Professor Brian Cox is an English physicist and Professor of Particle Physics in the School of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Manchester in the UK, author of many books, and broadcast personality. Catch him live in 2025 on his "Horizons—A 21st Century Space Odyssey" tour. Briancoxlive.co.uk Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
The Joe Rogan Experience.
Showing by day, Joe Rogan Podcast by night, all day. 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, I would say. I've been doing some work on black holes recently, which I hadn't started last time I saw you, actually. So I got interested in it. And the amount of the progress that's been made in trying to understand how they work. And a question that was posed by Stephen Hawking a long time ago, 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... 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. One of the one in the center 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 6 million times the mass of the sun, which makes it a little supermassive.
And then there's another one, the first 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. I mean, imagine that, 6,000 million times more massive than our sun. Is that the largest black hole we've ever discovered?
No, there are bigger ones than 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 Schwarzschild 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 kilometers, about two miles. So you've got to take this thing, which is what I have to convert from kilometers to miles. That's okay. 700,000 kilometers. It's about 500,000 miles radius or something like that, the sun.
So you squash it down until 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. So it's a big structure. Now, 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 disk. So that was a prediction from Einstein's theory, basically. He published it in 1915. And you can predict that that's what one should look like.
And then just about, what 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 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 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, right, won the Nobel Prize for this. And he calls it a storm in time. So you get a time storm. So really, we're to think, 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 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 stands for something like gravitational interferometer. I can't remember exactly what the word is. So basically, it's laser beams. And there's one in Washington State, north of Seattle, and one in Louisiana. And they're 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. It essentially measures the distortion in space-time caused by these ripples. And it's way less than the diameter of an atomic nucleus, by the way. Way less. These little sort of... Oh, my God.
And so we've 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, he 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 as if there's nothing there apart from a distortion in space and time. He calculated that they glow, so they have a temperature of... 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 it all gets scrambled up and thrown out. And so in practice, you can't do it. But 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.
But this calculation that Stephen did said there is no information in that radiation at all. Zero, just nothing. So it seemed that uniquely in the universe, black holes erase information.
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There's no information. 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 could just collect everything.
Then somewhere in 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.
Remember I said that the sun, if you squashed it down within three kilometres 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 you go to the end of time. We could talk about that.
There's a picture of that. Maybe I should talk about it. This is getting quite complicated already, isn't it? We didn't start in a relaxing way, did we?
That's fine. No need to.
No need to. Let's get right into it. So we wouldn't notice anything. Not for the big black holes. So, yes, 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 when 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 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 real sense, they kind of flip over. They get mixed up.
And so this singularity, which you might have thought of as the point to which this thing collapsed, this infinitely dense point, you might think. But actually, more correctly to be seen as the end of time. Because everything's got mixed up. So you go to the end of time. And it's just like saying, why can't I escape that thing? It's like, why can't we escape tomorrow? So we are going to tomorrow.
And if I said to you, let's run away from tomorrow, you'd go, I can't run away from tomorrow.
So is it the end of time because all information is being erased? So there's nothing? No.
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 is leading us. So to backtrack a bit, why does this calculation Stephen did, why does it say there's no information in this radiation? The thing is, it's coming from the horizon. So there's loads of ways to think about it.
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 is 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 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. 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... When we're looking at the structure of the universe, obviously there's... so much still to learn just about what's out there. But what role do we think? Is there a purpose? Is that the right term for a black hole? Obviously, do they still believe that in the center of every galaxy there's a supermassive black hole that's, what is it, one half of 1% of the mass of the galaxy?
Is that what it is?
Yeah, something like that. 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.
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 term.
Well... So 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 center. 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... 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, is the stars orbiting it very close to it. They call the S stars that whiz around in these orbits very close to the black hole.
Imagine that view. Imagine that view. 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. Yeah.
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. 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...
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 yeah it would it would greatly expand the curiosity of young people yeah 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 and
It's like that. It's like that screen. That's what we see because of light pollution. That should be remedied. That's not a good tradeoff. Lights are wonderful, but it seems to me like, hey, there's got to be a way to do this where you 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, can't it? 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. You know what I'm saying? It's impossible to picture.
Yeah, it's insane. Your brain doesn't even process that. I could repeat that. If someone says, how many suns? Oh, 400 billion. I don't know what that means.
