#373 - NASA Physicist: UFOs, Moon’s South Pole, & Advanced Pre-Human Civilizations | Adam Frank

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Is it true you are one of the first scientists to get a grant from NASA to look for aliens? Look for, not for aliens, but for intelligent civilization, signs of intelligent life. Signs of intelligent life. Yeah. Because there's the whole history of SETI, right? So SETI, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, is old, right? It goes back to the 1960s, really. First searches were done then. And, you know, it kind of, it was always marginalized, right? There were scientists who were doing it, but it was never very well-funded. So we can talk about things like the Fermi Paradox, why there is no Fermi Paradox. But we can get to that. But just that SETI was never really well-funded. And then it really, there was a couple of congressmen in the 80s and 90s who really were like, we're not going to fund this stuff. And they just kept, they basically said to NASA, you can't fund any of this. Like, you know, you'll just get burned if you do. And then, but in the, by 1995, we discovered our first planet orbiting another star. So that was a big deal. Like, that was when. That was the first exoplanet we discovered? Exoplanet, 95. So when I was coming up in graduate school in the late 80s, If you asked me if there were any other planets, I'd be like, don't know. We could, you know, so our solar system could be the only one, right? So, 95, we discovered the first exoplanets. So, the field of astrobiology, of thinking about life in space, sort of starts, really starts in earnest then. NASA starts putting money into it. But there was always this thing of like, sure, we'll study dumb life, like microbes. We'll go to Mars and we'll look for microbes and stuff, and we can talk about that. But still, if you wanted to look for intelligent life, there was still kind of a bias at NASA. They literally, in some of the language, like, oh, you want to apply for a grant? You can look for life, but don't look for intelligent life. And then there was this famous meeting in 2018 where somebody in Congress said, oh, we need $10 million. NASA should have a $10 million program for techno signatures, which is the new word for SETI. Searching for signatures of technology. Interesting. And that was when sort of like NASA was like, oh, okay. So they brought a bunch of us together, people who were kind of interested. It was an amazing three-day meeting. And from that, Cosme colleagues and I put in a grant that was explicit, like, yeah, we're looking for, we want to think about. We weren't even going to look yet. We were going to think about how to think about actually looking for techno signatures rather than just bio signatures. And that was the first grant. We got it funded in 2019, and we're still going. Well, that's interesting. They said that in 2018, because wasn't it 2017 that the New York Times came out with that article about the UFOs? Yeah, but these were pretty disconnected. Like this was, you know, I mean, the UAP stuff and the technosignature stuff are very disconnected. And so we can talk about that, right? The technosignatures are using telescopes, right? Using like high-powered telescopes to look at other planets or, you know, I mean, especially when we're doing technosignatures. Biosignatures, we'll do biosignatures in the solar system, right? We'll look for biosignatures by going to Mars, looking on the ocean moons of the big planets. We don't really think there's techno signatures in the solar system. But for people who are, you know, in our solar system. In our solar system. But there's people, and I'm one of them. We've done some work on this, and I can tell you about it. But in general, you know, the UFO and UAP stuff is very disconnected from the techno signature work. And I can tell you in general why, you know. But, you know, I mean, you know, one could ask how one could look at UAPs and UFOs scientifically. But in general, the data, and I'm sure we're going to get into this, is just not even close. There's nothing to do scientifically in general with the data that we have. Sure, that makes sense. It's just definitely an interesting coincidence. I think the coincidence goes back actually in the other way. So what is happening, so in 1995, we discover our first planet orbiting another star, which was a huge revolution, right, because we just didn't know whether or not. This question about whether or not there are other planets orbiting other stars goes back to the Greeks, right? You can see, like, Aristotle and Democritus beating each other up over it. So it's an old, ancient question. Giordano Bruno in 1600 gets burned at the stake in some reason, in some way. I mean, it's a little, you know, it's not quite true. But, you know, he was advocating for there being other planets orbiting other stars, right? Now, this was before anybody had any data, but, you know, that was a heresy in those days. So this is an old question. So 1995, we discover proof positive that there's another planet orbiting another star. Slowly then, 1995, 1996, we start accumulating data about other, you know, we start building a census of other planets. By 2005, we now, we're getting the data that like every star has planets orbiting it, right? So, and then you start seeing in the news like, oh, scientists find an Earth twin, you know, meaning like a planet like the same size as Earth. So, like, all this data about other planets is coming out, which is far away, light years away. And I think it kind of was the other way around. People were getting used to hearing about other planets that they exist. Some of them may be Earth-like. And I think that set the stage in some sense for UFOs and UAPs to become a little bit more acceptable to be talked about. People were thinking about life in the universe in a way that they hadn't in 1990. Sure. Now, one of your biggest theories is the Silurian hypothesis, right? And this is the idea that human beings weren't the first industrial civilization. Well, I wouldn't put it that way, but we did it in the paper. Right. So we asked the question. Right. So the Silurian hypothesis was a paper that I wrote with Gavin Schmidt, who's the head of the Goddard Institute for Space Studies, which is a big climate facility in New York City. And what we were asking in that paper was, how would you know? How would you know whether or not, could you tell? If there was a technological civilization, you know, 100 million years ago, you know, the dinosaurs got wiped out 65 million years ago, how could you tell whether or not the dinosaurs had it, you know, like there were dinosaur cities? So we weren't saying there were. In general, I don't think there's any, well, in general, I would be very skeptical if anybody told me there was a civilization before. But, you know, the cool thing about this question was, and this is pure science, how could you tell, right? Right. What evidence would there be? Right. There's no toasters in the desert. Right. And so this actually, this whole paper came about because I had gone down to New York to meet with Gavin, who I knew, and I was writing papers on what I called the astrobiology of the Anthropocene. which meant, you know, the Earth's climate is changing. And I'm sure there's people right now, as soon as I said that are like typing, we're like, oh my God, it's one of these climates. I know. We should get into the whole topic. Yeah. Which it shouldn't be, right? Because there's, you know, I mean, there's the reason. Well, let's put a pin in there. We'll put a pin in there. But this was my thing. You know, I mean, our understanding of climate change comes from our understanding of planets, right? Planets have climate. That's basically the average weather patterns. And we've been studying climate for long enough that we have a deep understanding of how life and planets and climate fit together. We have 4.2 billion years of Earth's history to read off how planets and climate. So my hypothesis, so there's a hypothesis that comes before the Silurian hypothesis. My hypothesis is like, you know what? Climate change is just something that any technological civilization goes through. It's kind of like you should expect it, right? So the idea being that if you are building a, you know, powerful civilization that harvests energy from the planet, which is what we're doing, and we're harvesting it from fossil fuels from previous, that you're going to have an impact, right? You know, the planets, you can't use all that much energy and not have it affect the planet. So I was saying, like, any technological civilization that reaches a certain level of sophistication is going to push back on their planet. on their planet. They're going to go through a period of climate change. So that was the idea I came to Gavin with. And I wanted to be like, hey man, you're a climate scientist. Let's talk about this crazy idea that alien civilizations would trigger climate change. And I started to describe this to him. And before I could even get two sentences out of my mouth, and I said to him, I said, you know, because we know there's been no technological civilizations on Earth beforehand. Because I wasn't going to go into this whole thing about alien civilizations. And he's like, how do you know that? And I was like, eh. And he, you know, so he outweirded me. I thought I was coming in with the weirdest idea ever. And he outweirded me in five minutes. I love when that happens. Because he wasn't saying that there were technological civilizations. He was just saying, and then this is what's the beauty and power of science. There's the question. How would you know? You know, everybody can have an opinion. Opinions are, you know, what is it like? Opinions are like assholes. Everybody's got one. Nobody thinks they're sphinx. You know, opinions are a dime in a dozen. But that, you know, science is about finding a way to get a hold, a handle on answering the question, right? So his question was, how would you know? Forget about the debates about, like, Atlantis and everything. How would you know? Especially once you go back more than, because his point was, once you go back more than, say, about 2 million years, the Earth's surface has mainly resurfaced. You know, the Earth's surface, it's not, you know. It's regenerated. It's regenerated because of plate tectonics, right? The Earth's surface, the plates, the continental plates are constantly being dragged down into the, you know, the deeper layers of the Earth where they melt. And then new stuff, new continental plates or new Earth's surface is born in the mid-ocean ridges, right? So that means it's kind of like a conveyor belt. The continents are constantly getting dragged down like, you know, the California, Hawaii, not Hawaii, Japan. That's where there's all the earthquakes and volcanoes are. And then new land comes up. So after about two, five million years, there is no record of, you know, you're not going to find any subway stations. Right. And so if you start going back 10 million years, 100 million years, like really now the planet has changed so dramatically that all you've got are fossils. And in general, the fossil record sucks. Right. Most things do not get fossilized. Right. Okay. So like our fossil record, it's great. We've been able to use it to, you know, talk about dinosaurs and everything. but like some giant fraction of all the living things out there have net did not get fossilized. So especially if you have a civilization that lasts, say, 10,000 years, which for us would be a long time, right? Our human technological civilization has been around for maybe, what, like 200 if we're lucky. What Gavin wanted to ask was if there was like a dinosaur civilization that lasted 10,000 years, nothing's going to get fossilized. It's just too short. You know, the odds of, you know, every year, you know, you have odds, there's some odds of some of your stuff getting fossilized. And it's pretty low, right? So if you only last for 10,000 years, that's not long enough to have lots of fossils from, you know, whatever kind of species you are. So what it means is that there would be no record of a, you know, no fossil record of a civilization that lasted 10,000 years. So it means it's like we're blind to it. That lasted 10,000 or less. Or less, yeah. And not 10,000, it could be 100,000. And it's very, you know, nobody gets... How long would it have to last to have a good amount of fossils? Millions, millions of years, right? In general, the dinosaur species were, you know, we're talking about species that were around for a million or more years. You know, a civilization that lasts... This is one of the interesting things about the work I do with techno signatures. We are forced to really think about, you know, civilizations and planets and their long-term evolution. Human technological civilization is, you know, is about 200 years old. I mean, you know, obviously we go back to, you know, we go back. Human civilization is farming and shit. 10,000 years, right? You know, to the Ice Age. Everything, all modern civilizations come out of the advent of farming after the glaciers, the last glaciers melted. So, but, you know, the technological part, like having radios and stuff, or even trains, you know, is only 200 years old. The industrialization. The industrialization, right? 200 years. So, what happens to a civilization? If, you know, or are there that last, can you get a civilization that's a million years old, right? Can you get a civilization that's 10,000 years old? Kind of hard to imagine having a continuous, you know, one civilization that holds itself together, you know, continues to progress technologically. I don't know, right? So 10,000 years would be a long time. Based on what we know, 10,000 years would be a long time. So the Silurian hypothesis, what we were really asking was, would there be a way to tell if, you know, there was a civilization like ours that lasted for, say, 10,000 years. That was the number we chose because it was just a good kind of not too short, not too long. And Gavin, being a, you know, very skilled Earth scientist, what he was able to do was, you know, sort of look through and see the only way you'd be able to tell was from the strata, the rock strata, The chemical composition of the rock strata. Because, like, you know, if there was a technological civilization and it was dumping a lot of, you know, even, like, say, carbon dioxide, like what we're doing, into the atmosphere, you would see that in the rock strata. The rock strata would have, like, these chemical, what's called isotopes, which are, you know, they're, like, you know, carbon, but with one extra neutron in them. So you'd be able to see that in the strata. So if you could do that with ice cores, too, right? Yeah, yeah. But ice cores only go back, you know, ice cores, I think the maximum they go back is about 100,000 years. Okay. So if you want millions of years, you need rock. Got it. You know? So you got to go, you know, you go to the Grand Canyon and see all those layers going down. Those layers are, you're talking, millions of years all the way down. So you'd have to go down to find, you know, the layers from 50 million years ago, break it up, put it into a chemical laboratory, do all the work you'd have to do. But what Gavin showed is like, yeah, you would see for the kind of industrial activity that we think of as being associated with high-tech civilizations, you might see like increases in like carbon 13, you know, or certain oxygen isotopes. Right. That might be a marker. And that might be the marker that we leave. Like, if we only last for another 200, 300 years and we disappear, another civilization, you know, 20 million years from now might, or if aliens land 20 million years from now and wanted to know whether or not we were here, that's what they would have to use. For some reason, most dress shirts make you choose between looking good and feeling comfortable. Mizzen and Main is the first brand I've worn that does both, without ironing, steaming, or dry cleaning. They're super soft, stretchy, and feel buttery to the touch. I love wearing them when I'm golfing, especially in this hot floor to heat because this fabric actually makes you feel cool in the sunlight. 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And if you'd rather shop in person, you can find Mizzen and Main stores in select states. Is it possible that a previous civilization could have figured out technology on like a different trajectory than we're on now, like without using combustion or burning of gases and natural minerals and stuff like this or electricity? Maybe they figured out a different way of doing physics altogether. Yeah, that's kind of hard to imagine just because, like, we know there's four forces in the universe, right? There's gravity, electromagnetism, the strong nuclear force, and the weak nuclear force, right? So gravity is holding our butts to the, you know, to the chairs here. Electromagnetism is light. Something is. We just call it gravity, right? It's just a theory. We know it pretty well. Well, like, you know, there's Einstein's general relativity is a description of gravity as the warping of space-time. Right. It's a beautiful theory. Like, the mathematics of it is just gorgeous. And, you know, we can predict the timing of pulsars, like two pulsars orbiting each other. So that is a very well-validated theory. You know, when we talk about theories, and this is going to be probably important as we're going on, in science there's two kinds of ways that the word theory gets used, right? There's, like, when I write a scientific paper, I write a paper about, like, I'm just working on a paper right now that is about how, you know, specifically how plants, as they evolve, you know, how they changed the Earth's evolution. How they changed the climate and such as when the first plants were. That is a theory with a little T, right? It's my little thing I've worked out, right? It's like, what, you ever play Clue? You know the game Clue? Right. So there's like, you know, in the kitchen with Mr. Colonel Mustard and the broom handle, you know? That's a theory with a little T. Sure. But then there's like the theory of electromagnetism, you know, which is like 10,000 experiments. No, not even that, 100,000 experiments, 100,000 scientific papers done. You know, it's been validated so many times. It's a theory with a capital T. If you do an experiment. Lots of legs to hold it. Lots of legs. That's really what it's. It's not a house of cards. It's a mountain of boulders. Where you could like, let's say you found some particular paper written about electromagnetism or gravity, Einstein's gravity. And it's like, oh, this seems to contradict it. It may be like, oh, maybe you're even right. So you've pulled one boulder out, but the mountain's still there. The mountain's going to adjust itself a little bit, but the mountain ain't going anywhere because it's been tested so many times. You can't have just one paper that says electromagnetism is wrong, and everybody's going to be like, oh, shit, electromagnetism is wrong. There's too much support. And we built everything on it. So, for example, let's say Einstein's theory of general relativity. So let's pull out my favorite tool for exposition. My cell phone, right? So when you use your GPS, right, if you did not take into account Einstein's general theory of relativity, right? Because you have to, because this thing, you know, there's GPS uses all these satellites that are orbiting the Earth. And there are corrections, you know, and they're sending signals back and forth, and that's how they're triangulating to figure out where exactly you are when you open up the map and go, hey, man, I've got to go to Costco to get, you know, some eggs. If you didn't take into account Einstein's general theory of relativity, which explains gravity as the four-dimensional warping of space-time, within like 10 minutes it would show you that rather than being in Florida, you were like about 100 meters over Cleveland. You have to take that into account or you'd get the answer wrong. So Einstein's general theory of relativity, which explains gravity, is a theory with a capital T. Electromagnetism is a theory with a capital T. Evolution is a theory with a capital T. You're going to have to do a lot of work through this logic. Totally. Yeah, so getting back to what we're saying, there's four forces that we know of. What I was getting at, though, I didn't necessarily mean like a whole new physical universe. I meant like a different way or a different form of technology to manipulate it, like a different way to manipulate gravity without rocket propulsion or something like that. Right, right, right. Yeah, and there are ideas along those lines. You require, like, you know, it's not clear that it would work. Like, it would require, like, you know, black holes worth of energy to be able to do something like that. But I get your point, right? So could they have some other kinds of technologies? Maybe different elements they brought from somewhere else, or who knows? Yeah, well, elements, like, again, all this, like, what other elements? Like, we know all the elements that there are, right? Have you ever heard of Townsend Brown? No. So Townsend Brown came up with the Byfield-Brown effect. It was the Byfield-Brown effect. And Townsend Brown was a physicist that was working during the Cold War. Pull up Townsend Brown. He was working with the government, the military, even like the CIA, and he was working with all of the top physicists during that time. And he came up with this theory called the Bifield-Brown effect, which was – pull it up. I'm not Jesse Michaels. I can't regurgitate this off the top of my head. So the Bifield-Brown effect is electromagnetic phenomenon discovered in the 20s, okay, way earlier, where the high-voltage asymmetrical capacitor produces a net directional thrust towards smaller electrodes, often linked to electrogravitics or lifters. The force is generally understood in modern physics to be caused by ion wind rather than gravity manipulation. So this is something that he was on the leading edge of, and this was like a crazy discovery back then. And then he got really wrapped up in, like, the military and stuff, and all this stuff kind of, like, went dark. But this technology is still used for things like those stealth bomber planes, like what they use on the edge of them. Yeah, maybe on the – let me just say, like, so I'm going to give you my – So I don't know about the, Google Townsend Brown. Right. So, but you know, we probably go to, so I'm going to give you my, this is where, you know, we'll start something as a working astrophysicist, as a working physicist. The town, you know, I've never heard about this. This is not an important piece of the, you know, of the, of the knowledge we have of physics. Right. If you go to a graduate, if you trained in physics, you know, there, there is no anti-gravity. There's no anti-gravity. Like, you know, there's the idea that he worked with the top physicists. No, he didn't. I can tell you who the top physicists were in gravity. Kip Thorne, right? Kip Thorne is the guy who took Einstein's