The Realistic Future of AI w/ Brian Keating

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If they're faking it, they're not making it past us. Get award winning scam detection today. Mcafee.com keepitreal if you're alignment in charge of keeping the lights on, Grainger understands that you go to great lengths and sometimes heights to ensure the power is always flowing. Which is why you can count on Grainger for professional grade products and next day delivery. So you have everything you need to get the job done. Call 1-800-GRAINGER click granger.com or just stop by Granger for the ones who get it done. 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.

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

Can you have truly artificial intelligence, you know, gai, whatever you want to call it, AGI without pain.

Are we as humans a series of algorithms?

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

Is huge philosophical, religious implications.

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

I love when you geek out like that. 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. 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 Going to have Fun. You're going to hear a conversation around a couple 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 Things like Arthur C. Clarke 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 going to dive deep into artificial general intelligence. Is it a good or bad thing? Is it something that's going to 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 nine 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 human imagination. All right, let's dive in with Dr. Brian Keating. Hey, Brian.

Peter.

Good to see you, buddy.

It's been a while. Yeah. 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 Diamandez bump.

Well, my pleasure and pleasure to have you reciprocate here and to talk about subjects that I dream about and I love. 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.

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.

That is amazing. I remember when you and Eric Veery started talking about this and you know, I've been a huge Arthur C. Clarke fan forever. 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.

Yeah, there's so few people like him around and historically speaking, both for his scientific kind of science fiction output, but also his quips. The name of my podcast, Into 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.

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

It was my idea.

Persevered. I'd love to share, if you don't mind, my memories of him, because I met him. Yeah, I met him when I was 21 years old. I was at MIT as an undergrad, or I was 20. And Todd Hawley, Bob Richards, 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 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. And I walk into this hall and there is Arthur C. Clarke with a group of people around him holding court. And 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 so Bob Richards and Todd Hawley goes, oh, my God, it's Arthur C. Clarke. Let's go talk to him. And so we go, 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. And so we end up going to hear his presentation. And he's on stage in this un like forum 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 just so convicted about. I had such conviction. And so afterwards, I go up and I find him and I say, you know, Mr. Clark, I would love if my colleagues and I could take you out to dinner tonight. And 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. And it turns out he has a hearing aid, and he just thought we stopped talking. But he ended up becoming the chair of our advisory board at Students for Exploration Development of Space. And we 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.

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 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. Thank you so much. When I. We always open 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 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.

Yeah, well, a lot emanates from his storytelling and his stories. His books are still as relevant today as they always have been.

What do you think he'd make of the kind of singularity that seems to be approaching, to quote your good friend Kurzweil, with A.I. i mean, I've listened to a lot of your Moonshots podcasts lately, and they've rightfully been. I think you are perhaps the go to source for some of these great conversations with leaders 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 responds to sarcastically to kind of. He says, 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? But anyway, what do you think Arthur would think about 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 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, I think he would view humanity birthing a 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 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 and 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. There will be those humans who choose not to go on the journey, those that merge with technology and those and AI on its own. I think that's fascinating and one of the questions I've been pondering, and you're the right person to talk to about it. Brian, is this the inevitable process that goes on in the universe? Does it start with biological life? Always. And then biology leads to silicon or pick your favorite substrate materials.

Yeah, I mean, I've been wanting to talk to you about that as well. First of all, you said something, I think recently about kind of the pathway forward and how the age of abundance has taken us away from 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 that was really the purview of Alfred Nobel and the construction and mining operations that dynamite enabled. But I wonder if you think about it, and I'll just put it out there, the development of a solar panel in some ways might require whales. In other words, there might be some inevitability that you have to go through this pathway to get to Kardashev logarithm 10 to the minus 3 or whatever we are Dyson level that we're not even approaching.

I love when you think out like that.

Yeah, it's fun to get paid to do that. Right? And on the other hand. So there is this sort of inevitability towards the predecessor primitive technologies I joked about, well, we needed dinosaurs to get to petroleum, right? And people, oh, it's not dinosaurs, it's pre. Okay, it's dinosaur life. Or it's ancient biological hydrocarbons. Right, hydrocarbons. So is that a necessary step? Is that sufficient step?

