April 13, 2021 • 15 mins
George Noory and space engineer Sir Charles Shults explore the rapid advances in robotics and technology that would allow humans to colonize Mars, which nations may return to the Moon before the United States, and how to get kids more interested in space exploration.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Now here's a highlight from Coast to Coast AM on
iHeart Radio and welcome back to Coast to Coast George
nor with you along with Sir Charles Schultz the third.
Sir Charles, we're talking about fossils on Mars. What do
you think actually Mars might have had there? What kind
of life? Well, everything that I found was a trace
of a marine fossils. So anything to live on the
planet would probably have lived in an ocean, in the water.
(00:23):
And the reason fat is very simple. With an atmosphere
as thin as that, things could still survive in an
atmosphere of water, just as anything can can survive in
a thicker atmosphere. You can breathe if you've gotten nothing
on the outside to speak of in terms of air pressure,
and water is still present, gases can dissolve in the water.
The experiments showing this have been done at the Houston
(00:46):
Johnson Space Flight Center years ago. They with greatly reduced
atmospheric pressure, they were able to keep a lot of
animals alive very easily. So you know, this is a
proof of principle that nobody seems to consider. And if
you look at Mars today, the water is present, but
it's almost always in the form of minerals ice under
the soil, and that's also been seen. There are fields
(01:07):
of glaciers on the planet, the slope streets, the slope streaks,
I'm sorry, where the soil heats up a little from sunlight,
the water melts underground and then runs and flows down
the slopes. And they've seen this for many years and
recently have admitted yes, that is a sign of water
being present. So the very fact that we see present
(01:27):
day erosion, I mean you can look from one frame
to the next one these rovers and you can see
that the soil is changing. Then these features that we
see that appear to be running water formed must have
been formed recently, not millions of years ago, because they
would have eroded away by now otherwise. But everything was
a marine fossil and nothing that's not so hard to believe.
I mean fish, well like sea urchins, trilobytes, crinoids, and
(01:54):
a number of shells, very simple marine organisms. Nothing complicated. Now,
if you know, as many people have claimed, well it's
a religious issue, they won't say it because of that.
That doesn't make any sense. What's the fear from a
planet of marine organisms it's silly. And the fact is,
and God made everything as far as I everything exactly.
(02:15):
So what gets me is this. I've presented this information
in a number of forms, and Coast has certainly been
one of them. And I've done television shows, I've done
presentations with people, and literally in every case, the bulk
of the people, the majority of people said I see it,
you know, and they couldn't unsee it once they've seen it.
From official channels, people working in colleges and research centers,
(02:38):
I've had numerous people send nothing but insults and invective,
and NASA won't even debate it. I mean, the feeling
in my mind is, if you've got something built with
the data that you've supplied, and it looks like a
solid case, why would you refuse to even look at it? Exactly?
So it makes no sense to me. But the fact is,
we stand possibility when the sample returned mission happens of
(03:02):
bringing back an organism that we have no resistance too.
And this, in my mind, is the single most important
message I can give to people. You're bringing back god
knows what from a planet that had a lot of
life on it in the past, and something that we
would have absolutely no resistance too. If I can make
no other point to people, it is do not sample
(03:23):
from mars of the Earth. You stand the risk of
infecting the planet with something we have no defenses against.
Eats aside, I think there's universe is teeming with all
kinds of life. Well, absolutely, And if you think about it,
what's the most common life on Earth? Bacteria? That's simple,
and it can live in conditions that would kill you
or I in an instant. The most clement places in
(03:45):
the universe where people could live are going to be
rarer than a vacuum covered rock with rock eating bacteria
inside it. And that's going to be probably the most
common life on Earth, or I'm sorry, not on Earth.
