Art Bell welcomes British astronomer Dr. David Darling, who debunks fears of undetected six-mile-wide asteroids—deflection would be impossible if found just five years out—and dismisses moon explosion theories as absurdly improbable. Darling counters evolution skepticism using natural selection, rejects "Planet X" doomsday claims tied to seed vaults and military drills, and cautiously explores fast radio bursts from Australia (2014) as potential alien signals. He affirms Mars may have seeded Earth’s life via meteorites but calls panspermia from interstellar sources unproven. Advanced civilizations might avoid humanity due to its perceived egoism or lack of detectable life, Darling suggests, while stressing science requires verifiable evidence beyond anecdotes. The episode blends cosmic threats with fringe theories, leaving open questions about alien life and Earth’s place in the universe. [Automatically generated summary]
From the high desert and the great American Southwest.
I bid you all good evening, good morning, good afternoon, wherever you may be across the world in all its time zones, each and every one covered deeply by this program.
Midnight in the Desert.
What a great name for a show, Midnight in the Desert.
All right, so the rules of the program are easy.
We have only two rules, no bad language, because we don't need it to make a point, and only one call per show because you'd probably get boring.
So, thank you, Belgab.
I want to throw that in tonight.
Good friends over at Belgab helped out so much with this show.
And other thank yous go out to Telos.
Joe Talbot.
Thank you, Joe.
I don't believe that he was here in town.
I call Telos and they say, well, you know, our chief engineer lives in Prump.
Right.
Keith Roland, my webmaster.
Heather Wade, my producer.
StreamGuys, LV.net.
They had a big van out there doing something to my internet today.
Sales, Pete Eberhardt.
And TuneIn Radio, of course, Lee Ashcraft, our dark matter news guy.
And I want to thank tonight, my wife, Aaron, and Asia both for putting up with me because, you know, I have cut such a big slice out of life with them by doing this.
You know, I mean, one day I go to my wife and say, hey, hon, you know, I think I want to do a show.
Speaking of big slices of life, I had this weekend, right?
Wrong.
I didn't have this weekend.
I have three computers in this room with me.
Two of the laptops are fine.
And then I have this desktop computer.
And it hasn't been right now in months.
The operating system disk was flawed.
Something was wrong with it.
It crashed all the time.
I was over here Saturday night.
It began to throw runtime errors on programs.
And I said a lot of bad language.
And yeah, I do sometimes say it.
And then I spent hours trying to fix it.
I finally, I gave up, went over to the house, got another Windows 7 disk, brought it over here, wiped the drive.
That was the best feeling, actually.
It was like a feeling of revenge or something against the computer.
I said, enough.
You're done.
You're done, baby.
Format.
So I did, and that then took a day and a half of my life to put it all back together again.
Total piece of silicon.
Day and a half of your life gone.
All right, anyway.
Where am I?
News.
There's a little bit of news that I thought was interesting.
On the one hand, the Justice Department is saying that Clinton, thus far, has done nothing illegal about the emails and stuff, right?
But it's kind of weird because they're redacting about 150 of the censored emails, these emails that they're going to release to the public, and they're saying their redacted information was classified in preparation for the public release of the emails.
What the heck?
That just doesn't make sense to me.
Why don't they just release the damn things?
I mean, if you're going to redact 150 of them, then you're not going to think that they're telling you the truth, are you?
It's a mystery to me.
Her campaign, of course, is suffering mightily because of it.
And I guess it's not going to go away.
A crew testing how a small group of humans might cope with a trip to Mars has begun their 12-month mission.
No, they didn't last off.
But they'll have to eat, communicate, and live exactly as they would on Mars in a tiny little dome in Hawaii.
I guess the goal is for them not to kill each other.
Six people began a year of isolation behind a dome in Hawaii on Friday to help NASA prepare for a human mission to Mars.
Really?
Is that going to go before the one where you've got a volunteer for the one-way trip?
They'll live in a dome 36 feet, 11 meters wide, and 20 feet, 6 meters tall on the slope of Moana Loa with no animals and little vegetation.
Oh, that sounds like so much fun.
Let's see.
Do we have any women?
Now, we've got a German physicist, a French astrobiologist, four Americans, a pilot, an architect, a doctor, and a soil specialist.
What does the pilot do, I wonder?
I mean, they're sitting on the ground in Hawaii, right?
Anyway, I think that's interesting.
It will be fun to watch.
By the way, somebody sent me a wormhole message asking, aren't wondering if you read the wormhole when you're not on the air.
That was sent when I'm not on the air.
Yes, obviously, I do.
I like the wormhole.
I read it all the time.
All right.
As a member of the National Cartoonist Society, this is an email to me.
I just thought it was cool.
Last week I was on a U.S.O tour drawing cartoons for the U.S. troops stationed across Southwest Asia and Part of Africa.
It was a fantastic experience giving a little something back to those men and women of the armed services who sacrificed so much overseas and away from their families.
I thought you'd be happy to know that throughout the tour, I was able to download the Midnight in the Desert podcast whenever we had Wi-Fi access, and on a last stop, was even able to listen live at 7 a.m. local time, wherever that was, Africa or something, via TuneIn.
I wanted you to let you know how awesome it is being an Art Bell time traveler and having you along on the trip, Roswell's Eddie in Central Florida.
Cool, Eddie.
Yes, the podcast is kick butt cool.
No question about it.
It really is.
All right, coming up now.
David Darling, Dr. Darling, is a British astronomer and science writer who has written many books on subjects such as extraterrestrial life, the origin of the universe, mega catastrophes, and the nature of consciousness.
And you know I love that.
He lectures widely, plays in a rock band.
How many astronomers play in a rock band?
And runs a popular science website, www.daviddarling.info.
You might want to check it out.
His latest books are May Day about pioneering aviators and a new edition of the Extraterrestrial Encyclopedia.
He lives in Dundee, Scotland.
What an interesting place to be.
I would love to go to Scotland.
I have been around the world no less than three or four times, and I have never touched the ground in Scotland.
I don't know why.
I never have.
Anyway, coming up in a moment, Dr. Darling, and we will talk about things above.
Things that may enter here below.
I'm Mark Bell.
This is midnight in the desert.
unidentified
I hear the drums are going tonight.
She is only whispers of some quiet...
I'm your Venus, I'm your fire, you're the fire.
