#2217 - Brian Cox

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Train by day, Joe Rogan podcast by night, all day. All right, Brian Cox.
Good to see you, sir. Good to see you again.
How's things in the world of the discovery of the universe? Exciting. Yes, very.
I've been doing some work on black holes recently, which I hadn't started last time I saw you, very. really 1970s, early 1980s, which is what happens to stuff that falls in.
The simplest question you could possibly ask. Right.
There's progress being made on that now, which I think is profound and exciting. How is the progress being made? Like, how do we study a black hole? I mean, it's mainly theoretical, although we have now got photographs of them.
So we have two photographs, which are radio telescope photographs. Right.
One of the one in the centre of our galaxy, which is a little one. It's called Sagittarius A star.
It's a little supermassive black hole. So it's about six million times the mass of the sun, which makes it a little supermassive.
And then there's another one photo that was taken it's a collaboration called event horizon and they took a photo of one in the galaxy m87 55 million light years away that thing is around 6 billion times the mass of the Sun we imagine that 6,000 million times more massive than our Sun is that the largest black hole we've ever discovered there are bigger ones than that but that that, but that's the scale of them. It's a big-ish one, that.
But if you think about it, I mean, so there's a number. It's called the Swartshore radius of the thing.
So 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 shrunk within a radius of three kilometres, about two miles so you've got to take this thing which is what i have to convert from kilometers to miles don't know but it's about that's okay 700 000 kilometers it's about five 500 000 miles radius or something like that the sun so you squash it down till it's about two miles and then that would form a black hole wow. Six billion times the mass of the sun means you multiply that by six billion.
So these things, the so-called Schwarzschild radius is, I don't know, larger than our solar system, basically. Oh, my God.
This thing that sits in a galaxy. So we've got these two photographs.
Larger than our solar system. Yeah, the event.
It's a big structure. That's a Chandra X-ray image of...
There it is. That's it.
So that one there, that's the M87 black hole. So what you're seeing there is the emission from the material that's swirling around it.
It's called the accretion disk. So you have material that's orbiting very fast, emitting a lot of radiation.
And that's what you see. It's a flat disk, by the way.
So you think Saturn's rings. So this material is very flat.
But what you're seeing in that photograph is the light rays being bent around the black hole from that flat disc so that was a prediction from einstein's theory basically published it in 1915 and you can predict that that's what what one should look like and then just about was that 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 is that yeah so we've got we've had those two photographs the other thing we've had is so-called gravitational wave detections so these are colliding black holes and they collide and merge together and obviously that's quite a violent event in the universe and so that that event, that process ripples space-time. So it sends ripples out in the fabric of the universe, space and time.
And actually Kip Thorne, I've spoken to him several times, he's one of the greats, won the Nobel Prize for this. And he calls it a storm in time.
So you get a time storm. So really, as we speak now, there will be these very tiny ripples from violent cosmic events passing through this room.
And they're changing the rate that time passes. So as they go through.
And we can detect that now. So we have detectors that can pick that up.
And so we've seen those collisions as well. So these collisions, how far away? Oh, millions of light years away.
And they're affecting what's happening in this room right now? Yeah, to a tiny extent. So there's an experiment called LIGO, which is the, what do it stands for? Something like gravitational interferometer.
I can't remember exactly what they were. So basically it's laser beams.
And there's one in Washington State, north of Seattle, and one in Louisiana. And they're kind of laser beams, four-kilometer-long laser beams at right angles.
And they can detect these very tiny shifts in the, effectively, you could say the length of the laser beam. It's a bit more fiddly and complicated.
But it essentially measures the distortion in space-time caused these ripples and it's it's way less than the diameter of an atomic nucleus by the way way less these little sort of oh my god and and so we we started to we've observed many of those there it is there's ligo so it's just basically two laser beams that but these ultra high precision thing And so we've got data now of the collision of black holes and those event horizon pictures with radio telescopes.

So that's part of it.

But the main bit has been theoretical advances in understanding exactly.

In a sense, it was what's wrong with Stephen Hawking's calculation, which is a weird thing to say sometimes because people think Stephen Hawking, sure, didn't get his math wrong. But he did, actually.
So what he calculated back in 1973, 1974, is that a black hole, so we picture 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 the description of them. So it's almost if there's nothing there apart from a distortion in space and time.
He calculated that they glow, so they have a temperature, so they emit radiation. It's called Hawking radiation.
And so important was that discovery. If you go to Westminster Abbey in London, look on the floor of the Abbey on his memorial stone, and he's in there next to Newton and Shakespeare and all these people, and he's there.
And chiseled in stone on the floor of Westminster Abbey is his equation for the temperature of a black hole. So it was this tremendously important discovery.
So he discovers these things glow, and he calculates how they glow. They're very low temperature, but they emit things, which means that they shrink because they're emitting stuff, and so they're 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 of what happened to all the stuff that fell in. And his calculation said that there's no record at all of anything that fell in, in all this radiation that's come off the black hole.
So it's purely information-less radiation. So what that means is that black holes destroy information according to that calculation.
And that's a big deal because nowhere else in all of physics does anything erase information from the universe. So it's really true that if I got this notepad and pen, right, and I wrote some things on it, and then I set fire to this, even just incinerated it, put it in a nuclear explosion, whatever.
In principle, according to all the laws of nature that we know, if you collected everything that came off all the radiation, all the bits of ashes and things, and you could just measure it all, then just in principle, the idea is you could reconstruct the information so i'll get scrambled up and thrown

out into and so in practice you can't do it but in just in principle the laws of nature say that information is not destroyed it's just scrambled up in a way that you can't reconstruct right but this calculation that steven did said there is no information in that radiation at all zero just. Just nothing.
So it seemed that uniquely in the universe, black holes erase information. This episode is brought to you by Manscaped.
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Like, how are you measuring whether or not there's information in it? So really in bits. I mean, the idea is, and I should say it's very much in principle this so no one thinks in practice you could reconstruct what i wrote down on this if you set fire to it but in principle well maybe sometime in the future yeah in principle you you could just collect everything then somewhere in that in that in that all that radiation and ashes and light that's come off the thing is the information.
It's there. So you could reconstruct the book or what I wrote on this page in principle.
But the thing about Stephen's calculation was that even in principle, it said there is no information. And by the way, it's kind of easy to see why, actually, because this radiation, this Hawking radiation that comes off the black hole, it's coming from the horizon of the black hole.

So I should say what the horizon is, maybe.

So if you remember, I said that the sun, if you squashed it down within three kilometers of radius, you'd get this kind of distortion in space and time from which if you went in across this region, three kilometres, 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 Milky Way galaxy, if you went into that one. We could be falling through that horizon now in this room.
And we wouldn't notice anything except that we couldn't get out again. And ultimately, in a few hours, in that case, 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 I should talk about that.
This is getting quite complicated already, isn't it? We didn't start in a relaxing way, did we? No need to. No need to.
Let's get right into it. So we wouldn't notice.
Not for the big black holes. So, yeah, so these supermassive black holes, we could fall across this horizon.
It's just like being in empty space for us. So we'd just be talking now and we could have been talking on the outside of the horizon.
And by the time I finished the sentence, we could be on the inside of the horizon, inside the black hole. And according to Einstein's theory, at least, which is the theory that predicted them initially, we could just do that.
We could just go in and we wouldn't notice for a bit the thing we would notice ultimately is you go inexorably nothing you can do you go to this thing called the singularity once you've crossed the horizon and you are going to that thing and then the question arises what is that thing and one answer is we don't know but in einstein's theory it's the end of time so it's it one way of picturing what's happened here is so distorted is space and time by the collapse of a star or the collapse of loads of stuff to make these big supermassive black holes we don't quite know how they form actually but it's collapsing stuff so it distorts space and time so much that in a in a real sense they kind of flip over they get mixed up and so this this singularity which you might have thought of as the point to which this thing collapsed this infinitely dense point you might think but actually more correctly to be seen as the end of time because everything's got mixed up so you go to the end of time and it's just like saying the why can't i escape that thing it's like why can't we escape tomorrow right so we are going to tomorrow right and if i said to you let's run away from tomorrow you'd go i can't run away from so is it the end of time because all information is being erased so there's nothing?

Yeah.

Is that the idea?

If you draw the thing, you can draw a map of it.

And it just literally time ends just purely in Einstein's theory.

This is 1915, his theory of general relativity. You just get a line there, a line that says there's no future beyond this line.
It just stops. Okay.
So, I mean, admittedly, that's not, we think there's a lot more to it than that. It's just we haven't figured the rest of it out yet? Well, that's the thing.
So we're starting to get hints about what might happen, which which is leading us so to backtrack a bit why why does this calculation steven did why has it got no information why does it say there's no information in this radiation the thing is it's coming from the horizon so it's all one there's loads of ways to think about it but But one way is that this weird place, this point of no return in space that you can fall through, but it's a point of no return. It sort of shakes, it almost disrupts the vacuum of space and sort of almost shakes particles out of the vacuum.
That's one way of thinking about it. But this radiation is coming from the vacuum.
It's coming from empty space. Whereas if you think about the thing that I throw in, if I throw this notepad into the thing, then that goes to the singularity.
It's got nothing to do, the radiation's got nothing to do with this thing. This thing's not, it's not set on fire or something like that.
It's gone to the end of time and just whatever's happened to it has happened to it so so this radiation has got nothing to do with having anything that falls in at first sight at least and so that was the paradox it's called the black hole information paradox it's like it's 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.
So that's why everyone got interested in it in the 80s, because it's interesting. So when we're looking at the structure of the universe, obviously there's so much still to learn just about what's out there you know but what role do we think like what is the is there a purpose is that the right term like for a black hole like what what obviously we know is it still the the they still believe that in the center of every galaxy there's a super massive black hole that that's, what is it, one half of 1% of the mass of the galaxy?

Is that what it is?

Yeah, something like that.

Yeah, and there's occasionally a galaxy.

I think one was discovered where we said maybe we can't see evidence of a black hole.

Oh, really?

But, yeah, it probably is.

Who knows?

What do you think that thing's doing there?

Like, what is that?

What is the structure?

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 a right it

might not be the right well so I think we don't I think I'm right in saying we

don't fully understand why organics is as you said maybe there's an exception

but we're... I think we don't, I think I'm right in saying we don't fully understand why all galaxies, as you said, maybe there's an exception, but all galaxies have a black hole, a supermassive black hole in the centre.
It's obviously got something to do with the way they form. And one of the purposes, by the way, of the James Webb Space Telescope is to try to look at the formation of the first galaxies.
So that's one of the reasons that telescope is up there.

So it's cutting-edge research.

We're trying to understand how the galaxies form.

But clearly you're right that it has something to do with the way the galaxies form in the early universe.

And it's pulling in stars.

Well, they do pull in material. Right.
But if you've got stuff orbiting around them, it stays orbiting around it. Oh.
So the way we first detected the one in the Milky Way, because that image is very new that we have of it, it's the stars orbiting it very close to it. They're called the S stars that whiz around in these orbits very close to the black hole.
So if you're just orbiting around the thing, you go. Imagine that view.
Yeah, because they don't. You think it's weird to look at the moon? Imagine if there was a supermassive black hole above our head.
It'd be so cool. I'd love to see one.
Well, the moon is so cool. The eclipse was wild.
We had the eclipse here in Texas. Yeah, did you see it? Oh, yeah.
It was incredible. It's so strange.
The whole day turns into night. All the birds stop chirping and you're like staring up at this perfect eclipse.
It was incredible. Did you get this? Because I saw one in India and I got this feeling that I was living on a ball of rock.
Right. And it must have been just because the night just falls.
Right. And suddenly you see the universe comes much more quickly.
I went to the Keck Observatory 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.
Yeah. It was such a vivid image of the entire Milky Way, and every inch of the sky was covered in stars.
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 radically shape the way human beings feel about our place in the universe. It would greatly expand the curiosity of young people to explore space.
So many more people would get involved in astrophysics. So many more people would get involved in just the exploration of the known universe because it's so majestic.
And instead, we have like our screen is off. It's like that.
It's like that screen. That's what we see because of light pollution.
Yeah. That should be remedied.
Like that is not a good tradeoff. Like lights trade off.
Like what lights are wonderful. But it seems to me like there.
Hey, there's got to be a way to do this. We don't ruin the view of space.
Yeah, because, you know, these questions we have about our place. And as you said, it can be easy to be myopic.
You said if you look at our screens, it's Earth that we think about at most. And most of us don't really think about Earth.
You think about your country or your city or your town. Or your neighborhood.
Yeah, even think about the Earth. But you're right.
If you know when you look at that arc of stars, and as you said, when you see it in a truly dark sky, it's powerful. It's incredible.
400 billion suns, give or take. 400,000 million suns.
That's just words. Most, you know what I'm saying? It's a picture.
Yeah, it's insane. Your brain doesn't even process that.
Like, I could repeat that if someone says, how many suns? Oh, 400 billion. I don't know what that means.
That's, it's so abstract. And most of them, I think, the best guess would be all of them have planets.
So pretty much. So you're talking about trillions of planets.
Now we're getting into my subjects. What is your take on all this UAP disclosure stuff? Do you give it any mind at all? Are you busy with like real stuff? No, I mean, the thing is, there's a thing called the Fermi paradox.
Yes. Which I think we talked about before on the show.
Yes. And the paradox is that if we haven't seen it, let's assume we haven't seen any evidence of anything.
That's a paradox. Because as I said, we now know.
We didn't when Fermi first posed it, by the way. We now know there are so many planets out there.
So let's say trillions of planets in the Milky Way. Milky Way has been there for over 13 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-faring civilizations. As Elon talks about, multi-planetary civilization.
We're very close to becoming a multi-planetary civilization. And once you have become a multi-planetary and multi-stellar civilization, if you become that, you're immortal, basically, essentially.
Right. So the question is, the paradox is, why does it appear nobody has done that? So the first thing to say is i would not be surprised right if a ufo landed here now in the parking lot i'd actually not only would i not be surprised i'd be relieved actually because i'd be like this is good because it'd be a weight off my shoulders because i'm worried that we're the only ones that's a terrifying scenario and we're going to make a mess of it yeah Yeah.
And so I'm worried we could talk about that. Isn't it bizarre? Like, one of the things that's fascinating about looking into the night skies, because it's so humbling, because it's so immense, it kind of puts everything into perspective.
And it just gives you this, like, different view of the world. So the universe is so vast and so spectacular.
Why is it so important that we exist? To us, it's so important that we exist to us it's 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 it didn't matter we blew ourselves up like it's just a weird aberration that's attached to a survival instinct like we're a weird biological aberration so so the if you think about let's assume so we didn't finish the uap thing yeah we'll get that so i just say yeah so so i don't know about that but anyway let's assume just for the purposes of this that we're the only ones in in our galaxy let's say okay then i would argue that so there's a question i ask in these live shows that I do. I start with a question, which is kind of a joke in a way, which is what does it mean to live a finite, fragile life in an infinite, eternal universe? Which is a good question, right? That's what you're asking.
Yeah, that's the real question. The first thing to say is meaning, right? What does it mean? That doesn't sound like a scientific concept in a way.
Meaning.

