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Oct. 21, 2015 - Art Bell

02:18:16

Art Bell MITD - Dr William Forstchen Space Elevator EMPs

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	From the high desert and the great American Southwest, I bid you all good evening.
	Good morning, good afternoon.
	Across all 25 time zones around the world, This is Midnight in the Desert.
	I'm Art Bell.
	This program covering all 25, that's right, 25 time zones, like a blanket.
	The rules for our program are simple.
	No bad language.
	One call per show.
	On Fridays, a two-drink maximum.
	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 uh...
	is going to be very very very good professor uh...
	uh... they'll be coming up but uh...
	term.
	Thank you.
	Try just writing something like that.
	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 roll, of 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 Boyajian.
	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 846285-2, 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 Boyajian 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 scientist 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 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 Kik 846-285-2 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 Seth Shostak, myself, that night, who was ill in bed, and he said they would be immediately pointing the telescope 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 a 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.
	So that's not going to happen.
	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.
	I, 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, guess 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 and the world.
	That's just me.
	And if that's not big news, then baby, 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.
	Alright, 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 it went out, you know, come to the Rose Garden.
	That's a place you want to make an announcement.
	Right at the Rose Garden.
	I wonder where they'll make the... anyway, the other announcement.
	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.
	Now what does that mean?
	Does Russia want a piece of Syria?
	A diplomatic solution?
	How does that happen?
	Syria is the disaster of the world right now, right?
	The black-clad people are there.
	The insurgents that want Assad gone.
	We've got bombing runs over ISIS.
	Russians have bombing runs over the people that want to overthrow Assad.
	It's a mess.
	How do you get a political settlement?
	I'll be watching.
	It's interesting.
	Lamar Odom and Khloe Kardashian are going to stay together.
	See, I fooled you.
	That's the big news.
	Lamar Odom and Khloe Kardashian are going to stay married.
	They filed to unfile.
	Oh, circling back for just one moment, I'll run a really weird theory by you.
	If you like conspiracy theories and stuff like that, you're going to love this.
	Going back to the star for a moment and the possibility of aliens.
	Kepler, the Kepler telescope, did all this work some time ago, right?
	Because they were reviewing all this in 2011.
	It probably took them two years to decide to open their mouths.
	Anyway, Kepler went kafui on the 27th of May, 2013.
	It sort of came up a little bit and then went hard down again in June.
	Now, I don't dispute that Kepler is down.
	I do think it's down.
	But I wonder, I do wonder, if they knew that this news was coming out, and you know they knew, right?
	Then, Wouldn't it be convenient to have Kepler go down so that we couldn't absolutely confirm what we believe to be true?
	Again, I'm not trying to feed any conspiracy theories.
	I'm just saying that, well, If you wanted to test the waters, and surely this article, this story now, is testing the waters.
	I think Dr. Kanku was quoted as saying it could be the biggest story in 500 years or nothing.
	And it's seeming truer tonight to me, and I'm sure you as well.
	Biggest discovery in 500 years?
	How about... I wonder what it was 500 years ago that would have been bigger than this.
	I've been trying to think.
	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. Forsgen, that's a hard name, has a PhD 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 prepper 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 is Professor Foch.
	I think you're going to find this very enlightening in more ways than one.
	I'm Art Bell.
	This is Midnight in the Desert.
	The devil went down to Georgia.
	He was looking for a soul to steal.
	He was in a bind because he was way behind and he was willing to make a deal.
	When he came across this young man sewing on a fiddle and playing it hot.
	And the devil jumped up on a hickory stump and said, boy let me tell you what.
	Fuck. I guess you did.
	Thanks for watching! Please subscribe!
	There's also big news on the show front.
	I can't talk about it.
	It's killing me.
	This is Midnight in the Desert with Art Bell.
	Please call the show at 1952-225-5278.
	That's 1952.
	Call Art.
	And let me add this.
	There's also big news on the show front.
	I can't talk about it.
	It's killing me.
	It's absolutely killing.
	You know me.
	I blurt out everything, whatever it is, but I can't blurt this out.
	I can only tell you, well, it's big news, but not tonight.
	All right, well, so be it.
	I've eaten up most of the poor professor's first few minutes here, so we'll just say hello to him.
	Hi, professor, welcome to the show.
	All right, it's a pleasure to be with you, and can we run with your opening story for a few more minutes, because... I don't see how we can't.
	Well, the last time you and I chatted was several years back, and between then and now, I wrote a book in cooperation with NASA called Pillar to the Sky, which was about building the first space elevator.
	You know what?
	I'm reading that right now.
	Oh my gosh!
	I guess maybe you or your people sent it to me, and I'm in the middle of that book right now.
	Well, I hope it's going okay for you.
	I love it.
	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 light stick agent, but you need to get them on the ball.
	Yeah, yeah.
	And, you know, you mentioned that part of the speculation about collecting solar energy in space rather than scrambling for it here on Earth.
	I didn't say that.
	I just read about it.
	That came from the Post.
	Just so you know, the Post.
	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 Parnell 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, some might be through, and I'm fascinated by this.
	So, this would make it, Professor, what Kaku, Professor Kaku, calls a Type II civilization able to harness, you know, 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.
	Yeah.
	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.
	I, you know, I just added to it with, I've got this NASA source and they, 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, don't you think it would be like a presidential thing?
	I would prefer to see NASA do the announcement, because they have a very soft spot in my heart.
	You and I are the same generation, and I'm a kid of the Apollo age.
	Oh no, I'm with you.
	I think they deserve, they deserve to make payments.
	I'm not saying they have the credit.
	Yeah, they deserve it.
	They deserve it.
	But, but, I think this is actually, even though they discover it, it's above their pay grade.
	Or even some sort of global thing.
	It's, or even let's, remember the Russians were the first one to put something up there, not us, which motivated us to go forward.
	When I was writing my book, Color to the Sky, I'm 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 1500 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's beginning to confirm this to a pretty high percentage, you know, I just...
	It blows my mind.
	I don't know how else to put it.
	It makes my life.
	How about you?
	Well, remember this famous quote from Isaac Asimov when he was presented with the question, is there life out there?
	Yes.
	And it was, whether there is or there is not.
	Both prospects are equally fascinating.
	They are.
	All right, Professor, hold tight.
	We're at that break I told you about.
	We'll be back.
	This is Midnight in the Desert.
	To reach Midnight in the Desert via Skype worldwide, if on a computer, please be sure
	Remember to use a headphone mic and call MITD51.
	That's MITD-51.
	All right, here we are back again, 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 Forsgen 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.
	Anyway, now we've got lots of time.
	Professor, welcome back.
	Pleasure to be with you.
	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.
	It 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.
	All of that, yes.
	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, not good.
	The one that's technologically superior will almost inevitably, even if they have the best of intentions, Will Trump wipe out the one that is technologically inferior?
	Yeah, right.
	I mean, we like to nation-build.
	Maybe they like to, you know, planet-build.
	Well, it'd be fun to watch the planet-building from 1,500 light-years away as we figure it out.
