The Joe Rogan Experience - Joe Rogan Experience #610 - Brian Cox

00:00:05.000 Joe Rogan Podcast, check it out!

00:00:08.000 The Joe Rogan Experience.

00:00:10.000 Train by day, Joe Rogan Podcast by night, all day.

00:00:17.000 All right, we're live.

00:00:18.000 We can't hear ourselves because Brian Cox, even though he's a musician, he goes no headphone.

00:00:23.000 Well, we can still hear ourselves, can't we?

00:00:24.000 I can hear you.

00:00:25.000 You're right.

00:00:25.000 We just can't hear whether or not, but we wouldn't know anyway.

00:00:28.000 What would we do?

00:00:29.000 He's got headphones on.

00:00:29.000 He knows.

00:00:30.000 You're right.

00:00:31.000 This is revolutionary.

00:00:32.000 From now on, no more headphones. 0.98

00:00:34.000 It's ridiculous. 0.62

00:00:35.000 What would you use them for? 0.98

00:00:36.000 Well, it's like watching television while you're on television.

00:00:39.000 It's like if you were on TV and you were watching a video monitor.

00:00:41.000 It seems weird.

00:00:43.000 It's a little redundant.

00:00:43.000 Yeah.

00:00:44.000 I think we should cast them aside in a revolutionary act.

00:00:50.000 Push them away.

00:00:52.000 Like, not just put them down.

00:00:53.000 Push them away.

00:00:54.000 We reject you, oh headphones.

00:00:57.000 We reject you.

00:00:58.000 Amazing technology.

00:01:00.000 Infinite Monkey Cage.

00:01:01.000 What's going on, man?

00:01:02.000 What is this?

00:01:03.000 First of all, I'm a huge fan of your work.

00:01:04.000 I said that when you came in, but I have to tell people online.

00:01:06.000 This is a huge treat for me.

00:01:07.000 I'm very excited.

00:01:09.000 Space has been my all-time adult freak-out pleasure.

00:01:12.000 I love watching space documentaries.

00:01:15.000 I love watching television shows on space.

00:01:18.000 So having you in here is a huge treat.

00:01:20.000 Thank you.

00:01:21.000 What's Infinite Monkey Cage?

00:01:22.000 It's a long-running now BBC radio show.

00:01:26.000 So the idea initially was to get scientists to talk about their science, whatever it may be.

00:01:32.000 As you said, cosmology or archaeology, human origins, mathematics.

00:01:38.000 And then I do it with a stand-up comedian called Robin Ince.

00:01:41.000 He's a very good friend of mine.

00:01:42.000 And we always also invite another guest who will be a comedian sometimes or an actor or someone who will kind of ask those questions that come in from left field.

00:01:53.000 But it always goes off, as your podcasts do.

00:01:57.000 You never know where it's going to go.

00:01:58.000 So we record it in front of a live audience, usually in London, and we record for about two hours, usually, and broadcast it for about 30 minutes, and there's a podcast as well, which is a bit longer.

00:02:07.000 But we decided to bring it to the States, because there are lots of scientists in the States, lots of comedians and people like yourself.

00:02:14.000 You're going to do it with us in three weeks, isn't it?

00:02:16.000 Yeah, three weeks.

00:02:17.000 Thursday the 12th in L.A., Yes.

00:02:20.000 So we're going to record them for the BBC, and they're going to be on the podcast and broadcast in the UK, but also in front of a live audience.

00:02:27.000 Someone asked me this morning, actually, and I said, it's kind of like a variety show.

00:02:31.000 I said, do you have those in the States?

00:02:33.000 He said, yeah, we used to have them.

00:02:34.000 Dean Martin used to do one.

00:02:34.000 We used to have them.

00:02:36.000 So I said, well, it's kind of like if Dean Martin had a PhD, it would have been that, black and white, a bit of singing, a bit of dancing, a bit of quantum mechanics.

00:02:44.000 Basically.

00:02:45.000 That's one of the things that's so important about what you do, what Neil deGrasse Tyson does, is that you guys, you're entertaining as well as having a genuine passion and a deep knowledge of science.

00:02:58.000 So it's not just, like, here's the cold, hard facts, which are amazing and fascinating on their own, but you guys both have this way of...

00:03:07.000 Sort of germinating these ideas into people's minds that might not ordinarily accept them, because there's a lot of people in America, especially, that associate learning with boring.

00:03:19.000 Well, I think the important point, the serious point, is that science is too important not to be part of popular culture.

00:03:27.000 So if we...

00:03:29.000 popular culture is the thing that people discuss.

00:03:32.000 So if we cede that to, you know, talent shows or sports or whatever it is, then we're removing the most important area of human endeavour out of general conversation.

00:03:42.000 So I think there's a very...

00:03:43.000 there's a responsibility on scientists to say, well, I accept that, of course, I can't talk at...

00:03:49.000 You know, the level that I lecture at as an undergraduate lecture course at university or even a post-grad lecture course at the level of my thesis or my research.

00:03:56.000 I can't do that.

00:03:57.000 But it's extremely important that we don't just cede all the ground.

00:04:01.000 We don't want people in bars tonight or wherever in restaurants to only be talking about the Grammys last night.

00:04:09.000 We would like them to be talking about the fact that The universe may be infinite in extent.

00:04:15.000 Asking questions such as, how many civilizations are there in the Milky Way galaxy?

00:04:19.000 The answer might be, not very many.

00:04:22.000 If that's true, then what does that mean for the way that we behave?

00:04:25.000 These are important questions, but they will never be debated.

00:04:29.000 Unless we take the time and make the effort to make the science and the ideas and the debate around them part of popular culture.

00:04:38.000 The internet has also opened up a lot of people's ideas about what science can be and also it opened up a lot of people's ideas about the actual popularity of science because there's Until you know maybe 10-20 years ago with the notable exception like maybe Carl Sagan and a few other famous people that became famous for you know either cosmologists or mathematicians it's very very rare but now you're seeing guys like yourself guys like

00:05:08.000 Neil deGrasse Tyson it's like more and more Richard Dawkins Christopher Hitchens while he's alive these interesting intellectuals become much more mainstream they become because people realize It wasn't that folks weren't interested in these subjects before.

00:05:23.000 It's just they really weren't being presented them.

00:05:26.000 If you don't get enough ratings, if you put your show on Thursday night at 8 p.m.

00:05:30.000 and you don't get X amount of number of people watching, the studio loses interest.

00:05:34.000 The people that produce it start looking at other jobs and, well, this one isn't gonna work, and they start moving on.

00:05:40.000 And that's just the reality of television.

00:05:42.000 And I think that With the internet, people are able to look at some of these subjects and, you know, someone will send out a tweet or a Facebook link or something like that, and you'll say, whoa, this got a million people to look at it over the last 12 weeks.

00:05:56.000 And this has sort of, instead of having this immediate time frame where everybody has to pay attention or the show dies, now ideas are allowed to sort of grow.

00:06:06.000 Yeah, I think you're absolutely right about that.

00:06:09.000 I think we, as a culture, underestimate people.

00:06:13.000 I think this is what you found with your podcast, I think.

00:06:16.000 There are millions of people out there who are interested in ideas, interested in the latest things we found out about the universe and nature and the way that it works.

00:06:26.000 And they'll come to it.

00:06:29.000 You build an audience, I suppose.

00:06:31.000 Yeah.

00:06:31.000 And it's very important for the reasons that I outlined.

00:06:34.000 Our civilisation, Carl Sagan always used to say this, our civilisation is based on science and technology.

00:06:40.000 And so in democracies, if your democracy is going to function properly, then people need to know about the cutting-edge discoveries and the things that we found out which form the basis of our civilisation.

00:06:51.000 Otherwise, how can your democracy function properly?

00:06:54.000 So that's partly the responsibility of the education system.

00:06:58.000 Of course.

00:06:59.000 But I see, actually, the media, on the internet and actually on television and radio, as part of the education system.

00:07:06.000 Now, I know that the media doesn't see itself as that often.

00:07:09.000 It sees itself as a corporate effort to generate money for shareholders.

00:07:16.000 I criticise that quite strongly, actually.

00:07:18.000 We're fortunate in Britain that we've got the BBC, whose job it is to be part of the education system.

00:07:24.000 It is a national institution.

00:07:27.000 So having a strong public service broadcaster, I think, is one of the best things you can do as a country.

00:07:34.000 I know it would be anathema to the big corporations who run the TV channels, but imagine you had a channel which really had a lot of money.

00:07:42.000 The BBC is well-funded, that everybody contributed to in the States, whose job it was to act in the interests of the nation.

00:07:49.000 Whose job it was to say, well, we're going to make these big science documentaries and put them on.

00:07:55.000 And yeah, we'll make entertainment shows and drama shows as well.

00:07:57.000 We're going to make them because we think people need to know this stuff.

00:08:00.000 We want to enthuse the next generation of scientists and engineers.

00:08:03.000 That's important, actually.

00:08:05.000 It's important not to expose people continually to...

00:08:08.000 To, you know, drivel, basically.

00:08:12.000 Populist drivel.

00:08:13.000 Because people, I think you're right, people want to think. 0.60

00:08:16.000 I really believe that.

00:08:17.000 People are interested.

00:08:18.000 I rarely go into, you know, a bar or a restaurant or a party and people say, what do you do?

00:08:23.000 And I say, well, I work at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN in Geneva.

00:08:27.000 We recreate the conditions that were present less than a billionth of a second after the Big Bang.

00:08:31.000 It's very rare that someone just says, yeah, yeah.

00:08:34.000 Whatever.

00:08:35.000 And then goes and talks to somebody else.

00:08:37.000 They're interested.

00:08:38.000 So, yeah, I think, and maybe you're right, the optimistic view, as you say, is that the internet will remove this corporate layer of middle management in a way, this kind of, the television executive.

00:08:38.000 Sure.

00:08:51.000 Maybe if you can remove that filter, which is like a sort of a malfunctioning kidney in the flow of information, then maybe it's a good thing.

00:09:03.000 In a way, it is.

00:09:04.000 It's really kind of an archaic idea.

00:09:06.000 The idea that, you know, at, you know, Thursday night at eight o'clock, that's when the show airs.

00:09:11.000 It airs for an hour.

00:09:12.000 Well, now you could, of course, DVR things.

00:09:14.000 And you can, of course, there's a lot of television shows of things on demand, so you can download them, you know, later.

00:09:19.000 But I think that that's the model.

00:09:21.000 The model is the distribution through the Internet.

00:09:23.000 And this idea of sending things through the satellites and all, the way they're doing it now with television networks, it's like, it's not going to work.

00:09:30.000 It's not going to last.

00:09:31.000 As soon as companies like Netflix and now Amazon is creating their own television shows as well, those are Internet-based companies, and they We truly understand what the internet is all about.

00:09:44.000 And when Amazon, or rather when Netflix releases a series, they release the entire series.

00:09:49.000 You can download like all ten episodes.

00:09:51.000 You can binge watch them, which is a great way to get people hooked on shows as well.

00:09:55.000 It's like this idea of...

00:09:57.000 That, you know, the only way you're going to watch something is if it's on NBC or CBS or ABC. And then those people that run those networks, they're in a panic because they've got to get people to watch.

00:10:05.000 So they'll throw on some reality show about housewives that are fighting to the death and people tune in. 0.92

00:10:12.000 I mean, I hosted Fear Factor.

00:10:13.000 You know, I understand what they're doing.

00:10:15.000 I was a part of the problem or part of the solution, if that's what you wanted to watch on television.

00:10:20.000 They're just trying to get by.

00:10:22.000 They're just trying to figure out what's the next American Idol, what's the next whatever show, The Voice.

00:10:28.000 What do I have to do to get 18 million people to sit in front and watch a ball being passed from one man to the other and they try to get across the line.

00:10:36.000 Everybody goes crazy.

00:10:37.000 This idea that that's the only way we can get our information, the only way you're going to get entertainment or anything that's coming at you that's being produced and created.

00:10:48.000 That's dead.

00:10:50.000 What I find interesting about this debate, though, is that the media is obviously tremendously powerful.

00:10:56.000 It's obviously the interface between most people and ideas.

00:11:01.000 And so I worry about the increase of choice, in a sense.

00:11:08.000 So it's a very good thing in some respects.

00:11:10.000 But in other respects, you can ghettoise audiences...

00:11:14.000 Our audiences will become ghettoised.

00:11:16.000 So let's say that, for example, I'm interested in playing computer games.

00:11:20.000 So as a 17-year-old or something, if that's what you're into, you can just watch that 24-7.

00:11:26.000 So you're not exposed to new ideas.

00:11:29.000 So I would say, is that choice, really?

00:11:31.000 Choice is...

00:11:33.000 Really what you mean is informed choice.

00:11:35.000 So you mean, well, here's the spread of ideas that our culture has generated over more than 3,000 years of civilization.

00:11:44.000 You'll stumble across things you didn't know about.

00:11:46.000 Maybe you become interested in ancient Egypt.

00:11:48.000 Maybe you become interested in the evolution of Homo sapiens in the Rift Valley 200,000 years ago.

00:11:54.000 Maybe you find that fascinating.

00:11:56.000 But if you're not exposed to those ideas at all, and culture has no way of exposing you to those ideas beyond the education system, then we have a problem.

00:12:06.000 So I don't know what the solution is to this, but I think that there's something to be said.

00:12:12.000 It will never come back now, but the old-fashioned model that we had in Britain for many years, where the BBC was really quite dominant, was that you could almost say, well, we're going to put X Factor on, let's say, or Dancing with the Stars or whatever that thing is.

00:12:26.000 And then after it, we're going to put a documentary on about astronomy.

00:12:30.000 And the idea is that some of the people who are watching the talent show will drift into the documentary and go, I didn't know.

00:12:36.000 I was interested in the moon of Jupiter called Europa that has an ocean surrounding it that may have life on it.

00:12:42.000 I didn't know that.

00:12:43.000 I was interested...

00:12:43.000 I didn't know.

00:12:44.000 And that model works.

00:12:46.000 So you're right though, it's gone probably.

00:12:49.000 So I think the great challenge is how do you expose people to new ideas in our culture?

00:12:53.000 How do you get debates going?

00:12:55.000 How do you stimulate that kind of excitement about knowledge in this new media world?

00:13:00.000 Maybe you know, but I'm worried about it.

00:13:01.000 You're sort of an evangelist.

00:13:03.000 In that sense.

00:13:04.000 I don't mean in a religious way.

00:13:06.000 I mean you're someone who evangelizes about the ideas of science and of space.

00:13:11.000 Like, you think it's very important to spread these ideas.

00:13:13.000 And that 17-year-old kid who watches video games all day, which easily could have been me, that kid will never break out of that mold.

00:13:20.000 I think that the 17-year-old kid, if you watch his...

00:13:25.000 If he really is completely obsessed and he wants to watch video games all day, the only thing that's going to fix that is he's going to eventually get bored.

00:13:32.000 And he's going to want to try something new.

00:13:34.000 And having the infinite options that are available today.

00:13:37.000 Someone could send him a text.

00:13:39.000 Dude, three words.

00:13:40.000 Infinite Monkey Cage.

00:13:42.000 Google it. 0.99

00:13:43.000 And the guy, he'll go, all right, shit, I'm bored with video games. 0.99

00:13:45.000 And then he'll have access to all kinds of shit that, like, if he was just waiting for the BBC to spoon-feed him, he's never gonna do. 0.99

00:13:54.000 Also, I think that having the stupid shows that we have here in America, like, if you watch reality shows, one of the things that you'll notice is the anger that people have about these shows. 1.00

00:14:04.000 The anger that they're being force-fed this fucking stupid shit, but they're still watching it! 1.00

00:14:10.000 That anger, sometimes, that rejection of it, almost in your soul, forces people to go explore other ideas. 1.00

00:14:20.000 Or it inspires people to go explore other ideas.

00:14:23.000 It's an interesting model, isn't it?

00:14:24.000 Frustrate them to the point of...

00:14:26.000 Yes!

00:14:27.000 Absolutely!

00:14:28.000 You get so angry about that anodyne, soul-crushing...

00:14:33.000 What's the word?

00:14:35.000 Dullness of culture that you go seek out knowledge.

00:14:39.000 Maybe that is a model.

00:14:40.000 I think there's something to it, man, because one time I was in my hotel room and I was watching Keeping Up With The Kardashians and, you know, it was in between shows, like, you know, just flipping through the channels and it was on and it was like, I'm shopping and I can't find what I want to get.

00:14:56.000 This is so frustrating.

00:14:58.000 And my sister won't stop bothering me. 0.97

00:15:00.000 And they're like texting each other and it's so fucking mind-numbing. 0.96

00:15:03.000 And somehow or another I'm sucked into it. 0.96

00:15:05.000 Like it's a tornado and it's carrying me away up into the sky.

00:15:09.000 Then I changed the next channel, and it's some biology thing on crocodiles, and it's instantly fascinating. 0.82

00:15:17.000 It's these people that live on the Nile, and this scientist who's down there, and he's studying these crocodiles, and there's the villagers who are worried about these things eating them, and then I'm thinking, wow, this is so fucking fascinating.

00:15:29.000 These people are living next to dinosaurs.

00:15:32.000 I mean, they have a real issue with dinosaurs eating their family.

00:15:36.000 Or, you can watch these Just simple apes talk about shiny things. 0.99

00:15:43.000 And they'll talk about shiny things for a whole- And millions of fucking people do! 0.99

00:15:46.000 But the anger of, can't take this anymore! 0.99

00:15:49.000 And then you switch the channel or go online.

00:15:52.000 I really think that does- There's a yin and a yang to the world.

00:15:55.000 This is the strongest case for the Cardassians I've ever heard. 0.97

00:15:58.000 That it compresses your very soul and existence into such a small space that you burst out into a world of ideas.

00:16:08.000 Well, it's analogous to California, because in California we have too much sun.

00:16:13.000 We have so much sun that it doesn't rain.

00:16:14.000 We need 11 trillion gallons of water just to make up for the water that didn't rain in the last three years. 1.00

00:16:20.000 It's a fucking disaster. 0.99

00:16:23.000 But if you lived in a place like Alaska in the winter where there's no fucking sun at all and just looking for little peaks in the clouds or those days in Portland where it's just 39 days in a row there's no fucking sun! 1.00

00:16:38.000 You just get crazy! 0.99

00:16:39.000 You can't take it anymore!

00:16:40.000 And then one day that sun is there and you're like, oh!

00:16:44.000 It's so beautiful. 1.00

00:16:47.000 Whereas in LA, we're like, fucking sun. 0.99

00:16:49.000 We're so tired of the sun. 1.00

00:16:52.000 People get used to shit. 0.99

00:16:54.000 I'm going to call it the Rogan model, which is just depress everyone to the point of... 1.00

00:16:59.000 The Rogan model for broadcasting. 0.98

00:17:02.000 Yeah, bore the fuck out of them. 0.93

00:17:03.000 And they'll surely at some point... 0.83

00:17:05.000 And then put the cosmos on.

00:17:06.000 There must be more to write.

00:17:08.000 Yes.

00:17:08.000 And then when it comes on...

00:17:12.000 And then they get it.

00:17:13.000 Well, not everyone.

00:17:15.000 There's going to be some people that are always going to be...

00:17:18.000 They're going to always gravitate towards nonsense.

00:17:21.000 There's nothing you can do about that.

00:17:23.000 We're so varied.

00:17:25.000 The spectrum of human beings, from the smartest to the dumbest, is so wide.

00:17:30.000 There's no getting around that.

00:17:32.000 Life experiences, genetics, whatever causes it, I don't know. 0.99

00:17:35.000 But there's just certain people that do not give a fuck. 0.98

00:17:38.000 And they're going to always be there. 0.99

00:17:40.000 But concentrating on them, You know, and like, it's profitable. 1.00

00:17:46.000 Like, you could sell them shit. 1.00

00:17:47.000 It's a really good model if you're in the business. 1.00

00:17:51.000 It is.

00:17:52.000 I'd still, you said earlier that I'm perhaps optimistic, but I think you could, I think we can sell them.

00:17:59.000 It sounds almost like them, this group.

00:18:02.000 Some of them, yeah.

00:18:03.000 You could sell ideas.

00:18:05.000 I still think you can sell ideas to people.

00:18:07.000 I'm going to be optimistic about it. 0.99

00:18:09.000 Those people maybe not, but there's a lot of fucking people. 0.99

00:18:11.000 There's 350 million people in this country alone. 0.99

00:18:14.000 We underestimate people.

00:18:15.000 I've rarely met someone who wasn't interested.

00:18:18.000 Oh, let me take you around.

00:18:20.000 Let me take you around and bring around some dummies. 1.00

00:18:23.000 Listen, dude, there's some fucking dummies out there. 0.99

00:18:26.000 A lot of smart folks like yourself, you're hanging out at CERN, a bunch of other physicists, you're... 1.00

00:18:31.000 Talking about black holes and shit? 0.96

00:18:33.000 There might be a selection effect, you're right. 0.98

00:18:34.000 I've never been into the cafeteria at CERN, and anyone who's not interested.

00:18:39.000 I hosted Fear Factor for six years, and I'm a cage fighting commentator.

00:18:39.000 Trust me, man.

00:18:44.000 There's dummies out there. 0.98

00:18:46.000 There's unfixable dummies.

00:18:48.000 And it's probably not their fault, but it's probably one of the greatest pieces of evidence to...

00:18:55.000 It points towards natural selection, it points towards the variability of life, and that human beings, we vary so strongly in comparison to other, like, wild animals.

00:19:05.000 If you see wolves, I mean, you see wolves that are slightly larger and slightly more dominant, and wolves that are slightly smaller and slightly more timid, and they get pushed out of the pack. 0.99

00:19:14.000 But they're all fucking wolves. 0.98

00:19:16.000 You see people, and you see Brian Cox, and then you see Kim Kardashian. 0.99

00:19:21.000 I mean, you guys are both on the same timeline.

00:19:24.000 You're both alive in this point in history. 0.98

00:19:26.000 And one of you is talking about fucking shoes, and the other one is trying to figure out what happened right after the Big Bang. 0.99

00:19:31.000 And one of them has a fuckload more people paying attention, Brian Cox, and it ain't you, buddy! 1.00

00:19:37.000 It's that chick! 1.00

00:19:38.000 The chick with the fake ass is the one who's getting all the eyeballs! 1.00

00:19:41.000 Going back to Carl Sagan's great book, The Demon Haunted World. 1.00

00:19:44.000 Great book, I love that book.

00:19:45.000 I mean, he makes the point that the thing is, everyone has a vote, and rightly so.

00:19:50.000 We live in a democracy right now.

00:19:51.000 You might say, well, could we have some kind of IQ test threshold for the vote?

00:19:56.000 But therefore, the direction of our societies is...

00:20:00.000 In principle, in the hands of everyone.

00:20:02.000 So we can't just accept the fact that, you know, well, alright, well, 1% of the world's population is going to pay attention to reality, and the rest of them are going to pay attention to reality TV, and we're going to be okay.

00:20:15.000 We're not going to be okay, because the 99% will be unaware what they're voting for.

00:20:20.000 They have control, and rightly so, over the direction of our countries. 0.84

00:20:25.000 So education is extremely important.

00:20:27.000 It is important for us to try and make available the great swathe of knowledge that we've accumulated over the last...

00:20:36.000 We were absolutely in agreement about that.

00:20:39.000 I just think that the open nature of the internet enhances that more than stifles it.

00:20:46.000 I think there's only good. 1.00

00:20:49.000 I think I'm a big fan of old shit. 1.00

00:20:49.000 I only see good. 1.00

00:20:52.000 I love to go watch old television shows and old movies and especially old stand-up comedy performances.

