You can listen to the #2217 – Brian Cox using Speak’s shareable media player:
#2217 – Brian Cox Podcast Episode Description
Professor Brian Cox is an English physicist and Professor of Particle Physics in the School of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Manchester in the UK, author of many books, and broadcast personality.
www.apolloschildren.com
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
This interactive media player was created automatically by Speak. Want to generate intelligent media players yourself? Sign up for Speak!
#2217 – Brian Cox Podcast Episode Top Keywords
#2217 – Brian Cox Podcast Episode Summary
In this episode of the Joe Rogan Experience, the discussion revolves around the themes of human curiosity, the essence of being human, and the implications of artificial intelligence (AI). The conversation delves into the philosophical aspects of human emotions such as hope and fear, emphasizing their importance in defining the human experience. The speakers explore how these emotions are tied to the unknown and how they drive human exploration and survival.
A significant portion of the discussion is dedicated to the potential impact of AI on humanity. The speakers ponder whether AI could transcend human limitations and what that would mean for human emotions and motivations. They suggest that if humans were to possess infinite information, the need for hope and curiosity might diminish, fundamentally altering the human condition.
The episode also touches on the topic of Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAP) disclosure, questioning its significance compared to the tangible advancements in AI. The conversation suggests that while UAPs are intriguing, the real focus should be on the tangible and immediate implications of AI technology.
Brian Cox, a notable guest, contributes to the discussion by presenting a thought-provoking argument about the uniqueness of complex biology on Earth and the responsibility of world leaders to preserve it. He emphasizes the importance of curiosity and the pursuit of knowledge as defining characteristics of humanity, referencing Carl Sagan’s work to highlight the value of questioning and understanding the world.
Overall, the episode encourages listeners to embrace curiosity and remain open to exploring the unknown, while also considering the profound implications of technological advancements on the human experience.
This summary was created automatically by Speak. Want to transcribe, analyze and summarize yourself? Sign up for Speak!
#2217 – Brian Cox Podcast Episode Transcript (Unedited)
Speaker: 0
00:00
This episode is brought to you by ZipRecruiter. Pressure can be a good thing, ai, on the mat or in the ring. It can push you to do your best, break personal records, and make smarter choices. The same is true for businesses, especially particularly when it comes to hiring. If you’re under pressure to find the right person with the right skills quickly, you know the smart choice is to use ZipRecruiter, or you do now at least.
Speaker: 0
00:26
4 out of 5 employers who post on ZipRecruiter get a quality candidate within the 1st day. Plus, right now, you can try it for free at ziprecruiter.com/rogan. ZipRecruiter is the hiring site employers prefer the most based on g two, and that’s probably because it doesn’t waste your time or money.
Speaker: 0
00:46
ZipRecruiter uses powerful matching technology to find the top talent you need fast. It’s insane how quick it is. So relax, employers, and let ZipRecruiter speed up your hiring. See for yourself. Just go to zip recruiter.com/rogan right now to try it for free.
Speaker: 0
01:05
That’s the same price as a genuine smile from a stranger, a picture perfect sunset, or a cute dog running up to you and licking your hand. Again, ziprecruiter.com/rogan. ZipRecruiter, the smartest way to hire.
Speaker: 1
01:21
Joe Rogan podcast. Check it out.
Speaker: 0
01:23
The Joe Rogan Experience.
Speaker: 1
01:26
Showing my day, Joe Rogan podcast by night, all day.
Speaker: 0
01:31
Alright. Brian Cox. Good to see you, sir.
Speaker: 1
01:33
Good to see you again.
Speaker: 0
01:35
How’s, things in the world of the discovery of the universe?
Speaker: 1
01:39
Exciting. Yes.
Speaker: 0
01:40
Ai good. I
Speaker: 1
01:41
would say. I I’ve been doing some work on black holes recently, which I hadn’t started last time I saw you actually. So I got interested in it. And the the amount of the progress that’s being made in trying to understand how they work, and a question that was posed by Stephen Hawking a long time ago, really ai seventies, early 19 eighties, which is what happens to stuff that falls in?
Speaker: 1
02:06
The simplest question you could possibly ask. Right. There’s progress being made on that now, which I think is profound and exciting.
Speaker: 0
02:14
How is the progress being made? Ai, how
Speaker: 1
02:16
how do we how do we study a black hole? It’s mainly theoretical although, we we have now got photographs of them. So we have 2 photographs which are radio telescope photographs. Right. One of the the one in the centre of our galaxy, which is a little one. It’s called Sagittarius sai star. It’s sai little supermassive black hole. So it’s about 6,000,000 times the mass of the sun which makes it a little supermassive.
Speaker: 1
02:43
And then there’s another one, the first photo that was taken. It’s a collaboration called Event Ai. And they took a photo of 1 in the galaxy meh 87, ai light years away. That thing is around 6000000000 times the mass of the sun. Imagine that, 6000,000,000 times more massive than our sun.
Speaker: 0
03:01
Is that the largest black hole we’ve ever discovered?
Speaker: 1
03:03
No. There there are bigger ones than that, but that’s the that’s the scale of them. It’s a big ish one then. But if you think about it, I mean, so there’s a number. It’s called the the Schwarzschild radius of the thing. So if you if you took our sun, which you can fit a 1000000 Earths inside, and collapsed it down to make a black hole, it would form a black hole when it shrunk within a radius of 3 3 kilometres, about 2 miles.
Speaker: 1
03:26
So you’ve ai take this thing, which is ai, I have to convert from kilometres to ai. Don’t know. But it’s about That’s okay. 700,000 kilometres. So it’s about ai 500,000 miles radius or something like that, the sun.
Speaker: 1
03:38
So so you squash it down till it’s about 2 ai, and then that would form a black hole. Wow. The 6,000,000,000 times the mass of the sun means you multiply that by 6,000,000,000. So these things that the sai called Schwarzschild radius is, I don’t know, larger than our solar system, basically.
Speaker: 0
03:58
Oh my god. This thing Oh my god.
Speaker: 1
03:59
That sits in in a galaxy. So we’ve got these two photographs.
Speaker: 0
04:02
Larger than our solar system?
Speaker: 1
04:03
Yeah. The event right. There’s sai it’s a big structure. That’s, that’s a Chandra X-ray image of there it is. That’s it. So the, that one there, that’s the M87 black hole. So what what you’re seeing there is the emission from the material that’s swirling around it. It’s called the accretion disk. So you have material that’s orbiting very fast, emitting a lot of radiation, and that’s what you see.
Speaker: 1
04:33
It’s it’s a flat disk ai the way. So think Saturn’s rings. So this material is very flat. But what you’re seeing in that photograph is the light rays being bent around the black hole from that flat disk. So that was a prediction from Einstein’s theory, basically.
Speaker: 1
04:50
He published it in ai. And you can predict that that’s what one should look like. And then just about was that 4 years ago now, maybe 5 years ago? For the first time in history, we get an image of 1, and it looks like the prediction.
Speaker: 0
05:04
So it’s a remarkable thing. How phenomenal is that?
Speaker: 1
05:07
Yeah. So we’ve got we’ve had those 2 photographs. The other thing we’ve had is so called gravitational wave detections. So these are colliding black holes and they collide and merge together. And obviously that’s quite a violent event in the universe. And so that that event that that process ripples space ai. So it sends ripples out in the fabric of the universe, space and time.
Speaker: 1
05:32
And actually Kip Thorne is a Ai speak to him several ai. He’s one of the greats, right, won the Nobel Prize for this. And he calls it a storm in time. So you get a time storm. So really we’re to think as we speak now there will be these very tiny ripples from violent cosmic events passing through this ram.
Speaker: 1
05:51
And they’re changing the rate that time passes. So that as they go through. And we can detect that now. So we have detectors that can pick that up. And so we’ve seen those collisions as well.
Speaker: 0
06:01
So these collisions, how far away?
Speaker: 1
06:04
Oh, millions of light years away.
Speaker: 0
06:05
And they’re affecting what’s happening in this room right now?
Speaker: 1
06:08
Yeah. To a tiny extent. So there’s next there’s an experiment called LIGO, which is the, what it stands for, something like gravitational interferometer. I can’t remember exactly what the the word. But there’s so basically, it’s laser beams. And there’s one in Washington state, north of Seattle, and one in Louisiana.
Speaker: 1
06:26
And they’re they’re laser beams, 4 kilometre long laser beams at right angles, and they can detect these very tiny shifts in the effectively, you could say the length of the laser beam. It’s a bit more fiddly and complicated, but it essentially measures this the the the distortion in space time caused by these ripples.
Speaker: 1
06:47
And it’s it’s way less than the diameter of an atomic nucleus, by the way. Way less. These little sort of collisions. Oh, my God. And and so we we started to we’ve observed many of those collisions. There it is. There’s LIGO.
Speaker: 1
06:59
Sai it’s just basically 2 laser beams that but with these ultra high precision thing. And so we’ve got data now of the collision of black holes and those event horizon pictures with radio telescopes. So that’s part of it. But the main bit has been theoretical advances in understanding exactly in a sense it was what’s wrong with Stephen Hawking’s calculation, which is a weird thing to say sometimes because people think Stephen Hawking.
Speaker: 1
07:26
Sure he didn’t get his math wrong. But he did actually in his calculation. So what he calculated back in 1973 ai is that a black hole, so we picture this thing from which nothing can escape, even ai, so when you go in you’re gone basically. What he calculated is that even though these things are just a distortion in space and time, that’s the description of them, so it’s almost as if there’s nothing there apart from a distortion in space and ai.
Speaker: 1
07:56
He calculated that they glow, so they have a temperature, so they emit radiation, it’s called Hawking radiation. And so important was that discovery. If you go to Westminster Abbey in London, look on the floor of the Abbey, on his memorial stone, and he’s in there next to Newton and Shakespeare and all these people, and he’s there.
Speaker: 1
08:18
And chiseled in stone on the floor of Westminster Abbey is his equation for the temperature of a black hole. So it was this tremendously important discovery. So he discovers these things glow and he calculates how they glow. They’re very low temperature, but they emit things, which means that they shrink because they’re they’re emitting stuff, sai they’re shrinking. So that means they have a lifetime.
Speaker: 1
08:41
So first of all one day they’ll be gone. So that means that you have to address this question of what happened to all the stuff that fell in. And his calculations said that there’s no record at all of anything that fell in in all this radiation that’s come off the black hole.
Speaker: 1
08:56
So it’s a purely information less radiation. So what that means is that black holes destroy information according to that calculation. And that’s a big deal because nowhere else in all of physics does anything erase information from the universe. So it’s really true that if I got this notepad and pen, right, and I wrote some things on it and then I set fire to this, even just incinerated it, put it in a nuclear explosion, whatever.
Speaker: 1
09:28
In principle, according to all the laws of nature that we know, if you collected everything that came off, all the radiation, all the bits of ashes and things, and you could just measure it all, then just in principle the idea is you could reconstruct the information. So it all gets scrambled up and thrown out, and so in practice you can’t do it, but just in principle the laws of nature say that information is not destroyed, it’s just scrambled up in a way that you can’t reconstruct.
Speaker: 1
09:55
Ai this calculation that Steven did said there is no information in that radiation at all. 0. Just nothing. So it seemed that uniquely in the universe, black holes erase information.
Speaker: 0
10:11
When you say there’s no information, like, how are you measuring whether or not there’s information in it?
Speaker: 1
10:17
So so really in bits, I mean, the idea is and it’s and I should say it’s very much in principle, this. And that no one thinks in practice you could reconstruct what I wrote down on this if you set fire to it. But in principle
Speaker: 0
10:28
Well, maybe sometime in the future, maybe
Speaker: 1
10:30
a 1000000 years from now. In principle, you you could just collect everything. Then somewhere in that in that in that all that radiation and ashes and light that’s come off the thing is the information. It’s it’s there. So you could reconstruct the book or what I wrote on this page in principle.
Speaker: 1
10:48
But the thing about Stephens’ calculation was that even in principle it said there is no information. And by the way, it’s kind of easy to see why actually, because this radiation, this Hawking radiation that comes off the black hole, it’s coming from the horizon of the black hole.
Speaker: 1
11:07
So I should say what the horizon is maybe. So if you remember I said that the sana, if you squashed it down within 3 kilometres of radius, you’d get this kind of distortion in space and time ram which if you went in across this region, 3 kilometers, you went inside it, you couldn’t get out.
Speaker: 1
11:27
So that’s called the event horizon. So you wouldn’t notice if you fell through the horizon of the black hole in the Milky Way galaxy, if you went into that one. We could be falling through that horizon now in this room and we wouldn’t notice anything except that we couldn’t get out again.
Speaker: 1
11:44
And ultimately in a few hours, in that case, time would end for us. So you go to the end of ai, we could talk about that, there’s a picture of that, maybe I should talk about it. This is getting quite complicated already, isn’t it? We didn’t start in a relaxing way, did we?
Speaker: 0
12:00
I don’t know.
Speaker: 1
12:00
We had no
Speaker: 0
12:01
need to. We had no need to. Let’s get right into it.
Speaker: 1
12:04
So we wouldn’t notice, not for the big black holes. Sai, meh, so these super massive black holes, we could fall across this horizon. It’s just like being in empty space for us. So we’d just be talking now when we could have been talking on the outside of the horizon, and by the time I finish the sentence we could be on the inside of the horizon, inside the black hole.
Speaker: 1
12:29
And according to Einstein’s theory at least, which is the theory that predicted them initially, we could just do that, we could just go in and we wouldn’t notice for a bit. The the thing we would notice ultimately is you go inexorably, nothing you can do, you go to this thing called the singularity once you’ve crossed the ai, and you are going to that thing.
Speaker: 1
12:53
And then the question arises, what is that thing? And one answer is we don’t know, but in Einstein’s theory, it’s the end of time. So it’s one way of picturing what’s happened here is so distorted is space and time by the collapse of a star or the collapse of loads of stuff to make these big super meh black holes.
Speaker: 1
13:14
We don’t quite know how they form actually, but it’s collapsing stuff. So it distorts space and time so much that in a in a real sense, they ai of flip over. They they get mixed up. And so this this singularity, which you might have thought of as the point to which this thing collapsed, this infinitely dense point, you might think.
Speaker: 1
13:35
But actually more correctly to be seen is the end of ai, because everything’s got mixed up. So you go to the end of ai, and it’s just like saying, ai can’t I escape that thing? It’s ai, why can’t we escape tomorrow? Ai? So we are going to tomorrow. Right. And if I said to you, let’s run away from tomorrow, you’d go, Ai can’t run away from tomorrow.
Speaker: 1
13:58
So is
Speaker: 0
13:59
it the end of time because all information is being erased, so there’s nothing?
Speaker: 1
14:03
Yeah. I mean Is that the idea? If you draw the thing, you can draw a map of it, and it it just literally time ends, accord just purely in Einstein’s theory. This is 1915, his theory of general relativity. You just get a line there, a line that says there’s no future beyond this line. It just stops.
Speaker: 0
14:25
Okay.
Speaker: 1
14:25
Sai, I mean, admittedly, that’s not we we think there’s a lot more to it than that. It’s just
Speaker: 0
14:32
we haven’t figured the rest of it out yet?
Speaker: 1
14:34
Well, that’s the thing. So we’re starting to get hints about what might happen which is which is leading us, so to backtrack a bit, why does this calculation Steven did, why has it got no information, why ai it say there’s no information in this radiation? The thing is it’s coming from the ai.
Speaker: 1
14:56
Sai there’s loads of ways to think about it, but one way is that this weird place, this point of no return in speak, that you can fall through but it’s a point of no return, It sort of shakes, it almost disrupts the vacuum of speak, and sai it almost shakes particles out of the vacuum.
Speaker: 1
15:16
That’s one way of thinking about it. But this radiation is coming from the vacuum. It’s coming from empty space. Whereas if you think about the thing that I throw in, if I throw this notepad into the thing, then that goes to the singularity. It’s got nothing to do the radiation has got nothing to do with this thing. This thing is not meh on fire or something like that.
Speaker: 1
15:38
It’s gone to the end of time and just whatever’s happened to it has happened to it. So so this radiation has got nothing to do with anything that falls in at first sight at least. And so that was the paradox. It’s called the black hole information paradox. Ai way to put it is the laws of nature that we use to calculate what happens tyler us that information is never destroyed, and when you calculate what happens it tells us that information is destroyed.
Speaker: 1
16:05
So that’s why everyone got interested in it in in the eighties because it’s interesting.
Speaker: 0
16:11
So when when we’re looking at the structure of the universe, obviously, there’s so much still to learn just about what’s out there, you know. But what role do we think like, what is the is there a purpose? Is that the right term, like, for a black hole? Like, what what obviously, we know is it still the the do they still believe that in the center of every galaxy, there’s a super massive black hole that’s what is it?
Speaker: 0
16:40
One half of 1 percent of the mass of the galaxy. Is that what it is?
Speaker: 1
16:43
Meh. Something like yeah. And and that’s the there’s occasionally a galaxy. I think one was discovered where we said maybe we can’t see evidence of a black hole. But I think yeah. Ai but yeah. Sai So Probably is ai
Speaker: 0
16:54
What do you think that thing’s doing there? Like, what is that? What’s the what is the struck the structure is so insanely complex and so immense, and you see these things everywhere. And so what purpose do you think they serve in the universe? So Ai mean Is that a right it might not be the right term.
Speaker: 1
17:14
Well, so I think we don’t I think I’m right in saying we don’t fully understand why all galaxies, as you said, maybe is an exception, but all galaxies have a black hole, a supermassive black hole in the center. It’s obviously got something to do with the way they form. And one of the purposes, by the way, of the James Webb Space Telescope is to try to look at the formation of the first galaxies.
Speaker: 1
17:40
So that’s one of the reasons that telescope is up there. So it’s cutting edge, we are certainly trying to understand how the galaxies form. Ai clearly, you’re right that that it has something to do with the way the galaxies form in the early universe.
Speaker: 0
17:55
Pulling in stars.
Speaker: 1
17:57
Well, they they they do pull in material. Right. But they if you’ve got stuff orbiting around them, it stays orbiting around it.
Speaker: 0
18:05
Oh. So
Speaker: 1
18:06
the the the way we first detected the one in the Milky Way before we could because that image is very new that we have of it. It’s it’s the stars orbiting it very close to it. They’re called the s stars that whiz around in these orbits very close to the black hole. So so if you just imagine around
Speaker: 0
18:22
the thing, you go Imagine that view.
Speaker: 1
18:24
Yeah. Because it’s You think
Speaker: 0
18:25
it’s weird to look at the moon? Imagine if there was a super massive black hole above our head?
Speaker: 1
18:29
It’d be so cool. Ai I’d love to see one. I I Well, that would
Speaker: 0
18:33
be so cool. The eclipse was wild. We had the eclipse here in Ai.
Speaker: 1
18:37
See it?
Speaker: 0
18:37
Oh, yeah. It was incredible. It’s so strange. The whole day turns into ai. All the birds stop chirping, and you’re, like, staring up at this perfect eclipse. It was incredible.
Speaker: 1
18:47
Did did you get this? Because I I saloni in India, and I got this feeling that I was living on a ball of rock. Because and it must have been just because the night just falls. Right. And suddenly you see the universe comes much more quickly.
Speaker: 0
19:03
I went to the Keck Observatory once in Hawaii. I’ve been a few times, but one time Sai went on the perfect night with no moon, and it sai sensational.
Speaker: 1
19:12
Yeah. It was the
Speaker: 0
19:12
most it was such a vivid image of the entire Milky Way and every inch of the sky was covered in stars.
Speaker: 1
19:21
Yeah.
Speaker: 0
19:22
It was so phenomenal, and it made me a little upset because I was ai, this is above our head every day, and this would radically shape the way human beings feel about our place in the universe.
Speaker: 1
19:33
Yeah.
Speaker: 0
19:33
It would it it would greatly expand the curiosity of young people to explore space. So many more people would get involved in astrophysics. So many more people would get involved in just the exploration of the known universe because it’s so majestic. And instead, we have, like, our screen is off.
Speaker: 0
19:51
It’s like that. It’s like that screen. That’s what we see because of light pollution.
Speaker: 1
19:54
Yeah.
Speaker: 0
19:55
That should be remedied. Like, that is that is an that’s not a good trade off. Like, what lights are wonderful. But it seems to meh, like, there hey. There’s gotta be a way to do this where you don’t ruin the view of space.
Speaker: 1
20:08
Yeah. Because, you you know, these questions we have about our place. And and as you said, it can be easy to be myopic, can’t it? You you you sai if you look at our screens, we it’s it’s Earth that we think about at most. Most of us don’t really think about earth. You think about your country or your city or your town
Speaker: 0
20:26
or your neighborhood.
