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Nov. 26, 2006 - Art Bell
02:39:47
Coast to Coast AM with Art Bell - Prof. Jim Bell - Mars and the Rover Missions
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From Typhoon Alley.
That's right, Typhoon Alley.
The capital city of the Philippine Islands, Manila.
Hi everybody, I'm Art Bell, and this is yet another weekend edition of Coast to Coast AM.
My honor and privilege to be escorting you through the weekend.
Jim Bell will be here, telephone lines permitting, remember last week.
Should be very interesting.
He's at home, so we should be able to get a good phone connection this night, I hope.
Or you can add it to the list of conspiracies that have gone down on this program.
I mean, it would be impossible that we would not get a good connection tonight.
I said Typhoon Alley because here we are again.
Somebody sent me an email, bless you, I think, and said, well, Art, there's another one headed your way.
Sure enough, I went to the website, and there it is.
Forecast to be at least a Category 4, if not 5.
And its name is Durian.
D-U-R-I-A-N.
And it should have winds approaching 270 kilometers when it makes landfall here in the Philippines about Thursday or so.
Now, right now, the storm track would seem to show that it's more or less headed for us.
And it would seem as though I have moved straight into the middle of Typhoon Alley here.
There's simply no question about it.
There have been, it's just been a typhoon after typhoon after typhoon.
And just as they did in the Atlantic the season previous, they've all grown into Cat 4, Cat 5 at the least.
I mean, just super typhoons.
And the last couple have had the northern part of the Philippines, where the mountains are, to batter away at, which is no great deal.
It always hurts somebody, but better in the mountains, of course.
This one I've got not a good feeling about.
By the way, durian, D-U-R-I-A-N, is also a fruit here in the Philippines, which my wife informs me smells awful and is protected.
This is a fruit that has these long stickers that come out of it.
So if one falls on you from a durian tree, it kills you.
It's like a fruit with daggers, and there have been a number of people killed by durian fruit, so I guess it is an appropriate name for a typhoon.
We'll watch Typhoon Durian.
And if the web moguls are up at this hour, you can go to the usual Typhoon 2000 and put a graphic up if you will, but it really does look like this one is certainly potentially headed for Well, that'll take care of my antenna.
That'll take care of my antenna problems.
If Durian were to strike as Millenio did and directly hit Manila, that would sweep away my antenna.
Just erase it as though it were never there.
All right, let's look around the world a little bit.
Then we'll do some open lines and hope for, cross our fingers, knock on pressed wood for Jim Bell.
The journey home at the end of the long Thanksgiving weekend was smooth sailing for many travelers Sunday.
Although, have you seen it?
It's on the news nets.
Snow!
Slowed the journey for some in the west.
In Washington, 15 inches of snow fell near the Canadian border, and traffic slowed to a crawl on the state's main east-west corridor.
Farther south, chains were mandatory on vehicles traveling on two major highways linking Sacramento, California, to ski resorts in Nevada's Lake Tahoe area.
Now, here in the Philippines, nobody has ever seen snow, except in the movies or on television.
There just is no such thing, no matter how high you would go.
There are some pretty high mountains here, but not high enough to get to snow.
Sunni, Shiite, and Kurdish leaders called Sunday for an end to Iraq's sectarian conflict, vowed to track down those responsible for the war's deadliest attack, but even as they went on national TV to try to keep Iraq from sliding into an all-out civil war, fighting between Iraqi security forces and Sunni Arab insurgents raged for yet a second day north of Baghdad.
That doesn't look good.
What's going on in Iraq just does not look good.
An angry crowd demanded Sunday to know just why police officers killed an unarmed man on the day of his wedding, firing dozens of shots, I heard about 50, that also wounded two of the man's friends.
Some called for the ouster of the city's police commissioner.
At a vigil and rally the day after 23-year-old Sean Bell, Was supposed to have married the mother of his two young children, a crowd led by the Reverend Al Sharpton shouted, no justice, no peace.
Congressional leaders displayed eroding patience in the Iraqi government on Sunday.
They're no longer confident.
Adding pressure on President Bush and the Iraqi Prime Minister to find a faster path to peace when they meet this week.
It's not too late.
The United States can still extricate itself honorably from an impending disaster in Iraq, according to Republican Senator Chuck Hagel of Nebraska, a potential presidential contender in 2008.
He said that in urging for a planned withdrawal of U.S.
troops.
We've now been there longer, been involved in Iraq longer than World War II went on.
A motorcycle officer injured last week while escorting the president in the islands died Sunday.
Steve Fevella, 30, and two other officers crashed their cycles as the presidential motorcade was traveling across Hickam Air Force Base to meet troops for breakfast early Tuesday.
The other officers were treated at the Queens Medical Center and then released.
The leftist nationalist who is friendly with Venezuela's anti-US president is holding a commanding lead over a Bible-toting banana tycoon in Sunday's runoff presidential election down in Ecuador.
So it looks like Ecuador may go that-a-way.
An official quick vote count and two exit polls showed that Rafael Carrera, a U.S.-trained economist who has rattled Wall Street by threatening to reduce foreign debt payments and oppose free trade efforts, declared victory shortly after a very quick count was announced on Sunday, but his opponent didn't concede.
So we'll see.
Interesting story.
A woman faces a fine for a peace sign.
A homeowners association in southwestern Colorado is threatening to fine a resident $25 a day until she removes a Christmas wreath with a peace sign that some say is an anti-Iraq war protest or perhaps even a symbol of Satan.
Some residents who have complained have children serving in Iraq.
Uh, said the President of the Homeowners Association there.
Said some residents have also believed it might be a symbol of Satan.
Three or four residents have complained.
Well, it looks like, to me, just an old-fashioned peace symbol.
In a story unusual even for a soap opera, and believed to be perhaps a television first, ABC's All My Children this week will introduce a transgender character who is beginning to make the transition from man to woman.
The character, a flamboyant rock star known as Zarf, kisses the lesbian character, Bianca, and much drama ensues.
The storyline begins with Thursday's episode of the Daytime Drama.
So, usually when a TV show begins doing things like that, it means ratings difficulties.
Not always, I suppose, but usually when they really reach out to the fringe, it means they've seen some erosion somewhere.
So they've got to make some moves.
In a moment we'll look at some of the rest of the news.
You know let me add that I actually all my life I have enjoyed storms.
I have always enjoyed storm tracking, storm chasing, storms in general.
But this year, the half year that I have been here in what obviously is Typhoon Alley here in the Pacific, I always thought typhoons curved further to the north and generally went up and smacked Okinawa and then Japan, but now I learn that there is a second, more traveled track that comes right across the Philippines and then goes on to Vietnam.
Our neighbor.
If his experiment in splitting photons should actually work, says University of Washington physicist John Kramer, the next step is going to be to test for quantum retrocausality.
That's science talk for saying he hopes to find evidence of a photon going backward in time.
Quote, it doesn't seem like it should work, but on the other hand, I can't see what would prevent it from working, said Kramer.
If it does work, you could receive the signal 50 microseconds before you send it.
And what, wait a minute, what's that supposed to mean?
Roughly put, Kramer is talking about the subatomic equivalent of arriving at a train station before you've left home.
Or you might think of it as winning the lottery before you bought the ticket, or graduating from high school before you've been born, something like that.
It probably will not work, he said again carefully, peering through his large glasses as if to determine his audience's mental capacity for digesting what he was about to say.
Kramer, an accomplished experimental physicist who also writes science fiction, knows that it all sounds more like a made-for-TV script on the sci-fi channel than anything really serious.
If it doesn't work, we should be able to learn something new about quantum mechanics by simply trying it, he said.
What he and UW colleague Warren Nargoni plan to try soon is an experiment aimed at resolving some terrible contradictions in one of the most fundamental branches of physics known as quantum mechanics or quantum theory.
To be honest, I only have a faint understanding of what John's talking about.
Smiling, though claiming to be just a technician on the project, Kramer's technician partner previously assisted with the research of Hans Dimmelt, the UW scientist who won The 1989 Nobel Prize in Physics, Quantum Theory, describes the behavior of matter and energy at the atomic and subatomic levels, a level of reality where most of the more familiar Newtonian laws of physics, which explain why planets spin, airplanes fly, baseballs curve, no longer apply.
The problem with quantum theory, put simply, is that it's really weird.
Findings at the quantum level just don't fit well with either Newton's or Einstein's view of reality at the macro level, and attempts to explain quantum behavior often appear inherently contradictory.
There's a whole zoo of quantum paradoxes out there, said Kramer.
That's part of the reason Einstein absolutely hated quantum mechanics.
One of the paradoxes of interest to Kramer is known as entanglement.
We've been talking a lot about that on this program.
It's also known as the Einstein-Polosky-Rosen paradox, named for the three scientists who described its apparent absurdity as an argument against quantum theory.
Basically, the idea is that Interacting, or entangled, subatomic particles, you know, like two protons, the fundamental units of light, can affect each other no matter how far apart in time or space.
If you do a measurement on one, it has an immediate effect on the other, even if they're separated by light years across the universe, Kramer said.
If one of the entangled photons' trajectory tilts up, the other one, no matter how distant, will tilt down To compensate, Einstein ridiculed the idea as spooky action at a distance.
Now that's not very scientific, even for Einstein.
Spooky action at a distance.
Quantum mechanics must be wrong, the father of relativity contended, because that behavior requires some kind of signal passing between the two particles at a speed faster than light.
And of course, that's absolutely correct.
So, that really does mean that they might be able to receive a signal just before they send it.
And that, of course, will lead to time travel.
On the service, Thiago Olson is like any other typical teenager.
He's on the cross-country track team at Stony Creek High School in Rochester Hills.
Good looking, clean cut, 17-year-old, 3.75 grade average.
And he's got his eyes fixed on the next big step, college.
But to his friends, he's known as the mad scientist because in the basement of his parents' Oakland township home, Tucked away in an area most aren't privy to see, he's exhausting his love of physics on a project that has taken him more than two years and a thousand hours now to research and build.
It is a large, intricate machine that, on a small scale, creates nuclear fusion.
Nuclear fusion, when atoms are combined to create energy, is a kind of holy grail of physics, said he.
In fact, on, and there's a website named here, the Stony Creek Seniors ranked as 18th amateur in the world to create nuclear effusion, so...
How does he do it?
Pointing the steel chamber where all... He's got a big steel chamber where he claims all the magic occurs.
Said on Friday, this piece of the puzzle serves as a vacuum.
The air is sucked out and then into a filter.
Then, deuterium gas, that's a form of hydrogen, is injected into the vacuum.
About 40,000 volts of electricity are charged into the chamber from a piece of equipment taken from an old mammogram machine.
As the machine runs, the atoms in the chamber are attracted to the center and soon... Ta-da!
Nuclear fusion.
He said when that happens, a small, intense ball of energy forms.
He first achieved fusion in September and has been perfecting the machine that he built in his parents' garage ever since.
So there you have it.
A high school student Is the 18th person in the world to create nuclear fusion, in this case in his parents' basement.
You've got to wonder, you've really got to wonder what's going on across the U.S.
and other countries of the world.
These high school students, these 3.75 and lower grade average students, creating nuclear fusion.
It's enough to give you a little nervous tick, isn't it?
Russia is going to build a deep space exploration telescope that will outstrip the US-made Hubble telescope, according to a Russian astronomer.
Orbited in 1990, Hubble has been the most successful, the most expensive project in astrophysics, costing now over $6 billion, and I'm not sure that includes the mission coming to fix it.
In cooperation with our colleagues from Germany, the UK, China and Spain, we've set ourselves the task of building the Spectrum Ultraviolet Telescope, which will surpass Hubble in some aspects.
Boris Shutov, Director of the Astronomy Institute at the Russian Academy of Sciences, told a news conference, The telescope with a 170 centimeter diameter antenna will explore the structure of the universe in the ultraviolet spectrum.
Now, they are claiming that in concert with the telescope on Earth, this orbiting telescope will have the power to read a newspaper on the moon.
Do you hear me?
Read a newspaper on the moon.
We already know that Hubble, powerful as it is, is not able to see any of the artifacts that we Americans left on the moon.
Can't see a thing.
Too small to resolve.
I checked on it after we talked about it on the show a couple of weeks ago.
Too small to resolve.
And here they're talking about launching A telescope that in concert with another telescope on Earth would actually be able to read a newspaper.
Can you believe that?
Read a newspaper on the moon.
Suicide rates are down for some reason.
Nobody understands why.
But for 40 years, adolescent suicide rates rose.
Then the rates began to decline in late 1980s for adults 65 and older, and in the early 1990s for adolescents and young adults.
But many people were not aware.
They just kept saying suicides were increasing, and it's simply no longer true.
But nobody knows why.
They just, they have no idea of why.
It used to be that older people and younger people had a very, very high suicide rate.
They would take their own lives for whatever reasons.
Nobody really, of course, understood because when you take your own life, unless you leave a detailed note, nobody really knows why you did it.
And now we're finding out that though we thought rates were increasing, they're not.
They're decreasing both for the younger people and for the older people.
And that is also true, by the way, around the holidays.
We're now, of course, in the middle of the holiday season, which traditionally has been a season of high suicide rate, and it's declining.
So I wonder what's going on.
Oh, yesterday we were talking about old calculator machines.
You remember that?
Well, they're working on one of the oldest, about 2,000 years old.
There's an astronomical calculator that was found, dug up actually.
Its discovery was in 1902.
It's a mechanism with intricate and baffling systems of about 30 geared wheels.
Been an enigma until now.
Our knowledge of its structures, functions, has increased as computer-based imaging analysis and x-ray technicians have worked on it during the last 50 years.
Researchers have identified various astronomical and calendar functions, including gears that mimic the movements of the Sun and the Moon.