00:21:02.000 Not just because it's sort of like a time machine, you're looking back at this moment that's been captured, which is absolutely fascinating to me, but also the stark differences, the obvious differences between culture then and culture now, between the awareness of the people. 0.98

00:21:19.000 There's some movies that were really good movies, but if you try to watch them today, you go, oh, who's that fucking dumb today? 0.98

00:21:24.000 No one is that dumb today. 0.99

00:21:26.000 It's hard. 0.95

00:21:26.000 The education level of the people that are Communicating in these movies, the way they view life is very obviously different than the way we view life today. 0.95

00:21:37.000 Like, you could not put Father Knows Best on television today, because people wouldn't fucking, they're not like, not enough!

00:21:43.000 Nope, it's gotta go to a higher frequency, because human beings are very different today than they were in 1950. I think our culture is one of the clearest influences.

00:21:53.000 There's some amazing stuff from 1950. It's amazing books that were written.

00:21:57.000 There's amazing films that were made.

00:21:58.000 But the reality is the culture has shifted dramatically in the last 64 years.

00:22:04.000 There's no getting around that.

00:22:06.000 It's changing. 0.98

00:22:08.000 And I think having something like the Internet just Pushes that in a direction and a guy like you who gets upset a guy like you who gets upset all these reality shows It's really just proof that that this is what you're designed to do You like designed the edge like this these people that are annoying you and these programs that are stupid That's actually just fuel. 0.90

00:22:26.000 It's just giving you more.

00:22:28.000 It's giving you an adversary It's giving you motivation to stop it from happening.

00:22:33.000 I mean it's if everybody was going to college and everybody was super Educated and really aware of the problems with plastic and fossil fuels.

00:22:43.000 Boy, what a weird world we'd live in.

00:22:46.000 Probably nothing would ever get done. 0.72

00:22:47.000 The battle between the dummies and the people like yourself is essential. 0.61

00:22:53.000 It's the yin and yang. 0.96

00:22:53.000 It's essential. 0.96

00:22:55.000 The idea, the thesis, the defining, the motor of civilisation and human advancement is irritation with dumb people. 0.98

00:23:03.000 I don't appreciate naps unless I work out hard. 0.98

00:23:07.000 I don't appreciate vacations unless I'm just exhausted.

00:23:11.000 I have to be exhausted with work to appreciate vacations.

00:23:15.000 I must say, it's one of the threads.

00:23:17.000 I mean, we started talking about Infinite Monkey Cage.

00:23:18.000 It's one of the threads through the whole series is a slight...

00:23:22.000 Annoyance that we turn into something that's interesting.

00:23:26.000 It generates ideas for us.

00:23:27.000 We had a letter about the title, The Infinite Monkey Cage, complaining.

00:23:32.000 You shouldn't cage monkeys! 0.99

00:23:34.000 It's cruel.

00:23:37.000 It's an infinite cage.

00:23:40.000 It's roomy.

00:23:41.000 It's a lot of room.

00:23:42.000 It's arguably the universe is an infinite cage.

00:23:45.000 And then another letter came in, I think it might have been a response, so we sent that back and they said, it's also supporting this kind of Darwinian myth, the Darwinian myth that we somehow share a common ancestor with a monkey.

00:23:57.000 So we said, how so?

00:23:59.000 And he said, well, there was an experiment done that disproved all your nonsense.

00:24:03.000 We like experiments.

00:24:04.000 We like evidence.

00:24:06.000 So we said, this is really interesting.

00:24:07.000 What's the evidence? 0.96

00:24:08.000 And they said, there was an experiment done in a zoo in Alabama or somewhere where they got ten monkeys and they gave them typewriters and after a week all they'd done was shit on them. 0.93

00:24:08.000 So we read down. 0.93

00:24:22.000 So the idea that an infinite number of monkeys could write Shakespeare and all this is amazing.

00:24:27.000 It's like, well, there's a difference between ten monkeys and an infinite number of monkeys.

00:24:33.000 It's not, you know, ten is not very close to infinity.

00:24:36.000 And it's just these complaints about that.

00:24:39.000 And my friend Robin Inns, who I co-present it with, he said it's not an incremental process, this kind of infinite monkey thing.

00:24:46.000 It's not like if you have a hundred monkeys, then eventually they'll produce a leaflet.

00:24:50.000 And then if you have a thousand, they'll do maybe a book.

00:24:54.000 And then if you have ten thousand, they'll do Shakespeare.

00:24:57.000 And it's not...

00:24:58.000 Really, we mean it.

00:24:59.000 It's an infinite number of monkeys you need to type out the works of Shakespeare.

00:25:02.000 But yeah, we get a lot of...

00:25:04.000 We enjoy the complaints.

00:25:05.000 We get a lot from...

00:25:06.000 Yeah, we've got a lot of complaints from Deepak Chopra, actually, these days. 1.00

00:25:09.000 He's a silly bitch. 1.00

00:25:10.000 Isn't that one of those things that's like one of those expressions that people always use? 1.00

00:25:15.000 If you take an infinite number of monkeys and give them the typewriters, they'll type out Shakespeare, the works of Shakespeare.

00:25:20.000 Is that true?

00:25:22.000 Well, it is true.

00:25:22.000 It's an infinite number of monkeys.

00:25:24.000 Yeah, but even an infinite number, I think they're going to fail. 0.99

00:25:26.000 They're going to fuck it up. 1.00

00:25:27.000 They're monkeys. 1.00

00:25:29.000 You were talking to me earlier about infinity.

00:25:32.000 I know, but if you get an infinite number of monkeys, if there's the same animal, they're the same exact animal, they're going to type the exact works of Shakespeare?

00:25:41.000 Well, they will, because there's an infinite number of them, so every possible combination of letterpresses must happen.

00:25:47.000 That is true, but would it happen, what is the odds of it happening in the exact same order of the works of Shakespeare?

00:25:54.000 Is it even calculated?

00:25:56.000 Less than zero.

00:25:58.000 But it's still possible.

00:25:59.000 Greater than zero.

00:25:59.000 The odds are greater than zero.

00:26:00.000 So that's the point.

00:26:01.000 If you've got an infinite number of them, then you will get everything that can possibly happen Will happen.

00:26:06.000 Could you imagine if one monkey, just randomly, they gave it a key, you know, like, look, we're talking about the entire universe, right?

00:26:13.000 So we're talking about an infinite number. 0.99

00:26:14.000 But what if they just get lucky as fuck and give one monkey a typewriter? 1.00

00:26:18.000 And this little dude just starts banging out the entire works of Shakespeare, but he's still a monkey. 0.99

00:26:24.000 He's still, like, playing with his butt and, you know, swinging around and having a good time. 0.59

00:26:28.000 He's not doing anything else other than when they put him in front of this keyboard, he types out all the works of Shakespeare in exactly the right order, the exact punctuation, the exact spaces in between letters.

00:26:39.000 Well, if the universe is infinite, which it may well be, in fact, there are many ways the universe can be infinite, then that would happen.

00:26:52.000 Because if it's in accord with the laws of physics, then it can happen.

00:26:58.000 And everything that can happen in an infinite universe will happen, because the universe is formally infinite.

00:27:04.000 So I contend, and we'll probably get emails about it, but I'm trying to think whether there's any counter-argument.

00:27:10.000 I contend that in an infinite universe, even the most unlikely possibility must happen.

00:27:10.000 I don't think there is.

00:27:16.000 In fact, formally, an infinite number of times.

00:27:19.000 So, maybe Shakespeare?

00:27:22.000 A monkey.

00:27:23.000 Yeah, maybe someone's pet monkey.

00:27:25.000 Can you imagine?

00:27:26.000 We could calculate it.

00:27:29.000 Someone can do it online now.

00:27:32.000 How many letters are there in Shakespeare, the complete works of Shakespeare?

00:27:35.000 So you can Google that, someone will tell you.

00:27:37.000 And we know you've got 26 possibilities, and so off we go.

00:27:41.000 So, what's the probability?

00:27:43.000 What are the odds?

00:27:45.000 Of randomly typing on a typewriter, let's say at one letter per second, how long will it take and what are the odds that you'll type out the complete words of Shakespeare?

00:27:53.000 That's a known number.

00:27:54.000 I don't know it off the top of my head, but it can be calculated.

00:27:57.000 So that's my challenge to your viewers and listeners.

00:28:00.000 Send in that email.

00:28:02.000 There'll be someone working at MIT or something who can do it in five minutes.

00:28:02.000 Someone will do it.

00:28:06.000 That's an easy sum. 0.96

00:28:07.000 And then you would have to calculate how many monkeys start out with Romeo and Juliet and then just start shitting on their typewriter. 0.86

00:28:14.000 I know the answer that is more than the other one. 0.99

00:28:17.000 And how many, like, get the first chapter perfect and then just shit all over the place? 0.93

00:28:22.000 No, right all the way to the last word. 0.92

00:28:24.000 The last single digit. 0.99

00:28:26.000 Well, I bet every keystroke along the way, there's a monkey shitting on their typewriter. 0.99

00:28:30.000 Like, you get, like, the first paragraph, shit all over the place. 1.00

00:28:33.000 This guy got to the second paragraph, shit all over the place. 0.99

00:28:36.000 Yeah, and to go back to our infinite monkey cage complaint letter, that proves that Darwin's wrong. 0.98

00:28:41.000 That's the logic.

00:28:43.000 Can I just say that if someone doesn't remember, I just came into the podcast at that point.

00:28:47.000 Oh.

00:28:48.000 You can't cherry pick that quote.

00:28:51.000 Brian Cox does not think Darwin's wrong.

00:28:53.000 That'll be in the press.

00:28:55.000 There's a great website, a Twitter handle called Take That Darwin, where people that are...

00:29:02.000 educationally challenged will question Darwin's theories like that my favorite one is you know if people came from monkeys how come monkeys are still around like they retweet that all day because someone says that fundamental misunderstanding of evolution that really is you know you're going right where am I going to start here maybe with a book The only way to truly test is to,

00:29:23.000 I think, what we really need to do is take monkeys and give them psychedelic drugs.

00:29:27.000 We need to do this.

00:29:28.000 Someone needs to do this.

00:29:29.000 They need to take an island where the monkeys can't escape and give them psychedelic drugs and leave them puzzles and see what they figure out.

00:29:35.000 Why does that test anything?

00:29:39.000 It doesn't.

00:29:41.000 It would just be fun to watch.

00:29:42.000 There is a guy named Terence McKenna, who I'm a huge fan of, who had a theory called the stoned ape theory.

00:29:49.000 And he backed it up, allegedly, remember who this is coming from, with climatological data on that time of the world, that he believes that the...

00:30:01.000 Evolution of human beings, the big part of it, the development of the human brain, might have come from them experimenting with psychedelic mushrooms.

00:30:10.000 That as the rainforest receded into grasslands, animals were forced to try new foods out because their habitat was changing.

00:30:18.000 And they would climb down for these trees and flip over these cow patties to get bugs and worms and things along those lines. 0.98

00:30:24.000 And that this time of the world, it was very common to have these psilocybin mushrooms growing all over the place.

00:30:30.000 And that the monkeys that would eat them...

00:30:32.000 He had a bunch of theories like...

00:30:34.000 Apparently it's been proven that in low doses, psilocybin increases visual acuity, which would make you able to see things better, which would make you a better hunter.

00:30:44.000 Also makes you horny, so it would make people more likely to breed. 0.99

00:30:48.000 And that would favor the people, or the monkeys rather, the subhuman primates, whatever you call them, that went along that line. 0.56

00:30:56.000 It is...

00:30:58.000 One of the more widely accepted theories about hominin evolution is that climate change played a key role.

00:31:05.000 And actually, in my latest series, Human Universe, we focused on a theory which links the climate change, particularly in the Rift Valley, because we know that the big jumps in brain size all occurred in the Rift Valley of Africa.

00:31:20.000 And it's quite remarkable, actually.

00:31:21.000 And that's broadly speaking accepted, I think.

00:31:24.000 Although there's a lot of argument with anthropologists, because the data is sparse, you know.

00:31:28.000 But it's broadly accepted there.

00:31:29.000 And it seems that the big jumps in brain size occurred at times when the Earth's orbit was most elliptical.

00:31:37.000 So the Earth's orbit oscillates, it becomes more elliptical and more circular, and there are many different oscillations driven by gravitational interaction with the planets, like Jupiter in particular.

00:31:45.000 And it seems like when the Earth's orbit is most elliptical, that the rate of climate change in the Rift Valley is higher and more extreme.

00:31:54.000 And it seems to be the case, that there's relatively strong evidence for the case, that when you get these relatively rapid times of climate change, as you mentioned, then you get increases in hominin brain size, and therefore increases in intelligence.

00:32:06.000 There's a big one 1.8 million years ago, which was a very big increase in the number of species in the Rift Valley, of which Homo erectus was one of them, which eventually led to us, and a big jump in brain size as well.

00:32:21.000 And this was at a time when there was strong evidence for rapid climate change in that region.

00:32:26.000 So that makes sense, like the adaptability of these animals, experimenting with new food sources, trying out new hunting methods, a lot of them changed from herbivore to omnivore, a lot of the primates that were observed, right?

00:32:38.000 That's where it gets controversial, when you look at the academic research, because the Darwinian idea, so you get this pressure from climate change, but then what's the selection effect?

00:32:51.000 Because climate change happens over many generations.

00:32:53.000 It doesn't happen over one generation.

00:32:55.000 So the question is, well, what actually is doing the selecting?

00:32:58.000 What are we selecting for?

00:32:59.000 Why is this group more likely to breed and be more successful if it's more intelligent?

00:33:04.000 So some people say, well, it's because they were forced into groups.

00:33:07.000 So it's group dynamics.

00:33:08.000 It's the fact that you end up with bigger tribes, you know, hundreds of individuals cooperating together.

00:33:13.000 And that's what's being selected for.

00:33:15.000 And you need to be intelligent for that.

00:33:16.000 Some people say, as you said, that it's more adaptability, so maybe they have to learn to go fishing or they have to learn to eat the particular different crops.

00:33:25.000 So that's a big area of debate about what might have been the selection pressure, this precise selection pressure.

00:33:31.000 But it does seem pretty nailed down that climate change, certainly in that region of Africa, in Ethiopia and Tanzania and through the Rift Valley, played a role in driving us towards intelligence.

00:33:43.000 And essentially the size scale is very small, by the way.

00:33:45.000 I mean, so you go back four million years and things like Australopithecus are around, which are basically upright chimpanzees.

00:33:53.000 Their brain is not much bigger than a modern-day chimp. 1.00

00:33:56.000 But then you go to...

00:33:58.000 200,000 years ago, and that's when Homo sapiens first emerged, just over 200,000 years, which is not very long ago.

00:34:04.000 And it's quite remarkable, actually.

00:34:06.000 And the modern theories, they spread out of Africa about 60,000 years ago, and they made it into Europe about 43,000 years ago or so, into North America and South America only 15,000 years ago.

00:34:18.000 So it's quite a rapid spread.

00:34:21.000 And the fact that we've only been around as a species for at most a quarter of a million years, a quarter of one million years, is quite remarkable, I think.

00:34:28.000 Well, when you think about what we've accomplished, I was flying into Los Angeles last night, and I was thinking, if you could take the pioneers that Came from Europe in the seventeen and eighteen hundreds the guys who were on those Wagons with the wooden wheels and they're pulling them with horses across the country trying to see what's over there if you could show them like hey, 0.94

00:34:49.000 man, this is what's gonna go down in 2015 and Hop on this plane, look out this fucking window. 0.94

00:34:53.000 Whoa, look at that grid! 1.00

00:34:55.000 They would freak the fuck out. 0.80

00:34:57.000 They saw all the electricity.

00:34:59.000 The sky of Los Angeles, in my opinion, Los Angeles is more beautiful at night than any other city.

00:35:06.000 Because it's so spread out, it's all lights.

00:35:08.000 As you're flying in, it looks so science fiction.

00:35:11.000 You know, I recently interviewed the astronaut Charlie Duke.

00:35:14.000 He landed on the moon, one of the Apollo astronauts.

00:35:16.000 And he said to me, his father couldn't believe it, because he was alive when the Wright brothers flew.

00:35:23.000 So his father spanned the time from the Wright brothers, and he was alive, and then his son walked on the moon in one lifetime.

00:35:32.000 60 years.

00:35:33.000 Well, 70 years. 0.99

00:35:35.000 The real mindfuck is... 0.95

00:35:38.000 The creation of the plane to the time someone dropped an atomic bomb from the plane is less than 50 years. 0.99

00:35:45.000 Yeah, and the nuclear physics, we didn't know.

00:35:47.000 We didn't know there was an atomic...

00:35:49.000 Rutherford discovered the atomic nucleus in Manchester in...

00:35:53.000 was it 1912 or so?

00:35:55.000 I should know.

00:35:56.000 But anyway, something like 1912, 1913. So he discovers the nucleus.

00:36:00.000 And within 30 years, you have an atomic bomb.

00:36:04.000 I didn't even know.

00:36:04.000 True.

00:36:05.000 And Rutherford was actually asked at the time, he said, it's the usual question we get as physicists, they say, what's the use of this?

00:36:12.000 And Rutherford said, there's no use to it.

00:36:15.000 He said, anyone who thinks that you could use this as an energy source is talking moonshine.

00:36:19.000 And within...

00:36:20.000 30 or 40 years you have nuclear reactors producing power and you have atomic bombs.

00:36:26.000 Rapid, rapid progress.

00:36:28.000 Well, that's one thing that's been constant about people and predicting the future.

00:36:32.000 We've always got it wrong.

00:36:33.000 Always.

00:36:34.000 Yeah, we miss some of the rapid advances.

00:36:36.000 You know, we talk about, you know, there's a computer there and a phone here.

00:36:39.000 The fact that the...

00:36:42.000 Modern electronics is a single lifetime.

00:36:45.000 The transistor is, what, 1940s, I think, at Bell Labs here in the US. It's not long ago, you know, that you go from that to this.

00:36:53.000 I mean, we talked about the Apollo.

00:36:54.000 I mean, this is significantly more powerful than anything that was available in the world when Apollo was there.

00:37:00.000 The rooms filled with computers at NASA, which were nowhere near as powerful as that.

00:37:05.000 It's amazing.

00:37:06.000 I mean, those Google glasses that people are wearing is a sign of things to come, in my opinion.

00:37:11.000 They've stopped making them, but there's a new company that has a goggle that looks like a skiing goggle, and it allows you to move things in front of you like a virtual desktop.

00:37:21.000 You can spin squares, hold things in place, throw things to the side, and they disappear.

00:37:31.000 I've actually seen some of that technology.

00:37:33.000 There's a company called Magic Leap.

00:37:35.000 I've been there in Miami.

00:37:36.000 You saw it in person?

00:37:37.000 Yeah.

00:37:37.000 What does it look like?

00:37:38.000 It does indeed.

00:37:40.000 You can put 3D objects into your field of vision.

00:37:43.000 How is that working?

00:37:45.000 So you've actually seen it.

00:37:46.000 I signed an NDA. You did?

00:37:48.000 You can't talk?

00:37:49.000 But I tell you that it works.

00:37:50.000 It's a remarkable thing.

00:37:52.000 I think Google had just bought the company, actually.

00:37:53.000 Yeah.

00:37:54.000 We played some videos of it, and we couldn't figure out whether we were watching a simulation, we were watching what the future holds, or we were watching an actual demonstration of that technology.

00:38:04.000 Oh, it's going to be impressive, I think.

00:38:06.000 And it's interesting what you said, because it brings the web, this unlimited information, into your field of vision, so you can manipulate it.

00:38:14.000 And then there are questions about what's real and what isn't, and who cares anyway, you know, really.

00:38:21.000 And it's an interesting...

00:38:23.000 Do you dabble at all in the theory of some sort of an artificial world that we live in?

00:38:30.000 You know, these ideas of stimulation?

00:38:32.000 Do you dabble in that or is it just too much?

00:38:34.000 It's interesting actually.

00:38:34.000 I mean, a colleague of mine at Manchester, there are some physicists who think...

00:38:39.000 That it's a possibility, a strong possibility that we're living in a simulation.

00:38:44.000 I mean, it's, you know, it's speculative out there stuff, but it's an attempt to explain some properties of the universe that are interesting and unusual.

00:38:54.000 So one of my favourite I think, at the moment, piece of cutting-edge physics in cosmology.

00:39:00.000 Cosmology, I should say, the study of the universe, the origin and evolution of the universe, is going through a revolution at the moment.

00:39:05.000 And it's coming from data.

00:39:07.000 So it's coming from measurements of things like the cosmic microwave background radiation, which is the oldest light in the universe.

00:39:14.000 So just to rewind and say what that is, 380,000 years after the Big Bang, the universe became transparent for the first time to light radiation.

00:39:23.000 And that's because as it was cooling down, as it was expanding and cooling, then atoms formed.

00:39:28.000 It became cool enough for atoms to form.

00:39:30.000 And at that moment, very, very quickly, the universe becomes transparent, and so photons of light can travel on through the universe, and they've been doing so ever since.

00:39:39.000 And we can take a photograph of that, and we have them, with a series of satellites, the most recent of which is called Planck, which is a European satellite that's up there.

00:39:47.000 So this is a picture, a baby picture of the universe, as it was 380,000 years after the Big Bang.

00:39:52.000 It's a very beautiful picture.

00:39:54.000 But in explaining that, that's given support to theories called inflationary cosmology theories.

00:40:00.000 So inflationary cosmology theories say that before The universe was hot and dense, which we tend to call the Big Bang.

00:40:08.000 Before that, the universe was still there, and it was doing something else, which was an exponential expansion.

00:40:13.000 So it was expanding exponentially fast, way faster than the speed of light.

00:40:17.000 Then it stops, and all the energy that was causing that expansion gets dumped into space, heats it up, and that's what we see as the particles and energy today.

00:40:26.000 So those theories are kind of interesting.

00:40:29.000 But they also suggest that there are theories called eternal inflation theories that say, well, how long did that period of expansion go on for?

00:40:37.000 And does it all stop at once, or does it stop in patches?

00:40:40.000 And if it stops in patches, if it stops in a little patch, you'd get a big bang and a universe.

00:40:45.000 If it stops in another patch, you'd get another big bang and another universe.

00:40:49.000 So these theories suggest perhaps there are an infinite number Possibly, of Big Bangs, in inverted commas, which would mean there are an infinite number of universes like ours, and they're being created now, all the time, and they will continue to be created forever.

00:41:04.000 So you get this fractal multiverse, ever-growing, exponentially fast.

00:41:09.000 And really, bizarrely, those theories have some support from the cosmic microwave background.

00:41:15.000 They're theories that explain the structures we see.

00:41:18.000 I should just underline the fact that this is Speculative, in a sense, but it's relatively mainstream, that.

00:41:25.000 But what one of my colleagues noticed, and some physicists have noticed, is if you were some kind of omnipotent deity programmer and you wanted to run what's called a Monte Carlo simulation to say, well, I'll vary the strength of gravity in one universe and vary the mass of the electron in another one and vary these physical constants and see what happens,

00:41:44.000 then this is probably the kind of thing you'd do.

00:41:46.000 This is what it would kind of look like.

00:41:48.000 So you can make an argument that the universe in some sense looks like one of these kind of so-called Monte Carlo simulations because it gives you the possibility of generating every possible number of different ratios of the strengths of the forces of nature and all these things.

00:42:06.000 So I just have to emphasize this is way out there, way on the edge, but it's fun.

00:42:11.000 What is fun and interesting, though, is that the inflationary cosmology bit is probably the most widely accepted theory at the moment for how the universe got to be the way it is.

00:42:23.000 And it does lend itself to this idea that there may be a multiverse, and it may be that in each different pocket universe, if you like, you can have different physical constants.

00:42:32.000 So most of them wouldn't allow life to exist.

