.
	That's one of the very positive results of nanotech research.
	Another one would be the development of materials such as liquid metals.
	You've seen the Terminator movies where they have the liquid metal Terminator.
	We could actually make a substance that acts like the liquid metal and it consists of trillions of tiny robots, smaller than dust particles, and they have grabbers all over their surfaces and they can grab their neighbors in different positions and change their shape.
	So it becomes like a technical sort of clay and it can be commanded to take on any shape and then harden.
	It could change its surface texture and color on command and it could be used actually to camouflage a machine if you had to.
	This is a real possibility and they're already working on smart materials that are made in little modules and Manotech will give us the ability to make these things that are microscopic.
	So it would look like a liquid metal, yes.
	Another thing is, and this is a downside, Growing everything using nanotechnology would wreck the economy.
	You wouldn't need machine shops anymore because your parts could be fabricated very easily.
	I mean, think of the Star Trek Replicator, but instead of using energy fields as they do in the fiction, you would use nanoparticles to grow everything.
	You'd have a manufacturing cell that basically was a Santa Claus machine.
	You ordered what you wanted.
	Well, okay, so in that kind of economy, Sir Charles, who makes the money?
	And that's the whole point.
	There wouldn't be any specific person making the money once this technology was mature.
	It would be out there, and you could manufacture literally anything you wanted just by asking for it.
	And so it shuts down all your industry, basically, because nanotech can be self-perpetuating.
	Yes, there'd be upgrades and changes for a while, but after a bit, you'd reach a point where everybody felt that it was mature and that was stable in the end of it, and everything could be grown from sunlight and raw elements.
	In other words, there would be, there essentially would be no economy.
	That's right.
	Everything would be free.
	And I'm not sure what sort of a society that would make.
	I'm not sure either.
	It would be the ultimate welfare trip.
	That's right.
	And of course a lot of people have talked about the nanotubes that are now reality becoming this space elevator now.
	I just finished talking to Bob Bigelow who's launched his first private sector spacecraft.
	I know there are plans on the table for this space elevator made of nanotubes that would allow us to literally take an elevator into space.
	Is that idea now dead?
	Still on the table?
	Under way?
	What's going on?
	Actually it's still under development and there's even one company called Liftport that is making hardware that will allow them to test out some of the systems that will be necessary for a space elevator.
	They have a balloon system with a cable that can be climbed by something that is effectively just like the climber on a space elevator that can carry hardware for communications and they're even working on contracts to do wireless internet service.
	So they'll be using their systems To do research on the space elevator hardware, at the same time making money by selling wireless internet systems where you don't have satellites.
	So they'll... Wait a minute, I cannot picture this in my mind.
	Describe to me how the wireless internet aspect of this would work.
	You put a balloon with a very high tensile strength cable anchored to the ground, up into the atmosphere.
	And then you put a cable climber on that cable.
	And this cable climber is the same design as you would use on a space elevator, and it carries your wireless internet communication links up to whatever altitude you need, and provides your wireless service to a nearby city.
	Wow.
	So it's a tethered balloon with a cable climber on it and communications hardware.
	And the nanotubes themselves are making a lot of progress in making the material in bulk.
	Now recently there was a critique that said, well, The machines making these don't make them perfectly, and a flaw here and there, a missing carbon atom in places here and there, would cause the material not to be strong enough.
	But I think that this can actually be overcome.
	Just like we anneal metals to change their properties and harden them, I think we're going to find an annealing process that will allow us to repair damaged nanotubes.
	And, you know, the manufacture will go on.
	I don't really see any showstoppers to the space elevator.
	Uh-huh.
	That would, of course, this would change, nanotechnology would change virtually everything.
	It would replace our economy.
	It would, I don't know, it would turn it into sort of a, it would be dangerous, Sir Charles.
	There are people who would probably go to great lengths to stop any such progress, wouldn't Well, yes.
	I can imagine a lot of things that we do today that would have direct applications to it.
	For instance, imagine a medication that you have to pay a subscription for for it to work.
	You know, there will be stumbling blocks put in the way.
	They'll try to regulate it using your money.
	And I think that that's going to be one of the things that will slow the development to a crawl in many places.
	What about patents, for example?
	Well, you know, patents.
	I sometimes take issue with patents because they seem to be rather ineffective these days.
	Patenting nano hardware is just fine, but what happens to the intellectual property rights when you need a template to grow, you know, parts for a machine using your new nano factory that sits in a shoebox on the table?
	You're going to end up having a lot of patents issued in the beginning when everything becomes The new tech and everything's being sold to everybody and there's money being made, but later on, when you have a nano-factory in your home that makes what you need, who are you going to pay for the templates for the things you're going to make?
	Right.
	So there's a big intellectual property issue involved there, because what everything comes down to in the end is a template.
	I mean, anything you can think of, anything you own, anything you have, anything you see, can be described mathematically and chemically and physically And you can somehow get it on a computer disk or in a program somewhere, and then later, if you had that information, you could call it up and manufacture a duplicate of it.
	And I've got to point this out.
	When nanotechnology becomes common, forgery becomes useless.
	You can't tell the original from a copy, because it can be made so perfectly, atom for atom, it would be indistinguishable.
	So it's kind of like the new digital world.
	I mean, right now the movie industry is deeply in fear of this new digital world that we're entering now, where you can, for example, duplicate a motion picture with absolutely no degradation whatsoever.
	So you're talking about the material world, just as I'm talking about duplicating motion pictures with no degradation.
	Same deal, right?
	Well, that's absolutely correct.
	What the end result would be was a system that would allow you to absolutely duplicate or create anything with no loss.
	And the world itself then becomes just as fluid as a computer game.
	Our reality will shift right around us.
	Yeah, our reality will shift, a good way to put it.
	So, really, science fiction does have it nailed because, in the end, anything that we can imagine We can do.
	That's right.
	We're only limited by the laws of physics and the availability of materials and energy.
	Now, you know, some of the things that will come along, I think, in the near term, and this might be a positive thing, everybody has seen movies where people become miniaturized and travel through a world of cells and giant monster bugs and that sort of thing.
	Right.
	We can actually create small robots right now, and you can use a VR experience to move the robots around and run around in a maze or something.
	But what happens when you make nanorobots, smaller cells, and you put on the VR headset and you run them around the tabletop or in an aquarium or whatever?
	You can tour on the microscopic level without actually being miniaturized.
	Oh, my God.
	All right, we're at another break point.
	Hold on, Sir Charles.
	Sir Charles Schultz III is my guest.
	And, you know, we've laid out so much material right now that what I'd like to do is open the phone lines when we come back after the break here and allow all of you to begin asking some questions.
	I mean, the world that Sir Charles describes is so astounding and so different and potentially so destructive to the world that we all know right now that I I don't know.
