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April 9, 2010 - Art Bell

02:38:44

Coast to Coast AM with Art Bell - Astrobiology and Astronaut Training - David Grinspoon

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01:04:03

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01:07:37

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art bell ▲ ● ▼		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.
unidentified		Come on, $530,000.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		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.
		I should say welcome back.
		You've been on before.
david grinspoon ▲ ● ▼		Thanks very much.
david grinspoon ▲ ● ▼		It's a pleasure to be back.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Great to have you.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Actually, I don't...
david grinspoon ▲ ● ▼		I'm in Denver, Colorado.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Denver, Colorado.
		Okay.
		I don't know where to start.
		Lonely Planets, how did you come up with a name and why the name Lonely Planets?
david grinspoon ▲ ● ▼		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.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Do you think we really are primitive as compared to what else may be out there?
david grinspoon ▲ ● ▼		Oh, certainly.
		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.
		And compared to them, we must be very primitive.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Did you see District 9, the movie?
david grinspoon ▲ ● ▼		Oh, yeah.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Oh, yeah.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		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?
david grinspoon ▲ ● ▼		Well, it depends on how you look at it.
		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.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right.
		Well, then let me hit you up with one other movie reference, and then we'll leave it.
		Avatar.
		You must have seen that, obviously.
david grinspoon ▲ ● ▼		Of course.
david grinspoon ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
unidentified		Loved it.
david grinspoon ▲ ● ▼		Loved it.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		You loved it.
unidentified		Yeah.
david grinspoon ▲ ● ▼		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.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I've got a very good friend.
		He's a professor over.
		I talk to him on ham radio almost every night over in Thailand in Bangkok.
		And he hated the movie.
		He teaches motion pictures.
		And he hated the movie.
		And he's the first person I've run into that really just absolutely hated it based on the story.
		He found some hand.
david grinspoon ▲ ● ▼		What was it that he didn't like?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Oh, you don't want to ask.
		I mean, he just had a whole litany of things that were wrong with the story.
		I personally loved it.
		I saw it, you know, in 3D and all the rest of it here, and I thought it was spectacular.
david grinspoon ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, that 3D was so cool.
		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.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, the connected aspect of it all.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		You know, the trees, the birds, the animals, all of that.
david grinspoon ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, I agree.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		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.
		Well, that's what I think.
david grinspoon ▲ ● ▼		Well, wouldn't it be nice if our planet came under threat and all those creatures that we normally eat decided to help us out?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		It would be, yeah, that'd be great.
		Listen, there's a new survey.
		I read it at the beginning of the show.
		20% of those polled, that's about 23,000 adults in 22 countries, believe actually that aliens are not only real, but here walking among us.
david grinspoon ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, I I heard that.
		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.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		There you go.
		All right.
		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.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		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?
		Have you seen this yet?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I've heard about it, yes.
unidentified		Yeah.
		So he's going to go over that.
		Exactly what happens.
		He wrote a book called House to House.
		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.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		And did you hear the breaking news from AP at the top of the hour?
unidentified		I didn't hear whether...
art bell ▲ ● ▼		No, no, no.
		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.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Sounds like a Vatican Watergate.
unidentified		It is, very much so.
		Or, well, we'll find out.
		But we'll see whether it goes all the way up to Pope John Paul II.
		Maybe he even knew about it.
		That's what the authors say.
		Not just Ratzinger, but also all the way up to the first, Pope John Paul II.
		So we'll find out more on Sunday.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right.
		Ian Punnett, thank you very much.
		This sounds like a wild weekend.
		Take care about it.
unidentified		You too ready.
unidentified		Yeah.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Right.
		All right.
		Back now to Dr. Grinsmoon.
		Doctor, it is Dr. Grinsmoon, right?
		Is that correct?
david grinspoon ▲ ● ▼		That's right.
david grinspoon ▲ ● ▼		Yes.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Okay, good, good, good, good.
david grinspoon ▲ ● ▼		Although I'm not the kind of doctor that could actually heal you or tell you what's wrong with you or anything like that.
david grinspoon ▲ ● ▼		It's more esoteric knowledge I have.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right.
		All right.
		So again, just let's finish up.
		You know, that's a lot of people.
		I mean, if 20% of the world's population thinks that aliens actually live among us, that's a pretty serious statement.
		Even if you totally dismiss it, it's 20% of the people.
david grinspoon ▲ ● ▼		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.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		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?
david grinspoon ▲ ● ▼		Certainly, certainly.
		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.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		What do you think the odds are that intelligent alien life would be friendly to us?
unidentified		Well, you know, I think that I'm setting a trap for you, so.
david grinspoon ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, okay, well, that's good.
		That's good.
		I'm ready.
		I hope I'm ready for your trap.
		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.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		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.
unidentified		That's right.
david grinspoon ▲ ● ▼		That's right.
		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.
		And that's sort of a sobering way to think of it.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Okay, that's it.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Are you a fan of SETI?
david grinspoon ▲ ● ▼		Yes, of course.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Of course.
david grinspoon ▲ ● ▼		I am too.
		We have to listen.
		I mean, we're curious creatures.
		We can't turn our backs on the universe.
		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.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		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.
		Are you an advocate of active SETI?
david grinspoon ▲ ● ▼		It's a great question.
		And you're right.
		There's been recent controversy about it.
		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.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		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.
david grinspoon ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, no, it's true.
		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.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Breakpoint.
		We've got a breakpoint here.