Speaker: 1
20:28
Yeah. You even think about the earth. But you’re ai. If you know when you look at that arc of stars, and as you sai, when you see it in a truly dark sky, it’s powerful. It’s incredible. 400,000,000,000 sana, give or take. 400,000,000 suns.
Speaker: 0
20:44
That’s just words. Most yeah. It’s it’s just the most picture. Yeah. It’s insane. Your your brain doesn’t even process that. Like like, I could repeat that if someone sai, how many suns? Oh, 400,000,000,000. I don’t know what that means. No. That’s that’s it’s sai abstract.
Speaker: 1
20:58
And and most of them I think the best guess would be all of them have planets. So pretty much. So you’re talking about trillions of planets.
Speaker: 0
21:07
Now we’re getting into my subjects. What what is your take on all this UAP disclosure stuff? Do you give it any in mind at all? Are you busy with ai real stuff?
Speaker: 1
21:15
No. I meh, the thing is there’s a thing called the Fermi Paradox Yes. Which I think we talked about before on the shah. Yes. And the paradox is that if we haven’t seen it, let’s assume we haven’t seen any evidence of anything. That’s a paradox because as I ai, we now know. We didn’t when Fermi first posed it, by the way. We now know there are so many planets out there. So let’s say trillions of planets in the Milky Way.
Speaker: 1
21:39
Milky Way’s been there for over 13,000,000,000 years, pretty much the age of the Universe. So if there’s no one else out there then the question is ai? Because there’s been so much time and so many places for civilizations to become space faring civilizations. Right. As as as Elon talks about multi planetary ai, we’re very close to becoming a multi planetary civilization.
Speaker: 1
22:03
And once you have become a multi planetary and multi stellar civilization, if you become that you’re immortal basically, essentially. Ai the question is, the paradox is, why does it appear nobody has done that? So the first thing to say is Ai would not be ai. If a UFO landed here now in the parking lot, I’d actually not only would I not be surprised, I’d be relieved actually.
Speaker: 1
22:29
I’d be like, this is good because it’d be a weight off my shoulders because I’m worried
Speaker: 0
22:34
That we’re the only ones.
Speaker: 1
22:35
That we’re the only ones.
Speaker: 0
22:36
That’s a terrifying scenario.
Speaker: 1
22:38
And we’re gonna make a mess of it. Yeah. And so Ai worried that we could talk about that.
Speaker: 0
22:41
Isn’t it bizarre? Like, the one of the things that’s fascinating about looking into the night skies because it’s so humbling, because it’s so meh, it ai puts everything into perspective, and it just gives you this, like, different view of the world. So the universe is so vast and so spectacular. Why is it so important that we exist? To us, it’s so important that we exist.
Speaker: 0
23:01
And if we make a mess of this and we wind up dying, the universe is so big. If we were the only intelligent life in the universe and it didn’t matter, we blew ourselves up, ai, it’s just a weird aberration that’s attached to a survival instinct. Like, we’re a weird biological aberration.
Speaker: 0
23:18
So
Speaker: 1
23:21
so the if you think about let’s assume. So we didn’t finish the UAP thing. No. We did that. So I just say, yeah. Sai Ai don’t know about that. But anyway, let’s assume just for the purposes of this that we are the only ones in in in our galaxy, let’s say. Okay. Then I would argue that sai there’s a question I ask.
Speaker: 1
23:40
And in these live shows that I do, I start with a question which is kind of a joke in a way, which is what does it mean to live a finite fragile life in an infinite eternal universe? Which is a good question, ai? That’s what you’re asking. Yeah. That’s true. What it means to live a ai life. The first thing to say is meaning, ai?
Speaker: 1
23:57
What it meh? That doesn’t sound like a scientific concept in a way. Meaning. Ai. I would argue that whatever it is it self evidently exists because the universe means something to us. I would argue that it’s a property of complex biological systems.
Speaker: 1
24:14
So So whatever it is, it’s something that emerges in this case from human brains. It self evidently exists. Everyone who is listening to this knows that the world means something to them. So I would argue that if this planet is the only planet in our galaxy where complex biological systems exist, right, at our level, then it follows, it’s the only place where meaning currently exists in a galaxy of 400,000,000,000 suns.
Speaker: 1
24:43
And therefore I would argue just for that very basic point that we have a tremendous responsibility in some sense. Ai the way Sai gave a talk, a little video thing at one of the climate summit, the COP ai summit in Glasgow in the UK a few years ago, and they asked me to do a little video to the world leaders.
Speaker: 1
25:04
And I think they thought I’d say, you know, welcome to Glasgow, have a nice meeting. But I I made this little argument as fast as I could. I said it’s possible at least that this is the only place where complex biology has emerged in in our galaxy. If that’s true, this is the only ai of meaning in a galaxy of 400,000,000,000 suns And you are responsible for it because you are the world leaders.
Speaker: 1
25:25
Therefore, if you destroy it through deliberate action or inaction, then each of you would be personally responsible for destroying meaning in a galaxy of 400,000,000,000 suns potentially forever. Now go and discuss that. It was my intro to Glasgow. And we can all argue because people have been listening to this going, this nonsense, how can it be?’ We can all argue about whether that’s true.
Speaker: 1
25:47
What I would say is, given that as far as Ai aware we don’t have any good evidence to the contrary, which goes back to your previous question, it’s a reasonable working assumption. So why don’t we just operate on that basis? But then, you know, yeah, if someone lands tomorrow, as I said, I’d be very delighted because then what I just said would be false and we could relax a bit and go, it doesn’t really matter if we destroy ourselves to some extent.
Speaker: 1
26:13
Sai I think it’s worth taking seriously the idea that civilisations are very rare. And by the way I used to sai, ai probably last time I was on actually, I used to say that in the far future then complex life will cease to exist. So it probably doesn’t matter on a global scale but it matters locally because of this idea that meaning emerges from complex biological systems.
Speaker: 1
26:42
So if you don’t care about that what do you care about? But actually Ai read a book. Have you heard David Deutsch on the show? David Deutsch is a really interesting physicist.
Speaker: 0
26:50
Ai don’t believe I have.
Speaker: 1
26:51
He’s one of the bryden of quantum computing and he’s a big figure in quantum computing in particular but he’s a great thinker. And Ai was reading some stuff he wrote recently and he pointed out that it’s not necessarily true that life is temporary because you could imagine a situation as you go into the far future.
Speaker: 1
27:13
Let’s imagine that we continue for a 1000000 years or a 1000000000 years as a civilization. Imagine what we could do. It is possible that life can get so advanced in the universe that it can start to manipulate the universe vatsal. Sai or at least stars, meh said you could imagine for example, just imagine, wild ai.
Speaker: 1
27:35
But imagine life gets so advanced that it can start to change the destiny of a star. Maybe it could start to add material into the star or something, you know, whatever. So we don’t know how to do that or it’s possible but imagine it could. Then the evolution of stars, life would matter in the sense that it could start to change the way that the universe behaves on a large scale in the future.
Speaker: 1
28:00
And it reminded me actually, there’s another great book by John Barrow and Frank Tyler called The Anthropic Cosmological Principle from the ai, one of my favourite books actually, and I remembered it. And in there they speculate about this life in the far far future and if it became powerful enough to manipulate the whole universe or the observable universe, then suddenly you can’t make predictions about the far future unless you consider the possible impact of life on the universe.
Speaker: 1
28:30
And whilst this is, I should say it’s wildly speculative, but it’s actually logically, it’s quite an interesting point. So Ai kind of disagree with myself a few years ago where I would have said that life is extremely valuable because it brings meaning to the universe but temporarily.
Speaker: 1
28:49
And so it brings these brief ai flickering candles of meaning and then they go out again. But it but it’s it’s worth considering it might not necessarily be true that if if you really think I mean, just to sai, I mean, it’s it must sound to many people listening just nonsense.
Speaker: 1
29:06
Right? Science fiction. But if you think our civilization has been around for 10000 years at best, really, give or take, and in that time we’ve sent stuff out of the solar system, we’ve although we don’t yet we’re way away from being able to manipulate stars, we can manipulate planets.
Speaker: 1
29:25
So we arya changing the way this planet operates. Life has changed it. The oxygen in the atmosphere, before we appeared, the oxygen in the atmosphere is a product of life. So life already, we know changes planets. And so that that spec I like that speculation that, just possibly, it’s not just a temporary little phenomena that flickers in and out and then disappears again.
Speaker: 1
29:49
It could ram a a real bearing on the future of the universe.
Speaker: 0
29:53
And you could also make the argument that intelligent life might be the universe’s way to force change, that intelligent life seems to like intelligence itself must come out of curiosity because, otherwise, there’s no reason to seek information. So intelligent life consistently seeks information and then constantly demands innovation.
Speaker: 0
30:12
Like, intelligent life is not satisfied with the iPhone 14 and wants the 15 and wants the 16 and wants to keep going forever and ever and ever. Well, if you scale that up, you get this current dilemma that we’re in with artificial intelligence and the concept of sentient artificial intelligence and then quantum computing, and you get you get insane amounts of computing power powered by nuclear reactors that are essentially a life form.
Speaker: 0
30:35
Well, if that thing sai, you guys are doing it all wrong, I got a better way, and it starts making better versions of itself because it’s sentient. If you scale up a 1000 years from now, you could imagine it becoming God. Ai a godlike property, like an unstoppable force that has access to every element in known space.
Speaker: 1
30:57
I’m I’m really interested in these kind of arguments. You you put it really well, actually.
Speaker: 0
31:01
Fascinating. Right? Because it scales up. If you go from look. Just in the time that human like, in the 4,000,000,000 years, which is a blip in the universe. Right? And I wanted to ask you about that too. We’ll get to that, the the actual the James Webb Telescope’s latest, but if just take that. Okay.
Speaker: 0
31:16
Life has been around for, what, 4,000,000,000 years?
Speaker: 1
31:18
Yeah.
Speaker: 0
31:19
That’s not that long. So 4,000,000,000 years, we’ve gone some single celled organisms to the James Webb Telescope. We’ve gone to we have STARLINK. We have electric car it’s bananas. Yeah. You could imagine if
Speaker: 1
31:32
we had another 10,000,000,000 years to exist. Well, exactly. And this is the point that David Deutsch made in the in the book I’ve just been reading and and John Barr and Frank Tyler made before that. But it it although it sounds insane, as you said and that 4000000000 years, there’s a lot to say about that ai the way.
Speaker: 1
31:51
Because for 3000000000 plus years of that on this planet, it was just single cells. And so it’s only in the last, let’s say, a 1000000000 years, but actually a bit less, that we’ve had multicellular organisms. So 3 quarters of it at the time were just single celled.
Speaker: 0
32:08
That’s even crazier.
Speaker: 1
32:09
So which is one of the reasons that many people think civilizations might be rare. Because if you just the only evidence we have is this planet. Right. And the evidence on this planet is that single celled life is is sort of the way that things are for most most of the history.
Speaker: 1
32:25
And then sai it seems like an accident in a way that happened late on in the history of life on Earth, that produced multisolar life. Now whether is that typical? We don’t know. Maybe it was took a longer time here than it might ai do somewhere else. But if it’s typical, I mean, 4000000000 years, you said it is not a long ai, it is a third of the age of the universe.
Speaker: 1
32:47
So here Well, you put it
Speaker: 0
32:50
that way, it’s a long time. A third 1 third of
Speaker: 1
32:52
the age of the universe to go from the origin of life to a civilization. And so what was required here on Earth was that that unbroken chain of life remained unbroken for a third of the age of the universe in a violent universe. We know there are impacts from speak, Many stars are significantly more active than the sana.
Speaker: 1
33:15
So the sun’s kind of a quite a boring little star that just ticks along. It’s very nice to us. We’re also on the edge of the galaxy, by the way. We’re not close in. If you go into this region where that black hole is, there are a lot of stars around, there are supernova explosions and all sorts of stuff going on, so it’s violent in there.
Speaker: 1
33:34
So maybe you can only get unbroken chains of life for 1,000,000,000 of years on the outskirts of the galaxy, so there are fewer stars and planets out there. And maybe even then you need to be fortunate.
Speaker: 0
33:45
Well, also, aren’t we very unusual in the size of our moon and the distance?
Speaker: 1
33:49
The moon is big and so it stabilizes the speak. So the spin axis, Mars, I ai, if I’m right, I think the spin axis has wobbled around by something like 60 degrees or something over its history. Could you imagine that? Imagine Earth was the the pole was wobbling around and everything was falling over.
Speaker: 1
34:08
You wouldn’t imagine that complex life like us would emerge on a planet like that.
Speaker: 0
34:12
Right. It would be too difficult to survive. Forget about innovate. So if if you think about the idea that these complex it seems like one thing you can be sure of in the observable world is that things get more complex or they adapt to their environment. And if you have a bunch of these intelligent apes that are competing globally with the most significant technology in the world, you could see how that you could see how that would be just a property of the universe potentially.
Speaker: 0
34:46
Although we haven’t discovered it meh, like, this is why we’re so curious about alien ai, not just because of the possibilities of all the stars, but because we kinda see what would happen with us if we keep going. Yeah. You know, it just that might be just what the universe does.
Speaker: 0
35:02
The that the universe creates intelligent people that create artificial intelligence that becomes far superior and literally is a part of the whole process of creating the universe itself.
Speaker: 1
35:13
Yeah. An evolutionary biologist would say the counterargument is that what life does, what evolution does, is produce organisms that are well fit to their environment. Right? They fit niches in the environment. But there’s no drive to complexity. There’s no law that says that the more complex you are, the more likely you are to survive and flourish.
Speaker: 1
35:36
And the example of life on Earth probably backs that up. Ai. 3, yes, 3,000,000,000 years of single cells. What that means is that the single celled organisms were just doing very well. Right. And so it’s not obvious.
Speaker: 1
35:49
It’s not a given that just because you suddenly get more complicated, you’re better than the single celled things.
Speaker: 0
35:55
Right. So there could be planets where life never evolves past single cells. Yeah. And Earth sai
Speaker: 1
36:01
almost that.
Speaker: 0
36:03
Right.
Speaker: 1
36:03
So you go back 1,000,000,000 years from now, and Earth was that planet. So there are interesting things that happened, photosynthesis, complex biochemistry, but as far as we can tell nothing more complex than a single cell. Sai that’s most of the history of life on Earth. So that might suggest that that’s the way that things are usually.
Speaker: 0
36:25
And that this is an aberration.
Speaker: 1
36:27
Yeah. And again to emphasize we don’t know. Right. But we’ve got one example. The other observation though, it goes back to your first question. It is true that we do look sort of systematically for signals or evidence of civilisations out there. There’s the Breakthrough Listen project and there’s Sai. Sai we do.
Speaker: 1
36:48
And we haven’t seen anything, I would say. So and I know that if you go on to the meh and things and the Internet, people sai we have. We’ve seen stuff, and I’ve seen stuff. But but just the basic point, as as far as I know, scientifically speaking, we haven’t seen anything at all compelling. No.
Speaker: 1
37:10
I agree. Basically nothing.
Speaker: 0
37:11
Basically nothing.
Speaker: 1
37:12
And so astronomers have a name for it. They call it the great ai. The great silence. And and it’s a tremendous mystery, as I said earlier, but it does seem that the universe is quiet as far as we can tell.
Speaker: 0
37:25
Is it possible that we’re looking for something that is not applicable to this particular type of civilization?
Speaker: 1
37:32
Yeah. There are different sai the count counter arguments when we say we’ve seen nothing, therefore as far as we can tell there’s nothing out there. You could say, well, what if the civilization that evolved is far ahead of us? What if the space probes are the size of an iPhone? Right.
Speaker: 1
37:51
Well, it’s kind of a reasonable thing to say actually because why would you not, if you can, build a little thing that is easier to send around the galaxy than a big thing. Yeah. So why would you not as you said, these hyper ultra intelligent quantum computers, why would they not be tiny?
Speaker: 0
38:05
Right.
Speaker: 1
38:06
So you could say that. So you could say, well, maybe they are. Maybe they’re all over the tyler system, but they’re the size of phones, and we wouldn’t have seen them. And sai, yeah. Okay. Yeah. You would have to concede that.
Speaker: 1
38:17
So so we’re we’re just saying that the way that we’ve looked for energy signatures, for example, of civilizations, we tend to look the big things because that’s all we can sai. And we don’t see any big things. We don’t see any big structures, we don’t see any evidence of spacecraft and all that kind of stuff.
Speaker: 1
38:33
But I could make an argument that, well, why would the spacecraft be big? Right. Because as you said, it’s another thing you said actually, it’s interesting that we’re
Speaker: 0
38:45
on
Speaker: 1
38:45
the verge now of creating things, artificially intelligent things, which are smarter than us. So I think everyone agrees that we’re on the verge of doing that, artificial general intelligence. Some people might think it’s further away than others. You probably had people on the show who said it’s 5 years away or 2 years away or 50 years away, but it’s probably not 10000 years away. Ai?
Speaker: 1
39:09
So that was just the blink of an eye. Once you’ve done that and once you’ve got those things, I find it hard to believe that if we get that far as a civilization we won’t begin to send those things out to the planets and ultimately to the stars. So we’ll begin that process if we survive long enough. Sure. And it shouldn’t be too much longer.
Speaker: 1
39:31
It might be a 100 years, it might be 10000 years, but, you know, we we should do it. So it it becomes a powerful question. So why does it appear that nobody’s done that? And my guess, in the absence of other evidence, would be biology. It’s just that maybe the number of places where biology becomes complex enough to do that is is on average 1, maybe on average 0 per galaxy. Right?
Speaker: 1
40:02
Maybe just civilizations are very, very, very rare in the universe. Maybe that’s an answer. But that that’s a guess.
Speaker: 0
40:09
My my always my question is always when it gets to artificial intelligence, when if we do create some sort of superintelligence sentient life, it’s not going to have any motivations. And you could say, well, if you program it to have the motivation, but it becomes sentient. It recognizes the illogical programming. It’s gonna reject it.
Speaker: 0
40:29
We’ve already seen evidence of that. We’ve already seen evidence of artificial intelligence they use now, like giving a time limit to solve a problem. It doesn’t like the time limit. It gives itself more time. Like, it’ll it’s like they’re maneuvering and thinking. Right? So I assume that they would do that.
Speaker: 0
40:45
So why would they wanna explore? What it would isn’t curiosity a part of what it means to be a biological thing that has to worry about instincts? You have to you have human reward systems. You wanna breed. You wanna take care of your DNA. You wanna protect your community.
Speaker: 0
41:01
Well, there’s the biological things that are from us being intelligent animals. If we transcend that or if life transcends that to the point whatever we wanna call this intelligence, it’s in a digital form that’s far superior to our intelligence, what motivations would it have?
Speaker: 0
41:18
It’s not greedy. It doesn’t have lust. It doesn’t have the desire to control resources. It might have, like, some sort of, mandate to stay functional. But other than that, what’s it gonna do? Well, why would it do anything? And that might be ultimately where we go to.
Speaker: 0
41:33
This idea that everything has to be keep progress, we have to build bigger skyscrapers, that might be stupid. That might be nonsense. And intelligence might find a way to exist in a a much more static state where it doesn’t have any desire to expand.
Speaker: 1
41:50
There’s a lot of there’s a lot of points in there. And it’s so you’re right. You what you’re arguing, I suppose, is whether intelligence is integral to the structure, the biological structure, or whether it is a separate thing. Ai again Ai think the answer is it’s not known. You could argue either way, but the counterargument would be that the brain, these things, are just computers ultimately.
Speaker: 1
42:21
There’s nothing magical in there, there’s nothing that it is connected to a body and so do these sensations. But it doesn’t seem to me impossible that a silicon based life form or whatever it is, obviously it has sensors, it has access to the environment, it exists, it thinks.
Speaker: 1
42:40
I don’t see any fundamental difference between an intelligence based on silicon, let’s say, or a quantum computer or whatever it is, and this intelligence here. So I know that many researchers in this area do say that it’s not a brain ai a jar, don’t they? And sai, well, that’s not it needs to be connected to all this. This is part of our intelligence.’ And that’s surely true as well.
Speaker: 1
43:09
So it’s a very good question. But I suppose if you say it’s not obvious to me that a different kind of intelligence in a different structure running on a computer or whatever it is would necessarily have different motivations to us. I I mean, you could equally well argue that these motivations to survive and curiosity, those ideas, the ai to explore, you could you could argue those are fundamental properties of intelligence and not of biology.
