In this episode, I sit down with astrophysicist and author Adam Kownacki to talk about his new book, Alien Worlds and the Fate of the Earth. We talk about whether or not aliens have ever visited Earth, and what it means that we re not alone in the universe, and that there may have been other civilizations before us. We also talk about climate change and how we need to wake up to the fact that we may not be the only ones who have ever built a civilization, but rather, the only civilization that has ever existed. And that we are not alone. We are not the only civilizations in the entire history of the universe. And we are probably not the first ones to ever have built something like this either. But that doesn t mean it s not possible. And it certainly isn t impossible that there are other civilizations out there that have built things like us, but it s just not likely that they ve ever built anything like us. And if they have, maybe they re not just one civilization? or maybe a bunch of other civilizations have been here before us, and they re just waiting for us to figure out how to do something we can do something about it. And maybe they're not alone after all. And maybe we re just one of the last ones to do it? I don t know, but maybe they have been around before us too. We'll find out in a minute or two. I hope you enjoy this episode! I'll see you next week, folks! xoxo, Adam xo -Jon Sorrentino -- Jon Sorrenta Tim Ferraro Adam Kostr Ben Bergman Music: "Can't Be Trusted" by: "The Dark Side of the Universe" by Ian McKibben ( ) (featuring: and "The Good Place" by Jeff Perla ( ) and "Astro Boyz ( ) (feat. by: ) (Music: "Goodbye Outer Space" by The Good Place & "The Bad Girl" by by ( ) & is out on Soundtrack: "A Goodbye, Goodbye, My Brother" by "Feat. and ) by "Solo, My Girl ( ) by , " by ) and ( , "Good Morning America
00:00:58.000So yeah, I've been doing research on astronomy, astrophysics for a long time.
00:01:02.000But I also do all this popular writing, like for NPR and New York Times.
00:01:06.000And the genesis of this book came, A, because I love science fiction.
00:01:09.000I've been reading science fiction since I was a kid.
00:01:11.000But also I do a lot of work on climate change.
00:01:13.000I deal with a lot of climate change denial.
00:01:15.000What I realized was that there's this way we talk about it that completely forgets about the fact that we're probably not the first.
00:01:23.000That led me to a whole bunch of research that eventually led to this book, including one paper that we did That showed that the odds that we're the only time it's ever happened, the only civilization in the entire history of the universe, the only way that that could be true is if the odds per planet are 1 in 10 billion trillion,
00:01:52.000You know, there's been other civilizations before ours.
00:01:55.000And once you realize that, man, that is like, you know, it changes everything about how we think about ourselves, you know, and what's happening to us right now.
00:02:02.000So other civilizations before ours that have fucked things up.
00:02:07.000Well, that's kind of the premise, right?
00:02:09.000So that's what, you know, when you look at climate change, right, basically what it is is civilizations are giant machines for turning energy into work, right, you know?
00:02:46.000But the idea that, like, it's never happened before, it meaning, like, you know, civilization, what's happening around us, like this machinery and everything, that, you know, that just in the new world of what we understand about planets and shit, that is just like, you know, it's not tenable anymore.
00:03:02.000Some civilization has to be the first one.
00:03:05.000The only way you could ever think that we're the only ones is that some civilization has to be the first one, even in a universe that's infinite.
00:05:58.000You cannot—you know, Mercury's so hot that there's no way anything's going to happen.
00:06:01.000And, you know, planets that are far enough out, they're going to be so cold, you know, they're so far away from their star that they're going to be so cold that, you know, it's hard to get liquid water on the surface.
00:06:09.000So we define the habitable or Goldilocks zone as the place where you can pour water onto the surface and it'll just sit there.
00:06:16.000It won't freeze and it won't, you know, sort of just evaporate away.
00:06:19.000So, uh, all these 10 billion trillion planets I'm talking about are all in the right place for life to form, you know?
00:06:25.000And so, like, with that many numbers, that many experiments being run, like, you gotta be a psychotic pessimist to say that, like, this is the only time a civilization's ever happened.
00:06:46.000This is an argument by – I call it like an argument by exhaustion.
00:06:49.000If I gave you a bag of 10 billion trillion planets and you have to sort through all of them, right, the odds that you're never going to find another one that built a civilization is pretty – Like I said, you're really asking for really serious pessimism.
00:07:01.000But we're just getting started with this game of looking for life.
00:07:05.000That's why I keep saying this is not your grandfather's SETI where you point a radio telescope at a star and you kind of wait to see whether somebody's signaling you.
00:07:16.000Now what we can do, because we got all these planets to stare at, is, you know, we're going to be able to, like, stare at them as they pass in front of their star and get the light that passes through their atmosphere.
00:07:25.000So we're going to, like, who knows what we're going to find?
00:07:27.000You know, we're not waiting for them to signal us anymore over the next...
00:07:41.000All the arguments for the entire history of humanity have just been two dudes yelling at each other.
00:07:44.000But in the next 30 years, because of the stuff we're building, and now that we know there's planets, we're going to have real data to argue over with.
00:07:51.000So, man, it's like we're in a whole other ballgame now.
00:07:55.000I think the big fear for a lot of people is what happens when we find out for sure that there's something else out there.
00:08:00.000If we really do find some other Manhattan on some Goldilocks planet that's hovering some similarly sized star a billion light years away or whatever the hell it is, that's gonna be very, very, very strange.
00:08:16.000Because for religions, for, you know, I mean, wow, you know, what do you do if you find other intelligent creatures who are building civilization?
00:09:16.000So, you know, I think, like, there is, you know, the discovery, if we were to get any evidence, you know, and I think the way it's going to happen is going to be more by accident than by, like, signaling, you know?
00:09:27.000But if we had any evidence of another technological, if we had any evidence of just life, right?
00:09:31.000If we just find a biosphere, evidence that, you know, and we can do that from a distance, right?
00:09:35.000Even if the star is, you know, 30 light years away, if we get, if we see, as the light passes through the star's atmosphere for those few moments, if we see oxygen in the atmosphere, you know, we'll be able to detect that.
00:09:47.000That's what we can do with telescopes.
00:09:48.000We can tell, like, you can see the fingerprints of the different kinds of elements.
00:09:51.000If we see oxygen in that atmosphere, You know, and methane, that pretty much says that there's a biosphere there, that there's life.
00:10:22.000Because, right, this whole definition of the habitable zone was based on the idea like, oh, you've got to have a surface and it's got to be, you know.
00:10:28.000But now with the, you know, not every, but like a bunch of the moons orbiting Jupiter and Saturn and the gas giants, they have oceans under them.
00:10:35.000Well, there's thoughts that Europa might have something below the surface, right?
00:10:39.000Yeah, yeah, because the Europa is, you know, it's this pretty big moon, and we know it's covered in ice, right?
00:10:45.000You can see it's covered in a, you know, and we think that layer of ice is maybe like, I don't know, 10 kilometers thick, and then below that there may be 100 kilometers of ocean.
00:10:51.000And because as it moves around Jupiter, the gravity of Jupiter is always squishing the insides, so there's probably volcanic activity happening at the surface.
00:10:58.000So you have hydrothermal vents, you know, heat escaping out of, and chemicals escaping out of the surface under the ocean.
00:11:04.000And that's how we think life formed on Jupiter.
00:12:04.000So, you know, the thing is actually from the, you know, so I work in a lot of fields, but I would also consider myself an astrobiologist, right?
00:12:10.000Which is a pretty kind of wild idea that you can do astrobiology, even though you only have one example, which is the Earth.
00:12:16.000But we've learned so much that now we can start asking ourselves about the possibility of life elsewhere.
