Into the Impossible With Brian Keating - A Conversation with Physicist and Science Fiction Author David Brin (#039)

Episode Date: April 13, 2020

    http://davidbrin.blogspot.com/2020/04/more-repercussions-in-plague-year-and.html https://www.davidbrin.com http://www.davidbrin.com/fiction/givingplague.html A Conversation with Physicist and Science Fiction Author David Brin about his work and his recent post: More repercussions in a plague year… and some long term (excerpted here) : And yes, some foresee all this accelerating the exodus of the uber-rich, abandoning us to simmer in festering cities and suburbs. Connecticut, Wyoming and New Zealand have seen such influx. Certainly there is a “prepper” wing of oligarchy that’s bought up whole mountain ranges in Patagonia, Siberia and under the sea. I portrayed that mind set in The Postmanand in Earth and in Existence. Of course the smarter half of the zillionaire caste wants no part of such insanity. Nor will such preparations avail the selfishness-fetishists an iota, even if the fit truly hits the shan. There are five reasons why this masturbatory survivalist fantasy is utter proof of mental defectiveness. Finally Smart Sovereignty: – Whether this Minsky Moment triggers revitalization and waves of new-creative solutions by an empowered citizenry… or one of Marx’s purportedly “inevitable” stages of spiral into revolution… may depend on to what extent we revive civic goodwill and use new technologies to enhance logical, fact-centered. pragmatic civil discourse. Recall that earlier communication techs — e.g. the printing press, radio and loudspeakers — all led first to polemical horror shows that made things much worse… before folks sussed the new media and learned to parse truth from populist lies, making things much, much better. That natural progression took decades, though. Time we simply do not have. == The jury is still out == I left aside possible outcomes that seem more “science fictional”… …e.g. what-if there is more to this virus than meets the eye? We already know that corona viruses are not like the flu. Flu stays in business by mutating rapidly, every year, forcing new kinds of vaccines to be developed. (Again, see my predictive short story “The Giving Plague,” which dives into the many ways that viruses and parasites “negotiate” with their hosts.) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The only thing we can be sure of about the future is that it will be absolutely fantastic. Five, four, two. Welcome everybody to this special COVID-19 edition of the Arthur C. Clark Center for Human Imaginations into the Impossible Podcast. I'm your fearless host, Brian Keating, a professor of physics at UC San Diego, talking with a fellow physicist, astronomer, writer, and blurber of my book. And I owe him many things, including a blurb for my book and proofreading it a long time ago, more than three years ago now. It's David Brin.

Dr. David Brin, who is a world-renowned writer, award-winning writer, and also a scientist. And he maintains a flourishing catalog of all his musings on his website, which is called Contrary Brin. And I'll put a link to that in the show notes. and I wanted to talk to David on the podcast for a very long time, but a particular article of his and contrary to Brim, which you can find at Davidbrim.blogspot.com, was really focused on sort of the tagline,

the subheading, which is looking towards the future. And David, first of all, let me welcome you and ask, how are you doing and where you, I'm down by the beach. Where are you currently? Well, I happen to know you are obeying the law better than that. If you were at La Jolla Shores at this moment, but I'm in my office at home. For me, that adjustment is not as great as for most people.

Most days, I am working right here, either writing fiction or nonfiction or that sort of thing. I'm still waiting to hear from NASA's Innovative and Advanced Concepts program as to whether or not there's going to be a orientation meeting because I'm on their team of advisors, the advisory council for NIAC, whether there's going to be a meeting back east in D.C. in June, and I expect it will be canceled.

But I'm hoping we'll get past all of this in time for NIAC's symposium in October, because it's a highlight of my year to participate in NASA's most innovative and most far out and almost science fictional program and giving grants to small seed grants to groups that think they have something a bit outside the envelope that's worth investing. Interesting. I heard a seed funding or, you know, phase one study was approved for a radio telescope on the far side of the moon today. I don't know if that was under your purview or not. Yes. Well, Nyack just announced its new grants. And there are a number of things.

