The Realistic Future of AI w/ Brian Keating

In this episode, Peter and Brian discuss asteroids, multiverses, and how AI will impact the universe. Brian Keating is a renowned astrophysicist, cosmologist, inventor, and author. He is a professor at the University of California, San Diego and director of the Arthur C. Clarke Center for the Human Imagination. Keating's groundbreaking research on cosmic microwave background radiation has earned him prestigious awards, and his book "Losing the Nobel Prize" has received critical acclaim. Subscribe to his Youtube Channel. Follow Brian’s Podcast, INTO THE IMPOSSIBLE, on Apple devices https://apple.co/39UaHlB, Spotify spoti.fi/3vpfXok, Audible it’s here: adbl.co/3MeLPTj or, briankeating.com/podcast _____________ I only endorse products and services I personally use. To see what they are, please support this podcast by checking out our sponsors: Levels: Real-time feedback on how diet impacts your health. levels.link/peter _____________ 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 and Mindsets 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.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Moore's Law is sort of saturating. As resources become more and more capable, they become more and more demanded. A similar thing can happen with AGI, and I think it could be, A, because of the utility, but B, because of the lawyers.

• 0:13Peter Diamandis?

  I think that we are in the process of evolving not just one, but two new intelligences.

• 0:18Speaker 00

  Can you have truly artificial intelligent, you know, GAI, whatever you want to call it, AGI, without pain?

• 0:24Peter Diamandis?

  Are we, as humans, a series of algorithms?

• 0:28Speaker 00

  I think we have to say there is no evidence right now.

• 0:31Peter Diamandis?

  But there is huge philosophical, religious implications.

• 0:35Speaker 00

  Absolutely. I think in a way, the most beneficial use may redound to us in that it is a mirror.

• 0:40Peter Diamandis?

  I love when you geek out like that.

• 0:45Peter Diamandis?

  Everybody, welcome to Moonshots and Mindsets. About to dive into a podcast with a dear friend, Brian Keating, an astrophysicist, a cosmologist, and inventor. He's a professor of physics at UC San Diego, and he's also the executive director of the Arthur C. Clarke Center for Human Imagination. He's written a number of books, including Losing the Nobel Prize and Into the Impossible, and we're gonna have fun. You're gonna hear a conversation around a couple of different subjects. I'd love to hear your thoughts on them. The first is, is there intelligent life out there in the universe? Is there intelligent technological life? Brian takes the position that there is not, and I take the position that there is. I'd love to hear what you think after we share that debate. We're talking about

• 1:30Peter Diamandis?

  things like Arthur C. Clarke. I had a chance to meet him, his influence on science, on technology. Are we alone in the universe, and are we living in a simulation? We're gonna dive deep into artificial general intelligence. Is it a good or a bad thing? Is it something that's gonna transform life in a positive way or negative? Should we be going to Mars or living in O'Neill colonies orbiting the sun? Ultimately, this is a conversation for the 90-year-old kid in you who's excited about the future of humanity in space, the discovery of intelligent life, and really, a conversation around the potential for

• 2:11Peter Diamandis?

  human imagination. All right, let's dive in with Dr. Brian Keating. Hey, Brian.

• 2:18Speaker 00

  Peter.

• 2:19Peter Diamandis?

  Good to see you, buddy.

• 2:20Speaker 00

  Long time no see.

• 2:20Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 2:21Speaker 00

  You were my first big name guest on the Into the Impossible podcast when I started it in earnest in 2020. I started it in 2018 with Freeman Dyson as my first guest, but we didn't record video and I really didn't amp it up until you came on and gave me the patented Diamandis bump.

• 2:42Peter Diamandis?

  Well, my pleasure and pleasure to have you reciprocate here and to talk about subjects that I dream about and I love. You know, I've gone hard over on longevity, but the nine-year-old kid in me is still very much all a space cadet, for sure.

• 3:00Speaker 00

  Likewise, and of course, you've been such a generous and friendly supporter of the Arthur C. Clarke Center for Human Imagination, where I am the Associate Director now, and it's almost 11 years old, I think.

• 3:13Peter Diamandis?

  That is amazing. I remember, I remember when you and Eric Verri started talking about this and, you know, I've been a huge Arthur C. Clarke fan forever. You know, I pride myself in having known him earlier in my life and love his stories, love his work, and anything I could do to perpetuate his vision and his ability to foretell the future was something I wanted to do.

• 3:39Speaker 00

  Yeah, there's so few people like him around, and historically speaking, both for his scientific, you know, kind of science fiction output, but also his quips. You know, the name of my podcast, Into the Impossible, comes from a series of questions that I'll ask you later on, as I ask all my esteemed guests when they come on my podcast. But he said, of course, the only way to know the limits of the possible is to go beyond them into the impossible. He also said another thing, which I like to use at faculty club meetings, which is The, you know, for every expert, there's an equal and opposite expert. So I like to lay that on my department chair.

• 4:14Peter Diamandis?

  There's, there's lots of great quips, right? And, and it's like, you know, uh, in the beginning, uh, create, you know, when something's, uh, first presented, it's a crazy idea. And then the second stage, it's, you know, well, it might work, but it's not worth doing. And then the third stage of a, of a revolutionary idea is, you know, people say, I told you that was a great idea all along.

• 4:33Speaker 00

  It was my idea.

• 4:35Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 4:35Speaker 00

  And persevered.

• 4:37Peter Diamandis?

  You know, I'd love to share, if you don't mind, uh, my memories of him.

• 4:40Speaker 00

  Yeah, please do.

• 4:42Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, I met him when I was 21 years old. I was at MIT as an undergrad or as 20. And, uh, Todd Hawley, Bob Richards, uh, David Webb, and I went to the United Nations Conference on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space. It's the first international trip I had done my own and it was a big deal. I was, um, uh, chairman of Students for the Exploration and Development of Space, SEDS at the time. And it was incredible when I went there and there was this giant conference in the middle of Vienna on space and all, this was the height of the Cold War, right? The Reagan-Star Wars initiative is going on.

• 5:22Peter Diamandis?

  And, uh, I walk into this hall and there is Arthur C. Clarke with a group of people around him holding court. And, uh, I didn't actually know who he was. I had read childhood's end in high school, but that was it. I'd heard of 2001 and seen the movie, but never connected with him. And, uh, so Bob Richards and Todd Hawley goes, oh my God, it's, it's Arthur C. Clarke. Let's go talk to him. And so we go and, uh, we stand around and we start a conversation with him. In the middle of the conversation, he just leaves. He just takes off. And I'm like, how rude that I'm really pissed.

• 6:04Peter Diamandis?

  And so we end up going to hear his presentation. And he's on stage, you know, in this UN like forum, you know, up in the dais. And I lean over to Todd and Bob and I say, he's going to take us out to dinner. Because he was really rude. I was, I was just so convicted about, about that, such conviction. And so afterwards, I go up and I'm, I find him and I, I say, you know, you know, Mr. Clark, I would love if my colleagues and I could take you out to dinner tonight. And he, he ends up saying, yes, we go out to dinner. Of course, he pays. I win my bet that he would take us out to dinner.

• 6:49Peter Diamandis?

  And it turns out he has a hearing aid. He just thought we stopped talking. But he ended up becoming the, the chair of our advisory board at Students for Exploration and Development of Space. And we'd visited him a number of times in Sri Lanka. And the guy just had an incredible view and vision. I just saw a post that Elon made recently, sharing his, Arthur's sort of prediction on computers and on AI. And it's still as relevant today, you know, basically that we're birthing a new species on this planet.

• 7:26Speaker 00

  Yeah. And of course, you know, this podcast game that you and I are so deeply invested in, I think it gives us both a, a really surprising amount of joy that we get to talk to people outside of work. And at least for me, when I get to, there's people I have to talk to, Peter, and then there's people I want to talk to, right? So you're one of the latter.

• 7:44Peter Diamandis?

  Thank you.

• 7:45Speaker 00

  When I, when you, we always open the, the show, our show with his actual voice saying, open the pod bay doors, Hal, from 2001, A Space Odyssey. And of course, the iPod got its name from the pod bay in, in Arthur C. Clarke's 2001, A Space Odyssey. So very closely related, a direct through line from podcasting to Sir Arthur C. Clarke that I don't think most people appreciate.

• 8:08Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, well, a lot emanates from his storytelling.

• 8:14Peter Diamandis?

  And his stories, his books are still as relevant today as they always have been.

• 8:19Speaker 00

  What do you think he'd make of the kind of, you know, kind of singularity that seems to be approaching, to quote your good friend Kurt Swah, with AI? I mean, I've listened to a lot of your Moonshots podcast lately, and they've rightfully been, you know, I think you are, you know, perhaps the go-to source for some of these great conversations with leaders like like Samir Khan and other folks that you've talked to. And of course, you've talked intimately with Elon. And you're the only person, Peter, I think, that Elon never, you know, responds to sarcastically to kind of, you know, he says like, I love your optimism, Peter. And I think if he said that to anyone else, they'd be like, what the hell did I do to deserve his wrath?

• 9:01Speaker 00

  But anyway, what do you think Arthur would think about, you know, things like ChatGPT? And I'm using it for teaching. I'm using it for basic typesetting and research functions and coding. It's really blown me away. On the other hand, it needs more supervision than my, you know, my twins do on a daily basis. So as a father of twins, you know, the pleasures of twins. But tell me, Peter, what do you think Arthur would think about? I mean, if you can invoke his natural intelligence.

• 9:28Peter Diamandis?

  I think he would view humanity birthing new species. I think that we are in the process of evolving not just one, but two new intelligences. One is AI on its own, whatever you want to call it, you know, eventually AGI, and call it any name you want, but it's an intelligence that is different from ours. It's not structured like our cortical columns in our neocortex. It doesn't work the same, but there is a level of intelligence and growing intelligence there. And we're also giving birth to a hybrid, right, a human AI hybrid.

• 10:09Peter Diamandis?

  There will be the those humans who choose not to go on the journey, those that merge with technology and those and and AI on its own. I think that's fascinating and I, you know, one of the questions I've been pondering and you're the right person to talk to about it, Brian, is, is this the inevitable process that goes on in the universe? Is, does, does it have to start with biological life always and then biology leads to silicon or, you know, pick your favorite substrate materials?

• 10:43Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, I've been wanting to talk to you about that as well. First of all, you, you said something, I think, recently about, you know, kind of the pathway forward and how the age of abundance has taken us away from, you know, using whale oil and so forth. As I point out in my first book, Losing the Nobel Prize, that was really obviated and superseded by the development of petroleum and, and that was really the purview of Alfred Nobel and the construction and mining operations that dynamite enabled. But, but I wonder, you know, if you, if you think about it, I'll just put it out there, the, the development of a solar panel in some ways might require whales, you know? In other words, there might be some inevitability that you have to go through this, this pathway

• 11:27Speaker 00

  to get to Carteshev, you know, logarithm, you know, 10 to the minus three or whatever we are, Dyson, you know, level that we're not even approaching. So.

• 11:37Peter Diamandis?

  I love when you geek out like that.

• 11:40Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's, it's fun to get paid to do that, right? And then on the other hand, you know, so there is this sort of inevitability towards the, the predecessor primitive technologies. You know, I joked about, well, we needed dinosaurs to get to, to get to, you know, petroleum, right? And people, oh, it's not dinosaurs, it's pre, okay, it's dinosaur life or it's, it's ancient, you know, biological.

• 12:02Peter Diamandis?

  Hydrocarbons, right.

