Rationality, Science Fiction, and Humanity’s Future
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All right, let's talk about science fiction. 1001 of the greatest science fiction. By the way, I love the cover design. Whoever did that for Prometheus Books really kind of captured that 1950s feel when science fiction, I guess, really came of age. I suppose. Have you always been interested in science fiction since you were a kid? Yeah, yeah. Goes all the way back to the murky days of my childhood. The first...

I guess science fiction memory I have is standing, you know, probably four years old, maybe four years old. I have to be four or five, maybe standing sort of wobbly legged in the backseat of my parents' car at the drive-in theater, planet of the apes, the original, you know, mom and dad in the front seat. And I'm just watching that mind blown. And then, uh, that is still a great film. Oh, it is. It holds up. So, I mean, I mean, the sequels were, the sequels were, oh,

horrible but the first one was so good they they cut the budget more and more and more so they got progressively more challenging to make but yeah that first one's a classic but i don't know i just i think reruns of the original star trek series you know after school coming home middle school twilight zone reruns you know the old original twilight zone i mean things like that really just uh

made an impact on me because science fiction, oh, I also read early on,

probably middle school. I've read The Time Machine by H.G. Wells. Blew my mind. You know, I just love that story. I must have read it about 20 times in my lifetime. But I love science fiction because it's more than just an entertainment genre. You know, it matters because it's sort of like the fringe of our thinking, our reality adjacent thinking. So,

I've got no problem with fantasy, entertainment, horror, all that stuff. Great, it's fine, cool. But science fiction is special, in my opinion, because it's got just enough reality, possibility sprinkled into it so that it matters. It makes it more powerful. And as you know, it's common knowledge. Science fiction has inspired many people.

people to go into engineering science you know many astronauts the 100 asked hundreds of astronauts have you know said yeah Mr Spock was my hero when I was a little kid I mean it's a very common thing so yeah it's just an entertainment genre but science fiction is something special to our species because it's it's it's latching on to this most powerful way we have of knowing called science

And it's making it fun. It's making it exciting. It's making it scary. You know, dystopian possible futures. So it can be a warning, which again,

You go see The Exorcist, that's not really a warning if you don't believe in that stuff. But you go see Planet of the Apes and you see the Statue of Liberty half buried in the sand, then you might think, hey, maybe this nuclear war thing is worth being concerned about. So, yes, science fiction has so much...

uh so much of an impact on us always lies it's been here for so long it actually goes back further than most people think you know technically uh you could argue maybe Mary Shelley

The original Frankenstein novel. But I have one quote in my book from, oh gosh, I forgot, Voltaire. You know, he wrote a short story. I have that. I blanked that quote. I did. Let me see if I can find it here. Yeah, because I was surprised. I didn't know that he had written...

This, where is that? Yeah, it's about visiting other planets and there's no magic in it. So it qualifies by my definition. Yeah, so you could go back centuries, really. I think we think of it as a more modern thing. But anyway, I'll get that in a second. Yeah. Yeah. Hang on one second. Sure. Wanted to grab this issue of Skeptic we did. Volume two, number two. We call it the Gorky Eta. Oh, yeah, yeah. I have it. I still have my copy. You have this? I still have it. I love this. My partner, Pat Lindsey, who's there behind me right here in that room.

A plaque or two. Her Honor, she drew that. And this was, our cover story was by a guy named Steve Harris, who's a medical doctor, but he was also involved in the whole cryonics movement. But he's also a science fiction buff, so his article for us was

A couple of myths. One was that science always goes too far, and the scientists play God, and they can't succeed at that. They have to fail. That's the theme that comes up over and over. And also the resurrection is kind of in there. We're going to bring this body back to life.

But you can't just have that happen and then we all get to live forever happily ever after. There's no good story there, right? It's got to turn into this monster. This horrible thing happens because the scientists went too far. That kind of thing. And he was the one that told me about the day the earth stood still as a Christ allegory, which I never really thought of. You know, that Klaatu comes to warn the earthlings about their sinful nature and

and the authorities won't take him seriously, so he mingles among the common people, and he gets involved in this single mom, so she's kind of the Mary Magdalene character, and then they glom on to what he's up to, and then they chase him down and kill him, and they put him in the tomb, right? He's in the morgue or whatever, and then Gord has to go get him out of the morgue and then takes him and puts him back in the spaceship and pushes some buttons, and he comes back to life. Now, Steve Harris, who told me that in the original script...

The Mary Magdalene character, Patricia Neal, is standing there going, oh, my God, this is the power of science in the future. And in the original script, he goes, yeah, we can do this. And then the Breen censorship board said, no, no, no, you can't say that to the American people. Only religion, only God could do that. So the new line that he used in the film is something like, no, no, only the great spirit in the sky could do this.

Yeah, something like that. That is a common, I remember that article, by the way. But yeah, that's a common, a common train of thought is this idea of science replacing religion. And you have to be careful. One of my books, 50 Popular Beliefs That People Think Are True, which is sort of a grand tour of

you know, supernatural stuff and extraordinary claims, that kind of thing. I have a chapter in there about science and how you have to be careful because yeah, it's wonderful. It's great. It does all this stuff, you know, but yeah, but it's still done by humans. So it's not perfect and it's never going to be perfect. And it's like a,

you know, it's like a shovel. You can go out and dig, you know, work in your garden, make something beautiful, or you can whack somebody over the head with a shovel. It's just, you know, it's a shovel. And so science...

It's wonderful, but it's not some utopian, save us, this is everything we ever need. And scientists are not high priests, infallible, perfect people who have the magical knowledge to save us all. So yeah, you always got to keep a reality-based, humble perspective when it comes to science.

Yeah, I guess to make a good story, you have to have a hero and then put them in trouble. Something bad happens. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So you can't have science just doing wonderful things and we all get to live happily ever after. Right. Well, even like Star Trek, you know, my beloved Star Trek, uh,

Especially the original series. I mean, that is the that's, you know, Gene Roddenberry's optimistic hope for the future. And that's beautiful. But they still have flawed people and they got to fight the Klingons and all this kind of stuff. They're not just all hanging around writing poetry all day and flying around in space. So, yeah, you always got to have conflict or it would be boring.

