Instant Genius - There is no Plan B for planet Earth – Lord Martin Rees

Episode Date: November 21, 2018

Astronomer Royal Lord Martin Rees explains how unless we make significant changes now, the prospects for the human species are beginning to look bleak. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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When I said there's no plan B, that's because I don't think it ever makes sense to have mass emigration to Mars because dealing with climate change on the earth is a doddle compared to terraforming Mars to make it habitable. You're listening to the Science Focus podcast from the BBC Focus magazine team.

With the UK's best-selling science and technology monthly, available in print and in several digital formats throughout the world. Find out more at sciencefocus.com or look out for us in your app store. Hello and welcome to the Science Focus podcast. I'm Jason Goodyear, commissioning editor of BBC Focus magazine. People in the middle ages rarely thought about life beyond the next generation. Yet they still built beautiful cathedrals that took hundreds of years to complete. In the 21st century, we know that life on earth will continue long into the future.

But what is this future we're building for generations ahead of us? Should we work on technologies that will one day create a permanent human base on Mars? Should we concentrate on climate change here on Earth? What does a future governed by artificial intelligence mean for our livelihoods? These are the big questions facing our species, and indeed all other inhabitants of planet Earth, which Astronomer Royal, Lord Martin Rees, begins to answer in his new book on the future prospects for humanity.

He talks to ScienceFocus.com editor Alexander McNamara, about taxing robots, terraforming Mars and tackling climate change. And remember, if you like what you hear, then please rate, review and share with anybody you think might enjoy our podcast. Also, if there's anybody you'd like us to speak to here or a topic you want us to cover, then let us know on Twitter at at Science Focus. Obviously, a lot of what we see in the news can be quite bleak.

Should we be more positive for the prospects of humanity? The way I describe myself as being a technical optimist, but a political pessimist. As we all know, our everyday life today depends on technology, and that's been a huge boon, and it's going to develop far faster. But on the other hand, there's a big gap between the way the world is and the way it could be, and that's a symptom of political failure. So I think we have to make sure that we can harness all these new developments in a beneficial way. Otherwise, we won't be able to adequately take advantage of the huge benefits in health, agriculture, and technology in other respects.

So what are these developments that have the potential to really push us forward as a civilization? I think one of the most important, actually, is carbon-free energy. We all know that greenhouse warming is a serious issue and has to be dealt with in the next couple of decades. And one of the things I emphasize in the book is the need to accelerate research and development into all kinds of carbon-free energy so that we can bring down the cost more quickly. The problem is that of course countries like India where people now depend on burning stoves of wood and dung, they need electricity and they clearly ought to have electricity and their temptation now be to buy coal-fired power stations, which would be bad for the

the world and the climate. So the aim should be to bring down the cost of renewables so that India can leapfrog directly to them and other developing countries as well. So I would say that that's a kind of technology where accelerated R&D program will be highly beneficial for the world and of course offer huge opportunities for advanced countries to lead in technology. So is that something that countries like India and the developing nations should be taken on themselves or is there a role that, you know, the Western technologically more developed countries, is there something that they should be doing? Well, I think it's in our interest to do it for our own sake.

And of course, there will be an expanded market if we can do this ahead of what the Indians themselves do. Clearly, they will be able to do something themselves. But I think the important point is this is a one win-win situation in the climate debate where it's good for the developed countries, if they can pioneer the technology. and good for everyone if we can bring down their costs and apply them, and therefore we won't need to ban carbon-generating fuels because people will choose not to use them if, in fact, the others alternative cheaper.

So is there something there that's stopping us at the moment, so we do have renewable energy that it is becoming more common around the world? Is there a reason why it's not getting as far as other nations? Well, only 2% of publicly funded R&D is in the clean energy. And why is that not closer to the amount spent on health or defence, for instance? I think we could, without the nations, accelerate this. And indeed, there was a resolution after the Paris conference in 2015 that nations should try and double their publicly funded R&D.

