Peter Ward, astrobiologist and University of Washington professor, debates Earth’s uniqueness amid rising CO2 levels—matching 20–30 million-year-old climates—that could trigger 3+ feet sea-level rise by 2150, drowning deltas like the Nile. His Medea hypothesis warns microbes may drive future extinctions via H₂S buildup, while NASA’s Astrobiology Institute explores slow-life microbes on Europa or Titan. Skeptical of anthropic principle claims, Ward insists stable moons and magnetic fields are critical for complex life, yet human activity risks destabilizing them. Mars colonization is dismissed as impractical; instead, preserving Earth’s genome via frozen eggs and trusting future generations’ adaptability may be humanity’s best shot against extinction—even as solar flips and methane permafrost threats loom. [Automatically generated summary]
From the Southeast Asian capital city of the Philippines, Manila.
Good afternoon.
For most of you across the United States, well, good evening, good morning, whatever the time of day may be, it really doesn't matter.
I'm Art Bell, and this is Coast to Coast A.M. It is my honor and privilege to be filling in for somebody.
On Sundays, I really don't know who it would be.
George, perhaps, Ian, the other George?
I'm not sure.
Somebody.
Anyway, I'm here.
And that's great, and that's actually amazing.
We'll talk a little bit about that.
Anyway, from that intro, you can probably safely conclude that, yes, we are back on the other side of the world, yet again, all the way over here in Southeast Asia.
I don't know how many of you really understand where we are.
You might crank out a world map and take a look.
We're sort of a hop, skip, and a jump from a lot of places like Vietnam would be our closest neighbor.
Most of the typhoons that come through here continue on to Vietnam or on up to Hong Kong.
Hong Kong's about, I don't know, an hour and a half hop by plane, something of that order.
So we're down here at, I don't know, this end of the world.
Why?
Well, there were some family issues, property stuff we have to decide about, and some just plain fun, and then some other big issues I'll talk to you about on Friday.
All the ABs are well.
Asia, in fact, Little Asia will celebrate her second birthday on the planet with a big party at Jollibee.
Jollibee.
Jollibee is the McDonald's of the Philippines.
And all the kids here love it, Asia being no exception.
That'll be on May 30th.
She'll be two years old on May 30th.
Now, as you know, I'm pretty much of a techno geek.
But, God, it's really, it is impressive to me to do a long-form talk show like this from the other side of the world, the other side of the world for most of you.
It's incredible, actually.
When I last returned to the States, I had an opportunity to hear some of the shows I did from here in the Philippines, and I was unable to discern the difference in the quality of the audio at all.
It was as if I were there in the high desert doing the program, and I really couldn't tell the difference.
So I just think that's nothing short of absolutely astounding.
Even for somebody kind of technically into things as I am, it's astounding.
I wish I could describe with words, but I can't, what a different world it is here.
If you ever have a chance to travel in your lifetime, do it.
Take it from me, do it.
Now, if you're in the U.S. and you go to Europe, you're going to see really echoes is an inappropriate term of America.
In other words, when you're in Europe, particularly, of course, in Great Britain and for that matter, the other European nations as well, you're going to see echoes of America.
And it's really kind of a backwards way to put it because, of course, America is really an echo of Europe since we are in America quite a bit younger than Europe.
And so many came from Europe.
So when you go to Europe, you will see, you know, even though you're going to be in a different environment with people perhaps speaking a different language, you're still going to see things that are kind of familiar to you.
If you come to Asia, you're walking into a completely new world.
Everything is different.
And I mean everything.
The buildings, the way things are done, the way people act, the customs, the mores, just everything.
Everything is like walking into a new world in Asia.
So if you ever have the opportunity to do it by all means, folks, definitely do it.
So here we are, other side of the world again, looking briefly at the news.
President Obama calling for understanding.
He was apparently at Notre Dame, gave a speech.
And he said, even though the differences between those of us who are pro-abortion, those of us who are anti-abortion, would appear to be irreconcilable, he wants to see, well, I don't know what he wants to see.
Once you say something is irreconcilable, I'm not sure what you ask for.
In his case, he talked about open hearts, open minds, fair-minded words.
And I don't know how you do that with abortion.
I just, I don't have a clue, and I'm not sure he does.
I don't think anybody does because there is, it's so, he had it right, irreconcilable that there are no words that don't turn angry and upset when you discuss that subject.
A school principal who was sick for several days with swine flu on Sunday has now become the nation's first death other than that Mexican boy linked to the virus and actually the nation's sixth.
Michael Weiner, who worked at an intermediate school in Queens, died Sunday evening at Flushing Hospital Medical Center.
Now, they're suggesting that complications besides the virus very likely played a part in his death.
Hard to say.
A seasoned Democratic political operative will guide President Obama's eventual Supreme Court nominee on Capitol Hill, where the Senate's top Republican on Sunday refused to rule out a filibuster.
Stephanie Cutter expected to leave her job as an advisor, Treasury Secretary Geithner and move right next door to the White House.
Well, it looks like Pakistan is now going to be the place for war, huh?
Pakistani forces, security forces, fought Taliban militants on the outskirts of the main city in the northwest Swat Valley, entered two other Taliban-held towns there, foreshadowing what could become a bloody urban battle.
Nobody wants to see that.
Spacewalkers, specially designed tools, simply could not dislodge a bulky bolt, which apparently is interfering with repairs at the Hubble Space Telescope.
I hope they get it working.
So they took an approach more familiar to putting and puttering around down on Earth brute force, and it worked.
But it set spacewalkers so far behind they couldn't get all their tasks done.
So hopefully the Hubble will be repaired.
There was great controversy about whether or not to repair the Hubble at all.
Oh, you want a good deal?
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The dealers have simply just now a few weeks to sell the Chryslers, Dodges, and Jeeps or risk losing thousands of dollars on them, giving people, any of you out there, who want a really serious deal, a chance for a really serious deal.
All right, we're going to break here in a moment, and then I'm going to review some other news.
I want to remind the audience that even here on this side of the earth, I have Fast Blast available, and will do my very best to answer your questions, and or, if appropriate, read your Fast Blast if you want to send one.
And following a little additional news, we'll go to Open Lines.
Unscreened, open lines.
I will simply take calls as they come in, which means you allow the lines to just ring.
Let them ring and ring and ring.
And if I don't answer, you have not costed yourself, costed, you have not cost yourself a penny.
So that's the way we do it when I'm on the air.
I just let the lines ring.
I'll give out the numbers here in a bit.
So in a moment, back with a little more news.
Stay right where you are.
All right, at the top of the hour, we're going to be speaking with Peter Ward, Professor Ward, that is, and he's going to be talking about the state of the earth and things ecological, that sort of thing.
And I kind of wanted to mention that here in the Philippines, I've been here going out, what, a couple of months now.
And it's summertime here.
Summertime is, oh, middle of March until perhaps the very first part of June.
So we're in summertime right now.
And virtually every day, save at best two days, two or three days, we have had clouds every day.
Cloud cover every day.
Yes, we've had a couple of tropical storms and one typhoon, I think.
But that aside, we've had cloud cover every day, and that's not normal.
That's very abnormal indeed.
So something strange is going on, and it's as visible here, or perhaps more visible here, than it is elsewhere right now in the northern latitudes.
In the 1350s, we began a solar minimum.
It started then, about 1350, lasted 500 years.
And at present, the sun is unexpectedly quiet.
And it's been that way for much longer than anticipated.
As you know, I'm a ham radio operator, and I watch the sun very closely because when we have sunspots, then we have action in the ionosphere since the charged particles sort of tickle the ionosphere, and then things get really good for ham radio operators.
But things are not getting good at all.
Now, does this mean that global warming is perhaps no longer a matter for concern?
Should the sun remain quiet, we could be in for a warming reprieve.
If you believe that whether or not there are sunspots affects the climate, I'm not sure.
I don't think any of us are sure, but it certainly will not stop greenhouse gas emissions so that if we go through a big solar minimum, if the sun has that kind of an effect on the earth, then let's think about it for a moment.
Everybody's going to breathe easy, aren't they?
But then, someday, the sun will get active again, higher than ever in concentrations.
So all of a sudden, we're going to have disastrous quick warming.
According to NASA, the sun is at the deepest solar minimum in 100 years.
In 2008, there were no sunspots observed, almost 75% of the time.
That's incredible.
To find an earlier time when the sun has been this calm, you have to go all the way back to 1913.
And so far, in 2009, the sunspots are even less.
Solar physicist Dean Prisnell says we're experiencing a very deep solar minimum.