00:42:35.000 But some of them would.

00:42:36.000 So our universe looks very fine-tuned, if you look at it, in a sense.

00:42:40.000 It looks like the laws of nature were very slightly different.

00:42:44.000 You wouldn't get carbon, for example, produced in stars in large quantities, which you need in order to...

00:42:50.000 And when the stars die, the carbon and the oxygen come out and they re-conlapse into another generation of stars and solar systems, and that's how you get the heavy elements that make up our bodies and...

00:43:00.000 So all those things, look, you need, you either try and find an explanation for why the laws of nature are the way they are, or you go to one of these multiverse theories and say, well actually, it goes back to what we were talking about earlier about the infinite monkeys, actually every possibility occurs in nature,

00:43:17.000 and then we shouldn't be surprised that we live in a universe that seems fine-tuned for life, seems perfect for us to exist in, because every possible combination of the laws of nature exists somewhere.

00:43:28.000 And this is where cosmology is at the moment.

00:43:31.000 This is genuine.

00:43:32.000 You could go onto the web and Google it.

00:43:34.000 You'll find a thousand review papers on what's called inflationary cosmology.

00:43:38.000 And it is cool and interesting, actually.

00:43:41.000 Yeah, it's beyond that.

00:43:43.000 It's very...

00:43:45.000 The idea of something being infinite, and not just infinite, but infinite numbers of these infinite things.

00:43:52.000 Infinite numbers of infinite universes.

00:43:55.000 These theories exist.

00:43:57.000 So this idea of computer simulation, the idea that the world we live in, the universe we live in, is a simulation.

00:44:04.000 But that was the question that you first asked.

00:44:06.000 No, no, no, it's because what you went on is beautiful.

00:44:09.000 Don't change the thing.

00:44:10.000 Stay you.

00:44:12.000 The idea being that one day, if human beings continue to increase our technological abilities, one day we're talking about this magic leap, and we're talking about the goggles that allow you to see a virtual world,

00:44:29.000 we're going to, if we don't blow ourselves up or get hit by an asteroid, we're going to come up with something that is indistinguishable from the reality that we see right now.

00:44:40.000 And when people start examining the nature of the universe and they start looking at the fractal nature of things and looking at, like what you were saying, that if you were going to be some omnipotent deity that creates the universe, you'd probably do something like this.

00:44:54.000 Like every single combination and throw them out there.

00:44:55.000 That's true.

00:44:56.000 So when we discover, like, is this James Gates?

00:45:00.000 That was the guy's name?

00:45:02.000 Sylvester Gates.

00:45:03.000 It was a guy who spoke to Neil deGrasse Tyson about string theory and that they found in string theory this computer code that was created by humans in, like, the 1930s.

00:45:03.000 Sylvester Gates.

00:45:15.000 They figured this out.

00:45:16.000 And that this actually exists in these codes in string theory and his idea was that that somehow another Proves that there is some evidence support that life that the reality that we see right now is a simulation or it could be that Which way more likely that you're just discovering some sort of code that the entire universe is based on.

00:45:39.000 That when you look at things being fractal and you look at the idea of there being not just infinite expansion but infinite contraction and that there is no smallest point.

00:45:49.000 There's just smaller than we can measure.

00:45:52.000 But when we talk about subatomic particles, and we talk about atoms being mostly air, and then you go deeper and deeper, and you don't know what the fuck is going on, and particles are blinking in and out of existence, and existing at the same time, both moving and still.

00:46:05.000 But could it be that we just can't see it?

00:46:09.000 Well, the answer is... 0.93

00:46:11.000 We sort of do know what the fuck's going on at some level with subatomic particles. 0.82

00:46:15.000 If you look to the LHC, which is the Large Hadron Collider, which is the...

00:46:19.000 Place where we generate the highest energy, so it's the biggest microscope in the world in that sense.

00:46:23.000 We have an extremely good understanding of the laws of physics at that level, up to and including the discovery of the Higgs particle.

00:46:31.000 Has that been proven?

00:46:32.000 Is that in the debate at all?

00:46:34.000 The Higgs?

00:46:34.000 Because I remember there were some people that were debating whether or not the Higgs...

00:46:37.000 How do you say boson?

00:46:38.000 Do you say boson?

00:46:39.000 Yeah, boson.

00:46:40.000 There is a particle there that we've discovered, and it has all the right properties to be the predicted standard model Higgs particle.

00:46:47.000 Please explain what that means.

00:46:49.000 So the Higgs particle, it was predicted back in the 60s by Peter Higgs and others, and its name And the idea is, basically, that early on in the expansion history of the universe, so let's say less than a billionth of a second after the Big Bang, as the universe cooled, it went through something condensed out into empty space.

00:47:07.000 So people call it a phase transition.

00:47:09.000 But it's analogous to a window pane on a cold winter's day.

00:47:12.000 You don't have cold winter's days in LA. It gets 50!

00:47:17.000 If you were to get ice on a window, it's analogous to water vapour condensing out into ice.

00:47:22.000 As you drop the temperature, it changes into something else, into ice.

00:47:26.000 So in the same way, the theory is that as the universe cooled, something condensed out.

00:47:30.000 So empty space isn't empty.

00:47:32.000 It's full of Higgs particles, if you like, or a Higgs field.

00:47:36.000 So this means this space.

00:47:38.000 Now, it's not just space between the galaxies.

00:47:39.000 It's in this room.

00:47:41.000 That every square metre of this room is full of Higgs field.

00:47:45.000 And our fundamental particles, the electrons, let's say, in our bodies, interact with that Higgs field, and in that process they acquire mass.

00:47:53.000 So it's the mass generation mechanism.

00:47:56.000 It's why some particles are massive, like electrons and quarks, and some things like photons are not massive.

00:48:03.000 They're massless, and they travel through the universe at the speed of light.

00:48:07.000 So that's the theory.

00:48:08.000 Now, that was suggested and built mathematically, essentially.

00:48:12.000 There was very little evidence for it at the time, back in the 60s.

00:48:14.000 But over the years, the theory called the Standard Model of Particle Physics passed all experimental tests.

00:48:21.000 So we got to the point where we thought, right, okay, we will build a machine that will either disprove or prove that theory, and the LHC is such a machine.

00:48:28.000 If that theory is correct, which it now seems to be, the prediction is you must find The Higgs particle, the LHC, or some kind of Higgs particle.

00:48:39.000 And indeed we found it as far as we can tell.

00:48:42.000 So that means that we found a new particle.

00:48:44.000 It has the right mass as predicted in the window that was predicted by the theory.

00:48:48.000 It behaves in every way like the theory predicts.

00:48:51.000 So now what we have to do is be experimental physicists.

00:48:54.000 So the LHC turns back on again in about a month actually.

00:48:57.000 So it's been upgraded, it's been fixed, and it's done its maintenance.

00:49:00.000 So we're going to make more Higgs particles now, and that means we can make more precision measurements and find out whether it is the particle predicted by Peter Higgs, or maybe it's one of a number of Higgs particles, just possibly.

00:49:11.000 It's likely not now, but it might be.

00:49:14.000 So there might be five of them, for example, which would suggest that theories called supersymmetric theories are right.

00:49:19.000 So we need to know exactly which, precisely how the thing behaves, which is why we have more work to do.

00:49:25.000 But it looks like...

00:49:27.000 Very sure.

00:49:28.000 Very sure that it is a Higgs particle.

00:49:31.000 You can mess around and build esoteric theories that get you around it.

00:49:36.000 But there is a new particle there.

00:49:37.000 There's no doubt about that.

00:49:38.000 And it looks like one of these things.

00:49:40.000 But that's remarkable to think about it.

00:49:42.000 It's Wigner, a great physicist, who wrote an essay back in the 60s, I think, called The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Physical Sciences.

00:49:51.000 And the unreasonable effectiveness is demonstrated by this discovery, because it really is a mathematical prediction.

00:49:56.000 It's like we think there's a new fundamental particle that does the job of giving mass to the other particles.

00:50:01.000 And this is how it does it, and this is how it behaves, and this is what it will look like, and this is what it will do.

00:50:06.000 And then 50 years later, you build the biggest machine ever built, 16 miles in circumference.

00:50:13.000 Most of it's in France, a bit of it's in Switzerland.

00:50:15.000 10,000 scientists, 150 countries.

00:50:18.000 You accelerate protons, nuclei of hydrogen around this thing at 99.9999999% the speed of light.

00:50:25.000 They go around the 16 miles 11,000 times a second.

00:50:25.000 Wow!

00:50:28.000 We can collide 600 million of them together every second to recreate the conditions that were present less than a billionth of a second after the universe began.

00:50:35.000 Photograph it in the biggest digital cameras ever built.

00:50:39.000 The one I work on called Atlas is 40 meters in diameter.

00:50:43.000 Vast, vast thing.

00:50:45.000 7,000 tons of digital camera in a cabin the side of St Paul's Cathedral underneath the ground in Switzerland.

00:50:52.000 And you find it.

00:50:54.000 You find this thing that this guy, Peter Higgs, working with many other people, predicted to exist 50 years ago because he did some sums.

00:51:03.000 So it's real.

00:51:04.000 So the universe does behave like that.

00:51:06.000 There is a condensate in the vacuum.

00:51:08.000 It is a Higgs condensate.

00:51:10.000 It does give mass to the other particles.

00:51:13.000 So it's a tremendous testament to the power of human reasoning, I think.

00:51:17.000 And it means that we understand physics.

00:51:20.000 That's one of the important things about it.

00:51:22.000 It means that our understanding of fundamental physics is not horribly wrong at the moment.

00:51:27.000 It's good enough to predict something like that, which is a remarkable achievement.

00:51:33.000 That is mind-blowing.

00:51:34.000 That is truly, truly mind-blowing.

00:51:36.000 Do you know when Peter Higgs, actually, the day the discovery was announced at CERN, packed auditorium, Peter was there, and a journalist went up to him afterwards, and just what I've said, this is what happened, this machine did it, he found this thing, and he said, how do you feel, Professor Higgs?

00:51:52.000 And he said, it's very nice to be right sometimes, is what he said.

00:51:55.000 LAUGHTER Brilliant.

00:51:58.000 Understated.

00:51:59.000 Is he British?

00:52:01.000 Yes, he is.

00:52:02.000 There you go.

00:52:05.000 That's exactly how a British guy would behave. 0.78

00:52:07.000 A cup of tea.

00:52:08.000 American would show up with a fur coat on, with diamonds around his glasses, we have a big pimp cane. 0.81

00:52:14.000 And then someone would come on and say, you should have given the Nobel Prize to Beyonce. 0.99

00:52:24.000 I saw that at the Grammys last night, wasn't it?

00:52:26.000 Who was it?

00:52:27.000 It was Kanye West, wasn't it, who keeps jumping on stage?

00:52:31.000 Yeah, well, he jumped on stage once, right?

00:52:34.000 He didn't do it again last night, did he?

00:52:36.000 Apparently, didn't he?

00:52:37.000 Almost?

00:52:38.000 Did he have a go?

00:52:39.000 I can't be bothered.

00:52:41.000 See, you're part of it.

00:52:43.000 That's a problem.

00:52:44.000 You just went and talked about Kanye West in the middle of one of those mind-blowing discussions.

00:52:48.000 You know who he is.

00:52:49.000 I call that other guy JZ. And someone said, no, JZ. Well, it's because you call ZZ. I know, yeah. 0.76

00:52:53.000 That's a British thing.

00:52:55.000 People don't know, like, the Z06, like, is a type of Corvette.

00:52:59.000 They call it Z06. Yeah, so JZ was there. 0.98

00:53:02.000 Anyway, that's my level of popular culture.

00:53:05.000 The Large Hadron Collider also figured out or proved quark-gluon plasma?

00:53:12.000 Yes.

00:53:13.000 Explain that.

00:53:14.000 In the history of the universe.

00:53:16.000 So way after the Higgs mechanism kicks in, you have a period when it's still too hot for protons and neutrons to form.

00:53:24.000 So the building blocks of atomic nuclei are protons and neutrons.

00:53:28.000 So a proton is made of two up quarks, or quarks, and a down quark, and a neutron is made of two downs and an up, and then some other stuff in there, gluons and things like that.

00:53:37.000 But the universe went through a phase, and it was too hot for that to happen.

00:53:42.000 So you get this plasma, this sea of the free quarks and the gluons and all these things.

00:53:47.000 Just before it gets cold enough to condense into protons and neutrons.

00:53:50.000 And we investigate that by colliding heavier things than protons together at the LHC. So we can do silver atoms or silver nuclei or lead nuclei and things like that.

00:54:01.000 The LHC can do that.

00:54:02.000 And it produces this about a millionth of a second after the Big Bang.

00:54:05.000 So quite a long time.

00:54:06.000 Quite a long time!

00:54:08.000 You know, a lot has happened at that point.

00:54:10.000 So we can do that as well and see how that phase of the universe behaved.

00:54:10.000 Relatively speaking.

00:54:15.000 And that stuff is supposed to be just immeasurably heavy, right?

00:54:20.000 Oh, the atomic nuclei?

00:54:21.000 Yeah, yeah.

00:54:22.000 I mean, if you look at, so an astrophysical example would be a neutron star, which is basically a big nucleus, nuclear-dense material, the end point of a collapsed star when it's run out of fuel.

00:54:34.000 If it's not too big, if it's too big it'll turn into a black hole.

00:54:36.000 So a neutron star would be, what, one and a half times the mass of the Sun, let's say, something like that, but it would be a radius of 10 miles.

00:54:46.000 So it would easily fit in the LA metropolitan area, right?

00:54:50.000 But it would have the mass of the sun or greater.

00:54:53.000 So that's an atomic nucleus density.

00:54:56.000 That's how you can imagine it.

00:54:58.000 Something as massive as the sun compressed into something 10 miles across.

00:55:01.000 And we see these things all over the universe.

00:55:03.000 Neutron stars are fascinating things.

00:55:08.000 Someone online was explaining it.

00:55:10.000 Some physicist was explaining that if you had this quark-gluon plasma and it was the size of a sugar cube, it was some ungodly amount of weight.

00:55:21.000 Yeah.

00:55:22.000 Like you couldn't even imagine it.

00:55:24.000 You know, Mount Everest, you know, that kind of weight.

00:55:26.000 It would be like Mount Everest. 1.00

00:55:28.000 Fucking sugar cube! 1.00

00:55:28.000 Yeah. 1.00

00:55:30.000 It's something enormous.

00:55:32.000 You broke my brain!

00:55:34.000 Well, if you think about it, all our mass is in, you alluded to it earlier, all the mass, our mass is in the nuclei.

00:55:40.000 And if you've got all our atomic nuclei, mining your nuclei and stuff them together into that density, you know, it would be a grain of sand or something.

00:55:49.000 Less size, so you could...

00:55:52.000 I mean, you think about the universe, I mean, the modern theories of the Big Bang, we talked about earlier, these inflationary cosmology theories, they suggest that the entire observable universe, which has now got 350 billion galaxies in it, was at some point the size of a, I don't know,

00:56:08.000 a baseball or less.

00:56:10.000 So we imagine, we speak of, in modern physics, we have theories that address the time when the entire observable universe was something That you could hold.

00:56:20.000 So you've got enough energy in there to make 350 billion galaxies, each with 200 billion stars.

00:56:26.000 And it's remarkable that we're not quite there with the laws of physics, but we're not far...

00:56:30.000 Those are the kind of...

00:56:32.000 That's the physics we're doing at LHC, basically.

00:56:34.000 We're trying to explore the laws of nature and find the laws of nature.

00:56:38.000 We'll describe the universe when it was that hot.

00:56:41.000 And that dense.

00:56:42.000 And we are quite close.

00:56:43.000 I say we're good from about a billionth of a second after the Big Bang.

00:56:47.000 Then that's where we have our theories that talk about the Higgs boson and things like that.

00:56:50.000 And so we understand that very well.

00:56:52.000 And so the challenge now is to get back beyond that.

00:56:55.000 And that's where string theory attempts to live, which you mentioned earlier.

00:57:00.000 String theory, we don't know if it's right.

00:57:02.000 We have no evidence to that.

00:57:03.000 It's an approach to trying to describe the universe before those times when our current laws work.

00:57:11.000 The idea of a birth and a death of a universe troubles some people.

00:57:16.000 The idea that we have sort of artificially subscribed, the idea that this had to start somewhere, and that it may very well be an infinite expansion and contraction, like waves going in and waves going out.

00:57:28.000 The idea being that the entire universe may one day get to a point where it pulls down into itself and becomes One event horizon, one infinite piece of mass, and then starts all over again.

00:57:42.000 Is that possible?

00:57:43.000 If you look at how the universe is expanding at the moment, then it is accelerating in its expansion.

00:57:51.000 So the measurements tell us that the expansion rate itself is getting faster.

00:57:56.000 And we have a name for that.

00:58:00.000 We call it dark energy.

00:58:03.000 And of order, 65-70% of the energy in the universe appears to be taken up in driving this increasingly fast expansion.

00:58:13.000 And so that looks like if nothing happens, then that becomes dominant.

00:58:16.000 So it continues to accelerate its expansion.

00:58:20.000 And in the end, you get something that looks like this inflationary Period that I said may have existed before the universe was hot and dense.

00:58:28.000 So that looks like what's happening at the moment.

00:58:31.000 So whether that can stop, whether there's something that can stop it, in the same way as it seems to have stopped very early in the history, by the way, and whether that's true, nobody knows.

00:58:40.000 We don't know the mechanism.

00:58:42.000 But the measurements tell us of distant, particularly looking at supernova in distant galaxies, and also actually from this cosmic microwave background radiation I mentioned earlier, The detailed modelling and measurements of that all are consistent and suggest that the universe is accelerating in its expansion.

00:58:58.000 So that would suggest that it's not going to rebound because it's like a big rip scenario almost, where everything's accelerating.

00:59:06.000 Space-time is stretching at a faster and faster rate at the moment.

00:59:10.000 That seems to be what's happening.

00:59:12.000 So, you feel that it's much more likely that there are infinite numbers of these things happening, that there's not just one Big Bang that creates this universe, and we're watching this universe expand, but that there's infinite numbers of these things that are happening at the exact same time?

00:59:32.000 That's an...

00:59:33.000 That's more speculative.

00:59:35.000 So the way that...

00:59:36.000 Inflation is probably textbook now.

00:59:40.000 You get some physicists that will argue with it, but broadly speaking, I think many astrophysicists think that inflation is the best theory we have because it makes predictions that agree with observation.

00:59:51.000 So it's the best theory in terms of making the best predictions at the moment.

00:59:54.000 And this is that accelerating and its expansion?

00:59:57.000 That suggests that a very fast, superluminal, faster than light expansion, that stops, and the end point of that is what we used to call the Big Bang.

01:00:05.000 So that's broadly speaking textbook stuff.

01:00:09.000 That's what you teach in undergraduate cosmology courses.

01:00:13.000 Then some physicists argue that the natural extension to those theories, the theories called eternal inflation, which are what you said.

01:00:21.000 So this exponential expansion of space-time is always going on.

01:00:25.000 And it stops just in little patches, and that little patch is where you generate a new pocket universe, if you like, of which ours is one example.

01:00:34.000 And you can have an infinite number of those, and they would be being produced now.

01:00:39.000 And you can ask the question, how long has that been going on?

01:00:42.000 And the answer is nobody knows.

01:00:44.000 And there's a debate, even amongst the people who believe in those theories, about whether it could have gone on forever or whether it would have started.

01:00:51.000 A colleague of mine at Durham, Carlos Frank, calls the mother of all Big Bangs.

01:00:55.000 So was there a mother of all Big Bangs that set this process in motion?

01:00:59.000 And in that big fractal thing, you get loads of little Big Bangs.

01:01:03.000 And the answer is this is cutting-edge stuff.

01:01:06.000 It's very exciting.

01:01:08.000 So I'd say, just to be very precise, the inflationary bit.

01:01:12.000 The simple bit, which was first put forward in the 80s, actually, by Alan Guth and people like that in the US. Andre Linder, another one.

01:01:21.000 That looks right in the sense that it matches data very well.

01:01:24.000 And the consequences of it are argued about and are active areas of research at the moment.

01:01:30.000 One of the things that people were terrified of about the Large Hadron Collider is that in trying to find the Higgs that you might accidentally create black holes, little tiny ones that would just go eaten through the earth like a little ping-pong ball that shot through the entire planet. 0.99

01:01:46.000 That's idiots like me. 1.00

01:01:49.000 That's definitely shit. 1.00

01:01:53.000 Is it possible to create a Big Bang? 1.00

01:01:56.000 Or excuse me, a black hole?

01:01:57.000 Is it possible, theoretically, to have enough power?

01:02:00.000 Like if you don't have it right now with the Large Hadron Collider, is it possible that a larger machine will be created and human beings can recreate a black hole?

01:02:09.000 Yes, it's possible.

01:02:11.000 And it's possible if you have extra dimensions in the universe, right?

01:02:17.000 So the thing is that gravity is a very weak force.

01:02:21.000 It's by far the weakest of the four fundamental forces of nature.

01:02:26.000 We're good to go.

01:02:46.000 That gravity is as strong as the other forces.

01:02:48.000 The strength of the forces varies, I should say, with energy.

01:02:52.000 So they change.

01:02:53.000 And we've seen this behaviour.

01:02:55.000 So two of the forces, so-called electromagnetism, which is the most familiar one, electricity, that one, And the weak nuclear force, which is one of the forces that operates in the atomic nucleus, they are the same force.

01:03:07.000 They're manifestations of the same force.

01:03:09.000 And we've seen this experimentally.

01:03:11.000 In fact, the Higgs boson is part of that process.

01:03:13.000 And so we've seen the energies that they become the same force.

01:03:17.000 So the idea is the other force, the strong nuclear force, if you go to higher energies and temperatures, converges.

01:03:23.000 And then you have some things called grand unified theories.

01:03:25.000 And then gravity makes its lethargic way back and unifies with them at something called the Planck energy, which is immensely short timescales after the origin of the universe, if you want to.

01:03:36.000 Very, very hot.

01:03:37.000 So it's a way in excess of anything.

01:03:39.000 So if you just want to just create black holes in a lab, then the naive thing is you'd have to go to those energies.

01:03:45.000 And there's nowhere in the universe you'd never do it.

01:03:47.000 You'd have a power to accelerate to the side of the observable universe and it wouldn't be big enough.

01:03:50.000 Wow.

01:03:51.000 Wow.

01:03:51.000 But if you allow extra dimensions in space, so you imagine that, so we live in a three-dimensional space, and then there's time as well, so we've got four dimensions.

01:04:00.000 If you allow there to be five, or six, or thirteen, I think the string theory, they keep changing their mind, but you know, there's thirteen now?

01:04:09.000 Something like that.

01:04:10.000 I don't know.

01:04:13.000 Then what you can do is you can arrange for that energy scale at which gravity becomes important to come up so the temperatures to drop.

01:04:22.000 So you can arrange in some contrived way to get to the point where you could possibly access gravity, see gravity in action as it were in particle accelerators, things as big as the LHC. And in that case you would produce little black holes which would then They evaporate away very quickly,

01:04:42.000 we think, through a process called Hawking radiation, and they'd be gone.

01:04:46.000 So you can conceive of a way that you could, if given, as big of a leap, that there are extra dimensions in the universe, and given that they're configured in the right way, that you can imagine that you could do it.

01:04:58.000 The interesting point, though, is that LHC is a tremendous technological achievement.

01:05:05.000 But it collides particles together, energies that are just insignificant compared to the energies that are available in the universe to nature.

01:05:12.000 So cosmic rays, for example, hit the Earth with energies far in excess of those that we generate at LAC. So whatever physics you can conceivably access at these particle accelerators is already being accessed now in the upper atmosphere of the planet because the cosmic ray collisions are immensely higher energy.