• 12:03Speaker 00

  Hydrocarbons. So does, is that, is that a necessary step? Is that, is that sufficient step?

• 12:09Peter Diamandis?

  I think there need, I think there's no large jumps, in other words, our ability to need electrons would not have happened had we not had oil.

• 12:22Peter Diamandis?

  Right? In other words, we didn't create large dynamos burning whale oil. Whale oil gave us light and gave us the desire for more light to read and to function during the nights. But then it was only higher energy density petroleum, coal, petroleum, other things that allowed us to drive these large dynamos that created electrons. And then we switched over to an electron-driven tech ecosystem. And then we said, okay, how else can we get more efficient electrons? And that came from solar and soon fusion or micro nukes. And so I think that is a required predecessor.

• 13:05Speaker 00

  Yeah. And you look at it and you see things like, you know, computer was not designed by a computer, you know, the first programming language. Chat GPT is programmed on a very advanced, you know, programming substrate, which itself is predecessors going all the way back to assembly language. But but that, you know, is even not the first step. So this kind of first start problem or cold start problem, I think, is an interesting one. And and the other thing I like to point out, and I'll pose this to you. Do you know what Albert Einstein called his happiest thought, Peter? Did you? You've experienced

• 13:35Peter Diamandis?

  I think I've heard this, but

• 13:37Speaker 00

  You've experienced this with Stephen Hawking. So I'll leave it at that.

• 13:42Speaker 00

  Jog your memory. What was it that you experienced with Stephen Hawking?

• 13:45Peter Diamandis?

  I mean, it was it was his joy of being in weightlessness, his joy of being free. So what was Einstein's greatest thought?

• 13:53Speaker 00

  So his great, his most happy thought, he called this my most joyous thought, was that an observer in free fall will experience no gravitational field. This led to the notion of the Einstein equivalence principle, which led to general relativity. Now, I ask you, Peter, is it possible, A, for an artificial AI, AE, an artificial intelligent Albert Einstein, to A, experience joy, or B, somehow manifest what free fall viscerally feels like? In other words, the greatest culmination, one of my late colleagues, Professor Hans Pahr, used to call general relativity, we call it GR. As the greatest accomplishment of Western civilization, not just of mathematical physics,

• 14:38Speaker 00

  but it was a culmination because it took the work and collaboration and the abundant resources, the excess capital left over to allow people to do stuff, the lack of wars and so forth, and communications and so forth. So he called that the greatest pinnacle. So can a computer, Peter, feel the sensation of joy and free fall?

• 14:56Peter Diamandis?

  That's going to be the question. Ultimately, the question you're poking at, which I think about a lot and I ask many people, is will, and let's just call it AI versus AGI, but what is it that humans can do that AI cannot? Right? Is there anything that AI cannot accomplish? One of the conversations I had recently on the stage at A360, I need to get you there next year, by the way, was with Imad Mustak, who is the head of Stability AI, one of the top generative AI companies. And he was saying the number one thing that he selects for

• 15:36Peter Diamandis?

  at his companies and his employees and his partners is passion. And that idea of passion may in fact be the most important last stand for humans. And that passion falls into emotions. Can computers emulate love and passion and emotions? I'm sure they will be able to emulate it. Will they be able to exude it where when you as a human are on the other side of it, you truly feel their passion? That's going to be interesting.

• 16:12Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 16:13Peter Diamandis?

  What do you think? What do you feel about that?

• 16:16Speaker 00

  I'm an AI, you know, kind of minimalist in some sense. I'm also an artificial, I'm sorry, I'm an alien life minimalist too. I don't believe there are any intelligent life forms out there in the universe.

• 16:26Peter Diamandis?

  We're going to have a great argument about that one.

• 16:28Speaker 00

  Okay. I believe that if there is life in the universe, it originated from Earth. And we can sort of talk about some of the ideas behind why I think that way. It's controversial.

• 16:38Peter Diamandis?

  And we will.

• 16:40Speaker 00

  And even though I'm an astrophysicist, I'm not speaking on behalf of a field that I am directly involved in. And so like any physicist, that frees me up to speculate wildly. But but the best part about it is I don't believe it. What I'm saying can be falsified, at least in the near term. So we can make these predictions and and I wouldn't have to pay your famous wagers of of sin if I'm wrong. But Nicholas Taleb, you know, in cheerful fashion, as he's known to do, put something out, you know, that these tests that are passed by by the chat AI engines, the fact that they're passed has more about the test than it does about the the advanced ability of AI. And I sort of agree with that statement as curmudgeonly as he normally is, that, you know, I mean, I think a lot of what we're

• 17:25Speaker 00

  seeing is, you know, it's it's sort of a mirror, or what we're putting into it like a like a perfect mirror is reflective of who we are. And it can do things that we can do. But I've often wondered, you know, can you have, can you have truly artificial intelligent, you know, GAI, whatever you want to call it, AGI, without pain? And, you know, pain is different than love. You talked about, you know, can they love a few minutes ago? I think it's it's interesting to know, can they feel pain? Just like Bentham used to say about the, you know, being cruel to animals and so forth, that the question was not, you know, do they do they, you know, have consciousnesses, can they feel pain? And we could talk about that some other time. You've written a lot about the the prospects for artificial meat and and so forth in the future. But and currently, right

• 18:10Speaker 00

  now, I've talked a lot about.

• 18:12Peter Diamandis?

  But let's just let's go there one second, because I do think you can, I mean, what what is pain? Pain is a, you know, a negative, across the board, negative impulse as a result of of an action or a thought or an activity. And can you create a pleasure pain matrix for a computer that has implications? I mean, one of the things, you know, Palmer Lucky, the founder of Oculus, had another conversation with him at A360 this year, and he created a A version of a VR headset that had explosive bolts on it that if you died in the game,

• 18:56Peter Diamandis?

  it would take out your prefrontal cortex, right? And you'd be dead. And and he did it just for fun, more as a piece of artwork than anything else, just to say, you know, what would it be like if living in the virtual world had real consequences like life and death? Could you imagine creating that for an AI as well, where consequences of doing something that caused pain reduced your resources, access to power or memory or compute?

• 19:26Speaker 00

  Blew a capacitor.

• 19:27Peter Diamandis?

  And would shut you down at the end, you know, that there would be death and so forth. I believe you could, you could create that and and in in the algorithms that govern govern that. I mean, we are, one of the questions fundamentally is, are we as humans a very robust, complex series of algorithms? Whether we've got, whether we've got quantum compute in our in our microfibrils of our neurons, or whether we're something else. I just finished reading a book called Thousand Brains that looks at, you know, a theory for for intelligence in the mind.

• 20:09Peter Diamandis?

  I think you can. I think you can program love and and pain into computers. Going back to your original point, though, Brian, today's AIs, today's generative AIs, OpenAI and ChatGPT and the like, are all reflections of human data, right? I mean, the large language models simply reflect what we put out into the world. And so it reflects us. It doesn't reflect, it reflects extrapolations of what we've said and interpolations of what we've said, but it still reflects us.

• 20:46Speaker 00

  And I think it is exactly right, Peter. I think, I think in a way, the most beneficial use may redound to us in that it is a mirror. So you and I can nerd out about a great many topics from, you know, parenting twins to, you know, writing books. To space, to Arthur C. Clarke, but one of our shared passions is aviation and we both fly our own little planes around and so forth. So you, I recall using Microsoft Flight Simulator in 1985. It was back when I knew all the names of all the astronauts that have ever gone, come before.

• 21:17Peter Diamandis?

  And you would fly in, in, through the towers in Chicago and.

• 21:22Speaker 00

  And Urbana-Champaign and then you'd fly right through the towers.

• 21:25Peter Diamandis?

  Exactly.

• 21:26Speaker 00

  And since then, we've moved up, you and I moved up to, to larger and larger aircraft, you know, rather than the Piper Archer that they used to feature in MSFS. Now, we were flying around then and we'd go underneath the Golden Gate Bridge and so forth, or at least I would. And, and I would even do that in some of the more advanced simulators, including the moving simulators. And if you've ever been in one of those, it's really, you come out, you're nauseous a little bit, you really feel, and it's not like it's a faithful representation of the graphic capability of a modern, you know, a PC flight simulator. I mean, the modern flight simulator gives so much, but the addition of motion gives so much more reality to it. Now, building on what Palmer said, and I think he is a great visionary.

• 22:06Speaker 00

  He, imagine if in the flight simulator, when you tried to go through, you know, the Golden Gate Bridge underpass, or between the support cables, and you hit one of them, you got an electric shock, you know, right to the sphincter region or wherever. You could, you, you could design this, or you had on your helmet, you know, like you got, you got a little, you know, joy buzzer on you. It would, it would, in addition to the level up, you know, of the reality of it, it would make you more, I believe it would make you more capable to perceive risks. And I think pre-gaming.

• 22:37Peter Diamandis?

  You'd learn a lot faster.

• 22:38Speaker 00

  And so another way that I think that AI can help, but I believe it's being hindered, I, I believe this is true, that Moore's law is sort of saturating. There, we can leave aside the GPU kind of use of it, but there's, there's some principle, and I forget the name of it, you probably know the name of it. As resources become more and more capable, they become more and more demanded. Just like the old saying, if you want something, if you want something done right, ask somebody who's too busy to do it. Right? Cause they have so many people asking them because they're so capable. Now, I've seen a saturation on the upper end, although it's classified. Information, we use Department of Energy computers at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. And in that laboratory, they have, you know, the Pearl Mutter machine, and we don't even know how fast these machines are, Peter.

• 23:21Speaker 00

  But we know that both our allocations are dropping every year to analyze cosmic microwave background radiation data. That's my, that's my area of expertise. And also the, you know, the net throughput in these high throughput and high performance computing systems. Because of their utility are so and such high demand that actually the Moore's Law of performance where it really counts. The actual end use, how many actual papers are being written, say, or how many new data sets are analyzed is actually saturating. And I think a similar thing can happen with, with AGI. And I think it could be A because of the utility, but B because of the lawyers. And let me, let me just bring up this, this fact. So I talked to Eric Toppol, you know, a very famous physician down here at Scripps Research Institute.

• 24:03Speaker 00

  You know, he's involved in embrollos with the COVID-19. We're not going to talk about that. But, but he has a book, you know, the, the patient will see you now. And then he has, you know, a book about AI and so forth and data in medicine. Now, one of the most important barriers that he claims is that, you know, today we see people. It used to be the doctor was sitting there, you know, writing down on his notepad or whatever you guys used to use when you were back in medical school. And then the patient was like looking up at the ceiling and they weren't looking at each other. Right? And then now they said like the doctor's typing into a terminal and the patient's on their smartphone. And that's how they're communicating. And let's go back to aviation. When you and I are flying, you're landing at Santa Monica Airport and you're flying around in a Cessna.

• 24:44Speaker 00

  You have to take your eyes off of the outside world and reach over and dial on a knob.

• 24:50Peter Diamandis?

  Which is ridiculous.

• 24:51Speaker 00

  VHF, you know, radio. And then you have to wait, Peter, because you might miss the broadcast of the so-called no-tam system. You might miss the weather, you come in late. So then you have to listen to the whole two-minute loop again. Now you're flying, you can't communicate with anybody else. And the plane should know where you're going to land.

• 25:08Peter Diamandis?

  You're getting me frustrated just listening to you describe what actually happens every day.