And sunspot expert David Hathaway agrees this is the quietest sun we've had in almost a century.
Quiet suns come along about every 11 years or so.
That's a normal cycle.
Or the larger one, 22 years, as a natural part of the sunspot cycle.
For the 200 years that astronomers have been viewing the sun, peaks of solar activity have always been followed by periods of relative calm.
The current solar minimum is part of that pattern, but it's not supposed to be this quiet.
Right now, Prisnell thinks that sunspot counts will pick up again soon.
That's what he thinks.
Possibly, he says, by the end of the year, it'll be followed by a solar maximum of below average intensity in 2012 or 13.
Now, that's a conjecture.
And there could be a giant one ahead of us.
Or it could come true, and the sun could just sort of loll along for the rest of our lives.
Imagine if that were to occur, and the Earth were to begin to cool and get cooler and cooler and cooler.
After all, the last time we had something like this, we had a mini-ice age.
And that would calm everybody down, wouldn't it?
As I mentioned a little while ago, we'd get calm.
You'd say, ah, global warming, what do they know?
It's not warm out there.
It's cold.
In fact, it's getting really cold.
And we would continue emissions, I'm sure, that laws would begin to change, that whoever is president would begin to loosen up.
If it really got cool, they'd say, well, what the heck?
And loosen up regulations, emissions would increase, as they're going to do anyway.
I mean, look at India and China.
And then all of a sudden one day it's going to get warm, and that'd be that.
The Large Hadron Collider.
We've talked about that on the program before.
We've had Dr. Kaku and others who have talked about the Large Hadron Collider.
And always we've had, you know, very strong assurances that, hey, Art, don't worry.
The Hadron Collider, when they fire it up, it's not going to be a problem.
Yeah, they may create some black holes, but, hey, there'll be just little bitty black holes, and they're going to blink out in seconds.
There's absolutely, positively, definitely no chance of the LHC destroying the planet when it eventually switches on sometime later this year, right?
Yeah.
And just a few doubts are persuading some scientists right now to run through their figures again, and the new calculations are throwing up a few surprises.
One potential method of destruction is that the LHC, the Large Hadron Collider, will create tiny black holes that could swallow up everything in their path, including our planet.
In 2002, Robert Cassatio at the University of Lanya in Italy and a few pals reassured the world said not possible because the black holes would decay before they ever got a chance to do any damage at all.
Now they're not so sure.
The question is not simply how quickly a mini black hole decays, but whether this decay always outpaces any growth.
Now let's think about what they're saying there.
The question is not simply how quickly a mini black hole decays, but what it eats before it does.
In other words, create a little black hole, and what if it eats the Earth before it otherwise would have blinked out?
I mean, that's what black holes do, right?
They consume matter voraciously.
Anyway, Cassidio has worked out the figures and says now the growth of black holes to catastrophic size just doesn't seem possible.
Or does it?
That's not the unequivocal reassurance that particle physicists have been giving up until now.
What's more, the new calculations throw up a tricky new prediction in the past.
It's always been assumed that black holes would decay in the blink of an eye.
Not anymore.
As Hadio and Covidy say, they expect delay times are much longer, possibly greater than one second, possibly as much as minutes.
Minutes!
Doesn't sound good, right?
Waiting for CERN to clarify.
And then came another story, you know, it just made this absolutely irresistible to me.
In a truly frightening study, physicists at the University of Oxford have identified a massive miscalculation that makes the LHC safety assurances more or less invalid.
The focus of their work is not the safety of particle accelerators per se, but the chances of any particular scientific argument being wrong.
If the probability estimate given by an argument is dwarfed by the chance that the argument itself is flawed, then the estimate itself is suspect, according to the team.
That has serious implications, of course, for the LHC, which some people worry would generate black holes that might swallow the planet.
Nobody at CERN has put a figure on the chances of the LHC eating the planet.
One study simply said there is no risk of any significance whatsoever from such black holes.
The danger is the thinking could be entirely flawed.
Entirely, I'm sorry, I shouldn't laugh.
But what are the chances of it?
The Oxford team say that roughly one in a thousand scientific papers have to be withdrawn because of errors, but generously suppose that in particle physics the rate is one in 10,000.
It just gets worse for CERN and its attempt to reassure us that the Large Hadron Collider won't make mincemeat of the planet.
So I don't know what to say about this other than I hope they're very, very, very careful.
All right, let me give you a quick rendition of as many numbers as I can before we get to break here.
West of the Rockies, if you'd like to call in, unscreened open lines, 1-800-618-8255.
That's 1-800-618-8255.
Remember, let them ring.
East of the Rockies, it's 1-800-825-5033.
It's amazing how I remember how to do this, even after months and months and months.
First-time caller line, area code 818-501-4721.
That's 818-501-4721.
We have quite a few of those, so just let it ring.
Wildcard lines.
Did I say we had a lot of first-time caller lines?
I guess I am slipping after months.
We have, in fact, only one.
Wildcard line is Area Code, Wildcard Lines, ARIA Code 818-501-4109.
That's 818-501-4109.
And finally, the international line from anywhere in the world, 1-800-893-0903.
Once again, 1-800-893-0903.
Let them ring.
I'll get to you as I get to you, and there'll be no charge beyond that.
Listen, everybody, I've got a photograph up on the CoastacoastAM.com website.
They're not allowing it to get any bigger than the small version.
At least I can't figure out how to get it bigger.
But the photograph that we put up tonight is, well, you'll recognize, of course, Aaron and Asia.
And the new face is Anna Lynn.
I forgot to mention that.
And this also will give you an idea of the difference between things in the Western world and things here in Asia.
Anna Lynn was a very fortunate find.
She is what we here call a Yaya, who is kind of a mixture of a housekeeper and a alpair, you know, a babysitter, if you will, full-time.
So Anna Lynn comes from Mindanao and very near.
In fact, Annalyn, her family, I guess, knows my wife's family.
And so, you know, there's a kind of a connection.
And we hired her as a Yaya, and she lives here full-time, 24 hours a day, has her own room.
And we pay her $60 a month.
Now, that will give you some idea of the difference in scale between the United States and here.
When we first had Asia back in the U.S., I wanted to give Aaron a break, and we looked into somebody who could come for a few hours a day only, just a few hours a day.
And as I recall, it was $20 an hour, and we were talking about, what, five hours a day?
So it was about like $100 a day or something of that order.
And we never ended up doing that.
But it was about $100 a day for five hours.
And that was after we knocked the price down.
So here it's $60 a month.
And of course, we provide food and board and all that.
All right.
Open lines, unscreened open lines coming up right after this.
People have really long memories.
Somebody asks whatever happened to Maggie.
Little Maggie, who used to do the Want to Take a Ride for You occasionally.
That's Noelle in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania.
Noelle, Maggie is now Big Maggie, and I think is just beginning to get boyfriends and that kind of thing.
So that tells you how long it's been.
My gosh.
A lot of welcome back on the Fast Blast.
Thank you very much.
Good to be here, of course.
And one other thing, somebody asks about ham radio.
And am I on the air over here?
Well, the first time I got here, of course, I've got all my ham gear here.
First time I got here, I went to the roof and I didn't bother to, you know, what does it they say?
It's easier to ask forgiveness than permission.
And so I went up to the roof late at night and put up my own antenna.
It was like a two-night construction process.
And it stayed there for two months, and they never noticed.
And every day I was waiting for a knock on the door here.
You know, I'm in a condominium here, 19th floor, way up.
And I got feeling so guilty about it.
I got so tired of waiting for a knock on the door that I finally went down and got the manager, told her, look, I've got an antenna on the roof.
Her eyes went wide.
I said, maybe you should see it, and maybe it'll be okay.
So I took her up to the roof, and she went, oh my God, you did that?
And I said, well, yes, I did.
You know, I obviously had climbed up to the pinnacle of everything.
It was quite an affair, and I had to take it down when the first time Typhoon came along, and then the board said no, and so I had to, it stayed down.
This time, I'm applying.
I've written a letter, and we'll see if we can get an antenna up.
In the meantime, since I'm on the 19th floor, before I came to Southeast Asia in the Philippines this time, I brought an antenna with me, which I have taped to my window.
And you think, well, that's not going to work very well.
But up 190 feet in the air, oh, baby, let me tell you, it works pretty well.
And I'm in the process of getting my license renewed, so I'll do some VHF, UHF work, and simply pray that the board will see it my way and allow me to put up an HF antenna.
But the hopes are small.
All right, on to open screen, unscreened open line.
Let's begin.
Where do you want to begin?
