Daniel and Kelly’s Extraordinary Universe - The SF Universe of Max Barry

Episode Date: November 17, 2020

In Max Barry's new novel "Providence", humanity runs into aliens. It doesn't go well. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an I-Heart podcast. December 29th, 1975, LaGuardia Airport. The holiday rush, parents hauling luggage, kids gripping their new Christmas toys. Then, everything changed. There's been a bombing at the TWA terminal. Just a chaotic, chaotic scene. In its wake, a new kind of enemy emerged, terrorism. Listen to the new season of Law and Order Criminal Justice System

On the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. My boyfriend's professor is way too friendly, and now I'm seriously suspicious. Wait a minute, Sam. Maybe her boyfriend's just looking for extra credit. Well, Dakota, luckily, it's back to school week on the OK Storytime podcast, so we'll find out soon. This person writes, my boyfriend's been hanging out with his young professor a lot. He doesn't think it's a problem, but I don't trust her. Now he's insisting we get to know each other, but I just want or gone. Hold up. Isn't that against school policy? That seems inappropriate.

Maybe find out how it ends by listening to the OK Storytime podcast and the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. In sitcoms, when someone has a problem, they just blurt it out and move on. Well, I lost my job and my parakeet is missing. How is your day? But the real world is different. Managing life's challenges can be overwhelming. So, what do we do? We get support. The Huntsman Mental Health Institute and the Ad Council have mental health resources available for you at loveyourmindday.org. That's loveyourmindtay.org.

See how much further you can go when you take care of your mental health. Hey, Jorge, let's talk about aliens. Ooh, a bit early in the morning for that, isn't it? Not on alien standard time. All right, what are we talking about? All right, here's the situation. Say you are the first human to meet the aliens. Then we're in trouble already, Daniel.

I'm the ambassador for the entire human race. All right, so you're about to meet the aliens. Here's my question. What percentage of you is excited and what percentage of you is terrified for your life? Oh, man. I would say it's pretty even. It's about 100% excitement, 100% terrified. That sounds 100% right on to me.

Hi, I'm Jorge. I'm a cartoonist and the creator of PhD comics. Hi, I'm Daniel. I'm a particle physicist and I definitely don't want to be ambassador for planet Earth. Welcome to our podcast, Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe, a production. of Our Heart Radio. In which we send our minds, not our bodies, out into the universe to explore the far reaches of space. Talk about all the crazy stuff that's out there. We break down black holes.

We crack open neutron stars. We talk about the tiny particles that make up everything. And we explain all of it to you. That's right. We like to talk about all of the amazing things out there in the cosmos, everything that's actually happening right now as we speak. And we also like to talk about all the things that might be in this universe. Because the big part of exploring how the universe works is thinking about all the various scenarios for how it might work.

And while physicists like to be creative and imagine various scenarios and weird new kinds of particles, there's another community of folks out there whose entire job is being creative about speculative universes. Are you talking about cartoonists? I'm talking about our podcast listeners, those creative geniuses. Yeah, there's an amazing potential out there in the universe and it's up to science fiction authors. to kind of think about it and figure out what are the exciting possibilities of where the human race can go. Yeah, sometimes I think of science fiction authors is like the most mature thinkers. They're on the edge imagining other universes and the way things might work.

And sometimes I imagine that they've sort of like returned to childhood. You know, the way kids don't really understand the universe. And to them, the universe could be basically anything. They're not so like nailed down to the current orthodoxy and the current dogma for how the universe works. If you told them the universe is made of tiny, bouncing little oranges, they would be like, wow, that's cool. Can I see one? Can I make a plot out of that?

Can I get a series out of that? I'm not sure if you just praise science fiction authors or maybe insulted. There are scientific knowledge, Daniel. No, I think it's difficult to return to that sort of like childlike openness and curiosity and creativity and imagining the way the universe could be. It's difficult to take yourself out of our current mindset and think. about other ideas that you would have accepted other ways the universe could be. So I'm totally impressed with science fiction authors who are able to do that and really imagine brand

new creative worlds. Do you feel like having a physics degree somehow makes you jaded about that, about the possibilities out there? Like maybe it dampens your sense of what could be. I think it must a little bit. You know, there are these plots that show that no mathematicians or theoretical physicists have deep breakthroughs after the age of 30. And that's just because they're like so far into the orthodoxy and the establishment that they're just like, you know, adding shingles to the theory rather than like laying entire new foundations. I see. I wonder if there's a correlation with tenure, Denier.

There's definitely a correlation with tenure and the number of naps I'd take in my office. Well, there you go. Both things are easy to fix if you want it to be a pioneer in physics. That's right. I do want to be a pioneer in physics, but also naps are pretty nice. Can you be a napping pioneer? Can you take a nap on the ship that's out there exploring? That would be a deal.

Yeah, I think the way that I would explain it if my department chair walked in is that I was marinating on an idea and that I often wake up from naps with clever new ideas for research programs. And you say you lost your childlike propensity for making up stories, Daniel. That's right. That's definitely fiction. But anyways, yeah, we like to talk about science fiction authors and their amazing ideas and the amazing stories that they spin together using some of the interesting science ideas.

So today we'll be talking to another big science fiction author about their science and their fiction. That's right. I love these episodes where we talk to science fiction authors. We ask them how they built their universe, how the science works in their universe. This is not your typical literary science fiction podcast. We're asking science questions to science fiction authors.

So today on the program we'll be talking about The Science Fiction Universe of Max Barry. Now, this is an Australian author, right, Daniel? That's right. He's an Australian author. And so when you read his book, you have to read all the characters as having an Australian accent in your mind. It's very important. What do you mean? Australians have an accent?

I thought we had the accent. We do. Actually, when I first read his books, I didn't know he's Australian. And then when I interviewed him, it was pretty obvious. And then I'm reading another one of his books now, and I can't get his Australian accent out of my mind. So, like, even all the narration, I read in his voice in my mind. Are the characters in Australia, or are they Australian? Or does it take place, you know, not even in this planet?

