Into the Impossible With Brian Keating - Phil Plait, Bad Astronomer, on The INTO THE IMPOSSIBLE Podcast (#133)

Episode Date: April 5, 2021

Philip Plait, also known as The Bad Astronomer, is an American astronomer, skeptic, writer and popular science blogger. Plait has worked as part of the Hubble Space Telescope team, images and spectra of astronomical objects, as well as engaging in public outreach advocacy for NASA missions. He has written two books, Bad Astronomy and Death from the Skies. He has also appeared in several science documentaries, including How the Universe Works on the Discovery Channel. From August 2008 through 2009, he served as president of the James Randi Educational Foundation.[2][3] Additionally, he wrote and hosted episodes of Crash Course Astronomy which aired its last episode in 2016. Support the podcast: https://www.patreon.com/drbriankeating Thanks to today’s sponsor, LinkedIn Jobs! Visit linkedin.com/impossible to post your job ad for FREE! 🎥 🎥 Watch my most popular videos🎥 🎥 Deepak Chopra and Frank Wilczek https://youtu.be/E-8mF4HWDnE?sub_confirmation=1 Weinstein and Wolfram https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OI0AZ4Y4Ip4?sub_confirmation=1 Garrett Lisi https://youtu.be/TCZxpMTzRP4 Sheldon Glashow: https://youtu.be/a0_iaWgxQtA?sub_confirmation=1 Michael Saylor The Physics of Bitcoin https://youtu.be/CaN_CDKqXOg?sub_confirmation=1 Sir Roger Penrose, Nobel Prize winner: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AMuqyAvX7Wo?sub_confirmation=1 Frank Wilczek https://youtu.be/3z8RqKMQHe0?sub_confirmation=1 Jill Tarter https://youtu.be/O9K9OBd3vHk?sub_confirmation=1 Eric Weinstein: https://youtu.be/YjsPb3kBGnk?sub_confirmation=1 Sir Roger Penrose https://youtu.be/H8G5onAqlVo?sub_confirmation=1 Juan Maldacena's First Podcast Interview: https://youtu.be/uIzTliTHn7s?sub_confirmation=1 Jim Simons: https://youtu.be/6fr8XOtbPqM?sub_confirmation=1 Sara Seager Venus LIfe: https://youtu.be/QPsEDoOTU6k?sub_confirmation=1 Noam Chomsky: https://youtu.be/Iaz6JIxDh6Y?sub_confirmation=1 Sabine Hossenfelder: https://youtu.be/V6dMM2-X6nk?sub_confirmation=1 Sarah Scoles: https://youtu.be/apVKobWigMw Stephen Wolfram: https://youtu.be/nSAemRxzmXM 🏄‍♂️ Find me on Twitter at https://twitter.com/DrBrianKeating 🔥 Find me on Instagram at https://instagram.com/DrBrianKeating 📖 Buy my book LOSING THE NOBEL PRIZE: http://amzn.to/2sa5UpA 🔔 Subscribe for more great content https://www.youtube.com/DrBrianKeating?sub_confirmation=1 ✍️Detailed Blog posts here: https://briankeating.com/blog.php 📧Join my mailing list: http://briankeating.com/mailing_list.php 👪Join my Facebook Group: https://facebook.com/losingthenobelprize 🎙️Please subscribe, rate, and review the INTO THE IMPOSSIBLE Podcast on iTunes: https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/into-the-impossible/id1169885840?mt=2 🎙️Listen on all other platforms: https://wavve.link/into A production of http://imagination.ucsd.edu/ Support the podcast: https://www.patreon.com/drbriankeating Thumbnail Art: Sloan Sobie Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. You will not want to miss this incredible conversation with a legend. I call him the centuries Carl Sagan. And that is no small amount of praise for Dr. Phil Plate, who is joining us today. I'm hoping that we are now live on the Into the Impossible Network. And we're also live co-streaming on Clubhouse, for those of you who don't have video access, or don't have an invitation. That would be so sad to not have an invitation. But that's the way the clubhouse crumbles.