Joel Sersol of Transaster, for example, has grants to, one to investigate minding of asteroids for water, and another has an innovative way to get solar power down into the deep craters at the lunar poles where the ice is. And the ice is there because the sunlight never falls there. So it's really hard to find copious solar power with this refining the water from a place where it exists there because there's never solar power. Right, exactly. It's like the solar powered flashlight I once received as a swag gift from the SPIE.

It kind of confused me at first. Oh, I used to collect the hand-powered flashlights, but the solar power flashlight. That's a funny one, yes. So, David, today we wanted to get your opinion on this, obviously this whole, brave new world sort of cliche that we seem to be inhabiting. And I spoke last week with my friend, your friend, Michael Shermer, on the Into the Impossible Podcast. That should be out by the time people hear this. And we discussed kind of the role that science fiction and science fiction authors play in really visualizing the future and helping us. And, you know, some are more

successful in your case than others. I won't know any others. But what is it about science fiction that can be used? Is it its ability to sort of run, as Einstein called it, Godankan experiments, thought experiments? What about science fiction enables people to be futurist? Because on the face of it, they're not necessarily related, right? Yes. Well, the whole question of prediction is a fraught and and a difficult one. Professor Tetlock, for example, has been leading efforts that I've been engaged in because I'm one of those science fiction authors who speaks at the CIA and other agencies annually because they really want to get one more way of parting the curtain. But as Tedlock points out, even when you develop a new way to part the curtain on the future and model better

for example. All that does is move the goalpost a little. We're all used now to these wonderful, fantastic weather models, for example, where you can get a vague general idea of what the weather is going to be like in your region 10 days out. And that for the next 48 hours, it's really useful hour by hour. When I was a kid, you know, you were lucky if the two-hour weather report was even vaguely in the right direction. This is a fantastic sign of the competence and advancement of the models of the people who are using the same technologies and the same formulas as the climate people studying global climate change.

So it really puts a burden of proof on people who deny climate change, that the models that they use to plan their vacations or what to wear that day, suddenly are no darn good when applied to similar problems. But what happens and what TETLOC points out is that when you move the goalposts, you only make the problem harder. And especially if everybody gets models, like models of the economy or models of the stock market,

then everybody starts using them, and that makes the models no good anymore. Right. So what science fiction does is we have a tendency to claim we're not in this business to predict. where the highest form of science fiction is novels or movies that prevent. In other words, we're not trying to predict what's going to happen. We're sometimes trying to prevent things from happening.

And it can, at its best, be very effective. Millions of environmentalists were recruited to be active in this world. in environmental causes by the movie Soylent Green. And a number of science fiction's stories by John Brunner and Kate Wilhelm and others, showing how if we're careless, we could lose it all. Nuclear war. Retired military officers say that it was definitely prevented. Accidents were prevented by movies like Dr. Strangelove,

fails safe on the beach, stuff like that, that changed the mindset, war games, that changed the mindset just enough so that some potential failure roads were fixed. The granddaddy of all self-preventing prophecies would be George Orwell's 1984, which to this day inspires millions to worry about undue accumulation of power by conspiring elites. The difference between a decent Democrat and a decent Republican, and this used to be the case back when both were lively species, is that the decent Democrat is afraid that Orwellian powers are being accumulated by would-be Big Brothers out of aristocracy and wealth and faceless corporations. and a decent Republican is afraid that Big Brother is coalescing among snooty academics and faceless government bureaucrats.

But if you put it that way, they're both right. Both are dangerous, and we should be guarding each other's backs. And the one thing that's been a collapse this last decade or so has been this sense that we're guarding each other's backs. instead we've been pitted against each other. So, you know, as Asimov said, Isaac Asimov said, no, it was Fred Pohl. It's not the science fiction author's job to predict the automobile. It's our job to predict the traffic jam.

