← The History of Literature
The History of Literature
708 Science Fact and Science Fiction (with Keith Cooper) | AI Discovers a Work of Ancient Philosophy and Dreams Up a Reading List
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- [00:02]
Jack Wilson
The History of Literature Podcast is a member of the podglomerate Network and Lit Hub Radio.
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Sponsor Announcer
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Jack Wilson
Hello, we start with some questions. The world is amazing. Why do we even need fiction at all? Why not just celebrate the strangeness and beauty and mysteries of the actual universe? Where do fiction and poetry and other creative arts fit in? Is it restlessness that makes us think that humans can do a better job than whoever or whatever made our universe? Is it a lack of gratitude? Unjustified hubris? I'll give you the answer to those questions. Or an answer. My answer. In this episode plus, we explore two scientific developments. One great, one not so great. And talk to an expert in the amazing worlds of science fact and science fiction. That's all coming up today on the history of of literature. Okay, hello. Here we go. Welcome to the podcast. I'm Jack Wilson. Should I just blurt out the answers to those questions or should we build to it first? Let's build. I'm glad you're here today, by the way. We have a big show. We've crossed some kind of threshold and I'm sitting on a Vesuvius of news. A Vesuvius. Not a volcano, a Vesuvius. You know that trick, right? The way to avoid cliches used to used to grate on me a little bit. Fingernails on a chalkboard. When I saw people do this, instead of saying, I'm so hungry I could eat a horse, which, you know, is a cliche. So you say, I'm so hungry I could eat Secretariat or something like that. And everyone stares at you, astonished because wtf? Who wants to eat Secretariat? Or envision that and use. I'm just avoiding cliches. Give me A break. I'm hungry. I haven't eaten anything all day. I'm a little woozy. A better example, maybe you'd say, oh, I'd climb Everest to be with you, my dear. Because, you know I'd climb a mountain is a little hacky, a little overused. It's had the meaning leached out of it from years of repetition. Blah, blah, blah. That's why we avoid cliches. So you say, I'd climb Everest, and you think, well, maybe that gives us a little burst. But actually, I find that a little bit distracting because I think, well, I'm not. This person isn't really thinking that they would climb Everest. They're thinking that they were going to say I'd climb a mountain. And then they knew that was a cliche, so they switched it to Everest. And. And it doesn't actually freshen up the cliche for me. It distracts me. Well, maybe there's a little freshening. So anyway, when I say I'm sitting on a Vesuvius of news, part of me thinks, well, this is good. Last time I said I'm sitting on a volcano of news, and I just freshened up my little cliche here. But a bigger part of me thinks, well, this is perfect because I'm sitting on a volcano of news and I can say Vesuvius. And actually, that takes us right into one of our first topics today. It's a nice transition. A very small part of me thinks, I suppose Vesuvius is appropriate because my news is majestic and powerful and exciting, and knowing me, it will somehow destroy everything it touches, as this preamble has done. I'd like to think I'm going to inspire some good things to happen. All this news I have and announcements I'm going to make soon, hopefully. But somehow, when you're Jack Wilson, you have to get used to things going haywire and raining down chaos or fire and ash on unsuspecting innocence. That's innocence with a ts, by the way. Okay, Vesuvius is actually our first protagonist today. This comes courtesy of the Guardian newspaper, the newspaper I read, for the same reason that I like my American football team, the Green Bay Packers. I like the owners. Or more importantly, I like who does doesn't own them. Headline X ray reveals ancient Greek Author of Charred First Century B.C. vesuvius. Scroll subhead ink traces show text is part of work by Epicurean philosopher Philodemus. Is that how you say that Philodemus burned during AD 79 volcano eruption? End quote. This is very exciting. News. It's absolutely amazing. And let me tell you why we're going to be talking. Maybe I should have saved this news article for another episode. We have a forthcoming one where we'll be talking to an expert in ancient Greek and Roman texts. And one of the striking things, as always, is just how much we've lost. I used to think it was specific to the ancient world, but aren't we headed for that as well? I've got exams and papers written on floppy disks, saved on floppy disks that are going to be pitched ground up. Those will be gone forever, unless someone finds one in a dump someday that was somehow preserved. Paper, everything on paper will disintegrate over the centuries. Hard drives get tossed out and dinged up, scratched and battered, melted down. Do we really think in a thousand years every single word will be preserved? How could it? And why? There's way too many words to worry about. A lot of them are just going to disappear. And what if people in a hundred years decide, let's say Toni Morrison is the greatest author of our generation and they even then they might have beloved. Let's say that gets handed down and handed down, printed and reprinted. That never gets lost. Let's say there's a billion copies and it makes it through. Don't we think that future people will say, you know, we have a list of other works that she wrote, but we can't seem to find a copy of Sula or Jazz or pick whichever title you think, maybe doesn't get reprinted quite so often in the next three or four hundred years. Maybe that one gets lost. Or they might say, we know she wrote a lot of letters and we have a few of them. Or maybe they'll say, we don't have any. We know she was writing a lot of emails in her later years, but they're gone. That could happen. Time crushes all of us and all.
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Keith Cooper
Of our works, not just because we.
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Jack Wilson
Don'T have the means and money to preserve everything, but because all of the new stuff crowds out. The old people's attention spans are limited and fickle. And so we wind up in the position where Umberto Eco can say, look at this, a book by Aristotle on comedy, laughter, humor, and we don't have it anymore. That's Aristotle. A great loss for humanity. But somewhere along the way, humanity, or just the laws of chance, decided that this wasn't one of the ones that would make it through. Sorry, posterity, you can't have it all.
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Keith Cooper
Well, as we know from this new.
