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May 17, 2009 - Art Bell
02:35:48
Coast to Coast AM with Art Bell - Extinctions and Climate Change - Peter Ward
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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 AM.
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 skipping 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 no, 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 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 US 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 moors, the... just everything.
Everything is... it's 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 and 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 to Treasury Secretary Geithner and move right next door to the White House.
Well, looks like Pakistan is now going to be the place for war, huh?
Pakistani security forces fought Taliban militants on the outskirts of the main city in the northwest's 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 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.
Well, 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 on, 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, you know, 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 a hundred 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 Presnell 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.
That's 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 to 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 lull 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 all, we'd get calm.
We'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'll 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 There's not going to be a problem.
Yeah, they may create some black holes, but hey, they'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 Bologna 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, Casidio 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!
The Saudi oil companies 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, and 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 1 in 10,000.
It just gets worse for CERN in 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 on the screen to open lines, 1-800-618-8255.
That's 1-800-618-8255.
Remember, let them ring.
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 her 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.
Wild Card Line is area code, Wild Card Lines, area 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.
Good morning.
Afternoon.
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. Good morning, afternoon. I'm Mark Bell. Open lines, unscreened, coming up in a
Listen, everybody.
I've got a photograph up on the Coast2CoastAM.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.
Annalyn was a very fortunate find.
She is what we here call a yaya, who is kind of a mixture of a housekeeper and a au pair, you know, a babysitter, if you will, full time.
Annalyn comes from Mindanao, and very near.
In fact, Annalyn, her family is a, 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 bucks 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 never did, and we never ended up doing that, but it was about a hundred bucks a day for five hours, and that was after we knocked the price down.
So here at 60 bucks 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 Noel in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania.
Noel, Maggie's 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, you know, 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 is 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.
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.
I got so, 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 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 and the Philippines this time, I brought an antenna with me, which I have taped to my window 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 I, you know, 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.
Hi there, Art.
I just want to say you're the best, and I want to talk about all the people like Gerald Salente and Alvin Toppler and Alex Jones and Robert Young-Telton.
I think there's... That's too much to talk about.
I mean, can you lump them all together, sort of?
Yeah, I can.
I think there are a certain group of people, and I think they should be on the show all the time and a lot more, and they provide a certain credibility and a certain way of life and thinking.
Well, what is it specifically that you like about them?
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 bull, you know, kind of left and right, birds of the same wing, you know, mentality.
Alright, I want you to be very careful to delineate between cool and absolutely right on.
And I don't mean to detract from any, he mentioned many, I don't want to detract from anybody's credibility, but there is cool and then there is accurate.
And again, I don't detract from anybody's particular credibility or lack of it.
It's just that a lot of people confuse them.
And a lot of people, when they hear somebody that they think is cool, That person's got to be right, because their delivery is so cool.
Well, it doesn't always work that way.
This, I think, would be West of the Rockies.
Hello there.
You're on the air.
Well, hi, Art.
Howdy.
I have reached the iconosphere.
How cool.
Well, I was actually wondering about that antenna that you had there on the roof, and you told the story.
So, see, the thoughts go faster even than the radio signals, I guess.
That's true.
You know, Millennial was the typhoon that did me in.
It was approaching the island.
I had about 160 feet of wire up there attached to the red blinking lights warning aircraft.
Oh man, so the aircraft knew before the apartment manager, that's funny.
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 Reno, Nevada, 780 AM, the home of Ross Mitchell.
That's right.
I'm in the middle of Mendocino County, California.
So, you know, I'm fascinated by AMD X-ing 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 advance to 4755 P.O.
Box in Pahrump, 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 airwork.
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 CERT and the REACT people so that we've got an
emergency network that's...
Alright, well here's something for you to contemplate.
As I mentioned, I've got an antenna for VHF, UHF. Listening to two meters here,
about a third of the people on the air here are, on two meters, are women.
It just, it blew my mind.
So, I'm not sure why that would be here, why so many women would become interested in amateur radio here, but, and not there.
That's just the way it is, so.
Well, I could say something like maybe they don't have as good a telephone service, but I don't know.
But I do have to put out a book, man, on the art of in tennis.
I really am looking forward to seeing that.
Well, I'm not that much of an expert.
I do have a monster of an antenna back in the States, and if you want to get a look at it, I think you can put in my call letters, W60BB, W6, Ocean, Boston, Boston.
Put that in Google, it'll bring up a picture of the monster antenna back there.
I think it may be one of the largest, maybe the largest domestic ampte radio antenna in the United States.
Maybe even in the world, who knows?
I said amateur radio, not the biggest antenna, period.
So, oh, and one more note, P.O.
Box 4755, the old P.O.
Box I used to get in Frump is no longer active, so please do not send anything there.
Wildcard Line, you're on the air, good morning.
Hello?
Going once, going twice, Gone like the wind.
And going now to another wildcard line.
You are on the air.
Good morning.
Good morning.
Is this Art Bell?
It is indeed, sir.
Art Bell.
I'm calling from Fresno, California.
This is Al.
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 US-Mexican border?
What could you tell us about that?
It's not going to stop.
It's not going to stop?
Simple as that.
No, it's going to get worse.
The more the governments, theirs and ours, 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.
Too much cocaine coming in, right?
It's not just cocaine.
It's every amount of drug you can imagine.
Oh yeah, sure.
All righty.
Well, I just called to ask and see what was going on.
Thanks a lot.
You're very welcome, sir.
I wish I had better news.
But no, it's going to continue as long as the appetite remains, which it will in the U.S., then yes, it will continue.
And by the way, a couple of things that I kind of missed with you all would be the financial crisis.
I talked to you at the beginning of the financial crisis.
Looks as though it's kind of leveled out, right?
Same way it looked before the Great Depression.
So don't rule out part two.
And then there's the flu, and everybody's sort of relaxing now, despite the death in New York, the news of the death in New York this morning.
Everybody's kind of relaxed.
Eh, you know, looks like just a regular old flu.
Saw a possible reference to the fact that it might be mutating in Mexico.
There was a quick article that appeared.
I'm not sure if that's true.
I guess none of us are.
The flu as well is something that I think may be back in the fall, and I'm sure you've heard that from others.
That's the way it happened in 1918.
It began just like the swine flu.
They don't like swine flu.
They like H1N1, right?
It began in the spring and there were some relatively serious and then many mild cases as well that kind of went away.
You know, summer came and came back with a vengeance in August.
And I think between August and November, millions died.
So you can't rule out that possibility.
Well, I see we're getting challenged a little bit here.
It's suggesting to me that the link to the server is down.
Maybe it isn't.
Maybe that's a false message.
Let's try and answer a line and see if it works.
Wildcard line?
No, apparently they're serious.
Apparently the link really is down.
All right.
Well, if that's the case, back there in the studio, simply take one of the wildcard lines and put it on the air for me.
And wildcard line, good morning.
You're on the air.
Hello.
Thank you very much.
And I'm glad to hear you again.
And I want to thank you for being an open lines kind of guy.
I mean, open lines, but, you know, no screen callers.
Right.