What are the possible repercussions of these advances? And so, you know, I've done predictions in the near future, the intermediate future, which is really hard in my novels, Earth and existence. And then there's the far future where you can have lots of fun. You have throwing warp drive and talking dolphins and have some great adventures. But it's the near-term stuff where you can have real effect. This episode is brought to you by Redfin. You're listening to a podcast, which means you're probably multitasking,

maybe even scrolling home listings on Redfin. saving homes without expecting to get them. But Redfin isn't just built for endless browsing. It's built to help you find and own a home. With agents who close twice as many deals, when you find the one, you've got a real shot at getting it. Get started at redfin.com. Own the dream. So we're in the middle of a potentially existential climate in the biological sphere and sort of ecological, mixed with the impact of humans and animals, and that is, of course, the COVID-19 worldwide pandemic. And what I thought would be so timely is to kind of go through your thought process on how you appraise these risks. You are an advisor, as you said, to certain three-letter

agencies. And that's for a reason. And I think that some of the scenarios you paint and you paint sort of long-term and perhaps intermediate term, and then certainly longer-term impacts. And I think what I want to know, first of all, have you ever lived through anything comparable to this? I mean, the closest that I can think of is September 11th when there's just a paradigm shift. Does this remind you of anything? I mean, you're not old enough. You know, I tease you and I love you, but I'd never say would even hint that you're old

enough to remember the depression because, of course, you're not. But from your parents, from your father, who's a renowned scholar himself, what did he tell you? What lessons from the past? Is this comparable in any way? Are we just on a totally different branch of the wave function right now? Well, for one thing, Brian, you very smartly pointed in the right direction, and the right direction is the past. Science fiction authors supposedly science is the main thing driving our extrapolations and our projections, but that's not true. It should have been named speculative history because a certain fraction of science fiction, mine, because I have the training, is often, not always, based upon the next scientific thing.

But almost all science fiction authors are deeply steeped in history, because that's what science fiction really does. It is taking the greatest story ever told, and that is the 6,000 years of recorded human history, which is horrendous, a story of horrendous errors and injustices and grotesque mistakes made by kings who killed the,

people who might have helped them to prevent that mistake because it was criticism. And you know how humans hate, love criticism, especially human leaders. The, if you look across all that time and you see the patterns, you realize that that's the story, breaking out from those patterns, from those traps. And so, you know, it's not for accident that my father's generation was called the greatest generation. They survived the depression when things were worse than this. They overcame Hitler when the threat was worse than where we face. He was born into the 1918 flu epidemic.

They all lived in deadly fear for their children up until I was a lot of the United States. about six years old when Jonas Salk saved childhood by immunizing us against polio. And whereas Franklin Delano Roosevelt was the most beloved figure for the greatest generation, absolutely adored by them, Jonas Salk was adored by the generations of the 50s, for giving us back hope in our childhood and easing the fears of all those people who were far more desperately afraid for their children than we are now for the old guys like me who might be the top victims of the COVID-vifi,

I mean, COVID virus. So, you know, it's the historical perspective, I think, that we're sadly lacking, and especially, you know, in the political problems we have. I mean, to not recognize that across those 6,000 years, almost 99% of all those cultures languished under feudalism, ruled by kings and priests and lords and all of that, when the last 200 years, when we escaped from that way of life, we started actually accomplishing stuff. Duh. So to go back to rule by some aristocracy or king, this is the agenda that Vladimir Putin and the Saudis had for us. It's not just that it's not our way.