And some private investors like Bill Gates pledged several billion dollars more. So there is a push to enhance this R&D. And is that the sort of thing that's going to essentially solve the problems that we have or is there a lot more that we should be concerned about? Well, this would obviously allow us to have a low-carbon energy generation and that should remove the more serious threats of climate change by the end of a century. So that's one obvious thing. But of course there are many other technologies which can be a benefit to the world

which are advancing fast. Do you have examples of them? Well, I mean, obviously everyone knows about IT technology and health, and genetics is leading to improvement. But, of course, there are downsides to all these technologies. We know that IT has a downside of cyber attacks, and, of course, there's a risk of a misuse of genetics and molecular biology in order to generate bioweapons and all that

and also do things which are ethically ambiguous. So the way how I see that is you've got the carbon-free energy that is a long-term goal, as well as the other ones, as you say, like the bio-weapons, they seem quite immediate. Does that make them more immediately pressing, and that's why research is going into that? Well, I think that's true, that the climate issue is long-term, And of course, the reason it's hard to get climate issues up the agenda is that, of course,

politicians and the public tend to focus on the local and the immediate rather than something which affects people in distant parts of the world 50 years from now. But, of course, we do need to think about that long time scale because we need to pay an insurance premium now to avoid disasters in the second half of the century. So that's why climate is hard to deal with. But as you say, the issues stemming from advances in genetics are short term. The benefits are more immediate and also the risks are immediate. The risks, of course, stem from the fact that there's tremendous scope for error

and there's also scope for a few individuals to misuse these technologies. Is there something that we can do to sort of protect ourselves from these people? Well, obviously, there's a tremendous amount of effort going into discussing regulation. There has been ever since the dawn of Electrobology, when there was a famous conference in Asilamar in the 1970s, when people decided what sort of experiments could be done in the techniques of recombent DNA, which were new at that time, and there have been similar discussions more recently with these more powerful techniques, of inter-academy dialogues and all that sort of thing, and regulations on ethical grounds. So we need all that.

But the reason I'm a bit worried is that even if we have these regulations, enforcing them is very hard. Misuse of biological techniques can be done by a small group of people or an individual in the kind of lab that exists in universities and many industries. And my concern is that unlike at the time of the Assyllamar conference in the 1970s, these are globally understood techniques. There are strong commercial pressures. and I worry that anything that can be done, will be done somewhere by someone. And entirely effective regulation, I suspect, is as hopeless as global regulation of the drug laws or the tax laws. We know how hopeless that's been.

Does that mean that there needs to be a sort of a global effort to make sure that these things don't happen? Well, there has to be, but I'm saying even if there is a global effort, it's not clear how effective it'll be. And that, I think, is one of the most intractable problems. and of course to reduce the risk, there's going to be a tension between privacy, security and liberty. It seems to me that in that sort of case that it's just small entities that could put the entirety of our civilisations at risk. That seems, as you say, quite pessimistic in a way. Well, this is a new feature of these powerful technologies. We've already seen that a few people, even one person, can produce a cyber attack,

which can have cascading consequences even globally. And similarly, bio could go out of control. So I think this is a new feature of the technologies that we have now. And this is one of the main themes of my book to ask how we can cope in a world where the technologies empower small groups and individuals in a way that wasn't possible before. I mean, I like to say that the global village will have his village idiots, but they will have a global range, which they didn't in the past. So are there ways that we are able to deal with this, as you mentioned?

Well, I think we've got to do our best and make people aware of them. And the purpose of my book is to make people aware of these threats. But as I say, I think we'll have a bumpy ride through the century because of these issues. And as you said earlier, I think the bio and cyber and AI issues are more near. term than dealing with the climate, although we don't have to worry about climate and ecological tipping points linked to it. So you mentioned quite a few times in the book that there's essentially no plan B for the planet, which is one of the reasons why we have to sort of really focus on these problems head-on at the

moment. If we sort of step aside from that, are there any reasons why, you know, at the moment, there's quite a lot of us searching in the skies and looking up in. to space. Should we be putting so much of an effort on space or should we be concentrating more the homegrown problems? Well, I think space technology, of course, is another important technology alongside the ones we've discussed. And as we know, we depend on it every day for communications, sat nav, environmental monitoring, etc. And of course, scientifically, we depend on because of the ability to observe the universe clearly above the atmosphere and we've had probes

to the other plans of a solar system. So all that is a huge benefit and this has been transformative in the last 40 years and it's very cost effective. But I think perhaps you have at the back of your mind the question of manned spaceflight. And here I think as robots get better, then the practical case of sending people in space, the need for people in space gets less and less. We can imagine robotic probes going to all the plans of our solar system. We can imagine robotic fabricators building huge lightweight structures in space or maybe on the moon. And this doesn't need people at all. So I think if people are going to go into space, and indeed I hope they will, they will do this simply as an adventure rather than for any practical goal.

