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Oct. 1, 2023 - The Unexplained - Howard Hughes
01:05:36
Edition 760 - Dr David Whitehouse
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Across the UK, across continental North America and around the world on the internet, by webcast and by podcast, my name is Howard Hughes and this is The Unexplained.
Thank you very much for all of your emails.
Getting so much email in now.
If you'd been expecting a reply to an email, if you'd said in the subject line reply required and you haven't had it yet, please remind me.
So much email and so much stuff to deal with.
Please check my social media for news about the TV show.
The television show in the UK is ending.
And I will explain to you more about that as and when I can and what comes next.
So the TV show on air in the United Kingdom is ending.
And the last edition of the TV show should be the 1st of October.
So you may well have gone past that date by the time you hear this.
So that's the news on that.
And I will explain to you both on the podcast and in my social media, my Facebook page, what comes next.
So that's the news here.
What else to say?
Thank you to Adam, my webmaster, for his ongoing hard work.
The guest on this edition of the show is Dr. David Whitehouse.
We're going to talk far and wide about science and space.
David is giving three presentations on the upcoming cruise, The Unexplained Live 2023.
Morella, of course, put the holiday on and put the cruise on for you, and I host the events.
And David is one of our star performers, along with people like Andrea Perrin, Malcolm Robinson, Liz Cormel, and David Roth, the man who made the film about the Turin Shroud.
So they're going to be joining us on the Morella Discovery going up the eastern seaboard of the United States from October 22.
And the cruise itself will end back in Florida on November the 5th.
But full details of that are on the special edition of my podcast on the website, theunexplained.tv and usual podcast providers.
And the copy, the bit to read about the cruise, also contains a link that will explain how the cruise works and also give you details on how to book if you'd like to go.
One of the guests then from the cruise, one of the speakers, Dr. David Whitehouse on this edition of The Unexplained.
He's giving three breathtaking presentations.
You liked him so much last year.
He's back on the cruise this year.
This man, of course, former BBC Space and Science Editor, author, astronomer, and one of the single most interesting people, if not the most interesting person I've ever known in my life.
He was superb last year.
So if you can come on the cruise, you are in for multiple treats, including the presentations of Dr. David Whitehouse.
We're going to talk about a lot of things on this edition of The Unexplained, including the cruising experience.
I don't think I have anything else to say now, really.
If you want to communicate with me, please go to the website, theunexplained.tv.
If you would like to make a donation, and thank you if you have already, very gratefully received, you can do that through my website, theunexplained.tv.
And like I've said, the TV show comes to an end on October the 1st.
What happens next beyond that, I will explain on my social media and on the podcast.
So watch this space.
Sorry, I haven't been able to tell you more before now, but that's the news here.
Okay.
Anything else to say?
No, scratching my head now.
No, I think that's it.
So let's get to the guest on this edition.
Let's go down to Northampshire and Dr. David Whitehouse, great friend of mine in this show.
David, thank you very much for coming back on the show.
You're welcome, Harry.
How is life at the moment?
Have you had a busy year, David?
Writing, performing?
Yes.
Well, the thing I devote most time to is writing.
And after my last book, you know, The Incredibly Wonderful and Amazing Alien Perspective, I took a bit of time away from writing because I wanted to, if you like, do a lot more work on the next one before I showed it to my agent.
Because, you know, agents, they sometimes tell you the harsh truth.
And I thought I would do.
So I'm in the process of preparing the next one.
And although she does know about it and approves, which is good, I'm sort of getting this together because I'm in the fortunate position whereby the alien perspective comes out in paperback next year.
So I really don't want to get in the way of that.
So this book will be the year afterwards.
So I've got a reasonable amount of time to pull it all together, which is great fun.
You know, I respect everybody's rights who appears on this show, David, but what's the book about?
Well, it's actually, not to give too much away, all my previous books have been, apart from the one about the Earth, journey to the center of the Earth, have been, if you like, standing on the surface of the planet and looking out, looking out for alien life, looking out at the moon and the sun, and going to the moon, astronauts.
But this time I thought I'd take a journey to the very small and actually look inward.
Because, believe it or not, there is more space and room for structure and for laws and for order and indeed for chaos on the scales of the very small than there is on the very large.
We live, you and I are roughly halfway in terms of scale between the smallest and the largest.
So it seems interesting, you know, if you spend your time looking outwards, that occasionally you should look inwards and try and make a journey to the very smallest.
And that's the plan, you know, but as you know, Howard, you know, you start off with a plan for a book, and then when you write the book, the plan goes out the window because you end up going into directions you never thought you would.
And that's the joy of writing a book.
It takes you new places.
So that is the overall plan of the book.
But what it turns out to be, I won't know till the end of next year.
I think that's exciting.
And the idea of looking at the micro level, I also think is exciting because I think will encourage us to ask questions about ourselves because we exist on this scale, okay?
And we think this scale is all there is.
Yes, we relate to animals who have a smaller worldview and a different worldview than us, but there is an even smaller scale than us, and it is relevant.
Just as we look to the heavens and we see things on enormous scales, and we have to contemplate distances that give us all the headache when we think about them.
You know, this issue of scale and why things that are small and big are just as important as we are, I think is very significant.
The thing which really amazed me, and this is an amazing fact, is that there is a small scale, which some scientists believe is the smallest possible scale you can have, called the Planck length.
And the way to describe that, and this is a mind-blowing analogy, is imagine the width of a hair compared to the size of a universe.
Big difference.
However, if you enlarged that hair to the size of the observable universe, the Planck length would still be the width of a hair.
Shows you how much structure and detail and how small you can go.
That to me is an amazing fact.