I believe that that's the only thing that's holding George Norrie back from just blown the doors off Rush Limbaugh during the day. I
believe if he goes open lines, you was open lines all them years and look how far you went
with how many stations you went.
I predict he's going to do that too. 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 is, it has to be dark out, you know?
I'm not talking about competing with him on subject.
I'm talking about competing him on stations, the amount of stations that you have.
Oh, I see.
Well, Coast is way up above, I don't know what the latest figures are, but way above 500 stations.
That's a lot of stations.
That's pretty much blanket coverage.
Where are you again?
I'm in Anchorage, Alaska.
Anchorage.
One of your old stomping grounds here.
Oh, yes.
I would love to see you read Three Magic Words by U.F.
Anderson, and that's going to blow the doors off you.
It's just going to blow your mind.
When you get to the end, you're going to say, damn, I didn't know that.
For one.
For two is, you know, I was in the Philippines for four years.
Oh, you were?
Where?
Clark Air Base.
And I'm going to tell you what, nothing gets things accomplished like grazing a few palms.
And it doesn't take a lot.
A hundred pesos here, a hundred pesos there, and you know what?
You can do just about anything you want, you know?
Yeah, this gentleman is absolutely... I didn't mean to put you off, sir.
Sorry.
This man is absolutely correct.
There is a great deal of corruption here.
So much so that it is a way of life.
It's actually how the system works.
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, you're on the air.
Hi, Art.
Hi, howdy.
This is Louie from the great WABC in New York, 50,000 watts.
77 WABC, yeah.
Yeah, Art, how you doing?
Nice to hear you again.
It's been a while.
Listen, I just have more of a comment here about mankind.
I just feel so sorry for ourselves.
I mean, what's all the strife going on in the world?
Everybody's bickering with each other, Art.
And I really miss you because you're a great voice on the air.
And when you were on the air, I felt more comfortable.
I feel like I can cope with life a lot more with you on the air.
I hope you come back soon.
But it was just a comment that general picture, Art.
It's just terrible mess out there.
And I think we need something to really wake us up.
The whole world I'm talking about.
And I'll just hang up and listen to your comments, Art, and I love you and take care, Art.
Take care, my friend.
You know what?
I do have some comments, 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 Mininao, 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 non-violent 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, 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.
It's great to be here and a couple of comments before we go to our guest, Peter Ward, and they are Now 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.
Um, and there was something else, uh, 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, uh, have once again, uh, come with me to the Philippines.
They've now been around the world, uh, 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 The three of us, human beings, were able to go for about $1,500, as I recall, about $1,500 tickets.
about $1,500 as I recall about 1,500 bucks tickets.
Now, my three felines, Abby, Yeti and Dolly cost about a $6,000.
Now at a rate like that, they should be getting 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 moveage.
They like it 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 Pellion-tological 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.
But I'm going to drag him off topic.
Professor Ward, welcome to the program.
It is great to be back.
It's great to have you.
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 a perfect one to answer them, I guess.
And that is, when you scientists have looked at the probability now, with all we know, and you know, 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?
Well, I think it's good.
But the scary thing is, let's say we find life on Mars, which I think we will.
Is it Earth life that has gotten there by meteorite?
Or are we Mars life that got here by meteorite?
If it's exactly the same as ours, or is it even contamination?
And so we're really going to be stuck.
Wouldn't there be certain ways of discerning if it was from Earth?
In other words, wouldn't we find a match?
Or are we likely to find a match anyway?
In other words, is life likely to be similar?
I guess there is some underground volcanic action.
There's certainly some water on Mars.
All that would suggest at least microbial level life.
Yes?
You're exactly right.
And actually, it's funny you say that.
I lecture that in my classes.
Is DNA, could you make it many ways or is there only one way to make it?
So that if DNA is used, is it going to be exactly the same way every time because there's no other way to make it?
And that's certainly a possibility.
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, alright, 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.
Then the probability of life, what do you think?
Well, let's just start out with beyond Mars.
Let's go to Jupiter first and then Saturn.
We've got two really different alternatives for life.
Jupiter, of course, you've got the moons.
Europa has that ocean, the 100-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 its water, and you've got antifreeze, and it works great.
So life, if it could figure out how to put antifreeze, would be fine out there.
But life doesn't have to be carbon-based, right?
No, and that brings me to... Gosh, it's 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.
It's 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.
Cooler, better aliens.
Plus, the atmosphere, you can land, you can parachute in, you could have airplanes on it, if the atmosphere is as thick as Earth.
Could you, yeah, but could you go, ah, or would you go, boom?
You'd be dead really fast.
But your parachute doesn't care.
And you could also use hot air balloons.
You could actually balloon all the way around there.
You take your oxygen, get it out of the soil, and it's composed of pools of gasoline.
You've got ethane on the surface.
There's no problem for fuel there.
Well, all right.
Let's talk about silenes.
If it turned out to be silica-based life, What do you imagine it might be like?
Ah, there's a good question.
Would it be glass-like because it's silica?
Or would it be prickly?
I imagine still it might still look just like our common bacteria, that microbes seem to rule the Earth, perhaps they rule outer space as well.
But no one has yet done any sort of biomechanical analysis of what carbon silica life would be like.
Fascinating question.
Um, alright, so, you could, I guess, whatever you could come up with in your imagination is a possibility, is equally possible, yes?
In other words, anything?
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, would 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 or, 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.
And we just would miss it entirely.
And it would miss us as well.
Absolutely.
Wow, that's fascinating.
But if you get out, what about The big tomato here.
What about the possibility of, as we understand it, intelligent life somewhere?
Well, that's the big hope, isn't it?
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, 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 Shostak, 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 any time you go out and look into the night sky, you would see at least one, and we would be hearing them.
That's not true.
Well, 50 years is long, but it's not that long.
In other words, anything transmitted at the speed of light would only be 50 years out by now, or 50 light years out by now, and that's not that far.
That's true.
But nevertheless, within 50 light years, we have many hundreds of other stars.
Hundreds.
And so we're talking enough numbers that it's just starting to get a little more significant.
You're right.
I mean, it's still early days, but it is not the earliest days.
We're not in that first flush anymore.
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, you know, a certain range.
It simply isn't there and they may be forced at some point to actually admit that.
He did say that.
Yeah, I think the date I heard him say to me once was 2050.
He said, if we don't get it by 2050, of course, that was 10 years ago.
Maybe now it's 2060.
You know, it might be one of those sliding scales, you never know.
On and on.
And here's a good one for you.
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.
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 good if they're there that they're probably well beyond us.
And therefore, if we advertise we're here, they might come get us.
Well, there's always that case.
It's a case of, gee, are we going to meet the nice aliens or are we going to meet the Uh, to serve man, aliens, that wonderful Outer Limits, I think, where they find us a cookbook at the end of the movie.
Yeah, those are real, real problems.
You know, there's a, there's a NASA official called the Planetary Protection Officer for planet Earth.
No kidding.
That's really person.
He used to be single and he said it was the greatest pickup line at a bar in the world.
He pulls out this card and says, I am Earth's Planetary Protection Officer.
He was serious about this, but it was his job to make sure that We don't get bad aliens on Earth, but mainly that we don't spread our aliens to Mars.