		Hold tight, Dave.
		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?
david grinspoon ▲ ● ▼		Well, it's a good question.
		And, you know, I think the human race is very much at sort of a crossroads right now.
		We're not good at thinking on the long term.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		And not even to the next quarter, frankly.
david grinspoon ▲ ● ▼		That's right.
		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.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		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.
unidentified		It's just that everybody's listening.
david grinspoon ▲ ● ▼		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.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		So you're prepared to encourage people to begin a constant transmission?
david grinspoon ▲ ● ▼		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.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		So that meeting, I guess, would have to decide on the nature of the message that we would send.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Do you have any thoughts about what might be good?
david grinspoon ▲ ● ▼		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.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		It might be kind of a lie.
		I mean, stick figures being friendly to each other.
		Stick figures with guns might be more like.
unidentified		Yeah, yeah.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		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.
david grinspoon ▲ ● ▼		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.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		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.
david grinspoon ▲ ● ▼		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.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		To serve man.
david grinspoon ▲ ● ▼		To serve man, that's right.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Okay, you've trained to be an astronaut.
		I think you've recently gone through astronaut training.
		Can you give us all an idea of what that's like?
david grinspoon ▲ ● ▼		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.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		For long periods, Doctor?
david grinspoon ▲ ● ▼		No, no, the acceleration is.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		No, no, no, no, no.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I meant that to ask if human beings can withstand the environment of space for long periods.
david grinspoon ▲ ● ▼		Oh, I see what you mean.
		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.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		You think so?
		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.
		And I've never been able to find that.
		Any thoughts on that?
david grinspoon ▲ ● ▼		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.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		So save your seed before the Van Owen build.
david grinspoon ▲ ● ▼		Well, that's what I would advise, yes.
david grinspoon ▲ ● ▼		If you have not reproduced and you intend to, I would say put some in the freezer before you go.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		That makes sense to me.
		You said that you have met a number of astronauts.
		Did you talk to any that were on the moon?
david grinspoon ▲ ● ▼		Oh, yeah, I've met Doug Aldrin, and I've spent a little bit of time with him at some conferences and a couple of the other astronauts.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I'm sorry I have to stop you there.
		We're again at a breakpoint.
		They come, and I can't stop them.
		The clock just keeps on going.
		From Manila in the Philippines, I'm Art Bell.
		From Manila in the Philippines, Southeast Asia.
		Good morning, everybody.
		Professor David Rittenspoon is my guest.
		He has just recently gone through astronaut training.
		In fact, will be orbiting the Earth low Earth orbit missions that are funded privately.
		And there's a lot more going on in that area that you know about.
		It's happening very quietly.
		I have some friends that are involved in that, so I know something about it, and it's fascinating.
		It's amazing what's being done in the private sector.
		Well, more about that in a moment.
		Professor, I don't think that a lot of Americans understand how quickly the private sector is moving ahead with space travel.
		And indeed, as you point out, tourist space travel where they're working on virtual hotels in space, that sort of thing.
		You're very up on that, I'm sure.
david grinspoon ▲ ● ▼		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.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		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.
		And it's a shame, isn't it?
david grinspoon ▲ ● ▼		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.
		And that's exciting to me.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Very exciting.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		You're studying Titan, which you claim is a fascinating and strangely Earth-like place, correct?
david grinspoon ▲ ● ▼		Yes.
		It's a delightful surprise of recent planetary exploration.
		Titan is a moon of Saturn.
		It's the one really large moon that Saturn has.
		It's one of the largest moons in the solar system.
		And it's really a planet in its own right.
		It would be called a planet if it were orbiting the sun.
		It's as large and complex and interesting as, you know, more interesting than most planets, I would say.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Okay, well, Earth-like in what sense?
david grinspoon ▲ ● ▼		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.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Okay.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		So you've studied climates of some of the nearby planetary bodies, I would presume including Mars.
david grinspoon ▲ ● ▼		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.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		And we'll get to that.
		Mars is very interesting.
		Mars, apparently, I think most scientists believe, at one time had more of a climate.
		And there was perhaps billions of years ago a collision, it is thought, that stripped Mars of its climate.
		Is that your understanding?
david grinspoon ▲ ● ▼		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.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Okay.
		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?
david grinspoon ▲ ● ▼		Well, yeah, I think that one day it's possible.
		And there are a lot of questions.
		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?
		So I think it's a useful thing to do.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Can I stop you right there and ask you?
		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?
david grinspoon ▲ ● ▼		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.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		So you tend to think it's a real phenomenon.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		It really is a real phenomenon.
david grinspoon ▲ ● ▼		Well, yeah, like you said, look at what's happening with the sea ice.
		You know, that's like it's not 100% certain that that is connected with man-made global warming, but it seems likely.
		And if so, then it's alarming because the change is happening pretty rapidly.
		And so you've got to take seriously some of these sort of more worst-case scenarios.
		And, you know, we just don't want to mess with that, really, do we?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		See, I go back to Mars now.
		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.
david grinspoon ▲ ● ▼		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.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, that's right.
		That's absolutely right.
		So Mars is a practical possibility.
		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.
david grinspoon ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, we cannot save the bulk of humanity by moving them to Mars.
		It's impossible.
		You know, it's an insurance policy against the human race being wiped out, and it may be something that we want to do in its own right.
		If Mars turns out to be dead, maybe there's a value in cultivating it.
		But it's not like we're going to move everybody there.
