A catchup with legendary tv space and science broadcaster James Burke. James pioneered television space and science coverage in the UK and later became known in the US and worldwide. He is the great explainer. So what are his thoughts on the "tomorrow's world" that we now live in?...
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| Across the UK, across continental North America, and around the world on the internet, by webcast and by podcast. | |
| My name is Howard Hughes, and this is The Unexplained. | |
| Thank you very much for being part of my show, being part of this worldwide family, and you certainly demonstrated that over this last week. | |
| I will get into that in just a moment. | |
| Looking at the weather outside my window to my left, we've got this sort of milky grey sky, if a grey sky can be milky. | |
| A little touch of blue behind it all. | |
| But the one important thing that's happened in the last few days is we appear to have had the dawning of spring. | |
| So outside my front door, I have got loads, not quite a carpet, but a lot of daffodils, right, outside the block. | |
| And there are many other spring flowers that seem to have appeared almost overnight. | |
| So I think that things are beginning to improve a little early, but nice all the same. | |
| And spring is on the way. | |
| Let's hope it's not all spoiled by a big freeze. | |
| Some of the newspapers love to make headlines by saying, big freeze on the way. | |
| Winter not finished yet. | |
| And half the time, half the time, it's a load of tripe. | |
| As my dad used to say, it's a load of tripe, he'd say. | |
| You know, half the time it is. | |
| But look, I don't know. | |
| We'll see. | |
| Thank you for your emails, your suggestions, your thoughts about the show. | |
| We had a bit of a debate recently, and it's one that we had before, years ago, when the show was quite new. | |
| And I was finding my way and feeling my feet, as they say. | |
| And the debate was about the way that I start the show. | |
| Do I talk with you about what's going on with me, how things are? | |
| Or do I just say, here's a guest, here's a topic, talk to me, guest. | |
| Which I think is, and I've given it a lot of consideration lately, I just think is not a presentation, it's not a show. | |
| That's just content. | |
| And I think we've always been a bit more than content here. | |
| We've been a kind of collective over the years. | |
| Let's not talk too grandly about it. | |
| But, you know, we've been a gathering of people here for one end. | |
| And we've been doing it now, if you've been with me from the beginning, for 18 years next month. | |
| So, you know, maybe we've been doing something right. | |
| I don't know. | |
| You know, I wouldn't even hesitate to suggest. | |
| But I got an email saying people don't want to hear about the weather in London, about stuff that's been going on with you and stuff that's going on in the news and all of that. | |
| So I did a great big sigh and a rethink. | |
| I thought maybe I've got it all wrong. | |
| And I asked you, if you remember, in a recent edition. | |
| And I'd just like to thank a few of the people who replied. | |
| Tina and Michael in Devon. | |
| Gail, thank you for yours. | |
| Kevin in Ireland. | |
| Nita in Missouri. | |
| Wendy in Sydney. | |
| Phil in Michigan. | |
| Adam, Karen, John in Carbondale, Illinois. | |
| Thank you for your UFO thoughts, by the way, John. | |
| Paul, Nick, Dan, Mark in Melbourne, Tuche, John in Oxford, Christopher, Rhiannon and Anthony in Manchester, and many others. | |
| That's just some of them who've given me their thoughts both by email and also on my Facebook page, the official Facebook page of The Unexplained with Howard Hughes. | |
| Not to take up too much time here, but the consensus is, and it's like 100% pretty much, the consensus is you want to keep it like it is. | |
| And I thank you for that because I've been thinking about it and I just don't think I would want to do it if I couldn't put anything personal into it. | |
| Because what is the point? | |
| I remember the great broadcaster Terry Wogan in the UK, an Irish guy who I absolutely revered for his style, said, if you can't give it yourself, what are you doing it for? | |
| And that's the way I've always thought about it. | |
| And I think I'm too long in the tooth now. | |
| I've been around too many years to radically change. | |
| Although I do listen to what people say, you know that. | |
| On a totally separate note, Farhad in Saudi Arabia, Farhad, thank you very much for your points. | |
| And all of those are noted. | |
| I think that's just about it with correspondence. | |
| Please know that I see all emails as they come in and thank you for them. | |
| I watch my inbox grow from the Sunday radio show onwards through the week. | |
| And of course, the podcast here. | |
| Okay, one other thing to talk about here, and it's something that's impacted me very greatly this week, and I'll say this quickly, but it's very important, I think, to a lot of us in the United Kingdom. | |
