Latest / Daniel and Kelly’s Extraordinary Universe / How to take over the world

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How to take over the world · Daniel and Kelly’s Extraordinary Universe

• 0:08
  Speaker 1: Hey, Daniel, remember when we did that episode about supervillains,
• 0:11
  Speaker 1: the one where we worked through the physics of listeners
• 0:14
  Speaker 1: hypothetical nefarious schemes. Yeah? Are you sure they were hypothetical?
• 0:18
  Speaker 1: Do you know if anyone actually did any of them?
• 0:19
  Speaker 1: I didn't follow up with any of them, but I
• 0:21
  Speaker 1: guess we probably hear about it on the news. If
• 0:23
  Speaker 1: anyone actually managed to turn off the sun or build
• 0:26
  Speaker 1: nuclear power ants? That makes what do you think that
• 0:29
  Speaker 1: maybe we should have done more? Are you worried we
• 0:31
  Speaker 1: didn't help them enough? Maybe we should like write a
• 0:33
  Speaker 1: book with step by step instructions. Yeah, maybe maybe nobody
• 0:37
  Speaker 1: should write that book. Sounds like a bad idea, might
• 0:40
  Speaker 1: be too late. I am r handmade cartoonists and the
• 0:57
  Speaker 1: creator of PhD comics. Hi. I'm Daniel, a particle physicist
• 1:01
  Speaker 1: and a professor at UC Irvine, and I seriously hope
• 1:04
  Speaker 1: nobody takes over the world. What if it's a really
• 1:07
  Speaker 1: good person you mean, like a physicist. No, that's the opposite.
• 1:12
  Speaker 1: I mean, all right, I mean a great person, not
• 1:16
  Speaker 1: just good enough cartoonist thing. That's right, So with a
• 1:19
  Speaker 1: sense of humor and artistic skills. I think Plato suggested
• 1:22
  Speaker 1: that right that all societies should be ruled by philosopher
• 1:25
  Speaker 1: cartoonist kings. Yeah I could be a king, sure, But
• 1:29
  Speaker 1: welcome to our podcast Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe,
• 1:31
  Speaker 1: a production of I Heart Radio, in which we try
• 1:33
  Speaker 1: to explain everything we do and do not understand about
• 1:37
  Speaker 1: the universe to you. We dive into the details of
• 1:39
  Speaker 1: how quantum particles move, about how hurricane swirls, and about
• 1:43
  Speaker 1: how galaxies form. We seek to enlighten and to explain
• 1:46
  Speaker 1: and to illuminate, and not to arm you with the
• 1:49
  Speaker 1: tools to take over the world. That's right. We don't
• 1:51
  Speaker 1: try to take over the world. We try to explain
• 1:53
  Speaker 1: the world and talk about all the amazing things in it,
• 1:56
  Speaker 1: because it is a pretty wonderful world that if we
• 1:58
  Speaker 1: understood more about, maybe we can appreciate more and not
• 2:01
  Speaker 1: try to take it over. That's right. The express goal
• 2:03
  Speaker 1: of physics is not to build the next generation of
• 2:06
  Speaker 1: nuclear weapons or arm you with nuclear powered ants, but
• 2:09
  Speaker 1: to show you how the world works, to take it
• 2:11
  Speaker 1: apart bit by bit and try to digest it into
• 2:14
  Speaker 1: little mathematical stories that make sense to the human mind.
• 2:18
  Speaker 1: But of course, along the way sometimes we do accidentally
• 2:21
  Speaker 1: gain bits of knowledge which have practical consequences. That's right.
• 2:25
  Speaker 1: That's not the intended purpose of science, but it's kind
• 2:28
  Speaker 1: of a side effect sometimes it does kind of give
• 2:30
  Speaker 1: you the ammunition you need to change the world and
• 2:33
  Speaker 1: to do amazing things in it, and maybe terrible things too,
• 2:36
  Speaker 1: that's right. And it's transformed the world for the better
• 2:39
  Speaker 1: in many ways and some ways for the worst. I'm
• 2:41
  Speaker 1: sure people would argue, Well, that is a super big question,
• 2:44
  Speaker 1: and it's one that people have been asking themselves for
• 2:47
  Speaker 1: a long time, like, if you had the means and
• 2:49
  Speaker 1: maybe the science and the knowledge to do incredible things
• 2:53
  Speaker 1: here on earth, should you do them? Does physics and
• 2:55
  Speaker 1: the rest of science equip you with enough power to
• 2:59
  Speaker 1: control everything? It is a pretty big question and a
• 3:01
  Speaker 1: pretty complicated one. Fortunately, Daniel, you and I have a
• 3:04
  Speaker 1: friend who has written a whole book about this. Fortunately
• 3:07
  Speaker 1: or unfortunately he's written this book, fortunately because I didn't
• 3:11
  Speaker 1: really want to write it, So I'm glad that he didn't,
• 3:14
  Speaker 1: and then he can take the blame if something bad
• 3:17
  Speaker 1: happens from that. That's right. And so today on the podcast,
• 3:20
  Speaker 1: we'll be talking about Ryan North how to take over
• 3:28
  Speaker 1: the world with science? Science, Science, now, just to be
• 3:34
  Speaker 1: clear with science is not the part of the title
• 3:37
  Speaker 1: of his book. That's right, though he does dive deep
• 3:39
  Speaker 1: into realistic scientific approaches to how to solve these problems.
• 3:43
  Speaker 1: So it's a bit of a tongue in cheek. It's
• 3:45
  Speaker 1: come for the supervillain scheme to take over the world,
• 3:47
  Speaker 1: stay for the scientific understanding of how the world works. Yeah,
• 3:51
  Speaker 1: it is a pretty interesting book. It's kind of like
• 3:52
  Speaker 1: how if you wanted to be a super villain, Like,
• 3:55
  Speaker 1: what are some of the possible schemes and how would
• 3:57
  Speaker 1: you make them work if you wanted to do it?
• 3:59
  Speaker 1: Or me be you're a government regulator and you're wondering
• 4:02
  Speaker 1: how your citizens might turn into supervillains and you want
• 4:05
  Speaker 1: to know how to stop them. Also an excellent resource.
• 4:07
  Speaker 1: Oh man, you went pretty dark there. You went right
• 4:10
  Speaker 1: into like big brother. I would say maybe also it
• 4:14
  Speaker 1: could be a good guy for superheroes, Like if you
• 4:16
  Speaker 1: wanted to stay one step ahead of the supervillains, how
• 4:19
  Speaker 1: would you what would you need? Are you saying government
• 4:21
  Speaker 1: regulators can't be superheroes? That's what I was imagining Superman
• 4:24
  Speaker 1: working together with the FBI. That's right. N A stands
• 4:28
  Speaker 1: for New Superman Agency. Well, you don't want to hear
• 4:32
  Speaker 1: from us. We have not done any research into how
• 4:34
  Speaker 1: to take Over the World, which is why we invited
• 4:36
  Speaker 1: Ryan on the show to talk to us. And so
• 4:39
  Speaker 1: here is our interview with author and cartoonist Ryan North.
• 4:43
  Speaker 1: So it's my pleasure to introduce to the program Ryan North.
• 4:46
  Speaker 1: He's the author of Dinosaur Comics, Adventure Time Comics, and
• 4:50
  Speaker 1: Squirrel Girl. He's won the Eisner Award and Harvey Awards,
• 4:54
  Speaker 1: and has been a New York Times bestseller. In addition,
• 4:57
  Speaker 1: is an academic background in computational inguistics and a dog
• 5:01
  Speaker 1: named Chomsky. Ryan. Welcome to the program. Hi, thank you
• 5:04
  Speaker 1: for having me. We had Ryan on the show several
• 5:07
  Speaker 1: years ago to talk about his book called How To
• 5:09
  Speaker 1: Invent Everything, which is a piece of science communication in
• 5:12
  Speaker 1: the genre that we hear the podcast like having humble
• 5:16
  Speaker 1: titles like this podcast, and this new book continues that
• 5:19
  Speaker 1: theme and it's called how Do take Over the World.
• 5:22
  Speaker 1: So my first question for you, Ryan is why should
• 5:25
  Speaker 1: we take world domination advice from someone who was famously
• 5:28
  Speaker 1: trapped in a scaring pit with only an umbrella, a leash, phone,
• 5:32
  Speaker 1: and a dog. It's true, I did get stuck in
• 5:35
  Speaker 1: a hole with my dog, and we were there for
• 5:37
  Speaker 1: about an hour before Twitter helped me escape. But the
• 5:40
  Speaker 1: sort of secret about the book is it is called
• 5:43
  Speaker 1: how to take Over the World, and it is using
• 5:45
  Speaker 1: that as the kind of the candy coating to get
• 5:48
  Speaker 1: across the nonfiction inside. But the plots in the book
• 5:52
  Speaker 1: are really used as a a lens to explore the
• 5:56
  Speaker 1: actual science and technology and interesting ideas contained within it.
• 6:02
  Speaker 1: So while you could use the book to take over
• 6:04
  Speaker 1: the world, I hope you use it to learn more
• 6:07
  Speaker 1: about the really interesting world around us and the ways
• 6:10
  Speaker 1: we can make it better. I guess you could use
• 6:12
  Speaker 1: it to learn about the world so you can take
• 6:14
  Speaker 1: over it. Yeah you could. I mean I priced out
• 6:16
  Speaker 1: every plot in the book and it comes in at
• 6:18
  Speaker 1: a little under fifties six billion dollars. So if you
• 6:22
  Speaker 1: have that kind of cash kicking around, I know a
• 6:24
  Speaker 1: way you could spend it. You probably already run the world.
• 6:26
  Speaker 1: Is that what you're saying? Okay? Right, But do you
• 6:29
  Speaker 1: think it's kind of a bad idea to give people
• 6:31
  Speaker 1: instructions like that about how to take over the world?
• 6:34
  Speaker 1: In other words, should we stop the publication of this book?
• 6:38
  Speaker 1: I hope not. I'll tell you something I consider right, like,
• 6:40
  Speaker 1: is this a dangerous book? And I don't think it is,
• 6:44
  Speaker 1: because the truth of it is that what we're doing
• 6:49
  Speaker 1: is learning about the world. Like with How to Invent Everything,
• 6:52
  Speaker 1: the premise was you've gone back in time, your time
• 6:54
  Speaker 1: machine is broken, and we're going to use that fictional
• 6:57
  Speaker 1: premise to learn about how to rebuild civilization from. And
• 7:00
  Speaker 1: so with these world domination schemes, they're all lifted from
• 7:03
  Speaker 1: comic books. There are things that Dr Doom or Lex
• 7:06
  Speaker 1: Luthor would do, like having a secret floating base, or
• 7:09
  Speaker 1: clothing a dinosaur so you can ride around on it
• 7:12
  Speaker 1: and scare people. It's digging a hole to the Earth's
• 7:16
  Speaker 1: core so you can hold it hostage, that sort of stuff,
• 7:18
  Speaker 1: which in real life doesn't tend to get done, because
• 7:22
  Speaker 1: if you have the kind of means to dig a
• 7:25
  Speaker 1: hole to the Earth's core, you are probably already using
• 7:28
  Speaker 1: that to do a lot more direct world domination things,
• 7:31
  Speaker 1: if that's what you're interested in. So let me put
• 7:34
  Speaker 1: your listeners at ease and say that I don't think
• 7:38
  Speaker 1: it's a dangerous book. But I am also the guy
• 7:41
  Speaker 1: who wrote it, so I am therefore extremely biased. Well,
• 7:44
  Speaker 1: I mean, how many copies of this book do you
• 7:46
  Speaker 1: plan to sell? How many supervillains can the Earth tolerate?
