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[00:02:02.360 --> 00:02:08.200] You're listening to The Michael Shermer Show.
[00:02:14.600 --> 00:02:19.960] All right, everybody, it's Michael Shermer, and it's time for you know what, another episode of the Michael Shermer Show.
[00:02:19.960 --> 00:02:26.600] My guest today is a legendary scientist, probably the most decorated scientist I've ever had on the show.
[00:02:26.600 --> 00:02:29.000] He is Lord Martin Rees.
[00:02:29.000 --> 00:02:31.080] He is here for the second time.
[00:02:31.080 --> 00:02:43.560] He's the Astronomer Royale, former President of the Royal Society, fellow and master, former master of Trinity College, Cambridge, and Emeritus Professor of Cosmology and Astrophysics at the University of Cambridge.
[00:02:43.560 --> 00:02:46.680] He sits as a member of the UK House of Lords.
[00:02:46.680 --> 00:03:01.080] He is the author of many best-selling popular science books, including On the Future, Prospects for Humanity, Just Six Numbers, The Deep Forces That Shape the Universe, Before the Beginning, Our Universe and Others.
[00:03:01.080 --> 00:03:02.280] Hey, there's Others.
[00:03:02.280 --> 00:03:02.680] Okay.
[00:03:02.680 --> 00:03:04.440] We'll have to talk about that.
[00:03:04.440 --> 00:03:07.880] And Our Final Hour, A Scientist's Warning.
[00:03:08.520 --> 00:03:15.160] And his next book, it looks like he's co-authored with Alan Lightman, coming out in September.
[00:03:15.160 --> 00:03:17.560] We're recording this on July 2nd.
[00:03:17.880 --> 00:03:22.920] The Shape of Wonder, How Scientists Think, Work, and Live, which is where we're going to start here in just a minute.
[00:03:22.920 --> 00:03:24.040] But there's much more.
[00:03:24.120 --> 00:03:32.760] He's been elected to the Academy, American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, and the National Academy of Sciences.
[00:03:32.920 --> 00:03:36.520] And has received, here's the list from Wikipedia.
[00:03:36.840 --> 00:03:38.760] It's actually much longer than this.
[00:03:38.920 --> 00:03:54.320] He received the gold medal of the Royal Astronomical Society, the Albert Einstein World Award of Science, the Crawford Prize, very, sort of the Nobel Prize, or maybe the Fields Medal Prize for branches of science.
[00:03:54.320 --> 00:04:03.920] He's also been awarded the Order of Merit, the Templeton Prize, which tells us they're the highest, I think it's the largest sum of money of any prize given.
[00:04:03.920 --> 00:04:05.600] Well, we'll clarify that in a minute.
[00:04:05.600 --> 00:04:16.560] The Isaac Newton Medal, the Dirac Medal, the Lillian Field Prize, and the Fritz Sweakey Prize, the Copley Medal, and the Wolf Prize in Physics.
[00:04:16.560 --> 00:04:21.920] Not to mention, he has an asteroid named after him, number 4587 Rees.
[00:04:21.920 --> 00:04:27.120] Hopefully, Martin, it's not destined to collide with Earth anytime soon.
[00:04:28.720 --> 00:04:29.920] How are you?
[00:04:30.800 --> 00:04:32.880] Great to be on your show again.
[00:04:33.200 --> 00:04:34.000] Yes.
[00:04:34.000 --> 00:04:35.920] So much to discuss, Martin.
[00:04:35.920 --> 00:04:41.840] I mean, that's quite a long list, and that's not the half of it if you go to your Wikipedia page.
[00:04:41.840 --> 00:04:50.160] So I'm curious, before we get into all the science stuff, I'm working on a future book here at some point finish on how lives turn out.
[00:04:50.160 --> 00:05:06.720] You know, it turns out psychologists, behavioral geneticists, people that study twins, people that study personality, and so on, tell us that there's a large, unexplained source of variation that we can't get our minds around.
[00:05:06.720 --> 00:05:08.080] It's not genetics.
[00:05:08.080 --> 00:05:10.160] It's not the home environment.
[00:05:10.160 --> 00:05:13.120] It's what's loosely called the non-shared environment.
[00:05:13.120 --> 00:05:22.080] But it also includes just sort of the random events in one's life, contingency, chance, the zig and the zag of life.
[00:05:22.320 --> 00:05:23.760] You went left instead of right.
[00:05:23.760 --> 00:05:30.000] You got the upper bunk, and your brother got the lower bunk, or you had this teacher instead of that teacher, and so on.
[00:05:30.360 --> 00:05:43.560] So, considering how decorated a scientist you are, and you have a book coming out about how scientists work and think and live, maybe you could go back and give us a little sense of how you became Martin Rees.
[00:05:43.560 --> 00:05:43.960] Yes.
[00:05:44.120 --> 00:05:46.440] What are the influences in your life?
[00:05:46.760 --> 00:05:50.760] Well, it's certainly true that luck is a major element.
[00:05:50.760 --> 00:05:52.520] It certainly has been for me.
[00:05:52.920 --> 00:06:02.840] I grew up in a rural environment in Shropshire, which is on the borders of England and Wales, where my parents ran a small school.
[00:06:02.840 --> 00:06:05.880] So we lived in a small village in isolation.
[00:06:06.200 --> 00:06:10.360] From the age of 13, I was sent to a larger school.
[00:06:10.680 --> 00:06:20.280] But I have very warm memories of the childhood upbringing and the nature of that community and a huge respect for the people who taught me then.
[00:06:20.600 --> 00:06:24.280] And I was able to get into Cambridge University.
[00:06:24.280 --> 00:06:39.720] And because I was good at math at that time, I was encouraged to study that subject at Trinity College, Cambridge, which wasn't the right decision because I ended up having a more sort of synthetic style of thinking.
[00:06:39.720 --> 00:06:47.480] And I wasn't quite as nerdish in the same way as my mathematical contemporaries in the class at Cambridge.
[00:06:47.480 --> 00:06:56.360] And so I wanted to try and apply my math to some other more phenomenological topic.
[00:06:56.360 --> 00:07:00.600] And this was when I was 21 and graduating in math.
[00:07:00.600 --> 00:07:18.880] And my bit of luck was being accepted just luckily as a graduate student at Cambridge and to be able to join a group which happened to be very lucky in a number of ways.
[00:07:19.120 --> 00:07:29.120] First, it was headed by someone called Dennis Sharma, a remarkably charismatic character and a good friend and contemporary of Roger Penrose.
[00:07:29.440 --> 00:07:42.400] And the students he attracted included some who went on to good careers, most famously Stephen Hawking, who was two years senior to me.
[00:07:42.720 --> 00:07:46.720] And also, it was a time when the subject was changing.
[00:07:47.840 --> 00:07:53.120] The idea that there was a big bang that set the universe going was controversial.
[00:07:53.120 --> 00:08:03.120] And it was settled by events that happened in 1964 and 65, which was when I was just starting as a graduate student.
[00:08:03.120 --> 00:08:13.520] So I was very lucky in this subject starting in cosmology and also in understanding black holes and finding evidence for them.
[00:08:13.520 --> 00:08:16.480] And that was a very lucky period.
[00:08:16.480 --> 00:08:21.840] But what's been even luckier is that I would say the subject's been on a roll ever since.
[00:08:21.840 --> 00:08:30.720] And as you know, anyone who reads the press knows there's a whole succession of advances in astronomy and astrophysics.
[00:08:30.720 --> 00:08:37.360] Many of the problems which we puzzled about when I was starting have now been settled.
[00:08:37.360 --> 00:08:44.000] But of course, as any science advances, more subjects come into focus again.
[00:08:44.000 --> 00:08:47.760] And we are now focusing on questions that couldn't even have been posed back then.
[00:08:47.760 --> 00:08:49.440] So it's been a wonderful subject.
[00:08:49.440 --> 00:08:54.000] And I've been very lucky in being a participant in this.
[00:08:54.000 --> 00:08:56.960] And it's also a very international subject.
[00:08:57.280 --> 00:09:04.680] And I'm sorry, I'm rambling on too much, but let me just say which does interest the public.
[00:09:05.000 --> 00:09:15.880] And a topic which is featured in the book you just mentioned is that the scientists benefit from engaging with the public.
[00:09:15.880 --> 00:09:18.760] And of course, that's easy on some subjects than others.
[00:09:18.760 --> 00:09:26.840] Some subjects have a rather ambivalent reputation with the public, nuclear physics, for instance.
[00:09:26.840 --> 00:09:36.280] But I think it's fair to say that astronomy is one which has an unambiguously positive public image, as does ecology, for instance.
[00:09:36.280 --> 00:09:46.040] And as you know, it's a strong amateur element and a strong interest in the more philosophical elements of the subject.
[00:09:46.040 --> 00:09:49.480] So that's really a reason why you can imagine.
[00:09:49.480 --> 00:09:59.400] I'm still remaining cheerful, having been able to earn my living by working in this advancing field with international contact and real progress.
[00:09:59.720 --> 00:10:00.600] Yeah, nice.
[00:10:00.600 --> 00:10:02.520] You mentioned synthetic thinking.
[00:10:02.520 --> 00:10:05.000] What do you mean by that when you were doing math?
[00:10:05.240 --> 00:10:12.200] I mean, trying to put together and make sense of a variety of fragmentary data.
[00:10:12.200 --> 00:10:19.720] So I would say that what one does in a subject like astronomy, it's in some sense rather like what a detective does.
[00:10:19.720 --> 00:10:31.000] You want the various clues and you want to put them together to see if what you observe can be explained by a black hole moving around in a particular way or something of that kind.
[00:10:31.000 --> 00:10:38.200] So I wanted to interact with data and try and make sense of a phenomena.
[00:10:39.160 --> 00:10:42.120] You mentioned, okay, so other forms of luck.
[00:10:42.840 --> 00:10:49.360] Your parents ran a school, so obviously they were both intelligent and educated themselves.
[00:10:44.680 --> 00:10:51.360] So you inherited some of that.
[00:10:51.600 --> 00:10:53.120] I mean, this is another form of luck.
[00:10:53.120 --> 00:11:05.760] You didn't choose to be smart and have, I presume, lots of books in the home, and maybe they read to you, and then you read as a young neither was a scientist, but they generated a good atmosphere.
[00:11:06.080 --> 00:11:08.720] And I think I was well taught.
[00:11:08.720 --> 00:11:11.600] And you asked about other lessons one learned.
[00:11:11.600 --> 00:11:26.080] I mean, one thing which I think has influenced my general attitudes and politics ever since is when I look back at the people I encountered in my youth and the society I was in, I admire the quality of those people.
[00:11:26.080 --> 00:11:36.320] And the more I've gone on in my career, I've realized how poorly correlated achievement and status is to any intrinsic virtues.
[00:11:36.320 --> 00:11:41.680] And this is perhaps one reason why by American standards I'd be called very left-wing.
[00:11:42.960 --> 00:11:47.760] Okay, we can get into that in a minute, but that's pretty interesting.
[00:11:47.760 --> 00:11:48.240] Yeah.
[00:11:48.240 --> 00:12:03.840] So what you're saying is that the kind of general culture in which that school or your home or whatever happened to be located in shapes, you know, who you are, the people you encounter on the street or at the supermarket or just randomly.
[00:12:03.840 --> 00:12:04.160] Yeah.
[00:12:05.440 --> 00:12:06.160] Yeah.
[00:12:07.200 --> 00:12:08.560] No city.
[00:12:08.560 --> 00:12:10.320] Just a village shop.
[00:12:10.800 --> 00:12:11.600] Village shop.
[00:12:11.600 --> 00:12:12.080] Yeah.
[00:12:12.080 --> 00:12:12.640] Yeah.
[00:12:12.960 --> 00:12:24.960] So and then early on, were there any popular science books you read as a young boy or a teenager that influenced you?
[00:12:25.200 --> 00:12:32.040] Yes, well, I read some encyclopedias and some of the popular books.
[00:12:32.040 --> 00:12:35.080] In fact, I did read a book by Fred Hoyle.
[00:12:35.640 --> 00:12:46.360] But I think, although this was perhaps when I was at university, I read the books by a science fiction writer called Olaf Stapleton.
[00:12:47.560 --> 00:12:54.520] I don't know how well known he is now, but he is lecturing philosophy at Liverpool University in England.
[00:12:54.520 --> 00:13:01.080] And in the 1930s, he wrote three books, which I think were really visionary at the time.
[00:13:01.720 --> 00:13:18.200] One was called Last and First Men, and it was about a history of the next few billion years and how I think 16 or 17 different civilizations emerged in different parts of the solar system, formed, evolved, and died, etc.
[00:13:18.360 --> 00:13:20.040] Very imaginative.
[00:13:20.200 --> 00:13:23.320] And the second one was called Starmaker.
[00:13:23.320 --> 00:13:25.960] And Starmaker was a maker of universes.
[00:13:25.960 --> 00:13:34.360] And so this discusses what the universe was like and how it might be different, different numbers of dimensions, etc.
[00:13:35.000 --> 00:13:41.160] And for instance, there was the musical universe, which had one spatial dimension and time.
[00:13:41.160 --> 00:13:44.760] And the structure is like the structure of music.
[00:13:44.760 --> 00:13:46.120] And there are lots of things like that.
[00:13:46.120 --> 00:13:52.360] And the third one, which I think is more relevant today than it was then, is called Sirius.
[00:13:52.360 --> 00:13:55.400] And it's about a dog with superhuman intelligence.
[00:13:55.400 --> 00:14:06.520] So these were three books which I read, which in retrospect were especially far-sighted and indeed related to the kind of things I've been thinking about in later life.
[00:14:07.160 --> 00:14:07.800] Nice.
[00:14:07.800 --> 00:14:10.440] You must have read Flatland at some point.
[00:14:10.680 --> 00:14:12.040] Yes, indeed.
[00:14:12.040 --> 00:14:12.680] Yes.
[00:14:12.680 --> 00:14:13.880] I mean, it's a little bit like that.
[00:14:13.880 --> 00:14:26.160] It's interesting that science fiction writers or literary people can write books like this that expand the thinking of scientists to consider serious problems in a completely different way.
[00:14:26.160 --> 00:14:26.560] Yes.
[00:14:26.560 --> 00:14:33.040] Well, it's certainly better to read first-rate science fiction than second-rate science.
[00:14:34.320 --> 00:14:35.280] Okay.
[00:14:36.480 --> 00:14:39.520] There's a blurb for your next book right on the cover.
[00:14:40.480 --> 00:14:41.600] That's funny.
[00:14:41.600 --> 00:14:42.640] Yeah, okay.
[00:14:42.640 --> 00:14:46.560] So, well, so what drives you as a scientist?
[00:14:46.560 --> 00:14:50.400] Is it the search for truth or how would you characterize it?
[00:14:51.680 --> 00:14:56.320] Yes, I mean, a search to understand the big picture and to make progress.
[00:14:56.320 --> 00:15:10.160] But accepting that this isn't done the great problems head-on, it's always done, unless one's a genius or very lucky, by piecemeal progress, by trying to fit the bits together.
[00:15:10.480 --> 00:15:22.560] That's why I said it was more like synthetic relation of different obstacles.
[00:15:22.560 --> 00:15:26.320] So that's the way I did my science, but I've enjoyed it.
[00:15:26.320 --> 00:15:32.000] And I think I've enjoyed it particularly because of the interaction.
[00:15:32.560 --> 00:15:35.680] If you're an artist, your work is mainly solitary.
[00:15:35.920 --> 00:15:41.120] If you're a scientist, the interactions are very important.
[00:15:41.120 --> 00:15:58.240] And I benefited hugely from interacting with collaborators, colleagues, and then students, and also with international contacts, because no subject could be more international than studying the cosmos.
[00:15:58.240 --> 00:16:05.400] And so I've benefited hugely from many contacts in America, Russia, and China, and Europe, of course.
[00:16:06.040 --> 00:16:15.000] Well, your subject really is, it's almost religious in nature, in the sense that religion was kind of the first institution to tackle the biggest questions of all.
[00:16:15.000 --> 00:16:16.600] Why is there something rather than nothing?
[00:16:16.600 --> 00:16:17.800] And where do we come from?
[00:16:17.800 --> 00:16:18.600] Why are we here?
[00:16:18.600 --> 00:16:19.160] And so on.
[00:16:19.160 --> 00:16:22.760] And now, you know, cosmologists tackle some of these issues.
[00:16:22.760 --> 00:16:29.320] And it has that sense of deep roots, like, you know, I want to know what it all means or where we all came from.
[00:16:29.320 --> 00:16:33.960] So, you know, good on you that you get to tackle those questions from a scientific perspective.
[00:16:35.000 --> 00:16:38.440] But of course, as I said, we do it in a piecemeal way.
[00:16:40.440 --> 00:16:44.840] We look for particular objects and what it tells us about black holes.
[00:16:44.840 --> 00:16:59.080] And of course, to take a branch of the subject, which is now very exciting, looking for planets around other stars to see if there are any signs of life having existed there and all these things.
[00:16:59.080 --> 00:17:04.520] It's a piecemeal progress, but we hope it does fill in the big picture.
[00:17:04.840 --> 00:17:08.120] Can you give us a sense of what Stephen Hawking was like?
[00:17:08.120 --> 00:17:09.320] Let me cue this up for you.
[00:17:09.720 --> 00:17:15.240] Back in the 90s and early aughts, Kip Thorne used to bring Stephen to Caltech every year.
[00:17:15.240 --> 00:17:18.840] And we held our monthly science lecture series there for the skeptics.
[00:17:18.840 --> 00:17:21.240] And it was a big deal.
[00:17:21.240 --> 00:17:26.280] I mean, like on a Wednesday evening at six, he would speak.
[00:17:26.280 --> 00:17:32.040] And by like one in the afternoon, there's people lined up outside of Beckman Auditorium to come hear him speak.
[00:17:32.040 --> 00:17:34.280] And then, you know, of course, it's standing room only.
[00:17:34.280 --> 00:17:39.000] And they had a video broadcast in another auditorium, which was also filled.
[00:17:39.000 --> 00:17:48.160] And, you know, you had a sense that this is something of a scientific rock star, the likes of which maybe only Carl Sagan enjoyed before Stephen.
[00:17:48.160 --> 00:17:48.880] I don't know.
[00:17:49.760 --> 00:17:55.040] And people look to him as if, like, you know, he knows the ultimate answers.
[00:17:55.520 --> 00:18:00.720] How much of that would you say, I mean, to be fair, was earned?
[00:18:00.720 --> 00:18:02.960] He really was that great of a mind?
[00:18:02.960 --> 00:18:06.800] Or how much of it was also captured by the physical condition?
[00:18:06.800 --> 00:18:11.760] You know, it's almost like a brain in a vat, and, you know, he's almost a godlike figure.
[00:18:12.640 --> 00:18:21.600] Well, I think you're right in saying it was because of his success in overcoming tremendous obstacles that he became so unique.
[00:18:21.600 --> 00:18:37.920] I mean, I think it's clear everyone would agree that he was one of the leading developers of relativity, one of the two or three people since Einstein who've made the biggest impact on our understanding of gravity.
[00:18:37.920 --> 00:18:44.080] I think there's no denying his great contributions, especially the ones in the 60s and the 70s.
[00:18:45.040 --> 00:18:58.080] But of course, it was the contrast between the imprisoned mind and the cosmos that he was roaming that appealed to the public and made him such a rock star, as it were.
[00:18:58.080 --> 00:19:05.840] I think if he'd been an equally distinguished person working in, say, genetics, there wouldn't have been the same aura.
[00:19:05.840 --> 00:19:07.760] And so it was this contrast.
[00:19:08.000 --> 00:19:12.640] And of course, that led to his book being a bestseller and all the rest of it.
[00:19:12.960 --> 00:19:22.720] And his oracular statements being interpreted perhaps more deeply than they could really determine.
[00:19:23.040 --> 00:19:28.240] But I think it was really that combination that made him such a remarkable figure.
[00:19:28.240 --> 00:19:36.200] And indeed, he was remarkable because going back to when I first met him, I was a first-year graduate student.
[00:19:36.200 --> 00:19:37.800] He was in his third year.
[00:19:37.800 --> 00:19:40.200] He was already walking with two sticks.
[00:19:40.200 --> 00:19:46.680] And his supervisor, Dennis Sharma, had been told he might not live to finish his PhD.
[00:19:46.680 --> 00:19:53.960] And of course, he did do that and went on for 50 years after it with the amazing achievements that we've just mentioned.
[00:19:53.960 --> 00:19:56.440] So it was a remarkable story.
[00:19:57.160 --> 00:20:25.960] You mentioned Kip Thorne, and can I say that he's probably most admire of all living scientists for his combination of distinction as a researcher, as a popularizer, and also as a socially responsible person, not just the immense care he took to make Stephen Hawking's life interesting, but the way he tried very hard all through his career to improve relations with the Russian scientists and all that.
[00:20:25.960 --> 00:20:33.640] So I think he's someone who ticks all the boxes as a most outstanding personality.
[00:20:33.960 --> 00:20:43.000] Yeah, he was our sponsor at Caltech for the Skeptic Science Lecture Series because he was also concerned about pseudoscience and anti-science and all that.
[00:20:43.000 --> 00:20:49.320] So he worked and also really a super nice guy, which is and a modest guy for such a genius.
[00:20:49.640 --> 00:21:01.800] Well, I should say, when I got my PhD, I went as a visiting postdoc for a few months to Caltech, which is my first extended stay abroad.
[00:21:01.800 --> 00:21:08.760] And I met Kip, and he was then at age 30 or so, a young professor.
[00:21:08.760 --> 00:21:11.000] And I got to know him for that time.
[00:21:11.000 --> 00:21:17.680] And he helped me with the paper I wrote, the first paper to discuss polarization in the microwave background, as it turned out.
[00:21:14.840 --> 00:21:21.600] And he was very supportive indeed.
[00:21:21.920 --> 00:21:27.120] And did so with the large range of students that he taught.
[00:21:27.760 --> 00:21:29.680] Okay, you mentioned progress in science.
[00:21:29.840 --> 00:21:33.440] I absolutely agree that such a thing really exists.
[00:21:33.440 --> 00:21:45.280] There really is a reality out there, and we can know something about it and have sort of an asymptotic curve toward that understanding of reality, even if we never get there ultimately.
[00:21:45.520 --> 00:21:50.720] But there's those who say, well, but it's very culturally determined and bound.
[00:21:51.520 --> 00:21:53.600] They once believed this, now they believe that.
[00:21:53.600 --> 00:21:59.680] Who's to say that a century or two from now, all this stuff about the Big Bang cosmology, that'll be gone.
[00:21:59.680 --> 00:22:01.440] It'll be some other theory.
[00:22:01.680 --> 00:22:12.320] How confident are you that what you think now about the cosmos, let's say, since that's your area, is probably going to pretty much be the same, more or less, with some fine-tuning a century from now, say?
[00:22:12.320 --> 00:22:13.440] Well, some parts will.
[00:22:13.440 --> 00:22:28.960] I mean, obviously, Newton's theory of gravity has been tweaked by Einstein, but it's still good enough to predict the motions of asteroids and artificial satellites and the rest.
[00:22:28.960 --> 00:22:32.640] So no one would say that Newton's theory is a fashion.
[00:22:32.640 --> 00:22:33.760] It's so established.
[00:22:33.760 --> 00:22:35.120] It tells us about the world.
[00:22:35.120 --> 00:22:39.920] And there's some parts of cosmology which I would put in that category.
[00:22:40.240 --> 00:23:04.760] I think the idea that the universe is expanding from a hot, dense state, and that we can perhaps talk seriously about what happened right back when, if it's a second old, and certainly when it was a few hundred thousand years old, which is much less present age, I don't think those are going to be overthrown.
[00:23:06.200 --> 00:23:09.480] They're borne out by very reliable data.
[00:23:09.480 --> 00:23:28.200] But of course, in any science, you want to go beyond what we understand and try and understand in cosmology, for instance, what lies beyond the horizon of our observations and what happened in the initial fraction of a second.
[00:23:28.200 --> 00:23:31.880] And that is still conjectural, and ideas will certainly change.
[00:23:31.880 --> 00:23:48.920] The point there is, of course, that when going back to one second, and even perhaps to a millisecond, the physics that applied to the expanding Big Bang was the physics that we think we understand because we can test it experimentally in the lab.
[00:23:48.920 --> 00:23:58.920] But as you explore Epic further, the conditions get more and more extreme and beyond anything we can test or reproduce here on Earth.
[00:23:58.920 --> 00:24:01.800] And therefore, it's still very speculative.
[00:24:01.800 --> 00:24:13.480] And so that's why the very early universe, which is crucially important in determining why the universe expands the way it is, why it has the contents it has, those are still speculative.