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 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. The Milky Way has been there for over 13 billion years, pretty much the age of the universe. Yes. 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. Right. 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. 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 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. I'd be like... This is good because it would 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. And so I'm worried that we could talk about that.
But isn't it bizarre? Like one of the things that's fascinating about looking into the night sky is 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? Yeah. 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, it's just a weird aberration that's attached to a survival instinct. We're a weird biological aberration.
So if you think about it, let's assume. So we didn't finish the UAP thing. Yeah, we'll get to that. 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 our galaxy, let's say.
Okay.
Then I would argue... 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, right? What does it mean to live a finite life? The first thing to say is meaning, right? What does it mean?
That doesn't sound like a scientific concept in a way. Meaning, right? Right. 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, by the way, I gave a talk, a little video thing at one of the climate summit, the COP climate summit in Glasgow in the UK a few years ago. And they asked me to do a little video to the world leaders. And I think they thought I'd say, you 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 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, we can all argue, because people will be listening to this going... 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 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. So 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 founders of quantum computing.
And so he's a big figure in quantum computing in particular. But he's a great thinker. And I was 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. 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... 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's one of my favorite 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'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 change is planets.
And so I like that speculation that 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 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 wants the 15 and wants the 16 and wants to keep going forever and ever and ever. 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 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.
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I'm really interested in these kind of arguments. You put it really well, actually. It's fascinating, 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 you just take that, okay, life has been around for what, four billion years? Yeah. That's not that long.
So four billion years, we've gone from single-celled organisms to the James Webb Telescope. We've gone to – we have Starlink. We have electric cars. 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 John Baron Frank Tifler made before that. 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 3 billion plus years of that on this planet, it was just single cells.
And so it's only in the last, 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 celled. That's even crazier. Which is one of the reasons that many people think civilizations might be rare. Because the only evidence we have is this planet.
Right.
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, 4 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 quite a boring little star that just ticks along. It's very nice to 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 and 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 is wobbled around by something like 60 degrees or something over its history. 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. Right.
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.
Yeah.
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 organisms that are well-fit to their environment. They fit niches in the environment. But there's no drive to complexity. 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. 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 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 that happened, photosynthesis, complex biochemistry. But as far as we can tell, nothing more complex than a single cell. So as 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 civilizations out there. There's the Breakthrough Listen Project and there's SETI, as it's called. So we do. And we haven't seen anything, I would say.
And I know that if you go onto the web and things on 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, it's kind of a reasonable thing to say, actually.
Sure.
Because why would you not, if you can build a little thing, it's easier to send around the galaxy than a big thing.
Yeah.
So why would you not, as you said, these hyper, ultra intelligent quantum computers, why would they not be tiny? Right. So you could say that. You could say, well, 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.
Yeah.
Yeah. Okay. You would have to concede that. So we're just saying that the way that we've looked for energy signatures, for example, of civilizations, you 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 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 said it's five years away or two years away or 50 years away. But it's probably not 10,000 years away, right? So that which is 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 before?
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 motivations, 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. It 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. There's 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 mandate to stay functional. But other than that, what's it going to do? 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. And I think, so again, I think the answer is it's not known. You could argue either way, but the counter argument would be The brain, these things, are just computers, ultimately.
There's nothing magical in there. 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. Sure. 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, 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 and a vulnerable physical frame? Because most innovation relies upon quicker, safer transportation, more secure buildings, things along those lines, and then computers that help you do your job better and actually can do things that you can't do. And 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 get weird and you're just competing over numbers. It 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... Because part of the thing that you described, this desire to create things and build things and explore and expand, is almost the definition of being human, isn't it? 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, this T-shirt, I've got to say, was designed by a friend of mine, Peter Saville, who's a great designer who designed the Joy Division Unknown Pleasures album cover, amongst other things. Oh, wow. That's cool. That's a great shirt. It's a Joy Division.
Is that available on your website or anything?
It probably is, but I'm not going to do that because it's vulgar, isn't it? No, no, no.
It's cool. I want to buy one.
That's why I asked. He made it for, we did these gigs, I talk about them later, called Symphonic Horizons, which were the, 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 kind of 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.
If you acquire so much knowledge that you're essentially a god by any description and so much power and you become effectively immortal, which is what our descendants in the far future could be, as you said, these AI descendants. Right. What's the point of living?
Not just effectively immortal, but aren't we looking at the universe itself, we're looking at it 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 everything. 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 it 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.
