StarTalk Live: Building the Future

Is humanity on the cusp of momentous change? Neil deGrasse Tyson and futurists Jason Silva and Melissa Sterry explore the possibilities that lie at the intersection of technology, human biology and urban planning.

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

• 0:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Welcome to StarTalk. Your place in the universe where science and pop culture collide. StarTalk begins right now.

• 0:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I'm Neil deGrasse Tyson. I'm the host of StarTalk Radio. I'm an astrophysicist. My day job is with the American Museum of Natural History. And I'm here with my comedian co-host Eugene Mirman. Eugene?

• 0:33Speaker 01

  Hello. I'll be loud-ish.

• 0:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And I've got two futurists. We're gonna talk about the future of science, future of technology in particular, the intersection of technology and the human body, the intersection of technology, the future and of cities. And we're gonna start with Jason Silva. Jason, welcome.

• 0:53Speaker 02

  Thank you so much for having me.

• 0:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, this guy's all over the internet gesticulating what the future should be, making you feel bad because you haven't done anything to make it happen. So I'll get back to you on that in a moment.

• 1:05Speaker 02

  Alright.

• 1:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And I've got Melissa. Melissa Sterry, thanks for flying in from London.

• 1:08Speaker 03

  Pleasure.

• 1:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  For this. I'd love that. Say it again?

• 1:11Speaker 03

  A pleasure.

• 1:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  She's also a futurist, and she thinks about what the future of cities would be or should be. And so we have someone who's thinking about the human body, the human mind. We have someone thinking about human cultures. And I just wanna sort of jump right into this, if I may. So, we're going into space. I do astrophysics. I'm coming at this from a space, I'm a space person. We're going into space. Many people, myself included, are disappointed that we're not sending astronauts. I like robots, but I kinda would still like to have people doing this. You have an opinion on this?

• 1:51Speaker 02

  Uh, yeah, definitely. Well, you know, I like the idea of astronauts too. I mean, I actually like the idea of sending artists and poets into space because I think that they could really communicate.

• 1:59Speaker 01

  Definitely poets.

• 2:00Speaker 02

  Yeah. No, there was actually an article in Newsweek a while back.

• 2:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  They're dead weight, you know. You said poet fix, fix the engine, that this wouldn't work.

• 2:09Speaker 02

  Imagine a world with less. No, but I think that one of the things that people talk about often is that NASA and other organizations don't do a good enough job of telling people why sending, sending human consciousness into the cosmos is its own mesmerizing reward. I mean, that is what it is to be human. We didn't stay in the caves. We haven't stayed on the planet like we go. We transcend our boundaries. And so I think perhaps by sending artists and poets up there, an article in Newsweek called Rocket Men, actually, from a while back, said that this would be an interesting thing to do. But in terms of the argument against robots, I think that a lot of people are deciding that it's maybe less expensive and easier to send these robotic crafts out there.

• 2:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It may be less expensive, it is.

• 2:47Speaker 02

  Right, right, right. Fair enough. And, and for those that think, well, we should focus on the humans. Look, I think parallel, you know, I think we could focus on humans also, but I think that we shouldn't dismiss these robots as saying that that's not like sending humans because we are, we source our cognition to these robots. The mind of man crawls Mars at the moment. I mean, we're there. There's a cognitive philosopher called Andy Clark, who says that technology is like our extended phenotype, right? It's our exoskeleton. It extends our thought, reach and vision. And so we should think of these robots, the way we should think about our iPhones, as extensions of our mind. It's us, just like the termite colony is part of the termite. It's, it's exoskeleton.

• 3:31Speaker 02

  I think that that's how we should look at these robots.

• 3:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wow.

• 3:35Speaker 02

  Don't you think?

• 3:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, okay. No, that's good. I mean, I'm, I said, wow, good, not wow, crazy. Right, just to, just to make that clear.

• 3:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I read recently on the International Space Station, we're exploring creating sort of an internet that might work on an interplanetary scale.

• 3:52Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And someone on the space station controlled a Lego robot in Germany while orbiting the Earth. So this is an example of what you're saying.

• 4:00Speaker 02

  I saw that. That was pretty cool.

• 4:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 4:02Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 4:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, so this is an example.

• 4:03Speaker 02

  Sure, I think so. Um, or they played Will I Am's song in space, I thought, in Mars, actually. I thought that was pretty cool. I think that's too bad. But I mean, look, I mean, these robots, increasingly the instruments are becoming extensions of our sensorial instruments. So we're equipping these robots with something with eyes, with cameras, maybe, you know, they can examine the soil.

• 4:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  They're better than us.