Now, some of the people who've appeared on my show over the years, some of the ones who I think those in orthodox science would regard as being fringe people, but they've sometimes come up with theories that there are like common equations, common denominators between everything, everything that exists on whatever scale and wherever it is.
I'm not putting this well because, as you know, I'm not scientific, but do you believe in such things?
Do you believe that there may be a common denominator between ourselves and some civilization infathomably or unfathomably far away who we know nothing of yet?
Well, clearly we're going to have the laws of physics in common because we live in the same physical universe.
But whether or not they interpret those laws in the same way remains to be seen.
And we've had the blockbuster film Oppenheimer this year.
And Oppenheimer said something absolutely fascinating about aliens.
He said that common things, an ordinary perspective that we have, may be seen in a different way.
The fundamental questions might be asked differently by aliens, which is fascinating.
How they would presumably know about atoms and molecules and stars and galaxies.
But how they would describe them, how they would come up with their own logic to explain things and predict things and to do their science might not necessarily be exactly the same as the way we do it.
And that's one of the fascinating things, you know, if we ever found aliens, to look at their point of view, because we do not know whether we are unique or just commonplace.
If we found other alien civilizations out there, it would be great to compare them with us because are we average?
Do other civilizations out there have the same view of the universe as us based on science?
Or do they have their own interpretation of their own science?
And they could say to us, well, actually, have you thought about looking at it this way?
That would be fascinating.
I mean, conversations with an alien.
What could be more fascinating?
Well, what indeed could?
We've contemplated it many times, haven't we?
But, I mean, this is something that, and we'll come back to NASA and its quest for the truth about UAPs and all the rest of it in a little while.
But just for now, on that topic of the aliens.
We always assume, and at the moment, all of these people getting so excited about the possibility of so-called disclosure that I'm getting very doubtful of now, because I think if there was some big revelation coming, we'd already have had it.
But these people assume that there is going to be a truth that will be revealed, and they will say, well, yes, we've been communicating with this civilization.
That assumes an awful lot.
That assumes this civilization, A, wants to speak with us, dialogue with us, and B, dialogues and communicates in methods and languages and modes that we can understand.
You're quite right, because it may well be that we have little in common.
And it's not inconceivable that we could be visited by aliens.
And there is just no fundamental logic, linguistic common parameter that we can have to communicate with them.
We have to learn each other's language.
You've seen the film Arrival, where the whole film is about learning the aliens' language.
It's interesting they didn't learn our language.
So yes, you know, you're quite right.
It's the assumption that they would put up their tentacle or their hand and say, take me to your leader, it might be, if ever we encountered aliens, a lot stranger and weirder than that.
So yes, no human knows the mind of an alien.
And this is the problem, because when you see aliens in science fiction films, the bar in Star Wars is a common example.
They're not really aliens.
They're people dressed up in suits.
They're what we think of aliens.
And with a hint of mythology, with a hint of werewolves and incuby and succubi these strange creatures from our subconscious.
We put those into aliens, but they are our aliens.
And creatures born in interstellar space, born under the light of a different sun, could be so different that we cannot possibly imagine until we encounter them.
No human can possibly put themselves in the mind or the perspective of an alien because we are human and we need educating in that by the others.
The others.
And I believe that there may well be others somewhere and I'm not sure whether we're going to meet them or find out about them anytime soon, but I think there will be.
But we have to remember this question Of scale again, and it takes me back to the opening narration of War of the Worlds, which I'm sure you're a fan of too.
Oh, yes, yes.
Especially the Richard Burton version, where he says, you know, those who observe us as men busied themselves about their various concerns, they observed and studied the way a man with a microscope might scrutinize the creatures that swarm and multiply.
We might be insignificantly small to them.
That's an interesting point of view.
It's a valid scientific point of view, that if there are aliens and we encountered them or they encountered us, it's highly unlikely they would be as dumb as we are.
They're going to be much more advanced.
We can hope, yes.
They're going to be much more advanced.
And would they recognize our form of intelligence?
Would they respect it?
Would they not bother with us and want to come back when we're a bit more advanced?
We just do not know the answer to these questions.
I mean, it's interesting to speculate what a civilization will be like in a million years or a billion years old, because we like to think that if a civilization lasted a long time,
they would get over the problems of war and insecurity and violence and aggression and become cosmic princes of peace and bring us wisdom and enlightenment and a new point of view.
On the other hand, it's possible that they could spend a billion years becoming nastier and nastier and not liking any other form of life and just wanting to get rid of it.
We do not know.
And there are, as you know, Howard, there are people who say, as we look for life in space, we ought to be very careful because we might find something that we do not like because we do not know if, I mean, we are not a very nice species ourselves in many respects.
What would it be like if we found another not nice species with super weapons?
It's worth, I mean, it has been said, I think I said in the book, that all this idea about contact with aliens out there is that unless we talk about it, we will never be ready.
But when we find them, whatever we think, it will be too late.
And we've got to be ready no matter what.
And I'm hoping that the powers that be, you know, NASA, the US government, the British government, all of them, are making a plan.
I'm hoping that they are.
I'm not sure whether they are.
The thing is, they're not, actually.
This is a thing worth saying, that we could find aliens tomorrow.
I mean, as you know, Howard, some people believe we already have.
But we could find aliens tomorrow or a spaceship like Independence Day could arrive in our skies next week.
It's not impossible.
It doesn't violate any laws of science.
And there has to be a we can't react to that on the fly.
And yet if you go to the United Nations and say, what is your plan for alien encounters?
They're not interested.
They'll fob you off.
It's not important to them.
They've got other things.