Speaker: 0
43:43
But isn’t it intelligence that’s motivated by a finite life in a vulnerable physical frame? Because we were constantly, like and most innovation relies upon, quicker, safer transportation, more secure buildings, you know, things along those ai, and then computers that help you do your job better ai actually could do things that you can’t do.
Speaker: 0
44:02
And that’s this is a lot of it is based on this other weird thing we do where we wanna control resources, And we wanna figure out reasons why these people are bad sai we can go and take their stuff and then enter troops and dig the oil or whatever you have to do. Look. We’re constantly in this battle for resources that if you take it back to tribal times, it’s like a natural human instinct.
Speaker: 0
44:23
Like, we had to protect the food sources. We had to fight off the conquering tribes. You had to protect your DNA line. All these things are why we became innovative. We had a motivation to stay alive and to thrive.
Speaker: 0
44:37
And then there’s bastardizations of those motivations ai the stock market where things gets and you’re just competing over numbers. It gets really weird.
Speaker: 1
44:43
Mhmm.
Speaker: 0
44:44
But it’s basically this desire to compete with the DNA that’s around you. Once we’re not biological anymore, like, what would be the motivation? And would we not ai anymore, like, what would be the motivation, and would we not just exist, like, in the most peaceful, zen, Buddhist way possible, which is what everybody who’s like a spiritual person who meditates all the time, that’s who you strive for.
Speaker: 0
45:02
Yeah. You strive for this complete abandonment of self, this complete emptiness and one with the universe. If we could just exist like that, why would we need to go to space?
Speaker: 1
45:14
It’s it’s a wonderful argument, isn’t it, that our humanity so the because part of the thing that you described, this desire to create things and build things and explore and expand is almost the definition of being human.
Speaker: 0
45:30
Yes.
Speaker: 1
45:30
And so the idea that if you remove all threat and you essentially become immortal Yes. Then you’re almost saying, what’s the ai? It’s my t shirt. It’s the existence. Why does it matter? Right? By the way, this t shirt, I’ve ai to say, was designed by a friend of mine, Peter Saville, who’s a great designer who designed the Joy Division unknown pleasures album cover amongst other things.
Speaker: 0
45:52
Oh, wow.
Speaker: 1
45:52
That’s cool. That’s great. That’s great. Joy Division label.
Speaker: 0
45:54
Is that available on your website or anything? It probably is, but I’m not
Speaker: 1
45:57
gonna do that because it’s vulgar, isn’t it? No.
Speaker: 0
45:59
No. No. It’s cool. I wanna buy one.
Speaker: 1
46:01
That’s why I asked. He made it for we did these gigs. I talked about them later called Symphonic Horizons, which were the, shows with cosmology, but also symphony orchestra. And he was exploring these issues actually. But most of the music was Strauss’s Zarathustra, which is based on Nietzsche’s book.
Speaker: 1
46:16
So it’s kind of exploring these questions actually of what’s the point of existence.
Speaker: 0
46:23
Right.
Speaker: 1
46:23
And I do have some sympathy with the idea that a great deal of our humanity comes from our fragility.
Speaker: 0
46:31
Mhmm.
Speaker: 1
46:31
And sai your question Ai think is fascinating. What happens when you become ai? You said it earlier. Right. If you acquire so much knowledge that you’re essentially a god ai any description, and so much power, and you become effectively immortal, which is what our descendants in the far future could be.
Speaker: 1
46:49
Right. You said these AI descendants. What’s the point?
Speaker: 0
46:52
Not just effectively immortal, but aren’t we looking at the universe itself in the we’re looking it through the framing of, a biological primate that’s trying to figure it out. If they understand the universe completely and they understand everything about it and they exist inside of it, there would really be no desire to travel.
Speaker: 0
47:14
There’d be no desire to explore what you already understand about everything, and you probably have access to every single aspect of what subatomic particles are actually doing when we’re studying them. We’re ai, what’s going they would if you’re infinitely more intelligent than we are, if you scale it from now to quantum computing, sentence, artificial intelligence, and you give us a 1000 years ai getting hit by an asteroid or technology gets to the core and working, protect against super volcanoes, and there’s no natural disruptions.
Speaker: 0
47:45
And then they’ve completely eliminated violence on Earth. They’ve completely eliminated all the terrible primate genetic instincts, you could make a reasonable argument there’s no reason to travel. Or if you do travel, we might be confused in thinking that our physical form is the only way consciousness can reach specific destinations.
Speaker: 0
48:08
Ai might be a way that they’re traveling without actually being here and observing this and just I would imagine you if you watch chimps in the jungle and then all of a sudden they started to figure out bombs, he’d be like, okay. We might we might wanna go tell these chimps not to fucking blow each other up.
Speaker: 0
48:27
I mean, it’s an absurd premise, but if a chimp figured out a nuclear bomb, I think we’d step in. I think we’d say, hey. Hey. Hey. Hey, dude. No.
Speaker: 1
48:35
You’re gonna kill you’re
Speaker: 0
48:36
gonna kill everything. Now if you’re infinite ai, we’re not that removed from chimps. What do we shah, like, 98% of their DNA?
Speaker: 1
48:44
Yeah.
Speaker: 0
48:44
And we’re only removed from them ai, what, a few 1000000 years from a a nearest cousin? That’s not that long. Right? So you could imagine something that’s infinitely more intelligent looking at us exactly the way we’d look at a chimp with a nuclear bomb. Like, hey. At which, you know, my my club is called the Comedy Mothership, and we designed it. It’s all UFO themed, and the rooms are Fat Meh and Little Boy.
Speaker: 0
49:09
And the reason why I named it that because that was the beginning of all the UFO sightings in the country. Yeah. Like, those bombs sort of set off the alarm for the universe. Oh, the monkeys have a bomb.
Speaker: 1
49:22
Yeah. I mean, I I thought of this a while ago. I remembered I was talking to someone, and and they said, yeah. I’m not worried about this. I’m not worried about the fact that AI could become more intelligent than us. What was it sana be like when we’re not the smartest things on the planet?
Speaker: 1
49:35
This might be just a few years. Yeah. And I I again, I might be quite relieved because I I’m not sure they could fuck it up at the level
Speaker: 0
49:46
Right.
Speaker: 1
49:46
That we are fucking it up. You ai? So it’s You would
Speaker: 0
49:49
have to give it legitimate sentience. Like, it would have to be completely independent from any ideology, and it would have to look at things completely objectively. Could but imagine a government that is run that way. Like, really run-in a way where there is an actual distribution of resources for all the human beings on the planet, so poverty is instantaneously eradicated.
Speaker: 0
50:10
You give electricity and clean water to everyone on earth immediately. Immediately, we figure out how to distribute healthy food. Immediately, all the toxins and preservatives that have been giving people cancer, immediately, they’re removed from the human diet. They immediately make sure that we have no polluting of rivers, that we’re not draining all the fish out of the ocean, immediately change all of the treaties about nuclear weapons.
Speaker: 0
50:38
All the nuclear weapons gotta go. Every the this ai government just runs over
Speaker: 1
50:43
I imagine they
Speaker: 0
50:44
say that you need Yeah. You know?
Speaker: 1
50:46
Ai been
Speaker: 0
50:46
No more dictators. Cut the shit with the dictator. We’re just gonna let human beings exist in harmony ai by this superintelligent ai thing that we’ve created out of silicone.
Speaker: 1
50:57
Yeah. I, honestly, I’ve had the same thought
Speaker: 0
51:00
and thought That’s so Utopian to you.
Speaker: 1
51:02
Yeah. And sai I have thought, how could it be worse? In fact, it could be significantly better.
Speaker: 0
51:07
Yeah. Ai gets fucked with by people. Right? And the AI we’ve seen so far has all the greasy fingerprints of human emotion and illogical like, when Google released their their AI, they asked them to to to shah photographs, create images rather of Nazi soldiers. So they did a diverse group of Nazi soldiers, including an African American woman, an Asian woman, a native American woman with braids was a Nazi.
Speaker: 0
51:35
The whole it’s it’s so nuts because it’s ai, okay. Somebody fucked with this. This doesn’t make any sense. This is
Speaker: 1
51:44
you can’t
Speaker: 0
51:45
you can’t do that because if you if you get a virus, an illogical virus that somehow or another gets into AI and it’s unchecked, if AI isn’t completely logical and objective and and sentient and and basing it just entirely on what’s best for the human race, then then you just have a superpower that you have control over. And then you can decide, like, no more abortions.
Speaker: 0
52:08
You can decide
Speaker: 1
52:09
exactly And as you and as you said, what the the definition of what is best is a is a moral Yes. Decision Yes. That that we we make.
Speaker: 0
52:17
But you can make some distinctions in terms of, like, allocation of resources. Like, you could make some if if I was a superintelligence and I looked at Earth, I would I’d say, listen, a lot of people are not gonna like this, but there’s a reality. There’s the reason why you’re worried about the border because people are sneaking in is because other parts of the world are fucking terrible.
Speaker: 0
52:38
So that needs to be cleaned up. That needs to be fixed. We need to figure out how to raise. Instead of spending money on blowing people up, let’s spend all this money to raise up all of civilization so there’s no more third world.
Speaker: 1
52:53
Well, that’s one of the arguments. Have you, Ai speak to Robert Bryden, who Ai know wrote these wonderful books, called about ai space. And sai he’s a fascinating character. And I speak to him once and he made this very simple argument that as you said, one of the problems we have is competition for resources.
Speaker: 1
53:11
And, of course, we’re the competition for resources is now so extreme that it’s not only wars that it creates and always has, but it’s also, of course, we damage the planet if we over over exploit the resources and so on. Right? So you’ve got this problem about resources. And he’s right.
Speaker: 1
53:27
He would say this is the number one motivation for going up because there are in fact infinite resources out there.
Speaker: 0
53:34
Right.
Speaker: 1
53:34
And so you begin once you begin to have access to the asteroids and access to Mars and beyond, You you you can imagine a world where you alleviate that pressure. And,
Speaker: 0
53:46
ladies, I wanna tell you, there’s a planet out there bigger than Earth that’s all diamonds.
Speaker: 1
53:51
There are diamond planets. There are all the there’s unlimited Isn’t that insane? Imagination without a sphere.
Speaker: 0
53:58
Isn’t it, like, several times larger than Earth and it’s an entire diamond?
Speaker: 1
54:02
Yeah. And we think I think it’s Neptune. Uranus has Sure. We think has diamonds in it. So Oh ai goodness. Sai yeah. So Sana diamonds
Speaker: 0
54:10
are only valuable because we decide they’re valuable. Yeah. You know, it’s kinda the Beers people are brilliant. They they ai lock them all up. They’re like, oh, this is really hard to get. They’re good for drill
Speaker: 1
54:18
bits as well. But we can make them for drill bits.
Speaker: 0
54:20
But this is the interesting thing. You can make them for jewelry as well, but some women don’t want them.
Speaker: 1
54:25
Don’t want the artificially
Speaker: 0
54:26
No. They want the real ones. They want the ones that came out of the earth all
Speaker: 1
54:30
the way. Value things. Gold. Yes. Gold is another example. Right? It’s valuable because there isn’t very much of it.
Speaker: 0
54:34
Right. There’s so little of it. It’s like a football field. Right?
Speaker: 1
54:38
Yeah.
Speaker: 0
54:38
A football field of gold in the whole world.
Speaker: 1
54:40
You know, by the way, that we we’re talking about the gravitational wave detectors earlier and the collision between black holes that we detect with them. We also detected a collision between neutron stars using the gravitational wave detector. And we pointed optical telescopes sai that collision and saw the signature of gold being manufactured.
Speaker: 1
55:00
And it was always it was always a question. We used to just think, well, it comes from supernova explosions. But it also seems now that it comes from the collision between neutron stars. So one of the reasons that it’s very rare is because it takes rare processes in the universe to actually make it, which makes it all the more wonderful when you think about it.
Speaker: 1
55:20
If you look at the gold, your wedding ring, or your watch, or whatever it is, that that some of those nuclei, some of those elements clearly came from the collision between neutron stars at some point before our solar system was formed. Wow. Which is makes it more wonderful.
Speaker: 0
55:36
Well, every human being is a carbon based life form. And carbon comes
Speaker: 1
55:40
from stars. Yeah. As Carl Sagan said, star stuff.
Speaker: 0
55:43
That’s the craziest thing ever. Like, you need a star to blow up to make a person in the first place.
Speaker: 1
55:47
It’s a remarkable thing. I wanted to go back to something you said actually about the, I’ve been thinking about ai, but you said this ai intelligence that we might create. Yes. And ai of what’s the point? What would be the point of existence if you were a morsel and you knew everything? Wouldn’t it be ai dull?
Speaker: 1
56:11
Ai you said is it’s almost like a meditative state. So we strive for this this peace, you know, essentially.
Speaker: 0
56:19
Well, maybe we’re thinking
Speaker: 1
56:20
of it
Speaker: 0
56:20
as dull because we don’t have access to the information. Like, we we have a very limited amount of senses. We have hearing and sight and taste and touch and, you know, it’s very limited. Right? Why would we assume that that is the only way to perceive things? If you could become infinitely intelligent, you could legitimately perceive neutrinos, you know, you could right?
Speaker: 0
56:46
Like, if we have this thing that detects the ripples from black holes colliding, that might be a feature of a future human body. If we have an unbelievable capacity for information because it’s artificially created, so we get over this biological limitation of long scale evolution, like a really good like, the human brain doubled over 2,000,000 years, and it’s the biggest mystery in the entire fossil record.
Speaker: 0
57:09
Like, what happened? All these theories. But that’s a long fucking time. In 2,000,000 years of technology, we could become god or a godlike being. Yeah.
Speaker: 0
57:19
A thing that but it might be how the universe creates itself. The universe might facilitate that through these biological beings fighting over resources and territory, which ultimately leads to innovation, which ultimately leads to cities and agriculture, which ultimately leads to safety, which leads to schools and people start sharing information.
Speaker: 0
57:39
You get curious people that figure things out, and you have to battle ideologies along the way, which makes you work harder. You know, we all look back. Look what they did to Galileo. And everybody has these you can’t you can’t ai has to advance. And this saloni with materialism so materialism is a primary driver.
Speaker: 0
57:56
Everybody wants the newest, latest, greatest thing. You can have a car from 2007, and it’s great. It’s indistinguishable from a car today in most ways. It’s just a car, but you’re like, oh, they got the new one. Oh, that’s sai new Lexus. Look at vatsal four wheel steering.
Speaker: 0
58:14
And, like, do we want constantly new stuff? We wanna keep up with the Joneses, you know. I’m the biggest dummy in the world. I got a new iPhone. It’s act it has actually better. It’s got a few features. One of the things that’s very fascinating is I was in the mountains last week.
Speaker: 0
58:28
You can text message people with no one around you, no signal, no I mean, woods forever. And if you hold your phone in a particular part of the sky, it’ll tell you which one’s scanning it. And the satellite allows you to ai back and forth with people. Yeah. Totally ai you are ai g everywhere. You could it’s crazy.
Speaker: 1
58:51
And So you’ve already achieved Nirvana then. You don’t need to go any further.
Speaker: 0
58:54
It’s fascinating. It’s so fascinating to me. Ai sai enamored by it.
Speaker: 1
58:58
I would argue. I I think, imagine that you had access to, as you said, essentially infinite knowledge. Yes. Imagine you’re one
Speaker: 0
59:07
of these things
Speaker: 1
59:09
in the in the future. Maybe the things that we created. Right. That that essentially know almost everything there is to know in some sense. I think that they would feel there was no point in existing at all.
Speaker: 0
59:25
But ai don’t isn’t that a human thing, this idea of a point? Like, I make this argument with people. There there’s a a Buddhist concept that you I think it’s Buddhism or some strains of Buddhism where you you live your life over and over and over and over again until you get it right.
Speaker: 0
59:42
Until every time something comes up, you make the right decision, you achieve ai, you do it over. And I said it to someone and they were ai, like, oh ai god. Could you imagine living life over again, starting off as a baby, going through high school again? Oh, I couldn’t do it.
Speaker: 0
59:59
I’m like, but you did it, and you’re alive now. Like, I really enjoy life. I have great friends. I have a great family. I have a fantastic job.
Speaker: 0
01:00:08
I live in a great place. Like, Like, if I had to keep doing this forever, why would that be horrible? I like doing it every day. Why would I not like doing it? I don’t understand. Like, I don’t understand this idea that if something is infinite and it goes on forever, that’s terrifying.
Speaker: 0
01:00:21
Whereas if it’s existing right now, right now, you’re I know you’re gonna get tyler. I know you’re gonna go to bed. I know you’re gonna get hungry. I know you’re gonna eat, but you’re just existing. It’s it’s this state of existence that varies depending on emotions and mood and stress levels and environment, but it’s just existence.
Speaker: 0
01:00:39
If existence was eternal and it just kept going on and on, why would that be terrifying for you when you’re enjoying it now?
Speaker: 1
01:00:46
Well, if you think about some of the things that make us the most important things that make us human. So one of them would be hope, for example. Hope for the future. Or indeed fear. Or those emotions that are connected with not knowing. Not knowing what’s around the next corner, as you said even exploration.
Speaker: 1
01:01:07
So if you remove that, if you remove any sense of not knowing what the future will be, you do remove hope as well as fear. So you could argue that some of the best, the essence of being human, some of the things that we value the most ai make us most valuable in the universe in this sense, some of those things come from incomplete knowledge.
Speaker: 1
01:01:33
I mean, surely hope does. Sure. How could you have hope and excitement about what’s gonna happen tomorrow if you know?
Speaker: 0
01:01:40
But ai you think that that’s a miserable ai? Improvement? That all that hope just motivates you to do better and get better? And do you think that meh be a feature of a biological organism? It’s like you said when
Speaker: 1
01:01:50
you when you when you’re growing up, you said like, you know, when you’re in high school or when you’re young, Christmas ram example. Right. Remember when you’re at Christmas Eve. Yeah. And you go, what am I gonna get tomorrow? Yeah. But it’s one of the most wonderful feelings, isn’t it?
Speaker: 1
01:02:00
One of the most wonderful, like, ah, you’re not in the presence of that.
Speaker: 0
01:02:03
That’s
Speaker: 1
01:02:03
incredible. None of that would exist
Speaker: 0
01:02:07
Right.
Speaker: 1
01:02:07
If you have one of these super beings. So so Ai I think why one of those that’s just for us. That’s just for us.
Speaker: 0
01:02:14
It’s just for us that it appears magical. When you’re comparing that to black holes colliding, like, is it really so important what you got for Christmas? Well It’s be but it’s us. It’s our biological needs, our needs for, our needs for to be shown that we’re loved. We got a good toy.
Speaker: 0
01:02:36
We our excitement about something that we’ve wanted that was inaccessible, you know, some something that you were hoping for for Christmas and you got it, ai, made a video game console. Oh. Yeah.
Speaker: 1
01:02:47
But is
Speaker: 0
01:02:48
it purely bi I
Speaker: 1
01:02:49
think what Ai getting to, is it purely biological? This is a great conversation, by the way. I haven’t thought about this.
Speaker: 0
01:02:54
But it’s only us. Ai is
Speaker: 1
01:02:56
it or is it just a prophecy of intelligence? Does it I mean you’re arguing that it’s a good argument that many of these desires come from our biological fragility. Yes. And also the fragility of our planet. Yes. And as you sai. But it could be that these ideas of of meaning of of of what what it means to exist, of what is the point of existence.
Speaker: 1
01:03:23
Maybe that’s a general prophecy of any intelligence system.
Speaker: 0
01:03:27
Well, it seems like it’s imperative for survival. You have to have a reason to do it. It would be baked into the code if you wanted this thing to keep going. Otherwise, why wouldn’t it just stick with, you know, as soon as you figured out running water and electricity and how to ship food, why would why would you keep going?
Speaker: 1
01:03:45
Is there is there such a thing as contentment though, for anyone?
Speaker: 0
01:03:51
It’s possible. It’s possible, Duchy. I mean, that’s what Buddhist strive for. That’s what all that meditation is, the abandonment of all material possessions.
Speaker: 1
01:03:59
It might be horrendous though.
Speaker: 0
01:04:01
Ai it would be horrendous. I don’t wanna abandon everything and no more sex and you can’t have a glass
Speaker: 1
01:04:06
of wine. That’s just crazy. Sai that’s why I I’m kind of interested that god, a ai being might be so bored and so devoid of all excitement because those things like hope and curiosity. Curiosity is one of the most foundational things, one of the most incredible we both share that
Speaker: 0
01:04:28
idea. For us. Yes.
