Astrophysicist Adam Frank argues humanity isn’t the first civilization, with odds of 1 in 10 billion trillion against being alone, framing climate change as an inevitable planetary transition rather than a unique failure. His book Alien Worlds explores civilizations altering planets via energy consumption, while SETI now scans exoplanet atmospheres for tech signatures like rocket exhaust—though he dismisses sci-fi accuracy demands. Frank critiques climate denial as corporate-driven distrust, warning it risks ceding global leadership to China, and urges reframing Earth’s survival as a biospheric responsibility, not a moral crusade. He also debates whether humans could evolve beyond survival instincts or if interstellar expansion is inevitable, questioning VR’s ability to replicate nature’s transformative mystery while linking conspiracy theories to tribalism and mental health. Frank’s "spitballs vs. super tankers" analogy highlights media misrepresentation of science, contrasting coffee studies with gravity’s consensus, before Rogan and he wrap up with a nod to Frank’s engaging work and future VR potential. [Automatically generated summary]
So, yeah, I've been doing research on, you know, astronomy, astrophysics for a long time, but I also do all this popular writing, like for NPR, New York Times.
And the genesis of this book came, A, because I love science fiction.
I've been reading science fiction since I was a kid.
But also, I do a lot of work on climate change.
And so I do a lot of climate change denial.
And what I realized was that there's this way we talk about it that is like completely forgets about the fact that like we're probably not the first, you know?
And that led me to a whole bunch of research that eventually led to this book, including one paper that we did that showed that the odds that we're the only time it's ever happened, the only civilization in the entire history of the universe, the only way that that could be true is if the odds per planet are one in 10 billion trillion, right?
That's pretty low, right?
So the odds of anything being one in 10 billion trillion, that's pretty freaking low.
So it's probably happened before, you know?
There's been other civilizations before ours.
And once you realize that, man, that is like, you know, it changes everything about how we think about ourselves, you know, and what's happening to us right now.
So that's what, you know, when you look at climate change, right?
Basically what it is, is civilizations are giant machines for turning energy into work, right?
You know, New York City, right?
You sit over and you look at Manhattan and you're like, holy shit, right?
There's all this energy flowing into it.
And then there's all this work being done, you know, to keep everything moving.
And, you know, there's no way not to have an impact.
If you build a world-girdling civilization, which, you know, that's what a civilization is, there's going to be impact.
So the whole point of my doing this book was to start looking at ourselves as just one of, you know, we're not alone.
We're not the only time this has ever happened.
Doesn't mean anybody's around now.
Like, that's a different question.
But the idea that it's never happened before, it meaning like, you know, civilization, what's happening around us, like this machinery and everything, that, you know, that just in the new world of what we understand about planets and shit, that is just like, you know, it's not tenable anymore.
The idea that some civilization has to be the first one, that's what the only, the only way you could ever think that we're the only ones is that some civilization has to be the first one, even in a universe that's infinite.
So what we've learned, so one of my trips right now is like, this is not your grandfather SETI anymore, right?
Our understanding, we went through this major revolution in our understanding of planets about 20 years ago.
So you look back at the Greeks, right?
And you can see them arguing about whether any other stars had planets other than the sun.
And it goes back and forth.
Some of the Greeks were like, yeah, it's definitely happening.
And then Aristotle was like, no, we're the only world in the whole universe that has life.
And then as time goes on, it kind of goes back and forth.
And even at the turn of the 19th century, people thought planets were incredibly rare.
They thought the only way you could get a planet was if two stars passed really close to each other and they kind of like taffy pulled out stuff that would eventually form a planet.
And the odds of those kinds of collisions are so small that people are like, you know what?
There's just no planets.
And no planets, no life, unless something really freaky is going on.
But then 20 years ago, we discovered our first planet.
In my own lifetime, you know, people were teaching me when I was starting, like, you know, we just don't know, maybe they're rare.
And now we know for certain that they're everywhere.
And the thing people have to realize is every one of those planets is a place.
You know what I mean?
It's a place you could walk around.
Some of them for sure are going to have oceans.
There's going to be mountains.
There's going to be rain falling.
You know, I mean, like, they're all freaking places and they're all places where things can happen.
You know, planets are basically like nature's way of taking sunlight and doing something interesting with it.
So you have 10 billion trillion planets in the universe, right?
And every one of them is an experiment that's being run.
So, you know, the idea that like, we're the first time it's ever, now that we know that, right?
Now that we've gone through that revolution and understand that planets are like time a dozen.
We're not only talking about planets here.
We're talking about planets are in the right place for life to form.
So there's the idea of the habitable zone, right?
So, you know, Mercury sucks.
You cannot, you know, Mercury's so hot that there's no way anything's going to happen.
And, you know, planets that are far enough out, they're going to be so cold.
You know, they're so far away from their star that they're going to be so cold that it's hard to get liquid water on the surface.
So we define the habitable or Goldilocks zone as the place where you can have, you can pour water onto the surface and it'll sit there.
It won't freeze and it won't sort of just evaporate away.
So all these 10 billion trillion planets I'm talking about are all in the right place for life to form.
And so like with that many numbers, that many experiments being run, like you got to be a psychotic pessimist to say that like this is the only time a civilization's ever happened.
No, no, this is an argument by, I call it like an argument by exhaustion.
You know, if I gave you a bag of 10 billion trillion planets and you have to sort through all of them, right?
The odds that you're going to, you're never going to find another one that built a civilization is pretty, now, you know, like I said, you're really asking for a really serious pessimism.
But, you know, we're just getting started with this game, right?
Of looking for life.
That's why I keep saying it's not, this is not your grandfather's SETI where you like you point a radio telescope at a star and you kind of wait to see whether somebody's signaling you.
Who knows whether they are signaling?
Who knows what they'd be using?
Now what we can do, because we got all these planets to stare at, is we're going to be able to stare at them as they pass in front of their star and get the light that passes through their atmosphere.
So we're going to like, who knows what we're going to find?
You know, we're not waiting for them to signal us anymore.
Over the next, I swear to God, man, in the next 30 years, we're going to have data relevant to the question of life.
Maybe not civilizations.
That could happen too, but just life on other worlds.
And we've never had that before.
All the arguments for the entire history of humanity have just been two dudes yelling at each other.
But in the next 30 years, because of the stuff we're building, and now that we know there's planets, we're going to have real data to argue over with.
So, man, it's like, we're in a whole nother ball game now.
I think the big fear for a lot of people is what happens when we find out for sure that there's something else out there.
If we really do find like some other Manhattan on some Goldilocks planet that's hovering some similarly sized star a billion light years away or whatever the hell it is, that's going to be very, very, very strange.
You know, that the world population only crossed the billion mark in like 1850.
You know, I mean, it's, there were so few of us on the planet for most of the time that even we've been around.
Forget the planet's history.
So, you know, I think like there is, you know, the discovery, if we were to get any evidence, you know, and I think the way it's going to happen is going to be more by accident than by like signaling, you know, like that.
So, so, but if we had any evidence of another technological, if we had any evidence of just life, right?
If we just find a biosphere, evidence that, you know, and we can do that from a distance, right?
Even if the star is, you know, 30 light years away, if we get, if we see, as the light passes through the star's atmosphere for those few moments, if we see oxygen in the atmosphere, you know, we'll be able to detect that.
That's what we can do with telescopes.
We can tell like what you can see, the fingerprints of the different kinds of elements.
If we see oxygen in the atmosphere, you know, and methane, that pretty much says that there's a biosphere there, that there's life.
Because you wouldn't get oxygen would just react away really fast if it wasn't for life.
Like on Earth, if it wasn't for life, there'd be no oxygen in the atmosphere.
The idea that the because right, this whole definition of the habitable zone was based on the idea, like, oh, you got to have a surface and it's got to be, you know.
But now with the every, you know, not every, but like a bunch of the moons orbiting Jupiter and Saturn, the gas giants, they have oceans under them.
Yeah, yeah, because the Europa is, you know, it's this pretty big moon, and we know it's covered in ice, right?
You can see it's covered in a, you know, and we think that layer of ice is maybe like, I don't know, 10 kilometers thick, and then below that, there may be 100 kilometers of ocean.
And because as it moves around Jupiter, the gravity of Jupiter is always squishing the inside, so there's probably volcanic activity happening at the surface.
So you have hydrothermal vents, you know, heat escaping out of the, and chemicals escaping out of the, at the surface onto the ocean.
And that's how we think life formed on Earth.
That's one of the arguments for how life formed.
It formed first in the hydrothermal vents.
So yeah, you know, that's another game changer, right?
So that we should also be thinking not just about the classic habitable zone, but now we've got to think about like life.
And can you get civilizations in an underwater civilization?
You know, in an underwater, maybe you have a really rich ecosystem.
But the problem with an underwater life or forming civilization is that you can't really do fire, right?
Fire was pretty important for us for metallurgy.