| A friend of mine died this week. | |
| He wasn't a close friend, but he was a friend. | |
| And I knew him and had dealings with him, had recorded voiceovers for his shows on Radio 1 and Radio 2. | |
| Always a pleasure to go there and do those. | |
| And he always produced those himself. | |
| He didn't get, you know, a flunky or somebody else to do it. | |
| He sat there and he produced those voiceovers himself for his Radio 1 and Radio 2 shows. | |
| I met him last when I went into Radio 2's Wogan house to be part of a judging panel for some radio awards. | |
| Nobody asks me to do that stuff anymore. | |
| I think they think that I've disappeared practically, but I'm still here. | |
| And towards the end of that, somebody said, would you like to go in and see Steve? | |
| Because they knew I knew Steve Wright. | |
| And so they took me into the studio and I had a lovely conversation. | |
| It was the last time I spoke with Steve. | |
| I think it was nine years ago. | |
| And, you know, he was always interested in everyone. | |
| It didn't matter whether you were not famous like him, you know, if you were part of the radio firmament like me. | |
| He had time for everybody. | |
| I can remember going into a Starbucks once, not far from broadcasting house, and in the corner, quietly on his own was Steve, and I went and had a really nice chat with him. | |
| An ordinary guy, a massive talent. | |
| He was funny, incisive, a great disc jockey, and somebody that we're all going to miss, everybody in this business. | |
| I haven't heard a bad word said about this man. | |
| And we lost him earlier this week at the age of 69, tragically and sadly. | |
| And the bottom line about all of it is that Steve Wright was a huge talent, a nice man, and I am going to miss him. | |
| Okay. | |
| Now, this edition of The Unexplained. | |
| I normally, in these circumstances, put a couple of highlights from the radio show on here. | |
| I'm not going to do that this time because I just want you to hear this one item. | |
| It is a little shorter, the interview itself, 26, 27 minutes or so. | |
| But the person I'm speaking to is somebody who's been on this show before. | |
| He is the absolute doyen, If that is the word, of science and space broadcasting, James Burke, a man who did science and space broadcasting for the BBC for a very long time, then went on to have his own successful series. | |
| I think he made quite a following in America. | |
| And James is still around, still doing his stuff. | |
| He's 87 years of age now. | |
| And I wanted recently, let me tell you the story right from the beginning. | |
| I wanted to be able to run past James his thoughts on AI, space exploration, and the state of the world that we live in at the moment. | |
| So I got the chance to do that. | |
| He's currently living in France, and I caught up with him there. | |
| I have a lot of time for James Burke. | |
| I think he is a gifted broadcaster, a really nice man. | |
| He's far better than I will ever be at all of this stuff. | |
| And I wanted you to hear that conversation on this edition of The Unexplained. | |
| Don't forget, my website is theunexplained.tv. | |
| Check that out. | |
| 800 or so podcasts, certainly more than 800 hours of podcasting there. | |
| And also my Facebook page, the official Facebook page of The Unexplained with Howard Hughes. | |
| No more to say in case anybody says you've been talking too long. | |
| So, on this edition of The Unexplained, which will be of necessity slightly shorter, a conversation with a man I regard as a hero, James Burke. | |
| James, thank you very much for doing this. | |
| How are you? | |
| I'm pretty well. | |
| Thank you very much. | |
| Yes. | |
| And James, you know, I was sitting in my comfy chair just an hour or so ago, thinking, okay, second opportunity to speak with James about life, the world and everything. | |
| What would be the first thing that you would ask him? | |
| Well, what would be the first thing I would ask is this. | |
| Why do you think that we don't have James Burke-like shows on television now? | |
| Surely we need more than ever an ambassador through the maelstrom in which we exist. | |
| Why do you think they're not doing them? | |
| Well, for what it's worth, my opinion on that kind of subject is that as technology has made it easier for people to get online, to have laptops and whatever, that run one form or another of online links, connections, more and more, shall we call them, ordinary people as opposed to broadcasters are going online and doing their thing. | |
| And I suppose in general, as an old-fashioned, very old person like me would feel, the general thing is what you'd expect. | |
| The first thing that happens when everybody gets to express themselves is a general lowering of standards because the ship moves at the speed of the slowest engine. | |
| And it'll be a while before we catch that up. | |
