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CNN&Time

Visions 21: Questions for the New Century

Aired April 2, 2000 - 9:00 p.m. ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

ANNOUNCER: CNN & TIME. Tonight, "Visions 21: Questions for the New Century."

Will anyone ever run a three-minute mile?

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

STEVE HOLMAN, SECOND FASTEST MILE RUNNER IN THE U.S.: It's just a matter of time that we reach the specific benchmarks.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

ANNOUNCER: Will we keep evolving?

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

DAVID BRENNER, COMEDIAN: The neo-Nazis will find out they're a lost tribe of Israel.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

ANNOUNCER: Can we save California?

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

RICHARD EISNER (ph), CALIFORNIA GOVERNOR'S OFFICE OF EMERGENCY SERVICE: Interesting question. I think California can be saved. It will save itself.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

ANNOUNCER: Will we control the weather?

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

JAMES BAKER, NATIONAL OCEANIC AND ATMOSPHERIC ADMINISTRATION: We're influencing the atmosphere on a global scale.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

ANNOUNCER: Will we meet E.T.?

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

JON STEWART, COMEDIAN: I believe there are extraterrestrials, and I believe they are led by Tony Danza.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

ANNOUNCER: Will a killer asteroid hit the earth?

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

JEFF GREENFIELD, CO-HOST: So you agree that it's not if but when?

DR. ELEANOR HELIN, NASA'S JET PROPULSION LABORATORY: Exactly.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

ANNOUNCER: A CNN & TIME special, "Visions 21."

From Atlanta, here's Bernard Shaw.

BERNARD SHAW, CO-HOST: Good evening, and welcome to this special edition of CNN & TIME.

Tonight, "Visions 21: Questions for a New Century." In this, our third installment, we explore the final frontiers here on Earth and beyond. How far can we go? What are our limits?

Earlier this year, researchers at the University of California said they had found a way to mate human cells with circuitry to form a bionic chip. But will this sort of engineering really make us better, stronger, faster? Or are we quickly approaching our physical limits? Will anyone ever run a three-minute mile?

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

STEVE HOLMAN, SECOND-FASTEST MILE RUNNER IN THE U.S.: I love to run. I feel that I have, you know, God-given talent. I want to see how far I can take it.

SHAW (voice-over): Steve Holman realized in elementary school that he could outrun all the kids in the neighborhood.

STEVE HOLMAN, RUNNER: It was just something, you know, from a very early age that set me apart.

UNIDENTIFIED ESPN ANNOUNCER: Steve Holman trying to hold off the rest of this field.

SHAW: Today, at 30 years old, he is the second fastest mile runner in the United States. His best time in the mile is 3 minutes and 50 seconds, and because he doesn't believe he has reached peak performance, he trains six days a week, working out and sometimes running up to 16 miles at a time.

HOLMAN: My goal is to try to get as close to 3:44 as I possibly can, or 3:45.

SHAW: Until 1954, no one thought a four-minute mile was possible. Roger Bannister, a British medical student, broke the barrier, and since Bannister's run, the world record has fallen 18 times.

HOLMAN: Athletes, as they -- as they sort of progress, they break down mental barriers that -- the seemingly impossible all of a sudden, you know, doesn't seem so impossible. It becomes probable, and it becomes doable.

UNIDENTIFIED COACH: All the milers, let's go. Come on now. Come on.

SHAW: Holman is realistic enough to believe that, in his lifetime, no one will ever run a three-minute mile.

UNIDENTIFIED COACH: Just pick it up a little bit.

SHAW: Harvard physiologist Peter Weyand is one of the scientists trying to figure out why.

(on camera): What are the limits holding us back? Physical? Mental?

PETER WEYAND, HARVARD PHYSIOLOGIST: They're -- they're largely biologic limits.

Now we just want you to run for about five seconds in one spot. Just steady running.

SHAW (voice-over): For the last seven years, Weyand has been studying the biomechanics of running.

WEYAND: Once a runner gets going, they use their legs basically like springs. They bounce along on the ground. So running is a lot -- mechanically, running is very much like pogo sticking on alternate legs.

SHAW: The more force runners exert when their feet hit the ground, the faster they can go. But the amount of force they generate is limited by the amount of oxygen they can burn in their muscles.

WEYAND: It comes down to how quickly an athlete or a runner can get oxygen out of the air and send it all the way through the cardiovascular system to the muscles that need the energy. In order to push the limits back further, some sort of intervention is necessary provide more structure.