It's that reverse contamination that they're mainly worried about.
But, you know, we brought back pieces of a comet, Stardust.
My good friend Don Brownlee was the principal investigator of the Stardust mission that got the comet in 1999.
There was no planetary protection.
They let that sucker float down in the desert in Utah.
The Apollo stuff, they used to put those guys in quarantine, remember?
Well, these pieces of comet, they just trucked it down to Texas.
No planetary protection whatsoever.
Any old virus could have been aboard that little deal.
Boy, you know, the redo of Andromeda's train was in Utah.
I just saw it recently, and it was in Utah.
What a coincidence.
Well, that's where they land the stuff.
How smart or how dumb is that?
I mean, to actually, a comet after all is, well, what did they determine?
Water and little rocks and pebbles and junk?
People used to think there's absolutely no chance there could be life in the outer reaches of our solar system, out where the comets are, the Oort 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 and you have organic material, and comets are filled with organic material, why not?
And so actually, people are getting a little more concerned that, you know, it isn't a slam-dunk, there's no life out there at all.
Alright, 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?
That's correct.
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?
There's quite a danger.
There have been two sets of experiments.
One was done by friends of mine at Caltech.
There's a property of minerals where you lose your magnetic field, and it only comes when the rocks are heated up to about 100 degrees centigrade.
They noticed that some rocks coming in, some impact rocks, still had their magnetic field, so they never heated to 100 centigrade.
And to check it further, some scientists put actually some rock hunks on one of the heat shields of a returning Soviet spacecraft.
Repeatedly, these hunks of rock that had bacteria put within them in their center had viable bacteria after coming through.
So the rocks outside heat, I mean QED, there you go, it can be done.
Wow, so something like the Andromeda Strain is entirely possible.
Entirely possible.
In the redo of the Andromeda Strain, it was a 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 grey goo, if I recall correctly.
Is something that horrible possible?
Would it be so dissimilar to Earth, 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 Venter, 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 A 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 a 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 a mess.
I mean, it's Frankenstein myths, except really scary this time.
I was about to ask you, how smart is that?
I've been concerned.
I actually raised questions.
I was at a TED meeting, this really interesting group of people that get together once a year.
I was the main speaker.
Craig Venner was the speaker.
And I asked him flat out, what about weaponization?
And he said, oh, no problem, because my group could make a defense just as quickly as terrorists made an offense.
And that's complete nonsense.
Yes, you can get the defense, but how many millions are dead first?
That's crazy.
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.
Yes, we've already done it.
It's done.
It's being done as we speak right now.
That's really scary.
Yeah, well, yes.
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?
I have no idea if he's sure or not.
I suspect he can't possibly be sure.
I think it's very much similar to Monsanto, which began manipulating various types of crops and vegetables and that modified corn.
They put in genes, for instance, that would make it impossible for corn to die from a herbicide, except the genes escape, and they go to the weeds, and now you have herbicide-resistant weeds, and same with the bugs.
I mean, I think it got butterflies or something, didn't it?
Yeah, it did.
So, genes jump, and in this particular case, if you produce some sort of strange alien that still has a gene that can infect an earth creature, it's not far-fetched.
So, before we ever see an alien from out there, we're going to be seeing them from right here, and they're just going to be every bit as alien as we might imagine anything from out there might be.
Well, certainly they'll be as alien as we can make them, and we can probably, technology can make some pretty weird stuff, and will.
Yeah, I really worry about the things we do.
It goes back to the first hour story about CERN.
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 thoughts.
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, you know, 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, No, 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 Uyaya, Anna Lynn, and Asia couldn't be blown up to be a little bigger.
Well, I was wrong, and somebody corrected me on Fast Blast.
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, it is kind of small, so you can get a good look at her.
All right, back now to Professor Ward.
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, there's certainly been progress, I've noticed, in invisibility.
Even the military is saying that we're getting better and better at this.
I mean, it began crudely with radar and radar deflection and the stealth weaponry, but we're getting better and better and better.
On the other hand, there are limits of physics and chemistry that you just can't go around and get around.
We are so sophisticated at tracking because we are paranoid, or societies are.
We want to know if we're being Looked at, hounded, examined, photographed by other Earthlings, and I would think it would be difficult to completely erase all presence.
I don't know.
I mean, it's just pure speculation by both of us.
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?
Yeah, but again, there's a sense that physics and chemistry are the same everywhere.
And maybe that's even not right.
But if you go through our galaxy, even if you go to faraway galaxies, it was the same Big Bang.
We can see through telescopes and spectra, the same elements are out there.
Therefore, you've got radio waves or radio waves.
I mean, it isn't as if you could invent some entirely new way of transmitting energy and power and matter.
So you are, I think, limited by the rules of the universe.
All right, let's try this.
Okay, let's stay on that path.
Suppose they've got the same elements to work with.
In another two or three hundred years, or a thousand years, are we still going to be using fiber to get signals from here to there?
Probably not.
We're going to make all sorts of leaps.
I mean, look at the last hundred years.
Cosmologically, it's just a blink of an eye.
So, imagine, you know, somebody thousands or even millions of years, and even that small, ahead of us.
Well, it's just the argument's the same one, Art, about Moore's Law.
This idea that computers are going to double or triple every couple years.
You've got more and more and more.
People have been noticing it's starting to slow down a little bit.
And this is really one of the greatest of problems and non-understanding.
Are we going to hit a limit to say what we can make personal computers?
Can we ever get to AI or not?
Or will it just keep going and going?
You might say the same for technology.
Will there just be changes that we can't even imagine?
Or is it going to be framed more efficiently, perhaps, with new materials, perhaps, but nevertheless around the same frameworks we have now?
I'm kind of hoping it slows down.
I'm sick of buying computers.
I am, too.
I'm one of those guys.
I've got to always have the latest, right?
And so something new comes out and I've got to make a change.
I'm set up.
Anyway, it's hard to imagine, though, you know, a race of people who might be that far ahead of us.
Millions of years.
They would have certainly evolved past what we now know as any way to communicate.
So if they didn't want us to know, we wouldn't know.
No, you're probably right.
You're probably right.
Especially anything that is that far ahead of us.
Sure.
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.
Well, again, I hope you're right, 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.
We are the first to make it.
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.
I don't know why it frightens me.
Actually, why does it frighten me?
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 from people saying, no, no, no, there's aliens everywhere.
Don Brown 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 ocean 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?
Now that brings some interesting Touching the productivity?
I don't know.
Well, it does a lot of things to weather.
You're spinning so fast that the Coriolis effect is totally changed, as is the magnetic field.
Magnetic field goes way up.
Coriolis fold spins, and we start getting cloud banks like Jupiter.
All those bands on Jupiter, it has a similarly fast spin.
The climate as we know it would totally disappear.
We would get big storm cells that sit over the same spot virtually forever.
The heating from pole to equator would be radically different.
It would be a totally different world.
So the question is, how many times do you get a moon like ours?
And the answer is, not very often.
What about multiple moons?
I mean, there certainly are planets that have multiple moons.
Not big ones.
They're just so weird that our moon is so large compared to the size.