You know, to build advanced technology, you kind of need combustion.
So, you know, the thing is actually from the, you know, so I'm going to, I, I, I work in a lot of fields, but I would also consider myself an astrobiologist, right?
Which is a pretty kind of wild idea that you can do astrobiology, even though you only have one example, which is the Earth.
But we've learned so much that now we can start asking ourselves about the possibility of life elsewhere.
So finding even a microbe, like even a friggin, you know, amoeba on Mars would be, or even evidence that there used to be amoebas on Mars.
And so, but organic chemistry, man, I hated chemistry when I was growing up, and I hated organic, was that's just basically chemistry involving carbon, you know?
So you can have non-organ, you know, organic chemistry doesn't mean organisms, but it's the kind of chemistry that organisms love, right?
So finding evidence that there was like they drilled amazing, like we sent a freaking robot to Mars that could drill through a rock, you know, and then ingest the rock and, you know, and then send the data back across space.
Man, we're, you know, pretty good for a bunch of hairless apes.
Yeah.
So what they found was evidence for fairly complex, you know, organic chemistry, which meant that way back when Mars, and this we know for sure, right, Mars had water on it.
Most people now think that the Allen Hills meteorite, that probably, you know, it's inconclusive and it's not conclusive enough to be like, yeah, we found life.
But it was so small that it was like way smaller than any of the microscopic fossilized bacteria we've ever seen before.
So people in general are like, meh.
But by find, but that's what started, right?
That's when Clinton was like, okay, we're going to send a lot of shit to Mars.
Because back in 90, early 90s, people were kind of done with Mars.
And so that's what triggered the whole, you know, one space probe after another, the rovers.
And like, so, you know, the thing we found was a direct result of that effort, which was this organic chemistry, which says that back in the day, Mars had a lot of this stuff lying around, had a lot of these, you know, these organic chemicals lying around, which if you're life, that's what you're going to be using.
So that's like one more step.
Like we've been putting the Lego blocks for the argument for life on Mars one piece at a time since the, you know, since the first rovers went there.
Because right now we don't know if there's, you know, are we the only time in the entire history of the universe that like this crazy thing where you got, we went from non-life to life.
Like, is that common or is that never, ever, ever happen?
So that's the question we want to, you know, we want to answer.
And I, you know, I mean, like, you know, that argument I was given before is I think from the probable arguments, I'm saying it's like, you know, it's almost overwhelming that, yeah, it probably happened somewhere.
Again, it doesn't mean anything's here, but we need evidence, right?
You know, we find something and we're like, yeah, we find something, but we're pretty sure there's some kind of life and it's three billion light years away.
Like, you know, when people think about advanced alien civilizations, the idea of building large-scale structures is you think that may be the next thing you do once you reach a certain point.
Like, you know, the Dyson sphere, the idea you could collect all of the sun's energy and use it for yourself by building a giant sphere around the sun with solar panels on the inside.
People think like, that goes back to Kardashev's, the idea of this Kardashev scale back in the 60s, where he was like, look, there's going to be a natural progression of civilizations that goes, first, you collect all the energy you can from your planet, and then you use that to do amazing things.
And then you collect all the energy from your star, and then you do that.
You do amazing shit with that.
And then, you know, the whole galaxy.
So, you know, Kardashev thought there was a scale that civilizations naturally progress through.
I mean, I've criticized the Kardashev scale in one of the papers I recently did because what it fails to take into account is the fact that on your way up to the type one, type one is when you harvest all the energy from your planet, which basically means somehow covering your planet in solar panels or something.
That neglects what we've learned since Kardashev wrote his paper in 64 is that, you know, planets don't like that shit.
Like planets, the planet's going to feedback.
You try and build massive shit on your planet.
The planet has its own biosphere is pretty powerful and you've got to take the biosphere into account or you get climate change.
You get the planet being pushed off in another direction.
But whatever.
So for the alien megastructures, people thought like, oh, maybe this is like a piece of a Dyson sphere, right?
This is like, you know.
Now, so, you know, when he proposed this, people went bonkers over this, right?
He's just saying, he's like, look, here's the 15 different things could be, and I'm going to have to at least consider the possibility that it's artificial.
But for me, and some people got really angry and everything, but I thought like this is – Because there's been a thing in the community over the years.
SETI got a bad name, right?
SETI for a bunch of SETI was sort of thought as being like, oh, only wackadoodles do that.
It's all, you know, it's prosthetic foreheads, right?
It's the whole, we've had so much kind of crappy, you know, speculation about aliens that trying to do anything scientific always had this whiff of sort of being a little, you know, and then there's the UFO stuff, you know, which is completely separate, has nothing to do with it.
Like people have this idea like, wow, we've got telescopes all over the world and they're looking.
So the government never funded a SETI study, anything major, right?
So people, you know, all that SETI has done is like basically, you know, some dudes on a telescope get a little extra time.
Like, hey, man, look, let's go look at a star.
So Jill Tarter, who's one of the, you know, the founders, one of the greats of SETI, she compares it's like, you know, we got an ocean that we need to look at.
And there was a documentary I saw once about some biologist who was convinced that the giant sloth was still alive and that there was examples of them in South America.
And this poor bastard had spent more than a decade looking for this giant sloth in South America.
And there was this moment where he was chasing down this supposed dung pile and they were looking for it.
Dowdy.
And he had this look in his eyes where he was like, holy shit, what if I waste my fucking life in my academic career chasing down something that's not even real?
Yeah, but that's not the way the people, I mean, everybody who's involved in it, you know, I don't do SETI, you know, I mean, you know, I respect the people who are doing it.
But, you know, most of them are like, look, this is just a multi-generational thing.
And if even if I don't find it, I'm laying the foundation.
It's like, you know, cathedrals, right?
It took like, how many generations did it take to build a cathedral in medieval Europe, right?
So the first guy who laid the stone was like, I'm not going to see this.
You know, maybe my great-grandkid.
So most of them are like, you know, they know that this is going to, you know, this is a, this is a huge, it's like the most important question in humanity, right?
Are we alone?
And they're willing to accept that.
Like, you know, if you're going to do it scientifically, you're going to have to do it brick by frickin brick, you know?
And so you just have to accept that and, you know, go on.
But like I said, I think we were, you know, this is a new era now.
So the idea of like looking for signals, which assumes that somebody's putting out signals, right?
That's, that's a huge assumption right there.
But now that we know that there's all these planets and we're staring at all these planets, it's kind of we need to be thinking differently about, you know, we need to be prepared for like what happens when we see something we don't understand.
So here's some of the suggestions that people are talking about.
So Avi Loeb at Harvard talks about the idea, you know, maybe what you need, and you're going to need the sensitivity for this, you're going to see like rocket engines going back and forth between, you know, you have a planet, you have a multi-planet civilization on something, and you're going to see little flares as rockets decelerate and accelerate back and forth.
People have talked about seeing city lights.
You know, the telescopes are getting, you know, we're building these giant telescopes.
Like it tend, you know, a planet that's in a star 10 light years ago, that's 10 years ago.
So it's not like, you know, these things could still be around.
Here's a really interesting idea.
Like, because, you know, one of the things that I'm talking about in my book is like, how long does any civilization last, right?
That's the real question.
All of this stuff is super relevant for us now because the question is, what is the average lifetime of a civilization?
So you might be able to see artifacts from civilizations that are gone.
Like imagine a civilization covered one of its moons in solar panels, right?
The reflected light is going to show a spectral signature of the panels.
So it's like they don't even have to necessarily be alive now that we still might be able to see stuff from there, evidence of like artificial structures or something that's not natural around them.
So that's the thing, man.
It's like we're really, we're just, we're about to take this step in astrobiology where we're, you know, we're already running models of exo-biospheres, right?
Which we're asking, like, oh, what kind of chemistry can you have if you don't like, if you have photosynthesis on a planet around a star that's smaller than ours, that star is going to be mostly red as opposed to yellow like ours.
So the light that's coming off it is going to be different.
Can you have photosynthesis in that case?
And people are like, yeah, you probably could.
And what would it look like?
So we're already doing the work to be ready for exo-biospheres.
So exo-civilizations, we kind of need to be prepared for that too, looking for, you know, what could be the traces, what might we see from a distance from an exo-civilization.
They don't have to be signaling us.
You know, they're just there and we're going to catch some aspect of their being around.
I mean, if we did see rocket, if we did see some sort of a signature from rockets going back and forth, we would have to assume that this is a similarly aged civilization to ours.
Whereas if we saw something that was 1,000, 100,000 years advanced, we probably wouldn't see that anymore.
We probably see some sort of a manipulation of time and space.
So that's, I mean, of course, that is one of the problems is that when you start, you know, when you start pushing, it's just like saying, like, you know, what is what are we going to be like in a million years?
Who the freak knows?
You know, I mean, it's so long.
So I think you start with what you know.