And for that reason, I personally think it should be left to the private sector. The reason for that is that the private sector can take high risks of a kind that NASA or ESA can't if it's sending civilians who are public employees into space. We know that NASA had two failures of the shuttle in 135 launches and each was a big national trauma. On the other hand, if people like Suranoff finds who drag the sleds across the Antarctic in winter or people who fall to be solidly from high-outry balloons and things like that, or mountaineers, they're prepared to take high wrists. And they're the kind of people, I think, who will go into space as an adventure and who will perhaps settle on Mars later in this century.

But there will be a sort of independent group of pioneers. I think when I said there's no plan B, that's because I don't think it ever makes sense to have mass emigration to Mars, because dealing with climate change on the Earth is a dodle compared to terraforming Mars to make it habitable. But on the other hand, I think the people who go to Mars will be important in the long run for evolution and our species, because they will, of course, be in a place to which they're badly adapted. We're adapted to the earth, we're not adapted to the gravity or the low density atmosphere of Mars. And so they will have every incentive to use all the techniques of genetic modification and cyborg techniques to adapt themselves and their progeny to this alien environment. We will regulate these things on Earth, I hope, on prudential and ethical grounds, but they're away from the regulators.

And so I think my scenario is that in the next century there will be people, on Mars and they will become what I call post-humans. They'll be different from human beings. And of course, whether they remain organic or whether the machines take over with electronic brains, we don't know. But in the latter case, then, of course, they wouldn't want to be on a panace at all. They wouldn't need an atmosphere. They might prefer zero-g.

And so if there's going to be an expiration beyond our solar system, it won't be humans doing it. It'll be these electronic descendants, perhaps not directly. of us on Earth, but of the crazy people away from regulations who are living on Mars. So essentially, the prospects for humanity in one sort of direction will be that it's not humanity as we know it? Well, that won't be humanity as we know it's going into space, but I hope that humanity as we know it will survive and flourish here on Earth.

And of course, that is what can happen if we use all these new technologies wisely. So how should we be, with these new technologies, how should we prioritising what we invest in and what we essentially see as our ultimate goal for them? Well, I think first of all, humanity doesn't have to have an overall ultimate goal. We've got to let all ideas flourish and all stars of life flourish. But I think, obviously, we know how transformative AI and computers have been in the last 10 or 20 years. That's been the fastest transformation of any new technology. And that's got a long way to go. If AI improves, then, of course, that's going to lead to a redeployment of the labor force.

And I think the answer to that is to fund huge numbers of better paid, more dignified jobs as things like carers, teaching assistants, gardeners. The kind of jobs that can't be mechanized so easily. We ought to provide work of that kind by taxing the robots and those who own them. So I think we have to have a redeployment of effort and also to ensure that we have a society where people can flourish and the variety is allowed. And this will be beneficial if we make the optimum use of AI and also obviously health technologies. Incidentally, there's a problem with health, as I see it, which is this. that in the last hundred years, I think we can say that health technology has been an equalizing force because it's allowed poor countries to catch up in life expectancy, etc.

So it's been a good force in that sense. And there's a risk now, if the politics goes wrong, that these new techniques of possible human enhancement, etc., could be high. hijacked by an elite which can afford them and leave the rest behind. And the danger of that is it leads to a more fundamental kind of inequality than those as we have now. And so I think a political challenge will be to ensure that it doesn't happen and that these powerful technologies aren't used to give a small subset of fortunate people fundamental edge over the rest of us. Do you think that there's a way how we'll be able to make sure that, you know, avoid that

situation? Well, it's a political decision, isn't it? And I think we know already there are some strands of politics that support greater equality and others that don't. We've got to make sure that there's a realization that there's an ethical imperative to have greater equality. With that ethical imperative, are all of these things sort of subject to what, you know, we believe, the people who are making these decisions, essentially the scientist developing things, they're the ones deciding what counts as a positive outcome for humans. Well, I would disagree with what you say. I mean, the scientists are the people who generate the background knowledge for the technology.