Inside the Earth, there certainly is. But on other worlds,
we're going to see most of them dominated by bacterial life,
and it's going to be environments where complicated life forms
(04:07):
couldn't survive. Let's talk about the Moon for a second,
Sir Charles, Why the interest in the moon? It's a
barren place. Why even go there? Okay, there are a
number of really good reasons for going to the Moon,
and one of them is the fact that if you're doing,
for instance, radio astronomy. The backside of the Moon, the
far side of the Moon from the Earth, is completely
isolated from the radio noise of the Earth. So it's
(04:29):
a wonderful pristine environment for searching for radio signals out
of space. Even standard radio astronomy would be amazing from there.
The other issue is it's a very easy platform to
observe conditions on the Earth and in a space around
the Earth, and it's loaded with mineral resources and solar
(04:50):
power is you know, it's always shining the sun and
light is always on in space. If you have satellites
around the Earth or around the Moon, they can collect
sun and run power plants for a fraction of what
it takes to burn fossil materials that they call them
hydrocarbon fuels. Going to the Moon provides us with an
(05:10):
environment where it's low gravity. It's easy to leave the Moon.
I mean, imagine this spacecraft the size of a Volkswagon
with about a hatful of fuel, has the capacity of
getting off the Moon and into orbit around it. In
an environment like that, which is so much easier to
get into space from than it is on the Earth,
we would have a lot of advantages if we're going
(05:31):
to set up a civilization that uses lunar resources, asteroid
resources and wants to spit out of the Solar system,
the Moon is an excellent place to establish resource and
industrial places right there. Who's going to go back to
the Moon before we do China, Well, that's hard to say.
There are a number of projects to send people to
the Moon right now, and Artemis notably is one of
(05:54):
the most talked about ones. From the NASA standpoint. The
Artemis mission is as part of the new Let's see,
the Biden administration has set forth a budget proposal for
twenty four point seven billion dollars NASA this coming year,
and part of the funding will cover the Artimist project,
which has planned to put the first woman on the
Moon and the first person of color on the Moon.
(06:17):
The Artimist one launch now is scheduled for November. We'll
see if that flies. It's had a number of setbacks
in times past. But there are commercial companies as well.
We're both familiar with the fellow who put his own
private space stations up a couple of times in the past.
(06:38):
You know who I'm talking about, Bigelow himself. He bought
the patent information and the licensing for making inflatable habitats,
and has built a module for the International Space Station.
He has been working for a number of years on
habitat modules for hotels and space and on the Moon,
and it's quite possible that he might pull something off
(06:58):
in cooperation with another group. But I do expect that
the first landings back to the Moon will be a
semi present I would say, a semi permanent location of
people for doing research and scouting for mineral resources. And
it probably will end up, you know, this is just
a speculation. It probably will end up near the polar
regions where there is water ice shown to exist in
(07:20):
the shadowed craters there. That would make a lot of
sense because water, well, if you think about it, foundation
of life and the basis of an easy to make
rocket fuel. Sir Charles, when we were kids, it was
exciting to talk about being an astronaut and space and
everything else. Our kids getting that kind of flavor anymore,
I don't think so. And it's really a shame because
(07:44):
we came up in a world where there was so
much possibility and there was a great deal of unknown
as well. I think that in the world today. One
of the problems we face is entertainment is so good
that it displaces the unknown with fiction, so that people
don't know to go out and learn about the things
we don't really know. Instead they see a fantasy about it. Yeah,
(08:08):
with computer generated graphics and stuff like that. And I
think that one of the biggest problems is parents don't
have the sort of call it leverage in information if
they used to in the past. People were really much well,
much better educated in the past than they are today.