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

Yeah. And you look at it and you see things like computer was not designed by a computer. The first programming language, ChatGPT, is programmed on a very advanced programming substrate, which itself is predecessors going all the way back to assembly language. But that is even not the first step. So this kind of first start problem, or cold start problem, I think is an interesting one. 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 this, I think I've heard this.

But you've experienced this with Stephen Hawking, so I'll leave it at that to jog your memory. What was it that you experienced with Stephen Hawking?

I mean, it was his joy of being in weightlessness, his joy of being free, 100%. So what was Einstein's greatest thought?

So 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 aiae, 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 Parr, used to call general relativity, or we call it gr, as the greatest accomplishment of Western civilization, not just of mathematical physics. But it was a culmination because it took the work of 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 mathematics. So he called that the greatest pinnacle. So can a computer, Peter, feel the sensation of joy and free fall?

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? 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 Mustaq, 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 in his companies and his employees and his partners is passion. And that 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.

Yeah. What do you think?

What do you feel about that?

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.

We're gonna have a great argument about that one.

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, and we will. And even though I'm an astrophysicist, I'm not speaking on behalf of a field that I am directly involved. So like any physicist, that frees me up to speculate wildly. But the best part about it is I don't believe what I'm saying can be falsified, at least in the near term. So we can make these predictions. And I wouldn't have to pay your famous wagers of sin if I'm wrong. But Nicholas Taleb, in cheerful fashion, as he's known to do, put something out. These tests that are passed by the chat AI engines, the fact that they're passed says more about the test than it does about the advanced ability of AI. I sort of agree with that statement, as curmudgeonly as he normally is, that I think a lot of what we're seeing is it's sort of a mirror. What we're putting into it, like a perfect mirror, is reflective of who we are, and it can do things that we can do. But I've often wondered, can you have truly artificial, intelligent Gai, whatever you want to call it, AGI, without pain? And, you know, pain is different than love. You talked about can they love a few minutes ago. I think it's interesting to know, can they feel pain? Just like Bentham used to say about the being cruel to animals and so forth, that the question was not, do they have consciousness? Can they feel pain? And we could talk about that some other time. You've written a lot about the prospects for artificial meat and so forth in the future. And Currently, right now, I've talked a lot about.

But let's go there one second, because I do think you can. I mean, what is pain? Pain is a negative, across the board, negative impulse as a result 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. Palmer Luckey, the founder of Oculus, had another conversation with him at a 360 this year, and he created a version of a VR headset that had explosive bolts on it that if you died in the game, it would take out your prefrontal cortex and you'd be dead. And he did it just for fun, more as a piece of artwork than anything else. Just to say, 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, blew a capacitor and would shut you down at the end that there would be death and so forth? I believe you could create that. And in the algorithms that 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 quantum compute in our microfibrils of our neurons or whether we're something else? I just finished reading a book called Thousand Brains that looks at a theory for intelligence in the mind. I think you can. I think you can program love 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.

And I think it is exactly right, Peter. 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 parenting twins to 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 I recall using Microsoft flight simulator in 1985. It was back when I knew all the names of all the astronauts that have ever come before.

And you fly through the towers in.

Chicago, in Urbana Champaign, and then you'd fly right through the towers.

Exactly.

