In this episode of The Joe Rogan Experience, the host talks with astrophysicist Dr. Carl Sagan about the amazing work done by the Hubble Space Telescope and how it changed the way we see the universe for decades to come. Joe also talks about the importance of the Moon landing on the moon and the impact it had on our sense of achievement and how we can continue to grow into a better and better place in the universe. And he's joined by a special guest who's been a long time friend of the show, Dr. John Grumman, who talks about how he and his team at NASA are trying to solve the problem of putting a bigger telescope into orbit. Thanks to everyone who helped make this podcast possible and all the people who have contributed to making it possible in the first place! Thank you so much for being a part of this journey with me, and I can't wait for you to join us next week for our next episode. Cheers, Joe and the rest of the crew at J.R.J. Crew! Music: "Space Junk" by Zapsplat and "Goodbye Outer Space" by Fountains of Wayne (feat. Andrea Thomas) and "Outer Space Odyssey" by The Krew by The Weakerthans , courtesy of Suneaters, recorded live at WFMU and edited by John Rocha, produced by Haley Shaw, produced and produced by Alex Blumberg, edited by Jeff Perla, and produced in Los Angeles, CA, and edited in Baltimore, MD, PA, we are working on location and sound design. , we are . of the podcast, we will be working on a new version of "The Joe Rogans Podcast by day, by night, all day, by night. and all day thanks to , and , and is , produced by , edited by & , with help from , all by . Thank you for listening to this podcast, , thanks to all of you, my dear friends! and the amazing people who helped us make it happen. - - thank you for your support is so much - we can't thank you enough, thank you, all of our thanks to you, we really appreciate it, - and we appreciate you, so much of you're amazing, and we really really appreciate you.
00:00:37.000Could you please explain the difference in the ability of the capabilities of this telescope versus what we've had previously?
00:00:44.000Yeah, so first of all, it's all that, and the excitement was in part because so much could have gone wrong with this thing, and the fact that nothing went wrong, we were ecstatic.
00:00:58.000Could you explain how complicated it is to get something like that?
00:01:02.000Yeah, so one of the great challenges that we face is, how do you put a telescope in orbit that's bigger than the rocket that's gonna launch it?
00:03:09.000And so this is where you need engineers, clever engineers.
00:03:12.000We say, here's a rocket, one of the most powerful rockets we can use, but the fairing, that's the place where you hold the payload, can only be so big.
00:03:23.000And they say, all right, why don't we fold the telescope?
00:03:26.000Now, how are you going to fold the mirror?
00:04:21.000That was designed and built in Bethpage Long Island at Grumman Aerospace.
00:04:27.000And you go to Bethpage today, people still stand tall because they had aunts and uncles who worked on that project.
00:04:35.000Space is a force of nature unto itself in our sense of pride, in our sense of achievement.
00:04:43.000And our sense of what operates on civilization to take us into the future lest we continue to regress and move back into the cave which we came.
00:04:55.000There it is all folded up in the image we now see for those who are watching this.
00:05:01.000And you slip that into a fairing and then you launch it a million miles from Earth.
00:09:45.000This is the telescope peering deep into gas clouds that otherwise would enshroud what's going on.
00:09:52.000And you get to see stars being born, planets being born.
00:09:56.000And so what's remarkable about JWST is that to be tuned for the edge of the universe and the birth of galaxies is the same properties you would want to see the birth of stars.
00:10:13.000A star is born right in front of your nose that would otherwise be cloaked by gas.
00:10:19.000And infrared penetrates those clouds and enables you to see it as though the cloud isn't even there.
00:10:25.000And you already know this because if you're driving through fog, you put on your fog lights.
00:11:39.000Well, our detectors are better, and let me remind you that when the Hubble was designed, it was designed in like the 1980s, and it was scheduled to go up, and then we had the Challenger accident.
00:11:52.000So there's Hubble sitting there in mothballs with an old Microsoft chip.
00:11:57.000And by the time it launched, it was already not as fast as it could have been.
00:12:01.000And so the very first servicing mission swapped all that out and put in better methods and tools for measuring what it is we always needed it to do.
00:12:13.000So one sad part about this Is that it's not serviceable.
00:12:19.000We have no access to that point in space a million miles from the moon.
00:12:24.000We haven't left low Earth orbit since 1972. We're not going out a million miles from Earth to fix a telescope.
00:12:58.000And do they, I mean, they obviously know, like, where some of the asteroid belts are and where some of the, like, nearby Earth objects are.
00:13:08.000Yeah, so in this context, so first, most asteroids are in the asteroid belt.
00:14:46.000So, this James Webb telescope, in terms of its ability to recognize things, like what magnitude of improvement are we talking about from the Hubble?
00:14:56.000Yeah, a factor of 10. Yeah, a factor of 10. Yeah, easily.
00:18:30.000And so I went home and stood in front of the mirror.
00:18:34.000And had people just shout out things to me, anything in the universe, any idea, object, person, place, or thing.
00:18:40.000And I would come up with like three sentences that are interesting, make you smile, and be tasty enough to want to tell someone else the anatomy of a soundbite.