And yet you say that, okay, a lot of people, a lot of scientists believe it's unlikely, but still possible.
But you plan for unlikely but possible events like meteor impacts, like solar storms.
You've got a plan for those.
Why haven't you got a plan for alien encounters?
Well, that's interesting.
It has been asked again in various media articles, even in the last couple of weeks, you know, what is the plan?
And I assume that NASA had a plan and they were giving very positive signs, but we'll see.
Let's get into the meat of our conversation then, if we may, David.
In the news in the last 36 hours or so, there was some news about antimatter.
And I have to say, and again, I say that I'm not a scientist, which is half the excitement of doing what I do because I am constantly learning.
You know, I'm the victim of the education that we had in the times when I was being educated.
It was hit and miss.
Sometimes you can have a good teacher, and my science teacher turned me off and made me think that I just wasn't intelligent enough to do this.
But that has meant that I've had a lifetime of trying to understand, including this story.
New research from the National Science Foundation performed at the CERN labs in Switzerland shows that antimatter reacts to gravity until it suffers from catastrophic self-annihilation, as Einstein predicted.
Now, that's interesting because what that suggests to my generalist brain is that we've always thought, well, you know, antimatter, if we get to fully understand it, we're going to have a mode of reliable, fast propulsion that's going to take us to the stars.
This, unless I'm completely wrong, and I'm sure I probably am, suggests otherwise.
Well, perhaps not, in the sense that antimatter is strange stuff indeed.
I mean, it was predicted about roughly a century ago, mainly by Paul Dirac, a very strange and interesting physicist, who looked at the emerging equations of quantum mechanics, the description of nature on the very small, where things come in lumps, energy comes in lumps, matter comes in lumps.
He noticed that it was possible to conceive of a particle which was the opposite of an electron, a positron, and it was made of antimatter.
And that was discovered.
And we now know that there is a mirror image of the matter around us called antimatter.
And it's fascinating.
Take the anti-electron.
The electron, a fundamental particle with a negative electrical charge, a certain mass.
The positron, the anti-electron, has got an opposite charge and is made of matter, which is somehow the reverse of normal matter.
So if you bring an anti-electron and an electron together, then This matter will annihilate and you'll get a flash of radiation.
Antimatter is strange stuff.
There's a remarkable aspect of quantum mechanic theory which suggests that anti-electrons, antimatter is actually normal matter moving backwards in time.
That's weird.
That is very weird.
But the thing is, there is a big, major problem in astronomy.
And that when the Big Bang happened and the universe was created, it's thought that initially there were equal amounts of matter and antimatter.
But somehow the antimatter disappeared.
And our universe is now made of normal matter, you and I stuff.
So antimatter appears occasionally in small amounts.
And its properties are difficult to study.
And it was suggested by some people that antimatter doesn't be pulled by gravity.
It might actually, if you've got a piece of antimatter and you let it go, it would fly away from the Earth instead of being attracted to the Earth.
And they've done the experiment now and know it.
Antimatter is affected by gravity in the same way as normal matter.
But it's all a big mystery in the sense that antimatter is a strange mirror image.
I mean, you could have people who believe there are multiple universes.
You could have antimatter universes.
And if you lived in them, you'd have a life just like you and I. Why should we be made of one type of matter and not the other matter?
It's a wonderful, precise experiment they've done.
But when it gets you to think about antimatter, you end up voyaging into strange, weird areas of thought.
You do?
And are you saying then that all of the science fiction-like hope that antimatter would provide us with propulsion, maybe allow us to travel backwards in time, all of that is actually still alive after this?
Possibly.
I mean, the interesting thing about antimatter is it's very difficult to create, although its effects are around us all the time.
And when you have a scan, a PET scan, actually there's a little bit of antimatter involved with that or the system would not work.
But it's a tiny, tiny amount.
And we've never been able to generate more than, I think, nanograms of antimatter.
Because not only is it difficult to make, well, difficult to collect, it's difficult to store because you have to store it in a magnetic field because if it touches normal matter, then it just disappears in a flash of radiation.
So we've only, I think, ever made an anti-atom of anti-helium.
We have never done anything more than that.
But theoretically, if you had enough antimatter and you brought it into contact with the same amount of matter, you could convert, if you helped it along a little way, theoretically, perhaps you could convert all of the mass into energy.
And that is very efficient in terms of getting energy out of matter.
And that could be a form of propulsion, you know, a kind of handset for the antimatter, Captain, might be a phrase in the future.
We just don't know.
It's not ruled it out at all.
I mean, antimatter might be a propulsion system to travel between the stars.
Could be, but we need a lot more work.
Going to be a while.
Maybe not in our lifetimes, like a lot of things.
You and I are both enthused by the potential, you more than me because you understand it far better than I ever would, of the James Webb Space Telescope.
And it seems to be delivering stories to us every single week, including this one this week.
New readings from the exoplanet TRAPPIST-1B that you and I have talked about before, captured by the James Webb Space Telescope, have revealed the presence of ghost signals from its host star, as well as other critical data, atmospheric details about the planet itself.
Now, a lot of attention has been paid to this, and I'm not entirely sure why in the media this week, but can you explain?
James Webb is a truly revolutionary telescope.
I mean, it's absolutely wonderful in terms of the precision observations it can make.
It's making groundbreaking observations of the distant universe, which might rewrite our understanding of how the universe evolved, its observations of distant galaxies.
But it's also coming into its own in observing the atmospheres of exoplanets, planets around relatively nearby stars.
Because for the first time, really, we're getting wonderful analysis of the spectra of the light from these planets, because we can see as the planet moves in front of their star, the starlight shines through the atmosphere.