- [08:30]
Jack Wilson
X ray work, as brought to Us by the article in the Guardian, we can have it all. Or if not all, at least a little bit more. They've taken a charred scroll that was in a Roman villa buried under ash when Vesuvius erupted, and they've managed to use X rays to find some ink. And recently they found that they can identify the text and the author. It's called On Vices, written by the philosopher. I don't know how to pronounce the name. Philodemus. Philodemus. As it happens, this is a work we already have. It's not new. It covers things like arrogance, greed, flattery and household management. Is that even a vice? I guess so, if you do it poorly. The vice of household manager. Do Catholics confess that when they meet with their priest in those little boxes? Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned. I have engaged in abnormal and impure household management. I guess vices are different from sins. Keeping a dirty house, or maybe. Maybe hiring the wrong servants or something. Who knows? I haven't read on Vices because I've lived it. Well, how would I know? Anyway, even though this wasn't a lost text, as I understand it, the exciting thing is they have this scientific development with these X rays, finding little ink blots, scratchings, the letters. That's going to. This new development is going to let us see what's on these scrolls. There were hundreds found in the villa. There are already plans to scan dozens of them. These are documents so badly burnt that they crumble when researchers try to unroll them. The ink is unreadable to the human eye, but with this X ray machine plus AI software, we can put them together, we can figure out what they mean. Why do we need AI software for this? Why not just have the X rays do their work? Well, think about it. The scrolls are rolled up so there'd be a bunch of layers. So it's like seeing a dozen or a hundred pages of text all overlaid on one another. And the X rays can detect the ink, but they can't read one layer at a time. And so AI has been helpful in sifting and sorting to let us unlock the mysteries of these scrolls, which is what takes us to the next. So bravo AI for that. But that takes us to the next thing on our list today. Also from the Guardian headline, Chicago Sun Times confirms AI was used to create reading list of books that don't exist. Oh boy, oh boy. More science fiction. Science fact and science fiction. Technology will save us. No, it's not. It's going to end humanity. That's what these stories, both the stories today are on that spectrum. This one is more disheartening. Chicago Sun Times Roger Ebert's old paper. What a disgrace. Subhead outlet calls story created by freelancer working with one of the newspaper's content partners a, quote, learning moment, unquote. No, no, because Chicago Sun Times, you aren't learning, you're not committed to learning. We'll get there in a minute. Quote Illinois's prominent Chicago Sun Times newspaper has confirmed that a summer reading list, which included several recommendations for books that don't exist, was created using artificial intelligence by a freelancer who worked with one of their content partners, end quote. So there we go. The paper allegedly used AI software ChatGPT to generate an article with book recommendations, and they called it a summer reading list for 2025. And the AI hallucinated and made several fake titles, made up several fake titles and attached them to real authors. I wonder how those authors feel. How predictable do you think I am? ChatGPT I'd be curious to know if any of them thought really like I do when Netflix suggests a show to me and I think, oh come on, algorithm, you think I'm going to like that? So let's test it out. I don't know any of these authors, but let's see. Brit Bennett has written an actual life, the Mothers, a book called the Mothers and a book called the Vanishing Half. Are you looking forward to her new book Hurricane Season? ChatGPT Zooming on whatever magic mushrooms it takes when it comes up with this stuff thinks that you will be. Or how about Min Jin Lee? Actually, I guess I do know her.
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Keith Cooper
She is the author of Pachinko and.
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Jack Wilson
The author of Free Food for Millionaires. Well, perhaps you're excited about her new book, Nightshade Market. ChatGPT, having downed its fifth whiskey in five minutes, thinks that you might be I could go on, but let me make my bigger point and this is where I'm going to answer my own questions that I set out at the beginning. AI is terrible. If you notice, it's always people who think that it's smart in areas where the people are not themselves. Very informed. People who don't write novels or read novels say, oh well, it's soon going to replace writers of novels. We can write novels so much faster now. And people who don't appreciate art say, well, it's going to replace art. And maybe that's true. Maybe the novelists and the people who read them are just clinging to this hope and acting out of self preservation. But if you'll notice, the scientists say that ChatGPT is not producing good scientists and the lawyers say that it's not producing good law and doctor are good arguments about good court documents. Doctors say this is not producing good medicine. Hallucinations are not good people. If you hired someone to do some work for you and they were hallucinating all day, you wouldn't keep them employed for very long. But maybe I'm wrong. Maybe it will improve. Maybe they'll figure out how to stop it from hallucinating, which I would think would be the first. First thing you'd figure out how to make it do. And people say AI is great. You just have to check it because it hallucinates. And I think, well, that's exactly what I don't want to spend my time doing. AI reading a charred scroll when no human can do that and no other technology that we have can do it. That's fantastic. That's clearly a contribution to humanity. But AI generating an essay that turns the human being from the person who writes the essay into the person who has to check it, that's backwards. That's having the human being doing the boring part. You need to have computers do the boring parts. Every so often I get emails from people who say something like, hey, I've developed these stories about famous authors. Or I have a trivia series about literary people and events and surely you want to run this on your show. And I'll say, well, no, thank you. And they'll say, why not? I've done all the work. I'm offering you a partnership where you can run this content. I've already done all the work. It'll make your life easier. And I just think you haven't done all the work. You've done all the pleasure. You've got this backwards. I'm not here to. I'm not looking for content. All I've ever wanted since I was about six years old is to make things, to make content, to tell stories. When I was six, I tried writing a Hardy Boys novel. I got about halfway down a page. I was doing it on a typewriter, a manual typewriter. My fingers got a little tired. When I was five, I actually tried making a newspaper. Benedict Arnold was a traitor. That was the headline. When I was 8, I actually did make a newspaper that I published for a few years. Luckily, my father subsidized it with postage. Otherwise I was selling it. I would have been selling it at a loss. I think I was selling it for 10 cents a copy. My whole life has Been working to try to clear some space to make content. I have a day job. I get up in the morning to make content. Generating the content is why I do this. It's hopefully to try to clear some space, and I try to do that. I do this content to try to clear some space, to make the content. I really want to make more on that later. But putting out a podcast, hey, there are people who. Maybe there are people who don't want to make the content. Maybe they want to do all the other stuff associated with putting out a podcast. Maybe they see some value in that or enjoy those tasks. To me, those tasks are like torture. The editing, the show descriptions, the wrangling with technology that's always changing. The advertising, the website, the social media, the scheduling, the preparation, the dealing with requests and reviews and complaints, and all the people who know better, who want more, who want other. That's the work. So if you come to me and say, I've written up X or Y or Z, why don't you want to read these? Why don't you want me to read.