theory and progressed it. Like, he was the guy who really worked on black holes, you know, understood black holes, understood wormholes, gave us the, you know, he was the first one. What about the Wittens? Ed Witten? Ed Witten. Ed Witten's a modern, you know, I'm not a super huge, I mean, Ed Witten's a smart guy. But he's not, you know, like he was the guy behind string theory. String theory's failed. Like that's my take on string theory. Right. But like whatever this is, this is not, this made no impact on physics. Right. I mean, and so that's really, it's important to understand sort of like there's this sort of underground sort of discussions about it. But then you see like what actually happens, what's real physics, right? What's real physics is that whatever this is, you know, you can't, nobody's built unless you want to say, unless you want to say that it was built and the government's hiding it, Which is like, what am I supposed to do with that, right? Well, this is, but what his discovery led to was, like, the electrohydrodynamics, which is used in a lot of, like, click on electrohydrodynamics. Well, so that's, okay, electro, that's what I'm saying. So probably what this thing is, he did some physics, and it may be, it has very specific uses in, say, like something, like, even in, you know, ion thrusters. I don't know, like, very detailed sort of thing. But the idea that this was some kind of huge revelation of, like, cutting-edge physics that nobody ever heard, which transformed the field. No, that didn't happen, right? That just didn't happen. So this was like, you know, it sounds like, and I'd have to read through it, it sounds like he, you know, discovered something that had great engineering possibilities for very specific things, but was it anti-gravity? You know, no, we don't know of any kind of anti-gravity. We don't know that, right. And you know what's really cool? You want to know why there's no anti-gravity? It's because, and this was something Einstein worked out with, you know, sometimes you think when you go through what Einstein did and you see the genius, You know, his ability to see what nobody else could see. So you've got electric charges, right? And you've got plus charges and you've got minus charges. There's protons and electrons, right? So the protons have plus charges and the electrons have minus charges. And light charges or opposite charges attract, right? So in electromagnetism, you've got two kinds of charge, right? In gravity, you don't. Gravity, you can think of mass, you know, you can think of it as being charge, But there's only one kind of charge, and it always attracts. And because of that, there's no way to shield. Like in electromagnetic fields, if I have like a ball of protons, right, which has a very strong electric field, right? Everything is – the electric field is all pointing to the protons. If I want, I can build like a shell around it and put electrons around it. We have the opposite charge, and it will shield. Now you won't see the protons in there. So you can shield the electric charge. You can make the electric field go away. There's no way to do that in gravity because gravity only has one kind of charge. So it's this deep reason about the structure of reality, right, that leads to the fact that there's no way to shield yourself against gravity. So there is no anti-gravity. I wish there was. Maybe in the future there will be. But for right now to say that, like, somebody came up with a theory of anti-gravity would be like all the physics that all the physicists know that gets taught in graduate school like no that there's something they don't know and it's like well why don't why are these top guys you know why don't they know it and then you got to go into like oh it's being hidden by the military and then that just leads you down this you know this path we're like okay anything's true you know i can levitate right now but i can't show you because the military won't let it's unfortunate because the military is very obviously interested in that weird shit and like levitation I had a guy in here, Jeffrey Kripal, who's a professor of religion, and he said he was contacted by people at JPL to come to some intellectual salon to tell them about ancient stories of levitation because this rocket propulsion company is interested in it. Like, what do you mean? I'm super skeptical because, like, I work with JPL. You know, I would actually, I would love to talk to the guy and then find out, really, who did you talk to? Because that's what so much happens, what I see with kind of like the conspiracy theory stuff. Some guy comes up and he says something and I'm like, wait a minute. Okay, sit down with a bunch of experts. You know the founder of JPL was best friends with the guy who created this company? Not this company, this religion, Scientology. Yeah. L. Ron Hubbard, one of the most prolific science fiction writers. Shitty science fiction. Yeah. In the history of the universe. So that's what I mean. You know, like JPL, like a lot of this stuff, you know. So what I want to really, the reason, you know, that I'm, the work I'm doing right now is to really push the idea that there is, like, science. There's established science, you know, and established, I want people to understand, like, what established science means. Because it's easy for them to become like, oh, established, established me, the sorties, you know. But that's not what it is. Science is this beautiful process that we've learned over centuries to not fool ourselves. That's really what it's about, to not fool ourselves. And the way in which science collectively, because science is just a bunch of fallible human beings, the way we've established how to do that is through painstaking work. And so when I talk about established science, what I mean is the work that the community of researchers, thousands of people working together for endless, endless hours, what that community has figured out. You know, whereas like the stuff that's like supposedly on the side or the, you know, the fringe science and everything, you know, there's a reason why it's called fringe science is because it's actually, you know, you can't build anything with it. You're not going to build a, you know, you're not going to build a space shuttle with it. You're not going to build a cell phone with it. Right. Because it requires this. And it's so beautiful that the message I really have for people is like you don't need fringe science to like freak out about how beautiful the world is. Right. You know, have somebody on who can explain photosynthesis to you. It's crazy. what nature developed. Oh, sure. And then you can go outside, and every leaf that you see is a miracle. And then suddenly the whole world becomes this luminous, transparent, extraordinary event. And that's what real science is about. And it requires endless work, endless transparency. The stuff we know, we know it because it's been thousands of people, not working in the dark for some military thing, but working transparently together. That's over how, over 400 years, we've built an understanding of gravity as a four-dimensional space-time. How we've built an understanding of quantum mechanics with all of its weirdness, which leads to, you know, miracle devices like this. So, you know, I am an evangelist of science in many ways. But the science I'm talking about is the stuff that, like, you know, you've got to put the 10,000 hours into with you and all your buddies transparently. You know, that's what we know. And that's the beauty. The other stuff is just it's kind of hot. You know, it's entertaining, but it's not true. Well, yeah. I mean, I think there's like when you say what real science, I think there's like this weird dichotomy between like fringe and academic. Right. Or there's like some people who are on the academic side. They don't want to touch the fringe stuff. It's like you're on this you're in this weird cult. Right. And then you have those people who like the crazy cult cultist people are like anti everything. That's like academic or mainstream science. the reality is you can embrace all of it. And if you're a rational, reasonable human being, you can figure out where to take stuff and where to leave stuff behind and kind of see the forest through the trees and have a moderate 30,000-foot view of it. Because the most amazing thing about science, it was this slow... I've written about this a few different times. One, and through my writing, I ended up kind of as a historian of science. And it's really fascinating to watch how, going from the 1400s to the 1600s, how this process, like, human beings were always scientists, in a way. Like, every hunter-gatherer knows stuff about the world. Through empirical, like, ah, poke this. Oh, I ate that plant, I got sick. I ate that plant, I got better. I got high. I got exactly right. I ate that plant. That was awesome. But, you know, what happened in the 1600s was this codification of the scientific process, which really, what science really is, is a way to have a dialogue with nature that, you know, you push nature and it pushes back. And then you, you know, you learn how to do this and it requires a whole community. You can't just be like one dude. It is like you, for every Einstein, there's 10,000 other men and women in laboratories, you know, doing this slow, steady, painful work that builds you up to it. And one of the things we learned over those four centuries was how to carry out experiments, again, transparently, so that you would not be fooled. You would not, because that's what science is about. Human beings are kind of like designed to fool ourselves, you know? And in many ways, it made evolutionary sense, right? If there's, you know, is that a tiger in the bushes or is that just the bushes? Even memory, too, right? Like, we only take forward in memory. Like, our memories can be skewed very quickly from things that happen. Like, our brain is designed to take away the stuff that's useful for us to get through the day and the future. Right. It's filtering. Right. It's always filtering. So, you know, the whole thing about science was trying to find this public. It's got to be public knowledge. That's the important thing about science. Because, you know, there's public knowledge and there's private knowledge. You know, I love my wife. Can I prove to you that I love my wife? No. Right? There's, you know. Can you prove love is real? Right. How do you measure love? Exactly. Exactly. And that's why, you know, I'm a Zen Buddhist. Like, you know, I have a spiritual practice. I don't think science is amenable to the things that you gain in spiritual practice. But science is about public knowledge, right? So those things that can be investigated publicly, which is this method. And so that's the problem with the fringe science is that often it's like there's no way to investigate it publicly. Or it has been, and it doesn't work out, and people still hold on to it no matter what. You know? And I see this with the UFO and UAP stuff, right? So I am all for public, transparent investigations of UFO and UAPs, right? I don't think, I have never seen any evidence that even comes close to the standards that I'm going to be held to. If I say I've discovered, you know, alien life on another planet, I'm going to be held to very high standards. I've never seen anything from UFO and UAPs that lives up to that. But, okay, let's go do the work to, you know. But, you know, so you need that level of accuracy, that level of acuity, that level of rigor, for it to be scientific knowledge. If not, it's just, you know, it's opinion. That's what I was going to get lost. With the UAP stuff, there's people who, like, no amount of evidence, no amount of contra evidence will ever convince them that UFOs are not aliens. Like, because it's a faith. It's a belief, you know. Which, if that's what it is, okay, dude, that's what it is. Like, you know, that's fine. But don't make, you know, don't say it's scientific. Because science is about I'm going to make a claim, right? And here's how I'm going to validate that claim. And like I said, not all claims are amenable to science. I love my wife. That is not amenable to science, right? You know? I have a profound sense of connectedness with the world, you know, when I do contemplative practice. That's not really amenable to science. You can hook my brain up and everything and watch the E-game. But that's, you know. But when it comes to, like, things like anti-gravity, that falls into the science part. And there's no, there is nothing. And I can say this as somebody who knows Einstein's theory of gravity, studies the universe, cosmology and everything. There is no valid theory of anti-gravity. No one talks about it, but we all know it exists. Toxins are everywhere. In the air, water, plastics, your food packaging, cleaning products, etc. Even in all the stuff that's marketed as healthy. And it's not just one big exposure you should be worried about. 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It was called Age of Disclosure. Yeah, I've seen some of it, yeah. So they got like all of the highest level military generals, people in Congress, whistleblowers from government agencies, different parts of the military to all come out and talk about this real thing that's going on and people going in these skiffs, these secret compartmented, I don't know what you call them, their rooms that like nothing can be recorded in and explaining what they've been exposed to and like reverse engineered craft that they can't explain. And so if you have all these people that are running this country and in charge of us saying this is real, what do you make of that? Yeah. So this has always been this way. Like going back to this. One of the things for my last book, for the little book of aliens, you know, I did my research on the history of UFOs. And you can find those claims going all the way back to like I think it was 1955. The first study, the first Air Force study of UFOs, the first wave of UFO sightings happens in 1947. right um and then by the early 50s so what was roswell no no no roswell came later roswell actually 47 uh roswell was 47 but it was months after the first wave the first wave was i've forgotten the guy's name now where he was flying over the it was a guy pilot flying corsa in washington state no it wasn't oh yes i know you're talking about this was yeah yeah yeah and he saw like nine things so it's actually that's an interesting story in itself because it also tells you a lot about the psychology of things. But let's, before I go there, sometimes it's hard to stay on topic. Now we're over there. But so the first, or one of the first, Air Force studies, I think it was first called Project Saucer, and they're like, maybe we shouldn't call it that. And then they changed the name to Project Sign. And the guy who was the head of it. Grudge. Grudge, I think even came later. Oh wait, no, you're right, Grudge. That was a weird thing. Who comes up with these names? Project Grudge. But the guy who, the Air Force major who was in charge of it, he retires, and then he writes a book, first one of these books, claiming this secret government report that said, and this was interesting, said it was interplanetary. Because in those days, nobody really, we didn't really know much about it. So, oh yeah, it's interplanetary. Now, nobody would claim interplanetary, because we know the solar system is empty, right? There's no planets in the solar system that can harbor life other than Earth. But anyway, the important thing is he claimed there was, I think it was called the report of the situation or something. That was the name of this secret report. Nobody's ever found it. Nobody's ever found it, right? People have tried. People, you know, the black vault people never found. And that has been sort of the story for every guy. Like, you know, that age of disclosure thing kind of pisses me off, right? Really? Yeah, because, you know, you get people standing up making claims, but they never show anything. It's like, oh, I know a guy who knows a guy who knows a guy who saw something. You know, it's like, okay, show me the saucer. Can't do that, you know? And so this has been, so you look at like Sean Kirkpatrick, who was the head of the AA. He, you know, from his perspective, it's been this mutual circularity. Because of kind of a, you know, a circular conversation. Going back to the 50s, there were two kinds of people in the military. The ones who thought the UFO thing was aliens, and the ones who thought the UFO thing was ridiculous, right? And there has always been those two groups. Like with Age of Disclosure, that's the problem with these kinds of documentaries. They didn't show the armies of army guys and the armies of intelligent people who were like, no, this is crap. So what – because there's no actual data. It's always guys who claim they saw something or most of all, they don't claim they saw it. They claim they know somebody who says they know somebody who saw it. And at what point as a scientist, I'm like, come on, man. Show me the saucer. You know what I mean? I'm like, without the saucer, show me a piece of metal that you can distribute to every lab in the country, and we'll analyze it. It's never that. And we're going now into, like, the fourth year of these congressional hearings, and we still don't have any actual evidence. It's just people talking. And, like, can I stand up at a congressional hearing saying, hey, you know, I've got a theory of quantum gravity, which is, like, that's the most important thing in physics, to have a theory of quantum gravity. But I can't show it to you. You know, should everybody say like, hey, Adam Frankenfieden, you know, the theory of gravity. Right. It's like, no, I didn't because I can't show it to you. So I am not impressed. I mean, I'm all for the disclosure. If it's true, more hearings. Let's actually get to the bottom of it. I'm all for it. But everything I see and the way it gets hyped. It's frustrating. It's very frustrating. It's very frustrating for me because I believe that this stuff's real. But all the public evidence is, it's not, it's compelling depending on how generous you want to be to yourself. But you're right. In an objective scientific setting, you can't definitively say that any of those videos or any of that testimony proves shit. Right, right. Which frustrates me. So you're right. Your belief, like I said, I know lots of people who are really interested in UFO and UNVs, like you, who, like, yeah, want evidence, like, would like to know what's going on. And I think that's totally cool, right? But, right, you can't make the mistake from going to there and be saying, like, there's already proof. Right. You know, there's interesting things that are happening. I believe there is proof. I don't believe anything we've seen publicly is proof. Right. I think it exists. And, you know, I also think, like, it's hard for me to discredit people that are, like, some of these ex-Air Force guys that were in charge of running nuclear bases. You know, these guys are like top of the top of the top when it comes to being psychologically sound individuals, right? They get tested for this all the time because their job is to protect the button that launches the news, right? You'd like them to be kind of stable. That would be a good idea. These are the same guys that are saying they're seeing this stuff, and there's just too many cases. That and then also like the fighter pilots, like the Tic Tac pilots, you know. But you know the Tic Tac pilots are taken away. Like, those tick-tock pods, they say what they saw, and there's no photos of it. The radar got confiscated by people right after it happened. So there's no proof. We just have these guys saying this. Right, right. And that's actually – I've interviewed with them. I think that stuff could have been, like, secret military stuff that we've been testing. I don't know. Or piercing – so let me just step back a little bit on this because I want people to understand. Like, look, you know, my job, one of my jobs as a scientist, you know, because of that grant, is to think about alien intelligence, other intelligences. So men, yeah, and do I want them to exist? Yes. Do I hope that we find them when I'm around? Yes. Is it possible that UFOs are? It possible I going to be hyper about it because any in general any you know this is the famous Carl Sagan quote What is it? Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. And I think that's really true, right? So let me tell you an interesting story that's sort of related to that thing. I once talked to Adam Rees, who is the guy, he's a cosmologist, an astronomer. And he was the guy who discovered that the universe found the data that the universe was accelerating. After the Big Bang, we know that the universe is expanding. Every galaxy is expanding away from every other galaxy. So, like, you know, early on in the universe, the universe was set in motion expanding. We have absolute data from this. But what we always thought was that, okay, you get the Big Bang. Everything starts expanding. But the expansion should actually slow down because you've got all these galaxies, all this matter, pulling on all the other matter. So things should be, if you could look long enough, you could look far enough back and get a good timeline, everything should be slowly slowing down. Adam Reese is a graduate student. You know, he's 27 years old, and he's doing, they finally have the data to look really far back in time and do these measurements. And what he finds is it's accelerating. It's not decelerating. You know, it's not slowing down. It's accelerating. It's accelerating, right? This is like 1997. And so, you know, he's just like a 27-year-old dude sitting, he's up at the mountain, you know, sitting on this data, right? That is absolutely a Nobel Prize, like, without doubt, a Nobel Prize. And I said to him, I said, how did you feel when you, you know, realized what you had? He said, and this is, like, really important. He said, I was terrified because he knew that he was going to have to take these results. You know, this is all his work. He had planned the observations. He had taken the observations. He had done all the mathematical details to analyze the observations. You know, like, it's hard to, like, turn what you get from the telescope into, like, oh, the universe is accelerating. Yeah. And he knew that he was going to have to sit in front of the smartest guys in the world and women and get grilled. Like, they were going to, like, these people who know, like, they know their work down to the, you know, that final, you know, it's like going into a ring. Sure. You know, you're a young boxer, and you're going into a ring with five world heavyweight champions, you know? And so he was terrified. He's like, did I make a mistake? And so he had an extraordinary claim, and he needed to have extraordinary evidence, and he was going to have to, the gauntlet of fire he was going to have to run through. So I'm bringing that up to say, like, if you have an extraordinary claim, UFOs are aliens, right? You need, first of all, you need evidence of the highest quality, right? Just like if I and my colleagues said, oh, my God, we found, you know, we're looking at telescope images of, you know, Kepler-34B, some planet, We're like, oh, my God, there's city lights there, right? I know I'm going to expect to have, you know, I'm going to get a new one ripped. All my colleagues, even my friends, are going to come after me with knives, as they should. Because if this thing is true, then it is, you know, it'll change the world, right? So the problem with, like, all the UFO data, as you said, is that it's just not up to the standards. You can't make a claim like we are being visited by, you know, alien advanced technology with a bunch of fuzzy blob pictures or personal testimony. Because as you said, personal testimony is the worst form of evidence. It's the worst form of evidence. There's just nothing you can do with it, right? I mean, so I've talked with some of the pilots, and they're great guys. And a lot of times they're just saying, like, hey, could, you know, can you tell me some of the guys that saw the Tic Tac stuff, like Fravor or Graves? Yeah, Graves. I was on Graves' podcast. Great guy, you know, and he just is like, this is what I saw, you know, or this is what I remember. I saw because you were talking about memory, you know, so like and there's been all kinds of studies that show, especially when you get excited, something's happening that your memory, you know, you just will not. So there's that famous study of like they did. They had a bunch of people throwing balls around in a room. Right. And they had a bunch of observers, including trained observers, cops and everything to watch what's going on and report what's happening. Right. And while these people are throwing. So it's kind of a complicated thing. People are throwing a white ball to some people in brown shirts, some people in white shirts. nobody reported the guy in the monkey suit who walked through. They did this again and again. People just missed the guy in the monkey suit who walked slowly through the room. So it just points to the fact that personal testimony. You know, I'm sure people, these pilots are absolutely being honest. It is great that they can report, remove the stigma. You know, remove the stigma because that's what's going to help us figure, you know, people should be able to say what they saw. But it's just, it's not evidence of the kind that you can, you know, it's just not evidence. Like, from a scientific point of view, personal testimony is not rigorous evidence. So that, like you said, what you're saying is, like, yeah, you believe it to be true, which is cool. Like, I can have my beliefs. You can have your beliefs. But the whole point of science is to not fool ourselves, not let our beliefs get in the way of what we can actually show to be true. Again, public knowledge, right? Because, you know, you may feel that, like, yeah, we've been visited for a long time. I may be like, no, there's life out there, but I don't think we've been visited. So two different beliefs, right? Two different stories. But the only way, the public knowledge part has to be through this rigorous, brutal, that's why I always want people to understand this brutal process of science. Scientists are mean to each other. Like, we really are. Our lifeblood is tearing each other shreds. That's why the idea, like, you know, with academic science is this thing. You know, and I wouldn't, it's more than academic because there's the academy, universities, but there's also all the research labs and, you know, there's even the industrial labs. Science is this global, you know, diversified thing. Well, the problem with the fringe stuff, there's this blurry line between real science and the fringe. Because where it starts to get blurred is with shit like when you're dealing with the United States government and the federal government. Like, go back to Operation Paperclip. That's the only reason we went to the fucking moon is because we went and got a bunch of Nazis and brought them over here and got them to build nukes. And then we got to Saturn V and got to the moon and all that stuff. And that was hidden forever. And only until it was declassified did we learn that, oh, there was also MKUltra. We did mind control shit. That was also using top scientists and chemists and Nazis. So, like, when you want to talk about, like, fringe and real science, there is a very big overlap with this stuff. Well, that's right. So the government, but that's the, you know, I mean, so my feeling about, like, the government stuff. The government stuff gets really interesting on the one hand. And people like to use that excuse, too, of like, well, the reason we don't have any evidence for UFOs is because the government fucking whacks all those people. Exactly. And then it becomes this, like, circular. But it's like, well, I'm sure it's true in some cases, but it's not always true. Right, right. So that, you know, I mean, that's why I'm all in favor of, like, sure, let's do the investigations to have the, that's all I can say is, like, disclosure. I'm all for disclosure. Right. Open that up. Absolutely. But in general, until I see it, I'm not going to use, you know, I just simply can't. If somebody said, like, government's hiding it. I'm like, look, man, call me when it isn't because there's nothing I can do about that. And also when it really pushes on, like, the idea that we have anti-gravity. Like, we've done a lot of experiments about gravity. You know what I mean? Like, we really understand gravity and we understand what we don't understand, too. So the idea that, like, the military could have done anything, like, that would undermine, you know, or somehow live over here on the side of what we do understand gravity, there's just, I just, I don't, I reject that out of hand. Like, not even out of hand. I reject it because of, you know, my 30 years of study and talking to truly the greatest minds. Because, you know, the greatest minds don't go into the government. You know what I mean? For lots of reasons. You know, you've got really good scientists there. But certainly the greatest minds in the world do not work for black project government. Like, why would you? You know? I mean, you're a scientist. You want to understand the fundamental nature of reality. You're going to go talk to the people who are doing that. And you're not going to sequester yourself alone in this, you know, this thing with all of these rules and you can't disclose it. What about people like Enrico Fermi or even Von Braun or John von Neumann? You know, those people, those are some of the top minds. Yeah, and all their work is transparent and out there. And, you know, John, they're working for the government. They work for the government, and then they start. But they also, they continue to work for, they continue to publish academically, right? They work, you know, I love John von Neumann, by the way. People should know more about John von Neumann. You know, I read his papers all the time. He came up with the calculation for the perfect altitude to detonate the nukes over Japan to kill the most people. Yeah, maybe. I don't know that history. But, yeah, sure. I mean, all these guys worked for – but, I mean, sure, but they built a nuclear bomb. You know, all those guys at Los Alamos. Not only that, they were fucking testing them forever afterward. Like, they were testing them, blowing holes in the atmosphere with nukes. Yeah, yeah. So, but that was – Talking about climate change. No, it's true. I mean, listen, those years, you know, after the Second World War produced a, you know, an interaction between science and the government, that there was kind of like a rotating door, right? So John von Neumann, you know, all those, like the Manhattan Project, you got, you know, that's why that movie Oppenheimer is so great, right? So that history is very well known, that all these great scientists came in, but then they left. They all left and went back to their lives as scientists, you know? The greatest minds in science did not stay in black boxes because, you know, there's no – if you're a scientist, that is like, why would you do that? Like, you want to talk with other scientists. You want to talk with this little group of, you know. And all – you know, the best minds, the ones who win the Nobel Prizes, the ones who are really pushing the frontiers, they're all over the place. And there's a – you have to have the circulation of ideas. Like, no, that's why people have this, it's really important to get over, like, the Einstein, the Einstein bias. Like, oh, one lone genius who, like, opens up the frontier that nobody else can do. In general, that's not what happens. And, in fact, even Einstein required all, you know, there's a whole string of scientists, Mach and Poncray. Like, Einstein stood on the shoulders of giants. I know Newton said, I did what I did because I stood on the shoulders of giants. Same thing for Einstein. Einstein couldn't do it alone. He actually needed Riemann and all these other people, Herman Weill. So this idea that you could have like a small group of scientists in some dark government lab devise a theory that is, you know, light years ahead of what anybody else on the planet is thinking. It's just, that's not how science works. That is just, you know, you have to have the interaction, the kind of large-scale interaction for ideas to mature, for ideas to germinate and then, you know, mature. you've all seen this mushroom before the one with the bright red cap and the little white spots straight out of mario and your favorite christmas fairy tales it's not psilocybin and it's not a psychedelic it's amanita muscaria it's legal and it provides stress relief like i've never experienced before i would have never even touched amanita muscaria if it weren't for amintara because we see sketchy gas station products all the time causing harm and it damages our perception of the real thing. Amantara is the complete opposite. They are the largest Amanita supplier in the United States. Totally legal, ethically sourced, lab tested, and they work directly with foraging families around the world. This isn't a side hustle or a scam. It's a serious operation. Real Amanita tastes natural, like a tea, not an artificial chemical. 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I recently had a NASA physicist who was contracted by NASA, and he was a physicist who is now working on a project to search for UFOs and stuff in our atmosphere. and he is, and I think I would agree with him under the belief, like if these things are something that's real, it's most likely that this is their home. They didn't come from some exoplanet or something like this. That's kind of like a growing school of thought that, you know, anthropologists believe that if super intelligent life evolved somewhere else, so let's say, like I had one guy explain to me, Out of all the catalog species of animals on planet Earth, there's like 2 million, over 2 million. And 20 of them are hominids. And one of the 20 are the ones that could figure out technology to escape the planet. So we're like 0.001% of living species on this Earth that's teaming with life. So of all the other planets that we know that are in Goldilocks zones that are able to have life, a lot of them are water worlds. A lot of them have way different temperatures, different chemicals in the water, whatever it is. Maybe some of them experience more cosmic impacts. But what this anthropologist was explaining to me was that the chances of them evolving to be bipedal hominids that walk upright with their eyes sitting directly below their brains and all that stuff is almost zero. Yeah. I'm in full agreement with him on that. So that's a really interesting idea. So there's all this stuff about the greys. Exactly. Exactly. The greys. And, you know, they look like little people with slightly misshapen. I mean, that is not the way evolution works. So the cool thing about evolution, I talked about this in the book, because, you know, I'm an astrobiologist, but more on the astro side. So I've had to learn a lot about evolution. There's two forces in evolution. There is, and they're interesting because they play off each other. On the one hand, there is convergence, right? That, you know, evolution presents, you know, life or, you know, a planet will present evolving life forms with a bunch of problems, right? If you have solid land and then gas, like, you know, air, that you've got to figure out how to go get food, right? So, you know, how are you going to do that? Well, wheels, you know, or legs, jointed sticks, right? So, you know, and if the air is thick enough, you could fly. So, wings, right? So probably nature, evolution on another planet, would come up with similar solutions like jointed sticks, i.e. legs. But there's no, okay, so that's what we call convergence. That, you know, evolution, there's only, because of physics and chemistry, there's only certain solutions to the problems of go get food. Okay. So that's convergence. On the other side, though, is contingency, which is, you know, random stuff, like accidents, basically. And that is also a hugely powerful force in evolution. So say you're starting to evolve something that has, you know, jointed sticks the way our legs are, like the way our knees are, right, with that, the way the knees work, right? And then, you know, there's a drought, and all the creatures that, you know, had that mutation that sort of, you know, started with our kind of legs, they all wipe out, right? When the other species or the next species comes up and solves the problem, there's, you know, there's no guarantee. In fact, it's probably unlikely that you'll do the exact same solution. You'll have jointed six, but maybe they'll be jointed in the other way, the way birds' legs are. Or you'll have six joints, not, you know, or you'll end up with five. Jointed the other way. That'd be freaky. Goddamn. Yeah, right, with the dog legs or something. So, you know, and they've done experiments where they took, this is really cool, they took a bunch of microbes, right? And they, you know, microbes have very short time scales for evolution. So they let them evolve for a while. And then they, so they evolved certain characteristics. Like, you know, they're bigger than the ones they started with. You know, on average, the cells are bigger. So then they took them and they took half of them and they froze them, right? And just so these things are not reproducing anymore. They let the other half go on evolving. And then they took the frozen ones out and let them evolve again to watch, like, do we get the same things? These other ones that evolved, we now do it for, like, 20 years. We see how this one group evolved. Now we're going to take the ones that we froze and let them evolve. Do we get the same things? And the answer was no because it's all about accidents. Really? Accidents really matter. So the idea that you're going to get something with, like, a bipedal shoulders, arms, eyes that look like us, like, it's probably. So if those things are real and have all those experiences that are, like, if this is not just lore and myth 100%, it's probably that those things are from here or maybe even us from a different timeline, like, from the future. Well, I would say. Or, like, say that there's a breakaway civilization living under the ocean or something like that that we don't see, or Antarctica, you know. Well, I would be highly skeptical of all of those. I would say in general, like my position would be like, they're not true. Do you think it's possible, though, if we continue on our trajectory right now in humanity with technology and everything, that it is possible that we would look like that in 50,000 years? I think in 50,000 years. Muscles would atrophy, you know, maybe our heads would get bigger, eyes, I don't know. Yeah, but we've got genetic, two things. We've got genetic engineering. So, you know, in 10,000 years, I mean, I've been 10,000 years. In 1,000 years, we may be sexless space orbs. You know what I mean? That's what my daughter likes to say. I doubt that in 100,000 years, we probably are going to look, you know, we may not even have arms or legs or anything anymore. I mean, just because, you know, that's a long time. And we have the ability to evolve ourselves to take over evolution. Yeah. This anthropologist is explaining to me this concept called pedomorphism, which is a term in evolution where the future generations of like specifically in apes or chimpanzees, the fully grown adults look more like the offspring of the ancestors. oh is that like with dogs that dogs look more like like dogs look more dogs look like puppies like full-grown dogs look like puppies if you look at puppies of wolves if you look at like a newborn chimpanzee it looks more like a um a human being than it does look like a full-grown chimpanzee they their head slopes back they kind of arch over they grow these huge limbs and they kind of like they're hunched but if you look at a baby chimpanzee it sits straight up like this and it's It doesn't have that jaw and that sloping forehead, right? Yeah. So, like, the offspring look more like us, more evolved, right? I wonder if, like, I don't know. So it's hard for me to tell about it. Like, you see, so there's an adult and there's a baby, right? So the baby looks more like its future, what it's going to be in the future, right? Yeah. So if you extrapolate this into the future now, they say these grays look like they're the size of toddlers. You know, they have bigger heads. They're shorter. So this was just something he was throwing at the wall. Yeah. No, I mean, you know, because, again, I think the – I mean, you know, in general, I think the greys – You know, my whole thing with UFOs and UAPs is, like, there's just – as a scientist and as a science fiction fan, I also, like, there's so much about it that I'm, like, get out of here. Like, for example, let's put this, right? UFOs, right, they always, like – you know, they're from a super advanced civilization. They don't want us to know that we're here. Okay, turn off the fucking lights. Right? It's like, I saw lights in the sky. Like, you know, unless you want to write a really complicated science fiction story. Well, they don't want us to know, but they do want us to know. In general, like, these things, they're always trying to, they appear, they're trying to hide from us because they don't just sit around and be like, yo, what's up? We're from outer space. So they're trying to not be seen, but they suck at it. You know? And I'm like, come on. Like, you've got to, the problem with all the UFO stuff, it ends up being this highly elaborate science fiction story. And my thing is, if it sounds like a science fiction story, it is a science fiction story. So my whole thing was what I call the high beam argument, which is like, look, if they really don't want to be discovered, turn off the lights. You know, well, why do they have lights on their things if they don't want to be known? Well, maybe they only want to use them when they when they don't care about being seen. Right. Because because if you if you if you if you look at the big picture, they're not they're pretty damn good at hiding. There's only anecdotal stories of this worldwide. But exactly. So why, if they're pretty good at hiding, they should be really good at hiding. So it just doesn't, I mean, like totally good at hiding. They have advanced technology that can travel either backwards in time or, you know, across. Because we really have to get to how interstellar distances. Like interstellar distances. It is not, from my point of view, it is entirely possible that, you know, interstellar distances may really not be travelable. You know, actually, even in like an economic sense. Right. Right. Because, you know, so. You have time dilation. Right, right. And it's just, so like, you know, the nearest star to us is four light years away, right? So that is like, I forget, tens of trillions of miles. I may have that wrong. Yeah, that's a long way. But it's so long. Okay, so if we were to travel, if we were to be able to travel at the speed of light, it would take four years. Four years. And we're not even close. Not even close. The fastest thing we've ever produced would take like 100,000 years to get there. And so the economics of being able to build, you know, so the best thing we can do now, I think, you know, we have a couple ideas about how to at least get ourselves to a tenth of the speed of light, in which case it's 40 years to get there. 