In this episode of the Infinite Monkey Cage podcast, I sit down with astrophysicist Neil de Grasse Tyson to talk about the importance of science in popular culture, and why it should be part of every aspect of popular culture. We talk about how important it is for science to be a part of pop culture, why it s important to have it in popular conversation, and how to make it more accessible to the general public. We also discuss the future of the podcast and what it means to be an adult freak out pleasure in the 21st century, and whether or not we should be using headphones in the first place. This episode was recorded live on the Joe Rogan Experience, which is a podcast hosted by comedian and podcaster Joe Rogans. Check it out! Joe RogAN is a comedian, writer, podcaster, and science nerd, and is one of the most influential people in the world in the field of astrophysics and cosmology. He's a great friend of mine, and I'm so excited to have him on the show. I hope you enjoy this episode, and that you enjoy it! -Joe Rogan is a writer, comedian, and podcast host, and it's one of my favourite things in the whole wide world. If you like what you hear, please leave us a review on Apple Podcasts and tell me what you think of it. We're listening to this episode on iTunes and we'll send you a rating and review on the next episode! . Thank you! Cheers, Joe - Tom Bellamy and Brian . . . - - Cheers. - Timestamps: Timestories: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. Theme Song: 36 And so on Theme song by Ian Dervish 39. 44. 45. 46. 47. 49. 56. , Theme Music by Ian McKellan
00:01:42.000And we always also invite another guest who will be a comedian sometimes or an actor or someone who will kind of ask those questions that come in from left field.
00:01:53.000But it always goes off, as your podcasts do.
00:01:57.000You never know where it's going to go.
00:01:58.000So we record it in front of a live audience, usually in London, and we record for about two hours, usually, and broadcast it for about 30 minutes, and there's a podcast as well, which is a bit longer.
00:02:07.000But we decided to bring it to the States, because there are lots of scientists in the States, lots of comedians and people like yourself.
00:02:14.000You're going to do it with us in three weeks, isn't it?
00:02:20.000So we're going to record them for the BBC, and they're going to be on the podcast and broadcast in the UK, but also in front of a live audience.
00:02:27.000Someone asked me this morning, actually, and I said, it's kind of like a variety show.
00:02:31.000I said, do you have those in the States?
00:02:36.000So I said, well, it's kind of like if Dean Martin had a PhD, it would have been that, black and white, a bit of singing, a bit of dancing, a bit of quantum mechanics.
00:02:45.000That's one of the things that's so important about what you do, what Neil deGrasse Tyson does, is that you guys, you're entertaining as well as having a genuine passion and a deep knowledge of science.
00:02:58.000So it's not just, like, here's the cold, hard facts, which are amazing and fascinating on their own, but you guys both have this way of...
00:03:07.000Sort of germinating these ideas into people's minds that might not ordinarily accept them, because there's a lot of people in America, especially, that associate learning with boring.
00:03:19.000Well, I think the important point, the serious point, is that science is too important not to be part of popular culture.
00:03:29.000popular culture is the thing that people discuss.
00:03:32.000So if we cede that to, you know, talent shows or sports or whatever it is, then we're removing the most important area of human endeavour out of general conversation.
00:03:43.000there's a responsibility on scientists to say, well, I accept that, of course, I can't talk at...
00:03:49.000You know, the level that I lecture at as an undergraduate lecture course at university or even a post-grad lecture course at the level of my thesis or my research.
00:04:22.000If that's true, then what does that mean for the way that we behave?
00:04:25.000These are important questions, but they will never be debated.
00:04:29.000Unless we take the time and make the effort to make the science and the ideas and the debate around them part of popular culture.
00:04:38.000The internet has also opened up a lot of people's ideas about what science can be and also it opened up a lot of people's ideas about the actual popularity of science because there's Until you know maybe 10-20 years ago with the notable exception like maybe Carl Sagan and a few other famous people that became famous for you know either cosmologists or mathematicians it's very very rare but now you're seeing guys like yourself guys like
00:05:08.000Neil deGrasse Tyson it's like more and more Richard Dawkins Christopher Hitchens while he's alive these interesting intellectuals become much more mainstream they become because people realize It wasn't that folks weren't interested in these subjects before.
00:05:23.000It's just they really weren't being presented them.
00:05:26.000If you don't get enough ratings, if you put your show on Thursday night at 8 p.m.
00:05:30.000and you don't get X amount of number of people watching, the studio loses interest.
00:05:34.000The people that produce it start looking at other jobs and, well, this one isn't gonna work, and they start moving on.
00:05:40.000And that's just the reality of television.
00:05:42.000And I think that With the internet, people are able to look at some of these subjects and, you know, someone will send out a tweet or a Facebook link or something like that, and you'll say, whoa, this got a million people to look at it over the last 12 weeks.
00:05:56.000And this has sort of, instead of having this immediate time frame where everybody has to pay attention or the show dies, now ideas are allowed to sort of grow.
00:06:06.000Yeah, I think you're absolutely right about that.
00:06:09.000I think we, as a culture, underestimate people.
00:06:13.000I think this is what you found with your podcast, I think.
00:06:16.000There are millions of people out there who are interested in ideas, interested in the latest things we found out about the universe and nature and the way that it works.
00:06:31.000And it's very important for the reasons that I outlined.
00:06:34.000Our civilisation, Carl Sagan always used to say this, our civilisation is based on science and technology.
00:06:40.000And so in democracies, if your democracy is going to function properly, then people need to know about the cutting-edge discoveries and the things that we found out which form the basis of our civilisation.
00:06:51.000Otherwise, how can your democracy function properly?
00:06:54.000So that's partly the responsibility of the education system.
00:07:27.000So having a strong public service broadcaster, I think, is one of the best things you can do as a country.
00:07:34.000I know it would be anathema to the big corporations who run the TV channels, but imagine you had a channel which really had a lot of money.
00:07:42.000The BBC is well-funded, that everybody contributed to in the States, whose job it was to act in the interests of the nation.
00:07:49.000Whose job it was to say, well, we're going to make these big science documentaries and put them on.
00:07:55.000And yeah, we'll make entertainment shows and drama shows as well.
00:07:57.000We're going to make them because we think people need to know this stuff.
00:08:00.000We want to enthuse the next generation of scientists and engineers.
00:08:38.000So, yeah, I think, and maybe you're right, the optimistic view, as you say, is that the internet will remove this corporate layer of middle management in a way, this kind of, the television executive.
00:08:51.000Maybe if you can remove that filter, which is like a sort of a malfunctioning kidney in the flow of information, then maybe it's a good thing.
00:09:21.000The model is the distribution through the Internet.
00:09:23.000And this idea of sending things through the satellites and all, the way they're doing it now with television networks, it's like, it's not going to work.
00:09:31.000As soon as companies like Netflix and now Amazon is creating their own television shows as well, those are Internet-based companies, and they We truly understand what the internet is all about.
00:09:44.000And when Amazon, or rather when Netflix releases a series, they release the entire series.
00:09:49.000You can download like all ten episodes.
00:09:51.000You can binge watch them, which is a great way to get people hooked on shows as well.
00:09:57.000That, you know, the only way you're going to watch something is if it's on NBC or CBS or ABC. And then those people that run those networks, they're in a panic because they've got to get people to watch.
00:10:05.000So they'll throw on some reality show about housewives that are fighting to the death and people tune in.
00:10:22.000They're just trying to figure out what's the next American Idol, what's the next whatever show, The Voice.
00:10:28.000What do I have to do to get 18 million people to sit in front and watch a ball being passed from one man to the other and they try to get across the line.
00:10:37.000This idea that that's the only way we can get our information, the only way you're going to get entertainment or anything that's coming at you that's being produced and created.
00:11:56.000But if you're not exposed to those ideas at all, and culture has no way of exposing you to those ideas beyond the education system, then we have a problem.
00:12:06.000So I don't know what the solution is to this, but I think that there's something to be said.
00:12:12.000It will never come back now, but the old-fashioned model that we had in Britain for many years, where the BBC was really quite dominant, was that you could almost say, well, we're going to put X Factor on, let's say, or Dancing with the Stars or whatever that thing is.
00:12:26.000And then after it, we're going to put a documentary on about astronomy.
00:12:30.000And the idea is that some of the people who are watching the talent show will drift into the documentary and go, I didn't know.
00:12:36.000I was interested in the moon of Jupiter called Europa that has an ocean surrounding it that may have life on it.
00:13:06.000I mean you're someone who evangelizes about the ideas of science and of space.
00:13:11.000Like, you think it's very important to spread these ideas.
00:13:13.000And that 17-year-old kid who watches video games all day, which easily could have been me, that kid will never break out of that mold.
00:13:20.000I think that the 17-year-old kid, if you watch his...
00:13:25.000If he really is completely obsessed and he wants to watch video games all day, the only thing that's going to fix that is he's going to eventually get bored.
00:13:32.000And he's going to want to try something new.
00:13:34.000And having the infinite options that are available today.
00:13:43.000And the guy, he'll go, all right, shit, I'm bored with video games.
00:13:45.000And then he'll have access to all kinds of shit that, like, if he was just waiting for the BBC to spoon-feed him, he's never gonna do.
00:13:54.000Also, I think that having the stupid shows that we have here in America, like, if you watch reality shows, one of the things that you'll notice is the anger that people have about these shows.
00:14:04.000The anger that they're being force-fed this fucking stupid shit, but they're still watching it!
00:14:10.000That anger, sometimes, that rejection of it, almost in your soul, forces people to go explore other ideas.
00:14:20.000Or it inspires people to go explore other ideas.
00:14:40.000I think there's something to it, man, because one time I was in my hotel room and I was watching Keeping Up With The Kardashians and, you know, it was in between shows, like, you know, just flipping through the channels and it was on and it was like, I'm shopping and I can't find what I want to get.
00:14:58.000And my sister won't stop bothering me.
00:15:00.000And they're like texting each other and it's so fucking mind-numbing.
00:15:03.000And somehow or another I'm sucked into it.
00:15:05.000Like it's a tornado and it's carrying me away up into the sky.
00:15:09.000Then I changed the next channel, and it's some biology thing on crocodiles, and it's instantly fascinating.