And, you know, until we grow up, there always will be error and conflict if we ever do. Remember my favorite episode, one of the favorite episodes, the original series, The City on the Edge of Forever. So Harlan Ellison wrote that script. And he told me, and then he wrote a book about this later, that in the original script, he had put

all kinds of things going on in the enterprise. People were sleeping with each other and there was a drug dealer and people were addicted and drinking too much. And I guess Roddenberry said, no, no, no, no. That's too much. That's too dark. It's really funny. It's amazing what Roddenberry got away with though. Back for the time in the 60s, he slipped so much by those sensors because it was tough back then to get stuff on TV and he

He just worked it through. That was the whole point of the science fiction mirage, kind of just pumping out these stories. Remember the episode with the two characters? They're black on one side and white on the other. But they were reversed, right? So the one guy is explaining to Spock, who's like, I don't see the difference. He goes, can you not see it? I mean, he's black on the right side. That's the wrong side. Yeah.

That is so funny. Yeah, because if you just put it in American culture context of the 1960s, the censorship board would go, oh, no, no, no. You can't comment on race relations in America on television. You don't have a problem with that. Star Trek, that original series, always gets...

Like journalists write an article about it, you know, on the anniversary or whatever. And they always talk about the interracial kiss between Kirk and Uhura. But it's terrible because it actually was a problem. It wasn't aired in many southern states, you know, because of the controversy. But I don't see it as this glorious moment. First of all, it wasn't even the first interracial kiss in Star Trek because...

Kirk kissed an Asian woman, I believe, in an earlier episode. I forgot the name of it, but that technically counts. But the episode with Kirk and Uhura kissing, it was forced by these aliens who had mind control. So it wasn't even like, you know, a romantic kiss. I mean, it wasn't really, it's kind of weird. But anyway, back to the book, Damn You, Entropy, you asked. Yeah, it just grew out of my...

My love of science fiction. And it was never, it's weird because it was never, I never had an original plan for a book. I just sort of habitually or compulsively planned.

would note in the margins of books and short stories I read a great quote when I saw it. I just didn't want to lose it to time, let my memory forget it. So I noted it. If I'm watching a science fiction movie or a TV show and I just hear a great quote, I have a pretty good ear for great soundbites. My family hates watching science fiction movies with me because I pause it and I have to note the minutes so I can go back later and transcribe it. So I ended up

With a collection of thousands of quotes. And I realized, this is something. So I actually have close to 4,000 quotes. And I'm a publisher. And Cambridge Press, Cambridge University Press was interested. But then the Prometheus Books wanted to cut it down to 1,000 with the hope of maybe 10,000.

you know, succeeding volumes. So I just, you know, picked out a thousand and made that, but I've got so much more, you know, in the arsenal. So hopefully I can do a few more. And the idea about the quotes is that they're not context dependent and they're not, not about popularity.

So I didn't just, you know, scrape the Internet for popular quotes. You know, Arnold, I'll be back. You know, that's not in there. You know, every quote in there. It doesn't matter if you never saw the movie, never read the book, never saw the TV show. It doesn't matter. The quotes were selected because they have intellectual impact, because they're emotional or they're inspirational. There's some reason like that.

And you don't even need to know the whole story. Every one of them stands alone. And I was shocked to find how many really good quotes I had about critical thinking, you know, philosophy. Yeah, yeah. I love those. You know, a wide range of topics, you know, quantum physics, you know, things like that. Just really good stuff that anybody, even a non-science fiction fan would find very interesting, I think.

Yeah, since Terry Gargis died yesterday, I'll read that quote from Young Frankenstein that she was in, Gene Wilder. In my loneliness, this is the monster, I guess. In my loneliness, I decided that if I cannot inspire love, which was my deepest hope, I would instead cause fear. That actually was one of the themes of the original Frankenstein, right? He was lonely. Yeah, the original Frankenstein, it's worth reading for anybody who hasn't. It's really so much deeper than...

you know, our collective memory about the story for most people anyway. Yeah. The, the monster is such a sympathetic, good character, a thinker, you know, there's even, there's a great line when he says, you know, um,

you know, about how he struggles to understand how regular people are so violent and so hateful. And he's just, oh, he's like, well, almost wants nothing to do with us. You know, I mean, it's really amazing. You know, and she, you know, she was, I forgot her age. She was a teenager when she wrote that. It was one summer. Yeah. And I think it was the summer. I hope I don't remember this incorrectly, but she was in England and,

And it was a summer that was extra, extra dark and gloomy because of, I think, Fracatoa on the other side of the world, the volcanic eruption, which affected climate worldwide for like a year or so. And she just kind of stayed indoors and wrote, you know. So that's a really fascinating story about how she, you know, just did that great idea. Yeah, you have these root by themes. But that reminded me, I took a teaching company class, listen to,

of, it was like the meaning of science fiction stories or whatever. Anyway, one of them was this theme of loneliness and isolation that I never thought of, Frankenstein being one of them. The other one was Flowers for Algernon. You have some quotes from Flowers for Algernon. That was Keyes? I believe so, yeah. Yeah. But I never thought of it. Of course, I read the book. I mean, it was just a deeply moving book. And then the movie with Cliff Robertson.

in which he's kind of isolated and alone because he's mentally retarded. And he has this job at the bakery, and he thinks he has friends there, but they make fun of him.

And they're not really his friends. Okay. Then he gets the operation. Algernon's the mouse that gets the operation. He becomes super smart. And then they try it on humans, him, and then he becomes super smart. And as he starts getting smarter and smarter, those people he worked with, they, they no longer like him. They don't want to be around him because now he's smarter than them. He masters the sequence of the dough machine or whatever. And, and he thinks they're going to be proud of him. Look, I did it. I finally did it. And they're angry at him. He's like, what is this?

And then he kind of gets to a normal level of intelligence and then starts getting even smarter. And the scientist is the attractive woman that's working with him. He then becomes, like, attracted to her, and she's, like, repulsed by him. So, again, he's rejected and isolated. And then he kind of gives that speech at the end about, you know, that it's not so great to be so smart and all you elitists out there and so on. And then the thing goes wrong, and he –

reverts back to being mentally retarded and he's happy again. He's on the little swing. Just being a child. Like again, it's like, wow. Yeah. So that's what that's about. But maybe it's not about that. Maybe it's about multiple, maybe there's multiple themes in science fiction stories and we get out of it. What we want. Oh, it's, it's a good science fiction novel is standing in front of a Picasso and you, you,

feel what you feel and it's not right or wrong if you if you see it as this you know as a pollock painting or whatever whatever you see is is what you see and i respect that you know it's art it's a form of art a good story is you know it's going to hit us all different because we all have different life experiences we all come to it from a slightly different place so it's you know for me that novel like i don't want to say this i don't want to be interpreted wrong but

There really can be a sort of a sad, isolating feeling when you learn a lot because maybe some of your close friends

didn't take that same journey. And not that you're smarter than them or not that you're better than them, definitely not that, but you're just aware of things they aren't and you feel a little bit separate from your peers or whatever. And it's weird. And then you think, wow, well, what about, you know, this modern day Socrates over here? He must be feeling...

distant from me because I don't know what the hell he's talking about or something. So it is, I'm not saying it's bad, but it can be a challenging thing that when we have all of such varying levels of awareness and knowledge that we...

