Neil deGrasse Tyson - Are We Alone On Earth? The Truth About Aliens, UFOs, and Life on Mars | EP #118

In this episode, Neil and Peter discuss recent AI, Space, and UFO news, including the stranded astronauts, the Bezos vs. Musk space race, when humans will move to Mars, and more. Recorded on Sept 3rd, 2024 Views are my own thoughts, not Financial, Medical, or Legal Advice. 19:50 | The Geopolitics of Space Travel 43:15 | Life on Mars: A Real Possibility? 01:08:40 | The Truth Behind UFO Sightings Neil deGrasse Tyson is an American astrophysicist, author, and science communicator best known for making complex scientific concepts accessible to the general public. As the director of the Hayden Planetarium and host of popular science shows like Cosmos and StarTalk, he has become a prominent advocate for science education. Tyson's work spans academia and media, focusing on promoting scientific literacy and inspiring curiosity about the universe. Pre-order Neil’s new book: https://www.amazon.com/Merlins-Universe-Revised-Updated-Twenty-First/dp/1665019859 Watch StarTalk: https://www.youtube.com/@StarTalk ____________ I only endorse products and services I personally use. To see what they are, please support this podcast by checking out our sponsors: Get started with Fountain Life and become the CEO of your health: https://fountainlife.com/peter/ AI-powered precision diagnosis you NEED for a healthy gut: https://www.viome.com/peter Reverse the age of your skin with Oneskin; 30% here: http://oneskin.co/PETER _____________ Get my new Longevity Practices 2024 book: https://bit.ly/48Hv1j6 I send weekly emails with the latest insights and trends on today’s and tomorrow’s exponential technologies. Stay ahead of the curve, and sign up now: Tech Blog _____________ Connect With Peter: Twitter Instagram Youtube Moonshots Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Peter Diamandis?

  Probability that there is life of any type on Mars today, where do you put that?

• 0:08Speaker 01

  Today, that's a little harder.

• 0:09Peter Diamandis?

  We've seen hearings in Congress, a number of hearings about UFOs.

• 0:14Speaker 01

  All of a sudden, we're thinking that the Pentagon has special access to aliens. I'm just thinking, if we were being invaded by aliens, we would not require congressional hearings to establish that fact.

• 0:26Peter Diamandis?

  Is Earth life actually Martian life?

• 0:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's crazy as that idea sounds. It's completely plausible.

• 0:36Peter Diamandis?

  Hi, everybody. Peter Diamandis here. Welcome to Moon Shots. Today's a special episode of WTF Just Happened in Tech with the one and only Neil deGrasse Tyson, extraordinary author, scientist, and just provocateur across all things in tech. So Neil and I can talk about what's going on in the space world, what's going on in SpaceX and Blue Origin. Are you a Musk fan, a Bezos fan? Will we go to Mars? Should we be going to Mars? You know, will humanity actually make it beyond the Earth unless a government or military presence pushes us there? Neil and I disagree a little bit on this. I'm going to be showing a series of slides. If you're listening on audio, you'll hear me

• 1:20Peter Diamandis?

  referring to the slides that are coming up. We'll be discussing, again, the recent news pieces. If you're watching this on YouTube, you'll see the slides. We're going to be speaking about AI. We'll be talking about humanoid robotics. Again, Neil and I disagree. I think humanoid robotics are critically important, are going to be, you know, growing into the billions. Neil's not sure why we would have humanoid robotics. Anyway, join me for a fascinating conversation with a brilliant man, Neil deGrasse Tyson. All right, let's jump in. Everybody, welcome to Moon Shots and a special episode of WTF Just Happened in Technology this week. I have a friend, a dear friend. I wouldn't say an old friend because that sort of implies that you're old, but chronologically, we did meet some 30, 40 years ago. Neil deGrasse

• 2:04Peter Diamandis?

  Tyson. Neil, good to see you.

• 2:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, thanks for having me. About time you had me on your show.

• 2:08Peter Diamandis?

  I tell you, I'm jealous.

• 2:10Speaker 01

  You don't, right? You know, I'm here for you.

• 2:13Peter Diamandis?

  I appreciate it, buddy. I would love to talk about some of the recent advances in space and AI over the last couple of weeks that are pretty, I would say stellar, but you know, are amazing.

• 2:30Speaker 01

  Just by the way, it's not obvious to me, given how knee-deep you are in all of these subjects, that I would be able to offer any insights to you at all that you couldn't offer yourself. Just, I want to start the conversation that way.

• 2:45Peter Diamandis?

  Well, I have great faith that you have great wisdom and experience in all things space and many things, if not all, AI. So, you know, a lot of drama this past month on the whole Boeing versus SpaceX. I have been following this, so, you know, here's the situation about, I don't know, what was it here, a decade ago, NASA's retiring the space shuttle and they want to put up humans in the future. And so they give out two contracts, one to steadfast Boeing and one to upstart SpaceX.

• 3:27Peter Diamandis?

  And this week, the upstart is saving the steadfast Boeing. Any thoughts on this?

• 3:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, I never have strong opinions about what hardware ever gets used to go in and come back from space. By the way, I don't view it as the upstart beats the type, I don't think about it that way. I think about it as, you know you're in the future, when if one vehicle can't bring you back, you roll out another one. Okay? Why isn't anyone celebrating that fact? And we know these two astronauts' names, Sunita Williams and is it Butch?

• 4:05Peter Diamandis?

  You know, Sunita's gotten all of the publicity. It's always about bringing her back.

• 4:15Speaker 01

  Um, is Butch Wilmore? I forgot his first name, but Wilmore.

• 4:19Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 4:19Speaker 01

  So Williams and Wilmore, alright, they, we know their names, well, many of us knew them just because we knew them. They're, they're veteran astronauts, but other people now know their names for the first time because of this fact that they've been stranded. And consider that that's evidence once again that we're living in the future of space exploration because no one can remember the names of anybody in space. Whereas when I was growing up, you knew everybody who went into space and the, and the TV programs were interrupted to show you those launches. That's because they were unusual. They were rare. They were the first ever of any time we are reaching for the skies. It is so routine today

• 5:04Speaker 01

  that, that of course, we didn't know who was up there. Now we know, and now Boeing's not working, so we throw up SpaceX. They'll come back and they're veteran astronauts. The fact that the press was using the word stranded. Meanwhile, there's a half dozen other astronauts on the space station. Okay? How, how stranded can you be when there are other human beings there ready to hang out with until you get rescued? Plus, there's plenty of food, plenty of water, and there are people who you know well, who pay top dollar just to get into space. So if, if I were them, if I were Sanita and Butch, I'd say, oh, I have to spend longer in space? Oh, that's too bad, isn't it?

• 5:48Speaker 01

  I guess, let me just enjoy the rest of this time. So that's how I look at it.

• 5:53Peter Diamandis?

  You know, it's interesting. What do you think the next names that we will memorize and learn in school will happen? Is it the first people back on the moon, the first to Mars, or are we just past that part?

• 6:04Speaker 01

  It'll be the first to Mars for sure.

• 6:05Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 6:06Speaker 01

  For sure. And by the way, when we land people on Mars, you'll have to rename your podcast.

• 6:13Peter Diamandis?

  Off to Mars shots.

• 6:16Speaker 01

  Moonshots will be, oh, that's not even a big project anymore. So, yeah, so that's, that, those are my views there. And I, I think NASA is pretty calm about it. It was the press that, I, I think we, the idea that one can be stranded in space carries a lot of clickbait.

• 6:37Peter Diamandis?

  Along with it.

• 6:38Speaker 01

  I'm old enough to remember in 1969, there was a movie Marooned.

• 6:43Peter Diamandis?

  I remember it.

• 6:44Speaker 01

  I was young at the time, but I remember we were landing on the moon and here's this fictional story of astronauts stranded in space. They could not come back out of orbit. I don't remember why, but they could not come back out of orbit. You know, Gene Hackman was in it, Gregory Peck was in it, and big actors of the day and of a generation. Anyhow, they couldn't come back. And we had a rescue rocket to come rescue them. However, a hurricane was coming over Florida. And I'm young enough to say, well, how often do hurricanes happen? I'm growing up in New York City. Then I realized, yes, that's a real thing that happens in Florida. So they couldn't launch, otherwise everybody dies. And someone realized, this was brilliant.

• 7:27Speaker 01

  Brilliant storytelling. Someone noticed that the eye of the hurricane was going to pass over Cape Canaveral.

• 7:33Peter Diamandis?

  Ha ha.

• 7:35Speaker 01

  And I said, well, why does that make a difference? Because then I'm learning climate at the time. Oh, my gosh, the eye of the hurricane is calm and peaceful relative to everything else. That eye came over the launch pad, they launched the rocket up, rescued the mission, and it was a happy ending. That's being stranded.

• 7:52Peter Diamandis?

  Hmm.

• 7:53Speaker 01

  Okay. Not chilling with six other astronauts on something that, by the way, you know how much area they have in the module? You take a cross-sectional area. I mean, obviously they live in the volume, but the area is like 400 square feet. And there are studio apartments in Manhattan, smaller than that, that people live in their whole lives. So, yeah, I had no sympathy for them, and I'm pretty sure they're happy to spend more time in space.

• 8:19Peter Diamandis?

  They are. In fact, speaking of people going up privately on the launch pad right now is the Polaris Dawn mission. So this is a friend, Jared Isaacman, who made his money in the financial tech world and is funding private missions to the space station. This one's interesting because it's going to be going to a polar orbit and to new altitudes never seen since the Apollo days. Excited about this? Any thoughts on Polaris?

• 8:49Speaker 01

  A few things, maybe it's not obvious to people, that there's a reason why launches

• 8:56Speaker 01

  With great effort, launches are are made as close to the Earth's equator as you can. In fact, there is a a sea launch company that would launch your satellite from the exact equator because they've just moved their boat to the equator and then launch it there. But think about where we launch in the United States. It's not in Maine. It's not in Alaska. It's in Florida. And Florida is closer to the equator than most any place else in the continental United States. The the reason for that, of course, is as Earth rotates, the equator is moving faster than any other latitude. It's going about a thousand miles an hour.

• 9:37Speaker 01

  So that's an easy number to remember because the circumference of the Earth is about 25,000 miles. And we rotate once in 24 hours. You divide the two, you get about a thousand miles an hour. If you're anywhere else, you're traveling less fast. Well, if you launch east, something into orbit, you need less fuel because you're already going a thousand miles an hour. And so if you need less fuel, you have more payload. So nearly all things ever launched in the history of the space program were launched near the equator, due east. If you can launch in any other kind of orbit, it takes way more fuel to accomplish this.

• 10:18Speaker 01

  And what's cool about polar orbits, however, which is many spy satellites have those orbits because you get to spy over Russia. It goes over the pole and then you you spy and then it comes back over you and to give you the data. See, that's very convenient spy trajectories. But what's interesting about polar orbits, which is very common when we visit planets, is if you go into polar orbit, the planet rotates inside of your orbit so that you can paint photographic paths.

• 10:49Speaker 01

  Over the entire planetary surface and log a full map of what's going on. So, so these are good. And then you're gonna sell seats to it? I'd wanna fly over the North Pole and see, check out Santa.

• 11:05Peter Diamandis?

