Bart Kosko is a Professor of Electrical Engineering at the University of Southern California. In the first half, he talked about his new novel that explores catastrophic unintended consequences of geoengineering attempts to fix global warming. He also discussed the latest in artificial intelligence, brain implants, and scientific advances. In his sci-fi book, Cool Time, scientists attempt to gently move the earth-moon system further away from the sun to cool the planet. The futuristic technology posits using a "reverse gravity slingshot" from a large asteroid to pull off this feat, he explained. The book introduces the idea of artificial blood or "nano-blood," which allows people to live much longer.
Genetically designed children also figure in his novel, and he looks at the idea that such kids might revolt against their parents or society. The genome, he suggested, will eventually be searched through a technique called "quantum annealing," and our offspring might be chosen from the traits of many parents rather than just two. Kosko foresees the eventual microchipping of the population. The chip implants will be used first for medical procedures and then as a common form of memory "back-up." However, access to these powerful chip databases may be pay-as-you-go, he noted, and "if your subscription runs out," you could be left with a "big hole in your consciousness" like a stroke victim.
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Inventor of the satellite videophone, and NBC News Middle East war correspondent Jim Bruton talked about his incredible career and even more incredible near-death experience (NDE) after a horrific plane crash that left him for dead. He described what he experienced on the Other Side and how it altered his perceptions and beliefs about himself and the nature of reality. In October 2016, he was flying in an experimental craft, and smashed into trees near a lake and was fished out of the water. Taken to a hospital for multiple operations, he was put into a medical coma for a week. He believes the coma coincided with his NDE in a realm he came to know as the "in-between" place, poised between the past and the future in an eternal now.
It was as if he instantly teleported to a high building looking out over a post-apocalyptic landscape. He saw a tall egg-shaped structure that had gear-like mechanisms. When looking at individual gears, a video feed in his head portrayed events in his future. A disembodied voice (which stayed with him for the whole experience) explained to him that "this is the future birthing into the now." As he touched one of the gears, he felt extreme pain and pulled it out and threw it away. The entire mechanism started spinning, and the voice revealed that "each gear is a probability of a thought, order, or action in your future. Your destiny is resetting itself around what you removed." Bruton said at this point he was becoming depersonalized but continued the process of removing painful gears. He concluded that his NDE was tailor-made for his own particular journey.
News segment guests: John M. Curtis, Charles Coppes, Billy Gibbons