[00:24:13.480 --> 00:24:19.320] And I don't think we can confidently predict what the firm answer will be by the end of a century.
[00:24:19.800 --> 00:24:33.960] Seems like some of that is inferential based on particle physics experiments or mathematics or whatever, because the farthest back we can look with the best telescopes we have is what, like a few million years after the Big Bang, or something like that?
[00:24:34.520 --> 00:24:34.680] Yes.
[00:24:34.840 --> 00:24:35.640] Redshifting.
[00:24:35.960 --> 00:24:44.040] Yes, we can look, if you think of the universe expanding, we can look back, and you imagine two rods linking two parts of the universe.
[00:24:44.360 --> 00:24:54.240] When we look at the microwave background, we look back to when it was a thousand times more compressed and a billion times denser.
[00:24:54.640 --> 00:24:58.240] That's the microwave background when those photons were last scattered.
[00:24:59.120 --> 00:25:09.840] We have very good evidence from the proportions of helium, hydrogen, and deuterium in the universe about what the universe was like when it was a few seconds old.
[00:25:09.840 --> 00:25:17.200] And that's an extrapolation of the density by about a factor of 10 to the 30.
[00:25:17.200 --> 00:25:20.160] So we can, with confidence, go back that far.
[00:25:20.160 --> 00:25:29.440] But that's not far enough because we really want to go back to the limit of any understanding of physics, which is the so-called Planck time.
[00:25:29.440 --> 00:25:34.640] And that is the time when you have to worry about quantum effects in the micro world.
[00:25:34.640 --> 00:25:52.960] And as you know, there is no firm theory that links the theories of the micro world, atomic and nuclear physics, to the theories of the macro world, which is basically gravity and relativity.
[00:25:53.280 --> 00:26:02.960] And if we imagine things being very, very squeezed, then gravity is important even for particles.
[00:26:02.960 --> 00:26:21.840] And so the big stumbling block in fundamental physics is, of course, as everyone knows, not having a unified theory, which does bring together the forces of the microworld and the force of gravity and understand them all in the deeper sense.
[00:26:21.840 --> 00:26:25.840] And I hope we have such a theory, but I would like to put in a bit.
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[00:26:55.160 --> 00:27:11.240] Proviso at this stage is we may not, because I think we've got to be open-minded about whether some of the essential features of the world demand a level of understanding which is beyond the human brain.
[00:27:11.240 --> 00:27:21.960] There's no reason at all, in my opinion, to think that the capacities of our brain are matched to understanding the deepest aspects of reality.
[00:27:22.200 --> 00:27:31.160] So, just as a monkey can't understand quantum theory, so there may be important features that our brains will never understand.
[00:27:31.160 --> 00:27:33.400] Now, people say maybe AI can help in some way.
[00:27:33.400 --> 00:27:48.440] It can certainly solve some problems which involve very, very long calculations, which we could do in a lifetime, but still conceptual issues which perhaps will elude a human brain or what we can construct.
[00:27:48.440 --> 00:27:56.040] And so, I think we've got to bear in mind that there are mysteries in the complexities of the universe.
[00:27:56.360 --> 00:28:03.720] Yeah, Richard Dawkins likes to use the term middle land that we evolved in this, or maybe it's middle world.
[00:28:03.960 --> 00:28:12.040] We evolved on the savannahs of Africa to perceive things that are kind of of a middleene size, a middleening speed.
[00:28:12.280 --> 00:28:25.200] So, the idea of like speed of light or expanding universes or subatomic particles, none of this matches anything in our world for which we could hook it onto and go, oh, now I intuitively grasp what that means.
[00:28:25.520 --> 00:28:29.200] Well, no, in fact, this is very true.
[00:28:29.200 --> 00:28:45.440] And it's remarkable that we've been so successful actually in theory and the micro and atomic nuclear physics and understanding quite a bit about the cosmos, despite the fact that our brains haven't changed since our ancestors roamed the African savannah.
[00:28:46.320 --> 00:28:48.800] Something very complicated, but it is remarkable.
[00:28:48.800 --> 00:28:59.520] And there's an amusing coincidence, which I discuss in one of my books and illustrated with a picture of Nora Boris.
[00:28:59.920 --> 00:29:16.560] We are, in fact, in the geometric mean, in that it takes as many atoms to make a human body as there are human bodies to make up the cosmic scale.
[00:29:16.560 --> 00:29:24.880] So we are, in a more quantitative sense, in the midway on a log scale between the micro-world and the cosmic scale.
[00:29:25.200 --> 00:29:31.440] I used to have a joke about that: like there's 100 billion neurons in the human brain, there's 100 billion stars in the Milky Way galaxy.
[00:29:31.440 --> 00:29:32.320] What does it mean?
[00:29:32.320 --> 00:29:34.400] Nothing.
[00:29:34.720 --> 00:29:37.040] Even those figures aren't right anymore.
[00:29:37.520 --> 00:29:48.560] But this problem you're describing, does this lead us to ask nonsensical questions like what is the universe expanding into or what was there before time began, that kind of thing?
[00:29:48.880 --> 00:29:52.160] Well, I mean, those aren't nonsensical questions.
[00:29:52.160 --> 00:29:58.240] I mean, I think they are real questions.
[00:29:58.640 --> 00:30:05.560] You could imagine a universe that has an edge, but that's far beyond our observable horizon.
[00:30:05.560 --> 00:30:12.760] And there are some theories which do, in a sense, say that there was something that happened before the Big Bang.
[00:30:12.760 --> 00:30:15.240] It's a cyclic universe, etc.
[00:30:15.480 --> 00:30:33.080] And there's certainly theories which suggest that what we can observe with our telescopes, even with a very powerful telescope, is limited by a horizon, which is the maximum distance from which a photon could have traveled to us since the Big Bang.
[00:30:33.080 --> 00:30:35.400] And that's a definite finite volume.
[00:30:35.720 --> 00:30:46.520] But that's not reality as a whole, because it's just like if you sit in the middle of an ocean, you have an horizon around you, but you don't think the ocean stops just beyond the horizon.
[00:30:46.520 --> 00:30:55.160] And we have reason to think that the galaxies go on probably 100 times or so beyond the greatest distance we can see.
[00:30:55.160 --> 00:30:57.480] And they may go on much, much further still.
[00:30:57.800 --> 00:31:05.160] Now, that's all the aftermath of our one Big Bang, which is vaster than the region we can observe with our telescopes.
[00:31:05.160 --> 00:31:09.240] But then there's the other question, which is: was our Big Bang the only one?
[00:31:09.560 --> 00:31:12.440] And this is the concept of the multiverse.
[00:31:12.440 --> 00:31:29.080] And there are some specific theories which do predict that if you go back to the sort of substratum at the very early time, then there will be multiple Big Bangs produced, maybe in a turtle production.
[00:31:29.080 --> 00:31:35.080] And Andre Linde famously produced the first version of such a theory more than 30 years ago.
[00:31:35.640 --> 00:31:44.560] This is if you make particular assumptions about the physics, then these are consequences.
[00:31:44.120 --> 00:31:50.160] But the trouble is, as I said already, we don't know the physics that does apply.
[00:31:50.400 --> 00:31:56.160] So you make some assumptions and you can get a multiverse, others that you won't.
[00:31:56.160 --> 00:32:01.840] And there are also some other theories that would allow something to happen before the Big Bang.
[00:32:01.840 --> 00:32:13.840] And Roger Penrose has an idea of the cyclic universe that the universe ends being enormous, but it's left with nothing with any mass.
[00:32:13.840 --> 00:32:15.440] And so you can just rescale it.
[00:32:15.440 --> 00:32:19.440] And this end of the universe, you then scale down to a point and then start again.
[00:32:19.440 --> 00:32:25.760] So that's a particular version, not a very appealing one, in my opinion, of a universe.
[00:32:25.760 --> 00:32:35.520] But this is just to say that the ideas about what could happen beyond the horizon are observations.
[00:32:35.520 --> 00:32:37.440] And we have these horizons in time.
[00:32:37.440 --> 00:32:40.880] We can't go back too close to the real initial instance.
[00:32:40.880 --> 00:32:48.560] And of course, what we can observe is just a finite volume in space, although an enormous one.
[00:32:49.440 --> 00:33:05.520] So would something like that be your answer to the creationists or theologians or intelligent design theorists argument from a cosmological perspective that everything that exists began to exist at some point in time.
[00:33:05.520 --> 00:33:09.680] The universe existed, began to exist at some point in time called the Big Bang.
[00:33:09.680 --> 00:33:13.600] Therefore, there's a creator behind it, because how else would you explain it?
[00:33:14.480 --> 00:33:17.920] I gather what you're saying is something like, but but we don't know that.
[00:33:17.920 --> 00:33:19.520] We can't stop right there.
[00:33:19.840 --> 00:33:39.720] Well, I mean, I think, I mean, there are some very simple-minded religious people who ask that sort of question, but uh, uh, my view is that they're being unreasonable because, um, uh, as a scientist, I know that it's pretty hard to explain to most people what a single hydamism is and how that behaves.
[00:33:39.720 --> 00:33:49.880] And so, to believe that there's a simple yaboo, simple answer to what caused the universe is it seems to be so implausible that I can't take it seriously.
[00:33:49.880 --> 00:33:52.680] So, I think we have to accept it's a mystery.
[00:33:53.320 --> 00:33:57.160] And would that apply to why there's something rather than nothing?
[00:33:59.800 --> 00:34:01.320] I think so, yes.
[00:34:02.440 --> 00:34:12.040] But I mean, if you want to shortcut the mystery by saying God did it, then you can, but that doesn't explain anything.
[00:34:12.040 --> 00:34:23.080] And but I just think it's it shows a certain arrogance to think that an answer you can understand is actually an adequate explanation for one of the deepest mysteries.
[00:34:24.440 --> 00:34:36.360] And would it be reasonable to ask, well, if at some point there was nothing and then stuff got created out of it, then there couldn't have even been a God, or then what created God?
[00:34:36.360 --> 00:34:41.800] You know, most theologians kind of scoff at that question, but why is that not a legitimate question?
[00:34:43.400 --> 00:34:49.880] Well, I mean, I think if you can define what you mean by God, I don't know, but I just don't feel that's a fruitful kind of inquiry.
[00:34:51.080 --> 00:34:52.680] Because it doesn't explain anything.
[00:34:53.160 --> 00:34:57.800] You'd still want to know how did God let's say it's not God in the Judeo-Christian sense.
[00:34:57.800 --> 00:35:07.720] Let's say it's a super advanced extraterrestrial intelligence with super advanced AI, and they can create planets out of condensing clouds of interstellar gas or whatever.
[00:35:07.720 --> 00:35:09.480] It's an engineering project.
[00:35:09.480 --> 00:35:15.000] To us, it would look like a god, but if but to a scientist, it would be, well, that's just a super advanced AI.
[00:35:15.760 --> 00:35:33.920] Well, I mean, that's a separate idea, which isn't completely crazy, because there's no reason to think that we are the first intelligences because life could have got started on planets around stars two or three billion years older than the sun, which could have been far ahead of us.
[00:35:33.920 --> 00:35:43.040] So the idea that there are aliens who are vastly more intelligent than us is not a crazy idea.
[00:35:43.360 --> 00:35:49.280] And the idea that we, in some way, are consequences of their existence is not completely crazy.
[00:35:49.280 --> 00:35:52.320] But this is part of science.
[00:35:53.280 --> 00:35:59.440] Okay, last question on the creationist side, because you wrote a book called Just Six Numbers, which I've quoted.
[00:35:59.440 --> 00:36:01.920] But the intelligent design creationists quoted also.
[00:36:01.920 --> 00:36:08.160] They go, look, the great Lord Martin Rees says these are the six numbers that have to come together for us to exist.
[00:36:08.160 --> 00:36:09.920] There's no way this could happen by chance.
[00:36:09.920 --> 00:36:13.280] There must have been a tuner behind it, a designer.
[00:36:13.920 --> 00:36:15.360] Well, I just don't agree with them.
[00:36:15.360 --> 00:36:26.160] I mean, one simple answer would be in the Linde model, where there are many, many big bangs, and each of them has different numbers.
[00:36:26.160 --> 00:36:32.080] And some will have the numbers which are in the range that allows complexity to emerge.
[00:36:32.080 --> 00:36:33.600] That's just one answer.
[00:36:33.600 --> 00:36:36.320] So I don't really see this as a serious problem.
[00:36:36.800 --> 00:36:47.680] But more seriously, those six numbers were the ones which seemed to be the appropriate ones when I wrote this book 20 years ago.
[00:36:48.080 --> 00:37:02.200] And I think they're still the same ones because the most recently discovered number of those six was Lambda, the cosmic expansion, the one that causes the university series and the expansion.
[00:37:02.760 --> 00:37:22.680] But of course, I wish in my lifetime I'd be able to write a book called The Seventh Number, The Keys of the Universe, which I could do if there is progress in some sort of unified theory, which links together the micro world of nucleus and the cosmos and gravity.
[00:37:22.680 --> 00:37:26.520] That's, of course, the goal that people are working for.
[00:37:26.520 --> 00:37:27.080] Yeah.
[00:37:28.280 --> 00:37:31.960] That was Steven Weinberg's answer when I asked him the same question.
[00:37:31.960 --> 00:37:39.240] He said, well, when we unify it all, then there'll probably just be one number that explains the other six numbers.
[00:37:41.960 --> 00:37:50.920] Another philosophy of science question, model-dependent realism that Hawking and Leonard Milan now presented in their book, The Grand Design.
[00:37:52.120 --> 00:37:54.920] Do you want to comment on that?
[00:37:56.200 --> 00:37:57.160] They're just models.
[00:37:57.160 --> 00:37:59.640] We don't know what the reality really is.
[00:38:01.720 --> 00:38:03.320] I don't think I know what they say.
[00:38:03.320 --> 00:38:04.200] I'm sorry.
[00:38:04.360 --> 00:38:04.600] Okay.
[00:38:04.600 --> 00:38:05.080] It's all right.
[00:38:05.080 --> 00:38:06.280] No, it's all right.
[00:38:06.920 --> 00:38:10.600] And Leonard does have a funny story about that, though.
[00:38:10.600 --> 00:38:23.640] When that book came out, I think it was one of the London newspapers, whatever your biggest one there said, something like on the pub date: Stephen Hawking says they've proved there is no God.
[00:38:23.960 --> 00:38:27.560] And so Leonard had to do all the media interviews that day.
[00:38:27.560 --> 00:38:29.880] And he's like, we never said that.
[00:38:34.920 --> 00:38:35.800] Yeah, okay.
[00:38:36.440 --> 00:38:41.080] And then one other question on, again, another sort of philosophy of science question.
[00:38:41.400 --> 00:38:44.760] You hear this phrase, consensus science.
[00:38:45.680 --> 00:38:56.240] Now, you often hear this, you know, derogatorily regarding COVID and masks and vaccines, things like that, because of everything that happened during that time.
[00:38:56.240 --> 00:38:58.640] But is there something like consensus science?
[00:38:58.640 --> 00:39:02.160] The Big Bang, the way you describe the Big Bang is, well, there's a consensus now.
[00:39:02.160 --> 00:39:03.760] The steady state theory was wrong.
[00:39:03.760 --> 00:39:05.360] The Big Bang theory was right.
[00:39:05.360 --> 00:39:09.600] The theory of evolution, as Darwin presents it, is mostly right, consensus there.
[00:39:09.600 --> 00:39:12.800] The alternatives to it are probably wrong and so on.
[00:39:14.080 --> 00:39:22.160] Yes, and obviously the consensus will grow as present controversies eventually are settled.
[00:39:22.400 --> 00:39:30.240] So there's always going to be parts of science where we're pretty confident that things won't change.
[00:39:30.720 --> 00:39:36.880] And of course, a penumbra of controversial issues on which people are still working.
[00:39:36.880 --> 00:39:38.560] I think that's the way science will advance.
[00:39:38.560 --> 00:39:43.920] And of course, we've got to make advances.
[00:39:43.920 --> 00:39:49.280] And until that time, there are bound to be varieties of ideas.
[00:39:49.920 --> 00:39:50.800] Yep.
[00:39:51.120 --> 00:39:53.680] Okay, a couple other super interesting questions.
[00:39:54.000 --> 00:39:55.280] Fermi's paradox.
[00:39:55.280 --> 00:39:56.400] Where is everybody?
[00:39:56.400 --> 00:40:00.080] Do you think the aliens are out there and they just haven't found us yet?
[00:40:00.640 --> 00:40:16.560] Well, I mean, I do have a view expressed in an article with Mario Livio, which I think is not widely discussed, but which is my favorite view.
[00:40:16.880 --> 00:40:22.240] Well, first of all, let me say that we may be alone in the universe.
[00:40:22.240 --> 00:40:26.880] It could be that the origin of life is such a rare fluke, it has to happen elsewhere.
[00:40:26.880 --> 00:40:42.360] But let's, most people think it's unlikely, and incidentally, within 10 or 20 years, we will certainly know if simple life is rare or common from discoveries made mainly looking at exoplanets.
[00:40:42.600 --> 00:40:46.360] So we know that that will happen.
[00:40:46.360 --> 00:40:57.880] But as regards intelligent life, of course, you're quoting the famous Fermi paradox where discussing with colleagues he said, where are they all?
[00:40:57.880 --> 00:41:00.680] Why haven't they come and eaten us if they exist, as it were?
[00:41:03.080 --> 00:41:10.440] And of course, that is an argument against there being too many aliens which are before us.
[00:41:10.760 --> 00:41:15.400] But my argument, which at least weakens that, is the following.
[00:41:15.720 --> 00:41:22.680] Let's consider the evolution of the Earth and life on it, not just up till now, but in the future.
[00:41:23.000 --> 00:41:25.720] The Earth's four and a half billion years old.
[00:41:25.720 --> 00:41:40.120] It's taken sort of four billion years from the first protozoa to evolve via Darwinian selection into our biosphere of which we're a part.
[00:41:40.760 --> 00:41:45.800] But the Earth has six billion years ahead of it before the sun dies.
[00:41:45.800 --> 00:41:52.360] So in terms of time, we are not the culmination, not the end point of evolution.
[00:41:52.360 --> 00:41:56.520] We are not even the halfway stage in the emergence of complexity.
[00:41:56.520 --> 00:42:03.240] But if you make a guess of what's going to happen from what's happening now, things are happening very, very fast.
[00:42:03.240 --> 00:42:20.320] And it won't take a geological time, may only take a few centuries before we are superseded by post-humans, either drastically genetically modified versions of humans or entirely electronic entities.
[00:42:21.200 --> 00:42:25.040] And I think it's more likely to be electronic entities.
[00:42:25.040 --> 00:42:32.320] And I think the first civilization on Mars, if there is one, will be electronic, not humans.
[00:42:32.560 --> 00:42:43.600] But once you've got electronic entities of superhuman intelligence, then they're going to evolve, but not by Darwinian selection.
[00:42:43.600 --> 00:42:51.760] They will evolve by designing themselves better ones.
[00:42:51.760 --> 00:42:54.480] It's what I like to call secular intelligent design.
[00:42:54.480 --> 00:42:56.640] They'll design better and better like that.
[00:42:56.960 --> 00:43:14.640] And so there could be out there electronic entities which were triggered in existence by some civilization like ours, which is long dead.
[00:43:14.960 --> 00:43:28.880] And the point then is that whereas Darwinian selection favors aggression and competition, that's not the case for the sort of designing of better machines by existing machines.
[00:43:28.880 --> 00:43:38.080] And so there's no particular reason to believe that aliens, if they're of this electronic form, are aggressive or expansionist.
[00:43:38.080 --> 00:43:45.680] And they could be out there thinking deep thoughts, knowing all about us, but just leaving us, letting us be.
[00:43:45.680 --> 00:43:47.920] No reason they want to invade us.
[00:43:49.280 --> 00:43:50.080] Yeah, okay.
[00:43:50.080 --> 00:44:08.360] But Martin, if you have multiple species of these self-replicating machines who are then in competition for scarce resources on a planet, are they not going to then develop something like the emotions of wanting something?
[00:44:08.360 --> 00:44:12.440] And then you know the other machine also wants it, so you're in competition.
[00:44:12.440 --> 00:44:16.280] So let's not use words like aggression or violence in some negative way.
[00:44:16.280 --> 00:44:21.400] This is just the kind of game theoretic outcome of organisms trying to survive.
[00:44:21.400 --> 00:44:23.080] I don't think they'll be on planets at all.
[00:44:23.080 --> 00:44:25.960] I think they'll all be roaming separately in deep space.
[00:44:25.960 --> 00:44:26.840] Oh, okay.
[00:44:27.400 --> 00:44:30.360] Just consuming what will they use for energy?
[00:44:30.600 --> 00:44:36.920] Well, I mean, it may be something we haven't yet devised, or the background radiation or something like that.
[00:44:37.960 --> 00:44:41.320] We can't conceive the physics that will prevail there.
[00:44:41.320 --> 00:44:42.680] And so that's interesting.
[00:44:44.920 --> 00:44:51.480] They are not creatures like us, and there's no reason to think that they're going to be competing.
[00:44:51.800 --> 00:44:52.440] Yeah.
[00:44:52.440 --> 00:44:54.040] I think you're probably right about that.
[00:44:54.040 --> 00:45:05.400] I think von Neumann had the original idea that gave Fermi the paradox thought experiment that self-replicating machines could colonize the entire Milky Way galaxy in like 10 million years or something.
[00:45:05.400 --> 00:45:07.160] They could have done this a long time ago.
[00:45:08.040 --> 00:45:09.160] And so where are they?
[00:45:09.160 --> 00:45:10.200] Where are these machines?
[00:45:10.200 --> 00:45:14.280] Well, as you know, your colleague Avi Loeb is looking for the machines.
[00:45:14.280 --> 00:45:20.280] He just posted an article this morning, in fact, July 2nd, where recording this.
[00:45:21.000 --> 00:45:26.120] Another extrasolar system object flew through past Mars or something like that.
[00:45:26.760 --> 00:45:28.120] You were saying, sorry.
[00:45:28.120 --> 00:45:31.320] No, he's not really a colleague, but he's an old friend.
[00:45:31.320 --> 00:45:31.960] Oh, okay.
[00:45:31.960 --> 00:45:32.840] All right.
[00:45:33.800 --> 00:45:34.760] But what do you make of that?
[00:45:34.760 --> 00:45:45.000] I mean, most astrobiologists are looking for microbial life or gases in atmospheres of exoplanets that would suggest there's living organisms.
[00:45:45.040 --> 00:45:53.040] But Avi wants to look for technosignatures like Dyson spheres or machines that fly through our solar system.
[00:45:53.040 --> 00:45:53.440] Yes.
[00:45:53.440 --> 00:45:55.600] Well, I think he's quite right.
[00:45:56.000 --> 00:46:24.960] I think he was over optimistic in claiming he'd found one, but I certainly think it's very important not just to look for radio transmissions and things like that, which traditional SETI has done, but to look for artifacts, things going through the solar system, look for monuments on the outer planets, like the 2001 obelisk, etc.
[00:46:25.120 --> 00:46:32.800] Look for everything, look for something shiny in the asteroid belt or artificial look for because we have no idea what to expect.
[00:46:33.040 --> 00:46:35.680] So I'm not deriding the search.
[00:46:35.680 --> 00:46:41.520] I just think it's going to be a hard job to actually find something that's convincing.
[00:46:41.520 --> 00:46:42.000] Yeah.
[00:46:42.320 --> 00:46:43.760] I had Adam Frank on the show.
[00:46:43.760 --> 00:46:50.240] He was talking about the aliens could have come here, but if they did, it wouldn't be like in 1947.
[00:46:50.560 --> 00:46:58.400] It would be like, you know, 10 million years ago, and there'd be no signs of their coming here at all because everything would be erased.
[00:46:58.640 --> 00:47:00.080] I mean, even the pyramids.
[00:47:00.320 --> 00:47:01.840] He had a calculation that the great.
[00:47:02.640 --> 00:47:03.440] Sorry, go ahead.
[00:47:03.520 --> 00:47:07.600] Let's go back to Olaf Stableton, about the last and first men.
[00:47:07.600 --> 00:47:10.640] There could be no trace of earlier civilizations.