SHAW: Rigorous training helps. It enlarges the heart and blood vessels and speeds up an athlete's metabolism but only to a point. Fundamentally, our biological blueprints are second rate compared to other animals, and Weyand studies the range of those differences to better determine human limits.

WEYAND: If you only study humans, you're -- you're limited to small differences, but, in nature, the differences are huge. So the differences between, say, an ani -- a small animal and a large animal are about 30-fold if we compare an elephant to a mouse in those maximal rates. So comparative biology is a very powerful tool if you want to understand in the big view what's -- what determines these differences.

There's a limit to what human muscle can do, and most of the limits to those things, whether it's jumping farther or running faster, comes down to a limit of fiber speed. Human muscle fibers, even in the best athletes with the fastest fibers, only work so fast.

SHAW: In frogs, for example, the enzyme that makes muscle fibers contract, which is what generates power, works 10 times faster than it does in human muscles. That's how some frogs can jump 30 times the length of their bodies.

WEYAND: If you could make the human fibers as fast, it's unclear what would happen. They might be able to jump so well that they would break when they land. The tendons and the bones wouldn't withstand the pounding.

SHAW: The muscles of antelopes have three times as many mitochondria as human muscles, and because mitochondria are the tiny structures in the cell that convert oxygen to energy, antelopes can easily run a two-minute mile. And birds generate the enormous amount of muscle energy they need to fly because their lungs are far more efficient than ours.

WEYAND: The emu's legs -- the height of its hip is about the same as the height of our hip, even though they weigh a little bit -- about half of what we weigh.

SHAW: Weyand found that even big birds that don't fly, like the rhea and emu, have the same advantage.

WEYAND: So with the same lung size, the emus can get twice as much oxygen across their lungs as a human or a mammal because a bird lung works differently.

SHAW (on camera): Does what he says discourage you?

HOLMAN: No, it doesn't discourage me. The knowledge that there -- the body has limitations doesn't discourage me, just because I personally believe that we -- you know, there's a long way we have to go until we find out exactly what those limits are.

SHAW (voice-over): Holman says he relies on mental strength to overcome his physical limits, especially halfway through a race.

HOLMAN: And that's when your body is telling you to "Slow down. Slow down," you know, "This is too much." I can almost tell you the spot on the track where I start feeling really tired, so I really mentally prepare myself that it's going to happen and that I've done it in practice, I've run through it, and I've done successfully. So I tell myself that in the race, there's no reason that I can't keep running, even though it feels more difficult.

SHAW: But athletes know mental conditioning can take them only so far. Weyand is among scientists who predict the next big breakthroughs in human performance will likely come through the manipulation of our genes.

(on camera): Is it possible that scientists will be able to clone the speed gene?

WEYAND: Oh, that -- then you could clone a speed gene right now. Just take a mouse muscle. It's 20 times faster than a human muscle. It's already there.

SHAW: What do you do with it?

WEYAND: Well, if you can clone it into a human -- those techniques are not developed enough to be able to do that right now, but that's not far off.

SHAW (voice-over): Weyand points out that research on muscular diseases might also give a boost to athletes.

WEYAND: The medical advances for things like muscular diseases, muscular dystrophy will make it possible in the not-too-distant future to engineer muscles to -- to function, to be faster, and to be more powerful. When that happens, all bets are off on athletic performance in terms of how far back the barriers will be pushed.

HOLMAN: I think it would be terrible because people wouldn't know if they're, you know, looking at some bioengineered cyborg or someone who just worked incredibly hard. I mean, there'd really be no way.

SHAW: Even if genetic engineering makes a three-minute mile possible, Holman says he prefers to face the challenges of his sport with what nature gave him.

HOLMAN: I've been blessed to have what I have, so I think it would be a little greedy to ask for much more, you know. My job is to maximize what I have.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

SHAW: A bigger heart? Better muscles? Our only hope for ever running a three-minute mile may be evolution. But be careful what you wish for.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

DAVID BRENNER, COMEDIAN: I think people living in Los Angeles will eventually lose their feet and have large wheels. They'll be born with large wheels because they don't walk anywhere.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

ANNOUNCER: When CNN & TIME "Visions 21" continues.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

SHAW: Maybe it's our collective ego, but we take it for granted that we're superior when it comes to all things living. We also assume that, in the future, nature will continue its finetuning. But are we just a little too overconfident? Comedian David Brenner tackles the question: Will we keep evolving?

