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#373 - NASA Physicist Comes Clean on Advanced Ancient Civilizations | Adam Frank
02:53:59
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- [00:00]
A
Foreign. Adam Frank, thanks for coming, man.
- [00:09]
B
It's a pleasure.
- [00:10]
A
Is it true you are one of the first scientists to get a grant from NASA to look for aliens?
- [00:16]
B
Look for. Not for aliens, but for intelligent civilization. Signs of intelligent life.
- [00:22]
A
Signs of intelligent life, yeah.
- [00:24]
B
Because there's the whole history of seti, right? So seti, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence is old, right? Goes back to the SETI. 1960s really was. First searches were done then and you know, it kind of, it was always marginalized. Right. You know, there were scientists who were doing it, but it was never very well funded. So we can talk about like things like the Fermi paradox, why there is no Fermi paradox, but we can get to that. But just that SETI was never really well funded. And then it really. There was a, a couple of congressmen in the 80s and 90s who really were like, we're not going to fund this stuff. And they just kept, they basically said to NASA, you can't fund any of this. Like if, you know, you'll just get bur if you do. And then. But by 1995, we discovered our first planet orbiting another star. So that was a big deal. Like that was when that was the first exoplanet. We discovered exoplanet 95. So when I was coming up in graduate school in the late 80s, if you asked me if there were any other planets, I'd be like, don't know. We could, you know, so our solar system could be the only one. Right. So 95, we discovered the first exoplanets. So the field of astrobiology, of thinking about life in space sort of starts, really starts in earnest. Then NASA starts putting money into it. But there was always this thing of like, sure, we'll study dumb life, like microbes, we'll go to Mars and we'll look for microbes and stuff and we can talk about that. But still, if you wanted to look for intelligent life, there was still kind of a bias at NASA. They literally, in some of the language like, oh, you want to apply for a grant, you can look for life, but don't look for, you know, intelligent life. And then there was this famous meeting in 2018 that where somebody in Congress said, oh, we need $10 million. NASA should have $10 million program for techno signatures, which is the new word for seti. Searching for signatures of technology.
- [02:07]
A
Interesting.
- [02:08]
B
And that was when sort of like NASA was like, oh, okay. So they brought a bunch of us together, people who were kind of interested and it was amazing. Three day meeting. And from that. Cause some colleagues and I put in a grant that was explicit. Like, yeah, we're looking for. We want to think about. We weren't even going to look yet. We were going to think about how to think about actually looking for techno signatures rather than just bio signatures. And that was the first grant. We got it funded in 2019 and we're still going.
- [02:34]
A
Well, that's interesting. And they said that in 2018 because wasn't it 2017 that the new York Times came out with that article about the UFOs?
- [02:42]
B
Yeah, but these were pretty disconnected. Like this was, you know, I mean, you know, the UAP and you. The UAP stuff and the techno signature stuff are very disconnected. And so we can talk about that, right? What we're. The techno signatures are using telescopes, right? Using like high powered telescopes to look at other planets or, you know, I mean, especially when we're doing technosignatures. Biosignatures. We'll do biosignatures in the solar system, right? We'll look for biosignatures by going to Mars, looking on the, the, the ocean moons of, of the big planets. We don't really think there's technosignatures in the solar system, but for people who are, you know, in our solar system. In our solar system. But there's people and I'm one of them. Yeah, we've done some work on this and I can tell you about it. But in general, you know, the UFO and UAP stuff is very disconnected from the techno signature work. And I can tell you in general why. Like, you know, but, you know, I mean there, you know, one could ask, one could ask how one could look at UAPs and UFOs scientifically. But in general, the data, and I'm sure we're going to get into this is just not even close to even. There's nothing to do scientifically in general with the data that we have.
- [03:48]
A
Sure, that makes sense. It's just definitely. It's an interesting coincidence.
- [03:52]
B
I think the coincidence goes back actually in the other way. So what is happening? So in 1995 we discover our first planet orbiting another, another star, which was huge revolution, right? Because we just didn't know whether or not this question about whether or not there are other planets orbiting other stars goes back to the Greeks, right? You can see like Aristotle and Democritus beating each other up over it. So it's an old ancient question. Giordano Bruno in 1600 gets burned at the stake in some reason, in some way. I mean, it's a little you know, it's not quite true, but it's, you know, he was advocating for there being other planets orbiting other stars. Right. Now, this was before anybody had any data, but, you know, that was a heresy in those days. So this is an old question. So 1995, we discover proof positive that there's another planet orbiting another star. Slowly then, 1995, 96, we start accumulating data about other. We start building a census of other planets. By 2005, we now we're getting the data that, like, every star has planets orbiting it. Right. So, and then you start seeing in the news, like, oh, scientists find an Earth twin, you know, meaning like a planet like the same size as Earth. So, like, all of this data about, about other planets is coming out other, you know, which is far away, you know, light years away. And I think it kind of was the other way around. People were, you know, the, the people were getting used to hearing about other planets, that they exist, some of them may be Earth, like. And I think that set the stage in some sense for UFOs and UAPs to become a little bit more acceptable to be talked about. People were thinking about life in the universe in a way that they hadn't in, you know, 1990.
- [05:36]
A
Sure. Now, one of your biggest theories is this, the Silurian Hypothesis. Right. And this is the idea that human beings weren't the first industrial civilization.
- [05:47]
B
Well, I wouldn't put it that way. What we did in the paper, Right, So that we asked the question. Right, so that the Silurian Hypothesis was a paper that I wrote with Gavin Schmidt, who's the head of the Goddard Institute for Space Studies, which is a big climate facility in New York City. And what we were asking in that paper was, how would you know, how would you know whether or not could you tell if there was a technological civilization, you know, 100 million years ago, you know, the dinosaurs got wiped. Got wiped out 65 million years ago. How could you tell whether or not the dinosaurs had it? You know, like there were dinosaur cities. So we weren't saying it. There were. In general, I don't think there's any. Well, in general, I would be very skeptical if anybody told me there was a civilization before. But, you know, the cool thing about this question was, and this is pure science, how could you tell?
- [06:37]
A
Right, right.
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B
What evidence would there be?
- [06:38]
A
Right. And there's no toasters in the desert.
- [06:40]
B
Right. And so this, actually, this, this whole paper came about because I had gone down to New York to meet with Gavin, who I knew, and I was writing papers on what I called the astrobiology of the Anthropocene, which meant, you know, the Earth's climate is changing. And I'm sure there's people right now, as soon as I said that are like typing way. Oh, my God. You know, and so if we should.
- [07:01]
A
Controversial topic.
- [07:02]
B
Yeah. Which it shouldn't be. Right. Because there's, you know, I mean, there's the reason. Well, let's, let's put you. As we go there. We'll put a pin. We'll put a pin back to it. But this was my thing, you know, I mean, our understanding of climate change comes from our understanding of planets. Right? Planets have climate. That's what's just basically the average weather patterns. And we've been studying climate for long enough that we have a deep understanding of how life and planets and climate fit together. We have 4.2 billion years of Earth's history to read off how planets and climate. So I was, I. My hypothesis, this is. So there's a hypothesis that comes before the Silurian hypothesis. My hypothesis is like, you know what? Climate change is just something that any technological civilization goes through. It's kind of like you should expect it. Right? So the idea being that if you are building a, you know, powerful civilization that harvests energy from the planet, which is what we're doing, and we're harvesting it from fossil fuels from previous. That you're going to have an impact, right? You know, the planets, you can't. You can't use all that much energy and not have it affect the planet. So I was saying, like, any technological civilization that reaches a certain level of sophistication is going to push back on their. On their planet. They're going to go through a period of climate change. So that was the idea I came to Gavin with. And I wanted like, hey, man, you're a climate scientist. Let me, you know, let's talk about this, this crazy idea that alien civilizations would trigger climate change. And I started, like, to describe this to him, and before I could even like, get two sentences out of my mouth, because I was. And I said to him, I said, you know. Cause we know there's been no technological civilizations on Earth beforehand. Because I was gonna go into this whole thing about alien civilizations, and he was like, how do you know that? And I was like. And he, you know, so he outwearded me. I thought I was coming in with the weirdest idea ever. And he outweireded me in five minutes.
- [08:50]
A
I love when that happens.
- [08:52]
B
Because he wasn't saying that there were technological civilizations. He was just saying, and then this, what's the beauty and power of science? There's the question, how would you know? You know, everybody can have an opinion. Opinions are, you know, you know, what is it like? Opinions are like assholes, everybody's got one, Nobody thinks there stinks. You know, opinions are a dime in a dozen. But you know, science is about finding a way to get a hold a handle on any answering the question, right? So his question was, how would you know, forget about the debates about like Atlantis and everything. How would you know? Especially once you go back more than. Because his point was once you go back more than say about 2 million years, the Earth's surface has mainly resurfaced. You know, the Earth's surface, it's not the, you know, it's regenerated. It's regenerated because of plate tectonics, right? The Earth's surface, the plates, the continental plates are constantly being dragged down into the, the, you know, the deeper layers of the earth where they melt and then new stuff at new continental plates or new Earth surfaces born in the mid ocean ridges, right? So that means it's kind of like a conveyor belt. The continents are constantly getting dragged down. Like you know, the California, Hawaii, not Hawaii, Japan. That's where there's all the earthquakes and volcanoes are and then new land comes up. So after about 2,5 million years, there is no record of, you know, you're not going to find any subway stations, right? And so if you start going back 10 million years, 100 million years, like really now, the planet has changed so dramatically that all you've got are fossils. And in general the fossil record sucks, right? Most things do not get fossilized, right? Okay, so like our fossil record, it's great. We've been able to use it to, you know, think about dinosaurs and everything. But like some giant fraction of all the living things out there have net did not get fossilized. So especially if you have a civilization that lasts say 10,000 years, which for us would be a long time, right? Our human technological civilization has been around for maybe what, like 200 if we're lucky. What Gavin wanted to ask was if there was like a dinosaur civilization that lasted 10,000 years. Nothing's going to get fossilized. It's just too short. You know, the odds of, you know, every year, you know, you have odds, there's some odds of some of your stuff getting fossilized and it's pretty low, right? So if you only last for 10,000 years, that's not long enough to have lots of fossils from, you know, whatever kind of species you are.
- [11:17]
A
Right.
- [11:17]
B
So what it means is that there would be no record of a, you know, no fossil record of a civilization that lasted 10,000 years. So it's like we're blowing.
- [11:26]
A
That lasted 10,000 or less.
- [11:27]
B
Or less, yeah. 10,000. It could be 100,000. It's very, you know, nobody.
- [11:31]
A
How long would it have to last to have a good amount of fossils?
- [11:33]
B
Millions, Millions of years. Right. In general, the dinosaur species were, you know, we're talking about species that were around for a million or more years. You know, a civilization that lasts. This is one of the interesting things about the work I do with techno signatures, we are forced to really think about, you know, civilizations and planets and their long term evolution. Human technological civilization is, you know, the, is about 200 years old. I mean, you know, obviously we go back, there's, you know, 10th. We go back human civilization. If you mean farming and shit, 10,000 years, right. You know, the, to the ice age, everything.
- [12:08]
A
Right.
- [12:08]
B
All modern civilizations come out of the, the advent of farming after the glaciers, last glaciers melted. So but you know, the technological part, like having radios and stuff or even trains, you know.
- [12:21]
A
Right.
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B
Is only 200 years old. Industrialization.
- [12:25]
A
Right.
- [12:25]
B
200 years. So what happens to a civilization if, you know, or are there that last. Can you get a civilization that's a million years old? Right. Can you get a civilization that's 10,000 years old? Kind of hard to imagine having a continuous one civilization that holds itself together, continues to progress technologically. I don't know. Right. So 10,000 years would be a long time. Based on what we know, 10,000 years would be a long time. So the Silurian hypothesis, what we were really asking was, would there be a way to tell if there was a civilization like ours that lasted for, say, 10,000 years? That was the number we chose because it was just a good kind of not too short, not too long. And Gavin, being a very skilled Earth scientist, what he was able to do was sort of look through and see the only way you'd be able to tell was from the strata, the rock strata, the chemical composition of the rock strata. Because, you know, if there was a technological civilization and it was dumping a lot of, you know, even like, say, carbon dioxide, like what we're doing into the atmosphere. You would see that in the, the rock strata. The rock strata would have like these chemical, what's called isotopes, which are, you know, they're like, you know, carbon, but with one extra neutron in them. So you'd be able to see that in the strata.
- [13:45]
A
So if you do that with ice cores too, right?
- [13:47]
B
Yeah, yeah, but ice cores only go back the, you know, ice cores, I think the maximum they go back is about a hundred thousand years. Okay, so if you want millions of years, you need roc. Got it. You know, so you got to go, you know, you go to the Grand Canyon, see all those layers going down that, those layers are, you're talking millions of years all the way down. So you'd have to go down to find, you know, the layers from 50 million years ago, break it up, put it into a chemical laboratory, do all the work you'd have to do. But what, what Gavin showed is like, yeah, you would see for the kind of industrial activity that we think of as being associated with, with, with, with. Yeah, high tech civilizations, you might see like increases in like carbon 13, you know, or certain oxygen isotopes.
- [14:30]
A
Right.
- [14:31]
B
That might be a marker and that might be the marker that we leave. Like if we, if we only last for another 200, 300 years and we disappear, another civilization, you know, 20 million years from now, might or aliens land 20 million years from now and wanted to know whether or not we were here. That's what they would have to use.
- [14:49]
A
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- [16:28]
B
Yeah, that's kind of hard to imagine just because like we know there's, there's four forces in the universe, right? There's, there's gravity, electromagnetism, the strong nuclear force and the weak nuclear force, right. So gravity is holding our butts to the, you know, to the, the, the chairs here. Electromagnetism is light, something is.
- [16:45]
A
We just call it gravity, right. It's just a, it's just a theory.
- [16:49]
B
We know it pretty well. Like, you know, there's Einstein, Einstein's general relativity is a description of gravity as the, as the warping of space time, right. It's a beautiful theory. Like the mathematics of it is just gorgeous. And you know, we can predict the timing of pulsar. It's like two pulsars orbiting each other. So that is a very well validated theory. You know, when we talk about theories and this is going to be probably important for as we're going on in science, there's two kinds of ways that the word theory gets used, right? There's like when I write a scientific paper, I write a paper about like so, right. I'm just working on a paper right now that is about how, you know, specifically how plants, as they evolve, you know, how they changed the earth's evolution, right. How they changed the chemical, the climate and such as when the first plants were. That is a theory with a little T, right. It's my little thing I've worked out, right. It's like when you ever play Clue, you know the game Clue, right? So there's like, you know, in the kitchen with Mr. Colonel Mustard and the broom handle, you know, that's a theory with a little table. Sure. But then there's like the theory of electromagnetism, you know, which is like 10,000 experiments. No, not even that. 100,000 experiments, 100,000 scientific papers done. You know, it's coming. You've got, it's been validated so many times. It's a theory with a capital T. If you do an experiment, lots of
- [18:07]
A
legs to hold it.
- [18:07]
B
Lots of legs. That's really what, you know, it's not a house of cards. It's a mountain of boulders where you could, like, let's say you found some particular paper written about electromagnetism or gravity, Einstein's gravity. And it's like, oh, this seems to contradict it. You know, it may be like, oh, maybe you're even right. So you've pulled one boulder out, but the mountain's still there. Like, you know, the mountain's gonna adjust itself a little bit, but the mountain ain't going anywhere because it's been tested so many times. You can't have just one paper that says electromagnetism is wrong. And everybody's gonna be like, oh, shit, electromagnetism is wrong. It's just too, there's too much support. And we built. Everything on it. We built. So for example, let's say General Einstein's theory of general relativity. So let's pull out my favorite tool for exposition. My cell phone. Right. So when you use your gps, right. If you did not take into account Einstein's general theory of relativity. Right. Because you have to. Because this thing, you know, there's gps, uses all these satellites that are orbiting the Earth and there are corrections, you know, they're sending signals back and forth and that's how you're, they're triangulating to figure out where exactly you are when you open up the map and go, hey, man, I got to go to Costco to get, you know, some, some eggs. If you didn't take into account Einstein's general theory of relativity, which explains gravity as the, you know, the four dimensional warping of space time within like 10 minutes, it would show you that rather than being in Florida, you were like, you know, 100, about 100 meters over Cleveland. You know, you have to take that into account.
- [19:29]
A
Yeah.
- [19:30]
B
Or you'd get the answer wrong. So that's, I mean, so Einstein's theory of relative general theory of relativity, which explains gravity, is a theory with a capital table. Electromagnetism is a theory with a capital T. Evolution is a theory with a capital T. You know, you're going to have to do a lot of work.
- [19:46]
A
Yes.
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B
To dislodge it.
- [19:47]
A
Totally.
- [19:47]
B
Yeah. So getting back to what we're saying, there's four forces that we know of.
- [19:51]
A
What I was, what I was getting at, though, I didn't necessarily mean like a, like a whole new physical universe. I meant like, like a different way or a different form of technology to manipulate it. Like a different way to, to manipulate gravity without rocket propulsion or something like that.
- [20:05]
B
Right, right, right. Yeah. And there are ideas along those lines. You require like, you know, it's not clear that would work like, require. It would require like, you know, black holes worth of energy to be able to do something like. But I, but I get your point. Right. So could they have some other kinds of technologies?
- [20:20]
A
Maybe different elements they brought from somewhere else or who knows?
- [20:23]
B
Yeah, well, elements like. Again, all this. Like what other elements? Like, we know all the elements that there are. Right. Because, you know.
- [20:28]
A
Have you ever heard of Townsend Brown?
- [20:30]
B
No.
- [20:31]
A
So Townsend Brown came up with the Byfield Brown effect. Is the Byfield Brown effect. And he. Townsend Brown was a physicist that was working during the Cold War. Or pull up Townsend Brown, he. He was working with the government, the military, the. Even like the CIA. And he was working with like all of the top physicists during that time. And he came up with this theory called the B field Brown effect, which was. Pull it up so we can. I'm not, I'm not Jesse Michaels. I can't regurgitate this off the top of my head. So. The B field Brown effect is electromagnetic phenomenon discovered in the 20s. Okay. Way earlier, where the high voltage asymmetrical capacitor produces a net directional thrust towards smaller electrodes, often linked to electrogravitics or lifters. The force is generally understood, modern physics, to be caused by ion wind rather than gravity manipulation. So this is something that he was, he, he was on the leading edge of. And this was like a crazy discovery back then. And then he got really wrapped up in like the military and stuff and all this stuff kind of like went dark and.
- [21:41]
B
But.
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A
But this technology is still used for things like those, those stealth bomber planes. Like what they use on the edge of them.
- [21:51]
B
Yeah. Maybe on the. Let me just say, like, I'm gonna give you my, my. So I don't know about the Google Townsend Brown. Right too. But yeah, we probably go to. So I'm gonna give you my. This is where, you know, we'll start something as a working astrophysicist, as a working physicist. The town. You know, I've never heard about this. This is not an important piece of the, you know, of the, of the knowledge we have of physics. Like if you go to a graduate, if you trained in physics, you know, there, There is no anti gravity. There is no anti gravity. Like, you know, there's. And the idea that he worked with the top physicist. No, he didn't. I can tell you who the top physicists were on in gravity. Kip Thorne. Right. Kip Thorne is the guy who Took Einstein's theory and progressed it like he was the guy who really under. Who worked on black holes, you know, understood black holes, understood wormholes, gave us the, you know, he was the first one.
- [22:42]
A
And you know, what about the Wittens?
- [22:45]
B
Ed Witten?
- [22:45]
A
Ed Whitten.
- [22:46]
B
Ed Whitten's a modern. You know, I'm not, I'm not a super huge. I mean, Ed Witten is a smart guy. He's, you know, but he's not a, you know, like he was the guy behind string theory. String theory's failed. Like, that's my take on string, right? But like, whatever this is, this is not. This made no, this made no impact on physics, right? I mean, and so that's really, it's important to understand sort of like there's this sort of underground sort of discussions about it. But then you see, like what actually, what's real physics, right? What's real physics is that whatever this is, you know, you can't. Nobody's built. Unless you want to say. Unless you want to say that it was built and the government's hiding it, which is like, what am I supposed to do with that? Right?