	Well, here's one little problem I see.
	As you just mentioned, 1,500 light-years out.
	1500 light years out. There they are, 1500 years ago, harnessing the power of the sun.
	Because that's what we're seeing 1500 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... What do they call it?
	Anyway, it's about that movie, Back to the Future, right?
	So... Oh, yes.
	October 21st, 2015 is supposed to be the day from Back to the Future.
	That's right, that's 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.
	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, you know, 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?
	We're in for a very interesting encounter.
	That is indeed the case.
	And I want to be around to witness it.
	Oh yeah, me too.
	Just so you know, I get these messages as the show goes on.
	People can type to me.
	It comes through what's called the wormhole.
	And most of the people are saying, you know, Art, I don't have a good feeling about this.
	And this is what I think part of the announcement is.
	I wonder how many people out there don't have such a good feeling about it.
	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 more important, most importantly, loft up things like the Webb Telescope and systems beyond that to really focus in on it.
	Give us some time to think about and get used to the idea before extending out contact or accepting contact coming towards us.
	Yes.
	Anyway, it's going to be fun.
	I think that, well, I hope it's going to be fun.
	And I hope contact is a very long way off.
	It'll give us time to assimilate this and grow up and try to be a type one civilization by the time they do make contact.
	And let's add, it would revitalize the space program, both through NASA and private sector.
	Ooh, whatever.
	Give us a positive vision of the future again.
	Are you hearing all the talk about M-drives, Professor?
	Oh, yes.
	Yeah.
	Yeah.
	There's so much fascinating stuff going on.
	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.
	And that's actually, you know what, that's actually what I want to talk about.
	Yeah.
	Would you mind?
	Oh no, no, but let me just say that the critic actually said, this book was too happy.
	Fortune 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?
	I have to be honest with you, I understand what an EMP attack would do.
	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 A pulse would be not all that important to the ashes.
	Yes.
	Anyway, so I want to talk a little bit, we will get to that, I promise, but I want to get to Pillar to the Sky, and I want to get to... I forgot to speak, thank you.
	Okay, good.
	So, is a space, explain to the audience what a space elevator would be.
	The concept of a space elevator got the math before it was worked out by Tsiolkovsky, a Russian high school teacher, actually, back in 19, 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.
	Was that 22,000?
	That's 22,000 and several hundred miles.
	Okay.
	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 that many listeners, well your listeners grab it.
	But a lot of others, particularly some daytime audiences, don't quite get it.
	Okay, so let's keep it easy.
	Such a structure, from the Earth to geosync orbit, is just impossible to contemplate from any number of angles.
	Number one, let us begin with Where would you begin building it?
	On Earth?
	Or in space?
	Or would you begin both simultaneously?
	That's the great part of it.
	Let's look at a different angle.
	Impossible to conceptualize building it from the Earth's surface at the 22,000 miles.
	Utterly absurd.
	The idea is to loft up to geosynchronous orbit a thread made out of carbon nanotube.
	And then string that thread Back down to the equator.
	Once anchored in place... By the way, this, folks, is where it's gotta be, is at the equator.
	Has to be.
	Actually, you can build it offline from the equator, but the stress loads start getting a little bit weird.
	Right.
	The engineers' pleasure point is at the equator.
	Why?
	Because the place I picked in my book is Kiribati.
	Perhaps more familiar to many Americans because it's a small island chain nation.
	One of the islands about 60 miles off the equator is Tarawa, one of the great battlefields of World War II.
	So if we build it right at the equator, you string a thread from geosynchronous orbit down to the equator, anchor it in place, 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.
	Right.
	Same thing would work with a space elevator, and once you get that first thread in place, in 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.
	How strong are these carbon fibers, nanotech things?
	How strong, potentially?
	Is there a way you can tell me compared to, I don't know, steel, compared to something we know?
	Thousands of times stronger than steel, both in compression and extension.
	And steel simply would not work for this.
	We need to think of a whole new construction material.
	Let's look back, the historian in me looks back to the development of mass production of steel via the Bessemer process in the 1860s.
	Okay.
	Steel, prior to that, was almost as valuable and expensive as silver.
	Right.
	You know, weight for weight.
	Yes.
	Suddenly, Bessemer process of turning out steel at literally just a couple dollars a ton.
	We're gonna see the same thing happen with nanotube technology and C60 technology.
	It will become the building material of the 21st century, replacing steel.
	Look how steel transformed the cityscapes of the world between 1870 up to our current age.
	I vaguely understand nanotubes.
	I don't know what C60 is.
	C60 is one variant on that, and it's easy to pull up for folks.
	In fact, there's some pretty good stuff, I believe, on Wikipedia about it.
	It is actually a molecular rearranging of carbon.
	It's also referred to sometimes as buckyballs.
	It's Buckminster Fuller, 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.
	Okay.
	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?
	You and I have synchronicity here because that was going to be my answer.
	Currently, to low Earth orbit, no matter how efficient we get with rocket technology, Your price is still going to run $1,000 to $3,000 per pound.
	Okay, that's low Earth orbit.
	What about geosync?
	Geosynchronous, you can run as high as $100,000 a pound.
	$100,000 a pound?
	Really?
	Yeah.
	It's funny because I was eating at my favorite restaurant here on Black Mountain several hours ago with some friends.
	We were talking about this, and in the novel, Pillow 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.
	$10 a pound.
	All right.
	Imagine the structure for me, the pillar, if you will, to get to that efficiency.
	How big would it be?
	We're talking about these nanotubes or C60.
	The final product, how big would it be?
	It could go any size we want.
	In my novel, A Poet to the Sky, we start off by just laying on 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 him to the tens of billions of dollars.
	Tens of billions?
	Alright.
	Once you got the first wires in place, then you can use that to haul up to haul up everything else.
	Thousands of tons of construction material.
	Sure.
	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.
	I get it.
	But can you estimate for me something that would be efficient enough to take up the kind of Weight that you just talked about, how big might it be, do you think?
	You mean in terms of size?
	Yes, yes, yes, yes.
	If we were standing back and looking at it, how big would the thing be?
	And would it be different sizes at different points where there might be different stresses or something?
	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.
	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.
	That's about the diameter.
	All right.
	My next question is this.
	I'm trying to envision how you would get the first thread of nanotubes or whatever from geosync to earth.
	Would you?
	That's the challenge.
	I'm sure it is, but there has to be a way to envision that challenge before this becomes realistic.
	In other words, I don't know.
	Me, I take a nice fishing weight, attach it to my nanotube, and I start dropping and dropping and dropping and dropping.
	But that's probably not going to work, right?
	Again, it's like you and I have a synchronistic link tonight.
	A Vulcan mind meld, if you will, because that's how I envision it.
	It would be the equivalent of... Seriously?
	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.
	I remember those days.
	You'd 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 hundred miles, but once anchored... All right, hold it right there.
	Hold it right there.
	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.
	You'd think that people would've had enough of silly love songs.
	The look around me and I see it isn't so.
	Some people want to be...
