Art Bell hosts Coast to Coast AM from drought-stricken Manila, discussing El Niño’s chaos and global warming skepticism while introducing David Grinspoon, astrobiologist behind Lonely Planets, who argues humanity’s 13.7-billion-year-old universe likely hosts far stranger life than sci-fi portrays—evolution explains Earth’s "perfection," but consciousness remains mysterious. Grinspoon debates SETI ethics, noting humanity’s accidental broadcasts and the risk of revealing DNA, while proposing math-based communication like prime numbers. He speculates on directed panspermia and Venus’ active volcanoes, confirmed by Venus Express data, and dismisses UFOs as either probes or military experiments, though Bell shares his own defied-gravity encounter. Callers report ghostly Polaroids, telepathic giants, and Bigfoot sightings, blending paranormal claims with cosmic curiosity—raising questions about humanity’s place in the universe and the nature of unexplained phenomena. [Automatically generated summary]
From the Southeast Asian capital city of the Philippine Islands, 7,107 islands.
There's a lot of islands here, folks.
This is Coast to Coast A.M. And I'm Art Bell, filling in for George Norrie, who will take this evening off, and well-deserved at that.
It's a pleasure to be with you, and an honor to be with you, no matter what time zone you reside in, and we cover so very many of them around the world.
All the ABs are well.
Some people don't understand that.
I'm Art Bell, of course, AB.
My wife is Erin Bell, AB.
My daughter is Asia Bell, AB.
And by the way, there is a new photograph of Miss Asia.
And I say Miss Asia because she is looking like a young lady these days.
She is not yet three years old.
May 30th, she'll be three years old.
But, you know, like all proud dads, I can't resist putting a photo up there.
So if you go to the website, coasttocoastaum.com, you'll see a little picture of Asia there.
Click on it, and then click on the next one that it takes you to, and you'll get a big version of it, and you'll see what I mean.
Quite a young lady.
She is really something.
And also, Yeti, Abby, and Dolly.
Our three fur-bearing friends are all well.
Incidentally, before we really get started, I want to give out my email address.
I love getting email, and I try to answer it.
I do my very best.
I am ArtBell, A-R-T-B-E-L-L, at mindspring.com.
That's artbell at mindspring, M-I-N-D-S-P-R-I-N-G.com.
And you can also Fast Blast Me.
Now, that requires you go to the very same website, coastcoastam.com.
And there you will see something called FastBlast.
And that allows you to send me a message or a question for the guest or whatever.
And by the way, our guest coming up is a very, very good one, David Grinspoon, who I'll tell you all about him in a moment.
But suffice to say, we're going to talk about the possibility of aliens in more ways than one this morning.
Still looking now for bodies in West Virginia, the missing miners.
It doesn't look good.
I was watching CNN just part of coming on the air, and it looks now as though they're searching more for bodies than they are for any survivors.
This breaking news from the Associated Press, and this is a very, very, very troublesome story.
Pope Benedict, apparently, according to the Associated Press, just breaking, resisted pleas to defrock a California priest with a record of molesting children, citing concerns, including, quote, the good of the universal church, end quote, according to a 1985 letter with his signature.
The correspondence obtained by the Associated Press is the strongest challenge yet to the Vatican's claim that Benedict indeed played no part, no role, in blocking the removal of pedophile priests during his years as head of the doctrinal watchdog office.
That could be very, very troubling.
I don't know that a pope has ever been removed.
Of course, I'm not a Catholic expert, but I don't think that it's ever happened in that way.
President Obama, Republican Sarah Palin are sparring back and forth about the use of nuclear weapons in anger.
And, you know, we're cutting, what, about a third of what we've got left.
And I don't think that's a problem.
I believe that combined, we still have enough nuclear weapons to destroy the world one or two times over.
So I don't know what all the fuss is about.
It seems to me that there's plenty to turn everybody into dust, if that's what mankind decides it wants to do.
The Bureau of...
I don't know if it caught you the same way, but the Bureau of Meteorology down in Australia has taken some photographs that are impossible.
They're not photographs.
They're actually radar images.
And one shows a large doughnut, and the other shows a spiral, neither of which resemble any kind of random interference.
Now, they try to call it random interference to the radar in sort of a late-breaking addendum to the story, but it's not.
There's no way in hell this is random interference.
What it might be, very well maybe, is HARP.
As you know, HAARP is really cranking up in Alaska.
And the only thing that I could think that would interfere with radar on such a massive scale, I mean, it just shows it virtually covering Australia or the southern part of Australia.
The only thing that I can see that would do something like that would be HARP or perhaps not the hand of man at all.
And I'll leave that one to you.
This is an interesting story.
Now, over here, when we get Yahoo, we get the Asian version of Yahoo.
And Reuters ran this story from Singapore.
I'm quoting exactly.
Aliens exist, and they live in our midst disguised as humans.
At least that's what 20% of people polled in a new global survey, global, believe.
The Reuters poll of 23,000 adults, that's a pretty good size sample, in 22 countries is showing that more than 40% of people from India and nearest here in China believe that aliens walk among us, disguised As humans.
While those less likely to believe this are from Belgium, Sweden, and the Netherlands.
Now, here's what they believe.
In more populated countries, we tend to believe that aliens indeed walk among us.
In less populated countries, small towns, villages, that sort of thing, people say no because they tend to know their neighbors.
Most of those believing this are under the age of 35.
They cross all income classes.
And of those who do not believe, most of you are women.
So that's an interesting part of the survey, isn't it?
Of men and women, women generally do not believe, while men do.
Researchers have concluded that a giant golden spotted monitor lizard discovered here in the forested mountains of the Philippines six years ago is indeed a new species.
Now, this sucker is big.
It's six feet five inches long.
That's a big lizard.
First spotted in 2004.
And, you know, it is very, very unusual indeed to get a vertebrae this large and found right here in the Philippines.
So we've got a new species here in the Philippines.
Very unusual to find a new species of tiny fish frog or insect these days.
But when you find a rare occurrence like this, a large vertebrate, particularly on an island hit by deforestation and nearby development, well, they compared their find to the 93 discovery of the forest-dwelling ox in Vietnam and apparently a new monkey species discovered in the highlands of Tanzania back in 2006.
But this really is big.
Hey, the Large Hadron Collider is colliding.
They have now had the first particles colliding at the record energy of 7 trillion electron volts, teravolts, I guess.
These collisions mark the beginning of a decades-long LHC research program and the beginning of the research for discoveries by thousands of scientists around the world.
Today's collisions are a great start for that science.
We'll see.
They're looking for dark matter, extra dimensions, the ever-elusive Higgs boson, and so forth.
And then finally, before we get to our guest, I call your attention to Arthur Fitzberg.
Arthur says he's hypersensitive to certain frequencies of electromagnetic radiation.
Now, Arthur lives at a house, fairly remote, mind you, and he's bothered by electromagnetic radiation.
Not a lot of it, just a little of it bothers Arthur so much that he filed a giant lawsuit against his new neighbor, it seems, rented a house on the next block backed up to his property.
And he claims waves of nausea, vertigo, body aches, dizziness, heart arrhythmia, and insomnia.
All of this, he claims, from an internet wireless router run by his neighbor, along with a dimmer switch and some stuff.
But, I mean, that's it.
An internet wireless router.
Boy, I'll tell you, if that kind of stuff really did get you, it would have gotten me a long, long time ago.
He's suing for $530,000 in damages only in America, right?
A wireless router.
I sit right next to my wireless router, boosted by an ever-larger antenna, as well as a cell phone booster and some other stuff that I've got in here, not to mention all the shortwave.
All right, coming up in a moment, David Greenspoon is a planetary scientist specializing in the evolution of planetary surfaces, atmospheres, and habitability.
He has modeled the evolution of the surface, atmosphere, and clouds and climate of Venus, the climate of Mars, the bombardment history of the Earth-Moon system, the chemistry of the solar nebula, and possible metabolic reactions on Titan.
Wow.
He is curator of astrobiology at the Denver Museum of Science, Nature and Science, an adjunct professor of astrophysical and planetary science at the University of Colorado, serves also as a frequent advisor to NASA on space exploration strategy.
He's lead scientist for astrobiology, or an instrument that will fly on NASA's next Mars rover.
He is interdisciplinary scientist for climate studies on Venus Express.
That would be the European Space Agency spacecraft that's currently in orbit around Venus.
Grimsboon awarded the 2006 Carl Sagan Medal for public communication of planetary science by the American Astronomical Society.
Wow.
His first book, Venus Revealed, was a Los Angeles Times Prize Finalist.
His book was a prize finalist.
His latest book is called Lonely Planets.
The Natural Philosophy of Alien Life won the 2004 Penn Center USA Literary Award for Research Nonfiction.
Entertainment Weekly called Lonely Planets, quote, proof that life on this planet is both intelligent and funny, end quote.
So in a moment, Dr. David Greenspoon.
Well, as my daughter would say when pointing out some new assemblage of toys, ta-da!
Here, David Grinspoon, welcome to Coast to Coast AM.