- [23:22]
A
Well, this is. But, but, but what, what his discovery led to was like the electro hydrodynamics, which is used in a lot of like click on electro hydrodynamics.
- [23:30]
B
So that's okay. Electro. That's what I'm saying. So probably what the this thing is, he did some physics and it may be it has very specific uses in say like something like, you know, maybe even in, in, you know, ion thrusters. So I don't know, like this is a very detailed sort of thing. But the idea that this was some kind of huge revelation of like cutting edge physics that nobody ever heard, which transformed the field. No, that didn't happen, right? That just didn't happen. So this was like, you know, there it sounds like I'd have to read through it. It sounds like he, you know, discovered something that had great engineering possibilities for very specific things. But was it anti gravity? You know. No, we don't know of any kind of.
- [24:07]
A
We don't know that, right.
- [24:07]
B
And you know what's really cool? You want to know why there's no anti gravity is because. And this was something Einstein worked out. You know, sometimes you think when you go through what Einstein did and you see the genius, you know, his ability to see what nobody else could see. So you got electric charges, right? And you've got plus charges and you got minus charges, right? There's protons and electrons Right. So the protons have plus charges and the electrons have minus charges. And, like, charges or opposite charges attract. Right. So in electromagnetism, you got two kinds of charge. Right. In gravity, you don't. Gravity, you can think of mass, you know, you can think of it as being charged, but there's only one kind of charge, and it always attracts. And because of that, there's no way to shield. Like, in. In electromagnetic fields, if I want to. If I have, like a ball of protons, Right. Which has a very strong electric field. Right. Everything is point. The electric field is all pointing to the protons. If I want, I can build like a shell around it and put electrons around it. We have the opposite charge, and it'll shield. Now you won't see the protons in there. So you can shield the electric charge. You can make the electric field go away. There's no way to do that in gravity because gravity only has one kind of charge. So it's this deep reason about the structure of reality, right. That leads you to the fact that there's no way to shield yourself against gravity. So there is no anti gravity. I wish there was. Maybe in the future there will be. But for right now, to say that, like, somebody came up with a theory of anti gravity would be like, all the physics that all the physicists know that get taught in graduate school, like, no, that there's something they don't know. And it's like, well, why don't. Why are these top guys, you know, why don't they know it? And then you gotta go into, like, oh, it's being hidden by the military. And then that just leads you down this, you know, this path where, like, okay, anything's true, you know, I can levitate right now, but I can't show you because the military won't let.
- [26:00]
A
Well, it's unfortunate because the military is very obviously interested in that Weird. And like, levitation. And so I had a guy in here, Jeffrey Kripal, who's a professor of religion, and. And he said he was contacted by people at JPL to come to some intellectual salon to tell them about ancient stories of levitation because this rocket propulsion company is interested in it. Like, what? I mean, that's super.
- [26:20]
B
I am. Yeah. Well, I'm super skeptical because, like, I work with jpl, you know, I would actually. I love to talk to the guy and then find out, really, who did you talk to? Because that's what so much happens. What I see with kind of like the conspiracy theory stuff. Some guy comes up and he says something and I'm like, wait a minute. Okay, sit down with a bunch of experts.
- [26:39]
A
Well, do you know the founder of JPL was best friends with the guy who created this company or not? This company, this religion. Scientology.
- [26:45]
B
Yeah, L. Ron Hubbard. The.
- [26:48]
A
One of the most prolific, prolific science fiction writers. Shitty science fiction history there.
- [26:53]
B
Yeah, universe. So that's what I mean, you know, like jpl, like a lot of his stuff, you know. So what I want to really, the reason, you know, that I'm with the work I'm doing right now is to really push the idea that there's like science, there's established science, you know, and established. I want people to understand like what established science means because it's easy for to become like, oh, establish the establishment authorities, you know. But that's not what it is. Science is this beautiful process that we've learned over centuries to not fool ourselves. That's really what it's about, to not fool ourselves. And the way in which science collectively, because science is just a bunch of fallible human beings, the way we've established how to do that is through painstaking work, you know, and so when I talk about like established science, what I mean is like the work that the community of researchers, thousands of people working together for endless, endless hours, what that community has figured out, you know, whereas like the stuff that's like supposedly on the side or the, you know, the fringe science and everything, you know, there's a reason why it's called fringe science is because it's actually, you know, you can't build anything with it. You're not gonna build a, you know, you're not gonna build a space shuttle with it, you're not gonna build a cell phone with it, right? Because it requires this. And it's so beautiful that the message I really have for people is like, you don't need fringe science to freak out about how beautiful the world is, right? Have somebody on who can explain photosynthesis to you. It's crazy what nature developed about. And then you can go outside and every leaf that you see is a miracle. And then suddenly the whole world becomes this luminous, transparent, extraordinary event. And that's what real science is about. And it requires endless work, endless transparency, right? That you know, the stuff we know. We know it because it's been thousands of people not working in the dark for some military thing, but working, you know, transparently together. That's over how over 400 years we've built an understanding of gravity as a four dimensional space time, how we've Built an understanding of quantum mechanics with all of its weirdness, which leads to, you know, miracle devices like this. So, you know, I am an evangelist of science in many ways. And, and, but the science I'm talking about is the stuff that like, you know, you got to put the 10,000 hours into with you and all your buddies transparently, you know, that's what we know and that's the beauty. The other stuff is just, it's kind of hot, you know, it's entertaining, but it's not true, you know?
- [29:29]
A
Well, yeah, I mean, I think there's like, when you say what real science, I think there's like this, this weird dichotomy between like fringe and academic, right? Where there's like some people who are on the academic side, they don't want to, to fringe stuff. It's like you're on this, you're in this weird cult, right? And then you have those people who like the crazy cult, cultist people are like anti everything that's like academic or mainstream science. You know, like, like the reality is like there's. You can embrace all of it, right? And if you're rational, if you're a rational, reasonable human being, you can, you know, figure out, you know, where to take stuff and where to leave stuff behind and kind of like see the forest through the trees and have like a, a moderate kind of like 30,000
- [30:10]
B
foot view of it.
- [30:11]
A
I love that.
- [30:11]
B
Because you know what science, the most amazing thing about science, right? It was this slow and I, you know, written about this in a few different times because like one and through my writing I ended up kind of as a historian of science. And it's really fascinating to watch how, going from the 1400s to the 1600s, how this process, like human beings were always scientists in a way. Like every hunter gatherer knows stuff about the world through empirical like ah, poke this. Oh, I ate that plant. I got sick. I ate that plan. I got better, I got high.
- [30:42]
A
Yeah, I got exactly right.
- [30:43]
B
And that plan, that was awesome. But you know, in the, what happened in the 1600s was this codification of the scientific process which really what science really is is a way to have a dialogue with nature that, you know, you push nature and it pushes back and then you, you know, you learn how to do this and it requires a whole community. You can't just be like one dude. It is like for every Einstein, there's 10,000 other men and women in laboratories, you know, doing the slow, steady, painful work that builds you up to it. So and one of the things we learned over those four centuries was how to carry out experiments, again, transparently, so that you would not be fooled. You would not. Because that's what science about. We human beings are kind of like, designed to fool ourselves, you know, and in many ways it made evolutionary sense. Right. If there's, you know, is that a tiger in the, the, you know, the bushes or is that just the bushes?
- [31:43]
A
Even memory too, right? Like, we only take forward in memory. Like, our memories can be skewed very quickly from things that happen. Like, because our brain is designed to take away the stuff that's useful for us to get through the day in the future.
- [31:54]
B
Right. It's filtering. Right? It's always filtering. So, you know, the whole thing about science was trying to find this public. It's got to be public knowledge. That's the important thing about science. Because, you know, there's public knowledge and there's private knowledge. You know, I love my wife. Can I prove to you that I love my wife?
- [32:07]
A
No.
- [32:07]
B
Right. There's, you know, and there's.
- [32:08]
A
Can you prove love is real?
- [32:09]
B
Right.
- [32:10]
A
How do you measure love?
- [32:11]
B
Exactly. Exactly. And that's why, you know, I'm a Zen Buddhist. Like, I, you know, I have a spiritual practice. I don't think, like, science is definitely. I don't think science is amenable to the things that, you know, you gain in, in spiritual practice. So. But science is about public knowledge. Right? So those things that can be investigated publicly. Yes. Which is this method. And so that's the problem with the fringe science is that often it's like there's no way to investigate it publicly or it has been and it doesn't work out and people still hold onto it no matter what. You know, there's a, I see this with the UFO and UAP stuff. Right. So I am all for public, transparent investigations of UFO and UAPs. Right. I don't think, I don't think. I have never seen any evidence that even comes close to this. The standards that I'm going to be held to if I say I've discovered, you know, alien life on another planet, I'm going to be held to very high standards. Yeah. I've never seen anything from UFOs in UFPs that lives up that. But okay, let's go do the work to, you know, but, you know, so you need that level of accuracy, that level of acuity, that level of rigor, that level to, for it to be scientific knowledge. If not, it's just, you know, it's opinion that's What I was going, I got lost with the UAP stuff. There's people who, like, no matter. No amount of evidence, no amount of contra evidence will ever convince them that UFOs are not aliens. Like. Cause it's a faith, it's a belief, you know, which if that's what it is, okay, dude, that's what it is. Like, you know, that's fine, but don't make, you know, don't say it's scientific because science is about. I'm gonna make a claim, right? And here's how I'm gonna validate that claim. And like I said, not all claims are amenable to science. I love my wife. That is not amenable to science. Right. You know, I have a profound sense of connectedness with the world. You know, when I do contemplative practice, that's not really amenable to science. You can hook my brain up and everything and watch the eq, but that's, you know, but when it comes to like things like anti gravity, that falls into the science part and there's no, there is nothing. You know, I can say this as somebody who, like, you know, Einstein's theory of gravity studies the universe, you know, cosmology, everything. There is no valid theory of anti gravity.
- [34:19]
A
No one talks about it, but we all know it exists. Toxins are everywhere. In the air, water, plastics, your food packaging, cleaning products, etc, even in all the stuff that's marketed as healthy. And it's not just one big exposure you should be worried about. It's the daily buildup. And that's why I pay attention to glutathione, specifically rose liposomal glutathione. Glutathione is your body's master antioxidants. But stress, poor sleep, alcohol, processed food and environmental toxins burn through it fast. Glutathione plays a major role in liver detox pathways and helps fight oxidative stress. The stuff that leaves you feeling inflamed, foggy and rundown. And not all supplements are created equal. A lot gets broken down during digestion. That's why I like roe. Their liposomal glutathione is designed to protect and improve absorption so your body can actually use it. So if you want to legitimate daily way to support detox antioxidants and overall health. Check out row nutrition's liposomal glutathione. Go to rownutrition.com and use the code Danny for 20% off sitewide. That's r h o nutrition.com and get 20% off by using my code, Danny. It's linked down below. Now back to the show. Have you seen that, that recent documentary that came out, it was called Age of Disclosure?
- [35:33]
B
Yeah, I've seen some of it. Yeah.
- [35:35]
A
So they got like all of the highest level military generals, people in Congress, whistleblowers from government agencies, different parts of the military to all come out and talk about this real thing that's going on. And people going in these skiffs, these secret compartmented, I don't know what you call them, their rooms that like nothing can be recorded in and explaining what they've been exposed to. And like reverse engineered craft that they can't explain. And so if you have all these people that are running this country and in charge of us saying this is real, what do you make of that?
- [36:15]
B
Yeah, so this has always been this way. Like going back to this. One of the things for my last book, the little Book of Aliens, you know, I did, did my research on the history of UFOs, and you can find those claims going all the way back to like, I think it was 1955, the first study, the first Air Force study of, you know, UFOs. The first wave of UFO sightings happens in 1947. Right. And then by the early 50s. So what was Roswell? No, no, no, Roswell came later. Roswell.
- [36:40]
A
Actually, 47.
- [36:41]
B
Roswell was 47, but it was months after the first wave. The first wave was. I've forgotten the guy's name now, where he was flying over the. It was a pilot flying Corso in Washington State. No, it wasn't.
- [36:53]
A
Oh, yes, I know you're talking about this.
- [36:55]
B
This was.
- [36:55]
A
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
- [36:56]
B
And he saw like nine things. So it's actually, that's an interesting story in itself because it also tells you a lot about the psychology of things. But let's, before I go there, let's. Sometimes it's hard to stay on topic, right? Like we're over there now. We're over there. But so the, the first or one of the first Air Force studies, I think it was first called Project Saucer. And they're like, maybe we shouldn't call it that. And then they changed the name to Project Sign. And the guy who was the head of it, Grudge. Grudge, I think even came later.
- [37:22]
A
Okay.
- [37:23]
B
Oh, wait, no, you're right. Grudge.
- [37:24]
A
Okay.
- [37:24]
B
They thought that was a weird thing. Like why. Who comes up with these names?
- [37:28]
A
Project Grudge.
- [37:29]
B
But the guy who, the Air Force major who was in charge of it, he retires and then he writes a book. First, one of these books claiming this secret government report that said. And this was interesting, right? Said it was interplanetary. Right. Because in those days, nobody really. We didn't really know much about. So, oh, yeah, it's interplanetary. Now. Nobody would claim interplanetary because we know the solar system is empty. Right? There's no planets in the solar system that can harbor life other than Earth. But anyway, the important thing is he claimed there was. I think it was called the Report of the Situation or something. That was the name of this secret report. Nobody's ever found it. Nobody's ever found it. Right. People have tried people, you know, the Black Vault people never found. And that has been sort of the story for every guy. Like, you know, that age of disclosure thing kind of pisses me off. Right?
- [38:14]
A
Really?
- [38:14]
B
Yeah, because, you know, you get people standing up, making claims, but they never show anything. It's like, oh, I, you know, I know a guy who knows a guy who knows a guy who saw something. You know, it's like, okay, show me the saucer. Can't do that, you know? And so this has been. So you look at, like, Sean Kirkpatrick, who is the head of the aa, right? He, you know, from his perspective, it's been this mutual circularity, because for every of kind of a, you know, a circular conversation going Back to the 50s, there were two kinds of people in the military. The ones who thought the UFO thing was aliens and the ones who thought the UFO thing was ridiculous. Right? And there has always been those two groups for every. Like, with the age of disclosure. That's a problem with these kinds of documentaries. They didn't show the armies of army guys and the armies of intelligence people were like, no, this is crap. So what? Because there's no actual data, it's always guys who claim they saw something, or most of all, they don't claim they saw it. They claim they know somebody who says they know somebody who saw it. And at what point, as a scientist, I'm like, come on, man, show me the saucer. You know what I mean? Like, without the saucer, show me a piece of metal that you can distribute to every lab in the country, and we'll analyze it. It's never that. And we're going now into, like, the fourth year of these congressional hearings, and we still don't have any actual evidence. It's just people talking and, like, can I stand up at a congressional hearing saying, hey, you know, I've got a theory of quantum gravity, which is like, that's the Most important thing in physics to have a theory of quantum gravity. But I can't show it to you. You know, should everybody say, like, hey, Adam, Frank invited the theory of gravity? Right. It's like, no, I didn't, because I can't show it to you. So I am not impressed. I mean, I'm all for the disclosure. Let's. If it's true, more hearings, let's actually get to the bottom of it. I'm all for it, but everything I see and the way it gets hyped, it's frustrating. It's very frustrating.
- [40:13]
A
It's very frustrating for me because I, I believe that this stuff's real, but all the public evidence is. It's not. It's compelling, depending on how, you know, generous you want to be to yourself. But you're right. In, in a objective scientific setting, you can't definitively say that, that any of that, any of those videos or any of that testimony proves.
- [40:36]
B
Right, Right.
- [40:36]
A
Which frustrates me. Frustrates the hell.
- [40:38]
B
It's like, so you're right, your belief. I mean, like I said, I know lots of people who are, you know, really interested in UFO and UAPs like you who like, yeah, want evidence, like, would like to know what's going on. And I think that's totally cool. Right. But the. Right. You can't make the mistake from going to there be saying, like, there's already proof.
- [40:54]
A
Right.
- [40:54]
B
You know, there's, there's interesting things that are happening.
- [40:57]
A
I believe there is proof. I don't believe anything we've seen publicly is proof.
- [41:01]
B
Right.
- [41:02]
A
I think it exists. And, you know, I also think, like, it's hard for me to discredit people that are like some of these ex Air Force guys that were in charge of running nuclear bases. You know, these guys are like, top of the top of the top when it comes to being psychologically sound individuals. Right. They get tested for this all the time because their hand, their. Their job is to protect the, the button that launches the news. Right.
- [41:26]
B
You'd like them to be kind of stable. That would be a good idea.
- [41:29]
A
The same guys that are saying they're seeing this stuff and there's just too many cases that. And then also the, the fighter pilots, like the Tik Tok pilots, you know, say. But, you know, the Tik Tok away, like those, those Tik Tok pots, they say, they say what they saw and there's no photos of it. The radar came that got confiscated by people right after it happened. So there's. We just have, we Just have these guys saying this.
- [41:49]
B
Right, right. And that's like. So I, I've interviewed with, I think
- [41:52]
A
that stuff could have been like secret military stuff that we've been testing, I
- [41:57]
B
don't know, or, or pierced. So. But let me just step back a little bit on this because I want people to understand. Like, look, you know, my job, one of my jobs as a scientist, you know, because. Is to think about, you know, alien intelligence, other intelligences. So man. Yeah. And do I want them to exist? Yes. Do I hope that we find them when I'm around? Yes. Is it possible that UFOs are. It's possible. I'm going to be hyper skeptical about it because any, in general, any, you know, this is the famous Carl Sagan quote. What is it? Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. And I think that's really true. Right. So let me tell you an interesting story that sort of relates, related to that thing. I once talked to Adam Reese, who is the guy, he's a cosmologist and astronomer and he was the guy who discovered that the universe found the data that the universe was accelerating right after the Big Bang. We know that the universe is expanding. Every galaxy is expanding away from every other galaxy. So like, you know, early on in the universe, the universe was set in motion, expanding. And we have absolute data from this. It's, you know, but what he found, what we always thought was that okay, you get the Big Bang, everything starts expanding, but the expansion should actually slow down because you got all these galaxies, all this matter pulling on all the other matter. So things should be, if you looked, if you could look long enough, you could look far enough back and get a good timeline. Everything should be slow, slowly slowing down. Adam Reese is a graduate student, you know, he's 27 years old and he's doing, they, they finally have the data to look really far back in time and, and do these measurements. And what he finds is it's accelerating, it's not decelerating, you know, it's not slowing down, it's accelerating, it's accelerating. Right. This is like 1997. And so, you know, he's just like a 27 year old dude sitting, he's up at the mountain, you know, sitting on this data, right? That is absolutely a Nobel Prize, like without doubt a Nobel Prize. And I said to him, I said, how did you feel when you, you know, realized what you had? He said, and this is like really important. He said, I was terrified because he knew that he was going to have to take these results. You know, this was all his work, he had planned the observations, he had taken the observations, he had done all the mathematical details to analyze the observations. You know, like, it's hard to, like, turn the. What you get from the telescope into, like, oh, the universe is accelerating. Yeah. And he knew that he was going to have to sit in front of the smartest guys in the world and women and get grilled. Like, they were going to, like, these people who know, like, they know their work down to the. You know, the. That final. You know, it's like. It's like going into a ring. You know, you're a young boxer and you're going into a ring with five world heavyweight champions, you know, and so he was terrified. He like, did I make a mistake today? And so he had an extraordinary claim, and he needed to have extraordinary evidence, and he was going to have to. The gauntlet of fire he was going to have to run through. So I'm bringing that up to say, like, if you have an extraordinary claim, UFOs are aliens, right. You need, first of all, you need evidence of the highest quality. Right? Just like if I and my colleagues said, oh, my God, we found, you know, we're looking at telescope images of, you know, Kepler 34b, some planet, we're like, oh, my God, there's city lights there. Right, Right. I know. I'm gonna. I am gonna expect to have my, you know, I'm gonna get a new one ripped. All my colleagues, even my friends, are gonna come after me with knives, as they should. Because if this thing is true, then it is, you know, it'll change the world.
- [45:20]
A
Right?