	...or going insane.
	Cause every time we touch, I get this feeling.
	And every time we kiss, I swear I can fly.
	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.
	That's 1-952-225-5278.
	My guest is Professor William Forshton.
	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 pillar, 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.
	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.
	I'm delighted to be talking about it.
	Alright, good.
	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.
	Initially, no.
	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.
	Of course.
	They're doing the final descent down to the surface.
	Yeah, well, of course, you know, when you're at the equator, you're going to have thunderstorms.
	Yeah.
	And that's, let me throw in, that's another reason why you want it at the equator, because the equator is all but free of hurricanes.
	Yes, that's true.
	But thunderstorms?
	Oh, baby.
	You know, I lived in Manila for years, and we're 15 degrees off or so, and let me tell you, it rips and it snorts every night.
	Sure does.
	Really severe stuff, so there would be that to contend with.
	And another reason I chose Kiribati out in the middle of the Pacific is security.
	Now, the equator goes across Africa, goes across South America, but it goes across some nations He'd be a number one target for terrorists.
	So you want an island nation out in the Pacific for your first pillar because of security issues as well.
	How about a Japan Airlines 777 bumping into it?
	What do you have then?
	You'd have a plane that would go down and until the pillar was of sufficient strength, it could possibly sever it.
	Possibly.
	Chances are, though, a wing hit, it would just shear the wing off.
	It would shake the pillar.
	The plane would go down, but the pillar would survive.
	That is how strong C-60 or buckyballs or nanotubing is.
	All right.
	Now, down to brass tacks here, as it were, do we have enough nanotubes or enough C-60 or enough of whatever it's going to take to actually do this yet?
	When I first proposed the book, it was back, gosh, it was around 2010, 2011.
	The initial reaction in the team I was coordinating with with NASA was, hey, Bill, that stuff is still 20, 30 years out.
	And just in the last three or four years, there's been tremendous strides.
	And we're now up to manufacturing, potentially up to, last time I checked, definitely centimeter length.
	It will soon be going to millimeter length, and once you get that, it's like making steel wire in the 19th century.
	Wow.
	Steel wire really did not exist several hundred years back, except in very short lengths.
	It was difficult and expensive to make.
	And then it started getting mass produced.
	Once you start mass producing this material, you can weave it to whatever you want.
	All right.
	Try this for me, Professor.
	I'm imagining something like a shuttle trip.
	We don't have shuttle trips anymore, but some kind of spacecraft would go to geosync orbit and would fire this rocket you spoke of.
	Pretty much straight down, I guess.
	Yes.
	And this thing would go flying down into the atmosphere.
	Mm-hmm.
	The normal, it would be going fast, as in re-entry fast?
	No.
	No, not at all.
	Not at all.
	Okay.
	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.
	And those final mile or so descent to the anchor point.
	You have a pre-assembled anchor point that you lock your cable into.
	Once locked and... What do you mean?
	Where would that be?
	Are you talking about the ground?
	Right on the equator.
	Okay, so this rocket would, one way or the other, Get it all the way to the ground.
	Correct.
	And the key thing is you have a locking system there that it is attached to.
	It's been assembled, you know, prior to even beginning to send the material up into space.
	Right.
	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 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've got your stairway to the heavens.
	How much time would be involved?
	Let's say you've got the first thread in place.
	Yes.
	From that point to usability, how long?
	Five to ten years.
	Well, that's a lot of work.
	Well, we remember Jack Kennedy making a challenge in May of 1961, and not much more than eight years later we were on the surface of the moon.
	Good point.
	It would be a mega-project, same way Hoover Dam or the building of the interstate highways.
	There was a time when America embraced mega-projects.
	This is a mega-project for America for the 21st century.
	I guess we could almost call it a mega-structure.
	Yes.
	It would be the ultimate megastructure.
	For us.
	Actually, to start, because once you're up there, think about going to Mars.
	What's the cost of going to Mars right now?
	Escaping orbit, pretty much.
	Right.
	Haul your material, once you have that cable viable, you haul your equipment up via the cable, assemble 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 with just a slight extra boost for escape velocity from Earth's gravity.
	Now what do they say when you're in Earth orbit, you're pretty much halfway to anywhere?
	Right.
	Right.
	That's where all the big bucks are spent getting up out of the atmosphere.
	And once you're at geosync, you're well over 90% of the way out there.
	This just seems like such a good idea.
	Poke holes in your idea.
	Major problem, orbital material, because all objects in orbit cross the equator twice in each orbit.
	Think of a polar orbit launch.
	Oh, you're talking about like space junk, that kind of stuff?
	Everything from that glove that one of the astronauts had, Floated out of his spacecraft, so 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.
	A price?
	Yeah, essentially become garbage collectors in space, taking care of the material that's out there.
	It will be expensive, And we're going to have to control the traffic, the traffic in space.
	There's about 15,000 to 20,000 objects in orbit right now, of which only a fraction are viable operational satellites.
	Most of them are dead or debris from launches or systems breaking apart.
	Yeah, because our space elevator is not just a fuel sink.
	It's going all the way down.
	It is subject to virtually that whole line, right?
	Correct.
	And these objects coming around in orbit, the junk you talked about, typically moving at what kind of speeds?
	Well, remember the movie Gravity?
	Now, they played a lot with some of the science, vertical mechanics and gravity, but it was still a great film.
	It was.
	My fiancé and I watched it on a cruise ship that was going through some stormy weather.
	And so the whole theater was going up and down 15 to 20 feet.
	People were getting sick.
	I loved it.
	I do well in those situations, too.
	You have to clean up the space junk.
	Yeah.
	So you really would have to go up there and garbage collect.
	Yes.
	If a glove, professor, hit your space pillar, pillar to the sky, that would be enough to fracture it?
	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 35mm film.
	That if need be you can turn sideways or you stitch fifty, twenty, a hundred of these films together.
	You have a structure that's ten, twenty, thirty meters wide.
	Yes, a glove could damage it, but the rest of the structure will survive.
	What about one of Ronald Reagan's satellites sitting up there protecting it with lasers?
	That is A very serious consideration.
	That's most likely what we'll be doing as well.
	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.
	Well, if we want to stay in space, it seems to me that the movie Gravity should serve up a perfect warning that we damn well better clean it up first.
	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.
	Uh-huh.
	And it turned out they figure 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, a simple bolt.
	Do they have adequate, since we're on the subject, take the space station.
	Do they have adequate warning Are we watching that closely or could they be surprised unhappily?
	The potential is there.
	We've been lucky.
	There's been some near incidents.
	I believe one object passed within 50 or 100 meters of it a couple years back.
	But again, the difference between the space station and a pillar is, of course, the space station is in orbit itself.
	Yes.
	It's sort of like moving down the interstate highway With all the traffic moving along with it.
	So, not much of a problem, but if you have a thread sticking up on that interstate highway, you are going to have a problem sooner or later.
	Alright, let's take on the subject material in Gravity for just a second.