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

DAVID BRENNER, COMEDIAN: I think man will evolve, man meaning men and women. I think we'll evolve. But we'll become -- I think we'll become victims of our environment, as we have in the past.

I think people living in Los Angeles will eventually lose their feet and have large wheels. They'll be born with large wheels because they don't walk anywhere. There's no use to have feet out here.

I think eventually that basketball players are going to be smashing their heads against the rims, and -- and they'll have to either raise the baskets or find a way to keep them somewhat dwarfed.

I think people will start to look -- they'll have Jay Leno's chin and David Letterman's separation in their teeth.

Seventy-one percent of the population now in America is heavy, overweight. I think it will increase to about 98 percent. I think then at that point that people will explode and, unfortunately, they'll kill all the thin people. So this land will be barren because of it.

So I think, physiologically, that's -- that's our future. Now I don't know whether we'll have a huge brain, but I think our brain will start to change in the value systems. I think things will happen that will change people's values and folkways and morays, such as I think, eventually, the neo-Nazis will find out they're a lost tribe of Israel. They'll find out they're all Jewish. They'll commit suicide.

I think the far right is going to keep getting whiter and whiter and whiter until they become transparent and we won't see them anymore. So I think this is the evolution of our values, which I think is very important for the next hundred years.

Yeah, I think what has happened is we took -- because of our ability with our thumbs, to bend our thumbs, and we have little brains, and we could, you know, use tools, we evolved into a superior being, a superior animal, but I think, eventually, we're going to disappear, and it -- and the rights of this world are going to belong to the dolphin, which was the original concept that God had, and once that's done, she's going to laugh her black ass off.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

ANNOUNCER: Coming up, from human evolution to a revolution in science. Will technology tame the forces of nature?

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

DR. DAVID SCHWARTZ, U.S. GEOLOGICAL SERVICE: In the next 30 years, there's a 32-percent chance that somewhere along that fault, we'll have a magnitude 6.7 or larger earthquake. (END VIDEO CLIP)

ANNOUNCER: Can we save California? When "Visions 21" continues.

Enjoy more "Visions 21" online at cnn.com/cnntime.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

SHAW: Earthquakes and California go together like politicians and peccadillos. But, for all the talk about California falling off into the ocean, there it sits.

Still, much of the scientific community agrees there's about a 70-percent chance of a massive earthquake striking the San Francisco Bay area within the next 20 years. So Jeff Greenfield asks, "Can we save California?"

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

JEFF GREENFIELD, HOST (voice-over): Mention California to someone, and they're likely to think of Hollywood or the miles of sand and surf or the splendor of the San Francisco Bay or cable cars climbing steep hills. But every resident there lives with the underside of California.

UNIDENTIFIED CORRESPONDENT: We have a breaking story.

UNIDENTIFIED CORRESPONDENT: There apparently has been a major earthquake in San Francisco.

UNIDENTIFIED CALIFORNIAN: It felt like a bomb went off.

UNIDENTIFIED CALIFORNIAN: It just seemed to collapse.

UNIDENTIFIED CALIFORNIAN: I thought it was the big one.

GREENFIELD: Earthquakes are a simple, stark geological fact of life and death in California. Eleven years ago, the Loma Prieda (ph) quake near San Francisco killed more than 60 people, caused natural gas fires, collapsed a freeway, and nearly toppled the Bay bridge. Five years later, 57 died from the Northridge earthquake near Los Angeles. Damage there was estimated at some $20 billion.

But neither of those was considered the big one. That title goes to the great 1906 San Francisco quake that measured 7.9 on the Richter scale. It killed thousands and destroyed the city, and for almost a century, Californians have been waiting for the next big one.

That uncertainty has special meaning to scientists who have struggled for decades with two questions: Can we ever prevent earthquakes, or can we at least predict them so that people can get out of harm's way?

DR. DAVID SCHWARTZ, U.S. GEOLOGICAL SERVICE: No, we can't. I think we'd like to be able to do so, but the -- the technology is not here and the basic understanding of how the earth works is not here. How many stations have we actually had recording this?

GREENFIELD: Dr. David Schwartz is chief of the U.S. Geological Service's Earthquake Hazards Project for the San Francisco Bay area. Even though they're not in the prediction business, Schwartz and his colleagues at the USGS have started to issue very broad earthquake forecasts and hope to do better.

SCHWARTZ: Maybe we'll get to the point where can say there are a whole bunch of factors, this is one of them, and that we're really concerned that in, you know, the next month or so or two months, we're going to have a real problem with the Hayward fault.

