TRIGGERnometry - We Asked an Astrophysicist About Aliens, Mars and the Origin of Everything

00:00:00.880 Since I was a little kid, I was always fascinated with not just my own origin, you know, which

00:00:04.960 is the only story you come into, but the universe and what is the ultimate, potentially the

00:00:09.400 ultimate origin story of all, which is how did everything come to be, to say what happened

00:00:13.520 on the Tuesday before the Big Bang?

00:00:15.460 That may have an answer for the first time in history by technology that my colleagues,

00:00:19.920 who are far smarter than I am, are helping to build via what's called the Simons Observatory.

00:00:25.080 Going to Mars is fundamentally, I believe, an escapist, you know, kind of fantasy.

00:00:31.580 Do you think it's pointless?

00:00:33.460 Is there anything for us on Mars, I guess is what I'm asking.

00:00:36.260 Well, so there's something for us, right?

00:00:39.300 The question is, is that worth the price you'll have to pay?

00:00:42.540 There's a famous quote by one of my heroes, Richard Feynman.

00:00:45.440 He said, science is the belief in the ignorance of experts, not the wisdom, not the knowledge

00:00:51.580 of experts, but the ignorance of it.

00:00:53.420 What the hell are you talking about?

00:00:54.860 Feynman was a genius.

00:00:56.100 Einstein was a genius.

00:00:57.680 Yeah, they were genius because they doubted what came before them.

00:01:01.540 Science has never settled.

00:01:12.720 Hello, and welcome to Trigonometry.

00:01:15.440 I'm Francis Foster.

00:01:16.660 I'm Constantin Kissin.

00:01:17.780 And this is a show for you if you want honest conversations with fascinating people.

00:01:23.100 Our terrific guest today is a cosmologist, which, as he just told us, is a branch of astrophysics.

00:01:27.780 Professor Brian Keaton, welcome to Trigonometry.

00:01:29.780 Wow, it's a great pleasure and honor to be here, guys.

00:01:31.780 Thanks for hosting me.

00:01:32.780 It's great to have you on the show.

00:01:33.780 Before we get into everything to do with space and everything that's out there and not out there,

00:01:37.920 tell everybody who are you, how are you, where you are, what's been your journey through life?

00:01:42.240 Yeah, so I always like that question that's become your trademark because it allows me to segue into what I always ask people.

00:01:50.160 What's the most important day on the calendar?

00:01:52.420 You know, I say, what is it?

00:01:53.340 And usually if you're smart and you're a guy, you'll say my anniversary, right, or my wife's birthday.

00:01:58.420 But it's always some kind of origin story, right?

00:02:00.500 Everyone's fascinated with an origin.

00:02:02.420 And since I was a little kid, I was always fascinated with not just my own origin, you know,

00:02:06.600 which is the only story you come into that you will have to rely on other people to tell you the truth of what came before,

00:02:13.220 but the universe and what is the ultimate, potentially the ultimate origin story of all,

00:02:17.580 which is how did everything come to be?

00:02:19.060 And it's interesting because what I do is called cosmology, which a lot of people, you know,

00:02:24.040 because of the way that I look and, you know, my handsome visage, they, no, I'm just kidding,

00:02:28.460 they think it has cosmetology.

00:02:30.240 So, you know, if I don't get that, I get, you know, you're an astrology or astrologer or whatever,

00:02:35.420 can you tell me my horoscope?

00:02:36.820 I used to say no, I used to say no, but now I take opportunity to actually answer it.

00:02:41.680 I say, oh, you're a Gemini.

00:02:43.060 Oh, that's really terrible.

00:02:44.800 You know, you should have that wart looked at on the back of your neck there.

00:02:47.940 But the, you know, the similarities between both astrology and astronomy, cosmology and cosmetology are very deep.

00:02:55.900 You know, etymology is very important.

00:02:57.940 Cosmos means beauty, our face.

00:03:00.020 And what I study is the face that's presented by the universe to ordinary mortals to perceive.

00:03:05.820 And it's very beautiful.

00:03:06.660 And so I've been fascinated by that on aesthetic level and never really thinking as a kid when I was interested,

00:03:13.300 got my first telescope as a, you know, 10-year-old little boy, that I could do it as a job.

00:03:18.720 You know, who's going to pay me to be, you know, like essentially the equivalent for nerds of being an ice cream taster

00:03:24.340 or, you know, a wizard, you know, or one of those guys who, you know, like tests a roller coaster at SeaWorld.

00:03:30.060 So I didn't think you could do it as a job.

00:03:32.600 So I was kind of stymied because I loved it.

00:03:34.340 I had this great passion for it all throughout high school, college, in graduate school.

00:03:38.900 And even in graduate school, I didn't think I could do what I'm doing now,

00:03:42.380 which is to be a professor of physics and astronomy at a top university in Southern California, UC San Diego,

00:03:48.720 where I get to teach young people and work with brilliant people that teach me things

00:03:53.760 about how the universe came to be and what's going to happen in the deep future of our existence.

00:03:59.500 And so in a real way, I get paid to ask and answer and just grapple with the most fascinating origin story of them all.

00:04:08.100 And that's how did our universe come to be.

00:04:09.760 Well, that's an awesome thing to spend your life doing.

00:04:13.040 And I can tell you love it and you're super excited by it.

00:04:16.400 As you know, as we sit here recording this, we've just had your friend, Derek Weinstein, on the show.

00:04:22.040 And one of the conversations, part of the conversation we were having was about, you know, pessimism and optimism

00:04:29.900 and how we see the future of humanity and also how we, you know, our relationship with the things that you study, actually,

00:04:37.320 our relationship with things beyond Earth.

00:04:39.900 And I was saying that when I was growing up, and I imagine even more when you were growing up,

00:04:44.160 you're 10 years older than I am, you know, this idea that our destiny was somehow beyond Earth

00:04:50.240 was not just universally accepted, it was embedded in literature, it was embedded in culture.

00:04:55.500 That's what movies were about, that's what books were about.

00:04:58.200 You know, science fiction really focused.

00:05:00.840 It didn't even focus on, like, how are we going to get to the start.

00:05:03.460 That was kind of like a done deal.

00:05:05.560 It was like, when we form a society on another planet, here are some of the challenges.

00:05:09.840 Or when we have robots, here's some of the moral quandaries that we'll enter.

00:05:15.660 And yet, in my lifetime, and in yours too, I think that seems to have actually been rolled back.

00:05:21.420 And there isn't anymore that sense of destiny and vision and optimism.

00:05:25.060 Is that fair to say?

00:05:26.140 I think there is and there isn't.

00:05:27.860 There's certainly optimism, you know, more so than ever in terms of space and our future being in space.

00:05:33.380 And ironically, I'm more pessimistic about our future being in space rather than, you know, people like Eric or people like Elon Musk and so forth.

00:05:41.520 And we can get into that.

00:05:42.800 But, you know, it's the old saying, the optimist builds the airplane, the pessimist builds the parachute.

00:05:47.680 And, you know, who's to say who's more important?

00:05:49.880 I think there's a temptation because you sound smart if you're a pessimist.

00:05:54.160 And you sound like just wild-eyed naivete if you say, oh, we're going to be building these, you know, like you had Zubrin on last year or earlier.

00:06:01.400 And, you know, we're going to be there in 20 years.

00:06:03.780 There's going to be a baby born on Mars.

00:06:05.360 And I love his writing.

00:06:06.620 I love what he said.

00:06:07.140 But I think he's totally off base.

00:06:08.640 I mean, I think from a practical standpoint, he's off base.

00:06:11.480 And yet, and yet, I think it's extremely important to contemplate these things.

00:06:15.980 For example, people in my department, Shelley Wright, very famous astrophysicist, she's looking for signals of extraterrestrial intelligence using flashes of light emitted by potential lasers, you know, wielded by extraterrestrial.

00:06:31.260 Not in Star Wars, but communicating their presence, using it as some sort of vast internet, intergalactic, interstellar internet.

00:06:38.820 I think that boggles the mind and, in fact, is one of the inspirations that may, you know, spark a young Brian or, you know, Brianna or somebody now to want to get into science, which I do think is the most important thing.

00:06:51.300 I think there's no more important thing, and I get into fights with my colleagues in the literature department all the time, you know, that, you know, what is the most important thing to study?

00:06:59.000 Do we need more scientists?

00:07:00.780 Do we need more engineers?

00:07:02.060 Do we need more, you know, people in the so-called STEM fields?

00:07:04.500 Do we need more people in the humanities to tell us about meaning and so forth?

00:07:07.880 And so for that, I always look back.

00:07:10.160 Who are the people that could do both?

00:07:12.260 Who are the people like, you know, like our friend Eric?

00:07:14.460 Eric can do both.

00:07:15.900 He's one of the most eloquent, well-read, historically intelligent intellectuals, public intellectuals, talking about, you know, Bengali.

00:07:24.080 I don't know.

00:07:24.660 He can speak in Russian to you.

00:07:26.240 He can do all sorts of, you know, he can do basic, you know, he can play music.

00:07:30.460 And it was funny because you guys were talking about, oh, like, why do we shame people that don't play an instrument?

00:07:35.160 I was thinking, like, I'm pretty good at playing Spotify.

00:07:37.700 That's about where I end up.

00:07:38.900 But do we need these two cultures as C.P. Snow used to talk about?

00:07:42.700 I claim, let's look back to the greatest intellects of history.

00:07:45.860 Read Principia by Isaac Newton.

00:07:48.400 Read Michael Faraday.

00:07:50.420 Read my hero, who is Galileo.

00:07:53.640 And you will read things in there that rival the deepest, most enriching poetry in written prose format.

00:08:00.540 You think, well, what are they talking about?

00:08:01.740 Equations with, like, pendulums.

00:08:03.500 What does that have to do?

00:08:04.280 No, because they were speculating on things.

00:08:06.320 There was no science in the way that we have it today.

00:08:08.920 There were no journals.

00:08:09.860 There was no peer review, as Eric rails about.

00:08:14.100 And so you would do things either by live demonstration.

00:08:17.300 So imagine you have this theory, as I'll be speaking tonight, I'm being honored by giving this discourse at the Royal Institution, which is the oldest continuing dialogue in humanity and civilization that's never ended since the early 1800s, where speakers come in, they're pushed onto the stage, and they give a speech.

00:08:33.120 And that's to evoke this notion that science is an evolving story.

00:08:37.080 It's never finished.

00:08:37.940 You never reach the end of science.

00:08:39.400 So when I look at that, and then I look at Faraday's writing, who is one of the founding members of the Royal Institution, I read his writing.

00:08:48.260 It's poetic, and it's humble, and it's beautiful.

00:08:51.180 And I say, well, you could learn a lot about literature by reading Michael Faraday's works on electromagnetism, the invention of the motor, and thoughts about things that were speculative.

00:09:00.940 At UC San Diego, I'm delighted to be the associate director of what's called the Arthur C. Clarke Center for Human Imagination, one of your great countrymen, right?

00:09:10.180 And Arthur C. Clarke, in many of his books, I mean, it's incredible, rich language, brilliant ideas, insights, a lot of technology we have today was presaged, not invented by him, but presaged in many of his books.

00:09:23.840 The iPad, geosynchronous satellites, bases on the moon, AI, and all sorts of other things that we talk about today.

00:09:32.000 He was talking about those 50 or 60 years ago, writing almost as a poet.

00:09:35.760 And so I feel like to be optimistic is to think and dream about these things, you know, and reach beyond what your grasp is, as Kennedy used to say.

00:09:43.980 But at the same time, I think we can have a little bit of a devolvement into, well, let's escape this place.

00:09:52.120 And that's what I'm worried about.

00:09:53.380 So I think we have to balance the pessimism, where you sound really smart because you can predict the sky is falling, and no one really ever keeps the receipts.

00:10:01.740 You know, I actually went back and listened to this podcast by this guy, Sam Harris.

00:10:06.460 I don't know if you've ever heard of him.

00:10:08.140 But he had this other guy, Scott Galloway.

00:10:11.160 And they were talking about it, and it was like from 2020 or early 2020.

00:10:14.860 They were talking about how evil it would be if Trump got elected because, you know, God forbid, there'd be a war in the Ukraine probably.

00:10:20.000 And I'm just like, wait, guys, do you ever look back and check your predictions?

00:10:24.600 So it's easy to make predictions about things and come off as a pseudo-intellectually sound reasoning.

00:10:30.880 But I think you have to balance that.

00:10:33.880 And humans are awful at balancing things, right?

00:10:36.440 We like polarization.

00:10:37.760 We like going in one direction or the other.

00:10:39.100 We're very uncomfortable being in the middle.

00:10:41.060 There's an old Yiddish saying that if you stand in the middle of the road, you get hit by both sides of the traveling.

00:10:45.980 Tell us about it.

00:10:47.740 No, you guys.

00:10:48.660 That being the case, do you sometimes get frustrated at the fact that we seem to be becoming ever more pessimistic?

00:10:56.200 Even America, the most optimistic nation in the world, is now kind of pessimistic.

00:11:01.220 Yeah, it is and it isn't.

00:11:02.860 When you look at things politically, I was, you know, musing with Constantine earlier today, you know, that when I got into astronomy, part of it was because, you know, no one wakes up in the morning and says,

00:11:13.820 I hate those damn Republican constellations over there and, oh, that Democratic comet is going to save us.

00:11:19.780 We don't think like that.

00:11:20.980 It's a safe space from politics, so it's not polarized.

00:11:23.560 It can be, there are overlays of that, we can get into that, because everything at some level has some notion of politicization, but that's okay.

00:11:32.400 It's manageable.

00:11:33.620 I think in terms of optimism, there's kind of this wild-eyed thing where, you know, just take the most prominent ones that are going on right now, and you guys have had conversations about this.

00:11:43.060 You had some with Eric, and you've had others, you know, it's AI, depopulation, and then going to Mars, right?

00:11:49.880 So those are three very, very interesting and unique conversations that you guys have had.

00:11:54.140 And when I look at that, and I think, well, in all those cases, there's some element of escapism, which is a fundamental expression of dissatisfaction with where you are now.

00:12:03.880 But that's not a bad thing, right?

00:12:05.160 If we weren't dissatisfied with our lot, we would have never invented at my home institution the polio vaccine by Jonas Salk, right?

00:12:12.080 We would have said, okay, we have to live with this or die with this or not live with this, et cetera.

00:12:16.620 So dissatisfaction is a hallmark of a civilization, the discontent and sort of, like, unwillingness to settle for the current dynamic.

00:12:26.540 So I think that that is a good thing.