And hopefully we can make do with just our video extraordinaire. And it is such a great pleasure to welcome Phil Plate, the bad astronomer himself. Where is he? Got to get him on screen. There he is. Here. There I am. There he is, joining us all the way from the wilds of Colorado, where he is a gentleman farmer. He is a gentleman astronomer.

He is an inspiration to literally millions around the world. As I say, he is this generation's Carl Sagan. Here is my finger puppet. Phil, do you have a finger puppet of Carl Sagan? No. All right. I do not have some puppets and stuff around here, but I'd have to find them. I will rectify that.

And if you're really good, I will throw in. a side order of the very first good astronomer. This is Galileo Galilei, who Phil is intimately connected with. Oh, let's see what you got there. Puppet John. I have Krieger from Archer. Nice. So that's, you know, that's about the best I can do.

I think we, you might have got here in San Diego. Did you get that in San Diego, a Comic-Con? No, that's a long story. It turns out the voice actor, Lucky Yates, who does Krieger, is a big science. science fan. And so he gave me that. So now I've got a Krieger doll. And it says it says rude things when you hit the button. Well, we'll keep this PG-13 at least. So Phil, I want to take us back to the early 21st century, 20 years ago when bad astronomy came out. And it's really amazing. I have the audio copy. I have the Kindle copy. I have the printed copy. And I went back

because I was so excited you accepted this. And I went back and I read and listened to it. And I couldn't believe how much has changed. Because back then, news anchors didn't know much about science and were proud of their lack of knowledge or ignorance about science. There were people that believe the earth was flat. Can you believe that? There are people that aliens are among us even to this very day.

And there were even people back then in the early part of this millennium who thought that vaccines were dangerous. It's so glad and so refreshing. Thanks to your book, all that changed. And now we have nothing but science and the culture of science. Oh, my God. Are you disappointed or dismayed at how little has changed in some ways, Phil? I see it as an optimistic pessimist or pessimistic optimist, which is it?

Yeah. One of the things about doing this sort of thing, and that is like jumping in both feet to debunk bad science. And I tend not to use that term quite as much as I used to. But, you know, you can't debunk something unless it's bunk. And the thing about it is that you have to go in knowing that this is going to be probably the single most frustrating thing you're ever going to do in your whole life. You know, you absolutely know going in that you will make a difference, hopefully. I mean, you can't know that, but you can hope that you'll make a difference.

But the second part of that is that you'll have to do it all over again in five years or less. You'll make a difference with some people, but there's always new people coming in. This is a pipeline. And so, you know, I can spend all that time like I did debunking people who thought the moon landings were fake or that, you know, vaccines have mercury in them or whatever. But what's going to happen is sometime later, it's just going to be just as strong as it was. You might cause a little dip. And even that, that's wonderful if you can do that. But typically it's just that this is an ongoing thing.

It's a dynamic process. You can't just say, well, you know, we debunk that. Now we're done. Let's move on. That's never going to happen. Right. And as you say, you know, bunk and debunk, I never know which one I am bunk or debunk. But it really made me think because I had a kind of semi-confrontational but friendly good-natured conversation with a man by the name of Stephen Meyer who is a proponent of intelligent design.

And that has an awful, you know, kind of representation. in scientific circles, he's actually a very sweet gentleman. And we had a friendly debate. I'm always very courteous. That's, you know, I'll have on people, whatever their viewpoint, as long as they're respectful and not preaching odious nonsense. But he pointed out one thing. When we talk about things like the multiverse or string theory.