00:12:20.000So finding even a microbe, like even a friggin', you know, amoeba on Mars would be, or even evidence that there used to be amoebas on Mars.
00:12:28.000What is the evidence that they've discovered on Mars?
00:12:29.000What they found was organic chemistry, right?
00:13:03.000So what they found was evidence for fairly complex organic chemistry, which meant that way back when, Mars – and this we know for sure, right?
00:13:23.000That's how we have, you know, we have chunks of Mars here, right?
00:13:26.000That, you know, the thing in 96 or whatever, when they were like, oh, we found life on Mars, you know, they thought what they found was fossil bacteria in a chunk of Mars that they found in Antarctica.
00:13:35.000So the planets have been swapping spit for, like, the entire history of the solar system.
00:13:39.000That's fossilized bacteria that they found.
00:13:42.000Most people now think that the Allen Hills meteorite, that probably, you know, it's inconclusive and it's not conclusive enough to be like, yeah, we found life.
00:13:50.000It's like a tiny little squiggly worm looking thing.
00:14:07.000You know, early 90s, people were kind of done with Mars.
00:14:09.000And so that's what triggered the whole, you know, one space probe after another, the rovers.
00:14:13.000And like, so, you know, the thing we found was a direct result of that effort, which was this organic chemistry, which says that back in the day, Mars had a lot of this stuff lying around, had a lot of these, you know, these organic chemicals lying around, which if you're life, that's what you're going to be using.
00:14:28.000So that's like one more step, like we've been putting the Lego blocks The argument for life on Mars, one piece at a time since the first rovers went there.
00:14:38.000Yeah, if we did discover just even plants on some other planet, even just a planet with some sort of plant-like life...
00:14:50.000Because, you know, right now we don't know if there's, you know, are we the only time in the entire history of the universe that, like, this crazy thing where we went from non-life to life, like, is that common or is that never, ever, ever happened?
00:15:03.000So that's the question we want to answer.
00:15:05.000I mean like that argument I was given before is I think from the probable arguments, I'm saying it's like it's almost overwhelming that, yeah, it probably happened somewhere.
00:15:13.000Again, it doesn't mean anything is here.
00:15:27.000You know, we find something and we're like, yeah, we find something, but we're pretty sure there's some kind of life and it's three billion light years away.
00:16:05.000And so now that's how we know that every star in the sky has planets.
00:16:09.000But they found one that just made no sense.
00:16:12.000Like the light would dip, then it would stop dipping, then it would dip again three times, and it would stop dipping.
00:16:15.000Sometimes it was lower, sometimes it was higher.
00:16:18.000And for a year or so, people were like, what the fuck is this?
00:16:22.000And so Jason Wright and others, Jason's a friend of mine, they wrote a paper where they were like, hey, at least – because this is what the future is going to look like.
00:16:30.000We can't say – we have to at least consider the possibility that these are artificial structures that are like orbiting the star.
00:17:07.000That goes back to Kardashev's, the idea of the Kardashev scale back in the 60s, where he's like, look, there's going to be a natural progression of civilizations that goes first, you collect all the energy you can from your planet, and then you use that to do amazing things.
00:17:18.000And then you collect all the energy from your star, and then you do that.
00:17:33.000I mean, I've criticized the Kardashev scale in one of the papers I recently did because what it fails to take into account is the fact that like, you know, on your way up to the type one, type one is when you harvest all the energy from your planet, which basically means somehow covering your planet in, you know, solar panels or something.
00:17:48.000That neglects what we've learned since Kardashev wrote his paper in 64 is that, you know, planets don't like that shit.
00:17:53.000Like, The planet's going to feed back.
00:17:54.000You try and build, you know, massive shit on your planet, the planet has its own, you know, biosphere is pretty powerful and you've got to take the biosphere into account or you get climate change.
00:18:02.000You get, you know, the planet being pushed off in another direction.
00:18:12.000Now, so, you know, when he proposed this, people went bonkers over this, right?
00:18:16.000He was just saying, he's like, look, here's the 15 different things could be and I'm going to have to at least consider the possibility that it's artificial, right?
00:18:23.000But for me – and some people got really angry and everything.
00:18:25.000But I thought like this is – Why did they get angry?
00:18:27.000Because there's been a thing in the community over the years.
00:19:13.000Like, people have this idea, like, wow, we've got telescopes all over the world, and they're looking—you know, so the government never funded a SETI study, anything major, right?
00:19:21.000So people—you know, all that SETI has done is, like, basically, you know, some dudes on a telescope get a little extra time.
00:19:27.000They're like, hey, man, quick, let's go look at a star.
00:19:56.000Because I feel like they're wasting their time.
00:19:58.000And there was a documentary I saw once about some biologist who was convinced that the giant sloth was still alive and that there was examples of them in South America.
00:20:09.000And this poor bastard had spent more than a decade looking for this giant sloth in South America.
00:20:16.000And there was this moment where he was chasing down this...
00:20:23.000Supposed a dung pile and they were looking for it.
00:20:25.000He had this look in his eyes where he was like, holy shit, what if I waste my fucking life in my academic career chasing down something that's not even real?
00:20:37.000That's kind of how I've always felt about SETI. Yeah, but that's not the way the people – I mean, everybody who's involved in it – I don't do SETI. I mean, I respect the people who are doing it.
00:20:46.000But most of them are like, look, this is just a multi-generational thing.
00:20:51.000And even if I don't find it, I'm laying the foundation.
00:21:01.000So most of them are like – You know, they know that this is going to, you know, this is a huge, it's like the most important question in humanity, right?
00:22:07.000So here's some of the suggestions that people are talking about.
00:22:10.000So Avi Loeb at Harvard talks about the idea, you know, maybe what you need, and you're going to need the sensitivity for this, you're going to see, like, rocket engines going back and forth between, you know, you have a multi-planet civilization in some way.
00:22:23.000And you're going to see little flares as rockets decelerate and accelerate back and forth.
00:22:26.000People have talked about seeing city lights.
00:22:28.000You know, the telescopes are getting, you know, we're building these giant telescopes.
00:23:10.000All of this stuff is super relevant for us now because the question is what is the average lifetime of a civilization?
00:23:16.000So you might be able to see artifacts from civilizations that are gone.
00:23:20.000Like imagine a civilization covered one of its moons in solar panels, right?
00:23:26.000The reflected light is going to show a spectral signature of the panels.
00:23:32.000So it's like they don't even have to necessarily be alive now that we still might be able to see stuff from their evidence of artificial structures or something that's not natural around them.
00:25:22.000Yeah, I'm so curious as to what we're going to be able to do in a thousand years and ten thousand years and a hundred thousand years if civilization does stay around and we figure out how to not melt the earth or boil the oceans or whatever the fuck we're doing wrong.
00:25:39.000But there's a bunch of science fiction films that do speculate on what's going to be possible in the future.
00:25:46.000And one of them was, what was that recent one with, what's his name?
00:27:28.000And then there's, you enter into this, they discover like what they call the protomolecule.
00:27:33.000Like, you know, it was, this is basically this alien molecule that was really a device that some aliens threw our way billions of years ago that was, you know, I don't, how much am I supposed to give away?
00:27:43.000You know, I don't want to, so no, not too much.
00:27:54.000It's kind of like people call it like the Game of Thrones in space.
00:27:57.000But I'll tell you what I love about it is that this is what it's going to look like.
00:28:00.000Like they get the science on this show so right, as much as you can, right?
00:28:04.000So, you know, in space, if your rocket motors are on, there's gravity.
00:28:08.000Because, you know, the rocket motors push up towards you and so you've got gravity, you can walk around.