[00:47:11.600 --> 00:47:12.160] Yeah.
[00:47:12.160 --> 00:47:20.880] Yeah, because he had a calculation about that the Great Pyramids will be gone within a couple million years, just ground down by weathering, and there'll be no trace of them.
[00:47:20.880 --> 00:47:21.680] Well, yeah.
[00:47:21.680 --> 00:47:24.080] So, so right.
[00:47:24.080 --> 00:47:25.600] It's so hard to conceive of these things.
[00:47:25.600 --> 00:47:33.560] When I was flying over to the UK to interview you for our documentary, I watched Contact was on the airplane entertainment thing.
[00:47:29.760 --> 00:47:35.720] So I re-watched Sagan's Contact.
[00:47:35.720 --> 00:47:44.440] And, you know, that now, the search for listening for prime numbers or whatever, that seems to be a little passe now for SETI, right?
[00:47:44.440 --> 00:47:46.600] They're trying to find new things to look for.
[00:47:46.600 --> 00:47:48.440] Well, I think they're still doing that.
[00:47:48.600 --> 00:47:58.120] I should say that I chair Yuri Milner's Breakthrough Listen Committee, which is promoting search-effective radio.
[00:47:58.120 --> 00:48:09.160] They're buying time of big radio telescopes to do that sort of thing, but for more complicated software and also special instruments that can look for some unusual patterns.
[00:48:09.400 --> 00:48:10.840] So that's being done.
[00:48:10.840 --> 00:48:27.640] But I think we should also look for artifacts and they do as well, but and keep our eyes open, whatever observations we're doing for something which looks manifestly unlikely to have emerged naturally.
[00:48:27.640 --> 00:48:28.200] Yeah.
[00:48:28.520 --> 00:48:37.160] But again, it's like a religious impulse there of, you know, if there are aliens that are out there, they're going to be super advanced.
[00:48:37.160 --> 00:48:43.720] And if they know that we're here and they're monitoring us or whatever, that does have a kind of sense like, well, that's a God, right?
[00:48:43.720 --> 00:48:46.520] That's what God is to most religious people.
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[00:49:18.480 --> 00:49:25.360] One of my Scientific American columns, I wrote about a study done by Clay Routledge on the search for aliens.
[00:49:25.760 --> 00:49:28.720] People who, let's see, what was the correlations here?
[00:49:28.720 --> 00:49:45.600] That people that score high in need for spirituality, they consider themselves a spiritual person, but they're not traditionally religious, are more likely to think aliens are out there than those who are more mainstream religious believers.
[00:49:45.920 --> 00:49:53.280] And the one other component was if you have a high need of awe, there's different measures that psychologists use to get this.
[00:49:53.600 --> 00:50:05.840] And that the search for aliens or the belief that there's aliens out there is kind of an awe-inspiring spiritual fulfillment thing that if you're not religious, that kind of replaces it.
[00:50:07.680 --> 00:50:09.040] That may be true.
[00:50:10.000 --> 00:50:12.640] Well, I mean, you won the Templeton Prize, but you're an atheist.
[00:50:12.880 --> 00:50:18.560] That was quite unusual for them to give a prize to an atheist, but you're not a militant atheist.
[00:50:18.880 --> 00:50:22.080] No, I think I know you've had Dawkins on your show.
[00:50:22.080 --> 00:50:24.400] I mean, indeed, he's one of your heroes.
[00:50:24.400 --> 00:50:28.320] And I admire his work on evolution.
[00:50:28.320 --> 00:50:43.360] But I was on his show a few months ago when he had recently written an article saying he was a cultural Christian in that he enjoyed Christmas carols and going to cathedrals, etc.
[00:50:43.920 --> 00:50:46.640] And I'd use that phrase myself.
[00:50:46.640 --> 00:50:54.400] But I said that if he really felt that way about the church, he was being parasitic.
[00:50:54.400 --> 00:50:56.240] But it wouldn't be there.
[00:50:56.240 --> 00:51:02.040] Were there not many people who actually believe this stuff who kept it going and had created it?
[00:51:03.080 --> 00:51:05.560] I am a cultural Christian.
[00:51:05.560 --> 00:51:14.920] I don't believe anything in particular, but I wouldn't do anything to reduce the faith of those who have it.
[00:51:14.920 --> 00:51:15.720] Good luck to them.
[00:51:16.040 --> 00:51:19.720] I don't have any, but I wouldn't want to do anything to diminish their faith.
[00:51:19.720 --> 00:51:34.360] I certainly wouldn't want to attack them in the way that Dawkins and the people who call them new atheists, who in my view are just small-time Bertrand Russells saying less well what he said a century ago.
[00:51:34.360 --> 00:51:36.440] You know, there's nothing new in what they say.
[00:51:36.680 --> 00:51:49.320] But I would say that if one appreciates the cultural value, then let them continue to keep it going by being actual believers.
[00:51:49.320 --> 00:51:52.040] I don't see any reason why we shouldn't do that.
[00:51:52.040 --> 00:52:03.160] But I think the other point is that one has to realize how much of what all humans do is not directly rational.
[00:52:03.960 --> 00:52:13.560] So there's a blur distinction between what one calls religion and what one calls rational behaviour.
[00:52:13.560 --> 00:52:18.040] And it doesn't depend on some sort of God as the old man in the sky.
[00:52:18.520 --> 00:52:28.280] To take two examples, one is the wish to celebrate funerals and lay flowers at places where there's relaxed.
[00:52:28.840 --> 00:52:33.400] That's something which is done by people who wouldn't call themselves confessive religion.
[00:52:33.400 --> 00:52:34.120] That's one thing.
[00:52:34.120 --> 00:52:39.960] And the other thing is the huge effort made to recover dead bodies.
[00:52:40.280 --> 00:52:53.600] As you know, it's thought very important by most people, and they risk their lives to recover bodies from war zones or from shipwrecks and things like that.
[00:52:53.920 --> 00:53:00.400] Now, that's in a sense entirely irrational, but it's a very strong human impulse.
[00:53:00.400 --> 00:53:10.560] And so I just think that the people who are atheists should realize that there are lots of human impulses which are strong, which are nothing to do with conventional religion.
[00:53:11.840 --> 00:53:12.400] Interesting.
[00:53:12.400 --> 00:53:27.040] Yeah, I had a philosophy professor in college, Richard Hardison, who used to tell a story of when he went, I think, to the Philippines or somewhere, and he was passing by a cemetery and they were putting food out to the, you know, their lost, their dead loved ones.
[00:53:27.280 --> 00:53:33.600] And he made a snarky remark about, you know, when are the loved ones going to come back and eat the food?
[00:53:33.600 --> 00:53:38.320] And the response was, about the same time your guys are coming back to smell the flowers.
[00:53:43.920 --> 00:53:47.920] Well, so, but I want to distinguish between two different concepts here.
[00:53:48.400 --> 00:53:52.960] Dan Dennett made a point in his book about belief and belief.
[00:53:52.960 --> 00:54:04.320] So a lot of his fellow professor philosophers and scientists, you know, like you say, well, I don't believe I'm an atheist, but I believe in belief, that some people need to believe.
[00:54:04.320 --> 00:54:09.120] But there's an element of that argument that's kind of condescending.
[00:54:09.360 --> 00:54:12.800] You know, religion's for the little people, the people that need it.
[00:54:12.800 --> 00:54:15.840] And we intellectual elites, we don't need it.
[00:54:16.400 --> 00:54:18.480] You don't mean it that way, do you?
[00:54:18.800 --> 00:54:19.920] No, no, I don't.
[00:54:19.920 --> 00:54:22.320] I just wish I could believe.
[00:54:22.320 --> 00:54:24.720] I wish I did believe, but I just don't.
[00:54:25.360 --> 00:54:26.000] But you just don't.
[00:54:26.000 --> 00:54:26.400] But why?
[00:54:27.920 --> 00:54:29.280] Is it an empirical question?
[00:54:29.280 --> 00:54:34.760] And if there was just a little more evidence for the resurrection of Jesus, say, you'd be a Christian.
[00:54:34.760 --> 00:54:36.200] Or is it off the table?
[00:54:29.840 --> 00:54:37.240] There's no way to know.
[00:54:37.880 --> 00:54:44.040] Well, I think you must distinguish between particular religious stories and religion in general.
[00:54:44.600 --> 00:55:01.560] And I don't really share either, but the main point is that I know people who do believe all that stuff, who are certainly as intelligent as me, and I don't want to disparage them or dismiss their views.
[00:55:02.200 --> 00:55:06.520] Well, okay, so here's let me come at it another way.
[00:55:06.520 --> 00:55:09.880] This is not my argument, but it's a good one.
[00:55:10.200 --> 00:55:17.400] So if I say there's a parking lot behind the church, the church goers can go check for themselves.
[00:55:17.400 --> 00:55:19.000] They go, yeah, there it is.
[00:55:19.000 --> 00:55:24.520] But if I say God is three and one and one and three, and the believers go, yeah, I believe that.
[00:55:24.520 --> 00:55:26.360] But they can't go check.
[00:55:26.360 --> 00:55:29.880] It's just like, well, that's what we believe because we're Catholic or whatever.
[00:55:32.440 --> 00:55:35.640] So, I mean, it's an epistemological question.
[00:55:35.960 --> 00:55:39.560] What's on the table for you and what's off the table?
[00:55:39.560 --> 00:55:42.680] So, you know, whether the Big Bang happened or not, this is an empirical question.
[00:55:42.680 --> 00:55:43.720] We'll just answer it.
[00:55:43.720 --> 00:55:46.440] Or climate change is human-caused or it's not, you know.
[00:55:47.320 --> 00:55:54.280] But these other kinds of questions, you know, how could God be three in one, the problem of identity and so forth?
[00:55:54.280 --> 00:55:55.480] How would they get around that?
[00:55:55.480 --> 00:55:58.360] And theologians write great treatises about these things.
[00:55:58.360 --> 00:56:02.920] Or, you know, how could somebody who's actually really dead for three days, really come back?
[00:56:02.920 --> 00:56:10.600] Now, I have tried, interestingly, a new set of arguments that maybe it didn't happen literally.
[00:56:10.600 --> 00:56:23.680] Maybe it's a mythical kind of truth, a story, a story that has deeper purposes about the human condition or something like that, starting over redemption.
[00:56:24.800 --> 00:56:30.000] The resurrection represents forgiveness and redemption, that sort of thing.
[00:56:30.800 --> 00:56:34.480] In a kind of a Joseph Campbell, you know, mythology way.
[00:56:34.480 --> 00:56:38.000] But most of the Christians I float this past, they're not buying it.
[00:56:38.000 --> 00:56:39.520] They're saying, no, no, no.
[00:56:39.840 --> 00:56:44.400] If the resurrection didn't literally happen, we should not be Christians.
[00:56:44.400 --> 00:56:45.120] Yes.
[00:56:45.600 --> 00:56:46.960] No, some do say that.
[00:56:46.960 --> 00:56:49.600] In fact, our last archbishop said that.
[00:56:50.560 --> 00:56:51.200] He did?
[00:56:51.200 --> 00:56:52.320] Some does say that.
[00:56:52.960 --> 00:57:01.520] But see, I think Richard's point is that why would you believe it then if there's no reason to believe it?
[00:57:01.840 --> 00:57:04.960] So for him, there aren't mythical truths in that sense.
[00:57:05.360 --> 00:57:06.800] They're the equivalent of empirical.
[00:57:06.800 --> 00:57:08.000] There's something different.
[00:57:08.480 --> 00:57:09.200] Yes.
[00:57:09.200 --> 00:57:18.160] Well, I mean, I suggest you should talk to Roan Williams, who's at least as intelligent as him, who does believe this stuff.
[00:57:18.720 --> 00:57:19.440] Well, that's true.
[00:57:19.440 --> 00:57:19.680] Yes.
[00:57:19.680 --> 00:57:24.160] And they've had some, I think there's some conversations with them on film.
[00:57:25.040 --> 00:57:38.400] You know, but I guess it's, I think you're right that most of what we believe in other areas as well, politics, economics, ideology, culture, even like, you know, what's happening in Iran right now.
[00:57:38.720 --> 00:57:39.520] How would I know?
[00:57:39.760 --> 00:57:44.320] I depend on what the news media tells me or the president.
[00:57:44.320 --> 00:57:49.040] And I have reasons to be maybe skeptical of some of it, you know, but I can't go check.
[00:57:49.040 --> 00:57:52.640] I'm not going to go over there and check to see if they really have nuclear weapons or not.
[00:57:52.960 --> 00:57:53.280] Right.
[00:57:53.280 --> 00:57:57.040] So, most of what we believe about the world comes from other sources.
[00:57:57.040 --> 00:57:57.840] Yes, yes.
[00:57:57.840 --> 00:58:09.080] But I think when one gets into sort of politics and ethics, then of course that is, as we know, subjective.
[00:58:09.080 --> 00:58:16.920] And in fact, I've done podcasts with various of these atheistic people.
[00:58:16.920 --> 00:58:18.840] I did one with Sam Harris.
[00:58:18.840 --> 00:58:28.680] And I said that our choice of ethical systems was rather like our aesthetic judgments.
[00:58:28.680 --> 00:58:33.080] We might think something is beautiful, rate it highly, and does not.
[00:58:33.080 --> 00:58:39.080] And that's not completely objective, but nor are our ethical views.
[00:58:39.080 --> 00:58:42.120] And he reacted.
[00:58:42.440 --> 00:58:51.400] He said that ethics, he said, aesthetics, he said, is objective.
[00:58:51.400 --> 00:59:03.560] He said, you know, if you could go through the works of Shakespeare and catalogue the word use or something like that, you'd come out with something special, which is why we value Shakespeare, which struck me as rubbish.
[00:59:03.560 --> 00:59:16.440] And so I think the reasons that we rate some artists as great and others not is a judgment which you can't reduce to any constitutive scientific assessment.
[00:59:16.440 --> 00:59:24.360] And I would put aesthetic judgments and ethical judgments both in that category.
[00:59:24.680 --> 00:59:35.200] Well, okay, do you think that the abolition of slavery and torture and other medieval practices that we are appalled by today.
[00:59:35.200 --> 00:59:47.360] Is real objective progress morally, or is it just random and maybe a couple of centuries from now, women won't have the vote, slave trade will be back in vogue in England, and so on?
[00:59:47.680 --> 00:59:48.480] Well, it could be.
[00:59:48.480 --> 00:59:49.760] I really hope not.
[00:59:50.880 --> 00:59:51.680] Right.
[00:59:52.000 --> 00:59:56.960] So, your book, Our Final Hour, you wrote, what is that, maybe a decade ago now?
[00:59:56.960 --> 01:00:05.600] Are you still what did you put us at 50, 50 percent chance Bayesian 50 percent probability of making it to 2100, something like that?
[01:00:06.320 --> 01:00:08.800] I should say that that was the American title.
[01:00:08.800 --> 01:00:20.000] Um, I um I gave the book the title Our Final Century Question Mark, and the British publishers put away the question mark, and the American publisher was asking me, uh, gave it this absurd title.
[01:00:20.000 --> 01:00:26.080] But I think to answer your question seriously, um, I think we're going to have a bumpy ride.
[01:00:26.080 --> 01:00:49.040] Um, I'm not an optimist that we will avoid uh mega-disasters because the ones that I've discussed and which we now have a group in Cambridge focusing on are disasters where by error or terror, even a small group of people can create a catastrophe which cascades globally.
[01:00:49.040 --> 01:00:58.240] This is something which is really new, and I think that's going to give us a bumpy ride, and we just have to make sure we can cope with these without too many disasters.
[01:00:58.240 --> 01:01:11.440] So, I don't think we wipe ourselves out completely, but we are going to have problems, and so I'm not too optimistic about the overall political scene 10 or 20 years from now.
[01:01:11.440 --> 01:01:13.360] But I hope for the best.
[01:01:14.720 --> 01:01:25.840] You said it in an interesting way: we're due as if it's some kind of, I don't know, inevitability or some larger force or what it's just people acting certain ways that we should be worried about.
[01:01:25.840 --> 01:01:28.320] So, like, well, what would be the biggest concern?
[01:01:28.320 --> 01:01:29.520] Nuclear weapons?
[01:01:30.200 --> 01:01:39.000] Um, I think, I think the biggest concern is we're obviously engineered pandemics, even though pandemics.
[01:01:39.000 --> 01:01:53.240] Um, that's that's one, and the other is simply um uh over-dependence on globally connected networks for the internet and electricity grids and all the rest of it.
[01:01:53.240 --> 01:01:55.320] And uh, we're so dependent on them.
[01:01:55.320 --> 01:02:20.920] I mean, it's uh, I quote in one of my books, a 2012 um report from your Department of Defense, which says that if there was a state-level attack on the electricity grid on the east coast of the US, uh, then it would lead to complete social breakdown within a few days, and they say it would merit a nuclear response on the purpose of the human service.
[01:02:20.920 --> 01:02:34.840] Now, the worry is that maybe, um, unless we're very careful and avoid um uh interconnection of lots of different networks, um, there's a risk that it wouldn't take a state actor to generate that sort of cyber attack.
[01:02:34.840 --> 01:02:38.840] It could be done by a small group with the aid of AI.
[01:02:38.840 --> 01:02:51.400] And so, I think our vulnerabilities are increasing as we depend more on networks for the internet, for electricity, for communications, DPS, and all these things.
[01:02:51.400 --> 01:02:54.280] And so, that's the reason why I worry.
[01:02:54.280 --> 01:03:04.760] And I think we've got to prioritize resilience and multiple supply chains and all the rest of it, if we are to be safe.
[01:03:06.040 --> 01:03:07.000] Yeah, okay.
[01:03:07.880 --> 01:03:13.960] So, that would not necessarily then lead to a nuclear exchange because these attacks are not going to come with a return address.
[01:03:13.960 --> 01:03:14.840] Who do we nuke?
[01:03:15.440 --> 01:03:16.640] No, no.
[01:03:17.840 --> 01:03:22.160] And the taboo against using nuclear weapons is pretty strong.
[01:03:22.160 --> 01:03:25.040] I mean, it's not been done since 1945.
[01:03:25.360 --> 01:03:29.440] No, but an engineered pandemic is worse in itself than a nuclear attack.
[01:03:29.680 --> 01:03:30.160] Oh, yes.
[01:03:30.160 --> 01:03:30.560] Okay.
[01:03:30.560 --> 01:03:32.240] So, all right.
[01:03:32.240 --> 01:03:34.480] Why has this not happened yet then?
[01:03:35.040 --> 01:03:36.640] Let me key it up here for you.
[01:03:36.640 --> 01:03:44.320] So I have one of my friends here works in a software company for internet security stuff.
[01:03:44.320 --> 01:03:44.960] Okay.
[01:03:45.280 --> 01:03:48.240] And so I drive a Tesla.
[01:03:48.240 --> 01:03:52.800] So he's always telling me, you know, somebody, your car is online.
[01:03:52.800 --> 01:03:56.960] So somebody could take over, steer your car into the wall.
[01:03:56.960 --> 01:04:03.440] And for that matter, you know, they could take, you know, there's 10,000 Teslas on the highways of just Southern California, probably maybe more.
[01:04:03.440 --> 01:04:04.080] I don't know.
[01:04:04.080 --> 01:04:13.840] They could take over all of the Teslas at once and have a mass terrorist attack, drive them all into the wall in the 405 freeway and cause a mass casualty event.
[01:04:14.080 --> 01:04:19.600] Or for that matter, they could cause airplanes to fall out of the sky by taking over their controls or whatever.
[01:04:19.600 --> 01:04:21.520] Okay, why has this not happened?
[01:04:21.520 --> 01:04:23.520] Because there are people that would want to do that.
[01:04:23.520 --> 01:04:27.360] There are bad people, and the technology has been there to do that for a while.
[01:04:27.360 --> 01:04:29.280] Why has it not happened?
[01:04:30.880 --> 01:04:39.360] Well, it's not perhaps so probable that you expect it to happen within one or two years, but it may be probable enough that you expect it to happen within 20 years.
[01:04:39.360 --> 01:04:51.920] So I think the fact that something is okay at the moment is not a reason for complacency when, of course, our dependence on these systems is growing all the time.
[01:04:51.920 --> 01:05:08.520] So I think, and that's why we came to set up this system because we feel there needs to be far more attention given to resilience against all these kinds of cascading threats to the technology we depend on.
[01:05:09.160 --> 01:05:31.960] Kevin Kelly's response to that is that the more interlinked everything is, the harder it is for terrorists to pull off something like just taking over the entire electric grid or whatever, because there's so many interlinking links in the chain that it's not possible to put them all together in one way.
[01:05:32.280 --> 01:05:32.920] Yes.
[01:05:33.400 --> 01:05:35.720] Whether that's true or not, I don't know.
[01:05:35.720 --> 01:05:38.120] And I haven't mentioned undersea cables yet.
[01:05:38.120 --> 01:05:39.320] That's another threat.
[01:05:39.640 --> 01:05:43.560] So I think we just have to make sure.
[01:05:43.560 --> 01:05:56.600] But I think the fact that these things haven't happened yet is not very reassuring when we know there's a greater variety of possible scenarios, each getting more probable with time.
[01:05:57.480 --> 01:05:58.520] Interesting.
[01:05:58.520 --> 01:06:00.200] All right, Martin, I know you got to go.
[01:06:00.680 --> 01:06:02.040] One last question here.
[01:06:02.760 --> 01:06:08.440] You've said you're, well, I guess I would ask, are you optimistic, pessimistic, realistic, whatever?
[01:06:08.680 --> 01:06:11.080] You had that bet with Steven Pinker, which was interesting.
[01:06:11.240 --> 01:06:12.760] I like the idea of betting markets.
[01:06:13.320 --> 01:06:14.280] Let's not just speculate.
[01:06:14.280 --> 01:06:15.320] Let's put some money on it.
[01:06:16.280 --> 01:06:24.920] And it appears you, it looks like you won that one, sort of, but I guess it depended on whether it was a lab leak or a zoonomic cause, right?
[01:06:25.560 --> 01:06:33.720] It ended at, I thought I'd won because there was a pandemic, which he didn't expect.
[01:06:33.720 --> 01:06:38.840] But of course, we said a pandemic caused by error or terror.
[01:06:39.160 --> 01:06:47.360] And of course, as you know, there's been a debate about whether it was caused by leakage from the Wotan lab or whether it was natural.
[01:06:47.360 --> 01:06:50.480] And we don't know, but of course, both are possible.
[01:06:50.480 --> 01:06:55.840] But one thing we can hope for is better vaccines for future pandemics.
[01:06:55.840 --> 01:06:59.200] That's the key salvation, I suppose.
[01:07:00.240 --> 01:07:11.120] But in terms of the far future of humanity, do we need to change human nature or can we technologically and scientifically just engineer society to make it there?
[01:07:11.120 --> 01:07:16.160] Well, that's going back to Aldous Huxley and Brave New World, isn't it?
[01:07:18.720 --> 01:07:19.840] I think we don't know.
[01:07:19.840 --> 01:07:26.960] But I think another point is that we can't really predict things.
[01:07:27.600 --> 01:07:28.640] Change is so fast.
[01:07:29.120 --> 01:07:30.160] We can't predict things.
[01:07:30.160 --> 01:07:50.560] And in fact, I use this paradox in my book where I contrast the people who built cathedrals in the Middle Ages, which took 100 years to build and they wouldn't be finished in a lifetime, but they still were committed to building the cathedral.
[01:07:50.960 --> 01:07:59.200] Whereas now, we don't really plan 100 years ahead, even though our horizons stretch for billions of years.
[01:07:59.200 --> 01:08:05.280] Whereas in medieval times, their horizons were only a small part of Europe.
[01:08:05.600 --> 01:08:07.040] So it seems paradoxical.
[01:08:07.040 --> 01:08:22.880] But the reason it's not paradoxical is that in the Middle Ages, even though their horizons were narrow, they thought their children and grandchildren would live as they did and have the same preferences and tastes as they do.
[01:08:22.880 --> 01:08:27.040] Whereas I don't think we can say that now of our children and grandchildren.
[01:08:27.040 --> 01:08:35.640] The changes are so rapid, and that therefore is a deterrent to very long-term planning because we don't quite know what our descendants are going to want.
[01:08:36.360 --> 01:08:44.040] Even if they are trying to be good ancestors, we don't quite know what to do in order to ensure that we do the best for our descendants.
[01:08:44.360 --> 01:08:46.760] Yeah, that's a nice way to put it.
[01:08:53.160 --> 01:08:58.680] What I would say to someone who's considering FDU is to come because they give great scholarship opportunities.
[01:08:58.680 --> 01:09:00.440] The professors are very helpful.
[01:09:00.440 --> 01:09:03.240] They want you to learn and they want you to pass.
[01:09:03.240 --> 01:09:05.880] And FDU gives you a second family.
[01:09:05.880 --> 01:09:09.240] See the moment and change your world at FDU.