And we can analyze the starlight in its normal mode and the starlight that's passed through the planet's atmosphere and look at the difference.
And we can tell what the atmosphere is made of.
And we're finding a tremendous number of interesting molecules and conditions there.
We found nothing that suggests life yet.
There was a bit of a kerfuffle about a particular molecule, which is only on Earth generated by life.
But the statistical evidence of that molecule is pretty slight, and they need to do a heck of a lot more work to show that it's there.
But one day, they will be able to look at an atmosphere of an exoplanet and say, this is really interesting.
This is in such a state, such an out-of-equilibrium state, that it could indicate there's life there.
And there's a telescope which is actually currently being built, which will come online, I think, 2028, 2029, called the Extremely Large Telescope, which is built for the exact purpose of looking at the atmospheres of nearby stars, different types of stars to that which James Webb can get at.
And that's really going to do the business.
I mean, if we find, it's this way, we could actually find the first evidence For life in space.
And it's within our grasp at the moment with James Webb and the extremely large telescope.
But as you say, stories every week and expect lots and lots of fabulous stories about exoplanet atmospheres.
Well, and one of the other aspects of all of this is that because James Webb has all of this tremendous resolution that what we had before, Hubble and others, didn't have, I guess the more you're able to look, the more you find.
So the number of potential places where there might be stuff we'd be interested in, i.e.
life, they're going to increase.
And will we have the capacity to study them all, or will we have to prioritize, which I guess we do anyway?
Yes, when somebody comes up with an idea, there's more ideas for these telescopes than they could possibly carry out.
So, yes, I mean, take, for instance, James Webb's observations of the very early universe shortly after the Big Bang.
One of its remarkable findings, which is causing a lot of discussion at the moment, is that it found that some galaxies formed much earlier than predicted.
We had thought we had an idea about how the universe evolved when you've got the Big Bang and then you've got hydrogen and helium clouds and then they formed stars and the stars formed galaxies.
And we had a time scale for that.
That time scale has gone out of the window now because it's found relatively well-structured galaxies much, much earlier than we had thought they could possibly exist.
And that's thrown, as I say, the cat among the pigeons.
So you're right.
It's the availability of a world-class instrument that pushes the parameters further, enables you to see further, better, in more detail.
You always see things you didn't expect.
You always see something which changes what you thought.
That's a wonderful thing, isn't it?
I would say so.
Now, roughly just over a week ago from when this is being heard, maybe up to two weeks from when this is being heard, Bennu, the asteroid and the OSIRIS-REx mission to return samples, I still am boggled by how they were able to get this material off this moving half, what was it, 500-meter wide thing, how they were able to land on it and get these, but they did it, and they've scooped them up and brought them back.
There's been news this week about the return of the samples and the race by scientists to analyze those samples here on Earth, but also some discussion of some black dust that covers these samples and people speculating on what that might be and from where.
I don't think anybody knows at the moment.
Certainly getting the samples back was remarkable.
I mean, we all waited and watched as this capsule came in and landed in Utah.
And then everybody rushed towards it to get the capsule and put it in the right box to take it to Houston to start unpacking it, unboxing it.
And it's just a tremendous feat.
It's, I think, the third time we have asteroid samples.
There were two previous Japanese missions which returned samples from asteroids.
But Bennu is a different type of asteroid.
It's got much more carbon and much more oxygen in it.
And therefore, it speaks more about the carbon and oxygen that went on to form life when the solar system was young.
How did it help the Earth be the right place for life to form?
So it's important for the history of the solar system, for the molecules that went on to form life.
And also, should we ever want to deflect an asteroid, it's another one to understand.
But you're right, there's going to be surprises.
This is a strange asteroid.
When they swooped down to pick up the sample, that was a remarkable maneuver in 2020 because they had this sort of scoop on the end of an arm and they didn't realize initially that the surface was quite as loose and as fluid.
It looks like gravel, but it's like a ball pond.
You know, you can reach into it and it moves.
I didn't expect that.
And instead of getting, I think, 60 grams of material, they got 250.
And it filled up the sample arm.
And they had problems closing the door on the sample device to actually safe it to bring it back.
So there's a lot more material there than they thought, most of which will be put into storage for future reference.
But look, whenever you open that up, and oh, to be one of those scientists who, you know, you're standing over the capsule as you pull off the lid and you're looking at it in the clean room, in the special nitrogen-filled environment to keep it safe, you know, that thrill of what are you going to see?
And is there something strange there, black dusk, whatever, that is what science is all about, isn't it?
The thrill of the eye at the eyepiece, the eye at the microscope, the person on the computer looking at the first image of this, that, and the other, the first time you take the lid off a sample from asteroid Bennu, you know, you've got an idea, but you've really got no idea what you're going to find.
No, it is exciting to be the first to do that.
You know, others will do it in other generations, but this is definitely the first.
And as you said, one of the things about this is that there is a slim possibility, but a possibility nonetheless, that Bennu, on its return to our vicility, might have Stoke Poges or Washington, D.C. in its sights.
Or indeed Twickenham in its sights, or anywhere.
And it would be helpful, joking apart, to have an understanding of the composition, because if we need to nudge it out of the way, we're going to need to know properly what it's made of.
You're quite right.
And It would make a mess of Twickenham or Farnborough.
It's only 500 meters across, but it comes in.
It's not so much the mass, I suppose, as the speed.
You know, 20,000 miles an hour, it would slam into the Earth, release a lot of energy, and create a crater five miles across and devastation for tens and tens and tens of miles, much further than that.
Terrible.
But the thing is about Bennu is, as we said, its surface is very fluid, it's gravelly, it's like a ball pond.
