Kind: captions
Language: en
the following is a conversation with
neil stephenson a legendary science
fiction writer exploring ideas in
mathematics science cryptography money
linguistics philosophy and virtual
reality from his early book snow crash
to his new one called termination shock
he doesn't just write novels he worked
at the space company blue origin for
many years including
technically being blue origin's first
employee he also was the chief futurist
at the virtual reality company magic
leap
this is the lex friedman podcast to
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and now here's my conversation with neil
stevenson
you write both historical fiction like
world war ii in
kryptonomicon and science fiction
looking both into the past and the
future so let me ask
does history repeat itself in which way
does it repeat itself in which way does
it not
i'm afraid it repeats itself a lot um so
i i think human nature kind of is what
it is and so
we tend to see similar behavior patterns
emerging again and again and so
it's it's kind of the uh exception
rather than the rule when something new
happens
what role does technology play in the
suppression or in revealing human nature
well the standards of living life
expectancy all that have gotten
incredibly better within the last
particularly the last hundred years i
mean just antibiotics
modern vaccines
electrification
the internet these are all
improvements in most people's standard
of living and health
and longevity that
that exceed anything that was seen
before in in human history
so so people are living longer they're
generally healthier and so on but again
we still see a lot of the same behavior
patterns some of which are
not very attractive
so some of it has to do with the
constraints on resources presumably with
technology you have less and less
constraints on resources so
we get to maybe emphasize the better
angels of our nature
and in in so doing does that not
potentially
fundamentally alter the sort of
the experience that we have of life on
earth you know until the last 10 or so
years i would have
taken that view i think but um
you know
people who will find ways to be
to be divisive and angry
if it scratches a kind of psychological
itch that they have got and
we used to look at the weimar republic
what happened in the economic collapse
of germany prior to
the the rise of hitler
world war ii
[Music]
and kind of
explain
hitler at least partially by
just the the misery that people were
living in at that time
the economic collapse yeah
hyperinflation
and unemployment and um the
the decline in standard of living and
that sounds like a plausible
uh explanation but there are economic
troubles now for sure we had the bank
collapse in 2008
and there's stagnation
in some people's standards of living but
it's hard to explain what we've seen in
this country in the last few years just
strictly on the basis of people are poor
and angry and sad
i think they want to be angry
so
without being political in a divisive
kind of way
can we talk about the lessons you can
draw from world war ii
sure this singular event in human
history it seems like yeah and yet as
you say
history rhymes
at the very least yeah
being who i am i tend to focus on the
curious technological things that
happened in in conjunction with that war
um
which may not be where you want to go
but uh well there's several things
inside to interrupt so one in crypto
nomicon is more like the alan turing
side of things right right and then
and then there's the
outside of technology
first of all there's the tools of war
which is the kind of technology but then
there's just like the human nature the
nature of good and evil yeah well so one
of the things that emerges from
uh from the war and from the um the
extermination camps is that we we're
never allowed to have illusions anymore
about human nature
so you you have to to learn that lesson
to be
an educated person and you have to know
that
that even in a supposedly you know
enlightened civilized society people can
become monsters
quite easily
so that is for sure the big takeaway so
do you agree with solzhenitsyn about the
what is it uh
the line between good and evil runs
through the heart of every man yeah that
all of us are capable great line yeah
i read
a good chunk of the gulag archipelago
when i was a teenager um because my my
grandfather had it in his house because
he was one of these
americans who was obsessed with the
soviet union and the soviet threat
and and wanted
people to to be aware of some of what
what had happened um and so
so he had those books lying around and
and uh you know i would i would read
them and it's a similar
kind of parallel story to the
to what happened in in in germany during
the war you know this creation of this
system of camps and and oppression and
and uh lots of um
troubling behavior
to me it's a story of um
how fear and desperation
combined with a charismatic leader can
lead
to uh to evil but it's also a story of
of bravery of of love of brother
brotherhood and sisterhood and
basically survival you have like a man
search for meaning which is the stories
of uh the story of a man
in a concentration camp
basically finding beauty in life even
under
uh most extreme conditions so to me
world war ii is not necessarily
um
a bleak view of human nature
it's it's a little
moment of evil that revealed a much
bigger
good mm-hmm in humanity
so i'm not i'm not so sure that it leads
me to a pessimistic view of the world
the fact that uh somebody like hitler
could happen the fact that uh
a lot of people could follow hitler and
get excited and maybe even love the hate
of the other yeah for some moment of
time
i think that's
all of us are capable of that but i
think all of us also have a capacity for
good
and i think i don't know what you what
you think but i think we
have a greater desire for good
than evil and that it seems like that's
where technology is very useful as a
guide
has a helping hand okay okay can you
give me an example maybe
so i give you examples of futuristic
technologies and i can give you examples
of current technologies current
technologies
uh
knowledge
uh in the form of
very basic knowledge which is like
wikipedia
and
search the original dream of google yeah
that i think is very much a success
which is
making the world's information
accessible at your fingertips
that kind of
technology
enables the natural
if if this
axiom this assumption that people want
to do good is is true yeah then
letting them discover all of the
information out there false information
and true information all of it
and let them explore that's going to
lead to a better world to better people
uh futuristic technologies is
uh i personally
i mentioned you offline sort of love
artificial intelligence and so
ai that's an assistant that's a guide
like a mentor to you yeah that you can
in the way that
google searches but smarter where you
can help send it out and say
this is the direction in which i want to
grow not
authoritarian lecturing down from the
algorithm of telling you this is what
this is how you should grow but almost
uh the the opposite where you use it as
um
an assistant a a servant in your journey
towards knowledge
yeah that that sounds like an easy thing
but it's actually from an absolutely
very difficult i mean
this is the theme of a book i wrote
called the diamond age which you know
talks about a book that essentially does
that
and i've been sort of watching people
try to come at the the problem of
building that thing uh from different
directions for
ever since the book came out basically
um and so
uh the uh
and so i i kind of have a although i
haven't worked on it myself i do get a
sense of the the level of difficulty
in in realizing that
that that goal
um so that book is in the 90s so as
google
is coming to be
essentially
uh not google but the search engine the
initial search engines event which gave
birth to google essentially in in
contrast
right yeah yeah that was still in the
era of alta vista and ask jeeves and
multiple different uh search
engines and yeah i'm pretty sure i had
not heard of google at that point that
would have been 95 96 i think the book
came out in 94.