There's nothing else in the solar system anywhere near like it.
It's just a weird setup, and it's because we got hit by a Mars-sized planet.
Early in solar system history.
And that's a very improbable hit.
And there it is.
Well, all right.
But I'm not sure it makes the argument.
In other words, from this point of view, and by the way, I guess I'm not scared that there's not life out there.
I'd be sad if there was other life out there.
Sad is the right word.
We sort of tend to sit here on Earth with what intelligence we have and say, look, everything is absolutely perfect, or we couldn't be here.
I mean, like, for example, the moon and any number of other things I guess you could discuss.
The moon's an important one, and all the elements we have, and it's just a miracle.
It's amazing!
But could it really be any other way, Professor?
It has to be this way for us to be here as we are right now.
So it's not perhaps as amazing as you think.
It's how it has to be for us to be having this conversation right now.
Yeah, I don't know.
That's called the anthropic principle.
I've never bought that thing.
I don't like that.
I kind of just feel that we've won some cosmic lottery, but you know, somebody wins a lottery every single day in this country.
It's rare, but it's not impossible.
Yeah, but it's Occam's razor-like, though.
I mean, it's what it is.
Yeah, I don't know.
It's just this whole sense that the universe was designed for life, that everything was put up so that life could evolve.
I just, intuitively, I don't like it.
I don't know why.
It makes us too important somehow.
I think it makes us too important if we imagine everything was just so lucky for us.
And I tend to buy the other argument that everything is just as it is because that's the way it is and we wouldn't be here otherwise.
But that's fine, we can agree to disagree on that.
Alright, let's come back to Earth at least for a moment.
You know, it was irresistible not to ask you about life elsewhere because You've obviously done so much work in that area.
It must be a fascinating area to work in.
I mean, to sit around with some other scientists and just... What do you guys do?
Sort of kick around ideas about what might be, or how do you work?
Yeah, we do some of that.
A lot of us drinking beer and just talking.
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.
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's arsenic life.
That you replace all the phosphorus in a cell and put arsenic in its place, and it's a totally viable life form.
Chemically it could work.
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.
Yeah, well that is happening, but people with a lot bigger money than us are doing that sort of stuff.
You need big money.
I'm sure you do, and you probably need a very, very good lab and all the rest of it, but we all know those things exist, and we can only hope they're being... I worry about science, Professor, I really do.
I mean, whether it's CERN, or whether it's somebody, as you point out, creating aliens, Or whatever it is they're doing.
I seriously worry about science because it's going too fast.
It's going faster than the politicians can make rules and laws, not that they'd probably be followed anyway, to control it.
It's gonna happen.
There's nothing we can do to stop it.
And when it comes down to that moment of should we push the button or not, the decision is always to push the damn button.
Yeah, seems to be that's the case, alright.
Well, I agree with you about the worrisome.
I'm really worried about this The ability to perturb life and change life and build new
types of life that evolution ever produced is to me scary.
And 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.
And it only takes one mistake.
One mistake, exactly right.
Thank you.
So is there any way, I'm sure you've all thought about this, is there any way to reasonably control this or am I right when I say there is no way and that the scientists are always going to plow forward, they're always going to push the button?
Well, 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.
I've heard that before, you know.
We all have.
It's just, you know, it's just, yeah, the chemicals will never escape, or yeah, there'll never be an accident in the nuclear power plant, and yeah, we would never lose our atomic bombs when they fly from North Dakota all the way to Florida without knowing, or yeah, we would never send a bomb timer all the way to Japan as happened last year.
We have had assurances in every single one of those areas, and in every one of them, it's happened, including nuclear meltdowns and all the rest of it.
So, when you start talking about the creation of alien life, you know, forget the assurances.
It's just going to happen, and I guess the answer is, we can't do anything about it.
Well, at least we can talk about it and hear you and I are talking about it.
Right, but no, I suppose there were some government regulation that required everything of this sort be run by what, run by a committee or something?
I don't know.
It wouldn't have to be a committee, but the opposite is even scarier.
Again, I was at this conference, 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 says, 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 him not to touch the viruses, that's the first thing they'd go for.
Of course, yes.
It was frightening to hear this guy.
Speaking of viruses, I just have to run this by you at least.
The H1N1 virus, there's some back chatter on the net.
A couple of things about H1N1.
One is that it was in fact designed by somebody and got out accidentally.
And then the other is that Mexico is thinking that there's been some sort of Morphing of the virus recently, some sort of change.
Have you heard either one of these things?
Well, one of them, actually, yes, it scared me.
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, a set of physicians, he said what scared him about this, it reminded him of the World War I, that great Hong Kong It started out as a very benign or not very serious form and then disappeared for six months and then came back.
Catastrophic.
Are you talking about an Asian virus or are you talking about the 1918 Spanish flu?
The 1918, but he said that the analogy or the similarity between what happened then and what could happen now is what scared him.
He thought this reminded him of the first phase of that particular Plague, which actually was quite benign, just like this one.
Everybody thought the worst.
It wasn't.
Six months later it mutated in a slightly different form, far more dangerous than lethal, and then ravaged the world.
That's exactly right.
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 you have heard that rumor.
Have you heard the one that 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 refer 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, certainly are 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, you know, people are talking about sea level rise and changes in climate, you worry a little bit.
Any comments?
Yeah, well I worry quite a bit myself.
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.
Yeah, a lot of Americans don't understand how important rice is.
It is a staple of the diet here and all over Asia, as a matter of fact.
You don't have a meal without rice.
And without rice, sometimes, for a lot of people, you don't have a meal.
So, it's serious stuff.
Yep.
And, Professor, I, so, could there be anything to that?
I mean, are we going through a change in our climate?
Yeah, I think absolutely we are.
You could step back and say the 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.
Ice cap is something that floats on the sea.
Ice sheet sits on land.
If an ice cap melts, so what?
If an ice sheet melts, up goes sea level.
Bye.
Right.
There are people who are saying that right now, the Antarctica ice is actually increasing, not decreasing.
Is there any support for that?
Uh, interestingly, I just have come back from Antarctica, my first trip ever.
Oh, lucky you!
That's the one continent I have not been to.
How was it?
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 National 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, 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's been cooling, they say.
No.
Now they can show that every continent is warming, warming rapidly.
There's 240 feet of sea level rise In the ice on Antarctica, we cannot let that melt.
Wow.
240 feet.
My gosh.
Where were you in Antarctica?
Antarctic Peninsula.
The long string of islands stick out, so we didn't go through McMurdo.
We went down from Chile, a place called Punta Arenas, 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.
Wow.
The purpose of your trip?
Fossil hunting.
We're looking at mass extinctions of the past.
And just coincidentally, we're watching ice sheets.
Just as amateurs, not as professionals.
We were doing fossil collecting as professionals.
But our camp was on permafrost, which is no longer perma.
So we were on these, it's just this muddy mess where it's supposed to be frozen solid.
It's very, It's changing very fast according to those who know it.
Well of course that is a great danger because we've got the Ross ice shelf there and if, as you point out, if an ice shelf goes then the sea level rise really does begin in earnest and that's scary stuff.