	I don't know where we're going.
	Maybe some of you have relevant questions.
	From Manila, the Philippines, I'm Art Bell.
	Indeed.
	Coming to you from a land where satellite dishes point straight up because we're just about at the equator.
	It's really amazing.
	Actually, they have to drill little holes in the middle of the satellite dishes so the rain that pours so freely down here can drain away.
	Anyway, that's where we are.
	My guest is Sir Charles Schultz III, describing a world that is almost unimaginable.
	And you think it's not possible?
	Well, an awful lot of the applications we've been talking about tonight are underway and being produced right now, or about to be produced.
	What a world it's going to be!
	be, we'll give you a chance to talk with Sir Charles and ask any question because
	anything you can imagine is probably possible in a moment.
	Interesting.
	Listen to this.
	With respect to nanotechnology, Chuck from Nevada says, remember Arthur C. Clarke's famous line from Childhood's End, the technology of a truly advanced civilization is indistinguishable from magic, and that certainly seems to apply to nanotechnology.
	Sir Charles?
	Yes, I would have to agree with that.
	We can do literally anything with nanotechnology.
	All right.
	Just before we go to the lines here, there's a million people who want to talk to you.
	I do want to ask this.
	Years ago, science fiction talked a whole lot about robots.
	I mean, we were going to have robots walking around, doing the vacuum, vacuuming, doing dishes, doing all of our drudgery work.
	It was all going to be a done deal some years ago.
	Well, it never happened.
	Is the promise of nanotechnology a more solid promise than that of robots was?
	Well, it probably is in the fact that we're going to see a lot of applications right away, and the first ones we're going to be seeing will be medications and displays, display technologies and high tensile strength materials.
	But you see, the problem with robotics is we don't see intelligent robots because people are having a hard time working out the software for them, and it's all a matter of organizing the software.
	The nanotech is going to pay off a lot more quickly, I think, because there's a great deal of development going on.
	And one of the things we're going to see is nanotechnology is going to allow us to engineer materials that are indistinguishable from living materials.
	You can have a robot that looks so human it would be indistinguishable.
	And you're going to see that.
	You're going to see that as soon as the nanotech becomes available and the material science advances a little bit more.
	All right, one other question before the phones, and that is, we're all seeing a warming world right now.
	I think there's very little disagreement left.
	Global warming is well underway.
	Whatever is causing it is causing it, but it is underway.
	It's going to change the way we live.
	It's going to change agriculture.
	It's going to change just about everything.
	The storms are getting more violent.
	We all know what's going on.
	I'm wondering if there's any potential application for nanotechnology in terms of controlling the weather.
	Well, there certainly could be.
	We could have particles in the atmosphere that were black on one face and silver on the other that could be rotated under command.
	To reflect sunlight away during the day and retain it when we wanted it.
	And so we could turn the particles over from black to reflective and change the amount of sunlight reaching the surface of the planet.
	That could be done with nanomachines, but there are other ways to do it, too.
	I mean, I've got a solution for ending global warming right now that we could do in a matter of days, and it would be very, you know, non-politically correct and controversial, but it would certainly work.
	We take our three biggest hydrogen bombs, go out to the rottenest piece of desert we have, and we detonate them.
	And we introduce a small amount of nuclear autumn.
	And every five, six years we reevaluate and do it again as needed.
	And the downsides that people mention, like fallout, don't apply because, you know, we're very conscientious weapons makers and we don't want to make bombs that are going to make territory radioactive.
	We couldn't occupy it or go in and take care of business.
	So the weapons that we make tend to burn out their fallout within a few days.
	And this would be a solution that, you know, don't hide it, tell everybody, bring your cameras, come see the show, you know, we're going to end global warming now.
	But the only reason that this will not happen is because there's no way for anybody to make a buck off of it.
	And I can guarantee you that the one thing slowing down any progress in global warming is nobody's figured out how to make a dollar off of it.
	Well, how about the Arizona desert?
	Everybody always wants to go for Nevada.
	Well, that's right.
	We have a nuclear test site.
	You know, we have a number of nuclear test sites in the desert.
	It would be ideal.
	So, the facilities are already in place.
	This could be done very, very easily.
	Alright.
	Wild Card Line, you're on the air with Sir Charles Schultz III.
	Are you talking to me?
	I am indeed.
	Oh, this is Ronnie.
	I'm from Pennsylvania.
	Yes.
	And hi, hi everybody.
	So Charles, you made my mind spin.
	I have a degree in biology and in the 70s I wrote a book.
	I didn't publish this book.
	I studied cells, pollen cells.
	I took every biology course I could find.
	I told my son, I said, Michael, I said everything is made of molecules.
	I said compressed molecules and atoms.
	I said, in one day, people are going to be thinking more on the atomic, the little atom, and I said, it's coming in the future.
	I said, and now, when you were on tonight, my mind was spinning.
	I should copy this book and send it to you.
	I didn't publish it, because I'm a, I have, I'm an ecologist, and I think, on the scientific In 1947, when we found the creche out in the desert from the extraterrestrials, the silver paper that they found that you could crumble up and open up, that was all on the atomic level.
	The atoms would realign themselves and the paper would open again.
	Actually, Ronnie, actually that's a pretty good point, Ronnie.
	We don't know whether that's science fiction or science fact, Sir Charles, but the fact of the matter is what she just described, that aluminum that could be crumpled and then would return to its regular form, that sounds like a nanotechnological application to me.
	Well, yes it does.
	You know, we can think of a lot of materials that would repair themselves that could be made with nanotechnology and We're actually seeing some early applications in things like bridge parts.
	You know, they're thinking about putting materials that are smart enough to sense their own strain and perhaps make their own repairs.
	So, yeah, material that was made of nanomachinery or nanomaterials or metamaterials could very easily repair itself and you wouldn't see any damage.
	It's just hard to imagine the world we're about to enter.
	East of the Rockies, you're on the air with Sir Charles.
	Hello.
	Hi, how are you doing?
	This is Randy from Memphis.
	Yes, Randy.
	When you were talking about the gray goo, it really reminded me of a book I read in college called Kurt Vonnegut's Cat's Cradle and the Ice Nine.
	Are you familiar with that?
	Yes, I've seen it.
	Ice Nine was a very interesting concept where a form of ice was found that when it froze, it became more dense than water and sank to the bottom.
	And it was a catalytic process that eventually made all the ice on earth that way and froze the world over.
	Oh, really?
	Well, it's an interesting concept.
	It just seems to me, Sir Charles, that we've got to advance significantly socially in our behavior before we can allow this kind of technology out, but it's not working out that way, is it?
	Well, there's going to have to be some sort of fundamental change in human nature before we can really have this sort of technology in a general sense without killing ourselves.
