Douglas Mulhall, nanotech pioneer behind Our Molecular Future, reveals how Cuba’s 1980s nanoparticle meningitis vaccine—ignored due to embargoes—nearly wiped out the disease globally. His work on FDA-approved nano-antibody conjugates and Haiti’s water recycling systems for earthquake survivors showcases precision medicine’s potential, yet pharmaceutical resistance and $259K cystic fibrosis treatments highlight cost barriers. Mulhall warns of unchecked risks like LHC-induced black holes or AI-driven nanites, while dismissing "zombie apocalypses" as fringe theory, instead framing transhumanism as inevitable through brain implants and emotional tech bonds—like a German journalist’s iPhone dependency. Nanotech’s dual role in healing (e.g., retinal implants) and weaponry (DARPA’s exoskeletons, radiation shields) underscores its transformative power, with AI integration already reshaping human evolution. [Automatically generated summary]
I bid you all good evening, good afternoon, good morning, whatever the case may be, and all 25 world time zones, each and every one covered by this program.
All right, so I know everybody wants to know what happened last night, and what happened last night is as described.
Well, it was a little bit of an update.
About, I don't know, to me it seemed like 10.30.
I guess that's when it actually occurred.
My most immediate neighbor sent me a text saying there had been four or five shots fired real fast over near my studio.
And, of course, that freaked everybody out, including my wife, my child.
Then a second text came in from a nice lady down the street who said, Art, somebody was up in front of your studio on the circle, which is idiotic because we're on a dead-end street here.
What fool would do that on a dead-end street?
Dumb, right?
So I finally got to talk to her at about two or so in the morning.
And she said, look, I saw someone up there with a rifle by your studio.
And they snapped off about four or five rounds, what everybody says, and took off.
And she described for the police as best she could their vehicle.
And so naturally, everybody was freaked out, certainly me.
But the show went on nevertheless.
And then, of course, we had, what, two separate visits, actually from the Nye County Sheriff, thank you very much, Sheriff's Office, and gave them some information.
And that's all I'm going to say about that.
Then a little later, I was going to visit my tax lady who lives yet another house down.
And I called her and I said, listen, I want to push our appointment a day because, well, frankly, somebody kind of shot toward me last night.
She said, oh, I heard him too.
So that's three neighbors.
This is a very, very alert neighborhood.
That I will say.
Very alert.
Then all of that and that trauma was followed by this morning our website went down.
It was a specific denial of service attack at artbell.com.
Keith talked to me, I guess it was down for about three or four hours, and it was specifically at artbell.com.
Once he was able to separate artbell.com from Dark Matter and everything else, it turned out to be directed at artbell.com only.
So somebody obviously is after us.
And that's where I'll leave that.
It's in the hands of the Sheriff Department here and perhaps soon the FBI.
So that's it.
Now on to other things.
Last night I told you I had big news, right?
And it was big news.
Now a lot of people poo-pooed it.
And I'm going to run through it again quickly again tonight.
You all by now know, and I'm not going to repeat, the story of the star that, according to the Washington Post and all the other big media, has serious scientists talking about an alien megastructure.
These scientists, one at Penn State, the one who analyzed the data at Yale University, virtually exhausted every single other possibility.
And then they finally, at the expense of their careers and their lives, uttered the word aliens.
Because what was happening to the light of this star and the odd flicker rate pointed to no other possibility.
And last night I told you that NASA, I had a source in NASA that told me that NASA internally now believes at a level of 50% or a bit better now that this is exactly as described.
In other words, an alien structure.
And it's funny, I read later some comments on the show and people went, oh, 50%, big deal, 50-50.
It's a really, really big deal.
Think about it for a moment.
If you were to point to any given star and ask NASA if they could please take a look and see what they think the odds are that there are aliens on the planets around that star or doing something with that star, and you were to ask them for odds of that for any given star, you know, they'd come back and tell you about 150 trillion to one, gazillion.
That's not really a word, is it?
Or a number?
I hope not.
Because it'll be in the budget if it is.
So that NASA internally, according to my source, now believes at 50% or better that this is the real McCoy.
This is big news, really big News now tonight.
Let me add to that a little bit.
Oh, two items actually.
One, I now have a second source in NASA that confirms the information from the first source, this one, from JPL in NASA.
And again, saying that they now believe with confidence of 50% or better that this is the real McCoy.
We're talking about alien life, folks.
In our lifetimes.
Moreover, SETI has, now the Allen telescopes, just so you know, are tasked with many things.
people come along and they write proposals and say, you know, I would like to point at so-and-so and look for so-and-so in the SETI world.
And they're all canceled.
Every single last one of them is canceled.
I guess Seth told them cancel everything, forget everything, and point at this star and begin listening.
So that's additional news.
Now we have a second source from NASA.
And I guess you guys are going to still do it and say, ah, well, it's nothing but a coin flip.
That's big news.
Good Lord, nothing but a coin flip.
How people...
I think that people are not thinking this through completely.
Or some people are in denial about it.
Or some people think it's just like every other story about UFOs they've heard and they're waiting for a blurry image.
They're not quite grasping what we're being told.
We're not wanting to accept it.
And I think that accounts for the some beatitude that we're seeing.
Really, I do.
So anyway, that's the latest that I have, and I think it's really something.
Coming up in a moment, we're going to turn our attention toward nanotechnology.
Joining us from Germany is Douglas Mulhall.
It's been a long, long time since I've interviewed him.
Douglas has a best-selling book called Our Molecular Future, which was one of the first to describe how nanotechnology, robotics, genetics, and artificial intelligence are leading to get this folks the technological singularity.
The book is still in print 14 years later, was selected for the new scientist magazine must-read list, featured on the Discovery Channel's Modern Marvels, translated into Chinese, Japanese, and Korean.
Douglas Mulhall's subsequent work on nanomedicine is featured in the network television documentary Dangerous Calcium.
Hmm, dangerous calcium.
His work on topics like nanoecology appear in publications including the Decker Encyclopedia of Nanoscience and Nanotechnology, the Springer Encyclopedia of Sustainability Science and Technology.
He is a contributor to the award-winning Cradle-to-Cradle Design Protocol used for designing thousands of products and is co-author of Materials Passports that was launched in Europe this year in a 10 million EU initiative.