01:05:31.000 So if you can make little black holes because there are extra dimensions in the universe, then they are raining down on us now.

01:05:39.000 They're here.

01:05:40.000 They get made.

01:05:41.000 Because the energies of the LHC, as I said, astrophysical processes all over the universe, way in excess, way exceed those energies.

01:05:49.000 We're not very good at doing high energy collisions compared to nature, compared to supernova explosions and cosmic rays.

01:05:56.000 There's a cosmic ray, actually, that was detected.

01:05:58.000 I think the highest energy one had the energy of a professional tennis player serve.

01:06:04.000 So a 100 mile an hour tennis ball.

01:06:06.000 And it's a single particle.

01:06:09.000 So you imagine getting hit by a hundred mile an hour professional tennis player serve on the back of the head.

01:06:14.000 There are cosmic rays with that energy.

01:06:17.000 One particle would be equal to getting served.

01:06:21.000 The energy is a hundred miles an hour tennis ball.

01:06:22.000 So these are incredible energies, way beyond energy.

01:06:26.000 How many particles would be in a tennis ball?

01:06:29.000 Oh, it's a good question, that.

01:06:30.000 So let's have a think.

01:06:32.000 So Avogadro's number is, what is it, 6 times 10 to the 23, isn't it?

01:06:37.000 That's right.

01:06:37.000 So that's the number of atoms, let's say, in 12 grams of carbon.

01:06:45.000 So it's of the order of...

01:06:48.000 So it's 10 to the 23, is it?

01:06:49.000 Well, 10 to the 24 is a million, million, million, million, right?

01:06:54.000 So a million, million, million, million particles would be what you'd have in atoms of carbon.

01:07:00.000 You're putting me on the spot here, aren't you?

01:07:00.000 You'd have in a...

01:07:02.000 That's what you'd have in about, what, 60 grams of carbon or something like that.

01:07:08.000 So if I was to guess, I'd say something like that.

01:07:10.000 A million, million, million.

01:07:12.000 And that's...

01:07:13.000 Chemistry.

01:07:15.000 That's chemistry.

01:07:16.000 See, I don't do chemistry.

01:07:17.000 But that's out there just floating around in the galaxy.

01:07:19.000 Like when a hypernova...

01:07:21.000 You're still trying to do the math?

01:07:22.000 Yeah, well, I just made sure.

01:07:24.000 Because we're live on the web.

01:07:25.000 I don't want to get it right.

01:07:26.000 I get old questions.

01:07:27.000 Yeah, people do that all the time.

01:07:28.000 This show's all about wrong answers.

01:07:31.000 Yeah, you got that wrong.

01:07:33.000 You're just talking.

01:07:34.000 I mean, it's not your field of study.

01:07:36.000 I understand.

01:07:37.000 Really?

01:07:37.000 Well, it should be, really.

01:07:38.000 Chemistry.

01:07:39.000 Yeah, I do a bit of chemistry.

01:07:41.000 It's just particle physics, but bigger blobs.

01:07:44.000 I watched a documentary once on hypernovas, that when they were first discovering the gamma bursts in the galaxy, they thought it was aliens having wars with each other.

01:07:52.000 That was one of the ideas that were being bandied about.

01:07:55.000 It's really great.

01:07:56.000 I mean, people do legitimately look for signatures from alien civilizations like that.

01:08:01.000 Sort of, yeah, but it's kind of...

01:08:03.000 Well, no, there's mad people who do it, but actually you can do...

01:08:06.000 There are papers written about...

01:08:08.000 Because you might say, what would the signature of an interstellar starship look like?

01:08:13.000 Presumably be a matter-antimatter drive or something like that.

01:08:16.000 So you get these very clear signatures of matter-antimatter annihilation that we know about, because we do that.

01:08:21.000 The particular photons, gamma rays with particular energies.

01:08:25.000 So you can actually say, well, shall we have a look?

01:08:28.000 What would it look like?

01:08:29.000 If we saw an interstellar civilisation, an interspace-faring civilisation, could we detect the signatures?

01:08:35.000 So there's a bit of work done on that, and we don't see any evidence for anything.

01:08:39.000 Well when you see someone like the people that run SETI and search for extraterrestrial intelligence and they're always like asking for funding like you know we need more funding we have to figure this out and one day what if we shut down and then the signal comes like that seems to me to be like one of the biggest like Hail Mary wishes like hoping that you're gonna find a radio signal from a galaxy far far away that has intelligent life in it.

01:09:02.000 Well, it's interesting though, if you ask astronomers, so you say, what's the probability of other civilizations being out there?

01:09:08.000 Then they will point, for example, to the new data from the Kepler Space Telescope, which tells us that there are probably around 20 billion Earth-like planets in the Milky Way galaxy, in the sense that they're small rocky planets in what's called the habitable zone around stars.

01:09:23.000 The Goldilocks.

01:09:24.000 Around main sequence stars like the Earth.

01:09:26.000 Like the Sun.

01:09:27.000 So 20 billion.

01:09:28.000 So maybe one in 10 stars in the sky has an Earth-like planet around it, potentially.

01:09:35.000 So that's a lot.

01:09:36.000 So you think 20 billion?

01:09:37.000 Well, surely life must have arisen on some of those.

01:09:40.000 The answer is probably yes, I suspect.

01:09:43.000 I suspect we may find life on Mars in the next 10 years, but it'll be microbes.

01:09:47.000 So the question then becomes, well, how likely is it for simple life, if it arises, to make its way into a civilisation?

01:09:55.000 And that's where the biologists come and kind of calm the astronomers down and say, well, you might think there are lots of places for life, we would agree.

01:10:03.000 But on Earth, it took 3.8 billion years to go from the origin of life to a civilization, which is about a third of the age of the universe, give or take.

01:10:13.000 So you had to have an unbroken, stable line of life that evolves in the right way, as it were.

01:10:23.000 So first of all, it gets complex.

01:10:25.000 I mean, it took...

01:10:26.000 There's a thing called the Cambrian Explosion in the history of life on Earth, which was about 550 million years ago or so, which sounds like a long time.

01:10:34.000 But for three billion years before that, there was nothing that we would call complex.

01:10:39.000 Single-celled organisms doing some clever stuff, like photosynthesis, but not much.

01:10:44.000 And then suddenly you get a big jump in the oxygen content of the atmosphere on Earth, which was to do with photosynthesis and some geology in play with it.

01:10:54.000 That's how the oxygen gets into the atmosphere.

01:10:56.000 And then you get a big jump and you get complex life emerging.

01:10:59.000 And then pretty quickly, you know, half a billion years or so, you go from complex things to a civilization.

01:11:06.000 But even then, you think about Homo sapiens we mentioned earlier, they only arose 200,000 years ago.

01:11:12.000 So for the vast majority of the history of life on Earth, there's been nothing that could do anything clever in a sense of thinking and building spacecraft and radio telescopes.

01:11:23.000 So there's a legitimate debate about whether the undoubted increase in...

01:11:29.000 We know now that there are homes for life out there in the Milky Way.

01:11:32.000 They're very common.

01:11:33.000 We know that.

01:11:34.000 But...

01:11:35.000 What we don't know is the probability that life will emerge in the first place, and secondly, the probability that will turn into a civilization.

01:11:42.000 And I think that's very low.

01:11:44.000 So I think the probability, if I guessed, I would say the probability that life will emerge, given the right conditions, is very high.

01:11:51.000 And what one piece of evidence you could put forward to that is that it did appear to emerge on Earth as soon as it could, after the formation of the Earth and the oceans.

01:11:59.000 So you get life, but then it took a long time on Earth.

01:12:02.000 So you might say, well, the probability of it doing anything intelligent and interesting are quite low, maybe less than 1 in 20 billion.

01:12:10.000 In which case we end up being the only civilisation in the Milky Way at the moment.

01:12:15.000 It's possible.

01:12:16.000 You can make that argument.

01:12:17.000 And my experience is academic biologists tend to be on the cautious side and astronomers tend to be on the optimistic side.

01:12:25.000 It's all relative, though, isn't it?

01:12:27.000 Because even if we are only one out of this entire Milky Way galaxy, you still believe that it's possible for an infinite number of monkeys to create the works of Shakespeare.

01:12:37.000 Well, let us believe that.

01:12:39.000 That's clearly a fact, isn't it?

01:12:40.000 Right.

01:12:41.000 Because we did that with Infinity, didn't we?

01:12:44.000 But if you look at the entire universe, then the idea of there being not just A life form like human beings, but the exact same life form is not just once, but an infinite number of times.

01:12:58.000 In the universe, absolutely.

01:12:59.000 In the universe.

01:13:00.000 I mean, there are 350 billion galaxies in the observable universe.

01:13:00.000 Well, I'm sure.

01:13:04.000 Surely there are civilizations out there.

01:13:06.000 And more advanced as well, then.

01:13:08.000 I'm sure that's the case.

01:13:08.000 Yeah, I'm sure.

01:13:09.000 Sure.

01:13:10.000 And it has to be the case in an infinite universe, as you say.

01:13:13.000 But if we confine ourselves to the Milky Way, which is really the only place we ever have any hope of exploring or contacting anyone, we'll never contact anyone, even in the Andromeda galaxy.

01:13:23.000 It's 2.2 million light-years away.

01:13:25.000 We won't.

01:13:25.000 But...

01:13:26.000 We won't.

01:13:27.000 But the Milky Way, if there's someone there, we could at least aspire to contact them.

01:13:33.000 So it's worth...

01:13:34.000 That effort to listen.

01:13:36.000 We don't spend much money on it.

01:13:37.000 We spend too little on it, I think.

01:13:39.000 It would be a tremendous discovery if we made it.

01:13:42.000 If we found something like us.

01:13:43.000 It's worth listening because, you know, when SETI started, back with Frank Drake and Carl Sagan and others back in the 60s, then no planets had been discovered beyond the solar system.

01:13:53.000 None.

01:13:54.000 So the only planets we knew were our planets.

01:13:57.000 Now, as I said, we've discovered thousands of planets, confirmed discoveries, and the statistics tell you there are billions of them out there.

01:14:08.000 So virtually every star probably has a planetary system.

01:14:11.000 So the statistics have gone in the favour of SETI from the astronomical perspective, but as I say, you've also got to have the time to make things like us You know, and that's a tortuous process.

01:14:23.000 There's no inevitability to evolution.

01:14:25.000 It's not to be seen as some march to complexity, evolution.

01:14:31.000 It does what it does.

01:14:33.000 Single-celled organisms were very, very good at just surviving and getting on with it for most of the history of life on Earth.

01:14:40.000 So it may be that complex multicellular life is kind of just an aberration, really.

01:14:45.000 It's just a bit of a lucky accident.

01:14:48.000 So it's all really just perspective when you think about it, because even though there is an enormous galaxy, relatively speaking, it's one tiny little thing in comparison to the rest of the universe.

01:15:03.000 So even if we could find something out there, the likelihood of it being as advanced as us are very small.

01:15:10.000 But it's just a matter of how far we can reach or how far we can see.

01:15:14.000 I wouldn't go that.

01:15:16.000 Nobody knows.

01:15:18.000 What people do know, I think, is that the Milky Way is probably the boundary of our aspirations.

01:15:24.000 For this generation?

01:15:25.000 No, forever, I think.

01:15:27.000 I think so.

01:15:27.000 Forever?

01:15:28.000 What if we live 100,000 years and people keep evolving?

01:15:31.000 The galaxy is 100,000 light years across.

01:15:34.000 200 billion star systems in it.

01:15:38.000 It's big.

01:15:39.000 It's too big.

01:15:40.000 But that's not...

01:15:41.000 So you could just about perhaps conceive in the far future of beginning to spread out into the Milky Way.

01:15:49.000 You could conceive of that.

01:15:51.000 Given hundreds of thousands of years, right?

01:15:55.000 But then you go, well, where's the next galaxy?

01:15:58.000 Andromeda.

01:15:59.000 It's over two million light years away.

01:16:02.000 So the idea that you would get across a distance of two million light years with any conceivable technology is to me probably...

01:16:09.000 I mean, it takes light, a light beam to two million years.

01:16:13.000 So if you want to talk to someone in Andromeda, it will take two million years to get a message out there and two million years to get it back.

01:16:21.000 So there's a four million round trip.

01:16:24.000 That's the nearest galaxy.

01:16:26.000 So it's big, right?

01:16:28.000 So you can imagine, possibly, the Milky Way.

01:16:32.000 It's some chance if there are other civilizations there talking to them.

01:16:36.000 But I think beyond that, I just cannot conceive of how it would be done.

01:16:39.000 Is this relative, though, in perspective to the single-celled organisms that existed billions of years ago in comparison to us?

01:16:47.000 Do we really think that we're the end-all be-all and this is the last stop on the road to evolution?

01:16:52.000 Isn't it possible that we get so advanced if we live to be another billion years that we can all these ideas that we have in our head about the laws of space and time and what particle physicists are trying to figure out and what string theorists are prescribing as far as,

01:17:10.000 you know, 15 different dimensions?

01:17:11.000 Is that what you said?

01:17:12.000 They change their mind all the time.

01:17:14.000 That's pretty unfathomable.

01:17:15.000 I want to get into that because I don't understand string theory.

01:17:18.000 But I don't understand what you're saying either.

01:17:22.000 But my idea is that if we continue to go on the same path, I mean, isn't it possible that we will achieve some unfathomable level of technological proficiency or of control over matter or of an understanding of the universe?

01:17:40.000 It's such a deep...

01:17:42.000 Level that we can violate all these things that we now consider laws, like the laws of...

01:17:48.000 Yeah.

01:17:48.000 So the laws would have to be approximations to some deeper laws.

01:17:51.000 Right.

01:17:52.000 So Einstein's theories of relativity are the best theories we have at the moment of space and time, of space-time.

01:17:59.000 Thank God for Einstein.

01:18:01.000 That dude.

01:18:02.000 Well, he was incredible.

01:18:03.000 And general relativity, actually, is 100 years old this year.

01:18:06.000 So that is...

01:18:07.000 That's amazing.

01:18:08.000 And so the speed of light as a fundamental part of the structure of space and time actually is central to that theory.

01:18:18.000 It's actually the thing that protects cause and effect.

01:18:22.000 So it protects, if you like, the past from the present and the future.

01:18:26.000 So it's built in a very fundamental way to that theory.

01:18:30.000 So you are right, in principle, and it's a speed limit in that theory, by the way.

01:18:35.000 And by the way, there are strange things happening.

01:18:38.000 As you approach the speed of light, for example, the theory says that time slows down.

01:18:42.000 The thing that's travelling relative to us.

01:18:42.000 Right.

01:18:44.000 So if someone, the number I know is the number for the protons in the LHC. So the protons go at 99.999999% the speed of light.

01:18:52.000 So imagine one of those flying past us now.

01:18:55.000 Imagine it had a watch, a proton with a watch.

01:18:58.000 You'd see its watch pass 7,000 times more slowly than our watch.

01:19:03.000 And it would live 7,000 times more slowly than us.

01:19:06.000 So conversely, if it was watching us, it would see the same effect.

01:19:12.000 So you can move through time at different rates, essentially, in Einstein's theory.

01:19:18.000 The faster you go relative to somebody else, the slower your watch ticks.

01:19:22.000 I got an idea.

01:19:23.000 We combine your world and the Kardashians and we shoot them into space at the speed of light and they don't age.

01:19:29.000 Well, that's exactly right.

01:19:30.000 So exactly what you said.

01:19:31.000 The cool thing about...

01:19:32.000 That's what I was getting to.

01:19:34.000 So the thing about relativity is if you go at the speed of light, you don't age.

01:19:38.000 No time passes.

01:19:41.000 It's kind of pointed that you can't go at the speed of light unless you're massless.

01:19:45.000 But if you're massless, you have to. 0.99

01:19:48.000 Well, have you ever seen her ass? 1.00

01:19:49.000 Good luck making that thing massless. 0.99

01:19:51.000 So she would be limited to travel below the speed of light.

01:19:51.000 Well, exactly.

01:19:55.000 Not only due to that.

01:19:57.000 Even if she's only one gram in mass. 0.85

01:20:00.000 She's a lot more than that.

01:20:02.000 Plus, that's not a very aerodynamic object either. 0.99

01:20:06.000 So good luck launching that sucker. 1.00

01:20:08.000 It wouldn't matter in space because it's a vacuum. 0.99

01:20:08.000 Oh, that's right. 0.99

01:20:10.000 So you're all right.

01:20:11.000 It's aerodynamics.

01:20:13.000 So it's a fundamental thing.

01:20:16.000 So if you're going at that fundamental speed, There's no time.

01:20:21.000 There's no distance, actually, either.

01:20:22.000 All the distances shrink to zero.

01:20:24.000 So what I'm trying to say is it's a fundamental part of the structure of space and time.

01:20:28.000 So it's impossible.

01:20:29.000 So you would need a different theory.

01:20:32.000 So it's literally impossible in Einstein's theory to go at the speed of light unless you're massless, in which case you have to go at the speed of light.

01:20:39.000 Could you go just under the speed of light and then time would just slow down?

01:20:43.000 Yes.

01:20:43.000 So it wouldn't stop, but it would slow drastically.

01:20:49.000 Yeah.

01:20:49.000 Yeah, so as I said, 99.99999% gives you a factor of 7,000.

01:20:54.000 Now, here's the question.

01:20:55.000 If you somehow or another were able to go 99.999% of the speed of light, what would happen in your perspective as far as time?

01:21:07.000 Normal rate.

01:21:08.000 At a normal rate?

01:21:09.000 Yeah.

01:21:09.000 So you would age at a normal rate in your perspective.

01:21:12.000 Yes.

01:21:13.000 But back home, like, if you came back around, if you went out into space and you went 10 years at the speed of light and, you know, you came back, everything would change, but you'd be exactly the same.

01:21:23.000 Yes.

01:21:24.000 What would change for you, though?

01:21:26.000 Something has to change.

01:21:27.000 So it's the distances.

01:21:28.000 So if you travel...

01:21:30.000 So the other thing is from the...

01:21:32.000 Let's talk about the protons in the LHC again.

01:21:34.000 Okay.

01:21:34.000 So they're times passing 7,000 times more slowly from the perspective of someone stood on the ground watching them go round.

01:21:41.000 But from their perspective, time's going at the same rate, but something must change.

01:21:45.000 So what is it?

01:21:46.000 It's the distance.

01:21:47.000 So the LHC is no longer 16 miles in circumference.

01:21:52.000 It's about, now I know the number in metric, so it's 4 meters.

01:21:56.000 So that's, what is that, in feet?

01:21:58.000 3 feet, the meters, like 3.12 feet.

01:22:00.000 12 feet, yeah.

01:22:01.000 So it's 12 feet, so it squashes.

01:22:04.000 So distances shrink from the perspective of the protons.

01:22:08.000 So time passes at the same rate, the normal rate for them on their watch, but the distances seem to shrink, or do shrink, not seem to, they do.

01:22:18.000 Are you concerned at all about artificial life?

01:22:22.000 Are you concerned at all about the creation, the inevitable creation, of something that in some way replicates independent thought?

01:22:33.000 Yeah.

01:22:48.000 We're absolutely fascinated with whether or not it benefits us or not.

01:22:51.000 We're fascinated with technological innovation.

01:22:54.000 We want faster computers, even if we don't even have applications for them.

01:22:57.000 We want cars to go zero to 60 in two seconds.

01:23:00.000 We want everything to go quicker and better, and we don't get satisfied.

01:23:05.000 Like, nobody ever looks at computers and goes, we're good.

01:23:07.000 We're good.

01:23:08.000 We don't need a bigger laptop.

01:23:09.000 We don't need a stronger hard drive.

01:23:11.000 Everything seems fine.

01:23:12.000 Let's stop innovating on computers and move towards cancer research or whatever.

01:23:16.000 We're never going to stop.

01:23:16.000 No.

01:23:18.000 And I always wonder if Whatever drives us, what if it's similar in some way to a caterpillar building a cocoon, about to give birth to this new thing, totally unaware, and that artificial life that our work with,

01:23:35.000 whether it's code or whether it's electronics or whether it's 3D printing, a combination of all those technologies coming together to create some new form of life.

01:23:48.000 And we don't think of life Being possible in an electronic sense because we think of life as being cells and blood and all the things that we are.

01:23:58.000 But is it possible that we might just be building the next thing that, you know, we look at, well, we've only been alive for 200,000 years.

01:24:06.000 Yeah, but we might be shitting out the new version of life.

01:24:11.000 Yeah.

01:24:11.000 With our constant fascination with materialism.

01:24:15.000 I mean, what is materialism, ultimately, if not a push for innovation and technology?

01:24:21.000 A big part of what materialism is, is keeping up with the Joneses, getting the latest and greatest.

01:24:25.000 Look at this.

01:24:26.000 This guy's got a new TV. It sees your fucking brain. 1.00

01:24:29.000 You know, it looks through your soul. 1.00

01:24:31.000 You could play back your history.

01:24:32.000 You know, it gets a fingerprint, you read it, it takes your DNA, and it shows you what your ancestors were doing two billion years ago.

01:24:40.000 Well, there's another aspect to R&D besides consumerism, isn't there?

01:24:43.000 There's increased life expectancy, decreased child mortality.

01:24:46.000 Oh, there's great things, too.

01:24:48.000 I don't see any reason why AI is, in principle, not possible.

01:24:48.000 But I agree with you.

01:24:56.000 Because I think that although the research, we don't understand the brain, but I think it must be an object that operates in accord with the laws of physics.

01:25:07.000 I strongly suspect that our conscious experience is emergent.

01:25:11.000 So it emerges, so there's an algorithm there, a very complex algorithm, but I don't see why it can't be simulated in a sufficiently powerful computer in principle.

01:25:21.000 So I don't see why you can't have a conscious computer.

01:25:24.000 I don't personally see why you can't.

01:25:26.000 Therefore, I agree with you.

01:25:55.000 And as you said, 3D printers essentially seem to be the first step on the road to a self-replicating machine.

01:26:02.000 So you've got the computing power that can be intelligent, and you've got a means of it being a replicator, then I don't see why you can't build AIs that replicate.

01:26:11.000 And actually, going back to the cosmology for a minute, one of the arguments against the existence of civilizations, more advanced civilizations than us in the Milky Way, is that they would have done that.

01:26:24.000 And this is an argument from a mathematician called von Neumann and also a physicist called Fermi.

01:26:29.000 It's called the Fermi paradox.

01:26:32.000 Let's fast forward, as you said, let's fast forward our civilization 10,000 years, let's say.

01:26:37.000 Blink of an eye.

01:26:38.000 Let's see.

01:26:39.000 We've only been around for less than that as a civilization.

01:26:42.000 Let's double it. 0.94

01:26:42.000 10,000. 0.94

01:26:43.000 What are we going to look like?

01:26:44.000 Will we have built self-replicating AIs? 0.60

01:26:47.000 Yeah, unless there's some reason in principle why you can't.

01:26:50.000 So what do you do?

01:26:51.000 You send those out.

01:26:53.000 They're replicators.

01:26:54.000 They can go to asteroids, mine, print, 3D print a version of themselves, go off again.

01:26:59.000 They exponentiate.

01:27:00.000 They can crawl over the galaxy exploring for free.

01:27:04.000 You send them out.

01:27:05.000 We see no evidence of those things.

01:27:07.000 They're called von Neumann machines.

01:27:09.000 So it's one of the great, you can either say that there's something in principle that stops you doing it.

01:27:14.000 So actually there is something special about intelligence and you just can't, there's some reason why you can't build a computer that's artificially intelligent.

01:27:23.000 I don't see why that would be the case.

01:27:24.000 Or you could argue you can't build a self-replicator, but you can because we are, we are replicators and we operate in accord with the laws of physics.