I would imagine if you watch chimps in the jungle and then all of a sudden they started to figure out bombs. He'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.
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. Those bombs sort of set off the alarm for the universe. Oh, the monkeys have a bomb.
I mean, I thought this a while ago. I remembered I was talking to someone and they said, yeah, I'm not worried about this. I'm 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? This might be just a few years.
Yeah.
And I again, I might be quite relieved because I'm not sure they could fuck it up. The level that we are backing it up.
You have to give it legitimate sentience. 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 AI government just... I imagine they'd say that immediately.
No more dictators.
Cut the shit with the dictator. We're just going to let human beings exist in harmony guided by this super intelligent godlike thing that we've created out of silicone.
Honestly, I've had the same thought. 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. When Google released 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 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 said, the definition of what is best is a moral decision that we make.
But you can make some distinctions in terms of, like, allocation of resources. Like, you could make some... If I was a superintelligence and I looked at Earth, I'd say, listen... A lot of people are not going to like this, but there's a reality. 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 to be fixed. We need to figure out how to raise, instead of spending money on blowing people up, let's spend all this money to raise up all of civilization so there's no more third world.
Well, that's one of the arguments. I spoke 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
that it creates and always has. But it's also, of course, we damage the planet if we over-exploit 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. 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 I think it's Neptune or Uranus that we think has diamonds in it. Oh, my goodness.
Diamonds are only valuable because we decide they're valuable. The beers people are brilliant. They 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 jewelry.
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 used ones.
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 a question. We used to just think, well, it comes from supernova explosions. 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 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.
Yeah, as Carl 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. You said this godlike intelligence that we might create. And kind of what's the point? What would be the point of existence if you were immortal and you knew everything? Wouldn't it be incredibly dull? Well, 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. We have a very limited amount of senses. We have hearing and sight and taste and touch. It's very limited. Why would we assume that that is the only way to perceive things? If you could become infinitely intelligent, you could legitimately perceive neutrinos.
If we have this thing that detects the ripples from black holes colliding, that It might be a feature of a future human body if we have an unbelievable capacity for information because it's artificially created.
So we get over this biological limitation of long-scale evolution, like a really good – like the human brain doubled over two million years and 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. 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, well, look what they did to Galileo. And everybody has these... You can't... Science has to advance, 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. I mean, woods everywhere. Forever. And if you hold your phone in a particular part of the sky, it'll tell you which way to scan it. And the satellite allows you to iMessage back and forth with people. Totally like you are 5G everywhere. It's crazy.
So you've already achieved nirvana then. You don't need to go any further. It's fascinating.
It's so fascinating to me. I'm so enamored by it.
I would argue, I think, imagine that you had access to, as you said, essentially infinite knowledge. Imagine you're one of these beings in the future. Maybe the things that we created that essentially know almost everything there is to know in some sense. Right. I think that they would feel there was no point in existing at all.
But 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've really enjoyed 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 right for the future or indeed Fear or that those emotions that are connected with not knowing Not knowing what's around the next corner as you said even 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
But don't you think that that just motivates improvement? That all that hope just motivates you to do better and get better? And don't you think that may be a feature of a biological organism?
It's like you said when you're growing up, you said like, you know, when you're in high school or when you're young, Christmas, for example. Right. You know when you're at Christmas Eve?
Yeah.
And you go, what am I going to get tomorrow? Yeah. It's one of the most wonderful feelings, isn't it? One of the most wonderful, like, oh, God, in the presence of God. That's incredible. None of that would exist if you were one of these super beings. Right. But 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? But it's us. It's our biological needs, our needs to be shown that we're loved, we got a good toy, our 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, make a video game console. Oh! Yeah.
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 property of intelligence? 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 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 you keep going?
Is there such a thing as... contentment, though, for anyone.
It's possible. It's possible to achieve. I mean, that's what Buddhists strive for. That's what all that meditation is, the abandonment of all material possessions. It might be horrendous, though, to get to that position. 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.
So that's what I'm kind of interested that God... A godlike 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. It's 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?
Isn't this a property of what it means to be a finite life span, a finite life form? that exists on a volatile planet, that this hope, but if that is bypassed, why do we need to be anxious all the time? Why do we need to have hope? Why wouldn't we have a complete bliss, a complete connection to everything?
You linked hope to anxiety. Is that right?
I hope it works out.
I hope.