We may have to make a little bit of an extra effort to still connect to our fellow humanity, regardless of where we're at intellectually. Because we all need each other. We can all benefit from each other, regardless of where we're at intellectually. But sometimes it really can be a significant canyon between us. When you know about...

human evolution and you know the real age of the earth 4.6 billion years and your best friend thinks the earth is 6 000 years old you know that's a tough yeah it's not just a conflict worth debating it's also a kind of a sad divide between you because you're looking around at nature and you're not seeing the same thing yeah when you first saw 2001 did you

Sit there like the rest of us going, what the hell is this mean? Oh yeah. Cause I was about, yeah, because I was about nine years old. So I was completely, I saw it really young, you know, I don't think it was in the theater maybe, but I saw it soon after it was released and I was completely confused. I loved all the astronaut stuff leading up. I love the Austral, Australopithecine, you know, with the, with the bone. But when it got to the, the LSD trip at the end, I was like, wow. And I, I,

i've re-watched that over the years come to appreciate it much much more i read the book by arthur c clark and all that but but um i'm astonished by stanley kubrick how patient he is with shots compared to movies today i mean there remember the shot in the circular uh odyssey i believe it is the ship that's on its way to jupiter

And all but two of the astronauts are in cryosleep. And one of them's jogging in this round thing. That shot goes on for what feels like five minutes, you know. It's unbelievable how patient, you know. And now today, it's such a contrast to movies today. Just so fast, you know. Two-second scene. Jump, jump, jump.

Kubrick just would let the camera go. You know, that movie has to be approached with the right attitude. You have to relax and absorb it and not expect car chases. Right. But what does it mean? What, what, what, what was, uh, Clark tried to convey there? Well, in my view, it's two things. One, it could be interpretive sort of, uh,

almost the chariots of the gods things about aliens, you know, enlightening us, you know, touching the monolith, the Australopithecus that touches it and all of a sudden he figures things out, tool use. But I think, see, this sounds crazy probably, but I recently watched it and I was interpreting it in a way that it's a really cool, it can be seen as a really cool way of uniting people

space and time and humankind with the universe. That sounds like I'm, you know, turning into a hippie on you right now, but it just felt like that, you know, with the embryo and the, in the womb and the final scene and the way that,

The way that scene, you know, the LSD scene when he's speeding through all these weird lights and everything, because when you think about the size of the universe and you think about the age of the universe, you know, 13.8 billion years, that's an absurd amount of time. And and how much further will it keep going on before, you know, it ends if it ends?

And what you think about it, like, what if we could somehow flash, compress time, australopithecines, astronaut on Europa, you know, near Jupiter? What if we could compress it all, connect it all? And I was just looking at it that way. I don't want to go any deeper because I'll sound like a rambling lunatic, but that's something I do better writing down an article rather than answering you now. But

Yeah, I saw it as a journey into time and space where it's beyond our comprehension, but we can still enjoy the thrill of the ride. A little bit like what Sagan did in Contact, where he didn't show who the aliens were. It's just the image of her father.

as you know the actor playing rather than some you know guessing what an alien might look like yeah you know so the lsd trip at the end of 2001 it's almost like we're just going to show the aliens as the astronauts or whatever they're people but but of course it's this weird multi-dimensional color thing like an lsd trip because who knows what the aliens would be like you know yeah and maybe that's that's the approach then the other theme also was the

you know, lying to the computer about the true meaning. And so you get that logic loop, which also happened at the end, the last episode of MASH,

where Hawkeye has to smother the infant, screaming infant, because they'll all be killed. I watched that, yeah. But then he goes into a kind of a broken logic loop and freaks out and ends up having to go to the psychiatrist. You know, something like that. If you deceive too much or you break human nature, then it falls apart. Something like that. Yeah. You know, you mentioned what aliens look like.

I remember I interviewed Neil deGrasse Tyson many years ago in his office in New York at the Hayden Planetarium. And one of the questions I asked him, what do you think aliens will look like, extraterrestrials, if they exist? And he said they will be more different than the most different thing you can imagine.

And at the time, I thought that was a cool answer. And over the years, I completely reject it, you know, because... You do? Yeah, because, I mean, who knows? But who knows if they even exist? But because the more I've studied biology on this planet, the diversity of it, I mean, yeah, they... Extraterrestrial life may be structured different. Internally, it may work different from us. Who knows? But the basic shape of it

I guarantee when we find it and take a photo of it, if that ever happens, there will be some botanist or microbiologist or zoologist, somebody on Earth, marine biologist is going to say, hey, that looks just like so-and-so. Because the diversity of life, as far as it appears, okay, appearance, structure,

external structure. The diversity on this planet over the last, you know, three and a half billion years is just mind-boggling. You know, the shapes of viruses, bacteria, fungi, jellies, you know, plants, just alive today. And then when you push it all the way back with what we know, just what we know of the fossil record, it's staggering. You know, the marine life alone is

I could show so many to most people that would think, my God, that's an alien out of a science fiction movie. No, that lives in the Atlantic Ocean. They're everywhere. And then the microbial world is just incredible as far as the freakishness. The problem that science fiction TV movie guys have is that

They've got to come up with an extraterrestrial if they're really thinking, if they're smart, you know, and they don't just make it a humanoid. But they've got to come up with something that looks completely exotic and different. Look around. You can find cars like these on AutoTrader. Like that car right in your tail. Or if you're tailgating right now, all those cars doubling as kitchens and living rooms are on AutoTrader too.

Are you working out and listening to this ad at the same time? Well, multitasking pro, cars like the ones in the gym parking lot are for sale on AutoTrader. New cars, used cars, electric cars, maybe even flying cars. Okay, no flying cars, but as soon as they get invented, they'll be on AutoTrader. Just you wait. AutoTrader. Front and weird, like, you know, like could really be something we'd encounter, but they

The audience can still connect with it and it could feel like care about it. It's not just a lump, you know, that's the problem they have. So I kind of sympathize with Star Wars, Star Trek, you know, when they're trying to they need to see facial emotions and anger and two eyes. We have to kind of relate with it. You know, it's tough. So it's a it's a challenge.