  The only, the only challenge is the radiation belts, right? Are not giving us as much protection over the poles. And because it's a higher orbit, you know, I'm thinking about, you know, half my life these days, Neil, is in the longevity business. And I have grown up passionate about going to space. My only concern is getting too much cosmic radiation and too high a dose if I spend any significant time up there.

• 11:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, what elevation will they be going?

• 11:33Peter Diamandis?

  Their, their orbit is gonna peak at 700 kilometers altitude, which is significantly. Yeah, yeah.

• 11:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, that's, that's what factor two or so above the space station. And that makes them more susceptible to high-energy particles from space, deep space, as well as from the sun. You know, we take it for granted, we're in the, at the base of this ocean of atmosphere, protecting us not only from asteroids, okay? Otherwise, we'd look like the surface of the moon. But of course, the high-energy particles deflect around Earth's magnetic field. And they were protected by the, by that as well. So if you can go up higher than that, you're at risk. Now, I don't know how long they're gonna spend in orbit. Do you remember how long?

• 12:21Peter Diamandis?

  I don't. It, the trip has been delayed now by a week because of the downrange recovery location. But I think it will be on the order of five days, thereabouts, which isn't too bad.

• 12:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, and so, I mean, think about it. The, the radiation that we're speaking of does not require all that much.

• 12:43Speaker 01

  To be shielded. So for example, a thin layer of water

• 12:48Peter Diamandis?

  Yes.

• 12:48Speaker 01

  Will do that. And I imagine sort of long space flights, you'd have your entire water supply forming just under the skin of the of your vessel. Right? And the water just gets cycled in and out of there. Any good engineer would be able to design this. And there are other metals that it doesn't get through. So there are ways to protect yourself. And five days of this, I I don't know if that's good or bad. Like you said, you're worried, but we do know that very, very low doses of radiation can be promote longevity within you as your DNA gets mildly damaged and gets repaired better than

• 13:30Speaker 01

  it was before at very low levels. And so, so yeah, maybe they can just sign up for the medical experiments. We can find out whether the rest of us should take that trip.

• 13:40Peter Diamandis?

  You know, what I'm excited about more than anything in the space business, and I'm curious what you are, is the upcoming flights of Starship, right? Starship is the Conestoga wagon. It's the it's the first transatlantic like

• 13:54Speaker 01

  Conestoga wagon? Come on, dude. It's a rocket. Give it give it a little more. Give it a little more romance.

• 13:59Peter Diamandis?

  It's the it's the Connie for transatlantic flights. What would you call it?

• 14:06Speaker 01

  I

• 14:06Peter Diamandis?

  I'm trying to go the Pony Express.

• 14:09Speaker 01

  I let me resonate with you here.

• 14:11Peter Diamandis?

  The railroads, railroads. Okay.

• 14:12Speaker 01

  When I first learned that Europe was pooling together their resources into a brand airplane, and they were going to call it the Airbus, it was like, no, no, no, no, how dare you? Okay. And if you look at the A three eighty, yeah, that's a big old fat bus. It's just it's just a we are cargo in those airplanes. And so I maybe we're just we're done with fancy words and we're just trying to move move the population.

• 14:43Peter Diamandis?

  All right. So sure. It's called Starship for the moment. And

• 14:48Speaker 01

  It's not going to the stars. It's really a planet ship.

• 14:51Peter Diamandis?

  It is. It's a moon ship and

• 14:53Speaker 01

  Space is riddled with all manner of exaggeration that way, okay? NASA says they're going into space and they're going 200 miles above Earth's surface, which is like one, it's like one centimeter above a schoolroom globe. But that's not to an astrophysicist, excuse me. So there's a lot of this exaggeration going on.

• 15:19Peter Diamandis?

  I pulled this clip from...

• 15:23Speaker 01

  One other thing, is there still a Miss Universe contest? Because if there is, she's really Miss Earth, okay? We should be clear about this.

• 15:33Speaker 01

  Stop the exaggeration.

• 15:36Peter Diamandis?

  All right, I pulled this clip from, I'll call it Twitter for the moment, even though it's a clip by Elon. And let me play this, I found this compelling. Take a look, see.

• 15:47Speaker 02

  A little super crazy, but the more you talk about it, I mean, I think, you know, at SpaceX, we specialize in converting things from impossible to late.

• 16:03Speaker 02

  So...

• 16:05Speaker 02

  But it's pretty nutty because you're going to have this gigantic, you know, booster coming back.

• 16:14Speaker 02

  And I mean, that's nine meters in diameter, not counting the chines, or roughly 30 feet in diameter.

• 16:22Speaker 02

  And it'll weigh about 250 tons. Put on the heavy side, we'll make that ladder of a time.

• 16:31Peter Diamandis?

  So that's the mechanism by which the starship booster comes back. It lands with these giant mechanical arms being captured by the original launch pad so it could be refueled and sent back later that day.

• 16:45Speaker 01

  Reused, yeah, yeah.

• 16:46Peter Diamandis?

  That's audacious.

• 16:47Speaker 01

  If every time you flew a 747 to London and they had to roll it off a cliff and bring out a new one, that trip would be really expensive, okay? So what Elon is pioneering is not what is impossible in space exploration. He's pioneering what was unrealistic.

• 17:09Speaker 01

  In terms of price and just cost, so the engineering is getting a workover. But consider that he hasn't done anything that NASA hasn't already done. The the actual space frontier is still held by NASA, right? And so, and it remains to be shown if his um his new ventures have commercial support, commercial value, because if they don't, then it's a one off and it it's a spectacle, but it'll just uh it'll go, what'll happen? It'll, you know, we'll applaud it, but then he goes on to his other projects.

• 17:54Peter Diamandis?

  I'll I'll differ with you on on that.

• 17:57Speaker 01

  Oh, please, I'm here.

• 17:58Peter Diamandis?

  I think, I think honestly, you know, the space shuttle was an attempt for reusability. And you remember this, when it was a first, when it was first proposed to Congress, the space shuttle, I think, had a per-flight cost of $50 million and was supposed to fly 50 times a year.

• 18:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 18:17Peter Diamandis?

  And it and it ended up at a price tag of $4 billion a year, independent of how many flights it flew, because it was a workforce initiative, right? So four flights a year was $1 billion, each one flight a year was $4 billion a flight. And uh the very, you know, while it reused the shuttle itself, the tank and the boosters were effectively, you know, the tank was was thrown away and and the boosters were refurbished, which was extraordinarily expensive. So I think what what SpaceX has done is is shown actual reusability of the Falcon.

• 18:52Speaker 01

  No, I agree. These are engineering frontiers that have been breached here.

• 18:56Peter Diamandis?

  So you're saying whether the markets are there?

• 19:00Speaker 01

  No, no, no, no, I'm just trying to, I just want to make it clear that when people say, oh, now Elon is leading us in space. No, he's not. He is making everything we used to do cheaper. Okay, so those are engineering technological improvements on what had been done by government spending with, with tax money, basically, right? And to the extent to which he carries NASA product, including humans, into space, it's once again tax money, but spent by commercial enterprise rather than by NASA. So, so I'm, I'm, so you, I don't know where you were differing with me. I agree with you. It's way more efficient and the shuttle never lived up to its hopes and expectations.

• 19:43Speaker 01

  But the shuttle nonetheless went in and out of orbit, just like everything Elon has launched. It's gone in and out of orbit. So people, when you hear the people dream of a space frontier, is where have you gone lately? How far from Earth have you?

• 19:59Peter Diamandis?

  So let's, let's, let's talk about that. So they, SpaceX just announced its, uh, its first ship to Mars is going to be called Heart of Gold. Okay, nice poetic. But this is the conversation I wanted to have with you, Neil. It's the what should we be, you know, where should we be going? What should our vision be? So, you know, you and I are, have been in this industry long enough to know there were sort of two different schools of thought on one side, and I think Bezos and Musk differ on this. Um, you know, Elon was, let's go to Mars directly. I think the contracts at NASA uh, for going to the moon has swayed him to go to the moon first and then to Mars.

• 20:44Peter Diamandis?

  Jeff, uh, actually is much more in the school of thought I am, which came from the days of Gerard O'Neill at Princeton, which is let's go to the moon. Let's get resources there and let's not go back into a gravitational well. Let's not dive back into something we have to use a lot of energy to get out of. And instead, let's build large-scale O'Neill colonies. And, you know, basically, large, rotating, kilometer-long cylinders where you live on the inside of the cylinder and build society there. I'm curious, you know, where you come out in this. Should we go to Mars and colonize that? Or should we use asteroidal materials and lunar materials to build habitats for large populations?

• 21:27Speaker 01

  So, it reminds me of a lot of commentary that I published, actually, in one of my books, several books ago, called "Space Chronicles: Facing the Ultimate Frontier." Just a side note, that was not the original title. I submitted it with the title "Failure to Launch: The Dreams and Delusions of Space Enthusiasts." Because that's really what the book is about. And the publisher said, "No, you can't have the word 'failure' in a title and 'delusion.'" "No, no, we have to..." And so we tidied up the title, all right? But in it is a frank assessment of the mismatch between everybody's dreams about where we would or should be in space and what actually happens.

• 22:11Speaker 01

  If you go back to the 1960s, we're walking on the moon, early 70s. All the commentary was, "We're walking on the moon now? We will have colonies on Mars by the mid-1980s."

• 22:23Peter Diamandis?

  I remember. I remember the reports that came out. And it was like, it was, it was like, "If we keep, if we spend at the Apollo level, we'll have this amazing..." Even if we cut it back by half, we'll still be on Mars in the 80s.

• 22:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, but that "if" statement was, yes, that's literally true if you kept that spending. But it is, it was tone-deaf of geopolitics. And space does not exist in a vacuum... Yes, it does, actually. It does.

• 22:54Speaker 01

  Sorry, you beat me to it. Yeah, bad analogy there. Okay. Space spending does not exist independent of the geopolitics that drives it. So, there's everyone thinking that we went to the moon because we're Americans and we're explorers and it's in our DNA and it's the next thing to do and therefore Mars follows. No, Mars does not follow. Excuse me. No. That is not how any of this works. It's not how it has ever worked. We got to the moon, looked over our shoulder, the Ruski's aren't there. And we said, "We're done here. We're not going back to the moon." Stranding Apollo 18 and further mentions.

• 23:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, we had, we had, we had actually built the rockets. That's why I said, "Stranding Apollo 18." All those rockets were built. But, but the budget gets cut. Is it because we lack the political will? No, it's because the geopolitical forces no longer stoked it. And so that's why we have not left low Earth orbit in 52 years. It's not because of the absence of political will. It's because it's an absence of a perceived enemy. So let's, let's fast forward. What happens? I'm on a presidential commission under W to assess how we're going to transition NASA from the space shuttle into some future program. And we say, "Let's phase out space shuttle money, phase in a return to the moon."

• 24:22Speaker 01

  Let's do that. Okay? And we had it all laid out and then move on to Mars. It was called the Moon, Moon, the Moon, what's it? Moon Mars Initiative. I remember it well. Yeah, I know, but the commission, well, it's the Commission on the Future of the US Space Exploration Policy. But that was shortened to the Moon, the Moon and Mars Commission. That's what it got shortened to. Anyhow, we advised Congress of this. And then they costed it out. And it would cost like a trillion dollars. By the way, a trillion dollars spent. The same money for NASA every year over thirty years gets you basically a trillion dollars. So, so, so the number sounded heavy and impossible to reach, even though it was plainly laid out in front of us.