00:28:12.000When you turn the rocket motors off, You float around, right?
00:28:14.000On spinning things, you know, anything.
00:28:16.000So, you know, in this universe, you know, in the fictional universe, they've taken the big asteroids and they've hollowed them out and spun them up.
00:28:23.000So people live on the inside, you know.
00:28:25.000And so at one point, like one of the characters, the private eye, they got this great sort of film noir thing going on.
00:28:31.000And he pours a drink, you know, some whiskey.
00:29:09.000Well, we have this ability to communicate now that we never did before, where everybody has an ability to say their piece about how they feel about how things are going.
00:30:12.000Because of all the writing I did for NPR and the New York Times, I have dealt with a lot of climate change denialists, man, and it drives me crazy.
00:30:19.000Because I recently had a discussion with someone on the podcast that didn't believe in climate change.
00:30:24.000And it was a weird thing because I kept pulling up all the different scientific consensus studies, all the different studies that show that we were having an impact.
00:31:05.000Yeah, and that's, I think it's a giant problem with our culture.
00:31:08.000There are two groups of people that you can't, like to truly be an independent thinker, you're like one of these weirdos that's off in the fringe.
00:31:16.000You know, to be independent of either party.
00:32:26.000So if they're asking the question because they want to know, I'm down to talk until the cows come home.
00:32:31.000But that's not what typical deniers are.
00:32:33.000Deniers are like, get climate changing all the time.
00:32:35.000And they're not interested in the answer.
00:32:36.000Not only are they not interested in the answer, they're just trying to win.
00:32:41.000It's not a real conversation because it's a really complex thing.
00:32:46.000If you dig an ice core and you tap down to 50,000, 80,000, 100,000 years, you see all these bizarre shifts of the climate that could be indicative of super volcanoes and astroidal impacts and solar flares.
00:33:01.000A lot of shit happens over the course of a million years.
00:33:54.000Once you go down this slippery road of denying saying like, OK, that kind of science I hate, man, they're all a hoax.
00:34:01.000Well, you know, America's prosperity and our safety has been built on science over the last 200 years.
00:34:06.000You know, you start to erode the whole thing.
00:34:08.000You can't just, like, call one group of, you know, scientists hoaxters, you know, and not have it slowly infect everything else to the point where, like, you know, China will be happy to eat our lunch, you know, when it comes scientifically.
00:34:54.000Well, the scientific method is what has established the actual real facts of how things interact with each other that's allowed us to create technology.
00:35:03.000And I think they split that distinction.
00:35:06.000They focus on the technology and commerce, which is more important in their eyes than the consequences of the I don't know if it was a working prototype or just a concept,
00:35:33.000but there was an enormous building that was really an air filter.
00:35:36.000Yeah, they're starting to look at carbon capture again.
00:35:39.000With places like Hong Kong and places where they have terrible, Beijing.
00:35:43.000They have terrible, terrible pollution.
00:35:44.000And more importantly, particulates in the atmosphere.
00:37:46.000This is what happens when you reach this level.
00:37:48.000And the other thing that, you know, in the book that I'm trying to argue to also, and it pushes back against the deniers, is like, climate deniers are human haters.
00:37:55.000You know, they're all like, you know, like, you know, we did this amazing thing.
00:37:58.000We changed the atmosphere of an entire planet, right?
00:38:06.000And if you look at the, you know, from the perspective of, you know, species doing this again and again across the universe, this shows that we've reached a level, right?
00:38:40.000And just like when you're a teenager and you're, you know, you start to drive, right?
00:38:44.000Either you figure it out, you know, either you're drinking and you're partying and drive the car off a cliff or you figure out how to handle your responsibility.
00:39:17.000And, you know, what bums me out is they don't understand the consequences of that for both the American enterprise and the human enterprise, right?
00:39:25.000I mean, because, you know, if you keep calling one branch of science a hoax, then what's to say the other branches?
00:39:33.000Like, you know, then you're rolling down this, you know, slippery slope where, like, the...
00:39:53.000And the other part is like, dude, it's just science.
00:39:55.000It doesn't care about your political views.
00:39:58.000And it's not fair to use the cell phone and take the antibiotics...
00:40:02.000And then turn around and like – and then suddenly treat this thing as if it was another thing in your bucket of ideologies.
00:40:07.000I think also people think if you somehow or another compromise industry's ability to work that you're going to kill jobs and you're going to damage the economy and that's more important.
00:40:19.000Yeah, but I think it's the exact opposite, right?
00:40:22.000I mean, again, just like I'm saying, climate change shows how powerful people have become.
00:40:27.000It also shows how powerful our enterprise, right?
00:40:30.000We did this by building businesses, by building enterprise, and we built this world-girdling machine of civilization, and the planet actually noticed.
00:40:41.000Why do you like that term, world-girdling?
00:40:53.000But it's the idea that like, you know, in the Foundation trilogy, the Isaac Asimov, you know, classic science fiction thing, there's the city of, the planet of Trantor, which is the center of the empire, the galactic empire.
00:41:03.000And it's, you know, it's basically the whole planet's been covered in city.
00:41:07.000You know, like, you know, the planet, you got to go down like 500 levels before you get to the surface.
00:41:11.000So that idea, you know, I mean, what I like about it is the idea that, like, you know, we've done something, we're kind of covered the planet in our effect, you know?
00:41:37.000And then there's the airport right over there.
00:41:39.000Four different infrastructures, you know, which everyone took huge amounts of money to build, one of which we don't even use anymore, right?
00:41:46.000So the idea of building an infrastructure that will not be carbon polluting, will not trigger climate change, it's like, dude, this is what we do, you know?
00:41:55.000So the idea that there's going to be more jobs that come out of this than it could ever come out of fossil fuels.
00:42:00.000You know, it's not a big deal for human beings because that's what we do to switch infrastructures and there will be a lot of wealth generated by, you know, just like there was, you know, when we switched to the trains.
00:42:12.000Trevor Burrus Where's the argument coming that we – because there are people that just adopt the party line, the party line that, you know, climates always change and human beings barely affect it and it's not something to concentrate on.
00:42:24.000Trevor Burrus Again, I think it's the, you know, the gradual political polarization of everything.
00:42:29.000Because if you look at in the – we're now at the – what is it?
00:42:33.00030-year anniversary of Jim Hansen, who was a famous climate scientist, giving his testimony in front of Congress in 1988 on a hot, sweltering summer day.
00:42:41.000We said climate change is already happening.
00:42:53.000And then it just gradually over time as the whole political polarization thing happened, you can actually see the very purposeful denial, right?
00:43:01.000They took a page out of the cigarette companies, you know, for years, right?
00:43:04.000Cigarettes were like, oh, the cigarette companies were like, no, it's not a problem.
00:43:06.000So they were purposefully, you know, there were people who had money invested, right?
00:43:11.000There's a documentary that goes into that.
00:43:29.000Obviously, the cigarette companies would be paying the same people to put doubt into the idea that cigarettes are addictive or cigarettes cause cancer.
00:43:38.000And this is what had been done in the past.
00:43:40.000Now, the same people are involved in doing it with climate change.
00:43:44.000Well, you know, one time I wrote a piece for the NPR that was kind of positive about, like, yeah, we can switch infrastructures, like I'm saying.
00:43:51.000And some guy wrote me back very angry.
00:43:52.000And he said, you know, the proven reserves, you know, the stuff, the oil that's in the ground has a wealth, you know, has a monetary value.
00:44:00.000Like, you know, that's in the oil company's banks, you know, in their bank accounts of like $1.5 trillion.
00:44:06.000And the guy said, dude, you know, people have gone to war for a lot less than $1.5 trillion.
