Into the Impossible With Brian Keating - Is There Hope for Humanity? Marcelo Gleiser’s Case for Biocentrism [Ep. 422]

Episode Date: June 2, 2024

Join my mailing list https://briankeating.com/list to win a real 4 billion year old meteorite! All .edu emails in the USA 🇺🇸 will WIN! Is there hope for humanity?  In light of the numerous challenges we face today, from political to environmental crises, it seems like there isn’t.  But according to today’s esteemed guest Marcelo Gleiser, there’s still hope! However, we need to shift our perspective, recognize our place in the universe, and rediscover our connection to the natural world.  These are topics he thoroughly explored in his most recent book: The Dawn of a Mindful Universe: A Manifesto for Humanity's Future. I used our interview to ask him a few questions that came to my mind when I was reading this wonderful book.  Tune in! Key Takeaways: 00:00:00 Intro 00:03:11 Judging a book by its cover 00:09:44 Copernicus’ heliocentric model 00:15:57 The perfect cosmological principle  00:21:14 Crises in cosmology  00:26:38 Humans, the natural world, and biocentrism  00:38:05 But what about technological progress?  00:42:16 Information theory, panspermia, and exoplanets  00:55:33 The origins of life and unifying theories  01:00:39 On a more optimistic note  01:05:28 AI’s impact on education  01:11:30 Audience questions 01:26:21 Outro — Additional resources: 👉 To try everything Brilliant has to offer for free for a full 30 days, visit https://brilliant.org/DrBrianKeating/ or click on the link in the description. You’ll also get 20% off an annual premium subscription. 📝 Get one month of Snipd Premium for free with this link: https://get.snipd.com/Cx7S/brianSnipd Snipd lets you take Smart Notes 🧠 with AI 💡 — it’s my favorite podcast player 😀 ! ➡️ Connect with Marcelo Gleiser: 💻 Website: https://marcelogleiser.com/ ➡️ Follow me on your fav platforms: ✖️ Twitter: https://twitter.com/DrBrianKeating  🔔 YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/DrBrianKeating?sub_confirmation=1  📝 Join my mailing list: https://briankeating.com/list  ✍️ Check out my blog: https://briankeating.com/cosmic-musings/  🎙️ Follow my podcast: https://briankeating.com/podcast Into the Impossible with Brian Keating is a podcast dedicated to all those who want to explore the universe within and beyond the known. Make sure to subscribe so you never miss an episode! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Is there hope for humanity? In light of the numerous changes we face to today, from political to scientific to environmental crises, it seems there might not be. But according to today's esteemed guest, Marcelo Gleiser, all is not yet lost. However, to get back on the right path, we must shift our perspective, recognize our place in the universe, and rediscover our connection to the natural world.

He thoroughly explored these topics in his incredible new book, The Dawn of a Mindful Universe, a manifesto for humanity's future. I use this incredible opportunity to talk to him and ask him about how a manifesto, which evokes the communist manifesto, is relevant to today's times and in modern science. I think you'll enjoy this wonderful ride through the most meaningful topics in the universe. Come along. Let's go. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Open the pod bay doors, hell.

Joining us all the way from Dartmouth, how are you today? I am well, Brian. Thank you for having me. It's a pleasure. And I also have been wanting to talk to you for a long time, so this is perfect. This is great. We're going to talk about so much stuff, including your wonderful new book and also your work in synthesizing the conciliance, if you will, between science,

religion, spirituality, of which there is plenty in this book. But I want to make a couple of connections first. You, I've interviewed 19 Nobel Prize winners on the podcast, and I've interviewed four Templeton Prize winners. And the first winner of the Templeton Prize that I ever interviewed was my very first guest. And his name was Freeman Dyson. Oh, wow. And he was, of course, a great hero. And he told me, Martel, I don't know if you knew this, but he told me that he was so happy when Lord Martin Rees, who's also been a guest on the podcast many times, when he, when Lord Martin won the Templeton Prize.

then Freeman told him, I'm so grateful to you, because now there's someone who did even less to deserve the Templeton Prize than did I. But you certainly did a tremendous amount, and we will get into that. But I want to highlight one more connection besides that giant wave behind you, which is reminiscent of San Diego surfing beaches, which we'll have to host you on at some point. But you see San Diego and Dartmouth share a very special connection. I don't know if you know what it is.

I actually don't. So we here at UC San Diego, we were the place where the Geisel family, Theodore Geisel, came to retire. And in fact, our library is the Dr. Seuss, Theodore Geisel library. But I understand you have won up to us in that you at Dartmouth have the Dr. Seuss Medical School. Is that right, Marzell? Well, it's actually called the Geisel Medical School. But yes, I'm sure it was mostly funded by him, his family at least. Yeah.

So, yeah, he was a student here. So that's why. I want to talk about your book and I want to do what you're never supposed to do in keeping with the medical discussion we just had. And that this book, The Dawn of a Mindful Universe, a Manifesto for Humanity's Future, to me, it's sort of three things in one. It's a diagnosis of what perhaps is ailing. our collective consciousness and the universe at large.

It's a prognosis of where we might be going in the future if things are unchanged, unheeded. And third, it's a prescription for how to make that change. Have I summarized the book in your, and, you know, adequately for you and in that perspective? Yeah. No, I think that's, that's quite right on. It does all these three things or tries to do all these three things, you know. And it's a book very different from anything else that I've done before in a sense that

other books are always about the modern science and also the relation between science and history of science and philosophy and also religion and spirituality in some ways. But this is different, right? This is about our planetary future, about the future of civilization as we know it. I call it the future of our project of civilization, which, as we're, we all know is a little under stress to put it mildly. And the question is, what can we do about that? And that was a response really to the rampant pessimism and that we see everywhere, right?

It's all about dystopian futures. And I'm like, is this really all we've got, you know, is this all we can do is to talk about the future in a horrible, negative, the end of life as we know it? Or is there a better way to do it? That's what I tried to do with this book. Wonderful. And as we were mentioning before the button, record button was hit, you have agreed to do the thing you're never supposed to do, which is to judge a book by its cover. So, Mortello, can you show us the cover?

I have my copy of it here. I got it. I've had some problems with dust in the past. And, you know, it's kind of the villain of my book, losing the Nobel Prize. And I always wonder, why do people have these dust jackets? Why do they care so much about dust covers and so forth? But actually, I found out that if you don't have a dust cover on a first edition book, the value gets reduced by 90%.

So I lost mine, but I have highlighted the heck out of this thing. So we will be discussing it. So can you show us the cover and walk us through Idol? And what does it mean? Right. So here's the cover. So the title, the Dawn of a Mindful Universe, immediately people are going to be thinking, I don't know,

if I should keep showing it. No, no, no, no. It's okay. Good. Thanks. All right. Yeah. Here I am.

I'm back. So the dawn of a mindful universe. So where we use the word mindful, you know, we tend to think of about, who stuff and mindfulness and being in the present and sort of like a different way of using the words. So what I mean by mindful here is really the emergence of minds in the universe. And to me, the emergence of minds in the universe. emergence of minds in the universe is when the universe became mindful. So the dawn here represents

that emergence. And as I make the point in the book, as far as we can tell, there may be others out there, but as far as we can tell, we are the only ones that are able to tell stories and have a memory and cannot just look into the past, but also try to predict the future. and that makes us the cosmic storytellers. And so the mindful universe is essentially that idea, right? And the subtitle, which is very important, is a manifesto for humanity's future. A manifesto is kind of a heavy-loaded word. And I went back to my teenage years and I actually reread the Communist manifesto by Marx and Engels to see,

okay, how the heck to write a manifesto, what that even means? right? And basically what they do is it's two parts. The first part is you have to make your case, right? You have to explain why is it that change is absolutely necessary. In their case, was about the end of bourgeoisie, the exploitation of the workers, right? And workers of the world unite kind of thing, material dialectic, geo-dial dialectics, you know, that's exactly, you know. And so the second part is, okay, if you agree with us, how do you do it? Meaning, you know, what are the action items that you can actually implement in order to bring that change forward? And so that's what I do.

