Caitlin McShea (Aliens, the Universe, Cosmic simulations & more)

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• 00:03:00 How should we act when we find other conscious life? How should we settle other planets?
• 00:09:01 Is there a cosmic cross pollination process?
• 00:11:01 Why are images of alien space ships always so grainy? Is there already an alien base on Mars?
• 00:14:02 Did Aliens come to earth and upgrade us over time? Does time run differently in different parts of the universe?
• 00:20:46 Do we live in a simulation?
• 00:30:23 Should we all read a lot of science fiction? Why it is like a mind lab.
• 00:37:34 How would life on Mars look like?
• 00:50:08 How will we cope with increasing technological change? Will it keep accelerating?
• 01:01:19 What is Caitlin's solution for the 'Fermi Paradox'?
• 01:15:16 Are we being 'indoctrinated by our past'?

You may watch this episode on Youtube - Caitlin McShea (Aliens, the Universe, Cosmic simulations & more).

Caitlin McShea is the director of the Santa Fe Institute’s InterPlanetary Project & host of the Alien Crash Site podcast.

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Welcome to the Judgment Call Podcast, a podcast where I bring together some of the most curious minds on the planet. Risk takers, adventurers, travelers, investors, entrepreneurs and simply mindbogglers. To find all episodes of this show, simply go to Spotify, iTunes or YouTube or go to our website judgmentcallpodcast.com. If you like this show, please consider leaving a review on iTunes or subscribe to us on YouTube. This episode of the Judgment Call Podcast is sponsored by Mighty Travels Premium. Full disclosure, this is my business. We do at Mighty Travels Premium is to find the airfare deals that you really want. Thousands of subscribers have saved up to 95% in the airfare. Those include $150 round trip tickets to Hawaii for many cities in the US or $600 life let tickets in business class from the US to Asia or $100 business class life let tickets from Africa round trip all the way to Asia. In case you didn't know, about half the world is open for business again and accepts travelers. Most of those countries are in South America, Africa and Eastern Europe. To try out Mighty Travels Premium, go to mightytravels.com slash MTP or if that's too many letters for you, simply go to MTP, the number four and the letter U dot com to sign up for your 30 day free trial. What would you say is at the core of the Interplanetary Project? That's what you run at the Santa Fe Institute? Precisely. So I think the core of the Interplanetary Project is a sort of counterfactual imagination exercise about human civilization off planet and of course that does necessarily if you want to include something like the interaction with other extraterrestrial species or different evolutionary tracks that occur when we seed life on other planets but it's mostly about human civilization and how to kind of challenge the complex systems that we have to build in order to succeed in that endeavor. So it's like a speculative exercise about engineering. Yeah, so if Robert Zubrin would, yeah, probably he does already, but if he wouldn't know how to build a society on Mars, he would come to you guys and you would produce a white paper for him, right? Yeah, it's not so much a white paper. This is a public outreach event. So as opposed to like our closed door meetings that produce white papers, which, you know, a Zubrin would be perfectly welcome to attend. I think that more interestingly, we would want to get the work of his imagination and his engineered society out to the world through like public programming. So this is more, this is SFI's sort of imaginative public outreach arm. Yeah. Well, maybe you can tell us what you've found over the years. What is kind of the baseline thinking that you guys have found? You probably have found a lot of stuff. But how should we act as a civilization when we go to other planets? And what do we do if we encounter aliens? Yeah, so that's the question, right? That's the hardest question. I think what we try to do is think through these sort of large questions with reference to what we've experienced on Earth in our evolutionary track so far. And I think that we've seen that quite often something like xenophobia comes at a great detriment to developing wonderfully thriving societies. And that's quite often the consequence of a misunderstanding or a fear. And I think aliens might present a sort of symbol of something to be feared. And since we've seen the detrimental consequences of things like wars and colonization, we want to be sure that we're not colonizing other planets, though I guess technically we are migrating to them and building societies there. So how to kind of effectively recalibrate the way that we do that peacefully for the planet itself and peacefully for whatever indigenous life might exist on those planets. And just I think try to eliminate this fearful prejudice we have against things that aren't like ourselves. And the trick is that we can't assume that alien life is like ourselves. Of course, that would be the most easy to detect. It's almost like we are hoping the universe turns out to be something like a mirror. And we hear radio signals or we see creatures that resemble something that we're familiar with on Earth, but we can't know that for sure. And so inevitably, it's something like an unfamiliar thing we are likely to encounter. And I say likely because I have to assume that there is life in the universe that's other than ours. And so when we do just taking the lessons that we've learned from our failures in the systems that we've built and engineered so far on Earth and attempting to break those and hopefully build better versions. Of course, that's not flawless. But that's the idea exercise, so to speak, is if you could break apart all of the systems that have proven to be not so robust, especially like in 2020, 2021. If you could break those apart into like their lowest divisibility and pick what you think were effective things, but then invent new things, perhaps that would allow us the best opportunity to peaceably engage with other things in the universe, better than we peaceably engage with ourselves. It seems like we have to be ready for the unknown on notes Donald Trump's fault would say. Yes. And we just have to be open for this. When you just briefly mentioned the ESSE project, it always struck me as odd that we're looking for very specific signature that seems to be something we invented only in the 30s and 40s, and that might not be relevant in 50 years from now anymore, because we don't have a lot of radio frequency pollution, so to speak anymore, because cables are underground, we find another technology, whatever that is, fiber has taken off. That's what all the signals are. What do you think of the ESSE project? Do you think it was a good idea? And do you think we're going to find something there? I do think that it's a good idea. I think it's an extraordinarily meaningful idea to have built a system around for investigation, even just in the ideology undermining the desire to seek things, techno signatures that to look for something more than just life, but to seek intelligent life, because I think that that life is found is going to be the most informative about what it is to exist as a sort of evolved species in the universe writ large, not just on our planet. And so the radio question is a really good one, because it seems to us that intelligent species necessarily invent, and it seems to us that intelligent species necessarily must communicate, watch to communicate. But yeah, the obsolescence thing is a really good point that if we're not even using as much, or we found new inventions that kind of veer us off the path of radio, why is it that we're using that as a proxy for intelligence elsewhere? And what