Well, he's written lots of different books. He writes speculative fiction. He wrote a book called Lexicon about five years ago, which is really wonderful and fantastical. And I totally encourage everybody to read it. And there are scenes there in Australia. The book we're talking about today takes place mostly in deep space, which is not Australia, as far as I understand. But, no, he's not just an Australian writer. He's a writer who happens to be Australian.

Yeah, so today we'll be talking about his book, Providence, which takes place in space. Yeah, that's right. It takes place mostly in space, and it's a sweeping space opera. It happens all over the universe and their grand battle between aliens and humans. It's a bit of a departure for him. He writes speculative fiction, so, you know, like in alternative universes, but not always science. fiction. You know, speculative fiction is like the rules of the universe are different, but it's not always technology related or space related or something like that. But it's in the same sort of

category of stuff I really enjoy because it's a different universe where you have to be a detective and like figure out what are the rules of this universe. And for me, that's the fun of being a physicist is that we're being detectives about this universe. And so it's fun to play around in somebody else's invented universe. Cool. I wonder, Daniel, what makes something a space opera? like a space musical. They have to be Viking hats and there have to be really, really high notes. And it has to go on for hours and then it's an opera. I see.

But in space, nobody can hear you then. So who's doing the singing? Oh, well, maybe that's good based on all the operas I've attended. I wish they were in space. No, I think a space opera is just, you know, something with a grand scale. It takes place in multiple solar systems or galaxies or preferably over hundreds or thousands of years. So it's operatic sort of in the scale of the story you're telling.

You see, the drama, I guess. Yeah, the drama. All right, well, this book sounds interesting. Let's talk about what the book is about. I guess, first of all, how did you hear about it? I heard about this book because I read his other book, Lexicon, and really enjoyed it. No idea how I came across that one and recommended it to me by somebody who recommended something else to me, maybe. So then I just picked up this next book that he had just come out with.

And I was pleasantly surprised to learn that it was all about aliens and human alien warfare and zooming around the galaxy and all sorts of crazy stuff. I'm hooked. Aliens Opera. Do they have accents at all? I wonder if humans went out into space, they would develop a different accent? Oh, yeah. Haven't you seen the expanse? They have a whole interesting accent for the belters and like a little dialect of English.

It's really well done. I imagine they would. You know, any geographically separated population is going to drift off linguistically. So I imagine they would. Interesting. All right. Well, let's talk about the book. What's the book about?

You said aliens. It's aliens. Good aliens or bad aliens? Well, you start off and you don't know, right? all we know is that there's this moment of first contact we're going to meet the aliens they found this weird rock essentially accelerating through the solar system and it turns out it's an alien spaceship and they go out and they meet it and there's this exciting scene where the aliens like come through the hatch and you don't know as the reader and you can tell that the characters in the

scene they don't know like are we about to die or are we about to meet friendly aliens they're going to unlock the secrets of the universe so it's a the moment of great tension that really underpins a lot of what happens in the book. Really? There was no texting contact or phone call before meeting in person? No. And, you know, how would you know how to communicate with these aliens? You don't have like electronic signals in common. I mean, it's hard enough to get another human being on Skype or Zoom to get that to work, you know? Getting your audio to work on a Zoom call is hard enough. So getting to chat with an alien

before you meet with them in person is pretty tricky. So the aliens sort of climb aboard a human ship. And what you discovered is not really a spoiler because it happens very early on in the book is that the aliens are not friendly, not at all. Oh man, what do they do? They come in, guns of blazing or brandishing their claws? Yeah, they come in and it turns out they can do something crazy

which is they can spit mini black holes. They can spit black holes? What? Yeah, they spit these little black holes which pass through you and basically just like tear you to shreds. And that's not a very friendly thing to do. And so the humans are basically

torn apart in the very first moment of contact. And that sets the tone for the human-alian interaction in the rest of the book. Oh, man. Wow, there's a lot of science there to talk about. But then what happens? Then the book is sort of about what a war or cleaning up after this mess? Yes. So then it launches a massive planetary war. And the rest of the book is essentially an exploration for what that war is like and how it plays out. You know, how does humanity respond to that. What kind of weapons do we build to try to defend ourselves, to try to take it to the aliens? What has to happen for that to work? And then what's it like for those humans on board? And it's pretty fascinating because he develops this technology, this almost self-driving ship

and these massive warships that are so complicated, they have to be essentially driven by AI. Man, oh wait, so there's robots too involved? Yeah, well, the whole ship is like a robot. And it's making decisions. The humans are on board. but they're not really in charge. They're just sort of like there. And it's not clear in the very beginning, like, well, why are humans even on the ship? What is the nature of this AI? And one of the things I really like about this book is that there's not a lot of just like explainer.

You've got to figure stuff out for yourself, which leaves mysteries. Why are the aliens attacking us? Like, why are they so grumpy? Are they interested in having a conversation? Or like, what is the AI on the ship? What is it doing? Why is it making these decisions? Why are the humans even on the ship?

It's pretty fascinating. Wait, there's nobody, like, in charge of the ship? Like, the humans are just passengers. Yeah, the ship is in charge of the ship. I mean, the humans have roles. They have to, like, do this and do that. But it becomes pretty clear that they're not actually necessary. And I think he's put the humans on board mostly to sell the war back to people on Earth.

So the humans are there, like, basically take pictures and, like, turn out Instagram stories so that the folks back on Earth feel invested in the war. Otherwise, the war is just sort of like our AI versus these weird, inscrutable aliens. Well, I'm all in favor of putting Instagram influencers on a spaceship and shooting them off to fight aliens. I think that would certainly improve our society here. Are you saying you want to send Kim Kardashian out to meet the aliens? I won't deny that I do. Or maybe she is an alien.

That would actually explain a lot. Or a robot. Yeah, that would explain a lot. room. Yeah. So humans are just walking around the spaceship doing tasks. Now, is this where the game Among Us came from? Like, is one of them an imposter?

