#2217 - Brian Cox
03:01:34 Share

The joe rogan experience.

Good see, sir. Good see again. How's things in the world of the discovery of the universe exciting?

Yes, I say i've been doing some work on blank holes recently, which I hadn't started last time you actually. So I got interested in IT and the the amount of the progresses been made in trying to understand how they work. And and a question that was posed by Stephen hawking a long time ago, really one thousand seventies, early one thousand nine eighties, which is what happens to stuff that falls in. But the simple question you could possibly ask, right, progress be made on that now, which I think is profound, an exciting.

How is the progress being made? Like how do we how do we study a black hole?

IT is mainly theoretical, although we have now got photographs of them. So we have two photographs, which radio telescope photographs, right one of the the one in the center of our galaxy, which is a little one called sagetown arias a star a is is a little supermassive black hole, so so about six million times the mass of the sun, which takes IT a little supermassive.

Er, and there is another one of the first place that was taken, it's a colleran called event horizon. And they took at a photo of one in the galaxy, eighty seven, fifty five million light years away. That thing is around six billion times the master of the sun. Imagine that six thousand million times more massive than I A sun.

Is that the largest black hole we've ever discover?

There are bigger ones than that. That's that's the scale of them makes a big issue one on that. But you think about I think so there's a number is called the the swatch ual radius of the things. So if if you took our sun, which you can fit a million earths inside and collapsed IT down to make a black hole, IT would form a black hole when IT shunk within a radius of three, three kilometers, about two miles. So you got to take this thing, which is what I have to convert from kilometers to miles down.

And seven thousand kilometers .

is about five, five, five thousand miles. Radio saw something like that. The sun, so you see you squashed down to its about two miles, and then that would form a black hole.

The six billion times the mass of the sun means you motifs that by six billion. So these things that the psychos washed, al radio is, are now large in our solar system, basically. Oh my god, that sits in in the galaxy. So we got these two .

photographs larger .

than our sources yeah the event so it's a big structure that's that's no that's a changer x ray image of there IT is that's IT. So so the that one there that's the I mate is seven black hole. So what what you're seen there is the emission from the material that swail in around, it's called the accretion desk.

So you have a material that's all bitting very fast, emitting a lot of radiation. And that's what you see is a flat desk, by the way. So you think, think that and drinks.

So this is in material. He's very flat. But what you're seen in that photograph is the light rays being bent around the black hole from that flat disk.

So that was a prediction from minds theory, basically published in one thousand nine hundred and fifteen. And you can predict that. That's what one should look like. And then just about was at four years ago now, maybe five years ago, for the first time in history, we get an image of one, and IT looks like the prediction.

So it's a remarkable thing. How phenomenal.

Yeah so we've we ve had this two photographs. The other thing we've had is so called gravitational wave detections. So these are colliding, black holds, and they collide and merge together. And obviously, that's quite a violent event in the universe. And so that that event, that that process ripples space, time.

So IT sends ripples out in the fabric of the universe, space and time, and actually keep there is A I i've spoke to to him several times, is one of the great right when the nobel prize for this. And he calls IT a storing time, so you get a time storm. So really, we were to think, as we speak now there will be these very tiny rifles from violent cosmic events pass through this room, and they're change in the rate that time passes.

So they go through and we can detect that now. So we have detectives that can pick that up. And so we've seen those collisions as well.

So these collisions.

how far away? Oh, millions of light years away.

And they are affecting what's happened .

in this room right now. Yeah, to a tiny extent. So this experiment called ligo, which is the extend for something like gravity into form, eto, I can't member exactly what basically IT said later.

Beans, and there's one in washington and state north of seal, and one in lousianner, and that they can laser beams four kilometer along laser beams at right angles, and they can detect these very tiny ships in the effectively, you could say the length of the laser beam is a bit more fitly in complicated, but IT IT essentially measures this, the distortion in space time caused by these rips. And it's is way less than the diameter of an atomic nucleus, by the way, way less these little god. And and so we started to we've observed many of those close averis ligo.

So it's just basically two laser beam that but these ultra high precision thing. And so we ve got data now of the collision of black holes and that those event arises in peaches with radio telescopes. So that's that's part of IT.

But the main that has been theoretical advances in understanding exactly in a sense, he was what's wrong with Stephen and hawking's calculation, which is that we had thing to say sometimes if you think Steven hawking sure didn't get his math wrong, but he did actually in is so what you calculated back in thousand and seventy three, thousand and seventy four, is there a black hole? So we pick you this thing from which nothing can escape, even light. So when you go in, you're gone.

Basically, what he calculated is that even though these things are just a distortion in space and time, that's that's the description of them. So so much said there's nothing there apart from a distortion in space and time, he calculated that they glow, so they have a temperature so that they met radiation called hawking radiation. And so important was that discovery that he got to westminster abby in london.

Look on the florida, the ambition on his memorial stone, and he's in their next to newton and shakespeare and all these people, and he's there, incited in stone on the floor of westminster's, his equation for the temperature of a black hole. So this is tremendously important discovery. So you discovers these things glow, and you calculates how they glow in the very low temperature.

But they meet things, which means that they shrink because they they're emitting stuff and so they shrinking, so that means they have a lifetime. So first of all, one day they'll be gone. So that means that you have to address this question.

What happened to all the stuff that felling? And his calculation said that there's no record at all of anything that fell in in all this radiation that come off the black hole. So is IT purely information less radiation? So what that means is that black holes destroy information according to that calculation.

And that's a big deal because nowhere else in all of physics does anything you raise information from the universe. So it's really true that if I got this this note in pan, right, I wrote some things on IT, and then I set fire to this, even just instinct IT put IT in a nuclear explosion, whatever, in principle, according to all the laws of nature that we know. If you collected everything that came off, all the radiation, all the bits of actions and things, and you could just measure IT all, then, just in principle, the idea is you could reconstruct the information.

So i'll get scrambled up and throw out into. In some practice, you can do IT. But in just in principle, the laws of nature say the information is not destroyed.

It's just scrambled up in a way that you can't reconstruct, right? But this calculation, Steven did said there is no information in that radiation at all. zero. I just nothing. So IT seems that uniquely in the universe, black holes erased information when you .

say there's no information like how you measuring, whether not there's information in IT.

So so really emit something. The here is. And I since it's very much in principal this so no, no one thinks you practice, you could reconstruct what I wrote down on this if you set fit. But in principle.

or may be some time in the future, million years in principle, you could just .

collect everything then somewhere in that, in that, in that all that radiation, and actually is a light that come off. The thing is, the information is, is there so you could reconstruct the book or what I wrote on this page in principal. But the thing about Steven's calculation was that even in principle, IT said, there is no information.

And by the way, that is kind of easy to see why, actually, because this radiation, this hawking radiation that comes off the blank hole, it's coming from the horizon of the black hole. So I should say what the horizon is may be. So if you remember, I said that is the sun that you squashed IT down within three kilometres of radius, you'd get this kind of distortion in space, in time from which you've went in.

Across this region, three kilometers, you went inside IT, you couldn't get out. So that's called the event horizon. So you wouldn't notice if you fell through the horizon of the black hole in the milk galaxy, if you went into that room, we could be following through that arises and that in this room and we wouldn't notice anything except that we couldn't get out again and and ultimately in a few hours in in that case, what time would end for us.

So we just go you go to the end of time, we could talk about that. There's a picture of that. Maybe you talk quite. Come on now let's .

get right into IT. So we ouldn't notice.

not for the big black holes, such a get to these supermassive black holes, you, we could fall across this horizon. It's just like being an empty space for us. So we just, we just be talking now when we could have been talking on the outside of the horizon, and by the time I finish the sentence, we could be on the inside of the horizon, inside the black hole.

And according to einstein theory at least, which is the theory that predicted them initially, we could just do that. We could just go in and we ouldn't notice for a bit. But the thing we would would notice ultimately is you go incapably you nothing you can do.

You go to this thing called the singularity. Once you across the horizon. And you are going to that thing.

And then the question arises is what is that thing? And one answer is we don't know. But in einstein's theory is the end of time.

So it's one way of pitching in. What's happened here is so distorted in space, in time, by the collapse of a star, or the collapse of loads, stuff, stuff to make. These big super macy black holes were quite know how they fall, actually, but it's collapsing stuff.

So IT distort space in time. So much that in in a real sense, they kind of flip over, they get mixed up. And so this singularity, which you might have thought of as the point to which this thing collapsed, this infinitely dense point you might think, but actually more correctly, to be seen as the end of time because everything's got a mixed up.

So you go to the end of time. And it's just like saying, why can't I escape that thing? It's like, why can't we escape tomorrow? Most we are going to tomorrow. And if I said to you, let's run away from tomorrow, go. I cannot run.

The way is at the end of time because all information being erased. So there's nothing yeah, I know. Is that the idea?

If you draw the thing, you can draw a map of IT and IT, just literally time ends a court. Just purely in einstein theory. This is one thousand nine hundred and fifteen is theory generativity. You just get a line there, a line that says there's no future beyond this line IT just stops. So and I vitally, that's not we think IT, there's a lot more to IT than that.

But figured the rest of IT out there.

Well, there's the thing. So we start to get hints about what might happen, which is which is leading us. So to backtrack a bit, why? Why does this calculation, Steve ended? Why is he got no information? Why, IT said, is no information in this radiation?

The thing is, it's coming from the horizon. So it's all one. This loads ways to think about IT. But one way is that this this weird place, this point of no return in space that you can fall through, but it's a point of no return. It's sort of shakes, almost disrupts, the vacuum of space in such almost shakeh particles out of the vacuum. That's one way, thinking about IT, which radiation is coming from the vacuum is coming from empty space.

Whether if you think about the thing that I threw any, I throw this this note pad into the thing, then that goes to the singularity is got nothing to do, the radiations got nothing to do with this thing, these things, this thing is not set on fire, or something like that is gone to the end of time. And just whatever has happened to IT is happen to IT. So so this radiation got nothing to do.

They've been anything that falls in at first site, at least. And so that was the paradox is called the black hole information paradox. It's like one way to put IT is the laws of nature that we use to calculate what happens, tell us that information is never destroyed. And when you calculate what happens, IT tells us that information is destroyed. That's why wronger are interested in, in the eighties because .

it's interesting. So when when we're looking at the structure of the universe, obviously, there's so much still to learn just about what's out there, you know. But what role do we think? Like what is the is there at purpose? Is that at the right term, like for a black hole? Like what what obviously we know is IT still, they still believe that in the center of every galaxy they're a supermassive black hole. That's what is IT one half of one percent of the mass of the galaxy.

Is that what that is? Yes, something like, yeah. And and that occasionally a galaxy. I think what was discovered, what we said, maybe we can see evidence of a black hole, but I think, yeah but yeah so probably is what .

you think that things doing there? Like what is that? What's the first? What is the the structure is so insanely complex and so immense, and you see these things everywhere. And so what purpose do you think they serve in the universe?

So I mean.

is that the right might not be the right time?

Well, so I think we don't I think camera in saying we don't fully on stand. why? All galaxies, as you said, maybe is an exception, but with all galaxies have a black hole, a super master black hole in the center is obviously got something to do with the way they form.

And one of the purposes, by the way, of the James web space telescope, is to try to look at the formation of the first galaxies. So that's what one of the reasons that tells scope is up there. So so is cutting resets. We trying to understand how the galaxies form. But I clearly you're right that IT has something to do with the way organic ics is form in the early universe.

pulling in stars.

Well, they they do pull in material, right? But if you've got stuff fall bing around them, IT stays obviously IT. So the way we first detected the one in the milky way before we because that image is very new, that we have a IT, is the stars orbit in IT very close to IT. They call the s stars that was around in his orbit is very close to the so, so just managed around the thing.

Imagine that you think it's weird to look at the moon. Imagine there was a supermassive black hole bour hood.

IT would be so cool, i'd love to say one I .

can say so cool of the eclipse was wild. We have the clipsed here. You, oh yeah.

That was incredible. It's so strange. The whole day turns into the night. All the birds stop carping and alex staring up at this perfect eclipse. IT was incredible.

Did you get this? Because I saw on in india and I got this feeling that I was living on the ball of rock, because, and IT must have been just because the night just falls right and sudden. You see, the universe comes much more quickly.

I went to A C observe a tory once in hawaii. I've been a few times, but one time I went on the perfect night with no moon and IT was sensational. Yes, IT was the most increase, was such a vivid image of the entire milky way, and every inch of the sky was covered in stars.

Yeah, IT was so phenomenal. And IT made me a little upset because I was like, this is above our head every day. And this would radical shape the way human beings feel about our place universe.

IT would. I would greatly expand the curiosity of Young people. Yeah, that took explore space. So many more people would get involved in astrophysics.

So many more people get involved in just the exploration of the known universe, because it's so majestic. And instead we have, like our screen is off. It's like that like that screen that's what we see because of light pollution yeah that should be remedied, ed.

Like that is that is an that's not a good trade off. Like what lights are wonderful, but that seems to me like there's hey, there's god to be a way to do this way. You don't rule in the view of space .

because you know these questions we have about our place and and he said he can be easy to be my office because yeah said we look at our screens we it's earth that we think about at most. Most of us done think about earth. You think about your country or your city or your town layer od.

yeah, even think about the earth.

But you're right, if you know, when you look at the ark of stars and as you said, when you see IT on in a truly dark sky, yeah, powerful to create four hundred billion sons, give up a take four hundred thousand million sons. That's just words most yes.

you know yeah, it's insane. Your your brain doesn't even process that like like I could repeat that if someone says how many sons of four hundred billion? I don't know what that means. It's so .

abstract .

and most of them.

I think the best guest will be all of them have planets. So pretty much so you're talking about trillions of planets.

Now we're into my s subjects. What is your take on all this U A P disclosure stuff? Do you give IT any mind at all? Busy with like real stuff?

no. I mean, the thing is there's a thing called the ferme paradox, yes, which I think we told before on the show, yes, which is in the paradox, is that if if we haven't seen let's assume we haven't seen any evidence of anything. That's the paradox because as I said, there are we now know we didn't when fr me first posted, by the way, we now know there are so many planets out there.

So let's say, trillions of planets in the milky way, milk way, has been there for over thirteen billion years, pretty much the age of the universe. So if there's no one else out there, then the question is, why? Because there's been so much time and so many places for civilizations to become space, various civilizations, right? As elon talks about multiplying etal.

Civilization, which we are very close to, becoming a multiplying ETC civilization. And once you have become a muli planets and multistep lar civilization, if you become that, you're immortal. Basically, essentially. So the question is, the paradox is, why does IT appear nobody has done that?

So the first thing says, I would not be surprised that if A U F O landed here now in the parking lot, i'd actually, not only would I not be surprised, i'd be relieved actually, because I feel like this, he's good, because that would be a way of my shellers. Because i'm worried the only ones and we are flying scenario and we're onna make a massive of IT. Yeah, i'm worried that we could .

talk about isn't IT bizarre, like one of the things is fascinating about looking into the nights is because it's so humbling, because it's so immense that kind of puts everything in the perspective. And I just gives you this like different view of the world. So the universe is so vast and so spectacular, why is is so important that we exist to us? Is so important that we exist.