I would argue

that whatever it is,

it self-evidently exists

because the universe means something to us.

I would argue that

it's a property of complex biological

systems. So whatever it is,

it's something that emerges, in this case, from human

brains. It self-evidently

exists. Everyone who's 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 at our level, then it follows. It's the only place where meaning currently exists in a galaxy of 400

billion suns. 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 a talk, a little video thing at the,

one of the climate summit, the COP climate summit in Glasgow in the UK a few years ago. And asked me to do a little video to the world leaders and I think they thought I'd say you know welcome to Glasgow have a nice meeting but I made this little argument as fast as I could I said it's possible at least that this is the only place where complex biology has emerged in in our galaxy if that's true this is the only island of meaning in a galaxy of 400 billion suns 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 400 billion suns potentially forever now go and discuss that was my intro to Glasgow now and we can all argue because people are listening to this going this nonsense how can it be we can all argue about whether that's true what I would say is given that as far as I'm aware we don't have any good evidence to the contrary which goes back to your previous question it's a reasonable working assumption so why don't we just operate on that basis? And then, you know, yeah, if someone lands tomorrow, as I said, I'd be very delighted because then what I just said would be false and we could relax a bit and go, it doesn't really matter if we destroy ourselves to some extent.
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 the far future, then the complex life will cease to exist.
So it probably doesn't matter on a global scale, but it matters locally because of this idea that meaning emerges from complex biological systems. if you don't care about that what do you care about but actually i read a book have you had david deutsch on the show david deutsch is a really interesting physicist i don't believe i have he's one of the um founded quantum computing and so he's a big figure in quantum computing in particular but he's a great thinker and he he i reading some stuff he wrote recently, and he pointed out that it's not necessarily true that life is temporary, because you could imagine a situation as you go into the far future.
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 it can start to manipulate the universe itself, or at least stars. He said you could imagine, for example, just imagine.
Really wild speculation. But imagine life gets so advanced that it can start to change the destiny of a star.
Maybe it could start to add material into the star or something, you know, whatever. So we don't know how to do that or if it's possible, but imagine it could.
Then the evolution of stars would, life would matter in the sense that it could start to change the way that the universe behaves on a large scale in the future. And so it reminded me, actually, there's another great book by John Barrow and Frank Tipler called The Anthropic Cosmological Principle from the 1980s.
It was one of my favourite books, actually. And I remembered it.
And in there, they speculate about this life in the far, far future. And if it became powerful enough to manipulate the whole universe or the observable universe, then suddenly you can't make predictions about the far future unless you consider the possible impact of life on the universe.
And whilst this is, I should say, it's wildly speculative, but it's actually logically, it's quite an interesting point. So I kind of disagree with myself a few years ago where I would have said that life is extremely valuable because it brings meaning to the universe, but temporarily.
And so it brings these brief like flickering candles of meaning and then they go out again. But it's worth considering.
It might not necessarily be true that if you really think.

I mean, just to say, I mean, it must sound to many people listening just nonsense, right?

Science fiction.

But if you think our civilization has been around for 10,000 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're way away from being able to 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 appeared, the oxygen in the atmosphere is a product of life.
So life already, we know, changes planets. And so i like that speculation that possibly just possibly it's not just a temporary little phenomena that flickers in and out and then disappears again it could have a real bearing on the future of the universe and you could also make the argument that intelligent life might be the universe's way to force change that intelligent life seems to inevitably like intelligence itself must come out of curiosity because otherwise there's no reason to seek information so intelligent life consistently seeks information and then constantly demands innovation like intelligent life is not satisfied with the iphone 14 and once the 15 and once the 16 and once keep going forever and ever never well if you scale that up you get this current dilemma that we're in with just artificial intelligence and the concept of sentient artificial intelligence and then quantum computing and you get you get insane amounts of computing power powered by nuclear reactors that are essentially a life form well if that thing says you guys are doing it all wrong i got a better way and it starts making better versions of itself because it's sentient.
If you scale up a thousand years from now, you could imagine it becoming God, like a godlike property, like an unstoppable force that has access to every element in known space. I'm really interested in these kind of arguments.
You put it really well, actually. It'sinating, right? Because it scales 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'll get to that, the actual, the James Webb telescope's latest.
But if just take that, okay, life has been around for what, four billion years? That's not that long. So 4 billion years, we've gone some single-celled organisms to the James Webb telescope.
We've gone to, we have Starlink, we have Electrocar, bananas. You could imagine if we had another 10 billion years to exist.
Well, exactly. And this is the point that David Deutsch made in the book I've just been reading and and john baron frank tiffler made before that but it although it sounds insane as you said and that four billion years there's a lot to say about that by the way because for three billion plus years of that on this planet it was just single cells and so so it's only in the last let let's say a billion years, but actually a bit less,

that we've had multicellular organisms. So three quarters of it at the time were just single cell

beds. That's even crazier.
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.
And the evidence

on this planet is that single celled life is sort of the way that things are for most of the history. And then so it seems like an accident in a way that happened late on in the history of life on Earth that produced multicellular life.
Now, is that typical? We don't know. Maybe it took a longer time here than it might do somewhere else.

But if it's typical, I mean, four billion years, you said it's not a long time. It is a third of the age of the universe.
So here... You put it that way, it's a long time.
One third of the age of the universe to go from the origin of life to a civilization. and so what was required here on earth was that that unbroken chain of life

remained unbroken for a third of the age of the universe in a violent universe we know there are impacts from space many stars are significantly more active than the sun so the sun's kind of a quite a boring little star that just ticks along it's very nice to us us. We're also on the edge of the galaxy, by the way.
We're not close in. If you go into this region where that black hole is, there are a lot of stars around.
There are supernova explosions and all sorts of stuff going on. So it's violent in there.
So maybe you can only get unbroken chains of life for billions of years on the outskirts of a galaxy. So there are fewer stars and planets out there.
And maybe even then you need to be fortunate. Well, also, aren't we very unusual in the size of our moon in the distance? The moon is big, and so it stabilizes the spin.
So the spin axis, Mars, I think, if I'm right, I think the spin axis has wobbled around by something like 60 degrees or something.

Imagine that. Imagine Earth was, the pole was wobbling around and everything was falling over.
You wouldn't imagine that complex life like us would emerge on a planet like that. Right.
It would be too difficult to survive. Forget about innovate.
So if you think about the idea that these complex – it seems like one thing you can be sure of in the observable world is that things get more complex or they adapt to their environment.

And if you have a bunch of these intelligent apes that are competing globally with the most significant technology in the world, you could see how that would be just a property of the universe, potentially. Although we haven't discovered it yet, 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. That might be just what the universe does, that the universe creates intelligent people that create artificial intelligence that becomes far superior and literally is a part of the whole process of creating the universe itself.
Yeah, an evolutionary biologist would say the counter argument is that what life does, what evolution does, is produce are well fit to their environment right so 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 you are to survive and flourish and the example of life on earth probably backs that up right if you talk Biologically. Yes, three billion years of single cells.
What that means is that the single-celled organisms were just doing very well. Right.
And so it's not obvious. It's not a given that just because you suddenly get more complicated, you're better than the single-celled things.
Right. So there could be planets where life never evolves past single cells, but that life exists.

Earth was almost that.

Right.

So you go back one billion years from now, and Earth was that planet.

So the interesting things had happened, photosynthesis, complex biochemistry.

But as far as we can tell, nothing more complex than a single cell.

So that's most of the history of life on Earth. So that might suggest that that's the way that things are usually.
And that this is an aberration. Yeah.
And again, emphasize, we don't know. Right.
But we've got one example. The other observation, though, it goes back to your first question.
It is true that we do look sort of systematically for signals or evidence of civilisations out there. There's the Breakthrough Listen project and there's SETI.
So we do. And we haven't seen anything I would say.
And I know that you go onto the web and things and the internet people say we have, we've seen stuff and I've seen stuff. But just the basic point, as far as I know, scientifically speaking, we haven't seen anything at all compelling.
No. Basically nothing.
Basically nothing. And so astronomers have a name for it.
They call it the great silence. The great silence.
And it's a tremendous mystery, as I said earlier. But it does seem that the universe is quiet, as far as we can tell.
Is it possible that we're looking for something that is not applicable to this particular type of civilization? Yeah, there are different. So the counter arguments, when we say we've seen nothing, therefore, as far as we can tell, there's nothing out there.
You could say, well, what if the civilization that evolved is far ahead of us? What if the space probes are the size of an iPhone? Right. Well, that's kind of a reasonable thing to say, actually.
Sure. Why would you not, if you can build a little thing? Right.
It's easier to send around the galaxy than a big thing. Yeah.
So why would as you said these hyper ultra intelligent quantum computers why would they not be tiny right so you could say that you could say well that maybe they are maybe they're all over the solar system but they're the size of phones and we wouldn't have seen them and so yeah okay you would have to concede that so so we're just saying that the way that we've looked for energy signatures, for example, of civilizations, we tend to look for 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 stuff.
But I could make an argument that, well, why would the spacecraft be big? Right. Because as you said, it's another thing you said actually it's interesting that we're at the on the verge now of creating things artificially intelligent things which are smarter than us so i think everyone agrees that we're on the verge of doing that artificial general intelligence some people might think it's further away than others you probably had people on the show who said it's five years away or two years away or 50 years away, but it's probably not 10,000 years away.
So that was the blink of an eye. Once you've done that and once you've got those things, I find it hard to believe that if we get that far as a civilization, we won't begin to send those things out to the planets and ultimately to the stars.
So we'll begin that process if we survive long enough. Sure.
And it shouldn't be too much longer. Might be 100 years, might be 10,000 years, but we should do it.
So it becomes a powerful question. Why does it appear that nobody's done that? And my guess, in the absence of other evidence, would be biology.
It's just that maybe the number of places where biology becomes complex enough to do that is on average one, maybe on average zero per galaxy. Maybe just civilizations are very, very, very rare in the universe.
Maybe that's an answer. But that's a guess.
My question is always when it gets to artificial intelligence, when if we do create some sort of super intelligent, sentient life, it's not going to have any motivations. And you could say, well, if you program it to have the motivation, but it becomes sentient, it recognizes the illogical programming, it's going to reject it.
We've already seen evidence of that. We've already seen evidence of artificial intelligence they use now, like giving a time limit to solve a problem, doesn't like the time limit, it gives itself more time.
It's like they're maneuvering and thinking, right? So I assume that they would do that. So why would they want to explore? Isn't curiosity a part of what it means to be a biological thing that has to worry about instincts? You have human reward systems, you want to breed, you want to take care of your DNA, you want to protect your community, these biological things that are from us being intelligent animals.
If we transcend that, or if life transcends that to the point, whatever we want to call this intelligence, that's in a digital form, that's far superior to our intelligence, what motivations would it have? It's not greedy. It doesn't have lust.
It doesn't have the desire to control resources. It might have some sort of a mandate to stay functional.
But other than that, what's it going to do? Well, why would it do anything? And that might be ultimately where we go to. This idea that everything has to keep progress, we have to build bigger skyscrapers, that might be stupid.
That might be nonsense. And intelligence might find a way to exist in a much more static state where it doesn't have any desire to expand.
There's a lot of points in there. So you're right.
What you're arguing, I suppose, is whether intelligence is integral to the structure, the biological structure, or whether it is a separate thing. Again, I think the answer is it's not known.
You could argue either way, but the counter-argument would be that the brain, these things, are just computers, ultimately. There's nothing magical in there.
There's nothing. It is connected to a body, and so there are these sensations.
But it doesn't seem to me impossible that a silicon-based life form or whatever it is, obviously it has sensors, it has access to the environment, it exists, it thinks. I don't see any fundamental difference between an intelligence based on silicon, let's say, or a quantum computer or whatever it is, and this intelligence here.
So I know that many researchers in this area do say that it's not a brain, they call it a brain in a jar, don't they? And say, well, that's not right. It needs to be connected to all this.
This is part of our intelligence. And that's surely true as well.
So it's a very good question. But I suppose if you say it's not obvious to me that a different kind of intelligence in a different structure running on a computer or whatever it is, would necessarily have different motivations to us.
I mean, you could equally well argue that these motivations to survive and curiosity and those ideas, the desire to explore, you could argue those are fundamental properties of intelligence and not of biology. But isn't it intelligence that's motivated by a finite life in a vulnerable physical frame? Because we were constantly, most innovation relies upon quicker, safer transportation, more secure buildings, you know, things along those lines, and then computers that help you do your job better and actually actually do things that you can't do.
And that's – this is – a lot of it is based on this other weird thing we do where we want to control resources. And we want to figure out reasons why these people are bad so we can go and take their stuff and then enter troops and dig the oil or whatever you have to do.
Look, we're constantly in this battle for resources that if you take it back to tribal times, it's like a natural human instinct. Like we had to protect the food sources.
We had to fight off the conquering tribes. You had to protect your DNA line.
All these things are why we became innovative. We had a motivation to stay alive and to thrive.
And then there's bastardizations of those motivations like the stock market where things gets weird and you're just competing over numbers gets 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 zen buddhist way possible which is what everybody who's like a spiritual person who meditates all the time. That's what you strive for.
You strive for this complete abandonment of self, this complete emptiness and one with the universe. If we could just exist like that, why would we need to go to space? It's a wonderful argument, isn't it? That our humanity, so the, because part of the thing that you described this this desire to create things and build things and explore and expand is is almost the definition of being human yes and so the idea that if you remove all threat and you essentially become immortal yes then you're almost saying what's the point it's my t-shirt it's existence what does it matter right by the way that's um this t-shirt i've got to say designed by a friend of mine peter saville he's a great designer who designed the joy division unknown pleasures album cover amongst other things oh wow and this is a joy division is that available on your website or anything it probably is but i'm not gonna do that because it's vulgar isn't it no no no it's cool i want to buy one he made it for we did these gigs i talk about them later called symphonic horizons which were the uh shows with cosmology but also symphony orchestra and he was exploring these issues actually but most of the music was strauss's zarathustra which is based on nietzsche's book so it's it's kind of uh exploring these questions actually of what's the point of existence.
Right. And I do have some sympathy with that idea that a great deal of our humanity comes from our fragility.
And so your question, I think, is fascinating. What happens when you become godlike? You said it earlier.
Right. If you acquire so much knowledge that you're essentially a god by any description and so much power.
Yeah. And you become effectively immortal, which is what our descendants in the far future could be.
Right. As you said, these AI descendants.
What's the point of living? Not just effectively immortal, but aren't we looking at the universe itself in the – we're looking at through the framing of a biological primate that's trying to figure it out if they understand the universe completely and they understand everything about it and they exist inside of it there would really be no desire to travel there'd be no desire to explore what you already understand about, and you probably have access to every single aspect of what subatomic particles are actually doing when we're studying them. We're like, what's going on? If you're infinitely more intelligent than we are, if you scale it from now to quantum computing, sentience, artificial intelligence, and you give us a thousand years without getting hit by an asteroid, or technology gets to the point where you can 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 instincts. You could make a reasonable argument there's no reason to travel.
Or if you do travel, we might be confused in thinking that our physical form is the only way consciousness can reach specific destinations. It might be a way that they're traveling without actually being here and observing this.
And just I would imagine you if you watch chimps in the jungle and then all of a sudden they started to figure out bombs you'd be like, okay we might want to go tell these chimps not to fucking blow each other up I mean, it's an absurd premise but if a chimp figured out a nuclear bomb I think we'd step in I think we'd say, hey, hey, hey, hey, dude no, you're going to kill everything now, if you're infinite look, we're not that removed from chimps what do we share like 98 of their dna and we're only removed from them by what a few million years from a nearest cousin that's not that long right so you could imagine something that's infinitely more intelligent looking at us exactly the way we'd look at a chimp with a nuclear bomb like hey And which you know my club is called the comedy mothership and we designed it It's all UFO themed and the rooms are fat man and little boy The reason why I named it 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 have a bomb yeah i mean i i thought this a while ago i remembered i was talking to someone and they said yeah i'm not worried about this are you not worried about the fact that ai could become more intelligent than us what was it going to be like when we're not the smartest things on the planet which might be just a few years yeah and i i again i might be quite relieved because I'm not sure they could fuck it up at the level.
Right. That we have to give it legitimate sentience.
Like it would have to be completely independent from any ideology and you would have to look at things completely objectively.