		So we have to save Earth from the worst ravages of human civilization if we want to save humanity en masse.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I mean, here the controversy rages on the political right.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		They've already decided that the whole thing is a hoax, and so forget about it.
david grinspoon ▲ ● ▼		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.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		We sure do have to find something fairly quickly, I would think.
		We had a taste of some very high oil prices recently.
		Really, that's kind of what tipped us into this recession-slash depression that we're still going through.
		I think oil got up around $150 a barrel, something like that, and it's creeping up yet again.
		And our society is so based on oil that obviously we can't stand that.
		So we're going to have to start doing something quickly.
		I would have imagined this administration would have moved very quickly to some sort of alternative energy source.
		But I don't see them moving that quickly.
		Dr. hold tight right there.
		We're going to take a break as we always have to do.
		The clock just keeps marching forward.
		Honored with Dr. David Grinspoon, my guest.
		I'm Art Bell in Manila, Philippines, and we're talking about them.
unidentified		We'll be right back.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Indeed, here I am.
		It's been interesting this afternoon.
		We've had not a brownout, but our power has dipped, something I guess you didn't notice a couple of times.
		It is so dry here, as I mentioned earlier.
		We've had, I don't know, months and months and months.
		The first year I came here, we had nothing but rain.
		As you know, rain and rain and rain, and then Andoe, which absolutely flooded the whole place.
		And this year, not a drop.
		It has literally been desert-like blue skies now, day after day, month after month.
		It's kind of scary, you know, for an island with rainforests and such.
		My guest, Dr. David Grinspoon, astronaut training.
		We'll do low Earth orbit missions, studies, other planetary bodies, just an absolutely commenting on SETI.
		We're just going all over the place, and we'll get back to him in a moment.
		Once again, Dr. David Grinspoon.
		Doctor, do you know Bob Bigelow by any chance?
david grinspoon ▲ ● ▼		I do not, actually.
david grinspoon ▲ ● ▼		I know who he is, and I think we've spoken on, I think we were on a radio show together, but I haven't met him in person.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Fascinating guy.
		Along with Virgin, Bob Bigelow has an active program right now.
		He plans a hotel in space.
		He's got a couple of, at least a couple of satellites in orbit.
david grinspoon ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, he's got a very innovative mind and has really, I think, very clever ideas for new, low-cost ways to build space structures.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Certainly does.
		He's a good friend of mine, and I got to tour his aerospace facility.
		It was pretty mind-expanding.
		know what's going on in the private sector is amazing.
		You also said that you spoke with several...
		Dr. Mitchell, of course, got to walk on the moon.
		And I asked Dr. Mitchell to sort of close his eyes.
		I've said this before on the show, but it's always hung with me.
		I said, would you do me a favor and just close your eyes and tell me what it, recall it for me.
		Tell me what it felt like and what your emotions were when you walked on another body in space.
		And, you know, his answer was long in coming.
		There was a long pause, and he said, you know, Art, it's a strange thing, but I don't remember.
		And I thought, my God, how can that be?
		How could you walk on the moon and not remember your emotions and not remember what it was like?
		And it just seemed impossible to me.
david grinspoon ▲ ● ▼		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.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Maybe so.
unidentified		Maybe so.
david grinspoon ▲ ● ▼		But several people have had profound reactions to being up there.
		It's easy to understand.
		Another astronaut I've gotten to know pretty well is Rusty Schweikert, who was involved in Apollo.
		He did not go to the moon, but he was involved in, you know, he spent a lot of time in space.
		He did one of the first long spacewalks.
		And, you know, he had a very profound reaction and wrote really beautifully about being up there.
		And one of the things he said was he sort of felt like he was almost a censor for the human race, like, you know, the advanced probe up there.
		And it was his responsibility to try to remember and try to relate that because he was sort of experiencing it for all of us.
		So that struck me as a really kind of profound sensation that he had.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, if you're lucky, you'll get to experience it yourself.
david grinspoon ▲ ● ▼		Well, I certainly hope so.
david grinspoon ▲ ● ▼		I'd love to come back on the show and talk to you about what it was like.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		And please do.
		You know, if that occurs, I would ask you the same question to simply close your eyes and recall what you saw and how you felt and all the rest of it.
		For those of us who've never done it, that's a very, very important question, or the answer to it's an important answer.
david grinspoon ▲ ● ▼		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?
david grinspoon ▲ ● ▼		Tell me now while you're up there, you know, so they won't have to remember.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		That's a very good point.
		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.
david grinspoon ▲ ● ▼		And the individuals who have gone up have not been representative of all humanity.
		I mean, they've been, you know, really have been the right stuff in a lot of ways.
		And they're very carefully chosen to be able to do a certain kind of job in a certain kind of way, which is very understandable.
		And it's worked really well.
		But I think a much broader range of human beings are going to be going up.
		We're going to have artists and poets and people with a wider range of sort of emotional reactions to things and ability to relate.
		So I think that's going to really change the experience for the rest of us as well.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I would think being able to look down on the Earth in that way would be such a sobering experience.
		Well, anyway, you are involved in so much research of other planetary bodies.
		For example, Venus, I believe, right?
david grinspoon ▲ ● ▼		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?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		In this just recent week, I think in the journal Science, they found or announced active volcanoes having been discovered on Venus.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Is that right?
david grinspoon ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, yeah.
		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.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Let me ask you a couple of out-on-the-limb questions, if you don't mind.
		I'm curious, you're a scientist, hard science at that, and you're contemplating the possibility of life on other planets, your book Lonely Planets.