So the very last chapter, well, there is an epilogue, but before that one is the manifesto itself, which is basically stating the case that I developed in more detail in the book and presenting some possible steps that we can all take as individuals, as members of communities, as CEOs and companies, you know, which is also a very important part, to kind of do something about what's going on. And the cover itself, I think I'll show it again, just to bring it back, I think it's very beautiful. But first of all, I love the colors coding because it's really about us.

First of all, here we are the human, on top of the human. which is the utmost symbol of romanticism. I don't know if you remember, there is this very famous painting in the romantic movement, which is man alone contemplating its own fate, and it's really on a top of a mountain, this guy looking out into the infinite, with this sea of fog underneath.

And the idea is that we have this profound connection to both the land that we come from, and to the skies that we try to understand, right? And that a lot of what we do is establishing this connection between us here on Earth and the skies where essentially we come from, which is something I'm sure we can talk about later. And the whole fullness, right, the idea that look, the sky has the arms up like that, meaning, okay, let's do something and look at the universe and the earth in awe,

and what does this awe can do to us? Yeah, it is truly evocative of that. And I think that we'll go through the kind of stages of the book. But the most important figure that I see is this figure of Copernicus, who in addition to telling his story and the kind of almost bittersweet, tragic irony of his receiving the revolution, this book that really did act as a lever and displaced the earth from centrality. And the notion that great scientists can have great ideas and be based. on essentially no evidence. And I want to have this conversation with you specifically because you and I agree very, very closely on this notion of being alone in the universe is the most likely scenario based on evidence. We have no evidence of any other alien technology visiting the

earth, although there are claims that this has happened. I do want to get into that because you've written about that as well. But the fact is we don't really have any evidence of that. And so it is likely to assume this. Now, Copernicus conjectured the earth not being the center and, in fact, the sun being the center of the universe, which is also wrong, because the sun is not, as you point out any time to the book. But can you talk about how this idea of Copernicism sort of spread without evidence until really the 1800s? As I understand it, the proof came not from Galileo's dialogue, which I translated with Carlo Rovelli and others. into the first audiobook by Galileo, which is pretty awesome. But in fact, we didn't get proof, if you will, until the stellar aberration measurement. So how could this idea take off from 15, what was it, 1543 until 17, 1800s without any physical evidence? There are some things that are happening between, you know, the time that Copernicus published

his book and the 1800s or late 1700s. and we can go over that. But there is something that I wanted to preface, which is kind of fun. So this historian of science from Harvard is, it's deceased now called Owen Gingrich. He wrote a book about, I don't know if you know about this book. He wrote a book about Copernicus's book called The Book Nobody Read. And the point that he made, and he did this really wonderful scholarly work. He went around European monasteries and old villas and libraries,

collecting all the extant copies of Copernicus's other revolutions and studying who annotated them and everything. And what he realizes by the time Galileo comes around. So Copernicus dies in 1543. Galileo is publishing his first book in 1610. So that is a long time, right? I mean, you're talking about 50, 67 years. Only about 10 people that read the book took the idea.

of Copernicus seriously, right? And one of them was Giordano Bruno, who ended up burned at the stake in 1600. And the other one was Michael Maslin, who was Kepler's teacher. And of course, Galileo did as well. So it wasn't like an explosive revolution, right? I mean, the guys that brought the revolution forward were really Galileo and Kepler and then Descartes and then certainly Newton. And that's where I want to go. So Newton, I think, is this bridge, because Because he showed that, first of all, he showed that he proposed, he didn't show, he proposed the universe was infinite, not finite, which was something that everybody thought of at the time, right? And he believed that because of this stability of stars, you know, I mean, if I have a finite

universe and everything is attracting everything else, stuff could be lumpy up in the middle. And this theologian from Oxford called Richard Bentley wrote letters to Newton saying, can I use your theory to prove the existence of God? And Newton said, absolutely, let's go for it. And so Bentley asked these questions, and Newton starts to answer them. And one of them was, is the universe finite or not finite? And the other one was, if it's infinite, is God acting in the universe? And to Newton, he was.

But what Newton is going to do is he's using his theory of gravity, right, to show that as planets move around, the sun, right? And there wasn't a lot of discussion about the sun Billy or not the center of the universe with Newton anymore because a lot of people are thinking of stars as just other suns. People have, Joe Donovan had proposed that. Christian Huygens had proposed that.

And other people like in France, Bernardia, Beauvais de Fontanelle, I'm speeding out names here, but also wrote a book called Conversations of La Plurantia. reality of worlds where he, in 1686, so one year before Newton publishes his book, this guy publishes this wild book with actually Freeman Dyson, you mentioned him, he wrote the preface to one of the editions of this book, and it's just wonderful. So in which he is basically conjecturing precisely that, that the other stars are just suns and their planets going around them, and if so, could there be life there? And so, and Hershey, and Hershey, William Herschel, so 1781, so he discovers Uranus. He is very much a defendant of that idea

that stars are just like on the suns and he discovers Nebulae, right, 2,500 of them, which is really wild. And so the picture of the universe is changing when they're getting to the late 1700s, right? And even though there wasn't yes, some real proof of the other stars out there and not being the sun in the center, I think there was no reason to believe there anymore as there was with Copernicus and his heliostatic system. The Copernican theory, when extrapolated to the ultimate extent, say, in the 1900s, becomes the. cosmological principles at a certain level. And then, and then, curiously, it's extended even further by Tommy Gold and Fred Hoyle and even some extent my late, my late great colleague here at UC San Diego, Jeff Burbage, to become what's called the perfect cosmological principle. And of course, they're doing that to instantiate a universe that's steady state, in a quasi-steady

state. And so that ultimately is incorrect as well, but that doesn't enjoy the success that the Copernican principle does. I wonder, what are your thoughts about the perfect cosmological principle or even the cosmological principle as well? And as you know, it's come under

attack lately. Right. So let's talk about the Copernican principle first, just to contextualize things, right? So basically, Copernicus did that. He said, look, the earth is just a planet and the sun is kind of in the center. That's a more technical question we don't, but kind of in the center. And so the Earth is a planet. And that was obviously true. But what happened after that is that

there was this narrative that was constructed, which is like that the more we learn about the universe, the less central or important we become we being, we humans and we planet Earth and even the sun. So you're right. the sun gets displaced from being the center, is just a star, and then we'll figure out that there's the Einstein's cosmological principle that says the universe is essentially the same everywhere you look, so there's nothing very central to that. But he proposes the cosmological principle in 1917, I think, and Hubble, only 100 years ago, actually, this is the the otherth anniversary of Hubble's discovery that the Milky Way is also not the only galaxy

in the universe, but it's just one amidst hundreds of billions of other galaxies. So that's the idea. And then in 1929, five years later, he says in these galaxies, I'm moving away from one another, right? And then that upset Poyle and Bond and Goldie because they said, you know, this looks pretty biblical because if you play this movie backwards, the galaxies are coming together on top of each other in the past. And there is this initial moment or time of creation looks too genesis-like. And that's what Fred Hoyle, he was actually in a program of the BBC, he made a joke about saying, oh, you know, there is this crazy theory called a Big Bang Theory

from the American. So that was Gamow, other company. and the name stuck and they were proposing instead that that's not what happens, that you can impose not just perfect or whole genius and isotropic universe in space, but also in time. And that's the idea of the perfect cosmological principle, which is an interesting. I don't know why you put the perfect data, but that's how, you know, why is that perfect? But the universe is basically not really changing globally, is only changing locally.

and so that kind of tries to get away from the notion of a beginning of everything, right? And so that's the story. And then, of course, you're talking about criticisms or problems with our modern cosmological models because, well, that's a big, low conversation. But what has been happening is that a lot of the data that we're getting that measure how fast the universe is expanding. There are different ways of doing that. One is using very early universe data,

the micro-background radiation. The other one is using galaxies somewhat in our neighborhood, which is the astronomical way of doing that. And the data is off. They are not the same. The rate of expanding expansion of the universe is not close enough so that we can say there is no issue there. So the question is who is right, who is wrong,

and is our history of the universe, as we tell it, you know, backwards, problematic in some way or not, right? So that's where so-called crisis is in a sense. Hey, there, you beautiful magicians. I hope this wonderful conversation with Marcello is inspiring you as much as it inspired me. And it also inspired me to do a deep dive into data. And I found out a troubling fact that made me concern for humanity's future. And that's that only about 50% of you who are watching, enjoying, listening to this podcast or actually subscribed.