• 25:12Speaker 00

  Forget about AAGI. Just imagine there was an Alexa. I actually changed the name of my Alexa to, so it won't go off when I'm talking to you. Cause I'll say, computer, close the pod bay doors. Let's see if it'll do it. I changed the name of it. Uh, he's busy right now.

• 25:26Peter Diamandis?

  Okay.

• 25:27Speaker 00

  But anyway, imagine if we had a device and said it knows we're coming up on Santa Monica Airport. Let's tune in the, the VOR, let's tune in the, the, uh, the NOTAM. And then not only would it broadcast visually, cause we can read things 60 times faster than we can process auditorily. And it would just be a, a boon. Now, why isn't that available to pilots right now? It's a, it's a $29 unit, right? For God's sakes.

• 25:48Peter Diamandis?

  Well, it's even worse than that. Why do I have to use a human in the loop at all, right? Because when air traffic control sends me my, my, uh, airway vectors and so forth, it just upload into the computer.

• 26:00Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 26:00Peter Diamandis?

  And I should get it and say, accept, and that's it. Instead of it reading it to me, me inputting it, reading it back, them saying yes, and it's fraught with error, uh, propagation in that regard.

• 26:12Speaker 00

  And congestion. When you're talking to an air traffic controller, no one else can use that frequency. It's not even like CDMA where every other, and oh, you're completely blocking it, which is actually a safety risk too, Peter, right? I mean, some terrorist, right? Could, could occupy.

• 26:25Peter Diamandis?

  Aviation makes medicine look advanced, which is, which is funny.

• 26:29Speaker 00

  So I think the humans are the ultimate limit and, but I do hope that AGI will let us kind of segue out of a world where we're dominated by, you know, kind of the needs of catering to, to, you know, computers and using it more to cater to what we actually need as an end user.

• 26:42Peter Diamandis?

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• 27:23Peter Diamandis?

  If I eat bread by itself, I get this prolonged spike in my blood glucose levels. But if I dip that bread in olive oil. It blunts it. And these are things that I've learned from wearing a continuous glucose monitor and using the Levels app. So Levels is a company that helps you in analyzing what's going on in your body. It's continuous monitoring 24/7. I wear it all the time. It really helps me to stay on top of the food I eat, remain conscious of the food that I eat, and to understand which foods affect me based upon my physiology and my genetics. You know, on this podcast, I only recommend products and services that I use, that I use not only

• 28:05Peter Diamandis?

  for myself, but my friends and my family, that I think are high quality and safe and really impact a person's life. So, check it out. Levels.link/peter. Give you two additional months of membership, and it's something that I think everyone should be doing. Eventually, this stuff is going to be in your body, on your body, part of our future of medicine. Today, it's a product that I think I'm going to be using for the years ahead, and hope you'll consider as well. So, going back to the question of are we saturating, you know, I recently gave a few presentations on AI, and you know this already, and a lot of people may not. So,

• 28:47Peter Diamandis?

  the idea of artificial intelligence has been discussed since 1956, right? It was the conferences at Dartmouth. And so, we're, you know, some 60 years later. And so, why is, why now? Why just now? Why these last few years is it pivoting? And then, you can say, well, it's because deep learning is now a concept. But, you know, it turns out the first deep learning algorithms actually were described and conceived of in the mid 60s, so 50-plus years ago. But what it is, is four factors, as you know. Number one, computation is continuing to grow. We're still on Moore's Law. We're still doubling compute. I just saw Steve

• 29:28Peter Diamandis?

  Jarvison just put out a graph that predicts through 2025 that we're just still on Moore's Law. It's still doubling every roughly 18 to 24 months. The second thing is the amount of labeled data is doubling every year. So the amount of data that we're mining in the world is just exploding. The third, which was blew me away, it was the efficiency of the algorithms for training large language models has been over five years. It's been compounding at 99.5% increased efficiency. And then finally, it's amount of capital flowing into the markets, right? Huge amount of capital flowing into AI and which bringing people to it. And then it's self referential, right?

• 30:11Peter Diamandis?

  Because better coding algorithms are allowing you to more rapidly code and experiment. And it's just, it's accelerating, it's not slowing down. And so, you know, we've got Nvidia producing more and more powerful compute than ever before. So while certain systems may be becoming saturated and, you know, we have these traditional S curves, right? Where we have very low, slow growth and then a rapid period and then whatever the medium is gets saturated and falls off. But the S curves are stacked and as you all know, we have new capabilities coming online.

• 30:53Peter Diamandis?

  So I think what's interesting is going to be quantum computation coming online and quantum technologies that will support AI and machine learning algorithms before the end of this decade.

• 31:04Speaker 00

  Yeah, I think, you know, one, one kind of concept I've been kicking around with, but again, it's not my area of expertise, which allows me to, you know, speculate wildly and enjoy that as we, you know, there is this excess pleasure that humans get from planning, right? Is we need sort of, you know, and this is now, now mixing two controversial opinions, okay? One, one is that the, the existence of extraterrestrial intelligence is limited to null. And B, the existence of artificial intelligence is wildly over, over concerned, or people are wildly over concerned about it. Now let's blend them together. What is the governing equation of the search for extraterrestrial intelligence? It's the so-called Drake equation. And I believe we need a Drake equation for a

• 31:47Speaker 00

  Processing the threat or the risks or the the prospects for truly, you know, super touring level AI. And again, it's not my area of expertise. But the one thing I always teach my students, and actually I did this recently, as I'm teaching cosmology to 45 brilliant undergraduates, who will have to listen to this podcast and leave a thumbs up for you on your podcast network as well. No, that's how I grew my subscribers so violently.

• 32:12Peter Diamandis?

  Those 45 students are important.

• 32:15Speaker 00

  They are. They're they're really the best in the known universe. So I told them I showed them the data from Edwin Hubble. Now, you love to quote things that happened 100 years ago, and I have a list of the the 22 things that happened in 2022, and you'll make your one for 2023, as opposed to 1923, which I love seeing. So something happened in 1923, and it was called, it was called the discovery of an extra, an extra galactic Nova in the constellation Andromeda, in the so-called Andromeda Galaxy.

• 32:44Peter Diamandis?

  Was it true that we believed there was only one galaxy up until then?

• 32:47Speaker 00

  We believed we were it. We believed Einstein, remember Einstein was 20 years before this in his special relativity days up until general relativity 1915. So we're talking about 1923, people did not know there were any galaxies outside of the Milky Way. In fact, the Andromeda Galaxy, Peter, is the most distant object a human eye can perceive. It's 3 million light years away, which means the light coming to us left that particular galaxy when Lucy was walking upright in the Serengeti plains. It's just amazing to think about, right? And you can see it with your naked eye. It's the only extra galactic thing you can see. You know, not counting the Southern Hemisphere, you can see the Magellanic Clouds, but they're basically satellites of the Milky Way. So when you think about the fact that we didn't know until in Mount Wilson,

• 33:31Speaker 00

  in LA, where you are, that there was the existence of a Nova, which is an oscillating brightness or semi regular brightening star, that that can be used as a distance measuring tool using tools that that earlier astronomer named Henrietta Lovett had come up with. So that allowed us to measure this. Now, we've only known that the universe had galaxies other than the Milky Way for 100 years, but we didn't know the universe was expanding. And I show the students the data that were only taken in 1929 by Hubble's associate Vesto Slyfer and other people. Now, you look at that data, and the data are horrible. They're like scattered around. The Y-axis is labeled wrong.

• 34:12Speaker 00

  Instead of being units of velocity, he uses kilometers as units of velocity, distances. But the worst part about it is there's no error analysis. Each data point is just put there as if God told you, you know, there's no errors associated with it whatsoever. And ironically, of course, he, you know, as I joke, he misoverestimated the distance, which made the age of the universe seven times too small. So there were objects in our galaxy which were known at that time, and Earth too, to be older than the Milky Way Galaxy. It's like, you found out one day you're older than your mom. It's pretty embarrassing, right? And I don't mean if your mom, you know, is your dad's second wife or something. I'm not getting into that. But if you think about it, we've only known that the universe is expanding because of this kind of crude data, but that's very important.

• 34:57Speaker 00

  I teach the students, never trust an equation, or a plot, or data that don't have error bars. My biggest beef with the Drake equation, and rest in peace Frank Drake, who passed away last year, is that, is that there are no error bars associated with it. So I did a talk at the SETI Institute up there in Mountain View a couple of years back, where I went through an exercise that said, how many people are visiting the San Diego Zoo right now? And it happened to be this time of year, spring break, et cetera. And you come up with a number, and it's about 7,000. And then if you actually apply an error analysis, an error budget to each of the seven terms that goes into that, or the Drake equation, you get a number that could be plus or minus 10,000. In other words, it could be negative, it could be people fleeing the San Diego Zoo.

• 35:42Speaker 00

  And my problem with, with both the, you know, kind of predictions and the catastrophizing about AGI and extraterrestrial intelligence, we don't pay any attention to the error analysis, which is, as a scientist, the most important aspect of any scientific endeavor.

• 35:55Peter Diamandis?

  Fascinating. Yep, I, I agree. And it's, I'm, I'm in the midst of these conversations on fear mongering around AI. My bias has been that AI is most important tool that humans are creating in order to help it, help humanity solve the grand challenges. And there's been a lot of fear mongering from, from Elon, and from Bill Gates, and from a multitude of other individuals. Now- I'm, uh, we have to look at what is the basis for that fear. And like you said, we can, we can break it down. And I don't want to go dystopian in this conversation, but let's take one second to go there.

• 36:39Peter Diamandis?

  Right. There is, uh, the negative implications of loss of jobs, uh, which is one category. We can come back to that and that will have real implications. And like I tweeted the other day, you know, AI is not going to replace you. It's somebody else using AI that will replace you. Right. We're going to have a, uh, we're going to have a astrophysicist co-pilot, Brian, for you. Uh, that's going to make your work far more efficient and more rapidly publishable. And if you're not using it, you know, you won't compete with your peers. Uh, but of course you will be, and you'll be writing the code as well to support that. But so job loss is one area. Uh, the second area that we can name is in fact the use of AI by terrorists,

• 37:24Peter Diamandis?

  by, uh, negative forces in society is same time that it makes us more capable of solving problems. It enables people to cause problems. So that is a second, um, uh, part in this. This is where we get to on one side of the equation, which is AI without AGI. On the other side of the equation of, uh, of AGI, um, the first thing you bump into in my mind is the terrible twos. If you develop a, a truly artificial general intelligence that doesn't know its own strength and is trying to figure things out and is exploring and playing, uh, could it, you know, pick up the heavy object and hit the glass table without knowing what the implications of that are?

• 38:09Peter Diamandis?

  Right. So the terrible twos, the early adolescent version of a AGI could be a problem. And then the extreme is a malevolent AI that just, you know, is Terminator. And I think that one is frankly, highly improbable. I think the version of, you know, AI for the movie Her, that is like, you know, we're bored with you humans, we're going off into the universe. I don't think there's any special resources we have on the planet that a-

• 38:43Speaker 00

  Peter, why did I have to get one of the most attractive women in the world to play a part where she's not even featured in the movie? I'm sorry, my wife is the second, is the first most attractive woman, but Scarlett has to make up there.

• 38:55Peter Diamandis?

  Well done, well done. I'll take notes. So, you know, I don't believe in AI is going to destroy us and is the Terminator. And I think, you know, our Hollywood dystopian movies have just gotten us, our fear mongering brain activated way too much. Do I think that AI could do things that are unfortunate and making mistakes in its early learning? Possibly. I think, I personally believe that intelligence, the greater the level of intelligence, the greater it is in compassion and love and all the positive aspects. I think that the more intelligent people are, the less likely they are to be doing harm to each other.