	The working hypothesis there was that somebody, Chinese or whoever it is, blow up a satellite And by the way, there has been a lot of that going on, or some of it going on, I know, just to prove that they could blow up a satellite.
	Now you have lots of pieces and bolts and stuff, and what they theorized was a sort of a chain reaction.
	Isn't that possible?
	It is possible, not to the degree that we saw in the movie.
	It made a heck of a good movie.
	Yeah.
	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.
	Oh, yeah.
	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, they're just simply cruising alongside of each other.
	Pretty much, but I mean, if you blow up something, you know, that weighs a lot, you know, then you get a lot of little pieces and they're all on their own trajectories and yet orbiting at the same time.
	So, it's like a shotgun blast.
	Absolutely, yes.
	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.
	And the next pass is worse because it's hit another satellite or two by then and so forth?
	Yeah.
	Though there was some math being played with there in terms of the time it took the debris to circle the Earth and come back and hit things again.
	They were kind of sticking to 90 minutes, weren't they?
	But remember, The targets that were going to be hit are also moving in Earth orbit as well.
	True.
	Different points.
	But nevertheless, I love the movie, and I think it would help generate interest again in the space program.
	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?
	We better do it and we better do it first.
	Recall in the 50s, with all the talk about flying saucers and everything else, and then the Russians putting up Sputnik, 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 State 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.
	We're going to be on the moon.
	We're going to be going as far as Saturn.
	Oh, I thought that too.
	I thought that too.
	I'm so disappointed.
	Yeah.
	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.
	One of the main factors I wrote in The Pillar to the Sky was, it solves the energy crisis once and for all.
	Because, once you've got the pillar, what's the product you can ship back down?
	Put out solar panels, collect energy, And then you have them hardwired.
	One of the beauties of some of the carbon nanotubing we're looking at is they can be superconductive as well.
	Oh, really?
	Yes.
	So in other words, the energy you collect, you could then send to Earth with virtually no loss.
	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.
	It just ain't going to happen.
	I know.
	You need a hard wire.
	You need a space elevator to do it.
	And as you pointed out, it would be made of Material that would conduct it without loss to speak of, yes?
	Yes.
	God, that's exciting.
	All of this is so exciting.
	What happened to us anyway?
	We seem to have lost our will in the last 30 to 40 years.
	This belief that Jack Kennedy... Remember, his challenge was, why are we going to do it?
	Because we're Americans and we can do it.
	That's all we need.
	That's all we need to go.
	Oh, we're still Americans.
	Yeah, we're still Americans.
	But we just don't have that... I don't know, we don't have that will.
	And I hate to say it, but maybe we need Trump.
	Somebody just... a wild man up there.
	Or, for that matter... I mean, he'd just order it, you know?
	Get the damn thing built now.
	We know how to make big buildings.
	Build it!
	Look to what I hate when history books refer to them as the robber barons.
	Look at the Carnegie's, the Mellon's, and others of the 1870 Edison.
	It's like, okay, I got the capital, I got the ability, I got the knowledge, I'm going to wire this country with electricity.
	Well, you could call it the Trump pillar.
	Oh, then that would sell them on the idea.
	We got to give the guy a call.
	Listen, if you win, we got an idea for you.
	All right.
	I think it's a wonderful idea.
	I especially love the whole prospect of getting that first fiber down.
	Yes.
	That for me, researching it, figuring it out, talking to people at NASA, and then writing it, that was a fun moment, writing that scene.
	Have you had any discussions with anybody from NASA about this whole idea?
	That was the beauty of the project.
	My publisher, Whittore Forge, 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.
	Right.
	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, count me in.
	So I had a lot of fun working with the folks with Goddard on this one.
	In the book, how do you deal with the trash problem?
	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.
	All right.
	It's called Pillar to the Sky.
	If you want to pick it up and this idea intrigues you, well, there's the name of the book.
	You can grab it.
	I assume it's available, you know, everywhere.
	One other thing I would give away with that.
	You can set up a harmonic wave.
	The pillar is flexible.
	If you know something's coming, you can actually bend it out of the way of the object.
	But you don't want it to turn into a gallop.
	Remember Gallop and Gertie?
	The bridge that collapsed around 1940?
	Not particularly, but... Well, it's an easy video to find on YouTube.
	It was called Gallop and Gertie.
	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?
	Correct.
	Yes.
	That's just simply not the case with Pillar to the Sky.
	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.
	Okay.
	Other than the possibility of being halfway to anywhere, which certainly you would be, what would you tout as the economic benefits of this?
	What else could you do with it beyond launching elsewhere?
	To me, the biggest thing of all, Twenty 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.
	And so we really begin to yield the source, or the power of our own sun.
	Correct.
	What a concept!
	Wow!
	It's neat, isn't it?
	Beyond me, yes.
	All right, let us move now to other areas and let us consider your book, One Second After, and An Electromagnetic Pulse.
	Let's begin at the beginning.
	Short version, what is an electromagnetic pulse and how is it made?
	Yeah, I'm actually in my brain, I'm shifting gears at this moment from happy smiling to okay, let's get to the serious stuff now.
	Sure, sure, let's do it.
	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 sort of like a pinball machine gone berserk, 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.
	Are you talking about a single detonation?
	Perfect storm for our enemies would most likely be the detonation of three weapons.
	That's what I thought.
	One over the eastern United States, one over the central United States, and then, of course, one out your way towards the West Coast.
	So, in other words, three detonations.
	You have destroyed the grid across the entire nation, probably parts of Canada and Mexico.
	Yes.
	Got it.
	Line of sight event.
	All right, well, so, number one, you've got to have fission weapons, and I don't know how far away... How far away is Iran, in your estimation, from something of that sort?
	Do you know?
	The pessimist in me?
	Six months to a year.
	Oh, you are a pessimist.
	Yeah.
	So this deal we just cut will not prevent that?
	This deal we just cut is Munich.
	For 2015.
	This deal that we cut is like going to the Japanese in the spring of 1941 and saying, hey, we got half a dozen extra aircraft carriers.
	You want to buy them?
	This deal we cut is a nightmare.
	Yeah, well, you're not the first or the last to say that one.
	And I guess I believe it.
	Not good, huh?
	Not good.
	It's perhaps the worst deal of our lifetime.
	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?
	Absolutely.
	Easily done.
	Easily?
	Easily done.
	Already the North Koreans I have demonstrated, starting with tonight's CBM, the Iranians have actually gone into orbit.
	Hold tight.
	Professor, hold tight.
	We're at a break point.
	Take a nice deep breath, maybe a cup of coffee.
	We'll talk about what they're doing.
	You get a shiver in the dark, it's raining in the fog, but meantime.
	Sound of the river, you're stopping, you're holding everything.
	I've been flowing.
	You're the middle of life.
	To the other man.
	La la la la la la la la la la.
	by home
	That's 1952.
	To initiate a dialogue sequence with Art Bell, please coordinate your phalanges and call
	1952-225-5278. That's 1952. Call Art. Oh, this is interesting. I'm not sure what to
	Oh, this is interesting.