And if we make a mess of this and we wind up dying, the universe is so big. If we were the only intelligent life in the universe and we didn't matter, we blew ourselves up like it's just a weird abortion that's attached to a survival instinct. We're a weird biological abortion.

So so that if you think about, let's assume so we didn't finish the op thing. So just so so I don't know that anyway, let's assume just for the purposes of this, that were the only ones in in our galaxy, let's say, okay, then I would argue that so there's a question I asking these life shows that I do. I start with a question which she's kind of a joke in a way.

Which she's, what does that mean till live a fine light, fragile life in an infinite eero universe? Which she's a good question, right? That's what you ask.

Yeah, he made the first thing says meaning, right? But IT mean that that doesn't sound like a scientific concept in the way me. I would argue that whatever IT is itself evidently exists, because the universe mean something to us.

I would argue that is a property of complex biological systems. So whatever is is something that emerges, in this case from human brains. IT self evidently exists, which we eat. One is listening to. This knows that the world means something to them. So I would argue that if this planet is the only planet in our galaxy where complex biological systems exist right at our level, then IT follows is the only place where meaning currently exist in galaxy of four hundred billion sons.

And therefore, I would argue, just for that very basic point, that we have a tremendous responsibility, in some sense, because if I, by the way, I gave to talk a little video thing at the one of the climate summer, the cop climate summer, in glasses in the U. K. A few years ago, and they asked me to do a little video to the world leaders, and I think they thought i'd say you welcome to glasses of a nice meeting.

But I I made this, the arguments fast as I could. I said it's possible, at least, that this is the only place where a complex biology has emerged in in our galaxy. If that's true, this is the only island of meaning in a galaxy of four hundred billion songs.

And you are responsible for IT because you are the world leaders. Therefore, if you destroy IT through deliberate action or inaction, then each of you would be personally responsible for destroying, meaning in a galaxy of four hundred billion suns, potentially forever. Now go and discuss.

That was my end to go. Now we can all argue because people have listened to nonsense. How can that be? We can all argue about whether that's true. What I would say is given the as far as I am aware, we don't have any good evidence to the country, which goes back to your previous question. It's a reasonable working assumption.

So won't we just Operate on that basis then? You know, yeah, if someone lends tomorrow, as I said, i'd be ready lighted, because then what I just said would be false. And we could relax with that and go IT doesn't n't really matter if we destroyed us up to something that.

But so I think it's worth taking seriously the idea that civilizations are very rare now. And by the way, I used to say so I probably last time I was on, actually, I used to say that in in the far future, then the complex life will seize to exist. So IT probably doesn't matter on a global scale, but IT matters locally because of this idea that meaning emerges from complex biology, gc systems.

So if you don't care about that, what do you care about? But actually, I read a book that your David dodge on the show, David dodge ch, is really interesting. Physicists don't be one of the quantum computing and is big figure in quantum particular, is a great thinker.

And he he has reading some stuff out recently and he pointed out that is not necessarily true, that life is temporary. Because you could imagine, in a situation as you go into the far future, let's imagine that we continue for a million years, or a billion years as a civilization. Imagine what we could do IT is possible that life can get so advanced in the universe that you can start to manipulate the universe itself.

So, or at least stars you, he said, you could imagine, for example, just image great, wild speculation. But imagine life gets so advanced that you can start to change the destiny of a star. Maybe could start to add material into the star, something know whatever.

So we don't know how to do that or it's possible nobody imagine IT could then the evolution of stars would life would matter in the center that could start to change the way that the universe behaves on a large scale in the future. And so it's any reminding me actually, is another great book by john barrow in Frank tier of the enthroned Cosmological principle from the one thousand nine and eighties. It's of my favourite books, actually.

And I remembered IT. And in there they speculate about this life in the far, far future. And if IT became powerful ly enough to manipulate the whole universe or the observable universe, then suddenly it's got to make predictions about the far future, unless you consider the post of the impact of life on the universe.

And worse, this is actually takes wildly speculate, but it's actually logically it's quite an interesting point. So so I kind of disagree with my self a few years ago where I would have said that life is extremely valuable because IT brings meaning to the universe, but temporarily. And so IT bring these brief like flickering candles of meaning and then they go out again.

But but it's it's worth considering IT might not necessarily be true that if you're greatly I mean, it's just to say, I mean, IT IT must sound so many people listening this nonsense, right? Science fiction. But if you think our civilization has been around for about ten thousand years, at best, really give or take.

And in that time, we've sent stuff out of the solar system, although we don't yet, we have weight from beeps and manipulate stars. We can manipulate planets. So we are changing the way this planet Operates.

Life has changed IT, the oxygen in the atmosphere before we have fared, the oxygen, the atmosphere of products of life. So life already, we know, changes planets. And so that I like that speculation that just possibly it's not just a temper, a little phenomena, that flick is in and out and then disappears in IT. Could rap IT a real barring on the future of the universe?

And you could also make the argument that intelligent life might be the universe's way to forced change. That intelligent life seems to, like intelligence itself, must come out of curiosity, because otherwise there's no reason to see information. So intelligent life consistently seeks information and then constantly demands innovation.

Like intelligent life is not satisfied with the iphone fourteen, and once to fifteen, and once to sixteen and once, keep going wherever, never, never. Well, if you scale that up, you get this current dilma that we're in with this artificial intelligence, in the concept of sentient artificial intelligence and then quantum computing. And you get you get insane amounts of computing power powered by nuclear reactors that are essentially a life form.

Well, if that thing says you guys are doing IT all wrong, i've got a Better way. And IT starts making Better versions of itself because it's sent in. If you scale up a thousand years and now you could imagine IT becoming god. You like a god like property, like an unstoppable force that has access to every element in known space. I am really .

interested in these kind of arguments. You put IT really well like fascine.

because this gives up if you go from, look, just in the time that human, like in the four billion years, which is a blip in the universe, right? And I wanted to ask you about that too. We get to that the actual the James web telescopes latest.

But if just take that, okay, life has been around for what? Four billion years? Yeah, does not that long.

So four billion years we ve done some single celled organisms to the jim's web. Tesco's we've gone to. We have starling. We have electric car with bananas. Yeah, you could imagine if we had another ten billion years to exist.

Well, exactly. And this is the point that David dodge made in the in the book i've just been reading and jump by on Francis ff made before that. But although IT sounds insane, he said, and not four billion years, there's a lot to say about that, by the way, because vote for three billion plus years of that on this planet, you were just single cells.

And so so it's only in the last, let's say, a billion years, but actually bit less that we've had multi cellar organism. So three quarters of IT at the time, we're just single out. That's even crazy.

So which is one of the reasons that many people think civilizations might be rare, because if you just the only evidence we have is this planet, right? And the evidence on this planet is the single cell life is a sort of the way that things are for most, most of the history. And then so IT seems like a an accident in a way that happened late on in the history of life on earth that produce multiple lar life.

Whether is that typical, we don't know. Maybe I was took a longer time here, then I might might do someone else. But if it's typical, I mean, four billion years, he said, IT is not a long time, that is a third of the age of the universe. So here you put IT.

There was a time.

one third of the age of the universe, to go from the origin of life to a civilization. And and so what was required here on earth was that that unbroken chain of life remain done, broken for a third of the age of the universe. In a violent universe, we know their impacts from space.

Many stars are significantly more active than the sun, so the sun's kind of a quite a boring little star that just takes along very nice to us. I will also on the edge of the galaxy. By the way, we're not close in.

If you go into this region where that black hole is, there are a lot of stars around, there are super over explosions and all thoughts and stuff going on. So it's violent in there. So maybe you can only get unbroken chains of life for billions of years on the outskirts of a galaxy. So there are few styles and planets out there. And maybe even then.

you need to be, fortunately also, aren't we very unusual, the size of of a moon and the distance.

and that is is big. And so IT stabilizes the spin. So the spin acis mars.

I think, if i'm right, I think the spin axial is wavered around by something like sixty degrees or something history. Imagine that, imagine earth was that the poll was bobbing around and and over. You wouldn't imagine that complex life like emerge on a planet like right there .

would be too difficult to survive. Forget about innovate. So if if you think about the yeah that these complex IT seems like one thing you can be sure of in the observer able world is that things get more complex or they adapt their environment.

And if you have a bunch of these intelligent apps that are competing globally with the most significant technology in the world, you can see how that you could see how that would be just a property of the universe potentially, although we haven't discovery yet. Like this is why we're so curious about alien life, not just because of the possibilities of all the stars, but because we kind of see what would happen with us if we keep going. Yeah, you know, just that might be just what the universe does, that the universe creates intelligent people that create artificial intelligence that becomes farce, superior, and literally is a part of the whole process of creating the universe itself.

Yeah, an evolutionary biologist would say, the counter argument is that what life is, what evolution does, is produce organisms that are well for to their environment, right? They fit niches in the environment. But there's no drive to complexity, that there's no law that says that the more complex you are, the more likely about to survive and flourish.

And the example of life on earth probably backs that up. If you tell three, three billion years of single cells, what that means is, is that the single cell organisms we just doing very well, right? And so it's not obvious. It's not a given that just because you suddenly get more complicated, your Better than the single cell things.

right? So there could be lot of planets where life never evolves passed single cells.

But this earth was almost that. So you go back one billion years from now on earth was that planet. So there are interesting things that happened, photosynthesis, complex by a chemistry. But as far as we can tell, nothing more complex than a single cell. So as most the history of life on earth, so that might suggest that that's the way that things are usually .

and that this is elaboration yeah.

And again, the emphasize, we don't know, right, but we've got one example. The other observation though, that goes back to your first question. IT is true that we do look sort of systematically for the signals or evidence of civilizations out there.

There's the break through listen project and there's your set is IT. So we do and we haven't seen anything I would say so and I know that you go on to the web on things and incident, people say we have we've seen stuff and i've been to. But just the basic point, as as as far as I know, scientifically speaking, we haven't seen anything at all compelling.

No, basically nothing, basically. And and so astronomers have a name for IT. They call IT the great silence, the great silence. And it's a tremendous, as I said earlier, but IT does seem that the universe is quiet as much as we can .

tell is IT possible that we're looking for something that is not applicable to this particularly type of civilization.

Yeah, there are different there.

So the counter arguments, when we say we've seen nothing, therefore, as far as being told they're nothing out there, you could say, well, what if the civilization that evolves far ahead of us? What if the space probes are the size of an iphone? right? What is kind of a reasonable thing to say actually before? Why would you know if you can build a little thing? It's easier to send around the galaxy than a big thing? yeah.

So why would you not, as you said, these hipe for ultra intelligent quantum computers, why would they not be tiny? right? So you could say that, you could say, well, that maybe there, maybe they are all over the solar system, but they are the size of phones.

And we wouldn't seen him. And so yeah okay, yeah, you would have to concede that. So so we're just saying that the way that we've looked for signal energy signatures, for example, of civilizations, you tend to look the big things because that's all we can see.

And we don't see any big things. We don't see any big structures. We don't see any evidence of spacecraft and all that kind of.

But I could make an argument that, well, why would why would the spacecraft be big, right? Because as you said, it's another thing you said actually is interesting that we're at the on the verge now of creating things, artificial intelligent things which are smarter than us. So I think everyone agrees that were on the verge of doing that artificial general intelligence.

Some people might think it's further away than others you can. We had people on the show said it's five years away or two years away or fifty years away, but it's probably not ten thousand years away. So that wish the blink of an eye.

Once you've done that, once you've got those things, I find IT hard to believe that if we get that far as a civilization, we won't begin to send those things out to the planets and ultimately to the stars. So we will begin that process if we survive long enough. And IT shouldn't be too much longer, might be hundred years, might be ten thousand years, but we should do IT.

So IT IT becomes a powerful questions. So why does IT appear that nobody's done that? In my guess, in the absence of other evidence, would be biology is just the maybe the number of places where biology becomes complex enough to do that is, is, on average one, maybe on average zero per ggt axy. Maybe just civilizations are very, very, very rare in the universe. Maybe that's an answer, but that's a guess.

My my question is always when he gets to artificial intelligence, when if we do create some sort of super intelligence sentient live, it's not going to have any motivations. And you can say, well, if you program IT to have, the motivations would have become santin. And IT recognizes theological programme is going to reject IT.

We've never seen evidence to that. We've alti seen evidence of artificial intelligence they use now, like giving a time limit to solve a problem, doesn't the time? And I IT gives self more time, like IT.

It's like they're maneuvering and thinking, right? So I assume that they would do that. So why would they want to explore what IT? Isn't curiosity a part of what that means? Be a biological thing that has to worry about instincts.

You have to, you have human reward systems. You want to breed, you want to take care of your DNA. You want to protect your community.

Who is biological things that are from us being intelligent animals? If we transcends that, or if life translate that to the point, whatever we want to call this intelligence is in a digital form. As far so period or intelligence, what motivations would IT have? It's not greedy.

IT doesn't have lost. IT doesn't have the desire to control resources. IT might have like some sort of a Mandate to stay functional. But other than that, what's you gonna or why would I do anything? And that might be ultimately where we go to this idea that everything has to be key progress. We have to build bigger skyscrapers that might be stupid, there might be nonsense, and intelligence might find a way to exist in uh, a much more static state where IT doesn't have any desire to expand.

There's a lot of there's a lot of points in that. So you're right. What you're arguing, I suppose, is whether intelligence is integral to the structure, the biological structure, or whether we is a separate thing.

The and I think so again, I think the answer is, is not known. You could argue either way, but the counter argument would be the brain. These things are just computers. Ultimately, there's nothing magical in there. There's nothing that IT is connected to a buddy. And how do these sensations? We didn't seem to me impossible that a silicon based life, former, whatever is this is obviously as senses, as access to the environment IT IT exists.

IT thinks I don't see any fundamental difference between an intelligence in based on silicon and, let's say, or a quantum computer or whatever that IT is, and this intelligence here that so I know that many researchers in this area do say the it's not a brain. They got IT a brain in a jd. The in table that's not IT needs to be connected to all this.

This is part of our intelligence, and that's surely true as well. So IT is a very good question, but especially we say it's not obvious to me that a different kind of intelligence in a different structure running on a computer or whatever he is, would necessarily have different motivations to us. I mean, you can equally well argue that these motivations to survive and curiosity and those ideas that the desire to explore, you could you could argue there's a fundamental properties of intelligence and not a biology.

But I isn't. An intelligence is motivated by a finite life in a vulnerable physical frame because we were constantly most innovation relies upon uh, quicker, safer transportation, more secure buildings. Um you know things is one in those lines and then computers that help you do your job Better and then actually could do things that you can't do.

And that this is a lot of that is based on this other weird thing we do where we want to control resources. We want to figure out reasons why these people are bats, so we can go and take their staff and then enter troops and dig the oil or whatever you have to do. Look, we're constantly in this battle for resources that if you take IT back to travel times, it's like a natural human instinct, like we had to protect the food sources, where to fight off the concrete tribes at a protect your DNA line.