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Keith Cooper
These on your show?
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Jack Wilson
And you just supply the distribution, which you have. But I've done all the work. I've done the content. I've done all the work. Well, no, that's not how this works. You need to go start a podcast and put your X or Y or Z up down there. That's the. That's the. You haven't done the work. You've done the fun. You want me to do the work so you can keep doing more fun. Well, no hard feelings, but you knocked on the wrong door. And that brings us back to AI and technological progress and science fact and science fiction. The problem I have with AI is that we're assuming, we're taking it as a given that anything faster or cheaper is better. And it also seems that people with limited personalities and vision and. And life experience are making these decisions on behalf of everyone else. I won't say his name. He's a famous tech mogul, and he said that most people want more friends than they currently have. And his solution is, well, that gap will be filled by AI friends. And he said 80% of your friends, in the future, 80% of your friends will be AI owned by his company, I suppose. And why wouldn't that be his vision for it? These friends will be recommending products and insinuating things to us that'll make this guy a very wealthy person, even wealthier than he already is. Now, the person who thinks that, who thinks that the solution to this friend gap is the solution to wanting more friends isn't. Well, here's how you make friends. You can, you can join some clubs, you can, you can sign up for some things. You can get out there, you can go out, go out more, spend some time meeting people. The friends will follow the person who thinks, well, we can solve this friend deficit with fake human beings who will. Who will act just like a friend, who will trick you into thinking that they're your friend. That's not a person who should be making decisions on our behalf about what we want AI to do. We humans need to stand up for ourselves against people like that. That's a damaged person, a friend, a friendless, or a friend. That person has too few friends, a too few friended person, there's probably a better word, but that's a damaged person cramming something down our throats. You will be friends with my robots. You will. You will like it. Are you lonely? Take some of these friends. Raise your hand if you're a doctor who thinks, you know, what I'd really like to do is spend less time with patients and more time dealing with insurance companies. But guess what? In the world of tech geniuses, they look at the medical profession and they don't think we should develop AI that will make it easier for doctors to spend more time with patients and less time dealing with. With the crazy payment system that we have. They don't seem to be thinking, what is it that humans don't really want to do? So we can make their lives better by letting them focus on the things that they're really good at and that they enjoy doing. They swoop in and say, aha. People go to see doctors. AI will make it easy for you not to have to go to the doctor. You can go to your robot instead of your doctor. And oh, by the way, the robot's going to get stuff wrong because the robot drops acid all the time. So we'll have to have some doctors review your conversation, and maybe we'll have transcripts where doctors read it and point out mistakes. And insurance companies, they don't really want to pay for the robot because he's zooming on acid all the time. So the doctors will have to show how the conversation justifies the treatment. And basically humans are going to be reviewing transcripts and all the stuff they don't want. Nobody wanted robot doctors in the first place, you morons. We don't want robot friends. We want to get rid of the stuff in life we don't like. I don't want robots to do the content for this show. I want them to do everything else, all the stuff I don't want to do. So let me get back to the questions I asked at the beginning of this episode, and then we can lead into our guest today, Keith Cooper, who's written about progress of a slightly different sort, maybe the cousin to actual technological progress, and that is the human beings who have imagined other worlds, other planets, places outside the solar system, exoplanets, people who have ventured out into the cosmos. And Keith Cooper has asked, what do we know about these places for real? How do. How does our knowledge compare with what we. How do the. How do the people who have invented these things in fiction and so on? How does. How do those inventions compare with what we actually know about what's out there beyond our solar system and those planets and other celestial bodies out there? So the questions that I asked at the beginning to repeat were, the world is amazing. Why do we even need fiction at all? Why not just celebrate the strangeness and beauty and mysteries of the actual universe? Where do fiction and poetry and other creative arts fit in? And why do we think we're better? Why do we. Is it restlessness, hubris, lack of gratitude? Why do we think we can invent something that's better? Why not just read nonfiction about our universe? That's pretty miraculous, too. And you could add to this. If we need some stories, if there's some component that says, well, there's a reason why we don't just read nonfiction, it's because human beings need stories, then you could say, well, then why not just have AI generate those stories for us? Why employ ragged, flawed human creativity when we could either just talk about scientific facts, stick to reality, or we could have science talk about science in a different format, so to speak, have AI invent these stories for us. But here's my answer. Yes, the universe is amazing. And guess what? Human creativity is part of the universe. It's one of the most amazing things out there. The stuff that humans dream up is one of the great miracles of the universe up there with quantum entanglement and exploding quasars and evaporating exoplanets. That's all out there for the humans who are turning their mind to that kind of invention down here. Closer to home, we have Chekov, who wrote about the loneliness of life in a beautiful way, in a way not solvable by AI all apologies to the overlords who want me to solve my loneliness with fake people. You can keep your fake people, and I'LL hang on to my Chekhov Keith Cooper after this.
- [26:23]
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- [28:07]
Jack Wilson
Okay.
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Keith Cooper
Joining me now is Keith Cooper, a.
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Jack Wilson
Science journalist who has written for New Scientist, Physics, World sky and Telescope, Space.com, supercluster, and other publications. He has a degree in physics with.
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Keith Cooper
Astrophysics from the University of Manchester, and.
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Jack Wilson
He'S edited Astronomy now magazine for nearly 20 years. He's here today to discuss his new book, Amazing Worlds of Science Fiction and Science Fact. Keith Cooper, welcome to the History of literature.
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Keith Cooper
Thank you. It's a pleasure to be speaking to you.
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Can you pinpoint the moment that you knew that you wanted to become a scientist?
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Oh, gosh. A long, long time ago. Lost in the mists of time. I think when I was a child, my dad was very into astronomy.