	I've got a report from a neighbor of mine of shots fired near my studio.
	Good bumper music for that.
	Sheesh.
	Well, this is weird.
	Professor Forsten 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.
	But it would withstand the elements nearly as you know.
	Absolutely, yes.
	Okay, 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 MIRV, Multiple Reentry 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.
	It's 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.
	Can I ask you to hold on for a moment, please?
	Absolutely.
	We've got a situation here.
	I'll be right back.
	Everybody, stay where you are.
	I'm just gonna play a little bit of music and I'll be right back
	Tremenator Game of Thrones Opening Song Title Card Videos.
	Listen folks, what's happened is there were shots fired here in my area.
	Somebody driving by, probably drunk, and probably hunting for meat.
	I don't know.
	But shots fired, quite a number of them.
	And I guess the police are on the way, and that sort of thing.
	So, got my attention, called home, family's safe, everybody's okay, including myself at this hour, so hopefully that's all there is to it.
	Be aware out there, we are very, very well armed and my wife is a really good shot.
	I'm at least a better shot.
	Professor, welcome back.
	I admire your phlegmatic attitude.
	Nothing like a little shots fired action to get your blood going, huh?
	Yeah.
	As long as you're safe and your family is safe.
	Yep, we are.
	But all the neighbors heard it, so it's It's the real McCoy.
	God, what kind of world is this we live in?
	It's not the guns.
	I'm going to say it again.
	You know, everybody says it's the guns.
	It's not the guns.
	They just accomplish a mechanical thing.
	It's the mentally ill people that wield them.
	Stupid people.
	Okay, so where the hell were we?
	We were talking about the potential end of the world, but... Yeah, yeah, okay.
	We were talking about Iran, we were talking about North Korea, and yes, North Korea has launched, indeed, things that have gone apparently into orbit.
	It's not great stuff yet, but they're close.
	I'll give you that.
	They're close.
	You don't even need an ICBM.
	You can get a container ship into the Gulf of Mexico, You have a Scud missile, which is really not much more than an upgraded V-2 from World War II.
	A Scud can go high enough?
	Yeah.
	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 EMT launch.
	An upgraded stud packed aboard a cargo ship could do the same job.
	All right.
	I'm getting messages here.
	Very dangerous person out there, I guess.
	So, they could go off our coast, they could be in a sub, they could launch something that would get high enough to detonate, you mentioned a fusion bomb, One second after that thing went off, what would the effect be on the ground?
	Everything was shut off.
	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.
	You know the threat of a major static buildup hitting your antenna and hitting your radio system.
	I don't mean to laugh, Professor.
	Let me tell you how much I understand the threat of it.
	I have what's called a double loop antenna, which extends around five acres of five acres.
	I envy it.
	Yes.
	And even on clear days, no wind, I have a voltage that will destroy a radio if hooked directly to it.
	Yes.
	So I have to bypass this voltage.
	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.
	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?
	All of it.
	And of course, you're a ham radio operator, and so was my old man.
	I used to spend many a night in the attic with him.
	Right.
	Why don't we talk about solar storms?
	A major CME has most likely caused you some interesting moments as a ham radio operator.
	It has.
	Mostly pain, because the main effect, the negative effect of CMEs is that the ionosphere
	becomes unusable for hands.
	Now, I've heard some interesting things that I'd like to run by you lately.
	Scientists have detected... What protects us, Professor, against, let's say, a megaflare?
	The magnetosphere.
	Right.
	In the last couple of years, few years, I've been hearing about our magnetic field weakening.
	Have you heard that?
	Yeah.
	So the very thing that protects us is weakening.
	In fact, some people feel that we might eventually be headed for a pole shift.
	Yet another thing to worry about.
	I mean, in the last 20 minutes, we've gone through CMA, EMP, and you have a nut job wandering around near your property.
	Yeah, yeah.
	It's hard to concentrate on.
	I apologize.
	No, sir.
	I'm admiring that you're carrying on.
	Yes.
	So anyway, I'm monitoring text that I'm getting on the event on a regular basis here.
	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 Amman, 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 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.
	Professor, I'm going to have to ask you to stand by for a moment again.
	I'm really sorry about this.
	No, I want you to be safe and your family.
	I just got news that my back sensor light has gone on, which probably means somebody set it off, or could mean that.
	As long as you need.
	Okay, so I'm just going to play a little bit of music.
	And, um... I'm gonna take a look around.
	I'll be right back.
	I'm going to go get my stuff.
	Alright.
	you you
	Boy, I'll tell you what.
	You okay?
	I'm all right.
	I'm very well armed here.
	I just wanted to take a look around real quick.
	I assume, by now, I'm sure the cops are all over the place out there.
	So, I'm sure all will be well.
	Anyway, Professor, when you say it would fry everything, that an EMP of this sort with something... You said 60 to 80 megatons, I think, didn't you?
	Or was it kilotons?
	Kilo.
	It's a fission weapon.
	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.
	Okay.
	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, gee, I don't know, 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.
	If it were the North Koreans, I think that quickly the mix would escalate to the Russians, the Chinese.
	I just think it would be all over quite quickly.
	Your thoughts on that?
	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, OK, who started all this?
	Professor, listen, I am sorry.
	No, you've got issues.
	No, we've got a break.
	Oh, OK.
	We've got a break.
	We'll be right back.
	What is love for?
	Absolutely nothing.
	What is love for?
	Absolutely nothing.
	Absolutely not! Say it again, y'all!
	What?
	Huh!
	What?
	Absolutely not!
	Listen to me!
	Aaaaaah!
	Piano fool, you play Gone tomorrow than yesterday
	These really are strange times, aren't they?
	Hi everybody, I'm Art Bell, and this is Midnight in the Desert.
	My guest is Professor Pushton, and it's been a strange night.
	Call Art, that's 1-952-225-5278.
	These really are strange times, aren't they?
	Hi everybody, I'm Art Bell, and this is Midnight in the Desert.
	My guest is Professor Washington, and it's been a strange night.
	All right, Professor, welcome back.
	Everything okay there?
	Well, yeah, I guess so far so good.
	As I mentioned, I think the cops are everywhere now.
	I was just confirming that fact and... Just a whole bunch of shots fired out there, so...
	You know, you're making me, this historian during the break was thinking about, this is Edward Armour 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.
	Yep, my wife's over there with Asia on the floor, lights out, that kind of deal.
	Neighbors are all up in arms in more ways than one.
	So, anyway, it's probably me.
	Where was I?
	All right.
	A coronal mass ejection, Professor, could there be... I mean, we go back to the Carrington event, for example.
	It burned up telegraph wires, gave big shocks to operators.
	It was a bad news event.
	It was from the sun.
	And it was a big event.
	I don't think we measured back then the way we can now, so we don't know really... Do we know how big it was?
	Yes.
	I highly recommend a 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.
	What would it do?
	The Carrington event, if occurring today, would do what?
	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 want to haywire accusations back and forth.
	Scrambling for resources.
	It would be global chaos.