I mean, let's face it, a lot of people can't
even start a lawnmower anymore. Pretty amazing when you think
(08:29):
about it. I mean, everything around us depends on an
extremely high level of technology. And the problem is we
use the technology because it's been made so fool proof
that you can be technically incompetent and use it. How
many people can fix anything anymore, it's you know, you
throw it away and buy a new one. But the
educational process has been short circuited, in part by public
(08:53):
schools and in part by the fact that most parents
don't have the technical expertise so to speak, that they
did in the past. Just look back at some of
the magazines that were published for kids in the sixties,
fifties and sixties. They had things that had a plan
to build a cabin or how to build a motorcycle,
or how you could make anything. And they had kits too,
(09:15):
They certainly did. Boy, they sold every sort of kit
you can imagine. People would build cabins, they'd build a psiloscope,
they'd build superchargers for their car, and I mean a
lot of times the fifteen to sixteen year old kids
with tools in the garage and their dad would go
out there and help them. That sort of world just
doesn't even exist anymore. And what do we do about it.
It's very difficult for people to know where to turn
(09:37):
for information, and yet in their hands they hold a
cell phone which is literally connected to the Library of
human achievement. Why have we seemed to forgotten about Venus
as a planet? I think that once people discovered how
hellish it's environment was and how difficult it is to
get a spacecraft to survive there. It's baked right. Well, yes,
(09:58):
you can't put anything on the surface that's going to
survive for very long. And the issues are the atmospheric
pressure is about seventy times greater than the atmospheric pressure
on the Earth. It literally rains a mist of sulfuric acid,
and it's about four hundred degrees centigrade and there's not
even a true day or night there. It stays dimly
(10:21):
lit at all times because the light is conducted through
the atmosphere, almost like a light fiber, from front to back.
It gets a little dimmer on the backside, but not nighttime.
It's such a forbidding environment that even now we have
a hard time building hardware that will last. And it's
because we've only recently begun to fabricate power supplies and
(10:42):
electronics that will survive those temperatures. And what about beyond
Mars Jupiter, Saturn? Are they're worth visiting now? They actually are.
The problem with visiting a place like the moons of Jupiter,
which is going to be a fascinating environment to explore,
is that Jupiter has this incredibly huge magnetic field. Now,
we're often told about the Earth's magnetic field being a
(11:04):
shield for radiation striking us from space, and yes, it
does that, but there's another thing that happens when you
have a magnetic field of that magnitude, particularly of jupiters
it traps particles of radiation and they circle the planet
like a cyclotron. It creates an immense radiation belt like
our Van Allen belts around the Earth. So if you
(11:25):
were to stand on the surface of one of the
moons of Jupiter, even in a spacesuit, you know where
you could survive the pressures and temperatures, you'd be killed
by the radiation in just a few hours, or it
would be scouring through every cell of your body and
destroying all your genetic material and wrecking the mechanisms that
keep the cells alive. So you'd probably need about three
(11:47):
feet of lead to shield you if you were to
stand on the surface off let's say Ganymede, And that's
not very practical. If you'll look at the missions that
they're sending. They try to send things with well fielded electronics.
I don't expect it to last very long. One of
the reasons that the orbiters for Jupiter and Saturns stay
basically far away from the planet and explore a lot
(12:10):
of the stuff by telescope is to increase the lifespan
of the spacecraft because the radiation destroys the microchips. Yeah, well,
one of the jobs I did years ago in defense.
I was working with a group called the Nuclear Design
and Test LAMB for a couple of years on some projects,
and we explored the effects of ionizing and non ionizing
(12:30):
radiation on microchips, and so I designed test fixturing, wrote
a lot of test programs for microchips, and it was
a joint venture between Intel and Martin Merida which is
now Lockheed Martin. And we looked at how radiation would
destroy some chips outright, but some of them had a
degree of recovery, and we learned a lot about how
(12:51):
radiation can damage a chip. We also discovered one of
the most interesting things. Military grade chips are in a
case made of ceramic called sermet, which means ceramic to metal.
