Dr. William Forstchen and Unknown 2275 explore KIC 8462852’s baffling 15–22% brightness drops, with NASA sources hinting at a 50%+ chance of alien megastructures like Dyson spheres. Forstchen details the space elevator—a 22,700-mile carbon nanotube cable anchored near Kiribati’s Tarawa Island—slashing launch costs to $10/lb and enabling orbital solar energy. Yet, he warns of EMP risks: Iran could trigger a tri-state U.S. grid collapse with three 60–80 kiloton detonations within months, despite recent deals. Unknown 2275 underscores EMPs as "nation-busters," citing a 2004 congressional report predicting 90% fatalities from cascading failures, while solar storms like the Carrington event pose similar threats. Underground grids aren’t safe, and transformers—unshielded and imported—could leave 80% of U.S. power offline for years. Preparedness, not government reliance, is key to survival amid these escalating risks. [Automatically generated summary]
I think I said minimum one night and reaped the benefits of that for the rest of the show.
All right, so sometime try what I tried.
I just.
You know, I went on Facebook.
I usually write something about the guest who's coming on, right?
Who, by the way, is going to be very, very, very good.
Professor Porschen.
Yeah, but he'll be coming up.
But I tried just writing something like that.
And then all I did is I went up there and posted on Facebook, big news tonight.
And I tweeted out, big news tonight.
You know, granted, it goes to many thousands of people, right?
But just typing that and nothing else apparently was either a mistake or brilliance.
I don't know which.
But it brought about mayhem.
If you want, fun, go to my Art Bell Facebook site and read.
You know, the speculation, of course, began immediately.
I didn't really intend that.
I just didn't have time tonight.
I went to a parent, you know, daughter-teacher meeting earlier today.
And by the way, I'd like to congratulate my daughter, Asia, who is now in third grade.
And once again, ever since, actually, kindergarten has had nothing but A's.
So she makes the third grade honor roller course.
I am really, really, really proud of her.
She's never had anything but an A. I'm worried if she ever gets a B, she'll be in tears.
So she probably gets her game that she wants.
Anyway, congratulations, Asia.
So the big news.
Okay.
A week ago, tonight, I broke this news.
And I'm going to read now, when I read it, of course, it wasn't in the big media.
And now I get to read you what's actually in the Washington Post.
And then I'll drop the news on you.
And I want you to listen closely and carefully, because this really is important.
The headline in the post is, The Strange Star that has serious scientists talking about an alien megastructure.
Reading from it, it was kind of unbelievable that it was real data, said Yale University astronomer Tabitha Boyagin.
We were scratching our heads for any idea that came up.
There was, well, always something that would argue against it.
She was talking actually to the new scientist about KIC 846-2852, a distant star with a very, very unusual flickering habit.
Something was making the star dim drastically every few years, and she wasn't sure what it was.
So she wrote up a paper on possible explanations for this star's really bizarre behavior, and it was published recently in the monthly notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.
But she also sent her data to fellow astronomer Jason Wright, a Penn State University researcher who helped develop a protocol for seeking signs of unearthly civilization.
And she wondered what he'd make of it.
Well, to Wright, it looked like the kind of star that he and his colleagues had been waiting a long time for, I added long.
If none of the ordinary reasons for the star's flux quite seemed fit, maybe an extraordinary one was in order.
Aliens.
Now, I want to stop here and I want to say that Yale University astronomers and professors at Penn State and since others don't utter the word aliens lightly.
Or to be more specific, something built by aliens, in this case, a swarm of megastructures.
That's a very important line, a swarm of megastructures, as he told the Atlantic, likely outfitted with perhaps solar panels to collect energy from the star.
When Boyjan showed me the data, I was fascinated by how crazy it looked, Wright said.
Aliens should always be the very last hypothesis you might consider, but this looked like something you would expect an alien civilization to build.
But one finding from the program was unlike anything else any scientists had seen.
I'm skipping down in the article a little here.
Volunteers marked it out as unusual in 2011, way back then, right after the program began, a star whose light curve seemed to dip tremendously at irregular intervals.
At one point, that was about 800 days into the survey, the star's brightness dropped by 15%.
Later, that same day, it dropped a shocking 22%.
Whatever was causing the dips, it could not have been a planet.
Even if you can imagine Jupiter as big as it is, the biggest star in our solar system, if that passed in front of this star, it would only dim the star by 1% as it transited across.
The Kepler telescope was badly damaged in 2013, so there is no more data to be had there at the moment.
Scientists, at least, again skipping in the article, the ones who like to theorize about these things, have long said that an advanced alien civilization would be marked by its ability to harness the energy from its sun.
Something Dr. Kaku has said for a very long time, rather than scrabbling over the planet's resources like us puny earthlings.
They envision something like a Dyson sphere, a hypothetical megastructure first proposed by scientist Freeman Dyson that would orbit and encompass, actually, a star, capturing its power and putting it to use.
In other words, harnessing the power of a star.
Obviously, a Dyson sphere has never been spotted in real life.
Perhaps until now, I'm adding.
Though they're all over science fiction.
But if one were to exist, it wouldn't look like a metal ball around the sun.
It probably would compromise a chain, comprise a comprise a chain of smaller satellites and or space habitats, something that would block its star's light as weirdly and irregularly as the light of KICK 8462852 has been blocked.
We've got to give this thing a name, don't we?
Instead of all these numbers, that's why researchers who are interested in finding alien life are so excited about the finding now.
Here's my news.
I want to say again that researchers at this level, folks, have gone through a great deal of college, a great deal of education.
And when they say the word aliens, they are putting their careers, their livelihoods, their families virtually on the line, right?
They're putting it all on the line.
It's like all in.
You don't say the word, if you're a legit scientist, an astronomer, you don't say aliens without being all in.