I'm your Venus, I'm your fire, you're the fire.
In the darkest time, between dusk and dawn, from the high desert, it's Art Bell's Midnight in the Desert.
Yeah, but we're talking about something in the case of the Russian object that was a small asteroid, something that maybe is 100 feet across.
we're not talking about something that's miles across or thousands of miles across.
So we're talking about a totally different scale of thing there.
And it's certainly true that small asteroids like that could still creep up on us unexpected and could cause a lot of damage if they made landfall.
That one actually blew up, as you know, you know, a few miles up and still caused a lot of damage in terms of broken windows.
And it's lucky people weren't killed in that.
But, you know, it caused a lot of structural damage.
But still, we're not talking about anything.
We're not even talking about a large asteroid.
We're talking about a small asteroid and a planet, something the size of the Earth.
We're talking about a different scale of things altogether.
So something the size of the Earth couldn't come out of the Sun or the direction of the Sun without us knowing about it a long, long time in advance.
We've got a lot of big telescopes trained on virtually all directions in space, and astronomers are not going to be blind to an Earth-sized object barreling down upon us.
It's not like these things, of course they're traveling fast in space, but they're not traveling so fast that they could creep up on you overnight, as it were.
Astronomers have got a pretty good handle on the big asteroids that could collide with the Earth now.
They're not so clever on the smaller ones, obviously like the Russian thing, and even ones that are maybe ten times bigger than that, which could devastate a city.
I mean, they could certainly, if it fell on New York or London or wherever, it would destroy the city.
It would be like a very large nuclear weapon going off.
So that would obviously be devastating, but it wouldn't wipe out civilization.
It would cause a heck of a lot of disruption.
Because the chances are it would probably land in Siberia or northern Canada or the ocean.
I mean, most of the Earth is actually uninhabited.
So the overwhelming possibility is that it would land somewhere that didn't wipe out a city, but it would still cause a lot of disruption.
If something, say, half a mile across collided with the Earth, wherever it hit, it would cause quite a lot of destruction.
Well, you know, the thing is that we're getting better at tracking these things.
You know, years and years ago, of course, these objects still passed relatively close, sometimes closer than the moon to the Earth, but we weren't aware of them.
We didn't have the equipment to detect these type of objects.
Now we do, and so newspapers are able to whip up scare stories based on what are not really close calls.
They're still, you know, you're still talking about something that's passing you by a million miles away.
There's no remote chance of collision.
But because it's an object of a scary size that came, well, you know, reasonably close, they say, oh, well, it could have hit the Earth.
Well, no, it couldn't have hit the Earth.
It was never on a collision course in the first place.
And these things can't change direction at the last minute.
And space is big.
I think a lot of people don't realize how big it is compared to the size of objects in it.
The Earth seems big when you're on the Earth, but once you get away from it in space, it's a tiny dot, you know.
And so are these objects that are flying around.
So the gaps between objects are just vast compared to the size of objects themselves.
So, you know, the chances of collision are very, very remote.
Of course, we know they happen.
They've happened in the past, and they will happen again in the future.
At some point in the future, almost inevitably, the Earth will be hit by an extinction event asteroid.
Statistically, it's almost guaranteed, but it could be millions and millions of years in the future.
If you're talking about something that big and that was going to hit within a few years' time, first of all, we would almost certainly know about it now.
But let's say, for the sake of argument, we didn't.
And let's say that the discovery was made tomorrow that this thing was on a collision course.
Let's assume that for some strange Reason we'd missed it and it was five years out.
It would be, in fact, and if we're talking about something that's several miles across, it would in fact be extremely difficult to do anything about it.
You know, probably the only thing you could do would be to try to break it up, but that could cause more problems than the original event itself, because all of those pieces of shrapnel, as it were, would still be on a collision course with the Earth.
So you'd just be hit by many moderate-sized pieces rather than one big piece, which would probably cause as much damage anyway, and be unpredictable.
And there would be no certainty that you could actually blow up something that big with, say, nuclear weapons.
Okay, well, that's exactly where I was going to go.
We would immediately have to contact the Russians because we don't really have the hardware anymore.
And if they could get a rocket to it, of course, that's a very long manned mission, but if they, assuming they could get a rocket to it while it was still far enough out, I guess it could be nudged.
Yeah, and obviously if we knew for sure the other thing is, of course, you can't be sure even once you've found the thing and it seems to be coming kind of your way.
You don't know whether it's going to hit you or not because you have to be very, very precise about that.
As I say, objects are tiny compared to the spaces between you.
So it's like one dust moat hitting another dust moat.
The chances are it would miss us.
What would happen if you put some sort of rocket deflector on and you made the terrible mistake of actually knocking it onto a collision course whereas before it was going to just slightly miss you?
I suppose all you could, you know, and if you discovered something, you wouldn't know its orbit precisely right away.
It usually takes a year or two to refine your knowledge of it.
So you wouldn't actually know whether it's going to hit you or not.
All you would know is it's coming close.
So it would be hard to compute how much deflection you needed to do, if any at all.
So we'd be in a real pickle if we found something that was just a few years out and that was that big.
We wouldn't know whether to deflect it or not.
And actually launching a mission of that complexity, I don't know whether we would be capable of doing it.
Even if we threw all the world's resources into it, I don't know whether we would actually be able to pull it off in that timeframe, five years, maybe 20 years we could, but not five years, I don't think.
And yes, in that case, if it's not in a sort of a regular small orbit around the Sun, it is possible that a comet, for example, from way out in the solar system, if you've got a few years, probably not.
We would probably even know about that by now because comets brighten as they approach the Sun.
We would know about it.
It's very, very unlikely.
But let us say, let us stretch the point and say it's a very dark object on a very unusual course that we don't have our telescopes trained on.
So if we entertain that as a possibility, which is unlikely, then we've got a six-mile wide object that is five years out.
Yes, it's within the bounds of possibility because pretty much everything is within the bounds of possibility.
We would be really, really stretched to do actually anything about it other than watch it and try to prepare contingency plans here on Earth for a large object hitting us.
I don't think there's very much we could do to move it out of the way in that kind of timeframe.
It's a solid rock, probably iron, and tumbling in the darkness.
And it's tumbling power away.
Anyway, Dr. Darling, so after imagining all that, it's coming toward us.