These chips, as it happened, had higher failures from internal
radiation because the ceramic itself contained radioisotopes that they didn't expect,
(13:12):
and so you couldn't really have reliable, high density memory
chips made out of sermet and be military certified because
the ceramic case itself would cause memory failures. They had
to do error correction and a lot of other things
doing it work. But we've learned a lot since then
maybe we can make spacecraft robust enough to stand higher
radiation levels. Now, if you are in charge of the
(13:34):
space program, what would you be doing right now? Oh? Wow,
you know, and you had a blank check, I would
immediately go into two things. Number one, let's put some
power stations in orbit to start beaming power collected from
sunlight down to receivers on the ground. Immediately, we could
cut out a lot of the well hydrocarbon burning a
(13:59):
huge capathit sits that would be powered down to us. Well,
they wouldn't be capacitors. There are a couple of methods explored.
One of them is to use a certain frequency of
infrared laser light that would pass through the atmosphere easily,
and it would be diffuse enough that it wouldn't harm
anything in its path. The other was to use microwaves
to couple the antennas in space down to those on
(14:20):
the ground, and receivers on the ground would take the
microwave signal and rectify it into DC voltage like a
battery current, and then turn it into an alternating current
to put in the grid. And that had a lot
of things that we could do very easily. So one
of the things I would do immediately is invest right
away in orbital power systems, and the other would be
(14:41):
to get some factories in orbit that could manufacture stuff
from off planet resources. Because we need two things to happen.
We need to build a place to go. A lot
of people have realized we don't do a lot of
space travel humans because there's nowhere to go. You have
to say, end an environment that's right in order to
(15:02):
have a place to survive. With robotic manufacturing, imagine really
sophisticated three D printers that can make their source material
out of let's say lunar material, the dirt on the
surface of the Moon, break it down, turn it intive
fuel for these three D printers, and print a habitat.
We know how to make concrete out of lunar materials.
(15:25):
We know how to extract the metals. You could actually
send robots called von Neumann machines, which are automated factories
of a sort that can reproduce themselves. You send them
the Moon, you send them the asteroids, and they set
up shop and they start making factories and turning out
sheet metal and plastics and all the things you need
to make microchips and breathable air and hydroponic gardens. And
(15:47):
then you have places to go. Listen to more Coast
to Coast AM every weeknight at one am Eastern, and
go to Coast to Coast am dot com for more
Now here's a highlight from Coast to Coast AM on
iHeart Radio and welcome back to Coast to Coast George
nor with you along with Sir Charles Schultz the third.
Sir Charles, we're talking about fossils on Mars. What do
you think actually Mars might have had there? What kind
of life? Well, everything that I found was a trace
of a marine fossils. So anything to live on the
planet would probably have lived in an ocean, in the water.
(00:23):
And the reason fat is very simple. With an atmosphere
as thin as that, things could still survive in an
atmosphere of water, just as anything can can survive in
a thicker atmosphere. You can breathe if you've gotten nothing
on the outside to speak of in terms of air pressure,
and water is still present, gases can dissolve in the water.
The experiments showing this have been done at the Houston
(00:46):
Johnson Space Flight Center years ago. They with greatly reduced
atmospheric pressure, they were able to keep a lot of
animals alive very easily. So you know, this is a
proof of principle that nobody seems to consider. And if
you look at Mars today, the water is present, but
it's almost always in the form of minerals ice under
the soil, and that's also been seen. There are fields
(01:07):
of glaciers on the planet, the slope streets, the slope streaks,
I'm sorry, where the soil heats up a little from sunlight,
the water melts underground and then runs and flows down
the slopes. And they've seen this for many years and
recently have admitted yes, that is a sign of water
being present. So the very fact that we see present
(01:27):
day erosion, I mean you can look from one frame
to the next one these rovers and you can see
that the soil is changing. Then these features that we
see that appear to be running water formed must have
been formed recently, not millions of years ago, because they
would have eroded away by now otherwise. But everything was
a marine fossil and nothing that's not so hard to believe.
I mean fish, well like sea urchins, trilobytes, crinoids, and
(01:54):
a number of shells, very simple marine organisms. Nothing complicated. Now,
if you know, as many people have claimed, well it's
a religious issue, they won't say it because of that.