Prompt 2: Key Takeaways

Now please extract the key takeaways from the transcript content I provided.

Extract the most important key takeaways from this part of the conversation. Use a single sentence statement (the key takeaway) rather than milquetoast descriptions like "the hosts discuss...". 

Limit the key takeaways to a maximum of 3. The key takeaways should be insightful and knowledge-additive. 

IMPORTANT: Return ONLY valid JSON, no explanations or markdown. Ensure:
- All strings are properly quoted and escaped
- No trailing commas
- All braces and brackets are balanced
Format: {"key_takeaways": ["takeaway 1", "takeaway 2"]}

Prompt 3: Segments

Now identify 2-4 distinct topical segments from this part of the conversation.

For each segment, identify:
- Descriptive title (3-6 words)  
- START timestamp when this topic begins (HH:MM:SS format)
- Double check that the timestamp is accurate - a timestamp will NEVER be greater than the total length of the audio
- Most important Key takeaway from that segment. Key takeaway must be specific and knowledge-additive.
- Brief summary of the discussion

IMPORTANT: The timestamp should mark when the topic/segment STARTS, not a range. Look for topic transitions and conversation shifts.

Return ONLY valid JSON. Ensure all strings are properly quoted, no trailing commas:
{
  "segments": [
    {
      "segment_title": "Topic Discussion", 
      "timestamp": "01:15:30",
      "key_takeaway": "main point from this segment",
      "segment_summary": "brief description of what was discussed"
    }
  ]
}

Timestamp format: HH:MM:SS (e.g., 00:05:30, 01:22:45) marking the START of each segment.

Prompt 4: Media Mentions

Now scan the transcript content I provided for ACTUAL mentions of specific media titles:

Find explicit mentions of:
- Books (with specific titles)
- Movies (with specific titles)  
- TV Shows (with specific titles)
- Music/Songs (with specific titles)

DO NOT include:
- Websites, URLs, or web services
- Other podcasts or podcast names

IMPORTANT: 
- Only include items explicitly mentioned by name. Do not invent titles.
- Valid categories are: "Book", "Movie", "TV Show", "Music"
- Include the exact phrase where each item was mentioned
- Find the nearest proximate timestamp where it appears in the conversation
- THE TIMESTAMP OF THE MEDIA MENTION IS IMPORTANT - DO NOT INVENT TIMESTAMPS AND DO NOT MISATTRIBUTE TIMESTAMPS
- Double check that the timestamp is accurate - a timestamp will NEVER be greater than the total length of the audio
- Timestamps are given as ranges, e.g. 01:13:42.520 --> 01:13:46.720. Use the EARLIER of the 2 timestamps in the range.