and then of course the social networks
followed which is another form
of um
guidance through the space of
information yeah
well what happens is that these things
come along and then people find ways to
game them
and so i saw an interesting thread the
other day pointing out that
you know
20 years ago if you had googled
pythagorean theorem
uh
chances are you would have been taken
directly to the page explaining the
pythagorean theorem if you do it now
you're probably going to
the top hits are going to be from
somebody who's who's got an angle who's
got a scheme right they're like trying
to sell you math tutoring
or you know they're
they're working some kind of marketing
plan on you
so
the the traditional engines become
actually less useful over time for their
original educational
purpose
that doesn't mean that they can't
it shouldn't be replaced by newer and
better ones
first of all to defend the people with
the angle
right
they're trying to find business models
yeah fund
oftentimes which is funny you went with
i think
like you went at math
those greedy bastards
but it's great it's great how can we
monetize the pythagorean theorem yeah
well
i mean education right yes to figure out
like
people who love math education for
example
love it purely not purely but very often
love it
for itself for just teaching math yeah
but then they start
you know when coming face to face with
for example like the youtube algorithm
they start to try to figure out okay how
can i make money off of this the the
primary goal is still
that love of education but they also
want to to make that love of education
of their full-time job but
i see that sort of that dance of
humanity with the algorithms as uh it
finds this kind of local pocket of
optimality that's or sub-optimality
whatever yeah it gets stuck in it anyway
it's a pocket of some sort and but i see
that pocket is way better than what we
had before
in the 80s right 90s before the internet
but like and now we're now this is this
is also human nature we start uh writing
very eloquent articles about how
this pocket is clearly pocket it's not
very good and we can imagine much better
lands far beyond and but the reality is
it's better than before yeah and now
we're waiting for
we have to escape yeah minimum and you
have to wait either for lone geniuses or
for some kind of momentum of a group of
geniuses that just say enough is enough
i have an idea yeah this is how we get
out and it's too easy to be sort of i
think uh partially because you can get a
lot of clicks in your articles being
cynical about being in this pocket and
we were forever stuck in this pocket and
then like coming up with this grandiose
theory that humanity has finally
like is collapsing
stuck forever like a prison in this
pocket but reality they're just it's
like it's just clickbait articles and
and books until we
one curious aunt comes up with the next
pocket yeah tunnels through the barrier
or gets enough energy to jump over the
barrier and eventually we'll be
as you've talked about i mean we'll be
we'll colonize the solar system and then
uh we'll be stuck in the solar system
and then people will say well we're
screwed when because when the sun energy
runs out there's no way to get to the
the next solar system and then and so on
it goes on until we colonize the
entirety of the observable universe yeah
i think i think getting out of the solar
system is going to be a hard one but so
can you you mention this can you
elaborate
why you think
back to sort of a serious question why
do you think it's hard to get outside of
our solar system it's just an energy
calcul i mean
you can do it slowly
uh whenever you want um
but uh the idea of getting there in you
know one lifetime or multiple
a few lifetimes is requires huge amounts
of energy to
to accelerate um and then you've as soon
as you get halfway there you need to
expend an equal amount of energy to
decelerate or you'll just go shooting by
and so um
that means carrying a lot of energy and
there's there's
ideas like yuri milner
i think is still funding the the idea to
use laser propulsion to send something
uh to another star system a small object
um
but it'll have no way to slow down
as far as i know they never talk about
that part yeah like how do i slow down
yeah
um so it's a quick flyby you take a good
picture i guess yeah you better take
some good pictures on your way by so and
that's great if it happens i'm not
knocking it
but
the amount of energy is is that's needed
is just staggering and there's there's
other issues like just how do you
maintain
uh
an ecosystem for that long in isolation
uh how do you prevent people from going
crazy what happens if you hit something
while traveling at a significant
fraction of the speed of light what
about it sort of
some combination of expanding human
lifespan but also just
good old-fashioned
stable society on a spaceship yeah yeah
the generation ship yeah yeah yeah no i
think that's the only way it would it
would have to keep going for a long time
um
and they might get to where they're
going and find
a shitty um solar system like we can try
to
we can try to do some advanced survey
but
i mean if you get there
and all the planets in that solar system
are just garbage planets then it's kind
of a big letdown
for for this like thousand-year voyage
that you've just uh you've just been on
right so i mean we have a pretty narrow
range of
of parameters that we need to stay
between in order to survive um in terms
of the the gravitational uh field that
we can deal with um
so that such a sets of bound on the size
of the the planet
and um what we need in the way of
temperature and atmosphere and so on
so
when you look at all those complications
then basically
building uh
uh sort of
exactly the environment we want out of
available materials in this solar system
starts to look a hell of a lot better
it's hard to make
an economic argument let's say for for
for making that journey
uh one of the things i like about the