So, even 2,000 years ago, we apparently had machines that emulated movements of our own Earth, of the Sun.
And had a way of keeping time and learning things.
Now that was just back toward the time of Christ.
That long ago.
They had those kinds of machines.
And we're just now beginning with modern computers.
To be able to untangle the mystery, the things they understood then.
Maybe they understood then a great deal more than we give them credit for.
From Manila in the Philippines, I am Art Bell.
Indeed, here I am.
Hi everybody.
Listen, if you want to get in on Open Lines and you've got something you want to say prior to our guest at the top of the hour, Jim Bell, if the phone lines work, by all means, grab one of those phone numbers and join us.
We're going to Open Lines in just a second here.
I've got to say, tonight we're going to be talking about the Mars machines and their cameras and the pictures they're taking of Mars.
The one picture that really did kind of grab me was the apparent, alleged skull.
Now, I've been on to this for some number of weeks.
I haven't said anything about the skull.
You know me, I'm sort of a skeptic when it comes to many of the things that Richard Hoagland sees.
As I've told Richard, straight to his face.
Or his ear, on the phone.
When he sees faces, many times I just see rocks.
Rocks.
Much to the frustration of Richard, I see rocks.
Now, we do have these amazing machines running about on Mars, and they did take one photograph of what appears to be a skull.
Now, the human brain tries to make sense out of something it sees that it does not understand, but I don't think the skull falls in that category.
Or maybe it does.
But the skull is clearly A skull.
One doesn't have to sit there and look at it as one would a cloud that seems to form some angelic shape to get it.
The skull is just a skull.
Now I suppose in a million rocks you're going to find one rock that looks like a skull.
And that's one possible explanation.
Then of course another fairly far-fetched one is that it is a skull.
Some Martian skull that somehow made it to the top of the ground on Mars.
Or something.
I have no idea.
Anyway, let's take a break, then do some open lines.
Stay right where you are.
I hope this stinky, deadly fruit named Dorian, also named Typhoon Dorian, does not come our
But if it does, it's going to be Thursday-ish here.
Bearing in mind that it's already Monday afternoon here, right now, Monday afternoon.
So, we'll see, but it certainly is looking ominous out there.
Let's go to the lines, as promised.
First time caller line, it's Todd in Arizona.
Hi Mr. Bell, I wanted to ask you about some of the music you play and whether or not you went backstage and met Barry and Maurice Gibb at the Bee Gees.
I did not go backstage.
No, I have very little weight.
You know, in the US, being who I am, frequently I was able to get backstage.
Being who I am here is being nobody.
So, no, I didn't get backstage.
And what was the other question?
I'm sorry.
The music you play, like, um, I noticed you play Dancing Queen a lot by ABBA, and you know, you might want to listen to The Day Before You Came or Chiquita by them, you know?
Okay, alright, well, actually, the truth is, I worship ABBA.
ABBA, there's just not another ABBA.
Is there ever going to be another ABBA?
Probably not.
In our lifetimes.
For one thing, music is not what it once was, in the harmony category.
I just, I've never heard a group as perfect as ABBA.
I have seen another documentary on ABBA, and I've picked up everything I can on ABBA.
They were just an amazing, absolutely an amazing group.
Do you know, ABBA was offered one billion dollars, that's with a B, a billion dollars to get together again and do a tour, and I think wisely, they refused it.
Wild Card Line, Bill, you're on the air from Georgia.
How you doing, bud?
I'm good, good.
I love your show, Art.
Listen, I have a question, or it's more of a statement, actually.
I'm thinking, like, now with the threat of, you know, terrorism and everything, like, especially the potential nuclear threat, you know, I'm thinking now, if there is a conspiracy to keep aliens, you know, to keep the treated by aliens, you know, from the American people, like, now would like to be the perfect time like to like
disprove some of the radical islam you know which teaches unfortunately that you know everything you need to know
it comes from the koran or whatever i'm thinking you know i'm
pretty sure there's no nothing about aliens in the koran i mean do you think
now would be a good time like to like to you know put
you know what i'm trying to say i think i know what you're trying to say
well i i i i would it would make the terrorists think well hell maybe you know
Maybe everything we didn't know is not in the Quran.
If aliens are real, then a lot of what we believe is wrong, too, you know?
Well, maybe a lot of what we believe is wrong.
Who knows?
I was listening a little bit earlier to an interview with William Shatner on Fox, and of course they talked to him a lot about, and he's tremendously successful.
I mean, with Boston Legal now and so much, including Star Trek behind him, he's an amazing character.
But he said something that kind of rocked me back a little bit.
He said he was very, very much afraid of death, and the interviewer said, why?
And he said, because I don't think there's anything that comes after.
Nothing.
And so I suppose somebody with that point of view would be, indeed, very much afraid of death.
Now it's interesting because I'm not really afraid of death.
I realize that the Grim Reaper lies ahead in my life somewhere.
Not all that far away, probably.
But either way, it can't be that horrible.
A bit of pain, like you get at the dentist, I suppose.
And then you're gone.
And either you go on to some sort of heaven, purgatory or hell, depending on your belief system, or the, what is it, 72 virgins, I don't know, where there's nothing at all.
And nothing at all would be not that bad.
It really wouldn't be that bad.
It would be a cessation of life, but it wouldn't be a painful eternity of paying for your sins.
It would simply be nothing.
I don't know.
Fear of death, I suppose it's in all of us a little bit, but I've sort of rationalized it to one of those possibilities.
And I don't believe, as William Shatner does, that there is nothing past this.
He'd be an interesting interview, wouldn't he?
Maybe I should work on interviewing William Shatner one day.
But if what he believes is true, that's nothing to necessarily be afraid of.
Let's go to West of the Rockies and say hello Sheila from Arizona.
Hi Art.
Hi.
When you were talking about entanglement earlier, and you mentioned that one proton would affect another proton at a distance.
In fact, if one proton goes up, the other at any distance, even light years away, goes down to compensate, yes.
But is that just any proton?
Or all protons?
I don't understand how it, does it choose one proton to affect?
It chooses its mate.
There's a positive and negative to everything.
I'm not, look, this is a leading edge science that I'm not even all that conversant with, but I think that if it happens, if for example they prove this really is happening and they in essence get a message 50 microseconds before they sent it, we are on our way to time travel.
Well that's true.
Are you going to be the first one in line?
I've said if time travel, and I don't think it's going to happen for human beings in my lifetime, unless it's already happened and some previous guests I've had on the subject actually have disappeared in time, then otherwise I don't think it's going to happen in my lifetime.
But I've always said I would choose to go back to the time of Christ to see if it really happened the way it has been written.
Wouldn't you want to know that?
Well, I guess because I believe it already, I don't need to.
You have so much faith that you really wouldn't need to see it?
No.
God, I wish I had that.
I wish I had that kind of faith, but I don't.
There's this seed of doubt.
I tend toward believing it, because there is so much written, so much documented, that I really tend toward believing it.
But I would love to see it.
I would absolutely love to go back and see Christ and see the miracles and really see it happen.
Well, that's true.
So I envy you.
I really envy you that absolute faith.
It doesn't come easy.
No, I guess it doesn't.
So if time travel was possible, where would you go, since you don't need to be reinforced with actually seeing all of that?
I think I would go back to the beginnings of Earth and see how that all happened, if it really happened the way, you know, you see in the History Channel and the National Geographic Channel, if it really happened the way they say it did.
Well, I kind of picture you running as fast as you can with a giant Tyrannosaurus Rex on your tail, you know?
True.
Find me a bush quick.
All right.
Thanks, Sheila.
Thank you.
You take care.
So back that far.
No, I don't think I would go back that far.
I really would like to see...
What we have this great debate about.
There is no greater debate, is there?
Than life and death and what may or may not be on the other side.
It is the greatest question of all, I think.
Second wildcard line, Steven in Georgia.
You're on the air.
Hi.
Good evening, Art.
How you doing, sir?
I'm fine.
Fantastic.
Getting kind of deep here, aren't we?
Really deep.
Well, sometimes it's inevitable.
It sure is.
Personally, I've got a few years left to go, and I'd just rather not think about my demise, if you know what I mean.
Well, I was listening, as I said, to William Shatner, and he thinks he's deathly afraid of death.
You know, he would be probably a good interviewer, and Art, I think all you'd have to do is pick up the phone and get him on any night that you wanted.
It could be.
I look here, congratulations are due to you, sir.
Hadn't spoken to you in quite a while.
Congratulations on the birth of your new baby coming up.
Well, you know, it's going to be interesting because we know the exact date of conception.
It was while we were in Hong Kong.
It was September 15th.
Wonderful city.
Yeah, it is a wonderful city.
If you do the math, the date of birth is going to be just about on my birthday, which is June 17th.
Come on, in December?
No, no, no, June 17th.
Oh, that's right, June, that's right.
June 17th is my birthday.
Now, would that be something or would that be something?
That's going back.
I'm going to tell you, that would be one to really think about.
But look here, I haven't spoken to you since before the elections.
How did you like the way everything turned out here in the States?
I thought it was fine.
I thought it was predictable.
And I guess I'm kind of like the stock market.
The stock market just loves it when we have divided government.
It did go up, didn't it?
And one other thing, I really enjoyed your guest last night, Joel Giroux.
He was really good.
He was good, wasn't he?
I'd love to hear him again, and I'm going to try to pick his book up, I think Radical Evolution, right?
Anybody, yes, anybody who does an interview like that is bound to have written a really good, understandable, fun-to-read book, so I agree.
And he must have really been prepared for your show last night, too.
I'll say.
I'll say.
He was an excellent guest.
I'd love to hear him again.
Okay, buddy, thank you.
Take care of yourself, and take care of that wonderful lady, and happy holidays to you.
Very same to you.
Take care.
She is a wonderful lady.
Her name is Erin.
I call her Erin.
It's actually Irene.
To give you an idea of the difference in cultures, something that I'm working very hard on, Yesterday, during the program, she went to a family picnic here in Manila.
She has quite a couple of brothers here in Manila.
And she asked me, could I go?
And I said, of course you can go.
Here in the Philippines, we all communicate by text.
We don't call each other.
It's all text, back and forth.
And she sent me a text during the show yesterday and said, thank you for allowing me to go.
And I went, oh, now there's a difference in culture for you.
And I went, oh my God.
And I texted her back and I said, hon, don't even say anything like that.
You are my wife, not my employee.
I'm not your boss.
Don't ever say anything like that to me again.
You can do whatever you want to do.
You are a woman.
But that has not occurred to the women here.
Devoted in a way that is frankly somewhat repugnant to a lot of Americans.
It's very old-fashioned.
Thank you for allowing me to go.
Good Lord.
I'm trying to work that part of, and it's a very deep cultural belief, you know, that the man is the absolute king of home and all that baloney that's behind us in the United States.
It's certainly not behind us here, and I will not have her Anyway, we talked about that.
The thing I'm having difficulty with right now is getting her to eat.
She's not eating and she's scaring me to death.
To her, now nine weeks pregnant or something, everything smells bad.
Doesn't matter what it is.
Everything tastes not good.
But particularly everything smells bad.
Doesn't matter what it is.
Her food, Philippine food, American food, any food, it smells bad.
And she can't eat it.
And she's having quite a time with morning sickness.
So, there you have it.
Okay.
Let's go to Andrew, I believe.
Andrew is in Oklahoma.
Andrew, hello.
Hi, Art.
How are you doing?
How are you doing?
I'm fine.
Okay.
I just wanted to let you know that last night's show was absolutely awesome.
I enjoyed it.
One of the best shows I think so far.
I had some questions I thought maybe you could answer.
As far as, you know, being able to integrate intelligence into the human, you know, do you think also we could incorporate reasoning or common sense as well?
Wisdom?
Yes.
I kind of doubt it.
You know, wisdom seems to come with age.
And when you're younger, you're smart, your memory is good, right?
And you're just smart as a whip, mostly, for the most part.
But you don't have wisdom.
Well, do you think that's also the fountain of youth, so to speak?
Or being able to increase lifespan also?
Well, they're certainly working on that.
They're working on perhaps, eventually, even eliminating death altogether.
I wonder if that would be a good thing or not.
Well, William Shatner would be happy about it.
He would indeed, wouldn't he?
Yeah, if you have that belief, then you'd be all on top of that technology.
Okay, say if we could do that, don't you agree that we indeed would have a superhuman on our hands?
Yes.
And that's what the whole program, that's what the whole thing yesterday was about.
The fact that we are approaching a mating with machines.
Humans and machines.
And the distinction between human and machine, I think, will begin to blur pretty quickly.
Next 10 or 20 years.
He was right about that.
So what do you think we would do with superhumans?
And do you think they already exist?
Maybe the better question is, what do you think superhumans would do with us?
Hmm.
That's a very interesting angle as well.
Yes it is.
They might decide that we're simply just not worth having around anymore.
The lesser humans, the Unimproved 1.0 versions are just not worth having around anymore unless it's to shine their shoes.
So there's going to be a lot of challenges as we move forward in this brave new world.
Let's go to Toronto, Canada on the international line.
Terry, you're on the air.
Good day, Art.
How are you doing?
I'm just spiffy.
Good.
How's the weather in Manila?
Well, actually, the sun is out and it's a beautiful day, but as I mentioned, we have this monster of a typhoon on the way again.
I had an incident back in the 80s where I disappeared for like six hours.
I don't remember anything that happened.
You just disappeared?
I don't know.
I woke up six hours later driving home.
I woke up six hours later in my bed and I ended up with a lump on my chest.
Which I had a friend remove, probably last year.
What do you mean you had a friend remove it?
He's a doctor and he removed it.
I've had an x-ray, it changes shape, it moves.
Oh, really?
X-rays, it's a triangle and the other times it's a square.