It's a stupid way. And there's 6,000 years of proof that it's a stupid way. And so looking towards the future, without being particularly, you know, to Pollyannish, I would say, you really list a couple of different things that resonated especially with me. And that is, is that, you know, in your article, again,

I'm going to post this in the show notes, both in YouTube and on the iTunes store for a podcast. This is an article called more repercussions in a plague year and some long term. The first thing I thought was so interesting for you to sort of cite was what may be happening behind perhaps one of the most intriguing characters in society today, someone by the name of Elon Musk. And that's how, you know, sort of these brilliant visionaries can perhaps take maybe their own initiative, advisedly or not, but try. try thousands of seeds planted in the ground to see if perhaps one will bloom. So I think I want to focus on the first of your kind of major predictions, or perhaps it's

already occurring right now. And that is how we could actually bifurcate the problem at its root and perhaps go and find some resistance or perhaps find people via serology or other means of testing to look for this, you know, people that have recovered from this. So first, can you talk about this idea that may, that you write, could have occurred elsewhere or could have occurred to someone like Elon Musk for people that may or may not have had this illness currently and be asymptomatic at present? Well, I mean, it seemed obvious to me about a month ago I started talking about this and got really bad feedback from people. And all of a sudden now, about one week ago, I start seeing the idea everywhere.

And that's the job of a science fiction offer to get apoplectic and upset because nobody gives you credit for the idea that they all called ridiculous just recently. That's right. The ridicule phase is the prerequisite for the... That's as obvious. Yeah, it's a standard professional complaint. In this case, it's very simple. If we had good testing, and we don't yet, it's been promised for some time.

But if we had good testing, it would be possible for Elon Musk, for example, to put out a call for auto workers who have already experienced their COVID-19 infection. Now, maybe they got sick and recovered. Maybe they just simply tested out as about a third of people do, as having had it, gained an immunity, and never noticed. You put them in quarantine at the Pebble Beach Golf Club,

which is not very far from the Elon's test factory. It's empty currently. For one week and keep testing. them, and then you ship them over to the Tesla factory and say, everyone working in this factory is COVID positive. So who are they going to hurt? Now, it's true. There are listed, they found about six different sub-variants of the COVID-19. And it is possible to get secondarily infected with a different variant. So things are more complicated. But from what I've heard, those secondary, for healthy young or middle-aged people who have already experienced the virus, those secondary infections manifest as a sniffle.

So the question is, how long will it be? I predict before the end of the week. before somebody comes out and says, why don't we have some restaurants that are staffed by COVID positives and are open for COVID positives? How about that Universal Studios is for COVID positives and Disney Nod and for COVID negatives?

You can't do the latter. You can't do it for a ladder until you have really, really good. rapid testing. But at least it's a path to getting things back open again. And I'll be honest with you, I see that's really the only path in the near future. Now, you go a little farther, and you go a little farther into the future, and you start having other things. I mean, The testing opens up other possibilities. But, of course, like for instance, doing it intelligently, doing isolation intelligently the way the South Koreans and the Taiwanese did.

And that's actually testing everybody and then finding the supercarriers and doing contact tracing. Now that's standard quarantine techniques and we'll be better at that next time. It's been pointed out that the death rate for COVID-19 is terrible, but largely because it'll over, the sick people will overwhelm our medical staff. The death rate is not truly horrendous by historical standards. and so some people say, well, this is going to leave us in much better shape when something really science fictional hits, something really horrible hits. And I have science fiction about that.

There's been a lot of science fiction about pandemics. You know, well, you can go to my website. I have a page of pandemic stories and novels and movies. people are talking about how one of the soonest treatments that they might try out of desperation is what's called serum. Now you've all heard that word and a lot of women have

skin care serums they're called they're sold in these little tiny bottles and it has nothing to do with what a real serum is. A real serum is where you take blood from a person who has survived an illness and strain out the antibodies and give them to a victim just to knock the virus down so that the victim has time to develop their own antibodies.

And so that's being tried in a very preliminary way around the world. That's what you point out in the piece has been featured in Omega Man and Outbreak, two films that you describe as lurid. Yes, because in those films, in outbreak, they come back with the monkey that's the original source. And Cuba Gooding Jr. disappears into a trailer, a lab trailer, and comes out within 45 minutes. With a serum. A serum that almost instantly saves Renee Russo.

It's a little hard of that. But that's the point. Yeah. It's going to get easier because we're going to throw resources at this. Fascinating. Yeah. And I think, you know, you start off in terms of technological changes with a call-out to the Manhattan project, and you discussed a little bit in the context of the greatest generation.

