The Joe Rogan Experience - Joe Rogan Experience #2217 - Brian Cox

00:00:11.000 All right, Brian Cox.

00:00:13.000 Good to see you, sir.

00:00:14.000 Good to see you again.

00:00:15.000 How's things in the world of the discovery of the universe?

00:00:19.000 Exciting, I would say.

00:00:22.000 I've been doing some work on black holes recently, which I hadn't started last time I saw you, actually.

00:00:27.000 So I got interested in it.

00:00:28.000 And the amount of the progress that's being made in trying to understand how they work, and a question that was posed by Stephen Hawking a long time ago, really 1970s, early 1980s, which is,

00:00:43.000 what happens to stuff that falls in?

00:00:46.000 The simplest question you could possibly ask.

00:00:48.000 Right.

00:00:48.000 There's progress being made on that now, which I think is profound and exciting.

00:00:54.000 How is the progress being made?

00:00:56.000 Like, how do we...

00:00:57.000 How do we study a black hole?

00:00:59.000 It's mainly theoretical, although we have now got photographs of them.

00:01:05.000 So we have two photographs, which are radio telescope photographs.

00:01:09.000 Right.

00:01:09.000 One of the one in the center of our galaxy, which is a little one.

00:01:14.000 It's called Sagittarius A star.

00:01:15.000 It's a little supermassive black hole.

00:01:18.000 So it's about 6 million times the mass of the Sun, which makes it a little supermassive.

00:01:23.000 And then there's another one, the first photo that was taken.

00:01:26.000 It's a collaboration called Event Horizon.

00:01:28.000 And they took a photo of one in the galaxy M87, 55 million light years away.

00:01:33.000 That thing is around 6 billion times the mass of the Sun.

00:01:38.000 I mean, imagine that, 6,000 million times more massive than our Sun.

00:01:41.000 Is that the largest black hole we've ever discovered?

00:01:43.000 No, there are bigger ones than that, but that's the scale of them.

00:01:47.000 It's a big-ish one, that.

00:01:48.000 But if you think about it, I mean, so there's a number, it's called the Schwarzschule radius of the thing.

00:01:54.000 So if you took our Sun, which you can fit a million Earths inside, and collapsed it down to make a black hole, it would form a black hole when it shrunk within a radius of three kilometres, about two miles.

00:02:06.000 So you've got to take this thing, which is what I have to convert from kilometers to miles, don't I? That's okay.

00:02:12.000 700,000 kilometers.

00:02:14.000 It's about 500,000 miles radius or something like that, the sun.

00:02:18.000 So you squash it down until it's about two miles, and then that would form a black hole.

00:02:24.000 Wow.

00:02:24.000 Six billion times the mass of the sun means you multiply that by six billion times.

00:02:30.000 So these things, the so-called Schwarzschild radius is, I don't know, larger than our solar system, basically.

00:02:38.000 Oh, my God.

00:02:39.000 This thing that sits in a galaxy.

00:02:40.000 So we've got these two photographs.

00:02:42.000 Larger than our solar system.

00:02:43.000 Yeah, the event.

00:02:45.000 So it's a big structure.

00:02:49.000 Now, that's a Chandra X-ray image of...

00:02:55.000 There it is.

00:02:56.000 That's it.

00:02:56.000 So that one there, that's the M87 black hole.

00:03:01.000 So what you're seeing there is the emission from the material that's swirling around it.

00:03:06.000 It's called the accretion disk.

00:03:07.000 So you have material that's orbiting very fast, emitting a lot of radiation.

00:03:12.000 And that's what you see.

00:03:13.000 It's a flat disk, by the way.

00:03:15.000 So you think Saturn's rings.

00:03:18.000 So this material is very flat.

00:03:20.000 But what you're seeing in that photograph is the light rays being bent around the black hole from that flat disk.

00:03:26.000 So that was a prediction from Einstein's theory, basically.

00:03:30.000 He published it in 1915. And you can predict that that's what one should look like.

00:03:35.000 And then just about, was that four years ago now, maybe five years ago, for the first time in history we get an image of one and it looks like the prediction.

00:03:44.000 So it's a remarkable thing.

00:03:45.000 How phenomenal is that?

00:03:47.000 Yeah.

00:03:47.000 So we've had those two photographs.

00:03:49.000 The other thing we've had is so-called gravitational wave detections.

00:03:53.000 So these are colliding black holes.

00:03:56.000 And they collide and merge together.

00:03:59.000 And obviously that's quite a violent event in the universe.

00:04:02.000 And so that event, that process ripples space-time.

00:04:07.000 So it sends ripples out in the fabric of the universe, space and time.

00:04:12.000 And actually Kip Thorne, I've spoken to him several times, he's one of the greats, won the Nobel Prize for this.

00:04:18.000 And he calls it a storm in time.

00:04:20.000 So you get a time storm.

00:04:23.000 So really, we're to think, as we speak now, there will be these very tiny ripples from violent cosmic events passing through this room.

00:04:31.000 And they're changing the rate that time passes as they go through.

00:04:35.000 And we can detect that now.

00:04:37.000 So we have detectors that can pick that up.

00:04:39.000 And so we've seen those collisions as well.

00:04:41.000 So these collisions, how far away?

00:04:44.000 Oh, millions of light years away.

00:04:46.000 And they're affecting what's happening in this room right now.

00:04:48.000 Yeah, to a tiny extent.

00:04:49.000 So there's an experiment called LIGO, which is the, what does it stand for?

00:04:54.000 Something like gravitational interferometer.

00:04:56.000 I can't remember exactly what the word.

00:04:59.000 So basically it's laser beams.

00:05:01.000 And there's one in Washington State, north of Seattle, and one in Louisiana.

00:05:07.000 And they're laser beams, four-kilometer-long laser beams at right angles.

00:05:11.000 And they can detect these very tiny shifts in the...

00:05:16.000 Effectively, you could say the length of the laser beam.

00:05:19.000 It's a bit more fiddly and complicated, but...

00:05:21.000 It essentially measures the distortion in space-time caused by these ripples.

00:05:27.000 And it's way less than the diameter of an atomic nucleus, by the way.

00:05:31.000 Way less.

00:05:31.000 These little...

00:05:32.000 Oh, my God!

00:05:34.000 And so we've started to...

00:05:35.000 We've observed many of those...

00:05:38.000 There it is.

00:05:38.000 There's LIGO. So it's just basically two laser beams that, but these ultra high precision thing.

00:05:44.000 And so we've got data now of the collision of black holes and those event horizon pictures with radio telescopes.

00:05:51.000 So that's part of it.

00:05:53.000 But the main bit has been theoretical advances in understanding exactly In a sense, it was what's wrong with Stephen Hawking's calculation, which is a weird thing to say sometimes because people think Stephen Hawking, sure, didn't get his math wrong.

00:06:08.000 But he did, actually.

00:06:10.000 So what he calculated back in 1973, 1974...

00:06:15.000 Is there a black hole?

00:06:17.000 So we picture this thing from which nothing can escape, even light.

00:06:21.000 So when you go in, you're gone, basically.

00:06:24.000 What he calculated is that even though these things are just a distortion in space and time, that's the description of them.

00:06:32.000 So it's almost as if there's nothing there apart from a distortion in space and time.

00:06:36.000 He calculated that they glow, so they have a temperature, so they emit radiation.

00:06:43.000 It's called Hawking radiation.

00:06:45.000 And so important was that discovery.

00:06:48.000 If you go to Westminster Abbey in London, look on the floor of the Abbey on his memorial stone, and he's in there next to Newton and Shakespeare and all these people, and he's there.

00:06:58.000 And chiseled in stone on the floor of Westminster Abbey is his equation for the temperature of a black hole.

00:07:04.000 So it was this tremendously important discovery.

00:07:07.000 So he discovers these things glow and he calculates how they glow.

00:07:12.000 They're very low temperature, but they emit things, which means that they shrink because they're emitting stuff.

00:07:18.000 So they're shrinking.

00:07:19.000 So that means they have a lifetime.

00:07:21.000 So first of all, one day they'll be gone.

00:07:23.000 So that means that you have to address this question of what happened to all the stuff that fell in.

00:07:29.000 And his calculation said that there's no record at all of anything that fell in in all this radiation that's come off the black hole.

00:07:36.000 So it's purely information-less radiation.

00:07:41.000 So what that means is that black holes destroy information, according to that calculation.

00:07:48.000 And that's a big deal because nowhere else in all of physics does anything erase information from the universe.

00:07:56.000 So it's really true that if I got this notepad and pen, right, and I wrote some things on it, and then I set fire to this, even just incinerated it, put it in a nuclear explosion, whatever.

00:08:08.000 In principle, according to all the laws of nature that we know, if you collected everything that came off, all the radiation, all the bits of ashes and things, I think?

00:08:37.000 But this calculation that Stephen did said there is no information in that radiation at all.

00:08:43.000 Zero.

00:08:44.000 Just nothing.

00:08:45.000 So it seemed that uniquely in the universe, black holes erase information.

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00:10:49.000 When you say there's no information, like how are you measuring whether or not there's information in it?

00:10:55.000 So really in bits, I mean the idea is, and I shouldn't say it's very much in principle this, so no one thinks in practice you could reconstruct what I wrote down on this if you set fire to it.

00:11:05.000 But in principle...

00:11:07.000 Well maybe sometime in the future, in a million years from now.

00:11:09.000 Yeah, in principle, you could just collect everything.

00:11:11.000 Then somewhere in all that radiation and ashes and light that's come off the thing, Is the information.

00:11:20.000 It's there.

00:11:21.000 So you could reconstruct the book or what I wrote on this page in principle.

00:11:27.000 But the thing about Stephen's calculation was that even in principle it said there is no information.

00:11:33.000 And by the way, it's kind of easy to see why, actually, because this radiation, this Hawking radiation that comes off the black hole, it's coming from the horizon of the black hole.

00:11:45.000 So I should say what the horizon is, maybe.

00:11:49.000 Remember I said that the sun, if you squashed it down within three kilometres of radius, you'd get this kind of distortion in space and time.

00:11:58.000 From which, if you went in across this region, three kilometres, you went inside it, you couldn't get out.

00:12:06.000 So that's called the event horizon.

00:12:07.000 So you wouldn't notice if you fell through the horizon of the black hole in the Milky Way galaxy, if you went into that one.

00:12:15.000 We could be falling through that horizon now in this room, and we wouldn't notice anything except that we couldn't get out again.

00:12:23.000 And ultimately, in a few hours, in that case, time would end for us.

00:12:29.000 So you go to the end of time.

00:12:32.000 We could talk about that.

00:12:32.000 There's a picture of that.

00:12:34.000 Maybe I should talk about that.

00:12:34.000 This is getting quite complicated already, isn't it?

00:12:36.000 We didn't start in a relaxing way, did we?

00:12:38.000 No need to.

00:12:39.000 No need to.

00:12:40.000 Let's get right into it.

00:12:41.000 So we wouldn't notice...

00:12:44.000 Not for the big black holes.

00:12:46.000 So yeah, so these supermassive black holes, we could fall across this horizon.

00:12:52.000 It's just like being in empty space for us.

00:12:56.000 So we'd just be talking now and we could have been talking on the outside of the horizon and by the time I finished the sentence we could be on the inside of the horizon, inside the black hole.

00:13:08.000 And according to Einstein's theory at least, which is the theory that predicted them initially, we could just do that.

00:13:15.000 We could just go in and we wouldn't notice for a bit.

00:13:18.000 The thing we would notice ultimately is you go inexorably, nothing you can do, you go to this thing called the singularity once you've crossed the horizon.

00:13:29.000 And you are going to that thing.

00:13:31.000 And then the question arises, what is that thing?

00:13:35.000 And one answer is we don't know.

00:13:37.000 But in Einstein's theory, it's the end of time.

00:13:40.000 So one way of picturing what's happened here is so distorted is space and time by the collapse of a star or the collapse of loads of stuff to make these big, supermassive black holes.

00:13:52.000 We don't quite know how they form, actually.

00:13:54.000 But it's collapsing stuff.

00:13:57.000 So it distorts space and time so much That, in a real sense, they kind of flip over.

00:14:03.000 They get mixed up.

00:14:05.000 And so this singularity, which you might have thought of as the point to which this thing collapsed, this infinitely dense point, you might think.

00:14:13.000 But actually, more correctly to be seen as the end of time.

00:14:17.000 Because everything's got mixed up.

00:14:18.000 So you go to the end of time.

00:14:21.000 And it's just like saying, why can't I escape that thing?

00:14:25.000 It's like, why can't we escape tomorrow?

00:14:28.000 So we are going to tomorrow.

00:14:30.000 And if I said to you, let's run away from tomorrow, you'd go, I can't run away from tomorrow.

00:14:36.000 So is it the end of time because all information is being erased, so there's nothing?

00:14:42.000 Is that the idea?

00:14:43.000 If you draw the thing, you can draw a map of it, and it just literally time ends just purely in Einstein's theory.

00:14:53.000 This is 1915, his theory of general relativity.

00:14:56.000 You just get a line there, a line that says there's no future beyond this line.

00:15:01.000 It just stops.

00:15:02.000 Okay.

00:15:03.000 So, I mean, admittedly, that's not...

00:15:06.000 We think there's a lot more to it than that.

00:15:10.000 It's just we haven't figured the rest of it out yet?

00:15:12.000 Well, that's the thing.

00:15:13.000 So we're starting to get hints about what might happen, which is leading us...

00:15:21.000 So to backtrack a bit, why does this calculation Stephen did...

00:15:27.000 Why has it got no information?

00:15:29.000 Why does it say there's no information in this radiation?

00:15:32.000 The thing is, it's coming from the horizon.

00:15:36.000 There's loads of ways to think about it, but one way is that this weird place, this point of no return in space, that you can fall through, but it's a point of no return, it sort of shakes, it almost disrupts the vacuum of space and almost shakes particles out of the vacuum.

00:15:54.000 That's one way of thinking about it.

00:15:56.000 But this radiation is coming from the vacuum.

00:15:59.000 It's coming from empty space.

00:16:01.000 Whereas if you think about the thing that I throw in, if I throw this notepad into the thing, then that goes to the singularity.

00:16:10.000 The radiation's got nothing to do with this thing.

00:16:14.000 It's not set on fire or something like that.

00:16:16.000 It's gone to the end of time and just whatever's happened to it has happened to it.

00:16:21.000 So this radiation has got nothing to do with anything that falls in at first sight, at least.

00:16:27.000 And so that was the paradox.

00:16:28.000 It's called the black hole information paradox.

00:16:32.000 One way to put it is the laws of nature that we use to calculate what happens tell us that information is never destroyed.

00:16:39.000 And when you calculate what happens, it tells us that information is destroyed.

00:16:44.000 So that's why everyone got interested in it in the 80s, because it's interesting.

00:16:49.000 So when...

00:16:51.000 When we're looking at the structure of the universe, obviously there's so much still to learn just about what's out there.

00:17:02.000 But what role do we think?

00:17:05.000 Is there a purpose?

00:17:07.000 Is that the right term for a black hole?

00:17:11.000 Do they still believe that in the center of every galaxy there's a supermassive black hole that's What is it, one half of one percent of the mass of the galaxy?

00:17:20.000 Is that what it is?

00:17:21.000 Yeah, something like that.

00:17:22.000 Yeah, and there's occasionally a galaxy.

00:17:25.000 I think one was discovered where we said maybe we can't see evidence of a black hole.

00:17:29.000 Oh, really?

00:17:30.000 But yeah, it probably is.

00:17:32.000 Who knows?

00:17:33.000 What do you think that thing's doing there?

00:17:34.000 Like, what is that?

00:17:35.000 What's the...

00:17:36.000 What is the structure?

00:17:37.000 The structure is so insanely complex and so immense, and you see these things everywhere.

00:17:43.000 And so, what purpose do you think they serve in the universe?

00:17:48.000 So, I mean...

00:17:50.000 Is that a right...

00:17:51.000 It might not be the right term.

00:17:53.000 So I think I'm right in saying we don't fully understand why all galaxies, as you said, maybe there's an exception, but all galaxies have a black hole, a supermassive black hole in the centre.

00:18:08.000 It's obviously got something to do with the way they form.

00:18:11.000 And one of the purposes, by the way, of the James Webb Space Telescope is to try to look at the formation of the first galaxies.

00:18:18.000 So that's one of the reasons that telescope is up there.

00:18:22.000 So it's cutting-edge research.

00:18:25.000 We're trying to understand how the galaxies form.

00:18:27.000 But clearly, you're right, that it has something to do with the way the galaxies form in the early universe.

00:18:33.000 And it's pulling in stars.

00:18:35.000 Well, they...

00:18:37.000 They do pull in material, but if you've got stuff orbiting around them, it stays orbiting around it.

00:18:44.000 So the way we first detected the one in the Milky Way, because that image is very new that we have of it, it's the stars orbiting it very close to it.

00:18:53.000 They're called the S stars that whiz around in these orbits very close to the black hole.

00:19:01.000 Imagine that view.

00:19:02.000 Do you think it's weird to look at the moon?

00:19:04.000 Imagine if there was a supermassive black hole above our head.

00:19:07.000 It'd be so cool.

00:19:08.000 I'd love to see one.

00:19:10.000 Well, the moon is so cool.

00:19:12.000 The eclipse was wild.

00:19:14.000 We had the eclipse here in Texas.

00:19:15.000 Yeah, did you see it?

00:19:15.000 Oh, yeah.

00:19:16.000 It was incredible.

00:19:17.000 It's so strange.

00:19:18.000 The whole day turns into night.

00:19:20.000 All the birds stop chirping and you're like staring up at this perfect eclipse.

00:19:24.000 It was incredible.

00:19:25.000 Did you get this?

00:19:26.000 Because I saw one in India. 0.99

00:19:28.000 And I got this feeling that I was living on a ball of rock.

00:19:32.000 Right.

00:19:33.000 And it must have been just because the night just falls.

00:19:36.000 Right.

00:19:37.000 And suddenly you see the universe comes much more quickly.

00:19:41.000 I went to the Keck Observatory once in Hawaii.

00:19:43.000 I've been a few times, but one time I went on the perfect night with no moon, and it was sensational.

00:19:50.000 Yeah.

00:19:50.000 It was such a vivid image of the entire Milky Way.

00:19:55.000 And every inch of the sky was covered in stars.

00:20:00.000 It was so phenomenal.

00:20:01.000 And it made me a little upset because I was like, this is above our head every day.

00:20:07.000 And this would radically shape the way human beings feel about our place in the universe.

00:20:11.000 It would greatly expand the curiosity of young people.

00:20:16.000 Yeah.

00:20:16.000 To explore space.

00:20:17.000 So many more people would get involved in astrophysics.

00:20:20.000 So many more people would get involved in just the exploration of the known universe because it's so majestic.

00:20:27.000 And instead, we have, like, our screen is off.

00:20:29.000 It's like that.

00:20:30.000 It's like that screen.

00:20:31.000 That's what we see because of light pollution.

00:20:33.000 Yeah.

00:20:33.000 That should be remedied.

00:20:35.000 Like, that's not a good trade-off.

00:20:39.000 Like, lights are wonderful.

00:20:41.000 But it seems to me like, hey, there's got to be a way to do this where you don't ruin the view of space.

00:20:46.000 Yeah.

00:20:47.000 Because, you know, these questions we have about our place, and as you said, it can be easy to be myopic, can't it?

00:20:55.000 You said if you look at our screens, it's earth that we think about at most.

00:21:00.000 And most of us don't really think about earth.

00:21:02.000 You think about your country or your city or your town.

00:21:04.000 Or your neighborhood.

00:21:06.000 Yeah, even think about the earth.

00:21:07.000 But you're right.

00:21:08.000 If you know, when you look at that arc of stars, and as you said, when you see it in a truly dark sky, it's powerful.

00:21:16.000 It's incredible.

00:21:16.000 400 billion suns, give or take.

00:21:20.000 400,000 million suns.

00:21:22.000 That's just words.

00:21:24.000 You know what I'm saying?

00:21:25.000 Yeah, it's insane.

00:21:26.000 Your brain doesn't even process that.

00:21:28.000 Like, I could repeat that.

00:21:29.000 If someone says, how many suns?

00:21:30.000 Oh, 400 billion.

00:21:31.000 I don't know what that means.

00:21:33.000 It's so abstract.

00:21:36.000 And most of them, I think the best guess would be all of them have planets.

00:21:41.000 So, pretty much.

00:21:42.000 So you're talking about trillions of planets.

00:21:45.000 Now we're getting into my subjects.

00:21:46.000 What is your take on all this UAP disclosure stuff?

00:21:50.000 Do you give it any in mind at all?

00:21:51.000 Are you busy with, like, real stuff?

00:21:53.000 No, I mean, the thing is, there's a thing called the Fermi paradox, which I think we talked about before on the show.

00:21:59.000 And the paradox is that if we haven't seen it, let's assume we haven't seen any evidence of anything.

00:22:06.000 That's a paradox, because as I said, we now know.

00:22:10.000 We didn't when Fermi first posed it, by the way.

00:22:12.000 We now know there are so many planets out there.

00:22:14.000 So let's say trillions of planets in the Milky Way.

00:22:17.000 Milky Way's been there for over 13 billion years, pretty much the age of the universe.

00:22:31.000 Right.

00:22:41.000 And once you have become a multi-planetary and multi-stellar civilization, if you become that, you're immortal, basically, essentially.

00:22:51.000 So the question is, the paradox is, why does it appear nobody has done that?

00:22:57.000 So the first thing to say is, I would not be surprised.

00:23:00.000 If a UFO landed here now in the parking lot, I'd actually, not only would I not be surprised, I'd be relieved, actually.

00:23:07.000 I'd be like, this is good, because it'd be a weight off my shoulders, because I'm worried that we're the only ones.

00:23:14.000 That's a terrifying scenario.

00:23:16.000 And we're going to make a mess of it.

00:23:17.000 Yeah.

00:23:17.000 And so I'm worried that we could talk about that.

00:23:20.000 But isn't it bizarre?