The water recycling systems he designed provide safe sanitation for 100,000 survivors of the 2009 Haiti earthquake.
Presently, he works on business development with EPEA International in Germany and is a research fellow at Technical University München and guest researcher at the Technical University of Delft in the Netherlands.
He also trains hundreds of companies and agencies.
So coming up in just a moment, we'll talk about the small stuff.
unidentified
Believe me when I tell you, this small stuff is really big stuff.
Okay, before we launch into the nano world, I would like to ask you if you have been following this megastructure story 1,500 light years away from us.
So, for example, one of the questions that comes up is what Stephen Hawking has been talking about for some time, and that is, should we tell them we're here?
You know, it would take us, presumably, 1,500 light years, short of that, really, To send them that message, and it would be very ill-advised, to be sure.
I mean, even at this moment, if they are actually harnessing the energy of a star, then that means they are what people are calling a type 2 civilization, almost as gods to us, not quite, but almost.
And that was 1,500 years ago, right?
Because that's how long it took the light to get here.
So now they're 1,500 years ahead of that at the moment.
And, you know, one of the things I wonder is, now that we have realized that they are here, have they realized that we now know they are there?
I wonder.
I wonder.
Anyway, it's exciting.
I mean, this is the kind of thing that, you know, for my whole career, I've been hoping for, frankly, that one day, you know, I'd get to read a headline like this.
And the reaction to it is really amazing.
It ranges from some people get angry.
You know, they say that's a big hoax.
And they get angry.
Other people say, no, I just don't believe it.
Other people say it's the devil or hell or some religiously based comment.
And there are a few of pure science out there who look at this and go, oh, my God, this really may be it.
But it's interesting because you and I have never heard any statement from any of the space agencies or any of the military agencies or governments stating in the unlikely events that this were to happen, what would be the response of our governments or agencies?
We've never ever heard any statement like that.
And that would be the sensible thing to do.
I mean, you've got people like Hawking saying, well, the history of superior civilizations meeting lesser civilizations is not great on Earth.
Not good.
So, you know, what would be our approach?
And that question is sitting on our doorstep right now because SETI has already turned its sites, as you described, to this location.
But have you heard any statements out of any of the agencies?
What would we do if?
And this is the concerning part, because we've been addressing this question for quite some time, and all the agencies have been so busy downplaying the potential for alien life that they haven't thought of the obvious, which is to tell the population of the world what all the agencies collectively would do if there were some convincing signs.
You know, Douglas, I wonder, can you imagine some of the meetings that must be going on?
I mean, this is news that, well, the agencies you spoke of and our government cannot ignore.
And so there have got to be meetings going on discussing this and scenarios, I guess, of how we react if we find out it's absolutely, certainly real, or if worse yet, we somehow come in contact with these people.
So the question is, why are they having the meetings now?
This is the disturbing part, is we should have a game plan.
And this game plan is not apparent in any way in any of the literature that I have read.
There is no announced plan.
I'm sure there are lots of unannounced plans.
But I think it just shows that the agency's been so busy in public denial for the last 45, 50 years that no one has just had the good sense to say, well, here is what we might do.
It seems to me, Douglas, honestly, somewhere in government, somewhere, Douglas, there's got to be a manual marked above top secret, and then probably at the top says, what to do if aliens land.
So, you know, there's a lot of communicators out there who have the opportunity to do something.
So the bottom line is that despite all of our advanced technologies, movements towards singularity, and everything that we'll be talking about tonight, our governments and corporations are woefully unprepared and have not prepared the population for the options of, you know, what would we do next.
There's been no public discussion about it at that level.
And so I think that's sort of at the top of the show.
That shows where we're at in terms of our sociological capacity to handle advanced technologies.
Yeah, and I think that we need to, that's the first thing we need to do.
We need to analyze at what level it is, and if it is at the level that is indicated, then clearly they're way ahead of us.
And then I think we need to start asking the Stephen Hawking questions.
So that's what I would do.
In terms of, am I surprised?
No, I'm not surprised.
The Kepler telescope over the past years has been discovering these planets at an increasingly rapid pace.
It was almost inevitable that we were going to come across something like this because a long time ago, Sagan calculated that it was virtually impossible not to have civilizations somewhere.
So, our technological capacity is catching up with what Sagan predicted, and it's catching up more quickly than was ever predicted.
Ten years ago, no one predicted that we would be finding thousands of exoplanets so quickly.
So, this technological capacity is now there.
We're now finding this.
It's no surprise based on the calculations, but again, sociologically, we're not prepared for it, so we better get ready.
If you look at the last 50 years of progress, it's frightening.
The pace of the increase technologically is incredible.
I mean, nothing short of incredible, I think.
And so it's hard to even imagine the next 30 to 50 years from now.
I think you'd be the guy to be able to imagine it for us if anybody could.
So I suppose it's a good moment to ask you about something I know you're looking at, and that's nanomedicine.
And it was kind of a big tease.
You wrote me that they are doing things in Cuba with nanomedicine that wouldn't even begin to be allowed to be done here, and I really want to know what that is.
I want to start with this story to give everybody a concrete example of what the potential is of nanomedicine,
because a lot of the talks that people have, and you just described this tremendous acceleration in technology, which was described by Hans Moravec and described in our book, it's logarithmic, and that's why it is accelerating so quickly.
But the question is, what can the ordinary person do about it aside from be completely intimidated by it and feel that they can't do anything about it?
And that's why I want to tell you this story about what happened in Cuba starting in 1983, before the word nanotechnology was known to most of the scientific world, let alone the rest of the population.
Well, I'm just about 25 kilometers south of Munich, and I am surrounded by farmhouses that have solar panels on their roofs because, as everybody probably knows, Germany has the largest proportion of solar-generated energy of any country in the world, and it is driven by nanotechnology.
But we'll get to that in a moment.
But suffice to say that you might remember everyone predicted that we wouldn't reach grid parity prices for solar energy until at least 2018.
And lo and behold, they reached it in Germany in 2014, which was 50% ahead of time, with the result that now 30% of all the electricity in Germany is generated from solar and wind sources, which is far greater than anyone had predicted.
And a lot of that is due to technological advances in nanotechnology, which have allowed the improvements in the efficiency of solar cells.
Yeah, and it's important because when we talked earlier about skeptics, about technology, all the skeptics were saying, ah, never possible, going to be too expensive, yada, yada, yada.
