Joe Rogan Experience #2217 - Brian Cox

Joe Rogan podcast check it out The Joe Rogan Experience Train by day Joe Rogan podcast by night all day all right Brian Cox good to see you sir good to see you again how's uh things in the world of the discovery of the universe exciting yes 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 the amount of the progress that's being made in trying to understand how they work and and a question that was posed

by Steven 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 how do we how do we study a black hole I it's mainly theoretical although um we we have now got photographs of them so we have two photographs which are radio telescope photographs right one of the the one in the center of our galaxy which is a a

little one it's called Sagittarius A star a little it's a it's a little super massive black hole so it's about six million times the mass of the sun which makes it a little super massive 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 imagine that 6,000 million times more massive than our sun is that the largest black hole we've ever discovered

no there there are bigger ones than that but that's the the that's a scale of them it's a big is one that but if you think about it I mean so there's a number it's called the the SWAT or radius of the thing so if if you took our sun which you can fit a million Earths inside and collapsed it down to make a black hole it would form a black hole when it shrunk within a radius of three 3 kilm about 2 miles so you've got to take this thing which is what I have

to convert from kilometers to miles don't but it's about 700,000 kilometers it's about five 500,000 miles radius or something like that the Sun so so you squash it down till it's about 2 miles and then that would form a black hole wow the six billion times the mass of the Sun means you multiply that by six billion so these things that the SoCal SWAT radius is I don't know larger than our solar system basically thing God that sits in in the Galaxy so we've got these two photographs larger than our solar system yeah the event

right there's so it's a big structure that's um that's no that's a Chandra x-ray image of there it is that's it so so the uh that one there that's that's the m87 black hole so what what you're seeing there is the emission from the material that's swirling around it it's called the accretion disc so you have material that's orbiting very fast emitting a lot of radiation and that's what you see it's it's a flat disc by the way so you think think Saturn's rings so this material is very flat but what you're seeing in that

photograph is the light rays being bent around the black hole from that flat disc so that was a prediction uh from Einstein's Theory basically published it in 1915 and you can predict that that's one what one should look like and then just about was that four years ago now maybe five years ago for the first time in history we get an image of one and it looks like the prediction so it's a remarkable thing how phenomenal is that yeah so we've got we've had those two photographs the other thing we've had is so-called gravitational wave

detections so these are colliding black holes and they Collide and merge together and obviously that's quite a violent event in the universe and so that that event that that process ripples SpaceTime so it sends ripples out in the fabric of the universe space and time and actually Kip Thoren is a I I I've spoken to him several times he's one of the greats right with 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 so that 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 there's an experiment called ligo which is the uh what it stand for something like gravitational interferometer I can't remember exactly what

but there so it's a laser beams and there's one in Washington state north of Seattle and one in Louisiana and they're kind of laser beams 4 kilometer long laser beams at right angles and they can detect these very tiny shifts in the effectively you could say the length of the laser beam it's a bit more fiddly and complicated but it it essentially measures this the the the Distortion in space time caused by these Ripples and it's it's way less than the diameter of Atomic nucleus by the way way less these little sort of oh my

God and and so we we started to we've observed many of those col 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 that those Event Horizon pictures with radio telescopes so that that's part of it but the main bit has been theoretical advances in understanding exactly it in a sense it was what's wrong with Stephen Hawking's calculation which is a weird thing to say sometimes because people think stepen Hawking surely didn't get his

math wrong but he did actually in his calc 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 space and time that's that's the description of them so it's obviously there's nothing there apart from a distortion in space and time he calculated that they glow so they have a temperature so they 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 westmin ABY is his equation for the temperature of a black hole so it was this tremendously important Discovery so he disco he discovers these things glow and he calculates how they glow very low temperature but they emit things which means that they shrink because they're 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 it purely informationless 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 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 all get scrambled up and thrown out into and so

in practice you can't do it but in just principle the laws of nature say that information is not destroyed it's just scrambled up in a way that you can't reconstruct right but this calculation that Steven did said there is no information in that radiation at all zero just nothing so it seemed that uniquely in the universe black holes erase information this episode is brought to you by the farmer's dog dogs are amazing they're loyal they're lovable like just having Marshall around can make my day 10 times better and I'm sure you love your dog just

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visit this episodes page to learn more offer applicable for new customers only when you say there's no information like how are you measuring whether or not there's information in it so so really in bits I mean the idea is and it's 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 maybe a million years from now in principle you could just collect everything then somewhere in that in

that in that all that radiation and Ashes and light that's come off the thing is the information it's it's there so you could reconstruct the book or what I wrote on this page in principle but the thing about Steven's calcul was that even in principle it said there is no information and by the way that it's kind of easy to see why actually because this radiation this Hawking radiation that comes off the black hole it's coming from the Horizon of the black hole so I should say what the Horizon is maybe so it's if you

remember I said that this the sun if you squashed it down within 3 kilometers of radius you you you you'd get this kind of distortion in space and time from which if you went in across this region 3 kilometers you went inside it you couldn't get out so that's called The Event Horizon so you wouldn't notice if you fell through the The Horizon of the black hole in in the Milky Way galaxy if you went into that one you 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 and ultimately in a few hours in in that case time would end for us so we just go you go to the end of time we could talk about that there's a picture of that maybe I should talk about this is getting quite complicated already is it we didn't stting a relaxing way no need to no need to let's get right into it so we wouldn't notice not for the big black holes so so yeah so these super massive black holes we could fall across this Horizon it's just

like being in empty space for us uh so we just we we would just be talking now when we could have been talking on the outside of the Horizon and by the time I finish the sentence we could be on the inside of the Horizon inside the black hole and according to Einstein'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 the thing we would notice ultimately is you go inexorably nothing you can do you go

to this thing called The Singularity once you've crossed the horizon and you are going to that thing and then the question arises what is that thing and one answer is we don't know but in Einstein's theory it's the end of time so it's it one way of picturing what's happened here is so distorted is space and time by the collapse of a star or the collapse of loads of stuff to make these big super massive black holes we don't quite know how they form actually but it's collapsing stuff so it distorts space and time so

much that in a in a real sense they kind of flip over they they get mixed up and so this this Singularity which you might have thought of as the point to which this thing collapsed this infinitely dense point you might think but actually it's 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 right so we are going to tomorrow right and if I said

to you let's run away from Tomorrow you'd go I can't run away from tomorrow is it the end of time because all information is being erased so there's nothing yeah I mean it's is that the idea if you draw the thing you can draw a map of it and it just literally time ends Accord 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 we think there's

a lot more to it than that but 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 which is leading us so to to backrack a bit why why does this calculation Steven did why has it got no why it say there's no information in this radiation the thing is it's coming from the Horizon so it's all one there's loads of ways to think about it but one way is that this this weird place this point of no return in

space that you can fall through but it's a point of no return it 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 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 this thing

is not set on fire or something like that it's it's gone to the end of time and just whatever's happened to it has happened to it so so this radiation's got nothing to do with anything that falls in at first sight at least and so that was the paradox it's called the black hole information Paradox it's like 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 you know but what role do we think like what is the is there a purpose is that the right term like for a black hole like what what obviously we know is it still the the do they still believe that in the center of every Galaxy there's a super massive 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 yeah and and that's there's occasionally a Galaxy I think one was discovered where we said maybe we can't see evidence of a black hole but yeah probably is what do you think that thing's doing there like what is that what's the what is the struct 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 so I

think we don't I think I'm right in saying we don't fully understand why all galaxies as you said maybe there's an exception but all Galaxies have a black hole a super massive 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 webspace telescope is to try to look at the formation of the first galaxies so that's what one of the reasons that telescope is up there so so it's Cutting Edge we we're trying to understand how the galaxies form

but I I clearly you're right that they it has something to do with the way the galaxies form in the early Universe pulling in Stars well they they they do pull in material but they if you've got stuff orbing around them it stays orising around it so the way we first detected the one in the Milky Way before we could because that image is very new that we have of it is is the stars orbit in it very close to it they call the S stars that whiz around in these orbits very close to the

black hole so so if you just around the thing you go imagine that view you think it's weird to look at the Moon imagine if there was a super massive black hole above our head it'd be so cool I'd love to see one I the mo is so cool uh the eclipse was wild we had the eclipse here in Texas 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 cuz I saw one in India and I got this feeling that I was living on a ball of rock because and it must have been just cuz the night just Falls right and suddenly you see the universe comes much more quickly I went to the kek 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 the most Inc it was such a vivid image of the entire Milky Way and EV the ENT every inch of the sky was

covered in Stars yeah it was so phenomenal and it made me a little upset because I was like this is above our head every day and this would 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 to explore space so many more people would get involved in astrophysics so many more people would get involved in just the exploration of the known universe because it's so Majestic and instead we have like our screen is off it's like that it's like that

screen that's what we see because of light pollution yeah that should be remedied like that is that is an that's not a good tradeoff like lights are wonderful but it seems to me like there hey there's got to be a way to do this where you don't ruin the view of space yeah because you you you know these questions we have about our place and and as you said it can be easy to be myopic can you you said if we look at our screens we it's 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 on in a truly dark sky is powerful it's incredible 400 billion Sons give or take 400,000 million Sons that's just words most yeah picture yeah it's insane your your brain doesn't even process that like I could repeat that if someone says how many sons oh 400 billion