None of them are imposters. They're all real people. But the story goes pretty deep into, like, what it's like to be them, what it's like to be on a tin can for six months far away from humanity, and to be on this ship where you might not even really be necessary. And also to be fighting these aliens and, like, what do they want and why are they attacking us? And it goes pretty deep into that and what it means to be fighting a war when the humans are not even the ones making the decisions about who to kill and where to go.

Oh, right. As it may happen here on Earth, like if we let AI, you know, drive the drones and stuff. Yeah, he's very clearly making a point about AI in weapons and AI in warfare. You know, is it a good idea to have the AI be doing these things because it's more efficient. It's obviously better than the humans at zapping the aliens. On the other hand, like, you know, who knows what it's doing? why? Why is it making these decisions? Does it really have our interests at heart?

Or the Mazdaq corporations that have funded it? Do they have interests which don't exactly support what the public wants? Yeah. And do we get to find out later what the aliens want? Or is that a spoiler alert? We come close to. There's sort of a moment of contact where one of the characters gets to talk to one of the aliens and sort of starts to maybe understand what they're doing and what they want.

And I think the way that Barry has pitched it is that it's essentially a confrontation between two forms of life and the way he looks at it life is conflict that everything on earth is constantly competing for resources and when two forms of life that occupy sort of the same niche come into contact they will instantly be in conflict they're sort of like driven by their genes so he sees like humans as just like the implementation of our DNA fighting to preserve and propagate our DNA and he imagines the aliens are just doing the same thing, whatever they use for code has created these bodies in order to propagate and reproduce that code.

I see. And then when does Will Smith come in? Does he come in on a spaceship, riding a horse? Well, let's get into the science of it. It sounds like there's some pretty interesting science going on here, AI for warfare and spitting mini black holes as a bullet. So let's get into that. But first, let's take a quick break.

December 29th, 1975, LaGuardia Airport. The holiday rush, parents hauling luggage, kids gripping their new Christmas toys. Then, at 6.33 p.m., everything changed. There's been a bombing at the TWA terminal. Apparently, the explosion actually impelled metal, glass. The injured were being loaded into ambulances, just a chaotic, chaotic scene. In its wake, a new kind of enemy emerged, and it was here to stay. Terrorism.

Law and Order Criminal Justice System is back. In Season 2, we're turning our focus to a threat that hides in plain sight. That's harder to predict and even harder to stop. Listen to the new season of Law and Order Criminal Justice System on the IHeart Radio, app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. My boyfriend's professor is way too friendly, and now I'm seriously suspicious. Well, wait a minute, Sam, maybe her boyfriend's just looking for extra credit. Well, Dakota, it's back to school week on the OK Storytime podcast, so we'll find out soon.

This person writes, my boyfriend has been hanging out with his young professor a lot. He doesn't think it's a problem, but I don't trust her. Now, he's insisting we get to know each other, but I just want her gone. Now hold up, isn't that against school policy? That sounds totally inappropriate. Well, according to this person, this is her boyfriend's former professor and they're the same age. It's even more likely that they're cheating. He insists there's nothing between them.

I mean, do you believe him? Well, he's certainly trying to get this person to believe him because he now wants them both to meet. So, do we find out if this person's boyfriend really cheated with his professor or not? To hear the explosive finale, listen to the OK Storytime podcast on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. Hey, sis, what if I could promise you you never had to listen to a condescending finance bro? Tell you how to manage your money again. Welcome to Brown Ambition. This is the hard part when you pay down those credit cards.

If you haven't gotten to the bottom of why you were racking up credit or turning to credit cards, you may just recreate the same problem a year from now. When you do feel like you are bleeding from these high interest rates, I would start shopping for a debt consolidation loan, starting with your local credit union, shopping around online, looking for some online lenders because they tend to have fewer fees and be more affordable. Listen, I am not here to judge. It is so expensive in these streets.

I 100% can see how in just a few months you can have this much credit card debt when it weighs on you. It's really easy to just like stick your head in the sand. It's nice and dark in the sand. Even if it's scary, it's not going to go away just because you're avoiding it. And in fact, it may get even worse. For more judgment-free money advice, listen to Brown Ambition on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. All right, we're talking about the book, Providence, by the author Max Barry,

who writes speculative fiction and science fiction, and has written a book about aliens coming to start some beef with the humans. That's right. It's not the sort of like interplanetary physics conference that I'm hoping for if we do meet the aliens. You probably, I wonder if you guys spit black holes at your conferences. A little bit probably, right? Hey, if somebody could show up and make black holes at a conference, they would be very popular. Ooh, make me one. I want to study one.

Depends in which direction he or she is spitting these black holes. I'd like one so I could power my black hole starship with it. Right, right, right. All right, let's talk about the science of this book, which sounds pretty interesting. So I guess, first of all, we're fighting this war with the aliens here in our solar system or does it spread out into the galaxy? It spreads out in the galaxy. We build these huge ships are called Providence Class ships. That's where the book gets its name. And they go out, they do these hard skips, these faster than light travel out to find the aliens to hunt them down. Humanity has

taken the first beating and the first contact, but now it's on the aggression. It wants to go out and to eradicate these aliens. What? And you know, it's interesting. It poses us as in conflict with these aliens. And as I was reading it, I was wondering, like, why do we have to eradicate those aliens? Or why are those aliens want to kill us? Like, why would aliens even want to kill us? And that's kind of part of the book, I imagine, right? Like you not knowing and you figuring that out? Yeah. And also sort of an extension of this question. It's natural for forms of life on Earth to be in conflict because there are limited resources. But then when you go out into space, like, man, there's plenty of room for everybody. And there are zillions of planets and huge blobs of ice or

any kind of mineral you want, do we really need to be in conflict? Isn't the galaxy big enough for two civilizations? But maybe we're just sort of like trapped into the modes of survival that we've developed on a planet where we're constantly in conflict and anybody who attacks us must be eradicated. And so it's an interesting question of like whether that really applies to a space civilization. I see. So they came to us. We were happily sitting around in our planet or did we already have like a multi-planet civilization?