And here we are, it's happening ahead of time.
It's realistic to the extent where some people are complaining that Germany is exporting too much of its renewable energy across the borders and competing against fossil fuel energy in surrounding countries.
And to be clear, this was the big discovery of those years.
Every cell, almost every cell in your body releases these nanoparticles.
And they originally thought just to be garbage delivery packets that just basically reject things from cells.
And that was because of our limitation in technology.
We didn't really understand, and we were not able to show with protein technology what they were.
Today, we now know that they are specifically programmed in health and in sickness to do hundreds of different things that larger cells are too big to do themselves.
We're talking a period before most people even had heard about nanotechnology.
And what they were able to do, just quite straight stated, is they were able to isolate, extract, and concentrate these nanoparticles and re-inject them into the patients to create an immune response that made them immune to the bacteria.
It sounds simple, but it's not, of course, because the trick of isolating exactly those particular types of nanoparticles is a real trick.
And you just described earlier, Art, there was a parallel private sector thing happening in Norway with one of the drug companies.
And they were racing to do the same thing.
But the Cubans got there first.
And so you had these parallel activities going on.
But the reason that Cuba is so interesting is because they were dealing with the embargo, with everything else.
And at the same time, everybody probably knows they have a really excellent healthcare system there.
And that's one of the reasons that it happened.
So the embargo actually created this necessity to have their own healthcare technology.
And so the result of that was the near eradication of bacterial meningitis in Cuba, followed shortly thereafter by the near eradication of bacterial meningitis in Brazil and New Zealand.
And so basically, by the early 1990s, bacterial meningitis had virtually been wiped out because of this use of nanoparticles to engender an immune response.
Except, because, of course, of the embargo and because conventional science was looking at nanoparticles as garbage removal, it was completely unacknowledged in the medical community with the result that it was actually not applied to a lot of other diseases.
Okay, let me just interject that I go to on a yearly basis, pretty much, the drugstore, and there they offer me up various kinds of shots, flu shots, pneumonia shots, things like that.
They have not yet offered me a shot like you just described.
They haven't offered it in the drugstore on a mass basis yet, and that is exactly what our campaign is designed to do that I'll be discussing later in the show, because it is available on a limited basis for limited types of diseases.
And there has been a recent discovery in heart disease that we believe using these nanoparticles has the capacity to reverse heart disease by 2020, but that's a story that we'll get to later.
Going back to the Cuban situation just for a moment, the amusing thing is that in 1989, the Cubans won the capitalist World Intellectual Property Organization gold medal for the vaccine.
But the wonderful news is that this shows that more than 25 years ago, nanomedicine innovation was going on, has been saving lives, has been proven.
So it's not something in the future.
It's been going on for quite some time.
Our challenge is to acknowledge that and to scale it up as quickly as possible in order to get it to as many people as possible.
And that brings us back to what can people do right now?
What can people do in their ordinary lives or unordinary lives, depending on how you see yourself?
What can each of us do to benefit from nanotechnology?
And from the last 20 years that I've been looking at this, the conclusion that I came to was that this is it, that nanomedicine is at the point where we now have the proven capacity to go from shotgun solutions that are at best only marginally effective and have terrible side effects in things like cancer,
heart disease, etc.
Really terrible, to very precisely targeted mechanisms that use these nanoparticles to get to the point of the source of the problem.
Now, the nanoparticles don't do that on their own.
They need a lot of mechanisms that are connected to them.
And fortunately, we have those mechanisms today.
And some of those mechanisms include, for example, antibodies that the purpose of an antibody, the body manufactures antibodies to recognize a particular pathogen in the body and then create an immune response.
They actually cause the white cells to come to a particular spot and start attacking it and also develop the capacity to actually get into the pathogen.
So you need something to actually recognize.
So number one, the nanoparticle can be loaded with a particular drug that can go to the point of the problem.
But number two, you need these antibodies in order to do the targeting.
And antibodies are not the only thing, but they are now there are about 50 antibodies that have been through or in the process of going through regulatory approval at the European Medical Agency and in Europe and in the United States.
The FDA has actually responded to years and years of complaints that things are too slow.
And there are about 50% of the new drug applications now are going through accelerated processes, especially for individuals who are seriously ill.
And so these antibody, these combined, they're called conjugated therapies with nanoparticles and antibodies, are actually going through the FDA approval process, and a lot of them are in the marketplace today.
Well, double those, I still hear about a lot of people who have come down with something really awful, whether it's a cancer or whatever it is, and they have to end up flying to Zurich or flying to who knows where, where there exists a treatment the FDA simply won't allow.
Yeah, that's correct, but it's also the other way around.
There's some Europeans going to the U.S., depending on what it is that you're dealing with, and yet other people are flying off to Thailand, number one, because of costs, number two, of advances that are going on there.
So you have this irregular situation where different regulatory agencies are delaying different things for different reasons.
Well, the good news is that this form of nanotech is something that we can do something about right now.
And if we do it in the right way, this unaffordability of medicine, and that is one of the main reasons why I am focusing on this particular area of nanomedicine, has the capacity to make it affordable because, first of all, it's a lot less expensive if you're just targeting a particular part of the disease because you're reducing all the side effects.
You don't need as much medical surveillance.
And so your costs absolutely go down dramatically.
And the cost of developing these nanoparticles and antibodies is significantly lower.
Douglas, you honestly believe that the pharmaceutical giants are going to allow these upstart nano people to come in and present medicines that are A, effective and B, cheap, and virtually put them out of business while they're almost like the oil cartels.
That's definitely a challenge, and that is why we've started this nano medicine for all initiative.
Because the happy news about what you've said, and what you've said is absolutely true.
There's what we call inertia, institutional resistance.
On the other hand, the good news is there are biotech companies, there are startup medical device delivery companies that are distinct from the pharmaceuticals companies that have another agenda because they are not burdened by their existing drug line that would lose out to these competing drugs.
So you actually now have the beginnings of competition within the industry.
That's number one.
And number two, globally, you have different regimes where it is easier to do things.
For example, in India, they're not putting up with this patent regime stuff anymore.
On the other hand, there are private sector groups out there in the medical device industry, in the biotech industry, that want to pick this up, that are picking it up, and that are moving forward with it.
And then Big Pharma is reluctantly coming on board.