00:19:22.000I read an article about the Webb telescope and what they were taking into consideration is the possibility that the Big Bang may be incorrect and that the universe might be larger and older than we think.
00:19:36.000So, I hesitate to ask what pages on the internet you hang out on.
00:19:43.000It wasn't saying the universe is older.
00:19:48.000It's saying as more data and new information comes in, there is a distinct possibility that the Big Bang might just explain the reach of the technology and not the actual scale of the universe itself.
00:20:02.000Okay, so the way to think about this is...
00:20:05.000And this is the way science has worked since basically the year 1600 where Galileo sort of starts codifying what people knew probably should be happening but no one really did it in large scale.
00:20:18.000If you have an idea about something, then you test it multiple ways and get other people to test it.
00:20:23.000And if the tests give you consistent results, you have a new understanding of the universe.
00:20:29.000When that happens, That knowledge of the universe doesn't go away.
00:22:08.000Because the Sun's gravity is so monstrous and Mercury's orbiting close enough to it that it's being influenced by extra phenomenon going on in the universe that's the product of very high and significant gravity.
00:22:22.000And so, so then do we throw Newton out the window?
00:24:18.000So now I've got this Big Bang thing, okay?
00:24:21.000And, well, is this embedded in something bigger?
00:24:28.000So when you put like quantum physics and general relativity and you try to come up with some bigger understanding, deeper understanding, strength theorists have been all into this, you get a multiverse.
00:24:49.000It's definitely older than our universe because it birthed our universe and it births other universes and it births The way the equations drive it, an infinity of universes.
00:25:01.000This is the idea that maybe there's a version of us in another where I'm bald and you got the afro, but everything else is the same.
00:25:08.000And also a version where everything's the same.
00:25:11.000Where everything would be the same, yes.
00:25:13.000Everything you've ever said has been said before exactly in the same order.
00:26:35.000You roll down that hill, you're gaining energy.
00:26:39.000At the bottom of the hill, something stops you.
00:26:43.000And then where does all that energy go?
00:26:46.000One of the hypotheses, and I'm highly simplifying here, is that the energy gained by rolling down a hill And these are energy hills that would exist in this sort of higher dimensional space that we're talking about.
00:27:00.000That energy has to manifest in that object somehow, and it becomes an explosion.
00:27:06.000With enough energy, it gives birth to matter, everything that we know and love, and it expands.
00:27:11.000Because when you concentrate that much energy in a small spot, that's the only thing you can do.
00:27:16.000I understand that you're simplifying it, but I don't understand.
00:27:19.000Simplify it in the sense that by using this basin analogy and rolling down a hill, that there are equations of the energetics of a system, and this is called a false vacuum.
00:27:34.000So you can be in a place that's not the true bottom energy state of the system, but you think everything is fine, but it's not.
00:27:46.000If you move around among these hills and valleys, you end up birthing universes out the other side.
00:27:53.000And this multiverse concept actually delivers this for you, basically for free.
00:27:59.000That thought would be that the Big Bang is just one of many events that happen in the multiverse.
00:28:23.000If you cross over from one universe to the other and the charge on the electron is slightly different, all your atoms could just scatter or compress into a pile of goo.
00:28:36.000Yeah, so take something to test first.
00:28:52.000Chickens are way easier to just send to space.
00:28:54.000I spent a whole section in this book talking about people who love animals and want to care for them and don't want to eat them, but the only loved ones that are cuddly.
00:30:33.000Mosquitoes, you know, the biggest enemy of humans, as big an enemy as we are to each other through warfare and the history of civilization, the greatest enemy to human life has been the mosquito.
00:30:48.000Responsible for more than a billion human deaths in the history of civilization.
00:30:54.000And so, here we have mosquitoes, ticks, tapeworms, you know, go down the list and you can ask, if you're really into animals and don't want to kill them, if you heard that ticks were endangered,
00:31:11.000Would you start a movement to protect ticks?
00:32:22.000Guaranteeing the mouse gets eaten whole by an owl or pecked apart by all manner of woodland predators between 9 and 18 months of its life.
00:32:34.000So the safest thing to do with your mouse is to leave it in your basement.
00:32:39.000If you really care about animal life and the mouse managed to get into your basement, leave it there.
00:32:46.000It'll live up to six years in your basement.
00:32:48.000I lived in Colorado for a while next to an ashram and I was visiting the ashram and talking to the woman who runs it and she sprayed raid all over these ants.
00:33:46.000It's probably made from the wood of about 50 trees.
00:33:49.000Each tree could have lived 100 years but didn't because it was cut down to make your home.
00:33:55.000The studs, the 2x4s, the floorboards, the wall panels, the siding.
00:34:02.000And each of those trees was home to birds and insects and fungus and squirrels and And every day of that tree's life, via photosynthesis, it created 15 times the mass of the mouse in breathable oxygen.
00:34:25.000So I ask you, who do you think nature cares more about?
00:35:48.000So to fault a tree or plant life for not having a beating heart, when it's not that they need one and don't have one, it's that they don't need one and never wanted one.
00:36:01.000Now, you're talking about the mycelium.