• 4:25Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah. And I think the article in Wired, we're saying it's gonna be the future of space exploration to be more like Avatar. So they're talking about like robots that we'll be able to control with kind of like full body virtual reality systems. And why not? You know, with the exponential growth curves of these technologies, we're gonna be able to create all sorts of immersive environments here on Earth that project us into...

• 4:44Speaker 01

  We're gonna need a lot of unobtanium.

• 4:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's what Dad just indicated in Avatar. But my question is...

• 4:51Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 4:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The reason why we're sending robots is because it's too costly to send people.

• 4:56Speaker 02

  At the moment.

• 4:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  At the moment.

• 4:57Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 4:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right. I think, given the choice, we'd rather go ourselves. Given that it's costly, we send the robot. But can you imagine, and plus, space is supremely hostile...

• 5:08Speaker 02

  Right.

• 5:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  ...to human biology. All right?

• 5:11Speaker 02

  Absolutely.

• 5:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You know, you get to Mars, there's no air, and, you know, it's poisonous, and you die, you know, so...

• 5:17Speaker 02

  Well, yeah, I mean, it seems impossibly complex, but so did the idea of jetliners before we invented the airplane.

• 5:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, no, wait, wait, wait. No, let's go, you can go further back. Columbus, going to the New World...

• 5:28Speaker 02

  Right.

• 5:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Didn't have to worry, I don't think, whether the New World had air to breathe, right?

• 5:34Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 5:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Or whether there'd be wood in trees to repair a ship that broke. Imagine Neil and Buzz crash landing on the moon, so let's just rebuild all the circuit boards and relaunch ourselves. No, that's not happening.

• 5:48Speaker 02

  But that's the argument of those that are saying that they want to send robots. I mean, that's why they make a good point.

• 5:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Here's my question. Do you or some of, like, your people, like, your community of futurists, is anyone thinking that you can modify human biology to not be so susceptible to the deathly forces of space?

• 6:07Speaker 02

  That's a very interesting question of whether we can make ourselves immune to the deathly forces of space, but certainly we're going to be tinkering with our biology. I think biology is going to be the next thing that's going to be swallowed up by information technology. When biology becomes an information technology, we master those information processes of biology and we can reprogram, basically, with the canvas of life itself.

• 6:28Speaker 01

  This is how people become evil scientists.

• 6:30Speaker 02

  Well, no, but I think it's actually, I think it sounds really fascinating. There's a guy called Juan Enriquez, he's a great TED speaker, but he talks about life code. And he says that we can, when we can write with biology the way we can write with, basically, digital code, we have software. The difference is that this time you have software that can write its own hardware. So we can basically write instructions that manifest themselves in physical space. We can basically reprogram ourselves. Freeman Dyson says in the near future, new generation-

• 6:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Physicist.

• 6:58Speaker 02

  Yeah. He says in the near future, new generation of artists will be writing genomes with the fluency that Blake and Byron wrote verses. So when biology becomes the new instrument for the artist, what new forms of exquisite things might we create? And we're dealing with life itself, so we can turn ourselves into something post-human, much more interesting and maybe not subjugated to the same limitations that we currently have.

• 7:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I like that. Plus, you can use as a template, all the cool things that other animals can do that we can't.

• 7:25Speaker 02

  Absolutely.

• 7:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Like grow another limb.

• 7:27Speaker 02

  Yeah, absolutely. I mean, all that's going to be possible. Biomimicry is going to be the next big thing. We're going to be able to model ourselves after things that work better in other species and be like, we should have that, we should have that feature.

• 7:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because I remember growing up, people say, oh, the human body is this pinnacle. We're not a pinnacle of anything.

• 7:39Speaker 02

  No, in fact, that's probably why we've created such great technology, to extend ourselves through our instruments.

• 7:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, that's a very polite set. I just said to make up for our inadequacy. Oh, I would have worded that very same-

• 7:49Speaker 02

  Fair enough.

• 8:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All these films and books where you see people with a cybernetic skeletal interface of biology and technology.

• 8:17Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, they're saying that, yes, we will be able to reprogram our biology and basically upgrade ourselves, but also with nanotechnology, matter becomes a programmable medium. So when you can build artifacts at the nano scale, then you have both. Maybe you have blood cell sized devices that are made of more exotic materials than biology that can interface with our biology in ways that we can't even see. So maybe we can replace 30% of our white blood cells or red blood cells with synthetic ones and we can, you know, stay underwater for five hours. I think that's the example Kurt Zweil uses.

• 8:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So let me ask you, Melissa, do you see human organized places, communities, towns, cities, being touched by this thinking?

• 8:59Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's all about connectivity and one of the things I do is look at biomimicry and looking at the way that ecosystems respond to natural disasters.