00:44:11.000So, you know, if we were to really be like, hey, man, we can't burn that, you know, you're going to have to leave that in the ground.
00:44:16.000That's like their bank accounts going like...
00:44:24.000And then it gets linked to other things.
00:44:26.000And then it becomes this sort of like mass—you know, it becomes the political—they use the political polarization to sort of, you know, sort of make this happen.
00:44:34.000It doesn't—and look, other countries aren't doing this.
00:44:37.000Other countries, there's always a little bit of climate denial going on, but we're like the only country that's got, as you can see, because we're the only ones who are not part of the Paris Accord.
00:44:44.000Well, it's one of the weirder things about this right-left thing is the left is always supporting the environment.
00:44:49.000The left is all about the environment.
00:44:51.000The left is about clean air and clean water.
00:44:58.000Well, I got, you know, I mean, I have issues with, you know, environmentalists too, because I think for one of your shows I was watching, you know, the whole idea of eco-bros, right?
00:46:26.000You know, my way around that, and that's what the whole book is about, is to like, when you've got a polarization, right, you know, where, you know, you're either this or you're that, the thing that, and this is like a mathematical idea, is to go orthogonal, you know?
00:46:37.000When you, you know, you go, because, you know, it's a line, basically, right?
00:46:40.000You're either on this side or that side.
00:46:42.000Go 90 degrees to it, now you're in a whole new space.
00:46:44.000Now you're up and down, so the left Exactly.
00:46:46.000And now like the questions that – so you see this in like revolutions in science, right?
00:46:51.000So you look at Einstein and what happened when Einstein came up with relativity.
00:46:54.000Everybody at the time was like – they were all concerned with what they called the luminiferous ether that light needed – light's a wave and everybody thought it needed something to propagate through, right?
00:48:21.000What people are really worried about when you talk to people that understand the history of the human race and the history of the earth is climate cooling.
00:48:28.000They think that climate cooling is far more terrifying than climate warming.
00:48:33.000Because if we go into a giant ice age again, I mean, way more people are going to die, terrible loss of resources, and it could be devastating to the human race.
00:49:35.000And if we weren't around, yeah, another 1,000, 3,000, 5,000 years would be another ice age.
00:49:40.000But the Anthropocene that we're triggering could hold off ice ages forever, right?
00:49:46.000As long as we're around, there won't be another ice age because we've already added enough warmth to the planet that it overcomes the effects that trigger an ice age.
00:49:53.000So, like, what are the ethical responsibilities of that?
00:49:55.000That's what I try and tell the environmentalists.
00:49:57.000Like, you know, you got this image like, oh, we got to save the Earth.
00:50:00.000But they're thinking of like the Holocene.
00:50:02.000And it's like, well, you know, the planet, even with us, even if we successfully keep biodiversity rich, it's not going to be the Earth we started with, you know, because we're here.
00:50:11.000So, yeah, what about the species that never form because we held off the Ice Age?
00:50:25.000To try to contemplate what species would have existed if we allowed the Earth to cool, and our responsibility for allowing the Earth to cool so that the potential for new species to advance...
00:50:36.000Let's keep this place warm so we can stay alive.
00:50:39.000Well, all I'm saying, the only reason I'm raising that, I'm not, you know, I'm raising that because when we talk about climate change, what you get sometimes when the environmental movement is this sort of like, the polar bear, the polar bear!
00:50:48.000It's like, what I'm trying to say is, look, I love polar bears.
00:50:51.000Kind of funny that polar bears always think, because polar bears will rip your head off and drink your blood in a second.
00:51:01.000And so it's so funny that we're like, oh, polar My friend Kevin is a biologist, and he said when you get polar bear babies right out of the womb, he said they're like the alien from the chest bursters team.
00:51:39.000And whether or not we're still part, that's the question, whether or not we're still part of it a thousand years from now, you know, is the big issue.
00:51:45.000So, you know, there are ethical issues about the polar bear, right?
00:51:56.000So we're going to have to understand there's this deeper ethical question about what does an Earth look like that's been changed by us, that's healthy, but still has us on it.
00:52:23.000How do we have a rich, healthy biosphere with us and our civilization still in it?
00:52:28.000And the thing about things that have gone extinct in the past, and more than 90% of everything that's ever existed is extinct, the problem is we didn't know then.
00:54:48.000I'd be down for seeing a woolly mammoth.
00:54:50.000In my science museum in Rochester, there's a woolly mammoth that they found, you know.
00:54:54.000And sometimes I'm looking at it and I'm like, that's a giant, hairy-ass elephant, man.
00:54:58.000And it was walking around right in my, you know.
00:55:00.000I think, like, depending on what you do with it, you know, trying to reintroduce it into the biosphere could be a little dangerous.
00:55:05.000I mean, the thing, look, climate change is, this is something I like to say, climate change is not our fault.
00:55:10.000And what I mean by that is we, you know, we found fossil fuels and they were awesome, you know, and they were just a continuation of what we'd always done, you know.
00:55:18.000And so we inadvertently, climate change was a mistake.
00:55:22.000Now, if we don't do something about it, it's our fault, right?
00:55:25.000And so you want to be really careful about unintended consequences.
00:55:29.000So this is my same thing with geoengineering.
00:55:32.000People talk like, oh, we should put particulates in the atmosphere to make it more reflective.
00:55:37.000I'm like, man, dude, we triggered climate change because we didn't know what we were doing.
00:55:41.000We didn't know what the consequences were.
00:55:42.000If we put those particles up there, how do we get them out?
00:55:44.000We're going to scoop them out with a net?
00:56:02.000Like, why take the hardest solution that's got the most uncertainty as opposed to the simpler solution, which just means building a different infrastructure?
00:56:43.000People are like, are you hopeful or not hopeful?
00:56:45.000Because, you know, I mean, I ran these, I did these models.
00:56:47.000One of the pieces of research we did was we modeled planets and civilizations, like alien civilizations.
00:56:51.000We, you know, developed a simple mathematical model about, you know, how a civilization will use a planet's resources to make more babies, alien babies.
00:56:59.000And then how the, you know, by using those resources, you feed back on the planet, right?
00:57:03.000And so what we wanted to do was we wanted to model the possible outcomes.
00:57:18.000Like in these models, there was like, you know, the population shoots up, the planet's temperature shoots up, but they come to a nice steady state.
00:57:53.000Because you think about if you're killing seven out of ten people, how many of those seven people are the ones who know how to make cell phones?
00:58:31.000We did find complete, like, extinction curves as well, where, you know, the population went way up and then, boom, dropped like a stone.
00:58:38.000And we even found those, we built into the models of possibility for the civilization to switch from a high-impact resource to a low-impact resource, like fossil to solar.
00:58:46.000And sometimes, because, you know, planets have minds of their own, you know?
00:58:49.000There's an internal dynamics to planets, and you push them far enough, and they're just going to roll off.
00:58:53.000So we'd have ones where the population went way up, they made the switch, and then the population started to come down, the planets started to cool down.
00:59:00.000Did you factor in random geological events, random solar events, random astroidal events?
00:59:07.000This was really all about just planet civilization and its feedback on the planet.
00:59:41.000So, like, we're on the lip of being a multi-planet species, right?
00:59:44.000And once you do that, which means you become a space-faring race, then I think, like, certainly the asteroid stuff you can take care of, right?
01:00:09.000So we couldn't really, like, you know, we're young enough now that if we discovered one heading right towards us, we could just, you know, put your legs between your legs and kiss your butt goodbye.
01:00:19.000But in time, right, 200 years from now, we will have done a much better job of mapping out all the major rocks.
