Adam Frank and the host dissect NASA's historical bias against intelligent life searches, contrasting underfunded SETI with recent technosignature grants. They rigorously debunk anti-gravity myths using fundamental physics while analyzing the "Silurian hypothesis" for detecting lost industrial civilizations via rock isotopes. The dialogue critiques hallucinating AI models that threaten democracy and warns against profit-driven space policies undermining the Artemis mission. Ultimately, they assert that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, emphasizing that Earth's unique biosphere, verified by atmospheric oxygen, remains our only confirmed home despite ancient flood myths and panspermia theories. [Automatically generated summary]
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Signs of Intelligent Life00:14:22
All right, Adam, Frank, thanks for coming, man.
It's a pleasure.
Is it true you are one of the first scientists to get a grant from NASA to look for aliens?
Look for, not for aliens, but for intelligent civilizations, signs of intelligent life.
Signs of intelligent life.
Yeah.
Because there's the whole history of SETI, right?
So SETI, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, is old, right?
It goes back to the 1960s, really.
First searches were done then.
And, you know, it kind of, it was always marginalized, right?
You know, there were scientists who were doing it, but it was never very well funded.
So we can talk about like things like the Fermi paradox, why there is no Fermi paradox, but we can get to that.
But just that SETI was never really well funded.
And then it really, there was a couple of congressmen in the 80s and 90s who really were like, we're not going to fund this stuff.
And they just kept, they basically said to NASA, you can't fund any of this.
Like, you know, you'll just get burned if you do.
And then, but by 1995, we discovered our first planet orbiting another star.
So that was a big deal.
Like, that was when.
That was the first exoplanet we discovered?
Exoplanet, 95.
So when I was coming up in graduate school in the late 80s, if you asked me if there were any other planets, I'd be like, no, no.
We could, you know, our solar system could be the only one, right?
So in 1995, we discovered the first exoplanets.
So the field of astrobiology, of thinking about life in space, sort of starts, really starts in earnest then.
NASA starts putting money into it.
But there was always this thing of like, Sure, we'll study dumb life like microbes.
We'll go to Mars and we'll look for microbes and stuff, and we can talk about that.
But still, if you wanted to look for intelligent life, there was still kind of a bias at NASA.
They literally, in some of the language, like, oh, you want to apply for a grant?
Eh, not.
You can look for life, but don't look for intelligent life.
And then there was this famous meeting in 2018 where somebody in Congress said, oh, we need $10 million.
NASA should have a $10 million program for techno signatures, which is the new word for SETI, searching for signatures of technology.
Interesting.
And that was when sort of like NASA was like, Oh, okay.
So they brought a bunch of us together, people who were kind of interested in it.
It was an amazing three day meeting.
And from that, Kostum colleagues and I put in a grant that was explicit, like, yeah, we're looking for, or we want to think about.
We weren't even going to look yet.
We were going to think about how to think about actually looking for techno signatures rather than just biosignatures.
And that was the first grant.
We got it funded in 2019, and we're still going.
Well, that's interesting.
And they said that in 2018, because wasn't it 2017 that the New York Times came out with that article about the UFOs?
Yeah, but these were pretty disconnected.
Like this was, you know, I mean, the UAP and the UAP stuff and the techno signature stuff are very disconnected.
And so we can talk about that, right?
The techno signatures are using telescopes, right?
Using like high powered telescopes to look at other planets.
Or, you know, I mean, especially when we're doing techno signatures.
Biosignatures, we'll do biosignatures in the solar system, right?
We'll look for biosignatures by going to Mars, looking on the ocean moons of the big planets.
We don't really think there's techno signatures in the solar system.
For people who are, you know, in our solar system, but there's people, and I'm one of them.
We've done some work on this, and I can tell you about it.
But in general, you know, the UFO and UAP stuff is very disconnected from the techno signature work, and I can tell you in general why, like, you know, um, but you know, I mean, there, you know, one could ask quite well, one could ask how one could look at UAPs and UFOs scientifically, but in general, the data, and I'm sure we're going to get into this, is just not even close to even there's nothing to do scientifically in general with the data that.
We have.
Sure, that makes sense.
It's just definitely an interesting coincidence.
I think the coincidence goes back actually in the other way.
So, what is happening?
So, in 1995, we discover our first planet orbiting another star, which was a huge revolution, right?
Because we just didn't know whether or not.
This question about whether or not there are other planets orbiting other stars goes back to the Greeks, right?
You can see like Aristotle and Democritus beating each other up over it.
So, it's an old, ancient question.
Giordano Bruno in 1600 gets burned at the stake in some reason, in some way.
I mean, it's a little, you know, it's not quite true, but it's, you know, he was advocating for there being other planets orbiting.
Orbiting other stars, right?
And this was before anybody had any data, but you know, that was a heresy in those days.
So this is an old question.
So in 1995, we discover proof positive that there's another planet orbiting another star.
Slowly then, in 1995, 1996, we start accumulating data about other, you know, we start building a census of other planets.
By 2005, we now were getting the data that like every star has planets orbiting it, right?
And then you start seeing in the news, like, oh, scientists find an Earth twin, you know, meaning like a planet like the same size as Earth.
So, like, all of this data about other planets is coming out, other, you know, which is far away, you know, light years away.
And I think it kind of was the other way around.
People were, you know, the people were getting used to hearing about other planets, that they exist.
Some of them may be Earth like.
And I think that set the stage in some sense for UFOs and UAPs to become a little bit more, um, Acceptable to be talked about.
People were thinking about life in the universe in a way that they hadn't in 1990.
Sure.
Now, one of your biggest theories is this Silurian hypothesis, right?
And this is the idea that human beings weren't the first industrial civilization.
Well, I wouldn't put it that way, what we did in the paper.
Right.
So we asked the question.
Right.
So the Silurian hypothesis was a paper that I wrote with Gavin Schmidt, who's the head of the Goddard Institute for Space Studies, which is a big climate facility in New York City.
And what we were asking in that paper was, how would you know?
How would you know whether or not, could you tell if there was a technological civilization, you know, 100 million years ago, you know, the dinosaurs got wiped out 65 million years ago, how could you tell whether or not the dinosaurs had it, you know, like there were dinosaur cities?
So we weren't saying there were.
In general, I don't think there's any, well, in general, I would be very skeptical if anybody told me there was a civilization before.
But, you know, the cool thing about this question was, and this is pure science, how could you tell?
Right?
What evidence would there be?
Right.
And this is no toasters in the desert.
Right.
And so this actually, this whole paper came about because I had gone down to New York to meet with Gavin, who I knew.
And I was writing papers on what I called the astrobiology of the Anthropocene, which meant, you know, the Earth's climate is changing.
And I'm sure there's people right now, as soon as I said that, are like typing, where, oh my God, he's one of these.
You know, and so if we could, we should get into that.
It's a controversial topic.
Yeah.
Which it shouldn't be, right?
Because there's, you know, I mean, there's the reason, well, let's, let's, Yeah, that's what they say.
We'll put a pin in.
We'll put a pin in.
Come back to it.
But this was my thing.
You know, I mean, our understanding of climate change comes from our understanding of planets, right?
Planets have climate.
That's what's just basically the average weather patterns.
And we've been studying climate for long enough that we have a deep understanding of how life and planets and climate fit together.
We have 4.2 billion years of Earth's history to read off how planets and climate.
So I was, my hypothesis, this is so there's a hypothesis that comes before the Silurian hypothesis.
My hypothesis is like, you know what?
Climate change is just something that any technological civilization goes through.
It's kind of like you should expect it, right?
So, the idea being that if you are building a powerful civilization that harvests energy from the planet, which is what we're doing, and we're harvesting it from fossil fuels from previous, that you're going to have an impact, right?
You know, the planets, you can't use all that much energy and not have it affect the planet.
So, I was saying, like, any technological civilization that reaches a certain level of sophistication is going to push back on their planet.
They're going to go through a period of climate change.
So, that was the idea I came to Gavin with.
And I wanted, like, hey, man, You're a climate scientist.
Let me, you know, let's talk about this crazy idea that alien civilizations would trigger climate change.
And I started to describe this to him.
And before I could even get two sentences out of my mouth, because I was, and I said to him, I said, you know, because we know there's been no technological civilizations on Earth beforehand, because I was going to go into this whole thing about alien civilizations.
And he was like, how do you know that?
And I was like, eh.
And he, you know, so he out weirded me.
I thought I was coming in with the weirdest idea ever.
And he out weirded me in five minutes.
I love when that happens.
Because he wasn't saying that there were technological civilizations.
He was just saying, and then this is what's the beauty and power of science.
There's the question How would you know?
You know, everybody can have an opinion.
Opinions are, you know, what is it?
Like, opinions are like assholes.
Everybody's got one.
Nobody thinks there's stinks.
You know, opinions are a dime in a dozen.
But, you know, science is about finding a way to get a hold, a handle on answering the question, right?
So his question was How would you know?
Forget about the debates about like Atlantis and everything.
How would you know?
Especially.
Once you go back more than, because his point was, once you go back more than, say, about two million years, the Earth's surface has mainly resurfaced.
You know, the Earth's surface, it's not the, you know, it's regenerated.
It's regenerated because of plate tectonics, right?
The Earth's surface, the plates, the continental plates are constantly being dragged down into the, you know, the deeper layers of the Earth where they melt.
And then new stuff, new continental plates or new Earth's surface is born in the mid ocean ridges, right?
So that means it's kind of like a conveyor belt.
The continents are constantly getting dragged down, like, you know, the California, Hawaii, not Hawaii, Japan, that's where there's all the earthquakes and volcanoes are.
And then new land comes up.
So after about two, five million years, there is no record of, you know, you're not going to find any subway stations, right?
And so if you start going back 10 million years, 100 million years, like really now, the planet has changed so dramatically that all you've got are fossils.
And in general, the fossil record sucks, right?
Most things do not get fossilized, right?
Okay.
So like our fossil record, it's great.
We've been able to use it to, you know, talk about dinosaurs and everything, but like, Some giant fraction of all the living things out there have not yet been fossilized.
So, especially if you have a civilization that lasts, say, 10,000 years, which for us would be a long time, right?
Our human technological civilization has been around for maybe what, like 200, if we're lucky.
What Gavin wanted to ask was if there was like a dinosaur civilization that lasted 10,000 years, nothing's going to get fossilized.
It's just too short.
You know, the odds of, you know, every year, You know, you have odds, there's some odds of some of your stuff getting fossilized.
And it's pretty low, right?
So if you only last for 10,000 years, that's not long enough to have lots of fossils from, you know, whatever kind of species you are.
Right.
So what it means is that there would be no record of a, you know, no fossil record of a civilization that lasted 10,000 years.
So it means it's like we're born.
That lasted 10,000 or less.
Or less, yeah.
Not 10,000, it could be 100,000.
It's very, you know, nobody's.
How long would it have to last to have a good amount of fossils?
Millions, millions of years.
Right?
In general, the dinosaur species were, you know, we're talking about species that were around for a million or more years.
You know, a civilization that lasts, this is one of the interesting things about the work I do with techno signatures.
We are forced to really think about civilizations and planets and their long term evolution.
Human technological civilization is about 200 years old.
I mean, obviously, we go back.
We go back.
Human civilization, if you mean farming and shit, 10,000 years, to the Ice Age.
All modern civilizations come out of the advent of farming after the last glaciers melted.
So, but you know, the technological part, like having radios and stuff, or even trains, you know, is only 200 years old.
The Victorian industrialization, right?
200 years.
So, what happens to a civilization?
If, you know, or are there that last, can you get a civilization that's a million years old, right?
Can you get a civilization that's 10,000 years old?
It's kind of hard to imagine having a continuous, you know, one civilization that holds itself together, you know, continues to progress technologically.
I don't know, right?
So, 10,000 years would be a long time based on what we know.
10,000 years would be a long time.
So, the Silurian hypothesis, what we were really asking was would there be a way to tell if there was a civilization like ours that lasted for, say, 10,000 years?
That was the number we chose because it was just a good kind of not too short, not too long.
And Gavin, being a very skilled earth scientist, what he was able to do was sort of look through and see the only way you'd be able to tell was from the strata, the rock strata, the chemical composition of the rock strata.
Because, like, You know, if there was a technological civilization and it was dumping a lot of, you know, even like say carbon dioxide, like what we're doing into the atmosphere, you would see that in the rock strata.
The rock strata would have like these chemical, what's called isotopes, which are, you know, they're like, you know, carbon, but with one extra neutron in them.
So you'd be able to see that in the strata.
So if you ground that with ice cores too, right?
Yeah, yeah.
But ice cores only go back the, you know, ice cores, I think the maximum they go back is about 100,000 years.
So if you want millions of years, you need rock.
Got it.
You know?
So, you got to go, you know, you go to the Grand Canyon and see all those layers going down.
Those layers are, you're talking millions of years all the way down.
So, you'd have to go down to find, you know, the layers from 50 million years ago, break it up, put it into a chemical laboratory, do all the work you'd have to do.
But what Gavin showed is like, yeah, you would see for the kind of industrial activity that we think of as being associated with high tech civilizations, you might see like increases in like carbon 13, you know, or certain oxygen isotopes.
Physics Beyond Relativity00:11:34
Right.
That might be a marker.
And that might be the marker that we leave.
Like, if we only last for another 200, 300 years and we disappear, another civilization, you know, 20 million years from now might, or if aliens land 20 million years from now and wanted to know whether or not we were here, that's what they would have to use.
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Is it possible that a previous civilization could have figured out technology on a different trajectory than we're on now, like without using combustion or burning of gases and natural minerals and stuff like this, or electricity?
Maybe they figured out a different way of doing physics altogether.
Yeah, that's kind of hard to imagine just because we know there are four forces in the universe, right?
There's gravity, electromagnetism, the strong nuclear force, and the weak nuclear force, right?
So gravity is holding our butts to the chairs here.
Electromagnetism is light.
Something is.
We just call it gravity, right?
It's just a theory.
We know it pretty well.
Like, you know, there's Einstein's general relativity is a description of gravity as the warping of space time.
Right.
It's a beautiful theory.
Like, the mathematics of it is just gorgeous.
And, you know, we can predict the timing of pulsars, like two pulsars orbiting each other.
So that is a very well validated theory.
You know, when we talk about theories, and this is going to be probably important for as we're going on, in science, there's two kinds of ways that the word theory gets used, right?
There's like, when I write a scientific paper, I write a paper about, like, so, right, I'm just working on a paper right now that is about how, you know, specifically how plants, as they evolve, you know, how they changed the Earth's evolution, right?
How they changed the climate and such, when the first plants were.
That is a theory with a little t, right?
It's my little thing I've worked out, right?
It's like, you ever play Clue?
You know the game Clue?
Yeah.
Right?
So there's like, you know, in the kitchen with Mr. Colonel Mustard and the broom handle, you know?
That's a theory with a little t.
Sure.
But then there's like the theory of electromagnetism, you know, which is like 10,000 experiments.
No, not even that.
100,000 experiments.
100,000 scientific papers done.
You know, it's coming, you've got, it's been validated so many times.
It's a theory with a capital T. Right.
If you do an experiment, lots of legs to hold it.
Lots of legs.
That's really what it says.
You know, it's not a house of cards.
It's a mountain of boulders where you could, like, let's say you found some particular paper written about electromagnetism or gravity, Einstein's gravity, and it's like, oh, this seems to contradict it.
You know, it may be like, oh, maybe you're even right.
So you've Pulled one boulder out, but the mountain's still there.
Like, you know, the mountain's going to adjust itself a little bit, but the mountain ain't going anywhere because it's been tested so many times.
You can't have just one paper that says electromagnetism is wrong and everyone's going to be like, oh shit, electromagnetism is wrong.
It's just too, there's too much support.
And we built everything on it.
We built, so for example, let's say Einstein's theory of general relativity.
So let's pull out my favorite tool for exposition, my cell phone, right?
So when you use your GPS, right, if you did not take into account Einstein's general theory of relativity, right?
Because you have to, because this thing, you know, there's GPS uses all these satellites that are orbiting the Earth.
And there are corrections, you know, and they're sending signals back and forth.
And that's how you're triangulating to figure out where exactly you are when you open up the map and go, hey, man, I got to go to Costco to get, you know, some eggs.
If you didn't take into account Einstein's general theory of relativity, which explains gravity as the, you know, the four dimensional warping of space time, within like 10 minutes, it would show you that rather than being in Florida, you were like, you know, 100, about 100 meters over Cleveland.
You know, you have to take that into account, or you'd get the answer wrong.
So, like I mean, so Einstein's theory of relativity, general theory of relativity, which explains gravity, is a theory with a capital T. Electromagnetism is a theory with a capital T. Evolution is a theory with a capital T. You know, you're going to have to do a lot of work to dislodge it.
Totally.
Yeah.
So, getting back to what we're saying, there's four forces that we know of.
What I was getting at, though, I didn't necessarily mean like a whole new physical universe.
I meant like a different way or a different form of technology to manipulate it, like a different way to manipulate gravity without rocket propulsion or something like that.
Right, right.
Yeah, and there are ideas along those lines.
You require, like, you know, it's not clear they would work.
Like, it would require, like, you know, black holes worth of energy to be able to do something like that.
But I get your point, right?
So, could they have some other kinds of technologies?
Maybe different elements they brought from somewhere else, or who knows?
Yeah, well, elements, like, again, all this, like, what other elements?
Like, we know all the elements that there are, right?
Because, you know.
Have you ever heard of Townsend Brown?
No.
So, Townsend Brown came up with the Byfield Brown effect.
It's the Byfield Brown effect.
And he, Townsend Brown was a physicist that was working during the Cold War, or.
Pull up Townsend Brown.
He was working with the government, the military, even like the CIA, and he was working with all of the top physicists during that time.
And he came up with this theory called the Byfield Brown effect, which was, pull it up so we can.
I'm not Jesse Michaels.
I can't regurgitate this off the top of my head.
So the Byfield Brown effect is an electromagnetic phenomenon discovered in the 20s, okay, way earlier, where the high voltage asymmetrical capacitor produces a net directional.
Thrust towards smaller electrodes, often linked to electrogravitics or lifters.
The force is generally understood in modern physics to be caused by ion wind rather than gravity manipulation.
So, this is something that he was on the leading edge of.
And this was like a crazy discovery back then.
And then he got really wrapped up in like the military and stuff, and all this stuff kind of went dark.
But this technology is still used for things like those.
Those stealth bomber planes, like what they use on the edge of them.
Yeah, maybe on the, let me just say like some of the things.
Okay, so I'm gonna give you my, so I don't know about the, Google Townsend Brown.
Right.
But yeah, we probably go to, so I'm gonna give you my, this is where, you know, we'll start something as a working astrophysicist, as a working physicist.
The town, you know, I've never heard about this.
This is not an important piece of the, you know, of the knowledge we have of physics.