• 25:06Speaker 01

  So, it languished. Plus, the Bush haters said, "Send Bush to Mars." Okay, fine. So then, who replaces Bush? We have Obama, okay? Obama does not pursue the moon. Who follows Obama? We have, um, am I getting my years correct here? My presidents? Uh, did I leave anybody out? Bush, Obama. Who came after Obama?

• 25:29Peter Diamandis?

  Uh, well, Trump came in there at some point.

• 25:32Speaker 01

  I know.

• 25:36Speaker 01

  So, oh, so what happens is, so Trump says, "Let's go back to the moon." And then the Trump haters say, "No, send Trump to the moon." Fine. Then Biden comes in and preserves this scope for NASA. Now, why does that happen all of a sudden? How come it's a real thing? How come we have Artemis?

• 25:55Peter Diamandis?

  Because, well, it's China!

• 25:57Speaker 01

  We could have done this fifty years ago, forty years ago, thirty years ago, twenty years ago, but we didn't. No. Why? Oh, we didn't, the geopolitics didn't force it. What happens? China says, "We're gonna put astronauts on the moon." Alright, they just come shy of saying, "We're gonna put military bases on them." "We're gonna put astronauts on the moon." Oh my gosh, all of a sudden, it's the right thing for us to do. And I want to tell you this, based on my read of, and by the way, all of this is in the book. Just, it's all in the book. Everything I'm telling you now is, is written, done, and I'm ready to talk about something else. But I'm telling you that the, the, if, if Elon's ships will ever fly to Mars,

• 26:42Speaker 01

  it's because China says... I'm making this up, but let any of them say, we want to put military bases on Mars. Ba-da-bing, we're going to Mars. We are going to Mars, and you know something? NASA doesn't really have a ship to do that, but you know who does? Elon. So he rolls out his Mars ship and tax money pays Elon for us to get to Mars. And it's not on his dime.

• 27:05Peter Diamandis?

  I'm gonna, I, I, I get it, but I'm gonna disagree in part here. Because the fact of the matter is Starship has been built on his dime. It's been built on-

• 27:16Speaker 01

  But it hasn't been launched, yes.

• 27:17Peter Diamandis?

  It's been, it's been launched, it's been launched three times successfully. Not to Mars, but the capability, once it working, has the capability of refueling and going. And I hope that NASA does-

• 27:28Speaker 01

  What I'm telling you is, what I'm, what I'm telling, yeah, all there. What I'm saying is, that as a Mars program, the cost of that goes beyond any venture capitalist's interest in handing money to Elon, even his own money, unless he does it as a one-off, as a vanity project. And holding vanity projects aside, if his ships take us to Mars, it's because you're my tax money as voted in Congress for our geopolitical defense to protect our space interests against adversaries.

• 28:04Peter Diamandis?

  You know-

• 28:05Speaker 01

  That's what's gonna unfold here.

• 28:06Peter Diamandis?

  And knowing him well enough, he will spend every one of his last dollars making a mission to Mars happen, even if the government doesn't want it. In fact, you know, I remember I was with-

• 28:19Speaker 01

  That's a one-off vanity project.

• 28:20Peter Diamandis?

  Well, but it, what, listen, a lot of times-

• 28:23Speaker 01

  I don't have a problem with that. I'm just saying, don't tell me it's a business case.

• 28:26Peter Diamandis?

  The, no, it's not a business case. It, by no means, this is a backup humanity vision for him. Now, that wasn't the conversation I wanted to have with you, uh, because I'm not a huge Mars fan. I mean, I love the idea of going to Mars and finding the life that's sub-soil there.

• 28:42Speaker 01

  Me too. By the way, this idea that it's Mars, the- The idea that it's Earth 2.0 is, is, that has serious flaws in it. I'd be happy to chat about that with you if we have time, but continue.

• 28:55Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, so the point is, when we talk about where does humanity expand to next, right? If we're going to start to see millions of people, not thousands of people, millions of people in space, where, or when I say in space, beyond the Earth's surface, where are we going to see that? We'll see some large populations of scientists and researchers on the moon, maybe some vacation spots on the moon, but I think it's unlikely to be on Mars. My bet still is on the vision that Gerard K. O'Neill painted of large cylinders built from astrotonal materials, that at this point, built by robotics and AI autonomously without

• 29:36Peter Diamandis?

  humans in the loop, sort of creating ideal environments for us to go into and move into without having to worry about all of the issues of getting onto and off of the Martian surface.

• 29:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, so let me just say some supportive things of what you just said. The Gerard K. O'Neill model, as you've noted, has the advantage that you park one of these at a Lagrangian point or somewhere in orbit, and so it itself does not have much of any of a gravitational well, so you just sort of slide up next to it and disembark. And since it's rotating, as a rotating cylinder, everybody lives on the inner surface of that cylinder, and it's rotated to 1G. You don't have the bone loss problems or any other health problems related to lower G as you would have on the moon, as you would have on Mars, which is, those kinds of challenges

• 30:34Speaker 01

  were thoroughly explored in the TV series sci-fi story Expanse. If you look at any Expanse episodes, there are people who live on Mars, there are people who live on asteroids, and their bones are weaker, and they can't travel from one place to another because they were born and raised in these different... Sources of gravity and earth in that mix has the heaviest gravity. So the earth people tend to be sort of sturdier than everybody else. So there's been some sci fi people have thought about this. It's completely bypassed when you have a rotating system. So the question would be, um, how idyllic will you make this such that everyone will just want to go? Will

• 31:17Speaker 01

  it be like, oh, the new world is so amazing. Everybody get in a ship and board one way and you'll get off and you'll never come back. Is that what you foresee and in how much time?

• 31:27Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, so I I do foresee uh one way missions. Um, in fact, I, you know, I've done this in the lecture halls at universities typically for uh young graduate students in early twenties, asking how many of you would go on a one way mission to the Martian surface? And, you know, before they're married or before they have responsibilities, the percentage of of hands that go up in the audience is pretty large, uh, close to fifty percent.

• 31:51Speaker 01

  By the way, there was the the project Mars one. Do you remember that?

• 31:55Peter Diamandis?

  Yes, I do remember.

• 31:56Speaker 01

  Baz Luanda was the entrepreneur. He's Dutch, which was interesting because I said, how does a Dutch person get involved in this? And then I realized there was the Dutch East India Trading Company. They were early out of the box in this, let's explore the unknown uh business. And of course, they have since gone out of business, even though they had many supporters, many funders. Uh, we had, I had Baz Luanda on my podcast. It's in our archives. And the, uh, we interviewed one of the people who did sign up. He was a young kind of geeky guy, liked science. And we asked him, and I said, um, so you really want

• 32:37Speaker 01

  to go one way on this trip? And he said, and he said, yes. And I said, uh, aren't you married? And he said, yes. Well, what is, I said, what does your wife say about this? And he said, oh, she's encouraged it. And I said, okay, you don't understand what's going on in your marriage.

• 32:54Peter Diamandis?

  Good, good riddance. Good riddance.

• 32:57Speaker 01

  So, so, yeah, I, I, I get that. But and maybe Elon with his, you know, starship is, that's a first step. But to say we will have robotic AI. Mining asteroids, building colonies, enough for all of us to move there and live there. On what timescale are you imagining this? By the way, George K. O'Neill imagined all of this by the 21st century.

• 33:22Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, he wrote his books in the mid, late 80s. And so I

• 33:27Speaker 01

  I thought he was even earlier than, was it? I think he was earlier than

• 33:29Peter Diamandis?

  High Frontier was earlier, was in the mid 70s, you're right. He wrote, he wrote 2008, 2084, which is his follow-on. I mean, I, I see this occurring in the next 30 years, which might be completely ridiculous on your timescale. But I think that the abilities to do this will be there.

• 33:51Speaker 01

  By the way, 30 years ago was 1994.

• 33:54Peter Diamandis?

  Yes.

• 33:55Speaker 01

  Just to put your predictions in context.

• 33:57Peter Diamandis?

  But we are on a nonlinear curve, I would say.

• 34:00Speaker 01

  Yes, we are. Would love to talk about that. And it's part of, it's part of your professional identity to be on that exponential. And that you made a career out of that. So I applaud you for this.

• 34:11Peter Diamandis?

  Thank you.

• 34:12Speaker 01

  By the way.

• 34:13Peter Diamandis?

  But space, space has been here to for slow, risk averse and government driven.

• 34:19Speaker 01

  Than what our predictions were, but other things. By the way, not everything is on an exponential, but overall, society is. That's the point. So if, if you look at the future that never was, everyone's visions of the future. You know, no, we don't have flying cars and all the rest of that because everyone imagined that energy would be cheap. But what the future brought was cheap information. So we have an information-driven economy more than an energy-driven economy, transportation-driven economy. And everything we have in our information world, nobody foresaw, okay? Even the best of the, of the, of the futurists.

• 35:02Speaker 01

  So, okay, I mean, they foresaw pieces of it. Okay, but so our advances are not on the on the line that most people are drawing, where they would rather have it be.

• 35:14Peter Diamandis?

  But there are changes. Now, first of all, to point out that from May of 1961, when JFK said, you know, let's get to the moon, through July of 1969 was extraordinary because of the will and because of the, you know, the 400,000 Americans that joined the Apollo program in one shape or form.

• 35:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, engineers and scientists.

• 35:38Peter Diamandis?

  Engineers, scientists, and politicians. But, you know, what we have today is 3D printing of rocket components. We do have the ability to AI model things. We do have the ability for new material sciences. We have a whole slew of technologies that if we needed to go faster, and I think a commercial industry, when it's talking about a profit motive or a business motive, needs to go fast and efficient as compared to the government. Because let me ask you this, from my point of view, NASA is a government works project that keeps the DOD companies employed during peacetime. That's the way I think about it. And it's not about.

• 36:21Speaker 01

  That's that's a a more cynical view, which I'm not.

• 36:27Peter Diamandis?

  Which I'm not not typically cynical, but on the subject.

• 36:29Speaker 01

  I get that. You're definitely not a cynical guy. So the fact that you went cynic there, that says something. And I and I'm not even gonna argue that. What I will say, however, is NASA, with all the the pyramid of of below it that has to be, all the moving parts that run 10 NASA centers and all the rest of the machinery that NASA is.

• 36:59Speaker 01

  It continues to be the singular agency that is at the frontier of space exploration. And it's it's not clear that that will be replaced by commercial space exploration, because the act of exploration almost inherently means there's not a profit, there's not an ROI expected for it. And as long as they're not an ROI, the motivation then falls on the on the shoulders of geopolitics rather than on private enterprise. What happens is private enterprise comes later, and then they do it more cheaply. But they're not gonna they're not gonna be the first to invest.

• 37:41Speaker 01

  By the way, they can be the first to invest in something if it's not that much money. But if you're talking the level of money that space involves, I do not see private enterprise leading anything.

• 37:53Peter Diamandis?

  So it depends it depends it depends what the it depends what the rules are, right? Because everything we hold of value on Earth, metals, minerals, energy, real estate, is in near infinite quantities in space. But if you can't own it and can't create a market for it, then private enterprise isn't going to be able to invest and capitalize on it.