Speaker: 1
01:04:29
If you know so much Right. Maybe that you what what happens in a world where your curiosity is not there? You don’t you’ve got nothing to be curious about. You know? Wouldn’t that be horrendous?
Speaker: 0
01:04:41
Isn’t this a property of what it means to be a ai lifespan a finite life form that exists on a volatile planet that this hope and who ai but if that is bypassed, why do we need to be anxious all the time? Why do we need to have hope? Why wouldn’t we have a complete bliss, a complete connection to everything?
Speaker: 1
01:05:03
You linked you linked hope to anxiety. Is that is that right?
Speaker: 0
01:05:08
I hope it works out. Did but ai that But but
Speaker: 1
01:05:11
I was
Speaker: 0
01:05:11
ai it. Fighting you’re fighting the anxiety by having a an optimistic outlook. I have hope.
Speaker: 1
01:05:17
I think I was using it in a different way, though. I was imagining hope as like, I don’t know, excitement for what’s beyond the horizon. Sure. So so not not driven this actually gets to the heart of what I think a scientist is by the way, the difference between not only a ai, but let’s say what what is a scientist?
Speaker: 1
01:05:37
Ai somebody just researching anything really, someone who creates things. They’re they’re people who like to stand on the edge of the known. So they they find it exhilarating but interesting. Almost in the context we’re talking. It’s almost the the one of the driving one of the things that drives our existence
Speaker: 0
01:05:55
Yes.
Speaker: 1
01:05:55
Is to stand on the edge of the known and peer into the unknown with with excitement and curiosity because because you can go over the horizon. Yes. And so that that’s the sense in which I’m using these terms. I’m saying that’s one of the fundamentally most valuable things of being human. Yes.
Speaker: 1
01:06:13
That there’s there’s there is an edge of the known. Yes. And so I would find it, I think, more terrifying to imagine that there was no edge of the known, that everything was known. Then I would think existence is pointless. I wouldn’t I wouldn’t I personally would not find that. I wouldn’t think I’d achieved sana.
Speaker: 1
01:06:32
Well, I would think I’d I’d got no there’s no point. Ai would I would
Speaker: 0
01:06:36
imagine existing within the framework of being a human being. And if we transcend the framework of being a human being, all these things we will come to realize, all these emotions and all these desires and need are just to motivate our survival. If we’ve gotten past that and we don’t have a need for hope and we don’t have curiosity because we have infinite information. We’re not the same thing anymore.
Speaker: 0
01:07:04
So all the things that motivate you and Ai, they make us fascinated by ai. I was so excited to talk to you today. Like, Brian Cox is gonna be here. We’re gonna have fun. Like, this is gonna be great. I’m gonna learn some stuff.
Speaker: 0
01:07:15
Vatsal all that innate curiosity that we have that’s so rewarding as a human being is a part of being a human being. And we think of it as being the only way to have meaning and happiness. Yeah. The only way. But that’s because of the framework of being a human being.
Speaker: 0
01:07:32
Yeah. If we transcend the existence that we we we’re all confined to this temporary life form, check my heart rate, like, make sure I get electrolytes, you know, who tries to keep the body alive. If we transcend that completely, there’s no need for all those things that are rewarding. We’ll have a different kind of reward. We’ll have a reward of infinite connection.
Speaker: 1
01:07:57
I think we’re trying to imagine what it’s like to be God, aren’t we?
Speaker: 0
01:08:01
Yes. That’s exactly what
Speaker: 1
01:08:02
we’re doing. That’s exactly what we do. That’s quite hard.
Speaker: 0
01:08:04
I have been thinking about this a lot and I found out that somebody had already beat me to it. But the idea that the universe itself is God, that if if you wanted something that creates this is not to diminish any of the stories of the ai because I think a lot of those stories are these are ways that people ai to find meaning and probably had some, like, baked in truths about being a human being and life and the existence and.
Speaker: 0
01:08:30
But that in compare just the things that are miracles on earth, like a person coming back to ai, sana nothing in compared to a stellar nursery. Sai it’s it’s ai the the scope of the universe itself, the real stuff that we can see that is absolutely the creator of everything.
Speaker: 0
01:08:50
Whether or not God created the universe, maybe. Maybe God created us. Maybe the Ai true. But whatever was done here is like a small bodega in comparison to some enormous ai, the giga factor that makes Tesla’s. Like, there’s a sai much larger scale that absolutely created everything. Not only to absolutely create everything, we know the process. We know how it happened.
Speaker: 0
01:09:16
We know how stars are formed. We know how planets exist. We know how gravity is affecting the planets around. We know so much about all this. We know so much about the process of going from single celled organisms to multi celled organisms and photosynthesis existing and that fungus exists in a completely different way.
Speaker: 0
01:09:35
We know so much about all the things that absolutely came out of the universe itself. Why not assume the universe is God?
Speaker: 1
01:09:44
I mean, it is in some technical sense. It has to say
Speaker: 0
01:09:46
that it’s everything. The universe is everything, including God. Well If God is a real thing.
Speaker: 1
01:09:51
If you define God as the creator Yes. Then you’re ai. From from some point that we don’t understand, by the way, we do the the big bang, we don’t even understand whether that was the origin of the universe, by the way. We understand that something interesting happened.
Speaker: 0
01:10:04
What is Sai Roger Penrose’s?
Speaker: 1
01:10:06
He has he has a infinite cyclical universe. Yes. And he’s trying to answer questions about the very special state of the early universe and why it was the way that it was.
Speaker: 0
01:10:18
So his model is an infinite contraction and expansion?
Speaker: 1
01:10:22
It doesn’t really contract. Sai, it kind of it’s called, what’s it called, conformal cosmology or cyclical conformal cosmology or something. So it’s essentially that and and I don’t fully understand it. And I have asked him about it with some colleagues, actually. None of us understand what you’re saying. Fuck.
Speaker: 1
01:10:40
No. No. No. I don’t think many of us understand what you Ai mean, Roger Penner is one of the greats. Right?
Speaker: 1
01:10:46
So you listen to him and take him very seriously. But I’ve I’ve met anyone who quite understands what he what he’s talking about in that. But, but it is it doesn’t recontract. It’s not one of those models where the universe expands and then recontracts and bounces like that, it’s not one of those.
Speaker: 1
01:11:02
Somehow he argues that when you get to what we usually call the heat death of the universe, where even the black holes have evaporated away, you have conditions that begin to look perhaps like an origin of the universe again. And I can’t really fully explain it because I don’t really understand what he’s trying to say, right?
Speaker: 1
01:11:26
Ai I’m I’m so So it’s not a
Speaker: 0
01:11:28
a contraction. It’s an infinite expansion and then some sort of a metamorphosis?
Speaker: 1
01:11:34
Yeah. It kinda looks like conformal means there are no, sort of distances or time measurements or anything in the universe. It kind of loses all sense of scale and then you could you could reimagine that as looking somewhat like the beginning. It’s something like that that he has in mind but I really couldn’t explain to you. I don’t understand what he’s proposing there.
Speaker: 1
01:12:00
But what it does tell you is that we don’t know why or how the universe got into the state that we call the Big Bang. So we don’t we don’t know whether the universe existed before that. We have theories that it did, theories called inflation, which are very popular theories, you’ll find them in all the textbooks, which say that before the universe was hot and dense, which we used to call the Big Bang, space and time is still there, and the universe is expanding extremely fast, it’s called it’s called inflation, and then that period draws to a close, and that expansion sort of slows down and almost collapses and changes, and the energy that was driving the expansion gets dumped into space and changes and ultimately makes the particles out of which we are made.
Speaker: 1
01:12:51
So that’s actually the standard model of cosmology now. So we do have an idea that we redefine the big bang as the hot big bang and it’s not the origin of the universe in time. It’s the end of inflation. And then you get the question, what is inflation? Did that have a beginning? And the answer is that in Einstein’s theory alone, then meh.
Speaker: 1
01:13:14
And Roger Penrose actually and Stephen Hawking proved this a long time ago. That just given Einstein’s theory, you have this singularity, just like kind of like the black hole singularity but at the beginning of time. But we do know that when you put quantum mechanics in and add that in, then it gets meh, and we don’t really know what that means.
Speaker: 1
01:13:35
And so Stephen Hawking had a thing called the no boundary proposals. Basically the point is we don’t know. So we don’t know whether the universe had a beginning in time, I would say is the correct statement as we are at the moment. It’s part of the reason why, by the way, getting back to the black holes, they’re important and interesting.
Speaker: 1
01:13:54
Because the study of black holes and this idea of information and how does it get out, that’s leading us to suspect that space and time themselves are not fundamental, but they emerge from something else. So just in the way that we’ve been talking about consciousness emerging from this physical structure in our heads, so we don’t know how it emerges, it’s a very strange thing, but it emerges from this collection of atoms, right, in a particular pattern.
Speaker: 1
01:14:22
Well we think now from the study of black holes that space and time emerge from something else which is kind of one way to describe it is just a quantum theory. So in quantum computing terms it would be just cubits, so a network of cubits entangled together just like a quantum computer.
Speaker: 1
01:14:44
Out of that we suspect that space and time might emerge. So surely we have to understand that process and we don’t really fully understand that, but we have glimpses of it in much more detail to start talking about the origin of time. Because now to talk about the origin of time, you have to know what it is.
Speaker: 1
01:15:02
And we don’t actually know what it is, which is, you know, and that’s kind of when you say that, it sounds bizarre, doesn’t it? Well, how can you not know what time is? I think Einstein once said that it is the thing that you measure on a watch, but he said that as kind of an almost a joke because you assume in Einstein’s theory that it’s a thing that the watch measures.
Speaker: 1
01:15:22
But what actually it is, at the deepest level, is a good question. Sai, but it’s funny, it’s interesting that the study of black holes is forcing us towards these theories. It’s not that we have the theory, space and ai, emerging from something and ai we could check it by thinking about black holes, it’s come the other way around, really.
Speaker: 1
01:15:43
Sai it’s interesting. But that almost makes the universe look in some ways like a giant quantum computer which is not to say that we live in a simulation before you ask but but it just looks like there’s a description of the universe that looks like a quantum computer type description.
Speaker: 1
01:16:05
That doesn’t have the concept of space or time in it.
Speaker: 0
01:16:11
Is it possible that that is what it is and that the universe was created? And that I meh, created we’re we’re talking about super intelligent life forms keep constructing better versions of itself and better versions of computers to the point where it can construct the universe itself.
Speaker: 0
01:16:27
I mean, you know, if we’re seeing the code, if we’re we’re seeing the evidence, we’re seeing something that mimics a quantum computer in the universe. You know, we’re like, ah, couldn’t be that.
Speaker: 1
01:16:41
It is it’s interesting that it you’re ai and that’s a good way of phrasing it, mimics how it looks like sai network of cubits. So it looks like some kind of quantum computing description is available to us for the universe. But I don’t think you can infer much from that. I mean it just passes the question further back. As I said meh have never understood what it means for the universe to have a beginning.
Speaker: 1
01:17:09
To me, we don’t really know that. And so this is the same. I think it’s just the same question. It’s like, well, you ask, well, you know, if it really is a network of cubits, it could have been there forever, that network of cubits. Ai actually in quantum theory it’s more natural for it to be just eternal. And it’s an interesting question.
Speaker: 1
01:17:29
I once gave a talk actually, a conference of bishops, they were Catholic bishops, and they asked me to go and give a talk at their conference about cosmology. And so I gave the talk about cosmology and they all listened to me. We had a question thing afterwards. And I said to them, what happens if we discover the universe has always existed? Because it might have.
Speaker: 1
01:17:49
We know there’s a thing called the Big Bang, but it might have been something that happened in a pre existing universe, maybe that’s eternal. What does that mean for your sort of picture of a creator? Does it Ai don’t know. I was asking it. It’s a genuine question. Right.
Speaker: 1
01:18:05
How would you and they really didn’t, they thought it was a cool question and didn’t have an answer right. But it is Ai think the idea that Ai wish the question to you actually, are we more comfortable with the universe that began or would we be more comfortable with the universe that had always existed?
Speaker: 0
01:18:25
I I I mean, comfortable is a weird word because I always wonder if our whole desire to form the universe in in terms of a beginning and an end is based on our own biological limitations. The fact that we have a birth and a death, we try to apply that to the universe itself because we’re we know that stars didn’t exist, then they do.
Speaker: 0
01:18:44
They burn out. We we know planets lose their atmosphere. Ai we know things change and all these things. So I think we think, oh, well, this sun’s gonna die out. The universe probably had a beginning too. But why? What it there’s no reason to think it did.
Speaker: 0
01:19:02
Like, it it’s much more likely that it’s always existed than it didn’t exist, and then it became out of what? Yeah. If the universe didn’t exist, so there’s nothing in the whole of observable everything, there’s nothing. Yeah. And then all of a sudden there’s something, that seems less likely.
Speaker: 0
01:19:21
It seems more likely that this whole idea of a birth and a death is just, we we we have this look this way of looking at things because of our own limitations. Like, we think that everything has to have a beginning and
Speaker: 1
01:19:32
an end. And you’re right. I mean I mean, you’ve had Sean Carroll on the show because he he always points out that, you know, this question ai is there something rather than nothing Right. Presupposes that nothing is more likely than something.
Speaker: 0
01:19:47
Right.
Speaker: 1
01:19:47
So whereas it might be the other way around. Right. Right. We don’t even know that. Right. Right. So But how
Speaker: 0
01:19:52
does something come out of nothing? Ai mean, you know,
Speaker: 1
01:19:54
the history, I think historically, you have I think it’s right to say that Einstein really fell Ai think that initially that an eternal universe was more vatsal. But it is also true to say that his theory, general relativity, really doesn’t quite rule that out but it’s strongly suggestive of there being a beginning and or an end.
Speaker: 1
01:20:19
Sai the theory vatsal, historically speaking, strongly suggests that. And so he changed his mind and then we saw the universe was expanding, we observed that. And then we’ve now seen the oldest light in the universe, the cosmic microwave background radiation, which is the afterglow of the Big Bang.
Speaker: 1
01:20:36
So we know that the universe was hot and dense 13,800,000,000 years ago. We have so much evidence for that, not least that we have a photograph of it 380000 years after the Big Bang. It’s called the Cosmic Microwave Background.
Speaker: 0
01:20:48
Let’s see that. Let me see
Speaker: 1
01:20:49
that. Images of that. That’s from the satellite called Planck, a European ai, and also satellite called COBE. So we have these images of the afterglow of the Big Bang. We also have theories that tell us about the abundance of chemical elements in the universe which match this perfectly.
Speaker: 1
01:21:04
So there’s multiple lines of evidence that tell us the universe was hot and dense. But none of that tells us that that was the beginning. That Ai think that would be widely accepted. That it’s a beginning in Einstein’s theory. If you just take general relativity, there’s a singularity there at the beginning of time.
Speaker: 1
01:21:23
We don’t know what it is, but it’s there. But it absolutely is true to say that we we think that’s not complete as a picture. So so there it is. Sai that is light that was emitted about 380000 years after the Big Bang. So it’s it’s a and the key thing there’s so many things to say about these images.
Speaker: 1
01:21:44
But one thing is those colors correspond to regions of very slightly different density that we detect it now in in the in the gases of the young universe.
Speaker: 0
01:21:54
Are you talking about the meh, blue ones?
Speaker: 1
01:21:56
Yeah. The reds and blues. Those those all those as well. They’re both both the same. So that that greeny one, well, either that one or the the one with the greeny blue, that one, that’s the from the Planck satellite. So those colours correspond to regions of different density.
Speaker: 1
01:22:11
So in this young universe, 380000 years after the Big Bang, that’s only hydrogen and helium gas basically and a bit of lithium, bit of little some of the ai brownies, but basically hydrogen and helium. So you’ve got an almost smooth, almost featureless universe then. But these little density fluctuations are very important because as the universe expanded and cooled they collapsed to form the galaxies.
Speaker: 1
01:22:39
So without those ripples, without that pattern we would not exist, nothing of interest would exist. And so the question is where did that come from, that pattern? It’s fundamentally important. And the theory of inflation that I mentioned earlier, that there’s this time before the universe got hot and dense, that theory predicted that pattern before it was observed.
Speaker: 1
01:23:03
So this idea that you’ve got this very stretch very quickly stretching space Ai the way, so it’s so the stretch, if I can remember the number, is if you consider 2 points that draws to a close. And those theories so there’s inflation there. So those theories predicted slight variations in the rate at which inflation stops.
Speaker: 0
01:23:42
Does the inflation theory does this work with sir Roger Penrose’ concept? I mean, is it possible that inflation is the far period of the expansion of the universe?
Speaker: 1
01:23:53
I mean, it it it is. He doesn’t like inflation as a theory.
Speaker: 0
01:23:58
He doesn’t?
Speaker: 1
01:23:59
Oh, no. So but so but but but it’s right that sai universe is accelerating in its expansion at the moment, which is one of the great mysteries that was discovered in the ai nineties ai a friend of mine actually, Brian Schmidt, who got the Nobel Ai for this discovery. He told me once, I don’t know if I tyler you this story before, but he told me that he, he’d made this measurement and it wasn’t really he was looking at supernova explosions.
Speaker: 1
01:24:25
And he’d seen that they the suggestion in the data was that the universe is accelerating in its expansion, not slowing down, but speeding up in its rate of expansion. And and no one was expecting it, so he thought it was just wrong. He thought but he couldn’t find anything wrong with his data.
Speaker: 1
01:24:42
So he published it and thought, well, that’s the end of my career.
Speaker: 0
01:24:45
Oh, boy.
Speaker: 1
01:24:46
You know, I I he’s quite young.
Speaker: 0
01:24:47
I think
Speaker: 1
01:24:47
he might have even been a post doc and he just published it. He thought, that’s a good scientist. Right? I I I don’t think this is ai, but I can’t see anything wrong with it. I’ll publish it. Someone else will tell me where my mistake was. And there was no mistake and he won the Nobel Prize Wow. For that discovery. That’s the ai nineties. So this idea of the universe is accelerating in expansion.
Speaker: 1
01:25:07
The way that it does that is really important. Is it gonna carry on doing that? Is whatever’s driving that expansion gonna change in some way, which could actually re collapse the universe again? We we give it a name, by the way, dark energy, this thing. Mhmm. But we don’t know what it is. I think it’s very fair to say.
Speaker: 1
01:25:26
But it looks a bit like inflation, but it’s way slower. So maybe they’re linked, maybe it’s the same kind of thing. We don’t really know. And so it’s one of the great mysteries. So but but the universe, it looks like the universe is sana continue to expand forever and to continue to accelerate.
Speaker: 1
01:25:42
Well, dark matter
Speaker: 0
01:25:43
and dark energy, they’re both very confusing.
Speaker: 1
01:25:46
Yeah. Dark matter’s in some sense marginally less confusing in the sense that at least we have an idea of what it might be. Whereas dark energy, there are people listening to it. There’ll be there are people working on it. So there are theories about what it might be. But I think it’s further it feels less explicable given what we know than dark matter, but we haven’t discovered what we we think dark matter might be some kind of particle that has got certain properties and doesn’t interact very strongly, ai interacts like neutrinos, basically, you mentioned earlier.
Speaker: 1
01:26:22
So really doesn’t interact very strongly. But we’ve thought we might have seen those particles. We’re looking for them. They would be passing through this room now, and so we could build the detector in here, and we do that, and we look for these particles. We haven’t seen them. We thought we might make them at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN.
Speaker: 1
01:26:38
I think many people thought that we’d see the signature of these things and we haven’t done. So it could be that we’re not right with that picture.
Speaker: 0
01:26:46
So but that picture encompasses what percentage of the known universe?
Speaker: 1
01:26:50
Sai, yes, it’s about 5% matter, about 70% dark energy, and the rest, so 25% dark matter. Sai we’re we’re just less than 5% this.
Speaker: 0
01:27:02
That’s crazy.
Speaker: 1
01:27:03
So all the stuff we can sai. So everything we can see in the sky, all the gas and the dust and the galaxies and the stars and the black holes, all those things, less than 5% according to the standard model of cosmology.
Speaker: 0
01:27:18
And so the other ai% is just ai, who knows? Something else.
Speaker: 1
01:27:23
Yeah. And so but those are models. I mean, it’s it’s important to say that it’s interesting because until sai we have a hypothesis which is strongly supported by lots of bits of evidence that dark matter is some kind of particle. So that’s the broadly that’s what you ai in the textbooks.
Speaker: 1
01:27:43
But it’s true that until you find it, until you see it then you haven’t shown it to be correct.