All these things are why we became innovative. We had a motivation to stay alive and to thrive. And then there's vast verizon to those motivations like the talk market or thinks it's and you're just competing over numbers. It's really weird, but it's basically this desire to compete with the DNA that's around you once we're not biological anymore.

Like what would be the motivation? And would we not just exist like in the most peaceful than budgeted way possible, which is what everybody who is like, a spiritual person who meditates all time? That's what you strive for. You strive for this complete a band amin of self, this complete empty ness, and one with the universe. If we could just exist like that, why would we need to go?

Space is a wonderful argument. Isn't IT that our humanity? So because part of the thing that you describe, the desire to create things and build things and explore and expand IT is is almost the definition of being human. yes.

And so the idea that if you remove all threat and you essentially becoming mortal, yes, then you are not saying, what's the fight? Is my t shirt? What does IT matter? right? By the way, that teach, I got to say, designed by friend, by Peter sail, he was a great designer who designed the joy division on known .

plages about gone.

I'm not. He's dogger.

It's school. I want you made IT. We did these .

gigs at all, and like cause symphonic horizons, which were the shows with Cosmology of also simponi orchestra. And he was expLoring these issues, actually. But most of the music with strings araiza we should based on natures book.

But it's it's kind of explore these questions actually of what's the poking of existence, right? And I do have some sympathy with the idea that a great deal of our humanity comes from our fragile ity. And so your question, I think, is fascinating and.

What happens when you become god? Like you said IT earlier, right? If you acquire so much knowledge that you're essentially god by any description and so much power, yeah and you become eef, clive's immortal, which is what our descendants in the far future could be. He said, these A I descendants, what's the point .

not just effectively immoral, but aren't we looking at the universe itself in the we're looking IT through the framing of a biological primate is trying to figure that out if they understand the universe completely and they understand everything about in the exist inside of IT, there would really be no desire to travel. There be no desire to explore where you already understand about everything.

And you probably have access to every single aspect of what subatomic particles are actually doing, what we're studying them, where I was going, if you're infinitely more intelligent than we are, if you scale IT from now to quantum computing, sentence, artificial intelligence, ence, and you give us a thousand years of getting hit by an asteroid or technology gets to the form working, protect against super volcanoes, and there's no natural disruptions, and then they've completely eliminated violence on earth. They've completely eliminated all the terrible primate genetic instance. You could make a reasonable argument, there's no reason to travel.

Or if you do travel, we might be confused and thinking that our physical form is the only way consciousness can reach specific destinations yeah, might be a way that they're traveling without actually being here and observing this. And just I would imagine you if you watch champs in the jungle and then all said, they start figure out bombs even, okay, could tell these games not to fuck to blow each other up. I mean, it's an absurd premise, but if a champ figured out a nuclear bomb, I think we would step in.

I think we say, hey, hey, hey, hey, dude, no, you're going to kill everything now if you're infinite, like we're not that removed from champs, what do we share? Like ninety eight percent of their DNA and worldly removed from them by what? A few million years from a nears cousin.

That's not that long, right? So you could imagine something that's infinitely more intelligent looking at us exactly the way we look at a chap of the nuclear bomb o at which, you know, my my clubs called the comment mothership and we designed IT. It's all the UFO thee't, and the rooms are fat man and little boy. The reason why I named with that, because that was the beginning of all the UFO sightings in the country, like those bombs sort of set off the alarm for the universe. Oh, the monkeys .

have a bomb. I thought this a while ago. I remember that I was talking someone and and they said, yeah, I not worried about this.

I not worried about the fact that A, I could become more intelligent than us. What was he going to be like when we are not the smartest things on the planet? Might be just a few years.

yeah. And I again, I might be quite relieved because I am not sure they could fuck IT up the level, right, that we have fucking IT up. You say you have to give IT legitimate science ence.

Like you would have to be completely independent from any ideology, and you would have to look at things completely objectively. Could but imagine government that is run that way, like really run in a way where there is an actual distribution of resources for all the human beings on the planet. So poverty is instantaneously eradicate.

You give electricity and clean water to everyone on earth. immediately. Immediately we figure out how to distribute healthy food. Immediately all the toxins and preserve tips that are giving people cancer. Immediately they removed from the human diet.

Immediately make sure that we have no polluting of rivers that were not draining all the fish out of the ocean. Immediately changed all of the treaties about nuclear weapons. All the nuclear weapons got to go.

This a on the government just runs over. No more tatars, no more ict tors caught this shape with the we're just going to let human beings exist in harmony, guided by this super intelligent god like thing that we've created. Had a silicon.

I honestly, i've had the same thought.

and that's no to be, have you?

yeah. And I thought I am thought, how could IT be worse in that could be significantly Better? yes.

A I gets fucked with by people, right in the A, I. We've seen so far has all the greece y fingerprints of human emotion and illogical, like what google released, their their AI. They asked them to to show photographs, create images, rather of native soldiers.

So they did a diverse group of native soldiers, including an african woman, an asian woman, a native american woman with brains was a native. The whole IT is so not because it's like, okay, somebody talked with this. This doesn't make any sense.

This is you can you .

can do that because if you if you get a virus and illogical virus, that somehow another gets into A I and it's unchecked. If AI isn't completely logical and objective incentives and and basing IT just entirely on what's best for the human race, then you just have a superpower that you have controlled LED over. And then you can decide, like no more abortions. You can decide .

he he said, what the definition of what is best is is a moral yeah decision yeah we make.

But you can make some distinction in terms of allocation of resources like you could make some if if I was a super intelligence and I looked at earth, i'd say, listen, a lot of people, we're not going to like this, but there's a reality. There's the reason why you're worried about the border or because people are sticking in because because other parts of the world are fuck in. terrible.

So that needs to be cleaned up. That needs to be fixed. We need to figure out how to raise. Instead of spending money on blowing people up, let's spend all this money to raise up all of civilization. So there's no more third world.

Well, as one of the arguments, have you, I respect to rob a zebra, who are these wonderful books and call the about colonise in space. And so he is IT fascinate in character. And I, I sposed him one. And he made this very simple argument that, as you said, one of the problems, we have his competition for resources. And of course, we have the competition for resources.

And now so extreme that it's not only wars that IT creates and always has, but is also, of course, we damaged the planet if we over exploit the resources and so on, right? So you've got this problem about resources. I need right.

He would say, this is the number one motivation for going up, because there are, in fact, infinite resources out there, right? And so you begin, once you begin time, access to the asteroid and access to miles and beyond. You can imagine a world where you alleviate that pressure.

And little, I want to tell you, there's a plan out there bigger than earth. That's all diamonds.

The diamond planets that is unlimited imagination without say.

isn't IT like several times larger than earth an entire diamond? yeah.

And we think I think it's and we think has diamond in IT. So oh.

my good. So yes, diamonds are only valuable because we decide their valuable. It's because people brilliant. They like like all but I go, this is really .

hard to get for drilling bit as well.

but we can make them for drill. This is interesting thing. You can make them for jeweler as well, but some women don't want them. The real they were the ones that came out of the earth.

the very things. Yes, gold is another example, right? Valuable because there isn't very much of IT.

They're so little love IT. It's like a football field, right? Yes, a football field of gold in the whole world.

you know, by the way, that we we are so much to the gravity wave detectors earlier and the collision between black holes we detect with them. We also detected the collisions between new tram stars using the gravitational way detector, and we pointed optical telescopes at that collision and saw the signature of gold be manufactured. And IT was always IT was always a question. We used to just think why IT comes from south over explosions, but but IT IT also seems now that IT comes from the collision between new tron stars. So one of the reasons that is very rare is because IT takes rare processes in the universe to actually make IT, which makes IT all the more wonderful when you think, if you look at the gold of wedding ring, or your watch or whatever IT, is that some of those nuclear, some of those elements, clearly came from the collision between new tron styles at some point before our solar system was formed, which makes IT more wonderful.

Well, every human being is a carbon based life form.

And carbon comes from ah is cosan said the stuff that's the crazy thing .

ever like you need to start to blow up to make a person in the first play. It's remarkable thing.

I want to go at something he said actually about the I i've been thinking about this this said, this god lie intelligencer yeah, that we might create and and kind of whats the point, what would be the point of existence if if you were more so than you knew, everything wouldn't IT be, I don't know, incredibly dull. I, me, what you said, it's almost like a mediated state. So we strive for this, this peace. You essentially, well.

maybe we we have his dull because we don't have access to the information like we have a very limited amount of senses. We have hearing and sight and taste and touching. You know, it's very limited, right?

Why would we assume that that is the only way to perceive things? If you could become infinitely intelligent, you could legitimately perceive new trios. You know, you right? Like if we have this thing that detects the ripples from black holes colliding, that IT might be a feature of a future human body. If we have an unbelievable capacity for information because it's artificially created.

So we get over this biological limitation of long scale evolution, like a really good, like the human brain doubled over two million years and is the biggest mystery in the entire fossil record, like what happened all these theories, but that's a long fucking in time, in two million years of technology we could become god, or a god like being ah a thing that but IT might be how the universe create itself. The universe might facilitate that through these biological beings fighting over resources and territory, which ultimately leads to innovation, which ultimately leads to cities and which ultimately leads to safety, which leads to schools and people start sharing information. You get curious people to figure things out, and you have to battle ideologies along the way, which makes you work harder.

We all look back with work, what they did galail. And everybody has these. You can, you can.

Science has to advance. And this, along with materialism. So materialism is the primary driver.

Everybody wants the newest, latest, greatest thing. You can have a car from two thousand seven and it's great. It's in distinguishable from a car today in most ways it's just a car.

But you like go they got the new one. No, that's the new lex OK that all four wheeling do. We want constantly new stuff.

We want to keep up with the Jones, as you know, i'm the biggest dummy y in the world. I've got a new iphone. IT has actually Better is got a few features.

One of things is very fascinating. I was in the mountains last week. You can text message people with no one around you, no signal, no, I mean woods forever. And if you hold your phone in a particular part of the sky, it'll tell you, and the satellite allows you to eye message back and forth with people, and totally like, you are five g everyone, you is crazy.

And so you've already achieved around that .

that you don't need to go. It's fascinating. It's so fascinating to me.

I'm so enable, I would argue. I I think imagine that you had access to, as you said, essentially infinite knowledge. Yeah, imagine you want beings in the in the future, maybe the things that we created, right, that essentially no, almost everything there is to know in recent, I think that they would feel there was no pots in existing at all.

But because I don't. Isn't that a human thing? This idea of a point, like I make this argument with people, there's a buddhist concept that you I think it's buddies or some strange of buddies.

You live your life over and over and over and over again until you get IT right. Until every time something comes up, you make the right decision, you achieve enlightenment, you do IT over. And I said that to someone, and they were horrified, like, oh my god, could you imagine living life over again, starting off as a baby going through high school again?

H, I couldn't do IT. I might, but you did IT and you're alive now. Like, I ve really enjoyed life.

I have great friends. I have a great family. I have a fantastic job. I live in a great place.

I, if I had to keep doing this forever, why would that be horrible? I like doing IT everyday. Why would I not like doing IT? I don't understand like I don't understand this idea that if something is infinite and a on for an ever, that's terrifying.

Whereas if it's existing right now, right now, I know you're going to get tired and I know you going to go to Better, you going to go to hungry, now you're going, but you're just existing. It's the state of existence that varies depending on emotions, in mood and stress levels and environment. But it's just existence if existence was eternal. And I just kept going on on why would that be terrifying for you when you're enjoying IT?

Now if you think about some of the things that make us there, most important things that make us human, so one of them would be hope, for example, hope for the future, or indeed fear, or that those emotions that are connected with not knowing, not knowing what's around the next corner, as you said, even next exploration. So if you remove that, if if you remove any sense of not knowing what the future will be, you do remove hope as well as fear.

So you could argue that some of the best, that the essence of being humans, some of the things that we value the most right and make us most valuable in in the universe in this, some of those things compromising complete knowledge is surely hoped. sure. How could you have hope in excitement about what's going to happen tomorrow, if you know?

But do you think that might be a able motivates improvement, that all that hope just motivates you to do Better and get Better? And do you do think that may be a feature .

of a biologging ii? Go out like, know when you're in high school and when you Young Christmas, for example, when you a Christmas eve yeah, i'm gona get tomorrow yes is one of the most wonderful feelings and one of the most wonderful yeah. And the present said, that's good. None of that would exist do with one of these super beings. So so right .

of that just right constant. It's just for us that IT appears magical when you're comparing that to black holes colliding. Like is that really so important what you got for Christmas? Well, it's be but it's us.

It's our biological needs, our needs for, uh our needs for to be shown that we're loved. We're got a good toy. We are excitement about something that we've wanted that was inaccessible, you know that you were hoping for, for Christa and you've got IT like the video game.

carl. Yeah I think i'm IT is IT purely biological .

are is just a propac's .

of intelligence. Does that I mean, you're arguing that is a good argument that that many of these desires come from a biological fragile ity, yes, and also the fragile ity about planet yeah, as you said. And but IT could be that this these ideas of of meaning, of of what what IT means to exist to what is the point of existence? Maybe that's a general property of any intelligence system.

What seems like it's imperative for survival. You have to have a reason to do IT. IT would be backed in to the code if you want this thing to keep going. Otherwise, why wouldn't IT just stick with, you know, as soon as you figure out running water and electricity and how to ship food, why would, why would you keep going?

Is, is this such a fingers? Contentment though, for anyone.

it's possible, it's possible to cheat me. That's what boot is dry for. That's what all that meditation is, abandonment of all material possesion.

IT might be henders there.

I think IT would be here around this. I don't want to abandon everything and no more sex, and you can have a glass wine that is.

So that's what i'm kind of interested, that god, a god like being, might be so bored and so devoid of all excitement, because things like hope and curiosity. There were curiosity, curious. Ity is one of most foundational things, the most incredible what we both so if you know so much, right, maybe that what what happens in the world way your curiosity is not that you've got nothing to be curious about.

wouldn't be hearted. Isn't this a property of what IT means to be a finite lifespan, a finite life form that exists on a volatile planet? That this hope, and would this survive? But if that is bypast, why do we need to be anxious all time? Why do we need to have hope? Why wouldn't we have a complete bullish, a complete connection to .

everything he linked? You linked hope to anxiety? That is not right. Did and IT works out, did know you fighting?

You're fighting the anxiety by having a optimistic outlook?

I have hope. I think I really that in a different way, though, I was imagine hope is like and I know excitement for what's beyond the horizon. sure. So so not not driven. This actually gets to the heart of what I think a scientist is, by the way, the difference between not only a scientist, but let's say what what is a scientist IT or somebody just researching anything, really, somebody create things that they're people like to stand on the edges of the known. So they're find the exhilarating but interesting almost in the context we're talking.