And that's a problem in the sense that if you want to nudge it out the way and change its trajectory slightly, and you do what most people think you should do, is just fire something heavy into it to knock it to one side, then that's not going to work very well because it's just going to get swallowed up.
You know, it's going to be like hitting candy floss.
So there really has to be a better understanding of the range of asteroids that might threat us, their physical properties.
And that's going to lead into, well, how do you nudge it?
What do you do?
Do you blow it up?
Circumstances, if you blew it up, you might actually cause more of a problem because you might have more dangerous pieces.
The object to blowing it up would be to make so many small pieces, they would all burn up.
But you might just create a handful of big pieces, which are just going to spread the devastation over wider areas.
Cosmic shrapnel.
You either tug it out the way or you use some kind of percussive effect of having an explosion near it.
Could be.
All these things are, you know, there are suggestions, but, you know, it needs to do a lot more work on this because although NASA was mandated by the government to find something like 80 or 90% of all threatening asteroids that will threaten the Earth several years ago, we're probably about 70%, 75% of them.
They're going to improve rapidly as the Vera-Rubin telescope comes on board.
And the Chinese have got a new telescope that samples the sky very quickly and will find a lot more of these objects.
But it's not impossible that an object might approach from an undersampled region of the sky, from the position of the sun, say, where it's difficult at certain times of the year to actually see incoming trajectories.
They're obscured by the sun.
It's not impossible we might find an object which would threaten us on the time scale of months.
And have we got a plan?
There is a plan.
The plan at the moment is track it and evacuate.
We don't have a plan or any hardware we could send up to it to nudge it out of the way at the moment.
We're actually very good at tracking these type of things.
It was a case of, you know, should we find out roughly where it's going to be, civil emergencies would come into effect and people would be moved out of the way.
Right.
Now, certainly in the United Kingdom, most of Europe, I think, parts of the United States have recently experienced something like this, but we're not really geared up for mass evacuation, are we?
And part of this is going to have to be, you know, if this event happens, and some politicians and others say it's going to happen sometime, maybe not in our generation.
But we have to be careful how we mobilize people in this way so as to avoid panic and to make sure that people know where they're going to go and go where you want them to.
Exactly.
It's a major task.
It's a major, major task.
And although, as you say, it's unlikely to happen.
It's unlikely to happen until we have a method of something stationed in space that could actually get to these things and nudge them out of the way, even at relatively short notice.
But it's not impossible.
And it's part of government to actually prepare for emergencies.
You know, you have to have a plan.
And the government in the civil emergencies plan of risk in this country includes all sorts of problems, including sort of, sorry, solar flare problems.
But rapid reaction to evacuation from asteroids would presumably be covered with other evacuation plans.
But I don't think it's specifically addressed.
Well, that's more work for the scientists than the planners then.
Can I ask you about the moon, David?
Because other nations than America have been making all the headlines about the moon recently.
And we're not hearing very much about America's plan, NASA's plan, for the Artemis mission, which is still going ahead and is reasonably imminent.
Has America been upstaged in exploration of the moon?
I suppose you could, in the sense that we're all talking about.
We're all talking about other nations.
We're talking about several other nations have attempted to land on the moon.
Including India.
Including India, which has done remarkably well.
They're the first to land at the south pole of the moon.
I mean, Japan tried it.
Countries in the Middle East have tried it.
And they failed.
And it's difficult to land.
And Israel tried it and they failed.
It's difficult to land on the moon, even with modern technology.
So India having succeeded is remarkable.
And they've led the way to the South Pole.
And they found some remarkable discoverers already just, you know, in the couple of weeks that they were able to function at the South Pole.
They've already told us some new facts about the lunar soil, about its temperature, about the fact that how far you have to go in before you might actually find some ice, some water, and tells us very strongly that you're not going to find it under the surface.
You're going to find it in the shadows, which is an interesting thing to learn.
But there are American companies who are going to put similar things on the lunar surface.
They just haven't got there yet.
There's one that's going to be launched in A few weeks.
It's going to take a while to get to the moon, but it's going to set off.
There's going to be a rover called Viper going around a region in the South Pole to actually study the volatiles, the ice that's there.
So other countries, if you like, have got ahead of America, but America private industry is going to, is hopefully going to put things on the moon and start getting the ground truth for the Artemis astronauts who've been touring the world, who've been looking at the, been in Europe recently, looking at the service module that's been built by Europe.
And their mission, their crew of four to go around the moon, spend best part of a month in space, I believe, is set for the end of next year.
The landing, it's difficult to say at the moment because nominally it's the year later, but it wouldn't surprise me if it ends up as being two years later because that is a considerable step forward.
So Artemis is still progressing.
And it's curious because the reason Artemis got going was because of Trump, believe it or not.
Because Trump said to NASA when he came into the presidency, when are you going to the moon?
And they said 2028.
And he said, that's not going to be within my presidential in my tenure.
So get a move on.
And to be honest, he did kick them and get them to actually get started.
And Mike Pence did some good work and they actually got on with it.
Now, Trump, of course, only had four years.
And Biden's come along.
But if Trump gets back, he will actually be in tenure when the next lunar landing occurs, because it will be within the next term after this current presidential term.
Now, there's an irony for you.
He may want to beat China.
I can't say the way that he's.
China's avowed plans are to get astronauts on the moon by the end of the decade.
But we know that China are quick, they're learning, they've got great, their space station is fantastic, they've already put things on the moon.
Although the signs would be obvious to Western intelligence if China was planning a manned, a crewed lunar mission, we would know about it.
We would know what they were doing and when they would plan it.