Well, you know, I wanted to do sort of a broad survey of the topic of extraterrestrial life, not just from a scientific perspective, although I am trained and I work as a scientist, but also sort of just the broad human perspective on extraterrestrials, what it evokes in us, how it mirrors our views of ourselves and has historically.
And, you know, looking out at the night sky, it's a very emotional.
I didn't want it to just be sort of a cold, factual treatment.
You know, I liked using the word lonely because it's emotional.
And it's sort of a paradox in that it implies lonely, meaning, well, maybe we're lonely.
There's not very many people out there.
And yet I say plural lonely planets, meaning there are other lonely planets out there, other places in the sky, looking up in their own skies, wondering who else is out there.
And that's what I've come to believe, is that it may be not easy to answer the question of who's out there, at least not easy for a primitive species like ourselves, but surely they're there.
And as long as we're searching, then we're lonely until we're certain that we have that company.
Certainly we are, because if you look at the time scales involved in evolution of the universe, the universe is billions of years old, of course, something like 13.7 billion years.
And our species has been around, depending on how you look at it, for less than a million years, and our civilization for a few thousand years.
And our technological civilization, much, our scientific civilization, depending on how you look at it, a few hundred years.
And our ability to use radio technology and other technology to search the heavens is just decades old.
So we're babies.
We've been at it such a long time.
And surely somebody is out there, probably, I believe, many, many species who've been at it, it meaning this science game, for much, much longer than we.
So you don't think the odds of something parking over Johannesburg or Denver, for that matter, and then dispersing a million dummies and garbage scouring aliens is probable?
You know, I'm sure that I'm virtually sure that they are out there.
The thing that bothers me about science fiction movies like that is that the aliens are, it just, they don't seem that imaginative to me.
They seem like sort of minor variations on Earth creatures.
And their interactions, I mean, I love that movie because of the whole allegory and the fact that, you know, it's always interesting when it turns around the humans are the bad guys.
And, you know, it was an interesting movie in terms of the plot.
But I didn't think the aliens were that imaginative.
They just weren't that, they weren't strange enough for me.
I think real aliens will be much stranger than most movie aliens.
I mean, I have some criticisms, of course, but how could you not love how beautifully rendered and beautifully imagined the world was that they created?
I mean, you know, the part I didn't really like was, again, the interaction with the sort of intelligent aliens, the navy.
I mean, they were fun in a cartoon kind of way, but they were just so human-like.
They were these minor variations of humans, really.
And I just picture real aliens being much stranger.
But what I really did love and thought was wonderful was the jungle life, you know, all the strange plants and birds and animals and just those scenes.
I thought it was the most fully rendered sort of alien ecosystem I've ever seen done in a movie.
You know, the thing that disappointed me was I thought that the human characters were a little bit sort of cliché, you know, the general and, you know, the plot ended up getting a little bit just sort of too normal.
It ended up just being this big fight in the end.
But other than that, you know, the world that they created, I thought, was incredibly imaginative and beautiful.
He did not like the part where the animals at the end, which had previously been eating the blue guys, ended up helping the blue guys.
But I thought I explained it fairly well when I said, well, you know, the whole planet was in peril and it was connected, and so they decided that was a great threat anyway.
I I I and uh you know, I mean, I have a few different reactions to that.
One is, you know, when you when I hear that a large number of people believe something, usually it tells me more about something, about, you know, humans than it does, and the human proclivity to believe things than it necessarily tells me about the reality of what they believe.
Because, of course, people believe all kinds of things.
And just because a lot of people believe something doesn't necessarily sway me if you look at, you know, you can look at polls of all kinds of things that people believe.
And so, you know, that's a very interesting result.
But I don't know if it tells us something about aliens so much as it tells us about the human mind.
All right, David, we've got to take a quick break.
We're already at the bottom of the hour.
We'll continue in a moment from Manila, Philippines.
I'm Art Bell.
Other side of the world from the great majority of you, I would imagine.
And it's great to be here.
We're suffering what I think is an artifact of global warming, of course, at El Niño, but we have not had rain here in months.
In fact, to the degree that the southern island of Mindanao is going through daily, and I mean daily, three and four hour brownouts, here in Manila, the capital, in the capital district, were also suffering brownouts.
Now, we've not had one in my area yet, and I have certain thoughts about why that may be, but should I suddenly disappear, that would be one possibility.
My guest is David Greenspoon, and he will be back in a moment.
Well, all right, just before returning to Dr. Greenspoon, let's go to Ian Pan.
Ian will be on, of course, tomorrow night, and let's find out what he's going to be doing.
Ian, welcome.
unidentified
Always a pleasure.
Art, been too long.
I will tell you, I'll be doing Saturday and Sunday night.
Let me just give you a little bit on, you mentioned the global warming piece.
I live here in Minnesota.
First time in 125 years, it didn't snow once in March.
It's the weirdest thing.
It was the warmest March.
It was delightful, but everybody's still kind of shaking their heads about it.
My God, I didn't know it ever stopped snowing in Minnesota.
unidentified
Yeah, honestly, we were, I mean, the new stadium opens up for the Twins on Monday, and everybody was thinking it might snow on opening day.
It's going to be in the 70s.
It just, something's changed.
I don't know if it's permanent, but it's not bad.
Anyway, coming up tomorrow night, we've got David Balavia.
Have you seen the WikiLeaks story that's out about the helicopter pilots that were shooting at these at what were thought to be insurgents, and two of them ended up being photographers for Reuters?
So we'll talk about what it's like to have to go house to house and look for insurgents, just how hard that is, and the decisions that get made right and wrong all the time.
And then on Sunday night, the co-author of Vows of Silence, he's also the filmmaker of the documentary of the same name, and he says he can trace the scandal here that goes directly to John Paul II, the number of bishops and cardinals that looked the other way on the priest abuse stories, and it goes all the way up to the highest levels of the Vatican.
He'll make his case coming up Sunday night on Coach Ben.
Well, the future, not future, Pope Benedict, apparently, this according to the Associated Press, breaking it exclusively, resisted pleas to defraud a California priest with a record of molesting children, citing concerns including the good of the universal church.
That's in quotes.
It's all according to a letter with his signature, which, of course, belies the Vatican's claim that he had no role in blocking the removal of pedophile priests during his years as head of the doctoral watchdog office.
That's serious stuff.
unidentified
It is.
That's when he was still known as Cardinal Ratzinger, and this is before he became Pope.
And this is, in fact, a 180-degree turn away from where they said he was.
That he had no direct knowledge.
And here they have a memo with his signature on it that says we shouldn't go forward with this.
That's some of what we'll be talking about coming up on Sunday night on Costa Rica.
Yeah, well, I don't think you can totally dismiss anything like that because, you know, getting back to our discussion earlier, if you believe, as I believe, that compared to any alien species,
any intelligent alien species we are likely to encounter, that we are going to be very, very primitive and essentially babies, then you really can't make the statement that anything, any capability they might have is impossible.
And so, and you can't really claim to think that we could understand their motivations or their rationale for doing something.
So, certainly if they wanted to be among us and masquerade as human beings and sort of study us in that way, one would imagine they'd be capable of doing so because their capabilities,
their technological capabilities and their understanding probably of us and our minds would be, one could imagine would be very, very far advanced and farther than anything we could imagine.
So who's to say that it's impossible?
I don't think you can really say anything is impossible with regard to the capabilities of intelligent aliens.
You can question why they would want to do something like that, but you can't claim to know that they're not doing something like that.
Professor, when you look up into the night sky and you see all those little dots of light, which are actually sun's planets, I guess we're now finding out, very likely revolving about them, and many of those, at least some of those, Earth-like planets, would you agree that it's very probable that there is alien intelligent life?
Yeah, and, you know, as you just pointed out, you know, that something has really changed in what we know about the night sky over really over the last decade or so.
That, you know, we've known for a long time that, as you say, the stars are other suns and other potential homes for life.
But the idea that most of those suns up there are surrounded by planets of their own is one that we believed in as scientists for many, many years.
But we didn't know.
We thought, well, probably in analogy to our own solar system, that forming suns also gather and form planets around them, and therefore solar systems are probably common.
But we didn't know until very recently when we developed the technology to start making observations that have proved that not just a few, but in fact, probably most of those stars out there have planets of their own.
So now this idea that there probably are planets beyond our solar system has moved from just a speculation to a certainty.
So that really changes the equation.
We now know that there are so many billions of places, you know, more planets probably than there are stars in the sky.
So when you look up and see all those points of light, which are suns, now you know, we've verified that there are, you know, as Carl Sagan used to say, billions and billions of planets up there.
And those are all potential homes for life.
And on some of those, there surely is life evolving.
And on some of those places with life, there is surely life that has developed the capability for thought and civilization and technology.
And it just seems really, really illogical in the face of all that knowledge and kind of arrogant to imagine that we are the only intelligent species.
And in fact, we are anything like the most advanced intelligent species.
In fact, I would say that the opposite is much more likely, that we're probably not among the most advanced.
But, you know, again, I have to say that it's a very speculative question.