It's almost the one of the driving, one of the things that drives our existence, yes, is the stand on the edge of the known and peered into the unknown with with excitement and curiosity because because you can go over the horizon. yeah. And so that's the sense in which I am using these terms.

I'm saying that one of the fundamentally most valuable things of being human, yes. The reason, edge of the known, yes. And so I would find that, I think more terrifying to imagine that there was no edge of the known, that everything was known.

Then I would think existence is pointless. I won't, won't. I personally would not find that I won't think i'd achieved navona. Well, I won't think i've got ten know there's no point .

I was assisting within the framework of being a human being. And if we transcend the framework of being a human being, all these things, we will come to realize all these emotions and all these desires in need are just a motivate or survival. If we've gotten past that, and we don't have a need for hope, and we don't have curiosity because we have infinite information, we're not the same thing anymore.

So all the things that motivate you and I, they make us fascinated by this. I was so excited to talk to today and like brian cox, got to be here. We're going to have fun like this, going to be great.

I want to learn some stuff that all that innate curiosity that we have, that so reward as a human being is a part of being a human being. And we think of IT as being the only way to have meaning and happiness the only way. But that's because of the framework of being a human being.

If we and the existence that we we were all confined to this temporary life form, check my heart rate. Like, make sure get electrized you. We tried to keep the body like, if we transcend that completely, there's no need for all those things that are rewarding will have a different kind of reward, will have a reward of infinite connection.

I think we're trying to imagine what it's like to be god down.

Yes, that's actually quite hard. I have been thinking about this a lot, and i've found out that someone had already beat me to IT. But the idea that the universe itself was god, that if if you wanted something that creates this, is not to diminish any other stories of the bible.

Because I think a lot of those stories, these are ways that people try to find meaning and probably had some, like baked, in truth, about being a human being in life and the existence, and but that in compare, just the things that are miracles on earth, like a person coming back to life, is nothing in compared to a Stellar nursery. It's like the scope of the universe itself, the real stuff that we can see that is absolutely the creator of everything, whether not god created the universe, maybe, maybe god created us, maybe the bibles, true, but whatever was done here is like a small boat deg. In comparison to some enormous, factly, the given factor that makes testers, like there's a so much larger scale that absolutely created everything, not only absolutely create everything, we know the process, we know how this happened.

We know how stars are formed. We know how plan is. We know how gravity is affecting the planets around that.

We know so much about all this. We know so much about the process of going from single cell organisms to multi sel organisms. Photos, senses, is existing, and that fund is exist in a completely different way. We know so much about all the things that absolutely came out of the universe itself. Why not assume the universe is got.

I mean, IT is in some technical sense.

everything that you is, everything, including god. If god is a real thing.

if you define god is the creator, yes, then you're right from from some point that we don't understand, by the way, the big bang. We don't even understand whether that was the origin of the universe, by the way, we understand that something interesting .

happened is roses. He has.

he has social universe. yes. And he's trying to answer questions about the very special state of the early universe and why IT was the way that IT was.

So his model is an infinite contraction and expansion.

IT doesn't recontre kind of it's called was IT called conformal Cosmology, or special conformal Cosmology? Asm, so essentially the and I don't fully understand that, and I have asked him about IT with some colleagues.

Actually we are no.

no, no, I don't many of us understand what I mean what fenders is one of the great, right? So you listen to him and taking very seriously. But I i've met anyone who quite understand what what talking. But but IT doesn't recontre. He's not one of those models where the universe expands and then and then recontre ts and baLances like that is not one of those.

It's somehow he argues that when you get to what we usually called the heat debt of the universe, or even the black holes have evaporated away, you have conditions that begin to look perhaps like a origin in of the universe again. And and I can't really fully explain IT because I don't really understand what he's trying to say, right? And so it's .

not A A contraction, it's an infinite expansion and then some sort of a metamorphism .

ah you kind of looks like conformal means there are no sort of distances of time measurements or anything in the universe. IT kind of lose is all sense of scale. And then you could you could reimagine that is looking somewhat like the beginning.

It's something like that they has in mind, but I really couldn't explain to you. I don't understand what what is what is proposing that. So but what IT does tell you is that we don't know why or or how the universe got into the state that we call the big bang.

So we don't, we don't know whether the universe existed before that. We have theories that he did. There was called inflation, which are very popular. The are easy.

You find them in all the textbooks, which say that before the universe was heart and dense, which we used to call the big bang, space and time is still there, and the universe is expanding extremely. Fest is called inflation. And then that period draws to a close.

And then expansion that slows down and almost collapses and changes. And the energy that was driving the expansion gets dumped into space and changes and ultimately makes the particles out of which we had made. So that's actually the standard model of Cosmology, you know.

So so we do have an idea that we we redefine the big bang is the hot big bang. And it's not the origin of the universe in time. It's the end of inflation. And then you get the question, what is inflation? They did not have a beginning.

And the answer is that in ice dance there alone then yes, in Roger panera s is actually in Stephen hawking prove this a long time ago, that just given einstein theory, you have this singularity, just like, kind of like the black hole singularity, but at the beginning of time. But we do know that when you put quantum mechanics ene and add that in, then IT gets messy. We don't remember that means.

And so Stephen hawking, out of think of the no boundary proposal, is, are all sorts IT based. The point is we don't know. So we don't know whether the universe had a beginning in time.

I would say that is the correct statement, as we are at the moment, is what part of the reason why, by the way, getting back to the black holes, they're important and interesting because the study of black holes in this idea of information and has to get out that's leading us to suspect that space and time themselves are not fundamental, but they emerge from something else. So just in the way that we've been talking about consciousness emerging from this physical structure in our heads. So we don't know how we emerges its raining, but emerges from this collection of items right in in a particular pattern.

Well, we think now from the study of black holes at space and time emerge from something else, which he is kind of one way to describe. IT is just a quantum theory. So it's a in quant computing terms, IT would be just cubits.

So a network of cubits and tangled together, just like a quantum computer out of that, we suspect that space in time might emerge. So surely we have to understand that process, and we don't really fully understand that. But we have glimpses of IT in much more detail to start talking about the origin of time.

Because I was sucked by the origin of time after know what he is and we don't actually know what he is, which is and that kind of when you say that, he sounds bizarre in IT. But how can you not know what time is? I think estein once said that IT is the thing that you measure on the watch, but he said that is kind of almost a joke because you assume in nice stand there there's a thing that the watch measures.

But what actually he is at the deep face level is a good question. So but its funny is interesting that study of black holes is four singers towards these theories. It's not that we had the theory space and time emerging from something and found decided we could check IT by thinking about black holes is come the other way around really. So it's it's interesting but that that almost makes the universe look in some ways like her, a giant quantum computer, which is not to say that we live in a simulation before, yes, but he just looks like this, a description of the universe that looks like a quantum computer type description that doesn't have the conceptive space all time in IT is IT possible.

That that is what IT is, and that the universe was created. And I mean, we're talking about super intelligent life forms keep construction, Better versions of itself and Better versions of computers to the point where I can construct the universe itself. I mean.

you know.

if we're seeing the code, if we're seeing the evidence, we're seeing something that myself ics a quantum computer, you couldn't be that IT is .

is interesting that you're right and that's a good way of phrasing. IT mimics how looks like a network of cubits. So IT looks like some kind of quantum computing description is a very level to us, right for the universe.

But I don't think you can infer much from that. I mean, IT just passes the question for the back because I said we have never understood what he means for the universe to have a beginning. Do what? You don't really know that.

And so this is the same I think it's just the same question. Is that what you ask? Well, you know, if IT really is the network of cubits, what IT could have been there forever, that network of cubits.

So I actually, quantity theories is more natural for IT to be just eternal. And IT is an an interesting fashion. I wants to go a talk, actually, a conference of bishops. They were catholic, and they asked me to give, give a talk at that conference about Cosmology. So I gave to talk about Cosmology, and they'll listen to question thing afterwards.

And I said, then what happens if we discovered that the universe has always existed? Because I might have, we know, is the thing called the big bang, but IT might have been something happened in a preexisting universe. Maybe that's eternal.

What does that mean for your sort of picture of a creator? Does IT? I don't know. I was asking that is a genuine question, right? How would you and and they really didn't.

They thought I was a cool question and didn't have an answer, right? But but he is, I think the idea that I always the question to you actually, are we more comfortable with the universe that began? Or would we be more comfortable with the universe that had always existed?

I comfortable with a weird word, because I always wonder if our whole desire to form the universe in in terms of the beginning, in the end, based on our own biological limitations, the fact we have a birth in a death, we tried to apply that to the universe itself because we're, we know that stars didn't exist, then they do, they burn out, we know planets lose their atmosphere, we, we know things change and all these things that, so I think we think, uh, well, this sons going to die out, the universe probably had a beginning to.

But why what IT there's no reason to think IT did like IT, it's much more likely that it's always existed. Then IT didn't exist and then IT became out of what yeah if the university didn't excel. So there's nothing in the whole of observable. Everything is nothing. And also, so there's something that seems less likely that seems more likely that this whole idea of a birth in a death is just a we we we have this look this way of looking at things because of our own limitations, like we think that everything has ever begin. And you're .

right I mean I mean you shown Caroline yeah because he he always points out that ah this question why is there something rather than nothing right presupposes that nothing is more likely than something right. So where I might be the .

other way right right? We don't even know that right? Something out .

story I think you have is right to say that einstein really fell. I think that initially that an eternal universe was more natural, but he is also treat, say, that his theory, general relativity, really doesn't quite real. That out with is strongly suggested of there being a beginning.

And durant said, so the theory itself, historically speaking, I strongly suggest that. And so he can change his mind. And then we saw the universe was expanding.

We observe that. And then we've now seen the old delight in the universe, the cosmic micro background radiation, which is the afterglow of the big bang. So we know that the universe was hot and dense thirteen point eight billion years ago. We have so much evidence for that, not least that we have a photograph of IT three hundred eighty thousand years after the big bang, called the cosmic microwave background.

Let's see the images of that.

That's from the satellite called plank, european satellite, and also satellite kobe. So we have these images of the afternoon, of the big bank. We also have theories that tells about the abundance of chemical elements in the universe, which match this perfectly said as multiple lines of evidence that tell us the universe was hot and dense.

But none of that tells us that was the beginning, that I think that would be widely accepted that that is a beginning in einstein theory. If you. Just take general relativity.

This is singularity there at the beginning of time. We don't know what IT is, but it's there. But it's absolutely is true to say that we we think that's not complete as a picture. So so with there is that so that is light that was admitted about three hundred eighty thousand years after the big bang. So IT is a and the key thing, there's so many things to say about these images, but one thing is those colors correspond to regions are very slightly different density that we detected now in, in, in the gases of the Young universe.

Are you talking about the red? blue? yeah.

The red and blues, those as well. The both, both same. That Greeny one. Well, even the one with the Greeny blue, that one, that's the from the plank satellite. So those colors correspond to regions of different density.

So in this Young universe, three hundred ninety thousand years out of the big bang, that's only hydrogen and helium gas, basically. And a bit of lithium, bit of little, some of the lights. Governments are basically hydro in healing.

So you ve got an almost smooth, almost features universe then, but these little density fluctuations are very important, because as the universe expanded in cool, they collapse to form the galaxies. So without those ripples, without that pattern, we would not exist. Nothing of interest would exist.

And so you, the question is where did that come from that pattern it's fundamentally important. And the theory inflation that I mentioned earlier that there's this time before the universal heart and dense, that theory predicted that pattern before I was observed. So this idea that you've got this very street very quickly stretching space, by the way.

So it's so the stretch, if I can remember the number is, if you consider two points in space during inflation, the distance between them was doubling every tend to the minus thirty seven seconds, which is point not, no, no, no, no, no. Thirty seven notes, one of his agg. So this incredible rate of expansion that draws to a close and those theories and there's inflation there. So those theories predicted slight variations in the rate, which inflation stops.

Does the inflation theory does this work with the japan ros's concept? I mean, is that possible that inflation is the far period of the expansion of the universe?

I mean, is he doesn't like inflation as if there he doesn't.

And oh no, so but .

so but right? That our universe accelerating in its expansion at the moment. Wish is one of the great mysteries that was discovered in the one thousand and nineties by a friend of my, actually, brian chmidd got the nobel prize for this discovery.

He told me once, I don't know, I tell you the story before. He told me that he he made this measured and he wasn't really is like a supernovas logo ons. And i'd seen that they the suggestion in the data was that the universe is accelerating in its expansion, not slowing down, but speeding up in its rate of expansion.

And and no one was expecting in IT. So he thought I was just wrong. He thought, but you couldn't find anything wrong with this data.

So published IT and thought at the end of my career, you know, I I used quite Young, I think might have been in a post dark, and he just publish state. He thought, I, that's a good scientist, right? I don't think this is right, but I can't see anything wrong with that.

I publish IT someone else. I'll tell me where my mistake was and there was was no mistake. And he want the nobel prize.

wow. But that discovery, that's the one thousand eight ninety. So this idea, the universe is accelerating an expansion.

The way that IT does that is really important is gonna Carry on doing that is whatever is driving that expansion, gonna change in some way, which could actually recollapse the universe again, what we give, by the way, dark energy this thing, but we don't know what he is, I think it's very fair to say. But IT looks a bit like inflation, but it's wait slower. So maybe they are link, maybe it's the same kind of thing.

We don't really no in. So it's one of the great mysteries. So but but the university IT looks like the universe is going to continue to expand forever and to continue to accelerate.

Well, dark matter and dark energy, they're both very confusing .

yeah that matters in some sense, marginally less confusing in the sense that at least we have an idea of what I might be. There is dark energy. There are people listening there.

There are people working on IT. So there are theory about what you might be, but I think is is further, IT feels less explicitly given what we know than dark matter. But we haven't discovered what we think that matter might be.

Some kind of particle that has got certain properties and doesn't interact very strongly, interact like new tree nodes, basically, you mentioned earlier. So really doesn't interact very strongly. But we have thought we might have seen those particles.

We're looking for them. They would be passing through this room now. And so we could build a detector in here.

And we do that, and we look for these particles. We haven't seen them. We thought we might make them at the large hadron collider at cern. I think many people thought that we'd see the signature of these things, and we haven't done so. IT could be that we're not right with that picture.

So but that picture encompasses what percentage of the known universe?

So yes, it's about five percent matter, about seventy percent dark energy. And the rest of twenty five percent that matter. So we were just less than five percent. This is so island stuff we can see. So everything we can see in the sky, all the gas and the dust and the galaxies in the stars and the black holes, all those things, less than five percent according to the standard model of Cosmology.

And so other ninety nine percent is just like something else. Do something else yeah.

And but those in models and me is important to say that it's interesting because until so, we have a hypothesis which is strongly supported by lots of bits of evidence. The dark matter is some kind of particle. So that's the broadly, that's what you find in the textbooks. But is true that until you find IT, until you see IT, then you have shown IT to be correct.

Are there are alternative theories.

there are and they're really compelling. No, that they all have problems and most of them have problems with that pattern. This cnb that cost me my way background that we just saw because that pattern, what you're looking at actually in that time is acoustic, is waves, sound waves, essentially in the early universe that go through the plaster of the early universe.