And you're fighting the anxiety by having an optimistic outlook.
I have hope. I think I was using it in a different way, though. I was imagining hope as like, I don't know, excitement for what's beyond the horizon. Sure. So not driven by... 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 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.
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, then I would think existence is pointless. I personally would not find that.
I wouldn't think I'd achieved nirvana. I would think there's no point.
It's because you're existing within the framework of being a human being. And if we transcend the framework of being a human being, all these things we will come to realize, all these emotions and all these desires 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. This is going to be great. I'm going to learn some stuff.
that 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. The only way. But that's because of the framework of being a human being. If we transcend the existence that we're all confined to, this temporary life form, check my heart rate, make sure I get electrolytes.
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 is 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 comparison, just the things that are miracles on earth, like a person coming back to life, is nothing 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.
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 them. 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 recontract. It's called, what's it called, conformal cosmology or cyclical conformal cosmology or something. 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 what he... I mean, Roger Penner 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 in that. But... 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'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?
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 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 what he's what he's proposing wow so it 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 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 up 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 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's actually the standard model of cosmology now.
So we do have an idea that 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? 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. 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. 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 of 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 the study of black holes is forcing us towards these theories. It's not that we had the theories face 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, it couldn't be that.
It is. It's interesting that you're right. And that's a good way of phrasing it. It mimics or looks like a network of qubits. So it looks like some kind of quantum computing description is available to us, to 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... 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, 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 cosmology, 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 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 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 the idea that I was the question to you, actually, are we more comfortable with the universe that began or would we be more comfortable with the universe that had always existed?
I mean, 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 because 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 going to die out. The universe probably had a beginning, too. But why? There's no reason to think it did. It's much more likely that it's always existed than it didn't exist. And then it became out of what? If the universe didn't exist, so there's nothing in the whole universe.
observable everything, there's nothing. And then all of a sudden there's something? That seems 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. We think that everything has to have a beginning and an end.
And you're right. You've had Sean Carroll on the show. He always points out that this question, why is there something rather than nothing, 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.
But 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 radiation. Let's see that images of that. That's from the satellite called Planck, a European satellite and also 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 there. But it absolutely is true to say that we think that's not complete as a picture. So there it is. So that is light that was emitted about 380,000 years after the Big Bang.
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 detected now in the gases of the young universe.
Are you talking about the red, blue?
Yeah, the reds and blues, all 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 colors 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 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 those 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 stretch very quickly stretching space by the way so it's so the stretch if i can remember the number is if you consider two points in space during inflation the distance between them was doubling
every 10 to the minus 37 seconds, which is 0.0000000000. 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 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. 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.
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. He was quite young. I think he might have even been a postdoc, and he just published it. 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 its 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 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 matter's 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 it, there are people working on it, so there are theories about what it might be. But I think 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 interacts like neutrinos, basically, that you mentioned earlier. So it 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, yes, 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 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.
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 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. 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...
uh require the dark matter the dark matter fits well if it's in there in in this plasma in this kind of soup that 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 the the idea also came from looking at galaxies and how they rotate and galaxies and how they bend light and and
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 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 a good question.
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 what you do with science, which is why 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? And it's true that 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 of 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? And 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 what's called helioseismology. So 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 that sunquakes. You can measure how much helium is 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 4.5 billion years old, a planet that's 4.5 billion years old, the fact that it all fits is 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, as 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. Pretty sure, but it could not be. Were any of the other competing theories compelling at all?
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 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 supernovae 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 changes over time or something. So you can invent theories that would allow you to change 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'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. But then there are some mysteries. Not least, what is this stuff? 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. 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, you know, 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. 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 know, you shouldn't be anyway.
Good scientists are not trying to be the person that got it right. You're not trying, you know, you're not trying to do it. There's obviously human failure. Everyone's got fragility and everyone's human, you know, an 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. 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 wanted to talk about the James Webb, some of the discoveries. But 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 you 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 think it's fair to say there's nothing there that's 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 said that it looks like the stars and the galaxies...
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 mmm so galaxies form quicker than we expected yeah that 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 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 just speed reading that. It says a class of galaxies that... 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 like next generation James Webb type telescope that's even more efficient or more capable? Yeah.
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, right? 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? Right. And if so, what does that mean? What does it mean for something like this to begin? Yeah, I really... I find it... And the most exciting thing of all is that we don't know.