I think, I don't want to say that this is what Ceti assumes, but what I think it underlines is this thought that what we will find is either comparably intelligent to us, or perhaps less intelligent than us. And I don't agree with that. I do think that we should keep the radio telescopes out because you never know what we might find. And you can't rule out a possibility until you falsified it, I think. But I love the pursuit of it. I just happen to think that we haven't found them yet, because we can't even conceive of what advanced technologies they might have in terms of communication. And if we can't conceive them and represent or recreate them, how would we know to look for them at all? So it's a bit of a yes and no with Ceti for me. Yeah. Well, it seems like a good idea to me, but it's so specific from what I understand that I always felt like we came through this long time spent of millions, billions of years of development, and we reached it within 20 years, and that's what we're looking for in our next star system is what, 4 million light years away. So that's quite a distance. We've just missed 20 years in that for whatever reason. Maybe then if the technology becomes somewhat obsolete, radio frequency up to emissions, I always found that's not just a needle in a haystack. That's kind of it makes no logical sense to me, but maybe I'm wrong, right? And it's probably worth it. It doesn't cost much. And from what I understand, it was almost grassroot funded. It doesn't cost much. So why not keep it up? It's at least, you know, feeding the algorithms. One thing I wanted to get into is if do you personally believe that aliens have been here? Aliens in the widest definition and other intelligence, it has contributed to the development of life on earth at some stage at the development of life on earth. Okay, so, huh, okay, so I think initially I would have said no in terms of something like a visitation and evidence for something like an intelligent visitation. And so intelligent, whatever, I don't know where I draw the line for intelligence, by the way, I kind of hold contradictory thoughts about where that is in my head and sort of titrate between those thoughts based on what new information I get. So like these days, let's okay, so let's say I draw the line at intelligent life in, in terms of a life that can communicate very inventively. Let's say that's my new definition today. I'm not sure that that has happened, that we have had a visitation from an alien species that sophisticated. However, I'm not convinced that panspermia isn't, isn't like reversely inversely possible. Like, because we haven't yet determined that the life that we have on earth necessarily emerged from earth itself, I can't rule out the possibility that something from elsewhere interacted with our geology to potentially get the thing going. I can't, I can't rule that out. So I have to think maybe yes. So by the term you mean that bacteria came to us from a different planet or another being like a one singular, the singular cell being, or what does that specifically mean? Or it could just be some sort of an interesting dynamical process that was like hanging out on the, in a crater of a rock that wasn't yet living, but kind of collided with another potential condition for it to become something that it never had the possibility to become. So it could even be beneath the level of like single life that we, that we think. So that's like very low level possibility, but I can't rule that out. So I think that might have been the case. I think it might not be the case. I'm undecided. This is why I think it's so good to continue to explore. Yeah, it's definitely a belief question, right? And I'm always disappointed. I've been looking at lots of the alien sightings over the years and they always fascinated me as a kid. And I always wonder what the images are so great. We have these great cameras now, right? Everyone has a 4k camera, but whenever we see it, the UFO, the pictures are crap and the videos are crap and the lighting is terrible. And I always feel, why is that right? We have, we have good images and videos of pretty much any other lens that goes on. Well, perhaps it's something like a cloaking mechanism. Like perhaps they're coming to investigate, but they don't necessarily want to be known in their true entity. So it's something like a technological cloaking device that has worked effectively to kind of scramble the technology that we possess, which would suggest that they understand the technology that we possess. But again, who knows? Well, I like the man in black idea that you literally make people forget around you about a specific event. That would make a lot of sense to me. Obviously, we don't have a device like this, right? We can't do it. But if you ever had a device like this, that would be wonderful. Right? So you say a thousand mile radius, you make everyone forget about the last 10 minutes. It must absolutely be possible. Yeah. The thing about the men in black movies is that that's usually used to, for instance, protect the citizens involved from recognizing that this event happened. And I wonder if that's necessarily like a benefit. I don't think, like if, if something like a visitation happened, I wonder if the use of that sort of a memory erasure device on the people who maybe have been within a certain radius of witnessing it, perhaps it would be good to know. I think it might be the most galvanizing thing for humanity on this planet. If it was known, that an alien visitation took place. Sorry for that. So I feel like, yeah, the whole mind erasure thing might not be in the best service in the same way that we think we want to protect the children in our lives by, you know, hiding or covering things up. Sometimes that doesn't work out. Sometimes it's better to be frank. I'm certainly no like alien psychologist, but I think that I would be so enamored if it was true that we knew for a fact that aliens visited. Yeah, it would change everything. I think it would change the whole power play that we have with Earth politics, right? And that was the claim that Jaime Shatmet, the former Israeli Mossad intelligence chief, and he came out. He's obviously a little beyond his best age, his best years. You know, he's in his late eighties now, and he came up with this claim and said, you know what, I didn't want to say it earlier. And he definitely had, you know, a very distinguished career that there is a base on Mars and maybe even on the moon and aliens at the U.S. and a couple of the nations they have been working together since the fifties. And I couldn't come out with this earlier. And they won't come out with it publicly and provide evidence because it would change life on Earth. And that's unpredictable. So they don't want to do it. But he was very convincing. And I think nobody knew was he just, you know, doing PR for his book. Is there some truth to it? Is he just crazy? We still don't know. And that's like what four, five months later now. Are you aware of the impression that there are these secret files in the Library of Congress that only the president has access to that demonstrably proves something like alien contact? It's unsurliculous, right? Because we can't keep any secrets. Nobody can keep any secrets for long. We know this from the Cold War, right? There were some crazy secrets and we're doing where the nukes are. And they all came out. It's pretty much obvious now. It's some satellite imagery where the nukes are. I mean, you find out sooner or later. And we found these talents in Moscow that they dark world, like the subway construction also included nukesites. And they were all found to bail on. So but you can keep this ticket for a while, right? Maybe for 20 years, 30 years. But I don't know, since the 50s, the sounds are quite a stretch to me and the whole base on Mars. I mean, there must