And since then, we've moved up, you and I moved up to larger and larger aircraft rather than the Piper Archer that they used to feature and 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 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, imagine if in the flight simulator, when you tried to go through the Golden Gate Bridge underpass or between the support cables and you hit one of them, you got an electric shock right to the sphincter region or wherever you could design this, or you had on your helmet, you got a little joy buzzer on you. In addition to the level up reality of it. It would make you more, I believe it would make you more capable to perceive risks. And I think pregaming learn a lot faster. And so another way that I think that AI can help, but I believe it's being hindered. I believe this is true, that Moore's Law is sort of saturating. We can leave aside the GPU kind of use of it, but 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 done right, ask somebody who's too busy to do it right because 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 the Perlmutter machine. And we don't even know how fast these machines are, Peter. But we know that both our allocations are dropping every year to analyze cosmic microwave background radiation data. That's my area of expertise. And also the net throughput in these high throughput and high performance computing systems, because of their utility, are so in 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 AGI, and I think it could be A, because of the utility, but B, because of the lawyers. And let me just bring up this fact. So I talked to Eric Topal, a very famous physician down here at Scripps Research Institute. He's involved in embroglios with the COVID 19. We're not gonna talk about that. But he has a book, the patient will see you now. And then he has a book about AI and so forth and data in medicine. Now one of the most important barriers that he claims is that today we see people. It used to be the doctor was sitting there writing down on his notepad or whatever you guys used to use when you were back in medical school. And then the patient was looking up at the ceiling and they weren't looking at each other. And then now they said the doctor's typing into a terminal and the patient's on their smartphone. And that's how they're communicating. Let's go back to aviation. When you and I are flying and you're landing at Santa Monica Airport and you're flying around in a Cessna, you have to take your eyes off of the outside world and reach over and dial in a knob, which is ridiculous, ancient VHF radio. And then you have to wait, Peter, because you might miss the broadcast of the so called NOTAM system. You might miss the weather, come in late. So then you have to listen to the whole two minute loop again. You can't communicate with anybody else and the plane should know where you're gonna land.

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

Forget about aagi. Just imagine there was an Alexa. I actually changed the name of my Alexa so it won't go off when I'm talking to you. Because I'll say, computer, close the pod bay doors, let's see if it'll do it. I changed the name of it. He's busy right now. 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 vor, let's tune in the not. And then not only would it broadcast visually because we can read things 60 times faster than we can process auditorily and it would just be a boon. Now why isn't that available to pilots right now? It's a $29 unit, right? For God's sakes.

Well, it's connecting 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 airway vectors and so forth, it's just uploaded into the computer 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 propagation in that regard.

And it's 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. Oh, you're completely blocking it. Which is actually a safety risk too, Peter. Right? I mean, some terrorist, right? Could occur.

Aviation makes medicine look advanced, which is funny.

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

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Yeah, I think you know, 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 mixing two controversial opinions. Okay, one, one is that the existence of extraterrestrial intelligence is limited to null and B, the existence of artificial intelligence is wildly over concern 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 processing the threat or the risks or the prospects for truly super Turing 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.

Those 45 students are important.

They are. 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 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 the discovery of an extra galactic nova in the constellation Andromeda in the so called Andromeda galaxy.

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

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 the 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 in the southern hemisphere, you can see the Magellanic Clouds, but they're basically satellites of the Milky Way, so. So when you think about the fact that we didn't know until in Mount Wilson in la, where you are, that there was the existence of a nova which is oscillating brightness or semi regular brightening star that that can be used as a distance measuring tool using tools that earlier astronomer named Henrietta Lovett had come up with. So that allowed us to measure the Sun. Now, we've only known that the universe is 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 Slipher 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. Instead of being units of velocity, he uses kilometers as units of velocity distance. But the worst part about it is there's no error analysis. Each data point is just put there as if God told you there's no errors associated with it whatsoever. And ironically, of course, he, 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 is your dad's second wife or something. I'm not getting into to 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. 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 there are no error bars associated with it. So I did a talk at the SETI Institute up there in Mountain View a couple years back, 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, it was 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. And my problem with both the 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.

Fascinating. Yep, I agree. And it's. I mean, I'm in the midst of these conversations on fear mongering around AI. My bias has been that AI is the 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 Elon and from Bill Gates and from a multitude of other individuals. Now we have to look at what is the basis for that fear. And like you said, 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. Right there is the negative implications of loss of jobs, which is one category. We can come back to that and that will have real implications. And like I tweeted the other day, AI is not going to replace you. It's somebody else using AI that will replace you. Right. We're going to have a astrophysicist co pilot, Brian, for you. That's going to make your work far more efficient and more rapidly publishable. And if you're not using it, you won't compete with your peers. But of course you will be and you'll be writing the code as well to support that. So job loss is one area. The second area that we can name is in fact the use of AI by terrorists, by negative forces in society, is at the same time that it makes us more capable of solving problems. It enables people to cause problems, problems. So that is a second part. And 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 AGI, the first thing you bump into in my mind is the terrible twos. If you develop a truly artificial general intelligence that doesn't know its own strength and is trying to figure things out out and is exploring and playing, could it pick up the heavy object and hit the glass table without knowing what the implications of that are? 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 is terminated. And I think that one is frankly, highly improbable. I think the version of AI from 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 Peter.