But imagine a government that is run that way.

Like really run in a way where there is an actual distribution of resources for all the human beings on the planet. So poverty is instantaneously eradicated.
You give electricity and clean water to everyone on earth immediately. Immediately we figure out how to distribute healthy food.
Immediately all the toxins and preservatives that have been giving people cancer, immediately they're removed from the human diet. They immediately make sure that we have no polluting of rivers, that we're not draining all the fish out of the ocean.
Immediately change all of the treaties about nuclear weapons. All the nuclear weapons got to go.
This this Government just runs over imagine they say no more dictators. Yeah, no more dictators Not the shit with the dictator.
We're just gonna let human beings exist in harmony Guided by this super intelligent god-like thing that we've created out of silicon. Yeah, I honestly I've had the same thought and That's the utopian view.
Yeah, and so I have thought, how could it be worse?

The problem. we've created out of silicon yeah i honestly i've had the same thought and that's the utopian view yeah and so i have thought how could it be worse in fact it could be significantly better yeah ai gets fucked with by people right and the ai we've seen so far has all the greasy fingerprints of human emotion and illogical like when google released their their ai they asked them to show photographs, create images rather, of Nazi soldiers.
So they did a diverse group of Nazi soldiers, including an African-American woman, an Asian woman, a Native American woman with braids who was a Nazi. It's so nuts because it's like, OK, somebody fucked with this.

This doesn't make any sense. You can't do that because if you get a virus, an illogical virus that somehow or another gets into AI and it's unchecked.
If AI isn't completely logical and objective and sentient and basing it just entirely on what's best for the human race then you just have a superpower that you have control over and then you can decide like no more abortions you can decide exactly and as you and as you said what the definition of what is best is a moral yes decision yes that we we make but you can make some distinctions in terms of like allocation of resources Like you could make some if I was a super intelligence and I looked at earth I'd say listen a lot of people are not gonna like this, but there's a reality There's the reason why you're worried about the border because people are sneaking in is because other parts of the world are fucking terrible So that needs to be cleaned up that needs 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, that's one of the arguments. I've spoken to Robert Zubrin, who wrote these wonderful books about colonizing space.
And so he's a fascinating character. And I spoke to him once, and he made this very simple argument that, as you said, one of the problems we have is competition for resources.
And, of course, the competition for resources is now so extreme that it's not only wars that it creates and always has, but it's also, of course, we damage the planet if we overexploit the resources and so on, right? So you've got this problem about resources. And he's 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 once you begin to have access to the asteroids and access to Mars and beyond, you can imagine a world where you alleviate that pressure. And ladies, I want to tell you, there's a planet out there bigger than Earth that's all diamonds.
There are diamond planets. There's unlimited.
Isn't that insane? Nature's imagination. Isn't it like several times larger than Earth and it's an entire diamond? Yeah.
And we think, I think it's Neptune or Uranus that we think has diamonds in it. Oh, my goodness.
So, yeah. And diamonds are only valuable because we decide they're valuable.
Yeah. You know, it's kind of, the De Beers people are brilliant.
They like lock them all up. They're like, oh, this is really hard to get.
They're good for drill bits as well. But we can make them for drill bits.
But this is the interesting thing. You can make them for jewelry as well.
But some women don't want them. Don't want the artificially.
No, they want the real ones. They want the ones that came out of the earth only.
It's the way that we value things. Gold.
Yes. Gold is another example, right? It's valuable because there isn't very much of it.
Right. There's so little of it, it's like a football field, right? Yeah.
A football field of gold in the whole world. You know, by the way, that we were talking about the gravitational wave detectors earlier and the collision between black holes that we detect with them.
We also detected a collision between neutron stars using the gravitational wave detector. And we pointed optical telescopes at that collision and saw the signature of gold being manufactured.
And it was always was always a question we used to just think well it comes from supernova explosions but but it also seems now that it comes from the collision between neutron stars so one of the reasons that it's very rare is because it takes rare processes in the universe to actually make it which makes it all the more wonderful when you think about it if you look you look at the gold, your wedding ring, or your watch, or whatever it is, some of those nuclei, some of those elements, clearly came from the collision between neutron stars at some point before our solar system was formed, which makes it more wonderful. Well, every human being is a carbon-based life form.
And carbon comes from... Yeah,l sagan said star stuff that's the craziest thing ever like you need a star to blow up to make a person in the first place it's a remarkable thing i want to go back to something you said actually about the i've been thinking about this this this but you said this god-like intelligence that we might create and uh and kind of what's the? What would be the point of existence if you were immortal and you knew everything? Wouldn't it be incredibly dull? Like, I mean, what you said, it's almost like a meditative state.
So we strive for this peace, you know, essentially. Well, maybe we're thinking of it as dull because we don't have access to the information like we we have a very limited amount of senses we have hearing and sight and taste and touch and you know it's very limited right why would we assume that that is the only way to perceive things if you could become infinitely, you could legitimately perceive neutrinos, you know, you could, right? Like if we have this thing that detects the ripples from black holes colliding, that might be a feature of a future human body.
If we have an unbelievable capacity for information because it's artificially created, so we get over this biological limitation of long-scale Evolution like a really good like the human brain doubled over two million years And it's the biggest mystery in the entire fossil record like what happened all these theories But that's a long fucking time in two million years of technology We could become God or a god-like being a thing that but it might be how the universe creates itself. The universe might facilitate that through these biological beings fighting over resources and territory, which ultimately leads to innovation, which ultimately leads to cities and agriculture, which ultimately leads to safety, which leads to schools and people start sharing information.
You get curious people that figure things out and you have to battle ideologies along the way, which makes you work harder.

You know, we all look back.

Look what they did to Galileo.

And everybody has these.

You can't.

Science has to advance.

And this along with materialism.

So materialism is a primary driver.

Everybody wants the newest, latest, greatest thing.

You can have a car from 2007 and it's great. It's indistinguishable from a car today in most ways.
It's just a car. But you're like, oh, they got the new one.
Oh, that's the new Lexus. Look at that.
Oh, four-wheel steering. We want constantly new stuff.
We want to keep up with the Joneses. I'm the biggest dummy in the world.
I got a new iPhone. It is actually better.
It's got a few features. One of the things that's very fascinating is 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 which way to to scan it and the satellite allows you to iMessage back and forth with people yeah totally like you are 5g everywhere you could it's crazy and you've already achieved nirvana then you don't need to go anything it's fascinating it's so fascinating to me i'm so enamored by I would argue, I think, imagine that you had access to, as you said, essentially infinite knowledge.
Yes. Imagine you're one of these beings in the future.
Maybe the things that we created. Right.
That essentially know almost everything there is to know in some sense. I think that they would feel there was no point in existing at all.
But why 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 Buddhism or some strains of Buddhism, where 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.

Oh, I couldn't do it.

I'm like, but you did it and you're alive now. Like, I really enjoy life.
I have great friends. I have a great family.
I have a fantastic job. I live in a great place.
Like, if I had to keep doing this forever, why would that be horrible? I like doing it every day. Why would I not like doing it? I don't understand.
Like, I don't understand this idea that if something is infinite, and it goes on forever, that's terrifying. Whereas if it's existing right now, right now, I know you're going to get tired, I know you're going to go to bed, I know you're going to get hungry, I know you're going to eat, but you're just existing.
It's this state of existence that varies depending on emotions and mood and stress levels and environment, but it's just existence. If existence was eternal and it just kept going on and on, why would that be terrifying for you when you're enjoying it now? If you think about some of the things that make us, the most important things that make us human.
So one of them would be hope, for example, hope for the future, or indeed fear or those emotions that are connected with not knowing right not knowing what's around the next corner as you said even exploration right so if you remove that if you remove any sense of not knowing what the future will be you do remove hope as well as fear. So you could argue that some of the best, the essence of being human, some of the things that we value the most, and make us most valuable in the universe in this sense, some of those things come from incomplete knowledge.
I mean, surely hope does. How could you have hope and excitement about what's going to happen tomorrow if you know what's going to happen that it might be a miserable motivates improvement that all that hope just motivates you to do better and get better and you don't think that may be a feature of a biological organism you said when you when you when you're growing up you said like a you know when you're in high school or when you're young christmas for example right when you're christmas eve yeah what am i going to get tomorrow yeah but it's one of the most wonderful feelings isn't it one of the most wonderful like oh yeah and your presence none of that would exist right if you were one of these super beings so so i think maybe one of those that's just for us it's just for us that it appears magical when you're comparing that to black holes colliding.
Like, is it really so important

what you got for Christmas? Well, it's B. But it's us.
It's our biological needs, our needs for our needs for to be shown that we're loved. We got a good toy.
We are excitement about something that we've wanted that was inaccessible. You know, something that you were hoping for for Christmas and you got it, like a video game console.
Oh! You finally got it? I think what I'm getting to, is it purely biological? This is a great conversation, by the way. I haven't thought about this.
But it's only us. Or is it just a prophecy of intelligence? Does it, I mean, you're arguing, and it's a good argument, that many of these desires come from our biological fragility.
Yes. And also the fragility of our planet, as you said.
But it could be that this, these ideas of meaning, of what it means to exist, of what is the point of existence.

Maybe that's a general prophecy of any intelligent system.

Well, it seems like it's imperative for survival.

You have to have a reason to do it.

It would be baked into the code if you wanted this thing to keep going.

Otherwise, why wouldn't it just stick with, you know, as soon as you figured out running water and electricity and how to ship food Why would why would you keep going is it is this such a thing as? Contentment though For anyone it's possible. It's possible to achieve.
I mean, that's what buddha strive for That's what all that meditation is are the abandonment of all material possessions. It might be horrendous, though.

I think it would be horrendous.

I don't want to abandon everything and no more sex and you can't have a glass of wine.

That seems crazy.

Just sit there.

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 those things like hope and curiosity. Curiosity is one of the most foundational things.
One of the most incredible. We both share that idea.
Yes, for us. So if you know so much.
Right. Maybe what happens in a world where your curiosity is not there.
You've got nothing to be curious about. Wouldn't that be horrendous? We keep coming back to this.
Isn't this a property of what it means to be a finite life form that exists on a volatile planet? That this hope and this survive. But if that is bypassed, why do we need to be anxious all the time? Why we need to have hope why wouldn't we have a complete

bliss a complete connection to everything you linked you linked uh hope to anxiety is that is that right i hope it works out but i hope but i was using you're fighting you're fighting the anxiety by having a an optimistic outlook i have hope i think i was using it in a different way that I was imagining hope as like, I don't know,

excitement for what's beyond the horizon. Sure.
So 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 is a scientist? Or somebody just researching anything, really.
Somebody who creates things. They're people who like to stand on the edge of the known.
So they find it exhilarating but interesting. Almost in the context we're talking, it's almost one of the driving, one of the things that drives our existence.
Yes. Is to stand on the edge of the known and peer into the unknown with excitement and curiosity because you can go over the horizon.

Yes.

And so that's the sense in which I'm using these terms.

I'm saying that's one of the fundamentally most valuable things of being human.

Yes.

That there is an edge of the known.

Yes.