And the cool thing about the planet part, though, is that, you know, unless they become like energy beings, you know, they're going to have an effect on their planet.
So looking at their planets to look for, you know, for spectral indications, that's probably, even after they die, there might even be things.
So that's, I think, a, you know, a good way to go.
Yeah, I'm, you know, I'm so curious as to what we're going to be able to do in a thousand years, ten thousand years, and a hundred thousand years if civilization does stay around and we figure out how to not melt the earth or boil the oceans or whatever, whatever the fuck we're doing.
I think we're, well, we have this ability to communicate now that we never did before, where everybody has an ability to say their piece about how they feel about how things are going.
Because one of the things my thing, so what's interesting about this fictional world, too, is that like climate, you know, the Earth is dealing with climate.
The Earth has like 30 billion people on it.
And, you know, New York is halfway underwater.
And so that's part of the story, too.
So we're trying to navigate our way through now becoming a multi-planet species.
So, you know, that is a version of at least 200 years where you can really extrapolate the technologies and ask yourself, because that's real.
I mean, I think that's really going to happen.
If we make it through climate change, that's the prize at the end of the, you know, of the story.
If we make it through climate change, you know, what the stuff that Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos are doing, man, that's real.
What is their big, what's the big, because I recently had a discussion with someone on the podcast that didn't believe in climate change.
And it was a weird thing because I kept pulling up all the different scientific consensus studies, all the different studies that show that we're having an impact.
And the thing about science is the whole point of science is to be and to have, you know, what science is, science is a way of having public knowledge.
You know what I mean?
Like everybody has their opinions, whatever.
But science is about the stuff we can all be like, oh, yeah, for sure.
You know, it's this whole process that we've evolved over 400 years.
And with climate denial, man, sometimes, you know, it's just, yeah, you want to be like, what, what are you saying, man?
Yeah, but if so, so if somebody comes to me, because what I want most for people, like, I consider myself an evangelist of science.
I love science.
And so if people come to me and they say, hey, man, isn't the climate always changing?
I'm like, oh, man, great question.
You know, we actually know the answer to that.
Yeah, it's changing, but it's changing.
Like, what's the time scale?
You know?
So it changes often on million-year time scales.
But like from the last 10,000 years, since the last ice age, which was 10,000 years ago, which is amazing, like there used to be a mile of ice above our heads, you know, 10,000 years ago.
Climate has been remarkably stable.
There's been little blips in it, but no major changes, right?
So like, and I can show them the graph of this and everything.
So if you're, if you know, if they're interested, you know, I mean, if they're, so if they're asking the question because they want to know, I'm down to talk until the cows come home.
But isn't it, not only are they not interested in the answer, they're just trying to win.
It's not a real conversation because it's a really complex thing.
If you dig an ice core and you tap down to 50,000, 80,000, 100,000 years, you see all these bizarre shifts of the climate that could be indicative of super volcanoes and asteroidal impacts and solar flares.
A lot of shit happens over the course of a million years.
But to hang all your ideas on the party's ideology and to deny all this really interesting stuff and all these variables.
It's like, you know, what I try and tell people is like, look, climate science is like awesome.
Like, it's science.
It's got these amazing stories to tell about, you know, yeah, the Earth.
I mean, Earth, over the past 4.5 billion years, the Earth has gone through the most profound changes.
And we've learned about, aren't you interested in that?
But no, right.
They basically have this thing where like, you know, I'm part of this group and therefore I have to have this opinion.
And I'm like, dude, it's science.
Science doesn't care who you voted for.
You know what I mean?
Like the radiative properties of a CO2 molecule doesn't care whether you're wearing a blue tie or a red tie.
And the fact that people can't make that distinction, and here's the real problem.
Once you go down this slippery road of denying, saying like, okay, that kind of science I hate, man, they're all a hoax.
Well, you know, America's prosperity and our safety has been built on science over the last 200 years.
You know, you start to erode the whole thing.
You can't just like call one group of scientists hoaxers, you know, and so they're only doing it for learning, and not have it slowly infect everything else to the point where like, you know, China will be happy to eat our lunch, you know, when it comes scientifically.
China's pumping huge amounts of money into science.
They're not doing this.
So like, you know, we're, we're limiting.
And here's the other thing that really bums me out.
Science is not a, it's not a lunch buffet.
You know what I mean?
You can't be like, oh man, can I have some of those antibiotics?
I love antibiotics.
And oh, yeah, the cell phone's great.
I'll use that.
And I really want to fly on a plane.
But climate change is bullshit.
You know, I mean, like, you know, either you accept that you live in a scientific society.
It doesn't mean like you're slavishly adhered to anything comes out in a journal late yesterday.
But either you adhere to the idea that this method has produced miracles for us, or give me the cell phone back.
Well, the scientific method is what has established the actual real facts of how things interact with each other that's allowed us to create technology.
And I think they split that distinction.
They focus on the technology and commerce, which is more important in their eyes than the consequences of the environment or what's going to happen to the environment.
The big hope is that we're going to figure it out.
And I'm hopeful of that too, is that we're going to figure out some way to extract carbon from the atmosphere with devices or some enormous like there was some, I don't know if it was a working prototype or it's just a concept, but there was an enormous building that was really an air filter.
With places like Hong Kong and places where they have terrible Beijing, they have terrible, terrible pollution, and more importantly, particulates in the atmosphere.
And, you know, from when you take the 10,000 light-year view, then what you realize is like, what did you expect?
Like, we built a world-girdling civilization that uses a quarter almost of all the energy the biosphere uses, right?
So, you know, every you know, every day the biosphere has like, you know, 200 terawatts of energy that it's producing in sugars.
We use about a quarter of that.
Like, how did you expect there wasn't going to be an impact, right?
So this changes the whole way we look at it.
We don't need to argue about like, did we or didn't we?
Of course we did.
This is what happens when you reach this level.
And the other thing that, you know, in the book that I'm trying to argue that also kind of pushes back against the deniers, is like, well, climate deniers are human haters.
You know, they're all like, you know, like, you know, we did this amazing thing.
We changed the atmosphere of an entire planet, right?
Climate change shows on one level how freaking awesome we are.
You know, how far we've gotten.
And if you look at the, you know, from the perspective of, you know, species doing this again and again across the universe, this shows that we've reached a level, right?
We have, we've leveled up, right?
You know, I play a lot of video games, right?
And so that whole thing when you level up and, you know, you get the sniper rifle, we've leveled up.
And so now the question is, are we smart enough, you know, to see what we've done and make the right choices?
Because that's what the universe is going to be.
There's going to be species that trigger climate change.
It's going to happen all the time.
And some are going to be like, oh, man, we need to do something, right?
And they'll make the actions.
They'll be able to work it out, get it together.
And other ones, you know, we're just going to end up in the cosmic waste pile.
So we're like cosmic teenagers.
And just like when you're a teenager and you're, you know, you start to drive, right?
Either you figure it out, you know, either you're drinking and you're partying and drive the car off a cliff, or you figure out how to handle your responsibility.
And what bumps me out is they don't understand the consequences of that for both the American enterprise and the human enterprise.
Right.
I mean, because if you keep calling one branch of science a hoax, then what's to say the other branches?
Like, well, you know, then you just, you're down, you're rolling down this slippery slope.
We're like other countries, you know, like so most of the Nobel Prizes Americans have won were people from other countries.
They came here to do their science because we had the best scientific enterprise.
You know, the next generation will just go somewhere else.
They'll go to China, you know?
So there's that part of it.
And the other part is like, dude, it's just science.
It doesn't care about your political views.
And, you know, it's not fair to use the cell phone and take the antibiotics and then turn around and like and then suddenly treat this thing as if it was another thing in your bucket of ideologies.
I think also people think if you somehow or another compromise industry's ability to work, that you're going to kill jobs and you're going to damage the economy.
I think it's because it's from like Shakespeare, like from Caesar or something.
I always thought it was a good.
But it's the idea that like, you know, in the Foundation trilogy, the Isaac Asmanov, you know, classic science fiction thing, there's the city of the planet of Trantor, which is the center of the empire, the galactic empire.
And it's, you know, it's basically the whole planet's been covered in city, you know, like the planet, you got to go down like 500 levels before you get to the surface.
So that idea, you know, I mean, what I like about it is the idea that like, you know, we've done something, we're kind of covered the planet in our effect, you know, covered the planet in our enterprise.
So this issue of business is that like there's a place I can stand in Rochester.
I did this for NPR.
And there's the Erie Canal.
I can stand right on the edge of the Erie Canal.
Then there's a train tracks.
You know, the tracks were laid.
Those tracks were laid back in the original line back in the 1870s.
Then there's a highway.
And then there's the airport right over there.
Four different infrastructures, which every one took huge amounts of money to build, one of which we don't even use anymore, right?
So the idea of building an infrastructure that will not be carbon polluting, will not trigger climate change.