Yeah, they got to go to the wardrobe department and say, okay, we need an alien. What have you got? Yeah, yeah, yeah. So it's an interesting debate. I'm kind of conflicted about it. Dawkins and I debated this years ago when I wrote one of my Scientific American columns that aliens won't look anything like us, you know, bipedal primates with some gnarly stuff on the forehead and they speak English with a weird accent. Yeah, that's unlikely. But he did point out, making the case that Simon Conway Morris makes about convergent evolution,

that if you're given a certain planet with a certain kind of gravity and air and so on, you're going to end up with certain body types. If you're in the air, you have to have something like an aerodynamic structure, like a wing, to move through it. Or if you're in a liquid medium that's fairly dense, like water, you have to have a fusiform body that can push through it if you want to cover some ground. And that bipedalism isn't that crazy, right?

and that you have the sensory apparatus on one end and the waste disposal apparatus on the other end, and you've got to have some arms and legs to move around on the land. It's not completely crazy to think you could end up with something like

like a bipedal dinosaur or whatever. Hey, but that's the argument. Yeah. Yeah. But look, look here right now on earth right now, we have intelligent life forms, the octopus who spreads its intelligent out through eight tentacles. You know, they're so different from us, you know, they look like something out of war of the worlds. Right. But they're intelligent, you know, and, uh, I forgot what I was going to say. Go ahead. Well, I was just thinking of the, the, the,

alien in that read. Oh, sorry, I remembered. I interviewed, gosh, I can't remember his name. I interviewed a prominent paleontologist. What was his name? Anyway, he did some speculation about dinosaurs. Had they not been wiped out? Dale Russell. He's the guy that did the bipedal dinosaur. Yeah, okay. I can't remember now, but yeah, years ago I interviewed him, and

He was saying, you know, he even has a, he's Canadian. Are we talking about the same guy? This guy was Canadian. Yeah. He has a museum exhibit where he helped consult on it. And it shows like this, you know, bipedal dinosaur guy. Yeah. It's really cool. But he explained it all to me and I suppose it could happen, but I don't know. You know, evolution is just, that's what's so beautiful and bizarre about evolution. It's just this, it's like this organic hurricane thing.

And it's got this sort of filtering process of what keeps you, what gets to survive and what doesn't. And just so creative. You know, it's amazing. It's, you know, it's unintelligent, indifferent, but infinitely creative in the sense that anything can come out of this hurricane. Yeah. It's crazy. Well, that's the other argument I counter with is that, you know, in the tens of millions of species, maybe 100 million that have evolved on Earth, only a couple have become bipedal primates.

Right? So it's not like evolution is moving in that direction. It's going to happen on some other planet. Very, very unlikely. Yeah. And then, of course, is the idea that, so we can say to AI, that if we encounter aliens, they're not going to be biological at all. They'll be silicon or digital or whatever. Yeah, Seth Shostak.

I've interviewed him and he makes that case that first thing we're going to, if we find anything, it's going to be one of their robots coming at us and they may be long gone. It's just a descendant of some civilization. So what is your answer to the Fermi paradox? Where is everybody?

Yeah, there's good answers to a lot of good answers. Of course, we don't know. So they're all good answers, I suppose. But probably the boring answer that is really solid is just distance. We're all too far apart. First of all, let me qualify to be clear.

I don't know that something's out there intelligent. I don't even believe it. I think it's likely, given the time, given the possibilities, the opportunities. I think it's likely. You know, the Drake equation, that whole thing. It's likely, but I don't know. My question, you know, I'm very comfortable saying, I don't know. But,

Assuming there are thousands, millions of intelligent civilizations out there, some kind of life forms, then why aren't they here? Why haven't we seen them? Why is there no evidence of them? Why can't we hear them, see them? What's going on? Well, like I said, it could be distance. The universe is incomprehensibly large. People who say they comprehend how big the universe is, including astronomers, they're faking it. They're lying. It's too big. It is just so big.

I mean, even if we could travel, by the way, we can't travel faster than the speed of light, according to Einstein. Until somebody breaks that, we're stuck extremely slow. Even if we had a spaceship that could go 99.9% of the speed of light, it would take us a couple of million years to get anywhere really interesting.

and really check things out. So we're in trouble that way. And maybe they are as well, even more people, you know, even beings more advanced than us, maybe just can't get here. But the more interesting things, of course, let me mention that could be the great filter. Once a species gets so intelligent, the inevitable, inevitably self-destruct, you know, but,

I'm not convinced of that. You know, if you've got a million life forms, sure, maybe half of them are idiots who blow themselves up. But the other half, why would everybody blow themselves up? It doesn't make sense. You can't assume that. We may be the weirdos who are so violent and everything. We may be complete aberration. Who knows? We could also be, by the way,

We could be the first intelligent life form in the universe. Somebody had to be the first, right? Somebody has to be. Or we might be the last. Maybe they're all gone. We're the last, which is a horrifying thought. So why? I think a pool of reasons as to why we haven't seen anything or haven't been contacted or anything is because...

We have to think. Well, we're big on exploration. We have telescopes. We send probes out everywhere. We've sent humans to the moon, six lunar landings. We're doing all this stuff. But maybe curiosity is a weird human quirk. Maybe there could be intelligent beings out there

you know millions of them who just aren't curious they're internal they they study themselves they you know have some kind of art they look inward not outward i mean that's who knows you can't assume curiosity um another thing could be that they are extremely curious but we

are just pathetically boring. We could be the most boring species in the universe. Who knows? Somebody has to be, you know, we could be microbes in the soil compared to what's going on out there. So nobody bothers, you know, paying us a visit. I mean, who knows? You know, so, so yeah, it's so much fun to play with that as to, you know, why is nobody here? But

I am hopeful. I'm really hopeful. Like I said, I don't know anybody's out there, but I hope they are. And I applaud SETI. Hope they keep listening. You know, I hope NASA keeps sending those probes everywhere.

What I don't like is the UFO hysteria, you know, I mean, because it draws away from it draws people, people's attention away from what is so exciting, the actual search for life in the universe. You know, we're worried about hubcaps on strings and, you know,

you know, blurry satellite, you know, blurry radar images and things like that. In recent years, there's been all this excitement about UFOs. And now it's so sad. It really saddens me. I'm sure you've heard this, but

So many people run around now like sort of it's all been confirmed because U.S. Navy pilots saw them and all that. Nothing has been confirmed. There's no evidence. There's no compelling, convincing – well, compelling maybe, but there's no scientifically verifiable, no convincing evidence that anything has happened in the last five, ten years. Nothing. So on these UAP videos, the tic-tac, go fast, the green triangle, the gimbal, the –

Omaha sphere. What do you think these are then? They're anomalies, aberrations that are unexplained. The same thing as when

Your aunt Ethel sees a light in the sky at night moving in weird ways. Yeah, she saw it. Cool. Okay. Where do we go from there? We don't know. I don't know. But these are pilots. Guy, these are trained pilots with credentials. And they're good looking. They look like Tom Cruise. Come on. Look, I have nothing but respect for the capabilities, the abilities, the awesomeness.

of naval aviators and all other military pilots. Flying a modern day jet is amazing. But guess what? I don't care who the pilot is, no matter how well trained he is, how talented he is or she, they all have human brains inside their craniums, just like you and I, just like Aunt Ethel who sees the light in the sky. And they may be trained to fly at high speeds, but they're not

They are not specifically trained about how the brain works, how vision works, how memory works. They're just as vulnerable to these traps of cognition and belief and delusion and hallucination as we all are, everyone else. So it means a little more if a military pilot sees something they can't explain.