That doesn't make any sense. What's the fear from a
planet of marine organisms it's silly. And the fact is,
and God made everything as far as I everything exactly.
(02:15):
So what gets me is this. I've presented this information
in a number of forms, and Coast has certainly been
one of them. And I've done television shows, I've done
presentations with people, and literally in every case, the bulk
of the people, the majority of people said I see it,
you know, and they couldn't unsee it once they've seen it.
From official channels, people working in colleges and research centers,
(02:38):
I've had numerous people send nothing but insults and invective,
and NASA won't even debate it. I mean, the feeling
in my mind is, if you've got something built with
the data that you've supplied, and it looks like a
solid case, why would you refuse to even look at it? Exactly?
So it makes no sense to me. But the fact is,
we stand possibility when the sample returned mission happens of
(03:02):
bringing back an organism that we have no resistance too.
And this, in my mind, is the single most important
message I can give to people. You're bringing back god
knows what from a planet that had a lot of
life on it in the past, and something that we
would have absolutely no resistance too. If I can make
no other point to people, it is do not sample
(03:23):
from mars of the Earth. You stand the risk of
infecting the planet with something we have no defenses against.
Eats aside, I think there's universe is teeming with all
kinds of life. Well, absolutely, And if you think about it,
what's the most common life on Earth? Bacteria? That's simple,
and it can live in conditions that would kill you
or I in an instant. The most clement places in
(03:45):
the universe where people could live are going to be
rarer than a vacuum covered rock with rock eating bacteria
inside it. And that's going to be probably the most
common life on Earth, or I'm sorry, not on Earth.
Inside the Earth, there certainly is. But on other worlds,
we're going to see most of them dominated by bacterial life,
and it's going to be environments where complicated life forms
(04:07):
couldn't survive. Let's talk about the Moon for a second,
Sir Charles, Why the interest in the moon? It's a
barren place. Why even go there? Okay, there are a
number of really good reasons for going to the Moon,
and one of them is the fact that if you're doing,
for instance, radio astronomy. The backside of the Moon, the
far side of the Moon from the Earth, is completely
isolated from the radio noise of the Earth. So it's
(04:29):
a wonderful pristine environment for searching for radio signals out
of space. Even standard radio astronomy would be amazing from there.
The other issue is it's a very easy platform to
observe conditions on the Earth and in a space around
the Earth, and it's loaded with mineral resources and solar
(04:50):
power is you know, it's always shining the sun and
light is always on in space. If you have satellites
around the Earth or around the Moon, they can collect
sun and run power plants for a fraction of what
it takes to burn fossil materials that they call them
hydrocarbon fuels. Going to the Moon provides us with an
(05:10):
environment where it's low gravity. It's easy to leave the Moon.
I mean, imagine this spacecraft the size of a Volkswagon
with about a hatful of fuel, has the capacity of
getting off the Moon and into orbit around it. In
an environment like that, which is so much easier to
get into space from than it is on the Earth,
we would have a lot of advantages if we're going
(05:31):
to set up a civilization that uses lunar resources, asteroid
resources and wants to spit out of the Solar system,
the Moon is an excellent place to establish resource and
industrial places right there. Who's going to go back to
the Moon before we do China, Well, that's hard to say.
There are a number of projects to send people to
the Moon right now, and Artemis notably is one of
(05:54):
the most talked about ones. From the NASA standpoint. The
Artemis mission is as part of the new Let's see,
the Biden administration has set forth a budget proposal for
twenty four point seven billion dollars NASA this coming year,
and part of the funding will cover the Artimist project,
which has planned to put the first woman on the
Moon and the first person of color on the Moon.
(06:17):
The Artimist one launch now is scheduled for November. We'll
see if that flies. It's had a number of setbacks
in times past. But there are commercial companies as well.
We're both familiar with the fellow who put his own
private space stations up a couple of times in the past.
