Adam Frank

00:00five four three two one boom boom Adam what's up man how you doing it's good to be here today it's good to be here too with you and to talk can't be trusted your book alien worlds yeah and a fate of the earth yeah all about it that's deep man just the just a title alone you like whoa I love aliens everybody loves aliens everybody does but what are you thoughts on actual aliens and whether or not they've ever visited here yeah it's interesting because you know sort of two things so first of all we should tell everybody you have a background in science I do I'm an astrophysicist at the University of Rochester I run a research group that studies like stars and planets I'm not a crazy person I've brought on here no no no I'm a card-carrying scientist I got a card and everything so yeah I've been doing research on you know astronomy astrophysics for a long time but I also

01:03do all this popular writing like for NPR in New York Times and that Genesis to this book came a because I love science fiction been reading science fiction since that's kid but also I do a lot of work on climate change and so I deal with a lot of climate change denial and what I realized was that like there's this way we talk about it that is like completely forgets about the fact that like we're probably not the first you know and that led me to a whole bunch of research that eventually led to this book you know including one paper that we did that showed that the odds that we're the only time it's ever happened only you know the only civilization in the entire history of the universe the only way that that could be true is if the odds per planet are one in ten billion trillion right that's pretty low right so if you know you know the odds of anything being one in ten billion

01:49trillion that's pretty freakin low so um it's probably happened before you know there's been other civilizations before ours and once you realize that man that is like you know changes everything about how we think about ourselves you know and what's happening to us right now so of other civilizations before ours that have things up well that's the kind of the premise right so that's what you know when you look at climate change right basically what we it is is civilizations are giant machines for turning energy into work right you know New York City right you sit over and you look at Manhattan you're holy right now there's all this energy flowing into it and then there's all this work being done you know to keep everything moving and you know there's no way not to have an impact if you build a world girdling civilization which you know that's what a

02:32civilization is there's gonna be impact so the whole point of my doing this book was to start looking at ourselves as just one of you know we're not alone not the only time this has ever happened doesn't mean anybody's around now like that's a different question but the idea that like it's never happened before it meaning like you know you know civilization was happening around us like this machinery and everything that you know that just in the new world of what we understand about planets and that is just like yeah it's not tenable anymore we got to wake up the idea that some civilization has to be the first one that's that's what the only the only way you could ever think that we are the only ones is that some civilization has to be the first one even in the universe that's infinite yeah it has to happen one time right but the idea is are the conditions

03:20ideal in you know a trillion different spots all over the the infinite spans of right the universe yeah and that's the thing right so what we've learned is so you know one of my trips right now is like this is not your grandfather's SETI anymore our understanding we went to this major revolution in our understanding of planets about 20 years ago so you look back at the Greeks right you can see them arguing about Wendy whether any other stars had planets other than you know the Sun and you know it goes back and forth you know some of the Greeks were like yeah it's definitely happening and then like Aristotle was like no we're the only world and the soul in the whole universe you know that has life and then as time goes on it kind of goes back and forth and even at the turn of the last of this the 19th century people thought planets were incredibly rare that like they all

04:02they thought the only way you could get a plan it was if two stars passed really close to each other and they kind of like taffy pulled out stuff that would eventually form a planet and the odds of those kinds of collisions are so small that people are like you know what there's just no planets no planets no life you don't let something really freaky is going on but then 20 years ago we discovered our first planet it's not crazy when you really think about that 20 years is such a short amount of time 1998 yeah yeah and nobody knew before that like nobody knew whether there were any planets right you know when I was starting to strive you were like read know whether there's gonna be any other planets and we went from so the first one was actually 96 I think 95 96 from that to now where we know that every freaking star in the sky that's a planet at least one you know pretty much

04:45everyone pretty on me the big the giant ones maybe not but they're they're so rare that you know pretty much every star you see in this guy has a family of planets around it that is so nuts it's so nuts that this is such a new discovery yeah I mean when we think about what we know about the universe we think that we've had a pretty good understanding of it for a long time right but the fact that we didn't even know for sure that there are planets right right in my own lifetime you know people were teaching me when I was starting like you know we just don't know maybe they're rare and now we know for certain that they're everywhere and the other thing people have to realize is every one of those planets is a place you know I mean it's a place you could walk around some of them for sure gonna have oceans there's gonna be mountains it's gonna be rain falling you know I

05:24mean like they're all frickin places and they're all places where things can happen you know planets are basically like nature's way of taking sunlight and doing something interesting with it so you have ten billion trillion planets in the universe right and every one of them is an experiment that's being run so you know the idea that like we were the first time it's ever now that we know that right now that we've gone through that revolution and understand that planets are like dime a dozen planets now not only talk about planets here well my plants are in the right place for life to form so there's the idea the habitable zone right so you know mercury sucks you cannot you know mercury so hot that there's no way anything's gonna happen and you know planets that are far far enough out they're gonna be so cold you know they're so far away from their star that they're gonna be so cold that

06:07they'll you know it's hard to get liquid water on the surface so we define the habitable or Goldilocks zone is the place where you can have you can pour a little water onto the surface until to sit there won't freeze and it won't sort of just evaporate away so all these 10 billion trillion planets sometime out are all in the right place for life to form you know and so like with that many numbers that many experiments being run like you got to be a psychotic pessimist to say that like this is the only time a civilizations ever happened right but there's still no evidence yet obviously we didn't even know there really absolutely were planets until 20 years ago right but we don't know for sure that there's something else out there know no this is an argument by I call it like an argument by exhaustion you know if I gave you a bag of ten billion trillion

06:51planets and you have to sort through all of them right the odds that you're gonna you're never gonna find another one that that built a civilization is pretty Spinola cup said you're really asking for really serious pessimism but you know we're just getting started with this game right of looking for life that's why I keep saying it's not this is not your grandfather's SETI where you like your point you know a radio telescope at a star and you kind of wait to see if whether somebody's Cygnet from you they are signaling who knows what they'd be using now what we can do because we got all these planets to stare at is you know we're gonna be able to like stare at them as they pass in front of their star and get the light that passes through their atmosphere so we're gonna like who knows what we're gonna find you know we're not waiting for them to signal us anymore

07:29over the next I swear to god man in the next 30 years we're gonna have data relevant to the question of life maybe not civilization so that could happen too but just life on other worlds you know and we've never had that for all the arguments for the entire history of humanity there's been two dudes yelling at each other right but in the next thirty years because the stuff we're building and now that we had knows there's uh planets we're gonna have real data to argue over with so man it's like this is we're in a whole nother ballgame now I think the big fear for a lot of people is what happens when we find out for sure there's something else out there yeah if we really do find like some other Manhattan on some Goldilocks planet yeah it's hovering some similarly sized star a billion light years away or whatever the hell it is that's that's gonna be very very very strange it will

08:15be it'll be a game-changer right because for religions for you know I mean wow you know what do you do if you find other intelligent creatures who are building symbolism you start making them pay taxes that's what you do they're not doing what you want them to do believe in this one you know so but I think you know for me this thing is like it's about climate change because what it means it's like there's no way well from my perspective you know that that if you have a civilization you push your planet you know you can't stop it in some sense if you build a civilizations well the only way around it is if you have like subsistence culture the indigenous you have American culture right which it seems impossible but it existed here 200 years we just a blink of an on right right I know it's amazing it's only 200 years since like this the ramp-up you know

09:05that the world population only crossed up the billion mark in like 1850 well you know I mean it's not there were so few of us on the planet for most of the time that even we've been around forget the planet yeah so you know I think like there is you know the discovery if we were to get any evidence you know and I think the way it's gonna happen he's gonna be more by accident then by like signaling you know like this oh so but if we had any evidence of another technological just life right if we just find a biosphere hmmm evidence that you know and we can do that from a distance right even if the star is you know 30 light years away if we get if we see as the light passes through the stars atmosphere for those few moments if we see oxygen in the atmosphere you know we'll be able to detect that that's what we can do with telescopes we can tell like whether you can see the

09:49fingerprints of the different kinds of elements if we see oxygen that atmosphere you know and methane that pretty much says that there's a biosphere there that there's life because you wouldn't get oxygen would just like react away really fast if it wasn't for life like in our on on earth if it wasn't for life there'd be no oxygen what are the possibilities of life that exists in a completely different environment than we expect like I know that they found life at the bottom of the ocean and these volcanic vents yeah at extreme heats boiling water they didn't expect to see this yeah this is fairly recent as well that is that yeah the idea that the because right this whole definition of the habitable zone was based on the idea like oh you gotta have a surface and it's got to be you know but now with the you know not every but like a bunch of the moons orbiting Jupiter and Saturn

10:33than the gas giants they have oceans well there's thoughts that your OPA might have something below the surface right yeah yeah because the Europa is you know it's it's this pretty big moon and we know it's covered in ice where you can see it's covered in it you know and we think that layer of ice is maybe like I don't know 10 kilometers thick and then below that there maybe 100 kilometers of ocean and because as it moves around Jupiter its conch the gravity of Jupiter's always squish in the inside so there's probably volcanic activity happening at the surface so you have hydrothermal vents you know heat escaping out of and chemicals escaping out of the at the surface under the ocean and that's how we think life formed on on earth that's one of the arguments for how life formed a firm formed first in the hydrothermal vents so yeah you know we it's a nude that's another game-changer right

11:13so that we should also be thinking not just about the the classic the habitable zone but now we got to think about like life and can you get civilizations in an underwater civilization you know in an underwater you maybe have a really rich ecosystem but you know with the problem with a you know an underwater life or forming civilization is that you can't really do fire right fire was pretty important for us for metallurgy you know to build advanced technology you kind of need combustion so you know that's kind of the open question with that yeah we are not really concerned with animals we're concerned with things that think and change their environment isn't that weird like we are concerned with life but we're only concerned with life that's at least similar or comparable to us yeah microbes don't like we don't know we don't they don't they're not excited go to Jupiter for some microbes

11:57but we are excited about the things that they've recently found on Mars right I mean yeah discovery right yeah right so you know the thing is actually from the you know so I'm gonna work in a lot of fields but I would also consider myself an astrobiologist right which is a pretty kind of wild idea that you can do astrobiology even though you only have one example which is the earth but we've learned so much than now we can start asking ourselves about the possibility of life elsewhere so finding even a microbe like even bringing you know amoeba on Mars would be convinced that there used to be amoebas on what is the evidence that they discovered on Mars what they found was um organic chemistry right and so our but organic chemistry and I hated chemistry when I was growing up and I hated arguing was that just basically chemistry involving carbon you know so you can have non or does organic

12:43chemistry doesn't mean organisms but it's the kind of chemistry that organisms live right so finding evidence that there was like they drilled it we sent a freaking robot to Mars that could drill through a rock you know and then ingest the rock and then send the data back across space you know pretty good for a bunch of hairless apes yeah so what what they found was evidence for a fairly complex you know organic chemistry which meant that way back when Mars and this we know for sure right Mars had water on it we know that for sure now Mars was a blue planet first they think that Mars was hit by an asteroid or a comet or something well everything got hit by comets that's how we have you know we have chunks of Mars here right that you know the thing in ninety whatever when they were like we found life on Mars you know they thought what they found was fossil bacteria in a

13:33chunk of her Mars that they found in Antarctica so the planets had been swapping spit for like the entire history of the solar sets fossilized bacteria that they found has that been confirmed no no most people now think that the Helen Hills meteorite that probably you know it's inconclusive and it's not conclusive enough to be like yeah we found life it's like a tiny little squiggly worm looking that's what it was yeah but it was so small that it was like way smaller than any of the microscopic fossilized bacteria we've ever seen before so people in general are like me but by five but that's what started right that's when Clinton was like okay we're gonna send a lot of tomorrow back in ninety your early 90s people are kind of done with Mars and so that's what triggered the whole you know one space probe after another the Rovers and like so you know the thing we found

14:15was a direct result of that effort which was this organic chemistry which says that back in the day Mars had had a lot of this stuff lying around had a lot of these you know these these organic chemicals lying around which if your life that's what you're gonna be using so it's like one more step like we've been put in the Lego blocks for the argument for life on Mars one piece at a time since the you know since the first Rovers went there yeah if we did discover just even plants on some other planet even just a planet with some sort of plant like life yeah that would be that'd be a game to a game change because right now we don't know if there's we you know are we the only time in the entire history of the universe that like this crazy thing where you got we went from non-life to life like is that common or is that never ever ever happen so that's the question we want to

15:04you know we want to answer you know I mean like a you know that argument I was given before is I think from the probable arguments I'm saying it's like you know it's it's almost overwhelming that yeah it probably happened somewhere again doesn't mean anything's here but we need evidence right science so we got to build that evidence yeah and if we do find something the one of the weirder things would be if we found something and there was a way to get there yeah you know we we find something and like yeah we found something but it's we're pretty sure there's some kind of life and it's three billion light years away like well that's cool yeah what do we do yeah it's nice to know that we're not the only ones yeah you know it's interesting like how much would that that change you know even if we found like evidence for this because is a debate like if we found evidence of

15:46a technological civilization we saw like alien mega structures like that star they thought yeah what was that nonsense something floating around right so here's what they saw so that you know the way we discover planets is we look for when the the planets passes in front of the star you get a little dip in the light right it blocks out a little bit like a little Eclipse um and so you know we now that's how we know that every star in the sky has planets but there's like they found one that just made no sense like the light would dip then would stop dipping then would dip again three times and would stop dipping sometimes it was lower sometimes it was higher and you know for a year so people you know and so you know Jason right now there's a Jason's a friend of mine you know they wrote a paper where they're like hey you know at least because this is what the futures gonna look like we

16:30can't say we can't we have to at least consider the possibility that these are artificial structures that are like orbiting the star or you know it would have to be ungodly huge ungodly huge alien mega structures like that's the best word like the size of a country right yeah yeah these things would be huge right but that's what people think like you know when people think about advanced alien civilizations the idea of building large-scale structures is you think that maybe the next thing you do once you reach a certain point like um you know the Dyson Sphere the idea you could collect all of the sun's energy and use it for yourself by building a giant sphere around the Sun with solar panels on the inside people think like that goes back to Carter chefs the idea of this Kardashev scale back in the 60s where he's like look there's gonna be a natural progression of civilizations