00:15:17.000It's these people that live on the Nile, and this scientist who's down there, and he's studying these crocodiles, and there's the villagers who are worried about these things eating them, and then I'm thinking, wow, this is so fucking fascinating.
00:15:29.000These people are living next to dinosaurs.
00:15:32.000I mean, they have a real issue with dinosaurs eating their family.
00:15:36.000Or, you can watch these Just simple apes talk about shiny things.
00:15:43.000And they'll talk about shiny things for a whole- And millions of fucking people do!
00:15:46.000But the anger of, can't take this anymore!
00:15:49.000And then you switch the channel or go online.
00:15:52.000I really think that does- There's a yin and a yang to the world.
00:15:55.000This is the strongest case for the Cardassians I've ever heard.
00:15:58.000That it compresses your very soul and existence into such a small space that you burst out into a world of ideas.
00:16:08.000Well, it's analogous to California, because in California we have too much sun.
00:16:13.000We have so much sun that it doesn't rain.
00:16:14.000We need 11 trillion gallons of water just to make up for the water that didn't rain in the last three years.
00:16:23.000But if you lived in a place like Alaska in the winter where there's no fucking sun at all and just looking for little peaks in the clouds or those days in Portland where it's just 39 days in a row there's no fucking sun!
00:18:48.000And it's probably not their fault, but it's probably one of the greatest pieces of evidence to...
00:18:55.000It points towards natural selection, it points towards the variability of life, and that human beings, we vary so strongly in comparison to other, like, wild animals.
00:19:05.000If you see wolves, I mean, you see wolves that are slightly larger and slightly more dominant, and wolves that are slightly smaller and slightly more timid, and they get pushed out of the pack.
00:19:51.000You might say, well, could we have some kind of IQ test threshold for the vote?
00:19:56.000But therefore, the direction of our societies is...
00:20:00.000In principle, in the hands of everyone.
00:20:02.000So we can't just accept the fact that, you know, well, alright, well, 1% of the world's population is going to pay attention to reality, and the rest of them are going to pay attention to reality TV, and we're going to be okay.
00:20:15.000We're not going to be okay, because the 99% will be unaware what they're voting for.
00:20:20.000They have control, and rightly so, over the direction of our countries.
00:20:52.000I love to go watch old television shows and old movies and especially old stand-up comedy performances.
00:21:02.000Not just because it's sort of like a time machine, you're looking back at this moment that's been captured, which is absolutely fascinating to me, but also the stark differences, the obvious differences between culture then and culture now, between the awareness of the people.
00:21:19.000There's some movies that were really good movies, but if you try to watch them today, you go, oh, who's that fucking dumb today?
00:21:26.000The education level of the people that are Communicating in these movies, the way they view life is very obviously different than the way we view life today.
00:21:37.000Like, you could not put Father Knows Best on television today, because people wouldn't fucking, they're not like, not enough!
00:21:43.000Nope, it's gotta go to a higher frequency, because human beings are very different today than they were in 1950. I think our culture is one of the clearest influences.
00:21:53.000There's some amazing stuff from 1950. It's amazing books that were written.
00:22:08.000And I think having something like the Internet just Pushes that in a direction and a guy like you who gets upset a guy like you who gets upset all these reality shows It's really just proof that that this is what you're designed to do You like designed the edge like this these people that are annoying you and these programs that are stupid That's actually just fuel.
00:22:28.000It's giving you an adversary It's giving you motivation to stop it from happening.
00:22:33.000I mean it's if everybody was going to college and everybody was super Educated and really aware of the problems with plastic and fossil fuels.
00:23:42.000It's arguably the universe is an infinite cage.
00:23:45.000And then another letter came in, I think it might have been a response, so we sent that back and they said, it's also supporting this kind of Darwinian myth, the Darwinian myth that we somehow share a common ancestor with a monkey.
00:24:08.000And they said, there was an experiment done in a zoo in Alabama or somewhere where they got ten monkeys and they gave them typewriters and after a week all they'd done was shit on them.
00:25:29.000You were talking to me earlier about infinity.
00:25:32.000I know, but if you get an infinite number of monkeys, if there's the same animal, they're the same exact animal, they're going to type the exact works of Shakespeare?
00:25:41.000Well, they will, because there's an infinite number of them, so every possible combination of letterpresses must happen.
00:25:47.000That is true, but would it happen, what is the odds of it happening in the exact same order of the works of Shakespeare?
00:26:01.000If you've got an infinite number of them, then you will get everything that can possibly happen Will happen.
00:26:06.000Could you imagine if one monkey, just randomly, they gave it a key, you know, like, look, we're talking about the entire universe, right?
00:26:13.000So we're talking about an infinite number.
00:26:14.000But what if they just get lucky as fuck and give one monkey a typewriter?
00:26:18.000And this little dude just starts banging out the entire works of Shakespeare, but he's still a monkey.
00:26:24.000He's still, like, playing with his butt and, you know, swinging around and having a good time.
00:26:28.000He's not doing anything else other than when they put him in front of this keyboard, he types out all the works of Shakespeare in exactly the right order, the exact punctuation, the exact spaces in between letters.
00:26:39.000Well, if the universe is infinite, which it may well be, in fact, there are many ways the universe can be infinite, then that would happen.
00:26:52.000Because if it's in accord with the laws of physics, then it can happen.
00:26:58.000And everything that can happen in an infinite universe will happen, because the universe is formally infinite.
00:27:04.000So I contend, and we'll probably get emails about it, but I'm trying to think whether there's any counter-argument.
00:27:10.000I contend that in an infinite universe, even the most unlikely possibility must happen.
00:27:45.000Of randomly typing on a typewriter, let's say at one letter per second, how long will it take and what are the odds that you'll type out the complete words of Shakespeare?
00:28:55.000There's a great website, a Twitter handle called Take That Darwin, where people that are...
00:29:02.000educationally challenged will question Darwin's theories like that my favorite one is you know if people came from monkeys how come monkeys are still around like they retweet that all day because someone says that fundamental misunderstanding of evolution that really is you know you're going right where am I going to start here maybe with a book The only way to truly test is to,
00:29:23.000I think, what we really need to do is take monkeys and give them psychedelic drugs.
00:29:29.000They need to take an island where the monkeys can't escape and give them psychedelic drugs and leave them puzzles and see what they figure out.
00:29:42.000There is a guy named Terence McKenna, who I'm a huge fan of, who had a theory called the stoned ape theory.
00:29:49.000And he backed it up, allegedly, remember who this is coming from, with climatological data on that time of the world, that he believes that the...
00:30:01.000Evolution of human beings, the big part of it, the development of the human brain, might have come from them experimenting with psychedelic mushrooms.
00:30:10.000That as the rainforest receded into grasslands, animals were forced to try new foods out because their habitat was changing.
00:30:18.000And they would climb down for these trees and flip over these cow patties to get bugs and worms and things along those lines.
00:30:24.000And that this time of the world, it was very common to have these psilocybin mushrooms growing all over the place.
00:30:30.000And that the monkeys that would eat them...
00:30:34.000Apparently it's been proven that in low doses, psilocybin increases visual acuity, which would make you able to see things better, which would make you a better hunter.
00:30:44.000Also makes you horny, so it would make people more likely to breed.
00:30:48.000And that would favor the people, or the monkeys rather, the subhuman primates, whatever you call them, that went along that line.
00:30:58.000One of the more widely accepted theories about hominin evolution is that climate change played a key role.
00:31:05.000And actually, in my latest series, Human Universe, we focused on a theory which links the climate change, particularly in the Rift Valley, because we know that the big jumps in brain size all occurred in the Rift Valley of Africa.
00:31:29.000And it seems that the big jumps in brain size occurred at times when the Earth's orbit was most elliptical.
00:31:37.000So the Earth's orbit oscillates, it becomes more elliptical and more circular, and there are many different oscillations driven by gravitational interaction with the planets, like Jupiter in particular.
00:31:45.000And it seems like when the Earth's orbit is most elliptical, that the rate of climate change in the Rift Valley is higher and more extreme.
00:31:54.000And it seems to be the case, that there's relatively strong evidence for the case, that when you get these relatively rapid times of climate change, as you mentioned, then you get increases in hominin brain size, and therefore increases in intelligence.
00:32:06.000There's a big one 1.8 million years ago, which was a very big increase in the number of species in the Rift Valley, of which Homo erectus was one of them, which eventually led to us, and a big jump in brain size as well.
00:32:21.000And this was at a time when there was strong evidence for rapid climate change in that region.
00:32:26.000So that makes sense, like the adaptability of these animals, experimenting with new food sources, trying out new hunting methods, a lot of them changed from herbivore to omnivore, a lot of the primates that were observed, right?
00:32:38.000That's where it gets controversial, when you look at the academic research, because the Darwinian idea, so you get this pressure from climate change, but then what's the selection effect?
00:32:51.000Because climate change happens over many generations.
00:32:53.000It doesn't happen over one generation.
00:32:55.000So the question is, well, what actually is doing the selecting?
00:33:15.000And you need to be intelligent for that.
00:33:16.000Some people say, as you said, that it's more adaptability, so maybe they have to learn to go fishing or they have to learn to eat the particular different crops.
00:33:25.000So that's a big area of debate about what might have been the selection pressure, this precise selection pressure.
00:33:31.000But it does seem pretty nailed down that climate change, certainly in that region of Africa, in Ethiopia and Tanzania and through the Rift Valley, played a role in driving us towards intelligence.
00:33:43.000And essentially the size scale is very small, by the way.
00:33:45.000I mean, so you go back four million years and things like Australopithecus are around, which are basically upright chimpanzees.
00:33:53.000Their brain is not much bigger than a modern-day chimp.
00:34:06.000And the modern theories, they spread out of Africa about 60,000 years ago, and they made it into Europe about 43,000 years ago or so, into North America and South America only 15,000 years ago.
00:34:21.000And the fact that we've only been around as a species for at most a quarter of a million years, a quarter of one million years, is quite remarkable, I think.
00:34:28.000Well, when you think about what we've accomplished, I was flying into Los Angeles last night, and I was thinking, if you could take the pioneers that Came from Europe in the seventeen and eighteen hundreds the guys who were on those Wagons with the wooden wheels and they're pulling them with horses across the country trying to see what's over there if you could show them like hey,
00:34:49.000man, this is what's gonna go down in 2015 and Hop on this plane, look out this fucking window.