(06:38):
You know who I'm talking about, Bigelow himself. He bought
the patent information and the licensing for making inflatable habitats,
and has built a module for the International Space Station.
He has been working for a number of years on
habitat modules for hotels and space and on the Moon,
and it's quite possible that he might pull something off
(06:58):
in cooperation with another group. But I do expect that
the first landings back to the Moon will be a
semi present I would say, a semi permanent location of
people for doing research and scouting for mineral resources. And
it probably will end up, you know, this is just
a speculation. It probably will end up near the polar
regions where there is water ice shown to exist in
(07:20):
the shadowed craters there. That would make a lot of
sense because water, well, if you think about it, foundation
of life and the basis of an easy to make
rocket fuel. Sir Charles, when we were kids, it was
exciting to talk about being an astronaut and space and
everything else. Our kids getting that kind of flavor anymore,
I don't think so. And it's really a shame because
(07:44):
we came up in a world where there was so
much possibility and there was a great deal of unknown
as well. I think that in the world today. One
of the problems we face is entertainment is so good
that it displaces the unknown with fiction, so that people
don't know to go out and learn about the things
we don't really know. Instead they see a fantasy about it. Yeah,
(08:08):
with computer generated graphics and stuff like that. And I
think that one of the biggest problems is parents don't
have the sort of call it leverage in information if
they used to in the past. People were really much well,
much better educated in the past than they are today.
I mean, let's face it, a lot of people can't
even start a lawnmower anymore. Pretty amazing when you think
(08:29):
about it. I mean, everything around us depends on an
extremely high level of technology. And the problem is we
use the technology because it's been made so fool proof
that you can be technically incompetent and use it. How
many people can fix anything anymore, it's you know, you
throw it away and buy a new one. But the
educational process has been short circuited, in part by public
(08:53):
schools and in part by the fact that most parents
don't have the technical expertise so to speak, that they
did in the past. Just look back at some of
the magazines that were published for kids in the sixties,
fifties and sixties. They had things that had a plan
to build a cabin or how to build a motorcycle,
or how you could make anything. And they had kits too,
(09:15):
They certainly did. Boy, they sold every sort of kit
you can imagine. People would build cabins, they'd build a psiloscope,
they'd build superchargers for their car, and I mean a
lot of times the fifteen to sixteen year old kids
with tools in the garage and their dad would go
out there and help them. That sort of world just
doesn't even exist anymore. And what do we do about it.
It's very difficult for people to know where to turn
(09:37):
for information, and yet in their hands they hold a
cell phone which is literally connected to the Library of
human achievement. Why have we seemed to forgotten about Venus
as a planet? I think that once people discovered how
hellish it's environment was and how difficult it is to
get a spacecraft to survive there. It's baked right. Well, yes,
(09:58):
you can't put anything on the surface that's going to
survive for very long. And the issues are the atmospheric
pressure is about seventy times greater than the atmospheric pressure
on the Earth. It literally rains a mist of sulfuric acid,
and it's about four hundred degrees centigrade and there's not
even a true day or night there. It stays dimly
(10:21):
lit at all times because the light is conducted through
the atmosphere, almost like a light fiber, from front to back.
It gets a little dimmer on the backside, but not nighttime.
It's such a forbidding environment that even now we have
a hard time building hardware that will last. And it's
because we've only recently begun to fabricate power supplies and
(10:42):
electronics that will survive those temperatures. And what about beyond
Mars Jupiter, Saturn? Are they're worth visiting now? They actually are.