be some rockets, you know, we would detect those. Right. We would be able to see if Obama and Hillary are flying back and forth. So it's a little ridiculous. I think short term, it makes sense. Long term, it doesn't make much sense. I do believe, personally, that we had some contribution of alien intelligence to life on Earth. I feel like we had this continuous improvement. And obviously, that's an argument to be made. Are we getting actually better? Are we going somewhere? Right? Are we going? Is this complexity that we are adding and we have, like, you know, neocortex and we behave like an intelligent civilization? At least sometimes is that is it like an end goal? Or is there something like, you know, Michael Graziano made that argument? He said, well, it's basically like some, some ants who find the wall on the other side. If you give them long enough time, they will build a crazy complex civilization. But it is not, it's not going to last because they don't know what they are up to. But we know what we are up to. So I like that because it points to this problem about time scales when you think about the possibility of something like a visitation, that perhaps species in the universe existed much longer moral time scales than we do, such that it's easier for them to seed something like the start of life on our planet, because our evolution happens fast enough in their duration, then it makes sense for them to outsource the building of the civilization to do it themselves. But I also, that brings back the problem of the likelihood of a species with which we could directly communicate coming to our planet during our planet's lifespan. This is why I love the movie Arrival that's based on Ted Chang's story of your life. These octopods, they're so similar in their capacity to communicate with humans. But it seems unlikely that those two intelligent tracks would actually exist at the same time. So I don't know how to reconcile that, but I think it's worth examining. And so I like this idea, I can't, you know, I like this idea that there was some sort of an intelligence quorum that was like, let's begin what could be intelligent life over here, so that we can save ourselves the trouble of building an additional civilization in the universe. Yeah, I mean, it's, it's for me, you know, when you look down to the complexity of the DNA and how it looks like computer code, that this cannot be just a coincidence, maybe it is, who knows? I mean, nobody obviously has good evidence. And we make these jumps and complexity from time to time and single celled organism, multi celled organism, and then we go into neocortex, which hasn't really spread to any other animal. Nobody really knows why, right? Why don't the apes behave exactly like we do or some other apes or the dolphins, right? They haven't built big cities and started talking and trying to, to build, you know, slight or whatever is necessary for the civilization. I always feel like it would be so much more convenient. And obviously, it's kind of outsourcing that a little bit until we can prove it, but as a hypothesis that someone came down here every 100,000 years, 50,000 years, half a million years, and gives us a little upgrade, right? It gives us a little, it might be, it might be like a drone, it doesn't have to be a real person, right? There's like a drone coming in, upgrades a little bit of our DNA, and then it moves to the next level, and then they come back a million years later. And as you say, time might actually be different in different parts of the universe or two different intelligence. And for them, a million years is like a year to us. So they, they, they see it happening. And the influence of it a little bit, but say they've only been here 15 times, but this is like 3.5 billion years on our time scale. Huh. I like, okay. So in this speculative exercise, I, I, I like the possibility of trying to figure out how it is that these sort of complexity jumps happen in human life. But I guess initially my thought was more like, if I'm going to entertain this as a possibility, and I totally will, it seems more like the flick at the start, because I think that we have, I mean, it's hard to say because there's, we could put it, we could talk about the scientific method in a second to get to this. We can't say for certain that we understand the mechanism through which these sophisticated molecules evolved, but we, we can to a really certain degree. Like I think that, so I'm good with the potential alien flick at the start, but I think that we could see a trajectory of something like the evolution of our genetic material and, you know, multi organ things inside of individual agents, which is, you know, organels and cells, my organs and me. So I think the leveling up has something almost to do with scaling. Like once something gets to a certain size, when a cell becomes multi cellular or tissue becomes a colony, then something has to happen evolutionarily to like cause that leveling up. And so I don't know, I mean, it could be alien intervention, but I'm not so sure. I don't, I'm not so sure that I'm with you there, but I could, I could entertain the flick at the beginning. Yeah, let's go a little further. And then I obviously want to speculate a little bit. Yeah, that's great. That's one of your themes. I know you've been thinking about this. What if time is, is very different in different parts of the universe, obviously outside the universe, it would exist very differently. You know, if someone actually created the universe in his PlayStation, maybe only a few seconds evolved the process of a few billion years. And I think like Mayor Murrow had a really good illustration of that, how the, the abstract consciousness and the concept of time and a lot of people feel, and that's again speculation, that time has something to do with consciousness. If nobody is there, nobody realizes time, right? If we are the only beings who can realize time is there, because anyone who doesn't have consciousness doesn't really have a time idea. I mean, if they have a watch you or not, it doesn't make any difference to them because there is no abstract thinking about tomorrow. But maybe we, we will see the time runs really differently, maybe just in a few galaxies away. Yeah, I think that's totally likely. I mean, we see the time operates differently in spaces that we occupy on earth, like you said, even without clocks, but we occupy so many different types of clocks. It's this like time flies thing. We, we perceive time in a variety of different ways in our living waking lives. And so this consciousness thing that you bring up to me seems more like something more that points to what I understand to be the arrow of time, that there's this comparative measure of something maybe like it's entropy, or it's just a conscious experience, like anti Hume, this thing that happened before is bound to happen again. Hume says, no, maybe, I don't know, it's a helpful tool when you're navigating the world. But the idea that there is some sort of a preliminary causation seems like something that could only be recognized by consciousness. But that could be a completely inaccurate understanding of time, right? I'm not, I'm no physicist. I'm just willing to be a little imaginative. And so, yes, that's what we are doing today. And, you know, just we can just pretend we want to talk about quantum dynamics, quantum mechanics. Because nobody really knows the answer, right? So that's, that's still the area of science fiction in the area of philosophy until the physicist will fix it one day and they need to figure it out, right? We are not there yet. With the science model, I think it's proven so well that, you know, with this speculation becomes a little harder. Right. And I think that that kind of points to this, you know, need for speculation, especially, you know, in addition to scientific