And it's always mentioned that Carl Popper mentioned that the criterion for good science is that it be falsifiable. And he said, well, you know, the earth is flat, is false. Therefore, is it good science? Or is it part of scientific investigation? And so I said, well, yes and no. In fact, it sure appears that the earth is flat. And I think some of that is responsible for the perniciousness, persistence of scientific fallacies. But I first wanted, before we get to that, if you have a comment on that, falsification is held up as sort of girdles, incompleteness theorem of physics. What do you think about this notion that even though you can falsify something, that's still not. not make it science. For example, astrology or the flat earth. Oh, I see where you're going. Yes. If something is false. Okay, if something's not falsifiable, then is it science. Yes. I can argue that back and forth. But if we set that aside and take the sideways version of that that you just said, if something is falsifiable, is it science? And the answer to that is

obviously no. Because if I say, I am Thor, you know, that's falsifiable, yet it's not science. That is a claim that has no evidence. It makes predictive statements. You know, if I'm Thor, then I can wield Muleyneur and I can fly around and I can summon lightning. I can't do any of that stuff. So that's falsifiable, but it's not science. In a sense, you can say it's a scientific claim, because if I make a claim that has some sort of evidence for it and that does make some sort of prediction, then you can say, sure, that falls in the framework of science, but that doesn't make it science. And so astrology, for example, is falsifiable, and it has been falsified to my satisfaction many, many, many times over. So that's not a science. Now, the more straightforward aspect of this,

is that is science, you know, if you make a claim for it to be scientific, it has to be falsifiable, I guess there are levels of detail to that. I don't think that's necessarily true at first. If you have an issue in quantum mechanics, which shows you that, for example, in one interpretation of quantum mechanics, that every time any decision is made, whatever you mean by decision, but any time an event can go left or right, both things actually happen, and you're just splitting off and creating a new universe, this is super oversimplified, of course.

This is a whole branch of thinking in quantum mechanics, and I'm summing it down in one sentence. So please don't come with a pitch force. Undergraduate should not bring this on to the exam. Yes, exactly. But if that's sort of your idea and you say, you pause it, well, there's a multiverse. That is, you know, is that a scientific claim? Well, you're trying to explain some evidence and you don't have a whole lot of evidence for this.

You don't really have a whole lot of evidence against it. But that doesn't mean it's not scientific necessarily. What you have to do is you have to start thinking about it scientifically and say, well, if there is a multiverse, is there something else that it might have an effect on? When we look out into the universe, does this leave an imprint on the universe itself in some way? Does this explain something else? Any big idea in science is going to come along that way. I mean, when quantum mechanics itself was first dreamed up, there was a problem in astrophysics where we were trying to, astronomers were looking at the colors of stars, and the way stars emitted light didn't make sense.

And I want to say it was Max Planck, who came along and said, well, let's pretend that light doesn't behave the way we've always thought it does. Let's pretend it's quantized. It comes in these little packets. And when you do that, suddenly that problem goes away. And he just kind of made this up. He said, well, maybe we're just thinking of this wrong. Einstein did the same thing with relativity.

You know, he started with a thought experiment and said, let's see where this goes. And you know what? If your theory winds up not explaining anything, it's not terribly useful. But if it does, then it becomes a little bit more firmly grounded and you can start testing it. Yeah. And then there are, of course, things that are science fictional. And you start off your book with a conversation about how lost in space and all these bad science fiction, as you call it, influenced you in a good way. And, of course, many of my listeners, of course, know that I am the co-director of the Arthur C. Clark Center.

for human imagination here at UC San Diego. And in this capacity, we have paid tribute to Sir Arthur's legacy via the quest to understand the imaginative process that could couple together fiction and nonfiction science fact, with speculative culture. We've had all sorts of exposés in that front. But I wonder, to what extent has science fiction, even though it's sort of known to be wrong, has it influenced you? And has it made you, you know, a better scientist or did it make you a better scientist from these considerations of things of asking the question, could this be possible to have a flat, you know, an orbiting satellite and geosynchronous orbit? No, that was fanciful. Is there anything about science fiction that inspired you as a scientist?