No, we were basically just living on Earth. We had a few spaceships. It was early days in spacefaring. Sort of the way we are now. But we hadn't really like established a lot of colonies. But then this really fires up the space military industrial complex. And we develop a whole new class of warships, which gobble up huge fractions of our economy. So all of a sudden we develop AI and faster than light travel?

Yeah, absolutely. You know, when we are facing an existential threat, the scientists can do some amazing stuff. if they cut out their naps and they really get to work. Oh, man. But it makes me wonder, like, if aliens do come, would they just sort of follow a biological drive to meet and exterminate any competition? Or is it possible for us to sort of mentally and socially evolve to a point where we're like, hey, there's plenty of room in the galaxy.

Let's just have a nice coffee, right? It's not clear to me that if we meet aliens, they will naturally want to attack us. I imagine that 40% of us would want to build a wall. Yeah, it'll probably be partisan in the end, you know. Are the aliens, Democrats or Republicans, right? Yeah, I guess maybe pro-human or anti-alien. But I think there is something that he gets right, which is that aliens, if they do come, will be very alien. You know, I imagine some sort of like interplanetary physics conversation, but that's really very unrealistic.

It's very likely that if they come, we won't understand what they're doing or why they're doing it. And it'd be very hard to sort of drill down to understand their motivations. it can be hard to understand other people, even other people you've known for a long time. So the idea of understanding the motivations and the drives of a completely alien intelligent species seems pretty far out of our reach. So I think it's very likely that if aliens do come,

they'll be inscrutable in their motives. And you really do get a good sense of that in this book. You never really understand why the aliens are doing what they're doing. And nobody spends any time trying to figure this out? Where are the sociologists and the cultural anthropologists or alien trologists. Yeah, there are. And you hear internal debate

in some of the characters like, why are we trying to essentially commit genocide against this intelligent species? Is that the right thing to do? But then again, you're on this massive ship and that's the job of the ship and you're following orders.

And so there's some discussion about that. And, you know, I think Barry raises some questions about whether that's the appropriate response. But in the end, if it's killer, be killed, then humanity steps up and tries to do the killing. All right. There's some science in the book. book, Providence by Max Barry, and some of it has to do with spitting black holes, but there's also

something called the Violet Zone. What is that? At some point in the book, they lose contact with Earth because the ship goes into the Violet Zone. The Violet Zone is a place where you're just out of touch with Earth and there's no communication possible. And I think he's done this to sort of isolate the characters so they can't be supported and instructed by, you know, smart folks back on Earth and they sort of felt like they're alone. They're there with the AI. And at some point, of course, things break down. The AI isn't doing what it's supposed to do. And they're wondering, like, how should we solve this problem and the characters come into conflict with each other? A lot of interesting developments. I don't want to spoil for the future

readers. It's more of a plot device, you think, than any kind of meaningful science statement. Absolutely. And as you hear in my conversation with Max, he's very clear that he wanted this part of the plot. And he was like, I don't really care about the science of how this happens. So I'll just make something up. He totally owned it. Right, right. I wonder how often physicists say that. Well, I just needed something to make the equation balance, so I just made up this thing called the Higgs boson. That is essentially theoretical physics.

Yes, absolutely. They are unconstrained by reality. They just invent new ideas to fit what they need. And then we have to go out and check, like, well, that's a cool idea, but is it real? So absolutely, theoretical physicists are always creating stuff that suits their plot devices. All right. And so the other piece of science here is that the aliens somehow, spit black holes and they use them as bullets.

Like, that's how they kill you. They shoot black holes at you. Yeah, and they can shoot them at your ship and, you know, puncture your ship. And these little black holes, they're not just like bullets. They do pass through stuff and tear stuff up, but they also have intense gravitational fields. And so they, you know, disorganize the ship and they pull stuff into them. So they're pretty powerful. It's a pretty cool idea for a little weapon.

It sounds like a bad idea. Like if you shoot it, wouldn't you get sucked? into it, too. Yeah, you have to shoot it away from you at some velocity. It's not the kind of thing you can really think about too deeply scientifically because it doesn't really hold water. What do you mean? Like, how do you make a black hole inside you without having all that mass and energy already inside you? You'd need to be incredibly massive or have incredible energy stores to create the kind of energy density you need to make a black hole. Right. Yeah. It's like making a plot in which people shoot bullets. Where do the bullets come from and the metal for them? Yeah, exactly. but here the bullets, you know, have to have like incredible amounts of mass. You could make a black hole and you can make a black hole really, really small. There's no theoretical lower limit there. The problem is to have a black hole that's effective and it has like powerful gravity, like the strength of Earth's gravity, right, even which is not that powerful, but pretty

effective. You need to create these black holes to have significant mass. So I did the calculation and like for you to have the power of Earth's gravity and be one meter away from a black hole, that black hole would have to have the mass of 150 billion kilograms. So you have to compact 150 billion kilograms of mass into a tiny dot in order to have the same power of Earth's gravity just a meter away from the black hole. Wow. That would be a lot.