So today, one week after this news broke in the lower strata media, and I happened to luckily pick it up and I said, my God, this is a big story.
Then it broke, of course, across the mainstream media, eventually actually getting to CNN.
See, here's my news.
I have a source inside NASA.
And this source says that, of course, since, as you know, I called Sashostak myself that night, who was ill in bed, and he said they would be immediately pointing the telescopes that away.
And you can bet every other big telescope capable of looking at this in any way is looking.
My source inside NASA is saying that NASA is now 50%, or perhaps a little better than 50% sure, that this data is as advertised.
Is as reported.
Now, I don't think my source is wrong.
I trust my source.
And if this is true, then number one, I would invite any NASA person to either get hold of me and confirm or deny this report.
I'm not going to name the source because the source would get in a lot of trouble.
However, if our own NASA now has gotten to the point where they're 50% or more sure that this is real, that we have found an alien civilization, number one, I believe it.
Number two, after giving it some serious thought, and believe me, I've been giving this thing serious thought because, look, I've been doing this show, this kind of show, for longer than I can remember, literally.
I mean, just so long ago that I don't, somebody will bring up a name and I don't even remember them.
No, not Alzheimer's.
Just thousands upon thousands of interviews.
So I've wanted to announce this kind of thing all my life, all my adult life.
And here it is, finally, in front of me.
Now, my expectation is this, and I'll just throw it out, and you can make of it what you will.
I think my information is good.
Again, I invite anybody who's going to say it isn't to contact me and tell me.
But if it is good, that means NASA is getting closer and closer, or even past the tipping point of knowing it's real.
You'll notice the story hit the media big time and then quieted right down.
Well, that's because NASA's now going through the Kepler stuff with a fine-tooth comb, and everything's pointed that way.
So I think if the announcement is made that it's too big for NASA, I really mean that.
I think it will not be made at NASA, and therefore I'm sure I will not get confirmation.
I think when it's announced, it will be announced by the President of the United States.
That's where I'm going out on a limb.
This is my, I'm telling you, I told you what I know about NASA from my source.
Now I'm speculating.
I don't think NASA will announce it.
I think if it is confirmed, and it's obviously on the way to being confirmed, that the President of the U.S. would be the one to confirm and announce it to the country in the world.
That's just me.
And if that's not big news, then maybe I don't know what is.
That we finally found an alien civilization.
Now, I guess it's not done until it's done, right?
But it's really beginning to seem like that is what we found.
In other words, we're not alone.
So it doesn't get any bigger than that, from my point of view.
All right.
End of big news.
That's it.
But I think that's pretty big.
And again, I would invite anybody at NASA to come and either confirm or deny that report.
Moving on to other things.
Hard to do.
I think Halloween, we're going to call the show Midnight in the Graveyard.
How do you like that?
Midnight in the Graveyard.
It has a ring to me.
Vice President said he's out of time.
That's it.
Not going to run.
There was a message, I guess, that went out, you know, come to the Rose Garden.
That's a place you want to make an announcement, right?
the Rose Garden.
I wonder where they'll make the Bashar al-Assad's meeting, surprise meeting, everybody found, with Vladimir Putin could signal that Russia ultimately seeks a political settlement after weeks of heavy airstrikes in Syria.
I think you'd have to go back further than 500 years.
If I get Dr. Kaku on, I will ask him that.
Coming up after the break, Dr. William R. Porschen, that's a hard name, has a Ph.D. in history from Purdue University with specializations in military history and the history of technology.
He is the author of over 40 books, a number of them New York Times bestsellers.
His book about the threat to the U.S. by use of electromagnetic pulse was on the bestseller list, actually, for 12 weeks, is credited with helping to start the PREPER movement.
I understand that.
He is a professor of history and a faculty fellow at Montreat College in Western North Carolina.
And I last interviewed him in 2009.
So coming up shortly, his Professor Fortune, I think you're going to find this very enlightening in more ways than one.
I'm our bell this midnight in the desert.
unidentified
He was looking for a boat deal.
He was in a bad way.
He was looking to make a deal.
he came across this young man sewing on the fiddle and playing it hot.
And the devil jumped up on a hickory stump and said, boy, let me tell you what.
I guess you didn't.
Watching him so bold as you turn around to play.
Take our way to the land.
Take a walk on the wild side of midnight from the Kingdom of Nigh.
Man, you know, the books you have written, anyway, the books you've written, I told you this before the show, they need to be on a motion picture screen.
So I don't know what's up with your agent, but you need to get them on the ball.
And I read the same article, and the whole thesis behind building a space elevator is not just about getting out there, but also harvesting solar energy.
And while you were going through that news item, I'm thinking, a partially completed Dyson sphere or even a ring world such as Jerry Purnell and Larry Niven wrote about many about three, four decades ago, that could create that type of anomaly of the dimming of a sun.
If you have a partially completed Dyson sphere that's slowly rotating, sometimes part of it that hasn't been completed yet, sunlight will be through.
So this would make it, Professor, what Kaku, Professor Kaku calls a type 2 civilization able to harness the power of the sun.
And so it begs so many questions.
I mean, my God, it's, I think, almost just short of 1,500 light years away from us.
So in some ways, this is a safe, maybe, a safe release to the public to sort of test the waters and see how people are going to react.
You know, I just added to it with I've got this NASA source, and I'm telling you, they believe, apparently, that over, by over half, that this is the real McCoy.
That's serious news.
And I really think if it's all true, Professor, that it would not be NASA, this would, don't you think it'd be like a presidential thing?
It's, remember, the Russians were the first one to put something up there, not us, which motivated us to go forward.