17:13that goes first you collect all the energy you can from your planet and then you use that to do amazing things and then you collect all the energy from your star and then you do that you know you do amazing with that and then you know the whole galaxy so he you know Kardashev thought there was a scale that that civilizations naturally progress through and so hopefully don't blow yourself up along the way well I think that's the question you know I've criticized that called the Kardashev scale in one of the papers I recently did because what it fails to take into account is the fact that like you know on your way up to the type one type one is when you harvest all the energy from your planet which basically means somehow covering your planet in you know solar panels or something that neglects what we've learned since Carter Chef wrote his paper in 64 is that you know

17:52planets don't like that like planets a plant's gonna feedback you try and build you know massive on your planet the planet has its own your biosphere is pretty powerful and you got to take the biosphere and account or you get climate change you get you know they ant the planet being pushed off in another direction so but whatever so for the UM for the alien megastructures people felt like oh maybe this is like a piece of a Dyson Sphere right this is like you know now so you know when he proposed this people went bonkers over this right he was just saying he's like look here's the 15 different things could be and I'm gonna have to at least consider the possibility that it's artificial but for me and some people got really this is why they get angry because there's been a thing in the community over the years you know said he got a bad name right SETI for a bunch of said he was sort of

18:34thought as being like only wackadoodles do that but why why is that just because there was no results I just think you know it was you notice it's because a shitty TV you know I mean I reel it in some ways right it's all you know it's prosthetic foreheads right it's the whole we've had so much kind of crappy you know speculation about aliens that trying to do anything scientific always had this whiff of sort of being a little you know and then there's the UFO stuff you know which is completely separate has nothing to do with it but said he never really achieved any results right there was that one big blip that was highly popularize wow signal yeah but here's the thing about city we never really did SETI that much you know I mean like people have this idea like wow we've got telescopes all over the world and they're looking you know so the government never funded a SETI study I

19:20Ben ething major right so people you know all that SETI has done is like basically you know some dudes on a telescope get a little extra time like hey man quit let's go look at a star you know so um Jill tarter who's one of the you know that founders one of the Great's of SETI she compares it's like you know we got a notion that we need to look at and wait so far we've looked at a thimble right was she the Jodie Foster carries the Jodie Foster character yet in a contact yeah yeah so she's late on it's a good point like we haven't really looked yet so the idea that you know the stars are silent or anything it's like man come on we haven't even begun to do a comprehensive service said he makes me sad why because I feel like they're wasting their time and there's a there was a documentary I saw once about some biologist who was convinced that the giant sloth was still alive

20:06and that there was examples of them in South America and this poor bastard had spent more than a decade looking for this giant sloth in South America and there was there's this moment where he was chasing down this supposed dung pile and they were looking for and they were thinking about yeah and he had this look in his eyes where like he was like holy what if I waste my life yeah in my academic career chasing down something that's not even real yeah that's kind of how I've always felt about SETI yeah but that's not the way the people I mean everybody was involved in it um Your Honor do SETI you know I mean you know I respect the people are doing it it's not yeah but you know most of them are like look this is just a monkey generational thing you know and if even if I don't find it I'm laying the foundation concealer all's right it took like how many generations did it

20:56take to build a cathedral in medieval Europe right so the first guy who laid the stone was like I'm not gonna see this yeah maybe my great-grand kid so most of them are like you know they're you know they know that this is gonna you know this is a this is a huge like the most important question in humanity right why are we alone and they're willing to accept that like you know it's gonna do it scientifically you're gonna have to do it brick by fricking brick you know and so you just have to accept that and you know go on so but like I said I think we've you know this is a new era now so the idea of like looking for signals which assumes that somebody's putting out signals right that's that's a huge assumption right there but it would now that we know that there's all these planets and we're staring at all these planets it's kind of we need to be thinking differently

21:34about you know we need to be prepared for like what happens when we see something we don't understand well it's also we don't even use radio anymore right right cable radio is dying right slowly but surely yeah local radio is yeah I mean it's it's kind of a thing of the past yeah right the only thing that's really we're beaming out a large scale is military radars you know that's the main thing so there'd be some kind of signal wouldn't necessarily have to be radar or radio just have to be something that we could detect right some formula nominally that seemed to be artificial right so here's like here's some of the suggestions that people are talking about so ovule obit Harvard talks about the idea you know maybe what you need and you're gonna need the sensitivity for this you're gonna see like rocket engines going back and forth between you know but you have a planet you haven't a

22:20multi-planet civilization on in some and you're gonna see little flares as Rockets decelerate and accelerate back and forth people talk about seeing city lights you know the telescope's are getting you know we're building these giant telescopes they're like 30 meters it may be a potential one day to see you could see city lights you know there you're gonna see the planet come around like this is all like you know we're not we're not there yet but um people 20 years 30 years 30 years 40 years yeah this is a long game and you got to be playing the long game at some point we're gonna need to build stuff in space that's even larger so we can collect more light and won't the issue also be that if we do see these city lights we're seeing city lights from millions of years ago well it depends like you tend you know a planets that that's in a star ten light years ago that's ten

23:00years ago so it's not like you know these things could still be around here's a really interesting idea like because you know one of the things that I'm talking about my book is like how long does any civilization last right that's the real quiet is rest super relevant for us now because the question is what is the average lifetime of a civilization so you might be able to see artifacts from civilizations that are gone like imagine of civilization covered one of its moons in solar panels right the reflected light is going to show a spectral signature of the the panel's you know so it's like you they don't even have to necessarily be alive now that we still might be able to see stuff from there you know our evidence of like artificial structures or something that's not natural around them so you know that's the thing man it's like we're really we're just we're about

23:45to take this step instead in astrobiology where we're you know we're already running models of uh EXO biosphere it's right which we're asking like what kind of chemistry can you have if you don't like if you have photosynthesis and it's our on a planet around a star that's smaller than ours that stars gonna be mostly red as opposed to yellow like our so the light that's coming off it is gonna be different can you have photosynthesis in that case some people like yeah you probably could what would it look like so we're already doing the work to be ready for EXO biospheres so EXO civilizations we kind of need to be prepared for that too looking for you know what could be the traces what might we see from a distance from an EXO civilization they don't have to be signaling us you know they're just there and we're gonna catch some aspect of their being around even if we did see

24:28rocket if we did see some sort of a signature from raw it's going back and forth or the we would have to assume that this is a similarly aged civilization to ours whereas if we saw something that was a thousand a hundred thousand years advanced we probably wouldn't see that anymore probably see some sort of a manipulation of time and space right if that's possible everybody possibly if it's possible yeah yeah so that's I mean of course that is one of the problems is that um when you start you know when you start pushing it's just like saying like you know what is the water is that what are we gonna be like in a million years no it's you know I mean it's so long so I think you start with what you know and the cool thing about the planet part though is that you know unless they become like energy beings you know they're gonna have an effect on their planet so looking at their planets to

25:14look for you know for spectral indications that's prior even after they die there might even be things so that's I think a you know a good way to go yeah I'm yeah I'm so curious as to what we're going to be able to do in a thousand years in ten thousand years and a hundred thousand years if civilization does stale around and we figure out how to not melt the earth right boil the oceans or whatever whatever the folly of the ground we're doing Yeah right but there's you know a bunch of science fiction films that do speculated what what's going to be possible in the future and one of them was was that recent one with what's-his-name all right all right what's his name the his name McConaughey the one where they go through the wormholes right how much do those movies piss you off but they don't I don't know I I do not mean but they gets of science fiction so you know I mean I do not need

26:07my science fiction to be correct to be correct I mean it's you know if they want to make it you know so I love the expanse the expanse is my favorite show ever I will talk about it what is the expanse the expanse I don't even know yes thank you help me so the expanse it's a series of books first of all that I think are the best science fiction books in the last 15 years and then they made him into it made it into a show on sci-fi and then had three years of it and you know at first people were like oh it's kind of hard to follow cuz you know it's a lot of stories coming together and then you know if this year it got a hundred percent ratings or what is it rotten tomatoes rotten tomatoes a hundred or ninety five percent like if people love show any friggin sci-fi cancelled it you know and so the Jeff Bezos just yeah Jeff piezo just picked it up oh because people yeah tell you

26:53why this show is amazing right so um it takes place about two hundred years from now and we are truly a multi-planet species like Mars now has you know you know billion people on it and it's become its own political power right it's separated from the earth and then the asteroid belt has also people are colonizing and you know living on the asteroid belt to you know my niece or tsa's but the belters as they call them are like they're like second-class citizens they're basically like super poor and there be other they got the boot on their necks by either earth or Mars and so there's this whole interplanetary kind of political going on which is just great you know and then there's you enter into this they discover like the what they call the proto molecule like you know it was this is basically this alien molecule that was really a device that some aliens threw our way billions of years

27:40ago that was you know I don't know how much my supposed to give away you know I don't want I said no that's what so close no one's gonna remember good good so complicated so that you know that becomes kind of a weapon in this this political intrigue so it's just a great stories kind of people call it like the game of Thrones in space mmm but I'll tell you what I love about it is that this is what its gonna look like like they get the science on this show so write as much as you can right so you know in space if your rocket motors are on there's gravity because you know the rocket motors push up towards you until you got grabbed you can walk around when you turn the rocket motors off you float around right on spinning things you know anything so you know in the in this universe you know in this the fictional universe they've taken the big asteroids and they've hollowed them out and spun

28:23them up so people live on the inside you know and so one point like that one of the characters that the Private Eye they got this great sort of film noir thing going on and He pours a drink you know some whiskey and the whiskey does this it spirals into this so they got the coriolis uh like I peed my pants Coriolis effect right so it's like this is really what its gonna look like you know I mean this is if you want to imagine 200 years from now which I think it's completely feasible that we have millions of people living in space I make any advances socially no people are to each other that's what makes it yeah it's only 200 years that's a lot to ask for well think about how different we are from people that live 50 years ago we that different think we're quite a bit different in what way what do you think well we have this ability to communicate now that we never had before

29:12where everybody has an ability to say their piece about how to feel about how things are going yeah no that's interesting right and that has changed a lot of things in a lot of ways but I mean has it changed who we are I mean I think I think it's chipping away yeah well that would be good good you know because one of the things my thing so it what's interesting about this fictional world - is that like climate you know the earth is dealing with client arts has like 30 billion people on it and you know New York is half way underwater and so that's part of the story too is that you know so we're trying to navigate our way through now becoming a multi-planet species so you know that is a version of at least 200 years or you can really extrapolate the technologies and ask yourself because that's real I mean I think that's really gonna happen if we make it through climate change that's

29:54the that's the prize at the end of the you know of the of the story if we make it through climate change you know what the stuff that Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos are doing man that's real like this this is what your number one concern is climate change Michael I'm a single voter yeah climate change because it's like it is an existential dilemma you know and because of all the writing I did for NPR in New York Times I have dealt with a lot of climate change denial SMAN and it drives me what is their big what's the big because I recently had a discussion with someone on the podcast that didn't believe in climate change and it was it was a weird things because I kept pulling up all the different scientific consensus studies all the different studies that show that we were having an impact it's an undeniable impact undeniable under 30 years of science yeah I know I saw that

30:37and she was like you know that's what I'm saying I don't think that she's really thinking about that in her case it was I don't think she really thinks about it I think she just has this stance that she believes that that group that she's a part of that's what it subscribes to so there's an ideological yeah aspect of it yeah you you kind of you have a predetermined pattern that you're supposed to follow and on one side we have to be pro-life you have to be pro second market it's tough guy stuff yeah and that's I think it's a giant problem with our culture so there are two groups of people you can't like to truly be an independent thinker you like one of these weirdos it's often the fringe yeah you know to be independent of either part right right and the thing about science is the whole point of science is to write independent is to be and to have it you know that what

31:23science is science is a way of having public knowledge you know I mean like everybody has their opinions whatever but science is about the stuff we can all be like oh yeah that for sure yeah it's this whole process that we've evolved over 400 years and with climate denial man sometimes you know it's just yeah you want to be like what are you saying man like what you read a book because they'll say stuff like here's my favorite one climate always changing hey man claims who's changing man which is true yeah so if somebody comes to me because you know what I want most for people like I consider myself an evangelist of science I love science and so if people come to me they say hey man isn't the climate always changing I'm like oh great question you know we actually know the answer to that yeah it's changing but it's changing what's the time scale you know so it changes

32:05often on million-year timescales but like from the the last ten thousand years since the last ice age which was ten thousand years ago which is amazing like there use to be a mile of ice above our heads you know ten thousand years ago climate has been remarkably stable yeah it's been little blips in it but no major changes right so like and I can show them the graph of this and everything so if you're if you know if they're interested you know I mean if they're so if they're asking the question because they want to know I'm all I'm down to talk until the cows come home but that's not what the typical deniers are deniers like you climate changing little time but they're not interested in the answer but isn't it it's not only they're not interested in the answer they're just trying to win it's not a real conversation because it's a really complex thing if you dig

32:46an ice core and you you tap down to fifty thousand eighty thousand a hundred thousand years you see all these bizarre shifts of the climate right that could be indicative of super volcanoes and asteroid impacts and solar flares a lot of happens yeah over the course of a million years right but to hang all your ideas on the parties ideology and to deny all this really interesting stuff and and and all these variables that's what that's what pisses me off it's like you know what I try and tell people's like look climate science is like awesome like it's it's got these amazing stories to tell about you know yeah the earth I mean earth over the past 4.5 billion years the earth has gone through the most profound changes and we've learned about aren't you interested in that but no right there they basically have this thing we're like you know I'm part of this group and therefore I have to have

33:42this opinion and I'm like dude it's science science doesn't care who you voted for you know I mean like the radiative properties of a co2 molecule doesn't care whether you're wearing a blue tie or a red tie and the fact that people can't make that distinction and here's the real problem once you go down this slippery road of denying saying like okay that kind of science I hate man they're all a hoax well you know America's prosperity and our safety has been built on science over the last 200 years you know you start to erode the whole thing you can't just like call one group of VO scientists hoaxsters you know and it's all they're only doing for learn and not have it slowly infect everything else to the point we're like you know China will be happy to eat our lunch you know when it comes scientificly Chinese pumping huge amounts of money into science they're

34:22not doing this so like you know we're limiting and here's the other thing that really bums me out science is not a it's not a lunch buffet you know I mean you can't be like oh man can I have some of those antibiotics I love antibiotics and oh yeah the cellphones great I'll use that I really want to fly in a plane but climate change is you know I mean like you know either you accept that you live in a scientific society doesn't mean like your slavish Lee adhere to anything you know comes out in the journal it yesterday but you know either you adhere to the idea this method has produced miracles for us or you know give me the cell phone back well the scientific method is what has established the actual real facts of how things interact with each other that's allowed us to create technology right I think they they split that distinction right they focus on the technology and commerce