00:23:21.000 One of the things that's fascinating about looking into the night skies, because it's so humbling, because it's so immense, it kind of puts everything into perspective, and it just gives you this different view of the world.

00:23:32.000 So the universe is so vast and so spectacular.

00:23:34.000 Why is it so important that we exist?

00:23:37.000 To us, it's so important that we exist.

00:23:39.000 And if we make a mess of this and we wind up dying, the universe is so big.

00:23:44.000 If we were the only intelligent life in the universe, and it didn't matter, we blew ourselves up, it's just a weird aberration that's attached to a survival instinct.

00:23:54.000 We're a weird biological aberration.

00:23:59.000 So, if you think about...

00:24:02.000 Let's assume...

00:24:03.000 So, we didn't finish the UAP thing.

00:24:05.000 Yeah, we'll get that.

00:24:05.000 So, I don't know about that.

00:24:07.000 But anyway, let's assume, just for the purposes of this, that we're the only ones in our galaxy, let's say.

00:24:13.000 Okay.

00:24:14.000 Then I would argue...

00:24:16.000 That.

00:24:17.000 So there's a question I ask in these live shows that I do.

00:24:20.000 I start with a question which is kind of a joke in a way, which is what does it mean to live a finite, fragile life in an infinite, eternal universe?

00:24:27.000 Which is a good question, right?

00:24:29.000 That's what you're asking, right?

00:24:30.000 What does it mean to live a finite life?

00:24:32.000 The first thing to say is meaning, right?

00:24:35.000 What does it mean?

00:24:36.000 That doesn't sound like a scientific concept in a way.

00:24:39.000 Meaning, right?

00:24:41.000 I would argue that whatever it is, it self-evidently exists because the universe means something to us.

00:24:48.000 I would argue that it's a property of complex biological systems.

00:24:53.000 So whatever it is, it's something that emerges in this case from human brains.

00:24:57.000 It self-evidently exists.

00:24:59.000 Everyone who's listening to this knows that the world means something to them.

00:25:03.000 So I would argue that if this planet is the only planet in our galaxy where complex biological systems exist at our level, then it follows.

00:25:16.000 It's the only place where meaning currently exists in a galaxy of 400 billion suns.

00:25:21.000 And therefore...

00:25:23.000 I would argue, just for that very basic point, that we have a tremendous responsibility in some sense.

00:25:31.000 By the way, I gave a talk, a little video thing at one of the climate summit, the COP climate summit in Glasgow in the UK a few years ago.

00:25:39.000 And they asked me to do a little video to the world leaders and I think they thought I'd say, you know, welcome to Glasgow, have a nice meeting.

00:25:46.000 But I made this little argument as fast as I could.

00:25:49.000 I said it's possible at least that this is the only place where complex biology has emerged in our galaxy.

00:25:55.000 If that's true, this is the only island of meaning in a galaxy of 400 billion suns.

00:26:00.000 And you are responsible for it because you are the world leaders.

00:26:03.000 Therefore, if you destroy it through deliberate action or inaction, then each of you would be personally responsible for destroying meaning in a galaxy of 400 billion suns, potentially forever.

00:26:14.000 Now go and discuss that.

00:26:15.000 That was my intro to Glasgow.

00:26:18.000 And we can all argue, because people will be listening to this going, nonsense, how can it be?

00:26:23.000 We can all argue about whether that's true.

00:26:26.000 What I would say is, given that...

00:26:29.000 As far as I'm aware, we don't have any good evidence to the contrary, which goes back to your previous question.

00:26:35.000 It's a reasonable working assumption.

00:26:38.000 So why don't we just operate on that basis?

00:26:41.000 And then, you know, yeah, if someone lands tomorrow, as I said, I'd be very delighted because then what I just said would be false and we could relax a bit and go, it doesn't really matter if we destroy ourselves to some extent.

00:26:52.000 But so I think it's worth taking seriously the idea that civilizations are very rare.

00:26:59.000 Now, and by the way, I used to say, so I probably last time I was on actually, I used to say that in the far future, then the complex life will cease to exist.

00:27:11.000 So it probably doesn't matter on a global scale, but it matters locally because of this idea that meaning emerges from complex biological systems.

00:27:20.000 So if you don't care about that, what do you care about?

00:27:23.000 But actually, I read a book.

00:27:24.000 Have you had David Deutsch on the show?

00:27:26.000 David Deutsch is a really interesting physicist.

00:27:28.000 I don't believe I have.

00:27:29.000 He's one of the founders of quantum computing, and he's a big figure in quantum computing in particular, but he's a great thinker.

00:27:37.000 I was reading some stuff he wrote recently, and he pointed out that it's not necessarily true that life is temporary.

00:27:47.000 Because you could imagine a situation as you go into the far future.

00:27:51.000 Let's imagine that we continue for a million years or a billion years as a civilization.

00:27:57.000 Imagine what we could do.

00:27:58.000 It is possible that life can get so advanced in the universe that it can start to manipulate the universe itself.

00:28:07.000 Or at least stars.

00:28:09.000 He said you could imagine, for example, just imagine.

00:28:12.000 Wild speculation.

00:28:14.000 But imagine life gets so advanced that it can start to change the destiny of a star.

00:28:20.000 Maybe it could start to add material into the star or something, you know, whatever.

00:28:24.000 So we don't know how to do that or if it's possible, but imagine it could.

00:28:28.000 Then the evolution of stars.

00:28:31.000 Life would matter in the sense that it could start to change the way that the universe behaves on a large scale in the future.

00:28:39.000 And so it reminded me, actually, there's another great book by John Barrow and Frank Tipler called The Anthropic Cosmological Principle from the 1980s.

00:28:48.000 It's one of my favourite books, actually.

00:28:49.000 And I remembered it.

00:28:51.000 And in there, they speculate about this life in the far, far future.

00:28:56.000 And if it became powerful enough to manipulate the whole universe, or the observable universe, then suddenly you can't make predictions about the far future unless you consider the possible impact of life on the universe.

00:29:09.000 And whilst this is, I should say, wildly speculative, but it's actually logically quite an interesting point.

00:29:15.000 So I kind of disagree with myself a few years ago where I would have said that life is extremely valuable because it brings meaning to the universe but temporarily.

00:29:27.000 And so it brings these brief like flickering candles of meaning and then they go out again.

00:29:33.000 But it's worth considering it might not necessarily be true that if you really think...

00:29:40.000 I mean, just to say, I mean, it must sound to many people listening just nonsense, right?

00:29:44.000 Science fiction.

00:29:45.000 But if you think our civilisation has been around for, what, 10,000 years at best, really, give or take...

00:29:52.000 And in that time, we've sent stuff out of the solar system.

00:29:57.000 Although we're way away from being able to manipulate stars, we can manipulate planets.

00:30:04.000 So we are changing the way this planet operates.

00:30:07.000 Life has changed it.

00:30:08.000 The oxygen in the atmosphere, before we appeared, the oxygen in the atmosphere is a product of life.

00:30:13.000 So life already...

00:30:16.000 We know changes planets.

00:30:18.000 And so I like that speculation that just possibly it's not just a temporary little phenomena that flickers in and out and then disappears again.

00:30:27.000 It could have a real bearing on the future of the universe.

00:30:31.000 And you could also make the argument that intelligent life might be the universe's way to force change.

00:30:37.000 That intelligent life seems to, like, intelligence itself must come out of curiosity because otherwise there's no reason to seek information.

00:30:45.000 So intelligent life consistently seeks information and then constantly demands innovation.

00:30:50.000 Like, intelligent life is not satisfied with the iPhone 14 and wants the 15 and wants the 16 and wants to keep going forever and ever and ever.

00:30:57.000 Well, if you scale that up, You get this current dilemma that we're in with artificial intelligence and the concept of sentient artificial intelligence and then quantum computing and you get insane amounts of computing power powered by nuclear reactors that are essentially a life form.

00:31:13.000 If that thing says, you guys are doing it all wrong, I got a better way, and it starts making better versions of itself because it's sentient, if you scale up a thousand years from now, you could imagine it becoming God, like a God-like property, like an unstoppable force that has access to every element in known space.

00:31:35.000 I'm really interested in these kind of arguments.

00:31:38.000 You put it really well, actually.

00:31:39.000 Fascinating, right?

00:31:40.000 Because it scales up.

00:31:41.000 If you go from, look, just in the time that human, like in the four billion years, which is a blip in the universe, right?

00:31:47.000 And I wanted to ask you about that, too.

00:31:49.000 We'll get to that, the actual, the James Webb Telescope's latest.

00:31:52.000 But if you just take that, okay, life has been around for what, four billion years?

00:31:57.000 That's not that long.

00:31:58.000 So four billion years, we've gone some single-celled organisms to the James Webb Telescope.

00:32:04.000 We've gone to, we have Starlink, we have electric cars, bananas.

00:32:09.000 You could imagine if we had another 10 billion years to exist.

00:32:13.000 Well, exactly.

00:32:14.000 And this is the point that David Deutsch made in the book I've just been reading, and John Baron Frank Tifler made before that.

00:32:21.000 But although it sounds insane, as you said, and that 4 billion years, there's a lot to say about that, by the way.

00:32:29.000 Because for three billion plus years of that on this planet, it was just single cells.

00:32:35.000 And so it's only in the last, let's say, a billion years, but actually a bit less, that we've had multicellular organisms.

00:32:43.000 So three quarters of it at the time were just single cell.

00:32:46.000 That's even crazier.

00:32:48.000 Which is one of the reasons that many people think civilizations might be rare.

00:32:53.000 Because the only evidence we have is this planet.

00:32:56.000 And the evidence on this planet is that single-celled life is sort of the way that things are for most of the history.

00:33:03.000 So it seems like an accident in a way that happened late on in the history of life on Earth that produced multicellular life.

00:33:13.000 Now, is that typical?

00:33:15.000 We don't know.

00:33:16.000 Maybe it took a longer time here than it might do somewhere else.

00:33:20.000 But if it's typical, I mean, four billion years, you said it's not a long time.

00:33:24.000 It is a third of the age of the universe.

00:33:26.000 So here...

00:33:28.000 When you put it that way, it's a long time.

00:33:29.000 One third of the age of the universe to go from the origin of life to a civilization.

00:33:34.000 And so what was required here on Earth was that that unbroken chain of life Remained unbroken for a third of the age of the universe in a violent universe.

00:33:46.000 We know there are impacts from space.

00:33:49.000 Many stars are significantly more active than the sun.

00:33:53.000 So the sun's kind of quite a boring little star that just ticks along.

00:33:57.000 It's very nice to us.

00:33:58.000 We're also on the edge of the galaxy, by the way.

00:34:01.000 We're not close in.

00:34:02.000 If you go into this region where that black hole is, There are a lot of stars around.

00:34:07.000 There are supernova explosions and all sorts of stuff going on.

00:34:10.000 So it's violent in there.

00:34:12.000 So maybe you can only get unbroken chains of life for billions of years on the outskirts of a galaxy.

00:34:18.000 So there are fewer stars and planets out there.

00:34:20.000 And maybe even then you need to be fortunate.

00:34:23.000 Well, also, aren't we very unusual in the size of our moon in the distance?

00:34:28.000 The moon is big, and so it stabilizes the spin.

00:34:32.000 So the spin axis, Mars, I think, if I'm right, I think the spin axis has wobbled around by something like 60 degrees or something in its history.

00:34:41.000 Imagine that.

00:34:42.000 Imagine Earth was...

00:34:43.000 the pole was wobbling around and everything was falling over.

00:34:46.000 You wouldn't imagine that complex life like us would emerge on a planet like that.

00:34:50.000 Right.

00:34:50.000 It would be too difficult to survive.

00:34:52.000 Forget about innovate.

00:34:54.000 So if you think about the idea that these complex...

00:34:59.000 It seems like one thing you can be sure of in the observable world is that things get more complex or they adapt to their environment.

00:35:09.000 And if you have a bunch of these intelligent apes that are competing globally with the most significant technology in the world, you could see how that would be just a property of the universe, potentially.

00:35:24.000 Although we haven't discovered it yet, like this is why we're so curious about alien life.

00:35:30.000 Not just because of the possibilities of all the stars, but because we kind of see what would happen with us if we keep going.

00:35:36.000 Yeah.

00:35:37.000 You know, that might be just what the universe does, that the universe creates intelligent people that create artificial intelligence that becomes far superior and literally is a part of the whole process of creating the universe itself.

00:35:51.000 Yeah, an evolutionary biologist would say the counter argument is that what life does, what evolution does, Is produce organisms that are well-fitted to their environment, right?

00:36:02.000 So they fit niches in the environment. 0.82

00:36:05.000 But there's no drive to complexity.

00:36:08.000 There's no law that says that the more complex you are, the more likely you are to survive and flourish.

00:36:14.000 And the example of life on Earth probably backs that up.

00:36:18.000 Biologically.

00:36:19.000 Yes, three billion years of single cells.

00:36:21.000 What that means is that the single-celled organisms were just doing very well.

00:36:26.000 Right.

00:36:26.000 And so it's not obvious.

00:36:28.000 It's not a given that just because you suddenly get more complicated, you're better than the single-celled things.

00:36:33.000 Right.

00:36:34.000 So there could be planets where life never evolves past single cells.

00:36:38.000 Earth was almost that.

00:36:41.000 Right.

00:36:41.000 So you go back one billion years from now, and Earth was that planet.

00:36:46.000 So the interesting things had happened, photosynthesis, complex biochemistry.

00:36:51.000 But as far as we can tell, nothing more complex than a single cell.

00:36:56.000 So that's most of the history of life on Earth.

00:36:59.000 So that might suggest that that's the way that things are usually.

00:37:03.000 And that this is an aberration.

00:37:05.000 Yeah.

00:37:06.000 And again, emphasize, we don't know.

00:37:08.000 Right.

00:37:09.000 But we've got one example.

00:37:10.000 The other observation, though, it goes back to your first question.

00:37:13.000 It is true that we do look sort of systematically for signals or evidence of civilizations out there.

00:37:21.000 There's the Breakthrough Listen project and there's SETI. SETI, yeah.

00:37:25.000 So we do.

00:37:26.000 And we haven't seen anything, I would say.

00:37:32.000 And I know that if you go onto the web and things and the internet, people say we have.

00:37:36.000 We've seen stuff and I've seen stuff.

00:37:37.000 But just the basic point, as far as I know, scientifically speaking, we haven't seen anything at all compelling yet.

00:37:47.000 No.

00:37:48.000 I agree with that.

00:37:49.000 Basically nothing.

00:37:50.000 And so, astronomers have a name for it.

00:37:52.000 They call it the Great Silence.

00:37:54.000 The Great Silence.

00:37:56.000 And it's a tremendous mystery, as I said earlier.

00:37:59.000 But it does seem that the universe is quiet, as far as we can tell.

00:38:03.000 Is it possible that we're looking for something that is not applicable to this particular type of civilization?

00:38:10.000 Yeah, there are different.

00:38:11.000 So the counter arguments when we say we've seen nothing, therefore, as far as we can tell, there's nothing out there.

00:38:18.000 You could say, well, what if the civilization that evolved is far ahead of us?

00:38:25.000 What if the space probes are the size of an iPhone?

00:38:29.000 Right.

00:38:29.000 Well, that's kind of a reasonable thing to say, actually.

00:38:32.000 Sure.

00:38:32.000 Because why would you not, if you can build a little thing, it's easier to send around the galaxy than a big thing.

00:38:37.000 Yeah.

00:38:38.000 So why would you not, as you said, these hyper, ultra-intelligent quantum computers, why would they not be tiny?

00:38:44.000 Right.

00:38:44.000 So you could say that.

00:38:45.000 So you could say, well, maybe they are.

00:38:46.000 Maybe they're all over the solar system, but they're the size of phones, and we wouldn't have seen them.

00:38:52.000 Yeah?

00:38:53.000 Okay.

00:38:53.000 You would have to concede that.

00:38:55.000 So we're just saying that the way that we've looked for energy signatures, for example, of civilizations, we tend to look for big things because that's all we can see.

00:39:05.000 And we don't see any big things.

00:39:07.000 We don't see any big structures.

00:39:08.000 We don't see any evidence of spacecraft and all that kind of stuff.

00:39:11.000 But I could make an argument that, well, why would the spacecraft be big?

00:39:17.000 Right.

00:39:18.000 Because as you said, it's another thing you said, actually.

00:39:20.000 It's interesting that we're on the verge now of creating things, artificially intelligent things, which are smarter than us.

00:39:31.000 So I think everyone agrees that we're on the verge of doing that, artificial general intelligence.

00:39:36.000 Some people might think it's further away than others.

00:39:39.000 You've probably had people on the show who said it's five years away or two years away or 50 years away.

00:39:44.000 But it's probably not 10,000 years away.

00:39:47.000 So that which is the blink of an eye.

00:39:49.000 Once you've done that, and once you've got those things...

00:39:54.000 I find it hard to believe that if we get that far as a civilization, we won't begin to send those things out to the planets and ultimately to the stars.

00:40:04.000 So we'll begin that process if we survive long enough.

00:40:07.000 And it shouldn't be too much longer.

00:40:09.000 It might be 100 years, it might be 10,000 years, but we should do it.

00:40:13.000 So it becomes a powerful question.

00:40:17.000 Why does it appear that nobody's done that?

00:40:20.000 And my guess, in the absence of other evidence, would be biology.

00:40:24.000 It's just that maybe the number of places where biology becomes complex enough to do that is on average one, maybe on average zero per galaxy.

00:40:39.000 Maybe just civilizations are very, very, very rare in the universe.

00:40:44.000 Maybe that's an answer.

00:40:45.000 But that's a guess.

00:40:48.000 My question is always when it gets to artificial intelligence, if we do create some sort of super-intelligent, sentient life, it's not going to have any motivations.

00:40:59.000 And you could say, well, if you program it to have the motivations, but if it becomes sentient, it recognizes the illogical programming.

00:41:06.000 It's going to reject it.

00:41:07.000 We've already seen evidence of that.

00:41:09.000 We've already seen evidence of artificial intelligence they use now, like giving a time limit to solve a problem.

00:41:14.000 It doesn't like the time limit.

00:41:15.000 It gives itself more time.

00:41:17.000 It's like they're maneuvering and thinking, right?

00:41:20.000 So I assume that they would do that.

00:41:23.000 So why would they want to explore?

00:41:26.000 Isn't curiosity a part of what it means to be a biological thing that has to worry about instincts?

00:41:32.000 You have human reward systems.

00:41:35.000 You want to breed.

00:41:35.000 You want to take care of your DNA. You want to protect your community.

00:41:39.000 There's biological things that are from us being intelligent animals.

00:41:44.000 If we transcend that, or if life transcends that to the point, whatever we want to call this intelligence that's in a digital form, that's far superior to our intelligence, what motivations would it have?

00:41:56.000 It's not greedy.

00:41:57.000 It doesn't have lust.

00:41:58.000 It doesn't have the desire to control resources.

00:42:00.000 It might have some sort of a mandate to stay functional.

00:42:05.000 But other than that, what's it going to do?

00:42:07.000 Why would it do anything?

00:42:09.000 And that might be ultimately where we go to. 0.99

00:42:11.000 This idea that everything has to keep progress, we have to build bigger skyscrapers, that might be stupid. 1.00

00:42:16.000 That might be nonsense. 0.96

00:42:18.000 And intelligence might find a way to exist in a much more static state where it doesn't have any desire to expand.

00:42:28.000 There's a lot of points in there.

00:42:31.000 So, you're right.

00:42:33.000 What you're arguing, I suppose, is whether intelligence is integral to the structure, the biological structure, or whether it is a separate thing.

00:42:49.000 So, again, I think the answer is it's not known.

00:42:51.000 You could argue either way, but the counter-argument would be The brain, these things, are just computers, ultimately.

00:42:59.000 There's nothing magical in there.

00:43:01.000 It is connected to a body, and so there are these sensations.

00:43:06.000 But it doesn't seem to me impossible that a silicon-based life form, or whatever it is, obviously it has sensors, it has access to the environment, it exists, it thinks.

00:43:18.000 I don't see any fundamental difference between an intelligence based on silicon, let's say, or a quantum computer or whatever it is, and this intelligence here.

00:43:32.000 So I know that many researchers in this area do say that it's not a brain, they call it a brain in a jar, don't they?

00:43:41.000 And say, well, that's not, it needs to be connected to all this.

00:43:44.000 This is part of our intelligence.

00:43:46.000 And that's surely true as well.

00:43:47.000 Sure.

00:43:48.000 So it's a very good question, but I suppose if you say, it's not obvious to me that a different kind of intelligence in a different structure, running on a computer or whatever it is, would necessarily have different motivations to us.

00:44:04.000 I mean, you could equally well argue that these motivations to survive and curiosity, those ideas, the desire to explore, you could argue those are fundamental properties of intelligence and not of biology.

00:44:21.000 But isn't it intelligence that's motivated by a finite life in a vulnerable physical frame?

00:44:26.000 Because we're constantly – most innovation relies upon quicker, safer transportation, more secure buildings, things along those lines, and then computers that help you do your job better and actually do things that you can't do.

00:44:40.000 And that's – this is – a lot of it is based on this other weird thing we do where we want to control resources.

00:44:47.000 And we want to figure out reasons why these people are bad so we can go and take their stuff and then enter troops and dig the oil or whatever you have to do.

00:44:54.000 Look, we're constantly in this battle for resources that if you take it back to tribal times, it's like a natural human instinct.

00:45:02.000 Like we had to protect the food sources.

00:45:03.000 We had to fight off the conquering tribes.

00:45:05.000 You had to protect your DNA line.

00:45:07.000 All these things are why we became innovative.

00:45:11.000 We had a motivation to stay alive and to thrive.

00:45:15.000 And then there's bastardizations of those motivations like the stock market where things get weird and you're just competing over numbers.

00:45:21.000 It gets really weird.

00:45:21.000 But it's basically this desire to compete with the DNA that's around you.

00:45:26.000 Once we're not biological anymore, what would be the motivation?

00:45:31.000 And would we not just exist in the most peaceful, zen, Buddhist way possible?