And in this field, I think ultimately we will learn the answers through exploration and through discovery, not through our own speculation.
As clever as we think we are, it's fun to speculate.
I kind of like, you know, Carl Sagan used to have these arguments that any species that survived to sort of explore the galaxy and survived its own technological infancy and survived the development of weapons of mass destruction would have had to have a kind of moral development to keep pace with
that technological development.
That if they were too warlike and hostile and sort of primitive in that sense, that they wouldn't survive the advent of very advanced technology.
And you can see that danger in ourselves, in our own development, that we may not survive our own technology because of our warlike tendencies.
So there is this argument that there's sort of a selection effect, that those species that live a long time and learn to handle themselves in an era of advanced technology are going to be less warlike and less aggressive in that sense, and that maybe there's that filter so that advanced species might not have those aggressive tendencies.
And I kind of like that argument, but I've heard counter arguments that are also hard to refute, that a very advanced species might find it advantageous to be kind of paranoid and aggressive and respond to possible threats by wiping them out so that they don't have to worry about them.
And so you can imagine, I don't like to, but I can imagine a very advanced species that would also be very sort of aggressive and paranoid and destructive and just decide that it doesn't want to live with other species that could potentially be threats.
Well, if we hadn't won the Second World War, we'd all be going Heil Hitler right now.
And Hitler would be or his successor running the world.
And that that would be a pretty aggressive world.
I guess once Hitler had conquered all there was to conquer here on Earth, you know, if he were to meet another species, conquering it would be his first idea.
And there are a lot of examples, certainly from human history, that the interaction between different civilizations, World War II, being one of the more recent, but going way back where you can look at what happened when so-called primitive societies encountered so-called more advanced societies.
And it wasn't always a very happy outcome for the less advanced societies.
And people have made that analogy with the potential interaction between species in the galaxy.
If we have the possibility of detecting our brethren out there, you know, whether they're friendly or not, we can't turn our backs on that possibility.
We have to search.
It's our nature.
And of course, I'm a fan.
We need to keep listening.
And, you know, I just hope very much to be alive when we succeed and learn who's out there.
You know, I've had the honor of interviewing Seth Shostak a number of times, who's running SETI.
And now there's a as a matter of fact, I think this weekend, Dr. Genspoon, the Arecibo dish has been turned over to ham radio operators who are going to put a transmitter out there at the end of the feed point.
and bounce stuff off the moon and elsewhere.
Now, that leads into something called active SETI, which, instead of listening, would transmit a very high-powered signal, unlike the 450 megahertz ham signal.
signal, to who knows where, to virtually anywhere that the dish is pointed.
And there's a lot of controversy surrounding active SETI.
Instead of listening, we transmit and we sort of let everybody know, hey, here we are.
Traditionally, SETI has always been just about listening for signals.
And there's a rationale for that that was developed by Frank Drake and other people, that the pioneers of SETI, which is basically, well, we should just listen because of the fact that chances are whoever we eventually make contact with, they're going to be much more powerful and advanced than we are.
And so they're going to be transmitting.
And we have, you know, the best possibility for success is just to listen that in order to be a transmitting society, you have to be much more advanced than we are.
And you have to be able to keep a signal on the air for thousands of years.
And, you know, we can't do anything continuously for thousands of years.
So it's an interesting rationale.
And I think there's a consistent logic there.
But other people recently have said, you know, the heck with that.
We need to be broadcasting our own signals in addition to listening.
And there's a moral argument on both sides.
There's a fellow, a friend of mine, a charismatic Russian radio astronomer who he's just said, I'm not going to wait for this debate.
He's started already broadcasting from Russia.
He's sending out signals to other stars on behalf of you and I, on behalf of all Earth.
He's doing it.
He's already sent signals to some of the nearest stars.
And his argument is it's not really, it's kind of immoral to be just listening and not broadcasting.
If you want to have a galactic society, a galactic conversation going on there, then we have to be broadcasting too, because what if everybody's just listening?
If everybody's just listening, then nobody will hear anything.
But the moral argument against that is, well, what if there's somebody really dangerous out there?
What if by broadcasting, we inadvertently alert somebody bad, something evil, to come and attack us?
And the analogy there is if you're out in the jungle and you don't know what creatures are out there, do you start shouting at the top of your lungs in the middle of the night in the jungle?
Maybe not.
So I think there's an interesting argument on both sides.
I guess I tend to come down with Dr. Zaitsev and say, what the heck?
Let's broadcast and make our really own and see who's out there.
And you can't be too careful out there in this universe.
Let's not be scared of the universe and let's embrace it and just see what's out there.
And I understand the arguments against that.
And I do recognize that there is potentially some danger there.
But I also think that we just sort of can't hide from the universe, that we want to know what's out there and we want to know who's out there, and we just have to sort of be brave and face it.
I would think there's a very great deal of danger, though, Doctor, because, as you admitted, there's a distinct possibility they'd be far advanced of our civilization, and they might not like us, or they might even regard us as nothing more than an anthill to be stepped on.
And with a sting, because, I mean, we've developed nuclear weapons.
We continue to fight our history in terms of being a warlike nation and world, for that matter, is pretty clear.
I mean, taking a look at Earth and how it's acting right now, if you were an alien and you were advanced, and even if you were sort of in the middle of the road and you were going to be friendly with friendly civilizations and squish unfriendly civilizations, you might decide to squish.
You know, there's no ironclad argument for the safety of that approach.
What you just said reminded me of we just watched the other night The Day the Earth Stood Still.
And there's that great speech about if you humans continue your warlike ways, then we will reduce your planet to a burnt-out cinder.
Those guys could be out there.
But the counter-argument to that is, well, it's too late if we're really worried about that because, of course, we've already made our presence known with our radios, our careless leaking of our radio signals and our TV broadcasts.
So we really can't, it's too late to completely hide ourselves from the universe.
Now, whether that means we should be screaming out there in the jungle in the middle of the night is an interesting question.
It comes down to what your view of the universe is.
Is it basically hostile or is it basically friendly?
And I tend to think that it's, maybe I'm just a naive, optimistic scientist, but I tend to think that the really advanced civilizations out there, civilizations, will be sort of morally advanced as well as technically advanced.
That will be how they've managed to survive so long, and that they may even have something to teach us about survival that we may need to pay attention to.
Look, you know, if aliens are deciding whether or not to squish us based on watching our television, I say to you, prepare to be squished.
From Manila in the Philippines, I'm Art Bell.
It is.
We own the night.
We own the night.
Good morning, everybody.
My guest is Professor David Grinspoon.
And among other things, Professor Grinspoon has just gone through training to be an astronaut.
That's right, to be an astronaut.
And he'll be participating in private low-Earth Orbit missions.
And, you know, I've wondered for a long time what it's like to train to be an astronaut in this next hour, among other things.
We're going to find out.
Stay right there.
Let me clear a couple of things up.
One, it is not this weekend, which we're already well into, but next weekend that the Hams are going to be given an opportunity to send out some 450 megahertz signals from the Arecibo dish in Puerto Rico.
So that'll be next weekend.
There was something else that I wanted to ask you, Professor, hearkening back to something you said.
Here in Manila in the Philippines right now, we're experiencing some rotating brownouts because we haven't had rain in months and months and months.
I mean, this is a tropical rainforest type place that's in danger of turning into a desert if we don't get rain pretty soon.
And, of course, it contributes to hydroelectric power, and we don't have a lot of that right now because we don't have rain.
So a couple of questions for you.
It seems like we should be building nuclear power plants here.
But, you know, we have them in the U.S., and I hearken back to the statement you made last hour.
You said we, meaning human rights, can't do anything for thousands of years, and surely it's true.
But we are preparing to shove all this nuclear waste, which has to, I think, be cared for very carefully for tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of years, or else into Yucca Mountain.
And I wonder what you think about that.
I mean, are we going to be able to take care of this stuff for tens of thousands of years?
And certainly not, you know, beyond an election cycle in terms of our decision-making powers that be.
And we're not good at thinking globally.
And yet we've developed capabilities, technological capabilities that require us to think on the long term and think globally in order to survive ultimately.
And so, you know, we're sort of coming to sort of the end of, I think, our adolescence as a species.
So, you know, you think of an adolescent, and when you're a kid, you live in this bubble, and you don't really have to think of consequences of what you're doing.
And then, you know, you grow up and you do have to think of consequences and live with them.
And I think as a species, that's kind of where we are.
And we have a lot of potential, but it's by no means obvious that we will realize that.
And the example of nuclear power, nuclear waste is a good one.
Nuclear power is potentially a good solution to some of our energy needs and our global environmental problems.
And yet it does generate this waste and the need for, nuclear waste is a great example of the need for a project that will be continued not just by our generation, but by future generations.
If we're going to build a repository, it has to be cared for.
We have to have a civilization that can maintain continuity of purpose over that period of time or we'll be in trouble.
And similarly, if you want to broadcast to other species with radio waves, to other species in the galaxy, then the only way to really do it right is to have a continuous beacon that's on for thousands of years.
I mean, you can do what Professor Zaitsev is doing and do these little blasts to other stars, and maybe you'll be successful.