He removed it and put it in a vial and it went liquid.
We put it back in my chest and it went back to solid again.
Do you, excuse me, did you say you put it back?
Yeah, I actually put it back in my chest.
Now you're the first one I've ever heard that's put back an implant.
It's actually really weird.
Wait a minute, wait a minute.
Why did you put it back?
Because I don't understand what this thing is.
Well, wait a minute.
How do you know it's good?
I don't, but it's not bothering me.
Yeah, but anything that moves around in your chest all on its own... I've never heard of anybody putting it back.
I put it back on my chest.
I didn't put it back in my chest.
When I was in a test tube.
So you mean kind of like a baby that has been birthed, you put it on your chest and sort of let it gurgle?
It was a solid, but when we removed it, it turned to a liquid.
And then when I put it back on, that's when I was in a test tube, it turned back to a solid again.
You are indeed.
Hi everybody.
Okay, here we go.
We tried to do this last week and we couldn't get hold of Professor Bell.
In New York City, of all places, not only did his hotel room phone not work, but he went to the business center of the hotel and that didn't work either.
Jim Bell is an associate professor in the Cornell University Astronomy Department.
He received his B.S.
from Caltech and his Ph.D.
from the University of Hawaii, performing research on Mars Surface Mineralogy and Climate Variations Using Infrared and Optical Telescopes at Moanake Observatory.
That's in Hawaii.
His studies primarily focus on the geology, chemistry and mineralogy, I guess it is, of planets, asteroids and comets using data obtained from telescopes and spacecraft missions.
Now, Jim is the lead scientist For the PanCam Color Imaging System on the NASA Mars Exploration Rover Spirit and Opportunity Missions.
He's also a member of the science teams of the NASA Mars Pathfinder, Mars O1 Odyssey Orbiter, Mars O5 Reconnaissance Orbiter, and the 2009 Mars Science Laboratory Mission Teams.
So coming up in a moment is Professor Jim Bell.
This should be a good one.
Stay right there.
By the way, just for clarification, it was kind of a shame at the top of the
last hour my board out there forgot to run the music.
It got involved in something else, and so I just kept on talking.
Actually, it was a fascinating A little story we're in the middle of there, and it turns out, I don't know how much you heard, but this fellow had removed an implant and then held it on his chest like a newborn baby.
The doctor had removed it.
But we talked right up until the break with no music, and that's why it got cut off like that.
All right.
Professor Jim Bell, welcome to the program.
Hey Art, it's great to be here.
It was very frustrating last week, but I'm glad we got together.
It was.
It's almost unimaginable, Professor, that a New York hotel would not have a serviceable, good phone line either in your room or certainly in the business area.
I mean, unbelievable.
I agree.
I felt like it was ironic that we were going to have this conversation about 21st century technology and we were thwarted by the technology of the 19th century.
Anyway, you are quite the catch to have on the program.
Now, I'm curious.
First, if you would.
Give us a status on these machines that really should not still be operating.
I don't think they should.
Aren't we way past the usable life of these things?
They are way beyond the manufacturer's warranty.
Today we're talking about the Spirit and Opportunity rovers that are on Mars.
The little robot cars that have been driving around Mars for almost three years now.
Today is day 1031.
on Spirit's mission, and Day 1010 is just about ending on Opportunity's mission on the other side of the planet.
So we thought they'd last, we were hoping they would last three months, 90 Mars days.
And, you know, if you probably have friends or know people who are engineers, and they design and build things, and they put in a little bit of margin of error, and we figured, oh, maybe they'll last 100 days, maybe they'll last 120 days.
No one, not even the people who built them, figured that they would last more than a thousand, and they're still going strong.
Why?
Good old American engineering, that's what I say.
Boy, I guess.
They were built for that environment.
They are machines that were designed to be self-sufficient.
They survive on sunlight.
They have solar panels.
They turn sunlight on Mars into electricity.
They recharge their batteries every day.
The most important thing we do is recharge those batteries so that they can survive the very cold Martian night.
It gets down to about minus 140 degrees Fahrenheit at night and we run heaters to keep the electronics on and the heaters keep the electronics alive at night and then the sun rises the next morning and we get more solar power and we just continue our mission that way.
We've been, you know, a combination, I think, of great engineering by the folks at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, other universities and vendors around the country, around the
world, and some really good luck as well.
I mean, we thought that the famous Martian dust storms would eventually choke the solar panels,
cover the solar panels with dust, and decrease our electricity, and that started to happen,
and then we've had gusts of wind come along, little dust devils, little gusts of wind, and clear the
solar panels off, and our power jumps up, and we continue to survive.
That's just amazing.
It's really incredible.
Is there any other, other than solar panels and the electricity needed to do all of this,
is there any other thing that will eventually be used up that is a power source?
Yeah, I guess probably the two sort of things.
One is that the batteries, you know, if you've ever used rechargeable batteries, you know, you can only charge and discharge them so many times.
Right.
And they just become impossible to recharge again.
And those batteries, the latest numbers that I've seen, they're still charging up to about 80% of their original charge capacity.
So that is slowly decaying, right?
But not as quickly as I think a lot of people had thought.
That's one thing that will eventually get us maybe years and years from now.
And the other thing is just the lifetime of motors and transmitters and transistors and, you know, integrated circuits.
I mean, these things, Just like your TV, just like your radio, your iPod, your laptop, whatever, these things stop working eventually.
It's just electronic parts.
So someday, something will just stop working.
Maybe it'll be a transmitter, maybe it'll be... We've already seen that happen on one of the wheels on the Spirit Rover, for example.
One of the wheels has stopped working.
So you're dragging it around like a bad shopping cart.
Exactly.
Exactly.
Well, the other possibility, of course, was tragedy, and that is that you would walk one into a cavern you couldn't get out of, or a crevice or something.
Right, or drive one over the lip of a crater, or down a steep mountain slope, and those have been risks that we have to face with both rovers.
Spirit has been climbing hills for much of its nearly three years on Mars, scrambling up and down slopes, and the opportunity of Rover has been And today is driving around slopes or crater walls on Mars that are near 60, 70, 80 degree slopes.
Wow.
If we accidentally drive the thing over the edge, you know, there's nobody there to go pick the rover up and dust it off and set it on its wheels and put it on its way again.
That would be the end of the mission.
So it's a very Careful, slow, methodical, conservative way of driving these things around, just so we don't do something dumb like that.
How far from the point of landing have they traveled?
What is the furthest trip one of them has taken from its initial point of landing?
Put it in context, the numbers I'll tell you, we were hoping, we were hoping we could take Either rover, five or six hundred meters, maybe up to a half a mile.
That would have been incredibly successful.
And the Spirit rover, the first one that landed, has gone more than 6,800 meters or nearly four miles of driving.
And the Opportunity rover has just passed 9,500 meters or more than six miles now on the surface.
In that aspect of it, they've surpassed our wildest hopes as well.
What have we learned, Professor, that we did not know before the missions?
I think if I had to boil it down to one thing, that would be this, that there was liquid water on the surface of Mars a long time ago.
No longer in doubt?
In other words, exactly.
I mean, we went there to test that hypothesis.
We've seen evidence in pictures from the previous landers and previous orbiters that have been going to Mars for 30 years now, 40 years now.
We've seen evidence in those pictures that there are giant channels, maybe riverbeds on the surface.
What we were looking for is some kind of smoking gun on the ground Dig it up with your robotic hands kind of evidence in the rocks, in the chemistry, in the minerals that says, hey, there was water there, liquid water on the surface.
And we found that with the rovers.
And what we don't know, though, is exactly when was it there.
We know it was early in the history of the planet, three to four billion years ago.
We don't know exactly when.
And the big, big unknown right now that's got a lot of people interested is how long was it there?
You know, if we were to travel back in time and be on Mars three or four billion years ago, I think we would recognize the place as much more Earth-like than it is today.
And so now we can really start thinking about, you know, was it an Earth-like environment for a long time?
Did life form evolve there?
Is life still there that could have formed there?
These have become serious scientific questions.
Instead of speculation that they were.
Alright, let me ask you, even if it's technical, present me with the proof that you found that definitively says there was water there.
How do you make that determination technically?
Yeah, several different lines of evidence.
One piece of evidence I mentioned was the minerals.
So there are certain kinds of minerals there, and they're similar in some ways to minerals that we find on the Earth.
And I'll give you one example, a certain kind of mineral called Jarosite, J-A-R-O-S-I-T-E.
It's an iron-bearing sulfate mineral that has water, or hydroxide, in its mineral structure.
And this kind of mineral is found on the Earth as well, in places where water and rock are interacting.
And it requires this mineral requires water liquid water in order to form and some of that water is actually still still there in the mineral structure and we can see evidence for it we can measure.
It's presence and abundance with the instruments.
And you have found it in the amount of abundance that would clearly say this did not come from, I don't know, something that crashed into the planet?
Right, exactly.
It's not like a fluke meteorite or something.
No, it's really in the rock, in outcrop rocks that we see on the ground in tens of percent abundances.
And it's not the only one.
There are other kinds of hydrated, they're called hydrated minerals, when they have water in their structure.
And that water has to come from somewhere.
And just like on the Earth, it comes from water that was on the surface, rainwater, groundwater, you know, that's interacting with the rock in a warm and wet and ultimately very Earth-like environment a long time ago.
Professor, can you stick your neck out far enough to say that there were oceans or that part of the planet was covered or that the entire planet might have been a water planet at some point?
Yeah, what we know, Art, is that there was some water on the surface and probably very near the surface, at least in the area that the Opportunity rover is driving around in.
This is an area that is I mean, of course, we've only covered this small amount of real estate with the rover so far, but that whole area that we can see from orbit is comparable to the northwest of the United States, Oregon, Washington, those kind of regions.
So maybe we're looking at large ponds, lakes, maybe small seas.
It's been speculated that there were large seas and even global oceans on Mars, but we haven't found evidence for that.
That's still speculation, that's still hypothesis.
The rovers haven't found any evidence to support that hypothesis.
Is there any way, Professor, to understand whether this water had any salinity to it, as in our oceans, or whether it would have been what we consider freshwater?
Well, what we believe, based on the kinds of minerals that we see, is that it was salty water.
We've seen a little bit of evidence for salt like we're most familiar with, table salt, sodium chloride.
Most of the salt that we see, though, is sulfate salt.
A very common sulfate salt that people are familiar with probably is Epsom salt.
You know, people use it to make your feet feel good after a long day at work standing on your feet.
That's a magnesium sulfate salt, and it dissolves in water just like table salt does.
And we've seen evidence for those kinds of sulfate salts in these rocky outcrops that we've seen now at both landing sites.
So we know it was salty water and the other thing that's interesting that the minerals tell us is that it was also probably acidic water.
Low pH in technical terms.
Right.
Maybe not quite battery acid, but definitely acidic kind of water when you dissolve these kinds of minerals in it.
And that has a lot of my colleagues who study biology and astrobiology a little bit concerned about the implications for life on Mars because we don't know on the Earth whether life when it formed was in neutral water or acidic water or salty water or basic water.
These are outstanding questions on our own planet.
Well, we do find life down near these volcanic vents at the bottom of some of the deepest parts of the ocean, right?
That's right.
You know, we find life almost everywhere that it can exist on the Earth.
And the puzzle that scientists on the Earth, Earth scientists, Earth biologists, are trying to figure out is where did it start and where did it evolve into?
Did it start in an acidic environment, a low pH environment?
Did it start in a neutral pH environment?
Did it start in a hot place and eventually spread into everywhere else?
Did it start in cold places, etc.?
And so there's a lot of crosstalk, a lot of interaction between the folks who are trying to understand life on our own planet and those of us trying to think about life on other planets as well.
Anybody making guesses about how long ago the water was, as you described it might have been?
Well, one thing that the rovers can't do is tell us the age of the rocks.
I mean, if you were a geologist on the Earth, you'd go out to the field, pick up some rocks, you'd bring them back to your laboratory, and there's all kinds of equipment that can do radioactive age dating on rocks, and it'll tell you how old these things are.
Right now, that equipment takes up You know, giant university laboratories.
And no one has yet figured out how to miniaturize that to be the size of a laptop computer or something that you can stick on a spacecraft, a rover or a lander.
So we don't have the capability to do that kind of age-dating on other planets yet.
And unlike the situation with the moon rocks from the astronauts, we haven't brought any rocks back from Mars, from the surface of Mars yet.
No, but we do have rocks, I think, that we believe have come from Mars.
That's correct.
We have some meteorites, about 20 meteorites have come from Mars, believed to have come from Mars.
We don't know where on Mars they came from, and they seem to have come from not the uppermost surface, but from beneath the surface, ejected off the planet in a giant asteroid or comet crash, or many giant asteroids and comet crashes.
So those aren't You know, the best kind of samples, because we don't know where they came from and we can't tie that place to a specific age.
So the rovers can't tell us in detail how old these places are.
So the next best thing that we can do is count how many craters there are nearby.
And the theory is that if you're looking at a part of a planet that has a whole bunch of these holes, these craters all over it, then it's much older.
than a place that has very few of them.
And we basically try to guess how much older based on that same kind of very heavily cratered versus less cratered surface on the moon where the astronauts did bring us samples from the heavy crater than the light crater regions.
So we try to use the moon to guess what's called the absolute time scale on Mars is.
And so all that tied together, all those guesses put together, Give us the sort of best estimate is that both rovers are traveling around, driving around in areas that are something like three to four billion years old.
Comparable to the oldest places that are preserved on the surface of our planet.
So, very similar to Earth, age-wise.
Some of the old parts of Australia, old parts of Canada, Earth is really young overall.
I mean, you know, parts of Earth created yesterday in Hawaii to the ocean floor.