- [45:21]
B
So the problem with, like, a lot of the UFO data, as you said, is that it's just not up to the standards. You can't make a claim like we are being visited by, you know, alien advanced technology with a bunch of fuzzy blob pictures or personal testimony. Because as you said, personal testimony is the worst form of. It's the worst form of evidence. There's just nothing you can do with it. Right. I mean, so I've talked with some of the pilots, and they're great guys, and a lot of times they're just saying, like, hey, could, you know, can
- [45:47]
A
you show me some of the guys who saw the Tic Tac stuff like Fravor or Graves.
- [45:51]
B
Yeah, Graves. I was on Graves podcast. Great guy, you know, and he just is like, this is what I saw. Yeah. You know, or this is what I remember I saw. Because you were talking about memory, you know, so, like, and there's been all kinds of studies that show, especially when you get excited, something's happening that your memory, you know, you just will not. So there's that famous study of, like, they did. They had a bunch of people throwing balls around in a room, right? And they had a bunch of observers, including trained observers, cops and everything, to watch what's going on and report what's happening, right? And while these people are throwing. So it's kind of a complicated thing. People are throwing a white ball. There's some people in brown shirts, some people in white shirts. Nobody reported the guy in the monkey suit who walked through. They did this again and again. People just missed the guy in the monkey suit who walked slowly through the room. So it just points to the fact that personal testimony, you know, I'm sure people. These pilots are absolutely being honest. It is great that they can report. Remove the stigma, you know, Remove the stigma because that's what's gonna help us figure, you know, people should be able to say what they saw. But it's just. It's not evidence of the kind that you can, you know, it's just not evidence. Like, from scientific point of view, personal testimony is not rigorous evidence. So that, like you said, what you're saying is like, yeah, you believe it to be true, which is cool. Like, I can have my beliefs, you can have your beliefs. But the whole point of science is to not fool ourselves, not let our beliefs get in the way of what we can actually show to be true. Again, public knowledge, right? Because, you know, you may feel that, like, yeah, we've been visited for a long time. I may be like, no, there's life out there, but I don't think we've been visited. So two different beliefs, right? Two different stories. But the only way the public knowledge part has to be through this rigorous, brutal. That's why I always want people to understand this brutal process of science. Scientists are mean to each other. Like, we really are. Our lifeblood is tearing each other shreds. That's why the idea, like, you know, with academic science is this thing in. You know, and I wouldn't. It's more than academic because it's. There's. There's the academy, universities, but there's also all the research labs and the, you know, there's even the industrial lab. Science is this global, you know, diversified thing.
- [47:50]
A
Well, the problem with the. With the fringe, there's. There's this blurry line between real science and the fringe. Because where it starts to get blurred is with shit like when you're dealing with the United States government and the federal government, like, go back to Operation Paperclip. That's the only reason we went to the moon, is because we went and got a bunch of Nazis and brought them over here and got them to build nukes.
- [48:14]
B
Yeah.
- [48:14]
A
And then we got the Saturn 5.
- [48:16]
B
Yeah.
- [48:16]
A
Then got to the moon and all that stuff. And that was hidden forever.
- [48:20]
B
Yeah.
- [48:20]
A
And only until it was declassified did we learn that. Oh, there was also MK Ultra. We did mind control. That was also using top scientists and chemists and Nazis.
- [48:29]
B
Yeah.
- [48:29]
A
So like, like when you want to talk about, like, fringe and real science, there is a very big overlap with this stuff.
- [48:35]
B
Well, that's why. Right. So the government. But that's the, you know, I mean, so my feeling about, like, the government stuff. The government stuff gets really interesting on the one hand, and people like to
- [48:42]
A
use that excuse too, of like, well, the reason we don't have any evidence for UFOs is because the government whacks all those.
- [48:49]
B
Exactly. And then it becomes this, like.
- [48:51]
A
Well, I'm sure it's true in some cases, but it's not always true.
- [48:55]
B
Right, right. So that, that. And, you know, I mean, that's why I'm all in favor of, like, sure, let's do the investigations to have the. The. That's all I can say is like, disclosure. I'm all for disclosure.
- [49:03]
A
Right.
- [49:04]
B
Open that up. Absolutely. But in general, until I see it, I'm not going to use, you know, I just simply can't. If somebody says the government's hiding it, I'm like, look, man, call me when it isn't, because there's nothing I can do about that. And also when it really pushes on, like the idea that we have anti gravity, like, we've done a lot of experiments about gravity. You know what I mean? Like, we really understand gravity and we understand what we don't understand, too. So the idea that, like, the military could have done anything like that would undermine, you know, or somehow live over here on the side of what we do, understand gravity. There's just. I just, I don't. I reject that out of hand. Like, not even out of hand. I reject it because of, you know, my 30 years of study and talking to truly the greatest mind because, you know, the greatest minds don't go into the government, you know what I mean? For lots of reasons. You know, you got really good scientists there, but certainly the greatest minds in the world do not work for Black Project Government. Like, why would you, you know, I mean, you're a scientist. You want to Understand the fundamental nature of reality. You're going to go talk to the people who are doing that, and you're not going to sequester yourself alone in this, you know, this thing with all of these rules and you can't disclose it.
- [50:09]
A
What about, like, people like Enrico Fermi or even Braun or John von Neumann, you know those people? Those are some of the top minds.
- [50:17]
B
And. Yeah, and they. All their work is transparent and out there. And, you know, John, they're working for the government. They worked for the government and then they stopped. But they also. They continued to work.
- [50:25]
A
Work for.
- [50:26]
B
They continued to publish academically. Right. They were, you know, I love John von Neumann, by the way. People should know more about John von Neumann. You know, I read his papers all the time.
- [50:36]
A
He came up with the calculation for the perfect altitude to detonate the nukes over Japan to kill the most people.
- [50:43]
B
Yeah, that may be. Yeah, I don't, I don't know that history, but, yeah, sure. I mean, all these guys worked for. But I mean, you know, sure, that they, they built a nuclear bomb. You know, all those guys at Los Alamos.
- [50:51]
A
Not only that, they were testing them. Them forever afterward. Like they were testing them blowing holes in the atmosphere with nukes.
- [50:57]
B
Yeah, yeah. So. But that talk about climate change. No, it's true. I mean, listen, those years, you know, after the Second World War produced a, you know, an interaction between science and the government that there was kind of like a rotating door, right. So John von Neumann, you know, all those, like the Manhattan Project you got, they, you know, that's why that movie Oppenheimer is so great. Right? So that history is very well known that all the. These great scientists came in, but then they left. They all left and went back to their lives as scientists. You know, the greatest minds in science did not stay in black boxes because, you know, there's. There's no. If you're a scientist that is, like, why would you do that? Like, you want to talk with other scientists, you want to talk with this little group of, you know, and all, you know, the best minds, the ones who win the Nobel Prizes, the ones who are really pushing the frontiers, they're all over the place. And there's a. You have to have the circulation of ideas. Like. No, that's why people have this. It's really important to get over, like, the Einstein, the Einstein bias. Like, oh, one lone genius who, like, opens up the frontier that nobody else can in general. That's not what happens. And in fact, even Einstein required all, you know, there's A whole string of scientists, Mach and Poincare. Like Einstein stood on the shoulders of, you know, Newton said, I did what I did because I stood on the shoulders of giants. Same thing for Einstein. Einstein couldn't do it alone. He actually needed Riemann and all these other people, Hermann Weil. So this idea that you could have like a small group of scientists in some dark government lab devise a theory that is, you know, light years ahead of what anybody else on the planet is thinking, it's just that's not how science works. That is just, you know, you have to have the interaction, the kind of large scale interaction for ideas to mature, for ideas to germinate and then, you know, mature.
- [52:52]
A
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- [56:00]
B
Yeah, I am in full agreement with him on that because, you know, so that's a really interesting idea. So there's all this stuff about the grave grays. Exactly. Like, oh, the grays. And they're, you know, they look like little people with slightly misshapen. I mean, that is not the way evolution works. So the cool thing about evolution, I talked about this in the book because, you know, I had to go, I'm not. I'm a astro. You know, I'm an astrobiologist, but more on the astro side. So I've had to learn a lot about evolution. There's two forces in evolution. There is, and they're interesting because they play off each other. On the one hand, there is convergence, right? That, you know, evolution presents, you know, life or, you know, a planet will present evolving life forms with a bunch of problems, right? If you have solid land and then gas, like, you know, air, that you got to figure out how to go get food, right? So, you know, how are you going to do that? Well, wheels, you know, or legs. Jointed sticks. Right. So, you know, and if, you know, if the air is thick enough, you could fly, so wings, right. So. So probably nature evolution on another planet would come up with similar solutions like jointed sticks, I. E. Legs. But there's no. Okay, so that's what we call convergence that, you know, evolution, there's only. Because of physics and chemistry. There's only certain solutions to the problems of go get food. Okay, so that's convergence. On the other side though, is contingency, which is, you know, random stuff like accidents, basically. And that is also a hugely powerful force in evolution. So say you're starting to evolve something that has, you know, jointed sticks. The way our legs are, like the way our knees are, right, with that. The way the knees work, right. And then, you know, there's a drought and all the creatures that, you know, had that mutation that sort of, you know, started with our kind of legs, they all wipe out, right. When the other species or the next species comes up and solves the problem. There's, you know, there's no guarantee, in fact, it's probably unlikely that you'll do the exact same solution. You'll have jointed sticks, but maybe they'll be jointed in the other way. The way birds legs are, are. Or you'll have six joints. Not, you know, or you'll end up with five jointed the other way.
- [58:02]
A
That'd be freaky. Goddamn.
- [58:03]
B
Yeah, right, with the dog legs or something. So, you know, and they've done experiments where they took. This is really cool. They took a bunch of microbes, right? And they, you know, microbes have very short time scales for evolution. So they let them evolve for a while and then they, so they evolved certain characteristics. Like, you know, they're, they're bigger than the ones they started with. You know, on average the cells are bigger, right? So then they took them and they took half of them and they froze them, right? And just so these things are not reproducing anymore. They let the other, the other half go on evolving and then they took the frozen ones out and let them evolve again. To watch, like, do we get the same things, these other ones that evolve? We now do it for like 20 years. We see how this, this one group evolved. Now we're going to take the ones that we froze and let them evolve. Do we get the same things? And the answer was no, because it's all about accidents. Accidents really matter. So the idea that you're going to get Something with like a bipedal shoulders, arms, eyes that look like us, like.
- [59:01]
A
Yeah, it's just, it's probably so if those things are real and if all those experiences are like, if this is not just lore and myth 100, it's probably that those things are from here or maybe even us from a different timeline, like from the future. Well, I would say or like say that they're a breakaway civilization living under the ocean or something like that, that, that they we don't see or Antarctica, you know.
- [59:23]
B
Well, I would be highly skeptical of all those. I would say in general, like my position would be like, they're not true.
- [59:28]
A
Do you think it's possible though, if we continue on our trajectory right now in humanity with technology and everything, that it is possible that we would look like that in 50,000 years?
- [59:38]
B
I think at 50,000 years muscles were
- [59:41]
A
hyp would atrophy, you know, maybe our heads would get bigger eyes, I don't know.
- [59:44]
B
Yeah, but we got genetic, two things. We've got genetic engineering. So, you know, in 10,000 years, not even 10,000 years. In a thousand years we may be sexless space orbs.
- [59:54]
A
Yeah.
- [59:54]
B
You know what I mean? That's my daughter likes to say.
- [59:56]
A
So he was, I mean, you know,
- [59:58]
B
you know, I doubt that in a hundred thousand. I think in a hundred thousand years we probably are going to look, you know, we're not, we may not even have arms or legs or anything anymore. I mean just because, you know, that's a long time and we have the ability to evolve ourselves to take over evolution.
- [60:11]
A
Yeah. This anthropologist was explaining to me this concept called, called pedomorphism, which is a, it's a term in evolution where the, the future generations of like specifically in, in apes or chimpanzees, the, the fully grown adults look more like the offspring of the ancestors.
- [60:41]
B
Oh, is that like with dogs? That dogs look more like, like dogs look more. Dogs look like puppies. Like full grown dogs look like puppies. So if you look at puppies of
- [60:49]
A
wolves, if you look at like a newborn chimpanzee, it looks more like a, a human being than it does look like a full grown chimpanzee. They, their head slopes back, they kind of arch over, they grow these huge limbs and they kind of like they're hunched. But if you look at a baby chimpanzee, it's sits straight up like this and it's got, it doesn't have that, that jaw and that sloping forehead.
- [61:12]
B
Right.
- [61:12]
A
So like the, the offspring look more like us.
- [61:16]
B
It more evolved I wonder if, like, I don't know. So it's hard for me to like, you see.
- [61:22]
A
So there's a, there's an adult and there's a baby, right? So the baby looks more like it's future.
- [61:28]
B
Yeah.
- [61:28]
A
What it's going to be in the future, Right. So if you extrapolate this into, into the, the future. Now, you would say. They say these grays look like they're the size of toddlers. You know, they kind of. They have bigger heads, they're shorter. So this was just something he was throwing at the wall.
- [61:42]
B
Yeah, I mean, you know, because again, I think the gray. I mean, you know, in general, I think the grays. You know, my whole thing with UFOs and UAPs is like, there's just. As a, as a scientist and as a science fiction fan, I also, like, there's so much about it that I'm like, get out of here. Like, for example, let's put this right, right? UFOs, right? They always like, you know, they're from a super advanced civilization. They don't want us to know that we're here. Okay, turn off the lights.
- [62:07]
A
Right?
- [62:07]
B
It's like I saw lights in the sky. Like, you know, the whole. Unless you want to write a really complicated science fiction story. Well, they don't want us to know, but they do want us to know in general. Like these things, they're always trying to. They appear, they're trying to hide from us because they don't just sit around and be like, yo, what's up? We're from outer space. So they're trying to not be seen, but they suck at it, you know, And I'm like, come on. Like, you gotta. The problem with all the UFO stuff, it ends up being this highly elaborate science fiction story. And my thing is, if it sounds like a science fiction story, it is a science fiction story. So my whole thing with what I call the high beam argument, which is like, look, if they really don't want to be discovered, turn off the lights, you know? Well, why do they have lights on their things if they don't want to be nice?
- [62:50]
A
Well, maybe they only want to use them when they, when they don't care about being seen. Right? Because. Because if you, if you, if you, if you look at the big picture, they're not. They're pretty damn good at hiding. There's only anecdotal stories of this worldwide, but.
- [63:02]
B
Exactly. So why, if they're, if they're pretty good at hiding, they should be really good at hiding. So it Just doesn't. I mean, like, totally good at hiding. They have advanced technology that can travel either backwards in time or, you know, across. Because we really have to get to how. Interstellar distances. Like, interstellar distances. It is not. From my point of view, you. It is entirely possible that, you know, interstellar distances may really not be travelable in the, you know, actually even in, like, an economic sense.
- [63:26]
A
Right, right. Because, you know, so you have time dilation and things.
- [63:30]
B
Right, right. And it's just so like, you know, the nearest star to us is four light years away. Right. So that is like. I, you know, I forget. Tens of trillions of miles. I may have that wrong, you know. Yeah, that's a long way. But it's so long. Okay, so let's.
- [63:44]
A
So if you were to travel. If we were to be able to travel at speed of light. Light, it would take four years.
- [63:47]
B
Four years. And we're not even close. Not even close. The fastest thing we've ever produced would take like a hundred thousand years to get there. And so it's the economics of being able to build, you know. So the best thing we can do now think, you know, we have a couple ideas about how to at least get ourselves to a tenth of the speed of light, in which case it's 40 years to get there, 40 years there, 40 years back. Right. With time dilation, which also means you start to disconnect from the people that
- [64:11]
A
you have to kiss your relatives goodbye, call your friends goodbye. And. And also there's the. There's the, like. If you're traveling that fast, time is going way faster on Earth. That means technology could develop on Earth to where we could figure out faster travel.
- [64:26]
B
Yeah, Right. So you arrive, you're 50,000, 50 years into your trip.
- [64:30]
A
Now these guys pull up with a belly full of breakfast because they just left this morning.
- [64:33]
B
There's a great. Let's just do a little sidebar sidebar. Because we were talking about video games before. So there's a video game coming called Exodus, which takes. And it's just. And now there's a novel that's a story. Everybody's really excited about this. This video game. It's the Mass Effect. It's supposed to be the spiritual successor to Mass Effect as a great space video game. But there's also. They hired Peter Hamilton, who's a good science fiction novelist, to sort of fill out the lore. So I'm sorry to go off on this thing, but it's just a great story because it's related to this. So the idea Is, you know, Earth's falling apart, the usual thing. And so they send out ark ships right in all directions. And the idea is that anybody who finds a habitable world will send out out the green signal, right? So you get these ships and they're all traveling at like a tenth of the speed of light or half the speed of light. And one of the ships finds a cluster of stars, you know, a dense, what we call a globular cluster. It's like 10,000 stars packed pretty close together. Like there's only like the closest star is only one light year away. And they discover a habitable world there, right. So they send out the signal to everybody else, right. And then they start, they settle. You know, there's lots of settable worlds in this. It's the Centauri Cluster, that's the name, name of it. And they start evolving, they start developing technology and they end up rapidly over like, you know, 5,000 years, 10,000 years, become like gods. They have developed this genetic engineering technologies. They're, you know, almost like gods. Meanwhile, all of the other ships, you know, have turned around and are heading back. So like these, it's such a great story. These human beings, these regular human beings on their ships are arriving in the Centauri Cluster to find it's full of like our. Not ancestors, our progenitors or what's the word for like, who are now. Yeah, descendants. Right. Who are now like so radically evolved that we're like, we're monkeys to them, you know, or we're ants to them. And it's a great story that sort of takes place. It does two interesting things. One, it uses the fact that a globular cluster stars will be so close that one year, it's just a one year travel time back and forth. And so if you can travel at close to the speed of light, you get time dilation, but it's not crazy. So you leave, leave and you come back and it's eight years later. You know, it's only like a few months for you, but it's eight years later for the people you left. And then two, it just does this idea of like, yeah, descendants. Our descendants will be so crazily different that they're not even recognizable anymore. So anyway, I just want to put in that, that I'm very excited about Exodus as a game.
- [66:51]
A
Yeah.
- [66:52]
B
And I think we're another. We're maybe a year away from it. But then also I recommend the Peter Hamilton.
- [66:57]
A
Oh, interesting. So, yeah, yeah, well, sorry, I just
- [67:00]
B
had to go off on that.
- [67:00]
A
No, that's fascinating. I'm. I'm more scared of the reality of arc racing raiders becoming reality.
- [67:06]
B
That's right. We were talking about arc raiders before. I'm sure we got some people.
- [67:09]
A
Dystopian planet that's ruled by killer drones.
- [67:12]
B
Yeah, yeah. Which is like, you know, I mean, yeah, I'm AI. What was the.
- [67:16]
A
You said you read a description online about what the plot was for that. The back plot for that. What was that?
- [67:22]
B
So the people who are playing it. Right. So, you know, if you haven't played. So here's the deal. You're in this dystopian future, everybody's living underground. The surface is like. You go up there and there's the remnants of human civilization, but there's also these like killer robots, you know, flying ones and you know, you know, joint spiders, but giant spiders. And so you learn very like they'll give you the. They'll give you a piece of the lore when you first start. And it's the idea that there was, you know, there was an environmental catastrophe, you know, climate went crazy. But then people sort of, you know, we don't even know how the time scales. You know, a thousand years later, people started to rebuild civilization. So it was a period of the greening or whatever. I forgot what they called it. And civilization started to come back. And then suddenly these arks arrived. And the arks is just the name they give to these from space. These, you know, killer drone robots. And then there was the first wave where we actually won. The human beings were actually. We won in the. You know, and then we started to repopulate the surface again. And now the game takes place. The second wave of arks, which are much smarter, has arrived. And so it's, you know, we don't really. In the game so far. You don't really know what happened. Where are these arks coming from?
- [68:31]
A
Right. Who built the arks?
- [68:32]
B
Who built the arks? And in the story it becomes clear. Cause if you fight in some of the different landscapes, like one of the landscapes is a spaceport, you know, a sort of, you know, spaceport that's been abandoned for, you know, a thousand years. And the idea is that the rich left the rich like a breakaway, you know, they just, they could leave. Right. The Elon musks of the world built their space stations or whatever. You don't know where they would leave went.