00:37:06.000I mean, those Google glasses that people are wearing is a sign of things to come, in my opinion.
00:37:11.000They've stopped making them, but there's a new company that has a goggle that looks like a skiing goggle, and it allows you to move things in front of you like a virtual desktop.
00:37:21.000You can spin squares, hold things in place, throw things to the side, and they disappear.
00:37:31.000I've actually seen some of that technology.
00:37:54.000We played some videos of it, and we couldn't figure out whether we were watching a simulation, we were watching what the future holds, or we were watching an actual demonstration of that technology.
00:38:04.000Oh, it's going to be impressive, I think.
00:38:06.000And it's interesting what you said, because it brings the web, this unlimited information, into your field of vision, so you can manipulate it.
00:38:14.000And then there are questions about what's real and what isn't, and who cares anyway, you know, really.
00:38:34.000I mean, a colleague of mine at Manchester, there are some physicists who think...
00:38:39.000That it's a possibility, a strong possibility that we're living in a simulation.
00:38:44.000I mean, it's, you know, it's speculative out there stuff, but it's an attempt to explain some properties of the universe that are interesting and unusual.
00:38:54.000So one of my favourite I think, at the moment, piece of cutting-edge physics in cosmology.
00:39:00.000Cosmology, I should say, the study of the universe, the origin and evolution of the universe, is going through a revolution at the moment.
00:39:07.000So it's coming from measurements of things like the cosmic microwave background radiation, which is the oldest light in the universe.
00:39:14.000So just to rewind and say what that is, 380,000 years after the Big Bang, the universe became transparent for the first time to light radiation.
00:39:23.000And that's because as it was cooling down, as it was expanding and cooling, then atoms formed.
00:39:28.000It became cool enough for atoms to form.
00:39:30.000And at that moment, very, very quickly, the universe becomes transparent, and so photons of light can travel on through the universe, and they've been doing so ever since.
00:39:39.000And we can take a photograph of that, and we have them, with a series of satellites, the most recent of which is called Planck, which is a European satellite that's up there.
00:39:47.000So this is a picture, a baby picture of the universe, as it was 380,000 years after the Big Bang.
00:39:54.000But in explaining that, that's given support to theories called inflationary cosmology theories.
00:40:00.000So inflationary cosmology theories say that before The universe was hot and dense, which we tend to call the Big Bang.
00:40:08.000Before that, the universe was still there, and it was doing something else, which was an exponential expansion.
00:40:13.000So it was expanding exponentially fast, way faster than the speed of light.
00:40:17.000Then it stops, and all the energy that was causing that expansion gets dumped into space, heats it up, and that's what we see as the particles and energy today.
00:40:26.000So those theories are kind of interesting.
00:40:29.000But they also suggest that there are theories called eternal inflation theories that say, well, how long did that period of expansion go on for?
00:40:37.000And does it all stop at once, or does it stop in patches?
00:40:40.000And if it stops in patches, if it stops in a little patch, you'd get a big bang and a universe.
00:40:45.000If it stops in another patch, you'd get another big bang and another universe.
00:40:49.000So these theories suggest perhaps there are an infinite number Possibly, of Big Bangs, in inverted commas, which would mean there are an infinite number of universes like ours, and they're being created now, all the time, and they will continue to be created forever.
00:41:04.000So you get this fractal multiverse, ever-growing, exponentially fast.
00:41:09.000And really, bizarrely, those theories have some support from the cosmic microwave background.
00:41:15.000They're theories that explain the structures we see.
00:41:18.000I should just underline the fact that this is Speculative, in a sense, but it's relatively mainstream, that.
00:41:25.000But what one of my colleagues noticed, and some physicists have noticed, is if you were some kind of omnipotent deity programmer and you wanted to run what's called a Monte Carlo simulation to say, well, I'll vary the strength of gravity in one universe and vary the mass of the electron in another one and vary these physical constants and see what happens,
00:41:44.000then this is probably the kind of thing you'd do.
00:41:46.000This is what it would kind of look like.
00:41:48.000So you can make an argument that the universe in some sense looks like one of these kind of so-called Monte Carlo simulations because it gives you the possibility of generating every possible number of different ratios of the strengths of the forces of nature and all these things.
00:42:06.000So I just have to emphasize this is way out there, way on the edge, but it's fun.
00:42:11.000What is fun and interesting, though, is that the inflationary cosmology bit is probably the most widely accepted theory at the moment for how the universe got to be the way it is.
00:42:23.000And it does lend itself to this idea that there may be a multiverse, and it may be that in each different pocket universe, if you like, you can have different physical constants.
00:42:32.000So most of them wouldn't allow life to exist.
00:42:36.000So our universe looks very fine-tuned, if you look at it, in a sense.
00:42:40.000It looks like the laws of nature were very slightly different.
00:42:44.000You wouldn't get carbon, for example, produced in stars in large quantities, which you need in order to...
00:42:50.000And when the stars die, the carbon and the oxygen come out and they re-conlapse into another generation of stars and solar systems, and that's how you get the heavy elements that make up our bodies and...
00:43:00.000So all those things, look, you need, you either try and find an explanation for why the laws of nature are the way they are, or you go to one of these multiverse theories and say, well actually, it goes back to what we were talking about earlier about the infinite monkeys, actually every possibility occurs in nature,
00:43:17.000and then we shouldn't be surprised that we live in a universe that seems fine-tuned for life, seems perfect for us to exist in, because every possible combination of the laws of nature exists somewhere.
00:43:28.000And this is where cosmology is at the moment.
00:44:12.000The idea being that one day, if human beings continue to increase our technological abilities, one day we're talking about this magic leap, and we're talking about the goggles that allow you to see a virtual world,
00:44:29.000we're going to, if we don't blow ourselves up or get hit by an asteroid, we're going to come up with something that is indistinguishable from the reality that we see right now.
00:44:40.000And when people start examining the nature of the universe and they start looking at the fractal nature of things and looking at, like what you were saying, that if you were going to be some omnipotent deity that creates the universe, you'd probably do something like this.
00:44:54.000Like every single combination and throw them out there.
00:45:03.000It was a guy who spoke to Neil deGrasse Tyson about string theory and that they found in string theory this computer code that was created by humans in, like, the 1930s.
00:45:16.000And that this actually exists in these codes in string theory and his idea was that that somehow another Proves that there is some evidence support that life that the reality that we see right now is a simulation or it could be that Which way more likely that you're just discovering some sort of code that the entire universe is based on.
00:45:39.000That when you look at things being fractal and you look at the idea of there being not just infinite expansion but infinite contraction and that there is no smallest point.
00:45:49.000There's just smaller than we can measure.
00:45:52.000But when we talk about subatomic particles, and we talk about atoms being mostly air, and then you go deeper and deeper, and you don't know what the fuck is going on, and particles are blinking in and out of existence, and existing at the same time, both moving and still.
00:46:05.000But could it be that we just can't see it?
00:46:49.000So the Higgs particle, it was predicted back in the 60s by Peter Higgs and others, and its name And the idea is, basically, that early on in the expansion history of the universe, so let's say less than a billionth of a second after the Big Bang, as the universe cooled, it went through something condensed out into empty space.
00:47:41.000That every square metre of this room is full of Higgs field.
00:47:45.000And our fundamental particles, the electrons, let's say, in our bodies, interact with that Higgs field, and in that process they acquire mass.
00:47:53.000So it's the mass generation mechanism.
00:47:56.000It's why some particles are massive, like electrons and quarks, and some things like photons are not massive.
00:48:03.000They're massless, and they travel through the universe at the speed of light.
00:48:08.000Now, that was suggested and built mathematically, essentially.
00:48:12.000There was very little evidence for it at the time, back in the 60s.
00:48:14.000But over the years, the theory called the Standard Model of Particle Physics passed all experimental tests.
00:48:21.000So we got to the point where we thought, right, okay, we will build a machine that will either disprove or prove that theory, and the LHC is such a machine.
00:48:28.000If that theory is correct, which it now seems to be, the prediction is you must find The Higgs particle, the LHC, or some kind of Higgs particle.
00:48:39.000And indeed we found it as far as we can tell.
00:48:42.000So that means that we found a new particle.
00:48:44.000It has the right mass as predicted in the window that was predicted by the theory.
00:48:48.000It behaves in every way like the theory predicts.
00:48:51.000So now what we have to do is be experimental physicists.
00:48:54.000So the LHC turns back on again in about a month actually.
00:48:57.000So it's been upgraded, it's been fixed, and it's done its maintenance.
00:49:00.000So we're going to make more Higgs particles now, and that means we can make more precision measurements and find out whether it is the particle predicted by Peter Higgs, or maybe it's one of a number of Higgs particles, just possibly.
00:49:38.000And it looks like one of these things.
00:49:40.000But that's remarkable to think about it.
00:49:42.000It's Wigner, a great physicist, who wrote an essay back in the 60s, I think, called The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Physical Sciences.
00:49:51.000And the unreasonable effectiveness is demonstrated by this discovery, because it really is a mathematical prediction.
00:49:56.000It's like we think there's a new fundamental particle that does the job of giving mass to the other particles.
00:50:01.000And this is how it does it, and this is how it behaves, and this is what it will look like, and this is what it will do.
00:50:06.000And then 50 years later, you build the biggest machine ever built, 16 miles in circumference.
00:50:13.000Most of it's in France, a bit of it's in Switzerland.
00:50:28.000We can collide 600 million of them together every second to recreate the conditions that were present less than a billionth of a second after the universe began.
00:50:35.000Photograph it in the biggest digital cameras ever built.
00:50:39.000The one I work on called Atlas is 40 meters in diameter.
00:51:36.000Do you know when Peter Higgs, actually, the day the discovery was announced at CERN, packed auditorium, Peter was there, and a journalist went up to him afterwards, and just what I've said, this is what happened, this machine did it, he found this thing, and he said, how do you feel, Professor Higgs?
00:51:52.000And he said, it's very nice to be right sometimes, is what he said.
00:53:16.000So way after the Higgs mechanism kicks in, you have a period when it's still too hot for protons and neutrons to form.
00:53:24.000So the building blocks of atomic nuclei are protons and neutrons.