expanse is the fact that the people who
are trying to build the starship to go
to the other solar system are doing it
for religious reasons
i think that's the only reason that you
would do it
because economically it just makes more
sense to build
rotating cylindrical space habitats and
make them perfect
well is isn't everything done for
religious reasons like why do we
exploration yeah like what why why do we
go to the moon again
and do the other things uh what does jfk
said is because not because they're easy
but because they're hard it's not kind
of a religious reason
i knew a veteran of the apollo program
who once said that the apollo moon
landings were communism's greatest
achievement
yeah so the conflict between nations is
a kind of
um not exactly a religion but it's what
you're talking about well it's a
struggle for meaning yeah i mean uh and
that meaning isn't found in some kind of
it's it's hard to find meaning in
mathematics yeah it's it's found in some
kind of
in music and religion whatever art i
mean some people do
but those are
probably not enough of them to
well they uh people that find beauty uh
meaning in mathematics they usually find
meaning between the lines nevertheless
not in the actual uh
for like the proving
proving some kind of thing fair enough
yeah so
from a cost perspective do you actually
see a possible future where we're b
building these kind of generation ships
and just
why not launch them one a year
out
like uh like wandering ants i'll come to
the
into the galaxy
i have nothing against it uh it's just
like i said it's got a
the motivation to do it has to come from
um some kind of spiritual or
or kind of non-tangible
uh calculus from a business model
perspective you don't think there's a
business model there no no way
one of the many fascinating things
you've done in your life
you were
at the very beginning you were the
person that can feel convinced basis to
start a spaceship company a space
company
you were there at blue origin
for a few years in the beginning
working on alternate
propulsion systems
and at least according to wikipedia uh
alternate business models
yeah i mean to go back to the first
thing you said uh jeff bezos is not a
guy who required a lot of convincing
um he'd been thinking about it since he
was five years old and it was an
inevitability but
um the
the idea um
that that kind of got hatched in 1999
was to um
just do some uh advanced scouting work
you know
explore the corners of the the space of
possibilities
and so that's what uh
that was blue operations llc which was
the precursor to blue origin
and um
so it was a small staff of people that
that did that for a few years and i
think it was about 2003 2004 that
uh it swung decisively towards the
direction it's it's been following ever
since which is you know using
basically existing aerospace
technologies and models to make chemical
fueled rockets
for for space tourism
uh i believe and i continue to believe
that the the fact that we use chemical
rockets is just an accident of history
that comes out of world war ii
so until world war ii rockets are being
built on a small scale by people like
robert goddard
but then
hitler
desperately wants to bomb london
but he can't quite reach it and the
liftwaffe has been kind of neutralized
so
he he decides he's going to lob warheads
into it with with rockets
which is a terrible
misallocation of resources it's a
terrible idea but
so it only could have happened in a
dictatorship controlled by
a lunatic um
but that's that's the situation that
existed so they built these rockets they
you know that's the v2
um and then it's just a complete
coincidence that that war ends with um
atomic bombs being developed in a
completely separate
super weapon program
and so suddenly the the existence of the
bombs
creates a demand for rockets that didn't
exist before
because if you've got
atomic bombs you need a way to deliver
them you can do with bombers but
it's a lot better to just hurl them
to the other side of the world on the
top of a rocket
so um so suddenly
rockets which had gotten a boost
because of hitler's v2 program got a
much bigger boost
during the
50s and 60s
and it is a complete you're right for
some reason never thought of this it is
an accident of history that nuclear
weapons are developed at a similar time
first of all nuclear weapons didn't have
to be developed at the same time as
world war ii right that's an accident in
history yeah and the fact
that okay so then hitler started using
rockets that's an accident okay
that's fascinating it's a fascinating uh
set of coincidences yeah and which is
true of a lot of technologies by the way
but by the time these rockets are kind
of working um we've got hydrogen bombs
that
are so big and so devastating that
nobody really wants to use them but it
turns out you can fit a capsule with a
couple of people in it
into the the socket on the end of a of a
missile that was made to hold a hydrogen
bomb
so um
so we start doing that instead
as a proxy
for for having a war
um
and um i'd love to be in the meeting
where the first guy brought that up as
an idea
it's probably a russian why don't we
strap a person to the rocket yeah
yeah well it probably was because they
did it first right uh the russians did
it and they had perhaps less respect for
sort of safety protocols could be
they're a little bit more uh willing to
sacrifice the life of an astronaut or to
risk the life of an astronaut
yeah yeah this is basically the story of
how
through all of this competition and
because of these historical accidents
you know trillions of r d dollars and
rubles were put into
development of chemical rocket
technology which is you know now
advanced to an incredibly high degree
but there's other ways to make things go
really fast
which is like all that rockets do
that's all orbit is it's just going
really fast
and
because so many nerds are obsessed with
space people have been
uh thinking about alternate schemes for