- [68:53]
A
It's clear that Musk and Bezos, yeah.
- [68:55]
B
Build their spa and they leave. And it's not clear. I'm not sure if this is gonna be true, but like, these arcs, maybe they want Earth back, and so they're trying to clean out all the descendants. Yeah, so. Or all the people left over. So I don't know. We'll see whether or not that's true. But, you know, the AI is a real AI is a danger. Not in some of the ways that I think people I'm not really worried about, like, super intelligence, I don't think. I'm not even sure that's possible, but just definitely having these technologies shoved down our throats, which I think are imperfect, that's the problem. They're, you know, they're amazing technologies, but they're not what they claim to be. Which means if we build society around them where there's huge dangers in, like, having it run the world economy or, you know.
- [69:33]
A
Yeah, it's. It's most disheartening that to me that, like, this technology seems to be going towards things that are just built to distract us and, and built into like, just this consumerism.
- [69:44]
B
I know, exactly. Right, right. And it's so. And again, like I said, you know, the, the AI that we have now is, which is what's called large language models. It's. The term is generative AI. And what we have are these large language models. And the way they are built is they are. You have to take a huge amount of data from the Internet. You basically scrape the Internet. And it really all. It is on some level, I mean, I want to give it its due, but really it's autocomplete, of course, you know, but autocomplete on steroids, as they say. So, you know, you type in a bunch of stuff and you ask it a question, it seems to answer it, but there's nobody in there. There's nobody in there. The AI doesn't. It doesn't know anything. It's just literally, you know, putting the words together for, you know, it's putting the next word after the, you know, statistically that should follow from the word you just put in. And because of that, because it doesn't know anything, there's no way to get rid of what they call hallucinations.
- [70:38]
A
Right.
- [70:39]
B
Which really, a better word for that is errors. It's just making shit up. Yeah, right. And there's no way to get rid of it. And so if you build these systems into the heart of like, every. You're going to fire a thousand people to, you know, oh, we're going to replace it with AI, you're never going to get rid of these, you know, which Means they're fundamentally untrustworthy. Right. They're fundamentally. You do not want to put them. They're fine to like, oh, you got to complete your homework, you know, but you know, you're going to put it in charge of deciding what your, I don't know, your portfolio, retirement portfolio, or you're going to put it in charge of anything physical. So I feel like we're going to get these. So much wealth, so much wealth inequality has been generated by big tech that these technologies are going to be shoved down our throats and we're going to be forced to use them. And they are fundamentally flawed. And they're going to like, they're just going to erode there. You already see what it's doing to democracy, right? It's going to erode all the things that are necessary to have a coherent modern civilization where we're free, you know? Right.
- [71:37]
A
No, it's really weird how, especially how everything on social media is fake and it's really hard to distinguish what's real and what's fake anymore. And you know, you have to build up this detector, right. Like, if it was anything you see
- [71:51]
B
now, you have to be like, yeah,
- [71:52]
A
you have to really question it and really, like, do your homework to figure out if that's real or if that's fake. Because everything looks so real and the majority of on. On Instagram or X is fake.
- [72:03]
B
Yeah. And you know what's interesting is that like, again, these technologies are amazing. They are a triumph of human intellect. You know, I totally give them their due, but like, their, they're not what they claim to be in terms of, like, how they're getting deployed. Right. So, you know, let me give you an example. Like again, myself, this is why I always keep the cell phone around. Hopefully it won't ring. Hold on a second, everybody. We're just gonna turn it off in case I get a phone call from anybody. Like, you can't really live without a cell phone anymore, right? You can't do anything. You can't get a taxi, you can't do your banking. You can't. You know, we have been. We live in a society where these technologies, like I said, were forced down our throats. Now, I love my cell phones phone, it does great things, but I can't live in a modern society without one of these. And that is what my fear is with the AI. Because the AI, these are, they're amazing technologies, but they're flawed for what they're. They're. They cannot do what they're claimed to Be able to do. So we're going to be stuck in this society where we can't get away from AI, you know, and what are they?
- [72:59]
A
What, what would you say? They're claimed to be able to.
- [73:02]
B
They're claimed to be sort of like the idea of like. So, for example, AI is agents. Everybody's talking, oh, AI agents we're going to be. Which can autonomously go off and you know, you just say like, oh, you know, book me a, you know, a Sure. A holiday in Italy, right. And it's going to go off and do it by itself assistance. And then what will happen actually is you'll, you know, you'll find out that like two of the. You'll show up and there's no hotel. Like it was it hallucinated the hotel? Yeah, but even worse than that. So I went to a lecture that pissed me off and scared the of me. It was a lecture by a CEO of a company called, I think it was called Effecta. And it was the idea of emotional computing. Right. And what this person, what this company wanted to do was have like your, you know, you're at your computer or you're watching TV and there's a little camera and the camera is watching your face and it's watching like, are you smiling? Are you grimacing? Are you, you know, and it's supposedly reading your emotions and it's going to change what it does based on your emotions. Oh, God. And so like one, like one, you know, she was pitching this as sort of like, oh, you know, you know, for old people who are left alone, there'll be a robot who can read it, you know, and so first of all, that whole thing that. First of all, we should ask ourselves, why do we live in a society where we're warehousing our old people and nobody goes to see them except the emotional robots? So there's that. But even more important is this flawed assumption that like the muscle, the location of muscle G7 in your cheek is happiness. Right. The equation. And, and people have shown that the research that this is based on is totally flawed like that. You know, in general, it is. People grimace for lots of reasons. It may not be at all because they're in pain. They can grimace just because, you know, they're. There's just, there's lots of different reasons. There's not a one to one correspondence between an emotion and the location of your muscles on your face. And if you're from, you know, if you're from a different part of the world, you may have you know, in Asia they may have an entirely different set of facial expressions. So. But what these techno and these technologies are already deployed. They are abused. Like you're taking a job interview. Like there's some job interview things where like you're being recorded online and it's record, it's responding to your facial muscles. So again this is the idea of these technologies being deployed. They're being put out there. Companies are buying them, building it into their structures and they're fundamentally flawed in their, in the claims of what they can do. You cannot not read emotions purely off some off. Off facial muscles. There's a thousand things I gotta be often in the, you know, you know, with zoom, zoom is a weird thing. You can't really tell what people are doing.
- [75:30]
A
I gotta stand zoom. I can't stand zoom.
- [75:32]
B
Right.
- [75:32]
A
I won't do podcasts with zoom.
- [75:33]
B
Right, right. Because you, you know, you're not really there with the.
- [75:36]
A
Yeah, you lose it, you lose the connection.
- [75:38]
B
Yeah, right. There's a thousand. There's so many different cues even to how we smell. Right. You know?
- [75:42]
A
Yeah.
- [75:43]
B
How emotion is read. So that's an example of what I mean being sold a bill of goods about what these technologies can do. It's gonna make those guys money who are already so rich that they're a threat to democracy, a threat to having a harmonious society and it's just gonna make them more money and it's gonna make our. It's gonna flatten us. They're claiming their technology can reproduce consciousness or reproduce, but it can't. And so what they're gonna do is they're gonna build a version of society that we have to drop to its level.
- [76:12]
A
Level.
- [76:13]
B
Right. It's as if like with self driving cars, you know, there's a problem with self driving cars where like, you know, they work best when you just have a grid of streets, you know, so it's like you can only have self driving cars work if like all it knows how to do is 90 degree right hand turns and left hand turns. So we're going to flatten all our cities and rebuild them so it's nothing. So the self driving cars can work. Right, right. As opposed to being like, well this technology doesn't work, we're not going to use it. Right. And that's what it's, it's going to do to the human interactions that you know, the depth of what it means to be human. It's gonna level us out, you know,
- [76:47]
A
because it doesn't us.
- [76:48]
B
It's gonna diva that's exactly.
- [76:49]
A
Well, I mean, you can already see that because people have to think less to do to complete easy tasks.
- [76:54]
B
Yeah, I see this with my students. Is that really. So you know what's interesting? But I think what's going to be interesting. So there's a couple things about this, like maybe the way the natural, the way the response is going to work. So one thing that's happening in colleges is professors are saying like, oh, we're gonna have a writing assignment. I need you to write, you know, your response to Hamlet. Right. But we're doing it in class for the next 40 minutes here. I'm handing out some of those blue notebooks.
- [77:17]
A
You can give those. What are those bags you get in comedy clubs so you can't record the comedy.
- [77:22]
B
Put your phone in the bag.
- [77:23]
A
They had these bags that no radio signals can get out of it. What are they called?
- [77:26]
B
They're called Faraday cages.
- [77:29]
A
Yeah, they're little Faraday cages.
- [77:31]
B
Yeah. And so, like, you know, okay, you're going to write this in front of me. So that's like, you can imagine these sort of natural responses that people evolve to because. To these technologies. Right. So, for example, the idea of AI slop. I don't know if you've heard this term. So with AI, AI, AI has been deployed now there's like 90% of all companies in the world, or at least the United States, are using it, and they're seeing zero productivity. Like, they're all using it, but nothing's changing. And part of the reason is this idea of AI slop. That AI makes it easy to produce a bunch of stuff, but it actually isn't useful. Right. Like so. Well, let's take the example of the Internet first. So AI is trained on the Internet. You take these large language models and you have it look at everything on the Internet. Yeah. Search everything and sort of build the databases that you need, build the connection, the relationships, everything you need. Right. But then you start then, now you have AI, and now you start using AI to produce new content on the Internet. Right. And it's full of bullshit. It's full of stuff that's not true. Right. So then the next generation of AI trains itself on this version of the, you know, of the Internet that was produced by AI. So the next generation was trained on bullshit. And so you just like, you know, it's AI slop. This just.
- [78:49]
A
Is that how it works?
- [78:51]
B
Yeah, that's how it works. They have the only thing they train. That's why it's so expensive and so resource Intensive to build these AIs is you've got to have it look at everything on the Internet. And so as you go on, what's going to happen is, is that the
- [79:06]
A
Internet, there's so much garbage on the Internet to start with.
- [79:08]
B
To start with. And now imagine 10 years from now when all the AIs and the AI, you can't get away from the AI.
- [79:13]
A
Oh, my God.
- [79:13]
B
So you can't trust. You're not going to be able to trust anything on the Internet. In which case, what happens, people stop using the Internet or use, you know, it's only good. You know, people are going to use it for scamming and, you know, God knows elsewhere. But most people.
- [79:25]
A
Will it be able to. Is there a. How would you train it or how would it train itself over time to be able to get better at detecting or its own.
- [79:36]
B
It can't. That's the problem with this version. I mean, there's other ways to do it. You know, there's a great writer named, or a scientist named Gary Marcus who has a newsletter which I highly recommend to everybody. You know, and he's been, it's so funny watching. He has always been arguing that this kind of AI, generative AI, which are the large language models, it's great for what it's good for, but it is not the path to like what we call artificial general intelligence. It is very limited in what can you do. And he said, you know, his thing is, like, there's other ways to build AI, at least research paths that would get away from this. But we're not pursuing them because, you know, Elon Musk and all those guys are spending trillions of dollars. It's all going into these and open AI, into the generative AI and that stuff. You know, he. So he was predicting back in 2020 that this, it'll stall like that. You know, you will. You will see by 2025, you know, you will see that.
- [80:26]
A
Who was predicting this?
- [80:27]
B
This guy named Gary Marcus. Okay. And it's funny because he was alone. You see, like his interactions with the big leaders of AI, you know, on the Internet or on, on Twitter back in, you know, and they're all like, you're, you know, you're just a, you know, you're a. Has been, you know, they were really very rude to him. And now almost all of those guys, except for. Yeah, there it is. All those guys. Almost all those guys.
- [80:49]
A
Stocks are crashing and the AI stocks are all down.
- [80:51]
B
Yeah, well, that's the other. Let's not even talk about the financial stuff, but he is basically, Gary Marcus's point was that scaling those guys, like Sam Altman from OpenAI was like, oh, we'll just make them bigger. We'll just make them bigger and we'll get over the hallucination. And Gary Marcus was like, there's no way scaling will not do that. So 2022, 2023, everybody's like, scaling, scaling. We'll just build bigger versions. And then, you know, 2025, finally you get like, chat GPT5. Oh, chat GPT5 is going to be, you know, an artificial general intelligence, which is what everybody wants. Something that can just do anything, right? And it turns out chat GPT5 was a huge disappointment. It wasn't even close. It sucked, you know.
- [81:29]
A
Yeah.
- [81:30]
B
And that was the beginning where people were like, oh, Gary Marcus was right, you know, and so overall, general people have now agree with the point that scaling will not sell. You can't make. Making it bigger won't get rid of hallucinations. So you got it. You need a whole other path, like a research path that we haven't done if you want an AI, that somehow. And the reason that somehow won't have this problems. And a lot of it is the idea. And we're actually doing some work. Work. There are my, my research, you know, the group I'm part of, of just thinking about, like, what is it? We're just thinking about life. We just want to know about why is life different? Like, why is a cell different from a rock? Right? You know, there's no doubt, you know, life is just really weird. And this goes back to the astrobiology. Life is the only system, you know, physical system in the world that can innovate, that can, you know, that can create new things either through evolution or just its own behavior. You know, rock is just a rock, right? And the only thing we know that is truly intelligent, right, that truly has intelligence, is life. You know, that goes off in. Whether you're talking about monkeys or, or all the way. You know, even cells, even the simple cells have a certain degree. So what Gary Marcus is arguing for and even what we're sort of interested in just thinking about life is to be intelligent, to really be. You have to really have that kind of creative novelty. The ability to really innovate, the ability to see. Intelligence is not just solving problems. It's knowing which problem to solve, Right? It's an infinite number of problems to solve. If you're a cell, you get to figure, you know, how to figure out, like, oh, I need to go find sugar. Yes. You know that you need to live in a world. You probably may even need to live in a body. Like you need to be embodied. But certainly you have to have knowledge of the world. The AI that we have now, it doesn't know anything because there's nobody in there. Like, you know, you can ask it a question, it seems like it's answering you, but it's just auto completing. It's just a program that is auto completing. So, you know, it may be that the next generation of AI, the one that could solve the problems that this version can't, is going to have to know something. You have to build world models, they call them.
- [83:31]
A
Right, yeah, that makes sense because, you know, there's so many goofy stories that are coming out every single day about like these autonomous drones that are supposed to be delivering people burritos, getting hit by trains or running over by cars. And like, it's all over the news, dominating the news stories. You know, you don't hear about the guy that overdosed, but you hear about the poor robot delivering a burrito to somebody at 3am Right.
- [83:51]
B
It's just. And then.
- [83:52]
A
And then also you have the. Another whole side of it is like you have. I had a. I had a Delta Force operator in here the other day and he was explaining to me how, like in Yemen and all over the Middle east, like Iran has these drones that are powered by autonomous AI and they're dialed in. They're. They're not controlled by anyone. They just say, go kill this guy. And those. It'll make its own decisions along the way for weapons.
- [84:15]
B
Weapons. Oh, man, that is terrifying. You know that? Then you're getting the Terminator, you know.
- [84:19]
A
Right?
- [84:20]
B
Yeah. So it's like. And these things are flawed. You do not want these things. So whatever. So I just really think AI. Yeah. The version of AI we have now is deeply flawed. And people have a right. People have a right to say, no, you know. Yeah, I don't want this technology. At least not now. You know, like, this is. I do think, like, oh, everybody, we just have to, you know, it's new technology, so you have to take it low. Human beings. Beings have a right to decide which kind of technology, especially because these technologies are going to wipe out jobs. That is really true. You see people being fired already. So, yeah, I don't think. I think we need to recognize the reasons why there's this rapid push. It's about money. It's about somebody making crap, tons of money. And if you want a functioning democracy where people have a say, you got to be able to push back.
- [85:12]
A
But where do you draw the line between like an iPhone in your hand, which is basically, you know, it's a. It's a symbiosis of. Of biology and technology. Right. It's not like implanted in us.
- [85:26]
B
Right, Right.
- [85:27]
A
We can drop it, we can let it go wherever we want, whenever we want. But, like, it is an extension of the human being today in a sense.
- [85:35]
B
So like kind of cyborgs already.
- [85:37]
A
We are kind of cyborgs. So, like, like. But where, where. But now with everything on our phones being integrated with AI, you can see how that can kind of get out of control. But you can also see how there's like a balance there. Like, you know, obviously life is way better with. With this iPhone. Me be able to call somebody or send somebody a video.
- [85:55]
B
Yeah, technology. That's what I mean. I'm not like, I'm certainly not anti technology, but I think you. What's really interesting is how it. How rapid these technologies have changed our lives. So, you know, if you go back. So one of the first video games I played was Assassin's Creed. Like the first Assassin's Creed, which took place in like 1200, right. And you know, you're running around, you're like, stab, stab, stab. You know, stab, stab, stab. And then I played Assassin's Creed 2, which takes place like 300 years later in, you know, Florence, right? In Renaissance Florence. And you're still basically like, stab, stab, stab, stab, stab. You know, so they kind of first had a gun like that was, you know, that was like, you know, that you had to. That was a weapon that, you know, you took a while to get. And my. The thing that hit me was like 300 years. And basically I'm using the same. I could have been using the same sword that I had, right. Like, technology just didn't, you know, you used your grandfather's tools, right. Because technology was just very slowly evolving. And now, my God, like the time from, you know, I'm 63 years old. Old. You know, let me tell you about what phones were like back in the day. And now, you know, within three years, I'm not even going to be able to use this.
- [87:03]
A
Right.
- [87:04]
B
And there's a way in which this. There's a kind of instability that is coming from these that I think, you know, it may come naturally or it may need, you know, we may need to reevaluate how fast we want technology to advance like that, you know, that, you know, we're willing to like, put certain things off for us to stabilize. You know, the effect of this is of this technology on culture. Right. And I think that may come in time maybe because, like, we actually hit a point where like, it blows everything up and our descendants, you know, it'll be two generations later after the AI crash or whatever, that wipes out all of the.
- [87:39]
A
Right.
- [87:40]
B
That people have a different sort of approach to technology or people will just like, what's happening in classes, like, Right. My professor friends who are like, you know what? I'm gonna make you write that. I'm gonna have you actually think.
- [87:52]
A
Yeah. And also everything is sort of like, like, it's almost like all the new branches are just coming off of like, the same original branch. There's no like, foundational, like, trunks coming out. Right. Like, like, I don't remember anything as profoundly mind blowing as when the iPhone first came out. Like, that just completely blew me out of the water that this thing existed. I had a friend that got one right when it came out, and I was like, dude, can I touch it? Can I hold it? Can I Like, oh my God, like, there's nothing like that sense, you know?
- [88:28]
B
I know. And then it's just been.
- [88:29]
A
Everything's just been a spin off.
- [88:31]
B
Right.
- [88:32]
A
Or, or not only a spin off, but like something that works with that.
- [88:36]
B
Right.
- [88:36]
A
It integrates with it.
- [88:37]
B
Right.
- [88:38]
A
There's been no foundational, like, gain.
- [88:40]
B
And like robotics, you could imagine like, you know, when you get your first humanoid robot, you know, that could be. But again, we don't have those technologies aren't, you know, you don't want a. The current version of AI to be powering your robot. You know, there's just.
- [88:52]
A
Yeah.
- [88:53]
B
So. And you know, also you think about, like, the way the tech companies, like there's been a real problem for the democracies for the, you know, the, the. All the democracies with what these things did, you know, having the social media thing in your, you know, the, the on your hand, you know, right in your hand, and then everybody.
- [89:10]
A
Polarization. Tap into it. What now the NSA can tap right into it.
- [89:13]
B
Right, right. Well, on the polarization where like, you know, the United States enemies were purposely on left and right. Purposely polarizing conversations.
- [89:22]
A
Oh, yeah.
- [89:23]
B
On Twitter, half the. Half of these are Russian, bo, whatever
- [89:26]
A
you name the country, they're in there.