Yeah, I may listen to that guy a little more and dig a little deeper than I would if it was, say, just, you know, my goofy neighbor. But...

It's still a human, a fragile, frail human with a human brain. And you have to take that in context. It's not evidence. An eyewitness account is still an eyewitness account no matter who the person making it is. It still is. And, you know, that may sound frustrating to UFO enthusiasts, but I'm not being dismissive. Yeah, check it out. Investigate. Go all the way.

But until you have evidence of something, you don't have anything. This is an extraordinary claim. You have got to have a mountain of evidence to back it up. You can't just accept it. We don't know what that blur is.

I don't know what that light is. Therefore, aliens. That's ridiculous. Ridiculous. Yeah. Of course, I agree with you. Have you seen that Scott Kelly comment about pilots being highly credentialed and they can see things better and so on? He was a pilot and an astronaut. And so he tells the story of, I think it was his brother and one of the space shuttle missions where

where they're about to close the bay doors there where they had the satellite that they released. And all of a sudden, they see like a tool floating around in the bay, the pod bay or whatever it is. And they go, oh, hang on, hang on. We better have to get this thing before we close it. And so they take pictures of it. They're getting ready for a spacewalk. And then they blow up the picture and they go, wait, that's not a tool inside the space shuttle bay.

It's the space station that's 80 miles away. Yeah. And he goes, and then he goes, I have a dozen stories like this for you. He goes, one time, you know, I'm in the jet and my co-pilot says, Hey, did you see that? I think it was a UFO or something weird. So they go circle around back to see it. And it's a Bart Simpson balloon. Anyway, he's got a bunch of stories like this. These are trained pilots, right? Well, keep in mind, Michael, they're the most trained pilot on earth.

probably not an astronomer okay so they're not trained they're not familiar with all the many things you can see Neil deGrasse Tyson would say oh that's Venus but right a an American Airlines pilot may say oh my gosh what is that you know UFO you know I always tell by the way as far as that the distance anomaly thing that

That's one of the short list items I tell people who are really sucked into the UFO thing. I say, when you see something in the sky and you don't know what it is,

You can't make assumptions about the size of it because your brain will trick you instantly. If you think it's far away and you're seeing it, you're going to think it's massive because it's so far away when it really could be very small and very close, relatively close. So there's so many things. And your prior beliefs will literally shape what you see in many cases, you know, because vision and memory are.

are creative processes. So when you see something, your brain is constructing that image, you know, based on input. It's not giving you a snapshot and you're looking at a photo of what's there. Your brain's making this image. It's like cognitive theater going on. And then five minutes later, when you remember what you see, your brain is piecing together from artifacts of input five minutes ago, what you remember.

It's not a videotape. It's not a video recording of what just happened. It's your memory. And it's, as we know, so, so flawed and vulnerable. So you got to be careful. Have you read up on the Foo Fighters in World War II? And maybe it's ball lightning or whatever, but what do you make of that?

Oh, I can't remember. Yeah, I'm familiar with it, but I can't remember. Okay, yeah. I've never heard a good explanation other than ball lightning and some plasma physics or something. Where were they? I'm trying to remember. These were World War II fighter pilots. Where? In Europe. They saw what they called them Foo Fighters.

which are like these balls of like ball lightning that were like following them and turning around in front of them and doing weird stuff. These are fairly well documented. I mean, a lot of pilots saw these weird things. Probably plasma physics, that's, you know, that ball lightning, something like that. But in any case, what do you make of Oumuamua and Avi Loeb's claim that this could be a artifact of a distant civilization? Prove it. Prove it. Yeah, I'm completely...

I mean, I don't know him. I don't want to attack him or anything, but I have real pushback on the tone of his book, you know, because...

I believe it said right on the inside jacket, you know, like, you know, now we know and all it was. We know. Yes. Yes. Oh, it was. It was ridiculous. Mark, maybe maybe it was more as publisher. Like I said, I don't want to be too negative on the guy. I don't want to be unfair. But but yeah, I mean, this fascinating object comes, you know, flying through our solar system. It's I think it's the first time.

We know of when something from beyond the solar system came buzzing through like this. So it really was interesting. It's like cigar shaped, really fascinating, but interesting.

One thing, it seemed to have changed course possibly, but astronomers have, astrophysicists have alternative explanations than a spaceship. It could have been sort of thawing out gases, ice on it. It could be sort of venting and that could explain it possibly, but...

Again, it's not enough and it's exciting. I never want to come across as if I'm discouraging investigation or I'm somehow closed-minded and don't want to hear it. Yeah, I want to hear all about it. Yeah, absolutely. But do not make conclusions before they're warranted. You need to come forward with the evidence. That's the key. Because you've got to be responsible, especially if you're a scientist, if you're

If you're a Harvard professor, you've got to be extra, extra, extra responsible because the general public will see you. And we're all vulnerable to authority figure bias. We see an authority figure and immediately we're prone to believe it, accept him. Oh, he's wearing a nice hat or he's got a uniform on or he's got credentials. Believe him. Well, you've got to be careful what you say and how you say it because you end up just...

You know, creating millions of irrational believers in something where it didn't have to happen. So you can still be excited about something, curious about something, investigate something without having an irrational belief in it.

Yeah, I know. I know Avi pretty well. He says that it was the publicist that did that in that first book. But he definitely spins the rhetoric in a way that makes it sound like he thinks we have made contact or there's good evidence we've made contact with.

And when you push them on it, you know, we really don't have good evidence. You end up with this kind of it's a philosophy of science problem. You know, what do you do with anecdotes or one off events like the mua mua just blew through the solar system? We can't collect more data. There is no more data. It's just it was doing something weird.