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. It's almost like the opposite of the knowledge. It's just this idea that... I think... It goes back to what we were talking 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 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... The most human I feel, I think, is when I'm on the edge of the known. Sure. So it's the fact that there are mysteries in the universe, profound mysteries, to me is one of the things that makes life worth living.
Most certainly. As a human being, that's true.
Yeah.
My point is that I think eventually we're not going to be human beings.
I'm sure you're right. What if we get past this little blip?
Well, we're also in this 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, which will 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 face, environmental challenges and so on. Competition for resources.
Geopolitically, the world looks rather, I think it looks as unstable as it was in the 1930s in some respects. So 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, you know, the rockets that we have now, I mean, 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 skyscraper. Yeah. Caught it. It's amazing. Yeah. 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 in future generations. We'll 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 right there, that that moment.
Tell me that doesn't remind you of the movie Contact.
It does a bit, doesn't it? That does a lot. That didn't end well, though.
No. Well, you know, neither did Apollo 1.
And also, of course, Blue Origin are maybe not far behind. Right. I love that.
Two private companies with billionaires at the helm that are out of their mind pushing a space race.
Let's go. Yeah. You know, and I get, you know, I get criticised 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. It was Carl Sagan, wasn't it, who said that if dinosaurs had a space program, they'd still be around. So it's their fault, in a sense. Which I kind of, you know, they didn't build rockets.
Well, it's almost like nature realized that, look, with these giant lizards running around, people are never going to figure out how to make spaceships.
Let's just reset.
Send in the hard reset button.
Yeah. 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. Yeah. 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.
So the idea that we can build infrastructure in space and then, of course, build bases on the moon and then ultimately on Mars and then beyond, that's a lot closer now.
101.
120-ish, is it?
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. There it is. To go from that to blue origin is insanity in such a short period of time.
So I think we're on the 1906. 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 this... 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 it in Iran, Russia uses it in Ukraine. We have World War III happening.
And I'm sure you're aware of what Einstein said about World War IV, that World War III, I don't know what weapons they'll use, but in World War IV, it'll 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 Reith 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 this, 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 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. 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, it is like this thing, it 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... And 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. 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 challenge. 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 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 convince enough people that your view is the right view. And that obviously is part of democracy. It's the way it works. 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 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 Oppenheimer wrote – 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 – 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 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 a sense of how it was probably originally established, 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. You know, and 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.
Like, 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 Mehta's band. Well, I'm just curious. 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.
Yeah. And it's a couple of decades. It's been influential. Yeah. So I think it feeds. It's another of those problems we face now. This what we talked about, this 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, will be listening to this and they'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 how – the way that it's influencing our –
changing our democracies yeah let's just use a non you know that it might be changing them for the better it might be changing them for the worst 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 they make polarizing statements and crazy 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 thoughts. A former FBI analyst made an 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 5%.
5% were fake. He said, well, 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 see all of your data. And it became this big issue. And that's when he tried to get out of the deal. And then they took him to court. And then he wound up buying it.
Yeah.
But that was a big part of it. How much of this is even real? I see arguments online where people take these crazy inflammatory positions, just insulting and attacking people that believe one thing or another thing. And I'm like, how much of this is 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, one answer, 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. Right. I just ignore them.
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 aeroplanes, so a lot of my stuff is retweeting stuff about aeroplanes, 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? Yeah. So what do you do? I suppose you could argue it's education. Ultimately, ultimately, everything comes back to to education. A democracy requires an educated population. Right. And 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 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 probably underappreciated. 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 8 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. Right. 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 like very bizarre bias towards like 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. You're like, okay, we got to figure out how to get all the water out of here. Like this is nuts. This place is flooded. And we're essentially in the middle of the flood, the 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, I'm very optimistic. Because of the things we've talked about today.
Well, I also think 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. Yes.
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, though, that you and I, you know, we're in a good position, Mike, personally. Yes. As 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 financially. When they become well-known for the first time, for example.
I mean, I remember when I became quite late in life, became well-known as a public figure. I did a series on the BBC in 2009 or 2010 called Wonders of the Solar System. And suddenly I was well-known. And I find it very difficult to navigate. And fortunately, I had the support structures and people around me 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. 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, it can.
Right.
And I think it's probably almost impossible to navigate that 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 late in their 40s.
Yeah. And it wasn't in a controversial area. It's about planets and the solar system, astronomy. So 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. They're just angry. There's a lot of really messy people out there.