		Do you think that all we see about us, which appears to be so perfect for man, I mean, everything is just right.
		If you discount the global warming and all the rest of it, everything else is just right.
		You know, the right amount of this and the right amount of that.
		And if it wasn't so, then man obviously wouldn't be here, nor, I guess, would be most of the animals.
		So does that imply to you the possibility of creation, or does the hard science part of you just stick with evolution all the way?
david grinspoon ▲ ● ▼		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.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		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.
david grinspoon ▲ ● ▼		Exactly.
		And we being the intelligent slugs that we are, you know, we're the only intelligent kind of creatures that could exist on a planet like this.
		Therefore, you know, it's perfect.
		And maybe the slug-like creator who created slugs in his own image created this planet.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yes.
		Yeah.
		So you take the pretty hard-bitten science way of looking at it.
david grinspoon ▲ ● ▼		Well, I guess so.
		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.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		There sure are.
unidentified		Have you seen a UFO?
unidentified		Yes.
david grinspoon ▲ ● ▼		You didn't expect me to say that, did you?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		No, I didn't.
		No, of course not.
		Wasn't one of the questions.
		But I've got a reason for asking.
		Describe what you've seen.
david grinspoon ▲ ● ▼		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.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Entity.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Interesting.
david grinspoon ▲ ● ▼		Okay.
		And one time I was in California when I was, much more recently when I was a postdoc, and I was on the beach.
		And I don't know, I saw some very strange craft fly overhead that I had never seen photographs of or seen described.
		And it seemed like a weird contraption.
		It didn't necessarily seem alien, but it was certainly something I didn't know what it was.
		It seemed like some sort of a drone contraption.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		A drone contraption.
david grinspoon ▲ ● ▼		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.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		It tells you that so many people believe in UFOs, believe that they're extraterrestrial life of some sort, right?
david grinspoon ▲ ● ▼		Well, I mean, it fuels that belief.
		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.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, I had a very close encounter.
		I had a triangular object come over my head.
		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 tend toward believing the latter.
unidentified		Wow.
david grinspoon ▲ ● ▼		Well, that's a powerful experience.
		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.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, and sometimes there really are cover-ups.
		From Manila in the Philippines, I'm Art Bell.
		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?
david grinspoon ▲ ● ▼		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.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Bob, somebody calling himself Bub, fast blast me.
		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?
david grinspoon ▲ ● ▼		Oh, I'd tell the world immediately.
unidentified		You would.
david grinspoon ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, no question in mind.
		You can't keep something like that a secret.
		I mean, you can't in two senses.
		I don't think it would work.
		I don't think you'd be able to.
		And also, you know, sort of morally, you can't.
		I think that that knowledge doesn't belong to just the scientists who discovered it.
		It's, you know, the public is supporting them in some way or another.
		And it's, you know, that's important knowledge for mankind, for humankind that you would want to spread.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Of course.
		Yes, of course.
		But you wouldn't be in fear that all the bubs of the world would basically lose it.
david grinspoon ▲ ● ▼		Well, they lose something for sure.
		I don't know what it would be.
		I think anybody's worldview would be all of us would have our worldview challenged and shaken and enlarged, I think, in some way.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Okay.
		All right.
		Let's go to the phones, I promised, and here it comes.
		On the wildcard line, one of the wildcard lines, you're on the air with Professor Grinspoon.
unidentified		Hi.
		Hi, gentlemen.
		How are you doing tonight?
		Dr. Oslake.
		All right, good to hear you.
		I'd like to ask a question.
		You mentioned, Doctor, the Titan moon of Jupiter, and it's methane, and it rains methane, has methane rivers and lakes and atmosphere.
		How come one of those don't cause a landslide that creates a spark?
		Methane ignites without oxygen.
		How come the whole place doesn't just blow up?
		And secondarily, could we blow it up intentionally if we wanted to?
		Okay, there you go.
david grinspoon ▲ ● ▼		No, it's a fair question.
		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.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Okay, so even if we wanted to, we couldn't do it.
david grinspoon ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, that's right, because there's nothing for it.
david grinspoon ▲ ● ▼		There's no oxygen, so it's sort of inert in that environment.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Okay, let's see.
		Let's go.
		I'm not really sure.
		I think this would be East of the Rockies.
		You're on the air with Dr. Grinsmoon.
		Good morning.
david grinspoon ▲ ● ▼		All right.
unidentified		Long time listener.
		Glad to hear you.
		Basically, my question is, dark side of the moon, we've always heard that there's some kind of alien sitting out there.
		Is there any way we can set a probe or something out there to check?
		Or maybe they even dug something in there.
		Maybe the moon is hollow or something.
		Maybe that's where they keep an eye on us.
		I mean, I've always heard that, and that's just my question, you know.
david grinspoon ▲ ● ▼		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.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		And I think the far side of the moon would be a great place for a giant radio telescope, wouldn't it?
david grinspoon ▲ ● ▼		Absolutely.
		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.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right.
		Let's move.
		I think this would be east of the Rockies, I think.
		You're on there with Dr. Grinsman.
		Hello.
		Going once.
unidentified		How about west of the Rockies?
unidentified		Hello.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		How you are there?
unidentified		Yeah, this is me, David.
		I've been listening to you since Richard C. Hoagland discussed the control of the atmosphere and the line.