And if you were on an island, as I am now, would you be concerned, or is it still far enough in the future that you'd shrug it off?
Yeah, it's not in our lifetimes.
I've been to the Philippines.
I very much enjoyed it.
I've been to Manila, I've been to Negros, Tumigeti City, and it's, 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 sand hills.
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 you 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.
How long, looking far ahead, Professor, can we expect that there will be animal life on Earth?
Yeah, we're going to actually have a long time.
And that's what's so strangely ironic about this whole business I'm in.
The short-term danger is too much carbon dioxide.
The long-term danger for all animals on this planet is not enough carbon dioxide.
And that kind of goes to the heart of this book I just wrote, The Medea Hypothesis, that life has done this.
Life is shortening the time on which life could be on the planet.
That sounds circular, but it's not.
Life is ultimately its own worst enemy.
All right.
Let me interject this because it's something I read in the first hour.
We are now in this really bizarre solar minimum.
Yep.
There's just virtually nothing going on in the sun.
And by this time, hem operators like myself and those who study the sun expected we would be well Into a new solar, on our way to a new solar maximum.
It hasn't happened.
The sun is just dead.
Dead quiet.
And there are many who believe, and we'll find out if you're one of them, that the action on the sun ultimately affects the climate here on Earth.
And it does seem a reasonable hypothesis that it would be so.
Are you one of those people or no?
Well, I mean, who could deny 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 Milutin Milankovitch 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 fluctuating the energy output?
I mean, that's what we're really looking at, isn't it?
Yes, it is.
Do we have climate 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.
We don't know yet.
We just don't know yet.
Okay, well here's the thing.
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, you know, slow them down.
And there's always a possibility that once the sun finally does become active again, you know, 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.
Yes?
Yeah, it's very scary, isn't it?
Yeah, it is.
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 sun time if it's the
sun? So the arguments that greenhouse gas have nothing to do with it, I think, fall
apart right there.
Well, I know there's going to be a lot of brouhaha about this, but I think most scientists
now consider global warming to be a settled science.
In other words, among real scientists, there's not that much argument anymore about it.
Is there?
No, there's none.
Really, the people who argue against it are people like the Senator from Oklahoma, who have axes to grind.
It reminds me so much of the smoking battles of the 60s and 70s, where They would get doctors to stand up, say, oh, smoking's good for you.
I know.
No, so that part, what we don't know is the ultimate effect of how fast things will happen.
And that's where people look at the legitimate doubts on rates and seem to construe that as there are fights about whether or not it's happening.
It's happening.
How fast it happens, when and where, that stuff's all up in the air still.
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.
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?
None, to me.
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 ten 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 a thousand 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.
Well, a few years ago, my eyes went wide open.
I think they put up a satellite picture of the North Pole 10 or 20 years ago.
I can't recall what it was.
And then a recent satellite photograph of the North Pole.
And that's the scariest damn thing I've ever seen.
What, 40, 50% of the North Pole is now melted?
Yeah, it's going, going, gone.
Well, it's the Great Northwest Passage.
It's there now.
All those people, the Franklin Expedition, they all died trying to find it.
Well, they find it now.
Yeah.
Let's talk a little bit about...
Where we as human beings will go, if this change is inevitable, and it sure looks that way, this continued warming, human beings have evolved through time, through climate changes and all the rest of it.
We've evolved.
Is there any chance, in your opinion, Professor, that we would evolve to be able to survive in a changed and changing climate?
Well, I suspect so.
We certainly have, 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 the nasty cold everywhere, and interglacial back and forth.
But to really produce a new species, if you want to evolve, if 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 Evolve 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 and 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 reading Well, here's an interesting, perhaps semi-relevant point.
I have three kitty cats.
Two of them are from North America.
They're brought over here from North America.
One is a Filipina cat.
And all the cats here in the Philippines have very short hair.
And our little Filipina cat has very short hair.
The two I brought from North America have very long hair.
I guess that was Evolution's way of saying, here, have a bunch of fur and stay warm.
You live in a cold climate.
And the short hairs here live in a very warm climate, so they don't need all that hair.
Human beings, on the other hand, don't have hair, most of us.
And we're not really equipped to be in a warmer climate than we're in right now.
And I can't imagine how we would evolve And maybe you can imagine, how would we evolve to live in a normally much warmer climate than we have at the moment?
Yeah, I don't think we can.
I mean, we are already as hairless as we can be.
I think we did come from a very tropical place.
And the only way you could do it really is to evolve to be even taller and skinnier.
I mean, you can get rid of heat that way.
If you're short and round, it's much harder to get rid of heat.
You can reduce your fat content, but the reality is That it would be very hard for us.
On the other hand, any sort of technology helps you get out of that.
You build an air conditioner.
Evolution only works if people die on huge numbers.
Organisms have to die and then you can spur evolution.
We save everybody.
I mean, nobody dies anymore, essentially.
Not from the diseases, not from the stuff that used to kill you, not from the predators.
They don't get us anymore.
So evolution is really stopped in many respects.
Isn't that awfully dangerous for us?
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 evolve.
All right, evolve.
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 aren't.
Global warming is the 21st century boogeyman.
Cannot be convinced otherwise.
Or David in Ball Ground, Georgia.
Global warming is not settled science.
My God, you lemmings.
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 keep 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 their 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.
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?
It even maintains, some of them, that the 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?
Yeah, probably a little bit of both.
I didn't put his life suicidal.
The book company did that.
What I try 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 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.
It sounds like you might have moved away from the telephone a little bit, Professor.
Oh, not there yet.
The telephone fell off my, there we go, how's that?
Very much better, thank you.
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 that 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
I know, it sounds crazy.
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.
What do you think?
Yeah, I've heard about this and you're right.
It is a real idea.
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 us a little bit further out into space.
Right.
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.
So it would actually be possible?
Yep, it would work.
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.
Imagine 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 beat thousands of volcanoes and see the atmosphere.
It'll cool us off.
But the crazy thing... Should we actually do that?
Do we actually have the... We do?
Yes.
It's all that can be done.
Sure.
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 they're already very acid.
This is a crazy, crazy crackpot solution.
I see.
And then what if you wanted to remove the sulfur from the upper atmosphere at some point?
Could you do that?
You'd have to let it gently float out and also produce a huge amount of acid rain.
So the rain goes through it, converts it to acid rain, it washes out.
So you've cooled the earth, but you've also acidified almost all the lakes and oceans on the planet.
And you've murdered a lot of people because they've run out of food.
Important word.
Viable ideas, in your opinion, to cool the Earth, if we have to.
I mean, technology is one thing that I suppose could save our butts, if it came to it.
Is there any viable way to do it?
Yeah, there is.
And I mentioned this to one of my undergraduate classes, and he looked at me like I was totally insane.
A recent study has suggested that 10% of US power is being used up by flat-screen TVs and iPods.
10% of U.S.
power.
I said, get rid of your iPods and your flat screens, and you will do a whole lot for cooling the earth.
And they go, well, not those.
So yeah, the simple thing is certainly just reducing the power plants.
It's not automobiles.
It's the power plants that make automobiles.