as long as they've been thinking about
rockets
um and so one of the first things that
you that i learned
kind of trying to explore new
possibilities
uh
was that
i could
put all of my brain power to work and
and be creative as i could and and
invent some idea that i thought was new
for making things go fast and i would
always find out that some guy in russia
or somewhere had had thought the same
idea up 50 years ago
and figured out all the math yeah you
know and so
so at a certain point you give up on
trying to invent completely new ideas
and just go
poking around trying to find those guys
um so there's a number of uh
of ideas that we looked at
you know some are crazier some are less
crazy but um the direction that that
company eventually took was was chemical
rockets is there something you can
comment on possible ideas like so first
of all like
i mean uh
uh like you could use nuclear so nuclear
pulse propulsion
yeah so that's i mean you've probably
heard of project orion which um
was the
freeman dyson and
some of his collaborators
had a scheme to um
to power a large space vehicle by
detonating atomic bombs behind it
and so one of the other people who was
working at blue operations during this
time was george dyson the son of freeman
and so we knew all about
project orion
and he found an old
film that they'd shot on a beach in la
jolla of a prototype of this that was
powered by
uh like
uh lumps of c4
so that was an idea but for private
company
obtaining a large number of atomic bombs
was probably out of scope so
there's more of a theoretical
thing there's a
conceptually similar
approach using lasers that
uh that freeman worked on
with arthur kantrowitz and some others
where you take a pulse blazer
and you fire it at a vehicle that has a
block of ice on the back
and the pulse hits the
ice and
flashes off a layer of steam that
becomes plasma
and plasma is opaque because it conducts
and so being opaque it then absorbs all
of the energy from the laser pulse and
gets really hot and just pushes
on the back of the the block of ice
and then you wait a moment for that to
dissipate and then you do it again
so it would just kind of uh vibrate its
way
like it sounds really violent but
freeman said that if you were wearing
like rubber soled tennis shoes standing
in this vehicle you would just feel a
mild
vibration
so there your source of energy is on the
ground and you're getting higher
specific impulse than you could get by
burning chemicals
jordan care and others worked on another
laser system the late dr jordan care
that just would heat up a heat exchanger
by
converging many converging solid-state
lasers from the ground
and kevin parkin
um works on a similar scheme that just
uses uh microwaves
to do that
we looked at
tall towers
i spent a while looking kind of semi
seriously a giant bull whips
um with a bull lip
just a whip just uh
you have them here in texas right
yeah i understand
but how does that have to do with
propulsion if you think about it a whip
is an incredibly simple primitive object
that can break the speed of sound
so it's unbelievable in a way that for
thousands of years
people with no technology
have been able to
to accelerate objects through the speed
of sound
just through an architectural trick
just just you know just the physics of a
moving bend of material in a medium
can do this so
[Music]
so that's the thing i still think about
from time to time you can use the same
physics to make freestanding loops of
chain or
or other
flexible materials
that just kind of stand up under their
own
[Music]
physics
i mean it's kind of awesome
to imagine so imagine using the same
kind of physics of a whip
but have
at the end of it
a spaceship yeah
that would detach
at the moment of maximum
velocity why
why not
why wouldn't that so part of
my motivation in studying that was to
ask that that question it was it was
more uh almost a
symbolic way of saying
look
there's
all kinds of physics we haven't
explored yet um that it's no more crazy
than the idea of chemical rockets
um
it's just that uh more money's gone into
chemical rockets right
but can i ask you uh
a question on propulsion that's a little
bit more
out there so
i don't know if you've
seen
quite a
a lot of recent articles and reports and
so on about
uh ufos like the tic tac aircraft i keep
seeing a lot of
chatter about it but i haven't gone
deep into it
so the dod released footage
filmed by
pilots
and there's a lot of reports about
objects that moved in ways they haven't
seen before that seem to defy the laws
of physics
if we consider the aircraft that we have
today
and so the reason i asked you
that is because it kind of um
to me
whatever the heck it is
it's inspiring
for the possibilities of ideas for
propulsion
if it's like um
secret projects from foreign nations
or it's physical phenomena that we don't
yet understand like ball lightning all
those kinds of things or if it is aliens
or
objects from an alien civilization i
most likely believe it's if it's an
object from an alien civilization it's
got to be like
a really dumb drone they just like got
lost it's definitely not
like the pinnacle
of intelligence it's like some like
teenagers like uh science fair
experiment yeah he just flew for for a
few centuries out and just landed and
then we humans are all like really
excited about this
yes this wild thing i mean what what do
you think about those um
first of all like the millions of
reports of ufos right there's some
psychology there that's deeply cultural
uh but also the possibility of aliens
having visited earth
yeah i mean i'd like to see some better
pictures
for the reason i mentioned earlier
having to do with the difficulty of
traveling between star systems
it's really hard for me to believe it's
aliens
i just can't understand why you would
go to all that trouble to transport
something across light years
and then
do what these ufos
are allegedly doing
like how is that interesting how does
that justify