01:00:27.000I mean, if we have that kind of interplanetary, we're going to be mapping them out just because you don't want to run into them, or you're going to be mining them.
01:00:34.000What do you think is promising in terms of the ability to prevent impacts?
01:00:40.000I think the best one, if you catch it early enough, there's the gravity tug, where you just literally park a spaceship next to it and slowly have the spaceship move.
01:00:49.000Because all you have to do is alter the trajectory a little bit.
01:00:51.000You know, you just really have to kind of tap on it.
01:01:21.000That'd be a bummer to be the one that, like, you know, they both come out at the same time, and your movie doesn't get any attention, and the other one becomes, like, a massive hit, you know?
01:02:01.000The one thing I worry about the most, like we were talking before, you know, technological societies are these like overlaid networks, you know, you got the transportation network, you got the energy network, you got social networks, you know, and those are really complex.
01:02:13.000And so I do a little what's called network theory.
01:02:15.000And what you find with network theory is that you, you know, you may have an individual network that's pretty robust, meaning like I can cut some of the connections, like you got your social network, I could take, you know, 20% of the people out of your social network and the social network will still function, you know, like most people will still talk to each other or anything.
01:02:30.000But once you start layering them so that the social network is now connected to the telecommunications network, which is connected to the energy network, blah, blah, blah, then you can ripple a small change, ripples through the whole thing and blows it apart and it just doesn't function anymore.
01:02:42.000So, you know, I don't need like apocalypses to have the fabric of technological civilization fall apart.
01:02:49.000Like, so if just the weather patterns change enough, that agriculture becomes really hard, you know?
01:02:55.000We're used to the rains falling pretty much the same way they do yearly and everything.
01:02:59.000That, you know, like we talk about, you look at what the, you know, like refugees, how much, you know, Trouble having a huge influx of refugees can cause.
01:03:08.000Climate change is going to have people moving all over the planet because now they can't grow food anywhere.
01:03:12.000So it's like I don't – like I said, you don't need – I do worry like ocean rise is going to be huge.
01:03:19.000Most of the wealth in the world is in coastal cities.
01:03:21.000But you don't really need too much to like really shift the weather patterns and then the thing you're used to falls apart.
01:03:28.000Now, when you factor in human beings and our evolution from primitive hominids to what we are today, and you sort of extrapolate and keep going and think about what we're going to be in the future, and then think about what these creatures might be that live a hundred million light years away,
01:03:51.000I mean, I've got to think that whatever is holding us back, our primitive instincts, these human reward systems that were engaged when we were running away from wild animals and fighting off tribes of invaders,
01:04:06.000that slowly but surely those are going to either evaporate or evolve and we're going to get to a point where we can be more rational.
01:04:16.000If we do do that, what is the motivation for expanding the human race?
01:04:23.000Isn't sustaining the human race in a healthy way on this planet a better option than traveling to Mars or traveling to other solar systems?
01:04:33.000Wouldn't we be better served trying to achieve some sort of a balance here on this planet?
01:05:37.000We're the agent of the biosphere, right?
01:05:39.000And, you know, the biosphere started off as like, you know, single-celled creatures in like little tiny parts of the planet and then, you know, conquered the oceans.
01:05:46.000And then eventually when they were, you know, because in the beginning there weren't continents.
01:05:49.000The Earth was a water world when we started off.
01:05:51.000And so when, you know, there was enough continents, you know, then they took over the, life took over the land.
01:05:56.000I think it's just kind of, life may be kind of like a cosmic force if I can get all woogly on you.
01:06:00.000So if we do go to Mars, it will essentially be ultimate panspermia.
01:06:51.000I've thrown this out so many times people are sick of it, but I think that what we're looking at when we see these archetypal aliens with the big heads and the big eyes and the tiny bodies and no genitals, I think we think this is what we're eventually going to be.
01:08:22.000We'll extrapolate that to what this alien creature is going to be in terms of its understanding of time and space and matter versus hours.
01:08:32.000We are this crude thing that's weirded out by the word sperm, whereas it is telepathically communicating with a universal language and has this unbelievable ability to manipulate matter.
01:08:44.000And they've achieved homeostasis with their environment.
01:09:06.000But there, you know, there is a kind of a problem with, because we're just doing a paper on this now, you know, part of the Fermi Paradox, let's get, I don't want to go too far on this, we can go back, circle back to it later.
01:09:20.000Okay, so the Fermi Paradox is the idea that like, you know, if there is, if the paradox part is like, if you're telling me that intelligence is common, it evolves everywhere, then why don't I see it already?
01:09:55.000Even if you're traveling at a tenth of the speed of light, if you manage to build world ships that can travel across the stars and you're traveling at 0.1% of the speed of light, if you do that and you hop from one star to the other, build another ship, hop to the next one, in about 600,000 years,
01:10:10.000you have covered the whole galaxy, right?
01:10:12.000So 600,000 years sounds like a long time, but it's a tiny part of the galaxy's history.
01:11:07.000If we can get some sort of 3D virtual reality imaging of these planets, like, hey man, do you want to see what it's like on Pandora?
01:11:15.000Here, put these goggles on, and you will go wherever you want that robot to go, and you'll be there.
01:11:21.000And maybe it'll get to the point where you can actually smell it and touch it and feel it, but not be compromised by its environment in terms of your biology.
01:11:57.000So it's like, it may be exactly like you're saying, that we think like, oh, you just land on a planet, you terraform it, and you just turn it into habitable.
01:12:11.000I mean, there's a lot of possible solutions to this, which is just that, you know, one of which is space travel is really hard and really, interstellar, not interplanetary, but interstellar travel is really hard and really expensive.
01:12:22.000I was just reading a paper on this where the guy estimated that in order to get like, say you wanted to have a thousand people on a world ship to get to another star, that would take the economy, you'd need like, I think it was like a hundred thousand Earth economies to build that.
01:12:37.000By the time we're ready, you might have 100,000 Earth economies.
01:12:41.000But it was just like, it was so much that, like, you know, unless you were, you know, with the conclusion he came to, unless you were a multi-planet species, if you were like a, if you had conquered the entire, or settled the entire solar system, maybe you'd have an economy that big.
01:12:54.000So one possible solution is good planets are hard to find, and it's just too expensive.
01:16:46.000I guess it was like a 5.5, where the whole thing just...
01:16:53.000It was weird, but it gave me the impression that the house that I was living in, or the apartment that I was in, was made out of the same stuff, like a box that a refrigerator would come in.
01:17:03.000You know how you'd kind of move it around?
01:18:14.000Do you think that's possible that something's ever visited here?
01:18:17.000Because that is the big question and that's the thing that gets the UFO dorks more jazzed up than anything is the possibility that we've been visited.
01:18:49.000People are always like, oh, man, I saw lights in the sky, and then they moved around, and then they disappeared, you know, but they don't really want to be seen.
01:18:54.000I'm like, well, why do they have headlights on?
01:18:56.000Like, just turn off the frickin' lights.
01:18:58.000Why would they have lights in the first place?
01:19:39.000They've done all that research even in trials, right, where people, you know, see things.
01:19:43.000So I just do UFOs, you know, just kind of like...
01:19:45.000But you think it's possible that there could be life on other planets, and it's possible there could be intelligent life on other planets, and we send probes to Mars.
01:19:54.000I think that if they do send something here, they're going to send something without biological life inside of it.
01:21:19.000And then when you get to it, you realize that what he actually wants to do is recreate his father.
01:21:26.000Yeah, his father died when he was young, and he wants to be able to, through memories and photographs and what he knows about his father, literally recreate his father and be able to have a conversation with him.