I've heard that there are about 1 in 100 Chinese and Indians who own cars.
They want cars.
Building the power plants to build the cars is why China and India are building coal-fired plants.
And all that coal goes somewhere and it is probably the greatest single problem we have now are all the new coal-fired plants all around the world.
Why aren't we going to nuclear facilities?
You know, that's a great question.
I certainly have advocated that in a couple of my talks, and I got booed off one stage.
And yet... Well, everybody right away, Professor, brings up the waste problem.
You know, they're ready to ship it all to Yucca.
But I keep hearing that, you know, France and other areas of Europe are managing to recycle this stuff successfully.
And if they can do it, I keep wondering why we can't.
Well, it's not a zero-sum game.
There certainly are going to be accidents down the road.
And look at Chernobyl.
That's a total mess.
But again, that's a different species.
That wasn't a waste problem.
That was just the Disaster?
Maintenance problem, if you will.
Well, it was a single dome affair.
It wasn't very well done.
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.
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.
Why not here?
Or there?
Great question.
I can't answer that.
Great question.
We've got to have the power.
We do have to have the power.
Do we need as much power as we have though?
Conservation really Could make a big dent in this.
It can't solve all of it.
It's not going to be any single solution.
But conservation has to be one.
We have to increase nuclear.
We have to conserve.
And we simply need to increase the alternate forms of energy that are out there.
Wind and tidal energy is the one that I really like.
Where I live in Puget Sound, we have these great big tidal surges.
You simply put floats that go up and down and up and down and you're creating electricity.
Right.
I don't know if you're doing it in sufficient quantities.
Solar power certainly appears to be becoming more and more viable.
All of this.
But nuclear plants do seem the way to go.
It's just that everybody's so frightened of them that we don't do it.
We're going to have to do something and we're going to have to do it pretty soon.
If you're going to ask people to give up their flat screens, then you might as well contemplate the end of the world.
I've done both.
Okay, well, so there are ways that Earth could be cooled.
It could be done.
Technology could save us.
I think technology will have to save us.
And again, in this book, I argue that we need to engineer our way out of these things.
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 offing, we 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.
And what have we got, about six and a half billion now?
Six and a half billion, and we're expected to have nine billion between 2050 and 2075, if current projections continue.
What kind of numbers, in your opinion, mark the not sustainable point?
Well, I suspect 6.5 isn't sustainable, at least with current technology.
But the hope is, I mean, the hope is that We talked earlier about aliens being built on Earth.
That type of technology, I think, is going to be the sort of engineering that I think we need.
And the two things that that kind of engineering can do for you is increased fuel outputs.
We can start building hydrocarbons instead of digging them out of the Earth.
And secondly, food production.
Human food production, not at the level of killing cows and eating cows, but of growing algae in vast lakes.
At low levels, bacterial if you will, it may not taste good, but it will certainly sustain you.
And if we get around the food and fuel problems, a lot of the problems are far less.
Your hypothesis states that it was life, not asteroids, from space that caused all of the mass extinctions, save the dinosaur kill-off.
And that's quite a statement to make.
What evidence do you have that supports that?
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 history, it was microbes producing hydrogen sulfide gas, toxic H2S, which caused the mass extinction.
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?
Yeah, it could be.
The guy, a 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 10 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.
Well, I hope so.
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 It seems like even things out.
Well it has in the past, but then nothing, anything like humanity has ever come along before.
There's never been an intelligence like ours.
Just the fact that when it's cold we can put a coat on, I mean that changes the whole dynamic.
We can make the coat.
My dog, I get this beautiful dog, I have a cat too, I love my cat, but compared to us they're dumb as sticks.
I mean they're wonderful creatures, but they're not going to be building radio telescopes, they're not going to be trying to expand to other planets.
And they're not going to do the engineering solutions that we absolutely need to keep our species going.
And not just going, but happily going.
And you just said something, Art, just a minute ago.
You say you hope.
And hope is that operative word.
If we don't keep that hope, what do we have?
So our hope has to be through engineering.
It has to be engineering solutions.
It has to be producing lots and lots of new engineers in the upcoming generations.
In your book, Under a Green Sky, And again, the 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 and 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.
Purple Ocean?
Purple Ocean.
I have a slide in my PowerPoint.
You can go out to the Black Sea now.
You throw a bucket over and pull it up from about 20 feet up and the water's pure purple.
There's a purple sulfur bacteria that lives only in no oxygen water with hydrogen sulfide.
And a green sky.
Green sky is coming up from sulfur compounds moving up into that blue sky.
Nice yellow and blue makes green.
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 Art 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.
For real?
Yep, absolutely for real.
And this is, I think it's going to be one of the greatest medical breakthroughs in a long time.
Imagine now that you have a spinal injury.
Somebody gets in a terrible accident.
What happens with spinal injuries, it swells.
Now, if you can cool it, remember there's a Buffalo Bill football player about three years ago, terrible spinal injury.
They put him in ice and he was able to walk again.
Well, the hydrogen sulfide takes the oxygen out of your body.
It lets then the doctors cool you 20 degrees cooler than you otherwise would be able to be cooled.
And once cooled, you have time.
Doctors have time.
And in trauma situations, there's nothing like time.
So this was a totally unexpected discovery.
And it is one that comes from deep time.
In earlier segment, we're talking about these hydrogen sulfide mass extinctions.
Yeah, that's where we as mammals first encountered this stuff.
And each of us now, in every one of our cells, is the ability to make tiny bits of hydrogen sulfide.
It's a really strange, weird life stuff.
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 says 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 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, short-term so far, because the problem with it, hydrogen sulfide removes oxygen out of your body.
That's not good for brain cells.
Brain cells die in the absence of oxygen, but it is really good If, for instance, a soldier gets blown apart in Iraq with an IED, this work originally was put out by the Army to try to figure out how they could give surgeons time when someone has bled out.
How would they have the time to put the blood back in them?
They need time, and in such a situation, hydrogen sulfide can give you time.
A mouse, if you put a mouse under H2S for four hours, its heartbeat almost stops.
You can almost freeze the mouth.
After four hours, it comes back to life.
These are just first day experiments.
These are just starting.
The last couple years, I think it's going to be a great medical breakthrough.
I know that surgeons, for example, have lowered the body temperature of people to repair, for example, brain aneurysms, that sort of thing.
And that's been going on for some time.
I had not heard about the hydrogen sulfide.
What does it actually do?
In other words, if you've got somebody with an aneurysm in their brain, you know, it's like a balloon that's ready to burst.
So what they do is they cool the person down, they open the brain, and because they actually remove the blood, the balloon is no longer large.
So they can actually remove this, repair it, sew it up, and then put the blood back in the person, warm them up.
And voila, back to life!
So, where does hydrogen sulfide come in in this process?
Well, if you think about what a major wound is, at the cellular level, think of a heart attack.
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 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 slows 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 is bad stuff.
And so he just had this idea.
The reason I'm looking at it, the Permian 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 Permian extinction.
The reptilian forms, the dinosaurs survive, and voila, you have an age of dinosaurs.
We're really reciting the history.
I have occupied your time, perhaps too much of it.