| So I think we're in the first stages of moving towards a fully informed, well-educated population. | |
| Problem is, as you say, there is many slip between cup and lip, and we have to go through a lot of disinformation, an awful lot of fog to get to a place where the people are well-informed and not misinformed. | |
| Oh, yeah, you betcha. | |
| I mean, and of course, the trouble is there are lots and lots of people in the world at individual levels and at levels of government who are perfectly happy to have a half-informed populace around them that they can use for whatever purpose they have in mind. | |
| So it isn't going to be, we're not all heading along the same road towards a kind of utopia we all want. | |
| We have institutions that were created like Parliament to work in an environment very different from what it could be now when we can all be sitting on the benches and all have our say and saying, just a moment, Mr. Speaker, I want to say, than just to, you know, take the news from on high. | |
| So we've got a long way to go. | |
| Your series, Connections, made an impact on me, and indeed it was big in America, I know, too. | |
| This was 30 years or so ago now. | |
| But you were there at the forefront of a lot of this, of foreshadowing what is a connected world. | |
| And I wonder if this connected world that we are now stepping into, and I think often find very hard to understand, if this world of AI chat bots, which I read this week, were given scenarios to deal with some of the world's problems and ended up being trigger happy in many cases, which is very, very worrying since we cede more and more autonomy to these things. | |
| And, you know, this world of chips in people's brains and all the rest of it. | |
| I wonder if this is a good place, if this is a place that is becoming difficult for ordinary people, and I count myself among those number to handle. | |
| Well, the problem with AI is that it's the first major problem we have had to handle in society since we came out of the caves, because it makes very likely radical change to every aspect of society right from the top to bottom and fast change because artificial intelligence won't wait until everybody's read the paper or everybody's taken the vote or everybody's seen the thing before making a decision | |
| about it. | |
| AI will make a decision in a split second because that's all it will take. | |
| And we will have to live with the results if we have set up artificial intelligence to do such a thing. | |
| So I think we're in for a rocky ride because I think the best we can hope is that artificial intelligence will take away all the, as it were, what we used to call the dirty work. | |
| There's a lot of rubbish talked about the fact that artificial intelligence will supplant us on the planet. | |
| I think it should be said, I think we should think more about exactly which way we want artificial intelligence to work and program it in such a way. | |
| Mind you, of course, one of the ways you program the thing to make it work as fast and as completely and as efficiently as you want is to let it have access to stuff that will then make it possible to have it fast, efficient, and intrusive or changing life beyond simply what that artificial intelligence machine does at that particular time. | |
| This is why I think we have a rocky ride ahead because artificial intelligence, I think, could be the device that does away with every job on the planet. | |
| And, you know, that sounds great, but nobody will need to have a job. | |
| Nobody will need to work. | |
| Nobody will need to have qualifications to do things that the artificial intelligence machines will Do far better and faster. | |
| Well, if they don't need to do those things, what do they need to do? | |
| Do they need to do anything? | |
| And what do you do in a world where people don't need to do anything? | |
| When people are no longer a doctor or a nurse or a teacher or an aeroplane mechanic, and you no longer say to people, what are you? | |
| You say, who are you? | |
| We've never said, who are you, as far as I know, in the existence of the human race. | |
| We've always said, what are you? | |
| Maybe the first time somebody said, what are you? | |
| And the guy said, I grow food, you know, back 25,000 years ago. | |
| When that question can no longer be asked, what question will be asked? | |
| And that's something I think we should be addressing rapidly, like now. | |
| But we're not, are we? | |
| No, we're not, because I suppose, I'm going to sound terrible to say this, but I suppose the kinds of people asking these questions are the kinds of people who are in a very small minority, people who are well educated. | |
| And of course, I mean planet-wide, not England or America or whatever. | |
| If I had to say how do we prepare as fast as possible for the questions that we need to be, we need to get answers for, I'd say it's almost too late, but we should start with an accelerated rate of pulling people into education and making sure that any spare money we've got goes into producing the kinds of teachers that can give people this kind of education. | |