• 7:49
  Speaker 1: You know what, if this book creates several supervillains and
• 7:52
  Speaker 1: they have competing tunnels to the center of the Earth.
• 7:54
  Speaker 1: If this book produces several competing supervillains all digging to
• 7:58
  Speaker 1: the Earth's core, I would argue that the actual good
• 8:02
  Speaker 1: science that would come out of actually reaching the Earth's
• 8:06
  Speaker 1: core with a tunnel would probably be worth those repeating
• 8:10
  Speaker 1: villains trying to do it as quickly as possible. Also,
• 8:13
  Speaker 1: you don't need actual supervillains to read your book, You
• 8:15
  Speaker 1: just need aspiring supervillains. Yeah. I had a friend who
• 8:19
  Speaker 1: was like, you know, I never considered myself to be
• 8:21
  Speaker 1: a super villain, but part way through reading your book,
• 8:24
  Speaker 1: I started thinking, this feels like self help. This feels
• 8:28
  Speaker 1: like I'm becoming more and more convinced that I could
• 8:31
  Speaker 1: become a supervillain and I could take over the world
• 8:34
  Speaker 1: if I really wanted to, which I counted as a success. Yeah.
• 8:37
  Speaker 1: Well that kind of brings up the next question we have,
• 8:39
  Speaker 1: which is it do you think scientists or like writers
• 8:42
  Speaker 1: like yourself have responsibility for how their technology is applied?
• 8:46
  Speaker 1: I mean, like, do you think it would be Daniel's
• 8:48
  Speaker 1: fault if the l C, for example, accidentally creates a
• 8:51
  Speaker 1: black hole and destroys the Earth. I would personally blame
• 8:54
  Speaker 1: Daniel for that. Yes, absolutely, But seriously, I think there
• 8:58
  Speaker 1: is there's always a discussion, right of what do we
• 9:00
  Speaker 1: owe each other and how responsible are we the things
• 9:03
  Speaker 1: that we do when we produce. And my angle on
• 9:06
  Speaker 1: this is growing up in the eighties and nineties and
• 9:10
  Speaker 1: studying computers, and at the time there was this idea
• 9:14
  Speaker 1: that I fully subscribed to that the Internet was an
• 9:17
  Speaker 1: intrinsic good. It was good by its very nature because
• 9:20
  Speaker 1: it would let people talk to anyone in the world,
• 9:22
  Speaker 1: and communication was good by its very nature, and whatever
• 9:25
  Speaker 1: the Internet did, it had to be positive for the
• 9:27
  Speaker 1: world because we were connecting humans like that just felt
• 9:29
  Speaker 1: like it was. You accepted it as too, because it
• 9:31
  Speaker 1: was so obvious. And of course, twenty years later we
• 9:34
  Speaker 1: see things like Facebook inciting genocide and may and Mare
• 9:39
  Speaker 1: and all these ways in which human communication has been
• 9:43
  Speaker 1: weaponized and used to accomplish some very bad things, and
• 9:47
  Speaker 1: that was nothing that we foresaw at the time. Like
• 9:50
  Speaker 1: we all thought it was great, we didn't realize that
• 9:53
  Speaker 1: anyone in the world being able to talk to you
• 9:55
  Speaker 1: meant that if you were in any way marginalized, you'd
• 9:57
  Speaker 1: have to be constantly defending yourself against an effe actively
• 10:00
  Speaker 1: infinite array of strangers, always calling upon you to justify
• 10:05
  Speaker 1: your existence, Like there were these downsides we didn't see.
• 10:07
  Speaker 1: And I don't think you can call up you know,
• 10:09
  Speaker 1: Tim Bernard's Lee and say, hey, you invented the Worldwide Web.
• 10:14
  Speaker 1: I'm holding you responsible for this, but I think there
• 10:16
  Speaker 1: is a responsibility to try to foresee the negative ways
• 10:22
  Speaker 1: technology can be used. And that's a that's a very
• 10:24
  Speaker 1: serious answer to have. Probably not that serious question. I
• 10:27
  Speaker 1: apologize for that. No, I think it is a serious
• 10:29
  Speaker 1: question and it needs a serious answer. So thank you
• 10:31
  Speaker 1: for that. And I'm also glad to hear that you're
• 10:34
  Speaker 1: leaving most scientists of the responsibility for their actions except
• 10:38
  Speaker 1: for me. I'm responsible for the black hole in case
• 10:42
  Speaker 1: the LC eats the Earth, and that micro second I
• 10:45
  Speaker 1: have before I get stuck into the black called like
• 10:47
  Speaker 1: Daniel exactly, I haven't spent a whole lot of time
• 10:49
  Speaker 1: preparing my defense for the post Earth has been destroyed.
• 10:53
  Speaker 1: You know Hague trial, in which I'm called into justice.
• 10:57
  Speaker 1: You're probably fine, but you know, it is an important
• 11:02
  Speaker 1: topic and it's something that I personally have thought about
• 11:04
  Speaker 1: a lot. Having grown up in Los Alumos, where the
• 11:06
  Speaker 1: development of nuclear weapons, you know, literally has changed the
• 11:09
  Speaker 1: nature of human society, I definitely shied away from any
• 11:13
  Speaker 1: kind of physics research which had immediate applications, and tried
• 11:18
  Speaker 1: to imagine that, you know, particle physics was basically useless
• 11:21
  Speaker 1: to humanity except that its scratched our itch. You know
• 11:24
  Speaker 1: that it's satisfied some curiosity about the nature of reality.
• 11:27
  Speaker 1: But I think it's fun in your book how you
• 11:30
  Speaker 1: very directly connect these ideas of here's some knowledge about
• 11:34
  Speaker 1: how the universe works, and here's how you could use
• 11:36
  Speaker 1: it for your own personal gain at the expense of
• 11:38
  Speaker 1: the rest of humanity. I introduced this idea of what
• 11:41
  Speaker 1: I call enlightened superability, where you're helping the world by
• 11:46
  Speaker 1: helping yourself. I think the best example of that is
• 11:48
  Speaker 1: in the chapter about becoming immortal. We explore all the
• 11:51
  Speaker 1: different ways that people have tried to reach for immortality
• 11:54
  Speaker 1: in the past, and a lot of them feel really
• 11:55
  Speaker 1: goofy from our current point of view, like there's an
• 11:58
  Speaker 1: idea of popular and ang in the sixteen hundreds where
• 12:01
  Speaker 1: if you drank all these medicines which are really toxins poisons,
• 12:05
  Speaker 1: then your hair would fall out and your nails would
• 12:08
  Speaker 1: fall off. And we recognize this as like a very
• 12:09
  Speaker 1: crude form of chemotherapy, but they saw that when the
• 12:13
  Speaker 1: hair grew back and the nails grew back, if you
• 12:15
  Speaker 1: survive the treatment, then you'd be reborn as a baby,
• 12:18
  Speaker 1: and you live for longer by surviving this really crude
• 12:21
  Speaker 1: form of amateur chemotherapy that it feels goofy now, but
• 12:25
  Speaker 1: at the time they're like, yeah, this this might be
• 12:26
  Speaker 1: way we can become immortal. And sort of the conclusion
• 12:29
  Speaker 1: of that chapter is that if you did become immortal
• 12:32
  Speaker 1: through any sort of medical process, then that would be
• 12:35
  Speaker 1: really bad for the world, right because if it's a
• 12:38
  Speaker 1: medical way to become immortal, it's not some magical thing,
• 12:40
  Speaker 1: it's some scientific thing you're doing to yourself. Then that
• 12:42
  Speaker 1: takes money, that takes resources, and not everyone can have it.
• 12:46
  Speaker 1: And now you've produced a world in which you have
• 12:48
  Speaker 1: a class of immortal humans who won't die and everyone
• 12:51
  Speaker 1: else who will die. And that's that's like cartoonist levels
• 12:54
  Speaker 1: of dystopia and inequality. And the way you get around
• 12:57
  Speaker 1: that perfectly is you keep it a secret. Only you
• 13:00
  Speaker 1: become immortal, you're the only one who does is you're
• 13:02
  Speaker 1: the only one who knows about it. And then you
• 13:04
  Speaker 1: have these benefits of immortality where you can study something
• 13:07
  Speaker 1: for for hundreds of thousands of lifetimes and the rest
• 13:10
  Speaker 1: of the world doesn't need to suffer for it. And
• 13:13
  Speaker 1: that feels like a benefit, but also there's clearly something
• 13:16
  Speaker 1: villainous in becoming immortal and keeping it all for yourself,
• 13:20
  Speaker 1: And that narrow space is what I call it enlightened Supervillain.
• 13:22
  Speaker 1: You feel like it's where a lot of the book
• 13:24
  Speaker 1: operates and has fun with. Well, I guess I have
• 13:26
  Speaker 1: a more general question and now, Ryan, which is what
• 13:29
  Speaker 1: kind of inspired the book for you, Like, what made
• 13:31
  Speaker 1: you think to write a book about how to take
• 13:33
  Speaker 1: over the world. That's a good question. It sort of
• 13:35
  Speaker 1: came from me writing stories for Marvel and DC Comic
• 13:39
  Speaker 1: book Adventures. And in those stories, you always have a
• 13:45
  Speaker 1: hero fighting a villain. That's the rule of a genre,
• 13:47
  Speaker 1: superhero comics, and the best stories have the heroes winning
• 13:52
  Speaker 1: at the last second, right like in a sports game.
• 13:54
  Speaker 1: If your team dominates the whole match, it's not very
• 13:57
  Speaker 1: exciting because you know how it's going to end. But
• 13:59
  Speaker 1: if they come into the last second and double overtime
• 14:01
  Speaker 1: and that's a really good game, that's super exciting. And
• 14:03
  Speaker 1: so I realized that we were writing these stories where
• 14:06
  Speaker 1: the villains always lost at the last second, and what
• 14:10
  Speaker 1: happened if they didn't have to lose, what happened if
• 14:12
  Speaker 1: we structure the story so that they could win. And
• 14:15
  Speaker 1: if we could do that in a story, what's to
• 14:18
  Speaker 1: stop us from doing it in real life? And so
• 14:20
  Speaker 1: part of writing the book was me trying to convince
• 14:22
  Speaker 1: myself that this is fine, this is safe. No one
• 14:25
  Speaker 1: is going to blow up the moon or do any
• 14:27
  Speaker 1: crazy stuff. And part of it is, well, if someone
• 14:30
  Speaker 1: was trying to actually pull off supervillain schemes, like if
• 14:34
  Speaker 1: they really wanted a floating base, how close can we get?
• 14:37
  Speaker 1: Can we do it? If they really wanted a dinosaur
• 14:40
  Speaker 1: to write around on, what's the state of the art
• 14:42
  Speaker 1: for that? How close are we to de extinctifying which
• 14:46
  Speaker 1: is definitely a very scientific term these sorts of animals,
• 14:50
  Speaker 1: And there's a lot of really interesting things happening there.