Let's go to the phones and see who's out there and what's up with them.
First would be David in Pasadena.
You're on with Professor Ward.
Hey, Dr. Ward and Art, this is David, and thanks for taking the call.
Yes, sir.
Dr. Ward, I've been on and off listening, and I don't know what your background is.
I was fascinated by the hydrogen sulfide issue.
I'm a physician, and is that in your book?
Is that chemistry in your book that we're talking about?
Yeah, we touch on it.
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 MEDIDA hypothesis.
And I also, you can go on to Google.
I did a TED 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.
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.
No, I mean, you're absolutely correct.
It's all the creativity that we can get.
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 answer.
Thank you very much.
And I'll read your books.
No, I mean, you're absolutely correct.
It's all the creativity that we can get.
I just try to take a view of this book of being realistic.
And the realism is that all these people are not going to go away very soon.
It would be wonderful if, you know, we have this TV series, you know, Life Without People
or the earth without people or whatever it is.
It's kind of a wishful thinking.
Maybe we'll just go away.
It's going back to that guilt for being humans.
Let that go.
You know, we are a pretty wondrous creature.
Let's make the best of it.
Let's try to reduce human misery.
And we're going to have to do that with our brains.
So what I've tried to do is write a very hopeful book.
Okay.
Dustin, I believe it is, in Oklahoma.
You're on with Professor Ward.
Yes, sir.
Mr. Art Bell and Professor Ward, it's a great honor to speak with you.
Good morning.
I was wanting to bring up, now I only got to start listening about two 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 six foot two, 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'd 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.
Caller, that project's underway right now.
That's fantastic.
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 Uh, 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 that would become something of an issue for who's going to get that energy.
But I'm, I'm glad to hear that the orbital generators are coming in and, um, I'll quit tying up your lines.
I just wanted to throw that in there and thank you very much.
Okay.
Uh, respond to the six foot.
Uh, part of that's probably diet.
We're all getting better and better and better food.
That's an interesting point.
I don't think anybody's looked to see if humanity is evolving taller size.
I could check on this for you.
Great call.
So it could be true that we're evolving now in the exact direction you talked about?
Maybe so.
Maybe you just refuted me, Art.
Won't be the first time.
Won't be the first time.
I'm not sure we're getting thinner.
I'm not.
All right.
To Billy in Toronto, Canada.
You're on with Professor Ward.
Hi.
Art, the water's warm.
The water's warm?
The water's warm.
Okay.
Well, I appreciate that message.
And apparently, if you believe what's going on, getting warmer all the time.
Jason in Huntington Beach, California.
Hi, Art.
This is Jason in Huntington Beach with 640 KFI.
It's good to talk with you again.
And with you.
If you don't mind, I have a half a legal pad of topics I'd like to bring up with your guest.
No, that's too many.
Pick your favorite and let her rip.
I was just looking to the challenge of an intelligent designer about whether there may be an intelligent design behind all this.
And I know your guest doesn't agree.
But I'd like to point out the phylo-tactic which was reported by John Conway and Ian Stewart, that the number of... No, wait a minute, wait a minute.
Are you sure?
Yeah, let's cover intelligent design.
I don't know that he completely disagrees with that.
It's an interesting question, Professor.
What about intelligent design?
Yeah, actually I do disagree with it in the sense that I've debated some of the intelligent design people.
They purport to be scientists, and I've asked them, any science is falsifiable.
For instance, if I were to find a dinosaur bone with a true human bone, I'd have to really give up on evolution, as I believe it.
And so I asked them, look, what finding would make you totally discount and disavow intelligent design as a scientific theory?
And they couldn't come up with one or wouldn't come up with one.
And so until they can, it's not science.
Why does evolution rule out intelligent design anyway?
Why could it not be that the hand of God designed evolution?
Yeah, very well could be.
But science can't speak to that.
Again, the supernatural, which God would be, is not something that any scientific law can look at.
It doesn't mean it doesn't exist.
It just means science can't address it.
Fair enough.
Cornelius in Alexandria, Louisiana.
You're on with Professor Ward.
Hello.
Hello, Art.
God bless you and Mr. Ward.
And thank you to your call screener, Ms.
Gina.
I just wanted to ask, with the global warming and stuff, would the pandemic be more like an outbreak killing millions or billions of people?
And that's my question.
I'll take it off the air.
Well, you're right about warming, actually.
The thing about diseases is that you need a vector to send them.
And the biggest scare that I have is malaria, actually, not so much the viruses.
Malaria is transmitted by mosquitoes that like warm temperatures.
And so as we warm the Earth, these particular warm temperature mosquitoes can spread as well.
And who knows what viruses they could be picking up, too.
So this is a very great concern by a lot of people.
That's a great question.
Great point.
Malaria is a concern here where I am, as a matter of fact.
All right.
Let's go to Robert in Irvine, California.
You're on with Professor Ward.
Hi.
Hello.
I would like to ask whether the guest, what does he think about the chemtrails with regard to how they're trying to reduce to global cooling?
All right.
All right.
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.
You've heard about them?
You discount them or what?
Actually I haven't, so this is news to me and I will certainly after this program take a look.
I do not know about these.
All right, I'll tell you what, when we get done, just go to Google and put in chemtrails and next time we're on, we'll have a discussion about it.
I hope it's again soon.
I love this program.
I do too.
Sean in Astoria, New York.
You're on with the professor.
Good morning.
Good morning.
Very interesting show.
Nice to have you back, Art.
One of your callers a couple of calls ago alluded to the satellite energy, solar satellites beaming energy to the planet.
That's right.
I think that was, I remember when I was very young seeing Wernher 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.
No, I'm not a scientist.
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.
Or am I wrong?
No, you're absolutely right.
And actually, people have been thinking more on Giant mylar sheets are just enormous, great big sheet-like mirrors up there.
You know, there's a simpler, cheaper way to do it.
All you need to do is put white paint on black rock.
It increases the reflectivity of the Earth.
A big problem with melting ice is that the rock beneath it absorbs heat, whereas the ice reflects.
That's the albedo.
If we can put enormous mirrors on desert rock now, we can reflect a lot of light off the planet, and that will help cool Once again, it's just all in this engineering that I try to tout in this book I've just written.
These are all solutions.
I mean, your listeners, everybody's got some ideas.
We need to just pull together and stay optimistic.
Well, it's difficult, to be honest with you, to stay optimistic, but I'll do my darndest.
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, that'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?
Yeah, absolutely.
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 one.
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 Madea, 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?
Oh yeah, there's great calculations that are going all the time about this.
This is again one of these nasty positive feedbacks.
It gets warmer and makes it warmer as it gets warmer.
And so this is a very scary sort of situation that we're in.
And we don't know, again, at what point do we lose the ice sheets.
And that is the scariest scenario in all of this, because that's 240 feet of sea level rise.
That's not good for society, let alone all the coastal cities.
Right.
Right, 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.
They're doing calculations and models.
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?
Who owns Antarctica?
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.
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 Well, for the first, I certainly applaud Pickens and his effort to diversify energy.
That's what we need to do.
We cannot have just one.