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Huh.
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So he introduced that to me at a young age. And, you know, he also liked to watch Star Trek and read science fiction. So I, I guess I inherited that at a very young age. And I always imagined myself like when I was 8 years old, you know, that's what you wanted to be when you grow up. I always imagined myself as a professional astronomer, sat at a big telescope on mountain in California or somewhere and, you know, using it to make discoveries. Slightly naive way of looking at it as a child because everything's done remotely and via computers now. But yeah, it's always been a part of me. Space and astronomy and science fiction.
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Jack Wilson
Right.
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Keith Cooper
So my question was going to be if one came before the other, if you were interested in science fiction and films before and that kind of pointed you toward a career in science or if it was the other way around. But it sounds like it's always both of those have kind of been there as far back as you can remember.
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Yeah, they've been pretty interchangeable. You know, imagine being four or five years old and, you know, you're learning about the planets of the solar system for the first time and watching Star wars for the first time all at the same time. It just all got wrapped up in one amazing sort of learning experience. So yeah, it was two sides of the same coin.
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Jack Wilson
Right, Right.
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Keith Cooper
So I have a friend who was a musician and he had perfect pitch and it always kind of, in a way, it kind of ruined things for him because we'd be walking down the street and we'd see some Christmas carolers or something and we would stop and listen and everyone would be smiling and.
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Jack Wilson
Feeling the warmth of it and he.
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Keith Cooper
Would be cringing as, you know, they hit some off key notes and so on. And I wonder if, for a scientist.
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Jack Wilson
If science fiction can be kind of like that while the rest of us.
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Keith Cooper
Just kind of go along with the flow. You're spotting inaccuracies and impossibilities. Does it ever feel like it? It kind of turns you into a curmudgeon when it comes to science fiction or are you able to suspend your disbelief like everyone else?
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It depends. I know some people. It bothers a lot of. You know, a lot of scientists like science fiction, but a lot don't for the reasons you just described there. I guess I have more of a tolerance to it because I grew up with science fiction before I knew any better. So as long as it's not too silly, I don't mind it. I certainly don't expect the science to be perfect because at the end of the day, you know, science fiction writers, filmmakers, they're telling a story, they're not giving you a science lesson.
- [31:47]
Right.
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So as long as it's not too ridiculous, as long as they at least pay lip service to some kind of scientific accuracy, I can look past it. Otherwise, you know, I wouldn't be able to be a Star Trek fan if I was nitpicking every five minutes at the techno babble.
- [32:02]
Right. And there must be some instances where we have to kind of check ourselves because what seems to us like it's implausible or out there sometimes is kind of prophetic and actually it can turn out to sort of come true. And I'm guessing that you probably have in mind some practitioners who are very good at getting things right and are actually. We could read them in addition for story and kind of the ideas. We could actually learn science from them.
- [32:37]
Yeah, absolutely. There's a genre of science fiction called hard science fiction. Not hard because it's difficult to read or anything, but because it tries to stick to sound scientific principles. You know, it wants to explore these scientific ideas rather than just, you know, what's the word I'm looking for? Rather than tossing out the window and just doing whatever they want because they feel it's science fiction, we can hand wave it when do what we want. Hard science fiction is, you know, it's more rigorous. It uses the science to tell a story. It doesn't have to necessarily be realistic science. It can be very speculative. You know, you get a lot of space opera stories set, you know, far in the future and it's talking about cosmology and the fate of the universe and things like that. But you know, you can put all back to our scientific understanding today. So yeah, so there's that genre, but even something like Star Trek, they at least try to remain consistent within their story. So they have a lot of techno babble and things. But there are certain rules in Star Trek to what they can and can't do. They can't just do anything. So as long as they stay consistent to that and they can hand wave some of it away as this magical future technology that we don't have now so we don't have to explain how much it works too much. A lot of people are a little bit snooty towards TV shows and movies in science fiction because they feel that they don't get the science right. I want to be a little bit careful there because there's a lot of science fiction novels that also get the science wrong. I think with a novel you have the latitude to go a little bit more in depth, you know, you're able to describe how a spaceship works, whereas on Star Trek or Star wars you just see it flying through space. I think had science fiction literature is able to combine the science with the fiction and take you on adventure that is scientifically consistent and sound. But you have to remember that it is fiction. But, yeah, I try not to let the scientific inaccuracies get in the way of me enjoying something too much, as I said, unless it's plainly ridiculous.
- [34:49]
Right. And I guess to make the case for science fiction a bit, you could also say, well, it's advancing science to posit something and basically say, go ahead.
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Jack Wilson
And prove me wrong.
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Keith Cooper
If it encourages some young person, let's say, to go out and figure out, well, why is it that this spaceship.
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Jack Wilson
Wouldn'T have been able to do that?
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Keith Cooper
Or why couldn't this be true?
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Jack Wilson
There's educational value in that.
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Keith Cooper
Absolutely. It's inspiring. Science fiction will present a piece of technology, or maybe it'll present a particular planet or an alien species or something, and inspires would be scientists watching it, or even people who are already scientists watching it to. To go and try and invent that technology or to look for that planet or to search for alien life. So, yeah, it's really inspiring. So my book, Amazing Worlds of Science Fiction, Science Fact, I think, really embodies that. It's presenting the science through the lens of the science fiction, and the science fiction does inspire. And then, you know, you go and look at other planets like. Like Vulcan or like Tatooine. Are there really planets like that? And what we're finding is that there certainly could be planets like that, and there's even stranger planets that science fiction just didn't even imagine. I know it's a cliche, but sometimes truth really is stranger than fiction.
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Jack Wilson
Yeah.
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Keith Cooper
So you start out the book with a look at how little we knew about the galaxy not that long ago. And you note that science fiction works have often been ahead of scientific discoveries and that the power of imagination at times has soared way ahead of the science. So what are some of these discoveries? Maybe in the past few decades that it appeared first in science fiction and then it was subsequently confirmed by telescopes or spacecraft.