But really, a good interstellar beacon has to be out in the air for thousands of years to really have a decent chance of being found.
And, you know, that's the kind of thing that we need to learn how to do, but we can't quite do it yet, is to sort of commit to these long-term projects.
Well, when you were earlier talking about nobody listening, I was laughing because, and I shouldn't have been laughing, but without letting everybody in on the joke, occasionally on amateur radio, you'll be listening to, for example, the 20-meter band, and it's just deader than a doornail.
And the deal is, Professor, that everybody's listening.
And so if you get on there and make noise and call CQ, all of a sudden you get an answer, and the band wasn't dead at all.
Well, that seems like it would be really kind of rather boring if nobody was saying anything.
And one could say that the cosmos is, in fact, like that.
And I think that's Professor Zeitz, the part of Professor Zaitsev's point is that, yeah, if we're just listening, then who's to say that everybody else isn't just listening?
And isn't that, in addition to not having much of a chance of success for SETI in that case, then it's also kind of a boring universe if nobody's saying anything.
Well, yeah, I think that in a way it would be a good signal to ourselves if we started that.
We'd be saying, hey, let's grow up and live in this and acknowledge the universe we live in, even acknowledging the dangers, but let's become the kind of species that we want to have inhabit this universe.
Let's grow up ourselves.
And then if there is nobody else out there, then at least there will be one truly advanced civilization if we become it.
I think in the absence of that context, all we can do is conduct ourselves in the way that we would want other species to be conducting themselves.
And you can make an argument that it's dangerous to broadcast, and I think that it is a reasonable argument.
And what some people are saying is not like don't broadcast, not let's prohibit it, but let's have a global conversation first.
And let's decide this as the nations and the peoples of Earth.
Let's not have sort of a rogue operation of one person just deciding to broadcast and speak, claim to speak for all Humanity.
And I think there's something to that argument that we should have a conversation about it first.
But I also think that once we do that, yeah, heck, let's start broadcasting and see if we eventually get an answer.
Well, yeah, that's another really sort of juicy topic is what do you say to an alien and how can you claim to say anything that they might understand given that they don't share the language with us, any language with us?
But then an answer that people have countered that with, and I think is actually a rather good one, is that they will share some language with us.
And that would probably be the language of mathematics and the language of physics.
You know, if they live in the same universe, then they've observed some of the same things.
You know, there's certain sort of mathematical universals that you think that other intelligent species would have come upon themselves, circles and logarithmic spirals and patterns in nature.
They'll observe these same things.
They live in the same universe as us.
So maybe you start using some of those universals, the physics and the mathematics that's sort of built into our universe.
You use those as the basis to begin a language, a universal language.
But then, you know, it becomes more challenging to try to say more abstract things.
And some people, a colleague of mine at the SETI Institute, Dr. Doug Vakach, I don't know if you've ever had him on your show, but he's actually tried to develop some more sophisticated signals.
He said, well, let's try to send messages of altruism.
And he's even made pictorial images of sort of stick figures of creatures helping other creatures and trying to send these sort of moral messages.
Now, whether an alien would actually be able to make sense, whether that would be intelligible to them, is an interesting question.
But certainly, it's an interesting exercise for us and an interesting message to our fellow humans to say, well, let's at least try to think of how we would construct such a universal message.
Maybe we pull a page from contact and we send prime numbers, but then we put subcarriers in and give them a lot more detailed information about our civilization and about human beings, perhaps including the DNA unraveling and all that sort of thing.
Yeah, prime numbers are prime numbers a topic that often comes up when discussing message construction.
And the reason why is because prime numbers, as far as we can tell, are really a product of intelligence.
There's no known natural process that generates prime numbers.
It's never been found.
And if that's the case, then the idea is if you see a signal with a series of prime numbers, then that's coming from another mind.
And then, in fact, if you're clever, you can use prime numbers to build up two-dimensional and even three-dimensional or four-dimensional pictures.
And so then you're not just communicating, hey, this is another mathematical species, but you're saying, hey, if you know about prime numbers, then you can decode this signal and start seeing our pictures.
And then, yeah, you can start showing things like DNA and planetary systems and, you know, start to actually show them something of what we know and what we are like in that kind of pictorial language using prime numbers.
So that's something that's often been actually imagined in fiction, like in contact, as you mentioned, but also some of the messages that have already been sent out, which there are some.
We have sent some messages, and they've used that kind of prime number construction to try to build up a message that somebody might be able to decode.
And of course, once again, once you've given them our DNA construction, if they're very advanced, you've given them information to turn us into soup, if that's what they want to do.
Yeah, that's true, but it's hard to imagine for me that they would really want to turn us into soup.
I think there's probably easier ways for them to get soup if that's what they like than coming all these light years and turning us into soup.
It just doesn't seem like the best use of their super advanced technology.
If they're hungry, there are probably easier ways for them to produce food than come all this way and try to eat us.
Because after all, one would have to imagine that their biochemistry was very, very similar to ours to even have them find us at all edible or delectable.
And in this universe of ours with all the different paths that evolution can take, I think it's much, much more likely that their biochemistry would not be similar enough to ours for them to even be able to think about eating us or to find us tasteful.
Yeah, I was very fortunate to be invited to be in the first class of scientist astronauts that recently was trained for potential flight on these new private spacecraft that are starting up.
You've heard of Virgin Galactic, and then there's a couple of competitor companies that are not as public that are starting up, and they're going to be taking tourists into space if all goes well starting next year.
And the idea is, well, if there's going to be all these new spaceflights, if there's going to be this whole new program of spaceflight to take tourists up, why not send scientists and educators up as well?
And a group of us have been pushing that, and we've actually managed to convince the industry that it's actually a good idea and that they are planning on having a research and education components of these flights.
And to sort of demonstrate the seriousness of that, they trained a Group of a dozen of us.
Just a couple months ago, we went through training to be qualified to go up on these flights once they start up.
And it was quite an experience going through the training.
You know, we did this altitude decompression training where they put you in a chamber and you sort of take the oxygen out of the room so you get to experience the effects of hypoxia and anoxia and see what it does to your brain and try to perform functions with not enough oxygen.
And that was challenging and exciting.
But the most exciting part really was the centrifuge training where they spun us up in a big centrifuge and they put us up to 6Gs.
And you got to experience what that kind of acceleration is like.
And I'm not going to lie, it was a little bit scary at first, but then it was ultimately very thrilling to realize that it's not that hard to withstand that.
There's a few tricks you have to learn that they teach you.
The trainers are very good, and there's things you have to do with your body to kind of keep the blood flow going to your brain so you don't pass out.
But once you learn how to do those things, it's really not that hard, and you realize that any person in reasonably good physical health can withstand that and will, in fact, be able to participate in space flight.
Not just the rigors of launch, but the actual inhabitation in space for long periods of time.
Well, you know, that's a challenge, and I think we're still learning about that.
You know, there are some problems that seem to crop up when people are put into space for long periods of time.
And, you know, much face that we're, you know, we're evolved and bred and adapted to an environment with 1G, gravity, and without the radiation environment of space.
And there's some challenges.
You know, people experience bone loss and bone density loss.
And, you know, radiation is a serious challenge.
But my view is that in the long run, with technology, we'll be able to solve those problems if we want to live in space.
Our medical technology, like our other technology, is still in its infancy.
But we're just beginning to really study the effects of the space environment on human beings.
And I think we'll figure it out.
We'll figure out how to solve those problems.
And if we want to live in space, we'll figure out how to do it.
I've always wondered, there are people who make an argument that we never went to the moon.
It was all stage.
I personally think we did go.
But there is a point that I've never been able to reconcile, and that's the Van Ellen belt.
You know, to do any serious, even go to the moon, you know, you've got to go through the Van Ellen belt.
And I don't know how we did that.
I mean, you really should get a lethal dose of radiation when you do that.
And I think the covering for the spacecraft was not sufficient to protect one from the Van Ellen belt.
And I've always wondered about the dosimeter readings that the astronauts who went to the moon experienced, what sort of dosimeter readings they really had.
Yeah, well, first of all, I'm quite certain that people did go to the moon.
I mean, I've met several of the astronauts and spent time with them.
And, you know, it's like there's a lot of logical arguments that one can make.
And I buy those arguments.
But to me, the most compelling thing is knowing some of these human beings and just knowing their character and experiencing firsthand.
And, you know, these guys are not participants in some massive hoax.
I just, you know, I believe that very strongly from that personal experience.
But as far as the radiation risk and the Van Allen belts, I think that people do get harmful doses of radiation in space.
I don't think that it's fatal passing through the Van Allen belts briefly.
I think it's not a, there are certain altitudes where there is a lot of radiation where you wouldn't want to hang out and spend a lot of time.
But if you travel through these altitudes briefly, you can survive.
You may get doses of radiation where that would affect your, you know, I don't think, you know, I wouldn't advise somebody pregnant to do that.
I would advise people to maybe have their kids or store away some of their seeds, if you will, before they go up if they want to reproduce.
You know, I don't think that it's necessary.