• 14:52
  Speaker 1: So it end up being this fun exploration of the
• 14:54
  Speaker 1: sort of current edges of science and research, all through
• 14:58
  Speaker 1: this lens of I want to take over the world,
• 15:01
  Speaker 1: like dr doing what can I do. One thing that
• 15:03
  Speaker 1: excited me but also terrified me was how realistic some
• 15:07
  Speaker 1: of these schemes sort of are, especially in the category
• 15:11
  Speaker 1: of like geo engineering. It's certainly possible that somebody fairly
• 15:16
  Speaker 1: wealthy could decide they want to change the climate of
• 15:19
  Speaker 1: the Earth and do something about it, you know, where
• 15:22
  Speaker 1: one person makes a decision essentially for the whole planet.
• 15:25
  Speaker 1: I don't know if you've read the recent novel by
• 15:27
  Speaker 1: Neil Stevenson, Termination and Shock, in which this is sort
• 15:30
  Speaker 1: of explored. Can you talk about how somebody could actually
• 15:33
  Speaker 1: impact the climate, how an individual, fairly wealthy person could
• 15:37
  Speaker 1: make a decision about geo engineering for the whole human population. Yeah,
• 15:41
  Speaker 1: that was actually one of the chapters. That was the
• 15:43
  Speaker 1: chapter where I was most aware of. We're all having
• 15:46
  Speaker 1: fun here with this book for supervillaince, but I want
• 15:48
  Speaker 1: to make it clear that this is probably not something
• 15:50
  Speaker 1: we should be doing. Don't go off and do this
• 15:52
  Speaker 1: on your own. So the basic idea is that the
• 15:55
  Speaker 1: Earth's climate is changing, and one way we could stick
• 16:00
  Speaker 1: that if we can't get rid of carbon dioxide in
• 16:02
  Speaker 1: the atmosphere, which causes a greenhouse effect, is just have
• 16:05
  Speaker 1: less sunlight hit the Earth. And if we reduce the
• 16:08
  Speaker 1: amount of sunlight hitting the surface of the Earth by
• 16:10
  Speaker 1: two that could bring global temperatures down to pre industrial levels.
• 16:15
  Speaker 1: And one way you can do that is you go
• 16:17
  Speaker 1: up to the stratosphere and you spray sulfur dioxide into it,
• 16:22
  Speaker 1: which is white, and it reflects light back to space.
• 16:25
  Speaker 1: Everything's fine, and then that sulfur dioxide falls down as
• 16:29
  Speaker 1: acid rain. Don't worry about it. That sounds fine, It's
• 16:32
  Speaker 1: probably fine. And you could do this with a fleet
• 16:37
  Speaker 1: of not that strongly modified airplanes change so that they
• 16:42
  Speaker 1: can fly through the stratosphere and disperse this this sulfur dioxide.
• 16:47
  Speaker 1: And the cost for that would be about as seven
• 16:50
  Speaker 1: billion dollars US initially and then two billion dollars a
• 16:53
  Speaker 1: year ongoing, because of course this sulfur dioxide falls down
• 16:56
  Speaker 1: to Earth, it needs to replenished once a year. And
• 16:58
  Speaker 1: you know the plus side is, yes, this this would
• 17:00
  Speaker 1: reduce global temperatures down to where they were pre industrially,
• 17:04
  Speaker 1: but the downsides are pretty significant. It's something that needs
• 17:07
  Speaker 1: to be maintained. So if we stopped, then suddenly you
• 17:10
  Speaker 1: have two hundred years of climate change happening in one year,
• 17:14
  Speaker 1: which would obviously be catastrophic. But of course, like we
• 17:16
  Speaker 1: also rely on fertilizers to feed all the humans that
• 17:18
  Speaker 1: are live in the planet, so there's some precedent for
• 17:20
  Speaker 1: for doing this. But the real objection I see is
• 17:23
  Speaker 1: that if you do this, you're not just changing the
• 17:26
  Speaker 1: global climate, but you're also changing global weather, the weather patterns,
• 17:30
  Speaker 1: and that means, you know, when a tornado strikes somewhere,
• 17:34
  Speaker 1: we call that an act of God, because we can't
• 17:36
  Speaker 1: control the weather. But when you have modified the weather,
• 17:38
  Speaker 1: there's no more acts of God. There's just acts of you.
• 17:40
  Speaker 1: And there's also the concern of if there is to
• 17:42
  Speaker 1: be a global thermostat, why is one person controlling it.
• 17:46
  Speaker 1: Who's to say it can be controlled or should be
• 17:49
  Speaker 1: controlled by that one person. So you get these really
• 17:51
  Speaker 1: thorny issues of culpability, especially if say, these tornadoes only
• 17:56
  Speaker 1: happen to affect one part of the planet that you're
• 17:58
  Speaker 1: not in, maybe you'll decide that's fine. Like, it gets
• 18:01
  Speaker 1: so messy so quickly and doesn't actually fully address the
• 18:05
  Speaker 1: problems with climate change. It addresses the temperature thing, but
• 18:08
  Speaker 1: there's still extra carbon dioxide causes coral re bleaching and
• 18:11
  Speaker 1: things like that. So it's not a perfect solution, and
• 18:14
  Speaker 1: it's not even a consequence free solution, but it is
• 18:19
  Speaker 1: a surprisingly achievable thing for someone with nine billion dollars
• 18:25
  Speaker 1: kicking around to do if they were really motivated. And
• 18:28
  Speaker 1: I don't think the answer there is to pretend it
• 18:31
  Speaker 1: doesn't exist. I'd like for people to be aware that
• 18:34
  Speaker 1: this is something that's out there, and this is something
• 18:36
  Speaker 1: that someone might try to do one day, or a
• 18:39
  Speaker 1: government or a country might try to do, and I
• 18:40
  Speaker 1: wouldn't want us to be surprised by it. Well, I'll
• 18:42
  Speaker 1: admit that I was terrified as I was reading this,
• 18:45
  Speaker 1: imagining what if Jeff Bezos is reading this book, because
• 18:48
  Speaker 1: this is something he could do. He could like push
• 18:50
  Speaker 1: a button and do this and decide, Hey, you know,
• 18:52
  Speaker 1: I'm sorry I blew away your country and tornadoes. But
• 18:56
  Speaker 1: I decided it was for the best. It really helped
• 18:58
  Speaker 1: Amazon's bottom line in America, so we went for it.
• 19:01
  Speaker 1: All right, Well, we have lots more questions for Ryan,
• 19:03
  Speaker 1: but first let's take a short break. Okay, we're back
• 19:19
  Speaker 1: and we're talking to Ryan North, the author of the
• 19:22
  Speaker 1: book How to take Over the World, who really really
• 19:25
  Speaker 1: doesn't want you to use his book to take over
• 19:28
  Speaker 1: the world, or maybe in a way you do. You
• 19:30
  Speaker 1: want people to be more informed and you know, make
• 19:33
  Speaker 1: better decisions with the book. Yeah, I do. Um. I
• 19:36
  Speaker 1: think there's this interesting angle in science communication where like,
• 19:41
  Speaker 1: these schemes have not been fully created by me. It's
• 19:45
  Speaker 1: just me looking around at what's there on the ground
• 19:48
  Speaker 1: and how it can be put together. And if me,
• 19:51
  Speaker 1: a simple cartoonist put them together in these ways, I'm
• 19:54
  Speaker 1: sure others have too. So I feel like, you know,
• 19:56
  Speaker 1: let's be aware of it. Let's let's look at what
• 19:58
  Speaker 1: can be done. And I also do want to make
• 20:00
  Speaker 1: it sound like it's all dire and and bad. Like
• 20:03
  Speaker 1: the scheme for bringing back dinosaurs, I think is a
• 20:06
  Speaker 1: lot of fun and could be a great benefit for people.
• 20:11
  Speaker 1: The argument there is less of you know, let's clone
• 20:14
  Speaker 1: dinosaurs like in Jurassic Park, and more let's look at chickens,
• 20:18
  Speaker 1: which are a distant ancestor of dinosaurs and use a
• 20:23
  Speaker 1: bespoke development environment to bring out arms instead of wings
• 20:28
  Speaker 1: and a snout instead of a beak, and a rounded
• 20:30
  Speaker 1: butt instead of a tail, and produce very dinosaur like
• 20:33
  Speaker 1: chickens which we could then track in with ostriches. And
• 20:36
  Speaker 1: then there's your dinosaur tour to run around on. And yes,
• 20:39
  Speaker 1: it's not technically a dinosaur, but it looks like one,
• 20:44
  Speaker 1: and it would probably sound like one if it worked.
• 20:46
  Speaker 1: But it would it taste like a dinosaur? I don't know.
• 20:49
  Speaker 1: I think probably pretty close. I'm gonna go on record
• 20:52
  Speaker 1: and say I think dinosaurs are delicious. Yeah, dinosaurs tastes
• 20:55
  Speaker 1: like chicken. I'm thinking about all sorts of tie ins
• 20:57
  Speaker 1: with fast food restaurants. You know, you get your Jurassic nuggets.
• 21:00
  Speaker 1: I mean, it sounds fantastic. I don't know why you
• 21:01
  Speaker 1: didn't base the whole book on that, but tell us
• 21:04
  Speaker 1: a little bit about that. You know, is Jurassic chicken
• 21:06
  Speaker 1: actually a possibility? Is this something that you know scientists
• 21:09
  Speaker 1: could actually accomplish if they decided it was a good idea.
• 21:12
  Speaker 1: It's interesting there are some scientists who think it's a
• 21:14
  Speaker 1: great idea. One in particular, Jack Horner wrote a book
• 21:18
  Speaker 1: called How to Build a Dinosaur where he was like,
• 21:20
  Speaker 1: this is what needs to be done, and we could
• 21:21
  Speaker 1: do it. And there's other teams who have been working
• 21:23
  Speaker 1: on this who have sort of gone up to the
• 21:25
  Speaker 1: line and then stepped back. There was one team that
• 21:28
  Speaker 1: was working on snouts and produced chicken embryo in an
• 21:32
  Speaker 1: egg that had a snout with teeth, and then they
• 21:35
  Speaker 1: didn't allow the egg to develop because they thought, you know,
• 21:38
  Speaker 1: there's some definite ethical and moral implications with what we're doing,
• 21:42
  Speaker 1: and let's avoid them by just not hatching this more
• 21:46
  Speaker 1: dinosaur like chicken. Are you saying that they thought about
• 21:49
  Speaker 1: the ethics after they had succeeded in creating a mini dinosaur.
• 21:52
  Speaker 1: That seems a tiny bit late in the game. I
• 21:55
  Speaker 1: mean better late than never. I feel like better late
• 21:58
  Speaker 1: than ever for sure. But the new thing of out
• 22:00
  Speaker 1: this process is we're not genetically engineering chickens to be dinosaurs.
• 22:04
  Speaker 1: Were just expressing different genes in their development to make
• 22:06
  Speaker 1: them more dinosaur like. And so if one of these
• 22:09
  Speaker 1: chicken Asaurus is actually hatched, it would have the same DNA,
• 22:13
  Speaker 1: the same genetic code as a chicken, and if it
• 22:16
  Speaker 1: could reproduce with another chicken, which probably would be unlikely,
• 22:20
  Speaker 1: but if it worked, you wouldn't get more chicken a souruss.