		Yeah.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Anyway, do you have to?
unidentified		Control the weather.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Okay.
unidentified		I think it's time we get back to that in relation to what's going on today.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		If we could control the weather, this would be a gym dandy time to begin.
		There's no question about that.
		So you're suggesting that we control the weather?
unidentified		I think we have come to the point where we are controlling the weather.
unidentified		If you consider what the weather was like back when he said that there was control being built for purposes of control of the weather.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right.
		We'll take it from right there, I guess.
		Any prospect, David?
		It is an interesting question.
		Do you think we have any chance of getting to the point where we actually can control our weather?
		Obviously, if we could, I think we would be right now.
		The Russians made some claims that they could, by satellite, create monsoons or typhoons and actually offered to do it.
david grinspoon ▲ ● ▼		You know, there's a long history of, of course, of humans thinking that we can control things that we really can't, right?
		And certainly we're affecting the weather now, and we're affecting the environment, we're affecting the climate.
		I think using the word control almost gives us too much credit for knowing.
		There have been limited cases where PBL people have figured out how to create storms by feeding clouds.
		I think as far as anything like creating a typhoon or something, I think that is something that we haven't really mastered.
		I don't know, the whole notion of trying to Control the weather.
		I mean, climate is one thing where you're gradually changing the overall environment of a planet.
		But the weather, you know, it's such small-scale, kind of random events.
		And, you know, I don't really know if I want it controlled.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		There are those who would suggest perhaps we better get at something like that before we consider other planets.
		But, oh, well, good morning on the international line.
		You're on the air with Dr. Grinspoon.
unidentified		Oh, hi, Eric.
		What a pleasure.
		You're one of my great American idols.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Thank you.
unidentified		You're welcome, no problem.
		And Mr. Greenspoon, is it?
		Yes, I wanted to ask for a long time.
		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.
		They don't fit in with most of the population.
david grinspoon ▲ ● ▼		That's an interesting theory.
		I had not heard that before.
		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.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Okay, well, I don't want to upset the bubs out there in the world again, but isn't it possible, Professor, that we are alien?
		And by that I mean that Earth was, in fact, seeded with life at some point.
		As you know, when scientists look at evolution, the evolutionary process, there are gaps that seem very difficult to explain.
		In fact, have not been explained.
		You know, when man suddenly, intelligent man suddenly appeared, there's some strange gaps in there.
		And isn't it possible that life, in fact, was seeded by aliens?
		And we could be all aliens.
david grinspoon ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, well, it's quite possible.
		I mean, it depends on what you really mean by seeded and aliens.
		I mean, when you say maybe we really are aliens, there's a couple senses in which that could be true.
		And we know that when the planets were young, they were exchanging material frequently.
		Planets were getting bombarded by asteroids and comets, and shards were getting chipped off.
		And just as we have some Martian meteorites here on Earth, that transfer between planets was much more common back then.
		And so there were pieces of Earth falling on Mars and pieces of Mars falling on Earth.
		And if there were viable bacteria or simple life on any of those planets, a certain number of them would have been able to hit your ride.
		And so life could easily have been seeded on Earth from Mars or from Venus.
		We know both those planets had more sort of clement climates when they were young and probably had liquid water.
		So we could be Martians.
		We could be Venusians.
		Now, whether life could have been intentionally seeded on Earth by an intelligent species is an entirely different question.
		And that's a theory that scientists have a fancy name for, which we call directed panspermia.
		The idea that life could be purposefully seeded by an intelligent species that wanted to spread life to other plants.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, I would not have used that word, but that's exactly what I was driving at.
david grinspoon ▲ ● ▼		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.
david grinspoon ▲ ● ▼		But it's funny, because I'm sure creationists would be offended by the idea, too.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		That's right.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		It offends just about everybody, I guess.
david grinspoon ▲ ● ▼		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.
david grinspoon ▲ ● ▼		So I think just for that reason, we should adopt it as our preferred theory.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		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.
		Now, you said you didn't think.
david grinspoon ▲ ● ▼		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.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, exactly.
david grinspoon ▲ ● ▼		There you go.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I don't wrinkle.
		I like that.
		Okay.
		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?
david grinspoon ▲ ● ▼		I'm not saying that.
		I'd say the notion just struck me that, wow, what if there was some specific content that you didn't want people to know?
		That would change the morality.
		But if you're asking me specifically if I learned that we had been seated, would I hide that?
		Yes.
		No, no, I don't think I would want to hide that.
unidentified		I think that you're right, it would upset almost everybody.
david grinspoon ▲ ● ▼		Or it would be more upsetting than just contact by itself.
		But I still have to do that.
		That's right.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Professor Lauren.
david grinspoon ▲ ● ▼		I'm not sure to hide it.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Right.
		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.
david grinspoon ▲ ● ▼		Yo, it's been a blast for me, and I'd love to come back.
david grinspoon ▲ ● ▼		And, you know, the time flies by when you're talking to interesting people about interesting things.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		It indeed does.
		Okay, my friend, thank you so much for being here, and you have a good sleep.
		I'm sure you will.
david grinspoon ▲ ● ▼		Okay, thanks a lot.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Take care, and good night.
		I'm going to talk about what time it might be in Denver, but it's very, very early in the morning.
		No question about that, or late in the morning, I guess would be the way to put it.
		All right, so we're going to go to open lines.
		Anybody who has anything, that's great.
		I look forward to this.
		As you know, I love unscreened open lines.
		So what that means is pick up the phone and just call.
		Whatever's on your mind, you and I will chat about.