You know, there are some serious risks that we haven't fully figured out how to counter, but it's quite clear that people can go into space and survive.
And I think that as we study these risks and learn our knowledge of biomedicine and of the physical environment of space increases, which it will, we'll get better and better at making it more safe.
Yeah, the initial Virgin Galactic flights cost a couple hundred thousand dollars, which would be pretty steep for a lot of us, but apparently isn't for a lot of other people because they're sold out.
They're oversubscribed for the first several flights.
And the good thing is that if those are successful, then the plan is to build a lot more.
I want to build five more of spacecraft like Spaceship Two.
And then the price will come down, and the flights will be going multiple times a day, and it'll become more and more sort of space travel will become democratized, will be available to many, many people.
And then, yeah, other kinds of craft will follow.
Eventually, there'll be orbital flights and orbital hotels and maybe lunar hotels.
And I think, you know, the kind of public-private partnership that's starting to develop will really be the way that humanity enters space in a more significant way than just the sort of government programs in the past.
I mean, I think that government does have a role in space exploration and will for a long time, but I also think that it's really cool that the private sector is getting involved.
And I think that will end up driving a lot of innovation and a lot of just sort of diverse approaches to space exploration.
So it won't just be one agency with one technological approach, but there'll be a range of approaches.
And that'll be a much healthier, ultimately a healthier space exploration program.
And I think that will be the way that humanity enters the universe.
Well, it's amazing to me that we went to the moon all those decades ago now and have not been back, much less planned seriously for anything to go to Mars, which would be, I guess, the first close point of interest.
Not that it's that close, but I mean, comparatively to anything else.
And we've sort of slowed down and, if not almost stopped.
Yeah, I mean, it's weird to me that Apollo is sort of an ancient history now because that was such an important event in history.
But in my personal history, in my life, and I think really every space scientist and a lot of other people of my generation, you know, Apollo was a pivotal moment.
I was in fourth grade when humans landed on the moon.
And it's one of my first vivid memories of staying up and watching that.
And I just assumed that that was what people would be doing.
And when I saw the movie 2001 as a kid right around the same time, I assumed that that seemed so real.
I assumed that in the 21st century, people would be all over the solar system and that I, as an adult, would be living and working in space.
It seemed totally credible at that time with the way things were going.
And then, as you say, things slowed down after Apollo.
A lot of things were canceled.
Other priorities became more important.
And it was shocking to me to realize that when I was teaching astronomy at the University of Colorado, that I had college students that were not alive at the time of Apollo and that, in fact, saw that as just something in history lessons.
And it's like, wait a minute, this wasn't supposed to be the future that we were going to have.
So in light of that, it's very exciting now to see space exploration about to explode again and a lot of people prepared to go into space.
And in fact, to have the opportunity myself to go into space now that I assumed was the sort of dream I had to abandon as a dream of childhood that now is suddenly coming back to life.
And I think, well, I probably will get to go into space after all.
Well, yeah, it's got rivers and canyons and sand dunes and complex weather and storms and clouds and a greenhouse climate.
But the amazing thing is that it's doing all these very Earth-like things, but not using the same materials as here because it's very, very cold there.
It's way too cold for liquid water.
But it turns out it's the right temperature range for liquid methane.
So liquefied natural gas is flowing on the surface and evaporating and forming clouds and raining back down and doing all the same, pooling into lakes, doing all the things there that water does on Earth, but it's liquid methane behaving in the same way, resulting in a place that looks very Earth-like in our pictures.
And the other strange thing is that there's organic evolution going on there.
Organic molecules, the same stuff that makes life on Earth, is doing all kinds of stuff on Titan.
And in fact, honestly, we don't know what it's doing in total, but we've only got like hints of some interesting organic stuff going on there.
So there's just a lot about Titan that sort of draws us back and is interesting enough to make us want to explore it further.
Yeah, a lot of what I do in my own scientific research that's funded by NASA is climate modeling, which is a phrase you hear a lot these days of people worrying about global warming and climate modeling of Earth.
And that is what I do, but in fact, I do climate modeling of other planets.
So I look at Venus and Mars and try to understand their temperature and their environments in terms of the amount of greenhouse gases that they've got in their atmosphere and model the radiation coming from the sun and then the infrared going back out and getting trapped in the atmosphere and see if I can sort of recreate the climates of those planets using the same kinds of climate models that people use to predict things that are changing on Earth.
Well, it is my understanding for sure that Mars has gone through radical cataclysmic climate change.
You know, we see, you look at the surface of Mars, and you see all kinds of signs of an environment that is no longer there but is preserved, that left its mark, and that in fact it was a much more Earth-like environment.
We see rivers really all over Mars, the features that look like rivers that are kind of dried up, and primitive lakes, and all kinds of signs of water.
And in order to have water on the surface, it had to be warmer, had to have higher surface pressure.
So it was more like Earth.
Now something changed.
And certainly there were large impacts, many large impacts on Mars early on.
And we see the scars, we see these massive impact craters where big things hit Mars.
And yeah, I do believe that not just one cataclysmic impact, but probably a whole series, an era of Mars getting pummeled from space did strip the atmosphere.
There are other things that can strip the atmosphere too, like a solar wind.
But Mars clearly got bombarded and clearly lost a lot of its atmosphere and probably lost the ability to maintain that Earth-like climate because of that pummeling and all those catastrophic impacts.
Well, perhaps what was once there could be there again.
Are you one of those scientists who believe that terraforming Mars is perhaps one day a realistic possibility that we could launch something that would kind of seed Mars and eventually produce an atmosphere?
You know, there's the question of can we do it, how would we do it, and then should we do it?
And there's a real interesting morality that comes in when you talk about altering another planet, a planet that may even have its own life forms that we would be hurting.
And I think the first thing we have to do is establish what Mars is like today, and does it have life and doesn't it?
And we don't know yet if there's underground life on Mars.
And if there is underground life on Mars, I think there's a good argument for sort of leaving Mars alone or it changes the morality of that.
But then the other thing is that, yeah, we can think about how we would change the climate of Mars.
And people do think about terraforming Mars.
And it's very instructive for thinking about climate change on our own planet, too.
How does climate work?
And how would you purposefully change a planet's climate as opposed to inadvertently accidentally changing a planet's climate, which we seem to be doing now?
Now, there's a big, big controversy right now about global warming, whether it's real or I'm sure you're familiar with the big email controversy, and apparently some numbers were fudged and all the rest of that.
Well, you know, it seems like global warming is absolutely real.
When you look up at the North Pole, for example, it seems like 40% of it or better is gone.
You know, the ice and the stuff's all gone.
It's going to be a navigable sea pretty soon, as a matter of fact.
What do you think about this big controversy?
Do you maintain that global warming is, in fact, real and we had better watch out?
Or do you think these emails prove it was a bunch of baloney?
No, you know, I don't think the emails really prove very much about the science.
I think the emails prove something about human beings and about scientists and the way we behave and the way we react to being perceived as being under threat.
And there's some stuff in those emails that maybe people didn't behave perfectly.
But the science is pretty convincing.
Global warming is a real concern, and the Earth does seem to be getting warmer, not just from any one particular story you can refute, but there's a whole convergence of signs.
But I think part of the problem is scientists are not really very good at being part of these sort of political discussions.
And usually we don't have to.
Usually the stuff we study, people don't care about that much because it's not about whether civilization is threatened.
So we have this sort of way of communicating with one another where you're supposed to criticize each other's arguments and you're supposed to be skeptical and you're supposed to kind of not believe it.
And science advances through that.
But now there's this feeling by scientists of, oh, we're under siege and people are criticizing us.
So we should sort of circle the wagons and pretend we all agree with each other, you know, and sort of tamp down criticism a little bit because people might Get the wrong impression.
And you can kind of understand why scientists are behaving that way, because a lot of them are genuinely concerned about global warming, and they're worried that people won't take it seriously.
And so they're worried, well, if we talk about our criticisms, maybe people will get the wrong idea.
So I think it comes from a good place, but sometimes the behavior is such that people are sort of abandoning that normal scientific need to critique each other.
But on the other side, there's a lot of dishonest criticism, I think, of people trying to fan the flames of skepticism of global warming, not necessarily for the best motives.
So, you know, it's actually terribly complicated, and it's the kind of thing that scientists are not really good at doing is sort of participating in that kind of debate with the outside world.
I think that it's so serious that one day, if we don't change our ways, we're going to need a new place to live.
Now, there may or may not be things crawling about Mars or below the surface, but I'm not sure that we should worry about that as much as needing another place to live.
And frankly, though I'm a big advocate of space travel, we really don't have a way to get to an Earth-like planet.
We don't live long enough for those kind of space flights, nor have the capability.
So Mars looks like at least a possibility if we're able to terraform it.
I know there's ethical, perhaps ethical problems with it, but we may need another place to go.
Well, one of the advantages of, you know, I think one of the arguments for human colonization of outer space and other planets, and, you know, it's really, in a way, kind of a moral argument, is that if we become a multi-planet species, it will ensure the survival of the human race.