Okay, so someone like Neil will say, well, yeah, I don't know. We don't know. Maybe it was an anomalous asteroid or comet. Or maybe there's something in some other solar system that's slightly in between a comet and an asteroid, and it just behaves weirdly. We just don't know. So here, your principle of just say, I don't know, is okay. Yeah, yeah. Well, okay.

Well, for this object, we may learn, even though it's gone, because you collect as much data as possible and you've got that data forever. And you can go back and look at it again with fresh eyes or the next generation of scientists may know so much more than we know that they can look at it and know. Or another one may come through and we can compare the two. You know, there's all sorts of things that can happen in the future to explain it.

But until then, it's all about the power of I don't know. I love that phrase. We humans tend to fear ignorance. We look down on ignorance. It's a horrible thing, but I embrace ignorance. I use ignorance as inspiration. When you say I don't know, it doesn't mean you've given up. It means you're honest. It means you're a good thinker because ignorance

You're not pretending to know things you don't know. You're willing to face your ignorance and then hopefully keep moving forward and try to figure something out. So you do know. Simple as that. All right, let's read some quotes from your book here. This is Aldous Huxley, 1962 novel, Island. We cannot reason ourselves out of our basic irrationality. All we can do is to learn the art of being irrational in a reasonable way.

What does that mean? Yeah. Well, it's kind of cool when you think about it. First of all, that novel, you might like that novel. It's about this guy. I've never heard of it. Yeah, yeah. It's pretty interesting. This guy ends up on an island with this whole society going there, and they're trying to build the perfect, utopian, rational, wonderful society. And they're doing pretty well. But that quote in particular, I love it because it's kind of suggesting that

And you would probably agree, I think, Michael, is that we are flawed thinkers. Because of the way our brain is such an evolutionary hodgepodge of shortcuts and reactions and just the way we process things. It's not really the way you do it if you really want to design the perfect brain, but that's what we have. So we're always going to be susceptible to...

to biases and hallucinations. We're always going to have this problem, but we can resolve to be rational about our irrationality. We can declare ourselves to be thinking maniacs and lunatics. We can be mature children. We can strive to be better than just the victims of our own madness. Nice.

Here's from Larry Niven and Greg Benford, a 2020 novel, Glorious, to learn which questions are unanswerable and not to answer them. Maybe that's wisdom. Look around. You can find cars like these on AutoTrader, like that car right in your tail. Or if you're tailgating right now, all those cars doubling as kitchens and living rooms are on AutoTrader, too.

Are you working out and listening to this ad at the same time? Well, multitasking pro. Cars like the ones in the gym parking lot are for sale on AutoTrader. New cars, used cars, electric cars, maybe even flying cars. Okay, no flying cars, but as soon as they get invented, they'll be on AutoTrader. Just you wait. AutoTrader. So this would be known unknowns or maybe known unknowables.

Like we now know enough to know we can never know X, whatever that is. Something like that. Yeah. But my, well, two things. One, I think that's a cool quote because I think you do, you've only got so much time and energy. So you need to pick your paths of, of, uh, you know, discovery. What are you going to, what are you going to try to figure out? What are you going to dedicate your time to, to learning, to knowing, but then you, you,

You think about it and you say, well, hold on. I don't like the idea, me personally, of unknowable. I don't think we should declare anything unknowable. It might be so unlikely to know that it'd be a waste of your time. But I just something rubs me the wrong way about saying that, you know, some people

arena of potential knowledge is just unknowable so ignore it i don't like that you know i like esp psychics astrology i personally am not going to investigate a lot of time trying to figure out if esp works or telekinesis or something because i think it's been looked into so much there's still nothing there that as far as you know can really convince us but i

I wouldn't want us to stamp that, you know, unknowable, nothing's there, leave it alone, go away. You know, I'm happy if somebody's off still checking on it, you know, and holding up the cards and seeing if you can match them or whatever. That's fine with me. That's why I don't like the term agnostic, you know, as far as being unknowable. You know, gods are not unknowable. Who are we to say that? You may not know. How would you know if you encountered a god?

If you say, well, he's omniscient and omnipotent, you can't. Right. Well, first of all, gods aren't even defined. We can't even define what a god is. So it's all problematic from there. But yeah, a god could be our advanced extraterrestrial. It could be a real wizard. Maybe magic is real. Who knows? I don't know. Oh, that was another great line in one of the Star Trek movies where –

uh, the, the alien, uh, steals the starship or wants to steal the starship and says he's, he's God. And Kirk says, why does a God need a starship? You just go anywhere you want. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So great. Yeah. Undiscovered country. Yeah. No, um,

Star Trek 5. I don't know. I can't remember. Yeah, it's one of the movies with Shatner and all of them. Yeah, let's see. It was Rocky 1 and 3 are the good ones and 2 and 4 are the bad ones. In Star Trek, it was 1 was bad and 2 and 4 were the good ones or something like that. Anyway. Yeah. Okay. All right. So some more quotes here from your book. This is...

Oh, well, let's skip the reason and move on to other topics. Oh, I know what it was on not critical thinking but consciousness issues.

Let's see. This is Neil Blomkamp and Terry Tatchell. Oh, Chappie, the 2015 film. Am I saying that right? Chappie? Yeah, Chappie. It's about an AI robot. You can't be copied because you're not data. We don't know what consciousness is, so we cannot move it. That's pretty interesting. I like that because we don't know what consciousness is, at least the hard part of it.

Yeah. And so what are you... You know, the idea of uploading, mind uploading. What are you uploading? Yeah. I...

You know, the singularity is near the first, not the most recent one, but Ray Kurzweil's book, the one about 10, 20 years ago, whatever it was, I read that. I was so excited about that. You know, really got me thinking. But assuming we had the, oh man, you opened a can of worms here. But assuming we had the computer power, the ability to scan your brain completely, could we just put it somewhere else? And is it you?

I don't know. I mean, I'm not convinced that there's something magical about your mind, your consciousness. I don't think, you know, that we need to go that extra step and say some magic for want of a better word happens. I mean, we are just kind of a bunch of neural networks, you know, and the way they're put together, that's us. That's who we are, you know, in any given moment, changing all the time. So why can't we just copy that and reproduce it then? Why? But

I don't know, still something in me. Maybe it's just the time and place of culture, the enculturation of where I'm at in human history that I somehow had this gut feeling that you couldn't just copy me and put me in a laptop.

I wouldn't be in there with all my dreams and personality and everything. But why? I don't if you ask me to explain why not. I couldn't do it. I don't know. Yeah, my answer to that is that it's not you. It's a copy of you, first of all. And second of all, what do you mean by you? So that's what you've described as the memory self that, you know, copy of your connectome and all your memories.