And they they go out and we know what speed they go through that plasma. So it's almost like your working at a pond and you're throwing stones into the pond and they all lend in the pond at the same time and send ripples out the little circular ripples in the pond, and they're all overlap. And that's what that pattern is.

So we're looking at its sound waves going through this plasma and and those those theories I require the data ter, the dark matter fits well if it's in there, in in this classmates, in this kind of soup, that the sub omc political soup, that the early universe and the way the same waves go through IT fit that idea. So that's one thing. But the idea also came from looking at galaxy, isn't how they rotate and galaxies, and how they bend light and deform space in time, and that how they interact together.

So this loads a different bits of information. The observations of the universe from the cosmic way background all through to galaxies, and the formation of galaxies in the theory that we have there that suggests there, these particles around that interact very weekly with light, so they don't really interact, we'll e at all, which is why we don't see them, which is why the dark. That's just like a new trio, right? So like heavy new tino is, and actually there was a theory once that maybe they were heavy new tree nodes, but that kind of this favor now.

And so so we have loads of kind of different beats that fitted. This is how you do science. You start with a theory and you make a load of observations, and you can infer things and you get a consistent picture. But very importantly, until you find IT, until you really find that particle, then you don't know, right? So that's what we don't know.

just what we don't know. So fascinating, just that aspect of that that ninety five percent of the universe is like we're not really sure .

but IT is yeah and and we've inferred IT. So you might say, how do you know it's there? IT was a good question, right? I mean, if if if we have not detected this stuff, how do you know? And it's from mindstorms ory, really. So it's from gravity is from looking at the way that galaxy is rotate and the way that these sound ways moves through the early universe and the way that universe expends.

Because the way the universe expends is related to the stuff that in the universe, so we can weigh the universe, but and find out what kind of different things are in there by looking at the way it's expanded and how that expansion history has changed over time. So it's all you what you do with science, which is, wait, you know, it's true that you can criticize anyone, bit of IT and people will. So online you're seeing the comments under these other people and about this what and is true that you can you can plug away and pick away any piece of IT.

But the way IT tends to work is when you have this kind of consensus view of something, is because you have multiple observations that all fit a particular. This is, and by changing one of them, by changing the explanation of one of them, you tend to mess the whole other thing up. You, you must the wider description of multiple phenomenon, but you meet IT all up.

So it's quite hard to to find the other theories at the moment that will fit all of those different observations. I mean, another example would be the age of things is IT. It's interesting that you can look at, we can measure the age of the earth, right?

You member from geological processes, radiative something and so on. And you can can measure the edge of the earth. You can measure the edge of the sun in a different way.

You can measure IT by looking, by looking at called helio size molloy, they can work out. You can measure how much helium is in the core of the sun and the sunshine, by making helium from hydrogen. So by measuring the of helium in the core, by looking at fairly sound way, just like an earthquake, the sun quakes, you can measure at helios in there.

So you can get an estimate at the age of the sun, and then you can get an estimate the age of the universe by measuring how it's expanding. And using einstein theory. The fact that they all fit with the picture of the universe is thirteen point eight billion years old, a sun that's born a half billion years old, a planet that's born half million years old.

The fact that he all fits is is quite an intricate model. And so you could say what I argue with the the measures of the age of the earth. Maybe I don't like the radioactive dating or something and people will say that.

But the thing is it's a consistent picture with multiple different observations in saying we dart matter. So the standard model of Cosmology is you have, I had about five percent matter, twenty five percent dark matter, seventy five, seventy percent dark energy. IT might be wrong, but IT fits loads of different independent observations. So I say consistent picture.

So we just don't know what IT is, but we're not very sure that it's a thing. The other party.

but could IT could not be. What was the company .

where any the other theories competing the theories were any compile .

the theories that people try to build, where you modify our theory of gravity. So many of these observations, not all of them, so the cosmic way background, different observations, but many of them depend on gravity. And how gravity works sign down to the of general relativity.

So you could try to modify that theory to say, well, if our observations wrong, maybe because the way we measure how the expansion of the universe is, is to look at light from sup anos one way and see how IT stretched over time. Because the light, let's say, yeah, a super over and IT happened a billion years ago. Then the light has been travelling in for a billion years across the universe, and so the universe has been expanding for a billion years.

So the light, it'll be stretched. And so you can measure how much stretch there is. You said, you just measure the color of the light from the sea in over.

So, but so you can argue that maybe if you go for light that's been travelling twelve billion years across the universe, then maybe there is something different. Maybe the light was admitted a bit different, maybe the speed of light changes over time or something. You know, you can invent theory that would allow you to change the the data, all the interpretation of the data. But what you always find, I think you would be fair to say, is that you can change your theory and explain one bit, but all the whales come off the other bit so that that's why it's quite difficult.

So the dark matter, dark age theory, other theories, yes.

so fit with, you know. But then there are some mysteries, but not least, what is this stuff? right? right? And so until you know what he is, you don't have a complete theory.

Well, that is one of the most fascinating that ninety five percent of .

the universe is like. Common knows what that is. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And say, that's what I love about. One of the things I love about science is often gets presenting, you know, because I talk about science a lot in public, and you can often seem arrogance.

I think you can seem, you know, that there these people, well, this is the way the world is. You might say what? You know what? how? Who are you to say this?

The thing I like about IT personally, and the reason for success is that really you you have to be delighted when you're wrong, is the key, the key to science? It's me said many times, Richard fine in the great physicist said, IT, you know this. This is if if you, if your goal is to understand nature, so that's what you want to do.

So you don't you have not got an ego or anything. You don't want to be too right. You just want to understand then being wrong.

So if this idea of dark energy, dark matter turns out to be wrong, all scientists, or a good scientists, will be absolutely delighted, because they would be tremendously exciting that we'd ruled out this picture. IT would be great to rule out this picture. So there isn't such a thing as dark matter and dark energy.

So they saw nonsense. We, where we are barking at the wrong tree, looking in the wrong direction. It's something else which should be more wonderful undoubtedly in that theory that we have.

So I think it's said it's a humble pursuit, ultimately science and and that's the reason for its success. You you just trying to understand how things work. You're not try to.

You not, you shouldn't be. Anyway, good scientists are not trying to be the person you've got IT, right? You not trying to do IT. There's obviously human fairly. Everyone's got for gilty and everyone's human and you know and ga, but ultimately, you just trying to understand how things work.

Yes, and that's a beautiful thing. And it's so important for everyone else that does not have the time we need to do in that. I need if IT really does in some way, give us comfort to have A A Better, more comprehensive view of what we're experiencing and as technology expand. Like I was wanted to talk about the jam's web, some of the discoveries um but IT sometimes that raises more questions and one of them was these galaxies that were formed that appeared to have been formed too quickly is safe to say.

yeah so we had one of the reasons we built that telescope was to what he does IT, because I can see very distant things. And because light travels at a finite speed, the further out to university you look, the further back in time you're looking, right.

So because that can see things from which the light is been traveling for over thirteen billion years, then you are seeing things as they were in the first billion years of few hundred thousand years in the history. The universe, right? essentially.

So, well, few hundred million years, sorry, I should have sent so so you're seeing the first galaxies form IT with that telescope, which is one of the reasons I was built. And in the reason we want you to see is because we we don't fully understand that process. As I mentioned before, we don't really fully understand why they have black holes in them and it's something to do with their formation, but we don't understand IT very well.

So it's not surprising to me that when you build that instrument and collect light from the early universe, you see an early universe that's behaving in a different way to the way that you thought IT behaved. And so indeed, yes, we're seeing galaxy is that you formed earlier than you would have predicted. But that means that that means that your model of the way the university of this is not quite right. And that's not a surprise because we would not built the thing if we know everything course. So I don't think there's any I think it's fair to say there's nothing there is absolutely completely destroy our picture of how the universe evolved from the cosmic microby background that you saw in those images.

Does that have more complexity? Does is that that more nuances?

Yeah, I would say so. And i'm not an expert in that field, but my understanding is that it's interesting because we're having to refine and developing new models of the way that the galaxy is formed, an indeed a send that that IT looks like the styles and the galaxy is a present in the universe earlier than we might have expected. So IT might be IT might be that you're seeing a hint of something really profound that we didn't understand or IT might be that just the model's native bit of a tweak.

So he's from quicker than we expected. Yeah the universe. Um what are those red dots? The red dots that were observed? Do you don't .

talk about in the images? The James who have image is of the early .

universe yeah disappeared 智能 抓包。 I saved that because I do that. We're going to have to talk about this um IT was um jme I know we've talked about IT before yeah there are also found hundreds of little red dots, the ancient universe.

We still know what they are. Small galaxies of the cramp with stars or the host gania black holes. The data astronomers have collected continues to puzzle them. So what is that all about? Do you know?

I don't know. He says, he says there that we don't know. I'm going to go with that. I mean, I think .

what you .

just speed reading that he says the classic galaxies that that so I I suppose we're looking at IT, a kind of galaxy seems we're looking at a kind of galaxy that we don't see today in the universe, red in compacts, visible, lowly during about hundred, one billion years of cosmic history. So that would be, as I said, because we don't really understand the formation of the galaxies and the supermassive holes.

That's interesting because what you're seeing in the data is a kind of almost protogalaxy, I suppose, these little tiny galaxy. Is that what IT seems to suggest that yeah that's the first time i've seen that, but just so so yeah, I think what we're seeing is that we don't understand how stretches formed in the universe. We we have a reasonable idea, but we don't understand the detail. And the more things like that you find, the more information you have to build models of her stuff formed.

Do we have another like next generation James web type telescope that's even more efficient or more capable?

There are, I mean, there there are several, so proposed observe atari and and also, by the way, gravitation wave detectors, which so we got ligo, she's on the ground. There are proposals to put one in space, which is called lisa. One of one of the proposals is called lisa, which she's lasers between satellites so we can have much bigger things.

And the reason that's interesting is because they're be gravitation waves from the big bang. So you're not not as you mention neutrinos, you've got a neutrino observatory, oris, which can observe neutrinos from the early universe, and you can see things. It's just like light in the way, but IT gives you a different view you mentioned earlier, it's a different way of looking at the universe. So the new tines will have information gravitational waves will have detailed information about the big bang itself, but we can't detect them at the moment because we can't detect the really tiny little ripples in space and time.

That's fascinating. If they do launch this and they find new information, that's even more posturing and keep going further and further and further.

We want to know. It's like you said, we ask very deep questions about why the universe is the way that is, and maybe why there's a universe at all in the sense that they have a beginning. And if so, what does that mean? Was IT mean for something like this? To begin? I really, I find IT fascinating, because the most exciting thing of all is that we don't know yeah and that's so important, by the way.

And I just read I think it's often missed when you talk about the beauty of science and the value of signs. It's almost not the knowledge. It's almost like the opposite of the knowledge is it's just this idea that I think IT goes about what it's like earlier.

I'm really thought about this connection before, but is that I was pushing back on you say I don't know. I'd like, what would you mean to know everything? I don't think i'd like that and you say, maybe would maybe that's what that means navara.

You know, maybe achieving enlightenment, that's what that means. But I find the most the most human are, I feel, I think is when I when i'm on the edge of the known sure. So it's that that the fact that there are mysteries in the universe, profiling mysteries to me is is one of the things that makes life worth living.

most certainly as a human, as a human being. That's true. yeah. My point is that I think eventually we're .

not going to be human beings.

I'm sure you're right.

I know where we get pass this .

they're also in this weird depopulation stage where you know of the urban areas is very strange. Well, it's it's very weird because IT doesn't seem like that because people worried about over population. But then you have a lot of the chemicals and the plastics and all different things in people's bodies are interrupting our reproductive cycles. And you could see that eventually becoming an even bigger issue in the future if we continue to fuck up the world. You got like the problem, loads of problems, which all be fixed by AI.

There is an x an exciting in future, isn't that? I feel that gna go. I feel that we are a kind of a fork in the roads here because is, he said, the tremendous chAllenges that we find, environmental chAllenges and so on, competition for resources, geopolitically, the world looks rather, yes, I think this looks as as unstable as IT wasn't the one hundred thirties in some respects, quite terrifying, but we have nuclear weapons now.

So it's terrifying. But on the other side, he said, we have not only A I in quantum computers, which are potentially profoundly powerful things, but also, you know that the rockets that we have now in reusable rockets, yeah, we talked about that. But I I think IT is an absolute game changer.

IT is now the case that we can. We have cheap and reliable access to space. We should .

play that video of them catching IT, because that is one of the most incredible achievements in human history. And you bear so because even on mask, unfortunately, is so polarizing to some people, particularly now because the political cycle that we're in that you don't appreciate what space sex just did. I did one of the most extraordinary things ever, they caught a rocket is bigger than a fuck and skyscraper.

Come the video. It's amazing. Yeah, it's, this is absolutely A A feet of engineering that rivals almost anything human beings have ever done.

Yeah, this is really important.

This is so incredible. I think I .

will remember that in future generations will remember that .

I thought I was C. G. I. I really did. I thought this was fake when I first thought. I thought this was something that someone had made. And then I realized this was the actual video footage of my, oh my god.

that's the road to the stars that moment.

Tell me that doesn't remind .

you of the movie contact IT that does anywhere there no well.

you know needed to apolo .

one so that that and also of cost you have blue origin ah not far maybe not far behind, right?

I love that to private companies with billionaire the helm .

that are out of their mind. But I you know and I get know, I get criticize for this quite a lot and will no doubt after this interview because I I do think our future at some point is is beyond earth. IT has to be right, obviously, logically is.

But the question is when? And there there are two things to say. That one thing to emphasize, which i'm sure you degree with, is that I don't think anybody is suggesting that what we what we're able to do now is trash this planet and then moved because no one in that way in the future.

But there's things out of our control like the the killed dinosaurs. yes.

Well, that's no control. I mean, you can move. What's not IT was coming .

right now. Not really, that's true.

But so we need that technology. And so on the verge, you've having that would be nice because because sagan on IT, he said the dinosaurs had a space program that they still be around. Is dad full in the sense, which I kind of, you know.

they didn't build a rocket? Most like nature realized that, look, with these giant lizard turned around, people are never going to figure out how to make space ships.

Yeah, this is.

this is reset. Yeah, send in the hard reset button.

yeah. But, I mean, so, but I think that idea, that basic idea, I intervened jf pade us once, and he was fascinating. And he said to me, the first of all, we need infrastructure in space.

Because if you think of that building, amazon, he said, what what I needed, IT, was two pieces of infrastructure, the postal service in the internet and how they were provided. And I could build my company. So I want to do that for the next generation of entrepreneurs in space.

I don't know what they are going to do in space, but I would like the infrastructures to be there for them to do in and that's really simple yeah. And then he also goes on to say, of course, we said before the resources pt, that they are infinite, infinite resources, infinite energy, effectively up there. And so the idea, he said to me, I want to zone in the earth residential. And people say, that's ridiculous.