Very, very young.
Mars... So then, so is Mars?
So is Mars?
Yeah, Mars and the Earth were formed at the same time, but Mars hasn't been reshaped and resurfaced so much as the Earth has.
Hold tight, Professor.
We'll be right back.
This is Coast to Coast AM.
What an honor.
Professor Jim Bell.
We're learning The real story of what we're finding on Mars.
Here's a man who runs the machines, Spirit and Opportunity, the little crawlers that we have on Mars that were supposed to last about three months and they're, well, just about three years into their mission.
That in itself is nothing short of incredibly amazing.
Just amazing.
Back to what we're learning about Mars in a moment.
Once again, Professor Jim Bell.
Jim, welcome back.
Now, you were saying that Mars is relatively young, as is Earth.
So we're, what, about the same age, roughly?
Is that a good guess?
Well, all the Sun and all the planets in our solar system basically formed around the same time.
The theory goes that about four and a half to five billion years ago.
So the age of the Earth has been estimated scientifically to be about 4.6 billion years old.
Based on radioactive age dating.
And we believe that all the other planets are basically the same age, if our theory of how the solar system formed is correct.
So Mars as a planet is that old.
And when we talk about, when you and I have been talking about the age, we've been talking about the surface age.
How long has it been since that surface was last changed?
So, for example, if you're walking around the big island of Hawaii, The surface age is zero, plus or minus, you know, a few thousand years, maybe, in places, because it's been freshly erupted onto the surface.
When we look at the Earth, on average, the surface age is very young, a few hundreds of millions of years, which is young geologically.
There's only a small fraction of the Earth preserved from the earliest history of our planet, places in Canada, parts of Australia, where three to four billion year old rocks are found.
Now, conversely, much of Mars, we believe, is ancient, compared to much of the Earth.
Much of Mars is 3 to 4 billion years old.
And so that tells us that all this action, that when Mars was Earth-like, when it was warm, when it was wet, when it had a climate that we would really recognize, is very, very different than Mars today.
A thick atmosphere, warm temperatures, liquid water on the surface, all of that was happening very early in the history of the planet, 3 to 4 billion years ago.
You mentioned that temperatures at night reach about 100 minus 140 Fahrenheit, is that correct?
Right.
What about during the day?
How warm does it get at best during the day?
Where the rovers are, when it's summertime, and Mars has seasons like the Earth, so there's winter, spring, summer, and fall.
In the summertime, they're near the equator where the rovers are.
Temperatures get up to about 30 to 40 degrees Fahrenheit, so just slightly above freezing.
Wow.
That's actually a temperature we could survive in.
Yeah, I mean it's cold but survivable, certainly comparable to balmy day in the Antarctic or Greenland, for example.
The issue, the big issue with people being on Mars is the atmosphere.
It's extremely thin.
There isn't any.
Now that was my next question.
What is the atmosphere?
It's almost all carbon dioxide, CO2.
But it's very, very thin.
It's only about 1% of the pressure on the surface of the Earth.
So it's not breathable by people.
There's just extremely little oxygen.
There's a tiny amount of water vapor, a little bit of argon, some other trace gases, but it's like 95% CO2 and very, very thin.
So when people go to Mars, they'll need spacesuits and breathable oxygen packs and things like that.
Yeah, that's not a shame.
Well, it is.
And of course the big worrisome question is, we all apparently believe that Mars at one time was very much like Earth.
Now, it's not now.
It wouldn't support life now without spacesuits and lots of protection.
So, something awful, from our perspective, happened to Mars.
And if it happened to Mars, conceivably it could happen to Earth, yes?
You know, this is, you've hit the nail right on the head.
One of the main motivators for folks like me and my colleagues who study planets, who study astronomy, we look at the other planets ultimately to learn more about our own planet.
And how does our planet work?
Well, we need comparisons.
We look at places like Mars, places like Venus, the giant outer solar system planets, and we understand how their atmospheres work, or we try to at least.
We develop theories and hypotheses that we can test.
And all of this is trying to come back to what you just talked about.
How do you change the entire climate of a planet from an Earth-like place to the cold, barren, lifeless, waterless world that it is today?
And could something like that happen to the Earth?
You know, we know there have been big climate changes in the past history of the Earth.
The Ice Ages, for example.
We know that our environment is, our climate is warming now.
perhaps as part of some kind of a natural cycle but we as humans aren't
helping it by pumping a bunch of CO2 into the atmosphere uh... and and you know what's going to happen to our
climate uh... one of the ways we can help answer that question is
by studying places like Mars
trying to figure out what happened to that climate there is there
any indication from either one of these uh...
uh... now aged machines that there was life of any sort microbial uh... to large
life on Mars did we uncover
Have we uncovered any evidence?
No, nothing that I could point to, nothing that I've ever seen presented that's unambiguous.
Partly, it's a limitation of the rovers.
We don't have organic chemistry laboratories on board.
If there were some sort of microscopic bacterial life form on the surface, which is unlikely, and we can come back and talk about why, if there were something that was microscopic instead of macroscopic, we don't have a very good way of detecting it with these rovers.
They're rock thunkers.
They're geologists.
They have cameras.
We can take beautiful pictures, and if a little green man got up and walked in front of the camera, we'd see that.
Well, what about a cockroach?
Yes, we would see that too.
We would see any kind of insects, and we've certainly taken more than 160,000 pictures now looking for any kind of evidence, even fossils.
No unambiguous evidence that I've seen presented.
We haven't seen anything bizarre or lifelike in terms of the chemistry or the mineralogy.
But the rovers aren't really optimized to do that kind of a life detection experiment.
That was attempted back in the 70s.
You probably remember the Viking landers that were sent in the 70s, and there were life detection experiments there.
And for the most part, they came up pretty negative.
And it's a harsh environment on the surface.
There's no ozone layer like we have to protect the surface from ultraviolet radiation.
It's extremely cold.
Very, very dry.
So, it's a very hostile environment.
Now, one thing I will say, and this is, you know, I touched on this earlier, and it's exciting.
There is the possibility that there is life under the surface on Mars.
And I think many scientists would agree that that possibility still exists today, if there was a lot of liquid water there.
And we think there was.
And if it's warm under the surface, as you go down to the surface, just like on the Earth, as you go deeper, it gets warmer.
Then maybe there's still water down there today and maybe that's a haven for any life that was on the surface a long time ago.
Now that's speculation.
That's wild speculation.
We don't have any evidence.
We've never drilled into Mars.
We've never pulled samples up from underground like we do on the Earth all the time.
But one thing the rovers and the other missions that are there have done is make that a sort of a respectable, reasonable scientific hypothesis.
That underground, deep underground, there may be environments that are still conducive to life, as we know.
Professor, I saw a very interesting, I guess it was NOVA, or something like NOVA, I can't recall, but it suggested that if a four or five mile diameter rock were to crash into Earth, it would destroy all life on Earth, right on down to the microbial level.
Down deep in the Earth, there would be an area between, I guess, the core of the Earth, where it's too hot for any kind of life to survive, and the surface, which would be sterilized.
but there would be this area where microbial life would survive perhaps
millions or billions of years to eventually one day re-populate the earth with some form of life in some sort
of cycle of life and death that planets may go through. Is it
possible that Mars is in sort of an opposite cycle of Earth right
now, that cycle between
life and I guess we could say death and that life is harbored at
some point under the surface of Mars to one day with some giant change
that would come along
once again come to the surface?
You know Art, it sounds like a plot of a science fiction movie, but what you've just described is actually a completely reasonable hypothesis for what might happen to planets that have life in our solar system or other solar systems.
We don't know how many times in the past the Earth was hit by something big, but we know it did happen.
There are still scars of impact craters on our own planet.
There's a beautiful one in Arizona called Meteor Crater, for example.
Hundreds of other ones around the Earth that we can find.
You look up at the moon with a telescope or look at the pictures that the Apollo astronauts took as they were flying over, and the moon is littered by holes and scars from when it was pounded early in its history.
And so the Earth has been hit, the moon has been hit, Mars has been hit, all the planets are hit with asteroids and comets flying around this early solar system of ours.
And some of those things are big.
In fact, we think that the Moon, one reasonable hypothesis for the origin of the Moon is that it was formed when something really big hit the Earth and broke it into basically multiple pieces, some of which went to form the Moon.
So, certainly it's reasonable to say, hey, you know, life on Earth was actually a word that Stephen Jay Gould used, was frustrated.
Life was frustrated by these kinds of events.
It got started.
Yes.
Something catastrophic happens, something violent happens, wipes it all out except for one little niche, like maybe in the mantle like you described, or some little pool of organic stuff somewhere that escaped the catastrophe, and then it flowers from there.
It's possible that Mars may still be recovering from some catastrophic event early in its history that changed the climate so dramatically that the surface is no longer hospitable, no longer conducive to life, and that there's
only life underground.
It's one of the things that astronomers are going to set their sights on over the next
few decades, is trying to search for any evidence that the environment is different underground
on Mars and that maybe it's conducive to life as we know it.
I have a dumb question for you, Professor, and that is that if our Moon was in effect
blasted from the Earth, which seems like a reasonable theory, you would expect it to
be sort of a jagged mass, but instead it's more like not a perfect ball, but it's more
like a ball.
It's more like a...
How would that have happened if it was a jagged mass which just was torn from the Earth and then assumed its current orbit?
How come it's round?
Well, my understanding, and you're teetering on the edge of my knowledge here, but my understanding of the best theory that I've heard for the formation of the Moon is that it wasn't formed as a jagged mass, like you said.
Basically, something probably the size of Mars or smaller smashes into the Earth.
It completely melts the Earth and throws a huge ring of debris around the Earth.
Parts of the Earth and parts of the original object that hit the Earth are mixed into this
melted ring of material that slowly coalesces into the Moon.
And so it was molten, it was melted.
And so just like a drop of liquid metal, it's going to be spherical.
It's going to assume that spherical shape because of its gravity.
Okay, fascinating.
I've just always wondered about that.
Well, at least that's the theory, you know, and it is a hypothesis, and it's consistent with the data that we have.
But, you know, someone's going to come along and change it.
That's the beauty of science.
We'll figure out more as we go along.
How much do the temperatures vary on Mars with the seasons?
Well, it depends on where you are, just like on the Earth.
If you're near the equator, In the so-called tropics of Mars, which we certainly wouldn't think of as tropical, but nonetheless, you call it the tropics if it's near the equator.
The temperatures get up to just above freezing and down to, like I said, minus 120, minus 140 degrees Fahrenheit.
If you go up towards the poles, where you actually have ice on the surface, dry ice, CO2 ice, and water ice, H2O ice, The maximum daytime temperatures might only be 0 degrees Fahrenheit minus 10 degrees Fahrenheit.
And the lower temperature can get even lower than minus 140.
So it's similar to the Earth in that it depends on how far away from the equator you are.
Those are the temperature extremes.
Okay.
If we go back in time to when Mars had the water, and then presumably with the water a very different atmosphere than it has now, can we make guesses about the climate at that time on Mars?
Would it have been similar to Earth, or enough dissimilar that there would not have been life?
Well, here we have to speculate pretty intensely, and there's a wide range of scientific hypotheses On how warm it was and how wet it was.
What we know is that we need water to be a liquid.
And in order for water to be a liquid, the atmosphere must have been thicker and the temperature must have been higher on Mars.
You can actually, you can have water as a liquid even below freezing if it's very, very salty.
You can lower the freezing point of water by making it very salty.
In some models, it doesn't have to be incredibly warm to still have liquid water on the surface.
You could be at or even slightly below freezing with a thicker, slightly thicker atmosphere and still have liquid water on the surface.
So that would be an Earth-like environment, but it might be like a Siberia or an Alaska environment where it's frozen most of the time except for a short part of the year, maybe the summertime when the sun's rays are most intense, parts of that environment thaw out and you have Small ponds or lakes.
A lot of groundwater that occasionally makes it to the surface as liquid.
Sort of one extreme.
Another extreme you can imagine is a very, very thick atmosphere.
A thick CO2 atmosphere like Venus has, for example.
And a lot of greenhouse effect warming like we're seeing on our own planet from CO2.
Making it much, much warmer.
Making the temperatures well above freezing.
50, 60, 70 degrees Fahrenheit.
for shorter, long periods of time, depending upon the season and the details of how long the environment was that way.
And so that would have been conducive to having water, much more water stable as liquid on the surface for a long period of time.
And there's every flavor of model you can imagine between those extremes, where the latter, the second, very warm, very wet model might even involve having large scale global oceans.
on the planet.
So we don't have any data on this.
It's speculation and it's one of the things that we're trying to develop hypotheses that can be tested with future rovers, future landers and eventually people who go there.
So there's nothing that we know of that would rule out the possibility of microbial or even large life at one time, one very long time ago on Mars.
Is that correct?
I think that's technically correct.
I think you can make an argument for microbial life even still being there, although we don't have any evidence for it underground today.
Large life forms, it's a much harder argument to make, because all we have is our own experience here on the Earth, where it took so long as 60 to 80 percent of the history of our planet for life to get macroscopic like that, to get big and start to swim and walk around.
And, you know, there's not good evidence, Art, that Mars was Earth-like for that long.
So if life followed this same track, As the Earth.
And it's very hard to argue for big, macroscopic, swimming, walking life forms on Mars.
Now, if it followed its own completely different Martian track for some long or short period of time that could have led to that, then, you know, so be it.
But that's speculation that we don't have any data for.
And we are, you know, all of us who think about life elsewhere in the solar system, elsewhere in the universe, are working from one data point.
The planet we live on.
How typical is that?
It's a big unknown.
Boy, it sure is.
What is your best guess, Professor, when you look into the sky, as we all do from time to time, and contemplate the number of stars we see?