I do, yeah, there's still, I mean, the number of people who, when I, so I did that, the rocket catch, 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 I got quite a lot of it.
You know, it's 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 disc. Yeah, the earth is a disc. And you can't get through the firmament. And 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 he's right.
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. Obviously, you learn that. I go, what possible advantage could there be? Right. What's the answer? I think they think that it's just a scam. So, yeah, SpaceX are just like a scam or something.
So they're just taking all this money for launching satellites. So, again, it's a very complicated scam because they're getting it off, you know, communications satellites. 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 people that rebel against this idea and go, this is madness. Everything's round.
Look at the sky. The fundamental thing as well, the fundamental misconception these people have is they assume that there's a competence...
there in government you know 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 right it's very basic that so i think that is this assumption that there's some kind of
underlying competence to the world.
Yes, not just 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 – you make some fake documentary and you attach a bunch of fake facts to it. 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 planet is around. This is how we know. This is what Bode's Law is.
This is what – 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
I've learned something I didn't know because I didn't know the space is fake thing was linked to that.
It's a very religious thing. At the root of all the flat earth stuff is the firmament. The root of all the flat earth stuff is based on some very bizarre interpretation of 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 flat. 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 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 a 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, a lot of that gets lost in the translation. A lot of it gets like, you had a thousand years of oral tradition. 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 with, in the beginning, God created the heaven and the earth, and the earth was that form of void, and darkness was on the face of the deep. I love that. It's a great line. Well, it's amazing.
Darkness was on the 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 who's It seems to come from the Egyptian creation myth, I think. I might be wrong there, but 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, the 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'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 it, isn't it?
And very little information.
That's what we talked about earlier. To me, that's one of the defining characteristics of being human, trying to make sense of the world. And that's why, by the way, I don't like to get into 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 are people who are not curious. Right. And don't have questions. Because Carl Sagan wrote a great book called The Demon-Haunted World, Signs of the Candle in the Dark.
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 it got sidetracked into all this strange stuff.
I think the 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, simpler things.
Yes, but more... 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. Yeah. 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 OK.
If you ask me a question about the origin of the universe, the answer is don't know. So I think it's if, as you said, if you can be comfortable with not having to have a simple, intelligible explanation for something, then you'll make more progress in life. But it's quite difficult. Yes. 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 said an idea, then you are attached to that idea and you defend that idea. It's a real problem.
That's 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 fyman he said um what the great there's a great essay i probably talked to you about before called the value of science that you 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. 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'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% votes in whatever it is. It doesn't matter. Nature just doesn't care. And so the more you interrogate nature, even as a kid at school with a little experiment with a battery and 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. Yeah.
How do we 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. So are we going 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 a model that kind of works. And you say, well, this is the best version of our knowledge at the time. And then you can try to act on it and you define 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. 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 don't see any other way to act as a civilization other than with the best we can do. It's the best we can do.
Yeah. And that term reliable information is so important because people want to leap to conclusions to try to 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 the Fermi 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, everything. I'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? It probably has to be. There's probably some sort of radical propulsion system 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 of 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 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'd be like, let's keep an eye on these fucking freaks.
I would most certainly say this is a – 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. 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, 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 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 inside the realm of possibility. That can absolutely happen. So something has to get past all of these hurdles to – and if I saw a planet that's real close like us, I'm like, wow, they're going to 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 bringing 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. That's a safe and that's an intelligent assumption. And also, that's how you want your children to behave. Right. You don't want to go save your children every time, you know, like they're. When they get older, they got 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.
Yeah. Whatever they have. I'm so fascinated by it. I want to believe everything. I'm such a sucker. Every time I see Bob Lazar talk, I want to believe it. I want to believe all of it.
As I said, I wouldn't be surprised. I'd be relieved. I'd be relieved as well.
Please help us. But also, do you think about the way we interact with primitive tribes? It's not good. It ruins them almost every time. 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 tribal leaders are complaining. Yeah.
As we talked about earlier. Yeah.
These kids are on their phones all day in the fucking jungle. Instead of 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 videos. Getting shouted at. Yeah. Just looking at TikTok, arguing with people online, trolling. Yeah. Looking at memes and laughing.