You know, it's funny, the way you phrase that has got me thinking now. You said science fiction, which is known to be wrong. And I think, well, that's an interesting way to phrase it because you can say, well, if you're writing a story, you're lying. This didn't happen. It's like, well, no, of course not. But I'm not lying. I'm telling you a story. There's an agreement between the writer and the reader that this is made up, that it's not real. So in that sense, and, and, And now that I'm thinking about it, that actually crystallizes some other thinking I've had. In a science fiction story, there are going to be some caveats, some McGuffin, McGuffins, as they say, in the business. Something you throw in there that the audience just has to accept, warp drive, transporters, directed energy weapons, aliens. You can make a huge list of these things. And that's fine, and I'm okay with that. As a matter of fact, I love that because without a lot of those, you can't tell these stories. It becomes a problem when they're not internally consistent. And so if you posit something, and I'm not going to worry that if you go faster than light, that's actually a form of time travel in some sense. I'm not going to worry about it if you start dealing with all the relativistic aspects of your faster than light drive. I don't care about that so much in the story. But if you use a

it one way in one episode and another way in another episode that contradicts the first one. I want to know about that. You know, why did you do it that way? Was it just lazy storytelling? Did you just not care? You know, that's the difference between being fiction and being wrong. And so I think I'm hoping to answer your question along the way here, that stories are important to people.

I mean, that's one of the first things we did as a society way back. you know, hundreds of thousands of years ago, maybe not that long ago. They're verbal language, but I mean that stories were told and we learn from stories, their morality plays, we learn about being human through these stories. We get one of the most important things for me specifically too is you see the world through another person's eyes. You get insight into the way other people think, which I think is very, very important because when we think we're right and we don't really have any experience with how other people deal with reality, yeah, you're just going to butt heads.

There's never going to be any real kind of discussion that way. So all of this is important. And what I found for science fiction, for me, I just love the spaceships. I love the aliens. That gets me going. It just makes me happy. But there's also a lot of morality that goes on in good science fiction. Like right now, the expanse has a huge amount of morality in it.

And there's a big conflict going on between Earth and Mars and people who live out in the asteroid belt. And the thing is, everybody thinks they're right. And the way these characters are presented, their arguments make sense. Whether they're executing the morality of these arguments correctly, that's a different story. But everybody's got their own reasons for doing things. And I love that. And that inspires me in my own life. the decisions and the way I think about life as well. Yeah, I love the aspect of science fiction that allows

you to essentially do goodunkin experiments with speculations about culture. Because even though the kind of tropes to the contrary exist, science is done by human beings, and human beings are subject to all the foibles and peccadillos, even if they are scientists, that all human beings are sensitive to. And I think that's quite wonderful when you get to kind of pregame the future, I call it, when we get to explore the nature of science fiction and perhaps understand science fact, even better, as Sir Arthur Clark certainly impelled us to do. I want to just mention to folks that we are alive with none other than the bad astronomer, who goes by the moniker the bad astronomer, who is none other than Phil Plight,

who is joining us from Colorado, and there I am with him. You can find him on Twitter is the best way to access him, and that is at Bad Astronomer, and he has a newsletter, which I have subscribed to for a long time, and he even has a YouTube channel, which is the Bad Astronomer, I guess Bad Astronomer was taken, and we can't always choose our names. People are like, you're so haughty. You have to call yourself Dr. Brian Keating on Twitter and on YouTube. Why are you so naughty about it?

Are you trying to be Dr. Jill Biden? I say, no, I would love to be just Brian Keating, but the guy wanted like $100,000 for those domains. So, you know, on one hand, it's, it's flattering, but on the other hand, give it back to me. Stop squatting on my domain, whoever you are out there. But you can find him online. And he does such phenomenal work, outreach, and definitely subscribe to his newsletter. There's a free version of it. Of course, you are welcome to do the paid version as many, many subscribers do. Yesterday, speaking of aliens, because you mentioned it, you mentioned the A word. You brought up the A word. Yesterday you had a marvelous tweet. And actually, I really want to

commend you on the, just the throughput, the output that you have in terms of scientific communication. And we're going to get to that later. I'm going to make a provocative claim, Phil, that scientists have moral obligation to be not as good as you, but we have to do something. It's not enough to not try. But we'll get to that in just a little bit, my hectoring, my moral and ethical hectoring of my fellow scientists. But I want to talk about aliens, because you mentioned aliens. And of course, in the book, you talk a little bit about it as well. And they're replete within science fiction. Yesterday you mentioned Omuamua, which was the subject of a book by a previous guest of mine, Dr. Avi Lowe, the former chairman of the Estrami Department at Harvard University, a little university, I'm told, up in the Northeast.