We get anywhere from five to ten years warning.
But we cannot stop it, as you have suggested.
So if you were the one who discovered it, and you were the one who told the government, or whoever you tell, I guess everybody, really, if you thought about it, Doctor, do you think that you really would recommend or that it would be a good idea to tell the world that it's about to be done, that if we get hit, it's all over, we'll all be dead?
Or would it be better to let people have six to ten years of happy life, not waiting for the end?
Well, given the scenario, let's assume that this is what's happening without looking into the chances of that being the case.
Let's assume that this is there.
Now we're on to the different subject of how do we deal with the news a bit.
First of all, it would be very difficult, I think, to keep that kind of news quiet.
I mean, let's say I'm the discoverer, so I'm a professional scientist and I've made this startling discovery.
It's unusual for scientists to work in such isolation that they would be able to keep that kind of news quiet.
But again, let's make the assumption that I'm a group.
I'm in with a group of scientists who have made this discovery, and rather than make a sort of a sensational announcement that the Earth is doomed, we consult the government and say, well, this is what we think is going to happen.
Well, I don't know whether I'd consult the government first.
I think I would consult my scientific colleagues first of all, and I would look for verification of it.
I wouldn't just take my own figures and facts as definitive.
I think that's the way scientists work.
They're collaborative by nature.
So they want to share the information.
They want to get it verified.
That's how science works.
It works by peer checking of other work.
So that's what you'd do.
You'd say, you check on this for me.
Do you think this is right?
And then I think at that point, it would actually be rather difficult to keep it quiet.
But let's assuming you did.
I think at some point you would have to consult other agencies as to how you go about releasing this news.
It's the same thing as if we discovered extraterrestrial intelligence, what we would do there, something that is world-changing, although in this case it might be world destroying.
Well, the reason I say this, Doctor, is because not only would people have that many years left of happy, not knowing life, but if you did announce it and it became increasingly apparent that it was going to hit, you know, there would be riots, there would be all kinds of horrible things that would go on, looting people loot when they get blinked at the wrong way.
So, you know, it would be bad.
And I would think the agencies you would talk to would probably say better not to say anything.
If I was the ruler of the world, I would release the information.
I would let people know exactly what was happening.
And yes, you're right.
It would cause panic, obviously.
But I think I prefer people to know what's happening anyway so they can then make their own decisions about it.
And there may be some rational decisions you can make.
It may be even an object of that size isn't necessarily going to wipe out all life or even human life if we made some sensible precautions.
Certainly with several years to go, you could make, for example, large underground bunkers into which you could probably send thousands, tens of thousands, possibly hundreds of thousands of people so that the race might survive after it's safe to go back to the surface.
Those sort of preparations would be difficult to make in the dark.
So my own preference would be to release the information.
And in fact, I think that's probably what would happen.
I think people would get wind of it.
And I think pretty soon everybody would know about it.
There would be panic, obviously.
There'd be a lot of discussion as well.
There would be people who say, wait a minute, I'm not sure I'm prepared to believe this.
Let's make sure.
Let's check, you know, because these are difficult things.
We wouldn't know.
We wouldn't know that far out that it was actually on a collision course.
All we could say is that it's going to come fairly close.
I've got a message from Chelsea through the wormhole.
That's a sort of a computerized thing.
People can send me messages.
And she says, I've always thought, she's obviously seen the movie, always thought if you broke up an asteroid or a comet, even if the remaining pieces were headed for Earth, they'd be small enough to burn up harmlessly In the atmosphere.
Anything smaller than about, say, 100 feet across probably would.
That's what happened with the Russian asteroid or meteor, if you like.
It's what happened in, was it 1908 with the Tunguskar event?
That was another big, an even bigger object, actually, that exploded over Siberia and flattened a wide area of trees.
It would have flattened a city if it had come down over a city.
So objects that size do vaporize, but anything that's bigger than that, for example, say half a mile across, would not, that would penetrate through to the surface.
So if you broke up something that was several miles across, you would end up with presumably a number of big chunks that certainly wouldn't burn up in the atmosphere.
It could happen in the sense that there could be regional destruction possibly at this stage.
But you see, in your lifetime, we've become a lot better at knowing what's out there.
Certainly in terms of the large asteroids.
When you and I were born, we knew of virtually no asteroids that came close to the Earth.
Now we know virtually all of them, in fact, probably all of them, that are extinction events.
We'll certainly be out for the next century or more.
As you say, it is possible that something could come on us unexpected that is dark and on an unusual object because we're discovering things out there all the time, new stuff.
So we can't rule that out.
But in terms of near-Earth asteroids, we've got them pretty well nailed down, the ones that are a few miles across.
But something that was coming from deep space on an unusual orbit, it is possible, yes, just about.
I really hate it, hate it, hate it, hate it when my news guy beats me.
I had a picture put up on the website earlier.
It is an interesting picture, Doctor.
It's from NASA's space probe Dawn, and it was sent from the surface of the dwarf planet Ceres, and it has revealed this pyramid-shaped object with a flat top.
As a matter of fact, I've got a photograph of it at artbell.com right now.
It's quite a good photograph.
And the astronomers that are looking at it right now are saying they have never seen anything like it in the entire solar system.
Yeah, and possibly stretching it a little bit far.
It is very unusual.
First of all, to say it's pyramid-shaped, I think, is a little bit provocative, if I may say so.
It's unusual, and it does kind of look geometric in the sense it looks like it's got shaped sides, but it's not really a pyramid like the pyramids of the Egyptian desert, for example.
It doesn't sort of have four flat sides.
It's an unusual looking thing, and it has bright sides to it and a sort of flattish top.
And it is very unusual.
Certainly on Ceres, we haven't yet seen anything else like it.
There are some features on Pluto that look a little bit like it.
And there are some objects actually here on Earth in the sort of Arctic regions.
They're called pingos.
And they're not as big as this.
This is a huge thing.
But then again, Ceres is a small world.
It has a low gravity pull.
So, you know, things that stick up could stick up higher and further than they would perhaps on Earth.
There are these things called pingos.
I'm not sure why they're called.
That's a strange name.
But they are caused by ice swelling beneath the surface, pushing the soil up.
And you get this sort of odd plateau, raised plateau, that look sort of miniature versions of this thing.