35:08right which is more important right their eyes than the the the consequences of the environment all right what's going to happen to the environment there this is the big hope is that we're gonna figure it out and I'm hopeful of that too is that we're going to figure out some way to extract carbon from the atmosphere with devices or some enormous like there was some I don't know if it was a working prototype or it's just a concept but there was an enormous building that was really an air filter yeah yeah they're starting to look at carbon yeah sure with places like Hong Kong and right places where they have Terra Beijing and they have terrible terrible pollution and more importantly particulates in the atmosphere yeah so it's not just a like a carbon thing it's like they have in their air breathing awful man it's you know I went to Mexico City a couple

35:58years back I've been there twice but I went there for a UFC and when we're flying in I took photos and I put them on my Instagram seat you see you find those they're shocked it's unbelievable right what kind of a creepy animal is the human where the human is capable of burning smoke yeah into the very air that I need to take into our lungs to keep our body a lot oh you see it's so bad people have never been to Mexico City yeah like it's a stunner dude my head was killing me after two days there yeah that's what like have with the Beijing when they had the Olympics right they had to like you know they had to stop all industrial activity for like this months right this is LA used to look like this right before the Clean Air Act LA when I wrote I wrote Mexico's LA on steroids Mexico cities LA on steroids just so dark you know the this whole question of what

36:45we'll do like this brings us back to the aliens right what so my point is is that you know we're not the first time this has happened yet pretty much if you build the civilization anybody who builds a civilization like we've done is gonna trigger climate change right it's like it's kind of unavoidable right so that goes back to the denier thing and one of things I'm trying to his book is flip the script right cuz you talked to climate denialists and it's the same freaking set of things that like you know man dude we've been here before we've questioned is that answered but I'm trying to like flip it to show that like the whole question of you know did we change the climate that's why everybody focuses on did we to be not you know right and you know from when you take the 10,000 light your view then what you realize is like what did you expect like we built a world

37:25girdling civilization that uses a quarter almost of all the energy the biosphere uses right so you know every you know everyday the biosphere has like you know 200 terawatts of energy that it's producing in sugars we use about a quarter of that like how did you expect there wasn't gonna be an impact so this changes the whole way we're looking we don't need to argue about like did we or didn't we of course we did this is what happens when you reach this level and the other thing that you know in the book that I'm trying to argue also and it pushes back against the deniers is like what climate deniers are human haters you know they're all like you know like that you know we did this amazing thing we changed the atmosphere of an entire planet right climate change shows on one level how freaking awesome we are you know how far we've gotten and is if you look at the you know from the

38:08perspective of you know species doing this again and again across the universe this shows that we've reached a level right we have we've leveled up right you don't play a lot of video games right and so that whole thing when you level up and you know you get that the sniper rifle we've leveled up and so now the question is are we smart enough you know to see what we've done and make the right choices because that's what the universe is going to be there's gonna be species at the trigger climate change is gonna happen all time and some are gonna be like oh man we need to do something right and they'll make the actions they'll be able to work it out get it together and other ones you know we're just gonna end up in the cosmic waste pile so we're like cosmic teenagers and just like when you're a teenager and you're you know you start to drive right either you figure it out

38:45you know either you're drinking and you're partying and drive the car off a cliff or you figure out how to handle your responsibility and that's us now yeah yeah no I agree with you and I feel like there's a fundamental problem with the way people approach ideas and I think it goes back to what we're talking about earlier about right versus left or yeah you know Republican versus Democrat they're not thinking the consequences of arguing for against the possibility that climate change is a human cause thing they're not thinking of the consequences they just want to win right right and want their side to be they want their side to be right and that you know what what bums me out is they don't understand the the consequences of that for the both the American enterprise and the human Enterprise right I mean because you know if you if you keep calling one branch of science a hoax

39:31then what's to say the other branch is like well you know then you just you're down you're rolling down this you know slippery slope or like the other countries you know like so most of the of the Nobel Prizes Americans have won were people from other countries they came here to do their science because we had the best scientific enterprise know the next generation we'll just go somewhere else I'll go to China you know so there's that part of it and the other part is like dude it's just science it doesn't care about your political views and you know it's not fair to use the cell phone and take the antibiotics and then turn around and like and then suddenly treat this thing as it was another thing in your bucket of you know ideologies I think also people think if you somehow another compromise industries ability to to work that you're gonna kill jobs and you're gonna

40:16damage the economy and that's more important yeah but I think it's the exact opposite right and if people really saw right I mean um you know again just like I'm saying climate change shows how powerful people's become it also shows how powerful our enterprise right we did this by you know building businesses by building enterprise by and we built this world girdling machine of civilization and it you know it the planet actually noticed why do you like that term world girdling because that's it gives me the turtle because it's from like Shakespeare like from Caesar or something I was thought it wasn't good but it's the idea that like you know in the foundation trilogy the Isaac gazzman off you know classic science fiction thing there's the city of the Planet of Trant or which is the center of the the Empire the Galactic Empire and it's a you know it's

41:04basically the whole planets been covered in City you know like the other planet you got to go down like five hundred levels before you get to the the surface so that idea you know I mean what I like about it is the idea that like you know we've done something we're kind of covered the planet in our our effect you know covered the planet in our enterprise so this issue a business is that like um there's a place I can stand in Rochester I did this for M PR and there's the Erie Canal I can stand right on the edge of the Erie Canal then there's a train tracks you know the tracks was laid those tracks were laid back in the original line back in the eighteenth you know whatever 70s then there's a highway and then there's the airport right over there for different infrastructures you know which everyone took huge amounts of money to build one of which we don't

41:45even use anymore right so the idea of building an infrastructure that will that will not be carbon polluting will not trigger climate change like did this is what we do you know so the idea that there's gonna be more jobs that come out of this than it could ever come out of fossil fuels you know it's not a big deal for human beings cuz that's what we do to switch infrastructures and there will be a lot of wealth generated out by you know just like there was you know when we switched to the trains where's the argument coming that we because there are people that just adopt the party line the party line that you know he climates always changed and human beings barely affected and it's not something to concentrate on where's that coming from again I think it's the you know the gradual political polo polarization of everything you know because you look at

42:30in the we're now at the what is it 30 year anniversary of Jim Hanson who was you know the famous climate scientist giving his testimony in front of Congress in 1988 hot sweltering summer day we said climate change is already happening you know and that made news everyone that was the first like public awakening that this was happening and if you look at the first Bush administration they were like oh yeah we're ready to do something about this sure we can do it you know and then it just gradually over time as the whole political polarization thing happened you can actually see the the very purposeful denial right they took a page out of the cigarette companies you know it's four years right cigarettes were like other cigarette companies were like now it's not a problem so they were purposefully you know there were people had money invested right you know like there's a

43:12documentary that that goes into that what is the name of that merchants of doubt' merchants of doubt' yeah that's a great smoke man that's a really good book yeah and the documentary is really good yeah it was purposeful that's it's also confusing it's like why are they doing that like who's paying them to do that obviously the cigarette companies would be paying the same people right to put doubt in to the idea that cigarettes are addictive or cigarettes cause cancer and this is what had been done in the past now the same people are involved in doing it with climate change right but why well you know at one time I wrote a piece for the NPR there was kind of positive about like yeah we can switch infrastructures like I'm saying and some guy wrote me back very angry and he said you know the proven reserves you know the stuff the oil that's in the ground

43:56has a wealth you know has a valve on eteri value like they're you know that's in there in the oil companies banks you know that in their bank accounts of like 1.5 trillion dollars and I said dude you know people have gotten to war for a lot less than 1.5 trillion dollars so you know if we were to really be like hey man we can't burn that you know you're gonna have to leave that in the ground that's like do their bank accounts going like you know zero pretty fast so what I don't so it's those industries I think that's part of it and then it gets you get linked to other things and then it becomes this sort of like mass uh you know becomes the political poet they use the political polarization to sort of you know sort of make this happen it doesn't and you look other countries aren't doing this right that's the important thing you know other countries there's always a little bit of

44:39climate denial going on but we're like the only country that's guys you can see cuz we're the only ones who are not part of the Paris Accord well it's one of the weirder things about this right left things the left is always supporting the environment the left is all about the environment the left is about clean air and clean water the whole thing is very strange well I got you know I mean I have issues with you know environmentalists too because um I think one of your shows I was watching you know the whole idea of eco bro it's right and you get eco broad by people and have you guys I have a piece in The New York Times today an op-ed where I'm basically saying like look man the planets gonna be fine like you know long term there's nothing we can throw at the biosphere that it's gonna kill it weird it's not about saving the planet the earth it's not a fuzzy little bunny

45:20you know the planet is powerful and it's really about saving us let's be honest about what's going on there's gonna be all kinds of ethical choices that go on that you know the polar bears may not be able to come along with us on the ride here you know we need a healthy biosphere would've you know a lot of biodiversity but you know we're part of it and we're gonna have an impact there's no such thing as no impact and you know already I'm getting an eco bro do you just you know you don't care about life yeah come on I just put it in the thing I said we need to be wise and compassionate you know but they're like no people have convenient opinions I mean this is this is one of the things you get involved with when you start talking with people about really important issues it mean it's like we were talking about earlier they want to be right yeah and they want to be on the

46:04side that's righteous and with virtue and ethics right right they find anything that you disagree that they disagree with that you're saying they don't ask you questions they don't go what do you think the implications are or how do you how do we minimize the effects and the negative consequences of our they just immediately want to say you are insensitive you are an you are the problem yeah you know my way around that and it's what the whole book is about is to like when you've got a polarization right you know where you know you're either this or you're that the thing that this is like a mathematical idea is to go orthogonal you know when you when you you know you go because you know it's a line based right you're on this side or that side go 90 degrees to it now you're in a whole new space now you're up and down to the left and right exactly and now

46:47like the questions that so you see this in like revolutions in science right so you look at Ernst ein and what happened when Einstein came up with relativity everybody at the time was like you know um they were all concerned what they call the luminiferous ether that you know light needed likes a wave and everybody thought it needed something to propagate through right radio waye are um water waves go through water sound wave goes through air so you know the whole thing was about this ether the illuminance every sir is this it exists does it not exist sounds like you know I'm not really interested in that problem I'm gonna do it he just like changed the whole thing he just said look here's to new ideas they have nothing to do with the luminous areas either and like all the old questions all the old battles kinda just fell away they didn't even make sense anymore so that's what I'm trying

47:25to do in the book is say look when you look at climate change as a planetary transition a predictable planetary transition the whole idea of like environmentalism versus you know business interests and you know right the Republicans versus Democrats it just doesn't you know it's not even relevant anymore what matters is that this is gonna happen we should have expected it to happen and now the question is do we become a cosmic winner or a cosmic loser and we have to think about the biosphere differently we have to think about our place in the biosphere differently and the old arguments so that's what you know sometimes with climate change deniers I'll throw this stuff at them and it's their kind of fun to watch and be like because they're expecting me to say like a B and C and they've got D E and F and response and I throw this stuff at them and they're just like I'm

48:07not doing it just to fight with climate change but I think it's true but well who was it that was on the podcast that was talking about climate stabilization techniques and that this is probably the future was it boy on anyway what people are really worried about when when you talk to people that understand the history of the human race and the history of the earth is climate cooling they think that climate cooling is far more terrifying than climate warming because if we go into a giant Ice Age again yeah I mean way more people gonna die terrible loss of resources and it could be devastating to the human race but that is is that is that something you agree with yeah no I don't think so I mean it's true here's something interesting we're kind of overdue for an ice age yeah well that was the thing in the 70s they were saying that we were in verge of an ice age yeah I mean that you

48:57know there was just a couple of guy I mean I'd holster you because that that's often something that climate deniers will throw at you in the seventies it was like there was like one or two guys who said that and then it got picked up on the news but the climate community at that time was not like oh my god it's cooling right but here's the interesting thing for me and it too fits into this whole idea is that like we're holding off an ice age like there may never be if human humanity is successful and we navigate the Anthropocene you know that term the Anthropocene that we've now entered we've now entered the human dominated era we've been for the last 10,000 years the geological epoch has been what they call the Holocene that's all of human civilization happened in the whole scene you know it's pretty warm it's pretty wet moist you know everything's not locked up in

49:33ice um and it's an interglacial period and if we weren't around yet another thousand three thousand five thousand years would be another Ice Age but the Anthropocene that we're triggering could hold off ice ages forever right as long as we're around there won't be another Ice Age cuz we've already added enough warmth to the planet that it overcomes the effects that trigger an ice age so like what are the ethical responsibilities of that that's what I try and tell the you know the environmentalists like you know you got this image like oh we got to save the earth but they're thinking of like the Holocene and it's like well you know the planet even with us even if we successfully keep biodiversity rich and it's not gonna be the earth we started with you know cuz we're here so yeah what about the species that never form because we held off the Ice Age you know

50:17I mean forever like what about the ethical responsibility though so like it opens before that is a long equation though isn't it in what way to try to contemplate what species would have existed if we allowed the earth to cool and our responsibility for allowing the earth to cool so the the potential for new species to advance those species it's keeping let's keep this place warm so we can stay alive well I'm saying the only reason I'm raising it I'm not you know I'm raising that because right we are when we talk about climate change what you get sometimes when the environmental movement is this sort of like the polar bear the polar bear it's like what I'm trying to say is look I love polar bears kind of funny that polar bears always think these polar bears will rip your head off and drink your blood not only that then one of the rare bears it doesn't need anything but meat yeah

51:00right right so it's funny that we're evan is a biologist and he said like when you get polar bear babies like right out of the womb he said they're like the like the alien from the chest the chest burster Steen he said literally like right out of the womb we're gonna kill and eat yeah you're like oh that is a obviously people have tamed them and fed them to the point where they don't never worry about your head off yeah but that's a predatory enormous animal yeah so I'm raising that point to say like look the thing we're going through now is a it's an epoch-making planetary transition we met and were part of it right and whether or not we're still part that's the question whether or not we're still part of it a thousand years from now you know is the big issue so you know there are ethical issues about the polar bear right but there are also ethical issues you know there can't just