the trip so if you travel
across
you know those kinds of distances you'd
make a bigger splash
first of all i would expect that the
the arrival of these things would be
something we'd notice it's gotta you
know decelerate into into our solar
system
by
unless it got here really really really
slowly so i guess that's
that's a possibility and just kind of
snuck in so at the end we would detect
some kind of footprint in terms of
energy you would think so i actually
think your idea of a science fair
project gone gone bad
you know it makes more sense
in in that it would explain why these if
these things are alien technologies
they're just kind of
hanging around our aircraft carriers for
no particular reason like doing doing
not trying to communicate yeah you know
is it can you imagine a scenario
where
aliens have visited earth or are
visiting earth and we wouldn't notice it
at all oh sure i mean if they've got
technology to
to get here they've probably got
technology to conceal the fact oh
they're trying to conceal themselves i
meant more like they're not trying to
conceal themselves but we're just our
cognitive capabilities are
like too limited and we are not thinking
big enough we're looking for a little
green men yeah we're looking for things
that operate at a time scale that's
human-like
uh you know it's
yeah no i i love thinking about ideas
like that that's great science fiction
novel father you know that the aliens
are are so different uh that we simply
don't don't see them
i mean is there um you know in terms of
language do you think
it would be difficult
not aliens visiting us but traveling to
other places to find a common language
you you've written about the importance
of language in intelligent civilizations
um
how difficult is the problem to bridge
the gap between aliens and humans
yeah in terms of language so we're not
lost in translation yeah i mean there's
different takes on that depending on how
biologically similar they are
to us you know i mean there's a school
of thought that says
basically
uh
advanced life has to be carbon based
for just reasons of chemistry so right
away if you impose that limitation then
you're you're kind of assuming a uh
something that's starting to be
biologically similar to us
so if they're about as big as we are and
uh you know they um they they kind of
move around in in space you know a
physical body the way we do then then
there's probably a way to to solve that
communication problem
uh if they're you know like beings of
pure energy from star trek or something
like that then
it's a different story well i love
thinking about that kind of stuff too i
mean this
you know
consciousness itself may be maybe
i mean it could be
like you said beings of pure energy
um i i think i think of life
as just complex systems and the kind of
forms those complex systems can take
seems to be much larger than the
particular biological systems we see
here on
earth um i have to ask a twitter
question okay about aliens yeah you're
ready this is for twitter i'm ready what
would you expect from twitter can humans
have sex with aliens
and yes
you can pass
i asked the language question can the
community communicate yeah
can they fall in love before before sex
that's how it works
so which question are am i answering the
sex or the the love
um i mean
it depends what is more fundamental to
relations across
yeah across intelligent species yeah i
mean um
you know sex can mean a lot of things um
so i mean
uh if your production right you know the
the
when in star trek in classic star trek
you had to
to really
suspend your disbelief to to think that
um
spock was half vulcan and half human
right because that's just
not gonna not gonna work dna wise um
so um
so if by sex you mean reproductive sex
then um
uh i would say no unless
you unless you go to a panspermia
kind of theory which is that
uh you know humans were seeded onto the
planet as part of a galactic uh you know
uh
program of some of some sort
and then we're just returning home yeah
and hanging out with our
old relatives assistant cousins yeah
yeah
but that that doesn't seem
you know it doesn't seem
seem plausible we know that we know that
humans had sex with neanderthals with
denisovans denisovans
so you could think of them as aliens
that that came from our
planet
um
so um so that's a kind of data point i
guess
but
you know if you broaden your definition
of sex to mean any kind of
uh gratifying physical
interaction then sure
right
dancing and that's that's how we get to
love
okay and love can take many forms love
can certainly take many forms i have to
ask you um in terms of space
just looking at where blue origin is
looking at where spacex is today
and maybe looking out 10 20 years out
from now
are you impressed of what's happening we
just saw william shatner go up to space
yeah i was i was just watching his video
this morning before i came here yeah
are you impressed to where things stand
today yeah i mean
i mean spacex
in particular is has
done things that are just unbelievable
um
and um
yeah i don't think anyone was
anticipating
um 20 years ago let's say when this all
started just the uh the speed with which
they'd be able to um rack up these
incredible
achievements
if you've kind of uh
even seen a little bit of how the
sausage is made and and so the the the
difficulty of of doing any kind of space
travel
um
what they've achieved is uh
is just uh
is is unbelievable what about the maybe
a question about elon musk
um even more than jeff bezos
he has a very kind of
ambitious vision
of um this
project that we're on as a species yeah
of becoming a multiplanatarian species
and becoming that quickly
yeah as soon as possible landing on mars
colonizing mars what do you think of
that project
there's two questions to ask first the
question is what what do you think about
the project of colonizing mars
and second
what do you think
about a human being
who is so
unapologetically ambitious
at achieving the impossible at what a