And so, yeah, it's trying to say, well, it's unique, unique on Ceres, but there are things that look kind of like it somewhere else.
So it's not totally unique.
And I think it's wrong to say it's pyramid-shaped.
All right, well, that's what they're saying anyway, pyramid-shaped.
And I thought, boy, when Richard sees this, he's going to lose his mind.
Richard Seeley.
I'm sure he'll be coming on it later.
Okay, so let's talk for a second about Pluto.
There was another gigantic surprise.
And, you know, somehow you think of Pluto out there as kind of like a billiard ball, just cold, round, uninteresting, hardly even a planet anymore, actually.
And here our spacecraft goes by, takes these photographs, we see 11,000-foot-plus mountains, and everybody went berserk.
How do you think, how can you account for those mountains?
Whenever you see a new world for the first time, and you know, we've grown up with Pluto since 19, it was discovered in 1930, you know, and since you and I were children, we've known about Pluto, and it's just been a dot in the sky, just a star-like point.
And people have always imagined what it might be like, and it's lost its status, of course, as a real planet.
Now we call it a dwarf planet.
But nobody had really any clue what it was going to be like.
So whenever you see a world for the first time, whether it's Ceres or Pluto or anywhere like that, you're going to find some surprises.
The surprise with Pluto is that it looks to be so active.
It looks like there's stuff still happening on Pluto, that it's not the dead frozen ball of rock and ice that we previously presumed it to be.
Well, it ought to be, but obviously it still has some residual internal heat that is driving these things, and that's the only way that these features could be formed.
And it's obvious that something has happened on Pluto in the relatively recent past, and we're talking, of course, millions of years still, but in terms of the lifetime of the planet, that's pretty recent.
You know, there's been resurfacing events, there's obviously been occasions where the ice has melted and stuff has been upthrust through the crust.
And so that tells you that there is something driving that, and that has to be internal heat, which is left over from the formation of Pluto.
And so that is a surprise, considering its size.
But the same thing is also happening on Ceres as well.
And Ceres is even smaller than Pluto.
So there is some activity on the surface that is really unexpected.
Yes, it is a little more like the Earth, but its soil is toxic.
It has no breathable atmosphere.
Gravity pull is a third that of Earth.
So long-term habitation on Mars is very, very problematic.
Just getting people out there in orbit and bringing them back again is a huge technical challenge.
Actually landing them on the surface and creating an environment where they can live for months or years on end, a huge, huge challenge, a massive challenge.
These ideas of sending out parties of people, in some cases, see largely unqualified people signing up for trips to Mars is ridiculous.
Well, the exciting thing is that we now know of quite a few places in the solar system where there might be life.
As you mentioned, there, Europa, which a number of years ago we would never have thought of as a place where anything could live.
Mars, yes, Mars has always been on the cards.
But places like Europa and some of the other moons of the outer planets, we always thought were just cold, frozen, dead places.
But now it seems that there may be liquid water oceans underneath the surface, for example, of Europa.
And Saturn's large moon, Titan, is another possibility.
We know there's hydrocarbons on the surface and possibly the building blocks for life there at least.
But you know, I think, my personal opinion is that we will have signs of extraterrestrial life.
And I know people have been saying this for years, but I believe that within the next 10 years or so, say 10 to 15 years, we will have definitive evidence of extraterrestrial life.
But I don't think it will come from within the solar system.
It's possible, but we don't really have any life detection missions on the horizon that would provide proof, say, of life on Mars or Europa.
But we do know of a couple of thousand planets now going around other stars.
And you might say, well, how on earth could we find life on these planets that we know so little about?
But we can look at the light coming from these planets, and we can look at the type of substances that are in their atmospheres.
And we are getting to the stage where we can do that.
And over the next 10 to 15 years, we will get much better at that.
And we will be able to, by looking at the light reflected from the surface of these exoplanets, be able to see what kinds of gases are in their atmosphere.
And if we find, for example, that an exoplanet has an oxygen-rich atmosphere, that is a very strong indication that there might be life on the surface, because to have an oxygen-rich atmosphere is pretty unusual, unless it's caused by biology.
And certainly if you get a combination of gases, like, for example, oxygen and methane, that is almost proof that there is life there.
Now, if you've got a couple of thousand and that number is growing rapidly, soon it's going to be many, many thousands of planets out there, and we can check the light signatures from all those planets, I personally think that that is where we're going to find the first evidence of life.
We won't necessarily know what kind of life it is, just that there is some sort of biology going on on the surface.
And that would be intelligent life, and it would be in the form of some sort of a signal that was being sent out by an intelligent race.
I was just talking about life in general.
But just because we can't get there or send probes there, no, of course we can't send probes to other stars, not at the moment and not in the foreseeable future, but we are getting extraordinarily good at looking at the messages, the light that is coming from these worlds.
And we could not just eventually look for gases like oxygen and methane, for example, we may also be able to look for industrial pollutants in those atmospheres.
So the type of things that would indicate a technological civilization.
So if we find a planet where there's life, we can then look for more details to see if there's possibly intelligent life out there.
And there is always that possibility that we will get a signal out of the blue or the black, as it were, and that would immediately say there is intelligence out there.
But there's a huge difference between life in general and intelligent life and how often that transition happens.
Let's talk for a moment about intelligent life, Doctor.
Isn't it possible that intelligent life could evolve in an utterly different way than we have evolved?
And they don't have radio transmitters, they don't have iPhone 6s, or any of that stuff, because they don't need it, because they've evolved in some utterly alien way.
We've only had powered flight since, what was it, 1903, the Wright brothers.
That's just over a century ago.
You go back to the 1950s, 1940s, that's when the first electronic computers were here, and now we virtually carry a supercomputer around in our pocket, in our smartphones.
So that the rate of technological progress is absolutely dramatic.
And if you extend that a few more centuries into the future, you know, goodness knows what we're going to be doing.
What we're doing then, if we survive, is going to be like magic in terms of our technology.
We are already developing brain-computer links.
It's quite possible that in some way we will merge with our machines to become some kind of synthetic intelligence or combined biological and artificial intelligence.
And if you project along those lines, then an advanced race out there may be more in the form of a machine than a biological species.
And they may be communicating by means that we have no conception of and not able to tap into at present.
Yeah, the universe itself is about just over 14 billion years old.