00:53:28.000So a proton is made of two up quarks, or quarks, and a down quark, and a neutron is made of two downs and an up, and then some other stuff in there, gluons and things like that.
00:53:37.000But the universe went through a phase, and it was too hot for that to happen.
00:53:42.000So you get this plasma, this sea of the free quarks and the gluons and all these things.
00:53:47.000Just before it gets cold enough to condense into protons and neutrons.
00:53:50.000And we investigate that by colliding heavier things than protons together at the LHC. So we can do silver atoms or silver nuclei or lead nuclei and things like that.
00:54:22.000I mean, if you look at, so an astrophysical example would be a neutron star, which is basically a big nucleus, nuclear-dense material, the end point of a collapsed star when it's run out of fuel.
00:54:34.000If it's not too big, if it's too big it'll turn into a black hole.
00:54:36.000So a neutron star would be, what, one and a half times the mass of the Sun, let's say, something like that, but it would be a radius of 10 miles.
00:54:46.000So it would easily fit in the LA metropolitan area, right?
00:54:50.000But it would have the mass of the sun or greater.
00:55:10.000Some physicist was explaining that if you had this quark-gluon plasma and it was the size of a sugar cube, it was some ungodly amount of weight.
00:55:34.000Well, if you think about it, all our mass is in, you alluded to it earlier, all the mass, our mass is in the nuclei.
00:55:40.000And if you've got all our atomic nuclei, mining your nuclei and stuff them together into that density, you know, it would be a grain of sand or something.
00:55:52.000I mean, you think about the universe, I mean, the modern theories of the Big Bang, we talked about earlier, these inflationary cosmology theories, they suggest that the entire observable universe, which has now got 350 billion galaxies in it, was at some point the size of a, I don't know,
00:56:10.000So we imagine, we speak of, in modern physics, we have theories that address the time when the entire observable universe was something That you could hold.
00:56:20.000So you've got enough energy in there to make 350 billion galaxies, each with 200 billion stars.
00:56:26.000And it's remarkable that we're not quite there with the laws of physics, but we're not far...
00:57:03.000It's an approach to trying to describe the universe before those times when our current laws work.
00:57:11.000The idea of a birth and a death of a universe troubles some people.
00:57:16.000The idea that we have sort of artificially subscribed, the idea that this had to start somewhere, and that it may very well be an infinite expansion and contraction, like waves going in and waves going out.
00:57:28.000The idea being that the entire universe may one day get to a point where it pulls down into itself and becomes One event horizon, one infinite piece of mass, and then starts all over again.
00:58:03.000And of order, 65-70% of the energy in the universe appears to be taken up in driving this increasingly fast expansion.
00:58:13.000And so that looks like if nothing happens, then that becomes dominant.
00:58:16.000So it continues to accelerate its expansion.
00:58:20.000And in the end, you get something that looks like this inflationary Period that I said may have existed before the universe was hot and dense.
00:58:28.000So that looks like what's happening at the moment.
00:58:31.000So whether that can stop, whether there's something that can stop it, in the same way as it seems to have stopped very early in the history, by the way, and whether that's true, nobody knows.
00:58:42.000But the measurements tell us of distant, particularly looking at supernova in distant galaxies, and also actually from this cosmic microwave background radiation I mentioned earlier, The detailed modelling and measurements of that all are consistent and suggest that the universe is accelerating in its expansion.
00:58:58.000So that would suggest that it's not going to rebound because it's like a big rip scenario almost, where everything's accelerating.
00:59:06.000Space-time is stretching at a faster and faster rate at the moment.
00:59:12.000So, you feel that it's much more likely that there are infinite numbers of these things happening, that there's not just one Big Bang that creates this universe, and we're watching this universe expand, but that there's infinite numbers of these things that are happening at the exact same time?
00:59:40.000You get some physicists that will argue with it, but broadly speaking, I think many astrophysicists think that inflation is the best theory we have because it makes predictions that agree with observation.
00:59:51.000So it's the best theory in terms of making the best predictions at the moment.
00:59:54.000And this is that accelerating and its expansion?
00:59:57.000That suggests that a very fast, superluminal, faster than light expansion, that stops, and the end point of that is what we used to call the Big Bang.
01:00:09.000That's what you teach in undergraduate cosmology courses.
01:00:13.000Then some physicists argue that the natural extension to those theories, the theories called eternal inflation, which are what you said.
01:00:21.000So this exponential expansion of space-time is always going on.
01:00:25.000And it stops just in little patches, and that little patch is where you generate a new pocket universe, if you like, of which ours is one example.
01:00:34.000And you can have an infinite number of those, and they would be being produced now.
01:00:39.000And you can ask the question, how long has that been going on?
01:00:44.000And there's a debate, even amongst the people who believe in those theories, about whether it could have gone on forever or whether it would have started.
01:00:51.000A colleague of mine at Durham, Carlos Frank, calls the mother of all Big Bangs.
01:00:55.000So was there a mother of all Big Bangs that set this process in motion?
01:00:59.000And in that big fractal thing, you get loads of little Big Bangs.
01:01:03.000And the answer is this is cutting-edge stuff.
01:01:08.000So I'd say, just to be very precise, the inflationary bit.
01:01:12.000The simple bit, which was first put forward in the 80s, actually, by Alan Guth and people like that in the US. Andre Linder, another one.
01:01:21.000That looks right in the sense that it matches data very well.
01:01:24.000And the consequences of it are argued about and are active areas of research at the moment.
01:01:30.000One of the things that people were terrified of about the Large Hadron Collider is that in trying to find the Higgs that you might accidentally create black holes, little tiny ones that would just go eaten through the earth like a little ping-pong ball that shot through the entire planet.
01:01:57.000Is it possible, theoretically, to have enough power?
01:02:00.000Like if you don't have it right now with the Large Hadron Collider, is it possible that a larger machine will be created and human beings can recreate a black hole?
01:02:55.000So two of the forces, so-called electromagnetism, which is the most familiar one, electricity, that one, And the weak nuclear force, which is one of the forces that operates in the atomic nucleus, they are the same force.
01:03:07.000They're manifestations of the same force.
01:03:11.000In fact, the Higgs boson is part of that process.
01:03:13.000And so we've seen the energies that they become the same force.
01:03:17.000So the idea is the other force, the strong nuclear force, if you go to higher energies and temperatures, converges.
01:03:23.000And then you have some things called grand unified theories.
01:03:25.000And then gravity makes its lethargic way back and unifies with them at something called the Planck energy, which is immensely short timescales after the origin of the universe, if you want to.
01:03:51.000But if you allow extra dimensions in space, so you imagine that, so we live in a three-dimensional space, and then there's time as well, so we've got four dimensions.
01:04:00.000If you allow there to be five, or six, or thirteen, I think the string theory, they keep changing their mind, but you know, there's thirteen now?
01:04:13.000Then what you can do is you can arrange for that energy scale at which gravity becomes important to come up so the temperatures to drop.
01:04:22.000So you can arrange in some contrived way to get to the point where you could possibly access gravity, see gravity in action as it were in particle accelerators, things as big as the LHC. And in that case you would produce little black holes which would then They evaporate away very quickly,
01:04:42.000we think, through a process called Hawking radiation, and they'd be gone.
01:04:46.000So you can conceive of a way that you could, if given, as big of a leap, that there are extra dimensions in the universe, and given that they're configured in the right way, that you can imagine that you could do it.
01:04:58.000The interesting point, though, is that LHC is a tremendous technological achievement.
01:05:05.000But it collides particles together, energies that are just insignificant compared to the energies that are available in the universe to nature.
01:05:12.000So cosmic rays, for example, hit the Earth with energies far in excess of those that we generate at LAC. So whatever physics you can conceivably access at these particle accelerators is already being accessed now in the upper atmosphere of the planet because the cosmic ray collisions are immensely higher energy.
01:05:31.000So if you can make little black holes because there are extra dimensions in the universe, then they are raining down on us now.
01:07:41.000It's just particle physics, but bigger blobs.
01:07:44.000I watched a documentary once on hypernovas, that when they were first discovering the gamma bursts in the galaxy, they thought it was aliens having wars with each other.
01:07:52.000That was one of the ideas that were being bandied about.
01:08:29.000If we saw an interstellar civilisation, an interspace-faring civilisation, could we detect the signatures?
01:08:35.000So there's a bit of work done on that, and we don't see any evidence for anything.
01:08:39.000Well when you see someone like the people that run SETI and search for extraterrestrial intelligence and they're always like asking for funding like you know we need more funding we have to figure this out and one day what if we shut down and then the signal comes like that seems to me to be like one of the biggest like Hail Mary wishes like hoping that you're gonna find a radio signal from a galaxy far far away that has intelligent life in it.
01:09:02.000Well, it's interesting though, if you ask astronomers, so you say, what's the probability of other civilizations being out there?
01:09:08.000Then they will point, for example, to the new data from the Kepler Space Telescope, which tells us that there are probably around 20 billion Earth-like planets in the Milky Way galaxy, in the sense that they're small rocky planets in what's called the habitable zone around stars.
01:09:37.000Well, surely life must have arisen on some of those.
01:09:40.000The answer is probably yes, I suspect.
01:09:43.000I suspect we may find life on Mars in the next 10 years, but it'll be microbes.
01:09:47.000So the question then becomes, well, how likely is it for simple life, if it arises, to make its way into a civilisation?
01:09:55.000And that's where the biologists come and kind of calm the astronomers down and say, well, you might think there are lots of places for life, we would agree.
01:10:03.000But on Earth, it took 3.8 billion years to go from the origin of life to a civilization, which is about a third of the age of the universe, give or take.
01:10:13.000So you had to have an unbroken, stable line of life that evolves in the right way, as it were.
01:10:26.000There's a thing called the Cambrian Explosion in the history of life on Earth, which was about 550 million years ago or so, which sounds like a long time.
01:10:34.000But for three billion years before that, there was nothing that we would call complex.
01:10:39.000Single-celled organisms doing some clever stuff, like photosynthesis, but not much.
01:10:44.000And then suddenly you get a big jump in the oxygen content of the atmosphere on Earth, which was to do with photosynthesis and some geology in play with it.
01:10:54.000That's how the oxygen gets into the atmosphere.