Like if you go to a graduate, if you trained in physics, You know, there is no anti gravity.
There is no anti gravity.
Like, you know, there's, and the idea that he worked with the top physicists.
No, he didn't.
I can tell you who the top physicists were in gravity Kip Thorne, right?
Kip Thorne is a guy who took Einstein's theory and progressed it.
Like, he was the guy who really worked on black holes, you know, understood black holes, understood wormholes, gave us the, you know, he was the first one.
And, you know, what about the Wittons?
Ed Witten?
Ed Witten.
Ed Witten's a modern, you know, I'm not a super huge fan.
I mean, Ed Witten is a smart guy.
He's, you know, but he's not a, you know, like he was the guy behind string theory.
String theory's failed.
Like, that's my take on string theory.
But, like, whatever this is, this is not, this made no, this made no impact on physics.
Right.
I mean, and so that's really, it's important to understand sort of like there's this sort of underground sort of discussions about it.
But then you see, like, what actually happened, what's real physics, right?
What's real physics is that whatever this is, you know, you can't, nobody's built unless you want to say, unless you want to say that it was built and the government's hiding it, which is like, what am I supposed to do with that, right?
Well, this is, but, but, but, but, what, What his discovery led to was like the electrohydrodynamics, which is used in a lot of like, click on electrohydrodynamics.
So that's okay, Electra.
That's what I'm saying.
So, probably what this thing is, he did some physics and it maybe has very specific uses in, say, like something like maybe even in ion thrusters.
So, I don't know, like this is a very detailed sort of thing.
But the idea that this was some kind of huge revelation of like cutting edge physics that nobody ever heard, which transformed the field no, that didn't happen, right?
That just didn't happen.
So, this was like, you know, there it sounds like, and I'd have to read through it, it sounds like he discovered something that had great engineering possibilities for very specific things.
But was it anti gravity?
No, we don't know of any kind of anti gravity.
We don't know that, right?
And you know what's really cool?
You want to know why there's no anti gravity?
It's because, and this was something Einstein worked out.
Sometimes you think when you go through what Einstein did and you see the genius, his ability to see what nobody else could see.
So you got electric charges, right?
And you've got plus charges and you've got minus charges.
There's protons and electrons, right?
So the protons have plus charges and the electrons have minus charges.
And light charges or opposite charges attract, right?
So in electromagnetism, you've got two kinds of charge, right?
In gravity, you don't.
Gravity, you can think of mass, you can think of it as being charge, but there's only one kind of charge and it always attracts.
And because of that, there's no way to shield.
Like in electromagnetic fields, if I have like a ball of protons, right, which has a very strong electric field, right, everything is pointing, the electric field is all pointing to the protons.
If I want, I can build like a shell around it and put electrons around it.
We have the opposite charge and it'll shield.
Now you won't see the.
The protons in there.
So you can shield the electric charge.
You can make the electric field go away.
There's no way to do that in gravity because gravity only has one kind of charge.
So it's this deep reason about the structure of reality, right?
That leads you to the fact that there's no way to shield yourself against gravity.
So there is no anti gravity.
I wish there was.
Maybe in the future there will be.
But for right now to say that somebody came up with a theory of anti gravity would be like, All the physics that all the physicists know that get taught in graduate school, like, no, that there's something they don't know.
And it's like, well, why don't, why are these top guys, you know, why don't they know it?
And then you got to go into like, oh, it's being hidden by the military.
And then that just leads you down this, you know, this path where like, okay, anything's true.
You know, I can levitate right now, but I can't show you because the military won't let it.
Well, it's unfortunate because the military is very obviously interested in that weird shit and like the levitation.
The Myth of Anti-Gravity00:08:57
And so I had a guy in here, Jeffrey Kreipel, who's a professor of religion, and he said he was contacted by people at JPL.
To come to some intellectual salon to tell them about ancient stories of levitation because this rocket propulsion company is interested in it.
Like, what?
I mean, that's super shit.
Yeah, well, I'm super skeptical because, like, I work with JPL.
You know, I would actually, I would love to talk to the guy and then find out, really, who did you talk to?
Because that's what so much happens, what I see with kind of like the conspiracy theory stuff.
Some guy comes up and he says something, and I'm like, wait a minute.
Okay, sit down with a bunch of experts.
Well, do you know the founder of JPL was best friends with the guy who created this company, or not this company, this religion, Scientology?
Yeah.
L. Ron Hubbard, one of the most prolific science fiction writers, shitty science fiction.
Yeah, what's that?
History of the universe.
So that's what I mean, you know, like JPL, like a lot of this stuff, you know.
So, what I want to really, the reason, you know, that I'm, the work I'm doing right now is to really push the idea that there's like science, there's established science, you know, and established, I want people to understand like what established science means.
Cause it's easy for it to become like, oh, establish the establishment authorities, you know, but that's not what it is.
Science is this beautiful, Process that we've learned over centuries to not fool ourselves.
That's really what it's about, to not fool ourselves.
And the way in which science collectively, because science is just a bunch of human, fallible human beings, the way we've established how to do that is through painstaking work.
And so when I talk about established science, what I mean is the work that the community of researchers, thousands of people working together for endless, endless hours, what that community, Has figured out, you know?
Whereas, like, the stuff that's supposedly on the side or the fringe science and everything, you know, there's a reason why it's called fringe science is because it's actually, you know, you can't build anything with it.
You're not going to build a, you know, you're not going to build a space shuttle with it.
You're not going to build a cell phone with it.
Right.
Because it requires this.
And it's so beautiful that the message I really have for people is like, you don't need fringe science to freak out about how beautiful the world is, right?
You know, have somebody on who can explain photosynthesis to you.
It's crazy what nature developed about, you know, and then you can go outside and every leaf that you see is a miracle, you know, and then suddenly the whole world becomes this like luminous, transparent, extraordinary event, and that's what real science is about, and it requires endless work, endless transparency, right?
That you know, the stuff we know, we know it because it's been thousands of people not working in the dark for some military thing, but working to you know, transparently together.
That's over how.
Over 400 years, we've built an understanding of gravity as a four dimensional space time.
How we built an understanding of quantum mechanics with all of its weirdness, which leads to, you know, miracle devices like this.
So, you know, I am an evangelist of science in many ways.
And, but the science I'm talking about is the stuff that, like, you know, you got to put the 10,000 hours into with you and all your buddies transparently.
You know, that's what we know.
And that's the beauty.
The other stuff is just, it's kind of high, you know, it's entertaining, but it's not true, you know?
Yeah.
I mean, I think there's like when you say what real science, I think there's like this weird dichotomy between like fringe and academic, right?
Where there's like some people who are on the academic side, they don't want to touch the fringe stuff.
It's like you're on this weird cult, right?
And then you have those people who like the crazy cultist people are like anti everything that's like academic or mainstream science.
You know, like the reality is like there's you can embrace all of it, right?
And if you're rational, if you're a rational, reasonable human being, you can, you know, figure out.
You know, where to take stuff and where to leave stuff behind and kind of like see the forest through the trees and have like a moderate kind of like 30,000 foot view of that.
I do that because, you know, what science, the most amazing thing about science, right?
It was this slow, and I've, you know, written about this in a few different times because like one, and through my writing, I ended up kind of as a historian of science.
And it's really fascinating to watch how going from the 1400s to the 1600s, how this process, like human beings were always scientists in a way, like every Hunter gatherer knows stuff about the world through empirical, like, I poke this.
Oh, I ate that plant.
I got sick.
I ate that plant.
I got better.
I got high.
Yeah, exactly.
And that plant, that was awesome.
But, you know, in the, what happened in the 1600s was this codification of the scientific process, which really, what science really is, is a way to have a dialogue with nature that, you know, you push nature and it pushes back.
And then you, you know, you learn how to do this and it requires a whole community.
You can't just be like, One dude.
It is like you, for every Einstein, there's 10,000 other men and women in laboratories, you know, doing the slow, steady, painful work that builds you up to it.
So, and one of the things we learned over those four centuries was how to carry out experiments, again, transparently, so that you would not be fooled.
You would not, because that's what science is about.
We, human beings, are kind of like designed to fool ourselves, you know?
And in many ways, it made evolutionary sense, right?
If there's, you know, is that a tiger in the, you know, the bushes or is that just the bushes?
Even memory, too, right?
Like we only take forward in memory.
Like our memories can be skewed very quickly from things that happen, like, because our brain is designed to take away the stuff that's useful for us to get through the day in the future.
Right.
It's filtering, right?
It's always filtering.
So, you know, the whole thing about science was trying to find this public knowledge.
It's got to be public knowledge.
That's the important thing about science.
Because, you know, there's public knowledge and there's private knowledge.
You know, I love my wife.
Can I prove to you that I love my wife?
No, right?
There's, you know, and there's all kinds of things.
Can you prove love is real?
How do you measure love?
Exactly, exactly.
And that's why, you know, I'm a Zen Buddhist.
Like, I, you know, I have a spiritual practice.
I don't think, like, science is definitely, I don't think science is amenable to the things that, you know, you gain in spiritual practice.
So, but science is about public knowledge.
Right.
So those things that can be investigated publicly, which is this method.
And so that's the problem with the fringe science is that often it's like there's no way to investigate it publicly, or it has been, and it doesn't work out, and people still hold on to it no matter what.
You know, there's a, I see this with the UFO and UAP stuff, right?
So I am all for public, transparent investigations of UFO and UAPs, right?
I don't think, I don't think, I have never seen any evidence that even comes close to the standards that I'm going to be held to if I say I've discovered, you know, Alien life on another planet.
I'm going to be held to very high standards.
I've never seen anything from UFOs and UFPs that lives up to that.
But okay, let's go do the work to, you know.
But, you know, so you need that level of accuracy, that level of acuity, that level of rigor, that level for it to be scientific knowledge.
If not, it's just, you know, it's opinion.
That's where I was going.
I got lost.
With the UAP stuff, there's people who like, no amount of evidence, no amount of contra evidence.
Will ever convince them that UFOs are not aliens.
Like, because it's a faith, it's a belief, you know?
Which, if that's what it is, okay, dude, that's what it is.
Like, you know, that's fine.
But don't make, you know, don't say it's scientific because science is about I'm going to make a claim, right?
And here's how I'm going to validate that claim.
And like I said, not all claims are amenable to science.
I love my wife.
That is not amenable to science, right?
You know?
I have a profound sense of connectedness with the world, you know, when I do contemplative practice.
That's not really amenable to science.
You can hook my brain up and everything and watch the EK, but that's, you know.
But when it comes to like things like anti gravity, That falls into the science part.
And there's no, there is nothing.
I can say this as somebody who knows Einstein's theory of gravity, studies the universe, cosmology, and everything.
There is no valid theory of anti gravity.
No one talks about it, but we all know it exists.
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Secrets of the Age of Disclosure00:06:54
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Now back to the show.
Have you seen that recent documentary that came out?
It was called Age of Disclosure.
Yeah, I've seen some of it.
So they got like all of the highest level military generals, people in Congress, whistleblowers from government agencies, different parts of the military to all come out and talk about this real thing that's going on and people going in these skiffs, these secret compartmented.
Uh, I don't know what you call them, they're rooms that like nothing can be recorded in, and explaining what they've been exposed to and like reverse engineered craft that they can't explain.
Um, and so if you have all these people that are running this country and in charge of us saying this is real, what do you make of that?
Yeah, so this has always been this way, like going back to this.
So, one of the things for my last book, The Little Book of Aliens, you know, I did my research on the history of UFOs, and you can find those claims.
Going all the way back to like, I think it was 1955.
The first study, the first Air Force study of UFOs, the first wave of UFO sightings happens in 1947, right?
And then by the early 50s, so what?
It was Roswell.
No, no, no.
Roswell came later.
Roswell actually.
He was 47.
Roswell was 47, but it was months after the first wave.
The first wave was, I've forgotten the guy's name now, where he was flying over the, it was a pilot flying Corso?
In Washington State.
No, it wasn't Corso.
Oh, yes.
I know what you're talking about.
This was, yeah, yeah, yeah.
And he saw like nine things.
So it's actually, that's an interesting.
Story in itself because it also tells you a lot about the psychology of things.
But let's, before I go there, let's sometimes it's hard to stay on top of it, right?
Like, oh, we're over there, now we're over there.
But so, the first, or one of the first Air Force studies, I think it was first called Project Saucer, and they're like, maybe we shouldn't call it that.
And then they changed the name to Project Sign.
And the guy who was the head of it, Grudge.
Grudge, I think even came later.
Oh, wait, no, you're right, Grudge.
I thought that was a weird thing too.
Like, who comes up with these names?
Project Grudge.
But the guy who, the Air Force major who was in charge of it, he retires, and then he writes a book, first one of these books, claiming this secret government report that said, and this was interesting, right?
Said it was interplanetary, right?
Because in those days, nobody really, we didn't really know much about it.
So, oh, yeah, it's interplanetary.
Now, nobody would claim interplanetary because we know the solar system is empty, right?
There's no planets in the solar system that can harbor life other than Earth.
But anyway, the important thing is he claimed there was, I think it was called the report of the situation or something.
That was the name of this secret report.
Nobody's ever found it.
Nobody's ever found it, right?
People have tried, people, you know, the black vault people never found.
And that has been sort of the story for every guy.
Like, you know, that agent disclosure thing kind of pisses me off, right?
Really?
Yeah, because, you know, you get people standing up making claims, but they never show anything.
It's like, oh, I, you know, I know a guy who knows a guy who knows a guy who saw something.
You know, it's like, okay, show me the saucer.
Can't do that, you know?
And so this has been, so you look at like Sean Kirkpatrick, who was the head of the AA, right?
He, you know, from his perspective, it's been this mutual circularity because for every of, of, um, kind of a, you know, a circular conversation going back to the 50s, there were two kinds of people in the military the ones who thought the UFO thing was aliens and the ones who thought the UFO thing was ridiculous, right?
And there has always been those two groups for every, like with the age of disclosure, that's a problem with these kinds of documentaries.
They didn't show the armies of army guys and the armies of, of, um, intelligence people who were like, no, this is crap.
So, Because there's no actual data.
It's always guys who claim they saw something, or most of all, they don't claim they saw it.
They claim they know somebody who says they know somebody who saw it.
And at what point, as a scientist, I'm like, come on, man, show me the saucer.
You know what I mean?
Like, without the saucer, show me a piece of metal that you can distribute to every lab in the country and we'll analyze it.
It's never that.
And we're going now into like the fourth year of these congressional hearings, and we still don't have any actual evidence.
It's just people talking.
And like, can I stand up at a congressional hearing saying, hey, you know, I've got a theory of quantum gravity, which is like that's the most important thing in physics to have a theory of quantum gravity, but I can't show it to you.
You know, should everybody say, like, hey, Adam Frank invited the theory of gravity?
Right.
Right.
It's like, no, I didn't because I can't show it to you.
So I am not impressed.
I mean, I'm all for the disclosure.
Let's, if it's true, more hearings.
Let's actually get to the bottom of it.
I'm all for it.
But everything I see and the way it gets hyped, it's frustrating for me.
It's very frustrating.
It's very frustrating for me because I believe that.
This stuff's real, but all the public evidence is it's not, it's compelling depending on how generous you want to be to yourself.
But you're right, in an objective scientific setting, you can't definitively say that any of those videos or any of that testimony proves shit.
Right, right.
Which frustrates me.
It's like, so you're right, your belief, I mean, because like I said, I know lots of people who are really interested in UFO and UAPs like you, who like, yeah, want evidence, like would like to know what's going on.
And I think that's totally cool, right?
But the right, you can't make the mistake from going to there be saying, like, there's already proof.
Right.
You know, there's interesting things that are happening.
I believe there is proof.
I don't believe anything we've seen publicly is proof.
Right.
I think it exists.
And, you know, I also think, like, it's hard for me to discredit people that are like some of these ex Air Force guys that were in charge of running nuclear bases.
You know, these guys are like top of the top of the top when it comes to being psychologically sound individuals, right?
They get tested for this all the time because their job is to protect the.
The button that launches the news, right?
You'd like them to be kind of stable.
That would be a good idea.
These are the same guys that are saying they're seeing this stuff.
And there's just too many cases that, and then also like the fighter pilots, like the Tic Tac pilots, you know.
But you know, the Tic Tac pilots.
But that stuff got taken away.
Like those Tic Tac pilots, they say what they saw and there's no photos of it.
The radar got confiscated by people right after it happened.
So there's no photos.
So they say.
We just have these guys saying this, right?
Right.
And that's like, so I've done an interview with them.
I think that stuff could have been like, Secret military stuff that we've been testing.
Testing the Greatest Minds00:09:59
I don't know.
Or pure state.
So, but let me just step back a little bit on this because I want people to understand like, look, you know, my job, one of my jobs as a scientist, you know, because of that grant is to think about, you know, alien intelligence, other intelligences.
So, man, yeah.
And do I want them to exist?
Yes.
Do I hope that we find them when I'm around?
Yes.
Is it possible that UFOs are?
It's possible.
I'm going to be hyper skeptical about it because, in general, any, you know, this is the famous Carl Sagan quote.
So let me tell you an interesting story that's sort of related to that thing.
I once talked to Adam Reese, who is the guy, he's a cosmologist and astronomer, and he was the guy who discovered that the universe, found the data that the universe was accelerating, right?
After the Big Bang, we know that the universe is expanding.
Every galaxy is expanding away from every other galaxy.
So, like, you know, early on in the universe, the universe was set in motion, expanding.
Absolute data from this.
But what he found, what we always thought was that, okay, you get the Big Bang, everything starts expanding, but the expansion should actually slow down because you got all these galaxies, all this matter pulling on all the other matter.
So things should be, if you could look long enough, you could look far enough back and get a good timeline, everything should be slowly slowing down.
Adam Reese is a graduate student, he's 27 years old, and they finally have the data to look really far back in time and do these measurements.
And what he finds is it's accelerating.
It's not decelerating.
It's not slowing down.
It's accelerating.
It's accelerating, right?
This is like 1997.
And so he's just like a 27 year old dude sitting.
He's up at the mountain, sitting on this data, right?
That is absolutely a Nobel Prize, like without doubt a Nobel Prize.
And I said to him, I said, How did you feel when you realized what you had?
He said, And this is like really important.
He said, I was terrified because he knew that he was going to have to take these results.
This was all his work.
Planned the observations.
He had taken the observations.
He had done all the mathematical details to analyze the observations.
You know, like it's hard to like turn what you get from the telescope into like, oh, the universe is accelerating.
Yeah.
And he knew that he was going to have to sit in front of the smartest guys in the world and women and get grilled.
Like they were going to, like these people who know, like they know their work down to the, you know, that final, you know, it's like going into a ring.
Sure.
You know, you're a young boxer and you're going into a ring with five world heavyweight champions, you know?
And so he was terrified.
He's like, did I make a mistake?