Like, dude, this is what we do, you know?
So the idea that there's going to be more jobs that come out of this than it could ever come out of fossil fuels.
It's not a big deal for human beings because that's what we do, to switch infrastructures.
And there will be a lot of wealth generated by, just like there was when we switched to the trains.
Well, where's the argument coming that we, because there are people that just adopt the party line, the party line that, you know, climate's always change and human beings barely affect it and it's not something to concentrate on.
Again, I think it's the, you know, the gradual political polarization of everything.
You know, because you look at in the, we're now at the, what is it, 30-year anniversary of Jim Hansen, who was, you know, the famous climate scientist, giving his testimony in front of Congress in 1988 on a hot, sweltering summer day.
We said climate change is already happening.
You know, and that made news everywhere.
And that was the first like public awakening that this was happening.
And if you look at the first Bush administration, they were like, oh, yeah, we're ready to do something about this.
Sure, we can do it.
And then it just gradually over time as the whole political polarization thing happened, you can actually see the very purposeful denial, right?
They took a page out of the cigarette companies.
For years, right, cigarettes were like, oh, the cigarette companies were like, no, it's not a problem.
So they were purposefully, there were people who had money invested, right?
Obviously, the cigarette companies would be paying the same people to put doubt into the idea that cigarettes are addictive or cigarettes cause cancer.
And this is what had been done in the past.
Now the same people are involved in doing it with climate change.
Well, one time I wrote a piece for the NPR that was kind of positive about like, yeah, we can switch infrastructures, like I'm saying.
And some guy wrote me back very angry and he said, you know, the proven reserves, you know, the stuff, the oil that's in the ground, has a wealth, you know, has a monetary value.
Like, you know, that's in there in the oil company's banks, you know, in their bank accounts of like $1.5 trillion.
And the guy said, dude, you know, people have gone to war for a lot less than $1.5 trillion.
So, you know, if we were to really be like, hey, man, we can't burn that.
You know, you're going to have to leave that in the ground.
That's like their bank accounts going like, you know, down to zero pretty fast.
And then it becomes this sort of like mass, you know, becomes the political polar.
They use the political polarization to sort of, you know, sort of make this happen.
It doesn't have.
And look, other countries aren't doing this, right?
That's the important thing.
You know, other countries, there's always a little bit of climate denial going on, but we're like the only country that's got, as you can see, because we're the only ones who are not part of the Paris Accord.
Well, I got, you know, I mean, I have issues with environmentalists too, because I think after one of your shows I was watching, you know, the whole idea of eco-bros, right?
And you get eco-broad by people.
And, you know, so I have a piece in the New York Times today, an op-ed, where I'm basically saying, like, look, man, the planet's going to be fine.
Like, you know, long term, there's nothing we can throw at the biosphere that is going to kill it.
It's not about saving the planet.
The Earth is not a fuzzy little bunny.
You know, the planet is powerful, and it's really about saving us.
Let's be honest about what's going on.
And there's going to be all kinds of ethical choices that go on that.
You know, the polar bears may not be able to come along with us on the ride here.
You know, we need a healthy biosphere with a lot of biodiversity, but we're part of it and we're going to have an impact.
There's no such thing as no impact.
And already I'm getting eco-broad.
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People are like, hey, man, you don't care about life.
And now like the questions that, so you see this in like revolutions in science, right?
So you look at Einstein and what happened when Einstein came up with relativity.
Everybody at the time was like, you know, they were all concerned with what they call the luminiferous ether.
That, you know, light needed, light's a wave, and everybody thought it needed something to propagate through, right?
Radio wave or water waves go through water, sound wave go through air.
So, you know, the whole thing was about this ether, the luminous ether.
Does it exist?
Does it not exist?
Einstein was like, you know, I'm not really interested in that problem.
I'm not even going to do it.
He just like changed the whole thing and he just said, look, here's two new ideas.
They have nothing to do with the luminous ether.
And like all the old questions, all the old battles kind of just fell away.
They didn't even make sense anymore.
So that's what I'm trying to do in the book is say, look, when you look at climate change as a planetary transition, a predictable planetary transition, the whole idea of like environmentalism versus business interests and right Republicans versus Democrats, it just doesn't, it's not even relevant anymore.
What matters is that this is going to happen.
We should have expected it to happen.
And now the question is, do we become a cosmic winner or a cosmic loser?
And we have to think about the biosphere differently.
We have to think about our place in the biosphere differently.
And the old arguments, so that's what sometimes with climate change deniers, I'll throw this stuff at them.
And it's really kind of fun to watch them and be like, because they're expecting me to say like A, B, and C, and they've got D, E, and F in response.
And I throw this stuff at them, and they're just like, you know, and I'm not doing it just to fight with climate change, but I think it's true.
Well, who was it that was on the podcast that was talking about climate stabilization techniques and that this is probably the future?
Was it Boyan?
Maybe.
Anyway, what people are really worried about when you talk to people that understand the history of the human race and the history of the Earth is climate cooling.
They think that climate cooling is far more terrifying than climate warming.
Because if we go into a giant ice age again, I mean, way more people are going to die, terrible loss of resources, and it could be devastating to the human race.
But that is, is that something that you agree with?
I mean, that whole thing, because that's often something that climate deniers will throw at you.
In the 70s, there was one or two guys who said that, and then it got picked up on the news, but the climate community at that time was not like, oh, my God, it's cooling.
But here's the interesting thing for me, and it fits into this whole idea, is that we're holding off an ice age.
Like, there may never be, if humanity is successful and we navigate the Anthropocene, you know, that term, the Anthropocene, that we've now entered, we've now entered the human-dominated era.
We've been, for the last 10,000 years, the geological epoch has been what they call the Holocene.
That's all of human civilization happened in the Holocene.
You know, it's pretty warm.
It's pretty wet, moist, you know, everything's not locked up in ice.
And it's an interglacial period.
And if we weren't around, yeah, another 1,000, 3,000, 5,000 years would be another ice age.
But the Anthropocene that we're triggering could hold off ice ages forever, right?
As long as we're around, there won't be another ice age because we've already added enough warmth to the planet that it overcomes the effects that trigger an ice age.
So what are the ethical responsibilities of that?
That's what I try and tell the environmentalists.
Like, you know, you got this image, like, oh, we got to save the Earth.
But they're thinking of like the Holocene.
And it's like, well, you know, the planet, even with us, even if we successfully keep biodiversity rich, and it's not going to be the Earth we started with, you know, because we're here.
So yeah, what about the species that never form because we held off the ice age?
You know, I mean, forever.
Like, what about the ethical responsibility of those?
To try to contemplate what species would have existed if we allowed the Earth to cool and our responsibility for allowing the Earth to cool so that the potential for new species to advance.
Well, all I'm saying, and the only reason I'm raising that, I'm not, you know, I'm raising that because when we talk about climate change, what you get sometimes within the environmental movement is this sort of like, the polar bear, the polar bear.
And it's like, what I'm trying to say is, look, I love polar bears.
Kind of funny that polar bears always think because polar bears will rip your head off and drink your blood section.
My friend Kevin is a biologist, and he said, like, when you get polar bear babies, like right out of the womb, he said they're like the alien from the chest, chest burster steam.
He said they literally are like, like right out of the womb, they're looking to kill and eat.
So I'm raising that point to say, like, look, the thing we're going through now is a, it's an epic-making planetary transition.
And we're part of it, right?
And whether or not we're still part, that's the question.
Whether or not we're still part of it a thousand years from now, you know, is the big issue.
So, you know, there are ethical issues about the polar bear, right?
But there are also ethical issues.
You know, we can't just return the Earth to some pristine state.
We're here.
There's 7 billion of us.
So, you know, you have to, we're going to have to understand like there's this deeper ethical question about what does an earth look like that's been changed by us, that's healthy, but still has us on it.
It may not have polar bears, you know?
It may have rich phytoplankton, you know, and it may be very species diverse, but some of the species may not come with us.
So like we can't, this sort of like thing of like, oh, the pristine earth, there is no more pristine earth.
You know, we've been changing the earth since we were here.
So it's like, how do we have a healthy, a rich, healthy biosphere with us and our civilization still in it?
And that's, you know, I mean, you know, we have to have compassion for life because we're part of it.
Like without the compassion, you know, we end up with, as Gavin Schmidt, a friend of mine calls, we have ecological hooliganism, right?
We just do crazy.
We're just dumping shit into rivers.
Like, yeah, you don't have to do that, man.
But, you know, in my talks on this, I'll show like the polar bear, the lonely polar bear on the island.
And, you know, like, oh, everyone's really, you know, bummed out about this.
And then I'll show like a Velociraptor, right?
You know, who's crying for the Velociraptor, right?
Species come and go.
So we have to, you know, and the Earth goes through these huge transitions.
I'm not saying be like, don't care about those species, but you got to have the bigger picture with us in it.