00:36:23.000There's the plant kingdom, animal kingdom, fungal kingdom, and then we have a kingdom that includes all of the bacteria and archaea and other microscopic life forms.
00:41:30.000So, the test for whether you really left your body or whether you were hallucinating it is get some writing that faces the ceiling up above your body.
00:41:47.000And if you're floating above your body, above that piece of paper, when you come back to life, you should be able to say what's written on that piece of paper.
00:42:33.000So like, hey, I know this guy's about to die, but instead of concentrating on bringing him back to life, let's write down on a piece of paper and leave it on the show.
00:42:43.000In 1895, after Wilhelm Röntgen discovers x-rays, and they find out it penetrates your body, and you can see bones inside your body, you know what they did?
00:43:55.000World is what is objectively true, and what's objectively true can be verified by multiple people.
00:44:01.000And if it's only true within your head, it's not useful, is all I'm saying.
00:44:09.000How could it not be useful if it's useful to you?
00:44:12.000But hold on, if it's useful to you, and then that usefulness to you actually manifests itself in something that gets created because of this experience, like Kerry Mullis created the PCR method because he had an acid trip,
00:44:28.000and during the acid trip came up with this idea.
00:44:32.000So, what we'd have to ask is, how frequent So you get everybody who takes trips of any kind, be it mushrooms or acid, and look at the body of their new thoughts that have come from them,
00:44:50.000For them having, when they credited, okay?
00:44:53.000And Carl Sagan was a big pothead, okay?
00:45:08.000Carl Sagan actually believed that there was What was his description, the way he described it?
00:45:15.000But he said he believed that there are thoughts that were only available when you were under the influence of marijuana.
00:45:21.000That is certainly the case for any drug, right?
00:45:23.000Yeah, but he felt like those thoughts were beneficial.
00:45:25.000Well, I can ask, are those thoughts more connected to reality than if you were not so influenced?
00:45:31.000I did an experiment with myself, okay?
00:45:34.000When I first started writing in graduate school at a monthly column, You know, there's that stereotype of Hemingway with a drink, you know, and they're writing, and that's their creative moment.
00:45:47.000I said, I don't really like hard liquor, but I like wine, so I said, let me get a bottle of wine and drink wine while I write.
00:45:54.000And I said, yeah, this is good, this is good, and I'm doing it.
00:48:08.000Well, George Carlin had a great point.
00:48:10.000He's like, you should write about things that you're thinking about and things that are, like, important or things that are on your mind, and then he would, like, let it sit, and then he would smoke pot and go back to it.
00:48:21.000And then he would come up with all the funny.
00:49:15.000You could build a house with a hammer, or you could hit yourself in the dick if you're fucking crazy.
00:49:19.000And that's the problem with all sorts of things.
00:49:22.000They need to be managed responsibly, and people need to understand what the effects are, what the dosage is, and that's where science comes in.
00:49:48.000And then I'll see if some new creative thing comes out of me at that time.
00:49:52.000Well, I don't know if new creative things will come out of you, but I think thoughts will come out that probably wouldn't exist without them.
00:50:02.000And when you're talking about like really breakthrough psychedelic moments like DMT or mushroom psilocybin, one of the really fascinating things is they mimic neurochemistry.
00:50:14.000Like, DMT is in the brain, and it's in all the organs, and it's a part of natural human neurochemistry.
00:50:23.000Well, except, of course, so is fentanyl.
00:50:25.000Fentanyl is a part of the human neurochemistry?
00:51:49.000Well, it certainly can kill you today because so much of it is laced with fentanyl, which is one of the number one killers of young people, unfortunately, is fentanyl contamination of drugs.
00:52:35.000Listen, I've had many, many conversations with people on this podcast about that because I've worked with my friend Josh Dubin who was originally an ambassador for the Innocence Project and has done a bunch of stuff on his own where he's gotten many, many, many people out of jail.
00:52:51.000The fact that an Innocence Project even has to exist in this world is itself a travesty.
00:52:56.000Well, I'm hoping that with science there's going to come a time where we can actually read the contents of people's minds.
00:53:04.000And that this will no longer be, I remember this.
00:53:11.000But I think maybe, yes, that would be interesting.
00:53:15.000But isn't the problem is that false memories are a real thing.
00:53:17.000So there are people who believe something, and if you read their mind, you'll just see what it is that they believe.
00:53:23.000But I wonder if you could sort of back-engineer that belief.
00:53:28.000I wonder if it could get to the point where you could say, oh, you believe this because this is a memory of the way you've described the memory.
00:53:36.000No, we just do it Black Mirror style and you have a chip that records everything that you see.
00:55:32.000If the only evidence available is eyewitness testimony, then everything I know about it Tells me I should not trust it on the level where you end up putting someone in jail.
00:55:47.000So I could not convict if that's the only evidence you have.
00:55:51.000What the judge said next was, are there any other jurors, like juror 14, who needs more than one witness before they would be able to convict?
00:56:06.000And I said, should I jump in now and say, that's not what I said.
00:57:01.000I mean, if that's how you were talking, when they used to dunk people, and if you died face up, you were innocent and died face down, you were guilty.
00:57:08.000That was the best they had then, but we improved on it.