And so he had an extraordinary.
Claim and he needed to have extraordinary evidence, and he was going to have to the gauntlet of fire he was going to have to run through.
So, I'm bringing that up to say, like, if you have an extraordinary claim, UFOs are aliens, right?
You need, first of all, you need evidence of the highest quality, right?
Just like if I and my colleagues said, Oh my God, we found, you know, we're looking at telescope images of, you know, Kepler 34b, some planet, and we're like, Oh my God, there's city lights there, right?
To have my, you know, I'm going to get a new one ripped.
All my colleagues, even my friends, are going to come after me with knives as they should.
Because if this thing is true, then it is, you know, it'll change the world, right?
So the problem with like a lot of the UFO data, as you said, is that it's just not up to the standards.
You can't make a claim like we are being visited by, you know, alien advanced technology with a bunch of fuzzy blob pictures or personal testimony.
Because as you said, personal testimony is the worst form of evidence.
There's just nothing you can do with it, right?
I mean, so I've talked with some of the pilots and they're great guys.
And a lot of times they're just saying, like, hey, could you know, can you talk to some of the guys that saw the TikTok stuff, like Fravor or Graves?
Yeah, Graves.
I was on Graves' podcast.
Great guy, you know, and he just is like, this is what I saw, you know, or this is what I remember I saw because you were talking about memory, you know?
So, like, and there's been all kinds of studies that show, especially when you get excited, something's happening, that your memory, you know, you just will not.
So, there's that famous study of like they did, they had a bunch of people throwing balls around in a room, right?
And they had a bunch of observers, including trained observers, cops, and everything to watch.
What's going on and report what's happening, right?
And while these people are throwing, so it's kind of a complicated thing.
People are throwing a white wall.
There's some people in brown shirts, some people in white shirts.
Nobody reported the guy in the monkey suit who walked through.
They did this again and again.
People just missed the guy in the monkey suit who walked slowly through the room.
So it just points to the fact that personal testimony.
I'm sure people, these pilots are absolutely being honest.
It is great that they can report, remove the stigma, remove the stigma, because that's what's going to help us figure, people should be able to.
Say what they saw.
But it's just, it's not evidence of the kind that you can, you know, it's just not evidence.
Like from a scientific point of view, personal testimony is not rigorous evidence.
So, that, like you said, what you're saying is like, yeah, you believe it to be true, which is cool.
Like, I can have my beliefs, you can have your beliefs.
But the whole point of science is to not fool ourselves, not let our beliefs get in the way of what we can actually show to be true.
Again, public knowledge, right?
Because, you know, you may feel that, like, yeah, we've been visited for a long time.
I may be like, no, there's life out there, but I don't think we've been visited.
So, two different beliefs, right?
Two different stories.
But the only way the public knowledge part has to be through this rigorous process.
Brutal.
That's why I always want people to understand this brutal process of science.
Scientists are mean to each other.
Like, we really are.
Our lifeblood is tearing each other shreds.
That's why the idea, like, you know, with academic science is this thing.
And I wouldn't, it's more than academic because there's the academy, universities, but there's also all the research labs and the, you know, there's even the industrial labs.
Science is this global, you know, diversified thing.
Well, the problem with the fringe, there's this blurry line between real science.
And the fringe, because where it starts to get blurred is with shit like when you're dealing with the United States government and the federal government.
And when, like, go back to Operation Paperclip, that's the only reason we went to the fucking moon is because we went and got a bunch of Nazis and brought them over here and got them to build nukes.
Yeah.
And then we got the Saturn V, yeah.
Then got to the moon and all that stuff.
So, and that was hidden forever.
Yeah.
And only until it was declassified did we learn that, oh, there was also MKUltra.
We did mind control shit that was also using top scientists and chemists and Nazis.
Yeah.
So, like, Like when you want to talk about like fringe and real science, there is a very big overlap with this stuff.
Well, that's why, right?
So the government, but that's the you know, I mean, so my feeling about like the government stuff, the government stuff gets really interesting on the one hand.
And people like to use that excuse too of like, well, the reason we don't have any evidence for UFOs is because the government fucking whacks all those things.
Exactly.
And then it becomes this like circular.
Well, I'm sure it's true in some cases, but it's not always true, right?
Right.
So that, that, and you know, I mean, that's why I'm all in favor of like, sure, let's do the investigations to have the, the, that's all I can say is like disclosure.
Right.
Open that up.
Absolutely.
But in general, until I see it, I'm not going to use it.
You know, I just simply can't.
If somebody says the government's hiding it, I'm like, look, man, call me when it isn't because there's nothing I can do about that.
And also when it really pushes on, like, the idea that we have anti gravity.
Like, we've done a lot of experiments about gravity.
You know what I mean?
Like, we really understand gravity and we understand what we don't understand, too.
So the idea that, like, the military could have done anything like that would undermine, you know, or somehow live over here on the side of what we do understand gravity, there's just, I just, I reject that out of hand.
Like, not even out of hand.
I reject it because of my 30 years of study and talking to truly the greatest mind.
Because the greatest minds don't go into the government.
You know what I mean?
For lots of reasons.
You got really good scientists there, but certainly the greatest minds in the world do not work for black project government.
Like, why would you?
I mean, you're a scientist.
You want to understand the fundamental nature of reality.
You're going to go talk to the people who are doing that.
And you're not going to sequester yourself alone in this thing with all of these rules and you can't decide.
What about people like Enrico Fermi or even Von Braun or John von Neumann?
Those people, those are some of the top minds.
Yeah, and all their work is transparent and out there.
And they're working for the government.
They worked for the government and then they stopped.
But they also continued to work for, they continued to publish academically.
I love John von Neumann, by the way.
People should know more about John von Neumann.
I read his papers all the time.
He came up with the calculation for the perfect altitude to detonate the nukes over Japan to kill the most people.
Yeah, that may be.
I don't know that history.
But yeah, sure.
I mean, all these guys worked for, but I mean, sure, but they built a nuclear bomb.
Yeah.
You know, all those guys at Los Alamos.
Not only that, they were fucking testing them forever afterward.
Like they were testing them, blowing holes in the atmosphere with nukes.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So, but that was.
Talking about climate change.
No, it's true.
I mean, listen, those years, you know, after the Second World War produced an interaction between science and the government, there was kind of like a rotating door, right?
So, John von Neumann, you know, all those, like the Manhattan Project, you got, you know, that's why that movie Oppenheimer is so great, right?
So, that history is very well known that all these great scientists came in.
But then they left.
They all left and went back to their lives as scientists.
The greatest minds in science did not stay in black boxes because there's no, if you're a scientist, that is like, why would you do that?
You want to talk with other scientists.
You want to talk with this little group of, and all, the best minds, the ones who win Nobel Prizes, the ones who are really pushing the frontiers, they're all over the place.
And you have to have the circulation of ideas.
Circulating Ideas Among Scientists00:02:33
That's why people have this, it's really important to get over the Einstein.
The Einstein bias, like one lone genius who opens up the frontier that nobody else can see.
In general, that's not what happens.
And in fact, even Einstein required all, you know, there's a whole string of scientists, Mach and Poincare.
Like Einstein stood on the shoulders of, you know, Newton said, I did what I did because I stood on the shoulders of giants.
Same thing for Einstein.
Einstein couldn't do it alone.
He actually needed Riemann and all these other people, Hermann Weil.
So, this idea that you could have like a small group of scientists in some dark government lab.
Devise a theory that is, you know, light years ahead of what anybody else on the planet is thinking.
It's just, that's not how science works.
That is just, you know, you have to have the interaction, the kind of large scale interaction for ideas to mature, for ideas to germinate and then, you know, mature.
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Evolution and Alien Toddlers00:06:50
I recently had a NASA physicist.
He was contracted by NASA and he was a physicist who is now working on a project to search for UFOs and stuff in our atmosphere.
And he.
Is, and I think I would agree with him under the belief like, if these things are something that's real, it's most likely that they're, this is their home.
They didn't come from some exoplanet or something like this.
And there's, there's a, that's kind of like a growing school of thought that, you know, anthropologists believe that if super intelligent life evolved somewhere else.
So let's say, like, I had one guy explain to me, out of all the catalog species of animals on planet Earth, there's like 2 million, over 2 million.
And 20 of them are hominids.
And one of the 20 are the ones that could figure out technology to escape the planet.
So we're like 0.001% of living species on this earth that's teeming with life.
So, of all the other planets that we know that are in Goldilocks zones that are able to have life, a lot of them are water worlds.
A lot of them have way different temperatures, different chemicals in the water, whatever it is.
Maybe some of them experience more cosmic impacts.
But what this anthropologist was explaining to me was that, The chances of them evolving to be bipedal hominids that walk upright with their eyes sitting directly below their brains and all that stuff is like almost zero.
Yeah.
I am in full agreement with him on that.
Because, you know, so that's a really interesting idea.
So there's all this stuff about the grays.
Exactly.
Exactly.
Like, oh, the grays.
And, you know, they look like little people with slightly misshapen.
I mean, that is not the way evolution works.
So the cool thing about evolution, I talked about this in the book because, you know, I had to go, I'm not, I'm a I'm an astrobiologist, but more on the astro side.
So I've had to learn a lot about evolution.
There's two forces in evolution.
There is, and they're interesting because they play off each other.
On the one hand, there is convergence, right?
That, you know, evolution presents, you know, life or the, you know, a planet will present evolving life forms with a bunch of problems, right?
If you have solid land and then gas, like, you know, air, that you got to figure out how to go get food, right?
So, you know, how are you going to do that?
Well, wheels.
You know, or legs, jointed sticks, right?
So, you know, and if the air is thick enough, you could fly.
So, wings, right?
So, probably nature, evolution on another planet would come up with similar solutions like jointed sticks, i.e., legs.
But there's no.
Okay, so that's what we call convergence.
That, you know, evolution, there's only, because of physics and chemistry, certain solutions to the problems of go get food.
Okay.
So, that's convergence.
On the other side, though, is contingency, which is.
You know, random stuff like accidents basically.
And that is also a hugely powerful force in evolution.
So, say you're starting to evolve something that has, you know, jointed sticks the way our legs are, like the way our knees are, right?
With that, the way the knees work, right?
And then, you know, there's a drought and all the creatures that, you know, had that mutation that started with our kind of legs, they all wipe out, right?
When the other species or the next species comes up and solves the problem, there's, you know, there's no guarantee.
In fact, it's probably unlikely that you'll do the exact same solution.
You'll have jointed sticks, but maybe they'll be jointed in the other way, the way birds' legs are.
Or you'll have six joints, not, you know, or you'll end up with five.
They'll be jointed the other way.
That'd be freaky.
Goddamn.
Yeah, right.
With a dog's legs or something.
Yeah.
So, you know, and they've done experiments where they took, this is really cool.
They took a bunch of microbes, right?
And they, you know, microbes have very short time scales for evolution.
So they let them evolve for a while.
And then they, so they evolved certain characteristics.
Like, you know, they're bigger than the ones they started with.
You know, on average, the cells are bigger.
Right.
So then they took them and they took half of them and they froze them.
Right.
And just so that these things are not reproducing anymore, they let the other half go on evolving.
And then they took the frozen ones out and let them evolve again to watch do we get the same things?
These other ones that evolve, we now do it for like 20 years.
We see how this one group evolved.
Now we're going to take the ones that we froze and let them evolve.
Do we get the same things?
And the answer was no, because it's all about accidents.
Accidents really matter.
So the idea that you're going to get something with like a bipedal shoulders, arms, eyes that look like us, like, yeah, it's just, it's probably.
So if those things are real and if all those experiences that are like, if this is not just lore and myth, 100%, it's probably that those things are real.
From here, or maybe even us from a different timeline, like from the future.
Well, I would say that there's a breakaway civilization living under the ocean or something like that, that we don't see, or in Antarctica, you know?
Well, I would be highly skeptical of all those.
I would say in general, like my position would be like, they're not true.
Do you think it's possible, though, if we continue on our trajectory right now in humanity with technology and everything, that it is possible that we would look like that in 50,000 years?
I think in 50,000 years, I'd be skeptical.
Because the muscles would atrophy, you know, maybe our heads would get bigger, eyes, I don't know.
Yeah, but we got genetic.
Two things.
We've got genetic engineering.
So, you know, in 10,000 years, not even 10,000 years, in 1,000 years, we may be sexless space orbs.
Yeah.
You know what I mean?
As my daughter likes to say.
So he was sexless.
I doubt that in 100,000 years, I think in 100,000 years, we probably are going to look, you know, we may not even have arms or legs or anything anymore.
I mean, just because, you know, that's a long time.
And we have the ability to evolve ourselves to take over evolution.
Yeah.
This anthropologist was explaining to me this concept called pedomorphism, which is a term in evolution.
Where the future generations of, like, specifically in apes or chimpanzees, the fully grown adults look more like the offspring of the ancestors.
Oh, is that like with dogs?
That dogs look more like, like, dogs look more, dogs look like puppies.
Like, full grown dogs look like puppies.
So if you look at puppies of wolves.
If you look at, like, a newborn chimpanzee, It looks more like a human being than it does look like a full grown chimpanzee.
Their head slopes back, they kind of arch over, they grow these huge limbs, and they kind of like they're hunched.
But if you look at a baby chimpanzee, it sits straight up like this, and it doesn't have that jaw and that sloping forehead.
So the offspring look more like us, more evolved.
It's interesting.
I wonder if, like, I don't know.
Flattening Humanity with AI00:14:46
So it's hard for me to.
I'm not a.
Like, you see, so there's an adult and there's a baby, right?
So the baby looks more like.
It's future, yeah, what it's going to be in the future, right?
So, if you extrapolate this into the future now, you would say they say these grays look like they're the size of toddlers, you know, they kind of have bigger heads, they're shorter.
So, this was just something he was throwing at the wall, yeah.
No, I mean, you know, because again, I think the gray, I mean, you know, in general, I think the grays, you know, my whole thing with UFOs and UAPs is like there's just as a scientist and as a science fiction fan, I also like there's so much about it that I'm like, get out of here.
Like, for example, let's put this right, um.
UFOs, right?
They always like, you know, they're from a super advanced civilization.
They don't want us to know that we're here.
Okay, turn off the fucking lights, right?
It's like I saw lights in the sky.
Like, you know, the whole, unless you want to write a really complicated science fiction story, well, they don't want us to know, but they do want us to know.
In general, like these things, they're always trying to, they appear, they're trying to hide from us because they don't just sit around and be like, yo, what's up?
We're from outer space.
So they're trying to not be seen, but they suck at it, you know?
And I'm like, Come on.
Like, you gotta.
The problem with all the UFO stuff, it ends up being this highly elaborate science fiction story.
And my thing is, if it sounds like a science fiction story, it is a science fiction story.
So, my whole thing with what I call the high beam argument, which is like, look, if they really don't want to be discovered, turn off the lights.
You know?
Why do they have lights on their things if they don't want to be known?
Well, maybe they only want to use them when they don't care about being seen, right?
Because if you look at the big picture, they're pretty damn good at hiding.
There's only anecdotal stories of this worldwide.
But exactly.
So, if they're pretty good at hiding, they should be really good at hiding.
So, it just doesn't, I mean, like, totally good at hiding.
They have advanced technology that can travel either backwards in time or, you know, across time.
Because we really have to get to how interstellar distances, like interstellar distances, it is not, from my point of view, it is entirely possible that, you know, interstellar distances may really not be travelable in the, you know, in actually even in like an economic sense.
Right.
Right.
Because, you know, so you have time dilation and things like that.
Right.
Right.
And it's just, so like, you know, the nearest star to us is four light years away.
Right.
So that is like, I forget, tens of trillions of miles.
I may have that wrong.
Yeah, that's a long way.
But it's so long.
Okay.
So let's, so if we were to travel, if we were to be able to travel at the speed of light, it would take four years.
Four years.
And we're not even close.
The fastest thing we've ever produced would take like 100,000 years to get there.
And so the economics of being able to build, you know, so the best thing we can do now, I think, you know, we have a couple ideas about how to at least get ourselves to a tenth of the speed of light, in which case it's 40 years to get there.
40 years there, 40 years back, right?
With time dilation, which also means you start to disconnect from the people that you have to kiss your relatives goodbye, all your friends goodbye.
And also there's the, there's the, like, if, You're traveling that fast, time is going way faster on Earth.
That means technology could develop on Earth to where we could figure out faster travel.
Yeah, right.
So you arrive 50,000, 50 years into your trip.
Now these guys pull up with a belly full of breakfast because they just left this morning.
There's a great, let's just do a little sidebar, sidebar.
Because we were talking about video games before.
So there's a video game coming called Exodus, which takes, and it's just, and now there's a novel that's associated.
Everybody's really excited about this video game.
It's the Mass Effect.
It's supposed to be the spiritual successor to Mass Effect.
Great space video game.
But there's also, they hired Peter Hamilton, who's a good science fiction novelist, to sort of fill out the lore.
So I'm sorry to go off on this thing, but it's just a great story because it's related to this.
So the idea is, you know, Earth's falling apart, usual thing.
And so they send out arc ships, right, in all directions.
And the idea is that anybody who finds a habitable world will send out the green signal, right?
So you get these ships and they're all traveling at like a tenth of the speed of light or half the speed of light.
And one of the ships finds a cluster of stars, you know, a Dense, what we call a globular cluster.
It's like 10,000 stars packed pretty close together.
Like there's only like the closest star is only one light year away.
And they discover a habitable world there, right?
So they send out the signal to everybody else, right?
And then they start, they settle, you know, there's lots of settleable worlds in this.
It's the Centauri cluster.
That's the name of it.
And they start evolving, they start developing technology.
And they end up rapidly over like, you know, 5,000 years, 10,000 years, become like gods.
They have developed this genetic engineering technology.
They're, you know, almost like gods.
Meanwhile, all of the other ships.
You know, have turned around and are heading back.
So, like, these it's such a great story.
These human beings, these regular human beings on their ships are arriving in the Centauri cluster to find it's full of like our, not ancestors, our progenitors, our what's the word for like, who are now, yeah, descendants, right?
Who are now like so radically evolved that we're like, we're monkeys to them, you know, or we're ants to them.
And it's a great story that sort of takes place.
It does two interesting things.
One, it uses the fact that a globular cluster of stars will be so close that.
One year.
It's just a one year travel time back and forth.
And so, if you can travel at close to the speed of light, you get time dilation, but it's not crazy.
So, you leave and you come back, and it's eight years later.
You know, it's only like a few months for you, but it's eight years later for the people you left.
And then, two, it just does this idea of like, yeah, descendants, our descendants will be so crazily different that they're not even recognizable anymore.
So, anyway, I just want to put in that.
I'm very excited about Exodus as a game.
And I think we're maybe a year away from it.
But then also, I recommend the Peter Hamilton novel.
Oh, interesting.
So, yeah.