I don't know what that means that's so abstract and and most of them I think Pro 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 what is your take on all this UAP disclosure stuff do you give it any mind at all are you busy with like real stuff no I mean the thing is there's a thing called the fmy Paradox yes which I think we talked about before the show which is and the Paradox is that if

if we haven't seen let's assume we haven't seen any evidence of anything that's a paradox because as I said there are we now know we didn't when fery first posed it by the way we now know there are so many planets out there so let's say trillions of planets in the Milky Way Milky Way has been there for over 13 billion years pretty much the age of the universe so if there's no one else out there then the question is why because there's been so much time and so many places for civilizations to become space

varing civilizations right as as as Elon talks about multiplanetary civiliz we're very close to becoming a multiplanetary civilization and once you have become a multiplanetary and multi Stellar civilization if you become that you're Immortal basically essentially right so the question is the Paradox is why does it appear nobody has done that so the first thing to say is I would not be surprised right if a UFO landed here now in the parking lot I'd actually not only would I not be surprised I'd be relieved actually I'd be like this is good because it'd be a

weight off my shoulders cuz I'm worried that we're the only 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 if we could talk about that but isn't it bizarre like the one of the things that's fascinating about looking into the night guys because it's so humbling because it's so immense it kind of puts everything into perspective persective and it just gives you this like different view of the world so the universe is so vast and so spectacular why is it so important

that we exist to us it's so important that we exist and if we make a mess of this and we wind up dying the universe is so big if we were the only intelligent life in the universe and it didn't matter we blew ourselves up like it's just a weird aberration that's attached to a survival Instinct like we're a weird biological aberration so so the if you think about let's assume so we we didn't finish the UAP thing so just say so I don't know about that but anyway let's assume just for the purposes of

this that we're the only ones in in in our galaxy let's say okay then I would argue that so there's a question I ask 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 good question right that's what you're asking it mean right the first thing to say is meaning right what do it mean that that doesn't sound like a scientific Concept in a way mean 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-evident exists we we everyone who's listening to this knows that the the world means something to them so I would argue that if this planet is the only planet in our galaxy where complex biological systems exist right at our level then it follows 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 I by the way I gave a talk a little video thing at the one of the climate Summit the [ __ ] climate Summit in Glasgow in 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 I have a nice meeting but I I made this little argument as fast as I could I

said it's possible at least that this is the only place where complex biology has emerged in in our galaxy if that's true this is the only island of me 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 in action then each of you would be personally responsible for destroying meaning in a galaxy of 400 billion Sons potentially forever now go and discuss that was my intro to glasg now and we can all argue because people have be

listening to this going this nonsense how can it be we can all argue about whether that's true what I would say is give even the 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 it's worth taking seriously the idea that civilizations are very rare now and by the way I used to say so I probably last time I was on actually I used to say that in in the far future then the complex life will 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 you

had David deuts on the show David Deutsch is a really interesting physicist I don't believe I have he's one of the um found Quantum competing and and he's a big figure in Quantum competing in particular but he's a great thinker and he he 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 so or at least Stars you could IM 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 we don't know how to do that or if it's possible but imagine it could then the evolution of stars would life would matter in the

sense that it could start to change the way that the Universe behaves on a large scale in the future and so it's it reminded me actually there another great book by John Barrow and Frank tippler called the anthropic cosmological principle from the 1980s it 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 w wildly speculative but it's actually logically it's quite an interesting point so so I kind of disagree with my 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 it bring these brief like flickering candles of meaning and then they go out again but but it's it's worth considering it might not necessarily be true that if if you really think I mean just to say I mean it's

it must sound to many people listening just nonsense right science fiction but if you think our civilization has been around for what 10,000 years at best really give or take and in that time we've sent stuff out of the solar system we've although we don't yet we're way away from being able to manipulate Stars we can manipulate planets so we are changing the way this planet operates life has changed it you the oxygen in the atmosphere before we appeared the oxygen in the atmosphere is a product of life so life already we know changes planets

and so that that spec I like that speculation that Poss just possibly it's not just a temporary little phenomena that flickers in and out and then disappears again it could have a real bearing on the future of the universe and you could also make the argument that intelligent life might be the universe's way to force change that intelligent life seems to inevit like intelligence itself must come out of curiosity because otherwise there's no reason to seek information so intelligent life consistently seeks information and then constantly demands Innovation like intelligent life is not satisfied with the

iPhone 14 it wants the 15 it wants the 16 it wants to keep going forever and ever and ever well if you scale set up you get this current dilemma that we're in with is artificial intelligence and the concept of sentient artificial intelligence and then Quantum Computing and you get you get insane amounts of computing power powered by nuclear reactors that are essentially a life form well if that thing says you guys are doing it all wrong I got a better way and it starts making better versions of itself because it's sentient if you scale

up a thousand years from now you could imagine it becoming God you like a Godlike property like an Unstoppable force that has access to every element in known space I'm I'm really interested in these kind of arguments you put it really well actually 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 the actual the James Webb telescopes latest uh but if

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 some single- cell organisms to the James web telescope we've gone to we have starlink we have electric car it's bananas yeah you could imagine if we had another 10 billion years to exist well exactly and this is the point that David Deutch made in the in the book I've just been reading and and John Barron Frank tier made before that but 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 for three billion plus years of that on this planet it was just single cells and so so it's only in the last let's say a billion years but actually a bit less that we've had multicellular organisms so three quarters of it of the time were just single cell that's even crazier so which is one of the reasons that many people think civilizations might be rare because if you just the only evidence we have is this planet right and the evidence on this planet is

that single cell life is is sort of the way that things are for most most of the history and then so it it seems like a uh an accident in a way that happened late on in the history of life on Earth that produced multicellular life now whe is that typical we don't know maybe it was took a longer time here than it might might do somewhere else but if it's typical I mean four billion years you said it 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 a onethird of the age of the universe to go from the origin of life to a civilization and and so what was required here on Earth was that that bro unbroken chain of life remained unbroken for a third of the age of the universe in a violent Universe I mean we you know we know there impacts from space many stars are significantly more active than the Sun so the sun's kind of a quite a boring Little Star that just taks 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 we aren't we very unusual in the size of our moon and

the distance the Moon that 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 it history imagine that imagine Earth was that the 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 if you think about the idea that these complex it seems like one thing you

can be sure of in the observable world is that things get more complex or they adapt to their environment and if you have a bunch of these intelligent Apes that are competing globally with the most significant technology in the world you could see how that you could see how that would be just a property of the universe potentially although we haven't discovered it yet like this is why we're so curious about alien life not just because of the possibilities of all the stars but because we kind of see what would happen with us if we

keep going yeah you know it just 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 right so 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 the example of life on Earth probably backs that up if you talk three yes three billion years of single cells what that means is that the Single Cell organisms were just doing very well right and so it's not OB it's not a given that just because you suddenly get more complicated you're better than the Single Cell things right so there could lot 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 they're interesting things it happened photosynthesis complex biochemistry but as far as we can tell nothing more complex than a single cell so most of the history of life on Earth so that might suggest that that's the way that things are usually and then 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 for signals or evidence of of civilizations out there there's the Breakthrough listen project

and there's set as it so we do and we haven't seen anything I would say um so and I know that if you go on to the web and things and interet people say we have we've seen stuff and I've seen stuff but but just the basic Point as 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 and it's a tremend 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 were different so the count counterarguments when we say we've seen nothing therefore as far as we can tell there's nothing out there you could say well um what if the civilization that evolved is far ahead of us what if the space probes are the size of an iPhone right well that's kind of a reasonable thing to say actually 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 so 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 and so yeah okay you would have to concede that so so we're just saying that the way that we've looked for signat 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 why would the spacecraft be big right um because as you said it's another thing you said actually it's interesting that we're at the on the verge now of of creating things artificial 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 5 years away or two years away or 50 years away but it's probably not 10,000 years away right so that wish is the blink of an eye once you've done that and once you 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 you know we we should do it so it it it becomes a powerful question why does it appear that nobody's done that and my guess in the absence of other evidence would be biology it's just that maybe the number of places where biology becomes complex enough to do that is is on average one maybe on average zero per Galaxy right maybe just civilizations are very very very rare in the universe maybe that's an answer but that's

a guess my my always 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 becom sensient it recognizes the illogical programming it's going to reject it we've already seen evidence of that we've already seen evidence of artificial intelligence they use now like giving a time limit to solve a problem doesn't like the time liit gives more time like it'll it's like they're maneuvering

and thinking right so I assume that they would do that so why would they want to explore what isn't curiosity a part of what it means to be a biological thing that has to worry about instincts you have to you have human reward systems you want to breed you want to take care of your DNA you want to protect your community we these biological things that are from us being intelligent animals if we transcend that or if life transcends that to the point whatever we want to call this intelligence that's in a digital form that's

far superior to our intelligence what motivations would it have it's not greedy it doesn't have lust it doesn't have the desire to control resources it might have like some sort of uh 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 be 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 a much more static state where it

doesn't have any desire expand there's a lot of there's a lot of points in there and it's so you're right you what you're arguing I suppose is whether intelligence is integral to the structure the biological structure or whether it is a a separate thing that and I think so again I think the answer is it's it's not known you could argue either way but the counterargument would be that the brain the these things are just computers ultimately there's nothing magical in there there's nothing that it is connected to a body and so there are these

Sensations but it doesn't seem to me impossible that a a a silicon based life form or whatever it is does obviously it has senses it has access to the environment it it exists it thinks I I don't see any fundamental difference between an intelligence in uh based on Silicon let's say or a quantum computer or whatever it is and and this intelligence here that so I know that many researchers in this area do say that that that the it's not a brain in they call it a brain in a jar don't they and say well

that's not 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 it's a very good question but you I suppose if you say it's not obvious to me that a different kind of intelligence in a different structure running on a computer or whatever it is would necessarily have different motivations to us I mean you could equally well argue that these motivations to survive and curiosity and th those ideas the the desire to explore you you could you could argue those are fundamental properties

of intelligence and not of biology but isn't an intelligence that's motivated by a finite life in a vulnerable physical frame cuz we we're constantly like and most Innovation relies upon uh quicker safer Transportation more secure buildings uh you know things along those lines and then computers that help you do your job better and actually could do things that you can't do and that's this is a lot of it is based on this other weird thing we do where we want to control resources and we want to figure out reasons why these people are bad so

we can go and take their stuff and then enter troops and dig the oil or whatever you have to do look we're constantly in this battle for resources that if you take it back to tribal times it's like a natural human instinct like we had to protect the food sources we had to fight off the concrete 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 bastardization those motivations like the stock market where things gets weird and

you're just competing over numbers gets really weird but it's basically this desire to compete with the DNA that's around you once we're not biological anymore like what would be the motivation and would we not just exist like in the most peaceful Zen Buddhist way possible which is what everybody who's like a spiritual person who meditates all the time that's what you strive for you strive for this complete abandonment of self this complete emptiness and one with the universe if we could just exist like that why would we need to go to space it's it's a