And in fact, the survival of other species too, you know, beyond the, in the event of a planetary catastrophe, you know, the worst case scenario where something wipes out life on Earth, if we've propagated life beyond Earth, then we've helped Earth life, you know, not just humans, survive.
And ultimately, you know, humans or some other phenomena probably will make the Earth uninhabitable, habitable.
We know in the long run, Earth will become uninhabitable whether humans do anything or not.
So in the very long run, if you believe that life is a good thing and you want not just humans, but you want Earth's biosphere to survive, then you have to be an advocate of space colonization because Earth's biosphere will not survive ultimately without space colonization.
I mean, we should tell everybody the truth that, you know, in terms of how quickly we can travel from here to there, it would take generations of humans.
Yeah, well, it'll be interesting to see how it plays out in the long run.
I think that, you know, I'm kind of an optimist, you know, even in the face of good counter-arguments sometimes.
And I think that, you know, okay, in the worst case scenario, we don't know how fast.
The honest scientific answer is nobody knows how fast global warming might be.
In the worst case scenarios, where, you know, it's really fast, it will hit some tipping point and some positive feedback.
It'll all happen really fast.
And then we don't have the capability to modify our behavior in a way to prevent that.
But in those non-worst case scenarios where we may have decades or even centuries, nobody knows how fast it's all happening.
I think that changes in human health are quite possible.
And one fact is that the oil is running out, peak oil and all that.
We don't really know how fast and what hidden reserves there are.
But we have to change how we use energy.
We don't have any choice.
Fossil fuels won't last forever.
So we will change that, whether it's catastrophically because of some bad thing we do to Earth or whether it's more gradual and logical because we find better energy sources, I think is up for grabs.
But you know we have to change our energy use and ultimately that is probably good news for the climate.
But that he would have no memory is, I mean, I wonder if what he was really saying was that he just couldn't relate it, you know, that it was such an alien experience that.
Well, you know, I think another aspect of spaceflight in the future is going to be, you know, because telecommunications has gotten so much better that I think you'll also have more occasion to talk to somebody in real time, you know, perhaps even on the radio and say, well, what does it feel like?
Tell me now while you're up there, you know, so they won't have to remember.
And I would think, you know, I mean, we're going to send some people up who are, I suppose, philosophers.
And as you point out, private citizens are going to be going up.
So we should be getting a lot of that kind of feedback.
And there hasn't been that much of that sort of thing.
Usually it's, you know, you see a group shot of the astronauts in the space station, sort of all gathered and smiling and talking to school kids and that kind of thing.
But you just don't get the kind of rhetoric that I guess you would expect from seeing such an incredible sight.
Yeah, Venus has been one of the major scientific interests of, you know, really of my career.
And I've had the opportunity to participate in a couple of the missions to Venus, sending spacecraft and trying to, you know, it's a real puzzle because it's a planet that's so much like the Earth in some very basic ways, same size as Earth and, you know, very similar physically in many ways as nearby, and yet it's evolved this radically different climate and radically different environment.
So, you know, they're almost like twins, twin planets that became very different individuals, and it's really interesting to sort of puzzle out why that is.
You know, what was it that led them to go down such different paths?
It's a really cool result and a very clever piece of science.
And it actually stems from this spacecraft, Venus Express, which is at Venus now.
It's a European orbiter, a little, tiny little, very cleverly designed robot spacecraft.
And with an infrared camera on that instrument, they were able to use some very clever techniques to see all the way through the thick clouds and all the way through that thick atmosphere and actually pick up some signals from the surface and study the differences in the kinds of rocks in different areas.
And they found that the rocks right on these volcanoes are very, very young, which is indicating that there are recent and probably active flows supplying those young rocks to Venus.
So, you know, we thought there may well be active volcanism on Venus because there are areas that look so Earth-like and look like fresh volcanoes.
But this is the first sort of chemical evidence we've had that those volcanoes really probably are active.
And it's another way in which Venus is strangely Earth-like, even though its environment is so different.
Well, you know, the particular aspect of Earth that you just cited, how perfect it seems to us, you know, is traditionally, I think, one of the reasons why humanity, you know, found a belief in a creator to be an appealing kind of explanation.
But the thing is that, you know, when you understand the way planets work and you understand the way life evolves on a planet, and not only does life evolve on a planet, but a planet evolves with life.
In other words, if you look at the long-term relationship between life and the planet, it's not just that Earth has changed and life has sort of gone along and figured out how to live on that changing Earth, but life has changed the Earth as well.
The two have co-evolved and co-created each other.
So the fact that when finally an intelligent species, you know, a semi-intelligent species like humanity comes along with the ability to look at the world and say, oh, wow, you know, we seem to be, we live in this place that seems perfect for us.
But when you understand evolution, of course it's going to seem perfect for us because we're the creatures that evolved to take advantage of that environment.
And if Earth had a very different environment, we'd be different creatures and, you know, and it would be a planet that human beings couldn't live on and would seem horrible to us.
But the creatures that live there would be saying, wow, what a perfect planet, just right for us.
Maybe there's a creator.
You know?
So I think you've got to be careful with that logic, although you can understand why historically it was so appealing.
Yeah, so I suppose nearly flat slugs on another planet somewhere that somehow evolved to be intelligent flat slugs, well, they could, too, look about their planet and say, gee, it's just perfect for Slugville here.
I mean, you know, it's funny because I think that there are, at the depth of our understanding of the universe, there's huge mystery.
And I think that we do not understand at all really what consciousness is.
And, you know, so there's some huge mysteries of our existence which I think create an opening for the possibility of some ideas that some people would call religious.
But the idea of the sort of biblical kind of creator who literally created Earth as a sort of paradise, then, you know, that kind of that part of it isn't necessary once we understand the power of evolution.
But there's some other ideas that people might call religious that I don't think science invalidates at all because we still, at the bottom of it all, there's still some huge, huge mysteries that we don't understand about who we are and what we're doing here.
Well, I've seen a few things in my life that I would classify as UFOs.
You know, things in the sky moving or appearing in strange ways that I didn't understand.
I was, you know, I could probably tell you half a dozen, because I watch the sky all the time.
But I'll tell you two of the weirdest ones.
Once when I was in college driving up Route 95 on the East Coast, I saw a very strange, you know, what I would have, if I was in Alaska, I might have thought was an auroral display, a glowing spot in the sky.
But it was very coherent and had a sort of coherent shape to it.
It didn't seem like a cloud.
So I don't even know how to describe it that well.
It was years ago, but it was some kind of coherent, seeming non-natural seeming glowing entity off the coast.
So, you know, I've seen things that somebody who was prone to interpret things as evidence of some other intelligent presence would probably find to be pretty good ammunition.
There are many things that we don't understand that if you watch the sky long enough and carefully enough over enough years, you'll probably see things you don't understand.
And, you know, if you're the kind of person who has a rational bent and doesn't want things to be mysterious and wants to say, well, we can understand everything, you'll find some way to explain that.
And maybe you'll be right, or maybe you'll just be comforting yourself by thinking you have an explanation.
And if you're the kind of person that sees evidence for intelligent visitors, then that will sort of fuel that belief.
So I think we tend to interpret things we see in terms of our already existing belief systems and kind of reinforce those beliefs.
It was my wife and I. And I've told this story a million times.
But this thing couldn't have been more than 150 feet above me.
It was monstrous.
It was late at night.
The stars went away.
The moon went away.
This giant triangular object with lights at each corner passed directly over my head.
If I hadn't been in shock, I probably, you know, I felt like I could throw a rock at it.
It was silent.
Could hear crickets a quarter of a mile away.
This thing passed over my head, doing no more than 30, 35 miles an hour, very slowly, defying gravity.
I know what it takes to fly.
I know about the lift required and so forth.
No engine, no sound, defying gravity right over my head.
And I stood and watched it pass over the valley in which I lived, the Prom Valley headed to the west, basically, pretty much to the west, and watched it disappear.
And I wasn't the only one.
Many, many, many people in the valley in which I lived had the same sighting they saw it.
Contacted the air base, Nellis Air Force Base.
There appeared in the next week's newspaper a story saying, oh, yes, there was a secret mission that overflew the Brump Valley that night, responding to all the reports.
And it was an Air Force C-130 on a classified mission.
And what a joke.
You know, I flew in C-130s.
And it would have rattled your teeth at 150 feet in the air.
Big engines, big plane, silly response to what was seen.
And when you've seen something like that, Professor, it changes your life.
It was only one of two things that I've seen of that nature, but clearly it was either something so advanced that our own government has, or it was extraterrestrial.
And I can't claim to know enough to have a really intelligent explanation of what you saw.
I mean, as I was saying before, there's a lot of mystery left in our own sky and what we know about the universe.
I mean, I will say that it has, and you know about this, but it's come out and the U.S. military has admitted this, that a lot of the UFO sightings that people made in the 60s and in that era that the government denied or the government claimed was one thing or another,
that they've subsequently now admitted that a lot of those sightings were, in fact, experimental military craft that they wanted people to know about.
And they sometimes did make up cover-ups.