01:27:31.000 So there, so there's a replicator.

01:27:34.000 The reason we don't see them is because there aren't any civilizations that ever got to that level in the Milky Way.

01:27:40.000 So we're at the tip of the spear?

01:27:41.000 Well, we couldn't be the first.

01:27:44.000 It's very difficult to see how we could be the first.

01:27:46.000 Someone has to be the first.

01:27:47.000 Why can't it be us?

01:27:49.000 Because the Milky Way has been around for the age of the universe.

01:27:52.000 So you say, don't you know the Earth is 6,000 years old?

01:27:55.000 Do you not go online?

01:27:56.000 Putting that aside.

01:27:57.000 So the timescales, we're talking billions of years.

01:28:01.000 Billions of planets, billions of years.

01:28:03.000 But it has to happen one time, somewhere.

01:28:06.000 And if you get one wave of these AIs away into space, then you can show, using computer models with realistic assumptions about rocket power and things like that, that you can cover the galaxy on timescales of much less than A billion years.

01:28:23.000 Actually, a million years.

01:28:24.000 Less than that.

01:28:25.000 So you can show that you can cover the galaxy in your von Neumann probes, your replicators, in, you know, hundreds of thousands of years.

01:28:33.000 Let's say a million, two million, three million, ten million.

01:28:36.000 It doesn't matter because we've got billions of years.

01:28:38.000 And yet we see no evidence of them.

01:28:40.000 So what are we to make of that?

01:28:42.000 Either there's something wrong with our arguments that we're putting forward, that actually you can't build self-replicating intelligent robots.

01:28:49.000 I don't see why not, but maybe there's something wrong with that.

01:28:52.000 Or, really, civilizations are so rare that, as you say, we are the first to get to that level.

01:29:00.000 But that's interesting, isn't it?

01:29:01.000 That would be an interesting...

01:29:02.000 I always think in a Sagan-esque sense of this.

01:29:06.000 Imagine we're the only civilization in the galaxy.

01:29:09.000 What a tremendous responsibility there is on us.

01:29:13.000 Imagine what that knowledge should do to our political processes, the way that we think about ourselves, the way that we get on together. 0.57

01:29:19.000 Imagine how ridiculous it is.

01:29:21.000 To divide our little world up into countries and have a little war every now and again and point nuclear missiles at each other.

01:29:28.000 If in fact there's nowhere else in the Milky Way galaxy where anybody thinks, where anybody can look at the stars and think about and have these conversations. 0.96

01:29:36.000 What a ridiculous way to behave.

01:29:38.000 So I think cosmology gives a perspective which doesn't necessarily need to be humbling. 0.95

01:29:46.000 It is humbling and that's perhaps a good thing.

01:29:49.000 But you don't need to be depressed about it.

01:29:51.000 It could be quite elating.

01:29:52.000 You say, well, what we are, according to the evidence and the data at the moment, is almost indescribably special.

01:29:59.000 Our tininess, our potential uniqueness, our insignificance in a cosmic scale actually makes us special because we're the only place.

01:30:11.000 And so these ideas are worth pursuing, I think, because they make you think about these issues.

01:30:18.000 Well, doesn't it also point to our ego that we think that our biological process is any more important than the exploding suns that are required to create carbon life in the first place?

01:30:28.000 Or any of the processes of the universe?

01:30:31.000 The answer to that, I think, is that you're right.

01:30:32.000 In a completely logical sense, we're no more important or less important than the stars themselves.

01:30:41.000 You're right.

01:30:41.000 We're just natural objects.

01:30:44.000 I would counter by saying that people look for meaning in the universe.

01:30:48.000 People like to look for meaning.

01:30:49.000 It's one thing that we've done since we began to look at the stars.

01:30:53.000 The universe means something to me, doesn't it?

01:30:56.000 Meaning exists because it means something to us.

01:30:59.000 So we know that.

01:31:00.000 It would be ridiculous to say the universe is meaningless.

01:31:02.000 It means something in my head.

01:31:04.000 We have families, we have loved ones, etc.

01:31:06.000 So the fact that that meaning might be emergent, it might appear from the laws of nature, and it is almost certainly transient, unless we build these self-replicating machines.

01:31:16.000 We're not going to last forever as a civilization, probably.

01:31:19.000 So to me, that doesn't in any way water down the significance of it.

01:31:25.000 So I think, again, cosmology can be a powerful aid to philosophical thought in this sense.

01:31:33.000 Because we have to accept that there's meaning in the universe, because it means something to us.

01:31:37.000 I don't see why it has to be eternal.

01:31:39.000 I don't see why meaning doesn't imply purpose.

01:31:42.000 I don't think there's any purpose to the universe.

01:31:44.000 I don't think there's any point to our existence.

01:31:46.000 But the fact that we exist at all is worth celebrating.

01:31:49.000 You don't need to add anything else.

01:31:51.000 In fact, for me, you devalue it.

01:31:54.000 This is remarkable.

01:31:56.000 We emerged as single-celled organisms.

01:31:58.000 Probably before that, we emerged as some chemical reactions in hydrothermal vents, probably, down in the deep primordial oceans of ancient Earth.

01:32:06.000 And over 3.8 billion years, we've come to the point where we can sit and think about the stars and have conversations like this.

01:32:12.000 Is that not enough?

01:32:15.000 Can we just leave it there?

01:32:17.000 Why does there have to be a point?

01:32:19.000 There isn't a point.

01:32:20.000 I don't think there's a point to that, but it's worth celebrating.

01:32:24.000 Well, it certainly is to us.

01:32:26.000 To us it's amazing, but in a lot of ways isn't looking throughout the incredible cosmos for signs of life like looking in a sea of parked Mercedes-Benz for dust. 0.98

01:32:39.000 Like, one of these cars must be fucking dusty. 0.92

01:32:42.000 They just cleaned them. 0.96

01:32:43.000 I'm gonna find it.

01:32:44.000 And you're ignoring the incredible mechanisms that are in front of you. 0.99

01:32:48.000 This amazing technology, anti-lock brakes, fucking 12-inch computer screens. 0.96

01:32:53.000 They don't even have gauges anymore. 0.99

01:32:55.000 The cars drive for you.

01:32:56.000 They steer for you.

01:32:57.000 They brake for you. 1.00

01:32:58.000 And we're like, one of these motherfuckers has dust on it, just like us. 0.97

01:33:04.000 I mean, these planets, we talked about our planet being 4.6 billion years, the universe is 13.8. 0.98

01:33:11.000 We're looking for things that live a hundred years.

01:33:13.000 We're like, there's got to be one out there that sings songs.

01:33:18.000 Somewhere there's a better rapper than Jay Zed, and he's out there in the universe.

01:33:22.000 We've got to find him!

01:33:24.000 We've got to find him!

01:33:26.000 This is a search, and we're ignoring asteroids and gamma rays.

01:33:31.000 The search for better rap.

01:33:34.000 We should rewrite NASA's reasons.

01:33:37.000 Again, though, it doesn't take anything away from the fascination of just, you know, one of the beautiful things about being a human being is that we think about these things and that we can communicate.

01:33:49.000 And that you, in getting on this podcast, you're planting all these seeds in people's minds that are making them consider these thoughts, and now it spreads.

01:33:58.000 And that's one of the most fascinating things about the idea of intelligence, is that intelligence begets intelligence.

01:34:06.000 Intelligence sort of stimulates other intelligence.

01:34:08.000 It's not simply...

01:34:10.000 I think one of the reasons why you love It's like you know how important this is for you and you want you've seen the spark in people's eyes when you explain these things to them and you realize that that person might spread that spark somewhere else and this is really what this process is about in the first place.

01:34:27.000 It has meaning to us, but in the grand scheme of things, you know, we're just exporting Kardashians through the universe.

01:34:40.000 Well, we could make a start by exporting the Kardashians to the universe.

01:34:43.000 And then the resistance of exporting the Kardashians makes people, you know, the new version of Cosmos with Neil deGrasse Tyson.

01:34:50.000 That gets out there, too.

01:34:51.000 That makes me optimistic, actually, because I wouldn't have thought that that would be done.

01:34:56.000 I think it's all together.

01:34:58.000 Again, you know, I have to, because Carl Sagan, great hero of mine, the fact that it would be done and put on Fox, on a network, you know, 13 episodes of it, it is, there are people out there who want to do it.

01:35:13.000 It's very important.

01:35:14.000 Most certainly, and more so now than I think ever before, and more so in the future. 0.99

01:35:19.000 I think even though there is evidence that people are dumb as shit, there's still more evidence that people are super curious. 0.99

01:35:25.000 I think it's a numbers thing. 1.00

01:35:28.000 And if you spoon feed people the same thing over and over again, like there's the argument for a limited network, especially American style.

01:35:38.000 You could just sort of do it the BBC way, but the BBC way is beautiful in that it sort of sandwiches these brilliant shows in between other shows.

01:35:48.000 But not enough.

01:35:50.000 There's not enough room.

01:35:51.000 There's too many things out there now.

01:35:52.000 You only have 24 hours in a day. 0.84

01:35:54.000 There's no fucking way you're going to have enough programming. 0.92

01:35:56.000 Unless you have an infinite number of BBCs. 0.98

01:35:59.000 You can't. 0.99

01:36:00.000 There's just too much shit going on. 1.00

01:36:01.000 The world is too vast. 1.00

01:36:03.000 And that's not discounting anything that...

01:36:06.000 The BBC's ever done, because it's one of my favorite networks.

01:36:08.000 I have this Congo series that I've probably watched a dozen times about the BBC, which is one of the most fascinating documentaries, not just on a particular area of the world, but on life itself adapting, which is like the primary Sort of theme to that documentary where they're talking about these parts of the world that were changed really rapidly over a period of a couple thousand years where it used to be planes and then it became these dense rainforests and there's all these animals that

01:36:38.000 are sort of trapped in this world like rhinos.

01:36:41.000 And planes, animals, and there was a piece on these, a type of antelope called a diker that swims underwater a hundred yards. 1.00

01:36:51.000 They can fucking swim. 0.99

01:36:53.000 They eat fish. 1.00

01:36:54.000 I mean, it's craziness.

01:36:56.000 Swimming antelopes.

01:36:57.000 Well, it's related to an antelope, but the idea is that you're talking about a very short period of time, a couple thousand years, that's had this rapid amount of change.

01:37:05.000 These animals have had to adapt to this very strange new environment.

01:37:13.000 The inability of some people to understand evolution and therefore react against it, I don't think it's all actually just religiously motivated.

01:37:24.000 Most of it is, but some of it isn't.

01:37:25.000 I think there's also a lack of understanding of the timescales involved and how fast animals can adapt and change and what a powerful sieve, if you like, evolution is.

01:37:35.000 You can see it.

01:37:36.000 Richard Dawkins often write when he's Writing beautifully about these things, writes about, look at domestic dogs, and look how quickly the wolf got turned into these...

01:37:48.000 Poodles!

01:37:48.000 Poodles to German Shepherds to whatever it is, all those things.

01:37:52.000 Now that's selection by humans, right?

01:37:55.000 So we're selecting particular traits.

01:37:57.000 But the environment and the interaction with other species is as powerful as that.

01:38:02.000 It's as efficient as that.

01:38:04.000 The environment is a very powerful selector of traits.

01:38:08.000 And so you can see that evolution happens quickly.

01:38:12.000 Speciation happens quickly.

01:38:14.000 Not quite with the dogs, they're still the same species.

01:38:16.000 But you can see how, given a bit of time, you're going to get the poodles and keep going on that line and get the wolves and keep going on that line and eventually you're going to get things that look so different That if you separate them and don't let them interbreed, that you're going to end up with something that can't breed with that anymore.

01:38:31.000 And that's kind of the definition of a new species, one of the definitions of a new species.

01:38:35.000 So you can see how it can happen.

01:38:37.000 It's obvious.

01:38:38.000 And I think one of the problems is the timescales are not understood.

01:38:41.000 When you talk about thousands of years, that's quite a long time.

01:38:45.000 10,000 years is a long time.

01:38:47.000 200,000 years.

01:38:48.000 You go back that long and we didn't exist as a species.

01:38:52.000 We weren't there.

01:38:54.000 So, you know, hundreds of thousand years is a hell of a long time.

01:38:59.000 Yeah, too long to, I think, in our mind, to process.

01:39:03.000 Like, we can kind of process a lifetime.

01:39:06.000 You know, we can process birth to a hundred years.

01:39:09.000 Wow, he lived to be a hundred.

01:39:11.000 Wow, what a lot of things that guy must have seen.

01:39:13.000 Yeah.

01:39:14.000 But to process a hundred of those?

01:39:16.000 Yeah.

01:39:17.000 A hundred hundreds?

01:39:19.000 How about a thousand?

01:39:21.000 How about a hundred thousand?

01:39:23.000 It's just too much going on.

01:39:25.000 There's too much change.

01:39:26.000 Do you subscribe to the idea, and I've heard this debated about, that human intelligence may be in some form exponential and that all the knowledge that people have acquired, I mean obviously not like in a physical sense, like you're not born with an understanding of math and language and all these things are learned,

01:39:26.000 It's a long time.

01:39:46.000 but that intelligence may somehow or another be Not just passed on from generation to generation but enhanced by life's experiences and that the genes that are transmitted from you to your children may be in fact more powerful than the genes you were given and that as you've lived your life and acquired information and knowledge and understanding and whatever whatever intelligence means you know whatever Sort of intangible idea intelligence truly is but that this mind

01:40:16.000 power this this this Accumulation over the two hundred thousand years that human beings have existed and people breeding and getting to this point that this might Exponentially be growing and expanding is that is that in any way possible that we're I'm not an expert on genetics.

01:40:34.000 I don't think so.

01:40:35.000 I don't think there's any evidence, as far as I know, that our IQ, average IQ has changed much over the last few hundred years, certainly.

01:40:47.000 So as far as I know, that's not the way that it works.

01:40:52.000 You need...

01:40:53.000 I think some kind of selector that would say you'd have to take the most intelligent of us by some measure, let's say, and have them be more successful at producing offspring than the people who are less intelligent.

01:41:11.000 You'd have to do something.

01:41:12.000 You need some mechanism.

01:41:13.000 But hasn't that been proven? 1.00

01:41:13.000 Like, haven't they done, like, they do those sperm banks with really super intelligent people and the kids that come out of it are smart as shit? 1.00

01:41:20.000 Yeah. 0.99

01:41:21.000 Oh, well, I can imagine that might be true.

01:41:24.000 I don't think we know.

01:41:25.000 I think the correct answer scientifically is we don't know the link.

01:41:28.000 We don't know enough about the genetics and the genome, the human genome, to say which bits are producing brain power.

01:41:35.000 If there is such a thing, what is it?

01:41:37.000 You know, which genes?

01:41:39.000 Is there an intelligent gene or a set of genes?

01:41:42.000 I think that's not known, I think, is the right thing to say.

01:41:45.000 But as I emphasize, it's not my field.

01:41:48.000 It must be something you ponder when you think about evolution.

01:41:51.000 You think about genetic knowledge.

01:41:53.000 Well, that I would perhaps argue with.

01:41:57.000 The idea that...

01:41:59.000 I know there's some interest in this, but I think the standard answer is that the knowledge, let's say, so I become educated, I think the standard answer is that that would not have any impact on the genes that I pass to my offspring.

01:42:13.000 I don't think there's any known mechanism to have knowledge.

01:42:24.000 It's hard to look into a kid's head and find out exactly where all the information is coming from, right?

01:42:33.000 Yeah, but I don't think there's a known...

01:42:35.000 Well, there isn't a known...

01:42:39.000 Ain't no, what's that?

01:42:40.000 We had a TriCaster just freeze up on us. 0.95

01:42:43.000 People at home right now are freaking the fuck out!

01:42:45.000 We were just about to get to the bottom of this! 0.70

01:42:47.000 Um, instincts.

01:42:48.000 Like, humans have certain instincts, right?

01:42:51.000 Like, there's, people have fears, like, genetically sort of predisposed fears to, like, scary dogs, animals.

01:42:57.000 I mean, we know. 0.99

01:42:58.000 You don't have to have a dog bite you to know that a dog is fucking terrifying. 0.99

01:43:01.000 Like, what is that? 0.99

01:43:02.000 Like, when a dog is like growling, like, kids are afraid of teeth.

01:43:05.000 They're afraid of big teeth and monsters.

01:43:07.000 Even children that grow up in cities, they're afraid of monsters.

01:43:10.000 And the idea behind that that I've heard, I think it was Rupert Sheldrake that was talking about this, he was saying that it may very well be that these memories of being preyed upon by cats, these genetic memories,

01:43:26.000 That are from our ancient, ancient, ancient ancestors when we didn't have homes and we were living in trees and things were running after us, trying to eat us.

01:43:35.000 These ideas are passed down from animal to animal and eventually human to human.

01:43:40.000 I don't think, as I say, as far as I know, there's no solid evidence that suggests that things you experience as an adult or as a child, that the experiences themselves can be passed on.

01:43:55.000 Other than verbally to them when they're listening to your stories.

01:43:58.000 I'm not aware of any mechanism that's known that would allow that to happen.

01:44:03.000 Haven't they proven that genetics, like epigenetics and some memes, like even useless ones like racism, can be transmitted from parent to child?

01:44:12.000 Not that I'm aware of.

01:44:14.000 But I don't know.

01:44:16.000 This is obviously not my field of study either.

01:44:18.000 I'm just fascinated by the idea that we don't totally understand all of the ingredients of the mind.

01:44:27.000 That's certainly true.

01:44:28.000 That's certainly true.

01:44:29.000 But I'm not aware of it.

01:44:31.000 I don't know.

01:44:33.000 I doubt it because I can't see a mechanism.

01:44:36.000 I don't know.

01:44:36.000 Right.

01:44:37.000 Are we back up, Jamie?

01:44:39.000 What's going on?

01:44:40.000 The TriCaster froze?

01:44:41.000 Yeah, completely froze. 1.00

01:44:42.000 Oh, what a piece of shit that we paid $15,000 for. 1.00

01:44:44.000 How dare you, TriCaster people. 1.00

01:44:47.000 Meanwhile, we should probably be excited that someone figured that fucking thing out. 0.99

01:44:51.000 You think it might have to do with the box and it gets heated up? 0.99

01:44:53.000 I have no idea.

01:44:54.000 No? 0.99

01:44:55.000 Just shit out on us. 1.00

01:44:56.000 Beautiful. 1.00

01:44:57.000 Yeah, most likely, right?

01:44:57.000 It'll be a piece of thing.

01:45:00.000 How dare they?

01:45:02.000 One of the things that was proposed that I read recently was that black holes aren't real.

01:45:06.000 Is that nonsense?

01:45:07.000 Is that like one person's controversial idea?

01:45:11.000 Yeah, basically.

01:45:11.000 Yeah.

01:45:12.000 So it's not necessarily nonsense just because it's one person's idea, but it's likely to be nonsense.

01:45:19.000 I haven't seen that particular theory, so I don't know.

01:45:21.000 I mean, we have a lot of good evidence for the existence of black holes, not least they're predicted.

01:45:27.000 They're a prediction of Einstein's theory of general relativity.

01:45:32.000 They're on solid theoretical ground, and we've seen the signatures of them.

01:45:36.000 So, for example, the objects at the centre of the Milky Way galaxy.

01:45:40.000 We know what the mass is of that object because we've measured the orbits of stars very close to it.

01:45:45.000 We know what the maximum size of the object can be because it can't be bigger than the orbits of the stars that go around it.

01:45:52.000 So we measure its mass, I think it's about 4 million times the mass of the Sun.

01:45:55.000 And the only way that our current laws of physics allow such an object to exist and be so small is for it to be a black hole.

01:46:02.000 So there's good evidence that black holes are around.

01:46:05.000 But you can always say, well, you know, we haven't been to one.

01:46:09.000 They're very hard to photograph because they're black. 1.00

01:46:11.000 But you can photograph the stuff that falls into them.

01:46:14.000 You can see the signature of stuff falling into them, which we do.

01:46:18.000 And they've...

01:46:19.000 What was it?

01:46:21.000 Somewhere in the 2000s, they figured out that at the center of every galaxy is a supermassive black hole that is like one half of one percent of the mass of the galaxy or something along those lines.

01:46:30.000 Yeah, we think so.

01:46:31.000 As I said, off the top of my head, I think it's about four million times the mass of the sun.

01:46:35.000 And so the larger galaxies would have a larger black hole?

01:46:38.000 I'm not sure if it's that.

01:46:40.000 It's not well understood, actually, because it's not well understood how galaxies form in the first place and what role these supermassive black holes have in the formation of the galaxies.

01:46:50.000 So that's a real active area of research, actually.

01:46:53.000 It's a good question.

01:46:55.000 The thing that I was reading was they were debating the possibility that inside each one of these supermassive black holes, so there being hundreds of billions of galaxies, each one of them with a black hole in the center of it, a supermassive black hole, In through that black hole is a whole nother universe with hundreds of billions of galaxies each with black holes Go through that whole hundred billion more galaxies each with black holes go through that hundred billion more I mean that that each Galaxy itself literally is

01:47:25.000 a portal to a completely different universe.

01:47:26.000 We I mean The problem with black holes is that they're a prediction of Einstein's theory.

01:47:36.000 One of the earliest predictions is a thing called the Schwarzschild metric, which describes black holes.

01:47:41.000 It was done, I think, in 1915 or 16. As soon as Relativity was published, it was shown that these things could exist.

01:47:52.000 But the theory itself breaks down then.

01:47:56.000 The theory of black holes?

01:47:57.000 The general relativity, which is Einstein's theory, which predicts their existence, but the characteristics of black holes, the physics inside black holes, is not understood.

01:48:08.000 We don't know.

01:48:09.000 Our theories don't work.

01:48:10.000 We need what's called a quantum theory of gravity to make progress there.

01:48:15.000 So that's the unification of quantum theory and relativity.

01:48:18.000 And general relativity, which is what string theory is an attempt to do, but we don't know whether that's the right theory.

01:48:23.000 So this is the edge of knowledge.

01:48:26.000 So we don't know.

01:48:28.000 We don't know how to describe black holes properly.

01:48:31.000 We don't have a theory that's capable of describing.

01:48:33.000 We can describe the edge to this thing about an event horizon and all that stuff.

01:48:36.000 That works.

01:48:37.000 That's not a problem in Einstein's theory.

01:48:39.000 So the idea that if you have a sufficiently dense object...

01:48:43.000 Then there's a region around it out of which light can't escape because space and time are too curved for light to get out.

01:48:52.000 That's fine.

01:48:53.000 The theory describes that properly.

01:48:55.000 But when you start asking questions about what happens at the centre of a black hole, the singularity, the very idea it's called a singularity tells you there are infinities in the theory.

01:49:03.000 The theory is doing things.

01:49:05.000 It's infinitely dense.

01:49:06.000 It's infinitely small.

01:49:08.000 No, it won't be.

01:49:09.000 We don't have infinities in general, in nature, other than perhaps the size of the universe, as you say.

01:49:15.000 So there's something going on there, but we don't have the physical theory, we don't have the tools to describe it.

01:49:22.000 It's an active area of research.

01:49:24.000 So, I don't know is a good answer in science.

01:49:26.000 And so, speculation's fun, but ultimately, you know, we're talking about a regime of nature.

01:49:35.000 Which our current theories are not capable of describing with any authority.

01:49:40.000 And that's the inside of a black hole.

01:49:42.000 We were talking about this before the podcast, the difference between the way you present your shows in the BBC and the way you're sort of forced to present your shows on, like, the Science Channel.

01:49:53.000 And this was one of the very issues.

01:49:56.000 A little bit.

01:49:57.000 I mean, that's a bit strong.

01:49:58.000 A bit strong.