Yeah, well, I'm sorry.
I just had to go off on that.
No, that's fascinating.
I'm more scared of the reality of Arc Raiders becoming reality.
That's right.
That's right.
We were talking about arc raiders before.
I'm sure we got some people in the audience.
That dystopian planet that's ruled by killer drones.
Yeah.
Which is like, you know, I mean, yeah, I'm AI.
What was the, you said you read a description online about what the plot was for that, the back plot for that?
Right, right.
What was that?
So the people who are playing it, right?
So, you know, if you haven't played, so here's the deal.
You're in this dystopian future, everybody's living underground.
Yeah.
The surface is like, you go up there and there's the remnants of human civilization, but there's also these like killer robots, you know, flying ones and, you know, jointed spiders.
Spiders.
Giant spiders.
Yeah.
And so you learn very, like, they'll give you a piece of the lore when you first start.
And it's the idea that there was, you know, there was an environmental catastrophe, you know, climate went crazy.
But then people sort of, you know, we don't even know how the time scales, you know, a thousand years later, people started to rebuild civilization.
So it was a period of the greening or whatever, I forgot what they called it.
And civilization started to come back.
And then suddenly these arcs arrived.
And the arcs is just the name they give to these from space, these, you know, killer drone robots.
And then there was the first wave where we actually won.
The human beings were actually, we won in the, you know, and then we started to repopulate the surface again.
And now the game takes place, the second wave of arcs, which are much smarter, has arrived.
And so it's, you know, we don't really, in the game so far, you don't really know what happened.
Where are these arcs coming from?
Right.
Who built the arcs?
Who built the arcs?
And in the story, it becomes clear because if you fight in some of the different landscapes, like one of the landscapes is a spaceport, you know, a sort of, you know, spaceport that's been abandoned for, you know, a thousand years.
And the idea is that the rich, Left.
The rich.
Like a breakaway.
You know, they just, they could leave, right?
The Elon Musk's of the world built their space stations or whatever.
You don't know where they went.
It's clear that.
Elon Musk and Bezos.
Yeah, build their space.
And they leave.
And it's not clear.
I'm not sure if this is going to be true, but like these arcs, maybe they want Earth back.
And so they're trying to clean out all the descendants.
Yeah.
So, or all the people left over.
So I don't know.
We'll see whether or not that's true.
But, you know, the AI is a real, AI is a danger.
Not in some of the ways that I think people, I'm not really worried about like super intelligence.
I don't think, I'm not even sure that's possible.
But, Just definitely having these technologies shoved down our throats, which I think are imperfect.
That's the problem.
They're amazing technologies, but they're not what they claim to be, which means if we build society around them, there's huge dangers in having it run the world economy or.
Yeah, it's most disheartening to me that this technology seems to be going towards things that are just built to distract us and built into just this consumerism, really.
I mean, really.
Right, right.
And again, like I said, the AI that we have now is what's called large language models.
The term is generative AI.
And what we have are these large language models.
And the way they are built is you have to take a huge amount of data from the internet.
You basically scrape the internet.
And it really is, on some level, I mean, I want to give it its due, but really it's autocomplete.
Of course.
But autocomplete on steroids, as they say.
So you type in a bunch of stuff and you ask it a question, and it seems to answer it.
There's nobody in there.
There's nobody in there.
The AI doesn't know anything.
It's just literally putting the words together.
It's putting the next word after the statistically that should follow from the word you just put in.
And because of that, because it doesn't know anything, there's no way to get rid of what they call hallucinations.
Right.
Which, really, a better word for that is errors.
It's just making shit up.
Yeah.
Right.
And there's no way to get rid of it.
And so, if you build these systems into the heart of like every, you're going to fire a thousand people to, you know, oh, we're going to replace it with AI, you're never going to get rid of these, you know, which means they're fundamentally untrustworthy.
Right.
They're fundamentally, you do not want to put them, they're fine to like, oh, you got to complete your homework, you know.
Right.
But, you know, you're going to put it in charge of deciding what you're, I don't know, your portfolio, your retirement portfolio, or you're going to put it in charge of anything physical.
So I feel like we're going to get these.
So much wealth, so much wealth inequality has been generated by big tech that these technologies are going to be shoved down our throats and we're going to be forced to use them and they are fundamentally flawed and they're going to like, they're just going to erode.
You already see what it's doing to democracy, right?
It's going to erode all the things that are necessary to have a coherent modern civilization where we're free, you know?
Right.
No, it's really weird how.
Especially how everything on social media is fake.
And it's really hard to distinguish what's real and what's fake anymore.
And you have to build up this bullshit detector, right?
Like, if anything you see now, you have to really question it and really do your homework to figure out if that's real or if that's fake because everything looks so real.
And the majority of shit on Instagram or X is fake.
Yeah.
And what's interesting is that, again, these technologies are amazing.
They are a triumph of human intellect.
I totally give them their due.
But they're.
They're not what they claim to be in terms of how they're getting deployed.
So, let me give you an example.
Like, again, myself, this is why I always keep the cell phone on.
Hopefully, it won't ring.
Hold on a second, everybody.
We're just going to turn it off in case I get a phone call from anybody.
Like, you can't really live without a cell phone anymore, right?
You can't do anything.
You can't get a taxi.
You can't do your banking.
You can't.
We have been, we live in a society where these technologies, like I said, were forced down our throats.
Now, I love my cell phone, it does great things, but I can't live in a modern society without one of these.
And that is what my fear is with the AI.
Because the AI, these are amazing technologies, but they're flawed for what they're, they're, they cannot do what they're claimed to be able to do.
So we're going to be stuck in this society where we can't get away from AI, you know, and what are they, what would you say they're claimed to be able to do?
They're claimed to be sort of like the idea of like, so for example, AI agents.
Everybody's like, oh, AI agents, we're going to be, you know, which can autonomously go off and, you know, you just say like, oh, you know, book me a, you know, a holiday in Italy.
Right.
And it's going to go off and do it by itself.
Assistance.
Yeah.
And then what will happen actually is you'll, you know, you'll find out that like two of the, you'll show up and there's no hotel.
Like it was, it hallucinated the hotel.
Yeah.
But even worse than that.
So I went to a lecture that fucking pissed me off and scared the shit out of me.
It was a lecture by a CEO of a company called, I think it was called Effecta.
And it was the idea of emotional computing.
Right.
And what this person, what this company wanted to do was have like your, you know, you're at your computer or you're watching TV and there's a little camera and the camera is watching your face and it's watching like, Are you smiling?
Are you grimacing?
Are you, you know, and it's supposedly reading your emotions and it's going to change what it does based on your emotions.
Oh, God.
And so, like, what, like, what, you know, she was pitching this as sort of like, oh, you know, you know, for old people who are left alone, there'll be a robot who can read it, you know.
And so, first of all, that whole thing, that first of all, we should ask ourselves, why do we are in a society where we're warehousing our old people and nobody goes to see them except the emotional robots?
So, there's that.
But even more important is this flawed assumption that, like, the muscle, the location of muscle G7 in your cheek.
Is happiness, right?
The equation, and people have shown that the research that this is based on is totally flawed.
Like that, you know, in general, it is people grimace for lots of reasons.
It may not be at all because they're in pain, they can grimace just because, you know, there's just lots of different reasons.
There's not a one to one correspondence between an emotion and the location of your muscles on your face.
And if you're from, you know, if you're from a different part of the world, you may have, you know, in Asia, they may have an entirely different set of facial expressions.
So, but what these technologies are already deployed.
They are abused like you're taking a job interview.
Like, there's some job interview things where, like, you're being recorded online and it's responding to your facial muscles.
So, again, this is the idea of these technologies being deployed.
They're being put out there.
Companies are buying them, building it into their structures, and they're fundamentally flawed in the claims of what they can do.
You cannot read emotions purely off facial muscles.
There's a thousand things.
I got to be often in the, you know, you've known with Zoom.
Zoom is a weird thing.
You can't really tell what people are doing.
I can't stand Zoom.
I can't stand Zoom.
I won't do podcasts with Zoom.
Right.
Right.
Because you're not really there with the person.
Yeah, you lose it.
You lose the connection.
Yeah, right.
There's a thousand, there's so many different cues, even to how we smell, right?
Yeah.
How emotion is read.
So that's an example of what I mean.
We're being sold a bill of goods about what these technologies can do.
It's going to make those guys money who are already so rich that they're a threat to democracy, a threat to having a harmonious society.
And it's just going to make them more money.
And it's going to make.
Our it's going to flatten us like they're claiming their technology can reproduce consciousness or reproduce, but it can't.
Building a Lower Version of Society00:14:08
And so, what they're going to do is they're going to build a version of society that we have to drop to its level, right?
It's as if, like with self driving cars, you know, there's a problem with self driving cars where, like, you know, they work best when you just have a grid of streets, you know.
Um, so it's like you can only have self driving cars work if, like, all it knows how to do is 90 degree right hand turns and left hand turns.
So, we're going to flatten all our cities and rebuild them so it's nothing, so the self driving cars can work.
Right?
Right.
As opposed to being like, well, this technology doesn't work, we're not going to use it.
Right?
And that's what it's going to do to the human interactions, the depth of what it means to be human.
It's going to level us out.
It's going to devolve us.
It's going to devolve us.
That's exactly right.
Well, I mean, you can already see that because people have to think less to complete easy tasks.
Yeah.
I see this with my students.
Really?
So, you know what's interesting?
But I think what's going to be interesting, so there's a couple things about this, like maybe the way the natural response is going to work.
So, one thing that's happening in colleges is people.
Professors are saying, like, oh, we're going to have a writing assignment.
I need you to write your response to Hamlet, right?
But we're doing it in class.
For the next 40 minutes, here, I'm handing out some of those blue notebooks.
You could give those, what are those bags you get in comedy clubs so you can't record the comedy?
Put your phone in the bag.
They had these bags that no radio signals can get out of it.
What are they called?
They're called Faraday cages.
Yeah, they're little Faraday cages.
Yeah, and so, like, okay, you're going to write this in front of me.
So that's like, you can imagine these sort of natural responses.
That people evolve to these technologies, right?
So, for example, the idea of AI slop.
I don't know if you've heard this term.
So, with AI, AI has been deployed now.
There's like 90% of all companies in the world, or at least in the United States, are using it and they're seeing zero productivity.
Like they're all using it, but nothing's changing.
And part of the reason is this idea of AI slop that AI makes it easy to produce a bunch of stuff, but it actually isn't useful, right?
Like, so, well, let's take the example of the internet first.
AI is trained on the internet.
You take these large language models and you have it look at everything on the internet and build all, yes, search everything and sort of build the databases that you need, build the connections, the relationships to everything you need, right?
But then you start, then now you have AI and now you start using AI to produce new content on the internet, right?
And it's full of bullshit.
It's full of stuff that's not true, right?
So then the next generation of AI trains itself on this version of the internet that was produced by AI.
So the next generation was trained on bullshit.
And so you just like, You know, it's AI slop.
Is that how it works?
Yeah, that's how it works.
They have the only thing they train.
That's why it's so expensive and so resource intensive to build these AIs, you've got to have it look at everything on the internet.
And so, as you go on, what's going to happen is that the internet.
There's so much garbage on the internet to start with.
To start with.
And now, imagine 10 years from now when all the AIs and the AI, you can't get away from the AIs.
Oh, my God.
So, you can't trust, you're not going to be able to trust anything on the internet.
In which case, what happens?
People stop using the internet.
Or use, you know, it's only good, you know, people are going to use it for scamming and, you know, God knows else.
But most people.
Yeah, but will it be able to.
Is there a.
How would you train it or how would it train itself over time to be able to get better at detecting bullshit or its own bullshit?
It can't.
That's the problem with this version.
I mean, there's other ways to do it.
You know, there's a great writer named or scientist named Gary Marcus who has a newsletter, which I highly recommend to everybody.
You know, and he's been.
It's so funny watching.
He has always been arguing that this kind of AI, generative AI, Which are the large language models.
It's great for what it's good for, but it is not the path to what we call artificial general intelligence.
It is very limited in what you can do.
And he said, you know, his thing is like there's other ways to build AI, at least research paths that would get away from this, but we're not pursuing them because, you know, Elon Musk and all those guys are spending trillions of dollars.
It's all going into these and open AI into the generative AI.
And that stuff, you know, so he was predicting back in 2020 that this, it'll stall.
Like that, you know, you will see by 2025, you know, you will see that.
Who is predicting this?
This guy named Gary Marcus.
Okay.
And it's funny because he was alone.
You see, like, his interactions with the big leaders of AI, you know, on the internet or on Twitter back in, you know, and they're all like, you're, you know, you're just a, you know, you're a has been, you know.
They were really very rude to him.
And now almost all of those guys, except for, yeah, there it is.
All of those guys, almost all the stocks are crashing and the AI stocks are all down.
Yeah.
Well, that's the other.
Let's not even talk about the financial stuff.
But he is basically, Gary Marcus's point was that scaling, those guys, like Sam Altman from OpenAI, was like, oh, we'll just make them bigger.
We'll just make them bigger and we'll get over the hallucinations.
And Gary Marcus was like, there's no way scaling will not do that.
So, 2022, 2023, everybody's like, scaling, scaling.
We'll just build bigger versions.
And then, you know, 2025, finally you get like Chat GPT 5.
Oh, Chat GPT 5 is going to be, you know, an artificial general intelligence, which is what everybody wants something that can just do anything, right?
And it turns out Chat GPT 5 was a huge disappointment.
It wasn't even close, it sucked, you know?
And that was the beginning where people were like, oh, Gary Marcus was right.
You know, and so overall, general people have now agreed with the point that scaling will not sell.
You can't make it bigger, it won't get rid of hallucinations.
So, you got to, you need a whole other path, like a research path that we haven't done.
If you want an AI that somehow and the reason that somehow won't have this problem, and a lot of it is the idea.
We're actually doing some work there are my research, you know, the group I'm part of, of just thinking about like what is it.
We're just thinking about life, we just want to know about why is life different, like why is a cell different from a rock, right?
You know.
There's no doubt.
You know, life is just really weird.
And this goes back to the astrobiology.
Life is the only system, physical system in the world that can innovate, that can create new things, either through evolution or just its own behavior.
A rock is just a rock.
And the only thing we know that is truly intelligent, that truly has intelligence, is life.
And that goes over whether you're talking about monkeys or all the way, even cells, even the simple cells have a certain degree.
So, what Gary Marcus is arguing for, and even what we're sort of interested in, just think about life, is to be intelligent, to really have that kind of.
Creative novelty, the ability to really innovate, the ability, intelligence is not just solving problems, it's knowing which problem to solve.
Right.
It's an infinite number of problems to solve.
If you're a cell, you get to figure, you know how to figure out, like, oh, I need to go find sugar.
Yes.
You know, that you need to live in a world.
You probably may even need to live in a body.
Like, you need to be embodied, but certainly you have to have knowledge of the world.
The AI that we have now, it doesn't know anything because there's nobody in there.
Like, you know, you can ask it a question, it seems like it's answering you, but It's just auto completing.
It's just a program that is auto completing.
So, you know, it may be that the next generation of AI, the one that could solve the problems that this version can't, is going to have to know something.
You have to build world models, they call them.
Right.
Yeah, that makes sense.
Cause, you know, there's so many goofy stories that are coming out every single day about like these autonomous drones that are supposed to be delivering people burritos, getting hit by trains or running over by cars.
And like, it's all over the news, dominating the news stories.
You know, you don't hear about the guy that overdosed, but you hear about the poor fucking robot delivering a burrito to somebody.
3 a.m.
Right.
It's just, and then also you have the another whole side of it is like you have, um, I had a, um, I had a Delta Force operator in here the other day and he was explaining to me how, like, in Yemen, uh, and all over the Middle East, like Iran has these drones that are powered by autonomous AI and they're dialed in, they're not controlled by anyone.
Yeah.
They just say, go kill this guy and those, it'll make its own decisions along the way.
Weapons.
Oh man, that is terrifying.
You know, that then you're getting to Terminator, you know, right.
Yeah.
So it's like, and these things are flawed.
You do not want these things.
So, whatever.
So, I just really think AI, the version of AI we have now is deeply flawed, and people have a right.
People have a right to say, no, you know, I don't want this technology, at least not now, you know?
Like, this is like, oh, everybody, we just have to, you know, it's new technology, so you have to take it.
No, human beings have a right to decide which kind of technology, especially because these technologies are going to wipe out jobs.
Like, that is really true.
You see people being fired already.
So, like, yeah, I don't think, you know, I think we need to recognize the reasons why there's this rapid push.
It's about money, it's about somebody making crap tons of money.
And if you want a functioning democracy where people have a say, you've got to be able to push back.
But where do you draw the line between an iPhone in your hand, which is basically a symbiosis of biology and technology, right?
It's not implanted in us.
Right, we can drop it, we can let it go wherever we want, whenever we want, but like it is an extension of the human being today, in a sense.
So, like, we're kind of cyborgs already, we are kind of cyborgs.
So, like, but where, but now with everything on our phones being integrated with AI, you can see how that can kind of get out of control, yeah.
But you can also see how there's like a balance there.
Like, you know, obviously, life is way better with this iPhone, we may be able to call somebody or send somebody a video, yeah.
That's what I mean.
I'm not like, I'm certainly not anti technology, um, but I think.
What's really interesting is how rapid these technologies have changed our lives.
So, you know, if you go back, so one of the first video games I played was Assassin's Creed, like the first Assassin's Creed, which took place in like 1200, right?
And, you know, you're running around, you're like stab, And then I played Assassin's Creed II, which takes place like 300 years later in, you know, Florence, right?
In Renaissance Florence.
And you're still basically like stab, You know, and so they kind of first had a gun.
Like that was, you know, that was like, you know, that was a weapon that, you know, you took a while to get.
And the thing that hit me was like 300 years.
And basically, I'm using the same, I could have been using the same sword that I had.
Right.
Like technology just didn't, you know, you used your grandfather's tools, right?
Because technology was just very slowly evolving.
And now, my God, like the time from, you know, I'm 63 years old, you know, let me tell you about what phones were like back in the day.
And now, you know, within three years, I'm not even going to be able to use this.
Right.
And there's a way in which this, there's a kind of instability that is coming from these that I think, you know, it may come naturally or it may need, you know, we may need to reevaluate how.
Fast we want technology to advance.
Like that, you know, that, you know, we're willing to like put certain things off for us to stabilize, you know, the effect of this technology on culture.
Right.
And I think that may come in time, maybe because like we actually hit a point where like it blows everything up and our descendants, you know, it'll be two generations later after the AI crash or whatever that wipes out all of the, right.
That people have a different sort of approach to technology.
Or people will just like what's happening in classes.
Like, right.
My professor friends who are like, you know what?
I'm going to make it right.
I'm going to have you actually think in class.
And also, everything is sort of like it's almost like all the new branches are just coming off of like the same original branch.