But when I was writing my book, Tiller to the Sky, and trying to point out that you could carpet the entire southwest of the United States with solar panels, it would only deliver a fraction of the energy that we could harness if we built some space elevators and linked them together with solar panels and then hot wired the energy back down to the surface of the Earth.
Sounds like science fiction, but in fact, it can be a reality.
The technology is here now.
So maybe we're witnessing this from 1,500 light years away on an even grander sphere, which is encompassing the entire sun, a mega project that could take thousands of years, but then would have limitless energy for the civilization that built it.
Well, and so it makes sense that a very advanced civilization would be doing exactly that.
I mean, this sends kind of a chill down my spine.
I'm sure it does you too.
I mean, you write science fiction.
I talk about it on the air with people like yourself.
But to actually have this story sitting in my hands and then to get a call saying NASA is beginning to confirm this to a pretty high percentage, you know, it just, it blows my mind.
And again, I'm not over this announcement, nor what I told you about NASA.
It's just, you know, it's one of those things that when you do this kind of program for decades, you know, it is what you've been waiting for.
And as Professor Vorschin said, I guess, really, it's gigantic either way.
I suppose it could still turn out to be something else.
But when you've got NASA beginning to get sure, and that's the way I'd sort of put this information, NASA beginning to get sure, you get a kind of a chill up the back of your spine and you realize what this really means or could mean, or is seeming more and more like it may mean that we're not alone.
A lot of roads we could go down tonight, but how do you think that the American public, the world, will respond if this news is confirmed by NASA or the president, whoever confirms it?
You made a very interesting point, and you said that 1,500 light years away is perhaps a little less threatening than to say we have just spotted something 150 miles up and it's coming our way.
Gives us time to process the information, think about it, study it, put up a far bigger array of telescopes to examine the situation more carefully.
I attended, when I was working on the book Pillar to the Sky, I attended a fascinating three-hour discussion with some exobiologists as to if somebody's out there, do we really want to talk with them or not at this point?
And as a historian, I said no.
The history of two cultures coming into contact with each other, two civilizations, the one that's technologically superior will almost inevitably, even if they have the best of intentions, will trump and wipe out the one that is technologically inferior.
As you just mentioned, 1,500 light years out, there they are 1,500 years ago, harnessing the power of the sun, because that's what we're seeing 1,500 years ago.
So if they were doing that then, oh, just imagine what they're doing now.
I mean, just even if you project technology increase at only the pace of us, right?
Look at the last, I don't care, 50 years.
Where were we then?
Where are we now?
In fact, that's a big deal going on right now.
Today is supposed to be some special day.
It's, what did the president call it or the White House?
I think it's the, what do they call it?
Anyway, it's about that movie, Back to the Future, right?
And so, you know, the White House is saying people should speculate on the next 30 years.
And I think that would be a cool topic for Friday night, by the way, folks, that we speculate on the next 30 years.
So I'm putting off Back to the Future day until Friday.
In the meantime, as I said, imagine where they would be from a technological point of view now.
Well, you can't imagine.
I can't imagine.
So presumably, while we are limited by the speed of light, actually we're nowhere near it, if we could get to the speed of light, they may have long ago conquered that.
And, well, here's something cool to think about.
What if they've been watching us, Professor, and they just now become aware of the fact that we're aware of them?
It's why my response when we came back on was, I'm kind of glad it's 1,500 light years away.
It gives us some time to think about it, evaluate it, and most importantly, loft up things like the Webb Telescope and systems beyond that to really focus in on it.
It gives us some time to think about it and get used to the idea before extending our contact or accepting contact coming towards us.
And I know we're going to be talking a bit later about the book I wrote about the threat of EMP.
And what I'm thinking about at this moment is there was a critic of the book that I wrote called Pillar to the Sky, which is about building a space elevator.
Oh, no, no, but let me just add that the critic actually said, this book was too happy.
Forest should stick to doom and gloom.
So I'm glad to talk about a happy topic before getting into the doom and gloom stuff of EMP.
And maybe, just maybe, the realization that something else is out there would be a systemic blow that would wake us up to why are we ripping each other's throats out when there's the whole universe waiting for us?
But spending a lot of time on it is not necessarily, in my opinion, productive.
And the reason I'm saying that is because if the United States were attacked by EMP weapons, the next second would probably be the beginning of World War III.
So, you know, the academic downsides of a big EMP pulse would be not all that important to the ashes.
The concept of a space elevator, God, the math for it was worked out by Zielkovsky, Russian high school teacher actually back in around 1905, who also worked out the mathematics of how to get into orbit.
The idea is to actually string a tiller from geosynchronous orbit down to the equator.
Using carbon nanotubing, C60, for example, which is being developed in the lab and is, in fact, right on the edge of going into commercial product use.
Now, I know to many listeners, well, your listeners grab it, but a lot of others, particularly some daytime audiences, don't quite get it.
So if we build it right at the equator, you string a thread from geosynchronous orbit down to the equator, anchor it in place, excuse me, and then the centrifugal force imparted to it by the rotation of the Earth will keep the thread rigid.
Very simple example.
Take a shoe off, tie your shoelace to it, spin it around, and it will stand out rigid.
Same thing would work with a space elevator.
And once you get that first thread in place, and the same way we used to build suspension bridges, you got that first wire across, and then you would attach spinners to it that would just start adding more and more threads and layering it out bigger and bigger.
One of the things I came up with actually building off other people's work would be not necessarily would you then be adding more threads, but you would be stitching on something that looked like 35 millimeter film, perforated on either side that you can stitch them together, and then you can be running material up and down the side of that, going up and going down.
And the fascinating part of it is it's almost energy-free once you get it in place.
Because it looks very similar to Buckminster Fuller's geodesic domes.
And we're talking about at the molecular level.
When we master stitching those together and being able to turn them out as a wire thread or as a flat film, like old 35 millimeter film, you have the construction material of the future.