00:57:33.000So, in one of the voyages, they went on some stretch of time and they didn't have food and they had Indians that they brought on board as well as some of their own crew.
00:58:14.000But now we have his handwritten notes in his testimony of something that is completely fulfilling his own worldview's expectations of how things should be.
00:58:27.000So in the whole sort of law and order chapter, I just pick all that apart and just try to say, you know, why not have jurors that are really good at data analysis?
00:59:02.000As they've done many times in psychology class, the class is unfolding, and they stage some violent thing with an explosion, and then they say, write what you just saw.
01:01:14.000Do you realize that the first time anyone ever did that to realize that maybe there's some interesting result here was after The invention of algebra, trigonometry,
01:02:43.000And there are a lot of people in it who you don't know.
01:02:46.000It's just very unusual when you meet someone in another country that you know from back home.
01:02:50.000Well, if you do the math, there are a lot of things that people say are unusual where it would be unusual if you didn't.
01:02:59.000Well, if you fly to England and you don't tell anybody you're flying to England and you run into a friend from back home, that's pretty unusual.
01:03:08.000Look how often people say that it happens.
01:03:15.000Okay, everybody you know has that story.
01:03:18.000If you run the statistics on it, it would be odd if you went your life—presuming you have a normal life and you know people and your school was big and all of this, okay?
01:03:28.000You didn't grow up in a farm with nobody—you didn't know anybody.
01:03:33.000It requires some basic number of people.
01:03:36.000So there's a lot of errors of statistics that we make of probability and statistics.
01:03:44.000The sad part of it is there's an entire industry that has risen to exploit that fact.
01:04:00.000Well, look at the previous roles because they'll show you the previous roles and seven hasn't appeared in 20 roles or whatever the number is they put.
01:08:53.000No, I'm just saying it's a little suspicious.
01:08:59.000That the very knowledge of math that would undermine the ability of the state lottery to make money is not a required part of the math curriculum in kindergarten through 12. But you don't think that's why.
01:09:57.000Just removing ourselves from the conspiracy theory aspect of it, do you think that it would be beneficial to teach probability and statistics to people?
01:10:39.000If you're shooting 50% in a game, or 40%, and you take, I don't know how many shots, you take 30 shots, you can look at the probability that you'll have multiple shots in a row that are made.
01:10:53.000And it's very high and it's very real.
01:10:55.000So it's not something special happening.
01:10:58.000It is the randomness of the statistics that's happening.
01:11:01.000Okay, but this is talking about statistics, but from an individual basis.
01:11:04.000Do you discount the idea that sometimes people feel really good and they have a very good sense of where the ball's going, where they're more loose or relaxed or more practiced, whatever it may be, and they're more accurate because of that?
01:13:23.000Do you realize last year we lost as many people in the United States to traffic accidents...
01:13:32.000As we did in all the years we fought in Vietnam.
01:13:36.000Look at the effort we put up as a country beginning maybe 1967, certainly 68, to stop the carnage And that's just the American deaths, not to mention the millions of deaths of the Vietnamese themselves, North and South.
01:13:52.000Point is, our reactions to statistics are very different depending on what caused it.
01:17:40.000Because the government would be introducing an animal that killed your children, But no one's looking at the hundred people that were, whatever the numbers were, it was a factor of three or so.
01:20:09.000When deer rut is when you hunt them, and one of the things that happens during the rut is they get ridiculous, and they just run out into traffic.
01:20:16.000Okay, they can't even control themselves.
01:20:27.000Or the male is trying to chase the female, and all he's got on his mind is he's got tunnel vision, and they just, boom, gets hit by that F-250.
01:20:35.000Speaking of deer, By the way, my sister drives an F-250.
01:25:11.000There's a bear walking down a highway, and there's a tipped over traffic cone, and it looks at it, and then it writes it back up and keeps walking by it.
01:25:50.000What do you think's going on with that?
01:25:51.000I don't want to say that's evidence of intelligence so much as it's evidence of more going on inside the animal's head than any of us would have previously ever credited.
01:26:04.000In another example, and I get this example in body and mind again, there's a magpie Bird, who there's a bottle of water in some playground area, park area, and it goes up to the bottle of water and it dips its beak in to drink from it.
01:27:42.000So what they did was say, they say, oh, no, we don't have the biggest brain, oh, but brain to body weight ratio, then we're the highest, okay?
01:27:53.000Yes, so our, because they're bigger, much bigger creatures than we are, and when you divide the weight of the brain by the weight of the body, we win.
01:28:03.000We beat out Whales, we beat out dolphins, we beat out elephants.
01:28:08.000Then there are those who are fans of those who say, well, you want to do it lean weight because the dolphins and whales have a lot of blubber and the brain is not having to control the blubber.
01:28:20.000That boosts them, but they're still not as high as us.
01:28:22.000So we walk away saying, we're at the top.
01:28:25.000However, what they did not say, which I had to, 40 years later, I learned this, That we do not have the highest brain-to-body weight ratio among animals,
01:28:42.000The magpie has a higher brain-to-body weight ratio than humans do, as do all other mid-sized birds, like crows, owls, eagles, these folks, okay?