So two of my, you know, kind of green shoots looking forward is that perhaps as the Manhattan project did for physics. in the 20th century, namely stimulating nuclear research, high-energy particle physics, the LHC, particle physics in general, both theory and these massive colliders culminating with a large Hadron Collider in Europe, as well as the program to develop radar, which, as you know, led to the development of radio astronomy as a practical tool to learn more about the universe, including the serendipitous discovery by Bell Laboratory, scientists, Arno Penzias, and Robert Wilson, of the cosmic microwave background radiation that I study. Those were both directly related with genetics and direct lineage to the

World War II. So the Manhattan Project, of course, is much more well known for producing the atom bomb, but equally important and arguably much more important on a daily basis for things like weather, radar, et cetera, was the development of radar taking place at Lincoln Labs and, and Bell eventually as well. So I like to think maybe a green shoot that might emerge is, will be found in the context of rapid testing, which is not high tech, but scalability of advanced technology. But perhaps with, you know, with a real Manhattan Project-esque push to develop CRISPR, to develop biological testing and editing and capabilities for the first time, reminiscent of the Manhattan Project. My question to you is, can we keep up with nature? In other words, we harness the

power of the atom before we were really mature enough to use it properly, arguably, although it did lead to the end of World War II, obviously. But do you think a similar danger could be present in this green shoot that we might develop technology that might come back to haunt us later on? Well, I think those are several very, very good questions, very good points. And all of my life, I've heard the phrase, it's too bad that our wisdom hasn't kept up with our technology. And my blog is called Contrary Brin, which means I have an automatic reflex that got me killed in all of my previous lives before I was 16 years old. And I have an automatic, by the way, I don't believe in reincarnation. That is a metaphor.

The reflex to be contrarian is that, in fact, it appears to me that there have been many technologies that have not met the schedules we expected for them, like spaceflight. We expected to be at Saturn by now. But our ancestors, even in the granders, even in the great, greatest generation, if we brought them forward from World War II, to have seen President Obama, for example, to have seen the mixed races that are routine on television, and we take for granted now, to have seen so many things, examples of us gradually, grudgingly, becoming better. Now, it's true that right now, the forces that are preventing us

from showing the maturity towards ecological matters that easily 60% even 70% of Americans would prefer to see that there are reasons why

that generously forward-looking attitude is not propelling us as far as it should. But this is one of the reasons why I wrote my non-fiction book called The Transparent Society. And that is that one thing has enabled us to accomplish so much in a positive sum way. The positive sum is where I want to win more than you win.

But I don't want to win by causing you to lose. In a positive sum game, all I want to be is a little richer than you. I want you to be rich too. A zero-sum game is one in which I win by making you lose. And that's what happens in most sports. And that was most of human history. Right.

If we can manage a positive sum game, then the rising tide raises all boats. And the only thing that has ever enabled that to happen is what we innovated for the last 200 years, and that's transparency. Reciprocally being able to find each other's errors and hold each other accountable, then make alliances with each other. So, you know, that's a whole other topic. As far as the implications for this plague year is concerned, what we need to do is take advantage of the vast proliferation of talent and skill that we've been developing. And the only way we can do that is by keeping things open. I look back at 9-11. People look back at the year 2001 and they remember the Twin Towers.