Here's the problem with the environmental movements, you know, sometimes the way it gets framed, it's not just the environmental movement, it's the way we talk about climate change.
We think of ourselves as being a plague, right?
Oh, human beings, we suck, right?
That's the basic, that's the only story.
We have two stories.
It's not happening or we suck.
And my whole thing is like, that is the wrong, not only is that story wrong, it's unhelpful.
You know, we are what the biosphere is doing now.
You know, millions of years ago, it was grasslands.
You know, grasslands were a new innovation and they changed the planet.
You have a lot of grass.
You know, the biosphere evolved grasslands.
They swept across the planet.
They changed how the planet worked.
And then the Earth moved on with it, went on to the new experiment.
We are what the, we're exactly that.
We are like the dinosaurs or the grasslands or the blue-green algae that created the oxygen atmosphere.
And like, you know, we're not, we're, you know, there's no difference between a city and a forest on some biospheric level.
We don't suck.
The question is whether we're smart enough to still be part of what the biosphere is using us to trigger.
In my science museum in Rochester, there's a woolly mammoth that they found, you know.
And sometimes I'm looking at that and I'm like, that's a giant hairy ass elephant, man.
And it was walking around right in my, you know.
I think like, depending on what you do with it, you know, trying to reintroduce it into the biosphere could be a little dangerous.
I mean, the thing, look, climate change is, this is something I like to say.
Climate change is not our fault.
And what I mean by that is we, you know, we found fossil fuels and they were awesome, you know, and they were just a continuation of what we'd always done, you know?
And so we inadvertently, climate change was a mistake, you know.
Now, if we don't do something about it, it's our fault, right?
But, you know, and so you want to be really careful about unintended consequences.
You know, so this is my same thing with geoengineering.
People talk like, oh, we should, you know, put particulates in the atmosphere to make it more reflective.
I'm like, man, dude, we triggered the whole, we triggered climate change because, you know, we didn't know what we were doing.
Like why take the hardest solution that's got the most uncertainty as opposed to the simpler solution, which just means building a different infrastructure.
So, you know, I mean, these are all the kinds of things that we're going to have to work out.
I'm hopeful.
People are like, are you hopeful or not hopeful?
Because, you know, I mean, I ran these, I did these models.
One of the pieces of research we did was we modeled planets and civilizations, like alien civilizations.
We developed a simple mathematical model about how a civilization will use a planet's resources to make more babies, alien babies, and then how the, you know, by using those resources, you feedback on the planet, right?
And so what we wanted to do was we wanted to model the possible outcomes.
Like, what is the generic outcome?
You know, if I've got 100,000 civilizations all being born in different places, what's the, you know, in general, what happens?
And what we found is like basically four different possibilities.
One was good news.
Like in these models, there was like, you know, the population shoots up, the planet's temperature shoots up, but they come to a nice steady state.
Like, you know, you know, the population's stable, everything's good.
So they're in those models was hope.
We also saw die-off, where like the population, you know, skyrockets, the planet, they overshoot the carrying capacity of their planet, and then you get something like 70% of the population dying off.
So like seven out of every 10 people you know is gone.
So you know, but then you come to a steady state.
So maybe if you can survive the disaster, you're still there.
So for a complex civilization like ours, even if you don't go extinct, you may not be able to have this kind of civilization.
But we did find collapse.
We did find complete like extinction curves as well, where the population went way up and then boom, dropped like a stone.
And we even found those, we built into the models the possibility for the civilization to switch from a high-impact resource to a low-impact resource, like fossil to solar.
And sometimes, because planets have minds of their own, there's an internal dynamics to planets, and you push them far enough and they're just going to roll off.
So we'd have ones where the population went way up, they made the switch, and then the population started to come down, the planet started to cool down.
So we couldn't really, like, you know, we're young enough now that if we discovered one heading right towards us, we could just, you know, put your legs between your head between your legs and kiss your butt goodbye.
But in time, right, 200 years from now, we will have done a much better job of mapping out all the major rocks.
Yeah.
Well, I think so.
I mean, I'm really, that's a, you know, I mean, if we have that kind of interplanetary, we're going to be mapping them out just because you don't want to run into them.
I think the best one, if you catch it early enough, there's the gravity tug, where you just literally park a spaceship next to it and slowly have the spaceship, you know, move.
Because all you have to do is alter the trajectory a little bit.
You just have to tap on it.
Yeah, and it'll, you know.
Because shit in space is just so vast that a little tap will make it miss.
So the gravity tug, you know, you don't have to try and do the, you know, what was it?
That'd be a bummer to be the one that, like, you know, they both come out at the same time and your movie doesn't get any attention and the other one becomes like a massive hit.
The one thing I worry about the most, like we were talking before, you know, technological societies are these like overlaid networks.
You know, you got the transportation network, you got the energy network, you got social networks, you know.
And those are really complex.
And so I do a little, what's called network theory.
And what you find with network theory is that you may have an individual network that's pretty robust, meaning like I can cut some of the connections.
Like you got your social network.
I could take 20% of the people out of your social network.
And the social network will still function.
Most people will still talk to each other and everything.
But once you start layering them, so the social network is now connected to the telecommunications network, which is connected to the energy network, blah, blah, blah, then you can ripple a small change, ripples through the whole thing, and blows it apart.
It just doesn't function anymore.
So I don't need like apocalypses to have the fabric of technological civilization fall apart.
So if just the weather patterns change enough that agriculture becomes really hard, we're used to the rains falling pretty much the same way they do yearly and everything.
That, you know, like we talk about, you look at what the, you know, like refugees, how much, you know, the trouble, you know, having a huge influx of refugees can cause.
Climate change is going to have people moving all over the planet because now they can't grow food anywhere.
So it's like, I don't, you know, like I said, you don't need, I do worry, like ocean rise is going to be huge.
Most people live in coastal cities.
Most of the wealth in the world is in coastal cities.
But you don't really need too much to like really shift the weather patterns and then the thing you're used to falls apart.
Now, when you factor in human beings and our evolution from primitive hominids to what we are today, and you sort of extrapolate and keep going and think about what we're going to be in the future and then think about what these creatures might be that live 100 million light years away or whatever the fuck it is.
What I mean, we've got, I've got to think that whatever is holding us back, our primitive instincts, these human reward systems that were engaged when we were running away from wild animals and fighting off tribes of invaders, that slowly but surely those are going to either evaporate or evolve.
And we're going to get to a point where we can be more rational about complex issues.
If we do do that, what is the motivation for expanding the human race?
Isn't sustaining the human race in a healthy way on this planet a better option than traveling to Mars or traveling to the other solar systems?
Like, wouldn't we be better served trying to achieve some sort of a balance here on this planet?
Like, you look at the human migration patterns from when we started, right?
You know, we started off as a bunch of people in Africa, maybe a few thousand, right?
And then you see this migration, like, you know, a bunch of us, like a few hundred, crossed the Red Sea, which was pretty low at the time.
And then it's like they just worked their way around the coasts, you know, took boats over to Australia, went all the way back around through, like, we're explorers, man.
Like, you know, it's really, I think, something fundamental for us psychologically to have these frontiers.
This is kind of like, I think there's something deep in life that wants more life, right?
So if we settle Mars, right?
Then it's not going to be really us settling Mars.
It's going to be the Earth's biosphere, right?
I mean, really, we are.
That's what we are.
We're the agent of the biosphere, right?
And, you know, the biosphere started off as like, you know, single-celled creatures in like little tiny parts of the planet and then, you know, conquered the oceans.
And then eventually when they were, you know, because in the beginning, they weren't continents.
The Earth was a water world when we started off.
And so when there was enough continents, then they took over the life took over the land.
I think it's just kind of life may be kind of like a cosmic force if I can get all woogly on you.
Do you think that this is my theory, and I've thrown this out so many times people are sick of it.
But I think that what we're looking at when we see these archetypal aliens with the big heads and the big eyes and the tiny bodies and no genitals, I think we think this is what we're eventually going to be.
That thing that can levitate things with its mind, that thing that communicates telepathically, that thing that has this incredible ability to map out the cosmos and create wormholes and super advanced intellect to the point where we can't even comprehend.
So like if you think about how what, you know, we evolved from, at one point in time, we split from mollusks like what, 600 something years ago.
How much does a squid understand about cell phone networks and whether or not Sprint's unlimited data plans really any good?
They don't.
Well, we'll extrapolate that to what this alien creature is going to be in terms of its understanding of time and space and matter versus ours.
We are this crude thing that's weirded out by the word sperm, whereas it is telepathically communicating with a universal language and it has this unbelievable ability to manipulate matter.
And they've achieved homeostasis with their environment.
Okay, so the Fermi paradox is the idea that like, you know, if there is, if the paradox part is like, if you're telling me that intelligence is common, it evolves everywhere, then why don't I see it already, right?
So if you're asking about like, why don't we see signals from, I've already answered that, right?