It only takes a second, and I know you're going to enjoy all the great guests that come after this wonderful episode. So please do it, subscribe, and follow on your favorite podcast app of choice. While you're there, don't forget to leave a comment. Help me improve this so that we can do better. The future of humanity depends upon it. Do it now before you forget.

Now back to the episode. And you've written about this recently, or relatively recently, on a cosmological time scale with Adam Frank, a response in the New York Times last September. And I just had on a researcher from the Flatiron Institute named Chris Hayward, who's a really brilliant young man, who's doing incredible work. And we kind of went through this article, but really some of the implications within it,

based upon his simulation team he called the, it's called the fire simulation, which incorporates feedback and galaxies. and Aper that you wrote with Adam, or the guest essay, rather, the story of our universe may be starting to unravel, extremely provocative. I don't know if you got to choose the title for the essay. Of course not. No, of course.

We don't see that. Yeah. So it gets into the James Webb Space Telescope and the mature galaxy problem, so to speak, and all these crises. And I just want to make one kind of convoluted connection to what you said. You mentioned the Genesis account that was so anathema to Burbage. But actually, it was Stephen Weinberg, who said that the steady state was more attractive because at least resembles Genesis 1-1.

And, yeah, and in fact, he really kind of maintained that up until the Kobe FIRAS. And, yeah, really the thermal spectrum was proven by past guest John Mather. But the question I want to relate to you is this notion that, that Weinberg said once, I think in 89, he said that physics thrives on crises, but right now there aren't many crises. I seem to think that in cosmology, at least, we're kind of abundant, we're overflowing with crises. What do you make of these claims that Big Bang never happened, that the universe might be 26 billion years old that were referenced and links embedded in that essay with you and Adam Frank? Yeah. So, first the thing about earlier

I mean, this issue, it's true. I mean, there is so little that we understand right now on for how those early galaxies were formed that it may be possible, you know, to kind of like get around some of these issues as we learn more. So that's totally fine. I think where Adam and I were pointing towards was not so much that problem, but really the way we try to model the early universe, you know, with like inflation and string theory and multi-universes, you know, ideas that really push extrapolation way beyond the limit of what we can say with any certainty that those ideas make sense or not. I mean, they may be appealing for different reasons. Inflation being one of them, and you know, you can't be a cosmologist if you don't have a model of inflation.

And of course, I have my own. But the point is that, that we're really pushing models towards realms where we have zero empirical evidence of what's going on, right? And that could be dangerous. And it's important, but it's also dangerous if you don't do it carefully and with humility. Let's put it that way. And the other problem, of course, that is hanging in our heads big time is dark matter and dark energy, right? As you know even better than I do. I mean, what is dark matter, right?

It's been around since Fritz Wiki proposed in 1933, and then it kind of came back with Senator Faber and all that. And we have been trying to capture this thing if it's made of little particles for quite some time, many decades, and the windows are smaller and smaller. And then, well, maybe it's not. Maybe it's very light. So people are looking for very light, and it's also not being found. And we have this thing, which is like, we love it because it helps us understand how

matter clumped early in the universe. So it's a very important thing. We see distortions of galaxies using this thing called microlensing that seems to be caused by some kind of invisible matter that clusters around galaxies and clusters of galaxies. Oh, we have no clue what it is. And that's sort of remarkable. And at the same time, exciting. So that to me is a crisis, but a crisis is not necessarily a bad thing. That's one point I like to. Crisis is a point of discovery is where novelty

may be coming from. So maybe there is something else we're going to find out. And the same with dark energy, obviously, right? I mean, you know there have been these new very recent discoveries that seem to point to the fact that dark energy may not be constant.

There may change in time. And there opens all sorts of exciting possibilities that what it could be. So again, when you have a universe where you understand 5% of the stuff that fuels it up, you can call it a crisis or you can call it a challenge. I like to call it more of a challenge. But the problem with that is that you have to ground your theoretical work on things that do not disrupt perhaps the fabric of how we do physics. And I think like multiverse theories is an example of something that does disrupt.

the way we do physics. And yet... You said this place was steps from the water. We just haven't found the steps yet. How much did we save? Enough. Enough to get lost! Or you could book a stay with Hilton.

Welcome to your oceanfront room. Just steps from the water. The Hilton sale is on now. Book on Hilton.com or the Hilton app and save up to 20% to get the stay you expected. When you want savings, not surprises. It matters where you stay. Hilton for this day.

It might be kind of in keeping with the various Copernican revolutions or great debates, as I've called them, you know, from the, from Copernicus to Hubble to eventually, yeah, the notion that there may be a special place within the multiverse that are cosmos and habits and that it's the only one that we know for sure has life within it. Getting back to the book, it's divided into, into, you know, five major parts, including an epilogue, but four parts that really the titles really speak for themselves. Worlds imagined, which covers Copernicus, worlds discovered, which speaks about the desacralization of nature and life on other worlds. The universe awakens, which is really the story of us,

the mystery of life and consciousness, and then eventually the mindful cosmos. And I kind of love this way of describing it because, you know, they're really, we talk about the Big Bang, but there are really multiple big banks, right? I mean, there's the origin of the universe from pure energy. Some people call that the big bang. There's the formation of the elements. People call that the big bang or nucleosynthesis. Then there's a formation of molecules from those simple atoms.

Then there's a formation of organic compounds from those simple atoms. Then there's a formation of life. Then there's a formation of consciousness. Then there's the formation of mindfulness. All of these things at some level, I kept making me think of something you and I share in common, which is Judaism. We're both Jews, although people sometimes don't know that about me because of my last name, but I'm actually a practicing, you know, what I call myself as a practicing agnostic, meaning that I go to a temple,

I keep kosher, I, you know, don't work on the Sabbath. So I have all these ways of practicing. But the fundamental tenet of Judaism, the word Yehuda in, or Judah, which is where the name Judaism comes from, it has a root word, which means Hodea, which means gratitude. And I kept thinking when I read this book that this is really a meditation on gratitude, that once you realize that we have this possibly unique capacity, that you're driven to be, once you have mindfulness, then you're driven to be grateful. And once you're grateful, you want to be a steward of the planet. But simultaneously, Marcel, I want to kind of push back with respect and love. In the Torah, in the Bible, the earth is given to humans for their benefit,

to master, to take care of. It doesn't say to destroy. That's actually a sin. But it says we're to subdue nature. And no one else has the capabilities that we have. You know, God says, at one point, let us make man in our image. Well, who the hell is he saying us to? Right. Some say, you know, that's truth that there are multiple gods, that I don't believe. Actually, I think he's talking to the animals and that those are the only creations, creatures that were alive that he could say in the collective. And man does have an animalistic side and it does have a godlike side. So I wonder, you know, how do you react to that? I mean, obviously you're very concerned about stewardship of the planet, the only one we know there's life. But how do you react to the fact that people say, well, no, it's our job to, it's our job to, exploit and take advantage of everything we have, not for evil capitalistic goals, maybe, in the manifesto sense. But how do you react to that, that the Earth is our property in a splitting sense? I consider that way of thinking about us and the Earth a profound mistake and a very serious one. And the mistake is at the root of what the problem, the problems that

we have right now. And so, in fact, in the book, I tell the whole story of this so-called desecralization, of nature that I mentioned is precisely the notion that before we became a grand society, so before monotheistic religions, we were really hunter-gatherers, you know, bands of people that had a completely different relationship to the planet than the one we developed became agrarian societies, right? So for those people, there was no separation between the world in which we exist and the world of spirits, right? world was magical. You had the god of the volcano and the winds and the water and you would have a relationship with those because you wanted to have some sort of power over things