lot of people would say is impossible i
think that colonizing mars is the kind
of
of gold that's uh it's easily
stated uh
it's um it's catchy it's it's it's the
kind of thing that
that can inspire people to get involved
in a way that some other programs might
not
um so i think it's well chosen in that
way
i have technical questions about um
you know there's there's a problem of
perchlorates uh on the surface of mars
that's going to be big trouble
um
and there's there's radiation so and
this is known i'm uh
but um what about business questions
do you think cause you mentioned sort of
uh
going outside of the solar system would
would best be done for religious reasons
um what about colonizing mars
can you spin it into a business
proposition it's hard to
think of a resource that's on mars that
could be brought back here cheaply
enough to compete
with um
with stuff we could just dig out of the
ground here or grow here
so i don't know if there is a business
plan for that or if it's just strictly
we're going to go there
and and see what happens
um you know
maybe again we need communism to kind of
yeah to get us going
to give us a reason a little bit of the
competition well there's plenty of
people who are sufficiently excited by
the colonized mars vision that they're
willing to to just go all in on it
even if there's not a business
plan behind it
so so i think it's well chosen it's just
uh
um
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i i think it's probably the only um
the only approach to take
um
you know a lot of the when when white
people came to this continent and and
started colonizing it
you know
uh
there was not a lot of coherent planning
like what what plans they did have
turned out to be terrible plans um you
know trying to come up with plans that
extend decades into the future is
uh is a waste of time to do it for the
kind of
like unexplainable love of the unknown
like like
the the uh the journey towards
exploring the unknown yeah and just kind
of keep going yeah
well you saw it with shatner and his
uh reaction to the the flight uh
yesterday
um
he uh
um
for him that trip was
more than worth it just for these
intangible reasons
what did he say i haven't watched the
video yet he was trying to express the
the talking a lot about the moment where
suddenly you kind of
rise above the the thin blue blanket of
uh
of the atmosphere and and you're up into
the the blackness um and uh
that had a huge
impact on him so he was kind of uh i
wouldn't say groping for words because
he was pretty eloquent but
he was trying to express his feelings
about that
in a way that is pretty pretty gripping
to watch
so
you've worked on this kind of stuff we
can go back to 10 years ago you wrote an
essay
called innovation starvation you worked
on this kind of idea uh since then
kind of looking at
uh maybe a little bit cynically about
our age today and our unwillingness to
take on big risky projects
so in the face of that what do you think
of people like elon musk
because to me people like that
are inspiring and gives you hope in the
face of
a more kind of um
pessimistic perspective
of our age
yeah well he's clearly willing to tackle
um
[Music]
big ambitious uh projects uh without a
lot of
kind of
soul searching or uh or were
trying to make up his mind right it's
just like
um
just go and do it let's dig tunnels
under cities go you know let's uh um
step one make a joke about on twitter
step two actually do it yeah yeah
yeah
and uh i mean things have slowed down uh
quite our ability to um
to build things uh uh
at pace um is is a lot less than it was
and there's there's reasons for that you
know we're more concerned with safety
and
environmental impacts than um than
people were when they were building
uh some of the great publix works
projects of the mid
20th century
but even we're at the point now where
even just maintaining the stuff that
we've got is such a huge
project
that we need to put big resources into
it and and good minds into it
or else we're going to be we're going to
be losing
things that we
take for granted
do you think that there's a lot to be
done in the digital space that's uh we
mentioned sort of wikipedia and
knowledge
don't you think there could be a lot of
flourishing in the space of innovation
in terms of innovation in in the digital
space
yeah i mean i'd like to see that i think
it's where
a lot of the brain power went during the
last couple of generations
because people who who might previously
have been building rockets or
or other kinds of sort of hard
technologies
ended up instead going into programming
computer science
which is understandable and great
we've got structural problems right now
in the way social media works that are
pretty severe and so
i
certainly hope that we're not
10 years from now that we're not exactly
where we are today
when it comes to to that stuff we need
to move on
the beautiful thing
about problems is they show you how not
to do things yeah and they give you give
opportunity to
new ideas to flourish
and to beat out the ideas of the old
which is uh
a dream for me in in
to see um
new social media yeah that beats out the
ways to go so i i tend to you perhaps
agree that it's not that it's impossible
to do social media well well not at all
i mean i i listened to your uh interview
with jaren a couple weeks ago and i
i know jaren and we've
you know we've talked about this and he
went he went hard on me he basically
said like it is very impossible he's
very nice well the last time i kind of
paid attention to jaron's thoughts on
and he was thinking in terms of
that basically there should be you know
payments
uh such that if i by clicking the like
button on something i'm essentially
giving
um
valuable intellectual property
to facebook or twitter or whatever
it's not a very large amount of ip but
it's definitely a transfer of
information that that when they
aggregate it is beneficial to them so
and now i now i do remember that he uh