And now, of course, we're learning that there are planets around many, if not perhaps the majority of those stars, certainly many of them.
The likelihood of life out there somewhere, even large life, mathematically has to be pretty high, doesn't it?
I would agree with that.
I guess you could call it the Carl Sagan school of life in the cosmos.
You win by the numbers alone.
The many billions and billions just add up in your favor.
I think the big debate, the big argument that we're having now is, is it simple bacterial life forms or is it largely complex life?
Got it.
Professor, take a good deep breath.
We'll relax and we'll be right back.
This is Coast to Coast AM.
Indeed!
Here I am.
What an opportunity we have.
Professor Jim Bell is our guest.
He's an Associate Professor in the Cornell University Astronomy Department.
He received his B.S.
degree from Caltech and his Ph.D.
from the University of Hawaii.
He's a guy who runs Spirit and Opportunity.
Those little machines we have scurrying around much more of Mars than we originally anticipated.
And we've been asking him, I hope, a lot of questions that a lot of you wanted answered.
And we'll get some of the more complex stuff.
Richard Hoagland, big dick, sent a number of questions, which we will pummel the professor with shortly.
But we've been doing some basics on Mars, and they certainly are fascinating.
And a little worrisome from my point of view.
As I mentioned to the professor, what happened there, and he agrees, could well occur here, and that's a good reason for studying Mars and the other planets in our system and any other system we're able to reach.
Listen, at some point during the weekend, I wanted to mention this, being here on the opposite side of the world, in the Philippines, has been just a wonderful, fascinating experience.
I don't have a lot of friends here and anybody in a similar situation I certainly would like to hear from you.
Coming to the opposite side of the world is kind of like, I don't know, when you leave high school you have a whole bunch of friends and for a while you stay in touch and then you kind of drift apart.
Well, same deal after college and same deal when you move to the other side of the earth.
You have a lot of friends, and as it sinks in that you're on the other side of the earth, you kind of drift apart.
So, if there are any other Americans here that are married Filipinas, I'd certainly love to meet you, and toward that end, And any other end, if you'd like to get hold of me, here's the way you do it.
I'm Art Bell at AOL.com, or perhaps better, ArtBellAtMindSpring.com.
That's A-R-T-B-E-L-L at MindSpring.
M-I-N-D-S-P-R-I-N-G.com.
ArtBellAtMindSpring.com.
And I certainly, on any subject, would love to hear from you.
In a moment, we continue with Professor Bell.
All right, let's get a couple of things out of the way very quickly.
Professor Bell, the face on Mars.
Do the latest images that we've received of the face on Mars, do they make it a dead issue?
Richard Hoagland, I've done many shows, I'm sure you've heard him many times with Richard.
He sees things that I and I don't.
I see rocks most times when he sees faces, but these latest images, is it a dead issue now?
Well, I don't know.
I mean, you know, it's the latest images that have been coming down across the planet are spectacular and they show, you know, amazing landforms.
I don't know if that, I don't personally think that features a face, but do I think that makes it less spectacular?
No.
You know, as a geologist, as someone who admires beautiful photography, space photography, you know, they're beautiful landforms.
I want to understand what causes maces and knobs and hills and dales and channels and other things on Mars, and so do the folks that I know who Who work on this, and the approach that people like that are taking, I think it's reasonable.
You put forth a hypothesis, and you come up with tests to test the hypothesis, and you see if your idea matches what's coming back in the data.
Just because I haven't been swayed, or others haven't been swayed, doesn't mean you should stop.
I mean, just ask people like Copernicus and Galileo, right?
My bottom, if you want a bottom line answer, is I guess I don't believe that features like that are artificial.
They seem perfectly natural and the higher resolution data seems to be consistent with that, but I have no problem with people who want to investigate that further and put forth ideas that others can test.
I think that's a great thing.
Well, I guess I was referring to the latest... I mean, certainly the early images really did make it look like a face.
I mean, there was no question about it.
Oh, sure.
No, absolutely.
The Viking images with the certain data dropouts and sun angles and all that, absolutely.
And as humans, we're programmed to see faces and lots of nature as well as each other.
No, absolutely.
And so it was certainly something worth looking into in more detail.
I guess my opinion, based on looking at the data and reading a whole bunch of studies on both sides, is that the new data that have come down since Viking just don't support that hypothesis.
However, let me ask this.
In the early days, Professor, when it really did look like a face, was there within NASA a group that thought, you know, maybe it is a face?
I don't know, Art.
I mean, I was only eight years old at the time.
I really can't tell you.
I know that what I can tell you is that, I mean, seriously, I think I was in high school at the time.
Part of the reason that people are so fascinated by Mars is because of things like that, because of enigmas, both real and imagined, going all the way back to Percival Lowell and before.
It's a place that we can picture ourselves being.
It's a place that we can project a civilization like ours onto, because it seems familiar.
And that's part of the allure of Mars.
I would be dishonest if I said that things like the Face on Mars controversy didn't sort of get me a little inspired about studying Mars and learning more about the mysteries and enigmas of our solar system.
So I think on balance it's a net positive thing and I'm not one of these, you know, Anti-face fighters, you know, that gets all hung up about it.
I just, I want to see good science done, and that involves posing hypotheses and testing them, and I think that's what a lot of people are doing.
I like to see that.
Yes, it does.
All right.
Circulating around the internet recently, there has been a photograph apparently taken by one of your cute little machines of what absolutely looks like a skull.
Now, I'm sure you've seen this photograph.
Comments?
I don't know exactly which one you're talking about, and I'm not trying to be coy, to be honest with you, because I've seen an enormous number of rocks and landforms that one could say kind of looks like a skull or looks like a funny rock.
Whatever, but I don't know exactly which one you're talking about.
Really?
Maybe one of my web gurus back there can get it quickly posted up on the site.
I'd be happy to look at that, yeah.
It does look like a skull, it really does.
Once in a while I'll get emails from folks who say, oh, I saw this funny shape in this image, and did you guys look at that?
We are looking at all the images, of course.
There's ambiguity, I think, in a lot of these things, especially when you get right down to the limit of resolution of the camera or the microscope.
So I personally haven't seen anything that I would say, oh, that's a skull, or that's a femur, or that's a piece of whatever, a bacterial strand.
I haven't seen anything like that.
Others claim they have.
I just haven't been convinced.
Alright, here are a few questions from Big Dick, Richard Hoagland.
How much Mars astronomy can be done with the rover pan cams?
What are the engineering constraints, power, lighting, computer memory, and so forth?
Can you actually do Mars astronomy with them?
Yes, actually, and we have, and I had an article in Sky & Telescope a few months ago, Sky & Telescope Magazine, called Backyard Astronomy from Mars, because we had the luxury situation Back in the summer of 2005, of being able to have so much power that we could run the rovers at night as well as the daytime.
Wow.
And this is when it was summer at the landing sites and we had so much solar power coming in, the solar panels were kept pretty clean by the dust, by the wind, clean of dust by the wind, that we could wake up the rovers at night and do some astronomy.
The cameras on the rovers that my group runs here at Cornell are not telescopes.
They're cameras.
And it's sort of the equivalent of taking a 100mm lens on a 35mm camera, if you're familiar with photography.
I am.
So, it's not like looking through a telescope.
It's just like taking your camera out in your backyard.
So, you're still seeing primarily stars.
We're not, you know, zooming in and seeing the rings of Saturn or any of that kind of stuff.
But still there are some cool things to see in the night sky of Mars, particularly the two moons of Mars, Phobos and Deimos, are the most prominent things in the night sky of Mars, moving across the sky.
And it turned out that, we looked into this early on, it turned out that the orbits of those moons hadn't been carefully monitored by astronomers since the late 1980s.
And so we had a way, sitting on the surface, measure the positions of the moons against the background
stars and just update the orbits of the moons.
And Phobos, for example, is really close to Mars and it's slowly spiraling into Mars.
It's going to take millions of years, but it is slowly spiraling in, so its orbit is
changing slowly.
And so we're actually able to do some measurements from the surface to refine its orbit.
And we can also see the moons pass in front of the sun in little mini solar eclipses from
And so we've done that with the rovers also.
Now we could only do it for a short period of time when it was summertime at the landing site of Spirit.
We couldn't do it with Opportunity because one of the heaters on Opportunity stuck on at night and it uses up an enormous amount of power and we just didn't have enough power to run that rover at night.
But Spirit doesn't have that problem.
So for a short period of time, For about 35 nights or so, we were able to run an observatory, in quotes, on another planet.
And boy, as an astronomer here, it was great fun.
And we were doing some pretty good science, too.
So what you discovered is that eventually, millions of years albeit, Phobos will crash into Mars.
We didn't discover that with the rovers.
That was known beforehand.
But the rate that that was happening has not been monitored very well since the late 1980s.
And so we're providing some new data.
To monitor that, the way that that orbit is changing.
Will that be a steady decay or will it speed up at some point as the gravitational pull gets greater?
It'll be, it's predicted to be steady until the thing actually starts interacting with the upper atmosphere, which will be very, very late.
So it'll be steady over the next few millions of years.
Boy, that'd be something to see.
Oh, yeah.
Oh, my God.
All right.
What about our own moon?
Is our own moon absolutely stable in its orbit, or is it also slowly decaying?
Well, yeah, our own moon is slowly moving away from us, actually.
When I was a kid, there was this wonderful science fiction TV series called Space 1999.
Maybe you've watched it, or, you know, the moon was ripped away from the Earth.
And that's really happening in reality.
A few centimeters, I'm trying to remember, I want to quote you a number, a few centimeters per century or something on that order.
Very, very slowly.
I apologize, I don't know the exact number.
But it is slowly moving away because of tides and that energy is being lost by tidal dissipation in the Earth-Moon system.
And so that slowly moves the Moon away.
Here's a science fiction question for you.
We always talk about something hitting the Earth.
What if something hit the Moon and hit the Moon hard enough to actually send it out of its current orbit around the Earth?
What effect would that have on the Earth?
Well, it would change certainly the The moon is a major cause of the ocean tides, so all those cycles that fishermen and people who live along the coast are used to would change dramatically.
It would also be a big loss to all the poets and romantics of the world, right?
Oh, it sure would.
No more full moon in the sky.
Some people have hypothesized that the moon actually helped life on Earth form originally by keeping the Earth's orbit stable and creating these nice tidal environments that are changing in some rhythmic pattern.
It's not clear to me that if somehow the Moon were to be catastrophically yanked away from us that it would dramatically change life on Earth except for cycles of tides and life forms that rely on tide pools and things like that.
It would dramatically affect those ecosystems.
I would wager that people would survive.
I wouldn't want to do the experiment, but I would bet people could survive.
OK.
Can PanCam help find the missing Mars Surveyor, perhaps by taking long exposures of the sky, bracketing the time when Surveyor is expected to pass over either rover, thus pinning down its present orbit for MRO imaging?
Yeah, I wish we could, but I think the answer is no, for two reasons.
One, the cameras are not as sensitive as a telescope, okay?
And the orbiters are just tiny little things way up in the sky, and so you need very, very sensitive cameras.
And we've actually looked for several of the orbiters in the past with the cameras on the surface, and we were not able to find them.
So I don't know if we have the sensitivity.
We've tried previously and failed.
The other reason That might not be possible because you want the orbiter to be in the sunlight as it's passing over.
And the way that the orbit of that spacecraft is oriented, it's usually in the dark when it's passing over.
It's usually in the shadow, not in the direct sunlight when it's passing over the landing site.
And so it's like when you go out in the early evening and look for satellites in earth skies.
You see them best right after sunset when they're still reflecting the sun high above you before they sort of rotate around into Earth's dark side.
And it's similar on Mars.
Those are the best times that we've looked is when they were predicted to be reflecting the sunlight and we couldn't find them.
Those of us on the camera team haven't been asked by anyone higher up on the org chart of the rover project to try this search.
I think because they realize that the cameras might not be sensitive enough and the spacecraft isn't in the right orbit.
But if we're asked to do it, we'll certainly give it a shot.
Another factor is that it's wintertime at both rover sites, so it's a very, very low power situation.
Have enough power to run the rovers at night and then make sure that they'll survive the next day.
I'm right.
Here's a far out question for you.
I'm going to give you a lot of those, Professor.
Go for it.
We know roughly the current condition of Mars.
Is there anything that we could do as humans if we had enough money?
To change Mars in any way, to change the climate.
Certainly man, as you mentioned, is beginning to change the climate of Earth without trying that hard.
It's just what we're doing.
If we actually wanted to change the climate of Mars, or in some form terraform Mars, is that a reasonable thing to contemplate?
Absolutely.
It can be done.
What you need are two things.
One, you've already mentioned money.
The other thing that you didn't mention is time.
It takes an enormous amount of time to do things like that.
And there have actually been very good scientific studies done by colleagues of mine, a guy named Chris McKay at the Ames Research Center, for example, others who work with him and have worked before on this problem.
have thought about this issue.
What if you were to, for example, plant some kind of lichen or moss that could give off oxygen and that could live on the polar caps or that could somehow survive in the Martian soil if it does turn out to have nutrients in it, which we don't know, and slowly change the environment of Mars?
It's possible.
Certainly, life slowly changed The climate of the Earth by introducing all this oxygen into our environment, but it took millions and millions of years.
It's not something I don't think we have the technology to do quickly.
You know, they may have that technology on Star Trek, but that's just not the real world.
And it's not the foreseeable future either.
So I think you're talking many centuries.
First of all, we have to get to Mars and be able to understand it in more detail and and find out what, if any, organisms that soil, those polar
caps can host.
And then to start the experiment, it would be a slow process.
But I think it's doable.
It's definitely doable.
It would require a lot of money, a lot of time, and some significant commitment to do
that.