01:10:56.000And then you get a big jump and you get complex life emerging.
01:10:59.000And then pretty quickly, you know, half a billion years or so, you go from complex things to a civilization.
01:11:06.000But even then, you think about Homo sapiens we mentioned earlier, they only arose 200,000 years ago.
01:11:12.000So for the vast majority of the history of life on Earth, there's been nothing that could do anything clever in a sense of thinking and building spacecraft and radio telescopes.
01:11:23.000So there's a legitimate debate about whether the undoubted increase in...
01:11:29.000We know now that there are homes for life out there in the Milky Way.
01:11:35.000What we don't know is the probability that life will emerge in the first place, and secondly, the probability that will turn into a civilization.
01:11:44.000So I think the probability, if I guessed, I would say the probability that life will emerge, given the right conditions, is very high.
01:11:51.000And what one piece of evidence you could put forward to that is that it did appear to emerge on Earth as soon as it could, after the formation of the Earth and the oceans.
01:11:59.000So you get life, but then it took a long time on Earth.
01:12:02.000So you might say, well, the probability of it doing anything intelligent and interesting are quite low, maybe less than 1 in 20 billion.
01:12:10.000In which case we end up being the only civilisation in the Milky Way at the moment.
01:12:27.000Because even if we are only one out of this entire Milky Way galaxy, you still believe that it's possible for an infinite number of monkeys to create the works of Shakespeare.
01:12:41.000Because we did that with Infinity, didn't we?
01:12:44.000But if you look at the entire universe, then the idea of there being not just A life form like human beings, but the exact same life form is not just once, but an infinite number of times.
01:13:10.000And it has to be the case in an infinite universe, as you say.
01:13:13.000But if we confine ourselves to the Milky Way, which is really the only place we ever have any hope of exploring or contacting anyone, we'll never contact anyone, even in the Andromeda galaxy.
01:13:43.000It's worth listening because, you know, when SETI started, back with Frank Drake and Carl Sagan and others back in the 60s, then no planets had been discovered beyond the solar system.
01:13:54.000So the only planets we knew were our planets.
01:13:57.000Now, as I said, we've discovered thousands of planets, confirmed discoveries, and the statistics tell you there are billions of them out there.
01:14:08.000So virtually every star probably has a planetary system.
01:14:11.000So the statistics have gone in the favour of SETI from the astronomical perspective, but as I say, you've also got to have the time to make things like us You know, and that's a tortuous process.
01:14:23.000There's no inevitability to evolution.
01:14:25.000It's not to be seen as some march to complexity, evolution.
01:14:48.000So it's all really just perspective when you think about it, because even though there is an enormous galaxy, relatively speaking, it's one tiny little thing in comparison to the rest of the universe.
01:15:03.000So even if we could find something out there, the likelihood of it being as advanced as us are very small.
01:15:10.000But it's just a matter of how far we can reach or how far we can see.
01:15:59.000It's over two million light years away.
01:16:02.000So the idea that you would get across a distance of two million light years with any conceivable technology is to me probably...
01:16:09.000I mean, it takes light, a light beam to two million years.
01:16:13.000So if you want to talk to someone in Andromeda, it will take two million years to get a message out there and two million years to get it back.
01:16:28.000So you can imagine, possibly, the Milky Way.
01:16:32.000It's some chance if there are other civilizations there talking to them.
01:16:36.000But I think beyond that, I just cannot conceive of how it would be done.
01:16:39.000Is this relative, though, in perspective to the single-celled organisms that existed billions of years ago in comparison to us?
01:16:47.000Do we really think that we're the end-all be-all and this is the last stop on the road to evolution?
01:16:52.000Isn't it possible that we get so advanced if we live to be another billion years that we can all these ideas that we have in our head about the laws of space and time and what particle physicists are trying to figure out and what string theorists are prescribing as far as,
01:17:15.000I want to get into that because I don't understand string theory.
01:17:18.000But I don't understand what you're saying either.
01:17:22.000But my idea is that if we continue to go on the same path, I mean, isn't it possible that we will achieve some unfathomable level of technological proficiency or of control over matter or of an understanding of the universe?
01:20:32.000So it's literally impossible in Einstein's theory to go at the speed of light unless you're massless, in which case you have to go at the speed of light.
01:20:39.000Could you go just under the speed of light and then time would just slow down?
01:21:13.000But back home, like, if you came back around, if you went out into space and you went 10 years at the speed of light and, you know, you came back, everything would change, but you'd be exactly the same.
01:22:04.000So distances shrink from the perspective of the protons.
01:22:08.000So time passes at the same rate, the normal rate for them on their watch, but the distances seem to shrink, or do shrink, not seem to, they do.
01:22:18.000Are you concerned at all about artificial life?
01:22:22.000Are you concerned at all about the creation, the inevitable creation, of something that in some way replicates independent thought?
01:23:18.000And I always wonder if Whatever drives us, what if it's similar in some way to a caterpillar building a cocoon, about to give birth to this new thing, totally unaware, and that artificial life that our work with,
01:23:35.000whether it's code or whether it's electronics or whether it's 3D printing, a combination of all those technologies coming together to create some new form of life.
01:23:48.000And we don't think of life Being possible in an electronic sense because we think of life as being cells and blood and all the things that we are.
01:23:58.000But is it possible that we might just be building the next thing that, you know, we look at, well, we've only been alive for 200,000 years.
01:24:06.000Yeah, but we might be shitting out the new version of life.
01:24:56.000Because I think that although the research, we don't understand the brain, but I think it must be an object that operates in accord with the laws of physics.
01:25:07.000I strongly suspect that our conscious experience is emergent.
01:25:11.000So it emerges, so there's an algorithm there, a very complex algorithm, but I don't see why it can't be simulated in a sufficiently powerful computer in principle.
01:25:21.000So I don't see why you can't have a conscious computer.
01:25:55.000And as you said, 3D printers essentially seem to be the first step on the road to a self-replicating machine.
01:26:02.000So you've got the computing power that can be intelligent, and you've got a means of it being a replicator, then I don't see why you can't build AIs that replicate.
01:26:11.000And actually, going back to the cosmology for a minute, one of the arguments against the existence of civilizations, more advanced civilizations than us in the Milky Way, is that they would have done that.
01:26:24.000And this is an argument from a mathematician called von Neumann and also a physicist called Fermi.
01:27:09.000So it's one of the great, you can either say that there's something in principle that stops you doing it.
01:27:14.000So actually there is something special about intelligence and you just can't, there's some reason why you can't build a computer that's artificially intelligent.
01:27:23.000I don't see why that would be the case.
01:27:24.000Or you could argue you can't build a self-replicator, but you can because we are, we are replicators and we operate in accord with the laws of physics.
01:27:57.000So the timescales, we're talking billions of years.
01:28:01.000Billions of planets, billions of years.
01:28:03.000But it has to happen one time, somewhere.
01:28:06.000And if you get one wave of these AIs away into space, then you can show, using computer models with realistic assumptions about rocket power and things like that, that you can cover the galaxy on timescales of much less than A billion years.
01:28:42.000Either there's something wrong with our arguments that we're putting forward, that actually you can't build self-replicating intelligent robots.
01:28:49.000I don't see why not, but maybe there's something wrong with that.
01:28:52.000Or, really, civilizations are so rare that, as you say, we are the first to get to that level.
01:29:21.000To divide our little world up into countries and have a little war every now and again and point nuclear missiles at each other.
01:29:28.000If in fact there's nowhere else in the Milky Way galaxy where anybody thinks, where anybody can look at the stars and think about and have these conversations.
01:29:52.000You say, well, what we are, according to the evidence and the data at the moment, is almost indescribably special.
01:29:59.000Our tininess, our potential uniqueness, our insignificance in a cosmic scale actually makes us special because we're the only place.
01:30:11.000And so these ideas are worth pursuing, I think, because they make you think about these issues.
01:30:18.000Well, doesn't it also point to our ego that we think that our biological process is any more important than the exploding suns that are required to create carbon life in the first place?
01:30:28.000Or any of the processes of the universe?
01:30:31.000The answer to that, I think, is that you're right.
01:30:32.000In a completely logical sense, we're no more important or less important than the stars themselves.
01:31:04.000We have families, we have loved ones, etc.
01:31:06.000So the fact that that meaning might be emergent, it might appear from the laws of nature, and it is almost certainly transient, unless we build these self-replicating machines.
01:31:16.000We're not going to last forever as a civilization, probably.
01:31:19.000So to me, that doesn't in any way water down the significance of it.
01:31:25.000So I think, again, cosmology can be a powerful aid to philosophical thought in this sense.
01:31:33.000Because we have to accept that there's meaning in the universe, because it means something to us.
01:31:56.000We emerged as single-celled organisms.
01:31:58.000Probably before that, we emerged as some chemical reactions in hydrothermal vents, probably, down in the deep primordial oceans of ancient Earth.
01:32:06.000And over 3.8 billion years, we've come to the point where we can sit and think about the stars and have conversations like this.
01:32:26.000To us it's amazing, but in a lot of ways isn't looking throughout the incredible cosmos for signs of life like looking in a sea of parked Mercedes-Benz for dust.
01:32:39.000Like, one of these cars must be fucking dusty.
01:33:37.000Again, though, it doesn't take anything away from the fascination of just, you know, one of the beautiful things about being a human being is that we think about these things and that we can communicate.
01:33:49.000And that you, in getting on this podcast, you're planting all these seeds in people's minds that are making them consider these thoughts, and now it spreads.
01:33:58.000And that's one of the most fascinating things about the idea of intelligence, is that intelligence begets intelligence.
01:34:06.000Intelligence sort of stimulates other intelligence.
01:34:10.000I think one of the reasons why you love It's like you know how important this is for you and you want you've seen the spark in people's eyes when you explain these things to them and you realize that that person might spread that spark somewhere else and this is really what this process is about in the first place.
01:34:27.000It has meaning to us, but in the grand scheme of things, you know, we're just exporting Kardashians through the universe.
01:34:40.000Well, we could make a start by exporting the Kardashians to the universe.
01:34:43.000And then the resistance of exporting the Kardashians makes people, you know, the new version of Cosmos with Neil deGrasse Tyson.