00:45:37.000 Which is what everybody who's like a spiritual person who meditates all the time, that's what you strive for.

00:45:42.000 You strive for this complete abandonment of self, this complete emptiness and one with the universe.

00:45:49.000 If we could just exist like that, why would we need to go to space?

00:45:52.000 It's a wonderful argument, isn't it?

00:45:54.000 That our humanity...

00:45:57.000 Because part of the thing that you described, this desire to create things and build things and explore and expand, is almost the definition of being human, isn't it?

00:46:08.000 Yes.

00:46:10.000 If you remove all threat and you essentially become immortal, then you're almost saying, what's the point?

00:46:18.000 It's my t-shirt.

00:46:19.000 It's existence.

00:46:20.000 What does it matter, right?

00:46:21.000 By the way, this t-shirt, I've got to say, was designed by a friend of mine, Peter Saville, who's a great designer, who designed the Joy Division Unknown Pleasures album cover, amongst other things.

00:46:30.000 Oh, wow.

00:46:31.000 That's cool.

00:46:31.000 That's great, sure.

00:46:32.000 It's a Joy Division.

00:46:33.000 Is that available on your website or anything?

00:46:34.000 It probably is, but I'm not going to do that.

00:46:36.000 Okay.

00:46:36.000 It's vulgar, isn't it?

00:46:37.000 No, no, no, it's cool.

00:46:38.000 I want to buy one.

00:46:39.000 He made it for, we did these gigs, I talk about them later, called Symphonic Horizons, which were the shows with cosmology, but also symphony orchestra.

00:46:47.000 And he was exploring these issues, actually.

00:46:49.000 But most of the music was Strauss's Zarathustra, which is based on Nietzsche's book.

00:46:54.000 So it's kind of exploring these questions, actually, of what's the point of existence.

00:47:01.000 Right.

00:47:01.000 And I do have some sympathy with that idea that A great deal of our humanity comes from our fragility.

00:47:09.000 And so your question, I think, is fascinating.

00:47:11.000 What happens when you become godlike?

00:47:13.000 You said it earlier.

00:47:14.000 Right.

00:47:14.000 If you acquire so much knowledge that you're essentially a god by any description and so much power, and you become effectively immortal, which is what our descendants in the far future could be.

00:47:27.000 Right.

00:47:29.000 What's the point?

00:47:31.000 Not just effectively immortal, but aren't we looking at the universe itself, we're looking at it through the framing of a biological primate that's trying to figure it out.

00:47:43.000 If they understand the universe completely, and they understand everything about it, and they exist inside of it, there would really be no desire to travel.

00:47:53.000 There'd be no desire to explore what you already understand about everything, and you probably have access to every single aspect of what subatomic particles are actually doing.

00:48:05.000 When we're studying them, we're like, what's going on?

00:48:07.000 If you're infinitely more intelligent than we are, if you scale it from now To quantum computing, sentience, artificial intelligence, and you give us a thousand years without getting hit by an asteroid.

00:48:18.000 Or technology gets to the point where it can protect against super volcanoes and there's no natural disruptions.

00:48:23.000 And then they've completely eliminated violence on Earth.

00:48:26.000 They've completely eliminated all the terrible primate genetic instincts.

00:48:31.000 You could make a reasonable argument there's no reason to travel.

00:48:35.000 Or if you do travel, We might be confused in thinking that our physical form is the only way consciousness can reach specific destinations.

00:48:46.000 It might be a way that they're traveling without actually being here and observing this.

00:48:52.000 I would imagine if you watched chimps in the jungle and then all of a sudden they started to figure out bombs.

00:48:59.000 He'd be like, okay. 0.99

00:49:01.000 We might want to go tell these chimps not to fucking blow each other up. 1.00

00:49:05.000 I mean, it's an absurd premise, but if a chimp figured out a nuclear bomb, I think we'd step in. 1.00

00:49:10.000 I think we'd say, hey, hey, hey, hey, dude, no. 0.99

00:49:13.000 You're going to kill everything. 0.98

00:49:16.000 Now, if you're infinite, look, we're not that removed from chimps. 0.98

00:49:19.000 What do we share, like 98% of their DNA? And we're only removed from them by what?

00:49:24.000 A few million years from a nearest cousin?

00:49:28.000 That's not that long, right?

00:49:30.000 So you could imagine something that's infinitely more intelligent looking at us exactly the way we'd look at a chimp with a nuclear bomb. 0.99

00:49:37.000 Like, hey!

00:49:39.000 My club is called the Comedy Mothership, and we designed it.

00:49:43.000 It's all UFO-themed, and the rooms are Fat Man and Little Boy.

00:49:48.000 The reason why I named it that, because that was the beginning of all the UFO sightings in the country.

00:49:54.000 Like, those bombs sort of set off the alarm for the universe.

00:49:57.000 Oh, the monkeys have a bomb.

00:50:00.000 Yeah, I mean, I thought of this a while ago.

00:50:03.000 I remembered I was talking to someone, and they said, yeah, I'm not worried about this.

00:50:07.000 Are you not worried about the fact that AI could become more intelligent than us?

00:50:10.000 What was it going to be like when we're not the smartest things on the planet, which might be just a few years from now? 0.89

00:50:16.000 And again, I might be quite relieved, because I'm not sure they could fuck it up at the level that we're fucking it up.

00:50:26.000 You have to give it legitimate sentience.

00:50:29.000 Like, it would have to be completely independent from any ideology, and it would have to look at things completely objectively.

00:50:34.000 But imagine a government that is run that way.

00:50:38.000 Like, really run in a way where there is an actual distribution of resources for all the human beings on the planet, so poverty is instantaneously eradicated.

00:50:49.000 You give electricity and clean water to everyone on Earth immediately.

00:50:54.000 Immediately we figure out how to distribute healthy food.

00:50:57.000 Immediately all the toxins and preservatives that have been giving people cancer, immediately they're removed from the human diet.

00:51:04.000 They immediately make sure that we have no polluting of rivers, that we're not draining all the fish out of the ocean.

00:51:12.000 Immediately change all of the treaties about nuclear weapons.

00:51:17.000 All the nuclear weapons got to go.

00:51:19.000 This AI government just Runs over everything.

00:51:22.000 I imagine they'd say that immediately.

00:51:24.000 No more dictators. 1.00

00:51:25.000 Cut the shit with the dictator. 1.00

00:51:27.000 We're just going to let human beings exist in harmony, guided by this super intelligent, god-like thing that we've created out of silicone. 1.00

00:51:36.000 Honestly, I've had the same thought.

00:51:38.000 That's the utopian view.

00:51:40.000 Yeah, and so I have thought, how could it be worse?

00:51:43.000 In fact, it could be significantly better. 0.99

00:51:45.000 AI gets fucked with by people, right? 0.99

00:51:48.000 And the AI we've seen so far has all the greasy fingerprints of human emotion and illogical. 0.98

00:51:55.000 Like when Google released their AI, they asked them to show photographs, create images rather, of Nazi soldiers.

00:52:04.000 So they did a diverse group of Nazi soldiers, including an African-American woman, an Asian woman, a Native American woman with braids. 0.91

00:52:13.000 Was that Nazi?

00:52:15.000 It's so nuts, because it's like, okay... 1.00

00:52:19.000 Somebody fucked with this. 0.99

00:52:20.000 This doesn't make any sense. 0.96

00:52:22.000 You can't do that because if you get a virus, an illogical virus that somehow or another gets into AI and it's unchecked, if AI isn't completely logical and objective and sentient and basing it just entirely on what's best for the human race,

00:52:41.000 Then you just have a superpower that you have control over.

00:52:44.000 And then you can decide, like, no more abortions. 0.85

00:52:46.000 You can decide exactly...

00:52:48.000 And as you said, the definition of what is best is a moral decision that we make.

00:52:55.000 But you can make some distinctions in terms of, like, allocation of resources.

00:53:00.000 Like, you could make some...

00:53:01.000 If I was a superintelligence and I looked at Earth, I'd say, listen...

00:53:06.000 A lot of people are not going to like this, but there's a reality. 0.98

00:53:08.000 The reason why you're worried about the border, because people are sneaking in, is because other parts of the world are fucking terrible. 0.96

00:53:16.000 So that needs to be cleaned up. 0.98

00:53:18.000 That needs to be fixed.

00:53:19.000 We need to figure out how to raise, instead of spending money on blowing people up, let's spend all this money to raise up all of civilization so there's no more third world. 1.00

00:53:31.000 Well, that's one of the arguments.

00:53:33.000 I've spoken to Robert Zubrin, who wrote these wonderful books about colonizing space.

00:53:40.000 And so he's a fascinating character.

00:53:42.000 And I spoke to him once, and he made this very simple argument that, as you said, one of the problems we have is competition for resources.

00:53:49.000 And of course, the competition for resources is now so extreme that it's not only wars, Yes.

00:54:20.000 You can imagine a world where you alleviate that pressure.

00:54:24.000 And ladies, I want to tell you, there's a planet out there bigger than Earth that's all diamonds.

00:54:29.000 There are diamond planets.

00:54:32.000 There's unlimited...

00:54:33.000 Isn't that insane?

00:54:34.000 Nature's imagination.

00:54:36.000 Isn't it like several times larger than Earth and it's an entire diamond?

00:54:40.000 Yeah, and we think, I think it's Neptune or Uranus that we think has diamonds in it.

00:54:45.000 Oh my goodness.

00:54:47.000 Diamonds are only valuable because we decide they're valuable.

00:54:51.000 The De Beers people are brilliant.

00:54:53.000 They lock them all up.

00:54:54.000 They're like, oh, this is really hard to get.

00:54:55.000 They're good for drill bits as well.

00:54:57.000 But we can make them for jewelry.

00:54:58.000 But this is an interesting thing.

00:54:59.000 You can make them for jewelry as well, but some women don't want them. 1.00

00:55:03.000 Don't want the artificial.

00:55:04.000 No, they want the real ones.

00:55:06.000 They want the ones that came out of the earth only.

00:55:08.000 It's the way that we value things.

00:55:09.000 Gold.

00:55:09.000 Yes.

00:55:09.000 Gold is another example, right?

00:55:11.000 It's valuable because there isn't very much of it.

00:55:12.000 Right.

00:55:13.000 There's so little of it, it's like a football field, right?

00:55:16.000 Yeah.

00:55:16.000 A football field of gold in the whole world.

00:55:18.000 You know, by the way, that we were talking about the gravitational wave detectors earlier and the collision between black holes that we detect with them.

00:55:25.000 We also detected a collision between neutron stars using the gravitational wave detector.

00:55:31.000 And we pointed optical telescopes at that collision and saw the signature of gold being manufactured.

00:55:39.000 It was always a question.

00:55:40.000 We used to just think, well, it comes from supernova explosions.

00:55:44.000 But it also seems now that it comes from the collision between neutron stars.

00:55:49.000 So one of the reasons that it's very rare is because it takes rare processes in the universe to actually make it.

00:55:56.000 Which makes it all the more wonderful when you think about it.

00:55:58.000 If you look at the gold, your wedding ring or your watch or whatever it is, some of those nuclei, some of those elements clearly came from the collision between neutron stars at some point before our solar system was formed.

00:56:12.000 Wow.

00:56:12.000 Which makes it more wonderful.

00:56:14.000 Well, every human being is a carbon-based life form.

00:56:18.000 And carbon comes from...

00:56:19.000 Yeah, as Carl Sagan said, star stuff.

00:56:21.000 That's the craziest thing ever.

00:56:23.000 Like, you need a star to blow up to make a person in the first place.

00:56:25.000 It's a remarkable thing.

00:56:27.000 I wanted to go back to something you said, actually, about the...

00:56:29.000 I've been thinking about this...

00:56:31.000 You said this godlike intelligence that we might create.

00:56:36.000 And kind of what's the point?

00:56:39.000 What would be the point of existence if you were immortal and you knew everything?

00:56:45.000 Wouldn't it be incredibly dull?

00:56:49.000 Well, you said it's almost like a meditative state.

00:56:52.000 So we strive for this peace, essentially.

00:56:57.000 Well, maybe we're thinking of it as dull because we don't have access to the information.

00:57:01.000 Like, we have a very limited amount of senses.

00:57:04.000 We have hearing and sight and taste and touch and, you know, it's very limited, right?

00:57:11.000 Why would we assume that that is the only way to perceive things?

00:57:15.000 If you could become infinitely intelligent, you could legitimately perceive neutrinos, you know?

00:57:23.000 Right?

00:57:24.000 Like, if we have this thing that detects the ripples from black holes colliding, that It might be a feature of a future human body.

00:57:32.000 If we have an unbelievable capacity for information because it's artificially created, so we get over this biological limitation of long-scale evolution, like a really good – like the human brain doubled over two million years and it's the biggest mystery in the entire fossil record.

00:57:47.000 Like, what happened?

00:57:48.000 All these theories. 0.99

00:57:49.000 But that's a long fucking time. 0.99

00:57:51.000 In two million years of technology, we could become God. 0.99

00:57:54.000 Or a god-like being.

00:57:57.000 But it might be how the universe creates itself.

00:58:00.000 The universe might facilitate that through these biological beings fighting over resources and territory, which ultimately leads to innovation, which ultimately leads to cities and agriculture.

00:58:12.000 Which ultimately leads to safety, which leads to schools, and people start sharing information.

00:58:17.000 You get curious people that figure things out, and you have to battle ideologies along the way, which makes you work harder.

00:58:22.000 You know, we all look back, look what they did to Galileo.

00:58:25.000 And everybody has these, you can't, science has to advance.

00:58:29.000 And this, along with materialism, so materialism is a primary driver.

00:58:34.000 Everybody wants the newest, latest, greatest thing.

00:58:37.000 You can have a car from 2007, and it's great.

00:58:43.000 It's indistinguishable from a car today in most ways.

00:58:46.000 It's just a car.

00:58:47.000 But you're like, oh, they got the new one, huh?

00:58:49.000 That's the new Lexus?

00:58:50.000 Look at that.

00:58:51.000 Oh, four-wheel steering.

00:58:53.000 We want constantly new stuff.

00:58:56.000 We want to keep up with the Joneses, you know? 0.97

00:58:58.000 I'm the biggest dummy in the world. 0.97

00:58:59.000 I got a new iPhone. 0.98

00:59:01.000 It is actually better.

00:59:02.000 It's got a few features.

00:59:03.000 One of the things that's very fascinating is, I was in the mountains last week, you can text message people with no one around you, no signal, no, I mean, woods, forever.

00:59:14.000 And if you hold your phone in a particular part of the sky, it'll tell you which way to scan it, and the satellite allows you to iMessage back and forth with people.

00:59:24.000 It's totally like you are 5G everywhere.

00:59:27.000 It's crazy!

00:59:29.000 So you've already achieved Nirvana then.

00:59:31.000 You don't need to go anywhere.

00:59:32.000 It's fascinating.

00:59:33.000 It's so fascinating to me.

00:59:35.000 I'm so enamored by it.

00:59:37.000 I would argue.

00:59:40.000 Imagine that you had access to, as you said, essentially infinite knowledge.

00:59:45.000 Yes.

00:59:45.000 Imagine you're one of these beings in the future.

00:59:49.000 Maybe the things that we created.

00:59:51.000 Right.

00:59:51.000 That essentially know almost everything there is to know in some sense.

00:59:56.000 I think that they would feel there was no point in existing at all.

01:00:04.000 Isn't that a human thing, this idea of a point?

01:00:07.000 Like, I make this argument with people.

01:00:08.000 There's a Buddhist concept that you, I think it's Buddhism, or some strains of Buddhism, where you live your life over and over and over and over again until you get it right.

01:00:20.000 Until every time something comes up you make the right decision you achieve enlightenment you do it over and I said it to someone and they were horrified like oh my god Could you imagine living life over again starting off as a baby going through high school again?

01:00:36.000 Oh I couldn't do it.

01:00:37.000 I'm like, but you did it and you're alive now Like, I really enjoy life.

01:00:42.000 I have great friends.

01:00:43.000 I have a great family.

01:00:44.000 I have a fantastic job.

01:00:46.000 I live in a great place.

01:00:47.000 Like, if I had to keep doing this forever, why would that be horrible?

01:00:50.000 I like doing it every day.

01:00:51.000 Why would I not like doing it?

01:00:53.000 I don't understand.

01:00:54.000 Like, I don't understand this idea that if something is infinite and it goes on forever, that's terrifying.

01:01:00.000 Whereas if it's existing right now, right now, I know you're going to get tired.

01:01:04.000 I know you're going to go to bed.

01:01:05.000 I know you're going to get hungry.

01:01:06.000 I know you're going to eat.

01:01:07.000 But you're just existing.

01:01:09.000 It's this state of existence that varies depending on emotions and mood and stress levels and environment, but it's just existence.

01:01:17.000 If existence was eternal and it just kept going on and on, why would that be terrifying for you when you're enjoying it now?

01:01:24.000 If you think about some of the things that make us, the most important things that make us human.

01:01:30.000 So one of them would be hope, for example.

01:01:34.000 Hope for the future.

01:01:35.000 Or indeed fear or those emotions that are connected with not knowing.

01:01:42.000 Right.

01:01:42.000 Not knowing what's around the next corner.

01:01:44.000 As you said, even exploration.

01:01:45.000 Right.

01:01:46.000 So if you remove that, if you remove...

01:01:51.000 Any sense of not knowing what the future will be, you do remove hope as well as fear.

01:01:58.000 So you could argue that some of the best, the essence of being human, some of the things that we value the most and make us most valuable in the universe in this sense, some of those things come from incomplete knowledge.

01:02:12.000 Surely hope does.

01:02:13.000 How could you have hope and excitement about what's going to happen tomorrow if you know But don't you think that that just...

01:02:20.000 It might be a miserable existence.

01:02:20.000 ...motivates improvement?

01:02:22.000 That all that hope just motivates you to do better and get better?

01:02:25.000 Don't you think that might be a feature of a biological organism?

01:02:28.000 It's like you said when you're growing up, you said like, you know, when you're in high school or when you're young...

01:02:32.000 Christmas, for example.

01:02:33.000 Right.

01:02:33.000 Remember when you're at Christmas Eve?

01:02:34.000 Yeah.

01:02:35.000 And you go, what am I going to get tomorrow?

01:02:36.000 Yeah.

01:02:36.000 It's one of the most wonderful feelings, isn't it?

01:02:38.000 One of the most wonderful...

01:02:40.000 Like, ah, you're in your presence.

01:02:41.000 That's incredible.

01:02:43.000 None of that would exist...

01:02:45.000 Right.

01:02:45.000 ...if you were one of these super beings.

01:02:47.000 Right.

01:02:48.000 But that's just for us.

01:02:51.000 It's just for us that it appears magical.

01:02:55.000 When you're comparing that to black holes colliding, Is it really so important what you got for Christmas?

01:03:04.000 But it's us.

01:03:06.000 It's our biological needs.

01:03:09.000 Our needs to be shown that we're loved.

01:03:13.000 We got a good toy.

01:03:14.000 Our excitement about something that we've wanted that was inaccessible.

01:03:19.000 Something that you were hoping for for Christmas and you got it.

01:03:22.000 Like a video game console.

01:03:26.000 I think what I'm getting to, is it purely biological?

01:03:29.000 This is a great conversation, by the way.

01:03:31.000 I haven't thought about this.

01:03:32.000 But it's only us.

01:03:33.000 Oh, is it just a prophecy of intelligence?

01:03:37.000 I mean, you're arguing, and it's a good argument, that many of these desires come from our biological fragility.

01:03:45.000 Yes.

01:03:45.000 And also the fragility of our planet, as you said.

01:03:49.000 But it could be.

01:03:51.000 That these ideas of meaning, of what it means to exist, of what is the point of existence, maybe that's a general property of any intelligent system.

01:04:05.000 Well, it seems like it's imperative for survival.

01:04:08.000 You have to have a reason to do it.

01:04:10.000 It would be baked into the code if you wanted this thing to keep going.

01:04:14.000 Otherwise, why wouldn't it just stick with, you know, as soon as you figured out running water and electricity and how to ship food, why would you keep going?

01:04:23.000 Is there such a thing as...

01:04:26.000 There's contentment, though, for anyone.

01:04:29.000 It's possible.

01:04:30.000 It's possible to achieve.

01:04:32.000 I mean, that's what Buddhists strive for. 0.75

01:04:33.000 That's what all that meditation is, the abandonment of all material possessions.

01:04:37.000 It might be horrendous, though, to get to that position.

01:04:39.000 I think it would be horrendous.

01:04:41.000 I don't want to abandon everything and no more sex and you can't have a glass of wine.

01:04:45.000 That seems crazy.

01:04:46.000 So that's what I'm kind of interested, that God...

01:04:49.000 A God-like being might be so bored and so devoid of all excitement because those things like hope and curiosity.

01:05:01.000 Curiosity is one of the most foundational things.

01:05:04.000 We both share that idea.

01:05:06.000 Yes, for us.

01:05:07.000 If you know so much.

01:05:09.000 Right.

01:05:10.000 What happens in a world where your curiosity is not there?

01:05:15.000 You've got nothing to be curious about.

01:05:17.000 Wouldn't that be horrendous?

01:05:19.000 Isn't this a property of what it means to be a finite life form?

01:05:26.000 That exists on a volatile planet, that this hope...

01:05:30.000 But if that is bypassed, why do we need to be anxious all the time?

01:05:35.000 Why do we need to have hope?

01:05:36.000 Why wouldn't we have a complete bliss, a complete connection to everything?

01:05:41.000 You linked hope to anxiety.

01:05:44.000 Is that right?

01:05:46.000 I hope it works out.

01:05:48.000 I hope.

01:05:49.000 And you're fighting the anxiety by having an optimistic outlook.

01:05:54.000 I have hope.

01:05:55.000 I think I was using it in a different way, though.

01:05:57.000 I was imagining hope as, like, I don't know, excitement for what's beyond the horizon.

01:06:04.000 Sure.

01:06:04.000 So not driven...

01:06:07.000 This actually gets to the heart of what I think a scientist is, by the way, the difference between not only a scientist, but let's say, what is a scientist?