• 38:11Speaker 01

  No, no, I'm not saying private enterprise has no place in space. I'm saying they just won't do it first, that's all.

• 38:16Peter Diamandis?

  Okay, fair enough.

• 38:18Speaker 01

  But I don't see evidence of that. I'm not I'm not wishing this were the case. I'm simply declaring that my observation of the delusions of space enthusiasts of the past 65 years tells me that the disconnect comes about because people say, "We can do it, therefore we will." No, just because you can do something doesn't mean all the forces are aligned for it to happen at all, at all. And before we went to the moon, people thought it was impossible. Now no one is thinking landing on another planet is impossible. So what's in our way is not the technology, it's the actual motivation that would...

• 38:59Speaker 01

  Fund who would do it first. That's all I'm talking about.

• 39:03Peter Diamandis?

  I it's I understand the incentive business very, very well.

• 39:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, and you have to and sometimes you have to incentivize as you've brilliantly done with the X prizes and all the other prizes you've conceived and put into motion. I mean, it's how we how we met. Was it thirty five years ago, forty years ago?

• 39:20Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, it was thirty. It was thirty years ago. And just to tell that story, I had just come up with the idea of the X prize, the first one for spaceflight.

• 39:28Speaker 01

  Like, maybe before you knocked on my door.

• 39:31Peter Diamandis?

  And and, yes, literally. And I read in the back of the science fiction Penguin books that there were these tear out sheets that you could sign up for a trip to Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, and maybe even Pluto, since it was a planet back then. And you would submit your name and address and information in this form for a raffle and submit it to the Hayden Planetarium. And so

• 40:00Speaker 01

  I was recently appointed as chair.

• 40:02Peter Diamandis?

  Yes.

• 40:02Speaker 01

  So I'm grand new in that office. Yes.

• 40:05Peter Diamandis?

  And I'm thinking to myself, OK, everybody who submitted their name would be a perfect individual for me to go and hit up to help fund my X prize for spaceflight.

• 40:14Speaker 01

  And that was from the nineteen fifty s.

• 40:16Peter Diamandis?

  That that that That wasn't that wasn't exactly as clear to me at that point when I knocked on your door. And I'm like, hey, Dr. Tyson, do you happen to have a database of all the people who signed up for this?

• 40:31Peter Diamandis?

  Because

• 40:32Speaker 01

  There's a bin of archives of everyone who signed up. Yeah. So it turns out we were able to recover a small box of them.

• 40:40Peter Diamandis?

  It was you pulled out a shoebox.

• 40:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, it was a shoebox. Yeah. I didn't know anything about it, right? This is your so that was a clever sort of ploy, but you know, that's back when addresses didn't even have zip codes.

• 40:53Peter Diamandis?

  Naive.

• 40:53Speaker 01

  Who knows if anyone was still alive.

• 40:55Peter Diamandis?

  Naive I was. Everybody, I want to take a short break from our episode to talk about a company that's very important to me and could actually save your life or the life of someone that you love. Company is called Fountain Life. And it's a company I started years ago with Tony Robbins and a group of very talented physicians. You know, most of us don't actually know what's going on inside our body. We're all optimists. Until that day when you have a pain in your side, you go to the physician in the emergency room and they say, listen, I'm sorry to tell you this, but you have This stage three or four going on. And you know, it didn't start that morning. It probably was a problem that's been going on for some time, but because we never look,

• 41:37Peter Diamandis?

  we don't find out. So what we built at Fountain Life was the world's most advanced diagnostic centers. We have four across the US today, and we're building 20 around the world. These centers give you a full body MRI, a brain, a brain vasculature, an AI-enabled coronary CT looking for soft plaque, DEXA scan, a GRAIL blood cancer test, a full executive blood workup. It's the most advanced workup you'll ever receive. 150 gigabytes of data that then go to our AIs and our physicians to find any disease at the very beginning, when it's solvable. You're going to find out eventually. Might as well find out when you can take action. Fountain Life also has an entire side of

• 42:22Peter Diamandis?

  therapeutics. We look around the world for the most advanced therapeutics that can add 10, 20 healthy years to your life. And we provide them to you at our centers. So if this is of interest to you, please go and check it out. Go to fountainlife.com/peter. When Tony and I wrote our New York Times bestseller, Life Force, we had 30,000 people reached out to us for Fountain Life memberships. If you go to fountainlife.com/peter, we'll put you to the top of the list. Really, it's something that is, for me, one of the most important things I offer my entire family, the CEOs of my companies, my friends. It's

• 43:03Peter Diamandis?

  a chance to really add decades on to our healthy lifespans. Go to fountainlife.com/peter. It's one of the most important things I can offer to you as one of my listeners. All right, let's go back to our episode. Here is a next story that surfaced this week. So, large amounts of water appeared to be subsurface on Mars. Are you tracking this story?

• 43:29Speaker 01

  No, I'm not, but we expect that. We, Mars clearly, if you look at its surface today, there is no end of visual evidence of there once having been running water. There are meandering riverbeds, river deltas, flood plains, all the telltale signs of

• 43:49Speaker 01

  Of erosion caused by slowly flowing water and rapidly flowing water. And Mars is bone dry today. Have to ask, where did the water go? And the betting person's suggestion was that it was sunken into the ser- beneath the surface as a permafrost. And you just have to go down there and melt it, or there could be some pockets, if there's any energy source at all, that would maintain water in liquid form. And if that's the case, that would be a very high target for the search for life. Because everywhere on Earth where we find liquid water, we find life, including the Dead Sea. They don't call it the Dead Sea because whoever named it didn't have a microscope.

• 44:32Peter Diamandis?

  I'm gonna, I'm gonna put on your, your betting man's hat. So, probability that there is life of any type on Mars today, where do you put that?

• 44:47Speaker 01

  Today, that's a little harder. Whether there was once life, sure, life got started on Earth pretty quickly, within about a hundred billion years of the earliest moment it possibly could have formed. And, and that's not very, did I say a hundred billion? Sorry, a hundred million years. Um, that's a very short interval of time.

• 45:07Peter Diamandis?

  About half, about half a billion years after the Earth was formed, right? So, four and a half billion years ago.

• 45:12Speaker 01

  So, so.

• 45:13Peter Diamandis?

  About four billion years ago.

• 45:14Speaker 01

  You know, the, in the early textbooks, they dated the earliest fossil evidence of life from the formation scenario of the Earth. That would have given you 600 million years or so. But that's not fair to life. Because Earth was hot. Earth was hotter than what could sustain complex molecules. So, give it a chance, please. Okay, so, Earth cools down, then you have a period of heavy bombardment, heat it up again, that's leftovers from the formation of the solar system. That has to cool down. Now, you can start making complex molecules.

• 45:48Peter Diamandis?

  But you haven't answered my question.

• 45:50Speaker 01

  Oh, what?

• 45:51Peter Diamandis?

  What's the probability today, if you had to put, you know, as a betting man, that life exists, subsurface, permafrost?

• 46:01Speaker 01

  Maybe 50/50 microbial life, definitely nothing more complex than that. Because you, you can't be highly complex life and navigating.

• 46:12Speaker 01

  Rocks, inside the rocks and the, we can't call it soil because it's not soil, but the regolith of Mars, you can't, you have to be small enough to be able to make that your home, and that would be microbial life. So, I would, I'd maybe 50/50 microbial life, but I don't think anything more complex than that.

• 46:31Peter Diamandis?

  Now, the next question is, we know that ejecta from asteroid impacts on the Martian surface reaches the Earth.

• 46:40Speaker 01

  And the lunar surface as well.

• 46:42Peter Diamandis?

  And the lunar surface.

• 46:43Speaker 01

  That's even cooler. I know where you're going with this, but let me slip something in.

• 46:46Peter Diamandis?

  Okay, sure.

• 46:47Speaker 01

  It goes both ways. It goes all ways, right? A lot of asteroids moving through space were ejected rocks from their home planet. That means there could be rocks from Earth that are meteorites on the moon. And if that's the case, we could find fossilized evidence of Earth life in meteorites on the moon. That's a whole other project that somebody needs to undertake.

• 47:17Peter Diamandis?

  Well, I think when you make your trip there, you should go out fossil.

• 47:20Speaker 01

  I'll do, I'll do that.

• 47:21Peter Diamandis?

  But the point, and you know where I'm going with this, is Mars cooled first, being further from the Earth.

• 47:28Speaker 01

  Well, and also being smaller. When you're smaller, you have a higher surface area to volume ratio, and whenever that happens, you, you will cool. So, a small potato will cool faster than a big potato after you pull them out of the oven.

• 47:41Peter Diamandis?

  Oh, I remember that.

• 47:42Speaker 01

  So Mars is one tenth our mass, something like that, and, you know, one, what is it? One third, one half, one, two and a half our size, and so you, it will cool way faster than Earth does. But go on.

• 47:58Peter Diamandis?

  So, the question, of course, is, is Earth life actually Martian life? Did it form on Mars first, and then did ejecta from the Martian surface reach the Earth and begin a process here?

• 48:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's crazy as that idea sounds. It's completely plausible.

• 48:15Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 48:15Speaker 01

  Because if Mars... Formed early, cooled earlier, formed light, and it had water, formed life earlier than Earth formed life. And we're still living in a active early period of Earth's solar system where impacts were more common than they are today. It is completely rational to suspect that, or even logical to suspect, that a rock on Mars where microbial life living in the nooks and crannies of that rock moves through space after having been ejected and finds Earth's gravity, lands on Earth, spawning life on Earth.

• 48:59Speaker 01

  Now, very important here, many people misunderstand evolution. Let me just make it clear, in evolution, no animal adapts to anything. It either survives the change or dies. It does not adapt, okay? What happens is at any given generation, the, of a species, there's variation typically in, in what is born. And that variation is random, and if there's an assault on the environment that favors one of those variations, then that variation will walk through that portal into that new environment and all the rest die.

• 49:44Speaker 01

  None of them adapted to anything. Adaptation sounds like it's an active thing that you are doing on purpose. That's not how any of this works. I say this because the rock going through space where there is no water, there is high radiation, there's high temperature coming out and landing and it's cold temperature and the, all of these are forces operating on all the microbes.

• 50:09Speaker 01

  Most microbes will die. If any microbe happened to have resistance to radiation, to pressure, to temperature, it will survive.

• 50:18Peter Diamandis?

  Yes.

• 50:18Speaker 01

  And on Earth, you look around, is there anybody who has this kind of resistance on Earth? And you can't help, but look at the top of that list and you get the tar-degrade water bear.

• 50:31Peter Diamandis?

  Hmm.

• 50:32Speaker 01

  It's microscopic, you can't kill this thing, okay? It's, you can irradiate it, you can freeze-dry it, you withhold water from it, it curls up and waits around, like, however long it takes for water to show up again, it pops back to life.

• 50:48Peter Diamandis?

  The other astronaut.

• 50:49Speaker 01

  Where the hell did this creature get these abilities? Because it certainly wasn't on Earth. Because these forces operating to, for its survival, would have been the properties of space. Now, we don't think it came from space, but that's an example of how you would reason, go through the reasoning about whether something on Earth came from Mars, because it has to get through space first.

• 51:12Peter Diamandis?

  And of course, on Earth, we see all these extremophiles in the hydrothermal vents and deep in the ocean at the point of volcanic eruptions. We see things in the coldest places on Earth, so.