- [89:28]
B
Yeah. Right. So there's again, this sort of sense that like, these technologies really spun us out of control in a lot of ways. And I kind of, I feel I'm, you know, I'm generally An optimist that we, it may take a couple of generations. We'll, we'll work it out. But on the other hand, I think we have to exert some controls. We have to exert, you know, that we the people have to be able to say, like, you know what? Because again, these, you know how like you get these updates on your phone and it's like, oh, here's this new feature that you know, and you're like, I don't want that feature. Feature, you know, like, I really liked the other one. No, this new thing now, it can put it in six colors. I don't want six colors. So, you know, and that's all driven by the profit motive, right? It's all driven. Like we got to keep pushing stuff out. Like, you know, I'm gonna. They. Apple wants me to have to buy a new phone in two years, even though this phone probably could work for a while, right? So, you know, I can see that coming just because, you know, this, the, the, the systems, the social, economic, political, geophysical systems that we all grew up in are being pushed into a new state, right? So the climate change thing, we're being pushed there will be. We are headed towards a different Earth, you know, in the next 30, 40, 50, 100 years, it'll be a different planet. You know, not wildly different, but it's going to be a different planet. And that along with other things that are happening, we will be forced, humanity will be forced into some difficult times. Like, that's my kind of thing. The next century is probably going to be a difficult time for humanity. But that'll force us, you know, that'll force us into new, you know, new configurations and maybe make new choices and, you know, and that sense, I like to remind people, history's long residence day
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A
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- [91:32]
B
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- [91:33]
A
Yes. So hold that thought. I gotta take a pee real quick.
- [91:37]
B
Go. So this idea of sort of the progress of civilizations and how they change with technology is what I'm really interested in. Because, you know, as an astrobiologist thinking about civilizations, that's the coolest thing about that job, right? We have to really think seriously about trajectories. What are the possible trajectories of civilization? Which also brings you back to, you know, human civilization future, right? So it is a book that I highly recommend, I think is so amazing, called Goliath's Curse. It's by a guy who's kind of a futurologist. And what he does in there is he sort of looks at the whole history of civilizations on earth, right? And a Goliath, what he calls a Goliath is like any, the state, any kind of state, any kind of, you know, kingdom, you know, any kind of large organized. And what he shows is that throughout history, you know, and what's it after? After the last ice age, we started farming. And when we started farming, we started to have what he calls lootable resources, right? Because we used to be hunter gatherers. We had small groups of maybe 100 people. And they all talked to each other, all these different tribes, but it was very egalitarian. Nobody really owned anything because nobody really had anything to own. And then once we started farming, there was like you were starting to gather stuff, right? There were grain silos. So for him, these Goliaths, these early Goliaths, these early states were basically. Because you had a bunch of guys, he said it was basically gangs, like organized crime that started these states. But then what he shows is all the way through history, then as time went on, you got these larger and larger Goliaths, Rome, Tang dynasty, China, and now the modern one. But he says that almost always what brings them down are two things. One is climate. Because often you're, you know, you're sucking up all the resources that changes, you know, either changes climate or changes the resources you have, given the climate you have or the climate you have. Local climate changes. But even more importantly was inequality. Almost always it's inequality that brings the Goliath down. The inequality gets so large, you know, the leaders, the kings, whatever, are so, you know, they're so over rich compared to the average person. And of course they're extracting that wealth from the average person via taxes or whatever, that finally people are like, we're done. And they rebel or they leave. That's an interesting. Either they leave, they just like, I'm done with the city, I'm gonna go live in the hills. Or they actually rebel. So that's a really interesting conclusion over all this time that it's often inequality, which is clearly we have like, it's insane the amount of inequality we have now that there's, you know, this small group of people own 90%, you know, the upper 1.1% owns whatever 50% of the wealth in a nation or more. So I thought that was really interesting that often you look at history and it's often inequality which will sort of tap out how much, how much whether people are willing to put up with being governed, you know.
- [94:43]
A
Right.
- [94:43]
B
Yeah, yeah.
- [94:44]
A
It makes you wonder where we're going to end up here in this civilization.
- [94:47]
B
Yeah. Because clearly, you know, we see this and that's. I actually the point was going back to the cell phone and AI and everything was just that these technologies are amazing, but they have really only very few people have benefited from financially from, you know, I mean, it's a small fraction of the world that has really financially benefited from them, which is especially when you get to things like robots. You know, who owns the robots. Right. If the robots are putting everybody out of work, the only people who are really, you know, getting rich are the people who own the robots.
- [95:11]
A
Well, Steven's a big advocate for robot police. He thinks robot police are going to solve all of our problems.
- [95:15]
B
I have robots. Robots being the, like the policeman.
- [95:18]
A
Yeah. He thinks robots should have full autonomy to kill people and make the decisions.
- [95:22]
B
Oh man, that seems like, I think I've seen a lot of those science fiction movies. Well, I mean, science fiction is meant for drama, reality.
- [95:29]
A
If you make it, make it, give it rules.
- [95:34]
B
A robot police isn't going to get mad and shoot somebody. Well, that's true. Right. There would be. Yeah.
- [95:39]
A
But my question is, who's in control of the robot police?
- [95:42]
B
Right, exactly. And who. Yeah, and what, what. You know, because the, and what biases? Because, you know, somebody programmed the robot police.
- [95:48]
A
Someone's going to program the robot, somebody's going to, you know, human being isn't going to be behind that.
- [95:52]
B
Right. And you look at like the, you know, the, there's all this evidence, like really clear evidence of all the biases in these algorithms that were built in by the people, you know, can't recognize certain kinds of people, literally can't recognize their faces.
- [96:07]
A
Google, Google is, is extremely biased. There's been tons of research and placebo controlled double blind studies on it.
- [96:14]
B
Yeah, yeah. So anyway, I think it's really interesting that, you know, sort of there's this. And this really matters for the search for intelligent Life on other planets. Because, you know, we have to ask ourselves like, you know, what are we looking for? What kind of things will a civilization do that you could see using a super powerful telescope across 30 light years or 100 light years. And so that, that requires kind of trying to build some maps of how technological civilizations evolve.
- [96:41]
A
Yeah, well, didn't. Didn't Elon say that if we were going to inhabit Mars, we would need to like detonate nukes at the poles to like create some sort of an atmosphere or something?
- [96:56]
B
Well, what he wanted to do was
- [96:57]
A
melt that was to terraform it or something.
- [97:00]
B
Well, with everybody wanted to do, Elon Musk is like on serious drugs when it comes to Mars. Like the idea that we're going to build a city on Mars. He's on lots of crazy drugs. But when it comes to Mars in particular, his Mars stuff, you know, I mean, I'm all for let's go to Mars.
- [97:12]
A
Like, well, let's start with the moon. How about that? Yeah, they just pushed back the Artemis mission again.
- [97:17]
B
I know, I know. Boy, man, it's really, you know, we are definitely in serious danger that the Chinese will go back to the moon before we.
- [97:24]
A
I mean, the moon landing deniers are having a heyday right now, but let's not even get.
- [97:29]
B
Don't. I'm gonna take a deep breath now. Don't get me started with the moon landing deniers because I will just, I will go freaking ballistic.
- [97:37]
A
Oh, let's hear it. I need to hear it.
- [97:38]
B
Oh, it's just the. It is such bullshit. Those. I want, I want those moon landing deniers, I want one of them to come have the balls to stand in front of like a team of NASA scientists, you know, not one guy on, you know, like doing some, you know, doing a podcast who's no a team and get grilled. Just like I said. Remember what I was talking about with Adam Reese? You know, they'll be shredded. They're like evidence for why it's, you know, it's all been refuted a thousand times. It's just bullshit. You know, I got rocks from the moon that have different isotopic, you know, the whole theory of our moon rocks
- [98:12]
A
land in Antarctica, South Pole and not
- [98:15]
B
enough for the kinds of the volumes that we need to be able to do what we've, what we've been able to do. And also, you know, we went to the highlands, we went to the lowlands, and it's just, you know, this is not a road I want to go down, cuz I will literally Freak out.
- [98:25]
A
I just had a guy on here recently who. He's got a great YouTube channel. It's called Everyday Astronaut. He. He's like. He's not a moon landing denier at all. He's a very big proponent of. Of all this stuff. And he's like, extremely. He's not a rocket scientist, but he's extremely smart when it comes to rocketry.
- [98:39]
B
I've seen some of his stuff and
- [98:41]
A
I asked him, I'm like, can you steel man the. The moon landing deniers? And he goes, yeah, I can actually. He's like. A very good point that they have is, why the. Haven't we gone back to the moon since 69?
- [98:51]
B
That point is purely. Purely fricking political. You look at the history of what happened, we get, you know, I get it.
- [98:59]
A
It's like, I understand. Like, here's what my take is on it. My take is, really briefly, is that it was a stunt. It was a stunt to see we could put human beings on the moon. There's no real need to put humans out there when. When it's. It's too much of a risk. We can do a better job with robots. Like.
- [99:15]
B
Well, the reason we did it was because of the Cold War. It was like, purely political. It was like.
- [99:19]
A
It was a. It was just a fucking. It was a publicity stunt to see if we could. If we could beat Russia. It was a dick meas.
- [99:25]
B
It was.
- [99:25]
A
It was a weakened Russia to put a human being there, right? There's no rational reason to put a human being there. Unless it's that.
- [99:31]
B
No, no, it wasn't, but it was. It was. And then what happened was we got there, you know, it's the end of the Vietnam War, Nixon's in trouble politically, blah, blah, blah. Spending like shitloads of money on exactly sending people the moon. It just was no longer. Politically, you couldn't do it. You couldn't get the votes in Congress to do it. So then we shifted to, you know, the. The shuttle program, which was just Earth orbit, you know, and then time went on.
- [99:56]
A
It's.
- [99:56]
B
It's very expensive, right? As you see, it's a very expensive. That's why we didn't go back. There has not been the political or financial will to go back. And so now what happens is, you know, you're trying to go back again. You gotta. So now also, I'm about to get ballistic on something else, you know, with what just happened to the government right now. We just fired all the people who had the expert. We either fired them or forced them into retirement. And all the people who had the experience to do this right, that's what Elon Musk did with that stupid Dodge thing. I got friends in NASA.
- [100:27]
A
Oh, Doge.
- [100:28]
B
Doge. Yeah, yeah, they Doggy. Basically they whacked NASA. All these guys were. Did they really? Oh, NASA. A lot of retirements. A lot of retirement. They forced people into retirement. You know, lot of layoffs. And these were the people, like, getting a probe to land on Mars. Like, there's not a recipe for it. You need human experience. You know, I was talking to a friend of mine who was in the room with a bunch of NASA engineers. It was for. This was for a Jupiter probe. And like, somebody threw out this idea of like, oh, you know, we could put this. We could do this and that to be able to, you know, build a magnetometer on it. And one guy spoke in the back said, no, we tried that in 72. It doesn't work. You know.
- [101:05]
A
Oh, yeah. Oh, mid-2025, last year, nearly 4,000 NASA employees.
- [101:09]
B
These are people who have the experience that you need, like the real world experience that's not in books that, you know. And we wiped them out. Why? You know, and so, you know, I mean, listen, there was. I would argue that like, yeah, sort of what you've seen the bloating of, you know, the reason Artemis. Artemis is in trouble for a lot of reasons that have to do with the private sector. You know, the. We were hoping that isn't the Artemis.
- [101:35]
A
I don't know if you know about this stuff, but I heard that the Artemis rocket is using the space shuttle engine. I'm not.
- [101:43]
B
I'm not sure. I don't know. I don't know.
- [101:45]
A
Can you Google that?
- [101:46]
B
Well, it's got the solid rocket boosters on the side, but the main engines, you know, they were trying to rebuild assets. So I'm not. Yeah, I'm not skilled enough in that. But like, you know, the program, I mean, I'm all for it. I am all for going we should have gone back to the moon, you know, 10 years ago. But it does look like every president
- [102:03]
A
has said we were going to go back.
- [102:04]
B
There's never been the political will because it's so expensive, right? It's really expensive. And that was the great thing. Like, I was. Was all in favor, and I still am in favor of commercial space. Like, amazing things are happening in. With the commercialization of space. Like there's. I think we're now at like, I'm not going to get this number right, but it's on the order of like, like $600 million. Billion, sorry. Billions. Space. The burgeoning space economy for all kinds of. Of.
- [102:27]
A
Oh, my God. Somebody just showed us the other day. There's a guy, a YouTuber, was it? Who is the guy? Is there some guy selling selfies in space? He's got a satellite in space. And you could like, pay an exorbitant amount of money and have the screen show your face, a selfie of you in outer space.
- [102:45]
B
But there is, like, you know, there is.
- [102:47]
A
That's, that's a sign of declining.
- [102:49]
B
There are huge, There are huge reasons for us, you know, there's lots of reasons where there's, there's money to be made in space, which I think is great.
- [102:56]
A
You know, isn't this the same guy who's creating those, those cool things for kids? Oh, yeah. Crunch Labs. Yeah. This guy, the Crunch Labs things is, Is actually school. He's creating these things for kids where they can like, solve puzzles and stuff.
- [103:10]
B
Well, this is the thing, like, there's a lot, you know, now it becomes. Thanks. You know, the, the good thing that Elon Musk did with SpaceX is the cost of, you know, getting a pound into space. A kilogram in space has just dropped. And now there's lots of other space companies coming up. Rocket labs. I think it's. Electron rocket.
- [103:25]
A
Blue origin.
- [103:26]
B
Blue Origin. So this is all great, but in general, like, you know, the. We are not making. SpaceX is not making the progress that we needed them to make with the starship. Starship, right. It's, you know, it's just not coming along as fast as they need to. And getting back to the moon, that's a huge part of it. You know, this having space, having the starship work is a huge part. They need to be doing refuel. All the stuff that like, you know, Musk promised.
- [103:51]
A
They have to refuel in Earth's atmosphere to get into.
- [103:54]
B
No, in orbit.
- [103:55]
A
In Earth's orbit to do the translator.
- [103:57]
B
Nobody's done that. So there's like, it's not even clear whether they're kind of quite behind. So I'm quite worried that one of
- [104:04]
A
the biggest thing that the skill the moon landing deniers say about, about which again, I'm still on the fence, right? I'm not definitively saying the fence.
- [104:12]
B
I want to. Hardly, hardly, you know, from all the science that I, I use that depended on the, you know, also if you're a moon. Here's my. Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. Let me just finish this, okay? If You're a moon denier. What about the Martian probes? What about like the landers? The, the, you know, the. Are those all fake too?
- [104:30]
A
No, no, no. I think we've landed probes. I think for sure we've landed probes there.
- [104:33]
B
I mean it's not that much harder with, with humans. It's not that.
- [104:35]
A
I don't know. I, I think. Here's my thing. I think that, here's another argument I've been turned on to the pro moon side is that I, I was under the assumption or under the illusion that the Saturn 5 rocket need, didn't need to be re. Like you have all of these people like Elon and all these people saying that like to get to the moon we have to refuel in Earth's orbit to get to, to do the translunar injection. Saturn 5 did not need to refuel once.
- [105:12]
B
Right.
- [105:13]
A
But here's what I recently learned is that, which this is kind of stupid, I didn't think about this, but all of the rockets that are being designed today are designed in the, the, the primary thing they're looking at is reusability.
- [105:26]
B
Right?
- [105:26]
A
The Saturn 5 was an expendable rocket.
- [105:28]
B
Exactly.
- [105:29]
A
We're not trying to do it with expendable rockets.
- [105:30]
B
We went to like, we sent like the Artemis one went to the moon, right? Didn't land on the moon, you know, and it was, the cat didn't have any human beings in it. But it was the capsule, like it was just basically Artemis 1.
- [105:41]
A
There was no. They refueled in orbit.
- [105:43]
B
No, no, no, no, you didn't need to because it's. Did they bring it back rocket?
- [105:47]
A
Did they bring it back?
- [105:47]
B
Yeah, they brought it back. Well, no, no they didn't. No. I mean, you know, the whole, none of it was reusable. None of it was intended to be all expendable. And that's why it was so expensive. Right, right. We only, you know, it would be too expensive.
- [105:58]
A
Expensive. To make this an expendable thing. We have to be able to get these rockets to be reusable. That's why we need to refuel them because they're so much bigger.
- [106:04]
B
But you know, there was no the tech. When you watch, you know, a SpaceX Falcon come land and you see it do that crazy thing where it comes out and it just slows down. It's insane.
- [106:14]
A
And it's going, it's like adjusting, it's autonomously adjusting on the way down.
- [106:17]
B
You couldn't do that in 1969, right? You couldn't do that in 1995. It's only because of the technology we have now, now that you can do that. So everything that was built in those days was built, you know, it was all one off, which was why it was so crazy expensive.
- [106:33]
A
And one of the other reasons I can't definitively jump off the fence yet is just because, you know, we had that, that period in history was the President got killed, got shot in the head. We had MK Ultra, the Vietnam War, Golf of Tonkin, you name it. And then right in the middle of all those fucking lies, we went to the moon. The most extraordinary achievement of humanity.
- [106:55]
B
But it was all, I mean, you know, the idea this, it's just, It's a really great. Because you know what the moon landing, like, it didn't really. So, you know, I grew up in the space age. Yeah, that moon landing, you know, denial was just like complete wackadoodle craziness. I know.
- [107:11]
A
It was the one time, it was the one conspiracy. You were automatically painted as a fool for it. Like, you can believe in all the
- [107:15]
B
other ones, the moon one.
- [107:17]
A
You're a fool for good reason.
- [107:19]
B
I mean, it still is and it speaks to sort of what has happened. You know, you cannot have a cohesive technological civilization if something as foundational as, you know, the experience of, you know, of the space, of the American space program is denied. Right? That door is where everything gets denied. There is no, there's no shared reality, right? And that. There's no way democracy can survive if you don't have a shared, shared reality. So there is like.
- [107:49]
A
Right.
- [107:50]
B
You know, there is just.
- [107:51]
A
We don't have a shared reality. This whole world we live in right
- [107:54]
B
now, everyone's in aswell, you know, and that's why you really ask, like, you know, sometimes I think, we're not gonna make it. Right? We're not. We're not gonna. We've built a society that has. That undermined itself, right? And so, you know, I. What I'm a proponent of most of all is American science, right? American science has been a triumph. And American science is because is. Is what's given us our prosperity. It's what's given us our security. And what has happened over the last 20 to 15 years with these conspiracy theories, and that's a big part of it is the undermining of what makes American science possible. And then you get what's happening with these cuts and, you know, because that's the cut, the ability, like, for the. You know, it used to be that like every politician understood, like, no science is why, you know, we have a strong defense. And you know, the rise of these conspiracy theories is what undermines the ability of politicians now to just cut NASA in half, you know, or whatever, do the damage that it's done. And so an interesting thing, here's a very interesting factoid. I think it was two weeks ago. You know, every year like this international organization just looks at how much knowledge is being produced. Papers, you know, scientific papers, patents, et cetera. And they look at the universities where, you know, the top universities where this is being produced. And it was always American universities. This year for the first time, I think at the first two slots are Chinese universities. So, you know, the thing is, like, you can have your conspiracy theories and, you know, woohoo. Everybody's having a good time, but there's a real world consequence of it. Like China does not have these conspiracy theories. They're like running straight forward.
- [109:24]
A
They're under an iron fist over there.
- [109:26]
B
Well, but they're, they have put their money into science and technology. Like, I don't want their society, but
- [109:31]
A
they have, they might be a more optimal nation state. Right, but they might, they don't have the freedom that we have here.
- [109:36]
B
You know what's interesting, but, but that freedom will erode if you, you know, if you're not, if you are not the most. The society that wins is the society that's, this is history that has, that leads in science and technology. Yes, that is the. And we are now taking, we're starting to step back. So here's an interesting thing, right? So in 1600, if you wanted to learn the cutting edge of science, you went to Italy, Right. Because that's where Galileo was. That's where, you know, that's where all the leaders of science were in 1600, in 1700, you didn't go to Italy. It was. Its time had passed. Like they didn't. For what? The princes stopped investing in it, you know, and then you went to, you went to England or you went to France. Right. In 1900, if you wanted to be at the cutting edge of science, you went to Germany. Germany was where quantum mechanics was being born. Electromagnetism, you know, the frontiers were happening. But by 1960, you didn't go to Germany, you went to the United States. Right. So scientific preeminence is not something you're guaranteed. It's not like you, you get it and then you just get to keep it forever.
- [110:37]
A
Yeah.