01:49:59.000 But dealing with...

01:50:00.000 Unknowns dealing with what when you're you're describing things like black holes or like the event horizon of a black hole that there are Points in time where you have to say we don't know yet Yeah, we were talking earlier and I said because at the moment we're cyber series in the UK called human universe which has been on in the UK and five episodes one hour long and So we also make them with Science Channel.

01:50:26.000 And the Science Channel's one hour is 43 minutes because they have adverts, right?

01:50:30.000 Commercials.

01:50:30.000 So fine.

01:50:32.000 So we've got to take 17 minutes out.

01:50:34.000 But also we have some interaction about, well, how do we nuance things for the, you know, because you'll do things for a British market that will be different in the American market.

01:50:44.000 And one of my favorites recently was that, so one of the programs is about this multiverse.

01:50:48.000 That we just talked about earlier.

01:50:50.000 The fact there may be an infinite number of universes.

01:50:52.000 The universe may have been around forever.

01:50:53.000 There may be no beginning to the universe.

01:50:56.000 All speculative, right?

01:50:57.000 So what does that mean?

01:50:58.000 It means that our existence is inevitable.

01:51:01.000 We have to exist in an infinite universe.

01:51:03.000 And we are because we have to be.

01:51:06.000 So there's no purpose to our existence.

01:51:09.000 There's no universal meaning to our existence.

01:51:12.000 We are because we have to be.

01:51:14.000 And in the British version I say, so to the camera, how does that make you feel?

01:51:18.000 And the wonderful thing is, nobody knows.

01:51:21.000 This is new physics, it's right at the edge, it's speculative, but we're beginning to address it with the data and the theories.

01:51:28.000 So we need theologians and philosophers and artists and novelists.

01:51:31.000 We need to discuss these things.

01:51:32.000 What does it mean for us if our existence is inevitable and we're not special?

01:51:38.000 But yet we may still be valuable.

01:51:39.000 What does it mean?

01:51:40.000 I don't know.

01:51:41.000 So the last thing I say in the British version is, so what do you think?

01:51:44.000 I say to the audience.

01:51:45.000 And I think it's beautiful.

01:51:46.000 And it's filmed over Tokyo, over Tokyo skyline.

01:51:49.000 I think it's beautiful.

01:51:50.000 But I did get a note from the Science Channel saying, well, the thing is that this is not the style.

01:51:55.000 So we tend to try and leave the viewer with some concrete things.

01:51:58.000 So can you tell them what it means for the...

01:52:03.000 So I'm going, what the meaning of life?

01:52:05.000 The great existential question of what does it mean to exist?

01:52:09.000 You want me to answer that?

01:52:11.000 Yes, that'd be better for our audience.

01:52:14.000 It's like, well, I really, I'm a bit, I don't know.

01:52:20.000 So I said, you know, can you tell me what to say, perhaps?

01:52:23.000 I'd love it if, look, if Science Channel, if you know the meaning of life, Then tell me, and I'll gladly say it on the program.

01:52:31.000 I don't know.

01:52:32.000 So it's kind of interesting.

01:52:33.000 There's that difference in style.

01:52:35.000 But I loved it that they said, we really do want you to broadcast The Meaning of Life on Discovery at 9 o'clock.

01:52:40.000 Because I can see it would be a great sell on Discovery tonight after sharks.

01:52:45.000 You know, whatever they put on.

01:52:46.000 Shark Week.

01:52:47.000 Then we're going to do The Meaning of Life with Professor Brian Cox.

01:52:51.000 Brian Cox will tell you what it means to exist, for your existence to be inevitable in a possibly infinite cosmos.

01:52:57.000 Find out at nine.

01:52:59.000 It would be good.

01:53:00.000 It would be completely subjective.

01:53:03.000 What life means to you doesn't, you know...

01:53:05.000 Jamie has a different need.

01:53:07.000 This is what we do do.

01:53:08.000 I do do in the series.

01:53:10.000 This is what it's about.

01:53:11.000 It's a love letter to the human race, human universe.

01:53:14.000 You see that certainly if you buy the one-hour versions, I don't know how it's going to pan out in 43, but if you get the one out, which you can buy from good retailers on the internet.

01:53:24.000 Can you get it on iTunes?

01:53:25.000 You need a...

01:53:26.000 It's not on iTunes at the moment, but you need a 1080i Blu-ray player, I will say.

01:53:31.000 Do you do?

01:53:32.000 And I found out with my friends that not all US DVD players play 1080i content.

01:53:36.000 They play 1080p content.

01:53:38.000 What's the difference?

01:53:39.000 One of them's called Interlaced and one of them's called Progressive Scan.

01:53:42.000 There's virtually no difference except that in Europe we tend to...

01:53:44.000 So some of your Blu-ray players in America will play it and some of them won't, it turns out.

01:53:48.000 I just found out.

01:53:49.000 Oh, so they won't play it at all?

01:53:51.000 They won't play it on the Blu-ray.

01:53:53.000 You can buy it, and I encourage you to because it's wonderful.

01:53:58.000 But it'll be on Science Channel anyway in a few months, but it'll have cut down a bit.

01:54:03.000 But the central message is this, what we talked about earlier, that it leads you, I think, to value the human race.

01:54:10.000 So there's a lot we filmed in Ethiopia, which I love.

01:54:12.000 I always love filming in Ethiopia because we're in the Rift Valley filming this story about the emergence of humans from the Rift Valley.

01:54:18.000 And then we filmed in somewhere called the Danical Depression, which is one of the, other than Death Valley, it divides with Death Valley often for the hottest place on Earth, but it's far more barren than Death Valley.

01:54:29.000 It's up in northern Ethiopia on the Eritrean border.

01:54:31.000 There are volcanoes and it's bleak, but there's a tribe of people called the Afar that live there, and they're fascinating.

01:54:39.000 I stayed with them a few years ago.

01:54:41.000 And they don't have a concept, for example, of possessions because they don't have anything.

01:54:45.000 They just live on these volcanoes in this wasteland. 0.85

01:54:48.000 So if you put something down, like something, then they will legitimately pick it up and they'll say, I'm going to use it for a while.

01:54:57.000 So when you're a film crew, you kind of...

01:54:59.000 There's no cultural idea.

01:55:01.000 They're not stealing.

01:55:02.000 They're not taking stuff.

01:55:03.000 They don't have that idea because they don't have anything.

01:55:06.000 So if you leave a camera, they might...

01:55:08.000 And we had some guards with us from the Afar tribe because it's a bit dangerous there. 1.00

01:55:08.000 Get your camera. 1.00

01:55:12.000 And he had an AK-47, this guy, and he sat there with his AK-47.

01:55:16.000 And then we woke up one day and we had a mountaineer with us and he got one of his mountaineering ropes attached to his AK-47 and he's sat there now with this guy's rope.

01:55:23.000 So the guy said to me, shall I ask for it back?

01:55:26.000 I was like, no.

01:55:28.000 Number one, it's attached to an AK-47, right?

01:55:31.000 Which gives him the advantage, presumably, when we get into an argument.

01:55:35.000 And number two, it's fascinating.

01:55:35.000 They have no idea of possession.

01:55:37.000 But the reason I started saying that was because we were filming, we were talking about meaning in life, and we said to this man, he was called Aidan Ali, a guy at the FR tribe, a small man, probably four foot tall, right?

01:55:50.000 Old.

01:55:50.000 And we said, we were talking to him about this through a translator, and he said to us on camera, he said, he said, you're...

01:55:57.000 Your eyes have your age, but your ears have your father's age.

01:56:01.000 Your ears hear the past and your eyes see the present.

01:56:05.000 And this is the way you should live.

01:56:07.000 And I just thought, amazing, beautiful thing that came out of this man.

01:56:12.000 And so we put that in the series just and subtitled it and left it there.

01:56:16.000 So it's full of little...

01:56:18.000 Just people, celebrating those people.

01:56:20.000 It's something you'd never see.

01:56:22.000 You don't think there are people who live on volcanoes in northern Ethiopia that say wonderful things about your ears, having your father's age, and the past being used through your ears to manipulate and inform the way you behave in the present.

01:56:35.000 Beautiful, deep thoughts.

01:56:37.000 So we tried to fill the series with those things as well.

01:56:40.000 So it's a mixture of cosmology and this celebration of the wonder of human existence, the diversity of human thought.

01:56:47.000 So there's beautiful stuff in there.

01:56:48.000 A love letter to the human race.

01:56:50.000 Yeah, and why not?

01:56:51.000 Because we deserve it.

01:56:52.000 Well, we're so adaptable.

01:56:54.000 The idea that people can live like that with no possessions at the same time where people live in a world that...

01:56:59.000 One of our biggest issues is that people live to accumulate possessions.

01:57:04.000 And the idea of materialism is...

01:57:07.000 Like, very much like you were talking about the 17-year-old boy that only pays attention to video games, that becoming obsessed with anything, whether it's becoming obsessed with objects, becoming obsessed with ideas.

01:57:20.000 Human beings, we are so flexible.

01:57:24.000 We're so flexible in how we can exist as a culture or as a community that our ideas are so rigid That people have to be this way.

01:57:33.000 You can't run around on the internet saying that there's no meaning to life when Jesus' name is being broadcast right now on Christian ministries all throughout the world.

01:57:43.000 They understand what the meaning of life is all about, Brian Cox.

01:57:47.000 You are the one who is ignorant to the ways of the Lord.

01:57:51.000 What I've found is that travel... 0.97

01:57:53.000 Because I filmed in...

01:57:54.000 I was just filming in...

01:57:56.000 Actually, for Infinite Monkey Cage.

01:57:57.000 For Infinite Monkey Cage, because we're doing the shows and they're live, you have to have a different kind of US visa, right?

01:58:02.000 And the visa you have to put where you've been in the last five years.

01:58:06.000 How many countries have you visited within the last five years?

01:58:10.000 38 I'd been to filming these things.

01:58:14.000 38 countries.

01:58:15.000 And I thought, wow, I didn't know that.

01:58:16.000 That's a lot, you know.

01:58:18.000 And what's interesting, what I found, really, honestly, is that when you go to Ethiopia or India or Japan or out into the wilds in these places, people tend to be relatively...

01:58:29.000 Well, everyone I've met has, first of all, been interested in stuff.

01:58:33.000 So through the translator with the Afar tribe, we talk about the stars and I say, I talk about stars and they're interested.

01:58:39.000 So they've never been to school.

01:58:41.000 They have their own education.

01:58:42.000 They're up there learning about how to live in a volcanic wasteland, but yet they're interested.

01:58:48.000 And the things they're interested in are common, I find.

01:58:51.000 And I genuinely haven't met anyone that I found uncomfortable, that I was uncomfortable with.

01:58:56.000 I haven't met any of the maniacs that we consider, we think of as populating the world.

01:59:01.000 You know, we think, well, it's okay here, you know, in North America or in Europe or something, we're okay, but there's all these wild people out there, you know.

01:59:08.000 No, I just haven't seen any evidence of that.

01:59:11.000 And so that's part of the human universe.

01:59:13.000 It's just trying to put these impressions.

01:59:15.000 Yeah, they believe different stuff.

01:59:16.000 So you might think, you know, like you said, there's the people who say, well, Jesus is the way, but then you'll go to India and you'll find that there are people who are Hindus, who have strange beliefs towards, you know, Ganesh, the blue elephant god, and people,

01:59:31.000 you know, and they're They're part of their fabric of understanding the universe.

01:59:36.000 And I find it wonderful, actually.

01:59:39.000 It tells you something.

01:59:41.000 There are some things that are cultural and some things that are not.

01:59:44.000 Religion's cultural.

01:59:45.000 You go different places, you have different religions.

01:59:47.000 That's not to say, although I don't...

01:59:50.000 I don't have any interest in religion.

01:59:52.000 People ask me quite a lot, you know, do you believe in Godness?

01:59:54.000 No, but I don't really even think about it until I get asked.

01:59:57.000 I would have never stumbled across that concept myself.

02:00:01.000 I get asked a lot now because I do science on television.

02:00:04.000 I always say the same thing, which is I'm not really interested.

02:00:07.000 I don't think about it at all.

02:00:08.000 Does that upset anybody?

02:00:09.000 Well, kind of, because I don't want to be dismissive.

02:00:11.000 I'm not trying to be dismissive.

02:00:12.000 You're just talking about your own personal interests.

02:00:14.000 Does that upset anybody?

02:00:17.000 No, I mean, what I'm saying is, I'm just reaffirming what you're saying.

02:00:20.000 You're just talking about your own personal interests.

02:00:22.000 Like, why does your personal lack of an interest in something upset people?

02:00:28.000 But it seems to, right?

02:00:30.000 Well, it can do, because I think it's a central part of the framework they use to explain the world and meaning and all these questions that we're discussing, which are difficult questions.

02:00:38.000 And I think don't have answers.

02:00:41.000 It's a complicated question.

02:00:43.000 What does it mean to be alive?

02:00:45.000 As we've said, it obviously means something, personally, but I don't...

02:00:50.000 These are complicated questions.

02:00:51.000 But I think what's interesting is you go around the world and you see that these questions are common and people think about them wherever they are, whatever their level of education, they have some framework for understanding that.

02:01:00.000 But there are also...

02:01:01.000 The commonalities are large.

02:01:03.000 The curiosity about the stars is something that you see everywhere.

02:01:06.000 You see...

02:01:07.000 You know, the curiosity about the origins of the universe and there are stories which are different all over the world.

02:01:13.000 All, in my view and in the human universe view, are equally valid.

02:01:17.000 They're all worth...

02:01:19.000 I don't recall from them.

02:01:21.000 I think they're interesting.

02:01:22.000 They're interesting responses to nature.

02:01:25.000 So these people that live around this volcano, how do they survive?

02:01:29.000 What are they eating?

02:01:30.000 They have goats that they manage to feed on the limited, tiny amounts of limited vegetation that's there.

02:01:39.000 Very little water, so they're very careful with the water.

02:01:42.000 But they've developed this way of living.

02:01:47.000 They're a remarkable, tough, really tough bunch of people.

02:01:51.000 How many people live up there?

02:01:52.000 I don't know actually how big the Afar is, but it's one of the... 0.99

02:01:55.000 Ethiopia's very tribal, and it goes into Eritrea as well, so it's in this area at the top of the Rift Valley.

02:02:00.000 It's called the Triple Afar Junction, which is a tectonics, plate tectonics.

02:02:04.000 It's where all the volcanism at the top of the rift is.

02:02:07.000 So it's the generator of the Rift Valley, if you like, which is beautiful, actually, as an idea, because this is the cradle of humanity.

02:02:14.000 So you've got this...

02:02:15.000 I find it a magical place, actually, Ethiopia, for that reason.

02:02:19.000 And I recommend it, actually.

02:02:21.000 Addis Ababa is a beautiful city.

02:02:23.000 It's a high-altitude city.

02:02:25.000 So Ethiopia you tend to think of, especially if you're kind of my generation, you think of Live Aid and the big famine in Ethiopia, you think of this dusty place, and it is in some areas.

02:02:32.000 But actually the capital, it's a very green country.

02:02:36.000 It's high-altitude, quite a pleasant country.

02:02:39.000 Because some African cities, when they're very hot, they can be very unusual for people like us from places that are not dusty and hot.

02:02:47.000 But Addis is not like that, actually.

02:02:49.000 And I find there's an idea...

02:02:51.000 When I go there, I like the...

02:02:52.000 There's an idea that...

02:02:54.000 Because you kind of almost know that we came from there somehow.

02:02:56.000 You come armed with this knowledge that this is...

02:02:58.000 That we were all related to someone who lived here, in and around Addis Ababa, in the Rift.

02:03:05.000 200,000 years ago.

02:03:07.000 We're all related to someone who lived there.

02:03:09.000 And we wandered out from there.

02:03:11.000 I find that a powerful thought, actually.

02:03:14.000 And it dismisses...

02:03:16.000 You know, there's a great deal of talk of differences amongst us.

02:03:19.000 But actually, if you go to Ethiopia, you realise very soon that we're...

02:03:23.000 It's not far back, as you said.

02:03:25.000 You trace your generation as parents, father, grandfather, back, back, back.

02:03:29.000 You don't go far back before you get to an Ethiopian, which is quite wonderful, I think.

02:03:34.000 Wow.

02:03:35.000 It's so perspective-enhancing, too, to see people in this day and age.

02:03:40.000 I was watching a documentary on people that live in the Amazon that are barely contacted by the Western world.

02:03:47.000 They may have American underwear or something that someone gives them.

02:03:52.000 But other than that, these people have been living essentially very similar to the way they've been living thousands of years ago.

02:03:59.000 And they're getting by.

02:04:00.000 They're fine.

02:04:05.000 This world that we live in right now, that we think everybody has to have an email address, everybody has to at least have some form of public transportation.

02:04:13.000 No, they don't.

02:04:14.000 You don't have to have anything.

02:04:14.000 You don't.

02:04:15.000 These people all walk around.

02:04:16.000 They walk around in the jungle, and they live.

02:04:19.000 And they've been living, and they know what to eat, they know what not to eat, and they know what to avoid, and they have babies, and their culture continues.

02:04:26.000 And they don't even write things down.

02:04:28.000 And they've been living like that for a long time.

02:04:31.000 And they're people just like you and just like me.

02:04:33.000 Yeah.

02:04:33.000 With the same, you know, I find the same level of curiosity and interest.

02:04:39.000 It's kind of… Sometimes more so.

02:04:41.000 Well, yeah, exactly.

02:04:42.000 Yeah, exactly.

02:04:44.000 So it's very interesting, that perspective.

02:04:46.000 The people that you contacted in Ethiopia, how many are in their group, the ones that you were in contact with?

02:04:52.000 There were maybe, I don't know, I'd be guessing, a hundred or so in this kind of village.

02:04:58.000 Do they have a written history?

02:04:59.000 No.

02:05:00.000 No, oral history.

02:05:02.000 Yeah, so these are stories passed down from generations, so they're great storytellers.

02:05:08.000 Wow.

02:05:08.000 As a result.

02:05:10.000 These isolated tribes.

02:05:11.000 I mean, obviously, Ethiopia is a fascinating country because it's one of the few countries in Africa that is an ancient country.

02:05:18.000 I mean, they're there in biblical times.

02:05:21.000 You know, they've got these myths about...

02:05:22.000 When you go to Addis, they say, we've got the Ark of the Covenant in the cathedral in Addis.

02:05:28.000 And you say, can I see it?

02:05:29.000 And they go, no.

02:05:29.000 I can't look at it, but it's there.

02:05:31.000 But I like the mythology.

02:05:33.000 The mythology is that the Queen of Sheba was up there and stole it, I think, and came back and brought it back, stole it off King Solomon.

02:05:42.000 So you've got this.

02:05:42.000 It would be Solomon, wouldn't it?

02:05:44.000 It's all intertwined.

02:05:45.000 So the fact that their written history, the central Ethiopian written history, It's biblical in its span.

02:05:54.000 It's about ancient Egypt.

02:05:55.000 They were part of that thing, the Egypt and Ethiopia, and then into Jerusalem and those areas, Palestine, and then out to...

02:06:03.000 That 1,000-year-old, 2,000-year-old history is part of that country, very centrally part of it.

02:06:10.000 Whereas usually in Africa, you know, you get countries that have been divided up and they came out of the Second World War and they post-imperial things.

02:06:16.000 But Ethiopia is a real... 1.00

02:06:19.000 It's a more grounded place in history.

02:06:22.000 So it's a fascinating place.

02:06:23.000 What is the area that's supposed to contain the Ark of the Covenant?

02:06:27.000 It's in that cathedral, allegedly.

02:06:30.000 As I say, I wasn't allowed to see it, so I'm verified that it exists.

02:06:36.000 How many people are supposed to be looking at it?

02:06:38.000 Nobody.

02:06:39.000 There are issues with this myth.

02:06:42.000 Is it like Al Capone's vault where it took Geraldo Rivera to break down the wall before we realized there was nothing in it?

02:06:49.000 Is there a room that no one goes into?

02:06:51.000 I think broadly speaking, yes.

02:06:52.000 Other than the priests and things, I think.

02:06:56.000 Is there someone that's supposed to guard it, maybe?

02:06:59.000 Someone must have built the cathedral, and obviously the Queen of Sheba stole it in the first place. 0.98

02:07:03.000 Oh, so it's not there anymore, or it is there?

02:07:05.000 No, it's there.

02:07:06.000 She stole it from Jerusalem. 0.97

02:07:07.000 Oh, and brought it to Ethiopia.

02:07:09.000 I think that's right, and took it down to Ethiopia.

02:07:11.000 Imagine if it is something, some technological object from a forgotten time.

02:07:17.000 Do you remember, there was some work that was done on ancient batteries, where they believe that some of the artifacts they found,

02:07:33.000 like Egyptian pyramids perhaps, might have functioned in a very similar way to a modern battery.

02:07:38.000 I saw that, yeah.

02:07:39.000 I mean, it's possible, I suppose.

02:07:42.000 Right.

02:07:44.000 Again, we talk about timescales.

02:07:46.000 It's three and a half thousand, four thousand, five thousand years.

02:07:49.000 You know, the earliest pyramids, I think.

02:07:51.000 Right.

02:07:51.000 So, yeah, we don't know.

02:07:54.000 We know quite a lot about the Egyptians.

02:07:57.000 Again, I'm going to talk about human universe.

02:07:59.000 I'm supposed to talk about a monkey cage, but I'll talk about human universe as well.

02:08:02.000 Because we found...

02:08:04.000 My wife actually started learning Egyptian.

02:08:06.000 She was just interested in hieroglyphics.

02:08:08.000 She just got interested, so she did some classes.

02:08:09.000 And the literature from ancient Egypt is fascinating.

02:08:13.000 You're talking about 2000 BC, these things that have been written down.

02:08:17.000 And the earliest...

02:08:18.000 I looked in the book of human universe, which you can get in the US, I should say.

02:08:22.000 I went to look.

02:08:23.000 I want the earliest literature.

02:08:24.000 What is it?

02:08:25.000 And it's basically...

02:08:27.000 One of the earliest things I could find was basically Monty Python's parrot sketch, right?

02:08:31.000 Because it's this...

02:08:32.000 It's a complaint.

02:08:33.000 And it's like, I wish to register a complaint.

02:08:36.000 It's a piece of papyrus.

02:08:36.000 Really?

02:08:38.000 And it's a complaint about...

02:08:41.000 I think it was the...

02:08:43.000 A coffin.

02:08:44.000 It was a coffin manufacturer who'd supplied this coffin that was the wrong size.

02:08:49.000 And it was kind of a bit of a rip-off.

02:08:50.000 And this person was saying, I'm complaining about this.

02:08:53.000 I want to send it back.

02:08:54.000 This is terrible.

02:08:55.000 I want my money back.

02:08:56.000 And they'd say, oh, you can have two coffins instead.

02:08:57.000 And they'd go, I don't want a voucher.

02:08:59.000 I want my money.

02:09:00.000 And so you see this...

02:09:02.000 What's wonderful is it's a modern voice that echoes down the ages from ancient Egypt.

02:09:07.000 Most of them are either admin things about, my garden was, you've nicked a bit of my garden, you moved the fence in the night, or something like that, or complaining about some piece of commerce, like this is, I've been ripped off by this shopkeeper, and it's terrible, and it's wonderful.

02:09:22.000 But then there are also poems, fantastic poems.

02:09:25.000 There's one about, it's a woman talking to her husband, And the other way around, it's a husband talking to a woman. 0.82

02:09:33.000 And so you go through and he's saying, why did you leave me?

02:09:35.000 Why didn't you love me?

02:09:37.000 It's quite touching and moving.

02:09:38.000 And then you realise, towards the end, that this woman had died.

02:09:43.000 She's dead.