wonderful argument isn't it that our Humanity so the because part of the thing that you described this this desire to create things and build things and explore and expand is is 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 say distance what does it matter right by the way that's um this t-shirt I got to say designed by a friend of mine Peter savel who's a great designer who

designed the Joy Division Unknown Pleasures album cover amongst other things wow this is Joy 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 he made it for we did these gigs I talk about them later called syonic Horizons which were the uh shows with cosmology but also Symphony Orchestra and he was exploring these issues actually but most of the music was strauss's zarathustra which is based on n's book from so

it's it's kind of a exploring these questions actually of what's the point of existence right and uh I do have some sympathy with that idea that a great deal of our Humanity comes from our fragility and and so your question I think is fascinating what happens when you become Godlike you said it earlier right if 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 these a descants what's the point not just

effectively Immortal but aren't we looking at the universe and in the we're looking at through the framing of uh a biological primate that's trying to figure it out yeah 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 they would if you're infinitely more intelligent than

we are if you scale it from now to Quantum Computing sentinent artificial intelligence and you give us a thousand years without getting hit by an asteroid or technology gets to the point where 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 there might be a

way that they're traveling without actually being here and observing this and just I would imagine you if you watch chimps in the jungle and then all of a sudden they started to figure out bombs he'd be like okay we might we might want to go tell these chimps not to [ __ ] blow each other up I mean it's an obsurd 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 you're going to kill everything now if

you're infinite like we're not that removed from chimps what do we share like 98% of their DNA and we're only removed from them by what a few million years from a nearest cousin that's not that long right so you could imagine something that's infinitely more intelligent looking at us exactly the way we'd look at a chimp with a nuclear bomb like hey and which you know my my club is called The Comedy Mothership and we designed it it's all UFO themed and the rooms are fat man and little boy the reason why I named it

that because that was the beginning of all the UFO sightings in the country like those bombs sort of set off the alarm for the universe oh the monkeys have a bomb yeah I mean I I thought this a while ago I remembered I was talking to someone and and they said yeah are not worried about this are not worried about the fact that AI could become more intelligent than us what what is it going to be like when we're not the smartest things on the planet which might be just a few years from and I

I again I might be quite relieved because I I'm not sure they could [ __ ] it up at the level right that we are [ __ ] it up you know so you would have to give it legitimate sentience like it would have to be completely independent from any ideology and you would have to look at things completely objectively but imagine 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 health healthy food immediately all the toxins and preservatives that have 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 every this AI government just runs over IM dictators no more dictators cut the [ __ ] with dictator we're just going to let human

beings exist in harmony Guided by this superintelligent Godlike thing that we've created out of silicone yeah I honestly I've had the same thought and that's the utopian view yeah and so I have thought how could it be worse in fact it could be significantly better yeah AI gets [ __ ] with by people right and the AI we've seen so far has all the greasy Fingerprints of human emotion and illogical like when Google releas their their AI they asked them to 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 was a Nazi the whole it it's so nuts because it's like okay somebody [ __ ] with this this doesn't make any sense this is you can't you can't do that because if you if you get a virus and illogical virus that somehow or another gets into Ai and it's unchecked if AI isn't completely logical and objective and and Cent and and basing it just entirely on what's best for the human race then you just have a superpower that you

have control over and then you can decide like no more abortions you can decide exactly and as you and as you said what the definition of what is best is a is a moral yes decision that we we make but you can make some distinctions in terms of like allocation of resources like you could make some if if I was a super intelligence and I looked at Earth I I'd say listen a lot of people are not going to like this but there's a reality there's the reason why you're worried about the Border because people

are sneaking in is because other parts of the world are [ __ ] 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 ra up all of civilization so there's no more third world well that's one of the arguments have you um I spoke to robbert Zubin who went wrote These wonderful books um called about colonizing space um and and so he's a fascinating character and I 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 we the competition for resources is now so extreme that it's not only Wars that it creates and all always has but it's also of course we damage the planet if we over overe 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 right and so

you begin once you begin to have access to the asteroids and access to Mars and Beyond you you in you can imagine a world where you alleviate that pressure and Ladi I want to tell you there's a Planet out there bigger than Earth that's all diamonds there're are Diamond Planet they all there's unlimited his imagination isn't it like several times larger than Earth and it's an entire diamond yeah and we think I think it's Neptune or Uranus that has we think has diamonds in it so oh my goodness so yeah so diamonds are only valuable

because we decide they're valuable you know it's kind of beers people are brilliant they they like lock them all up they're like oh this is really hard to get they good for as well but we can make them for drill but this is interesting thing you can make them for jewelry as well but some women don't want them don't want the artificially no they want the real ones they want the ones that came out of the earth way we value things gold 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 we're talking about the gravitational wave detectors earlier and the collision between black holes that we detect with them we also also detected a collision between neutron stars using the gravitational wave detector and we pointed optical telescopes out that collision and saw the signature of gold being manufactured and it was always it was always a question we used to just think well it comes from Supernova explosions but but

it 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 if you look at the Gold your wedding ring or your watch or whatever it is that that 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 wow which is makes it more wonderful well every human

being is a carbon based life form and carbon comes from Stars yeah as car SE 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 remarkable thing I wanted to go back to something you said actually about the I I've been thinking about this this this but you said this Godlike intelligences that we might create and uh and kind of what's the point what would be the point of existence if you if you were Immortal and you knew everything wouldn't it

be wouldn't it be I don't know incredibly dull like you I me what you said it's almost like a meditative state so we strive for this this peace you know essentially well maybe we're thinking of it as dull because we don't have access to the information like we we have a very limited amount of Senses we have hearing and sight and taste and touch and you know it's very limited right why would we assume that that is the only way to perceive things if you could become infinitely intelligent you could legitimately perceive neutrinos you know

you could right like if we have this thing that prots the ripples from black holes colliding that might be a feature of a future human body if we have an unbelievable capacity for information because it's artificially created so we get over this biological limitation of long scale Evolution like a really good like the human brain doubled over two million years and it's the biggest mystery in the entire fossil record like what happened all these theories but that's a long [ __ ] time in 2 million years of Technology we could become God or a Godlike

that but it might be How the Universe creates itself the universe might facilitate that through these biological beings fighting over resources and territory which ultimately leads to Innovation which ultimately leads to cities and agriculture which ultimately leads to safety which leads to schools and people start sharing information you get curious people that figure things out and you have to battle ideologies along the way which makes you work harder you know we all look back look what they did to Galileo and everybody has these you can't you can't science has to advance and this along with

materialism so materialism is a primary driver everybody wants the newest latest greatest thing you could 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 you know I'm the biggest dummy in the world I got a new iPhone it's it has actually better it's got a few features one of the things that's very

fascinating is I was in the mountains last week you can text message people with no one around you no signal no I mean Woods forever and if you hold your phone in a particular part of the sky it'll tell you which way to scan it and the satellite allows you to iMessage back and forth with people totally like you are 5G everywhere you could it's crazy and so you've already achieved Nana then you don't need to go any it's fascinating it's so fascinating to me I'm I'm so enamored by it I would argue I I

I think imagine that you had access to as you said essentially infinite knowledge imagine you're one ofs in the in the future maybe the things that we created right that that essentially know almost everything there is to know in I think that they would feel there was no point in existing at all but why don't isn't that a human thing this idea of a point like I make this argument with people there's a a Buddhist concept that you I think it's Buddhism or some strains of Buddhism where you 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 over and I said that to someone and they were horrified like oh my God could you imagine living life over again starting off as a baby going through high school again oh I couldn't do it I'm like but you did it and you're alive now like I really enjoy life I have great friends I have a great family I have a fantastic job I live in a great place like if

I had to keep doing this forever why would that be horrible I like doing it every day why would I not like doing it I don't understand like I don't understand this a that if something is infinite and it goes on for an every that's terrifying whereas if it's existing right now right now you're 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 it's this state of existence that varies depending on emotions

and mood and stress levels and environment but it's just existence if existence was eternal and it just kept going on and on why would that be terrifying for you when you're enjoying it now if you think about some of the things that make us the most important things that make us human so one of them would be hope for example hope for the future or indeed fear or those emotions that are connected with not knowing not knowing what's around the next Corner as you said even exploration right there 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 right and make us most valuable in 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 don't you think that miserable motivates Improvement that all that hope just motivates you to do

better and get better and don't you think that may a feature of a biological organism it's like you said when you when when you grow up you said like a you know when you're in high school or when you're young Christmas for example when you Christmas Eve you go what am I going to get tomorrow it's one of the most wonderful feelings isn't it one of the most wonderful like oh in the presence of none of that would exist if you were one of these super beings so so I think one that's just it's just

for us that it appears magical when you're comparing that to black holes colliding like is it really so important what you got for Christmas well it's be but it's us it's our biological needs our needs for uh our needs for to be shown that we're loved we got a good toy we our excitement about something that we've wanted that was inaccessible you know some something that you were hoping for for Christmas and you got it like make a video game console oh yeah is it I think what I'm getting to is it purely biological this

is a great conversation by the way I thought about this but it's only us or is it a just a property of intelligence does it I mean you're arguing and it's a good argument that that many of these desires come from our biological fragility yes and also the fragility of our planet as you said um but it could be that this these ideas of of meaning of of of what what it means to exist of what is the point of existence maybe that's a general property of any intelligent system well it seems like it's imperative

for survival you have to have a reason to do it it would be baked into the code if you wanted this thing to keep going otherwise why wouldn't it just stick with you know as soon as you figured out running water and electricity and how to ship food why would why would you keep going is there is there such a thing as contentment though um for anyone it's possible it's possible to achieve I mean that's what Buddhist drive for that's what all that meditation is the abandonment of all material possessions it might it might be

horrendous though I think it would be horrendous I don't want to abandoned everything and no more sex and you can't have a glass of wine that czy there so that's what I 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 curiosity is one of the most foundational things one the most incredible we both Shar that idea for us if you know so much right maybe that what happens in a world where Cur your curiosity is not there you

don't you've got nothing to be curious about you know to this isn't this a property of what it means to be a finite lifespan a finite life form that exists on a volatile planet that this hope and this surv 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 you linked to hope to anxiety is that is that right I hope it works out but hope and you're fighting you're fighting