which are much more powerful than you are, the powers of nature. You don't control the storms. You don't control the tidal waves or the volcanic eruptions. But if you could talk to the gods, you know, maybe things will get a little better. And the point here is that they venerated the planet as a sacred realm because it was part of where the spirits were. And as their mother, you know, the generation of life comes from the world. Once we became agrarian societies, we started to realize and very cleverly that, hey, you know what? Instead of grabbing stuff around or hunting, we can just plant. And by planting, we can have more people in the same place. And so about 10,000 years ago, in the Middle East, the Tigris and the Euphrates, where today is Iraq,

those big societies started to develop, and a few years later, not surprisingly, monotheistic religions started to appear. And one of the fundamental points of the monotheistic religions, in particular, Judaism, is that God was in the beginning present. I mean, the burning bush, so God is around, you know, it's talking to Abraham, is talking to job, etc. But as monotheistic religions develop, God becomes more and more. an abstract idea, right? And it moves on to the realm of the unknowable, right? I mean,

the heavens, but omniscient and omnipresent. And with that, once the spirits left the world, and God went up to the sky, so to speak, the earth became more and more objectified. It lost its sacred values. And with the development of a grand society, we also developed the illusion, I would say that we actually could control nature. Then we were not part of nature like the other, 95% of the history of our species or more. Homo sapiens were part of nature. And then we said, look, you know what? We are actually controlling.

We can control this stuff. And then science comes in, allows us to develop all these amazing technologies that help us control nature of amor and blow up this notion of this illusionary notion of control. out of proportion, to the point that now two things were lost. You know, first of all, the notion of we belonging to the natural world. We are not above it, but we are a fundamental part of it, completely co-dependent on how this world operates. Very simply, if you don't breathe good air or drink good water, you die.

And so, and where does this come from? It's coming from the environment, right? So we're not separated from that. We are very much part of that. So number one, number two, is the gratitude, which is exactly what you're talking about, which I love there actually, the gratitude of understanding, realizing

that belonging to nature is a privilege and that we should actually worship the planet that gives us the right to be here. We only tell these stories. We only hear listening to Brian, kidding because this planet allows us to do that. But we are so detached from the natural world. I mean, I'm teaching a class here at Dartmouth now, and I asked my students, 50 of them, how would you find Venus in the sky? And only one person raised their hand. And not because

they were sure. It's just because people are not even looking. They're not connected. You know, it's all about urban life. And I think this is a consequence. of this progressive detachment from the natural world. The notion of the earth or thunder god or something, these are sort of intermediaries. Judaism has a very great sin to worship idols, right? So that's a second commandment. So the point that I'm trying to make is, why stop at the intermediary? Why not just go to the source and say, God made the earth and God made the universe?

again, I don't even think you have to be religious to sort of accept, as you call yourself, an agnostic. So you're not an atheist. And you make it very clear that you are not an atheist. But you don't go so far as to say you're the atheistically inclined. But why stop at the earth? Is it just because it's harder to talk to a college kid about, you know, worshiping God or maybe we shouldn't be talking about God and science at the same time. But this book seems to me to be a spiritual book as well as a scientific book. So my question, I guess, is why stop at the earth and kind of sanctifying earth in a sense? Why not to say, I worship God? Because he made the earth and he made it such that we can enjoy it, but we have to take care of it as well. In this book, I proposed something called biocentrism, which is essentially a way of thinking about life as being sacred, not attached to a particular religion. I talk about secular spirituality. but attached to the fact that there is something profoundly wonderful and mysterious and awesome in the right way of the word about being in this planet which is a living world.

But if you attach it to a specific kind of faith, I think you take away the power of the biocentric notion because then people are going to invoke more tribal allegiances and say, well, no, my God is different from your God. I'm not going to believe in you. And I want to go beyond that because I'm going to speak to humanity as a whole, as a single tribe of primates that can actually make meaning out of life. And we can only do that in this living planet. And another thing that I would like to say is that biocentrism is not just about our planet,

any living world, if there are others out there and we cannot know for certain. It's not looking good right now, but we cannot know for certain. I mean, I'm working on this area in astrobiology these days. But the point is that we need to understand that life is the most complex and amazing phenomenon that we know of in the universe because it's an emergence of matter with intentionality, right? And that to me is absolutely beautiful. And the fact that we live in this world that has this and allows us to be, I wouldn't like to call the maximal expression of this because that sounds like what people

call human exceptionalism, but we're definitely the ones that can tell the story of this. And that makes us special and also morally connected to the preservation of what we have here or we should be. Again, to be slightly but lovingly confrontational. When you imagine an alternative history, we talked about the perfect cosmological principle before extending the Pernican principle to both space and time and the cosmological principle to both space and time. Some call it the mediocrity principle, but imagine in a different scenario, if this manifesto is truly applicable to me, it should apply at any time

in human history or life history, conscious history, mindful history. Therefore, I ask you to consider a following counterfactual example, which would be, what if Marcelo Gleister lived in 1820 and was living in the United Kingdom right after the Industrial Revolution? And you wrote this book and you talked about the exploitation of resources, extracted as you say, and you're such a beautiful writer. It's just so rare to have someone so erudite in science, but also a writer of your caliber. But you talk about the entrails of the planet being extracted early on in the book. What if they stopped then? What if they said, okay, Marcelo, you are the prophet of this new biocentrism. We will adhere to what you say.

I claim, perhaps, that would be a grave mistake because we would not have the scientific, we wouldn't have the Large Hadron Collider. We wouldn't have the JWST, which you know, you and I make our living off of to some extent. We wouldn't have, we wouldn't have, you know, vision and fusion energy. and we wouldn't have the capability to eventually, Marcelo, suck the carbon out of the atmosphere and have high-temperature superconductivity and all these great advantageous things

that depend on the exploitation of the very resources that you quite frankly do a good job of extolling why we should be careful for the earth, but what if someone took the advice of this book in the 1800s? Would that not have stifled? All of the amazing technical progress that we've made. Possibly, but this, book was not written in 1820. So this is a very big if and rewriting history is never a very strong

way of thinking about the future. It's really about what happened in the past. And the point is that right now, nobody's saying that we should stop developing technologies or exploiting, you know, resources that we have in order to advance the project of civilization, which is the central focus of this book, which is, how can you do that? Can you keep growing without harming the environment and thus ourselves, right? That's the question. And so this shift is not necessarily stop growing because you're hurting the planet, but is instead of using the fossil fuels that we have used for 150 years, we can actually collect the energy that is coming to us from the skies to promote this growth.

So it's just a shift in perspective, you know, is about using the energy that comes from the sun and from the winds to propel forward our ideas. And in fact, this is not stopping technology. This is actually pushing technology in new directions. So I'm not sure it would work with this kind of analysis, analogy, but I would certainly encourage new technologies because of the new ways in which

we're growing. So it's not an anti-growth, but it's a critique of the moment now, not of the moment 100 years ago or 200 years ago, because then, yes, history was different, technologies were different, you're beginning the industrial revolution, you needed to propel things forward, steam engines, et cetera. But we are living in a very different moment now, in which we really are at a crossroads. And we are at a crossroads not just because of the way we interact with the planet, but the way we interact with each other. And so this book is trying to kind of bring both things together. Wonderful. Thank you so much. Okay, I want to talk about one of the prerequisites for conscious life, which is the necessity of life. And I want to do that by referencing one of your

most recent papers, which I've really enjoyed, along with past guest and uprockets. coming guest. Lisa Coltonneger, who is, she is the Carl Sagan. You recognize this guy, Marcello. This is, someday we'll have one of you, Peppa, Carl Sagan Finger Puppet. She's the director of the Carl Sagan Institute. So this is a wonderful paper, and I want to use it as a selfish way of springboarding into some ideas I want to run by you on Pants, Parmia, which you talk about in the book. But first, can you describe this paper? It's called an information theory approach to identifying signs of life on transiting planets. And this has insights onto whether or not you could diagnose if exoplanets are habitable, which is a prerequisite for life. And then that life could then

potentially, after passing an infinite number of hurdles, in my opinion, but nearly infinite number of hurdles, maybe host conscious life, technological life. So please, talk us through this paper with Sarah, Anna and Lisa. Right. So thanks for bringing that up. So the paper is about this wonderful revolution that is happening, right? Thanks to James Webb, right, that we are able to collect spectra. So we can see, let's speak this in a more, so we can actually look at these distant worlds and find out within the accuracy that we can with our current instruments, find out what is the composition of the atmosphere of these worlds.