02:09:44.000 But he's still talking to her.

02:09:46.000 Because the Egyptians thought that she'd moved on.

02:09:50.000 A conscious decision to go into the afterlife.

02:09:54.000 And so there's this kind of bitterness being expressed in this very moving piece of poetry.

02:09:58.000 And then you realise that it's...

02:10:00.000 4,000 years old.

02:10:03.000 It's wonderful, actually.

02:10:05.000 So we haven't changed at the point you find from this old literature.

02:10:09.000 Well, one of the oldest pieces of human language was the cuneiform, right?

02:10:15.000 From Sumer.

02:10:16.000 I read this one thing that was, there was a passage they were talking about that was about divorce.

02:10:21.000 It was about marriage and divorce.

02:10:23.000 There was something along like, I forget what, but it was like a sort of a very short poem about divorce, about marriage and, you know, for your relief or for your pleasure, divorce.

02:10:38.000 It was very bizarre, like the concept of two people uniting by ritual existed six, whatever, five, six thousand years ago, and they wrote about it.

02:10:51.000 And these little scratches, you know, the cuneiform, which looks like ancient nails, you know, with a flat top and a line that points down.

02:10:58.000 And in a certain pattern, they've been able to figure out that it means some form, some language that you can kind of...

02:11:06.000 We attempt to translate to our modern languages in a weird clunky, you know, if you ever read like Russia, like the Russian translations from Russian to English, it's so bizarre because their language is so alien to us. 0.95

02:11:19.000 It's so different that the way they use pronouns and the subtext and all the different aspects that we sort of take for granted about language don't translate correctly.

02:11:29.000 Yeah, and you imagine that for hieroglyphics.

02:11:31.000 Thousands of years ago!

02:11:32.000 Thousands!

02:11:33.000 I like the fact that the voices are so familiar.

02:11:37.000 We haven't changed.

02:11:38.000 The Library of Alexandria.

02:11:40.000 Man, the burning of the Library of Alexandria. 0.92

02:11:43.000 If that had never taken place and we could somehow or another go back and read all the shit that they knew about construction methods and how they built those things and what was the purpose behind them and what was the... 0.96

02:11:54.000 The significance of the astrological alignment. 0.94

02:11:58.000 Like, what were they doing?

02:12:00.000 What they were doing was so insane in comparison to the greater sum of humanity. 0.98

02:12:07.000 Like, if you look at humans in 2500 BC and then you look at Egypt, you're like, Jesus Christ, what the fuck happened here? 0.99

02:12:14.000 How did you guys figure this shit out that no one else anywhere near, was anywhere close to this level of sophistication? 0.95

02:12:23.000 I think there's something you can take from this, because if you look at ancient Egypt, of course, if you go to some of the temples down there on the Nile and Luxor in particular, it's just astonishing achievement. 0.98

02:12:36.000 I mean, as you say, you look at Greece, you look at the Greek literature, and then you look at the Library of Alexandria, which the knowledge was lost because the barbarians came and burnt the thing down.

02:12:45.000 You realise that civilisations rise and fall and knowledge can be lost.

02:12:49.000 And the Romans, I suspect, thought they were eternal as a civilisation.

02:12:55.000 They would continue to progress.

02:12:56.000 The Greeks, before them, thought that.

02:12:58.000 The Egyptians thought that.

02:12:59.000 We think that now.

02:12:59.000 They didn't.

02:13:02.000 And it's interesting to reflect, I think, on the fact that you don't have to make progress.

02:13:08.000 Progress is in your own hands, so you can choose to make progress.

02:13:11.000 They didn't choose to make progress.

02:13:13.000 For various reasons, they stopped making progress.

02:13:16.000 And they vanished, and their knowledge vanished with them a lot of the time.

02:13:19.000 And I think it's a lesson for us.

02:13:21.000 We could do that.

02:13:22.000 Maybe we've got into this position now with our technology where it just won't go like that.

02:13:27.000 But I don't think we can take it for granted, which I think goes right back to the start of the conversation, about how do we say to people, you know, this is a remarkable thing that we've done.

02:13:37.000 But don't take it for granted.

02:13:39.000 It's not just going to tick along while you guys sit there and watch sports all the time.

02:13:43.000 That's not the way that you make progress.

02:13:46.000 Somebody's got to do something.

02:13:48.000 And we've all got to support the people.

02:13:49.000 Even if you don't want to do it, then support the people that want to do it.

02:13:53.000 So you look at the...

02:13:55.000 You know, I was filming on Friday for a thing I'm doing in Britain with Rusty Spigot, who's an Apollo 9. So he test flew the lunar module on Apollo 9 in 1968. First test flight of it in Earth orbit before they went to the moon in July of that year.

02:14:12.000 And so we landed on the moon, actually, in the simulator.

02:14:18.000 It was terrific, and he showed me how to do it, and it was fantastic.

02:14:21.000 But you look at NASA, the investment in NASA at that time, it was never more than 4% of federal expenditure, and actually it was often less than that.

02:14:28.000 So it wasn't particularly expensive.

02:14:29.000 It was, on average, maybe about 3% of federal expenditure.

02:14:32.000 But it laid the foundation, I could argue, for American technological dominance in the last quarter of the 20th century.

02:14:39.000 Because, for example, the average age of the engineers in the NASA mission control when Apollo 11 landed on the moon was below 30. Below 30 years old, those engineers.

02:14:50.000 So what happened to them after the Apollo program?

02:14:52.000 They went out to work for Boeing and, you know, Microsoft.

02:14:57.000 Bell Labs or Lockheed Martin or whoever it is, all these people.

02:14:57.000 Bell Labs.

02:15:02.000 And you get this explosion in technological achievement, in economic growth.

02:15:08.000 America is a terrific place to be because, in many ways, because of the growth that happened in those 30 or 40 years since Apollo.

02:15:17.000 But that was because of a conscious investment, led by Kennedy's great speech, and also inspired by the Cold War, etc.

02:15:24.000 There's many reasons why he did it.

02:15:25.000 But ultimately, that investment paid vast dividends.

02:15:29.000 You look at NASA today, and the investment is way down.

02:15:32.000 So the ambition that America had.

02:15:35.000 To go to the moon because it's there.

02:15:38.000 And to beat the Russians, yeah, but to do it. 0.99

02:15:40.000 And that ambition seems to be missing to me.

02:15:43.000 And I look to this country, actually, because I think it is the country.

02:15:48.000 No other country could have done that.

02:15:49.000 No other country could have gone.

02:15:51.000 The moon will go, I think, before this decade is out.

02:15:56.000 They hadn't flown anyone in space when Kennedy made that speech.

02:15:59.000 You hadn't flown anyone in space.

02:16:01.000 And you say, within ten years I'm going to walk on the moon.

02:16:03.000 That's an American thing to do, I think.

02:16:06.000 It's part of what's great about this country.

02:16:07.000 And I regret the fact that that doesn't seem to be there at the moment.

02:16:10.000 And going back to why I started saying that, the idea that progress comes to the bold, right, I would say.

02:16:18.000 So the idea that it will just come, that we'll just make progress, is not necessarily right.

02:16:24.000 In fact, history tells us it's wrong.

02:16:27.000 I believe, bold visions and visionary leaders.

02:16:31.000 And leaders will just say, well, this is not a great deflection of resources.

02:16:35.000 It was, as I say, it was always less than 3-4% of federal expenditure.

02:16:39.000 But it's a great deflection of national will.

02:16:42.000 And it's a great generator of a sea of engineers and scientists who are inspired by those things and trained in that process that go out into the economy and make the economy better.

02:16:52.000 There's a study that...

02:16:54.000 Suggested there was a 14 to 1 return on every dollar invested in Apollo by 1980. And people can argue about the, was it 10 to 1, was it 14 to 1, was it 20 to 1?

02:17:04.000 Is the return to the private sector or a return to the government?

02:17:08.000 GDP. Just into wealth generated.

02:17:11.000 And Tang.

02:17:12.000 So each one of those dollars generated at least 10 and maybe 20 in a decade.

02:17:20.000 And it's obvious how it did it because look at those young engineers and look at the technologies that were developed for Apollo.

02:17:26.000 Someone said to me at NASA Ames up in San Francisco, virtually every technology in commercial aviation today got invented there.

02:17:44.000 Do you think it's because of the ending of the Cold War, the lack of competition with Russia?

02:17:51.000 We were on top, so we just got soft.

02:17:53.000 There's no need to keep pushing and pressing.

02:17:56.000 There wasn't an adversary.

02:17:57.000 There wasn't this technological adversary that's out there that gives people the motivation to continue to invest 4% of the gross domestic product or whatever the amount of money we need.

02:18:10.000 I don't know.

02:18:11.000 It seems...

02:18:11.000 I often...

02:18:12.000 I mean, if I look at Britain, so I talk about my country, which did the big thing, ran the world and then declined, you know, and doesn't run the world anymore, handed it over to you guys.

02:18:21.000 Well, you guys had a little island.

02:18:22.000 You ran it out of an island.

02:18:23.000 It's pretty dope.

02:18:24.000 Yeah.

02:18:25.000 You know, we have a big-ass continent.

02:18:26.000 Yeah, I think we just set off from the wrong place.

02:18:29.000 You guys did it out of Rhode Island.

02:18:30.000 Yeah.

02:18:31.000 Well, yeah, it's kind of smaller than California, isn't it?

02:18:33.000 Yeah, it's pretty crazy.

02:18:35.000 So we did well for a while.

02:18:35.000 Not bad.

02:18:36.000 But it seems to me that what we lack is these things are not expensive.

02:18:42.000 In fact, they're vital.

02:18:43.000 They generate money.

02:18:44.000 So it seems to me it's leadership.

02:18:46.000 It's visionary leadership, I think.

02:18:49.000 Inspiration.

02:18:50.000 Yeah, and it doesn't take, well, I was going to say it doesn't take much.

02:18:53.000 It took a Kennedy, I think.

02:18:55.000 I mean, that speech is a remarkable speech that rallies a nation behind something.

02:18:59.000 But it's not a particularly large diversion of resources, that's the point.

02:19:02.000 And certainly, given what you get back, it seems to me that investment in R&D, in science and technology and education, these are the things that form the foundation of our future.

02:19:11.000 Absolutely.

02:19:12.000 And everybody agrees with that.

02:19:13.000 And I get involved in politics in Britain, but not party politics, but this, lobbying for this.

02:19:19.000 Spend money on the young.

02:19:21.000 Spend money on the education system.

02:19:23.000 Spend money on inspiration.

02:19:24.000 Make sure that there's a generation of these great engineers and scientists that America is currently world-leading in, absolutely.

02:19:35.000 And make sure that they're still there.

02:19:37.000 And how do you get them?

02:19:38.000 I don't want kids to want to be singers, actually, particularly on X Factor.

02:19:38.000 How do you inspire them?

02:19:43.000 I don't want them to be famous.

02:19:45.000 There was a survey done recently, I think, where they said to loads of school kids, what do you want to be when you grow up?

02:19:49.000 And a lot of them said famous.

02:19:52.000 What do you mean?

02:19:52.000 Famous?

02:19:53.000 Famous?

02:19:53.000 You want to walk on the moon, don't you?

02:19:55.000 You want to invent the world's fastest computer, don't you?

02:19:58.000 What do you mean, famous?

02:20:00.000 You've got to be famous for something.

02:20:01.000 It's not famous because you're on a talent show.

02:20:03.000 We go back to the poor Kardashians.

02:20:05.000 I've never seen the Kardashians, by the way.

02:20:06.000 I don't know.

02:20:07.000 Who the hell they are, and thank God I don't, because I don't know.

02:20:10.000 I don't think we have them in Britain.

02:20:11.000 Maybe we do.

02:20:12.000 Oh, they get over there.

02:20:13.000 Do they get over there?

02:20:14.000 I'm sure.

02:20:15.000 But I don't want to pick on that lot.

02:20:16.000 I mean, they're doing what they do, right?

02:20:17.000 But the point is, you don't want to be one of those.

02:20:19.000 I mean, without being disrespectful.

02:20:21.000 Maybe they...

02:20:22.000 They're having a good time.

02:20:23.000 You're so British. 1.00

02:20:24.000 You try to insult people and then not at the same time.

02:20:27.000 I don't want to insult people who kind of make their way, you know, and do well.

02:20:30.000 They're not criminals.

02:20:31.000 They're not evil people.

02:20:32.000 They're not the scourge of society.

02:20:34.000 But the point is, what do you want to aspire to be as a kid?

02:20:36.000 What do you want to aspire to be?

02:20:38.000 And it's true that in the 60s, they wanted to be Neil Armstrong, or one of the engineers in Mission Control.

02:20:43.000 And that's a government.

02:20:44.000 Government has...

02:20:45.000 I know it's kind of unfashionable in some circles to say that, but government sets the direction in the...

02:20:50.000 It has to.

02:20:52.000 You know, companies can do it as well.

02:20:55.000 So you have the big companies like Apple and Google.

02:20:57.000 So people do aspire to work with those companies.

02:21:00.000 But I think the grand direction of civilisation is set by governments and visionaries.

02:21:06.000 And it's not expensive.

02:21:08.000 But it's terrifically expensive not to do it.

02:21:11.000 Well, governments, the idea of government has really been hijacked in this country and it's become about money.

02:21:17.000 It depends what you mean by government and big government and small government.

02:21:22.000 Special interest groups and lobbyists.

02:21:25.000 There's too much money involved.

02:21:29.000 There's absolutely legal corruption in this country where giant corporations are allowed to invest enormous sums of money.

02:21:47.000 I think that's a reality, and that's very unfortunate, but I think that's a reality that's also being eroding or is eroding, rather, by technology.

02:21:59.000 I think people understanding the mechanisms involved in government is making them want to change those mechanisms.

02:22:05.000 People pushing for ideas like It's being able to vote online.

02:22:10.000 People are really frustrated by this.

02:22:12.000 How come I can bank online?

02:22:15.000 How come you can deal with the entire world's economy through computers and the internet, but you can't vote?

02:22:20.000 How come?

02:22:21.000 Is it because you don't want it to be that easy for people to give their opinion and people to vote?

02:22:25.000 Because the world of the internet and the world of actual voting, there's a big gap between them.

02:22:32.000 There's a big gap that would instantly shift right over if you were allowed to vote online.

02:22:37.000 And there's people that say, oh, there's problems with that.

02:22:39.000 Oh, corruption.

02:22:40.000 Oh, you're the one who's always worried about hacking.

02:22:42.000 Well, guess what?

02:22:43.000 That's going to be the case no matter what you do.

02:22:46.000 There's all sorts of problems with voting the conventional way.

02:22:49.000 I mean, in America, we've had giant scandals and die-bolt voting machines.

02:22:54.000 It contained third-party access, the ability to manipulate the data.

02:22:58.000 It's all been proven.

02:22:59.000 There was a documentary called Hacking Democracy that showed how ludicrous it is to think that our system that's in place right now is infallible.

02:23:07.000 Not only that, it's massively flawed.

02:23:11.000 The technology that exists because of the internet, because of the ability to exchange information instantaneously with each other, is unprecedented.

02:23:19.000 And I think that is going to shift the idea of government, that's going to scatter all these crazy people that are running things right now, that's not going to be viable anymore, just like kings aren't viable anymore.

02:23:31.000 You can't be Henry VIII. In 2015, unless you're the guy in North Korea, he's like the last one.

02:23:37.000 But most governments can't be run the way they were run thousands of years ago.

02:23:42.000 There's too much access to information.

02:23:44.000 We know you're not a god.

02:23:46.000 We know you're just a person.

02:23:47.000 We have this ability.

02:23:50.000 To exchange these ideas so quickly that the word gets out too fast.

02:23:55.000 I mean, if you listen to Tim Berners-Lee when he talks about the World Wide Web and invented, by the way, CERN, of course, the web bit of it.

02:24:03.000 Yes.

02:24:03.000 And then he talks in those terms, actually.

02:24:06.000 You feel it's quite idealistic, Tim Berners-Lee.

02:24:08.000 I am too.

02:24:09.000 Freedom of information, free exchange of information.

02:24:12.000 And I think you're right.

02:24:13.000 I mean, it goes right back to the beginning of the conversation, doesn't it?

02:24:15.000 Is the internet a good thing or a bad thing?

02:24:18.000 Or the web, let's say, a good thing or a bad thing?

02:24:19.000 And you must be right in this sense, that as long as people We're having this conversation at quite a high level.

02:24:29.000 We're talking about great movements and great shifts in civilisation.

02:24:34.000 So I suppose you need the perspective first, don't you?

02:24:39.000 You need your appetite stimulated for knowledge and information and not to use the internet or the web to ghettoise yourself.

02:24:47.000 You need to have some instinct that I'm not going to just go find the little sliver of information that interests me.

02:24:53.000 And perhaps information that's non-Centicon is also the, you know, how you can go and be a conspiracy theorist and find plenty of information to support your conspiracy.

02:25:02.000 Reptile people.

02:25:03.000 That toolkit. 0.99

02:25:04.000 Sagan always talks about this in the demon-hotted world, again, about giving people a toolkit, bullshit detectors, I think he called it, you know, the education, science, the scientific method, that's a bullshit detector kit, basically.

02:25:16.000 So if you can get that in, if you can get that in, maybe this is the priority really in schools to say, well, I want you to know how to think, how to look at information, assess where the information came from, understand if it's likely to be tainted or biased or good or bad,

02:25:32.000 or how do I assess this vast quantity of information out there?

02:25:36.000 How do I not ghettoise myself?

02:25:38.000 How do I not decide that I'm only going to read, I'm only going to exist on forums that say that We didn't land on the moon and there was a big conspiracy and everyone covered it up.

02:25:46.000 How can I broaden my reach to say, is that really true?

02:25:50.000 Shall I check some other stuff?

02:25:51.000 Like the telescopes where you can look at the spacecraft on the moon?

02:25:54.000 You know, that kind of bits of evidence.

02:25:57.000 So I think that's very important.

02:25:59.000 Is it ironic that in this day and age we accumulate more data?

02:26:04.000 I think there was some statistic about in every two days we accumulate more data, more like numbers, and a lot of it's probably Instagram pictures and Twitter and shit that's useless, but that more hard data gets accumulated or processed or produced by humans today than the entire time of human history up to that point.

02:26:29.000 Staggering.

02:26:30.000 But it also, most of it takes place on computers.

02:26:36.000 Most of it is ones and zeros.

02:26:38.000 Most of it takes place in a language that you and I can't even read if it was written on a piece of paper.

02:26:42.000 And it's a big subject, how do you use that data?

02:26:46.000 And how would we use it?

02:26:48.000 There's an example, the programme I do in the UK called Stargazing Live, which is a live astronomy show on the BBC. Lots of people watch it, people like it.

02:26:56.000 One of the things that we do is citizen science projects.

02:27:00.000 So, for example, last year we used the European Space Agency's database of photographs of the surface of Mars.

02:27:07.000 Nobody's ever looked at them.

02:27:09.000 There's too many of them.

02:27:09.000 So we've got too many pictures of Mars.

02:27:11.000 No human eyes have ever looked at these pictures.

02:27:14.000 So we ran a project where we wanted to answer a question about some features that were seen moving across the surface of Mars, weather features, that we thought may be seasonal.

02:27:25.000 So maybe in the Martian winter they moved down to the equator and they moved back up again in the summer.

02:27:29.000 Didn't know.

02:27:30.000 And we proved that they were indeed seasonal by getting millions of people who watched the programme to go look at the pictures for the first time.

02:27:37.000 So you can go online now and look at pictures of Mars, let's say, that nobody's ever seen.

02:27:42.000 Because there's too much data, even on another planet.

02:27:46.000 So imagine the amount of data generated on this planet that no one's ever looked at.

02:27:51.000 There'll be data about what increases the likelihood of certain cancers, for example.

02:27:57.000 The lifestyle that does that, that'll all be there in the data.

02:28:02.000 But no one's quite got their head around how to go and mine that data.

02:28:06.000 And try to use it.

02:28:08.000 Just using the data is extremely difficult and challenging.

02:28:12.000 But you're right, it's there.

02:28:14.000 No one ever looks at it.

02:28:15.000 Well, not only that, the idea of somehow or another preserving this.

02:28:19.000 If there was some event, supervolcano eruption, like they're constantly worried about Yellowstone, and there's one in Indonesia, I believe it is, that they believe is connected to a mass extinction event that killed off a giant swath of the population.

02:28:33.000 Oh, they're nasty, those supervolcanoes.

02:28:35.000 We don't want one of those to go up.

02:28:35.000 Terrifying!

02:28:36.000 And if one of those hits, and somehow or another the power goes out all around the world, and the only people that survive are those folks that live by the volcano, fuck, man. 0.99

02:28:46.000 We're starting from scratch? 0.96

02:28:48.000 Like, I mean, relatively, in terms of the universe, that's nothing.

02:28:51.000 So, you big baby, you got to wait another 10,000 years for civilization to reemerge and someone to reinvent the internet, you know, and the Ark of the Covenant and still locked up in Ethiopia because they already did this and they already figured out how to make a little nuclear bomb or something like that. 0.98

02:29:06.000 I don't know what the fuck it is. 0.90

02:29:07.000 But for our immediate life, it's so critical to not just acquire this information, but to nurture it. 0.98

02:29:15.000 And to spread it.

02:29:16.000 I mean, that's your whole idea, right?

02:29:17.000 You're just talking about expanding science and education and getting people excited and involved. 0.99

02:29:22.000 But all that doesn't mean jank shit if the fucking Earth spits out a giant ball of lava that engulfs half of North America and kills 90% of the planet. 0.99

02:29:32.000 Like, we're starting from scratch. 0.99

02:29:34.000 None of this is gonna be any good.

02:29:34.000 And there's not...

02:29:36.000 No computers, no hard drives, no flash drives, no fucking database. 1.00

02:29:39.000 It's all bullshit. 1.00

02:29:40.000 The cloud? 1.00

02:29:41.000 Go fuck your cloud. 1.00

02:29:42.000 It's not really in the cloud. 1.00

02:29:43.000 I got news for you.

02:29:44.000 It's down on Earth.

02:29:45.000 Oh, it's in the cloud.

02:29:46.000 No, it's not.

02:29:47.000 There's no cloud, okay?

02:29:48.000 It doesn't exist. 1.00

02:29:49.000 You go up and look around for your fucking data. 1.00

02:29:51.000 It's not there. 1.00

02:29:52.000 It's in someone's goddamn building, okay? 1.00

02:29:55.000 It's in a fucking building. 1.00

02:29:56.000 Stop saying it's in the cloud, because it's not. 1.00

02:29:59.000 That's a dirty, stinky lie. 0.95

02:30:03.000 That's reality. 0.99

02:30:04.000 Unless you're launching that fucking shit up, taking all the hard drives of all the world and launching it into space and, you know, on a 10,000 year loop, so it comes back around and lands, you know, you do it 99.9% of the speed of light so that the data, 0.99

02:30:20.000 you know, it comes back around. 0.99

02:30:26.000 Could you imagine if that's what happens? 0.98

02:30:28.000 Like, one day, you know, they pick a strategic location that they believe will be a large population of life, and it relands 10,000 years later, and we go, oh, fuck, look at this. 1.00

02:30:39.000 Look at all the shit they knew. 0.97

02:30:40.000 And it's all in DOS or whatever, something that we could read, like, fairly easily. 1.00

02:30:45.000 They run it through some computers, and they realize, like, wow, fucking people have been around. 0.50

02:30:49.000 Do you remember my first operating system on a PC was DOS 5? 0.97

02:30:52.000 Do you remember that?

02:30:53.000 DOS 5. I was post-DOS. No, I like DOS. The first computer that I ever had had Windows 95, and Windows 95 was the big deal.

02:31:02.000 My friend Chris made computers with Windows 3.2.