And these aliens can like shoot it like a machine gun or is it like a more like a death star kind of takes a while for the engineers to pull the levers and... They can shoot them out. It's not like a machine gun, but I don't know how many they have. inside them, but it's not like it takes 10 minutes to warm up, you know. In the moment of first contact, they open the latch, they come inside, and then they just sort of like start black holeing people. What? And so, okay, so you shoot a black hole and how big are these black holes? They're tiny, you know, they're infinitesimal essentially. They're, you know, less than a millimeter

across. Oh, less than a million. But they have about the mass of a planet. Well, he doesn't specify the mass of these things, but I did that little calculation. And in order to have the same gravity as a planet, then they would have to be like 150 billion kilograms. in mass. And so it doesn't seem to me at all feasible that these aliens that are walking around are holding 150 billion kilograms of mass inside them. Oh, right. Because if it's inside them before, they would also be pretty heavy. Exactly. Exactly. And the thing about these black holes is that they come out and they don't just pass through you, but they gravitationally attract you. So they have to be massive enough to have that gravity. And you know, if it's just like a one millimeter blob

that has, you know, the same amount of stuff as one millimeter size rock, there's no gravity there. Like the gravity there is so negligible you would never feel it. So you have to make it so compact and so dense that it's essentially physically impossible for an alien of human scale to have that much energy

or stuff inside them to make that black hole. So then you shoot the black hole and like fast or is it like floating out away from you? Yeah, it's pretty quick. I mean, it's not like light speed or anything but it's also not a bullet speed. But it just sort of like drifts forward and passes through stuff and it does a lot of damage.

Now, would a black hole like that lasts very long or does it evaporate or does it keep going forever? And then basically you created a black hole in the universe? Oh, that's a great question. Now, black holes do evaporate, we think. There's something called hawking radiation

where a black hole can give energy to quantum particles just outside of it and lose some of its energy in doing so. And if those particles then drift away, the black holes effectively lost some of its mass. This is black hole evaporation. It actually happens much more rapidly for small black holes than for big black holes. So for small black holes like these, they do evaporate.

But these would last a long time. Like a black hole, the size of the Empire State Building, for example, that would last several years. And this is 147 billion kilograms, so substantially bigger than the Empire State Building. So these should last several years, yeah. Oh, wow. All right. Well, and you talk to Max Berry, right, Daniel, you, Zoom or Skyped him?

I reached out to Max and he was very happy to talk to us about the science of his novel. Cool. And did you tell him that it was totally implausible? I let him know we'd be talking about the science of his novel and he said, that sounds like something I'd be totally out of my depth for, but I'm totally up for it. He's like, just don't shoot any black holes in me. No, he was a great sport. Cool.

All right. Well, here is Daniel's interview with science fiction author, Max Barry, reader of the book, Providence. Okay, then it's my pleasure to introduce to the podcast, Max Barry, author of Providence. Max, say hello to our listeners. Yeah, hello listeners. Thank you for having me. And thanks very much for being on the program.

Tell us a little bit about how you got into science fiction writing. It seems like a small departure from some of your earlier novels like a lexicon or company. Yeah, look, it's funny because my first. first ever novel was, it's called Syrup, and it's a satire, basically, a comedy about a guy who works in the marketing industry. And it doesn't really have anything to do with science fiction at all, except for the fact, I guess, that the characters make a science fiction movie at some point during the book. And then the second one was Jennifer Government, which is probably the book I'm best known for, and that is science fiction without the aliens and spaceships and futuristic

technologies, right? So it's an alternate present kind of science fiction novel where, you know, the Social structures are different. It's set in a ultra-capitalist society where Australia is a part of the United States and there's basically no government and everything is run by the free market. So it's, yeah, it's science fiction of ideas rather than of objects or things. So anyway, I was invited along to a science fiction con here in my hometown of Melbourne, Australia, not too long after that book was published. And I felt like a bit of a fraud because I had these two books and only one was even sci-fi and I'm there on panels

with all these actual science fiction writers who have produced their 13th novel in, you know, the ring arc cycle. And the guy said, no, no, it's fine because, you know, there's Jennifer Government. And then with syrup, you know, even though it's not science fiction, it feels like it was written by a sci-fi fan. And I was really pleased to hear that

because, yeah, I have been a sci-fi fan my whole life. It was basically all I read in my teen years. That and horror. I was really into that, into sci-fi and horror. with a bit of fantasy probably when I was younger. But, yeah, I have this real background in a lot of classic sci-fi, especially, the sort of Isaac Asimov and Arthur C. Clarke and Larry Niven, all these sort of golden age sci-fi novels were part of my diet growing up.

So, yeah, I've just always been into that, and it sort of leaks through in my books, even when I don't really set out to write a sci-fi novel. So help us orient you a little bit in the sort of space of science fiction writers and answer a few questions about the science fiction genre. are you of the opinion that a Star Trek transporter will actually kill you and then clone you on the other side, or does it literally transport your atoms from one place to another? Yeah, I mean, it's got to transport information, right?

There'd be no sense in transporting atoms, and it would be kind of meaningless, too, wouldn't it? Because they're just atoms. It's not like they're imbued with the soul of you in your molecule. So, yeah, it surely has to be murdering you and then rebuilding an identical you on the other side. So then would you be willing to get into a transporter if somebody built one? No, no, I wouldn't. I mean, that's a death sentence. I mean, it's terrific for my clone on the other side, but that's a different person.

All right. So then what technology that you see in science fiction would you most like to see come reality? Oh, wow. Yeah, I mean, to completely contradict what I just said, like something that would actually take me to long distances would be fantastic. If I could get the teleportation without the murdering, that would be terrific. Yeah, I mean, it's a thing, the vast distance of the universe is something I actually bumped up again against with Providence. Because it is my classic sci-fi story where it's set on a spaceship.

It involves aliens and all of these sort of really traditional space opera elements that I really loved as a kid. But the thing, and I've tried to transport that into a really plausible world. to make the technology work like I think it really would and the AI function like I think an AI would function. But the distance thing is a real problem. At some point, I think when you're writing a book like this, unless you want to get into, unless you want to write a story about the technology of faster than light space travel, you have to hand wave at some point and say in this universe, there is faster than light travel. I'm not sure exactly how it works, but people can get from here to there in a short amount of time, like within a generation. Otherwise, you know,

You have no story to tell. So then what is your personal answer to the Fermi paradox if the universe is so likely to host life? Where is everybody? Are the distances just too vast and the speed of light too slow? Right. I have to believe that there's something out there. I guess I tend to think that there must be something out there, but maybe it doesn't fit neatly

within our pretty narrow ideas of what life is because we tend to imagine everything experiencing the world the same way we do. We tend to think that unless something fits into our own idea of what a person thinks like or what a life form should look like, then it doesn't really count. And there's really no reason to believe that there isn't a vast range of other types of things out there that would shock the hell out of us if we actually encountered them, but wouldn't turn out to be the kind of Star Trek alien where it's like us with bumpy ridges on the forehead or, you know, a different shade color ear or something like that. So then let's turn to the topic of your novel Providence, which I just read and thoroughly enjoyed. So congratulations on a really wonderful exciting space opera with lots of really fascinating themes in it. And something that I really liked about the novel was that you have the excitement of meeting aliens, but then basically everything goes wrong. Is that something that you were trying to capture in the book, something that you were trying to explore?