01:28:58.000We all have a higher brain to body weight ratio than humans do.
01:29:01.000So that rule that put us at the top was specifically for mammals.
01:29:07.000And I'm angry that I didn't think to hear how specific that was when I was taught that in eighth grade.
01:29:16.000Isn't our understanding of like crows using tools very recent, like within the last hundred years?
01:29:22.000All I can tell you is any animal that we have ever got to study in more detail than we previously did has shown to be more intelligent than we ever gave it credit for being.
01:29:32.000And you know who has the biggest brain to body ratio of any creature on earth?
01:29:38.000Some species of ants really 15% of the body weight is their brain And it's kind of obvious some of them like the whole front section is their head, right?
01:29:47.000It's kind of in retrospect It's kind of obvious and ants are very busy doing some complicated things and we don't know what they're doing especially leaf cutter ants that they're busy carpenter ants leaf cutting ants and crossover into termite land I don't know how big their brains are,
01:30:10.000One of my favorite cartoons was two dolphins swimming together, and there's a human up, you know, it's like one of these water parks, right?
01:30:17.000And one dolphin says to the other, they, speaking of the humans that are up on dry land, they face each other and make noises, but it's not clear they're actually communicating.
01:30:29.000So, I'm just saying, we have a picture of an ant, remember?
01:31:31.000Well, you don't digest your food, first of all.
01:31:33.000Second, you want to keep them happy because if they're not happy, then they're in charge.
01:31:40.000They send you to the nearest toilet as fast as can be.
01:31:45.000So part of a cosmic perspective on this world is looking at things in a way that decentralizes who and what you are relative to everything else.
01:31:55.000And you get a much more honest account of how things work, how they're put together.
01:32:01.000That's very hard for people to really grasp.
01:34:40.000That's the only way you can distort it to fit it onto a flat plane, because it's looking at a full sort of 360, well, 180, and it's trying to get it in.
01:34:48.000But what happens if you take that horizontal line, the horizon, and put it below the midplane of the camera?
01:36:15.000Edgar Mitchell, Apollo 14. You develop an instant global consciousness, a people orientation, an intense dissatisfaction with the state of the world, and a compulsion to do something about it.
01:36:31.000From out there on the moon, international politics looks so petty.
01:36:35.000You want to grab a politician by the scruff of the neck and drag him a quarter million miles out and say, look at that, you son of a bitch.
01:36:44.000Edgar Mitchell also believes some wacky stuff.
01:36:48.000Yeah, I've spoken with him about it, and he was one of the, was he co-founder of the Noetic Institute?
01:36:55.000He was a big fan of the possibility that there was a deeper level of consciousness, and I don't think it involved drugs, but just that there was a deeper level of consciousness That the brain might be capable of if subjected to the proper influences and He told me how he came across this.
01:37:20.000Okay, I'll tell you They're on their way back from the moon and they're in the capsule and the capsule rotates It helps to stabilize it among other reasons for that happening and he happened to be positioned in the capsule for three days and Where the windows to the capsule were aligned with the plane of the solar system.
01:37:46.000Which means every time the capsule rotated, what came in and out of view was the Sun, the Moon, Earth, and all the planets.
01:37:59.000And so he's there for three days watching this drift by.
01:38:06.000And he felt like he had descended or ascended into a trance state that was beyond what he had ever experienced here on Earth.
01:38:19.000By normal things you encounter just being a human on Earth.
01:38:24.000And that led him to wonder whether this was an achievable state by some other means By some other forces that you could emulate here on Earth.
01:38:37.000And because he experienced that and I didn't, who am I to say?
01:39:31.000You know, only as an adult did I look back on that and I say, you trained me.
01:39:38.000From elementary school to know who my enemies are and who my friends are by color-coding contiguous land masses on a globe to teach me about the planet Earth.
01:40:46.000I mean, if you were in the dead of night, You don't know the difference between the ocean and the land as your sightline crosses North and South Korea.
01:40:59.000If you look at the GDP per capita differences between Israel and surrounding nations and South Korea and North Korea, it's factors of 8, 9, 10, 12. Space can reveal economic inequities in at least those two places,
01:41:22.000which is itself kind of a stunning fact.
01:41:27.000So I want to tell Elon, you're now neighbors with him, right?
01:41:31.000Get him back here and say, Elon, build a bus, a space bus.
01:42:40.000Ritual, because now we'd have what's called service observing.
01:42:43.000You just write in what things you want to observe on what nights for how many hours, and then they send you back the data.
01:42:49.000There used to be a pilgrimage to the top of a mountain, and you'd live nocturnally, and you'd go to them and be up all night with the telescope and the universe.
01:42:56.000There's a certain almost spiritual connectivity that When it's just you alone.
01:43:06.000And there are moments that mountains are high up enough so that if clouds roll in, you're above the clouds.
01:43:51.000In the southern hemisphere, only 15% of humans live there.
01:43:57.000So there's essentially no light pollution anywhere there.
01:44:01.00085% of all humans in the north, you're hard-pressed to find a completely dark sky in the north, leaving you to think that there's something magically beautiful and different about the southern sky.