51:51return the earth to some pristine state we're here there's 7 billion of us you know so you know you have to we're gonna have to understand like there's this deeper ethical question about what does an earth look like that's been changed by us that's healthy but us still has us on it it may not have polar bears you know it may have rich phytoplankton you know and it may be a very species diverse but some of the species may not come with us so like we can't this sort of like things like oh the pristine earth is no more pristine earth you know we've been changing the earth since we were here so it's like how do we have a healthy of rich healthy biosphere with us and our civilization still in it and the thing about things that have gone extinct in the past and more than 90% of everything that's ever existed is extinct problem is we didn't know then right we didn't have a you know a

52:41checklist right like Oh spotted owl check got it you know tree frog check got it now we do and when one goes away we kind of freak out yeah and that's you know I mean we have to have compassion for life because we're part of it like without the compassion you know we end up with as Gavin Schmidt friend of mine calls economic illogical hooliganism right we just do crazy were just dumping into rivers like yeah you don't have to do that man but you know what in my talks on this i'll show like the polar bear the lonely polar bear on the island and you know like all one's really you know bummed out about this and they'll show like a velociraptor right you know who's crying for the Velociraptor right species come and go so we have to you know and the earth goes to these huge transitions I'm not saying be like don't care about those species but you gotta have the bigger picture

53:26with us and here's the problem that with the environmental movement's you know sometimes the weight gets frame it's not just the environment what's the way we talk about climate change we think of ourselves as being a plague right human beings we suck right that's the basics that's the only story you we have two stories it's not happening or we suck and my whole thing is like that is the wrong not only is that story wrong it's unhelpful you know we are what the biosphere is doing now you know millions of years ago it was grasslands you know grasslands were a new innovation and they changed the planet you have a lot of grass you know the biosphere evolved grasslands if they swept across the planet they changed how the planet worked and then the earth moved on with it went on to the new experiment we are what the we're exactly that we are like the dinosaurs or the grasslands or the

54:12blue-green algae that created the oxygen atmosphere and like you know we're not we're you know there's no difference between a city and a forest on some biospheric level we don't suck the question is whether we're smart enough to still be part of what the what the biosphere is using us to trigger you know I mean you know what are your thoughts on the reintroduction of extinct animals through genetic cloning oh you know I watched Jurassic Park like with woolly mammoths yeah this is a real possibility so yeah I know the close ancestors of the woolly mammoth is still alive right I know I'd be down for seeing it in my in MedImmune the Science Museum in Rochester there's a woolly mammoth that they found you know you know I think like depending on what you do with it you know trying to reintroduce it into the biosphere could be a little dangerous I mean a thing

55:06look climate change is is something I like to say climate change is not our fault and what I mean by that is we you know we found fossil fuels and they were awesome you know and they were just a continuation of what we'd always done you know and so we inadvertently climate change was a mistake you know now if we don't do something about it it's our fault right but you know and so you want to be really careful about unintended consequences yeah so this is my same thing with uh with geoengineering people talk like oh we should you know put particle particulates in the atmosphere to make it more selectively like Mantid we triggered the hope we triggered climate change because you know we didn't know what we were doing we didn't know what the consequences when we put those particles up there how do we get them out well no no the wind is bad gotta keep putting them in that's the problem you

55:49gotta keep putting them in so what happens if like one nation decides they don't want to do it anymore you know and the whole thing falls apart now something you're gonna get massive changes and so like anything like that like why don't we just work on not using fossil fuels like I take the hardest solution that's got the most uncertainty as opposed to the simpler solution which just means building a different infrastructure yeah well especially in California I mean this is one of the weirder places ever to not see solar power whenever yes it never rains should be everywhere everywhere most things should be run on solar yeah why not man you got and solar seems so efficient now it's also very difficult to get it up and running like I had a friend of mine who had his done for four or five months before he got approved Wow because he said they they make it difficult on you

56:35yeah which is crazy yeah to be on solar power and not be on the grid yeah so you know I mean these are all the kinds of things that we're gonna have to work out I'm hopeful people are like are you hopeful or not hopeful because you know I mean I ran these I did these models one of the pieces of research we did we modeled planets and civilizations like alien civilizations we you know developed a simple mathematical model about you know how a civilization will use that planet's resources to make more babies alien babies and then how the you know by using those resources your feedback on the planet right and so what we wanted to do was we wanted to model the possible outcomes like what is the generic outcome you know if I've got a hundred thousand civilizations all being born in different places what's the you know in general what happens and what we found is like basically four different

57:16possibilities one was good news like in these models there was like you know the population shoots up the planets temperature shoots up but they come to a nice steady state like you know you know the population stable everything's good so they're in those models was hope we also saw die-off we're like the population you know skyrockets the planet they overshoot the carrying capacity of their planet and then you get something like 70% of the population dying off so like well you know seven out of every ten people you know is gone so you know but then you come to a steady-state so although maybe if you can survive the disaster you can you're still there we also probable and survivor the disasters how much of the information gets her store right right because you think about if you're killing seven out of ten people how many of those seven people are the ones who know how to make

57:58cell phone yeah exactly that's a dark it yeah right that's what happens in a dark age I remember the first time I went to Europe I saw those Roman the other aqueducts man like five stories tall carrying water you know and by the 980 nobody knew how they got built yeah few of those dips in human civilization right and so it's not clear especially with a society as complex as arts right if like the food doesn't arrive in my grocery store what do I do right right you know I garden but you know I'm not it's not enough not enough right gonna keep you long yeah so for a complex civilization like ours even if you don't go extinct you may not be able to have this kind of civilization but we did find collapse we did find complete like extinction curbs as well where you know the population went way up and then boom dropped like a stone and would even we even found those we built into the

58:41models possibility for the civilization to switch from a high impact resource to a low impact resource like fossil to solar and sometimes because you know planets have minds of their own you know there's an internal dynamics to plan it so you push them far enough and there's gonna roll off so we'd have ones where the the population went way up they made the switch and then populations started to come down the planet started to cool down did you factor in random geological events random solar events random this was really all about just planet civilization and it's feedback on the planet you could we could build models like that that would be one of the major issues with any advanced civilizations it's a matter of time before something happens right as we said you know we know that Mars has been hit before Worth's been hit the moon's been hit everything I mean the moon is one of our

59:27best examples we just look at it and see craters everywhere because it doesn't have an environment or an atmosphere the moon was built by a huge impact between Earth and more on Mars like Bobby you know at the beginning of the planets history so yeah those happen all the time I think if you get advanced oh like we're on the lip of being a multi-planet species right and once you do that which means you become a spacefaring race then I think like certainly the asteroid stuff you can take care of right we've already done we've identified like a huge fraction of all the earth crossing asteroids like we're not really sure what to do about them if we find one coming at us but we see some coming at us all the time will they just recognize them a few hours before near right right but it happened a couple weeks ago right and then yeah luckily it always you know it passes you can I mean

60:08like so ways yeah so we couldn't really like you know we're young enough now that if we discovered one heading right towards us we could just you know you know put your legs between your amp you know yeah between your legs and kiss your butt goodbye um but but in time right two hundred years from now we will have done a much better job of mapping out all the major roads yeah well I think so I mean I'm really you know I mean if we have that kind of planetary interplanetary we're gonna be mapping them out just because you don't want to run into more you gonna be mining them what I think is promising in terms of the ability to prevent impacts there's a couple of things I think the best one if you catch it early enough there's a gravity tug we just literally Park a spaceship next to it and slowly have the spaceship you know move you know cuz you only have to

60:50is alter the trajectory a little bit you know you just really have a long bond it yeah and it'll you know um cuz in space is just so vast that a little tap will make it miss so the gravity Tokyo you don't have to try and do the L pot was it what was the movie Apocalypse one with from the 90s with the space miners Oh Armageddon yeah thank you there was a deep impact deep impact was the smart one yeah rip each others off right because they're both came out at the same time and I know I think deep impact came out first but it was developed second yeah bummer to be the one that like you know they both came out at the same time and your movie doesn't get any attention and the other one becomes like a massive hit you know Wow so so like you're there they drilled holes and stuff and you try and blow them up but then the problem there is you now have a bunch of rocks and if some of those

61:35rocks are big enough so I think the gravity tug is kind of probably the the best idea but you know because of mining asteroids well probably you know those little ones may be the easiest to you know to mine hmm what are you worried about more than anything in terms of climate change like you worried about the rising of the ocean levels are you worried about the heating of the actual planet the temperature being unsustainable for human life like what are you worried about the most the one thing I'm worried about the most like we were talking before you know technological societies are these like overlay networks you know you got the transportation network you got the energy network you got social networks you know and those are really complex and so I do a little what's called network theory and what you find with network theory that you you know you may have an

62:17individual Network that's pretty robust meaning like I can cut some of the the connections like you got your social network I could take you know twenty percent of the people out of your social network and the social like will still function you know I like to feel most people will still talk to each other anything but once you start layering them so if the social network is now connected to the telecommunications network which is connected to the energy network blah blah then you can ripple a small change ripples through the whole thing and blows it apart it doesn't function anymore so you know I don't need like apocalypses to have the fabric of technological civilization fall apart like so if the if just the weather patterns change enough that agriculture becomes really hard you know we're used to the rains falling pretty much the same way they do yearly and everything

62:59that you know like we talked about you look at what the you know like refugees how much you know we're the trouble you know having a huge influx of refugees can cause climate change is gonna have people moving all over the planet because now they can't grow food anywhere so it's like I don't you know like I said you don't need I do worry like ocean rise is gonna be huge most people live in coastal cities most of the wealth in the world is in coastal cities um but you don't really need too much - like really shift the weather patterns and then the thing you're used to falls apart now when you factor in human beings and our evolution from primitive hominids to what we are today and you sort of extrapolate and keep going and think about what we're going to be in the future and then think about what these creatures might be that live a hundred million light years away or whatever the

63:48it is yeah what I mean we've got I've got to think that whatever is holding us back our primitive instincts these human reward systems that were engaged when we were running away from wild animals and fighting off tribes of invaders that slowly but surely those are going to either evaporate or evolve and we're going to get to a point where we can be more rational yeah about complex issues if we do do that but what is the motivation for expanding the human race isn't sustaining the human race in a healthy way on this planet better option than traveling to Mars or traveling to the other solar systems like wouldn't we be better served trying to achieve some sort of a balance here on this planet I think the I think one serves the other like we you know you look at the human migration patterns from when we started writing you know we started off as a you know a bunch of

64:50people in average Africa maybe a few thousand right and then you see this you know migration like her you know saw a bunch of us like a few hundred crossed the Red Sea which was pretty low at the time and then it's like they just worked their way around the coasts you know two boats over to Australia and went all the way back around through like we're explorers man like really I think something fundamental for us psychologically to have these frontiers exactly that's one question those will we've evolved past that well I don't think that's a bad thing I yeah yeah I don't think this bad thing because again you know it's goes back to the biosphere this is kind of like I think there's something deep in life that wants more life right so if we call it Oh settle Mars right then it's not going to be really us settling Mars it's gonna be the Earth's biosphere right I mean

65:35really right we're the agent of the biosphere right and you know the biosphere started off as like you know single-celled creatures in little tiny parts of the planet and then you know conquered the oceans and then eventually when they were cut in the beginning they weren't continents there was a water world when we started off and so when you know there was enough continents you know then they took over the life took over the land I think it's just kind of life maybe kind of like a cosmic force if I can get all boogly on you you know so if we do go to Mars it will essentially be ultimate panspermia yes exactly right yeah in that way bright panspermia which is we're always a weird word panspermia well just because people are they feel weird about sperms whenever I give an academic talk I'm like parents Maria I know it's a strange when you say sperm in front of people

66:19they're like you piece of yeah term a nice no matter that's like saying niggardly yeah right so it's very very difficult word to say yeah I know it has nothing to do with the N word yeah so um you know I think I think it's part of life I think life wants more life and this is the question you're raising about look what do we look like in a million years what happens to a species that become and you know now we're in the realm of science fiction that's all cool um you know like what might we become like the gods and some so you think that this is my theory and I've thrown this out so many times people are sick of it but I think that what we're looking at when we see these archetypal aliens with the big heads and the big eyes and the tiny bodies and no genitals I think we think this is what we're eventually going to be yeah oh man I'll see you in your pants firming this

67:19is the problem this is why we need diversity I just think that if weak so those are archetypes kind of built into us in some sense that we're moving Pat like what did we used to be well we used to be monkeys right and what are we going to be what we're going to be that thing yeah that thing that can levitate things with its mom and the thing that communicates telepathically that thing that has this incredible ability to map out the cosmos and create wormholes and the super advanced intellect and point where we can't even comprehend so like if you think about how what you know we evolved from at one point time we split from mollusks like what 600 it's got to be on it got to be past the Cambrian explosion but you know it's like yeah 300 400 I don't know yeah but so a while ago how how much does a squid understand about cellphone networks and whether or not it's Sprint's it's really good

68:22Deauville will extrapolate that to what this alien creature is going to be in terms of its understanding of time and space and matter versus hours yeah we are this crew thing that's weirded out by the word sperm whereas it is telepathically communicating with a universal language and it has this unbelievable ability to manipulate matter and they've achieved homeostasis with their environment I no longer have this well that's one of the things about you know there's the Fermi paradox right yeah like why haven't we seen so I already said we haven't looked enough to say that the we haven't seen evidence of life right it's like opening your door and goes well where are all the Buffalo yeah but you know there is a kind of a problem with because we just doing a paper on this now you know part of the Fermi paradox let's get I don't want to go too far on this we can go back please do later um I

69:15liked it so yeah it hard ox is fast but it is right so that so the the the idea that we had two people okay so the Fermi paradox is the idea that like you know what if there is if the paradox part is like if you're telling me that intelligence is common it evolves everywhere then why don't I see it already right so the the if you're asking about like why don't we see signals from that I've already answered that right because we just we haven't looked yet so that's nice to know yeah but hid part of his question and this was done by a guy in heart I mean oh so Fermi was just this happened over a conversation in for lunch you know 1950 so uh he just posed the you said where are they all but in 1975 guy named Hart wrote a paper where he really mapped out the here's the main problem even if you're traveling at a tenth of the speed of light if you manage to build like world ships that

69:59can travel across the Stars you know and you're traveling at 0.1% of the speed of light in you know if you do that you hop from one star together build another ship hop to the next one in about 600,000 years you have covered the whole galaxy right so 600,000 years sounds like a long time but it's a tiny part of the galaxies history galaxies ten billion years old so in that case like why you know then every if you're just one species has to do that and they can cover the galaxies so why aren't there why don't we see the colony ships here right that's that's a much harder version of the Fermi paradox to get around is it though because if we did look we're already sending robots to Mars right we're not going to Mars yet but we're sending robots there what if we decide that there's no real benefit in sending biological entities into space and that the the dangers of