Return ONLY valid JSON. Ensure all strings are properly quoted and escaped, no trailing commas:
{
  "media_mentions": [
    {
      "title": "Exact Title as Mentioned",
      "category": "Book",
      "author_artist": "N/A",
      "context": "Brief context of why it was mentioned",
      "context_phrase": "The exact sentence or phrase where it was mentioned",
      "timestamp": "estimated time like 01:15:30"
    }
  ]
}

If no media is mentioned, return: {"media_mentions": []}

Full Transcript

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[00:00:58.880 --> 00:01:01.360] So, when I ask, what is Odoo?
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[00:01:02.880 --> 00:01:05.520] Well, Odoo is a bit of everything.
[00:01:05.520 --> 00:01:12.640] Odoo is a suite of business management software that some people say is like fertilizer because of the way it promotes growth.
[00:01:12.640 --> 00:01:21.040] But you know, some people also say Odoo is like a magic bean stock because it grows with your company and is also magically affordable.
[00:01:21.040 --> 00:01:27.840] But then again, you could look at Odoo in terms of how its individual software programs are a lot like building blocks.
[00:01:27.840 --> 00:01:37.600] I mean, whatever your business needs: manufacturing, accounting, HR programs, you can build a custom software suite that's perfect for your company.
[00:01:37.600 --> 00:01:39.440] So, what is Odoo?
[00:01:39.440 --> 00:01:42.480] Well, I guess Odoo is a bit of everything.
[00:01:42.480 --> 00:01:48.000] Odoo is a fertilizer, magic beanstalk building blocks for business.
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[00:01:56.400 --> 00:01:59.120] That's ODOO.com.
[00:02:02.360 --> 00:02:08.200] You're listening to The Michael Shermer Show.
[00:02:14.600 --> 00:02:19.960] All right, everybody, it's Michael Shermer, and it's time for you know what, another episode of the Michael Shermer Show.
[00:02:19.960 --> 00:02:26.600] My guest today is a legendary scientist, probably the most decorated scientist I've ever had on the show.
[00:02:26.600 --> 00:02:29.000] He is Lord Martin Rees.
[00:02:29.000 --> 00:02:31.080] He is here for the second time.
[00:02:31.080 --> 00:02:43.560] He's the Astronomer Royale, former President of the Royal Society, fellow and master, former master of Trinity College, Cambridge, and Emeritus Professor of Cosmology and Astrophysics at the University of Cambridge.
[00:02:43.560 --> 00:02:46.680] He sits as a member of the UK House of Lords.
[00:02:46.680 --> 00:03:01.080] He is the author of many best-selling popular science books, including On the Future, Prospects for Humanity, Just Six Numbers, The Deep Forces That Shape the Universe, Before the Beginning, Our Universe and Others.
[00:03:01.080 --> 00:03:02.280] Hey, there's Others.
[00:03:02.280 --> 00:03:02.680] Okay.
[00:03:02.680 --> 00:03:04.440] We'll have to talk about that.
[00:03:04.440 --> 00:03:07.880] And Our Final Hour, A Scientist's Warning.
[00:03:08.520 --> 00:03:15.160] And his next book, it looks like he's co-authored with Alan Lightman, coming out in September.
[00:03:15.160 --> 00:03:17.560] We're recording this on July 2nd.
[00:03:17.880 --> 00:03:22.920] The Shape of Wonder, How Scientists Think, Work, and Live, which is where we're going to start here in just a minute.
[00:03:22.920 --> 00:03:24.040] But there's much more.
[00:03:24.120 --> 00:03:32.760] He's been elected to the Academy, American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, and the National Academy of Sciences.
[00:03:32.920 --> 00:03:36.520] And has received, here's the list from Wikipedia.
[00:03:36.840 --> 00:03:38.760] It's actually much longer than this.
[00:03:38.920 --> 00:03:54.320] He received the gold medal of the Royal Astronomical Society, the Albert Einstein World Award of Science, the Crawford Prize, very, sort of the Nobel Prize, or maybe the Fields Medal Prize for branches of science.
[00:03:54.320 --> 00:04:03.920] He's also been awarded the Order of Merit, the Templeton Prize, which tells us they're the highest, I think it's the largest sum of money of any prize given.
[00:04:03.920 --> 00:04:05.600] Well, we'll clarify that in a minute.
[00:04:05.600 --> 00:04:16.560] The Isaac Newton Medal, the Dirac Medal, the Lillian Field Prize, and the Fritz Sweakey Prize, the Copley Medal, and the Wolf Prize in Physics.
[00:04:16.560 --> 00:04:21.920] Not to mention, he has an asteroid named after him, number 4587 Rees.
[00:04:21.920 --> 00:04:27.120] Hopefully, Martin, it's not destined to collide with Earth anytime soon.
[00:04:28.720 --> 00:04:29.920] How are you?
[00:04:30.800 --> 00:04:32.880] Great to be on your show again.
[00:04:33.200 --> 00:04:34.000] Yes.
[00:04:34.000 --> 00:04:35.920] So much to discuss, Martin.
[00:04:35.920 --> 00:04:41.840] I mean, that's quite a long list, and that's not the half of it if you go to your Wikipedia page.
[00:04:41.840 --> 00:04:50.160] So I'm curious, before we get into all the science stuff, I'm working on a future book here at some point finish on how lives turn out.
[00:04:50.160 --> 00:05:06.720] You know, it turns out psychologists, behavioral geneticists, people that study twins, people that study personality, and so on, tell us that there's a large, unexplained source of variation that we can't get our minds around.
[00:05:06.720 --> 00:05:08.080] It's not genetics.
[00:05:08.080 --> 00:05:10.160] It's not the home environment.
[00:05:10.160 --> 00:05:13.120] It's what's loosely called the non-shared environment.
[00:05:13.120 --> 00:05:22.080] But it also includes just sort of the random events in one's life, contingency, chance, the zig and the zag of life.
[00:05:22.320 --> 00:05:23.760] You went left instead of right.
[00:05:23.760 --> 00:05:30.000] You got the upper bunk, and your brother got the lower bunk, or you had this teacher instead of that teacher, and so on.
[00:05:30.360 --> 00:05:43.560] So, considering how decorated a scientist you are, and you have a book coming out about how scientists work and think and live, maybe you could go back and give us a little sense of how you became Martin Rees.
[00:05:43.560 --> 00:05:43.960] Yes.
[00:05:44.120 --> 00:05:46.440] What are the influences in your life?
[00:05:46.760 --> 00:05:50.760] Well, it's certainly true that luck is a major element.
[00:05:50.760 --> 00:05:52.520] It certainly has been for me.
[00:05:52.920 --> 00:06:02.840] I grew up in a rural environment in Shropshire, which is on the borders of England and Wales, where my parents ran a small school.
[00:06:02.840 --> 00:06:05.880] So we lived in a small village in isolation.
[00:06:06.200 --> 00:06:10.360] From the age of 13, I was sent to a larger school.
[00:06:10.680 --> 00:06:20.280] But I have very warm memories of the childhood upbringing and the nature of that community and a huge respect for the people who taught me then.
[00:06:20.600 --> 00:06:24.280] And I was able to get into Cambridge University.
[00:06:24.280 --> 00:06:39.720] And because I was good at math at that time, I was encouraged to study that subject at Trinity College, Cambridge, which wasn't the right decision because I ended up having a more sort of synthetic style of thinking.
[00:06:39.720 --> 00:06:47.480] And I wasn't quite as nerdish in the same way as my mathematical contemporaries in the class at Cambridge.
[00:06:47.480 --> 00:06:56.360] And so I wanted to try and apply my math to some other more phenomenological topic.
[00:06:56.360 --> 00:07:00.600] And this was when I was 21 and graduating in math.
[00:07:00.600 --> 00:07:18.880] And my bit of luck was being accepted just luckily as a graduate student at Cambridge and to be able to join a group which happened to be very lucky in a number of ways.
[00:07:19.120 --> 00:07:29.120] First, it was headed by someone called Dennis Sharma, a remarkably charismatic character and a good friend and contemporary of Roger Penrose.
[00:07:29.440 --> 00:07:42.400] And the students he attracted included some who went on to good careers, most famously Stephen Hawking, who was two years senior to me.
[00:07:42.720 --> 00:07:46.720] And also, it was a time when the subject was changing.
[00:07:47.840 --> 00:07:53.120] The idea that there was a big bang that set the universe going was controversial.
[00:07:53.120 --> 00:08:03.120] And it was settled by events that happened in 1964 and 65, which was when I was just starting as a graduate student.
[00:08:03.120 --> 00:08:13.520] So I was very lucky in this subject starting in cosmology and also in understanding black holes and finding evidence for them.
[00:08:13.520 --> 00:08:16.480] And that was a very lucky period.
[00:08:16.480 --> 00:08:21.840] But what's been even luckier is that I would say the subject's been on a roll ever since.
[00:08:21.840 --> 00:08:30.720] And as you know, anyone who reads the press knows there's a whole succession of advances in astronomy and astrophysics.
[00:08:30.720 --> 00:08:37.360] Many of the problems which we puzzled about when I was starting have now been settled.
[00:08:37.360 --> 00:08:44.000] But of course, as any science advances, more subjects come into focus again.
[00:08:44.000 --> 00:08:47.760] And we are now focusing on questions that couldn't even have been posed back then.
[00:08:47.760 --> 00:08:49.440] So it's been a wonderful subject.
[00:08:49.440 --> 00:08:54.000] And I've been very lucky in being a participant in this.
[00:08:54.000 --> 00:08:56.960] And it's also a very international subject.
[00:08:57.280 --> 00:09:04.680] And I'm sorry, I'm rambling on too much, but let me just say which does interest the public.
[00:09:05.000 --> 00:09:15.880] And a topic which is featured in the book you just mentioned is that the scientists benefit from engaging with the public.
[00:09:15.880 --> 00:09:18.760] And of course, that's easy on some subjects than others.
[00:09:18.760 --> 00:09:26.840] Some subjects have a rather ambivalent reputation with the public, nuclear physics, for instance.
[00:09:26.840 --> 00:09:36.280] But I think it's fair to say that astronomy is one which has an unambiguously positive public image, as does ecology, for instance.
[00:09:36.280 --> 00:09:46.040] And as you know, it's a strong amateur element and a strong interest in the more philosophical elements of the subject.
[00:09:46.040 --> 00:09:49.480] So that's really a reason why you can imagine.
[00:09:49.480 --> 00:09:59.400] I'm still remaining cheerful, having been able to earn my living by working in this advancing field with international contact and real progress.
[00:09:59.720 --> 00:10:00.600] Yeah, nice.
[00:10:00.600 --> 00:10:02.520] You mentioned synthetic thinking.
[00:10:02.520 --> 00:10:05.000] What do you mean by that when you were doing math?
[00:10:05.240 --> 00:10:12.200] I mean, trying to put together and make sense of a variety of fragmentary data.
[00:10:12.200 --> 00:10:19.720] So I would say that what one does in a subject like astronomy, it's in some sense rather like what a detective does.
[00:10:19.720 --> 00:10:31.000] You want the various clues and you want to put them together to see if what you observe can be explained by a black hole moving around in a particular way or something of that kind.
[00:10:31.000 --> 00:10:38.200] So I wanted to interact with data and try and make sense of a phenomena.
[00:10:39.160 --> 00:10:42.120] You mentioned, okay, so other forms of luck.
[00:10:42.840 --> 00:10:49.360] Your parents ran a school, so obviously they were both intelligent and educated themselves.
[00:10:44.680 --> 00:10:51.360] So you inherited some of that.
[00:10:51.600 --> 00:10:53.120] I mean, this is another form of luck.
[00:10:53.120 --> 00:11:05.760] You didn't choose to be smart and have, I presume, lots of books in the home, and maybe they read to you, and then you read as a young neither was a scientist, but they generated a good atmosphere.
[00:11:06.080 --> 00:11:08.720] And I think I was well taught.
[00:11:08.720 --> 00:11:11.600] And you asked about other lessons one learned.
[00:11:11.600 --> 00:11:26.080] I mean, one thing which I think has influenced my general attitudes and politics ever since is when I look back at the people I encountered in my youth and the society I was in, I admire the quality of those people.
[00:11:26.080 --> 00:11:36.320] And the more I've gone on in my career, I've realized how poorly correlated achievement and status is to any intrinsic virtues.
[00:11:36.320 --> 00:11:41.680] And this is perhaps one reason why by American standards I'd be called very left-wing.
[00:11:42.960 --> 00:11:47.760] Okay, we can get into that in a minute, but that's pretty interesting.
[00:11:47.760 --> 00:11:48.240] Yeah.
[00:11:48.240 --> 00:12:03.840] So what you're saying is that the kind of general culture in which that school or your home or whatever happened to be located in shapes, you know, who you are, the people you encounter on the street or at the supermarket or just randomly.
[00:12:03.840 --> 00:12:04.160] Yeah.
[00:12:05.440 --> 00:12:06.160] Yeah.
[00:12:07.200 --> 00:12:08.560] No city.
[00:12:08.560 --> 00:12:10.320] Just a village shop.
[00:12:10.800 --> 00:12:11.600] Village shop.
[00:12:11.600 --> 00:12:12.080] Yeah.
[00:12:12.080 --> 00:12:12.640] Yeah.
[00:12:12.960 --> 00:12:24.960] So and then early on, were there any popular science books you read as a young boy or a teenager that influenced you?
[00:12:25.200 --> 00:12:32.040] Yes, well, I read some encyclopedias and some of the popular books.
[00:12:32.040 --> 00:12:35.080] In fact, I did read a book by Fred Hoyle.
[00:12:35.640 --> 00:12:46.360] But I think, although this was perhaps when I was at university, I read the books by a science fiction writer called Olaf Stapleton.
[00:12:47.560 --> 00:12:54.520] I don't know how well known he is now, but he is lecturing philosophy at Liverpool University in England.
[00:12:54.520 --> 00:13:01.080] And in the 1930s, he wrote three books, which I think were really visionary at the time.
[00:13:01.720 --> 00:13:18.200] One was called Last and First Men, and it was about a history of the next few billion years and how I think 16 or 17 different civilizations emerged in different parts of the solar system, formed, evolved, and died, etc.
[00:13:18.360 --> 00:13:20.040] Very imaginative.
[00:13:20.200 --> 00:13:23.320] And the second one was called Starmaker.
[00:13:23.320 --> 00:13:25.960] And Starmaker was a maker of universes.
[00:13:25.960 --> 00:13:34.360] And so this discusses what the universe was like and how it might be different, different numbers of dimensions, etc.
[00:13:35.000 --> 00:13:41.160] And for instance, there was the musical universe, which had one spatial dimension and time.
[00:13:41.160 --> 00:13:44.760] And the structure is like the structure of music.
[00:13:44.760 --> 00:13:46.120] And there are lots of things like that.
[00:13:46.120 --> 00:13:52.360] And the third one, which I think is more relevant today than it was then, is called Sirius.
[00:13:52.360 --> 00:13:55.400] And it's about a dog with superhuman intelligence.
[00:13:55.400 --> 00:14:06.520] So these were three books which I read, which in retrospect were especially far-sighted and indeed related to the kind of things I've been thinking about in later life.
[00:14:07.160 --> 00:14:07.800] Nice.
[00:14:07.800 --> 00:14:10.440] You must have read Flatland at some point.
[00:14:10.680 --> 00:14:12.040] Yes, indeed.
[00:14:12.040 --> 00:14:12.680] Yes.
[00:14:12.680 --> 00:14:13.880] I mean, it's a little bit like that.
[00:14:13.880 --> 00:14:26.160] It's interesting that science fiction writers or literary people can write books like this that expand the thinking of scientists to consider serious problems in a completely different way.
[00:14:26.160 --> 00:14:26.560] Yes.
[00:14:26.560 --> 00:14:33.040] Well, it's certainly better to read first-rate science fiction than second-rate science.
[00:14:34.320 --> 00:14:35.280] Okay.
[00:14:36.480 --> 00:14:39.520] There's a blurb for your next book right on the cover.
[00:14:40.480 --> 00:14:41.600] That's funny.
[00:14:41.600 --> 00:14:42.640] Yeah, okay.
[00:14:42.640 --> 00:14:46.560] So, well, so what drives you as a scientist?
[00:14:46.560 --> 00:14:50.400] Is it the search for truth or how would you characterize it?
[00:14:51.680 --> 00:14:56.320] Yes, I mean, a search to understand the big picture and to make progress.
[00:14:56.320 --> 00:15:10.160] But accepting that this isn't done the great problems head-on, it's always done, unless one's a genius or very lucky, by piecemeal progress, by trying to fit the bits together.
[00:15:10.480 --> 00:15:22.560] That's why I said it was more like synthetic relation of different obstacles.
[00:15:22.560 --> 00:15:26.320] So that's the way I did my science, but I've enjoyed it.
[00:15:26.320 --> 00:15:32.000] And I think I've enjoyed it particularly because of the interaction.
[00:15:32.560 --> 00:15:35.680] If you're an artist, your work is mainly solitary.
[00:15:35.920 --> 00:15:41.120] If you're a scientist, the interactions are very important.
[00:15:41.120 --> 00:15:58.240] And I benefited hugely from interacting with collaborators, colleagues, and then students, and also with international contacts, because no subject could be more international than studying the cosmos.
[00:15:58.240 --> 00:16:05.400] And so I've benefited hugely from many contacts in America, Russia, and China, and Europe, of course.
[00:16:06.040 --> 00:16:15.000] Well, your subject really is, it's almost religious in nature, in the sense that religion was kind of the first institution to tackle the biggest questions of all.
[00:16:15.000 --> 00:16:16.600] Why is there something rather than nothing?
[00:16:16.600 --> 00:16:17.800] And where do we come from?
[00:16:17.800 --> 00:16:18.600] Why are we here?
[00:16:18.600 --> 00:16:19.160] And so on.
[00:16:19.160 --> 00:16:22.760] And now, you know, cosmologists tackle some of these issues.
[00:16:22.760 --> 00:16:29.320] And it has that sense of deep roots, like, you know, I want to know what it all means or where we all came from.
[00:16:29.320 --> 00:16:33.960] So, you know, good on you that you get to tackle those questions from a scientific perspective.
[00:16:35.000 --> 00:16:38.440] But of course, as I said, we do it in a piecemeal way.
[00:16:40.440 --> 00:16:44.840] We look for particular objects and what it tells us about black holes.
[00:16:44.840 --> 00:16:59.080] And of course, to take a branch of the subject, which is now very exciting, looking for planets around other stars to see if there are any signs of life having existed there and all these things.
[00:16:59.080 --> 00:17:04.520] It's a piecemeal progress, but we hope it does fill in the big picture.
[00:17:04.840 --> 00:17:08.120] Can you give us a sense of what Stephen Hawking was like?
[00:17:08.120 --> 00:17:09.320] Let me cue this up for you.
[00:17:09.720 --> 00:17:15.240] Back in the 90s and early aughts, Kip Thorne used to bring Stephen to Caltech every year.
[00:17:15.240 --> 00:17:18.840] And we held our monthly science lecture series there for the skeptics.
[00:17:18.840 --> 00:17:21.240] And it was a big deal.
[00:17:21.240 --> 00:17:26.280] I mean, like on a Wednesday evening at six, he would speak.