01:44:14.000Hawaii's like 15 degrees north, so it's a lot of the southern sky as well.
01:44:18.000Point is, you have the best observing site in the world.
01:44:23.000Which is why they wanted to put a 30 meter telescope there and there's some conflict with the indigenous groups regarding that and whether the mountain is sacred and in what ways it's sacred and the like.
01:44:36.000And so that's still going on, last I checked.
01:46:14.000You know, if they're asking me to verify, I'm like, wow, it looks like stars.
01:46:20.000But that view of the Keck Observatory, just even from the base station, it's so stunning that it does reset your understanding of where we are.
01:46:30.000And it makes you angry that we have so much light pollution that people are denied that.
01:46:35.000Because I think it changes the way people view our relationship with the cosmos.
01:46:39.000In fact, it goes even deeper than that.
01:46:42.000I want to quickly comment that there is an entire indigenous community in the world that is very concerned about the loss of very dark night skies because so much of the culture Relates to that night sky as part of what it values and what it passes down from one generation to the next and it goes beyond just the light pollution because now folks like your boy Elon Is
01:47:13.000launching And I don't like the fact that they use the word constellation to refer to satellites.
01:47:40.000I'd say one out of six of my colleagues is probably on the autism spectrum.
01:47:45.000In retrospect, now that I look at, once you learn what the spectrum is, there used to be Asperger's and then they folded that in.
01:47:53.000You know, there are colleagues who just would not relate to another person or a camera, but they were graded in their lab and in the things.
01:48:01.000And so you say you're just not socialized.
01:48:03.000No, there's something else going on in there.
01:48:07.000Do you think that that is an evolutionary advantage that in some way people are developing in this manner so that they can concentrate on things like technology, like astrophysics,
01:48:22.000like these very specific things that require immense amounts of concentration?
01:48:30.000Do you think there's possibly that human beings are developing in that way, specifically to accentuate our ability to innovate?
01:48:38.000So it would be very hard to draw that conclusion as some kind of modern force of evolution, because for that to be the case, What would have to happen is those who had this sort of autistic level of focus, so high functioning autism,
01:48:55.000they would have to be making more babies than other people.
01:49:04.000So they'd have to be making more babies relative to everyone else to affect the evolutionary path of modern civilization.
01:49:13.000And it's not clear that that's what's actually happening.
01:49:16.000So we have to ask, did that have any value historically?
01:49:19.000I mean, in the history of the evolution of our species.
01:49:22.000So, in the chapter Body and Mind, I go over the variations that exist within our species.
01:49:31.000Huge variations in height, in weight, in speed, in all kinds of things.
01:49:42.000And you can ask, well, then what is normal?
01:49:48.000The day that we control the genome, is there going to be some place somewhere where there's a normal human and you're going to take your genome that you're about to control in your unborn child and say, let me adjust it so that it matches this so that all your senses are working as they're supposed to and all the proportions.
01:51:37.000The point is, when you look at someone and they're not, quote, normal, and then you start listing what you think they should not do in life.
01:51:49.000Constraining the options that maybe they have ambitions that are greater than anything you imagined.
01:53:13.000The captain had given a tour of the bridge to a passenger who later that day waxed poetic About the experience.
01:53:21.000Again, I stood with the captain on the bridge, and he was quiet and composed in the presence of a million universes, a man with the power of a god.
01:53:32.000In imagination, I saw the captain standing on the bridge, gazing into the wide canopied heavens and seeing the darkness sprinkled with stars, systems, and galaxies.
01:56:28.000Where because she sees the world the way animals do, she could advise farmers in ways they can handle and herd cows that does not create stress in them.
01:57:25.000And he's one of the absolute best that's ever done it.
01:57:27.000And he developed a style of jiu-jitsu where he utilizes that left hand to get under chins because it's not encumbered by the mass of the fingers.
01:57:37.000And he slides it in there and sinks rear naked chokes on people.
01:57:40.000And he also developed a style that didn't rely on grips.
01:57:44.000He developed a style that's overhooks and underhooks, which became modern nogi jujitsu, which is incorporated in mixed martial arts because in mixed martial arts they don't wear the kimono.
01:57:56.000And people who have fingers probably would have never even thought to think that way.
01:58:00.000And people who saw Jean-Jacques Machado as a child said, oh, this poor child, he will never reach his full potential, and turned out to be one of the greatest ever.
01:59:10.000In 2012, after a lecture on hallucination at Cooper Union College in New York City, I asked him, if you could go back in time, would you take a magic pill in your youth to cure your neurological disorder?
02:00:55.000So all of this you'd expect to happen on some kind of spectrum of severity, let's call it, or featurity.
02:01:08.000And depending on where you are on that spectrum, you will have certain access to ways people have never thought before, ways people have never done things before.
02:01:21.000Have you seen the video of the woman somewhere in East Asia who has no arms?
02:01:28.000And she gets out of bed, folds up her, takes care of her child, puts on her makeup.
02:04:13.000Yeah, I mean the diversity of human beings and their interests and what they look like and their sizes and the way they interact with the world is one of the reasons why we can create such an amazing world.
02:04:25.000But consider also, and it goes beyond just this, what we call these disabled features, right?