GREENFIELD: And right now, the Hayward is the one fault in Northern California that most worries scientists.

SCHWARTZ: The Hayward fault runs from just east of San Jose up to Hayward, Oakland, Berkeley. Basically, the fault bisects the Bay area. So a large earthquake on the Hayward fault is going to be felt throughout the region.

GREENFIELD (on camera): So what we're talking about here in part is a large earthquake along the Hayward fault. Clearly, San Francisco's involved as well, right?

SCHWARTZ: Clearly.

GREENFIELD (voice-over): By digging trenches and by observing changes in the rock formations, the USGS has been able to look back 3,000 years to estimate when and how often the Hayward and other faults suddenly shifted and produced major earthquakes.

SCHWARTZ: We've really recorded the fault very, very nicely on these photographs.

GREENFIELD (on camera): Yeah, but what do they tell you about the future?

SCHWARTZ: Well, you know, the Hayward fault moves every 250 years plus or minus 50 years, and we've gone 240 years since the last large earthquake, and with that information, we can calculate, in 10 years or 20 years or 30 years, what the likelihood is.

GREENFIELD (voice-over): Last October, the USGS issued this forecast about the Hayward fault.

SCHWARTZ: In the next 30 years, there's a 32-percent chance that somewhere along that fault, we'll have a magnitude 6.7 or larger earthquake. So that's -- while you're standing there...

GREENFIELD (on camera): I'll keep that in mind.

SCHWARTZ: ... in the stadium, just keep that in mind.

GREENFIELD: So here we are walking on the University of California football field. GREGORY FENVEZ (ph), U.C. BERKELEY CIVIL ENGINEERING PROFESSOR: That's right. Memorial Stadium.

GREENFIELD (voice-over): Gregory Fenvez is a professor of civil engineering at U.C. Berkeley and is part of a team of engineers who research and test designs for earthquake-resistant buildings, bridges, and roads.

(on camera): And what else are we walking on?

FENVEZ: Well, this is the direction that the Hayward fault takes as it goes through the Berkeley campus and through the stadium.

GREENFIELD: So I want to make sure that -- that people don't think we're -- we're fooling around with them. The Hayward fault that we've seen maps of and -- that literally runs across the football field at Berkeley.

FENVEZ: That's correct.

GREENFIELD (voice-over): But even before the fault reaches the stadium -- and this is what really frightens scientists -- it passes under some of the most densely populated and developed parts of California. More than two million people live and work here. Some hospitals and schools pass directly over the fault line. Cracks in the concrete and asphalt are visible everywhere, including U.C. Berkeley's football stadium. Where? If you go to Section KK, Row 74, Seat 22, you'll find a crack expanding at one-quarter inch every year.

(on camera): Can you even break it down in your mind as to what worries you the most? Is it the fires because of gas mains? Is it the -- just the sheer collapse? The panic? What -- how do you do...

FENVEZ: Well, in terms of engineering, the largest hazards are reinforced concrete buildings built before 1975. That -- that's where the population is most at risk.

GREENFIELD (voice-over): In Kobe, Japan, at least a hundred thousand buildings collapsed during a 1995 earthquake because they were not built to modern standards, more than 6,000 people were killed, and direct and indirect losses were estimated at $200 billion. That's $200 billion. Scientists, engineers, and public safety officials say that Kobe and the Hayward fault have a lot in common.

RICHARD EISNER, CALIFORNIA GOVERNOR'S OFFICE OF EMERGENCY SERVICES: The fault runs directly under the most urbanized area. Two and a half million, three million people live on top of the Hayward fault. We don't take the threat lightly. We take it quiet seriously.

GREENFIELD: Richard Eisner is the San Francisco Bay area administrator for the California governor's Office of Emergency Services.

EISNER: All utilities cross either through this very hazardous zone or cross the fault directly into the zone, so we'd expect a tremendous amount of disruption, and the housing losses look about the same, about a hundred thousand houses lost. So our -- our response will have to be at the scale of what was done in Kobe.

FENVEZ: This is direct physical losses.

GREENFIELD (on camera): A quarter of a trillion dollars?

FENVEZ: Yeah, if it -- if the worst scenario was to develop.

GREENFIELD (voice-over): That number is more than a fifth of the annual gross domestic product for the entire State of California, and it doesn't even measure the ripple effect on the state and national economy, much less the human toll.