• 39:39Peter Diamandis?

  But I do think that in the early days, AGI is going to cause havoc in the next election cycle. 2024 is going to be fascinating when a clone of your mother's voice is asking you to, you know, to vote for the other party.

• 39:52Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, and it's really happening and there's, there's no sign of it letting up, the, you know, deep fakes, but yeah, as you're pointing out, the shallow fakes, you know, the less famous people. When you have Shirley MacLaine is always, you know, reincarnated as someone, you know, ultra famous, like some queen of Egypt or whatever, but they're never like, oh, I was the, you know, Wash Basins, you know, attendant in 1920s jazz club. Yeah, nobody ever gets reincarnated like that, right? But no, it's, it's, you know, we worry about them, you know, deep faking Elon and he tells you to buy Dogecoin or whatever, but it's really, yeah, you're right. What is the level of trust that we have on these, on these individuals? And yeah, your mom asking you to do something is a lot, is going to be a lot more persuasive.

• 40:34Speaker 00

  And they're gonna be, you know, just as video game designers and casino designers and app designers. You know, all kind of traffic in the same milieu of human psychology in order to generate outcomes that are beneficial for their product or service. I think, yeah, you're absolutely right. This is going to be a tool that could be, you know, potentially weaponized. Whether, you know, you think the uses are benign because it's for your favorite candidate or not is irrelevant.

• 40:59Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 40:59Speaker 00

  It's eventually going to come to haunt you. They're about to turn five.

• 41:03Peter Diamandis?

  So my boys are 11. And, you know, I think about where I was when I was 11. And as you go into, you know, teen years and you go through puberty, and, you know, I'm, you know, one of the concerns I have is the implications of all of this technology on pornography, right? And that where all of a sudden, there are no limits. You know, when I was growing up, it was a magazine. But what happens when it becomes, you know, unlimited in its capacity for perversion and such. I think there are interesting unfortunate ramifications that

• 41:43Peter Diamandis?

  that unfortunately, our government is not even thinking about or able to, able to contain. And so we have a lot of challenges ahead, which have nothing to do with killer terminators coming.

• 41:57Speaker 00

  Yeah. And on the other end of the bell curve, you know, it's, it is, of course, you know, as a loving father, it is very concerning of me. There are some tools to block, you know, certain things from my kids and I employ those and Chrome extensions. And I encourage people to do that because simply I believe the most, you know, people always say time is the most precious resource because you can't make more time. But Peter, really, we waste a lot of time. I mean, it is true. I mean, you, you personally may may not, but, you know, I know I do. I'm burned out. At the end of the day, I'll scroll, you know, my YouTube feed and just watch myself on repeat, you know, because I'm a narcissist. But, but, but the, no, I don't do that.

• 42:32Peter Diamandis?

  That's my job.

• 42:33Speaker 00

  Not that much. Yeah, not that much. But, but then I think about, you know, kind of the other end of the bell curve, which are the seniors, which have not only the same kind of vulnerability. And I didn't say what I believe is the most precious commodity is innocence. Because innocence, and I've had on special operators on my podcast, I know you've worked very closely with them as well. I always ask Um, you know, like, what, what do you regret? Like, and, and they'll tell me Dan Holloway is a wonderful man that you should talk to eventually. And I've had very close friends and relatives that are special forces operators. And they'll always say, like, I can't undo, I can't unsee what I did while I was in combat.

• 43:08Speaker 00

  And I can't undo it. And I thank God I did it because they wouldn't be here, Peter. They, they risk life and death, unlike me, you know, fake doctor, you know, who's a, you know, just like risking getting a chalk, you know, breaking in the middle of lecture. But, but these are people who have to have their innocence taken away and, you know, and thank God in some sense that they didn't succumb to not being innocent. But kids have this innocence that must be cherished and it must be protected because it's a one-way ratchet, which can never go backwards. And on the other end of the bell curve are the people that you just mentioned, you know, which are the elderly, which have real political power. They have capital and, and they're also vulnerable to this. I mean, you think like, I mean, my twins have, have long known that if they want me to shut up, they just pretend they're swiping my face.

• 43:50Speaker 00

  You know, they act like I'm an iPad. They can just change a video, but elderly, you know, they might not be as, as tech savvy as young people are. It's hard enough for me to keep up with it. So now they get, imagine that that combined with purchasing power, manipulation combined with purchasing power. That's really scary. And I don't see anybody addressing these ethical implications. I, I wonder what you think about your friend Elon. And, um, and he is such a mercurial and interesting figure. Um, I, I wonder, you know, if you could kind of, you know, convey what you think he might answer to the following question. He's obviously a space geek. He's a lover of, of not just, you know, going to Mars and, and as Martin Rees said, you know, Elon wants to die on Mars. I hope he doesn't die on impact.

• 44:33Speaker 00

  But he's willing to take these risks, um, which is, which is saying something because he is a doting, you know, caring father. He's got 10 kids, I believe. It's hard, you know, when he gets, when he do, when he.

• 44:44Speaker 00

  Yeah, when you have Poisson errors, Peter, on a number of kids, you're you're kind of at the upper limit, but but God love him, and he should, and he should have as many kids as as God or Mother Nature will provide. But we have the situation in astronomy with with Starlink, and I have a Starlink, you know, unit, but it is it is causing, you know, challenges for optical astronomers, but more so will cause problems for microwave and radio astronomers. And he's talked and he's engaged, and it's true. He has endeavored to blacken the satellites to make them less visible. But Peter, as you know, I study the cosmic microwave background radiation, the thermal relic of the Big Bang, the most ancient photons in the universe, which just so happened to be in the Ku band and Ka band. And with

• 45:26Speaker 00

  thousands of satellites darkening the the sky, there's no way to darken something. Let me just tell you, for those that may not know, there's no way to darken thermal radiation. It makes it worse, right? So I wonder, you know, how does how do you think he weighs these these grand challenges? And it is almost ethical in a sense, like if you if he knew you couldn't darken them optically, and they were just going to be glowing bright with the, you know, Olbers paradox type brightness, what would what do you think he would endeavor to do?

• 45:52Peter Diamandis?

  I think I I haven't had this conversation. I've had many conversations with him. I had I had I spent hours with him last Sunday at a friend's birthday party. Next time I I'll ask. But number one, he's doing what is legally allowed to be done, right? So he applies for FCC licenses to launch 30,000 satellites, maybe more. He's gotten licenses to launch, you know, on the order of 10,000 plus. And I think if I'm channeling my inner Elon, he would say the best place for these observatories is not Earth orbit, it's on the other side of the moon. It's going to be in in Lagrange points, it's going to be

• 46:37Peter Diamandis?

  away from Earth's radiation, you know, transmission, and that we have a short period of time during which we are burdened by by that, that in, you know, we're going to be back on the lunar surface in I don't know, three years' time, probably. And that started-

• 46:57Speaker 00

  With one of the other graduates of UCSD, Dr. Jessica Mayier. She may be the first female to land on the moon.

• 47:03Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, well, and I'm thinking with Starship going there, probably first delivering and, and you know, the ability, I mean, Starship, once it's up and operational, and we're recording this a week before the presumed first flight launch attempt, the week of April the 20th. And we'll see. I'm hopefully going to fly in to Boca Chica. And Elon said his goal for that mission is that it doesn't blow up the launch pad. I say, okay, that's a, that's a great goal. And we'll see how far it gets.

• 47:39Speaker 00

  Even if it does, he'll say something like, ah, it's just a scratch.

• 47:41Peter Diamandis?

  It's just a scratch, yes.

• 47:42Speaker 00

  It'll buff right out. So cheerful when these billion-dollar machines explode.

• 47:48Peter Diamandis?

  But, yeah. Anyway, so I think, I think that Starlink has the potential to do extraordinary good for humanity. We've seen that in the Ukraine. And it's a new, you know, communications layer wrapped around the planet. Yeah, it is causing havoc. I'm surprised that all of this wasn't debated by the FCC in granting the license in the first place. And by the way-

• 48:13Speaker 00

  It's a very niche, you know, it's how many, there are more NBA players than astrophysicists who study the cosmic microwave background.

• 48:20Peter Diamandis?

  True.

• 48:21Speaker 00

  But it is a window which, once closed, can never be reopened. And it's actually worse than just the thermal radiation, which would be bad enough because they're moving and they can't easily be subtracted, although we know their orbits. But it's the fact they transmit in the band that we're looking at. So they're equivalent to millions of Kelvin emission. And we're trying to look for nano Kelvin.

• 48:39Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, yeah, no, it's impossible. It's like, yeah.

• 48:42Speaker 00

  Yeah, if you get a chance to ask them.

• 48:43Peter Diamandis?

  If, if, I mean, what I would be doing as a community is like saying, okay, Elon, fine, but we want an observatory on the far side of the moon.

• 48:52Speaker 00

  I've often thought about that of how to approach him and he is a physicist and he did graduate from, you know, a University of Pennsylvania, one of our close colleagues on the Simons Observatory, the most ambitious and most expensive observatory ever funded to do what we're doing. It's a hundred and ninety million dollar project by the time it's done, funded by Jim and Marilyn Simons and the Heising Simons Foundation, New York and the Bay Area respectively. And what we're trying to look for has such incredible ramifications and I want to use this as a jumping off point to maybe, you know, not just for you to convey to Elon, which would be nice, but that's not really why I'm asking. The second most famous in, you know, citizen of Lesbos was a man by the name of Aristotle, second only to you, Peter.

• 49:36Peter Diamandis?

  And just for clarity, my parents were both born on the island of Lesbos.

• 49:43Speaker 00

  And so on Lesbos, there's a lagoon and there's a wonderful book called Aristotle's Lagoon. And in it is described the scientific method as understood by Aristotle. And he talks about some of the discoveries, which in the world of physics were almost universally incorrect, Peter. He believed heavier objects fell faster than lighter ones. He believed there were only four elements. He had a whole host of things that could have been falsified, easily falsified, as Galileo did sixteen centuries later by just answering a thought experiment by saying, well, if heavy things fall faster than light things, what happens if I just tie two light things together to make a heavy thing? Shouldn't they fall faster at that point? Of course they don't. So that was just a thought experiment. It didn't require like a large hadron collider.

• 50:27Speaker 00

  But one of the things you that he brought up was, and he was correct about in the natural sciences, was that whales were mammals. And it really wasn't understood until Aristotle came up with that by observing in the lagoons of Lesbos in ancient Greece, this fact, which he observed, constructed hypothesis, did more observations, inductive reasoning, and then, you know, came up and utilized this, this role of the scientific method. When you open your podcast, every week I listen to it, you talk about the massive transformative purpose and you talk about what the, what the goal of the massive transformative purpose is to create a dent in the universe, unique to the individual, right?