• 9:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You use the word biomimicry.

• 9:11Speaker 03

  Yeah, it just means bionics, basically. It's just mimicking nature.

• 9:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Biomimicry is bionics. I don't need to know what that means.

• 9:18Speaker 03

  Bionics is literally looking at nature and stealing great ideas from it. So what you were saying about copying species that can do stuff better than us, that's all it is.

• 9:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so biomimicry means you're using the palate of the tree of life as a source of ideas.

• 9:34Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's your database.

• 9:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Like Velcro came from some plant.

• 9:37Speaker 03

  Absolutely, and you know, if we were thinking about how we might apply this to exploring space, we found possible planets that are maybe bigger than Earth. If you think about inhabiting those, the gravitational force would make walking and running a very different experience.

• 9:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Things would sag even more than they do here on Earth.

• 9:55Speaker 03

  Sadly so. And if you didn't engineer the human, you'd have to create an exoskeleton to respond to that. And maybe, you know, one of the places you might look for an answer to that would be at the bottom of the oceans, where the pressure forces are extreme, and looking at how you get what appear to be very delicate creatures in these incredibly hostile environments.

• 10:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  OK, so there's still a lot to be learned.

• 10:15Speaker 03

  Absolutely, yeah.

• 10:16Speaker 02

  But it's interesting, a lot of this biomimicry actually happens inadvertently. Like, there was an interesting thing that came out recently talking about how when forage your ants hunt for food, the patterns in which they do that mirrors the TCP IP protocols that govern information flow on the internet, or that the information...

• 10:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wait, wait, wait.

• 10:32Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 10:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Say that again.

• 10:34Speaker 02

  That basically, the way TCP IP protocols work to send information, this is this smart, engineered way that we figured out how to send data on the web, mirrors the way forage your ants hunt for food. Like, they share the same patterns, which is really interesting. Or how the information sharing systems that comprise the internet look exactly like neurons in the brain. These man-made things, that we call man-made, like non-natural, when they work really well, they tend to mirror these patterns from natural systems, which I think goes to the bigger picture, is that we're of nature, and anything we make is just an extension of nature too. Take the long view, and you look at Earth as a single system, everything that we call synthetic or man-made is just evolution, it's just nature unfolding in another way, it's part of the continuum. Kevin Kelly calls it the technium, the sort of man-made extension of our nature, but

• 11:18Speaker 02

  it's still nature.

• 11:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The notion that computers are getting so fast, Moore's Law, right? They're doubling in speed and capacity...

• 11:27Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 11:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  ...every 18 months or so. At some point, two things are gonna converge. What are those things?

• 11:34Speaker 02

  Well, here's the interesting thing about exponential, the exponential growth curves of Moore's Law that most people don't understand. We have a brain that evolved in a world that was linear and local, but the world now is global and exponential. And the famous example that Kurzweil likes to give, you take 30 linear steps, you go 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 30 steps later, you're at 30. You same those same amount of steps exponentially, it would go 2, 4, 8, 16. By the 30th step, you're at a billion. That's why your smartphone today is a million times cheaper, a million times smaller, and a thousand times more powerful than a $60 million supercomputer that was half a building in size 40 years ago. When you take that 25 years into the future, what do you have? You have basically computers disappearing from the visible space. I mean, we're gonna have molecular-sized devices inside of us, augmenting us. You have robots eating people. Robots eating people? I mean, no, but basically-

• 12:19Speaker 02

  What are the chances of that? Of robots eating people? In 30, 50, 70-

• 12:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, yeah, is there an apocalyptic fear factor?

• 12:26Speaker 02

  I think that mostly it comes down to this idea. We keep talking about the robots as them, but that's us. These are gonna be extensions- We are the robots that will eat ourselves. No longer scared. Yeah, I think we just will continue to do what we've always done, which is to use these tools not to make something else, but to extend who and what we are.

• 12:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, we've been doing that since the dawn of computing.

• 12:47Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 12:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We've been doing that for our mechanical bodies since the dawn of the industrial revolution.

• 12:52Speaker 02

  We inhabit our exoskeletons.

• 12:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  This is not a new thing. Why is everyone talking about it like it's a new thing?

• 12:57Speaker 02

  Pretty much. I mean, Terrence McKenna says we live inside of condensations of our imagination, but that's pretty much skyscrapers, jet engines. These are things that the human mind basically spit out, and then the human mind now resides inside of these things.

• 13:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So why all the talk of a singularity?