- [36:43]
Yeah, well, I think the big one is the subject of the book, Exoplanets. So now we kind of take it for granted that there are planets orbiting other stars out there in the universe besides our sun. It's easy to forget that we. Until the 1990s, we didn't know that nobody had discovered any planets beyond our own solar system.
- [37:04]
Jack Wilson
Wow.
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Keith Cooper
So all the planets in science fiction before the 1990s, they were really leading the way in imagining what these worlds could be like, whether, you know, they could even exist. And because we had. We had no observations, no real discoveries to work with, science fiction was. Was really the only way that we could explore these other worlds. So science fiction really did lead the way. Then, you know, we started getting hints that there could be planets in the late 70s, early 1980s. The first ones were found around dead stars called pulsars in 1992, and then the first planet around a star like our sun was found in 1995. So it's only been 30 years.
- [37:46]
Yeah.
- [37:46]
And you think back to all the science fiction from before then.
- [37:49]
Jack Wilson
Yeah.
- [37:49]
Keith Cooper
Right.
- [37:50]
You know, portrayed alien planets around other stars.
- [37:53]
Yeah.
- [37:54]
As if, you know, it was. I think a lot of people just assumed that we knew about them and they were there from watching the science fiction.
- [38:01]
Jack Wilson
Right.
- [38:02]
Keith Cooper
So now we're making this discovery is. It's starting to pivot a little bit. You know, it is pivoting the other way where now the science is leading our understanding of the planets rather than the science fiction. And the science fiction is following in science's lead a little bit. But there's still so much that we don't know about these planets. There's plenty of. Of areas that science fiction can still take a lead in.
- [38:22]
Right. Yeah, that's really something, because when I think of science fiction that was working with information that we didn't yet have, I was thinking of John Carter and H.G. wells and things like that, which we can maybe talk about too. But to think about it being something.
- [38:45]
Jack Wilson
That Star wars and Star Trek was.
- [38:48]
Keith Cooper
Even in advance of, I mean, that's.
- [38:51]
Jack Wilson
Pretty recent in my lifetime.
- [38:53]
Keith Cooper
Yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely. You know, the Enterprise was visiting strange new worlds in the 1960s. The science fiction writers didn't care that we hadn't found any planets around other stars yet. They wanted to write about them, and so they did. And yeah, I mean, you know, going back to H.G. wells and John Catt, I mean, they were based on Mars, World of the worlds. The aliens came from Mars and, you know, John Carter on Barsoom, which was the name given to Mars. And back then, even back then, at sort of the beginning of the 20th century, scientists had a good idea that Mars probably wasn't going to be habitable. It certainly wasn't going to be like Earth. So even then, you know, the stories of John Carter were a little bit fantasy.
- [39:41]
Jack Wilson
Yeah.
- [39:43]
Keith Cooper
We did have an idea that Mars perhaps wasn't the greatest planet to find life on. But, yeah, you know, space travel. You know, think of all the golden age science fiction from the 20s and 30s and 40s. E. Doc Smith and early Asimov. You know, they were talking about interstellar adventures before we'd even launched Sputnik 1.
- [40:04]
Jack Wilson
Yeah.
- [40:05]
Keith Cooper
So, yeah, when it comes to exploring the universe, science fiction has often been ahead of science. But that's fine, because technology takes a little while to catch up. But we can still dream about these things before the technology is ready to take us there.
- [40:22]
I wonder if in some ways, the technology and the information that we've gained has made it harder for science fiction. It seems like it's one thing to.
- [40:34]
Jack Wilson
Say there's intelligent life on Mars, for.
- [40:36]
Keith Cooper
Example, because we could imagine being able.
- [40:39]
Jack Wilson
To go visit Mars.
- [40:41]
Keith Cooper
But if we're talking about these impossibly distant places where it might even be an impossibility within the span of a human lifetime to get there, then it's almost like you have to start inventing technologies that maybe push the boundaries of what's physically possible.
- [41:04]
I don't think it necessarily makes science fiction harder to write. After all, the more that we explore the deep oceans on Earth or Antarctica or other wildernesses, that doesn't negatively affect fiction written in those places. It strengthens it. And I think the same goes for discoveries that we make in space. Of course, you know, as we discover exoplanets, it to a point, I guess, narrows some of the options that the writers have because we start to get a better scientific understanding of what planets are like and what they're not like. But, you know, I mean, this is a question. In my book, I interview some science fiction authors, and this was a question that I put to them that now that we're discovering planets, does it force you to limit your imagination? And they would say, no, not. Not at all. It helps us because, you know, now we have something, a foundation to build our imaginary worlds on. And there's still so many things that we don't know about these planets that there's still, you know, so much room for the imagination. And as I mentioned, truth is often strange for fiction. A lot of discoveries we make are huge surprises, and they're great inspiration for new science fiction. Star is. So I don't think science inhibits a science fiction at all. If anything else, it strengthens it.
- [42:25]
Okay, let's take a quick break, and then we'll come back and hear exactly what we do know about these exoplanets.
- [42:45]
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- [43:12]
Keith Cooper
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- [43:40]
Okay, we're back. So, Keith, what exactly do we know about exoplanets?
- [43:44]
Jack Wilson
We know now that they exist.
- [43:46]
Keith Cooper
Are we, are we getting a sense of how many there are, how far away they are and the characteristics they have? I'm guessing that we don't know everything yet. But what is it that we do know?
- [44:00]
Well, I think I'm going to disappoint a lot of people here when I say we don't know very much. And we don't even have images of most of them. Since 1992, we've discovered over 5,800 exoplanets, planets around, orbiting around other stars. That's as of January 2025. And I'm sure when the listeners come to listen to this episode, we'll have found some more. The numbers are going up all the time.
- [44:28]
So we find them based on their gravitational pull or the effects that we see in the data.