Why do they have to get one of the most attractive women in the world to play a part where she's not even featured in them. I'm sorry, My wife is the second, is the first most attractive woman. But Scarlett has to get there.

Well done. I'll take notes. So I don't believe in AI is going to destroy us and is the Terminator. And I think 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. 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.

Yeah, yeah. And it's really happening and 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 and 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, we worry about them 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 individuals? And yeah, your mom asking you to do something is going to be a lot more persuasive and they're going to be just as video game designers and casino designers and app designers 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 potentially weaponized. Whether you think the uses are benign because it's for your favorite candidate or not is irrelevant.

Yeah. How old are your twins?

They're about to turn 5.

So my boys are 11. And I think about where I was when I was 11 and as you go into teen years and you go through puberty and one of the concerns I have have is the implications of all of this technology on pornography and that where all of a sudden there Are no limits. When I was growing up, it was a magazine. But what happens when it becomes unlimited in its capacity for perversion and such? I think there are interesting, unfortunate ramifications that, that unfortunately our government is not even thinking about or able to contain. And so we have a lot of challenges ahead which have nothing to do with killer terminators coming.

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

That's my job.

Not that much. Yeah, not that much. But then I think about 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 innocent 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 them what do you regret? And they'll tell me, Dan Holloway is a wonderful man and you should talk to eventually. And I've had very close friends and relatives that are special forces operators and they'll always say, I can't undo, I can't unsee what I did while I was in combat and I can't undo it. And thank God I did it because they wouldn't be here. Peter. They risk life and death, unlike me fake doctor, you know, just like risking getting a chalk, you know, breaking in the middle of lecture. 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 they're also vulnerable to this. I mean, you think like, I mean my Twins have long known that if they want me to shut up, they just pretend they're swiping my face. They act like I'm an iPad. They can just change the video. But elderly, they might not be as tech savvy as young people are. It's hard enough for me to keep up with it. So now 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 wonder what you think about your friend else. And he is such a mercurial and interesting figure. I wonder if you could kind of convey what you think he might answer to the following question. He's obviously a space geek. He's a lover of not just going to Mars. And as Martin Reese said, Elon wants to die on Mars. I hope he doesn't die on impact. But he's willing to take these risks, which is saying something, because he is a doting, caring Fox. He's got 10 kids, I believe. It's hard, you know, when he gets.

The current gnome count.

Yeah, when you have Poisson errors, Peter, on a number of kids, you're kind of at the upper limit. But God love him, and he should. He should have as many kids as God or Mother Nature will provide. But we have the situation in astronomy with Starlink, and I have a Starlink unit, but it is causing 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 studied 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 thousands of satellites darkening the sky, there's no way to darken something. Let me just tell you, for those that may not, there's no way to darken thermal radiation. It makes it work. So I wonder, how do you think he weighs these grand challenges? And it is almost ethical in a sense. Like if he knew you couldn't darken them optically and they were just gonna be glowing bright with the Olbers paradox type brightness, what do you think he would endeavor to do?

I think I haven't had this. I've had many conversations with him. I spent hours with him last Sunday at a friend's birthday party. Next time I will 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 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, the moon. It's going to be in Lagrange points. It's going to be away from Earth's radiation transmission and that we have a short period of time during which we are burdened by that. We're going to be back on the lunar surface in, I don't know, three years time probably. And that starts one of the graduates.

Of UCSD, Dr. Jessica Meir. She may be the, the first female to land on the moon.