• 22:22
  Speaker 1: You just get regular chickens because they hadn't had their
• 22:25
  Speaker 1: development environment altered, so it feels safe. There's no escaping
• 22:30
  Speaker 1: the park and taking over the world angle here, and
• 22:32
  Speaker 1: if they do escape, like you said, there's lots of
• 22:35
  Speaker 1: companies dedicated towards breading and frying these animals for delicious consumption.
• 22:41
  Speaker 1: So I feel like it's it's like plugs, right, Like
• 22:43
  Speaker 1: dogs are wolves that we have bread into being something
• 22:46
  Speaker 1: cuter and more acceptable to us. And pugs are a
• 22:49
  Speaker 1: strong example because they have these short noses that are
• 22:53
  Speaker 1: not great for respiration, Like that's not what the animal
• 22:55
  Speaker 1: would want if it was choosing itself. But we love
• 22:58
  Speaker 1: these animals, we care for them. We give them all
• 23:00
  Speaker 1: the attention and and care they could need so that
• 23:03
  Speaker 1: they're not affected poorly by these snouts. So we do
• 23:06
  Speaker 1: what we can for the animals we love. And I
• 23:08
  Speaker 1: feel like had we created or if we created a
• 23:11
  Speaker 1: chicken dinosaur, it would absolutely be one of the most
• 23:14
  Speaker 1: cared for and celebrated animals in the world and they
• 23:17
  Speaker 1: would have a pretty good life. I'm still stuck in
• 23:19
  Speaker 1: the idea of a dinosaur giving birth to a chicken
• 23:22
  Speaker 1: and the trauma for that poor chicken that has to
• 23:25
  Speaker 1: have a dinosaur mom. Like you know when your parents
• 23:27
  Speaker 1: look different from all the other parents, Like, wow, that's
• 23:29
  Speaker 1: gonna be a difficult chicken childhood there, I mean the
• 23:32
  Speaker 1: ugly duckling. Still that's where it's happy or that No,
• 23:36
  Speaker 1: the ugly duckling. The duckling grows up to be a
• 23:38
  Speaker 1: swan and then like beats up the other ducks. Right,
• 23:41
  Speaker 1: it's a really mean, very tale recall. All right, Well,
• 23:45
  Speaker 1: Danie and I really love your book, Ryan, But one
• 23:47
  Speaker 1: thing that is pretty cool is that it's for a
• 23:50
  Speaker 1: wide range of people. So the book was a big
• 23:52
  Speaker 1: hit in my house, was a big hit in Daniel South,
• 23:54
  Speaker 1: and our kids also got into the book. So we
• 23:57
  Speaker 1: have a couple of questions from Hazel dan his daughter,
• 24:00
  Speaker 1: and a couple of questions from my son. Sure this
• 24:02
  Speaker 1: is great, all right, So here's a question from my daughter, Hazel.
• 24:05
  Speaker 1: If hypothetically a twelve year old wanted to take over
• 24:08
  Speaker 1: the world and didn't have access to a lot of
• 24:10
  Speaker 1: resources other than her dad's particle accelerator, what would you recommend, hypothetically, hypathetically, sympathetically,
• 24:17
  Speaker 1: That is a great question, Hazel I would say that
• 24:20
  Speaker 1: you're in a great position given this access to a
• 24:24
  Speaker 1: particle accelerator. I feel like I'm not really best qualified
• 24:27
  Speaker 1: to tell you what you can use a particle accelerator
• 24:30
  Speaker 1: for in terms of world domination. But with the particle
• 24:34
  Speaker 1: accelerator and a very tredulous father, I think you could
• 24:37
  Speaker 1: trick him into doing stuff. But just just ask him, like,
• 24:41
  Speaker 1: you know, Dad, what should I definitely never use that
• 24:44
  Speaker 1: particle accelerator for because I want to be super safe.
• 24:47
  Speaker 1: And he'll tell you, and then you know, do it,
• 24:50
  Speaker 1: And then he'll say, go ask your mother. If mom
• 24:54
  Speaker 1: says it's okay to make a black hole, then I
• 24:56
  Speaker 1: guess it's fine. I think it's it's great deniability here
• 24:59
  Speaker 1: because you can do Google what not to do with
• 25:01
  Speaker 1: a particle accelerator and just tell the FBI, like what
• 25:04
  Speaker 1: I was trying to be safe. That actually brings me
• 25:07
  Speaker 1: to my son's question. So my son really liked your book.
• 25:10
  Speaker 1: He read it and he wants to know how many
• 25:12
  Speaker 1: times did you use Google to get all the information
• 25:15
  Speaker 1: for the book. But I think it was so impressed
• 25:16
  Speaker 1: by all the information in it. He was like, how
• 25:18
  Speaker 1: do you how do you do you even get all
• 25:20
  Speaker 1: this stuff. Yeah, that's a great question. I think anyone
• 25:24
  Speaker 1: these days uses Google. But it's not like you can
• 25:27
  Speaker 1: just type in what should I put in a book
• 25:30
  Speaker 1: called how to take Over the World? PS, it's an
• 25:33
  Speaker 1: emergency and have it work. So what I what I do?
• 25:37
  Speaker 1: I think? What what all of us do going through
• 25:39
  Speaker 1: the world is we're always keeping our eyes peeled for
• 25:42
  Speaker 1: interesting things and remembering things that surprised us or that
• 25:46
  Speaker 1: we thought were unexpected. And so when you sit down
• 25:49
  Speaker 1: to write, you have all this stuff you remember of, Oh,
• 25:52
  Speaker 1: you know, I think I've read somewhere that plastics aren't
• 25:56
  Speaker 1: eaten by anything alive on the world, and just how
• 25:59
  Speaker 1: they'll has a really long time. And then you google
• 26:02
  Speaker 1: that and you think, oh, you realize, oh, no, there
• 26:04
  Speaker 1: was an animal that was discovered in the early two
• 26:06
  Speaker 1: thousands that does actually or can actually eat plastic, but
• 26:09
  Speaker 1: still most animals don't, so it's it's a really long lasting,
• 26:13
  Speaker 1: non biodegradable product. In certain scenarios, then you say, well,
• 26:17
  Speaker 1: if nothing eats plastic on the ocean floor, then you
• 26:20
  Speaker 1: could use a engraved hunk of plastic and put it
• 26:24
  Speaker 1: in the ocean and it will last ten thousand years.
• 26:26
  Speaker 1: And you know what, if you put that maybe near
• 26:29
  Speaker 1: the marian A Trench, because that's the deepest part of
• 26:31
  Speaker 1: the ocean, so it's naturally interesting, just like Mount Everest
• 26:33
  Speaker 1: is naturally interesting for us, then that might be give
• 26:36
  Speaker 1: it a better chance of being found in that time period.
• 26:39
  Speaker 1: And then you google how fast the maran A trench
• 26:41
  Speaker 1: plate is being subducted, and you realize, oh, it's fifty
• 26:44
  Speaker 1: three millime a year. So you put it like five
• 26:47
  Speaker 1: kilometers away in the right direction, it'll be right where
• 26:49
  Speaker 1: it's at the most interesting point on the planet at
• 26:52
  Speaker 1: the time period we want. And then you've got a
• 26:54
  Speaker 1: scheme for sending a villainous message centuries thousands of years
• 26:59
  Speaker 1: in the future. I think get all starts from just
• 27:01
  Speaker 1: being curious about the world around you and remembering the
• 27:04
  Speaker 1: stuff you find interesting, and then you can put it
• 27:06
  Speaker 1: together in different ways like little villainous lego blocks. That
• 27:09
  Speaker 1: sounds like the answer is Google, but I think he's
• 27:13
  Speaker 1: saying it's how you use Google, right, Like, if you
• 27:16
  Speaker 1: use it in the right way, you can get the
• 27:17
  Speaker 1: interesting places. Every nonfiction book these days is curated Google
• 27:22
  Speaker 1: and Wikipedia. Wikipedia. Actually, it's surprising I wish it were
• 27:26
  Speaker 1: because of me so much easier. There's still lots of
• 27:29
  Speaker 1: information in books that you can't find online, and you
• 27:33
  Speaker 1: can't just search for what you want. I do love
• 27:35
  Speaker 1: that a lot of the older out of copyright books
• 27:37
  Speaker 1: are online, so you can find like these on the
• 27:40
  Speaker 1: chapter immortality, I found all these schemes from the mid
• 27:45
  Speaker 1: fift hundreds onward that were written down these books and
• 27:48
  Speaker 1: published and forgotten, but then someone scanned to put them online.
• 27:50
  Speaker 1: I can read these original ideas of here's how you
• 27:53
  Speaker 1: make this juice that makes you immortal. And you look
• 27:55
  Speaker 1: at the recipe from our modern era and you're like,
• 27:57
  Speaker 1: this is ludicrous. This will at best not kill you.
• 28:02
  Speaker 1: Come close. Well, technically not killing you is extending your life. Yeah.
• 28:07
  Speaker 1: I guess if you continue to not be killed for
• 28:10
  Speaker 1: long enough, then you can live forever. That's the trip,
• 28:13
  Speaker 1: as I just avoid a hoax. He cures and you
• 28:16
  Speaker 1: might live forever. Speaking of cures, my daughter had this
• 28:18
  Speaker 1: moment Hazel realized the power of Google. We're watching this
• 28:22
  Speaker 1: show All Creatures Great and Small and PBS, this wonderful show.
• 28:26
  Speaker 1: But he's trying to save some cow and he's looking
• 28:28
  Speaker 1: through books for an answer. He's like desperately doing research
• 28:31
  Speaker 1: all night long, and Hazel's like, Wow, too bad he
• 28:34
  Speaker 1: doesn't just have Google. And I think she'd like clicked
• 28:37
  Speaker 1: for her the power of being able to search through
• 28:39
  Speaker 1: all these texts simultaneously to find an answer. I want
• 28:42
  Speaker 1: to come back to something you talked about earlier, about
• 28:44
  Speaker 1: sending a message into the future. You know, why do
• 28:46
  Speaker 1: you think this is such a powerful theme in supervillain
• 28:49
  Speaker 1: e Being immortal or not being forgotten? Is it such
• 28:53
  Speaker 1: an important theme? And what are some of the schemes
• 28:55
  Speaker 1: you have in your book for not being forgotten? Well?
• 28:58
  Speaker 1: It ties into ego, right, Like the best villains are
• 29:01
  Speaker 1: always super egotistical. Your your doctor Dunes and lex Luthors
• 29:04
  Speaker 1: are very convinced that they are the best humanity has
• 29:07
  Speaker 1: to offer. But since they are a human, they're going
• 29:11
  Speaker 1: to die one day and that feels unfair to them,
• 29:15
  Speaker 1: and they want either cheat death by becoming immortal, or
• 29:18
  Speaker 1: at least ensure that they're never forgotten and find at
• 29:20
  Speaker 1: least some some flavor of immortality. It's fascinating how often
• 29:24
  Speaker 1: this idea shows up across human cultures, and you look
• 29:26
  Speaker 1: at it just from like first principles, that makes sense, right,
• 29:29
  Speaker 1: like humans begin as an egg and sperm cell, and
• 29:35
  Speaker 1: then from those two pieces we build up an entire
• 29:38
  Speaker 1: baby in nine months, which is incredible. It's it's it's
• 29:42
  Speaker 1: a magic trick. And then somehow just maintaining that body
• 29:47
  Speaker 1: is what kills us. We can build a human being
• 29:50
  Speaker 1: from two cells and nine months, and then just keeping
• 29:53
  Speaker 1: it around is fatal. That feels like there's something wrong there,
• 29:57
  Speaker 1: like there must be some mistake and we can fix this.