Let's begin with, I don't even know what line this is.
Let's see.
I guess it would be the first time caller line.
You're on the air, I hope.
unidentified
Hi there.
All right.
I just want to say you're the best.
And I want to talk about all the people like Gerald Salente and Alvin Topler and Alex Jones and Robert Young Felton.
Well, what is it specifically that you like about them?
unidentified
They're just so cool, and they're so truthful.
And I think they're the intellectual spearhead of reality, and they cut through all of the sort of cock and bowl, you know, kind of left and right words of the same wing, you know, mentality.
Well, you know, a couple years ago, a few years ago, as a matter of fact now, and by the way, I'm listening on KKOH out of Brino, Nevada, 780 a.m., the home of Ross Mitchell.
And I'm in the middle of Mendocino County, California.
So, you know, I'm fascinated by AMDXing and all that you've talked about.
And a couple years ago, I asked you when the Art of Antennas was going to come out.
And I'm willing to send the advanced 4755 PL box in Perot, Nevada, or wherever you may be.
I really am interested in that.
And I think there's a lot of techno geeks out here that would love to see you put something out like that.
You've done so many things that have really advanced all the stuff that we listen to to this day.
I appreciate it.
And of course, you're on the air work.
It goes without saying.
But the things that you've done, I believe, and educating us on things like the Hubble, I can't thank you enough for all that you've exposed us to.
And by the way, my sister works for Mattel.
I've talked to her about putting out a ham radio Barbie so that young women will get interested in that, as you asked a few years ago to advance that concept and bring back the certain, the React people, so that we've got an emergency network that's going to be.
I'm just calling to ask and see if you could kind of guide us and let us know what do you see in the future in Mexico and the United States regarding the drug violence and all the drug cartels killing each other at the U.S.-Mexican border?
The more the governments, there's an Rs crack down on it, the worse it's going to get, I'm afraid.
And as long as there's an appetite for drugs in the U.S., they're going to continue to propagate their way across the Mexican border, and the violence is going to increase the harder they crack down.
I don't, look, I disagree with you about blowing away Rush Limbaugh because, well, for a whole lot of reasons, but primarily because this, the show I'm doing right now, despite the fact that I'm doing it at 1.51 in the afternoon here in the Philippines, is not the kind of show that you do during the day.
It's the kind of show that has to be done at night.
The mood is a night mood.
The mood has to be dark out, you know?
unidentified
I'm not talking about competing with him on the subject.
I'm talking about competing him on stations, the amount of stations that you have.
And it's preventing the country from obtaining the kind of progress that it should be making.
You know, if you look at the other Asian countries and how they've done, from South Korea to Japan to China to Taiwan to now even Vietnam, the Philippines should be making more progress.
It should be a richer nation than it is.
And the reason, one of the reasons, certainly is because of the corruption here.
But the man is right.
I mean, it works both ways.
If you want to get something done and you understand how it works, then believe me, it gets done.
Let's go east of the Rockies and say, good morning.
And after having just made the comment about the degree and depth of the corruption here, there's another comment I want to make.
We all know about the violence going on in Mexico and elsewhere right now.
And I would like to say that that stuff isn't happening here.
Oh, yes, I know.
You can look in the net, and everybody says, whoa, I'm really scared of the Philippines.
People get their heads chopped off.
Well, down in the very southern part of Mindanao, around an area, Jolo Island in that area, a very tiny area at the bottom, there are some al-Qaeda operatives.
But other than that, other than that, this has got to be one of the most peaceful, generally nonviolent countries in the world.
And it's difficult to understand, or maybe it isn't so difficult to understand.
The people here, two-thirds of them survive on $2 a day U.S. or less.
Think about that.
Two-thirds of the people here survive on $2 a day or less.
That's Poverty at a level that we can't begin to understand.
We talk about poverty in the U.S. The poverty here is unbelievable, and yet the people here are as happy as they can be.
The level of violence is low.
The level of respect for elders, for older people, is very high.
In fact, the respect for others generally is very high.
We'll have to talk about this more as time goes on and sort of reason it out.
And oh, there's one more thing.
Maybe it bears on it, maybe not.
The distinction between church and state here doesn't even exist.
I'm Art Bell.
Good morning.
Well, good afternoon from Southeast Asia.
I'm in the Philippines, everybody.
Great to be here.
And a couple of comments before we go to our guest, Peter Ward.
And they are, let's see, we've got so many here.
Apparently it's overloaded trying to look at my antenna.
Just go to Google and put in W60BB, and somehow or another you'll get a picture of that antenna.
It's pretty big.
It's spread over five acres.
And don't forget the photograph up there of the three gals.
It is strange living in a house with three girls.
And there was something else.
Let's see.
I'm trying to read through these very quickly.
I get so.
Oh, the kitty cats.
Yeah, everybody's asking about the kitty cats.
All three of my cats have once again come with me to the Philippines.
They've now been around the world, I don't know, one and a half times, something like that.
Two times around the world for cats.
In fact, let me just lay this very interesting story on you.
I guess it has something to do with priorities or something.
But fortunately, I have the money.
When we came over here, we came on Korean Air, which I must say was a wonderful flight.
Korean Air was excellent.
And the three of us, human beings, were able to go for about $1,500, as I recall, about $1,500 tickets.
Now, my three felines, Abby, Yeti, and Dolly, cost about $6,000.
Now, at a rate like that, they should be getting, you know, caviar at every stop.
They should be getting people personally tending to them and grooming them and petting them and massaging them.
And I can't think of what else would justify a fee like that, but that's what it is.
So having done it three times now, we're into about $18,000 of cat movage.
Well, I'll get you back here.
All right.
On to business.
Peter Ward is professor of biology, a professor of earth and space sciences, and adjunct professor of astronomy at the University of Washington in Seattle.
Listen to this.
He is principal investigator of the University of Washington Node of the NASA Astrobiology Institute.
Here's the key, which involves the leadership of over 25 scientists studying the probability of finding life beyond Earth.
He is also senior counselor of the Paleontological Society and was awarded an affiliate professorship at the California Institute of Technology.
And his topic this evening is going to be mass extinctions and the self-destructive nature of our planet.
I want to drag you, Professor, off, I guess, what we were going to talk about tonight.
We'll get to that.
But in view of what you've been studying, I do have a few questions, and you'd be perfect one to answer them, I guess.
And that is, when you scientists have looked at the probability now with all we know, and we're knowing more all the time, finding Earth-like planets, a lot of water out there, and I see the headlines all the time, this and that.
But we're learning more.
What is the probability of finding life outside of Earth?
What about as we let's let's move away from Mars in our minds and go out to other Earth-like planets that are being discovered?
Oh, I forgot.
Tell you what, Professor Ward, think about that for a moment.
I forgot my break.
In a moment, Professor Ward will be right back.
Professor Ward, all right, so as we go past Mars and we go way out there and begin to look at other Earth-type planets, I guess there are many, or we will discover many.
We've got two really different alternatives for life.
Jupiter, of course, you've got the moons.
Europa has that ocean, a hundred-mile-thick ocean, but it's capped by ice.
And as we head out, the problem's cold.
We cannot get bacteria to reproduce any colder than about minus 20 centigrade.
But the great Carl Sagan years ago said, look, all that bacterium needs to do is integrate, put a little bit of ammonia in with this water, and you've got endifreeze, and it works great.
So life, if you could figure out how to put endifreeze, would be fine out there.
No, and that brings me to, gosh, this is as if you pay me to do this.
It's great.
That brings me to Titan, which is so cold that it wouldn't be carbon-based.
And there have been some really cool biochemical studies showing that it is a combination of carbon and, of course, silica.
At very cold temperatures, silica unites with carbon to make very long chains that mimic organic molecules, carbon-organic molecules, called silanes.
And in one of my books called Life as We Don't Know It, I suggested that we skip Mars, skip Jupiter, go straight to Titan because there would be cooler, better aliens there than any place.
No, I think there's still going to be laws, and everything's ruled by chemistry.
Now, the question is, it's so cold, would that life, because chemical reactions are so slow in the cold, will that life be moving so slowly that we fast life wouldn't even know it's alive?
I mean, you're talking about, do you see a big tree grow?
You know, maybe the trees are moving at different speeds than we are.
And it's just that this could be like millennial life with an atom moving here and atom moving there over millennia.
Except that how much has SETI spent, 50 years of SETI work, for nothing?
I mean, at what point do you say, you know, maybe not?
Well, it's at least maybe not in our corner of the galaxy where at least they can pick up radio waves.