empirical experimental pursuit, because there are elements of science that don't yet, that can't yet be reconciled. And so that indicates that something's either missing or something's broken. And so, like, it's okay. I think it's necessary to kind of jettison the assumption that what we have firmly established as a scientific proof is, is done, because we've seen so many times that it hasn't been done. So to continue to pursue in both ways, speculatively and like falsifiably and empirically, that's what's going to get us somewhere, I think. So it's an important exercise. Yeah, I think so too. When, when, and the kind of touch on this right now, it's, it's my favorite question to ask a lot, because it kind of, I think it expresses where you stand, but also how adventurous you are with your thought process is, do you think we are in a simulation? And if so, is there someone who controls the simulation? Is it the same people maybe or the same intelligence that might be responsible for what's going on in our plan, but maybe for the whole universe? So one question, I guess I have two questions about that. The first question is, does something like a spirituality imply that there's a simulation? Like if there's a controller over and above a simulation, and I happen to believe that it's some sort of spiritual being, is that an answer in the affirmative to your question? Not necessarily, but yes, they're related, they're definitely related. Okay, so, so you have a sense of how I feel about that, Pin. And then the other thing I want to say is that I, I've been thinking a lot lately about in, in science, whether or not we are are actually objectively capable of observing and understanding systems that we occupy. Like, can we understand the universe when we can't observe it over and above it? That doesn't, that doesn't mean that I necessarily believe that we can understand things that are scaled smaller than us, like cell colonies, because there's this empathic thing, we don't occupy them, perhaps we'll never understand. But I wonder if, I don't know that I think that I exist in a simulation, but I think that it's possible that there might be some, I mean, I will, I will concede that it's possible that in the same way that individuals are making toy models of the functions of the universe in order to understand it, it could be that that's happening one level above in truth. So it seems to me that the, the scientific observer who models is sort of a proxy for something like the simulation, necessarily. And I find that really an interesting space to occupy, because it makes me question how it is that the experiments that produce the conclusions that I, I read and mostly love, if, like, if there's some, some element that needs to be kind of tacked on to that, a little asterisk about the success of modeling of toys. So yeah, I mean, if we, if we just write this forward, you know, we always want to model because our neocortex, that's one of you, we came out as the apex predator, because we can model the future. So we don't fail as many times we would without it because we can predict the future. Well, very limited, but now we're getting better at predicting the future. And I feel nothing will ever stop us from simulating more and more of those questions because it will be seen as with AI, basically what it does is statistically simulates all the options and comes up with the best, most relevant answer for our problem. Yeah. Well, comes up with a mathematical, mathematically, like, I don't know if it's most correct. I think that we've seen a lot of bad decisions made by AI. Yes, yes, yes. Well, it doesn't know the future, right? But it, based on the data that it has, it comes up with the best answer. And the algorithm, obviously most of the algorithms don't produce anything useful. But the validation, obviously you do it against the future. Is it better than the old model? Yes or no? That's relatively easy to say because it's called the last function, right? So you see if it makes money or not in finance, or if it gives you a shorter route to your destination when you use it as a GPS, or it reduces the launch time for a new rocket. So you always know what that function is, right? So I think it's the same. It's just, it's a backward simulation, then you produce it forward. It's similar to do this with the whole universe. And even if the universe is this unique thing that cannot be replicated, always there once, is one day someone like us, you know, our descendants, they will come up with a way, and with the wish, I think, to rebuild this whole thing and see, oh, if we change the parameters along the way, what would actually happen? I think this is inbuilt into our curiosity. And the question is, is this a question, is this coming from our consciousness? So where does this particular curiosity for progress that we definitely have, where does this come from? Oh, I mean, I think that's life. I think this sort of creative and curious force that exists throughout the universe is necessarily life. I don't know what comes first. Is it possible that there is consciousness that imbues the possibility for something like life? I have no idea. But I think that necessarily they're entangled, and I think that's like, that's the thing that life does, life life. But a couple of carbon monogues won't have it, or do they? It depends on what they're doing. What are they doing? Yeah, if by physics, by an algorithm that's pretty simple, they're producing energy, and so they have a purpose that's tough with our model of consciousness to say that. Oh, I see. So like, yeah, that's right. So like, you're presuming something like a level of sophistication that differentiates consciousness from like, just dynamical processes, physical processes? Yes, I mean, the question is, I mean, then we go into what is what is consciousness, right? But is it an algorithm that's kind of, it doesn't know it's running, or is it like consciousness? I would consider it's an, it's an algorithm that feels like it's running, even if this might be an illusion, but it has some self reflection built in, that it can to change the future outcome. Yeah, I see, I see what you're saying, that it's self aware and seeking something like progress. Yeah. Yeah. But if we use that model, then the animal world doesn't have that, but clearly it wants to grow, right? So I mean, the argument makes sense. But if we go all the way down to a little single molecule, that becomes pretty tough to make that argument. But can we say that the animal, animal world doesn't have it? Because I feel like, you know, in the evolutionary sense, there's a need to reproduce one's self stuff into the universe more and more. And there are these animals that, you know, in an effort, like, whether they're self aware of the fact that they're doing that, put on beautiful dance shows and build pieces of art in an effort to secure someone who will mate with them so that they can succeed in this progressive endeavor, this progress endeavor. So I don't know that, I don't know that we can say that it's something that, that the animal world doesn't possess. Do you think that that's the case? You think that's like a human or alien intelligent special feature? Well, I think there's many other universes like ours and we are definitely in assimilation. So I think, I read with you, there's an inbuilt mechanism and inbuilt outcome for this. And there was a Black Mirror episode that had that, you know, basically, the idea was they took two people's consciousness and you only learned that all the way to until the end. So you didn't see, you saw the whole episode, you didn't know what's going on, you kept guessing. And they took two people's consciousness or lots of people's consciousness, they splattered apart. So basically, they multiplied. So you have many, many versions of this. And then they found the