There's no like foundational like trunks coming out, right?
That's right.
Like, I don't remember anything as profoundly mind blowing as when the iPhone first came out.
Like, that just completely blew me out of the water that this thing existed.
I had a friend that got one right when it came out, and I was just like, Dude, can I touch it?
Can I hold it?
Can I, like, oh my God.
Like, there's been nothing like that since, you know?
I know.
And then it's just been everything's just been a spin off.
Right.
Or not only a spin off, but like something that works with that.
Right.
It integrates with it.
Right.
There's been no foundational gains.
Right.
You know, and like robotics, you could imagine, like, you know, when you get your first humanoid robot, you know, that could be.
But again, we don't have those technologies aren't, you know, you don't want the current version of AI to be powering your robot.
You know, there's just.
Yeah.
So, um, And you know, also, you think about like the way the tech companies, like, there's been a real problem for the democracies, for the, you know, the, the, all the democracies with what these things did.
You know, having the social media thing in your, you know, the, the, on your hand, you know, right in your hand, and then everybody can tap into it.
What?
Now the NSA can tap right into it.
Right, right, right.
Well, and the polarization where like, you know, the United States' enemies were purposely on left and right, purposely polarizing conversations.
Oh, yeah.
What's it on Twitter?
Half of these are Russian bots or whatever.
You name the country, they're in there.
Yeah, right.
So, there's again this sort of sense that like these technologies really spun us out of control in a lot of ways.
And I kind of feel, you know, I'm generally an optimist that we, it may take a couple of generations, we'll work it out.
But on the other hand, I think we have to exert some controls.
We have to exert, you know, we the people have to be able to say, like, you know what?
Because, you know, because again, these, these, you know how like you get these updates on your phone and it's like, oh, here's this new feature that, you know, and you're like, I don't want that feature, you know, like I really liked the other one.
No, this new thing now it can put it in six colors.
I don't want six colors.
So, you know, and that's all driven by the profit motive, right?
It's all driven like we got to keep pushing stuff out.
Like, you know, I'm going to, they, Apple wants me to have to buy a new phone in two years, even though this phone probably could work for a while.
Right.
Trajectories of Inequality00:04:25
So, you know, I can see that coming just because, you know, the systems, the social, economic, political, geophysical systems that we all grew up in are being pushed into a new state.
Right.
So the climate change thing, we're being pushed.
There will be, we are headed towards a different earth, you know, in the next 30, 40, 50, 100 years.
It'll be a different planet.
You know, not wildly different, but it's going to be a different planet.
And that, along with other things that are happening, we will be forced, humanity will be forced into some difficult times.
Like, that's my kind of thing.
The next century is probably going to be a difficult time for humanity.
But that'll force us, you know, that'll force us into new, you know, new configurations and maybe make new choices.
And, you know, and that sense, I like to remind people history's long, you know?
Yes.
So hold that thought.
I got to get pee real quick.
Go.
So, this idea of, Sort of the progress of civilizations and how they change with technology is what I'm really interested in because, you know, as an astrobiologist thinking about civilizations, it's that's the coolest thing about that job, right?
We have to really think seriously about trajectories.
What are the possible trajectories of civilization?
Which also brings you back to, you know, human civilization future.
Right.
So there's a book that I highly recommend, I think is so amazing, called Goliath's Curse.
It's by a guy who's kind of a futurologist.
And what he does in there is he sort of looks at the whole history of civilizations on Earth, right?
And a Goliath, what he calls a Goliath, is like the state, any kind of state, any kind of kingdom, any kind of large organized.
And what he shows is that throughout history, you know, and what's after the last ice age, we started farming.
And when we started farming, we started to have what he calls lootable resources, right?
Because, you know, we used to be hunter gatherers, we had small groups of, you know, maybe 100 people, and they all Talk to each other, all these different tribes, but it was very egalitarian.
Like nobody really owned anything because nobody really had anything to own, right?
And then once we started farming, there was like you were starting to gather stuff, right?
There were grain silos.
So for him, these Goliaths, these early Goliaths, these early states were basically because you had a bunch of guys.
He said it was basically gangs, like organized crime that started these states.
But then what he shows is all the way through history, then as time went on, you got these larger and larger.
Goliaths, Rome, Tang Dynasty, China, and now the modern one.
But he says that almost always what brings them down are two things.
One is climate, because often you're sucking up all the resources that either changes climate or changes the resources you have given the climate you have, or the climate, you have local climate changes.
But even more importantly, was inequality.
Almost always it's inequality that brings the Goliath down.
The inequality gets so large, you know.
The leaders, the kings, whatever, are so, you know, they're so over rich compared to the average person.
And of course, they're extracting that wealth from the average person via taxes or whatever that finally people are like, we're done.
And they rebel or they leave.
That's an interesting, either they leave, they just like, I'm done with the city.
I'm going to go live in the hills.
Or they actually rebel.
So that's a really interesting conclusion over all this time that it's often inequality, which is clearly we have like, it's insane the amount of inequality we have now.
That this small group of people own 90%.
The upper 0.1% owns whatever, 50% of the wealth in a nation or more.
So I thought that was really interesting that often you look at history and it's often inequality, which will sort of tap out how much, how much, whether people are willing to put up with being governed, you know?
Right.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It makes you wonder where we're going to end up here in this.
Yeah.
Cause I clearly, you know, we see this.
And that's actually the point was going back to the cell phone and AI and everything was just that these technologies are amazing, but they have really only very few people have benefited from financially.
You know, I mean, it's a small fraction of the world that has really financially benefited from them.
Especially when you get to things like robots, who owns the robots?
If the robots are putting everybody out of work, the only people who are really getting rich are the people who own the robots.
The Pro-Moon Argument00:15:26
Well, Steven's a big advocate for robot police.
He thinks robot police are going to solve all of our problems.
Or have robots being the policemen?
Yeah, he thinks robots should have full autonomy to kill people and make the decisions.
Oh, man, that seems like.
I think I've seen a lot of those science fiction movies.
Well, I mean, science fiction is meant for drama.
Reality, if you make it give it rules.
A robot police isn't going to get mad and shoot somebody.
Well, that's true.
Right.
There would be, yeah.
But my question is who's in control of the robot police?
Right.
Exactly.
And who, yeah.
And what, what, you know, because the, and what biases, because, you know, somebody programmed the robot police.
Someone's going to program the robot police.
Somebody's going to, you know, a human being isn't going to be behind that.
Right.
And you look at like the, you know, there's all this evidence, like really clear evidence of all the biases in these algorithms that were built in by the people, you know, can't recognize certain kinds of people, literally can't recognize their.
Faces.
Google.
Yeah.
Google is extremely biased.
There's been tons of research and placebo controlled double blind studies on it.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So, anyway, I think it's really interesting that, you know, sort of there's this, and this really matters for the search for intelligent life on other planets because, you know, we have to ask ourselves, like, you know, what are we looking for?
What kind of things will a civilization do that you could see using a super powerful telescope across 30 light years or 100 light years?
And so that requires kind of trying to build some maps of how technological civilizations evolve.
Yeah.
Well, didn't Elon say that if we were going to inhabit Mars, we would need to detonate nukes at the poles to create some sort of an atmosphere or something?
Well, what he wanted to do was melt.
That was to terraform it or something?
Well, with Aerie, what he wanted to do Elon Musk is on serious drugs when it comes to Mars.
Like the idea that we're going to build a city on Mars.
He's on lots of crazy drugs.
He's on lots of crazy drugs.
But when it comes to Mars in particular, his Mars stuff.
You know, I mean, I'm all for let's go to Mars.
Like, let's start with the moon.
How about that?
Yeah.
They just pushed back the Artemis mission again.
I know.
I know.
Boy, man, it's really, you know, we are definitely in serious danger that the Chinese will go back to the moon before we.
I mean, the moon landing deniers are having a heyday right now.
But let's not even get, don't, I'm going to take a deep breath now.
Don't get me started with the moon landing deniers because I will just, I will go freaking ballistic.
Oh, let's hear it.
I need to hear it.
Oh, it's just the, it is such bullshit.
Those, I want, I want those moon landing deniers.
I want one of them to.
Come and have the balls to stand in front of like a team of NASA scientists.
You know, not one guy on, you know, like doing some, you know, doing a podcast or some, no, a team and get grilled.
That's like I said.
Remember what I was talking about with Adam Reese?
You know, they'll be shredded.
They're like evidence for why.
It's, you know, it's all been refuted a thousand times.
It's just bullshit.
You know, I got rocks from the moon that have different isotopic, you know, the whole theory of our moon rocks land in Antarctica, South Pole.
And not enough for the kinds of volumes that we need to be.
Yeah.
Do what we've been able to do.
And also, you know, we went to the highlands, we went to the lowlands.
It's just, you know, this is not a road I want to go down because I will literally freak out.
I just had a guy on here recently who, he's got a great YouTube channel.
It's called Everyday Astronaut.
He's like, he's not a moon landing denier at all.
He's a very big proponent of all this stuff.
And he's like, extremely smart.
He's not a rocket scientist, but he's extremely smart when it comes to rocketry.
Yeah, he goes to all launches.
I think I've seen some of his stuff.
Yeah.
And I asked him, I'm like, can you steal man the moon landing deniers?
And he goes, yeah, I can actually.
He's like, a very good point that they have is why the fuck haven't we gone back to the moon since 69?
Right.
But that point is purely political.
That is purely freaking political.
You look at the history of what happened.
We get, you know, I get it.
It's like, I understand.
Like, here's where my take is on it.
My take is, real briefly, is that.
It was a stunt.
It was a stunt to see we could put human beings on the moon.
There's no real need to put humans out there.
When it's too much of a risk, we can do a better job with robots.
The reason we did it was because of the Cold War.
It was purely political.
It was just a publicity stunt.
Wow, that's amazing.
If we could beat Russia, it was a dick measuring conference.
It was a dick measuring conference.
To see if we could beat Russia to put a human being there.
There's no rational reason to put a human being there unless it's that.
No, no, it wasn't.
And then what happened was we got there.
The you know, it's the end of the Vietnam War.
Nixon's in trouble politically, blah blah blah, spending like shitloads of money on exactly sending people to the moon.
It just was no longer politically you couldn't do it, you couldn't get the votes in Congress to do it.
So then we shifted to you know the shuttle program, which was just Earth orbit, you know, and then time went on.
It's very expensive, right?
As you see, it's a very expensive thing.
That's why we didn't go back.
There has not been the political or financial will to go back.
And so now what happens is you know, you're trying to go back again, you got to.
Yeah, so now I'm also about to get ballistic on something else.
You know, with what just happened to the government right now, we just fired all the people who had the experience.
We either fired them or forced them into retirement.
All the people who had the experience to do this, right?
That's what Elon Musk did with that stupid Dodge thing.
I got friends in NASA.
Oh, Doge.
Doge, yeah.
Doge, doggy.
Basically, they whacked NASA.
All these guys were.
Did they really?
Oh, NASA.
A lot of retirements.
A lot of retirements.
They forced people into retirement.
You know, a lot of layoffs.
And these are the people like getting a probe to land on Mars.
Like, there's not a recipe for it.
You need human experience, you know.
I was talking to a friend of mine who was in the room with a bunch of NASA engineers.
It was for a Jupiter probe.
And like somebody threw out this idea of like, oh, you know, we could put this, we could do this and that to be able to, you know, build a magnetometer on it.
And one guy spoke in the back and said, no, we tried that in 72.
It doesn't work, you know.
Oh, yeah.
Oh, mid 2025, last year, nearly 4,000 NASA employees.
These are people who have the experience that you need, like the real world experience that's not in books that, you know.
And we wiped them out.
Why?
You know?
And so, you know, I mean, listen, there was, I would argue that, like, yeah, sort of what you've seen, the bloating of, you know, the reason Artemis is in trouble for a lot of reasons that have to do with the private sector.
You know, we were hoping that.
Isn't the Artemis, I don't know if you know about this stuff, but I heard that the Artemis rocket is using the space shuttle engines.
I'm not sure.
I don't know.
Can you Google that?
Well, it's got the solid rocket boosters on the side, but the main engines, you know, they were trying to rebuild at.
So, I'm not, yeah, I'm not skilled enough in that.
But, like, you know, the program, I mean, I'm all for it.
I'm all for going, we should have gone back to the moon, you know, 10 years ago.
But it does look like every president has said we were going to go back.
And there's never been the political will because it's so expensive, right?
It's really expensive.
And that was the great thing.
Like, I was all in favor and I still am in favor of commercial space.
Like, amazing things are happening with the commercialization of space.
Like, there's, I think we're now at like, I'm not going to get this number right, but it's on the order of like, Like $600 million?
Billion, sorry, billion.
The burgeoning space economy for all kinds of reasons.
Oh my God, somebody just showed us the other day.
There's a guy, a YouTuber.
Who is the guy?
So there's some guy selling selfies in space.
He's got a satellite in space, and you could pay an exorbitant amount of money and have the screen show your face, a selfie of you in outer space.
Like, why?
But there is, like, you know, there is.
That's a sign of declining.
So there are huge reasons for us, you know, there's lots of reasons where there's money to be made in space, which I think is great.
Isn't this the same guy who's creating those cool things for kids?
Oh, yeah, Crunch Labs.
Yeah, this guy, the Crunch Labs thing is actually really cool.
He's creating these things for kids where they can like solve puzzles and stuff.
Well, this is the thing like, there's a lot, you know, now it becomes thanks, you know, the good thing that Elon Musk did with SpaceX is the cost of, you know, getting a pound into space, a kilogram into space has just dropped.
And now there's lots of other space companies coming up Rocket Labs, I think it's Electron Rocket, Blue Origin.
Blue Origin.
So this is all great.
But in general, like, you know, SpaceX is not making the progress that we needed them to make with the Starship, right?
It's just not coming along as fast as they need to.
And getting back to the moon, that's a huge part of it.
Having the Starship work is a huge part.
They need to be doing all the stuff that Musk promised.
They have to refuel in Earth's atmosphere to get into.
No, in orbit.
In Earth's orbit.
In Earth's orbit to do the translunar injection.
Nobody's done that.
So it's not even clear whether they're kind of quite behind.
So I'm quite worried that.
One of the biggest things that the moon landing deniers say about, which again, I'm still on the fence, right?
I'm not definitively saying we're on the fence.
I would say I want to heartily, heartily, you know, from all the science that I use that depended on the.
Also, if you're a moon denier, what about the Martian probes?
What about like the landers?
Are those all fake too?
No, no, no.
I think we've landed probes.
I think for sure we've landed probes there.
I mean, it's not that much harder with humans.
It's not that much.
I don't know.
I think, here's my thing.
I think that.
Here's another argument I've been turned on to the pro moon side is that I was under the assumption or under the illusion that the Saturn V rocket didn't need to be refueled.
You have all of these people, like Elon and all these people, saying that to get to the moon, we have to refuel in Earth's orbit to do the translunar injection.
Saturn V did not need to refuel once.
Right.
But here's what I recently learned is that, which this is kind of stupid.
I didn't think about this, but all of the rockets that are being designed today are designed in the primary thing they're looking at is reusability.
Right.
The Saturn V was an expendable rocket.
Exactly.
We're not trying to do it with expendable rockets.
We just recently sent, like, the Artemis I went to the moon, right?
Didn't land on the moon, you know, and it didn't have any human beings in it, but it was the capsule.
Right.
It was just basically Artemis I. There was no.
They refueled in orbit?
No, no, no, no.
You didn't need to because it's a giant fucking rocket.
Did they bring it back?
Yeah.
They brought it back.
Well, no, no, they didn't.
No, I mean, you know, the whole, none of it was reusable.
None of it was intended to be reusable.
It was all expendable.
And that's why it was so expensive.
Right.
Right.
We only, you know, it would be too expensive to make this an expendable thing.
We have to be able to get these rockets to be reusable.
That's why we need to refuel them because they're so much bigger.
But, you know, there was no, the tech, when you watch, you know, a SpaceX Falcon come land and you see it do that crazy thing where it comes out and it just slows down.
It's insane.
It's insane.
And it's going, it's like, It's autonomously adjusting on the way down.
You couldn't do that in 1969, right?
Shit hasn't stopped.
You couldn't do that in 1995.
It's only because of the technology we have now that you can do that.
So everything that was built in those days.
Was built, you know, it was all one off, which was why it was so crazy expensive.
And one of the other reasons I can't definitively jump off the fence yet is just because, you know, we had that period in history the president got killed, got shot in the head.
We had MKUltra, the Vietnam War, Gulf of Tonkin, you name it.
And then right in the middle of all those fucking lies, we went to the moon.
The most extraordinary achievement of humanity.
But it was all, I mean, you know, the idea, it's just, it's a really crazy, because you know what, the moon landing.
Like, it didn't really.
So, you know, I grew up in the space age.
Yeah.
The moon landing, you know, denial was just like complete wackadoodle craziness.
I know.
It was the one conspiracy you were automatically painted as a fool for.
Like, you can believe it all the other way.
For good reason.
The new one, you're a fool.
For good reason.
I mean, it still is.
And it speaks to sort of what has happened.
You know, you cannot have a cohesive technological civilization if something as foundational as, you know, the experience.
Of the American space program is denied.
That door is where everything gets denied.
There's no shared reality.
And there's no way democracy can survive if you don't have a shared reality.
So there is just.
We don't have a shared reality.
This whole fucking world we live in right now.
Everyone's in a bad place.
And that's why you really ask.
Sometimes I think we're not going to make it.
We built a society that has.
That undermined itself, right?
And so, you know, I what I'm a proponent of most of all is American science, right?
American science has been a triumph, and American science is because it's what's given us our prosperity, it's what's given us our security.
And what has happened over the last 20 to 15 years with these conspiracy theories, and that's a big part of it, is the undermining of what makes American science possible.
And then you get what's happening with these cuts, and you know, because that's the cut, the ability, like for the you know, it used to be that like every politician understood, like, no, science is why you know, we have a strong defense.
And the rise of these conspiracy theories is what undermines the ability of politicians now to just cut NASA in half or whatever, do the damage that it's done.
And so, an interesting thing here's a very interesting factoid.
I think it was two weeks ago.
Every year, this international organization looks at how much knowledge is being produced, scientific papers, patents, et cetera.
And they look at the universities where, the top universities where this is being produced.
And it was always American universities.
This year, for the first time, I think the first two slots are Chinese universities.
So, you know, the thing is, like, you can have your conspiracy theories and, you know, woohoo, everybody's having a good time.
But there's a real world consequence of it.
Like, China does not have these conspiracy theories.
They're like running straight forward into it.
Well, they're under an iron fist over there.
Well, but they have put their money into science and technology.
Like, I don't want their society, but they have put their money into science and technology.
They might be a more optimal nation state, right?
But they don't have the freedom that we have here.
Do you know what's interesting?