- [110:37]
B
And what is happening? And I really think this conspiracy thinking, like with the moon landing stuff, which to me, you know, Given all the knowledge that I know came from those that, you know, the. The space program and the moon landing all, you know, my, my. I can't do the science I have of the solar system without what happened to the space program program. That conspiracy theory is actually undermining American science and there will be real world consequences. If that kind of sort of like, oh, it's all a hoax. Everybody's lying. If that really promulgates, then you can guarantee that by 2100, China's leading the world in science or the Europe or, you know, other countries, you know, India, they will take our place. They're happy to take our place. So there are real world consequences to this kind of thing that, like this thing that everybody wants. Watched the moon landing saying that like, oh, that's. No, no, you didn't really see that it was a hoax. So that's why I think, like, you know, we got to be really careful about this. There are. It's not just kind of a fun Internet conversation.
- [111:34]
A
Right. Well, if they would go back, it would shut all those people up. Just go back and get some footage.
- [111:38]
B
Yeah, of. Of what? Of going.
- [111:40]
A
Of walking on the moon.
- [111:42]
B
Well, you know what? It. We're gonna. Somebody will. And it may very well be a, you know, the Chinese flag that you see. No, they're Chinese.
- [111:49]
A
China.
- [111:49]
B
China is like systematically marching forward in their space capacities are pretty amazing.
- [111:56]
A
I was watching something a couple maybe a year ago. We brought this up on the podcast before, but it was the head of the former director of NASA being questioned about China exploring the dark side of the moon. And this guy's response was like, ah, we're. We'll let him do it. We're not interested in exploring the dark side of the moon. Do you see that?
- [112:13]
B
You know, you know, everybody, whatever. What I know is everybody. Everybody's interested in is the South. South Pole, because that's where the water is.
- [112:19]
A
Well, that's where they're going to land our contested.
- [112:21]
B
That's because so is the Chinese. The Chinese are going for there as well. You know, there's a movie. What is it? I didn't like the movie very much. I think it was called Ad Astra with.
- [112:30]
A
Is that Brad Pitt?
- [112:31]
B
Yeah, Brad Pitt. You know, I didn't really like the movie very much because I thought it kind of. In the end it got kind of stupid. But it shows. It does a really nice job of showing what the moon might look like in 50 or 60 years. And it's kind of a wild west, you know, like there's one point he's got to draw from one place to
- [112:45]
A
the other running around or just like
- [112:47]
B
people, peer state adversaries like they have to go from, they have to cross over thing and they get attacked.
- [112:52]
A
Right.
- [112:52]
B
You know, it's gonna, it could, you know, so I, I will bet you, I'll put the money down right now that you will have your pictures, you know, within, within a decade. Yeah. But it, I'm not, cannot, sadly I cannot guarantee that it's going to be an American flag that you're going to see also.
- [113:06]
A
How crazy is the moon? Like do we, I don't think we know. No one about, no one I ever talked to has ever explained any evidence of any other moons of other planets having the insane miraculous distance from the Earth and the sun to where it's able to create this eclipse.
- [113:27]
B
Oh that is, yeah. You know that's temporary by the way.
- [113:30]
A
Yeah, well it's moving away a little bit, right?
- [113:32]
B
No, no, it's been moving away for you know the, the day used to be like, you know, if you were visited earth like 2 billion years ago, moon would have been billions like 10% bigger in the sky because it was much closer. And the, so there's been this complicated gravitational interaction between the Earth and the moon over time that you know, the moon was born much like you really can't explain Earth without the stuff we learned from landing on the moon. Yeah. When actually getting the, you know, visiting the different sites, the highlands and the lowlands. Right. But so here's what. Absolutely. There's something very weird about the moon which is, it's so, so big. Like there's no other planet in the solar system that has a moon that is as big compared to the planet. Right. So Jupiter's got lots of moons and some of the moons are actually bigger than Earth's.
- [114:16]
A
What is it like it's a quarter the size of the Earth or something.
- [114:18]
B
It's a thou. The moon I think is a diameter of a thousand kilometers and Earth find
- [114:24]
A
the, find the Earth I think find the relative size.
- [114:26]
B
So I think it's 1/6 or so 1 6. But I'm, let's, let's check. I'm, you know, I forget.
- [114:31]
A
I know it's only like point to the mass.
- [114:34]
B
Yeah.
- [114:34]
A
Which is wild. The size and the mass difference.
- [114:37]
B
Yeah, yeah. But the thing is all the other like, you know, Jupiter's moons are like teeny tiny compared to the planet and
- [114:42]
A
a lot of them are for potato shapes.
- [114:45]
B
If you get big enough, you get round and anything that's gravity does this if you're large enough. Since the moon is roughly rough quarter the size of Earth in diameter. Okay, okay, okay.
- [114:53]
A
And then what's the mass? 2% the MA of the volume.
- [114:56]
B
Yeah, volume. But you've got. Because volume goes with radius cubed. So what about the mass? 11 1% of the Earth?
- [115:01]
A
It's the fifth largest moon in the solar system.
- [115:03]
B
Yeah, but it's the, it's the comparison. So if you were to visit, if you were visiting from another solar system, you might think that the Earth and the moon were kind of binary planets. You might not even sort of be like oh look, there's a planet with a satellite. You might be like oh, these are two planets that were.
- [115:16]
A
Why is it such low volume compared to the size? Did they find like, do they think there's like caves in there? Like maybe it's like funny.
- [115:24]
B
This is just R cubed. It's not. No. So it's, it's.
- [115:28]
A
Didn't they find caves in the.
- [115:30]
B
Oh, there are caves, but it's not hollow or anything. But let me tell you, like not hollow.
- [115:33]
A
I mean just like maybe honeycomb.
- [115:34]
B
Yeah, yeah. No, no, it's mostly, it's going to mostly be solid because it's, you know, it's, it's like it has a composition thanks to the moon rocks that is like Earth but different enough. You know, we know like our theories of how the Moon formed was a big ass collision between the Earth and probably a Mars sized body very early on in the solar system. So but let's just. This is a really interesting thing, thing about the moon is so large relative to the Earth that it has profoundly affected its, the Earth's evolution. Right. So it slowed the day down. For example, the day used to be much faster. There used to be like. Really? Yeah, yeah. There would have been like what, 23 hours or 22 hours in a day. We can bring that up to isn't
- [116:13]
A
the day on a moon to in on the moon two weeks?
- [116:16]
B
It's a month actually. Well, this is what it is. So what has happened is there's what's called tiling tidal locking. So you know, the Earth is when the Earth they were both born, they were both spinning and they're and the moon's orbiting the Earth. But then there's a gravitational interaction between the Earth and Moon that slowed the Earth's rotation, pushed, allowed, you know, at the same time moved the moon further out in its orbit and then slowed the moon spin until the moon always shows the same face Towards Earth. It's called tidally locked, right? Like, it's not the dark side of the moon, it's the far side of the moon, right?
- [116:46]
A
Because it's not always dark.
- [116:47]
B
It's not always dark, right. But we can never see it. We always see the same side. So what's happening is as the Moon is going around the Earth, it always shows the same side, which means it is spinning, but it's spinning at the same rate as it's orbiting, right? So it's day and it's year. It's saying it's all gravity. It's all the theory of gravity, right? You can work it out for the theory of gravity. And that has had huge concepts, tides, the fact that we have tides, huge consequences so complicated for the evolution of life because like, life may have been born in those tidal. You know, you have the interstitial tidal zones where the water washes up and you're underwater and then the water washes down and you're out of water. And that may have been hugely important for the evolution of life on Earth. So the fact that we have a big moon, you know, may actually. Is it. Is it why we got intelligent life on the Earth? You know, I don't know, but that's one of the things people. There's the rare Earth hypothesis, which is that, you know, Earth actually has some very unusual characteristics compared to other planets in our solar system and maybe other planets in the universe. So like, is. Is that mean that it's rare? That, you know, life would be rare?
- [117:54]
A
Two, two questions. Well, first one, what are the biggest differences that we have found with other Goldilocks planets and Earth?
- [118:02]
B
Yeah, well, the thing is we haven't been able to. You know, we just now are getting the ability and we're still. Even the James Webb Space Telescope, as powerful as it it is, are just beginning at the ability to actually look at them in detail. Like, so the, you know, up until James Webb, the main thing was just finding them. Like, oh, there's a planet in the habitable zone, right. Because it's hard to find plants. You can't see plants.
- [118:23]
A
The color of it, like, the color. Right. Is a big thing.
- [118:26]
B
Well, even that we're still, we're just be able. So here's what you want to do if you want to. So first of all, finding a planet, you never or rarely can ever see planet directly. You have to look at the star and look at changes in the star to infer the existence of a planet. So for example, one thing, the main way we find planets is by what we call transits, which is like a little eclipse. You know, the planet's going around the star and if the orientation of its orbit is right, it goes in between us and the star. And what you'll see is a little teeny tiny dip in starlight. And so it took, you know, decades to build the instruments that could see like a 1 in 1000 dip in the star starlight. Right? Now we've gotten really good at that. So we can, we're very good at finding those dips in starlight and using those dips to infer how big is the planet, how massive is the planet. We actually need other things to get the mass. But one of the amazing things you can do with this is when, if the planet has an atmosphere, like a little veil of gas around it when it's passing in front of the star, when the planet is passing between us and the star, some of the starlight will pass through the atmosphere and get to us, right? And when it does, the chemicals in the atmosphere will absorb some of the light. It'll, you know, there's a rainbow going through the, from the star into the, through this, the planet's atmosphere. And some of that rainbow will be sucked up by chemicals in the atmosphere. It was called a spectra, right? And, or absorption spectra. And every, every chemical, every element, every molecule has a very distinctive way it absorbs light. So it's like a chemical, it's a fingerprint, a spectral, a light fingerprint. So we get that light, we, you know, with our telescope. And if the telescope's big enough, it can collect enough light that we can then, then, you know, spread that light out and say like, oh, oh, look, some of the light was taken out at this wavelength and then twice that wavelength. That's carbon dioxide. So you can be like, holy crap, there's carbon dioxide in that atmosphere. So we're just like, we can do that for big planets, like Jupiter sized planets. We're just at the hairy edge of being able to do that for Earth, like planets. Got it. So we don't really know yet what a Goldilocks planet. We're not there yet. But the point of my book, you know, when I was writing it, was that what is so exciting is that in the next 10, 20, 30 years, we're building the next generation of telescopes. That's what they're for. They are going to be able to collect that light and look for things like oxygen. Like if you find oxygen in a planet's atmosphere, that may be a determinant that there is a biosphere there, right? Because all the oxygen. This is a crazy idea. If you were to land on Earth 4 billion years, 3 billion years ago, there was already life. You know, there was. You would have found, like, bacteria, mats of bacteria. But if you stepped out of your spaceship and took your helmet off, the first thing would have happened is you would have died because there was no oxygen in the atmosphere. There was nitrogen and there was some carbon dioxide and you know, the other stuff, but there was no oxygen in the atmosphere, right? Nobody take a deep breath. Where's that oxygen come from? It came from life, like somewhere about two and a half billion years ago ago, evolution, microbial evolution, figured out a new trick, which was how to do a kind of photosynthesis that used water. But, you know, there was photosynthesis before that, but it had to use, like, iron ions in the ocean. And there's not a lot of iron, you know, ions in the ocean. So life was kind of limited. The food was limited. And then about two and a half billion years ago, life figured out, through evolution how to use water as the basis for photosynthesis. The chemical shenanigans that take a photon, you know, a light ray and clank, clank, clank, clank, clank, you know, turn it into a sugar molecule that you can eat. And that changed life forever for two reasons. One, suddenly there's water everywhere, right? So now suddenly there's all the food you could possibly for photosynthesis you could need. You know, there's all this water that you can use to turn sunlight into sugar. So life just accepts, explodes. But the second thing was, like, what happens is life, you know, the microbes inside the microbes, they take the water molecule, H2O, they split it apart, they take the hydrogen, you know, which is a proton. They use that to build the sugar and the oxygen, they fart out. They literally like, they. So all this oxygen is getting just pumped back out into the oceans first and then into the atmosphere. And it takes about maybe half a million, half a billion years. The ox, the atmosphere fills up with oxygen, right? They call it the Great Oxidation Event. And it took, you know, it took a little while, but that is why it was life that put oxygen into the atmosphere. Wow, isn't that wild? So if you find. So there's. Because if, like, if tomorrow all life on Earth went away, all that oxygen would just recombine with the rocks really quickly. Like, if, you know, if life disappeared tomorrow, you'd come back. And I'm not really sure what it'd be like, you know, a million years. The Earth, the atmosphere would have no oxygen in it. Right now it's got 21% oxygen. It would all go away. So that story is.
- [123:09]
A
So if you're saying all the life disappeared on the Earth right now, all
- [123:12]
B
the oxygen would go away in the atmosphere. Because the only reason, the only reason there's oxygen in the atmosphere is life keeps farting it out. It's the, you know, it is a product of. Photo of, of biological photosynthesis. That is what every day is pushing oxygen into the atmosphere. So every day oxygen is pushed into the atmosphere by life. And every day oxygen gets bound back up into rocks. So if you remove the life, if for some reason magically you could make all the life go away. But what happened is the, the 21 oxygen that's in the atmosphere would just get.
- [123:45]
A
What would happen to, like the plants in the rainforest?
- [123:47]
B
No, no, that's. I'm saying, let's say magically if I could take life away, right, Then the oxygen in the atmosphere would go away. So the reason I'm saying that is that, so what's important, what it tells you is that if you see oxygen in a planet's atmosphere, right, like that whole thing I was just talking about, that tells you that the. There probably is life there. There's probably a biosphere, right? So you will not have oxygen in an atmosphere, in a planetary atmosphere, most likely, without there being life to keep pumping it back in. Right.
- [124:16]
A
Okay, that makes sense.
- [124:17]
B
Yeah. So, so the other thing. So that, that story has two important points. So it shows us how we're going to characterize how we're going to look for life on distant planets, right? Because, yeah, we're not going there anytime soon, right. So how can we see life, how can we see signatures of biology, I. E. Bio signatures on planets that are 100 light years away? Well, once we have these more powerful telescopes, we're going to be able to do exactly what I was just telling you. We're going to be able to look for the, the light that's passed through the planet's atmosphere, analyze that light and look for compounds that can only be produced by biology. Yeah, but there's a second really important consequence of this, right? So what happens is these little critters, right, that two and a half billion years ago that in, you know, innovated and invented this new form of photosynthesis, they literally changed the planet, right? You know, having oxygen in the atmosphere changed everything about the planet's history. Oxygen, chemistry is just totally different. So. So it's a really nice, very important example of life changing the atmosphere, which changed the climate, also radically changed the climate of the Earth. And actually it was kind of poisonous to the critters that were around ground then, like, it actually, it was kind of a devastation. The invention of, you know, this photosynthesis was good for a while, but then it pumped so much oxygen in the atmosphere that that speed those species of critters ended up, they had to like burrow into the ground, like get away from the oxygen. Oxygen was actually poison for them.
- [125:40]
A
Wow.
- [125:41]
B
So it's a really nice example of a species becoming very successful and in the process changing the climate in ways that wasn't so useful for them. Sound familiar? Right. That's all we're doing now. So this whole. So I'm just bringing it back to climate change now. There's people who are like, it's a hoax. It's like, dude, this is what life does. When successful species change planets, that is important for us to think about our future. It's important for us to think about other technological civilizations. They probably change their planets. And also that whole thing that, like, oh, it's a hoax. It's, you know, it's also very human hating. If you take the position that, you know, a ridiculous position that like climate science, which has been around for so long is a hoax, then it's like, why do you hate human beings so much? We did this amazing thing, like we changed the atmosphere of an entire planet. Right. We put extra CO2 into the atmosphere because of our, we built this amazing global civilization. Like it's, it's indicative of what a successful species we are.
- [126:43]
A
Well, I think that's a, the, the idea that the, the climate, the idea of the climate changing being a hoax is nonsense. But the problem with that, that term climate change is it's attached to so much political baggage.
- [126:56]
B
Yeah, right. Which, you know, so. But people, you know, so, right, there's climate change happening.
- [127:01]
A
Like, like, here's the problem. Whether you think it's. Whether you think it's a hoax or you think it's being overblown or you think it's a real existential threat. The problem is, is the majority of people who are in both camps, they don't understand how it works at all.
- [127:15]
B
I know, I know. And that's. As a scientist, that's what I'm trying to say. You know, like, there's a, What I always want to say is there's a difference between the scientific problem of like what are the radiative properties of the carbon dioxide molecule? Like that does not care about who you voted for. Right. So the climate is changing because of our activity, because that's how climate works. Like you put more CO2. No, it's basic climate science. I can, I literally teach this to my undergraduate non science majors. Yeah, simple theory, the simple formula. I can show them for how put more CO2 into any planet's atmosphere, planet's gonna warm up. So that part doesn't care who you voted for. So there's a difference between the scientific question about climate change and what drives it and the political question of what you're gonna do about it. Right. So you have to separate those two, you know, not doing anything about it, and say, you know, that's a poly, you know, that's a policy too, Right. So somehow as a species, and that's why I, you know, somebody called this, this is humanity's final exam, right. You've triggered climate change, you know, because of your success. Now what are you going to do about it? Are you going to ignore it or are you going to try and take some actions to like change your energy?
- [128:20]
A
Well, the Earth's climate has been a crazy roller coaster for the last like 500 million years, right. It's been up and down and up and down. And right now, in the big picture of the history of the Earth, we are actually in one of the coolest periods. You see the Washington Post article that came out about a year and a
- [128:38]
B
half ago about, I mean, there's, because there's the petm that we've had periods of up and down.
- [128:43]
A
Right.
- [128:44]
B
But the thing is, is like climate, you know, so sometimes people say to me, like, well, climate's changing all the time. And it depends on what timescale you're talking about.
- [128:50]
A
Sure.
- [128:51]
B
So for the last 10,000 years, since the last Ice age ended, we've been in what's called the geologic epoch called the Holocene. Right. And 485 million years.
- [129:05]
A
Have you seen this? Yeah. This is so this 485 million year graph of the, the, the surface temperature of the Earth.
- [129:14]
B
Right. And you see, you, you've had periods
- [129:15]
A
of very, you see that very tiny little hockey stick on the right?
- [129:19]
B
Yeah.
- [129:19]
A
That's where we are.
- [129:21]
B
And you see it starting to go up, Right. So all of that going up is us, that at the, at the tip there. But what you see is. Right.
- [129:27]
A
So we came and we came. I'll go, go down so you can see the bottom a little zoom in Just zoom in. But let us. So we can see the bottom part of the graph. So that's 25 million years ago right there.
- [129:37]
B
Millions of years. Right.
- [129:38]
A
So that the time frame for human beings is what, 300,000. 300,000, but it just went back a million. We just found a skull in China that's a million years old. So we don't really know how long human beings have been here or you know.
- [129:50]
B
Well, we know we certainly weren't here 65 million years ago. Right, right. Because it's a dinosaur and we know that like thank God for that, that comet that hit the Earth because you know, the only thing that was around mammal wise were these little tiny rat like creatures. So that gave us the.
- [130:03]
A
But like if you look at the history of planet Earth, like going back to the Silurian hypothesis, it's, it's entirely possible there could have been civilizations living in the dips of all of, all of the history.
- [130:17]
B
That was our question. Would you be able to tell? But you know, the important thing for this is that so what you see is like, yeah, climate on, on hundreds of millions of years, climate goes up, climate goes down. But for the last 10,000 years, right, that's where we actually have the best data because we've got tree rings, we've got, you know, it's amazing. You can drill down on like in Greenland, let's talk about Greenland, you know, and get the ice cores or Antarctica and you can go back like 100,000 years and you can get like bubbles, trapped bubbles.
- [130:44]
A
That's insane.
- [130:44]
B
It's insane. And then you can see like, oh, how much CO2. There was. What was the temperature, what was in
- [130:48]
A
the atmosphere, what metals were there in the atmosphere where there's an industrial going on.