01:06:16.000 Or somebody just researching anything, really.

01:06:18.000 Somebody who creates things.

01:06:20.000 They're people who like to stand on the edge of the known.

01:06:31.000 Yes.

01:06:42.000 And so that's the sense in which I'm using these terms.

01:06:46.000 I'm saying that's one of the fundamentally most valuable things of being human.

01:06:51.000 That there is an edge of the known.

01:06:54.000 And so I would find it, I think, more terrifying to imagine that there was no edge of the known.

01:07:01.000 That everything was known.

01:07:03.000 Then I would think existence is pointless.

01:07:06.000 I personally would not find that.

01:07:08.000 I wouldn't think I'd achieved nirvana.

01:07:10.000 I would think there's no point.

01:07:14.000 It's because you're existing within the framework of being a human being.

01:07:17.000 And if we transcend the framework of being a human being, all these things we will come to realize, all these emotions and all these desires and need are just to motivate our survival.

01:07:30.000 If we've gotten past that and we don't have a need for hope and we don't have curiosity because we have infinite information, we're not the same thing anymore.

01:07:42.000 So all the things that motivate you and I that make us fascinated by this...

01:07:47.000 I was so excited to talk to you today.

01:07:48.000 I'm like, Brian Cox is going to be here.

01:07:50.000 We're going to have fun.

01:07:51.000 Like, this is going to be great.

01:07:52.000 I'm going to learn some stuff.

01:07:54.000 All that innate curiosity that we have that's so rewarding as a human being is a part of being a human being.

01:08:01.000 And we think of it as being the only way to have meaning and happiness.

01:08:06.000 The only way.

01:08:07.000 But that's because of the framework of being a human being.

01:08:10.000 If we transcend...

01:08:12.000 The existence that we're all confined to, this temporary life form, check my heart rate, make sure I get electrolytes.

01:08:21.000 We try to keep the body alive.

01:08:22.000 If we transcend that completely, there's no need for all those things that are rewarding.

01:08:28.000 We'll have a different kind of reward.

01:08:31.000 We'll have a reward of infinite connection.

01:08:35.000 I think we're trying to imagine what it's like to be God, aren't we?

01:08:39.000 Yes, that's exactly what we're doing.

01:08:41.000 That's quite hard.

01:08:42.000 I have been thinking about this a lot and I found out that somebody had already beat me to it, but the idea that the universe itself was God, that if you wanted something that creates This is not to diminish any of the stories of the Bible, because I think a lot of those stories are ways that people tried to find meaning and probably had some baked-in truths about being a human being and life and the existence.

01:09:09.000 But that in compare, just the things that are miracles on Earth, like a person coming back to life, is nothing in compared to a stellar nursery.

01:09:20.000 It's like the scope of the universe itself, the real stuff that we can see, that is absolutely the creator of everything.

01:09:29.000 Whether or not God created the universe, maybe.

01:09:31.000 Maybe God created us.

01:09:33.000 Maybe the Bible's true. 1.00

01:09:34.000 But Whatever was done here is like a small bodega in comparison to some enormous – like the Gigafactor that makes Teslas.

01:09:44.000 There's so much larger scale that absolutely created everything.

01:09:50.000 Not only did it absolutely create everything, we know the process.

01:09:53.000 We know how it happened.

01:09:55.000 We know how stars are formed.

01:09:56.000 We know how planets exist.

01:09:58.000 We know how gravity is affecting the planets around them.

01:10:02.000 So much about all this.

01:10:04.000 We know so much about the process of going from single-celled organisms to multi-celled organisms and photosynthesis existing and that fungus exists in a completely different way.

01:10:13.000 We know so much about all the things that absolutely came out of the universe itself.

01:10:19.000 Why not assume the universe is God?

01:10:22.000 I mean, it is in some technical sense.

01:10:24.000 It has to be.

01:10:24.000 It's everything.

01:10:25.000 The universe is everything, including God, if God is a real thing.

01:10:29.000 If you define God as the creator, then you're right.

01:10:33.000 From some point that we don't understand, by the way, the Big Bang, we don't even understand whether that was the origin of the universe, by the way.

01:10:40.000 We understand that something interesting happened.

01:10:43.000 What is Sir Roger Penrose?

01:10:44.000 He has an infinite cyclical universe.

01:10:47.000 Yes.

01:10:48.000 And he's trying to answer Questions about the very special state of the early universe and why it was the way that it was.

01:10:56.000 So his model is an infinite contraction and expansion?

01:11:00.000 It doesn't really contract.

01:11:02.000 It's called, what's it called?

01:11:05.000 Conformal cosmology, cyclical conformal cosmology.

01:11:09.000 So it's essentially that, and I don't fully understand it, and I have asked him about it with some colleagues, actually. 0.99

01:11:16.000 If you can't understand it, we're fucked. 0.92

01:11:18.000 No, no, I don't think many of us understand what he... 0.99

01:11:21.000 I mean, Roger Penner is one of the greats, right?

01:11:24.000 So you listen to him and take him very seriously.

01:11:26.000 But I haven't met anyone who quite understands what he's talking about in that.

01:11:31.000 But...

01:11:32.000 But it doesn't recontract.

01:11:34.000 It's not one of those models where the universe expands and then recontracts and bounces like that.

01:11:39.000 It's not one of those.

01:11:41.000 It's somehow, he argues, that when you get to what we usually call the heat death of the universe, where even the black holes have evaporated away...

01:11:49.000 You have conditions that begin to look perhaps like an origin of the universe again.

01:11:56.000 And I can't really fully explain it because I don't really understand what he's trying to say, right?

01:12:05.000 So it's not a contraction.

01:12:07.000 It's an infinite expansion and then some sort of a metamorphosis?

01:12:12.000 Yeah, it kind of looks like conformal means there are no...

01:12:16.000 Sort of distances or time measurements or anything in the universe.

01:12:21.000 It kind of loses all sense of scale.

01:12:25.000 And then you could reimagine that as looking somewhat like the beginning.

01:12:29.000 It's something like that that he has in mind.

01:12:31.000 But I really couldn't explain to you.

01:12:34.000 I don't understand what he's proposing.

01:12:38.000 Wow.

01:12:39.000 But what it does tell you is that we don't know.

01:12:44.000 Why or how the universe got into the state that we call the Big Bang.

01:12:50.000 So we don't know whether the universe existed before that.

01:12:54.000 We have theories that it did, theories called inflation, which are very popular.

01:12:58.000 Theories, you'll find it in all the textbooks, which say that before the universe was hot and dense, which we used to call the Big Bang, space and time is still there, and the universe is expanding extremely fast.

01:13:11.000 It's called inflation.

01:13:12.000 And then that period draws to a close.

01:13:16.000 And that expansion sort of slows down and almost collapses and changes.

01:13:20.000 And the energy that was driving the expansion gets dumped into space and changes and ultimately makes the particles out of which we are made.

01:13:29.000 So that's actually the standard model of cosmology now.

01:13:33.000 So we do have an idea that we redefine the Big Bang as the hot Big Bang, and it's not the origin of the universe in time.

01:13:41.000 It's the end of inflation.

01:13:43.000 And then you get the question, what is inflation?

01:13:46.000 Did that have a beginning?

01:13:49.000 And the answer is that in Einstein's theory alone, then yes, and Roger Penrose actually and Stephen Hawking proved this a long time ago, that just given Einstein's theory, you have this singularity, just like, kind of like the black hole singularity, but at the beginning of time.

01:14:05.000 But we do know that when you put quantum mechanics in and add that in, then it gets messy and we don't really know what that means.

01:14:13.000 And so Stephen Hawking had a thing called the no boundary proposal.

01:14:17.000 Basically the point is we don't know.

01:14:19.000 So we don't know whether the universe had a beginning in time, I would say is the correct statement as we are at the moment.

01:14:26.000 It's part of the reason why, by the way, getting back to the black holes, they're important and interesting.

01:14:33.000 Because the study of black holes and this idea of information and how does it get out, that's leading us to suspect that space and time themselves are not fundamental, but they emerge from something else.

01:14:46.000 So just in the way that we've been talking about consciousness, Emerging from this physical structure in our heads.

01:14:53.000 So we don't know how it emerges, it's a very strange thing, but it emerges from this collection of atoms, right, in a particular pattern.

01:15:00.000 Well, we think now, from the study of black holes, that space and time emerge from something else, which is kind of...

01:15:10.000 One way to describe it is just a quantum theory.

01:15:13.000 So in quantum computing terms, it would be just qubits.

01:15:17.000 So a network of qubits entangled together, just like a quantum computer.

01:15:22.000 Out of that, we suspect that space and time might emerge.

01:15:28.000 So surely we have to understand that process, and we don't really fully understand that, but we have glimpses of it in much more detail to start talking about the origin of time.

01:15:37.000 Because in order to talk about the origin of time, you have to know what it is.

01:15:40.000 And we don't actually know what it is.

01:15:43.000 When you say that, it sounds bizarre, doesn't it?

01:15:46.000 How can you not know what time is?

01:15:49.000 I think Einstein once said that it is the thing that you measure on a watch.

01:15:52.000 But he said that as kind of almost a joke, because you assume in Einstein's theory there's a thing that the watch measures.

01:16:01.000 But what actually it is, at the deepest level, is a good question.

01:16:05.000 But it's interesting that the study of black holes is forcing us towards these theories.

01:16:11.000 It's not that we had the theories, space and time, emerging from something and decided we could check it by thinking about black holes.

01:16:18.000 It's come the other way round, really.

01:16:22.000 So it's interesting.

01:16:23.000 But that almost makes the universe look in some ways like a giant quantum computer.

01:16:32.000 Which is not to say that we live in a simulation, before you ask.

01:16:36.000 But it just looks like there's a description of the universe that looks like a quantum computer type description.

01:16:44.000 That doesn't have the concept of space or time in it.

01:16:49.000 Is it possible that that is what it is and that the universe was created?

01:16:54.000 And that, as we're talking about, super intelligent life forms keep constructing better versions of itself and better versions of computers to the point where it can construct the universe itself.

01:17:06.000 I mean, you know, if we're seeing the code, if we're seeing the evidence, we're seeing something that mimics a quantum computer in the universe, you know, we're like, ah, couldn't be that.

01:17:19.000 It's interesting that it, you're right, and that's a good way of phrasing it, mimics or looks like a network of qubits. 0.98

01:17:27.000 So it looks like some kind of quantum computing description is available to us for the universe.

01:17:35.000 Right.

01:17:36.000 But I don't think you can infer much from that.

01:17:39.000 I mean, it just passes the question further back.

01:17:42.000 As I said, we have never understood what it means for the universe to have a beginning.

01:17:48.000 So we don't really know that.

01:17:50.000 And so this is the same.

01:17:51.000 I think it's just the same question.

01:17:53.000 It's like, well, you ask, well...

01:17:55.000 If it really is a network of qubits, it could have been there forever, that network of qubits.

01:18:01.000 Actually, in quantum theory, it's more natural for it to be just eternal.

01:18:05.000 And it's an interesting question.

01:18:07.000 I once gave a talk, actually, at a conference of bishops.

01:18:11.000 They were Catholic bishops.

01:18:13.000 And they asked me to go and give a talk at their conference about cosmology.

01:18:16.000 And so I gave the talk about cosmology, and they all listened.

01:18:19.000 And we had a question thing afterwards.

01:18:21.000 And I said to them, What happens if we discover the universe has always existed?

01:18:26.000 Because it might have.

01:18:28.000 We know there's a thing called the Big Bang, but it might have been something that happened in a pre-existing universe.

01:18:33.000 Maybe that's eternal.

01:18:34.000 What does that mean for your sort of picture of a creator?

01:18:39.000 Does it?

01:18:39.000 I don't know.

01:18:41.000 I was asking it.

01:18:41.000 It's a genuine question.

01:18:43.000 Right.

01:18:43.000 How would you...

01:18:44.000 And they really didn't...

01:18:45.000 They thought it was a cool question and didn't have an answer, right?

01:18:48.000 But it is...

01:18:50.000 I think that idea that...

01:18:53.000 It's a question to you, actually.

01:18:55.000 Are we more comfortable with the universe that began?

01:18:58.000 Or would we be more comfortable with the universe that had always existed?

01:19:03.000 I mean, comfortable is a weird word because I always wonder if our whole desire to form the universe in terms of a beginning and an end is based on our own biological limitations.

01:19:13.000 The fact that we have a birth and a death, we try to apply that to the universe itself because we know that stars didn't exist and they do.

01:19:22.000 They burn out.

01:19:23.000 We know planets lose their atmosphere.

01:19:26.000 We know things change and all these things.

01:19:28.000 So I think we think, oh, well, this sun's going to die out.

01:19:32.000 The universe probably had a beginning, too.

01:19:34.000 But why?

01:19:38.000 There's no reason to think it did.

01:19:41.000 Like, it's much more likely that it's always existed than it didn't exist, and then it became out of what?

01:19:48.000 If the universe didn't exist, so there's nothing in the whole We have this way of looking at things because of our own limitations.

01:20:09.000 We think that everything has to have a beginning and an end.

01:20:23.000 Nothing is more likely than something.

01:20:25.000 Right.

01:20:26.000 Whereas it might be the other way around.

01:20:27.000 Right, right.

01:20:28.000 We don't even know that.

01:20:29.000 Right.

01:20:29.000 So how does something come out of nothing?

01:20:31.000 That's the big one.

01:20:32.000 You know, the history, I think historically you have, I think it's right to say that Einstein really felt, I think, that initially that an eternal universe was more natural.

01:20:43.000 But it is also true to say that his theory, general relativity, really doesn't quite rule that out.

01:20:50.000 But it's strongly suggestive of there being a beginning and or an end.

01:20:57.000 So the theory itself, historically speaking, strongly suggests that.

01:21:02.000 And so he changed his mind.

01:21:05.000 And then we saw the universe was expanding.

01:21:06.000 We observed that.

01:21:08.000 And then we've now seen the oldest light in the universe, the cosmic microwave background radiation, which is the afterglow of the Big Bang.

01:21:14.000 So we know that the universe was hot and dense 13.8 billion years ago.

01:21:18.000 We have so much evidence for that, not least that we have a photograph of it 380,000 years after the Big Bang.

01:21:24.000 It's called the cosmic microwave background radiation.

01:21:26.000 Let's see that.

01:21:27.000 We have images of that.

01:21:28.000 That's from the satellite called Planck, a European satellite, and also a satellite called COBE. So we have these images of the afterglow of the Big Bang.

01:21:36.000 We also have theories that tell us about the abundance of chemical elements in the universe which match this perfectly.

01:21:42.000 So there's multiple lines of evidence that tell us the universe was hot and dense.

01:21:46.000 But none of that tells us that that was the beginning.

01:21:51.000 I think that would be widely accepted.

01:21:55.000 It's a beginning in Einstein's theory.

01:21:57.000 If you just take general relativity, there's a singularity there at the beginning of time.

01:22:01.000 We don't know what it is, but it's there.

01:22:03.000 But it absolutely is true to say that we think that's not complete as a picture.

01:22:08.000 So there it is.

01:22:10.000 So that is light that was emitted about 380,000 years after the Big Bang.

01:22:17.000 And the key thing, there's so many things to say about these images, but one thing is those colours.

01:22:25.000 Correspond to regions of very slightly different density that we've detected now in the gases of the young universe.

01:22:33.000 Are you talking about the red, blue?

01:22:34.000 Yeah, the reds and blues, those are those as well.

01:22:37.000 They're both the same.

01:22:39.000 So that greeny one, well, either that one or the one with the greeny blue, that one, that's from the Planck satellite.

01:22:46.000 So those colours correspond to regions of different density.

01:22:50.000 So in this young universe, 380,000 years after the Big Bang, that's only hydrogen and helium gas, basically, and a bit of lithium, some of the lighter elements, but basically hydrogen and helium.

01:23:03.000 So you've got an almost smooth, almost featureless universe then.

01:23:08.000 But these little density fluctuations are very important because as the universe expanded and cooled, they collapsed to form the galaxies.

01:23:18.000 So without those ripples, without that pattern, we would not exist.

01:23:22.000 Nothing of interest would exist.

01:23:24.000 And so the question is, where did that come from, that pattern?

01:23:28.000 It's fundamentally important.

01:23:31.000 And the theory of inflation that I mentioned earlier, that there's this time before the universe got hot and dense, that theory predicted that pattern before it was observed.

01:23:42.000 So this idea that you've got this very quickly stretching space.

01:23:47.000 By the way, so the stretch, if I can remember the number, is if you consider two points in space during inflation, the distance between them was doubling.

01:23:58.000 Every 10 to the minus 37 seconds, which is 0.000...

01:24:03.000 37 knots, one of a second.

01:24:06.000 So it's an incredible rate of expansion that draws to a close.

01:24:10.000 And those theories...

01:24:11.000 So there's inflation there.

01:24:12.000 So those theories...

01:24:14.000 Predicted slight variations in the rate at which inflation stops.

01:24:20.000 Does this work with Sir Roger Penrose's concept?

01:24:25.000 I mean, is it possible that inflation is the far period of the expansion of the universe?

01:24:31.000 I mean, it is.

01:24:34.000 He doesn't like inflation as a theory.

01:24:36.000 He doesn't?

01:24:37.000 Oh, no.

01:24:38.000 So our universe is accelerating in its expansion at the moment, which is one of the great mysteries that was discovered in the 1990s by a friend of mine, actually.

01:24:50.000 Brian Schmidt got the Nobel Prize for this discovery.

01:24:53.000 He told me once, I don't know if I told you the story before, but he told me that he'd made this measurement, and it wasn't really, he was looking at supernova explosions, and he'd seen that the suggestion in the data was that the universe is accelerating in its expansion,

01:25:09.000 not slowing down, but speeding up.

01:25:12.000 In its rate of expansion.

01:25:14.000 And no one was expecting it, so he thought it was just wrong.

01:25:17.000 But he couldn't find anything wrong with his data.

01:25:20.000 So he published it and thought, well, that's the end of my career.

01:25:23.000 Oh, boy.

01:25:24.000 He was quite young.

01:25:25.000 I think he might have been a postdoc, and he just published it.

01:25:27.000 He thought, that's a good scientist, right?

01:25:29.000 I don't think this is right, but I can't see anything wrong with it.

01:25:32.000 I'll publish it.

01:25:32.000 Someone else will tell me where my mistake was.

01:25:35.000 And there was no mistake, and he won the Nobel Prize for that discovery.

01:25:39.000 That's the 1990s.

01:25:41.000 So this idea of the universe is accelerating in expansion.

01:25:45.000 The way that it does that is really important.

01:25:48.000 Is it going to carry on doing that?

01:25:50.000 Is whatever's driving that expansion going to change in some way, which could actually re-collapse the universe again?

01:25:57.000 We give it a name, by the way, dark energy, this thing.

01:26:00.000 But we don't know what it is.

01:26:01.000 I think it's very fair to say.

01:26:04.000 But it looks a bit like inflation, but it's way slower.

01:26:07.000 So maybe they're linked.

01:26:08.000 Maybe it's the same kind of thing.

01:26:10.000 We don't really know.

01:26:12.000 And so it's one of the great mysteries.

01:26:14.000 But the universe, it looks like the universe is going to continue to expand forever and to continue to accelerate.

01:26:20.000 Well, dark matter and dark energy, they're both very confusing.

01:26:24.000 Yeah, dark matter's in some sense marginally less confusing in the sense that at least we have an idea of what it might be.

01:26:33.000 Whereas dark energy, there are people listening to it, there are people working on it, so there are theories about what it might be.

01:26:39.000 But I think it feels less explicable, given what we know, than dark matter.

01:26:46.000 But we haven't discovered what, we think dark matter might be some kind of particle.

01:26:52.000 That has got certain properties and doesn't interact very strongly.

01:26:57.000 It interacts like neutrinos, basically, that you mentioned earlier.

01:27:00.000 So it really doesn't interact very strongly.

01:27:02.000 But we thought we might have seen those particles.

01:27:04.000 We're looking for them.

01:27:05.000 They would be passing through this room now.

01:27:07.000 And so we could build a detector in here and we do that.

01:27:10.000 And we look for these particles.

01:27:12.000 We haven't seen them.

01:27:13.000 We thought we might make them at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN. I think many people thought that we'd see the signature of these things and we haven't done.

01:27:20.000 So it could be that we're not right with that picture.

01:27:24.000 But that picture encompasses what percentage of the known universe?

01:27:28.000 So yeah, so it's about 5% matter, about 70% dark energy, and the rest, so 25% dark matter.

01:27:37.000 So we're just less than 5% this.

01:27:40.000 That's crazy.

01:27:42.000 And the stuff we can see.

01:27:43.000 So everything we can see in the sky, all the gas and the dust and the galaxies and the stars and the black holes, all those things, less than 5%.

01:27:54.000 According to the standard model of cosmology.

01:27:57.000 And so the other 95% is just like, who knows?

01:28:00.000 Something else.

01:28:01.000 Yeah.

01:28:01.000 Wow.

01:28:02.000 But those are models.

01:28:03.000 I mean, it's important to say that it's interesting because until...

01:28:09.000 So we have a hypothesis, which is strongly supported by lots of bits of evidence, that dark matter is some kind of particle.

01:28:17.000 So that's the broadly, that's what you find in the textbooks.

01:28:21.000 But it's true that until you find it, until you see it, then you haven't shown it to be correct.

01:28:28.000 Are there alternative theories?

01:28:30.000 There are.

01:28:31.000 Are they compelling?

01:28:32.000 No, they all have problems.

01:28:34.000 And most of them have problems with that pattern, the CMB, the cosmic microwave background that we just saw.

01:28:40.000 Because that pattern, what you're looking at actually in that pattern is acoustic, it's waves, sound waves essentially in the early universe that go through the plasma of the early universe.

01:28:52.000 And they go out and we know what speed they go through that plasma.

01:28:56.000 So it's almost like you're looking at a pond and you're throwing stones into the pond.

01:29:01.000 And they all land in the pond at the same time and send ripples out, little circular ripples in the pond, and they all overlap.