But they will admit, even Seth Szostak, whom I know quite well, will admit that, you know, it isn't the one million estimate that Carl Sagan made.
He suggested there may be a million civilizations in our galaxy, which means that anytime you go out and look into the night sky, you would see at least one, and we would be hearing them.
In fact, I also know Seth rather well, and he said to me a show or two ago, which is quite a while now, that if they don't find life, I can't remember what he said, in the next X number of years, decades, whatever, that it might begin to be safe to say there is not life within a certain range.
It simply isn't there, and they may be forced at some point to actually admit that he did say that.
I wonder if you scientists, you said there were 25, I think, considering all this.
I've talked to Seth about this a number of times, and I think there was one transmission by Arecibo.
And we transmitted, I forget what it was, but years ago, one quick blast of a few seconds out there.
And then the scientists began to get cautious, and they said, you know what?
Maybe it's not such a good idea to transmit out there and let everybody know where we are.
It just might not be that great an idea because, and you can argue with this if you want, but somebody who would receive it would already be at a certain level of technological development.
And in fact, the odds are pretty, if they're there, that they're probably well beyond us.
And therefore, if we advertise We're here, they might come get us.
People used to think there's absolutely no chance that there could be life in the outer reaches of our solar system out where the comets are, the Uort cloud.
And then more and more, people are starting to think, you know, any big rock with ice in it, there could be some liquid in there, especially when a comet comes closer to the sun.
If you have liquid water, you have organic material, and comets are filled of organic material.
Why not?
And so actually, people are getting a little more concerned that, you know, it isn't a slam duck.
Let me understand how great the danger really is, because after all, the Earth is plummeted by things that burn up in our atmosphere and sometimes don't burn up all the way and hit Earth, right?
So would it be true that something that passes through our atmosphere would heat to the degree that it would self-sterilize and we'd be protected against anything inside?
Or is there a danger from things that collide with Earth on a regular basis?
In the redo of the Andromeda Strain, it was kind of an intelligent type of thing that was able to communicate with others like it, and it began eating up the Earth kind of like gray goo, if I recall correctly.
Is something that horrible possible?
Would it be so dissimilar to Earth that if it made it to Earth, it would be unstoppable?
So, you know, kind of like the swine flu, they said, because we have no natural immunity to it.
Well, possibly, but, you know, there's a much greater danger from aliens than aliens from space.
Craig Venture, who was the first person to get the human genome all figured out, he has a company down in San Diego, and he has, for the first time, built an alien.
He has taken an Earth bacteria, changed the genome enough so it now has different amino acids than any Earth life.
I mean, this is nothing that Mother Earth ever produced.
This is the start.
He is going to manipulate and produce a whole range of aliens on Earth.
And there are certainly no protocols.
There are no laws.
There's nothing on the books to stop anybody from really starting the mess.
I mean, it's Frankenstein myth except really scary this time.
So in other words, we now have the ability to manipulate genetic structure to the point where, you just said it, we can actually create alien, something so alien that it would be called an alien here on Earth.
Particularly if you're not aware of what the properties are going to be.
Now, when he does that kind of genetic manipulation, is he sure as he moves things around that what he ends up with is going to be benign to human beings?
You know, they're going to create these little black holes, and they were assuring us that nothing could happen.
And now they're not so sure.
Professor, stay right where you are.
Professor Peter Ward is my guest.
It's going to be a fascinating night.
We're going to bring things back down to Earth here in a bit.
From Southeast Asia, the Philippines, I'm Art Bell.
We listen and we listen, and we don't hear anybody saying, calling Earth.
Anybody out there?
Whatever.
We don't hear it.
We listen and listen, but we don't hear it.
Now, here's something to consider.
A professor can consider it during the break coming up, and that is perhaps advanced alien civilizations very easily would be able to get word to us if they wanted to.
Perhaps they don't even use radio.
Perhaps they don't use television.
Perhaps they communicate with thought.
I mean, if you can imagine it, it could easily be true.
But the bottom line is if they're really an advanced civilization well beyond us, whether or not they experimented with radio and television, if they don't want us to know they're there, we wouldn't know.
And we have these sightings all the time.
It seems almost irrefutable that something or another has been visiting us every now and then.
But even there, you've got to consider if they really didn't want us to see them, if they didn't want us to notice, we wouldn't notice.
Well, of course, there'd be some sightings of, I don't know, Venus and all the usual, but we wouldn't have these sightings like the one I had, you know, the big triangular object.
Maybe it was U.S. government, but maybe not.
So many sightings.
Anyway, the bottom-line question here is, if they're so advanced, and it's likely they would be, we wouldn't know they were there.
Not if they didn't want us to.
We'll be right back.
By the way, everybody, I said the photograph I've got up there of Aaron, Aaron, Uyah, Enelin, and Asia couldn't be blown up to be a little bigger.
Well, I was wrong, and somebody corrected me on FastBlast.
Thank you very much.
The way you do it is just click on the picture on the front page.
It will take you to a second, albeit small, photograph.
And when you click on that one, it gets bigger.
And you really can, you know, Asia is kind of small, so you can get a good look at her.
All right, back now to Professor Ward.
Professor, how about that?
In other words, if a civilization was way ahead of us and they didn't want us to know that they were around, there's no way we'd know, is there?
If they weren't using what we regard as a way to communicate, transmitters, microwaves, something like that, if they weren't using that to communicate, then how would we know?
Well, it is, but I mean, what makes us think, except our own egos, that they would take the same path that we took in terms of, for example, television, radio, microwave, all the different ways of transmitting intelligence from one place to another, that they would even take that path?
And if they didn't, how would we know we wouldn't?
I mean, you were speculating a little while ago about invisibility.
We are just now sort of getting to that point where we can kind of make aircraft invisible or very close to invisible.
Another million years.
It's astounding to me.
If you look at the last hundred years, it seems like we've had almost an eerie, disproportionate growth in technology, and it's hard to imagine what another hundred years will bring.
But I was at a very interesting conference two weeks ago at Harvard called the Crossroads Conference, and some very interesting people were talking about the age of the universe, the age of our galaxy, and when it would be after the Big Bang that you could even have life at all.
You'd have to go through a first generation of stars to get heavy elements.
A star would have to go through its whole life, go supernova, before you could get iron or anything heavy.
And someone said, you know, it isn't beyond the range of possibility that we are the first intelligence.
It's not out of the range of possibilities, but my gosh, with all of the planets out there they've already found that are Earth-like, and then when you project how many there might be, it seems improbable that we're the first, and perhaps even the only.
Now, that's a frightening scenario to me, that we are the only.
Well, here's some new information that just blew me away.
I wrote a book called Rare Earth.
It wasn't unique Earth, but I've taken a lot of grief for people saying, no, no, no, there's aliens everywhere.
But Don Browning and I looked at what it is that makes Earth Earth-like.
So at another conference I was at, a Caltech guy named Dave Stevenson came up with a very simple thing.
He said, what if there were no moon?
Well, we already know that the moon keeps our axis at the same angle.
We all knew that.
But then he says, no, you're missing the point.
If there were no moon, the daylight time and the night time, the revolution, the day on Earth would be four hours long, two hours light, two hours dark.
We'd be spinning a four-hour day.
The moon slows us down.
The gravity of the moon on the oceans slows us to a 24-hour day.
So all of a sudden now, what happens on a planet where you have a four-hour day?
A lot of us drinking beer and just talking and shooting the ball, you know, sometimes we play ping-pong.
Yesterday, I was up at a cabin mowing a lawn with a colleague of mine, and we're mowing the lawn and losing track of mowing the lawn.
And we were thinking about hydrogen sulfide of all things, which is a Really interesting, scary gas.
Someone in our shop has just proposed, and actually it was a dual thing with Harvard, that there is arsenic life, that you replace all the phosphorus in a cell and put arsenic in its place.
You know, you guys sitting around considering these things is one thing, but when you start telling me that there's somebody doing these things, actually creating aliens on Earth, at whatever level, you know, tampering with DNA and producing aliens, that's really frightening.
The ability to perturb life and change life and build new types of life that evolution ever produced is, to me, scary.
And, you know, once we got atomic weapons, which is the analogous case, laws went up, secrecy went up, the government took it over, not always successfully.
And the world, let's face it, produced very few nuclear physicists, people capable of building a bomb.
Very few of those are produced every year.
But the biological equivalent, the ability to perturb a cell and change it, that's available to almost any biology major if they put their mind to it.
And we produce hundreds of thousands of those every year, millions around the world.
And so you've got this Pandora's box that really could open.