And that's wonderful because what we have. learned in the last 30, 40 years is that there is a profound connection between the presence of life in a world and the atmospheric composition of their world, meaning life affects the air you breathe, so to speak. And so on Earth in particular, three billion years ago, the atmosphere had almost no oxygen and life as we know it didn't exist. But then those bacteria, there were the only kind of life forms around, mostly, they mutated into photosynthetic bacteria, they started to get CO2, which was pretty dominant in the atmosphere, and produce oxygen, and it's called great oxygenation event, changed the planet, allowed for life to develop, and in particular, more complex

life forms eventually, too. So the presence of life writes itself in the chemical composition of the atmosphere. So you go out and you look for, okay, we have to stay with life as we know it for now anyways. And life as we know it is about carbon dioxide. So CO2 is about oxygen, is about ozone, is about methane. And can you go and can you find those gases in these atmospheres in the other planets, right? So that's the idea. And can you compare that to Earth? Because if you look at most of what people say, oh, Earth-like planets, you know, in astrobiology, they're talking about planets that have a mass. and a radius similar to ours. But having a mass and a radius similar to Earth says nothing about

life in the world. Having life in the world is a much more complicated story. So to be really earth-like or to be an Earth-analog, you need to just, not just have those properties, but also be orbiting a star similar to our sun, because different stars output different kinds of radiation, and have the right composition. So what we do, long story, we look at the spectra, the composition of these other worlds, the atmosphere of these other worlds, and compare it to Earth. But not just Earth now, Earth at different times in its history, because, you know, you could have a planet that could become Earth in two billion years from now,

but it's looking like something completely different. So what the book, the paper does is that we use tools from information. theory, basically we consider the composition of the atmosphere as a message, like a text, right? A text is made of letters. Well, the message from the planets is made of chemical compounds. And we compare the messages from those planets with the message of our planet, which is what is the composition of Earth now two billion years ago, three billion years ago, to see if there are similarities or not. So that's what our tool does. And the idea is hopefully that as people buy this, the community buy this, they'll be able to automate searches very quickly and immediately compare it to Earth's spectra and very easily either rule out or bring in planets that do have a chance of host in life.

So I want to run an idea by you because I thank you and Lisa, I don't know Sarah, but I assume she'd be wonderful as well. we often in in you know astronomy the concept of panspermia will come about and this I believe was popularized by Fred Hoyle as well as the Big Bang and many other things he was such an incredible intellect he was a little bit impolitic with criticizing the Nobel Committee apparently and that's why he didn't win it along with Willie Fowler apparently who is the advisor of one of my very close friends here George Fuller but the concept of panspermia is that life, it doesn't explain the origin of life, but it explains how origin of life on Earth may have come about. And that's via these devices, these messengers, meteorites. So these are actual meteorites. And by the way, I give these away to anybody with a dot edu email address when you go to Brian Keating.com,

because I want to spread the message of science and technology to as many young people as possible. So, Brian Keating.com, you'll get your own meteorite. And I also give them way, if you don't have one, just one or two a month. Anyway, these meteorites have been found all over the Earth. And I actually have a small fragment of them that I give away. But I want to make an analogy. If I told you, Marcelo, that you were sleeping last night, but I heard from Lisa, that they

found a binary planet system. They found two planets in the habitable zone of a G2-type yellow sub-dwarf, just like the sun. It's about 40 light years away. And they found one of them has abundant signatures of life. It has phosphine. It has ozone. It has oxygen. Molecular oxygen.

It has all these things. Maybe it even has, you know, sugar molecules and all sorts of wonderful signatures of life. Guaranteed. That's one of the planets. And then the other planet, also in the Habital Zone, they haven't looked at the James Webb telescope. It's going to cost a couple of million dollars per minute to observe. And they want to know if you want to use your one chance in your career to direct the web telescope,

to look at the other planet, and they want to know your confidence that that planet would have life on it. Can you say, based on a Bayesian kind of analysis, is it possible, information theoretic, French, is it possible to say anything about the probability of life on the other planet, call it Sram and the other one is called E-Tath. So E-Tath has life on it, guaranteed 100%. They want to know, does this other planet have life on it? What would you say? Could we use the existence of life on a planet in the habitable zone

to predict the existence of life on another planet in the habitable zone of the same star? No, you can't. You can't know. And the reason is that if you look at the history, at least there is sort of life in this planet, but that's going to be true for every planet, because it is completely contingent on the particular history of the world, right? And you could say, you know, look at Earth and Mars, right?

I mean, they are not that different, but they are incredibly different, you know, in a sense. What happened and why is that? Well, and there is like, there are details on it. And some people even believe that maybe there was life on Mars in the first billion years of its existence, but then it became this frigid, horrible deserts that, I definitely don't want to go there. Maybe Elon Musk does. I don't.

Maybe he can go. But the point is that we cannot, without seeing it or having some information from it, we cannot say anything about life. Even if you had similar Earth and radius to this planet or to this other planet that you call E-Tape, it would be very... That's Earth backwards. That's Earth spelled backwards. Oh, okay.

Got it. Tram is Mars. spelled backwards. So yes, I was basically made me. Very cute. So we would not be able to, I didn't get it, but I did it somehow, because I compared to Earth and Mars. So something funny happened there. That's exactly what I wanted you to do. Yeah. Wow. All right. And then I would say that we cannot say just because the same thing could have happened here. If there were no photosynthetic bacteria that oxidated atmosphere life, as we know it here, would not have happened. So how could we say anything about that?

So the upshot is that when it comes to biology, you cannot use induction. That was the analogy, you know, that we have tons of material, literally tons of material on Earth that come from Mars. And presumably there's material that's come from Earth, lots of it that's landed on Mars, including life sustaining and life, you know, tardigrades and amino acids and so forth. I had Craig Venter on who mapped the human genome about a month ago, and he said, the international space station is covered in microbes. The outside of his absolutely sotty and discussing with microbes from the poop of astronauts that they expel it to the outer regions of the spacecraft, and so it's covered with it, and he guarantees that there's material on Mars. So my question is, you know, since we haven't discovered life in the solar system yet, and there's been billions of years since life evolved on Earth, as you describe in this book, shouldn't we have any reduction in the ability of panspermia to solve the problem of origin of life? In other words, can it tell us anything? And it sounds like there's so many factors that are so contingent upon life in the universe that we, on Earth, rather, that it's just impossible to extrapolate from that. Is that right?

Right. Yes, that's right. And two things. First, you know, I think panspermia, Gustavarius. Yes, he was probably the original. In 1911 or 1920, I don't know, very early on, he was the guy who first of all predicted global warming and explained it. And it's kind of amazing. And he was the one, I think, that first planted this notion of panspermia that, you know, you could have life traveling around planetary distance and maybe even interstellar distances. But you know what bothers me about this whole panspermia thing, Brian, is that it kind of puts the dust under the carpet. Because it's saying, oh, look, life could have come from somewhere else, but then you ask, okay, how did life appear in that somewhere else? And then it said, oh, it came from somewhere else, and then it sturtles all the way down, right? I mean, it doesn't really illuminate

the origin of life itself, because somewhere it must have happened. And the question is, to me, one of the most fascinating and deeper questions in science is precisely this transition from non-living to living matter. Right. How? did that happen here or possibly other places. And it's a completely open question right now. And it's absolutely fascinating because life is really complicated. Hey there, it's me again. I know you're enjoying this wonderful episode with my esteemed guest, Marcelo Gleiser. Now, if I told you that this is not the end of the content and the conversation with Marcelo, in fact, it's just the beginning. If you join my Monday Magic Messages,

which is a mailing list I send out every week. You'll get some great additional content on this episode and many, many other interesting tidbits from around the world of science, technology, engineering, and math, your favorite STEM subjects. And if you're one of the lucky winners each month, I give away one of these, a piece of real space schmutz, a meteorite from the early solar system.