You know, we've ruined them. And this is one of the reasons why places like North Sentinel Island, you're not supposed to visit them. You're supposed to leave them alone. Because they are this very bizarre state of uncontacted and very primitive lifestyle that we can preserve, which is also weird. Like, shouldn't we help them? That's sort of weird, too.
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 that's... If I was an alien life form and I wasn't so, you know, cautious about the impact, 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?
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 we do get to Mars. We set up bases on Mars. We do become...
uh... we we develop the technology that allows us to travel to other solar systems and we do observe uh... a civilization that is you know like uh... the bronze age you know and we we stumble upon these people that are developed 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 directive. The thing is, yeah, the prime directive, do no harm, right? Isn't that what it is?
Yeah, well, don't intervene at all. Don't intervene at all, isn't it?
Yeah. I mean, 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 did they let us just practice blowing things up in the Nevada desert for like 30 years? Like,
I think you're absolutely right. I mean, the point is I think there's nobody there for a long way.
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 only the perfect of circumstances.
That would be my baseline view.
But if the universe is so big, wouldn't every single potential situation happen infinitely?
If it's infinite? I mean, we don't know if it's infinite. We have the observable universe. I think the current number is something like two trillion galaxies, depending on how many smaller ones there are.
So wouldn't you think that just out of two 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 Earth?
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 and nearest large neighbor. So I think when I 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 at Manchester University for 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 that 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.
So according to laws of physics, if you can build a spacecraft that goes very close to the 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 the 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 you can't – 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 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, so 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 spacetime 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 is the time measured by a clock that's carried along that path. So that's how much.
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 the 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 30.8 centimeters. 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 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 it's an effect that we can easily measure with atomic clocks, but it doesn't make much difference to us as humans. But just the point is that the laws of nature would allow you to do it if you could go close to the speed of light. By the way, the last thing I'll say is the limiting factor. You might say, well, 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 the 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 traveled alongside a beam of light? And the answer is that you wouldn't perceive any time. You can't. The last thing I'll say 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 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 the – I can never pronounce it. It's the albacore – what's it called? The drive. So 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. So that's what gravity is. It's the distortion of space and time by mass and energy.
It's Einstein's theory. So you can, and it's been done, 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, right, right. But 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 those things don't appear to exist. So these particular kinds of matter and energy, 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?
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. 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 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, the final thing, this is very neat because it goes right back to what I said at the start, that one of the pictures of how I said there was this thing, the black hole information paradox. 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, but only in the sense that 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. 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, there's some role for it in the way the universe works. So it's really cool. The last thing I'll say, because I think we're going to, is 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, EPL, 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 together. 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. which is quite a controversial paper, but I think it 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 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 that paper was published recently. There it is. That's it. A holographic wormhole. It's important to say that wormhole is 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... It's blown! 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, the great physical Maldacena. 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 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. There's a completely equivalent description that lives in fewer dimensions on a surface somehow that's surrounding us. And it's really woolly and hand-wavy 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 that 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. There is a quantum system that's a quantum bit.
So you build it in 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 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, you know, factoring large numbers, it's kind of boring. But building wormholes, which is, and I caution, it's a complicated thing, but it looks like the beginnings of...
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're talking you might be the only person that could explain this to us that 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're seeing right and
I couldn't understand if they did this on purpose to make it the shape of a yin yang and it's just the 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, 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, as I said, perhaps producing space and time itself,
But also is the way that quantum computers work and the way that you – we didn't talk about this, but 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 run a quantum computer. Yeah. 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're 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?
And he would say, he would say, it's doing it in the multiple universes.
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. 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.
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 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 back to Feynman, 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 make a pattern you can see. And I think that's what that is.
But how crazy is it that that pattern is an ancient symbol?
It is beautiful, isn't it?
It's unbelievably beautiful.
It's a beautiful thing.
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. Wow. And I thought just to finish it, because I want to finish it and write another one, I'd come back to the U.S. We did a few in the U.S.
So coming back in April and May and doing these quite relatively small issues. I saw the one you did years ago. That was ages ago, wasn't it? Yeah. So this is, you know, it explores many of these questions, actually, particularly black holes. And just to round it off, I'm doing a few. So if you go and look on the web, you'll find some. We're doing some LA, New York, Chicago, around.
I hope we do in Austin, actually. I hope you do in Austin.
Maybe I will insist.
Yeah, please. If it's not in there, we couldn't do Austin. Please come. Yeah, so that's what I'm up to.
Bye.
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