- [44:35]
Yeah, there's two main ways of finding exoplanets and neither of them are imaging them, which is, you know, I imagine a lot of people would imagine that, you know, a telescope would take a picture of an exoplanet and they see all these artists impressions and oh, that must be what we're seeing. But it, but it isn't. So one way is to look for the way the planet's gravity causes its start to wobble. How does a small planet cause a big star to wobble? We talk about a planet orbiting a star. Not quite accurate. What, what it's doing, it's orbiting the center of mass between the planet and the star. So if you imagine a seesaw, and you want to get a seesaw to balance a larger person, a heavier person would move inwards and the, the lighter person, maybe a child, would move outward. You get it to balance and there's a pivot point between them and that's a center of mass. So they're orbiting around the center of mass. Now, since in a planetary system, most of the masses inside the star, then the center of mass is also inside the star, but it's not at the center of the star. So the star is kind of wobbling around the center of mass. And we can see that in kind of like a Doppler shift effect of its light. And it's only like 10, 5, 10 meters per second that is wobbling. And we can detect that. And from the size of the wobble, we can infer the mass of the planet. But that doesn't tell us how big the planet is. It only tells us how heavy it is. So the other way is looking for transits. Now this is when a planet is orbiting a star, orbiting the center of mass between it and its star, and it moves in front of the star. So you can imagine like a little planet silhouetted in front of its star from our point of view. And the planet blocks some of the stars light, not a lot. A planet the size of Jupiter, which is the biggest planet in our solar system, blocks about 1% of a star's light. And a planet about the size of Earth would block 0.01% of the star's light. Yet we can detect this minute dip in the starlight. And the size of the dip tells us how big the planet is. So we've got the mass and we've got its radius. And from that we can calculate the planet's density, which tells us whether it's made of rock or ice or water, or whether it's mostly gas. And after that, we're struggling a little bit to be able to say things about these worlds. We can work out how far they are from their star based on the, the period in which they orbit the star. We can, if you have an atmosphere and they transit, we can detect the, the light of the star passing through the light of the planet's atmosphere because the atmosphere absorbs a little bit of the, the starlight at different wavelengths, wavelengths for different molecules. And we can detect that in the star spectrum and say, ah, there must be an atmosphere there with hydrogen or oxygen or methane. And that is something that the NASA James Webb Space Telescope, which launched three years ago, or is it four years, that's something that that can do for relatively nearby planets. So we're starting to characterize them a little bit. We know based on how far away they are from their star, how warm they must be. And there's a region around the star called the habitable zone. The habitable Zone is where the temperatures should be just about right for liquid water to exist on the surface of a planet with an atmosphere like Earth, because life as we know it needs water. So we found some planets in the habitable zones. It doesn't mean they're habitable, it doesn't mean they have water. They might be airless, but they're certainly good targets for further study. But beyond that. Yeah, there's not a lot that we can say about these worlds. We haven't found another planet like her, unfortunately not yet. That doesn't. Well, I should probably clarify that. We haven't identified another planet. Like I guess we could have discovered one and not recognized it for what it is yet because it doesn't necessarily mean that Earth like worlds would be rare. Partly it's a detection bias because the planets that are easiest to find are the ones that are big, close to their star, because these transit more often and they cause a bigger wobble. And Earth like planets in habitable zone which are further away, they don't cause a big wobble, they don't transit very often, so they're harder to find. But yeah, as of now, we don't know of any other world like Earth that we could go and live on. So all these science fiction stories of ark ships voyaging into the void to, you know, I don't want to say colonize, but to settle on another planet right at the moment we can't do that because we don't know of any worlds that we could go to that would be habitable.
- [49:20]
Yeah, I think I read it in your book where Star Trek was accused of having a lot of planets that happen to look like sets on backlots in California.
- [49:33]
Yeah, and science fiction does that a lot. It has a lot of Earth like worlds to an extent. You could accuse it of lacking imagination, but what are they gonna do that, you know, the studio is on Earth, they can't go and film on Mar or Mercury or something.
- [49:48]
Jack Wilson
Right, right.
- [49:49]
Keith Cooper
Well, it also is the thing. If space is infinite and assuming you.
- [49:54]
Jack Wilson
Could get to all parts of it.
- [49:55]
Keith Cooper
If you can kind of wipe that part away, that objection away, then I always kind of chuckle when I see a show and they are traveling to some other planet and they happen to find one that has the world of Sherlock Holmes or Elizabethan England or something, and you think, well, that was probably a fun script to write, but I don't know how plausible that is.
- [50:22]
Star Trek used to do that. A lot of it was a cost cutting measure because they already had the wild west or 1930s New York. You know, they already have the sets on the Paramount lot, so obviously it was cheaper to use use them. And they did build up kind of like this theory in Star Trek of parallel evolution where cultures paralleling Earth would develop. So they kind of tried to explain it away in the Star Trek universe. But yes, we shouldn't expect to go to another planet and find Nazis or gangsters as Star Trek had.
- [51:00]
Jack Wilson
Right?
- [51:01]
Keith Cooper
Well, we may find alien narges and alien gangsters, but they wouldn't have swastikas and tommy guns. But the other reason why Earth like planets feature a lot in science fiction is, is also because, you know, we want our human characters to go and have adventures and they're pretty limited if they, they can't survive on the surface of the planet because there's no atmosphere to breathe. So again, that's, that's another reason why they do that. But not all science fiction, you know, does that, as evidenced in my book. There's a lot of imaginative worlds. You know, take a planet like Arrakis from Dune. I imagine a lot of your listeners will have either read Dune or seen the movies. Now it's a vast desert world, barely any water, yet people live there. How can somebody live there? It's like living on a planet is just like the Sahara desert. But you know, scientists have modeled worlds like that theoretically, and they worked out ways in which planets that are just desert could be habitable. Not massively. You know, vast regions of it would be fairly uninhabitable. But there would be areas, niches where life could survive the same on in the Empire Strikes Back, the planet of Hoth, completely covered in ice and snow. But there again, there are niches where life could survive on, on such worlds. And we know that because Earth itself has undergone snowball events in its past hundreds of millions of years ago, where practically the entire planet would have been covered in ice. And yet we know life survived because we're still here. So yeah, one of the things I learned from writing the book and talking to scientists and also the science fiction writers because they looked for these niches where life could survive in an otherwise inhospitable planet. So yeah, maybe we won't find another planet like Earth, which is, you know, virtually all habitable, but maybe we'll find worlds where there's a small area where life can just about live. We don't know how rare, rare an Earth like planet would be. So that's one of the, still one of the great unanswered questions that's interesting.