• 29:59
  Speaker 1: So I get the implication for why you'd want to
• 30:02
  Speaker 1: be immortal, and when that fails, I absolutely understand this
• 30:04
  Speaker 1: idea of well, well, let's at least make sure people
• 30:07
  Speaker 1: always remember me. I want to send a message of
• 30:09
  Speaker 1: the futures that they know I was here, and I
• 30:11
  Speaker 1: feel like that's also very very common in humans, this idea.
• 30:14
  Speaker 1: But we'll build something so that people knew we were here.
• 30:16
  Speaker 1: And in the book, I look at different time ranges,
• 30:19
  Speaker 1: so one year, ten year, a hundred year, a thousand year,
• 30:22
  Speaker 1: and as we go for larger and larger periods of time,
• 30:26
  Speaker 1: we start getting greater and greater problems. Right, and we
• 30:29
  Speaker 1: looking at uh, ten thousand years into the future. It's
• 30:32
  Speaker 1: not impossible to get an object to survive that long.
• 30:35
  Speaker 1: But the fact is that no human language has survived
• 30:40
  Speaker 1: that long, And so you start getting into well, maybe
• 30:43
  Speaker 1: we can use a subset of words that we believe
• 30:47
  Speaker 1: evolved more slowly than other words, so very common things
• 30:51
  Speaker 1: like like face and numbers and letters. But even that
• 30:54
  Speaker 1: doesn't get you far enough, and you're like, well, maybe
• 30:56
  Speaker 1: we can use symbols and communicate with the universe a
• 31:00
  Speaker 1: language of pictures. But comics. Yeah, But the problem with
• 31:03
  Speaker 1: comics is that even they're culturally interpreted, like a skull
• 31:06
  Speaker 1: and crossbones we would see as being a symbol of death,
• 31:10
  Speaker 1: or maybe it's piracy, or to a medieval alchemist, it's
• 31:13
  Speaker 1: the bones of Adam that promised eternal resurrection, and comics
• 31:17
  Speaker 1: are reading them left to right or right to left,
• 31:19
  Speaker 1: like we we don't know the culture that these symbols
• 31:22
  Speaker 1: will be interpreted in, so we can't. Actually, they're not
• 31:26
  Speaker 1: nearly as reliable as as we'd like. We need like
• 31:28
  Speaker 1: an ikea manual for how to read the comics. People
• 31:31
  Speaker 1: have tried it. People have because that's such a tantalizing idea, right,
• 31:34
  Speaker 1: if we can come up with a symbol, a set
• 31:36
  Speaker 1: of symbols that any human can look at and understand.
• 31:40
  Speaker 1: Then we've got a universal language, and especially in the seventies,
• 31:43
  Speaker 1: see a lot of efforts to try to build this
• 31:45
  Speaker 1: universal pictorial language. And as soon as you get to
• 31:48
  Speaker 1: something even a little bit complicated, you start making these
• 31:51
  Speaker 1: assumptions that a circle is good and a square is bad,
• 31:57
  Speaker 1: or green means go and red means stop, and all
• 31:59
  Speaker 1: these things that you can't actually bake in. So it
• 32:02
  Speaker 1: starts to get very very challenging. But when you're looking
• 32:05
  Speaker 1: at say a hundred thousand years or even a million
• 32:07
  Speaker 1: years in the future, at that point, all you can
• 32:10
  Speaker 1: do is leave the Earth and be like, you know what,
• 32:13
  Speaker 1: We're gonna put a satellite in orbit, like NASA did
• 32:16
  Speaker 1: with Legios, which is a million dollar satellite nineteen and
• 32:19
  Speaker 1: the polar orbit that's expected to last about a million
• 32:22
  Speaker 1: years before the grades. And so you could launch a
• 32:25
  Speaker 1: very similar satellite with your message on it, and maybe
• 32:29
  Speaker 1: it won't be understood, but the fact that it made
• 32:31
  Speaker 1: it a million years in the future, that's remarkable on
• 32:35
  Speaker 1: its own. Are you saying that NASA launched a satellite
• 32:38
  Speaker 1: just to send a message to the future, that's the
• 32:40
  Speaker 1: primary purpose of this satellite, or it's an auxiliary purpose.
• 32:43
  Speaker 1: It's an auxiliary revercose I wishly done it on purpose.
• 32:45
  Speaker 1: So this satellite was used to initially measure continental drift.
• 32:49
  Speaker 1: It's basically imagine a giant golf ball and if you
• 32:51
  Speaker 1: fire a laser at this sallit it reflects it back
• 32:54
  Speaker 1: to you and you can use that to measure distance
• 32:57
  Speaker 1: very accurately, which you can then use to measure the
• 32:59
  Speaker 1: very light movements of the continents. And so it was
• 33:02
  Speaker 1: used to sort of nail down this newer theory of
• 33:05
  Speaker 1: continental drift naturally get measurements for it, and it worked.
• 33:08
  Speaker 1: And it was only when they were launching it, well
• 33:11
  Speaker 1: not just we're launching, but as they're launching it, they realized,
• 33:13
  Speaker 1: you know, if this stays up for this long, this
• 33:15
  Speaker 1: is a chance to talk to life on Earth millions
• 33:19
  Speaker 1: of years in the future if it's understood. And so
• 33:22
  Speaker 1: what they did trying to figure out this problem of language,
• 33:25
  Speaker 1: They did the numbers one to ten in binary to
• 33:28
  Speaker 1: show that we knew what numbers were, and then there
• 33:30
  Speaker 1: were three pictures of what Earth looked like around eight
• 33:34
  Speaker 1: million years ago we think from continent drift, what it
• 33:37
  Speaker 1: looked like when it was launched and then what it
• 33:39
  Speaker 1: might look like around eight million years in the future.
• 33:41
  Speaker 1: And that was basically a little more than a guest
• 33:43
  Speaker 1: because we hadn't yet precisely measured how the continents were moving.
• 33:47
  Speaker 1: But it at least says I can give you some
• 33:49
  Speaker 1: idea of this is about when this came from, and
• 33:53
  Speaker 1: this is about what we were trying to do if
• 33:55
  Speaker 1: you know what the Earth looks like. But that's a
• 33:57
  Speaker 1: pretty big if, right, if the Earth even looks like
• 33:59
  Speaker 1: what we think will look like. So you don't have
• 34:03
  Speaker 1: anything guaranteed, But I think the fact that it's possible
• 34:06
  Speaker 1: to try and to maybe succeed is absolutely wild, right.
• 34:11
  Speaker 1: I think if humans look at that thing in a
• 34:13
  Speaker 1: million years, there would be a big group of people
• 34:15
  Speaker 1: who think it's a fake. It must be a hoax.
• 34:17
  Speaker 1: There's no way NASA actually did that a million years ago.
• 34:21
  Speaker 1: Well there's the for a hundred million years. What I
• 34:23
  Speaker 1: suggest is based on this satellite, the Echo Star sixteen,
• 34:28
  Speaker 1: which there's a type of orbit called the graveyard orbit.
• 34:32
  Speaker 1: So if you're in geosynchronous orbit, it's really useful for
• 34:34
  Speaker 1: satellites because you're always in the same place in the sky.
• 34:37
  Speaker 1: But when the satellites exceed they're useful lifetime. They're pushed
• 34:41
  Speaker 1: up about three kilometers higher to what's called the graveyard orbit,
• 34:45
  Speaker 1: where they just orbit in this graveyard indefinitely and on
• 34:51
  Speaker 1: this Echo Star sixteen satellite. This artist, Trevor Peglin, talked
• 34:55
  Speaker 1: them into letting him put on a silicon disc that
• 34:58
  Speaker 1: had a hundred different pictures of Earth, portraits of humanity,
• 35:01
  Speaker 1: he called it. And we're all familiar with the Voyager Record,
• 35:05
  Speaker 1: which had these images of humans and humanity shows by NASA,
• 35:08
  Speaker 1: and they were all very It was like Earth on
• 35:10
  Speaker 1: a good day, right. These images we put in our
• 35:12
  Speaker 1: dating profile if we were a planet or a species
• 35:15
  Speaker 1: looking to meet other species. But what Trevor chose were
• 35:19
  Speaker 1: I thought very interesting because he just chose images that
• 35:23
  Speaker 1: showed all these different aspects of Earth. There was a
• 35:25
  Speaker 1: screenshot of the text adventure game Zorc. There was what
• 35:29
  Speaker 1: you might expect, like pictures of beautiful buildings and stuff,
• 35:32
  Speaker 1: but also here's a picture of a factory farm. Here's
• 35:35
  Speaker 1: a picture of a predator drone taken from the ground
• 35:38
  Speaker 1: in Iran. Here's pictures of children who were born with
• 35:43
  Speaker 1: deformations caused by Agent Orange, like stuff that we wouldn't
• 35:46
  Speaker 1: normally want to. Remember, he also put on this satellite
• 35:49
  Speaker 1: where it might last a hundred million years or more.
• 35:52
  Speaker 1: And I actually got to speak to him, and I
• 35:55
  Speaker 1: was saying, well, what do you think this means? And
• 35:57
  Speaker 1: he was saying, Look, there's all these forces on Earth
• 36:00
  Speaker 1: that we can't control, that are beyond us, that no
• 36:03
  Speaker 1: one human can can influence. But that doesn't mean you
• 36:07
  Speaker 1: don't have to try or don't have to participate. And
• 36:11
  Speaker 1: he recognized that if these were ever found, which is
• 36:14
  Speaker 1: not super likely, it's even less likely that they'd be understood.
• 36:19
  Speaker 1: But just because it wasn't likely didn't mean he couldn't
• 36:23
  Speaker 1: stop himself from trying. And he wanted to put art
• 36:26
  Speaker 1: into orbit where it might be seen a hundred million
• 36:28
  Speaker 1: years from now. And I think that is part of
• 36:31
  Speaker 1: the beauty of it too. Like as much as as
• 36:33
  Speaker 1: his project or the Voice your Record is us trying
• 36:36
  Speaker 1: to speak to the future, trying to speak to distant
• 36:40
  Speaker 1: aliens or anything, it's also us speaking to ourselves, right.