And Avi made the claim that Omuamua was alien technology with a confidence of greater than 90% from his perspective. Yesterday, you tweeted out and informed people of a rather prosaic explanation for it. And I wonder if you can comment on it. And just as science can be informed by a science fiction, sometimes it can be hurt by science fiction, in my opinion, because you get this prosthetic forehead and you get the alien, you know, kind of with the googly eyes and wanting to probe people and so forth. And I pointed out to Avi, just the last thing before I wind up this meandering question, I pointed out to Avi that the majority of alien sightings are done in America on planet wide, come from America. America, and the majority of those come from the Northeast, where he is this esteemed professor. So anyway, can science fiction hurt science because it'll portray these fanciful narratives of things we don't really believe to be probable? And then what do you make of kind of the hype cycle

in science from discovery, you know, tentative discovery to like, we are being visited by alien technology? What do you make of those two competing forces? Wow. Okay, so for the next two hours, I'll be talking about this. I'll take it. Sure. You know, science fiction inspires science, and that is, the evidence for that is overwhelming. You can talk to any number of scientists my age and younger who say, you know, they were inspired by Star Trek, for example, or Battlestar Galactic or whatever science fiction that they watched or read or consumed in whatever manner. And so you can inspire scientists directly through that.

You can also inspire science. You need some device to get you out of trouble in a story and you whip that thing out and use it. And then some scientist goes, you know, there might be something to that. And that's happened as well. You know, not necessarily one-to-one like that, but there has been inspiration from these shows or books or whatever. And you can find history is filled with things like that. It can hurt science too because if it represents something incorrectly, especially if you're young and you're this stuff, that can be sort of the way you think about things. So, you know, evolution, for example,

is always portrayed very poorly in mass media science fiction. You know, you're always saying, well, they're more advanced in an evolutionary sense. They're evolving towards something. It's like, well, evolution doesn't work that way. You're not more advanced in an evolutionary sense. You're just more, you're better adapted for a system that exists around you. So, you know, if a virus or a cell, a bacterian can thrive in our environment, who's to say whether they're more advanced than we are, you have to define your terms a little bit better. So sure, also the way scientists are portrayed. You go back in the 1950s and scientists kind of look like me, bald guy, beard, white, generally older with a young, attractive daughter who is also

becoming a scientist who then becomes a romantically involved with the hero of the story, that that trope is used over and over and over again. And that's not true. And so when you do surveys and you ask kids, you know, draw a scientist, they draw somebody who looks like me. They don't draw a woman. They don't draw somebody who's not white or anything like that. That's getting a lot better.

A lot of movies and TV shows and other types of mass media are going out of their way now to show a more diverse group of scientists. And I love that. The other part of your question was, is there a tendency to overhype things? Is there a tendency to leap to a conclusion which is not warranted by the evidence? This is how I'm going to interpret your question at least.