	So, you believe that the first 24 hours after an EMP event would be a cascading of hostilities?
	Yes, absolutely.
	And you talk about casualty rates, and this is just now an EMP event.
	This is not global thermonuclear warfare.
	This is just the event You're talking about now, you would expect casualty rates of 90%?
	Is that right?
	Yes.
	I base that on the Congressional Report of 2004 that anybody can pull up.
	Just do a search.
	Congressional Report EMP 2004.
	And the projection by that committee was a fatality.
	A fatality rate in the United States that could approach 90% within a year after the event.
	Whew, and this would be due mainly to what?
	Well, consider, let's call it a Maslow Hierarchy of Needs.
	I mean, we are biological beings, so, you know, the BMP event is not going to hurt us physically.
	No.
	Right?
	No.
	Okay.
	But, let's take a city like Phoenix or Las Vegas.
	Where does it get its water?
	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 backed 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 forget 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.
	Yes.
	It'll be a field day.
	It'll be an absolute field day for them.
	And then disease, disease control, what happens in nursing homes, I put a chapter into the novel one second after because while I was working on it my father was in a nursing home last months of his life and interviewing the staff there they said half the people in here will be dead within 36 to 48 hours.
	That's certainly believable, yes.
	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 fiance 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 and 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.
	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.
	Right.
	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, 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 fiancee, 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.
	Yeah.
	And let's pray they're friendly and say, Hey, can I have a can of fruit?
	How about some help?
	Yeah, that's right.
	Versus I'm going to hear I'm just going to take what you got.
	Yeah, well, after a gunfight.
	Big one.
	Yes.
	I mean, I do believe in being armed.
	I believe in our right to be armed.
	And, and I exercise that.
	That's why when I wrote One Second After, I was thinking top-down still, of hoping to influence at the federal level.
	My thinking has shifted in six years, and I take delight when I get a chance to talk at length with somebody like you, reaching out to a lot of people.
	Think from the bottom up.
	Plan for yourself, plan for your family, then plan for your neighbors and your friends, and learn to work together.
	Now.
	Do it now, not later.
	I also have a water well in the ground.
	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.
	Without water, you don't live.
	The first thing anybody should go out and get tomorrow if they're saying, OK, 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.
	Right.
	Or even just get a gallon of bleach and several drops for either a pint or a quart.
	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.
	Right.
	Now, the likelihood of any of this occurring, as I mentioned, and I'm going to mention again, if North Korea did something... I mean, the good old days, the mad days, I miss them.
	Now we have... Isn't that weird?
	Yeah, we... You miss mad, yes.
	And I do.
	Because it was Mutual Assured Destruction.
	It kept it from happening.
	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.
	Yes.
	That's what they want.
	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... We would know who did it, I'm pretty sure.
	And we would absolutely obliterate that nation.
	There would be nothing living.
	And yet, as I wrote in the novel one second after, towards the end, a word comes in from the outside, well, looks like it might have been North Korea or Iran, And maybe about a thousand years from now they'll be able to sell souvenirs 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 two to three thousand 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 in Atlantic Monthly in March titled, What Does ISIS Want?
	I am aware of the contents of it, and it's pretty much as I described to you.
	I urge all your listeners, it's online, Atlantic Monthly, March, What Does ISIS Want?
	Armageddon?
	That will put a chill down your back.
	Armageddon.
	Yes.
	Yeah, they want to start the end.
	I know.
	Yeah.
	Yeah.
	That's correct.
	And the article he references, if you read it, you'll understand.
	North Korea is somewhere in the middle, or somewhere that we don't know about.
	This guy is... They're in the twilight zone.
	Just nuts.
	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.
	Yes.
	And that applies to little guns and big guns and big bombs.
	It's true all the way across.
	I would like to take calls, which will give me an opportunity to Try and concentrate on what else is going on as well.
	So, let me give out the numbers, folks.
	Here they come.
	My public number is area code 952-225-5278.
	Let me give that to you again.
	Dial a 1 and then area code 952-225-5278.
	Let me give that to you again.
	Dial a 1 and then area code 952-225-5278.
	If you want to reach us by Skype, it's MITD51 in North America and MITD55 outside of North America.
	the next video.
	Let me make a couple of quick adjustments here.
	This has been one really weird night.
	But I guess my career, I've had a lot of weird nights.
	You know, we live out here where normally, you know, nothing like this ever happens.
	This never happened before, Professor.
	Well, you're demonstrating Winston Churchill's famous words, keep calm and carry on.
	I guess so.
	All right, let's answer a call.
	In Michigan, I believe, you're on the air.
	Hi.
	Hi, this is Scott.
	Hey, Scott.
	Hey, my idea is to put a space elevator, like there's three or four of them in the country.
	Couldn't they become like the round wires, if there ever is an electrical attack on the United States, Craig?
	Well, Professor, he raises a good point.
	Being the superconductors you mentioned they would be, and combining that with the EMP idea, none of that sounds good at all.
	However, we're going to have to build the space elevators along the equator, and preferably on one of the island chains out in the Pacific.
	Almost.
	You could build a space elevator within the continental United States, but the stress loads would get really weird.
	So, I doubt if we would ever see one built in the United States.
	It has to be, the best, the optimal place is build it on the equator.
	Right, and the further you get away from the equator, the more stress you have.
	Is that correct?
	Correct.
	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.
	Really?
	And be running your power systems that way.
	And then relaying it back across the continental United States.
	Okay.
	Caller, anything else?
	Yeah, but that wouldn't solve an electromagnetic pole situation, you know what I mean?
	The way you described it.
	Well, these are very different things we're talking about.
	Uh, if an electromagnetic pulse occurred when the, um, when the pillar, or space elevator, was built, that would be tragic indeed.
	Yes, it would be.
	It would take it out.
	Okay, let's go to, uh, Mojave, I believe.
	You're on air.
	Mojave?
	Hello?
	Mojave Valley?
	How about that?
	Hello?
	Yes, hello?
	I'm actually in Topak, but the first time I ever spoke to you was when you were interviewing the senatorial candidate.
	I've lost my notes, but it was Charles something.
	Alright, well right now we've got Professor Forshen here, so do you have a question for
	him?
	I understand that, but he was, his premise was our biggest threat was biological.
	And between my call and your probing, we got him to admit that either by hacking, sabotage, EMP, or a natural disaster that the grid would go down.
	And he pointed out the fact that our transformers, there's like 12 critical ones, And they're not made in this country.
	I spoke to Professor Forsen on his EMP show and he mentioned the San Jose shooting, the destruction of the Transformers.
	You know, I'm sure you're absolutely right.
	There's all kinds of things in our infrastructure that would not be immediately or even Reasonably replaced, probably, in our lifetimes.
	Professor?
	Still there?
	Yes.
	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.
	Professor, minus an EMP, our electrical grid in the U.S.
	is a patchwork mess of deteriorating, rut-in-the-road, slung-together junk anyway.
	It's the yugo of electrical systems.
	It's the yugo?
	It is.
	It's the truth.