• 51:24Speaker 01

  Well, that's a reminder that unlike how you and I learned biology in our textbooks, you don't need this 72-degree tide pool, you know, where everything's just right. Life can thrive in far greater range of environments than we were ever taught in the early days of learning about life on Earth. And if that's the case, of course, that opens up the options for places in the universe that previously we might have thought to be hostile to life, where you can find microbes just doing the backstroke because they love the extreme environments. And like you said, we have a whole term for them, they're called the extremophiles. But here's the point, if we go to Mars. The two scenarios.

• 52:07Peter Diamandis?

  When we go to Mars.

• 52:09Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 52:12Peter Diamandis?

  When we go to Mars.

• 52:13Speaker 01

  Mr. Optimistic man.

• 52:15Peter Diamandis?

  Oh, come on. Do you think there's a... Okay, listen, you know, we could end as a species. That's true. But at some point, somewhere.

• 52:22Speaker 01

  If we go to Mars, it's because the military forces of the world required it of us.

• 52:27Peter Diamandis?

  Okay, you and I will continue to differ on that point.

• 52:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, but I have the evidence of history on my side. You have wishful thinking on your side. That's the difference here. That's all I'm saying.

• 52:39Peter Diamandis?

  We have individual explorers who have charted paths.

• 52:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, but going to Mars is not an individual explorer. That's a trillion dollars right there.

• 52:50Peter Diamandis?

  A trillion dollars?

• 52:51Speaker 01

  Hundreds of billions of dollars. That's not private money making that happen.

• 52:54Peter Diamandis?

  So this next topic here, I'll tell you, I'll remember when I was with Elon on a particular day. He was extremely glum. And I'm like, why are you so glum? And he goes, just figured out that Falcon 9 cannot get us to Mars. And he said, I have to stop and I need to build something bigger. And Starship was designed not for the lunar program. It was designed for going to Mars and retrofitted for the Moon-Mars initiative. But how do you fund this thing? And Starlink is his venture to fund this thing.

• 53:38Peter Diamandis?

  How do you get a trillion dollars in value? You plug into a large consumer-based engine, economic engine, which is communications. And I think he's doing pretty damn good. I'm not sure. I actually switched to T-Mobile on this note.

• 53:56Peter Diamandis?

  So.

• 53:56Speaker 01

  He's very loyal of you.

• 53:58Peter Diamandis?

  I know, I know. Well, you know, the idea of communicating over Starlink is pretty cool.

• 54:03Speaker 01

  Okay, so I was recently on a ship.

• 54:06Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 54:06Speaker 01

  Circumnavigating Iceland. And we crossed the Arctic Circle where there are no cellphone towers. And all of our internet there was via Starlink. And that was the first time I was on Starlink. Bandwidth is very modest, like one megabit per second, but enough to do email and not to stream 4K video. But it definitely enabled communication. So of course, Starlink's greatest value is where you don't otherwise have. Typical cellphone communications. So we can ask the very simple question. How many people will be served by Starlink at very high latitudes?

• 54:46Speaker 01

  And that number is vanishingly small compared to everybody else who's served by cellphone towers.

• 54:53Peter Diamandis?

  I'll tell you, I use it on my airplane when I fly things because the cellphone towers are there, just not in communication. So how many people are on?

• 55:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, sorry. At high altitude or high elevation, yes.

• 55:08Speaker 01

  So again, you are, can I just back up for a minute? You mentioned President Kennedy's speech. So you may remember Kennedy gave two speeches. The first was to a joint session of Congress in May 1961, as you correctly remembered. Then he gave a speech the next year, 1962, a little more flushed out with the idea of going to the moon. But that original speech, which we remember, you know, we will put a man on the moon before the decade is out and return safely to Earth, this sort of thing. You can even hear his Brookline, Massachusetts accent saying it, right? That's how resonant those words are in so many of us. That's fine.

• 55:50Speaker 01

  And you realize in Kennedy Space Center, Florida, is a bust of Kennedy. And in the granite, next to the bust, are those very words chiseled in. There it is. But man on the moon before the decade. They say, oh, we had leaders back then with visionaries. And then, excuse me, excuse me, go back a few paragraphs in that speech. Oh, nobody does that. Why don't they? Let's find out what else he said that day.

• 56:15Peter Diamandis?

  What did he say that day?

• 56:17Speaker 01

  To a joint session of Congress. Before he said, let's go to the moon. He, he, he says, if the events of recent weeks could not utter the man's name, Yuri Gagarin, okay, who had just come out of orbit, could not utter his name. Said, if the events of, I'm paraphrasing, the events of recent weeks are any indication of the impact of this adventure on the minds of men everywhere, then we need to show the world the path of freedom over the path of tyranny. That was the battle cry against communism, and that's actually what wrote the checks. Not the stirring rhetoric about how wonderful it would be to explore the moon.

• 56:57Speaker 01

  It was, we were scared witless that the godless communists would get the new high ground. So, let's be honest with ourself, and when people don't recall that part of the speech, that's part of the delusional state that we occupy when we're trying to make predictions about the future. Yeah, we'll be on Mars if China says they want to set up base camp, then we're going to Mars. If China doesn't do that, my read of history tells me we're never going to Mars.

• 57:25Peter Diamandis?

  So, I hear you, my friend. I hear you, and I think that you're right on so many levels. But, but I still believe we have moved from the era where only governments could, and large corporations could do things at this scale, to the point where entrepreneurs and individuals can do things. You know, it used to be the kings and the queens and robber barons, the only person who could possibly, you know, change the world. And today, individuals are, and that will always be my belief.

• 57:57Speaker 01

  No, individuals, just to be clear, individuals have always changed the world. So, I don't want to under-celebrate.

• 58:05Peter Diamandis?

  But there is, there is a different, there's a different boogie man.

• 58:08Speaker 01

  Individuals run around with a trillion dollars and they just spend it all. They changed the world with their views, with their, with their spirit energy to convince people that some things, what we should be doing.

• 58:19Peter Diamandis?

  Well, you know, let's look at the railroads, let's look at the oil industry. But they, you know, they were underwritten by the Rockefellers and such. Yes, there was economic engines there, and there need to be economic engines.

• 58:34Speaker 01

  Who protected the railroads? It was the US cavalry. Excuse me, just the government was totally in that. Just, you sound like Newt Gingrich, who was a very big railroad analogist, if I know. Where he said, if we'd given the NASA's money to private enterprise, we would have been on the moon 10 times over. No, no. There's complete economic value to land that you're gonna take from the Indians. This was the entire movement.

• 59:05Peter Diamandis?

  It was.

• 59:06Speaker 01

  And minerals and so did not.

• 59:10Peter Diamandis?

  There is one, I understand the need for a boogeyman, to use that term. There is another one out there. You know, many years ago, I flew Stephen Hawking into zero G. Do you remember that?

• 59:20Speaker 01

  I didn't know you were part of that, but I did know he was in zero G. Thanks for doing that. That was, you know, he, that's, he needed to do that.

• 59:29Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, it was, it was, my company Zero Gravity Corporation. We fly these parabolic flights and it's another, you know, overnight success after 11 years of hard work. Started in 93.

• 59:39Speaker 01

  And I bet it didn't cost you a trillion dollars. Cost you a lot of money, but not a trillion dollars. Go on.

• 59:44Peter Diamandis?

  So in 2006, after the Ansari X Prize was won, it was won in 2004, but two years later, I find myself on the phone with Professor Hawking on his computer and with his administrative assistant slash nurse. And he is asking me the question whether I can fly him on a suborbital flight into space. And I say, I'm sorry, Professor Hawking, I can't do that, but I can fly you on a zero G flight. And I thought, you know, taking the world's expert in gravity into zero gravity, what could be better? Long story there, different podcast episode that I recorded on zero G. When he is at the Kennedy Space Center, when we're getting ready to take off, he agrees to do a pre-flight press conference.

• 1:00:30Peter Diamandis?

  And we had no idea how he would do on this flight, right? He's very frail, his lungs, his ribs, you know, how, we had a whole emergency room medical center on the flight. And in the pre-flight press conference, he was asked the question.

• 1:00:45Speaker 01

  You don't want headlines, Peter Diamandis kills.

• 1:00:47Peter Diamandis?

  World famous, yes, yes, that was.

• 1:00:49Speaker 01

  Bad PR for zero G flight.

• 1:00:52Peter Diamandis?

  Believe me, I had, I had the FAA telling me I could not make, I was disallowed from doing the flight after I'd spent 11 years. And I said, why? And they said, your operating specifications require you to only fly able-bodied. People and I had the presence of mind to ask who determines whether they're able bodied? And the FAA person said, well, I guess a flight doc or his physicians. I said, great. I bought malpractice for those individuals, got them to write letters to FAA that he was able bodied to fly into ZRG. And they basically said, it's your ass. Good luck.

• 1:01:27Speaker 01

  That's right, but they got their paperwork. So their ass is covered by the paperwork.

• 1:01:31Peter Diamandis?

  Exactly. So, long story short, we're at the pre-flight press conference and he's asked, why are you doing this? And he goes, given all the paraphrasing and all the risks humanity has from nuclear war and pandemics, he didn't include AI there. He said, I don't think the human race has a future unless we expand our presence out into space. And so the problem is that's not a clear and present danger on the top of people's minds like Russia, Soviet Union, or China.

• 1:02:13Peter Diamandis?

  But it is an important element, right? This is what Elon keeps on going. We have to spread the light of consciousness beyond the planet.

• 1:02:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, I would. So I don't know if you want to talk about that now, but I'm happy to. I would ask, why do you want to do that?

• 1:02:29Peter Diamandis?

  In case the earth should be, or humanity should be wiped out by some existential threat.

• 1:02:38Speaker 01

  Such as? Give me your top three.

• 1:02:41Peter Diamandis?

  Asteroid approaching us from the sun before we had a chance to see it, nuclear Armageddon, a well-engineered killer virus pandemic.

• 1:02:54Speaker 01

  Okay, so, so those, everything you just said makes complete sense and makes perfectly readable headlines. With all your eggs in one basket, everyone understands that principle. Okay. I have a more practical view of all of this.

• 1:03:11Peter Diamandis?

  Please tell me.

• 1:03:12Speaker 01

  Which is, it seems to me.

• 1:03:16Speaker 01

  That whatever it takes to terraform Mars and ship a billion people there, that seems to me to be more effort than finding all dangerous asteroids and deflecting them. It just seems to me, I'm just, it just.

• 1:03:34Peter Diamandis?

  Just, just saying.

• 1:03:35Speaker 01

  I'm just spitballing here, okay? It seems to me that if we trash Earth with climate change and, and, or there's some killer virus. It seems to me that medical research to find a perfect antiviral serum, given our access to the human genome and with AI assisted understanding of proteins and whatever else, it seems to me that is a more realistic plan than shipping a billion people to Mars in case one planet gets taken out that way.

• 1:04:14Speaker 01

  And so, so the, the, the reality of this for me is I would love to go to Mars, but not because if we go to Mars, then half of all humans will die and we protect the remaining. Like what? Really? No, you want to save all humans no matter where we are. And if you can do that to Mars, every possible scenario we can think of today is trivial to solve, it seems to me, compared with what you want to accomplish by shipping a billion people.