• 13:09Speaker 02

  Actually, Kevin Kelly says we've had singularities before. The emergence of language was the first one. We could not have imagined a rich symbolic world of language when we were the early hominids on the other side of that line. And I think the metaphor that's applied into the future now is that we're getting to the point where it's almost impossible to make predictions, because it's like staring into the sun. We can't really see what's gonna happen when that inflection point happens, the acceleration reaches a point where it transforms everything.

• 13:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That inflection point is?

• 13:31Speaker 02

  Well, Kurzweil says it within 35 years or something like that.

• 13:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, no, no, not when-

• 13:34Speaker 02

  That we'll become living rocks?

• 13:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, that's what I'm trying to-

• 13:36Speaker 02

  Oh, okay.

• 13:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 13:37Speaker 02

  Well, I think-

• 13:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That point of inflection means...

• 13:41Speaker 02

  Everything becomes linked with everything else, and matter becomes mind. So no reason to fear Iran?

• 13:49Speaker 02

  It means we basically impregnate the universe with intelligence. I mean, basically, the full flourishing of nanotechnology turns all of matter into a programmable medium. The full flourishing of biotechnology turns all of life into something for the aesthetic artist to manipulate. And then artificial intelligence means non-biological intelligence that's smarter than we are and that can upgrade itself ad infinitum.

• 14:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Who's the dude who played the Jeopardy?

• 14:14Speaker 02

  Watson.

• 14:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Watson. Watson wiped the floor.

• 14:17Speaker 02

  A hundred percent.

• 14:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  With the best players Jeopardy ever had.

• 14:20Speaker 02

  Right, and they had to use natural language.

• 14:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's already happening.

• 14:23Speaker 02

  Well, because we're taking now Watson and we're making it read all the medical journals in the world. So we're gonna make Watson into a doctor now. You have the tricorder.

• 14:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I don't have an issue with that.

• 14:32Speaker 02

  Me neither, why would you?

• 14:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We have machines that replace our physical body.

• 14:34Speaker 02

  Of course.

• 14:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Effort.

• 14:35Speaker 02

  People have pacemakers, people have things.

• 14:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's not some singular moment where all the world is gonna be different one second after that happens.

• 14:43Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, I think it's just a series of incremental steps that are gonna be happening so fast. But I think that the world that we live in today would be unfathomable to people even a hundred years ago. So I think that even when the singularity arrives, we might not notice it because of our own kind of hedonic adaptation. It's like that funny video where the guy's talking about being on an airplane when the internet doesn't work and he's complaining. And he's like, dude, you're flying through the sky, connect to the internet, and you're complaining when the signal drops.

• 15:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right, so Melissa, tell me about transportation. That's been influenced greatly by technology, of course, right? From horse-drawn buggies to the automobile, to the airplanes. But I can't help but be a little disappointed that planes today are not faster than planes were in the 1960s. If we don't have the flying cars.

• 15:29Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 15:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I blame you.

• 15:32Speaker 03

  Fair enough. I think the problem is that it's going back to the light and the dark. There are always different forces at work. Standing like.

• 15:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The dark, yes.

• 15:40Speaker 03

  Yeah, from Star Wars here. But when it comes to technology, we're seeing essentially our world split in two. Because there are those who are embracing it and running with it, and there are those that are very resistant to it. So I think we'll see quite a mixed picture. We're at the point now where advances in transportation are definitely on the edge. And they will happen in some of the most ambitious smart city projects. And the kind of things that will facilitate them will be smart data. And I'm not just talking about information flowing from your smartphones, but you know, referring to projects like Planet Valley in Portugal, where there'll be a hundred million sensors across that smart city that'll be able to track everything from what's going on with the environment, with the wind direction, you know, with the temperature,

• 16:23Speaker 03

  to where people are, where stuff needs to be going on. And that can inform. Innovation in transportation that's not necessarily really radical in terms of the vehicle itself, but in terms of the organization of the vehicle. And I think that is replicated across all the spaces where we're seeing huge advancements.

• 16:40Speaker 01

  Meaning cars will know where to park?

• 16:42Speaker 03

  Yeah, think of how much time you waste trying to work out which route, where to park, should you go on this kind of transportation or that? If you can get that information straight away.

• 16:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, the amount of time humanity wastes on free will, I don't know.

• 16:56Speaker 03

  I know.

• 16:57Speaker 02

  I don't know about free will, but the amount of times we spend on the banal.

• 17:01Speaker 01

  I would like to park, but I would like to still have free will.

• 17:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I need some banal every now and then, all of life can't be not banal.

• 17:07Speaker 02

  Well, but I mean, if we can just free up our mental faculties to machines so that we can have more space to be contemplative and dream about what might be.

• 17:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I've already done that, my computer calculates pi for me.

• 17:18Speaker 02

  That's great.