And you can go there to briankeating.com slash list and get your own chance to win a meteorite. And if you have a .edu email address, you're automatically going to win. So go to Brian Keating.com slash edu if you're one of those lucky students of Marcello or anywhere else in the universe. So do it now. Before you forget, now back to the episode. So I want to run by you a quote, just pivoting more to the grander topics that the book evokes to me.

And this is a quote from Peter Medawar, who I'm sure you know is the only Brazilian, also from Rio to win the Nobel Prize in medicine. And he said the following, Marcella, I want to get your reaction to it. He said there's no such thing as a scientific mind. Scientists are people of very dissimilar temperaments, doing very different things in very different ways. Among scientists are collectors, classifiers, and compulsive tidiers up. Many are detectives by temperament and many more are explorers. Some are artists and some are artisans. I find that so beautiful. What are you, Marcella, what type of scientist are you? And how do you teach a young person to become a scientist? That's a wonderful question. I think I'm a weaver.

I weave ideas from different fields into one another. You know, so string theory. You brought in string theory. I knew you would do it. So the string theory was in my brave youth where I believe that there was a platonic way of understanding the universe, you know. But I moved way far away from that. I wrote a whole book kind of basically criticized. even the notion of unifying theories and finding solutions to that, you know, is a pretty

strong critique. And I look not at symmetry as beauty, but as asymmetry as beautiful and fundamental, right? But when I say weaver, I mean a weaver of ideas. And I'll give an example for my career. So in 2012, I came up with a measure of information, which using information theory came up, which in a sense measures the complexity of a spatial structure, whatever that is, or of a message. And I wrote this thing and I applied the first for the things I always work on, which was like these solitons in few theory, which are basically little lumps of energy. They have a certain profile of energy. And then from there, I started to apply that to astrophysics, and I try to reproduce the critical mass of white dwarfs and neutron stars

using the same measure, and then I applied to the hydrogen atom, and I applied it to face resitions and critical phenomena, and then I am applying now to astrobiology and reading the atmospheres of other planets. And so I basically like to imagine that there are universal measures that we can apply to many different ways or many different physical systems, so to speak. And I've always kind of like love that, the ability to work in many different areas, not just in one area. So you mentioned Freeman Dyson, right?

So he had this whole thing of the fox and the hedgehog. He has this beautiful essay about the fox. So just in case your listeners don't know, he says, you know, there are two kinds of scientists, you know, the foxes and the hedgehogs. And the hedgehogs are those that work very deeply on a single field of knowledge and they go very deep. And let's say they spend the whole lives studying the property of black holes, how they eat up on their stars, right? And then you have, they tend to get Nobel prizes, those guys, because they're really focused. They're looking enough to choose an area that is a right one. And then you have the foxes who are people that work

in many different areas. So there are beautiful examples of foxes like Newton was a fox, and Einstein was a fox, and Feynman was a fox. And in my own very little world bubble here, I consider myself also that kind of scientist that has an interest in many different areas of physics and biology as well. How do I teach kids to love science by showing how awesome our story of the universe is? And that's something that one of the items on my manifesto at the end of the book is that we should be teaching kids at every different level from elementary school to PhD programs, the history of the universe, independent of the area.

Because once you do that and once you understand how deeply connected we are to billions of years of history of how the universe evolved, the stuff that I'm sure a million people said in your show already about us being made. of stardust, meaning we are really made of stuff which is billions of years old and how this interconnection with the history of the universe makes us who we are right now and makes the planet so remarkably special. That story is a wow story that everyone should know. And I think that if you do know that story, you start to understand us and the planet in a completely different way. So I just try to wow people with the beauty of the scientific narrative that were a building about who we are in this big universe.

It's peak pollination season, and my business is scaling fast. To keep the nectar flowing, I need a phone plan with top priority data speeds. That's why I chose GoogleFi Wireless. My connections stay strong even when the hive is buzzing. Plus, unlimited plans started $35 a month. Now, that's a deal that doesn't stay. Explore GoogleFi Wireless plans today. Plus taxes and government fees, Google Fiore Wireless is not subject to data traffic deprivation.

When I think about, you know, kind of the gratitude that this book evokes, and I think if you're able to take the message to heart, it's impossible not to feel grateful for the kind of precarious, you know, position that humans are perched upon. And then, of course, I also have to, you know, admit that there are, you know, reasons to be optimistic. And, you know, reasons to be optimistic. And, One of those is the advent of technology and the production of new, new solutions to these problems. And that could range from everything from advancements in high temperature superconductivity so that electrical losses could be reduced, which would reduce carbon emissions or the complete illumination, you know, not just the stoppage of carbon emissions, but if we had cheap, plentiful nuclear fusion or fission, quite frankly, and used it more wisely and more. appropriately, we would have abundant ability to vacuum out the carbon dioxide from our own atmosphere. So that would make it harder for, you know, Gleas, you know, 22B to detect our civilization maybe because we would lose our biosignature and they would not be applying the glycer information theory complex. But are you optimistic? Are you pessimistic? How do you see it? Because there's only so much carbon, for example, there's only so much carbon in the earth, right?

There's not an infinite store of carbon. And some people claim my colleague at UC San Diego, Tom Murphy, recently retired. But he claimed, you know, that there's going to be a peak in the carbon emissions and it's going to stop because there's only so much carbon in the earth. That doesn't mean there won't be horrible consequences. But are you optimistic? And if so, why? And if you're pessimistic, what do we do next? People often ask me that, you know, are you optimistic or pessimistic about the future or what's going on?

And I answer with a very Brazilian answer, which is this. Imagine you're going to play a soccer game, right? And you have your opponents, and your opponents are tough. If you're a pessimist, you're going to be like that guy that doesn't even kick the ball because he knows he already lost the game. And what kind of life is that, right? I mean, so the only option that I think we can have as human beings that want to make a difference is being optimists because an optimist transforms this optimism in action, in choices that you make

in your life to actually make a difference. So, and what I have seen, and so this is a decision I made a few years ago when I realized that a lot of our public intellectuals are extremely pessimistic about not just our future, but about us humans. You know, that humans suck, right? I mean, there's this notion that we are just awful to one another and how could we possibly fix our problems if that's the way we are. And I like to, I beg to differ, you know, and I think that that's not true, that there are wonderful things that we do to one another, apart from killing each other, which is another story. But there are wonderful things. And I see the younger generations, you know, I have kids of many different ages from 35 to 12. And I see, especially

on the younger ones, you know, 25 and below, a different way of treating the differences between us, cultural, ethnic, sexual, and a much more, a higher acceptance, and also a deeper connection with the world and nature and understanding that things can just not go the way they are. So I see this nascent, nascent level of activism in younger people. And I think that's wonderful because they're the ones they're going to be living in this mess, right? So I want their world to be a much better world. And I think the job of every generation is to live the place, a better place for the next generation. That's the least that we can do.

And so being pessimistic is not going to help. On the other hand, Brian, I think that technological solutions are absolutely essential. and they are going to definitely be fundamental in the changes that come. So carbon sequestration, alternative energy sources, fusion, whatever it's going to be. However, if you don't change your mindset, those are just not going to be enough. Science by itself is not going to solve our problems. We need to really go to a very deep re-evaluation of who we are as a species on a fragile and limited planet. it. And that's what the proposal of this book is. So speaking of pedagogy, you're a master educator.