ultimate mate for you for your life. And they ran it through 100 years of living together, right? But you didn't know what was going on. It was your consciousness, it was you, but it was separate from you and it was assimilation. And then eventually they found the best possible match and that's the person you will be introduced to. That was all assimilated out. And I thought that illustrates it very well. And there seems to be this, this progress towards a better future. And we think actively about this. I don't know if plants really think about this. As someone else inbuilt this into certain, into the algorithm. But I don't know if this is really intelligence. I don't know what to say, to be honest, but I don't feel that it's a real intelligence or some molecules just going to coming together because of gravity. Yeah, I'm not sure. I feel like an argument could be made that like something like gravity, gravataxis is like an exploitation, like a clever molecular exploitation. And to exploit something I think kind of exists within the realm of this conscious intelligence consideration. So I'm not willing to rule it out completely. Wait, can you tell me in that episode, since I'm not sure that I've seen that one, when the two mates are found, when the perfect mate is found, are they supplanted back into the universe where it worked? Or are they in a new milieu? No, it's not a universe. It's literally just an, it's assimilation. It's an AI simulation, right? But the individual consciousness, it feels real. They don't know they're in assimilation for the whole time. But they know it's something strangers a little dream like, but it doesn't have to be such assimilation could be fully like the real world. But they know something is strange or like, they feel like this whole story doesn't really add up and they don't go to work and they only get introduced to other people. They ask questions, but they're not getting answered. And you know, they can't get out. So they keep going on that time stream. And then the answer is being the, especially just reflected back to the original, to the host, right, to your consciousness. And that's the result. But that's the other question. Is that result real? Is it assimilation or is it fake? Kind of what we see on social media now, we don't know. They, it will tell us what's real and what's the right thing to deal with, say COVID. But do we know? Can we ask someone? I don't know. It's, it's strange, right? So it becomes, even if you have the results of the simulations, reality doesn't become much easier. Because you don't know if it's real, right? Unless you know somehow, I don't know if you have a good, but if you never knew, it's not like you suddenly know, I guess. That's my question. It's not suddenly the actual players in the simulation are aware of the fact that they exist in a simulation. Not supposedly, but they will. And in the escape, that's kind of the big ending. But yes, but you don't know if this was planned all of them, or if this is spontaneous because of revolution, they break the rules, they almost die. So was it planned all the way? Or is, is that some part of the algorithm? Because this is the perfect match. You escape, you break the rules. Oh, wait. Oh my gosh. Is this, is this the episode with, I think it starts Brandon Gleason. They just keep going on like numerically assigned dates. And then they kind of climb over this wall. Yes, yes, yes. Okay. They continue to see on different dates. Okay. That's great. Oh, I have to rewatch that. I wonder if I, hmm, I think I had a different read on that, but it's been so long since I've seen it. The whole Black Mirror series is just a spectacular work of speculative fiction. It really like puts you into the perspective of what is so adjacent to your actual reality that you have no choice but to question whether or not this is happening. So I think it's a really good framework. Yeah. Yeah. And I think this is, I think one of your themes, I think science fiction has a lot well done science fiction. And Ben Narasen, he was describing it at, at hard science, as hard science fiction. So something that really takes physics and idea of hypothesis, white papers, and takes it and puts it into a novel and comes out with something that could describe another world. And I always feel that it's required reading for, you know, people in finance, people in venture capital. They only, the only thing they should do is read science fiction, because once something comes close to it, they will recognize it, right? Yeah. I think, I'm not sure that it should, I'm not sure that that's the limitation, just that economists, et cetera, venture capitalists read science fiction, though I think everyone should. But I also think that there's a place for the classics. I think it's worthwhile to learn from our mistakes or to learn from the foundations that we built and the path that we depended on for a while. But yes, I think we've seen some really, really interesting applications of, as you say, scientific work in a more exploratory safe space, this kind of simulation engine, if you will. And I think that's especially interesting for me when it comes to trying to build social systems, political systems, the way that we interact in new milieu in hopefully, what would you call that, like altruistic and empathic ways, because quite often what you see is the book and that this is why dystopia is such an important medium for science fiction to explore is that it's really, really good to learn from counter example as well. And so I like it, I like it a lot for, I think policymakers should also have to read science fiction. Yeah. Absolutely. Give me an idea where current ideas, if we go to Mars or we go to another planet, well, how would the political system look different than what we have right now? What would be kind of the vision? Well, first of all, I think what would be important, you have to, I have to assume that we're not off Earth yet, right? I think that Earth is still in the mix and Mars might be one of many colonies or I shouldn't say colonies, let's call them civilizations. So the first thing that would need to happen is some sort of a robust communication system, because I think that as we've seen human to human, even one semantic misunderstanding, the whole message falls apart. And just given the difficulty of existing across a space as broadly distributed as the universe, communication must be crucial and key. So there's got to be some sort of like a technology and communication council that ensures something like distributed access to whatever machines we need to effectively exist openly with the rest of the inhabitants of all of these civilizations, some sort of like a committee, but an ever changing committee, right? You don't want these tyrannical communications ours. Well, it's a communication, you mean that people can talk to each other or the state leaders can talk to each other? No, that people, yeah, something like, you know, for lack of a better example to ground it, something like broadly distributed internet, yes, yes, but literally distributed. And someone that is or a committee that ensures that that remains the case, until it turns out to be destructive in some way, because I can only foresee the positives. And then of course, if you tease it out to its logical example, its logical conclusion, a science fiction author might find a fault in that theory. And it turns out to be the worst thing that ever happened. Well, you kind of have a video call with someone and Sarah, right? It's just about 20, 30 minutes of delay. It's, it's a big call. So it must be something like, you know, what's, what's assing grounds. So right, exactly. Right, right. But also maybe like, like a civil discourse committee that ensures that people are, you know, willing to be broad minded and willing to are capable of expressing themselves