• 17:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  To memorize the digits. And Einstein has famously said, "Don't memorize anything that you can just look up."

• 17:24Speaker 02

  Right, but I think it was actually Socrates, he used to say that the technology of writing was bad because if we wrote things down, we wouldn't remember things, it would atrophy our brains. So there's always this fear of basically outsourcing certain faculties to a technology, whether it's writing or something else. But in the end, I think it frees us up to do something far greater. I think we get to free up space to probe what Stephen Johnson calls the adjacent possible, which is kind of this shadow future that hovers on the present state of things. It's a map of all the ways.

• 17:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  My favorite example of that is, was all the fear that when technology influenced the assembly line, the productivity of the assembly line, society would be so productive, you'd only have to work two days a week.

• 18:05Speaker 02

  Yeah, exactly.

• 18:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So Melissa, I'm old enough to remember, you didn't go more than a week or two before the weekly magazines would extol the virtues of the city of tomorrow, the homes of tomorrow, transportation of tomorrow, the kitchen of tomorrow, everything was about tomorrow. We were coincidentally en route to the moon when that was happening. The World's Fair, Flushing Meadow, Queens. Did not create the 1960s, the 1960s created that World's Fair. So, what happened to all the cities of tomorrow? And how can we not make that mistake again? Because you professionally are trying to create the city of tomorrow.

• 19:04Speaker 03

  Policymakers are a big problem.

• 19:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You just punted that. You're gonna blame... But we vote for policymakers. They are...

• 19:10Speaker 03

  Exactly.

• 19:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  In a democracy, we vote for them.

• 19:11Speaker 03

  One thing I notice in the world of science is in your area, no idea can be big enough. The bigger the better. It could be at a cosmic scale. But for example, if you think about city planning, city planning historically has been segmented into a sum of its parts. So for example, if we're thinking about resilience to natural hazards, the flooding team are over here, the heatwave team are over here, and it's all segmented and...

• 19:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Just a quick point. I think you have more heatwave teams in London than we have here. Because here we have air conditioning.

• 19:43Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 19:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, so we have heatwave solutions.

• 19:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, we have heat...

• 19:47Speaker 01

  And inside each of our homes.

• 19:50Speaker 03

  Exactly.

• 19:51Speaker 01

  Keeps us cold.

• 19:52Speaker 03

  Yeah, you don't have to worry about that one.

• 19:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You make a good point. There are these sort of crack teams that are specific to tasks.

• 19:57Speaker 03

  But if you look at, for example, a forest, think about how a forest responds to the seasons. Spring, it's budding, it's gearing up to regrow. Summer, it peaks. Autumn, it's losing its leaves. Do you know what I mean? The whole year is a series of changes. That's a forest. And if we look at a city, well, how does your city really change to the seasons? The changes have been very superficial, but we now have the technology. We have smart materials, we have adaptive structures, we have entire buildings that can move, and we have the sensors, the information systems, to inform those processes.

• 20:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so that just means when the next disaster comes, you just know more about how you die. Right? It's not preventing the next disaster. Isn't that, at the end, that's what you want to do?

• 20:45Speaker 03

  It's where you set your level of ambition. You know, you could say, well, we're happy with what we've got. It's like looking at a car and saying, well, I'm happy that it can reach this maximum speed and it's safety to this degree. Or you can say, that's not good enough. You can have that ambition to make it faster, to make it safer. We've tended to accept that our cities are as they are. They don't have to be this way.

• 21:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, but part of why they are as they are is because its own citizenry created it out of their own energies. It's why you have a community here that's different from a community there. This is older, this is younger, this is hipper, this is more educated. And that's the personality, the organic growth of a city. Some of the most failed cities that I've read about.

• 21:31Speaker 02

  Are the planned ones.

• 21:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We are the city planners and we will plan this city. No, you're not.

• 21:35Speaker 03

  But that's the irony. I mean, in nature, things are bottom up. For example, if you think about Maastricht City, Maastricht City reminds me of the dome city in Logan's Run because everything is so organized and planned and then the citizens rebel. But as long as you allow people to participate in this process of adaptation, to create, if you like, the seasonality, whether or not that is the resilience to natural hazards or that's the cultural activities that are going on. You know, for example, today we see billboards that use LEDs. It's all very static. You've got layers and layers of materials. Imagine smart materials that organize themselves at a molecular level to restructure themselves to.

• 22:13Speaker 01

  To have ads inside our minds.

• 22:16Speaker 03

  Have ads inside your minds.

• 22:17Speaker 02

  Google Glass.

• 22:18Speaker 03

  Automatize these things.

• 22:19Speaker 01

  Sounds awesome. You guys writing this down?