01:22:08.000Well, you'd be able to recreate human beings based on your knowledge of them and then they'll be able to come up with some sort of a program where he'll be able to have a conversation with his father.
01:22:32.000What's the relationship between mind and matter?
01:22:34.000And I think we have a serious misunderstanding.
01:22:37.000We don't understand consciousness very well at all.
01:22:40.000So the idea that, oh yeah, it's just going to be trivial to download your consciousness into a computer, I think there's a shitload of assumptions in there about what mind is and the relationship between your neurons and awareness.
01:22:55.000So that's why I think those guys, it's a little bit of a religion.
01:23:07.000It's going to be like every other rapture.
01:23:10.000Oh, we thought it was 2045. We really meant 2065. Well, we went to this 2045 conference, me and my friend Ari and Duncan, and we got to talk to some of these guys, and it was really fascinating.
01:23:19.000And one of them had created some robot that was supposed to be him, but it didn't work well, so they never revealed it at the conference.
01:24:17.000The danger with anything when it comes to AI... Here's an interesting thing about AI. We are making amazing strides with AI. Now, artificial intelligence is different from artificial consciousness, you know what I mean?
01:24:29.000But the AI, what we're getting out of it is nothing like us.
01:24:34.000Back in the day, people were like, oh, we're going to model the human brain, and that's how we'll do it.
01:24:40.000And what they've learned is, oh, that doesn't really work that well.
01:24:43.000So now this whole big data thing, like, you know, network theory and big data and deep learning, where, like, you know, they're using statistical, you know, the power of having huge amounts of computing and statistical reasoning.
01:24:54.000So that, like, you know, yeah, the computer, like, you know, it'll find the picture of the cat, but you have no idea why it found the picture.
01:25:01.000It didn't reason, like, oh, yeah, that sort of looks like cat, and I like cats.
01:25:04.000You know, it was just like, oh, these kinds of lines go with that kind of thing.
01:25:06.000It has no idea what it's doing, but it'll act intelligently.
01:26:05.000I'm not going to be like, it'll never happen.
01:26:07.000But as a guy I know as a philosopher says, there's a certain way in which everything we do with AI right now, it's not like Watson is playing chess.
01:26:16.000It's like we're using Watson to play chess.
01:26:19.000And I think the fear is the tool gets out of hand.
01:26:22.000Not that it, like, develops a thing where, like, I hate humans, you know, Dad, I hate you.
01:26:26.000But more that it's like, you know, these things which are not actually thinking, they act intelligently, but they're not thinking, can have a huge, like, it'll have a really negative impact.
01:26:35.000You know, it'll, you know, what is it?
01:26:36.000There's that example of, like, if you design something that is an AI system to make paperclips, it ends up consuming the entire planet making paperclips because that's what you told it to do.
01:26:44.000Right, you never told it to make a sustainable amount of paper clips.
01:26:47.000So I'm more worried about that than I am of Skynet, you know, coming over and deciding that it's going to drop all the bombs on us because it needs to get rid of us.
01:26:55.000Well, there's no biological imperative for silicon-based artificial intelligence to procreate, to keep going and move forward.
01:27:14.000And it's because there's a real possibility that you might get consumed by some other life form.
01:27:19.000So you have to protect yourself and you have to look out for other people who might want to breed with the viable female that you've copulated with.
01:27:28.000There's a lot of shit that's going on.
01:27:30.000It's built in evolutionarily to have that.
01:29:13.000And you know what's revolutionary about that show too?
01:29:14.000The way they did the special effects were like, you know, the camera moved around, like there's a spaceship, but I'm, you know, I don't have, it didn't do, you know, sometimes it did those long pans, but it was, it kind of opened up a whole new way of sort of looking at, you know, just sort of what it looks like to be in space and stuff.
01:29:28.000Yeah, but it really scared the shit out of people in terms of artificial life.
01:29:31.000Something that we create that decides it's done with us and it's taking over.
01:29:35.000Well, you know what's amazing about that, and I've written about this, this idea that we keep telling that story over and over again.
01:29:40.000How many movies can you think of that have that?
01:29:42.000So I'm really interested in myth, the whole mythology, the way we can never get away from the myths, coming of age, the hero's journey, blah, blah.
01:29:55.000But like, you know, what's happening with us now, there's nothing in the storehouse of myth to take care of, like, building machines that take over, right?
01:30:03.000So the reason we keep telling that story over and over again is we're preparing ourselves, right?
01:30:07.000We're building the myths, you know, that sort of will help.
01:30:10.000We don't know what's going to happen, but we have to keep telling that story because we can feel it coming, you know what I mean?
01:30:15.000So we need to keep telling that story to kind of explore what the options are.
01:30:20.000And that's what I liked about the ending.
01:30:23.000But the idea that like, oh yeah, this balance, you know, you've got to keep going through these cycles of trying to achieve this balance between, you know, silicon forms and biological forms.
01:32:09.000And back in the day, you know, you paid for your, you had to, you know, first of all, you got your ass kicked.
01:32:13.000But, you know, you had to go to the store every week and get the comics and, you know.
01:32:17.000And now, you know, you just look up Captain America and you can know everything there was about his, you know, his origin story and everything.
01:32:22.000So it's like that idea that, like, there's no domains of knowledge that you can't instantly access and have all the backstory that you need.
01:34:19.000So the thing we had to figure out was...
01:34:22.000First of all, that scene where he first encounters the ancient one, you know, and she has to kind of like, you know, school him on there's more ways to think about the world than science.
01:35:24.000There is no better way to kill an hour, especially after a stressful day, than to And it stimulates the mind.
01:35:33.000Jamie and I have talked about this many times, that we have this deep appreciation for chess and for Go and all these ancient games, but there are games like StarCraft and even one-on-one quake matches that require intense calculating.
01:35:48.000You have to think about the environment and understanding of the map that you're competing in.
01:36:05.000Because I'm so bad at it that I know there's some kids, some 13-year-old in Korea who's just like, pow, you're dead, pow, you're dead, spawn, die, spawn.
01:36:12.000But I like something with a really good story, you know?
01:38:26.000Yeah, so you've got to wonder what's up with that.
01:38:28.000Why is that something that's stirring around in our head?
01:38:30.000I think the apocalypse is because we kind of feel we're nervous about what's happening with us because we can see we're pushing up against boundaries.
01:41:24.000Somebody had an image, and it was from 2007. And it said, man, look at this.
01:41:30.000I wonder what video games are going to be looking like, the graphics are going to be looking like in 2018. And then it shows Fortnite.
01:41:36.000It's like they've turned the textures off.
01:41:40.000You turn the textures off when you play online if you don't have a powerful enough computer so that you don't screw up your streaming.
01:41:47.000It doesn't make your video card work so hard, but also it makes it easier to recognize shapes.
01:41:55.000That was the thing they did with Quake.
01:41:57.000They would completely turn the textures off when guys would be playing in high-level matches.
01:42:01.000And you would just deal with these flat walls, and then the object, the person that you were fighting against, they would stand out in stark contrast.
01:42:10.000Whereas, you know, otherwise you'd be in this castle wall, you'd have incredible textures on the wall, and you wouldn't be able to see them as easily.
01:43:56.000Shadows still exist, but all the textures are gone.
01:43:59.000And if you show a video of that, see if you can find a video of that, Jamie.
01:44:03.000When, in the videos, you see things moving around with no textures, and you realize what an advantage it would be if you were playing someone who's...
01:44:10.000You're constantly dealing with all this visual input.
01:44:36.000Didn't they come out with another version of Doom?
01:44:38.000Yes, they did, and there's another one that's coming out soon.