on on his interview with you was talking
about
what data unions or
yeah those are a lot of interesting
ideas but for me
the biggest disagreement
was in the level of cynicism
he has a distrust and cynicism towards
people in silicon valley being able to
do these kinds of things
and i'm really
okay when you have a large crowd of
people that are doing things the wrong
way
you should nevertheless maintain
optimism because
what's important is to find the one
person in that room that's going to do
things the right way cynicism is going
to completely silence out the whole room
so he was saying i've i've been here a
long time oh yeah i i've known you know
i i underst like how these folks work
they think
they're gods
and they know the right way to do things
and they will
tell you how to do those things and that
kind of hubris is going to always lead
you astray
when you are the one who's engineering
the algorithms
and there's a lot of deep truth to that
because algorithms are powerful
and uh many people when given power
do not do the best of things i mean most
what is it uh the old lincoln line if
you want to test the man's character
give him power yeah
yes but that doesn't mean that some
people are not able to handle the power
that some people are not able to come up
with good uh
ideas that create better social media
yeah i didn't interpret jaron's
statements as being entirely cynical and
hopeless i mean he's definitely
raising
you know issues of concern
but he wouldn't be out you know writing
the books that he's written and talking
about this stuff if you didn't think
there was a way if if you didn't think
there was hope yeah and part of it as
you probably know with jiren he just
loves a good argument yeah
he's just loves to have a little bit of
fun
well i have to ask you about uh i mean
we talked about
taking all
big
bold risky ideas so in your new book
termination shock
it's set here in texas
part of it is yeah yeah most of it yeah
it's a great place to set it so in it
the main character tr
mccool again a texas billionaire oil man
and truck stop magnate
decides to solve climate change to take
on climate change by himself so this is
an interesting philosophical exploration
of how to solve climate change from a
perspective that's perhaps different
than we've been thinking about i
wouldn't i wouldn't use the word solve
but let's say
ameliorate ameliorate the temporary
effects but please take on yeah take on
the challenge so it's it's very
interesting but as
there's a gradual nature to this process
and
i mean just like in in your book
um
the power of innovation
is something that has uh
saved us quite a few times in history
so what role does that play as in this
gradual process right so ultimately
we don't solve the problem until we get
the
co2 out of the atmosphere
um but that is going to take a while um
we're still adding more
uh we haven't even started to
to reduce the amount so
um so there's two possibilities inside
to interrupt reduce the amount that
we're putting in the atmosphere and two
is removing what we got in the
atmosphere we have to do both right and
those are two different kind of uh
efforts in terms of like what's involved
because it stays up there so
i think just last week china
announced that they're going to try to
level off
their co2 emissions
in like 2030
so 2031 they'll only put as much co2
into the atmosphere as they did in 2030
which is still
a lot of co2
in 2060 they're saying will be net zero
so if everyone in the world does that
and the ppm
of co2 in the atmosphere by then is say
450 parts per million it'll stay at 450
parts per million
until we take it out
and taking it out
um is hard it's a you know it's a big
we took us a long time we had to empty
out huge coal mines
and oil reservoirs and burn all that
stuff we had to chop down forests and
dig up peat bogs
in order to create all of that co2 and
so we have to reverse all of those
processes uh somehow in order to
remove the co2 and get it back down
hopefully into the 200 and some parts
per million range where it used to be
so how about you get a a single texas
billionaire
to have a massive gun that blasts huge
quantities of sulfur into the upper
atmosphere so that's idea number one
that's uh this is called solar
geoengineering and it's uh
we know that it's a possibility on a
technical level because volcanoes have
been doing it forever
um so many times in human history we've
seen a volcanic eruption
that was followed by a global cooling
trend that lasted for a couple of years
and one of these things happened i think
in the 60s or 70s in indonesia and
and the australians sent a a plane up
into the stratosphere to take some
samples of the plume
and when it came back down the
windscreen of the plane had sort of a
deposit
on it so one of the australian
scientists
licked it
and reported that it was painfully acid
so that was our first kind of clue that
what was being injected into the
stratosphere was sulfur dioxide
so um
and and so we know
then well pinot tubo came along in the
90s and and did this experiment for us
so we know that
sulfur in the in the stratosphere it
forms little uh spherical droplets of
sulfuric acid after it combines with
water and
those bounce back some of the sun's rays
and
reduce the amount of solar energy
entering
the troposphere which is where we live
so um
so we know that it works and we've we
also know that this stuff goes away
after a couple of years
so it gradually washes out and so it's
not a permanent thing you have to the
it's the good news bad news is
um
good news is it's not permanent so if
you don't like
what's happening you can just stop and
wait a couple years
and you'll get back to where you started
and the the bad news if if you're in
favor of this kind of thing is that you
have to keep doing it
forever
or um
so so this guy is one of those
he's read these papers he under the tr
the character in the book he knows all
this
and all all people who