		West of the Rockies, 1-800-618-8255.
		East of the Rockies, 1-800-825-5033.
		And we do have quite a number of wildcard lines.
		Area code 818-501-4109-4109.
		The international line out of the country.
		Get hold of your AT ⁇ T operator.
		Tell her you want to call 1-800-893-0903.
		And she will connect you.
		And we'll just open it up to anything and everything.
		Coming up in a moment.
		All right.
		As I mentioned, we give the screener an hour off here and simply open the lines to anything you want to talk about.
		You've got the numbers, and I've got the lines.
		So here we go.
		Good morning.
		It says here, as he tries to press the button.
		Yeah, there we go.
		You're on the air.
unidentified		I am.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		You are.
unidentified		It's the commercial.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, turn your radio off.
		By the way, everybody, you've got to turn your radio off right away when you get on the air.
		Look, there's a time delay.
		Don't worry about it.
		Turn your radio off and let her rip.
unidentified		Can I talk to Eric?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Okay.
		You've got to really turn that radio off and proceed, sir.
		You're on the air.
		Honest to goodness.
unidentified		Hey, Eric.
unidentified		How are you doing?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I'm doing fine, sir.
unidentified		I'm just a first-time caller been listening to you forever.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, I haven't been here forever, but I appreciate the thought.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		It makes me feel a little bit.
unidentified		Well, no, thank you.
unidentified		I got my kitty sitting on my lap, and I just want to thank you for everything you've done for me.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		You're very welcome, sir.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Is there anything specifically you want to ask?
unidentified		No, I just wanted to say hi to you.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Okay, well, you give your kitty a good pat for me, and as you know, I'm a cat person.
		I love cats.
		I have spent, this will boggle your mind.
		My kittens, they're not kittens anymore.
		What am I talking about, though?
		Dolly is still sort of in kittenhood.
		We've bounced back and forth between the United States and Southeast Asia a few times, as you know.
		I have spent $18,000 in cat moving.
		That's right.
		$18,000 in cat moving.
		Is that ridiculous or what?
		But I have a no-cat left-behind policy.
		West of the Rockies, you're on the air.
		Good morning.
unidentified		Hello, Arch.
unidentified		It's Deb Deb from Green Valley.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Hey, hey, how are you doing?
unidentified		I'm pretty good.
		Thanks.
		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.
		We all love you.
		All right.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Thank you so very much.
		And good night.
		Yeah, I guess we all do go back just a ways, huh?
		Let's go east of the Rockies.
		Say good morning.
		You're on the air.
		Hello.
unidentified		Hello?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yes.
unidentified		Hi.
unidentified		I'm sorry.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Don't be sorry.
unidentified		Just proceed.
		Okay, got some questions about cryptozoology.
		Okay.
		I live in southeast Texas.
		I'm an avid hunter.
		I spent most of my life.
		I'm 42 years old.
		I spent most of my life in the woods hunting.
		I've hunted about any animal in North America.
		Three years ago, I saw something in Montgomery County on the San Jacinto River bottom.
		I do not quite know how to explain.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, do your best.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		What did you see?
unidentified		It looked like an ape.
		Okay.
		But it moved like a man.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		You're describing Bigfoot.
unidentified		I saw it through my rifle sights.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		But you didn't pull the trigger?
unidentified		No, I did not.
		I had all intention to kill this animal.
		I first saw it because I did not know what it was.
		And I've been able to kill anything I've ever come across.
		When this happened, I could not pull the trigger.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		That's interesting.
		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.
		But that's another show, isn't it?
		Wildcard line, you're on the air.
		Good morning.
unidentified		Good morning, there, Aric.
unidentified		How are you?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I'm very well indeed.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Thank you.
unidentified		This is Diane Newman-Gregerson from California.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Okay.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		We want to try and eliminate last name.
unidentified		Oh, I beg your pardon.
unidentified		I'm sorry.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		We'll just say Diane.
unidentified		Yes, we'll say Diane.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Okay, Diane.
unidentified		That'll be fine.
		I understand you're in Manila now.
		I understand that correctly.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		You do indeed.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		That's where I am.
unidentified		Wonderful.
		In the Catholic Church, I've attended for many years.
		I have many friends from the Filipino community.
		In fact, our priest is Filipino, and I actually went to a Filipino Corsilio.
		I don't know if you know what that is.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Oh, this is a very, very Catholic country, as I guess you're aware.
unidentified		I know.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I believe we're 87% Catholic and about 10% Muslim and other assorted.
unidentified		Right, right.
		Well, the Corsilio is like, you know, it's a religious kind of part of the Catholic Church, and it's like a charismatic movement.
		And I met Father Orbos.
		I don't know if you have met him yet.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I have not.
unidentified		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.
		And we were in a retreat for five days.
		And I've done that several times, so obviously.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, they are different languages.
		Tagalog is one language.
		And, of course, if you speak Spanish, there are some similarities, but only a few.
unidentified		Absolutely.
		Absolutely.
		I'm really pleased to hear you again.
		I was talking to my hairstylist who used to work up in Hollywood in Orange County, and her husband is a retired FBI agent.
		And she's telling me she's listening to Coast to Coast.
		And I said, well, I used to listen to Art Bell.
		She said, well, he's on there sometimes.
		And I said, well, good.
		I like to listen to him again.
		I know that you're very intuitive.
		I am having, this is something completely different than the Catholic Church.
		I'm having an issue with my only son.