If you can help me out understanding how big this so-called pillar to the sky would have to be to transport whatever it is we plan to transport up to geosync orbit in a way that, well, let's even back up from that.
Right now, what does it cost to launch a pound of something or another into Geosync?
Yeah, it's funny because I was eating at my favorite restaurant here in Black Mountain several hours ago with some friends.
We were talking about this.
And in the novel, Pillar to the Sky, one of the people working on deploying the first space elevator has a hankering for some good North Carolina barbecue.
Cost of the meal, $7.50.
Delivery charge, $100,000.
But once you have that pillar in place, the cost to get from the Earth's surface to geosynchronous drops to as little as $10 a pound.
In my novel, Pillar to the Sky, we start off by just laying out some threads of sufficient strength to be hauling additional material from the Earth's surface up the geosync.
The math works out that laying out that first wire is going to cost into the tens of billions of dollars.
Once you've got the first wires in place, then you can use that to haul up thousands of tons of construction material to make a pillar of any size you wish.
In other words, it's like laying out the first railroad across the United States cost a ton of money for that time.
But once it was built, then it became very inexpensive to haul hundreds of thousands of tons of rail to make additional rails that were even bigger, stronger, more efficient than the first Transcontinental Railroad.
Within the Earth's atmosphere, and particularly in the area of the Earth's atmosphere where we have weather, you would want something that was more beefed up.
Once you're beyond the Earth's atmosphere, you can start thinning it out.
And to get to that first step of efficient use, to be able to haul things up, I'm looking at a 20-ounce bottle of soda on my table right now.
Yes, you have a weight that is rocket-powered, and you guide it down.
It's like a contest.
I remember as a kid where you had like a fishing pole with a line on it, and you had to drop it down through like a little hole to pick up a prize or something.
That you could find down at the boardwalk, the boardwalk.
So basically the same thing.
You're dropping it from geosync down to the Earth's surface.
The tricky part will be the last 100 miles, but once anchored.
We're at a two-minute break here, so take a deep breath and we'll be right back.
Professor Fortune is my guest.
I'm Art Bell, and you know what this is, right?
Midnight in the desert.
Think about it.
A space elevator.
Pillar to the sky.
unidentified
You think the people were padding up a silly level?
I look around me and I see it so people are going to say.
Because every time we touch, we get a screamer And every time we kiss, that's where I'm just now While midnight sweeps across America, you've found an oasis for the mind.
To call midnight in the desert, please dial 1-952-CALL ART.
And at the moment, we're talking about something he probably didn't expect to be talking about when he came on the program, and that is a space elevator, a puller, if you will, title of his book, To the Sky.
And strangely, it's coincidental.
You know, I've got a gigantic array of books.
You just cannot imagine, Professor.
And so every now and then I'll wander over and I'll just look for something I haven't read to read, came on your book and said, yeah, baby, this is the one.
So as I mentioned, I'm right in the middle of it.
So I don't know the whole story.
And that's why I kind of wanted to talk about the space elevator.
So we were talking about getting the thread from geosync down to Earth, and you were mentioning you'd have a rocket, and I wonder why you need a rocket.
If you're up at Geosync, gravity would not be enough, I take it, to pull my fishing weight down.
But as we transition in closer to Earth, of course, the effect of gravity increases.
The tough part of the maneuver is the last 100,000 feet.
Because now you're dealing with wind, atmosphere, potential storms, and part of the drama in my book is they're dealing with the potential of thunderstorms in the area as they're doing the final descent down to the surface of the Earth.
The figures I looked at, the descent from geosync down to the Earth's surface would take about 10 days.
You'd have a reel of this that would be gradually unrolling.
You're not going fast.
You're pulling it out at a rate of maybe about 100 miles an hour, and you keep it controlled, letting it out slowly all the way down to the Earth's surface.
The rocket actually would serve to boost it down, but also as a retro rocket in this final mile or so descent to the anchor point.
You have a pre-assembled anchor point that you locked your cable into.
And the key thing is you have a locking system there that it is attached to.
It's been assembled prior to even beginning to send the material up into space.
And then once you have that platform with the cable locked to it, then you add spinners onto it the way they used to spin cable on suspension bridges.
And those spinners just keep going up and down the cable, taking a couple of weeks for each journey, weaving more and more layers onto it to make it stronger and stronger.
Once that first thread is in place, you got your stairway to the heavens.
Once you have that cable viable, you haul your equipment up via the cable, dissemble your Mars-bound spaceship, and your energy cost is but a fraction because what you are actually using?
Centrifugal force imparted by the Earth's atmosphere to fling your craft towards Mars, which is a slight extra boost for escape velocity from Earth's gravity.
Everything from that glove that one of the astronauts had floated out of his spacecraft to, I believe there's a camera floating up there, from nuts and bolts to entire booster rockets that are in space.
In fact, a couple years back, a Swiss firm actually did make a proposal.
We'll start cleaning up the space junk for a price.
Potentially, particularly in the opening stage of construction.
But it's another reason while working on the book and some of the new research coming out, I myself was moving from the concept of a thread to something that looks like 35 millimeter film that, if need be, you can turn sideways or you stitch 50, 20, 100 of these films together.
You have a structure that's 10, 20, 30 meters wide.
Yes, a glove could damage it, but the rest of the structure will survive.
But, you know, one of the hard math things I had to work out was to try and figure out the math of having an object, the width of a soda bottle, how many objects would impact it in a Given year.
And one study I saw from some years back indicated about every five to seven years, you're going to have a problem.
You're going to have a near flyby or a potential hit.
Absolutely, yes, because I know you, without doubt, recall, one of the shuttle missions came back and they're staring at the forward cockpit windshield and there's one heck of a deep gouge in it.
