Interview with Brian O’Leary, PhD

Brian O’Leary, PhD, has been researching this dilemma for more than 20 years, and has spent virtually his entire life exploring and writing about new paradigms of science and global transformation.

After becoming the nation’s second youngest astronaut at age 27, O’Leary spent two decades as a faculty member at some of America’s most prestigious universities, including Princeton, Caltech, Cornell (alongside Carl Sagan), and UC Berkeley. He was a NASA scientist-astronaut during the Apollo program and deputy team leader of the Mariner 10 Venus-Mercury television science team, and has co-authored numerous books on space exploration.

Whole Life Times: We know we need to drive less and turn down the heat, but what can you tell us about proactive scientific solutions to global warming?

Brian O’Leary: Energy is the area in which pollution is the greatest, and it’s also where we have the greatest potential for solutions. I’ve spent decades researching solutions, including not only the more traditional renewable clean energy sources such as solar energy and a hydrogen economy, but also some of the more exotic: pre-energy and cold fusion energy sources, and to my way of thinking we can have our cake and eat it too. We can have an emission-free economy, and we can do it within 10 to 20 years if we have an all-out program to do this. There’s really nothing stopping us besides the money it takes to invest in an infrastructure. Hydrogen is emission-free, and we could get off being hooked on fossil fuels.

Is it truly realistic to think we could transition into a hydrogen economy?

The technology has been with us for a long time. Actually, hydrogen combustion was discovered in the 1830s, [as were] solar fuel cells. Fuel cells are almost like magic devices that produce electricity out of hydrogen. And the answer is yes, pipelines and gas stations and everything that we now use with fossil fuels can also be done with hydrogen, with solar energy, and with some of the more exotic energy sources now being researched. But it takes a front-end capital investment to make this competitive with fossil fuels.

We’re going to run out of oil no matter what the estimates are of how much is left on the planet. We’re going to run out in about 50 years, so we’re going to have to do something [eventually] anyway.

In layman’s terms, what is zero-point energy and what would be its impact?

So-called free energy, or zero point energy, has been researched off and on for about two centuries. An Englishman named Faraday discovered unusual energy coming off a motor that he built with magnets on it. He would spin up the wheel and energy, electricity, would come off it. Nikola Tesla, at the beginning of the 20th century, also made some remarkable discoveries about this miraculous energy that seems to come from nowhere, from the vacuum of space. Since then, this phenomenon has been studied by literally thousands of very good scientists. They understand theoretically and experimentally what’s going on here—that the vacuum of space has an enormous potential energy field that can be tapped and used practically—but the technology at this point has not come far enough for us to have viable commercial prototype models. There has been no funding to develop this technology.

Zero point energy is an energy field that is forced into existence by some of the basic principles of quantum theory. No physicist is going to deny that there’s an enormous potential energy field out there in time and space; we just have to learn how to tap it. There are some very viable theories that have been published in the physics literature that actually explain the fact that if you accelerate charged particles—magnets, or any kind of practical device—in the presence of this field, you can get energy out of it, and that energy could run light bulbs, cars, everything. It would be an elegant little device that basically hums along and interacts with this hypothesized zero point field. It’s called zero point, by the way, because it still exists even in temperatures of absolute zero.

What about cold fusion?

Cold fusion was discovered in 1989. The mainstream nuclear physics community came down on cold fusion, but I think it’s probably the most promising area of new energy and could literally transform the world overnight. It’s more difficult to explain in non-scientific terms.

In 1989, Stanley Paulenson and Martin Fleshman, two electrochemists from the University of Utah, found that when they dipped a palladium alloy into a solution of heavy water, there were nuclear reactions taking place on the cathode with a release of large amounts of energy. It’s actually controlled nuclear fusion, the fusion of hydrogen atoms to produce energy and helium.

You haven’t mentioned nonphysical solutions. Is that also an underutilized resource?

The experiments of quantum physics early in the 20th century, and the experiments in parapsychology that have become more mature through the years, point inevitably toward the fact that human intention can create miracles in the physical world. When the intention is positive and well-aligned, we sometimes have healings of individuals. We’re able to use the same approaches to heal the planet, and there have been really remarkable experiments by some of my colleagues, Professor William Tiller and Professor Maridus at Stanford University. [They have] been able to show that meditators planting their intention into a body of water can actually purify the water; change the properties of the water.

The power of prayer is another very interesting question that’s been researched at many universities, and there’s no question that intention through prayer can actually heal people, even remotely. So the way I see the future is not just in near-term solutions such as a solar and hydrogen; or interim solutions like cold fusion and zero-point energy. The long-term solutions are nothing less than miracles. The miracles of our consciousness and our intention combined can create a world that is truly magnificent.

— Paul Andrews

Share:

Facebook

Twitter

Linkedin

Pinterest

StumbleUpon