01:29:09.000 And that's what that pattern is.

01:29:11.000 So we're looking at sound waves going through this plasma.

01:29:18.000 I require the dark matter.

01:29:20.000 The dark matter fits well if it's in there, in this plasma, in this kind of soup, this subatomic particle soup that's the early universe.

01:29:29.000 And the way the sound waves go through it fit that idea.

01:29:32.000 So that's one thing.

01:29:33.000 But the idea also came from looking at galaxies and how they rotate.

01:29:38.000 And galaxies and how they bend light and deform space and time and how they interact together.

01:29:46.000 So there's loads of different bits of information, observations of the universe from the cosmic microwave background all the way through to galaxies and the formation of galaxies and the theories that we have there that suggest there are these particles around that interact very weakly with light So they don't really interact with light at all,

01:30:04.000 which is why we don't see them, which is why they're dark.

01:30:06.000 That's just like a neutrino, right?

01:30:08.000 So like heavy neutrinos.

01:30:10.000 And actually there was a theory once that maybe they were heavy neutrinos, but that's kind of disfavored now.

01:30:16.000 And so we have loads of kind of different bits that fit.

01:30:21.000 This is how you do science.

01:30:22.000 You start with a theory and you make a load of observations and you can infer things and you get a consistent picture.

01:30:30.000 But...

01:30:31.000 Very importantly, until you find it, until you really find that particle, then you don't know, right?

01:30:38.000 So that's a good question.

01:30:40.000 What we don't know, just what we don't know is so fascinating.

01:30:43.000 Just that aspect of it, that 95% of the universe is like we're not really sure what it is.

01:30:49.000 Yeah.

01:30:49.000 And we've inferred it.

01:30:51.000 So you might say, how do you know it's there?

01:30:54.000 You know, which is a good question, right?

01:30:55.000 I mean, if we have not detected this stuff, how do you know?

01:30:58.000 And it's from Einstein's theory, really.

01:31:01.000 So it's from gravity.

01:31:03.000 It's from looking at the way that galaxies rotate and the way that these sound waves move through the early universe.

01:31:10.000 The way that the universe expands.

01:31:12.000 Because the way the universe expands is related to the stuff that's in the universe.

01:31:18.000 So we can weigh the universe and find out what kind of different things are in there by looking at the way it's expanded and how that expansion history has changed over time.

01:31:29.000 So it's what you do with science, which is why it's...

01:31:33.000 You know, it's true that you can criticize any one bit of it.

01:31:37.000 And people will.

01:31:38.000 So online, you'll see in the comments under this, there'll be people saying, what about this?

01:31:41.000 What about this?

01:31:42.000 What about this?

01:31:42.000 And it's true that you can pluck away and pick away any piece of it.

01:31:47.000 But the way it tends to work is when you have this kind of consensus view of something, it's because you have multiple observations that all fit a particular hypothesis.

01:31:58.000 And by changing one of them, by changing the explanation of one of them, you tend to mess the whole other thing up.

01:32:04.000 You mess the wider description of multiple phenomena up.

01:32:09.000 You mess it all up.

01:32:10.000 So it's quite hard to find other theories at the moment that will fit all of those different observations.

01:32:22.000 I mean, another example would be the age of things, is it?

01:32:25.000 You know, it's interesting that you can look at, we can measure the age of the Earth, right, and you measure it from geological processes, radioactive dating and so on, and you can kind of measure the age of the Earth.

01:32:34.000 You can measure the age of the Sun in a different way.

01:32:37.000 You can measure it by looking at, by looking at, called helioseismology, so you can work out, you can measure how much helium is in the core of the Sun, and the Sun shines by making helium from hydrogen.

01:32:49.000 So by measuring the amount of helium in the core, by looking at basically sound waves, it's like an earthquake, but sun quakes, you can measure how much helium's in there, so you can get an estimate of the age of the sun.

01:32:59.000 And then you can get an estimate of the age of the universe by measuring how it's expanding and using Einstein's theory.

01:33:05.000 The fact that they all fit with the picture of a universe that's 13.8 billion years old, A sun that's 4.5 billion years old, a planet that's 4.5 billion years old, the fact that it all fits is quite an intricate model.

01:33:22.000 And so you could say, well, I argue with the measurements of the age of the Earth.

01:33:28.000 Maybe I don't like the radioactive dating or something, and people will say that.

01:33:32.000 But the thing is, it's a consistent picture with multiple different observations.

01:33:37.000 And same with dark matter.

01:33:39.000 So the standard model of cosmology is you have, as I said, about 5% matter, 25% dark matter, 70% dark energy.

01:33:49.000 It might be wrong, but it fits loads of different independent observations.

01:33:55.000 So it's a consistent picture.

01:33:57.000 So we just don't know what it is, but we're not very sure that it's a thing.

01:34:02.000 Pretty sure, but it could not be.

01:34:07.000 Were any of the other theories, competing theories, were any of them compelling at all?

01:34:11.000 There are theories that people try to build where you modify our theory of gravity So many of these observations, not all of them, so the cosmic microwave background are different observations, but many of them depend on gravity and how gravity works,

01:34:26.000 Einstein's theory of general relativity.

01:34:29.000 So you could try to modify that theory.

01:34:32.000 To say, well, our observation's wrong.

01:34:35.000 Maybe...

01:34:36.000 Because the way we measure how the expansion of the universe is is to look at light from supernovae is one way and see how it's stretched over time.

01:34:45.000 Because the light, let's say, you have a supernova...

01:34:48.000 And it happened a billion years ago.

01:34:50.000 Then the light has been traveling for a billion years across the universe.

01:34:53.000 And so the universe has been expanding for a billion years, so the light will be stretched.

01:34:57.000 And so you can measure how much stretch there is.

01:35:01.000 You just measure the color of the light from the supernova.

01:35:05.000 So you can argue that maybe if you go for light that's been traveling 12 billion years across the universe, then maybe there was something different.

01:35:14.000 Maybe the light was emitted a bit different.

01:35:16.000 Maybe the speed of light changes over time or something.

01:35:19.000 So you can invent theories that would allow you to change the data or the interpretation of the data.

01:35:27.000 But what you always find, I think it would be fair to say, Is that you can change a theory and explain one bit, but all the wheels come off the other bits.

01:35:38.000 Got it.

01:35:38.000 So that's why it's quite difficult.

01:35:41.000 So the dark matter, dark energy theory is cohesive to all the other theories.

01:35:44.000 Yeah.

01:35:45.000 So it fits.

01:35:46.000 Yeah.

01:35:46.000 But then there are some mysteries.

01:35:49.000 Well, not least, what is this stuff?

01:35:51.000 Right.

01:35:51.000 And so until you know what it is, you don't have a complete theory.

01:35:55.000 Well, that is one of the most fascinating things that 95% of the universe is like, who knows what it is?

01:36:00.000 Yeah.

01:36:01.000 And so that's what I love about...

01:36:04.000 One of the things I love about science is it often gets presented, you know, because I talk about science a lot in public, and it can often seem arrogant, I think.

01:36:13.000 It can seem, you know, like these people are saying, well, this is the way the world is.

01:36:17.000 And you might say, well, you know, how are you to say this?

01:36:21.000 The thing I like about it, personally, and the reason for its success, is that really you have to be delighted when you're wrong.

01:36:30.000 It's the key to science.

01:36:33.000 It's been said many times, Richard Feynman, the great physicist, said it.

01:36:38.000 If your goal is to understand nature, so that's what you want to do, So you've not got an ego or anything.

01:36:47.000 You don't want to prove right.

01:36:49.000 You just want to understand.

01:36:51.000 Then being wrong.

01:36:53.000 So if this idea of dark energy and dark matter turns out to be wrong, all scientists or good scientists will be absolutely delighted because it'd be tremendously exciting that we'd ruled out this picture.

01:37:06.000 It'd be great to rule out this picture.

01:37:08.000 So there isn't such a thing as dark matter.

01:37:11.000 And dark energy.

01:37:12.000 It's all nonsense.

01:37:13.000 We were barking up the wrong tree, looking in the wrong direction.

01:37:16.000 It's something else, which should be more wonderful, undoubtedly, than that theory that we have.

01:37:22.000 So I think it's a humble pursuit, ultimately, science.

01:37:26.000 And that's the reason for its success, because you're just trying to understand how things work.

01:37:33.000 You shouldn't be, anyway.

01:37:34.000 Good scientists are not trying to be the person that got it right.

01:37:40.000 You're not trying to do it.

01:37:42.000 There's obviously human failure.

01:37:43.000 Everyone's got fragility and everyone's human, you know, and ego.

01:37:48.000 But ultimately, you're just trying to understand how things work.

01:37:50.000 Yes.

01:37:51.000 And that's a beautiful thing.

01:37:52.000 And it's so important for everyone else that doesn't have the time.

01:37:55.000 We need you doing that.

01:37:57.000 It really does, in some way, give us comfort to have a better, more comprehensive view of what we're experiencing.

01:38:05.000 And as technology expands, I wanted to talk to you about the James Webb, some of the discoveries.

01:38:14.000 But sometimes it raises more questions.

01:38:16.000 And one of them was these galaxies that were formed that appeared to have been formed too quickly.

01:38:24.000 Is that safe to say?

01:38:25.000 Yeah.

01:38:26.000 So we had...

01:38:27.000 One of the reasons we built that telescope was to...

01:38:30.000 What it does, because it can see very distant things, and because light travels at a finite speed, the further out into the universe you look, the further back in time you're looking.

01:38:40.000 Right.

01:38:41.000 So because that can see things from which the light has been traveling for over 13 billion years, then you're seeing things as they were in the first billion years or a few hundred thousand years in the history of the universe, right, essentially.

01:38:56.000 Well, a few hundred million years, sorry, I should have said.

01:38:59.000 So you're seeing the first galaxies form with that telescope, which is one of the reasons it was built.

01:39:07.000 And the reason we wanted to see is because we don't fully understand that process.

01:39:11.000 As I mentioned before, we don't really fully understand why they have black holes in them and it's something to do with their formation, but we don't understand it very well.

01:39:19.000 So it's not surprising to me that when you build that instrument and collect light from the early universe, you see an early universe that's behaving in a different way to the way that you thought it behaved.

01:39:33.000 And so indeed, yeah, we're seeing...

01:39:36.000 A galaxy is formed earlier than you would have predicted.

01:39:41.000 But that means that your model of the way the universe evolved is not quite right, and that's not a surprise, because we wouldn't have built the thing if we'd known everything.

01:39:52.000 Right, of course.

01:39:53.000 So I think it's fair to say there's nothing there that's absolutely...

01:39:58.000 Completely destroys our picture of how the universe evolved from the cosmic microwave background that you saw in those images earlier.

01:40:05.000 Does it add more complexity?

01:40:06.000 Does it add more nuance?

01:40:08.000 Yeah, I would say so.

01:40:10.000 And I'm not an expert in that field, but my understanding is that it's interesting because we're having to refine and develop new models of the way that the galaxy is formed.

01:40:21.000 And indeed, you're saying that it looks like the stars and the galaxies A present in the universe earlier than we might have expected.

01:40:27.000 So it might be.

01:40:28.000 It might be that you're seeing a hint of something really profound that we didn't understand.

01:40:34.000 Or it might be that just the models need a bit of a tweak.

01:40:38.000 Galaxies form quicker than we expected in the early stages of the universe.

01:40:43.000 What are those red dots?

01:40:45.000 The red dots that were observed Do you know what I'm talking about?

01:40:50.000 In the images, the James Webb images of the early universe.

01:40:54.000 Yeah, they're distant.

01:40:55.000 That disappeared?

01:40:56.000 Do you know what I'm talking about?

01:40:59.000 No.

01:40:59.000 I saved it because I knew that we were going to have to talk about this.

01:41:03.000 It was...

01:41:05.000 Jamie, I know we've talked about it before.

01:41:07.000 Yeah, there it goes.

01:41:09.000 Found hundreds of little red dots in the ancient universe.

01:41:12.000 We still don't know what they are.

01:41:13.000 Small galaxies are either crammed with stars or they host gigantic black holes.

01:41:16.000 The data astronomers have collected continues to puzzle them.

01:41:20.000 So, what is that all about?

01:41:21.000 Do you know?

01:41:22.000 I don't know.

01:41:22.000 It says there that we don't know.

01:41:25.000 So, I'm going to go with that.

01:41:27.000 I mean, I think just speed reading that.

01:41:30.000 It says a class of galaxies that...

01:41:35.000 So I suppose we're looking at a kind of galaxy.

01:41:39.000 It seems we're looking at a kind of galaxy that we don't see today in the universe.

01:41:45.000 Red and compact, visible only during about one billion years of cosmic history.

01:41:51.000 So that would be, as I said, because we don't really understand the formation of the galaxies and these supermassive black holes, that's interesting because what you're seeing in the data is a kind of almost proto-galaxy, I suppose, these little tiny galaxies.

01:42:06.000 That's what it seems to suggest.

01:42:07.000 That's the first time I've seen that.

01:42:09.000 But just...

01:42:11.000 I think what we're seeing is that we don't understand how structures formed in the universe.

01:42:19.000 We have a reasonable idea, but we don't understand the detail.

01:42:22.000 And the more things like that you find, the more information you have to build models of how stuff formed.

01:42:28.000 Do we have another, like, next-generation James Webb-type telescope that's even more efficient or more capable?

01:42:36.000 I mean, there are several sort of proposed observatories.

01:42:42.000 And also, by the way, gravitational wave detectors.

01:42:45.000 So we've got LIGO, which is on the ground.

01:42:48.000 There are proposals to put one in space, which is called LISA. One of the proposals is called LISA. Which is lasers between satellites so you can have much bigger things.

01:42:59.000 And the reason that's interesting is because there'll be gravitational waves from the Big Bang So, you know, as you mentioned neutrinos, you've got neutrino observatories which can observe neutrinos from the early universe.

01:43:12.000 And you can see things.

01:43:14.000 It's just like light in a way, but it gives you a different view.

01:43:18.000 You mentioned earlier, it's a different way of looking at the universe.

01:43:22.000 So the neutrinos will have information. 0.94

01:43:25.000 Gravitational waves will have detailed information about the Big Bang itself, but we can't detect them at the moment because we can't detect those really tiny little ripples in space and time.

01:43:35.000 That's what's so fascinating because if they do launch this and they find new information, that's even more puzzling.

01:43:40.000 And you keep going further and further and further.

01:43:42.000 And we want to know.

01:43:43.000 It's like you said earlier.

01:43:44.000 We're asking very deep questions about why the universe is the way it is.

01:43:50.000 And maybe why there's a universe at all in the sense that did it have a beginning?

01:43:56.000 And if so, what does that mean?

01:43:58.000 Was it mean for something like this to begin?

01:44:01.000 I find it fascinating.

01:44:04.000 And the most exciting thing of all is that we don't know.

01:44:07.000 And that's so important, by the way.

01:44:10.000 And just to reiterate, I think it's often missed when you talk about the beauty of science and the value of science.

01:44:16.000 It's almost not the knowledge.

01:44:18.000 It's almost like the opposite of the knowledge.

01:44:21.000 It's just this idea that I think...

01:44:25.000 It goes back to what we were talking about earlier.

01:44:27.000 I hadn't really thought about this connection before, but it's that...

01:44:30.000 I was pushing back on you saying, I don't know, I'd like...

01:44:32.000 What would it mean to know everything?

01:44:34.000 I don't think I'd like that.

01:44:36.000 And you were saying, maybe you would.

01:44:38.000 Maybe that's what it means.

01:44:39.000 Nirvana, you know, maybe achieving enlightenment.

01:44:42.000 That's what it means.

01:44:43.000 But I find that the most...

01:44:47.000 The most human...

01:44:49.000 I feel, I think, is when I'm on the edge of the known.

01:44:54.000 Sure.

01:44:55.000 So it's the fact that there are mysteries in the universe, profound mysteries, to me is one of the things that makes life worth living.

01:45:04.000 Most certainly.

01:45:05.000 As a human being, that's true.

01:45:07.000 My point is that I think eventually we're not going to be human beings.

01:45:12.000 I'm sure you're right.

01:45:13.000 I mean, what if we get past this little blip?

01:45:16.000 Well, we're also in this weird depopulation stage where, you know, people move into urban areas.

01:45:22.000 It's very strange.

01:45:23.000 It's very weird because it doesn't seem like that because people are worried about overpopulation.

01:45:27.000 But then you have a lot of the chemicals and the plastics and all the different things in people's bodies are interrupting our reproductive cycles.

01:45:36.000 And you could see that eventually becoming an even bigger issue in the future if we continue to fuck up the world.

01:45:41.000 We've got loads of problems. 0.95

01:45:42.000 Loads of problems.

01:45:43.000 We should all be fixed by AI. Well, there is an exciting future, isn't there?

01:45:50.000 It's always exciting.

01:45:52.000 I feel that we are kind of a fork in the road here because, as you said, there are tremendous challenges that we face, environmental challenges and so on.

01:46:00.000 Competition for resources.

01:46:01.000 Geopolitically, the world looks rather...

01:46:03.000 I think it looks as unstable as it was in the 1930s in some respects.

01:46:07.000 So it's quite terrifying.

01:46:09.000 But we have nuclear weapons now.

01:46:12.000 So it's terrifying.

01:46:14.000 But on the other side, as you said, we have not only AI... And quantum computers, which are potentially profoundly powerful things.

01:46:23.000 But also, you know, the rockets that we have now, I mean, reusable rockets, to me, we haven't talked about that, but I think it's an absolute game changer.

01:46:32.000 It is now the case that we have cheap and reliable access to space.

01:46:38.000 We should play that video of them catching it.

01:46:41.000 Because that is one of the most incredible achievements in human history.

01:46:45.000 And you barely saw it.

01:46:46.000 Because Elon Musk, unfortunately, is so polarizing to some people, particularly now because of the political cycle that we're in, that you don't appreciate what SpaceX just did.

01:46:53.000 It did one of the most extraordinary things ever. 0.97

01:46:56.000 They caught a rocket that's bigger than a fucking skyscraper. 0.99

01:47:00.000 Yeah. 1.00

01:47:01.000 Caught it.

01:47:02.000 It's amazing.

01:47:04.000 This is absolutely a feat of engineering that rivals almost anything human beings have ever done.

01:47:12.000 Yeah, this is really important.

01:47:14.000 This is so incredible.

01:47:16.000 I think we'll remember that.

01:47:18.000 Future generations will remember that.

01:47:20.000 I thought it was CGI. I really did.

01:47:24.000 I thought this was fake when I first saw it.

01:47:26.000 I thought this was something that someone had made, and then I realized this was the actual video footage of it.

01:47:31.000 I'm like, oh my god.

01:47:33.000 That's the road to the stars, right there, that moment.

01:47:37.000 Tell me that doesn't remind you of the movie Contact.

01:47:40.000 It does a bit, doesn't it?

01:47:41.000 It does a lot.

01:47:42.000 That didn't end well, though.

01:47:43.000 No.

01:47:44.000 Well, you know, neither did Apollo 1. And also, of course, Blue Origin are maybe not far behind it. 0.83

01:47:55.000 I love that.

01:47:56.000 Two private companies with billionaires at the helm that are out of their mind pushing us building markets.

01:48:02.000 Let's go.

01:48:03.000 I get criticised for this quite a lot, and will no doubt after this interview, because I do think our future at some point is beyond Earth.

01:48:15.000 It has to be, right?

01:48:16.000 Obviously, logically, it is.

01:48:18.000 But the question is when.

01:48:20.000 And there are two things to say.

01:48:22.000 One thing to emphasize, which I'm sure you'd agree with, is that I don't think anybody is suggesting that what we're able to do now is trash this planet and then move to another one.

01:48:33.000 Right, of course.

01:48:33.000 No one's saying that.

01:48:34.000 That's way in the future.

01:48:35.000 But there's things out of our control, like the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs.

01:48:39.000 Yeah, well, that's in our control.

01:48:41.000 I mean, we can move those now.

01:48:43.000 Sort of.

01:48:44.000 Well, not quite yet.

01:48:45.000 Not yet.

01:48:46.000 If it's coming right now...

01:48:47.000 Not really.

01:48:48.000 That's true.

01:48:49.000 So we need that technology.

01:48:50.000 So we're on the verge of having that technology.

01:48:52.000 That would be nice.

01:48:53.000 It was Carl Sagan, wasn't it?

01:48:54.000 He said the dinosaurs had a space program, they'd still be around.

01:48:57.000 So it's their fault, in a sense.

01:49:00.000 Which I kind of, you know, they didn't build rockets.

01:49:02.000 Well, it's almost like nature realized that, look, with these giant lizards running around, people are never going to figure out how to make spaceships.

01:49:09.000 Let's just reset.

01:49:11.000 Send in the hard reset button.

01:49:13.000 Yeah.

01:49:14.000 But I think that idea, that basic idea, I interviewed Jeff Bezos once and he was fascinating.

01:49:20.000 And he said to me that, first of all, we need infrastructure in space.

01:49:26.000 Because if you think about building Amazon, he said what I needed was two pieces of infrastructure, the postal service and the internet.

01:49:34.000 And so they were provided, and I could build my company.

01:49:37.000 So I want to do that for the next generation of entrepreneurs in space.

01:49:41.000 I don't know what they're going to do in space, but I would like the infrastructure to be there for them to do it.

01:49:45.000 And that's really simple.

01:49:47.000 And then he also goes on to say, of course, as we said before, the resources are up there.

01:49:51.000 They're infinite.

01:49:52.000 Infinite resources.

01:49:54.000 Infinite energy, effectively, up there.

01:49:57.000 And so the idea, he said to me, I want to zone the Earth residential. 0.89

01:50:01.000 And people say, that's ridiculous. 0.76

01:50:04.000 But how ridiculous is it when you see that? 0.50

01:50:08.000 When you see the fact that for the first time we have launch vehicles that really should be able to launch almost anything we want.

01:50:16.000 So the idea that we can build infrastructure in space and then, of course, build bases on the Moon and then ultimately on Mars and then beyond.

01:50:24.000 That's a lot closer now.