is falling. What they don't remember is something that happened a month later. And that was the anthrax attacks. This brilliant imbecile filled envelopes with weaponized anthrax spores and sent them around to sabotage and murder and a couple people died. And what was the response of the United States government? The United States immediately said, hello, all the world's experts, here's what's going on. Come and help. And as a result,

the 99.99% of skilled biological researchers who were sane collaborated to overcome the 0.001% who were insane. Yes. And the problem was solved quickly. And that's what we rely upon. Exactly. And I think, you know, you brought up in that, you know, concomitant with the transparent society, I think has to be an unoperness and obviously the sunlight being the best disinfectant. And in the book, or in the piece, rather, which maybe you'll turn into a book, you talk a lot about the really, you know, kind of tectonic shifts in the way that Americans have, adapted more or less instantaneously. I know I'm running, you know, this unlicensed daycare center

here while advising graduate students and trying not to, you know, toilet train a graduate student or teach quantum mechanics to a two-year-old. And that's a meeting with mixed success, but I'm getting through it. You point out the role of, you know, kind of remote virtual presence. And I wonder if you could get into that a little bit. How can society expect to, take advantage of this? Or do you think as soon as the all clear is given, we will get back to get back to our old habits and continue flying around the world to go to climate change conferences or astronomical telescopes, etc. Do you see a long-term repercussion accruing to our benefit? Or do you think we're natural to go back to our wasteful old ways? Well, I think that's a long-term repercussion. I think

it's going to be sort of midway between those two. Obviously, for instance, there are several technologies that are going to get a huge boost out of this, beyond the biomedical, beyond the important ones that we're going to be investing in to handle the testing and the vaccines much quicker than before and the detection and all of that. For one thing, it's going to be local sourcing.

The ships that criss-crossed the ocean, ocean, spewing carbon into the air and just because labor was a little bit cheaper in China, that's going to go into decline because it was already going to go into a decline, because we're gaining technologies that will enable people in a city to get a large fraction of their food, a large fraction of their manufactured goods from real close nearby. and, you know, that includes additive manufacturing, 3D printing, all sorts of things. And that's going to reduce waste, and so it's going to have positive ecological benefits, but it's also going to make us more resilient.

And that's a very important word. The last several times I've been back east to talk to three-letter agencies, I've pounded the table about resilience. And there's an interview that I did with the proceedings of the ACM that will appear underneath this interview. Brian will, I'm sure, offer that link in which I talk about all sorts of ways in which our cell phones, for example, in a crisis, is the exact time when we need them and the exact time they will work. Yes. Because the cell towers will go down. And we've seen this happen many times.

there is a way that our phone systems could be vastly more resilient. And it would be very easy if it's ready to do, and it's almost turnkey. We have two million solar homes in America today. Almost all of them shut down in a power blackout for a really, really stupid reason. It could be easily fixed. And I speak about pandemics and things like that. This was in an interview last year. So this notion of resilience is something that's absolutely essential for us to restore,

and one of the things will be local sourcing. Another is, yes, we'll develop better business meetingware, better speechifying ways of holding meetings and things like that. And the regular meetings, conventions and all that, they'll be back. this is a personal worry to me because a substantial portion of my income has come from public speaking. Will I be paid the big bucks for a speech to a virtual audience? You might have to rely on the proceeds, you know, the honorarium that I'm sending you after today. Oh, yes. I expect to cash that in.

That's right. Another thing that you brought up, and I know that you take part in, personally is sort of this, you know, really ultra-local, micro-local economy of gardening and subsistence. Can you talk about the prospects for that in a world where, you know, there could be, say, a second wave, a third wave? Would you say now is not a bad time for people to do as you have done with urban or maybe suburban farming for people that can do such a thing? I find it a great way not only to have some resiliency measure, I don't have a huge plot, but to have some resiliency and also educate my kids. What do you think about that as a positive outcome of this whole awful pandemic? Well, you know, for one thing, having developed a fairly

large vegetable garden, I have come to realize that there's no way in God's green earth I'm going to feed myself with my family. It's too hard. It's just a complete illusion. What I am going to do is I'm going to get a whole lot of artichokes that I can swap. Yes. I can barter. Maybe I can barter for a bushel of brain at some point. I give you a telescope eyepiece that I'm not using an exchange for a bushel. There you go.

No, but to have the habit of maintaining a victory garden, this is one of the positive, the green shoots you talk about. It's almost impossible to buy seeds right at this particular point in April, 2020 because people are loading up their minivans with manure and seeds and going for it. Now, I think that's terrific.