00:12:28.260 On the other hand, being too wild-eyed and, you know, just take the Mars example, going to Mars is fundamentally, I believe, an escapist, you know, kind of fantasy.

00:12:41.380 Do you think it's pointless?

00:12:43.800 I wouldn't say it's pointless.

00:12:45.420 There are technological benefits that will redound to any society that endeavors to do something on such a grand scale.

00:12:54.040 But, I mean, they're actually going to, like, yes, the project of making the thing that takes you to Mars will create new technology and whatever.

00:13:03.240 But is there anything for us on Mars, I guess is what I'm asking.

00:13:06.480 Well, so there's something for us, right?

00:13:09.360 The question is, is that worth the price you'll have to pay?

00:13:12.600 So I always ask, you know, Elon, God bless him, has 10 kids that we know about.

00:13:17.240 So far.

00:13:17.680 Yeah, I mean, what time is it, right?

00:13:19.940 And I love that.

00:13:21.300 I love his, and he said that, you know, he's doing his part.

00:13:24.040 To forestall population collapse.

00:13:26.860 And I do mean that.

00:13:28.520 But on the other hand, talking about dying on Mars, who my friend I've had on, and you should interview at some point, Lord Martin Rees, the astronomer royal of this great kingdom here.

00:13:38.100 He used to joke with me that, you know, his job as astronomer royal was to tell the queen her horoscope.

00:13:42.840 But he doesn't do that anymore.

00:13:44.240 Sadly, she's deceased.

00:13:45.900 So the question is, you know, he said he wants to die on Mars.

00:13:49.240 And Lord Rees would say, well, hopefully it's not on impact, right?

00:13:54.240 So let's just say it's not on impact.

00:13:55.880 And he's going to make it there, right?

00:13:56.820 Right.

00:13:56.920 So he's going to get there.

00:13:57.800 Elon, which of your 10 kids are coming with you?

00:14:01.000 Which of the sort of pilots on this craft are not, it's not at all possible, in my humble estimation, for it to be a return trip.

00:14:10.860 I mean, the minimum you're talking about, at least the better part of a decade.

00:14:14.340 To go there, do something there, return voyage, you know, the way that the planetary orbits work out, the minimum time duration round trip would be at least two years, maybe even more.

00:14:24.240 All the way, you're experiencing extreme microgravity, which destroys your mental capacity.

00:14:31.460 It destroys brain function.

00:14:33.280 Astronauts come back.

00:14:34.620 Their bodies are literally as if they've been, you know, in a concentration camp, wasting away.

00:14:39.740 Just there's no way to exercise, see actual natural sunlight.

00:14:43.400 And then once you get there, it's not like Christopher Columbus had to bring civilization with him to the new world or, you know, that he couldn't find things to sustain him there.

00:14:53.380 Now, I know, yes, there's carbon dioxide on there, as Zubrin talked about on this podcast.

00:14:58.320 So carbon dioxide, you can use that to make oxygen and carbon.

00:15:01.800 And, oh, hey, life has a lot of carbon and oxygen.

00:15:03.780 Yeah, but it's not like Columbus had to bring with him, like, actual seeds so that when he got to the new world, he could start to grow stuff.

00:15:10.440 No, there were people living there watching him discover the new world, right?

00:15:14.060 So, but moreover, when you look at the resources that a planetary environment can sustain, what is it actually made up of?

00:15:22.620 If you took all life on Earth and all life that's ever existed, so all the biosphere, what we call the biosphere,

00:15:28.600 and you took it and you made it into a creamy, Vegemite-like paste, okay, how thick do you think that would be?

00:15:36.880 Like, every dinosaur that ever lived, every amoeba that ever lived, every chlorophyll molecule that ever produced inside of these lovely plants and bushes behind us, right?

00:15:45.960 How thick do you think that layer of the Earth's surface would be?

00:15:49.840 No idea.

00:15:50.500 Kilometers, you know, microns, what would it be?

00:15:53.580 Francis, any idea?

00:15:54.580 I mean, I have never been more out of my debt.

00:15:55.700 I thought you guys were trigonometry.

00:15:56.580 I thought we were going to talk about trigonometry.

00:15:58.600 My favorite thing.

00:15:59.520 Tell us.

00:16:00.100 It's about four millimeters.

00:16:02.020 Really?

00:16:02.480 Yeah.

00:16:02.740 That's all?

00:16:03.260 Yeah.

00:16:03.520 And if you've ever seen the Earth from space, like that blue marble picture, you know, something above on your screensaver, right?

00:16:09.480 You're looking at, you know, tens of kilometers, you know, millions of times bigger layer of, you know, and even that is the so-called thin blue line.

00:16:18.420 Without that, we don't exist, right?

00:16:19.880 So just imagine, like, taking that layer of biosphere, that shell of biology, and spreading it on Mars.

00:16:26.200 Now, Mars is smaller.

00:16:27.140 It's a little bigger than our moon, a little bit smaller than the Earth.

00:16:29.560 So that would be a little bit thicker.

00:16:31.800 But can you imagine it?

00:16:33.400 I mean, can you imagine transporting that much material or having, unlocking, or converting the carbon dioxide, the nitrogen, the phosphorus, and DNA, and RNA to make a living biosphere?

00:16:45.760 So why is this important, though?

00:16:47.960 Why am I not denying that we should do it?

00:16:50.340 I question it, as I said, I question it on a personal level, as a father myself.

00:16:54.120 You're a father, too, constantly, right?

00:16:55.920 I don't think you're not.

00:16:57.540 Not yet.

00:16:58.180 No, yeah.

00:16:58.560 Ladies, I think.

00:17:00.560 So when you have a child, your world changes.

00:17:04.040 And by the way, you don't have to have a biological child for your world to change.

00:17:06.900 You can have an ideological child.

00:17:08.280 You can be a father figure.

00:17:09.220 I was an uncular figure for many years before.

00:17:11.860 So the point is, what do you leave behind to go on this one-way journey?

00:17:16.400 Let's stipulate it's possible you could get there.

00:17:18.400 Maybe even you'd live.

00:17:20.220 Who are you going to bring with you?

00:17:22.140 What kind of psychological damage is that going to do to you to leave people behind?

00:17:27.340 So maybe you could say that just for Elon.

00:17:30.620 Maybe he's comfortable with that, or maybe he's not, and he's just so detached from that sense of reality.

00:17:36.280 But I think for most people, it would be very hard to do that, and then let alone to convince millions of people to do it, to create a sustainable, you know, agriculture.

00:17:45.540 But then why are you going there?

00:17:47.460 What is the reason?

00:17:48.200 Nobody ever asks him why.

00:17:50.060 He says, I want to go there.

00:17:51.320 It's almost like he wants to make this arc.

00:17:53.800 It's a very sort of almost eschatological, you know, like he's making this arc.

00:17:58.440 Mars is the arc.

00:17:59.400 And in order for us to be, and the way I've heard him describe it, and I'd love to talk to him more about it.

00:18:04.760 I don't think he's talked to a real physicist, you know, as far as I can tell.

00:18:08.460 I don't think Joe Rogan, you know, qualifies as a physicist yet, although he's had on a lot of physicists.

00:18:13.280 But the point being, what are the physical limitations?

00:18:16.760 What is the purpose of this?

00:18:17.940 Well, it's to store consciousness.

00:18:19.700 Yes.

00:18:19.960 Well, I say, well, there are other ways you can store consciousness, just like there are other ways you can time travel.

00:18:25.140 Did you guys know you can time travel?

00:18:27.120 Right now we're time traveling.

00:18:28.280 I don't mean it like that.

00:18:29.600 But the problem comes in when people want to travel through time, and they want to bring their bodies with them,

00:18:35.340 and they want to bring their possessions with them, like some pharaoh from, you know, from ancient Egypt.

00:18:41.760 And so they're greedy.

00:18:42.640 In other words, they want to have their afterlife and live it too.

00:18:48.100 And I think that when you step back and realize you are capable right now, or in the future, hopefully you live a long life,

00:18:53.960 but you are capable of living a very long time.

00:18:56.400 And it's not, you know, as Woody Allen said, I don't want to live on in the minds of my countrymen.

00:19:02.680 I want to live on in my apartment in Brooklyn.

00:19:05.320 In this case, it's through the impact and the connections that you make on Earth right now.

00:19:10.960 By connecting to people, by nurturing relationships and establishing the geometrical explosion of connection and meaning that comes from relationships.

00:19:20.640 That's all gone when you're on Mars.

00:19:22.520 You're talking about three other people, four other people.

00:19:24.440 If that, I mean, it might just be one person.

00:19:26.840 Right?

00:19:27.460 And so the question is, what is the goal?

00:19:29.860 Well, where does consciousness reside?

00:19:32.040 Is consciousness universal?

00:19:33.700 Like, can you store it on a flash drive?

00:19:36.980 You know, can we upload it?

00:19:38.100 Are AIs conscious?

00:19:39.200 I've been playing around a lot with these.

00:19:41.020 We can talk about those and the potential.

00:19:43.080 Well, I know Eric's expressed, you know, some concerns about them and others, Elon as well.

00:19:47.800 So what is the goal?

00:19:49.940 Nobody ever really gets into that.

00:19:51.200 Well, no.

00:19:51.720 I mean, if I was to steel man, what I perceive as Elon's argument is, yes, okay, you can download the sum of human knowledge onto a flash drive and launch it into space where it can be like, you know, a message in a bottle for the rest of eternity.

00:20:03.580 And you could argue that's consciousness, but it's not self-replicating, right?

00:20:08.480 It's frozen in time, whereas what he's talking about is survival of humanity, whereby if we all have a nuclear war here on Earth, there'll be, you know, seven people on Mars who are able to reproduce and survive on Earth.

00:20:23.020 Right. So there's two approaches, right?

00:20:25.020 And I agree with you.

00:20:26.060 Although it is possible to, you know, if there's an explanation for the origin of life is a very mysterious thing.

00:20:31.980 We actually don't know about it.

00:20:32.940 There are people that stipulate that life, you know, spontaneously originated.

00:20:36.640 Some of the work done by late professors at UC San Diego, Miller and Urey, established this primordial chemistry, primordial Earth-like environment, and they put in some goop, and they shocked it with electrodes, and out came, you know, these little Neanderthals.

00:20:51.140 No, that would be pretty surprising.

00:20:53.380 But it was some amino acids.

00:20:54.800 Yes.

00:20:55.020 Maybe they pre-pre-pre-precursors to life.

00:20:57.300 Anyway, it turns out that experiment had a lot of incorrect assumptions about what the Earth was like.

00:21:02.540 Anyway, the point being that the history of the Earth is intimately related to the life that's inhabited it.

00:21:09.180 And actually, the life, that four-millimeter layer, is probably the most consequential of all the geographic strata that one would encounter going, you know, drilling down to the core of the Earth, essentially.

00:21:20.940 And it's a relic of what we call the Anthropocene, you know, when the hominids have existed.

00:21:25.380 So the question is, does that encode it?

00:21:27.840 You know, does DNA encode it?

00:21:29.520 What level of hierarchy of life?

00:21:31.360 So is it for humanity?

00:21:33.500 That, of course, again, it is a selfish thing, right?

00:21:36.220 I mean, there's, what would happen if the, if, not a nuclear war, let's just say the Earth is hit by some massive extinction-level event that wipes out humanity.

00:21:45.100 Well, there will be other entities that will live.

00:21:48.400 It's not like all life would be obliterated, nor did it happen during the Jurassic period when the giant extinction event took out all the dinosaurs.

00:21:55.660 What happened then, it allowed mammals to thrive and flourish, and then we descended from that.

00:21:59.520 I'm not saying I want that to happen, by the way, don't get me wrong.

00:22:02.880 But the point is, when you put so much into this, I mean, it's not, I don't want to say it's a fantasy, but it is escapist.

00:22:12.260 We are escaping, which is a good thing.

00:22:14.120 Like, you're on a plane that's going down, and you want that parachute that the pessimists pack for you, right?

00:22:18.060 On the other hand, what's the net goal?

00:22:21.360 It should be to preserve humanity, right?

00:22:23.680 So let's say it's going to cost trillions and trillions, whatever amount it is.

00:22:27.260 What if you could put that into another thing that would alleviate the need for Noah's Ark number two?

00:22:33.880 In other words, if Elon and put his time and attention into putting in safeguards against the main ways that a planet could rid itself of our presence, namely nuclear war and some biological war or biological entity like a virus that becomes a global pandemic, you know, not that that could ever happen.

00:22:55.180 So what could you do to mitigate those?

00:22:57.800 I think it's far more efficient.

00:23:01.000 Just take one thing.

00:23:02.700 Imagine you go down to the Pacific Ocean, and you scoop up a bottle of water.

00:23:08.740 You guys are invited.

00:23:09.560 Come visit me and my podcast in San Diego.

00:23:11.860 And we'll go down to the beach, and we'll scoop up some water from the Pacific.

00:23:14.240 There's trillions of microorganisms in there.

00:23:16.500 There's relics and fossils of coral and all sorts of things in there.

00:23:19.360 If you found that on Mars, it would be the greatest discovery of all time, potentially, right?

00:23:25.020 But that means something very different.

00:23:27.240 Like, that means you can find life right now.

00:23:29.980 It's in the ocean.

00:23:30.780 And could we live in the ocean?

00:23:32.220 Maybe.

00:23:32.780 Not like those guys, unfortunately, in the submersible recently.

00:23:35.540 But you can live, and we already know how to live underwater.

00:23:39.340 You know, there are people in the Navy in San Diego that do it six months at a time on a submarine, right?

00:23:43.060 So the question is, where is the most efficient use of resources, intellectual capital, human capital?

00:23:50.560 Why is it that it's being focused in that direction towards, you know, one planet, which is, you know, admittedly potentially supportable of, you know, it's more hospitable than Venus, but it's less so than the ocean?

00:24:04.600 Do you know what you're reminding me of?

00:24:06.380 Did you ever watch West Wing?

00:24:08.360 No, I never got into that.

00:24:09.880 There's a great scene in West Wing where somebody asks one of the staffers of the White House why it is that we have to go to Mars.

00:24:19.320 I think they're actually talking about Mars, and he launches into this long monologue about how it's what's next, as in human beings have always explored.

00:24:28.160 They've always taken the next step.

00:24:29.760 They left the cave and they walked out, and then they went to the new world, inverted commas.

00:24:35.060 And it's kind of like the idea is that we're an exploring species, and that's what's next.

00:24:41.300 And what does that speak of, though?

00:24:42.900 I think it speaks of a restlessness and unhappiness and with your current system.

00:24:46.360 It's not like, oh, I really can't wait until I can get away from my wife and kids.