• 1:04:48Peter Diamandis?

  Let's, let's, let's, let's begin. I'm not, I'm not saying a billion and I'm not a Mars fan.

• 1:04:53Speaker 01

  Whatever is the number.

• 1:04:54Peter Diamandis?

  But, but I am.

• 1:04:55Speaker 01

  You're gonna have to terraform Mars if you want to, like Elon wants to do.

• 1:04:58Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, well, or we need to back up some, some significant population off, off planet. Now, listen, I have read maybe too many science fiction books and.

• 1:05:12Speaker 01

  That's not possible.

• 1:05:13Peter Diamandis?

  And looking for.

• 1:05:14Speaker 01

  You're thinking too much science fiction.

• 1:05:16Peter Diamandis?

  And looking for, and looking for rationale to fund our, our space programs. But, you know, we are, you know, thousands of years from now, millions of years from now, whatever we evolve to, we're gonna look back at these next few decades as the moment in time that the human race moves irreversibly off the planet, right? We are the lungfish equivalent. And that's part of evolution is our

• 1:05:40Speaker 01

  One fish is the first creature to

• 1:05:42Peter Diamandis?

  Move out of the oceans onto land, yes. So I think that I think that is in our It's not a genotype, it is a phenotype of humans to desire to explore.

• 1:05:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, I agree. By the way, you're mixing two Highly separable variables there. One of them is, we want to go to Mars because it's cool and we're going to explore. And we're going to be the lung fish leaving Earth going, cool, let's do it. But if you're motivated by saying, let's do that so that half the humans will die while the other half survives. And we're not going to save everybody. That's for me, that

• 1:06:18Peter Diamandis?

  I know, I'm not saying that. I'm just saying

• 1:06:21Speaker 01

  It's the consequence of what you're saying.

• 1:06:22Peter Diamandis?

  This is insurance policies.

• 1:06:24Speaker 01

  That's what I utter. I uttered the insurance policy for the species. I'm saying by the time we can do that on Mars, all of your dreams of mining asteroids will be true. They'll all be true. And if we can mine asteroids, it's like, hey, mining company 807, We've detected an asteroid headed our way. Go to them and mine them to zero. Okay, or what then? They'll have the ability to do this.

• 1:06:49Peter Diamandis?

  I, I sure, I sure hope so. Did you see the movie Oppenheimer? If you did, did you know that besides building the atomic bomb at Los Alamos National Labs, That they spent billions on biodefense weapons? The ability to accurately detect viruses and microbes by reading their RNA? Well, a company called Viome exclusively licensed the technology from Los Alamos Labs To build a platform that can measure your microbiome and the RNA in your blood. Now Viome has a product that I've personally used for years called Full Body Intelligence, Which collects a few drops of your blood, spit and stool, and can tell you so much about your health.

• 1:07:30Peter Diamandis?

  They've tested over 700,000 individuals and used their AI models to deliver members Critical health guidance, like what foods you should eat, what foods you shouldn't eat, As well as your supplements and probiotics, your biological age and other deep health insights. And the results of the recommendations are nothing short of stellar. You know, as reported in the American Journal of Lifestyle Medicine, After just six months of following Viome's recommendations, Members reported the following, a 36% reduction in depression. A 40% reduction in anxiety, a 30% reduction in diabetes, and a 48% reduction in IBS. Listen, I've been using Viome for three years. I know that my oral and gut health is one of my highest priorities.

• 1:08:15Peter Diamandis?

  Best of all, Viome is affordable, which is part of my mission to democratize health. If you want to join me on this journey, go to viome.com/peter. I've asked Naveen Jain, a friend of mine, who's the founder and CEO of Viome, to give my listeners a special discount. You'll find it at viome.com/peter. Let's turn to a much more scientific conversation here. We've seen hearings in Congress, a number of hearings, about UFOs. I'm curious, I mean, you must have been asked over and over again, what do you think of these? Seems like super credible individuals who are bringing forward

• 1:08:55Peter Diamandis?

  what they believe as viable evidence for these unidentified flying objects. They're not even called UFOs anymore, are they? They're called something else?

• 1:09:04Speaker 01

  UAPs, yeah.

• 1:09:05Peter Diamandis?

  UAPs?

• 1:09:05Speaker 01

  Unidentified anomalous phenomenon.

• 1:09:10Peter Diamandis?

  Okay.

• 1:09:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, who are they kidding? They mean UFOs. They're just trying to rebrand it to get rid of the giggle factor. So, yeah, the government calls them UAPs. So, and I noticed that the News Nation is saying, "Forget the UAP, let's go back to what everyone knows what these are." So, you want to know, I think they're interesting mysteries. I don't have any problem investigating mysteries. But if you want to think that the thing you don't know what you're looking at are visiting aliens from outer space, that's a leap. You can't go from, "I don't know what I'm looking at," to, "I definitely know what I'm looking at, I'm looking at aliens." You can't do that because you're replacing certainty.

• 1:09:53Speaker 01

  You're replacing ignorance with certainty in the absence of anything to bridge that gap. So, these are fun. I'd be curious. I have other questions. Like, why is it that the James Webb Space Telescope can produce high-resolution color images of gas clouds 7,000 light-years away? Yet, the best evidence we have for aliens is monochromatic, fuzzy tic-tac in restricted airspace on Earth seen only by the US Navy. That's a little weird to me. And, by the way, it's in our own atmosphere, and that's the best image they can produce. That's a little weird to me. So, other thing.

• 1:10:35Speaker 01

  At any given moment, you surely know, a million people are airborne. A million, with a window. And there's six, at least, 6 billion smartphones in the world, each capable of high-resolution photos and videos. If we were being invaded by aliens, we have the capacity to crowdsource that phenomenon. Cat videos go viral overnight. If you get any picture of an alien, or their spaceship, that with the detail you'd expect from high-resolution photography, oh my gosh, the world will know about it overnight. Overnight, but that's not what's happening here.

• 1:11:18Speaker 01

  So, all of a sudden, we're thinking that the Pentagon has special access to aliens. Really? Really? We have people everywhere on Earth, even places where the Pentagon isn't. And, no, we don't see... So, we have fuzzy images. Fine, keep looking for them. I don't want to stop people's enthusiasm for this. I don't know what that is. Go figure it out. But I'm just thinking, if we were being invaded by aliens, we would not require congressional hearings to establish that fact. I love it. By the way, one of the testifiers back last summer said he had, uh, he had, um,

• 1:12:01Speaker 01

  uh, non-human biologics. Yes. In a lockbox in the back. And, you know, I take people at their word. You know, what would a non-human biologics be? Well, take the tree of life with everything on it, all the plants, animals, fungus, insects, everything, and remove the branch that are humans. And everything else would be non-human biologics. So he could have tree bark in his, in his locked box, for all I know, based on that kind of testimony.

• 1:12:35Peter Diamandis?

  You know, I want to switch us over to another subject that is making the headlines heavily, and it's AI. How do you feel about AI safety? What are your, what are your thoughts? Are you concerned about the speed at which AI is progressing?

• 1:12:51Speaker 01

  I'm not uniquely concerned about AI relative to any other highly powerful bit of technology, science, engineering, that we have brought upon ourselves in the history of civilization. So, no, I'm not uniquely worried. I think there should be constraints, yes. There should be, but the constraints need to be established by people who know what they're constraining. It can't just be some members of Congress who read a few headlines and now they want to pass legislation based on a fear factor. It has to be intelligently reasoned, debated, of course. And by the way, you need politicians in that debate, because politicians are our collective representatives.

• 1:13:36Speaker 01

  And so they carry some of the fears or the joys of the citizenry. So, but you would have this conversation to find out what would be taking AI too far. And let's put constraints. Make that illegal to take it too far. What would be just right? And then you have examples of what would be just right.

• 1:13:56Peter Diamandis?

  So this week, California Legislature approves a bill with sweeping AI restrictions. I, I find, you know, listen, safety standards requiring large-scale AI companies that undergo safety testing before deployment, fantastic. In fact, OpenAI and Anthropic have volunteered to do this. Transparency, great. But this is interesting. Worker protections, protecting workers and call centers from being replaced by AI.

• 1:14:24Speaker 01

  Well, that would be right for Republicans to argue against. Okay, that's like a, that's like raw meat for a Republican. Um, I, I, that I think is naive. Yes. That would be like passing a law saying we have to protect all auto workers from these bots that are now assembling our cars. That, you know, if had you done that, then we would have trailed the world in an entire industry and the industry would have gone out of business. So there's cert, so that looks a little naive to me. And, uh, so, oh, by the way, we, you and I are old enough to remember that when cars were made by humans, there was a very real chance that in the morning your car wouldn't start.

• 1:15:11Speaker 01

  Okay, I was, I was showing a movie to my son from, the movie was from like the seventies and the, the, the, the bad guys are, are running to get away and they get in the car and they try to start the car and it doesn't turn over. And my son said, didn't they have gas in the car? It's not, you can't think that, why would a car not start? Of course it's gonna start. It's a machine that works perfectly, right? So, so cars are lighter, faster, better, more fuel efficient than they've ever been and all made by robots. So, so we have to, one has to think about, if, if you wanna be proactive about it, what you should say is, what new job opportunities will AI bring to us?

• 1:15:56Speaker 01

  Rather than complain about what jobs it replaces. Just to keep that in mind. And by the way, Hollywood went through this brilliantly. All right, the, the strikes that happened, was it a year ago, just coming out of COVID? What part of those, those arguments, and I'm a member of SAG-AFTRA, the Screen Actors Guild, American Federation of Radio and Television Artists. That's, the two unions had joined together, cause I, I've had some cameos, not that I'm a big time actor, of course I'm not, that I don't know how to act, but I can be myself as a cameo in a tiny role, as I have been in a few movies. But, uh, one of their concerns was they don't want a movie studio that has access to your, your video record.

• 1:16:40Speaker 01

  To now recreate your character and your voice for a role that you don't even have to show up for. And even more so than that is the concern. Let's say I have 20 seasons of Law and Order, right? And I have staff writers that wrote them all. I get an AI bot to ingest all 20 seasons and I say, write me 20 more seasons on this topic, that topic, that topic, in the style that these previous 20 had been written. Well, that's clearly intellectual property theft at that level. And so this all had to be hammered out, and it was.

• 1:17:14Peter Diamandis?

  Let me ask you, because this is interesting, right? The disruption of the hegemony of Hollywood is coming because we're not far, if we're not there already, from the studios saying, I'm going to create my own stars and starlets. And we're going to own them and they're going to be fully digital. And we're going to make our movies based on them. We're going to create celebrities.

• 1:17:41Speaker 01

  That's what cartoons are.

• 1:17:43Peter Diamandis?

  But when they become lifelike, or we're going to bring back Marilyn Monroe.

• 1:17:47Speaker 01

  They're animated cartoons. They're animated movies. Disney created The Lion King. So what's your point? Somebody gets money for the voice. Okay, of course, that was James Earl Jones, okay, as Mufasa. But the character, Disney owns the characters. So what's different to you about this?

• 1:18:06Peter Diamandis?

  Only that they are photorealistic human characters that would obviate the need for actors at some point in the future.