40 years there, 40 years back, right? With time dilation, which also means you start to disconnect from the people that you're... You have to kiss your relatives goodbye, all your friends goodbye. And also, there's the, like, if you're traveling that fast, time is going way faster on Earth. That means technology could develop on Earth to where we can figure out faster travel. Yeah, right. So you arrive. That's a big time. That's a big time. You're 50 years into your trip. Now these guys pull up with a belly full of breakfast because they just left this morning. There's a great, let's just do a little sidebar. Sidebar. Because we were talking about video games before. So there's a video game coming called Exodus, which takes, and it's just, and now there's a novel that's associated with it. Everybody's really excited about this video game. It's the Mass Effect. It's supposed to be the spiritual successor to Mass Effect. It's a great space video game. But there's also, they hired Peter Hamilton, who's a good science fiction novelist, to sort of fill out the lore. So I'm sorry to go off on this thing, but it's just a great story because it's related to this. So the idea is, you know, Earth's falling apart, usual thing. And so they send out arc ships, right, in all directions. And the idea is that anybody who finds a habitable world will send out the green signal, right? So you get these ships, and they're all traveling at, like, a tenth of the speed of light or half the speed of light. And one of the ships finds a cluster of stars, you know, a dense, what we call a globular cluster. It's like 10,000 stars packed pretty close together. Like, there's only, like, the closest star is only one light year away. And they discover a habitable world there, right? So they send out the signal to everybody else, right? And then they start, they settle, you know, there's lots of settlable worlds in this. It's the Centauri cluster. That's the name of it. And they start evolving. They start developing technology. And they end up rapidly over, like, you know, 5,000 years, 10,000 years, become like gods. They have developed this genetic engineering technologies that are, you know, almost like gods. Meanwhile, all of the other ships, you know, have turned around and are heading back. So, like, these, it's such a great story. These human beings, these regular human beings on their ships are arriving in the Centauri cluster to find it's full of, like, our, not ancestors, our progenitors, our way, what's the word for it? Who are now, yeah, descendants, right, who are now, like, so radically evolved that we're, like, we're monkeys to them, you know, or we're ants to them. And it's a great story that sort of takes place, it does two interesting things. One, it uses the fact that a globular cluster charge will be so close that one year, it's just a one-year travel time back and forth. And so if you can travel at close to the speed of light, you get time dilation, but it's not crazy. So you leave, and you come back, and it's eight years later. It's only like a few months for you, but it's eight years later for the people you left. And then two, it just does this idea of like, yeah, descendants. Our descendants will be so crazily different that they're not even recognizable anymore. So anyway, I just want to put in that. I'm very excited about Exodus as a game, and I think we're maybe a year away from it. But then also I recommend the Peter Hamilton. Oh, interesting. So, yeah. Yeah, well. Sorry, I just had to go off on that. No, that's fascinating. I'm more scared of the reality of Ark Raiders becoming reality. That's right. That's right. We were talking about Ark Raiders before. I'm sure we've got some people in the audience. A dystopian planet that's ruled by killer drones. Yeah. Which is like, you know, I mean, yeah, I'm AI. You said you read a description online about what the plot was for that, the back plot for that. What was that? So the people who are playing it, right? So, you know, you haven't played, so here's the deal. You're in this dystopian future. Everybody's living underground. The surface is like you go up there and there's the remnants of human civilization, but there's also these, like, killer robots, you know, flying ones and, you know, giant spiders. And so you learn very, like, they'll give you a piece of the lore when you first start. And it's the idea that there was an environmental catastrophe, you know, climate went crazy. But then people sort of, you know, we don't even know how the time scales. You know, a thousand years later, people started to rebuild civilization. So there was a period of the greening or whatever. I forgot what they called it. And civilization started to come back. And then suddenly these arcs arrived. And the arcs is just the name they give to these from space, these, you know, killer drone robots. And then there was the first wave where we actually won. The human beings were actually, we won, you know, and then we started to repopulate the surface again. And now the game takes place, the second wave of arcs, which are much smarter, has arrived. And so, you know, we don't really, in the game so far, you don't really know what happened. Where are these arcs coming from? Right, who built the arcs. Who built the arcs. And in the story, it becomes clear because if you fight in some of the different landscapes, like one of the landscapes is a spaceport, you know, a sort of, you know, spaceport that's been abandoned for, you know, a thousand years. And the idea is that the rich left. The rich could break away. They could leave, right? The Elon Musks of the world. Yeah. They built their space stations or whatever. You don't know where they went. It's clear that. Musk and Bezos. Yeah. Build their space. And they leave. And it's not clear. I'm not sure if this is going to be true. But these arcs, maybe they want Earth back. And so they're trying to clean out all the descendants. Yeah. Or all the people left over. So I don't know. We'll see whether or not that's true. But, you know, the AI is a real, AI is a danger. Not in some of the ways that I think people, I'm not really worried about, like, super intelligence, I don't think, I'm not even sure that's possible. But just definitely having these technologies shoved down our throats, which I think are imperfect. That's the problem. They're amazing technologies, but they're not what they claim to be, which means if we build society around them, there's huge dangers in having it run the world economy. Yeah, it's most disheartening to me that this technology seems to be going towards things that are just built to distract us and built into, like, just this consumerism. I know. Exactly. Right, right. And it's so – and again, like I said, you know, the AI that we have now is what's called large language models. The term is generative AI. Sure. And what we have are these large language models. And the way they are built is they are – you have to take a huge amount of data from the Internet. You basically scrape the Internet. And it really – all it is on some level. I mean, I want to give it its due. But really, it's autocomplete. Of course. But autocomplete on steroids, as they say. So you type in a bunch of stuff and you ask it a question and it seems to answer it, but there's nobody in there. There's nobody in there. The AI doesn't know anything. It's just literally putting the words together. It's putting the next word after the, statistically, that should follow from the word you just put in. And because of that, because it doesn't know anything, there's no way to get rid of what they call hallucinations. Right. which really a better word for that is errors. It's just making shit up. And there's no way to get rid of it. And so if you build these systems into the heart of like every, you're going to fire a thousand people to, you know, oh, we're going to replace it with AI. You're never going to get rid of these, you know, which means they're fundamentally untrustworthy, right? They're fundamentally, you do not want to put them, they're fine to like, oh, you got to complete your homework, you know. But, you know, you're going to put it in charge of deciding what your, I don't know, your portfolio, retirement portfolio, or you're going to put it in charge of anything physical. So I feel like we're going to get these so much wealth, so much wealth inequality has been generated by big tech that these technologies are going to be shoved down our throats and we're going to be forced to use them and they are fundamentally flawed and they're going to like, they're just going to erode. You already see what it's doing to democracy, right? It's going to erode all the things that are necessary to have a coherent modern civilization. We're free. Right. No, it's really weird how, especially how everything on social media is fake. And it's really hard to distinguish what's real and what's fake anymore. And, you know, you have to build up this bullshit detector, right? Like, if there's anything you see now, you have to really question it and really, like, do your homework to figure out if that's real or if that's fake. Because everything looks so real. And the majority of shit on Instagram or X is fake. Yeah. Yeah. And, you know, what's interesting is that, like, again, these technologies are amazing. They are a triumph of human intellect. You know, I totally give them their due. But, like, they're not what they claim to be in terms of, like, how they're getting deployed, right? So, you know, let me give you an example. Like, again, for myself, this is why I always keep the cell phone around. Hopefully it won't ring. Hold on a second, everybody. We're just going to turn it off in case I get a phone call from anybody. Like, you can't really live without a cell phone anymore, right? You can't do anything. You can't get a taxi. You can't do your banking. You can't, you know. So we live in a society where these technologies, like I said, were forced down our throats. Now, I love my cell phone. It does great things. But I can't live in a modern society without one of these. And that is what my fear is with the AI. Because the AI, they're amazing technologies, but they're flawed for what they're – they cannot do what they're claimed to be able to do. So we're going to be stuck in this society where we can't get away from AI. What would you say they're claimed to be able to do? They're claimed to be sort of like the idea of, like, so, for example, AI agents. Everybody's like, oh, AI agents. Which can autonomously go off and, you know, you just say, like, oh, you know, book me a holiday in Italy, right? And it's going to go off and do it by itself. Assistance. Yeah. And then what will happen, actually, is you'll, you know, you'll find out that, like, two of the – you'll show up and there's no hotel. Like, it hallucinated the hotel. Yeah. But even worse than that, so I went to a lecture that fucking pissed me off and scared the shit out of me. It was a lecture by a CEO of a company called, I think it was called Affecta. And it was the idea of emotional computing, right? And what this person, what this company wanted to do was have like your, you know, you're at your computer or you're watching TV and there's a little camera and the camera is watching your face and it's watching like, are you smiling? Are you grimacing? Are you, you know, and it's supposedly reading your emotions and it's going to change what it does based on your emotions. Oh, God. And so, like, she was pitching this as sort of like, oh, you know, for old people who are left alone, there'll be a robot who can read it. And so, first of all, that whole thing, first of all, we should ask ourselves, why do we are in a society where we're warehousing our old people and nobody goes to see them except the emotional robots? So there's that. But even more important is this flawed assumption that, like, the muscle, the location of muscle G7 in your cheek is happiness, right? The equation, and people have shown that the research that this is based on is totally flawed. Like, that, you know, in general, it is people grimace for lots of reasons. It may not be at all because they're in pain. They can grimace just because, you know, there's lots of different reasons. There's not a one-to-one correspondence between an emotion and the location of your muscles on your face. And if you're from, you know, if you're from a different part of the world, you may have, you know, in Asia, they may have an entirely different set of facial expressions. But these technologies are already deployed. They are used like you're taking a job interview. Like there's some job interview things where like you're being recorded online. And it's responding to your facial muscles. So, again, this is the idea of these technologies being deployed. They're being put out there. Companies are buying them, building it into their structures, and they're fundamentally flawed in the claims of what they can do. You cannot read emotions purely off facial muscles. There's a thousand things. I've got to be often in the, you know, you've known with Zoom. Zoom is a weird thing. You can't really tell what people are doing. I can't stand Zoom. I can't stand Zoom. Right. I won't do podcasts with Zoom. Right. Right. Because, you know, you're not really there with the person. Yeah, you lose it. You lose the connection. Yeah. Right. There's a thousand, there's so many different cues, even to how we smell, right, you know, about how emotion is read. So that's an example of what I mean. We're being sold a bill of goods about what these technologies can do. It's going to make those guys money who are already so rich that, like, they're a threat to democracy, you know, a threat to, like, having a harmonious society. And it's just going to make them more money, and it's going to flatten us. Like, they're claiming their technology can reproduce consciousness or reproduce, but it can't. And so what they're going to do is they're going to build a version of society that we have to drop to its level, right? It's as if with self-driving cars. There's a problem with self-driving cars where they work best when you just have a grid of streets. So it's like you can only have self-driving cars work if all it knows how to do is 90-degree right-hand turns and left-hand turns. So we're going to flatten all our cities and rebuild them so it's nothing, so the self-driving cars can work, right? Right. As opposed to being like, well, this technology doesn't work. We're not going to use it, right? And that's what it's going to do to the human interactions, you know, the depth of what it means to be human. It's going to level us out, you know. It's going to devolve us. It's going to devolve us. Well, I mean, you can already see that because people have to think less to complete easy tasks. Yeah. I see this with my students. Really? So you know what's interesting? But I think what's going to be interesting, so there's a couple things about this, like maybe the way the natural, the way the response is going to work. So one thing that's happening in colleges is professors are saying, like, oh, we're going to have a writing assignment. I need you to write, you know, your response to handle it, right? But we're doing it in class. For the next 40 minutes, here I'm handing out some of those blue notebooks. You can give those, what are those bags you get in comedy clubs so you can't record the comedy? Yeah, put your phone in the bag. They have these bags that no radio signals can get out of it. What are they called? They're called Faraday cages. Yeah, they're little Faraday cages. Yeah, and so like, you know, okay, you're going to write this in front of me. So that's like you can imagine these sort of natural responses that people evolve to these technologies, right? So, for example, the idea of AI slop. I don't know if you've heard this term. So with AI, AI has been deployed now. There's like 90% of all companies in the world, or at least in the United States, are using it, and they're seeing zero productivity. Like they're all using it, but nothing's changing. And part of the reason is this idea of AI slot, that AI makes it easy to produce a bunch of stuff, but it actually isn't useful, right? Like, so, well, let's take the example of the Internet first. So, AI is trained on the Internet. You take these large language models and you have it look at everything on the Internet. Searching everything. Yes, search everything and sort of build the databases that you need, build the connections, the relationships, everything you need, right? But then you start, now you have AI, and now you start using AI to produce new content on the Internet, right? And it's full of bullshit. It's full of stuff that's not true, right? So then the next generation of AI trains itself on this version of the, you know, of the Internet that was produced by AI. So the next generation was trained on bullshit. And so you just like, you know, it's AI slop. Is that how it works? Yeah, that's how it works. The only thing they train, that's why it's so expensive and so resource intensive to build these AIs, is you've got to have it look at everything on the Internet. And so as you go on, what's going to happen is that the Internet. There's so much garbage on the Internet to start with. To start with. And now imagine 10 years from now when all the AIs, and you can't get away from the AIs. Oh, my God. So you can't trust, you're not going to be able to trust anything on the Internet. Right. In which case, what happens? People stop using the Internet. Or, you know, it's only good, you know, people are going to use it for scamming and, you know, God knows elsewhere. But most people. Yeah, but will it be able to, is there, how would you train it or how would it train itself over time to be able to get better at detecting bullshit or its own bullshit? It can't. That's the problem with this version. I mean, there's other ways to do it. You know, there's a great writer named or scientist named Gary Marcus who has a newsletter, which I highly recommend to everybody. You know, and he's been, it's so funny watching. he has always been arguing that this kind of AI, generative AI, which are the large language models, it's great for what it's good for, but it is not the path to what we call artificial general attention. It is very limited in what can you do. And his thing is there's other ways to build AI, at least research paths, that would get away from this. But we're not pursuing them because Elon Musk and all those guys are spending trillions of dollars. It's all going into these, and open AI, into the generative AI. And that stuff, you know, so he was predicting back in 2020 that it'll stall. Like, by 2025, you know, you will see that. Who was predicting this? This guy named Gary Marcus. Okay. And it's funny because he was alone. You see, like, his interactions with the big leaders of AI, you know, on the Internet, on Twitter, back in, you know. And they're all like, you know, you're just a, you know, you're a has-been, you know. They were really very rude to him. And now almost all of those guys, except for, yeah, there it is. All those guys. Oh, yeah, all those guys are crashing. The AI stuff's going down. Yeah. Well, that's the other. Let's not even talk about the financial stuff. But he is basically, Gary Marcus's point was that scaling. Those guys, like Sam Altman from OpenAI was like, oh, we'll just make them bigger. We'll just make them bigger and we'll get over the hallucinations. And Gary Marcus was like, there's no way. Scaling will not do that. So 2022, 2023, everybody's like, scaling, scaling. We'll just build bigger versions. and then, you know, 2025, finally you get like ChatGPT5. Oh, ChatGPT5 is going to be, you know, artificial general intelligence, which is what everybody wants. I think they can just do anything, right? And it turns out ChatGPT5 was a huge disappointment. It wasn't even close. It sucked, you know? And that was the beginning where people were like, oh, Gary Marcus was right. You know? And so overall, general people have now agreed with the point that scaling will not sell. You can't make, making it bigger won't get rid of hallucinations. So you need a whole other path, like a research path that we haven't done if you want an AI that somehow, and the reason that somehow won't have these problems, and a lot of it is the idea, and we're actually doing some work, my research, the group I'm part of, of just thinking about what is it, we're just thinking about life. We just want to know about why is life different? Why is a cell different from a rock? There's no doubt, You know, life is just really weird. This goes back to the astrobiology. Life is the only system, you know, physical system in the world that can innovate, that can, you know, that can create new things, either through evolution or just its own behavior. Yeah. A rock is just a rock. Right. And the only thing we know that is truly intelligent, right, that truly has intelligence is life, you know. And that goes on whether you're talking about monkeys or even cells, even the simple cells have a certain degree. So what Gary Marcus is arguing for, even what we're sort of interested in just thinking about life, is to be intelligent, to really have that kind of creative novelty, the ability to really innovate. Intelligence is not just solving problems. It's knowing which problem to solve. It's an infinite number of problems to solve. If you're a cell, you know how to figure out, like, oh, I need to go find sugar. Yes. That you need to live in a world. You probably may even need to live in a body. Like, you need to be embodied. But certainly, you have to have knowledge of the world. The AI that we have now, it doesn't know anything because there's nobody in there. Like, you know, you can ask it a question. It seems like it's answering you. But it's just auto-completing. It's just a program that is auto-completing. So, you know, it may be that the next generation of AI, the one that could solve the problems that this version can't, is going to have to know something. You're going to have to build world models, they call them. Right. Right. Yeah, that makes sense because, you know, there's so many goofy stories that are coming out every single day about, like, these autonomous drones that are supposed to be delivering people burritos, getting hit by trains and running over by cars. And, like, it's all over the news, dominating the news stories. You know, you don't hear about the guy that overdosed, but you hear about the poor fucking robot delivering a burrito to somebody at 3 a.m. Right. And then also you have another whole side of it is, like, you have – I had a Delta Force operator in here the other day, and he was explaining to me how, like, in Yemen, and all over the Middle East, like Iran has these drones that are powered by autonomous AI, and they're dialed in. They're not controlled by anyone. They just say, go kill this guy, and it'll make its own decisions along the way. For weapons, oh, man, that is terrifying. Then you get the Terminator. Right. Yeah. And these things are flawed. You do not want these things. So whatever. So I just really think AI, the version of AI we have now is deeply flawed, and people have a right. People have a right to say, no, you know? I don't want this technology, at least not now, you know? Like, this is like, oh, everybody, we just have to, you know, it's new technology, so you have to take it. No, human beings have a right to decide which kind of technology, especially because these technologies are going to wipe out jobs. Like, that is really true. You see people being fired already. So, like, yeah, I don't think, you know, I think we need to recognize the reasons why there's this rapid push. It's about money. It's about somebody making, you know, crap tons of money. And, you know, if you want a functioning democracy where people have a say, you've got to be able to push back. But where do you draw the line between, like, an iPhone in your hand, which is basically, you know, it's a symbiosis of biology and technology, right? It's not, like, implanted in us. We can drop it. We can let it go wherever we want, whenever we want. But, like, it is an extension of the human being today, in a sense. We're kind of cyborgs already. We are kind of cyborgs. But now with everything on our phones being integrated with AI you can see how that can kind of get out of control Yeah yeah But you can also see how there like a balance there Like you know obviously life is way better with this iPhone We need to be able to call somebody or send somebody a video. Yeah. That's what I mean. I'm not like – I'm certainly not anti-technology. But I think what's really interesting is how rapid these technologies have changed our lives. So, you know, if you go back, so one of the first video games I played was Assassin's Creed, like the first Assassin's Creed, which took place in like 1200, right? And, you know, you're running around, you're like stab, stab, stab, you know, stab, stab, stab. And then I played Assassin's Creed 2, which takes place like 300 years later in, you know, Florence, right, in Renaissance Florence. And you're still basically like stab, stab, stab, stab, stab. You know, and so they kind of first had a gun. Like that was, you know, that was like, you know, that was a weapon that, you know, you took a while to get. But the thing that hit me was like 300 years, and basically I'm using the same, I could have been using the same sword that I had. Like technology just didn't, you know, you used your grandfather's tools, right? Because technology was just very slowly evolving. And now, my God, like the time from, you know, I'm 63 years old, you know, let me tell you about what phones were like back in the day. And now, you know, within three years, I'm not even going to be able to use this. Right. And there's a way in which there's a kind of instability that is coming from these that I think, you