• 22:22Speaker 02

  No, but that's a very interesting point that you made about the planned cities that didn't work out because the best cities seem to have a kind of self-organizing property to them. And I think Jeffrey West from the Santa Fe Institute talks about how cities are really like organisms, they exhibit like metabolic properties. And I think that's fascinating because it goes back to the whole idea about like the man-made as just another manifestation of nature. And cities are us and they're an extension of us and they create spaces in which ideas can flourish. And the best cities, they tend to follow those patterns, those metabolic patterns. I think that's fascinating.

• 22:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, Melissa, if you look at any city, take New York, not that it's an average city, but it's certainly an interesting city. Their buildings built 100 years ago and buildings built yesterday. And so how do you say, let's put all smart materials everywhere? You can't rebuild everything.

• 23:08Speaker 03

  No, you can adapt the structure, though. I mean, you could have smart coatings on buildings that, for example, were in the same way that a species would change colour in response to the environmental conditions. So they adapted their environment, they mitigated the heat island effect.

• 23:22Speaker 01

  You could turn visible and hide from a hurricane.

• 23:23Speaker 03

  Hopefully.

• 23:28Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, you know, and also, the great thing about the moment is that there are experiments in cities going on all over the world, and those are very much taking the character of those nations. And the most interesting things are happening where there's space for experimentation in the developing world, in Brazil, in China. And you've got kids that are experimenting, and they are hacking technology. And necessity is the mother of invention. And I think we'll see more of that culture in the developed world, in places like New York City, and particularly if you get to a point when, hey, insurance aren't going to cover the damage that was done by this hurricane, or when you get to the point where no one's going to sort you out, and you yourself have got to create that solution.

• 24:09Speaker 01

  Right.

• 24:10Speaker 03

  And think about the weird thing in the digital sector. If you were using technology that was 100 years old, would you be in business in the historic cities? You know, this is a Victorian city. It is crazy. The built environment is on the cusp of acknowledging, my god, we've actually got to get with the times. We've got to take advantage of these new opportunities.

• 24:47Speaker 03

  Can nature survive an asteroid impact? You know, the creative is aligned with the destructive, so they're both part of the same cycle of events, and one leads to the other. And actually, nature does have a positive response to some asteroid impact sites. There are bacteria that thrive in those sites because they're eating up the new nutrients that have arrived on site and that are exposed.

• 25:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's positive for those species that didn't go extinct.

• 25:12Speaker 03

  Absolutely. We can't survive an asteroid impact. But I would argue that something like Sandy or some of the extreme events that we've had, there are technologies, there are new engineering innovations and new systems that could build greater resilience to these things. And whether or not they're taken up depends on policymakers and ultimately depends on people knowing about this stuff. If you don't know it exists, you're not going to fight for it.

• 25:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  OK, so we need technologically literate policymakers.

• 25:38Speaker 03

  Absolutely.

• 25:38Speaker 02

  And then better communication of these ideas and these technologies.

• 25:41Speaker 01

  What are some of the things that could help against something like Sandy that you know?

• 25:45Speaker 03

  Hurricanes are the tough ones. I mean, the first thing you've got to think about is the complexity of the site. Whether or not a hurricane is really going to affect you from a structural position is obviously going to depend on the site that you're built. You know, New York is going to suffer from liquefaction. It's built on very unstable foundations. So it's not very well positioned from the perspective of...

• 26:06Speaker 01

  You don't have to be mean about it.

• 26:08Speaker 03

  It isn't. I'm just saying it's here. But, you know, had somebody kind of thought a little bit more about it, they might have thought, OK, well... But some of the resilience we could possibly bring in, obviously looking at the way that nature builds resilience. You could, for example, to stop the storm surges, you could put barriers, which are, you know, not the kind of classic levees, but where you created a more graduated system that would help prevent that, which is obviously one of, well, really your biggest problem, isn't it? The storm surge. When we're engineering buildings, we haven't really thought too much about extreme storm systems. You know, we've tended to build stuff that is, you know, just full frontal to whatever wind systems are there. We can plan cities that are intelligently interacting with the wind so that, you know, think about, OK, from what direction will the wind help cool the city?

• 26:53Speaker 03

  How could we break up the kinetic impact of wind? Exactly the same with tsunamis.

• 26:57Speaker 02

  That's really interesting. So when buildings, when skyscrapers are designed, they're not designed to deal with the extreme?

• 27:02Speaker 03

  Well, wind engineering is part of it, but not at extremes. Yeah, the swing stuff, but not at the extreme level. And part of that is because of this assumption that insurance will pick up the tab. You know, and that's why when you look at tornado alley. I mean, you know, these buildings...