	A number of scientists, very bright minds that I've had on the air here, have said that we had darn well better begin to colonize other planets because reflecting on exactly that, our social progress or lack of it, we're going to need another planet because we're going to ruin this one.
	And it seems to me nanotechnology has the potential to do exactly that.
	Well, I think that we could also undo any damage eventually.
	I mean, it would not be a very pleasant thing.
	My personal feeling is when we reach the technical level to be able to do it, the Earth should be a park.
	We should live elsewhere.
	All right.
	West of the Rockies, you're on the air with Sir Charles.
	Hi.
	Hello?
	Hello.
	Art.
	Yes.
	A pleasure talking to you.
	Sir Charles, Yes.
	What is your background?
	Well, basically, I've done most of my work in aerospace and defense years ago, and then in the last few years, most of my background has been in research and artificial intelligence and robotics.
	Okay.
	I have a strong background in electronics and very deeply into physics.
	Okay.
	Well, we have mutual experience in aerospace.
	I have 13 years with the U.S.
	military.
	And then I switched to bioengineering, and I hold a PhD.
	And I've been in the patent office for the last 20 years.
	And my research told me, you know, that if I can eliminate paralysis before it starts at the onset of an injury, and which I'm quite certain I can, I believe in patent suppression, you know, I don't think.
	I mean, I think you're a very bright man, but I don't think you're going to see this technology in our lifetime because of what I just said, you know.
	All right.
	Well, it's a good question, Sir Charles.
	How much of this is the average person likely to see manifest in their lifetime?
	Well, that's an excellent question, and I'll tell you why.
	A number of years ago, some research in paralysis and repairing damage to the spinal cord was done, and what they found was actually quite simple.
	Most of the damage that was done in spinal injuries could be halted or reversed by the application of two compounds, oxytocin and vasopressin, using hyperbaric oxygen, or oxygen under high pressure, and a lot of the materials would diffuse into the injury site and help to reverse or
	halt the damage.
	With the application of something called nerve growth factor, many of the neurons would reconnect.
	And so with a minimal amount of rehabilitation, people would be back on their feet again.
	They actually severed and reconnected the spinal cords of rats in some of the experiments.
	But this was like 10 years ago and we've seen nothing more, heard nothing more about it.
	So there has definitely been a great deal of advancement in spinal injuries and how
	to repair them, yet we don't really hear anything about it.
	So it does make you wonder, what advances have been made since and why are we not hearing about it?
	Well, okay, answer that one.
	I think it has to do, it's got to do with the control of information and it all comes down to who's funding the research and who's going to make the money on it.
	Well, I just don't see how this science can proceed if, in the end, people cannot make money on it.
	That man said he worked in the patent office.
	I think we're beginning to get to the point where, oh, for example, if somebody were to put together something that would, oh, I don't know, it doesn't matter, allow the space elevator to be reality now, and they applied for a patent on it, or something that would Any of the other applications that we're talking about and sent it to the Patent Office, the Patent Office wouldn't begin to know how to either award or not award the patent because they would not understand what was right in front of them.
	Well, I've been through a couple of patent application processes where they either disallowed or didn't understand the technology and a great deal of money went down the hole and we never heard it hit bottom.
	So, I have a sort of bad taste of a mouth over the patent issue.
	Yeah, but there's got to be a way.
	In the end, it sounds wonderful that the world will become some sort of utopian place where everything is free and you ask for whatever you want, food or furniture or housing, and it just appears.
	But, you know, if somebody can't make money on it, it probably isn't going to happen, or is it?
	Well, consider that money is actually a tool of civilization, not of individuals.
	If we have the ability to provide everything for ourselves as individuals, Then the only issue we have in terms of civilization is entertainment and communication, relating experiences to each other.
	Money is the thing that makes our economy possible, but it also makes cooperation of huge amounts of people possible on big projects like getting to the moon or developing cancer vaccines.
	Once we reach the nanotech stage and everybody basically has everything they need out of a replicator box, I don't see how society as we know it is going to hold together, because we certainly won't have the exchange of money that we have.
	And without that, you don't have an economy.
	First time caller on the line, you're on the air with Sir Charles.
	Hello.
	Hello, Art.
	Hello, Sir Charles.
	How are you doing today?
	Good.
	My name is John.
	I'm calling from the Gulf Coast.
	Sir Charles, my question is this.
	Once we create this box, this You know, transport box that you were discussing.
	And then we have these wonderful batteries and we have this spray that we can spray on our roofs and collect limited amounts of solar energy that goes into these batteries.
	Wouldn't we actually be living almost in a utopian society where people are free to discuss their minds and basically just improving everybody?
	Well, yes, we would have a utopian society, but understand that utopia doesn't come from having things.
	It comes from a state of mind.
	People achieve happiness by the achievement of goals, not from the acquisition of things.
	So, no matter if everybody has everything they want, You really have to undergo adversity to understand the other man's position and how tough life can be, and you really have to have problems in your life in order to understand how good things can be.
	Well, yes, but doesn't this technology remove the adversity?
	Well, yes it does, and that's a real concern.
	You see, the people who you know who are truly of character are those who have been through very tough times.
	And people who have had no adversities and have everything handed to them
	tend to be very bland individuals.
	I think that that is one of our greatest dangers, the loss of humanity itself
	because of a loss of civilization, when everything is given to you for free.
	Well, that's right.
	You're exactly right, and it brings to mind the bumper I play from time to time in the year 2525, when our arms are hanging loosely by our sides, and we've got nothing to do because it's all done for us, or at the wish or whim, anybody gets whatever they want.
	It's just unimaginable, Sir Charles, and yet it's in front of us.
	Yes, it is.
	So you don't have so many answers for the social aspect of this, do you?
	You know, I think that we may have to end up with a stratified society where individuals start at the bottom and undergo hardships and then graduate to a higher level where more becomes available for them, and the qualities of mind can emerge.
	I don't see any easy way for it.
	It'll be just like a childhood.
	Consider if you have a thousand year or longer lifespan.
	How are you going to have to work your way up through the ranks before you can be respected for your mind?
	Because unless you develop and display the ability to use your mind and to reason and interact with others in a reasonable manner, you're not truly a human being anyway.
	Well then, wouldn't that really mean that you would have to, in some way, not be in receipt of this technology right away, but in some manner have to earn the right to use it?
	I think that's true.
	One thing that many people Very conveniently forget, is that freedom isn't free.
	Everything has a cost.
	And everything that you do, you must earn.
	You must work for, in some manner.
	Yeah, that's exactly right.
	First, no wild card line.
	You're on the air with Sir Charles.
	Hi.
	Hello, my name is James.
	I'm from St.