And it turned out they figured it was a bolt that was floating around up there.
And remember, low Earth orbit velocity is 17,000 miles per hour, and you're intersecting the kinetic energy, it could have wiped out a shuttle.
It is possible, not to the degree that we saw in the movie.
It made a heck of a good movie.
And I loved it.
I think it was beautifully filmed, particularly that scene when she gets into the capsule and she turns the air back on.
That put me in tears.
But they played a bit fancy with the math behind it.
Yes, there is that possibility.
But remember, again, it's like traffic moving on an interstate.
As long as you're not a drunk driver going the other way, the car next to you going 80 miles an hour, you're just simply cruising alongside of each other.
As well demonstrated in that movie where a nearby satellite was destroyed and suddenly you had debris coming at the space station and suddenly everything starts to get torn apart.
Well, you know, this first story I read tonight, that may definitely get the program on the move again.
If we really think there's somebody else out there, Professor, I think that just might fire up the American people to the point that they say, you know what?
Recall in the 50s, with all the talk about flying saucers and everything else, and then the Russians putting up Splutnik, that was a major drive for people to be looking up and saying, you know, we got to get up there too.
Yes.
And when Apollo shut down, I was such a fan of the movie 2001.
We're talking about looking 30 years in the future because of the movie Back to the Future and its date today.
But back when 2001 came out, I assumed, hey, by the time I get to be 50, that's what we're going to be doing.
It might take a story like this to get confirmed, to get us on the move again.
It would take something at that level, I think, to do it because otherwise, short of your pillar to the sky, economically, there are not reasons enough, in their opinion, to do it.
We see talk all the time about the idea of putting up solar panels.
In fact, just about a week ago, didn't the Japanese talk about orbiting, putting them around the moon or something?
No environmental group on this planet is going to stand still for a massive microwave beaming or laser beaming of energy back down to the Earth's surface.
My publisher, Wator Forged, I think one of the greatest publishers out there, Tom Doherty, had been talking with NASA for years, and his premise was brilliant in that back in the 50s and the 60s, NASA had a whole legion of cheerleaders.
Guys like Asimov, Clark, Heinlein, Bradbury.
Today, everything is almost dystopic, and yes, I do that too.
I've written quite a few dystopic novels.
So when my publisher called me and said, how would you like to write a positive story about the space program?
I was counting me in.
So I had a lot of fun working with the folks with Goddard on this one.
The trash problem is solved a couple different ways.
Yes, we actually have a Swiss-type firm that is up there starting to collect the debris.
It also becomes a major plot point, which I'm not going to give away yet because that is a major plot point, I think, a little bit further down the road from where you've read so far.
It was a bridge, I think, in Tacoma, Washington, where you got this steel bridge that, because of wind coming from a certain direction, it's literally bouncing up and down 10 to 15 feet and torquing until it finally rips apart.
Now, the pillar, you can torque a little bit to bend it out of the way of an object that you're tracking as incoming, but don't let it get out of control.
So with traditional building, when you build a big building and you're designing it, the bigger it's going to be, the bigger it has to be on the ground.
In other words, the taller you imagine it, the larger the base has to be normally with traditional engineering, correct?
Well, there's the beauty of it because you're overcoming gravity when you're building a building that's 1,000 to 3,000 feet high.
But when you have a building going all the way up to geosynchronous orbit, where there is actually a counterweight that will finally be placed out beyond geosync, the rotation of the Earth imparts centrifugal force, which will keep the thing rigid.
If anything, your concern is that it might split and fly up and apart rather than collapse down.
To me, the biggest thing of all, 20 years after it becomes operational and you start to put up solar arrays the size of Manhattan, you can take most of the oil fields of the world and just cover them over and let them go back into the desert.
You don't need that energy source anymore.
You're harnessing the sun's energy because unlike a solar panel on Earth, you are getting pure, unfiltered 24-7, 365 sunlight on solar panels in space.
It makes the solar panel at last a truly economically viable energy source.
An electromagnetic pulse, EMP, is generated by detonating a small fission.
Let me emphasize, not the city buster bombs of the Cold War era.
A small fission bomb of 60, 80 kiloton, exactly like the type of weapons Iran is pursuing, detonated above the Earth's atmosphere.
The gamma ray burst in that first microsecond of detonation, as the gamma rays hit the upper atmosphere, it's called the Compton effect now, you have electrons being broken loose, and it's sort of like a pinball machine gone by circ cascades down to the Earth's surface with a static charge buildup that when it hits the Earth's surface is picked up by every wire out there,
every antenna, every inch of electrical wiring systems short-circuits the power grid of the United States in one second.
All right, second part of the equation, and that is you've got to get those weapons you talked about down to size, and then you've got to get them launched onto something that will get them where they need to be to do what you're describing, yes?
Professor Fortman is my guest, and we're having a fascinating discussion.
Space elevator, and now EMPs.
But you know what?
For one second, twist and twist again, back to the space elevator, because I want to ask Professor, on behalf of Kate, what about weather, lightning, wind, ice buildup, lateral load?
If you can sort of address that for people, you know, it's a question everybody would ask, so it's a good one to be answered.
The answer we talked about a bit earlier, actually, is it would be variable width.
And within the Earth's atmosphere, particularly below 40,000 feet, 50,000 feet, where we really start to get some serious weather issues, you're going to have to beef the system up.
And it would have to be significantly stronger there than it would at 200 to 300 miles out.
When we left in the break, we were talking about Iran and North Korea.
Indeed, North Korea has developed, you know, I don't want to say ICBMs, but they've put stuff into orbit, and that's definitely halfway to anywhere, including orbit, right?
When we're looking at an EMP strike versus the silo-busting and city-busting methods of the potential nuclear war of the 60s, 70s, and 80s, The MERV, multiple re-entry vehicle weapons of the 70s and the 80s, they have to target down to within a couple hundred meters of their target.