01:34:58.000Again, you know, I have to, because Carl Sagan, great hero of mine, the fact that it would be done and put on Fox, on a network, you know, 13 episodes of it, it is, there are people out there who want to do it.
01:35:28.000And if you spoon feed people the same thing over and over again, like there's the argument for a limited network, especially American style.
01:35:38.000You could just sort of do it the BBC way, but the BBC way is beautiful in that it sort of sandwiches these brilliant shows in between other shows.
01:36:03.000And that's not discounting anything that...
01:36:06.000The BBC's ever done, because it's one of my favorite networks.
01:36:08.000I have this Congo series that I've probably watched a dozen times about the BBC, which is one of the most fascinating documentaries, not just on a particular area of the world, but on life itself adapting, which is like the primary Sort of theme to that documentary where they're talking about these parts of the world that were changed really rapidly over a period of a couple thousand years where it used to be planes and then it became these dense rainforests and there's all these animals that
01:36:38.000are sort of trapped in this world like rhinos.
01:36:41.000And planes, animals, and there was a piece on these, a type of antelope called a diker that swims underwater a hundred yards.
01:36:57.000Well, it's related to an antelope, but the idea is that you're talking about a very short period of time, a couple thousand years, that's had this rapid amount of change.
01:37:05.000These animals have had to adapt to this very strange new environment.
01:37:13.000The inability of some people to understand evolution and therefore react against it, I don't think it's all actually just religiously motivated.
01:37:25.000I think there's also a lack of understanding of the timescales involved and how fast animals can adapt and change and what a powerful sieve, if you like, evolution is.
01:37:36.000Richard Dawkins often write when he's Writing beautifully about these things, writes about, look at domestic dogs, and look how quickly the wolf got turned into these...
01:38:14.000Not quite with the dogs, they're still the same species.
01:38:16.000But you can see how, given a bit of time, you're going to get the poodles and keep going on that line and get the wolves and keep going on that line and eventually you're going to get things that look so different That if you separate them and don't let them interbreed, that you're going to end up with something that can't breed with that anymore.
01:38:31.000And that's kind of the definition of a new species, one of the definitions of a new species.
01:39:26.000Do you subscribe to the idea, and I've heard this debated about, that human intelligence may be in some form exponential and that all the knowledge that people have acquired, I mean obviously not like in a physical sense, like you're not born with an understanding of math and language and all these things are learned,
01:39:46.000but that intelligence may somehow or another be Not just passed on from generation to generation but enhanced by life's experiences and that the genes that are transmitted from you to your children may be in fact more powerful than the genes you were given and that as you've lived your life and acquired information and knowledge and understanding and whatever whatever intelligence means you know whatever Sort of intangible idea intelligence truly is but that this mind
01:40:16.000power this this this Accumulation over the two hundred thousand years that human beings have existed and people breeding and getting to this point that this might Exponentially be growing and expanding is that is that in any way possible that we're I'm not an expert on genetics.
01:40:53.000I think some kind of selector that would say you'd have to take the most intelligent of us by some measure, let's say, and have them be more successful at producing offspring than the people who are less intelligent.
01:41:13.000Like, haven't they done, like, they do those sperm banks with really super intelligent people and the kids that come out of it are smart as shit?
01:41:59.000I know there's some interest in this, but I think the standard answer is that the knowledge, let's say, so I become educated, I think the standard answer is that that would not have any impact on the genes that I pass to my offspring.
01:42:13.000I don't think there's any known mechanism to have knowledge.
01:42:24.000It's hard to look into a kid's head and find out exactly where all the information is coming from, right?
01:42:33.000Yeah, but I don't think there's a known...
01:43:02.000Like, when a dog is like growling, like, kids are afraid of teeth.
01:43:05.000They're afraid of big teeth and monsters.
01:43:07.000Even children that grow up in cities, they're afraid of monsters.
01:43:10.000And the idea behind that that I've heard, I think it was Rupert Sheldrake that was talking about this, he was saying that it may very well be that these memories of being preyed upon by cats, these genetic memories,
01:43:26.000That are from our ancient, ancient, ancient ancestors when we didn't have homes and we were living in trees and things were running after us, trying to eat us.
01:43:35.000These ideas are passed down from animal to animal and eventually human to human.
01:43:40.000I don't think, as I say, as far as I know, there's no solid evidence that suggests that things you experience as an adult or as a child, that the experiences themselves can be passed on.
01:43:55.000Other than verbally to them when they're listening to your stories.
01:43:58.000I'm not aware of any mechanism that's known that would allow that to happen.
01:44:03.000Haven't they proven that genetics, like epigenetics and some memes, like even useless ones like racism, can be transmitted from parent to child?
01:46:21.000Somewhere in the 2000s, they figured out that at the center of every galaxy is a supermassive black hole that is like one half of one percent of the mass of the galaxy or something along those lines.
01:46:40.000It's not well understood, actually, because it's not well understood how galaxies form in the first place and what role these supermassive black holes have in the formation of the galaxies.
01:46:50.000So that's a real active area of research, actually.
01:46:55.000The thing that I was reading was they were debating the possibility that inside each one of these supermassive black holes, so there being hundreds of billions of galaxies, each one of them with a black hole in the center of it, a supermassive black hole, In through that black hole is a whole nother universe with hundreds of billions of galaxies each with black holes Go through that whole hundred billion more galaxies each with black holes go through that hundred billion more I mean that that each Galaxy itself literally is
01:47:25.000a portal to a completely different universe.
01:47:26.000We I mean The problem with black holes is that they're a prediction of Einstein's theory.
01:47:36.000One of the earliest predictions is a thing called the Schwarzschild metric, which describes black holes.
01:47:41.000It was done, I think, in 1915 or 16. As soon as Relativity was published, it was shown that these things could exist.
01:47:52.000But the theory itself breaks down then.
01:47:57.000The general relativity, which is Einstein's theory, which predicts their existence, but the characteristics of black holes, the physics inside black holes, is not understood.
01:48:55.000But when you start asking questions about what happens at the centre of a black hole, the singularity, the very idea it's called a singularity tells you there are infinities in the theory.
01:49:24.000So, I don't know is a good answer in science.
01:49:26.000And so, speculation's fun, but ultimately, you know, we're talking about a regime of nature.
01:49:35.000Which our current theories are not capable of describing with any authority.
01:49:40.000And that's the inside of a black hole.
01:49:42.000We were talking about this before the podcast, the difference between the way you present your shows in the BBC and the way you're sort of forced to present your shows on, like, the Science Channel.
01:50:00.000Unknowns dealing with what when you're you're describing things like black holes or like the event horizon of a black hole that there are Points in time where you have to say we don't know yet Yeah, we were talking earlier and I said because at the moment we're cyber series in the UK called human universe which has been on in the UK and five episodes one hour long and So we also make them with Science Channel.
01:50:26.000And the Science Channel's one hour is 43 minutes because they have adverts, right?
01:50:34.000But also we have some interaction about, well, how do we nuance things for the, you know, because you'll do things for a British market that will be different in the American market.
01:50:44.000And one of my favorites recently was that, so one of the programs is about this multiverse.
01:53:11.000It's a love letter to the human race, human universe.
01:53:14.000You see that certainly if you buy the one-hour versions, I don't know how it's going to pan out in 43, but if you get the one out, which you can buy from good retailers on the internet.
01:53:53.000You can buy it, and I encourage you to because it's wonderful.
01:53:58.000But it'll be on Science Channel anyway in a few months, but it'll have cut down a bit.
01:54:03.000But the central message is this, what we talked about earlier, that it leads you, I think, to value the human race.
01:54:10.000So there's a lot we filmed in Ethiopia, which I love.
01:54:12.000I always love filming in Ethiopia because we're in the Rift Valley filming this story about the emergence of humans from the Rift Valley.
01:54:18.000And then we filmed in somewhere called the Danical Depression, which is one of the, other than Death Valley, it divides with Death Valley often for the hottest place on Earth, but it's far more barren than Death Valley.
01:54:29.000It's up in northern Ethiopia on the Eritrean border.
01:54:31.000There are volcanoes and it's bleak, but there's a tribe of people called the Afar that live there, and they're fascinating.
01:55:12.000And he had an AK-47, this guy, and he sat there with his AK-47.
01:55:16.000And then we woke up one day and we had a mountaineer with us and he got one of his mountaineering ropes attached to his AK-47 and he's sat there now with this guy's rope.
01:55:23.000So the guy said to me, shall I ask for it back?
01:55:37.000But the reason I started saying that was because we were filming, we were talking about meaning in life, and we said to this man, he was called Aidan Ali, a guy at the FR tribe, a small man, probably four foot tall, right?
01:56:22.000You don't think there are people who live on volcanoes in northern Ethiopia that say wonderful things about your ears, having your father's age, and the past being used through your ears to manipulate and inform the way you behave in the present.
01:57:07.000Like, very much like you were talking about the 17-year-old boy that only pays attention to video games, that becoming obsessed with anything, whether it's becoming obsessed with objects, becoming obsessed with ideas.
01:57:24.000We're so flexible in how we can exist as a culture or as a community that our ideas are so rigid That people have to be this way.
01:57:33.000You can't run around on the internet saying that there's no meaning to life when Jesus' name is being broadcast right now on Christian ministries all throughout the world.
01:57:43.000They understand what the meaning of life is all about, Brian Cox.
01:57:47.000You are the one who is ignorant to the ways of the Lord.
01:58:18.000And what's interesting, what I found, really, honestly, is that when you go to Ethiopia or India or Japan or out into the wilds in these places, people tend to be relatively...
01:58:29.000Well, everyone I've met has, first of all, been interested in stuff.
01:58:33.000So through the translator with the Afar tribe, we talk about the stars and I say, I talk about stars and they're interested.
01:58:42.000They're up there learning about how to live in a volcanic wasteland, but yet they're interested.
01:58:48.000And the things they're interested in are common, I find.
01:58:51.000And I genuinely haven't met anyone that I found uncomfortable, that I was uncomfortable with.
01:58:56.000I haven't met any of the maniacs that we consider, we think of as populating the world.
01:59:01.000You know, we think, well, it's okay here, you know, in North America or in Europe or something, we're okay, but there's all these wild people out there, you know.
01:59:08.000No, I just haven't seen any evidence of that.
01:59:11.000And so that's part of the human universe.