in a productive and not bullying, terroristic way. I don't know, maybe that's, maybe that's what's different about a civilization on Mars 5000 years from now is that we have a more broad and inclusive way of dealing with controversial or contradicting ideas. You know, maybe we've evolved out of something like the social media limitation that a concise 140 character tweet reduces our thoughts to something so small that then we suddenly have to be defensive of what we didn't necessarily mean. And then we're misconstrued. And then it's just, you know, I don't know. So yes, Robert Zubrin says it's only 20 years until we have people living on Mars in a good case scenario, 20 years, very definitely more optimistic scenario, but it's technologically possible. He says to have people, you know, continuously live on Mars. And we're talking what, like six individuals? No, like, like a few thousand, let's put it this way. So the good news with Mars is with the, a lot of stuff is there, like we can put this oxygen, pretty cheap, it is energy there. So we don't have to bring much. That's the good news with Mars. And it's, it's maybe, and that's obviously a maybe if we find enough stuff that's so valuable that it's actually, we make money by going there. But that's a big if we don't have that yet. So we find a technology to make so much money, like mining, mining asteroids, for instance, could make a lot of money because based on the prices of platinum and gold. But the problem obviously is if you bring it all back to earth, then the price of platinum and gold will crash and it won't be as profitable anymore. So it's kind of a fine balance. Right. And if you think about cashing those kind of mind assets back to earth, then already you're creating some sort of an economic, a disequity, like an inequity between, you know, what exists on earth and what exists at Mars. And you have to factor in something like the payload that would allow you to send those assets unless you electronefy them. And you have a robust electronic simultaneous system that it works across this. So, so even just the thought that you mine and bring back to earth already creates something like an inequity that you would hope to, to work out before 20 years from now, apparently, which is still, that blows my mind. What do you mean by inequity or that the Mars is more platinum than we have? Or what do you mean by? No, if there's a meteor that's, that's between our planets and their mind. And as you suggested, whatever assets are found, the platinum and whatever are returned to earth, then already you have to build some sort of a robust system between Mars and earth to ensure that the people at Mars have the same access to that economic activity. Right. But it would be the whoever puts the money up for this venture, he gets access to all the gold, right? Whoever that is, it might be government or might be a private enterprise, but whoever goes out and pioneers this mining of that particular asteroid, he will get whatever the asteroid is worth, right? Well, but what, what if it is something like crowdsourced or what if it is something that like, yeah, that's a company can be crowdsourced, right? So that's, okay. Yeah, I just mean that there's not necessarily, it's not like find, finders keepers. I'm hoping in the future, it's not necessarily finders keepers. Yeah. Well, it's, you know, you have to put some money in. It's like, like an enterprise that puts something at stake, right? So it's, it's like, you take a risk, you put money in it, then you get the outcome. So it shouldn't be like, I don't know, Russia claims the first 50 and then we claim the next 50. So it's kind of a random assignment, right? That I agree with you. But it's ideally in an entrepreneurial way. Obviously, you never know if this actually materializes, it might be slightly different in the end. But what if it's something like a, you know, a federally funded mission, you know, that, that's something that's a consequence of taxpayers money from earthlings and from Martians, or I don't know if we call Mars occupying citizens Martians, but you can imagine that there is something short. It sounds good. Like you can imagine like, I want to be a Martian. You want to be a Martian. Yeah, I hear so much about it. It sounds so much fun. It's like the last frontier. And so just do you can imagine something like underground, subterranean? Yeah, you can't be on the surface for too long. It's just too much radiation. You can be for a little bit. But he's very confident that once you go not very far and around a couple of a couple of meters, maybe 20 feet, then you will be safe from radiation. So it seems relatively easy to build all frozen. So it's easy to build, you know, easy to build tunnels and there's enough ice, there's tons of water. That's all kind of cool. You want you want to occupy one of these tunnels? Maybe not the tunnel itself. I'd rather have a two way ticket. He's really set on the one way tickets, which makes sense, right in his spirit, because that's the spirit you need. But I think most of us think of a two way ticket, I would love to go there and come back on my own. Maybe a year later, I can say you stay for a while, but I don't just want to live my life on Mars. That's me a little much. Yes, I think the round trip aspect is huge, because also you have your own life that you've built for yourself on this planet. And everything you have to jettison, if you choose to take a one way trip to Mars, it's like the it's this kind of social rebuilding that you have to do a sort of, you know, heart rebuilding. So yeah, I think a two way, yes, a round trip ticket is something a little more delicious. But even still, I'm not sure that I'm not sure that I can handle the austerity of it. I'm sort of, you know, I don't know. It's a very luxurious planet. It's very luxurious. It might change. I don't know if you did you have a chance to watch the expanse on Amazon Prime? I watched the first season and we've had those authors, James S.A. Corey, it's two authors actually. We've had them to interplanetary to talk about specifically this how you consider world building. But tell me what you're going to say. No, I love how they set it up. I love how they set up this kind of grittiness on the outer colonies. You know, it kind of resembles a bit more of a ghetto, a slum. I loved how they set up this and also how to bring into Martians and struggle with earthians. I'm not sure if I like, you know, most of the story, I wasn't a big fan, but the way they set up the science fiction piece, I think, was close to the real work, but could actually be the case in a hundred years from now. I love that. Yeah, and it's just a recalibration of something like resource scarcity, but taken off earth and then put into the universe. It's like oxygen is pretty awesome. And so therefore, those who have the means have access to it. And everyone else is living in like an ash city. It's wild. Yeah. Yeah, I thought they had it. They had it worked out. I wish they would, you know, with the, with the novel, the nonfiction part of that. I mean, it's all kind of a fiction, but I thought they had the nonfiction part worked out that the fiction part would happen with the individual personalities. That wasn't my favorite. I thought it was kind of going in weird directions, but I think they made a bunch of scenes like season six now. So it's all successful. There was a big group. It was almost announced that they were canceled. And then all of these sci fi channel subscribers to the show just like stormed the studio and like with the with the petition and demanded that they continue. And I think they won their case. But yeah, you also have to realize when you're writing these these types of stories, you want to get across the the system engineering that is this science part. But then in order to make that accessible to