- [130:52]
B
Yeah, but there wasn't. There was. But anyway, let's just complete this thought. The last 10,000 years the climate has been very stable, like very. It's been a good time to build a civilization, right? It's been warm and it's been moist, right. And that is when all of the history of human civilization, that this civilization, you know, you want to say there's other ones, I don't agree, but like, okay, this one, right? That's when farming was invented, blah, blah. And that's the reason why farming could be invented. Invented was that the climate was stable. See when, when you know the people talk about with climate change that we needed to stay under 1.5 degrees variation, right? We don't want the temperature of the planet to go above 1.5 or 2 degrees of Celsius. That's what all the reports, the IPC things are. Don't go above 1.5 to 2 degrees. Like why, why that number? Because in the Holocene, you look at the Holocene and you look at the variations over the last 10,000 years, it's never gone above or below below the average. Well, it's never gone above or below 1.5 degrees on that average of the Holocene. Right. And now what we're doing is we're blowing it past that.
- [131:56]
A
The average temperature, the surface temperature, the
- [131:58]
B
average surface temperature on the Earth has had for the last 10,000 years no more than 1.5 to 2 degrees Celsius variations.
- [132:07]
A
Okay, yeah, so go, go back to that, go back to that article, Steve.
- [132:12]
B
But that was billion. That was hundreds of. You won't even see that right on this plot.
- [132:15]
A
It's too small. 10,000 years is too small.
- [132:18]
B
Years is like you can't even.
- [132:19]
A
10,000 years might be the, the very bottom part of that dip. But I mean, look how dramatic that goes down.
- [132:25]
B
Which shows you like crazy. This is our future. Like this is the planet. We're driving the planet. So that I think 65 million years or before that is what's called the, the dinosaurs temperature maximum, the petm. And the planet was so warm that, that there was no snow anywhere. Like maybe at the tip of like,
- [132:43]
A
no, no ice caps.
- [132:45]
B
We've been. So that's the thing about Earth has been many planets over its history. It's been a water world. Like in the beginning, this is wild. There weren't continents. Right. It takes a while for the continents to grow. So there were like kind of some Australia, they call them craton. So we were a water world for a while. And then there have been periods when we've been a snowball world. The Earth has been almost completely covered in glaciers and we've been a jungle world. Right. So the Earth and it's all often life which pushes the planet into these different regimes that has, you know, that's often been what's happened. So the idea that, that US life have triggered another, you know, a new age of climate change.
- [133:20]
A
Yeah.
- [133:20]
B
We shouldn't be surprised. Some of those variations that you're seeing there came because a new form of life was invented. Like grasslands. Like, you know, evolution came up. The biosphere evolved grasslands. Right. It was like, hey, this is good. Oh, and then the climate change changes.
- [133:33]
A
At what point were the. Was the super volcano. There was like five major events, right?
- [133:39]
B
There were. Yeah, there's been five mass extinctions.
- [133:43]
A
Five mass extinctions. And the biggest one was super volcanoes, right?
- [133:46]
B
Oh, they were more than volcanoes, right? Those were the, the Deccan traps. These were like, I mean they were more than. They were just huge upwellings of, of lava.
- [133:55]
A
Right.
- [133:55]
B
And I forget when exactly that one is. That might even be further. Yeah, look at the. Oh, this is good. 445.
- [134:02]
A
The.
- [134:05]
B
Which was the biggest one?
- [134:06]
A
Yeah. Find out what the biggest.
- [134:08]
B
90. You got almost 95 in the one that was the one that came from the deck. And traps go further back.
- [134:15]
A
Here you go.
- [134:16]
B
96. Yeah, yeah. And, and Permian.
- [134:18]
A
And Permian extinction. The Great Dying 95.
- [134:21]
B
Wow.
- [134:22]
A
250 to 252 million years ago, you
- [134:24]
B
know, which is, you know the interesting thing about this, what it shows you is, is the biosphere. As Lynn Margallis, the famous who invented help co invented the gynecosis. The biosphere is a tough bitch. Like you know, you cannot. And this is the thing what pisses me off like when we come to climate change was that thing like we got to save the Earth. It's like, dude, you know, the Earth is not a furry little bunny, you know, the Earth will be, the biosphere will be just fine. We gotta save us. You know, it's human civilization, especially this tech, global technological civilization which really depends on very, you know, a very stable, you know, you want to feed 8 billion people, you better have a stable climate, you know, year to year in order to have agriculture, right? But the biosphere is, you know, we, there's nothing we can do to really fuck with the biosphere and the biosphere. This is what people need to understand is we don't have to save the Earth, we need to be scared shitless of it, right? Because on some levels, you know, our ancestors worshiped the Earth as a God or a God. They were kind of right in a certain way because the Earth literally channels cosmic power, which is sunlight, you know, we take in. I forgot this number. This is. You can look this up, you know, the equivalent. It's like how many atomic bombs worth of energy fall on the Earth every second? You know, something, you know, like, let's look this up.
- [135:36]
A
Wow.
- [135:37]
B
So the Earth is constantly receiving from the sun huge amounts of energy and that energy like hits the atmosphere, hits the ground and it all just channels four to five Hiroshima type bombs per second.
- [135:51]
A
The Earth is currently accumulating heat from.
- [135:53]
B
Oh no, this is not even right. So this is, this is actually, this isn't even what we're looking at this is how much, because of climate change, is that the temperature, that's the energy that's being, being trapped that normally would go back out into space, but I don't know if we can find it. The amount of, of energy that just flows through the Earth system right from the sun, from the sun every day, every second, there's this huge amount of energy that hits the Earth and it, you know, the Earth warms, it generates clouds, it feeds the life forms, it generates the ocean circulation. And you know, it looks to us very like in balance, it's like, oh, but we don't really understand is that like, it's like a, you know, a blast furnace. We don't see the blast furnace of this, you know, apocalyptic amount of energies that are channeling through that system. And what we're doing by, you know, dumping more CO2 in the atmosphere is like we're taking like a giant monkey wrench. Imagine a jet engine, a super powerful jet engine, and we're just taking this monkey wrench and we're just throwing it into the. And oh, let's see what happens. Like we're unbalancing that. And when those forces, you know, you already see this with some of the climate events that are happening. We, you unbalance those forces and you end up in a very different kind of planet, which is what the, you know, when we looked at those, the temperature was like 15 degrees Celsius hotter on average. That's a different kind of planet. Planet. So we need to, you know, the whole partisan dialogue about climate change needs to change so we understand what's really at stake. It's not the Earth that's at stake, it's us. It's this civilization.
- [137:19]
A
I mean, when I start. The reason when, whenever I start to become skeptical of things is when you start to see certain folks try to use it to their advantage and you start to see all these financial entanglements involved and involved in stuff like this. You see the same thing happening happen in, in medicine and pharmaceuticals. You see the same thing happening in geopolitics, in every aspect of our civilization, where there's lots of economic power and lots of money happening, this starts to happen. And you know, when you see people start to try to use emergencies like the climate emergency to gain not only more profit for themselves, but more power and control over people, that's when I start to get skeptical and that's when I start to back off. And let's say, okay, these people are saying, trust the science. I'm going to take this Advice from some billionaire who's flying in this private Jetta. Like, I, I don't know if I trust you.
- [138:16]
B
Right, well, don't trust them.
- [138:17]
A
Is the science settled. And there's a lot of.
- [138:19]
B
The science has been settled for decades.
- [138:21]
A
Well, there's also MIT scientists.
- [138:23]
B
No, no, no, no, no. There's no one. There's one MIT scientist. There's the one. And so this is what happens when I have this. I'm sorry to interrupt. Yeah, I'm sorry to interrupt. I'm sorry to interrupt. So go ahead.
- [138:31]
A
No, no, no, no. I was going to say, like, there seems to be, There seems to be lots of. There. Maybe there's one. I don't know, maybe it's the same one.
- [138:37]
B
I've heard.
- [138:37]
A
And, and as well as Princeton scientists who seem, who seem to, like, a lot of them, don't seem to agree on everything. And one of the things that I wasn't alive back then, but I guess like after the 40s, it was like there was an emergency of cooling. There was a great cooling event from the 40s to the 70s.
- [138:55]
B
Yeah, there was. Yeah, there wasn't. So let me tell you the history because I have a, I have a. Here's my, here's my climate story.
- [139:00]
A
Okay?
- [139:01]
B
Adam's climate story. So it's 1986 or 1985. I, you know, graduate from University of Colorado. I'm like, I'm tired. You know, I know I'm going to go to grad school. I need a break. So I took a year and a half off and I did everything. I planted trees in British Columbia. I was a bouncer at the Rocky Horror picture show on 8th street in New York. I just needed time off. And then after a year, I was like, okay, let me go back to science, right? So I started applying. I would have taken any job in science in a Twinkie lab. I didn't care. I got a job job at the Goddard Institute for Space studies on 113th street and Broadway in New York. It's a NASA installation that studies Planetary Science. It's 1986, right. Nobody's ever heard of climate change, right? So I, you know, I go there, I got a job as a, you know, a, a scientific program. I'm just doing low level programming, you know. And at one point, after like two months, I go to my boss and I say, like, what are we doing here? Like, what are we studying? She says, oh, and that's Funk, very famous climate scientist. She says, oh, sit down. And she tells me, like, well, there's this idea that because of CO2 that the Earth's climate is going to change and we don't really have the signal yet. By the signal, they meant seeing in the data. But we were studying this and we're studying how to find the signal. And I said, well, what will happen if the climate change. Then she sort of laid out everything that would happen. And I remember walking out of there and I walked down to Riverside Drive and I was like, holy crap. She just told me about the end of the world. And this was like, 1985, 86. We're like, again, nobody. I went to, you know, my bros, we went to the bar, you know, and I'm like, dude, like, we could be changing the climate. They're like, yeah, man, whatever, you know. So I have spent my entire life watching this unfold and everything. Like, even I have a plot from a paper that was done with like a dumbass computer model that tracks the temp, the global average temperature. I can show. Boop, boop, boop. They were dead on, right? So. So I have watched over time the progress of climate science to where like, you know, nobody gave a shit. It was kind of something people talked about. And then 88, there's a famous testimony by James Hansen, who ran this. He was the big boss at this place when climate change sort of finally got into people's imagination, you know, and it wasn't until really the mid-2000s that people really, really, really started to hear about it.
- [141:11]
A
Is that when the Gore documentary came out? Out?
- [141:13]
B
Yeah, that actually, the Gore documentary was a big part of, you know, because Gore actually was friends with the, the main climate scientists who were responsible this.
- [141:20]
A
So all his predictions were wrong, by the way.
- [141:22]
B
No, all those predictions are absolutely right.
- [141:24]
A
No, he said the sea level was going to rise like 50ft.
- [141:26]
B
Not anytime soon, he said. Yeah, he said within 10 years. In 10 years, there's no way. He said the level is going to run 50ft. I mean, that's insane. That's. No, no, he wouldn't look up the
- [141:36]
A
predictions from the Gore documentary. What was that called documentary called about again? Inconvenient Truth.
- [141:40]
B
Inconvenient Truth, yeah. You know, when you have to see that, did he mean, like, if there was a. If there was an anomalous, you know, melting event of the West Arctic and ice sheets, you know, but no scientist would say that. That thing.
- [141:51]
A
I was talking to my mom the other day who's a, you know, she's a. She's really big into this stuff too. She, she's you know, she's on the very far left of the political spectrum. She's a fine arts teacher. Right, Right. She grew up in university. She got her master's degree in fine art. She goes, and I was talking about this house. We're looking at this, like, really nice house on the. On the, on the water that was like, in. Near where my mom lives or whatever. And she's. She's like, oh, that house is going to be underwater in 50 years. She came by that. Really? I'm like, you grew up here, Mom. Wasn't the waterline in the same exact spot 50 years ago to where it is now?
- [142:26]
B
Well, no, the water's gone up. You know, it's not at the same place. Right. It's. It's, you know, because it's been, you know, this steady increase in measurable. Absolutely. But, you know.
- [142:36]
A
Yeah, but all those houses have been there, like, all those houses.
- [142:38]
B
Because it's. But it's. It's in. Right now. It's in the. It's on the level of centimeters.
- [142:42]
A
Right.
- [142:43]
B
So, you know, but the fl. You know, why are you. Let me go back before we go back on this, because I want. This is a really important point to make. The science and the scientists. Has the science been settled? Right. The science. So that was 86. Right. There's somebody, you know, I'm. I'm at this NASA facility. This was before there were any politics. It wasn't like Inez Fung was like a liberal. You know, I'm going to teach this kid about science. We're just doing science. Yeah. Also, when was the first time that a US President mentioned climate change? What do you think?
- [143:12]
A
The first time? First time, I have no idea.
- [143:15]
B
But just to take a guess. Clinton, 1964.
- [143:22]
A
Oh, really?
- [143:23]
B
It's in a speech to Congress, Lyndon Johnson brings up carbon dioxide pollution, as he called it, because already Roger Revell and these scientists had all. That's why there was no. There was like, one paper that somebody wrote about the possibility of cooling in the 70s, and it got picked up by Time magazine. Most. You know, that was also so early that nobody really. Nobody knew what was going to happen. So it was a paper and then Time magazine, but there wasn't. Like, all the climate scientists were like, holy shit, it's gonna. It was just the data wasn't there yet, but the understanding that the climate could warm and most likely would warm. There's a paper in 1903 by Sven Arrhenius, you know, that predicted, you know, he just added up all the coal burning, the CO2 burning and predicted in 1903. Because the science is so basic that, yeah, the planet's probably going to warm. And he was Swedish, so he's like, great, more warming. So anyway, this idea we're asking, the question about, is the science settled? Science has been settled since like the 1990s. Right. And so what happened was the. There is. We're talking about rich people and, you know, trying to get their way. The oil company and Shell was brought to court for this. You can see the documents. The oil companies knew that, like, this is death for us. Like, if, you know, if we're gonna. Because really, what is this about? It's about changing energy modalities. Right. We power our civilization on fossil fuels. We used to power our civilization on wood. We just change. Like, it's not that big a deal, but somebody stands to lose a lot of money if you do this. So the science was totally settled and somewhere around.
- [144:51]
A
Yeah, but how much would it cost to. To reinvent in a whole.
- [144:54]
B
How many times have we done it? We've done. It'll cost something, but also money's going to be made. Money will be made. And you already see this with like, what's happening with renewables. There's a place in Rochester.
- [145:02]
A
Yeah, but solar panels have. Shit the bed.
- [145:04]
B
No solar. What are you talking about, solar panels?
- [145:06]
A
No one I know who has solar panels is like, they've. They've all.
- [145:09]
B
Dude, you need to look at the world economy. Solar panels. Look at what China is doing with solar panels right now. Solar panels. There are more jobs now. There are more jobs via solar panels than there are for car coal. But they're so inefficient. They're not inefficient. The inefficiency has blown up. From the time I was growing up to now. The inefficiency has. The efficiency has exploded. Look at China's solar and renewable policy. They are flooding markets, you know, and they.
- [145:38]
A
China accounts for like 35 of all the CO2 emissions worldwide.
- [145:42]
B
Right, Right. And they are pushing. They understand where the world economy. The world economy is going to decarbonize. But let me. There's a place in Rochester I can stand where, like, there's the Erie Canal, right. There is a train line and there's a highway all in the same place. And then the jets fly right over it. That is four different transportation infrastructures that were built and then abandoned. Right. We do this all the time. Humanity constantly changes. It's transportation infrastructure, it's energy infrastructure. This is just what we do, right. You know, and there's going to be huge amounts of money to be made. Just like when oil first was born, you know, when the beginning of the oil, the United States subsidized oil. We subsidize oil production because it made sense for the, for the, the country, you know. So the only reason we're not doing it now is because we started doing it is because oil industry didn't want it. Because there, you know, if you're the oil industry and you've got what's called proven reserves, you know, all this oil in the ground, that's part of your bank account. And if suddenly people are like, you know, we're not going to use oil anymore. We're going to use whatever renewables or nuclear or something, you know, what happens to your bank account rolls to zero. So, you know, as somebody wants, I one time when I was writing for the, for npr is doing the science blog for npr. You know, I was talking about like, yeah, we're going to change in energy, infrastructure is going to be great. And somebody wrote back and said, dude, you know, the proven reserves are like $8 trillion. People have gone to war for a lot less than that. Like they're not giving up their way wealth, you know, so easily. So what I saw in the starting going back to the proven science was that somewhere around 20 2005, there started to be organized climate denial. Right. Like I would write something on the NPR blog about like climate change. Yeah. And I'd see like boop, boop, boop. Like all of a sudden I get these, the comments back when there were comments section just filling up, filling up with like that's a hoax, blah, blah, blah. And I was like, holy, this is like organized. Like somebody's like, this is not just random people.
- [147:35]
A
This happens on both sides. I mean, I'm not saying there's just uninformed fools on every, on every.
- [147:40]
B
No, but this was not, this was not uninformed fools. This was organized. I could see it happening. Like I wrote something else on another, you know, topic I get a few people. Yes, A few people know if it was about client. And it started because for three years I've been writing about climate change. Nothing. Then all of a sudden, now listen, you know, also there's a book called Agents of. Oh, what is it called? It's a book that was written about the oil companies organized. They took a lesson from the cigarette companies about how to push back against science. If there's some science that is going to hurt your bottom Line. Here's what you do, right? So, but again, my point really here is right, the politics is a mess. I completely agree. The politics is a mess. But the point about the established science there is. So what happened? The reason I'm telling this story is what happened after 2005. You started to have the same group of scientists. There's like eight scientists whose name would come up Willie soon, the guy from MIT over and over again, because that's all there was. If you went to a meeting of the American Geological Society. We're like one of the places climate science gets discussed. And there's 2,000 people in this giant hallway. Find somebody there who doesn't believe in science, call up randomly 10 geology departments and say, is there anybody in there who doesn't believe in climate science? You won't find anybody.
- [148:54]
A
Well, that's a, that's a, a broad way of putting it. Is there anyone who doesn't believe in climate science?
- [148:59]
B
Scientists, Scientists who work in the field.
- [149:00]
A
I, I, I don't think that they don't believe in climate science. I think they would argue that the CO2 is the primary cause of climate
- [149:06]
B
change, like basic, basic planetary science.
- [149:09]
A
Well, even on the, I heard that on the IPCC website or whatever, they were saying that like, water vapor and clouds contribute more to the warming of the planet's surface temperature than actual CO2.
- [149:19]
B
That's true. See, this is that, and that's, that's a great point to bring up, right? Climate science, you know, to really, and this is what drives me crazy when like, you know, I have to argue with people about, you know, people who are like, really seriously into denial. It's like they'll say things to me and I'm, and they're taking these strident positions. Like, you know, you're very open. You're like, interested in the science and everything. And it becomes really clear that like a, these people don't know what they're talking about. Like, they really, they make these claims that are like, wow, man, you can read a freshman textbook and have that question answered, but they're not interested in the science. They've got some political point of view. You know, I see this happening on the left in own their right. And what they really care about is their political point of view. And like a scientist, they care about winning. I'm a scientist. All I care about is the science. And so that question, so you bring up a really good question. Water vapor and other things. It's true. Water vapor is actually the, you know, by far has the Most climate changing effect. But you have to do. You have to like study climate and what you see is like, yeah, but water vapor cycles, right? Water vapor is constantly cycling in and cycling out. So the net level of water vapor vapor always stays the same, right? There hasn't been any changes. There hasn't been any change. Nothing we're doing is really going to change dramatically the amount of water vapor in the air. So there's nothing happening with water vapor that is going to lead to climate change. CO2 is increasing because of what we're doing, so it's not going to. And it cycles on much longer timescales. You put CO2 into the atmosphere, it takes a lot longer for it to come out. One of the major. Charlie Revelle, who I was talking about, they got nice. One of the things he really discovered, people thought like, oh, the ocean will absorb it all. The ocean will absorb the CO2. And what he realized, what he showed through like painstaking experiments, is that actually the ocean will stop. The ocean can only absorb so much CO2. So that's the difference. Like, you bring up a really good point, but to answer that point, you gotta go in and, you know, like, take the freshman class. Actually, you probably need to take the senior class, you know, before like one of these guys stands up and says climate change is a hoax because of water vapor. You know, it's like, no, if you do this, you know, if you actually just put the time into learning it, you'll see with. That question's totally been answered, you know, a thousand times with a thousand experiments.
- [151:29]
A
You know, are there any, are there any instances in history that we can pinpoint where the CO2 level was really high, but the temperature was really low?