00:24:50.180 If you're happy and you have a network, a connections, a community, something that you have a deeper meaning for.

00:24:57.620 You know, Viktor Frankl spoke about, I'm sure you guys have encountered this, you know, that as opposed to Freud who said that, you know, the sexual drive was the strongest innate drive in humanity.

00:25:07.200 He said, no, the search for meaning is.

00:25:08.660 And people do anything for meaning, including deprive other people of their meaning, right?

00:25:12.480 And so I think it is almost escapist in a sense.

00:25:17.640 And I don't say that necessarily in a judgmental way.

00:25:20.700 I'm just saying be cognizant of it.

00:25:22.780 Why are you doing what you're doing?

00:25:24.380 And I've encountered that a lot in science as well.

00:25:27.340 But one thing I just want to come back to with Mars and the search for alien life, which I'm very interested in.

00:25:32.460 Although there I'm very pessimistic about as well.

00:25:35.680 And I think some of it relates to these very same topics that would cause somebody like a Musk or anybody who's conscious and curious about what it would be like to live on another planet to think about what are the planetary astrophysics-based limits to things like climate change.

00:25:51.840 Like, is it possible that the climate could just run away forever and we could just keep pumping carbon dioxide into this atmosphere?

00:25:59.040 No, it's not.

00:26:00.420 And, in fact, by studying other so-called exoplanets, of which we know of thousands now, many of which are exactly like the Earth in terms of this host star that they are orbiting around and their density and their average size.

00:26:12.880 So there's plenty of places where life could exist.

00:26:15.160 And so the question is, well, what would it take for them to get to the same stage that we had?

00:26:19.300 And I always like to point out, like, I think, you know, the key thing is, the key question that I would want to ask an alien is, do you have whales on your planet?

00:26:27.760 And you're like, what the hell is he talking about?

00:26:29.000 Do they have whales on your planet?

00:26:30.260 Like, why are you asking about that?

00:26:31.520 Well, you know, to get here in this beautiful studio, to make these beautiful neon lights, these computers that are driving the cameras that are filming us in glorious 4K, right?

00:26:41.640 They weren't built by computers, right?

00:26:43.980 There wasn't, like, some primordial computer that sprung into it.

00:26:47.140 No, no, no.

00:26:47.580 They were built up for something more primitive.

00:26:49.300 And, in fact, a computer was built up with transistors.

00:26:52.160 And if you look at what a transistor is, the first one was this thing of, like, chicken wire and chewing gum.

00:26:57.380 It was really, you wouldn't say, like, hmm, now there's 15 billion of them on my single iPhone, you know, 14.

00:27:04.500 But it's true.

00:27:05.560 But it wasn't built with an iPhone 14, right?

00:27:07.820 So you keep going back and you come to, like, light and you come to petroleum and so forth.

00:27:13.180 So whale oil was replaced by petroleum.

00:27:15.640 So that means that for a long time humans had their lighting needs met, instead of kerosene and petroleum products, by whale oil.

00:27:25.040 So, like, well, how could they have gotten there from point A to point B?

00:27:29.320 Yeah, maybe they could have.

00:27:30.140 Maybe they could have discovered it and they could have.

00:27:31.720 But the question is, what are the contingent things?

00:27:35.100 The things, you know, the sine qua non, without that, it makes the further justification of technology impossible, right?

00:27:42.820 So we look at things like plate tectonics.

00:27:45.920 There are theories that suggest that the biosphere that existed on Earth provided a lubricant that then allowed the plates to move and adjust themselves from the Pangea configuration into the more modern configuration over a span of just a few millions of, hundreds of millions of years.

00:28:01.900 Not a short amount of time, but not as long as the Earth, all this year.

00:28:05.600 And some people believe that's contingent, that we needed to have that in order to have life exist.

00:28:10.000 So you start putting together all these different sequences that had to occur, and in the right order, right?

00:28:16.640 If you discover, how do you discover, you know, the transistor before you had the vacuum tube, right?

00:28:21.580 Is that possible?

00:28:22.320 Maybe it is, but maybe it's not.

00:28:23.820 So by asking questions about these other planets, we can then learn about, well, what are the unique things about our own planet?

00:28:29.940 And to just go back to this discovery of life thing, which I said, you know, it meant you just go down to the lake and scoop up, or the Pacific Ocean, scoop up some water.

00:28:38.340 We actually know what would happen the day after life is discovered.

00:28:42.380 I bet you guys think it would be pretty exciting if we discovered, do you know that we discovered extraterrestrial life on Earth, or it was claimed that we did?

00:28:49.700 Didn't this happen during the pandemic?

00:28:51.520 No, well, it did, yes.

00:28:52.980 Yeah.

00:28:53.440 Yes, but also before that.

00:28:54.680 Was it not like some dead bacteria on an asteroid or something like that?

00:28:58.300 So close, yeah.

00:28:58.600 Yeah, I did read about it.

00:28:59.520 Yeah, yeah, so there's been about eight different recordings of claims of the discovery of extraterrestrial life or technology, technology via a signal received from another solar system, potentially, or a byproduct of life in the case of what was discovered during the pandemic.

00:29:16.200 As Francis just mentioned, the so-called byproduct of living creatures called phosphine, which was discovered on Venus, it's been retracted.

00:29:24.120 What I'm talking about is from this very, very famous movie called Contact with Jodie Foster.

00:29:31.220 So that was written by Carl Sagan and his wife, Ann Drurian, who has been a guest on my podcast.

00:29:35.860 And it was the only science fiction book he ever wrote.

00:29:39.720 And that book is based loosely on an actual figure who's another guest named Jill Tarter, who's a leader of the search for extraterrestrial intelligence.

00:29:48.580 Well, in the 1990s, in Antarctica, where I've been twice, they discovered a meteorite.

00:29:55.000 And that meteorite seemed to have on it fragments or portions of microorganisms, either that or their respiratory products.

00:30:03.960 In other words, if you found like, you know, exhaled carbon dioxide, you don't have to ask, how does it get there?

00:30:07.900 Because it doesn't form so easily naturally.

00:30:10.760 Pure oxygen doesn't form, you know, so easily naturally.

00:30:13.360 So the question, how did it get there?

00:30:14.380 Well, so there was this huge press conference and Bill Clinton, there's a scene in the movie Contact.

00:30:20.000 Maybe you guys will cut it and you guys have such an enormous budget here.

00:30:23.480 It's so lovely.

00:30:25.000 Good afternoon.

00:30:30.780 I'm glad to be joined by my science and technology advisor.

00:30:36.860 This is the product of years of exploration by some of the world's most distinguished scientists.

00:30:43.400 Like all discoveries, this one will and should continue to be reviewed, examined, and scrutinized.

00:30:50.740 It must be confirmed by other scientists.

00:30:53.260 If this discovery is confirmed, it will surely be one of the most stunning insights into our universe that science has ever uncovered.

00:31:02.700 Its implications are as far-reaching and awe-inspiring as can be imagined.

00:31:07.760 Even as it promises answers to some of our oldest questions, it poses still others even more fundamental.

00:31:15.100 We will continue to listen closely to what it has to say as we continue the search for answers and for knowledge that is as old as humanity itself, but essential to our people's future.

00:31:28.360 But he's on the discovery, if confirmed, will you go down as the greatest discovery of all time?

00:31:35.880 Okay, so it wasn't confirmed, but it wasn't this confirmed either for decades.

00:31:41.380 In other words, the general public was left.

00:31:43.200 And that was a real scene.

00:31:43.940 Now, by the way, that was recorded and spliced into a movie about the discovery, you know, in this white albino guy.

00:31:50.640 He looks weird.

00:31:51.340 It's the whole narrative of the book that's fictional, but that one scene is factual.

00:31:56.300 It goes to show you, in the mind of the general public, that never was recanted, right?

00:32:01.740 You guys just both mentioned two separate claims.

00:32:04.460 So did those change the world?

00:32:07.380 They didn't change?

00:32:07.960 I mean, did you guys wake up and say, oh, well, like, all is restored now.

00:32:12.080 I have meaning in my life because they discovered some phosphine on Venus.

00:32:15.660 For all you know, they didn't disconfirm it, right?

00:32:18.020 I just told you that it hasn't been confirmed.

00:32:19.780 Most people don't believe it's valid.

00:32:22.660 So it didn't change your lives.

00:32:24.320 So why do we think, you know, discovering life on another planet or going to another planet is going to find this transcendent meaning?

00:32:30.480 I find that it's not entirely self-consistent.

00:32:34.540 It's also, but isn't it also about pushing the limits of what we think human beings can do?

00:32:41.400 Isn't that it?

00:32:42.880 Seeing a self-imposed limit, then going beyond that.

00:32:45.760 Isn't that consistent with the human spirit, the drive for more?

00:32:49.240 Or the wanting to test yourself, push beyond the limits of society or what people think human beings are capable of?

00:32:57.060 So I want to give you one example from my country and one example from your country.

00:33:01.520 So 112 years ago, there was a race.

00:33:05.320 Every bit as viscerally competitive as the space race to land on the moon, which I'll get to next.

00:33:11.700 And that was the race to reach the South Pole Antarctica, which, as I said, I've been there twice.

00:33:16.000 It's as close to the most boring, undeveloped, you know, pure white hellscape of a frozen planet in any science fiction movie you've ever seen.

00:33:24.860 You go out there.

00:33:26.280 Here's how you picture it.

00:33:27.460 Go in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, flash freeze it, solid, and then look around you.

00:33:32.640 What would you see?

00:33:33.380 It's nothing for 700 miles.

00:33:36.240 And yet, that was the goal of a generation of explorers dating back to Roald Amundsen and Robert Falcon Scott.

00:33:43.200 And they both approached it.

00:33:45.580 Amundsen actually tried to reach the North Pole first, failed, immediately did a 180, literal 180, and he beat Scott to the South Pole by three weeks.

00:33:55.860 And that three-week period between December, when he reached it, and January, when Scott reached it, meant the difference between life and death for the explorers in Scott's party.

00:34:05.280 And the reason they did that, there's many reasons why the Brits were doing it on a scientific journey.

00:34:10.300 So they were trying to, they would encounter things for the Royal Geographical Society.

00:34:14.800 They'd pick up a meteorite.

00:34:15.780 They would find meteorites there, too.

00:34:17.540 They found, you know, petrified seals.

00:34:19.640 But mostly, it was a pretty much boring ski trip.

00:34:22.260 The other thing is that the Norwegians were very comfortable using animals as their rockets, you know, as their exploration vehicles driving them, knowing full well that once you got to the top of the South Pole or Plateau, it's about 9,000 feet above sea level, which most people don't realize is pretty high up.

00:34:38.600 So they had to ski up over these dangerous things called crevasses that people would die in and freeze to death.

00:34:44.000 And so they'd ski up, and the dogs would pull them up, and then the way home, they don't need the dogs.

00:34:47.940 So what do you think they had, you know, for lunch at the top of the world or bottom of the world, they would eat the dogs.

00:34:52.880 The Brits didn't want to do that.

00:34:53.940 So they had to be their own conveyance animals, and they pulled their sleds, which meant they had to carry more food, more fuel, more water, everything.

00:35:01.160 So it ended up costing them between life and death that technological decision that they made, which there are some parallels here.

00:35:06.860 So this was reached at great cost.

00:35:09.000 It was a huge thing.

00:35:09.940 People, and you know probably about the Shackleton voyages, these captivated the world.

00:35:13.960 I mean, these were some of the most interesting things.

00:35:15.680 They have far horizon, go what's over it.

00:35:18.220 Do you know that we didn't go back to Antarctica for over 50 years?

00:35:21.600 Like, in other words, they reached this goal, they got there, and then they left, and they didn't come back for 50 years.

00:35:28.340 And now there's about 100 people there in the middle, and we're talking in the middle of the northern hemisphere summer, exactly.

00:35:34.300 It's the middle of winter.

00:35:35.120 At the South Pole, there's about 45 people.

00:35:37.300 That's it.

00:35:38.160 For 700 miles, you could be like the richest person on the continent, the fattest person on the continent.

00:35:42.760 You could be whatever you want on a continent the size of western United States.

00:35:47.060 It's huge, right?

00:35:49.600 Then, now let's fast forward.

00:35:51.000 Another, you know, 50-year interval, which we haven't gone back to.

00:35:54.860 At least we've gone back to the South Pole.

00:35:56.300 That's the exploration of the moon.

00:35:57.620 First reached 1969, July 20th.

00:36:00.040 When we got there, we said we came in peace for all mankind.

00:36:03.120 Really, it was a battle of Cold War superiority.

00:36:05.960 It was an intellect.

00:36:07.320 But in other words, people always talk about the need for human exploration.

00:36:10.700 But really, when we point to it, we're really thinking about a psychological frontier more than like a physical frontier.

00:36:17.260 Otherwise, why wouldn't we have gone back to the moon?

00:36:19.360 If it was so beneficial, you know, there's helium-3 there, and there's, you know, there's a lot of, you know, minerals, aluminum, whatever.

00:36:26.880 Maybe not enough to overcome that kind of what I call the Roger Bannister problem.

00:36:31.320 So once Roger Bannister broke the 4-minute mile, you know, it became past.

00:36:34.880 Nobody was really that interested.

00:36:36.120 Oh, I'm going to be 357.

00:36:37.380 Who cares?

00:36:38.080 Bannister already did that.

00:36:39.040 So there's this first kind of priority.

00:36:42.360 And actually, what Scott said resonates through to this day.

00:36:46.080 He said, great God, when he reached the South Pole, imagine you're coming, you know, out of the lunar lander, and Neil Armstrong steps onto a Soviet Union flag.

00:36:56.800 Okay?

00:36:57.580 It would have been the most disappointing thing.

00:36:59.500 These guys had that experience.

00:37:01.320 They were skiing, and from the South Pole, it's so flat and so barren, they could see the Norwegian flag from miles away.

00:37:08.120 So they got there.

00:37:09.960 They knew that they had lost, and they still had to make it there to say that they had reached the South Pole, at least to maybe check.

00:37:16.080 Maybe he was off by a couple feet.

00:37:17.460 No, he wasn't.

00:37:18.300 I haven't seen what's quite awesome at navigation as well.

00:37:21.140 He got there.

00:37:21.740 He saw it.

00:37:22.080 He said, great God, said Scott.

00:37:23.760 This is an awful place.

00:37:26.260 All the more so for having reached it without the benefit of priority.

00:37:31.920 That's the human drive.

00:37:33.160 We want to get there first.

00:37:34.660 It's not getting there.

00:37:35.840 Getting there.