At the opposite extreme of that impulse is, of course, the preppers, and they're buying up guns as if they didn't already have 40 or 50 guns. My novel, The Postman, which was made into that movie by Kevin Costner, and it makes feelings about it. It was actually visually. I love that movie.

I know you pan it, but I actually really enjoy it. I think two out of three ain't bad. It's visually and musically one of the most beautiful films ever shot. It's my favorite Kevin Costa movie. And he did not betray the heart message about citizenship in my book.

It's dumber than a stone, but gorgeous, big-hearted, and dumb. that's what my wife married. So, you know, there's worse things. There's worse things that marches big, hard and dumb. And do you see, yeah, you talk also about education, which is obviously a priority for you, not only having been the product of the higher educational system

I'm earning your doctorate, attending Caltech, attending UC San Diego, and being a practicing astronomer for some time before you went commercial. Before you began your really illustrious career as a writer and thinker and public intellectual, which I think is really the way I think about you. What do you see as the future of education? Even before this happened, I started to think about distance learning, is my career, is my job really a long term for my students and their students, my grand students, of which I have a couple already, which is kind of scary. My graduate students,

who are professors themselves, have now obtained their own graduate students. I think when you get to the fourth generation, you have to quit or something. But I look at them. I look at my young grandchildren, as we're in graduate school. What prospects will they have when, you know, perhaps in not too long from now, instead of talking to me about astronomy, they can talk to a doppelganger of Galileo himself. What relevance will I have in such an era? Well, you know, look, I'm torn about that sort of question. First off, the science fiction author and me is happy to dive in and write stories about such scenarios. And I have. I mean, one of my most popular stories that are called Stones of Significance is set in a pretty much

post-singularity world in which we're pretty much gods. People are pretty much gods because we've added to those prefrontal lobes you mentioned. New layers, new layers, new layers. They're in the walls of the house and they're interacting with us and we aren't being dominated by AI, we are AI. Yeah, augmented. That's right. And so it's great grist for science fiction.

And I might mention my short story, The Giving Plague, which is about how viruses interact with their hosts and find a find either a way to kill them or come to terms with their hosts.

And it's available at my website, David Brin.com. You just go to short stories and you can get this. Hugo nominated story, The Giving Play. And it has somewhat to do with the fact that I was then and am now a blood donor and I was just prevented by the COVID thing from giving my 96th pint. But there's also another side of me, and that is the consultant. That's the guy who gives sage speeches about the near future. And that guy, you know, says one thing, and that is, it's not our job to worry about that,

about whether or not are the grand graduate students, the little tiny, the distant graduate students of your graduate students, of your graduate students, talk to an AI Galileo or whether or not

they have to use sign language because they're chimps or they squeak through a translator because they're dolphins or their aliens or their AIs. Our job is to create a civilization that's wise enough to raise them to be wise enough to deal with that. That's enough.

To have the intellectual tool. Right. That's enough. It's enough. Dainu, it's enough for our, for us to raise a new generation that's not stupid in the ways we were. just like we are not stupid in the ways our parents took for granted. My parents were liberals of their day, but they would have plotzed if I brought home a date from a distant race.

You know, they would have got used to it. They were like that, but they weren't used to it. So it's our job to make things better enough that our wiser and better children can make children who are wiser and better enough that they can make the makers of Star Trek. For the moments that matter, choose Kyrad Naturals. Infused with aloeuvreous and vitamin E, Kyrad Natural's bandages protect your unexpected scrapes, cuts, and burns, while also moisturizing your skin. Find deeper relief with natural ingredients you can trust to start the healing. When life surprises call for the best, choose Kiraad, a deeper level of care. Shop the full collection on Amazon or visit curad.com to learn more.