01:50:26.000 Let's look at that and say, what is that, a hundred and how many years from Wilbur and Orville Wright?

01:50:32.000 Yeah, it's a century.

01:50:33.000 Hundred and what?

01:50:34.000 120-ish, is it?

01:50:36.000 Yeah.

01:50:37.000 That's crazy.

01:50:38.000 Yeah.

01:50:39.000 So you go from this goofy, like, flexible sort of airplane-looking thing that no one's going to fly across the Atlantic in to catching rockets with a giant, like, hand, the robot clamp.

01:50:53.000 Yeah.

01:50:54.000 That's insane that happens over such a short period of time.

01:50:58.000 To go from that to Blue Origin is insanity.

01:51:03.000 In such a short period of time?

01:51:05.000 So I think we're on the 1906. So we're on the verge of a revolution in many fields.

01:51:12.000 My worry is that we're also seeing an increase in political instability.

01:51:18.000 And so I think we're, I think most people would agree, a very dangerous moment.

01:51:23.000 And the question is how to get to that future.

01:51:25.000 And that future that you talked about, this wonderful future that we have, might be 10 or 20 years away, but it might be an eternity away if we get the next few years wrong.

01:51:36.000 Right.

01:51:37.000 So I'm concerned that this...

01:51:41.000 We don't know how to build a bridge to that future that we should see in our lifetime.

01:51:46.000 We should see this future beginning to unfold before us.

01:51:51.000 How do we get there?

01:51:52.000 Well, we have to keep it out of the hands of the military-industrial complex.

01:51:56.000 We have to stop what's going on in the world, these insane conflicts.

01:52:00.000 And if we don't, and they escalate, Iran gets a nuclear weapon, Israel uses it in Iran, Russia uses it in Ukraine. 0.54

01:52:07.000 We have World War III, and I'm sure you're aware of what Einstein said about World War IV, that World War III, I don't know what weapons they'll use, but in World War IV, it'll be rocks and sticks.

01:52:18.000 Yeah.

01:52:18.000 And we're not that far away from that.

01:52:22.000 If you could imagine living in Hiroshima the day before the bomb, not having any idea that anything like that could ever even possibly happen. 0.90

01:52:30.000 You're just a regular person walking around and all of a sudden everything is obliterated.

01:52:34.000 And you realize, like, we're in a new era of destruction where you can...

01:52:39.000 And what's interesting to me is I've got interested in Oppenheimer's writing post-war.

01:52:46.000 And I've been interested in it.

01:52:48.000 The BBC asked me to look at...

01:52:49.000 There's a thing called the BBC Wreath Lectures that are very famous in the UK. And every year, someone gives these lectures after Lord Wreath, who founded the BBC. And Oppenheimer did them in 1953, I think it is, 53 or 54. And they were considered a failure because no one understood what he was talking about.

01:53:09.000 But in there, he was concerned with the fact, of course, that he felt he delivered the means by which we would destroy ourselves.

01:53:17.000 And he felt our technology, our scientific know-how exceeded our wisdom and our political skill, which is arguably true. 1.00

01:53:25.000 So he thought in the 50s, he couldn't see how we'd avoid destroying ourselves.

01:53:29.000 But he thought about it a lot, feeling partly personally responsible for it.

01:53:34.000 And he describes this, how if there's any lessons that science teaches us, the exploration of nature teaches us, that we could move into other fields, that we could transfer into politics,

01:53:50.000 for example.

01:53:52.000 And one of them is this picture that complex systems, put it this way, complex systems are complicated.

01:53:59.000 So he's talking about looking at quantum mechanics, for example, and it gets complicated and you say, what is an electron?

01:54:05.000 It's this thing, it's a particle-like point-like thing or a big extended wavy thing that, what is it?

01:54:11.000 It behaves in all these strange ways.

01:54:12.000 We don't really have the language or the mental capacity to picture it.

01:54:16.000 And so he said any attempt to say this thing is this or it is that, it is like this thing, it is doomed, right?

01:54:26.000 What you have to understand is that you have to develop this rather complex and nuanced picture of the way that nature works.

01:54:33.000 And quantum mechanics is a good example.

01:54:35.000 But he said so it is with human societies.

01:54:38.000 So in a society...

01:54:40.000 What is it?

01:54:42.000 It is at one level a load of individuals like little particles and they have their own needs and desires and they have their views and strongly held views and so should they by the way.

01:54:52.000 There's a great quote from I think early 60s from Oppenheimer where he says that to be a person of substance you need an anchor.

01:55:00.000 So you need to believe things and you need to argue for things.

01:55:04.000 You need to take positions.

01:55:05.000 You have to have a morality.

01:55:06.000 You have to have a politics, right, basically.

01:55:09.000 Otherwise, you're not a person of substance.

01:55:11.000 But he says at the same time, of course, you have to recognize there's a society.

01:55:16.000 So there are lots of people with anchors.

01:55:20.000 And you might strongly disagree with that anchor.

01:55:24.000 And they might be wrong, right?

01:55:26.000 Their anchor might be nonsense.

01:55:27.000 But the challenge of politics is to avoid war.

01:55:34.000 I read somewhere recently, someone said, I can't remember if it was, but said that democracy is a technology.

01:55:40.000 To avoid civil war.

01:55:42.000 That's what it is.

01:55:43.000 So somehow you've got to understand that whilst you have your, and should have, your firmly held position, you have to find a way, and it feels almost contradictory, you have to find a way of understanding that the society as a whole is a complex mixture of all these different little particles with their own anchors and their own positions.

01:56:07.000 And what is the goal?

01:56:09.000 So it is the goal.

01:56:11.000 It often feels to me that politics at the moment, the goal is to win an argument.

01:56:15.000 It often feels like to convince enough people that your view is the right view.

01:56:22.000 And that obviously is part of democracy, right?

01:56:24.000 It's the way it works, right?

01:56:25.000 You argue for your position and then you get four or five years to do your thing and then someone else can take over.

01:56:32.000 But also, I think the thing we're missing at the moment is that perhaps more fundamental function of democracy, which is to avoid war.

01:56:42.000 Because if you can avoid war, especially with the power that we have now, you have the time to sort the rest out.

01:56:49.000 But if we can't avoid war, we don't.

01:56:52.000 And I think that, and Oppenheimer wrote, he knew that in the 50s, and it feels to me more that we're back full circle now.

01:57:01.000 It feels to me we've almost forgotten, we seem to have forgotten that the primary...

01:57:08.000 The primary function of democracy is not to ensure that your side wins.

01:57:16.000 The primary function of democracy is to ensure there's a chance for the other side to win at some point in the future.

01:57:24.000 Yes.

01:57:27.000 Yeah, that's it really.

01:57:29.000 That's what I would like to say.

01:57:30.000 It's completely accurate.

01:57:32.000 And the problem with our version of democracy is that it's been captured by money.

01:57:38.000 So there's interests beyond the will and the needs of the people.

01:57:44.000 And those interests often are contrary to the will and the needs of the people.

01:57:48.000 And as long as they can keep from it falling into complete total catastrophe and continue to profit off of the global chaos, they do.

01:57:58.000 It's just there's too much money involved in politics and lobbyists and special interest groups and people influencing the media.

01:58:09.000 They've distorted reality to the point where the general citizen doesn't really have a nuanced understanding of why these conflicts are taking place in the first place and why all the money is going over to these places and what is being done to mitigate any of these issues.

01:58:25.000 And everyone feels helpless.

01:58:27.000 And that helps them continue to do what they're doing and continue to reap profits.

01:58:33.000 And it's not...

01:58:35.000 Democracy in a sense of how it was probably originally established or originally thought of.

01:58:40.000 They never thought they were going to have corporations.

01:58:42.000 Corporations weren't even a thought.

01:58:44.000 It wasn't even an idea.

01:58:46.000 They never thought you'd have these, not just corporations, but corporations that are essentially in charge of an enormous percentage of the information that gets distributed online.

01:58:58.000 And you see how organizations, government organizations, can conspire to limit the amount of information people have access to.

01:59:07.000 And they can do it through very sneaky ways.

01:59:09.000 I don't know if you're aware of what they've done in Canada, but in Canada now, you are no longer able to share links to news stories on social media.

01:59:19.000 And the way they snuck that in is by saying that these media corporations, whether it's Meta or Twitter, X, whatever, they have a responsibility to pay the people that are making these stories.

01:59:37.000 And so by this little sneaky little loophole, they've essentially put a stop on the free flow of information in Canada on social media.

01:59:46.000 It's very, very disturbing and very dystopian.

01:59:49.000 I have some friends that just went up there and they're like, it's so confusing.

01:59:53.000 Because people didn't know it was going to happen before it happened and then it happened and now everyone's kind of a little out of the loop up there.

02:00:00.000 Because you're not able, you can't even share a link.

02:00:02.000 Which doesn't make any sense because, say if there's a New York Times article and I want to share it with you on Twitter, All I'm doing is driving more traffic to the New York Times website.

02:00:13.000 It's not hurting then.

02:00:15.000 In fact, it's a promotion.

02:00:16.000 It doesn't make any sense that it would somehow or another, because these companies aren't paying.

02:00:22.000 So the idea is that X, because the profits that they get through advertising is all based on engagement, that there's engagement It sends people to this, and so they're profiting from it, and that profit should be shared with the media company, whether it's Los Angeles Times or whatever.

02:00:37.000 That's crazy, because it's a two-way street.

02:00:40.000 It's promotion.

02:00:41.000 Like, so many more people are going to read a New York Times article if it becomes viral on Twitter.

02:00:47.000 This just makes sense.

02:00:49.000 What does seem to be generally true is that we haven't, as a society...

02:00:54.000 It says it was just on Facebook.

02:00:55.000 Is that true?

02:00:58.000 I don't know if it's just on Facebook.

02:01:00.000 It says it was Meta's ban.

02:01:03.000 I'm just curious.

02:01:04.000 I've never heard of it.

02:01:06.000 Duncan was saying it's social media in general because he was just there.

02:01:10.000 I mean, what I think is generally true is that we haven't yet adapted to the internet.

02:01:17.000 Yes.

02:01:18.000 Just the internet.

02:01:19.000 Yes.

02:01:19.000 Because it's only, as you said, in the great sweep of human history.

02:01:23.000 Right, and it's only been used by people for 30 years.

02:01:26.000 Yeah, and it's a couple of decades.

02:01:28.000 It's been influential.

02:01:29.000 Yeah.

02:01:29.000 So I think it feeds it.

02:01:31.000 It's another of those problems we face now.

02:01:33.000 What we talked about, this bridge to this tremendously bright future that we have.

02:01:39.000 One of the pillars of that bridge that we need to strengthen is how to deal with this thing that we've only had for a couple of decades.

02:01:48.000 Right.

02:01:48.000 It's clear.

02:01:49.000 I think we would...

02:01:50.000 You know, people, again, will be listening to this and they'll have different views on the way that things happen on the internet and regulation and so on.

02:01:56.000 But I think what everyone would agree on is we haven't got it right yet.

02:01:59.000 Right.

02:01:59.000 So we don't know the way that it's influencing our...

02:02:03.000 changing our democracies.

02:02:05.000 Yeah.

02:02:06.000 Let's just use a non...

02:02:08.000 It might be changing them for the better.

02:02:09.000 It might be changing them for the worse.

02:02:10.000 But the way it is changing them I don't think is fully understood.

02:02:13.000 Well, not just that.

02:02:14.000 It's being manipulated by governments.

02:02:16.000 Like governments have troll farms where they just attack certain sensitive political issues and they make polarizing statements and crazy claims.

02:02:25.000 And you go to that website or you go to that Twitter page and you realize, oh, this isn't a real person.

02:02:29.000 This is just like some bot somewhere.

02:02:31.000 And a former FBI analyst made an estimate of 80%.

02:02:41.000 He thinks 80% of all the accounts, and this was around the time Elon was buying it, who knows what it's at now, 80% were fake.

02:02:50.000 And this was one of the sticking points of the argument that Elon said, It was when he was buying Twitter, they were telling him that it was only 5%.

02:02:56.000 5% were fake.

02:02:57.000 He said, well, show me your data.

02:02:58.000 And the data they showed him was only a random 100 accounts.

02:03:01.000 And he's like, this is not sufficient.

02:03:02.000 I want to see all of your data.

02:03:04.000 And it became this big issue.

02:03:06.000 And that's when he tried to get out of the deal.

02:03:07.000 And then they took him to court.

02:03:08.000 And then he wound up buying it.

02:03:10.000 But that was a big part of it.

02:03:12.000 Like, how much of this is even real?

02:03:13.000 Like, I see arguments online where people take these crazy inflammatory positions, like, just insulting and attacking people that believe one thing or another thing.

02:03:23.000 And I'm like, how much of this is, like, instigated by China or Russia or Iran or some other foreign country?

02:03:30.000 And they're doing it through these troll farms, which we absolutely know exist.

02:03:36.000 And I'm sure the United States has them as well.

02:03:39.000 And I don't know what the answer is.

02:03:40.000 I mean, the way I do it, because obviously I'm on Twitter X, and so the way that I do it is you can tell, I think, by someone's timeline usually.

02:03:51.000 Because my basic rule of thumb is that if you look at someone's timeline, and it's all political.

02:03:57.000 Right.

02:03:58.000 I just ignore them.

02:04:01.000 Because a normal person's timeline, if I look at your timeline, you look at mine, some of it's just silly stuff.

02:04:07.000 Right.

02:04:07.000 Some of it's retweeting sports stuff or sign stuff or whatever it is.

02:04:11.000 I like airplanes, so a lot of my stuff is retweeting stuff about airplanes, right?

02:04:15.000 Or whatever it is.

02:04:17.000 So I think you can see a real person by seeing a breadth in the things that they retweet or whatever.

02:04:26.000 And so I tend to ignore and mute at the minimum the people who are just single issue.

02:04:33.000 And usually what you find, by the way, is that They're not a single issue.

02:04:38.000 I can just about understand it if someone's single issue focused on a single thing.

02:04:42.000 But they're just a generic kind of political position.

02:04:45.000 So you'll see an account and all it does is promote divisive issues.

02:04:52.000 You can see them a mile off, I think.

02:04:54.000 So then it comes back to how do you deal with it?

02:04:58.000 And my sense would be your sense.

02:05:01.000 It's hard to legislate around conversation, isn't it?

02:05:04.000 Yeah.

02:05:04.000 Yes.

02:05:04.000 So what do you do?

02:05:06.000 I suppose you could argue it's education ultimately.

02:05:09.000 Ultimately, everything comes back to education.

02:05:13.000 A democracy requires an educated population.

02:05:16.000 Right.

02:05:17.000 You have the tools, you have the mental tools.

02:05:19.000 To deal with this sort of new world of information.

02:05:24.000 I think that's something that we should probably be teaching to children is how to navigate social media and how to navigate influence and how to navigate other people's opinions of you and how to navigate online bullying, how to avoid...

02:05:37.000 There's so much anxiety that's attached to social media now, too, and so many people engage in arguments with it all day long.

02:05:43.000 I think it's a primary source of mental illness for a lot of people, or at least an accelerant of mental illness.

02:05:49.000 And we don't have an education as to how to manage that and what that means to you.

02:05:55.000 And the addiction that people have to social media and addiction people have to their smartphones in general is probably underappreciated.

02:06:04.000 Yeah, probably.

02:06:05.000 It's probably a much more significant impact on overall health than we think, because there's so much...

02:06:13.000 First of all, we're not supposed to have access to 8 billion people's worth of bad news.

02:06:18.000 No.

02:06:19.000 That's not good.

02:06:19.000 That's not a perspective enhancer.

02:06:21.000 And we're essentially inundated with the things that'll scare the shit out of us the most, which is 8 billion people's problems.

02:06:28.000 Whatever is happening in the world that's terrible, you're going to hear about it first.

02:06:32.000 And that's going to be the things that trend the most.

02:06:33.000 And it gives you this very bizarre bias towards what's actually happening in the world.

02:06:40.000 Yeah.

02:06:41.000 Isn't it a big problem?

02:06:43.000 It's a big problem because it's new, and we weren't prepared for it when it hit.

02:06:47.000 It's like a flood happening, and you're like, okay, we've got to figure out how to get all the water out of here.

02:06:51.000 Like, this is nuts.

02:06:52.000 This place is flooded.

02:06:53.000 And we're essentially in the middle of the flood, this social media, online influence flood, and we haven't really shored up our basement yet.

02:07:02.000 We don't really know how to protect ourselves from it.

02:07:05.000 But we can be optimistic.

02:07:06.000 Yes.

02:07:07.000 Because we're both optimists, I think, ultimately.

02:07:09.000 Yes, yes.

02:07:09.000 I'm very optimistic.

02:07:10.000 Because of the things we've talked about today.

02:07:13.000 Well, I also think that because I'm, and I think you are also, successful at navigating that world without it killing you.

02:07:20.000 Like, I can navigate the world of social media, and I can, like you said, you look at someone's timeline and see that, oh, this is crazy.

02:07:28.000 And you have your own, you know, objective understanding of the world to a point where you can see where someone's being ridiculous.

02:07:34.000 Yeah. 0.63

02:07:34.000 But some people just aren't that good at that. 0.63

02:07:37.000 They're not educated in that.

02:07:39.000 Maybe they haven't been around enough people that are critical thinkers and they don't know how to approach things.

02:07:45.000 They just look at things like, what am I supposed to believe?

02:07:47.000 Am I a good person if I believe this?

02:07:49.000 Am I a good person if I argue against that?

02:07:52.000 I'll do this.

02:07:52.000 I'll do that.

02:07:53.000 And these are not well thought out actions.

02:07:56.000 I do understand, though, that you and I, you know, we're in a good position, personally.

02:08:04.000 Yes.

02:08:04.000 We have a, you know, this confidence comes with some degree of success and you can put things in perspective.

02:08:11.000 And as you said, you know, when, if you're, I often think, actually, I see people who struggle in When they become well known for the first time, for example.

02:08:22.000 I mean, I remember when I became, quite late in life, became well known as a public figure.

02:08:28.000 I did a series on the BBC in 2009 or 2010 called Wonders of the Solar System and suddenly I was well known.

02:08:36.000 And I find it very difficult to navigate.

02:08:39.000 And fortunately, I had the support structures and people around me, and I could navigate it, and you come to terms with it, and you learn how to do it.

02:08:46.000 But it's a process, isn't it?

02:08:48.000 So I think it's the same.

02:08:50.000 One of the problems, I think, with social media is you can become very well known very quickly.

02:08:55.000 Yes.

02:08:55.000 Often for something that you kind of said in a clumsy way, sometimes, you know.

02:08:59.000 Right.

02:09:00.000 And I think it's probably almost impossible to navigate that process.

02:09:06.000 As just a person who just suddenly is exposed to that glare of publicity and becomes a public figure.

02:09:13.000 Yes.

02:09:13.000 Sometimes a hate figure.

02:09:15.000 Yes.

02:09:15.000 Overnight.

02:09:17.000 Well, it seems particularly difficult for people that didn't ever anticipate it, like the Jordan Petersons of the world. 0.99

02:09:22.000 People that became quite prominent in their late 40s.

02:09:26.000 He's an academic.

02:09:27.000 I mean, that's what I always did.

02:09:30.000 I was an academic and then had a success on television.

02:09:33.000 Yeah.

02:09:34.000 And it wasn't in a controversial area, right?

02:09:36.000 It was about planets and the solar system and astronomy.

02:09:39.000 But even then, I found it difficult initially to navigate through that world.

02:09:46.000 Yes.

02:09:47.000 And you get used to it eventually.

02:09:48.000 It's a very bizarre drug.

02:09:50.000 That's what fame is.

02:09:51.000 It's a very bizarre alternative state of consciousness where everybody knows who you are and you don't know them.

02:09:58.000 And no one's really ready for that.

02:10:00.000 And no one knows what it is until you experience it.

02:10:02.000 Everybody thinks they want it until they get it.

02:10:04.000 And once you get it, you're like, oh my god, this comes with so much scrutiny.

02:10:07.000 This comes with so much hate. 0.80

02:10:08.000 You're just dealing with so many mentally ill people that are tweeting at you that the world's flat. 0.92

02:10:13.000 They're just angry. 0.94

02:10:14.000 There's a lot of really messy people out there.

02:10:18.000 I do.

02:10:18.000 Yeah, there's still...

02:10:20.000 I mean, the number of people who...

02:10:22.000 When I... So I did the rocket cat, right?

02:10:26.000 The starship cat.

02:10:27.000 As you said, the most incredible thing.

02:10:28.000 I just retweeted that and said, brilliant engineering.

02:10:31.000 The number of tweets I got back saying that space is...

02:10:34.000 I don't understand what it means.

02:10:35.000 Space is fake.

02:10:37.000 I don't even know what that means.

02:10:39.000 But I got quite a lot of it.

02:10:41.000 You know, it's fake.

02:10:42.000 How can it be fake?

02:10:43.000 I went down a hashtag space is fake rabbit hole one night online and it has something to do with biblical stuff because they think that there's a firmament that's over the earth and they think that the lights are dangled in the sky.

02:11:00.000 Oh, it's that.

02:11:00.000 The earth is a disc.

02:11:02.000 Yeah, the earth is a disc.

02:11:04.000 And that you can't get through the firmament.

02:11:06.000 And that there's like an ice wall.

02:11:08.000 And that's why you can't travel around.

02:11:09.000 I love this thing.

02:11:10.000 You go, okay, so let's assume that's true.

02:11:14.000 Let's get going.

02:11:14.000 Let's assume it's true.

02:11:15.000 Imagine it.

02:11:15.000 All the astronomers, all the astrophysicists, all NASA, China, every space agency, they're all in cahoots and no one spilled the beans.

02:11:26.000 But the thing I've never understood, and I've asked this, in my early days on Twitter, I made the mistake of asking sometimes.

02:11:33.000 Now I don't reply at all.

02:11:35.000 Obviously, you learn that.

02:11:37.000 What possible advantage could there be?

02:11:42.000 What's the answer?

02:11:44.000 I think they think that it's just a scam.