Well, I was, again, I was lucky enough to sit next to Craig Venter at this conference.
I asked him exactly that same question, and he reassured me and the crowd that, oh, yes, those of us doing this have thought about protocols, and we're very careful, and on and on and on.
Again, I was at this conference that Harvard Freeman Dyson was there, the great Freeman Dyson, the physicist.
And he said he views the revolution coming at us, not so much the computer revolution anymore, but the biological revolution.
And one of the examples he gave just floored me.
He said, I expect that in 50 years from now, instead of giving kids video games, we will give them biological kits where they get to design their own life forms.
But then he said, of course, we shouldn't let them have viruses.
We'll tell the kids you can do anything except mess with viruses because that could hurt us.
Look, I have a 12-year-old kid.
If you told them not to touch the viruses, that's the first thing they'd go for.
I had dinner tonight with two physician friends of mine, fans of your radio program, by the way.
They never miss it.
And we were talking about that virus.
And my friend, their husband and wife set of physicians, he said what scared him about this, it reminded him of the World War I, that great Hong Kong flu, Asiatic flu that killed millions on Earth.
It started out as a very benign or not very serious form and then disappeared for six months and then came back catastrophic.
In fact, the 1918 virus came in the spring, was really scary, then went away, sort of went away, just as this one is presently doing, and then came ravaging back between August and November.
It killed millions and millions.
It actually went around the earth two or three times.
And that was in an era when there weren't airplanes carrying it around the earth.
So so you you have heard you've heard that rumor.
Have you heard the one that uh says that it may have been something that was worked on in a lab and got away from them?
No, but then again, I'm already on record as being very worried about aliens being produced by people.
I guess I'd be the last person that I'm already concerning certain various groups for having the temerity to question some of this progress, if we call it progress.
Well, for a long time, I've been very concerned that it's not going to be the big things that get us.
It's going to be little things, as in viruses and little tiny nanotechnological, who knows what, with many legs and probably a big jaw and lots of teeth.
Anyway.
Listen, my guest is Professor Peter Ward, and we are going to drag things back to Earth and talk about our Earth and our climate and all of that sort of thing when we continue from Southeast Asia.
Here I am, Dr. Professor Peter Ward is my guest.
Fascinating program.
We're talking about life elsewhere.
And we're talking about life here.
Aliens elsewhere, aliens here.
It's kind of a disconcerting conversation in a lot of ways.
Don in Madison, Wisconsin writes, hey, Art, missed the first 11 minutes of the show.
Why are you back in the Philippines and for how long?
Well, we'll talk more about that on Friday.
Maybe forever.
Who knows?
We'll see.
In a moment, we're going to drag things back to Earth, and there's plenty to talk about with regard to what's going on here on our own planet.
It's pretty strange.
I'll tell you all about it in a minute.
It's a very strange summer here.
We'll be right back.
Professor Ward, let's come back to Earth for a moment.
I'm, of course, here in the Philippines, and it's summertime here.
Our summer is from, oh, I don't know, mid-late March until about June, what they've referred to as summer.
And during the entire period, Professor, it's been cloudy.
I could count perhaps two or three days in the entire period when we had anything relating to blue skies and sunshine.
It has been one cloudy day after another.
And the local media here, the television and the radio, is certainly widely talking about global warming and the change in the global climate as a reason for it.
That could be pure hogwash, but they're talking about that over here.
And of course, they're worried about it because the Philippines is made up of 7,107 islands.
And when you're on an island and people are talking about sea level rise and changes in climate, you worry a little bit.
It doesn't do anybody any good to spout doom and gloom to the point that there's no hope.
But look, we have three feet of sea level rise tied into the system right now.
If we don't put another carbon dioxide molecule into the atmosphere, there's going to be a three-foot rise just because the sea is warmed.
Three feet doesn't sound like much, but three feet up also means hundreds of feet of salt moving laterally into agricultural fields.
That's the spooky part.
To me, if you start computing how much of the world's agricultural fields are at sea level, below sea level, or within three feet, it's really spooky because the deltas, like the Nile and the Ganges and the Mississippi, these are some of the biggest rice-growing areas on the planet.
And three feet takes out every single delta on Earth.
You could step back and say that climate is always changing, and so in one sense, that's nothing unusual.
On the other hand, if you look at historical records, the level of CO2 carbon dioxide in our atmosphere now is equivalent to what it was somewhere between 20 and 30 million years ago.
We haven't been this high in 20 to 30 million years, and very soon we will be back where we were 100 million years ago.
During the age of dinosaurs, a very warm, warm climate.
We have within 100 to 150 years, a current increase.
We will be back in the Cretaceous.
Now, the Cretaceous was not a time of any ice sheets, let alone ice caps.
Well, there were some moments when I was thinking I'm not very lucky at all.
We had a storm on our third day.
We were two parties, one from the American Museum of Natural History and our party, University of Washington and Caltech.
And the big storm hit on the second third day.
The American Museum team was found in a cave, just barely alive, after the storm blew all their tents down.
So if you don't have a tent in a big storm when it's below zero and you've got, we had 90 mile an hour winds, you die real fast.
So they got evacuated by icebreaker.
We survived that storm, but all the Antarctic hands kept saying they've never seen weather this severe.
And the reason is, you just warm it up a little bit.
So, to go back to your question, I had with me one of my colleagues, is Eric Steig.
He's a University of Washington professor like me, but he had the cover of Nature about four months ago, the most prestigious journal of all, showing that Antarctica is warming.
I mean, this is the last hope for anti-global warming skeptics.
Antarctica has been cooling, they say.
No.
Now they can show that every continent is warming and warming rapidly.
There is 240 feet of sea level rise in the ice on Antarctica.
We went down from Chile, a place called Punto Renas, and took a ship, an icebreaker, five days across the Drake Passage, got dumped off, seven of us, with our tents, and picked up six weeks later.
I've been to Manila, I've been to Negro, Stubaghetti City.
And as you know, it's a high island.
There's plenty of high levels there.
It's not like Nauru or the Bahamas, for heaven's sake.
The Bahamas are just like low sandhills.
So the volcanic islands, the high islands, are fine.
But near the ends of our lives, I hope to live to 200 years in age, and I hope they do too, but near the ends of our lives, we will start seeing this acceleration of sea level, and it will be scary and spectacular.
Well, I mean, who could deny it that the sun affects climate?
And all we need to look at are the fact that the Earth goes around in an ellipse, not a circle, and that the great Malutin Milankovich was the one who showed that these three aspects of orbit totally affect climate.
The fact that we went into ice age, out of ice age, into ice age, is all about where you are in those orbital parameters.
Sometimes you're closer to the sun every year, sometimes you're farther away every year.
So just even a minimal change in our distance really radically changes weather.
Now, the longer term, is the sun fluctuated in the energy output?
I mean, that's what we're really looking at, isn't it?
Do we have with more energy and less energy?
And the trouble is our observation, yeah, we've observed sunspots over long periods of time, but we're just getting to the point where we're getting sophistication in understanding energy output.
We don't have a thousand-year record, and yet maybe some of these cycles are 2,000, 10,000, 15,000 years.
The last time we had a solar minimum that looked kind of like this one when the sun just became dead for a long period of time, we had a mini-ice age.
Now, perhaps that's coincidence, and perhaps not.
If not, and if there really is a relationship between climate and the action on the sun, which again seems reasonable, then we're at an interesting juncture in Earth's history in that we're producing so much greenhouse gas right now and beginning to have arguments with ourselves about the wisdom of continuing to do so.
And right now, it would seem as though we're beginning to make, or at least beginning to make intelligent changes in that direction.
But if the sun remains quiet, and if that means another sort of mini-ice age or a cooling on the planet, then it's absolutely going to crush the arguments of those who would like to stop the greenhouse emissions or at least slow them down.
And there's always a possibility that once the sun finally does become active again, we've sort of gone on emitting these gases Because, well, it's the economic thing to do.
And then all of a sudden the sun gets active, and then we get this incredible spike in global warming.
If we're now dealing with the quiet time where the sun is minimizing the output and we're still getting warmer, I mean, you just read the Riot Act for what we ought to be doing in terms of at least slowing down greenhouse gases.
Now, there are those, many you know, who say that greenhouse gases have nothing to do with global temperature and that it's all the sun.
And yet, how could we have these measurable increases in temperature during quiet suntime if it's the sun?
So the arguments that greenhouse gas have nothing to do with it, I think, fall apart right there.
Well, again, if we do get a sort of a small ice age, and if it actually cools for a while because of the sun, it's going to make the argument for global warming very difficult once again.