But part of his question, and this was done by a guy in Hart.
I mean, so Fermi was just, this happened over a conversation for lunch, you know, in 1950.
So he just posed, he said, where are they all?
But in 1975, a guy named Hart wrote a paper where he really mapped out the, here's the main problem.
Even if you're traveling at a 10th of the speed of light, if you manage to build like world ships that can travel across the stars, you know, and you're traveling at 0.1% of the speed of light, in, you know, if you do that and you hop from one star to the other, build another ship, hop to the next one, in about 600,000 years, you have covered the whole galaxy, right?
So 600,000 years sounds like a long time, but it's a tiny part of the galaxy's history.
Galaxy is 10 billion years old.
So in that case, like why, you know, then every, if, you know, just one species has to do that, and they can cover the galaxy.
So why aren't there, why don't we see the colony ships here, right?
That's that's a much harder version of the Fermi paradox to get around.
Because if we did, look, we're already sending robots to Mars, right?
We're not going to Mars yet, but we're sending robots there.
What if we decide that there's no real benefit in sending biological entities into space and that the dangers of radiation and asteroidal impacts, this is just too great.
And maybe it'll get to the point where you can actually smell it and touch it and feel it, but not be compromised by its environment in terms of your biology.
So that's one of the things we're looking at in this paper is the idea that good planets may be hard to find.
There's this great novel by Kim Stanley Robinson, who's like just, for me, one of the great science fiction writers.
And it's called Aurora.
And it's the usual world ship thing.
So they build the colony ship.
It takes three generations to cross space and they get to the planet.
And the planet sucks.
It looked like it was going to be good.
But there's like prions, tiny, super small biological shit that just makes you can't live there.
And then you're going back, right?
So it's like, it may be exactly like you're saying that, you know, we think like, oh, you just land on a planet and you terraform it and you just turn it into habitable.
And it's like, that may not work.
And maybe it does, but that's a science fiction idea.
So, right, it's entirely possible.
I mean, there's a lot of possible solutions, this, which is just that, you know, one of which is space travel is really hard and really interstellar, not interplanetary, but interstellar travel is really hard and really expensive.
I was just reading a paper on this where the guy estimated that in order to get like, say you wanted to have a thousand people on a world ship to get to another star, that would take the economy, you'd need like, I think it was like 100,000 Earth economies to build that.
But it was just like, it was so much that, like, you know, unless you were, he said, you know, what the conclusion he came to, unless you were a multi-planet species, if you were like, if you had conquered the entire or settled the entire solar system, maybe you'd have an economy that big.
So one, one possible solution is good planets are hard to find.
And, you know, it's just too expensive.
It really costs a lot.
And so, yeah, it's not really worth the effort.
You send out some probes once in a while, but it's not.
They're predicting, because, you know, Seattle's got like, I mean, I don't know that much about this.
I'm way out of my, I'm in the danger zone.
The plates are super deep, you know, so you don't get as many tremors, but, you know, when it releases, it's going to, you know, it's just be a super powerful earthquake.
And, you know, it'll, it'll be so powerful.
Yeah, that they said that, like, there's not going to be a lot.
Even with the earthquake proofing, there's not going to be a lot of stuff left standing.
The biggest ones I ever felt was when I first moved here.
I first moved here in 94, and it was right after the Northridge earthquake.
And I was in my house, and I felt, I guess it was like a 5.5 where the whole thing just was weird.
It gave me the impression that the house that I was living in or the apartment that I was in was made out of the same stuff, like a box that a refrigerator would come in.
But you think it's possible that there could be life on other planets, and it's possible there could be intelligent life on other planets, and we send probes to Mars.
Why wouldn't we?
And I think that if they do send something here, they're going to send something without biological life inside of it.
Yeah, you know, well, this, you know, what's a really interesting question is like, and we're talking about like what will we evolve into in a million years?
You know, it may be possible that biology is a short period of intelligence.
And then when you get to it, you realize that what he actually wants to do is recreate his father.
Yeah, his father died when he was young, and he wants to be able to, through memories and photographs and what he knows about his father, literally recreate his father and be able to have a conversation with him.
But what he's doing is he's going way, way into the future into the possibilities of he's not seeing like, well, five years from now, we're going to be able to send, you know, gigabyte pictures through the mail.
No, he's saying, let's think of if you keep going exponentially, electronics and technology and innovation keeps continually accelerating, we could potentially get to the point where it's the impossible.
Well, you would be able to recreate human beings based on your knowledge of them, and then they'll be able to come up with some sort of a program where he'll be able to have a conversation with his father.
I mean, I think it's true about the possibility of a singularity in technological development.
But it's not going to be his father.
That's the sad thing.
I think we seriously, I've done some work on this as an interest of mine about mind.
What is mind?
And what's the relationship between mind and matter?
And I think we have a serious misunderstanding.
We don't understand consciousness very well at all.
So the idea that, oh, yeah, it's just going to be trivial to download your, you know, your consciousness into a computer, I think gets pretty, you know, there's like a shitload of assumptions in there about like what mind is and the relationship between like your neurons and you know awareness.
So that's why I think those guys, it's a little bit of a religion.
So I think like, you know, I mean, and the danger with anything when it comes to AI and stuff.
So when you know, here's an interesting thing about AI.
Like we are getting making amazing strides with AI.
Now, now, artificial intelligence is different from artificial consciousness.
You know what I mean?
So like, but the AI, you know, what we're getting out of it is nothing like us, right?
So the, you know, back in the day where people were like, oh, we're going to like model the human brain.
And that's how we'll do it.
We'll like make programs that are what.
And what they've learned is like, oh, that doesn't really work that well.
So now this whole big data thing, like, you know, network theory and big data and deep learning, we're like, you know, they're using statistical, you know, the power of having huge amounts of computing and statistical reasoning.
So that like, you know, yeah, the computer, like, you know, it'll find the picture of the cat, but you have no idea why it found the pit.
It didn't reason like, oh, yeah, that sort of looks like cat, and I like cats.
You know, it's just like, oh, these kinds of lines go with that kind of thing.
It has no idea what it's doing, but it'll act intelligently.
And so that's, you know, I mean, that's kind of freaky deeky in a lot of ways, too.
I think people are, I think it's smart to think about the dangers of AI.
I mean, don't you think that if you go back and interview the single-celled organism before it branched off into multi-cell, that'd be kind of a boring interview.
Fuck this multi-cell bullshit.
I don't want to stay a single cell at the bottom of the ocean.
Like, I'm not going to be like, it'll never happen.
But as a guy knows a philosopher says, you know, there's a certain way in which everything we do with AI right now, it's not like, you know, Watson is playing chess.
It's like we're using Watson to play chess.
It's our tool, you know.
And I think the fear is the tool gets out of hand.
Not that it like develops a thing where like, I hate humans, you know, dad, I hate you.
But more that it's like, you know, these things which are not actually thinking, they act intelligently, but they're not thinking, can have a huge, like, it'll have a really negative impact.
You know, it'll, it'll, you know, what is it?
There's that example of like if you design something that is an AI system to make paper clips, it ends up consuming the entire planet making paper clips because that's what you told it to do.
So I'm more worried about that than I am of like Skynet, you know, coming over and like, you know, deciding that it's going to, you know, drop all the bombs on us because it needs to get rid of us.
And you know what was revolutionary about that show, too?
Way they did the special effects were like, you know, the camera moved around.
Like, there's a spaceship, but I'm, you know, I don't have it, it didn't do, you know, sometimes it did those long pans, but it was, it kind of opened up a whole new way of sort of looking at, you know, just sort of what it looks like to be in space and stuff.
Yeah, but it really scared the shit out of people in terms of artificial life, something that we create that decides it's done with us and it's taking over.
Well, you know what's amazing about that, and this is, I've written about this, this idea that, like, you know, we keep telling that story over and over again.
How many movies, you know, can you think of that have that?
And I think like, so I'm really interested in myth, right?
You know, the whole mythology, the way, like, you know, we can never get away from the myths, you know, coming of age, the hero's journey, Joseph.
But like, you know, what's happening with us now, we got, there's nothing in the, there's nothing in the storehouse of myth to take care of like building machines that take over, right?
So the reason we keep telling that story over and over again is we're preparing ourselves, right?
We're building the myths, you know, that sort of will help us.
We don't know what's going to happen, but we have to keep telling that story because we can feel it coming.
You know what I mean?
So we need to keep telling that story to kind of explore what the options are.
And I like, that's what I liked about the ending.
And I didn't think the ending was great, but the idea that like, oh, yeah, this balance, you know, you're going to keep going through these cycles of trying to achieve this balance between, you know, silicon forms and non-silicon and biological forms.
But we're worried that we're going to be taken over by something else, but we're not overly concerned with evolving our own biology and changing.