	Louis, California.
	Okay.
	And I have a question about nanotubes.
	I've always wondered, is it possible to wrap a nanotube around, say, a piece of iron or ferric oxide?
	Well, nanotubes themselves are very, very tiny.
	They're thousands of times smaller than human hair.
	And while you probably could wrap it around it, it wouldn't really do much for you.
	You'd have a tiny fiber around it, and it would probably break fairly easily, because even though it has a very high tensile strength, it's only in the bulk that we see the strength of materials emerge in a useful manner.
	A tiny little fiber like that would be like wrapping a hair around the Brooklyn Bridge.
	You really wouldn't see any advantage to it.
	My application really doesn't have to do with strength, though.
	It would be more along the lines of a superconducting magnet, where you could polarize the iron within the tube, and then gather the tubes in an alignment, and maybe apply an electric field to everything, and it would create a superconducting magnet that would operate at room temperature.
	Well, and again, you know, when the conduction properties of nanotubes are better understood and we have True superconductors at room temperature and above.
	Yes, we'll see some very interesting advances in magnetics.
	Absolutely, we will.
	We certainly would.
	How close are we to nanotubes that would allow superconducting at room temperature?
	Have they actually experimented with this?
	Have they done it?
	Well, they're getting fairly close.
	They haven't, to my mind, done any cryogenic experiments with nanotubes, which would give you some means of qualifying how well they were performing.
	But estimates are that room temperature conduction in nanotubes could reach over a thousand amps per square centimeter, which is very, very favorable.
	And we could eventually end up replacing a lot of power lines with this stuff.
	I think that it's going to be probably five or six more years of development of the metamaterials phase before we see real, true room temperature superconductors.
	There's also going to have to be, at least in the beginning, a gigantic manufacturing process underway to do this, right?
	Well, yes.
	Right now the material is processed in huge ovens and special chemicals and pressures and temperatures are used.
	So right now it's a factory job, yes.
	Got it.
	All right, Sir Charles, hold on.
	We're at the top of yet another hour taking questions for Sir Charles on probably one of the wildest things you've ever heard in your whole life.
	It's called nanotechnology from Manila in the Philippines where the rain falls and falls and falls.
	I'm Art Bell.
	Right on the money.
	Your arms hanging by your sides.
	We're not ready for that just yet, are we?
	Are we really ready for a world where anything you want can become reality?
	Where anything you need is produced as soon as you think about it?
	I'm not so sure.
	Anybody out there remember Forbidden Planet?
	I think we'll ask about exactly that in a moment.
	My guest is Sir Charles Schultz III.
	We'll get back to them in a moment.
	I would like to remind everybody out there that I am as close as your keyboard.
	You can get hold of me by email in the following manners.
	I am Art Bell, A-R-T-B-E-L-L at AOL.com.
	That's ArtBell at AOL.com.
	Or perhaps better, ArtBell at MindSpring.com.
	That's A-R-T-B-E-L-L at MindSpring.com.
	And I welcome Any input anybody has, any questions about the Philippines, for example.
	A lot of people sending me questions about the Philippines.
	Be glad to answer what I can.
	Certainly any stories, strange, the unusual kind of thing we cover here on coast.
	I'd appreciate any links or any information anybody has.
	You can be pretty sure if it's good, it's going to get aired.
	Sir Charles, welcome back to the program.
	Well, thank you.
	Charles in Berkeley, California, I thought that was utopia.
	At any rate, he says, a bit too utopian for me.
	Remember the film Forbidden Planet and the monsters from the id?
	There the Krell could have anything they could dream and they were killed by the manifestation of their own subconscious demons.
	In fact, doesn't nanotechnology almost have that Potential promise?
	Well, it does in many ways, because without some sort of control or restriction on what we produce, then we literally could produce anything, and so it could be a threat.
	And so you can be sure that at some point there's going to be the equivalent of a nano-police, some sort of nanoparticles in the atmosphere, in a room, or some sensor system that will be able to detect things that would be considered dangerous, or at least render them harmless.
	That's the only way we could ever get around it.
	Again, back to this utopian society, I think we were on to something when we said, well, perhaps you would have to earn your right to get there, to prove that you would socially evolve to the point where you could responsibly have anything you wanted, but that would lead to a world of, well, the same world we have now of the haves and the have-nots, right?
	Well, you always will, but a lot of times, you know, we have to decide whether The haves and have-nots got there because of a lack of material or a lack of incentive.
	I know a lot of people who are quite capable of performing who will not because they've got what they want and they're happy.
	And there are other people who are never quite happy with anything they have and they continue to fight and struggle all the time.
	But I think that even though we lose money as a currency in a nanotech world, we have another type of currency that will emerge most likely and that would be information.
	So an information can take many forms.
	It can be, you know, factual information or entertainment or a structure of a new device or a design of something.
	So we won't actually be in a world completely without some sort of currency or trade.
	Well, a lot of people worry that the U.S., for example, is on the wrong track right now.
	We are clearly an information society, and people will say, well, it's not worth anything.
	You need factories, you need to build things, and maybe they're wrong.
	Maybe the information society that we're building in the U.S.
	is really the right track after all.
	Well, that could well be, but we always have to have the basic infrastructure in place.
	I mean, it's not glamorous, but People have to grow food, and handle plumbing, and put up drywall, and transportation has to be handled.
	So, the delivery of power and food, I mean, those are things we've got to have.
	At the moment, but in a full-blown nanotechnological society, those things could be wished for, and then manifested.
	Well, that's right, and then you get to the point of what your power source is, where it's generated from, and how much there is.
	You know, you can bet that petroleum would really not be the way to go, because of how it stores and produces its energy.
	Sunlight would be the way to go, and possibly, you know, some advanced sort of fusion reaction, perhaps, for power, or something we've never even conceived of.
	But nanotechnology means that as long as you've got basic raw atoms to work with, you can make literally anything.
	Okay.
	Hello there, you're on the air with Sir Charles.
	Hi, Sir Charles, this is Justin in Phoenix.
	How are you doing tonight, Art?
	I'm just fine, sir.
	All right, sounds great.
	I'm a longtime listener, love the show.
	One thing, a question I had for Sir Charles was when he was talking about resurrecting as far as using nanotechnology to bring us back from the dead and what he was speaking of, would that basically mean that we're no longer human, we don't have any souls anymore, if we're just replications of what we used to be?
	Another question I have is, would we be able to bring people that are dead right now back from the dead with nanotechnology?
	And also, if you have seen the movie Lawnmower Man, have you seen that movie at all, Sir Charles?
	I saw it many years ago, yes.
	That's kind of like a way that you said if somebody had that kind of, that power, that it could possibly be abused that way as well.
	But I just wanted to know your take on that.