So obviously you wouldn't get life evolving right at the start, but it could be there could be life out there that is billions of years older than ourselves.
If there is intelligent life out there, certainly within a reasonable distance, because obviously the further away these beings are, when they look at the Earth, they're seeing the Earth as it was in the past.
That's one of the features of space.
The further you look out there, the further you look back in time.
But if, say, there was intelligent life within one or two hundred light years of the Earth, so they're seeing us as we were, say, a century or so ago, they would be aware if they had the instruments.
And these are the same kind of instruments that we are already developing.
We were just talking a moment ago about our ability to be able to look at exoplanets and see whether there might be life there or not.
Obviously, the other way around, if they're more advanced than us, they can tell more about what's happening on the Earth.
So they will know that there is life on Earth, and they will probably know, if they're within a reasonable distance, that there is intelligent life on Earth.
And then, of course, they will tend to watch more closely, just as we would the other way around.
And possibly they may, if they have the technology, be able to send out instrumented probes to take a closer look.
So I think it's a very real possibility.
And I tend to be on the optimistic end of the spectrum.
There's quite a few scientists who think that intelligent life is probably very, very uncommon.
I happen to think that it's perhaps more common than they would suggest.
So I think it's a very real possibility that we're being observed, yes.
I mean, I have seen things that most people that you talk to have.
Now, a lot of them are balloons, some of them are experimental aircraft and what have you, but I don't rule out the possibility that we're being observed, that some of what we see doing impossible things in our atmosphere may be from elsewhere.
In fact, if you had definitive proof of one, then yes.
I mean, if you had a white crow, then there's no disputing it.
If you put it in a you trap the white crow and show it to the world, then yes, that's right.
Then the white crow, there could be other white crows.
But the evidence for UFOs, and this is the problem, even if a large number of people see a phenomenon, it doesn't necessarily mean it's an alien spacecraft.
It just means that it's something that we can't explain.
So UFO means unidentified flying object, which, as you know, I don't have to say that to you, doesn't say it's an alien spacecraft.
It could be some phenomenon we don't understand.
For example, like ball lightning, just to throw out an example.
A phenomenon that rarely occurs, that is seen occasionally and unpredictably, and is difficult, therefore, for science to study.
Science likes to be able to reproduce things.
And in the case of UFOs, these are things that are seen.
And there's no doubt of the veracity of some of these sightings in the sense that people aren't making it up.
It's obvious that there are some strange phenomena occurring, but what is behind it?
Are these intelligently controlled things, or is it some sort of natural phenomenon that we don't understand?
The evidence to me is still not compelling that they are intelligently controlled objects.
So that's the point I'm getting at.
There's nothing wrong with UFOs, nothing wrong with the theory of aliens observing us, but let's get some evidence that's not just fuzzy objects moving in the sky.
It depends who they are and how well documented it is.
I always like, and I don't want to sound like a stick-in-the-mud scientist.
Whenever somebody tells me something, first of all, I don't just take for granted what they say.
I mean, if there's somebody who knows, well, I'll say, well, obviously you're honest.
You're telling me something what you believe you saw.
But I like to go to the original source.
So if I hear something or somebody writes something, I like to go to, wait a minute, where did this come from?
Where is the evidence?
First of all, is what they're telling me the actual case?
Either they've misinterpreted it or they're passing on something they've heard.
Let's get to the actual best known scenario.
Once we've got the data, then we can work from that.
So if we see an object that's traveling at 20,000 miles an hour and it takes a right-hand turn, where is the documented case of that, the evidence of that, the actual source of that information?
Is it the case that that object actually exists?
If it does, yes, we have a problem explaining it because there's no natural phenomenon that behaves like that.
So what do we do then?
Either it's a natural phenomenon that we don't understand or it's an entirely different phenomenon.
So if you have a question for Dr. David Darling, and I bet you do, the public line is area code 952-225-5278.
One more time.
Put a one in front of it.
1-952-225-5278.
Then also we have, as you know, I'm trying to train people with Skype.
So if you've got an Android or an iPhone, for heaven's sakes, put Skype on it.
And then it's ever so easy.
I know I hear the groans.
I'm going to keep doing this until people start to get it right.
Put Skype on your phone.
It's a free download.
Free, free, free.
Put Skype on there.
And then after you've done it, go to Add a Contact, a little plus sign.
You'll find it.
And if you're in North America, America, or Canada, simply enter MITD, the letters M-I-T-D 5-1.
That's M-I-T-D 5-1.
If you're outside, somewhere in the rest of the world, you can call us from anywhere.
Free.
M-I-T-D 5-5.
That's M-I-T-D-5-5.
And after you have initiated that, I don't have to accept you as anything.
It will show up in your contact list, and you can call any time you want.
Free of charge.
All right.
Back now to Dr. David Darling.
If there is intelligent life out there, doctor, and I mean a way out there, and they have been observing us, which is I think it's fair to conclude that we might be, and I think you feel the same way, we might be getting observed right now.
And they look at how we're behaving, our wars, the way we're treating our own biosphere, the Earth, what's going on right now.
I personally think we're in the process, in the middle of poisoning our own planet, but that's just me.
A lot of people think there is nothing that we can do that could possibly harm Mother Nature in any way.
I don't know.
If they looked at us and they were to judge us, how do you think we'd make out?
Well, I think that other intelligent species have probably been through the same problems as we are currently going through.
And if you think of a race that is dominant on its planet, has risen to dominance over a period of millions and billions of years as we have done to become what we perceive to be, as it were, the top dog in terms of intelligence and technology.
They probably have been through similar crises to us.
You don't get to be the top dog without being a fairly vicious, self-serving species.
And so you probably have that aggression built into you.
It's a question of whether you can control it and come out on the other side.
With us, we're in the balance at the moment, and things are not looking too good.
And I'm certainly exactly in agreement with you that we are causing untold damage to our biosphere at the moment.
And it's us to blame, and only we can fix it or stop doing the harm we're doing.
But I think other species probably, too, have been through that situation.
So I think they would understand us.
I'm sure that aliens who have, intelligent aliens who have mastered their world have that belligerent streak in them.
So I think they would see possibly some similarities and maybe have some sort of sympathy with what's happening here at the moment.
Whether they would actually intervene to help us or want to quarantine us or not is another matter.