	And, you know, I mean, I've seen worse in third world countries.
	But what we have here, honestly, is just not good.
	And so it wouldn't take much, would it, to take it out?
	There's a vulnerability.
	And I mean, we can pull up Sun Tzu quotes or Uh, from any number of military writers across history of knowing your weakest, you better know your weakest spot, because if your enemy does and you don't, you've had it.
	We were talking about America earlier, and you know, the deteriorated space program.
	Well, that's not all that's deteriorated.
	And I think it accounts for why people, I mean, there's a lot going wrong with America right now that we're not fixing.
	We're Americans.
	We used to do things.
	Now, we've sort of stopped.
	And so if you want to account for the popularity of Trump, look to that kind of thing.
	You know, he's right about so much of what he says about China, and I don't want to get political here, but yeah, folks, look, we're a mess, and we're getting older.
	And I don't just mean Older in our bodies and physical years.
	I'm talking about what we built that built this nation to be the great thing it is.
	Or was.
	We've kind of let it run down.
	True?
	Let me point out what's become a wonderful personal experience for me, and that's my fiance's mother.
	When her mother was a young woman, 23, 24 years old, She was contracted with NASA to write the translunar injection software.
	She was part of a team, one woman on a team, software to run in a 40K computer that would guide Apollo to the moon.
	And she was doing calculations by hand on a piece of paper for a computer that had yet to even be built.
	That was the can-do spirit of America about 50 years ago.
	Want to go to the moon?
	Okay.
	Let's get a team together, write the software before the computer's even built, build it, let's fly it, let's go.
	Yes, sir.
	Do we have that spirit today?
	I want to believe we can revitalize it.
	But, Don, at the older I'm getting, I want to see us go back.
	Oh, I want to believe that, too.
	I want to believe it for, you know, my daughter, especially, and all our daughters and sons.
	And I really think that accounts for this abandoning the typical politics that we've had and the embracing, I guess, almost damn near of the unknown, frankly, when you're talking about what you're going to get.
	But at least you know what you're not going to get.
	And that's the norm.
	Vancouver, you're on the air.
	Hi.
	Good evening, Art.
	This is Howard, and I'm listening to you on KXL 101 out of Portland, Oregon.
	Thank you.
	I keep wanting people to mention the affiliates they're listening to, and that's a monster.
	Okay.
	Now, I'm hearing you an hour behind your broadcast, so forgive me if I cover something that's already been covered.
	You know what?
	You can't possibly make a mistake.
	We've covered so much.
	It virtually doesn't matter where you go.
	Go ahead.
	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, and
	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.
	That's my question.
	All right.
	Hold on.
	Don't go anywhere.
	Professor?
	Excellent point on the structural design.
	We have the cable going at the geosynchronous orbit.
	But eventually, you would also extend the cable an extra 10 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 will most likely be magnetic 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.
	Okay, that makes sense.
	Thank you very much.
	What a wonderful idea, though.
	What an absolutely wonderful idea.
	Let's go to Cameron, is that you on Skype?
	Yes, it is.
	Yeah, it's been interesting listening to your show.
	I've been watching it, and we've been posting on X, and it's kind of funny.
	I like to imagine... You know that story by Stephen King, that stand where that virus wipes everybody out?
	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 in, 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 shoot him and everybody flinches.
	Yeah, wonderful.
	But anyway, yeah, I hope that you guys are hunkered down and you have your hand cannon pointed at the door.
	I do, and that's a worry in itself.
	I've got a round chambered and, you know, 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?
	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, while 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 gotta wonder how they would survive through something like this.
	And, um, God, one of my dimwit sisters has a 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 gotta 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 wonder which, Professor, that's a pretty good question, which would be the better situation to be in if something like that, EMP balls, occurred?
	Would you be better off in the city?
	Would you be better off way out in the country?
	Where would you be better?
	I'm not quite sure.
	There's probably a lot of answers to that.
	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 out in 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.
	Yeah, I'm sure.
	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 hand hoe.
	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 transformed farming.
	So do you want to be out in the country?
	I want to be, like, in a small town like I'm in right now.
	All right.
	Got it.
	Hold it.
	We'll be right back.
	This is Midnight in the Desert.
	To call the show, please dial 1-952-CALL-ART.
	That's 1-952-225-5278.
	To paraphrase one of my own commercials, downside, it looks like these shots were fired at the structure that I'm in.
	Upside, I'm still here.
	So, good, uh, good evening, everybody.
	Had some nights on radio, I'll tell you.
	Um, Dr. William Forshten, I'm gonna learn to pronounce that, uh, eventually, is my guest, and he's a guest on any number of subjects, including space elevators, he calls it pillar to the sky, doesn't matter, you get the idea, right?
	On EMPs and their effects.
	And, um, He's got one line in here.
	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.
	But I mean, first strike weapon?
	Both with Russia and China, we're back to the mayor paradigm.
	Yes.
	You EMP us, we EMP you.
	Who wins?
	Everybody loses.
	But I think they EMP us, we launch.
	Period.
	That's it.
	We launch.
	Right.
	Yes.
	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... Oh yeah?
	Or the Iranians who wish to bring about the return of the 12th Iman, yeah, the Imati 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.
	Yeah, for a third-rate nation.
	All right.
	Michelle, I think in Japan, hello?
	Michelle, oh no, wrong button.
	Michelle, there you are.
	Yes, okay, you can hear me.
	I do.
	Sorry, I'm on 4G, so I'm going to try and talk to you.
	It's a really big honor for me to talk to you, Dr. Forsgen.
	Thank you.
	I actually was a student of yours about 15 years ago, and I've been wanting to try and talk to you for years now.
	I've heard you on the radio and other shows, and you've always blown me away.
	But I was in your classroom.
	I have two things I want to tell you.
	I was in your classroom on September 11th.
	Oh my God.
	And I will never forget what you said that day.
	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.
	Wow.
	And then you gave a prayer for those people who had died and you dismissed the class.
	Wow.
	And I think you could not have been more right in saying that.
	So I wanted to let everyone else know this is a man who understands so succinctly our past and where we're going.
	I was just, I've always been floored by that.
	Looking back now and seeing where the country is going is absolutely right.
	That's incredible.
	So Professor, you remember that moment as she describes?
	Yeah.
	And you're putting a lump in my throat.
	And would you do me a favor?
	Would you drop me a note to Montreat.edu?
	Just put B. Forreston, Montreat.edu.
	I'd love to be back in touch with you.
	I would love to.
	I actually had a different name and a different gender at the time and the other thing I was going to tell you was 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.
	You've made my night.
	You've really made my night.
	Thank you.
	Thank you, Michelle.
	That's amazing.
	That's an amazing story.
	You really said that, Professor?
	I'm imploring Michelle, please, send me an email tomorrow.
	BeForshten at Montreat.edu.
	I'd like to be back in touch.
	I will do that.
	Alright.
	And I remember you.
	Thank you.
	And I remember that day.
	Pretty small world, huh?
	I've got to add something very personal.