	It may be religious and then scientific, but does that mean that we would no longer have a soul?
	Well, that's a very good question.
	I guess I could counter with another question.
	First of all, I don't think that we would lose our humanity just because we had used nanotech to repair any damage.
	I mean, presently we use a lot of medical technologies that never existed, you know, in the wild to perform treatment and to help us through our lives, but we don't consider ourselves less than human.
	If you, however, used nanotechnology to make an exact duplicate of yourself that had all of your memories and everything, would the duplicate have no soul?
	If you couldn't tell the two apart, how could you tell who did and did not have a soul?
	It raises some very interesting theological questions because it comes right down to what is a soul and where does it come from?
	As far as resurrection of the dead, it's all going to depend on how well your nanotech works and how much damage has been inflicted on the dead.
	You know, it may be very possible to repair the body no matter what's been done to it, but if you can't get the brain to work properly, I don't think you'd want an immortal maniac on your hands.
	That's right.
	That's correct, but there are people currently cryogenically freezing themselves on the promise of exactly this kind of technology coming along.
	What do you think about that?
	Well, I think that it is very possible that nanotech offers their best hope for repairing Those bodies that have been frozen, and whatever damage has been done by the freezing process.
	As many people aren't aware, when you freeze water, the ice forms crystals, and the crystals tend to act like little growing knife blades and penetrate the cell walls and destroy the machinery inside the cells.
	And, of course, they've come up with a number of different antifreeze compounds that help to alleviate a lot of that damage, and there's other freezing methods they can use.
	For instance, if you were to take the body and put it in a pressure chamber under thousands of pounds of pressure, and then freeze it, it would form a new type of ice that didn't make those
	crystals and destroy the cells.
	After the freezing had been done, the pressure could be removed and they could be
	changed down to another chamber where they're like near the temperature of liquid helium
	and they could last for many thousands of years with very little damage.
	But nanotech would afford you the possibility of repairing any freeze damage.
	Absolutely.
	Have you given a lot of thought to immortality?
	You mentioned the fact that you'd have to stop reproduction, and I suppose that's true.
	But beyond that, do you think that's really something that people would want, Sir Charles?
	It's all going to depend on their state of mind.
	If you have an interesting existence and you like what you do and there's always another challenge in front of you, you would probably be very happy to live an existence where it was easy not to have to fight for a living every day and struggle to get the bills paid and And not have to compete with others on a daily basis.
	I could see where you could have a very interesting, entertaining, and very full life for many thousands of years, all based on your frame of mind.
	But some people are always going to be miserable, and I don't think those people would ever want to live that long.
	And I don't know if I'd want to be around somebody who lived that long who was miserable.
	West of the Rockies, you're on the air with Sir Charles.
	Hi.
	Hi, this is Sophia from Eureka, California.
	Hi there.
	Hi Art, and hi Sir Charles.
	Hello.
	I had a question about immortality, and basically I'm wondering if somebody could will themselves to grow back a limb.
	For instance, could you will yourself to gain kind of like superhuman abilities?
	Ah, well, you know, there are some possibilities of enhanced ability through nanotechnology.
	I mean, it's easy to see that if you were to alter the structure of your joints and bones and muscles to a much more durable material and something that could have more energy throughput, you could be extremely strong and extremely tough.
	And probably, you know, that will be one of the first things they start doing with nanotechnology when the technology is ripe.
	But as far as whether you'd want to do it on a regular basis, I think there would be some very severe disadvantages.
	For instance, all of the things around us are constructed from materials that are designed to work with absolutely normal human beings.
	And if you made yourself so strong and so impervious that you were effectively a super being, It's quite likely that you would wreck a lot of things around yourself and not even be aware of it.
	And just imagine the people you know who are just intrinsically clumsy, who are always stumbling over or tripping on things or stepping on things.
	And then just imagine them ten or a hundred times stronger and doing the same sort of damage.
	Oh my God.
	The whole thing is hard to imagine.
	First time caller line, your turn with Sir Charles.
	Yes, hi.
	Good to talk to you.
	And Sir Charles, very good.
	A physics problem.
	I was wondering if it would be possible to... David Derrida had talked about raising the resonance of a structure or a ship so that it could overcome inertia.
	So 90 degree turns would no longer be a problem because it would no longer be a part of this.
	Okay.
	Inertia, as many people may know, is the resistance to change in movement or the change in velocity.
	Any material object has mass and as a consequence has inertia.
	If you were to have like a wagon and put a ball in the wagon and then pull the wagon, the ball would roll back momentarily because it resists the acceleration.
	That's inertia.
	Well, we don't really know exactly what causes inertia in terms of physics.
	Some people feel that it's caused by something called the Higgs Vector Boson, a particle that may be the cause of mass in solid objects, or in any material object.
	Until we truly understand where the origin of inertia is, and it seems to be linked somehow with mass and gravitation, until we truly understand it, we couldn't really make a projection about what nanotech could do for us in that regime.
	So, we first have to understand the effect itself and then there might or might not be an application for nanotech.
	Is nanotech going to ripen quickly or is it going to be very slow?
	Well, I believe that's going to depend on what aspects we're looking at.
	When it comes to materials and medications and products, we're going to see extremely rapid development of some of those things.
	When it comes to nanorobotics, that's an entirely different thing.
	Robotics itself is in a tough field.
	You can make any sort of robotic manipulator or sensor you can imagine.
	And with nanotech, it means you can do even more of the same.
	But again, we're right up against the intelligence end of it, you know, the software wall.
	Until people get their act together on exactly what thinking is and get some agreement on the definitions, they can't make any real progress in it, whether we have nanotech or not.
	Alright, first time caller, no wildcard line, I'm sorry, you're on the air with Sir Charles.
	Hello Art, hi Sir Charles.
	My question runs along the lines of the way people think.
	We obviously would have a wonderful society if everybody thought positively and if everybody abided by the rules and you know, things like that.
	What about people that are violent and things like that?
	How do you think nanotechnology would work to curb that kind of behavior?
	I have a very good suggestion about that.
	When it comes down to allowing people to have nanotechnology applied to themselves for life extension or medical treatment, if you get to the point where you have an individual who has demonstrated, you know, an inability to function in the society, a criminal or, you know, somebody who is habitually violent or even mentally ill, I think what you would have to do is give them the choice of allowing themselves to be repaired.
	A repair.
	That's a very broad term.
	The problem is there's a possibility of great abuse with that as with anything.
	So it's hard to say.
	I mean, if we can arrive at a point where we trust what nanotech is going to do for
	us and it's able to do what we want, and somebody says, you know, I want to live a thousand
	years or a million years and I want the treatment.
	You're going to have to find out a lot about them psychologically.
	And I think nanotech will allow us to do that.