The problem with visiting a place like the moons of Jupiter,
which is going to be a fascinating environment to explore,
is that Jupiter has this incredibly huge magnetic field. Now,
we're often told about the Earth's magnetic field being a
(11:04):
shield for radiation striking us from space, and yes, it
does that, but there's another thing that happens when you
have a magnetic field of that magnitude, particularly of jupiters
it traps particles of radiation and they circle the planet
like a cyclotron. It creates an immense radiation belt like
our Van Allen belts around the Earth. So if you
(11:25):
were to stand on the surface of one of the
moons of Jupiter, even in a spacesuit, you know where
you could survive the pressures and temperatures, you'd be killed
by the radiation in just a few hours, or it
would be scouring through every cell of your body and
destroying all your genetic material and wrecking the mechanisms that
keep the cells alive. So you'd probably need about three
(11:47):
feet of lead to shield you if you were to
stand on the surface off let's say Ganymede, And that's
not very practical. If you'll look at the missions that
they're sending. They try to send things with well fielded electronics.
I don't expect it to last very long. One of
the reasons that the orbiters for Jupiter and Saturns stay
basically far away from the planet and explore a lot
(12:10):
of the stuff by telescope is to increase the lifespan
of the spacecraft because the radiation destroys the microchips. Yeah, well,
one of the jobs I did years ago in defense.
I was working with a group called the Nuclear Design
and Test LAMB for a couple of years on some projects,
and we explored the effects of ionizing and non ionizing
(12:30):
radiation on microchips, and so I designed test fixturing, wrote
a lot of test programs for microchips, and it was
a joint venture between Intel and Martin Merida which is
now Lockheed Martin. And we looked at how radiation would
destroy some chips outright, but some of them had a
degree of recovery, and we learned a lot about how
(12:51):
radiation can damage a chip. We also discovered one of
the most interesting things. Military grade chips are in a
case made of ceramic called sermet, which means ceramic to metal.
These chips, as it happened, had higher failures from internal
radiation because the ceramic itself contained radioisotopes that they didn't expect,
(13:12):
and so you couldn't really have reliable, high density memory
chips made out of sermet and be military certified because
the ceramic case itself would cause memory failures. They had
to do error correction and a lot of other things
doing it work. But we've learned a lot since then
maybe we can make spacecraft robust enough to stand higher
radiation levels. Now, if you are in charge of the
(13:34):
space program, what would you be doing right now? Oh? Wow,
you know, and you had a blank check, I would
immediately go into two things. Number one, let's put some
power stations in orbit to start beaming power collected from
sunlight down to receivers on the ground. Immediately, we could
cut out a lot of the well hydrocarbon burning a
(13:59):
huge capathit sits that would be powered down to us. Well,
they wouldn't be capacitors. There are a couple of methods explored.
One of them is to use a certain frequency of
infrared laser light that would pass through the atmosphere easily,
and it would be diffuse enough that it wouldn't harm
anything in its path. The other was to use microwaves
to couple the antennas in space down to those on
(14:20):
the ground, and receivers on the ground would take the
microwave signal and rectify it into DC voltage like a
battery current, and then turn it into an alternating current
to put in the grid. And that had a lot
of things that we could do very easily. So one
of the things I would do immediately is invest right
away in orbital power systems, and the other would be
(14:41):
to get some factories in orbit that could manufacture stuff
from off planet resources. Because we need two things to happen.
We need to build a place to go. A lot
of people have realized we don't do a lot of
space travel humans because there's nowhere to go. You have
to say, end an environment that's right in order to
(15:02):
have a place to survive. With robotic manufacturing, imagine really
sophisticated three D printers that can make their source material
out of let's say lunar material, the dirt on the
surface of the Moon, break it down, turn it intive
fuel for these three D printers, and print a habitat.
We know how to make concrete out of lunar materials.
(15:25):
We know how to extract the metals. You could actually
send robots called von Neumann machines, which are automated factories
of a sort that can reproduce themselves. You send them
the Moon, you send them the asteroids, and they set
up shop and they start making factories and turning out
sheet metal and plastics and all the things you need
to make microchips and breathable air and hydroponic gardens. And
(15:47):
then you have places to go. Listen to more Coast
to Coast AM every weeknight at one am Eastern, and
go to Coast to Coast am dot com for more
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