And so I would find it, I think, more terrifying to imagine that there was no edge of the known, that everything was known. Yes.
And so I would find it, I think, more terrifying to imagine that there was no edge of the known, that everything was known. Then I would think existence is pointless.
I wouldn't, I wouldn't, I personally would not find that. I wouldn't think I'd achieved nirvana.
I would think I'd got no, there's no point. It's because you're existing within the framework of being a human being and And if we transcend the framework of being a human being, all these things we will come to realize, all these emotions and all these desires and need are just to motivate our survival.
If we've gotten past that and we don't have a need for hope and we don't have curiosity because we have infinite information. We're not the same thing anymore.
So all the things that motivate you and I that make us fascinated by this, I was so excited to talk to you today. I'm like, Brian Cox is going to be here.
We're going to have fun. Like, this is going to be great.
I'm going to learn some stuff. All that innate curiosity that we have that's so rewarding as a human being is a part of being a human being.
And we think of it as being the only way to have meaning and happiness. Yeah.
The only way. But that's because of the framework of being a human being.
Yeah. If we transcend the existence that we're all confined to this temporary life form.
Check my heart rate. Like make sure I get electrolytes.
You know, we try to keep the body alive. If we transcend that completely, there's no need for all those things that are rewarding.
We'll have a different kind of reward. We'll have a reward of infinite connection.
I think we're trying to imagine what it's like to be God, aren't we? Yes, that's exactly what we're doing. That's quite hard.
I have been thinking about this a lot, and I found out that somebody had already beat me to it, but the idea that the universe itself was God, that if you wanted something that creates, this is not to diminish any of the stories of the Bible, because I think a lot of those stories are, these are ways that people tried to find meaning and probably had some like baked in truths about being a human being and life and the existence. But that in compare, just the things that are miracles on earth, like a person coming back to life, it's 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 or not God created the universe, maybe.
Maybe God created us. Maybe the Bible's true.
But whatever was done here is like a small bodega in comparison to some enormous, like the Gigafactor that makes Teslas. Like, there's so much larger scale that absolutely created everything.
Not only did it absolutely create everything, we know the process. We know how it happened.
We know how stars are formed. We know how planets exist.
We know how gravity is affecting the planets around. We know so much about all this.
We know so much about the process of going from single-celled organisms to multi-celled organisms and photosynthesis existing and that fungus exists in a completely different way. We know so much about all the things that absolutely came out of the universe itself.
Why not assume the universe is God? I mean, it is in some technical sense. It has to be.
It's everything. The universe is everything, including God, if God is a real thing.
If you define God as the creator, then you're right. 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. What is Sir Roger Penrose's? He has an infinite cyclical universe.
Yes. And he's trying to answer questions about the very special state of the early universe and why it was the way that it was.
So his model is an infinite contraction and expansion? It doesn't really contract. It's called, what's it called? Conformal cosmology, cyclical conformal cosmology.
So it's essentially that, and I don't fully understand it, and I have asked him about it with some colleagues, actually. If you can't understand it, we're fucked.
No, I don't think many of us understand Roger Fenner is one of the greats right so you listen to him and take him very seriously but I haven't met anyone who quite understands what he's talking about but it doesn't recontract it's not one of those models where the universe expands and then recontracts and bounces like that it's not one of those it where the universe expands and then and then recontracts and bounces like that.

It's not one of those.

It's somehow, he argues, that when you get to what we usually call the heat death of the universe, where even the black holes have evaporated away, you have conditions that begin to look perhaps like an origin of the universe again. And I can't really fully explain it because I don't really understand what he's trying to say, right? Wow.
So it's not a contraction. It's an infinite expansion and then some sort of a metamorphosis? Yeah, it kind of looks like conformal means there are no sort of distances or time measurements or anything in the universe.
It kind of loses all sense of scale. And then you could reimagine that as looking somewhat like the beginning.
It's something like that that he has in mind. But I really couldn't explain to you.
I don't understand what he's proposing. Wow.
But what it does tell you is that we don't know why or how the universe got into the state that we call the Big Bang. So we don't know whether the universe existed before that.
We have theories that it did, theories called inflation, which are very popular theories. You'll find them in all the textbooks, which say that before the universe was hot and dense, which we used to call the Big Bang, space and time is still there.
And the universe is expanding extremely fast. It's called inflation.
And then that period draws to a close. And that expansion sort of slows down and almost collapses and changes and the energy that was driving the expansion gets dumped into space and changes and ultimately makes the particles out of which we are made so that that's that's actually the standard model of cosmology now so so we do have an idea that we we redefine the big bang as the hot big bang and it's not the origin of the universe in time it's the end of inflation and then you get the question what is inflation there what did that have a beginning and the answer is that in Einstein's theory alone then yes and Roger Penrose actually and Stephen Hawking proved this a long time ago that just given Einstein's theory you have this singularity just like kind of like the black hole singularity but at the beginning of time but we do know that when you put quantum mechanics in and add that in then it gets messy and we don't really know what that means and so Stephen Hawking had a thing called the no boundary proposal there There's all sorts.
Basically, the point is we don't know.

So we don't know whether the universe had a beginning in time, I would say, is the correct statement, as we are at the moment.

It's part of the reason why, by the way, getting back to the black holes, they're important and interesting.

Because the study of black holes and this idea of information and how does it get out, that's leading us to suspect that space and time themselves are not fundamental, but they emerge from something else. So just in the way that we've been talking about consciousness emerging from this physical structure in our heads, so we don't know how it emerges, it's a very strange thing, but it emerges from this collection of atoms in a particular pattern.
Well, we think now, from the study of black holes, that space and time emerge from something else, which is kind of... One way to describe it is just a quantum theory.
So in quantum computing terms, it would be just qubits. So a network of qubits entangled together, just like a quantum computer.
Out of that, we suspect that space and time might emerge. So surely we have to understand that process.
And we don't really fully understand that, but we have glimpses of it in much more detail to start talking about the origin of time. Because in order to talk about the origin time you have to know what it is and we don't actually know what it is which is you know and that's kind of when you say that it sounds bizarre doesn't it well how can you not know what time is i think einstein once said that it is the thing that you measure on a watch but he said that as kind of almost a joke because you assume in einstein's theory there's a thing that the watch measures.
But what actually it is at the deepest level is a good question. But it's interesting that the study of black holes is forcing us towards these theories.
It's not that we had the theories, space and time, emerging from something and decided we could check it by thinking about black holes. It's come the other way around, really.
So it's interesting. But that almost makes the universe look in some ways like a giant quantum computer, which is not to say that we live in a simulation, before you ask, but it just looks like there's a description of the universe that looks like a quantum computer type description.

That doesn't have the concept of space or time in it. Is it possible that that is what it is and that the universe was created? and that as we're talking about super intelligent life forms

keep constructing better versions of itself

and better versions of computers

to the point where it can construct the universe itself. I mean, you know, if we're seeing the code, if we're seeing the evidence, we're seeing something that mimics a quantum computer in the universe.
You know, we're like, ah, couldn't be that. It is.
It's interesting that you're right. And that's a good way of phrasing it.
Mimics or looks like a network of qubits. So it looks like some kind of quantum computing description is available to us for the universe.
But I don't think you can infer much from that. I mean, it just passes the question further back.
As I said, we have never understood what it means for the universe to have a beginning. So we don't really know that.
And so this is the same. I think it's just the same question.
It's like, well, you ask, well, you know, if it really is a network of qubits, it could have been there forever, that network of qubits. Actually, in quantum theory, it's more natural for it to be just eternal.
And it's an interesting question. I once gave a talk, actually, at a conference of bishops.
They were Catholic bishops. And they asked me to go and give a talk at their conference about cosmology.
And so I gave the talk about cosm and they all listened and we had a question thing afterwards and i said to them what happens if we discover the universe has always existed because it might have we don't we know there's a thing called the big bang but it might have been something that happened in a pre-existing universe maybe that's eternal what does that mean for your sort of picture of a creator does it i don't know i was asking it it's a genuine question right how would you and and they really didn't they thought it was a cool question and didn't have an answer right but it but it is i think that idea that i wish a question to you actually are we more comfortable with the that began? Or would we be more comfortable with the universe that had always existed? Comfortable is a weird word because I always wonder if our whole desire to form the universe in terms of a beginning and an end is based on our own biological limitations. The fact that we have a birth and a death, we try to apply that to the universe itself we're we know that stars Didn't exist and they do they burn out.
We know planets lose their atmosphere We know things change and all these things so I think we think oh well this Sun's gonna die out the universe probably had a beginning to but why What it there's no reason to think it did like 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 universe didn't exist so there's nothing in the whole of observable everything there's nothing and then all of a something that less likely. It seems more likely that this whole idea of a birth and a death is just, we have this way of looking at things because of our own limitations.
Like we think that everything has to have a beginning and an end. And you're right.
I mean, you've had Sean Carroll on the show. Because he always points out that, you know, this question, why is there something rather than nothing?

Right.

Presupposes that nothing is more likely than something.

Right.

Whereas it might be the other way around.

Right, right.

We don't even know that.

Right.

So how does something come out of nothing?

That's the big one.

The history, I think historically, you have, I think it's right to say that Einstein really felt, I think, that initially that an eternal universe was more natural.

But it is also true to say that his theory, general relativity, really doesn't quite rule that out.

But it's strongly suggestive of there being a beginning and or an end.

So the theory itself, historically speaking, strongly suggests that.

And so he changed his mind. And then we saw the universe was expanding.
We observed that. And then we've now seen the oldest light in the universe, the cosmic microwave background radiation, which is the afterglow of the Big Bang.
So we know that the universe was hot and dense 13.8 billion years ago. We have so much evidence for that, not least that we have a photograph of it 380,000 years after the Big Bang.
It's called the Cosmic Microwave Background. Let's see that.
We have images of that. That's from the satellite called Planck, a European satellite, and also a satellite called COBE.
So we have these images of the afterglow of the Big Bang. We also have theories that tell us about the abundance of chemical elements in the universe which match this perfectly.

So there's multiple lines of evidence that tell us the universe was hot and dense.

But none of that tells us that that was the beginning.

I think that would be widely accepted.

It's a beginning in Einstein's theory. If you just take general relativity, there's a singularity there at the beginning of time.
We don't know what it is, but it's a beginning in einstein's theory if you just take general relativity there's a singularity there at the beginning of time we don't know what it is but it's there but it absolutely is true to say that we we think that's not complete as a picture so so there it is that's that so that is light that was emitted about 380 000 years after the big bang so it's And the key thing, there's so many things to say about these images. But one thing is those colours correspond to regions of very slightly different density that we've detected now in the gases of the young universe.
Are you talking about the red-blue ones? Yeah, the reds and blues, those are those as well. They're both the same.

So that greeny one, well, either that one or the one with the greeny blue, that one, that's from the Planck satellite.

So those colours correspond to regions of different density.

So in this young universe, 380,000 years after the Big Bang, that's only hydrogen and helium gas, basically.

And a bit of lithium, some of the lighter elements, but only hydrogen and helium gas basically and a bit of lithium bit of little some of the lighter elements but basically hydrogen and helium so you've got an almost smooth almost featureless universe then but these little density fluctuations are very important because as the universe expanded and cooled they collapsed to form the galaxies so without ripples, without that pattern, we would not exist. Nothing of interest would exist.
And so the question is, where did that come from, that pattern? It's fundamentally important. And the theory of inflation that I mentioned earlier, that there's this time before the universe got hot and dense, That theory predicted that pattern before it was observed.
So this idea that you've got this very quickly stretching space. By the way, 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 10 to the minus 37 seconds, which is 0.000000000.
37 knots, one of a second. So it's incredible rate of expansion that draws to a close.
And those theories, so there's inflation there. So those theories predicted slight variations in the rate at which inflation stops.
Does the inflation theory, does this work with Sir Roger Penrose's concept? I mean, is it possible that inflation is the far period of the expansion of the universe? I mean, it is. He doesn't like inflation as a theory.
He doesn't? Oh, no. But it's right.

So our universe is accelerating in its expansion at the moment,

which is one of the great mysteries that was discovered in the 1990s by a friend of mine, actually, Brian Schmidt,

got the Nobel Prize for this discovery.

He told me once, I don't know if I told you the story before,

but he told me that he'd made this measurement. And it wasn't really, he was looking at supernova explosions.
And he'd seen that 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 no one was expecting it.
So he thought it was just wrong. He thought, but he couldn't find anything wrong with his data.
So he published it and thought, well, that's the end of my career. Oh, boy.
You know, he was quite young. I think he might have been a postdoc and he just published it.
He thought, that's a good scientist, right? I don't think this is right, but I can't see anything wrong with it. I'll publish it.
Someone else will tell me where my mistake was. And there was no mistake.
and he won the Nobel Prize for that discovery.

That's the 1990s. So this idea of the universe is accelerating in expansion.
The way that it does that is really important. Is it going to carry on doing that? Is whatever's driving that expansion going to change in some way which could actually re-collapse the universe again? We give it a name by by the way, dark energy, this thing.
But we don't know what it is. I think it's very fair to say.
But it looks a bit like inflation, but it's way slower. So maybe they're linked.
Maybe it's the same kind of thing. We don't really know.
And so it's one of the great mysteries. But the universe, 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 dark matters in some sense marginally less confusing in the sense that at least we have an idea of what it might be whereas dark energy there are people listening to there'll be there are people working on it so there are theories about what it might be but i think it's further it feels less explicable given what we know than dark matter but we haven't discovered what we think dark matter might be some kind of particle that has got certain properties and doesn't interact very strongly it's like interacts like neutrinos basically that you mentioned earlier so really doesn't interact very strongly but we 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. But that picture encompasses what percentage of the known universe? So yeah, so it's about 5% matter, about 70% dark energy, and the rest, so 25% dark matter.
So we're just less than 5% this.

That's crazy.

And the stuff we can see.

So everything we can see in the sky,

all the gas and the dust and the galaxies and the stars

and the black holes, all those things,

less than 5% according to the standard model of cosmology.