• 1:18:16Speaker 01

  Okay, so I wonder if, that's an interesting future. I wonder if they would ever become as popular as real human being actors, where the press, you know, where TMZ follows them when they come out of the restaurant. You know, if you're not an actual living thing, is it lifestyles of the rich and famous? Will that, will anyone have any interest at all? I'd bet not.

• 1:18:41Peter Diamandis?

  So let's take a look at this. This is out of.

• 1:18:45Speaker 01

  You've got no end of slides here.

• 1:18:47Peter Diamandis?

  This is fascinating for me, so let's check this out here. So the ability of AI to create effectively total disinformation, right? So do you imagine we're gonna head towards a future of defaulting to disbelief?

• 1:19:07Speaker 01

  Yes, yes. In fact, I foresee, so my, my big prediction here, I predict that we are within five years, or less, possibly three, of an internet where the deep fakes are so good that even people who believed that fake news was real will no longer believe the fake news. Okay, think about it.

• 1:19:41Peter Diamandis?

  So we're defaulting to disbelief?

• 1:19:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. So the people who believed the fakes will no longer believe the fakes because they'll think the fakes are faked, okay? Those who thought the fakes were real will no longer believe that the fakes are real because they'll think the fakes are fakes. The day that happens will represent an implosion of information integrity of the entire internet. And that, and that'll be its tombstone, the internet, you know, 1994 to 2028, rest in peace. And all that will remain are cat videos and other entertaining postings, which is how

• 1:20:22Speaker 01

  we all were baptized into the internet 30 years ago. It will no longer be a source of objective truth, of objective information, and we'll have to resort to books, oh my gosh, or actual one-on-one interviews, things like that.

• 1:20:43Speaker 01

  That is the future. Yeah, and it'll, it'll, it'll be its own fault. Right? Or with the written rules and regulations, it'll be a crime to have a deep fake that is not otherwise watermarked as such.

• 1:21:00Peter Diamandis?

  Counterfeiting, counterfeiting rules.

• 1:21:02Speaker 01

  If you're found out, then you are sent to prison. So you can't stop people from doing nefarious things, but you can have a penalty for them if they do. And maybe that will help rein some of this in.

• 1:21:12Peter Diamandis?

  Real quick, I've been getting the most unusual compliments lately on my skin. Truth is, I use a lotion every morning and every night religiously called OneSkin. It was developed by four PhD women who determined a 10 amino acid sequence that is a senolytic that kills senile cells in your skin. And this literally reverses the age of your skin, and I think it's one of the most incredible products. I use it all the time. If you're interested, check out the show notes. I've asked my team to link to it below. All right, let's get back to the episode. Have you been tracking the humanoid robot wars?

• 1:21:49Speaker 01

  I'm not into humanoid robots. I think it's a waste of time.

• 1:21:52Peter Diamandis?

  Really?

• 1:21:53Speaker 01

  I won't tell other people it's a waste of time, but personally, you know, I don't, I don't go on, on the airwaves or on the internet posting my opinions because I don't care whether anybody shares my opinion at all. Okay?

• 1:22:05Peter Diamandis?

  Well, I care whether you're, what your opinion is here. So why, why do you, why do you think that's a waste of time?

• 1:22:11Speaker 01

  I feel the love. Thank you. Thank you, Peter. This, to build a humanoid implies that there's something useful about a humanoid. When in practically anything we need a human to do, we can make a machine that does it better and the machine doesn't look human. Right on down to the running blades of sprinters who don't have feet. Okay. I remembered in elementary school, my teacher saying, oh, the human body is so well designed. And the the feet are all the every bone in the right place and tendon and ligament. And and it's perfect for walking and running and keeping our balance.

• 1:22:55Speaker 01

  The people don't have feet, you give them blades, they can run faster than they would have without feet. So the idea that the human form is something to emulate, I find to be shortsighted. Because if you want to get tasks done, to have a human do the task, no, no. You go to remember the Jetsons, the Jetsons, remember, oh, by the way, 2022, that year. All evidence shows that that's the year George Jetson was born. Sharing that with you. And that was the year of Soylent Green took place.

• 1:23:26Peter Diamandis?

  Interesting.

• 1:23:28Speaker 01

  In the Jetsons, he had a car that he flew. At the time, no one would imagine a self-driving car. They would imagine a humanoid robot who would drive the car for you. Just take out the middle man, take out the middle bot. And the car is the robot. And you know something, it's in the shape of a car because that's what you needed to do. Well, so this hunt to get a hu- I don't. Other than for, you know, to help autistic children relate to humans. If it's if you can get out of that uncanny valley, sure. But for the utility of a robot to be in a human form, I don't see that taking on at all.

• 1:24:13Peter Diamandis?

  Do you want to hear the argument for it?

• 1:24:15Speaker 01

  Please.

• 1:24:16Peter Diamandis?

  So we are running a global hundred and 510 trillion dollar GDP. And right now, half that GDP is labor and it's human labor. The projections that, you know, I showed you that image of the three top robot companies domestically are, you know, One X and Optimus by Tesla and Figure Two by Figure. Their price point target is- Japan's no longer in the running there? Japan? Japan, no, there are about thirty well-funded humanoid robot companies. And there's many in China, right? China's got the problem that it based its entire economy on labor rates. And labor rates are going up.

• 1:25:00Peter Diamandis?

  And people are no longer manufacturing in China. They're manufacturing domestically with 3D printers and local manufacturing improvements and so forth. So, and China's also got the issue of an aging population without, you know, it's the one child policy basically left, you know, half the grandparents without a kid to take care of them. With the bit him in the ass, yeah. Yeah. So, the, these robots, there's Unitree out of China, which is a $16,000 robot. So, the, the numbers right now are trending towards a $20,000 price tag for one of these robots. If you look at it on a price per kilogram, which, you know, I, I think is a reliably, let's call it $40,000 per robot.

• 1:25:42Peter Diamandis?

  So, you're able to rent or lease a robot for $100, $200 per month.

• 1:25:51Peter Diamandis?

  You know, I can think of a thousand things, like cleaning up my house, doing the laundry, mowing the, you know, the lawn, just anything that I don't need to do. If these robots are driven by multimodal, multimodal AI, that are just helping around. The projections right now may be off, but, you know, on the order of by 2040, somewhere between 1 to 10 billion doll, 1 to 10 billion humanoid robots on the planet.

• 1:26:23Peter Diamandis?

  I- That means as many humanoid robots as humans. Yes, that would mean that. More, more than, you know, Elon's predictions, and God knows he's not always right, but he thinks more prevalent than cars on the planet. But having one of these-

• 1:26:43Peter Diamandis?

  Sort of multimodal, full utility capabilities that gives your AI arms and legs to do things. Right? Like, you know, please take care of everything in the house, go shopping, go get these things for me. You know, the one thing that we humans all have in common is 24 hours in a day, seven days in a week. And the wealthy differentiate from the poor by having other people to do things for them, or the ability to, you know, save time by hopping on a private jet. So I think these are time savers and the ability to make yourself multi-present. Does that not have an appeal for you?

• 1:27:25Speaker 01

  So this would be to put a person, a robotic person, in place of tasks that are not otherwise streamlined to happen without a person. So I, there would surely be a marketplace for that over some interval of time. But why not design a house, why not design laundry that cleans itself?

• 1:27:47Peter Diamandis?

  Because, because, because building a humanoid robot that can do what a human do in a human environment, that's driven by an AI at a human or above capability, allows you to do everything without redesigning everything.

• 1:28:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, no, I get that.

• 1:28:05Peter Diamandis?

  It's a universal interface.

• 1:28:06Speaker 01

  Designs change, right? But so, so I agree. But we're not going to not design everything forever, all right? So I'm gonna say, I don't want a robot, I'm gonna find a way, I'm gonna design my home so I don't need the robot. Okay, I'm gonna design my home so that I don't, I'm gonna design my car so I don't need a robot to drive me to work. Oh, I have a self-driving car, right? This is my point, the self-driving car is the single best, earliest example of the, of, to me, why you will ultimately not need humanoid robots. Because you're gonna build a thing that is itself the robot and it doesn't look anything like a human.

• 1:28:43Peter Diamandis?

  Well, we call, everything that be, that works like this, we call the robot that cleans dishes dishwasher.

• 1:28:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly.

• 1:28:53Peter Diamandis?

  We, we give it, we give it a name.

• 1:28:54Speaker 01

  Are you gonna get a robot to load the dishwasher? Are you that fucking lazy?

• 1:29:01Speaker 01

  Probably. By the way, remember on the Jetsons, the maid, I forgot her name. Yeah, Rosie, Rosie. Rosie, of course, Rosie, you know, she, she wore a little maid's apron, you know?

• 1:29:15Speaker 01

  Neil, you've got a new book coming out in a few weeks. Tell me about it. Thank you. Give it a shout out. No, so it's, it's, oh my gosh, this is, I almost well up when I comment on this. This is emotional. This is deep. A little bit, a little bit, a little bit. My very first book. Yes. That I published back in the 1980s while I was in graduate school. You were 18 at the time. I have updated into the 21st century. And at the time I wrote a column and it was called Merlin. Merlin. And I created for Merlin, it's a different Merlin than your favorite Merlin, but it's similarly magical. This Merlin

• 1:29:57Speaker 01

  has lived for all of time. And if you ask Merlin, it was a question and answer column. You'd ask Merlin, Dear Merlin, I don't quite know how gravity works. And because Merlin has lived for all of time, Merlin just recounts a conversation with Isaac Newton. And you'll see the, the dialogue between the two of them as the reply to that question. And so, so this access through time and space has made for a much richer question and answer experience for the reader than I think would otherwise be possible. Well, I, I, it's called Merlin's Tour of the Universe. And my brother illustrated it. So he's, he's an artist. And there's, and there's sort of playful, fun, irreverent illustrations throughout. Does he, does he do this one as well?

• 1:30:42Speaker 01

  Uh, yes, no, no, he did it. He did the original. And so we update, yeah, a lot of science had to be updated, of course. Because this was from 30 years, 35 years ago. But it was, I, I mean, I, I well up a little bit because re-inhabiting the character of Merlin in this book, bringing it up to date. It was, it was so joyous to have done it the first time and to do it a second time was even more so. And then I'm reminded that Merlin is actually sort of terse when necessary and witty and a little bit irreverent. And I, and the answers are mostly short. And I realized that was my proving ground for my postings on Twitter.

• 1:31:26Speaker 01

  It was like, I was, I was being honed for that, for the short form commentary on the world.

• 1:31:34Peter Diamandis?

  You're just ahead of your time.

• 1:31:35Speaker 01

  At the end of October, Merlin's tour of the universe.

• 1:31:39Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, and I just checked and it's, you can, you can pre-buy it on Amazon, so.

• 1:31:43Speaker 01

  Pre-order, yeah, yeah, okay, excellent. They got that, it only just, would have just been listed there, because we're just putting in the final touches.

• 1:31:51Peter Diamandis?

  So who's it, who's it for, by the way? Who'd you write it for originally, and now?

• 1:31:54Speaker 01

  Oh, no, no, I mean, it was, it was a question and answer column, so it tended to be a lot of retired people with like, time on their hands to like.

• 1:32:02Peter Diamandis?

  And curiosity.