know, it may come naturally or it may need, you know, we may need to reevaluate how fast we want technology to advance. Like that, you know, we're willing to, like, put certain things off for us to stabilize, you know, the effect of this technology on culture. Right. And I think that may come in time maybe because, like, we actually hit a point where, like, it blows everything up. And our descendants, you know, it will be two generations later after the AI crash or whatever that wipes out all of the – Right. That people have a different sort of approach to technology. Or people will just like what's happening in classes. Like, right? My professor friends were like, you know what? I'm going to make you right – I'm going to have you actually think in class. And also everything is sort of like, it's almost like all the new branches are just coming off of like the same original branch. There's no like foundational like trunks coming out, right? Right. Like I don't remember anything as profoundly mind-blowing as when the iPhone first came out. That's true. Like that just completely blew me out of the water that this thing existed. I had a friend that got one right when it came out, and I was just like, dude, can I touch it? Can I hold it? Kind of like, oh, my God. There's been nothing like that since, you know? I know. And it's just been – Everything's just been a spinoff. Right. Or not only a spinoff, but like something that works with that. Right. It integrates with it. Right. There's been no foundational, like, game engine technology. You know, and like robotics, you can imagine, like, you know, when you get your first humanoid robot, you know. Yeah. But again, those technologies aren't, you know, you don't want the current version of AI to be powering your robot. You know, there's just. Yeah. So, and you know, also you think about like the way the tech companies. Like there's been a real problem for the democracies, for the, you know, all the democracies with what these things did. You know, having the social media thing in your, you know, on your hand, you know, right in your hand. And then everybody. The NSA can tap into it. What? Now the NSA can tap right into it. Yeah, right, right. On the polarization where, like, you know, the United States' enemies were purposely, on left and right, purposely polarizing conversations. Oh, yeah. On Twitter, half of these are Russian bots or whatever. You name the country, they're in there. Yeah, right. So there's, again, this sort of sense that, like, these technologies really spun us out of control in a long ways. And I kind of, I feel, you know, I'm generally an optimist that it may take a couple of generations. We'll work it out. But on the other hand, I think we have to exert some controls. We have to exert, you know, we, the people, have to be able to say, like, you know what? Because, again, you know how long you get these updates on your phone? And it's like, oh, here's this new feature. And you're like, I don't want that feature. You know, like I really liked the other one. No, this new thing now can put it in six colors. I don't want six colors. So, you know, and that's all driven by the profit motive, right? It's all driven like we've got to keep pushing stuff out. Like, you know, I'm going to – Apple wants me to have to buy a new phone in two years, even though this phone probably could work for a while. So, you know, I can see that coming just because, you know, the systems, the social, economic, political, geophysical systems that we all grew up in are being pushed into a new state. Right? So the climate change thing, we're being pushed. It will be – we are headed towards a different earth, you know. in the next 30, 40, 50, 100 years, it'll be a different planet. You know, not wildly different, but it's going to be a different planet. And that, along with other things that are happening, we will be forced, humanity will be forced into some difficult times. Like, that's my kind of thing. The next century is probably going to be a difficult time for humanity. But that'll force us, you know, that'll force us into new, you know, new configurations and maybe make new choices. And, you know, in that sense, I like to remind people, history is long. Starting a business can be overwhelming. 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So this idea of sort of the progress of civilizations and how they change with technology is what I'm really interested in because, you know, as an astrobiologist thinking about civilizations, that's the coolest thing about that job, right? We have to really think seriously about trajectories. What are the possible trajectories of civilization? Which also brings you back to, you know, human civilization in the future. Right. So there's a book that I highly recommend, I think is so amazing, called Goliath's Curse. It's by a guy who's kind of a futurologist. And what he does in there is he sort of looks at the whole history of civilizations on Earth, right? And Goliath, what he calls a Goliath, is like the state, any kind of state, any kind of kingdom, any kind of large organized. And what he shows is that throughout history, you know, after the last Ice Age, we started farming. And when we started farming, we started to have what he calls lootable resources, right? Because, you know, we used to be hunter-gatherers. We had small groups of, you know, maybe 100 people. And they all talked to each other, all these different tribes. But it was very egalitarian. Like, nobody really owned anything because nobody really had anything to own, right? And then once we started farming, there was like you were starting to gather stuff. There were grain silos. So for him, these Goliaths, these early Goliaths, these early states, were basically because you had a bunch of guys. It was basically gangs, like organized crime, that started these states. But then what he shows is all the way through history. As time went on, you've got these larger and larger Goliaths, Rome, Tang Dynasty, China, and now the modern one. But he says that almost always what brings them down are two things. One is climate, because often you're sucking up all the resources that either changes climate or changes the resources you have, given the climate you have, or the climate, you have local climate changes. But even more importantly was inequality. Almost always it's inequality that brings the Goliath down. The inequality gets so large, you know, the leaders, the kings or whatever, are so, you know, they're so over-rich compared to the average person. And, of course, they're extracting that wealth from the average person via taxes or whatever that finally people are like, we're done. And they rebel. Or they leave. That's an interesting – either they leave, they're just like, I'm done with the city. I'm going to go live in the hills. Right. Or they actually rebel. So that's a really interesting conclusion over all this time, that it's often inequality, which is clearly we have, like, it's insane the amount of inequality we have now, that this small group of people own 90%. You know, the upper 0.1% owns, whatever, 50% of the wealth in a nation or more. So I thought that was really interesting, that often you look at history, and it's often inequality, which will sort of tap out how much, whether people are willing to put up with being governed. Right. Yeah. Yeah, it makes you wonder where we're going to end up here in this situation. Yeah, because clearly, you know, we see this. And actually, the point was going back to the cell phone and AI and everything, was just that these technologies are amazing, but they have really only, very few people have benefited financially. I mean, it's a small fraction of the world that has really financially benefited from them. Right. Especially when you get to things like robots. You know, who owns the robots, right? If the robots are putting everybody out of work, The only people who are really getting rich are the people who own the robots. Well, Stephen's a big advocate for robot police. He thinks robot police are going to solve all of our problems. Have robots being the policemen? Yeah, he thinks robots should have full autonomy to kill people and make the decisions. Oh, man. I think I've seen a lot of those science fiction movies. Well, I mean, science fiction is meant for drama. Reality, if you make it, give it rules, a robot police isn't going to get mad and shoot somebody. Well, that's true. Right. But my question is who's in control of the robot police. Right, exactly. And what bias is? Because somebody programmed the robot police. Someone's going to program the robot police. Somebody's going to, you know. And a human being isn't going to be behind that. Right, and you look at, like, there's all this evidence, like really clear evidence of all the biases in these algorithms that were built in by the people, you know, can't recognize certain kinds of people, literally can't recognize their faces. Google. Yeah. Google is extremely biased. There's been tons of research and placebo-controlled double-blind studies on it. Yeah, yeah. So anyway, I think it's really interesting that, you know, sort of there's this, and this really matters for the search for intelligent life on other planets because, you know, we have to ask ourselves, like, you know, what are we looking for? What kind of things will a civilization do that you could see using a super powerful telescope across 30 light years or 100 light years? And so that requires kind of trying to build some maps of how technological civilizations evolve. Yeah. Well, didn't Elon say that if we were going to inhabit Mars, we would need to detonate nukes at the poles to create some sort of an atmosphere or something like that? Well, what he wanted to do was melt. That was the terraform it or something? Well, with everything he wanted to do, Elon Musk is like on serious drugs when it comes to Mars. Like the idea that we're going to build this video on Mars. He's on lots of crazy drugs. But when it comes to Mars in particular, his Mars stuff, you know, I mean, I'm all for it. Let's go to Mars. Let's start with the moon. How about that? Yeah. They just pushed back the Artemis mission again. I know. I know. Boy, man, it's really, you know, we are definitely in serious danger that the Chinese will go back to the moon before we do. I mean, the moon landing deniers are having a heyday right now. So, but let's not even get, don't, I'm going to take a deep breath now. Don't get me started with the moon landing deniers because I will just, I will go freaking ballistic. Oh, let's hear it. I need to hear it. Oh, it's just the, it is such bullshit. Those, I want, I want those moon landing deniers. I want one of them to come, have the balls to stand in front of like a team of NASA scientists. You know, not one guy on, you know, like doing some, you know, doing a podcast or something. No, a team and get grilled. Just like I said, remember what I was talking about with Adam Rees? Yeah. They'll be shredded. They're like evidence for why. You know, it's all been refuted a thousand times. It's just bullshit. You know, I got rocks from the moon that have different isotopic, you know, the whole theory of our moon rocks. Yeah, but moon rocks land in Antarctica, South Pole. And not enough for the kinds of the volumes that we need to be able to do what we've been able to do. And also, you know, we went to the highlands, we went to the lowlands. It's just, you know, this is not a road I want to go down because I will literally freak out. I just had a guy on here recently who, he's got a great YouTube channel. It's called Everyday Astronaut. He's like, he's not a moon landing denier at all. He's a very big proponent of all this stuff. And he's like extremely, he's not a rocket scientist, but he's extremely smart when it comes to rockets. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think I've seen some of his stuff. And I asked him, I'm like, can you steal me on the moon landing deniers? And he goes, yeah, I can actually. He's like, a very good point that they have is why the fuck haven't we gone back to the moon since 69? Right. But that point is purely political. That is purely freaking political. You look at the history of what happened. I get it. It's like I understand. Here's where my take is on it. My take is, real briefly, is that it was a stunt. It was a stunt to see if we could put human beings on the moon. There's no real need to put humans out there. When it's too much of a risk, we can do a better job with robots. Well, the reason we did it was because of the Cold War. It was purely political. It was just a publicity stunt. If we could beat Russia, it was a dick-measuring contract. It was. To see if we could beat Russia and put a human being there. There's no rational reason to put a human being there unless it's that. No, no, it wasn't. And then what happened was we got there. It's the end of the Vietnam War. Nixon's in trouble politically, blah, blah, blah, spending shitloads of money on exactly sending people to the moon. It just was no longer politically. You couldn't do it. You couldn't get the votes in Congress to do it. So then we shifted to, you know, the shuttle program, which was just Earth orbit, you know, and then time went on. It's very expensive, right? As you see, it's a very expensive. That's why we didn't go back. There has not been the political or financial will to go back. And so now what happens is, you know, you're trying to go back again. You've got to – so now I'm about to get ballistic on something. You know, with what just happened to the government right now, we just fired all the people who had the experiment. We either fired them or forced them into retirement. All the people had the experience to do this, right? That's what Elon Musk did with that stupid Dodge thing. I got friends in NASA. Oh, Doge. Doge, yeah. They basically whacked NASA. All these guys. Did they really? Oh, NASA. A lot of retirements. A lot of retirements. They forced people into retirement. You know, a lot of layoffs. And these are the people, like, getting a probe to land on Mars, like, there's not a recipe for it. You need human experience, you know? I was talking to a friend of mine who was in the room with a bunch of NASA engineers. This was for a Jupiter probe. And, like, somebody threw out this idea of, like, oh, you know, we could do this and that to be able to, you know, build a magnetometer on it. And one guy spoke in the back and said, no, we tried that in 72. It doesn't work, you know? Oh, yeah. Oh, mid-2025, last year, nearly 4,000 NASA employees. These are people who have the experience that you need, like the real-world experience that's not in books that, you know, and we wiped them out. Why? You know? And so, I mean, listen, there was, I would argue that, like, yeah, sort of what you've seen, the bloating of, you know, the reason Artemis is in trouble for a lot of reasons that have to do with the private sector. You know, we were hoping that... Yeah, isn't the Artemis, I don't know if you know about this stuff, but I heard that the Artemis rocket is using the space shuttle engines. I'm not sure. I don't know. Can you Google that? Well, it's got the solid rocket boosters on the side, but the main engines, you know, they were trying to rebuild assets. So I'm not, yeah, I'm not skilled enough in that. But, like, you know, the program, I mean, I'm all for it. I'm all for going, we should have gone back to the moon, you know, 10 years ago. But it does look like that. Every president has said we were going to go back. He's never been the political will because it's so expensive, right? It's really expensive. And that was the great thing. Like, I was all in favor, and I still am in favor, of commercial space. Like, amazing things are happening with the commercialization of space. Like, there's, I think we're now at, like, I'm not going to get this number right, but it's on the order of, like, $600 million, billion, sorry, billions of space, the burgeoning space economy for all kinds of reasons. Oh, my God, somebody just showed us the other day. There's a guy, a YouTuber. Who is that guy? There's some guy selling selfies in space. He's got a satellite in space, and you can, like, pay an exorbitant amount of money and have the screen show your face, a selfie of you, in outer space. Like, why? But there is, like, you know, there is... That's a sign of declining. There are huge reasons for us, you know, there's lots of reasons where there's money being made in space, which I think is great. Isn't this the same guy who's creating those cool things for kids? Oh, yeah, Crunch Labs. Yeah, this guy, the Crunch Labs thing is actually really cool. He's creating these things for kids where they can, like, solve puzzles and stuff. Well, this is the thing. Like, there's a lot, you know, now it becomes, thanks. You know, the good thing that Elon Musk did with SpaceX is the cost of, you know, getting a pound into space. Right, right. A kilogram in space. It just dropped. And now there's lots of other space companies coming up. Rocket Labs. I think it's Electron Rocket. Blue Origin. Blue Origin. So this is all great. But in general, like, you know, we are not making, SpaceX is not making the progress that we needed them to make. with the starship, right? It's, you know, it's just not coming along as fast as they need to. And getting back to the moon, that's a huge part of it. You know, having space, having the starship work is a huge part. They need to be doing refuel. All the stuff that, like, you know, Musk promised. They have to refuel in Earth's atmosphere to get into Earth's orbit. In Earth's orbit to do the trans-lune injection. Yeah, and nobody's done that. So there's, like, it's not even clear whether they're kind of quite behind. So I'm quite worried that China's going to get back. One of the biggest things that the moon landing deniers say about, which, again, I'm still on the fence, right? I'm not definitively saying on the fence. I would say I'm on a hardly, hardly, you know, from all the science that I use that depended on the, also, if you're a moon, wait, wait, wait, wait, let me just finish this. If you're a moon denier, what about the Martian probes? What about, like, the landers? You know, are those all fake, too? No, no, no. I think we've landed probes. I think for sure we've landed probes there. I mean, it's not that much harder with humans. It's not that much. I don't know. Here's my thing. I think that here's another argument I've been turned on to the pro-Moon side is that I was under the assumption or under the illusion that the Saturn V rocket didn't need to be – You have all of these people, like Elon and all these people, saying that to get to the moon, we have to refuel in Earth's orbit to do the translunar injection. Saturn V did not need to refuel once. Right. But here's what I recently learned is that, which this is kind of stupid. I didn't think about this. But all of the rockets that are being designed today are designed in the primary thing they're looking at is reusability. Right. The Saturn V was an expendable rocket. Exactly. We're not trying to do it with expendable rockets anymore. We went to the, like, we just recently sent, like, Artemis I went to the moon, right? It didn't land on the moon, you know, and it didn't have any human beings in it, but it was the capsule. Like, it was basically Artemis I. And they refueled in orbit? No, no, no, no. You didn't need to because it's a drag. Did they bring it back? Fucking rocket. Did they bring it back? Yeah. They brought it back. Well, no, no, they didn't. No, I mean, you know, the whole, none of it was reusable. None of it was intended to be reusable. It was all expendable, and that's why it was so expensive. Right. Right. We only, you know. It would be too expensive to make this an expendable thing. We have to be able to get these rockets to be reusable. That's why we need to refuel them because they're so much bigger. But, you know, there was no, the tech, when you watch, you know, a SpaceX Falcon come land and you see it do that crazy thing where it comes out and it just flows down. It's insane. It's like adjusting, autonomously adjusting on the way down. You couldn't do that in 1969. You couldn't do that in 1995. It's only because of the technology we have now that you can do that. So everything that was built in those days was built. It was all one-off, which was why it was so crazy expensive. And one of the other reasons I can't definitively jump off the fence yet is just because that period in history was the president got shot in the head. We had MKUltra, the Vietnam War, Gulf of Tonkin, you name it. And then right in the middle of all those fucking lies, we went to the moon, the most extraordinary achievement of humanity. But it was all, I mean, you know, the idea, it's just, it's a really crazy, because you know what, the moon landing, like, it didn't really, so, you know, I grew up in the space age. Yeah. The moon landing, you know, denial was just like complete wackadoodle craziness. I know. It was the one conspiracy you were automatically paid as a fool for. Like, you could believe it all the other ones. For good reason. The moon landing, you're a fool. For good reason. I mean, it still is, and it speaks to sort of what has happened. You know, you cannot have a cohesive technological civilization. It's something as foundational as, you know, the experience of, you know, of the American space program is denied, right? That door is where everything gets denied. There is no shared reality, right? And that, there's no way democracy can survive if you don't have a shared reality. So there is like, you know, there is just. We don't have a shared reality. This whole world we live in right now, everyone has their own reality. And that's why you really ask. Like, you know, sometimes they think we're not going to make it, right? We built a society that undermined itself, right? And so, you know, what I'm a proponent of most of all is American science, right? American science has been a triumph. And American science is what's given us our prosperity. It's what's given us our security. and what has happened over the last 20 to 15 years with these conspiracy theories, and that's a big part of it, is the undermining of what makes American science possible. And then you get what's happening with these cuts, because that's the cut, the ability, like for the, you know, it used to be that every politician understood, like, no, science is why we have a strong defense. And the rise of these conspiracy theories is what undermines the ability of politicians now to just cut NASA in half, you know, or whatever, do the damage that it's done. And so an interesting thing. Here's a very interesting factoid. I think it was two weeks ago. You know, every year, like this international organization, this looks at how much knowledge is being produced. Papers, scientific papers, patents, et cetera. And they look at the universities where, you know, the top universities where this is being produced. And it was always American universities. This year for the first time, I think the first two slots are Chinese universities. So, you know, the thing is, like, you can