Yeah, that's certainly the concept that first got me thinking that it might be an interesting story to tell. I guess it sort of stem from the idea that when we used to go off to fight wars, it used to be a very personal experience, used to be, you know, a man with a gun or not even that in some cases, up against another man with a weapon. And it has evolved because of technology to the point where it's, nowadays, it's a lot more like a person in a dark room with a screen guiding what's happening. And future wars may be fought with, you know, humans well back from the front line. science. And, you know, this was really impressed upon me watching the Gulf Wars and the way that warfare seemed to operate now, where you had this sort of asymmetric warfare between a force that was quite technologically advanced and one that was less so. So, yeah, and we value life differently in that sort of situation. So the loss of a soldier nowadays is quite shocking compared to

what it would have been, you know, in decades gone by. So, yeah, I was thinking about how this might work. And the situation that interested me was the idea that you have, say, a crew on a battleship as happens in Providence. So there is an amazing warship that has sucked the resources of Earth Dry to build. And it's fantastic. It's got these incredible weapons. It's run by this incredible AI. The functions of the actual four humans on board are pretty limited because, you know, they can't do a whole lot compared to the capabilities of this battleship. The interesting thing there, of course, is like, okay, so what happens when things start to go?

wrong and these people who were maybe there to basically to look good for the humans back on earth who are trying to fund this war effort now actually have to do their jobs but do you think it's sort of inevitable that if we meet an alien race that we will not understand them and essentially be launched into war just because it's impossible to sympathize or to communicate or to understand each other if as you say an alien race is very likely to be extremely alien right okay i think there's a couple of things there. First of all, I think any encounter with an alien race is going to be super disappointing from our point of view just because we, you know, we're expecting something like us and it will be something that is so different that we will think, like, it won't be cool

in any of the metrics that we rate as humans as being, has been interesting. So, you know, it'll be a type of life form that does things, yeah, maybe it grows by consuming a particular element and it doesn't seem intelligent at all to us, but it's extremely successful in terms of, you know, what it's doing to survive and multiply. The second part is, and this is a big theme of the book, the idea that there is conflict between life forms at every level, and there is a conflict between, I guess most obviously, in our own species, humans fight each other,

but there is also conflicts between the genes that make up our DNA. There's been a battle for territory on our DNA that goes back, however long. And this is a battle that we're completely unaware of, except it does really guide a lot of our behaviour. We do care for families and raise them and protect our kin and try to defeat the others who have different DNA. And all that's kind of guided by these instructions that we are only vaguely aware of, but we're basically programmed in a way. We're programs, but we have free will at the same time, which is another interesting concept. So yeah, the idea that there is, this inherent conflict between all living things and that the universe is, at some level,

this pretty bleak battleground where nothing matters except survival. I thought that was an interesting foundation for the story. And on top of that, you have these characters. There's four in particular who spend most of the book, just the four of them. And they, you know, they're people. So we go into this universe, this called uncaring universe of physics and logic. And we actually bring stories to it and we bring value and we create these really warm emotions. And yeah, I guess value is the best way to put it. We sort of create things out of nothing just by our perceptions of what we care about. So I think it's just a lovely contrast where you can have the pretty practical, brutal reality of the universe on one hand.

And then you have a more personal set of personal journeys going through it. I don't disagree with you, but I don't think that answer is going to get you nominated to be. among our contingent to go meet the aliens if we ever do meet them. Right, yeah. No, I don't think I'd like to either. I'd love to see it, but maybe from a distance, a safe distance. I'm actually more concerned about what we're going to do to ourselves with AI than what aliens are going to do to us.

All right, we have lots more to talk about, but first, let's take a quick break. December 29th, 1975, LaGuardia Airport. The holiday rush, parents hauling luggage, kids gripping their new Christmas toys. Then, at 6.33 p.m., everything changed. There's been a bombing at the TWA terminal. Apparently the explosion actually impelled metal, glass. The injured were being loaded into ambulances. Just a chaotic, chaotic scene.

In its wake, a new kind of enemy emerged, and it was here to stay. terrorism law and order criminal justice system is back in season two we're turning our focus to a threat that hides in plain sight that's harder to predict and even harder to stop listen to the new season of law and order criminal justice system on the iheart radio app apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts my boyfriend's professor is way too friendly and now I'm seriously suspicious. Oh, wait a minute, Sam. Maybe her boyfriend's just looking for extra credit.

Well, Dakota, it's back to school week on the OK Storytime podcast, so we'll find out soon. This person writes, my boyfriend has been hanging out with his young professor a lot. He doesn't think it's a problem, but I don't trust her. Now, he's insisting we get to know each other, but I just want her gone. Now, hold up. Isn't that against school policy? That sounds totally inappropriate. Well, according to this person, this is her boyfriend's former professor and they're the same age.

And it's even more likely that they're cheating. He insists there's nothing between them. I mean, do you believe him? Well, he's certainly trying to get this person to believe him because he now wants them both to meet. So, do we find out if this person's boyfriend really cheated with his professor or not? To hear the explosive finale, listen to the OK Storytime podcast on the Iheart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast.