So we're not ready to launch Genesis.
It's not happening yet.
Okay.
Another question that we can handle after the break because it's coming up.
Eventually, there are going to be missions that are going to bring back samples from Mars.
Rocks and dirt and whatever we can get our hands on, our mechanical hands on, I suppose.
How much danger is there, Professor, in bringing something back from Mars?
Again, we don't know.
We just would, I guess, grab a handful of something or another and mechanically store it and then bring it back to Earth.
We can talk about how that would happen.
What I'm wondering is, how dangerous it conceivably might be to do that?
So, Professor, hold tight.
We'll come back and get the answer to that question.
But who knows what might come back?
I'm Art Bell.
Yes, all the way over here in Typhoon Alley.
Hi, everybody.
My guest is Professor Jim Bell, and he's running little machines that are scurrying around Mars, taking all kinds of wonderful pictures.
And so, in a moment, we're going to ask about this danger of bringing something back.
I think it's planned in a mission coming up pretty soon.
Can you imagine?
Little tiny things.
They've always been the bane of man.
Even now, we worry about them.
We call them things like Ebola and the little, the terrible, horrible flus that emanate from here in Asia and then infect the rest of the world, things like bird flu.
We worry about them.
These are the earth-borne things.
What might be on Mars?
Actually, this is a dual question, Professor.
Let me begin by asking, the early Mars missions that we had, did we by any chance infect Mars with life?
That is a really good question, Art.
There are, just to back up, put a little context into that.
There are actually protocols that have been established by the United Nations, among others, NASA, space agencies around the world, that dictate how and whether we can contaminate the surface of another planet by sending spacecraft to the moon or astronauts to the moon or spacecraft to Mars or wherever.
Right.
And they're very strict.
And there's actually someone who works at NASA called the Planetary Protection Officer, whose job it is to make sure that these protocols are met and that we're not knowingly, intentionally infecting, in quotes, or contaminating the surfaces of other worlds with Earth life forms.
Of course, one of the things we want to do is find out if there's life out there, so the worst possible thing we could do is screw up the experiment, right, by bringing life with us.
That's right.
And of course, if there is something alive out there, we don't want to risk infecting it, killing it, modifying it, changing it in some way.
We want to be respectful of that.
So there have been protocols, but it's not clear, if you go back to the entire history of the space program, and there's a bunch of Russian missions, for example, that we still know very little about, openly, in the West.
Yes.
And even to Mars and what kinds of protocols and procedures were taken on those.
Even perhaps some of the early NASA missions before this started to become a very serious international topic.
It's not clear that they were held to the same standards as missions today are held.
So it's an excellent question and there are a lot of clever people trying to think about that and I hope the answer is that we have not contaminated.
Well, we now have an officer.
We don't call him the Prime Director's officer.
We don't.
Planetary Protection.
That really is a position at NASA.
So, that is a possibility.
Now, the opposite.
Do we have missions already on the books that are going to bring back Martian samples?
Well, unfortunately, we don't have anything on the books.
There are ideas.
There was a plan for Mars sample return, it's called, on the books almost a few years ago, but with all of the latest big budget crises in the government.
For this kind of exploration, a lot of that has been scaled back.
And so there are ideas and certainly a lot of interest in the scientific community, even in the general public, for going to Mars, most likely with a robotic mission, scooping up some rocks and dirt, like you said earlier, and bringing them back.
And that's not, it's not, it's a hard thing to do, but it's not impossible.
I mean, you know, the Russians did that with robots of the moon back in the 60s, for example.
So it's technologically within our reach, but just sort of not been approved yet, and the funding hasn't been found yet to do that, although I think most of us believe it's sometime in the next decade, the 2010s, we'll try to do that.
Alright, I would assume that anything brought back would be treated like you would treat a level 4 virus.
Is that fair?
Absolutely, and for two reasons.
One, that you talked about earlier, we do not want to take the chance, even if it's remote, even if it's a minuscule chance, we do not want to take the chance of introducing some bizarre alien virus or whatever bacteria into Our ecosystem.
You know, and I think most people who study this issue seriously don't think there's much of a chance, but it's not zero.
And so as long as it's not zero, you want to take every possible precaution and treat any samples that come back with the utmost respect and care, just similar to what was done when the Apollo astronauts came back.
From the moon.
Remember, they were in quarantine for many days.
And so that kind of an approach goes into the, you know, estimating the cost of one of these missions, of bringing samples back, whether you have to then bring them, for example, to the space station instead of to the surface of the Earth to be studied in detail.
Well, any good science fiction writer would tell you that If, I mean after all, there might be water below the surface, and if there is a virus-like, or some sort of something that lives at the bacterial level, it might be extremely hardy, and to then set it loose in an earth environment, it might really go berserk.
Right, so you're absolutely right.
That's one reason.
The other reason, which a lot of people don't think about, is that You know, we want to find out if there's anything alive or was alive there.
And so the last thing we want to do is contaminate those samples with anything that's living or was living on the Earth.
Because otherwise we might get the impression, if we contaminated a soil sample with Earth bacteria, that, oh my gosh, there's bacteria just like the Earth on Mars.
So we have to keep the ecosystems, if you will, completely separate, as absolutely separate as possible, For safety reasons and for scientific, sort of, biologic reasons in studying Mars.
All right, here comes another Richard question.
In the 19th century, serious mainstream scientists proposed creating a huge geometric feature on Earth, something like a big triangle, say, in the Sahara Desert, filling it with oil, lighting it up so Martians, if they existed, which we didn't know then, could see through their telescopes that there was, in fact, intelligent life here on Earth, which obviously knew fundamental mathematics and geometry, And therefore was intelligent.
Now it's the 21st century.
We've got lasers, telescopes, spacecraft.
Can the band cam on the rovers, in a time exposure, see a visible laser beam sent from Earth?
And if so, how big would the laser have to be and how big a telescope would it have to be sent backwards through to Mars and when?
That would be a fun experiment to try.
My estimate would be no, that we would not be able to see that.
Again, it comes down to two issues.
One is the sensitivity of the camera for taking pictures of astronomical objects is not very high.
You also have to remember that the Earth is a morning or evening star on Mars, just like Venus is for us.
So it's always in the twilight sky.
It's never in the pitch black sky.
Already you've lost a bunch of contrast.
It's also, the Earth is only about the size of one or so pixels, picture elements, in the camera.
So we don't, you know, we've seen the Earth in our pictures.
It appears just as a point-like star in the sky.
And so unfortunately we...
I don't think we'd have the sensitivity to do that experiment.
Is the Mars sky itself, actually, if we were standing on the surface of Mars, would we see a reddish color in the sky?
There are people who say it's blue.
Yeah, no, we would see a reddish color, and it's similar to the colors that we see in the sky on the Earth after there's been a big volcanic eruption.
Mount Pinatubo in your neighborhood went off not too long ago, and we got Around the world we were blessed with these beautiful reddish sunsets because of all the dust that was injected into the atmosphere of the Earth.
That's the same process on Mars.
We know Mars has a lot of dust in its atmosphere.
The famous Mars dust storms sometimes completely cover the surface from view.
We've seen that several times in the spacecraft era and people going back to the 19th century with telescopes saw that as well.
So we know there's a lot of dust there.
It's a very thin atmosphere.
That combination produces this, and to call it red is the wrong word, because when you say red, you sort of think of fire engine, right?
It's not red that way.
It's more like brownish, yellowish, orangish, and the color changes with the time of day, and just like the Earth's sky, depending on how close to the sun you're looking.
If you go out on a nice clear day on Earth, and it's blue sky, but as you look closer to the sun, it gets kind of whiter.
The color changes.
Same is true on Mars.
Time of day, the color changes.
If you put more dust in the atmosphere, there's a lot of dust storms going on.
It's a deeper brownish-red color.
If there's less dust in the atmosphere, it's a more lighter yellowish color.
So, you know, it's dynamic.
To say that there's one color of the sky is not correct, just like it isn't correct on the Earth.
But on average, it's sort of a reddish-brown.
One of the things that We found with the rover cameras that was also seen with the Mars Pathfinder and the Viking cameras is that it's kind of a cool thing.
It's opposite the Earth's sky.
You know, Earth's sky is normally blue during the day, and as the sun is setting, you get these reddish skies as the sun goes into all that dust and smog if you live in L.A.
On Mars, during the middle of the day, the skies are this kind of reddish-brownish color, and as the sun is setting, The sky, especially around the sun, starts to turn bluish because of the way the dust scatters light.
And it's going to be just a beautiful, dramatic sight when people go, and it's going to be a completely different realm of poets and romantic writing about the colors of the Martian sky, which are sort of opposite the colors of the Earth's sky.
Speaking of going, we have not even been back yet to the moon with man.
And for many of us, me included, that's, I don't know, it's kind of discouraging.
In fact, almost to the point where I've asked, from a conspiratorial point of view, why we have not been back to the moon.
It's bizarre to me that we went, we did it, and we haven't gone back.
Was it so disinteresting, was it so without value that it simply isn't worth the money to go back, or what?
Well, that's an excellent question, and I wish I knew the answer.
I mean, I was part, and many people in my generation were partly inspired by the Apollo mission, the voyages of these incredible people to go to the moon, to get into science and exploration of space.
I want, personally, I want to see NASA doing big things like that, risky things, pushing the envelope of human exploration, of science.
So it's incredibly discouraging to me, who grew up on this, to not see us doing that.
And I don't want to be a negativist, but I think really what it comes down to, unfortunately, is money.
It's discretionary.
It's discretionary spending on the part of our government to do these things.
To send people into space is not yet, or if ever, within the realm of individual billionaires or corporations.
It has to be governments to come up with this kind of money to do it.
And it just hasn't been since Apollo.
It has not been a national priority to do this.
It was a national priority then, partly because of the space race and the need to beat the Russians.
Maybe it'll become a national priority again if, for example, the Chinese become very serious into space exploration, which they're showing interest in doing.
But we're not there.
We don't have the national commitment of dedicated funding to do this.
We have so many other problems as a nation and ways to spend money to help people and wars and hurricanes.
There's a lot of pull on our tax dollars.
Who wants to pay more taxes, right?
So I think that's what it comes down to.
It's a little discouraging because that's not the...
The sort of optimistic, forward-looking future that I thought we'd have.
All right, let's talk for a second about the private sector.
It's not that there's nothing going on.
For example, a very good friend of mine, Robert Bigelow, as you know, has launched a spacecraft and has eventual plans to try and put a hotel in space.
No, I think that there is a definite future in that.
There's a definite future in In space tourism, there's a definite future in individual entrepreneurs, business people reaching out into the space frontier.
I think those days are coming.
But still, a dedicated, long-term program of getting astronauts into low-Earth orbit, sending them to asteroids, sending them to the moon, sending them to Mars, is still only within the reach of one or more governments Working together to put that kind of money together.
That said, how has NASA's attitude about the kind of thing that Robert Bigelow and some others are doing, how has it morphed over time?
I know that in the beginning you guys weren't really all that wild about the private sector going to space.
Has that changed?
Well, I don't speak for NASA.
I don't work for NASA.
I'm a professor at Cornell University.
I can cheer NASA or I can boo them.
It doesn't matter.
My job's secure that way.
So I don't speak for the NASA administrator or whatever, but my impression is that at least the current administration in NASA and even the current administration in Washington is very supportive of efforts to privatize space and to seek ways to ease the government's burden on getting payloads into Earth orbit.
and eventually getting people up there.
It's still, you know, I think there's a small amount of NASA funding that goes to support that.
I don't personally see evidence of antagonism, and just as a personal private citizen
and a scientist, I support it.
I think it's a good idea.
I want to.
I think there may have been a bit of antagonism early on when NASA sort of regarded space as their own.
Yeah, maybe.
For a number of years, kind of their own private domain.
Like a competitive spirit, maybe?
Yeah, that's right.
Maybe it's only human nature.
Perhaps so, but it is discouraging that we have not moved forward.
Do you think something basic has changed?
I mean, aside from the money angle of it, do you think something has... governments ultimately are pretty much responsive to what people want, and if the people were clamoring for man to go back to the moon and Mars, I think that ultimately it would happen, but we're not clamoring for that for some reason.
Yeah, well, maybe if I, I mean, I could wax philosophical a little bit and claim that maybe we're a bit jaded on all this stuff as a society.
You know, we as a nation and our media don't really pay attention, for example, to the space shuttle unless it blows up and kills heroic astronauts, and then we pay attention.
But, you know, it seems to have Come to pass that we take a lot of these things for granted, that we think of them as routine.
I don't think exploring space is ever going to be routine, just like going in a submarine to the bottom of the ocean is never going to be routine.
But maybe things like, you know, the fact that you can hop in a jet and be almost anywhere on the Earth in a weekend has sort of taken some of the edge off of this and made it seem less dramatic, less risky, Less of an adventure than it really is.
I know there's an enormous number of people, including many people in Congress, that really support space exploration and really understand that this is the human race pushing ourselves as hard as we can, sometimes failing, but many times succeeding.
And that's a noble, noble thing to spend a small bit of our wealth on.
But maybe as a society, not enough of us feel that way.
Well, I'd like to see more of that.
Gee, I would too.
And there are a number of theoretical physicists who believe that we ultimately are going to have to find a way to live off our planet and to get human beings off our planet because there's a great chance that this cycle we talked about early on that may have occurred to Mars and may eventually occur to Earth will occur again.
And if we want to see the human race continue in some form, we're going to have to learn to live elsewhere.
Oh, look, I mean, the Earth has been hit by asteroids and comets in the past, and it will be hit again.
It's not a question of if.
It's going to happen.
And, you know, this is one reason why the Congress has supported NASA in searching for asteroids and comets that could potentially hit the Earth using telescopes, using the giant radio telescope at Arecibo in Puerto Rico and other telescopes around the world.