| Because far worse than being told by artificial intelligence, we need to do this and saying, okay, I understand, is the 90-something percent of the population which will say, no, I don't understand, but will still have to put up with what's happening, what's being done. | |
| So the faster we can get general education out of the population is part of the answer. | |
| And I'm not sure we have enough time. | |
| Is the ultimate risk that we may become surplus to requirements? | |
| There will be no need for us. | |
| Well, it depends what you mean when you say need. | |
| I think one of the major things that will happen is a real redefinition of what it is that gives us a purpose in life. | |
| Up until now, you know, you went to a good school. | |
| You know, I went to a school founded in 1492, for heaven's sake. | |
| You know, and their job ever since has been to give several hundred boys a particular kind of preparation for the world. | |
| Now, that still leaves millions who are not getting that preparation. | |
| And as I say, I'm not sure how we're going to be able to do it in time. | |
| Surplus to requirement, again, it depends what requirement is. | |
| If requirement is to provide a planet which has, thanks to the work of a small percentage of the population, all the food, energy, opportunity, entertainment, all the things that human beings like, artificial intelligence will provide that tomorrow, almost. | |
| So I'm not sure about And materially speaking, we'll get that from artificial intelligence. | |
| What we might not get will be what we would now call the work of the imagination. | |
| And it's easy to say, oh, imagination, ha, you know, plays, storytelling, music, blah, blah. | |
| There are many, many kinds of imagination at work in everyday life at present. | |
| They come out of human brains, and it can be anything from, you know, the smallest example to a major opera or a major play. | |
| Now, you can do that. | |
| If you're an artificial machine, you can say, this is how they're all made. | |
| They all have to have these things and those things and those things. | |
| And if you're in G minor, you can only go from G minor to some other key in that particular tune. | |
| And I can reproduce that as human beings have. | |
| But I wonder, I have to say this because I'm a human being. | |
| I believe that the 100 billion neurons in the human brain, all working at once, and not necessarily any better or faster than the artificial intelligence structures that we will make, but that there will be the potential alternatives so large, there'll still be quite a lot of things that we human brains can do, but artificial intelligence simply hasn't got around to doing because it's doing everything else. | |
| So I have to hope that the human brain has nooks and crannies from which creative thought, creative activity, creative enjoyment will come. | |
| But it won't bother anymore with boring ordinary things like being a doctor or producing food or anything in the physical world. | |
| Well, that has got to be the hope, I think, James. | |
| Do you think, and I often feel this way, but then I'm getting older, that things are moving too fast for us to assimilate. | |
| There are too many developments. | |
| There are too many changes in technology for the ordinary person, and I know you talked about education, for the ordinary person to be able to understand or grip. | |
| I think it's a temporary phenomenon. | |
| I mean, I think what's happened, and you could have expected it going back and looking carefully at how things went. | |
| I think the development above all of the computer has meant that the discovery, new discoveries and the application of new discoveries has moving faster now than it did 50 years ago. | |
| If I were to say to you than 100 years ago, you'd say, yeah, yeah, of course. | |
| But not many people realize how much has happened in the last 50 years. | |
| In terms of changing life, I suppose I'd risk saying in the last 50 years, the last 50 years has produced more life-changing material than the last three or 400 years. | |
| If you look at various aspects of what technology has brought to us. | |
| Whether or not that's too fast, yes, but it's too late to argue about it. | |
| You have to say, yes, it's too fast. | |
| Now, how do we deal with it? | |
| And how we deal with it is, I suppose, to use the same technology. | |
| In the end, artificial intelligence. | |
| I mean, I think artificial intelligence is going to move on such a large scale, so fast, so immediately, that the biggest problems we can possibly think of at the moment will be soluble in a very short period of time. | |
| So we may not move fast enough to keep up with the change, but it will. | |
| Is the answer to that problem, and I promise to move off technology and move to something else in a moment, but is the answer to that problem that which is being developed by Elon Musk and others, the Chinese and the French as well, are looking at these things. | |