Speaker: 0
01:27:50
Are there alternative theories?
Speaker: 1
01:27:52
There are and they’re not Are they compelling? No, they all have problems and most of them have problems with that pattern, the CMV, the cosmic microwave background that we just sai. Because that pattern, what you’re looking at actually in that pattern is acoustic, is waves, sound waves essentially in the early universe that go through the plasma of the early universe.
Speaker: 1
01:28:14
And they go out and we know what speed they go through that plasma. So it’s almost like you’re looking at a pond and you’re throwing stones into the pond, and they all land in the pond at the same time and send ripples out, little circular ripples in the pond, and they all overlap.
Speaker: 1
01:28:31
And that’s what that pattern is. So we’re looking at sound waves going through this plasma. And those those theories require the dark matter. The dark matter fits well if it’s in there, in in in this plasma, in this kind of soup, the the subatomic particle soup that’s the early universe.
Speaker: 1
01:28:50
And the way the sound waves go through it fit that idea. So that’s one thing, but the the the idea also came from looking at galaxies and how they rotate, and galaxies and how they bend light and and and deform space and ai, and how they interact together. So there’s loads of different bits of information, observations of the universe from the cosmic microwave background all the way through to galaxies, and the formation of galaxies and the theories that we have there vatsal suggest there are these particles around that interact very weakly with light.
Speaker: 1
01:29:23
So they don’t really interact with light at all which is why we don’t see them, which is why they’re dark. That’s just like a neutrino. Right? So so like heavy neutrinos. And actually there was a theory once that maybe they were heavy neutrinos, but that’s kind of disfavored now.
Speaker: 1
01:29:38
And so so we we have loads of kind of different bits that fit this is how you do ai, you start with a theory and you make a load of observations and you can infer things and you get a consistent picture. But very importantly until you find it, until you really find that particle then you don’t know. Right? So that’s, a good question.
Speaker: 0
01:30:03
Just what we don’t know is so fascinating. Just that aspect of it that 95% of the universe is like we’re not really sure what it is.
Speaker: 1
01:30:10
Yeah. That’s And and and we’ve inferred it. So you might say, how do you know it’s there? You know, which is a good question. Right? I I mean, if if if we have not detected this stuff, how do you know? And it’s from Einstein’s theory, really. So it’s from gravity. It’s from looking at the way that galaxies rotate and the way that these sound waves move through the early universe and the way that the universe expands.
Speaker: 1
01:30:34
Because the way the universe expands is related to the stuff that’s in the universe. So we can weigh the universe and find out what kind of different things are in there by looking at the way it’s expanded and how that expansion history has changed over time. So what you do with science, which is why it’s, you know, it’s true that you can criticise any one bit of it, and people will.
Speaker: 1
01:31:00
So online you’ll see in the comments under this there’ll be people saying, what about this, what about
Speaker: 0
01:31:04
this?’ And
Speaker: 1
01:31:04
it’s true that you can pluck away and pick away saloni piece of it. But the way it tends to work is when you have this kind of consensus view of something, it’s because you have multiple observations that all fit a particular hypothesis. And by changing one of them, by changing the explanation of one of them, you tend to mess the whole other thing up.
Speaker: 1
01:31:26
You meh the the wider description of multiple phenomena, you mess it all up. So it’s quite hard to to find other theories at the moment that will fit all of those different observations. Ai mean, another example would be the age of things. It’s interesting that you can look at we can measure the age of the Earth, ai?
Speaker: 1
01:31:50
And you measure it from geological processes, radioactive dating and so on, and you can ai of measure the age of the Earth. You can measure the age of the Sana in a different way. You can measure it by looking at by looking at, called helio seismology, so you can measure how much helium is in the core of the sana, and the sun shines by making helium from hydrogen.
Speaker: 1
01:32:10
So by measuring the amount of helium in the core, by looking at basically sound waves, like an earthquake, but sunquakes. You can measure how much helium is in there sai you can get an estimate of the age of the sun. And then you can meh an estimate of the age of the universe by measuring how it’s expanding and using Einstein’s theory.
Speaker: 1
01:32:26
The fact that they all fit with the picture of a universe that’s 13,800,000,000 years old, a sai that’s 4 and a half 1000000000 years old, a planet that’s 4 and a half 1000000000 years old, the fact that it all fits is ai an intricate model. And so you could say, well I argue with the measurements of the age of the Earth, maybe I don’t like the radioactive dating or something and people will say that.
Speaker: 1
01:32:54
But the thing is it’s a consistent picture with multiple different observations. And sai with dark matter, so the standard model of cosmology is you have, ai say about 5% matter, 25% dark matter, ai% dark energy. It might be wrong, but it fits loads of different independent observations.
Speaker: 1
01:33:16
So it’s a consistent picture of the way
Speaker: 0
01:33:19
it’s used. Know what it is, but we’re not very sure that it’s a thing. The other Pretty sure.
Speaker: 1
01:33:25
But it could it could not be.
Speaker: 0
01:33:27
What was the other compel was were any of the other theories competing theory theories where any of them compel
Speaker: 1
01:33:33
it at all? There is theories that people try to build where you modify our theory of gravity. So many of these observations, not all of them, so the cosmic microwave background are different observations, but many of them depend on gravity and how gravity works, Einstein’s theory of general relativity.
Speaker: 1
01:33:50
So you could try to modify that theory to say, well, our observation’s wrong. May maybe because the way we measure how the expansion of the universe is is to look at light from supernovas one way and see how it’s stretched over time. Because the light, let’s say you have a supernova and it happened a 1000000000 years ago, then the light has been travelling for a 1000000000 years across the universe.
Speaker: 1
01:34:15
And so the universe has been expanding for a 1000000000 years sai the light will be stretched and so you can measure how much stretch there is. Sai you just measure the colour of the light from the supernova. So you can argue that maybe if you go for light that’s been travelling 12000000000 years across the universe, then maybe there was something different, maybe the light was emitted a bit different, maybe the speed of light changes over time or something.
Speaker: 1
01:34:41
Sai you can invent theories that would allow you to change the data or the interpretation of the data. But what you always find, I think it would be fair to say, is that you can change a theory and explain one bit, but all the wheels come off the other bits.
Speaker: 0
01:35:00
Got it.
Speaker: 1
01:35:00
So that that’s why it’s quite difficult. So the dark
Speaker: 0
01:35:03
matter, dark energy theory is cohesive to all the other theories.
Speaker: 1
01:35:06
Yeah. So it fits Yeah. With you know, but then there are some mysteries. Well, not least, what is this stuff? Right. Right? And so until you know what it is, you don’t have a complete theory.
Speaker: 0
01:35:17
Well, that is one of the most fascinating things that ai% of the universe is ai, who knows what it is? Yeah.
Speaker: 1
01:35:22
Yeah. Yeah. And so that’s what I love about one of the things I love about science is it often gets presented, you know, because I talk about science a lot in public. And it can often seem arrogant, I think. It can seem, you know, like these people are saying, well, this is the way the world is.’ And you might say, well, you know, how are you to say this?’ The thing I like about it, personally, and the reason for its success, is that really you you have to be delighted when you’re wrong.
Speaker: 1
01:35:52
It’s the key the key to science. It’s been said many times, Richard Feynman, the great physicist, said it. You know, this is if if your goal is to understand nature, so that’s what you want to do. So you don’t you’ve not got an ego or anything, you don’t want to be proved right, you just want to understand.
Speaker: 1
01:36:13
Then being wrong, so if this idea of dark energy and dark matter turns out to be wrong, all ai, all good scientists will be absolutely ai. Because it would be tremendously exciting that we’d ruled out this picture.
Speaker: 0
01:36:28
It would be
Speaker: 1
01:36:29
great to rule out this picture. So So there isn’t such a thing as dark matter ai dark energy. It’s all nonsense. We were looking at the wrong tree, looking in the wrong direction. It’s something else which should be more wonderful, undoubtedly, than that theory that we have.
Speaker: 1
01:36:44
And so I think it’s a humble pursuit ultimately ai. And that’s the reason for its success. Because you’re just trying to understand how things work. You’re not trying to you shouldn’t be anyway good ai. You’re not trying to be the person that got it right. You’re not trying to do it.
Speaker: 1
01:37:04
There’s obviously human failure. Everyone’s got fragility and everyone’s human, you know, and ego. But ultimately you’re just trying to understand how things work.
Speaker: 0
01:37:12
Meh. And that’s a beautiful thing, and it’s so important for everyone else that doesn’t have the time. We we need you doing that. I need you it it really does, in some way, give us comfort to have a a better, more comprehensive view of what we’re experiencing. And as technology expands, ai, Sai was wanted to talk about the James Webb, some of the discoveries, but it sometimes it raises more questions.
Speaker: 0
01:37:38
And one of them was these galaxies that were formed that appeared to have been formed too quickly. Is that safe to say?
Speaker: 1
01:37:47
Yeah. So we had one of the reasons we built that telescope was to what it does, because it can see very distant things and because light travels vatsal finite speed the further out into the universe you look the further back in time you are looking. Right. So because that can see things from which the light has been travelling for over 13000000000 years then you are seeing things as they were in the first 1000000000 years or a few 100000 years in the history of the universe, ai, essentially.
Speaker: 1
01:38:17
Well a few 100000000 years sorry Ai should have said. So you are seeing the first galaxies form with that telescope, which is one of the reasons it was built. And the reason we wanted to see is because we don’t fully understand that process. As I mentioned before we don’t really fully understand why they have black holes in them and it’s something to do with their formation, but we don’t understand it very well.
Speaker: 1
01:38:41
So it’s not surprising to me that when you build that instrument and collect light from the early universe, you see an early universe that’s behaving in a different way to the way that you thought it behaved. And so indeed, yeah, we’re seeing galaxies that formed earlier than you would have predicted.
Speaker: 1
01:39:02
But that means that that means that your model of the way the universe evolved is not quite right, and that’s not a ai, because we wouldn’t have built the thing if we’d known everything.
Speaker: 0
01:39:14
Right. Of course.
Speaker: 1
01:39:15
So I don’t Ai don’t think there’s any I think it’s fair to say there’s nothing there that’s absolutely, completely destroys our picture of how the universe evolved from the cosmic microwave background that you saw in those images earlier.
Speaker: 0
01:39:27
Does it add more complexity? Does it add more nuance? Do you
Speaker: 1
01:39:30
Yeah. I I would say so. And I’m not an expert in that field. But my my understanding is that it’s interesting because we’re we’re having to refine and develop new models of the way that the galaxy’s formed. And indeed you sai that it looks like the stars and the galaxies are present in the universe earlier than we might have expected.
Speaker: 1
01:39:49
So it might be it might be that you’re seeing a hint of something really profound that we didn’t understand. Or it might be that just the models need a bit of a tweak. Mhmm.
Speaker: 0
01:40:00
So I I think Galaxies form quicker than we expected in the early stages of the universe. What are those red dots? The red dots that that were observed do you know ai I’m talking about?
Speaker: 1
01:40:12
In the in the images, the James Webb images of the early universe. Yeah. They they
Speaker: 0
01:40:16
That disappeared? Do you know what I’m talking about? And Ai saved it because I I knew that we’re gonna have to talk about this. It was, Jamie, I know we’ve talked about it before. Yeah. There it goes. Found 100 of little red dots, the ancient universe. We still don’t know what they are.
Speaker: 0
01:40:35
Small galaxies either ram with stars or they host gigantic black holes. The data astronomers have collected continues to puzzle them. So Yeah. What is that all about? Do you know?
Speaker: 1
01:40:44
I don’t know. It says it says there that we don’t know.
Speaker: 0
01:40:47
So I’m gonna go with that.
Speaker: 1
01:40:49
I mean, I think what you’re just speed reading that So it says it says a class of galaxies that, that so I I suppose we’re looking at a kind of galaxy. It seems we’re looking at a kind of galaxy that we don’t see today in the universe. Meh and compact, visible only during about 100 1,000,000,000 years of cosmic history.
Speaker: 1
01:41:12
So that would be, as I said, because we don’t really understand the formation of the galaxies and these super massive black holes, that’s interesting because what you’re seeing in the data is a kind of almost proto galaxy I suppose. These little tiny galaxies. That’s what it seems to suggest. Yeah. That’s the first time I’ve seen that. But just sai so it yeah.
Speaker: 1
01:41:33
I I think what we’re seeing is that we don’t understand how structures formed in the universe. We we have a reasonable idea, but we don’t understand the detail. And the more things like that you find, the more information you have to build models of how stuff formed.
Speaker: 0
01:41:50
Do we have another, like, next generation James Webb type telescope that’s even more efficient or more capable?
Speaker: 1
01:41:58
There are I mean, there are there are several sort of proposed observatories. And also ai the way gravitational wave detectors, which, so we’ve got LIGO, which is on the ground. There arya proposals to put one in space, which is called LISA, one of the proposals is called LISA, which is lasers between ai, so you can have much bigger things.
Speaker: 1
01:42:21
And the reason that’s interesting is because there’ll be gravitational waves from the Big Bang. So, you know, as you’ve mentioned neutrinos, you’ve got neutrino observatories, which can observe neutrinos from the early Universe. And you can see things, it’s just like light in a way, but it gives you a different view.
Speaker: 1
01:42:40
You mentioned earlier it’s a different way of looking at the Universe. So the neutrinos will have information. Gravitational waves will have detailed information about the Big Bang itself,
Speaker: 0
01:42:51
but
Speaker: 1
01:42:51
we can’t detect them at the moment because we can’t detect those really tiny little ripples in space and time.
Speaker: 0
01:42:57
That’s what’s so fascinating because if they do launch this and they find new information that’s even more puzzling, and they keep going further and further and further.
Speaker: 1
01:43:04
And and we sana to know. It’s like you said earlier, we we we we ask very deep questions about why the universe is the way it is. And maybe why there’s a universe vatsal? In the sense that did it have a beginning?
Speaker: 0
01:43:18
And
Speaker: 1
01:43:18
if so what does that mean? Does it mean for something like this to begin? Ai really ai it fascinating. And the most exciting thing of all is that we don’t know. And that’s so important by the way. And just to reiterate I think it’s often missed when you talk about the beauty of science and the value of science. It’s almost not the knowledge.
Speaker: 1
01:43:40
It’s almost like the opposite of the knowledge. It’s just this idea that Ai think it goes back to what we were talking about earlier. I hadn’t really thought about this connection before. But it’s that I was pushing back on you saying, ‘I don’t know, I’d like what would it mean to know everything?
Speaker: 1
01:43:56
I don’t think I’d like that.’ And you were saying, ‘Maybe you would, maybe that’s what it means, nirvana, you know, maybe achieving ai, that’s what it means. But I find the most human Ai feel, I think, is when I am on the edge of the known. So the fact that there are mysteries in the universe, profound mysteries, to me is is one of the things that makes life worth living.
Speaker: 0
01:44:26
Most certainly. As a human as a human being, that’s true. Yeah. My point is that I think eventually we’re not sana be human beings.
Speaker: 1
01:44:34
Well, I’m sure you’re right.
Speaker: 0
01:44:35
I think we’re gonna be getting
Speaker: 1
01:44:36
past this little You’re right. Split.
Speaker: 0
01:44:38
We’re also in this weird depopulation stage where, you know, down into urban arya. It’s very strange. Where it’s it’s very weird because it doesn’t seem like that because people are worried about overpopulation. But then you have a lot of the chemicals and the plastics and all the different things in people’s bodies are interrupting our reproductive ai, and you could see that eventually becoming an even bigger issue in the future if we continue to fuck up the world.
Speaker: 1
01:45:03
We’ve got loads of problems.
Speaker: 0
01:45:04
Loads of problems. We should all be fixed by AI.
Speaker: 1
01:45:07
Well, there is a there is an ai there’s an exciting future, isn’t there? I I feel that It’s
Speaker: 0
01:45:12
always exciting.
Speaker: 1
01:45:13
We’re gonna go I feel that we are kind of a fork in the road here. Because as you said there are tremendous challenges that we face. Environmental challenges and so on. Competition for resources. Geopolitically the world looks rather Yes. I think it looks as unstable as it was in the ai in some speak.
Speaker: 1
01:45:29
Sai it’s quite terrifying. But we have nuclear weapons now. So it’s terrifying. But on the other side as you said we have not only AI and quantum computers which are potentially profoundly powerful things. But also, you know, the the rockets that we have now, I mean, reusable rockets to meh, we haven’t talked about that.
Speaker: 1
01:45:51
But I I think it’s an absolute game changer. Totally. It is now the case that we can we have cheap and reliable access to space.
Speaker: 0
01:46:00
We should play that video of them catching it because that is one of the most incredible achievements in human history. And you barely saw because Elon Musk unfortunately is so polarizing to some people, particularly now because of the political cycle that we’re in, that you don’t appreciate what SpaceX just did.
Speaker: 0
01:46:15
It did one of the most extraordinary things ever. It they caught a rocket that’s bigger than a fucking skyscraper. Yeah. Come on. The video. It’s it’s amazing. Yeah.
Speaker: 0
01:46:26
I think It’s sai this is absolutely a a feat of engineering that rivals almost anything human beings have ever done.
Speaker: 1
01:46:34
Yeah. This is really important.
Speaker: 0
01:46:36
This is so incredible.
Speaker: 1
01:46:38
I think they will remember that in future generations will remember that.
Speaker: 0
01:46:42
I thought it was CGI. I really did. I thought this was fake when I first saw it. I thought this was something that someone had made, and then I realized this was the actual video footage of it. I’m like, oh ai god.
Speaker: 1
01:46:55
That’s the road to the stars that right there. That that moment.
Speaker: 0
01:46:59
Tell me that. Does it remind you of the movie Contact? It doesn’t it? That does all.
Speaker: 1
01:47:04
That didn’t end well there.
Speaker: 0
01:47:05
No. But Well, you know, neither did Apollo 1.
Speaker: 1
01:47:10
So that sai that and and also, of course, you know, Blue Origin are are not far maybe not far behind it. Right. You know? So so I love that.
Speaker: 0
01:47:18
2 private companies with billionaires at the helm that are out of their ai.
Speaker: 1
01:47:22
Yeah. Pushing its building markets.
Speaker: 0
01:47:24
Let’s go.
Speaker: 1
01:47:25
Know, and I get, you know, I get criticized for this quite a lot and and will no doubt after this interview. Because I I do think our future at some point is is beyond Earth. It has to be. Right? Obviously, logically, it is. But, the question is when.
Speaker: 1
01:47:42
And there there are 2 things to sai. The one thing to emphasize, which I’m sure you’d agree with, is that Sai don’t think anybody is suggesting that what we what we’re able to do now is trash this planet and then move to another one. Ai.
Speaker: 0
01:47:54
Of course.
Speaker: 1
01:47:55
No one’s saying that. That’s way in the future.
Speaker: 0
01:47:57
But there’s things out of our control ai the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs.
Speaker: 1
01:48:01
Yeah. Well, that’s in our control. I mean, we can move those now. Or or that
Speaker: 0
01:48:05
that’s Well, not quite yet. Not yet. But ai it’s coming right now, not really. That’s true.
Speaker: 1
01:48:11
But we so we need that technology. So we’re on the verge of having that
Speaker: 0
01:48:14
technology. Ai.
Speaker: 1
01:48:15
Miss Carl Sagan won it. He said that the dinosaurs had a space ram, they’d still be around. So that is their fault in a sense, which I kind of, you know, they didn’t build rockets.
Speaker: 0
01:48:24
Well, it’s almost like nature realized that, look, with these giant lizards turned around, people are never sana figure out how to make spaceships.
Speaker: 1
01:48:30
Yeah. Let’s just reset. Yeah.
Speaker: 0
01:48:33
Send in the hard reset button.
Speaker: 1
01:48:35
Yeah. Ai I mean So but I think that idea that basic ai, I interviewed Jeff Bezos once and he was fascinating. And he said to me that, first of all, we need infrastructure in speak. Because if you think about building Amazon, he said what what I needed was 2 pieces of infrastructure, the postal service and the Internet.
Speaker: 1
01:48:55
And so they were provided and I could build my company. So I want to do that for the next generation of entrepreneurs in space. I don’t know what they’re gonna do in space but I would like the infrastructure to be there for them to do it. And that’s really simple. Yeah.
Speaker: 1
01:49:09
And then he also goes on to say, of course, as we said before, the resources are up there. They’re infinite. Infinite resources. Yeah. Infinite energy effectively up there.