Yeah, well, and I'm thinking with starship going there, probably first delivering 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 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 launchpad. I say, okay, that's a, that's a great goal and we'll see how far it gets.

Even if it does, he'll say something like, ah, it's just a scratch, it's just a scratch. It'll buff right out. So cheerful when these billion dollar machines explode.

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

Yeah, yeah. No, it's impossible. It's like, yeah, but if you get a chance, 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.

I've often thought about that, of how to approach him. And he is a physicist, and he did graduate from a university, 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 $190 million 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 citizen of Lesbos was a man by the name of Aristotle. Second only to you, Peter.

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

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 16 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. But one of the things, things 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 a hypothesis, did more observations, inductive reasoning, and then, you know, came up and utilized this disrael, the scientific method. When you, you open your podcast every week, I listen to it. You talk about the massive transformative purpose, and you talk about what the goal of the massive transformative purpose is. To create a dent in the universe unique to the individual. Right. 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. And this to me is the most. Yeah, this is the most. 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 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 scientific hypothesis or paradigm. It's not even really at the level of a hypothesis because. Because it may or may not be testable, but one of the ways that you could not falsify the multiverse, but you could prove the multiverse. So it's very unlike other scientific conjectures. To whatever extent you can prove something. 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. 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 good old Aristotle and this search for falsifiability or proof, 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 13 billion years without changing too much, much prospects for life and so forth. They will eventually come into contact. 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 Venn diagram 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. So what will happen is another universe will make a physical dent which can 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.

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?

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 what's called 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 is finite. It's 10 to the 500th universes. But Max has shown that once you're. Once you get above 10 to the 80th, which is 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 and one.

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

Well, when you go to Texas in a week or so, you'll see the gigafactory 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 gigafactory, and you put another one at the other end of the gigafactory. 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 sun 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, colonize, whatever. But the important fact to note is that it's very large. So that when Milky Way galaxy combines and forms milk drama, when the Andromeda 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 two grains of sand past each other other in the gigafactory, 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.

But if you detect it, you could prove it.

Yes.

I was curious, I was going to ask you the question, 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. 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? A couple of trillion is the current estimate.

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

One of the fun things was. Do you remember Avogadro's number from chemistry?

Yep.

6.02 times 10 to the 23rd. You know, if you. One estimate of the number of galaxies, galaxies and the number of stars gives you Avogadro's number of stars in the universe. So I thought that was cool. That's right.

And people then use that 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 contract that we both signed to have this. But let me just get back. We don't know 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. It also gives. Has anyone ever given you a star, Peter, in the International Star Register?

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.

Yeah. What I wanted to just tell you is that speaking on behalf of all professional astronomers, that's absolutely meaningless. Nobody looks up there's Diamandis HD24. Okay. 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, brianketing.com, i will let you buy a universe from me in the multiverse. Actually, seriously, I want to make an offer to your. I want to make an offer to your listeners. I have these chunks 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, in the driveway. Battery. Sorry. Let me get, let me look around. Here it is. Okay, so I have chunks here, Peter. This is a chunk of a 4 billion year old asteroid that's.

It's a metallochondrite.

Looks like it's a metallochondrite.

Right?

So it fell in Argentina about 6,000 years ago. It was discovered in the 1500s and it was brought to Earth the old fashioned way by gravity. But if you have a Eduardo email address and you sign up for my mailing list, brianketing.com list, you will automatically win a fragment of this meteorite. Because my massive transformational purpose, which I know you're gonna get to at some point, involves 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. And don't tell Gavin Newsom, my book 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 realized in doing 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.

It's Brian Keating.com just to reinforce in people's memory.

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 some chat engine? This is two years ago now. So it really wasn't as prominent in my frontal cortex. But I realized, Peter, I could be replaced by Galileo for a lot of things, but one thing, 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. I mean, we can just the five Ds, right? We can just democratize it and demonetize it. That's what I want to do. In particular, the EDU folks, I am interested in reaching them because. Because the main obstacle, I think, to higher education and the unlocking Elon is not limited by money, Peter. He's limited by brains. I mean, he's limited by how many engineers and so forth. 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 in one way or another to demonetize it as much as I can.