You don't need to do that with an EMP launch.
Kind of a sick analogy.
It's like horseshoes and hand grenades.
All you got to do is get it close.
In other words, you don't need sophisticated guidance systems, nor do you need heat shielding for re-entry, which reduces the weight load significantly.
All you got to do is loft the warhead towards where you want it to go and detonate it when it's somewhere near where you want it to be.
If you're doing a vertical launch, you're not achieving orbital velocity by any means.
Iran for years has been fooling around with launching rockets straight up, get them up a couple hundred miles, blow them up, and then say, oh, well, we tested a rocket and it failed.
Well, it fits perfectly the profile of practicing for an EMP launch.
An upgraded stud packed aboard a cargo ship could do the same job.
I can remember last time you and I chatted, and you were describing your fascination with ham radio operation and the rig you have and everything else.
So you know the threat of a major static buildup hitting your antenna and your radio system.
However, when a thunderstorm is in the area, and trust me, over 20 years now, I've experienced many, more than you can know, thunderstorms.
And the transfer of energy from even a close strike is unbelievable.
That's an EMP pulse, folks, from a lightning strike.
What the professor is talking about, I don't know how that compares to a lightning strike, but in terms of area covered, what you're talking about would be, well, nationwide, or at least a third of the nation to effectively junk everything.
Now, we're not just talking about people like me with big antennas.
We're talking about your radios.
We're talking about your computers.
We're talking about virtually all the electronics around you turning to mush, pretty much, internally.
When I say turning to mush, transistors and diodes going, that sort of thing, right?
So anyway, I'm monitoring text that I'm getting on the event on a regular basis here.
So you think that there would be nations capable of this kind of attack, specifically, say, North Korea.
You know, there was a wonderful, the old days were wonderful when there was us, there was a Soviet Union, there was mutual assured destruction, and that kept us all safe and alive and well, right?
One of the greatest acronyms ever, mutual assured destruction, mad.
If you nuke us, we nuke you, nobody wins, so why bother?
But we're facing opponents today that have an apocalyptic vision.
If we EMP you, even if we trigger a global war, we will have fulfilled prophecies that we believe in that will bring about the end times, the return of the 12th Amon, or in the case of ISIS, bizarrely their belief that Jesus Christ will appear on their side for the final battle,
or a psychotic nutjob running a third-rate country, North Korea, who might do it for the hell of it simply because he can't have boasting rights, I took America down.
That's a bizarre world to be in compared to the face-off with the Soviets in the 50s, 60s, and 70s, and 80s.
By modern standards, a very unsophisticated fission versus a hydrogen bomb, a fusion weapon, which neither North Korea or Iran or even remotely near creating yet.
Well, you remember I mentioned earlier in the show that it seems to me that such a deed, whether it be one or three weapons ignited, as set off, as you said, it seems to me that it would produce World War III so quickly that it would almost be academic in some senses.
Yeah, it would go off, and yeah, it would be crippling to the United States, no question about it.
However, we would respond certainly in kind.
Now, if it were the North Koreans, I think that quickly the mix would escalate to the Russians, the Chinese.
In my novel One Second After, towards the end of the book, we finally have some outside information coming to the town of Black Mountain, North Carolina.
And my main character says, okay, who started all this?
You know, you're making me, this historian during the break was thinking about this is Edward Armor reporting from London while the bombs are coming down in the background.
That's what I'm feeling like at this moment, listening to you.
I highly recommend the book called The Sun Kings, S-U-N, The Sun Kings.
It's about the solar astronomer Carrington, his photographing of a solar flare, and his drawings of the solar flare, and then connecting it to the destruction of a fair part of the Victorian internet the following day.
And off the top of my head, I can't give you the classification of how high it was, but it is the goalpost event that if it happened today, it would be catastrophic to the entire world.
It would essentially blow out the power grid of the entire planet from about 25 degrees north up to the pole and 25 degrees south.
And it would take almost everything down.
And as you mentioned with EMP, I think within a matter of days, we would see eruption of wars all across the world as command and control systems won haywire, accusations back and forth, scrambling for resources.
Those cities become uninhabitable within a matter of hours.
So you have, first of all, a breakdown of water supply across almost the entire nation.
Item two, food.
Average community only has on hand enough food for about 20 to 25 days.
That counts what you have in your fridge to what's being banked up to the rear of your supermarket during the night.
Item three, command and control.
Safety.
Your public safety system is going to collapse instantly.
And what we've witnessed in the last year or two, say in Ferguson or Baltimore, well, if we get the reasons behind those, it's just simply the bad guys and the nut jobs like the one you have in your community at this very moment.
So you have a cascading series of events that trigger mass starvation, death from exposure, death from disease, or death from your neighbors.
Let me just quickly throw in.
A couple weeks back, my fiancé and I decided to do a simulated weekend of getting some of our emergency food out, relying on a backup solar generator.
We got about 24 hours into it, and we're finally staring at each other in a rather Funny moment.
I went and took a nap, and I came out about an hour later and I said, I smell Fritos on your breath.
I hear you've been cheating.
You've been cheating on me.
You're eating Fritos.
But it led to a very serious conversation that the emergency rations we had was Cadillac type food compared to people a mile away would be killing each other over a can of peaches or a can of dog food.
And we all need to understand that these big 18-wheeler trucks, along with the trains, long haul, bring us food that needs to be renewed every few days.
And then after that, the store shelves go empty very, very quickly.
So my thinking along those lines is 20-year type storable food.
I have solar panels.
I have batteries, inverters.
When the power goes off around here, I don't even know it.
That's how good it is.
You know, the batteries take over immediately, and so I'm grid or no grid, I'm still there.