• 36:43
  Speaker 1: It's humans speaking to humanity and saying, some of what
• 36:46
  Speaker 1: we've done here might survive, some of it might outlast
• 36:51
  Speaker 1: all of us. And I think that is really comforting
• 36:55
  Speaker 1: in a way. It's inspiring comforting. It makes me feel like,
• 36:58
  Speaker 1: no matter what, they're still this voyager record, there's still
• 37:03
  Speaker 1: these portraits of humanity on the Echo starsis team satellite
• 37:05
  Speaker 1: that will be there, probably long after all of us
• 37:09
  Speaker 1: are gone and at least have something to say about
• 37:12
  Speaker 1: who we were and what we were doing. Yeah, and
• 37:13
  Speaker 1: I think one of my favorite parts of your book
• 37:15
  Speaker 1: are these questions that really do touch everybody. I mean,
• 37:18
  Speaker 1: not everybody necessarily wants to be a geo engineer, but
• 37:21
  Speaker 1: everybody thinks about death and mortality and whether they'll be remembered.
• 37:25
  Speaker 1: And so one of the things you talk about in
• 37:27
  Speaker 1: the book is how to be remembered, how to leave
• 37:29
  Speaker 1: a you know, a statue of yourself or a message
• 37:32
  Speaker 1: that might be remembered. But you actually talk about also
• 37:35
  Speaker 1: literally curing aging. There's this quote where you when you
• 37:38
  Speaker 1: talk about a scientist who says that they can cure
• 37:41
  Speaker 1: aging in lab mice in ten years and in humans
• 37:44
  Speaker 1: within just a decade or so, more tell us a
• 37:46
  Speaker 1: little bit about the trajectory. There are we on the
• 37:49
  Speaker 1: verge of curing aging? Haven't they been saying that for
• 37:52
  Speaker 1: the last thirty years? There are absolutely people who will
• 37:55
  Speaker 1: tell you that the first immortal human it's already born,
• 37:58
  Speaker 1: already walking alive, and just doesn't walk around doesn't know
• 38:01
  Speaker 1: it yet. I in the book and in real life
• 38:03
  Speaker 1: take a more skeptical approach to that. Usually. I feel
• 38:07
  Speaker 1: like these these shots of immortality, things like cryonics or
• 38:10
  Speaker 1: uploading your brain to a computer, as soon as you
• 38:13
  Speaker 1: look at them in any sort of detail, they kind
• 38:15
  Speaker 1: of really fall apart. Chronics, especially where it's this idea
• 38:18
  Speaker 1: that if you freeze yourself and keep your body frozen,
• 38:22
  Speaker 1: you'll be thought out and rejuvenated in the future. And
• 38:25
  Speaker 1: it sounds great until you realize that, Okay, well you
• 38:28
  Speaker 1: have to not only cure whatever disease you were dying from,
• 38:32
  Speaker 1: but also cure it if it's advanced so much that
• 38:34
  Speaker 1: it's literally already killed you, And you have to keep
• 38:38
  Speaker 1: this body frozen for so long, And it feels like like,
• 38:40
  Speaker 1: is there anything we can point to that says this
• 38:43
  Speaker 1: is possible? And the closest example I could find was
• 38:46
  Speaker 1: this practice of chantry in medieval times, where when you died,
• 38:50
  Speaker 1: if you're rich, you'd pay people to sing for your
• 38:51
  Speaker 1: immortal soul to get you into heaven and This evolved
• 38:55
  Speaker 1: into this thing called perpetual chantry, where you'd give the
• 38:58
  Speaker 1: church land and they would charge rent, and that rent
• 39:01
  Speaker 1: on the land would pay for someone to sing for
• 39:02
  Speaker 1: your immortal soul forever, so you'd be definitely getting into heaven.
• 39:07
  Speaker 1: And this is are the same scheme of cryonics, where
• 39:10
  Speaker 1: you make the living do something to keep the dead around,
• 39:14
  Speaker 1: and it has advantage over cryonics that all you had
• 39:18
  Speaker 1: to do was sing and pray. And it's still lasted
• 39:21
  Speaker 1: less than four years until a king was like, you
• 39:23
  Speaker 1: know what, I'm taking this land. It's mine now this
• 39:26
  Speaker 1: is over. So I don't I don't see it very likely,
• 39:29
  Speaker 1: but that the quote you were mentioning was from Dr
• 39:31
  Speaker 1: Aubrey de Gray, who believes that there are treatments just
• 39:34
  Speaker 1: around the corner that could make effectively immortal humans. And
• 39:39
  Speaker 1: when I say that, I mean not they won't die,
• 39:41
  Speaker 1: but just they won't die from what we normally call
• 39:44
  Speaker 1: old age. They accidents might do them in and a
• 39:47
  Speaker 1: long enough timeline that is probably true. We're driving around cars,
• 39:51
  Speaker 1: I gotta hit someone. But he believes that it might
• 39:55
  Speaker 1: be possible to cure aging. Not by figuring out what
• 40:00
  Speaker 1: aging is. You don't really know what it is, but
• 40:02
  Speaker 1: just by figure out how to address the symptoms of it.
• 40:04
  Speaker 1: So if there's a problem with tissues becoming inflexible, well
• 40:08
  Speaker 1: let's find a way to make them flexible. If there's
• 40:10
  Speaker 1: a problem with cancer killing people, well then let's solve
• 40:14
  Speaker 1: this problem with cancer. And the way he suggests is basically,
• 40:18
  Speaker 1: cancer happens when cells divide without limit. They just keep dividing,
• 40:23
  Speaker 1: and they can do that because stem cells have this
• 40:28
  Speaker 1: thing called telomerase, which allows telomeres in the cell to
• 40:31
  Speaker 1: reproduce infinitely. So telomeres are repetitive parts at the end
• 40:36
  Speaker 1: of chromosomes, end of DNA that's shortened every time a
• 40:39
  Speaker 1: cell divides, and so there's a limit on how many
• 40:43
  Speaker 1: times a cell can divide. But if you have, like
• 40:45
  Speaker 1: stem cells, do telomerase, then you can do this indefinitely.
• 40:48
  Speaker 1: So he proposes, let's remove the ability to produce telomerase
• 40:53
  Speaker 1: from every cell in the body, which effectively, let's sterilize
• 40:57
  Speaker 1: every cell so it can no longer reproduce or only
• 40:59
  Speaker 1: produce a finite number of times, and then it we'll
• 41:02
  Speaker 1: have to die. And then to prevent this from being fatal,
• 41:05
  Speaker 1: he suggests we can genetically engineer special stem cells with
• 41:09
  Speaker 1: really long telomeres so they can't produce telomeras, but they
• 41:13
  Speaker 1: can divide enough to last, say ten years, and then
• 41:16
  Speaker 1: every ten years you get a new injection. And this
• 41:20
  Speaker 1: is wild, right, Like this is effectively saying, I will
• 41:24
  Speaker 1: kill my body's ability to reproduce at the cellular level,
• 41:28
  Speaker 1: but get topped up with cellular gasoline every couple of
• 41:31
  Speaker 1: years to keep myself alive. And you know, in theory,
• 41:36
  Speaker 1: maybe it could work. In practice. There's an awful lot
• 41:39
  Speaker 1: of very complicated things that we've just glossed over there
• 41:43
  Speaker 1: in an effort to, at the end of the day,
• 41:44
  Speaker 1: just make an individual live forever. And I find it
• 41:49
  Speaker 1: not a very convincing argument that an individual should live forever.
• 41:55
  Speaker 1: I think there's lots of individuals you look at your
• 41:57
  Speaker 1: Genghis Khan's, your Hitler's, where it's a bad thing if
• 42:01
  Speaker 1: they would live forever. And the fact that we all
• 42:03
  Speaker 1: do die has some really positive things for society. And
• 42:06
  Speaker 1: it's what encourages billionaires to be philanthropic, to to give
• 42:09
  Speaker 1: money away through the end of their lives and try
• 42:10
  Speaker 1: to get some sort of better angle for posterity. Because
• 42:14
  Speaker 1: I can't take it with them, but you can't take
• 42:17
  Speaker 1: it with you. Doesn't mean a lot if you never
• 42:18
  Speaker 1: have to go. Right. So I've been writing this book,
• 42:21
  Speaker 1: I've kind of come down surprisingly in favor of death,
• 42:25
  Speaker 1: and now a person who thinks death is good for
• 42:28
  Speaker 1: society and civilization as a whole. You're starting to sound
• 42:30
  Speaker 1: like a super villain, right, this is the beginning, Like
• 42:32
  Speaker 1: this is this whole thing has been a villainous monologue
• 42:34
  Speaker 1: where I started saying death is good and we should
• 42:37
  Speaker 1: embrace it. You sound like the speech by Thanos in
• 42:40
  Speaker 1: the Avengers movie. He's going to be a guest next
• 42:42
  Speaker 1: week on the podcast. So that was a very long
• 42:45
  Speaker 1: answer to a very simple question. But I think it's
• 42:48
  Speaker 1: so it's such a fascinating topic and it gets into
• 42:50
  Speaker 1: these deeper questions of like what life is and can
• 42:56
  Speaker 1: death have an upside? Right? Like I don't want to die.
• 42:58
  Speaker 1: I don't want anyone I love to die. But at
• 43:00
  Speaker 1: a larger level, I get it right, like I see
• 43:03
  Speaker 1: the benefits death gives to society and to our species
• 43:06
  Speaker 1: as a whole will be fascinating. Also, if if you
• 43:08
  Speaker 1: then you had an option, if some people could say,
• 43:11
  Speaker 1: you know what, I just want to live eighty years
• 43:12
  Speaker 1: or a a hundred years and I'm done, and other people
• 43:14
  Speaker 1: are like, no, I'm gonna do three hundred, 'm gonna
• 43:16
  Speaker 1: do ten thousand, or I'm just gonna go forever. It
• 43:19
  Speaker 1: really make for a really fascinating sort of segregated or
• 43:22
  Speaker 1: stratified society if that happened. But my real question is,
• 43:25
  Speaker 1: in this scenario, is this one doctor the soul source
• 43:28
  Speaker 1: for this sort of cellular gasoline and then eventually becomes
• 43:31
  Speaker 1: a gazillionaire because everybody's reliant on his one pipeline of regeneration. Yeah,
• 43:37
  Speaker 1: And my my pitch for this is you do it yourself,
• 43:41
  Speaker 1: and you split it up amongst different scientists of workers
• 43:44
  Speaker 1: so that no one can quite put together all the pieces,
• 43:46
  Speaker 1: and then you're the only one who does it, so
• 43:50
  Speaker 1: you can become rich if you want. But I would
• 43:52
  Speaker 1: encourage you more just to use this time you have
• 43:55
  Speaker 1: this now effectively unlimited time to do whatever you want
• 43:58
  Speaker 1: to do, things that you can accomp should one human lifetime.
• 44:01
  Speaker 1: Like I know, like I love linguistics, but I can't
• 44:04
  Speaker 1: bet on more than a hundred years if that on
• 44:06
  Speaker 1: this world, And there's more linguistics than I could ever
• 44:09
  Speaker 1: hope to learn in three hundred years, like you could
• 44:12
  Speaker 1: learn something beyond what any human can learn today. And
• 44:16
  Speaker 1: I think that's the appealing part of of striving towards
• 44:19
  Speaker 1: immortality for me, is to exceed these limits on what
• 44:23
  Speaker 1: we can do as one person. But then I see
• 44:25
  Speaker 1: the downsides of this ludicrous you know, inequality. Well, that's
• 44:30
  Speaker 1: kind of an interesting angle of this idea, like maybe
• 44:32
  Speaker 1: what if we've run out of space in your brain?