(on camera): You can't predict an earthquake. You certainly can't stop an earthquake. So everything you're doing here assumes there will be a big earthquake, and then -- then the question is: So how do we make it less catastrophic?

FENVEZ: So the first thing we want to do is make sure it doesn't collapse.

GREENFIELD (voice-over): Fenvez and others are in a race against time to redesign and retrofit structures before the next earthquake.

Here at the U.C. Berkeley Pacific Earthquake Engineering Research Center, for example, they're testing these blue bearings to see if they can sustain a bridge from violent shaking.

Elsewhere in the Bay area, the East Bay Municipal Utility District is retrofitting water pipes all over the Hayward fault. When they finish in 2005, they expect only minor interruptions in service due to an earthquake.

Across the Bay in San Francisco, Pacific Gas & Electric hopes to avoid the natural gas fires from Loma Prieda by replacing 800 miles of old cast-iron pipe with flexible pipe that withstands even severe shaking.

And the USGS is placing seismic sensors all over the Bay area to track fault movements and, once an earthquake happens, tell authorities where to send help.

So can we save California from the next big earthquake?

EISNER: Interesting question. I think California can be saved. It will save itself.

SCHWARTZ: I think we can save California, and the way to do it is with the proper planning, the proper engineering, the proper amount of money coming in to all of these regions to do what's necessary.

FENVEZ: Oh, definitely. Yeah, definitely. The combination of the Loma Prieda earthquake here in 1989 and the Northridge earthquake in 1994 has focused the public, government officials, and owners of -- of buildings that they need to fix it now before the -- the big earthquake hits.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

SHAW: If controlling the forces of nature beneath us isn't in the cards, what about controlling those above us? When we come back, will we control the weather?

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

JAMES BAKER, NATIONAL OCEANIC AND ATMOSPHERIC ADMINISTRATION: We're going to see warmer weather, we're going to see stronger storms, we're going to see more droughts, we're going to see sea level rise, and this is going to be part of all of our children's lives.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

ANNOUNCER: When CNN & TIME "Visions 21" continues.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

SHAW: Welcome back to "Visions 21," a special edition of CNN & TIME.

With a character like Sir August de Wynter, what else could Sean Connery play in "The Avengers" other than diabolical supervillain out to take over the world? And what better weapon for the maniacal de Wynter to use than a hijacked weather machine.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP, "THE AVENGERS")

RALPH FIENNES, ACTOR: You'll pay for that.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

SHAW: Hollywood aside, our attempts so far to harness the elements have been less than successful, to say the least. Or is it that we've been altering the forces of nature without even knowing it? From rain dances to global warming, will we control the weather?

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

SHAW: High in the New Mexico mountains at Los Alamos National Laboratory, where scientists usually are at work developing weapons of mass destruction, physicist Klaus Lackner is at work trying to turn carbon dioxide into sand.

KLAUS LACKNER, PHYSICIST: The hard part of the problem is making the chemical reaction fast and efficient.

SHAW: What Lackner is trying to do is control the weather, as others have tried to do throughout history, with everything from rain dances to sonic cannons for breaking up hail.

Lackner is removing greenhouse gases, such as carbon dioxide, from the air.

LACKNER: The CO2 levels in the air will affect the climate. So if you set the CO2 level to your choice, you've obviously made a choice about the climate.

SHAW: With his canisters of CO2, a high-pressure mixer, ground up rock and water, Lackner is building his own version of a weather machine to filter the atmosphere and slow global warming, which scientists say has been affecting the weather.

JAMES BAKER, NOAA: Well, there's no question that these warmer winters that we saw have at least part of their origin in global warming. We had -- last winter was the warmest winter ever. The one before that was the second. And the third was the third-warmest, all continuing a trend since 1980.

SHAW: James Baker, the nation's weatherman, has been following extreme weather events for years. From Hurricane Floyd and flooding in North Carolina to tornadoes ripping across the Midwest.

As head of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, he expects extreme weather events to get worse.

BAKER: We're going to see warmer weather. We're going to see stronger storms. We're going to see more droughts. We're going to sea level rise. And this is going to be part of all of our children's lives. It's that kind of climate change.

SHAW (on camera): How do we know the latest warming is not just a natural event?

BAKER: What we're seeing now, especially in the last 20 years, is a rate of change of temperature and of extreme events that is exactly the pattern that we would expect if we were influencing the climate on a global scale. This past decade, we've seen a very strange pattern of El Ninos. We saw three small El Ninos in a row, then a big one. Now, two La Ninas in a row. This is not the normal kind of pattern.