• 51:09Speaker 00

  We're at the point now, Peter, where we are actually looking for dents in the universe. And it would be in the form of a collision between universes in what's called the multiverse. Ah. And this to me is the most... You went there first. Yeah. This is the most, you know, we, we have to, as modern podcasters, we have to talk about at least two of the following three things: Bitcoin, aliens, the singularity, or the multiverse. Or are we living in a simulation? Exactly. That's right. So, uh, so we'll, we'll have to defer some of those in the interest of time, but getting to the multiverse. The multiverse is perhaps the most far-reaching and bizarre, you know, scientific hypothesis or paradigm. It's not even really at the level of a, a hypothesis, because it may or may not be

• 51:54Speaker 00

  testable. But one of the ways that you could, you could not falsify the multiverse, but you could prove the multiverse. So it's very unlike other, other scientific conjectures. To whatever extent you can prove something, you know, I always say, in the name of Isaac Asimov, who, a great writer, who influenced the name of one of my kids, I'll let you guess which one, uh, he used to say, "If you think the earth is flat, you're wrong. If you think the earth is a sphere, you're also wrong, but you're less wrong than if you think it's flat, right? The earth is slightly pear-shaped, it has a quadrupolar distortion to it because of its rotational act." Anyway, getting back to, uh, good old Aristotle and, and the search for, for falsifiability or quote-unquote "proof."

• 52:34Speaker 00

  If we were to see the following situation: two universes that are each expanding since their own big bangs, which could be wildly different ages of their own universe. Our universe can exist for another, you know, 13 billion years without changing too much prospects for life and so forth. They will eventually come into contact. Let's say, let's say they're one light year away from us is another universe, and therefore that universe, once our universe expands into it, or it expands into us, will have some combined, you know, Venn diagram, um, intersection, where these two things are sharing some common sphere. So imagine two balloons are blowing up, they're right next to each other, eventually they hit each other. That is what I'm calling the dent in the universe.

• 53:16Speaker 00

  So what will happen is another universe will make a physical dent which can be perceived, according to my colleagues in astrophysics and cosmology, that you'd be able to detect the telltale imprint of the multiverse by the existence of these certain patterns in the cosmic microwave background that I study. And those would be unequivocal, and you could actually use that to motivate, very high confidence, the multiverse exists.

• 53:40Peter Diamandis?

  But if there's an infinity of universes in the multiverse, because I don't think you can say, is it zero, is it one or infinite?

• 53:49Speaker 00

  It could be, so there's multiple multiverses, of course, right? So there's a multiverse in time, which is where the universe expands and contracts and keeps making more and more universes, but they're actually physically distinct in space. There's a multiverse, and this is all, you know, kind of the numbering scheme is courtesy of our mutual friend Max Tegmark at Your Alma Mater. And this impact of the multiverse would be another distinct universe, another level of the multiverse, and his nomenclature or counting scheme, there's four different levels. The multiverse could be distinct universes, it could be one, it could be an infinite number, or it could be a finite number, where that finite number is motivated by something called the string landscape, which comes from certain properties of the, what's called

• 54:34Speaker 00

  the vacuum state in phase space of different models of string theory, which is a number which is effectively infinite, as Max has pointed out. It's actually, the number's finite, it's 10 to the 500th universes. But Max has shown that, once you get above 10 to the 80th, which is, you know, no small number either, that you also effectively are in an infinite universe, where you'd have infinite copies of, effectively, infinite copies of events and people and so forth. So you're right, there are multiple levels, one of which is that there's an infinite number of other universes.

• 55:07Peter Diamandis?

  And one where there's almost infinite. But, I mean, if that's the case, I would imagine that this indentation... Would have been occurring constantly, all the time, everywhere unless they're out of phase in some phase, in some fashion, or some, or, or in, I guess, out of phase, the only way I can describe it.

• 55:27Speaker 00

  Well, when you go to Texas in a week or so, you'll see, you know, the Giga Factory and so forth. Imagine you bring with you a piece of sand, two pieces of sand from Santa Monica, and you put one at one end of the Giga Factory, and you put another one at the other end of the Giga Factory. Those two grains of sand, relative to their size, are closer to one another than the two nearest stars in the average vicinity of the, of the sun's solar neighborhood. In other words, space is unimaginably vast, right? And that shouldn't stop, you know, people to try to explore it and so forth, to colonize, whatever. But the, but the important fact to note is that it's very large. So, so that when Milky Way Galaxy combines and forms Milk-Dromeda, when the Andromeda

• 56:09Speaker 00

  Galaxy, which is only one of 12 galaxies, Peter, out of 100 billion to a trillion galaxies being discovered by Webb and other instruments, there's a trillion galaxies, 12 of them are not moving away from us. It's spectacular when you think about how rare it is that we inhabit this universe. But when one of those 12 crashes into the Milky Way with violent fervor, nothing will happen. If there are people, they won't even notice. The stars will pass almost right through them, just like if you shot, you know, two grains of sand past each other in the Giga Factory, not a damn thing would happen, right? So, space is vast, and with the universe and the multiverse, the same arguments could apply. It may be extremely rare, that's why I said you can't falsify it. You can't say the lack of observation of these dents.

• 56:51Peter Diamandis?

  But if you detected it, you could prove it.

• 56:52Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 56:53Peter Diamandis?

  I was curious, I was gonna ask you the question, how many, how many universes, how many galaxies do you hold in your mind as the current number? I mean, I remember sort of an average of 100 billion stars per galaxy. And then it was like, at one point, it was 100 billion galaxies in the universe, and then it was a trillion, then I heard as many as 20 trillion. And I was, so where are you now? Couple of trillion is the current estimate?

• 57:16Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's all like location, location, location, just like real estate here in California.

• 57:20Peter Diamandis?

  You know, one of the fun things was I, I, do you remember Avogadro's number from, uh, from chemistry?

• 57:24Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 57:25Peter Diamandis?

  6.02 times the 23rd. You know, if you, uh, one estimate of the number of galaxies and the number of stars gives you Avogadro's number of stars in the universe. So I thought that was fun.

• 57:36Speaker 00

  And people, people then use that to, you know, to make a claim of the existence of life elsewhere in the universe. And we have to get to that, Peter, because it's a mandatory in our contract, you know, that we both signed to have this project. But let me just get back, we don't know how, exactly how many, we don't even know how many stars there are in the Milky Way galaxy, let alone how many galaxies there are total outside of the Milky Way galaxy. And so we make approximations. Uh, it also gives, you ever, um, has anyone ever given you a star, Peter, in the International Star Register?

• 58:04Peter Diamandis?

  Yes, I have, early on in my life when it first came out. I think I have a couple of those stars. It's an interesting gimmick.

• 58:12Speaker 00

  Yeah. What I wanted to just tell you is that, you know, speaking on behalf of all, you know, professional astronomers, that's absolutely meaningless. Nobody looks up, so there's the de Mandis HD 24. Okay, so, but that doesn't stop me from having the idea that now we can sell universes in the multiverse. And so I have the Keating, if you go to my website, peter, briankeating.com, I will let you buy me, buy a universe from me in the multiverse. But actually, seriously, I want to make an offer to your, I want to make an offer to your, to your listeners. I have these chunks of, of rocks. Let me see if I can find one right here, I believe is one. I don't know where my kids have taken it. Yes. Nope, that's a battery. Sorry. Let me get, uh, let me look around. Here it is. Okay. So I have chunks here, Peter.

• 58:54Peter Diamandis?

  Okay, I can see that.

• 58:55Speaker 00

  This is a chunk of a four billion year old asteroid that fell.

• 58:59Peter Diamandis?

  It's a metallic chondrite, it looks like.

• 59:00Speaker 00

  It's a metallic chondrite. Right. So it's fell in Argentina and, uh, about 6,000 years ago. It was discovered in the 1500s and, uh, it was brought to earth the old fashioned way by gravity. But if you have a dot edu email address and you sign up for my mailing list, briankeating.com/list, you will, uh, Automatically win a fragment of this meteorite because my massive transformational purpose, which I know you're going to get to at some point, involves, you know, creating and connecting millions of minds in a network to really bring free education, as you do, so wonderfully so. I believe education is the sine qua non of humanity and what we do exquisitely well, and which doesn't actually need a university.

• 59:44Speaker 00

  And don't tell Gavin Newsom, my boss, you know, but I would do the job I do for free. I'm a public school employee, so I don't get paid all that much. But I do what I do because I love it. But I also am under no illusions that A, there aren't better teachers than me, that AI won't supersede me. If I, you know, I recently translated or not translated, recorded the first ever audiobook by Galileo with Frank Wilczek, also of MIT, and Carlo Rovelli and others. And this book, I realize and do, it has a million words, three characters. It's like a play. Galileo was a phenomenal writer. You can get a copy also on my website of the audiobook.

• 1:00:20Peter Diamandis?

  BrianKeating.com, just to reinforce in people's memory.

• 1:00:24Speaker 00

  And so what we did is we took all that and we just read it. But I was like, why don't I put this into like some chat engine? This is two years ago now. So it really wasn't as prominent in my frontal cortex. But I realized, you know, Peter, I could be replaced by Galileo for a lot of things. But one thing I replaced by Galileo in the form of an AI, which is easy to do now. And the fact that nobody has done that yet is kind of giving me an opportunity to do it. But the bottom line is, what I want to do is connect the ability to educate people for free. And I think that will unlock, because nothing's more abundant than free digital education. I mean, we can just, you know, the five Ds, right? We can just democratize it and demonetize it. And that's what I want to do.

• 1:01:07Speaker 00

  So in particular, the .edu folks, I am interested in reaching them because the main obstacle, I think, to higher education and the unlocking, you know, Elon is not limited by money, Peter. He's limited by brains. I mean, he's limited by how many engineers and so on. So anyway, I want to scale this up. I don't believe that you need to go to a university, even a public one necessarily, to get an incredible education and trying to in one way or another to make to demonetize it as much as I can.

• 1:01:34Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah. And if there's if there's two massive disruptions that's occurring this decade, it will be education and healthcare, right? Covid was a tipping factor. I don't think we were going to see the full implications of what occurred as a result of the shutdown for the next, you know, five years. But we're going to there is a massive reinvention of education and a massive reinvention of the healthcare industries, both of which are unfortunately performing very poor per dollar invested. Okay, now, the single most important conversation that one could have is, is there life out there? Is there intelligent life

• 1:02:15Peter Diamandis?

  out there? And we can talk about out there being our solar system, or our galaxy, or our universe. Welcome to the great debate, ladies and gentlemen. On one side of the story, Brian Keating says, no, we are the only ones out here. We are alone. Do not screw it up. You know, please.

• 1:02:33Speaker 00

  Technological life.

• 1:02:34Peter Diamandis?

  You're speaking of intelligent life.

• 1:02:37Speaker 00

  Technological life, yeah.

• 1:02:39Peter Diamandis?

  Technological life. You're

• 1:02:42Speaker 00

  So a dolphin swimming through the, you know, the the salt pools of Titan, that would not count. I believe that is possible, but I but I'm strictly speaking about intelligent life. I think that makes the odds of me winning this debate much higher.

• 1:02:55Peter Diamandis?

  Okay. On the other side, Peter Diamandis is no, intelligent life is ubiquitous in the universe. It is a forcing function that comes out of the laws of physics. It's reverse anthropic, and it is something which we're just beginning to understand. All right, you know, boxers, take your corners. Let the debate begin.

• 1:03:17Speaker 00

  We need a neutral party.

• 1:03:19Peter Diamandis?

  Brian, since you're younger, smarter, and better looking than me, you're first.