| That is putting things in our brains that initially will help people who have disabilities, for example, which is good, to be able to handle their world better, but ultimately to enhance us as human beings. | |
| Is that the answer? | |
| Do we keep up with the Joneses by having ourselves enhanced? | |
| I think this is an extremely questionable field of endeavor. | |
| I mean, if I had to say off the top of my head in one sentence, how would you do such a thing, I'd say you turn to artificial intelligence and ask it what to do. | |
| I think the problem of doing anything to a human brain is so complex. | |
| If you think about it, you know, 100 billion neurons, each one of which linked to other neurons by as many as 25,000 dendrites. | |
| Somebody wrote the other day that there's something like 1,000 billion ways of moving data around the brain. | |
| Now, even for artificial intelligence, that sized brain times the millions of brains there are to deal with is a daunting task. | |
| So I think with all due respect to Mr. Musk and others like him, you know, sticking something in a bit of your brain is like saying, I'm going to go to China. | |
| I don't know how to get there, but I'll take one step in this direction and you head north. | |
| How do you know you're heading north? | |
| You don't. | |
| So I'm not sure it's as easy as it looks. | |
| A few weeks ago, a friend of mine at work, actually, it's now a few months ago, came up to me with his phone, very excited. | |
| And he said, Howard, have you seen this? | |
| Now, he did not know that I was making plans to speak with you again. | |
| And he showed me the clip of you recorded in those days on film doing a perfectly timed introduction, as it turned out to be, to the launch of a space rocket, an Apollo, I think it was, in those days. | |
| And you were basically talking about the process of making that form of combustion. | |
| And you said, if you combine these elements in these proportions in this way, you get this. | |
| And you pointed, and behind you, a long way away, an actual launch happened. | |
| For me, that is the greatest moment in television history. | |
| People may differ on that. | |
| But this young guy, significantly younger than either of us, James, thought that it was the most amazing thing that he had ever seen. | |
| It seems to me that those were the days when talking about space and exploring space was perhaps much more exciting than now. | |
| What do you think? | |
| Well, yes, of course, it was, in the sense that the only way anybody had ever dealt with space until then wasn't really very different from Jules Verne and his pals. | |
| It was on a printed page. | |
| It was stories of, it was science fiction, blah, blah. | |
| We'd look up at the moon and we'd say, look, there's the moon up there. | |
| And in my lifetime, I remember the night I looked up at the moon and said, there's somebody on it. | |
| And it was the most fundamentally changing experience in my life, and I'm sure in everybody's life. | |
| The great thing about untameable human brains is that, you know, you say, they are, gotcha. | |
| And the brain says, you have so far, but try this bit. | |
| And then it shows you this vast landscape of what it's already thought of that you hadn't thought of. | |
| So the human brain has this great potential. | |
| And I think already more than 10 years ago, the exciting thing about going to the moon was going beyond it. | |
| Now, whether or not we were ever going to do that, could we afford to do that? | |
| Was there a political will to do that? | |
| Was there a need in terms of war to do it? | |
| Or did we rather, would we rather have spent the money on down-to-earth stuff? | |
| As it happens, I think, turns out there wasn't enough money at the time. | |
| And I remember at NASA, 1971, 1972, just after the last one went to the moon, a group of people had a meeting at which it was said, you know, what a great pity we all know we could, but we won't be able to because there are too many other problems to deal with on the planet. | |
| So I think people are still aware of the potential of going out there. | |
| But in the meantime, of course, we have built telescopes that show us that going out there is immensely further than we thought, well, might have thought. | |
| And that, you know, getting on a rocket and heading out towards whatever else is not there technologically. | |
| Even I mean, you know, the size of using the technology we've got, the size of rocket you would need to take you that far and bring you back again is can't be made, but you know how to do it. | |
| So it's always going to be a mystery. | |
| Well, you know, here we are. | |
| It's nice living with a mystery sometimes. | |
| It is lovely living with a mystery in some circumstances, James. | |
| Do you think we will ever colonize space? | |
| A lot of people still talk about it. | |
| And should we? | |