Yeah. And 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 five years, but we're going to. There is a massive reinvention of education and a massive reinvention of the health care 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 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. We are the only ones out here. We are alone. Do not screw it up, you know, please. Technological life. Technological life. To be clear, Speaking of intelligent life.

Technological life.

Yeah, technological life.

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

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 entropic. And it is something which we're just beginning to understand. All right, you know, boxers, take your corners Let the debate begin.

We need a neutral.

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

All right, Peter. I've had two 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 peak experience is going to Chile, 17,600ft above sea level in the Atacama 2 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 and the Atacama Desert, there is life, and in Antarctica, there is life. And it is actually considered a driest desert on Earth. It's actually drier than the Sahara by precipitable water vapor. And it's also very high. It's 9,000ft 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, Jocko willing, flying to 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 ice, some orcas. But then 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 six 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, trillion galaxies, nice round number. Now that's all fine and good. Now imagine, 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 go a long time ago, also purchased legally through proper channels, not collected by some rover. And that flake of Mars meteorite cost more than a 10 kilogram fragment of these metallochondrites 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 fake felony. If you get one on ebay, which I've collected them, you'll just 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 facility factor, and I call the facility factor how probable with life preexisting 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 Andrew and his daughter Sasha, who are both lovely women. I had the first mother daughter team ever in podcasting history in the sciences I believe. Anyway, the, 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. It had to go from inorganic materials, it had to go from, you know, hydrocarbons, it had to go from rather hydrogen than carbon. And so forth. It had to form on a rocky planet. Perfect, 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 the Earth and sucked up the real killer planet, planetesimals that could have destroyed the Earth. And all life in has to have a moon not too close to us and 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 1000. Let's say there are eight of those. What happens if you take 10, you raise 10 to the minus 3 to the 8th power, you get the same number, 10 to the minus 24. Okay, so that means that it'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. The problem is, how do you estimate something that may have occurred only one 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, around it. Okay, so you can increase it to whatever you like. But you know, 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. So I turn it over to you to decimate those arguments as you see fit.

Okay, okay, fair enough. So first of all, we know that there, the building blocks of life, the basic amino acids for even nucleotides that make up DNA, are present in the interstellar medium. We have seen that, we've observed that through your colleagues in astronomy. So we can say that the, the prerequisite building blocks that could lead to the early formation of life are out there. And for that reason any place that has for liquid based water life that these materials can rain upon has a possibility of creating early life forms. Right. So our planet's four point, call it 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. If we look at what the most I'm going to be focusing on advanced life. If you look at what the highest atomic number element that the human being needs to survive 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. His estimate was about a billion billion years after the Big bang. We would have had enough death birth cycles of stars to get iodine. So let's assume that life will have formed on planets because I do think that any planet that has liquid water and is within a decent radiation shield, that the pre ingredients of the life raining on the surface will ultimately lead to some single cell life form, 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. And how far has that come? I mean the argument that's typically made, Fermi's paradox is where are they? If in fact they evolved, where are they? And I had an experience 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 a place of worship, a church up in the, up in the mountains in Greece. And it was 6 o' clock and it was time to call all the priests to prayer. And this old priest, long white beard, long white hair, black outfit, very typical, walks up and there's this bell in the center and takes his cane and, and he hits the bell to call all of the priests to prayer. And in that moment my cell phone rings and 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 their being bathed at 800-900 MHz and 2.4 GHz frequencies. They just don't have the tech to perceive it or communicate. 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, 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? 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 available 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 have 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. It if you would of Star Trek. 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 have that for me the probability in all of these 2 trillion galaxies and 100 billion stars that were alone seems to me a false premise. Here's the question. I think we're going to find out whether life, 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. We'll know whether it originated from panspermia theory, where life has been rained 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, science and technology and how entrepreneurs can change the world 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 3D Printing, Synthetic Biology, AR.VR Blockchain. These technologies are transforming what you, as an entrepreneur can do. If this is the kind of muse you want to learn about and shape your neural nets with, go to dmanandis.comblog and learn more. Now back to the episode.