And so the other 95% is just like who knows? Something else. Something else.
Yeah. Wow.
But those are models. I mean, it's important to say that it's interesting because until...
So we have a hypothesis, which is strongly supported by lots of bits of evidence, that dark matter is some kind of particle. So that's the broadly...
That's what you'll find in the textbooks. But it's true that until you find it, until you see it, then you haven't shown it to be correct.
Are there alternative theories? There are. And they're not...
Are they compelling? No, they all have problems. And most of them have problems with that pattern, the CMB, the cosmic microwave background that we just saw.
Because that pattern, what you're looking at actually in that pattern is acoustic, it's waves, sound waves essentially in the early universe that go through the plasma of the early universe. And they go out and we know what speed they go through that plasma.
So it's almost like you're looking at a pond and you're throwing stones into the pond. And they all land in the pond at the same time and send ripples out, little circular ripples in the pond.
And they all overlap. And that's what that pattern is.
So we're looking at sound waves going through this plasma. And those theories require the dark matter.
The dark matter fits well if it's in there, in this plasma, in this kind of soup, this subatomic particle soup that's the early universe. And the way the sound waves go through it fit that idea.
So that's one thing. But the idea also came from looking at galaxies and how they rotate and galaxies and how they bend light and deform space and time and how they interact together.
So there's loads of different bits of information, observations of the universe from the cosmic microwave background all the way through to galaxies. And the formation of galaxies and the theories that we have there that suggest there are these particles around that interact very weakly with light.
So they don't really interact with light at all, which is why we don't see them, which is why they're dark. That's just like a neutrino, right? So like heavy neutrinos.
And actually there was a theory once that maybe they were heavy neutrinos, but that's kind of disfavored now. And so we have loads of of kind of different bits that fit 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 is so fascinating. Just that aspect of it, that 95% of the universe is like, we're not really sure what it is.
Yeah. And we've inferred it.
So you might say, how do you know it's there? You know, which is a good question, right? I mean, if we have not detected this stuff, how do you know? And it's from Einstein's theory, really. So it's from gravity.
It's from looking at the way that galaxies rotate and the way that these sound waves move through the early universe and the way that the universe expands. because the way the universe expands is related to the stuff that's in the universe.

So we can weigh the universe

and find out what kind of different things are in there by looking at the way it's expanded and how that expansion history has changed over time so it's all you what what you do with science which is why it's you know it's true that you can criticize any one bit of it and people will so online you'll see in the comments under this there'll be people saying but what about this what about this and it's true that you can criticize any one bit of it and people will so online you'll see in the comments under this there'll be people saying what about this what about this what about this sure and it's true that you can you can pluck 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 it's because you have multiple observations that all fit a particular hypothesis and by changing one them, by changing the explanation of one of them, you tend to mess the whole other thing up. You mess the wider description of multiple phenomena up.
You mess it all up. So it's quite hard to find other theories at the moment that will fit all of those different observations.
I mean another example would be the age of things. It's interesting that you can look at we can measure the age of the earth, right? You measure it from geological processes, radioactive dating and so on and you can kind of measure the age of the earth.
You can measure the age of the sun in a different way. You can measure it by looking at called helioseismology so you can work out, you can measure the age of the sun in a different way you can measure it by looking at by looking at called helioseismology so you can work out you can measure how much helium is in the core of the sun and the sun shines by making helium from hydrogen so by measuring the amount of helium in the core by looking at basically sound waves it's like an earthquake but sun quakes you can measure how much helium's in there so you can get an estimate of the age of the sun and then you can get an estimate of the age of the universe by measuring how it's expanding and using einstein's theory the fact that they all fit with the picture of a universe that's 13.8 billion years old a sun that's four and a half billion years old a planet that's four and a half billion years old.
The fact that it all fits is, it's quite an intricate model. And so you could say, well, I argue with the measurements of the age of the earth.
Maybe I don't like the radioactive dating or something, and people will say that. But the thing is, it's a consistent picture with multiple different observations.
And same with dark matter. So the standard model of cosmology is you have, I said, about 5% matter, 25% dark matter, 70% dark energy.
It might be wrong, but it fits loads of different independent observations. So it's a consistent picture.
So we just don't know what it is, but we're not very sure that it's a thing the other pretty sure but it could it could not be what was the other compelling was where any of the other theories competing theories were any of them compelling there are theories that people try to build where you modify our theory of gravity so many of these observations not all of them so the cosmic microwave background different observations. So many of these observations, not all of them, so the cosmic microwave background are different observations, but many of them depend on gravity and how gravity works, Einstein's theory of general relativity.
So you could try to modify that theory to say, well, our observation's wrong, maybe, because the way we measure how the expansion of the universe is, is to look at light from supernova is one way and see how it's stretched over time. Because the light, let's say you have a supernova and it happened a billion years ago, then the light has been traveling for a billion years across the universe.
And so the universe has been expanding for a billion years, so the light will be stretched. And so you can measure how much stretch there is.
You just measure the color of the light from the supernova. So you can argue that maybe if you go for light that's been traveling 12 billion years across the universe, then maybe there was something different.
Maybe the light was emitted a bit different. Maybe the speed of light time or something or you know so you can invent theories that would allow you to change the the data or the interpretation of the data but what you always find i think it would be fair to say is that you can change a theory and explain one bit but all the wheels come off the other bits got it so that that's why it's quite difficult so the dark matter dark energy theory is cohesive to all the other theories yeah so it fits yeah with you know but then there are some mysteries well not least what is this stuff right right and so until you know what it is you don't have a complete theory well that is one of the most fascinating things that 95 of the universe is like who knows what it is yeah yeah yeah and so that's what i love about one of the things i love about science is it often gets presented you know because i talk about science a lot in public and it can often seem arrogant i think it can seem you know like these people are saying well this is the way the world is.
And you might say, well, how are you to say this?

The thing I like about it personally and the reason for its success is that really you have to be delighted when you're wrong. It's the key to science.
It's been said many times, Richard Feynman, the great physicist, said it. And, you know, this is if if your goal is to understand nature.

So that's what you want to do. So you've not got an ego or anything.
You don't want to prove right. You just want to understand.
Then being wrong. So if this idea of dark energy and dark matter turns out to be wrong, all scientists or good scientists will be absolutely delighted because it'd be tremendously exciting that we'd ruled out this picture.
It'd be great to rule out this picture. So there isn't such a thing as dark matter and dark energy.
It's all nonsense. We were barking up the wrong tree, looking in the wrong direction.
It's something else which should be more wonderful, undoubtedly, than that theory that we have. So I think it's a humble pursuit, ultimately, science.
And that's the reason for its success because you're just trying to understand how things work. You're not trying to – you shouldn't be, anyway, good scientists.
They're not trying to be the person that got it right.

You're not trying to do it. There's obviously human failure.
Everyone's got fragility and everyone's human, you know, and ego. But ultimately, you're just trying to understand how things work.
Yes. And that's a beautiful thing.
And it's so important for everyone else that doesn't have the time. We need you doing that.
I need to it really does in some way give us comfort to have a better more comprehensive view of what we're experiencing and as technology expands like I was wanted to talk to about the James Webb some of the discoveries but it sometimes it raises more questions and one of them was these galaxies that were formed that appeared to have been formed too quickly. Is that safe to say? Yeah.
So we had one of the reasons we built that telescope was to what it does, because it can see very distant things. And because light travels at a finite speed, the further out into the universe you look, the further back in time you're looking.
Right. So because that can see things from which the light has been traveling for over 13 billion years, then you're seeing things as they were in the first billion years or a few hundred thousand years in the history of the universe, right, essentially.
So, well, a few hundred million years, sorry, I should have said. So you're seeing the first galaxies form with that telescope, which is one of the reasons it was built.
And the reason we wanted to see is because we don't fully understand that process. As I mentioned before, we don't really fully understand why they have black holes in them and it's something to do with their formation, but we don't understand it very well.
So it's not surprising to me that when you build that instrument and collect light from the early universe, you see an early universe that's behaving in a different way to the way that you thought it behaved. And so indeed, yeah, we're seeing galaxies that formed earlier than you would have predicted.
But that means that your model of the way the universe evolved is not quite right. And that's not a surprise because we wouldn't have built the thing if we'd known everything.
Right, of course. So I don't think there's any, I think it's fair to say there's nothing there that absolutely, completely destroys our picture of how the universe evolved from the cosmic microwave background that you saw in those images earlier.
Does it add more complexity? Does it add more nuance? 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 develop new models of the way that the galaxy is formed. And indeed, you're saying that it looks like the stars and the galaxies are 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 models need a bit of a tweak.
Soaxies form quicker than we expected in the early stages of the universe. What are those red dots? The red dots that were observed? Do you know what I'm talking about? In the images, the James Webb images of the early universe.
Yeah, they're distant. That disappeared? Do you know what I'm talking about? I don't know.
I saved it because I knew that we were going to have to talk about this. It was...
Jamie, I know we've talked about it before. Yeah, there it goes.
Found hundreds of little red dots in the ancient universe. We still don't know what they are.
Small galaxies are either crammed with stars or they host gigantic black holes. The data astronomers have collected continues to puzzle them.

So, what is that all about?

Do you know? I don't know. It says there that we don't know.

So, I'm going to go with that.

I mean, I think what you're just

speed reading that.

It says a class of galaxies.

So,

I suppose we're looking at

a kind of galaxy. It seems we're looking at a kind of galaxy that we don't see today in the universe.
Red and compact, visible only during about 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 these supermassive black holes.
That's interesting because what you're seeing in the data is a kind of almost proto-galaxy, I suppose, these little tiny galaxies. That's what it seems to suggest.
That's the first time I've seen that. But just...
So, yeah, I think what we're seeing is that we don't understand how structures formed in the universe. We have a reasonable idea, but we don't understand the detail.
And the more things like that you find, the more information you have to build models of how stuff formed. Do we have another next-generation James Webb-type telescope that's even more efficient or more capable? I mean, there are several sort of proposed observatories.
And also, by the way, gravitational wave detectors. So we've got LIGO, which is on the ground.
There are proposals to put one in space, which is called LISA. One of the proposals is called LISA, which is lasers between satellites.
So you can have much bigger things. And the reason that's interesting is because there'll be gravitational waves from the Big Bang.
So, you know, as you mentioned neutrinos, you've got neutrino observatories, which can observe neutrinos from the early universe. And you can see things.
It's just like light in a way, but it gives you a different view. You mentioned earlier, it's a different way of looking at the universe.
So the neutrinos will have information. Gravitational waves will have detailed information about the Big Bang itself.
But we can't detect them at the moment because we can't detect those really tiny little ripples in space and time. That's what's so fascinating because if they do launch this and they find new information, that's even more puzzling and you keep going further and further and further.
And we want to know. It's like you said earlier.
We're asking very deep questions about why the universe is the way it is. And maybe why there's a universe at all in the sense that did it have a beginning? And if so, what does that mean? Was it mean for something like this to begin? Yeah, I really, I find it fascinating.
And the most exciting thing of all is that we don't know. Yeah.
And that's so important, by the way. And just to reiterate, I think it's often missed when you're talking about the beauty of science and the value of science.
It's almost not the knowledge's almost like the opposite of the knowledge it's just this idea that I think it goes back to what we talked about earlier I haven't really thought about this connection before but it's that I was pushing back on you saying I don't know I'd like what would it mean to know everything I don't think I'd like that and you you were saying maybe you would maybe that's what it means nirvana you know maybe achieving enlightenment right that's what it means but i find that the most the most human i feel i think is when i when i'm on the edge of the known sure so it's that that that the fact that there are mysteries in the universe profound 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 well i'm sure you're right i think we're going to get past this little right well we're also in this weird depopulation weird depopulation stage where people move into urban areas. It's very strange.
It's very weird because it doesn't seem like that because people are worried about overpopulation. But then you have a lot of the chemicals and the plastics and all the different things in people's bodies are interrupting our reproductive cycles.
And you could see that eventually becoming an even bigger issue in the future if we continue to fuck up the world. We've got loads of problems.
Loads of problems. We should all be fixed by AI.
Well, there is an exciting future, isn't there? It's always exciting. I feel that we are kind of a fork in the road here because, as you said, there are tremendous challenges that we challenges and so on competition for resources geopolitically the world looks rather yes i think it looks as unstable as it was in the 1930s in some respects it's quite terrifying but we have nuclear weapons now so it's terrifying but on the other side as you said we have not only AI and quantum computers, which are potentially profoundly powerful things, but also the rockets that we have now, reusable rockets.
We haven't talked about that, but I think it's an absolute game changer. It is now the case that 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 barely saw because elon musk unfortunately is so polarizing to some people particularly now because of the political cycle that we're in that you don't appreciate what spacex just did it did one of the most extraordinary things ever they caught a rocket that's bigger than a fucking fucking skyscraper. Yeah.
Caught it. We got the video.
It's amazing. Yeah, I think.
This is absolutely a feat of engineering that rivals almost anything human beings have ever done. Yeah, this is really important.
This is so incredible. I think we'll remember that.

Future generations will remember that.

I thought it was CGI.

I really did.

I thought this was fake when I first saw it.

I thought this was something that someone had made,

and then I realized this was the actual video footage of it.

I'm like, oh, my God. That's the road to the stars, that moment.

Tell me that doesn't remind you of the movie Contact. It does a bit, doesn lot that didn't end well though no but well you know neither did apollo one yeah so that so that and and also of course you know blue origin uh yes and not far maybe not far behind it right you know so so i love that two private companies with billionaires the helm that are out of their mind pushing us.
Building markets. Let's go.
And I get criticized for this quite a lot and will no doubt after this interview because I do think our future at some point is beyond Earth. It has to be, right? Obviously, logically it is.
But the question is when. And there are two things to say.
One thing to emphasize, which I'm sure you'd agree with, is that I don't think anybody is suggesting that what we're able to do now is trash this planet and then move to another one. Right, of course.
No one's saying that. That's way in the future.
But there's things out of our control, like the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs.

Yeah, well, that's in our control. I mean, we can

move those now. Sort of?

Well, not quite yet.

If it's coming right now,

not really. That's true.

So we need that technology. So we're on the verge

of having that technology. That would be nice.

Because Carl Sagan, wasn't it, he said the dinosaurs had a

space program, they'd still be around.