And remember that actually there's a lot of, like here, for example, in this tiny little town that I'm living in is the world headquarters of Sandos and Hexol.
And they're one of the world's largest generic drug companies.
So their job is to actually provide generic drugs as cheaply as possible to people.
But you know, in a way, Douglas, I'm sorry, you're kind of in dreamland here, in my opinion, because everything is determined by supply and demand.
Example, if something is really in demand, let's say you have a terrible disease, let's say you've got AIDS, for example, and there becomes a new drug that is really effective in you living with or even somehow getting rid of AIDS, and then some CEO somewhere raises the price by 5,000%.
Supply and demand, Douglas.
If the demand is sufficient, there will be people who, even though hating it and hating them, will pay the money, stay alive, right?
If there becomes a nano-drug or a nano, whatever you want to call it, that allows people to live for an extra 50 years, what do you imagine the demand for that would be?
Yeah, but I think here is our strategy for dealing with that.
Number one, there are examples of vaccines, for example, that are in the marketplace today.
And I mentioned the Cuban and other vaccine That are remarkably affordable.
So, to be clear, there are examples out there with specific diseases, especially diseases, for example, in the tropics, where you do have affordability.
So, it's not what you say is correct, and the cystic fibrosis drug is an example.
This is a serious problem in the United States and Europe today.
I am absolutely not denying that.
However, what I am saying is there are also a few examples that demonstrate how you can get through this.
And that is what our initiative is about.
Our aim is to get together a group of individuals and investors who actually want to bring these approaches through to clinical trial phase three.
And we believe that with heart disease, this can be done by the year 2020.
Well, this is all very interesting, and I do hear the hopefulness in your voice.
I, however, sort of disagree with you, and I think that these drugs are going to come along, and I do want to talk about them, and I do want to talk about nanotechnology, but I'm afraid, I believe, that they will be rare and very expensive, depending on demand.
However, just let me point out the hopeful logic to this.
One of the key things that these technologies allow us to do is to improve the effectiveness of existing drugs.
And so these drugs are off-patent.
So to be clear, anybody can pick them up, they can put them into a nanoparticle, they can attach an antibody to them, they can target a disease.
And that is what is beginning to happen now.
As well, the nanoparticles themselves are already approved by regulatory agencies, so you don't need a big expensive pharmaceuticals company to go off and invent a new one.
So what's going on is that one by one, ingredients of these nano-solutions are becoming generic.
And so I believe that we're actually on the edge of a significant reduction in not only the cost, but also the capability to bring to market affordable solutions.
And that is what our initiative is all about.
So let's hope that we can turn these dreams into reality based on some solid case examples that have gone on in the past, but also acknowledging that what you say is also the present reality.
Most Americans should know: if you look around in the right place, folks, I don't know what medicines you regularly take, but check in into India because if you connect with the right people, you can buy the same damn drug from India for a when I say a fraction of the price, I mean like something that was 20 bucks is now 44 cents.
So I don't know that it's completely legal.
Probably isn't, but India is doing this.
It's probably a combination of corruption in India, profit-making in India, and not caring about anybody's patent in India.
No, I think what you said is quite accurate, and you might remember the story earlier that people were doing that also from Canada, but then that pipeline got closed down.
Well, gray goo supposedly is the result of what happens when we reach the singularity and everything gets totally out of control and nanobots turn everything into gray goo.
So there would be essentially a small nanobot, gazillions of them, that would be set loose, they would multiply, and they would virtually eat everything.
And if you look at the way that the whole biome, the whole biosystem of the planet works, everything is trying to turn everything else into grey goo and has been trying to do so for billions of years.
But there are balances that have been established.
And of course the argument is, yes, but if you invent some nanobot that doesn't have any balance against it, then you will have grey goo.
Yes, the risk exists.
And you are probably going to start talking about the accelerator experiment that's going on in Zurich right now to try and find different dimensions of our universe.
unidentified
Oh, gee, only if you would like to talk about that.
Well, no, but there have been lawsuits filed against those guys for the same reason that somehow this is going to get loose and turn everything into grey goo.
I guess the general answer to that is that over the past four billion years, both in terms of physics and in terms of biology, our systems have evolved to become extremely stable and extremely robust.
And so the idea, I think it's a bit perhaps, shall I say, arrogant, for us to think that we might be able to invent something that is actually going to disrupt that.
If a scientist creates, you know, works for years of his life, and he creates something really cool, I don't know, something like the Large Hadron Collider.
Let's say he does it in his private lab.
And then he's finally at the end of his work, 40 years, and he's got a button in front of him.
And he can press the button with possible risk to the entire world if it goes all wrong, and no risk at all if it goes right.
So he can sit there and he can sort of stare at that button in front of him.
Let's see now.
Yeah, there is some risk, but, you know, I might push it.
And ten years ago on this show, you and I talked about the article That was written by Bill Joy called Why the Future Doesn't Need Us.
And at the time, it was the most published article in the history of humanity.
It went like wildfire through the internet.
And Bill basically said exactly that.
He said, there are some technologies, we just shouldn't simply go there.
But I think that Bill has come to the inevitable conclusion that we're going to go there anyways.
So Bill Joy's article still stands out there as an iconic example of where we're going.
And in the ensuing 10 years, I have yet to see a better piece than what he wrote.
All of the, you know, everyone, Kurzweil, Rothblatt, everyone who, very, very smart people, I haven't seen an evolution beyond that that would in any way contradict what Joy said in that article.
Yes, so let's talk about that for a moment because in our molecular future, your call gave me occasion to thumb through the book, and I realized that everything in the book is still current.
And one of the things that I described in the book is that one of the key trends that we're going to be running into is the fundamentalist opposition to technology because people are increasingly alienated by it.
So these so-called crazies that you're talking about are exactly the embodiment of what was forecast in the book.
And that's why I say the book is still current because it exactly said that this type of thing is not only going to happen, but it's going to accelerate.
And we're going to see an increase in this extreme reaction against technology as technology starts to bring us towards this so-called technological singularity.
So actually, the world is unfolding exactly as the book forecasted.
And if you run through the list of forecasts in the book, you'll find that quite a few of them are entirely accurate.
Some of them are happening more quickly than was forecasted.
I went through, by the way, a list of products that are on the market today that we were talking about then.
And they're here and they're in everybody's lives right now.