		I mean, do you care to talk about that, or is that okay with you?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Your only son?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		What's the issue?
unidentified		Well, the issue is he's my only child.
		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.
		He's 39.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		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.
		First time caller line, you're on the air.
unidentified		Hey, how you doing?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I'm doing quite well, thank you.
unidentified		Pleasure to speak with you.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Pleasure to speak with you.
unidentified		What's up?
		My great niece had a weird incident.
		I've been listening to you guys for years.
		Mainly for entertainment, driving down the road.
		my great niece is three years old and was sitting on my niece's new house they just bought up here in Michigan.
		And uh she said there's asking herself my niece is like, what are you talking about?
		She says, oh, it's my imaginary friend, don't you feel?
		She's laughing.
		She's going, no, no.
		She goes, oh, don't be silly, mom.
		And my niece goes, well, what's he look like?
		She goes, oh, he's kind of bald, heads glasses.
		He's really friendly.
		He's my new best friend.
		So my niece goes to the photo album and pulls out a picture of my dad who passed away about eight years ago.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yes.
unidentified		And she goes, that's him.
unidentified		I just thought that, you know, for, I just thought that was kind of a stony.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		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.
		That's silly.
		There's nobody there.
		And they no longer see them.
		That doesn't mean there wasn't somebody there.
		Wildcard line, you're on the air.
		Good morning.
unidentified		Mr. Bell, how are you doing?
david grinspoon ▲ ● ▼		I am one of your biggest fans from Bismarck, North Dakota.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Thank you.
		Doing quite well.
		Thank you.
unidentified		I have a question for you.
david grinspoon ▲ ● ▼		This may be completely untrue.
		I don't know.
		Do you still own property in Perrump?
		I know you used to live there and now live in the field.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yes, of course.
		Yes.
		Oh, yes.
		I have two houses there and quite a bit of property.
unidentified		Yes.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Okay.
david grinspoon ▲ ● ▼		Well, the reason I ask is I have a friend here that made a trip down to Las Vegas a couple years back when Oscar used to call the show a lot.
		And he went through Perump and said he put a note in your mailbox that Oscar was here.
		I was just wondering if that's true.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yes, it's true.
		It's absolutely true.
		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.
		So I had a lot of notes in my mailbox.
		And I do think that I recall Oscar, actually.
		Wildcard line, you're on the air.
		Good morning.
unidentified		Good morning.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Hi.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Turn your radio off, please.
unidentified		Okay, I was surprised.
unidentified		I wanted to ask a question about colonizing space.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yes.
unidentified		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?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Absolutely not at all is the answer.
		We have to either change our ways, but of course, you know, we want to continue living.
		We want the species to continue.
		So even if we don't change our ways, I guess we will pursue a policy of trying to get humans to, for example, Mars.
		That's hard, but it's probably doable.
		Now, is it moral?
		Maybe not.
		But, you know, that's really never stopped the human instinct for survival.
unidentified		You're right.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		So my guess is we'll try.
unidentified		Yeah, I hope we don't.
		I mean, I hope we don't ruin Earth.
		Hey, this was great.
		Thanks.
		It was great to get to talk to you.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, it's good to talk to you.
		Thank you very much.
		No, you know, it's a good question.
		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.
		We're right here, and we will be right back.
		All right, let's do it.
		Unscreened open lines means just that.
		Wildcard line, you're on the air.
		Good morning.
unidentified		Hey, good morning.
unidentified		Is this Art Bill?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		It is indeed.
unidentified		Hey, listen.
		This is Jim from Detroit.
		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.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Entirely possible.
		As good a theory as any, sir.
		Really as good a theory as any.
		I wonder about these things myself.
		I guess we all do.
		There are so many great mysteries of life, aren't there?
		To the first time caller line, you're on the air.
		Good morning.
unidentified		Hello.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yes, hello.
unidentified		I'm a first-time caller here, and I just actually just recently started listening to your show.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Out of curiosity, where are you?
unidentified		I am in Indiana.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Indiana, okay.
unidentified		Yes, sir.
		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.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, they might turn us into soup, sir.
		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.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, I know.
		I know.
		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.
		East of the Rockies, you're on the air.
		Good morning.
unidentified		Hello, Jason Polly from Ann Arbor, Michigan.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Hello, Jason.
unidentified		Oh, it's wonderful to hear your voice, Art.
		I'm a cab driver, and you've certainly helped through many, many, many nights.
		And the question I had for you, sir, could you kind of take us behind the scenes?
		What's the creative process?
		You guys have one of the top radio shows.
		What do you do off-air to decide the directions you want to take the show, what subjects you want to cover?
		How do you keep a program that's been on the air as long as you have fresh?
		If you could take a look at it.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Boy, is that a good question?
		It's a wonderful.
		All right, I'll do my best.
		It's a wonderful question.
		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.
		Good morning, Wildcard Line.
		You're on the air.
unidentified		Oh.
		Hello.
		Am I on the air already?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		It would appear so, yes.
unidentified		Good morning, Art.
		Good morning.
		Wonderful to talk to the master once again.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Thank you.
unidentified		And actually, I can answer that last caller's question.
		I think it's the listeners that have done it.
		And the fact that they can open their minds up and think out of the box is what's kept this program alive.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, that, and of course, there's nothing else like it on the air now, is there?
unidentified		And that's it.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Most of the rest of the programs, as you go across the dial, are politics and politics and politics and politics.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		And you would think that's the only thing you can talk about on talk radio is politics.
unidentified		Well, and when you're talking politics, you're pretty much stuck in a box.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		That's really nothing.