But the scientists and technologists should not be the people who have sole control over how these things are used because scientists have special expertise, but they have no greater wisdom outside that sphere of expertise. And so any decision which affects the lifestyle of ordinary people has been made by politicians and the public because it involves ethics, economics, etc., as well as just technology. And I think this is crucially important. But this does, incident, they have a consequence of scientists. It has a consequence that scientists should be mindful of the impact of their work. They should alert the public to potential dangers and try and exploit. potential benefits, but also they should realize that science isn't just for scientists. And if the

public are to make informed decisions on issues of health, energy and environment, etc., which all have a scientific component, then the public needs to have some feel for science. They can't all be expert scientists, but they need to know enough about science, not to be bamboozled by slogans and gobbledygoo. So it's very important that science should be part of everyone's education. And that's even more important in future when the consequences of the misuse of science can be more serious. But to crucial point that scientists themselves have no special expertise in ethics or politics. That makes me, when you sort of mentioned the misuse of science, it makes me think about for the scientists that worked on the atomic bomb and how many of them afterwards came out and

said this is not such a positive thing, essentially. Obviously, the science they did was incredible. Yes. Well, in fact, I take them as an example in my book because I was fortunate to know some of these people in their later years, people like Hans Bata and Joe Rothblatt. And it is true that many of them worked on the bomb. They thought it was the right thing at the time.

But then they returned to civilian life, universities perhaps, and they nonetheless thought they had an obligation to try and help control the problem. power that they had helped unleash. And that, I think, is a model which we need not just in nuclear science now, but in biology and in cybertech, because all these involve expertise. And it's very important that those who are experts should engage with the public and politicians to try and minimize the downsides. So if, if for an example, something happens to say we take AI, for example, and that goes to a point

where the AI becomes self-aware in some way, not, you know, without going too far down the sci-fi route. Do we then have a response to be to step back and say, okay, we didn't quite get that right, or it achieved one goal, but we need to change it now. We need to sort of move the goalposts. Well, I think we want to avoid any kind of runaway disaster of the kind which some science-fixirios predict and portray

if AI gets out of control. And in that context, incidentally, it's often important to ensure that innovations happen in a certain order because you can have some techniques which actually help to control the AI and some which don't. And one of the issues which I discuss in my book and we have a group in Cambridge which is thinking about these things is how you can ensure responsible innovation so that the innovations lead to the brakes being developed before the accelerator, as it were. And did you have a good example of how that might work? Well, I think it's true in all cases because we know what the dangers are,

and we want to ensure that there are controls which can be applied, which would prevent any kind of runaway disaster. And this is true in the case of AI. It's also true in biology because one of the things being talked about is so-called gene drive where you use CRISPR technology to make a particular species sterile. This has been used in order to make a particular mosquito sterile of carouserica virus. It seems a good thing to do. But on the other hand, tampering with an ecology could lead to unintentional downsides like

the importation of certain species into Australia did, for instance. And so this is a kind of thing where we have to ensure the best science is deployed in order to explore these scenarios so that we can be alert to these possible dangers and thereby minimize them. As I said earlier, I don't think we can avoid having a fairly bumpy ride through this century, but we can ensure that we minimize the risks by ensuring that there are enough experts who are thinking about what these risks are, trying to minimize them, trying to explore the scenarios, and engaging with the public and the politicians.

So do you think enough is being done now to make sure that the next generation, the next century will be a flourishing period of human existence? Well, clearly not enough is being done. There's a huge gap, as I said at the beginning, between the way the world could be and the way it is. And it is appalling that we have the bottom billion on this planet living in huge poverty. And as I say in my book, the wealth of the thousand richest people on the planet could make a big difference that billion people is not happening. And this incidentally is why I'm ambivalent about those who are optimists about progress. I mean, it's quite right that we have seen a great deal of progress. And it's a book by my friend Stephen Pinker who graphs all the benefits we've had in the last 50 years in life expectancy and everything else.