But that freedom will erode if you, you know, if you're not the most The society that wins is the society that's, this is history that has, that leads in science and technology.
Yes.
That is the, and we are now taking, we're starting to step back.
So here's an interesting thing, right?
So in 1600, if you wanted to learn the cutting edge of science, you went to Italy, right?
Because that's where Galileo was.
That's where, you know, that's where all the leaders of science were in 1600.
In 1700, you didn't go to Italy.
It was, its time had passed like they didn't for whatever, the princes stopped investing in it, you know?
And then you went to, you went to England or you went to France, right?
In 1900, if you wanted to be at the cutting edge of science, you went to Germany.
Germany was where quantum mechanics was being born, electromagnetism, the frontiers were happening.
But by 1960, you didn't go to Germany.
You went to the United States, right?
So, scientific preeminence is not something you're guaranteed.
It's not like you get it and then you just get to keep it forever.
History of Scientific Centers00:06:55
And what is happening, and I really think this conspiracy thinking, like with the moon landing stuff, which to me, given all the knowledge that I know came from those that, the space program and the moon landing, I can't do.
The science I have of the solar system without what happened to the space program.
That conspiracy theory is actually undermining American science.
And there will be real world consequences.
If that kind of sort of like, oh, it's all a hoax, everybody's lying, if that really promulgates, then you can guarantee that by 2100, China's leading the world in science or Europe or other countries, India, they will take our place.
They're happy to take our place.
So there are real world consequences to this kind of thing that, like, this thing that everybody watched.
The moon landing, saying that, like, oh, that's no, no, you didn't really see that, it was a hoax.
So that's why I think, like, you know, we've got to be really careful about this.
There are, it's not just kind of a fun internet conversation, right?
Well, if they would go back, would you shut all those people up?
Just go back and get some footage, yeah, of what, of going, of people walking on the moon.
Well, you know what, it we're gonna, somebody will, and it may very well be a you know, the Chinese flag that you see.
Oh, no, they're China, China is like systematically marching forward.
And their space capacities are pretty amazing.
I was watching something a couple, maybe a year ago.
We brought this up on the podcast before, but it was the head of the former director of NASA being questioned about China exploring the dark side of the moon.
And this guy's response was, like, we'll let them do it.
We're not interested in exploring the dark side of the moon.
Do you see that?
You know, everybody, what I know is what everybody's interested in is the South Pole because that's where the water is.
Well, that's where they're going to land Argus.
That's the contested.
That's because so is the Chinese.
The Chinese are going for their.
As well.
You know, there's a movie, what is it?
I didn't like the movie very much.
I think it was called Ad Astra with.
Is that Brad Pitt?
Yeah, Brad Pitt.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
You know, I didn't really like the movie very much because I thought in the end it got kind of stupid, but it shows, it does a really nice job of showing what the moon might look like in 50 or 60 years.
And it's kind of a wild west, you know?
Like there's one point he's got to cross from one place to the other.
Gangs roaming around.
Or just like peer state adversaries.
Like they have to go from, they have to cross over things and they get attacked.
Right.
You know, it's going to, it could, you know, so.
I will bet you, I'll put the money down right now, that you will have your pictures within a decade.
But sadly, I cannot guarantee that it's going to be an American flag that you're going to see.
Also, how crazy is the moon?
I don't think we know.
No one I've ever talked to has ever explained any evidence of any other moons of other planets having the insane, miraculous distance from the Earth and the sun to where it's able to create this eclipse.
Oh, that is, yeah.
You know, that's temporary, by the way.
Yeah.
Well, it's moving away a little bit, right?
No, no.
It's been moving away for, you know, the day.
It used to be like, you know, if you were visited Earth like 2 billion years ago, the moon would have been like 10% bigger in the sky because it was much closer.
And so there's been this complicated gravitational interaction between the Earth and the moon over time that, you know, the moon was born much like you really can't explain Earth without the stuff we learned from landing on the moon.
You know, when actually getting the, you know, Visiting the different sites, the highlands and the lowlands.
Right.
So here's what, absolutely, there's something very weird about the moon, which is it's so big.
Like, there's no other planet in the solar system that has a moon that is as big compared to the planet, right?
So Jupiter's got lots of moons, and some of the moons are actually bigger than Earth's moons.
What is it?
Is a quarter the size of the Earth or something like that?
The moon, I think, is a diameter of 1,000 kilometers.
And Earth is.
Find the relative size.
Yeah, and Earth, I think it's 1,000 kilometers.
I think it's 1 sixth or so.
1 sixth.
But let's check.
I'm forgetting.
I know it's only like 0.2 the mass.
Yeah.
Which is wild.
The size and the mass difference.
Yeah.
But the thing is, all the other, like, you know, Jupiter's moons are like teeny tiny compared to the planets.
And a lot of them are potato shapes.
If you get big enough, you get round.
And anything that's.
Gravity does this.
If you're large enough, Sense.
The moon is roughly a quarter the size of Earth in diameter.
Okay.
And then what's the mass?
2% of the volume.
Yeah, volume, but you've got, because volume goes with radius cubed.
So what about the mass?
1% of the Earth.
It's the fifth largest moon in the solar system.
Yeah.
But it's the comparison.
So if you were to visit, if you were visiting from another solar system, you might think that the Earth and the moon were kind of binary planets.
You might not even sort of be like, oh, look, there's a planet with a satellite.
You might be like, oh, these are two planets that were.
Why is it such low volume compared to the size?
Did they find like, do they think there's like caves in there?
Like maybe it's like honeycomb on the bottom?
This is just R cubed.
It's not, no, so it's, it's, um.
Didn't they find caves in the hole?
Oh, there are caves, but it's not hollow or anything.
But let me tell you, like, not hollow.
I mean, just like maybe honeycomb.
Yeah, yeah, no, no.
It's mostly, it's going to mostly be solid because it's, you know, it's, it's like, it has a composition thanks to the moon rocks.
Yeah.
That is like Earth, but different enough, you know, we know, like our theories of how the moon formed was a big ass collision between the Earth and probably a Mars sized body very early on in the solar system.
Mm hmm.
So, but let's just, this is a really interesting thing about the moon is so large relative to the Earth that it has profoundly affected the Earth's evolution, right?
So, it slowed the day down, for example.
The day used to be much faster.
There used to be like.
Really?
Yeah, yeah.
There would have been like, what, 23 hours or 22 hours in a day?
We can bring that up to it.
Isn't the day on the moon two weeks?
It's a month, actually.
Oh, a month.
Well, this is what it is.
So, what has happened is there's what's called tidal locking.
So, you know, the Earth is, when they were both born, they were both spinning, and the moon's orbiting the Earth.
But then there's a gravitational interaction between the Earth and Moon that slowed the Earth's rotation, pushed, allowed, you know, at the same time, moved the Moon further out in its orbit, and then slowed the Moon's spin until the Moon always shows the same face towards Earth.
It's called tidally locked.
Right.
Like, it's not the dark side of the Moon, it's the far side of the Moon, right?
Exactly.
So it's not always dark.
It's not always dark, right?
But we can never see it.
We always see the same side.
So what's happening is, as the Moon is going around the Earth, it always shows the same side.
Which means it is spinning, but it's spinning at the same rate as it's orbiting, right?
So it's day and it's year.
It's all gravity.
It's all the theory of gravity, right?
You can work it out for the theory of gravity.
And that has had huge consequences.
Tides, the fact that we have tides, huge consequences for the evolution of life.
Because life may have been born in those tidal zones where the water washes up and you're underwater, and then the water washes down and you're out of water.
And that may have been hugely important for the evolution of life on Earth.
So the fact that we have.
A big moon, you know, may actually, is it?
Climate Over Hundreds of Millions Years00:15:11
Is it why we got intelligent life on the Earth?
You know, I don't know, but that's one of the things people, there's the rare Earth hypothesis, which is that, you know, Earth actually has some very unusual characteristics compared to other planets in our solar system and maybe other planets in the universe.
So, like, is that mean that it's rare, that, you know, life would be rare?
Two questions.
First one, what are the biggest differences that we have found with other Goldilocks planets?
And Earth.
Yeah.
Well, the thing is, we haven't been able to, you know, we just now are getting the ability, and we're still, even the James Webb Space Telescope, as powerful as it is, are just beginning to get the ability to actually look at them in detail.
Like, so the, you know, up until James Webb, the main thing was just finding them.
Like, oh, there's a planet in the habitable zone, right?
Because it's hard to find planets.
You can't see planets.
It's mainly the color of it, like the color, right, is a big thing.
Well, even that, we're still, we're just be able.
So here's what you want to do if you want to.
So, first of all, finding a planet, you never or rarely can ever see a planet directly.
You have to.
Look at the star and look at changes in the star to infer the existence of a planet.
So, for example, one thing, the main way we find planets is by what we call transits, which is like a little eclipse.
The planet's going around the star.
And if the orientation of its orbit is right, it goes in between us and the star.
And what you'll see is a little teeny tiny dip in starlight.
And so, it took decades to build the instruments that could see like a one in 1,000 dip in the starlight.
Now we've gotten really good at that.
So, we're very good at finding those dips in starlight and using those dips to infer.
How big is the planet?
How massive is the planet?
We actually need other things to get the mass.
But one of the amazing things you can do with this is when, if the planet has an atmosphere, like a little veil of gas around it, when it's passing in front of the star, when the planet is passing between us and the star, some of the starlight will pass through the atmosphere and get to us, right?
And when it does, the chemicals in the atmosphere will absorb some of the light.
There's a rainbow going from the star through the planet's atmosphere, and some of that rainbow will be sucked up.
By chemicals in the atmosphere.
It was called a spectra or absorption spectra.
And every chemical, every element, every molecule has a very distinctive way it absorbs light.
So it's like a chemical, it's a fingerprint, a spectral light fingerprint.
So we get that light with our telescope.
And if the telescope's big enough, it can collect enough light that we can then spread that light out and say, Oh, look, some of the light was taken out at this wavelength and then twice that wavelength.
That's carbon dioxide.
So you can be like, Holy crap, there's carbon dioxide in that atmosphere.
So we're just like, we can do that for big.
Planets like Jupiter sized planets, we're just at the hairy edge of being able to do that for Earth like planets.
Got it.
So, we don't really know yet what a Goldilocks planet is.
We're not there yet.
But the point of my book, you know, when I was writing it, was that what is so exciting is that in the next 10, 20, 30 years, we're building the next generation of telescopes.
That's what they're for.
You know, they are going to be able to collect that light and look for things like oxygen.
Like, if you find oxygen in a planet's atmosphere, That may be a fair, that may be a determinant that there's a biosphere there, right?
Because all the oxygen, this is a crazy idea.
If you were to land on Earth four billion years, three billion years ago, there was already life.
You know, there was, you would have found like bacteria, mats of bacteria.
But if you stepped out of your spaceship and took your helmet off, the first thing that would have happened is you would have died because there was no oxygen in the atmosphere.
There was nitrogen and there was some carbon dioxide and, you know, the other stuff, but there was no oxygen in the atmosphere, right?
And everybody take a deep breath.
Where's that oxygen come from?
It came from life.
Like somewhere about, Two and a half billion years ago, evolution, microbial evolution, figured out a new trick, which was how to do a kind of photosynthesis that used water.
But there was photosynthesis before that, but it had to use iron ions in the ocean.
And there's not a lot of iron ions in the ocean.
So life was kind of limited.
The food was limited.
And then about two and a half billion years ago, life figured out through evolution how to use water as the basis for photosynthesis, the chemical shenanigans.
That takes a photon, you know, a light ray, and clank, clank, clank, clank, you know, turn it into a sugar molecule that you can eat.
And that changed life forever for two reasons.
One, suddenly there's water everywhere, right?
So now suddenly there's all the food you could possibly for photosynthesis you could need.
You know, there's all this water that you can use to turn sunlight into sugar.
So life just explodes.
But the second thing was like what happens is life, you know, the microbes inside the microbes, they take the water molecule, H2O, they split it apart, they take the hydrogen, you know, which is a proton, they use that to build the sugar and the oxygen, they fart out.
They literally like, they, you know, so all this oxygen is getting just pumped back out into the oceans first and then into the atmosphere.
And it takes about, Maybe half a million years, half a billion years, the atmosphere fills up with oxygen, right?
They call it the great oxidation event.
And it took a little while.
But that is why it was life that put oxygen into the atmosphere.
Wow.
Isn't that wild?
So if you find, because if tomorrow all life on Earth went away, all that oxygen would just recombine with the rocks really quickly.
Like if life disappeared tomorrow, you'd come back and I'm not really sure what it'd be like a million years, the atmosphere would have no oxygen in it.
Right now it's got 21% oxygen, it would all go away.
So that story is.
So if you're saying all the life disappeared on the Earth right now, all the oxygen would go away in the atmosphere.
Because the only reason there's oxygen in the atmosphere is life keeps farting it out.
It is a product of biological photosynthesis.
That is what every day is pushing oxygen into the atmosphere.
So every day, oxygen is pushed into the atmosphere by life, and every day, oxygen gets bound back up into rocks.
So if you remove the life, if for some reason magically you could make all the life go away, What would happen is the 21% oxygen that's in the atmosphere would just get stuck.
What would happen to the plants in the rainforest?
No, no, that's not what I'm saying.
Let's say magically, if I could take life away, then the oxygen in the atmosphere would go away.
So, the reason I'm saying that is that so what's important, what it tells you is that if you see oxygen in a planet's atmosphere, like that whole thing I was just talking about, that tells you that there probably is life there.
There's probably a biosphere.
Right.
So, you will not have oxygen in an atmosphere, in a planetary atmosphere.
Most likely without there being life to keep pumping it back in.
Right.
Okay.
That makes sense.
Yeah.
So, the other thing, so that story has two important points.
So, it shows us how we're going to characterize, how we're going to look for life on distant planets, right?
Because, yeah, we're not going there anytime soon, right?
So, how can we see life?
How can we see signatures of biology, i.e., biosignatures, on planets that are 100 light years away?
Well, once we have these more powerful telescopes, we're going to be able to do exactly what I was just telling you.
We're going to be able to look for the light that's passed through the planet's atmosphere.
Analyze that light and look for compounds that can only be produced by biology.
Yeah.
But there's a second really important consequence of this, right?
So, what happens is these little critters, right, that two and a half billion years ago that innovated and invented this new form of photosynthesis, they literally changed the planet, right?
You know, having oxygen in the atmosphere changed everything about the planet's history.
Oxygen chemistry is just totally different.
So, it's a really nice, very important example of life changing the atmosphere, which changed the climate also.
Radically changed the climate of the earth.
And actually, it was kind of poisonous to the critters that were around then.
Like, it actually was kind of a devastation.
The invention of this photosynthesis was good for a while, but then it pumped so much oxygen in the atmosphere that those species of critters ended up, they had to like burrow into the ground, like get away from the oxygen.
Oxygen was actually poison for them.
Wow.
So, it's a really nice example of a species becoming very successful and in the process changing the climate in ways.
That wasn't so useful for them.
Sound familiar?
Right.
Right?
That's all we're doing now.
So I'm just bringing it back to climate change now.
There's people who are like, it's a hoax.
It's like, dude, this is what life does when successful species change planets.
That is important for us to think about our future.
It's important for us to think about other technological civilizations.
They probably change their planets.
And also, that whole thing that, oh, it's a hoax.
It's also very human hating.
If you take the position that, a ridiculous position that climate science, which has been around for so long, is a hoax, then it's like, why do you hate human beings so much?
We did this amazing thing.
We changed the atmosphere.
Of an entire planet.
Right.
We put extra CO2 into the atmosphere because of our.
We built this amazing global civilization.
Yeah.
It's indicative of what a successful species we are.
Well, I think that's the idea that the climate, the idea of the climate changing being a hoax is nonsense.
But the problem with that term climate change is it's attached to so much political baggage.
Yeah.
Right.
Which, you know, so, but people, you know, so, right, there's climate change happening.
Like, here's the problem whether you think it's, whether you think it's, A hoax, or you think it's being overblown, or you think it's a real existential threat.
The problem is the majority of people who are in both camps don't understand how it works at all.
I know.
I know.
And that's as a scientist, that's what I'm trying to say.
You know, like there's a difference between what I always want to say is there's a difference between the scientific problem of like what are the radiative properties of the carbon dioxide molecule?
Like that does not care about who you voted for, right?
So the climate is changing because of our activity, because that's how climate works.
Like you put more CO2, you know, it's basic climate science.
I can literally teach this to my Undergraduate non science majors.
Simple theory, the simple formula I can show them for how to put more CO2 into any planet's atmosphere, the planet's going to warm up.
So that part doesn't care who you voted for.
So there's a difference between the scientific question about climate change and what drives it and the political question of what you're going to do about it, right?
So you have to separate those two.
Not doing anything about it and say, you know, that's a policy too.
So somehow as a species, and that's why somebody called this, this is humanity's final exam, right?
You've triggered climate change, you know, because of your success.
Now, what are you going to do about it?
Are you going to ignore it?
Or are you going to try and take some actions to like change your energy?
Well, the Earth's climate has been a crazy roller coaster for the last like 500 million years, right?
It's been up and down and up and down.
And right now, in the big picture of the history of the Earth, we are actually in one of the coolest periods.
Did you see the Washington Post article that came out about a year and a half ago?
About, I mean, because there's the PETM, we've had periods of up.
And down, right?
But the thing is, is like climate, you know, so sometimes people say to me, like, well, climate's changing all the time.
And it depends on what time scale you're talking about.
Sure.
So for the last 10,000 years, since the last ice age ended, we've been in what's called the geologic epoch called the Holocene, right?
Yes.
And, oh, 485 million years.
Have you seen this?
Yeah, this is a 485 million year graph of the surface temperature of the Earth.
Right.
And you see, you've had periods of very long.
You see that very tiny little hockey stick on the right?
Yeah.
That's where we are.
That's where we are.
And you see it starting to go up, right?
So all of that going up is us at the tip there.
But what you see is, right.
So we came and we came, go down so you can see the bottom a little.
Zoom in.
Just zoom in, but let us so we can see the bottom part of the graph.
So that's 25 million years ago, right there.
That's millions of years.
So that the time frame for human beings is what, 300,000?
300,000.
But it just went back a million.
We just found a skull in China that's a million years old.
Yeah.
So, we don't really know how fucking long human beings have been here.
Well, we know.
We certainly weren't here 65 million years ago.
Right.
Right.
Because we see dinosaurs.
And we know that, like, thank God for that comet that hit the Earth because, you know, the only thing that was around mammal wise were these little tiny rat like creatures.
So that gave us the.
But, like, if you look at the history of planet Earth, like, going back to the Silurian hypothesis, it's entirely possible there could have been civilizations living in the dips of all of the history of the planet Earth.
That was our question.
Would you be able to tell?
But, you know, the important thing for this is that, so what you see is like, yeah, climate on hundreds of millions of years, climate goes up, climate goes down.