the anxiety by having a an optimistic Outlook I have hope I think I was using it in a different way though I was imagining hope as like uh I don't know excitement for what's Beyond the Horizon sure so so not not driven this actually gets to the heart of what I think a scientist is by the way the difference between not only a scientist but let's say what is a scientist it or somebody just researching anything really someone who creates things they're people who like to stand on the edge of the known so they they

find it exhilarating but interesting almost in the context we're talking it's almost the one of the driving one of the things that drives our existence yes is to stand on the edge of the known and peer into the unknown with with excitement and curiosity because because you can go over the horizon yes and so that that's the sense in which I'm using these terms I'm saying that's fund one of the fundamentally most valuable things of Being Human yes that there's a there is an edge of the known yes and so would find it I think

more terrifying to imagine that there was no edge of the known that everything was known then I would think existence is pointless I wouldn't I wouldn't I personally would not find that I wouldn't think I'd achieved Nirvana then I think I I'd got no there's no point 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 like this is going to be great I'm going to learn some stuff that all that inate 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 we we're all confined to this temporary life form oh check my heart rate like make sure I get electrolytes you know we try to keep the body alive if we transcend that completely there's no need for all those things that are rewarding we'll have a different kind of reward we'll have a reward of infinite connection I think we're trying to imagine what it's like

to be God aren't we yes that's exactly what we're doing that's exactly quite hard I have been thinking about this a lot and I found out that somebody had already beat me to it but the idea that the universe itself was God that if 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

and but that in compar just the things that are miracles on earth like a person coming back to life is nothing in compared to a stellar Nursery it's it's it's like the 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 fact like the Giga factor that makes Teslas like there's a so much larger scale that

absolutely created everything not only absolutely create everything we know the process we know how it happened we know stars are formed we know how planets exist we know how gravity is affecting the planets around we know so much about all this we know so much about the process of going from single celled organisms to multicell 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 you everything the universe is everything including God if God is a real thing if you define God as the Creator yes then you're right from from some point that we don't understand by the way we 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 Roger penrose's he has he has a infinite cyclical Universe yes and he's trying to answer questions about the very special state of the early universe and why it was the way that it was

so his model is an infinite contraction and expansion it doesn't really contract it kind of it's called uh what's it called conformal cosmology or cyclical conformal cosmology or something so it's essentially that and and I don't fully understand it and I have asked him about it with some colleagues actually we none of us you understand it we're [ __ ] no no no I don't think many of us understand what Roger I mean Roger fener is one of the greats right so you listen to him taken very seriously but I I haven't met anyone who

quite understands what he what he's talking about in that but um but it doesn't Rec contract it's not one of those models where the universe expands and then and then Rec contracts 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 and I can't really fully explain it because I don't really understand what he's trying

to say right and so so it's not a 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 um 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 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 it what it

does tell you is that we don't know why or or How the Universe got into the state that we call the big bang so we don't we don't know whether the universe existed before that we have theories it did theories called inflation which are very popular theories you'll find them in all the textbooks which say that before the universe was hot and dense which we used to call the big bang space and time is still there and the universe is expanding extremely fast it's it's called inflation and then that period draws to a close and

that expansion so slows down and almost collapses and changes and the energy that was driving the expansion gets sort of dumped into space and changes and ultimately makes the particles out of which we are made so that that's that's actually the standard model of cosmology now so so we do have an idea that we we 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 that what did did that have a beginning

and the answer is that in Einstein's theory alone then yes and Roger penos is actually and Steven 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 Steven Hawking had a thing called the no boundary proposal all sorts basically the point is we don't know so we don't know

whether the universe had a beginning in time I would say is the is the correct statement as we are at the moment this 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 but it emerges from this collection of atoms right in 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 it's in Quantum Computing terms it would be just cubits so a network of cubits entangled together just like a quantum computer out of that we 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 so but it's funny it's interesting that study of black holes is forcing us towards these theories it's not that we had the theory space and time emerging from something and find and decided we could check it by thinking about black holes it's come the other way around really um so so it's it's interesting but that that almost almost makes the universe look in some ways like a a giant quantum computer

which is not to say that we live in a simulation right 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 I mean as we're 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 we're seeing the evidence we're seeing something that mimics a quantum computer in the UN you know we're like ah couldn't be that it it is it's interesting that it you're right and that's a good way of phrasing it m mimics how looks like like a network of cubits so it looks like some kind of quantum Computing description is is is available to us for the universe but I don't think you can infer much from that I mean it just passes the question further back as I said we we we we

we have never understood what it means for the universe to have a beginning do we don't really know that and so this is the same I think it's just the same question it's like well you ask well you know if it really is a network of cubits what it could have been there forever that network of cubits actually in quantum theory it's more natural for it to be just Eternal and and it's an interesting question I I I once gave a talk actually a um 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 cuz it might have we don't we know there's a thing called The Big Bang but it might have been something that happened in a pre-existing Universe maybe that's Eternal what does that mean for your sort of picture of a Creator does it I don't know I was asking it's a genuine question

right how would you and and they really didn't they thought it was a cool question and didn't have an answer right but it but it is I think that idea that I was a question to you Are we more comfortable with the universe that began or would we be more comfortable with the universe that had always existed I I I mean comfortable is a weird word because I always wonder if our whole desire to form the universe in 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're we know that stars didn't exist and they do they burn out we we know planets lose their atmosphere we 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 what it there's no reason to think it did like it 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 of observable everything there's nothing 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 we we have this look this way of looking at things because of our own limitations like we think that everything has to have a beginning and you're right I mean I mean you've had Sean Carrol on the show because he he always points out that you know this question why is the something rather than nothing

right presupposes that nothing is more likely than something right whereas it might be the other way we don't even know that how do 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 the 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 Andor an end so so the theory itself historically speaking strongly

suggests that and so he came changed his mind and then we saw the universe was expanding we observed that and then we've now seen the oldest light in the universe the cosmic microwave background radiation which is the Afterglow of the Big Bang so we know that the Universe was hot and dense 13.8 billion years ago we have so much evidence for that not least that we have a photograph of it 380,000 years after the big bang it's called The Cosmic microwave background let's see that let me see images of that that's from the satellite called

plank a European satellite and also satellite called Kobe so we have this images of the Afterglow 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 that I think that would be widely accepted the it's a beginning in Einstein's theory if you just take general relativity there's a singularity there at the beginning of time we don't know what

it is but it's there but it absolutely is true to say that we we think that's not complete as a picture so so there it is that's the so that is light that was emitted about 380,000 years after the big bang so it's it's a and the key thing there's so many things to say about these images but one thing is those colors correspond to regions of very slightly different density that we detected now in in the in the gases of the young universe are you talking about the red blue yeah the Reds and blues

those those all those as well they're both both same so that that greeny one well even that one the the one with the greeny blue that one that's the from the plank satellite so those colors correspond to regions of different density so in in this young universe 380,000 years after the big bang that's only hydrogen and helium gas basically and a bit of lithium bit of little some of the lighter elements but basically hydrogen and helium so you've got an almost smooth almost featureless Universe then but these little density fluctuations are very important because as

the universe expanded and cooled they collapse to form the galaxies so without those ripples without that pattern we would not exist nothing of Interest would exist and so you the question is where did that come from that pattern it's fundamentally important and the theory 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 Theus 37 seconds which is0 37 kns one of a second so it's incredible rate of expansion that draws to a close and those theor so there's inflation there so those theories predicted slight variations in the rate at which inflation stops does the inflation Theory does this work with sir Roger P Rose's concept I mean is it possible that inflation is the far period of the expansion of the Universe I mean it it is he doesn't like inflation as

a theory he doesn't um oh no so but so but but but it's right that 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 told me once I don't know if I told you the story before but he told me that he uh he' uh me made this measurement and it wasn't really he was looking at Supernova explosions and he'd seen that they the suggestion

in the data was that the universe is accelerating in its expansion not slowing down but speeding up in its rate of expansion and and no one was expecting it so he thought it was just wrong he thought but he couldn't find anything wrong with his data so he published it and thought well that's the end of my career oh boy you I he was quite young I think he might have even been a postar and he just published it he thought that's a good scientist right I I I don't think this is right but I

can't see anything wrong with it I publish it someone else will tell me where my mistake was and there was no mistake and he won the Nobel Prize wow for that Discovery that's the 1990s so this idea of the universe is accelerating in expansion the way that it does that is really important is it going to carry on doing that is whatever's driving that expansion going to change in some way which could actually recollapse the universe again we we give it a name by the way dark energy this thing MH 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 so but but the universe it looks like the universe is going to continue to expand forever and to continue to accelerate well dark matter and dark energy they're both very confusing yeah Dark Matters in some sense marginally less confusing in the sense that at least we have an idea of what it might be whereas

Dark Energy there are people listening to there'll be there are people working on it so there are theories about what it might be but I think it's further it feels less explicable given what we know than dark matter but we haven't discovered what we we think Dark Matter might be some kind of particle that is got certain properties and doesn't interact very strongly it's like interacts like neutrinos basically that you mentioned earlier so really doesn't interact very strongly but we've thought we might have seen those particles we're looking for them they would be passing through

this room now and so we could build a detector in here and we do that and we look for these particles we haven't seen them we thought we might make them at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN I think many people thought that we'd see the signature of these things and we haven't done so it could be that we're not right with that picture so but that picture encompasses what percentage of the known universe so yeah so it's about um 5% matter about 70% dark energy and the rest so 25% Dark Matter so so we

we're just less than 5% the this that's crazy so 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% as according to the standard model of cosmology and so the other 95% is just like who knows something else yeah and W but th 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 it's that's the broadly that's what you'll find in the textbooks but it's true that until you find it until you see it then you haven't shown it to be correct are there alternative theories there are and they're not compelling no they all have problems and most of them have problems with that pattern the CMV 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 and they they go 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 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 and those those theories uh require the D matter the D matter fits well if it's in there in in in this