And he's quite right about that. But on the other hand, we can't claim much ethical credit. It's quite right that our lives are far better than the lives of people in the middle ages. But on the other hand, in the middle ages, there wasn't very much people could do to make things better. It was miserable, but they couldn't do much about it. Now, we are much better off, but also there's a bigger gap between the way things are and the way they could be. So I'm very skeptical of people who say there's been any ethical progress in the last 500 years. I'm not sure there has.

So the final thing I want to ask is just with everything that we can do to improve the prospects of a good future for humanity, are we missing something sort of very much? You know, you mentioned there about in a medieval, there wasn't much that they could do. That life was pretty bad for them. but are we moving away from just the natural, I don't want to say a natural order of things, but should we be focusing on humans or should we be focusing on the planet as a whole and all the life and diversity that's on it?

Well, I think we should focus on diversity and life. And in fact, I quote in my book, the great ecologist, E.O. Wilson, who says that if human actions destroy by diversity and lead to mass, extinctions, he says, it's a sin that future generations will least forgive us for. And I think there's a feeling, I mean, in fact, the Catholic Church has come out strongly on this in a way it didn't before, that we do have a duty to the entire environment, and it has value in its own right,

quite apart from its benefit to human beings. And so I think this is an attitude which needs to be more widely disseminated. And of course, I think the good news is that it is, because people do care about climate. As I say, it's hard to implement effective action because it seems rather remote from immediate concerns, but they care about the plastics in the oceans and things like that. And one point I would make, which I think is important, is that we need not only to ensure everyone has a basic understanding of the science of technology and environment, but also we need to ensure that they engage with the politicians.

because politicians respond to what's in their inbox and what's in the press. And the risk is that there's so many immediate issues that confront them that these long-term ones slip down the agenda. And the only way they won't do that is if we have people, will evangelists for these long-term issues, who ensure that the public remains engaged and remains putting pressure on politicians to do something about them and have a longer-term vision because the main problem,

and it's a big paradox, which I'm addressing my book, that we've got bigger horizons in space and time than ever before. We think in terms of billions of years for the future of our planets. But on the other hand, in many contexts, we don't plan ahead more than 30 years in terms of our investments. And that's a big contrast with the Middle Ages, when they thought the world might only last another thousand years, but nonetheless, they built cathedrals that took 100 years to be built.

They thought longer term than us in that sense. And the reason for that was that they didn't expect short-term changes. They thought that the next generation and generation after that would live the same kind of life as they did. They thought that there was no big change. Whereas now, although we have these huge expanses of space and time in our country, consciousness, we also know that the lives of our children and grandchildren are going to be very different from ours because technological change is very rapid. And if we think of the impact of the smartphone, which would have seen magic, say, 20 years ago, we can't really

imagine what technologies may dominate our lives in 2050 even. So that's why it's hard to plan ahead. But the things we can do, we can say if we go on as we are now, there is a risk to the climate and biodiversity, and there's a risk of triggering ecological tipping points if we put too much pressure on the environment. Because the thing about this present century is that because the world population is already 7.5 billion and is rising as 9 billion, and because we are all more profligate in our use of resources and energy, we are putting pressure on the finite planet's resources. And this is the first century in the Earth 45 million centuries of history when one species, namely ours, can determine the future. And I think we need

to highlight that that is a special responsibility which we have in these generations. That was Astronomer Royal Lord Martin Rees. His new book on the future is available now. Thanks for listening to the Science Focus podcast. The November issue of BBC Focus magazine is on sale now. In it, we find out how cloning Neanderthal brains could unlock the secrets of our own intelligence. Look at election hacking and learn how to speak canine. There is, of course, a lot more for the curious mind inside. Thank you for listening to the Science Focus podcast from the BBC Focus magazine team. We're the UK's best-selling science and technology monthly, available in print and in several digital formats throughout the world. Find out more at

sciencefocus.com or look out for us in your app store. This podcast is sponsored by Name, Audio and Focal. The texture and emotional depth of music can be lost through digital sources or poor signal. Name Audio believes you can have digital precision with analog warmth. Alongside French acoustic specialist focal, Name creates high-end audio systems, combining innovation with craftsmanship, so you can listen to music, just as the artist intended. Discover more at Name Audio.com.

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