And that brings us to, so where are we at today with nanotechnology?
So which is basically physics, space-time, black holes, an event horizon.
And at the time, your guest said it's just a word for saying physics cannot say what's going on in there.
That's a quote from him.
And of course, the recent film Interstellar explores exactly that potential.
So in physics, the singularity describes basically a space-time black hole where nobody knows what's going on in there.
That is quite different from the type of singularity that is referred to originally by a scientist by the name of Werner Winge and also was picked up by Ray Kurzweil in his book, The Singularity is Near, and three years before that in my book, where I describe Werner Vinge's singularity.
And everyone now, of course, there's a singularity university, And it's become a widely used word.
However, very quickly, the movie you referred to was interesting, and mentioning that once you get inside a black hole, there's really no way to describe it because we don't know what goes on in there, resulted in more theatrical license than I was willing to swallow.
It is the, and if you look at the title of the book, it's actually Our Molecular Future, How Nanotechnology, Robotics, Genetics, and Artificial Intelligence Will Transform Our World.
The merger of those technologies and their acceleration to the point where it becomes impossible to predict even the near future is the technological singularity.
So in other words, right now, you can reasonably predict what's going to happen the day after tomorrow in certain areas, in a lot of areas in the world.
You know, you will probably be able to walk to work, etc.
The singularity occurs when actually it becomes impossible to predict what's going to happen next week.
And that's because technology is moving so quickly that it is just dramatically transforming everything.
And a lot of technologists, and again, referring back to the book, are saying it has started.
For example, Martine Rothblatt has clearly, in her books about this, said that actually we are already beginning to enter the singularity.
She's published a book called Virtually Human.
And by the way, Rothblatt is also the highest paid woman in North America and is the chairman of United Therapeutics, which developed an affordable pharmaceutical for pulmonary arterial hypertension, which saved the life of her daughter.
So that kind of ties everything together.
But anyways, Rothblatt is probably my favorite person on the whole planet.
And she's written this book called Virtually Human that basically says the singularity is beginning now with us beginning to merge with the internet intelligence.
And so we're on our way.
So you're correct.
We have entered this era, and it's going to go on probably for the next 25 or 40 years.
He had purchased it and he was on the freeway and he let go of the wheel, gingerly, stayed close to it, and that car just stayed right in its lane, did everything just right.
Yeah, and the reason it works is because of they finally put together cars with global navigation systems, and that's exactly what we described in our molecular future.
We said, in order to have self-directed navigation, you need to have the internet-based global navigation systems because that was the thing that was missing.
So we exactly said that, and Google put it all together, and that's why you have the cars.
It's not just the cars.
It was the navigation system that was actually the obstacle.
And you might recall, for those of you who remember the Cold War, that we couldn't even do that earlier because it was all military secrets.
So it was actually the end of the Cold War that precipitated the capacity to have civilian navigation systems that allowed us to do that.
And, you know, again, Martin Rothblatt is the inventor of Sirius satellite radio, was one of those who actually was able to identify that you can basically target individual vehicles with signals.
So all of that came together, and now we have Google Cars.
Tesla.
So everybody knows Tesla now.
They're selling Tesla right down the street from me.
There's actually a guy down the street who's, I can almost look at him right now, who's got a Tesla in his driveway.
And the battery systems in Tesla are driven by nanotechnology.
All the car tires today are made using nanoparticles, and the nanoparticles are designed to improve the efficiency of the rolling efficiency of the tire.
I want to come back to your sponsor in a minute, but I'm going to talk about smart dust right now because your sponsor actually is involved in natural nanotech.
So smart dust is basically drones on steroids.
Drones on steroids?
You know, in the book, you remember we talked about this again.
All the drone stuff that's going on today was forecasted in the book.
You can see it there.
We've got photographs of one of the first Predator aircraft.
Yeah, so the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, which you know well as DARPA, most of your listeners have heard of it.
For years they've been working on SmartDust, and it does exist.
It's basically, as I said, drones on steroids because it has the camera and the levitation gear.
It's conventional stuff, but just miniaturized that allows it to effectively float on air because it just has minimal propulsion requirements because it's so light.
So that's basically SmartDust.
And you can see from the saturation that has occurred in the past 10 years of drones around the world and some of the beneficial and nasty uses of them, that This is, you know, years ago when we were talking about Smart Dust, everyone was going gee whiz, and today it's like.
So just, for example, if you wanted to get sampling from an ecosystem across a forest, you might go in and spread around hundreds of thousands of pieces of smart tests.
And those, in that case, that's simply sensors that are designed to give you a particular feedback on a particular environmental phenomenon.
So smart tests can vary depending on the application.
But environmental sensing is one of the key things for that.
The other one, of course, obviously is surveillance.
So because these are virtually undetectable.
So from surveillance to environmental sensing, from military to civilian to scientific, there are all kinds of applications, and a lot of those are being used today.
Yeah, let's define AI so that the listeners are clear on it.
For example, the stock market is being run by artificially intelligent algorithms today, and that's why you see a lot of the volatility in the markets today.
So virtually, I think something like 85% now of the U.S. stock markets are run by algorithms.
They're not run by people.
And these are not the true AI because they're not self-aware, but they do learn.
And this is called an evolutionary algorithm.
So basically, it's trial and error in very rapid sequence that allows highly powered computers to learn from experience.
So this is called a form of low-level artificial intelligence where machines learn by doing things.
So that's low-level.
The high-level is when you hasn't occurred yet as far as we know, where you have an artifici intelligent machine that is aware of its own existence.
And this is what Werner Vinge first dealt with when he predicted the singularity.
And what Vinge said in the 1990s was that sometime within the next 30 to 40 years, a computer will become self-aware and shortly thereafter, the human era will end.
That was his statement.
That's what provoked the huge debate over the possible impacts of AI.
So there's two types of AI.
One is in the marketplace today, running all kinds of things, all of our systems, all of our credit cards, everything else.
And then the other is the stuff that's yet to come that nobody's quite sure what's going to happen and basically is referred to also as the singularity.
You asked me the same question on the show in 2005, and the answer remains the same, and that is, what is happening today is the integration of human intelligence with machine intelligence, and that is occurring mostly on the Internet, where you can instantly recall things that before used to take weeks and months, and this is enhancing human intelligence.