Yes. And that happens all the time. And there's an old critical thinking phrase that says if you hear hoofbeats, think horses, not zebras, you know, unless you're at a reserve someplace where there are zebras. But typically, you know, in America, for example, if you hear hoofbeats, it's probably horses and, you know, more likely than that. So the idea is that look to the mundane

first. You don't necessarily jump to the conclusion that just because an object that comes from another star is acting in a way we don't expect means it's an alien spaceship. In fact, let's look at the more mundane explanations first. Look at the evidence and try to figure out what's going on. In my opinion, based on the evidence that I have seen, Dr. Loeb's conclusion that this is a spaceship, or at least, you know, if you want to say it's a spaceship, I would say the evidence doesn't even come close to that conclusion. If you say it might be a spaceship, that's different. Then I'll say, well, let's take a look at this and say, you know, how does a spaceship behave? Why does this thing make you think it's not natural? What is the evidence that it is natural? And just because, you don't have an explanation for something doesn't mean it doesn't exist, right? The idea now is that Omu-Mua, this object, which came from interstellar space and passed through the solar system a couple of years ago, we thought it was an asteroid, then it started acting like a comet, but it doesn't really act like a comet completely. And there have been a lot of different ideas that have been positive because it acted very oddly.

And the latest one is that it's a chunk of nitrogen ice, frozen nitrogen. that actually explains really well a lot of the stuff that we've seen maybe not everything but a lot of it and there's even a source for chunks of nitrogen ice when solar systems form so you know you if you want to posit something that is fairly extraordinary alien spaceship you can't just show me the evidence that supports your claim you have to show me why it's not a nitrogen chunk and i don't think that has been done yet interesting yeah and certainly that was a long answer but there you go well that's what i get for the waning topic yeah exactly and i think it's you know of of vital importance because to the extent that science is perceived by the public it's typically not really only looking at you know someone like

you or me who you know have certain uh you know privileged uh abilities and and and past light light cone so to speak uh but it's someone you know who does something very specialized you know with very specialized equipment, you know, and off access, out of access to a normal person, just the same way. Like, I wouldn't go down to the hospital, to the radiology department, start, you know, poking around the MRI machine just because I understand Robbie oscillations or, you know, it's specialized right now. Oh, God, I would. Every time I get an extra, I'm like, hey, I wonder what, I wonder what energy range this

one is. Take a look at the black on it and start asking questions, yeah. Yeah, can I bar some of that? Liquid nitrogen, I got to test a, umuamua theory for myself. But yeah, science is perceived as, you know, these special people doing special things. And I think, you know, some of the positive things that people like Carl Sagan would do, or Neil deGrasse Tyson, who's an upcoming guest, by the way. So please do make sure you stretch your little finger and don't get carpal tunnel syndrome.

Phil will tell you subscribe not only to my channel, to my Twitter, to his channel, his Twitter, and his newsletter, which is must read, bad astronomy news, which I look forward to every Monday, coming into my inbox, fresh and piping hot with the latest, greatest astronomical news, some of which I actually teach in my cosmology class. I'll bring in some cool image and some description that you very scientifically will link to other people who do the research. And I think that's what I love about Neil deGrasse Tyson. I can't wait to tell them in person next week.

And by the way, there are people praising you, thanking you for inspiring their love of astronomy, Phil. So you should know what a difference you make in the chat room, but all around the world. But let me just say in this second meandering. question. People like Sagan and people like, and people like Neil deGrasse Tyson also suffer. They suffer because they're perceived as not real scientists, you know, real scientists, stay in the lane, stay in the lab. You know, don't get out there and, you know, and do the stuff that, you know, anybody can do. Anybody can do what Neil deGrasse tight. Anyone could do what Phil.

Plate does. I mean, three TED talks. Oh, come on. Anybody can do that. But they can't really be a real scientist. And so what do you make of the fact that we're almost punished? You know, I was asked once, I actually talked to Jan 11, who I'm sure you know, and she told me when she wrote her first book, it was before she even had a tenure track position. And then her second book was written. She had tenure. And they said, and she asked her department chair, can I get time off to write my next best book, which was a work of fiction, which is phenomenal. And the department's there said, no, you can't get time off, but you should feel lucky if we don't penalize you. So it's almost like, you know, we as scientists who write popular works, we almost get not

credit, we get the opposite of credit. We get debit. So what do you make of that? Why is there a thirst by the public, but almost an antipathy from our fellow scientists towards the work that you so well exemplify? Well, thank you. First of all. That used to be a bigger problem.

