Future of Space Exploration/ Animal Communications

Robert Zubrin founded the Mars Society, an organization dedicated to furthering the exploration of Mars. In the first half, he predicted that NASA will not return to the surface of the Moon until 2024. He reported that the agency is pushing for an orbiting lunar station, which he believes will hamper efforts to develop any surface outposts as well as postpone missions to Mars. In the meantime, SpaceX will "reform NASA," he said, by putting a manned spacecraft in orbit around the Earth. This could encourage whoever is the US president at the time to request that NASA cooperate with private enterprise to put a human-crewed mission on track to reach Mars.

Zurbin outlined a projection of how Mars could be "terraformed" to make it habitable. This could be accomplished, he said, over the course of 200 years by warming the planet through greenhouse gases that would melt the water presently frozen in the soil. With the addition of plants, the oxygen content would be gradually increased until it became breathable for humans. Zurbin believes that "500 years from now there will be new branches of civilizations" throughout the solar system on Mars, the asteroids, and the moons of other planets.

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Lori Spagna says that she radically transformed her life after a series of near-death experiences while living in Maui. In the second half, she described her spiritual journey from "excessively smoking, drinking, and abusing pharmaceutical drugs" to a state where she stopped the self-abusive behavior and dropped 55 pounds of excess weight. She credits the start of her transformation to a spiritual master on Maui, who she said taught her to still her body and mind until "the physical reality I existed in would drop out." Spagna says that the teacher called it the "little death," which allowed her to realize that "the non-physical is more real than the physical."

She also spoke about the secret abilities of animals, including telepathy, and the spiritual role that animals play in our lives. She quit a six-figure job to do something that she loved, training dogs for the US military. After a while, she realized that they were actually training her to communicate with them telepathically. The dogs conveyed to her they were "here to help humans" as healers and teachers. Spagna described cats as possessing the ability to "see entities and non-physical beings" and to communicate with them, and dogs as "much more empathically sensitive…they are aware of how we are feeling and what we might need." She concluded that animals would "never lie to us."

News segment guests: John M. Curtis, Christian Wilde, Lauren Weinstein