• 1:03:24Speaker 00

  All right, Peter, I've had two like peak experiences in my life in terms of my career as a scientist. One has involved launching rockets into space to look for the signatures of first stars and shooting a Nike missile out of White Sands missile range and getting clearances and so forth together. The other two, you know, peak experience is going to Chile, 17,600 feet above sea level in the Atacama Desert. And the other is going to the South Pole, Antarctica. And all three of these environments share something very starkly similar. And that is, they have the possibility for life in the deserts of White Sands, there is life. And the desert, in the Atacama Desert, there is life. And in Antarctica,

• 1:04:09Speaker 00

  there is life, and it is actually considered a driest desert on Earth. It's actually drier than the Sahara by precipitable water vapor content. And it's also very high, so 9,000 feet above sea level. I've gone there, every time I go there, one of my kids asks me to bring back a penguin, you know, because he likes... You ever meet one of these people that goes to a restaurant and they can't decide between chicken or fish, Peter? Well, if you eat a penguin, no, he doesn't eat them, he just loves them, he thinks they're the cutest things in the world. So, there's a couple penguins, there are a couple of giant, like, imagine a seagull on steroids, like, just inflated up like Jaco Willing flying through the air. They're called skua birds, and that's basically it. There's no other, you know, there's some seals and stuff that come on the eye, some orcas. But then

• 1:04:51Speaker 00

  when you get to the South Pole, there's nothing there. There ain't nothing there. And in fact, 100 years ago, 112 years ago, humans made it there for the first time. And then it sat dormant for 50 years. In other words, we've not been back to the moon in longer than it took for them to discover the South Pole, reach the South Pole, and then for humans to go back in the 50s and 60s, only took 40 years to do that. We haven't been back to the moon in 50. Let's hope that changes. At any rate... My argument is connected to this calculation that you did a few minutes ago, which is avocado's number. Sometimes I call it a guacamole because it's avocado's number, but 10 to the 23rd. That's just basically 10 to the 24th, take a trillion stars in each galaxy, a trillion

• 1:05:33Speaker 00

  galaxies, nice round number. Now, that's all fine and good. Now imagine, though, that you have, just let's say there are eight hurdles, Peter, that life had to get to, to get to be technological. And let's call those hurdles, you know, first of all, there had to be on some particular planet, an abiotic scenario, unless we believe that life came from the Earth, which we know that the solar system exchanges material. So I will send your .edu listeners, one of these meteorites for sure. I will not send them the little tiny fleck of Mars that I got a long time ago, also purchased legally through proper channels, not collected by some rover. And that flake of Mars meteorite costs more than, you know,

• 1:06:13Speaker 00

  a 10 kilogram fragment of these metanthalachandrites that I will send to you. Anyway, that came to us from Mars, the more expensive one. So that means Mars and the Earth exchanged materials. And in fact, you can buy, if you get a sample of the moon, Peter, collected by the Apollo astronauts, you will go to jail for many, many years as a felony. If you get one on eBay, which I have collected them, you'll just, you know, give them out, but they're expensive. The solar system exchanges material back and forth all the time, which means not only can stuff come to Earth from Mars, stuff from Earth carrying tardigrades or what have you can go to Mars. So, first of all, the non-observation of life in our solar system, it has to count at some level for the facundity factor, and I call the facundity

• 1:06:57Speaker 00

  factor, how probable with life pre-existing to find a birth, a place of residence residing in the solar system. It is exquisitely low. We don't know exactly. It's very difficult to quantify it, because as our friend Carl Sagan, I haven't had on the podcast, but I had his widow, Andrian, and his daughter Sasha, who are both lovely women. I have the first mother-daughter team ever in podcasting history in the sciences, I believe. Anyway, the, you know, as Carl Sagan said, "Lack of evidence is not evidence of lack," or somebody said that, he could have said it. What I'm saying is, let's say this trillion trillion number. Let's say it's up against the following odds. There's eight hurdles that life elsewhere in the universe had to get to.

• 1:07:41Speaker 00

  It had to go from inorganic materials. It had to go from hydrocarbons. It had to go from rather hydrogen than carbon and so forth. It had to form on a rocky planet, perhaps. It may not have to be even carbon based. It could be silicon based. Let's ignore that we had whales, as we discussed earlier, and that led to. And we had prebiotic algae and so forth that led to the existence of oil and petroleum. Let's ignore. Let's summarize. Let's say there are eight factors like that. There has to be an outer planet like Jupiter to suck up all the inbound asteroids, which this thing came from before it impacted the Earth, and sucked up the real killer planet, planetesimals, that could have destroyed the Earth and all life in it.

• 1:08:25Speaker 00

  It has to have a moon not too close to us and a tectonic activity, spin rate, a diurnal period. So there are very many properties that have. Let's say there's eight of those factors. And let's say, unlike what most people believe that each individual term is incredibly improbable. Let's describe it a pretty high probability for each of the eight terms. Let's call it 0.1%. So one part in a thousand. Let's say there are eight of those. What happens if you take 10? You raise 10 to the minus three to the eighth power. You get the same number, 10 to the minus 24. Okay? So that means there'd be either zero or one other life form in the known universe. Now, again, I said before, I hate when scientists don't use error estimates.

• 1:09:10Speaker 00

  The problem is, how do you estimate something that may have occurred only once? All the contingent factors, and that's just to get to life. Let alone, that could be a dolphin, as I said, swimming through a methane pond on Titan, which we don't see. But now to get to iPhones and technological life, I just think the odds are incredibly low. And as I said, I've been to Antarctica. Antarctica, people will say, well, there's so much room for stars and life in the universe. And each star has 10 to the three planets or planetesimals orbiting around it. Okay, so you can increase it to whatever you like. But Antarctica is 1/7 of the continents of Earth, and I've been to it. And as I said, just the mere availability of real estate says nothing about the probability for that real estate to be inhabited.

• 1:09:55Speaker 00

  So I turn it over to you to decimate those arguments as you see fit.

• 1:09:59Peter Diamandis?

  Okay, okay. Fair enough.

• 1:10:03Peter Diamandis?

  So first of all, we know that the building blocks of life, the basic amino acids for even nucleotides that make up DNA are present in the interstellar medium, right? We have seen that, we've observed that through your colleagues in astronomy. So we can say that the prerequisite building blocks that could lead to the early formation of life are out there.

• 1:10:42Peter Diamandis?

  And for that reason, any place that has for liquid-based water life that can, that these materials can reign upon, has a possibility of creating early life forms, right? So our planet's 4.5 billion, and call the universe, 14.5 for round numbers for the moment. So we believe life came into existence on this planet about a billion years after the Earth roughly cooled. And so if we look at what the most, I'm going to be focusing on advanced life.

• 1:11:21Peter Diamandis?

  If you look at what the highest atomic number element that the human being needs to survive, I think it's iodine at around atomic number 56. And if you look back at when iodine probably came into existence in our universe after a series of supernova, I remember I had this conversation with Dr. William Fowler, who was one of the great, won the Nobel Prize for stellar evolution. It was, his estimate was about a billion years after the Big Bang. We would have had enough birth, you know, death, birth cycles of stars to get iodine. So let's assume that, that life will have formed on planets.

• 1:12:07Peter Diamandis?

  Because I do think that any planet that has liquid water and is within a decent radiation shield, that the pre ingredients of life raining on the surface will ultimately lead to some single cell life forms, some self replicating life forms. We've seen the experiments over and over again where you put these materials together and they eventually lead towards that process. So now the question becomes, how many of those might have come into existence over the last, let's not say 10 billion years, let's say a billion years?

• 1:12:50Peter Diamandis?

  And how far has that come? I mean, the argument that's typically made, you know, Fermi's paradox is where are they? Right? If in fact, they evolved, where are they? And I had an experience which was, which was a centerpiece for me here. I was with my dad in Greece at a place called Mount Athos, which was a observatory up in, not observatory, a, a, a place of worship, a church up in the, up in the mountains in Greece. And it was six o'clock and it was time to call all the priests to prayer and this old priest, long white beard, long

• 1:13:34Peter Diamandis?

  white hair, black outfit, very typical, walks up and there's this bell in the center and takes his cane and he, he hits the bell to call all of the priests to prayer. And in that moment, my cellphone rings. And I, it, it was like this cathartic moment. I'm like, oh my God, here is this society depending upon audio frequencies to communicate with each other. And in that same moment, little do they know, they're being bathed at 800, 900 megahertz and 2.4 gigahertz frequencies. They just don't have the, the tech to perceive it or communicate.

• 1:14:18Peter Diamandis?

  And so, as we know, the Drake equation, one of the elements of the Drake equation, which is the number of stars and the percentage of stars that have planets and the percentage of planets that are in the right Goldilocks zone and the percentage of those that form life and ultimately it ends up with what percentage of those life forms are, make it to a point where they're transmitting in the radio frequency? And how long does that species survive was the old dystopian point of view, you know, between the time they come up with, you know, Radio Marconi in the late 1800s to the point where they blow themselves up in a nuclear war? That was sort of like, you know, are they 100 years old?

• 1:15:02Peter Diamandis?

  And I want to interpret that a little bit differently, which is, I don't know that the way we can and will be communicating in 50 years even involves radio frequencies anymore. Is there a more fun, I mean, we would, I would imagine we know very little truly about the extent of all the laws of physics and there may be much more energy efficient and information efficient mechanisms that, once they're discovered, will flip a bit and all of this old stuff goes away. But the other side of the equation as well is, at some point, you know, have they, have

• 1:15:47Peter Diamandis?

  these intelligent life forms gone and built starships and gone out and explored the universe? And if they have, where are they? Then my mind turns to conversations like, you know, if a life form that was much more intelligent and could do interstellar travel, I'm sure they could visit the planet and be undetected. I don't think that we would be, would be obviously, you know, and the scientific method would have them come and observe us and take samples and do everything without disturbing us. It's the prime directive, if you would, of Star Trek.

• 1:16:21Peter Diamandis?

  And then the question would be, actually, at some point, would we become digital? Would we, in fact, not want to physically maintain our bodies and go in starships? Would we upload ourselves? Would we transform ourselves into a technological intelligence that doesn't need to go out and explore physically? So, I mean, these are the questions I have that, for me, the probability in all of these, you know, two trillion galaxies and 100 billion stars that we're alone, you know, seems to

• 1:17:01Peter Diamandis?

  me a false premise. You know, we're, you know, here's the question. I think we're going to find out whether life evolved independently. We'll have a few shots on goal on Mars in Europa. We'll find out when you look at its, whatever life form, whatever coding it uses, is it identical? We'll know whether it came from Earth or not, right? We'll know whether it originated from, you know, panspermia theory where life has been reigned upon the Earth and that's where it started. Hey, everybody, this is Peter. A quick break from the episode. I'm a firm believer that science and technology and how entrepreneurs can change the world

• 1:17:45Peter Diamandis?

  is the only real news out there worth consuming. I don't watch the crisis news network, I call CNN or Fox, and hear every devastating piece of news on the planet. I spend my time training my neural net, the way I see the world, by looking at the incredible breakthroughs in science and technology, how entrepreneurs are solving the world's grand challenges, what the breakthroughs are in longevity, how exponential technologies are transforming our world. So, twice a week, I put out a blog. One blog is looking at the future of longevity, age reversal, biotech, increasing your health span. The other blog looks at exponential technologies, AI.

• 1:18:27Peter Diamandis?

  3D printing, synthetic biology, AR, VR, blockchain. These technologies are transforming what you as an entrepreneur can do. If this is the kind of news you want to learn about and shape your neural nets with, go to dmandis.com/blog and learn more. Now, back to the episode.