And the scientists are telling us they can't explain the pattern we've seen unless they include the human effect. So this is something new.

SHAW (voice-over): Many scientists blame the industrialized countries for burning fossil fuels that pump 22 billion tons of carbon dioxide into the air each year.

Global temperature has been rising along with carbon dioxide levels since the industrial revolution began. In the next century, the temperature is expected to increase dramatically.

BAKER: In the United States, we project a 100-year temperature change of somewhere between six degrees and 11 degrees.

SHAW: A dramatic change, considering that in the last ice age the world was just 10 degrees cooler than it is today, and the government is treating global warming with the seriousness of a national threat.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Right now, the budget for the global U.S. GCRP -- Global Change Research Program -- is a little short of $2 billion a year, and that's of the same scale as the weapons program.

SHAW: With a computer called Nirvana that does a trillion computations a second another Los Alamos physicists, Andy White and his team, are trying to predict global warming's impact.

ANDY WHITE, PHYSICIST: What we're trying to do is put a virtual ocean and a virtual atmosphere and sea ice and land surface together.

SHAW: White's team is building a virtual planet Earth to experiment with CO2 levels and their effect on the United States and its economy.

WHITE: We need to understand what's going to happen to rainfall, say, over the Midwest of the United States, where a lot of agriculture occurs. How much rain is the rainfall going to change in the Southwest?

The basic idea is to try and understand what we're doing to the planet.

SHAW (on camera): Global warming, global population explosion: What's the connection?

BAKER: There's a one-to-one connection here. Last October, we passed a population of 6 billion. We're heading for 9, 10, maybe even 12 billion, and all of these people want more energy.

SHAW (voice-over): Despite all the optimism in recent years over alternative energy sources, such as wind and solar power, experts say only fossil fuels can meet world demand. Clean energy, they say, is too expensive.

LACKNER: We have so much fossil carbon that you clearly can mess up the planet. There's no question about that.

The next issue is, will we use it? In my mind, the answer is we will use it, because it's low-cost and the world is energy-hungry.

SHAW: Since the world will continue burning carbon, Lackner says, we at least have to imagine greenhouse gases, just like other forms of waste. That is why he is trying to turn carbon dioxide into sand, and possibly coming as close as anyone has come to controlling the weather.

LACKNER: Carbon management is a new field, a new area which people have not really explored. It is very much like sewage has been in the past. As people congregated into cities, we needed to deal with a sewage problem, now our CO2 emissions have reached a level where they become significant and we need to deal with the consequences of what it does. One way of dealing with it is to find a solid disposal. This is what we are doing.

SHAW: Lackner and his colleagues came up with the idea of filtration based on nature's own recycling process, the way carbon dioxide is absorbed by trees and rain, and eventually turned into rock. This geological cycle takes 200,000 years. Lackner and his colleagues found a way to do in a few hours.

LACKNER: When you burn fossil fuels like coal, you make carbon dioxide. The oxygen in the air reacts with it, and the carbon dioxide (UNINTELLIGIBLE). And we can react with minerals like this serpentine and turn the mineral we have here into a magnesium carbonate plus sand. This is magnesium carbonate sample, which shows how the result of this process will look.

Collecting the CO2 from the air with the absorbents is 10,000 times more effective than trees. As a result, the area you need to do these things is 10,000 times smaller. As a result, we have a very simple process, which has the promise of being very cost-effective.

We expect to get the speed even faster, and if you get it down to a half an hour or to an hour, I think we have something which will work.

SHAW: Already, Southern Company, the nation's largest generator of electricity and other large corporations are considering the process for an experimental zero emissions coal plant.

LACKNER: (UNINTELLIGIBLE) a decade, I think you will have very elegant designs to deal with this problem.

SHAW: James Baker says we had better solve the global warming problem soon.

BAKER: If we have more hurricanes, if hurricanes cause more floods, then this is a very serious and immediate problem for us. We have to find a way that we can make sure that this doesn't happen or find some ways that we can live with it. Both of them are going to be expensive.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

SHAW: If the folly of destroying our own planet seems ridiculous here on Earth, imagine how it must seem to those looking down on us from outer space. But is there anybody really out there laughing?

Coming up, will we meet E.T.?