You know, this is an important national issue now, national defense issue, if you will.
And it is going to happen.
It may not be in our lifetimes.
It might not be in our kids' lifetimes.
It could be tomorrow.
So the more we can do to protect ourselves and prepare as a species, I think the better off we'll be.
All right.
Now, when we come back, Professor, we'll allow the audience to ask questions.
I've held you for two hours.
I do want to ask a little more about deflecting some nasty object that might be headed our way.
Sounds great.
But we'll open the phone lines.
All right, Professor, hold tight.
We'll be right back.
I'm Mark Bell.
This is Coast to Coast AM.
Indeed, here I am.
It is a rare opportunity for you to speak to somebody of this caliber, Jim Bell, Associate Professor in the Cornell University Astronomy Department.
His B.S.
from Caltech and his Ph.D.
from the University of Hawaii.
And he is the guy running Spirit and Opportunity, the little machines we've got Roving about Mars and taking some incredible photographs now three years, three years into what was supposed to be perhaps a three-month mission.
And so if you have any questions about Mars, or any general questions, now would be the opportunity to speak to a man you just don't get to speak to every day.
All of that coming right up.
Stay right where you are.
Sound effects.
Well I guess the skull is a recirculated photograph unfortunately.
It was from a moon mission, Apollo 17.
Not one of the Mars missions.
Nevertheless, it really does point out what we were talking about a little bit earlier.
Damned if that doesn't look like a skull.
Professor, have you managed to locate it?
I did look at it.
I'd never seen it before.
And, you know, you're right.
It does sort of look like a skull.
It's fuzzy.
It's obviously been processed in some way.
It's hard to know, you know, and I think that's what these things always come down to, Art.
It's the old, again, you know, I quote my mentor Carl Sagan often, you know, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and this is some evidence, but it's not that smoking gun that, you know, you know it when you see it kind of picture.
And we haven't seen anything like that.
As hard as we've been looking and as much as we might want deep inside ourselves, boy, it would be great to find a fossil or some evidence that there was or is life on Mars.
We just haven't done it.
Well, speaking of searching and looking, I frequently interview people from SETI and it's getting to a pretty interesting point with SETI, probably harder and harder to justify whatever little money they do spend.
Uh, looking for some signal from anywhere out there.
The last time I think I interviewed Seth, he said that, you know, if we don't, in the next, I forget, X number of years, locate something, anything, We are going to have to make some sort of statement about the fact that maybe there isn't anything.
Do you have any thoughts on what said he's done and not found?
Yeah, first of all, I have just incredible respect for those folks and the fact that, I mean, I don't believe they're government funded at all.
I think it's almost all private funding now.
People, visionaries, you know, saying, hey, let's look because we can.
I think the search has to go on for some time because space is big.
It takes a long time for radio signals to move among the stars.
And even intentional signals can only travel at the speed of light.
And so we have to look for some number of years before we'd be able to say, hey, we can't see anything.
And maybe the reason is that our equipment isn't good enough.
Maybe the reason is we haven't been looking long enough.
Or maybe the reason is that we're alone.
There's nobody out there.
And when such a statement is made, you know, those folks are very reputable scientists and they're doing this in wide open, you know, easy to follow ways.
I think whatever statement they make, whether they find something or don't, it'll be believable.
And we'll just move on from there.
It would be awfully sad if in the end we don't find anything to contemplate the fact that of all of this, to go back to the movie Contact, what an incredible waste of space.
What a waste of space.
One of my favorite lines, yeah.
You know, I agree with you, but I also think that we are just in the infancy of doing the search art.
I mean, we have the technology and we've been looking for Enough time to survey a tiny number of stars in our neighborhood.
This is a search that can go on for a very long time before we can get positive or negative results.
Our galaxy is enormous and it's just one of an enormous number of galaxies.
One possible end result of this may be, and it may not be possible for us to know this, It may be the case that our galaxy and other galaxies are teeming with civilizations, advanced civilizations, and we just have no way of communicating with each other because the distances are so vast.
I mean, that's a possibility.
There's one other possibility, Professor, and that is that we are being visited.
Now, it is very difficult to ignore All of the sightings that there have been, and there continue to be, I mean, I certainly can't.
I've had my own sightings.
Now, these are things that are just completely inexplicable, and I suppose it could be some experimental U.S.
craft that I saw, but it certainly didn't seem that way.
Maybe we are being visited.
Perhaps we are being monitored.
Have you ever wondered about that?
Oh sure, I think everybody wonders.
You know, people watch enough TV and we're bombarded with this kind of stuff, so of course everybody wonders.
You know, I agree with you that there are many unexplained phenomena, and some of them may be natural, some of them may be human-made, and some of them may have other Other reasons, other explanations.
I don't know how to explain these things personally.
I know there have been commissions convened, and the governments looked into some of these things, and many of them still come out as unexplained.
But just as an individual, that doesn't push me over the edge to believing in aliens and things like that, because I just haven't I personally haven't experienced any of this myself, so I'm not coming from that perspective.
And I just haven't seen evidence that would stand up in a court of law, or even just a crowd of kindergartners.
I just want to see a good movie, or a good picture, or a piece of some alien mineral, or spacecraft, or gum wrapper that they left behind, or something tangible that That really is evidence, and boy, it just doesn't exist.
I don't want to disbelieve people, but it's also such an enormous thing with such incredible implications.
You can't just take someone's word on it, even if they're the most honest person in the world.
There may be some other explanation, and in the absence of that kind of Proof, I remain skeptical and I know a lot of other people do as well.
Well, I'm also skeptical and I've seen.
West of the Rockies, you're on the air with Professor Jim Bell.
Hi.
Yes, John, Seattle.
Hi, John.
I have a question here to lead off with.
Do you think that a man could exist for 10 or 15 minutes on the surface of Mars with nothing but an oxygen bottle?
Well, that's a good question, John.
I don't know.
I sort of doubt it because the pressure is very low.
It's not a vacuum, but it's only about 1% of the atmospheric pressure on the Earth.
And so, you know, the human body and your organs and your skin and all that, you know, assumes a certain, needs a certain kind of pressure to maintain its shape and function in your lungs and all that.
So I think Maybe a few seconds, but not minutes.
I'm not a doctor.
I'm not a biologist or a doctor, so I'm probably not qualified to give a real physiological answer.
I'm just guessing.
Do you think we would explode as we would in the vacuum of space?
I don't know.
I'm not sure if we'd explode, Art.
You know, certainly lots of our internal organs and cavities do have pressure associated with them, and you know, anybody who's had a good bowl of beans for dinner knows that, and so there is a big pressure gradient there.
I wouldn't want to do the experiment, let's put it that way.
A few seconds, caller.
Yeah.
You remember there was a guest that said, because of the dust storm, that there was so much dust on one of these machines that they had to Send a man in one of our own spaceships up there to clean it off with a roll of paper towels and a spray bottle?
I don't think I was listening to that show.
I don't remember that one.
But luckily we haven't... I mean, it'd be great to do that.
There'd be no shortage of volunteers willing to go if we could get people there.
But we haven't had to because the wind seems to be doing that for us.
You know, we can actually see These little mini, they're called dust devils.
You see them in the desert southwest in America as well.
Little mini tornadoes that move dust around, and we can see them.
We've taken little time-lapse movies with them, with the rovers, and occasionally they pass right over the deck, and they just sort of sweep the dust right off the rovers.
Not all of it, but enough of it so that our power goes up.
Well, actually, I come from the Desert Southwest, Professor, and I'm very familiar with the Dust Devils, and some of them...
Get going pretty well.
I mean they can tear off an occasional roof on a shed, that kind of thing.
Have you measured the, is there any way to measure the actual wind speed involved when one of these things passes over one of the craft?
Yeah, actually this is interesting because it's a little bit non-intuitive.
There's sort of a Hollywood view of what a dust storm on Mars is like.
If you've seen any of these Hollywood movies about astronauts on Mars and they're They're sandblasted and buffeted around, and things are rolling around.
Really, it's a violent event.
Unfortunately, that's a Hollywood view.
It's not really the reality.
Because the pressure is so low, the momentum, the amount of energy in those dust devils is extremely low.
I think it would be like somebody throwing feathers at you.
Those feathers can be moving very fast.
But they're still not going to do any damage.
You know, you're not going to feel much force associated with those.
Dust particles themselves on Mars are like the size of smoke, a few microns in size.
Still, it's enough to clean off your solar panels.
It's enough wind to lift these smoke-sized particles off the solar panels, but we don't have any evidence that it shakes the rover, that it buffets the mast, that it's really You know, causing any violence or damage to the spacecraft.
Probably when astronauts go one day and future equipment, the biggest problem would be getting this grit and dust in everything.
You know, it's just this really fine-grained, you know, imagine taking a bag of flour and just throwing it around your kitchen.
You'd be cleaning up that flour for years.
You'd find it in nooks and crannies.
It's such, such fine stuff.
And that's the same thing with the Martian dust.
Okay, let's go to the wildcard line.
Jeff in Mountain View, California.
You're on with Professor Bell.
Good afternoon, Art.
Good morning, Professor.
Listen, I need to redirect your attention to that skull, if you bear with me.
Art, I sent you over a couple of fast blasts that actually pulls that image down from the marsrover.jpl.nasa.gov site.
I'm just going by, Art put it on his website and it says, there's a caption there that says it was taken on the Apollo 17 mission in December 1972.
That's right.
I'm just going by what was posted on the website.
I've never seen the picture so I don't know where it comes from.
Okay, let me tell you the story behind this.
When Spirit had the little problem it did, what, three or four days into its mission, it stopped sending, or you A few weeks in, yeah, a few weeks in.
That kind of rang a bell with me, and I said, I wonder if they, you know, found something and didn't want us to see it.
So I jumped on the web and started looking into the recent images.
Now, this image is still posted on the gallery for Spirit, and Art, if you can check your Fast Blast, you'll see... You know, I thought that myself, so I was quite surprised when it was Apollo 17, so I thought it was more recent.
But if you check the link I sent you in the Fast Blast... Alright, well I've got hundreds of them, but I'll see if I can find it.
Okay, I would appreciate some clarification on that.
I just wanted to bring that to your attention.
There's what looks like machine parts.
There's 90 degree angles on rocks, which really isn't, you know, natural.
And the skull is very evident.
It does appear to be a skull, there's no question about that.
But again, the human mind really does try and make sense out of nonsense.
I mean, you can just sit on Earth on a cloudy day and look at all the faces and shapes you can find in the clouds or imagine.
Our minds just try and make sense of these things.
Let's go to New Orleans.
First time caller line, I think it's Shane.
Hi, Mr. Bell, Professor Bell, how are you gentlemen doing tonight?
Hello?
The bells are fine.
Oh, great.
Real quick, two-part question.
Do any of the rovers have capabilities to record or measure sound in any scientific way?
And in your professional opinion, why aren't these billion-dollar machines programmed to record, you know, such basic operations?
Which, in my novice mind, you know, would be easy to do, I would imagine.
Sure.
Good question, Shane.
Neither rover has a microphone on board.
And I think the reasons are sort of, I think there's sort of two reasons.
One, there's, in order to put a microphone on board, you have to allocate the mass and the power and the special wires and all that.
And we just, when the rovers were being designed and built, we were cutting things and removing things, not adding them.
And so there was no way to add another component.
Like a microphone.
So that's one sort of pragmatic reason, just hard to get it on there.
But another reason, I think, is that there's a number of people, and we should test this, we should try this someday, some future mission.
A number of people don't think that there would be any sounds to hear on Mars because that air is so thin.
Remember, sound is a wave that's traveling through the air.
It's not like light.
It doesn't travel through a vacuum.
It needs air molecules or any kind of gas molecules to propagate.
And it's such a thin atmosphere, it's likely that with a microphone, all we would hear
would be the rover motors and arm and the mast turning and the wheels turning and things
like that.
So there hasn't been a good sort of scientifically compelling reason to include a microphone.
That said, I think there are plans by groups like the Planetary Society that I'm part of
to try to get a microphone on a future mission, try to squeeze one in some spare electronics
port or something.
Actually, couldn't you simulate that atmosphere here on Earth and see if any sound propagated?
And that's where the skepticism comes from, from doing exactly that experiment.
You can create a Mars-like environment in a chamber on the Earth and it's It takes an enormous amount of energy to create any kinds of sounds that are detectable in that environment.
That doesn't mean that that's what would happen on Mars, but, you know, you try to base your best estimate on the best you can do on the Earth, and so there's a lot of skepticism that we might not be able to hear sounds on Mars because the atmosphere is too thin.
I do not support it.
All right.
Tiberius in Georgia, you're on the air with Professor Bell.
Hi.
Hello.
Good morning, Professor Bell and Art Bell.
Good morning.
Yes, Professor, I had a question and a comment.
I wanted to know, the first question is, on Mars, did they ever discover, did y'all ever find a pyramid on there, on Mars?
We haven't seen anything that looks in any way, you know, artificial.
Or, you know, anything like a pyramid, like that.
With the rovers, we did find pieces of the rover that fell when the rover was landing.
The heat shield, other metal parts that crashed in that area.
We drove the rover over to that stuff.
But we knew where that came from.
That's all stuff that we made and sent.
But with the rovers, we haven't seen any evidence for any kind of pyramids or things like that.
Some people have speculated that there's some of those kind of things from some pictures from orbit, but as we've been talking about for the past couple of hours, that's sort of in the eye of the beholder.
Okay, here's a question for you very quickly before the break.
If somebody had a telescope on Mars and looked back toward Earth, would they be able to reasonably or easily discern that Earth is teeming with life, Professor?
Or would that not be apparent?