What are you talking? But how ridiculous is IT when you see that? When you see the fact that for the first time, we have launch vehicles that really should be able to launch almost anything we want. So the idea that we can build infrastructure in space and then, of course, bill basis on the moon, and then ultimately aren't mars. And then beyond that is a lot closer.

Now let's look at that and say, what is that? A one hundred and how many years from wilbourn and orval?

right? yes.

And one twenty.

is that? Yeah, yeah.

That's crazy. yeah. So you go from this goofy, like, flexible sort of airplane looking thing that no one's gona fly across the atlantic.

An to catching rockets with a giant like, hand the robot clap. Yeah, that's insane. That happens over such a short time. That's one hundred to go from that to blue origin is and such a short, pretty time.

So I think I think we're on the nineteen, nine, six, yes. So so when the verge of ever a revolution in many fields, my worry is that we're also seen increase in political instability. yes.

And so I think we're I think most people agree a very dangerous moment, yes, when the question is how to get to that future and that future you talked about, this wonderful future that we have might be turned at twenty years away, but IT might be an eternity away if we get the next few years wrong, right? So i'm i'm concerned that this we don't have to build a bridge to that future that we should see in our lifetime. We we should see this future beginning to unfold before first. How do we get there? Well.

we have to keep IT out of the hands of the military industrial complex. So we have to stop what's going on in the world, these insane conflicts. And if we don't, and they escalate, iran gets a nuclear weapon.

Israel uses in iran. Russia uses in ukraine. We have world war three. And i'm sure you're wear what einstein in said about world war four, that war war three, I don't know what weapons will use, but war, war four, I will be rocks and sticks yeah and that we're not that far away from that.

If you could imagine living in here shima the day before the bomb, not having any idea, anything like that could never even possibly happen. And there's a regular person walking around, and also everything is a obliterated. And you realized, like burning, a new error of destruction .

where you can. And what was interesting is, to me, I got interested in in open heim's writing post war, and i've finished IT in IT. The baby, say, asked me to look at there's think called the BBC ref.

Lectures that are very famous in in the U. K. Every year. Someone gives these lectures after lord ref, who founded the BBC.

And often hya did that in thousand nine hundred and fifty three. I think IT is fifty three or fifty four. And they were considered a failure because no one understood what he was talking about.

But in there he was concerned with the facts, of course, that he felt delivered the means by which we would destroy ourselves. And he felt our technology, our scientific know how, exceeded our wisdom in our political skill, which arguably true. yeah.

So we thought in the fifties he couldn't see how we avoid destroying ourselves. But he thought about a lot, feeling partly personally responsible for IT any, any, he describes this, the the deal. How is there any lessons that science teaches? The exploration tion of nature teaches us that we could move into other fields, that we could transfer into politics, for example.

And one of them is this picture, that complex systems with complex systems are complicated. So so he's talking about looking at quantic mechanics, for example, and I guess complicated, you say, what is in the electron is this thing? It's a particle like point light thing or a big extended wave thing, that what is IT IT behaves in all these strange ways.

We don't really have the language of the mental capacity to picture IT. And so he said, any attempt to say this thing is this, or is that IT is like this thing is, is, is doomed, right? What you have to understand is that you have to develop this rather complex and nuance picture of the way that nature works in.

Quantum mechanics is a good example. But he said, so IT is with human societies. So in a society, what is IT? So IT is that one lever.

A lot of individuals like little particles, and they have their own need and desires, and they have their views and and strongly held views, and so should they. By the way, there's a great quote from, I think, early sixties from offenheimer way, says that to be a person of substance, you need an anchor. So you need to believe things, and you need to argue for things.

You need to take position. You have have a morality. You have to have politics, right, based that you are the wise. You're not a person of substance, he says. At the same time, of course, you have to recognize there's a society.

So there are lots of people with anchors, and they, and you might strongly disagree with that anchor, and they might be wrong, right? Their anchor might be nonsense. So but but the chAllenge of politics is to avoid war. Said I read somewhere recently, someone said I kind of IT was bit said that democracy is a technology to avoid civil war. That's what IT is.

So somehow you've got to understand that whilst you have your and should have your firmly held position, you you have to find a way, and if he feels on a contradictory, you have to find a way of understanding that the society as a whole is a complex mixture of all these different little particles with their own anchors and their own positions. And what is the goal? So IT is the goal.

I often feel to me that politics at the moment, the goal is to win an argument. He often feels like to to convince enough people that our, your view is the right view, and then obviously is part of democracy the way IT works, right? You you argue your position, and then you get, you get four or five years to do your thing, and then someone else can take over.

But also, I think the thing we're missing at the moment is that is that more, perhaps more fundamental function of democracy, which is to avoid war. Because if you can avoid war, especially with the power that we have now, you have the time to sort the rest out. But if we can't avoid war, we don't.

And I think that an alpen heima wrote that he knew that in the fifties, and IT feels to mean more, that we're backed full circle name. He feels to me, we've almost forgotten, we seem to forgotten the the, the primary the primary function of democracy is not to ensure that your side wins. The primary function of democracy is to ensure is is to ensure there's a chance for the other sites to win at some point in the future.

yes.

And yes, that's that's completely .

accurate. And the problem with our version of democracy is that it's been captured by money. So can there's interests beyond the will in the needs of the people and those interests often are contrary to the world the needs of the people. And as long they can keep from IT falling into complete total catastrophe and continue to profit off of the global chaos they do, it's just there's too much money involved in politics and lobby's and special interest groups and people influencing the media theyve.

They've distorted reality to the point where the general citizen doesn't really have a new on understanding of why these conflicts are taking place in the first place and why all the money is going over to these places and what what what is being done to mitigate any these issues. And everyone feels helpless. And that helps them continue to do what they are doing and continue to read profits.

And it's not democracy. In a sense of how IT was probably originally established, originally thought of this is they never thought they had to have corporations. Corporations were even, I thought IT wasn't even an an idea. Never thought these not just corporations, but corporations that are essentially in charge of an enormous percentage of the information that gets distributed online, you know and and you you see how organizations, a government oranienburg, conspire to limit the amount of information people have access to.

And they can do IT through very sneaky ways, like, I don't know if you aware, if they have done in canada, but in canada now you are no longer able to share links to news stories on social media. And the way they snuck that in is by saying that these media CoOperations, whether its meta or twitter x whatever, they have responsibility to pay the people that are are in that are making these stories. And so by this little snickey little loophole, they are essentially put a stop on the free flow of information in canada on social media.

It's very, very disturbing and very disturbed. And I have some friends that just one up there, and they like, it's so confusing because people didn't know what was going to happen before IT happened and then IT happened and now everyone's kind of a little out of the loop up there because you're not able you can assure a link which doesn't make any sense because save there's a new york times article and ah I want to share with you on twitter. Uh, all i'm doing is driving more traffic to the new york's website is not hurting them.

In fact, it's promotion. IT doesn't make any sense that IT would somehow another because you're not these companies aren't paying. So the idea is that x because the profits that they get through advertising is all based on engagement, that there's engagement that sends people to this and so they're profiting from IT and that profit should be shared with the the media company, whether los Angeles times or whatever.

That's crazy because it's it's a two way street. It's promotion like so many more people gonna read in new york times article. If that becomes viral on twitter, this is just like .

what does seem to be generally true is that we haven't, as a society.

this that was just an facebook. Is that true? we. I don't know, it's just on face was as well. And is that see, it's the case donk was saying it's told social media general cause it's just there.

I mean, what what I think you generally true is that we haven't yet adapted to. So the internet, yes. Just the internet, yes. Because it's, as you said, in the great sweep of human history.

only been used .

by people three years, yeah yeah. And a couple of decades been lueneburg. So I think IT IT feeds IT is another of those problems we face.

Now this what we talked about, this this bridge to this tremendous ly bright future that we have, one of the pillars of that bridge that we need to strengthen, how to deal with this, that we only had for a couple of decade, right? It's clear. I think we would you know, people again will be listened to this.

And I have different views on the way that things happen on the internet regulation is. So do I think where everyone would degree on is we haven't got IT right yet, right? We know how the way that it's influencing our changing our democracies and it's just use none.

You IT might be changing them for the Better. IT might be changing them for the worst. But the way changed them.

I don't think, is fully understood in putting by governments have true farms where they just attack certain sensitive political issues and they they make polarize zing statements and crazy, crazy claims. And you go to that website or you go to that twitter page and you realize all this is an a real person. This is just like some bought somewhere and bi analyst, i'm sure you have a lot.

A former FBI analyst made an estimate of eighty percent, he thinks, eighty percent of all the accounts. And this was around the time elon was buying IT. Who knows what it's at now? Eighty percent were fake.

And this was one of the sticking points of the argument that you on side IT was when he was buying twitter, they were telling him that he was only five percent, five percent. We're figures. I will show me your data.

And the data they showed him was only a random one hundred accounts and is like, this is not sufficient, and I want to see, like all of you data. And IT became this big issue, and that's what he tried to get out the deal and they took on the core. And he wanted buying IT.

But that was a big part of IT. Like how much of this is even real? I see arguments online where people take these crazy and flaming positions, like just insulting and attacking people that believe one thing or another thing. And i'm like, how much of this is like instigated by china or russia or iran or some other foreign country, and they're doing IT through these troll farms, which we absolutely know exist, and i'm sure the united states has them as well.

and know the I know what IT one of the way I do IT because I obviously on twitter x and and so the way that I do IT is you can tell you, I think by someone's time eline usually because my basic rule of them is that you look at someone's timeline and it's all political, right? I just ignore them. That's my best.

Because because a Normal person's time, I will look at your time, you look at mine, some of IT just silly stuff, right? Some of its retweet and sports stuff, or sign stuff, or whatever IT is. I like planes, so a lot of my stuff is really instead of an airplane, right? Or whatever this.

So I think you can I think you can see a real person by seeing a breath in the things that they yes, retweet or whatever or and so I tend to ignore and use at the minimum, the people who are just single issue. Then usually what you find, by the way, is that they're not a single issue. I can just have to understand that if someone single issue focused on a single thing, but they're just a generic kind of political position so that you're see an account and all that does is, is from dev issue.

You can see them in my laugh, I think so that comes back time. You know how? D how do you deal with that? And your your, my sense will be your sense.

You is hard to legislation conversation, isn't that you? yeah. So what do you do? I suppose you could argue its education ultimately, ultimately, everything comes back to to education. A democracy requires educated population.

right?

And tools who have the mental tools to deal with this sort of new world yeah, information.

And that I think that's something that we should probably be teaching to children, is how to navigate social media and how to navigate influence and how to navigate other people's opinions of you, and how to navigate like online bullying, how, how to avoid. This is so much an anxiety that attached to social media now to, and so many people engage in arguments with IT, like all day long.

I think it's a primary resource of mental illness for a lot of people, or at least an accelerant of mental illness. And we don't have an education, is to how to manage that and what what that means to you and the addiction that people have to social media, addiction people have to their spotted phones in general, is is probably unappreciated. Yes, probably it's probably a much more significant impact on overall health than we think because so much, first of were not most to have access to eight billion peoples were the bad news.

No.

that's not good. That's not a perspective and answer. And we are essentially indicated with the things it'll scared to share out of us the most, which is eight billion people's problems.

Whatever is happening in the world, that's terrible. You're going to hear about IT first, and it's going to be the hearings to trend the most. And that gives you it's like very bizarre bias towards like what's actually happening in the world.

Yeah, isn't a big problem. It's a big .

problem because it's new and we weren't prepared for IT when I hit. It's like a flood happening like OK. We got figure out how to get all the water out here like this.

Not this place is flooded and were essentially in the middle, the flood, the social media online in Lance flood. And we haven't really shored up our basement yet. We don't we don't really .

know how to protect ourselves from IT.

but we can be optimistic. And I missed the things .

we have talked about today.

We also think because I think you are also successful at navigating that world without a killing. You like I can navigate the world of social media and I can, like you said, you look at someone's time line and see that, well, this is crazy and you have your own objective understanding of the world to a point where you can see where someone's being ridiculous. But some people just aren't that good at that.

They're not educated in that. Maybe they haven't been around enough people that are critical thinkers and they don't know how do I approach things from. They just look at things like, what am I supposed to believe? Am I good person if I believe this is my good person, if I argue against that, i'll do this, i'll do that. And they are not like wealth of out actions.

I do understand that that you and I you, we win a good position. My person, yes, we ever you know this confidence comes with some degree of success. And you can put things in prospect.

And you said you that wait when if you I often think that actually I see people who struggle when they become well known for the first time, for example, I mean, I remember when I became quite late in life, became well known as a public figure. I did a series on the BBC at two thousand and nine or two thousand and ten, the wonders of the solar system. And suddenly I was well known.

And I find that I find IT very difficult to navigate. Unfortunately, I had to support structures and people, and I could navigate IT and you come to terms with you and you learn how to do IT. But is a process is.

So I think it's the same. The one of the problems, I think, with social media, you can become very well known very quickly. Yes, is often for something that you kind of said in a the way sometimes, no, he is probably almost impossible to navigate that as just a personal just. Suddenly, ly is exposed to the glare of publicity and becomes a public figure yeah, sometime to hate figure yeah. Overnight, he is particularly difficult .

for people that didn't ever anticipate IT, like the Jordan Peter sands of the world, like people that became quite prominent, like in their late.

their forties. And I could and yeah, I mean, that I was I was an academic and then had a success on television. yeah.

And IT wasn't in a controversial. We rise about planets and melons, this and astronomy. So, but even then, I found IT difficult initially to navigate through that world. Yes, and you get used to eventually.

It's a very bizarre drug. It's what fame is. It's a very it's a very bizarre alternative state of consciousness where everybody knows who you are and you don't know them and no one's really ready for that and no one knows what IT isn't to experience IT.

Everybody thinks they want IT until they get IT. And once you get IT like, oh my god, this comes with so much scrutiny, this comes with so much, hey, you're just dealing with so many mentally ill people that are tweet at you that the worlds flat like they just angry. There's a lot of like really messy people out there.

I do yeah there still. I mean the number of people who when I so I did that that that the rocket came from the star. Yes, do. As you said, the most important thing I just should be tweet that and said bin engineering, the number of tweet I got back saying that space is, I don't what means space is fake. I don't even know what that means, but I got quite alive IT, you know, fake.

I went down a hashtag spaces, fake rabbit hall one night online. And IT has something to do with a bible, uh stuff because they think that there's a first moment it's over the earth and they think that the lights are dangled in the sky. The earth is a yeah the earth is a disk and that you can get through the format is like a ice wall and that's what you can't .

travel when you you can 开车 来， let's assume that's true.

but let's asme all, all the astronomers, all the air physicists, all NASA china every space ages. See, they're all in kaos. But why no one spilled the beans? And then.

but the thing I never understood, and i've asked this in my early days on twitter, I made the mistake of asking, you know, sometimes and now I don't reply at all to the obviously you learn that yeah like why do what possible advantage could that be, right? But I mean, what's the answer? I think they think that it's just a sm so you are stay sex is just like a sm awesome. They just taken all this money yeah for launching and satellites. So again, it's a very complicated scam because they're in IT you know communication satellite.