| Human beings on another, what, in another solar system? | |
| Well, as I've just said. | |
| Perhaps on, you know, the moon to begin with, Mars, beyond that. | |
| The trouble is each step has to have a bloody good reason for doing it because it's going to cost the Earth. | |
| I didn't mean that as a planetary joke. | |
| I think it's most likely that what we'll do is send probes out into beyond the solar system to places where we think there are planets where we think there might be life and send these probes with some form of artificial intelligence on board to, if possible, contact and get in touch with whatever life forms there are there and report back. | |
| And I think that's the most we can hope in certainly in my, in your lifetime, maybe in the next 50 years. | |
| But I think it's going to happen because to return to our favorite subject, artificial intelligence will make it cheap enough to do. | |
| Because instead of sending an extremely expensive human being with life support systems and blah, blah, blah, and an extremely big engine and tons of, we won't be able to send the engine and fuel anyway. | |
| But it's just the only feasible way of doing it, I think. | |
| And I think it's possible that we could send a probe over the next 50 years with artificial intelligence on board. | |
| I probably asked you this question eight years ago or whenever it was when we last had a sit-down conversation. | |
| Do you think there is life in space, perhaps? | |
| Intelligent life? | |
| In the universe? | |
| Yeah. | |
| Of course. | |
| Of course, that the universe should have structured itself from nothing for so many millions and billions of years to produce only us. | |
| It can't be so. | |
| There has to be the length of time the universe has existed, the length of time we have existed, the level of intelligence we've reached in the brief period of our existence compared with the life of the universe, means there has to be a ton of intelligence out there. | |
| It's just a big place, a very big place. | |
| We just have to hope that they don't come looking for us. | |
| I don't think things will come physically. | |
| I mean, probes will be sent. | |
| What about UFOs? | |
| There are people who say the probes have been sent already. | |
| No, I don't think so. | |
| But then what can I say? | |
| I can only say, no, I think probes are people out of people's imaginations rather than anything else. | |
| We're a tiny speck in the middle of one corner of the universe, so small as to be almost insignificantly invisible. | |
| Why would we cross the earth to take a close look of at and maybe try to speak to a sand flea on the shores of New Guinea? | |
| We don't. | |
| And what about, I don't know whether you have seen all of the reports or kept up with all of the reports. | |
| I suspect you probably have. | |
| This business of so-called disclosure that we seem to be either edging away from or edging towards, depending on who you talk to. | |
| What do you think of this move towards getting the American government to reveal what it is claimed they know about alien technology and perhaps visitations from those from beyond this planet? | |
| Just a thought about what you make of those reports when you see them. | |
| This is not a very good word for your program, but I'd say crap. | |
| So you think we're not going there? | |
| We're not going to get that information because it isn't there to be got. | |
| Well, I mean, you know, for those kinds of things to come to this planet, to investigate whatever it is they might want to investigate or make contact in whatever way they might want to contact, what on earth would make them choose America, or indeed any particular country, on this small speck of dirt in the middle of nowhere? | |
| The answer to that isn't, well, Americans have the technology because they're not the only ones who do have the technology. | |
| The suggestion that you've expressed is, that others have expressed, is that somehow Americans have been chosen. | |
| Well, you know, that's absurd. | |
| Of all of the many people you've spoken with and met in your fabulous career that most of us can only dream about, who was the most interesting? | |
| Who was the one who left you in a situation where you had to go away, have a cup of coffee and think about what you just discussed? | |
| All of them. | |
| Wow. | |
| I say all of them because I can't tell you which one. | |
| The incredible thing about human beings is, as I said earlier, the human brain has 100 billion neurons in it and it produces stuff every split second. | |
| Sometimes it's an expression that a botanist might use to describe a flower or an astrophysicist might choose to describe why a rocket escapes gravity or why a newborn baby makes its mother very happy. | |
| I mean, there are literally millions of expressions by the human race, any one of which is worth me, in answer to your question, me sitting down, having a cup of coffee and thinking about. | |
| Fantastic answer, James, if I may say so. | |