Plasma in this kind of soup the 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 uh 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 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 so we 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 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 um 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 that's 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 if if we've not detected this stuff how do you know

and it's from Einstein's theory really so it's from Gravity it's it's from looking at the way that galaxies rotate and the way that these sound wavs 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 by and and find out what kind of different things are in there there by looking at the way it's expanded and how that expansion history has changed over time so it's all you what what you do with science

which is why it's you know it's true that you can criticize any one bit of it and people will so online you'll see in the comments under this there'll be people saying what about this what about this what about sure and it's true that you can you can pluck away and pick away any piece of it but the way it tends to work is when you have this kind of consensus view of something it's because you have multiple observations that all fit a particular hypothesis and by changing one of them by changing the explanation of

one of them you tend to mess the whole other thing up you you mess the The Wider description of multiple phenomena up you mess it all up so it's quite hard to to find um the other theories at the moment that will fit all of those different observations I mean another example would be the age of things it you it's interesting that you can look at we can measure the age of the Earth right you measure 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 by looking at called Helios seismology so you can work out you can measure how much helium is in the core of the Sun and the sun shines by making helium from hydrogen so by measuring the amount of helium in the core by looking at basically sound waves it's like an earthquake but Sun Quakes you can measure how much helium's in there so you can get an estimate of the age of the Sun and then you can get an

estimate of the age of the universe by measuring how it's expanding and using Einstein's theory the fact that they all fit with the picture of a universe that's 13.8 billion years old a sun that's 4 and a half billion years old a planet that's 4 and a half billion years old the fact that it all fits is it's it's it's quite an intricate model and so you could say well I argue with the the measurements of the age of the Earth maybe I don't like the radioactive dating or something and people will say that but

the thing is it's a consistent picture with multiple different observations and same with dark matter so the standard model of cosmology is you have I said about 5% matter 25% Dark Matter 75 70% Dark Energy it might be wrong but it fits loads of different dependent observations so it's a consistent picture of the way so we just don't know what it is but we're not very sure that it's a thing the other pretty sure but it could it could not be compel was were any of the other theories competing the theories were any of them

compelling there 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 it our observation's wrong may maybe because the way we measure how the expansion of the universe is is to look at light from Supernova is one way and see how it's stretched over time because the light let's say you

have a supernova uh 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 so you just measure the color of the light from the Supernova so but 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 or you know so you can invent theories that would allow you to change the the data or the interpretation of the data but what you always find I think it would be fair to say is that you can change a theory and explain one bit but all the wheels come off the other bits got it so that that's why it's quite difficult so the Dark Matter Dark Energy theory is cohesive to all the other theories yeah so it fits yeah with you know but then there are

some Mysteries well not least what is this stuff right right and so until you know what it is you don't have a complete Theory well that is one of the most fascinating things that 95% of the universe is like who knows what it is yeah yeah yeah and so that that's what I love about one of the things I love about science is it 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 there these people are

saying well this is the way the world is and and you might say well you know how are you to say this the thing I like about it personally and the reason for it success is that really you you have to be delighted when you're wrong it's the key the key to science it's been said many times Richard fan the great physicist said it you know this is if if you if your goal is to understand nature so that's what you want to do so you don't you you've not got an ego or anything you

don't want to be proved 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 all good scientists will be absolutely delighted because it' be tremendously exciting that we'd ruled out this picture it' 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 we're 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 and so I think it's it's a humble Pursuit ultimately science and and that's the reason for its success because you're just trying to understand how things work you're not trying to you're not you you shouldn't be anyway good scientists and not trying to be the person that got it right you're not trying you're you're not trying to do it there's obviously human failing everyone's got fragility and everyone's human you know and ego but ultimately you're just trying to understand how things work yes and that's a beautiful thing and it's so important for everyone

else that doesn't have the time we need you doing that I need it really does in some way give us Comfort to have a a better more comprehensive view of what we're experiencing and as technology expands like I was wanted to talked about the James web some of the discoveries um but it sometimes it raises more questions and one of them was these galaxies that were formed that appeared to have been formed to quickly is that safe to say yeah so we had one of the reasons we built that telescope was to what it does

it 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 mhm so um well a few hundred million years sorry I should have said so so you're you're seeing the first galaxies form with

that telescope which is one of the reasons it was built and and the reason we want it to see is because we we don't fully understand that process as I mentioned before we don't really fully understand why they have black holes in them and it's something to do with their formation but we don't understand it very well so it's not surprising to me that when you build that instrument and collect light from the early Universe you see an early universe that's behaving in a different way to the way that you thought it behaved and so

indeed yeah we we're seeing galaxies that for you formed earlier than you would have predicted but that means that that means that your model of the way the universe evolved is is not quite right and that's not a surprise because we wouldn't have built the thing if we'd known everything right of course so I don't I don't think there's any 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 do yeah I I would say so and I'm not an expert in that field but my my understanding is that it's interesting because we're we're having to refine and develop new models of the way that the Galax is formed and indeed you're saying that it looks like the stars and the galaxies are present in the universe earlier than we might have expected so it might be it might be that you're seeing a hint of something really profound that we didn't understand or it might be that just the models need a

bit of a tweak so galaxies form quicker than we expected in the early stages of the Universe um what are those red dots the red dots that that were observed do you know what I'm talking about in the in the images the James web images of the Universe yeah they're dis that disappeared do you know what I'm talking about I I saved it cuz I I knew that we're going to have to talk about this um it was um 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 he says it says there that we don't know I'm going to go with that I mean I think just speed reading that so it says it say a class of galaxies that um that so I 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 um red and compact visible only during about 100 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 super massive black holes that 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 there that's the first time I've seen that but just so so it yeah I think it what we're seeing is that we don't understand

how structures formed in the universe we we have a reasonable idea but we don't understand the detail and the more things like that you find the more information you have to build models of how Stuff formed do we have another like next Generation James web type telescope that's even more efficient or more capable there are I mean there are there are several sort of proposed observatories um and also by the way gravitational wave detectors which so we've got ligo which is on the ground there were proposals to put one in space which is called Lisa

one one of the one of the proposals is called Lisa which is lasers between satellites so you can have much bigger things and the reason that's interesting is because there'll be gravitational waves from The Big Bang so you know as you mentioned neutrinos you got nutrino 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 neutrino will have information gravitational waves will have detailed information

about the Big Bang itself but we can't detect them at the moment because that 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 ear we're asking very deep questions about why the universe is the way it is in maybe why there's a universe at all in the sense that did it have a beginning and if so what

does that mean was it mean for something like this to begin yeah I I really I find it fascinating because and the most exciting thing of all is that we don't know yeah and that's so important by the way and I 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 it's just this idea that I think it goes back to what we're 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 you were saying maybe you would maybe that's what it means Nana you know maybe achieving Enlightenment that's what it means but I find the the most the most human I feel I think is when I when I'm on the edge of the known sure so it's that that that the fact that there are mysteries in the universe profound Mysteries to me is is one of

the things that makes life worth living most certainly as a human as a human being that's true yeah my point is that I think eventually we're not going to be human beings well I'm sure you're right we get past this little flip well we're also in this weird depopulation stage where you know people move into urban areas it's very strange where it's 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 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 [ __ ] up the world we've got loads of problems loads of problems which should all be fixed by AI well there is a there is an excite there's an exciting future isn't there I I feel that it's always ex we're going to go 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 yes 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 the rockets that we have now I mean reusable Rockets to me we haven't talked about that but I I think it it's an absolute Game Changer it is now the case that we can we have cheap and

reliable access to space we should play that video of them catching it because that is one of the most incredible achievements in human history and you 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 it they caught a rocket that's bigger than a [ __ ] skyscraper yeah got the video it's amazing yeah I think it's this is absolutely a 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 remember that in future Generations will remember that I thought it was CGI I really did I thought this was fake when I first saw it I thought this was something that someone had made and then I realized this was the actual video footage of it I'm like oh my God that's the road to the stars that right there that that moment tell me that doesn't remind you of the movie contact it does a it is it that that

didn't end well though no but well you know neither did Apollo one yeah you know so that so that and and also of course you know blue origin and not far maybe not far behind it you know so so I love that two private companies with billionaires at the helm that are out of their mind pushing pushing building markets go you know and I get you know I get criticized for this quite a lot and and will no doubt after this interview because I I do think our future at some point is is beyond Earth

it has to be right obviously logically it is but um the question is when and there are two things to say that one thing to which I'm sure you'd agree with is that it I don't think anybody is suggesting that what we what we're able to do now is trash this planet and then move to another one 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 well not

quite not now but it's coming right now not really that's true but we so we need that technology so we're on the verge of having that nice there was Carl Sean one he said the dinosaurs had a space program they'd still be around so it's their fault in a sense which I kind of you know they didn't build Rockets 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 yeah them let's just reset yeah send in the hard reset button yeah I

mean so but I think that idea that basic idea I interviewed Jeff bazas once and he was fascinating and he said to me the um first of all we need infrastructure in space because if you think about building Amazon he said what what I needed was two pieces of infrastructure the postal service and the internet and so they were provided and I could build my company so I want to do that for the next generation of entrepreneurs in space I don't know what they're going to do in space but I would like the infrastructure to

be there for them to do it and that's really simple and then he also goes on to say of course as we said before the resources are up there they're infinite infinite resources Infinite Energy effectively up there and so the idea he said to me I want to Zone the Earth residential and and people say that's ridiculous what are you talking but how ridiculous is it when you see that when you see the fact that for the first time we have launch vehicles that really should be able to launch almost anything we want right so

the idea that we can build infrastructure in space and then of course build bases on the moon and then ultimately Mars and then beyond that's a lot closer now let's look at that and say what is that 100 and how many years from Wilbur and Orville right yeah it's essenti what 120ish is it yeah yeah that's crazy yeah so you go from this goofy like flexible sort of airplane looking thing that no one's going to fly across the Atlantic in to catching Rockets with a giant like hand the robot clamp yeah that's insane that happens

over such a short period of time like look at that thing it is that's 100 to go from that to Blue origin is insanity yeah in such a short period of time so I think we're I think we're on the 1906 yeah so we're on the verge of of a of a revolution in many fields My worry is that we're also seeing increase in political instability yes and so I think we're at a 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 I'm concerned that this we don't know how to build a bridge to that future that we should see in our life time we we should see this future beginning to unfold before 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 II and I'm sure you're aware of what Einstein said about World War I that World War III I don't know what weapons they'll use but in World War I it'll be rocks and sticks yeah and they 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 a sudden everything is obliterated and you realize like we're in a new era of Destruction where you can and what what's interesting is to me is I I've got interested in uh in oppenheimer's writing postwar um and I've been interested in it the BBC asked me to look at um there's a thing called the BBC wreath lectures are very famous in in the UK and every year someone gives these lectures um after Lord wath who founded the BBC and offenheim 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 KN how exceeded our wisdom and our political skill which is arguably true yes 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 and he he describes this um the