	To see exactly what they're thinking and how.
	And then some sort of judgment process will have to be applied to see whether they're allowed to do it or whether they need to have themselves edited in some way to be socially acceptable so they're not violent.
	Edited.
	That's interesting.
	Perhaps a bit of attendance at some sort of nanotechnological re-education farm.
	Quite possibly.
	Or some regulator installed in the brain.
	Oh, boy.
	Wild Card Line, you're on the air with Sir Charles.
	Hi.
	Art, Sir Charles, I heard you mention a doctor's name that was treating Alzheimer with gold.
	Could you repeat that to me, please?
	Yes, it's Marcelo Kogan, and it's in the University of Chile in Santiago.
	And his last name is spelled K-O-G-A-N.
	K-O-G-A-N.
	No, no, no.
	K-O-G-A-N, right?
	That's correct.
	K-O-G-A-N?
	Yes.
	And the first name?
	Marcello.
	M-A-R-C-E-L-O.
	And this was at the university where?
	Santiago in Chile.
	Chile in Santiago.
	So I would presume he can probably go input that name to Google and be on his way.
	Is there something on the web about it?
	Yes, there is.
	In fact, there's an article published in physorg.com, and if he puts it in Google, he'll find the article, I'm sure.
	Good enough.
	West of the Rockies, you're on the air with Sir Charles Schultz.
	Hi.
	Hello, Hart.
	This is Jeff from Portland, Oregon.
	Hello, Sir Charles.
	I've got two real quick questions.
	One is, what's the relationship between quantum physics and nanotechnology?
	And you'd indicated that once these little factories kept running, that it would be almost impossible to distinguish the originals from copies.
	And I remember listening to Art when he was interviewing Michelle McCarthy.
	Dr. Kaku?
	Yes.
	And he indicated that with quantum physics that you could basically create a system where you had a secure system as
	a result of quantum physics.
	Would that be a way of protecting an original from a copy?
	Well, it's a possibility.
	The only thing is, you'd have to have some way of putting a digital signature or a quantum signature on an object that couldn't be duplicated.
	And, right now, as we know, everything is made of atoms, and I don't know where you'd put that signature.
	So, it'd have to take some real developments in quantum mechanics to find a way to sign things to verify that they were actually the original.
	Because, as you know, anything is made of atoms, and if you knew the pattern, you could make it out of more atoms, and it would be a duplicate.
	As far as quantum mechanics and nanotechnology, Right now, there are some applications in nanotech that try and do quantum mechanics, in particular that single atom transistor I was talking about.
	But quantum mechanics is really a very, very different thing from nanotech.
	Nanotech effectively treats everything as Lego blocks, or little building blocks, like a director set.
	And quantum mechanics allows you to do things, very odd things, with waves and particles and information, where systems can actually become fuzzy or overlap each other.
	I'm sure that as the nanotech develops, we'll find some extremely interesting things at the edge of both disciplines, but we're really not close enough at this point to say for sure.
	Well, how does a single cell, a single atom, act as a transistor without a base collector and, you know, the three?
	Actually, they change, for instance, the spin of the electron in its orbital, or the energy state it's in.
	And so you can affect the state the transistor is in.
	Electron spins can be changed or tagged.
	In fact, they found a way to store up to a thousand different states on a single transistor by changing the spin states of the electrons.
	It's really moving us into an entirely new area of physics altogether, isn't it?
	Well, yes it is, because we're reaching the boundaries of traditional materials and the pedestrian world, and now we're pushing down to a scale where materials themselves act in new ways that we haven't observed in reality.
	One of the things that makes quantum mechanics very difficult for people to understand is that the properties we see at that scale don't match anything we see in the pedestrian world.
	So, in quantum mechanics, you can put a bunch of items in a box, you move the box, and half the items are still on the table.
	In the real world, we don't really see that happen.
	All right, Sir Charles, hold it right there.
	We're at the bottom of the hour.
	So, many of us have always thought that to reach a world where the laws of physics that we operate under right now would no longer We'd have to go to another dimension where the laws of physics would be different, but nanotechnology would seem to offer the possibility of virtually altering the laws of physics in the dimension that we now live in.
	Think about that a little bit.
	From Manila in the Philippines, I'm Art Bell.
	Well, here I am.
	Indeed, the rain falls in Manila almost horizontally.
	It's really come down.
	We've got another tropical storm here.
	They seem to come one after the other after the other.
	John in Kennewick, Washington asks or says, I guess the question is, can you replicate a soul?
	With nanotechnology, or any other technology, and I don't think we're going to have the answer to that, John.
	We will, nevertheless, ask.
	my guest is incredible sir charles schultz the third back in a moment
	well how about this uh... i i i
	The sole question is just too hard, but if nanotechnology could virtually duplicate anything, then one would presume even a human being when it's fully matured.
	So, another Britney Spears?
	Just like that?
	Sir Charles?
	It could be done, certainly, but if you had access to the original to start with, and a copy of all the memories and thoughts and everything, when you made the duplicate, it would think it was the original, and you'd have just as little control over it as you did the original.
	Well, whether your Britney had a soul or not might not be important.
	I guess it depends on what your application, for one, is.
	Wild Card Line, you're on the air with Sir Charles Schultz.
	Well, that was interesting.
	This is Wade and I'm calling from Kansas.
	I'm thinking that there's a good possibility that the developers of this technology would want to kind of keep this as a part of an elite society.
	They might be greedy and not let Other people get hold of it.
	So you'd have utopia for some and not for others.
	It really is a very good point, Sir Charles.
	That would be an immediate thought of anybody who developed something like this or matured it.
	The complications of it getting out and out of your hands would probably cause you to not let it out.
	Well, you know, everything can be hacked.
	And anybody who knows anything about it knows that no matter what you build, somebody else can make something else out of it.
	Whatever you can conceive of, somebody with the right tools will be able to modify it or make their own.
	And it happens all the time.
	Look at video games alone and how complex they are, and people hack them.
	It's true.
	Nanotech is just the ultimate video game.
	Boy, that's one way to think about that, I suppose.
	Alright, let's go to the first time caller on the line.
	Say hi, you're on the air with Sir Charles.
	Hi there.
	Hi.
	Hi, I'm Zach Bullard.
	I'm 18 and I'm a student and I wanted to become a nanotechnologist one day in a great show, by the way, Art.
	I have two quick comments and one very quick question.
	Now, a good movie to see regarding, you know, dying and being immortal and having your body resurrected is Zardoz.
	I don't know if you've ever heard of it.
	I've not.
	Another quick comment is regarding the gold nanoparticles I've always heard that in reference to cancer, using that, you know, to attach to cancer particles and put the infrared rays over there to, you know, fry them away and leave the healthy tissue.