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

JON STEWART, ENTERTAINER: Did you know that E.T. is named after that show? "Entertainment Tonight," his parents' favorite show. They have another kid, Access Hollywood, and they call him A.H. It's not as -- not as catchy.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

ANNOUNCER: When CNN & TIME "Visions 21" continues.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK) SHAW: Tiny creatures with bulging eyes and huge round heads. That's what extraterrestrial creatures look like, right? Truth is we really don't know for sure. In fact, just believing that life has sprung up elsewhere in the universe requires a lot of faith and a good sense of humor. That's why we saved this question for "The Daily Show's" Jon Stewart: Will we meet E.T.?

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

JON STEWART, HOST, "THE DAILY SHOW": I believe there are extra terrestrials and I believe they are led by Tony Danza. I've done my research. "Who's The Boss?" Interesting question. Who is the boss? Tony Danza. The boss of what? Aliens. Aliens always -- their names are always with Zs, Xs, Zs, Xs, Y -- any name you see with Zs and Xs, clearly not of this Earth.

They're going to have giant heads, you know what I mean? So they're just going to -- they're not -- you don't even have to talk to them. They just know it and they're going to have big capes and they're just going to -- you won't even have to communicate with them because they'll know what you're thinking.

The aliens are out there, they just don't want to, you know -- they got TV, they understand what we're doing here. They watch Springer. They don't want anything to do with us. We're like -- we're literally in terms of the planetary systems, we're considered, you know, like a whorehouse. They don't want anything to do with us. You know, they might come in for a little -- you know, pick up a guy in Nebraska, little anal probe, do a little business here, but always under stealth of night.

You know what's going to happen when the aliens come to this country, quite frankly? They're literally going to go to Spielberg and Lucas's house and go, oh, yeah, we're big freaks that sit in a bar with giant hoses coming out of our heads and drink steaming dry ice. Yes, that's what we are, big freaks. My head rises up three feet and all I want to do is phone home. I'm a little freak. They're going to be very angry when they get to Spielberg's house.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

ANNOUNCER: Next, forget about extra terrestrials. It's far more likely that we'll run into another more ominous sort of galactic invader.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

DR. ELEANOR HELENE (ph), NASA JET PROPULSION LAB: They prescribe doom to the Earth.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

ANNOUNCER: Will a killer asteroid hit the Earth, when VISIONS 21 continues. For more on VISIONS 21, go online at cnn.com/cnntime.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK) SHAW: OK, so it's likely no one will ever run a three minute mile and we may never even come close to controlling the weather. So what? We've got bigger things to worry about, things such as cosmic collisions. Never happen? Here's something to think about: Over the next 100 years, the odds of a celestial interloper wreaking havoc on us are better than winning the state lottery, which leads us back to Jeff Greenfield and our final query: Will a killer asteroid hit the Earth?

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

GREENFIELD (voice-over): Atop an extinct volcano on the Hawaiian island of Maui, 10,000 feet above sea level, this Air Force telescope recently began a new mission. Built originally to track satellites, it is now also used to find asteroids, specifically, anything big enough and close enough to Earth to pose a threat. The images from the telescope are transmitted electronically 3,500 miles to NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab in Pasadena, California.

HELENE: This looks actually brighter than its 18th magnitude there.

GREENFIELD: There a team led by Dr. Eleanor Helene analyzes the data.

HELENE: Almost two degrees.

GREENFIELD: She believes we may be statistically overdue for disaster, if not from one of the couple of hundred known asteroids big enough to devastate the planet, then more likely from one of the thousands of smaller ones that could wipe out an entire region.

(on camera): So you agree that it's not if, but when?

HELENE: Exactly. No question about that it's going to happen, but we have to -- by going out and searching the skies, hopefully find this object before it finds us.

GREENFIELD (voice-over): Finding the biggest potentially threatening asteroids is now a national goal funded by NASA and the U.S. Air Force.

HELENE: To the right is this asteroid.

GREENFIELD: But when Eleanor Helene got started in the 1970s, near-Earth asteroids were literally not on the radar. Most astronomers, she says, were only interested in objects far off in deep space.

HELENE: They would remark on, oh, there's these asteroid trails all over my photographic plates, you know, these are the vermin of the sky, you know, and I said those vermin of the sky are what I' interested in.

GREENFIELD: In 1976, her curiosity and her persistence paid off with a major discovery in a part of space that conventional wisdom held was empty. She found an asteroid. It showed up as a blur of light in time-lapsed photography.