- [151:39]
B
Not really. And not unless there's like, in general, CO2 tracks with, you know, with it always. It always tracks. It always tracks. Yeah, because it's just, it's basic climate science. Like, you know, sometimes it's because of the climate record, it seems to lead or lag, you know, but in general, you can see sort of the dynamic. You know, planetary dynamics is pretty complicated, you know, but you can see sort of what's going on. But it is basic physics that if you put more co. I mean, literally, it is literally basic physics in the sense of like CO2. We found out it was 1850 that I think Joseph Fresnel was it, who first discovered that CO2 absorbs sun, sunlight, you know, absorbs, you know, SO2 is really absorbed as well. What it's really good is absorbing the sun hits the ground. The ground warms up and then it emits infrared radiation. And CO2 just loves infrared radiation. So that was known like in 1840. So the science of this is just so firmly in place that like, for example, Venus. Right. Venus is very much like the Earth. It's closer to the sun, but it's not so much closer that, you know, you'd expect it like to be radically different from the Earth. In the 1930s, people saw Venus as. That's gonna be like a jungle plan it. The temperature is 800 degrees, right? It is. It's a pizza oven, basically. Why CO2? Its atmosphere is basically CO2. Exactly. So, you know, it's just like the science of just put more CO2 into the atmosphere. Your planet's going to. The climate's going to change. Yeah, right. It's not just going to warm up because what happens is you're pumping lots more energy into the atmosphere. Like I said my jet engine analogy. Now you're just messing with, with everything. The energy is going to flow, it's going to, it's. You're going to get warmer places, colder places. The system that is the climate is going to change.
- [153:17]
A
I wonder how much fucking CO2 all those SpaceX rockets are putting into the atmosphere.
- [153:20]
B
People. I just read something about also the stuff with all the Starlink that is going to like dive back down. Yeah.
- [153:26]
A
Allegedly. The satellites that get decommissioned, I heard that they burn up in the atmosphere on re entry.
- [153:31]
B
Yeah, yeah. Which also dumps a. I just read a thing. Somebody who knows. I don't really know if we need to be alarmed because that's the problem with the news every day. It's like you need to be alarmed by this.
- [153:40]
A
Yeah.
- [153:41]
B
Really. Another thing. So I don't know if that's really.
- [153:43]
A
This is emergency. We need to do a carbon tax on everyone, you know, now you have everyone living paycheck, paycheck to paycheck, pay an extra tax.
- [153:49]
B
Okay, but, but.
- [153:50]
A
And then you have the 15 minute cities and stuff in the UK and all that.
- [153:53]
B
Yeah, but what are you got to do something like not do, you know. Well, you don't have to do anything, right. I mean, you don't have to do anything. Right. Climate has changed, changing. That's just the way it is. I'm sorry, it's changing because of human activity. Look at that graph.
- [154:05]
A
Of course it's changing and of course humans contribute to it.
- [154:08]
B
Right. So the question is, what are you going to do? Like, you know, doing nothing is a policy decision. Doing something, you know, doing this is a poly. Doing that is a policy decision. So, you know, what is the, you know, okay, you don't want to do a carbon tax. What do you want to do? You know, ignoring it, you know, in general, the science says shit's going to get hard, you know. You know, the science indicates, of course, predicting the future is hard, right? As Yogi Berra said, prediction's hard, especially about the future. But, you know, we can map out like scenarios of what's going to change. If you raise the temperature by 2 degrees, right? You can look at history and see
- [154:47]
A
like, what was the global surface average temperature? Do we know what it was during the Renaissance?
- [154:53]
B
It had to be within 1.5 degrees of what we were.
- [154:55]
A
1.
- [154:55]
B
Within 1.5 degrees, I think. You know, again, every little blip. You had the Little Ice Age and everything, but those were all minor. We are now committed, like we are absolutely blowing past 2 degrees. You know, we're probably headed towards 3 degrees.
- [155:09]
A
During the Renaissance period, roughly 14 to 17 centuries, global average temperatures were generally cooler than today, falling within the cold phase interval known as the little ice age.
- [155:19]
B
1.2 degrees, right below 1.5, 1.2 Celsius. The temperature has not changed for the last 10,000 years by more, on average, by more than 1.5 degrees.
- [155:27]
A
What is your take on the, the Younger Dryas impact hypothesis? That there was a series of comet impacts that would have hit the Earth during 11,500 years ago?
- [155:39]
B
You know, it's very important as a scientist for me to say, like, I don't know, you know, like I'm not, you know, I mean, what I know about the Younger Dryas is that great story about the Younger Dryas, which is that, that I read about when I was reading about the history of the camp century, which was this nuclear powered research lab that the army built in the mid-50s on the ice in Greenland. They had to drag a nuclear reactor across 300 miles of the most inhospitable terrain in the world because they wanted to build a base on the ice on the top of the glaciers of Greenland. And one of the things they did there, they did this scientific experiment of drilling. That was the first ice course that they did. And the guy who was doing the analysis looked at, he could see switching from, you know, before the Younger Dryas to the Dryas. You could see that, you could see the climate change. Like the band where the, you know, the, the Younger Dryas, the wild temperature variation hit was like brown and black compared to the pure white called the Black Matte. Yeah, maybe, yeah, but, yeah, but you could see that, you know. So the thing that I understand about the, the, the younger dries was that it was really good evidence that the climate could change really quickly, which is a lesson for us, you know. So I don't know, you know, I don't know. I'd have to look at the evidence for a large impact, but in general, large impacts, you know, you're going to get, if you're going to get an impact that's really going to be able to change the climate by that dramatically, you're going to find lots of, lots of evidence. So I would want to see the evidence like you'd see on the other side of the earth. You should be able to see, you know, iridium 26 or something, you know, that came out of the explosion. Explosion. So yeah, I think it would be pretty clear that there was, I think
- [157:17]
A
one of the, the, the foundation of the hypothesis is that it was like a thousand, the younger drives was a thousand years, right?
- [157:23]
B
How long it lasted? Yeah, yeah, I think so.
- [157:25]
A
So it was like a thousand year
- [157:26]
B
period, radical climate change and then came
- [157:29]
A
back again and then like. Yeah, it was like flash frozen.
- [157:32]
B
Right.
- [157:32]
A
And there's woolly mammoths that were frozen with. That's why they call the younger drives because there was that flower that was in his stomach still.
- [157:37]
B
Yeah, yeah.
- [157:39]
A
And there was also. That correlates with that time period when that happened. There was this black matte layer that was found within the earth that the geologist found and they found nano diamonds and some other materials.
- [157:55]
B
An explosion that would have formed from cosmic.
- [157:57]
A
Yeah, cosmic stuff that would have was in that matte layer from that exact time period. Younger draws Black mat is organic rich dark sedimentary layer dating to 12,920 11,700. Found at over 70 sites primarily in North America. Represents cold, wet, traditional. So what was in the black mat layer there? I heard there was nano diamonds and these other blah, blah, blah, blah. Does it say considered? How would it not say? That's crazy.
- [158:26]
B
Yeah, that's like one we have to look to see. You know, the important thing is always to understand like sort of, you know, there's lots and lots and lots of, and lots and lots of scientists working on like what, what the driest was, you know, is this one guy who wrote a paper, you know that's, or has there, has there been like, you know, the emergence of a. Because, you know, science is very much like the blues. It's a call and response thing. Right. You write a paper and then and you got like a, you know, a radical claim. And then somebody writes a paper says you're, you know, you're crazy. And then you write a response about like, why no, why this back? You know, and you're, you're constantly giving each other's arguments and evidence and mathematical arguments and data, data that go back and forth. And eventually if an idea is really good. Yeah. You know, other people see like oh no. And you can watch it change. That's always a. I've been doing, I've worked in enough fields in science over the years. Like you'll be at a meeting where you'll see the shift will happen. Somebody's presenting data. This thing's been around for a while, but now like the data is so good and it's coming from so many different directions that you can see people leave the meeting being like, yeah, maybe so I don't know with this if whether it's, you know, where it sits that. Is it just one guy writing a paper?
- [159:27]
A
Yeah.
- [159:27]
B
Or has the community begun to see enough evidence for it?
- [159:30]
A
Well, that's the crazy thing. That's, that's the hard part about it, right. Because how much of this stuff is interdisciplinary, right? How many astrobiologists have meeting with geologists and, and climate change people and like there's so many different ways or like historic, like, like classicists, different scholars from different fields all coming together and just throwing at the wall, right. You know, having this, you know, that's
- [159:51]
B
what so much fun though. Like. So astrobiology now has become really an interdisciplinary field. So there's this thing called apps icon. It happens every two years and it is the most fun meeting ever because it is like pure biologists, microbiologists, you know, astronomers who study stars, planetary scientists who study both, you know, the, the planets in the solar system, which we know a huge amount about. And then exoplanets and then people, you know, techno signatures now. So the meeting is, the meetings are just like, they're mind boggling because you just, you go and you listen to a, a talk about the Great Oxidation event and you learn all this amazing stuff and then you go walk over to another meeting and you learn about like, you know, the, the, the biochemistry of sugar production in you know, this particular kind of microbe that can survive 700 degree temperatures. So it's like the field really, you know, those kinds of fields have become, and, and climate science is too very interdisciplinary. It's been so for a while even the word, it's beyond multidisciplinary. The new word is transdisciplinary because it's kind of its own new field.
- [160:49]
A
Yeah, like, like, just like even comparing some of the science that we know about the history of art Earth with ancient myths.
- [160:55]
B
Right.
- [160:56]
A
Like, how many of these myths could be just echoes of some sort of reality that could have got skewed in this telephone game over millennia?
- [161:02]
B
Yeah, no, I'm actually, you know, so my first book was on science and religion and I really focused a lot on myth because I was really affected by Joseph Campbell.
- [161:09]
A
Yeah.
- [161:09]
B
Idea of monomyths and everything. And you know, I definitely, you know, I really love the idea that, you know, myth encodes sort of things about being human, these sort of elemental things about being human. They were stories. Stories. They, you know, we often use the word myth to say a story that's not true. Like an urban myth, you know, like a lady who, you know, microwaved her dog to drive off, you know. But myth, you know, big myths. Myths are constellations of. Of stories that explained who we were. Like, you know, groups use myths, societies use myth to explain what we are, where we are, who we are. And you know, science is in some sense like that. I mean, science is a different kind of. Of story, but it definitely is. It's what tells us who and what we are. But we shouldn't forget the power of myth. And you know, like, for example, like with this, the, the flood narratives. Yeah, there are flood narratives all over the place. It's obvious that there were so many, you know, that floods were impact so impactful to people that, you know, they became part of myths. And whether or not there was the, the Noachian flood, like whether that was actually something that happened around the world, like the. There was some kind of glacial damber. Who knows, you know, is that possible
- [162:17]
A
during the Younger Dry as the hypothesis was that.
- [162:20]
B
Yeah, I don't know. You know, I don't know.
- [162:21]
A
It went from ice age to super warm. Like it could have been. There's this great. I don't want to inter interrupt you state of consciousness, but there, there's this gentleman who came on who was showing us the. The channeled scab lands in.
- [162:36]
B
In Washington State.
- [162:37]
A
In Washington state. And he has this. It's kind of a. Out there their hypothesis. But if you can just like work your way through the mind experiment there. He. He explains that if it's possible there were a comet impacts that broke those ice dams on the North American ice sheet and there was trillions of tons of water surging south, it could have channeled out those scablands I think that,
- [163:03]
B
I mean, my understanding of what I know, again which is limited, is that it was an ice dam that broke.
- [163:09]
A
Yeah.
- [163:09]
B
But the cause, like any kind of comet impact, any kind of, you know, astrophysical impactor is going to leave a lot of debris. So it really should be visible. You know, an impact of that size should be, should be that we should have debris and stuff. First of all, you should be able to find the crater or the remnants of the crater. But then also the stuff that gets kicked up, you know, a large enough impactor is going to like, you know, the cloud of debris. Look at Mount St. Helens, right. You can tell that Mount St. Helens erupted. On the other side of the plant you can still find clay, you know, so, you know, that's what you'd have to look for if you wanted to go for that. You'd have to look for. Can I find.
- [163:50]
A
And would the crater now be under ice?
- [163:53]
B
No, because it was, it was.
- [163:55]
A
If it was near Greenland maybe.
- [163:56]
B
No, but I thought that, I thought it was that those scablands were actually glacial craters, you know, or glacial damage in Washington or in that area because, you know, the Laurentine ice sheet.
- [164:06]
A
Right, right.
- [164:06]
B
All of North America. So it must have, it would have had to have been. I mean, if that, if it's, if, if you're saying that the ice dam broke because of a nearby impact, right. Then it would have to be somewhere in like North America. If you're saying that it happened like the comet could have been anywhere and it led to a triggering a temperature increase globally, then if it's that big, then it really. I think you just have to look. You gotta look to see whether or not. And that's the fun part. Like you have this conversation, this is how science works. You have this conversation over lunch and it's like, well, let's go look.
- [164:35]
A
And it's also interesting that all the mega fauna in the, in on North America kind of went away. Right. And in Africa we still have all the megafauna.
- [164:43]
B
Well, not the, you know, the real thing about megafauna. The sad truth of megafauna is we hate them. Like it's when human beings generally show up is when most of the megafauna are eaten. Not always, not all of it, but like in general, once human beings move into area, an area area.
- [164:59]
A
Yeah, certain kinds of sloth, saber tooth tigers and all the things that were here, like they're, they're gone and. But they're still there in Africa. There are still people in Africa, but
- [165:08]
B
there's not like mega. Not. There's not that. You know, there used to be like 40 foot bears or not 40.
- [165:12]
A
Right.
- [165:12]
B
12 foot bears. Like. Yeah. In general, the really large megafauna don't make it in mass once human beings show up, I think, you know, I mean, that's in general, my understanding. So we kind of. You kind of ate them all. Like, you know, where are the. Where are the mastodons? Right. So I can go. In Rochester, at the Rochester Science Museum, there is a woolly mammoth that was discovered, you know, not too far away, you know, that with even its codon, because it gotten, I think, you know, caught in a bog. And so it's recreated. And I go. I'm like, this is a giant hairy elephant. There were giant, like, right where I'm standing, there were herds of giant hairy elephants. Right. Where are they? We ate them. You know, human beings are. Yeah, we'll pretty much eat anything into extinction. What do you make.
- [165:56]
A
What do you make of those people that just revived the dire wolf?
- [166:00]
B
Yeah, that's interesting.
- [166:01]
A
You see that? Well, I love recreating direwolves.
- [166:04]
B
I'm kind of getting to it.
- [166:06]
A
What was the name of that organization that did.
- [166:08]
B
That's the whole. I mean, the ethics of. Wow. You could talk about that for a long time. What about the ethics of. Of. Should we. Should we settle Mars? Do we have a right? Should we settle Mars? Should we, like, you know, Elon Musk's dream of like, like, am totally in favor of, like, settling the solar system, of, like, having large human presence in the solar system. But there are some people who say, like, you know, what right do we have to the. To alter these worlds that didn't have anybody on them? So there. There, you know, I mean, I see there's nobody there.
- [166:35]
A
Well, Avi Loeb thinks there was people there at one point in Mars. Avi Lo.
- [166:40]
B
No, even Avi Loeb doesn't believe.
- [166:41]
A
I don't. Didn't he say that he did.
- [166:43]
B
Oh, my God. He thinks.
- [166:45]
A
No, he said that on the podcast, bro. He said he thinks humanity started on Mars.
- [166:49]
B
Oh, well, he might have meant. Okay. What he might have meant is that life started on.
- [166:53]
A
Life started on.
- [166:54]
B
Yeah, no, there's a real. Here and then three, like via a comet impact.
- [166:57]
A
Yes.
- [166:57]
B
Yeah. So it's possible. Yeah. This is. I mean, this is a really interesting idea that, you know, Mars we have, thanks to, you know, the space program, we have really clear evidence that Mars was once a blue world, like, you know, about 4 billion years ago. What's called The Noachian period, after Nokia Noah, Mars had, you know, if not oceans, it had, you know, deep lakes, you know, seas almost. And then the climate change, speaking of climate change and you know, became now it's a dry frozen hell. So the idea is like maybe life, microbial life started on Mars and then comet impacts because there were a lot of, you know, the earlier, the farther you go back in time, the more debris comet there were, you know, in the solar system to hit things and. And so maybe like there was a microbe, you know, microbe in a rock that got blown off a marine Mars and landed on Earth. Because we find Martian rocks. Right? Yeah, on. So. So yeah, I think that's possible. You know, that's an example of what they call panspermia, which is this idea about that life started some material swap and spit. Yeah. Because the planets we know have been swapping spit for a while. Pansperia is weird because. Yeah. Even saying it, it's kind of like ew. But it's possible even that, you know, with interstellar, you know, we now have seen a couple of Inter.3 interstellar objects.
- [168:09]
A
Oh yeah. Because of the new saddle or the new telescopes.
- [168:11]
B
Right, New telescopes. You know, we know they've been happening all the time, but now we can catch them as they go through. And maybe one of them, you know, at some point was, you know, it's our, you know, they're usually comets or asteroids from another an alien solar system. Right. And you know, maybe there's rocks got blown off some alien plant that had life and the, you know, the microbes just get sort of. They hibernate. They are able to last in the rock for hundreds of millions of years. And that's how life started on Earth. The problem problem is is that, you know, they you can do. Because now we've seen three. So that gives us actually, it's amazing science. You see three, that's enough to start doing calculations. Okay, I've seen these three. Let me work out how pro. Now I know how probable or at least I get some idea about how likely, how often.
- [168:52]
A
When was the first one? Do you remember?
- [168:53]
B
First one was Omuamua one eye.
- [168:56]
A
Oh, so that was like what, six years ago?
- [168:57]
B
2016.
- [168:58]
A
Oh, so then there was two eyes.
- [169:00]
B
Borisov.
- [169:01]
A
That was nine years ago.
- [169:02]
B
I know. Isn't that crazy? Wow. I know, I know.
- [169:05]
A
Seems like last year.
- [169:06]
B
I know. I mean, I wait till you get to my age. I think I was just 35. When was that? No, that was. Yeah, a long time ago. So. Yeah, so now, you know, we're watching them. We'll find more of them. And, you know, I. I have many issues with what Professor Loeb has done, but it's possible that one of them will be a techno signature. We should definitely be on the. Look. We just did a paper. I was part of a paper that was like, you know, really looking seriously at, like, what would you have to. What should you look for? If you want to see whether or not these are techno signatures, whether this is actually, you know, a probe or something, just a piece of technology. Well, we should definitely be looking for it.
- [169:40]
A
The bigger and better we keep making these telescopes, the weirder shit's gonna get.
- [169:44]
B
I know you always. That's the amazing thing with telescopes. Every time you build a bigger one or every time you open up a new wavelength window, X rays, infrared, the whole. You're like, oh, my God, I didn't know those were there.
- [169:54]
A
Yeah, yeah.
- [169:54]
B
So the, you know, the universe is pretty. Pretty amazing.
- [169:57]
A
It's wild.
- [169:57]
B
Yeah.
- [169:58]
A
Well, Adam, thank you so much for doing this, man. This has been great pleasure. Fascinating conversation. Where can people find you, find all your work and all that stuff.
- [170:05]
B
Okay, so the main thing is I have a newsletter called Every Man's Universe, where, you know, every week I'm just doing something on space and the human future and, you know, all kinds of different things. And then I, you know, I have books out. Like, my last book was the Little Book of Aliens, where I was trying to tell this whole story about, you know, everything from UFOs to what the. The bio signatures and techno signatures. So. And I'm on Twitter and I'm on social media, but I. You know, I don't use it that much because social media can be. So. I think social media is bad for your health.
- [170:35]
A
I think so, too.
- [170:36]
B
Yeah. So. But. So, yeah, Every Man's Universe. Subscribe to Every Man's Universe. And every couple time, you know, every once a week, we do a. I. I'll write a post about something that's going on in science or even science and spirituality. You know, I'm interested in that. And then we'll also do a post that's like, some news, like some stories. Oh, here. Some cool stories to read that I found as a, you know, a news aggregator.
- [170:55]
A
Beautiful. We'll make sure to link everything below for folks. Okay, thanks again.
- [170:58]
B
Thank you.
- [170:59]
A
All right, good night, everybody.