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 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 first, 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 Burbage, who equally, I believe, deserve 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, Jayant Narlakar, 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 to form. So first we have to stipulate how easy or hard it is for that to happen. And another colleague of the Burbages in Fowler was located here. His name is Harold Urey and he's the progenitor of the famous Miller Urey. Except experiment, which when you go through it is very persuasive sounding and many people have used it. Neil DeGrasse Tyson, we talk about it.

This is the experiment that lightning caused energetic nucleation of cellular forms of life.

Yeah, basically you have an oxygen vessel, you put in some phosphorus, you put in some nitrogen, stuff that was composed, they thought, at the time of the early Earth's atoms atmosphere. Then you shock it and out 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 gonna get into the theological implications, but they went down to the chemistry stockroom, which is located here in Urey hall, and they got a beautifully 99.959's pure isopropyl alcohol. And they got this thing and that thing sterilized, re reagents, sterilized vessels, Bunsen burner at the exact right temperature. 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 the point is, Peter, 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 it 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 1/7 of all intelligent life on Earth to be in Antarctica. When I go there, Peter, I'm not even the smartest person there. I might be the heaviest person there, you know, I might be the only native New Yorker there. I, I don't know. There's only 200 people. There's bigger than Texas.

But why wouldn't you stipulate the same as at the bottom of the Marianas Trench or at the top of the troposphere? There are going to be 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 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 it takes the least amount of energy to modify its environment. It's going to migrate, if it's intelligent, to the places is 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.

One argument that people have used, not original to me, is that you can 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 but the point is I don't believe, I don't have conviction that just because it's so improbable for technological life to exist throughout the universe, that there is. But I do believe almost to the fact of quasi theological conviction, not by you, Peter, but by many people in the SETI game, that this is. It's almost inevitable because the large number hypothesis, and that's exactly what Carl Sagan meant when he wrote with Andrewian, 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, who's. She's a wonderful guest. You should have her on. But the bottom line, Peter, is 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 kind of indulge us to have and beg our forbearance. That there is a tendency to extrapolate from sort of our own maybe kind of pedestrian 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 for all these reasons, and believe me, no one would be much more psyched and pumped for the existence of extraterrestrial light as long as it doesn't want to eat. Middle aged New Yorkers like me with a little bit too much avoirdupois hydrocarbons I'm storing. Peter, they say you should always have 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. I do believe 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 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.

I think you're right. But I also turn to a recent example. It wasn't too long ago 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, of eight planets and one dwarf planet. Okay, fine, I'll go there. But you know, 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 and 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.

That's true. And as we said earlier, 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 the bottom kind of 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 almost because people assume that there is life. I think it's important to have, maybe it's in my contrarian side, but to have kind of counterexamples and present them, because I think it's like these people that make a bet that their favorite sports team is going to lose the big game. And in San Diego that's no problem because we've never won a major championship in any sport whatsoever. But the bottom line is 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, one. They've also been able to master laws of physics and laws of sociology and communication and so forth. 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 the final thing I'll say, Peter, is do you care about your 82nd grandchild to the power two to the 80? Do you care about 100 generations, 1,000 generations, as Will McCaskill talks about? We're in the first inning of an overtime or extra innings game. I don't know the names of my great great grandparents. Right. It's likely my great great great grandchildren won't know my name, except for if they tune into the most popular podcast of all time, into the impossible. But I like to think also we've explored the local area of the galaxy quite well and we, it's true we've only dipped a thimble into the ocean, to use Jill Tarter's metaphor in searching the universe. But let's say there is life in another galaxy. It's 3 million light years away, Peter, and I think it's almost. It is becoming a branch of philosophy at that point. Could they be existing? Yeah, but what do you really care about? Just like you care about your kids and your grandkids and maybe they're to going grandkids, you know, it's hard to really think about. Well, I'd really care if there was a child living in M51. The poster I have behind me, Whirlpool Galaxy. That's 86 light years, 86 million light years away.

But there is huge philosophical, religious implications to humanity. Right.

I think it's 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.