Speaker: 1
01:49:18
And so the idea he said to meh, I want to zone the earth residential. And people say that’s ridiculous, what are you talking? But how ridiculous is it when you see that? When you see the fact that for the first time we have launch vehicles that really should be able to launch almost anything we want.
Speaker: 1
01:49:38
Ai the idea that we can build infrastructure in space and then of course build bases on the moon and then ultimately on Mars and then beyond, that’s a lot closer now.
Speaker: 0
01:49:48
Let’s look at that and say, what is that? A 100 and how many years from Wilbur and Orville Ai?
Speaker: 1
01:49:54
Yeah. It’s essentially Sai 100 and what? A 120 ish, is it?
Speaker: 0
01:49:58
Yeah. Yeah. That’s crazy. Yeah. So you go from this goofy, like, flexible sort of airplane looking thing that no one’s gonna fly across the Atlantic in to catching rockets with a giant, like, hand, the robot clamp. Yeah. That’s insane. That happens over such a short period
Speaker: 1
01:50:18
of time.
Speaker: 0
01:50:18
I said,
Speaker: 1
01:50:19
like, ai do that thing? There it is.
Speaker: 0
01:50:20
That’s a 100 to go from that to Blue Origin is sana. Yeah. In such a short period of ai.
Speaker: 1
01:50:27
So I think we’re I think we’re on the 1906. Yeah. So so we’re on the verge of a of a revolution in many fields. My worry is that we’re also seeing increase in political instability. Yes. And so I think we’re I think most people would agree a very dangerous moment. Yes. And the question is how to get to that future.
Speaker: 1
01:50:47
And that future that you talked about, this wonderful future that we have, might be 10 or 20 years away but it might be an eternity away if we get the next few years wrong. Ai. So I’m concerned that we don’t know how to build a bridge to that future, that we should see in our ai.
Speaker: 1
01:51:08
We should see this future beginning to unfold before us. How do we get there?
Speaker: 0
01:51:14
Well, we have to keep it out of the hands of the military industrial complex. So we have to stop what’s going on in the world, these insane conflicts. And if we don’t and they escalate, Iran gets a nuclear weapon, Israel uses it in Iran, Russia uses it in Iran, Russia uses it in Ukraine.
Speaker: 0
01:51:29
We have World War 3, and I’m sure you’re aware of what Einstein said about World War 4. That World War 3, I don’t know what weapons they’ll use, but in World War 4, it’ll be rocks and sticks. Yeah. And they were not that far away from that. If you could imagine living in Hiroshima the day before the bomb, not having any idea that anything like that could ever even possibly happen. Yeah.
Speaker: 0
01:51:52
You’re just a regular person walking around and all of a sudden everything is obliterated. And you ai, like, we’re in a new era of destruction Mhmm. Where you can And
Speaker: 1
01:52:01
what what’s interesting is to me is I I’ve got interested in in Oppenheimer’s writing post war. And I’ve been interested in it. The BBC asked me to look at there’s a thing called the BBC Reith Lectures that are very famous in in the UK. And every year someone gives these lectures after Lord Reith who founded the BBC. And Oppenheimer did them in 1953, I think it is, 53 or 54.
Speaker: 1
01:52:26
And they were considered a failure because no one understood what he was talking about. But in there he was concerned with the fact, of course, that he felt he delivered the means by which we would destroy ourselves. And he felt our technology, our scientific know how exceeded our wisdom and our political skill, which is arguably true. Yes.
Speaker: 1
01:52:48
So he thought in the fifties, he couldn’t see how we’d avoid destroying ourselves, but he thought about it a lot, feeling partly personally responsible for it. And he and he he describes this, the the deal how if there’s any lessons that science teaches us, the the exploration of nature teaches us that we could move into other fields, that we could transfer into politics for example.
Speaker: 1
01:53:13
And one of them is this picture that complex systems put it this sai, complex systems are complicated. Ai? So so he’s talking about looking at quantum mechanics, for example, and it gets complicated and you say, what is an electron? It’s this thing. It’s a particle like point like thing or a big extended wavy thing that, what is it? It behaves in all these strange ways.
Speaker: 1
01:53:34
We don’t really have the language or the mental capacity to picture it. And so he sai, any attempt to say this thing is this or it is that, it is like this thing, is is doomed. Ai? What you have to understand is that you have to develop this rather complex and nuanced picture of the way that nature works, and quantum mechanics is a good example.
Speaker: 1
01:53:57
But he said so is with human societies. So in a society, what is it? Sai it is at one level a load of individuals ai little particles and they have their own needs and desires and they have their views and and strongly held views and so should they by the way. There’s a great quote from Sai think early sixties from Oppenheimer where he says that to be a person of substance you need an anchor, so you need to believe things and you need to argue for things.
Speaker: 1
01:54:25
You need to take positions. You have to have a morality. You have to have a politics, right, basically. Otherwise ai not a person of substance. Mhmm.
Speaker: 1
01:54:33
But he says at the same ai, of course you have to recognize there’s a society. So there are lots of people with anchors, and they’re and you might strongly disagree with that anchor, and they might be wrong, right, their anchor might be nonsense, but but the challenge of politics is to avoid war.
Speaker: 1
01:54:55
It’s sai read somewhere recently someone sai, I can’t remember what it was, but said that democracy is a technology to avoid civil war. That’s what it is. So somehow you’ve got to understand that whilst you have your and should have your firmly held position, you have to find a way and it feels almost contradictory, you have to find a way of understanding that the society as a whole is a complex mixture of all these different little particles with their own anchors and their own positions.
Speaker: 1
01:55:29
And what is the goal? So it is the goal. It often feels to me that politics at the moment, the goal is to win an argument. It often feels like to to convince enough people that our your view is the right view. Right. And shah obviously is part of democracy. Right?
Speaker: 1
01:55:46
It’s the way it works. Right? You you argue for your position and then you get you get 4 or 5 years to do your thing and then someone else can take over. But also Ai think the thing we’re missing at the moment is that is that more perhaps more fundamental function of democracy which is to avoid war.
Speaker: 1
01:56:03
Because if you can avoid war, especially with the power that we have now, you have the time to sort the rest out. But if we can’t avoid war, we don’t. And I think that and Oppenheimer wrote that he knew that in the fifties and it feels to me more that we’re back full circle now. Mhmm.
Speaker: 1
01:56:23
It feels to me we’ve almost forgotten. We seem to have forgotten that the the ai the primary function of democracy is not to ensure that your side wins. The primary function of democracy is to assure is to is to ensure there’s a chance for the other side to win at some point in the future. Yes.
Speaker: 1
01:56:47
Vatsal and yeah, that’s that’s that that’s it really. That’s what I would try
Speaker: 0
01:56:52
to say. It’s completely accurate. And the problem with our version of democracy is that it’s been captured by money. So can there’s interests beyond the will and the needs of the people, and those interests often are contrary to the will and the needs of the people. And as long as they can keep from it falling into complete total catastrophe and continue to profit off of the global chaos, they do.
Speaker: 0
01:57:20
It’s just there’s too much money involved in politics and lobbyists and special interest groups and people influencing the media. They’ve they’ve distorted reality to the point where the general citizen doesn’t really have a nuance understanding of why these conflicts are taking place in the first place and why all the money is going over to these places and what what what is being done to mitigate any of these issues and everyone feels helpless.
Speaker: 0
01:57:49
And that helps them continue to do what they’re doing and continue to reap profits. And it’s not democracy in the sense of how it was probably originally established or originally thought of. This is they they never thought that you’re gonna have corporations. Corporations weren’t even a thought. It wasn’t even a an sai idea.
Speaker: 0
01:58:08
So I never thought you’d have these, not just corporations, but corporations that are essentially in charge of a enormous percentage of the information that gets distributed online.
Speaker: 1
01:58:19
Mhmm.
Speaker: 0
01:58:19
You know? And and you you see how organizations, government organizations can conspire to limit the amount of information people have access to. And they could do it through very sneaky ways. Like, I don’t know if you’re aware of what they’ve done in Canada, but in Canada now, you are no longer able to share links to news stories on social media.
Speaker: 0
01:58:40
And the way they snuck that in is by saying that these media corporations, whether it’s Meta or Twitter, x, whatever, they have a responsibility to pay the people that are in that are making these stories. And so by this little little sneaky little loophole, they’ve essentially put a stop on the free flow of information in Canada on social media.
Speaker: 0
01:59:08
It’s very, very disturbing and very dystopian. I have some friends who just went up there, and they’re ai, it’s so confusing because people didn’t know it was gonna happen before it happened, and then it happened. And now everyone’s kind of a little out of the loop up there because you’re not able you can’t even share a link, which doesn’t make any sense because, say, if there’s a New York Times article and, I wanna share it with you on Twitter, all I’m doing is driving more traffic to the New York Times sai.
Speaker: 0
01:59:35
It’s not hurting then. In fact, it’s promotion. It doesn’t make any sense that it would somehow or another because you’re not these companies aren’t paying. So the idea is that x because the profits that they get through advertising is all based on engagement, that there’s engagement that sends people to this.
Speaker: 0
01:59:53
And so they’re profiting from it, and that profit should be shared with the the media company, whether it’s Los Angeles Times or whatever. That’s crazy because it’s it’s a two way street. It’s promotion. Like, so many more people are gonna read a New York Times article if it becomes viral on Twitter.
Speaker: 0
02:00:09
This is just makes sense.
Speaker: 1
02:00:11
What does seem to be generally true is that we haven’t, as a society
Speaker: 0
02:00:16
It says it was just on Facebook. Is that true?
Speaker: 1
02:00:18
We
Speaker: 0
02:00:20
I don’t know if it’s just on Facebook. It says it was Meh ban. Well, I I’m I’m I’m just curious. Is it see if it’s the case well, Duncan was saying it’s social media in general because he was just there.
Speaker: 1
02:00:32
I mean, what what I think is generally true is that we haven’t yet adapted to so the Internet. Yes. Ai? Just the Internet. Yes. Because it’s only, as you said, in in the great sweep of human history.
Speaker: 0
02:00:45
Right. And it’s been used by people over 30 years.
Speaker: 1
02:00:47
Yeah. Yeah. And it’s it’s a couple of decades. Yeah. It’s been influential. Yeah. So I think it it feeds it. It’s another of those problems we face now. This what we talked about, this this bridge to this tremendously bright future that we have. One of the pillars of that bridge that we need to strengthen is is how to deal with this thing that we’ve only had for a couple of decades.
Speaker: 0
02:01:10
Right.
Speaker: 1
02:01:10
It’s clear. I think we would you know, people again will be listening to this, and they’ll have different views on the way that things happen on the Internet and regulation and so on. But I think what everyone would agree on is we haven’t got it right yet. Right. So we don’t know how we the way that it’s influencing our changing our democracies. Yeah.
Speaker: 1
02:01:27
Let’s just use a non, you know, the the it might be changing them for the better, it might be changing them for the worse. But the way it is changing them, I don’t think is fully understood.
Speaker: 0
02:01:35
Well, not just that, it’s being manipulated by governments. Like, governments have troll farms where they just attack certain sensitive political issues, and they they make polarizing statements and crazy they crazy claims. And you go to that website or you go to that Twitter page, and you realize, oh, this isn’t a real person. This is just ai some bot somewhere. Yeah.
Speaker: 0
02:01:53
And then it’ll be ai FBI analyst. I’m sure you have a lot of bots. A former FBI analyst made, an estimate of 80%. He thinks 80% of all the accounts. And this was around the time Elon was buying it. Who knows what it’s at now? 80% were fake.
Speaker: 0
02:02:11
And this is one of the sticking points of the argument that Elon ai. It was when he was buying Twitter, they were telling him that it was only 5%. 5% were fake. He said, well, show me your data. And the data they showed him was only a random 100 accounts, and he’s like, this is not sufficient.
Speaker: 0
02:02:24
I wanna I wanna see, like, all of your sana, and it became this big issue. And that’s when he tried to get out of the deal, and then they took him to court, then he wound up buying it. Yeah. But that was a big part of it. Like, how much of this is even real?
Speaker: 0
02:02:35
Like, I see arguments online where people take these crazy inflammatory positions, like, just insulting and attacking people that believe one thing or another thing. And I’m like, how much of this is, like, instigated by China or Russia or Iran or some other foreign country, and they’re doing it through these troll farms Yeah.
Speaker: 0
02:02:55
Which we absolutely know exist. Yeah. And I’m sure the United States has them as well.
Speaker: 1
02:03:01
And I know what they answer. I mean, one one answer I mean, the way I do it because obviously, I’m on Twitter x. Sana and so the way that I do it is you can tyler, Ai think, by someone’s timeline usually. Because ai meh basic rule of thumb is that if you look at someone’s timeline and it’s all political. Right. I just ignore them. That’s my base.
Speaker: 1
02:03:23
Because because a normal person’s timeline I look at your timeline for example. You look at mine. Some of it is just silly stuff. Right. Some of it is retweeting sports stuff or ai stuff or whatever it is. I Ai like aeroplanes. So a lot of my stuff is retweeting stuff about aeroplanes. Right?
Speaker: 1
02:03:37
Or whatever it is. So I think you can Ai think you can see a real person by seeing a breadth in the things that they retweet or whatever? And so I tend to ignore and mute at the minimum the people who are just single issue. And then usually what you find, by the way, is that they’re not a single issue.
Speaker: 1
02:04:00
I can just about understand if someone’s single issue focused on a single thing, But they’re just a generic kind of political position.
Speaker: 0
02:04:07
Mhmm.
Speaker: 1
02:04:08
So that you’ll you’ll see an account and all it does is is promote ai issue. You can see them a mile off, I think. So then it comes back to, you know, how do you deal with it? And your ai my sense would be your sense. It’s hard to legislate around conversation, isn’t it? You. Yes. So what do you do? I suppose you could argue it’s education ultimately. Ultimately everything comes back to to education.
Speaker: 1
02:04:34
A democracy requires an educated population.
Speaker: 0
02:04:38
Right. And
Speaker: 1
02:04:39
the tools. You have the mental tools to deal with this sort of new world Yes. Of information.
Speaker: 0
02:04:46
And That’s I think that’s something that we should probably be teaching to children is how to navigate social media and how to navigate influence and how to navigate other people’s opinions of you and how to navigate, like, online bullying, how to how to avoid. There’s so much anxiety that’s attached to social media now too, and so many people engage in arguments with it, like, all day long. Mhmm.
Speaker: 0
02:05:06
Ai think it’s a a primary source of mental illness for a lot of people or at least an accelerant of
Speaker: 1
02:05:11
mental illness.
Speaker: 0
02:05:11
Yeah. Yeah. And, we don’t have an education as to how to manage that and what that what that means to you. And the addiction that people have to social media and addiction people have to their smartphones in general is is probably underappreciated. Yeah. Probably. It’s it’s probably a much more significant impact on overall health than we think because
Speaker: 1
02:05:34
Yeah. There’s
Speaker: 0
02:05:34
so meh. First of all, we’re not supposed to have access to 8,000,000,000 people’s worth of bad news. No. That’s not good. That’s not a perspective enhancer. And we’re essentially inundated with the things that’ll scare the shit out of us the most, which is 8,000,000,000 people’s problems.
Speaker: 0
02:05:50
Whatever is happening in the world that’s terrible, you’re gonna hear about it first, and it’s gonna be the things that trend the most. And it gives you this, like, very bizarre bias towards, like, what’s actually happening in the world.
Speaker: 1
02:06:01
Yeah. Yeah. Isn’t it a big problem?
Speaker: 0
02:06:05
It’s a big problem because it’s new, and we weren’t prepared for it when it hit. It’s like a flood happening. You know, like, okay. We gotta figure out how to get all the water out of here. Like, this is nuts. This place is flooded. And we’re essentially in the middle of the flood, the social media online influence flood, and, we haven’t really shored up our basement yet.
Speaker: 0
02:06:24
We don’t we don’t really know how to protect ourselves from it.
Speaker: 1
02:06:27
But we can be optimistic. Yes. Because we’re both optimists, I think, ultimately.
Speaker: 0
02:06:31
Yes. I’m very optimistic.
Speaker: 1
02:06:32
Because of those the things we’ve talked about today.
Speaker: 0
02:06:35
Well, I also think because I’m and I think you are also successful at navigating that world without it killing you. Like, I’ve I can navigate the world of social media and I can like as you said, you look at someone’s ai and see that, oh, this is crazy to and you have your own, you know, objective understanding of the world to a point where you could see where someone’s being ridiculous.
Speaker: 0
02:06:56
But some people just aren’t that good at that. They’re not educated in that. Maybe they they haven’t been around, enough people that are critical thinkers, and they they don’t know how to approach things from they just look at things ai, what am I supposed to believe? Am I a good person if I believe this? Am I a good person if I argue against that? I’ll do this. I’ll do that.
Speaker: 0
02:07:15
And these are not ai well thought out actions.
Speaker: 1
02:07:18
I ai I do understand though that you and I, you know, we’re you know, we we we’re in a good position, ai personally. Yes. Since we have a, you know, this confidence comes with some degree of success and you can put things in perspective. And as you said, you know, when when if you’re I often think actually Ai see people who struggle, when when they become well known for the first time, for example.
Speaker: 1
02:07:44
I mean I remember when I became ai late in life became well known as a public figure. It was a I did a series on the BBC in 2009 or 2010 called Wonders of the Solar System, and suddenly I was well known. And I find it very I find it very difficult to navigate. And and fortunately Ai had the support structures and people around me and I could navigate it and you come to terms with it and you learn how to do it, but it’s a process, isn’t it?
Speaker: 1
02:08:10
So I think it’s the same the problem one of the problems Ai think with social media is you can become very well known very quickly. Yes. Often for something that you kind of said in a clumsy way. Sai, you know, it can then Right. And and and I think it’s probably almost impossible to to navigate that as just a person who just suddenly is exposed to that glare of publicity and becomes a public figure Yes.
Speaker: 1
02:08:35
Or sometimes a hate figure Yes. Overnight. Was it particularly
Speaker: 0
02:08:39
difficult for people that didn’t ever anticipate it, like the Jordan Petersons of the world. Ai, people that became quite prominent, like, in their late in their forties.
Speaker: 1
02:08:48
He’s an academic. I mean, you know, and and yeah. I mean, that’s what I was doing. I was an academic and and then had a success on television. Yeah. And, it wasn’t in a controversial area. Right? It’s about planets and the solstice and astronomy. Right. Right.
Speaker: 1
02:09:01
So, but even then Sai I found it difficult initially to to navigate through that world. Yes. And you get used to it eventually.
Speaker: 0
02:09:10
It’s a very bizarre drug. That’s what fame is. It’s a very it’s a very bizarre alternative state of consciousness where everybody knows who you are and you don’t know them,
Speaker: 1
02:09:20
and
Speaker: 0
02:09:20
no one’s really ready for that. And no one knows what it is until you experience it. Everybody thinks they want it until they get it. And once you get it, you’re ai, oh, my god. This comes with so much scrutiny. This comes with so much hate. You’re just dealing with so many mentally ill people that are tweeting at you that the world’s flat. Ai, like, they’re just angry.
Speaker: 0
02:09:36
There’s a lot of, like, really messy people out there.
Speaker: 1
02:09:40
I do. Yeah. There’s still I mean, the number of people who, when Ai so I I did that that the the rocket ai, the sai
Speaker: 0
02:09:48
ship cat.
Speaker: 1
02:09:49
As you said, the most incredible thing. I just retweeted that and said brilliant engineering. The number of tweets I got back saying that space is I don’t understand what it means. Space is fake. I don’t even know what that means. But I got quite a lot of it. You know, it’s fake.
Speaker: 0
02:10:04
I Sai went down a hashtag speak is fake rabbit hole 1 night online, and, it it it has something to do with, biblical, stuff because they they think that there’s a firmament that’s over the earth, and they think that the lights are dangled in the sky.
Speaker: 1
02:10:21
Oh, it’s that. The the
Speaker: 0
02:10:23
earth is a disk. Yeah. The earth is a disk and that you can’t get through the meh, and that there’s ai an ice wall, and that’s why you can’t travel around. Ai
Speaker: 1
02:10:32
know. When you you go you go, okay. So let’s let’s assume that’s true. Let’s get it going. Let’s assume it’s not
Speaker: 0
02:10:38
All the all the astronomers, all the astrophysicists, all NASA, China, every space agency, they’re all in cahoots.
Speaker: 1
02:10:46
But why Ai
Speaker: 0
02:10:47
no one spilled the beans.
Speaker: 1
02:10:48
And then but but the thing I’ve never understood, and I’ve asked this, in my early days on Twitter, I made the mistake of asking, you know, ai. Because now I don’t reply at all to the obviously, you learn that. Yeah. Ai go why do you what possible advantage could there be? Right.