70:46radiation and asteroid impacts no this is just too great yeah it's so far better to send something I mean look at what we're capable of doing now in terms of projection of video we can take a cell phone video and you could send it to your friend in New Zealand and they can get it almost instantly Skype call right we can get some sort of 3d virtual reality imaging of these planets like hey man do you want to see what it's like on Pandora here put these goggles on yeah and you old go wherever you want that robot to go and you'll be there yeah right and maybe it'll get to the point where you can actually smell it and touch it and feel it and but not be compromised by its environment terms of your biology well that's actually a huge point so that's one of the things we're looking at in this paper is the idea that you know good planets may be hard to find you know there's this great

71:35uh novel by Kim Stanley Robinson who's like dis life for me one of the great science fiction writers and it's called Aurora and they you know they it's the usual world ship they go so they build the colony ship it takes you know three generations to cross space and they get to the planet and the planet sucks it looked like it was gonna be good you know but there's like prions tiny or super small biological that just makes you can't live there and then you're going back right so it's like it may be exactly like you're saying that you know we think like oh you just land on a planet you terraform it and you know you just turn it into habitable when it's like that may not work and maybe it does but that's a science fiction idea so uh right it's entirely possible I mean there's a lot of possible solutions this which is just that uh you know one of which is space travels really hard and really

72:16interstellar not interplanetary but interstellar travel is really hard and really expensive I was just reading a paper on this with a guy estimated that in order to get like say you wanted to have a thousand people on a world ship to get to another star that would take the economy that come you need like a thud I think was like a hundred thousand earth economies to build that you know I mean if Bezos are you listening time we're ready you might have like you know you unless you were he's you know what the conclusion he came to unless you were a multi-planet species if you were like if you had conquered the entire or settled the entire solar system maybe you'd have an economy that big so one one possible solution is good planets are hard to find and and you know it's just too expensive it really costs a lot and so yeah it's not really worth you know the effort you you know you send

73:06out some probes once in a while but you know it's not well there's also finding an environment that's not just habitable but stable I mean our environment is habitable but look what's going on in Hawaii right now there a 400 year old Lake that evaporated in a matter of hours right it's the biggest lake on the big yeah it's gone right which is such a tragedy so but it's not it's not it's just magnificent right you watch that lava roll into that Lake and say that's a wrap kids more lake you yeah and it really shows you the power of a planet - right yeah I know that sources at work what makes continents may have made the island in the first place I can't be upset at it billowing off it is what made the island right it's continuing to make the island we're right right exactly you're right about your house but now you got more real estate so shuttle it's making the

73:53island bigger and it's always done that yeah it's been doing that for millions of years it's a fascinating place you know if you've been I've been and I've seen that I went to the park did you do the helicopter thing now oh man you got to do the helicopter thing that's crazy because you fly over the volcanoes we can't now because it's too crazy but I did a few years back and you could watch the lava go into the ocean yeah and you see these lava vents pour this red-hot yeah it's like it's glowing yeah it's going into the day I saw that we went to the park to see it you know you know then when you went to when you go to that volcano park there's just like Vince where Steve's coming out like New York City with the you know the manholes like that's like that's just from this heat coming down at the bottom of the planet are you scared about Yellowstone I like the what was that movie at 2012

74:43now yeah like where's that cuz that's like such a that's like that's what made the Adirondacks right yeah what was the 2012 movie I know I saw that with Cooney After Tomorrow day before tomorrow no no it was it was like climate change it was John Cusack it's actually a pretty good yeah destroy the plant those guys who made that hold on stop right there does not a pretty good movie that was so stupid mister by inches with the cars they never got a flat they always got away from the world caving in who totally believable man oh yeah no I thought it well Yellowstone is a caldera it's a supervolcano and they're experiencing thousands of earthquakes a year yeah and that eventually yeah every six to eight hundred thousand years it's a continent the last time it blew was 600,000 years ago yeah so why are you scared uh I don't I just don't think about it every

75:38day man I'll smoke a joint I think about once a month I think about yellow I should okay I'm gonna add that to my list of things I'm freaking out about I have friends in Australia and that's where I'm going yeah because there's light over just start driving on the left-hand side it's not me the only thing you can go do I worry more about Seattle I lived in Seattle for a while you know and they said the super-earth going from there that's gonna turn the whole thing into jello right you get north quakes so bad that the ground just literally becomes porous is it really that scary there yeah yeah they're predicting because you know Seattle's got like I mean I don't know that much about this some way out of my I'm in the danger zone um the plates are super deep you know so you don't get as many tremors but but you know when it releases it's gonna you know it's just be a super powerful

76:20earthquake and you know the it'll it'll be so powerful yeah that they said that like there's not gonna be a lot even even with the earthquake proofing there's not gonna be a lot of left standing geez so yeah Seattle you must be I mean because you're here right you feel tremors they must they happen all the time right I've only been at any time so not all the time I've felt them before the the biggest ones I ever felt was when I first moved here I first moved here in 94 and it was right after the Northridge earthquake and I was in my house and I felt I guess it was like a 5.5 where the whole thing just it was weird like it gave me the impression that the house that I was living in or the apartment that I was in was made out of the same stuff like a box that a refrigerator would come in yeah you can move it around inside the whole thing was just moving like easily left and

77:09right up holy that was my only had a few times I have you know felt like it's like it's you know at first I thought it was a truck I thought a truck was rolling but yeah you know and somebody that wasn't and the one that I experienced was nothing I mean it's a baby one the ones that they're getting you know right now somewhere in the world I mean there's there's always something that's like a five or six yeah so this goes back to your point about the you know a lot of planets right we'll be like way more plate tectonic reactive volatile yeah then our so you know I mean a lot I mean I think good planets are gonna be like really hard to find yeah so you know it may be that maybe the solution the other solution is you know I mean the way you guys found out about which I did that article about the previous civilization you know like how do you know whether not there was a

77:55previous civil and we know one solution could be that look they were here you know that somebody did arrive and spend some time on earth but if it was like half a billion years ago and they only last the right every civilization has a finite lifetime they only lasted for even up a few hundred thousand years they wouldn't leave there'd be no record left would be nothing left there'd be nothing like you think that's possible that something's ever visited here and because that is the big question and that's the the thing that gets that UFO dorks s'more jazzed up than anything is the possibility that we've been visited yeah not now I'm definitely not you UFOs they still have two arguments against UFOs one is as a friend of mine Jason Wright says it's like look as astronomers made we you know we're finding all those asteroids we're finding a little chunks of rock moving

78:39yeah nobody looks at the sky harder than we do right and you know if anything unless you want to go to the conspiracy theories we would have found something my other argument is like what's with the headlights you know I mean people are is like ah man I saw lights in the sky and then they moved around and then they disappeared you know but they don't really want to be seen I'm like well why do they have headlights on like what just turn off the frickin lights it just why would they have lights in the first place I don't have lights like what you can you know you came from another civilization and you can get around without your high beams the ideas what the are you seeing with those lights Ron you're not seeing yeah that was the last time you saw I mean planes have lights so other planes don't run into him they don't have a light so they could see where they're going yeah

79:15so what so why they have right exactly the planes have lights so other people can see them so fair answer but they're mysterious they don't want to be found in turn off the frickin light so well they yeah they wouldn't have any lights yeah they always have lights yeah so like this guy they move back and forth and so it's always a problem with human memory memories right horrible yeah and memory of events that are stunning or shocking or unnerving or you think you saw something right they've done all that research even in trials right where people do you know see things going so I just UFOs you know I'm just kind of like but do you think it's possible that there could be life on other planets and it's possible there could be intelligent life on other planets and we send probes to Mars well I wouldn't in that I think that if they do send something here they're going to send something

79:58now biological life inside of it yeah you know it's a really interesting question is like yeah we're talking like what will we evolve into in you know a million years you know it may be possible that biology is a short period of intelligence yes he's just build machines and the machines become you know download yourself into him I mean that's a real possibility that like you know silicon makes a lot more sense than wetware well the problem is we think of artificial intelligence as artificial right it's definitely real right yeah exactly it's not it's not fake it's right there right you know it's like there's artificial milk you know I mean but it's it's a liquid it's an actual liquid yeah there's not an artificial life it's just silicon created life that's again the idea the biosphere this may be the with the biosphere solution to spreading itself or you know to

80:45getting it may be that like yes so look in that that's the kind of a normal thing I mean I'm I am super skeptical about like the whole transhuman thing that we're gonna download ourselves and do intelligent you don't think are you ever gone in one of those conventions there's some pretty serious dark at night well there's geniuses in those dorks - it's really interesting it's like they're fully wholly committed to this prospect of downloading them selves you talk to Kurt's well before no but I've read his stuff I had a chance to interview him a few years back for Cybersmart he's like beyond smart but goddamn is he committed to it and then when you get to it you realized that what he actually wants to do is recreate his father yeah he's he his father died when he was young and he wants to be able to through memories and photographs and what he knows about his father literally

81:35recreate his father and because be able to have a conversation with him yeah he was talking about this right right but what he's doing is he's going way way into the future into the possibilities of he's not seeing like well five years from now we're going to be able to send you know gigabyte pictures through the mail no he's saying let's think of if you keep going exponentially and then electronics and technology and innovation keeps continually accelerating we could potentially get to the point where it's the impossible well you'd be able to recreate human beings Bay turn your knowledge of them and in the end they'll be able to come up with some sort of a program will he'll be able to have a conversation with his father yeah see I think that misunder I mean I think it's it's true about like the possibility of a singularity and technological development but you know

82:25it's not gonna be his father that's the sad thing you know I think we seriously I've done some work on this as an interest in mind about mind his mind you know what's the relationship in mind and matter and I think we have like a serious misunderstand we don't understand consciousness very well at all so the idea that like oh yeah it she's gonna be trivial to download your you know your consciousness into a computer I think it's pretty you know there's like a shitload of assumptions in there about like what mind is in the relationship between like your neurons and you know awareness yes so that's why I think those guys it's a little bit of a religion you know what I mean you know so it's like well 2045 is the new benchmark for whatever reason that's the new number will be back it's gonna be like every other you know which every other rapture we thought was 2045 we

83:11really been 2065 you know we went to this 2045 conference me and my friend Ari and Duncan and we got to talk to some of these guys and is really fascinating and one of them had created some robot that was supposed to be him but it didn't work well so they never revealed it at the conference it had so many bugs in it yeah it's intriguing it's like I want them to keep going because I mean when when we get gonna get to ex machina when are we gonna get to talk about good movies or did you like that one of my favorite movies ever so smart so like just like simple a beating over the head with it no kind of moments in that movie yeah no no whoa the entire I think that's one of my all-time top 20 movies but she stabs him just emotionless just let him put the blade in it was amazing amazing did you like annihilation yes I didn't like it as much but I liked it it

84:04was very weird and the ending seemed like some producers put their jizz in the soup what's happening here who made this part yeah but I yeah yeah so I think like you know I mean and the danger with anything when it comes to AI and so well here's an interesting thing about AI like we are making amazing strides with a oh yeah no now artificial intelligence is different from artificial consciousness you know it means like but um but the AI that you know what we're getting out of it is nothing like us right so the you know back in the day where people were like oh we're gonna like model the human brain and that's how we'll do it well like make programs that are what and what they've learned is like that doesn't really work that well so now this is the whole big data thing like you know network theory and big data and deep learning we're like you know they're using statistical you know the

84:50power of having huge amounts of computing and statistical reasoning so that like you know yeah the computer like you know it'll find the picture of the cat but you have no idea why it found that it didn't reason like oh yeah that sort of looks like cat and I like cats you know it's just like oh these kinds of lines go with that kind of thing it has no idea what it's doing but it'll act intelligently and so that's you know I mean that's kind of freaky deaky in a lot of ways too I think people are I think it's it's smart to think about the dangers of AI not necessarily what additional Jers to us yeah not necessarily the dangers just the dangers to this thing that we are this weird monkey thing yeah that wants to keep being a monkey thing yeah well you mean in the sense of like right that it's going to replace us yes yeah yeah I think it's inevitable I mean do you

85:37don't you think that if you go back and interview the single-celled organism before it branched off into multi cell multi cell I want to stay a single cell at the bottom of the cars that I don't want a car man I like staying down here yeah like there's a real thought to that that we are the wetware that is the problem yeah no no listen I think it's fully conceivable like I'm not gonna get or never happen but as a guy I know as a philosopher says you know there's a certain way in which everything we do with AI right now it's not like you know Watson is playing chess it's like we're using Watson to play chess it's our tool you know and I think the purpose the fear is the tool gets out of hand not that it like develops a thing we're like I hate humans you know dad I hate you but more that's like you know these things which are not actually thinking they act intelligent but they're not

86:31thinking can have a huge like it'll have a really negative impact it will you know what there's that example like if you design something that is an AI system to make paper clips it ends up consuming the entire planet making paper clips that's what you told it to do right you never told it to make a sustainable amount of it right exactly so I'm more worried about that than I am of like Skynet you know coming over and like you know deciding that's gonna you know drop all the bombs on us cuz we need to get rid of it well there's no biological imperative for silicon based artificial intelligence to procreate to keep going and move forward like why would they do that we're going to do it because we came from biology and biology needs to stay alive and everybody wants bigger faster stronger you want to keep moving and it's because there's a real possibility that you might get consumed

87:18by some other life-form yeah so you have to protect yourself and you have to look out for other people who might want to breed with the viable female that you've copulated with right there's a lot of just going on built in evolutionarily to have right that we assume that somehow or another these artificial creations will have as well right which is why right I mean yeah if we must we program it in so the thing is like but will it wake up like so that's that if it does wake up will it have the inclination towards scientific research would it even want to send something through the cosmos to view us yeah yeah no that's a really interest I think we just don't know right if it actually because listen we understand so little about what consciousness is and what its imperatives are like yeah once you wake up or you're like oh you're dead you know daddy I gotta kill I mean like why

88:04like who knows what really did you like Battlestar Galactica I loved battle how goddamn good was that new version but the new version was a much more if there is a show that I wish they would bring back it's Battlestar yeah it was you know they had to end it all right yeah but the series was million it was brilliant you know was amazing about that the way they wrapped like all the political that was happening under 9/11 to that man from like the torture scenes yeah man it was so and then they even had the whole thing with Starbuck about why no what was she yeah that was a there's a couple like it was five years right and there were a couple seasons where like it kind of got ran off the rails what's-her-name Katee Sackhoff is that her name buck yeah is that her name yeah she's so good yeah she was really good in that role instead of sense she's got a movie out right now