And it seems to me that laws will relax, regulations will relax, will begin emitting, and then away we go when the sun gets active.
So, you know, there is a – how much of a possibility do you think that if the sun remains calm that we'll actually get some cooling as a result of it?
And the reason I say that is I've just spent a lifetime – talking, well, dealing with past climate.
So interestingly enough, NASA came to myself and about 10 other people about four weeks ago and said, we are really worried about future climate change.
And we've ignored deep time.
We just have never looked at the deep time phenomena to understand, could this have anything to say about future climate?
And absolutely.
I mean, you go back in the past, we can measure past carbon dioxide levels.
We can then look at the record of the animals and the plants.
We can tell you, was it a hot world or a cold world?
We can tell you if there was ice or no ice based on certain carbon dioxide levels.
There has never been ice at 1,000 parts per million CO2.
That's three times what we have now.
We're heading there.
We're heading within 200 years at most to a world where there has never been ice with that CO2 level.
I mean, the sun has, if it's part of this, the rock record doesn't tell us.
The rock record says absolute fidelity between CO2 and past global temperatures.
We are, as Steve Stanley said, we are children of the Ice Age, and the Ice Age was nothing but change.
You had glacial and nasty cold everywhere and interglacial back and forth.
But to really produce a new species, if you want to evolve, you want to produce a new species, that's where most of the evolution takes place, we would have to separate somehow.
If we head out in space, yes, I could expect new human species to arrive.
But with transportation being what it is and with social mores falling with the taboos against breeding with other countries' people falling like crazy, the chance becomes less and less that some group of us could get isolated and have sufficient isolation, sufficient change around them to produce huge evolutionary differences.
I mean, the evolution we're doing now is over two things only.
It's over the food we're eating, and it's the fact that we evolved not to be in groups, but to be solitary pretty much.
And now we live in cities, and we're just being hammered by diseases.
We human species were never meant to be in cities.
And so evolution we see is against disease, and it's for all this new food we're eating.
I mean, if we find ways, at least temporarily, around a problem like global warming, because we have air conditioning or whatever else keeps us cool, then we fail to evolve if there was, in fact, a way to involve.
All right.
Evolve.
Peter Ward, Professor Peter Ward is my guest.
We're talking about what's going on here on Mother Earth.
I'm Art Bell.
A lot of fast blasting in its truest form.
Good to hear you, Art.
Global Warming is the 21st Century Boogeyman.
Cannot be convinced otherwise.
Or David in all ground, Georgia.
Global warming is not settled science.
My God, you lemmings.
Geologically, arming events preceded CO2 rise by 800 years.
Explain that one.
Let's see.
Had to turn the program off tonight.
Couldn't stand the idiocy of you two preaching global warming, despite the fact the Earth has been cooling for the past 10 years.
Never mind the facts.
We must keep the propaganda Going pathetic.
And so I knew there'd be a lot of that because there's a lot of that out there, more than all of you understand.
I would say by percentage, probably about 30% or so of people, the minute you mention global warming, get actually angry.
It's an interesting phenomenon, even though really the science is pretty much settled.
Honestly, it is.
If you look at the gigantic majority, probably up 90% or better of the scientists who study it, it is settled science.
It is warming.
But it makes people angry.
And it's worth examining a little bit about why they get angry.
They get angry because it threatens them.
They might have to change the way they live.
They might have to become a little greener.
They might have to drive something other than they're driving.
They might have to segregate their trash.
They might have to do this and that.
And so it makes them angry.
That's, I believe, the reason for the anger.
People don't like change.
They hate change, and they hate being told that they're doing the wrong thing or that what they're doing is harming the planet.
So I think that's a reason for the anger.
I understand that if we go into a cooling period, if we actually, as a result of the sun, go into a period of cooling, even an ice age, that these people are then going to be armed with all kinds of ammunition to have whatever limits, laws, and regulations we have in place right now removed and plow ahead with polluting the atmosphere as we wish.
Just imagine what that would do.
Professor Peter Ward, back in a moment.
Well, all right, Professor Peter Ward.
Professor, the Gaia hypothesis says, and it takes us right back where we were going earlier, that life makes the Earth optimal, or that actually the Earth may be alive, right?
Even maintain some of them that Earth is alive.
But you, Professor, advocate that life anywhere is inherently suicidal.
The Medea, you mentioned it, Medea hypothesis.
Is life crazy and needs to get locked up like suicidal patients?
Or are you the one that needs to be locked up, Professor?
What I tried to do is write a book on what's the far future going to do for this planet?
How long do we have to go?
What's going to happen to us?
And what is it about the deep past that informs the future?
So it really is a take on how long do we have on this planet before habitability runs out, before we have to go somewhere else?
I mean, we'll have two choices.
The sun is going to keep getting brighter and brighter and brighter.
There's no stopping that.
So our choice is to either engineer our way out of the brighter, brighter, brighter somehow, or move.
I mean, that's the two choices.
So I try to do a balanced view of this.
I try to take a good look at what is the far future.
We get so caught up in this near future.
And it's really a much more fascinating question.
We can predict the far future better than the near future.
The global warming, whether it's going to get hot, whether it's going to get cold, if we have a glaciation starting or not.
And that's what seems to consume us where far more interesting conjectures are the longer term.
But you say, well, I mean, who's going to be around to see it?
Species last a long time.
We have the sort of, I think, species guilt, thinking, oh, we're bad.
You know, we've done this, we've done that, and therefore maybe we'll die off soon.
No, I think we're going to be around for a very long time and that our species will have to come to grips with some very long-term solutions to planet Earth.
Did you know there was actually a NASA, I'm not sure what you would call it, a NASA idea, I guess, that they were rattling around suggesting that perhaps with global warming, one solution might be to change the orbital path of a large body,
whether it be whatever it might be, some sort of asteroid or comet or something, and cause it to pass very close by to Earth, thereby moving Earth moving Earth farther away from the sun until we get global warming under control.
It seemed like a crazy idea then and now, but it was a real idea at NASA.
It's a way to move the Earth farther away from the Sun.
However, I use this example actually in my public talks, and I tell people, do you want the government to have to throw, it's not just one, you'd have to throw thousands to millions of asteroids at the Earth, a near miss.
And every time there's a near miss, it goes around the Earth, it jerks this a little bit further out into space.
So you don't, it's a government operation if you screw up once, bang.
So I'm not sure I would trust the government to do it, but the physics is correct.
But even a crazier idea has been put forward by Paul Crutzen, who won a Nobel Prize in Chemistry.
And this past year, he has suggested that unless we get our act together to cool the planet somehow, he proposes injecting sulfur into the high atmosphere, just what volcanoes do, and mention Mount Pinatubo, which really changed the atmospheric content, changed climate on the Earth for a year.
That was one Philippine volcano.
Let's make airplanes be thousands of volcanoes and seed the atmosphere.
The trouble is, what it does, yes, it cools the Earth because the air becomes less transparent, but it also reduces your crops because you don't have as much light hitting the crops and it causes the oceans to get even more acid.
And, you know, it is fair to say, of course, we had Three Mile Island, but I mean, we really haven't had a Chernobyl-type disaster in the United States or anywhere else in the world for that matter.
That was the one big one.
And, you know, there's a certain case to be made that nuclear plants are reasonably safe.
Again, the big problem is the waste, and it's being dealt with in Europe.
And again, in this book, I argue that we need to engineer our way out of these things.
That the Gaia hypothesis says that if we simply go back to nature, nature will take care of us.
That's pretty naive.
We need to understand that there are 6.5 billion of us that we would like to reduce that population.
I don't see it happening anytime soon.
And therefore, unless you have some huge global disaster that wipes out a lot of people, which doesn't seem in the offering, we've got a lot of mouths to feed.
And the only way to do that is through technology.
You just have to sort of suck it up and say, you know, this is the hand we're dealt.
Let's do the best to cause the least misery out there that we can.
Well, we've been looking at these mass extinction boundaries for a long time.
Again, I was just reacting to this whole Gaia.
Gaia was Mother Earth, and the meanest Greek mother of all was named Medea.
She was Jason's wife, Jason of the Argonauts.
She got so mad at her very bad philandering husband that she murdered their kids.
And if you look back at this Earth's history, these mass extinctions, which were the greatest murder events in the history of the planet, were caused by bacteria.
One was caused by asteroids.
The dinosaurs died in asteroids.
But 14 other times in Earth's history, it was microbes producing hydrogen sulfide gas, toxic H2S, which caused the mass extinctions.
The evidence is written in the rocks.