And also with the implants in humans, in retinas, for example, that connect directly to the brain and also to the internet, you're seeing this merging Between the human brain and machine intelligence.
Okay, if I were a U.S. Senator angry or upset with Hillary Clinton, who was being interviewed essentially or testifying before me, I'd say, please, just a simple yes or no.
I mean, here in Germany on the first channel, there was a documentary on one of the journalists who actually is physically connected to her iPhone.
She just can't live without it.
And the show described how she almost had a nervous breakdown of a week without it.
So in that sense, we're emotionally beginning to bond.
And if you look at what's happening with robotics, where robotic companions were forecasted in the book, Our Molecular Future, and now, of course, they're being used in healthcare already.
This is an example, again, where we're beginning to see this melding between humans and machines.
Well, the way things are going here in the U.S., my friend, I'm sure that there'll soon be a marriage license issued in some state between a person and their phone.
But our institute, actually, with a German engineer by name, Wolfgang Behrens, installed what at the time was the largest green roof in the world on the Ford motor plant at Dearborn, Michigan.
And Ford is absolutely thrilled with the results 10 years later.
They've done a study on it, and it's exceeded their expectations.
But one of the things that these green roofs do is that they filter nanoparticulates from the air and from the water.
So this company that's sponsoring your program is actually using natural nanotechnology to filter nanopollutants from the air, and it's absolutely a fantastic product.
So you're actually being sponsored by a nature's nanotechnology company.
And the example of the car tires that we just talked about earlier and downcycling to put this stuff on tennis courts and then people inhaling the off-gassing of the nanoparticulates, it's crazy what's going on.
Basically, we've become a large experiment for nanoparticulates in products without really knowing what they're going to do.
So the irreversibility, some people would definitely call it damage, but the irreversibility of the impacts is definitely there already.
Well, actually, most people call me a pessimist, but in terms of the damage, it is definitely significant.
There's no question about it.
You're looking, just for example, if you look at the impacts of pharmaceuticals on the environment, there's hundreds of studies now that have shown this, and guess what?
The G7 at their last meeting said that the resulting drug resistance that has evolved from these pharmaceuticals being released into the environment is now a number one priority of the G7 because it is the fastest rising health cost, which of course brings us back to our nanomedicine thing because these nanoparticles that I was talking about eliminate that problem.
So there is a solution to it, but at the moment it's a huge problem.
And the answer to your question again is yes, there is irreversible damage going on due to the premature uncontrolled release of nanoparticles into the environment.
my drone how much regulation is there presently in nanotechnology development uh there is very significant uh regulation but the the difficulty Is the same difficulty that our institute has seen with the whole effort of banning chemicals?
So every year, thousands of new chemicals are invented and are being put into products.
Regulatory regimes take 5 to 15 years to identify, test, determine the toxicity of, and then maybe ban these.
How realistic do you think it is that our regulatory system is going to be able to catch up with all this stuff?
The answer is none.
There is no chance whatsoever.
Yet, we have an environmental toxicology regime that insists on the less bad approach to trying to ban the worst stuff.
And it simply isn't working.
So what our institute did was we turned it on its head and we said, look, instead of trying to sift through the 100,000 chemicals that are out there in the marketplace right now in products and trying to figure out which ones are really bad, why don't we actually develop a positive list of chemicals that we know are actually beneficial for the environment and highly functional and can perform the functions that are required.
And in fact, that is going on right now.
For example, there's a product that's in use in Europe.
It's called Climatex.
It's 100% biodegradable, and our institute developed 30, a list.
We didn't develop the chemicals.
We took them from a chemicals company.
We developed a list of 30 chemicals that can be used safely for biodegradability of the product.
And lo and behold, the company actually saved itself from bankruptcy because they were being told by the Swiss government that they had to put in a huge water recycling facility in order to get rid of all the toxins that were in their wastewater.
When they replaced the chemicals in their textile, the authorities thought that their machines were broken when they came to test the wastewater because it was cleaner than the water that was going into the plant.
So the moral of the story is there are examples in the marketplace today where if you use a positive list of chemicals, you can have a successful and profitable product and get away from this totally impractical approach of trying to identify and ban all these thousands of chemicals as they're coming out.
Well, you really are an optimist and a positive kind of guy.
I like that.
But what's the possibility that something that we think is safe, nanotechnologically speaking, is released upon the world, and one day we all wake up and our right foot is about 12 inches shorter than our left?
What happened in Fukushima is a classic example of that.
Who ever dreamed that you would have a tidal wave that would come in and close down all their systems?
Well, actually, if anyone had looked at the geological history, they would have seen that actually it did happen 100 years ago in Japan.
They knew it was going to happen again, but the technologists simply didn't account for it, and the result was what everybody knows about.
So these accidents are going on all around the world, but the chance of them totally annihilating humanity as a species, I would say, are minimal.
I would say the chances are better that we're simply seeing a slow degradation of the human health ecosystem so that you're going to see possibly a significant die-off of the population.
It's tied into Bartonella infections and sometimes also related to Lyme disease.
And you're correct that Morgellens, these little strandy things, sometimes identified also as nanostrands, but they're quite distinct from artificially, I believe they're quite distinct from artificially synthesized nanotubes or nanoparticles or nanowires.
But they've been around for many, many years, and as I say, now they've been closely connected with the bartonella infection.
Again, what is significant about that is that bartonella is actually one of these bacterias that infects by using these nanoparticles, which I referred to earlier as exosomes or membrane vesicles.
And those vesicles actually are the frontline troops that penetrate cells that weaken them, that allow the Bartonella virus to take over.
So this is an example of how nanoparticles are programmed by cells to infect other cells.
So that's what Barceonella does, and this is related to Lyme disease.
It might be connected to the formation of morgellens, but there hasn't been enough research done on that.
Again, the optimistic news is that we're gaining the capacity to target some of these pathogens with antibody-conjugated, artificially designed nanoparticles, and this brings some hope for Lyme disease sufferers as well.
So the question is, were they actually programmed to support the development of the housing bubble?
And by the way, you might remember that at the top of the housing bubble, the guys that created it sold short while they were telling their customers to buy long.
And guess what was telling them to do that?
So actually, you know, they didn't miss the housing bubble.
Do you think that nanotech is going to actually, before we go to another call, this is such a good question, change the actual direction of human evolution?