00:37:36.220 So if it was getting there, we would have set up a compound and done all this cool stuff.

00:37:39.400 Same on the moon.

00:37:40.680 We haven't gone back there.

00:37:41.660 I predict the same on Mars.

00:37:42.840 I think we can get to Mars.

00:37:44.200 I think a person can get there.

00:37:45.560 I think establishing an output is almost as remote or impossible as establishing one on the moon.

00:37:52.360 Yes, I know Zubrin will write in and say that, yeah, there's more raw materials there.

00:37:56.200 There's a lot of raw materials in Antarctica.

00:37:58.540 I don't see any civilizations popping up down there.

00:38:01.580 And if you say, well, like, there's this fallacy that if there was a nuclear war, and God forbid there's ever a nuclear war.

00:38:06.580 I'm not advocating it.

00:38:08.200 Keating advocates for nuclear holocaust.

00:38:10.200 No, not at all.

00:38:11.320 I treasure this planet.

00:38:12.400 And in fact, I'm trying to say we should be dedicating our efforts towards the mitigation, the militation against the destruction of the planet.

00:38:19.200 But these idiots who have been given, so I always say, the worst thing about physics is that it produces technology.

00:38:24.660 The worst thing is that we save the world, right?

00:38:26.900 We created the atomic bomb.

00:38:28.420 So there's a movie coming out this summer, Oppenheimer.

00:38:31.160 One of my friends, Shua Peck, is an amazing human being.

00:38:33.680 He's a star and not the main character, but he's one of the stars, and I'm going to chat with him on the podcast soon.

00:38:39.780 We save the world using physics, using the laws of physics, nuclear fission, creating an atomic device.

00:38:46.540 We then have the – that would not end even human life on Earth.

00:38:50.520 It might not be so great, but if Musk or others – I don't want to single them out, by the way,

00:38:55.380 because I think it's a very, you know, generous and interesting thing that he's trying to do if misguided in terms of its ultimate aim.

00:39:02.760 Because we could establish a human outpost in Antarctica.

00:39:06.720 That could happen.

00:39:07.540 And there's way more resources.

00:39:09.340 It's incredible.

00:39:10.040 To make one kilogram to take this coffee cup into space.

00:39:13.120 He's reduced it from $10,000 to a few hundred dollars.

00:39:16.920 It's still, you know, 80 to 100 times more expensive than doing the same thing which I can get Frappuccino down at the South Pole anytime I want.

00:39:26.040 Soft serve on demand.

00:39:27.820 It's incredible.

00:39:28.840 So, you know, we have to question, is that the most efficient way to accomplish the goal of archiving and backing up into the cloud what human consciousness is?

00:39:38.220 So your point is, it's a misallocation of resources.

00:39:41.620 In my opinion.

00:39:44.760 And what should we be focusing on?

00:39:47.320 I think the most important thing is education.

00:39:50.280 I think the more STEM-educated people we are, with a balance of, as I said, the humanities in the kind of model of a Galileo,

00:39:59.660 in the model of a Newton, or any of the great, you know, champions of science, scientific tradition.

00:40:07.040 If you can couple that with a sense of, I don't want to say divine, because I think it has a lot of religious overtones.

00:40:17.100 I happen to be practicing Jew in my case.

00:40:19.320 But in the sense of, that you have to recognize the limitations of the human ability, but that's like an enervating, a positive thing.

00:40:30.220 That you should say, look, we are here for this brief, brief amount of time.

00:40:33.920 It is a flash of the eye.

00:40:35.960 How do we then inculcate our children, our civilization, with meaning?

00:40:43.000 Science is great for producing technology, and so we come to expect technology from basic science.

00:40:48.020 And that's fine if you can have a steward of that technology that is competent, capable, soulful,

00:40:57.440 and disposed towards the same types of goals that someone like a musk or others are concerned with.

00:41:02.800 The preservation of what is unique and treasured and beautiful about human beings,

00:41:08.820 which I think is our soul, our consciousness, depending on how you phrase it.

00:41:12.060 So I think education, in particular in the STEM fields, I think that will become more and more important.

00:41:17.340 And harder and harder to replace by artificial intelligence as well.

00:41:22.100 I think the pandemic showed us that.

00:41:23.720 I think what the pandemic showed is, and this rapidly became clear to me as well, is our own ignorance.

00:41:30.740 And I include myself in this when it comes to science and medicine and all of these things.

00:41:36.320 You just realize that people who were very intelligent, they have no idea how to analyze

00:41:43.800 or how to talk about these subjects without becoming overly emotional and making choices

00:41:49.280 that were, quite frankly, ridiculous in many cases.

00:41:52.180 Even the most educated in some cases.

00:41:54.640 I mean, there's a famous quote by one of my heroes, Richard Feynman.

00:41:58.080 He said, science is the belief in the ignorance of experts.

00:42:02.560 Not the wisdom, not the knowledge of experts, but the ignorance of it.

00:42:05.960 What the hell are you talking about?

00:42:07.420 Feynman was a genius.

00:42:08.740 Einstein was a genius.

00:42:10.280 Yeah, they were genius because they doubted what came before them.

00:42:14.240 Science has never settled.

00:42:15.660 You never say, oh, well, this vaccine is 100% effective.

00:42:17.740 It's going to prevent transmission.

00:42:19.560 It's going to cure you.

00:42:20.460 It's going to...

00:42:20.960 No scientist was really...

00:42:23.360 Okay, I shouldn't say none because a lot of good scientists did that.

00:42:26.100 A lot of scientists were behind it.

00:42:28.080 I got vaccinated.

00:42:29.340 You know, even I didn't have...

00:42:30.740 My kids didn't get vaccinated.

00:42:31.980 I'm glad that they didn't.

00:42:33.180 We still have a vaccine requirement in my university to attend it in 2023.

00:42:37.320 In the fall of 2023, we still have to be vaccinated.

00:42:40.320 It's incredible to me.

00:42:42.420 And I taught for a long time wearing a paper mask that I could take off if I had a sip of

00:42:46.780 my trusty vodka that I kept with me at all times.

00:42:49.820 So we became very highly leveraged on science as a replacement for God.

00:42:57.280 Yes.

00:42:57.520 Science is so powerful.

00:42:58.700 Yes.

00:42:58.860 I mean, you were required to have faith in the science.

00:43:02.780 The science.

00:43:03.420 Yeah.

00:43:03.640 Follow the science.

00:43:04.880 No, I don't trust that.

00:43:05.980 I don't have faith.

00:43:06.780 You know, in Hebrew, the word amen, which we get in English as well, means faith or truth.

00:43:12.720 Belief.

00:43:13.220 I believe.

00:43:13.900 I always say, I don't believe in gravity.

00:43:16.080 I don't believe in it.

00:43:17.440 I have evidence for gravity.

00:43:19.060 I don't believe in evolution.

00:43:20.420 We have evidence for evolution.

00:43:22.120 Why are you asking me to believe and follow and trust and say, this person represents sign?

00:43:26.320 No scientist says that.

00:43:27.540 No valid scientist says that.

00:43:30.020 It's doing something political.

00:43:31.420 I would say the problem with, you know, with political science is that it's not limited

00:43:35.800 to just political scientists.

00:43:37.800 I feel, and this is controversial, I don't think I've said this elsewhere, but I think

00:43:41.360 that oftentimes scientists realize we've been given this glorious script.

00:43:45.680 The book of nature, as Galileo said, is written in the language of mathematics, right?

00:43:52.680 It's this beautiful script.

00:43:53.980 And yet we're so clumsy at communicating it because we're never taught those soft disciplines

00:43:58.800 of the second culture that C.P.

00:44:00.580 Snow spoke about.

00:44:01.940 How do you communicate?

00:44:02.720 Now I start doing this with my students.

00:44:05.120 It's not enough that they're way beyond me.

00:44:07.440 Math, physics, they understand so much.

00:44:10.320 They're so quick.

00:44:11.080 They're so, they're so, they're just so impressive, my students.

00:44:15.600 And that's the goal.

00:44:16.780 You should always exceed, you know, Leonardo da Vinci said, poor is a student who doesn't

00:44:19.700 exceed the master.

00:44:20.620 And so the notion of what is science in terms of, the word science from Latin means knowledge.

00:44:28.080 It doesn't mean wisdom.

00:44:29.200 That's sapien.

00:44:30.380 That's where we get homo sapien.

00:44:31.940 What does it mean?

00:44:32.800 Homo sapien means man who knows.

00:44:35.360 Man who is wise.

00:44:36.160 What is he wise about?

00:44:37.720 Do you ever think about this?

00:44:38.440 Your dog doesn't know he's going to die.

00:44:42.080 Your pet cat doesn't know she's going to die.

00:44:45.320 Humans, the only species that know that our time is limited.

00:44:49.440 That's what we know about.

00:44:51.000 Now, where does that come from?

00:44:51.980 That comes from the Bible.

00:44:53.020 We ate from the tree of knowledge of life and death, of good and evil.

00:44:57.600 Okay, you can take it as an allegory.

00:44:59.520 But the point being, we have put so much faith in science because it's so powerful, because

00:45:06.420 it produces this glorious technology that allowed us to communicate and set this up at

00:45:10.880 the speed of light across continents that are planetary in scale, that we then demand it.

00:45:15.980 And then we say, I don't understand this.

00:45:17.640 Just like, I don't understand God, you know, if you're religious.

00:45:21.140 So you tend to correlate and associate a godliness with science.

00:45:26.360 But there's nothing, science is amoral.

00:45:28.380 It's not immoral.

00:45:29.220 It's amoral.

00:45:30.160 Look at the most advanced civilization scientifically of the past century.

00:45:34.340 Where was it?

00:45:35.260 Not far from here.

00:45:35.960 It was in Germany.

00:45:36.580 Germany, yeah.

00:45:37.420 I went to the Imperial War Museum the other day with my children.

00:45:40.260 I couldn't believe the horrors that you see there.

00:45:44.320 And the equivalent of what they had back then, technologically, it was so sophisticated.

00:45:51.860 Some of the greatest scientists in history worked, Frisch and others worked on the, later

00:45:59.760 become known as the Haber-Bosch process.

00:46:02.080 And Fritz Haber was a German Jew in the early 1900s.

00:46:06.980 And he was very patriotic.

00:46:08.400 He wanted to be basically fully assimilated into German society.

00:46:11.640 He was known as the father of chemical warfare.

00:46:14.080 He invented chlorine gas, which then his factory then became the main production vehicle for

00:46:21.260 Zyklon B, which was used in the concentration camps that killed his own family members years

00:46:25.700 later.

00:46:26.000 So never conflate knowledge with wisdom.

00:46:30.660 And, but that's, that's the hard thing.

00:46:32.060 You need wisdom to see who is wise.

00:46:34.680 And, and, you know, as the Talmud says, the Talmud says, who is a wise person?

00:46:37.940 Someone who learns from every person they meet.

00:46:40.360 Okay.

00:46:40.780 You don't want to be like, well, my three-year-old can teach me as much as, you know, Professor

00:46:43.860 Keating.

00:46:44.700 But, but at the same time, wisdom can only be acquired by experience.

00:46:49.680 And when you encounter something that's never happened before, like a pandemic or nuclear

00:46:53.220 potential conflict, it's very dicey to put so much power in the hands of someone who

00:46:59.160 may not be particularly wise.

00:47:02.060 And do you sometimes find that in your own industry, that people think that they have

00:47:06.640 the answers, they think they're all knowing and all powerful, when the reality is you're

00:47:11.840 a scientist and you could be brilliant, but that doesn't stop you from being wrong.

00:47:16.360 Oh yeah.

00:47:16.740 Some of those, and I've had the benefit to interview 14 Nobel prize winners on my podcast.

00:47:20.760 It's kind of become one of my trademarks on the Into the Impossible podcast.

00:47:24.920 And, and I always like to end it though, that you guys have your wonderful question, which

00:47:29.340 we'll get to in a couple hours.

00:47:31.940 And, and I always ask, you know, similar questions, but from taken from more perspective of, of almost

00:47:39.020 like a scrubbing meaning to a scientist.

00:47:42.120 So most scientists don't, aren't comfortable talking about, you know, big picture things.

00:47:46.200 We're not particularly outgoing.

00:47:47.600 You know, there's all joke, how do you know a scientist is outgoing?

00:47:50.700 He looks at your shoes when he talks to you, you know, then that's how you can spot him.

00:47:54.960 But, but the point being, we, we don't communicate these things to our students.

00:47:59.600 So they're left with this notion that like, well, Einstein was always Einstein.

00:48:03.240 No, he wasn't.

00:48:03.760 He was very fallible.

00:48:05.320 Feynman, I just gave you that quote, right?

00:48:06.720 The ignorance of experts, not the wisdom of experts.

00:48:09.600 So the best scientists were, are, are aware of this.

00:48:12.640 And in fact, I encountered this when I interviewed a man who's become a good friend of mine, a

00:48:16.380 mentor, his name's Barry Barish.

00:48:18.020 He won the 2017 Nobel Prize for the discovery of gravitational waves.

00:48:22.060 So two black holes, 1.2 billion light years away from the earth, crashed together in this

00:48:27.560 dance of death that happened 1.2 billion years ago.

00:48:31.220 And these reverberations in space and time rippled throughout the cosmos and percolated

00:48:36.320 throughout the universe.

00:48:37.900 We don't actually know which galaxy it was in.

00:48:40.260 Eventually it hit the Milky Way galaxy, entered into our solar system, entered into our planet,

00:48:44.780 and then hit two different detectors, one in Louisiana and one in Washington state, within

00:48:50.080 a few milliseconds of each other, consistent with Einstein's laws of relativity.

00:48:54.220 And he detected this reverberation in space and time.

00:48:57.720 And I asked him, after he won the Nobel Prize, he was on my podcast.

00:49:01.180 And I said, my closing quote is about the, the name of the podcast comes from Arthur C.

00:49:06.180 Clark.

00:49:06.480 He said, the only way of determining the limits of the possible is to go beyond them into

00:49:10.700 the impossible.

00:49:11.640 So I always ask my analog of, you know, what are we not asking, is what would you tell your

00:49:16.640 20-year-old self, you know, what would you tell him or her to give you the courage to

00:49:20.720 do as you've done to go into the impossible?

00:49:22.880 And he would say, you have to overcome the imposter syndrome, especially, you know, after

00:49:30.600 you win the Nobel Prize.

00:49:31.660 I said, what the hell are you talking about?

00:49:32.980 Wait, you won the Nobel Prize and you have the imposter syndrome?

00:49:35.260 He goes, oh yeah, winning the Nobel Prize made it worse.