• 1:18:44Speaker 00

  Yeah, well, you said a lot of very, I think, incontrovertible facts. I mean, one of the things that we talk about in space exploration is we're looking for water. Well, I'll give you water. That's table stakes. Water is made of the most common element in the known universe, which is hydrogen, and the sixth most common element, which is oxygen. Very easy, very stable. I'll stipulate that it's been found in craters on the moon, in ice form, and obviously on regions of Mars. So, water's not a problem, even forming the precursors to amino acids. The problem is that, and I'm glad you brought up Willie Fowler, who was a very close colleague of two of my colleagues here at UC San Diego, Jeff and Margaret Burbidge, who equally, I

• 1:19:28Speaker 00

  believe, deserved the Nobel Prize, but we won't get into the politics of why that happened. And Hoyle, too. Hoyle came up with the theory of panspermia that you mentioned. He also came up with the name "The Big Bang." He was a really irascible character. I interviewed his best graduate student, Jyoti Narlikar, who's still alive and with us in Pune, India. But at any rate, all these precursors, again, it depends on how you do the error analysis. When you say, "I believe, based on this large number, that aliens are..." There's alien technological life, okay? That's incontrovertible, but you're using as a predicate the kind of phase space of available objects that could nucleate, form habitable nucleation sites for primitive life

• 1:20:13Speaker 00

  to form. So first, we have to stipulate how easy or hard it is for that to happen. And another colleague of the Burbidges and Fowler was located here. His name is Harold Urey, and he's the progenitor of the famous Miller-Urey experiment, which, when you go through it, is very persuasive sounding. And many people have used it. Neil deGrasse Tyson, we talked about it.

• 1:20:32Peter Diamandis?

  This is the experiment that lightning caused energetic nucleation of...

• 1:20:38Peter Diamandis?

  Cellular forms of life.

• 1:20:40Speaker 00

  Yeah, basically, you have you have a you have a very, you know, an oxygen vessel. You put in some phosphorus, you put in some nitrogen and stuff that was composed, they thought, at the time of the early Earth's atmosphere. Then you shock it and now comes some sludge, which, when you analyze it, has either some precursors to amino acids or amino acids themselves. But look what went into that. And I'm not even going to get into the theological implications, but, you know, they went down to the chemistry stockroom, which is located here in Yuri Hall, and they got a beautifully 99.5 nines pure, you know, isopropyl alcohol, and they got this thing and that thing, sterilized reagents, sterilized vessels, Bunsen burner at the exact right temperature.

• 1:21:25Speaker 00

  You know, it's very different than a stromatolite, you know, in Australia, very different. And there was a mind behind that, right? There were some people, and I'm not getting into intelligent design. I have my own challenges with that. You can see me kind of go off on people like James Tour and also even on Stephen C. Meyer, who I consider a friend. But but the point is, Peter, that that a lot of these things trace back to premises which depend very strongly on what's called the Bayesian prior that you apply. So, again, if you say the prior is how many stars that could support how many planets, I can give you any number you like, but it's just like if I said there's seven continents, Peter, so you'd expect a uniform prior for one-seventh of all intelligent life on Earth to be in Antarctica.

• 1:22:10Speaker 00

  When I go there, Peter, I'm not even the smartest person there. I'm not even, I might be the heaviest person there. You know, I might be I might be the only native New Yorker there. I don't know. There's only 200 people there, you know, in the whole continent that's bigger than Texas.

• 1:22:25Peter Diamandis?

  But why wouldn't you stipulate the same as at, you know, at the bottom of the Marianas Trench or at the top of the, you know, the troposphere? I mean, there are going to be, in a in a gradation of environments of heat and energy, food densities and so forth, places which are ideal for life to form and places where it's it's not ideal. And I don't expect there to be life, intelligent life, across the entire planet. All it requires is there to be a single nucleation point if the intelligent life is then able to modify its environment and then it's going to modify its environment at where

• 1:23:10Peter Diamandis?

  it takes the least amount of energy to modify its environment. It's going to migrate if it's intelligent to the places where it can create food and shelter and protection and so forth. So the question really is, in the course of a period of time, is there a local or an absolute maxima or a local maxima for that period of time where intelligent life can form and then maintain itself? I think that's really the conversation.

• 1:23:37Speaker 00

  One argument that people have used, not original to me, is that you can't have metallurgy in the troposphere. You can't have metallurgy in the Marianas Trench. You can't get from basic materials to the, forget about going from prebiotic ooze to, you know, I always say going from rocks to Rachmaninoff or from, you know, bacteria to Bach. I have a million dad jokes. That's one of the benefits of becoming a father, right? And so, so, but the point is, I don't believe, I don't, I don't have conviction that just because it's so improbable for technological life to exist in throughout the universe, that there is none. But I do believe almost to the fact of quasi-theological conviction, not by

• 1:24:18Speaker 00

  you, Peter, but, but by many people in, in the SETI game, that this is, it's, it's almost inevitable because the large number hypothesis, and that's exactly what Carl Sagan meant when he wrote with Andrew Ian, my past guest, in contact that if there is no other intelligent life in the universe, it's an awful waste of space, as Ellie Arroway's dad told her, right? So, and fun fact, that's modeled on a real person, Jill Tarter, who's a friend of mine. She's a wonderful guest. You should have her on. But but the bottom line, Peter, is, you know, there's there's no saying what a waste of space is. It's a teleological implication. And I think we need to have a little bit of what Aristotle would would kind of indulge us

• 1:25:01Speaker 00

  to have and and beg our forbearance that, you know, there there is a tendency to to extrapolate from, you know, from sort of our own, you know, maybe, maybe, you know, kind of pedestrian or or parochial observations and say that these are universal things. But I do think you're right, that if there are technological life forms, they may be computers, they may be artificial intelligences, which can defy the laws of physics that afflict us, and namely that they could travel at the speed of light. So so for all these reasons, and and believe me, no one would be more psyched and pumped for the existence of extraterrestrial light,

• 1:25:42Speaker 00

  as long as it doesn't want to eat, you know, middle aged, you know, New Yorkers like me with a little bit too much of what du poire hydrocarbons I'm storing. You know, Peter, they say you should always have, you know, six months of money and six months of food on hand. I keep the food on body at all times. But maybe you can help me with that with your medical training. But so I do believe it's it's something which dovetails back with where we started, which is that we need kind of a Drake equation to assess the likelihood where we assess the probabilities, the priors, the in a Bayesian sense, and take in all the data and assess it. Maybe this is something where AI can help us with. Once they have their own kind of brand of Drake equation for AI.

• 1:26:24Peter Diamandis?

  I think you're you're right. But I also turn to a recent example. It wasn't too long ago that we thought planets were scarce. That, in fact, the best astrophysicists, astronomers, scientists in the field, when you looked at, you know, in the early days of the Drake equation, the percentage of stars that had planets was seen was deemed to be relatively low, even though we live in a solar system of eight planets and one dwarf planet. Okay, fine. I'll I'll go there. But, you know,

• 1:27:03Peter Diamandis?

  We're finding planets everywhere now. I mean, all of the, you know, the observatories we've launched is disproving that. We're also finding black holes at the center of every galaxy. We're finding galaxies all over the place. I mean, whenever we have deemed to constrain these things, we've been wrong over and over again. I mean, that's my observation of it. Maybe there's the reverse, which I just don't know.

• 1:27:30Speaker 00

  That's true. And as we said earlier, you know, we didn't know of any galaxies outside of the Milky Way until less than 100 years ago, as you will include in your newsletter this year. And so it's a startling testimony to how brilliant and capable the human mind is. But, but the bottom, you know, kind of under, underlying fact is that I think we have to say there is no evidence right now. It doesn't mean that there is no existence, but there's no evidence that we have of anything remotely like that. And for that reason, I think it's, it's almost, it's because people assume that there is life. I think it's important to have, maybe it's my contrarian side, but to have, you know, kind of counter examples and, and, and present things. Because I think, you know, it's like these people

• 1:28:15Speaker 00

  that make a bet that their favorite sports team is going to lose the big game. And in San Diego, that's no, that's no problem because we've never won a major championship in any sport whatsoever. But, but the, the bottom line is, I mean, no one would be more excited. No one would be more thrilled. Because from these individuals or species or artificial intelligences, they have survived. They've gotten past the great filter, perhaps, if there is one. They've also been able to master laws of physics and laws of sociology and communication and so on. So I think a physicist, most of all, would appreciate the existence. And that's why maybe I'm hedging my bets and being a contrarian, but I think I'm bolstered by the fact that there are a great deal of hurdles to it. And, and the final thing I'll

• 1:28:58Speaker 00

  say, Peter, is, you know, do you care about your, you know, 82nd, you know, grandchild to the power two to the 80s? You know, do you care about like 100 generations, 1,000 generations, as Will MacAskill talks about, you know, we're in the first inning of Of a, you know, overtime or an extra innings game. I mean, I don't know the names of my great, great grandparents, right? Uh, it's likely my great, great, great grandchildren won't know my name, except for, you know, if they tune into the most popular podcast of all time into the impossible. Uh, so, um, but I, I like to think also, we, we've explored the local area of the galaxy quite well and we've, we've, you know, it's, it's true. We've only dipped a thimble into the ocean to use Jill

• 1:29:40Speaker 00

  Tarter's metaphor in searching the universe, but let's say there is life in another galaxy. It's three million light years away, Peter, and I, I think, I think it's, it's almost, you know, it is becoming a, a branch of philosophy at that point. Like, could they be existing? Yeah, but what really, what do you really care about? Just like you care about your kids and your grandkids and maybe their grandkids. You know, it's hard to really think about, well, I'd really care if there was a, a child living in M51, the poster I have behind me. The Whirlpool Galaxy is 86 light years, 86 million light years away.

• 1:30:13Peter Diamandis?

  But there is

• 1:30:16Peter Diamandis?

  huge philosophical, religious implications to the, to humanity, right?

• 1:30:21Speaker 00

  It is. I think it's one of the most, one of the top two interesting questions you could ask. The other is, you know, how did the universe come from a non-universe? How did life come from non-life? How did consciousness come from non-consciousness? And then how did technological life come from non-technological? I think those are the four big bangs that are most interesting to me.

• 1:30:37Peter Diamandis?

  Uh, and I love those and those are all good sessions for us to have in the future. Um, let me.

• 1:30:42Speaker 00

  Can I ask you one question to, to wrap up?

• 1:30:44Peter Diamandis?

  If I can ask you one question as well. Do you want to go first?

• 1:30:47Speaker 00

  Absolutely. Uh, turnabout is fair play. You want to go first?

• 1:30:50Peter Diamandis?

  Sure. So as I ask my guests on, on, on moonshots and mindsets, uh, if I were to fund an X Prize for you, uh, the Keating X Prize,

• 1:31:00Peter Diamandis?

  what would it be? What would you want, uh, innovators around the world, uh, using their shower time in the morning, their sleep and, and dream time at night to solve what challenge? What would they have to build, demonstrate, make happen to win the Brian Keating X Prize?

• 1:31:20Speaker 00

  Is the monetary amount unlimited or is it still $10 million?

• 1:31:24Peter Diamandis?

  No, it could be 10 to 100 million dollars. You know, we have launched 100 million dollar prize and I was very happy Elon funded. I've got two more 100 million dollar prizes that will be launched hopefully this year. So a lot coming, but you know, let's put it in that decade.

• 1:31:39Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's hard and I know I'm speaking from a place of great privilege to say this, but you know, I am among the four or five leaders of an experiment that's close to 200 million dollars by the time it's finished. And that is kind of born of conversations and visions of Jim Simons and myself and David Spiegel and my colleague Suzanne Staggs, Mark Devlin, Adrian Lee. And this is to really go back to the beginning of time and understand whether or not there was a big bang. We don't know, Peter, if the big bang occurred once, many times, is still occurring.