You find there's biomarkers, there's chemical signatures.
We are getting better and better at figuring out past microbial assemblages, and all evidence seems to say the asteroids are no longer implicated in mass murder.
I've never been one to believe that Earth is actually alive, but my belief system, and it's just mine, says that Mother Nature doesn't get angry, she just gets even.
In other words, when there become too many people on the Earth for nature to support us and things get so far out of balance, then, you know, a little microbe or something is issued that straightens all that out by taking out half of the people on the planet or something.
And so I guess that kind of fits in with what you're saying.
The Gaia hypothesis king himself, a man named James Lovelock, really smart guy.
And he was the person who first figured there couldn't be life on Mars because the atmosphere showed no evidence of life on Mars ten years before the Vikings of the mid-70s.
But then he moved on to believe that the Earth is alive, that the Earth is some giant superorganism.
And his point now is that of the 6.5 billion of us, there will only be a half billion left by the end of the century.
Now, he doesn't say why.
He just says that nature will do this little revision.
I don't think so.
My sense of it is that we're going to stay at high numbers.
We're going to muddle through.
There'll be a lot of misery.
But that if we keep our smarts about us, if we believe in technology, try to save as much as we can, we'll get through this.
But I do kind of believe in this getting even thing.
In other words, nature seems to have a way of balancing just about everything.
When you look at predators and those that are chased and eaten, things do have a way of balancing out.
If there's too many, I don't know, too many bunny rabbits, something comes along to eat a bunch of bunny rabbits.
And that's what I'm talking about when I'm talking about getting even, whether it's a microbe or something else, something comes along to sort of seems like even things out.
In your book, Under a Green Sky, and again, this same hypothesis, Medea hypothesis, you suggest that not so far in our future, Earth's future, the oceans are going to actually turn purple and the sky is going to turn green and people will start being poisoned by hydrogen sulfide.
That will happen if we don't get our act together in terms of stopping this huge run-up in greenhouse gases because it happened over and over in the deep past.
And so this is kind of like the ghost of Christmas future in the Christmas Carol.
This is the worst possible calamity that can happen if we do not somehow turn off this heating system that we're producing on the planet.
We're going to have to rewrite a whole lot of songs.
Well, all right.
Professor Peter Ward is my guest.
Coming up this next hour, we'll take just a few moments, hit a couple of other topics, and then we're going to open the lines for Professor Ward from the Philippines.
I'm Mark Bell.
Professor Peter Ward is my guest, and we're discussing our present situation, our future here on Earth and beyond.
It's a fascinating topic, and in a moment we'll continue.
And by the way, if you were listening carefully, those are the numbers.
We've got a few open.
If you'd like to pose a question to the professor, we're going to cover just a couple more topics, and then we're going to go straight to the phones.
Be right back.
Once again, Professor Peter Ward, welcome back, Professor.
You're working with a grant winner, a genius, I'm told, Mark Roth of Seattle.
And it says here that that man, Mark, has discovered that hydrogen sulfide can put mammals into true suspended animation.
Well, here's something I discovered, Professor, and that is I've got a bad back.
That's why I almost chuckled.
I've got a terrible back.
I fell off a pole when I was younger and injured my spine, L4 and L5.
And it's pretty serious.
It's been with me all my life and sometimes is very debilitating.
And I found early on with my injury, and you're right about the swelling, and I found if I, you know, everybody put heat on it, put heat on it, it made it so much worse.
It was indescribable.
It was awful.
And so I did the opposite, and I started putting ice packs on my back when it goes out and I'm in terrible shape.
And sure enough, the ice reduces the swelling.
The swelling pulls things back from the nerve, and you can live again.
So that part is absolutely true.
But this new business that hydrogen and sulfide can actually put you into real suspended animation.
Are you talking about short-term suspended animation for doctors to do work?
Or are you talking about something conceivably long-term?
Well, if you think about what a major wound is at the cellular level, think of a heart attack.
I mean, that's the cells around your heart, the muscles are in a catastrophic accident, and the cells themselves are being ripped apart.
Oxygen, when you want a nice fire, you put oxygen on it.
Oxygen is a free radical, as we know, that really is very bad for cells.
When we have a heart attack, and then the first thing the doctor does is put an oxygen mask on you, rushing oxygen right to the same site.
It makes it worse at a cellular level.
This guy Roth finally figured out that's the worst thing to do.
What we want to do is remove the oxygen that smows the trauma within the cells.
The cells can start healing themselves without all this free oxygen radicals that are at a chemical level ripping the cells apart.
Oxygen's bad stuff.
And so he just had this idea.
The reason I'm looking at it, the permeate extinction was caused by hydrogen sulfide, and our experiments are showing that the reptiles survive it better than the mammals did.
Cold-blooded animals need a whole lot more hydrogen sulfide than warm-blooded animals do.
The levels killed off the mammal-like reptiles, warm blood, and the permeate extinction.
The reptilian forms the rise of dinosaurs survive, and voila, you have an age of dinosaurs.
Yeah, we touch on it as to, interestingly enough, Roth said he got this idea about hydrogen sulfide by reading a previous book of mine that actually deals with these gas levels in the past.
But I touched on it in the Medita hypothesis.
And I also, you can go on to Google.
I did a TED, a T-E-D talk talking about hydrogen Sulfide and the medicinal parts.
And as I gather, human trials have already been tried.
A company will be forthcoming.
This will be a major medical breakthrough.
unidentified
Well, I won't ask that question.
I'm curious, you keep saying it will be up to engineers to solve the problems.
My question about that is that, in my experience, engineers are people who are really good at precision, and that's what we want them for.
We want them to build bridges we can drive over over and over and over again.
But are you talking, do you mean engineers or do you mean investigators of all sorts, physicists, chemists, the creative sorts that sit around and scratch their heads and say, hey, what do we do?
And I'll get off the phone and listen to your answers.
Yes, sir, Mr. Art Bell and Professor Ward, it's a great honor to speak with you, and good morning.
I was wanting to bring up, now I only got to start listening about 2 o'clock, so I might have missed something.
But in the idea that you said we can't get any hairless, the most we could do to evolve to be more heat resistant is get taller and thinner.
I wanted to bring up that not only am I 6'2 ⁇ , but I have many, many acquaintances and quite a few friends who are within one inch of me, if not taller, and my son even is eight years old and already five feet tall.
I was wondering if there had actually been a study to see if we aren't possibly evolving to that degree.
And I wanted to bring up the idea that something I'd read that was written, I think, in the 50s or so, it was written by Robert Heinlein, when you brought up solar power being viable, Mr. Bill, that we should have orbital generators that are collecting raw solar energy and pumping it down to us through like a laser beam or something along those lines.
I have to say I also agree with your viability of the tidal, the kinetic generators for the tidal flux.
I think that'd be fantastic, but I see that possibly bringing in a war between countries for how our current open sea laws currently exist because, you know, like what is it, 20 miles out, it's anybody's territory.
And as soon as we would need enough of those, that would become something of an issue for who's going to get that energy.
But I'm glad to hear that the orbital generators are coming in.
And I'll quit tying up your lines.
I just wanted to throw that in there and thank you very much.
I would like to ask whether, the guest, what does he think about the chemtrails with regard to how they're trying to reduce global cooling or attempts?
I don't know about global cooling, but Professor Ward, we have in the past covered a subject called chemtrails.
I'm sure you've heard about them, and there have been some very, very interesting reports.
They indeed do not seem like contrails, the normal contrails that we're used to in the sky.
They seem a little different.
We've had reports, there was a very interesting one, an AP story from Iowa, I believe it was, where they actually dissected what was in one of these chemtrails, and it was pretty awful.
I mean, there were viruses and just all kinds of awful things contained in these chemtrails.
I think that was, I remember when I was very young seeing Werner von Braun on television talking about that just prior to the Apollo program.
But I was thinking that along the lines of global cooling, that a system such as that with satellites all around the Earth at the equator, not beaming energy to the planet, but having the solar arrays on them and also very large light-producing elements,
which would when the sun is shining at any particular point in time on the planet, those satellites are shining light back at the sun, hence causing an interference pattern, as it were, and hopefully to divert photons which would normally make their way to the surface of the Earth to cause them to go elsewhere and perhaps induce cooling that way.
I think it's perhaps a reasonable way to gather energy, Professor.
There are people actually in the planning stages of launching these satellites now, but I think their mere presence would not filter enough or change enough to make any discernible difference on Earth at all in terms of the amount of sunlight getting here.
Well, it's difficult, to be honest with you, to stay optimistic, but I'll do my darnest.