• 27:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I got an issue with everything you just said. If I may, you look at some old photos of New York from a century ago. People say, "Oh, look how quaint that is with the horse-drawn carriage and the cobblestone." "Oh, I wish I was back in that time." I don't wish I was back in that time for many reasons. But leading the list, I would say, is the streets smelled like horse manure.

• 27:35Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 27:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  There were flies everywhere. Can we remember this, please? The streets were dusty. That's why people wore spats to prevent dust from getting on your laces. There's aspects of that world I don't want any part of, let alone whose servant I would have been. So, there was a big issue about how to make the streets healthier or less offensive than they were because all these flies, flies are a health concern, all right? So, they talk about things you can put in the horse feed to prevent the flies from wanting to reproduce in the horse. There was a whole conversation about this. And so, what solved the problem? Cars, all right? That was the solution to that problem. There was another one.

• 28:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  There were theories about the maximum number of people you could possibly have live per acre because of the communicable diseases that would run through it like wildfire. You wouldn't be able to stop it. So, there was a health limit that was posted. And no one thought about antibiotics. So, here you are trying to have a city survive a hurricane. And I'm saying, if we're gonna think about the future, let's bring out the top folks and say, "Let's prevent the hurricane."

• 28:45Speaker 01

  Geoengineering. Stuart Brand talks about that.

• 28:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Geoengineering.

• 28:48Speaker 01

  A monster that eats wind.

• 28:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah. I want the day to come where I don't need you. I don't want you to have to tell me how to survive a storm. It's like the medical community today, "Living with AIDS, living with..." When I grew up, we cured that stuff, all right? Now, it's "living with it." No, give me the cure. When you grew up, did anyone have to live with anything?

• 29:12Speaker 01

  Because people died a lot.

• 29:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes.

• 29:15Speaker 01

  I'm not saying I remember the 50s, but I think a lot of people used to die all the time.

• 29:22Speaker 01

  That's why they couldn't live with it. They die.

• 29:27Speaker 03

  But actually now, we do have the tools through the interdisciplinary approach. We're now able to bring the earth sciences together on a global scale to really understand what's going on. And when we really understand what's going on, we can see those cycles, we can see those pattern of events. For example, we used to think that when a natural disaster happened at a natural virgin site, the best thing to do was to go in and apply all these ideas we had. Now we've actually started to really study and understand that ecosystems have their own repairing strategies. They're better at it than we are, and it's hardly surprising. They've been doing it for billions of years. And I think now people get a bit scared about geoengineering, and they think, "Oh my god, we're gonna be designing the weather and it's all really scary."

• 30:10Speaker 03

  It could be stuff that actually is pretty incremental. It could be very subtle.

• 30:34Speaker 02

  Think of how amazing it is whenever we watch a time lapse video of a skyscraper being built, like three months accelerated, and we just see that it's just being realized in real time when seen through time lapse. Well, I think that full mastering of biotechnology, nanotechnology makes all of the physical world basically our clay for us to literally realize into being. We can turn deserts into oases. It's like dream engineering. We're talking world building stuff, but in time lapse mode. Like, it'll be on that scale of being able to transform.

• 31:04Speaker 01

  And we're gonna try some of this stuff, though, first in Brazil and China, right?

• 31:07Speaker 02

  Well, listen, if you were able to see, if you were able to see an entire city, if you were able to see New York and fast forward, you know, 500 years of development or 300 years of development, you would see that literally our thoughts transform the world and manifest the decisions of individuals over time and economic decisions people make change the topography of a place. We change the topography of a place more than geology does. And if we could fast forward that, it would be like...

• 31:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Manhattan, I think, used to be a mountainous place. And now, we left a few mountains in just for scenery. Otherwise, yeah, it's our island.

• 31:41Speaker 02

  We can terraform. We talk about terraforming other planets, we can terraform our own planet.

• 31:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  In Manhattan, we say, "You know..." This is really expensive real estate, let's add some more. To just landfill, they'll put in another building.

• 31:52Speaker 02

  I mean, look at the Palm Islands in Dubai. I mean, that's just astonishing. You look at that from the sky.

• 31:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So is this the future of the earth? And might there be unintended consequences? We're facing now climate change?

• 32:03Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 32:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That is...

• 32:04Speaker 02

  There's always gonna be unintended consequences. The man that discovered fire was probably burnt at the stake by his neighbor. So, technology extends our sphere of possibility. You can extend it in positive ways and negative ways, and there are gonna be unintended consequences. But, you know, you look at it as a single system. It's a self-remedying system. Will, you know, when something...

• 32:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Until it doesn't.