They should try starling, starling. They should try IT. So they know spaces real.

Everything is just deflecting of the of the doma.

I guess. But the crazy thing is the idea that everybody's in khuds, that all these competing countries decided to all lie together and yet I no record of IT, there's no record of communications, the snow exit, there's no people that rebel against this idea and go, this is mad as everything is round.

Funding thing is, well, the fundamental misconception these people have is they assume that there's a competence that in government, you know, anyone is interacted in government. I speak of my own country. I've interacted with the government of the idea that they're compassion enough to do this right.

Tremendously intricate. Sm, they can't, even in my country, they can't even make the trains rubb right. It's very basic that. So I think that is this assumption that there's some kind of underlying competence to the world.

Yes, not just pretence, but unbelievably calculating manipulation.

Yeah, I just don't think the world is run by people with smile enough to do that.

I mean, it's certainly tainting, conspiring that are real, but that's just proposers but it's also it's just like this it's again, it's attached to a weird religious thing they do believe in the literal interpretation of some of the stories in the bible and that's the somehow and another that's been attached the firm moment but that's one of the problems with um sort of um when you can if especially if you're an articular person and you even if you form like some great, you make some fake documentary and you attach much a fake facts to IT and if it's compelling and no one like you stops and goes, hold on, that's not how works.

This is how we know this. This is why the planets around. This is how we know. This is what boats law is.

This is what you start like, laying out what thousands of years of research and discovery has let us to. This is not like to, based on a wim. This is like a lot of information. And the idea that all that information is a vast conspiracy to hide the fact that god is real and that the firmament covers the earth, and earth exists in the center of the universe, is created by god.

Spaces fake OK. I've learned something I didn't know because I didn't know the spaces fake thing .

was linked to that. That is a very the root of all the flatter stuff is the format the all the filter stuff is it's based on at some very bizarre interpretation of biblical bibo. Um I I don't remember the exact depiction of the farming and how god describes IT in the bible, but they believe that that's what we're looking at, that there's like a class, like a cookie dome, like a play to cookies with a glass do.

But good is said early. If that was the way the nature is.

we would tell you, I love you. Well, not that, but everyone would be talking about how crazy your earth is. Good pair into all the other, the planets. Turns out earth is actually flat, like that would not be something anybody would hide.

I'd like to find that out, you know, because you become tremendously, you know, I mean, what a great discovery. So, but IT isn't so.

but people have like a natural inclined to uncover vast. And I think that's one of the the weirder ones that people gravitate to. But again, I I really think IT about something to do with blind belief in religious writings, and and not just that, but ironies interpretations of religious writings.

You know, when you we are dealing with something that was originally written in eighteen, he brew and then translated to light and and then degrees. And a lot of that gets lost in the translation. A lot of IT gets like you have a thousand years of oral tradition.

Like I ve always wondered at the beginning of the bible. In the beginning there was light. I wonder if that is like someone trying to figure out the big bang.

I mean, IT doesn't make sense that they would have a concept of IT back then, but that also doesn't. But maybe that's something like we inherently know is that there was an event. Maybe the echoes of that event are almost something that we just perceive, because we just think of IT as being a thing.

What is IT? IT starts with in the beginning, god create the happening in the earth. And who was that problem? boy? And darkness was on the face of the deep I love .

that .

is great line on the face of the deep.

It's amazing as a piece of literature .

yeah and the date I think I read somewhere that I was talking to a friend of my is IT seems from the egyptian creation with, I think I might be wrong there. But IT IT was very much to do with the deny and the waters. And if you find that in many religions at this water, when things emerge out of the waters, and you see that in genesis, the echo e of IT done, this was on the face of the deep, and then there's light.

Yeah, did that. So I don't know. I'm not a .

biblical school, but I am fascinated, by the same way i'm fascinated with science because I think it's people thousands of years ago trying to make sense of things .

that ultimately IT is and going very little information. So what we talked about earlier that yeah to me that's one of the defining characteristics of being human, trying to make sense of the world. And that's why, by the way, I don't like to get into the arguments with with people who have different, different views, different belief systems.

And my some baseline position is if you're curious, then you're interested and you want to know how things happened. That to me, common grounds that we can share the people I don't really understand the people who are not curious, right? I don't have questions because I am sagan.

What a great book called the dem haunted world science of the car. You but yeah, wait to that story about a taxi driver when he got in a taxi at the star and and he asking him all these questions about atlantis or whatever is and this and he realizes he doesn't think this guys is is an idiot. He thinks this guy is, is, has a curious mind, is someone who should be read. We can have a wonderful conversation. But he also says that he felt that he perhaps been failed by society, by education, and that his curiosity had not been, yes, somehow channel to the real mysteries, yes, but got side tracks into all this strange of.

I think, the real mess. The academic ministries are intimate to some people because they don't think of themselves as being intelligent. So then they grab a towards like youtube mysteries, some more more controversial.

So that puts them in like a select club of people actually know what's going on with. People love stuff like you in on. They love like that, whether there in the no of like some .

top sec information. By the way, that that idea that I think one of the problems we have communicating science and getting Young people into science is that idea that you have to summer be really clever, which is not true at all.

It's IT goes back to what I said before that the is more you have to be comfortable we're not knowing so that is a big step yeah to say i'm not gonna guess and i'm O K maybe you asked me a question about the the origin, the universe, right? The answer is don't know so the I think it's if like you said, if if you can be comfortable with not having to have a simple intelligible explanation for something, then you'll make more progress in life. But it's quite difficult.

So easy just god, this is simpler. That thing, yes. So a simpler explanation there.

What's also very difficult for people, because they attached their ego to ideas. And once you have said an idea, then you are attached that idea. You defend that idea. It's a real problem.

So important.

Yeah, ideas are just ideas. And you are you, and the way you interact with the ideas shows your intelligence. You can be incorrect.

People are often incorrect. But if you argue for something that you know is incorrect because you don't want to lose, that's that's bad for everybody. Yeah.

I am going back to real five and he said, what the great there's a great essay i've probably tell you that before called the value of science that you wrote one nine hundred and fifty five being get IT online and in there he says the most valuable thing is scientists bring this transferable skill to life and it's that you have a great experience, we would be wrong yeah. So nature is brutal.

And most of the time you come up with some really great theory and you are really sure about you do the experiment and you just wrong. And so you get so used to IT that you come to enjoy IT because you're learning, but it's a process you can't. That's why science is so important in schools and experiments are so important.

It's not that you just swing a pendula and this is nothing interesting about that, but it's just that you're learning that there is there's a gold standard of knowledge which is nature and is fireman said IT doesn't care who you are or what your title is or what your name is or you may be elected with ninety nine percent votes in the whatever IT is. IT doesn't matter. Nature just doesn't care.

And so the the more you interrogate nature, even as a little a kid at school with a little experiment, the battery in a light or something, you learn that there's a reality and you learn what IT takes to acquire a reliable knowledge about the world. And reliable knowledge is important. yeah.

How do we how do we form a view of? And IT can be very important questions. IT can be questions like what happened if we Carry on put in Greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, for example, whatever your politics are at, that is a legitimate question, a good question.

right? If we going to influence .

the climate, if we Carry on doing this. And so how do we then address that is a question you can't do IT. By going back to your political affiliation ation, or your belief system, you got to try and to understand this complicated system, which is the climate of a planet.

So you make measurements of the thing, and you build some models and computer models. And these are very famous, saying that all models are wrong, because the models right. So but you did the best you can do.

So you have to go and you come up with some information and a model that kind of work. So you say this is the best version of our acknowledge at the time. And then you can try to act on IT and you refine the model and that's the process. But that idea of how can we acquire reliable knowledge that we can trust, which might not be right and is very likely not completely right, but it's the best we can do at the time. That's what my definition of science would be, is IT is nothing more or less than the best picture we can manage of how nature works.

Any given moment, not a truth, is not something that its very nature, the way that science work says IT will IT may be shown to be incorrect or not particularly greater model tomorrow yeah but I would define IT as the best we and by we I mean our civilization, the best we can do. And so we act on that. I don't see any other way to act as a civilization. Then with that, the best we can do is .

the best we can do yeah and that that term reliable information so important because people want to leave to conclusions to try to like tie something up needed when the reliable information might not be available. Like reliable information is the number one reason I never take the u of thing seriously. I am.

So all in that there must be life out there. IT just makes sense. That makes sense that I know the firm y paradox with not a standing.

But I think if you just take new account, the sheer numbers of planet that we're looking at, the possibility of something achieving some sort of advanced life seems very high. But no reliable information. Zero, not one thing that have very seen and I go that's for sure, real, not one.

Every citing everything i'm like, how do we not know? How do we know if there is a top sea drone program, which most certainly there has to be there probably has to be. There probably some sort of radical propulsion system that they devise.

They probably made some breakthrough they haven't been forthcoming about because of national security risks. There's probably something really cookie that to fly really fast to this guy, kind of a drone, and that's probably what people are saying. That's probably a lot of IT. But then there's also this part of me that doesn't want abandoned the idea that if I was an intelligent species for another planet, and I saw that these territorial primates with thermo nuclear weapons are advancing towards the creative AI and like ruining the planet while they're doing IT like doing crazy shit to the ocean and poisoning extremes and war supplies, like, I believe let's keep an iron is fucked and freak. I would most certainly say this is a, if this happens, although out the universe, this, just imagine that this is the natural progression from single cell organisms to super curious advanced life forms that eventually transformed the world that they live. And this a natural progression there's got to be plan to don't make IT is probably a slew of them that get two thousand nine hundred and forty five and IT turns out that both germany, japan and or all germany, japan and the nine states all have nuclear weapons at the same time, launched them all each other. And then civilization .

goes down to zero.

Or kein missile, crikey, in missile crisis, or asteria impacts, or super volcanoes. I mean, the reason why we have mountains in the first place, we have volcanic activity. We know that every now and then there's a massive supervolcano, like what yellowstone is, this called dera, that if it's a continent killer, if IT blows, there's no more united states.

IT stops being a thing. Most people deployment die. We get down a few hundred savages. We start from scratch. And that's that's inside the realm of possible that can absolutely happen.

So something has to get past all of these hurdles to, if I saw plan this real close, like us, like, wow, they are gonna not fuck this up. They have achieved like this crazy apex who there so far beyond everything else on their planet. They're almost there.

There are almost, let's watch. I would think of that too, but I just don't seen the evidence everybody keeps I bringing these whistle blowers. They all tell me all i've seen IT. It's incredible one day it's going to be released.

Yeah, ah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I don't see shit. I think it's best to assume kind of sagan again wasn't when he said no one's coming to save us from ourselves.

Let's just ask me that we definitely should assume that and that's a safe and that's an intelligent assumption and also that's how you want your children to behave, right? You don't want to go to save your children every time there. When they they get older, they're going to go on their own.

They're going to make IT. They're to figure out on their own. If they don't, they're going to be infant for the rest of lives. And this might be one of the reasons why we don't get intervened, why something doesn't come down and like put a halt to us, like maybe there's just hoping we .

can figure this out of diplomacy and whatever they have. Mean, i'm so .

fascinated by I I want to believe everything. I'm such a soccer. You know, every time I see bobbles our talk, I want to believe, I want to believe all of IT.

I wait, as I said, I wouldn't be surprised, right? I'd be relieved.

I believe as well. Yes, please help us. But yeah but also do you think about the way we interact with, uh, primitive tribes? It's not good. IT ruins them almost every time. Like there is a story that we were talking about recently where starlink has been brought to some of these very remote tribes and they've been given cell phones and now travel leaders are complaining.

as we talked about earlier. Yeah.

these are on their phones all day in the fuck and jungle, like instead of like living this subsistence lifestyle, they're been living for tens of thousands years. Some of them we're getting lazy and they're just sitting around and they're looking at, you know.

videos can shop with that yeah.

just looking to tiktok argument with people .

along trolling you.

looking at means and laughing, you know, we ve ruin them. And this is one of the reasons why, like places like north century island, there's like you not supposed to visit them, just want to leave them alone. Because they are this very bizarre state of uncontacted, very primitive lifestyle that we can, we, we can preserve, which is also weird.

Shouldn't we help them if that's sort weird to like you are human beings and know, living like people live thousands of years ago. I don't want to live like that today, but that's if I was an alien life form and I wasn't so, you know, cautious about the impact that I would go. You guys need to stop this. We're going to come down land on the White house lawn, scare the shit out all you, you know, take all your nuclear weapons away.

I wish somebody would do that to be onest.

What do do you? Don't you think? So the I don't .

think the .

real problem would be the structure of our society is based on this idea that we have to work together to sort out our problems. And if something came here that was like far superior and intelligence and and its capabilities, we would sort to defer to that. That would be our space daddy now. And there probably religions, probably some scm religions that get invented to try to, you know, contact and make peace with these overlords.

How did we get?

We got no, the idea like, okay, let's take a look. Let's pretend that we will. It's extrapolate, let's imagine and um we do get tomorrow.

We set up bases on mars. We do become uh, we developed the technology that allows us to travel to other solar systems. And we do observe uh, a civilization that is, you know, like the bronze age, you know.

And we we stumble on these people that are developed, they have tools, they have an fired out steel, yet some pretty interesting things, and they're clearly intelligent. They figured out agriculture would we would be study them for sure, or one hundred percent, we would, you know, send word back to earth. Oh my god, we found these, you people that live like the mongols did. Twelve hundred ad IT would be fascinating. We would one hundred percent be interested in IT, and I think they would be .

interested in us. This is star track. This is stark track.

The prime is the thing is ah the prime directive. Harmer, what?

Well, if I don't yeah I mean that I think .

that's what they would do. I think we would hope that David prevent a but if that's the case, why didn't they prevent? He was a nag sachi. why? Why do they let us just practice blowing things up in the devote a desert for like thirty years?

I think you have I the point is I think there's nobody there that is the .

terrifying ideas that we're the only ones in the whole thing, and that intelligent life is so bizarre and such a rare thing that happens in the only the perfect of circumstances.

that that would be my baseline view.

The universe is so big, wouldn't every single potential situation happened? infinite? I mean.

we don't know if it's infinite. We right, we have the observable universe. I think the current number is something like two trillion galaxies depending on how many smaller ones there are.

So what do you think that just out of two trillion galaxies, there's probably pretty good odds that something would reach some sort of a goldy lock state in terms of where the planet exists in relationship to the star in?

But we are talking, the distance between the galaxies is the endorsed galaxies, two million light years away. He is the largest, a nearest st. Large neighbor.

So I think when I think about this, I tend to confine IT to our galaxy because I can't conceive of travel by sween galaxies. Too great. I think it's too far. Although for now he is true that the laws of physics do not prevent that. So IT, I teach relatives sy in the amendment university, the first year, the eighteen year old, when the first thing we do in special relativity is is talk about the fact that if you travel close, the speed of light, you've had a spacecraft travelling close the speed of light, then distance is shrink from your perspective.