• 1:32:12Peter Diamandis?

  I keep on reading that the James Webb Space Telescope has disproven the big bang over and over again.

• 1:32:18Speaker 00

  No, that's all nonsense. They've learned much more than we ever thought possible and they've built upon what Hubble's been able to do. But there's no sense that they've done anything to do what that clickbait type headline suggests of disproving the big bang. But what I mean is, we don't know if it was a singularity. We don't know if the big bang occurred once, not at all. Perhaps the big bang is a misnomer. As Hoyle described it as a euphemism for orgasm meant to disparage and deride the theory that he called atrocious because he believed in a steady state universe. Well, they're modern incarnations of the steady state universe. And that's kind of what I have dedicated my life to, along with this desire to bring, you know, basically zero cost education to consumers to think scientifically.

• 1:33:03Speaker 00

  I think that's the greatest hope that humanity has is to really completely, you know, devalue or de-economic, you know, incentivize what I do for a living. So I'm undercutting my own financial, you know, venal instinct, which is that I want education, at least in the STEM fields, to basically be free. And I want it to be the equivalent of, you know, we walk around San Diego and... And, you know, thank God, it's a very, very healthy economy down here, but we have our share of homelessness. And my wife and I were voyaging around, and we found at least the homeless have have cell phones. Okay, you can debate the policies, that good

• 1:33:44Speaker 00

  or bad, and whatever. They have access to information, they have access to data, they can enrich and better their lives. Peter, we need to do this at scale. And to make it really scale, as you've pointed out to me, we need to make it almost free. And it should be free.

• 1:34:00Peter Diamandis?

  It does, and it will be. And there's lots going on right now from the Khan Academy and GPT-4, and what Ahmad Mustak is doing in Malawi with providing tablets and generative AI education platforms for all the students there. But coming back to the Brian Keating X Prize, what would be, what's the grand challenge? What's the problem you want to solve? Is it in education? Is it in astronomy? What would you want teams doing, building, creating here?

• 1:34:29Speaker 00

  I think it would be to cultivate an education, a global brain, that would then turn itself, using the power of imagination and curiosity that I again, contrariantly think are unique to the human species, until proven otherwise. I'm hoping to be being proven wrong. But, but yes, it would be to effectively to determine a way to make a free university available 24/7, 365.24, to every human being on Earth. Because imagine that, you know, we had to, imagine that, you know, Elon's parents, they never met, right? Imagine, and I know he's had great troubles with his father, I had trouble with my father, but let's ignore that. If, you know, there's got to be more Elons, there

• 1:35:14Speaker 00

  should be some Elanas, there should be people, the world is vast, and the 8 billion people that need to maintain our ever burgeoning path to make a dent in the universe, as you say. I think that that can only occur with STEM education, Peter. I think that you can actually learn English from learning science. I have a weird, you know, reading Galileo, reading Aristotle, come on, these are the greatest minds. In history and and reading, you know, Abdul Salam, Steven Weinberg, they're incredible contributors, not just to science, where they excelled in one Nobel Proses or the equivalent thereof, but they have a gift for communication, as Feynman would say. You have to be able to explain it in simple terms, and as Einstein said, but no simpler.

• 1:35:59Speaker 00

  So we have to get to this, raise the baseline level of STEM education, and that will allow us, hopefully, to value life, to to think of life as precious, preserve the the precious human capital. I believe every person is made in the image of God. And then protect the planet, which means to expand our horizons. Not necessarily outside of Earth. I think we should save Earth.

• 1:36:21Peter Diamandis?

  Beautiful. All right. Accepted. Now your question, my friend.

• 1:36:24Speaker 00

  All right. Your your question is the following, and I usually ask four of these questions, but I'm gonna ask just one, and it's from Sir Arthur C. Clarke, your old friend. I never got to meet him. But but Arthur said many things. He said, "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." He said, "For every expert, there is an equal and opposite expert." And he said the following, he said the following thing as well. He said, "When an elderly," sorry, Peter, "when an elderly," you're only like two years older than me, I think, "but an elderly but distinguished," you are very distinguished, "when an elderly but distinguished scientist says something is possible, he is very likely to be right, but when he says something is impossible, he's almost certainly wrong." Peter, I want to ask you, what have you been wrong about?

• 1:37:08Speaker 00

  You're the most optimistic person, cheerful person. I emulate you as best as I can. And when I think of myself as being depressed, I say, "What would Peter do?" But I want to ask you, what have you been wrong about? What have you changed your mind about that you thought was impossible but really is possible?

• 1:37:22Peter Diamandis?

  Well, so, listen, I I take some extreme positions. One of the positions that I take is that we can extend, significantly extend the healthy human lifespan or health span, right? That we can break through what has been 120-year, 122-year upper age limit. That there are species of life on this planet, the bowhead whale that goes for 200 years, the Greenland shark can go for 500 years, and if they can go that long, why can't we? It's either a hardware problem or a software problem, and we're going to be able to solve that problem, and that the tools to solve those problems are coming online this decade.

• 1:38:05Peter Diamandis?

  So that's my belief, which I believe is probable.

• 1:38:11Peter Diamandis?

  And, you know, could I be wrong there? Possibly. But I think it's a matter of time, not a matter of if. So I guess your question is, what do I think is impossible?

• 1:38:26Peter Diamandis?

  That I could be wrong about. So, you know, the challenge is I don't spend a lot of time thinking about what's impossible. I think it's probably impossible for

• 1:38:39Peter Diamandis?

  today's governments to deal with the rate of technological change that will be occurring in the next two decades. As we head towards Ray Kurzweil's singularity. I think that it's that we're going to see governments failing as a result of their inability to maintain control. And so that's going to be interesting. The question of whether or not they will be able to reinvent themselves fast enough to to stay viable as a government. So that's one element that I think of as kind of impossible.

• 1:39:23Speaker 00

  Anything you feel you've been wrong about or, you know?

• 1:39:26Peter Diamandis?

  Oh, I've been wrong about timing on a number of things. So, I mean, you know, I had started an asteroid mining company a decade ago. And I remember having a conversation with Elon about it and saying, hey, would you buy liquid oxygen if I brought it back from these carbonaceous condrites? And he goes, of course I would, but I think you're way too early. And he was right. And I'll take another shot.

• 1:39:47Speaker 00

  By the way, Jim Simons has an asteroid and I told him about your asteroid mining and he said, I have mining rights on my asteroid, so he'll be interested too if it does come around. A couple billionaires, a couple billionaires in your corner, won't they?

• 1:39:59Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, well, I think, I think it will, I think we're, we're going to see the human species evolve off planet. So one of the questions, of course, I think about is, is it planetary or? O'Neill, Gerard K. O'Neill, a friend, a mentor at Princeton advocated for creating colonies in space, rotating space colonies that would house on average 10,000 individuals. There was a wide enough genetic pool and a pool of skills in that those colonies would bud like amoeba and you'd rebuild and you'd go on an exponential growth curve.

• 1:40:42Peter Diamandis?

  But rather than get into the deep gravity well of Mars and having to use energy to get off it again. So, you know, I'm much more of a moon and O'Neill colony guy than I am a Mars guy. So, you know, I might be wrong about that. Maybe Mars is the place we need to get ourselves to. We'll see. I'm like, really? It's kind of, I'd rather colonize the moon and start building, you know, with robots and AIs, O'Neill colonies out there and not dive back into the gravity well. So, I mean, that's another area of interesting debate. I don't know. What else, where else you want to take it?

• 1:41:24Speaker 00

  Well, I think in the interest of time, I should wrap up because my young folks, my twins are getting restless and there's nothing worse than the terrible, the formidable fours, as you know. Peter, it's been a great delight. It's always a pleasure to talk to you. And anything else, you know, that you'd like to have my audience be aware of on your side? I'm going to have a link to your newsletter, which I get and look forward to eagerly devouring every time you write something. I subscribe, follow you on Twitter and elsewhere. Anything else that would be of interest to my listeners?

• 1:41:58Peter Diamandis?

  My handles are at Peter Diamandis on Twitter and Instagram and diamandis.com is my website. You can learn a lot more and of course, moonshots and mindsets. And Brian, how about yourself? Where can my listeners find you and which parts of your life are the most important for them to dive into?

• 1:42:20Speaker 00

  Well, I just got one of your final onboarding emails that said, "I'll see you in the multiverse, in the metaverse. So I'll see you guys in the multiverse of minds." Most places I am is Dr. Brian Keating, Twitter, YouTube, Instagram, etc. But the most important thing is really to connect, especially the young people. I wrote several books, one of which is called Into the Impossible, named after Arthur C. Clarke's phrase in this as well. It's really a self-help guide, Peter, of all things. I never thought I'd write a self-help book for my second book. You endorsed my first book, which I'm so grateful, ever grateful for, and Julian Guthrie, who writes about you and her book, she endorsed my second book. But I'm really trying to really reach

• 1:43:02Speaker 00

  the undergraduate, high school demographic, college, and even graduate students and postdocs and young faculty, because there's a crisis of loneliness and isolation and imposter syndrome. And I talk about, I opened the book with my friend who wrote the foreword to the book Barry Barish, up there in LA, who won the Nobel Prize for LIGO, discovering two black holes crashing together at a quarter of the speed of light, a billion light-years away, Peter, imagine that? And I asked him, like, "What advice would you give to your former self?" And he said, "Don't have the imposter syndrome when you're 80." And I'm like, "You can't possibly have the imposter syndrome. You won the freaking Nobel Prize." And he said, "No, no, no, you got it wrong. When I won the Nobel Prize, I got it worse than ever, because when you accept the Nobel Prize," which I'll never find out about because of my first book, Losing

• 1:43:45Speaker 00

  the Nobel Prize, which we'll talk about some other time, "when you win the Nobel Prize, you have to sign a ledger that says, 'I got my check and I got my 24-carat golden medallion.'" And "I'm a curious dude," said Barry, and he looked through the pages, and he saw Richard Feynman, he said, "Oh, my God, Marie Curie, oh, my God." And he saw Einstein, "Same book as me. I'm not worthy." And I said, "Barry, guess what? I have good news. Einstein thought he was unworthy." And he said, "Of who?" He said, "I felt the imposter syndrome when it came to someone named Isaac Newton, because Isaac Newton did more, according to Einstein, than any other human being for Western civilization." And I said, "That's not all, Barry. Don't worry.

• 1:44:25Speaker 00

  Even Isaac Newton had his own imposter syndrome." He said, "You've got to be kidding me." And I said, "Barry, you and I are both Jews, but there was a man that Isaac Newton worshipped, and that was Jesus Christ." And I said, he felt he never lived up to it. In fact, he felt his greatest accomplishment was he died a virgin, like his mentor, Jesus Christ, but he failed in many other ways. So Peter, I wrote a lot, I do a lot. Go to my website, briankeating.com, sign up. If you have a .edu email address, you'll win a meteorite guaranteed. If you don't have one, you're entered into a drawing to win one, the first 100 listeners of the podcast. But Peter, thank you so much. This has been a real honor. You've been so gracious. You helped me with my TEDx talk, you helped me with my book, and I can't wait till we

• 1:45:09Speaker 00

  be together in person like we were when I was writing the book in 2016 with Sean Carroll, who is no longer in Los Angeles, by the way.

• 1:45:17Peter Diamandis?

  Well, buddy, a pleasure, and let's not wait that many years again for our next podcast. Be well.

• 1:45:25Speaker 00

  Great to talk to you.