89:02on Netflix I haven't seen it right but I'm so like oh yeah there's you know but she had rights you sort of disappeared she was so good in that show I was like well this is this is like the launching pad yeah her yeah I know was revolutionary about that show too the way they did the special effects we're like you know the camera moved around like there's a spaceship but I'm you know I don't have it didn't do you know it sometimes it did those long pants but it was it kind of opened up a whole new way of sort of looking at you know just sort of what it looks like to be in space and stuff yeah but it really scared the out of people in terms of artificial life something that we create that decides it's done with us and it's taking over well you know what's amazing about that and this is I've written about this this idea that like you know we keep telling that story

89:39over and over again yeah how many movies you know can you think of that have that and I think like so I'm really interested in myth right there you know the whole that you know mythology the way like you know we can never get away from the myths you know coming of age the hero's journey Tesla yeah Joseph camel big Joseph Campbell fan um but like you know what's happening with us now we got there's nothing in them there's nothing in the storehouse of myths to take care of like building machines that take over right so the reason we keep telling that story over and over again is we're preparing ourselves right we're building the myths you know that sort of will help we don't know what's gonna happen but we have to keep telling that story because we can feel it coming you know I mean like this is so we need to keep telling a story to kind of explore what the options are and

90:20I like that's what I liked about the ending and you know I didn't think the ending was great but the idea that like oh yeah this balance you know you got to keep going through these cycles of trying to achieve this balance between you know silicon forms and Ron silica and then biological forms but well we're not we're worried that we're gonna be taken over by something else but we're not overly concerned with evolving our own biology I know I'm changing and maybe that's the solution in terms of our physical limitations is some sort of a symbiotic connection between us and technology that instead of artificial technology and artificial life taking over usurping us instead of that maybe we become a part of it and it becomes a part of us and we had mean you have glasses on you guys see better with those that's essentially cyborgs yeah yeah yeah right right and these things you

91:07know these cellphones my god my memories in there right used to no cellphones my house two days ago without my phone and I turned around in a panic on my own Street where's my phone Oh Tim everyone used to have phone numbers in your head oh yeah you know twenty four three yeah my wife's number I can't like I got three digits out of yeah go further that's crazy yeah we're but we remember a lot of other stuff now I mean you have so much I mean I'm really overwhelmed I think I'm in that weird zone where I just don't have I don't I don't have enough data space I don't have enough story yeah yeah for all of us that's you gotta kind of pick and choose right sort of you know this is like what like Wikipedia we're all human knowledge an entire sum of human knowledge is right there mm-hmm you know I mean like whoa what uh let me talk about changes right that you were talking about what an

92:00amazing change that you can have pretty much you know like you know I love comics right you know I was a comic marvel guy way back right and back in the day you know you paid for your you had to you know first well you got your ass kicked but um you know you have to go to the store every week and get the comics and you know and now you know you just look up Captain America and you can know everything there was about is you know its origin story in the writing so it's like that idea that like there's no domains of knowledge that you can't instantly access and have all the backstory that you need well it'll be a physical comic books are amazing but I have to be honest comic books on an iPad or better because you don't see the next frame yeah yeah you just swipe yeah and then you get the next frame you don't you don't see it in event like if you're reading the left side yeah Doctor

92:45Strange and the right side is it explosion I'm like well I see that see that shit's coming next yeah I think it's kind of a shitty way to do it no I agree on it I have had it's amazing it's amazing ya know when you do that thing and now with the it's like embarrassing I have you know professor of physics at a major university I have like three thousand dollars still a brilliant guy we just also like cool like the S key or something I don't know you know it's familiar my dad was my dad was always like those my dad was a writer Oh comic books you know but it's like dad I'm learned yet especially with Marvel right Marty a great language writing the words synopsis from Marvel you know so especially you know I mean some of them like Doctor Strange had some great you know Fantastic Four didn't ya know the doctor so you know it's I was this the science advisor for Doctor Strange

93:33with for the movie for the movie yeah they called me in so I know Scott Derek's actually lunch with her breakfast has got to yesterday I know Scott from my first book which is about science and religion you know so I'd you know we got to somebody you know connected us and we've been talking for a long time and when he got tapped to do dr. strange he contacted I say you know email said Marvel wants to talk to you and so he basically worked on he wanted to work on - I - things for that and it what's funny here is I never read dr. strange right cuz I was like a science guy was all about Tony Stark you know or you know where uh spider-man or the x-men so I never I was like oh that guy uses magic so the thing we had to figure out was um first of all that that scene where he first do the counters the ancient one you know and she has to kind of like you know school

94:28him on there's more ways to think about the world than science and then the multiverse that was the other thing cuz I've written the block a lot on the multiverse but man it was awesome it was so much fun to be in the writers room you know with them and just like be throwing around ideas probably never ever happen again I don't care he's a weird thing that when you're young you like all this cool stuff but then when you get old you're supposed to be more pragmatic you're supposed to abandon that stuff and be mature but when I was a kid I was super embarrassed when I became an adult that I still like muscle cars yeah these stupid things and then when I became an older adult I was like who gives a it's really what it is yeah who cares man you know cuz I love video games I play a lot of video games Oh children yeah awesome man there is not there is no better way to kill an hour's but she

95:27after a stressful day to go and shoot aliens you know I mean this is like you know I mean it stimulates the mind I mean Jamie and I have talked about this many times that we have this deep appreciation for chess and go and all these ancient games but there are games like Starcraft and and even like one on one quake matches that require intense calculating right you have to think about the environment understanding of the map that you're right you're competing in right it's there's a lot of strategy no that's what's really good about I mean I tend to be I do I really like RPGs you know so whether with a map and every one of them ever Quest dorks I don't do anything multiplayer right because I'm so bad at it that like yeah I know there's some kids some thirteen year old in Korea who's just like your dad or your dad spawned I spawn but I like with something with a really good story you

96:14know all right whether you would what's the game you like oh god my favorite game is Last of Us what is that oh man I don't I don't like zombie games because I get scared you know no I saw the naughty Living Dead when I was like 12 it was on PBS little screen and it's just like after that I'm sorry zombies Wow yeah I can't believe they put it on TV like you know for it was like the 11 o'clock show so but Last of Us is kind of a zombie survival story but it's beautiful I mean it's really the narrative of it it's this guy you know it's 20 years after and the thing about this thing it opens up with the you know the zombie outbreak happening and the guy loses his daughter like you see him lose his daughter and it's so well it's the same company that did Uncharted which are other I really like those as well um and so it's just like the acting and it was really beautiful and then you

97:11know 20 years later and this guy's broken you know what I mean like he's just he's just you know he's he survived in this you know the society's falling apart but uh you know he just you track him as he gets this this young girl who is immune and he's got to take her cross-country too you know and you're following this guy story and you know then there's zombies and the theme of a movie a really recent movie wasn't it like like a foreign movie with yeah foreign zombie movie that was supposed to be very good but that was the idea behind it yeah but it was his own daughter was that bet they took it from this because because you know so Last of Us is one like huge amounts of awards just about to come out well the Schwarzenegger movie is older than that I believe because it came out right around the time where his wife left him because he bang the maid oh

98:05yeah yeah he was the governor then he was post it was post post governor yeah um but that that theme is a reoccurring theme that is a reoccurrence does that come back the plague wipes you cloud they come back to life they're zombies yeah so you got to wonder what's up with that like why is that something that's like stirring around in our head I think the apocalypse is because we kind of feel we're nervous about what's happening with us because we can see sort of shore pushing up against bound well we're also vulnerable yeah run were vulnerable to disease and we've honorable to I mean there's so many different things that people can get rabies Rison malaria and we had plagues we used to have plagues all the time you know so ya know it's but that's what makes this game so great is that it really takes the world after the fall seriously and it's heartbreaking you know what I mean

98:57that's it's beautifully done scarier than but you know beautifully done and it's for me it's like everything that I love most in you because like you're saying is you get into these situations and you know you're gonna get killed you know there's dark souls or like there's no getting through dark souls apparently the most hardest game ever I've never played it but you know this game is hard and you gotta quit as Dark Souls Dark Souls is uh it's also a story based you know open world game single-player I think that probably a multiplayer mode but um it's like you know kind of an Elvish you know you're in that kind of world maybe you're just trying to stay alive trying to stay alive and it's just like the hardest game ever that's what they say um but like you know exceda good hard game you gotta you know you gotta you gonna keep going back like oh I just died alright

99:39let me try it let me try coming around from this side you know uh let me use this weapon let me get on this it's really yeah we did a um I had a textbook that just came out a couple years ago and we did a video game we built a full first-ever full video game for an intro astronomy course and the whole idea was like the coolest thing about a game is like the first thing I do is learn the rules right and that's what makes being in a game world interest you know there's a whole set of rules got know how to craft you got to know which weapons to use in different kinds of situations and our idea with the video game was like just make the real the real rules make them the science rules right oh you want to go mine an asteroid well how do you know which asteroid has you know the most you know or in it you know I'm just gonna do what you're gonna do door Mele do an

100:18astronomy so I think like you know video games have not recognized they haven't like you said people don't understand actually how important they are you know for teaching for all kinds of things video games and for entertain 8:04 like a future of storytelling too well people take them they think that's a waste of time until they find out how much these professionals make you know someone was saying that some guy would what is the number that kid was making $500,000 a month playing fortnight wasn't that what Sean that's honest but it's way more than that he makes more than that so what is fortnight you can somebody explained fortnight to me I'm sorry I'm still in Far Cry 5 raising third person shooter you're jumping around shooting people I'm good with third-person shooters yeah like is it a story or is it just like your you know you people people up I think stories really just

101:04drop it in to survive oh yeah there's no campaign mode or if there is but that's a separate yeah that's not whatever you know what's interesting to me about fortnight the graphics suck don't you add me that's a graphic style but those that it has like a like a xbox to yeah yeah somebody had a an image and it was from 2007 it said man look at this I wonder what video games gonna be looking like the graphics gonna be looking like a 2018 and then it shows fortnight and it's like this is like dude they're just like they've turned the textures off they 100% you turn the textures off when you play online if you don't have a powerful enough computer a sure you don't like you're like claiming yeah so it doesn't make your streaming it doesn't make your video game video card works so hard but also it makes it easier to recognize shapes because they're not is like that was the thing

101:56they did with quake they would completely turn the textures off when guys would be like playing in Highland matches yeah and you would just deal with these flat walls and then the object the person that you were fighting against would they would be stand out in stark contrast right right so as you know otherwise you'd be in this castle wall you'd have incredible textures on the wall and you wouldn't be able to see them as easily distracting look that's one thing I think I love about videogames too is like you know the scenery sometimes I just want to stop and be like the right side has full graphics although that's not so yeah depends on what you were reasonable I mean it still is a little bit what you know in it that's not much different at all yeah I mean sort of the left side is just dark there's grass yeah look at the grass there's still some movement on the ground it's not

102:44flat plain like it isn't quake go to quake play go to quake 3 no textures make a video or pull up a video of that and you'll see what I'm talking about what I'm talking about is like literal flat walls where people turned everything off and he got to a point where they weren't allowing it in certain competitions because it makes such a big difference because now you're just like it started in front of a blank screen they also you could also replace all of the characters with a larger character like like say if you were playing as like this girl so I give this one it's doing like it's showing the mod in between I've heard here you son of a no no Jamie pull pull up quake no textures pull up quake no textures and then you can watch what it looks like that is not no textures that that's different you can see the difference in the colors and things are moving it's when they turn

103:44off all the textures you you get to see these flat well that's what it looks like right see ya now that is a way different experience yeah to see right you can't shadow I still exist but all the textures are gone and if you show a video that see if you could find a video that Jamie when in the videos you see things moving around with no textures and you realize what an advantage it would be if you're playing someone it was you're constantly dealing with all this input you've all this different high-visibility and quake 3 though it's hard to find out this is this which game was this quake live ok this is again I still got to ask what is quake I mean well I've heard of it but I've never played it like it's the ultimate first-person shooter and it's the original one it was originally quake 1 and well there was doom but it was doom I've heard of like yeah I've even you

104:34know there's a Swee did doom didn't they they came out with another didn't they come up with yes they did and there's another one that's coming out soon but what quake one was was these cool maps and you would run around and shoot each other and you'd have these death matches so one on one death matches and shoot rockets at each other like it and it's you're seeing it through your perspective like so if you have a rocket launcher you see the rocket launcher in front of you or there so that whole idea what is this one call this quake champions this is the newest version I mean the graphics aren't incredible in these things now they they're so excited we're gonna have we're setting up a lamb here a local area network here what we're gonna stream live and play each other excellent and waste massive mouse I'm sure man sometimes I'm sort of like oh three hours just went by yeah he's gonna

105:24go to sleep a little bit over well whatever dude it will suck up your time it'll suck up but you know I can't play I'm just I'm not good enough to play those kinds of things like it's just like spawned I spawned I how dare you say that there you put the limitations you just need to learn left with WASD learn how to move your fingers around consoles are I know some people say listen ya can't get any real accuracy with a console that's your problem how do you do I mean the console now listen to you how do you learn physics how do you like you can do it man you cats like rocky or something that's right a grotty kid or whatever that movie where someone teaches someone how to play a video yeah he's a nerd in the beginning and he's like a loser but you know it comes back and it gets the girl well one of the reasons why I wanted to talk to you about this in particular is because I am

106:25more and more convinced that it's our future may lie in some artificially created world and that people are more interested and more attracted everyday to virtual reality augmented reality virtual reality and what can Cheney what was that game the one game where there was you the created worlds I was gonna pull that up earlier and ask it's called no man's sky oh I played that I bet played that I bought because of course any space game I'm like right it's boring though it is because you know they have 80 trillion worlds but all this they're basically they don't look that different you know so it's like oatmeal 80 million bottles and over there you go there and people are shooting each other and stealing money no no what is better for that Cup yeah right I mean it's you know it looked like it was people but what's better is elite dangerous so after this I was so