And maybe that's the solution in terms of our physical limitations is some sort of a symbiotic connection between us and technology that instead of artificial technology and artificial life taking over, usurping us, instead of that, maybe we become a part of it and it becomes a part of us.
Sort of, you know, and it was just like Wikipedia where all human knowledge, the entire sum of human knowledge is right there.
You know, I mean, like, whoa, what a freaking, I mean, you talk about changes, right, that you were talking about.
What an amazing change that you can have pretty much, you know, like, you know, I love comics, right?
You know, I was a comic Marvel guy way back, right?
And back in the day, you know, you paid for your, you had to, you know, first of all, you got your ass kicked, but, you know, you had to go to the store every week and get the comics and, you know, and now, you know, you just look up Captain America and you can know everything there was about his, you know, his origin story and everything.
So it's like that idea that like there's no domains of knowledge that you can't instantly access and have all the backstory that you need.
And so we basically worked on, he wanted to work on two things for that.
And what's funny here is I never read Doctor Strange, right?
Because I was like a science guy.
It was all about Tony Stark, you know, or, you know, or Spider-Man or the X-Men.
So I never, I was like, oh, the guy uses magic.
So the thing we had to figure out was, first of all, that scene where he first encounters the ancient one, you know, and she has to kind of like, you know, school him on there's more ways to think about the world than science.
And then the multiverse.
That was the other thing that, because I've written a lot on the multiverse.
But man, it was awesome.
It was so much fun to be in the writer's room, you know, with them and just like be thrown around ideas.
Like, you know, for it was like the 11 o'clock show.
So, but Last of Us is kind of a zombie survival story, but it's beautiful.
I mean, it's really the narrative of it.
It's this guy, you know, it's 20 years after.
And the thing about this thing, it opens up with the, you know, the zombie outbreak happening, and the guy loses his daughter.
Like, you see him lose his daughter.
And it's so well.
It's the same company that did Uncharted, which are other, I really like those as well.
And so it's just like the acting in it was really beautiful.
And then, you know, it's 20 years later, and this guy's broken.
You know what I mean?
Like, he's just, he's a certain, you know, he survived in this, you know, the society's fallen apart.
But, you know, you just, you track him as he gets this young girl who is immune and he's got to take her cross-country to, you know, and you're following this guy's story.
Like, why is that something that's like stirring around in our head?
I think the apocalypse is because we kind of feel, we're nervous about what's happening with us because we can see sort of we're pushing up against boundaries.
Shadows still exist, but all the textures are gone.
And if you show a video of that, see if you can find a video of that, Jamie.
When in the videos you see things moving around with no textures and you realize what an advantage it would be if you were playing someone who's you're constantly dealing with all this visual input.
Well, one of the reasons why I wanted to talk to you about this in particular is because I am more and more convinced that our future may lie in some artificially created world and that people are more interested and more attracted every day to virtual reality.
So what happens when, and you know, right, I can be sort of like, you know, grandpa and be like, that's terrible.
People should be going out in nature.
Which I think they should be.
They should, you know, for now.
But, you know, I always, I'm always aware.
Whenever I'm sort of like, oh, shit, this is going to be terrible.
I always remember the whole, you can see in like, I think at some point, Socrates, you know, 2,000 five years, 500 years ago, he's like, ooh, kids today, they're a whole bunch of, you know, assholes.
Right.
So, you know, who knows what we'll do with it?
And, you know, hopefully, maybe it'll help.
You know, maybe, I don't know.
You know, I mean, I think there is, I don't want to be like, oh, that's terrible, but there clearly are there's going to be dangers with this a different game, Jamie?
Well, it's funny because we talked about like, you know, for the game that we built, which was awesome.
You know, it's really a lot of fun to actually go through the process of like, how do you, you know, how do you script it?
How do you teach people?
You know, like, because that whole thing that when we get in a good, when you're in a good game, right?
You know, in the first couple hours of a game and you're just learning the basic stuffs and you get excited.
You're like, oh, this is, this is a cool world to be in.
But I'd be interested to think like sort of, you know, at some point I tried VR for the same thing because what can you, once you can have people be tactile and they're not just sort of in their head, what else can you do to sort of show them, teach them things, you know, like glaciers or, you know, for sure.
They have a thing called soaring over the world that you sit in a chair and you get raised up and there's a giant like IMAX style screen and it flies you over these environments.
It's incredible.
It's so beautiful.
And different smells are in the air and the different places that you go to.
Like when you go over the elephant, yeah, the elephants, you smell grass and hay.
Like as we were talking about before, where biological entities might not be necessary for space travel, you might be able to send a robot, put on a suit, and be able to experience these worlds like in real time.
And the idea is like, look, if you get one, you know, we've been talking about like civilizations when they get a million years ahead, what can they do?
That they're so powerful, they can build computers that can simulate reality, like fully simulate reality.
Where like, you know, just like in the matrix, you have programs that are self-aware.
And so, you know, once they get to that and they start running simulations of the world, right?
It's cheaper to run, it's cheap to run simulations.
So they just run trillions of them, right?
So the idea is that from that argument, there's more simulated realities than there is the one real reality.
So odds are, right?
You know, if there's a trillion simulated realities and one real reality, you're probably in a simulated reality.
So are we a, you know, everything like right now, you and I think this is real, you know, but what we are is an incredibly detailed and we are self-aware programs in, you know, a silicon matrix of, you know, so that argument is brilliant.
I mean, you know, I mean, just from the, just from the point of view of like numbers, you know, there's lots of reasons to say that's not possible, but but it's, you know, raises this issue of like, yeah, what is simulation?
If you were in a simulation, the whole matrix thing, if you were in a simulation that was that real, how would you know?
And there's a way in which, again, when you think a million, two million years in the future, this is why I might want to, you know, I hate to loop this back to climate change, but just like, God, if we can just make it through, who the fuck knows what we're going to be?
Right.
I mean, there's the whole universe.
One thing I did like about Interstellar was the idea that like our future selves, which have now become integrated in the very fabric of reality.
You know, that's how far you've evolved.
You become the laws of physics, that they're kind of opening up the wormhole for us.
And so, you know, a million years is so long.
And who knows what we can become?
unidentified
I mean, it's just like, you know, don't hold us back.
I had an interesting conversation with Neil deGrasse Tyson about it.
And he said, one of the real problems with debating these people is you elevate their profile and they're never going to believe it in the first place.
And the reality is there's a mental illness involved in a lot of these people.
They're schizophrenics.
There's something wrong with them.
They believe this.
And then there's this massive lack of education and a lack of reading.
They're not interested in understanding how they know that the Earth is round or how they know that every other planet in the solar system is round.
Or how they know that every other planet that we've observed, all the stars, are round.
Why they're round.
Why it's a matter of mass and gravity and all these.
They don't care about all that.
But what they want to think is the government as if it's the government is like one cabal of equally minded people that are all working together to fuck you over somehow by convincing you that the earth is round.
It is one of the dumbest things.
But it's also a sign that we've created this world that's really easy to survive in.
We've nerfed all the hard edges and we keep the wolves off the streets.
And there's so these fucking dumb dumbs and then they get online with computers, which is hilarious.
But, you know, here's what's really messed up is that like, you know, climate change denial is just like a slightly less whackadoodle version of that, right?
Because, you know, there's a guy, writer, philosopher, I forgot his name, Morton, if I got his first name.
But he talks about climate change being a hyper object.
Like, you know, that modern world, we have things that are hyper objects, which means they're just so big that we just, we have a hard time wrapping our minds around them.
And that hyper objects, you know, if we're going to evolve, right, we're going to evolve new behaviors.
One of them is the capacity to deedle with hyper objects.
But people want everything to be simple, you know?
I mean, which cracks me up because like they're fine with this being complex.
You know, their cell phone can be complex because they like to use it.
But like, you know, the idea that like, you know, the climate could change, climate change, they need it.
It freaks them out because it's too complicated or something.
So they go for the simple answer, which is that, you know, it's a conspiracy.
It's a hoax.
I love this one.
The scientists are all doing it for the money.
As if my pay was that good that, you know, I mean.
I really wish, you know, I got nothing against Al Gore, but I wish he did.
I mean, I wish it didn't become the face of climate change because it just pushed.
I mean, if only, you know, Neil deGrasse Tyson or Sagan was still alive or, you know, had done it, it would have been a totally different thing because it wouldn't have happened.
Because if he's investing in these companies and the companies start making money, which like already solar is-solar employs more people now than coal does.
It's like, you know, it's just, but listen, I got to, one thing that you always got to acknowledge is that like this, you know, when you change infrastructures, people are going to get hurt.
You know what I mean?
Like, I mean, for those coal miners, man, that's what they've done their whole life.
It's been an honorable fucking thing.
So you can't just sort of be like, hey, we're switching infrastructures.
See ya.
You know, there's got to be some deep understanding of consequences and helping people who are going to be training how to put up solar panels.
You know, with the automation thing, it's so true, right?