are familiar with climate science are
kind of know this it's a pretty well
established fact
and so um
he just decides he's going to take
action unilaterally and and do this
um
and so
there's different ways to get the sulfur
up there but because it's texas he
builds the biggest gun in the world
he's just six barrels pointed straight
up and he begins firing shells loaded
with sulfur
into the stratosphere and so the book is
about not so much that as
how people react to his doing that
what the political ramifications are
around the world because
you know this is a extremely
controversial
idea
and not everyone's on board with it
and even if you
are willing to consider
using a technological intervention the
the fact is that it's going to have
different effects on different parts of
the world so some areas may suffer
negative uh you know more negatives than
positives
uh and they're not going to be happy
so what do you think uh so in in his
case in tr's case he can get around
you know getting permission from
governments
if we were to look at our
us facing um
outside of the store us facing climate
change where do you think the solution
will come from governments working
together or from
bold
billionaire texans
i'm pretty sure that this kind of
intervention is never going to emerge
from
western
democracies
um this kind of sorry government
coordinated uh uh which which option one
solar geo engineering soldier
engineering yeah from a government from
our offer like those are i i want to
sort of the distinction
one is the idea the technological idea
you're talking about but two uh two is
like
who comes up with the idea and agrees on
it governments or individuals yeah if
this were to happen i think it would be
either an individual or more likely just
a
some government somewhere that just
decides it's in their interests to
to unilaterally do this
and you know that's not me advocating it
it's just
it's so
it would be comparatively so cheap and
easy to implement the solar
geoengineering scheme
that
someone is probably going to do it once
things get get bad enough but i don't
think that the government will i think
or western governments just because
they're not um
well we've seen what happened with with
vaccines right so
you know getting
getting people to to take vaccinations
or wear masks you know has turned out to
be
incredibly hard even though it might it
might save those people's lives
see i blame
that's not western that's i blame
failure of leadership there of leaders
being
not coming off as authentic not being
inspiring uniting all those kinds of
things i think that's possible i think
it's it's just that we've gotten the
leaders we have right now aren't the
right people aren't the right people
because we've lived through kind of a
long stretch of relatively comfortable
times
and if it feels like
unfortunate if you just look at history
that hard times make great leaders and
easy times make
like bureaucrats that are
egotistical and greedy and
not very interesting and not very bold
yeah no i think that's fair so you know
we may be entering one of those
interesting times you know of hardship
in the chinese curse sense yeah
so um
um so i could be wrong but i mean there
have been some efforts to uh
explore
solar geoengineering uh there was a
uh
a plan to send up some balloons high
altitude balloons to take some
measurements
uh
in scandinavia that got um squashed by
uh objections from people who lived up
there uh uh who
who were just opposed to
the whole program on on principle
um so we'll see a lot more of that
and it's going to be a hard program to
advocate for just because i think people
don't quite understand how much carbon
dioxide is in the atmosphere
and how far we are from from even
slowing down
the rate that we're adding more to say
nothing of
bringing that number down
we're a long way out from from that
do you see in terms of portfolio of
solutions us becoming a multi-planetary
species as part of that
as a as this also being a motivator for
investing some percent
of gdp into becoming a multi-planetary
species and what percent should that be
you think you know in an indirect way
maybe i mean you know what people will
say which is this the same argument that
has been leveled against
space exploration since the apollo
program which is why we solve
our problems here on earth before we uh
spend money going into space so i've
never been a believer in that that
argument
i think
um
there could be uh a sense in which the
new perspective that
could be obtained by
uh
thinking about
like if we're thinking about
terraforming
mars
changing its atmosphere making it more
amenable to to life and survival
um
you could see that maybe changing
people's opinions about terraforming the
earth
yeah
there are some dangerous consequences to
this particular
uh idea
of blasting sulfur uh of geoengineering
um
what do you make of sort of
big bold ideas that have uh
that are a double-edged sword are all
ideas like this all big ideas like this
they have uh
they have the potential
to have
highly beneficial consequences and a
potential to have highly destructive
consequences
i wouldn't say all i think you know
going back to the
what we were talking about earlier you
know how technology developed in the 50s
and 60s there was a period of time there
when
people maybe had unrealistic ideas about
new technology and weren't sufficiently
attentive to
the possible downsides
so
so we got um
and and there's a reason why i mean uh
the
the there's
you know in in the mid 20th century we
saw you know antibiotics we saw the
polio vaccine we saw
just simple things like refrigerators in
the home you know
my my grandmother to her dying day
called the refrigerator the ice box
because when she grew up it was a box
with ice in it
so you see all that change and it's
largely for the benefit of people and so
if somebody comes along
and says hey we're going to build
nuclear reactors to to make energy or
here's a new
chemical called ddt that's goin