01:44:41.000But what Quake 1 was was these cool maps, and you'd run around and shoot each other, and you'd have these deathmatches, so one-on-one deathmatches and shoot rockets at each other and shit.
01:44:53.000And you're seeing it through your perspective.
01:44:55.000So if you have a rocket launcher, you see the rocket launcher in front of you.
01:44:59.000Oh, so that whole idea of first person.
01:46:14.000Oh, someone teaches someone how to play a video game?
01:46:16.000Yeah, like the guy who's a nerd in the beginning and he's like a loser, but you know, he comes back and he gets the girl.
01:46:20.000Well, one of the reasons why I wanted to talk to you about this in particular is because I am more and more convinced that our future may lie in some artificially created world and that people are more interested and more attracted every day to virtual reality.
01:47:48.000Like, that's what everybody's, and this just, this game had, you know, and there's like, I don't know, a few hundred thousand people in there, you know, creating the universe.
01:48:38.000There's a crazy archery game where you're on the top of a castle and these little monsters that look like they could be in South Park.
01:48:46.000They're not like detailed, but they're kind of cool looking monsters and you shoot at them with bows and arrows and they're trying to invade the castle.
01:48:51.000But man, it's addictive because you really look down, you see them all around you.
01:49:28.000If I'm holding my hands like this, which is I'm holding my hands vertically where my thumbs are up, the boxing gloves would be horizontal like they would be if you were punching someone.
01:51:54.000I'm telling you, man, this is better than any of the rides at Disneyland, and it's just outside of Disneyland, in downtown Disney, so you don't have to pay to get into Disney to get it.
01:53:16.000And it's funny, even with the controller on my crappy PS4, when it vibrates, even that's enough to sort of give you, it's amazing how much the brain sort of picks up on these signals.
01:53:27.000When you're using the HTC Vive and you draw an arrow back, when it gets to the knocking point, you feel it like, and then you release.
01:53:35.000There's a feeling in your hand releasing the arrow.
01:53:47.000But, you know, I'm always aware, whenever I'm sort of like, oh shit, this is going to be terrible, I always remember the whole, you can see in like, I think at some point, Socrates, you know, 2,500 years ago, is like, oh, kids today, they're all a bunch of, you know, assholes.
01:54:00.000So, you know, who knows what we'll do with it?
01:54:02.000And, you know, hopefully, maybe it'll help, you know, maybe, I don't know, you know, I mean, I think there's, I don't want to be like, oh, that's terrible, but they're clearly Is this a different game, Jamie?
01:54:48.000Because that whole thing, when you're in a good game, the first couple hours of a game, and you're just learning the basic stuff, and you get excited, you're like, oh, this is a cool world to be in.
01:54:57.000But I'd be interested to think, at some point, I'd try VR for the same thing.
01:55:01.000Because once you can have people be tactile, and they're not just sort of in their head, what else can you do to teach them things?
01:56:00.000You know, there's this guy, philosopher, who came up with this brilliant argument for, like, why we're probably somebody else's simulation, self-aware simulation.
01:56:09.000And the idea is like, look, if you get one, you know, we've been talking about like civilizations, when they get a million years ahead, what can they do?
01:56:15.000That they're so powerful, they can build computers that can simulate reality, like fully simulate reality, where like, you know, just like in the Matrix, you have programs that are self-aware.
01:56:24.000And so, you know, once they get to that, and they start running simulations of the world, right?
01:56:28.000It's cheaper to run, it's cheap to run simulations, so they just run trillions of them, right?
01:56:34.000From that argument, there's more simulated realities than there is the one real reality.
01:56:40.000So odds are, right, you know, if there's a trillion simulated realities and one real reality, you're probably in a simulated reality.
01:56:46.000So are we a, you know, everything, like right now, you and I think this is real, you know, but what we are is an incredibly detailed and we are self-aware programs in, you know, a silicon matrix of, you know...
01:57:18.000One day we're going to be, if you allow technology to continue, if we keep moving forward at an exponential pace, there's going to come a point in time where we have something that's indistinguishable from reality.
01:57:29.000So how do we know that we're not already in it?
01:57:31.000And once we're in it, will we create another reality?
01:57:34.000Will we continue to create simulations inside of simulations, like fractals?
01:58:02.000And there's a way in which, again, when you think a million, two million years in the future, this is why my, you know, I hate to loop this back to climate change, but just like, God, if we could just make it through, who the fuck knows what we're going to be?
01:58:14.000One thing I did like about Interstellar was the idea that, like, our future selves, which have now become integrated into the very fabric of reality, you know, that's how far you've evolved.
01:58:24.000You become the laws of physics, that they're kind of opening up the wormhole for us.
01:58:28.000And so, you know, a million years is so long, who knows what we can become?
01:58:34.000And it's just like, you know, don't hold us back.
01:58:37.000I'm not a fan of the people that deny science, but one thing I am a fan of is watching them do it.
01:58:46.000Like watching monkeys throw shit at the zoo.
01:58:49.000It's just something weird about watching people argue really obvious right-wing talking points.
01:58:55.000And most of them, by the way, have no financial interest in climate change one way or the other.
01:59:26.000It's not fair that like, oh, you get like, you know, you get in an accident and you're like, oh, God, please give me the MRI. And then, you know, as soon as your arm heals, you're going to be tweeting about how like, you know, climate change is all bullshit.
01:59:38.000I'm not sure what to do with that, right?
01:59:40.000I mean, are those guys just like, I mean, is this something we should like pay attention to or should we just be like, okay, you know, fine, go ahead, do your thing.
01:59:48.000Well, I had an interesting conversation with Neil deGrasse Tyson about it.
01:59:51.000And he said, one of the real problems with debating these people is you elevate their profile and they're never going to believe it in the first place.
01:59:56.000And the reality is there's a mental illness involved in a lot of these people.
02:00:05.000And then there's this massive lack of education and lack of reading.
02:00:10.000They're not interested in understanding how they know that the Earth is round or how they know that every other planet in the solar system is round.
02:00:17.000Or how they know that every other planet that we've observed, all the stars are round.
02:00:41.000We've created this world that's really easy to survive in.
02:00:44.000We've nerfed all the hard edges, and we keep the wolves off the streets, and there's so these fucking dum-dums, and then they get online with computers, which is hilarious.
02:01:29.000There's people who think there's aliens underneath the earth and there's tunnels and just reptilians and there's a secret cabal of kid fuckers that run the world.
02:01:39.000You made a really excellent point just a minute ago, right?
02:01:42.000Which is because the philosopher Karl Popper once said, if there was a conspiracy, it failed, right?
02:01:46.000The whole conspiracy thing is that like, oh yeah, everybody's in on it.
02:02:27.000But, you know, here's what's really messed up is that, like, you know, climate change denial is just like a slightly less wackadoodle version of that, right?
02:02:35.000Because, you know, there's a guy, writer, philosopher, I forgot his name, Morton, I forgot his first name.
02:02:42.000But he talks about climate change being a hyperobject.
02:02:45.000Like, you know, that modern world, we have things that are hyperobjects, which means they're just so big that we have a hard time wrapping our minds around them.
02:02:53.000And that hyperobjects, you know, if we're going to evolve, right, we're going to evolve new behaviors, one of them is the capacity to deal with hyperobjects.
02:03:01.000But people want everything to be simple.
02:03:03.000I mean, which cracks me up because they're fine with this being complex.
02:03:06.000Their cell phone can be complex because they like to use it.
02:03:08.000But the idea that the climate change, they need it.
02:03:14.000It freaks them out because it's too complicated or something.