- [53:15]
Because it means, I guess, that we don't have to only look for an exoplanet that we can detect, has all of Earth's characteristics, but that we could imagine life, maybe even intelligent life, arising on planets that don't have those Earth like qualities.
- [53:35]
Absolutely. I mean, it would take a little bit of a leap for scientists because the idea of how life is on Earth is so ingrained in our thinking. Anything else is by its very nature speculative. But yeah, we certainly couldn't rule those other types of planets out. And those other types of planets, you know, could be far more common in the universe than Earth like planets. So yeah, we certainly can't rule that out. And we shouldn't be disheartened by the lack of, you know, Earth 2.0. There's still lots of possibilities out there, but we just don't know enough at the moment. So yeah, there's, there's still loads of scope for science fiction to envisage these niche worlds and these other ways that life could survive on planets and that could inspire scientists in the future.
- [54:26]
Right, let's talk about some of the earliest imagineers, I guess I would say, of exoplanets. What can you tell us about authors like Margaret Cavendish and Voltaire?
- [54:40]
Jack Wilson
And I was surprised to see Immanuel Kant on this list.
- [54:43]
Keith Cooper
What did they know and what were they imagining?
- [54:47]
Sure. So let's go back to the early 1600s, and Giordano Bruno had just been burned at the stake for various things, but among them he believed that all those stars in the sky were other suns and they could have planets around them, which was, you know, very against theologian thinking of the time, you know, when Earth was the center of the universe created by God and so on. Then 10 years later, in 1610, Galileo used his telescope to observe the moons of Jupiter. And these moons were orbiting around Jupiter. And that just showed that not everything orbited the sun as Nicholas Copernicus had posited in the 1500s. So there was a growing realization that the sun was just like the stars in the sky. And if the planets orbit the sun, then there must be planets orbiting those stars in the sky as well. So one of the names you mentioned there, Margaret Cavendish, she was an English writer or philosopher. She was married to one of the commanders in the English Civil War. And she was also a member of the Royal Society, which was very male dominated at the time. But she would go along to the meetings and argue and debate with all the men. And she wrote a story called the Blazing World and in it involved some kind of travel to another world, a second Earth that seems to also orbit the sun, but we can't see it because it's behind the Sun. It's more of a flight of fancy. A philosophical introspection, perhaps, but it's an important step on the road to thinking about what other worlds could be like. Yeah, Obviously in the 1600s, the science wasn't there to really describe something like that. So, as I say, it was more of a flight of fancy. Voltaire, I think about 100 years later, he wrote a story about a visitor from the star Sirius. And Kant didn't write stories, but amazingly, he developed the theory about how the sun and the planets formed, called the nebula hypothesis. Basically, it just describes them condensing out of a collapsing cloud of gas and dust. And he came up this theory along with a French scientist, Pierre Laplace, and it was one of the two competing theories for how planets form. The other one was that a star had come very close to the sun and pulled out with its gravity, pulled out some material from. From the sun, and this material had then formed the planets. Now, the difference between these two theories is that the nebula hypothesis would mean that probably lots of planets in the universe because lots of clouds of gas that can collapse. Whereas the theory of the star going close to the sun and pulling out some material would suggest that the planets are rare because such close encounters wouldn't happen very often. It'd be a fluke. And around the turn of the 20th century, that model was actually the most popular one, even in the War of the Worlds. It kind of touches on that theory because in that model, it predicts that the planets furthest from the Sun, Neptune, would have formed first, and then Uranus, then Saturn, then Jupiter, then Mars and Earth. So that the life Mars was older than Earth, and the life on Mars would have been older than Earth. So that's why it was more technologically advanced. Yeah, when the aliens in the wilderness world invaded Earth. But it turns out that Kant and Laplace were correct all along and that planets do form when clouds of gas collapse. They generate a star at the center, and then the disk of gas and dust forms around that star, and planets condense out of those. And we can actually see this in action. We can actually see these collapsing clouds and these disks of gas and dust around young stars forming planets. And we've taken pictures of them and of the young planets within these dusty, gaseous disks. So we know that's how it happens. And yet Kant was the first to imagine that hundreds of years ago, is.
- [58:54]
There anything that would stop a cloud of gas from being so enormous and so big, with so much mass that you could have a planet that would form that would be powerful enough that.
- [59:07]
Jack Wilson
The sun would orbit it?
- [59:10]
Keith Cooper
No. So beyond a certain mass, a condensing object would ignite fusion, nuclear fusion actions in its core, and then by its very nature it will become a star. And that was the. In Arthur C. Clarke's 2010, the sequel to 2001. That was the plot point there because the aliens were using the monolith to build up the mass of Jupiter, to turn Jupiter into a star so that it could breathe life on Jupiter's moon Europa. So, yeah, there's a whole spectrum of planets. You've got giant planets like Jupiter. Then you have these objects called brown dwarves, which aren't planets, but they're not stars either because they don't really quite ignite the nuclear fusion reactions to generate the energy that a star does. And then you have low mass stars called red dwarves. And you've got more massive stars called, such as the Sun. And then you have the most massive stars which, which are the ones that explode as supernovae. So yeah, there's a whole spectrum, but beyond about 13 times the mass of Jupiter, you get a brown dwarf. And I think, is it 90 or 100 times the mass of Jupiter, you get the red dwarf stars. So there's a big spectrum there.