| I don't know, did you see the book that was released? | |
| I was lucky enough to interview the man who put it together, Andy Saunders is his name, a book of photos from the Apollo missions, many of these photos unseen, all of them cleaned up and remastered and published in great format. | |
| And even if you didn't see the book, I guess the question from that, and I do have a copy of the book, it is truly amazing. | |
| It's a huge, great, heavy coffee table thing. | |
| What I think shouted out from that book to all of us is that the exploration of space in the era that you knew and covered, the Apollo era mainly, was a dirty, sweaty, tense, and ultimately exciting thing. | |
| It was a very gritty phenomenon. | |
| Gritty in what sense? | |
| Well, gritty in that we tend to think of surgically clean control rooms and that kind of stuff. | |
| Those guys who went down onto the surface of the moon got covered in filth, had to somehow sleep standing up. | |
| It was not a picnic. | |
| No, sorry, yes. | |
| I understand what you mean. | |
| In private, that's what they talked about. | |
| One of them said to me, the only interesting thing about going to the moon were the minutes and seconds on the flight plan and seeing if you could keep up with them. | |
| Everything else took second place. | |
| And you didn't think about standing up or how you went to the loo or how you slept or if you slept or how it wasn't too much dirtiness because you wore gloves. | |
| But most of the unpleasant stuff that they had to deal with was really, you know, ignored by them because of the minutes and seconds on the flight plan that they had to deal with. | |
| And every so often you needed a little piece of genius, like using the tip of a ballpoint pen, I think it was, to fire a starter on the lunar module. | |
| Every so often you needed the tiniest little bit of human genius. | |
| And to bring us back to the beginning of this conversation, James, I don't think artificial intelligence will ever be able to come up with something like that. | |
| I'm with you, but then we're both human, you see, so we're bound to say that. | |
| Last question. | |
| Looking forward, I mean, both of us wish we could, well, I think we might wish. | |
| Maybe there's a thought in our minds also that perhaps not. | |
| Perhaps, you know, we've seen and done plenty, thank you. | |
| But if we could live another hundred years and see into the future, what would be the most exciting prospect of that future? | |
| Leaving behind all of the possible dystopian possibilities, what could the best outcome for us all be? | |
| Making contact with the first civilization other than ours in the universe. | |
| And as for James Burke in 2024, are you continuing to work in this field or do you observe and report mostly? | |
| No, I observe and report. | |
| I've just finished a series and I'm hoping to start one actually on artificial intelligence and I've got another book to write. | |
| So I'll just potter along in my corner. | |
| What's the series, James? | |
| It's about scarcity and the meaning of it and what it does. | |
| Once again, that is putting your finger right on the button, I think, because if you look around the world now more than ever, for all time, really, the greatest issue of all is scarcity. | |
| If you look at the way nations are configured, the problems that we have, the wars that we declare, it's about who has and gets what. | |
| Yes, that's right. | |
| It's about really what it'll be like to have a global community instead of a community of hundreds of little groups of people attacking each other. | |
| Do you think we'll ever get to that? | |
| Oh, sooner or later, of course. | |
| We don't wear animal skins and we can write, you know, so we've done quite well in 25,000 years. | |
| So we'll do better. | |
| Well, on a personal note, thank you very much for my Thursday evenings when I was a little school kid, James, because Thursday evenings, no, no, Thursday evenings were tomorrow, as you will remember. | |
| Thursday evenings on BBC One were Tomorrow's World. | |
| Tomorrow's World, yes, Josh, that's going back. | |
| Top of the pops so we could see who's in the chart. | |
| And the Burke Special. | |
| If they'd let me stay up late enough for the Burke Special, where you would simply talk cool topics to an audience of interested ordinary people. | |
| That was proper TV, James. | |
| We hope. | |
| Thank you very much for speaking with me again. | |
| Thank you very much, Howard. | |
| Thank you. | |
| The utterly incomparable James Burke and what interesting thoughts on this world that man had. | |
| What a privilege to speak with him and my thanks to him. | |
| More great guests in the pipeline here at the home of the Unexplained Online. | |
| So until we meet again, my name is Howard Hughes. | |
| This has been The Unexplained Online. | |
| Please, whatever you do, wherever you are, stay safe, stay calm, and please stay in touch. | |
| Thank you very much. | |
| Take care. |