have your conspiracy theories. and, you know, woo-hoo, everybody's having a good time. But there's a real-world consequence of it. Like, China does not have these conspiracy theories. They're, like, running straight forward into that. Well, they're under an iron fist over there. Well, but they have put their money into science and technology. Like, I don't want their society. But they have put their money. They might be a more optimal nation state, right? But they don't have the freedom that we have here. Do you know what's interesting? But that freedom will erode if you, you know, if you're not, if you are not the most, the society that wins is the society that's, This is history that leads in science and technology. Yes. And we are now taking, we're starting to step back. So here's an interesting thing, right? So in 1600, if you wanted to learn the cutting edge of science, you went to Italy, right? Because that's where Galileo was. That's where all the leaders of science were in 1600. In 1700, you didn't go to Italy. Its time had passed. Like they didn't for whatever the places stopped investing in it, you know. So, and then you went to England or you went to France, right? In 1900, if you wanted to be at the cutting edge of science, you went to Germany. Germany was where quantum mechanics was being born, electromagnetism, you know, the frontiers were happening. But by 1960, you didn't go to Germany. You went to the United States, right? So, scientific preeminence is not something you're guaranteed. It's not like you get it and then you just get to keep it forever. Yeah. And what is happening, and I really think this conspiracy thinking, like with the moon landing stuff, which to me, you know, given all the knowledge that I know came from those that, you know, the space program and the moon landing. I can't do the science I have of the solar system without what happened to the space program. That conspiracy theory is actually undermining American science, and there will be real-world consequences. If that kind of sort of like, oh, it's all a hoax, everybody's lying, if that really promulgates, then you can guarantee that by 2100, China's leading the world in science. Or Europe or other countries, India, they will take our place. They're happy to take our place. So there are real-world consequences to this kind of thing that everybody watched, the moon landing, saying that, no, no, you didn't really see that. It was a hoax. So that's why I think we've got to be really careful about this. It's not just kind of a fun Internet conversation. Right. If they would go back, it would shut all those people up. Just go back and get some footage. Yeah. Of what? Of going, of astronauts? Oh, we're walking on the moon. Well, you know what? We're going to. Somebody will. And it may very well be, you know, the Chinese flag that you see. China is, like, systematically marching forward. Their space capacities are pretty amazing. I was watching something a couple, maybe a year ago. We brought this up on the podcast before, but it was the head of, the former director of NASA being questioned about China exploring the dark side of the moon. and this guy's response was like, we'll let him do it. We're not interested in exploring the dark side of the moon. Do you see that? What I know is what everybody's interested in is the South Pole because that's where the water is. Well, that's where they're going to land art in it, right? That's because so is the Chinese. The Chinese are going for there as well. You know, there's a movie. I didn't like the movie very much. I think it was called Ad Astra with... Is that Brad Pitt? Yeah, Brad Pitt. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You know, I didn't really like the movie very much because I thought in the end it got kind of stupid, But it does a really nice job of showing what the moon might look like in 50 or 60 years. And it's kind of a wild west. You know? Like, at one point, he's got to cross from one place to the other. Gangs roaming around. Or just, like, peer state adversaries. Like, they have to cross over to them and they get attacked. Right. You know? So, I will bet you, I'll put the money down right now, that you will have your pictures, you know, within a decade. Yeah. But I'm not, I cannot, sadly, I cannot guarantee that it's going to be an American flag that you're going to see. Also, how crazy is the moon? Like, do we, I don't think we know, no one I've ever talked to has ever explained any evidence of any other moons of other planets having the insane, miraculous distance from the earth and the sun to where it's able to create this eclipse. Oh, that is, yeah. Oh, that's temporary, by the way. Yeah. Well, it's moving away a little bit, right? No, no, it's been moving away for, you know, the day. It used to be, like, you know, if you were visiting Earth, like, two billion years ago, the moon would have been, like, 10% bigger in the sky because it was much closer. So there's been this complicated gravitational interaction between the Earth and the moon over time that, you know, the moon was born much like you really can't explain Earth without the stuff we learn from landing on the moon. Yeah, when actually getting the, you know, visiting the different sites, the highlands and the lowlands. Right. So here's what, actually, there's something very weird about the moon, which is it's so big. Like, there's no other planet in the solar system that has a moon that is as big compared to the planet, right? So Jupiter's got lots of moons, and some of the moons are actually bigger than Earth's moons. What is it? Is it a quarter the size of the Earth or something? The moon, I think, is a diameter of 1,000 kilometers, and Earth is... Find the relative size. Yeah, and Earth, I think, is 6,000 kilometers. I think it's one-sixth or something. One-sixth. But let's check. I'm a, you know, I forget. I know it's only like .2, the mass. Yeah, yeah. Which is wild. Yeah. The size and the mass difference. Yeah, yeah. But the thing is, all the other, like, you know, Jupiter's moons are like teeny tiny compared to the planets. Yeah, a lot of them are for potato shapes. If you get big enough, you get round. Anything that's, gravity does this. If you're large enough, sense it. The moons are only a rough quarter of the size of Earth in diameter. Okay, okay. Okay. And then what's the mass? 2% of the volume. Yeah, volume, but you've got – because volume goes with radius cubed. So what about the mass? One percent of the Earth. It's the fifth largest moon in the solar system. Yeah, but it's the comparison. So if you were to visit – if you were visiting from another solar system, you might think that the Earth and the moon were kind of binary planets. You might not even sort of be like, oh, look, there's a planet with a satellite. You might be like, oh, these are two planets that were – Why is it such low volume compared to the size? Do they find like – do they think there's like caves in there? No, no, no. This is just R cubed. It's not, no, so it's, um... Didn't they find caves in the hollow? Oh, there are caves, but it's not hollow or anything. But let me tell you, like... Not hollow, I mean just like maybe honeycomb. Yeah, yeah, no, no, it's mostly, it's going to mostly be solid. Because it's, you know, it's like, it has a composition, thanks to the moon rocks, that is like Earth, but different enough, you know, we know, like our theories of how the moon formed was a big-ass collision between the Earth and probably a Mars-sized body very early on in the solar system. So, but let's just, this is a really interesting thing. about the moon is so large relative to the Earth that it has profoundly affected the Earth's evolution, right? So it slowed the day down, for example. The day used to be much faster. It used to be like... Really? Yeah, yeah. There would have been like, what, 23 hours or 22 hours in a day. We can bring that up to an individual. Isn't the day on the moon two weeks? It's a month, actually. Oh, a month. Well, this is what it is. So what has happened is there's what's called tidal locking. So, you know, the Earth is... When they were both born, they were both spinning, and the moon's orbiting the Earth. But then there's a gravitational interaction between the Earth and Moon that slowed the Earth's rotation, pushed aloud, you know, at the same time, moved the Moon further out in its orbit, and then slowed the Moon's spin until the Moon always shows the same face towards Earth. It's called tidally locked. Right, right. Like, it's not the dark side of the Moon. It's the far side of the Moon, right? Exactly. It's not always dark. It's not always dark. Right, right. But we can never see it. We always see the same side. So what's happening is that the moon is going around the earth, it always shows the same side, which means it is spinning, but it's spinning at the same rate as it's orbiting. So it's a day in its year. It's all gravity. It's all the theory of gravity, right? You can work it out for the theory of gravity. And that has had huge consequences. Tides. The fact that we have tides. Huge consequences for the evolution of life. Because life may have been born in those tidal, you know, you have the interstitial tidal zones where the water washes up and you're underwater and the water washes down and you're out of water. And that may have been hugely important for the evolution of life on Earth. So the fact that we have a big moon, you know, may actually, is it why we got intelligent life on the Earth? I don't know, but that's one of the things people, there's the rare Earth hypothesis, which is that, you know, Earth actually has some very unusual characteristics compared to other planets in our solar system and maybe other planets in the universe. So, like, does that mean that it's rare, that life would be rare? Two questions. First one, what are the biggest differences that we have found with other Goldilocks planets? And Earth. Yeah, well, the thing is we haven't been able to, you know, we just now are getting the ability, and we're still, even the James Webb Space Telescope, as powerful as it is, are just beginning to get the ability to actually look at them in detail. Like, so the, you know, up until James Webb, the main thing was just finding them. Like, oh, there's a planet in the habitable zone, right? Because it's hard to find planets. You can't see mainly the color of it. Like, the color, right, is a big thing. Well, even that, we're still, we're just be able. So here's what you want to do if you want to. So, first of all, finding a planet, you never or rarely can ever see a planet directly. You have to look at the star and look at changes in the star to infer the existence of a planet. So, for example, one thing, the main way we find planets is by what we call transits, which is like a little eclipse. You know, the planet's going around the star, and if the orientation of its orbit is right, it goes between us and the star. And what you'll see is a little teeny tiny dip in starlight. And so it took, you know, decades to build the instruments that could see like a one in 1,000 dip in the starlight, right? Now we've gotten really good at that. So we're very good at finding those dips in starlight and using those dips to infer how big is the planet, how massive is the planet. We actually need other things to get the mass. But one of the amazing things you can do with this is when, if the planet has an atmosphere, like a little veil of gas around it, When it's passing in front of the star, when the planet is passing between us and the star, some of the starlight will pass through the atmosphere and get to us, right? And when it does, the chemicals in the atmosphere will absorb some of the light. There's a rainbow going from the star through the planet's atmosphere, and some of that rainbow will be sucked up by chemicals in the atmosphere. It's called a spectra, or absorption spectra. And every chemical, every element, every molecule has a very distinctive way it absorbs light. So it's like a chemical, it's a fingerprint, a spectral light fingerprint. So we get that light with our telescope, and if the telescope's big enough, it can collect enough light that we can then spread that light out and say like, oh, look, some of the light was taken out at this wavelength and then twice that wavelength. That's carbon dioxide. So you can be like, holy crap, there's carbon dioxide in that atmosphere. So we're just, like we can do that for big planets, like Jupiter-sized planets. We're just at the hairy edge of being able to do that for Earth-like planets. Got it. So we don't really know yet what a Goldilocks planet. We're not there yet. But the point of my book, you know, when I was writing it, was that what is so exciting is that in the next 10, 20, 30 years, we're building the next generation of telescopes. That's what they're for. You know, they are going to be able to collect that light and look for things like oxygen. Like if you find oxygen in a planet's atmosphere, that may be a determinant that there's a biosphere there, right? Because all the oxygen, this is a crazy idea. If you were to land on Earth four billion years, three billion years ago, there was already life. You know, you would have found like bacteria, mass of bacteria. But if you stepped out of your spaceship and took your helmet off, the first thing that would have happened is you would have died because there was no oxygen in the atmosphere. There was nitrogen and there was some carbon dioxide and, you know, the other stuff, but there was no oxygen in the atmosphere, right? Anybody take a deep breath. Where does that oxygen come from? It came from life. Like somewhere about two and a half billion years ago, evolution, microbial evolution figured out a new trick, which was how to do a kind of photosynthesis that used water. But, you know, there was photosynthesis before that, but it had to use, like, iron ions in the ocean. And there's not a lot of iron, you know, ions in the ocean. So life was kind of limited. The food was limited. And then about two and a half billion years ago, life figured out through evolution how to use water as the basis for photosynthesis. The chemical shenanigans that take a photon, you know, a light ray, and clank, clank, clank, clank, clank, you know, turn it into a sugar molecule that you can eat. And that changed life forever for two reasons. One, suddenly there's water everywhere, right? So now suddenly there's all the food you could possibly, for photosynthesis, you could need. There's all this water that you can use to turn sunlight into sugar. So life just explodes. But the second thing was, like, what happens is life, you know, the microbes, inside the microbes, they take the water molecule, H2O, they split it apart, they take the hydrogen, you know, which is a proton, they use that to build the sugar, and the oxygen, they fart out. They literally, like, they, you know. So all this oxygen is getting just pumped back out into the oceans first and then into the atmosphere. And it takes about maybe half a billion years. The atmosphere fills up with oxygen. They call it the great oxidation event. And it took a little while. But that is why. It was life that put oxygen into the atmosphere. Wow. Isn't that wild? So if you find, because if tomorrow all life on Earth went away, all that oxygen would just recombine with the rocks really quickly. Like if life disappeared tomorrow, you'd come back, and I'm not really sure what it would be. Like a million years, the atmosphere would have no oxygen in it. Right now it's got 21% oxygen. It would all go away. So that story is. So if you're saying all the life disappeared on the Earth right now. All the oxygen would go away in the atmosphere. because the only reason there's oxygen in the atmosphere is life keeps farting it out it is a product of biological photosynthesis that is what every day is pushing oxygen into the atmosphere so every day oxygen is pushed into the atmosphere by life and every day oxygen gets bound back up into rocks so if you remove the life, if for some reason magically you could make all the life go away but what happens is the 21% oxygen that's in the atmosphere would just get... What would happen to the plants in the rainforest? No, no, I'm saying, let's say magically, if I could take life away, then the oxygen in the atmosphere would go away. So the reason I'm saying that is that, so what's important, what it tells you is that if you see oxygen in a planet's atmosphere, like that whole thing I was just talking about, that tells you that there probably is life there. There's probably a biosphere there. So you will not have oxygen in an atmosphere, in a planetary atmosphere, most likely, without there being life, to keep pumping it back in. Right. Okay. That makes sense. Yeah. So the other thing, so that story has two important points. So it shows us how we're going to characterize, how we're going to look for life on distant planets, right? Because, yeah, we're not going there anytime soon, right? So how can we see life? How can we see signatures of biology, i.e. bio signatures, on planets that are 100 light years away? Right. Well, once we have these more powerful telescopes, We're going to be able to do exactly what I was just telling you. We're going to be able to look for the light that's passed through the planet's atmosphere, analyze that light, and look for compounds that can only be produced by biology. But there's a second really important consequence of this, right? So what happens is these little critters, right, that two and a half billion years ago, that innovated and invented this new form of photosynthesis, they literally changed the planet, right? You know, having oxygen in the atmosphere changed everything about the planet's history. Oxygen chemistry is just totally different. So it's a really nice, very important example of life changing the atmosphere, which changed the climate also, radically changed the climate of the earth. And actually it was kind of poisonous to the critters that were around them. Like it actually, it was kind of a devastation. The invention of, you know, this photosynthesis was good for a while, but then it pumped so much oxygen in the atmosphere that those species of critters ended up, they had to like burrow into the ground, like get away from the oxygen. Oxygen was actually poison for them. So it's a really nice example of a species becoming very successful and in the process changing the climate in ways that wasn't so useful for them. Sound familiar? Right. Right? That's all we're doing now. So I'm just bringing it back to climate change now. There's people who are like, it's a hoax. It's like, dude, this is what life does when successful species change planets. That is important for us to think about our future. it's important for us to think about other technological civilizations. They probably changed their planets. And also that whole thing that, like, oh, it's a hoax. It's a, you know, it's also very human-hating. If you take the position that, you know, a ridiculous position that, like, climate science, which has been around for so long, is a hoax, then it's like, why do you hate human beings so much? We did this amazing thing. Like, we changed the atmosphere of an entire planet, right? We put extra CO2 into the atmosphere because of our – we built this amazing global civilization. It's indicative of what a successful species we are. Well, I think that's the idea that the climate – the idea of the climate changing being a hoax is nonsense. But the problem with that term, climate change, is it's attached to so much political baggage. Yeah, right. Which, you know – so, but people – so, right, there's climate change happening. Like, here's the problem. Whether you think it's a hoax or you think it's being overblown or you think it's a real existential threat, the problem is the majority of people who are in both camps, they don't understand how it works at all. I know. I know. And as a scientist, that's what I'm trying to say. What I always want to say is there's a difference between the scientific problem of what are the radiative properties of the carbon dioxide molecule. That does not care about who you voted for. So the climate is changing because of our activity, because that's how climate works. Like you put more CO2. You know, it's basic climate science. I literally teach this to my undergraduate non-science majors. Simple theory, the simple formula, I can show them for how put more CO2 into any planet's atmosphere, planet's going to warm up. So that part doesn't care who you voted for. So there's a difference between the scientific question about climate change and what drives it and the political question of what you're going to do about it, right? So you have to separate those two, you know, not doing anything about it and say, you know, that's a policy, you know, that's a policy, too. Right. So somehow as a species, and that's why, you know, somebody called this, this is humanity's final exam, right? You've triggered climate change, you know, because of your success. Now, what are you going to do about it? Are you going to ignore it? Or are you going to try and take some actions to, like, change your energy? Well, the Earth's climate has been a crazy roller coaster for the last, like, 500 million years, right? It's been up and down and up and down. And right now in the big picture of the history of the Earth we are actually in one of the coolest periods I would say that You see the Washington Post article that came out about a year and a half ago About I mean it because there the PETM We had periods of up and down right? But the thing is, like, climate, you know, sometimes people say to me, like, well, climate's changing all the time. And it depends on what timescale you're talking about. So for the last 10,000 years, since the last Ice Age ended, we've been in what's called the geologic epoch called the Holocene. Right? And 485 million years. Have you seen this? Yeah, yeah, yeah. So this is a 485 million year graph of the surface temperature of the Earth. Right, right. And you see, you've had periods of very high... You see that very tiny little hockey stick on the right? Yeah. That's where we are. And you see it starting to go up. Right. So all of that going up is us. Yes. At the tip there. But what you see is, right, and we came, and we came, I'll go down so you can see the bottom a little, zoom in, just zoom in, but let us, so we can see the bottom part of the graph. So that's 25 million years ago right there. Millions of years, right. So that, the time frame for human beings is what, 300,000? 