Assuming that you buy evolution, that we are still evolving, even at a macro level that we can't quite detect, will this speed up that evolution?
For example, it comes back to your talk that you and I have been having about the optimists versus the realists.
And I still say that after 15, 20 years working on this, we came to the conclusion that a nanomedicine for all initiative where everybody benefits this from this affordably because we're living longer but sicker.
And this is one of the concrete positive things that we can do.
And the information is on our website about the initiative.
So that's one thing that people can do.
The other thing is I would go to the website of the Singularity University because they have a very broad number of courses that are quite advanced in this area.
And also I would go to Kurtzweilai.net because they have some fantastic stories, both positive and negative, about what's going on.
And also, Arts Show has been covering a lot of this, so stay tuned.
Now that Islamists are taking over the entire world and they've already downed Europe and hundreds of thousands are being forced into America and Canada, I want to know how his prefaces actually have to do with anything to do with what's going on right now.
How will Islam react against his stuff, even though now that Islam is now being the biggest religion being perforated and it's going to be everywhere?
I want to know how he thinks that Islam will be with his stuff.
Yeah, Art, you and I talked about this earlier on the show.
One of the things that we outlined in the book was it's not just Islam, but there is a basic religious backlash against the onslaught of technology.
So Islam, and we have to be careful when we talk about Islam because there's Islam and there's radicalized Islam.
And we also have to be careful when we talk about what's going on because actually I'm right in the middle of it here because the refugees are streaming past our place on the trains on their way to Munich in the thousands.
So we're at ground zero in this area.
But the reason that this is happening is a confluence of at least two things.
Number one is what the caller just described, and that is the radicalization of people in response against technology.
And the next one is, and this is no secret, that the United States and Russia are still fighting in the Middle East over oil.
And Putin's regime has made a decision to turn to Asia and turn away from Europe.
They've made a strategic decision to do that.
And so one of the ways to do that is to weaken Europe by forcing thousands and thousands of refugees into the country.
Since you're in this area, why has Germany been so welcoming to refugees which are, I think, arguably going to be a mix of both good and bad while other countries have been trying to put up barriers,
close borders, otherwise slow them down and stop them, and yet Germany welcomes with open arms.
But the third thing is you have to remember history, and the history is the Holocaust.
So Germany is extremely and rightfully sensitive to the idea of, let's put them in camps.
You know, that really doesn't work here.
And so Germany has a particular history that it is very, very sensitive to.
So number one, successful economy, looking for, and remember, a lot of these people coming here are highly trained university graduates that are going to be very beneficial.
So the German economy is going to turn this to their advantage.
The answer is yes, our institute is working on it, but there are two areas of significance.
I have to tell you a story that a colleague of mine 10 years ago, who is an owner of one of the companies that manufactures the machines that make nanotechnology possible, said to us in a lecture that about 20 years from now, the environmentalists are going to be complaining because we're taking too much CO2 out of the atmosphere to manufacture products.
And the result of that was that today we actually have artificial photosynthesis at an extremely low level of efficiency.
So the result of that is that the efficiency is improving.
And when we get to 10%, we're at 1% now, you will see the widespread use of CO2 as a feedstock for artificial photosynthesis, and our climate change problem will be solved.
So the answer is yes, it's coming.
And today, here in Germany, we had a major conference last month on the reuse of CO2 as a valuable chemical for manufacturing products.
And there are actually companies in the United States that are now extracting CO2 from the atmosphere to make plastics.
So these are all nanotech-based technologies.
Call me an optimist, but CO2 is a valuable chemical.
And the environmentalists have not done us a great favor by painting it as the devil, because actually it's a valuable chemical, and we're going to extract it from the atmosphere, and we are doing it, and that's going to solve a lot of our climate problems.
It will not solve the problems that you and I talked about earlier, about these nanoparticulates that we're issuing and making humanity and the environment a very large experimental dish.
I was wondering if nanoparticles and this so-called smart dust could possibly be used in the future as a preventative measure for, say, radiation or bacteria or chemical weapons released in the air.
If it could be released beforehand or right before an attack, and if this sort of technology has any potential preventative or defensive uses, say, against nuclear weapons.
That's precisely what the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, DARPA, in the United States, has been researching for the past 10 years.
So the answer is that is already under investigation.
unidentified
Oh, fantastic.
And one more quick question or more of a comment when mentioning, like a previous guest from Manitoba, I believe, was sort of mentioning how the public could sort of get used to this and as it rolls out more public.
It sort of made me wonder if we might not see something out of Frank Herbert's Dune, the Butlerian Jihad, where we decide that everything that is mechanical, anything that's a machine of such a nature needs to go and we're going to start throwing out, never mind nanomachine particles, we're going to start throwing out our calculators and stuff.
Hi, yeah, no, I'd just like to say that, by the way, it's great to talk to you about, first of all, I'd just like to ask if you'd ever release your top 100 songs or time or if you could put a list up somewhere.
Anyway, I'm just calling to say that I really do not like the way that artificial intelligence is going, especially with where we're going in the next maybe 30 to 50 years with implants, brain hacks.
Really, really against it.
I mean, I think it's going to get to the point where, for example, you have people turning up at job interviews and they say, oh, you know, I've got this chip, you know, that gives me better memory.
I can concentrate longer.
Is there a word for those types of people that are really against, you know, like cyborgs or the evolution of man at the moment?
And, you know, talking about the so-called conspiracy theory, and I really dislike this word theory because there's so many examples in the legal annals of conspiracies that have been proven and prosecuted.
It's not a theory.
It happens all the time.
It's human nature.
And in the case of Volkswagen, this was an absolute classic, where at the very top of the company, they took a decision to develop an extremely sophisticated hardware that hid everything.
And when regulators in Europe and the United States asked them about that, they told them they were crazy and they were absolutely wrong.
And then they told them how to fix it.
And they fixed it and it still didn't work.
And finally, they had to admit after two years of testing that, yes, they actually had done it.
But the first reaction was, you're all lying.
No, you're telling the wrong story.
No, actually, your equipment doesn't work.
And this went on for two years.
So first of all, they went ahead and they deliberately hid the thing.
And then they started telling people they were crazy when they identified it.
So, you know, yes, the risk of this going on with high technology is not only there, but it's already shown.
You actually told a joke in how to approach this whole thing.