But I don't think they would think it was particularly unusual what's happening here.
Well, you know, dismiss them if you will, but most of the supposed alien contact, whether it's by abduction or by some message delivered in a crop circle or something else, most of it seems to suggest that you had better change your way, meaning us, or you are going to lose the planet you're living on.
And I don't know that, I mean, maybe we will change, but I don't know that we're going to do it in time.
And so interviewing people like Dr. Kaku suggests that, you know what, we had better figure a way to get to another planet eventually because we're going to need it.
Well, the only other planets available to us are in the solar system.
We can't reach other stars.
We have no technology available as of yet, yes.
And as of within the foreseeable future, to move any large number of people to another star in any kind of realistic time scale is out of the question.
So if you're looking at a sort of a lifeboat world to go to, you would be looking at somewhere like Mars, for example.
My own view of that is that unless we can look after our own world, there's not much chance that we're going to be able to fix up some other world so that we can survive on that.
I think that's a non-starter.
To move to Mars, for example, and set up a human settlement there that may eventually be the future for the human race, I think is completely unreasonable.
Mars doesn't have a life support system.
We can't suddenly terraform Mars into something that's a nice, pleasant world to live.
And if we can't fix our own world, I don't think there's any chance that we can make a go of it elsewhere.
I think colonizing other worlds is something that may possibly happen in the future, but we better sort out our own problems here because this planet at present is dying.
And within a century or two, we're going to have major, major problems here.
I think the idea that we're going to sort of find another world to escape to is completely unreasonable.
I just don't agree with that view at all.
And I don't think there's any possibility of us being able to do that.
Well, if I was a benign dictator and people followed what I was going to say, I would say we have to manage the resources we've got, and we can't do that if we keep increasing the world's population.
there's a limit to how many people the world can support.
At the moment, the population is growing outside of the b our bounds.
Also, we have to learn to work within the resources.
So we can't just keep mining stuff out of the earth and hoping this is just going to go on forever.
Fossil fuels are limited.
So we're going to have to learn how to use other forms of energy pretty soon.
He's coming to us all the way from Dundee, Scotland.
And we're talking about things up there.
And we're about to go to the line.
So if you have something you want to ask, now would be just a spiffy time.
One last question.
Well, actually, two.
One from the audience.
Dan in Anaheim writes through the wormhole.
It seems to me, he says, like mainstream scientists fall victim to the old adage that says that when a man has a hammer, all problems begin to look like nails.
They all want to measure volume with a ruler.
What makes them think our tools are adequate to study aliens?
And I don't think scientists are that closed-minded.
Scientists have considered all possible forms that aliens might take.
We're not closed-minded that we think they have to look like us or behave like us or be like us.
All possibilities are open.
But if you're going to try to detect aliens, the presence of aliens, you have to start looking for things that you're familiar with and with the tools that are available.
It doesn't mean you're not open to other possibilities, but you have to work with the tools that you have to hand.
No, God help them if they look like ten-penny nails.
All right.
Yes, let us take some questions.
Lewis on Skype.
Hello.
unidentified
Yeah, hello, Mr. Bell.
Dr. Darling, I'd appreciate some elaboration on an answer you gave to an earlier line of questions from Mr. Bell regarding others observing us, UFOs, and not just entities observing us from a billion light years away.
Are you suggesting that perhaps faster-than-light travel might be possible or fill-in-the-blank, if you would, as to how they might have arrived here?
Well, again, we don't know how faster-than-light travel is possible at the moment.
There are restrictions within physics, but we also know possibly of ways, speculative ways, that you get around them.
Obviously, people have heard of wormholes and shortcuts through space-time, if you like.
We have no idea how you would be able to do that, but certainly faster-than-light travel, faster-than-light communication is not out of the question.
And my response would be that if beings have arrived here, if they've arrived in their spacecraft, or if we ever hope to travel to other stars ourselves, we will probably need some form of faster-than-light travel.
So I certainly don't rule out that possibility.
And it would be my guess that if there are spacecraft in the vicinity of the Earth, it's quite possible that they have found this means of faster-than-light travel.
They could also have taken the sublight route as well, but that obviously prevents you from traveling great distances, really, because interstellar distances are so huge.
It would be catastrophic for the Earth if the Moon were to explode.
But I wonder what mechanism you think might cause that.
The only way the Moon could be destroyed would be by something very large hitting it very hard.
There is no other possible way in which the Moon could explode other than by a collision.
And it would have to be hit by a planetary-sized object.
So the passage of that planetary-sized object in itself would cause problems to the Earth, never mind whether it hit the Moon or not.
The destruction of the Moon is an extraordinarily unlikely event.
If it did happen, then obviously large pieces of the Moon would, some of them at least, would head our way, and that would be disastrous, but a very, very, very unlikely occurrence.
Anyway, I've been listening to you, Art, since I was studying mechanical engineering at the University of Utah and one of the old buildings they tore down now overnight, pulling overnighters to get ready for exams and that and thermodynamics and whatever.
And so I've I've studied mathematics to a pretty high degree, and I have a mathematical probability study that I've derived using Carl Sagan's figures out of cosmos, absolutely proving that evolution is mathematically impossible.
Really?
Yes.
I have the figures.
They're pretty simple, actually.
You just need to know the law of addition of exponents in algebra, no higher than that.
The, the, the, The probability of that happening, just that one protein randomly forming over, I've given 10 billion years as the limit for what could have evolved.
I put 10 Earths around each star that Carl Seggin says exists, which he says was 10 to the 22nd power.
And put 10 Earths around each star, filled each Earth's oceans with amino acids instead of water, which our Earth has about 10 to the 46th power water molecules in the oceans.
And had all of these amino acids combine every second over 10 billion years into proteins exactly 100 amino acids long.
And the chances of this one protein, not an entire ecosystem or the body itself, to randomly form is 1 over 10 to the 43rd power, which is 0.
And I said this to Mitchie Okaku, asking him for his reply.
Okay, but all these things that you're describing, wouldn't they be prudent measures to take for any disaster?
I mean, not just Planet X, which I don't believe in, but anything else that might happen that would be awful.
unidentified
Trillions of dollars.
All the governments around the world are doing this, and this whole thing with Jade Helm now Looks to me like they're getting ready for martial law in preparation to lock down the country.
So, yes, I know about Planet X. I know about Jade Helm.