107:13disappointed in this I went back and I found a leap dangerous which is just disappointing this because there was no action yeah there was no you just ran around and your mind stuff it was sort of like it just wasn't exciting there was nothing exciting there was no you know there was no so I like I said I don't usually play sort of these massive multiplayer games so this is elite dangerous is elite dangerous and it is man the trading or you know you can decide oh I want to be I want to be a bounty hunter you know and it was so rich I just I spent there was like a good six months of my life that I was like you know working my way getting better ships I became good see who doesn't want to be a bounty hunter right you know I'm saying like that's what everybody's and this just this game had you know and there's like I don't know a few hundred thousand people in there

107:53you're creating the universe it's evolving they add storylines so you know well we are setting up an HTC vive here and we're we when he was HTC EVO how dare you I know man it's like virtual reality it's and it's consumer virtual reality when my friend never done though oh boy I've been waiting I've been sort of well we tried to get one Jamie went out yesterday and look they're all sold out so we had to order one and so we're ordering one we're gonna have it set up in here and the the games I played the games of two years ago and I'm sure they're way more advanced than they are now yeah there's a crazy archery game where the you're on the top of a castle and these little monsters that look like they could be in South Park they're not like detailed right right kind of cool-looking monsters and you shoot out on with bows and arrows they're trying to invade the castle but man that's

108:52addictive because you really look down you see them all around you you have like a real sorry my always been my question about like you know I sit on my chair and I play my video game so like are you yes this is it see this guy has a thing in his hands and he's moving around this is like a Star Wars one right and there's a bunch of different ones that I've so you always got to be standing right in some sense yes if you want to just like sit down with the board and like you can but there's also a boxing one that you get a real workout in Wow so it's a game and I played it over Duncan's house so I think there's a video of it but it's weird because you punch wrong so like the like if I'm holding my hands like this which is I'm holding my hands vertically where my thumb's are up yeah right the boxing gloves would be horizontal like they would be if you were punching someone

109:41yeah so so it doesn't do the turn no it's weird so as you move your hands forward like this which you really wouldn't punch like that the punches come out so they've got to iron that as you guys say that'll be something they'll work out it yeah and make the the controller rotate the way a fist would but as you're doing it you throw real punches and someone's throwing punches at you and when they throw punches you and they hit you you see a white flash in front of you that's good makes you nervous just like real sparring does yeah yeah well you know and so like this question of like what are we gonna do with virtual reality cuz like I said um I already you know I see huge potential for like education in gaming and that's why we built our games yeah here's this is me over Duncan's house just I want anybody to walk by you know I gotta get a beer BAM I'm beating

110:26this guy up moving around him see that's the thing I always wonder what he got that guy was dunking up every day it's like dude how did you beat I was like move around don't stand right in front dope well you got a-you got footwork and movement but you you can really get a workout with that I'm not joking yeah you get exhausted yeah and you know you you keep going and fight tougher and tougher opponents right well you know that's and that's the queen oh so like talk about haptic suits like eventually you know you're gonna wear things I didn't see that I I've read the book I didn't see the what was it the movie that just Ready Set ready player one I didn't see I didn't see it have you read the book the book I'm like good because the book is like full immersion like the whole book is about like when virtual reality is it and so everybody has these suits that you and you're kind

111:14of in this ball you played the game in a brush you can run and you know but in some sense yes we're just starting out along these lines well they have these places you can go that they have a warehouse set up and you go inside of it and I went through one with my kids and it's a Star Wars one at Disneyland dude it's why you go across you're walking across this platform like they have all these different places where you actually walk through yeah and as you're walking through you look to the left and to the right and there's fire but you feel the heat from the fire it's crazy so I'm like heaters set up so it blows up and stormtroopers start shooting at you this is it right here what is it called the void the void yeah and you do this I'm telling you man this is better than any of the rides at Disneyland and it's just outside of Disneyland in Downtown Disney so you

112:00don't have to pay to get into different get it but it costs I think it's $35 for half an hour it's not cheap but it's not too bad it's not too fat like it is it's awesome I mean it is awesome yeah so the question is what happens with the lattice right future right because yeah virtual reality we're just on the cusp ever right we're just beginning to like start playing around these technology because people wouldn't stay in it for years they kind of sucked it was sort of clunky well we're we're we used to play pong right that's what I started with are you about 55 yeah I'm 50 so I remember pong we were excited I can't believe I'm controlling the TV making the thing move on the TV or asteroids yeah woo the yeah I was a Star Wars game I don't think was called asteroids but you flew through the train just like wireframe yeah but it was amazing times love that

112:47I dropped a lot of quarters sure so go from that to what you were showing us here these crazy new space games yeah and then imagine what these mean the Star Wars thing today the void is really cool but you know that it's not real right but it's cool right but you know it's not real well you're not gonna be able to tell it's not real in 20 years yeah right and how much time are people spending by the way right when you do this oh really there's so much pressure you and you feel it when you get in shot Wow you feel like Gd and you know it's funny even with the controller on my crappy ps4 whoo you know what it vibrates when you you know to sort of give you it's amazing how much the brain sort of picks up on these signals when you're using the HTC vive and you draw an arrow back when it gets to the knocking point you feel it release there's a feeling in your hand

113:36yeah seeing the arrow it's really cool yeah so what happens when I write I can be sort of like you know grandpa be like that's terrible people should be going out in nature which I think they should be you know now you know I always I'm always aware whenever I'm sort of like oh this could be terrible I always remember the hole you can see in like I think at some point Socrates you know mm five years 500 years ago he's like ooh kids today rowboats you know it's all right um so you know who knows what we'll do with it and you know hopefully you know maybe it'll help you know maybe I don't know you know I may think there is I don't want to be like oh that's terrible but there clearly are it's gonna be dangerous with just a different game Jamie there's a new one oh boy I'm gonna be far oh yeah just the hands yeah and so you're you have two little hand controllers and one of them would

114:23be the arrow and the other one would be the bow and you wear them and that's the haptic part middle there's controllers on them well you feel the arrow vibrating against the riser of the bow as you draw it back - it's really cool well it's funny because you know we talked about like you know for the game that we built which was awesome you know it's really a lot of fun to actually go through the process of like how do you you know how do you script it how do you teach people you know like because I don't think when we get in a good but when you're a good game right you know in the first couple hours of a game and you're just learning the six tops and you get excited this is a cool world to be in um but I'd be interested to think like sort of you know I'm some point I did try VR for the same thing because what can you once you can't at have people be tactile they're

115:04not to sort of in their head what else can you do to sort of show them teach them things you know like flashers or you know I'm sure that's another thing in Disneyland they have a thing called soaring over the world that you sit in a chair and you get raised up and there's a giant like IMAX style screen and it flies you over these environments it's incredible so beautiful right and you different smells are in the air and the different places that you go to like when you go over the elephant yeah the elephants you smell grass and hay and I think that it's just a matter of time like as we were talking about before where biological entities might not be necessary for space travel you might be able to send a robot put on a suit and be able to experience these rights right like in real time yeah well um so you know you know the simulation argument yeah that's a philosophy argue about you

115:53know and so that's a really interesting idea should we just run through it for people who's shorter okay so I forgot who was Nick Bostrom that maybe not a Brandon Carter there's this this guy philosopher came with this brilliant argument for like why we're probably a simulant we're probably somebody else's simulation self-aware simulation and the idea is like look if you get one you know we've been talking about like civilizations when they get a million years ahead what can they do that they're so powerful they can build computers that can simulate reality like fully simulate reality we're like you know just like in the matrix you have programs that are self-aware and so you know once they get to that and they start running simulations of the world right it's cheaper to run it's cheap to run simulations so they just run trillions of them right so the idea is

116:33that from that argument there's more simulated realities than there is the one real reality so odds are right you know if there's a trillion simulated realities in one real reality you're probably in a simulated reality so are we a you know everything right now you and I think this is real you know but what we are is an incredibly detailed and we are self aware programs in you know of silicon matrix of you know so that argument is brilliant I mean you know I'd be just from the just from the point of view of like numbers um yeah there's lots of reasons to say that's not possible but but it's you know raises this issue of like yeah what is simulation but if you were in a simulation the whole matrix thing if you were in a simulation that was that real how would you know yeah how could you know there are me we're going to be if you allow technology to continue right

117:22if we keep moving forward at an exponential pace there's gonna come a point in time where we have something that's indistinguishable from reality right so how do we know that we're not already in it yeah yes and once we're in it will we create another reality will we continue to create simulations inside of simulations like fractals and fractals exist nature they exist everywhere in the universe and there's there's also the argument that the atomic structure itself might really be a universe right right yeah superstellar talk but you know it's really I mean what that's why I love science fiction you know the explorations of these ideas you know I mean they're way out there and there but you know exercises they're fun exercises and there's a way in which again when you think a million two million years in the future this is why I might wonder you know I hate to lose

118:07this back to climate change but just like God if we could just make it through who knows what we're gonna be right right I mean there's stuff there's the whole universe one thing I did like about um interstellar was the idea that like our future selves which have now become integrated in the very fabric of reality you know that's how far you've evolved you become the laws of physics that they're kind of opening up the wormhole for us yeah so you know a million years is so long knows what we can become and it's just like you know don't hold us back I mean I'm you know I'm not a fan of the people that deny science but one thing I am a fan of is watching them do it like like watching monkeys throw at the zoo there's something weird about watching people argue like really obvious right wing talking points and and and most of them by the way have no financial interest in

118:59climate change right one way or the other they're not they're not the wealthy elite they're these weirdos that are like vampire familiars like they want to be recognized as like an eight and Ally yeah of the elite they think somehow that's really what it is yeah you know and it's like 89 again it's the tribal isn't but as you said it's like watching them do this and part the part that's so frustrating is just that like dude you're using science it's not fair it's not fair that like oh you get like you know you get into an accident and you're like oh god please give me the MRI and then you know as soon as your arm heals you're gonna be tweeting about how like you know climate change is all there's flat yeah I'm not sure what to do with that just like I mean is this something we should like pay attention to or we should we just be like okay you know fine go ahead

119:47do your thing I had an interesting conversation with Neil deGrasse Tyson about it and he said one of the real problems is debating these people is you elevate their profile and they're never gonna believe in the first place and right the the reality is there's a mental illness involved in a lot of these people just gets a friendiy yeah there's there there's something wrong with them right they believe this and then there's just is this massive lack of education and lack of reading yeah they're not interested in understanding how they know that the earth is down or how they know that every other planet in the solar system is round right or how they know that every other planet that we've observed all the stars are round why they're round right why it's a matter of mass and gravity and all these they don't care about all that but what they even want to think is the

120:27government as if it's the government is like one cabal that's what it is of equally minded people they're all working together to you over somehow by convincing you that the earth is round yeah it is one of the dumbest things but it's also a sign that we've created this world that's really easy to survive in we've nerfed all the hard edges and we keep the Wolves off the streets now and there's still these dum-dums and then they get online with computers which is hilarious yeah so these idiots my good research would you look at a website YouTube can search on YouTube videos yeah you know it's it's it's kind of stunning yeah well like you know that I think your point about actually we've made the world so safe yes yeah there's a certain way like you know in in hunter-gatherer those people would be food those are the people who are standing there looking at

121:13the tiger being like that's not a tiger you know so silly and it's right but what's weird about that so that is like the the ER exact like that is the dumbest you could possibly imagine so but there's Dumber gosh damn these people think there's aliens underneath the earth and there's Tahoe reptilians and there's a secret cabal of kid that run the world and you made a really excellent point just a minute ago right which is because it like the philosopher Karl Popper once said if there was a conspiracy it failed right the whole conspiracy thing is that like oh yeah everybody's in on it as if like look there are the powerful there are the oh you know there's all scenes who control you know but they have their own agendas they're beating the Crayola story of the world going after each other left and right it's about finances right right and the idea that like Oh

122:03somebody's gonna be able to keep this amazing secret right you know about the earth is flat and never I mean you know it just it gives people way more credit than you know then they do you would have to have everybody on the same page all the different governments yeah all over the world about like where's the benefit in lying about the shape of the planet Yeah right man who's making money but you know here's what's is what's really messed up is that like you know climate change denial is just like a slightly less version of that right because no um there's a guy writer philosopher Morton I got his first name but he talks about climate change being a hyper object like you know that modern world we have things that are hyper objects which means it's just so big we just we have a hard time wrapping our minds around them and that hyper objects you know if we're gonna evolve right we're

122:56gonna evolve new behaviors one of them is the capacity to deal with hyper objects but people want everything to be simple you know I mean which cracks me up because like they're fine with this being complex you know their cell phone can be complex because I like to use it but like you know the idea that like you know the climate could change imma change they they need it it freaks them out because it's too complicated or something so they go for the simple answer which is that you know it's a it's a conspiracy it's a hoax that I love this one the scientists are all doing it for the money well as if my pay was that good that you know I mean I think a big issue happened with Al Gore when Al Gore came out with an inconvenient truth everybody connected Al Gore with the left he's a Democrat and then they found out that he flies private jets and they're like this yeah and so they

123:40this is all yeah and so there was enough there's enough holes yeah well they started poking through and then looking for conspiracies and then looking to deny the whole thing I totally agree I really wish you know I got nothing against Al Gore but but I wish he didn't I wish he didn't become the face of me because it just pushed I mean life only you know Neil deGrasse Tyson or Sagan was still alive or you know had done it it would've been a totally different thing because it wouldn't have it is off of it in an extreme way yeah I don't I don't know I don't know what but you know pull up this article Al Gore maybe the first climate change billionaire or green billionaire that he's he's made so much money doing these seminars and speeches and itself and they're doing them right and then people actually came out it didn't do that well I'm out already I think so Al Gore could

124:31be the world's first carbon billionaire former vice president become the world's first carbon billionaire after investing heavily in green in it no that's okay that part's okey riot because if he's investing in these companies and the companies start making money which like already so sure solar employs more people now than coal does yes amazing well I'm coal but that was one of the dumbest things when when Trump became president I gotta bring back call like but how about bring back knocking rocks together start fires cool it's as if the typewriter companies got together and made sure you never bought a computer like we're gonna computers illegal anymore it's like you know yes but listen I got it one thing that you always gotta acknowledge is that like this you know when you change infrastructures people are gonna get hurt yeah you know I mean like I mean

125:21for those coal miners man that's what they've done their whole life it's been an honorable thing and they've you know so you can't just sort of be like hey we're switching infrastructure see yeah you know there's got to be some deep understanding of conjugative consequences and helping people who are gonna be yeah you know put you know train them how to put up so you know solar panel about universal basic income of your look oh yeah yeah no no I've thought about that a lot you know it's a big thought when right consideration when it comes to automation technology and you know with the automation thing it's so true right because you know when you think about what's been going on the last election you know and everybody was like oh you know like you know what's happening with blue-collar people workers and B which is totally true but like man it's not China its automation