the deal how if there's any lessons that science teaches us the exploration of nature teaches us that we could move into other fields that we could transfer into politics for example and one of them is this picture that complex systems put it this way complex systems are complicated right so so he's talking about looking at Quantum Mechanics for example and it gets complicated and you say what is an electron it's this thing it's a particle like Point like thing or a big extended wavy thing that what is it it behaves in all these strange ways

we don't really have the language or the mental capacity to picture it and so he said any attempt to say this thing is this or it is that it is like this thing it is is doomed right what 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 um what is it it's a Lo it is at one level a load of individuals like

little particles and they had 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 there and you might strongly disagree with their anchor and they might be wrong right their anchor might be nonsense but but the challenge of politics is to avoid war it's I read somewhere recently someone said I can't remember it was but said that democracy is a technology to avoid Civil War that's what it is so somehow you've got to understand that whilst you have your and should have your firmly held position you you have to find a way and it 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 to convince enough people that our your view is the Right View and that obviously is part of democracy right it's the way it works right youy you argue for your position and

then you get you get four or five years to do your thing and then someone else can take over but also I think the thing we're missing at the moment is that is that more perhaps more fundamental function of democracy which is to avoid war because if you can avoid war especially with the power that we have now you have the time to sort the rest out but if we can't avoid war we don't and I think that and offenheim 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 the primary the primary function of democracy is not to ensure that your side wins the primary function of democracy is to assure is to is to ensure there's a chance for the other side to win at some point in the future yes that and yeah that's that's that's it really that's what I would it's completely accurate and the problem with our version of democracy is that it's been captured by money so can there's interests beyond the will 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 they've distorted reality to the point where the general citizen doesn't really have a Nuance understanding of why these conflicts are taking place in the first place and why all the money is going over

to these places and what what what is being done to mitigate any 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 this is they they never thought they going to have corporations corporations weren't even a thought it wasn't even an an idea so they never thought you'd have these not just corporations but corporations that are essentially in charge of a enormous percentage of the information that gets

distributed online you know and and you you see how organizations uh 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 uh responsibility to pay the people that uh are in that

are making these stories and so by this little 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 uh I want to share it with you on Twitter uh 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 you're not these companies aren't paying so the idea is that X because the profits that they get through advertising is all based on engagement that there's engagement that sends people to this and so they're profiting from it and that profit should be shared with the the media company whether

it's Los Angeles Times or whatever that's crazy because it's it's a two-way street it's promotion like so many more people are going to read a New York Times article if it becomes viral on Twitter this is just makes sense it 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 we um I don't know if it's just on Facebook say meta ban well I I'm I'm I'm just curious is it see if it's the case well Duna was saying it's to 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 so the internet yes right just the internet yes because it's only as you said in in the Great sweep of human history right and it's only been used by people for 30 years yeah yeah and it's it's a couple of decades it's been influential yeah so I think it 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 is how to deal with this thing that we've only had for a couple of decades it's clear I think we would what you know people again will beist into 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 we don't know how we the way that it's influencing our changing our democracies let's just use a non you know

that it might be changing them for the better it might be changing them for the worse but the way it is changing them I don't think is fully understood well not just that it's being manipulated by governments like governments have troll Farms where they just attack certain sensitive political issues and they they make polarizing statements and crazy they crazy claims and you go to that website or you go to that Twitter page and you realize oh this isn't a real person this is just like some bot somewhere and a former FBI analyst I'm sure you

have a lot of bots a former FBI analyst made uh 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 like 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 I want to see like 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 W up buying it yeah but that was a big part of it like how much of this is even real like I see arguments online where people take these crazy inflammatory positions like just insulting and attacking people that believe one thing or another thing and I'm like how much of this is like instigated by China or Russia or

Iran or some other foreign country and they're doing it through these troll Farms which we absolutely know exist and I'm sure the United States has them as well and I don't know what the answer I mean one one answer I me the way I do it because obviously I'm on Twitter X and um and so the way that I do it is you can tell you I think by someone's timeline usually cuz my my basic rule of thumb is that if you look at someone's timeline and it's all political right I just ignore them that's

my Bas because because a normal person's timeline look at your timeline for example you look at mine some of it's just silly stuff right some of it's retweeting sports stuff or sign stuff or whatever it is I like airplanes so a lot of my stuff is retweeting stuff about airplanes right or whatever it is so I think you can I think you can see a real person by seeing a breadth in the things that they yes retweet or whatever or 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 M so they you you'll see an account and all it does is is promote divisive issue you can see them mile off I think so comes back to you know how do you how do you deal with it and you're your my sense would be your sense you it's hard to legislate around conversation isn't it you

yes so what do you do I suppose you could argue it's education ultimately ultimately everything comes back to to education evid a democracy requires an educated population right have the tools who have the mental tools to deal with this sort of new world of information that's I think that's something that we should probably be teaching to Children is how to navigate social media and how to navigate influence and how to navigate other people's opinions of you and how to navigate like online bullying how to 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 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 educ as to how to manage that and what that what that means to you and the addiction that people have to social media and addiction people have to their smartphones in general is is probably underappreciated yeah probably it's 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 we're essentially inundated with the things that will scare the [ __ ] out of us the most which is 8 billion people's problems whatever is happening in the world that's terrible you're going to hear about it first and that's going to be the things that Trend the most and it gives you this 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 and 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 this social media online influence flood and uh we haven't really shored up our basement yet we don't we don't really know how to protect ourselves from it but we can be optimistic yes as we say because we're both Optimist I think

ultimately yes I'm very optimistic because of those the things we've talked about today well also think that because I'm and I think you are also successful at navigating that world without it killing you like I've I can navigate the world of social media and I can like as you said you look at someone's timeline and see that oh this is crazy talk and you have your own you know objective understanding of the world to a point where you could see where someone's being ridiculous but some people just aren't that good at that they're not educated

in that maybe they they haven't been around enough people that are critical thinkers and they 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 with against that I'll do this I'll do that and these are not like well thought out actions I I do understand though that you and I you know we you know we we we're we're in a good position right personally 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 when if you're I often think actually I see people who struggle uh when 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 it was I did a series on the BBC in like 2009 or 2010 called wonders of the solar system and suddenly I was well known and I find it very I found it very

difficult to navigate and and fortunately I had the support structures and people around and I could navigate it and you come to terms with it and you learn how to do it but it's a process isn't it so I think it's the same the problem one of the problems I think withal 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 and and and know the I think it's probably almost impossible to to navigate that um as just

a person who just suddenly is exposed to that glare of publicity and becomes a public figure sometimes a hate figure yes overnight well it seems particularly difficult for people that didn't ever anticipate it like the Jordan Peterson of the world like people that became quite prominent like in their late their 40s an academic I mean you know um and and yeah I mean that's what I was did I was an academic and and then had a success on television yeah and um it wasn't in a controversial area right it's about planets and the Soul system

astronomy so um but even then I I I found it difficult initially to to navigate through that world and you get used to it eventually it's a very bizarre drug that's what Fame is it's a very it's a very bizarre alternative state of cons 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 just angry there's a lot of like really messy people out there I do yeah there's still I mean the number of people who when I so I did that that the Rocket Cat right the star c as you said the most incredible thing I just retweet that and said brilliant and genuine the number of tweets I got back saying that space is fake I don't know 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 hash spaces fake Rabbit Hole one night online and uh it it it has something to do with uh biblical uh stuff because they 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 that you can't get through the firmament and that there's like an ice wall and that's why you

can't travel around I love is that when you you go you go okay so let's let's assume that's true let's let's assume imagine all the all the astronomers all the astrophysicists all NASA China every space agency they're all in cahoots and no one spilled the beans and then 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 and now I don't reply at all to the obviously it's you learn that yeah M why do you what possible Advantage could there be

right for I mean and and what's the answer I I think they think that it's just a scam so so your 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 communication satellite they should try starlink starlink they should try it so they know space is real they probably think it's just deflecting off the off the Dome or something I don't know I guess but the the crazy thing is the idea that everybody's in

cahoots that all these competing countries decided to all lie together and yet I I there's no record of it there's no record of communications there's no ex there's no people that rebel against this idea and go this is madness everything's round 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 right I've interacted with the government the idea that they're competent enough to do this right tremend ously 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 I mean there's certain certainly conspiracies that are real but that's just Preposterous but it's also it's like this it's a again it's attached to a weird religious thing they they do believe in the literal interpretation of some of the stories in the

Bible and that's the somehow or another that's been attached to the firmament but that's one of the problems with um sort of um when when you can especially if you're an articulate person and you even if you form like some crazy you make some fake documentary and you attach a bunch of fake facts to it and if it's compelling and no one like you stops and goes hold on that's not how it works this is how we know this this is why the planets are around this is how we know this is what bod'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 it was created by God and space is fake okay well you you've I've learned something I didn't know because I didn't know the space is

fake thing was linked to that so that's that's um it's a very religious information yeah at the root of all the Flat Earth stuff is the firmament the root of all the Flat Earth stuff is uh it's based on some very bizarre interpretation of biblical biblical uh I I don't remember the exact depic ition 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 but that going

back to what we said earlier if that was the way that nature is we tell you I'd love it well 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 like that would not be something body would hide I'd like to find that out that you know that because you become tremendously you know I mean what a great discovery but it it isn't so but people have like um a natural inclination to uncover vast conspiracies and I think that's

one of the the weirder ones that people gravitate to but again I I really think it has something to do with blind belief in religious writings and not not just that but erroneous interpretations of religious writings you know when you're we dealing with something that was originally written in ancient Hebrew and then translated to Latin and then to Greek and then a lot of that gets lost in the translation a lot of it gets like you had a thousand years of oral tradition like I've always wondered at the beginning of the Bible in the beginning

there was light I wonder if that is like someone trying to figure out the big bang I mean it doesn't make sense that they would have a concept of it back then but it also doesn't but maybe that's something like we inherently know is that there was an event maybe the the 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 without form void and darkness

was on the face of the deep I love that it's a great line 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's in 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 denial and the waters and you find that in many religions that there's water and things emerge out of the waters and you see that in