[00:17:26.280 --> 00:17:32.040] And by like one in the afternoon, there's people lined up outside of Beckman Auditorium to come hear him speak.
[00:17:32.040 --> 00:17:34.280] And then, you know, of course, it's standing room only.
[00:17:34.280 --> 00:17:39.000] And they had a video broadcast in another auditorium, which was also filled.
[00:17:39.000 --> 00:17:48.160] And, you know, you had a sense that this is something of a scientific rock star, the likes of which maybe only Carl Sagan enjoyed before Stephen.
[00:17:48.160 --> 00:17:48.880] I don't know.
[00:17:49.760 --> 00:17:55.040] And people look to him as if, like, you know, he knows the ultimate answers.
[00:17:55.520 --> 00:18:00.720] How much of that would you say, I mean, to be fair, was earned?
[00:18:00.720 --> 00:18:02.960] He really was that great of a mind?
[00:18:02.960 --> 00:18:06.800] Or how much of it was also captured by the physical condition?
[00:18:06.800 --> 00:18:11.760] You know, it's almost like a brain in a vat, and, you know, he's almost a godlike figure.
[00:18:12.640 --> 00:18:21.600] Well, I think you're right in saying it was because of his success in overcoming tremendous obstacles that he became so unique.
[00:18:21.600 --> 00:18:37.920] I mean, I think it's clear everyone would agree that he was one of the leading developers of relativity, one of the two or three people since Einstein who've made the biggest impact on our understanding of gravity.
[00:18:37.920 --> 00:18:44.080] I think there's no denying his great contributions, especially the ones in the 60s and the 70s.
[00:18:45.040 --> 00:18:58.080] But of course, it was the contrast between the imprisoned mind and the cosmos that he was roaming that appealed to the public and made him such a rock star, as it were.
[00:18:58.080 --> 00:19:05.840] I think if he'd been an equally distinguished person working in, say, genetics, there wouldn't have been the same aura.
[00:19:05.840 --> 00:19:07.760] And so it was this contrast.
[00:19:08.000 --> 00:19:12.640] And of course, that led to his book being a bestseller and all the rest of it.
[00:19:12.960 --> 00:19:22.720] And his oracular statements being interpreted perhaps more deeply than they could really determine.
[00:19:23.040 --> 00:19:28.240] But I think it was really that combination that made him such a remarkable figure.
[00:19:28.240 --> 00:19:36.200] And indeed, he was remarkable because going back to when I first met him, I was a first-year graduate student.
[00:19:36.200 --> 00:19:37.800] He was in his third year.
[00:19:37.800 --> 00:19:40.200] He was already walking with two sticks.
[00:19:40.200 --> 00:19:46.680] And his supervisor, Dennis Sharma, had been told he might not live to finish his PhD.
[00:19:46.680 --> 00:19:53.960] And of course, he did do that and went on for 50 years after it with the amazing achievements that we've just mentioned.
[00:19:53.960 --> 00:19:56.440] So it was a remarkable story.
[00:19:57.160 --> 00:20:25.960] You mentioned Kip Thorne, and can I say that he's probably most admire of all living scientists for his combination of distinction as a researcher, as a popularizer, and also as a socially responsible person, not just the immense care he took to make Stephen Hawking's life interesting, but the way he tried very hard all through his career to improve relations with the Russian scientists and all that.
[00:20:25.960 --> 00:20:33.640] So I think he's someone who ticks all the boxes as a most outstanding personality.
[00:20:33.960 --> 00:20:43.000] Yeah, he was our sponsor at Caltech for the Skeptic Science Lecture Series because he was also concerned about pseudoscience and anti-science and all that.
[00:20:43.000 --> 00:20:49.320] So he worked and also really a super nice guy, which is and a modest guy for such a genius.
[00:20:49.640 --> 00:21:01.800] Well, I should say, when I got my PhD, I went as a visiting postdoc for a few months to Caltech, which is my first extended stay abroad.
[00:21:01.800 --> 00:21:08.760] And I met Kip, and he was then at age 30 or so, a young professor.
[00:21:08.760 --> 00:21:11.000] And I got to know him for that time.
[00:21:11.000 --> 00:21:17.680] And he helped me with the paper I wrote, the first paper to discuss polarization in the microwave background, as it turned out.
[00:21:14.840 --> 00:21:21.600] And he was very supportive indeed.
[00:21:21.920 --> 00:21:27.120] And did so with the large range of students that he taught.
[00:21:27.760 --> 00:21:29.680] Okay, you mentioned progress in science.
[00:21:29.840 --> 00:21:33.440] I absolutely agree that such a thing really exists.
[00:21:33.440 --> 00:21:45.280] There really is a reality out there, and we can know something about it and have sort of an asymptotic curve toward that understanding of reality, even if we never get there ultimately.
[00:21:45.520 --> 00:21:50.720] But there's those who say, well, but it's very culturally determined and bound.
[00:21:51.520 --> 00:21:53.600] They once believed this, now they believe that.
[00:21:53.600 --> 00:21:59.680] Who's to say that a century or two from now, all this stuff about the Big Bang cosmology, that'll be gone.
[00:21:59.680 --> 00:22:01.440] It'll be some other theory.
[00:22:01.680 --> 00:22:12.320] How confident are you that what you think now about the cosmos, let's say, since that's your area, is probably going to pretty much be the same, more or less, with some fine-tuning a century from now, say?
[00:22:12.320 --> 00:22:13.440] Well, some parts will.
[00:22:13.440 --> 00:22:28.960] I mean, obviously, Newton's theory of gravity has been tweaked by Einstein, but it's still good enough to predict the motions of asteroids and artificial satellites and the rest.
[00:22:28.960 --> 00:22:32.640] So no one would say that Newton's theory is a fashion.
[00:22:32.640 --> 00:22:33.760] It's so established.
[00:22:33.760 --> 00:22:35.120] It tells us about the world.
[00:22:35.120 --> 00:22:39.920] And there's some parts of cosmology which I would put in that category.
[00:22:40.240 --> 00:23:04.760] I think the idea that the universe is expanding from a hot, dense state, and that we can perhaps talk seriously about what happened right back when, if it's a second old, and certainly when it was a few hundred thousand years old, which is much less present age, I don't think those are going to be overthrown.
[00:23:06.200 --> 00:23:09.480] They're borne out by very reliable data.
[00:23:09.480 --> 00:23:28.200] But of course, in any science, you want to go beyond what we understand and try and understand in cosmology, for instance, what lies beyond the horizon of our observations and what happened in the initial fraction of a second.
[00:23:28.200 --> 00:23:31.880] And that is still conjectural, and ideas will certainly change.
[00:23:31.880 --> 00:23:48.920] The point there is, of course, that when going back to one second, and even perhaps to a millisecond, the physics that applied to the expanding Big Bang was the physics that we think we understand because we can test it experimentally in the lab.
[00:23:48.920 --> 00:23:58.920] But as you explore Epic further, the conditions get more and more extreme and beyond anything we can test or reproduce here on Earth.
[00:23:58.920 --> 00:24:01.800] And therefore, it's still very speculative.
[00:24:01.800 --> 00:24:13.480] And so that's why the very early universe, which is crucially important in determining why the universe expands the way it is, why it has the contents it has, those are still speculative.
[00:24:13.480 --> 00:24:19.320] And I don't think we can confidently predict what the firm answer will be by the end of a century.
[00:24:19.800 --> 00:24:33.960] Seems like some of that is inferential based on particle physics experiments or mathematics or whatever, because the farthest back we can look with the best telescopes we have is what, like a few million years after the Big Bang, or something like that?
[00:24:34.520 --> 00:24:34.680] Yes.
[00:24:34.840 --> 00:24:35.640] Redshifting.
[00:24:35.960 --> 00:24:44.040] Yes, we can look, if you think of the universe expanding, we can look back, and you imagine two rods linking two parts of the universe.
[00:24:44.360 --> 00:24:54.240] When we look at the microwave background, we look back to when it was a thousand times more compressed and a billion times denser.
[00:24:54.640 --> 00:24:58.240] That's the microwave background when those photons were last scattered.
[00:24:59.120 --> 00:25:09.840] We have very good evidence from the proportions of helium, hydrogen, and deuterium in the universe about what the universe was like when it was a few seconds old.
[00:25:09.840 --> 00:25:17.200] And that's an extrapolation of the density by about a factor of 10 to the 30.
[00:25:17.200 --> 00:25:20.160] So we can, with confidence, go back that far.
[00:25:20.160 --> 00:25:29.440] But that's not far enough because we really want to go back to the limit of any understanding of physics, which is the so-called Planck time.
[00:25:29.440 --> 00:25:34.640] And that is the time when you have to worry about quantum effects in the micro world.
[00:25:34.640 --> 00:25:52.960] And as you know, there is no firm theory that links the theories of the micro world, atomic and nuclear physics, to the theories of the macro world, which is basically gravity and relativity.
[00:25:53.280 --> 00:26:02.960] And if we imagine things being very, very squeezed, then gravity is important even for particles.
[00:26:02.960 --> 00:26:21.840] And so the big stumbling block in fundamental physics is, of course, as everyone knows, not having a unified theory, which does bring together the forces of the microworld and the force of gravity and understand them all in the deeper sense.
[00:26:21.840 --> 00:26:25.840] And I hope we have such a theory, but I would like to put in a bit.
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[00:26:55.160 --> 00:27:11.240] Proviso at this stage is we may not, because I think we've got to be open-minded about whether some of the essential features of the world demand a level of understanding which is beyond the human brain.
[00:27:11.240 --> 00:27:21.960] There's no reason at all, in my opinion, to think that the capacities of our brain are matched to understanding the deepest aspects of reality.
[00:27:22.200 --> 00:27:31.160] So, just as a monkey can't understand quantum theory, so there may be important features that our brains will never understand.
[00:27:31.160 --> 00:27:33.400] Now, people say maybe AI can help in some way.
[00:27:33.400 --> 00:27:48.440] It can certainly solve some problems which involve very, very long calculations, which we could do in a lifetime, but still conceptual issues which perhaps will elude a human brain or what we can construct.
[00:27:48.440 --> 00:27:56.040] And so, I think we've got to bear in mind that there are mysteries in the complexities of the universe.
[00:27:56.360 --> 00:28:03.720] Yeah, Richard Dawkins likes to use the term middle land that we evolved in this, or maybe it's middle world.
[00:28:03.960 --> 00:28:12.040] We evolved on the savannahs of Africa to perceive things that are kind of of a middleene size, a middleening speed.
[00:28:12.280 --> 00:28:25.200] So, the idea of like speed of light or expanding universes or subatomic particles, none of this matches anything in our world for which we could hook it onto and go, oh, now I intuitively grasp what that means.
[00:28:25.520 --> 00:28:29.200] Well, no, in fact, this is very true.
[00:28:29.200 --> 00:28:45.440] And it's remarkable that we've been so successful actually in theory and the micro and atomic nuclear physics and understanding quite a bit about the cosmos, despite the fact that our brains haven't changed since our ancestors roamed the African savannah.
[00:28:46.320 --> 00:28:48.800] Something very complicated, but it is remarkable.
[00:28:48.800 --> 00:28:59.520] And there's an amusing coincidence, which I discuss in one of my books and illustrated with a picture of Nora Boris.
[00:28:59.920 --> 00:29:16.560] We are, in fact, in the geometric mean, in that it takes as many atoms to make a human body as there are human bodies to make up the cosmic scale.
[00:29:16.560 --> 00:29:24.880] So we are, in a more quantitative sense, in the midway on a log scale between the micro-world and the cosmic scale.
[00:29:25.200 --> 00:29:31.440] I used to have a joke about that: like there's 100 billion neurons in the human brain, there's 100 billion stars in the Milky Way galaxy.
[00:29:31.440 --> 00:29:32.320] What does it mean?
[00:29:32.320 --> 00:29:34.400] Nothing.
[00:29:34.720 --> 00:29:37.040] Even those figures aren't right anymore.
[00:29:37.520 --> 00:29:48.560] But this problem you're describing, does this lead us to ask nonsensical questions like what is the universe expanding into or what was there before time began, that kind of thing?
[00:29:48.880 --> 00:29:52.160] Well, I mean, those aren't nonsensical questions.
[00:29:52.160 --> 00:29:58.240] I mean, I think they are real questions.
[00:29:58.640 --> 00:30:05.560] You could imagine a universe that has an edge, but that's far beyond our observable horizon.
[00:30:05.560 --> 00:30:12.760] And there are some theories which do, in a sense, say that there was something that happened before the Big Bang.
[00:30:12.760 --> 00:30:15.240] It's a cyclic universe, etc.
[00:30:15.480 --> 00:30:33.080] And there's certainly theories which suggest that what we can observe with our telescopes, even with a very powerful telescope, is limited by a horizon, which is the maximum distance from which a photon could have traveled to us since the Big Bang.
[00:30:33.080 --> 00:30:35.400] And that's a definite finite volume.
[00:30:35.720 --> 00:30:46.520] But that's not reality as a whole, because it's just like if you sit in the middle of an ocean, you have an horizon around you, but you don't think the ocean stops just beyond the horizon.
[00:30:46.520 --> 00:30:55.160] And we have reason to think that the galaxies go on probably 100 times or so beyond the greatest distance we can see.
[00:30:55.160 --> 00:30:57.480] And they may go on much, much further still.
[00:30:57.800 --> 00:31:05.160] Now, that's all the aftermath of our one Big Bang, which is vaster than the region we can observe with our telescopes.
[00:31:05.160 --> 00:31:09.240] But then there's the other question, which is: was our Big Bang the only one?
[00:31:09.560 --> 00:31:12.440] And this is the concept of the multiverse.
[00:31:12.440 --> 00:31:29.080] And there are some specific theories which do predict that if you go back to the sort of substratum at the very early time, then there will be multiple Big Bangs produced, maybe in a turtle production.
[00:31:29.080 --> 00:31:35.080] And Andre Linde famously produced the first version of such a theory more than 30 years ago.
[00:31:35.640 --> 00:31:44.560] This is if you make particular assumptions about the physics, then these are consequences.
[00:31:44.120 --> 00:31:50.160] But the trouble is, as I said already, we don't know the physics that does apply.
[00:31:50.400 --> 00:31:56.160] So you make some assumptions and you can get a multiverse, others that you won't.
[00:31:56.160 --> 00:32:01.840] And there are also some other theories that would allow something to happen before the Big Bang.
[00:32:01.840 --> 00:32:13.840] And Roger Penrose has an idea of the cyclic universe that the universe ends being enormous, but it's left with nothing with any mass.
[00:32:13.840 --> 00:32:15.440] And so you can just rescale it.
[00:32:15.440 --> 00:32:19.440] And this end of the universe, you then scale down to a point and then start again.
[00:32:19.440 --> 00:32:25.760] So that's a particular version, not a very appealing one, in my opinion, of a universe.
[00:32:25.760 --> 00:32:35.520] But this is just to say that the ideas about what could happen beyond the horizon are observations.
[00:32:35.520 --> 00:32:37.440] And we have these horizons in time.
[00:32:37.440 --> 00:32:40.880] We can't go back too close to the real initial instance.
[00:32:40.880 --> 00:32:48.560] And of course, what we can observe is just a finite volume in space, although an enormous one.
[00:32:49.440 --> 00:33:05.520] So would something like that be your answer to the creationists or theologians or intelligent design theorists argument from a cosmological perspective that everything that exists began to exist at some point in time.
[00:33:05.520 --> 00:33:09.680] The universe existed, began to exist at some point in time called the Big Bang.
[00:33:09.680 --> 00:33:13.600] Therefore, there's a creator behind it, because how else would you explain it?
[00:33:14.480 --> 00:33:17.920] I gather what you're saying is something like, but but we don't know that.
[00:33:17.920 --> 00:33:19.520] We can't stop right there.
[00:33:19.840 --> 00:33:39.720] Well, I mean, I think, I mean, there are some very simple-minded religious people who ask that sort of question, but uh, uh, my view is that they're being unreasonable because, um, uh, as a scientist, I know that it's pretty hard to explain to most people what a single hydamism is and how that behaves.
[00:33:39.720 --> 00:33:49.880] And so, to believe that there's a simple yaboo, simple answer to what caused the universe is it seems to be so implausible that I can't take it seriously.
[00:33:49.880 --> 00:33:52.680] So, I think we have to accept it's a mystery.
[00:33:53.320 --> 00:33:57.160] And would that apply to why there's something rather than nothing?
[00:33:59.800 --> 00:34:01.320] I think so, yes.
[00:34:02.440 --> 00:34:12.040] But I mean, if you want to shortcut the mystery by saying God did it, then you can, but that doesn't explain anything.
[00:34:12.040 --> 00:34:23.080] And but I just think it's it shows a certain arrogance to think that an answer you can understand is actually an adequate explanation for one of the deepest mysteries.
[00:34:24.440 --> 00:34:36.360] And would it be reasonable to ask, well, if at some point there was nothing and then stuff got created out of it, then there couldn't have even been a God, or then what created God?
[00:34:36.360 --> 00:34:41.800] You know, most theologians kind of scoff at that question, but why is that not a legitimate question?
[00:34:43.400 --> 00:34:49.880] Well, I mean, I think if you can define what you mean by God, I don't know, but I just don't feel that's a fruitful kind of inquiry.
[00:34:51.080 --> 00:34:52.680] Because it doesn't explain anything.
[00:34:53.160 --> 00:34:57.800] You'd still want to know how did God let's say it's not God in the Judeo-Christian sense.
[00:34:57.800 --> 00:35:07.720] Let's say it's a super advanced extraterrestrial intelligence with super advanced AI, and they can create planets out of condensing clouds of interstellar gas or whatever.
[00:35:07.720 --> 00:35:09.480] It's an engineering project.
[00:35:09.480 --> 00:35:15.000] To us, it would look like a god, but if but to a scientist, it would be, well, that's just a super advanced AI.
[00:35:15.760 --> 00:35:33.920] Well, I mean, that's a separate idea, which isn't completely crazy, because there's no reason to think that we are the first intelligences because life could have got started on planets around stars two or three billion years older than the sun, which could have been far ahead of us.