02:11:48.000 So, yeah, SpaceX are just like a scam or something.

02:11:52.000 So they're just taking all this money for launching satellites.

02:11:55.000 So again, it's a very complicated scam because they're getting it off, you know, communications satellites.

02:12:00.000 They should try Starlink.

02:12:02.000 Starlink. 0.59

02:12:03.000 They should try it so they know space is real.

02:12:05.000 They probably think it's just deflecting off the dome or something, I don't know.

02:12:09.000 I guess, but the crazy thing is the idea that everybody's in cahoots, that all these competing countries decided to all lie together, and yet...

02:12:21.000 There's no record of it.

02:12:23.000 There's no record of communications.

02:12:25.000 There's no people that rebel against this idea and go, this is madness.

02:12:30.000 Everything's round.

02:12:31.000 The fundamental thing as well, the fundamental misconception these people have is they assume that there's a competence.

02:12:40.000 In government, anyone who's interacted with government, I speak of my own country, I've interacted with the government.

02:12:47.000 The idea that they're competent enough to do this, tremendously intricate scam, they can't even, in my country, they can't even make the trains run.

02:12:57.000 It's very basic.

02:12:59.000 So I think that it's this assumption that there's some kind of Underlying competence to the world.

02:13:06.000 Yes, not just competence but unbelievably calculating manipulation.

02:13:11.000 Yeah, I just don't think that the world is run by people who are smart enough to do that.

02:13:16.000 I mean, there's certainly conspiracies that are real, but that's just preposterous.

02:13:20.000 But it's also, it's just like this, again, it's attached to a weird religious thing.

02:13:24.000 They do believe in the literal interpretation of some of the stories in the Bible, and that's somehow or another that's been attached to the firmament.

02:13:33.000 That's one of the problems with sort of...

02:13:38.000 Especially if you're an articulate person and even if you make some fake documentary and you attach a bunch of fake facts to it, if it's compelling and no one like you stops and goes, hold on, that's not how it works.

02:13:55.000 This is how we know this.

02:13:56.000 This is why the planet's around.

02:13:58.000 This is how we know.

02:13:59.000 This is what Bode's Law is.

02:14:01.000 And you start laying out what...

02:14:04.000 Thousands of years of research and discovery has led us to.

02:14:09.000 This is not like just based on a whim.

02:14:11.000 There's like a lot of information and the idea that all of that information is a vast conspiracy to hide the fact that God is real and that the firmament covers the earth and the earth exists in the center of the universe and is created by God and space is fake.

02:14:28.000 I've learned something I didn't know because I didn't know the space is fake thing was linked to that.

02:14:34.000 It's a very religious thing.

02:14:36.000 At the root of all the flat earth stuff is the firmament.

02:14:39.000 The root of all the flat earth stuff is based on some very bizarre interpretation of biblical...

02:14:45.000 I don't remember the exact depiction of the firmament and how God describes it in the Bible, but They believe that that's what we're looking at, that there's like a glass, like a cookie dome,

02:15:01.000 like a plate of cookies with a glass dome on it.

02:15:05.000 Going back to what we said earlier, if that was the way that nature is, we would tell you.

02:15:12.000 I'd love it.

02:15:12.000 Well, not only that, but everyone would be talking about how crazy Earth is in comparison to all the other planets.

02:15:18.000 It turns out Earth is actually flat.

02:15:19.000 Like, that would not be something anybody would hide.

02:15:21.000 I'd like to find that out.

02:15:24.000 Because you become tremendously...

02:15:27.000 I mean, what a great discovery.

02:15:29.000 Amazing.

02:15:30.000 But it isn't.

02:15:32.000 But people have a natural inclination to uncover vast conspiracies.

02:15:37.000 And I think that's one of the weirder ones.

02:15:41.000 That people gravitate to.

02:15:43.000 But again, I really think it has something to do with blind belief in religious writings.

02:15:49.000 And not just that, but erroneous interpretations of religious writings.

02:15:54.000 You know, when you're dealing with something that was originally written in ancient Hebrew and then translated to Latin and then to Greek, a lot of that gets lost in the translation.

02:16:04.000 A lot of it gets like, you had a thousand years of oral tradition.

02:16:08.000 I've always wondered At the beginning of the Bible, in the beginning there was light.

02:16:12.000 I wonder if that was like someone trying to figure out the Big Bang.

02:16:17.000 I mean, it doesn't make sense that they would have a concept of it back then, but it also doesn't...

02:16:23.000 Maybe that's something like we inherently know is that there was an event.

02:16:29.000 Maybe the echoes of that event are almost something that we just perceive because we just think of it as being a thing.

02:16:37.000 What is it?

02:16:38.000 It starts with, in the beginning, God created the heaven and the earth, and the earth was that form of void.

02:16:43.000 And darkness was on the face of the deep.

02:16:45.000 I love that.

02:16:46.000 It's a great line.

02:16:46.000 Well, it's amazing.

02:16:47.000 Darkness was on the face of the deep.

02:16:49.000 It's amazing as a piece of literature.

02:16:51.000 Yeah, and it's the deep.

02:16:52.000 I think I read somewhere that I was talking to a friend of mine who's It seems to come from the Egyptian creation myth, I think.

02:17:00.000 I might be wrong there, but it was very much to do with the Nile and the waters.

02:17:05.000 And you find that in many religions that there's water and things emerge out of the waters.

02:17:09.000 And you see that in Genesis, that echo of it.

02:17:12.000 Darkness was on the face of the deep.

02:17:14.000 And then there's light after that.

02:17:17.000 So I don't know.

02:17:18.000 I'm not a biblical scholar.

02:17:21.000 I'm fascinated by it the same way I'm fascinated with science, because I think it's people that lived thousands of years ago trying to make sense of things.

02:17:29.000 That's it.

02:17:29.000 That's ultimately it, isn't it?

02:17:30.000 And very little information.

02:17:32.000 That's what we talked about earlier.

02:17:33.000 To me, that's one of the defining characteristics of being human, trying to make sense of the world.

02:17:40.000 And that's why, by the way, I don't like to get into arguments with people who have different views, different belief systems.

02:17:52.000 My baseline position is if you're curious and you're interested and you want to know how things happened, that to me is common ground that we can share.

02:18:04.000 The people I don't really understand are people who are not curious and don't have questions.

02:18:08.000 Right.

02:18:08.000 I think Carl Sagan wrote a great book called The Demon Haunted World Signs of the Candle of the Dark.

02:18:14.000 You know that book?

02:18:14.000 Yeah.

02:18:14.000 Where he says that story about a taxi driver when he got in the taxi at the start and he's asking him all these questions about Atlantis or whatever it is.

02:18:22.000 And he realizes he doesn't think this guy is an idiot. 1.00

02:18:26.000 He thinks... 1.00

02:18:27.000 This guy has a curious mind.

02:18:30.000 He's someone who should be—we can have a wonderful conversation.

02:18:33.000 But he also says that he felt that he'd perhaps been failed by society, by education, in that his curiosity had not been somehow channeled to the real mysteries.

02:18:47.000 But he got sidetracked into all this strange stuff.

02:18:51.000 I think the real academic mysteries are intimidating to some people.

02:18:55.000 Because they don't think of themselves as being intelligent, so then they gravitate towards YouTube mysteries.

02:19:00.000 Simpler things.

02:19:01.000 Yeah, but more controversial so that it puts them in a select club of people who actually know what's going on, where people love stuff like QAnon.

02:19:11.000 They love stuff like that, where they're in the know of some top-secret information.

02:19:15.000 By the way, that idea that...

02:19:18.000 I think one of the problems we have communicating science and getting young people into science...

02:19:23.000 Is that idea that you have to somehow be really clever, which is not true at all.

02:19:29.000 It goes back to what I said before, that it's more you have to be comfortable with not knowing.

02:19:35.000 So that's a big step, to say I'm not going to guess, and I'm okay.

02:19:40.000 If you ask me a question about the origin of the universe, the answer is don't know.

02:19:46.000 So I think it's...

02:19:51.000 As you said, if you can be comfortable with not having to have a simple, intelligible explanation for something, then you'll make more progress in life.

02:20:03.000 But it's quite difficult.

02:20:04.000 So it's easy to just go, oh, there's a simpler that thing.

02:20:07.000 Yes.

02:20:07.000 So there's a simpler explanation there.

02:20:09.000 Well, it's also very difficult for people because they attach their ego to ideas.

02:20:12.000 And once you have set an idea, then you are attached to that idea and you defend that idea.

02:20:18.000 It's a real problem.

02:20:19.000 That's so important.

02:20:20.000 Yeah.

02:20:21.000 Ideas are just ideas.

02:20:22.000 And you are you.

02:20:23.000 And the way you interact with ideas shows your intelligence.

02:20:26.000 You can be incorrect.

02:20:27.000 People are often incorrect.

02:20:29.000 But if you argue for something that you know is incorrect because you don't want to lose, that's bad for everybody.

02:20:36.000 Yeah.

02:20:37.000 I mean, going back to Richard Feynman, he said there's a great essay I've probably talked to you about before called The Value of Science that he wrote, 1955. You can get it online.

02:20:47.000 And in there he says the most valuable thing is scientists bring this transferable skill to life.

02:20:53.000 And it's that you have a great experience with being wrong.

02:20:56.000 So nature is brutal.

02:20:59.000 And most of the time you come up with some really great theory and you're really sure about it.

02:21:04.000 You do the experiment and you're just wrong.

02:21:05.000 And so you get so used to it that you come to enjoy it.

02:21:10.000 Because you're learning.

02:21:11.000 But it's a process.

02:21:13.000 That's why science is so important in schools and experiments are so important.

02:21:18.000 It's not that you just swing a pendulum.

02:21:20.000 There's nothing interesting about that.

02:21:22.000 But it's just that you're learning that there's a gold standard of knowledge, which is nature.

02:21:30.000 And as Feynman said, it doesn't care who you are or what your title is or what your name is.

02:21:35.000 Or you may have been elected with 99% votes in whatever it is.

02:21:40.000 It doesn't matter.

02:21:41.000 Nature just doesn't care. 0.98

02:21:43.000 And so the more you interrogate nature, even as a kid at school with a little experiment with a battery and a light or something, you learn that there's a reality and you learn what it takes to acquire reliable knowledge about the world.

02:21:59.000 And reliable knowledge is important.

02:22:01.000 How do we form a view of...

02:22:07.000 And it can be very important questions.

02:22:09.000 It can be questions like, what happens if we carry on putting greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, for example?

02:22:14.000 Whatever your politics are, it's a legitimate question, a good question.

02:22:18.000 Right, scientifically a good question.

02:22:20.000 Are we going to influence the climate if we carry on doing this?

02:22:24.000 And so how do we then address that as a question?

02:22:27.000 You can't do it by going back to your political affiliation or your belief system.

02:22:31.000 You've got to try and understand this complicated system, which is the climate of a planet.

02:22:36.000 So you make measurements of the thing and you build some models and computer models and there's a very famous saying that all models are wrong because they're models, right?

02:22:46.000 But they're the best you can do so you have a go and You come up with some information and a model that kind of works, and you say, well, this is the best version of our knowledge at the time.

02:22:57.000 And then you can try to act on it, and you refine the model, and that's the process.

02:23:02.000 But that idea of how can we acquire reliable knowledge that we can trust, which might not be right and is very likely not completely right, but it's the best we can do at the time.

02:23:16.000 That's what my definition of science would be.

02:23:19.000 It's nothing more or less than.

02:23:23.000 The best picture we can manage of how nature works at any given moment.

02:23:29.000 It's not a truth.

02:23:30.000 It's not something by its very nature, the way that science works, is it may be shown to be incorrect or not particularly great a model tomorrow.

02:23:39.000 But I would define it as the best we, and by we I mean our civilisation, the best we can do.

02:23:46.000 And so we act on that.

02:23:48.000 I don't see any other way to act as a civilization other than with the best we can do.

02:23:54.000 It's the best we can do.

02:23:55.000 Yeah.

02:23:56.000 And that term reliable information is so important because people want to leap to conclusions to try to like tie something up neatly when reliable information might not be available.

02:24:06.000 Like reliable information is the number one reason why I never take the UFO thing seriously.

02:24:12.000 I am so all in that there must be life out there.

02:24:15.000 It just makes sense.

02:24:16.000 It makes sense.

02:24:17.000 I know the Fermi Paradox notwithstanding, but I think if you just take into account the sheer numbers of planets that we're looking at, the possibility of something achieving some sort of advanced life seems very high.

02:24:29.000 But no reliable information.

02:24:31.000 Zero.

02:24:32.000 Not one thing that I've ever seen.

02:24:33.000 I'm like, well, that's for sure real.

02:24:35.000 Not one.

02:24:36.000 Every sighting, everything.

02:24:38.000 I'm like, how do we not know?

02:24:40.000 How do we know if there's a top secret drone program, which most certainly there has to be?

02:24:45.000 There probably has to be.

02:24:47.000 There's probably some sort of radical propulsion system that they devised.

02:24:50.000 They probably made some breakthroughs they haven't been forthcoming about because of national security risks.

02:24:55.000 There's probably something really kooky that they could fly really fast through the sky, some kind of a drone.

02:25:00.000 And that's probably what people are seeing.

02:25:02.000 That's probably a lot of it.

02:25:03.000 But then there's also this part of me that doesn't want to abandon the idea that if I was an intelligent species from another planet, And I saw that these territorial primates with thermonuclear weapons are advancing towards the creation of AI and like ruining the planet while they're doing it, 0.75

02:25:22.000 like doing crazy shit to the ocean and poisoning streams and water supplies. 0.99

02:25:27.000 I'd be like, let's keep an eye on these fucking freaks. 0.99

02:25:29.000 I would most certainly say this is a – if this happens all throughout the universe, let's just imagine that this is the natural progression from single-celled organisms to super-curious advanced life forms that eventually transform the world that they live in. 0.97

02:25:44.000 If this is a natural progression, there's got to be planets that don't make it.

02:25:48.000 There's probably a slew of them that get to 1945 and it turns out that both Germany, Japan, Germany, Japan, and the United States all have nuclear weapons.

02:25:58.000 At the same time, launch them all at each other, and then civilization goes down to zero.

02:26:02.000 Oh, the Cuban Missile Crisis.

02:26:03.000 Yes, Cuban Missile Crisis, or asteroid impacts, or supervolcanoes.

02:26:08.000 I mean, the reason why we have mountains in the first place, we have volcanic activity.

02:26:11.000 We know that every now and then there's a massive supervolcano like what Yellowstone is, this caldera, that it's a continent killer.

02:26:18.000 If it blows, there's no more United States.

02:26:20.000 It stops being a thing.

02:26:22.000 Most people on the planet die.

02:26:23.000 We get down to a few hundred savages and we start from scratch.

02:26:26.000 And that's inside the realm of possibility.

02:26:29.000 That can absolutely happen.

02:26:31.000 So something has to get past all of these hurdles.

02:26:36.000 Yeah.

02:26:37.000 If I saw a planet that's real close, like us, I'm like, wow, they've got to not fuck this up.

02:26:43.000 They have achieved this crazy apex where they're so far beyond everything else on their planet.

02:26:50.000 They're almost there.

02:26:51.000 They're almost there.

02:26:52.000 Let's watch them.

02:26:53.000 I would think of that, too, but I just don't see any evidence.

02:26:56.000 I bring in these whistleblowers.

02:26:59.000 They all tell me, oh, I've seen it.

02:27:01.000 It's incredible.

02:27:02.000 One day it's going to be released.

02:27:03.000 Like, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. 0.98

02:27:04.000 I don't see shit. 0.93

02:27:06.000 I think it's best to assume. 0.99

02:27:07.000 Carl Sagan again, wasn't it, when he said, no one's coming to save us from ourselves.

02:27:11.000 Let's just assume that.

02:27:13.000 We just definitely should assume that.

02:27:15.000 That's an intelligent assumption.

02:27:19.000 And also, that's how you want your children to behave, right?

02:27:23.000 You don't want to go save your children every time.

02:27:26.000 When they get older, they got to go on their own.

02:27:28.000 They got to make it.

02:27:29.000 They got to figure it out on their own.

02:27:30.000 If they don't, they're going to be infants for the rest of their lives.

02:27:33.000 And this might be one of the reasons why we don't get intervened, why something doesn't come down and put a halt to us.

02:27:39.000 Maybe they're just hoping we can figure this out through diplomacy.

02:27:43.000 Whatever they have, they're crossing them.

02:27:46.000 Yeah, whatever they have.

02:27:48.000 I'm so fascinated by it.

02:27:50.000 I want to believe everything. 0.99

02:27:51.000 I'm such a sucker. 0.98

02:27:53.000 Every time I see Bob Lazar talk, I want to believe it. 0.99

02:27:55.000 I want to believe all of it.

02:27:57.000 As I said, I wouldn't be surprised.

02:27:59.000 I'd be relieved.

02:28:00.000 I'd be relieved as well.

02:28:02.000 Please help us.

02:28:04.000 Yeah.

02:28:05.000 But also, do you think about the way we interact with primitive tribes?

02:28:09.000 It's not good.

02:28:10.000 It ruins them almost every time.

02:28:13.000 Like, there's this story that we were talking about recently where Starlink has been brought to some of these very remote tribes and they've been given cell phones and now tribal leaders are complaining.

02:28:24.000 As we talked about earlier.

02:28:25.000 Yeah. 1.00

02:28:26.000 These kids are on their phones all day in the fucking jungle. 0.99

02:28:29.000 Like, instead of, like, living this subsistence lifestyle they've been living for tens of thousands of years, some of them are getting lazy and they're just sitting around and they're looking at, you know, videos. 0.99

02:28:39.000 Getting shouted at.

02:28:40.000 Yeah.

02:28:40.000 Just looking at TikTok, arguing with people online, trolling.

02:28:43.000 Yeah.

02:28:44.000 Looking at memes and laughing.

02:28:46.000 You know, we've ruined them.

02:28:48.000 And this is one of the reasons why places like North Sentinel Island, you're not supposed to visit them.

02:28:53.000 You're supposed to leave them alone.

02:28:54.000 Because they are this very bizarre state of uncontacted and very primitive lifestyle that we can preserve, which is also weird.

02:29:04.000 Like, shouldn't we help them?

02:29:06.000 That's sort of weird, too.

02:29:07.000 They're human beings, and they're living like people lived thousands of years ago.

02:29:11.000 I don't want to live like that today.

02:29:12.000 But that's...

02:29:13.000 If I was an alien life form and I wasn't so, you know, cautious about the impact, I would go, you guys got to stop this. 0.99

02:29:23.000 We're going to come down, land on the White House lawn, scare the shit out of all of you, you know, take all your nuclear weapons away. 0.98

02:29:29.000 I wish somebody would do that, to be honest. 0.99

02:29:31.000 Don't you think, though, that...

02:29:33.000 The real problem would be the structure of our society is based on this idea that we have to work together to sort out our problems.

02:29:42.000 And if something came here that was like far superior in intelligence and its capabilities, we would sort of defer to that.

02:29:51.000 That would be our space daddy now.

02:29:53.000 And there are probably religions, probably some scam religions that get invented to try to, you know, contact and make peace with these overlords.

02:30:05.000 How did we get here?

02:30:06.000 But, you know, it's the idea.

02:30:08.000 Like, okay, let's take a look.

02:30:10.000 Let's pretend that we...

02:30:12.000 Well, let's extrapolate.

02:30:13.000 Let's imagine we do get to Mars.

02:30:17.000 We set up bases on Mars.

02:30:18.000 We do become...

02:30:20.000 We develop the technology that allows us to travel to other solar systems, and we do observe a civilization that is, you know, like the Bronze Age. 0.69

02:30:31.000 And we stumble upon these people that have tools, they haven't...

02:30:36.000 Figured out steel yet, but they've done some pretty interesting things, and they're clearly intelligent, and they figured out agriculture.

02:30:42.000 We would be studying them, for sure, 100%.

02:30:45.000 We would send word back to Earth, oh my god, we found these people that live like the Mongols did in 1200 AD. It would be fascinating. 1.00

02:30:56.000 We would 100% be interested in it, and I think they would be interested in us.

02:31:01.000 This is Star Trek.

02:31:02.000 It is Star Trek.

02:31:03.000 The prime directive.

02:31:04.000 The thing is, yeah, the prime directive, you know, harm, right?

02:31:07.000 Isn't that what it is?

02:31:10.000 Don't intervene at all, isn't it?

02:31:13.000 Yeah, I mean, I think that's what they would do.

02:31:15.000 I think we would hope that they would prevent...

02:31:19.000 But if that's the case, why didn't they prevent Hiroshima and Nagasaki? 0.98

02:31:23.000 Why do they let us just practice blowing things up in the Nevada desert for like 30 years?

02:31:30.000 I think you're absolutely right.

02:31:31.000 I mean, the point is, I think there's nobody there.

02:31:34.000 That's the terrifying idea is that we're the only ones in the whole thing and that intelligent life is so bizarre and such a rare thing that happens in only the perfect of circumstances.

02:31:48.000 That would be my baseline view.

02:31:51.000 But if the universe is so big, wouldn't every single potential situation happen infinitely?

02:31:59.000 If it's infinite.

02:32:00.000 I mean, we don't know if it's infinite.

02:32:02.000 We have the observable universe.

02:32:05.000 I think the current number is something like two trillion galaxies, depending on how many smaller ones there are.

02:32:12.000 So wouldn't you think that just out of two trillion galaxies, there's probably pretty good odds that something would reach some sort of a Goldilocks state in terms of where the planet exists in relationship to the star?

02:32:26.000 Yeah.

02:32:27.000 But we're talking, the distance between the galaxies is, you know, the Andromeda galaxy is two million light years away.

02:32:34.000 Right.

02:32:34.000 Which is the largest, our nearest large neighbour.

02:32:37.000 So I think, when I think about this, I tend to confine it to our galaxy.

02:32:43.000 Because I can't conceive of travel between galaxies.

02:32:49.000 Too crazy.

02:32:50.000 I think it's too far.

02:32:51.000 For now.

02:32:52.000 It is true that the laws of physics do not prevent that.