300,000. But it just went back a million. We just found a skull in China that's a million years old. So we don't really know how fucking long human beings have been here. Or, you know. Well, we know. We certainly weren't here 65 million years ago. Right, right. Because we'd be dinosaurs. And we know that, like, thank God for that comet that hit the Earth because the only thing that was around mammal-wise were these little tiny rat-like creatures. So that gave us the... But if you look at the history of planet Earth, going back to the Solerian hypothesis, it's entirely possible there could have been civilizations living in the dips of all of the history of the Earth. That was our question. Would you be able to tell? But the important thing for this is that... So what you see is like, yeah, climate on hundreds of millions of years, climate goes up, climate goes down. But for the last 10,000 years, right, that's where we actually have the best data because we've got tree rings. We've got, you know, it's amazing. You can drill down on, like, in Greenland. Let's talk about Greenland. You know, and get the ice cores or Antarctica, and you can go back, like, 100,000 years, and you can get, like, bubbles. Yeah. Drapped bubbles. Yeah, that's insane. It's insane. And then you can see, like, oh, how much CO2 was there? What was the temperature? What was in the atmosphere? What metals were there in the atmosphere? Were there industrial shit going on? Yeah, but there wasn't. There wasn't. But anyway, let's just complete this thought. So for the last 10,000 years, the climate has been very stable. Like very – it's been a good time to build a civilization, right? It's been warm and it's been moist, right? And that is when all of the history of human civilization – this civilization. You know, you want to say there's other ones. I don't agree. But like, okay, this one, right? That's when farming was invented, blah, blah. And that's the reason why farming could be invented was that the climate was stable. See, when people talk about with climate change that we needed to stay under 1.5 degrees variation, right? We don't want the temperature of the planet to go above 1.5 or 2 degrees of Celsius. That's what all the reports, the IPC things are. Don't go above 1.5 to 2 degrees. Right. Why? Why that number? Because in the Holocene, you look at the Holocene and you look at the variations over the last 10,000 years, it's never gone above or below the average. It's never gone above or below 1.5 degrees on that average of the Holocene. Right. And now what we're doing is we're blowing it past that. The average temperature, the surface temperature? The average surface temperature on the Earth has had, for the last 10,000 years, no more than 1.5 to 2 degrees Celsius variations. Okay. Yeah. So go back to that article, Steve. But that was hundreds of years. You won't even see that. Right, right. It's too small. 10,000 years is too small, Steve. 10,000 years is like you can't even see this. 10,000 years might be the very bottom part of that dip. But, I mean, look how dramatic that shit goes down. Which shows you, like, this is our future. Like, this is the planet. We're driving the planet. So that, I think 65 million years or before that, is what's called the Permian temperature maximum, the PETM. And the planet was so warm then that there was no snow anywhere. Like, maybe at the tip of, like, no ice caps. So that's the thing about Earth. Earth has been many planets over its history. It's been a water world. Like, in the beginning, this is wild. There weren't continents. Right? It takes a while for the continents to grow. So there were like kind of some Australia, they call them cratons. So we were a water world for a while. And then there have been periods when we've been a snowball world. The Earth has been almost completely covered in glaciers. And we've been a jungle world, right? So the Earth, and it's often life which pushes the planet into these different regimes. That has, you know, that's often been what's happened. So the idea that us, life, have triggered another, you know, a new age of climate change, we shouldn't be surprised. Some of those variations that you're seeing there came because a new form of life was invented, like grasslands. Like, you know, evolution came up. The biosphere evolved grasslands, right? It was like, hey, this is good. And then the climate changes. At what point was the super volcano? There was like five major events, right? There's been five mass extinctions. Five mass extinctions. And the biggest one was the super volcanoes, right? Oh, they were more than volcanoes, right? Those were the Deccan traps. These were like, I mean, they were more than, they were just huge upwellings of lava. I forget when exactly that one is. That might even be further. Yeah, look at the, oh, this is good. 445. Which was the biggest one? Yeah, find out what's the biggest of the five. Because I think, you know, you got almost 95% in the one that was, the one that came from the Deccan Traps. Go further back. Here you go, 96. Yeah, yeah, and Permian. And Permian Extinction. The Great Dying. 250 to 252 million years ago. You know, which is, you know, the interesting thing about this, what it shows you is, is the biosphere, as Lynn Margellis, the famous, who invented, helped co-invented the Gynapoth, the biosphere is a tough bitch. Like, you know, you cannot, and this is the thing, what pisses me off, like, when we come to climate change, was that thing, like, we've got to save the Earth. It's like, dude, you know, the Earth is not a furry little bunny. You know, the Earth will be, the biosphere will be just fine. We've got to save us. You know, it's human civilization, especially this global technological civilization, which really depends on very, you know, a very stable. You know, you want to feed 8 billion people, you better have a stable climate, you know, year to year in order to have agriculture. Right. But the biosphere is, you know, there's nothing we can do to really fuck with the biosphere. And the biosphere, this is what people need to understand, is we don't have to save the earth. We need to be scared shitless of it. Right. Because on some levels, you know, our ancestors worshipped the Earth as a god or a goddess. They were kind of right in a certain way because the Earth literally channels cosmic power, which is sunlight. You know, we take in, I forgot this number. You can look this up. You know, the equivalent of, like, how many atomic bombs worth of energy fall on the Earth every second. You know, something, you know, like, let's look this up. Wow. So the Earth is constantly receiving from the sun huge amounts of energy. And that energy hits the atmosphere, hits the ground, and it all just channels four to five Hiroshima-type bombs per second. The Earth is currently accumulating heat from the warming. Oh, no, this is not even right. Actually, this isn't even what we're looking at. This is how much, because of climate change, the energy that's being trapped that normally would go back out into space. But I don't know if we can find it. The amount of energy that just flows through the Earth's system. From the sun. From the sun. Every day, every second, there's this huge amount of energy that hits the earth, and the earth warms. It generates clouds. It feeds the life forms. It generates the ocean circulation. And it looks to us very in balance. It's like, oh. But what we don't really understand is that it's like a blast furnace. We don't see the blast furnace of this apocalyptic amount of energies that are channeling through that system. And what we're doing by dumping more CO2 in the atmosphere is like we're taking a giant monkey wrench. Imagine a jet engine, a super powerful jet engine. And we're just taking this monkey wrench and we're just throwing it in. And, oh, let's see what happens. We're unbalancing that. And when those forces, you already see this with some of the climate events that are happening. You unbalance those forces and you end up in a very different kind of planet, which is what when we looked at those, the temperature was like 15 degrees Celsius hotter on average. That's a different kind of planet. So, the whole partisan dialogue about climate change needs to change so we understand what's really at stake. It's not the earth that's at stake. It's us. It's this civilization. I mean, the reason, whenever I start to become skeptical of things is when you start to see certain folks try to use it to their advantage. And you start to see all these financial entanglements involved in stuff like this. You see the same thing happen in medicine and pharmaceuticals. You see the same thing happen in geopolitics, in every aspect of our civilization where there's lots of economic power and lots of money happening. This starts to happen. And, you know, when you see people start to try to use emergencies like the climate emergency to gain not only more profit for themselves but more power and control over people, that's when I start to get skeptical. I start to back off and say, okay, these people are saying trust the science. I'm going to take this advice from some billionaire who's flying in his private jet. Like, I don't know if I trust you, right? Well, don't trust them. Is the science settled? And the science has been settled for decades. Well, there's also MIT scientists. No, no, no, no, no. There's one MIT scientist. There's the one. And so this is what happens when I have this. I'm sorry to interrupt. I'm sorry to interrupt. I'm sorry to interrupt. Go ahead. No, no, no. I was going to say, there seems to be lots of, maybe there's one. I don't know. Maybe it's the same one I've heard. And as well as Princeton scientists who seem to like, a lot of them don't seem to agree on everything. And one of the things that I wasn't alive back then, but I guess like after the 40s, it was like there was an emergency of cooling. There was a great cooling event from the 40s to the 70s. Yeah, there wasn't. Yeah, there wasn't. So let me tell you the history because I have a – here's my climate story. Okay. Adam's climate story. So it's 1986 or 1985. I, you know, graduate from University of Colorado. I'm like, I'm tired, you know. Now I'm going to go to grad school. I need a break. So I took a year and a half off and I did everything. I planted trees in British Columbia. I was a bouncer at the Rocky Horror Picture Show on 8th Street in New York. I just needed time off. And then after a year, I was like, okay, let me go back to science, right? So I started applying. I would have taken any job in science in a Twinkie lab. I didn't care. I got a job at the Goddard Institute for Space Studies on 113th Street and Broadway in New York. It's a NASA installation that studies planetary science. It's 1986, right? Nobody's ever heard of climate change, right? Starting a business can be overwhelming. You're juggling multiple roles, designer, marketer, logistics manager, all while bringing your vision to life. Shopify helps millions of business sell online. Build fast with templates and AI descriptions and photos, inventory and shipping. Sign up for your one euro per month trial and start selling today at shopify.nl. That's shopify.nl. It's time to see what you can accomplish with Shopify by your side. Starting a business can be overwhelming. You're juggling multiple roles. Designer, marketer, logistics manager, all while bringing your vision to life. Shopify helps millions of business sell online. Build fast with templates and AI descriptions and photos, inventory, and shipping. Sign up for your one euro per month trial and start selling today at Shopify.nl. That's Shopify.nl. It's time to see what you can accomplish with Shopify by your side. So, you know, I go there. I got a job as a, you know, a scientific programmer. I'm just doing low-level programming, you know. And at one point after like two months, I go to my boss and I say, like, what are we doing here? Like, what are we studying? She says, oh, and that's fun. Very famous climate scientist. He says, oh, sit down. And she tells me, like, well, there's this idea that because of CO2, you know, that the Earth's climate is going to change, you know. And we don't really have the signal yet. By the signal, they meant, you know, seeing in the data. But we were studying this and we're studying how to find the signal, you know, right? And I said, well, what will happen if the climate changes? And she sort of laid out everything, you know, that would happen. And I remember walking out of there, and I walked down to, like, Riverside Drive. And I was like, holy crap. You know, like, she told me about, like, the end of the world, you know. And this was, like, 1985, 86. We're like, again, nobody. I went to, you know, my bros. We went to the bar, you know. And I'm like, dude, like, we could be changing the climate. And they're like, yeah, man, whatever, you know. So I have spent my entire life watching this unfold. And everything, like, even I have a plot from a paper that was done with, like, a dumbass computer model that tracks the global average temperature. I can show it, boop, boop, boop. They were dead on, right? So I have watched over time the progress of climate science to where, like, you know, nobody gave a shit. It was kind of something people talked about. And then in 88, there was a famous testimony by James Hansen who ran this. He was the big boss at this place when climate change sort of finally got into people's imagination, you know. And it wasn't until really the mid-2000s that people really, really, really started to hear about it. Is that when the Gore documentary came out? Yeah, that actually, the Gore documentary was a big part of, you know, because Gore actually was friends with the main climate scientists who were responsible for this. All those predictions were wrong, by the way. No, all those predictions are absolutely right. No, he said the sea level was going to rise like 50 feet. Not anytime soon. He said, yeah, he said within 10 years. In 10 years, there's no way he said the sea level was going to rise. 50 feet, I mean, that's insane. No, he wouldn't. Look up the predictions from the Gore documentary. What was that documentary called again? Inconvenient Truth. Inconvenient Truth. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You know, when you have to see, did he mean like if there was an anomalous, you know, melting event of the West Arctic ice sheets? You know, but no scientist would say that. I was talking to my mom the other day. You know, she's really big into this stuff, too. She's, you know, she's on the very far left of the political spectrum. She's a fine arts teacher. Right. Right. She grew up in university. She got her master's degree in fine art. And I was talking about this house. we're looking at this like really nice house on the water that was like near where my mom lives or whatever and she's like oh that house is going to be underwater in 50 years she can't buy that money. I'm like really? I'm like you grew up here mom wasn't the fucking water line in the same exact spot 50 years ago to where it is now? Well no the water's gone up. It's not in the same place right? It's you know because it's been steady increase in measurable absolutely but you know Yeah, but all those houses have been there. Like, all those houses. Well, because it's in, right now, it's on the level of centimeters, right? So, you know, but the, you know, why are you, let me go back, before we go back on this, because I want, this is a really important point to make. The science and the scientists, has the science been settled, right? The science, so that was 86, right? There's somebody, you know, I'm at this NASA facility. This was before there were any politics. It wasn't like a Nesbong was like a liberal, you know, I'm going to teach this kid about science. We're just doing science. Yeah. Also, when was the first time that a U.S. president mentioned climate change? What do you think? The first time? First time. I have no idea. Just take a guess. Clinton. 1964. Oh, really? It's in a speech to Congress. Lyndon Johnson brings up carbon dioxide pollution, as he called it. Because already, Roger Revelle and these scientists had already... That's why there was no, there was like one paper that somebody wrote about the possibility of cooling in the 70s, and it got picked up by Time Magazine. Most, you know, that was also so early that nobody really, nobody knew what was going to happen. So it was a paper, and then Time Magazine, but there wasn't like all the climate scientists, like, holy shit, it's going to, it was just, the data wasn't there yet. But the understanding that the climate could warm, and most likely would warm, there's a paper in 1903 by Sven Arrhenius, you know, that predicted, you know, he just added up all the, the coal burning, the CO2 burning, and predicted in 1903, because the science is so basic that, yeah, the planet's probably going to warm. And he was Swedish, so he's like, great, more warming. So anyway, this idea that we're asking the question about, is the science settled? Science has been settled since like the 1990s, right? And so what happened was, we're talking about rich people and trying to get their way. The oil companies, and Shell was brought to court for this. You can see the documents. All companies knew that, like, this is death for us. Like, you know, if we're going to – because, really, what is this about? It's about changing energy modalities, right? We power our civilization on fossil fuels. We used to power our civilization on wood. We just changed. Like, it's not that big a deal. But somebody stands to lose a lot of money if you do this. So the science was totally settled. And somewhere around – how much would it cost to reinvent a whole – How many times have we done it? It'll cost something. But also money is going to be made. Money will be made. And you already see this with, like, what's happening with renewables. There's a place in Rochester. Yeah, but solar panels have shit the bed. No. What are you talking about? Solar panels? No one I know who has solar panels is like, they've all. Dude, you need to look at the world economy. Solar panels. Look at what China is doing with solar panels right now. Solar panels. There are more jobs now. There are more jobs via solar panels than there are for coal. But they're so inefficient. They're not inefficient. The inefficiency has blown up. From the time I was growing up to now, the inefficiency has exploded. Look at China's solar and renewable policy. They are flooding markets. China accounts for like 35% of all the CO2 emissions worldwide. Right, right. And they are pushing. They understand where the world economy is going. The world economy is going to decarbonize. But there's a place in Rochester I can stand where like there's the Erie Canal, right? There is a train line, and there's a highway all in the same place. and then the jets fly right over it. That is four different transportation infrastructures that were built and then abandoned, right? We do this all the time. Humanity constantly changes. It's transportation infrastructure. It's energy infrastructure. This is just what we do, right? And there's going to be huge amounts of money to be made. Just like when oil first was born, when we were getting the oil, the United States subsidized oil. We subsidized oil production because it made sense for the country. So the only reason we're not doing it now is because, and we started doing it, is because oil industry didn't want it. Because if you're the oil industry and you've got what's called proven reserves, all this oil in the ground, that's part of your bank account. And if suddenly people are like, you know, we're not going to use oil anymore. We're going to use whatever, renewables or nuclear or something. You know what happens to your bank account? Rolls to zero. So, you know, as somebody, one time when I was writing for NPR, I was doing a science blog for NPR. You know, I was talking about like, yeah, we're going to change energy infrastructure. It's going to be great. And somebody wrote back and said, dude, you know, the proven reserves are like $8 trillion. People have gone to war for a lot less than that. Like, they're not giving up their wealth, you know, so easily. So what I saw in the starting and going back to the proven science was that somewhere around 20, 2005, there started to be organized climate denial. Right? Like, I would write something on the NPR blog about, like, climate change. And I'd see like, boop, boop, boop, boop, boop, boop, boop, boop, boop. Like all of a sudden I'd get these comments back when there were comment sections. Just filling up. Filling up with like, that's a hoax, blah, blah, blah, blah. And I was like, holy shit, this is like organized. Like somebody's, like this is not just random people. Well, this happens on both sides. I mean, there's just uninformed fools on every. No, but this was not uninformed fools. This was organized. I could see it happening. Like I wrote something else on another, you know, topic. I get a few people, yes, a few people, no. If it was about climate, and it started, because for three years, I've been writing about climate change. Nothing. Then all of a sudden, now listen, also there's a book called Agents of, what is it called, Ari? It's a book that was written about the oil companies organized. They took a lesson from the cigarette companies about how to push back against science. If there's some science that is going to hurt your bottom line, here's what you do. But again, my point really here is, the politics is a mess. I completely agree. The politics is a mess. But the point about the established science, there is – so what happened – the reason I'm telling this story is what happened after 2005, you started to have the same group of scientists. There's like eight scientists whose name would come up. Willie Soon, the guy from MIT, over and over again because that's all there was. If you went to a meeting of the American Geological Society, where like one of the places climate science gets discussed, and there's 2,000 people in this giant hallway, you know, find somebody there who doesn't believe in science. Call up, you know, randomly 10 geology departments and say, is there anybody in there who doesn't believe in climate science? You'll never find out. Well, that's a broad way of putting it. Is there anyone who doesn't believe in climate science? Scientists. Scientists who work in the field. I don't think that they don't believe in climate science. I think they would argue that the CO2 is the primary cause of climate science. Basic planetary science. Well, even on the – I heard that on the IPCC website or whatever, they were saying that, like, water vapor and clouds contribute more to the warming of the planet's surface temperature than actual CO2. That's true. See, this is a great point to bring up, right? Climate science, you know, to really, and this is what drives me crazy when, like, you know, I have to argue with people about, you know, people who are, like, really seriously into denial. It's like, they'll say things to me, and they're taking these strident positions. Like, you know, you're very open. You're, like, interested in the science and everything. And it becomes really clear that, like, any of these people don't know what they're talking about. Like, really, they make these claims that are like, wow, man, you can read a freshman textbook and have that question answered. but they're not interested in the science. They've got some political point of view. You know, I see this happening on the left and the right. And what they really care about is their political point of view. And like, I'm a scientist. They care about winning. I'm a scientist. All I care about is the science. And so that question, so