• 44:35
  Speaker 1: Like how many memories can your brain hold? Yeah, I
• 44:37
  Speaker 1: think that's the common thing we forget when we we
• 44:39
  Speaker 1: fantasize what immortality is, that the brain is not infinite.
• 44:43
  Speaker 1: And I'm sure if I lived five hundred years, I
• 44:47
  Speaker 1: would remember the last twenty pretty good. I wouldn't better
• 44:50
  Speaker 1: remember in the first thirty with any number of detail.
• 44:53
  Speaker 1: This is gonna have a sidebar to that. But I
• 44:54
  Speaker 1: was really fascinated by the idea of childhood amnesia, where
• 44:57
  Speaker 1: we don't remember our first couple of years of life.
• 45:00
  Speaker 1: And I was wondering if this was something that was
• 45:02
  Speaker 1: unique to humans or other animals. And I talked to
• 45:05
  Speaker 1: a neuroscientist friend of mine, and I was like, here's
• 45:09
  Speaker 1: my theory. Tell me where I'm wrong. Humans are born
• 45:11
  Speaker 1: effectively premature, where we need a lot of care for
• 45:14
  Speaker 1: several years of our lives. But horses are born and
• 45:16
  Speaker 1: they're running around within the hour like they're they're born
• 45:19
  Speaker 1: and they're ready to go. So can a horse remember
• 45:23
  Speaker 1: being born? An adult horse remember being born? And he,
• 45:27
  Speaker 1: to his credit, took my question seriously and was like, well,
• 45:30
  Speaker 1: what seems to happen, putting future science terms for you,
• 45:34
  Speaker 1: is that when we're young, we address our memories in
• 45:37
  Speaker 1: a certain way, and as we get older, we change
• 45:38
  Speaker 1: the addressing scheme, so we lose access to those memories.
• 45:41
  Speaker 1: So I don't think an adult horse remembers being born,
• 45:45
  Speaker 1: And thank you for the question, And also, would you
• 45:47
  Speaker 1: want to remember being born? It doesn't sound like a
• 45:49
  Speaker 1: very pleasant experience. That sounds painful, But I think I
• 45:52
  Speaker 1: think all this to say is that our brains are finite,
• 45:55
  Speaker 1: and when we fantasize about living forever, we forget that
• 45:58
  Speaker 1: we can't remember everything. And if you live for every
• 46:02
  Speaker 1: you might just remember effectively one human lifetime on a
• 46:05
  Speaker 1: sliding scale through time. But you're talk in your book
• 46:07
  Speaker 1: also about the possibility of uploading your mind into the simulation,
• 46:11
  Speaker 1: and it makes me wonder if there's sort of a
• 46:12
  Speaker 1: hybrid there. You know, I already have some extension of
• 46:15
  Speaker 1: my brain on this device I carry around because I
• 46:18
  Speaker 1: don't remember any telephone numbers or email addresses or stuff
• 46:21
  Speaker 1: like that. Isn't there possibility where we store these memories
• 46:24
  Speaker 1: somewhere on the cloud, and then when you want to
• 46:26
  Speaker 1: remember your thirteenth birthday, you just have to, like, you know,
• 46:29
  Speaker 1: go and fetch it and download it back into your brain,
• 46:31
  Speaker 1: and then you can relieve the trauma. I mean, you're
• 46:33
  Speaker 1: describing a video clip, I think exactly. So we are
• 46:40
  Speaker 1: living in the future right now. You're you just invent YouTube.
• 46:47
  Speaker 1: That's right, I want my cut, guys, where's my cut
• 46:49
  Speaker 1: of YouTube? I just invented it. We can externalize things
• 46:52
  Speaker 1: that happened with some sort of motion picture. Deep thoughts
• 46:56
  Speaker 1: by Daniel Wetson. All right, I got lots more questions
• 46:59
  Speaker 1: for Ryan, but first let's take another break. Okay, we're
• 47:14
  Speaker 1: back and we're talking to the author of the book
• 47:16
  Speaker 1: How to take Over the World, Ryan North, who has
• 47:19
  Speaker 1: not yet successfully taken over the world, but instead decided
• 47:22
  Speaker 1: to write a book about it. How do you know
• 47:25
  Speaker 1: he's not the one pulling all the strings behind the currents.
• 47:28
  Speaker 1: Let's just say you'll all be surprised in a couple
• 47:30
  Speaker 1: of months. I guess you would be a lot busier
• 47:33
  Speaker 1: and have more important things to do than to be
• 47:35
  Speaker 1: on our podcast. Well, that's my question instead of joking
• 47:38
  Speaker 1: the aside. Having thought about all of these schemes about
• 47:41
  Speaker 1: how to potentially take over the world, what do you
• 47:43
  Speaker 1: think the prospects are that somebody in the future might
• 47:45
  Speaker 1: actually do it? You know, it's been the goal of
• 47:48
  Speaker 1: real life villains Alexander the Great and Napoleon Hitler for
• 47:53
  Speaker 1: a long time, but nobody's really pulled it off, actually
• 47:55
  Speaker 1: taken over the entire world. Do you think it's something
• 47:57
  Speaker 1: that somebody in the future might be able to accomplish.
• 48:00
  Speaker 1: I don't. The reason for that is that, in one sense,
• 48:04
  Speaker 1: it's it's kind of self defeating because once you've taken
• 48:07
  Speaker 1: over the world, the only thing left to do is
• 48:08
  Speaker 1: to lose the world, right, like, there's no political human
• 48:11
  Speaker 1: political system that lasts indefinitely. And the other reason is
• 48:16
  Speaker 1: that it's a it's an appealing goal to a certain
• 48:20
  Speaker 1: type of person, like what if I controlled everything? But
• 48:24
  Speaker 1: the reality is that the benefits are very limited. Right,
• 48:28
  Speaker 1: Like you get to Boston people around, I guess, but
• 48:31
  Speaker 1: there's no way you can effectively boss around every person
• 48:33
  Speaker 1: on earth. There's always resistance, there's always people who want
• 48:37
  Speaker 1: to do something else and what you want them to do.
• 48:40
  Speaker 1: So if anyone came up to me and sincerely said, Ryan,
• 48:43
  Speaker 1: I want to take over the world, I think my
• 48:46
  Speaker 1: first instinct would be to not take them seriously, to laugh,
• 48:49
  Speaker 1: because I don't think they would have thought about it
• 48:51
  Speaker 1: in enough depth to be a credible threat. You're saying
• 48:53
  Speaker 1: it's not a job anyone would want. Yeah, I don't
• 48:55
  Speaker 1: think it's a job you want. I think if you
• 48:57
  Speaker 1: think about it for a minute, to be like, you
• 48:58
  Speaker 1: know what, that sounds like a lot of work for
• 49:01
  Speaker 1: very little benefit, a lot of destruction for very little benefit.
• 49:05
  Speaker 1: Maybe I won't. That's how I feel about becoming department chair, Like,
• 49:08
  Speaker 1: why does anybody want that job? Much much smaller scale? Yeah,
• 49:12
  Speaker 1: it looks good on a resume, but surely you want
• 49:14
  Speaker 1: to do something else with your time. Well, Brian, what
• 49:17
  Speaker 1: were some of the ideas that did not make it
• 49:19
  Speaker 1: into the book about How to take Over the World?
• 49:21
  Speaker 1: There was one that I really liked. Um So the
• 49:25
  Speaker 1: idea was let's have a chapter on throwing your enemies
• 49:29
  Speaker 1: into the Sun, and it's a great idea. The issue
• 49:32
  Speaker 1: is that it's not actually that hard surprisingly, so that
• 49:36
  Speaker 1: the trick with it is that you want to throw
• 49:38
  Speaker 1: your enemy to the Sun, you need a rocket, obviously,
• 49:41
  Speaker 1: but if you just launch them away from Earth. The
• 49:43
  Speaker 1: challenges that the Earth is rotating around the Sun very
• 49:45
  Speaker 1: quickly and you've got all that momentum, and so if
• 49:47
  Speaker 1: you launch someone off the Earth, they're going to also
• 49:49
  Speaker 1: go into orbit around the Sun. You want to actually
• 49:51
  Speaker 1: be thrown into the Sun. You need to slow them
• 49:54
  Speaker 1: down an awful lot to get close to the Sun
• 49:56
  Speaker 1: and not just orbit around it. And so you can
• 49:59
  Speaker 1: look at NASA's solar probe, the Parker Solar Probe that
• 50:03
  Speaker 1: was in the news recently for doing that. It did
• 50:05
  Speaker 1: orbital fly bys to slow it down off of Venus
• 50:08
  Speaker 1: and eventually it's close enough now that they can enter
• 50:10
  Speaker 1: the outer outer layer of the Sun. So you could
• 50:12
  Speaker 1: use that sort of process, do some orbital fly bys
• 50:16
  Speaker 1: to slow down this I guess corpse of your enemy.
• 50:18
  Speaker 1: You've thrown into space enough to actually impact and be
• 50:22
  Speaker 1: burned up in the Sun. But the challenge there as
• 50:24
  Speaker 1: an author is that this is not super complicated. Surprisingly,
• 50:27
  Speaker 1: this is just the costs are well known, the orbital
• 50:29
  Speaker 1: mechanics are well known. It's just a better of something
• 50:32
  Speaker 1: someone willing to spend the millions of dollars it takes
• 50:35
  Speaker 1: to do this just to fire someone who's already dead,
• 50:38
  Speaker 1: because it's not a survivable trip into the sun. So
• 50:41
  Speaker 1: it sort of reaches this level of impractical but still
• 50:44
  Speaker 1: really really appealing. So it's not in the book, But
• 50:47
  Speaker 1: if anyone wants to spend a couple million on launching
• 50:51
  Speaker 1: their enemies corpses in the sun, give me a call.
• 50:54
  Speaker 1: I can send you over the spreadsheets. It's in the appendix. Well,
• 51:00
  Speaker 1: it sounds like something you might want to do just
• 51:02
  Speaker 1: to send a message, you know, like if you are
• 51:04
  Speaker 1: ruling the world, you want people to take you seriously
• 51:06
  Speaker 1: and not you know, rebel against. Yeah, but the other
• 51:09
  Speaker 1: downside it takes a long time because you're having to
• 51:11
  Speaker 1: fly out. The initial plan for Parker was to fly
• 51:13
  Speaker 1: out to Saturn, and that modified one was to use
• 51:15
  Speaker 1: a couple of flybys of Venus. But this still takes
• 51:18
  Speaker 1: years and years and years, and it's not super scary
• 51:20
  Speaker 1: to send a message to be like, if you cross me,
• 51:23
  Speaker 1: well you just wait five years, because when five years
• 51:27
  Speaker 1: were over, your dead body will be cremated in the sun.
• 51:32
  Speaker 1: Maybe depends on what do you do to them on
• 51:34
  Speaker 1: the on the way, They're like, maybe, I don't know.