But that's not the only you. There's the point of view self, the POV self, the you looking through your eyes and experiencing life moment to moment to moment to moment. The moment that's copied and moved over somewhere else, and let's say you're still alive when the copy happens, you're still sitting there.

And if I said, well, guy, you're now in the computer over there, you're like, no, I'm not. I'm right here. That's just a copy of me. By the way, there was Star Trek Next Generation where Riker and the crew ends up at some planet they'd been to 20 years before or whatever. And there's Riker. There he is. The transporter accidentally copied him twice and left the one. But of course, it's not him because now that Riker has had a completely different life

a history than the reicher on the enterprise and so that like twins they've just lived lived different lives yeah and that would happen the the instant you separate you become different i'm i you know think about this are you the same michael schirmer you were 10 years ago or is that a different person now yeah think about it it's weird when you think about it i mean i feel like a different person when i was a teenager and i don't mean just physically how i look and all but

It was, you know, all the atoms that have been replaced, the molecules. I mean, we're constantly changing. And our brain, the neurons, the neural networks, the changing state, the connections, it's just trillions of, you know, variations in these networks. And every moment of every day, you're changing. So...

You is not a, you know, it's not this thing that is the same. It's always changing. So I, we have a long way to go before we, you know, start making copies of ourselves. I don't know why I could spend all day thinking about that and talking about that. Well, that's what science fiction is for, right? I mean, in a way it's a way of exploring these ideas, not in science journals because science,

editors are going to go, what the hell is this? We can't publish this, but it's science fiction. Now you can explore those ideas, right? Sort of like counterfactual reasoning. Let's try this and flip it and see what happens in the scenario, something like that. I think it's totally legitimate. Um,

Yeah, okay, just some other topics here. Matthew Graham, The Hoodmaker, a 2017 episode of Electric Dreams. I never heard of that. But in the old world, I remember how we fretted over the computers, the web, the information on everyone and everything. We built firewalls and encrypted our lives. I always thought it was an overreaction.

There's a plug. Pull it out. So this is the AI existential threat. Why can't we just pull the plug, right? Because the AI will think of that. That's the problem. Right. It will have a backup power supply. That's the problem. Yeah, I included that quote because –

You know, not every quote in there, by the way, is my personal belief or something like that. I understand. They're interesting. But yeah, I mean, that is a great argument. In fact, I think Neil deGrasse Tyson pretty much makes, they keep bringing him up. Sorry, Neil. But he makes that argument that he's not panicking over AI because just turn it off. You know, he says, well, a bit of safety switches. But yet I've interviewed some AI experts and I've read some books by top, top AI experts and they're all saying,

Have me worried and I try not to fall into that apocalyptic, you know, phobia and all that stuff. But yeah, I think we really should be concerned about AI, especially in the hands of bad people. I mean, that's going to be the first problem. It's already a problem.

I just read just this morning, I read a news article about a 14-year-old boy that committed suicide, sort of according to his mother, at the urging of this AI chat box that he was friends with. Wow, I hadn't heard that. There was a trial of that woman, a teenager.

female teenage girl who talked the boyfriend into killing himself. And then she was held accountable, but she was a minor. So maybe I forget what happened with that, but yeah, I'd heard that. Uh, okay. Let's see. Here's James T. Kirk, a taste of Armageddon. This is in your, uh, section on peace. I remember this one cause I use this in my book, the science of good and evil. We're human beings with the blood of a million savage years on our hands, but we can stop it.

We can admit that we're killers, but we're not going to kill today. That's all it takes, knowing that you're not going to kill today. Such a great commentary on human nature. Yeah. Yeah, I love that because I've studied a lot of anthropology, read tons of anthropology books. Many touch on war and history as well. And we're capable of horrific things.

horrific things, you know, I mean, just brutality on a scale unimaginable for those who really haven't really, you know, taken a deep dive on it. And yet we don't have to, you know, there's some great books out there by anthropologists who point out that

We have this image of us as this warlike species. We're just genetically programmed to beat each other's throats and have wars all the time. And yet, there are many, many examples of societies, cultures that endured for very long periods total peace, total cooperation, no wars. So if we look at the ancient Greeks or Europeans and the

20th century as these examples of humanity. Look at all that bloodshed and horror. This is who we are. Well, why don't we look at these other societies who somehow managed to be peaceful for, you know, centuries? Like, why can one be the example and not the other? And it's a really good, and there's much more to it than that, but

Why not? Why don't we point to our peaceful nature as much as we do to our warlike nature and not ignore one or the other and just acknowledge that we have the capacity for both? We are bloodthirsty savages and we are peace-loving, cooperative savages.

nice beings. We're both, you know, in fact, to have a war requires a hell of a lot of cooperation. You know, you have to cooperate with your side to go kill the other guys. You know, so if we expanded that cooperation to just, you know, get over it and everybody get along, you could, you could intellectually theorize,

without going all pie in the sky, that we could become a species that has moved past war. It could happen. It's possible. It's possible. Not inevitable, not guaranteed, but we can do it. Yeah, my two favorite books on this, Steve Pinker's Better Angels Over Nature, and lesser well-known is Nicholas Christakis' book, Blueprint. Yeah, I read that. Nicholas has an interesting discussion of a database on shipwrecks

Right. Where it's a small group of people that they either survived or they didn't. And, you know, what was what did they do to survive or what did they do that led to their demise? And it had to do with horizontal versus vertical structures, social structures and how cooperative the people were or how non-cooperative they were in response to who the leader was and how how the leader led.

Or maybe there wasn't a leader. Maybe it was a committee or whatever. Anyway, it's very interesting. Yeah. And then, of course, he extrapolates from that as a blueprint for society. Yeah. Yeah. Anyway. Yeah, I recommend that. I recommend that book. It's fascinating. Yeah. Yeah. Yep. Yep. Yep.

Okay, let's see. Under meaning and purpose, this is from The Three-Body Problem, 2014 novel, now a Netflix series. I haven't watched it yet. Have you watched it? Is it great? Yeah, it's good. Yeah, it's good. And there's going to be a season two coming out soon. So yeah, I recommend it. It's good. A few minutes I watched, it looked like the cinematography was gorgeous. Yeah, a lot of cool physics. Yeah, it's good. Yeah, by the time you're my age, you'll realize that everything you once thought mattered so much

Turns out to mean very little. Now that I just turned 70, I thought, yeah, there's something there. Some of the stuff I cared about in my 20s, I wouldn't care about now. But maybe, I don't know, rethinking that, maybe it is important when you're 20 that in your 20s, you want to be competitive in this or that. Now it doesn't matter. But it mattered at the time. You know, I don't know. How do you think about that? Yeah, I agree. That's a good way to put it, actually, because I've experienced that myself. Like, I don't care.