00:49:38.880 It's like, Barry, come on, you're one of the most brilliant human beings that ever lived.

00:49:42.860 Like, you're telling me you have the imposter syndrome.

00:49:45.460 What hope is there for anybody else?

00:49:46.780 He said, well, when you win a Nobel Prize, you go to Stockholm, you meet the king, you

00:49:51.940 eat some reindeer, and you have this fetid celebration.

00:49:54.580 And one of the things they do before they give you this, you know, giant flavor-flav medallion,

00:49:57.980 and they give you a check for your share of the $1 million purse, is you sign a logbook.

00:50:04.500 And the logbook attests the fact that you received your medallion, your check, and your hand-painted

00:50:09.160 plaque.

00:50:09.700 So they want to make sure you don't come, where's that Nobel Prize that I left around?

00:50:13.460 Because it's, you know, 24-carat gold-plated, right?

00:50:15.460 So they don't have many of them.

00:50:16.800 So he said he's a curious sort.

00:50:18.280 So he looked at the ledger, and they have the original ledger going back to shortly after

00:50:22.600 Alfred Nobel died in 1896, and the first one was awarded in 1901.

00:50:27.800 So he looks back through the pages, and he sees Richard Feynman, you know, pretty amazing.

00:50:32.420 He sees Marie Curie, and he stops.

00:50:34.440 He sees Einstein.

00:50:36.800 And he goes, my heart stopped.

00:50:38.900 I said, why?

00:50:39.640 He said, you see Einstein and me a couple of pages apart, and our signatures are there?

00:50:45.240 I'm not worthy.

00:50:45.920 I said, Barry, I've got good news and good news for you.

00:50:49.760 I said, Barry, do you know that Einstein had the imposter syndrome?

00:50:53.620 He goes, oh, really?

00:50:55.080 And I said, yeah, yeah, he had the imposter syndrome, really bad, in fact.

00:50:58.200 And I said, well, and he asked me, who did he have the imposter syndrome about?

00:51:01.180 And he said, I told him, Isaac Newton.

00:51:03.660 He called Isaac Newton not only the greatest mathematician and physicist of all time, but

00:51:07.800 the greatest contributor to human civilization that ever lived.

00:51:12.500 And I said, but wait, there's more.

00:51:13.900 I said, Newton had the imposter syndrome as well.

00:51:18.120 Do you guys know who Newton worshipped the way that Einstein worshipped Newton?

00:51:22.920 One of the Greeks, maybe?

00:51:24.460 Oh, no.

00:51:25.140 No.

00:51:25.780 Oh, I was going to say something like Archimedes, but no.

00:51:28.400 No.

00:51:29.140 Jesus Christ.

00:51:30.720 Do you know what he called his greatest accomplishment?

00:51:33.120 Possibly, apocryphally, hard to verify this.

00:51:36.100 He died a virgin.

00:51:36.920 Because that was the only way that he could emulate Christ.

00:51:40.580 He was very religious, extremely devout religious man.

00:51:43.900 So he felt that he was inadequate and imposter before the likes of Jesus Christ.

00:51:49.520 Okay, that's pretty good company to feel that about.

00:51:53.200 But that this is a human trait is a very good thing.

00:51:57.420 And I want to bring this back because you asked me that scientists have this notion of kind

00:52:01.460 of superiority when maybe it's unearned.

00:52:04.280 In other words, maybe they're spending kind of the credibility that the great titans like

00:52:08.640 Feynman, like the Einsteins, who did grapple with, I mean, Einstein has way more written

00:52:12.780 about his thoughts on being, you know, on politics, on nationalism, on Zionism.

00:52:18.080 You know, they asked him to be one of the first presidents of Israel.

00:52:21.660 And he could have had a good career if he had, like, just imagine the fame he could have

00:52:25.380 had if he'd be.

00:52:27.100 That's a joke.

00:52:29.300 So he has way more writings.

00:52:31.980 I'd rather be a physicist.

00:52:34.380 Less stressful.

00:52:35.220 So he has way more written word about his thoughts on God and culture than he does about

00:52:41.940 physics by far.

00:52:43.340 Same with Feynman.

00:52:44.660 But the point being, they married these two traits of humility with swagger.

00:52:51.220 And that's very hard.

00:52:52.080 Again, there's an ambiguity.

00:52:53.820 It's like we said before.

00:52:54.640 It's easy to follow the left or the right.

00:52:56.380 It's hard to be in the middle.

00:52:57.660 So they could be humble to say, as much as I learn, the battle will be infinite.

00:53:03.280 We'll never end science.

00:53:05.180 Like, you never win science.

00:53:06.620 You can win a Nobel Prize.

00:53:07.540 You can get tenure.

00:53:08.200 You can get into a good college or graduate school.

00:53:10.300 You can't win science.

00:53:11.640 There's no end to it.

00:53:12.440 It's an infinite game, as they say.

00:53:14.560 But on the other hand, you have to also have a little bit of confidence, swagger that, look,

00:53:19.840 what, you know, who is a man that they can take on the challenge of unraveling the tapestry

00:53:24.860 of nature.

00:53:25.740 And the best scientists have that.

00:53:28.200 Do you want to say?

00:53:29.080 Yeah, go for it.

00:53:29.840 I was going to say, because one thing that you've been very interesting about when I read

00:53:35.540 your work, you've actually written a book about this, is actually being very critical of the

00:53:39.780 Nobel Prize.

00:53:40.440 And you just brought the Nobel Prize up.

00:53:42.480 Now, to an uneducated simpleton like me, I think, what, the Nobel Prize?

00:53:46.520 That's the greatest achievement possibly a human being could ever have.

00:53:50.040 Well, what's wrong with the Nobel Prize?

00:53:52.440 Yeah, there's a lot wrong with it.

00:53:54.660 And there's a lot right with it.

00:53:55.880 And like anything, again, we wrestle with ambiguities.

00:53:59.320 There are people that believe that abortion should be completely, you've had on Ben Shapiro.

00:54:04.460 He said that right here.

00:54:05.780 He said, no abortion.

00:54:06.760 Okay.

00:54:07.200 Then there have been people that you've had on, talked about population, you know, whatever.

00:54:11.340 And they'll say, nope, you should, it's a woman's choice.

00:54:13.620 You can do whatever she wants.

00:54:14.640 So those are two poles.

00:54:16.860 People cleave to the two poles.

00:54:18.020 It's hard to be in the middle and say, well, you know, I want to have this.

00:54:21.220 It's like Schrodinger's cat.

00:54:22.700 Is it alive or is it dead?

00:54:23.940 Well, I understand when it's alive.

00:54:25.420 I understand when it's dead.

00:54:26.300 What is this thing where it's alive and dead at the same time?

00:54:28.440 This mind-bending notion from quantum mechanics that we'll get into for the, the locals get

00:54:33.500 the homework assignments.

00:54:34.420 We give them the quantum mechanics homework.

00:54:38.320 So the good, so is the Nobel Prize good or bad?

00:54:41.780 Yes.

00:54:42.660 It has good things.

00:54:43.620 It has things that are worthy of retaining.

00:54:47.000 It has things that distort and, in some cases, destroy how science is done by putting

00:54:54.040 it into, again, this conflation between knowledge and wisdom every four years in America.

00:55:01.000 The New York Times publishes an article which says, signed by 70 Nobel Prize winners, why

00:55:05.840 you should vote for the present, the Democrat who's running for president.

00:55:08.800 Never once have these 70 Nobel Prize winners ever endorsed a Republican.

00:55:12.940 Be that, maybe they're always right.

00:55:14.520 But then they'll talk about, like, genetically modified organisms.

00:55:17.360 They talked about funding for Peter Daszak at the EcoHealth Alliance.

00:55:21.680 They supported it that he, that when Trump tried to suspend the 70 Nobel Prize winners

00:55:26.220 come out and do that.

00:55:27.360 So they're using this clout.

00:55:28.740 They're using their, what they've earned, rightfully so, by their grappling and wrestling

00:55:33.200 with major ideas and science and solving unknown things and being smarter than I could ever

00:55:37.600 aspire to be.

00:55:38.400 But they're using that to opine in political space.

00:55:41.440 That's a danger, right?

00:55:42.780 Because you're now outside of your lane completely.

00:55:45.300 They have a right to do it.

00:55:46.500 I'm not saying they shouldn't speak about it.

00:55:48.060 But someone who studies the cosmos, what do they know about a treaty with Iran?

00:55:53.200 What do they know about, you know, what the abortion policy should, they might, they're

00:55:57.180 entitled to it.

00:55:58.060 This doesn't mean they know it.

00:55:59.300 What the Nobel Prize does is it becomes a secular idol that literally, as Barry confirmed to

00:56:06.920 me, you bow down in front of the king of Sweden wearing royal regalia that's required.

00:56:12.780 And you bow down and you accept a gilded, graven image with the visage of Alfred Nobel on it.

00:56:21.640 So like every religion, it has an origin story, it has patron saints, it has apostates.

00:56:27.760 And so it has become a secular religion.

00:56:31.420 And sometimes the most zealous religious adherents are atheists.

00:56:39.060 93% of the American National Academy of Sciences do not actively affirm a belief in God.

00:56:44.920 I'm not saying, you know, you shouldn't, you shouldn't, I'm not a theocrat, right?

00:56:48.240 But it's an interesting fact.

00:56:50.080 And almost in every case, the Nobel Prize spans these divides between what, you know, Rabbi

00:56:59.340 Saloveitchik used to call the resume virtues versus the eulogy virtues.

00:57:06.240 So the notion is that you should, you have things that you'll put on your gravestone and

00:57:10.980 you'll have read about you, father, son, brother, you know, whatever, scientists.

00:57:14.400 And then there'll be resume virtues.

00:57:17.320 I went to Brown University, Case Western, I got my PhD and then I taught at UCS.

00:57:21.940 Like, I'm not going to, no one's going to talk about that, you know, hopefully when I'm

00:57:24.760 120 and pass away.

00:57:26.300 But no one's going to care.

00:57:27.860 Where was he an undergraduate?

00:57:29.220 Like, let me put that on the tombstone.

00:57:30.560 No, there's only so much space.

00:57:32.180 So I think, you know, we, but the Nobel Prize will always be there.

00:57:35.940 There's never been a eulogy or something where it's not mentioned for somebody, right?

00:57:39.980 So the question becomes, you know, what is it doing to culture?

00:57:42.940 How does it distort the way that science is done?

00:57:45.300 Funding for science, you're much more likely to get something if it's in a field where someone's

00:57:49.420 won a Nobel Prize.

00:57:50.320 If your advisor won a Nobel Prize, you're much more likely to win it.

00:57:53.440 There's historic discrimination that was present early on against Jews, later against

00:57:58.500 women and other minorities.

00:57:59.740 That's been, that's been demonstrally proven.

00:58:02.640 So it's good and bad.

00:58:04.340 Do I want it destroyed?

00:58:05.320 No, that's why I wrote the book.

00:58:06.460 People get this notion that, oh, I wrote the book called Losing the Nobel Prize because

00:58:11.400 I was, I was jealous and spurned and sour grapes that I didn't win the Nobel Prize for

00:58:16.920 this discovery that I played a huge role in that was announced and later retracted in

00:58:20.880 2014, 2015.

00:58:22.820 That would have been Nobel worthy had we not been stymied by another galactic imposter

00:58:27.020 that masqueraded as a signal we were trying to see, which was the spark of the universe's

00:58:31.520 first existing moment.

00:58:32.960 But in reality, so they'll say, oh, you're just have sour grapes, Keating.

00:58:37.340 You're just, you know, I say, well, look, here's the one way to prove it.

00:58:40.080 Good news for you.

00:58:41.320 You can prove if I'm a hypocrite or not, get them to offer me the Nobel Prize.

00:58:45.920 If I accept it, I'm a hypocrite.

00:58:48.240 So far, they haven't bitten.

00:58:49.500 But, but the point being, I've seen it from the inside.

00:58:51.720 I've been asked multiple times to nominate winners of the Nobel Prize.

00:58:54.600 I've compared it to what Alfred Nobel requested in his will and how it's been distorted for

00:59:00.400 purposes of the vainglory of the Nobel Prize committee and its own purposes and to the

00:59:06.440 destruction of scientific colleagues of mine and distortion of the scientific method, in

00:59:11.380 fact.

00:59:11.620 So it's good and bad.

00:59:13.440 Brian, come back to the science with me because this is the really fascinating thing.

00:59:17.860 So we've talked a little bit about it, but I think the two big questions that most people

00:59:21.700 have about space, the universe, et cetera, is are we alone?

00:59:27.020 And the conversation that Eric is very much fond of, which is chemistry imposes very specific

00:59:34.080 limitations on our ability to get anywhere in the universe and physics potentially is able

00:59:40.840 to transcend those.

00:59:41.740 So are we ever going to be able to travel in a way that doesn't require us to essentially

00:59:48.880 burn lots of fuel and travel in a linear way?

00:59:51.620 Right.

00:59:52.500 First of all.

00:59:53.340 Yeah.

00:59:53.660 So, yeah, I agree with you.

00:59:55.260 Those are two interesting.

00:59:55.980 The other one I always get asked about is, you know, what happened before the universe

00:59:59.180 came into existence, right?

01:00:00.340 That would be the third one.

01:00:01.160 Yeah.

01:00:01.500 So that's what I get paid, you know, big dollars from Gavin Newsom to answer.

01:00:06.580 So to answer the second question that you answered.

01:00:09.640 So can we transcend the limits?

01:00:12.080 Can we effectively, you know, create a portal to allow us to travel in finite time, essentially

01:00:21.100 infinite distances?

01:00:22.580 There's nothing that precludes that from happening, but it's been so trumpeted in things like movies,

01:00:29.320 Interstellar, you know, all these things.

01:00:31.640 The notion of wormholes and black holes and physicists are obsessed with holes.

01:00:37.480 Come on, guys.

01:00:38.520 Get over yourselves.

01:00:39.480 But the point being, if you could essentially visualize space-time, we can't visualize actual

01:00:45.660 space-time as four-dimensional.

01:00:47.540 That means there's three dimensions, up, down, right, left, backwards, forwards.

01:00:50.580 We can visualize that plus time.

01:00:52.340 That's four dimensions.

01:00:53.460 If I tell you I want to meet you in Trafalgar, did you say Trafalgar or Trafalgar?

01:00:57.140 Trafalgar Square.

01:00:57.520 Trafalgar Square at exactly 4 p.m.

01:00:59.980 You know where, when, and it's up to you how you get there.