And that, of course, fuels a lot of the belief in cover-ups, which I think sometimes is a little bit, people take it a little bit far, but the U.S. government definitely fueled that by covering up some experimental craft.
All right, in a moment, we're really going to go to the telephone.
So if you have one near you and you would like to talk to somebody who's been through astronaut training, who studies other planets, and who comments readily on not only UFOs, but on the possibility of life elsewhere, then this would be your opportunity.
DeJazzo calls himself DeJazzo in Aurora, Colorado, says, Art, don't you believe that these UFOs we're seeing are merely probes from another planet?
Doesn't that make the most sense?
Well, it does make some sense, and we'll have the good doctor comment on that and begin taking your calls in a moment.
Just two very quick questions, Professor, and then we'll go to the phones.
One is the probe question.
Does it make sense to you that many of these craft that we see are in fact, you know, hit-say unmanned, but probes without intelligent life necessarily on them, just sort of checking us out?
Actually, you know, I think that makes a lot of sense, and I would have to say, you know, if you think of the possible reasons why there might be UFOs, I mean, you can think of all kinds of reasons why people might, you know, really want there to be aliens, whether there are or not.
But on the other hand, if you think of, well, what could there be?
You know, there have been various attempts at scientific arguments about that.
You know, people saying, well, they couldn't be because it's too far and they'd have to spend too much energy and it's not logical.
But I don't think we can second guess them and their capabilities and motivations and all that.
But if you think about it, as a scientist, I would love to send probes to another planet if I had the resources.
Of course, I do send probes to other planets, to Zenus and Mars and Titan.
And if I could send probes to planets around other stars, you know I would.
And so, you know, why shouldn't they be sending probes?
So that actually makes a lot of sense to me that they might be.
I haven't personally seen, you know, a piece of a probe that somebody's brought into my laboratory that made me think, yeah, that's an alien probe.
But if that happens next week, I would certainly welcome it.
At the moment you made the statement you did about the perfection of the conditions for human life on Earth being more of a scientific reality than perhaps a creation, Bub said you lost all credibility.
Now, with that kind of person in mind, you know, Bub obviously is a religious person, and I respect that, but boy, there's a lot of them out there, Doctor.
And so my question would be, if we got a radio signal, if we made contact with aliens, and who knows, but we may already have, and you were in charge of, I don't know, SETI or the decision to tell the world or not tell the world, what would you do?
Titan is actually a moon of Saturn, and there's not a lot of oxygen out there.
It's the same.
So, I mean, what makes methane, you know, you're right, it's natural gas that's explosive.
Methane can be very dangerous on Earth because it ignites, but it ignites in oxygen.
It's that chemical reaction between the methane and between the oxygen that's so explosive.
So if you actually have an environment like Titan that's all methane or very rich in methane but there's no oxygen, then it's actually it can't explode.
There has to be something for it to react with and it's in its own weird kind of equilibrium there.
Now, you know, so we could we couldn't spark it for the same reason.
There's nothing to for it to burn, you know, to react with.
But if you could somehow crash a planet like Titan into a planet like Earth with oxygen in its atmosphere, then look out.
You know, you could cause a really big explosion, but by itself, it's not going to explode.
Yeah, well, the moon is one of our more well-explored places.
But there's still a lot of ways in which we have not explored the moon well.
And we do have a sort of new generation of spacecraft going up there to check it out and map it.
And there are parts of the moon that we really haven't sampled.
And one of the things we're hoping to do with a future mission is go back and sample some of those interesting places now that we've had more time to observe it, and we know where some of the interesting places are.
As far as some obvious civilization or something on the moon, it's not there in the pictures, huge bases and cities and some of those kinds of things.
But whether there could be some kind of an alien probe at all on the moon, to me, that's actually a fascinating question.
I mean, the moon is a good place to observe Earth from if you think about it.
So one could imagine some tiny little alien thing sort of sitting there on the moon watching us.
And of course, in fiction, you think of 2001 by Kubrick and Clark.
And that was them there, that once we got to the moon, we discovered the alien artifact that, in fact, ended up opening up the whole universe to us.
So I am kind of fond of that idea.
And I think it's something we should be on the lookout for as we explore the moon further.
It's one of the really cool things we could do if we return to the moon and do large engineering projects there is build a giant radio telescope on the far side of the moon, which is then shielded from all of our noise, all of our radio, like we're generating right now.
And so for that reason, it's very radio quiet, the far side of the moon, and it'd be a great place to build a big telescope and listen for alien signals.
And I think that is something we will do sooner or later.
I've heard and read many times that people with negative blood types, no one can account for where they've come from, how a negative, you know, since it's very rare, there's been some talk of extraterrestrial descendants and so on, because no one can adequately explain why there are people on the planet with negative blood types.
To be honest, I don't know much about the evolution of blood types.
You know, my sort of bent is to be skeptical and think that the first thing I would do would be to kind of talk to biologists and say, well, how did this evolve?
Or could this be some sort of mutation or one of these weird adaptations that sometimes things that don't seem logical evolve because of some weird mechanics of a chromosome because they happen to be attached to something else that in some random way, some other trait is selected for.
So you'll get some random thing in evolution because of just the mechanics of the way the molecules work.
So I don't know, but I don't want to dismiss the idea that there might be some huge mystery there because you're in a specific topic that's not my expertise.
Yeah, and again, it's something that you certainly can't rule out, and I think some scientists may have a bias against it because it starts to sound whatever, creationist or whatever to them.
But it's funny, because I'm sure creationists would be offended by the idea, too.
So that's one thing that you have to say is a beautiful aspect of the theory of directed panspermia that it probably ticks off both scientists and creationists.
So I think just for that reason, we should adopt it as our preferred theory.
Again, that brings me back to, and I hate to bring up Brookings, but the Brookings Institute at one time did a study that said they didn't think it would be a good idea to tell the world if there was contact.
And certainly if that contact included information that we had been intentionally ceded, that would upset so many people that it would be better held secret.
That the people who receive that message would say, not let's hide it because we want to hide the fact that there's aliens, but they would learn something specific that they would say, this is knowledge that the general public shouldn't have.
If you like that, then in fact, if the information, if contact occurred and the information was that we were, in fact, seeded, and these were the seeders coming back to check on us, you would not release that information?
We're at another breakpoint, which is right now from Manila.
I'm Art Bell.
Well, here I am.
I just learned something interesting.
Our guest was only scheduled for the, in fact, it was supposed to be the end of it, I guess, this hour.
So we're going to go to Open Lines here shortly.
It's fine by me.
We'll talk about anything you want.
In fact, I look forward to open lines.
So we will...
Let's just bring Professor Grinspoon back right now and say, Professor, I didn't realize you had only been scheduled for the first three hours of the program.
So that's fine.
It's been a pleasure having you on the show.
And I hope you can come back and spend more time with us.
I'm really, really happy that you got back on the air this evening.
I'm calling from an inferior cell phone, so please accept my apologies.
My regular phone doesn't work because we're in the process of moving.
Anyway, I'm calling just to tell you how much we all love you and miss you.
And, you know, we listen to the people that they have on nowadays, all the hosts and everything.
And, you know, it's not the same.
We've been listening to you since 1994.
And my husband and I got married on December 31st, 2002 for a reason.
It was because my husband figured that I would finally be coming to bed at night when you retired back one of the millions of times that you did retire.
We're all secretly hoping that you come back out of retirement, at least on a somewhat semi-level.
Sorry about my inarticulate nature, but it is one o'clock in the morning here, and I think it's one o'clock in the morning in Denver.
Anyway, just God bless you, sweetheart, and we just love you.
We adore you, and you're the one who always let me vent about Bill Clinton and that I really loved him as our president, but I wish he'd kept his pants on.
In any case, God bless us all, and thank you so much for being on the air tonight.
There's a big, big controversy, you know, about whether or not the first Bigfoot found should be killed so that we can document the fact that the species actually exists.
And then, of course, there's a large argument against any such thing by most of the Bigfoot researchers.
And as you know, I had an interview with a fellow who claimed to have killed a couple of them.
Yeah, he's a charismatic priest that travels around the world and prays with the different, like the Vietnamese community and the Filipino community and goes to Thailand.
And anyhow, several years ago, this is like during the time that Bill Clinton was in office, I was at a Holy Spirit seminar at San Los Rey Mission in Oceanside, California, and met a great group of Filipinos who then sponsored me to go into one of their retreats in San Diego.
And this is where I met Father Orbos in prayer.
And I was with the Filipino women, 80 of them.
And, of course, I speak Spanish, so I understood Tagalog.
You know, I divorced his father, who was a silver star in Vietnam twice, and he was extremely combative with me when he came back from Vietnam, and that caused issues.
And anyhow, he kidnapped my son when he was very young, six and a half, and ever since.
But my son is brilliant, and I put him through law school in Los Angeles, and he didn't pass the bar, but he's working in a big company here in San Diego.
But I have one granddaughter by him now, and as she gets older, now she'll turn four in July, he's become extremely possessive of her and wants to limit people seeing my granddaughter.
And she looks so much like me and acts like me.