I've known that since I first became aware of you, my colleague, and one of my many-time guest on the show is Stefan Alexander, and now Professor at Brown, but was one of your colleagues, and would extoll your virtues. Robert Caldwell, and one of my best friends is there as well. And they all speak of you as this master educator. I want to ask you about the possibility for augmentation or perhaps complete reformation of education. In that, what you and I do is probably the best job in the world. And I have proof of that, by the way, when Neil Armstrong came back from the moon, he became a professor. That's his final job was the only job that could top being an astronaut and being the first human on another world, on an alien world, was to be a professor

at Dayton at the of engineering. Anyway, but largely our profession of professoriates, the professor, it hasn't changed in a thousand years since University of Bologna opened in the year 1080. Do you see what's happening in education as being fraught with risk of perhaps disruption, pivoting revolution even? And I'm thinking primarily of maybe perhaps artificial intelligence, avatars, distance learning, Apple vision, you know, is out. And, you know, I'm hoping if the channel grows big enough I can afford one of those on a state university professor's salary, not an Ivy League salary. But I want to ask you, are you optimistic, pessimistic? What do you see as the opportunities and the threats to you and me of artificial intelligence, if any? As a substitute for teaching,

humans, for augmentation or augmenting our teaching, having a conversation with Carl or with Einstein and coming back, you know, using them as a tutor or a private, personalized, learning avatar. Is that a possibility? You know, this fear of the new technology is as old as technology in a sense, right? The idea of substitution of the human biomachine. I mean, look at modern times by Charlie Chaplin, right? I mean, the whole, and the difference between those technologies and AI technologies, those technologies before, they were doing things that were just awful for us to do, like, you know, going deep in the underground and building cars and, you know, like being high-risk environments. And AI is in a sense

different because it's trying to do what we do best as humans, right? I mean, like we take care of each other as doctors, we teach each other and we nurture each other, we invest money for each other. And I very recently, I gave a talk to 30, sorry, 3,000 oncologists in Sao Paulo in Brazil about AI in the future of medicine, not that I am an expert in the future of medicine with AI, but I actually did some homework and their fear was exactly the one you're saying, and that they were be obsolete, you know, because the robots with a very surgically, you know, fine-tuned sense of movement and an AI attached to that, they will be able to do the job that they're doing much better. And I think that's just the wrong way of thinking about that. I think

the way to think about that is not that the new technology is the enemy, but it's just another tool for us to expand ourselves. And so just like, for example, you can use AI to data mine a lot of huge amounts of data from accelerators and from satellites in order to find patterns that we can't find or will be much harder for us to find. But then once we have those patterns, you know, we'll be able to write our papers and understand the meaning of things in the ways that we can. So for education in particular,

you can, the small example of the pandemic, which is not quite the same, but look what happened during the pandemic and what's happening now. The students love to be back in the classroom, right? I mean, they love to have that eye-to-eye contact with their teachers and with their peers. And there is no way that a machine will ever take that place. A machine can help us.

For example, I'm grading exams, which is honestly a pain in the neck. And that's something that if I could feed those midterms to a machine, that would be great because I don't have to do that. But the act of teaching, of answering questions, of being human in the way we talk to one another, that's never going to happen. And I actually joke the dogs that said, look, guys, you know, maybe you become obsolete, but not the nurses. Because the nurses are the ones that actually are there holding the hand of your patient. And that's what makes all the difference is that being human that a machine is not going to do. So my perhaps naively optimistic

way of thinking about this is that those technologies are not going to make us obsolete is just going to change us like other technologies have changed us and in particular, you know, looking at stuff like this, you know, those technologies have changed us already. We're already

hybrids, you know, in a sense. I talk about cell phones as a continuation of who we are, you know, and that's why we can't forget one, you know, if you forget one and you go to work and you have your cell phone when you kind of get very anxious, like there is a piece of myself missing. And so there is already a hybridization between us and the machine.

But that's not making us less, hopefully, less human, is just making us different humans. Yeah, so you've got to teach that to the doctors at the doctor's pseudicematical. I know. It's true. We have a lot of questions from the audience. And I want to just take a couple of seconds to quickly answer how, what you think about them. So first one comes from Rodrigo Oshiro or Shiro. So nice, thank you. I grew up reading Marcella's articles in newspaper every Sunday.

I guess he might be Brazilian or maybe not. I don't know. Is there a limit to intelligence and what boundaries might it break? Individuals, societies, planets. And then he asked, what do you think the last intelligent beings will hold on to when the universe starts to fade? So first question. Is there a limits of human intelligence? To intelligence in general.

Well, if you think of intelligence as the capacity to process information, then because the number of atoms in the universe is finite and we're using those atoms to somehow process information, then yes, there is a limit to how much information the universe as a whole could process, right? And I think somebody has written a paper about this already. If not, that could be done. And so, yes, there is a limit. but we are talking about using the whole universe as a giant computer, which is kind of an amazing idea, but it's possible in principle. In practice, it's complicated because of speed of light and other issues.

But if you want to be a little more realistic, the limit of processing of intelligence, because intelligence needs connectivity in order to function. And so it's really limited by how far away your processes are going to be in order to create a communication that is viable if you want a quick answer like that. So there are ways of thinking about that. And what was the second one? The second one was... What do you think the last intelligent beings will hold on to when the universe starts to fade?

I don't know how you could answer that, but if you want to. I think it was going to be Mahler's Fifth Symphony. Okay. I have no idea. But I think what they are going to hold on to is the fact that they are beings, that they are creatures, whatever creatures they are with purpose and intentionality, which is something that is really the fundamental characteristic of any living thing. Next question, probably another Brazilian is asking, what is the biggest difference for Brazilians going into the field of physics? Does your nationality affect how you view the best path moving forward in your career? Well, since there are so many Brazilians listening, so I have a huge audience here, apparently.

This book is coming out in Brazil in March, March 5th, and I'm going to go down there to promote it. So, hey, awesome. Can you, do you have room for, you know, a Californian to come with you? Come along, to promote it for me. Yeah, never been to Brazil. We can talk about. A lot of time in Chile. I spent a lot of time in Chile where the Simon's Observatory.

Oh, nice. Never been to. My sister-in-law's from there, though. She's promised to take me there. You have to go. Absolutely. Yes. So the question was, again.

advice for Brazilians trying to get into physics? So right now there are lots of Brazilians that are getting into physics, not just in Brazil, which you can do very well. You know, Brazil has very good universities and wonderful scientists and mentors. So it's not like you can't do science, of high-quality science in Brazil. You can't, and it's not just possible when it's being done. But if you're going to go abroad, absolutely.

You know, you have to be a very good student in high school, get a nice SAT score, apply, and Dartmouth, and I'm sure many universities, including UCSD, Bryan's University has Brazilian students that go in, sometimes with full tuition, certainly in non-public schools that happens. And I know several of them. So yeah, you can do it, and being Brazilian or not is completely irrelevant nowadays, right? I mean, you just have to be good at what you do, wherever you come from. Okay, last question. YouTube or remind me of my audience, you can always ask me questions on YouTube, Dr. Brian Keating on Twitter, Dr. Brian Keating, Instagram, Dr. Brian Keating, everywhere you see it.

Last one from there, and then we'll take one from Twitter, and then we'll wrap up. Okay. How likely Jacob Ed. 1B.L. asked, how likely is it that humans will escape our solar system and thrive in the universe? Because I think we're bleep. So how likely will we escape the solar? So maybe first, do you think it's realistic that humans,

will live on Mars in the next century? No. I think it's going to take longer than that. First, we have to go to the moon, right? So the real first jump is the next step, so to speak, is going to the moon. And Brian knows about 2001, and it starts with the base on the moon, right? And the whole, so that's the first jump. But moving out of the solar system, it's pretty, unless something really remarkable happens

and we find out ways of covering interstellar distances very fast, it's completely impractical for the very simple reason that if you want to go from here to this closest star to our solar system, you know, the Alpha Centauri triplet of stars, which is four and a half light years away from us, it would give a take with our fastest spaceship. It would take about 100,000 years right now. So that is a trip that what are you going to do?