02:04:35.000For example, you must know that it was not until 1987 where the American Psychiatric Association, with some names such as that, but the psychiatrists, Removed homosexuality as a mental disorder from their records,
02:04:58.000And so, what does that even mean if whatever the number is, 10, 20% of people or higher are on a gender spectrum as measured in the multiple dimensions that have been revealed in recent years?
02:05:18.000If you had control over the genome of your children 50 years ago, and if homosexuality has a genetic component, would you say, I don't want that?
02:05:31.000That's abnormal, because you're going to go through that list of what is normal.
02:05:35.000And you're going to say, I don't want any abnormalities in my children.
02:05:57.000When you have, and this is what I wanted to get to, when you have things like CRISPR and you have what could be legitimate genetic engineering of fetuses and of embryos.
02:06:18.000But the fact that that is an emerging technology and that, like all technologies, it will increase in its ability with innovation, with new versions.
02:10:29.000But you're recognizing patterns and judgment and whether or not someone's paying attention and whether or not it's going to be...
02:10:34.000All that has to happen is that it goes into an AI learning mode and it gets the sum of all of these experiences of all drivers in these situations.
02:10:42.000Yeah, AI is going to kill some people in self-driving mode.
02:15:18.000Part of the diversity of who and what we are is who...
02:15:22.000Who you love, what you want to look like, you know?
02:15:25.000This resistance to the gender spectrum concerns me because it's a force of restriction on people's freedom.
02:15:37.000And somewhere I read that America is like pursuit of happiness.
02:15:43.000I read that somewhere, some document, right?
02:15:47.000And so if someone Wants to dress in whatever way they want, and if it doesn't conform with your binarity, you're going to create a law to prevent them from doing it?
02:16:02.000Are we any longer in a free country if you have that power over me to express my happiness?
02:16:12.000And another thing we're not good at And I gotta go, like, soon.
02:18:03.000So biogenetically, I can say that there's a boy and a girl or some variant on that, which is in the rare case where you have doubled up on the chromosomes.
02:20:30.000Mike, my wonder is, if you try to look at what human beings are capable of doing now in terms of genetic engineering and what the hopes are, where do you think this leads us if this is allowed?
02:20:43.000It's not whether or not it's going to be allowed.
02:21:34.000So if they incorporate that into the human genome, then you're going to have people that have incredible amounts of muscle mass, and they don't even have to do anything to achieve it.
02:21:43.000But what you would have done was, as a parent or as someone in control, predetermine I agree with you.
02:22:12.000And that people just start doing that to their children.
02:22:16.000We're talking 100 years from now, 1,000 years from now?
02:22:18.000Way sooner than that, 50 years easily.
02:23:07.000What are your thoughts on human neural interfaces, like things like Neuralink and these technologies that are being proposed that would allow human beings to integrate with technology in a physical way, symbiotically?
02:23:21.000Yeah, so I have a chapter in here called Exploration and Discovery, where we talk about the rapid pace of Technology and its impact on civilization, which is extraordinary.
02:23:54.000It reminds me of, there was an ad in 1992, 1903, early 90s from AT&T. They had a relatively successful ad campaign where they said, have you ever wanted to ba-da [...]-da?
02:28:06.000But then it gets to a point where people are making the argument that wild pigs are no longer invasive because they've been there as long as the humans have.
02:28:13.000Yeah, so it's only a problem when it's a problem, is really what that comes down to.
02:28:56.000Neuroscience and our understanding of the human mind will become so advanced that mental illness will be cured, leaving psychologists and psychiatrists without jobs.
02:29:06.000In a shift that echoes the rapid conversion from horses to automobiles in the early 20th century, self-driving electric vehicles will fully replace all cars and trucks on the road.
02:29:19.000If you want to be nostalgic with your fancy combustion engine sports car, you can drive on specially designed tracks akin to horse riding stables of today.
02:29:30.000The human space program will fully transition to a space industry supported not by tax dollars but by tourism and anything else people dream of doing in space.
02:29:41.000We develop a perfect antiviral serum and cure cancer.
02:29:46.000Medicines will tailor to your own DNA, leaving no adverse side effects.
02:29:53.000And this is in response to your earlier question.
02:29:56.000We will resist the urge to merge the circuitry of computers with the circuitry of our brains.
02:30:19.000Right, but if they do increase the capacity for human knowledge and your access to information substantially to the point where someone with a neural interface has an enormous advantage over anybody who doesn't.
02:30:29.000Well, they'll do it faster, perhaps, but I don't...
02:30:31.000But not just faster, but change the way you interface with...
02:30:53.000We will learn how to regrow lost limbs and failing organs, bringing us up to the level of other regenerating animals on Earth, like salamanders, starfish, and lobsters.
02:31:06.000Instead of becoming our overlord and enslaving us all, artificial intelligence will be just another helpful feature of the tech infrastructures that serve our daily lives.
02:31:16.000Those are my predictions to be found wrong in 30 years.
02:31:19.000Do you have any fears of artificial general intelligence?
02:33:09.000It's spooky because, again, we don't have the ability to sort of extrapolate and look at the future in terms of like how all these things are implemented and what the overall result is going to be.