01:01:02.900 The question is, can I fold space-time, you know, basically take it like a piece of paper

01:01:07.680 so we can be out here at the trigonometry podcast, you know, compound, and fold it so

01:01:14.280 that it would essentially take no time, because those two places in space-time in a higher

01:01:18.520 dimensional space, so to do that you have to fold it into another dimension, right?

01:01:22.220 You have to fold it from the two-dimensional analogy into the third dimension and put them

01:01:26.060 next to each other.

01:01:26.740 The question is, is that possible?

01:01:29.040 All we can say is there's nothing that precludes that from happening.

01:01:31.780 We have no evidence that that's even possible.

01:01:34.000 So the theories that Eric and others have worked on rely on things of having multiple

01:01:38.080 extra dimensions, more than four, less than 20, and that may seem like, well, you know,

01:01:43.780 who cares, it's less than a thousand.

01:01:45.640 Those can be very well rationalized, why it's, say, 10 or 11 in Eric's theory versus, say,

01:01:51.340 four that we observe today.

01:01:52.960 But I should say there's no evidence for it.

01:01:54.580 So the first thing, then, what I like to talk about when I'm with Eric is what are

01:01:59.080 some of the ways that we could verify not the actual existence of either strings at a

01:02:04.680 subatomic, you know, microscope atomic level, or extra dimensions on a grander scale in his

01:02:10.060 model of geometric unity, but are there testable traces, vestigial relics of those models that

01:02:17.140 can be tested at the relatively low energies that we have accessible on Earth, or at the most

01:02:23.020 powerful cosmic accelerator of all, which was the Big Bang, which is what I studied.

01:02:27.020 So there will be relics, just like right now, in this glass of finest vodka, there are molecules

01:02:34.200 of hydrogen and oxygen.

01:02:36.380 The hydrogen in here came from the Big Bang.

01:02:40.040 This is an artifact of the Big Bang that I'm holding right now.

01:02:43.500 In your body, there are artifacts of the Big Bang.

01:02:45.460 The oxygen came much later from a generation of stars that very, you know, very almost

01:02:51.540 scatologically sacrificed themselves, blew up, became, and their byproducts became the

01:02:57.080 oxygen in here.

01:02:57.780 But that's basically it, right?

01:02:59.660 So there are relics that have traveled through time.

01:03:02.160 And we can study the composition of this and ask, actually, in here, if we zoom in real

01:03:06.340 tight, and I know your crack animation team will do this the justice that I can only dream

01:03:10.720 of, but if you zoom in, every so often, about one in a few million particles of water in

01:03:17.180 here, molecules of water, have a hydrogen molecule that has an extra neutron.

01:03:21.320 So you guys know, because this is the second most erudite podcast in all of existence, after

01:03:26.300 my podcast, that hydrogen has three isotopes.

01:03:29.460 That means they have two different numbers of neutrons.

01:03:31.600 So there's a hydrogen, which is a proton, then there's a proton plus a neutron, that's

01:03:35.480 called deuterium, then there's a proton plus two neutrons.

01:03:37.920 Otherwise, they're chemically identical.

01:03:39.080 You can drink it, I have videos on my channel where I make it into ice, and I drink it.

01:03:43.260 This glass has a ratio of tritium and deuterium and ordinary protonic water that is exactly

01:03:50.620 predicted in the theory of cosmology known as the Big Bang nucleosynthesis.

01:03:55.280 So that is a vestigial relationship, but it's just this glass of water.

01:03:59.080 We could go in the laboratory next door and measure it.

01:04:01.520 That means we could prove the Big Bang.

01:04:03.200 Can we do the same for string theory?

01:04:05.740 Can we do the same for what's called loop quantum gravity?

01:04:07.720 Can we do the same for Stephen Wolfram's physics project?

01:04:11.900 Eric Weinstein's geometric unity?

01:04:13.800 Can we do that?

01:04:14.340 Are there any?

01:04:15.340 First, we have to answer those questions.

01:04:16.920 So yes, we're a long way off from motivating it.

01:04:19.740 It is nice to think about.

01:04:21.320 The most concrete thing we can say is there's nothing that forbids it, but is there any evidence

01:04:25.960 for it?

01:04:26.640 That's not so clear.

01:04:27.200 And it sounds like your answer is, so far there isn't.

01:04:29.420 There isn't any.

01:04:29.960 There's definitely no evidence for it, but there's also no evidence for string theory,

01:04:32.760 as Eric talked about, and that's garnered a lot more tension, time, and money.

01:04:35.500 All right.

01:04:37.000 Are we alone in the universe?

01:04:38.180 I've always been persuaded by the pure statistical argument that given the scale of it, there's

01:04:42.980 bound to be, and you mentioned yourself, you talked about there's loads of planets in the

01:04:46.540 Goldilocks zone all around the universe.

01:04:50.140 Surely there's intelligent life somewhere out there, statistically speaking.

01:04:54.100 Right.

01:04:54.400 So I like to make the following analogy.

01:04:56.600 So I believe that there's no intelligent life in the universe.

01:04:59.400 Well, especially, I mean, especially on this planet.

01:05:01.980 That's right.

01:05:03.640 This planet's the worst, except for all the others.

01:05:06.240 Yeah.

01:05:07.600 So I believe that we become very enamored of this notion.

01:05:13.720 Again, there is some primordial beauty to the notion of escaping and thinking about things

01:05:18.380 that transcend our limitations of time or space or existence.

01:05:22.340 And one of those is the existence of other life forms that may exist in the universe.

01:05:25.900 First of all, we can say there's zero evidence for such life forms, even a slime mold on Enceladus,

01:05:31.340 you know, in our own solar system.

01:05:32.340 There's no evidence for it.

01:05:33.540 And that's important because there is a concept purported by the man who coined the term Big

01:05:39.160 Bang.

01:05:39.640 Actually, you guys are the perfect people to ask this.

01:05:41.620 I've never gotten a straight answer.

01:05:43.320 Is Big Bang a dirty word?

01:05:44.920 Is it a dirty phrase?

01:05:46.320 No.

01:05:46.640 No.

01:05:46.980 No?

01:05:47.520 Because supposedly Hoyle, Fred Hoyle, Sir Fred Hoyle is one of the greatest astronomers

01:05:51.320 in history.

01:05:52.040 He coined the term Big Bang as a pejorative meaning orgasm.

01:05:56.480 Oh.

01:05:57.420 So that's never said in this country?

01:05:59.120 We had a better sex life than we would.

01:06:00.240 Maybe not.

01:06:02.020 I didn't know that.

01:06:02.980 No, I don't think it is.

01:06:04.080 Nobody would.

01:06:04.720 So he was a proponent of the steady state model.

01:06:07.880 But in any case, he also came up with the notion of what's called panspermia.

01:06:13.280 Can I say that on this show?

01:06:14.320 Yeah, say panspermia.

01:06:15.480 Whatever you want.

01:06:16.000 It's a free speech show.

01:06:16.740 It's a free speech show.

01:06:17.900 Great.

01:06:18.400 So the notion of what's called panspermia, it means that there will be exchange of material

01:06:23.360 between planets and between other solar systems in our galaxy.

01:06:28.320 And that will potentially be almost like a Noah's Ark for life to transport.

01:06:34.360 It doesn't solve the origin of life problem, but it could potentially solve the abundance

01:06:39.220 of life problem in our solar system.

01:06:41.000 Or how did it come here?

01:06:42.420 He claimed it could have come from another planet, not too far away by cosmic standards.

01:06:47.820 So it gets here.

01:06:48.800 Now, I actually have some of this.

01:06:50.740 And as we said, there's meteorites and so forth that are found in Antarctica.

01:06:54.520 It's a well-known phenomenon.

01:06:55.700 I actually have a tiny piece of Mars.

01:06:57.200 It doesn't have any amino acids or DNA or a little green men on it.

01:07:00.840 But it comes from Mars.

01:07:02.980 And we can prove it comes from Mars.

01:07:04.700 Just trust me.

01:07:05.440 We have it from many other bodies in our solar system.

01:07:08.280 So why is that important?

01:07:09.380 That means that things can come here.

01:07:11.260 Well, guess what?

01:07:11.920 That means that things can go from the Earth out there.

01:07:14.180 Right?

01:07:14.580 So you have to answer the question.

01:07:16.240 What is the probability?

01:07:17.780 And what does it say about life in the universe that we haven't found life, say, on Mars?

01:07:22.580 Now, Mars is a big place.

01:07:23.820 And yeah, if we went somewhere on Earth.

01:07:25.220 But almost everywhere on Earth has life.

01:07:27.260 Almost everywhere.

01:07:27.920 Even Antarctica, where I've been.

01:07:29.680 Antarctica is one-seventh of the total number of continents on this planet.

01:07:33.480 It's about the size of Australia.

01:07:35.440 So it's pretty big.

01:07:37.020 There's almost no life there, though.

01:07:38.680 There's almost no.

01:07:39.460 There is life.

01:07:40.160 There's microbial life.

01:07:41.060 There are these giant birds called skuas that will, like, take a toddler away if the toddlers

01:07:46.640 were allowed on the continents or not.

01:07:48.800 And then there's sea lions, a couple penguins on the coast.

01:07:51.600 That's about it.

01:07:52.400 There's no polar bears or anything like that.

01:07:54.280 And then there's humans.

01:07:55.620 So you're talking about, you know, this vast continent, the size of Australia, hundreds

01:08:00.540 of times better, you know, tens of times bigger than the UK.

01:08:03.860 No life.

01:08:04.460 Almost no life.

01:08:05.580 But if you make the argument that life should be abundant or based on statistical probability,

01:08:09.980 as Fermi did, Enrico Fermi, one of the greatest physicists, he created what's called the Fermi

01:08:13.900 paradox.

01:08:14.380 There's so many planets.

01:08:15.200 There's so many gold.

01:08:15.800 They didn't know about the Goldilocks zone back then.

01:08:17.340 But they said if the average lifetime of a technological civilization is even a million

01:08:21.940 years, then just in the age of our galaxy, which is maybe eight billion years or more,

01:08:27.840 that means we should have been visited by thousands and thousands, even going at a slow

01:08:31.320 chemical rocket speed.

01:08:32.820 So he asked the famous question, where are they?

01:08:35.140 So we have to ask, where are they?

01:08:38.140 And come up with solutions to that Fermi paradox.

01:08:41.320 And there are many purported solutions, but one of which is there are no aliens, right?

01:08:45.680 I mean, the most simple thing based on evidence is that there are no, certainly technological

01:08:50.180 civilizations that we're aware of.

01:08:52.500 There could be beyond what we're aware of.

01:08:54.440 Now, the best calculations do the following.

01:08:57.280 They don't say, and as I don't say, I don't say there's no life.

01:08:59.940 I say the probability is very small and certainly even smaller for technological life.

01:09:05.140 It has to be even smaller, right?

01:09:06.280 If there's a dolphin swimming on a pool in Enceladus, we're never going to know about

01:09:10.340 it because it doesn't have an iPhone to let us know that we live there unless we stumble

01:09:12.980 upon it, right?

01:09:13.400 So it has to be technological.

01:09:14.940 How do we get to that technology?

01:09:16.200 It comes back to what we said before.

01:09:17.760 We start with primitive things.

01:09:19.100 Maybe are hydrocarbons necessary?

01:09:21.420 Is global warming a trademark, a hallmark of civilization?

01:09:25.720 Some say it is.

01:09:26.540 In other words, we should look not for transmissions of, you know, I love Lucy, but we should look

01:09:31.460 for global warming on another planet.

01:09:33.360 So far, we haven't seen it.

01:09:34.300 Doesn't mean it doesn't exist, but that would mean terraforming and modifying that particular

01:09:38.860 climate.

01:09:39.520 Then do they have a biosphere?

01:09:41.500 Do they have chlorophyll?

01:09:42.420 Do they have a great oxidation event?

01:09:44.120 Do they have a Jupiter that sucks up deadly asteroids from impacting the Earth or whatever

01:09:49.180 the analog Earth is in the Goldilocks zone that's not in the Goldilocks zone?

01:09:53.140 Do they have a moon that's at the exact right distance to create tides that can cause chemical

01:09:57.880 intubation almost between life, land, and sea?

01:10:01.860 Do they have plate tectonics that we talked about?

01:10:04.040 Are those plate tectonics lubricated by these microorganisms?

01:10:07.520 So there's many different hurdles.

01:10:09.100 And the way I like to say it is, so you can phrase it like this.

01:10:12.120 Imagine that there were eight things that had to happen for us to have this conversation

01:10:16.100 under these lights and camera, right?

01:10:17.720 There had to be a big bang.

01:10:18.680 You know, there had to be the formation of matter from no matter.

01:10:23.680 So people think that matter is conserved.

01:10:25.640 It's not.

01:10:26.020 Energy is conserved, but matter is not.

01:10:27.680 Then there had to be primitive elements that could support life.

01:10:31.400 Then life had to come about and be conscious.

01:10:33.660 Then that life that was conscious had to create technology and so forth.

01:10:37.300 So you just go through and you say it like this.

01:10:38.700 And then there had to be things that prevented it.

01:10:40.620 Asteroids.

01:10:41.140 There had to be dinosaurs that were there but got killed off and fossils and so forth.

01:10:45.020 So you just say there's eight of them and each one has a probability of one in a thousand.

01:10:50.240 That's it.

01:10:50.880 Just say one in a thousand that there's a Big Bang, whatever that means.

01:10:53.600 One in a thousand that there's a Jupiter.

01:10:55.100 One in a thousand.

01:10:55.620 And we know the probabilities are much, much, much, much, much, much lower.

01:10:59.000 Let's just say for the sake of the argument, one divided by a thousand.

01:11:02.240 Eight of those.

01:11:03.300 You take one over a thousand.

01:11:05.280 You raise it to the eighth power.

01:11:06.660 You get one in 10 to the 24th.

01:11:08.260 That same number is the inverse of the number of planets we think there are in the observable universe's history.

01:11:15.940 So over 13.8 billion years, we think there have been 10 to the 24th, which is a trillion, trillion planets that could be life inhabiting.

01:11:23.720 But the probability, I just said, is one in 10 to the 24th.

01:11:27.600 So the problem comes about the human mind is incapable of multiplying a zero by an infinity.

01:11:33.340 And that's why the statistical argument, I think, is a very crude but often overestimate of the probability of possibility of technology.

01:11:40.240 So the emergence of life on Earth is so ridiculously unlikely that for that to be replicated anywhere in the universe,

01:11:50.620 even with the number of planets that exist, is still extraordinarily unlikely because it was so unlikely that it was formed here.