02:03:16.000So they go for the simple answer, which is that it's a conspiracy.
02:04:08.000Did you pull up this article, Al Gore may be the first...
02:04:12.000Climate change billionaire or green billionaire that he's made so much money doing these seminars and speeches and the film itself and they're doing a sequel to the film.
02:04:41.000Because if he's investing in these companies and the companies start making money, which already solar employs more people now than coal does.
02:05:43.000No, no, I've thought about that a lot.
02:05:44.000It's a big thought and consideration when it comes to automation and technology and...
02:05:51.000You know, with the automation thing, it's so true, right?
02:05:52.000Because, you know, when you think about what's been going on with the last election, you know, and everybody was like, oh, you know, like, you know, what's happening with blue collar people, you know, workers, which is totally true.
02:06:01.000But like, man, it's not China, it's automation, right?
02:06:05.000And that's what really is going to screw up the whole nature of work.
02:06:16.000Do you feel like being a university professor is one day going to be retro?
02:06:21.000That kids are going to want to learn online?
02:06:23.000They're going to want to learn through some sort of an interactive course so that you can get on your phone rather than go to an actual physical place?
02:06:31.000You know, I mean, it's possible, but I think, and this is going to be the whole question with the new economy, or whatever, whatever happens, whatever we're moving into, is finding those places where, you know what, I don't want a machine.
02:07:00.000I had one student say, you know, the reviews you get at the end, the guy said, hey, I hate to say this, but, you know, you should make those tapes for people to go to sleep because every class, your voice put me to sleep.
02:07:21.000I think that people will always, with education, there'll be some component of it that, yeah, sure, you can learn it online.
02:07:27.000But I think, like, You know, we're going to have to, there'll be a place for, like, people coming in and, like, learning in groups and having somebody who, like, has, you know, spent their whole life studying the thing, telling you, you know, what's going on.
02:07:40.000Right, like, there's a lot of things where, like, and we've lost a lot of this, mentorship, right?
02:07:46.000There's a lot of things you need somebody who spent their whole life going, oh, you crank it this way, not that way, because if you crank it that way, it'll never work.
02:07:53.000You can't learn that from watching a video or something.
02:08:38.000I think it may really be necessary, because if there's no work, you know, I mean, that's a recipe for disaster, you know, for your democratic society.
02:08:48.000Yeah, I just hope we can move past this idea that everybody who needs that is some sort of a welfare brat.
02:09:30.000And, you know, for the lives that are lost in the driving, I mean, you know, the car crashes, is that going to be worth the social upheaval that comes from not having any work anymore?
02:09:42.000So, I mean, just like, there are these huge issues bearing down on us.
02:11:22.000Because, you know, when you do backpacking or something, you're in the backcountry, you know, a couple days, you notice things changing, like, oh, the moon's not as quiet as you know.
02:11:29.000And so nobody looks up now anymore, right?
02:12:08.000And you feel like you're flying through space.
02:12:10.000And you have this really humble feeling that I think people get in a couple of different places.
02:12:16.000People get when they live Next to mountains, they get it when they live next to the ocean, but you really get it if you could see space.
02:12:23.000And I think one of the things that is haunting the human race is the arrogance of humans, which is compounded by the fact that we can't see the cosmos, that we only see what's in front of us, so this is the world that we live in, we put a roof over our head, this is the box, I got my blinders on, I'm moving ahead because I want a new Lexus,
02:12:40.000or whatever it is, whatever material thing you're trying to possess.
02:12:45.000This unstoppable force in front of, when you look up and you see the cosmos, it's like it's an undeniable reality.
02:12:51.000And you go, oh, okay, okay, this is just a small thing.
02:12:56.000My existence is just a small thing in this This mystery, this giant mystery of, you know, we just found out 20 years ago, there's planets out there.
02:13:50.000And I think, right, a lot of the stupidity of the modern age, as you said, the consumerism, particularly, all that matters to me is getting my next pile of shit.
02:13:59.000When you're out there, you realize, who cares?
02:14:36.000And that all this shiny shit is all innovation and it's eventually going to move to this one singularity and that singularity is some new being.
02:15:11.000We've got this really weird mixed evolutionary baggage.
02:15:14.000And whether or not you can make it to the next side with the existential challenge of triggering climate change is kind of like...
02:15:20.000A, what your evolution, what evolution gave you, you know, because you can imagine species like hive minds, you know, if you came from termite, an intelligent termite species, it might be a lot easier to deal with climate change.
02:15:29.000You're like, everybody, you know, get on the, you know, get on the, get on the course.
02:15:34.000Um, but, uh, uh, The most essentially is can you evolve new behaviors, right?
02:15:40.000So we've been on this track and it's leading us in a way that, as you said, it's like the shiny thing dangling in front of us is leading us off on this one track.
02:15:48.000And the question is, can we evolve new behaviors, which I actually am going to say this.
02:15:51.000I think part of it is spiritual, you know, or at least in my atheist way of like reconnecting with mystery to see like, you know, we're part of this and we need to respect it.
02:16:01.000And, you know, when you say spiritual, what do you mean?
02:16:04.000So my first book was about science and religion.
02:16:06.000You know, I'm an atheist, but I'm not a Richard Dawkins atheist.
02:16:49.000And so the spiritual part, like you said, you know, when you're in the mountains, right?
02:16:52.000So I love doing backcountry hiking and, you know, when you get above treeline, there's that weird thing that happens when you're above treeline and you're just like, you know, you got this panorama around you and that thing is, you know, the earth, right?
02:17:25.000Something about being in the mountains is also there's a weird feeling, and I don't know if it's real, but there's a weird feeling that there's no signal out there.
02:17:33.000Because in the places where there's no cell signal, there's a feeling you get when you're absolutely not connected.
02:17:57.000Yeah, and the signal, what you're talking about, the signal, it's really the thing is, for me, it's like when I get far enough back that I know there's just not another human being here, you know?
02:18:06.000And this is like, when I leave, this is going to still be happening.
02:18:09.000It just doesn't give a shit about you, right?
02:18:11.000And it's just moving along, and as you said, it's been moving this way for millions of years, and you just realize, like, and that's why, you know, part of the thing I'm saying with the book is that, like, look, if we trigger climate change, that's just the Earth's way of, like, It used us to create climate change to now move on to something else.
02:18:49.000Because When we connect to that mystery, then we're in a better place to make the right decisions, to understand what the decisions are.
02:18:57.000If not, we're like, oh, we got to save the polar bears.
02:18:59.000And we're not looking at, no, no, it's the biosphere as a whole that we have to understand.
02:19:03.000Well, operating out of ego and ideology and not out of rational thought with all the information at our disposal and really verifying that information.
02:21:16.000Well, there's always a problem with diet in that you're not taking into account how nutrients interact with other foods or different foods interact with foods.
02:21:24.000When you say coffee's bad, okay, was it bad when you're smoking cigarettes or bad when you're eating grass-fed meat or bad when you're on a vegan diet?
02:21:34.000And who are these people, and what are they putting in their system, and how much sugar are they taking in, and how much sodium, and what's the nutrient levels of their blood?
02:21:41.000Did you test them for B12 deficiencies, and all these different things?
02:21:45.000That's the real problem with any dietary studies.
02:21:47.000They don't take into account the extremely varied diet of human beings.
02:21:52.000And the complexity of the system, right?
02:21:53.000So I would tell people that when it comes to health sciences, anything in general about human beings, look, this stuff is really complex.
02:22:00.000And as you said, there's a A thousand different things that can interact.
02:22:03.000So you got to really take that stuff with a grain of salt.
02:22:05.000Like, okay, does smoking cause cancer?