HELENE: And so, I was excited because it was a near-Earth asteroid, certainly an Earth-crossing asteroid. But it was after the orbit was computed, which took the number of days, was it, gee whiz, this is, you know, noteworthy. One sees the asteroid move.

GREENFIELD: It was the first of 71 asteroids Helene and others eventually identified in that presumably empty part of space, asteroids whose orbits make them prime suspects for a collision with us.

HELENE: They prescribe doom to the Earth if one of these objects hits the Earth, and of course they're well posed to do that.

GREENFIELD: Well posed to bring doom to the Earth? Isn't that a story better left to an old sci-fi flick like "When Worlds Collide"?

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP, "WHEN WORLDS COLLIDE")

UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR: If our calculations prove to be correct, this would be the most frightening discovery of all time.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

GREENFIELD: Not necessarily. It was probably an asteroid that plowed into the Yucatan Peninsula, kicking up a toxic cloud of dust and gas that wiped out most life on the planet, including the dinosaurs. But that was 65 million years ago, you say?

Well, about 50,000 years ago, just yesterday by astronomical standards, a meteor crashed into the Arizona desert, gouging out a crater nearly a mile wide. And in 1908, what is believed to have been an asteroid exploded over a desolate region of Siberia, it knocked down and incinerated trees for hundreds of square miles.

HELENA: If you brought that down, say, over L.A., then you're talking about 1,000 square miles of devastation.

GREENFIELD (on camera): So, I mean, really like a nuclear attack or worse?

HELENA: Yes, exactly. When you have something coming in at such a velocity and the energy of that striking a solid body like the Earth, then you're going to cause the worst explosion, shockwaves through the country that you can -- well, we can't even imagine it.

GREENFIELD: And that's a relatively small piece of space debris?

HELENA: Yes, of course it is.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: We have lift-off the Delta rocket carrying the NEAR spacecraft bound for the asteroid Eros.

GREENFIELD (voice-over): As scientists learn more about what asteroids are made of through space probes like the one currently circling the asteroid Eros, they may be able to devise plans for self defense. Some have proposed putting a giant blockage in space to deflect an incoming asteroid. Others call for building a rocket engine on the surface to steer it away, or zapping it with a high- powered laser to vaporize the surface. In theory, the gases would act like thrust from a rocket.

JOHN DALE SOLAN (ph), THEORETICAL PHYSICIST: Most of this is grist for the science fiction mill.

GREENFIELD: John Dale Solan is a theoretical physicist at Los Alamos National Laboratory.

SOLAN: It isn't that it's impossible, it's just that it is incredibly impractical and outrageously expensive.

GREENFIELD: After Congress expressed interest in the problem some years ago, he calculated what it would take to knock a large asteroid off a collision course.

SOLAN: Suppose this is our comet or asteroid...

GREENFIELD: The only practical solution he could find was to use a nuclear bomb, but not like the Hollywood heroes did.

First of all, a manned mission is risky and a lot more expensive than a disaster movie. Second, exploding a nuclear weapon underground or on the surface could backfire.

SOLAN: It's like taking and hitting the asteroid with a hammer and a spike, it will fracture and you may end up with more than one piece still on the original trajectory.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Now we have solid motor jettison...

GREENFIELD: Better, he says, to use an unmanned mission and detonate the explosion above the surface.

SOLAN: And that radiation would illuminate an entire side.

GREENFIELD: The radiation would hit the asteroid evenly and the resulting force would hopefully alter the orbit.

SOLAN: It's the technology we have today. It makes me uncomfortable and I hope in the future we find a different way, but this is what we have now.

GREENFIELD: But to have any hope of success, we need ample warning, maybe years if the asteroid is big. Fortunately, the technology is available. Twenty-five years ago, Eleanor Helene and the early asteroid hunters had to view photographic plates manually, it was tedious, time consuming. Today, with digital cameras, a thousand images taken in a single night can be sorted with computers instantly. Astronomers now say they'll know within if there's anything really big heading this way.

HELENE: There always hangs this curtain, this shroud that this might happen, but there is still a very optimistic sense that I have that we're OK, we just have to do a more complete job of inventorying the skies. This is, you know, a small insurance policy for our children as to let's secure their future.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

SHAW: Clearly in this new century, we are placing our faith and future firmly in technology. From scanning the heavens for galactic intruders to protecting the planet from ourselves, we are relying on science to extend our reach beyond the limits of today.

Well, that's this installment of VISIONS 21. Part four, "America and The World," comes your way next month. I'm Bernard Shaw, thanks for joining us.

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