an even lay audience, there are individuals who only watch stuff that is based heavily in something like character development. So there is a trade off to this, but you see more on the science side of things. I'd rather have a documentary. No, but I don't want documentaries either because they're too boring, obviously. And they're also totally skewed. Like you can't trust what you watch. It's wild. So to have to navigate that too, maybe there's a maybe there's something that's different about a future civilization where that required self navigation is eliminated. It's like truth only like objective truth. But then what is that? Who knows? Well, there is so much power. I don't know if this will ever go away. There is so much power at controlling the message of the truth, right? The semi truth, so to speak. If you take something that's true or like mostly true, and then slightly add a variation onto the meaning, so to speak, what you say, okay, this is something we all agree it's true. But this is what it means. And you mix these things together. It's the biggest power on earth right now. You can influence anyone to literally do anything at any point of time. And I don't know if this will ever go away because we are very fallible. And we just don't have the resources to go back to the source and in fact, check it. Nobody has the time for this and will never happen. Now we have even more information. Right. It's just an inundation. But that's really disappointing to hear because I think like something that life is singularly capable of doing and especially intelligent life is interpretation. And I feel like that's the most fun and important thing that we can do. And it's just a little disappointing to recognize that there's now so much information in the world that the what used to be a desirable opportunity to interpret the meaning yourself is almost made an impossible like sisyphusian task. And so I just don't want to see that disappear in generations or you know hundreds of thousands of years from now. It could. I just don't. Yeah, I don't like that it's it's too hard to work. It's too much work to interpret. You got to be on the bleeding edge. Right. There is always something that sinks down and it's like the acceptor truth and might be challenged from time to time. But it's basically the acceptor truth. And you don't have to worry much about fact checking because it is true. Like when we think about Einstein's theories, there's not much we can we don't have to fact check it because it's done. Right. And we trust other people who've done this. But there's always this bleeding edge of say what happened in the last two months, two days, whatever the time frame is. And this you can you can massage in any way you want. Like it's the news literally, right? You massage the right way and you say the same fact. But you make the meaning completely different. And I think the social media is really outlined this for us is how much of a power that is. This is really you can explain the universe in that moment, right? Just by extrapolating that fact. And you can since people are so reliant on that information, they will do anything you want just by if you keep up that that echo chamber service week of similar information. And I'm not sure we agree. But we've always definitely grown. We learn and we could get to another level. But we will always be fallible for this if someone finds a new bleeding edge. It's been your theme. So this is yeah, this is sort of like the paradigmatic shift that happens sometimes with the pursuit of truth, whether it's through art, whether it's through science. I wonder if it would be best for like human civilizations on planets other than ours, have something like two brains, like simultaneously existing two brains, some way to yeah, very comfortably navigate the universe in contradiction and confusion and stupidity, call it, but never decisive decision, right? I think to be undecided is would be really crucial for building something like a truth seeking environment that's different than the one that we have now. I used to be that way. I was so sure that the way to navigate the world was to like do your readings, interpret it, speak to people, determine like decisively what you think the world is, and then stand by that opinion forever, lest you be called a hypocrite. But now I think hypocrisy is something that's really important when you're thinking about something as big as alien life, intelligence, consciousness, etc. So maybe we're maybe like future human civilization has two collaborative, but separately functioning brains. Well, it's so it's so hard, right? Because we need those two parts of the brain, because we will be if we don't, if we don't have this emotional shortcut to a solution, if we don't have this, okay, I trust you emotionally, so I don't re question you, we end up in this infinite progress, right? So we always keep asking, so why why why be like a little child? And if we never get, we don't get anything done. So if you wouldn't be emotional, I think, I don't know, you can so you can be this positive forward, thinking progressive being that we want to be. I don't think you can be that person without emotions, because it's too complicated to compute. Oh, totally. And I think that an emotional foundation to wanting to understand these things is hugely important, something like hope and desire and love, like I think that motivates the most intrepid explorations towards capital T truth. So you can't jettison that either. It's inherent, it's the cog, it's like the central cog. But yeah, I don't know. Yeah, it'd be interesting to try to engineer something like a different human consciousness or a different human form of intellectuality. You're kind of like spark. I don't know if spark would do so well, right? If a civilization that is like spark, that would be understand so far, it might not do so well. Isn't there all of this, you know, funny, critical literature out there about how spark and data were the worst representative, so what something might be like? Yes. But you know, I mean, they served they served a really good function, though, I think in in kind of pointing a positive way with which humans and machines can can forge a path together. That's important. It's not terminator, right? Well, maybe we're wrong, but I think we all want to be like Captain Kirk where we want to be these explorers and when it really goes to the edge of what's what the decision making, then we want to be like him, right? We don't want to be like spark or maybe maybe some of us will be, but I feel as a society, we really chosen this this Captain Kirk path. I don't know if this is a bad idea, but I think it works. It has been working for us for a long time. Right. I think this is what I was saying earlier is that I'm not so sure that AI always makes the correct decision. I think mathematically it must, right? It makes the best decision with what bits it has and what knowledge it's been fed. But you know, thank goodness, we I hope there are learning machines responsible for missile launches or you know what I mean? Like I think ultimately human Captain Kirk intervention is we keep that. I think we need that human intervention. Well, eventually the machines must be better than us. So the question is, will will they be just like us? That's kind of my theory. So any any sentient AGI will become or will go through a phase, even if it's just a minute, like it might be a short time, but it will be exactly like us. Maybe the next day, it's going to be a thousand times more, more clever. But for short timeframe, it must at least reach this human level with all its imperfections. And then it can go to a higher sentient level. And you and you see a pathway towards that something like artificial wisdom or artificial empathy. Oh, 100%. Yeah. So all of these things, when you look when you look