[00:35:33.920 --> 00:35:43.040] So the idea that there are aliens who are vastly more intelligent than us is not a crazy idea.
[00:35:43.360 --> 00:35:49.280] And the idea that we, in some way, are consequences of their existence is not completely crazy.
[00:35:49.280 --> 00:35:52.320] But this is part of science.
[00:35:53.280 --> 00:35:59.440] Okay, last question on the creationist side, because you wrote a book called Just Six Numbers, which I've quoted.
[00:35:59.440 --> 00:36:01.920] But the intelligent design creationists quoted also.
[00:36:01.920 --> 00:36:08.160] They go, look, the great Lord Martin Rees says these are the six numbers that have to come together for us to exist.
[00:36:08.160 --> 00:36:09.920] There's no way this could happen by chance.
[00:36:09.920 --> 00:36:13.280] There must have been a tuner behind it, a designer.
[00:36:13.920 --> 00:36:15.360] Well, I just don't agree with them.
[00:36:15.360 --> 00:36:26.160] I mean, one simple answer would be in the Linde model, where there are many, many big bangs, and each of them has different numbers.
[00:36:26.160 --> 00:36:32.080] And some will have the numbers which are in the range that allows complexity to emerge.
[00:36:32.080 --> 00:36:33.600] That's just one answer.
[00:36:33.600 --> 00:36:36.320] So I don't really see this as a serious problem.
[00:36:36.800 --> 00:36:47.680] But more seriously, those six numbers were the ones which seemed to be the appropriate ones when I wrote this book 20 years ago.
[00:36:48.080 --> 00:37:02.200] And I think they're still the same ones because the most recently discovered number of those six was Lambda, the cosmic expansion, the one that causes the university series and the expansion.
[00:37:02.760 --> 00:37:22.680] But of course, I wish in my lifetime I'd be able to write a book called The Seventh Number, The Keys of the Universe, which I could do if there is progress in some sort of unified theory, which links together the micro world of nucleus and the cosmos and gravity.
[00:37:22.680 --> 00:37:26.520] That's, of course, the goal that people are working for.
[00:37:26.520 --> 00:37:27.080] Yeah.
[00:37:28.280 --> 00:37:31.960] That was Steven Weinberg's answer when I asked him the same question.
[00:37:31.960 --> 00:37:39.240] He said, well, when we unify it all, then there'll probably just be one number that explains the other six numbers.
[00:37:41.960 --> 00:37:50.920] Another philosophy of science question, model-dependent realism that Hawking and Leonard Milan now presented in their book, The Grand Design.
[00:37:52.120 --> 00:37:54.920] Do you want to comment on that?
[00:37:56.200 --> 00:37:57.160] They're just models.
[00:37:57.160 --> 00:37:59.640] We don't know what the reality really is.
[00:38:01.720 --> 00:38:03.320] I don't think I know what they say.
[00:38:03.320 --> 00:38:04.200] I'm sorry.
[00:38:04.360 --> 00:38:04.600] Okay.
[00:38:04.600 --> 00:38:05.080] It's all right.
[00:38:05.080 --> 00:38:06.280] No, it's all right.
[00:38:06.920 --> 00:38:10.600] And Leonard does have a funny story about that, though.
[00:38:10.600 --> 00:38:23.640] When that book came out, I think it was one of the London newspapers, whatever your biggest one there said, something like on the pub date: Stephen Hawking says they've proved there is no God.
[00:38:23.960 --> 00:38:27.560] And so Leonard had to do all the media interviews that day.
[00:38:27.560 --> 00:38:29.880] And he's like, we never said that.
[00:38:34.920 --> 00:38:35.800] Yeah, okay.
[00:38:36.440 --> 00:38:41.080] And then one other question on, again, another sort of philosophy of science question.
[00:38:41.400 --> 00:38:44.760] You hear this phrase, consensus science.
[00:38:45.680 --> 00:38:56.240] Now, you often hear this, you know, derogatorily regarding COVID and masks and vaccines, things like that, because of everything that happened during that time.
[00:38:56.240 --> 00:38:58.640] But is there something like consensus science?
[00:38:58.640 --> 00:39:02.160] The Big Bang, the way you describe the Big Bang is, well, there's a consensus now.
[00:39:02.160 --> 00:39:03.760] The steady state theory was wrong.
[00:39:03.760 --> 00:39:05.360] The Big Bang theory was right.
[00:39:05.360 --> 00:39:09.600] The theory of evolution, as Darwin presents it, is mostly right, consensus there.
[00:39:09.600 --> 00:39:12.800] The alternatives to it are probably wrong and so on.
[00:39:14.080 --> 00:39:22.160] Yes, and obviously the consensus will grow as present controversies eventually are settled.
[00:39:22.400 --> 00:39:30.240] So there's always going to be parts of science where we're pretty confident that things won't change.
[00:39:30.720 --> 00:39:36.880] And of course, a penumbra of controversial issues on which people are still working.
[00:39:36.880 --> 00:39:38.560] I think that's the way science will advance.
[00:39:38.560 --> 00:39:43.920] And of course, we've got to make advances.
[00:39:43.920 --> 00:39:49.280] And until that time, there are bound to be varieties of ideas.
[00:39:49.920 --> 00:39:50.800] Yep.
[00:39:51.120 --> 00:39:53.680] Okay, a couple other super interesting questions.
[00:39:54.000 --> 00:39:55.280] Fermi's paradox.
[00:39:55.280 --> 00:39:56.400] Where is everybody?
[00:39:56.400 --> 00:40:00.080] Do you think the aliens are out there and they just haven't found us yet?
[00:40:00.640 --> 00:40:16.560] Well, I mean, I do have a view expressed in an article with Mario Livio, which I think is not widely discussed, but which is my favorite view.
[00:40:16.880 --> 00:40:22.240] Well, first of all, let me say that we may be alone in the universe.
[00:40:22.240 --> 00:40:26.880] It could be that the origin of life is such a rare fluke, it has to happen elsewhere.
[00:40:26.880 --> 00:40:42.360] But let's, most people think it's unlikely, and incidentally, within 10 or 20 years, we will certainly know if simple life is rare or common from discoveries made mainly looking at exoplanets.
[00:40:42.600 --> 00:40:46.360] So we know that that will happen.
[00:40:46.360 --> 00:40:57.880] But as regards intelligent life, of course, you're quoting the famous Fermi paradox where discussing with colleagues he said, where are they all?
[00:40:57.880 --> 00:41:00.680] Why haven't they come and eaten us if they exist, as it were?
[00:41:03.080 --> 00:41:10.440] And of course, that is an argument against there being too many aliens which are before us.
[00:41:10.760 --> 00:41:15.400] But my argument, which at least weakens that, is the following.
[00:41:15.720 --> 00:41:22.680] Let's consider the evolution of the Earth and life on it, not just up till now, but in the future.
[00:41:23.000 --> 00:41:25.720] The Earth's four and a half billion years old.
[00:41:25.720 --> 00:41:40.120] It's taken sort of four billion years from the first protozoa to evolve via Darwinian selection into our biosphere of which we're a part.
[00:41:40.760 --> 00:41:45.800] But the Earth has six billion years ahead of it before the sun dies.
[00:41:45.800 --> 00:41:52.360] So in terms of time, we are not the culmination, not the end point of evolution.
[00:41:52.360 --> 00:41:56.520] We are not even the halfway stage in the emergence of complexity.
[00:41:56.520 --> 00:42:03.240] But if you make a guess of what's going to happen from what's happening now, things are happening very, very fast.
[00:42:03.240 --> 00:42:20.320] And it won't take a geological time, may only take a few centuries before we are superseded by post-humans, either drastically genetically modified versions of humans or entirely electronic entities.
[00:42:21.200 --> 00:42:25.040] And I think it's more likely to be electronic entities.
[00:42:25.040 --> 00:42:32.320] And I think the first civilization on Mars, if there is one, will be electronic, not humans.
[00:42:32.560 --> 00:42:43.600] But once you've got electronic entities of superhuman intelligence, then they're going to evolve, but not by Darwinian selection.
[00:42:43.600 --> 00:42:51.760] They will evolve by designing themselves better ones.
[00:42:51.760 --> 00:42:54.480] It's what I like to call secular intelligent design.
[00:42:54.480 --> 00:42:56.640] They'll design better and better like that.
[00:42:56.960 --> 00:43:14.640] And so there could be out there electronic entities which were triggered in existence by some civilization like ours, which is long dead.
[00:43:14.960 --> 00:43:28.880] And the point then is that whereas Darwinian selection favors aggression and competition, that's not the case for the sort of designing of better machines by existing machines.
[00:43:28.880 --> 00:43:38.080] And so there's no particular reason to believe that aliens, if they're of this electronic form, are aggressive or expansionist.
[00:43:38.080 --> 00:43:45.680] And they could be out there thinking deep thoughts, knowing all about us, but just leaving us, letting us be.
[00:43:45.680 --> 00:43:47.920] No reason they want to invade us.
[00:43:49.280 --> 00:43:50.080] Yeah, okay.
[00:43:50.080 --> 00:44:08.360] But Martin, if you have multiple species of these self-replicating machines who are then in competition for scarce resources on a planet, are they not going to then develop something like the emotions of wanting something?
[00:44:08.360 --> 00:44:12.440] And then you know the other machine also wants it, so you're in competition.
[00:44:12.440 --> 00:44:16.280] So let's not use words like aggression or violence in some negative way.
[00:44:16.280 --> 00:44:21.400] This is just the kind of game theoretic outcome of organisms trying to survive.
[00:44:21.400 --> 00:44:23.080] I don't think they'll be on planets at all.
[00:44:23.080 --> 00:44:25.960] I think they'll all be roaming separately in deep space.
[00:44:25.960 --> 00:44:26.840] Oh, okay.
[00:44:27.400 --> 00:44:30.360] Just consuming what will they use for energy?
[00:44:30.600 --> 00:44:36.920] Well, I mean, it may be something we haven't yet devised, or the background radiation or something like that.
[00:44:37.960 --> 00:44:41.320] We can't conceive the physics that will prevail there.
[00:44:41.320 --> 00:44:42.680] And so that's interesting.
[00:44:44.920 --> 00:44:51.480] They are not creatures like us, and there's no reason to think that they're going to be competing.
[00:44:51.800 --> 00:44:52.440] Yeah.
[00:44:52.440 --> 00:44:54.040] I think you're probably right about that.
[00:44:54.040 --> 00:45:05.400] I think von Neumann had the original idea that gave Fermi the paradox thought experiment that self-replicating machines could colonize the entire Milky Way galaxy in like 10 million years or something.
[00:45:05.400 --> 00:45:07.160] They could have done this a long time ago.
[00:45:08.040 --> 00:45:09.160] And so where are they?
[00:45:09.160 --> 00:45:10.200] Where are these machines?
[00:45:10.200 --> 00:45:14.280] Well, as you know, your colleague Avi Loeb is looking for the machines.
[00:45:14.280 --> 00:45:20.280] He just posted an article this morning, in fact, July 2nd, where recording this.
[00:45:21.000 --> 00:45:26.120] Another extrasolar system object flew through past Mars or something like that.
[00:45:26.760 --> 00:45:28.120] You were saying, sorry.
[00:45:28.120 --> 00:45:31.320] No, he's not really a colleague, but he's an old friend.
[00:45:31.320 --> 00:45:31.960] Oh, okay.
[00:45:31.960 --> 00:45:32.840] All right.
[00:45:33.800 --> 00:45:34.760] But what do you make of that?
[00:45:34.760 --> 00:45:45.000] I mean, most astrobiologists are looking for microbial life or gases in atmospheres of exoplanets that would suggest there's living organisms.
[00:45:45.040 --> 00:45:53.040] But Avi wants to look for technosignatures like Dyson spheres or machines that fly through our solar system.
[00:45:53.040 --> 00:45:53.440] Yes.
[00:45:53.440 --> 00:45:55.600] Well, I think he's quite right.
[00:45:56.000 --> 00:46:24.960] I think he was over optimistic in claiming he'd found one, but I certainly think it's very important not just to look for radio transmissions and things like that, which traditional SETI has done, but to look for artifacts, things going through the solar system, look for monuments on the outer planets, like the 2001 obelisk, etc.
[00:46:25.120 --> 00:46:32.800] Look for everything, look for something shiny in the asteroid belt or artificial look for because we have no idea what to expect.
[00:46:33.040 --> 00:46:35.680] So I'm not deriding the search.
[00:46:35.680 --> 00:46:41.520] I just think it's going to be a hard job to actually find something that's convincing.
[00:46:41.520 --> 00:46:42.000] Yeah.
[00:46:42.320 --> 00:46:43.760] I had Adam Frank on the show.
[00:46:43.760 --> 00:46:50.240] He was talking about the aliens could have come here, but if they did, it wouldn't be like in 1947.
[00:46:50.560 --> 00:46:58.400] It would be like, you know, 10 million years ago, and there'd be no signs of their coming here at all because everything would be erased.
[00:46:58.640 --> 00:47:00.080] I mean, even the pyramids.
[00:47:00.320 --> 00:47:01.840] He had a calculation that the great.
[00:47:02.640 --> 00:47:03.440] Sorry, go ahead.
[00:47:03.520 --> 00:47:07.600] Let's go back to Olaf Stableton, about the last and first men.
[00:47:07.600 --> 00:47:10.640] There could be no trace of earlier civilizations.
[00:47:11.600 --> 00:47:12.160] Yeah.
[00:47:12.160 --> 00:47:20.880] Yeah, because he had a calculation about that the Great Pyramids will be gone within a couple million years, just ground down by weathering, and there'll be no trace of them.
[00:47:20.880 --> 00:47:21.680] Well, yeah.
[00:47:21.680 --> 00:47:24.080] So, so right.
[00:47:24.080 --> 00:47:25.600] It's so hard to conceive of these things.
[00:47:25.600 --> 00:47:33.560] When I was flying over to the UK to interview you for our documentary, I watched Contact was on the airplane entertainment thing.
[00:47:29.760 --> 00:47:35.720] So I re-watched Sagan's Contact.
[00:47:35.720 --> 00:47:44.440] And, you know, that now, the search for listening for prime numbers or whatever, that seems to be a little passe now for SETI, right?
[00:47:44.440 --> 00:47:46.600] They're trying to find new things to look for.
[00:47:46.600 --> 00:47:48.440] Well, I think they're still doing that.
[00:47:48.600 --> 00:47:58.120] I should say that I chair Yuri Milner's Breakthrough Listen Committee, which is promoting search-effective radio.
[00:47:58.120 --> 00:48:09.160] They're buying time of big radio telescopes to do that sort of thing, but for more complicated software and also special instruments that can look for some unusual patterns.
[00:48:09.400 --> 00:48:10.840] So that's being done.
[00:48:10.840 --> 00:48:27.640] But I think we should also look for artifacts and they do as well, but and keep our eyes open, whatever observations we're doing for something which looks manifestly unlikely to have emerged naturally.
[00:48:27.640 --> 00:48:28.200] Yeah.
[00:48:28.520 --> 00:48:37.160] But again, it's like a religious impulse there of, you know, if there are aliens that are out there, they're going to be super advanced.
[00:48:37.160 --> 00:48:43.720] And if they know that we're here and they're monitoring us or whatever, that does have a kind of sense like, well, that's a God, right?
[00:48:43.720 --> 00:48:46.520] That's what God is to most religious people.
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[00:49:18.480 --> 00:49:25.360] One of my Scientific American columns, I wrote about a study done by Clay Routledge on the search for aliens.
[00:49:25.760 --> 00:49:28.720] People who, let's see, what was the correlations here?
[00:49:28.720 --> 00:49:45.600] That people that score high in need for spirituality, they consider themselves a spiritual person, but they're not traditionally religious, are more likely to think aliens are out there than those who are more mainstream religious believers.
[00:49:45.920 --> 00:49:53.280] And the one other component was if you have a high need of awe, there's different measures that psychologists use to get this.
[00:49:53.600 --> 00:50:05.840] And that the search for aliens or the belief that there's aliens out there is kind of an awe-inspiring spiritual fulfillment thing that if you're not religious, that kind of replaces it.
[00:50:07.680 --> 00:50:09.040] That may be true.
[00:50:10.000 --> 00:50:12.640] Well, I mean, you won the Templeton Prize, but you're an atheist.
[00:50:12.880 --> 00:50:18.560] That was quite unusual for them to give a prize to an atheist, but you're not a militant atheist.
[00:50:18.880 --> 00:50:22.080] No, I think I know you've had Dawkins on your show.
[00:50:22.080 --> 00:50:24.400] I mean, indeed, he's one of your heroes.
[00:50:24.400 --> 00:50:28.320] And I admire his work on evolution.
[00:50:28.320 --> 00:50:43.360] But I was on his show a few months ago when he had recently written an article saying he was a cultural Christian in that he enjoyed Christmas carols and going to cathedrals, etc.
[00:50:43.920 --> 00:50:46.640] And I'd use that phrase myself.
[00:50:46.640 --> 00:50:54.400] But I said that if he really felt that way about the church, he was being parasitic.
[00:50:54.400 --> 00:50:56.240] But it wouldn't be there.
[00:50:56.240 --> 00:51:02.040] Were there not many people who actually believe this stuff who kept it going and had created it?
[00:51:03.080 --> 00:51:05.560] I am a cultural Christian.
[00:51:05.560 --> 00:51:14.920] I don't believe anything in particular, but I wouldn't do anything to reduce the faith of those who have it.
[00:51:14.920 --> 00:51:15.720] Good luck to them.
[00:51:16.040 --> 00:51:19.720] I don't have any, but I wouldn't want to do anything to diminish their faith.
[00:51:19.720 --> 00:51:34.360] I certainly wouldn't want to attack them in the way that Dawkins and the people who call them new atheists, who in my view are just small-time Bertrand Russells saying less well what he said a century ago.
[00:51:34.360 --> 00:51:36.440] You know, there's nothing new in what they say.
[00:51:36.680 --> 00:51:49.320] But I would say that if one appreciates the cultural value, then let them continue to keep it going by being actual believers.
[00:51:49.320 --> 00:51:52.040] I don't see any reason why we shouldn't do that.
[00:51:52.040 --> 00:52:03.160] But I think the other point is that one has to realize how much of what all humans do is not directly rational.
[00:52:03.960 --> 00:52:13.560] So there's a blur distinction between what one calls religion and what one calls rational behaviour.
[00:52:13.560 --> 00:52:18.040] And it doesn't depend on some sort of God as the old man in the sky.
[00:52:18.520 --> 00:52:28.280] To take two examples, one is the wish to celebrate funerals and lay flowers at places where there's relaxed.
[00:52:28.840 --> 00:52:33.400] That's something which is done by people who wouldn't call themselves confessive religion.
[00:52:33.400 --> 00:52:34.120] That's one thing.
[00:52:34.120 --> 00:52:39.960] And the other thing is the huge effort made to recover dead bodies.
[00:52:40.280 --> 00:52:53.600] As you know, it's thought very important by most people, and they risk their lives to recover bodies from war zones or from shipwrecks and things like that.