01:59:13.000It's just trying to put these impressions.
01:59:16.000So you might think, you know, like you said, there's the people who say, well, Jesus is the way, but then you'll go to India and you'll find that there are people who are Hindus, who have strange beliefs towards, you know, Ganesh, the blue elephant god, and people,
01:59:31.000you know, and they're They're part of their fabric of understanding the universe.
02:00:30.000Well, it can do, because I think it's a central part of the framework they use to explain the world and meaning and all these questions that we're discussing, which are difficult questions.
02:00:51.000But I think what's interesting is you go around the world and you see that these questions are common and people think about them wherever they are, whatever their level of education, they have some framework for understanding that.
02:02:25.000So Ethiopia you tend to think of, especially if you're kind of my generation, you think of Live Aid and the big famine in Ethiopia, you think of this dusty place, and it is in some areas.
02:02:32.000But actually the capital, it's a very green country.
02:02:36.000It's high-altitude, quite a pleasant country.
02:02:39.000Because some African cities, when they're very hot, they can be very unusual for people like us from places that are not dusty and hot.
02:04:05.000This world that we live in right now, that we think everybody has to have an email address, everybody has to at least have some form of public transportation.
02:04:16.000They walk around in the jungle, and they live.
02:04:19.000And they've been living, and they know what to eat, they know what not to eat, and they know what to avoid, and they have babies, and their culture continues.
02:04:26.000And they don't even write things down.
02:04:28.000And they've been living like that for a long time.
02:04:31.000And they're people just like you and just like me.
02:05:55.000They were part of that thing, the Egypt and Ethiopia, and then into Jerusalem and those areas, Palestine, and then out to...
02:06:03.000That 1,000-year-old, 2,000-year-old history is part of that country, very centrally part of it.
02:06:10.000Whereas usually in Africa, you know, you get countries that have been divided up and they came out of the Second World War and they post-imperial things.
02:09:02.000What's wonderful is it's a modern voice that echoes down the ages from ancient Egypt.
02:09:07.000Most of them are either admin things about, my garden was, you've nicked a bit of my garden, you moved the fence in the night, or something like that, or complaining about some piece of commerce, like this is, I've been ripped off by this shopkeeper, and it's terrible, and it's wonderful.
02:09:22.000But then there are also poems, fantastic poems.
02:09:25.000There's one about, it's a woman talking to her husband, And the other way around, it's a husband talking to a woman.
02:09:33.000And so you go through and he's saying, why did you leave me?
02:10:23.000There was something along like, I forget what, but it was like a sort of a very short poem about divorce, about marriage and, you know, for your relief or for your pleasure, divorce.
02:10:38.000It was very bizarre, like the concept of two people uniting by ritual existed six, whatever, five, six thousand years ago, and they wrote about it.
02:10:51.000And these little scratches, you know, the cuneiform, which looks like ancient nails, you know, with a flat top and a line that points down.
02:10:58.000And in a certain pattern, they've been able to figure out that it means some form, some language that you can kind of...
02:11:06.000We attempt to translate to our modern languages in a weird clunky, you know, if you ever read like Russia, like the Russian translations from Russian to English, it's so bizarre because their language is so alien to us.
02:11:19.000It's so different that the way they use pronouns and the subtext and all the different aspects that we sort of take for granted about language don't translate correctly.
02:11:29.000Yeah, and you imagine that for hieroglyphics.
02:11:40.000Man, the burning of the Library of Alexandria.
02:11:43.000If that had never taken place and we could somehow or another go back and read all the shit that they knew about construction methods and how they built those things and what was the purpose behind them and what was the...
02:11:54.000The significance of the astrological alignment.
02:12:00.000What they were doing was so insane in comparison to the greater sum of humanity.
02:12:07.000Like, if you look at humans in 2500 BC and then you look at Egypt, you're like, Jesus Christ, what the fuck happened here?
02:12:14.000How did you guys figure this shit out that no one else anywhere near, was anywhere close to this level of sophistication?
02:12:23.000I think there's something you can take from this, because if you look at ancient Egypt, of course, if you go to some of the temples down there on the Nile and Luxor in particular, it's just astonishing achievement.
02:12:36.000I mean, as you say, you look at Greece, you look at the Greek literature, and then you look at the Library of Alexandria, which the knowledge was lost because the barbarians came and burnt the thing down.
02:12:45.000You realise that civilisations rise and fall and knowledge can be lost.
02:12:49.000And the Romans, I suspect, thought they were eternal as a civilisation.
02:13:22.000Maybe we've got into this position now with our technology where it just won't go like that.
02:13:27.000But I don't think we can take it for granted, which I think goes right back to the start of the conversation, about how do we say to people, you know, this is a remarkable thing that we've done.
02:13:55.000You know, I was filming on Friday for a thing I'm doing in Britain with Rusty Spigot, who's an Apollo 9. So he test flew the lunar module on Apollo 9 in 1968. First test flight of it in Earth orbit before they went to the moon in July of that year.
02:14:12.000And so we landed on the moon, actually, in the simulator.
02:14:18.000It was terrific, and he showed me how to do it, and it was fantastic.
02:14:21.000But you look at NASA, the investment in NASA at that time, it was never more than 4% of federal expenditure, and actually it was often less than that.
02:14:29.000It was, on average, maybe about 3% of federal expenditure.
02:14:32.000But it laid the foundation, I could argue, for American technological dominance in the last quarter of the 20th century.
02:14:39.000Because, for example, the average age of the engineers in the NASA mission control when Apollo 11 landed on the moon was below 30. Below 30 years old, those engineers.
02:14:50.000So what happened to them after the Apollo program?
02:14:52.000They went out to work for Boeing and, you know, Microsoft.
02:14:57.000Bell Labs or Lockheed Martin or whoever it is, all these people.
02:16:27.000I believe, bold visions and visionary leaders.
02:16:31.000And leaders will just say, well, this is not a great deflection of resources.
02:16:35.000It was, as I say, it was always less than 3-4% of federal expenditure.
02:16:39.000But it's a great deflection of national will.
02:16:42.000And it's a great generator of a sea of engineers and scientists who are inspired by those things and trained in that process that go out into the economy and make the economy better.
02:16:54.000Suggested there was a 14 to 1 return on every dollar invested in Apollo by 1980. And people can argue about the, was it 10 to 1, was it 14 to 1, was it 20 to 1?
02:17:04.000Is the return to the private sector or a return to the government?
02:17:57.000There wasn't this technological adversary that's out there that gives people the motivation to continue to invest 4% of the gross domestic product or whatever the amount of money we need.
02:18:12.000I mean, if I look at Britain, so I talk about my country, which did the big thing, ran the world and then declined, you know, and doesn't run the world anymore, handed it over to you guys.
02:18:55.000I mean, that speech is a remarkable speech that rallies a nation behind something.
02:18:59.000But it's not a particularly large diversion of resources, that's the point.
02:19:02.000And certainly, given what you get back, it seems to me that investment in R&D, in science and technology and education, these are the things that form the foundation of our future.
02:21:29.000There's absolutely legal corruption in this country where giant corporations are allowed to invest enormous sums of money.
02:21:47.000I think that's a reality, and that's very unfortunate, but I think that's a reality that's also being eroding or is eroding, rather, by technology.
02:21:59.000I think people understanding the mechanisms involved in government is making them want to change those mechanisms.
02:22:05.000People pushing for ideas like It's being able to vote online.
02:22:59.000There was a documentary called Hacking Democracy that showed how ludicrous it is to think that our system that's in place right now is infallible.
02:23:11.000The technology that exists because of the internet, because of the ability to exchange information instantaneously with each other, is unprecedented.
02:23:19.000And I think that is going to shift the idea of government, that's going to scatter all these crazy people that are running things right now, that's not going to be viable anymore, just like kings aren't viable anymore.
02:23:31.000You can't be Henry VIII. In 2015, unless you're the guy in North Korea, he's like the last one.
02:23:37.000But most governments can't be run the way they were run thousands of years ago.
02:23:42.000There's too much access to information.
02:23:50.000To exchange these ideas so quickly that the word gets out too fast.
02:23:55.000I mean, if you listen to Tim Berners-Lee when he talks about the World Wide Web and invented, by the way, CERN, of course, the web bit of it.
02:24:13.000I mean, it goes right back to the beginning of the conversation, doesn't it?
02:24:15.000Is the internet a good thing or a bad thing?
02:24:18.000Or the web, let's say, a good thing or a bad thing?
02:24:19.000And you must be right in this sense, that as long as people We're having this conversation at quite a high level.
02:24:29.000We're talking about great movements and great shifts in civilisation.
02:24:34.000So I suppose you need the perspective first, don't you?
02:24:39.000You need your appetite stimulated for knowledge and information and not to use the internet or the web to ghettoise yourself.
02:24:47.000You need to have some instinct that I'm not going to just go find the little sliver of information that interests me.
02:24:53.000And perhaps information that's non-Centicon is also the, you know, how you can go and be a conspiracy theorist and find plenty of information to support your conspiracy.
02:25:04.000Sagan always talks about this in the demon-hotted world, again, about giving people a toolkit, bullshit detectors, I think he called it, you know, the education, science, the scientific method, that's a bullshit detector kit, basically.
02:25:16.000So if you can get that in, if you can get that in, maybe this is the priority really in schools to say, well, I want you to know how to think, how to look at information, assess where the information came from, understand if it's likely to be tainted or biased or good or bad,
02:25:32.000or how do I assess this vast quantity of information out there?
02:25:38.000How do I not decide that I'm only going to read, I'm only going to exist on forums that say that We didn't land on the moon and there was a big conspiracy and everyone covered it up.
02:25:46.000How can I broaden my reach to say, is that really true?
02:25:59.000Is it ironic that in this day and age we accumulate more data?
02:26:04.000I think there was some statistic about in every two days we accumulate more data, more like numbers, and a lot of it's probably Instagram pictures and Twitter and shit that's useless, but that more hard data gets accumulated or processed or produced by humans today than the entire time of human history up to that point.
02:26:48.000There's an example, the programme I do in the UK called Stargazing Live, which is a live astronomy show on the BBC. Lots of people watch it, people like it.
02:26:56.000One of the things that we do is citizen science projects.