into the old philosophers, none of these are things that that a machine cannot ponder about. I mean, they come might be so slightly different conclusions, but we have so many philosophers, they all come to different conclusions. These are questions machines will have relatively soon appeal, maybe 30 years from now, 40 years from now, and they will go through a slightly different, but similar goals and similar incentives development as we do. And then you might scale up from this. This is obviously the big question, right? If if we ever going to be a civilization that goes through another planet, or if we are the bootloader for this intelligence that does it, and they use it, it doesn't, you just leave us here. I'm not sure. Yeah, I think it's more likely to me. Yeah, that's, I don't know, I, I'm going to express my skepticism nonetheless. I, and this might, this might be like my kind of like life faith anthropomorphic settling and my own prejudice about how humans are awesome. But I do think that there is something singularly special about it, not just humans, but a concept driven, understanding type of an intelligence and an empathic type of intelligence, that I just don't know, at least the at least the AI that I witness now, I just don't see that happening soon. But I might also just have a fundamental misunderstanding of how architected structures like that evolve. So, but I just, I think we're safe for a while. No, I mean, I, I, it's not going to happen tomorrow. But it's relatively simple algorithms and Michael Grisiano was really, was really pushing that point, even saying basically, there's all these, this, this huge data stream that goes into your unconsciousness, like it just comes floating at you. There's megabytes of data every second from your sensory input and from your, from your, from your memory. And none of this is conscious to you. There's one little thing that's conscious to you, but you don't know how it's selected, and that should scare you because this is like machine intelligence. You don't know who makes these decisions. Where did these thoughts come from? Where do your dreams come from? Right. I don't know. I mean, they, I always had them, but then they change. And then it's really strange. I mean, it's, it's like someone is, is directing this whole thing. No, that's a fair point. There is this sort of a black box about life's sort of consciousness that is no different than the black box of how an AI might make a single decision and we can't really track how. So that's fair. Yeah. I think that is, that is a true comparable quality. Okay. All right. Okay. I'm fending. So you're not that far from us. So I feel, you know, in these AI's, obviously there's statistical models and everyone is like, I had Steve Swartz on, he was basically saying, well, this is just statistical models. You guys are crazy. And I'm like, yeah, but one, this one, once you have an interface and that the other side, the statistical model, it feels like another person. I don't know if there's really a difference left. Like, yes, you can make that argument. The person's not real, but is it so much real, that so much less real than any other person that you never met before that speaks a different language. You can't even decipher the language. This is more real than an AI that is exactly reacting to your deepest feelings because it's studied you for a long time. That is true. Yeah. Yeah. The idea of the stranger as a sort of straw man to this argument is a good one. Is this thing more real than someone you've never, no, I just mean, well, if it's a stranger, and we're trying to figure out which of these is less real, it seems to me. So maybe I didn't mean any accusation by that, but I like the idea of the stranger as a proxy, because it's so true. Right. I mean, especially what with cats, it's just like humans do this all the time. We're like the catfishing craze of technological opportunities to create second lives for ourselves. And yeah. Okay. Yes. Okay. Well, I, you know, it's hard to find really final answers for this. You probably never will. But I think it's so much fun to, to see the possibilities that we have there. And even if we really bring our lifespan to a few hundred years, which seems to be possible now, I mean, this is not something that's completely science fiction anymore. Maybe it's still, it hasn't been done yet, but it's still, it's in the works. It seems like relatively soon. And it's something I just don't feel that the next 100 years will look just like the last 100 years. No, we just changed that happened. But I think we're really going to scale out of this and people say, you crazy dude, that's not going to happen. It's history repeats itself more or less. So we overestimate our, the long term change and also the short term change. And we end up with this much, you know, more compressed version of what we expected. Like what people did in the 60s, they expected free energy, they expected supersonic planes, flying cars. Not much of this happened. I know. We do have the roadster. We have one flying car. No, but I think that, yeah, you're pointing to something that's sort of like a societal, evolutionary Moore's law, right? It's just faster and faster and faster. And I think that's true. There's no way that the next century resembles even closely the sort of stunted trajectory that this last century has, and that'll constantly be the case every century forward. And so that makes it even more challenging to sort of attempt to engineer a very flexible, robust system for future human civilization on earth, off earth, both, whatever. It's a very challenging problem. So that's why it's important to do these speculative exercises. I don't think it's a problem to put into the universe as many possibilities as there can be. The challenge is to decipher which of those would possibly be the most effective. That's the trick. And I'm not quite sure who should do that or through what method. Well, one thing I wanted to pick your brain on is a thought that I had, and I'm not sure it's true, but maybe you have historical data. But what I felt is if you have this increasing effect of specialization, and we go through these waves of special specialization, and they usually go along with information overload for the people affected, even though the information has been accelerating for thousands of years, for hundreds of thousands of years, probably. We obviously have access to more information, but we only feel overloaded at certain points of that. We were bored before. So this is relatively a quick phenomenon. But also, you see that this makes you quite pessimistic. It makes you stressed. Your cortisol levels goes up. So your happiness goes down. If this time of specialization comes upon, which we're clearly in right now because of the internet, it finally happened. We predicted it 20 years ago. And now it finally happens. Is there anything that's always temporary and we'll catch up? We just talked about the singularity. If the singularity comes along, we have this infinite scale up of progress, at least technological. It doesn't mean we adopt it. So lots of people will say, it's not for me. I'm out of this. Will it make us all really grumpy and unhappy for the rest of our lives? I don't know. I feel like what engagement I have with the technology that I have is for the most part a grumpy engagement. But that's a very pessimistic view. No, but I don't know if this is a fair answer in terms of historical evidence or something, but I think that there's a case to be made about the benefit of being like generalism over specialism over and against the unpredictable. So we can specialize and specialize in the way that we evolve and innovate and hopefully with an eye towards benefiting and bolstering society, like not a villainous aim. But then there's always the unexpected that can't be accounted fo