	My fiance and I are getting married in Gaither Chapel next May.
	And we were taking some friends through there just yesterday.
	And I flash back to 9-11.
	I'm choking up because the entire student body gathered in the chapel and we prayed together.
	I'll never forget that moment.
	Yeah, I don't think any of us will ever forget.
	Yeah, what a night.
	God bless you.
	Thank you.
	All right, let's move on.
	George, on Skype, you're on the air with a professor.
	Hi.
	Hey, guys.
	Hi there.
	Where are you?
	I am in Kansas.
	Kansas?
	Kansas City.
	Kansas City.
	Okay, go ahead.
	Hey, I have two quick, unrelated questions about the space elevator.
	Okay, you're breaking up on us a little bit, but what about it?
	I have two, sorry.
	One, I assume that cargo would be going up the space elevator, and how long would it take?
	A nice leisurely ride.
	150, 200 miles an hour as we're going through the Earth's atmosphere, and then 300, 400 miles an hour the rest of the way up.
	And let me throw in one of the early inspirations for it was, I thought up a sport, space diving.
	You've got a platform at 500 miles up.
	The question is, what happens if you step off the platform?
	99% of people say, oh, you go into orbit.
	No.
	You fall.
	It would be one heck of a ride.
	The ultimate sport.
	The ultimate skydiving experience.
	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 would you be able to go up to the 500 mile mark or the... You can join a 500 mile club.
	And then get off and get on a spaceship or a shuttle or...
	Yeah, did you catch the remark about the 500-mile club?
	Oh, well.
	You know, what an amazing concept.
	What, the 500-mile club?
	No, I was on to the bigger things, but yes, that too.
	All right, Caller, anything else?
	No, I just wanted to make sure that you could you know, hop off before going 22,000 miles.
	Sure.
	Well, you remember that guy that went up, I think he went up to, uh,
	what was it, 90 or 100,000, maybe 110,000, 20,000 feet, something like that?
	Yeah, he got up, I think it was actually around 130,000 or 135,000.
	Was it that high?
	He broke what would be defined as the sound, the speed of sound at land level.
	That's right.
	That's exactly right.
	Just incredible stuff.
	All right, let's go to wherever we go when we go here.
	You're on the air, on the phone.
	Hello there.
	You've been waiting.
	Do you want to speak?
	Hello, Art?
	Yes.
	This is Phil from San Diego.
	How are you doing?
	Doing fine.
	Go right ahead.
	And listen a second.
	Driver, of course.
	You're in a vehicle?
	Oh yeah, driving a truck.
	Okay.
	Welcome.
	Anyway, uh, Dr. Forston, I have this question for you, uh, because the competitions, you know, have this, you know, you guys have talked about this, you know, before, that 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, 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, Okay, I want to separate something here.
	First of all, a solar flare could be bad.
	I don't think a solar flare could stop your truck.
	I could be wrong unless something really goes berserk.
	An EMP detonation?
	Yeah.
	Then you've got a brick on your hands.
	A really large brick.
	And that's all it is.
	Professor, am I right or wrong?
	Dead on, and there's been a lot of debate about what happens with vehicles, and some people say, well, only 5 to 10% of the vehicles would short off.
	Well, imagine 5% of the vehicles on the DC Beltway shorting off at 4 o'clock in the afternoon.
	Good point.
	You have gridlock.
	Yeah, you sure do.
	Two or three of them, you've got a gridlock.
	Just driving at this gridlock.
	Yeah, that's right.
	So, yeah, a detonation, and you've got a big brick on your hands, my friend, for a truck.
	But a solar flare, probably you keep on trucking.
	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.
	Actually, I had heard 24 to 36 hours for the heavier particles.
	Would that be about right?
	Yes, sir.
	So, there would be warning, and that's a major question.
	We have not really sat down and tabletopped how to shut the power grid down and how to get a civilian population ready for such an event.
	You know, it's interesting, getting it back up is just as hard, if not harder, than shutting it down.
	Getting the power, it has to come back up in very slow stages.
	But, of course, after the event you described, I don't think There'd be any coming back up at all.
	Well, with a CME, that is the big issue.
	How do you shut the grid down to protect it?
	But then also, how do you bring it back online?
	And I've only known of one presidential candidate who posed that question back in 2012, that we should be studying this and simulating it.
	So we're wide open on that one as well.
	I cannot recall the The year, Professor, but it was some years ago we had an event from the Sun so large that they calculated, they actually said they couldn't rate it, they thought it might be an X26, X28, something incredible like that.
	Fortunately for us, It was at the edge of the, I think it was on the western edge of the disc of the Sun, and so the energy was directed away from us.
	Had it been pointed toward us, everything you imagined would have happened.
	We've had several near-misses.
	The Sun, all the time, is ejecting CMEs.
	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.
	Yes, indeed.
	All right, let's go here on the phones to Florida, I believe.
	Hey guys, how are you all doing?
	I'm fine, thanks.
	I just have a couple 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?
	Good question.
	To make it, you know, happen a little easier, I guess.
	Sure.
	And my other question is, Would underground facilities that I'm sure that we have be safe from the EMP?
	Okay, both good questions.
	Would it be an international effort with regard to the elevator or the whatever you want to call it?
	I actually postulated in the book, A Pillow to the Sky, which started 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 gonna 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.
	Well, it's been almost a year now since they lost Virgin Galactic.
	Right.
	My theory starts out as private, then becomes multinational, multi-government.
	Okay.
	The second thing he mentioned was about the grid.
	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, uh... and replaced by underground lines and underground uh... stations it could be conceivably i guess uh... the effect would be lessened or eliminated however to be a pessimist uh... sure go right ahead soviet test one eight four uh... can be found on wikipedia soviet test one eight four
	Where the Soviets of course, well they did it over their own country, well actually 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.
	Really?
	Yeah.
	Do they know, with the kind of yields you were talking about earlier, would penetrate the ground to what depth?
	I don't have the answer for that.
	Maybe the Soviets, or excuse me, the Russians do.
	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.
	So we're not sure.
	An interesting open question, to be sure.
	Boy, there are so many threats, aren't there, Professor, in the world.
	Listen, I don't know how to thank you for being here.
	Your latest book is Pillar to the Sky.
	And your other books are called One Second After, and then, I believe, we didn't even get to it.
	We didn't get to One Year After.
	One Year After.
	In that last month.
	Yeah.
	So, folks, enjoy those books.
	Professor, obviously, we'll have you back again, because we didn't cover everything.
	In fact, I led you astray.
	I loved it.
	So, I'm sorry about that and everything else that occurred during the show.
	A strange night, to be sure.
	One, I'm very glad I shared with you, Professor.
	You and your family are in my prayers.
	Be safe.
	Take care of my friends.
	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.
	Telos, Joe Talbot, Heath, my webmaster, Heather Wade, my producer, streamguys, lb.net, sales, Pete Eberhardt, TuneIn Radio, Amy Martin, who does the news, and such a good job with it, from everybody, coast to coast, 25 time zones wide.

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