- [60:26]
See, I just asked a question that I probably would have known if I had read the Arthur C. Clarke book. Do you feel like some of the more popular works we've talked about Star wars and Star Trek and Dune, and we mentioned H.G. wells and Edgar Rice Burroughs and Isaac Asimov is, is certainly up there. How well have works like that served the public in terms of imparting accurate knowledge to them?
- [60:55]
Let's put accuracy aside for now. It has certainly popularized the idea of planets beyond our solar system, of life beyond our solar system. And without that, I don't think people would think about those things too much, just regular people. So it certainly makes people think about those things and it might interest them and then they might go away and learn more about them and the science behind it. As I said, I'm not sure science fiction's responsibility is giving science lessons.
- [61:32]
Jack Wilson
Right.
- [61:32]
Keith Cooper
But it definitely puts these things in.
- [61:35]
People'S minds and it maybe encourages governments to devote more resources to scientific research, for example.
- [61:44]
It can do. It certainly can do. If they see that something is popular, then they'll feel more emboldened to Give the scientific research more money and people will complain. I think one of the points made in my book is that maybe scientists don't recognize the value science fiction in terms of it being their shop window. You know, people are learning about other worlds and alien life and stars and galaxies through science fiction. And it can be used as a great teaching tool by scientists, you know, to say what's right and what's wrong. But it's probably not valued as much as it should be. As I mentioned, you know, science fiction writers and TV shows and films were showing exoplanets decades before we even found any exoplanets. So it's been science fiction that have put this idea into people's mind, into the public's minds. And yeah, I think the scientific community could utilize that a little bit more in terms of their own outreach. This certainly shouldn't scoff at it just because it might get something wrong. That's almost kind of beside the point. I think maybe science fiction and the scientific community need to get together a little bit more. Lots of scientists are science fiction fans, but I think maybe science fiction writers and filmmakers need to talk to the scientists more and vice versa, because I think there's lots that they could learn from each other. So I do think it has the potential to have a great positive effect in terms of promoting science to the public.
- [63:28]
And science fiction also serves this valuable role of helping us become better human beings. Seeing the dangers of going down certain paths or having inspiration that can help us work toward better goals and better.
- [63:47]
Jack Wilson
Values here on Earth.
- [63:49]
Keith Cooper
Absolutely. I think that science fiction opens our minds to broader possibilities. Not just scientific, but social and cultural ideas as well. Science fiction in the past has been able to get away with conveying progressive ideas that perhaps more mainstream fiction has shied away from and still does. I mean, go back to Star Trek that broke barriers. It had women on the bridge, had people of color on the bridge. It had all these progressive ideas that it managed to sneak under the door a little bit that when. So the mainstream fiction of the time wasn't showing those things. And it's kind of why I don't want science fiction to become too mainstream, because I feel we would lose that progressive edge that it has, that's almost subversive edge. So sometimes I kind of worry when I just see these franchise, even Star Trek now, but Star wars and all the Marvel stuff, it just becomes this big juggernaut. And it's more about making money than having stories and challenging misconceptions. Science fiction was always this kind of underground genre for a long, long time. If you're at school and you like science fiction, you know, you were picked on because you were seen as a nerd. That doesn't happen now. It has become mainstream. So I guess that's a good thing that nobody gets bullied for liking science fiction anymore. But, yeah, I feel it might just take the edge off science fiction a little bit if it goes too mainstream. But, yeah, it allows us to dream. It allows us to imagine other possibilities. You know, the father of the space rocket, Robert Goddard, he was inspired by Edgar Allan Poe's John Carter stories. You know, if you haven't read them, if he hadn't thought, I want to go to Mars to bathroom, he may not have gone into, you know, aerospace engineering. And then the developed, you know, the theories behind how rockets work. You know, he developed the rocket equation, and it's all down to his work. Now we're able to go into space. Carl Sagan as well, was heavily influenced, inspired science fiction. And, you know, you can tell any story in science fiction. You could tell a romance story, a mystery story, but the science fiction elevates it from, in my view, the mundane. Yeah, I wouldn't be without it.
- [66:07]
That's a nice place to end. The book is called Amazing Worlds of Science Fiction and Science Fact. Keith Cooper, thank you so much for joining me on the history of literature.
- [66:16]
Thank you.
- [66:22]
Jack Wilson
Okay, there we go.
- [66:24]
Keith Cooper
My thanks to Keith Cooper for joining me today.
- [66:26]
Jack Wilson
And my apologies for the rant at the outset. I got a little carried away, but I don't want 80% of my friends to be AI I want more time to spend with my old friends and more time to make some new ones. Speaking of which, I'll have an old friend on Soon, Mr. Mike Palindrome, the president himself, and I'll introduce you to.
- [66:48]
Keith Cooper
Some new friends of mine or guests on the podcast.
- [66:51]
Jack Wilson
Anyway, I like to think that they're my friends. Maybe I do need some robots.
- [66:57]
Keith Cooper
Okay.
- [66:58]
Jack Wilson
Anyway, the new friends, I'll call him that, including will include an expert in Virginia Woolf and the famous diarist Samuel Pepys. And a man who said, hey, why don't we ever talk about Shakespeare's greatest love? And another man who said, we don't.
- [67:13]
Keith Cooper
Talk enough about old French epics.
- [67:15]
Jack Wilson
And another guest who said, hey, we're missing something important about the way John Milton has inspired revolutions. And to all of them, and so many more, I say, thank you for giving us so much to think about. It is truly an amazing world indeed. Both way, way, way out there and right here at home on this planet we all share. I'm Jack Wilson. Thank you for listening and we'll see you next time.
- [67:52]
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- [68:22]
Lee C Camp
Lee C Camp here. If you've been enjoying this show, I think you might enjoy my podcast no Small Endeavor. Produced by Great Feeling Studios and prx, no Small Endeavor explores what it means to live a good life. We sit down with courageous, impassioned people like actor Martin Sheen or civil rights hero James Lawson to ask what it means to live a life worth living. Follow no Small Endeavor wherever you get your podcasts. Living a good life is no Small endeavor and we would love to help.