Now, I would have to certainly cut down.
It doesn't work ideally for air conditioning.
That's a very high current device, and we have very high temperatures.
So it doesn't work for everything, but then I've got a 15-kilowatt generator.
I'm in pretty good shape because I've thought about all of this, the reality of it possibly happening, Professor.
And even then, you've got neighbors, you've got people who, I mean, just as an example, when the power fails here, my house stays on.
My neighbors all come out and they look up at my house, and I'm the only one with lights on, and they go, yeah, Art's got backup.
But, you know, if that happened, there's a lot of people, as you point out, not nice people running around, that wouldn't be patient and would certainly be armed and certainly have not good intent, the will to survive behind them.
You, I, my fiancé, having gone through that little brief drill with me, her family, and I bet a fair number of your listeners are thinking along the lines of being prepared, but the vast majority are not.
And then within three to five days, they're going to get rather desperate.
They'll see a light on in your house.
Yep.
And let's pray they're friendly and say, hey, can I have a can of food?
That's where we get our water professor and the battery backup and the alternative energy that I've got, wind generator and solar panels, will drive the pump in the ground.
So I have water.
And water probably is going to be your first most important asset.
The first thing anybody should go out and get tomorrow, if they're saying, okay, I'm going to start, go to Walmart, any camping supply store for $20 or $25, you can get a basic water filter system that will protect you from almost any waterborne disease.
Or even just get a gallon of bleach and several drops for either a pint or a quart.
It ain't going to taste good, but at least you're not going to come down with some gastrointestinal disaster three to five days ahead.
But now we have these guys dressed in black over there that actually, you know, the center of their ideology, Professor, is to precipitate, to bring about Armageddon.
And then we have North Korea, and we don't know what the hell they want, but they're crazy, and they're crazy enough to probably do something like you have described.
And of course, if we didn't get into some full-scale war, we would obliterate North Korea.
I mean, you know, if we would know who did it, I'm pretty sure.
And yet, as I wrote in the novel one second after, towards the end, the word comes in from the outside, well, it looks like it might have been North Korea or Iran.
And maybe about a thousand years from now, they'll be able to sell souls made of glass once the radioactivity level drops.
To which a character says back, does that change anything?
We're all dead.
Does that change anything?
And regarding North Korea or even hitting Iran, who are we killing?
The slaves that are on the surface of North Korea, while the monsters who created the madness are in bunkers 2,000 to 3,000 feet deep?
So there's no deterrence to them as mutual assured destruction, as we had with the Russians.
And very quickly, let me throw one other thing in.
Have you read the article on Atlantic Monthly in March titled, What Does ISIS Want?
Yeah, the problem in this life is that if somebody is willing to lose their life to get to you or anybody else, including presidents, if they'll give their own life to do it, the odds of success are pretty high, unfortunately.
But once you have one up, it could act like a large telephone pole, and you could string wires off of it, say, to Hawaii or Australia eventually, and be running your power systems that way, and then relaying it back across to the continental United States.
Yes, I'm going to say the gentleman that called in, I believe I recall our conversation, and yeah, particularly the high-level transformers that are boosting the energy along our, you know, boosting it up and then boosting it back down along our high transmission lines, none of them are made in the United States.
And according to one study presented in Impact America, 80% of our generating capacity would still be offline five years later.
But I had a question about this space elevator for the professor.
Absolutely.
It seems to me that the more weight that you add to this column going up to this platform that's in orbit there, the higher the velocity has to be in order to maintain the centrifugal force to keep all that weight up there.
Now, the only way that you could possibly gain that velocity would be to gain altitude.
Describe a larger circle around the Earth.
Now, I'm just wondering just how far this would have to extend out to get the velocity necessary to support the weight.
The majority of that weight would be in that line going up.
We have the cable going at the geosynchronous orbit, but eventually you would also extend the cable an extra 10,000 to 15,000 kilometers beyond that with a counterweight at the end to provide the centrifugal force necessary to keep the cable rigid.
And you would, of course, have to be balancing your cable cars, shall we call them, which are most likely magnetic LE lift systems, that would have to be carefully balanced as well, going up and down.
As you beef the system up, it can handle more and more traffic going up and down the system.
But yes, you really hit it.
You do have to go beyond geosync and place a counterweight out there to keep the system perfectly rigid.
Yeah, it's been interesting listening to your show.
have been watching this and we've been posting on X and it's kind of funny, I like to imagine, It's kind of funny.
We imagine you, I like to think of it as that scene where they're in the radio station where the broadcaster is reporting everything and all of a sudden the government bursts even, even though it's just some idiot with a gun probably.
And we're all waiting for the broadcaster, okay, okay, I'm refusing to turn off the air.
And then they nail him on air and they shoot him and everybody flinches.
anyway, yeah, about the EMP, it's kind of interesting being out where I am, and you kind of don't want to talk too much because then it's like bragging and asking for it.
But the farmers, how do you think we would do it?
I mean, a lot of our stuff runs on diesel.
A lot of our older vehicles, I've talked with some friends of mine, and they've talked about how they converted some of these old diesel trucks that, well, they have a heavy engine, they have a crank mount in the front so that you can turn them over manually.
But the farmers of the modern age, you've got to wonder how they would survive through something like this.
And, God, one of my Dimwit sisters has 65 GTO.
I was reading the wiki page on your guest's book that he's been talking about, and I found it very interesting.
I always kind of wanted to do something like that for a video in a natural disasters class that I once had in college, because I thought it would be a very interesting concept.
And I just, you got to wonder how those of us that aren't in major population centers would survive something like this, because we kind of are halfway started.
I would like to be in Black Mountain, North Carolina.
I think a small town environment in which you have a close-knit community, which people work together, to be isolated at a remote rural farm would be a little bit hairy.