Because, you know, when you think about what's been going on with the last election, you know, and everybody was like, oh, you know, like, you know, what's happened with blue-collar people, you know, workers, which is totally true.
But like, man, it's not China.
It's automation, right?
And that's what's what really is going to screw up the whole nature of work, you know, for everybody from truck drivers, you know, even to me to university professors is we got this, the AI, you know, the automation coming on.
When a university professor is one day going to be retro, that kids are going to want to learn online.
They're going to want to learn through some sort of an interactive course so that you can get on your phone rather than go to an actual physical place.
But I think, and this is going to be the whole question with the new economy, or whatever, whatever happens, whatever we're moving into, is finding those places where, you know what, I don't want a machine.
You know what I mean?
So right now, like, so when the, what is it, the MOOCs came out, the massively online courses, you know, that was like five years ago.
I went like, that's it.
Universities are done.
Everybody's going to take these online courses.
And it never happened, you know, because people want to be together.
They want to learn.
They want the experience of having, you know, part of my students is not just lecturing.
I had one student say, the reviews you get at the end, the guy said, hey, I hate to say this, but you should make those tapes for people to go to sleep because every class, your voice put me to sleep.
I think that I think people will always, with education, there'll be some component of it that, yeah, sure, you can learn it online.
Why don't you?
But I think like, you know, we're going to have to, there'll be a place for like people coming in and like learning in groups and having somebody who like has, you know, spent their whole life studying the thing, telling you, you know, what's going on.
Like there's a lot of things where like, and we've lost a lot of this, mentorship, right?
Or apprenticeship, right?
There's a lot of things you need.
Somebody who spent their whole life going, oh, you know, you crank it this way, not that way, because if you're going to get that way, it'll never work.
You can't learn that from watching a video or something.
Well, you know, once there's no work at all, you know, I mean, they're going to, because like, you know, this is the thing like with self-driving cars, right?
So I ask this question a lot and I've written about this.
Sort of like, okay, everyone's like, we got to have self-driving cars.
We're heading towards self-driving cars.
Like self-driving cars will destroy the last good blue-collar job in America, you know, truck driving, right?
And that's a really good livelihood for a lot of people.
And it's like, oh, we're just going to eliminate it.
It's like, why?
Like, do we have to?
Like, okay, yeah, you're telling me there's going to be...
And, you know, what are the, for the lives that are lost in the driving, I mean, you know, the car crashes, is that going to be worth the social upheaval that comes from not having any work anymore?
So, I mean, just like, there are these huge issues.
Yeah, and I'm asking like the, you know, we're moving so rapidly into this new world, right?
That like, who's deciding for us?
Who's deciding that we want cars?
You know, I mean, we're told that we're going to get it, but like a lot of these things, I think they're, you know, there needs to be a little bit more dialogue with democracy, right?
And having this stuff shoved down our throats and told, like, it's the best thing ever, you know?
Because, you know, if you're, you know, when you do backpacking or something, you're in the backcountry, you know, a couple days, you notice things change and like, oh, the moon's not as quiet as it is.
Like, I thought you have to have a telescope to see all.
No, it's right there.
And you feel like you're flying through space.
And you have this really humble feeling that I think people get in a couple of different places.
People get when they live next to mountains.
They get it when they live next to the ocean.
But you really get it if you could see space.
And I think one of the things that is haunting the human race is the arrogance of humans, which is compounded by the fact that we can't see the cosmos, that we only see what's in front of us.
So this is the world that we live in.
We put a roof over our head.
This is the box.
I got my blinders on.
I'm moving ahead because I want a new Lexus or whatever, you know, whatever it is, whatever material thing you're trying to possess.
When this unstoppable force in front of it, when you look up and you see the cosmos, it's like it's an undeniable reality.
And you go, oh, okay, okay, this is just a small thing.
My existence is just a small thing in this mystery, this giant mystery of what, you know, we just found out 20 years ago, there's planets out there.
I mean, this is a giant mystery.
You're looking up at 100 billion stars in this galaxy alone.
You know, where you're sort of like, you know, and you're right.
You can, you know, we can talk about it, right?
We can talk about, but it's really, it's an experience.
It's an experience that just shows you you're part of this.
It's more than you, but you're here.
And, you know, and I think, right, a lot of the stupidity of the modern age, you know, as you said, the consumerism, particularly, like all that matters to me is getting my next pile of shit.
When you're out there, you realize who cares?
You know, who freaking cares?
Like, you know, for a moment, even you just get the sense of that mystery.
Because, you know, one thing when I think about like, you know, all these other, you know, my argument about all these other civilizations is that, you know, whether or not you make it, maybe that the evolutionary heritage you get, right?
So we evolved from both chimpanzees or the chimpanzee ancestor and the bonobo ancestor.
So we've got like, we fight, we're hierarchy, we're very hierarchical, right?
So, you know, we've got a lot of aggression in this, but we also got the bonobo, kind of like, let's just have sex, everything's cool.
So we're like, we're sort of, we've got this really weird mixed evolutionary baggage.
And whether or not you can make it to the next side with the existential challenge of triggering climate change is kind of like, A, what your evolution, what evolution gave you, you know, because you can imagine species like hive minds, you know, if you came from termite, an intelligent termite species, it might be a lot easier to deal with climate change.
You're like, everybody, you know, get on the, you know, get on the course.
But most essentially is can you evolve new behaviors?
So we've been on this track and it's leading us in a way that, as you said, it's like the shiny thing dangling in front of us is leading us off on this one track.
And the question is, can we evolve new behaviors?
Which actually I'm going to say this.
I think part of it is spiritual, you know, or at least in my atheist way of like reconnecting with mystery to see like, ah, you know, we're part of this and we need to respect it.
Something about being in the mountains is also there's a there's a weird feeling, and I don't know if it's real, but there's a weird feeling that there's no signal out there.
Because in the places where there's no cell signal, there's no, there's a feeling you get when you're absolutely not connected.
And the signal, what you're talking about, the signal, it's really the thing is what for me, it's like when I get far enough back that I know there's just not another human being here.
And this is like when I leave, this exact, this is going to still be happening.
Like it just doesn't give a shit about you.
Right.
And it's just moving along.
And as you said, it's been moving this way for millions of years.
And you just realize, like, and that's why, you know, part of the thing I'm saying with the book is that like, look, if we trigger climate change, that's just the Earth's way of like creating the next set.
You know, it used us to create climate change to now move on to something else.
That's what the Earth does.
It's just this animate power.
And when you're out there, you feel that.
And you, you know, and the thing that I think we need to do is sort of re-establish our connection to that.
We're part of that.
We're from that.
We're not evil.
We're not bad.
We need to reintegrate ourselves in a way that we still get our civilization, but you know, that's what I mean.
So, yes, why spiritual?
Because when we connect to that mystery, then we're in a better place to make the right decisions, to understand what the decisions are.
If not, we're like, oh, we got to save the polar bears.
And we're not looking at, no, no, it's the biosphere as a whole that we have to understand.
Well, operating out of ego and ideology and not out of rational thought with all the information at our disposal and really verifying that information, understanding what's correct and what's not correct, and whether or not there's bias behind it or scientific research that was funded by people that have a vested interest in it leaning one way or the other.
All that stuff is very, very slippery and very dangerous.
And when you find out that studies have been influenced by special interest groups or lobbyists or whatever, and that they, you know, like especially pharmaceutical studies are the creepiest where they can do a series of studies and only one of them shows some sort of a positive impact for whatever weird reason, and that's the one they use.
And they don't have to publish the fact that they ran 100 fucking studies.
That, you know, science, I think the most important thing that people need to understand about science is not so much science's results, but how science works, you know, because it does work, right?
That's why we have all this stuff.
And so they can distinguish.
So I say that science is three things.
It's spitballs, super tankers, and stadiums, right?
You know, the problem with the news, it'll be like, the latest study shows the color red, you know, will make you have better sex.
Well, there's always a problem with diet in that you're not taking into account how nutrients interact with other foods or different foods interact with foods.
I mean, when you say coffee's bad, okay, was it bad when you're smoking cigarettes or bad when you're eating grass-fed meat or bad when you're on a vegan diet?
And who are these people and what are they putting in their system and how much sugar are they taking in and how much sodium and what's the nutrient levels of their blood?
Did you test them for B12 deficiencies and all these different things?
Like that's the real problem with any dietary studies.
Like they don't take into account the extremely varied diet of science.
I mean, so I would tell people that like, you know, when it comes to like health sciences, anything in general about human beings, look, this stuff is really complex.
And as you said, there's a thousand different things that can interact.
So you got to really take that stuff with a grain of salt.
Like, okay, does smoking cause cancer?
Yeah, got that, you know?
But like, yeah, is coffee good or bad?
We just, the studies aren't there yet, you know?
But that's different from climate change or, you know, gravity, you know, or is the earth round?