• 1:32:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, and curiosity, you know, retired people who, who, who were lifelong learners. But there's some very young people where the question was asked by the parent, like, one of them was, apparently a four-year-old asked this via the mother, it was, if, if, if rain can make rainbows, then can a moon make moonbows? Something like that, right, it's a cute little thing, and there's also, sometimes Merlin is, is, is prone to rhyme. All right, so if, if rhyming gives a better answer than otherwise, so, so can I, can I share one with you?

• 1:32:43Peter Diamandis?

  Please, I'd love to.

• 1:32:44Speaker 01

  First time I'm talking about this.

• 1:32:45Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, I'd love it.

• 1:32:46Speaker 01

  In any platform, first time I'm talking about it, so you get it first here.

• 1:32:50Peter Diamandis?

  Thank you.

• 1:32:51Speaker 01

  Someone asked, Dear Merlin, are, are red stars, red stars red because they're hotter than blue stars? Okay, perfectly rational question, and so rather than just say yes or no, so Merlin just fleshes it out a bit, so here it goes. Um, hang on. On canvas with paint, in the artist's school, it is red that is hot and blue that is cool. But in science we show, as the heat gets higher, a star will glow red like the coals of a fire. But raise the heat some more, and what is in sight? Behold, the star has turned bright white.

• 1:33:33Speaker 01

  But the hottest of all, Merlin says unto you, is neither red nor white when a star has turned blue.

• 1:33:41Peter Diamandis?

  Ah, that's beautiful.

• 1:33:45Speaker 01

  The challenge there was making it astrophysically accurate.

• 1:33:50Peter Diamandis?

  You're having your career, my friend.

• 1:33:51Speaker 01

  So blue hot is the hottest of all hot.

• 1:33:53Peter Diamandis?

  Yes.

• 1:33:54Speaker 01

  As wilder, no, for example. And the stove that you turn on that turns red hot, we think of that as the limiting hot. But if you kept increasing the heat, it would turn white hot, it would melt. But if you kept heating it even in a melted state, it would start glowing blue hot. And that's what's going on in the stars. Anyhow, so this is just a fun romp and I'm all the clamped.

• 1:34:14Peter Diamandis?

  Marlin tour of the universe.

• 1:34:16Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:34:17Peter Diamandis?

  On your, on your favorite book purchasing. Do you read the book as well?

• 1:34:23Peter Diamandis?

  Are you, for audible? Are you gonna?

• 1:34:25Speaker 01

  Oh, thank you. Yes, yes, yes. In fact, the, the company that's publishing the, the printed book.

• 1:34:31Peter Diamandis?

  Yes.

• 1:34:31Speaker 01

  Cut their teeth as a, as an audio book company. It's called Blackstone Publishers. And so, yes, I, I read all the answers, but we got voice actors to be the people asking the questions.

• 1:34:43Peter Diamandis?

  That's great.

• 1:34:43Speaker 01

  Those were fun. And plus, when I, when Merlin has a conversation with Isaac Newton, we gotta get a Brit in there with the Isaac Newton accent. You know, you gotta do that. So, so the conversations are split up that way.

• 1:34:56Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah. One, one last topic before we, we jump. Uh, we're gonna be seeing each other again, uh, in about a month's time.

• 1:35:03Speaker 01

  Yes, that's on my calendar. I look forward to that.

• 1:35:05Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, this is the 30th anniversary of the X Prize, which we spoke about when you and I met some 30 years ago. And you're gonna be on stage live with me and will be recording.

• 1:35:16Speaker 01

  Let your audience know I've not gotten an invitation until now. And you've been doing this for 29 years. I just want your audience to know.

• 1:35:23Peter Diamandis?

  I wanted to make it super special for you, my friend.

• 1:35:26Speaker 01

  And 30 years is a very, is an interesting interval of time.

• 1:35:29Peter Diamandis?

  That's why I'm saying, that's why I'm mentioning this. Yes, because it's the subject of one of your other books and we're gonna be talking 30 years ago and 30 years into the future.

• 1:35:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, thanks. Oh, my gosh, yes, 30 years. So in 2022, I published a book called.

• 1:35:45Speaker 01

  Starry Messenger, Cosmic Perspectives on Civilization. And it has all the wisdom that I've gleaned as a scientist in this world is in that book. And I could not have written it five years earlier, ten years, I was not wise enough to bring pen to page for what's in that book. Uh, one of the chapters is, oh, by the, so it's what civilization looks like if you're scientifically literate. And if you have a dose of cosmic perspective and the stuff in society. And all these paired words that we argue about over Thanksgiving are the titles of chapters like color and race, law and order, gender and identity, life and death, truth and beauty. This, it goes on and on and on.

• 1:36:29Speaker 01

  And it's what those look like if you are a scientist. And you say, you know, you haven't evaluated all the evidence, or you think you're right. But because what, what does a scientist do? But load up all the evidence and let the evidence do the talking. But if you do the talking instead of the evidence, you're going to land in a place that is, does not match objective reality. So that's what the book is. One of the chapters is called Exploration and Discovery. And I spend half that chapter on this journey from eighteen seventy to twenty twenty in thirty year increments, highlighting the fact

• 1:37:09Speaker 01

  that the world at the end of each thirty year increment is completely unrecognizable to the people at the beginning of that thirty year increment. The way we live, the way we communicate, the what we do with our time, what we care about is completely different. And I suppose one could have done a twenty year interval or a fifty year interval. Thirty seemed about right. And so the fact that we're on a thirty year cusp here, that's interesting. So thirty years ago, we're talking nineteen ninety four, I suppose, right? Yes, exactly. So I, a big point that I make is that almost every prediction made at the beginning of a thirty year period, just

• 1:37:54Speaker 01

  Is comes out wrong. You just get it wrong. Because the advances going exponentially come from places no one is thinking they come from. I'll give an example. And I give this in the book. In the year nineteen hundred, thirty years after eighteen seventy, that's when everyone talks about the year two thousand, right? Because it's a hundred years hence. Alright, so they draw pictures of what they imagine the future to be like. Here's one of them. You ready? There's a steamship coming on to shore. Because steamships in nineteen hundred was the way to go, crossing the Atlantic.

• 1:38:30Peter Diamandis?

  The rage.

• 1:38:31Speaker 01

  The steamship comes on to the shore and railroad wheels pop into place and it goes straight on to a railroad to continue the cargo transportation. This was the future. You go straight from ships to rail. Oh, my gosh. What else would it do? Oh, it had sidewalks that were on different levels and the sidewalks were on rollers. So it's just so quaint. And everyone had personal balloons that was strapped under your arm, armpit. So you can float around and get places. Because blimps and dirigibles were all the rage, okay? That's sorry, that is what they predicted for the year two thousand.

• 1:39:15Speaker 01

  When three years later, we'd have the airplane.

• 1:39:18Peter Diamandis?

  Yes.

• 1:39:19Speaker 01

  Okay, you can't give away a blimp today. Alright, so I I do a deep dive into what people are doing at the beginning and at the end of these intervals. And it's freaking mind blowing what has gone on in the last hundred and fifty years. So when people say, what's life going to be like in fifty years or thirty in the year twenty fifty? I'm saying, give up. Don't even try. Go home. One one last thing, I I quote a guy from uh from the Brooklyn Daily Eagle in the year nineteen hundred. He he works for the New York Central Railroad. So he's in the world of transportation. And he's and by the way, what's going on in nineteen hundred?

• 1:40:01Speaker 01

  The internal combustion engine car was just invented. The the the modern bicycle took final form. The the country is crisscrossed with railroad, steamships, dirigibles. He says.

• 1:40:15Speaker 01

  We can scarcely imagine that progress in transportation in the 20th century will be as great as the progress we've made in the 19th century.

• 1:40:25Peter Diamandis?

  Hmm.

• 1:40:26Speaker 01

  That's gotta be the most boneheaded prediction ever made, ever.

• 1:40:31Peter Diamandis?

  Uh.

• 1:40:32Speaker 01

  Ever. So, now, maybe you're not one of these guys making these boneheaded predictions, because that was a reverse prediction. That was, it'll never be as advanced as we have it now, and you're trying to go the other way with your X Prize, and, you know, maybe you land somewhere in the middle.

• 1:40:48Peter Diamandis?

  Hmm.

• 1:40:49Speaker 01

  But I'm betting in 1994, there are things happening today you had no idea would be going on in this world.

• 1:40:55Peter Diamandis?

  For sure. For sure. And as you said earlier, a lot of it has been in the digital.

• 1:41:01Speaker 01

  Digital information.

• 1:41:02Peter Diamandis?

  First, the first.

• 1:41:03Speaker 01

  And you're a future man. If, there's a future man walking this earth, it's you, okay?

• 1:41:08Peter Diamandis?

  Thank you, my friend.

• 1:41:09Speaker 01

  Because you put money behind your future investments, so that's, you're not just writing a book, you know, of predictions and sitting back and waiting for people to say what comes true or not. You've got skin in the game, and so I applaud you for that.

• 1:41:22Peter Diamandis?

  Thank you, buddy. Uh, where do people find you? Obviously StarTalk, if you have not yet listened to StarTalk.

• 1:41:28Speaker 01

  Oh, my podcast, yeah, StarTalk.

• 1:41:29Peter Diamandis?

  Please.

• 1:41:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, we, we, it's, it's, it's.

• 1:41:32Peter Diamandis?

  How long has it been going on? It's been?

• 1:41:34Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah, since, uh, 2009, so it's on a 15th year.

• 1:41:38Peter Diamandis?

  Nice. It was one of the earliest podcasts out there.

• 1:41:40Speaker 01

  It's one of the earliest. In fact, we were terrestrial radio before we were, uh, before podcasts were a thing. Uh, we also have a stint on television before Disney bought National Geographic. Um, we were on National Geographic Television, and so there are episodes that are there, uh, but we've been going strong ever since, and it's bringing the universe down to earth. In a fun way, I have a co-host who's a comedian.

• 1:42:05Peter Diamandis?

  Yes, he's excellent.

• 1:42:06Speaker 01

  Who's a force of levity in the conversation, and my guests are a force of gravity, and I carry the control knob, so it's the right mixture for everybody at all times.

• 1:42:14Peter Diamandis?

  And, uh, I see you on, uh, X occasionally, on Twitter.

• 1:42:18Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah, yeah, I've, I've been posting to X less often.

• 1:42:21Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 1:42:22Speaker 01

  Um, what's been, you know, the algorithms have changed. I have a huge following on X. It's like, it's like nearly 15 million people, but with algorithms now, it's just, what is the virality of what you post more than? Your following that's going to then view it. And we've had some highly viral postings from my podcast. Uh, cause we're now clipping the podcast and posting them on, on Tik Tok and, and Instagram. So, so X has, has become less of an object of affection for me in recent months and years than it had been.

• 1:42:57Peter Diamandis?

  Well, buddy, I am grateful for you in this universe and on this planet.

• 1:43:02Speaker 01

  But, but, but, but just to be clear. So I'm Neil deGrasse Tyson on all platforms except for X where that's too many letters to use up in your character allocation. So I'm Neil Tyson on X, on Twitter at X, but Neil deGrasse Tyson everywhere else. And, and the podcast is StarTalk, so thanks for those shout outs.

• 1:43:20Peter Diamandis?

  Of course, buddy. Uh, I look forward to seeing you on the stage at X Prize Visioneering, uh, towards the end of October. And thank you for joining me, my friend. Great to see you.