you bring up a really good question, water vapor and other things. It's true. Water vapor is actually the, you know, by far has the most climate changing effect. But you have to do, you have to like study climate. And what you see is like, yeah, but water vapor cycles. Water vapor is constantly cycling in and cycling out. So the net level of water vapor always stays the same. There hasn't been any changes. Nothing we're doing is really going to change dramatically the amount of water vapor in the air. So there's nothing happening with water vapor that is going to lead to climate change. CO2 is increasing because of what we're doing. So it cycles on much longer timescales. You put CO2 into the atmosphere, it takes a lot longer for it to come out. One of the major Charlie Revelle, who I was talking about, the guy, you know, the 19th, one of the things he really discovered, people felt like, oh, the ocean will absorb it all. The ocean will absorb the CO2. And what he realized, what he showed through, like, painstaking experiments, is that actually the ocean will stop. The ocean can only absorb so much CO2. So that's the difference. Like, you bring up a really good point, but to answer that point, you've got to go in and, you know, like, take the freshman class. Actually, you probably need to take the senior class, you know, before, like, one of these guys stands up and says, climate change is a hoax because of water vapor. You know, it's like, no, if you do this, you know, if you actually just put the time into learning, you'll see, wait, that question's totally been answered. You know? A thousand times with a thousand experiments, you know? Are there any instances in history that we can pinpoint where the CO2 level was really high, but the temperature was really low? Not really, and not unless there's, like, in general, CO2 tracks with, you know, with... It always tracks. It always tracks. It always tracks. Because it's basic climate science. Like, you know, sometimes it's because of the climate record, it seems to lead or lag, you know, but in general, you can see sort of the dynamic. You know, planetary dynamics is pretty complicated, you know, but you can see sort of what's going on. But it is basic physics that if you put more CO... I mean, literally, it is literally basic physics in the sense of, like, CO2. We found out it was 1850 that, I think, Joseph Fresnel, was it, who first discovered that CO2 absorbs sunlight. It absorbs, you know, CO2 is really absorbed. What is really good is absorbing, the sun hits the ground, the ground warms up, and then it emits infrared radiation. And CO2 just loves infrared radiation. So that was known like in 1840. So the science of this is just so firmly in place that, like, for example, Venus, right? Venus is very much like the Earth. It's closer to the sun, but it's not so much closer that, you know, you'd expect it, like, to be radically different from the Earth. In the 1930s, people saw Venus. That's going to be like a jungle planet. The temperature is 800 fucking degrees, right? It's a pizza oven, basically. Why? It's CO2. Its atmosphere is basically CO2. That's a whole day in hell. Exactly. So, you know, it's just like the science of just put more CO2 into the atmosphere, the climate's going to change. Yeah. Right? It's not just going to warm up because what happens is you're pumping lots more energy into the atmosphere. Like I said, my jet engine analogy, now you're just messing with everything. The energy is going to flow. You're going to get warmer places, colder places. The system that is the climate is going to change. I wonder how much fucking CO2 all those SpaceX rockets are putting into the atmosphere. I just read something about also the stuff with all the Starlink that's going to dive back down. Allegedly, the satellites that get decommissioned, I heard that they burn up in the atmosphere on reentry. Yeah, which also dumps the body. I just read a thing. Somebody, who knows? I don't really know if we need to be alarmed. Because that's the problem with the news. Every day it's like, you need to be alarmed. buy this. Yeah. Oh, really? Another thing? So I don't know if that's really. Yeah, this is emergency. We need to do a carbon tax on everyone. You know, you have everyone living paycheck to paycheck, not paying extra tax. Okay, but. And then you have the 15-minute cities and stuff in the UK and all that. Yeah. But what are, you got to do something. Like not do, you know, well, you don't have to do anything, right? I mean, you don't have to do anything, right? Climate is changing. That's just the way it is. I'm sorry. It's changing because of human activity. Look at that graph. Of course it's changing. And of course humans contribute to it. Right. So the question is, what are you going to do? Like, you know, doing nothing is a policy decision. Doing this is a policy decision. Doing that is a policy decision. So, you know, what is the, you know, okay, you don't want to do a carbon tax? What do you want to do? You know, ignoring it, you know, in general, the science says, it's just going to get hard. You know, the science indicates, of course, predicting the future is hard, right? As Yogi Berra said, predictions are hard, especially about the future. But, you know, we can map out, like, scenarios of what's going to change if you raise the temperature by two degrees, right? You can look at history and see, like, what was the global surface average temperature? Do we know what it was during the Renaissance? It had to be within 1.5 degrees of what we were. Within 1.5 degrees. Again, every little blip, you had the little ice age and everything, but those were all minor. We are now committed. Like, we are absolutely blowing past two degrees. You know, we're probably headed towards 3 degrees. During the Renaissance period, roughly 14 to 17 centuries, global average temperatures were generally cooler than today, falling within the cold phase interval known as the Little Ice Age. 1.2 degrees, right? Below 1.5 degrees. 1.2 Celsius. The temperature has not changed for the last 10 years on average by more than 1.5 degrees. What is your take on the younger Dryas impact hypothesis, that there was a series of comet impacts that would have hit the Earth during 11,500 years ago? You know, it's very important as a scientist for me to say, like, I don't know. You know, I mean, what I know about the Younger Dryas is that, great story about the Younger Dryas, which is that I read about when I was reading about the history of the Camp Century, which was this nuclear-powered research lab that the Army built in, like, the mid-50s on the ice in Greenland. they had to drag a nuclear reactor across 300 miles of the most inhospitable terrain in the world because they wanted to build a base on the ice on the top of the glaciers of Greenland. And one of the things they did there, they did this scientific experiment of drilling. That was the first ice course that they did. And the guy who was doing the analysis looked at it. He could see switching from, you know, before the Younger Dryas to the Dryas. You could see the climate change. Like the band where the Younger Dryas, the wild temperature variation in it, was like brown and black compared to the pure white. They called it the black matte. Maybe. Yeah, but you could see that. So the thing that I understand about the Younger Dryas was that it was really good evidence that the climate could change really quickly, which is a lesson for us. So I don't know. I'd have to look at the evidence for a large impact. But in general, large impacts, you know, if you're going to get an impact that's really going to be able to change the climate by that dramatically, you're going to find lots of evidence. So I would want to see the evidence. Like you'd see on the other side of the earth, you should be able to see, you know, iridium 26 or something, you know, that came out of the explosion. So I think it would be pretty clear that there was. I think one of the foundations of the hypothesis is that it was like 1,000, the younger drives was 1,000 years, right? How long it lasted? Yeah. Yeah, I think so. So it was like a thousand year period. Radical climate change. Radical. And then it came back again. And then like, yeah, it was like flash frozen. Right. And there's really mammoths that were frozen with the, that's why they call it the younger drows, because there was that flower that was in the stomach still. Yeah, yeah. And there was also, that correlates with that time period when that happened, there was this black matte layer that was found within the earth, the geologists found, and they found nanodiamonds and some other materials. From stuff, an explosion that would have formed during... From cosmic. Yeah. Cosmic stuff that was in that matte layer from the exact time period. Younger Dries Black Matte is organic, rich, dark, sedimentary layer dating to 12,900 to 11,700, found at over 70 sites, primarily in North America, represents cold, wet, traditional. So what was in the black matte layer? I heard there was nano diamonds and these other... Blah, blah, blah, blah. Does it say? How would it not say? That's crazy. Yeah. That's like one of the biggest parts of it. You know, the important thing is always to understand like sort of, you know, there's lots and lots and lots and lots and lots of scientists working on like what the driest was. You know, is this one guy who wrote a paper, you know, or has there been like, you know, the emergence of a, because, you know, science is very much like the blues. It's a call and response thing, right? You write a paper, and you've got a radical claim, and then somebody writes a paper and says you're crazy, and then you write a response about why this back. And you're constantly giving each other's arguments and evidence and mathematical arguments and data that go back and forth. And eventually, if an idea is really good, other people will see, like, oh, no. And you can watch it change. I've worked in enough fields in science over the years. Like, you'll be at a meeting where you'll see the shift will happen. Somebody's presenting data. this thing's been around for a while, but now, like, the data is so good and it's coming from so many different directions that you can see people leave the meeting being like, huh, yeah, maybe. So, I don't know with this if whether it's, you know, where it sits at. Is it just one guy writing a paper? Yeah. Or has the community begun to see enough evidence for it? Well, that's the crazy thing. That's the hard part about it, right? Because how much of this stuff is interdisciplinary, right? How many astrobiologists have meeting with geologists and climate change people? and, like, there's so many different ways or, like, historic, like, classicists, different scholars from different fields all coming together and just throwing shit at the wall. Right. You know, having this, you know. Well, that's what makes so much fun, though. Right. So, astrobiology now has become really an interdisciplinary field. So, there's this thing called AppSyCon. It happens every two years. And it is the most fun meeting ever because it is, like, pure biologists, microbiologists, You know, astronomers who study stars, planetary scientists who study both, you know, the planets in the solar system, which we know a huge amount about. And then exoplanets and then people, you know, techno signatures now. So the meetings are just like, they're mind boggling. You go and you listen to a talk about the great oxidation event and you learn all this amazing stuff. And then you go walk over to another meeting and you learn about, like, you know, the biochemistry of sugar production in, you know, this particular kind of microbe that can survive 700 degree temperatures. So it's like the field really, you know, those kinds of fields have become, and climate science is, too, very interdisciplinary. It's so for a while. Even the word, it's beyond multidisciplinary. The new word is transdisciplinary because it's kind of its own new field. Yeah, like just like even comparing some of the science that we know about the history of our Earth with ancient myths, right? Like, how many of these myths could be just echoes of some sort of reality that could have got skewed in this telephone game over millennia? Yeah, no, I'm actually, you know, so my first book was on science and religion, and I really focused a lot on myth because I was really affected by Joseph Campbell. Yeah. The idea of monomyths and everything. And, you know, I definitely, you know, I really love the idea that, you know, myth encodes sort of things about being human, these sort of elemental things about being human. They were stories. You know, we often use the word myth to say a story that's not true, like an urban myth. Sure. You know, like a lady who, you know, microwaved her dog to dry off, you know. But myth, you know, big myths. Myths are constellations of stories that explain who we were. Like, you know, groups use myths. Societies use myths to explain what we are, where we are, who we are. And, you know, science is in some sense like that. I mean, science is a different kind of story, but it definitely is. It's what tells us who and what we are. But we shouldn't forget the power of myth. And, you know, like, for example, like with the flood narratives. Yeah. There are flood narratives all over the place. It's obvious that there were so many, you know, that floods were so impactful to people that, you know, they became part of myth. And whether or not there was the Noachian flood, like whether that was actually something that happened around the world, like there was some kind of glacial dam, who knows? Was that possible during the Younger Dryas hypothesis? Yeah, I don't know. I don't know. Because it went from an ice age to super warm like it could have been. Yeah. There's this great – I don't want to interrupt you. No, no, no. Go ahead. I don't want to have consciousness. But there's this gentleman who came on who was showing us the channeled scab lands in – In Washington State? In Washington State. And he has this – it's kind of an out-there hypothesis. but if you can just work your way through the mind experiment there, he explains that if it's possible, there were a comet impacts that broke those ice dams on the North American ice sheet, and there was trillions of tons of water surging south. It could have channeled out those scab lands. I think that, I mean, my understanding of what I know, again, which is limited, is that it was an ice dam that broke. But the cause, like any kind of comet impact, any kind of astrophysical impactor is going to leave a lot of debris. So it really should be visible. An impact of that size should have debris and stuff. First of all, you should be able to find the crater or the remnants of the crater. But then also the stuff that gets kicked up, a large enough impactor is going to like the cloud of debris. like Mount St. Helens, right? You can tell that Mount St. Helens erupted on the other side of the planet. You can still find clay, you know. So, you know, that's what you'd have to look for. If you wanted to go for that, you'd have to look for, can I find... And would the crater now be under ice? No, because it was... If it was near Greenland, maybe? No, but I thought it was those scab lands were actually glacial craters, you know, or glacial dams in Washington or in that area. Because, you know, the Laurentine ice sheet, right? Right, right. All of North America. So it would have had to have been – if you're saying that the ice dam broke because of a nearby impact, then it would have to be somewhere in, like, North America. If you're saying that it happened, like, the comet could have been anywhere and it led to a triggering temperature increase globally, if it's that big, then it really – I think you just have to look. You have to look to see whether or not – and that's the fun part. Like, you have this conversation. This is how science works. You have this conversation over lunch, and it's like, well, let's go look. And it's also interesting that all the megafauna in North America kind of went away, right? And in Africa, we still have all the megafauna. Well, not the – you know, the real thing about megafauna, the sad truth of megafauna is we hate them. Like when human beings generally show up is when most of the megafauna are eaten. Not always, not all of it, but like in general, once human beings move into an area – Yeah, but the giants of lost, saber-toothed tigers and all the things that were here, like they're gone. But they're still there in Africa. There are still people in Africa. But there's not like mega. There's not that. There should be like 40-foot bears. Or not 40. There's 12-foot bears. In general, the really large megafauna don't make it in mass once human beings show up. I think that's in general my understanding. So it kind of ate them all. Like where are the mastodons? Right? So I can go in Rochester at the Rochester Science Museum. There is a woolly mammoth that was discovered not too far away. Even its codon, because it got caught in a bog. And so it's recreated. And I go, I'm like, this is a giant hairy elephant. They were giant. Right where I'm standing, there were herds of giant hairy elephants, right? Where are they? We ate them. Human beings are, yeah, pretty much eat anything into extinction. What do you make of those people that just revived the dire wolf? Yeah, that's interesting. Do you see that? Well, I love Game of Thrones. Recreating dire wolves. I'm kind of getting to it. What was the name of that organization that did that? Yeah, I mean, the ethics of that. Wow, you could talk about that for a long time. What about the ethics of should we settle Mars? Do we have a right? Should we settle Mars? Should we arm upstream? I am totally in favor of settling the solar system, of having a large human presence in the solar system. But there are some people who say, like, you know, what right do we have to alter these worlds that didn't have anybody on them? So, you know, I mean, I see nobody there. Well, Avi Loeb thinks there was people there at one point. Mars? Avi Loeb. No, even Avi Loeb doesn't believe that. I don't think. Didn't he say that? He did. He said, oh, my God. No, he said that on the podcast, bro. He said he thinks humanity started on Mars. Oh, well, he might have meant. Okay, what he might have meant is that life started on Mars. Life started on Mars. Yeah, no, there's a real party. And then through it, like, via a comet impact. Yes. Yeah, so it's possible. Yeah, this is, I mean, this is my really interesting idea that, you know, Mars, we have, thanks to, you know, the space program, we have really clear evidence that Mars was once a blue world. Like, you know, about four billion years ago, what's called the Nowakian period after Noah, Mars had, you know, if not oceans, it had, you know, deep lakes, you know, seas almost. and then the climate change, speaking of climate change, and now it's a dry, frozen hell. So the idea is that maybe microbial life started on Mars and then comet impacts, the farther you go back in time, the more debris comet there were in the solar system to hit things. And so maybe there was a microbe in a rock that got blown off of Mars and landed on Earth because we find Martian rocks. Right. Yeah. So, yeah, I think that's possible. That's an example of what they call panspermia, which is this idea about that life started somewhere else. Swapping material back and forth. Swapping spit. Because the planets we know have been swapping spit for a while. Panspermia is weird because even saying it is kind of like you. But it's possible even that, you know, with interstellar, we now have seen a couple of three interstellar objects. Oh, yeah. The new telescopes, right? The new telescopes, yeah. We know they've been happening all the time, but now we can catch them as they go through. And maybe one of them, you know, at some point, They had was, you know, they're usually comets or asteroids from another, an alien solar system, right? And, you know, maybe rocks got blown off some alien plant that had life, and, you know, the microbes just get sort of, they hibernate. They are able to last in the rock for hundreds of millions of years, and that's how life started on Earth. The problem is that, you know, you can do, because now we've seen three. So that gives us, actually, it's amazing science. You see three, that's enough to start doing calculations. Okay, I've seen these three. Let me work out how – now I know how probable, or at least I get some idea about how likely, how often. When was the first one? Do you remember? The first one was Oumuamua. One eye. Oh, so that was like what? Six years ago or something like that? Oh, so. And then there was two-eyed Borisov. That was nine years ago? I know. Isn't that crazy? Wow. I know. I know. Seems like last year. I know. I know. I wait to get to my age. I think I was just 35. When was that? I don't know. That was a long time ago. So, yeah. So now, you know, we're watching them. We'll find more of them. And, you know, I have many issues with what Professor Loeb has done. But it's possible that one of them will be a techno signature. We should definitely be on the loop. We just did a paper. I was part of a paper that was, like, you know, really looking seriously at, like, what would you have to – what should you look for if you want to see whether or not these are techno signatures, whether this is actually, you know, a probe or something, just a piece of technology. We should definitely be looking for it. The bigger and badder we keep making these telescopes, the weirder shit's going to get. I know. You always, that's the amazing thing with telescopes. Every time you build a bigger one or every time you open up a new wavelength window, X-rays, infrared, you're like, oh, my God, I didn't know those were there. Yeah. So, you know, the universe is pretty amazing. It's wild. Yeah. Well, Adam, thank you so much for doing this, man. This has been a fascinating conversation. A lot of fun. Where can people find you, find all your work and all that stuff? Okay. So the main thing is I have a newsletter called Every Man's Universe where, you know, every week I'm just doing something on space and the human future and, you know, all kinds of different things. And then I, you know, I have books out. Like my last book was The Little Book of Aliens where I was trying to tell this whole story about, you know, everything from UFOs to the bio signatures and techno signatures. So and I'm on Twitter and I'm on social media. But, you know, I don't use it that much because social media can be. So I think social media is bad for your health. I think so, too. Yeah. But so, yeah, Every Man's Universe. Subscribe to Every Man's Universe. And every couple times, once a week we do, I'll write a post about something that's going on in science or even science and spirituality. You know, I'm interested in that. And then we'll also do a post that's like some news, like some stories. Oh, here's some cool stories to read that I found as a news aggregator. Beautiful. We'll make sure to link everything below for folks. Okay. Thanks again. Thank you. All right. Good night, everybody.