Genesis that echo of it Darkness was on the face of the deep and then there's light yeah 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 very little information back to what we talked about earlier that 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 with PE people who have different different views different belief systems my sort of Baseline position is if you're curious and you're interested and you want to know how things happened that to me is Common Ground that we can share the people I don't really understand the people who are not curious right and don't have questions because I think Carl Sean wrote a great book called The Demon Haunted World science of the candle you know that book yeah well he say that story about a taxi driver when

he got in the taxi at the start and and he's asking him all these questions about Atlantis or whatever it is and this and he realizes he doesn't think this guy is is is an idiot he thinks this guy is is has a curious mind he's someone who who should be we 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 yeah somehow channeled to the real Mysteries yes but it got sidetracked into all this strange Stu

I think the real 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 simp simp more more controversial so that puts them in like a select club of people who actually know what's going on where people love stuff like Q andon they love stuff like that where they're they're in the know of like some top secret information and by the way that that that idea that I think one of the problems we have communicating science and getting young people into science

is that idea that you have to somehow be really clever which is not true at all it's um it's goes back to what I said before that the it's more you have to be comfortable with not knowing so that's a big step yeah to say I'm not going to guess and and I'm okay if you ask me a question about the the origin of the universe right the answer is don't know so I think it's it if as you said if if you can be comfortable with not having to have a simple intelligible explanation for

something then you'll make more progress in life but it's quite difficult so it's easy to just go it's a simpler that thing yes so there's a simpler explanation there well it's also very difficult for people because they attach their ego to ideas and once you have set an idea then you are attached to that idea and you defend that idea it's a real 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 fan he said um what the the great there's a great essay I've probably talked to you about before called the value of science that he wrote 1955 you can get it online and in there he says the most valuable thing is scientists bring this transferable skill to life and it's that you have a great experience with being wrong yes 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 you can't you that's why science is so important in schools and experiments are so important it's not that you just swing a pendulum and it's nothing interesting about that but it's just that you're learning that there is there's a gold standard of knowledge which is nature and as fan 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 the whatever it is it doesn't matter nature just doesn't care and so the the more you interrogate nature even as a little a kid at school with a little experiment with a battery in a live 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 so how do we how do we form a a view of and it can be very important questions

it can be questions like what happens if we carry on putting greenhouse gases into the atmosphere for example whatever your politics are it's a legitimate question a good question right scientifically good question to influence the climate if we carry on doing this and so how do we then address that as a question you can't do it by going back to your political affiliation or your belief system you've got to try and understand this complicated system which is the climate of a planet so you make measurements of the thing and you build some models and computer

models and there's a very famous saying that all models are wrong because they're models right so but they're the best you can do so you have a go and you come up with some can information and and and a model that kind of works and you say this is the best version of our knowledge at the time and then you can try to act on it and you refine the model and that's the process but the 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 it's it's nothing more or less than the best picture we can manage of how nature works at any given moment it's not a truth it's not something by its very nature the way that science works is it will it may be shown to be incorrect or not particularly great a model tomorrow yes but I would Define it as the best we and by we I mean our civilization the best we can do

and so we act on that I I don't see any other way to act no as a civilization other than with that the best we can do it's the best we can do yeah and that that term reliable information is so important because people want to LEAP to conclusions to try to like tie something up neatly when the 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 Allin that there must be life out there it just makes sense it makes

sense I know the firmy Paradox with not withstanding 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 well 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 there there probably has to be there probably some sort of

radical propulsion system that they devis they've probably made some breakthroughs they haven't been forthcoming about because of National Security risks there's probably something really kooky that they can 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 uh advancing towards the creation of AI and like ruining the

planet while they're doing it like doing crazy [ __ ] to the ocean and poisoning streams and Water Supplies like I'd be like let's keep an eye on these [ __ ] freaks I I would most certainly say this is a if if if this happens all throughout the Universe let's just imagine that this is the natural progression from single- cell organisms to super curious Advanced life forms that eventually transform the world that they live in if this is a natural progression there's got to be planets that don't make it there's probably a slew of

that get to 1945 and it turns out that both Germany Japan and the or all Germany Japan and the United States all have nuclear weapons at the same time launch them all at each other and then civilization goes down to zero oh the Cuban Missile Crisis yes Cuban Missile Crisis or asteroid impacts or super volcanoes I mean the reason why we have mountains in the first place we have volcanic activity we know that every now and then there's a massive super volcano like what Yellowstone is this Caldera that if it's a continent killer if it

blows there's no more United States it stops being a thing most people on the planet die we get down to a few hundred Savages and we start from scratch and that's that's inside the realm of possibility that can absolutely happen so something has to get past all of these hurdles yeah to and if I saw a planet that's real close like us like wow they got to not [ __ ] this up they have achieved like this crazy Apex who they're so far beyond everything else on their Planet they're almost there they're almost there let's

watch them I would think of that too but I just don't see any evidence everybody keeps I bring in these whistleblowers they all tell me oh I've seen it it's incredible one day it's going to be released like yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah I don't see [ __ ] I think it's best to assume Carl San again wasn't it when he said no one's coming to save us from ourselves let's just assume that that we just definitely should assume that that's a 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 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 maybe whatever they

have they Crossing them yeah whatever they have I mean I'm so fascinated by it I want to believe everything I'm such a sucker you know every time I see Bob Lazar talk I want to believe it I want to believe all of it I as I said I wouldn't be surprised right I'd be relieved reli as well yeah please help us but yeah but also do you think about the way we interact with uh primitive tribes it's not good it ruins them almost every time like there's this story that we were talking about recently where

um starlink has been brought to some of these um very remote tribes and they've been given cell phones and now tribal leaders are complaining as we talked about earlier yeah these kids are on their phones all day in the [ __ ] jungle like instead of like living this subsistence lifestyle they've been living for tens of thousands of years some of them are getting lazy and they're just sitting around and they're looking at you know videos getting shout that yeah just looking at Tik Tok arguing with people online trolling yeah looking at memes and laughing

you know we ruined them and you this is one of the reasons why I like play like North Cal Island there's like you're not supposed to visit them you're supposed to leave them alone cuz they are this very bizarre state of uncontacted and very primitive lifestyle that we can you know we we can preserve which is also weird like shouldn't we help them like that's sort of weird too like they're human beings and they're living like people lived thousands of years ago I don't want to live like that today but but that's if I was

an alien life form and I wasn't so you know cautious about the impact that I would go you guys are going to stop this we're going to come down land on the White House lawn scare the [ __ ] out of all you you know take all your nuclear weapons away I wish somebody had do that to be honest but do do you don't you think though that I don't think the real problem would be the structure of our society is based on this idea that we have to work together to sort out our problems

and if something came here that was like far superior in intelligence and and its capabilities we we would sort of defer to that that would be our space daddy now and there would probably be religions probably some scam religions that get invented to try to you know contact and make peace with these overlords how did we get here we' come to but you know it's the idea like okay let's take a look let's pretend that we well let's extrapolate let's imagine um we do get to Mars we set up bases on Mars we do become

uh we we developed the technology that allows us to travel to other solar systems and we do observe uh a civilization that is you know like uh the Bronze Age you know and we we stumble upon these people that are develop they have tools they haven't figured out steel yet but they they done some pretty interesting things and they're clearly intelligent they figured out agriculture we would we would be studying them for sure 100% we would you know send word back to earth oh my God we found these you know people that live like the

Mongols did 1200 ad you know it would be fascinating we would 100% be interested in it and I think they would be interested in us this is Star Trek it is Star Trek the prime director the thing is yeah the prime directive Do no harm right isn't that what it is well don't intervene at I think don't intervene at all isn't it yeah I mean that I think that's what they would do I think we would hope that they would prevent uh but if that's the case why didn't they prevent Hiroshima and Nagasaki why didn't

why do they let us just practice blowing things up in the Dada desert for like 30 years I think you're absolutely right I mean I the point is I think there's nobody there that's terrifying the terrifying idea is that we're the only ones in the whole thing and that intelligent life is so bizarre and such a rare thing that happens in the only the perfect of circumstances that that would be my Baseline view the universe is so big wouldn't every single potential situation happen infinite it's infinite I mean we don't know if it's infinite we

we right we have the observable universe I think the current number is something like two trillion galaxies depending on how many smaller ones there are so 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 goldilock state in terms of where the planet exists in relationship to the star yeah I'm but we're talking the distance between the galaxies is you know the Andromeda Galax is 2 million light years away which is the largest and our nearest large neighbor so I think when I

when I think about this I I tend to confine it to our galaxy because I can't conceive of travel between galaxies too great I think it's too far although for now it is true that the laws of physics do not prevent that so relativity I teach relativity in the at Manchester University right for the first years the 18 year olds and the first thing we do in special relativity is 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 so and the one number I always have in my mind is at the large hyron collider at CERN the protons go around the ring which is 27 kilometers in circumference and they go around at 99.999999% the speed of light so close to the speed of light at that speed distance is shrink by a factor of 7,000 and so that ring is something like 4 m in diameter to to to the protons W so so it according to laws of physics if you can build a spacecraft that goes very

close to speed of light you can shrink the distance to the androm Galaxy and therefore the time it takes to get there by a an arbitrary an arbitrary amount actually the closer you get to speed of light the more you can shrink it and so you can make those two million light years you could Traverse across that distance in principle in a minute according to physic however the downside is that you 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 so you can't so there's kind of a downside to it that you C we could in principle explore the Galaxy and Beyond but getting to chat to everybody about what you found is forbidden wow by the structure of the 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 speed of light so we could come back a million

years in the future and and look at the Earth and find out what had happened you can't go back as far as we can tell so you can't get back to your you can't build a time machine to go backwards so these are time machines that that the world is built such that a time machine a way to think about it the way that we teach it in 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 SpaceTime and what Einstein's theory tells you is it's about the relationship between events so so let's say that we wanted to come back here tomorrow that would be another event we meet again tomorrow and you can say how much time has passed between those events in Einstein's theory the amount of time that has passed is the length of the path you take over space time between the events so it's just like saying in in a sense what's the distance between Austin and Dallas right you'd say okay