	I haven't heard of it in Alzheimer's, but I've heard in rats it has an extremely high efficiency rating, like, you know, 90 to 95 percent, you know, right now today, which is amazing.
	And also, regarding the fabrication machines, you know, to be fab machines for short, but what is Sir Charles How would you turn, like, say, lead to gold?
	That would require the manipulation of the protons and the atoms.
	And I don't think that nanotechnology has the tools to do that today, right?
	That's absolutely correct.
	Whatever you make with nanotech would use the same elements you started with.
	So, if you didn't have any gold to start with, you certainly wouldn't have any at the end of the process.
	But that brings us to another thing.
	And it kind of relates to the quantum mechanics question.
	It's called femto-technology, which is an even smaller scale than nanotechnology.
	Femto-technology is a thousand times smaller than nanotechnology, and it would involve direct manipulation of the particles inside the atoms.
	And so when we get to the stage where nanotech is developed, you can expect that there will be inroads in femto-technology soon, which would mean that the conversion of one element to another could possibly be achieved.
	All right, so Charles, what about his initial question?
	Well, it wasn't a question.
	He said he wanted to get into this field.
	If somebody thinks what they've heard this morning is amazing, and they want to head toward this field, how do they do it?
	What field of study do they begin?
	Where do they go?
	You know, I would suggest that the very first thing to do is get online and see everything about nanotech you can, and find the universities that are most doing the research in it, because there are literally hundreds of centers of research in the universities right now.
	But what you will need to understand is the periodic table of the elements.
	Get yourself some good basic math, chemistry, and physics.
	And once you've done that, then you can begin to specialize.
	Do you want to go to the biological end, or the materials processing end, or the electronics end?
	Because right now, nanotech is divided into a number of fields, because each of the researchers is concentrating on specific things.
	One group made a car, a nano-car, that's just a couple of molecules shot together, and it has a motor that drives with light, and it's a light-powered vehicle that can carry materials around on the nanoscale for them.
	Some is in power storage, some is in medical technology and biology, So you really have to decide what it is you're going to concentrate on.
	General nanotech like manufacturing or some application that goes into a medical field.
	But it all really hinges on your understanding of physics and the elements in chemistry and possibly even computing because of how it's going to be controlled.
	So Charles, what do you think is going to be the first nanotechnologically produced item that we can walk into a Walmart or anywhere else and buy?
	Oh, displays.
	Definitely displays on electronic devices like the iPods or The other small PDAs.
	They've already come up with what they call digital paper, which is made of nanoparticles in a matrix that allows you to create a display that looks almost exactly like paper.
	Of course, the downside of that is you're going to be getting junk mail with animation and graphics on it now.
	International Line, you're on the air with Sir Charles.
	Hi.
	Hello?
	International Line, you're on the air.
	At least I think you're on the air.
	Maybe I didn't push the button right.
	Let me try it again.
	International Line, now I think you're on the air.
	Well, no you're not.
	They had other ideas.
	Apparently.
	International Line, one last time.
	Are you there?
	Hi Art, this is Justin from Winnipeg.
	Hey!
	Hey, how's it going?
	Hi Mr. Charles, I just had one question.
	I was just wondering, how would this be used maybe on animals or something like that?
	Well, once again, it's all going to depend on your application.
	You know, I imagine that you could make tags for pets with nanotechnology that could be absolutely identified.
	But also, if you have a pet and you want to be able to identify it anywhere, you could actually take a genetic sample.
	They have a laboratory on a chip, laboratory on a coin.
	They have systems they're coming out with now that have the ability to do a complete DNA analysis in a matter of minutes.
	By applying a sample that's so tiny you can't even see it.
	And they're talking like less than a nanogram of material being able to analyze everything in it and quantify everything in it.
	So it wouldn't surprise me if in the very near term we start seeing systems that will identify a pet by its actual genetic code.
	Okay, I hope that answers your question.
	So eventually, and not too far in the future, we are going to be able to go in and we're going to actually be able to buy something or another, right?
	Yes, absolutely.
	I expect that it's going to be out pretty soon.
	Already people are injecting tagging chips in their animals, and so I do expect that we're going to see it.
	It'll probably be one of the standard tools that law enforcement or animal control will have within a few years.
	Okay, let's go to one of the wildcard lines.
	Hello there, you're on the air with Sir Charles Schultz.
	Hi, my name's Freddy and I'm from Austin, Texas.
	Yes, sir.
	I had a question.
	If humans were allowed to live forever, like you were talking about, that would mean that our brains would stop evolving, and we possibly couldn't get any smarter.
	And what would happen if, say, we lived for a million years?
	What would happen to the hard drive in our head once it got full?
	Would we forget things, or would we not be able to learn more?
	Okay, that's a very good question, and it's one that I've actually given some thought to.
	As we experience things, we often forget a lot of our earlier memories, or they become fuzzier.
	As we refine our knowledge of things, we reach a point where we get a better understanding.
	But, if we lived so long that the number of experiences we had exceeded our storage, we really wouldn't have a place to put it, and we probably would become quite forgetful about it.
	Now, yes, the evolution of the brain stops.
	But, with nanotechnology, you have the ability to install memory upgrades, or expansion, or download what you know and save it somewhere.
	So, it really doesn't mean that it's an end, as far as your understanding of intelligence goes.
	I would well imagine that we'd end up, like, with a personal digital assistant in our head that has the storage capacity of a thousand lifetimes, perhaps.
	You there, caller?
	Okay, I guess not.
	Anyway, that's certainly a good answer.
	Let's go west of the Rockies and say, hello there, you're on the air with Sir Charles Schultz.
	Hi, Garthel.
	Hi, Charles.
	I'm Tim from Medford, Oregon, and I was curious, can nanotechnology end up becoming evil, a lot like technology from Star Trek?
	Well, it very well could.
	There are a lot of things that we could do with nanotech that we couldn't do any other way, and a lot of the things that people see in the Star Trek series and movies could actually be duplicated using nanotechnology.
	So, yes, I could see where we could have new materials, you know, foods, the ability to replicate materials that we haven't even thought of.
	Everything you ever need would essentially be a blueprint on the computer, and you just order it and have it made right away.
	So sure.
	And we could have the holodeck technology that you mentioned, you know, that was mentioned.
	That could easily be done.
	We've got, in fact, a new material, a metamaterial that's coming out very shortly.
	that will allow for something called a negative index of refraction.
	This is an optical term.
	And it means that the material would work counterintuitively with light,
	that you could project a scene into the material and it would materialize above the material.
	So you could actually make those floating in midair holographic displays quite likely.
	And we're going to be seeing some tests of those materials over the next year or two.