And your caller makes a very interesting point.
I'm a historian.
I used to do volunteer work at a 19th century living history farm back many years ago.
And we replicated a farm life during the Civil War.
You want to talk about a crummy job of being handed the hoe and go out and hoe the row of corn.
And you're looking at about a 200-yard line of corn that you're going to be going up and down all day with a handhoe.
And then let's milk the cows and let's do this and let's do that.
It ain't pretty.
I mean, electrification and the advent of automobiles transform farming.
To paraphrase one of my own commercials, downtide, it looks like these shots were fired at the structure that I'm in.
Uptide?
I'm still here.
So good evening, everybody.
Had some nights on radio, I'll tell you.
Dr. William Forschen, I'm going to learn to pronounce that eventually, is my guest, and he's a guest on any number of subjects, including space elevators.
Professor, it says you describe an EMP attack as a first-strike weapon, right?
I surely understand what a first-strike weapon means, but certainly the Russians, for example, or the Chinese would not use an EMP weapon as a first-strike weapon because it would not stop retaliation from us, which would mean the end of their countries.
And then ultimately, I'm sure, the end of the world.
So it doesn't strike me as a great first-strike weapon because, number one, the military is hardened and protected for the most part, so it wouldn't affect them nearly so much as it would the average people and everything in America, I'll grant you that.
But probably not the missiles that they would find coming their way that would end all life.
But as we talked about earlier, when dealing with a psychotic in North Korea or the Iranians who wish to bring about the return of the 12th Iman, yeah, the Hidden Mahdi or Iman, or ISIS, it is a first-strike weapon.
It's a nation-buster.
It busts the United States in the opening move.
That's what I meant by calling it a first-strike weapon, which maybe I should edit that for a third-rate nation.
You said that we were all just shell-shocked, and you said that every nation goes through a crisis like this at some point in their history, and how we respond to it will define us as a nation.
And then you gave a prayer for those people who had died, and you dismissed the class.
I actually had a different name and a different gender at the time.
And the other thing I was going to tell you was you, I had to leave the college because of a depression and gender issues.
And you sat me down in your office before I left.
And you told me that whatever I do, go back to college because the most brilliant minds you've ever met in your life, many of them were working at gas stations.
And I, because you told me that, several years later, I went back to college.
And now I've gotten through college and I'm teaching in Japan, which has always been my dream job.
It would be one heck of a ride, the ultimate sport, the ultimate skydiving experience.
unidentified
Well, and that's kind of my other question.
I assume that you'd be able to stop it at any point and get off maybe at the level that the ISS is at.
I mean, not that it would necessarily be right there, but you'd be able to go up to the 500-mile mark or the – And then get off and get on a spaceship or a shuttle or.
Anyway, Dr. Forston, I have this question for you because the competitions, you know, had this, you know, you guys have talked about this, you know, before.
Of course, he's been lobbying, you know, to isolate the power grids and all that.
I'm thinking that it would be a lot worse than what's talked about because the motherboards, you know, the computers that are in all modern vehicles, and the truck I'm driving right now, I'm driving a 2015 Freightliner Cascadia.
And my thinking is if an EMP was to happen or a major solar flare, that I would be sitting on the freeway all of a sudden with everybody else in their cars, and the cars would just go dead most likely because of the electronics in them.
And another key thing to remember with solar flares, we would have 8 to 24 hours warning that it's coming because it travels slower than the speed of light.
It's just a mathematical probability that at some point one of them is going to hit this little BB that's orbiting 93 million miles out.
But about a year or two ago, you might recall there were two that were almost back to back that if the Earth had been about two or three days back in its orbit, we would have been hit square on.
Let's go here on the phones to Florida, I believe.
unidentified
Hey, guys, how are you all doing?
Fine.
Just have a couple of things for the doctor, if I may ask.
First, to accomplish something like the space elevator, do you think it would be probably most likely a joint effort between governments, different governments?
Well, I actually postulated in the book Pull It Through the Sky, it would start as a private venture, that NASA, the government agency that it is right now to try and sell the American taxpayers on this, it ain't going to happen.
But regarding private venture, we have the multi-billionaires that came out of the computer revolution.
For example, in the book, I was placing some chips on Branson, that he'd be the type of guy that might move forward.
Unfortunately, there was a tragedy with his project.
What was it?
It's been almost a year now since they lost Virgin Galactic.
So my theory starts out as private, then becomes multinational, multi-government.
First of all, there's no way to protect the above-ground grid against the kind of EMP you're talking about.
It just can't be done, period.
However, it may be possible that if our grid were virtually torn down and replaced by underground lines and underground stations, it could be conceivably, I guess, the effect would be lessened or eliminated.
However, to be a pessimist, Soviet Test 184 can be found on Wikipedia, Soviet Test 184, where the Soviets, of course, well, they did it over their own country, Wachi, Kazakhstan, at that time, now.
And a power station 500 miles away was blown offline because it penetrates into the Earth's surface heading towards our iron core.
And it was picked up by underground wires in Kazakhstan, fed into the power station, and blew it out.
I don't see conspiracy in this at all, just coincidence that we in the Soviets in the early 60s started detonating Weapons in space became aware of the potential of EMP, but then only a year or two later, we had the Test Ban Treaty of 1963, which prevented that.
So we're just working off computer simulation models since.
And for everybody else, remember what I said at the beginning of the show, please.
I got to essentially say something that I've been thinking about all my life.
I want to thank everybody who had anything to do with this show.
Tell us, Joe Talbot, Heath, my webmaster, Heather Wade, my producer, StreamGuys, LB.net, Sales, Pete Everhardt, TuneIn Radio, Amy Martin, who does the news, and such a good job with it.
From everybody, coast to coast, 25 time zones wide.