I know about all the stuff going around, even the September stuff.
I know about it all.
That doesn't mean I buy into it all.
I know about it.
So there you go, Doctor.
There's a lot of, you know, no offense to that guy, but there are so many people now that believe essentially what he just said, and he took it pretty light, frankly.
Well, obviously, he talked about a lot of stuff, and he was stringing a lot of stuff together that other people might not necessarily think go together.
The fact that we build seed vaults is a sensible measure if plants are becoming extinct.
We would like to be able to keep those seeds for the future so that when conditions improve, we can replant them.
That's not anything to do with Planet X. It's to do with retaining the biosphere and preserving our biological heritage for the future.
If you're talking about observatories in various parts of the world, for example, the Antarctic, they're not looking for Planet X. The observatories in the Antarctic are looking for cosmic neutrinos as it happens.
They're built for a specific purpose.
Other observatories are built for looking at the universe in general, not looking at Planet X. As far as martial law goes, you're bringing in all sorts of things and trying to make it seem like it's a theory when it's not.
It's just a personal opinion and a personal attitude towards things.
And it doesn't wash with me at all that.
If you're going to make these sort of extraordinary claims, you need extraordinary evidence, not just wishy-washy hand-waving.
Probably, but if it's in the short wave range of frequencies, frankly, it's so congested and such a mess that you probably wouldn't know it even if you heard it.
Certainly you wouldn't know the origin.
Deming, New Mexico, I think.
You're on the air with Dr. Darling.
Hi.
unidentified
Yeah, you got it, Steve.
And hi, Art.
And, Doctor, you are a great guest, and it's just so easy to listen to you.
I was going to say a theory, but it's not a theory.
Now, first of all, before I express it, I am very much in agreement with your discussions on the possibilities of us being watched or other, whatever may be going on out there in the vastness of the universe, let's say.
But I have always had a thought that maybe, just maybe, we, because we're aware of ourselves and we have our egos and what's not, with all the vastness out there, why would there be an interest in us unless possibly we were transplants or something, we were placed here, maybe.
But in all that vastness, I always thought, isn't it a little egotistical of us to think that they'd be interested in us?
If it were not for the fact that we can and we are developing the means to look at other planets and possibly detect life on those worlds, now if we do in the future, over the next few years, we start looking at exoplanets and we see some that have life on them, they will become natural focuses of interest for us.
Well, I wrote two books on that subject back in the 1990s.
One was called Soul Search, and the other one was called Zen Physics.
And the Zen Physics, as you can probably gather from the title, was an inquiry into both Eastern and Western views of the nature of consciousness.
And as a scientist, I've kind of got some very unconventional views on this subject.
In other areas, I'm open-minded, but I tend to follow the party line unless I see extreme evidence.
But in the case of consciousness, I don't think science has a very good handle on what it actually is.
And my belief is that consciousness is a lot more fundamental than what science would lead us to believe.
Obviously, science believes that consciousness comes about through the workings of the brain, and when the brain dies, so does consciousness.
I am of the opinion that consciousness is more fundamental than that, that it is something that is kind of out there.
And what the brain really does is not create consciousness, but acts as almost as a filter, or at least a receiver of consciousness.
And the books really kind of play around with that idea.
It's more, I guess, more of an Eastern view of what the mind is and what consciousness is.
It's a more all-embracing concept.
We tend to focus in the West a lot more on the ego and ourselves, and we build them up to be quite important things.
Our self is really just a narrative, a little story that builds up during our lifetime.
Consciousness is a lot more basic and more important than that.
And I think it's a fundamental, rather like energy and time and things like that.
I think it's something that our brains have evolved to tap into, but when the brain dies, that's when consciousness expands because, in fact, it lies beyond the brain.
It doesn't mean that the one discounts the other or proves it in any way.
I think you can conceive of this idea of consciousness being out there without there being a God.
And by the way, if you ask somebody or ask me whether I believe in God or not, the first thing I'm going to say is, what do you mean by God?
And then I'll be able to give you an answer.
If you mean something that is supernatural and existed before the universe, then that is one thing.
If you say, okay, it's some sort of intelligence behind the universe, then that would be another thing.
You could imagine a highly advanced alien intelligence could almost have godlike powers.
So if you're going to ask about that, then you need to define exactly what you mean by God, a Christian God, an Eastern God, some kind of other God, you know.
It was called The Science of Death and the Logic of Reincarnation, but not reincarnation in a sort of a Buddhist sense, but In the sense of the continuation of consciousness after death.
So I believe that what happens when we die, when our brains die, is that consciousness continues.
And that from our perspective, it doesn't really make any difference the fact that we lose ourselves.
We lose our memories of this person that existed before, but other beings are constantly coming into existence.
And I think just as, for example, people fear death because they fear losing themselves.
But we don't fear the time before death when we didn't exist.
And I believe it's just a series of adventures in consciousness.
And therefore, I don't have any problem with the idea of us continuing after we die.
It's just that it's not us as an individual.
It's someone else.
But that's not a problem because it's happened before.
I think we know where most of the large pieces of space junk are, as far as I know.
I think the two things are unrelated.
Tracking large asteroids and tracking the re-entry of space junk is not quite the same thing.
There are different systems involved in doing that.
If a bright object is seen re-entering the Earth's atmosphere, well, it could be artificial or it could be a meteorite.
I don't know about this.
It's hard to comment on something when I don't know the details.
But if something has been seen coming down, it doesn't have to be artificial because meteorites fall to the Earth all the time, so we'd have to know what it was.
So I don't have anything more to say about that, really.
Okay, get a little closer to your microphone, wherever your mic is, get close to it.
unidentified
Okay.
Okay.
It's right near my head.
Okay.
So I've been listening to your show since 1995 when I was living in Taiwan and handing out episodes to everybody I knew, mostly of the shows you did with Michiu Kaku, which is what I want to ask Dr. Darling about today.
This is what drives me crazy about the whole conversation about space travel, and it's the issue of the multiverse and the fact that particle physicists now think there are at least 11 dimensions.
Now, if that's true, and if we're completely oblivious to most of these dimensions, doesn't that kind of open up infinite possibilities for extraterrestrial presence, travel, and also this confluence of science and religion, art, which is something that you have made a contribution to human civilization with.
So I thank you for that as well.