You go deep freeze for 100,000 years, or you develop a giant Noah's Ark that keeps a lot of people in and its own biosystem that is sustainable for that long and God knows. So the people that arrive in this new place, they don't even remember where they came from or if they do, it's really far back there. So the point is, I don't think we want to dream about those things as much as we want to dream about saving our operations. planet, which is where we are right now, and where we will exist for the next few decades, which are the fundamental decades we have to worry about. So that's really the point. Excellent. Okay. So we have one question from Twitter that I would take. Let's see if we can get that going here. Twitter user asked, why do I have the impression that the culture of falsification has gone away in science.

Artisan Tony has a long-time listener of the podcast, as falsification become passe, I think he's talking about it in the context, perhaps of string theory or even evidence or belief in alien technology. Where does this come in? Do we need falsification anymore? Is that adequate, as Popper suggested it was?

I think science without empirical validation, that is, without having a hypothesis, that can at least in principle be tested is not science anymore. So I don't know if I'm getting older and more conservative in my ideas, but if you come up with some idea that cannot be tested at all, in principle, then we'll never know if that thing is scientific or not, right? And that to me is a problem, yes. So are we moving away from falsification?

Turns out that in March, in the United States, I have a new book coming out written with Adam Frank and Evelyn Thompson, who is an amazing philosopher of mind, which is called The Blind Spot. And that book is a very serious analysis of precisely the question that this person is asking, which is the blind spot here is how far science has gone on its own trail of speculation,

when it loses sense of the fact that everything that we do in science starts with the experience of being in the world. world. And so this sort of like, it's called, there are several names for this, but the reification of mathematical ideas, like you have an idea that is so compelling that you say, this has to be true, you know, and even though you do not know or cannot know if it's true, the multiverse is a very good example of that. So yes, it is a concern and we should be worried about that. Very good. Okay. If you'll indulge me, we have just a

few questions that I love to ask my esteemed guest and I've asked them all the way back to Freeman Dyson and Martin race and many other fellow Templeton prize winners. And they all revolve around Sir Arthur C. Clark, who makes many appearances in this book wonderfully so. And you and I just watched it with our kids recently

so that's fun. And I have in the background open the pod bay door so the editor can zoom out. Do you know that the word podcast comes from that movie? Oh, I did not know that. Yeah. So one of the employees at Apple, when they invented the iPod, they didn't know what they called it, and they wanted something that was incredibly powerful, like computer technology and stored life-giving, supporting, and sustaining data. And they called it the iPod. And then from that came the word

based on the pod in Arthur C. Clark's 2001. So it has a direct linkage to where the word podcast comes from. So I'll open the beginning of this podcast with two, quotes from that movie or from Arthur C. Clark. The first is Dave asking how to open the pod bay doors, so he'll do that, and that's starting the podcast. But before that, I have a quote from Sir Arthur C. Clark, which goes like this, that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. And I want to ask you, in your opinion as a scientist and your career, what is sort of the most magical thing that we could put on a monolith, like in 2001, to sort of last for all time, a time capsule, a symbol of bragging, something to brag about. What is the most magical,

most powerful idea, technology, concept that human beings have ever had the right to brag about as truly representing a magical idea? Wow, that's a very hard question. Because to pick one, right, from everything that we have done, it's incredibly complex. But I would say that Perhaps one of the most remarkable things that we have done is that we have been able to create languages to tell stories about who we are. There were animals that can tell stories. And that brings us memory. And that makes all the difference. I think Feynman said it was atoms, right?

Feynman, when people ask him that question says it was atoms. That's right. But honestly, I think telling stories is. is kind of enculpuses atoms, too, because atoms are a story about the world being very small or what happens down there. That's right. Okay. The next quote from Sir Arthur C. Clark is the following.

He said when a distinguished but elderly scientist, I'm not calling you elderly, by the way, but when an elderly scientist says something is possible, they are almost certainly right. But when they say something is impossible, they're very probably wrong. And actually, you talk about this in the book. Clark called these failures of imagination in his book profiles of the future. Nowadays, psychologists call these things limiting beliefs. I want to ask you, what have you been wrong about? What have you changed your mind about, scientifically or otherwise?

And what, if you will, what limiting beliefs have you overcome in a way to help my audience to overcome them in their own lives? I can't say about things I've been wrong yet because a lot of the ideas that I put forward have never been tested. Some of them because they just get, and others just because it's hard to do. But I would say that my view of science when I started my career has changed. And I can say I was wrong, but I would say that my belief that I had that we could rationally construct a theory of everything, meaning a theory that would reunify all forces of nature into a single narrative, that is wrong. It just can't be done. And there's a book I wrote

called The Island of Knowledge that explains why that can't be done. It's epistemologically impossible to claim that we actually arrived at a final theory of everything, even if you restrict that to the world of the very small, you know, particles and forces and things like that. So my belief, leave my conviction in the beginning when I was younger, I think was wrong. And that's okay. You know, it's called epistemic humility. It's the notion that you do not need to always be right. In fact, being wrong is wonderful. And failure is an excellent way of learning to grow. Yeah, you can't have success without failure. Exactly. And that maybe dovetails into my final question for you, which also comes from Sir Arthur C. Clark's so-called third lot,

which is the following. The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to go beyond them into the impossible. And that's the origin of the name of my podcast. I want to use this as advice to a 20-year-old Marcello. You get 30 seconds to go back and talk to your former 20-year-old version of Marcello. What advice would you give him to give him the courage to do as you've done to go into the impossible.

Yeah, that's wonderful, and I thank you for that. I actually wrote a book only in Portuguese called Letters to My Younger Self, in which I do exactly that. I have that conversation with myself. I'm older, Marcelo, and the 17-year-old Marcelo. And the hardest thing for me was to have the courage

to go into physics, you know, growing up in Rio, and we're talking about the 80s here. and it was a leap of faith into something that would, most people around me said would be impossible to have a career as a physicist. You know, come on, you know, you're like this guy from Rio. What are you thinking, you know? And my older brother, who was a very wise guy, said to me, look, if you have a dream that is powerful enough within you,

you should follow it. Because if you don't, you're going to regret it for the rest of your life. And that's what I did. And it worked. So I think that was it. You know, so believe that you can do much more than you think you can. Arcella Gleiser is a physicist and esteemed professor at Dartmouth College. As work in science has concerned the physics of the early universe, the nature of complexity, the origin of life, particle physics, and cosmology. He's written numerous books ranging from the great minds don't think alike. A recent one. more recently. Simple beauty of the unexpected. The Island of Knowledge, a runaway bestseller, tear at the edge of creation, the prophet and the astronomer in the dancing universe. And today we've been talking about his really glorious new book, which I just devoured. I was a little bit

worried. Marcel, I should tell you that, you know, one of my kids, when I saw the name manifesto, it's impossible not to think of the communist manifesto. And I recall, I was driving one of my sons to, two of my sons to school one day, caught about three or four years ago and the eight-year-old at the time was listening. And Bernie Sanders came on and the older one said, well, he sounds like a communist.

And my younger son said, no, no, you fool. He's Jewish. He can't be a communist. So I thought, you know, Marx would be rolling around in his grave. But I was nervous, but it's actually an inspiring the monograph about the prognosis, diagnosis, and prescription for a hopeful future for humanity,

as we are at this loving tendrils of dawn illuminating the horizon of consciousness. Marcelo, I said, thank you so much. This has been a real treat. I hope to meet you in person one day and maybe sneak in your suitcase down to Rio and visit my, I used to have a Brazilian girlfriend and her nickname for me was Carcovado. I don't know if that's good or bad. I think it's bad, but I want to come visit you in Rio someday. That's sweet.

Korkovada is where the Christ statue is. So I think she was thinking of you as her savior, which is actually good. Or maybe my hunchback, you know, I think it means hunchback. Anyways, Brian, it was awesome. Thank you for having me. It's always great to have conversations. It's so rare, you know, to have like a conversation for this long and meaningful. I doubt.

You know, and I'm very grateful to you. and for all your nice words towards my work. I appreciate it deeply. Ambition comes in all shapes and sizes. At First Citizens Bank, we roll with your goals because we're built for what you're building. Fit for your ambition. First Citizens Bank.