01:11:56.980 Yeah, and there's so many contingent things that have to occur in just the right order.

01:12:00.200 Which brings us inexorably to the final question of the three that you always get asked, which is about where life comes from.

01:12:07.520 Yeah, so I think that—

01:12:09.560 Where everything comes from.

01:12:10.360 Where everything comes from.

01:12:11.500 Yeah, so right now is an interesting time because throughout history, you know,

01:12:18.740 if you took a ping pong ball and you put it in a bag for each year that human civilization has existed,

01:12:25.140 say going back 5,000 years, the very first cosmological models in the Bible and ancient Egypt and Sumeria.

01:12:33.300 And you wrote on it, what's your model of the universe?

01:12:35.620 Like, is it eternal?

01:12:37.180 Is it cyclical?

01:12:38.480 Is there a turtle on top of a turtle?

01:12:40.240 Is there a uroboros eating its tail?

01:12:42.320 What is it?

01:12:42.860 Just put it in there.

01:12:44.180 The overwhelming number of ping pong balls would have a static eternal universe.

01:12:49.200 Einstein believed in it.

01:12:50.340 Newton believed in it.

01:12:51.680 It's interesting.

01:12:52.120 The Bible does not believe in it.

01:12:53.400 The Bible has a creation event, right?

01:12:55.320 There are Egyptian myths that have a creation.

01:12:57.340 But most models and most people for all time believed that the universe was static.

01:13:02.400 And in fact, the name that we give—

01:13:04.440 Static meaning it exists, has always existed, and will always exist as it is.

01:13:08.400 Exactly.

01:13:09.000 Right.

01:13:09.240 100% right.

01:13:10.320 So, and why do we know that?

01:13:11.880 Well, we're sitting on this thing called a planet.

01:13:13.940 I don't know if you know any Greek.

01:13:15.180 My Greek's not that strong.

01:13:16.120 But planet means wanderer.

01:13:18.100 Well, why do we have a name?

01:13:19.300 It's like Jews.

01:13:19.920 We talk about people that aren't Jewish.

01:13:22.000 We call them goyim, which just means nation.

01:13:24.700 It's not like a put-down or anything.

01:13:26.320 But that's interesting because we're only 0.2% of the population of the world, right?

01:13:30.280 So we're just like, we have a name for the 99—just call them people.

01:13:33.500 And we're the weird ones, right?

01:13:34.740 But anyway, so we have a name for these things that moved.

01:13:38.100 They're called planets.

01:13:39.240 Well, why were they special?

01:13:40.280 Because they were the only things that moved.

01:13:41.980 Everything else is static.

01:13:43.260 It looks like it's unchanging.

01:13:44.540 We know the stars move a little bit, but you couldn't perceive them over human lifetime.

01:13:47.740 But the five planets that they could see back then, after which our days are named and so forth, there's deep inculcation of astronomy in our daily lives that we just take for granted.

01:13:56.040 But anyway, those things move.

01:13:58.260 And so it was natural to suspect, as Newton did, as Einstein did, that the universe was static and eternal.

01:14:05.400 And that prevailed for an extremely long period, the preponderance of human history.

01:14:11.560 And so we asked the question of what could overthrow that?

01:14:14.320 Well, before, I would say the last decade, it was impossible to speculate any more than just purely qualitatively.

01:14:22.880 But now, with telescopes and tools like that of my team, that my team and I are working on called the Simons Observatory and other competitor teams, we're looking potentially at a relic.

01:14:34.180 Just like these water molecules reveal the fiery fusion conditions that are present in the first second after the Big Bang, we're able to go 30 orders of magnitude farther back in time.

01:14:46.080 And we will reveal the presence via what are called gravitational waves.

01:14:52.100 Those gravitational waves would originate from a quantum, a purely quantum phase of the universe's history called inflation.

01:15:00.720 Okay.

01:15:01.260 What does any of that mean?

01:15:02.940 Okay.

01:15:03.480 So the universe, the question is, did the universe come from what's called a singularity or not?

01:15:07.720 Was there a point of infinite temperature, infinite density, infinite energy from which all the matter and energy that we're experiencing today came from, including the molecules in here, including every cell in our body, the matter of that?

01:15:20.620 So forgive me.

01:15:21.380 I'm just trying to make it simple enough that idiots like me can understand.

01:15:24.520 Hopefully other people watching can understand as well.

01:15:27.020 So the idea of the Big Bang is you have this matter that is, I'm using very stupid language, I'm aware, but it's super condensed.

01:15:36.040 Absolutely.

01:15:36.480 And then it explodes and cools over time and that's how you get the universe.

01:15:40.200 Exactly.

01:15:40.700 So it's either that.

01:15:41.920 Yeah.

01:15:42.320 Or a static universe.

01:15:44.660 There are actually other, more than one other alternative.

01:15:47.540 Yeah.

01:15:47.820 It could be that there was a preceding universe that had a Big Bang in reverse called a Big Crunch.

01:15:54.020 It could be that there are multiple universes that exist parallel to ours, of which were just one that has properties, features, and phenomena consistent with the existence of cosmologists and podcasts and people.

01:16:06.480 Right?

01:16:07.180 So we want to know, is our universe an accident?

01:16:10.140 Yeah.

01:16:10.280 But is it a fluctuation?

01:16:11.840 A fluke.

01:16:12.940 And using technology for the first time, we can confirm that.

01:16:17.280 We could potentially reveal that our universe did in fact begin not only with a singularity, with a point of incomprehensible hellscape like energy, density, pressure, everything you could imagine.

01:16:28.160 But it would also reveal the presence of what's called a multiverse.

01:16:33.400 Just as Copernicus and Galileo showed that the Earth is just a planet.

01:16:38.540 It's not the center of the universe as people have thought for thousands of years, back to Aristotle and beyond, that the universe was centered on the Earth because that was the natural place for it to be.

01:16:48.740 No.

01:16:49.060 They disproved that.

01:16:49.900 They conjectured in the case of Copernicus and proved in the sense of Galileo and eventually Isaac Newton.

01:16:55.620 No.

01:16:56.520 But there's more than one planet.

01:16:58.160 There's more than one star.

01:16:59.380 There's more than one galaxy.

01:17:00.520 There's more than one cluster.

01:17:01.700 There's more than one super cluster of galaxies.

01:17:04.180 Why not?

01:17:04.960 More than one universe.

01:17:06.760 And in fact, concomitant with the singular origin of the universe comes the multiverse.

01:17:11.640 So in other words, you almost cannot have a singularity, a Big Bang, without having a multiverse.

01:17:19.340 They're almost wedded at the hip.

01:17:21.540 So the stakes are very high because it's very incompatible with, say, biblical narratives or it's incompatible with a lot of philosophical speculation that you could have parallel multiple universes.

01:17:35.280 In fact, they may not be even distant from us, just like they may be very closely related to us or they may be us in the sense of what's called many worlds multiverse interpretation.

01:17:46.300 So the stakes are very high.

01:17:47.860 It's the most primitive thing.

01:17:48.900 This is why I'm so interested in this is why I do what I do because to study where everything came from, where potentially, as Stephen Hawking said, asking what came before the Big Bang is meaningless as asking what's north of the North Pole.

01:18:01.640 He may have been wrong, surprisingly.

01:18:03.920 He may have been wrong.

01:18:04.940 No, it would be very interesting, I would say, to ask God, if God exists, to say, what happened on the Tuesday before the Big Bang?

01:18:12.040 That may have an answer for the first time in history by technology that my colleagues, who are far smarter than I am, are helping to build via what's called the Simons Observatory, which is located, it's actually one of the, if not the highest altitude construction project in the world,

01:18:27.540 building a massive telescope array, $130 million project funded primarily by the Simons Foundation in Manhattan, New York, and this is to unravel what caused the bang.

01:18:40.440 Was there a Big Banger or was it all a spontaneous fluke?

01:18:43.900 And if it was a Big Bang, are there other universes parallel to ours, in a sense?

01:18:49.660 I think, you know, for me, it's one of the most exciting things to grapple with.

01:18:52.820 When are we going to find out?

01:18:54.780 Well, if you join my webinar.

01:18:56.240 So, the challenging thing is that these things take time.

01:19:01.780 We're almost done with construction.

01:19:03.960 We have colleagues that are there right now in Chile.

01:19:05.780 This is in the Atacama Desert, 5,200 meters above sea level, 17,000 feet above sea level.

01:19:10.700 As I said, highest observatory in the world, highest construction project in the world, higher than, you know, the base station, permanent base station in Mount Everest.

01:19:17.760 It's very challenging conditions, very low oxygen, extreme ultraviolet damage from the sun, but it does make, you know, it's compared to going to Mars, it's like a cakewalk, so Elon is welcome to spend some time.

01:19:30.320 There are active volcanoes next door to us, and it's a very inhospitable place.

01:19:35.680 We're delayed by the pandemic, a year and a half, two, three years, which costs money because you can't just say, well, I know you're going to get your PhD working in the Keating Laboratory.

01:19:43.320 Come back in two and a half years when things are, you know, no, we couldn't do that.

01:19:46.720 So we kept it going, cost more money, and luckily we've been able to see it through.

01:19:50.580 So, yes, we're about to get what's called first light, and we'll get the first astronomical data later this calendar year, 2023, and then we should have results a year later.

01:19:59.840 But what I always caution people is that we won't be able to say definitively.

01:20:05.520 We won't be able to say, yes, there was definitely a singularity.

01:20:10.680 You could, however, say that there was no singularity.

01:20:14.060 In other words, you can, in science, you have to be careful.

01:20:16.720 Most people think it's like math.

01:20:18.080 You can prove one plus one equals two.

01:20:19.960 You can prove, you guys know this, that, you know, sine is opposite over hypotenuse, right?

01:20:24.820 Trigonometry, isn't that right?

01:20:26.020 You guys know any?

01:20:26.640 Okay, you can prove those things mathematically.

01:20:27.940 He's such an optimist.

01:20:28.880 Yeah, I know.

01:20:30.460 It goes back to Euclid, right?

01:20:32.660 So you can prove those, you can't prove something in physics.

01:20:35.580 You can't prove that, you know, the Big Bang, but you can rule out the other alternatives.

01:20:39.840 And so, therefore, you can falsify things about alternative models.

01:20:43.880 So by discovering the pattern that we're searching for, we would not prove the singularity, but

01:20:49.320 we'd falsify the alternatives, including some purported by Nobel laureate and friend of mine

01:20:55.020 and your countryman, Sir Roger Penrose, who has a model that's a cyclical universe that

01:20:59.760 cycles into and out of existence.

01:21:01.780 So I always say my job is to not prove theories, it's to kill theories, prove them wrong.

01:21:06.720 And I think that's where it's nice to kind of marry the theoretical with the experimental

01:21:10.880 and hopefully we unveil new knowledge about the origin of the only story that had no precedent,

01:21:17.780 perhaps.

01:21:18.980 That is absolutely fascinating, Brian.

01:21:22.100 And the one question that I want to ask before we finish up is this.

01:21:26.240 When you see people whose knowledge of science is so completely awry, let's take, for instance,

01:21:32.760 something like a flat earther, do you think it's the fault of the individual or do you

01:21:38.260 think it's the fault of science?

01:21:41.460 Oh, that's a good question.

01:21:42.820 I first would say it's the fault of education because it's very difficult.

01:21:48.600 Although I should say you guys are very good at, you know, self-mocking behavior.

01:21:54.180 But I know because I'm a big fan of yours that you guys are highly intelligent.

01:21:59.460 It's a British thing.

01:22:00.440 You can't pretend to be smart here.

01:22:02.640 Otherwise people will beat it out of you.

01:22:03.920 That's right, yeah.

01:22:04.860 Okay, let's stipulate that.

01:22:06.880 I want you to be honest.

01:22:08.080 And now we're getting all diary of a CEO and you guys, which, you know, you guys are going

01:22:11.460 to support.

01:22:11.620 Who's that?

01:22:12.200 Never heard of him.

01:22:12.420 I don't mention all competitors.

01:22:13.660 Okay, so I'm going to make you guys...

01:22:14.760 I don't know who that is.

01:22:15.540 You guys got to be real.

01:22:16.560 London real.

01:22:17.320 No, no, no.

01:22:17.620 I'll say that guy either.

01:22:19.580 Could you guys prove the Earth is a sphere?

01:22:22.020 No.

01:22:22.560 You couldn't, right?

01:22:23.120 So imagine proving that the Earth is not the center of the solar system, right?

01:22:26.480 And imagine proving the solar system is not the center of the galaxy.

01:22:28.720 Anyway, so why is that?

01:22:31.180 You guys are educated people.

01:22:32.680 Can you imagine saying, ah, you know, I never read Shakespeare.

01:22:35.660 I can't spell.

01:22:36.920 You know, I mean, my spell checkers gets a lot of work, but you would never be comfortable

01:22:41.200 with that.

01:22:42.260 So it's a little bit on you guys, right?

01:22:44.720 An educated man or woman in the 21st century should know some of the classics.

01:22:49.660 It's like, you know, yes, we can cancel anyone you want, but to not know it, it's canceling

01:22:55.360 yourself, right?

01:22:56.520 If you don't know these things, if this doesn't bother you, like, how do you know that the

01:22:59.920 Earth is going around a giant fusion reactor called the sun?

01:23:04.020 So part of it's education.

01:23:05.460 Because it's hard, right?

01:23:07.020 People, so the teachers don't learn it.

01:23:08.600 They're not forced to do it.

01:23:09.920 And so they don't teach it to the students.

01:23:11.100 But also the curiosity of the individual has to be important.

01:23:13.820 And one thing I have, I'm not great at math.

01:23:15.860 I'm not the greatest at building, I have rapacious curiosity.

01:23:19.800 And I think that's the trait that has allowed me to achieve the modest success that I've

01:23:23.860 had, because I keep wanting to answer these questions, because I keep realizing how finite

01:23:28.160 my life is.

01:23:29.380 So I would say, you know, flat earthers just, you know, is a byproduct of this.

01:23:33.800 Unless it's people that, you know, much more passionately believe that aliens not only exist,

01:23:38.380 but are actually visiting, you know, parts of California and parts of Virginia.

01:23:41.940 And I've had a lot of conversations about that on my podcast.

01:23:44.360 And we'll continue to, because I think it's interesting, potentially because it would

01:23:48.540 open a portal to, you know, learn about physics of a different century.

01:23:52.600 But be that as it may.

01:23:53.500 So to answer your question, Francis, I do think it's partially on the individual, partially

01:23:57.560 on the society that's producing the individual, that we're giving us so much potential technology,

01:24:02.180 byproduct of basic science that nobody understands.