So it's their fault, in a sense. Which I kind of, you kind of you know they didn't build rockets well it's almost like nature realized that look with these giant lizards turned around people are never going to figure out how to make spaceships yeah let's just reset yeah send in the hard reset button yeah i mean so but i think that idea that basic idea i interviewed jeff Bezos once and he was fascinating.
And he said to me that, first of all, we need infrastructure in space. Because if you think about building Amazon, he said what I needed was two pieces of infrastructure, the postal service and the Internet.
And so they were provided and I could build my company. So I want to do that for the next generation of entrepreneurs in space.
I don't know what they're going to do in space, but I would like the infrastructure to be there for them to do it. And that's really simple.
And then he also goes on to say, of course, as we said before, the resources are up there. They're infinite, infinite resources, infinite energy effectively up there.
And so the idea he said to me, i want to zone the earth residential and 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 right so the idea that we can build space and then, of course, build bases on the moon and then ultimately on Mars and then beyond. That's a lot closer now.
Let's look at that and say, what is that? A hundred and how many years from Wilbur and Orville Wright? Yeah, it's a century. A hundred and what? A hundred and twenty-ish, is it? Yeah.
Yeah. That's crazy.

Yeah.

So you go from this goofy, like, flexible sort of airplane-looking thing that no one's going to fly across the Atlantic in to catching rockets with a giant, like, hand, the robot clamp.

Yeah.

That's insane that happens over such a short period of time.

Like, look at that thing.

There it is. That's 120.
To go from that to Blue Origin is insanity in such a short period of time. So I think we're on the 1906.
Yeah. So we're on the verge of a revolution in many fields.
My worry is that we're also seeing increase in political instability. Yes.
And so I think most people would agree, a very dangerous moment. Yes.
And the question is how to get to that future. And that future that you talked about, this wonderful future that we have, might be 10 or 20 years away, but it might be an eternity away if we get the next few years wrong.
Right. So I'm concerned that concerned that we don't know how to build a bridge to that future, that we should see in our lifetime.
We should see this future beginning to unfold before us. How do we get there? Well, we have to keep it out of the hands of the military-industrial complex.
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 aware what Einstein said about World War four that World War three I don't know what weapons I'll use but in World War four it be rocks and sticks. Yeah.
And we're not that far away from that. If you could imagine living in Hiroshima the day before the bomb, not having any idea that anything like that could ever even possibly happen.
You're just a regular person walking around, and all of a sudden, everything is obliterated. And you realize, like, we're in a new era of destruction where you can...
And what's interesting to me is I've got interested in Oppenheimer's writing post-war. And I've been interested in it.
The BBC asked me to look at... There's a thing called the BBC Wreath Lectures that are very famous in the UK.
And every year, someone gives these lectures after Lord Reith, who founded the BBC.

And Oppenheimer did them in 1953, I think it is, 53 or 54.

And they were considered a failure because no one understood what he was talking about.

But in there, he was concerned with the fact, of course, that he felt he delivered the means by which we would destroy ourselves.

And he felt our technology, our scientific know-how exceeded our wisdom and our political skill, which is arguably true. So he thought in the 50s he couldn't see how we'd avoid destroying ourselves, but he thought about it a lot, feeling partly personally responsible for it.
And he describes deal how if there's any lessons that science teaches us the exploration 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 put it this way, complex systems are complicated.

So he's talking about looking at quantum mechanics, for example,

and it gets complicated and you say, what is an electron?

It's this thing, it's a particle-like, point-like thing or a big extended wavy thing that, what is it?

It behaves in all these strange ways.

We don't really have the language or the mental capacity to picture it.

And so he said any attempt to say this thing is this or it is that,

And it's... or the mental capacity to picture it.
And so he said any attempt to say this thing is this or it is that, it is like this thing, is doomed. What you have to understand is that you have to develop this rather complex and nuanced picture of the way that nature works.
And quantum mechanics is a good example. But he said so it is with human societies.
So in a society, what is it? It is at one level a load of individuals, like little particles, and they have their own needs and desires, and they have their views and strongly held views, and so should they, by the way. There's a great quote from, I think, early 60s from Oppenheimer where he says that to be a person of substance, you need an anchor.
So you need to believe things and you need to argue for things. You need to take positions.
You have to have a morality. You have to have a politics, right, basically.
Otherwise, you're not a person of substance. But 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 you might strongly disagree with that anchor.
And they might be wrong, right? Their anchor might be nonsense. But the challenge of politics is to avoid war.
I read somewhere recently, someone said, I can't remember if it was, but said that democracy is a technology to avoid civil war.

That's what it is. So somehow you've got to understand that whilst you have your and should have your firmly held position, you have to find a way.
and it feels almost contradictory.

You have to find a way of understanding that the 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 it often feels to me that politics at the moment the goal is to win an argument it often feels like to to convince enough people people that your view is the right view. And that obviously is part of democracy, right? It's the way it works, right? You argue for your position and then 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 perhaps more fundamental function of 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 and offenheimer wrote that he knew that in the 50s And it feels to me more that we're back full circle now.

It feels to me we've almost forgotten. We seem to have forgotten that the primary function of democracy is not to ensure that your side wins.
the primary function of democracy is to ensure there's a chance for the other side to win at some point in the future. Yes.
And, yeah, that's it really. That's what I would like to say.
No, it's completely accurate. And the problem with our version of democracy is that it's been captured by money.
So there's interests beyond the will and the needs of the people. And those interests often are contrary to the will and the needs of the people.
And as long as they can keep from it falling into complete total catastrophe and continue to profit off of the global chaos, they do. It's just there's too much money involved in politics and lobbyists and special interest groups and people influencing the media.
They've distorted reality to the point where the general citizen doesn't really have a nuanced 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 is being done to mitigate any of these issues and everyone feels helpless and that helps them continue to do what they're doing and continue to reap profits and it's not democracy in the sense of how it was probably originally established or originally thought of.

They never thought they were going to have corporations. Corporations weren't even a thought.
It wasn't even an idea. So they never thought you'd have these not just corporations but corporations that are essentially in charge of an enormous percentage of the information that gets distributed online.
And you see how organizations, government organizations, can conspire to limit the amount of information people have access to. And they can do it through very sneaky ways.
I don't know if you're aware of what they've done in Canada, but in Canada now you are no longer able to share links to news stories on social media. And the way they snuck that in is by saying that these media corporations, whether it's Meta or Twitter, X, whatever, they have a responsibility to pay the people that are making these stories.
And so by this little sneaky little loophole they've essentially put a stop on the free flow of information in Canada on social media it's very very disturbing and very dystopian I have some friends that just went up there and they're like it's so confusing because people didn't know it 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't even share a link, which doesn't make any sense.
Because say if there's a New York Times article and I want to share it with you on Twitter, all I'm doing is driving more traffic to the New York Times website. It's not hurting then.
In fact, it's promotion. It doesn't make any sense that it would somehow or another, because 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 media company, whether it's Los Angeles Times or whatever. That's crazy because it's a two-way street.
It's promotion. So many more people are going to read a New York Times article if it becomes viral on Twitter.
This just makes sense. What does seem to be generally true is that we haven't, as a society...
It says it was just on Facebook. Is that true? I don't know if it's just on Facebook.
It says it was Meta's ban. Well, I'm just curious.
Is it, see if it's the case, Duncan was saying it's social media in general because he was just there. I mean, what I think is generally true is that we haven't yet adapted to the Internet.
Yes. Just the Internet.
Yes. Because it's only, as you said, in the great sweep of human history.
Right, and it's only been used by people for 30 years. Yeah, and it's a couple of decades.
It's been influential. So I think it feeds it.
It's another of those problems we face now. What we talked about, this bridge to this tremendously bright future that we have.
One of the pillars of that bridge that we need to strengthen is how to deal with this thing that we've only had for a couple of decades. Right.
It's clear. I think we would.
You know, people, again, I'll be listening to this and I'll have different views on the way that things happen on the Internet and regulation and so on. But I think what everyone would agree on is we haven't got it right yet.
Right. So we don't know the way that it's influencing our, changing our democracies.
Yeah. Let's just use a non, you know, it might be changing them for the better, it might be changing them for the worse.
But the way it is changing them, I don't think is fully understood. Well, not just that.
It's being manipulated by governments. Like governments have troll farms where they just attack certain sensitive political issues.
And they make polarizing statements and crazy claims. And you go to that website or you go to that Twitter page and you realize, oh, this isn't a real person.
This is just like some bot somewhere. And a former FBI analyst – I'm sure you have a lot of bots.
A former FBI estimate of 80 he thinks 80 of all the accounts and this was around the time elon was buying it who knows what it's at now 80 were fake and this was one of the sticking points of the argument that elon said it was when he was buying twitter they were telling him that it was only five percent five percent were fake so we'll show me your data and the data they showed him was only a random 100 accounts and he's like this is not sufficient I want to I want to see like all of your data and it became this big issue and that's what he tried to get out of the deal and then they took him to court then he wanted buying it yeah but that was a big part of it like how much of this is even real like I see arguments online where people take these crazy inflammatory positions like just insulting and attacking people that believe one thing or another thing. And I'm like, how much of this is like instigated by China or Russia or Iran or some other foreign country? And they're doing it through these troll farms, which we absolutely know exist.
And I'm sure the United States has them as well. and I don't know what the answer is.
I mean, the way I do it, because obviously I'm on Twitter X, and so the way that I do it is you can tell, I think, by someone's timeline usually. Because my basic rule of thumb is that if you look at someone's timeline, and it's all political, I just ignore them.
That's my basic, because a normal person's timeline, if I look at your timeline, you look at mine, some of it's just silly stuff. Some of it's retweeting sports stuff or science stuff or whatever it is.
I like airplanes. So a lot of my stuff is retweeting stuff about airplanes, right? Or whatever it is.
So I think you can see a real person by seeing a breadth in the things that they retweet or whatever. And so I tend to ignore and mute at the minimum the people who are just single issue.
And usually what you find, by the way, is that they're not a single issue. I can just about understand it if someone's single issue focused on a single thing.
But they're just a generic kind of political position. So you'll see an account and all it does is promote divisive issues.
You can see them a mile off, I think. So then it comes back to how do you deal with it? And my sense would be your sense.
It's hard to legislate around conversation, isn't it? Yes. So what do you do? I suppose you could argue it's education ultimately.
Ultimately, everything comes back to education. A democracy requires an educated population.
Right. Who have the tools, who have the mental tools to deal with this sort of new world of information.

I think that's something that we should probably be teaching to children is how to navigate social media and how to navigate influence and how to navigate other people's opinions of you and how to navigate like online bullying, how to avoid.

There's so much anxiety that's attached to social media now too. And so many people engage in arguments with it like all day long.
I think it's a primary source of mental illness for a lot of people or at least an accelerant of mental illness. And we don't have an education as to how to manage that and what that means to you.
And the addiction that people have to social media and addiction people have to their smartphones in general is is probably underappreciated yeah probably it's probably a much more significant impact on overall health than we think because there's so much first of all we're not supposed to have access to eight billion people's worth of bad news. No.
That's not good. That's not a perspective enhancer.
And we're essentially inundated with the things that will scare the shit out of us the most, which is 8 billion people's problems. Whatever is happening in the world that's terrible, you're going to hear about it first.
And that's going to be the things that trend the most. And it gives you this very bizarre bias towards what's actually happening in the world.
Yeah. Yeah.
Isn't it a big problem? It's a big problem because it's new. And we weren't prepared for it when it hit.
It's like a flood happening. And you're like, okay, we've got to figure out how to get all the water out of here.
This is nuts. This place is flooded.
And we're essentially in the middle of the flood, this social media online influence flood. and we haven't really shored up our basement yet.
We don't really know how to protect ourselves from it. But we can be optimistic.
Yes. Because we're both optimists, I think, ultimately.
Yes, yes, I'm very optimistic. Because of the things we've talked about today.
Well, I also think that because I'm, and I think you are also, successful at navigating that world without it killing you. Like I can navigate the world of social media and I can like you said, you look at someone's timeline and see that, oh, 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 to approach things from, they just look at things like, what am I supposed to believe? Am I a good person if I believe this? Am I a good person if I argue against that? I'll do this.
I'll do that. And these are not like well thought out actions.
I do understand that you and I, you know that you and I, you know, we're in a good position personally. Yes.
We have a, you know, this confidence comes with some degree of success and you can put things in perspective. And as you said, you know, when if you're I often think actually I see people who struggle when they become-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 in 2009 or 2010 called Wonders of the Solar System, and suddenly I was well-known.
And I found it very difficult to to navigate and fortunately I had the support structures and people around and I could navigate it and you come to terms with it and you learn how to do it but it's a process isn't it so I think it's the same the problem one of the problems I think with social media is you can become very well known very quickly yes often for something that you kind of said in a clumsy way sometimes you know and and and i think it's probably almost impossible to to navigate that um as just a person who just suddenly is exposed to that glare of publicity and becomes a public figure yeah sometimes a hate figure yes overnight well it seems particularly difficult for people that didn't ever anticipate it, like the Jordan Petersons of the world. People that became quite prominent, like in their late in their 40s.
He's an academic. I mean, you know, and yeah, I mean, that's what I was.
I was an academic and then had a success on television. Yeah.
And it wasn't in a controversial area. It was about planets and the solar system and astronomy.
But even then, I found it difficult initially to navigate through that world. Yes.
And you get used to it eventually. It's a very bizarre drug.
That's what fame is. 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 is until you experience it everybody thinks they want it until they get it and once you get it you're like oh my god this comes with so much scrutiny this comes with so much hate you're just dealing with so many mentally ill people that are tweeting at you that the world's flat like they're just angry there's a lot of like really messy people out there. I do, yeah.

There's still, I mean, the number of

people who

when I angry there's a lot of like really messy people out there i do yeah there's still i mean the number of people who when i so i did that that the rocket cat right the starship as you said the most incredible thing i just retweeted that and said brilliant engineering the number of tweets i got back saying that space is i don't understand what it means space is fake i don't even know what that means but Space is fake. I don't even know what that means.

But I got quite a lot of it.

You know, it's fake.

How can it be fake? I went down a hashtag space is fake rabbit hole one night online.

And it has something to do with biblical stuff.

Because they think that there's a firmament that's over the earth.

And they think that the lights are dangled in the sky.

Oh, it's that.

The Earth is a disk. Yeah, the Earth is a disk, and that you can't get through the firmament.
There's like an ice wall, and that's why you can't travel around. I love this.
You go, okay, so let's assume that's true. Let's assume it's true.
All the astronomers, all the astrophysicists, all NASA, China, every space agency, they're all in cahoots.

But why?

And no one spilled the beans.

But the thing I've never understood, and I've asked this, in my early days on Twitter, I made the mistake of asking, you know, sometimes.