So, and the one number I always have in my mind is that the large, hard and collider at son, the protests go around the ring, which is twenty seven kilometres in occupants, and they go around at one thousand and nine point nine, nine, nine, nine, nine, nine percent be the light. So close to the speed of light. At that speed, distance is shrink by a fact of seven thousand.

And so that ring is something like four meters in diameter to the protons. Well, so, so IT, according to the laws of physics, if you can build a spacecraft that goes very close to speed of light. You can shrink the distance to the endroits mental galactic and therefore for the time IT takes to get there by a an arbitrary, arbitrary amount.

Actually, the closer you get to see the light, the more you can drink IT. And so you can make those two million light years you could traverse across that distance in principle, in a minute, according to visit. However, the downside is that you you couldn't come back to tell if you came back to the earth. And that made to tell everybody what you'd found at least four million years would have passed on the earth or so. So you can, so this kind of a downside to IT that we could, in principle, explore the galaxy and beyond, but get in to chat to everybody about what you found is forbidden by the structure of the universe where the relatives works.

That really is essentially a time machine.

Well, is a time machine in the sense that we could go arbitrarily y far into the future by flying around in a rocket very close to speed the light. So we could come back a million years in the future and look at the earth and find out what had happened. You can't go back as far as we can tell, so you can't get back to you.

You can't tell the time machine to go backwards. So these are time machines that the world is built such that the time machine, a way to think about IT, the way that we teach IT in undergraduate physics, is that so einstein theory, there are events which are things that happen in space time. So that would be event if something happens.

Our conversation now is a thing that happens, space, time. And what einstein theory tells you is it's about the relationship between events. So so let's say that we wanted to come back here tomorrow. That will be another event we meet again tomorrow.

And you guess that how much time has passed between those events in einstein there? The amount of time that has passed is the length of the path you take over space time between the events. So it's just like same in in a sense what's the distance to in us in in dallas, right? You d say, okay, well IT depends what route you go.

Well, what's interesting in instances with the only complication is the length of the path you take between events is the time measured by a clock that's Carried along that path. So that's that's how much if you are Carrying your watch with you and you go between here and tomorrow, you go this way, you go off, maybe you flight to dallas and back as something, and then come back again. This is a good length. Someone else can take a different path, obviously, and so that a different amount of time will pass for them between those two things. That happen just because of that one fact is .

very infinitely small, but measurable.

amit is a tiny amount. Unless you travel, someone goes close to speed of light, or someone goes near a black hole or something where where this space time is all this sorted, then you can get big effects. But he still completely measurable.

I mean, that they are quite big effects. These in the sense that for the satellite navigation system, for example, GPS, that the clocks on the satellites take a different rate to the clocks on the ground. And it's quite a big effect, I think, from memory, something like thirty over thirty thousand nano seconds per day difference because there are a weaker gravity feel the moving in all sorts of things the same thing.

But thirty thousand and nano seconds light travels one foot per nano second, which he's going always say that god were using prior units because it's thirty point eight cents of IT. It's one foot good. It's one ana second that's thirty thousand and feet of position measurement if you drift your clock out by thirty thousand and nine o second.

So IT wouldn't work. So so it's a big effect for when you start using time to measure distance, which is what we do in satellite navigation GPS. So we have to correct so the clock have to be corrected for that the effect.

So so it's an effect that we can easily measure with atomic clock. But IT didn't make much difference to us as humans, right? But just that the point is that the laws of nature would allow you to do IT if you could go close to speed the light.

By the way, the last thing i'll says, the the limiting factor, you might say what what happens you really close the speed of light weapons if you go at the speed of light. Well, special relativity I instances there is built such that the the distance between any two events in the universe are longer. The path of the beam of lights between the events is zero, no time at all.

So, so that's the way the einstein theory is built. So he asked the question, when he was Younger, famously, what would the universe look like if I traveled the along side, the beam of light? And the answer is that you wouldn't perceive any time.

Well, you can't. The last thing I say just is, is if you've got any mess at all, you can't do that. You can't go to speed the light.

So I, according to our model, which is a good model, and IT was seems to work, but if you've got no mess, you go out the speed of light. So if you're a photo, you go at the speed of light and and no time. So what are your thoughts .

on the possibility of some sort of a novel propulsion system that doesn't move things at speed, but instead brings things together?

Yeah, it's the Albert. What's he called the drive? So, so you can, you can. Einstein's general theory, relativity. The general relativity is this theory of gravity.

And it's is a theory where space and time are distorted by things, anything in the universe, right, stars and planets. And so that's that's what gravity is. It's the distortion of space in time by mess and energy is nice time theory. So you can and and it's been done, but you can develop of things where you say, believe we could make this geometry of space and time. If we could distort IT in this way, then indeed, you can build a walk.

drive, right, right?

But then IT always turns out, as far as we can tell, that the other question is, but what kind of stuff would you need? What kind of matter or energy or field, whatever is, what kind of thing would you need to make that geometry? And he always turns out that those things don't appear to exist.

So these particular kinds of matter and energy that if you had them, you would be able to do that with face in time. We don't think you can have them and say, is kind of is a bus a right? Is IT status is most consider .

that we don't have them here, but that in different planets systems, different different environments that these elements could exist IT.

It's not it's not gonna element is going to be kind of some kind of quantum field, some kind of energy or something. And so you can also try to speculate. But Stephen hawking wrote a very famous paper called the chrono gy protection conjecture. So connect is important, is a guess and not proved. We say that whatever the ultimate laws of physics are, that we don't have them at the moment, string theory, whatever IT is, then there will be such that you can't do this because creole gy protection means protect the the present from the future. So in in other words, you can't build the time machine.

IT goes back in time, right? So but so that, but because einstein's theory allowed you to imagine such a thing, even though you might not able to build IT is not being proved and beyond doubt that you can somehow make these kinds of quantum fields of whatever is that you need to make worm holes, for example, stable worm holes you can go through. And so it's not been proven.

So just is suspected that that's going to be the case, by the way. The final thing, they say we very neat because he was right back to what I said at the start. One of the pictures of how I said there was this thing, the black hole information paradox.

And we thought Stevens calculation was that no information comes out. We now think IT comes out. So we now think that black holds do not destroy information. We're pretty sure it's been proven mathematically to most people satisfaction that the information ends up out again.

So if you went into a black hole, the information would be out in that hawkey radiation that could reconstruct you, but only in the sense that if we have an nuclear bomb landed on us now, then in principal, the information would be still there. In the future, we could be reconstructed, right? But it's still in principle there.

And then, but the question is, how does IT get out? How is IT getting? How is the information that is you ending up outside again? And and it's not the physical picture is not really understood, but the link is that one of the pictures that people are beginning to suggest to have is that there is some kind of worm holes, in a sense, some kind of worm hole that connects the inside of the black hole to the outside.

And so a picture is that your atoms and everything your bit get stumbled up and go basis through the worm holes and come out again. And but they are funny kind of worm holes, so people don't really understand this. But mathematic looks like maybe, so IT looks like maybe this some role, the worm holes, these things, the science fiction things, over after a fashion, some kind of them, is some role for IT in the way the universe works.

So it's it's really cool. The other the last thing i'll say, because and is is a thing called E R qual E P R, which is so pr was the spooky action at a distance. So we made up that before.

You know, the mechanics, there's this entanglement thing where something can be separated by a million light years, but if you do something to IT IT seems like this thing respond, right? Not in a way that you can transmit information, but IT respond. So entanglement, there's a picture of that, so that einstein pedal scheme rose.

And epr, where they wrote a paper on this same, we don't like this. IT must be something wrong with quantum mechanics. We don't think there is.

Now, this is the basis of quantum computers. So we build things that rely on this effect. E R.

Is einstein rosen, which is einstein rosen bridge, which is worm hole. So they also published a paper about wormholes are in standing rosen in the thirties. And so the idea is that you could picture that somehow.

It's been a kind of worm hole that connects the entangled particles, so that's how this entanglement work. Another description of quantum entanglement is a worm hole kindly geometry, and this is, this is part of the cutting entry research into black hole, but also the structure of space in time in quantum tanglement. And her quantum tanglement might produce space in time.

And it's related to the way that quantum puter work. So it's become a really hot topic because people are trying to build quantum computers and programme concert computers. And these are the kind of problem you have to face about quana tanglement and how you maintain IT and what IT means.

And there was a paper recently, which he is quite a controversial paper, but that I think was the google quantum computer, that that wish is one of the best ones. And it's not using IT as a computer. It's using IT just as these cubits, these little quantum systems that are kind of very stable, that are the basis of quantum competing.

And it's using those cubits and setting them up in such a way that something that looks like a kind of a worm hole is created in the quantum computer. It's kind of one dimensional wormhole. It's a bit anna, technical and everything.

But IT looks like IT might be the first hint of how you build space were from cubits. And so IT is. And so that paper was published there is that a holography warm all is is important to say that warm haul, it's what's called the hologram is not really our universe.

It's kind of a different thing because that's the last thing I think, because I got I got about your mind because your mind, these theories, the hologram thing is quite well established now and it's coming from a thing that you may talk fact with other people on the show, that the A D S C F T conjecture, a great physical models. Ena, so the idea is that you can have a quantum thear. We're living on a boundary, so you could imagine, picture you a fear with with a quantum theory, we living on the surface and that wanted there's a completely equivalent description of whatever is is going on, that the physics in the interior of the of the sphere.

So almost if the interior of the space is a hologram of the theory that lives on the surface, and and it's kind of not accepted, but one, many physicists think our universe is like that. So so what saying is that we have this conversation now, and there's an equivalent description of this somehow in a theory that does not contain space in time, that's a completely equivalent description that lives on in in fewer dimensions on the surface somehow, that surrounding us. And it's really worldly in hand wave, because we don't fully know what IT means, but IT, but IT would mean that we are holograms.

So this is a hologram of of this other jewel theory that that's what that thing was, the holographic wormhole thing. So it's all very the beginning of this work. But that is an example of how I could become an experimental science, because quantum computers now exist and they allow you to do those experiments to try to build filament, see somebody like a filament of space, a holographic filamentation face that you're building from these cubes, which is just and by the way, that word is a bit with it's just something like an electron.

It's not that they more complicated, but an electron will be an example of one. So it's a physical thing that we have in the lab that is a quantum system that's a quantum bit. So you build that in the different ways of building them, and that's what a quantum computer is.

But it's amazing that, that we beginning to use those things not for computing yet because they're really hard to program, but we do. Physicists have gone this is great because google and microsoft has spent billions of dollars building these things because they want to build these computers, but their perfect laboratories for quantum mechanics, so you can do abstract research into quantum mechanics on them, wish I find fascinating. That's actually .

more fascinating than using them to crack everybody's codes.

Yes, I know factory large numbers is kind of boring, but building worm holds. Yes, which is, I caution, it's not it's a complicated thing, but IT looks like the beginnings of a laboratory to build structures like that. But so far, and before you leave.

I have to ask you this because I thought about this, what you're talking, you might be the only person that could explain this to us, that we were looking at this im of these quantum entangled photons. And the image was in the shape of a union. We couldn't understand what we were saying, right? We couldn't understand if they did this on purpose to make IT the shape of a unique. And it's just a representation of these quantum tangle photons or of that is what quantum entangled photons actually look like in in a shape.

So is visualized to entangled basis in real time.

he says, making them appear as a stunning quantum in iag symbol.

Yeah I mean, it's I hadn't seen that but it's IT looks to me like it's another example of trying to visualize entanglement looks fundamental. Let me put IT that way.

So IT does look as if this idea of entanglement, which is the IT, is, as I said, perhaps producing space and time itself, and and but also is the way that quantum computers work, and the way that we didn't talk about this, but the way that you can, one way of pitching what this does is allow you access to multiple universes. So many world's interpretation of quantum mechanics. You mentioned IT breaking peoples encysted code, right? right? What are you actually doing there? You ve got an algorithm.

You're run the concert computer. And how does IT fact to these? What is doing is finding the prime numbers that you multiply together to make a very big number.

So it's very easy to multiply two big numbers together, together. Really big number is very hard to take a very big number and factory. So find out what the numbers were that got multiplied together to make IT. That takes much longer than the current age of the universe. For big numbers, we don't need conceivable clastic computer, but the quana computer can do IT in, know a second or something in the the, the explanation .

for how is doing IT .

a picture, which many people in the field, not everyone, many people would say the correct is what is doing is the calculations in multiple universes. So it's accessing the fact they are actually there's an interpretation of quantity. Can it's call the many worlds interpretation where you're to imagine these, you know, infinite, pretty much to see of universes and they compete kind of good.

And does the calculation in parallel, and then brings them back together again at the end. And then I mentioned David dodge. Charlie is a fascinating and writer in this field, and the instigate of many these algorithms early on. He would say that, he would say, this is what has happened. There is no other explanation.

How do you explain the fact that this quantum m computer can do something that no classical computer can ever do? How do you explain IT? Where is he doing the math? right? And he would say, he would say it's doing IT in the multiple. And well, I don't .

fully understand .

that .

alizad Better. Well, I never. By capturing the result of image with a nanosecond precise camera, the researchers teased apart the interference pattern they received, revealing a stunning in Young image of the two entangled photons.

So that sounds like that's what a, and in a real sense that the photos es are arriving and you're detesting them. So it's a photograph of.

So that's what IT actually looks.

If you think about what I think what must be happening, you get these 4 tons IT is true to say that against many worlds， international of quantum mechanics would be these entangled photons. You've send them on a path, then they, they going bother with that to find them.

If you calculate the the way you calculate how a photo on goes for me to be, or an electrum, whatever IT is IT just formally, if you allow IT to take all possible paths, that's one way of calculating the probability or go from one place to another. And when you get entanglement, ment gets more complicated. But you are essentially, you are mathematically saying, I allow IT to go on all path, and I really that you're seeing what an interference pattern is. You're seeing the result of the fact that these particles can go on all loads of paths and interfere with each other and and make a pat. And you can see, and I think that's what that is.

faces. That pattern is an ancient symbol. IT is beast for this is unbelievable, beautiful, crazy.

Brian, thank you so much. What a great conversation. I really, really enjoyed. IT, please help people how they can find you. I know you.

you're doing life performance. I'm going to for a long time now, actually, I needed up doing IT for about two and half years, and it's changed a lot. We've done if to over four hundred thousand people.

I was told the other day around the world and I thought just to finish IT because I want to finish IT and write another one i'd come back to to the us. We did a few in the us. But so going back in April and may and doing these well.

quite one two years ago that was .

eight years ago wasn't yeah so this is you know it's IT explores many of these questions actually, particularly black holes. And I used to round the off and doing a few. So you go and look on the web, you'll find, you know, we in some la, new york, chicago, and I hope we lost in night. Yeah, not in that we do. And you know so that's that's what i'm what i'm up to thank .

you very much. Appreciate what you do means thank you very nice.