02:35:19.000When European anthropologists started running through Africa and started describing what they saw, their urge was to say, Everyone in Africa is this thing, and they have dark skin, woolly hair, and that is a thing.
02:35:35.000And they called it a race, and they called it the Negroes, okay?
02:35:39.000And this is our attempt to classify into few categories something that might actually, in real life, be on a spectrum.
02:35:49.000We know that the human species began in Africa.
02:35:56.000And everybody who populates everywhere else in the world came out of Africa to do that.
02:36:02.000What that tells you is that the genetic diversity within Africa as the origin of our species is greater than it is between any other two people anywhere else in the world.
02:36:23.000But because the anthropologists were not thinking genetic diversity, they're thinking skin color.
02:36:33.000But if you have the most genetic diversity, then in practically every way humans vary, you would find the extreme of that in the African continent.
02:36:45.000Where would you find the tallest people in the world?
02:38:05.000While Europeans were still either disemboweling heretics or whatever the hell they were doing, Even before that, thousands of years ago.
02:38:16.000So my point is, if you don't look for it, and you don't find it, and you're going to create a map of humans of the world, you're going to put yourself at the top.
02:38:39.0001785, speaking of the Negroes, comparing them by their faculties of memory, reason, and imagination, it appears to me that in memory, they are equal to the whites, in reason, much inferior,
02:38:55.000as I think one could scarcely be found capable of tracing and comprehending the investigations of Euclid.
02:39:05.000And in imagination, they are dull, tasteless, and anomalous.
02:39:48.000But whatever were his observations and objections to black people, he had no hesitation continually mating with at least one of them, producing six children.
02:40:53.000When you have that mindset, and you have to put yourself at the top, and all people with dark skin are one entity, you're not looking for people smarter than you.
02:42:49.000On May 1st, 2021, a talented chess player reached the title of National Master for having achieved a U.S. Chess Federation rating above 2200, landing among the top 4% of 350,000 rated players in the world.
02:43:04.000A rating achieved that was 500 points higher than that of his chess coach.
02:43:10.000Just a few years after learning how to play the game.
02:43:13.000That prodigy is a 10-year-old boy named Tani Talua I played a brief chess game against the little fellow in March 2021 on Grandmaster Maurice Ashley's Twitch platform.
02:44:19.000Occasions to pause and wonder what depths of intellect...
02:44:24.000These are occasions to pause what depths of intellectual capital in math, science, and engineering or any field lay hidden deep within the African continent or anywhere else on earth, lost for now or lost forever for want of an opportunity to flourish.
02:44:46.000I'm going to leave you with a fast list.
02:44:47.000I want to tell you what my racist black anthropologist found.
02:44:52.000Let's go back to the 19th century and let all anthropologists be black racists instead of white racists.
02:45:41.000This is in a book that was never written.
02:45:44.000Chimps and other apes grow hair all over their bodies.
02:45:48.000The hairiest people you've ever seen have been white people, with mats of hair across their chests and ascending their backs.
02:45:57.000Their body hair can even reach upward and out of their shirt collar.
02:46:01.000Black people do not remotely approximate this level of hairiness.
02:46:07.000There was no mention of this in any of those books.
02:46:11.000Distinct from their face, hands, and feet, part the hair of most chimpanzees the way they do to each other when checking for lice, and their skin color is white, not any shade of black or brown.
02:46:26.000Chimps tend to have big ears relative to their head size.
02:46:31.000After decades of ear-watching, I can attest that the biggest ears I've ever seen on humans have been on white people.
02:46:38.000Have a look yourself, next time you're in a crowded public place.
02:46:43.000Doubtless there's strong overlap, but the size of black people's ears can be as little as half the size of white people's ears.
02:46:52.000You might now ask about the famously large ears of President Barack Obama.
02:47:29.000Time to clean up that backward primitive image.
02:47:32.000Since then, published references to Neanderthals instead comment on what must have been their creative, artistic, inventive, and articulate ways crafting sophisticated tools and technologies to shape their world.
02:48:31.000This could have been included and they would have said, well, wait a minute, maybe all humans are together and chimps are something completely different.
02:49:48.000That's a, look, dude, this is what we were doing as humans to each other.
02:49:54.000Not recognizing authentic diversity in who and what we are.
02:49:58.000Trying to separate, to say, I'm better, I make the rules, and whatever rule I'm making, I'm going to put myself at the top.
02:50:05.000And you're not going to be at the top, because you're different.
02:50:08.000Do you anticipate that as people get more education, more information, and as we evolve, that we'll stop doing that and we'll start recognizing the importance of diversity?
02:50:49.000I beseech you to treasure up in your hearts these my parting words.
02:50:54.000Be ashamed to die until you have won some victory for humanity.
02:51:02.000Our primal urge to keep looking up is surely greater than our primal urge to keep killing one another.
02:51:12.000If so, then human curiosity and wonder, the twin chariots of cosmic discovery, will ensure that starry messages—these are messages from science, from the sky, from the universe—continue to arrive.
02:51:26.000These insights compel us, for our short time on Earth, to become better shepherds of our own civilization.