And it's like, and then he had cancer last year.
He turned up and had melanoma and fought cancer for six months.
And I've helped him through everything.
I raised him, put him through school, put him through UC Santa Barbara.
And he's just, he's got these mood swings that are just horrible.
I'm very, you know, I'm concerned about it that one can only do so much.
Well, why don't you encourage him to see a doctor?
You mentioned mood swings.
He may be perhaps bipolar.
There's a lot of that out there.
And bipolar people, of course, go through intense mood swings from extremely excited, extremely happy and pleased about just virtually everything to very serious depression.
And that's something that if it's that or something else, whatever it is, obviously you should see somebody about it.
Well, I would normally, I guess, express some giant surprise at what you've just said, but I'm not going to.
I believe that children, especially children, he said for my daughter's age, my daughter, for example, frequently will be lying in bed in our bedroom, and she'll wave at the ceiling.
She'll say, hi, hi, you know, as though somebody is greeting her.
And this has been going on now for the better part of a year, I would guess.
She's obviously seeing someone.
This is not a joke.
And I'm not just saying this to concur with that caller or anything else, but my daughter is, you know, I could have conjecture about who it might be.
But there is no question about it.
She is seeing somebody.
She is communicating with somebody.
And you know what I think?
I think that many small children do this in just a natural way.
They communicate with those who may have passed on.
They communicate with who knows who it is.
As I said, I could conjecture, and I do have some personal conjecture.
But there is no question she is seeing somebody.
And I think that what we do is we train our children away from this.
We train our children to say, or to believe as we do, that's silly.
There's nobody there.
Well, eventually, I guess they come to the same conclusion.
I used to get, it's not that I'm, how can I put this?
It's not that I don't like people because, of course, I do.
I love people.
But we used to have people who would knock on our door, middle of the night, any kind of strange time of day or night, and want to say hello or would ask for an autograph.
And you just sort of can't have that and have a semi-normal life at the same time.
So we had to end up putting up a fence, finally.
And in some ways, it's really nice to be here in the Philippines where not a lot of people know me.
So people would resort then to putting notes in mailboxes and that sort of thing.
And well, because I thought of this during the guest, and I was thinking, if we humans, if we're going to ruin this planet, if we do ruin it, what right should we have to go to other places and ruin them?
What is the morality of terraforming another planet like Mars, which would be the most convenient and probably the most possible, and then doing to it what we have done to this planet, you know, exploiting its resources, perhaps ruining what thin atmosphere we managed to create?
I don't know.
What do the rest of you think?
How do you feel about that?
If we eventually make Earth unlivable or nearly unlivable, then do we have a right To attempt to colonize another planet?
The answer to that is probably we don't have a moral right, but I think that we will do it nonetheless.
We want to see the human species continue.
And, you know, the fact that it's not morally an upright thing to do has never stopped us before.
I don't think it would stop us now.
Actually, the way things are going and the speed with which they are progressing, that quickening that I talked about once, might dictate that we're going to have to begin doing that fairly quickly, colonizing, I mean.
One would think we could put some kind of moss up there, something that would eventually create an atmosphere.
Would it bother the bugs or that which crawls below the surface of Mars?
We might not care.
I'm Art Bell.
Unscreened open lines.
That's what we're all about.
So if you have something you want to talk about, something you want to say, comment on the show, whatever it may be, pick up the phone.
Yes, I've been listening the last couple weeks because I'm on midnight, and I find this show fascinating.
But you know, there's one thing that people seem to forget.
If Adam lived 935 years before he died, you know, and then let's do his thousand or whatever, we automatically assumed that they weren't any smarter than we were, or we are.
So what if they're in the pure sense, if they're in a pure state of health, they might be in a pure state of intelligence, too.
So they might have, as they sinned and got shorter lifespan, they still might have been able to pass off enough information to the Egyptians and so forth and so on.
Maybe we've just been looking in the wrong direction.
And I had to get a chuckle out of what you guys were talking about earlier.
If you have to excuse me, I'm at work with the professor earlier when you were speaking of like the other aliens, possible aliens, and you were saying something about they might turn us into soup and worried about that.
And I couldn't help but think how other scientists knew.
I mean, if really, realistically, if you were an alien and you studied our society or our various societies, what conclusions would you come to?
We're constantly at war.
We're constantly killing each other.
If you observed our television, for example, you would probably imagine that that's what we do every day, is draw guns and kill people.
unidentified
But the chuckle that made me laugh was how the other scientists said he actually started trying to send out messages of the altruism with the stick figures and stuff.
I think I responded to that, and I said, so we'd lie.
In other words, if we send out a constant signal to the universe and we talk about ourselves, other than giving what I consider to be critical and possibly deadly information to the aliens, you know, the makeup of our genetic code, all the rest of it, what would we say about ourselves?
Would we send out this altruistic lie about how good we are?
I guess we could do that, but if they've actually been observing us, well, they'd know.
In the early years of Coast, I actually did it all.
In other words, not only did I run my own board, you know, in other words, electronically and mechanically, I ran everything.
I had all the incoming lines coming to my house as opposed to going to the network as they do now.
But I also gathered together all the guests.
When we did have guests, I gathered them all together.
I did that personally.
Now, that process has evolved, of course, and we now have a producer.
And I can tell you that when I speak with her, her name is Lisa, that is one of the biggest problems that she has as a producer for Coast to Coast AM.
That is keeping the show fresh.
What do you do to keep the show fresh?
Obviously, there are guests who are recurring guests, you know, come back again and again because they are so Interesting, but you have to be careful with that because you want new material on the air.
So it would be a question best served up to Lisa, and maybe we'll get her on the air one of these days if she hasn't been already, and she can explain the agonies of trying to keep something fresh.
And so the format itself lends itself to staying fresh.
But there are problems for a producer.
A producer is charged with constantly finding new people, new topics, new things.
And so it is a challenge.
But you're right.
The program's nexus, the center of it is the fact that it's so different.
unidentified
Well, you know, that kind of leads me into something I wanted to kind of promote.
And the listeners, I'm calling from the San Francisco Bay Area.
And we have a theater in San Leandro called the Bow Theater.
And Dan Dillman bought it and has revamped it.
It's one of these old theaters from the 50s that kept trying and trying to do things and never came about again.
But what he's doing is he's running documentaries, and then he gets people who had something to do with the documentary show up to the viewing and do a question-answer session afterwards.
And it's great.
The people get involved, and most of the people that are showing up are coast-to-coast listeners.
In fact, I've become a little bit of a celebrity.
George has been allowing me to plug it on the show, and George has plugged it.
And it was so funny a few weeks ago, I was, well, about a month and a half ago, I had called in and was plugging the next show coming up.
And I went to the showing and the question and answer session, and it was on cross circles.
It was great.
And afterwards, I'm walking up the aisle, and this woman approaches me, and she says, are you Mike from Livermore?
And I says, yeah.
And she goes, yeah, I heard you on the air last night.
And I had to come down.
And I'm telling you, people in the Bay Area, this is new and exciting.
And come down to just go on the internet, type in BAL Theater, and you'll find the links and the calendars and everything else for the events coming up.
And it brings, it's so nice to meet other coast-to-coast listeners and talk to them in person.
We had standing outside for an hour, hour and a half after the showing, talking to about eight or nine people.
Okay, well, I guess anything that we don't understand, whether it's disturbing or not, I mean, it is disturbing.
If you see something that ought not be there, something that might be classified as a ghost, even if it's not frowning or snarling at you or bearing its teeth at you, it's going to be disturbing because it doesn't belong there and it's going to upset you.
I have seen a number of photographs that I would classify as real ghost pictures.
We used to kind of collect them and put them on the website.
I think they still do that from time to time, but there have been things caught on film that I just don't see how you can deny what they very well might be.
On what I think is the international line, you're on the air.
Well, Richard Hoagland and I have gone around and around and around and around about this sort of thing.
The face on Mars, when it was a low-resolution shot, one of the early shots taken, really, clearly, I think, would cause anybody to say, you know, that might have been put there intentionally and it might be a face.
But when you see it with some of the higher resolution photographs taken at different sun angles, I think it may be dismissed.
Some of the pyramids, some of the other things seen on Mars, not so easily dismissed.
But where Richard sees, I don't know, people, faces, buildings, I kind of see rocks most of the time.
Okay, and I had an incident where, well, I woke up in the middle of the night and found there was a woman on top of me.
And she was nude, but I couldn't really see her face.
I feel like she had long black blowing hair, which covered her private areas.
And it was, I had a real, like, if you ball up every negative feeling that you could ever have, I felt that, you know, it was like radiating from her.
And I couldn't really move.
And then when I happened to look next to me, there was another woman laying down next to me, also nude with long flowing hair, also covering her parts.
But I felt a real like motherly presence from her, like how you would feel towards your mother, real protective.
And I happened to move when I saw her, and she had her arm extended, like trying to reach out to me, but she couldn't.
She was right next to me.
And as soon as I was able to move then, because I focused on her, try to reach out to her.
And right before our hands touched, I just woke up.