Very good, very good. So in the last couple of minutes before we break for this inaugural episode of what I think and hope will be a recurring series, but we'll see depending on whether the check actually clears that I've posted in the mail, but the postman is late today, so no one. The postman. The postman, exactly. You've got it. So I want to just kind of close with some thoughts, perhaps recollections that you can share

with us of how people can develop this resiliency of mind. And I think that's really what you're getting at with what we do our graduate. students. Well, it's not just to graduate students alone. It should be for the public, for the intellectually engaged public who pay our taxes as scientists, especially those of us in state universities like myself. And I want to know, you know, in the end, we started off with a little bit of history. Maybe we can end with a little bit of history of how people can get engaged or perhaps, you know, is there something to be hopeful about that we haven't covered perhaps? You know, see this, the, you know, globalism and things like that, perhaps that's, that's something that we

now can rely on in a positive way, maybe cooperating with countries around the world, instead of, you know, kind of fighting with one another to, because we don't have a foe, you know, that can really be vanquished the way that we did in a war. And so I think it's hard to, to maintain this level of, of discipline, of commitment. And do you see any danger of, you know, society kind of having trouble adjusting to this as a reality, or do you think that we could pull together as generations of the past now through intellectual curiosity engagement, as we like to study here at the Arthur C. Clark Center, do you feel helpful? I mean, what's your, in a sentence, what are you feeling right now just at an emotional level for the future?

Well, I'm contrary, Brett. So if I'm around optimists who are fizzing with just total live assumptions of success, I can shake my finger with the best of them. There are plenty of warning signs. I live in an era in which there is too much gloom and it is

reducing our confidence which is the basis upon which we can solve problems and save all our lives. I think the odds have always been against us, especially against this renaissance that escaped from the stupidity

trap of feudalism. The odds have always been against us, and I think the odds are still against us. But with the odds only being two to one against us, that makes me a freaking optimist in the course of human events. And I think we can do it. Our parents' generation did it. Are we made of lesser stuff? No, I refuse that. It insults them to say that they made a generation less good than them. And I'll tell you this, my kids' generation, I talk to them, I talk to a great many of them, and they are better, nicer, smarter people than us OK boomers. And who gets the credit for that? Yes. That's right. He raised them. That's right. So they can't win. Even if they're better than us, and they're off. We made them. That's exactly the pattern that has to continue.

And what we need to do, us boomers, is stop panicking, decide that we are in favor of this Renaissance. Cuell phase eight of the freaking American Civil War, and the phases go back to 1778, it wasn't just the 1860s, quell this phase of the American Civil War, get it behind us and start doing what we're good at. And that is surprising everybody. Very good. Well, that certainly brightened up my day, and otherwise, gloomy, cloudy, rainy, San Diego, early spring day. David, I want to thank you for this. I want to potentially schedule a revisit of this sometime in the not too distant future.

And I want to thank you for your time, your insights, as usual. I want to point out to folks that David can be found all over the web, but in particular, the article that we were quoting today comes from his blog spot, David Brin, that blogspot.com. He also maintained. a website at David Brin.com, and I think you can get interchangeably between the two. I'll provide some links and resources in the show notes. And I want to thank folks out there for listening, and please leave your comments in the comments section. If you're watching this on YouTube, please leave a review if you're listening on iTunes. And really appreciate your time, David. Stay well, stay healthy. We need you more than ever.

Well, I have pretty low blood pressure, so I'm not too great, but I am scrubbing every surface. So you guys take care. And thank you, Brian Keating, a maven of mavens, and scholar of scholars. Thank you, David. If you enjoyed this episode of Into the Impossible, please subscribe, comment, share, and review. For a chance to win a free copy of our most recent guest's newest book, send a screenshot of your review to info at imagine.ucsd.edu. We appreciate hearing from you and are always open to your suggestions for future episodes. Into the Impossible is a production of the Arthur C. Clark Center for Human Imagination at UC San Diego in the Division of Physical Sciences.

directed by Eric Vary, Brian Keating, and Patrick Coleman, produced by Stuart Volgo. For more information, go to imagine.ucsd.edu. Find us on Twitter at ImagineucSD.