The second question, I'm not familiar with it.
the Tesla battery and perhaps form a really wonderful propulsion system.
What would be his opinion in that area?
Well, for the first, I certainly applaud Pickens and his effort to diversify energy.
That's what we need to do.
We cannot have just one.
The second question, I'm not familiar with it.
Maybe you could tell me how it's going to work.
No, he can't because he's not here anymore.
I'm sorry.
Don't know it.
Okay.
All right.
Very good.
Let's go to Newcastle, Pennsylvania.
Ted, you're on with Professor Ward.
Hey Art, how are you?
Fine.
Professor Ward, I got like a double question for you and I'll take the answer off the air.
You said you were down in Antarctica and you were in the permafrost down there?
Yep.
And from what I understand, permafrost is like compost and if that ice all melts into permafrost and the ocean starts to heat up, aren't we going to see a tremendous release of methane gas?
And if we have a flip of the Earth's magnetic field on top of this global warming, what What are we looking at then?
And then I'll take my answer off the air.
Thank you.
All right.
All right.
Here it comes.
Which one do you want first?
The first one, actually, they're great questions.
But the difference between the Arctic and the Antarctic, there's no plants in the Antarctic.
In the Arctic, you've got musk egg and you've got all kinds of plant peat material.
There's nothing in Antarctica.
It's just there's no living plant material whatsoever.
There's a little bit of fungus here and there.
So what we have is just this dead soil without organics in it.
Water goes in it and freezes.
That's what we're calling permafrost.
You may have met the North Pole in permafrost in Alaska, for example.
Yes, and there we have a lot of methane.
And so when you melt that stuff, methane does go into the atmosphere.
Methane is a very potent greenhouse gas, four times more potent than carbon dioxide.
And this is a lot of people are very much afraid of the methane catastrophes that could happen.
Okay, on our magnetic field.
Yeah, that's another really interesting one.
I'm surprised.
Art, you and I should write up a movie for this.
Because the 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.
It would be.
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.
Yeah, it was certainly an asteroid from space.
Look, the Alvarez's who discovered that were looking directly to see if there was a magnetic field change right at the extinction, and there wasn't.
Okay, clear enough.
San Diego has for us Steve with Professor Ward.
Hi, Steve.
Good to hear you again, Art.
I've been listening since 87.
Yeah, I've been around a long time.
Yeah, I used to pick you up out of Las Vegas.
Anyway, my questions are two.
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 9 out of 10 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?
7 out of 10 of them have a 2 degree temperature variant, and 5 out of 10 of them have a 5 degree temperature variant, meaning they're worthless in determining whether or not they're global warming.
One more point, 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?
I'll lift it on the air.
No, no, no, hold on.
All those changes you referred to at the NOAA stations as a result of asphalt and all the
rest of it, who did that?
NOAA reported it here about two weeks ago.
The local radio stations have been carrying the report.
No, no, no.
My point is, man is the one that laid down the asphalt.
No, this is true, but the point is, is NOAA has regulations saying that there has to be a 100 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.
Right, and the point is, that's getting more difficult to achieve all the time.
And 9 out of 10 of these weather stations have been encroached upon by airports, asphalt, roadways, and other buildings going up near them.
And they don't use NOAA's own regulations for being a weather station anymore.
Alright, well let's go back to your first point about males.
Say that again, please.
Yeah, if every male after their 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 ten.
Okay.
Professor, comments on any or all of that?
No, I'll just pass on these, I think.
Um, population control, though, is something you might want to comment on.
I mean, we've been sitting here discussing what the world can tolerate, 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.
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 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 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 much lower Yes, that's totally correct.
Look at Japan, it's got negative growth.
That's right.
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?
Yes, that's totally correct.
Look at Japan, it's got negative growth.
That's right.
The whole thing is we've got to raise up the rest of the world to standards of living that
allows populations to drop.
But at the same time, we cannot do it using so much more energy that we heat the gold
So this is a huge challenge that we have, is raising standards of living with low amounts of emissions.
Sounds like it'll be some sort of new world order.
Oh no, don't say that!
Black helicopters, oh no!
I know, I know, I know.
John in British Columbia, you're on with Professor Ward.
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.
I guess the underpinning of my contribution reflects evolution and devolution, you know, between, let's say, humanity and Earth.
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, you know, 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?
Interesting question actually, yes.
Well, going to Mars is going to be an interesting and expensive proposition.
Colonizing Mars is so fantastically expensive.
It's all about economics.
They call it the dismal science.
Where would the money come from to build the unbelievable technology it would take and energy consumption to send a viable colony of humans there?
It would be a whole lot easier to colonize Antarctica.
At least you could breathe the air there.
What about the prospect, Professor, of not sending people to Mars, but sending machines to Mars and attempting to terraform, or the beginning to terraform Mars, beginning to try to restore an atmosphere we could live with, so to speak?
That would certainly be much more sensible.
It would certainly be a whole lot cheaper.
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 some body in space, be it the backside of the moon, be it an orbiting colony, that if we are hit by some gigantic comet, Hale-Bopp 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.
Very interesting.
All right, all the way to Florida.
Thomas in Florida, you're on with Professor Ward.
Yes, sir, Professor Ward.
Many fine things this evening, and I thank you.
Thank you.
My best thought would be death.
And all of us as human beings on this planet will ultimately have to deal with that.
In the short-term basis that we live with, in 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, the short-term analysis is that you have to have some kind of a faith and a superior, ultimate thinking for the realm of humanity.
And the heart of men should know better.
I don't know that he's here to give us that kind of comfort, nor that he will, even though he can.
But you're welcome to try.
If you can instill faith, Professor, be my guest.
Well, here's my faith, is that we as a species 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.
So your faith extends practically to the next generation and you recommend that continue and then we'll be here until the red giant?
Yep, that's the hope.
Sounds naive, I know, but why not, right?
Well, no, it's actually, I guess, fairly practical.
Your thinking on our evolution is that we're pretty much slow, we've slowed in evolution.
Is it still going on?
Is there any evolution going on, other than getting taller, perhaps, and a little skinnier?
Yeah, actually, I had a Scientific American article this year in their special 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.
So it's not, you're not talking about a physical evolution, you're talking about a technological evolution, really, aren't you?
Well, that too, but it is physical evolution.
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, then there's diseases, but like lactose intolerance.
Humans can now drink cow's milk.
15,000 years ago, none of us could.
Professor, you're not going to believe this.
We're out of time.
That's it.
I mean, we're out of time.
Show's over.
I covered half the material I wanted to cover with you.
So, obviously, we will have you back again, Professor Peter Ward.
Bless your heart and thank you.
And good night.
It's over that quick.
I don't know where four hours goes.
Listen, everybody.
Anybody out there is welcome to email me.
I'm easy to get to, try to answer as many as I can.
I'm Art Bell, that's A-R-T-B-E-L-L at MindSpring.com.
Once again, Art Bell at MindSpring, M-I-N-D-S-P-R-I-N-G dot com, and I really do make an effort to answer as many as I can.
Obviously, you can't get to them all, but if it seems reasonable, I generally answer it.
So, from Southeast Asia, the Philippines, I'm Art Bell.
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