02:27:00.000So, for example, last year we used the European Space Agency's database of photographs of the surface of Mars.
02:27:09.000So we've got too many pictures of Mars.
02:27:11.000No human eyes have ever looked at these pictures.
02:27:14.000So we ran a project where we wanted to answer a question about some features that were seen moving across the surface of Mars, weather features, that we thought may be seasonal.
02:27:25.000So maybe in the Martian winter they moved down to the equator and they moved back up again in the summer.
02:27:30.000And we proved that they were indeed seasonal by getting millions of people who watched the programme to go look at the pictures for the first time.
02:27:37.000So you can go online now and look at pictures of Mars, let's say, that nobody's ever seen.
02:27:42.000Because there's too much data, even on another planet.
02:27:46.000So imagine the amount of data generated on this planet that no one's ever looked at.
02:27:51.000There'll be data about what increases the likelihood of certain cancers, for example.
02:27:57.000The lifestyle that does that, that'll all be there in the data.
02:28:02.000But no one's quite got their head around how to go and mine that data.
02:28:15.000Well, not only that, the idea of somehow or another preserving this.
02:28:19.000If there was some event, supervolcano eruption, like they're constantly worried about Yellowstone, and there's one in Indonesia, I believe it is, that they believe is connected to a mass extinction event that killed off a giant swath of the population.
02:28:33.000Oh, they're nasty, those supervolcanoes.
02:28:36.000And if one of those hits, and somehow or another the power goes out all around the world, and the only people that survive are those folks that live by the volcano, fuck, man.
02:28:48.000Like, I mean, relatively, in terms of the universe, that's nothing.
02:28:51.000So, you big baby, you got to wait another 10,000 years for civilization to reemerge and someone to reinvent the internet, you know, and the Ark of the Covenant and still locked up in Ethiopia because they already did this and they already figured out how to make a little nuclear bomb or something like that.
02:29:16.000I mean, that's your whole idea, right?
02:29:17.000You're just talking about expanding science and education and getting people excited and involved.
02:29:22.000But all that doesn't mean jank shit if the fucking Earth spits out a giant ball of lava that engulfs half of North America and kills 90% of the planet.
02:30:04.000Unless you're launching that fucking shit up, taking all the hard drives of all the world and launching it into space and, you know, on a 10,000 year loop, so it comes back around and lands, you know, you do it 99.9% of the speed of light so that the data,
02:30:26.000Could you imagine if that's what happens?
02:30:28.000Like, one day, you know, they pick a strategic location that they believe will be a large population of life, and it relands 10,000 years later, and we go, oh, fuck, look at this.
02:31:42.000Because you had to know how the computer worked.
02:31:45.000You had to have these little autoexec.bat files that allocated the memory.
02:31:50.000Isn't that like more work than you need?
02:31:52.000It's a big deal in a sense because we have a problem with getting kids to write code because they all sit there on PS4s and things like that.
02:31:59.000Well, it's a lot of work to write code, right?
02:32:01.000Yeah, but in the old days with the computers...
02:32:03.000I have friends that make video games and one of the most...
02:32:08.000Shocking things was the the sheer amount of hours that go into coding video games You know the the folks at id software they let me in behind the scenes and epic games to Cliffy B our friend Cliffy B who's been on the podcast before I would watch those guys work they would do 16 hour days and they would just be coding and drinking fucking caffeine and Just staring in front of these monitors and just running over thousands of lines of code and you're like,
02:32:36.000oh, that's how you make a fucking video game?
02:32:38.000Yeah, they're kind of hundred million dollar things.
02:32:45.000The average huge game, like a Grand Theft Auto, when those games get released, The amount of money that they generate is rival to like Avatar, some huge spectacular hit.
02:32:58.000Like not an average movie, but a just gigantic, monumental, epic, huge successful movie.
02:34:03.000Well, imagine if computer coders ceased to exist and all of us were forced to back engineer computer code.
02:34:12.000If today, like for somehow or another, I don't know how many people in this world have a deep understanding of computer operating systems or computer code, but I couldn't imagine it's more than 1%.
02:34:23.000And if we lost 1% of the population, just disappeared from the earth, and then the rest of us dopes were left To observe our cell phone crashing or our fucking TriCaster over here that shit the bed on us mid-broadcast.
02:34:37.000I mean, that's a critical part of our society, of civilization itself, and totally overlooked.
02:34:46.000So you coders out there, God bless you.
02:35:24.000For car enthusiasts, one of the main complaints is that you don't feel what a car is doing anymore.
02:35:31.000One of the thrills of driving an older car, especially an old sports car, they're not as fast, they don't handle as well, but you feel everything.
02:35:39.000You feel the road because it's a mechanical steering.
02:36:03.000But if you drive a modern Porsche, it's like there's a million operations that are going on behind the scenes at every second to avoid collisions and slow your tires down and braking on the right side because you're turning left.
02:36:16.000There's all this shit that's going on that you don't even know.
02:36:19.000There's a magnetic ride control system that's adjusting.
02:36:22.000There's certain cars now, like I believe Mercedes-Benz, It has a camera that looks at the road in front of you and gauges whether or not the suspension should be compliant or rigid.
02:36:56.000Takes out godless heathens, just drives around, eats assholes.
02:37:01.000I wonder, you know, I think for sure if we can live, you and I'm 47. How old are you?
02:37:08.00047. 47. So if we could live another, if we get really lucky, we live another 50 years based on modern interpretation of science and medicine.
02:37:58.000Let's go there For sure there's gonna be something, you know There's gonna be some they've already got these little Japanese talking head ones that look eerie very strange sort of artificial Faces that talk to you.
02:38:12.000There's gonna come a point in time As the exponential increase in technology, whether it's 20, 30 years, where they're gonna make fake fucking people, man.
02:38:24.000There's a friend of mine, Alex Garland, who just made a film called Ex Machina, which is a great science fiction film, which will be coming to the States.
02:38:30.000It's just been released in the UK. Ex Machina.
02:38:44.000You can get the trailer on YouTube, and it's been released in the States.
02:38:46.000I can't remember when, but it's great.
02:38:48.000And it's about an AI, a female AI. And it's about a guy, kind of like one of these Elon Musk-type guys who lives out in the woods, and he's built one of these things, and he gets one of his employees to come and do a touring test on it,
02:39:03.000which is to see if he thinks that this thing is sentient, this AI. But she's beautiful, and it kind of goes off from there.
02:39:10.000But Alex wrote The Beach, and he wrote 28 Days Later.
02:40:20.000But then, you know, it goes from masturbation to masturbation using technology, meaning the internet to watch pornography, to masturbation using a device.
02:40:31.000Like, they have these, you know what Oculus Rift is, I'm sure, right?
02:41:03.000There's an Oculus and something else they're using for the PS4, which is not out yet, but it'll be out in 12 months, I think, something like that.
02:41:17.000I think that is going to be a game-changer.
02:41:19.000Well, they decided to do first-person pornography with these things.
02:41:22.000That's supposed to just be like, there's a real issue that people are going to have with being addicted to this stuff.
02:41:27.000Because I don't believe that our minds...
02:41:30.000I think one of the reasons why people have such a deep...
02:41:33.000Like, what we were talking about earlier, that people get angry at dumb programming and people get angry at, you know, dumb songs and dumb television shows.
02:41:43.000One of the reasons I think we have this instinct to get upset at it is I think we inherently understand that we're not designed to process the media that we've created.
02:41:55.000We're designed to imitate the successful behaviors of other tribal members.
02:41:59.000We're designed to listen to people like you talk and be inspired.
02:42:12.000But if you take that into consideration, what about a screen that's 60 feet tall, and Brad Pitt comes on, and his bone structure is fucking perfect, and if it's not, they manipulate it and make it perfect with 3G, CGI,
02:42:28.000and every time he talks, music's playing, and every word out of his mouth is carefully considered, although it looks spontaneous, it's not.
02:42:36.000They've carefully considered this for weeks and weeks for maximum impact on your psyche.
02:42:40.000And you're sitting there, and the music's playing, and he kisses Angelina Jolie, and we're not designed for that!
02:42:46.000So our very existence, the world that we live in, our model of it is based Like 90% on bullshit, 10% on real life experiences, 90% on movies.
02:43:00.000I have a friend who got in a fight with a guy and the guy said to him while they're about to fight some drunken thing, prepare to dine in hell or tonight we dine in hell.
02:43:10.000He yelled out a fucking quote from a stupid movie like when they're about to fist fight.
02:43:15.000They were fist fighting, like, which could potentially lead to death.
02:43:18.000I mean, when you're involved in, like, actively trying to hurt another human being, all fucking bets are out the window.
02:44:12.000You have a physiological response to media, to something that's been created that doesn't exist in nature.
02:44:17.000With all of nature's majesty, with fucking waterfalls and flowers, it never figured out how to make sound come out of a headset that's just incredible.
02:44:26.000It just makes your fucking goosebumps raise up.
02:44:32.000And in creating that weird shit, we're altering our very version of the reality that we observe with our real senses, our eyes and our ears and our fingers, and we're changing it.
02:44:43.000And this Oculus Rift shit is going to take it to a whole new place.
02:44:48.000I mean, it's going to be as addictive as reality TV is with its stupidity.
02:44:52.000It's going to be way more addictive if you could, like, look at any part of those people while they're talking.
02:47:11.000I mean, obviously there's some real issues with culture and society, but I often wonder, as we talked about before, if those issues just inspire us to improve and change.
02:47:22.000I mean, you have a bunch of shit going on that is like a constant ebb and flow.
02:47:26.000And I always ponder whether or not that is almost a mechanism for progress or a mechanism for advancement, and that without it you don't get that.
02:47:44.000I think we brought it home in a beautiful way.
02:47:46.000And can I say, just because my promoter sat over there, and I know he's been sat there for three hours, he would like me to remind the viewers that the Infinite Monkey Cage tickets are available online.
02:48:00.000So you're on the LA one, which is the 12th of March.
02:48:06.000Yes, at the Ricardo Montalban Theatre.
02:48:09.000How ironic that Fantasy Island, the guy from Fantasy Island, that's who Ricardo Montalban was, that we're going to be at the Ricardo Montalban Theatre.
02:48:16.000One of the dumbest fucking shows ever.