But for the last.
10,000 years, right?
That's where we actually have the best data because we've got tree rings, we've got the, you know, it's amazing.
You can drill down on like in Greenland, let's talk about Greenland, you know, and get the ice cores or Antarctica, and you can go back like 100,000 years and you can get like bubbles, trapped bubbles.
Yeah, that's insane.
It's insane.
And then you can see like, oh, how much CO2 there was or what was the temperature?
What was in the atmosphere?
What metals were there in the atmosphere?
Were there any industrial shit going on?
Yeah, but there wasn't.
There was.
But anyway, let's just complete this thought.
The last 10,000 years, the climate has been very stable.
Like, very, it's been a good time to build a civilization, right?
It's been warm and it's been moist, right?
And that is when all of the history of human civilization, this civilization, you know, you want to say there's other ones I don't agree, but like, okay, this one, right?
That's when farming was invented, blah, blah.
And that's the reason why farming could be invented, was that the climate was stable.
So, when, you know, the people talk about with climate change that we needed to stay under 1.5 degrees variation, right?
We don't want the temperature of the planet to go above 1.5 or 2 degrees of Celsius.
That's what all the, Reports the IPC things are don't go above 1.5 to 2 degrees, right?
Why that number?
Because in the Holocene, you look at the Holocene and you look at the variations over the last 10,000 years, it's never gone above or below the average.
Well, it's ever gone above or below 1.5 degrees on that average of the Holocene, right?
And now what we're doing is we're blowing it past that.
The average temperature, the surface temperature, the average surface temperature on the earth has had for the last 10,000 years no more.
Than 1.5 to 2 degrees Celsius variations.
Okay.
Yeah.
So go back to that article, Steve.
But that was hundreds of millions.
You won't even see that.
Right.
Like on this plot, 10,000 years is too small.
10,000 years is like, you can't even see it.
10,000 years might be the very bottom part of that dip.
But I mean, look how dramatic that shit goes down, right?
Which shows you, like, this is our future.
Like, this is the planet.
We're driving the planet.
So that, I think, 65 million years or before that is what's called the Permian.
The Permian temperature maximum, the PETM.
And the planet was so warm then that there was no snow anywhere.
Like maybe at the tip of like the.
No ice caps.
Driving the Planet Into Regimes00:04:34
We've been so.
That's the thing about Earth has been many planets over its history.
It's been a water world.
Like in the beginning, this is wild, there weren't continents, right?
It takes a while for the continents to grow.
So there were like kind of some Australia, they call them Craton.
So we were a water world for a while.
And then there have been periods when we've been a snowball world.
The Earth has been almost completely covered in glaciers.
And we've been a jungle world, right?
So the Earth, and it's often life which.
Pushes the planet into these different regimes.
That has, you know, that's often been what's happened.
So the idea that us, life, have triggered another, you know, a new age of climate change, we shouldn't be surprised.
Some of those variations that you're seeing there came because a new form of life was invented, like grasslands.
Like, you know, evolution came up, the biosphere evolved grasslands, right?
And it was like, hey, this is good.
Oh, and then the climate changes.
At what point were the super volcanoes?
There were like five major events, right?
There's been five mass extinctions.
Five mass extinctions.
And the biggest one was the super volcanoes, right?
Oh, they were more than volcanoes, right?
Those were the Deccan traps.
These were like, I mean, they were more than that.
They were just huge upwellings of lava.
Right.
And I forget when exactly that one is.
That might even be further.
Yeah, look at the, oh, this is good.
445, the end.
Which was the biggest one?
Yeah, find out what the biggest of the five.
You got almost 95% in the one that was the one that came from the Deccan Traps.
Go further back.
Here you go.
96.
Yeah, yeah.
And Permian.
Permian extinction.
The great dying.
250 to 252 million years ago.
You know, which is, you know, the interesting thing about this, what it shows you is the biosphere, as Lynn Margellis, the famous who invented, helped co-invented the Gaian hypothesis, the biosphere is a tough bitch.
Like, you know, you cannot.
And this is the thing, what pisses me off, like when we come to climate change, was that thing, like, we got to save the earth.
It's like, dude, you know, the earth is not a furry little bunny.
You know, the earth will be, the biosphere will be just fine.
We got to save us.
You know, it's human civilization, especially this global technological civilization, which really depends on very, you know, A very stable climate, you want to feed 8 billion people, you better have a stable climate year to year in order to have agriculture, right?
But the biosphere is, there's nothing we can do to really fuck with the biosphere.
And the biosphere, this is what people need to understand we don't have to save the earth.
We need to be scared shitless of it, right?
Because in some levels, our ancestors worshipped the earth as a god or a goddess.
They were kind of right in a certain way because the earth literally channels cosmic power, which is sunlight, you know?
We take in, I forgot this number.
You can look this up.
The equivalent, it's like how many atomic bombs worth of energy fall on the Earth every second.
Let's look this up.
Wow.
So the Earth is constantly receiving from the sun huge amounts of energy.
And that energy hits the atmosphere, hits the ground, and it all just channels four to five Hiroshima type bombs per second.
The Earth is currently accumulating heat from the sun.
Oh, no, this is not even right.
This is actually, this isn't even what we're looking at.
This is how much, because of climate change, Is that the temperature, the energy that's being trapped that normally would go back out into space?
But I don't know if we can find it.
The amount of energy that just flows through the Earth system, right?
From the sun.
From the sun.
Every day, every second, there's this huge amount of energy that hits the Earth, and the Earth warms, it generates clouds, it feeds the life forms, it generates the ocean circulation.
And it looks to us very like in balance.
It's like, oh, it's a.
But we don't really understand is that like, it's like a.
A blast furnace.
We don't see the blast furnace of this apocalyptic amount of energies that are channeling through that system.
And what we're doing by dumping more CO2 in the atmosphere is like we're taking a giant monkey wrench.
Imagine a jet engine, a super powerful jet engine.
And we're just taking this monkey wrench and we're just throwing it into the.
And oh, let's see what happens.
Like we're unbalancing that.
And when those forces, you already see this with some of the climate events that are happening, you unbalance those forces and you end up in a very different kind of planet, which is what the.
When we looked at those, the temperature was like.
15 degrees Celsius hotter on average.
That's a different kind of planet.
So we need to, you know, the whole partisan dialogue about climate change needs to change so we understand what's really at stake.
It's not the earth that's at stake.
It's us.
It's this civilization.
Saving Our Civilization00:15:24
I mean, when I start, the reason whenever I start to become skeptical of things is when you start to see certain folks try to use it to their advantage and you start to see all these financial entwanglements involved in stuff like this.
You see the same thing happen in in medicine and pharmaceuticals.
You see the same thing happening in geopolitics, in every aspect of our civilization where there's lots of economic power and lots of money happening.
This starts to happen.
And when you see people start to try to use emergencies, like the climate emergency, to gain not only more profit for themselves, but more power and control over people, that's when I start to get skeptical.
And that's when I start to back off.
And I say, okay.
These people are saying, trust the science.
I'm going to take this advice from some billionaire who's flying in his private jet all over the place.
I don't know if I trust you, right?
Well, don't trust them.
Is the science settled?
Oh, the science has been settled for decades.
Well, there's also MIT scientists.
No, There's one MIT scientist.
There's the one.
And so this is what happens when I have this.
I'm sorry to interrupt.
Yeah.
I'm sorry to interrupt.
I'm sorry to interrupt.
So go ahead.
No, no, no.
I was going to say, like, there seems to be lots of.
Maybe there's one.
I don't know.
Maybe it's the same one I've heard.
And then, as well as Princeton scientists who seem to, like, a lot of them.
Don't seem to agree on everything.
And one of the things that I wasn't alive back then, but I guess like after the 40s, it was like there was an emergency of cooling.
There wasn't a great cooling event from the 40s to the 70s.
Yeah, there wasn't.
Yeah, there wasn't.
So let me tell you the history because I have a, here's my climate story.
Okay.
Adam's climate story.
So it's 1986 or 1985.
I, you know, graduate from the University of Colorado.
I'm like, I'm tired.
You know, I know I'm going to go to grad school.
I need a break.
So I took a year and a half off and I did everything.
I planted trees in British Columbia.
I was a bouncer at the Rocky Horror Picture Show on 8th Street in New York.
I just needed time off.
And then after a year, I was like, okay, let me go back to science, right?
So I started applying.
I would have taken any job in science in a Twinkie lab.
I didn't care.
I got a job at the Goddard Institute for Space Studies on 113th Street and Broadway in New York.
It's a NASA installation that studies planetary science.
It's 1986, right?
Nobody's ever heard of climate change, right?
So I go there.
I got a job as a scientific programmer.
I'm just doing low level programming, you know.
And at one point, after like two months, I go to my boss and I say, like, what are we doing here?
Like, what are we studying?
She says, Oh, Inez Fung, very famous climate scientist.
She says, Oh, sit down.
And she tells me, Well, there's this idea that because of CO2, you know, that the Earth's climate is going to change, you know, and we don't really have the signal yet.
By the signal, they meant, you know, seeing the data, but we were studying this and we're studying how to find the signal, you know, right?
And I said, Well, what will happen if the climate changes?
And she sort of laid out everything, you know, that would happen.
And I remember walking out of there and I walked down to like Riverside Drive and I was like, Holy crap, you know, like she just told me about like the end of the world, you know?
And this was like 1985, 86.
We're like, again, nobody.
I went to my bros, we went to the bar, you know, and I'm like, dude, like, we could be changing the climate.
And they're like, yeah, man, whatever, you know?
So I have spent my entire life watching this unfold.
And everything, like, even I have a plot from a paper that was done with like a dumbass computer model that tracks the global average temperature.
I can shoot, boop, boop, boop.
They were dead on, right?
So I have watched over time the progress of climate science to where, like, you know, Nobody gave a shit.
It was kind of something people talked about.
And then in 1988, there was a famous testimony by James Hansen who ran this.
He was the big boss at this place when climate change sort of finally got into people's imagination.
And it wasn't until really the mid 2000s that people really, really, really started to hear about it.
Is that when the Gore documentary came out?
Yeah.
That actually, the Gore documentary was a big part of, because Gore actually was friends with the main climate scientists who were responsible for this.
All his predictions were wrong, by the way.
No.
All those predictions are absolutely right.
No, he said the sea level was going to rise like 50 feet.
Not anytime soon.
He said, yeah, he said within 10 years.
Let's look that.
In 10 years, there's no way he said the freezing level is going to run.
50 feet.
I mean, that's insane.
No, he wouldn't.
Look up the predictions from the Gore documentary.
What was that documentary called again?
And also, listen, Inconvenient Truth.
Inconvenient Truth.
Yeah, yeah.
You know, when you have to see that, did he mean like if there was an anomalous, you know, melting event of the West Arctic ice sheets?
You know, but no scientist would say that thing was happening.
I was talking to my mom the other day, who's a, you know, she's really big into this stuff too.
She's, you know, she's on the very far left of the political spectrum.
She's a fine arts teacher.
Right.
Right.
She grew up in university.
She got her master's degree in fine art.
She goes, and I was talking about this house.
We're looking at this, like, really nice house on the water that was, like, near.
Where my mom lives, or whatever.
And she's like, oh, that house is going to be underwater in 50 years.
She came by that.
I'm like, really?
I'm like, you grew up here, mom.
Wasn't the fucking water line in the same exact spot 50 years ago to where it is now?
Well, no, the water's gone up.
Oh, no, no.
You can see.
That's a brain melt.
No, it's not at the same place, right?
It's, you know, because it's been, you know, this steady increase in measurable, absolutely.
But, you know.
Yeah, but all those houses have been there.
Like, all those houses have been there.
Well, because it's, but it's, it's in, right now, it's in the, it's on the level of centimeters, right?
Right.
So, you know, but the fly, you know, why are you?
Let me go back before we go back on this because I want this is a really important point to make.
The science and the scientists has the science been settled, right?
The science, so that was 86, right?
There's somebody, you know, I'm at this NASA facility.
This was before there were any politics.
It wasn't like Inez Fung was like a liberal, I'm going to teach this kid about science.
We're just doing science.
Yeah.
Also, when was the first time that a US president mentioned climate change?
What do you think?
The first time?
First time.
I have no idea.
But just take a guess.
Clinton.
1964.
Oh, really?
It's in a speech to Congress.
Lyndon Johnson brings up carbon dioxide pollution, as he called it.
Because already Roger Ravel and these scientists had all.
That's why there was no.
There was like one paper that somebody wrote about the possibility of cooling in the 70s, and it got picked up by Time magazine.
Most, you know, that was also so early that nobody really knew what was going to happen.
So it was a paper, and then Time magazine.
But there wasn't like all the climate scientists were like, holy shit, it's going to.
It was just.
The data wasn't there yet.
But the understanding that the climate could warm and most likely would warm, there's a paper in 1903 by Sven Arrhenius, you know, that predicted, you know, he just added up all the coal burning, the CO2 burning, and predicted in 1903 because the science is so basic that, yeah, the planet's probably going to warm.
And he was Swedish, so he's like, great, more warming.
So, anyway, this idea we're asking the question about is the science settled?
Science has been settled since like the 1990s, right?
And so what happened was the There is, we're talking about rich people and, you know, trying to get their way.
The oil companies, and Shell was brought to court for this.
You can see the documents.
The oil companies knew that, like, this is death for us.
Like, if, you know, if we're going to, because really, what is this about?
It's about changing energy modalities, right?
We power our civilization on fossil fuels.
We used to power our civilization on wood.
We just changed.
Like, it's not that big a deal, but somebody stands to lose a lot of money if you do this.
So the science was totally settled, and somewhere around.
Yeah, but how much would it cost to reinvent a whole.
How many times have we done it?
It'll cost something, but also money's going to be made.
Money will be made.
And you already see this with what's happening with renewables.
There's a place in Rochester.
Yeah, but solar panels have shit the bed.
No, solar panels.
What are you talking about?
Solar panels.
No one I know who has solar panels is like, they've all.
Dude, you need to look at the world economy.
Solar panels, look at what China is doing with solar panels right now.
Solar panels, there are more jobs now.
There are more jobs via solar panels than there are for coal.
But they're so inefficient.
They're not inefficient.
The inefficiency has blown up.
From the time I was growing up, To now, the efficiency has exploded.
Look at China's solar and renewable policy.
They are flooding markets.
China accounts for like 35% of all the CO2 emissions worldwide.
Right, right.
And they are pushing, they understand where the world economy is going.
The world economy is going to decarbonize.
But let me, there's a place in Rochester I can stand where like there's the Erie Canal, right?
There is a train line and there's a highway all in the same place.
And then the jets fly right over it.
That is four different transportation infrastructures that were built and then abandoned, right?
We do this all the time.
Humanity constantly changes its transportation infrastructure, its energy infrastructure.
This is just what we do, right?
And there's going to be huge amounts of money to be made.
Just like when oil first was born, when the beginning of the oil, the United States subsidized oil.
We subsidized oil production because it made sense for the country.
So the only reason we're not doing it now is because we started doing it is because the oil industry didn't want it.
Because if you're the oil industry and you've got what's called proven reserves, all this oil in the ground, that's part of your bank account.
And if suddenly people are like, you know, we're not going to use oil anymore.
We're going to use, you know, whatever, renewables or nuclear or something.
You know what happens to your bank account?
Rolls to zero.
So, you know, as somebody, I one time when I was writing for NPR, I was doing the science blog for NPR, you know, I was talking about like, yeah, we're going to change energy infrastructure.
It's going to be great.
And somebody wrote back and said, dude, you know, the proven reserves are like $8 trillion.
People have gone to war for a lot less than that.
Like, they're not giving up their wealth, you know, so easily.
So, what I saw, In the starting going back to the proven science, was that somewhere around 20, 2005, there started to be organized climate denial, right?
Like, I would write something on the NPR blog about like climate change, yeah, and I'd see like boop, boop, boop, like all of a sudden I get these comments back when there were comments section just filling up, filling up with like that's a hoax, blah blah blah.
And I was like, holy shit, this is like organized, like somebody's like, this is not just random people, this happens on both sides.
I mean, people, there's just uninformed fools on every, on every, but this was not, this was not uninformed fools.
This was organized.
I could see it happening.
Like, I wrote something else on another topic.
I'd get a few people yes, a few people no.
If it was about climate change, and it started because for three years I've been writing about climate change, nothing.
Then all of a sudden, now listen, also there's a book called Agents of.
What is it called?
It's a book that was written about the oil companies organized.
They took a lesson from the cigarette companies about how to push back against science.
If there's some science that is going to hurt your bottom line, here's what you do.
Right?
So, but again, my point really here is that, right, the politics is a mess.
I completely agree.
The politics is a mess.
But the point about the established science, there is what was so what happened, the reason I'm telling this story is what happened after 2005, you started to have the same group of scientists.
There's like eight scientists whose name would come up, Willie Soon, the guy from MIT, over and over again, because that's all there was.
If you went to a meeting of the American Geological Society, where like one of the places climate science gets discussed, and there's 2,000 people in this giant hallway, you know, find somebody there who doesn't believe in science.
Call up.
You know, randomly 10 geology departments and say, is there anybody in there who doesn't believe in climate science?
You won't find anybody.
Well, that's a broad way of putting it.
Is there anyone who doesn't believe in climate science?
Scientists.
Scientists who work in the field.
I don't think that they don't believe in climate science.
I think they would argue that the CO2 is the primary cause of climate change.
Basic planetary science.
Well, even on the IPCC website or whatever, they were saying that like water vapor and clouds contribute more to the warming of the planet's surface temperature than actual CO2.
That's true.
See, this is that, and that's a great point to bring up, right?
Climate science, you know, to really, and this is what drives me crazy when, like, you know, I have to argue with people about, you know, people who are, like, really seriously into denial.
It's like they'll say things to me and they're taking these strident positions.
Like, you know, you're very open, you're like interested in the science and everything.
And it becomes really clear that, like, A, these people don't know what they're talking about.
Like, they really make these claims that are like, wow, man, you can read a freshman textbook and have that question answered.
But they're not interested in the science.
They've got some political point of view.
You know, I see this happening on the left and the right.
And what they really care about is their political point of view.
Right.
And like, I'm a scientist.
They care about winning.
I'm a scientist.
All I care about is the science.
And so that question, so you bring up a really good question.
Water vapor and other things.
It's true, water vapor is actually the, you know, by far has the most climate changing effect.
But you have to do, you have to like study climate.
And what you see is like, yeah, but water vapor cycles, right?
Water vapor is constantly cycling in and cycling out.
So the net level of water vapor always stays the same, right?
There hasn't been any changes.
There hasn't been any change.
Nothing we're doing is really going to change dramatically the amount of water vapor in the air.
So there's nothing happening with water vapor that is going to lead to climate change.
CO2 is increasing because of what we're doing.