There's nothing the West could do to alter their timetable.
And if they decided that they were going to move very quickly on that, the West would just watch.
Wouldn't they just...
Nobody seems to be talking other than photographs that appear in various newspapers every single week of supposed statues, artifacts, shopping trolleys, whatever they might be on Mars.
Apart from those sort of pictures, and it's always fascinating to see the Martian landscape, the Martian daytime, all of those things are just amazing.
And I sit there looking at these pictures, thinking to myself, well, could we be looking at the rubble of a very ancient civilization, bearing in mind if we all cease to exist today, in a period frighteningly shorter than a lot of people would assume, there would be nothing left of anything that we've made or any of us.
So I always have those thoughts.
But the talk about going to Mars and Elon Musk and others getting very excited about it, it seems to have cooled a bit, David.
Why do you think that is?
Well, Elon Musk was always pushing the boat out a bit, so to speak, when it comes to putting a million people on Mars and traveling to Mars in a few years' time.
You know, he's a billionaire.
He's done fabulous, fantastic things with rockets and capsules and getting into low Earth orbit.
And his imagination sort of went away with him a bit.
And I think there's a bit of reality come into play here.
Planning for a Mars mission, preparing a Mars mission is going to take a long time, a decade, because sending people to Mars is the...
In terms of the distances, the time away, and the isolation and the technology needed to keep the crew alive, there's never been anything like it in our history.
It would be at least, given current technology, a three-year mission to Mars.
Three years living in a tin can, something the size of perhaps a small bus, more isolated than any humans have ever been in history, unable to come back.
If something goes wrong, you have to go to Mars to come back.
Subject to radiation.
Subject to radiation, subject to the health effects of zero gravity, relying on your closed-cycle life support system, having to recycle everything, having to count every calorie, having to measure every degree centigrade of heat.
Always, always in a state of alert because of the jeopardy you may face.
We are just not prepared for that at the moment.
Indeed, the toilet problem is a problem because when the toilet breaks down on the space station, they have two of them, it can be horrible and they have to repair it.
The toilet breaks down on a Mars mission and you cannot repair it, you are dead.
So you've got to have all this technology that works and works reliably and you're certain of because you will depend on it for your lives in a way you don't if you go to the moon when you can hopefully abort back to the earth.
And then there is the question of when you get there on the first mission, since you've struggled to get there and the toll on the human body is so great, do you then have the first mission land on the surface?
Because that's going to take concentration.
That's going to take everything they've got.
And after a voyage of not knowing the problem, you know, subject to radiation, subject to zero gravity, all that, it may well be that the first voyage is just to go round Mars and come back and learn about the voyage itself, as they did with Apollo eight to the moon.
And then our subsequent mission, attempt the landing based on the experience they've got with the first.
All this is not sorted out.
We do not have craft that could travel to Mars.
We do not have the life support system.
We do not know the support you'd have to give to astronauts.
So 10 or 20 years before we go to Mars.
Yes, and all of those optimistic estimates of it being this decade, that's not going to happen by the looks of it.
And the other issue is that artificial intelligence is proceeding at such a pace now.
It's able to do so many things and is shocking people with its speed of growth and its sophistication.
Maybe we don't need to be sending people anywhere, including Mars.
We should be sending robotics.
That's an interesting point in the sense that, as you say, unmanned, uncrewed spacecraft with AI support systems could go anywhere in the solar system where we couldn't.
And we do not regard them as being in jeopardy in the way we regard humans as being in danger on these missions.
And so my argument to that is, if you only want science, if you only want data and information, send a robot.
Highly sophisticated AI robot that would send you about wonderful data.
That's great.
That's great for the scientists.
And a lot of astronomers think that way.
But I don't think that way.
I think if you want adventure, if you want humanity, if you want exploration, you have to send a person.
And that person is, you know, there is an element of danger, there is an element of exploration there.
You get stories, you get adventure, you get commitment.
I mean, we do not celebrate the date of the first robot landing on the moon.
Most people cannot remember it.
Have to look it up.
When an unmanned craft landed on the moon and took pictures.
Wonderful.
We don't remember it.
We don't celebrate it.
We do celebrate the first footprint on the moon.
That's interesting.
And also, the issue is if we want to colonize the moon, if the secret agenda is we need to be finding places for us to go when this place is finished, which may be sooner than a lot of people think, then we have to send people.
Yes, in the sense that Stephen Hawking used to say this, although he used to echo what's been said for a long time in science and philosophy and science fiction, that having all our eggs in one basket on the Earth is a dangerous thing to do.
And that eventually when we have colonies on the moon, on Mars, and perhaps in between the planets or the stars, we will be as a humanity safe, even though these colonies would evolve into their own versions of humanity, different from Terrans who lived back on Earth.
So there is a case of keeping, you know, allowing humanity not to be as fragile or as perilous when we get off the planet.
But it's going to be a long time before we do that.
It's going to be a very long time, if ever, that you could have a self-sustaining Mars colony because it's such a difficult environment.
It may well be that the colonies in between the planets on artificial worlds, artificial, you know, large space stations are more secure and larger and able to grow better than actually being able to be on the planet Mars or on the moon and that.
But you touched on an interesting point there, Howard, you know, the problems we've got here on Earth.
In my mind, I sort of think that, sure, there will come a time in centuries when people live off this world.
Perhaps the Mars colony, there will be people who live and do not come back to the Earth, or a baby is born on Mars, or the moon who lives off Earth for the entire life.
But it's going to be a long time before we have self-sustaining large colonies, nations in space.
And that would solve a few of our problems, but we mustn't look to others to solve the problems that we must face here down on Earth.