126:04right and that's what what really is gonna screw up the whole nature of work you know for everybody from truck drivers you know even to me to university professors is we got this the AI you know the automation coming on and right what do you do what do you do when a university professor is one day gonna be retro that that kids are gonna want to learn online they're gonna want to learn through some sort of an interactive course so that you can get on your phone rather than go to an actual physical place it's possible you know I mean it's possible but I think and this is gonna be the whole question with the new economy all right whatever whatever happens whatever we're moving into is finding those places where you know what I don't want a machine right I mean so right now like so when the what is it the MOOCs came out the massively online courses yeah that was like five

126:45years ago budget universities are done everybody's gonna take these online courses and it never happened you know because people want to be together they want to learn they want the experience of a happy you know my part of my students it's not just lecturing no I'm agree lecture my students are probably I bet you are man you're good talker I had one students say I own the reviews you get at the end the guy said hey I hate to say this but you know you should make those tapes for people to go to sleep because every class your voice it a nice ways like you have a nice voice you know that's of aggressive yeah so whoever is I think that I think people will always with education there'll be some component of it that yeah sure you can learn it online want to but I think like you know we're gonna have to they'll they'll be they'll be a place for like people coming in and like

127:33learning in groups and having somebody who like as its but their whole life studying the thing telling you you know what's gonna write look there's a lot of things we're like and we've lost lot of this um mentorship right or apprenticeship mmm-hmm right there's a lot things you need somebody who know you know we spent their whole life going oh you crank it this way not that way cuz you gotta get that way you'll never work you know right you can't learn that from watching a video or something yeah well there's certain things martial arts which is a big part of my life you have to learn from a person you gotta have tiny things that they must show you while you're doing it but you can learn a lot of things from videos no no doubt yeah there's a lot of things that people are putting up online instructional courses and stuff and I use some of them you know if I have to

128:14fix my sink all for sure yeah it's kind of amazing yeah I know yeah so you know I think like with everything so let's circle back to the ubi um you know like with everything we're gonna have to invent new ways we will because we're just human beings like there's a way in which we're gonna find you know niche places that there will be economies where people make things but yeah in the end I mean ubi may be necessary yeah I think it may really be necessary because if there's no work you know I mean that's a recipe for disaster no for your Democratic Society yeah yeah I just hope we can move past this idea that everybody who needs that as some sort of a welfare brat yeah right right well you know once there's no work at all you know I mean they're good because like you know this is the the thing that I would like with the self-driving cars right so I asked this question a lot

129:05I've written about this sort of like okay everyone's like we gotta have self-driving cars we're heading toward self-driving cars like self-driving cars will destroy the last good blue collar job in America you know truck driving right that's a really good livelihood for a lot of people and it's like Oh words can eliminate it it's like why like do we have to like okay yeah there's you're telling me there's got a safety safe that's what they say right but intro it's not entirely clear right you know that that will work and you know what are the cut for the for the lives that are lost in the driving I mean you know the car crashes is that gonna be worth the social upheaval that comes from not having any work anymore so I mean just like they're these huge yes bearing down on them yes if it's your friend or your mom loved ones calculus I mean you know if it tears

129:51down if the if wiping out these jobs destroys democracy right and you end up with you know if that's a silly though that doesn't seem possible I just think that what it's gonna do is can make travel safer and then we have to figure out well these jobs that people got right from traveling how do we replace that that income yeah right well one of the things is we're gonna we're gonna have to start teaching kids to be creative yeah well you Mitch that I think there's going to be places where like the now we'll have so listen I'm not arguing that we shouldn't have no I know you're not you just being you're just looking at all the variables yeah and I'm asking like the cop you know we're moving so rapidly into this new world right that like who's deciding for us who's deciding that we want cars you know what you know we were told that we're gonna get it but like a lot of

130:38these things I think they're you know there needs to be a little bit more dialogue democracy right isn't having this stuff shoved down our throats and totally you know I mean well you know how about cell towers they're everywhere I mean there's no getting away from it right if you could I mean is there a community anywhere that has made some sort of an agreement will there be no cell towers in our community yeah no but there are communities that have decided to like in the southwest that no lights no lights at night that's amazing yeah they want to preserve their night sky we should really have some sort of a day where everybody shuts everything off and sees this guy see how crazy it is that we live in this weird state where we're on an organic spaceship flying through infinity yeah and we don't see that right because know if you're you know you when you do

131:24backpacking or something you're in the backcountry you know a couple days you notice things change and so nobody looks up now anyway because there's nothing to see because illusion I went to the Keck Observatory on the Big Island have you been I've never been I'm a theorist I don't you know nobody's gonna get me close to a telescope I could just you don't even have to go all the way to the observatory the visitor station which is I forget where it's at I think it's 14 or 12 or someone yeah it's really high right but there's they have diffused lighting all of the Big Island's so there's no light pollution and when you look up it is just stunning right you look up you're like wow the Milky Way right and most people have never seen the Milky Way right there right look I thought you have to have telescopes see oh no it's right there and you feel like you're flying through space you have

132:11this this really humble feeling that I think people get in a couple of different places people get when they live next to mountains they get it when they live next to the ocean but you really get it if you could see space and I think one of the the things that is haunting the human race is the arrogance of humans which is compounded by the fact that we can't see the cosmos that we only see what's in front of us so this is the world we live-in we put a roof over our head this is the box I got my blinders on I'm moving ahead because I want a new Lexus or whatever you know whatever it is whatever material thing you're trying to possess when this this unstoppable force in front of when you look up and you see the cosmos it's like it's an undeniable reality right and you go oh okay okay this is just a small thing my existence is just a small thing in this mystery

133:00this giant mystery of what you know we just found out 20 years ago there's planets out right I mean this is a giant mystery right you're looking up at a hundred billion stars in this galaxy alone man I couldn't you're speaking my language I mean you know the loss well and the myth that the capital M word right so I'm a scientist I'm an atheist but I believe in mystery I believe in that kind of at the core of our lives is just wake up every datum looking here and I'm not gonna I'm gonna be here until I die and then I have no idea what the hell happens right so you know and as you said like Mountain Mountains in particular you know I have a thing for mountains um the the night sky is it's it reminds you it opens that space up right you know we're sort of like you know and you're right you can you know we can talk about all right we talk about X but it's really it's an experience it's the

133:44experience that just shows you you're part of this it's more than you but you're you're here and you know and I think right a lot of the stupidity of the modern age as you said the consumerism particularly all that matters to me is getting my next pile of when you're out there you realize who cares you know who freaking cares like you know for a moment even you just get the sense of that mystery and it can be transformative you know I think what's happening is we've created these civilizations as civilizations need to be lit up the lights keep us from seeing the universe the universe humbles us so we're not humbled then we move towards acquiring physical possessions material objects because we think that that's gonna make us happy and our entire society is geared towards innovation because everybody wants the newest shiniest well that is that is what's leading us to artificial life

134:35yeah and that all this shiny is all innovation and it's eventually going to move to this one singularity and that singularity is some new being yeah so it's funny because you know one thing when I think about like you know all these other sitting on my argue about all these other civilizations is that you know the whether or not you make it may be that the evolutionary heritage you get right so we you know evolved from you know both chimpanzees or you know the chimpanzee ancestor and the bonobo ancestor so we've got like we fight we're higher art very hierarchical right so you know we've got a lot of aggression this but we also got the bonobo kind of like this just have sex everything's cool so we're like we're sort of we got this really weird mixed evolutionary baggage and whether or not you can make it to the next side with the existential challenge of trigger and

135:18climate change is kind of like a what your evolution what evolution gave you you know cuz you can imagine species like hive Minds you know if you came from termite and intelligent termite species it might be a lot easier to deal with climate change you like everybody you know get on like you know I get on the Kurds get on the course um but uh the most essential ease can you evolve new behaviors right so we've been on this track and it's leading us in a way that as you said you were it's like that the shiny thing dangling in front of us is leading us off on this one track and the question is can we evolve new behaviors which I actually I'm gonna say this I think they're part of it is spiritual you know or at least in my atheist way of like reconnecting with mystery to see like you know we're part of this and we need to respect it and you know when you say spiritual what do

136:03you mean so in my first book was about science and religion now you know I'm an atheist but I'm not Richard Dawkins atheist I think that whole idea there's a difference well you know Richard Dawkins is what I would call strident atheist and he's like you anybody who has any spiritual I need you know any inclination towards mystery he's an idiot you know and like Richard Dawkins needs to do LSD right in a certain way or DMT or psilocybin or something that just gives you an undeniable experience of mystery right exactly yeah you know so I've been doing Zen meditation for like the last thirty years you know and like you know so I've been staring at a wall for thirty years and the first thing you learn is it's really boring and then the second thing you learn is that there's stuff under your thoughts you are not just the you're thinking you know there's just sort of

136:44you settle down and there's just like this openness you know and so the spiritual parts like you said you know when you're in the mountains right so I love doing back country hiking and you know when you get up of tree lines weird thing that happens when you're above rely on you just like you know I got this panorama round you and that thing is you know the earth right of which we are part and you know so this is an interesting question about like convert to reality do this or do you actually need to get out there kind of think you need to get out there but maybe virtual reality can give people the impetus to get out there you know well it'll be a different experience I don't think there's anything wrong with the virtual reality experience of being in the mountains I think it's probably pretty cool but it's not gonna be being in the mountains right something about

137:25being in the mountains is also there's a there's a weird feeling and I don't know if it's real but there's a weird feeling that there's no signal out there because in the places where there's no cell signal there's no there's a feeling you get when you're absolutely not connected yeah and then you see wildlife and the wildlife out there they're almost like these mystical beings like when you see a deer step out of the tree line and it see like a dive yeah that thing has been that way for a million years yeah that's that species has not changed at all in a million years yeah and the signal what you talk about the signal I it's it's really the thing is what for me it's like when I get far enough back that I know it's just not another human being right you know yeah and it's just like when I leave this exact is this is gonna still be happening like it doesn't give

138:10a about you yeah and it's just moving along and as you said it's been moving this way for millions of years and you just realize like and that's why you know part of the thing I'm saying with the book is that like look if we trigger climate change that's just the Earth's way of like creating the next set you know it used us to create climate change to you know now move on to something else and emit power you know and when you're out there you feel that and you you know and the thing that I think we need to do is sort of we establish our connection to that we're part of that we're from that we're not evil we're not bad we need to reintegrate ourselves in a way that we still get our civilization but you know can that's what I mean so yes why spiritual because when we connect to that mystery then we're in a better place to make the right decisions to understand what the decisions are if not

138:57weird like we gotta save the polar bears and we're not looking at no no it's the biosphere as a whole that we have to understand well operating out of ego and ideology and not out of rational thought right with all the information at our disposal and really verifying that information understanding what's correct and what's not correct whether or not this bias behind it or scientific research that was funded by people that have a vested interest on it leaning one way or the other all that stuff is very very slippery and very dangerous and when you find out that studies have been influenced by special interest groups or you know lobbyists or whatever and that they you know like especially pharmaceutical studies of the creepiest well they they can do a series of studies and only one of them shows some sort of a positive impact for whatever weird reason and that's the one

139:41they use yeah and they don't have to publish the fact they ran a hundred studies right right well I try and teach people I'm sorry good yeah dad um you know cite what I think the most important thing that people need to understand about science is not so much science as results but how science works you know because it does work right that's why we have all this stuff and so so they can distinguish so I I say that science is three things it's spitballs supertankers and stadiums right you know the problem of the news it'll be like the latest study shows the color red you know will make you have better sex you know latest the latest study that can get you to click on that USA Today or yeah right because the media reports us as if this was science like every day a whole bunch of new articles come out you know I write scientific articles that's the currency of my profession but like

140:25one study is is just like it's a spit ball right basically we're shooting spitballs at each other but science is like a supertanker right you know we're like it takes seven miles to turn a supertanker around that's what really science is the things that we think we understand in science is like this super tanker and people are shooting spitballs at the papers every day and if you get enough spit balls on one side of the you know the prow or whatever it starts to turn it right and so the science will turn slowly if enough of the spit balls are lined up so people you know it's not about the single study it's about have there been 300 studies over the last you know thirty years that say the same thing so like you know the coffee stuff coffees good coffees bad clearly the fact that we keep getting both answers means we don't know that's all we don't know yet it's just not

141:10clear climate change 30 19 30 years a hundred years of the same results yeah we got that you know well there's always a problem with diet in that you're not taking into account how nutrients interact with other foods or different foods in Iraq it's a different you know you know when you say coffee's bad okay was it bad when you're smoking cigarettes yeah are bad when you're eating grass fed meat or bad when you're on a vegan diet like when is it bad right who are these people what are they putting in their system and how much sugar are they taking in how much sodium and you know what's the nutrient levels their blood did you test them for b12 deficiencies and all these different things like that's the real problem with any dietary studies like they don't take into account them extremely very diet and the complexity of the system right I mean so I would tell people that like

141:54you know it comes to like health science is anything in general about human beings look this stuff is really complex and as you said there's a thousand different things that can interact so you got to really take that stuff with a grain of salt like okay the smoking caused cancer yeah got that you know yeah but like yes coffee good or bad we just the studies aren't there yet you know that's different from climate change or you know a gravity you know or is the earth round yeah yeah those are those are stupid so listen man thank you very much for being here really appreciate it was really good to talk to you is fun do you have an audio book out uh yeah there is an audio book did you read it I have not a BP did I read that you read the words but that are in the audio book version did you were you narrating it no no I didn't goddamnit really I hate that when I really when I

142:46buy audio books and I know that the guy who's reading it doesn't have a single bone you know invested in this idea that he's saying he's just repeating the words well the guy I'm sure whoever did it was like you know totally channeling I must have felt it in the astral plane it'd be better if you read it managed to let you do it yeah why the didn't know what you do I don't know it's not wish for it no I don't even know you know that part of that no I didn't I didn't understand poor dodging tell people the title again light of the stars alien world and the fate of the earth Don Tom your Twitter is i Adam Frank 4y4 because that's the only one that everything else was taken okay six years ago when I got on Adam Frank four and do you have an Instagram as well no no I have an ally Facebook author page and website website is Adam Franks I think we just Google Adam Franco

143:39pop-up Thank You Adam I really appreciate I was so much in my mind yeah it's really a lot of fun bye