In Portland, between November 7th and 10th, there's a sustainable nanotechnology organization meeting that anyone on the West Coast might want to have a look at.
They've got, let me see now, 10.
It's a nonprofit organization, mostly students.
They've got 10 topics ranging from food to energy to urban systems and education.
So if anyone's interested in approaching sustainable nanotechnology, November 7th to 10, Portland, you can Google it.
I mean, it's, you know, it's just a joke from you is so rare that when you let one go, it takes me a second to realize that, well, it was a joke.
Full of a lot of science, put it that way.
In a moment, when we come back and we have one more break to go, I wonder if nanotech can be used to create this ever-talked about quantum computer that actually might put us in touch with somebody in a parallel universe or another universe or something.
So hold on.
We'll come back to all this in a moment.
Douglas Mulhole is my guest.
I am Art Bell.
unidentified
We came from somewhere, thank you how long ago.
Said about the fool, don't see, trying hard to recreate, forget yet to be created.
Watch it in the motion as you turn around today.
Watch it in the motion as you turn around today.
To initiate a dialogue sequence with Art Bell, please coordinate your Valanges and call 1-952-225-5278.
Now, as we advance nanotechnologically, I think that nanoparticles can be used in everything.
And certainly medicine, for example, could be one of them.
But again, we've also been talking about artificial intelligences and if there could be possible dangers with those.
So what could happen if, say, for example, these nanomachines were in us and an artificial intelligence might, for example, interact with those, you know, to control them or monitor them and actually use those nanomachines to control us?
Yeah, I can give you an example, and it refers back to the nanoparticulate therapy that is already being used currently.
This is traced externally with near-infrared that is controlled by computing.
So basically what you're seeing is the detection and manipulation of nanoparticles that are in the body that are being used, for example, to target cancer tumors, and they're being activated by computer-controlled mechanisms outside the body non-invasively.
Well, actually, you know, a lot of people that are dead and buried are considered to be toxic waste because of all of the toxins that we have in us already.
So it wouldn't be any surprise to have what you say, nanobots resting in biological materials.
But in nature, if you look at the way that nature invented the seed, that's basically what seeds are.
What seeds are are time packages that last over, in some cases, you know, hundreds of years that allow biological systems to replicate from degraded matter.
So what would be new about having nanobots in people that suddenly spring out many years later?
You know, plants that grow into coffins that implant themselves in biologically dead matter do exactly that.
He says, well, I think what this caller has in mind are nanobots that begin to be active after we're dead and buried and then cause us to rise, as in The Walking Dead, a show you may or may not get to see in Germany, and, you know, take after us.
So for the readers who are unaware, stem cells are the core cells that allow us to evolve all of our organs into everything else.
And they're used for researchers for generating new tissue.
And I am not personally familiar with the level of stem cell research in glaucoma, but you can very simply look into it by googling it, stem cell research, tissue regeneration, glaucoma.
And you yourself, without talking to your doctor, will be able to see that and then ask your doctor about it.
So that would be an example of how to look in the stem cell research.
You could also go to clinicaltrials.gov in the United States where they have all the most recent clinical trials on treating glaucoma.
Actually, if you look at a lot of the recharging that's going on right now, there's a huge field of applied research that's already being used for recharging cell phones for residual energy that's flying around in the atmosphere right now.
So actually, a lot of devices are being recharged right now using residual energy, which is actually free energy because it's waste energy.
It's out there and nobody's using it.
And if you go into airports, for example, they have similar types of charging devices.
Yeah, and it's a major issue with routers in homes because they have to pump out a lot of energy in your home in order to get this nice wireless internet access that everybody has.
So this is direct exposure.
And there's a lot of research right now going into how to effectively shield that by different delivery mechanisms.
Well, first of all, of course it's more than vapor.
What do you get when you have combustion?
So, yes, there's all types of chemicals being released from this combustion process.
There's no rocket science to that, if you'll pardon the pun.
So the answer is, what can you do to protect yourself from that, is the same answer as, what can you do to protect yourself from all of the tens of thousands of chemicals that are being released into our atmosphere.
And one of the things is nanofiltration.
And there are a lot of nanofilters on the market today that can be introduced, for example, into air conditioning systems.
But there is a major defect in them, and that is that a lot of them plug up very quickly.
And as a result, they actually end up worsening the problem.
And this is happening in China big time, because, as you know, they have a horrible micro-particulate problem in China.
And a lot of people are buying these filters.
And the filters are making the problem worse because they're not changing them rapidly enough.
Well, actually, there are new products that are coming onto the market in air conditioning systems.
And there's one particular product made by a company called KE Fibertech in Denmark that is replacing the air conditioning ducts in homes and offices with textile ducts that you can wash.
And the result of that is that the ducts don't, when they get dirty, you can simply take them out and wash them.
And these ducts, the textiles, actually filter the micro particulates much more effectively than the traditional ducting does in air conditioning systems.
So there is a product out there that's on the market right now.
It just came out about two years ago, and it's fantastic.
I know we're getting close to the end of the show.
We are.
The first question that I had was, has anybody followed up on some of the thoughts that were presented in XFiles with the ideas of super soldiers in the sense of you inject the nanobots into the human bloodstream, you get shot, you take a wound, et cetera, et cetera.
These nanobots rush to that wound, immediately heal that wound, and the person continues fighting or doing whatever it is they're doing.
Yeah, well, the answer to that is it's happening the opposite way to start with, and that is with exoskeletons.
So now the military has currently exoskeletons that if a soldier is shot, for example, it actually senses that and can release a temporary repair mechanism that stops bleeding, for example.
So this is all a result of, again, research by DARPA.
So it's happening externally at the moment.
What you're talking about is also being heavily researched.
So you're looking at a sequence of events.
One is the exoskeletons that make it happen on the outside.
And the second, which is probably going to happen in the next 10 to 15 years, is what you're describing.
unidentified
Okay.
And then my second question real quick was, would it be possible to take these nanobots?
And I was reading a book called Recursion, and I cannot remember off the top of my head the author of the book.
But basically, in that book, they had nanobots that would be used to build structures, entire buildings, space stations, et cetera, et cetera.
But I was thinking more down to the smaller side where you could get the world's finest sharp knife or scalpel.
I would just say if you really want to do something that you can control, go to the website, download this PDF file that we've got there on nanomedicine for all, and let's get going on this and work on it together.