And I love those. And those are all good sessions for us to have in the future.

Can I ask you one question to wrap up?

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

Absolutely. Turnabout is fair play. You want to go first?

Sure. So as I ask my guests on moonshots and Mindsets, if I were to fund an X Prize for you, the Keating X Prize, what would it be? What would you want? Innovators around the world using their shower time in the morning, their sleep and dreamtime at night to solve what challenge? What would they have to build, demonstrate, make happen to win the Brian Keating. Exactly. Prize.

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

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

Yeah, it's hard. And I know I'm speaking from a place of great privilege to say this, but I am among the four or five leaders of an experiment that's close to $200 million by the time it's finished. And that is kind of born of conversations and visions of Jim Simons and myself and David Spergel and my colleagues 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 it still occurring?

And so I think the James Webb Space Telescope has disproven the Bing Bang over and over again.

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 the 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 a 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, there are 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 basically zero cost education to consumers, to think scientifically. I, I think that's the greatest hope that humanity has is to really completely devalue or de economic incentivize what I do for a living. So I'm undercutting my own financial 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 we walk around San Diego.

And.

Thank God it's a 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 cell phones. Okay, you can debate the policy. Is that good or bad? 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 the to me we need to make it almost free and it should be free.

It does and it will be. And there's lots going on right now from the Khan Academy and GPT 4 and what Imad Mustaq 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'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?

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 contrarianly think are unique to the human species until proven otherwise. I'm open to being proven wrong. But yes, it would be to affect effectively to determine a way to make a free university available 24, 7, 365.24 to every human being on Earth. Because imagine that we had to imagine that Elon's parents, they never met and I know he's had great troubles with his father. I had trouble with my father. But let's ignore that. There's gotta be More Elans. There should be some Elanas. There should be people. The world is vast. And the 8 billion 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 reading Abdusalam, Steven Weinberg. They're incredible contributors, not just to science, where they excelled in one Nobel Prize 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. So we have to get to this, raise the baseline level of STEM education, and that will allow us hopefully to value life, to think of life as precious, preserve 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. Should save Earth.

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

All right. 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 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 elder. 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? You're the most optimistic person, cheerful person. I emulate you as best as I can. When I think of myself as being. I said, 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?

Well, so listen, 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 years, 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 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. So that's my belief, which I believe is probable. And 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 that I could be wrong about? So the challenge is I don't spend a lot of time thinking about what's impossible. Possible. I think it's probably impossible for 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 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 stay viable as a government. So that's one element that I think of as kind of impossible.

Anything you feel you've been wrong about.

Or, you know, oh, I've been wrong about time, like a mullen number of things. So, I mean, you know, I 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 chondrites? 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.

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. He'll be interested, too, if it does come around. A couple billionaires in your corner, won't I?

Yeah, well, I think 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, you know, 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 and that those colonies would bud like amoeba, and you'd rebuild and you'd go on an exponential growth curve. But rather than get into the deep gravity well of Mars. 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 where else you want to take it.

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 great, a delight. It's always a pleasure to talk to you and anything else 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. I follow you on Twitter and elsewhere. Anything else that would be of interest to my listeners?

My handles are Eterdiamandis on Twitter and Instagram and diamandis.com is my hand 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?

Well, I just got one of your final onboarding emails that said I'll see you in the multiverse, in the metaverse. I'll see you guys in the multiverse of minds. Most places I am as Dr. Brian Keating, Twitter, YouTube, Instagram, et cetera. 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 Julianne Guthrie, who writes about you and her book. She endorsed my second book, but I'm really trying to really reach 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 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. And I got my 24 karat 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 said, einstein, Same book as me. I'm not worthy. 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. To Einstein, than any other human being for Western civilization. And I said, that's not all, Barry. Don't worry. Even Isaac Newton had his own imposter syndrome. He said, you've got to be kidding me. And I said, you know, Barry, you and I are both Jews. But there was a man that Isaac Newton worshiped, 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 hundred 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 friend tedx Talk. You helped me with my book. And I can't wait till we 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.

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

Let's not be.

Well, great to talk to you.

Bye.