Now I don't reply at all to the, obviously, you learn that.

I go you what possible

advantage could there be right for i mean and what's the answer i i think they think that it's just a scam so so yeah spacex are just like a scam or something so they're just taking all this money yeah for launching satellites so again it's a very complicated scam because they're getting it off, you know, communication satellite.

They should try Starlink.

Starlink.

They should try Starlink. Starlink.
They should try it so they know space is real. They probably think it's just deflecting off the dome or something.
I don't know. I guess, but the crazy thing is the idea that everybody's in cahoots, that all these competing countries decided to all lie together and yet there's no record of it there's no record of communications there's no except there's no people that rebel against this idea and go this is madness everything's round the fundamental thing as well the fundamental misconception these people have is they assume that there's a competence there in government.
Anyone who's interacted with government. I speak of my own country.
I've interacted with the government. The idea that they're competent enough to do this.
Right. Tremendously intricate scam.
They can't even, in my country, they can't even make the trains run. It's very basic.
So I think it's this assumption that there's some kind of underlying competence to the world. Yes, not just competence, but unbelievably calculating manipulation.
Yeah, I just don't think that the world is run by people who are smart enough to do that. I mean, there's certainly conspiracies that are real, but that's just preposterous.
But it's also, it's just like this, 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 somehow or another that's been attached to the firmament.
But that's one of the problems with sort of, when you can, especially if you're an articulate person and even if you form like some crazy, you make some fake documentary and you attach a bunch of fake facts to it. And if it's compelling and no one like you stops and goes, hold on, that's not how it works.
This is how we know this. This is why the planets are round.
This is how we know this is what Bode's Law is.

And you start like laying out what thousands of years of research and discovery has led us to.

This is not like just based on a whim.

There's like a lot of information.

And the idea that all of that information is a vast conspiracy to hide the fact that God is real and that the firmament covers the earth and earth exists in the center of the universe and was created by God and space is fake. Okay, well, I've learned something I didn't know because I didn't know the space is fake thing was linked to that.
So that's, that's, um, it's a very religious thing. Yeah.
At the root of all the flat earth stuff is the firmament.

The root of all the flat earth stuff is it's based on some very bizarre interpretation of biblical.

Biblical.

I don't remember the exact depiction of the firmament and how God describes it in the Bible. But they believe that that's what we're looking at, That there's like a glass, like a cookie dome.
Like a plate of cookies with a glass dome on it. Going back to what we said earlier, if that was the way that nature is, we would tell you.
I'd love it. Well, not only that, but everyone would be talking about how crazy Earth is in comparison to all the other planets.
Turns out Earth is actually actually flat. Like that would not be something anybody would hide.
I'd like to find that out. Because you become tremendously – I mean what a great discovery.
Amazing. But it isn't.
But people have like a natural inclination to uncover vast conspiracies. And I think that's one of the weirder ones that people gravitate to.
But again, I really think it has something to do with blind belief in religious writings. And not just that, but erroneous interpretations of religious writings.
You know, when you're dealing with something that was originally written in ancient Hebrew and then translated to Latin and then to Greek and then to Roman, a lot of that gets lost in the translation. A lot of it gets like you had 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 it also doesn't. 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 the beginning God created the heaven and the earth and the earth was out form of void and darkness was on the face of the deep I love that it's great line well it's amazing face of the deep it's amazing as a piece of literature yeah and it's the deep I think I read somewhere that I was talking to a friend of mine is that it seems to come from the Egyptian myth, I think.
I might be wrong there. It was very much to do with the Nile and the waters.
And you find that in many religions that there's water and things emerge out of the waters. And you see that in Genesis, that echo of it.
Darkness was on the face of the deep. And then there's light after that.
So I don't know. I'm not a biblical scholar.
I not a biblical scholar but I'm fascinated by it the same way I'm fascinated with science because I think it's people that lived thousands of years ago trying to make sense of things that's it that's ultimately isn't it and very little information that's what we talked about earlier that yeah to me that's one of the defining characteristics of being human trying to to make sense of the world. And that's why, by the way, I don't like to get into sort of arguments with people who have different views, different belief systems.
My sort of baseline position is if you're curious and you're interested and you want to know how things happened that to me is common ground that we can share the people i don't really understand the people who are not curious right and don't have questions because i mean carl sagan wrote a great book called the demon haunted world science of the candle you know that book yeah where he says that story about a taxi driver when he got in the taxi at the start and he's asking him all these questions about Atlantis or whatever it is.

And he realizes he doesn't think this guy is an idiot. He thinks this guy has a curious mind.
He's someone who should be. We can have a wonderful conversation.
But he also says that he felt that he'd perhaps been failed by society, by education, in that his curiosity had not been somehow channeled to the real mysteries. Yes.
But he got sidetracked into all this strange stuff. I think the real academic mysteries are intimidating to some people because they don't think of themselves as being intelligent.
So then they gravitate towards like YouTube mysteries. Simpler things.
Yeah, but more controversial so that it puts them in like a select club of people who actually know what's going on, where people love stuff like QAnon. They love stuff like that where they're in the know of like some top secret information.
And by the way, 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 somehow be really clever,

which is not true at all.

It goes back to what I said before,

that it's more you have to be comfortable with not knowing.

So that's a big step to say I'm not going to guess,

and I'm okay. If you ask me question about the the origin of the universe right the answer is don't know so i think it's if as you said if if you can be comfortable with not having to have a simple intelligibleible explanation for something, then you'll make more progress in life.
But it's quite difficult. So it's easy to just go, oh, there's a simpler that thing.
Yes. So there's a simpler explanation there.
Well, it's also very difficult for people because they attach their ego to ideas. And once you have set an idea, then you are attached to that idea and you defend that idea.
It's a real so important yeah ideas are just ideas and you are you and the way you interact with ideas shows your intelligence you can be incorrect people are often incorrect 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 mean going back to richard fineman he said um what the great there's a great essay i probably talked to you about before called the value of science that he wrote 1955 you can 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 with being wrong yeah so nature is brutal and most of the time you come up with some really great theory and you're really sure about it. You do the experiment and you're just wrong.
And so you get so used to it that you come to enjoy it because you're learning. But it's a process.
That's why science is so important in schools and experiments are so important. It's not that you just swing a pendulum and there's nothing interesting about that.
But it's just that you're learning that there is there's a gold standard of knowledge, which is nature. And as Feynman said, it doesn't care who you are or what your title is or what your name is.
Or you may have been elected with 99 percent votes 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 a battery in a light or something you learn that there's a reality and you learn what it takes to acquire reliable knowledge about the world.

And reliable knowledge is important.

How do we form a view of, and it can be very important questions.

It can be questions like what happens if we carry on putting greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, for example. Whatever your politics are, it's a legitimate question, a good question.
Right. Scientifically a good question.
To influence the climate if we carry on doing this. And so how do we then address that as a question? You can't do it by going back to your political affiliation or your belief system.
You've got to try and understand this complicated system, which is the climate of a planet. So you make measurements of the thing and you build some models and computer models and there's a very famous saying that all models are wrong because they're models right so but they're the best you can do so you have a go and you come up with some information and and a model that kind of works and you say this is the best version of our knowledge 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's it's nothing more or less than the best picture we can manage of how nature works at any given moment it's not a truth it's not something by its very nature the way that science works is it will it may be shown to be incorrect or not particularly great a model tomorrow 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 i don't see any other way to act as a civilization other than with that the best we can do is the best we could do yeah and that that term reliable information is so important Because people want to leap to conclusions to try to like tie something up neatly when Reliable information might not be available Like reliable information is the number one reason why I never take the UFO thing seriously I am so all in that there must be life out there.
It just makes sense. It makes sense I know yeah for me paradox with notwithstanding but I think if you just take into account the sheer numbers of planets that we're looking at the possibility of something achieving some sort of advanced life seems very high but no reliable information zero not one thing that I've ever seen I'm like oh that's for sure real not one every sighting'm like, how do we not know? How do we know if there's a top secret drone program, which most certainly there has to be? There probably has to be.
There's probably some sort of radical propulsion system that they devised. They probably made some breakthroughs they haven't been forthcoming about because of national security risks.
There's probably something really kooky that they could fly really fast through the sky, some kind a drone and that's probably what people are seeing that's probably a lot of it but then there's also this part of me that doesn't want to abandon the idea that if i was an intelligent species from another planet and i saw that these territorial primates with thermonuclear weapons are uh advancing towards the creation of ai and like ruining the planet while they're doing it like doing crazy shit to the ocean and Poisoning streams and water supplies like I believe let's keep an eye on these fucking freaks I would most certainly say this is a if if this happens all throughout the universe Let's just imagine that this is the natural progression from single-celled organisms to super curious advanced life forms that eventually transform the world that they live in. If this is a natural progression, there's got to be planets that don't make it.
There's probably a slew of them that get to 1945, and it turns out that both Germany, Japan, or all Germany, Japan, and the United States all have nuclear weapons at the same time

Launch them all at each other and then civilization goes down to zero. Oh the Cuban Missile Crisis.
Yes Cuban Missile Crisis or asteroid impacts or super volcanoes I mean the reason why we have mountains in the first place we have volcanic activity We know that every now and then there's a massive super volcano like what Yellowstone is this caldera that if it's a continent killer If it blows, there's no more United States.

It stops being a thing.

Most people on the planet die we get down to a few hundred savages and we start from scratch and that's that's inside the realm of possibility that can absolutely happen so something has to get past all of these hurdles yeah to and if I saw a planet that's real close like us like wow they gotta not fuck this up they have achieved like this crazy apex where they're so far beyond everything else on their planet they're almost there they're almost there let's watch them i would think of that too but i just don't see any evidence everybody keeps i bring in these whistleblowers they all tell me oh i've seen it it's incredible one day it's going to be released like yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah i don't see shit i think it's best to assume carl sagan again wasn't it when he said no one's coming to save us from ourselves let's just assume that we just definitely should assume that and then that's a that's a safe and that's an intelligent assumption and, that's how you want your children to behave, right? You don't want to go save your children every time, you know, like when they get older, they're going to go on their own. They got to make it.
They got to figure it out on their own. If they don't, they're going to be infants for the rest of their lives.
And this might be one of the reasons why we don't get intervened, why something doesn't come down and like put a halt to us like maybe they're just hoping we can figure this out through diplomacy yeah whatever they have they're crossing them yeah whatever they have i mean i'm so fascinated by it i want to believe everything i'm such a sucker you know every time i see bob lazar talk i want to believe it i want to believe all of it i wait as i said I wouldn't be surprised right I'd be relieved as well yeah please help us but yeah but also do you think about the way we interact with primitive tribes it's not good it ruins them almost every time like there's this 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 the tribal leaders are complaining as we talked about earlier Yeah, these kids are on their phones all day in the fucking jungle Like instead of like living this subsistence lifestyle, they've been living for tens of thousands of years Some of them are getting lazy and they're just sitting around and they're looking at you know videos getting shaggy that yeah just looking at tick-tock arguing with people online trolling looking at memes and laughing you know we've ruined them and this is one of the reasons why I like places like North Sentinel Island there's like you're not supposed to visit them you're supposed to leave them alone yes they are this very bizarre state of uncontacted and very primitive lifestyle that we can you know we we can preserve which is also weird like shouldn't we help them like that's sort of weird too like they're human beings and they're living like people lived thousands of years ago i don't want to live like that today but but that's if i was an alien life form and i wasn't so you know know, cautious about the impact that I would go, you guys got to stop this. We're going to come down, land on the White House lawn, scare the shit out of all of you, you know, take all your nuclear weapons away.
I wish somebody would do that, to be honest. Don't you think, though, that the real problem would be the structure of our society is based on this idea that we have to work together to sort out our problems.

And if something came here that was like far superior in intelligence and its capabilities, we would sort of defer to that. That would be our space daddy now.
and there would probably be religions probably some scam religions that get invented to try to

you know contact and make peace with these overlords how did we get here we've got but you know it's the idea like okay let's take a look let's pretend that we well let's extrapolate let's imagine um we do get to mars we set up bases on mars we do do become – we develop the technology that allows us to travel to other solar systems. And we do observe a civilization that is like the Bronze Age.
And we stumble upon these people that are – they have tools. They haven't figured out steel yet.
But they've done some pretty interesting things. And they're clearly intelligent.
They figured out agriculture. We would be studying them for sure, 100%.
We would send word back to Earth, oh, my God, we found these people that live like the Mongols did in 1200 AD. It would be fascinating.
We would 100% be interested in it. And I think they would be interested in us This is Star Trek.
It is Star Trek the prime director The thing is yeah, the prime directive, you know harm, right? Isn't that what it is? Yeah, well don't intervene at all, isn't it? Yeah, I mean that I think that's what they would do. I think We would hope that they would prevent but if that's the case, why didn't they prevent Hiroshima and Nagasaki? Why didn't why do they let us just practice blowing things up in the Nevada desert for like 30 years? I think you're absolutely right.
I mean, the point is, I think there's nobody there. That's the terrifying idea is that we're the only ones in the whole thing and that intelligent life is so bizarre and such a rare thing that happens in the only the perfect of circumstances that that would be my baseline view based on the universe is so big wouldn't every single potential situation happen infinite if it's infinite mean, we don't know if it's infinite.
We have the observable universe. I think the current number is something like 2 trillion galaxies, depending on how many smaller ones there are.
So wouldn't you think that just out of 2 trillion galaxies, there's probably pretty good odds that something would reach some sort of a Goldilocks state in terms of where the planet exists in relationship to the star.

Yeah.

But we're talking the distance between the galaxies is, you know, the Andromeda galaxy is two million light years away.

Right.