All right, Professor, when we get back, and I want you to think about this during the break, the North Pole is melting.
All that nice white reflective ice is turning into dark, absorbent ocean.
Is there a trigger point when it'll all be too late?
I'm Art Bell.
Hi, everybody.
My guest is Professor Peter Ward, and in a moment, we're going to talk about trigger points.
Stay right there.
Once again, Professor Ward.
Professor, trigger points.
It seems a logical hypothesis to me.
In other words, as you lose the ice at the North Pole, that's a lot of reflectivity that's gone and a lot of very dark ocean to begin absorbing heat from the sun all of a sudden.
I mean, it's an entire region completely gone upside down.
Is there a possibility that we reach a point where it accelerates like somebody pulled a trigger?
And these are called tipping points as well as trigger points.
There's a lot of speculation in the press about what the tipping point might be.
The reality is nobody knows.
I try to show this in this book I wrote, the Medea hypothesis, that Gaia theory suggests that the feedback, something that is a reversal actually, should all be negative.
When the Earth gets warmer, the life will make it cooler.
But this is not the way it works.
I mean, you've just pointed out, Juan, when we start melting ice, it gets warmer, and there's less ice, there's less reflectivity, it gets warmer again.
This is a positive feedback.
Mother Medea, that nasty, nasty mother, made these positive feedbacks, and it makes things very dicey for life on the planet.
This is why, really, life is its own worst enemy sometimes.
I'm not a science professor, and so I don't know how much of a factor it is when you take an area as large as the North Pole, which was virtually all white ice, snow, and then suddenly turn it dark and let the ocean absorb heat.
Is there any real science That tells us how much of a difference this makes?
But I was just wondering if there's any hard science that says, look, if you take that area which was white and in a 50-year period or 60 years, whatever it is, turn it dark, there will be X number of change in degrees or portions of degrees or whatever.
Any hard science that tells us exactly what will happen?
It sounds like there really isn't, even though they're doing calculations.
I don't think 50 years ago that they were out there with really accurate measurements to do the exact measurement you're talking about.
But at least the physics of it are so well understood that certainly within several approximations they can come up with an answer.
But an even more interesting question, if that's possible, is when Antarctica loses all its ice and all those minerals and all that oil, who's going to get that?
Well, by the time the Antarctic has melted, I don't know that there's going to be any humans to apply the machines to the earth to drill.
We'll have to see.
Joe, in Minnesota, you're on with Professor Ward.
unidentified
Hello there, Art.
So good to have you back again.
I wonder if the professor knows much about T-Boone Pickens, what he thinks about his huge windmill farms, if that's going to provide any solution for us.
And could you combine the Stanley steamer process with the Tesla battery and perhaps form a really wonderful propulsion system?
You and I should write up a movie for this because a flipping of the field would cause a catastrophe that would be very interesting.
Back in the day, when I was a grad student, we thought that all the mass extinctions had been caused by a change in magnetic field because when the field goes to zero, all that ultraviolet and all the cosmic rays blast the surface.
And yet, there don't seem to be mass extinctions.
Maybe the field flips too quickly to really cause big changes.
Or maybe it just doesn't cause extinction, but it kills a lot of stuff.
But once again, I think it would be a fascinating movie.
There are some Israeli scientists who think that a change of that sort with a big bombardment from the sun or elsewhere caused the extinction of the dinosaurs.
But I guess we're pretty clear on what killed them.
One, if every male was required to get a vasectomy after their first child, wouldn't that cut the population in two generations down to less than a billion?
And second, did you catch the NOAA report here recently that clearly states that nine out of ten of their weather stations no longer meet their own criteria as being a weather station because of encroachment of artificial heat sources such as asphalt?
Seven out of ten of them have a two-degree temperature variant, and five out of ten of them have a five-degree temperature variant, meaning their worklist is determining whether or not they're global warming.
And if you still insist that it's man-made global warming, how do you explain NASA reporting for the last 10 years, all of the outer planets are also in global warming?
My point is, man is the one that laid down the asphalt.
unidentified
Well, this is true, but the point is, NOAA has regulations saying that there has to be a hundred yards difference between any artificial heat source, such as an air conditioner blower or asphalt or tar from a roof, etc., that's creating an artificial bubble of heat.
Yeah, if every male after the first child was required to have a vasectomy, either by stick or carrot, the population of the world would drop down to less than a billion in two generations.
But no one will do it for the simple fact that nobody wants their army to be cut by a factor of 10.
Population control, though, is something you might want to comment on.
I mean, we've been sitting here discussing what the world can tolerate and what kind of numbers it can tolerate before we're at a non-sustainable level.
Well, it is the elephant in the room, and certainly it must be addressed.
The trouble is, politically, how do you address it?
The Chinese took a crack at it, and they did actually pretty well, but they did it through an authoritarian government.
I personally would rather live in freedom, and I don't want people telling me how many kids to have or not have.
However, in the 70s, there was a great group called Zero Population Growth, and that organization and its very good goals has just seemingly disappeared.
We just don't talk about it.
I don't know why it isn't part of the public discussion.
And your listener is correct in bringing it up that this should be talked about.
Well, isn't population density and numbers, isn't it to some degree tied to economies?
In other words, as economies become richer, population growth tends to decline rapidly.
And if you look at the industrialized, richer countries, they have a much lower population gain than, well, for example, here in the Philippines, my wife comes from a family of eight.
You know, her dad's a farmer, put all eight through college.
But you tended to have children because you wanted them to help out on the farm.
Now, as countries become richer, they tend to have fewer children, yes?
John in British Columbia, you're on with Professor Ward.
unidentified
Yes, good evening.
Thank you very much.
Art, while your guest fulfills his purpose as a scientist, obviously you fulfilled your purpose in changing your theme format back in time with respect to your broadcasting.
British Columbia, thanks you.
Thank you.
I guess the underpinning of my contribution reflects evolution and devolution between, let's say, humanity and Earth.
And there's a lot of places I'd like to go, but I'll keep it short.
And I'd like to ask your guest, based on the fact that he's associated with NASA, as humanity has kind of left a mess here on the planet while Earth goes through its natural cycles of evolution and devolution, obviously we have too.
So I would just like to ask him what his perception would be as to before we clean up the mess here, or should we not clean up the mess here before we continue with our prospects to going to places like Mars?
What about the prospect, Professor, of not sending people to Mars, but sending machines to Mars and attempting to terraform or beginning to terraform Mars, beginning to try to restore an atmosphere we could live with, so to speak?
My own sense of it is that we just cannot afford to keep all of our eggs on one planet in one proverbial basket.
My thought is that we actually send up fertilized eggs frozen to somebody in space, be it the backside of the moon, be it an orbiting colony, that if we are hit by some gigantic comet, Hale Bop, for instance, that we have the ability to bring back the species.
It's crazy to have every bit of our genome on this planet and this planet alone.
And all of us as human beings on this planet will ultimately have to deal with that.
And the short-term basis that we live with, and the long-term basis that you talk of, what comfort can you give us as far as faith or reason?
And you are a reasonable person, and you're thinking that the short-term analysis is that you have to have some kind of a faith and a superior, ultimate thinking of the realm of humanity and the heart of men to know better.
Well, here's my faith is that we as a species we have it in our hands to be able to sit on this planet until the sun goes red giant.
The ultimate end of Earth will be in seven billion years.
The sun is going to expand beyond the Earth's orbit.
Biologically, there's no reason we can't be still there.
And at that time, if we can engineer our way to that particular point, there's no reason why we cannot have headed off into other planets in space, other Earths.
So my faith is in our intelligence.
My faith is the fact that we do not have to go extinct, that nothing is written anywhere that says we will go extinct, and that it is in our hands.
And my faith is the next generation.
That's all you can have faith in, is the next generation, that we train them, that we treat them well, that our kids have values and recognize the value of humanity and of life, and they have the hope to keep going, and that's all you can do.
Yeah, actually, I had a Scientific American article this year in their special edition on evolution, and it's about the future evolution of our species.
I was allowed to speculate a little bit about where we're going.
And in that, I did recount the fact that they have found that we are evolving faster now than any time in the last 15,000 years.
And it's the level of dealing with food and with disease.
At the level of the genome, the gene substitution and the number of mutations that are taking place within the human genome, we're evolving faster now than any time in the last 15,000 years, according to new studies.
And it is simply because 15,000 years ago, there was no agriculture.
We were so few in number.
Now that we live in cities and now that we eat all this different kind of food, we are evolving to deal with that.
And it's mainly from the new parasites, the new diseases.