	Isn't there some danger, Sir Charles, that with a holodeck type of technology,
	I don't know, that we'd all sort of disappear into a video game-like play world
	and our arms literally would be hanging by our sides?
	Well, we're seeing the beginnings of that right now with the video games we've got.
	It becomes better and more engaging.
	So yes, absolutely, we're going to see a lot of people who will just drop out of reality That is happening right now.
	There are people totally hooked on video games.
	So as it becomes, I don't know, more and more real to us, it just seems to me that we're going to lose more and more people.
	Let's go to the east of the Rockies line and say hello there.
	You're on there with Sir Charles Schultz.
	Thank you.
	I must say I'm a bit of a skeptic when it comes to advanced nanotech beyond just better materials and bulk.
	Because at that scale, a droplet of water is like an ocean of molasses or glue.
	A dust mote is an asteroid, a dust mite is Godzilla, and heat is death.
	For Brownian motion alone would make nanotech construction at that scale like getting Norm Abram and Bob Vila to build a two-story brownstone on Omaha Beach while being shelled.
	I mean, if nanotech is like the sales of John Carpenter's thing, the ambient environment is going to be like the blob.
	It's going to be very hostile to it.
	Trying to get nanotech to say split a boulder in half would be like trying to give every man in China a shovel and say, okay, now go dig the world in two.
	It all sounds to me like pixie dust from dejected scientists who say, lament of our space program and tired of being rejected themselves.
	They come up with this pixie dust, this nanopixie dust.
	They plant it and it's all going to happen without any funds for big science.
	I think we need to spend more money on heavy industry.
	If you want to go to Mars, say you'll go to Mars with Well, consider this.
	not with Rutan's ME-163 comet.
	If you want to terraform Venus, you've got to blow off half its atmosphere
	and not deposit little nanopixie dust that's going to vaporize in a puff of smoke.
	I mean, even the Venera super probe the Soviets put down is probably just a corroded pool of metal.
	I really doubt whether nanotech is going to be useful at all.
	Well, consider this.
	All of the hardware inside your cells is natural, biological nanotech.
	What we will be doing is building nanotech that is a little more durable
	and a little more flexible than what nature has already done.
	Yeah, but how many millions of years does it take?
	I mean, I think nanotech, the gray goo, would probably be no quicker than fungi.
	I mean, we have this idea, I think some of the nanotech folks have, of just planting something and somebody just kind of foams up before your eyes.
	I'm not buying it.
	I think we really need to get out of the lab and start supporting heavy industry.
	We're already going to have need for lays and the brute force approach.
	I really think we're fooling ourselves on this scale because it took a long time
	just to get things done at a cellular level and that's the things that kind of work with the
	environment. And if you try to have these small little
	mechanisms, I just don't see it.
	I really don't. Well the advantage we have over natural evolution is this.
	Nature did things at random, and whatever works survived and duplicated.
	But we have the ability to direct our thoughts and our efforts on specific results.
	And we can accomplish it in a matter of years, as opposed to millions of years.
	So because we have the ability to choose where we're directing our efforts, we can look for specific tools and build them as we see fit, just like the leaves and anything else.
	The laws of physics don't change.
	Let me give you an example.
	That's a very small little bug, if you will, Art.
	But the only way it's able to survive such hostile radioactive environments is because it doesn't do much.
	If you have something that's very complex, it does more and more things, the more vulnerable it is.
	I mean, let me give you an example.
	If I wanted to have nanobots try to split a boulder dead in two, it'd be like all the guys in China trying to dig the world in two.
	I could actually go at the sub-nano level directly with chemicals and try to dissolve it.
	But you know, if I really want to split that boulder, give me a hammer and a chisel and I'll do it lickety-splat.
	Well, but nothing says that nano can't use the same forces of physics.
	Yeah, it'll take a hundred years to do it.
	It'll take a hundred years for those little nanobots to split that thing.
	I don't buy it.
	I just don't.
	But consider that you can have an almost unlimited number of them working on the project simultaneously.
	So, there are some advantages to either process, absolutely.
	But you can bet that as we make progress, we're going to discover new things we never understood.
	Well, you know, if it turns out that nanotech is not a viable technology, we'll find out real fast.
	environment you try to put them out there by themselves and just be like you
	know trying to get a 105 year olds trying to dig a mountain in two they
	just can't do it. Well you know if it turns out that nanotech is not a viable
	technology we'll find out real fast and if it's something that doesn't survive
	in the world as a whole and in the environment that might actually be to
	our advantage because it could prevent the Grey Goo scenario.
	How much of a possibility, Sir Charles, is it that nanotech is just flat going to fail?
	I mean, obviously this caller is a doubter.
	How much of a possibility is there?
	Well, consider that we can make machines using metals and ceramics that can survive conditions that organic molecules will not.
	If we convert that sort of information and structure down to the nanoscale, we could make microscopic robots that are far more durable than cells.
	And, you know, the bottom line is, we're going to find out what's going to work best.
	And I do believe that nanotech will work, because it works at the very fundamental level.
	Consider that to split a boulder in half, you don't have to take a three centimeter wide strip out of it, you only need to take a few molecule wide strip right out of the middle.
	And nano is very suited for that.
	I think you still need brute force.
	I mean, I think when it comes to inert materials, I hope I'm wrong.
	I really do.
	I mean, the Great Goose scenario probably won't work, won't be.
	I really think that nanotech, even if it got out of control, would be like a general nuisance, something that would dissolve things.
	It'd be like extra bad moon dust and might get up under your You're plastic and eat it away, but, you know, good old-fashioned grit would do that, too.
	I mean, to me, it sounds like... I mean, I want us to have a futuristic society.
	I really do.
	I'm not a technophobe.
	I think technophobia is humanity's greatest threat.
	I think we're, right now, I guess, we're trapped between two parties, one of which wants to give us all a collective lobotomy and send us back into the dark age, and other guys want to call for opposable thumbs.
	Caller, I wish you'd been here a little bit earlier.
	I've got to cut you off because we're totally out of time.
	Sir Charles, it has been astounding.
	I mean, it's just been an astounding show, and I guess it's an astounding future we probably have in front of us.
	I wish we'd had that caller a little bit earlier in the show, and I would have liked to have continued that debate.
	But listen, is there any website you'd like to quickly plug or book or whatever?
	Well, of course, there's my Xenotech Research website that everybody's seen, and a lot of the new findings are posted there.
	I'm having a page put up on my site about my book very shortly, and I'm going to send you a couple of chapters to read up front, because we discussed a little of that.
	And other than that, I'm good.
	All right, buddy.
	Thank you so much for a wonderful show.
	You have a wonderful week ahead.
	And from the other side of the world, Sir Charles, take care.
	Everybody else out there, also, see you next weekend.

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