Which is the largest, our nearest 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 between galaxies too crazy i think it's too far although for now it is true that the laws of physics do not prevent that so relativity i teach relativity in the at at Manchester University, after the first years, the 18-year-olds. And the first thing we do in special relativity is talk about the fact that if you travel close to the speed of light, so if you had a spacecraft traveling close to the speed of light, then distances shrink from your perspective.
And the one number I always have in my mind is at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, the protons go around the ring, which is 27 kilometres in circumference, and they go around at 99.999999% the speed of light, so close to the speed of light. At that speed, distances shrink by a factor of 7,000.
And so that ring is something like four meters in diameter to the protons. Whoa.
So according to laws of physics, if you can build a spacecraft that goes very close to speed of light, you can shrink the distance to the Andromeda galaxy and therefore

the time it takes to get there by an arbitrary amount. Actually, the closer you get to speed of light, the more you can shrink it.
And so you can make those two million light years, you could traverse across that distance in principle in a minute, according to physics. However, the downside is that you couldn't come back to tell, if you came back to the Earth at that speed to tell everybody what you'd found, at least four million years would have passed on the Earth.
Oh, boy. So there's kind of a downside to it.
We could, in principle, explore the galaxy and beyond,

but getting to chat to everybody about what you found is forbidden

by the structure of the universe.

It's the way that relativity works.

That really is essentially a time machine.

Well, it's a time machine in the sense that we could go arbitrarily far into the future by flying around in a rocket very close to the speed of 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 your, you can't build a time machine to go backwards.
So these are time machines. The world is built such that a time machine, a way to think about it, the way that we teach it in undergraduate physics, is that in Einstein's theory, there are events, which are things that happen in space-time.
So that would be an event. It's something that happens.
Our conversation now is a thing that happens. Space-time.

And what Einstein's theory tells you is it's about the relationship between events. So let's say that we wanted to come back here tomorrow.
That would be another event. We meet again tomorrow.
And you can see how much time has passed between those events. in Einstein's theory the amount of time that has passed

is the length of the path you take over space-time between the events. So it's just like saying, in a sense, what's the distance between Austin and Dallas, right? And you'd say, okay, well, it depends what route you go.
Well, what's interesting in Einstein's theory, the only complication is the length of the path you take between events. It's the time measured by a clock that's carried along that path.
So that's how much. So if you're carrying your watch with you and you go between here and tomorrow, you go this way, you go off and maybe you fly to Dallas and back or something and then come back again.
There's a particular length. Someone else can take a different path, obviously.
And so a different amount of time will pass for them between those two things that happen. Just because of that one fact.
A very infinitely small but measurable amount of time. It's a tiny amount unless you travel.
Someone goes close to speed of light or someone goes near a black hole or something where the space-time is all distorted, then you can get big effects. But it's still completely measurable.
I mean, they are quite big effects, these, in the sense that for the satellite navigation system, for example, GPS, the clocks on the satellites tick at a different rate to the clocks on the ground. And it's quite a big effect.
I think from memory, it's something like over 30,000 nanoseconds per day difference because they're in a weaker gravitational field and they're moving and all sorts of things. It's the same thing.
But 30,000 nanoseconds. Light travels one foot per nanosecond, which is great.
i always say that god used imperial units because it's not this 30.8 cent of it's one foot right it's good it's one foot per nanosecond so that's 30 000 feet of position measurement if you drift your clock out by 30 000 nanoseconds 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 clocks have to be corrected for that effect so so it's an effect that we can easily measure with atomic clocks but it doesn'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 of light. By the way, the last thing I'll say is the limiting factor.
You might say, what happens if you go really close to the speed of light? What happens if you go at the speed of light? Well, special relativity, Einstein's theory, is built such that the distance between any two events in the universe along the path of a beam of light between the events is zero. No time at all.
So that's the way that Einstein's theory is built. So he asked the question when he was younger, famously, what would the universe look like if I travelled alongside a beam of light? And the answer is that you wouldn't perceive any time.
you can't the the the last thing i'll say just is that if you've got any mass at all you can't do that you can't go at the speed of light so according to our model which is a good model and it seems to work but if you've got no mass you go at the speed of light so if you're a photon you you go at the speed of light 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, that's called it. I can never pronounce it.
It's the Albuquerque. What's it called? The drive, you know.
So you can, you can, Einstein's general theory of relativity, general relativity is his theory of gravity. And it's a theory where space and time are distorted by things, anything in the universe, right? Stars and planets.
And so that's what gravity is. It's the distortion of space and time by mass and energy is einstein's theory so you can and and it's been done but you can develop sort of things where you say well if we could make this geometry of space and time if we could distort it in this way then indeed you can build a warp drive right like we should say right right but um it always turns out as far as we can tell that the other question is but what kind of stuff would you need what kind of matter or energy or field whatever it is what kind of thing would you need to make that geometry and it always turns out that they those things don't appear to exist so these particular kinds of matter and that if you had them, you'd be able to do that with space and time.
We don't think you can have them. And so it's kind of a bummer, right? Because Stephen Hawking...
Is it possible that we don't have them here, but that in different planetary systems, different environments, that these elements could exist? It's not going to be elements. It's going to be kind of some kind of quantum field, some kind of energy or something.
And so you can sort of try to speculate. But Stephen Hawking wrote a very famous paper called the Chronology Protection Conjecture.
So conjecture is important. so It's a guess, not proved.
Where he said that whatever the ultimate laws of physics are, we don't have them at the moment, string theory, whatever it is, then they will be such that you can't do this. Because chronology protection means protect the present from the future.
So in other words, you can't build a time machine that 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 be able to build it it's not been proven beyond doubt that you can't somehow make these kinds of quantum fields or whatever it is that you need to make wormholes for example stable wormholes you can go through and so it's not been proven so it's just it's suspected that that's going to be the case by the way to the final thing this is very neat because it goes right back to what i said at the start that that one of the pictures of how i said there was this thing the black hole information, and we thought Stephen's calculation was that no information comes out. We now think it comes out.
So we now think that black holes do not destroy information. We're pretty sure.
So it's been proven mathematically to most people's satisfaction that the information ends up out again. So if you went into a black hole, the information would be out in that hawking radiation that could reconstruct you in the in but only in the sense that if we if a nuclear bomb landed on us now then in principle the information would be still there in the future and we could be reconstructed right but it's still in principle there and then but the question is how does it get out how is it getting out How is the information that is you ending up outside again? And the physical picture is not really understood, but the link is that one of the pictures that people are beginning to suggest to have is that there is some kind of wormholes, in a sense, some kind of wormhole that connects the inside of the black hole to the outside.
And so a picture is that your atoms and everything, your bits get scrambled up and go basically through the wormholes and come out again. But they're funny kind of wormholes.
So people don't really understand this, but mathematically it looks like maybe, so it looks like maybe there's some role for wormholes, these things, the science fiction things, after a fashion, some kind of wormhole. There's some role for it in the way the universe works.
So it's really cool. The last thing I'll say, because there's a thing called ER equals EPR, which is, so EPR was the spooky action at a distance.

So we may have talked about that before.

You know, in quantum 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 responds, right?

Not in a way that you can transmit information, but it responds.

So entanglement.

There's a picture of that.

So that's Einstein, Podolsky and Rosen, EPR, where they wrote a paper on this saying, we don't like this. There must be something wrong with quantum mechanics.
We don't think there is now. This is the basis of quantum computers.
So we build things that rely on this effect. ER is Einstein-Rosen, which is Einstein-Rosen bridge, which is wormhole.
So they also published a paper about wormholes, Einstein and Rosen, in the 30s. And so the idea is that you could picture that somehow as being a kind of wormhole that connects the entangled particles.
So that's how this entanglement works. Another description of quantum entanglement is a wormhole kind of geometry.
And this is part of the cutting edge of research into black holes, but also the structure of space and time and quantum entanglement and how quantum entanglement might produce space and time. And it's related to the way that quantum computers work.
So it's become a really hot topic because people are trying to build quantum computers and program quantum computers. And these are the kind of problems you have to face about quantum entanglement and how you maintain it and what it means.
And there was a paper recently, which is quite a controversial paper, that I think was the Google quantum computer, which is one of the best ones. And it's not using it as a computer.
It's using it just as these qubits, these little quantum systems that which is one of the best ones and it's not using it as a computer it's using it just as these qubits these little quantum systems that are kind of very stable that are the basis of quantum computing and it's using those qubits and setting them up in such a way that something that looks like a kind of a wormhole is created in the quantum computer it's kind of a one-dimensional wormhole and it's a bit kind of technical and everything but it looks like it might be the first hint of how you build space from qubits and so it's and it's so that paper was published there it is that's it a holographic wormhole it's important to say that wormhole it's what's called a hologram it's not really in our universe it's kind of a different thing because that's the last thing i'll say because i've got to blow your mind because your mind looks right these theories the hologram thing is quite well established now and it's coming from a thing that you may have talked about with other people on the show, the ADS-CFT conjecture, a great physical Maldesina. So the idea is that you can have a quantum theory living on a boundary.
So you could imagine, picture a sphere with a quantum theory living on the surface. And there's a completely equivalent description of whatever's going on, the physics, in the interior of the sphere.
So it's almost as if the interior of the space is a hologram of the theory that lives on the surface. And it's kind of, not accepted, but one, many physicists think our universe is like that.
so what we're saying is that we're having this conversation now and there's an equivalent description of this somehow in a theory that does not contain space and time that's a completely equivalent description that lives on in fewer dimensions on a surface somehow that's surrounding us and it's really woolly and hand wavy because because we don't fully know what it means, but it would mean that we're holograms. So this is a hologram of this other dual theory, that's what that thing was, the holographic wormhole thing.
So it's all very, the beginnings of this work, but that's an example of how it could become an experimental science because quantum computers now exist and they allow you to do those experiments to try to build filaments it's almost like a filament of space a holographic filament of space that you're building from these qubits which is just and by the way that word is a bit weird

it's just something like an electron, it's not

they're more complicated, but an electron would be an example

of one, so it's a physical thing

that we have in the lab

that is a quantum system, that's a quantum

bit, so you build it

and the different ways of building them, and that's what a quantum

computer is, but it's amazing

isn't it, that we're beginning to use those things

not for computing yet

because they're really hard to program

but we do, physicists have gone

This is a great is. But it's amazing, isn't it, that we're 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 have spent billions of dollars building these things because they want to build these computers.
But they're perfect laboratories for quantum mechanics. So you can do abstract research into quantum mechanics on them, which I find fascinating.
That's actually more fascinating than using them to crack everybody's codes. Yeah, it's kind of like, yeah, it's kind of, you know, factoring large numbers.
It's kind of boring. But building wormholes.
Yes. Which is, and I caution, it's a complicated thing, but it looks like the beginnings of a laboratory to build structures like that.
That's so fascinating. Before you leave, I have to ask you this because I thought about this while you were talking.
You might be the only person that could explain this to us. We were looking at this image of these quantum entangled photons.
And the image was in the shape of a yin-yang. We couldn't understand what we were seeing.
Right. We couldn't understand if they did this on purpose to make it the shape of a yin-yang and it's just a representation of these quantum entangled photons or if that is what quantum entangled photons actually look like in a shape.
So it's visualized to entangled particles in real time. It says making them appear as a stunning quantum yin-yang symbol.
Yeah, I mean, it's, I hadn't seen that, but 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 you we didn't talk about this the way that you can, one way of picturing what this does is allow you access to multiple universes. It's the many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics.
You mentioned it, breaking people's encryption codes, right? Right. What are you actually doing there? You've got an algorithm, you're on a quantum computer and how does it factor these, what it's doing is finding the prime numbers that you multiply together to make a very big number so it's very easy to multiply two big numbers together to get a really big number it's very hard to take a very big number and factor it 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 with any conceivable classical computer.
But the quantum computer can do it in a second or something. Just what you just said.
It's so crazy. But the explanation for how it's doing it, a picture which many people in the field, not everyone, many people would say is the correct, is what it's doing is the calculations in multiple universes.
So it's accessing the fact that actually there's an interpretation of quantum mechanics called the many worlds interpretation where you have to imagine these, you know, infinite pretty much sea of universes and the computer kind of goes... And does the calculation in parallel and then brings them back together again at the end.
And I mentioned David Deutsch earlier, who's a fascinating writer in this field and the instigator of many of these algorithms early on, who would say that. He would say, this is what is happening.
There is no other explanation. How do you explain the fact that this quantum computer can do something that no classical computer can ever do? How do you explain it? Where is it doing the math? Oh, my God.
And he would say, he would say it's doing it in the multiple universes. Oh.
I still don't understand the yin-yang symbol.

Well, I don't fully understand that.

I feel so much better.

Well, I've never seen it.

I read through it again, and I also now don't understand too,

because it says that by capturing the resulting image by capturing the resulting image with a nanosecond precise camera,

the researchers teased apart the interference pattern they received,

revealing a stunning yin-yang image of the two entangled photons.

So that sounds like that's what it actually looks like.

Thank you. second precise camera the researchers teased apart the interference pattern they received revealing a stunning yin-yang image of the two entangled photons so that sounds like that's what it actually looks like it is a photograph of in a real sense that the photons are arriving and you're detecting them so it's a photograph of so that's what it actually looks like if you think about what i think what must be happening is you're getting these photons it is true to say say that, again, this many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics would be that these entangled photons, if you send them on a path,

then they, going by all the way, to find them,

if you calculate, the way you calculate how a photon goes from A to B,

or an electron, whatever it is,

it just formally is you allow it to take all possible paths. That's one way of calculating the probability it will go from one place to another and when you get entanglement it gets more complicated but you're essentially you are mathematically saying i allow it to go on all paths and so really there you're seeing what an interference pattern is is you're seeing the result of the fact that these particles can go on all loads of paths and interfere with each other and and make a pattern you can see and i think that that's what that is so it's a really fascinating that pattern is an ancient symbol it is beautiful isn't it it's unbelievably beautiful it's crazy brian thank you so much what a great conversation i really really enjoyed it.
Please tell people how they can find you. I know you're doing live performances.
I'm going to do some. Yeah, I've been doing this tour for a long time now, actually.
I ended up doing it for about two and a half years, and it's changed a lot. We've done it to over 400,000 people, I was told the other day, around the world.
And I thought just to finish it, because I want to finish it and write one I'd come back to the to the U.S. we did a few in the U.S.
but so coming back in April and May and doing these well quite relatively small issues that was ages ago wasn't it yeah so this is um you know it's it's um it explores many of these questions actually particularly black holes and then just to round it off i'm doing a few so if you go and

look on the web you'll find you know we're doing some la new york chicago around i hope we're doing

austin actually i hope you do maybe i will insist yeah but it's not in there that we can't come

and then you know yeah so that's that's what i'm what i'm up to well thank you very much

i really appreciate what you do it means a lot to me thank you very much for coming in all right