01:24:04.760 Well, I think that's kind of it, isn't it?

01:24:06.440 Because I think the world has come to a point where it's so complex and so complicated.

01:24:10.700 I don't know if you could, you may be able to, my grandfather could maintain his own vehicle.

01:24:18.800 Right.

01:24:19.340 Very few people can do that now.

01:24:21.160 And it's not because necessarily people have got dumber, it's because the vehicle has got

01:24:24.820 more complicated.

01:24:25.560 That's right, yeah.

01:24:26.080 And I think the same is true of, there are so many things you now have to know to survive,

01:24:30.980 or to thrive particularly, that the amount of time you can spend learning certain things,

01:24:36.260 most people simply aren't going to be able to dedicate that much time to that particular

01:24:40.460 thing.

01:24:41.040 On the other hand, technology takes away with one hand, as you're saying, the ability to

01:24:44.900 change a battery in your phone, yeah, good luck with that, let alone, you know, service

01:24:49.040 the CPU on your car.

01:24:51.240 But it gives, too, right?

01:24:53.120 Now with chat, GPT, with artificial intelligence, which we'll talk about some other time, that,

01:24:59.020 and you guys come on my podcast, hopefully in Southern California.

01:25:02.140 Yeah, we can tell you all about physics, man.

01:25:03.520 Yeah, exactly.

01:25:04.380 I'll sort you out.

01:25:05.040 I can't wait.

01:25:06.020 Tell him about the multiverse, man.

01:25:07.180 All right, sit down, Brian, all right?

01:25:09.200 I can't take, because we're going to be a Wally, man.

01:25:11.400 Then I'll win the Nobel Prize next time.

01:25:13.720 So, as an example, like, I'm kind of glad that I wrote my first three books without the

01:25:18.680 help of AI, because I know I did it myself.

01:25:20.920 It's provable I could do it, because it didn't exist.

01:25:24.000 But now that also has become a lever and a force multiplier for me, because now I can do

01:25:29.920 stuff where I can actually take, say, the written works of Galileo, who's one of my

01:25:34.780 heroes, I said, I was able to get his written words and create the first ever audiobook by

01:25:40.040 Galileo.

01:25:40.740 It's kind of weird.

01:25:41.260 You think, oh, there's audiobooks.

01:25:42.220 No, no one had ever done that.

01:25:43.400 I did it.

01:25:43.920 I read it with Carlo Rovelli, who's a famous physicist, and Lucio Piccirillo, and a couple

01:25:49.920 of Nobel Prize.

01:25:50.640 It was an amazing thing.

01:25:51.620 Well, now I can say, hmm, I can take that text, I have the document file, put it into

01:25:56.920 a large language model.

01:25:58.360 Then I can start to say, well, what would Galileo say about the multiverse?

01:26:02.200 And I've made a Galileo chatbot.

01:26:03.920 I've made a Feinbot.

01:26:04.860 I've made an Einstein bot.

01:26:06.980 And so I'm doing this exploring, because the question is, can they then derive new laws

01:26:11.680 of physics?

01:26:12.720 So the people who will win in the AI age are not the people who are gifted with this

01:26:17.640 innate ability.

01:26:18.400 Who has an innate ability to program in Python with a JavaScript wrapper?

01:26:23.080 Nobody knows how to do that.

01:26:24.340 But you might not need to.

01:26:25.640 I'm not a great programmer.

01:26:27.660 But now I can tell Bard or Chachi, write a Python wrapper around this model.

01:26:33.120 And I can ask Galileo, what do you think about quantum mechanics?

01:26:37.040 I can do mind, and then I can say, well, here's all these data points from the spectrum of

01:26:42.040 an exoplanet, and here's 10,000 of those.

01:26:45.220 Here's 1,000 simulations of what life could be like.

01:26:48.500 Compare those.

01:26:50.360 And I could never have done that 20 years, 10 or 5 years ago.

01:26:54.300 So technology is giving us abilities that we never had.

01:26:56.860 But what's the key thing?

01:26:58.180 You have to be curious about it.

01:26:59.600 I can't teach curiosity.

01:27:01.360 I can stimulate it.

01:27:02.600 I can avoid it.

01:27:03.440 And as Barry Barish, the same Nobel laureate I told you about, he said, we have almost

01:27:07.280 a negative association.

01:27:08.720 When I say curiosity killed the cat, that's a bad, like, I don't want to kill a cat, like

01:27:15.160 you murderous, you know, PETA violet, right?

01:27:17.920 So it's almost a negative thing.

01:27:20.040 Curiosity is the most beautiful, unique human event.

01:27:23.280 So when you have a child and you have your ideological children that you support and you

01:27:28.540 mentor, inculcating curiosity, that's a superpower.

01:27:32.200 That's all we have.

01:27:33.760 That's our claws.

01:27:34.960 That's our teeth as human beings.

01:27:36.720 So that's what I would want to inculcate most of all.

01:27:39.180 Well, I agree with you.

01:27:40.160 But then we come into conflict with, I suppose, what we were talking about at the beginning,

01:27:44.520 which is the curiosity to explore, right?

01:27:49.180 I suppose it's different when it costs you trillions of dollars, right?

01:27:52.720 And come back with me because I want to finish that conversation, actually, or at least

01:27:57.020 do more on it, which is, you mentioned education, but STEM education will only produce more scientists

01:28:03.160 and more engineers and so on who will want to go to Mars, right?

01:28:07.940 So my sense from what you're saying is that you think that a lot of the way we think we

01:28:15.320 want to use science to fill a void that actually gets to be filled by other things

01:28:19.800 while we're here, down here on Earth.

01:28:22.560 A lot of that is, I would agree with.

01:28:24.920 I would say that there's a meaning gap that can't be filled by technology.

01:28:30.660 And it can only be filled, ironically, by reverence for the past.

01:28:34.440 So, in other words, when you think about, you know, like the worship of the young that

01:28:39.480 we have nowadays, the TikTok, the Instagram, the Snapchat, and even with these AIs, and

01:28:44.640 so like, just like every second on Twitter, it's like some new get rich, you know, I can't

01:28:49.340 keep up with it, or like, follow these 10 tips and you'll get AI rich.

01:28:52.600 And before that was Web3, Bitcoin, it goes on and on.

01:28:56.560 And so there's this future shock that older people feel.

01:28:59.620 And yet, we are the only repositories of wisdom.

01:29:03.240 I say we, you know, I'm older than you guys, right?

01:29:05.380 But the point being that you have to have a reverence.

01:29:08.020 And in the age where you kill God, there's no reverence for it.

01:29:11.820 Who cares about some book that was written 3,200 years ago, even if it was written by

01:29:16.840 God, whatever, it's out of date.

01:29:18.320 But certainly, if it was written by man, like, it's totally irrelevant.

01:29:21.140 Like, I have the scene in my book where I kind of, you know, take down the Nobel Prize

01:29:25.040 through most of the book and try to build it up towards the very end.

01:29:27.400 Because I think if it doesn't get reformed, if we have more joke Nobel Prizes or things

01:29:31.280 that are, it's going to collapse under its own weight.

01:29:33.440 You know, the Pulitzer Prize used to be way more prestigious.

01:29:35.900 You talked about this with Michael Malice.

01:29:37.440 Like, the Pulitzer Prize used to be really prestigious.

01:29:41.000 Now, most kids don't know what a Pulitzer Prize is.

01:29:44.280 But the Nobel Prize, people still, the same danger can befall the Nobel Prize if it's

01:29:48.320 not reformed in the way that I hope in my college.

01:29:50.460 And the reforms I present are not that.

01:29:52.580 But anyway, so I decried this.

01:29:54.980 I write that in 2016, 2017, I finished the first draft of the book, handed it to the publisher,

01:30:00.820 and a Nobel laureate came to UCSD to give a talk.

01:30:03.040 Duncan Haldane, who's a Brit, and he was at Princeton.

01:30:05.500 He actually did the work that won the Nobel Prize at UC San Diego, where I am.

01:30:08.760 And he brought his Nobel Prize with him.

01:30:11.860 I was like, this is weird.

01:30:12.940 And after his talk, people went up to it and were kissing it.

01:30:17.720 People were taking selfies of it.

01:30:19.620 Somehow it ends up in my hand.

01:30:20.860 I took this, like, I'd just written a book.

01:30:23.740 And I remembered back to the scene from Exodus in the Old Testament.

01:30:28.720 And the Jews get led out of Egypt by Moses through a split sea after 10 deadly plagues.

01:30:35.360 And it's all super ridiculous and miraculous.

01:30:37.200 And then they get to the other side, and they don't have water for a couple days.

01:30:40.080 And they start to complain.

01:30:41.120 They're like, oh, why did you take us out of Egypt?

01:30:44.200 Were there not enough graves in Egypt?

01:30:45.980 That's like classic Jewish humor.

01:30:47.600 And then they start complaining about the food.

01:30:49.440 In Egypt, we had garlic and cucumbers.

01:30:52.960 I'm just like, what the hell?

01:30:54.480 We just think of them as, like, idiots.

01:30:55.760 And then 40 days later after that, they build a golden calf, worship it,

01:31:01.820 and they say, this is the God that led you out of Egypt.

01:31:05.540 They were just led out.

01:31:06.440 It was 40 days ago.

01:31:08.040 In other words, the attraction to idolatry is very, very strong in human beings.

01:31:12.920 We can't comprehend what it was like.

01:31:14.560 I mean, a rabbi once told me it was like the sexual urge in a man, you know, straight or gay, right?

01:31:19.280 It's like it's almost overpowering.

01:31:20.960 We have to control that as good men in society, right?

01:31:24.640 And that was what it was like to worship.

01:31:26.240 But we still worship idols.

01:31:27.740 Wealth, education, prestige, followers, ratings, advertising, all these things.

01:31:33.960 We're just as idolatrous as ever.

01:31:36.820 How would we know that?

01:31:37.780 Well, we have to go back and read and have some connection and reverence for wisdom.

01:31:43.940 I'm not saying, let's look at the technology of the 32nd century.

01:31:47.860 No, I'm way, I'm in love with technology.

01:31:50.640 But it's addictive.

01:31:51.980 And it's worshipful.

01:31:53.380 It's dangerous because it becomes a false idol.

01:31:56.320 And that's one of the second commandments.

01:31:57.760 We're warned against that.

01:31:58.560 And one of the things I'm hearing in that, which I find very interesting, is we confuse knowledge with wisdom.

01:32:06.240 And we think because we live in a world where all the knowledge of the universe is at our fingertips, that means that all the wisdom of the universe is at our fingertips.

01:32:14.620 That's right.

01:32:15.300 When maybe it's not.

01:32:16.360 That's absolutely not right.

01:32:17.660 And even going back and reading great literature, not only reading the Bible, reading, you know, the great literature of civilization and asking, yes, what can we do with that and the conflation of that?

01:32:29.240 You know, the old joke that, you know, knowledge is knowing a tomato is a fruit, but wisdom is not putting it in a fruit salad.

01:32:35.340 You know, there's some truth to that.

01:32:37.600 But never more so when we think that, you know, I happen to think, again, we keep talking about Elon.

01:32:43.720 I think he's very smart.

01:32:45.300 I don't, you know, he may be wise.

01:32:46.560 I haven't met him.

01:32:47.560 I haven't talked to him.

01:32:48.660 But just as I said that one thing, the one question, the first question I would ask him is, who are you going to leave behind?

01:32:55.940 I don't, I don't think, I think he is a good father.

01:32:58.840 I see him in pictures with his little ex and whatever.

01:33:02.040 As a man, as a father, is that what you're willing to give up?

01:33:06.660 Like, why?

01:33:07.740 How?

01:33:08.160 How will you explain it to him?

01:33:09.660 Because you're not going to take him.

01:33:11.420 So those are the, those are kind of the questions, you know, that, that I'm most curious about.

01:33:16.000 And so that's where I want to get.

01:33:18.140 Knowledge is cheap.

01:33:19.420 Knowledge can be found anywhere.

01:33:20.640 Wikipedia knows way more than any of us will ever know.

01:33:23.600 But wisdom is extremely precious.

01:33:25.660 And it's a highly, highly undervalued asset, unique to human beings.

01:33:30.260 Now that is a good point to finish on.

01:33:32.080 Professor Brian Keating, as always, the last question we ask is, what's the one thing we're not talking about that we really should be as a society?

01:33:38.840 I think the, the preciousness, the, the fact that we're likely alone, I think it inspires terror.

01:33:47.780 And I think things that terrify people, there's a book by Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death.

01:33:52.520 We don't like to think about it.

01:33:54.040 We build monuments.

01:33:55.240 We build pharaohs and sarcophagi and pyramids.

01:33:58.980 We build Nobel Prizes.

01:34:00.140 We do all these things to mark this little speck of a dot that we inhabit when intermeaning is available to everyone, no matter how wealthy or poor you might be.

01:34:09.840 And I think developing those connections to me and putting at risk the potential consequences of personal devastation.

01:34:22.680 And it seems ironic.

01:34:23.860 I'm advocating that you should be vulnerable to devastation.

01:34:26.940 No, no, no, no.

01:34:27.480 Because any of us that are parents can contemplate in a nanosecond the most devastating thing that we can imagine.

01:34:33.560 I won't even say it.

01:34:34.460 It brings me to tears to think about it.

01:34:36.540 But every parent has it.

01:34:37.480 Every parent has it.

01:34:38.220 You and I are just beaming this back.

01:34:40.020 We know what we're talking about.

01:34:40.760 I don't have to say a damn thing.

01:34:41.760 And you know what we're talking about, too.

01:34:44.100 But that's a very powerful guidepost.

01:34:47.380 It's telling you, lean into those things.

01:34:49.540 What's important.

01:34:50.340 That if taken away, would devastate you.

01:34:53.200 I don't think we like to talk about that.

01:34:55.480 And I think that and thinking in that way of bridging gaps and maybe, you know, not to make this, you know, too Lex Friedman-ish, but to bring this interpersonal connectedness that we are part of this vast network of humanity.

01:35:08.900 That will bring love, this nature of distribution of love.

01:35:12.180 Because every person you add to a network, it increases geometrically and exponentially.

01:35:17.140 Make those connections.

01:35:18.400 Make the deepest connections such that if they're taken away, you can't envision what life would be like.

01:35:24.700 Lean into those.

01:35:25.780 That's what we should be talking about.

01:35:27.440 That's really valuable.

01:35:28.400 I appreciate that, Brian.

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TRIGGERnometry - July 09, 2023

We Asked an Astrophysicist About Aliens, Mars and the Origin of Everything - Brian Keating

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