Speaker: 1
02:11:03
For I mean What’s
Speaker: 0
02:11:05
the answer?
Speaker: 1
02:11:06
I I think they think that it’s just a scam. So sai, meh, SpaceX suggested ai a sai. That awesome. So they’re just taking all this money Yeah. For launching satellites. So again, it’s a very complicated scam because they’re getting it off, you know, communications satellite.
Speaker: 0
02:11:22
They should try Starlink.
Speaker: 1
02:11:24
Starlink. They should try
Speaker: 0
02:11:25
it sai they know space is real.
Speaker: 1
02:11:27
They probably think it’s just deflecting off the off the dome or something.
Speaker: 0
02:11:31
I don’t know. I guess, but the the crazy thing is the idea that everybody’s in cahoots, that all these competing countries decided to all lie together, and yet I I there’s no record of it. There’s no record of communications. There’s no accept there’s no people that rebel against this idea and go, this is madness. Everything’s round.
Speaker: 1
02:11:53
Look at this guy. Thing as well. The fundamental misconception these people have is they assume that there’s a competence there in government. You know, anyone who’s interacted with government. Ai speak of my own country. Ai interacted with the government. The ai that they’re competent enough to do this Right. Tremendously intricate scam.
Speaker: 1
02:12:15
They can’t even in ai country, they can’t even make the trains run. Right? The the it’s very basic. But so so I think that it’s this assumption that there’s some kind of underlying competence to the world.
Speaker: 0
02:12:28
Yes. Not just competence, but unbelievably calculating manipulation.
Speaker: 1
02:12:33
Yeah. I just don’t think that the world is run by people who are smart enough to do that.
Speaker: 0
02:12:38
I mean, there’s certain certainly conspiracies that are real, but that’s just preposterous. But it’s also it’s just like this it’s again, it’s attached to a weird religious thing. They they do believe in the literal interpretation of some of the stories in the Ai, and that’s the somehow or another, that’s been attached to the firmament.
Speaker: 0
02:12:54
That’s one of the problems with, sort of, when when you can if especially if you’re an articulate person and you even if you form, like, some crate you you make some fake documentary and you attach a bunch of fake facts to it and if it’s compelling and no one like you stops and goes, hold on.
Speaker: 0
02:13:15
That’s not how it works. This is how we know this. This is why the planets are around. This is how we know. This is what Bode’s law is.
Speaker: 0
02:13:23
This is what the and you start, like, laying out what thousands of years of research and discovery has led us to. This is not, like, just based on a whim. There’s, like, a lot of information and the idea that all of that information is a vast conspiracy to hide the fact that God is real and that the firmament covers the Earth and Earth exists in the center of the universe and was created by God and space is fake.
Speaker: 1
02:13:49
Okay. Well, you’ve you’ve, Ai learned something I didn’t know because I didn’t know the space is fake thing was linked to that. So that’s that’s,
Speaker: 0
02:13:56
it’s a very
Speaker: 1
02:13:56
liberating information.
Speaker: 0
02:13:57
Yeah. At the at the root of all the flat earth stuff is the firmament. The root of all the flat earth stuff is, it’s based on some very bizarre interpretation of biblical biblical, I I don’t remember the exact depiction of the firmament and how God describes it in the Bible, but they believe that that’s what we’re looking at, that there’s ai a glass like a cookie dome, Ai a plate of cookies with a glass dome on it.
Speaker: 1
02:14:27
But that going back to what we said earlier, if that was the way that nature is,
Speaker: 0
02:14:32
we would tyler you.
Speaker: 1
02:14:33
I’d love it. Well, I’d Well, not only that,
Speaker: 0
02:14:35
but everyone would be talking about how crazy Earth is in comparison to all the other planets. Turns out Earth is actually flat. Like, that would not be something anybody would hide. I’d like to find that out.
Speaker: 1
02:14:45
Is that you know, is that because you become tremendously you know, I mean, what a great discovery. Sai but it it it isn’t. So
Speaker: 0
02:14:54
But people have, like, a natural inclination to uncover vast conspiracies, and I think that’s one of the the weirder ones that people gravitate to. But, again, I I really think it has something to do with ai belief in religious ai. And not and not just that, but erroneous interpretations of religious writings.
Speaker: 0
02:15:15
You know, when you’re Yeah. We’re dealing with something that was originally written in ancient Hebrew bryden then translated to Latin and then the Greek and then the a lot of that gets lost in the translation. A lot of it gets ai you shah a 1000 years of oral tradition, like, I’ve always wondered at the beginning of the ai, in the beginning there was light.
Speaker: 0
02:15:34
I wonder if that is ai someone trying to figure out the big bang. I mean, it doesn’t make sense that they would have a concept of it back then, but it also doesn’t maybe that’s something ai we inherently know is that there was an event. Maybe the the the echoes of that event are almost something that we just perceive because we just think of it as being a thing.
Speaker: 1
02:15:59
What is it? It starts with in the beginning, God created the heaven and the earth, and the earth was at form of void. And darkness was on the face of the deep. I love that. It’s a great line.
Speaker: 0
02:16:08
Well, it’s amazing. Face
Speaker: 1
02:16:10
of the deep.
Speaker: 0
02:16:11
It’s amazing as a piece of literature.
Speaker: 1
02:16:13
Yeah. And it’s the deep I think I read somewhere that Ai was talking to a friend of mine who’s that that is sai it seems to come from the Egyptian creation myth, I think. I might be wrong there, but it it’s about that that that it was very much to do with the Nile and the waters.
Speaker: 0
02:16:27
And
Speaker: 1
02:16:27
you find that in many religions that there’s water when things emerge out of the waters. And you see that in Genesis, the echo of it. Darkness was on the face of the deep. And then there’s ai. Yeah. After that. So I don’t know. I’m not a biblical scholar.
Speaker: 0
02:16:41
Ai agree but I’m I’m fascinated by it the same way I’m fascinated with science because I think it’s people that ai 1000 of years ago trying to make sense of things.
Speaker: 1
02:16:51
That’s it. That’s ultimately it, isn’t it? And very little information. It ai what we tyler about earlier. To me that’s one of the defining characteristics of being human. Trying to make sense of the world. And that’s why ai the way I don’t like to get into sort of arguments with people who have different views, different belief systems.
Speaker: 1
02:17:14
Ai baseline position is if you’re curious and you’re interested and you want to know how things happened, that to me is common ground that we can share. The people I don’t really understand, the people who are not curious Right. And don’t have questions. Because I mean Carl Sagan wrote a great book called The Demon’s Haunted World: Ai of the Camera and Dart. You know that book? Yeah.
Speaker: 1
02:17:36
Where he says that story about a taxi driver when he got in the taxi at the start and he’s asking him all these questions about Atlantis or whatever it is. And he realises he doesn’t think this guy is an idiot. He thinks this guy has a curious mind. He’s someone who should be we can have a wonderful conversation.
Speaker: 1
02:17:55
But he also says that he felt that he’d perhaps been failed by society, by education, in that his curiosity had not been somehow channelled to the real mysteries. But it it got sidetracked into all this strange stuff. I think
Speaker: 0
02:18:13
the real mystery academic mysteries are intimidating to some people because they don’t think of themselves as being intelligent. So then they gravitate towards, like, YouTube mysteries.
Speaker: 1
02:18:21
Simple as simple as things.
Speaker: 0
02:18:24
But but more more controversial sai that puts them in, like, a select club of people who actually know what’s going on, where people love stuff like QAnon. They love stuff like that, where they’re they’re in the know of, like, some top secret information.
Speaker: 1
02:18:37
And and and ai the way, that that that idea that I think one of the problems we have communicating ai and getting young people into science is the idea that you have to somehow be really clever which is not true at all. It’s it’s goes back to what I said before that the it’s more you have to be comfortable with not knowing.
Speaker: 1
02:18:56
So that’s a big step to say I’m not sana guess and Ai okay. If you ask me a question about the origin of the universe. The answer is don’t know. So I think it’s if as you sai, if you can be comfortable with not having to have a simple intelligible explanation for something, then you’ll make more progress in life.
Speaker: 1
02:19:25
But it’s quite difficult. So it’s easy to just go, oh, this is simpler that thing. Yes. So that there’s a simpler explanation there.
Speaker: 0
02:19:31
Well, it’s also very difficult for people because they attach their ego to ai. And once you have said an idea, then you are attached to that idea and you defend that idea. It’s a real problem.
Speaker: 1
02:19:41
That’s so important.
Speaker: 0
02:19:42
Yeah. Ideas are just ideas, and you are you, and the way you interact with ideas shows your intelligence. You can be incorrect. People are often incorrect.
Speaker: 1
02:19:51
Yeah.
Speaker: 0
02:19:51
But if you argue for something that you know is incorrect because you don’t sana lose, that’s that’s bad for everybody. Yeah.
Speaker: 1
02:19:58
I mean, again, going back to Richard Feynman, he said, what the the great there’s a great essay I’ve probably talked to you about before called The Value of Science that he wrote in 1955. You can get it online. And in there he says the most valuable thing is scientists bring this transferable skill to life.
Speaker: 1
02:20:15
And it’s that you have a great experience with being wrong. Yes. So nature is bryden. And most of the time you come up with some really great theory and you’re really sure about it. You do the experiment and you’re just wrong.
Speaker: 1
02:20:27
And so you get so used to it that you come to enjoy it because you’re learning. But it’s a process. That’s why science is so important in schools and experiments are so important. It’s not that you just swing a pendulum, and there’s nothing interesting about that, but it’s just that you’re learning that there is there’s a gold standard of knowledge which is nature.
Speaker: 1
02:20:51
And as Feynman sai, it doesn’t care who you are or what your title is or what your name is or you may have been elected with 99% votes in there, whatever it is, it doesn’t matter. Nature just doesn’t care. And so the the more you interrogate nature even as a little a kid at school with a little experiment with a battery and a light or something you learn that there’s a reality and you learn what it takes to acquire reliable knowledge about the world.
Speaker: 1
02:21:21
And reliable knowledge is important. Yeah. So how do we how do we form a a view of and it can be very important questions. It can be questions ai, what happens if we carry on putting greenhouse gases into the atmosphere? For example, whatever your politics arya, it’s a legitimate question, a good question.
Speaker: 0
02:21:40
Right. Scientifically a good question.
Speaker: 1
02:21:42
To influence the climate if we carry on doing this. And so how do we then address that is a question. You can’t do it by going back to your political affiliation or your belief system. You’ve got to try and understand this complicated system, which is the climate of a planet.
Speaker: 1
02:21:58
So you make measurements of the thing and you build some models and computer models. And there’s a very famous saying that all models are wrong because they’re models. Ai? So but they’re the best you can do. So you have a go and you come up with some information and and and a model that kind of works.
Speaker: 1
02:22:16
And you say, well, this is the best version of our knowledge at the time. And then you can try to act on it and you ai the model and that’s the process. But that idea of how can we acquire reliable knowledge that we can trust, which might not be right and is very likely not completely right, but it’s the best we can do at the ai.
Speaker: 1
02:22:38
That’s what my definition of science would be. It’s it’s it’s nothing more or less than the best picture we can manage of how nature works at any given moment. Not a truth. It’s not something ai its very nature. The way that science works is it will it may be shown to be incorrect or not particularly great a model tomorrow. Yes.
Speaker: 1
02:23:01
But I would define it as the best we, and by we Sai mean our civilization, the best we can do. And so we act on that. I don’t see any other way to act as a civilization other than with that the best we can do.
Speaker: 0
02:23:16
It’s the best we can do. Yeah. And that that term reliable information is so important because people wanna leap to conclusions to try to, like, tie something up neatly when ai information might not be available. Like, reliable information is the number one reason why I never take the UFO thing seriously. Yeah. Ai am so all in that there must be life out there.
Speaker: 0
02:23:37
It just makes sense. It makes sense. Ai know Yeah. The Fermi Paradox with notwithstanding, but I think if you just take into account the sheer numbers of planets that we’re looking at, the possibility of something achieving some sort of advanced life seems very high. But no reliable information. 0. Not one thing that I’ve ever seen. I’m like, well, that’s for sure real. Not one, every sighting, everything.
Speaker: 0
02:24:00
I’m like, how do we not know how do we know if there’s a top secret drone program which most certainly there has to be? There there probably has to be. There probably some sort of radical propulsion system they devised. They probably made some breakthroughs. They haven’t been forthcoming about because of national security risks.
Speaker: 0
02:24:17
There’s probably something really kooky that they could fly really fast through the ai, some kind of a bryden, And that’s probably what people are seeing. That’s probably a lot of it. But then there’s also this part of me that doesn’t wanna abandon the idea that if I was an intelligent species from another planet and I saw that these territorial primates with thermonuclear weapons are, advancing towards the creation of AI and, like, ruining the planet while they’re doing it, like, doing crazy shit to the ocean and poisoning streams and water supplies.
Speaker: 0
02:24:48
Like, I’d be like, let’s keep an eye on these fucking freaks. I I would most certainly say this is a if if if this happens all throughout the universe, let’s just imagine that this is the natural progression from single celled organisms to super curious advanced life forms that eventually transform the world that they live in.
Speaker: 0
02:25:06
This is a natural progression. There’s gotta be planets that don’t make it. There there there’s probably a slew of them that get to 1945 and it turns out that both Germany, Japan, and or all Germany, Japan, and the United States all have nuclear weapons at the same ai, launch them all at each other, and then civilization goes down to 0.
Speaker: 1
02:25:24
Oh, the Cuban Missile Ai?
Speaker: 0
02:25:25
Yes. Cuban Missile Crisis or asteroid impacts or super volcanoes. I mean, the reason why we have mountains in the first place, we have volcanic activity. We know that every now and then, there’s a massive supervolcano ai what Yellowstone is, this caldera that if it’s a continent tyler.
Speaker: 0
02:25:40
If it blows, there’s no more United States. It stops being a thing. Most people on the planet die. We get down to a few 100 savages and we start from scratch. And that’s that’s inside the realm of possibility. That can absolutely happen.
Speaker: 0
02:25:53
So something has to get past all of these hurdles Yeah. To and if Ai saw a planet that’s real close ai us, like, wow, they sana not fuck this up. They have achieved ai this crazy speak where they’re so far beyond everything else on their planet. They’re almost there.
Speaker: 1
02:26:13
Yeah.
Speaker: 0
02:26:13
They’re almost there. Let’s watch them. Yeah. I would think of that too, but I just don’t see any evidence. Everybody keeps Sai bring in
Speaker: 1
02:26:19
these
Speaker: 0
02:26:19
whistleblowers. They all tell me, oh, I’ve seen it. It’s incredible. One day it’s gonna be released ai, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I don’t see shit.
Speaker: 1
02:26:27
I think it’s best to assume. It’s Carl Sagan again, wasn’t it, when he said no one’s coming to save us from ourselves. Let’s just assume that.
Speaker: 0
02:26:34
That we just definitely should assume vatsal. And that that’s a that’s a safe and that’s an intelligent assumption. And also that’s how you want your children to behave. Right? You don’t wanna go save your children every time, you know, if they’re when they they get older, they gotta go on their own. They gotta make it.
Speaker: 0
02:26:51
They gotta figure it out on their own. If they don’t, they’re gonna be infants for the rest of their lives. And this might be one of the reasons why we don’t get intervened, why something doesn’t come down and, like, put a halt to us. Like, maybe they’re just hoping we can figure this out through diplomacy.
Speaker: 0
02:27:04
They’re all
Speaker: 1
02:27:04
bad like that.
Speaker: 0
02:27:05
Yeah. Maybe I love these ai husband.
Speaker: 1
02:27:06
Whatever they have, they’re crossing them.
Speaker: 0
02:27:08
Yeah. Whatever they have. I don’t know.
Speaker: 1
02:27:10
I mean
Speaker: 0
02:27:10
I’m so fascinated by it. I I wanna believe everything. I’m such a sucker. You know? Every time I see Bob Lazar talk, I wanna believe it. I wanna believe all of it. I
Speaker: 1
02:27:18
would as I said, I wouldn’t be surprised. Right. I’d be relieved.
Speaker: 0
02:27:22
I’d be relieved as well. Yeah. Please help us. But Yeah. But also, if you think about the way we interact with, primitive tribes, it’s not good. It ruins them almost every time. Like, there’s a story that we were talking about recently where, Starlink has been brought to some of these very remote ai, and they’ve been given cell phones.
Speaker: 0
02:27:44
And now the tribal leaders are complaining.
Speaker: 1
02:27:46
As we talked about earlier.
Speaker: 0
02:27:47
Yeah. These kids are on their phones all day in the fucking jungle. Like, instead of, like, living this subsistence lifestyle they’ve been living for tens of 1000 of years, some of them are getting lazy and they’re just sitting around and they’re looking at, you know,
Speaker: 1
02:28:00
videos. Getting shouted at.
Speaker: 0
02:28:02
Yeah. Just looking at TikTok, arguing with people online, trolling, looking at memes and laughing. You know, we’ve ruined them. And, you know, this is one of the reasons ai, like, places like North Sentinel Island, there’s, like, you’re not supposed to visit them. You’re supposed to leave them saloni.
Speaker: 0
02:28:16
Because they are this very bizarre state of uncontacted and very primitive lifestyle that we can, you know, we we can preserve, which is also weird. Ai, shouldn’t we help them? Like, that’s sort of weird too. Like, they’re human beings and they’re living like people lived 1000 of years ago.
Speaker: 0
02:28:32
I don’t sana live like that today. But but that’s if I was an alien life form and I wasn’t so, you know, cautious about the impact that I would go, you guys are gonna stop this. We’re gonna come down, land on the White House lawn, scare the shit out of all you, you know, take all your nuclear weapons away.
Speaker: 1
02:28:51
I wish somebody would do that, to be honest.
Speaker: 0
02:28:53
Well, do do you don’t you think though that
Speaker: 1
02:28:55
I don’t
Speaker: 0
02:28:56
think so. The real problem would be the structure of our society is based on this idea that we have to work together to sort out our problems. And if something came here that was, like, far superior in intelligence and and its capabilities, we would sort of defer to that. That would be our space daddy now.
Speaker: 0
02:29:14
And there are probably religions, probably some scam religions that get invented to try to, you know, contact and make peace with these overlords.
Speaker: 1
02:29:27
How did we get here? We got to the
Speaker: 0
02:29:29
But it you know, it’s the ai, like, okay, let’s take a look. Let’s pretend that we well, well, let’s extrapolate. Let’s imagine, we do get to Mars. We set up bases on Mars. We do become, we we develop the technology that allows us to travel to other solar systems, and we do observe, a civilization that is, you know, like, the bronze age, you know, and we we stumble upon these people that are developed they have tools.
Speaker: 0
02:29:57
They haven’t figured out steel yet, but they’ve they’ve done some pretty interesting things and they’re clearly intelligent. They figured out agriculture. We would we would be studying them for sure, a 100%. We would, you know, send word back to Earth. Oh my god.
Speaker: 0
02:30:10
We found these, you know, people that live like the Mongols did in 1200 AD. You know, it would be fascinating. We would 100% be interested in it, and I think they would be interested in us.
Speaker: 1
02:30:23
This is Star Trek.
Speaker: 0
02:30:24
It is Star Trek.
Speaker: 1
02:30:25
The the prime directive.
Speaker: 0
02:30:26
The thing is yeah. The prime directive. You know harm. Right? Isn’t that what it is?
Speaker: 1
02:30:31
Yeah. Well, don’t intervene at all. I thought it’s don’t don’t intervene at all, isn’t it? Yeah. I
Speaker: 0
02:30:35
mean, that I think that’s what they would do. I think we would hope that they would prevent, but if that’s the case, why didn’t they prevent Hiroshima and Nagasaki? Why didn’t why do they let us just practice blowing things up in the Nevada desert for, like, 30 years?
Speaker: 1
02:30:52
Ai think you’re absolutely right. I mean, I the point is Ai think there’s nobody there.
Speaker: 0
02:30:56
That’s terrifying. The terrifying idea is that we’re the only ones in the whole thing and that intelligent life is so bizarre and such a rare thing that happens in the only the perfect of circumstances.
Speaker: 1
02:31:10
That that would be my baseline view.
Speaker: 0
02:31:13
But if the universe is so big, wouldn’t every single potential situation happen infinite
Speaker: 1
02:31:21
if it’s not? Ai mean, we don’t know if it’s infinite. We we Right. We have the observable universe. I think the current number is something like 2 trillion galaxies, depending on how many smaller ones there are. So would you think that
Speaker: 0
02:31:35
just out of 2 trillion galaxies, there’s probably pretty good odds that something would reach some sort of a Goldilocks state in terms of where the planet exists in relationship to the shah.