That's you know, that's space is a help to this, particularly the Earth observations of our environment and the technology of space is wonderful.
But we're not going to get from technology, from space, a solution to our problems.
And this is another thing that takes us back to the aliens we were talking about at the beginning, in the sense that a lot of people look for aliens and alien contact as somehow they are wise.
They will help us solve our problems.
They will help us become less aggressive.
They will solve our environmental problems.
It's not impossible that they could.
But I don't think we should put off solving our own problem, put this off in hope that the aliens will save us when we should be confronting these problems.
We shouldn't give to others the problems that we have.
And we may well export our people because we're human beings.
And if we've created a mess here, then we're the same human beings who've created the mess.
We don't want to be taking that elsewhere.
You're quite right.
In my book, Space 2069, I talk about the tensions between the Mars colony and the Earth colony.
You know, when Mars gets a bit more of independence and doesn't like what the Earth wants.
And yeah, you're quite.
We're humans.
We'll take everything that's human with us.
Good and bad.
We're humans.
Wonderful, isn't it?
Actually, a lot of the time it is.
Just to ask you about this then, finally, Mark McInerney is the new head of UAPs for NASA.
Somewhat hamp-fistedly announced in a session by NASA a couple of weeks ago that everybody Instantly forgot.
Is he going to make a difference?
Who knows?
I mean, you have witnessed and you have chronicled better than anybody the febrile nature of the UFO-UAP this year and last year that's going on.
There's so much debate, there's so much interest, there's so much speculation.
And NASA's contribution to this, I think rather reluctantly, they got drawn into this, is to basically, as you know, say we need more data.
And there needs to be a report in practice for anybody who's got data to actually tell NASA about it so they can analyse it.
And this guy, that's this guy's job.
So it remains to be seen.
It remains to be seen, you know, how he will go about his job, whether or not they're going to develop an app whereby anybody who sees something interesting will be able to send it to NASA and it'll get analyzed eventually.
Because I think people realizing that the evidence for whatever UAPs or UFOs are is sparse.
Most of the things you see on the internet are fakes.
Those that aren't fakes, you haven't got enough information from and there aren't enough of them.
So they need more information to work out exactly what it is.
But for those who take an interest in what is it, David Grush said, non-human biologics, when he gave his testimony to Congress over 100 days ago now.
July 26th.
Yeah.
It's getting to be, you mentioned that, you alluded to this at the beginning.
I'll be interested to hear what you think.
But it's getting to be the stage whereby there are too many excuses.
We are told by some journalists and advocates that there are whistleblowers, but they can't tell us who they are.
We need the evidence.
I mean, it's been the case, as you know, in the history of UFology, of which I'm not a great scholar, but, you know, being an astronomer for many years, I've taken an interest.
There have been whistleblowers, well, whistleblowers are actually people who come up with evidence.
They're not people who come up with stories.
There have been people who say, we've got evidence and it'll come out and it never does.
And this one is starting to look like the same pattern as that, in the sense that Bill Nelson at the press conference at NASA gave and others have said, okay, where's the evidence?
It's about time that we had some evidence.
You know, there are so many whistleblowers two steps removed who say they've got the evidence.
And the thing that's always in the back of my mind is that when you hear people say that there are crashed UFOs, I think a strange chap called Stephen Greer says there are 120 of them more.
And David Grush says there are many of them.
I don't know the exact number.
But each one of those is in a facility.
Each one of those would be guarded.
Each one of those would be analyzed by scientists and technicians and support staff.
And everybody kept quiet.
Yeah, and if this has been going on for 75 years, that means you have had 10 generations of staff involved in this type of thing.
And their children and their families and the supports and the people who deliver the coffee, the people who take out the trash, the people who develop the photographs, the IT engineers who fix their computers with the images and the reports on.
In 75 years, must be tens of thousands of people.
There has not been one leak or decent picture.
No, well, look, I mean, just to put the other side of this, because I would like all of this to be true, and I am waiting as eagerly as anybody listening to this for the information and for more evidence.
But, you know, so far we don't have it.
We might well get it.
But over those decades, maybe those people have kept quiet because the penalties for opening your mouth about these things are the potential disappearance of you, your family, and anybody close to you.
So maybe if the sanctions are that great, then people don't speak.
I would argue, what is the evidence for that?
Well, you know, there are people who've said, many of them over the years, that they have been, you know, messed about, they have been put under terms of secrecy that would frighten you or I. I don't know.
That could be the reason.
You know what would be amazing?
Now, you know my point of view on this.
I do not believe there are crashed UFOs or we have alien contact.
But I'm, I'm, you know, if somebody's got the evidence, I'm willing to be convinced.
And why can't, I mean, if somebody who had the evidence, a picture, a sample, something proper, and they walked in to the foyer of the New York Times or the BBC and said, this is the evidence, publicize it, they would not be arrested.
They would not have a, if they had an NDA, nobody's been arrested for an NDA in this similar circumstances.
They would become world famous, mega-rich.
they would become...
They would have all their dreams satisfied and they would be untouchable.
not?
There may well be We just don't know the makeup of the deep secrets.
I remember Gary McKinnon, who, you know, supposedly hacked into American computers, making them very mad indeed, where there were all kinds of secrets there.
And I think he's been commenting or has been asked by the U.S. some in the last week about things.
So you can take a look at that.
I mentioned that on my show.
And there are also loose ends like the people who say that they have been abducted.
You know, people like Calvin Parker, who died recently.
I've interviewed Calvin Parker a number of times.
A perfectly sincere man with a very credible story, I would say.
You know, where does that all come into it?
I'm not expecting you to be able to answer this, but I get the point that you're making.