		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.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, that's because coast to coast listeners and callers and people who love these kinds of topics identify almost immediately with each other.
		And so those kind of conversations struck up are not a surprise at all.
		First time caller line, good morning.
		You're on the air.
unidentified		Hi, good morning, Art.
		My name is Dwight.
		I'm calling from Long Beach, California.
		Yes, Dwight.
		And been a long time listener to your show.
		I'm going to tell a little brief story.
		I'm a photographer for a long time, 27, 30 years.
		About 16 years ago, I worked on a feature film that shot in Azuse, California.
		And we were going up to a cabin to shoot a couple scenes in it.
		And lo and behold, the producers went out there to look at it first.
		And they took a couple of pictures with some Polaroid cameras.
		And they brought it back to the hotel one night.
		And they were showing them to me.
		And as a cinematographer, I was looking at these images.
		And I noticed that one of them had what looked like a face of a man.
		And I looked at it a little bit longer, and I realized that I think he actually got a ghost image.
		And I told him that, and he looked at it, and he agreed with me.
		And then we went up to shoot the movie.
		And in the time that we were up there, we were all joking about the place is haunted and stuff.
		And there was my time to take care of the place, kind of watch over it, watch the equipment, what have you.
		And one night, something happened in the cabin.
		A lamp swung from a ceiling.
		And it startled me pretty dramatically.
		And the makeup woman's Polaroid was on an Apple box nearby.
		I grabbed it and I sat in this chair.
		And then I didn't even think about it.
		I just took the camera and I took the image.
		And I sat there and I thought that nothing's going to come out.
		And within a minute, there was an image of a man's face on it.
		And it was a pretty disturbing image.
		And from that point on, I was convinced that this place was, indeed, something was going on there.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		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.
		Hello.
unidentified		How you doing?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Quite well, sir.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Where are you?
unidentified		I'm in Massachusetts, Region.
		Okay.
		I'm a first-time call, long-time listener.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yes, sir.
unidentified		Just wanted to call, speak a little bit on a topic.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Proceed.
unidentified		All right, I'm 27 years old.
		I've read a lot of books.
		I know you're familiar with St. Clair.
		Like I said, I'm 27 years old.
		I'm just starting to open my mind up to things now.
		I wanted to ask you a question.
		I was Googling some stuff and doing some research.
		Are you familiar with the pyramid and the Sphinx that's on Mars?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I am, yes.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, I'm not sure that I'm familiar with a Sphinx on Mars.
david grinspoon ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
unidentified		All right, all right, all right.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I'm familiar with what's been called the face on Mars.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Is that what you're referring to?
unidentified		No, I've seen pictures from satellites of a Sphinx.
unidentified		They had on one part of Mars a pyramid and a little river.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		No, no, I've seen pyramidal objects, yes, but not sphinx.
unidentified		Tell me a little more in-depth what you think about that and what that's about.
unidentified		I wanted to get your perspective on that.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right.
		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.
		We've been around and around about that.
		But I see a lot of rocks.
		First time caller line, you're on the air.
		Good morning.
unidentified		Hello.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Hi.
unidentified		Hi.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yes, sir.
		Go ahead.
		You're on the air.
unidentified		Yeah, my name's Angel, and I have a little story I would like to share with people.
		Something that happened to me a while back ago.
		I've heard several of your callers talk about the hag.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		The hag, yes.
unidentified		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.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Okay, well, okay.
		The implication of what you just said is that you were asleep while this was going on.
		So why should we not conclude that it was a dream?
		Because you just said you woke up.
unidentified		So I don't know.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I guess if you're going to suddenly realize that there's a naked woman on top of you, you probably don't want it to be something you'd label as a hag.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Wildcard line, you're on here.
unidentified		Hello.
		Yeah.
		Hi.
		How you doing, Art?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right, sir.
unidentified		Yeah, this is Patia.
unidentified		How are you?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		And where are you?
unidentified		All right.
		Sorry about that.
		I had the speakerphone on.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Oh, I'm glad you turned that off.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Where are you?
unidentified		I'm in Reynoldsburg, Ohio.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Okay.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		You've got quite an echo here.
unidentified		Oh, I do.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, I'm hearing it.
		You may not be.
		What can I do for you?
unidentified		Oh, I received a telepathic message about 11 o'clock yesterday.
		Said to call Art Bell on the wildcard line.
		Really?
		Yeah.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		And what did the mind thought tell you to say when you got me?
unidentified		Just said to tell you about everything I was told about giants.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Okay, it's going to have to be quick.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		The show is ending.
unidentified		All right.
unidentified		Well, I sent email to George Norrie, so if you could look up Pathia.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I sent his email, sir.
unidentified		Oh, alrighty.
		But yeah, I met a giant, and he was dressed in orange.
		He's about 20 foot tall.
		And he was telling me that they're coming here to help.
		And it's the humans we should worry about.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, Very much like the government, which, when they come many times, suggests they are there to help you.
		All I can say is, beware.
		20-foot orange giant.
		All right, well, that'll do it.
		I wish we had more time for open lines.
		I really do.
		We'll come back and do an open line show one of these days.
		It's been my pleasure filling in for George Nori, who will be back, of course, next week, Ian Punnett over the weekend.
		But for right now, from Southeast Asia, Manila, in the Philippines, where it's very dry, I'm Mark Bell.

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