02:31:05.000 He preceded me.

02:31:07.000 Yeah, 3.1, which he ran on DOS. So I had no Windows when I got my first PC. Wow.

02:31:12.000 That's cool.

02:31:13.000 That's crazy.

02:31:14.000 And if you think about how recent...

02:31:17.000 40 meg.

02:31:18.000 Yes, it's nothing.

02:31:19.000 You can't get an email on that.

02:31:21.000 Yeah, right.

02:31:22.000 If someone sends you a picture, it's way bigger than that. 0.98

02:31:24.000 Yeah, every fucking picture is 100 meg, right? 0.89

02:31:27.000 And if you think that that was 1995, it was only 20 years ago. 0.99

02:31:32.000 And in 20 years, a blink of an eye, you know?

02:31:36.000 A blink of an eye.

02:31:38.000 I think we should go back to DOS. You think so?

02:31:40.000 Why?

02:31:42.000 Because you had to know how the computer worked.

02:31:45.000 You had to have these little autoexec.bat files that allocated the memory.

02:31:50.000 Isn't that like more work than you need?

02:31:52.000 It's a big deal in a sense because we have a problem with getting kids to write code because they all sit there on PS4s and things like that.

02:31:59.000 Well, it's a lot of work to write code, right?

02:32:01.000 Yeah, but in the old days with the computers...

02:32:03.000 I have friends that make video games and one of the most...

02:32:08.000 Shocking things was the the sheer amount of hours that go into coding video games You know the the folks at id software they let me in behind the scenes and epic games to Cliffy B our friend Cliffy B who's been on the podcast before I would watch those guys work they would do 16 hour days and they would just be coding and drinking fucking caffeine and Just staring in front of these monitors and just running over thousands of lines of code and you're like,

02:32:36.000 oh, that's how you make a fucking video game?

02:32:38.000 Yeah, they're kind of hundred million dollar things. 0.99

02:32:41.000 They're just unbelievable.

02:32:42.000 They're like movies.

02:32:43.000 Well, they're bigger than movies.

02:32:45.000 The average huge game, like a Grand Theft Auto, when those games get released, The amount of money that they generate is rival to like Avatar, some huge spectacular hit.

02:32:58.000 Like not an average movie, but a just gigantic, monumental, epic, huge successful movie.

02:33:05.000 That's like an average video game. 0.98

02:33:07.000 You know, Grand Theft Auto and Madden, when those Madden games come out, the fucking world changes. 0.95

02:33:12.000 Like, I mean, people generate, there's so much income that gets poured into those video games. 0.80

02:33:17.000 And you realize that it's a lot of just people just coding, just standing in front of computers and just pounding on the keyboards.

02:33:23.000 It's madness.

02:33:24.000 You know, maybe that's the way that Western civilization falls.

02:33:28.000 The coders. 1.00

02:33:29.000 People stop fucking them. 0.99

02:33:30.000 That's what's gonna happen. 1.00

02:33:31.000 They're gonna stop breeding. 0.75

02:33:33.000 That's what's gonna happen. 0.99

02:33:34.000 Women will stop having sex with coders and it's all gonna fucking end. 1.00

02:33:39.000 All their accumulated knowledge we were talking about before, like the coders making children that are better coders. 1.00

02:33:45.000 Just ends.

02:33:45.000 Nope.

02:33:46.000 Yeah.

02:33:47.000 One day.

02:33:47.000 People like me, you can write Fortran.

02:33:49.000 Yeah, one day we wake up and we realize that no one's making video games anymore.

02:33:52.000 So we go to these places where they made video games.

02:33:55.000 Like, hello?

02:33:56.000 Everybody's dead.

02:33:57.000 Cobwebs everywhere. 1.00

02:33:59.000 They just died and no one fucked them. 1.00

02:34:01.000 The apocalypse. 1.00

02:34:02.000 No more.

02:34:03.000 Well, imagine if computer coders ceased to exist and all of us were forced to back engineer computer code.

02:34:12.000 If today, like for somehow or another, I don't know how many people in this world have a deep understanding of computer operating systems or computer code, but I couldn't imagine it's more than 1%. 0.96

02:34:23.000 And if we lost 1% of the population, just disappeared from the earth, and then the rest of us dopes were left To observe our cell phone crashing or our fucking TriCaster over here that shit the bed on us mid-broadcast.

02:34:37.000 I mean, that's a critical part of our society, of civilization itself, and totally overlooked. 0.95

02:34:46.000 So you coders out there, God bless you.

02:34:50.000 Keep breathing.

02:34:50.000 Yeah, keep breathing.

02:34:52.000 And may you breathe.

02:34:53.000 Breeding and breathing.

02:34:54.000 We need to supply them.

02:34:56.000 Praise Odin for the coders. 1.00

02:34:59.000 Ha ha ha!

02:35:00.000 It's amazing.

02:35:01.000 It's amazing if you really think of how much our life and our civilization revolves around electronics and around computer code.

02:35:10.000 We should do a monkey cage on this, actually.

02:35:12.000 Yes!

02:35:13.000 I mean, it's stunning!

02:35:15.000 Think about it.

02:35:16.000 Every single thing that used to be mechanical and analog is now computer.

02:35:23.000 Like cars.

02:35:24.000 For car enthusiasts, one of the main complaints is that you don't feel what a car is doing anymore.

02:35:31.000 One of the thrills of driving an older car, especially an old sports car, they're not as fast, they don't handle as well, but you feel everything.

02:35:39.000 You feel the road because it's a mechanical steering.

02:35:42.000 There's no assisting.

02:35:43.000 Like if you go to like a 1973 Porsche 911, there's no hydraulic assist in the steering.

02:35:50.000 It's all mechanical.

02:35:51.000 You feel every pebble.

02:35:52.000 You literally feel the mechanism turning the tire.

02:35:56.000 You feel the tires losing their grip.

02:35:58.000 It's all transmitted through your seat and through your hands.

02:36:00.000 And people live for this.

02:36:02.000 It's like exciting stuff.

02:36:03.000 But if you drive a modern Porsche, it's like there's a million operations that are going on behind the scenes at every second to avoid collisions and slow your tires down and braking on the right side because you're turning left. 0.92

02:36:16.000 There's all this shit that's going on that you don't even know. 0.94

02:36:18.000 You don't even feel it. 0.99

02:36:19.000 There's a magnetic ride control system that's adjusting.

02:36:22.000 There's certain cars now, like I believe Mercedes-Benz, It has a camera that looks at the road in front of you and gauges whether or not the suspension should be compliant or rigid.

02:36:34.000 It adjusts.

02:36:36.000 And you can go, I think, up to like 30 miles an hour. 0.97

02:36:38.000 You just take your hand off the wheel and put it in cruise control and it fucking turns based on the lines on the road. 0.90

02:36:45.000 So the first sentient being is going to be a 911. Sentient artificial being. 0.99

02:36:51.000 I hope it's an American car.

02:36:52.000 I hope it's a Corvette or maybe perhaps a truck.

02:36:54.000 Maybe an F-150. 1.00

02:36:56.000 Takes out godless heathens, just drives around, eats assholes. 1.00

02:37:01.000 I wonder, you know, I think for sure if we can live, you and I'm 47. How old are you? 0.99

02:37:08.000 47. 47. So if we could live another, if we get really lucky, we live another 50 years based on modern interpretation of science and medicine.

02:37:18.000 I'm actually 46, by the way.

02:37:19.000 I'm 47 in March.

02:37:21.000 Just because that'll get letters.

02:37:22.000 Oh, people get mad? 1.00

02:37:23.000 Fucking liar! 1.00

02:37:25.000 At least you added the right way, you know? 1.00

02:37:28.000 If you're like, I'm 40-ish.

02:37:29.000 I have a friend who won't tell me his age.

02:37:31.000 He won't tell me how old he is.

02:37:31.000 Ian Edwards.

02:37:33.000 Motherfucker. 1.00

02:37:35.000 I think he's my age, but he won't say it. 0.99

02:37:38.000 Actually, I should have said 47, because then Wikipedia will change.

02:37:40.000 Yeah. 1.00

02:37:42.000 Wikipedia is wrong about a lot of shit. 0.99

02:37:44.000 It still thinks Brian Cowan's my brother. 0.99

02:37:46.000 It still thinks I'm five feet tall.

02:37:48.000 If you if you consider This idea that we if we everything goes correct and we live to be 95 years old.

02:37:57.000 Let's go.

02:37:58.000 Let's go there For sure there's gonna be something, you know There's gonna be some they've already got these little Japanese talking head ones that look eerie very strange sort of artificial Faces that talk to you. 0.99

02:38:12.000 There's gonna come a point in time As the exponential increase in technology, whether it's 20, 30 years, where they're gonna make fake fucking people, man. 0.99

02:38:21.000 See what? 0.99

02:38:22.000 Let me plug something else.

02:38:23.000 Nothing to do with me.

02:38:24.000 There's a friend of mine, Alex Garland, who just made a film called Ex Machina, which is a great science fiction film, which will be coming to the States.

02:38:30.000 It's just been released in the UK. Ex Machina.

02:38:33.000 Can I get it online somewhere?

02:38:34.000 Legally?

02:38:36.000 Not legally, I suppose.

02:38:37.000 Oh, illegally?

02:38:38.000 Can I get it legal? 1.00

02:38:38.000 That's a problem, you fucker. 1.00

02:38:40.000 Make it legal so I can get it. 1.00

02:38:41.000 Ex machina.

02:38:43.000 You'll see the trailer.

02:38:44.000 You can get the trailer on YouTube, and it's been released in the States.

02:38:46.000 I can't remember when, but it's great.

02:38:48.000 And it's about an AI, a female AI. And it's about a guy, kind of like one of these Elon Musk-type guys who lives out in the woods, and he's built one of these things, and he gets one of his employees to come and do a touring test on it,

02:39:03.000 which is to see if he thinks that this thing is sentient, this AI. But she's beautiful, and it kind of goes off from there.

02:39:10.000 But Alex wrote The Beach, and he wrote 28 Days Later.

02:39:13.000 Ah!

02:39:14.000 It's a really brilliant science fiction film.

02:39:17.000 But it explores some of these issues that we've been talking about, about what it is to be human.

02:39:22.000 Are the AIs better than us? 1.00

02:39:23.000 Are they better than us morally, physically strained?

02:39:27.000 Why is this girl so beautiful?

02:39:30.000 Why did he make this beautiful woman?

02:39:32.000 It's a great film.

02:39:33.000 So I recommend that to everyone who's listening.

02:39:35.000 That sounds amazing.

02:39:37.000 When is it going to be released here?

02:39:38.000 It must be very soon because it's just been out in the UK. It did very well.

02:39:41.000 Is it going to be released in theaters or is it going to be a digital release?

02:39:45.000 April 10th in America.

02:39:47.000 It's a great film.

02:39:48.000 Wow, that's a great concept. 0.75

02:39:51.000 I've said for a long time that I believe the first artificial intelligence would be Sex Slaves. 0.80

02:39:55.000 People are going to make artificial sex people. 1.00

02:39:58.000 People that you're going to have sex with. 0.90

02:39:59.000 Like, you know, is it cheating to use a device? 0.99

02:40:02.000 Is it cheating to masturbate? 0.83

02:40:03.000 Some people say yes. 0.93

02:40:04.000 I was reading a forum article where these people are arguing.

02:40:07.000 This guy's arguing with his wife. 0.98

02:40:08.000 She's saying if he doesn't stop masturbating, she's going to divorce him. 0.97

02:40:12.000 Specifically to porn, you know, argue with his hand and say the unfaithful device of unfaithfulness. 0.99

02:40:19.000 Just beat his hand up. 0.96

02:40:20.000 But then, you know, it goes from masturbation to masturbation using technology, meaning the internet to watch pornography, to masturbation using a device. 0.96

02:40:31.000 Like, they have these, you know what Oculus Rift is, I'm sure, right? 0.81

02:40:34.000 Yeah, yeah.

02:40:35.000 That's good, actually.

02:40:36.000 I had to go with that.

02:40:36.000 It's amazing.

02:40:37.000 Well, the new version of it, my friend Duncan called me up.

02:40:41.000 I was at the improv, and when he called me, I was about to go on stage.

02:40:45.000 It was like five minutes before I go on stage. 0.99

02:40:47.000 And he had just got back from some 3D virtual reality conference, and he was just screaming at my phone, it's a fucking game changer, man! 1.00

02:40:55.000 This is the craziest shit I... He said that the HD quality was stunning. 0.99

02:41:00.000 I did.

02:41:01.000 Sony, let me have a look at the one.

02:41:03.000 There's an Oculus and something else they're using for the PS4, which is not out yet, but it'll be out in 12 months, I think, something like that.

02:41:09.000 It's amazing.

02:41:10.000 They showed me this demo, and it's that HD reel.

02:41:16.000 It's really very, very good.

02:41:17.000 I think that is going to be a game-changer.

02:41:19.000 Well, they decided to do first-person pornography with these things.

02:41:22.000 That's supposed to just be like, there's a real issue that people are going to have with being addicted to this stuff.

02:41:27.000 Because I don't believe that our minds...

02:41:30.000 I think one of the reasons why people have such a deep... 0.97

02:41:33.000 Like, what we were talking about earlier, that people get angry at dumb programming and people get angry at, you know, dumb songs and dumb television shows.

02:41:43.000 One of the reasons I think we have this instinct to get upset at it is I think we inherently understand that we're not designed to process the media that we've created.

02:41:55.000 We're designed to imitate the successful behaviors of other tribal members.

02:41:59.000 We're designed to listen to people like you talk and be inspired.

02:42:02.000 But you're right here.

02:42:03.000 I'm looking right at you.

02:42:04.000 Evolved.

02:42:04.000 Right.

02:42:05.000 Evolved, not designed.

02:42:05.000 Well, I don't mean it in that sense.

02:42:07.000 I mean in the sense of this is how we function.

02:42:10.000 Evolved.

02:42:11.000 I'm sorry.

02:42:11.000 I don't mean designed.

02:42:12.000 But if you take that into consideration, what about a screen that's 60 feet tall, and Brad Pitt comes on, and his bone structure is fucking perfect, and if it's not, they manipulate it and make it perfect with 3G, CGI,

02:42:28.000 and every time he talks, music's playing, and every word out of his mouth is carefully considered, although it looks spontaneous, it's not.

02:42:36.000 They've carefully considered this for weeks and weeks for maximum impact on your psyche.

02:42:40.000 And you're sitting there, and the music's playing, and he kisses Angelina Jolie, and we're not designed for that! 0.97

02:42:46.000 So our very existence, the world that we live in, our model of it is based Like 90% on bullshit, 10% on real life experiences, 90% on movies. 0.99

02:43:00.000 I have a friend who got in a fight with a guy and the guy said to him while they're about to fight some drunken thing, prepare to dine in hell or tonight we dine in hell. 1.00

02:43:10.000 He yelled out a fucking quote from a stupid movie like when they're about to fist fight. 1.00

02:43:15.000 They were fist fighting, like, which could potentially lead to death. 1.00

02:43:18.000 I mean, when you're involved in, like, actively trying to hurt another human being, all fucking bets are out the window. 0.97

02:43:24.000 This is chaos, right? 0.91

02:43:25.000 And the guy's yelling out a movie quote. 0.72

02:43:28.000 Tonight we dine in hell.

02:43:30.000 This could be the beginning of a beautiful friendship. 1.00

02:43:33.000 We're fucking crazy. 1.00

02:43:34.000 Just confuse the hell out of him. 0.99

02:43:35.000 Just start randomly shouting quotes back from the great humans.

02:43:40.000 We're off to see the wizards.

02:43:45.000 Frodo, you are my brother!

02:43:48.000 We're crazy!

02:43:49.000 I don't think we're...

02:43:51.000 The inspiration that I get from songs, like there's songs that I'll listen to, you know, like, there's certain, like, weightlifting songs.

02:43:59.000 I swear when you listen to those songs, you can lift more weights.

02:44:02.000 You can work out harder.

02:44:04.000 Like, you're tired, you're on the elliptical machine. 1.00

02:44:06.000 Queen comes on, like, dragon attack, and you fucking... 1.00

02:44:09.000 Your body reacts to it. 1.00

02:44:12.000 You have a physiological response to media, to something that's been created that doesn't exist in nature. 0.94

02:44:17.000 With all of nature's majesty, with fucking waterfalls and flowers, it never figured out how to make sound come out of a headset that's just incredible. 0.98

02:44:26.000 It just makes your fucking goosebumps raise up. 1.00

02:44:30.000 We've created some weird shit. 0.99

02:44:32.000 And in creating that weird shit, we're altering our very version of the reality that we observe with our real senses, our eyes and our ears and our fingers, and we're changing it. 0.99

02:44:43.000 And this Oculus Rift shit is going to take it to a whole new place. 1.00

02:44:48.000 I mean, it's going to be as addictive as reality TV is with its stupidity. 1.00

02:44:52.000 It's going to be way more addictive if you could, like, look at any part of those people while they're talking. 1.00

02:44:57.000 You know?

02:44:58.000 I mean, you could do whatever you want.

02:44:59.000 You could move around in their world while they're existing.

02:45:02.000 You don't have to have a real life.

02:45:03.000 Have you seen Wall-E? I haven't.

02:45:06.000 Wall-E. Go on, Wall-E. Was it good?

02:45:08.000 Yeah, it's great.

02:45:09.000 It's a great film.

02:45:10.000 But everyone just ends up... 1.00

02:45:11.000 Every human is basically a fat, useless... 0.99

02:45:16.000 That slob that floats around, can't even walk, and he's just on a big space liner, floating around in space. 1.00

02:45:24.000 Useless. 0.99

02:45:25.000 Just gone, watching TV. Well, that's certainly a pessimistic version of reality. 0.98

02:45:30.000 What do you think?

02:45:31.000 What's your version of reality?

02:45:33.000 Because we're running at three hours and we turn into a pumpkin.

02:45:37.000 We're right about there.

02:45:39.000 What do you think is going to happen with us?

02:45:43.000 Are you pessimistic?

02:45:45.000 Are you optimistic?

02:45:46.000 Do you enjoy the direction we're moving, ultimately?

02:45:52.000 Our scientific and engineering achievements are astonishing and going beautifully well.

02:46:01.000 I don't think it needs I'm optimistic, I think.

02:46:07.000 But I think it just needs a little...

02:46:09.000 I'm slightly pessimistic at the moment.

02:46:11.000 I think it just needs this little nudge, I think.

02:46:15.000 In countries like ours, we've got these education systems and these universities that are, broadly speaking, very good.

02:46:24.000 They need a bit more money, but they're pretty good.

02:46:26.000 And we've got a culture that allows us to be open-minded and we have democracies and all these things are very difficult to get.

02:46:34.000 So I think we often miss the great things that we have in place, in places like the US and Europe.

02:46:40.000 Really very good.

02:46:40.000 Definitely.

02:46:42.000 And so it just takes a recognition of that.

02:46:45.000 I think.

02:46:46.000 And that's how we started again, isn't it?

02:46:47.000 How do you just remind people what wonderful opportunities they have and what wonderful things there are to do?

02:46:52.000 And if you just turn the reality TV off for a bit and go and read a book or something, a Kindle book if you want.

02:47:01.000 It doesn't have to be a real book.

02:47:02.000 But then, you know, what wonderful things could we achieve?

02:47:06.000 So I'm kind of optimistic there.

02:47:08.000 Beautiful.

02:47:09.000 I think so.

02:47:11.000 I mean, obviously there's some real issues with culture and society, but I often wonder, as we talked about before, if those issues just inspire us to improve and change.

02:47:20.000 You can't have a yin without a yang. 0.97

02:47:22.000 I mean, you have a bunch of shit going on that is like a constant ebb and flow. 0.94

02:47:26.000 And I always ponder whether or not that is almost a mechanism for progress or a mechanism for advancement, and that without it you don't get that. 0.99

02:47:36.000 I don't know.

02:47:38.000 It's possible.

02:47:39.000 It is possible.

02:47:40.000 So we can be optimistic at the end of the podcast.

02:47:42.000 Yes, I think we wrapped it up nice.

02:47:44.000 I think we brought it home in a beautiful way.

02:47:46.000 And can I say, just because my promoter sat over there, and I know he's been sat there for three hours, he would like me to remind the viewers that the Infinite Monkey Cage tickets are available online.

02:47:59.000 InfiniteMonkeyCage.com.

02:48:00.000 So you're on the LA one, which is the 12th of March.

02:48:06.000 Yes, at the Ricardo Montalban Theatre.

02:48:09.000 How ironic that Fantasy Island, the guy from Fantasy Island, that's who Ricardo Montalban was, that we're going to be at the Ricardo Montalban Theatre. 0.99

02:48:16.000 One of the dumbest fucking shows ever. 0.99

02:48:18.000 Fantasy Island. 1.00

02:48:19.000 That has a little midget. 1.00

02:48:21.000 Boss, they're playing.

02:48:22.000 Yin and Yang.

02:48:23.000 Yes.

02:48:23.000 See?

02:48:24.000 It's all coming together.

02:48:26.000 And then in San Francisco the day after, New York and Chicago.

02:48:29.000 All the dates are available at infinitemonkeycage.com.

02:48:34.000 Thursday, March 5th, they're in NYU at the Skirball Center in New York City.

02:48:40.000 Neil deGrasse Tyson's doing that one, actually.

02:48:41.000 Yes, Neil deGrasse Tyson, astrophysicist John Levin.

02:48:45.000 Yeah, John Levin.

02:48:45.000 Did I say it right?

02:48:46.000 And then March 7th at the Anthenium Theater in Chicago with Paul Serrano, paleontologist and evolutionary biologist Jerry Coyne.

02:49:00.000 And then of course the 12th with me and Blossom.

02:49:05.000 The girl from Blossom?

02:49:07.000 She's on the Big Bang Theory, right?

02:49:08.000 She's Blossom to me.

02:49:09.000 And the guy you make, Futurama, is there.

02:49:11.000 David Cohen, Emmy award-winning writer.

02:49:14.000 Secret, secret as well.

02:49:16.000 There might be a Python around.

02:49:18.000 Oh, and you got one March 13th about UFOs, alien probes, and other close encounters.

02:49:24.000 I want to be on that one. 0.99

02:49:25.000 Damn. 0.99

02:49:25.000 Do you? 0.99

02:49:26.000 Can't make it.

02:49:27.000 Can't go to San Francisco.

02:49:28.000 I'm busy that day. 0.99

02:49:29.000 Listen, you're fucking awesome, man. 0.95

02:49:31.000 Thank you very much. 0.95

02:49:32.000 Thanks for existing.

02:49:33.000 Thanks for doing what you do because it's so important.

02:49:37.000 It's so exciting to me to be able to watch your shows and to be able to just sort of sponge that information from you.

02:49:44.000 Thanks for just keep on keeping on, man.

02:49:47.000 I'm going to see you in three weeks.

02:49:48.000 Yes.

02:49:48.000 So I'll bring the human universe stuff for you.

02:49:51.000 I'll bring you some...

02:49:53.000 Quick and watch it.

02:49:54.000 That's it, folks.

02:49:54.000 Or download it on the Tyrant.

02:49:55.000 Yes.

02:49:56.000 Do whatever you've got to do.

02:49:58.000 Do whatever you've got to do, folks.

02:49:59.000 Get by.

02:50:00.000 Alright, we love you.

02:50:00.000 Thank you.

02:50:01.000 See you soon.

02:50:04.000 Enjoyed that.

02:50:04.000 Thank you.

02:50:05.000 That's great.

02:50:05.000 Cool.

02:50:15.000 You're right, actually.

The Joe Rogan Experience - February 09, 2015

Joe Rogan Experience #610 - Brian Cox

Episode Stats

Summary

Transcript