[00:52:53.920 --> 00:53:00.400] Now, that's in a sense entirely irrational, but it's a very strong human impulse.
[00:53:00.400 --> 00:53:10.560] And so I just think that the people who are atheists should realize that there are lots of human impulses which are strong, which are nothing to do with conventional religion.
[00:53:11.840 --> 00:53:12.400] Interesting.
[00:53:12.400 --> 00:53:27.040] Yeah, I had a philosophy professor in college, Richard Hardison, who used to tell a story of when he went, I think, to the Philippines or somewhere, and he was passing by a cemetery and they were putting food out to the, you know, their lost, their dead loved ones.
[00:53:27.280 --> 00:53:33.600] And he made a snarky remark about, you know, when are the loved ones going to come back and eat the food?
[00:53:33.600 --> 00:53:38.320] And the response was, about the same time your guys are coming back to smell the flowers.
[00:53:43.920 --> 00:53:47.920] Well, so, but I want to distinguish between two different concepts here.
[00:53:48.400 --> 00:53:52.960] Dan Dennett made a point in his book about belief and belief.
[00:53:52.960 --> 00:54:04.320] So a lot of his fellow professor philosophers and scientists, you know, like you say, well, I don't believe I'm an atheist, but I believe in belief, that some people need to believe.
[00:54:04.320 --> 00:54:09.120] But there's an element of that argument that's kind of condescending.
[00:54:09.360 --> 00:54:12.800] You know, religion's for the little people, the people that need it.
[00:54:12.800 --> 00:54:15.840] And we intellectual elites, we don't need it.
[00:54:16.400 --> 00:54:18.480] You don't mean it that way, do you?
[00:54:18.800 --> 00:54:19.920] No, no, I don't.
[00:54:19.920 --> 00:54:22.320] I just wish I could believe.
[00:54:22.320 --> 00:54:24.720] I wish I did believe, but I just don't.
[00:54:25.360 --> 00:54:26.000] But you just don't.
[00:54:26.000 --> 00:54:26.400] But why?
[00:54:27.920 --> 00:54:29.280] Is it an empirical question?
[00:54:29.280 --> 00:54:34.760] And if there was just a little more evidence for the resurrection of Jesus, say, you'd be a Christian.
[00:54:34.760 --> 00:54:36.200] Or is it off the table?
[00:54:29.840 --> 00:54:37.240] There's no way to know.
[00:54:37.880 --> 00:54:44.040] Well, I think you must distinguish between particular religious stories and religion in general.
[00:54:44.600 --> 00:55:01.560] And I don't really share either, but the main point is that I know people who do believe all that stuff, who are certainly as intelligent as me, and I don't want to disparage them or dismiss their views.
[00:55:02.200 --> 00:55:06.520] Well, okay, so here's let me come at it another way.
[00:55:06.520 --> 00:55:09.880] This is not my argument, but it's a good one.
[00:55:10.200 --> 00:55:17.400] So if I say there's a parking lot behind the church, the church goers can go check for themselves.
[00:55:17.400 --> 00:55:19.000] They go, yeah, there it is.
[00:55:19.000 --> 00:55:24.520] But if I say God is three and one and one and three, and the believers go, yeah, I believe that.
[00:55:24.520 --> 00:55:26.360] But they can't go check.
[00:55:26.360 --> 00:55:29.880] It's just like, well, that's what we believe because we're Catholic or whatever.
[00:55:32.440 --> 00:55:35.640] So, I mean, it's an epistemological question.
[00:55:35.960 --> 00:55:39.560] What's on the table for you and what's off the table?
[00:55:39.560 --> 00:55:42.680] So, you know, whether the Big Bang happened or not, this is an empirical question.
[00:55:42.680 --> 00:55:43.720] We'll just answer it.
[00:55:43.720 --> 00:55:46.440] Or climate change is human-caused or it's not, you know.
[00:55:47.320 --> 00:55:54.280] But these other kinds of questions, you know, how could God be three in one, the problem of identity and so forth?
[00:55:54.280 --> 00:55:55.480] How would they get around that?
[00:55:55.480 --> 00:55:58.360] And theologians write great treatises about these things.
[00:55:58.360 --> 00:56:02.920] Or, you know, how could somebody who's actually really dead for three days, really come back?
[00:56:02.920 --> 00:56:10.600] Now, I have tried, interestingly, a new set of arguments that maybe it didn't happen literally.
[00:56:10.600 --> 00:56:23.680] Maybe it's a mythical kind of truth, a story, a story that has deeper purposes about the human condition or something like that, starting over redemption.
[00:56:24.800 --> 00:56:30.000] The resurrection represents forgiveness and redemption, that sort of thing.
[00:56:30.800 --> 00:56:34.480] In a kind of a Joseph Campbell, you know, mythology way.
[00:56:34.480 --> 00:56:38.000] But most of the Christians I float this past, they're not buying it.
[00:56:38.000 --> 00:56:39.520] They're saying, no, no, no.
[00:56:39.840 --> 00:56:44.400] If the resurrection didn't literally happen, we should not be Christians.
[00:56:44.400 --> 00:56:45.120] Yes.
[00:56:45.600 --> 00:56:46.960] No, some do say that.
[00:56:46.960 --> 00:56:49.600] In fact, our last archbishop said that.
[00:56:50.560 --> 00:56:51.200] He did?
[00:56:51.200 --> 00:56:52.320] Some does say that.
[00:56:52.960 --> 00:57:01.520] But see, I think Richard's point is that why would you believe it then if there's no reason to believe it?
[00:57:01.840 --> 00:57:04.960] So for him, there aren't mythical truths in that sense.
[00:57:05.360 --> 00:57:06.800] They're the equivalent of empirical.
[00:57:06.800 --> 00:57:08.000] There's something different.
[00:57:08.480 --> 00:57:09.200] Yes.
[00:57:09.200 --> 00:57:18.160] Well, I mean, I suggest you should talk to Roan Williams, who's at least as intelligent as him, who does believe this stuff.
[00:57:18.720 --> 00:57:19.440] Well, that's true.
[00:57:19.440 --> 00:57:19.680] Yes.
[00:57:19.680 --> 00:57:24.160] And they've had some, I think there's some conversations with them on film.
[00:57:25.040 --> 00:57:38.400] You know, but I guess it's, I think you're right that most of what we believe in other areas as well, politics, economics, ideology, culture, even like, you know, what's happening in Iran right now.
[00:57:38.720 --> 00:57:39.520] How would I know?
[00:57:39.760 --> 00:57:44.320] I depend on what the news media tells me or the president.
[00:57:44.320 --> 00:57:49.040] And I have reasons to be maybe skeptical of some of it, you know, but I can't go check.
[00:57:49.040 --> 00:57:52.640] I'm not going to go over there and check to see if they really have nuclear weapons or not.
[00:57:52.960 --> 00:57:53.280] Right.
[00:57:53.280 --> 00:57:57.040] So, most of what we believe about the world comes from other sources.
[00:57:57.040 --> 00:57:57.840] Yes, yes.
[00:57:57.840 --> 00:58:09.080] But I think when one gets into sort of politics and ethics, then of course that is, as we know, subjective.
[00:58:09.080 --> 00:58:16.920] And in fact, I've done podcasts with various of these atheistic people.
[00:58:16.920 --> 00:58:18.840] I did one with Sam Harris.
[00:58:18.840 --> 00:58:28.680] And I said that our choice of ethical systems was rather like our aesthetic judgments.
[00:58:28.680 --> 00:58:33.080] We might think something is beautiful, rate it highly, and does not.
[00:58:33.080 --> 00:58:39.080] And that's not completely objective, but nor are our ethical views.
[00:58:39.080 --> 00:58:42.120] And he reacted.
[00:58:42.440 --> 00:58:51.400] He said that ethics, he said, aesthetics, he said, is objective.
[00:58:51.400 --> 00:59:03.560] He said, you know, if you could go through the works of Shakespeare and catalogue the word use or something like that, you'd come out with something special, which is why we value Shakespeare, which struck me as rubbish.
[00:59:03.560 --> 00:59:16.440] And so I think the reasons that we rate some artists as great and others not is a judgment which you can't reduce to any constitutive scientific assessment.
[00:59:16.440 --> 00:59:24.360] And I would put aesthetic judgments and ethical judgments both in that category.
[00:59:24.680 --> 00:59:35.200] Well, okay, do you think that the abolition of slavery and torture and other medieval practices that we are appalled by today.
[00:59:35.200 --> 00:59:47.360] Is real objective progress morally, or is it just random and maybe a couple of centuries from now, women won't have the vote, slave trade will be back in vogue in England, and so on?
[00:59:47.680 --> 00:59:48.480] Well, it could be.
[00:59:48.480 --> 00:59:49.760] I really hope not.
[00:59:50.880 --> 00:59:51.680] Right.
[00:59:52.000 --> 00:59:56.960] So, your book, Our Final Hour, you wrote, what is that, maybe a decade ago now?
[00:59:56.960 --> 01:00:05.600] Are you still what did you put us at 50, 50 percent chance Bayesian 50 percent probability of making it to 2100, something like that?
[01:00:06.320 --> 01:00:08.800] I should say that that was the American title.
[01:00:08.800 --> 01:00:20.000] Um, I um I gave the book the title Our Final Century Question Mark, and the British publishers put away the question mark, and the American publisher was asking me, uh, gave it this absurd title.
[01:00:20.000 --> 01:00:26.080] But I think to answer your question seriously, um, I think we're going to have a bumpy ride.
[01:00:26.080 --> 01:00:49.040] Um, I'm not an optimist that we will avoid uh mega-disasters because the ones that I've discussed and which we now have a group in Cambridge focusing on are disasters where by error or terror, even a small group of people can create a catastrophe which cascades globally.
[01:00:49.040 --> 01:00:58.240] This is something which is really new, and I think that's going to give us a bumpy ride, and we just have to make sure we can cope with these without too many disasters.
[01:00:58.240 --> 01:01:11.440] So, I don't think we wipe ourselves out completely, but we are going to have problems, and so I'm not too optimistic about the overall political scene 10 or 20 years from now.
[01:01:11.440 --> 01:01:13.360] But I hope for the best.
[01:01:14.720 --> 01:01:25.840] You said it in an interesting way: we're due as if it's some kind of, I don't know, inevitability or some larger force or what it's just people acting certain ways that we should be worried about.
[01:01:25.840 --> 01:01:28.320] So, like, well, what would be the biggest concern?
[01:01:28.320 --> 01:01:29.520] Nuclear weapons?
[01:01:30.200 --> 01:01:39.000] Um, I think, I think the biggest concern is we're obviously engineered pandemics, even though pandemics.
[01:01:39.000 --> 01:01:53.240] Um, that's that's one, and the other is simply um uh over-dependence on globally connected networks for the internet and electricity grids and all the rest of it.
[01:01:53.240 --> 01:01:55.320] And uh, we're so dependent on them.
[01:01:55.320 --> 01:02:20.920] I mean, it's uh, I quote in one of my books, a 2012 um report from your Department of Defense, which says that if there was a state-level attack on the electricity grid on the east coast of the US, uh, then it would lead to complete social breakdown within a few days, and they say it would merit a nuclear response on the purpose of the human service.
[01:02:20.920 --> 01:02:34.840] Now, the worry is that maybe, um, unless we're very careful and avoid um uh interconnection of lots of different networks, um, there's a risk that it wouldn't take a state actor to generate that sort of cyber attack.
[01:02:34.840 --> 01:02:38.840] It could be done by a small group with the aid of AI.
[01:02:38.840 --> 01:02:51.400] And so, I think our vulnerabilities are increasing as we depend more on networks for the internet, for electricity, for communications, DPS, and all these things.
[01:02:51.400 --> 01:02:54.280] And so, that's the reason why I worry.
[01:02:54.280 --> 01:03:04.760] And I think we've got to prioritize resilience and multiple supply chains and all the rest of it, if we are to be safe.
[01:03:06.040 --> 01:03:07.000] Yeah, okay.
[01:03:07.880 --> 01:03:13.960] So, that would not necessarily then lead to a nuclear exchange because these attacks are not going to come with a return address.
[01:03:13.960 --> 01:03:14.840] Who do we nuke?
[01:03:15.440 --> 01:03:16.640] No, no.
[01:03:17.840 --> 01:03:22.160] And the taboo against using nuclear weapons is pretty strong.
[01:03:22.160 --> 01:03:25.040] I mean, it's not been done since 1945.
[01:03:25.360 --> 01:03:29.440] No, but an engineered pandemic is worse in itself than a nuclear attack.
[01:03:29.680 --> 01:03:30.160] Oh, yes.
[01:03:30.160 --> 01:03:30.560] Okay.
[01:03:30.560 --> 01:03:32.240] So, all right.
[01:03:32.240 --> 01:03:34.480] Why has this not happened yet then?
[01:03:35.040 --> 01:03:36.640] Let me key it up here for you.
[01:03:36.640 --> 01:03:44.320] So I have one of my friends here works in a software company for internet security stuff.
[01:03:44.320 --> 01:03:44.960] Okay.
[01:03:45.280 --> 01:03:48.240] And so I drive a Tesla.
[01:03:48.240 --> 01:03:52.800] So he's always telling me, you know, somebody, your car is online.
[01:03:52.800 --> 01:03:56.960] So somebody could take over, steer your car into the wall.
[01:03:56.960 --> 01:04:03.440] And for that matter, you know, they could take, you know, there's 10,000 Teslas on the highways of just Southern California, probably maybe more.
[01:04:03.440 --> 01:04:04.080] I don't know.
[01:04:04.080 --> 01:04:13.840] They could take over all of the Teslas at once and have a mass terrorist attack, drive them all into the wall in the 405 freeway and cause a mass casualty event.
[01:04:14.080 --> 01:04:19.600] Or for that matter, they could cause airplanes to fall out of the sky by taking over their controls or whatever.
[01:04:19.600 --> 01:04:21.520] Okay, why has this not happened?
[01:04:21.520 --> 01:04:23.520] Because there are people that would want to do that.
[01:04:23.520 --> 01:04:27.360] There are bad people, and the technology has been there to do that for a while.
[01:04:27.360 --> 01:04:29.280] Why has it not happened?
[01:04:30.880 --> 01:04:39.360] Well, it's not perhaps so probable that you expect it to happen within one or two years, but it may be probable enough that you expect it to happen within 20 years.
[01:04:39.360 --> 01:04:51.920] So I think the fact that something is okay at the moment is not a reason for complacency when, of course, our dependence on these systems is growing all the time.
[01:04:51.920 --> 01:05:08.520] So I think, and that's why we came to set up this system because we feel there needs to be far more attention given to resilience against all these kinds of cascading threats to the technology we depend on.
[01:05:09.160 --> 01:05:31.960] Kevin Kelly's response to that is that the more interlinked everything is, the harder it is for terrorists to pull off something like just taking over the entire electric grid or whatever, because there's so many interlinking links in the chain that it's not possible to put them all together in one way.
[01:05:32.280 --> 01:05:32.920] Yes.
[01:05:33.400 --> 01:05:35.720] Whether that's true or not, I don't know.
[01:05:35.720 --> 01:05:38.120] And I haven't mentioned undersea cables yet.
[01:05:38.120 --> 01:05:39.320] That's another threat.
[01:05:39.640 --> 01:05:43.560] So I think we just have to make sure.
[01:05:43.560 --> 01:05:56.600] But I think the fact that these things haven't happened yet is not very reassuring when we know there's a greater variety of possible scenarios, each getting more probable with time.
[01:05:57.480 --> 01:05:58.520] Interesting.
[01:05:58.520 --> 01:06:00.200] All right, Martin, I know you got to go.
[01:06:00.680 --> 01:06:02.040] One last question here.
[01:06:02.760 --> 01:06:08.440] You've said you're, well, I guess I would ask, are you optimistic, pessimistic, realistic, whatever?
[01:06:08.680 --> 01:06:11.080] You had that bet with Steven Pinker, which was interesting.
[01:06:11.240 --> 01:06:12.760] I like the idea of betting markets.
[01:06:13.320 --> 01:06:14.280] Let's not just speculate.
[01:06:14.280 --> 01:06:15.320] Let's put some money on it.
[01:06:16.280 --> 01:06:24.920] And it appears you, it looks like you won that one, sort of, but I guess it depended on whether it was a lab leak or a zoonomic cause, right?
[01:06:25.560 --> 01:06:33.720] It ended at, I thought I'd won because there was a pandemic, which he didn't expect.
[01:06:33.720 --> 01:06:38.840] But of course, we said a pandemic caused by error or terror.
[01:06:39.160 --> 01:06:47.360] And of course, as you know, there's been a debate about whether it was caused by leakage from the Wotan lab or whether it was natural.
[01:06:47.360 --> 01:06:50.480] And we don't know, but of course, both are possible.
[01:06:50.480 --> 01:06:55.840] But one thing we can hope for is better vaccines for future pandemics.
[01:06:55.840 --> 01:06:59.200] That's the key salvation, I suppose.
[01:07:00.240 --> 01:07:11.120] But in terms of the far future of humanity, do we need to change human nature or can we technologically and scientifically just engineer society to make it there?
[01:07:11.120 --> 01:07:16.160] Well, that's going back to Aldous Huxley and Brave New World, isn't it?
[01:07:18.720 --> 01:07:19.840] I think we don't know.
[01:07:19.840 --> 01:07:26.960] But I think another point is that we can't really predict things.
[01:07:27.600 --> 01:07:28.640] Change is so fast.
[01:07:29.120 --> 01:07:30.160] We can't predict things.
[01:07:30.160 --> 01:07:50.560] And in fact, I use this paradox in my book where I contrast the people who built cathedrals in the Middle Ages, which took 100 years to build and they wouldn't be finished in a lifetime, but they still were committed to building the cathedral.
[01:07:50.960 --> 01:07:59.200] Whereas now, we don't really plan 100 years ahead, even though our horizons stretch for billions of years.
[01:07:59.200 --> 01:08:05.280] Whereas in medieval times, their horizons were only a small part of Europe.
[01:08:05.600 --> 01:08:07.040] So it seems paradoxical.
[01:08:07.040 --> 01:08:22.880] But the reason it's not paradoxical is that in the Middle Ages, even though their horizons were narrow, they thought their children and grandchildren would live as they did and have the same preferences and tastes as they do.
[01:08:22.880 --> 01:08:27.040] Whereas I don't think we can say that now of our children and grandchildren.
[01:08:27.040 --> 01:08:35.640] The changes are so rapid, and that therefore is a deterrent to very long-term planning because we don't quite know what our descendants are going to want.
[01:08:36.360 --> 01:08:44.040] Even if they are trying to be good ancestors, we don't quite know what to do in order to ensure that we do the best for our descendants.
[01:08:44.360 --> 01:08:46.760] Yeah, that's a nice way to put it.
[01:08:53.160 --> 01:08:58.680] What I would say to someone who's considering FDU is to come because they give great scholarship opportunities.
[01:08:58.680 --> 01:09:00.440] The professors are very helpful.
[01:09:00.440 --> 01:09:03.240] They want you to learn and they want you to pass.
[01:09:03.240 --> 01:09:05.880] And FDU gives you a second family.
[01:09:05.880 --> 01:09:09.240] See the moment and change your world at FDU.