If I have a bad hair day, I don't lose sleep or anything. I don't have that problem. I wish I had your problem. Yeah. But I mean, seriously, I just...

You know, like here, we're doing this chat here. If I say something incredibly stupid, you know, I'll feel bad about it for like 10 minutes and I'll get over it. Whereas if I did, you know, if I did that when I was 25 or 30, even it, oh, it'd be the ultimate crisis, you know, but yeah, as, as you, as you age.

you just do have a much better perspective on things. You're just more interested in, you know, family, friends, world peace, you know, a good breakfast and, you know, relaxing and checking out the sunset. But when you're young, you're,

You're in that conquer mode, you know, you want to you want to go out, do everything and impress the mates and you want to, you know, be everything you can be. You're filled with all this energy and ambition. So, yeah, you you you you by nature, you're going to care much more.

About how you are perceived by others and what your accomplishments measure up to than you would later on. It makes sense. Yeah. It's not that you're dumb. It's not that young people are dumb or stupid for their priorities. It's that that's...

you know, their logical priorities at that time. They're searching for mates and they're trying to find their way in the world. They're trying to accomplish things. So you've got to be hyper diligent, hyper focused on everything about yourself. You know, it's easy to be self-centered then.

Yeah, it makes sense. Yeah, when I was in my 20s and 30s, I was a bike racer, and I cared deeply about the outcomes. The last weekend, I did this 50-mile Bovine Classic gravel bike race. 600 people. There was only two 70-plus people, me and my buddy, Ed. And, of course, I'm getting passed right and left, and I'm just like, you know what? I don't really care anymore.

I'm just out here enjoying the day. All right. Robert Louis Stevenson's The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. I never thought of it this way, but all human beings as we meet them are commingled out of good and evil. And that reminded me of the Solzhenitsyn quote about, you know, every person has a divided heart and, you know, you can't kill everybody because we all have this potential for evil inside of us.

So that's what that novel is really about. Yeah, and evil can be interpreted differently by different people, different cultures, different times. So even if you are a near perfect person, you could be the most evil thing ever, according to the society over the other side of the mountain or the last generation or the next generation to come. So, yeah, it's such a changing dynamic of good and evil. Is that what that novel is about?

I think it's more simple than that. I'm getting a little flaky there. But yeah, I think it's just the good and evil in all of us. We've got this potential to be a monster. Yeah, yeah. I remember this episode, the drumhead from Star Trek The Next Generation. We think we've come so far. Torture of heretics, burning of witches,

is all ancient history. Then before you can blink an eye, suddenly it threatens to start all over again. This was, if I recall, there was something of a witch hunt to find, you know, the rotten person on the Enterprise that did something bad. I forget the details of it.

But it quickly dissolved into this kind of everybody accusing everybody. Picard says, hang on for a second. We're not going to carry this on. The drumhead was where they flip over the drum and they have a court trial right there on the battlefield. Yeah. How dangerous that is. That's one of the beauties of science fiction. The power of science fiction is that

Regardless if you're in a spaceship on the other side of the universe or...

It's two extraterrestrials going at it, you know, whatever, whatever the scenario is, or it's, you know, nuclear war is destroying the world. You can still connect with a good science fiction story and see yourself or your society in it. And you can, you can hopefully be inspired to think deeper about, you know, yourself or your society. That's really, really cool. Powerful.

Yeah, you have this quote from Christopher Nolan from Interstellar. We must reach far beyond our own lifespans. We must think not as individuals, but as a species. We must confront the reality of interstellar travel. Wow. I mean, Elon is kind of one of those big thinkers. I love that. But is it really possible? I mean, how do you think of interstellar? You know, yeah. You mentioned the distances. I mean, at this point, the best we could hope for would be ARC ships. You know, we load them up with...

5,000 people or load them up with eggs and sperm or embryos or something with a robot tending to them and send them off, you know, to populate some planet a million years from now. So I actually, a friend of mine, Cameron Smith, he's an anthropologist at Portland State University. He's done a lot of work on, um,

the anthropology of deep space travel and like colony ships and really interesting stuff. Yeah. He's worth Googling Cameron Smith, but you could get away with it. If you think I, I talked to him about it once. He said that a genetically viable population of maybe 3000 humans, you could possibly repopulate a world. But the problem is you've got,

You've got to feed them. You've got to keep them from going insane. You've got to make them sign up for such a journey because it won't be them. It'll be their great, great, great, great, great, great, great grandchildren, you know, times 100 who make it there. You know, maybe so, you know, science fiction answers it with cryosleep or something cool like that.

But there's a great book by Alan Steele called Arkwright, a novel, science fiction novel I recommend, Arkwright, in which a science fiction writer is super wealthy, very successful. And he funds a long-term project starting, I think, back in the 50s to colonize other worlds and get human. He feels like eventually we're going to kill ourselves, so we got to go somewhere else. And so he has an ark ship.

heading out to, you know, just generations, generations later.

And it will just have genetic material or maybe embryos, if I remember correctly. And it's got an AI, you know, protecting them, navigating, finding the exoplanet that's proper once they get closer, landing, tending, and then inhabiting it with our descendants, you know, the children of the 20th century or whatever, 21st century. It's a great story. Great story. Long span story. That's great. I love that. Yeah. Yeah. I forget who it was that describes it.

spaceship earth in a way we are on that journey. You know, we just have 8 billion inhabitants on the spaceship and we're moving through the galaxy. Yeah. Which is why, you know, I don't know where we're going. Yeah. I have a deep love affair with the natural world, the wilderness, the ocean mountains, the sky. I just love it all. Love to hike, love to feel nature. Yeah. And sometimes it bugs me with these, uh,

Tech guys who want to go to other planets and all, but that's cool. I'm great, but we, we can't do it with the mentality of escaping this world, you know, trashing the earth and going there because the earth really is the perfect world for us. This is where we evolved. You know, we're, we're made for this planet and this planet is a spectacular treasure.

And billions of years of evolution gave us these forests, this ocean that's teeming with life, this microbial universe around us, all this life.

is just an invaluable resource and we shouldn't be running from it or giving up on it. We need to protect it. We need to understand it and protect it. And we don't see enough of that, unfortunately. But we can do both. My point is we can do both. We can go to other worlds and we can cherish this planet and protect the life on it. I like that idea. All right. All right. Well, hey, thank you so much for having me. Okay. It was a pleasure talking to you. You're welcome, man. Thank you.

Thank you.