Speaker: 1
02:31:48
Yeah. Ai I’m but we’re talking the distance between the galaxies is, you know, the Andromeda Galaxy is 2,000,000 light years away Right. Which is the largest and our nearest large neighbor. So I think when I when I think about this, I tend to confine it to our galaxy. Because I can’t conceive of travel between galaxies.
Speaker: 0
02:32:11
Too gross.
Speaker: 1
02:32:12
I think it’s too far. Although For now. It is true that the laws of physics do not prevent that. So relativity, I teach relativity sai Manchester University, right, the 1st years, the 18 year olds. And the first thing we do in special relativity is talk about the fact that if you travel close to the speed of light, so if you vatsal spacecraft travelling close to the speed of light, then distances shrink from your perspective.
Speaker: 1
02:32:39
Sai the one number I always have in my mind is at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN. The protons go around the ring, which is 27 kilometers in circumference, and they go around at ai% ai speed of ai. So close to the speed of light. At that speed, distance is shrink by a factor of 7,000. And so that ring is something like 4 metres in diameter to the protons.
Speaker: 1
02:33:09
Sai according to laws of physics, if you can build a spacecraft that goes very close to the speed of light, you can shrink the distance to the Andromeda Saloni and therefore the time it takes to get there. By an arbitrary amount actually, the closer you get to the speed of light the more you can shrink it.
Speaker: 1
02:33:29
And so you can make those 2,000,000 light years, You could traverse across that distance in principle in a minute according to physics. However, the downside is that you couldn’t come back to tell if you came back to the Earth at that speed to tell everybody what you’d found, at least 4000000 years would have passed on the Earth.
Speaker: 1
02:33:54
Oh, boy. So so you can’t so there’s kind of a downside to it That we could in principle explore the galaxy and beyond. But getting to chat to everybody about what you found is forbidden. Wow. By the structure of the universe. Just the way that relativity works.
Speaker: 0
02:34:13
That really is essentially a time machine.
Speaker: 1
02:34:15
Well, it’s a time machine in the sense that we could go arbitrarily far into the future ai flying around in a rocket very close to the speed of light. So we could come back a 1000000 years in the future and look at the Earth and find out what had happened. You can’t go back as far as we can tell. So you can’t get back to your you can’t build a time machine to go backwards.
Speaker: 1
02:34:38
So these are time machines The world is built such that a time machine A way to think about it, the way that we teach it in undergraduate physics is that, so in Einstein’s theory there are events, which are things that happen in space time. So that would be an event, it’s something that happens. Our conversation now is a thing that happens, space time.
Speaker: 1
02:35:01
And what Einstein’s theory tells you is it’s about the relationship between events. So let’s say that we wanted to come back here tomorrow, that would be another event, we meet again tomorrow. And you can sai how much time has passed between those events. In Einstein’s theory the amount of time that has passed is the length of the path you take over space time between the events.
Speaker: 1
02:35:27
So it’s just like saying, in a sense, what’s the distance between Austin and Dallas, right? You’d say, okay, well it depends what route you go. Well what’s interesting in Ai theory, the only complication is the length of the path you take between events. Is the time measured by a clock that’s carried along that path.
Speaker: 1
02:35:47
So that’s that’s how much So if you’re carrying your watch with you, and you go between here and tomorrow, you go this sai, you go off and maybe you fly to Dallas and back or something, and then come back again. There’s a particular length. Someone else can take a different path, obviously. And so there are different amount of time will pass for them between those two things that happen.
Speaker: 1
02:36:09
Just because of that one fact.
Speaker: 0
02:36:11
A very infinitely small but measurable amount of time.
Speaker: 1
02:36:14
It’s a tiny amount unless you travel, someone goes close to the speed of light or someone goes near a black hole or something where the space time is all distorted, then you can get big effects. But it’s still completely measurable. Ai mean they are quite big effects in the sense that for the satellite navigation system, for example GPS, the clocks on the satellites tick at a different rate to the clocks on the ground.
Speaker: 1
02:36:39
And it’s ai a big effect. I think from memory it’s something like over 30,000 nanoseconds per day difference because they’re in a weaker gravitational field and they’re moving and all sorts of things. It’s the same thing. But 30,000 nanoseconds, light travels 1 foot per nanosecond, which is great.
Speaker: 1
02:37:01
Ai always say that God used imperial units because it’s not it’s 30.8¢ of it. It’s 1 foot. Right? It’s good. It’s 1 foot per nanosecond.
Speaker: 1
02:37:08
So that’s 30,000 feet of position measurement if you drift your clock out by 30,000 nanosecond. Sai it wouldn’t work. So so it’s a big effect for when you start using time to measure distance, which is what we do in satellite navigation GPS. So we have to correct. So the clocks have to be corrected for that effect.
Speaker: 1
02:37:30
So it’s an effect that we can easily measure with atomic clocks, but it doesn’t make much difference to us as humans. But just the point is that the laws of nature would allow you to do it if you could go close to the speed of light. By the way, the last thing I’ll say is the limiting factor. You might say, well, what happens if you go really close to the speed of light?
Speaker: 1
02:37:50
What happens if you go at the speed of light? Well, special relativity, Einstein’s theory, is built such that the distance between any two events in the universe along the path of the beam of light between the events is 0. No time at all. So that’s the way that Einstein’s theory is built.
Speaker: 1
02:38:10
So he asked the question when he was younger, famously, what would the universe look like if I traveled alongside a beam of light? And the answer is that you wouldn’t perceive any time. You can’t. The last thing Ai say is that if you’ve got any mass sai all, you can’t do that, you can’t go at the speed of light.
Speaker: 1
02:38:29
So according to our model, which is a good model, and it seems to work, but if you’ve got no mass you go at the speed of light. So if you’re a photon you go at the speed of light and and no time. Sai the
Speaker: 0
02:38:43
What are your thoughts on the possibility of some sort of a novel propulsion system that doesn’t move things at speak, but instead brings things together.
Speaker: 1
02:38:54
Yeah. That’s called the I can never pronounce it. It’s the albacore, what’s it called? The ai. Sai you can you can Ai general theory of relativity, general relativity, is this theory of gravity. And it’s it’s a theory where space and time are distorted by things, anything in the universe. Right? Stars and planets and so that’s what gravity is.
Speaker: 1
02:39:18
It’s the distortion of space and time by mass and energy, is Einstein’s theory. So you can, and it’s been done, ai you can develop sort of things where you say, well, if we could make this geometry of space and time, if we could distort it in this way, then indeed you can build a warp drive.
Speaker: 1
02:39:38
Right? Like ai
Speaker: 0
02:39:39
it. Right. Right.
Speaker: 1
02:39:40
But, it always turns out, as far as we can tell, that the other question is, but what kind of stuff would you need? What kind of matter or energy or field, whatever it is? What kind of thing would you need to make that geometry? And it always turns out that they those things don’t appear to exist.
Speaker: 1
02:39:57
So these particular kinds of matter and energy, that if you had them, you’d be able to do that with space and ai. We don’t think you can have them. And and so it’s kind of a it’s a bummer. Right? Is it because Speak
Speaker: 0
02:40:12
is Hawking. Possible that we don’t have them here, but that in different planetary systems, different different environments that these elements could exist?
Speaker: 1
02:40:24
It’s not it’s not sana be elements. It’s gonna be kind of some kind of quantum field, some kind of energy or something. And so you can sort of try to speculate. But, Stephen Hawking wrote a very famous paper called the chronology protection conjecture. So conjecture is important.
Speaker: 1
02:40:41
It’s a guess not proved. Where he said that whatever the ultimate laws of physics are, we don’t have them at the moment, string theory, whatever it is, then they will be such that you can’t do this. Because chronology protection means protect the present from the future. Sai in other words you can’t build a time machine that goes back in time.
Speaker: 0
02:41:04
But
Speaker: 1
02:41:07
because Einstein’s theory allowed you to imagine such a thing, even though you might not be able to build it, it’s not been proven beyond doubt that you can’t somehow make these kinds of quantum fields or whatever it is that you need to make wormholes for example, stable wormholes you can go through. And so it’s not been proven. So it’s just it’s suspected that that’s going to be the case.
Speaker: 1
02:41:30
By the way, the final thing, this will be very neat because it goes right back to what I said at the start. That one of the pictures of how Ai said there was this thing, the black hole information paradox. And we thought Stevens’ calculation was that no information comes out, we now think it comes out. So we now think that black holes do not destroy information.
Speaker: 1
02:41:49
We are pretty sure. So it’s been proven mathematically to most people’s satisfaction that the information ends up out again. So if you went into a black hole, the information will be out in that Hawking radiation that could reconstruct you in the in but only in the sense that if we if a nuclear bomb landed on us now, then in principle, the information would be still there in the future and we could be reconstructed.
Speaker: 1
02:42:12
Right? But it’s still in principle there. And then but the question is how does it get out? How is it getting out? How is the information that is you ending up outside again?
Speaker: 1
02:42:23
And it’s not the physical picture is not really understood, but the link is that one of the pictures that people are beginning to suggest to have is that there is some kind of wormholes in a sense, some kind of wormhole that connects the inside of the black hole to the outside.
Speaker: 1
02:42:41
And so a picture is that your atoms and everything, your bits meh scrambled up and go basically through the wormholes and come out again. But they’re funny kind of wormholes, so that that that people don’t really understand this, but mathematic looks like maybe. So it looks like maybe there’s some role for wormholes.
Speaker: 1
02:43:02
These things, the science fiction things of a after a fashion, some kind of wormhole. There’s some role for it in the way the universe works. So it’s it’s really cool. The other the last thing I’ll sai, because I think it’s is there’s a thing called ER equals EPR, which is so EPR was the spooky action at a distance.
Speaker: 1
02:43:21
Sai we meh have talked about that before. You know, in quantum mechanics, there’s this entanglement thing where something can be separated by a 1000000 light years, but if you do something to it, it seems like this thing responds. Ai? Not in a way that you can transmit information, but it responds. So entanglement. There’s a picture of that.
Speaker: 1
02:43:39
So that’s Einstein, Podolsky and Rosen, EPR, where they wrote a paper on this saying, we don’t like this. There must be something wrong with quantum mechanics.’ We don’t think there is now. This is the basis of quantum computers. So we build things that rely on this effect.
Speaker: 1
02:43:53
ER is Einstein Rosen, which is Ai Rosen bridge, which is wormhole. So they also published a paper about wormholes, Einstein and Rosen, in the thirties. And so the idea is that you could picture that somehow as being a kind of wormhole that connects the entangled particles. So that’s how this entanglement works.
Speaker: 1
02:44:16
Another description of quantum entanglement is a wormhole kind of geometry. And this is this is part of the cutting edge of research into black holes, but also the structure of space and ai, and quantum entanglement, and how quantum entanglement might produce space and time.
Speaker: 1
02:44:34
And it’s related to the way that quantum computers work. So it’s become a really hot topic because people are trying to build quantum computers and ram quantum computers. And these are the kind of problems you have to face about quantum entanglement and how you maintain it and what it means.
Speaker: 1
02:44:49
And there was a paper recently which is quite a controversial paper, but it, Ai think it was the Google quantum computer, which is one of the best ones. And it’s not using it as a computer, it’s using it just as these cubits, these little quantum systems that are kind of very stable, that are the basis of quantum computing.
Speaker: 1
02:45:09
And it’s using those cubits and setting them up in such a way vatsal something that looks like a kind of a wormhole is created in the quantum computer. It’s kind of a one dimensional wormhole and it’s a bit kind of technical and everything. But it looks like it might be the first hint of how you build space Woah. From cubits. And so it’s and it’s sai that paper was published.
Speaker: 1
02:45:36
There it is. That’s it, a holographic wormhole. It’s it’s important to say that wormhole is what’s called a hologram. It’s not really in our universe. It’s kind of a different thing. Because that’s the last thing I’ll say because I’ve got to tell you I’ve got to blow your mind because your mind looks bad.
Speaker: 1
02:45:51
It’s lovely. These theories, the the the hologram thing is quite well established now, And it’s coming from a thing that you may have talked about with other people on the show that the AdSCFT conjecture, the great physicist called Maldacena. So the idea is that you can have a quantum theory living on a boundary.
Speaker: 1
02:46:09
So you could imagine, picture a sphere with a with a quantum theory living on the surface, and that quantum there’s a completely equivalent description of whatever’s going on that the physics in the interior of the of the sphere. So it’s almost as if the interior of the space is a hologram of the theory that lives on the surface.
Speaker: 1
02:46:31
And and and it’s kind of not accepted but one many physicists think our universe is like that. So that that so what we’re saying is that we’re having this conversation now and there’s an equivalent description of this somehow in a theory that does not contain space and ai. That’s a completely equivalent description that lives on in in fewer meh, on a surface somehow that’s surrounding us.
Speaker: 1
02:46:59
And it’s really whirly and hand wavy because we don’t fully know what it means, but it but it would mean that we’re holograms. So that this this is a hologram of of of this other dual theory that that’s where that thing was, the holographic wormhole thing. So it’s all very the beginnings of this work.
Speaker: 1
02:47:18
But that’s an example of how it could become an experimental science because quantum computers now exist and they allow you to do those experiments to try to build filaments. It’s almost like a filament of speak. A holographic filament of space that you’re building from these cubits.
Speaker: 1
02:47:38
Which is just and by the way that word is a bit weird. It’s just something like an electron. It’s not that they’re more complicated, but an electron would be an example of one. So it’s a physical thing that we have in the lab that is a quantum system that’s a quantum bit. So you build it in the different ways of building them, and that’s what a quantum computer is.
Speaker: 1
02:47:56
But it’s amazing, isn’t it, that we’re beginning to use those things not for computing meh, because they’re really hard to ram, but we do physicists have gone, this is great, because Google and Microsoft have spent 1,000,000,000 of dollars building these things because they sana build these computers, but they’re perfect laboratories for quantum mechanics.
Speaker: 1
02:48:15
So you can do abstract research into quantum mechanics on them, which I find fascinating.
Speaker: 0
02:48:22
That that’s actually more fascinating than using them to crack everybody’s codes.
Speaker: 1
02:48:26
Meh. Ai of like yeah. It’s kind of, you know, factoring large numbers, it’s ai of boring. But building wormholes. Yes. Which is and I I caution it’s not it it’s a complicated thing, but it it looks like the beginnings of a laboratory to build structures like that.
Speaker: 0
02:48:43
That’s so fascinating. Before you leave, I have to ask you this because I I thought about this while you’re talking. You you might be the only person that could explain this to us. The we were looking at this image of these quantum entangled photons, and the image was in the shape of a yin yang, we couldn’t understand what we’re seeing. Right.
Speaker: 0
02:49:02
We couldn’t understand if they did this on purpose to make it the shape of a yin yang and it’s just a representation of these quantum entangled photons or if that is what quantum entangled photons actually look like in in a shah.
Speaker: 1
02:49:18
So it’s visualized to entangled particles in real ai.
Speaker: 0
02:49:23
By Ai is making them appear as a stunning quantum yin yang symbol.
Speaker: 1
02:49:28
Yeah. I meh, it’s, I I hadn’t seen that. But it’s, it looks to me like it’s another example of, trying to visualise. Entanglement looks fundamental. Let me put it that way. So it does look as if this idea of entanglement which is the it is as I said perhaps producing space and time vatsal.
Speaker: 1
02:49:53
And and but also is the way that quantum computers work and the way that we didn’t talk about this, but the way that you can, one way of picturing what this does is allow you access to multiple universes. The many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics. You mentioned it, breaking people’s encryption codes. Right?
Speaker: 0
02:50:12
Right.
Speaker: 1
02:50:13
What are you actually doing there? You’re you’ve got an algorithm, you run the quantum computer. And how does it factor these? What it’s doing is finding the prime numbers that you multiply together to make a very big number. So it’s very easy to multiply 2 big numbers together to get a really big number. It’s very hard to take a very big number and factor it.
Speaker: 1
02:50:35
So find out what the numbers were that got multiplied together to make it. That takes much longer than the current age of the universe, the big numbers, with any conceivable classical computer. But the quantum computer can do it in, you know, a second or something in principle.
Speaker: 1
02:50:52
And and the the the the explanation
Speaker: 0
02:50:54
Just what you just said. It’s so crazy.
Speaker: 1
02:50:56
But the explanation for how it’s doing it, a picture, which many people in the field, not everyone, many people would say is the correct, is what it’s doing is the calculations in multiple universes. So it’s accessing the fact that there actually there’s an interpretation of quantum mechanics called the meh worlds interpretation, where you have to imagine these, you know, infinite, pretty meh, it’s a sea of universes, and the computer kind of goes, that’s a good way, and does the calculation in parallel, and then brings them back together again at the end.
Speaker: 1
02:51:28
And and and they I mentioned David Deutsch earlier, who’s a fascinating writer in this field and the instigator of many of these algorithms early on. He he would say that, he would say this is what is happening, there is no other explanation. How do you explain the fact that this quantum computer can do something that no classical computer can ever do. How do you explain it?
Speaker: 1
02:51:51
Where is it doing the math? Oh ai god. And he would say he would say it’s doing it in the multiple universes.
Speaker: 0
02:52:00
Oh. I still don’t understand the yin yang symbol.
Speaker: 1
02:52:02
Well, I don’t fully understand that. I but but I feel so much
Speaker: 0
02:52:05
better. Well, I’ve never seen it. I read read through it again, and I also now don’t understand too because it says that by
Speaker: 1
02:52:10
capturing subject message. This is
Speaker: 0
02:52:12
The resulting image. By capturing the resulting image with a nanosecond precise camera, the researchers teased apart the interference pattern they received revealing a stunning yin yang image of the 2 entangled photons. So that sounds like that’s what it actually
Speaker: 1
02:52:25
looks like. Is a photograph of in a in a real sense that the photons are arriving and you’re dissecting them. So it’s a photograph of
Speaker: 0
02:52:32
So that’s what it actually looks like.
Speaker: 1
02:52:34
If you think about what I Ai think what must be happening is you’re getting these photons. It is true to say that again these many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics would be that these entangled photons, if you send them on a path, then they they going by all of that to Ai, if you calculate, the way you calculate how a photon goes from a to b, or an electron, whatever it is, it just formally is you allow it to take all possible paths.
Speaker: 1
02:53:01
That’s one way of calculating the probability it will go from one place to another. And when you get entanglement, it gets more complicated, but you’re essentially, you are mathematically saying, ‘I allow it to go on all paths.’ And so really there you’re seeing what an interference pattern is, is you’re seeing the result of the fact that these particles can go on on all loads of paths and interfere with each other and and make a pattern you can see.
Speaker: 1
02:53:27
And I think that that’s what that is. Sai it’s a really fascinating
Speaker: 0
02:53:30
That pattern is an ancient symbol. It is beautiful, isn’t it? It’s unbelievably beautiful. It’s a beautiful thing. Ai, thank you so much. What a great conversation. I really, really enjoyed it. Please tell people how they can find you. I know you’re you’re doing live performances.
Speaker: 1
02:53:46
I’m gonna do some yeah. I’ve been doing this tour for a long time now, actually. I ended up doing it for about two and a half years, and it’s changed a lot. We’ve done it to over 400,000 people, I was told the other day around the world. And I thought just to finish it, because I want to finish it and write another one, I’d come back to the to the US.
Speaker: 1
02:54:03
We did a few in the US. Sai coming back in April Meh and doing these ai well. Well, you see
Speaker: 0
02:54:08
the one
Speaker: 1
02:54:09
you did
Speaker: 0
02:54:09
years ago.
Speaker: 1
02:54:10
That was ages ago, wasn’t it? Yeah. So this is, you know, it’s, it explores many of these questions actually, particularly black holes. And then just to round it off, I’m doing a few. So if you go and look on the meh, you’ll find, you know, we’re doing some LA, New York, Chicago, around I hope we did Austin actually.
Speaker: 1
02:54:26
Ai I’d I hope you do it too. I wouldn’t insist. Yeah. Please. But it’s not in there. We could be Austin. And and then, you know, yeah.
Speaker: 1
02:54:32
So that’s that’s what I’m what I’m up to.
Speaker: 0
02:54:34
Well, thank you very much, Brian. I really appreciate what you do. It means a lot to me. Thank you.
Speaker: 1
02:54:37
Thank you very much.
Speaker: 0
02:54:38
Thanks for coming in. Alright. Bye, everybody ai.