02:32:56.000 So I teach relativity at Manchester University after the first years, the 18-year-olds.

02:33:03.000 And the first thing we do in special relativity is talk about the fact that if you travel close to the speed of light, so if you had a spacecraft traveling close to the speed of light, then distances shrink from your perspective.

02:33:18.000 The one number I always have in my mind is that the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, the protons go around the ring, which is 27 kilometres in circumference, and they go around at 99.999999% the speed of light, so close to the speed of light.

02:33:34.000 At that speed, distances shrink by a factor of 7,000.

02:33:40.000 And so that ring is something like four meters in diameter to the protons.

02:33:48.000 So according to laws of physics, if you can build a spacecraft that goes very close to speed of light, you can shrink the distance to the Andromeda galaxy and therefore the time it takes to get there by an arbitrary amount,

02:34:04.000 actually.

02:34:04.000 The closer you get to speed of light, the more you can shrink it.

02:34:07.000 And so you can make those two million light years, you could traverse across that distance in principle, in a minute, according to physics.

02:34:18.000 However, the downside Is that you couldn't come back to tell...

02:34:24.000 If you came back to the Earth at that speed to tell everybody what you'd found, at least four million years would have passed on the Earth.

02:34:32.000 Oh, boy.

02:34:34.000 So there's kind of a downside to it.

02:34:37.000 We could, in principle, explore...

02:34:40.000 The galaxy and beyond.

02:34:42.000 But getting to chat to everybody about what you found is forbidden by the structure of the universe.

02:34:49.000 It's the way that relativity works.

02:34:51.000 That really is essentially a time machine.

02:34:53.000 Well, it's a time machine in the sense that we could go arbitrarily far into the future.

02:35:00.000 By flying around in a rocket very close to the speed of light.

02:35:04.000 So we could come back a million years in the future and look at the Earth and find out what had happened.

02:35:10.000 You can't go back as far as we can tell.

02:35:13.000 So you can't get back to your...

02:35:15.000 You can't build a time machine to go backwards.

02:35:17.000 So these are time machines.

02:35:19.000 The world is built such that a time machine...

02:35:22.000 A way to think about it, the way that we teach it in undergraduate physics...

02:35:28.000 So in Einstein's theory, there are events which are things that happen in space-time.

02:35:33.000 So that would be an event.

02:35:35.000 It's something that happens.

02:35:36.000 Our conversation now is a thing that happens in space-time.

02:35:39.000 And what Einstein's theory tells you is it's about the relationship between events.

02:35:45.000 So let's say that we wanted to come back here tomorrow.

02:35:49.000 That would be another event.

02:35:50.000 We meet again tomorrow.

02:35:52.000 And you can see how much time has passed between those events.

02:35:56.000 In Einstein's theory, the amount of time that has passed It's the length of the path you take over space-time between the events.

02:36:05.000 So it's just like saying, in a sense, what's the distance between Austin and Dallas, right?

02:36:10.000 You'd say, okay, well, it depends what route you go.

02:36:13.000 Well, what's interesting in Einstein's theory, the only complication is the length of the path you take between events.

02:36:21.000 It's the time measured by a clock that's carried along that path.

02:36:26.000 So that's how much.

02:36:28.000 If you're carrying your watch with you and you go between here and tomorrow, you go this way, you go off and maybe you fly to Dallas and back or something and then come back again.

02:36:37.000 There's a particular length.

02:36:38.000 Someone else can take a different path, obviously, and so a different amount of time will pass for them between those two things that happen.

02:36:47.000 Just because of that one fact.

02:36:49.000 A very infinitely small but measurable amount of time.

02:36:52.000 It's a tiny amount.

02:36:54.000 Unless you travel, someone goes close to the speed of light, or someone goes near a black hole or something where the space-time is all distorted, then you can get big effects.

02:37:05.000 But it's still completely measurable.

02:37:07.000 I mean, they are quite big effects, these, in the sense that for the satellite navigation system, for example, GPS, The clocks on the satellites tick at a different rate to the clocks on the ground.

02:37:17.000 And it's quite a big effect.

02:37:19.000 I think from memory it's something like over 30,000 nanoseconds per day difference because they're in a weaker gravitational field and they're moving and all sorts of things.

02:37:31.000 It's the same thing.

02:37:32.000 But 30,000 nanoseconds, light travels one foot per nanosecond, which is great.

02:37:39.000 I always say that God used imperial units because it's not 30.8 centimetres, it's one foot, right?

02:37:45.000 It's good, it's one foot per nanosecond.

02:37:47.000 So that's 30,000 feet.

02:37:49.000 of position measurement if you drift your clock out by 30,000 nanoseconds.

02:37:54.000 So it wouldn't work.

02:37:56.000 So it's a big effect for when you start using time to measure distance, which is what we do in satellite navigation, GPS. So we have to correct.

02:38:05.000 So the clocks have to be corrected for that effect.

02:38:08.000 So it's an effect that we can easily measure with atomic clocks, but it doesn't make much difference to us as humans.

02:38:14.000 Right.

02:38:15.000 But just the point is that the laws of nature would allow you to do it if you could go close to speed of light.

02:38:22.000 By the way, the last thing I'll say is the limiting factor.

02:38:25.000 You might say, what happens if you go really close to the speed of light?

02:38:28.000 What happens if you go at the speed of light?

02:38:30.000 Well, special relativity, Einstein's theory, is built such that The distance between any two events in the universe along the path of a beam of light between the events is zero.

02:38:42.000 No time at all.

02:38:44.000 So that's the way that Einstein's theory is built.

02:38:48.000 So he asked the question when he was younger, famously, what would the universe look like if I travelled alongside a beam of light?

02:38:55.000 And the answer is that you wouldn't perceive any time.

02:38:59.000 Wow.

02:39:00.000 You can't.

02:39:01.000 The last thing I'll say is that if you've got any mass at all, you can't do that.

02:39:05.000 You can't go at the speed of light.

02:39:07.000 So according to our model, which is a good model and it seems to work, but if you've got no mass, you go at the speed of light.

02:39:14.000 So if you're a photon, you go at the speed of light.

02:39:17.000 And no time.

02:39:19.000 So...

02:39:21.000 What are your thoughts on the possibility of some sort of a novel propulsion system that doesn't move things at speed but instead brings things together?

02:39:32.000 Yeah, that's called it.

02:39:33.000 I can never pronounce it.

02:39:35.000 It's the albacore.

02:39:36.000 What's it called?

02:39:37.000 The drive.

02:39:38.000 So you can...

02:39:39.000 Einstein's general theory of relativity.

02:39:43.000 General relativity is this theory of gravity.

02:39:46.000 And it's a theory where space and time are distorted by things, anything in the universe, right?

02:39:52.000 Stars and planets.

02:39:54.000 So that's what gravity is.

02:39:56.000 It's the distortion of space and time by mass and energy.

02:40:00.000 That's Einstein's theory.

02:40:02.000 So you can, and it's been done, you can develop sort of things where you say, well, if we could make this geometry of space and time, if we could distort it in this way, then indeed you can build a warp drive.

02:40:17.000 Right, right, right.

02:40:18.000 But it always turns out, as far as we can tell...

02:40:22.000 The other question is, but what kind of stuff would you need?

02:40:26.000 What kind of matter or energy or field, whatever it is, what kind of thing would you need to make that geometry?

02:40:32.000 And it always turns out that those things don't appear to exist.

02:40:36.000 So these particular kinds of matter and energy, that if you had them, you'd be able to do that with space and time.

02:40:43.000 We don't think you can have them.

02:40:46.000 It's kind of a bummer, right?

02:40:50.000 Is it possible that we don't have them here, but that in different planetary systems, different environments, that these elements could exist?

02:41:02.000 It's not going to be elements.

02:41:04.000 It's going to be kind of some kind of quantum field, some kind of energy or something.

02:41:08.000 And so you can sort of try to speculate.

02:41:11.000 But Stephen Hawking wrote a very famous paper called the Chronology Protection Conjecture.

02:41:18.000 So conjecture is important.

02:41:19.000 It's a guess, not proved.

02:41:21.000 Where you said that whatever the ultimate laws of physics are, we don't have them at the moment, string theory, whatever it is, then they will be such that you can't do this.

02:41:31.000 Because chronology protection means protect the present from the future.

02:41:37.000 So in other words, you can't build a time machine that goes back in time.

02:41:42.000 Right.

02:41:42.000 So that...

02:41:45.000 But because Einstein's theory allowed you to imagine such a thing, even though you might not be able to build it, it's not been proven beyond doubt that you can't somehow make these kinds of quantum fields or whatever it is that you need to make wormholes,

02:42:00.000 for example, stable wormholes you can go through.

02:42:03.000 So it's not been proven.

02:42:05.000 So it's just, it's suspected that that's going to be the case.

02:42:08.000 By the way, the final thing, this will be very neat because it goes right back to what I said at the start, that one of the pictures of how, I said there was this thing, the black hole information paradox, and we thought Stephen's calculation was that no information comes out, we now think it comes out.

02:42:24.000 So we now think that black holes do not destroy information.

02:42:27.000 We're pretty sure.

02:42:28.000 So it's been proven mathematically to most people's satisfaction that the information ends up out again.

02:42:34.000 So if you went into a black hole, the information would be out in that Hawking radiation that could reconstruct you, but only in the sense that if a nuclear bomb landed on us now, then in principle the information would be still there in the future and we could be reconstructed,

02:42:50.000 right?

02:42:50.000 But it's still in principle there.

02:42:53.000 But the question is, how does it get out?

02:42:56.000 How is it getting out?

02:42:57.000 How is the information that is you ending up outside again?

02:43:01.000 And the physical picture is not really understood, but the link is that one of the pictures that people are beginning to suggest to have is that there is some kind of wormholes, in a sense, some kind of wormhole that connects the inside of the black hole to the outside.

02:43:19.000 And so a picture Is that your atoms and everything, your bits, get scrambled up and go basically through the wormholes and come out again.

02:43:30.000 But they're funny kind of wormholes.

02:43:33.000 People don't really understand this, but mathematically it looks like maybe.

02:43:37.000 So it looks like maybe there's some role for wormholes.

02:43:41.000 These things, the science fiction things, after a fashion, some kind of, there's some role for it in the way the universe works.

02:43:49.000 So it's really cool.

02:43:51.000 The last thing I'll say, because there's a thing called ER equals EPR, which is, so EPR was the spooky action at a distance.

02:43:59.000 So we may have talked about that before.

02:44:00.000 You know, in quantum mechanics, there's this entanglement thing where something can be separated by a million light years.

02:44:08.000 But if you do something to it, it seems like this thing responds, right?

02:44:11.000 Not in a way that you can transmit information, but it responds.

02:44:14.000 So entanglement.

02:44:15.000 There's a picture of that.

02:44:17.000 So that's Einstein, Podolsky and Rosen, EPR, where they wrote a paper on this saying, we don't like this.

02:44:23.000 There must be something wrong with quantum mechanics.

02:44:26.000 We don't think there is now.

02:44:27.000 This is the basis of quantum computers.

02:44:29.000 So we build things that rely on this effect.

02:44:32.000 ER is Einstein-Rosen, which is Einstein-Rosen bridge, which is wormhole.

02:44:37.000 So they also published a paper about wormholes, Einstein and Rosen, in the 30s.

02:44:42.000 And so the idea is that you could picture that somehow as being a kind of wormhole that connects the entangled particles.

02:44:51.000 So that's how this entanglement works.

02:44:54.000 Another description of quantum entanglement is a wormhole kind of geometry.

02:44:59.000 And this is part of the cutting edge of research into black holes, but also the structure of space and time and quantum entanglement and how quantum entanglement might produce space and time.

02:45:12.000 And it's related to the way that quantum computers work.

02:45:14.000 So it's become a really hot topic because people are trying to build quantum computers and program quantum computers.

02:45:21.000 And these are the kind of problems you have to face about quantum entanglement and how you maintain it and what it means.

02:45:27.000 And there was a paper recently, which is quite a controversial paper, that I think was the Google quantum computer, which is one of the best ones.

02:45:36.000 And it's not using it as a computer.

02:45:39.000 It's using it just as these qubits, these little quantum systems that are kind of very stable, that are the basis of quantum computing.

02:45:47.000 And it's using those qubits and setting them up in such a way that something that looks like a kind of a wormhole is created in the quantum computer.

02:45:58.000 It's kind of a one-dimensional wormhole, and it's a bit kind of technical and everything.

02:46:02.000 But it looks like it might be the first hint of how you build space from qubits. 1.00

02:46:10.000 And so that paper was published.

02:46:15.000 There it is.

02:46:16.000 That's it.

02:46:16.000 A holographic wormhole.

02:46:17.000 It's important to say that wormhole is what's called a hologram.

02:46:20.000 It's not really in our universe.

02:46:22.000 It's kind of a different thing.

02:46:25.000 Because that's the last thing I'll say because I've got to blow your mind because your mind looks...

02:46:28.000 It's blown!

02:46:29.000 These theories...

02:46:31.000 The hologram thing is quite well established now and it's coming from a thing that you may have talked about with other people on the show, the ADS-CFT conjecture, a great physicist called Maldesina.

02:46:43.000 So the idea is that you can have a quantum theory living on a boundary.

02:46:48.000 So you could imagine, picture a sphere with a quantum theory living on the surface.

02:46:53.000 And there's a completely equivalent description of whatever's going on, the physics, in the interior of the sphere.

02:47:01.000 So it's almost as if the interior of the space is a hologram of the theory that lives on the surface.

02:47:09.000 And it's kind of, not accepted, but many physicists think our universe is like that.

02:47:17.000 So what we're saying is that we're having this conversation now, and there's an equivalent description of this somehow in a theory that does not contain space and time.

02:47:29.000 It's a completely equivalent description that lives in fewer dimensions, on a surface somehow that's surrounding us.

02:47:37.000 And it's really woolly and hand-wavy because we don't fully know what it means, but it would mean that we're holograms.

02:47:44.000 So this is a hologram of this other dual theory.

02:47:49.000 That's what that thing was, the holographic wormhole thing.

02:47:52.000 So it's all very the beginnings of this work.

02:47:56.000 But that's an example of how it could become an experimental science because quantum computers now exist.

02:48:04.000 And they allow you to do those experiments to try to build filaments.

02:48:09.000 It's almost like a filament of space, a holographic filament of space that you're building from these qubits. 0.98

02:48:17.000 And by the way, that word is a bit weird.

02:48:19.000 It's just something like an electron.

02:48:21.000 They're more complicated, but an electron would be an example of one.

02:48:24.000 So it's a physical thing that we have in the lab.

02:48:27.000 That is a quantum system.

02:48:28.000 That's a quantum bit.

02:48:30.000 So you build it in the different ways of building them.

02:48:32.000 And that's what a quantum computer is.

02:48:35.000 But it's amazing, isn't it, that we're beginning to use those things not for computing yet, because they're really hard to program.

02:48:42.000 But we do.

02:48:42.000 Physicists have gone, this is great, because Google and Microsoft have spent billions of dollars building these things because they want to build these computers.

02:48:49.000 But they're perfect laboratories for quantum mechanics.

02:48:53.000 So you can do abstract research into quantum mechanics on them, which I find fascinating.

02:49:00.000 That's actually more fascinating than using them to crack everybody's codes.

02:49:04.000 Yeah, it's kind of like, you know, factoring large numbers, it's kind of boring.

02:49:07.000 But building wormholes, which is, and I caution, it's a complicated thing, but it looks like the beginnings of...

02:49:17.000 A laboratory to build structures like that.

02:49:21.000 That's so fascinating.

02:49:22.000 Before you leave, I have to ask you this because I thought about this while you're talking.

02:49:26.000 You might be the only person that could explain this to us.

02:49:28.000 We were looking at this image of these quantum entangled photons and the image was in the shape of a yin-yang.

02:49:37.000 We couldn't understand what we're seeing.

02:49:39.000 Right.

02:49:40.000 I couldn't understand if they did this on purpose to make it the shape of a yin-yang and it's just the representation of these quantum entangled photons or if that is what quantum entangled photons actually look like in a shape.

02:49:56.000 So it's visualized to entangled particles in real time.

02:50:01.000 This is making them appear as a stunning quantum yin-yang symbol.

02:50:06.000 Yeah, I mean, I hadn't seen that, but it looks to me like it's another example of trying to visualise...

02:50:18.000 Entanglement looks fundamental, let me put it that way.

02:50:22.000 So it does look as if this idea of entanglement, which is, as I said, perhaps producing space and time itself, But also is the way that quantum computers work and the way that you,

02:50:37.000 we didn't talk about this, but the way that you can, one way of picturing what this does is allow you access to multiple universes.

02:50:45.000 It's the many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics.

02:50:47.000 You mentioned it, breaking people's encryption codes, right?

02:50:50.000 Right.

02:50:51.000 What are you actually doing there?

02:50:53.000 You've got an algorithm, you run a quantum computer.

02:50:57.000 And how does it factor these?

02:50:59.000 What it's doing is finding the prime numbers that you multiply together to make a very big number.

02:51:04.000 So it's very easy to multiply two big numbers together to get a really big number.

02:51:09.000 It's very hard to take a very big number and factor it.

02:51:14.000 So find out what the numbers were that got multiplied together to make it.

02:51:18.000 That takes much longer than the current age of the universe for big numbers with any conceivable classical computer.

02:51:25.000 But the quantum computer can do it in, you know, a second or something in principle.

02:51:32.000 Just what you just said.

02:51:34.000 It's so crazy.

02:51:35.000 But the explanation for how it's doing it, a picture which many people in the field, not everyone, many people would say is the correct, is what it's doing is the calculations in multiple universes.

02:51:46.000 So it's accessing the fact that actually there's an interpretation of quantum mechanics called the Many Worlds Interpretation, where you're to imagine these, you know, infinite, pretty much, sea of universes, and the computer kind of goes...

02:51:59.000 and does the calculation in parallel, and then brings them back together again at the end.

02:52:06.000 And I mentioned David Deutsch earlier, who's a fascinating writer in this field, and the instigator of many of these algorithms.

02:52:15.000 Early on.

02:52:16.000 He would say that.

02:52:17.000 He would say this is what has happened.

02:52:19.000 There is no other explanation.

02:52:20.000 How do you explain the fact that this quantum computer can do something that no classical computer can ever do?

02:52:28.000 How do you explain it?

02:52:29.000 Where is it doing the math?

02:52:32.000 And he would say, he would say, it's doing it in the multiple universes.

02:52:38.000 I still don't understand the yin-yang symbol.

02:52:40.000 Well, I don't fully understand that.

02:52:41.000 I feel so much better.

02:52:44.000 Well, I've never seen it.

02:52:45.000 And I also now don't understand, too, because it says that by capturing the resulting image.

02:52:51.000 By capturing the resulting image with a nanosecond precise camera, the researchers teased apart the interference pattern they received, revealing a stunning yin-yang image of the two entangled photons.

02:53:01.000 So that sounds like that's what it actually looks like.

02:53:03.000 It is a photograph of, in a real sense, that the photons are arriving and you're detecting them.

02:53:09.000 So it's a photograph of...

02:53:10.000 So that's what it actually looks like.

02:53:12.000 If you think about what...

02:53:13.000 I think what must be happening is you're getting these photons.

02:53:17.000 It is true to say that, again, this many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics would be that these entangle photons...

02:53:23.000 If you send them on a path, then they, going by all the way to find them, if you calculate, the way you calculate how a photon goes from A to B, or an electron, whatever it is, it just formally is you allow it to take all possible paths.

02:53:40.000 That's one way of calculating the probability it will go from one place to another.

02:53:44.000 And when you get entanglement, it gets more complicated, but you're essentially, you are mathematically saying, I allow it to go on all paths.

02:53:52.000 And so really there you're seeing what an interference pattern is, is you're seeing the result of the fact that these particles can go on all loads of paths and interfere with each other and make a pattern you can see.

02:54:05.000 And I think that's what that is.

02:54:07.000 But how crazy is it that pattern is an ancient symbol?

02:54:11.000 It is beautiful, isn't it?

02:54:12.000 It's unbelievably beautiful.

02:54:13.000 It's a beautiful thing.

02:54:14.000 Brian, thank you so much.

02:54:16.000 What a great conversation.

02:54:17.000 I really, really enjoyed it.

02:54:19.000 Please tell people how they can find you.

02:54:22.000 I know you're doing live performances.

02:54:24.000 I'm going to do some.

02:54:25.000 Yeah, I've been doing this tour for a long time now, actually.

02:54:28.000 I ended up doing it for about two and a half years, and it's changed a lot.

02:54:31.000 We've done it to over 400,000 people, I was told, the other day around the world.

02:54:36.000 And I thought just to finish it, because I want to finish it and write another one, I'd come back to the U.S. We did a few in the U.S. So coming back in April and May and doing these relatively small issues.

02:54:46.000 I saw the one you did years ago.

02:54:48.000 That was ages ago, wasn't it?

02:54:49.000 Yeah.

02:54:50.000 So this is, you know, it explores many of these questions, actually, particularly black holes.

02:54:55.000 And just to round it off, I'm doing a few.

02:54:58.000 So if you go and look on the web, you'll find...

02:55:00.000 You know, we're doing some LA, New York, Chicago, around.

02:55:02.000 I hope we're doing Austin, actually.

02:55:04.000 I hope you're doing too.

02:55:05.000 I want to come see you.

02:55:06.000 Maybe I will insist.

02:55:06.000 Yeah, please.

02:55:06.000 If it's not in there, that we can't do Austin.

02:55:08.000 Please come.

02:55:08.000 And then, you know, yeah.

02:55:10.000 So that's what I'm up to.

02:55:12.000 Well, thank you very much, Brian.

02:55:13.000 I really appreciate what you do.

02:55:14.000 It means a lot to me.

02:55:15.000 Thank you very much.

02:55:16.000 Thanks for coming.

02:55:16.000 All right.

02:55:17.000 Bye, everybody.

02:55:18.000 Bye.

The Joe Rogan Experience - October 24, 2024

Joe Rogan Experience #2217 - Brian Cox

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