well it depends what route you go well what's interesting in Einstein the the only complication is the length of the path you take between events is the time measured by a clock that's carried along that path so that's that's how much so if you're the 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 that a different amount of

time will pass for them between those two things that happen just because of that one fact a very infinitely small but measurable amount of time it's a tiny amount unless you travel someone goes close to speed of light or someone goes near a black hole or something where the where the SpaceTime 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 um the the clocks on the satellites tick at a different rate

to the clocks on the ground and it's a quite a big effect I think from memory it's something like 30 over 30,000 Nan per day difference because if they're they're in a weaker gravitational field and they're moving and all sorts of things it's the same thing but 30,000 NS light travels one foot per Nan which is great I always said God used Imperial units because it's not it's 30.8 cm it's one foot right it's good it's one foot per nanc so that's 30,000 ft of position measurement if you drift your clock out by 30,000 Nan

so it wouldn't work so so it's a big effect for when you start using time to measure distance which is what we do in satellite navigation GPS so we have to correct so the clocks have to be corrected for that effect so so it's an effect that we can easily measure with atomic clocks but it doesn't make much difference to us as humans right but just the point is that the laws of nature would allow you to do it if you could go close to speed of light that by the way the last thing I'll

say is the the limiting factor you might say what what happens if you go really close to speed of light what happens if you go at the speed of light well special relativity Einstein's theory is built such that uh that the distance between any two events in the universe along the path of a beam of Light Between the events is zero no time at all so 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 the beam

of light and the answer is that you wouldn't perceive any time wow you can't the the the last thing I'll say just is that if you've got any mass at all you can't do that you can't go at the speed of light so according to our model which is a good model and it seems to work but if you've got no Mass you go at the speed of light so if you're a photon you go at the speed of light and and no time so what are your thoughts on the possibility of some sort of

a novel propulsion system that doesn't move things at speed but instead brings things together yeah that's called the I can never pronounce it it's the alure what's it called the drive you so so you can you can Einstein's general theory of relativity that general relativity is this theory of gravity and it's it's a theory where space and time uh distorted by things anything in the universe right stars and planets and so that that's what gravity is it's the Distortion of space and time by mass and energy that's Einstein's theory so you can and and it's

been done but you can develop sort of things where you say well if we could make this geometry of space and time if we could distort it in this way then indeed you can build a warp drive right right right but um it always turns out as far as we can tell that the other question is but what kind of stuff would you need what kind of matter or energy or field whatever it is what kind of thing would you need to make that geometry and it always turns out that they those things don't appear

to exist so these particular kinds of matter and 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 and so it's kind of a it's a bummer right is Ste it possible that we don't have them here but that in different planetary systems different different environments that these elements could exist it it's not 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 um Step Hawking wrote a very famous paper called the chronology protection conjecture so conjecture is important so it's a guess not proved where he said that whatever the ultimate laws of physics are that 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 the the present from the future right so in other words you can't build a time machine that goes back in time right so but so that but because Einstein's theory allowed you to

imagine such a thing even though you might not be able to build it it's not been proven Beyond doubt that you can't somehow make these kinds of quantum fields or whatever it is that you need to make wormholes for example stable wormholes you can go through and so it's not been proven so it's just it's suspected that that's going to be the case by the way to the final thing this will be very neat because it goes right back to what I said at the start that that one of the pictures of how I said

there was this thing the black hole information power Parx and we thought Steven's calculation was that no information comes out we now think it comes out so we now think that black holes do not destroy information we're pretty sure so it's been proven mathematically to most people's satisfaction that the information ends up out again so if you went into a black hole the information would be out in that Hawking radiation That Could reconstruct you in the in but only in the sense that if we if a nuclear bomb landed on us now then in principle

the information would be still there in the future and we could be reconstructed right but it's still in principle there and then but the question is how does it get out how is it getting out how is the information that is you ending up outside again and and it's not the physical picture is not really understood but the link is that one of the pictures that people are beginning to suggest to have is that there is some kind of wormholes in a sense some kind of Wormhole that connects the inside of the black hole to

the out side 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 um but they're funny kind of wormholes so that people don't really understand this but mathematic looks like maybe so it looks like maybe there's some role for wormholes these things the science fiction things of a after a fashion some kind of there's some role for it in the way the universe works so it's it's really cool the other the last thing I'll say because I is there's a thing

called E equals epr which is so epr was the spooky action at a distance so we may talk 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 Ein sign Podolski and roseen EP where they wrote a paper on this saying we don't like this it must be something wrong with

quantum mechanics we don't think there is now this is the basis of quantum computers so we build things that rely on this effect 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 connect the entangled particles so that's how this entanglement Works another description of quantum entanglement is a wormhole kind of geometry and this is 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 Compu computers and program quantum computers and these are the kind of problems you have to face about quantum entanglement and how you maintain it and what it means and there was a paper recently which is quite a controversial paper but it that I think was the Google quantum computer that

that which is one of the best ones and it's not using it as a computer it's using it just as these cubits these little Quantum systems that are kind of very stable that are the basis of quantum Computing and it's using those Cube B 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 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 whoa

from cubits and so it it's and it's so that paper was published there it is that's it a holographic Wormhole it's it's important to say that that Wormhole it's what's called a hologram it's not really in our universe it's kind of a different thing CU that's the last thing I'll say cuz I got I've got to blow your mind because your mind looks the 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 that the ads CFT conjecture

great physical Malena so the idea is that you can have a quantum theory living on a boundary so it you could imagine picture a sphere with with a quantum theory living on the surface and that Quantum there's a completely equivalent description of whatever is going on that the physics in the interior of the 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 and and it's kind of not accepted but one many physicists think our universe is like that so that

so what we saying is that we're having this conversation now and there's an equivalent description of this somehow in a theory that does not contain space and time that's a completely equivalent description that lives on a in in fewer dimensions on a Surface somehow that's surrounding us and it's really woly and hand wavy because we don't fully know what it means but it but it would mean that we're Holograms so that this this is a hologram of of of this other Jewel theory that 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 cubits which is just and by the way that word is bit weird it's just something like an electron it's not they're more complicated but an electron would be an example of one so it's a physical thing that we have in the lab that is a

Quantum system that's a Quantum bit so you build it and the different ways of building them and that's what a quantum computer is but it's amazing isn't it that we're beginning to use those things not for computing yet because they're really hard to program but we do physicists have gone this is great because Google and Microsoft have spent billions of dollars building these things because they want to build these computer Compu but they're perfect Laboratories for quantum mechanics so you can do abstract Research into quantum mechanics on them which I find fascinating that that's actually

more fascinating than using them to crack everybody's codes yes kind of like yeah it's kind of you know factoring large numbers it's kind of boring but building wormholes yes which is and I I caution it's not it's a complicated thing but it it looks like the beginnings of a laboratory to build structures like that that's so fascinating before you leave I have to ask you this cuz I thought about this while you're talking you you might be the only person that could explain this to us we were looking at this image of these Quantum entangled

photons and the image was in the shape of a yin-yang we couldn't understand what we're seeing right we couldn't understand if they did this on purpose to make it the shape of a yin-yang and it's just the representation of these Quantum entangled photons or if that is what Quantum entangled photons actually look like in in a shape uh so it's visualized to entangled particles in real time it says making them appear as a stunning Quantum y yang symbol yeah I mean it's um I I hadn't seen that but it's uh it looks to me like

it's another example of um trying to visualize entanglement looks fundamental let me put it that way so it does look as if this idea of entanglement which is the it is as I said perhaps producing space and time itself and and but also is the way that quantum computers work and the way that we didn't talk about this but the way that you can one way of picturing what this does is allow you access to multiple universes so many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics you mentioned it breaking people's encryption codes right right what are you

actually doing there um you're you you've got an algorithm you run on a quantum computer and how does it Factor these what it's doing is finding the prime numbers that you multiply together to make a very big number so it's very easy to multiply two big numbers together to get a really big number it's very hard to take a very big number and Factor it so find out what the numbers were that got multiplied together to make it that takes much longer than the current age of the universe for big numbers with any conceivable classical

computer but the quantum computer can do it in you know a second or something imp princi and and the the explanation 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 the actually there's an interpretation of quantum mechanics called the many worlds interpretation where you 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 and and many I mentioned David Deutsch earlier who's a fascinating uh writer in this field and the instigator of many of these algorithms early on who who would say that he would say this is is what is happen 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 right God and he

would say he would say it's doing it in the multiple universes I still don't understand the yinyang symbol well I don't fully understand that I but I feel so much better never seen I threw it again and I also now don't understand too cuz it says that by capturing the resulting image by capturing the resulting image with a nanc 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

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 entangle photons if you send them on a path then they they going by all the way back to find them you if you calculate the the way you calculate how a photon goes from A to B or an electron

whatever it is it just formally is you allow it to take all possible paths that's one way of calculating the probability it will go from one place to another and when you get entanglement it gets more complicated but you're essentially you are mathematically saying I allow it to go on all paths and so really there you're seeing what an interference pattern is is you're seeing the result of the fact that these particles can go on all loads of paths and interfere with each other and and make a pattern you can see and I think that

that's what that is so it's really that pattern is an ancient symbol it is beautiful isn't it it's unbelievably beautiful crazy Brian thank you so much what a great conversation I really really enjoyed it um please tell people how they can find you I know you're you're doing live performances I'm going to do some yeah I've been doing this tour for a long time now actually I ended up doing it for about two and a half years and it's changed a lot we've done it to over 400,000 people I was told the other day around

the world and I thought just to finish it because I want to finish it and write another one I'd come back to the to the us we did a few in the US but so coming back in April and May and doing these quite relative saw one years ago that was ages ago wasn't it yeah so this is um you know it's it's um it explores many of these questions actually particularly black holes and then just to round it off I'm doing a few so if you go and look on the web you'll find you

know we're doing some La New York Chicago around I hope we doing Austin actually hope I will insist it's not in there that we come do and and then you know yeah so that's that's what I'm what I'm up to thank you very much bro I really appreciate what you do it means a lot to me thank you thanks for coming in all right bye everybody [Music]