So it's not going to, and it cycles on much longer timescales.
You put CO2 into the atmosphere, it takes a lot longer for it to come out.
One of the major, Charlie Ravel, who I was talking about, the guy, you know, the 19th, one of the things he really discovered people thought, like, oh, the ocean will absorb it all.
The ocean will absorb the CO2.
And what he realized, what he showed through like painstaking experiments, is that actually the ocean will stop.
The ocean can only absorb so much CO2.
So that's the difference.
Like you bring up a really good point, but But to answer that point, you gotta go in and take the freshman class.
Actually, you probably need to take the senior class before one of these guys stands up and says, Climate change is a hoax because of water vapor.
It's like, no, if you do this, if you actually just put the time into learning it, you'll see that question's totally been answered a thousand times with a thousand experiments.
Are there any instances in history that we can pinpoint where the CO2 level was really high, but the temperature was really low?
Not really, and not unless there's like in general, CO2 tracks with, you know, with.
It always tracks.
Yeah, because it's just, it's basic climate science.
Like, you know, sometimes it's because of the climate record, it seems to lead or lag, you know, but in general, you can see sort of the dynamic, you know, planetary dynamics is pretty complicated, you know, but you can see sort of what's going on.
But it is basic physics that if you put more CO, I mean, literally, it is literally basic physics in the sense of like CO2.
We found out it was 1850 that I think Joseph Fresnel was it who first discovered that CO2 absorbs sunlight.
You know, absorbs, you know, so if two is really absorbed, it's well, what it's really good is absorbing the sun hits the ground, the ground warms up, and then it emits infrared radiation.
And CO2 just loves infrared radiation.
So that was known like in 1840.
So the science of this is just so firmly in place that, like, for example, Venus, right?
Venus is very much like the Earth.
It's closer to the sun, but it's not so much closer that, you know, you'd expect it like to be radically different from the Earth.
In the 1930s, people saw Venus as that's going to be like a jungle planet.
Evidence for CO2 Science00:08:38
The temperature is 800 degrees.
Fucking degrees, right?
It is, it's a pizza oven, yeah, basically.
Why CO2?
Its atmosphere is basically CO2.
Yeah, I know.
It's exactly so, you know, it's just like the science of just put more CO2 into the atmosphere, your planet's gonna change, yeah, right?
It's not just gonna warm up because what happens is you're pumping lots more energy into the atmosphere.
Like I said, my jet engine analogy now you're just messing with everything.
The energy is gonna flow, it's gonna get warmer places, colder places.
The system that is the climate is gonna change.
I wonder how much fucking CO2 all those SpaceX rockets are putting into the atmosphere.
I just read something about also the stuff with all the Starlink that is going to like dive back down.
Allegedly, the satellites that get decommissioned, I heard that they burn up in the atmosphere on reentry.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Which also dumps a bunch.
I just read a thing somebody, and who knows?
I don't really know if we need to be alarmed.
Because that's the problem with the news every day.
It's like, you need to be alarmed by this.
Yeah.
Really, another thing?
So I don't know if that's really.
This is an emergency.
We need to do a carbon tax on everyone.
You know, you have everyone living paycheck to paycheck.
You don't have to pay an extra tax.
Okay.
But, but.
And then you have the 15 minute cities and stuff in the UK and all that.
Yeah.
But what are you got to do something?
Like, not do it.
You know, well, you don't have to do anything.
Right?
I mean, you don't have to do anything, right?
Climate is changing.
That's just the way it is.
I'm sorry.
It's changing because of human activity.
Look at that graph.
Of course it's changing.
And of course humans contribute to it.
Right.
So the question is what are you going to do?
Like, you know, doing nothing is a policy decision.
Doing this is a policy decision.
So, you know, what is the, you know, okay, you don't want to do a carbon tax.
What do you want to do?
You know, ignoring it, you know, in general, the science says shit's going to get hard.
You know, the science indicates that, of course, predicting the future is hard, right?
As Yogi Berra said, prediction is hard, especially about the future.
But, you know, we can map out like scenarios of what's going to change if you raise the temperature by two degrees, right?
You can look at history and see like.
What was the global surface average temperature?
Do we know what it was during the Renaissance?
It had to be within 1.5 degrees of what we were.
Within 1.5 degrees.
Again, every little blip, you had the little ice age and everything, but those were all minor.
We are now committed.
Like, we are absolutely blowing past.
We're probably headed towards three degrees.
During the Renaissance period, roughly 14 to 17 centuries, global average temperatures were generally cooler than today, falling within the cold phase interval known as the Little Ice Age 1.2 degrees, right?
Below 1.5 degrees.
1.2 Celsius.
The temperature has not changed for the last 10,000 years on average by more than 1.5 degrees.
What is your take on the Younger Dryas impact hypothesis that there was a series of comets?
Impacts that would have hit the earth during 11,500 years ago?
You know, it's very important as a scientist for me to say, like, I don't know.
You know, I'm not, you know.
I mean, what I know about the Younger Dryas is that great story about the Younger Dryas, which is that I read about when I was reading about the history of the Camp Century, which was this nuclear powered research lab that the army built in like the mid 50s on the ice in Greenland.
They had to drag a nuclear reactor across 300 miles of the most inhospitable terrain.
In the world, because they wanted to build a base on the ice on the top of the glaciers of Greenland.
And one of the things they did there, they did this scientific experiment of drilling that was the first ice cores that they did.
And the guy who was doing the analysis looked at it, he could see switching from you know before the Younger Dryas to the Dryas.
You could see this, you could see the climate change like the band where the Younger Dryas, the wild temperature variation, it was like brown and black compared to the pure water.
They called it the black mat.
Maybe.
I don't know.
Yeah, but you could see that.
So, the thing that I understand about the Younger Dryas was that it was really good evidence that the climate could change really quickly, which is a lesson for us.
So, I don't know.
I'd have to look at the evidence for a large impact.
But in general, large impacts, if you're going to get an impact that's really going to be able to change the climate by that dramatically, you're going to find lots of evidence.
So, I would want to see the evidence.
Like you'd see on the other side of the earth, you should be able to see.
You know, iridium 26 or something, you know, that came out of the explosion.
So, yeah, I think it would be pretty clear that there was.
I think one of the foundations of the hypothesis is that it was like a thousand, the younger dryness was a thousand years, right?
How long it lasted?
Yeah.
Yeah, I think so.
So it was like a thousand year period.
Radical climate change.
Like radical.
And then came back again.
And then, like, yeah, it was like flash frozen, right?
And there's woolly mammoths that were frozen with the.
That's why they call it the Younger Dries, because there was that flower that was in his stomach still.
Yeah, yeah.
And there was also, that correlates with that time period when that happened.
There was this black matte layer that was found within the earth that the geologists found.
And they found nanodiamonds and some other material.
Some stuff, an explosion that would have formed during the earth.
From cosmic.
Yeah.
Cosmic stuff that would have been in that matte layer from that exact time period.
The younger drives black matte is organic, rich, dark sedimentary layer dating to 12,900 to 11,700, found at over 70 sites, primarily in North America.
Represents cold, wet, traditional.
So, what was in the black matte layer?
I heard there was nano diamonds and these other.
blah, blah, blah, blah.
Does it say?
How would it not say?
That's crazy.
Yeah.
That's like one of the things we have to look to see.
And the important thing is always to understand, like, sort of, there's lots and lots and lots and lots and lots of scientists working on what the driest was.
Is this one guy who wrote a paper, or has there been the emergence of a.
Because science is very much like the blues, it's a call and response thing, right?
You write a paper and then you've got a radical claim, and then somebody writes a paper and says you're crazy, and then you write a response about why this back.
And you're constantly giving each other arguments and evidence and mathematical arguments and data.
That go back and forth.
And eventually, if an idea is really good, you know, other people will see, like, oh, no, and you can watch it change.
That's always a fact.
I've worked in enough fields in science over the years.
Like, you'll be at a meeting where you'll see the shift will happen.
Somebody's presenting data, this thing's been around for a while, but now, like, the data is so good and it's coming from so many different directions that you can see people leave the meeting being like, huh, yeah, maybe.
So I don't know with this, if whether it's, you know, where it sits that is it just one guy writing a paper?
Or has the community begun to see enough evidence for it?
Well, that's the crazy thing.
That's the hard part about it, right?
Because how much of this stuff is interdisciplinary?
Right, how many astrobiologists have meetings with geologists and climate change people?
And like, there's so many different ways, or like, historic, like, uh, like, classicists, different scholars from different fields, yeah, all coming together and just throwing at the wall, right?
You know, having this, uh, you know, well, that's what makes so much fun, though, because, like, right, so astrobiology now has become really an interdisciplinary field.
So, there's this thing called uh, absicon, it happens every two years, and it is the most fun meeting ever because it is like pure biologists, microbiologists, you know, astronomers who study stars.
Planetary scientists who study both the planets in the solar system, which we know a huge amount about, and then exoplanets, and then people, technosignatures now.
So the meetings are just like, they're mind boggling because you just go and you listen to a talk about the great oxidation event and you learn all this amazing stuff.
And then you go walk over to another meeting and you learn about the biochemistry of sugar production in this particular kind of microbe that can survive 700 degree temperatures.
So it's like the field really, those kinds of fields have become, and climate science is too, very interdisciplinary.
It's been so for a while.
Even the word, it's beyond multidisciplinary.
The new word is transdisciplinary because it's kind of its own new field.
Yeah, like just like even comparing some of the science that we know about the history of our earth with ancient myths, right?
Like how many of these myths could be just echoes of some sort of reality that could have got skewed in this telephone game over millennia?
Yeah, no, I'm actually, you know, so my first book was on science and religion, and I really focused a lot on myth because I was really affected by Joseph Campbell, his idea of monomyths and everything.
And, you know, I definitely, you know, I really love the idea that, you know, myth encodes.
Sort of things about being human, these sort of elemental things about being human.
They were stories.
Echoes of Ancient Myths00:08:21
You know, we often use the word myth to say a story that's not true, like an urban myth.
Sure.
You know, like a lady who, you know, microwaved her dog to drive off, you know.
But myth, you know, big myths, myths are constellations of stories that explained who we were.
Like, you know, groups use myths, societies use myth to explain what we are, where we are, who we are.
And, you know, science is in some sense like that.
I mean, science is a different kind of story, but it definitely is.
It's what tells us who and what we are.
But we shouldn't forget the power of myths and, you know, Like, for example, like with the flood narratives, there are flood narratives all over the place.
It's obvious that there were so many, you know, that floods were impactful to people that, you know, they became part of myths.
And whether or not there was the Noachian flood, like whether that was actually something that happened around the world, like there was some kind of glacial dam burst, who knows?
Was that possible during the Younger Dryas, the hypothesis?
Yeah, I don't know.
You know, I don't know.
Because it went from an ice age to super warm, like it could have been.
Yeah.
There's this great, I don't want to interrupt you.
No, no, no, no.
Shred of consciousness.
But there's this gentleman who came on who was showing us the channeled scab lands in Washington State.
And he has this, it's kind of an out there hypothesis.
But if you can just like work your way through the mind experiment there, he explains that if it's possible, there were comet impacts that broke those ice dams on the North American ice sheet, and there was trillions of tons of water surging south.
It could have channeled out those scablands.
I think that, I mean, my understanding of what I know, again, which is limited, is that it was an ice dam that broke.
But the cause, like any kind of comet impact, any kind of astrophysical impactor, is going to leave a lot of debris.
So it really should be visible.
An impact of that size should have debris and stuff.
First of all, you should be able to find the crater or the remnants of the crater.
But then also, the stuff that gets kicked up, you know, a large enough impactor is going to like, you know, the cloud of debris.
Look at Mount St. Helens, right?
You can tell that Mount St. Helens erupted on the other side of the planet.
You can still find clay, you know.
So, you know, that's what you'd have to look for.
If you wanted to go for that, you'd have to look for can I find.
And would the crater now be under ice?
No, because it was.
If it was near Greenland, maybe?
No, but I thought it was that those scablands were actually glacial craters, you know, or glacial dams.
In Washington or in that area.
Because, you know, the Laurentine ice sheet, right?
Right.
All of North America.
Yes.
So it must have, it would have had to have been.
I mean, if that, if it's, if, if you're saying that the ice dam broke because of a nearby impactor, then it would have to be somewhere in like North America.
Okay.
If you're saying that it happened, like the comet could have been anywhere and it led to a triggering a temperature increase globally, that if it's that big, then it really, I think you just have to look.
You have to look to see whether or not.
And that's the fun part.
Like you have this conversation, this is how science works.
You have this conversation over lunch and it's like, Well, let's go look.
And it's also interesting that all the megafauna in North America kind of went away, right?
And in Africa, we still have all the megafauna.
Well, not the.
You know, the real thing about megafauna, the sad truth of megafauna is we ate them.
Like, it's when human beings generally show up, is when most of the megafauna are eaten.
Not always, not all of it, but like in general, once human beings move into an area, certain kinds of life.
Yeah, but the giants of life.
Yeah, but the sloth, saber tooth tigers, and all the things that were here, like they're gone.
But they're still there in Africa.
There are still people in Africa.
But there's not like.
Mega, not there's not that you know, there used to be like 40 foot bears, or not 40, right?
12 foot bears, like, yeah, in general, the really large megafauna don't make it in mass once human beings show up.
I think that's in general my understanding.
So we kind of ate them all.
Like, where are the mastodons?
So I can go in Rochester at the Rochester Science Museum.
There is a woolly mammoth that was discovered not too far away, even its codon, because it got caught in a bog.
And so it's recreated.
And I go, I'm like, this is a giant hairy elephant.
There were giant, like right where I'm standing, there were herds of giant hairy elephants, right?
Where are they?
We ate them.
You know, human beings are, yeah, we'll pretty much eat anything into extinction.
What do you make of those people that just revived the dire wolf?
Yeah, that's interesting.
Do you see that?
Well, I love recreating dire wolves.
I'm kind of into it.
What was the name of that organization that did that?
Yeah, I don't know.
That's the whole, I mean, the ethics of that.
Wow, you could talk about that for a long time.
What about the ethics of should we settle Mars?
Do we have a right?
Should we settle Mars?
Should we, like, you know, Elon Musk's dream of, like, I am totally in favor of, like, Settling the solar system of like having a large human presence in the solar system.
But there are some people who say, like, you know, what right do we have to alter these worlds that didn't have anybody on them?
So they're, you know, I mean, I see nobody there.
Well, Avi Loeb thinks there was people there at one point.
Mars?
Avi Loeb.
No, even Avi Loeb doesn't believe it.
I swear.
Didn't he say that?
He did.
He goes, oh my God.
He thinks, no, he said that on the podcast, bro.
He said he thinks humanity started on Mars.
Oh, well, no, he might have meant, okay, what he might have meant is that life started on Mars.
Life started on Mars.
Yeah, no, there's a real pain here.
And then, like, via accommodation.
Yes.
Yeah.
So it's possible.
Yeah.
This is, I mean, this is a really interesting idea that, you know, Mars, we have, thanks to, you know, the space program, we have really clear evidence that Mars was once a blue world.
Like, you know, about four billion years ago, what's called the Noachian period after Noah, Mars had, you know, if not oceans, it had, you know, deep lakes, you know, seas almost.
And then the climate change, speaking of climate change, and, you know, it became a dry, frozen hell.
So, the idea is like maybe life, microbial life started on Mars and then comet impacts because there were a lot of comets.
The farther you go back in time, the more debris comet there were in the solar system to hit things.
And so, maybe there was a microbe in a rock that got blown off of Mars and landed on Earth because we find Martian rocks.
Right.
Yeah.
So, yeah, I think that's possible.
That's an example of what they call panspermia, which is this idea about that life started somewhere else.
Rocking material back and forth.
Yeah, swap and spit.
Yeah.
Because the planets we know have been swap and spit for a while.
Panspermia is weird because you've been saying it.
It's kind of like you.
But it's possible, even that, you know, with interstellar, you know, we now have seen a couple of three interstellar objects pass through the sky.
Oh, yeah, because of the new telescopes, right?
New telescopes.
We know they've been happening all the time, but now we can catch them as they go through.
And maybe one of them, you know, at some point was, you know, they're usually comets or asteroids from another, an alien solar system, right?
And, you know, maybe there's rocks got blown off some alien plant that had life, and, you know, the microbes just get sort of, they hibernate.
They are able to last in the rock for.
Hundreds of millions of years, and that's how life started on Earth.
The problem is that, you know, you can do because now we've seen three.
So that gives us actually, it's amazing science.
You see three, that's enough to start doing calculations.
Okay, I've seen these three.
Let me work out how pro now I know how probable, or at least I get some idea about how likely, how often.
When was the first one?
Do you remember?
First one was a muamua, one eye.
Oh, so that was like what six years ago, something like that.
2016.
Oh, so and then there was two eye Borisov.
That was nine years ago.
I know, isn't that crazy?
Wow, I know.
Seems like last year.
I know.
I can't wait to get to my age.
I think I was just 35.
When was that?
No, that was, yeah, a long time ago.
So, yeah, so now, you know, we're watching them.
We'll find more of them.
And, you know, I have many issues with what Professor Loeb has done.
But it's possible that one of them will be a techno signature.
We should definitely be on the look.
We just did a paper.
I was part of a paper that was like, you know, really looking seriously at what would you have to look for if you want to see whether or not these are techno signatures, whether this is actually, you know, a probe or something, just a piece of technology.
We should definitely be looking for it.
The bigger and badder we keep making these telescopes, the weirder shit's going to get.
Telling the Whole Story00:01:16
I know.
You always, that's the amazing thing with telescopes.
Every time you build a bigger one or every time you open up a new wavelength window, x rays, infrared, You're like, oh my God, I didn't know those were there.
Yeah.
So, you know, the universe is pretty, pretty amazing.
It's wild.
Yeah.
Well, Adam, thank you so much for doing this, man.
This has been a great pleasure.
Fascinating conversation.
A lot of fun.
Where can people find you?
Find all your work and all that stuff.
Okay.
So, the main thing is I have a newsletter called Everyman's Universe, where, you know, every week I'm just doing something on space and the human future and, you know, all kinds of different things.
And then I, you know, I have books out.
Like my last book was The Little Book of Aliens, where I was trying to tell this whole story about, you know, everything from UFOs.
To what the biosignatures and technosignatures.
So, and I'm on Twitter and I'm on social media, but I, you know, I don't use it that much because social media can be.
So, I think social media is bad for your health.
I think so too.
Yeah.
So, but so yeah, Every Man's Universe.
Subscribe to Every Man's Universe.
And every couple of times, once a week, we do a post about something that's going on in science or even science and spirituality.
You know, I'm interested in that.
And then we'll also do a post that's like some news, like some stories.
Oh, here's some cool stories to read that I found as a news aggregator.
Beautiful.
We'll make sure to link everything below for folks.