• 32:24Speaker 02

  And then if that, well, if doesn't, then we would die out. So it's not in our interest, it's not in evolution's interest for that to happen. So it's like, if evolution becomes self-aware, that might be a little arrogant. But if we can take control over our evolutionary destiny, then we can sort of remedy the consequences that we didn't choose, right? Like, global warming. Okay, this is not good.

• 32:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Fix it after the fact.

• 32:44Speaker 02

  Well, yeah. Or see it coming before it's too much of a problem, and address it.

• 32:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So what then of the forest analog? Which I thought was so beautifully conveyed. Where things are in balance, over the billion years that it took to figure out what balance was, it's in balance. And everything we do that trips up what nature wanted to do on its own

• 33:05Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 33:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  is gonna have some Rubik's Cube effect down the line. And maybe it'll get ahead of us. Why else is it that every science fiction novel I've ever read that reached for the latest discovery of technology portrayed a dystopic future?

• 33:21Speaker 02

  Because that makes a better story. But I think that the fact that we're still here, I think Matt Ridley wrote a great book, called The Rational Optimist, and he did a TED Talk called "When Ideas Have Sex." And he basically talks about the last hundred years of progress, and all the ways in which the world is getting better, through all these incremental increases. But that stuff doesn't make the news. What makes the news is if it bleeds, it leads. And we have these brains that, overactive amygdalas, looking for danger, because that's what we've inherited as a way to survive. It's positive. You know, you have Steven, you have

• 33:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, it's true.

• 33:49Speaker 02

  You have Steven Pinker, "The Myth of Violence", "The chances of a man dying at the hands of another man today are the lowest than they've ever been", you know? We have increased the population of the world, but the percentage of people living in poverty has actually gotten smaller. I mean, there's all of these ways in which we have improved the world, but it's not given that spin in the news, because it's just not what we pay attention to.

• 34:08Speaker 03

  I think the important role of science fiction is bringing humility, because it's very easy for us to get above ourselves and to think we've figured it all out. But the subject of fear of technology that you were talking about, I mean, "Future World" is a great movie to watch, 1976 film, where the idea is that artificial intelligence susses out that humans are a threat to the planet, so it decides it's going to kill off our leaders and replace us with clones, and those clones are going to direct us, and totally over the top, as you'd find in science fiction.

• 34:34Speaker 02

  So far, I'm sold.

• 34:35Speaker 03

  Yeah, we should be scared about unintended consequences, but you know what? If you don't get the good guys doing it, the bad guys are going to do it anyway, so...

• 34:44Speaker 02

  Of course.

• 34:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, we've got to wrap up here. If we have enlightened policymakers, and if money flows in all the ways it needs to technologically, how long into the future before we have the city of the future that you imagine?

• 35:00Speaker 03

  Very soon.

• 35:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's... No! I want a more quantitative answer than that.

• 35:06Speaker 03

  We will have very smart cities by the year 2020.

• 35:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Eight years.

• 35:12Speaker 03

  Yeah, within eight years. The kind of bionic city I'm talking about, I'm giving a timeline of between 2040 and 2050.

• 35:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 35:20Speaker 03

  So it's like the forest.

• 35:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's seeable.

• 35:23Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 35:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's touchable, smellable, yeah?

• 35:25Speaker 02

  Do I have an estimate as to when that might happen?

• 35:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes.

• 35:29Speaker 02

  You know, well, if Kurzweil's predictions are correct, I think over the next 30 years, the world is going to be transformed in ways that make the last 30 years look negligible. I think that we could see that level of transformation.

• 35:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, however, every exponential growth of anything, every period will say that about the previous period.

• 35:46Speaker 02

  Fair enough, yeah.

• 35:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's what exponential growth means.

• 35:49Speaker 02

  Probably the case.

• 35:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I have a quote from the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, the year 1900, December 31st. The editor writes...

• 35:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We can scarcely imagine that any advances in transportation in the 20th century will rival that which we have accomplished in the 19th century.

• 36:07Speaker 02

  Right, but we-

• 36:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  They had railroads and they had dirigibles.

• 36:10Speaker 02

  Right, and with the industrial revolution, we transcended the limits of our muscles. With the digital revolution, we're transcending the limits of our minds. We transcend and transcend and transcend.

• 36:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Your counterparts back then could have made the same statement at each period.

• 36:22Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 36:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I'm just saying, so I don't see your statement now as special over time. It's just the next person saying the next thing.

• 36:29Speaker 02

  You're absolutely right. I think we can always-

• 36:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  On an exponential growth curve.

• 36:31Speaker 02

  I think that we can always rely on our cosmic restlessness to assure that we're never done.

• 36:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I think we should end on that sentence. Join me in thanking my panel for StarTalk Live.