I think you'd be able to tell that there were things that became green and grow and then die with the seasons.
And you'd also see, if you put a spectrometer on that telescope, an enormous amount of oxygen in our atmosphere, which is Created by life.
So you'd know that there's some really interesting chemistry and you'd speculate it's related to life going on.
And how far out in space would you be able to make that same determination?
Well, NASA's trying to build telescopes to make that determination for planets around other stars.
So you should be able to see that even if the Earth is just a point of light in your telescope.
Remarkable.
All right, we are at the break.
Professor, hold tight.
We'll be right back.
I'm Art Bell, threatened by yet another typhoon headed straight at us.
We'll be right back.
My gosh, I've got it.
I knew it.
I knew it.
It's so late in the show.
The skull image that I was talking about is indeed from one of the rover missions, and I've got the link, and I just sent it to Lex.
So Lex, if you're still awake, quickly check your email.
And if you've got the link, which you do, because I sent it, replace the data head link, please, with this Mars link.
And let's get that picture up there very quickly for Jim Bell to take a look at.
That's all assuming that Lex is still awake and on the job.
Lex, if you are, it's in your mailbox right now.
You're going to have to act very quickly.
Darn it!
I knew it!
Professor Jim Bell is my guest.
We'll get back to him in a moment.
Once again pleading with Lex, if you're out there, I just sent you an email on this rover
So, Professor, we actually do have a rover image that's astounding, a skull.
And I really, really wanted you to see that, and we got the wrong one up.
The reason I'm waffling, I can imagine, I know of five or six different rocks that sort of have skull-like shape to them.
I can't imagine, I don't know, it's probably one of those.
It's not an uncommon thing to see funny-looking rocks, if you've ever hiked around.
Let's take a look at it, if you can get it up there.
All right.
We'll see if we can.
One thing I wanted to say is, this is a real thrill being on your show.
You may not know it, but you probably have a huge fraction of your audience that is astronomers, because we're up in the middle of the night.
We're up at telescopes and mountaintops all over the world.
I think it's a great thrill.
It really is.
All right.
Thank you.
It's great to have you.
Steve, in Miami, you're on with Professor Bell.
Hi.
Hi, Art Bell.
How are you?
Fine.
Hi, Professor Bell.
Hey there, Steve.
I'm sure, Art, you've gotten plenty of my fast blast messages.
It is very hard to get you on the phone.
Well, here you are.
Yeah.
I wanted to ask you, Professor, in dealing with the question that if the Moon were to be pulled away from the Earth, what would happen?
What came to mind was when we were kids, we used to turn our bicycles upside down to work on them and spin the front wheel around and pick off the front wheel.
That's right.
Right.
by the axles and try to, you try to hold that thing steady.
It's very hard to move it.
Once it gets going, depending on the speed of the wheel, it's very, it seems to want to stay in one place
and if you try to move it, it's very difficult in gyroscopic fashion.
Sure.
Would, if anything were to happen to the moon's revolution, the moon's revolution around the earth,
would anything, do each affect the balance of the other?
Yeah, no, Steve, that's a really good analogy.
And in fact, it is the case that having the Moon spinning around the Earth roughly aligned with the Earth's equator, not exactly, but roughly, does help keep the Earth's orbital tilt stable.
In other words, when there are forces from other planets Passing close to the Earth or whatever that would act to slowly make the Earth wobble like your bicycle tire.
The fact that the Moon is going around the Earth helps to prevent that wobble from being extreme.
So without the Moon, the effects of the other planets or passing stars in the distant future or whatever could be much more dramatic on the Earth.
You're absolutely right.
All right.
On the fourth wildcard line, that would be Tim in Grand Rapids.
You're on the air with Professor Bell.
Hi.
Hey, how you doing?
First time caller?
Glad to get through.
Yes, sir.
Hey, Tim.
I have a question about something that I've never fully understood.
I am, I guess you'd say, a little bit versed in astronomy and physics.
I'm sure you're both probably familiar with the Drake equation regarding just how many I guess the conservative estimate there is about 10,000, and maybe the more liberal estimate is maybe something like 100,000.
But now my question is this, regarding SETI, I guess what I don't understand fully is, if we have so many different dishes, ...that are searching for any type of electromagnetic transmission.
And I know that, you know, you need to pinpoint a certain location in space.
I know that you need to go through a long range, or many, many, many different, very specific frequencies.
I'm familiar with what I believe is the 21 centimeter hole that exists in our atmosphere, which could be a limitation for dishes on Earth.
But I guess I don't understand Why, if we assume technology is going to evolve to some degree as it has on Earth, whereby a technological civilization would be employing some form of electromagnetic usage, why is it so difficult for us to actually find something there?
Tim, I think you've hit the nail on the head earlier, because the sky is big.
There's a lot of stars.
There's an enormous number of frequencies to search.
And the other part that you didn't mention is that there's very few telescopes actually searching on the Earth.
This is not something that the government is supporting.
It's privately funded.
It's a few small organizations that are trying to do this incredibly big job without a lot of public government support.
I think that just those things alone could be the reason why we haven't heard anything.
Of course, another reason is that there's nobody out there.
But, you know, those things alone could explain it.
That's a possibility.
Professor, thank God, he's still on the job.
I assume, as I am, you're sitting right next to a computer.
Yes.
If you would refresh the coast2coastam.com site very quickly.
You will find something that says Mars humanoid skull question mark in the same place we had the other link and if you quickly click on that and then come down first you're going to see a hundred percent picture in other words full resolution and then if you will come down from that you'll see this comes from one of your missions if you come from come down from that you're going to see some astounding Close-ups with both darker and lighter.
Oh, cool.
That is one of the rocks that I was thinking of.
I hadn't seen this one before.
This one is a jaw dropper, I think.
Oh.
Well, it's got, it's not quite like a skull, is it?
I mean, it's sort of the top, sort of like a human head.
No, I mean, this is an enigmatic, funny-looking rock art.
It certainly is.
I don't know what else you can say about it.
Well, thank God.
It's the one I was looking for.
Yeah, no, I hadn't seen this one before.
I try to look at all the images, but we do have 160,000 of them so far, and some days I have to sleep.
Oh, I understand.
But I'm glad I was able to call this to your attention.
No, this is interesting.
I will take a look at this site in some more detail now that you've pulled it up.
Wonderful.
Thank you so very much.
I was able to get about 150 of our best pictures into this book that's out.
I don't know if... Oh, you have a book out?
I think you guys have a link.
It's called Postcards from Mars.
It just came out last week.
And this picture isn't in it, but there's a whole bunch of others, about 150 of them, About a dozen large format foldouts.
You can fold out the page and get up to four feet wide panoramas from Spirit and Opportunity.
Okay, postcards from Mars, huh?
All right, let me ask you something that I ask the SETI people all the time, and just try and give me the best answer you can.
If, Professor, you came across a photograph that you just weren't ready for, something that indicated some larger form of life, I mean something really, really shocking.
What would be the release procedure on something like that?
This is an excellent question, and I'm glad you asked it, because we have worked really hard, the folks who, those of us who run the cameras, Steve Squires, the principal investigator of the project, and even our colleagues at JPL, we've worked really hard to set up a system whereby when the pictures come back from the rovers, they are immediately posted onto the internet, or as immediately as possible.
Sometimes somebody has to be awake and flip a switch or something.
But as soon as we possibly can, they go right to the internet, unedited, uncut, all natural.
And so the public can see them essentially the same time we do.
And we don't cull anything from that.
We don't censor anything from that.
And that was a big goal of ours early on, and it still goes on today.
So if there were an abandoned shopping cart, Or an unambiguous skull on the surface, or a worm, or something.
Everybody would know about it at the same time.
There is no way to stop that process.
There's no human filter.
There's no sensor sitting there with a mouse and saying, yes, no.
They just go out there, Art.
That's very, very un-government-like.
Yeah, I know.
It's wonderful, isn't it?
We worked really hard to set this system up.
There's a whole bunch of people around the world who are following along every day, making their own mosaics and panoramas and color pictures using that system.
And our goal from the beginning was to be absolutely wide open, to share everything we possibly can and let people do their own studies and make their own pictures and find their own evidence for whatever they're looking for.
So, you know, the truth of the matter is It would just go out there.
Everyone would know at the same time.
It's so hard to believe.
I mean, Professor, the implications of that on society and what it would mean if you really ran into something shocking would be so severe that it's just hard to believe there would not be some process that would, I don't know, that would halt it at the last moment.
Well, I mean, I guess I sort of take issue with you.
There would be severe implications in a dramatically wonderful, positive way.
I mean, I don't see what the negative is, personally.
And so, you know, I don't think anybody else who's involved in taking these pictures does either.
I mean, the whole goal is to share it.
It's your tax dollars at work.
Oh sure.
So the whole goal is to share it all.
Let's just see what we see.
That's great.
But the possible negative, Professor, obviously would be very religious people who would be extremely upset, not all of them, but a substantial number of them, to see large life suddenly apparent in a photograph of Mars.
I mean, it just would be Yeah.
It would shake the social fabric to, you know, the very foundations.
That's an interesting point.
Well, the truth is, though, Art, there is no such filter or censorship going on.
And so if there were anything that earth-shaking in the pictures that everybody could agree on is unambiguously alien and technological, then everyone's going to see it at the same time.
And that's one of the things I love about our project.
All right.
Sean in New York.
You're on with Professor Bell.
Hi.
Hi.
Good morning, gentlemen.
Professor Bell, considering the longevity that the two little rovers have exhibited, might NASA be considering or reconsidering any plans for an aerial reconnaissance platform or a little rechargeable Mars plane?
And secondly, might the rocks that are supposed to be the Mars rocks that were discovered at the South Pole, could they be ejecta from Olympus Mons?
Two very, very different questions.
First one about Mars airplanes.
There are a number of different proposals that I've seen to send airplanes, gliders, balloons, low-flying spacecraft to do exactly the kind of thing you were talking about, low in the atmosphere.
None of them have been selected formally yet, but that doesn't stop people, scientists and engineers, from getting together and proposing ideas.
And so I would expect that one day something like that would go.
And there's a special small spacecraft program called the Scout Program that NASA has that is designed to try to send those missions to Mars.
And so we should find out sometime early next year which is the next scout mission that NASA is selecting.
And it may be one of those.
Would the atmosphere support it?
Yes, you can actually fly a light aircraft in the atmosphere.
It has to have a pretty big wingspan and it can't be too heavy, but some folks who do aerodynamics calculations and aeronautics people have figured out that you can, in fact, fly gliders and you can, of course, fly balloons as well in the Martian atmosphere.
What a view that would be!
Oh my gosh, that would be spectacular, absolutely.
And your second question about Mars rocks from Olympus Mons, that's possible.
In fact, a bunch of the Mars rocks are thought to have relatively young surface ages like we were talking about earlier in the show.
And so they could be from relatively recent volcanic lava flows in Olympus Mons, the largest volcano on Mars is a good example of that.
What we don't have Sean is a direct connection between those Mars rocks and where they came from on Mars.
We don't have that direct connection.
We have to speculate.
All right.
From Omaha, Nebraska, here's Steve.
Hi, Steve.
You're on with Professor Bell.
Oh, hey, Al Bell.
It's really great to talk to you.
I mean, your show is fantastic.
I mean, I've seen like probably four different UFOs.
different type objects. One is a classic saucer, and then I saw a big, huge, maybe two-mile-long
rectangle, rectangular ship, I guess you could say. And...
And your question for the professor is?
The question is, what does he think those things are?
I mean, your guests talk about them a lot of the time also.
Well, that's because these things really are there.
Millions of us have seen them.
Now, there are perfectly reasonable explanations for some of them, but Professor, I saw a triangle come above my head no more than about 150 feet with my now-deceased wife, and there was no question about what I saw.
Now, it may be a U.S.
experimental aircraft, it might have been, but I don't think so.
It was gigantic.
It flew without sound.
In fact, it wasn't flying.
Define gravity.
It was floating.
Now, maybe we've got some lighter than air craft that we're experimenting with or something, but these triangles, Professor, have been seen right around the world.
They infested Belgium there for a while, and they're being seen in Mexico, South America, North America, all over the world.
Well, what I'd really like, you know, somebody should get Steve a video camera here, because he's seen four of these things.
He should just carry a camera around with him and take a movie of the thing.
What it comes down to is just taking people at their word.
You seem like a trustworthy guy, Art.
You've got a great radio show, you talk to great people all the time, you're a reasonable person, and I want to believe you.
But I also want to see a picture or a movie or some piece of evidence That's not just, I saw this and you have to believe me.
You see, that's where the line is for me, for a skeptical person like me.
I'm even a skeptical person.
There's no question about what I saw, Professor.
None whatsoever.
None.
But what that was, of course, I'm skeptical about that.
It could have been one of ours, although I sincerely doubt it.
Well, listen.
It has been an absolute pleasure having you here.
I didn't know that you had a book out, Postcards from Mars, and you say it contains how many photographs?
It contains about 150 photos, including some large four-foot wide pull-outs, panoramas, and a whole bunch of stories about the rover missions, what they've done, some of the people involved.
Just hundreds and hundreds of people from around the world have brought these images to us and keep the rovers going every day.
So, you can actually just, if you Google postcards from Mars, if you go and do an Internet search on Mars rovers or PanCam, you'll find a huge number of sites on the Internet where you can get at the pictures and follow along the mission yourself.
Professor, what a pleasure it has been to have you here.
You have a good night and thank you and God bless the phone system.
Thank you so much, Art.
It's been great fun.
I really, really appreciate it.
Take care, my friend.
And that's our weekend.
Ladies and gentlemen, I will see you next weekend.
Remember, I'm Art Bell at MindSpring.com.
Everybody have a great week ahead.
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