That was the thrust of my question, Dr. Darling.
I'd love you to touch on that.
This is something Mitch Yukaku talks about all the time, and I think it's a very profound issue.
My guest is Dr. David Darling, all the way from Dundee, Scotland.
And what an appearance it has been.
I wonder if perhaps as we discuss other dimensions and we discuss this song, can't put them together, and it may well be that you get reincarnated to another dimension.
I was just making the point really that we're talking about two different things there.
You mentioned the multiverse, and that really refers to many other universes out there, of which we have no knowledge, which could host life and all kinds of other things that we don't know about.
As far as the dimensions of the particle physicists refer to, these 11 dimensions or 23 or however many, we have the three large dimensions of space that we know about, that we live in.
But these other dimensions are microscopic, well, sub-microscopic.
They're quantum level dimensions.
They're curled up, as it were, into a very small size.
So they're of a different order of things than the dimensions we know about.
So we need to be clear that we're talking about different things there.
And the conversation about making an attempt to redivert it or move it.
And it reminded me of another phrase that was in the movie Contact, which why build one when you can build two at twice the cost?
And it was a great line at the time, but it makes you wonder if such a small variance to detect whether the inbound object could strike Earth, but people could manipulate that minuscule variance in the data and actually create a panic and a good revenue stream to build a couple devices to try to protect the Earth.
So I wouldn't put it past the industrialist or the bankers to this is my, I'm trolling for conspiracy theorists here.
If an alien wanted to destroy humanity, they wouldn't even have to touch foot on the planet.
They could take one good look at us, say, what a bunch of baloney going on down there, go on out to where the big rocks are, and, you know, reorient one in our direction, and that'd be it.
Well, I mean, if they felt that we were dangerous in some manner and not good to be venturing out from our little globe, then that would be an easy way to get rid of us.
You'd never have to touch Earth, just gone.
unidentified
So I guess my question really is, the people detecting asteroids or comets, is there some built-in protection that we won't get fooled?
And basically, it said that if E.T. life was discovered, the disruption to institutions, to our basic everything, would be so great that it should not be disclosed.
On the one hand, you're talking about UFOs, and then you were talking about signals from SETI programs.
Those are two different issues as well.
There is a scientific search or searches going on for signals from other stars, and that's a separate process from the business of UFOs.
So you can't lump those two together.
As for how we would react, again, I think if a signal did come in, it would very quickly be Public knowledge because the people that are doing the detection are scientists, they're free-thinking people, and that information would very, very quickly spread around the world, especially with the internet now.
And there have been false alarms in the past, and we know that that information, governments couldn't keep it a secret, I don't believe.
It's one of those questions that if you said, you know, if you had three questions you could have answered, tell me what the nature of consciousness is, what it actually is.
Oh, listen, trust me, we're going to have Dr. We're already scheduled.
Well, I hate to give away things for the future, but we're going to have Dr. Jacobs on.
And he does not necessarily feel that aliens, and he does think they're real, and he does think abductions are real, but he doesn't think they're friendly.
unidentified
And I'm right there with him, Art, as far as that goes.
But the question is, the guests seem to indicate that he didn't, I guess I got the feeling that he didn't think that the UFO side of it had been credibly proven.
Well, again, I think there's this sort of opinion abroad that scientists have no time for UFOs.
It's not the case at all.
Many scientists believe it's entirely possible that the Earth has been visited or is being visited by Exetra.
There's nothing unscientific about that.
It isn't that scientists are against this idea.
They just simply want the evidence.
They don't want fuzzy patches in the sky.
And by the way, even if a pilot sees something unusual, it maybe is something unusual, but it may be natural, or it may be artificial.
We don't know.
it doesn't necessarily mean that it's an alien intelligence behind it, that's all I'm saying, is that there are many, many, Don't jump to the conclusion that it's something extraordinary to begin with.
That's all I'm saying, is that's the approach that most scientists take.
They go for the mundane first, eliminate all that.
If anything is left at the end, then yes, that possibility is now open to us.
So it's just a question of the way you look at these things, really.
If you cross an anthill, you don't go down and give them all your technology because they would not be able to understand it.
According to Moore's Law, technology advances for us at a rate of it doubles every 18 months or so.
For an alien civilization or whatever, their expansion is going to be at least as fast as the universe expands.
Not only would we not be able to use it, their technology, but our brains most likely would not be able to understand it.
So it would honestly be pointless for them to tell us.
Also, in the movie Interstellar, the technology was so advanced, the beings had to create a three-dimensional depiction of their world because, as I said, we would be unable to comprehend what was going on.
Also, just a quick theory that I came up with was the possibility that maybe we could be from another source or another planet, and maybe we possibly seeded the life to our planet.
And this kind of goes along with the space traveling or time traveling humans are actually the UFOs, but possibly the asteroids that killed the dinosaurs may have been a seed with our life, and maybe we found that Earth was a planet that could support life.
So we sent the asteroids not only to kill the dinosaurs, but to see our planet, thus killing two, you know, two birds with one stone, no pun intended.
But I don't know if the doctor has any suggestions or comments about that.
Well, we did talk about the idea that if there is alien intelligence, the chances are, first of all, that it's far more advanced than us.
We've only had high technology in the form of being able to fly and have computers over the past century or so.
So you can imagine how advanced an intelligence that was 1,000 or 10,000 or 1 million years ahead of us would be.
The caller is right.
It would seem like magic and we wouldn't even, even if we looked at their technology, we might not recognize it as such or it may not be visible to us.
So there's certainly truth in that matter.
As far as the seeding of life goes, of course, this is an old theory, the panspermia theory that life can spread from one world to another either accidentally or in the case of directed panspermia where it's actually planted on other worlds.
Yes, but the fact that asteroid that struck the Earth and did for the dinosaurs was a local asteroid.
I know that Dr. Darling was mentioning earlier about overpopulation or perhaps there being too many people, so that was unsustainable for the planet.
I'm curious if the doctor would have anything to say regarding the repugnant conclusion or the paradox of life in and of itself being a value and therefore having more and more children would be plus happiness for the people who are born.
I'm not saying that I agree with that, but I'm just curious to hear what his take would be on that.
What if there was an ancient race that lived here, evolved and moved on, and that's what we're going to find out there in our own solar system eventually, and they left behind?