As a scientist, what we need to see is evidence.
And I think as a community, there is a growing impatience, including with myself, that we started a ball rolling this summer.
And I don't know where it's going.
Now, maybe by the time this is released and people are hearing this, everybody will be laughing, saying, well, of course, we had that announcement yesterday that we're not alone.
I would bet, I would go to the bookies and put money on that not happening and that announcement not being made anytime soon.
But I simply don't know.
Yeah, I think you're very wise, Howard.
And I think that the whole UFO is a subject that exploded this year.
And it's got so many aspects to it, technological, sociological, media, communication, you know, the whole business.
And I think you have chronicled this superbly.
And I think you have kept across and enlightened me immeasurably in terms of what's happening and what it all means.
Well, thank you.
And I want to keep my feet on the ground.
I want to reach for the stars, like Casey Kasem on radio used to say.
I want to keep my feet on the ground, but keep reaching for the stars.
So I want to believe that this is true, but I do believe that now is the time for if there are bits of craft or people who've kept in their garage elements of things that it's time for us to be seeing.
I can't think of a better time when mankind is in the state that it is in for this to be brought out.
And I'm also told there's a generational change now where those people who would stick to oaths of secrecy don't feel as bound by them.
So maybe we are entering a new era.
But where you and I can agree on this is that we have to be seeing a semblance of the proof of any of this.
I mean the solid stuff, the stuff that you can hold, the stuff that you can see, the pictures of aliens that don't look like they're fakes.
We need to be seeing this now.
Otherwise, the public appetite for this, and maybe that's in somebody's plan somewhere, maybe somebody's planned that it should be this way.
But the public appetite for this will wither is what I think.
I think you've analyzed that very well, yes.
But there we are, David.
Mike, you know, you are the single most interesting person that I know, and you and I can talk all day.
Now, you and I are going on holiday again.
Second time, David.
We're going on it.
You know, I say holiday, but we're both going to be, you know, noses to the grindstone and working on this thing.
We're doing the second Unexplained Live cruise with Morella.
You can find the details of that at my website, theunexplained.tv, special edition of the podcast there.
And if you look at the copy that goes with it, it will explain about the booking process and more importantly, the places that you will go and those sorts of things.
So you can find all of that.
And it's with Mirella from the 22nd of October.
And David, last time, you and your good lady made great use of your...
You managed to not only do your presentations on board the ship, which was a wonderful experience, but you also managed to get out and see places.
This time, of course, it's the coast of North America up to Canada.
Oh, yeah.
Well, that's, we had a wonderful time last time.
Through traveling through the Mediterranean, we saw some wonderful places.
We had some great meals and some great conversations.
And we met a lot of fascinating people because I remember, you know, we occasionally used to, all the panelists, all the contributors used to sit down at this table and you would talk, talk, and they would come up.
And you meet some wonderful people, fascinating people.
And that's one of the big joys of doing something like this is the people you meet.
You know, not just after the talk, but walking around the ship.
You know, you've got a captive audience walking around the ship.
You know, people stop you and you talk to them.
And I remember you and I and my wife, Jill, we would sit down and have some coffee and people would come up to us and sit down next to us and start talking to us about various things.
And they're really fun.
Anywhere else.
You know, you can do sessions at a university or in a hall or somewhere, and you can do radio and TV shows.
But there is nothing like being on a ship with these people.
It's a great leveler.
Everybody's the same.
We're all on the same void, literally.
And that's what makes it so good.
Now, I don't want you to give away the content of your presentations and you're giving at least two on the ship.
Three.
Three.
Okay.
You're doing three.
But can you give me just a rough outline of where you might be going in a few seconds?
Right.
Well, I'm going to talk about the Apollo book, The First Voyage to the Moon, which is full of wonderful stuff.
It's a very multimedia.
It has news clips, modern and ancient newsclips.
It has recordings from Radio Moscow.
It has testimony from astronauts.
It hasn't got James Burke in it talking about it.
And it's great.
It's great fun.
It's a great, if you like, the first footprint and what happened to Neil Armstrong after that.
So that's great fun.
But the other two I've sort of slightly based on ones I've given before, but I've rewritten them completely and put in a lot of new graphics.
One is the future of the exploration of space, and that's not just the moon and Mars.
I talk about going back to the moon and going onto Mars, but I've spread it a lot wider than that.
I talk about the exploration of deep space and beyond to other planets.
So that's great fun and very visual.
And the third one, which is I'm still putting it together a bit, is about life.
It's about how we would search for life, find life, and what it would mean if we did find life.
Now, if they make that announcement, I have to rewrite that.
Well, yes, but at least we'll be off North America where we'll be within range of multimedia.
So at least we'll get to hear about it on the ship.
So we should have great fun.
Actually, the thing is about the last one is that there was such a range of people talking that you had your mind opened to their unexplained, to their experiences.
And I think that where else can you go where you get such different types of people talking about their own fascinations?
Well, I think you're dead right.
And I was a sceptic about actually doing this and being involved in something like this last year.
And it was an absolute dream.
So I'm really looking forward to it.
And it'll be nice to be working with you again, David.
Same here.
Thank you very much for helping me this time.
So I'll see you at the airport then.
Yeah, we'll be the ones looking confused.
Me more confused than you.
Thanks, David.
Thank you.
Dr. David Whitehouse, always a pleasure to speak with him.
More great guests in the pipeline here at the home of the Unexplained Online.
So until next we meet, my name is Howard Hughes.
This has been The Unexplained Online.
And please, whatever you do, stay safe, stay calm, and above all else, please stay in touch.
Thank you very much.
Take care.
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