I had this, like, overwhelming sensation that I had to call her right then. And I just hit call. I said, you know, hey, I'm Jacob Schick. I'm the CEO of One Tribe Foundation. And I just wanted to call on and let her know. there's a lot of people battling some of the very same things you're battling, and there is help out there. The Good Stuff podcast, Season 2, takes a deep look into One Tribe Foundation, a non-profit fighting suicide in the veteran community. September is National Suicide Prevention Month, so join host Jacob and Ashley Schick as they bring you to the front lines of One Tribe's mission.

I was married to a combat army veteran, and he actually took his own life to suicide. One Tribe saved my life twice. There's a lot of love that flows through this place, and it's sincere. Now it's a personal mission. I don't have to go to any more funerals, you know. I got blown up on a React mission. I ended up having amputation below the knee of my right leg and a traumatic brain injury because I landed on my head. Welcome to Season 2 of The Good Stuff.

Listen to the Good Stuff podcast on the Iheart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. And we're back and I'm talking to Max Ben. author of the science fiction novel, Providence. Well, something I thought was fascinating in the book was that moment of first contact, there's hope. The humans are not necessarily just pulling out their weapons and blasting. They're wondering, what are these like? Are they going to be friendly?

And then they sort of met with this immediate assault of this deadly attack. And something that drove me through the book was wondering, why are these aliens trying to kill us? And I hear what you're saying that life is in conflict always. But isn't that sort of on a planetary scale where we're completely, competing for resources and we're sort of trapped in. It makes me wonder, like, this alien species, why don't they just go somewhere else and find some empty planet?

Is it really necessary? Do you think for life forms to battle it out on the scale of galaxies or the universe where things are just so vast and so separated and so rich? Yeah, that's a great question. I think, no, there's not a need. There is a kind of bias towards conflict is maybe the best way to put it. It doesn't have to be resolved by conflict. And with this story, it begins in a fairly traditional way, I guess,

where there is basically a war between humans and aliens, and the aliens seem hostile and aggressive just because they are. And throughout the book, that question gets explored a little bit. And the different characters have different opinions about it as well. So for one of them, for Jackson, for example, it doesn't really matter why the aliens behave the way they do or why they're aggressive or what their aims are. It's just the fact that they attacked us.

we need to wipe them out. End of story. For others, they can try to imagine what the motivations of, so the alien race is called the salamanders, what the salamanders are actually, you know, thinking and what motivates them and try to tease out, you know, how did this conflict happen? Does it even need to happen? Do we need to be at war with this race or not? So, yeah, that is a question that gets explored a little bit. And, you know, without giving away the answer to it, I hope that it's resolved in a satisfying way but an unusual way too I hope my answer to that question is a pretty practical one and a pretty unsentimental one but yeah it's it felt true to me I thought it was really well done the way you have sort of this unthinking or ununderstandable alien war that you're

fighting or this ununderstandable enemy you're fighting and then the humans have to build essentially an ununderstandable undecipherable attack AI to fight that that war for them. And so you end up with this two sides, neither of which you understand, even if you're on one of them. Yeah, yeah, that's exactly right. And when I was tackling the idea of a story, it's a war story essentially, the question is how do you do that? Because war is too big to understand. You can, it happens on many different levels. At the top level, you can sort of understand maybe where the big forces are moving and which side is ascendant. But, you know, that's a really detached way of looking at war. The way that really matters to people is what's

happening to the individuals, you know, what's the individual's experience of war? But then their experience is only a tiny little slice of it. So I did hope that the feeling that you get from this book is that there are a lot of different levels of conflict going on at once, and some are moving faster than others. But there is a conflict at a very deep level. There is also the individuals who are soldiers in a war, who are fighting the most obvious form of it, but they are also really just tiny little players in the larger conflict because they are, you know, as you say, they're quite limited in what they can do, especially compared to the capabilities of the battleship run by the AI that they're inside. So yeah, and what is actually

happening with that AI, of course, is another whole area of the book. Yeah, and I love that you didn't just explain it to us, that you left in a mystery, we had to try to deciphered ourselves. That's one of my funnest elements in well-written novels. But let me ask you about the science of this universe that you've built. And so you have a few elements in this universe. You have faster than light travel. You call them skips. You have this region where no communication is possible, the violet zone. Did you have these ideas and then sort of build the story in that universe you created? Or did you sort of like make up physics as you went along in order to enable the story you wanted to tell. Yeah, probably closer to the second one. Whenever a writer approaches

a story, they have to decide which parts of it are the most interesting to them. So for some writers, they're more into the actual technology, like the hardware and what it does and how it works. Others are more into, you know, assume that this does exist and however it works, you know, we don't really mind so much, but let's look more at how it affects the choices people make and how it affects their behavior or how it affects society. So, you know, it's hard to do everything at once. And at some point, you've got to really decide where your focus is. So for me, it was the people, it was the characters and, you know, the particular experience that they go through. The hardware and the technology and the science of it, I'm a big fan. And I enjoy that stuff in the stuff I read, but not quite as much as I enjoy a novel with characters that I really fall in love with and identify with. That will carry me along on a story. So, so yeah, that was my focus. So there. Yeah, the skips, the faster than light travel, as I sort of mentioned earlier, is absolutely a, you know, I did not want to go into how that was possible because, yeah, it becomes such a distraction.

Unless your book is about that and is about the technology, then, yeah, it doesn't, it just slows everything down. So, you know, ironically, because I'm trying to speed things up. So they can travel faster than light just so they can remove themselves from the solar system without everybody growing old in the meantime. What was the other one that you mentioned? The other violet? You have the violet zone. Yeah, yeah. Well, again, it's just, you know, mainly because the idea is that you get these four people on a battleship.

And then they have to figure out what to do when the technology begins to fail them. And, you know, that is the core premise of the book. So there has to be a way for that to happen. But there's a few other things about, like, exactly what the weapons are and how the defenses work where, you know, I'll reference a few things. But, yeah, it is. It's not a book that describes how the technology works down to the technical level. Like for me, it has to make sense. It has to be plausible enough.