• 51:37
  Speaker 1: You put on some bad television on the on the
• 51:39
  Speaker 1: rocket ship to the side. So you're assuming we're keeping
• 51:41
  Speaker 1: them alive, and it's much more expensive to keep them
• 51:43
  Speaker 1: alive for that journey. I was assuming we just you know,
• 51:45
  Speaker 1: kill them on Earth, or to stick them in the
• 51:47
  Speaker 1: in the shuttle in alive and then launch them into
• 51:50
  Speaker 1: space and they'll die when they get into the cold
• 51:51
  Speaker 1: vacuum space. But keeping them alive for five years, yeah,
• 51:55
  Speaker 1: then it's worse. But then I feel like you're in
• 51:57
  Speaker 1: like Geneva Convention torture violation territory. I like that you
• 52:02
  Speaker 1: think so carefully about the budget for each of these schemes.
• 52:05
  Speaker 1: You know, that's important because it's like a it's like
• 52:07
  Speaker 1: a shopping list, you know, think about how much money
• 52:09
  Speaker 1: you have before you want to take over the world.
• 52:11
  Speaker 1: I feel like the fun of it, the fun of
• 52:13
  Speaker 1: going through these thought experiments is the logistics, right, like
• 52:16
  Speaker 1: with how to invent everything? The premise was you've got
• 52:19
  Speaker 1: a time machine that's broken, which is clearly fictional, but
• 52:22
  Speaker 1: let's use that to explore the science. But I also
• 52:24
  Speaker 1: wanted to be like legitimately what it says in the cover.
• 52:27
  Speaker 1: I wanted to be a real book that could actually
• 52:29
  Speaker 1: work if you were trapped in the past. And so
• 52:31
  Speaker 1: with this book, I wanted to be like, let's have
• 52:33
  Speaker 1: legitimate schemes here. Yes, they're going to cost billions and
• 52:37
  Speaker 1: billions of dollars, but well, most people use them to
• 52:40
  Speaker 1: learn about science and technology and history and the world
• 52:42
  Speaker 1: around us. Let's make it so that these are viable,
• 52:46
  Speaker 1: credible schemes, Like, let's let's have the fun of actually
• 52:49
  Speaker 1: pricing things out and thinking about logistics and if we
• 52:52
  Speaker 1: do want to do this, what does it cost, what
• 52:53
  Speaker 1: do we need? How is this gonna blow up at
• 52:55
  Speaker 1: our faces? That sort of thing. So it's I think
• 52:58
  Speaker 1: it's fun. Maybe you should write a book had to
• 53:00
  Speaker 1: be a Supervillains Accountant. It's a less catchy title. Maybe
• 53:04
  Speaker 1: we can use it for the paperback. That's like selling
• 53:06
  Speaker 1: pick access to the gold miners. Well, in terms of
• 53:09
  Speaker 1: credible schemes, I was expecting to see something about like
• 53:12
  Speaker 1: leading an AI revolution because I feel like AI is
• 53:15
  Speaker 1: gonna take over the world anyway. Is there some way
• 53:18
  Speaker 1: you can think of to like lead that charge, you know,
• 53:21
  Speaker 1: be the first conspirator, the first collaborator to join the
• 53:24
  Speaker 1: other side and uh and use the power of AI
• 53:26
  Speaker 1: to take over the world. Why did you reject that
• 53:29
  Speaker 1: kind of idea? I felt like it's it's hard to
• 53:31
  Speaker 1: get into specifics with something like AI because the ais
• 53:35
  Speaker 1: we have now are nowhere close to that um at all.
• 53:39
  Speaker 1: And I sort of touched on that in the mind
• 53:41
  Speaker 1: uploading section where the the issue encounter if you're gonna
• 53:45
  Speaker 1: upload your mind to a computer is well, it basically
• 53:48
  Speaker 1: boils down to who cares, right, Like, if I've uploaded
• 53:51
  Speaker 1: my brain to a computer, I can't prove that it's
• 53:53
  Speaker 1: me there. There's no way to prove that I'm conscious.
• 53:56
  Speaker 1: And we've all had, you know, computer games, so we've
• 54:01
  Speaker 1: loved and played for hours and hours and then forgotten
• 54:04
  Speaker 1: about and then later deleted or even just not to
• 54:06
  Speaker 1: be just left them on the hard dave and throughout
• 54:08
  Speaker 1: the computer. And I think the same sort of thing
• 54:11
  Speaker 1: would happen if you had a computer that had Ryan
• 54:14
  Speaker 1: dot e x C on it. You'd probably have fun
• 54:16
  Speaker 1: with it for a while, and then you might mess
• 54:18
  Speaker 1: with me for a while or try to get me
• 54:20
  Speaker 1: mad or try to probuke a reaction. I think that's
• 54:22
  Speaker 1: called torture. And then eventually you get bored with Ryan
• 54:25
  Speaker 1: dot e x C and deleted or whatever. But you're
• 54:29
  Speaker 1: not going to keep it running for four years. Like,
• 54:31
  Speaker 1: I don't think that is something that is likely to happen,
• 54:36
  Speaker 1: or if it does, I had to be giving you
• 54:38
  Speaker 1: some sort of benefits, some sort of profit, some some
• 54:40
  Speaker 1: reason for you to keep me running when you could
• 54:42
  Speaker 1: be running you know, Doom dot e XC or some
• 54:44
  Speaker 1: other game. Maybe you can pay the church to keep
• 54:47
  Speaker 1: a computer running in the back, you know, in the
• 54:49
  Speaker 1: back of the room. Yeah, So for an AI revolution,
• 54:52
  Speaker 1: sort of the same thing where I I think if
• 54:54
  Speaker 1: such a thing happened, I doubt they'd have much need
• 54:58
  Speaker 1: for a human at that point. They if they're in
• 55:00
  Speaker 1: a place where they can take over the world, do
• 55:01
  Speaker 1: they need a human collaborator to like let them in
• 55:03
  Speaker 1: the front door or can they just do what they want?
• 55:06
  Speaker 1: That's the next book, How to take Over the AI World.
• 55:10
  Speaker 1: Speaking about keeping computer programs running, I always remember my
• 55:14
  Speaker 1: dad who did his thesis on a computer that required
• 55:17
  Speaker 1: punch cards, and he kept his thesis around as a
• 55:21
  Speaker 1: hard copy, and he liked saying that it was the
• 55:23
  Speaker 1: last kind of hard copy that you could actually run,
• 55:26
  Speaker 1: where you know, printing out the program was actually also
• 55:29
  Speaker 1: the program you could insert back into the computer and
• 55:32
  Speaker 1: make it run again. That's something we've lost with more
• 55:34
  Speaker 1: modern technology, and that's fascinating. I saw on art project
• 55:37
  Speaker 1: the other day where someone had recorded every operation a
• 55:41
  Speaker 1: Nintendo entertainment system when playing Mario three for three seconds,
• 55:47
  Speaker 1: and then printed those out in a book. And there
• 55:49
  Speaker 1: are these three giant bound books of just assembly code
• 55:53
  Speaker 1: instructions that tell you everything that happens in the first
• 55:56
  Speaker 1: three seconds of Marrier Brothers. But it's such a different
• 55:59
  Speaker 1: way of looking at the program. Right. Well, Ryan, I
• 56:02
  Speaker 1: have a small request from my son, who apparently was
• 56:05
  Speaker 1: really taken by geodesic spheres that you describe in your book.
• 56:10
  Speaker 1: So his request is that you put more geodesic spheres
• 56:12
  Speaker 1: in your next book. I love a request that is straightforward.
• 56:18
  Speaker 1: I am happy to do it as much as I
• 56:20
  Speaker 1: am possible. I would try to get some geodesic spheres
• 56:23
  Speaker 1: in the next book. Well, you know, for some reason,
• 56:26
  Speaker 1: he was really taken by your description of like making
• 56:28
  Speaker 1: a ginormous geodesic sphere, and how like if even if
• 56:32
  Speaker 1: it's just a little bit warmer than the air around that,
• 56:35
  Speaker 1: it would float until you could create like a cloud city. Um,
• 56:38
  Speaker 1: so I guess he wants more of that. Yeah, that
• 56:39
  Speaker 1: that idea comes from Buckminster Fuller, who was given the
• 56:43
  Speaker 1: US Presidential Metal of Freedom, and he described this in
• 56:46
  Speaker 1: briefing one of his book's Critical path where he was
• 56:48
  Speaker 1: basically making the point that square cube law, the surface
• 56:52
  Speaker 1: area of something and the volume of something I grow
• 56:55
  Speaker 1: very differently. And so if you had a giant geodesic sphere,
• 56:59
  Speaker 1: the mass of the shell holding it in place gets
• 57:04
  Speaker 1: negligible as the sphere gets larger and larger. And then
• 57:06
  Speaker 1: you could just heat up the sphere a little bit
• 57:08
  Speaker 1: above the surrounding temperature and it'll float. And like the
• 57:11
  Speaker 1: numbers check out, this makes sense. The challenge is that
• 57:13
  Speaker 1: to build a you know, one point six kilometer diameter
• 57:16
  Speaker 1: geodesic sphere to float as a secret base, you need
• 57:19
  Speaker 1: some extremely strong materials, and we don't necessarily have those yet.
• 57:25
  Speaker 1: But I don't see any reason why someone couldn't If
• 57:28
  Speaker 1: you want to put the money into it. Also the
• 57:30
  Speaker 1: challenges that it would be larger than the birds Khalifa,
• 57:32
  Speaker 1: which is the largest building man made structure in the world,
• 57:36
  Speaker 1: almost twice size of it, which clearly has some engineering challenges,
• 57:39
  Speaker 1: But I mean solve them. These are just challenges, right, Yeah.
• 57:42
  Speaker 1: And I think Jorge Son has a father who's a
• 57:44
  Speaker 1: mechanical engineer, so maybe he knows somebody you can ask. Yeah, well,
• 57:47
  Speaker 1: I can draw it pretty different. It sounds like you've
• 57:52
  Speaker 1: got your plot. I'll figured out horror. It sounds like
• 57:54
  Speaker 1: I might have a little supervillain here in my house.
• 57:56
  Speaker 1: It sounds like he wants to move out. Hypothetically speaking,
• 58:00
  Speaker 1: we speaking all right, Well, I want to say thank
• 58:02
  Speaker 1: you very much to Ryan for speaking with us literally
• 58:04
  Speaker 1: and hypothetically about how to take over the world, and
• 58:08
  Speaker 1: encourage our listeners out there to go ahead and check
• 58:10
  Speaker 1: out the book How to take Over the World? Ryan.
• 58:12
  Speaker 1: Where can folks find your book? They can find it
• 58:14
  Speaker 1: at super Villain book dot com. And they can find
• 58:18
  Speaker 1: me at Ryan North dot c A or on Twitter
• 58:22
  Speaker 1: at at Ryan to North. And if we have questions
• 58:25
  Speaker 1: for your dog Chomsky, where should we send those all
• 58:27
  Speaker 1: questions can't be sent to Gnome Chomsky Chomsky with a
• 58:31
  Speaker 1: P because he's care of Ryan Norris. All right, thanks
• 58:37
  Speaker 1: very much trying. Oh, it's my sincere pleasure. Thanks for listening,
• 58:48
  Speaker 1: and remember that Daniel and Jorge explain the Universe is
• 58:51
  Speaker 1: a production of I Heart Radio or more podcast For
• 58:54
  Speaker 1: my heart Radio, visit the I heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts,
• 58:58
  Speaker 1: or wherever you listen to your favorite chills