And at some point, you know, I assume you reach a certain qualification of reader where no matter what I do, it's not going to be quite good enough because the maths and the physics just don't quiet that up. Although, like my next book, which is about parallel dimensions and involves a little bit of like multiverse thinking, I've turned out to be fantastic because there is such a wide disagreement among experts that it seems like almost anything really could be possible there. So I feel a bit more confident with that one. But with faster than light travel and stuff like that, it's a bit more limited. So yeah, the technology I think is, you know, it's stuff. I just love the sort of feeling that you have a character inside a world where they're surrounded by technology.

And this like really appeals to me just on a like a primal level. It's sort of the inner geek inside me. But the idea of being on a battleship where, you know, everything around you is designed for a purpose and, you know, works in a certain way because there is, you know, a purpose to it. I just find, like, I find that really cool. Like, that appeals to me in the sense of being a kid, you know, 13 years old at home, just hoping a spaceship would land in my backyard one day and take me off to the stars.

So, yeah, that environment I like. I enjoyed this little tidbit that the salamanders can spit these cork-gluon pellets. Tell me about how you came up with that or where that comes from. Yeah, it came fairly late. Like the enemy in the book, I hadn't really figured out until, yeah, probably later than you would expect. I got the main plot and the characters, which was the main thing for me, like who these people were, why they were there, and how they would interact.

So it was after that that I decided, okay, let's figure out who the enemy is and how they fight. And so, yeah, I had the idea of them being able to manipulate gravity, essentially, and that they can spit these incredibly dense particles that act as many black holes in that if they pass close by you, then you experience very different forces on different parts of your body that tear it apart. So, yeah, that was like just sort of, you know, a thing that I came up with fairly late. And it turns out to be a reasonably memorable part of the book, I think, for people who read it. But yeah, it wasn't my, I didn't set out to write a story about black hole spitting aliens. That actually came kind of late. Well, it made it pretty fun. Awesome.

Well, thanks very much for answering all of our questions. Can you tell us a little bit more about your next project when we can expect to see it out? Right. Well, I guess I can. And this is an exclusive because I've told nobody this. I only just heard yesterday from my publisher that it's okay to mention it. So I haven't even put it on my website yet. But yeah, so the next book after Providence is the 22 murders of Madison May. It is about a serial killer who murders the same woman over and over in parallel worlds. And it is out July next year. And I'm really hoping that we can have a COVID-19 vaccine before then so I can leave my own country and tour rounds, which I missed out on this time with Providence. My book tour was supposed to happen on

March 31st this year and the world shut down before I could leave the country. So, yeah, with luck, I'll get out there next year. All right. Pretty fun conversation. You guys talked about a lot of things. Yeah, we had a really fun conversation. He's obviously a guy who's thought about this stuff pretty deeply and has loss of interests. And so we just sort of let the conversation take us where it went. One of the things that he seems really interested in is this conflict between life forms and how that plays out across planetary boundaries. So that was a lot of fun. Yeah, it's interesting. He has such a pessimistic view about aliens. you know like he said aliens will be disappointing and unfriendly most likely yeah well he's probably right

you know our fantasies about aliens are just that fantasies and most likely the universe won't provide friendly aliens with lots of insights into the nature of the universe and granting us technology most likely they'll be weird and they'll be frustrating and disappointing but i think in the long run you know the longer arc of this human alien interaction will eventually be positive because we will learn learn from them what it's like to be an intelligent species that's not human. Right. Well, anything that causes us to send our influencers on a spaceship far away sounds like a net positive for humanity. Even if it costs trillions of dollars, that makes it worth it.

Well, I don't know what would be worse, Daniel. What do you think? Would it be worth to meet aliens and find them disappointing and unfriendly or to meet aliens and have them find us disappointing and unfriendly? What would be worse? Oh, no. That would be terrible. We're, like, desperate to hang out and they just keep ignoring our texts. We're going to ghost us.

Like, hello, he, oh, never mind. See you never. If they quickly discover that we have nothing to offer scientifically because they're so far ahead of us and they just sort of leave us alone and ignore us forever, oh, that would be torture. To know that there are answers out there that people could give them to you and then to not have access, oh, that would be torture. Yeah, imagine if they met us and they were like, oh, what a cute childlike fascination with physics. have. They just pat us on the head and move on.

All right. Well, if you're interested, the book is called Providence and the author is called Max Barry. Check out his book and other works that he's done. I highly recommend it and he's a nice guy, so support his work. Yeah, great. Well, thanks for joining us. We hope you enjoyed that. See you next time.

Thanks for listening. And remember that Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe is a. production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from IHeartRadio, visit the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. December 29th,

1975, LaGuardia Airport. The holiday rush. Parents hauling luggage, kids gripping their new Christmas toys. Then everything changed. There's been a bombing at the TWA terminal. Just a chaotic, chaotic scene. In its wake, a new kind of enemy emerged, terrorism. Listen to the new season of Law and Order Criminal Justice System

on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. My boyfriend's professor is way too friendly. I'm seriously suspicious. Wait a minute, Sam. Maybe her boyfriend's just looking for extra credit. Well, Dakota, luckily, it's back to school week on the OK Storytime podcast, so we'll find out soon. This person writes, my boyfriend's been hanging out with his young professor a lot. He doesn't think it's a problem, but I don't trust her.

Now he's insisting we get to know each other, but I just want her gone. Hold up. Isn't that against school policy? That seems inappropriate. Maybe find out how it ends by listening to the OK Storytime podcast on the IHeart Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. Tune in to All the Smoke Podcast, where Matt and Stacks sit down with former first lady, Michelle Obama. Folks find it hard to hate up close. And when you get to know people and you're sitting in their kitchen tables and they're talking like we're talking.

You know, you hear our story, how we grew up, how I grew up. And you get a chance for people to unpack and get beyond race. All the Smoke featuring Michelle Obama. To hear this podcast and more, open your free Eyeheart Radio app, search all the smoke and listen. now. This is an IHeart podcast.