Let me, let me, talking about privilege. being born when I was to have people like Carl Sagan and a host of others talk about science in a public venue. And, you know, Carl wasn't the first. That's a tradition that's gone on for centuries. But he went on mass media. He went on Johnny Carson's show, Tonight Show, wrote books, wrote for Parade Magazine, which is read by tens of millions of people.

And so he really went out there and talked up not just science, but also. the ethics of science, the morality that we have to use when we employ science in our lives. And that was a huge deal. And yeah, he got a lot of grief for it from a lot of other scientists who were thinking, well, talking to the masses, this is not what we do. We are scientists. We are removed from the lay people. And we will be in our ivory tower and dole out these bon motes of wisdom as reality.

as we see fit. And like, that's, that's garbage, in my opinion. I will argue the point, some people say all scientists should be out there talking about their work. And I disagree. Some are better than others. You know, I watch my friends who go out and talk about certain things on TV or on Twitter or whatever. And I think, wow, I wouldn't have phrased it that way. And the way they did it was way better than I would have thought of. So, you know, we need different people doing this. but we also, we need to understand that there are different ways to do this and different people who are better at it in some ways than other. And I'm always happy to refer to somebody else if I think this is a person who can

relay this better than I can, certainly. That has not completely gone away. It has really been reduced, this idea that we shouldn't communicate science to the public. We should just be doing science. Let me tell you a secret. I wasn't that great of a scientist. It was okay. You know, I got my degree. I worked on some big projects for a while, the Hubble and doing some other things. And we published papers and everything and I did my part. But it was never going to be, you know, big, important, groundbreaking stuff that I was working on. It was important, and I was a member of a team of people doing it. But I wasn't the one, you know, doing this, this research and going out and doing getting all the grants and doing all that sort of stuff that you kind of think of when you think of a scientist. Turns out I'm better at talking about it.

So I started doing that. You have to find the talents that people have and let that bloom, I think. So they're going to be scientists I don't think should be in front of a camera. And I think there are science communicators like me who maybe shouldn't be doing science anymore. And I'm fine with that. That's more allowed now, I think. I hardly get any grief from people saying, you know, you shouldn't be doing this. I almost never hear that.

And when I do, it's from people who don't really understand the importance of communicating science. And sometimes I hear people saying, well, you're not a scientist anymore. And I'm like, I'll cop to that. You know, I'm not doing the research anymore. I'm reading as pretty much as much as any scientist does. I read a lot of papers because I have to write about it. I have to understand them to a depth where I can sit down and write about it and not screw it up completely. So I try to understand the science as much as I can.

But, you know, not being an active research scientist anymore, yeah, sure. That's true. But that doesn't mean I can't still talk about it. And I think we need to appreciate what everybody's doing in their own way when we do this sort of thing. At first, I didn't think it was real. I woke up to this blinding light and I was transported to another place. Pluto TV. Then I heard a voice.

Come with me if you want to live. There were thousands of movies and shows and they were all free. The truth is ours. It's just so beautiful. On Pluto TV, free streaming of Terminator 2, Fringe Arrow, the 100 NX files may cause excitement, loss of sleep, and sudden belief in extraterrestrials. No credit cards or alien encounters necessary. Pluto TV, stream now, pay never. Absolutely, yeah.

When I think about science communication, and by the way, we've got some amazing guests in the chat room. We've got Christian from Launchpad Astronomy, who runs a huge channel coming up on 100,000 subscribers. And then we have a man by the name of Charles Darrow, who is married to one of the foremost astronomers of our age, Professor Sarah Seeger, of Massachusetts. A little technical college called Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Also in Cambridge, we've got a bunch of people in the chat room, which is wonderful to see. So we're talking, again, with the bad astronomer himself, Dr. Phil Plate, who is a proponent, an exponent, an expert exponent of scientific community. communication. Charles is saying in the chat room and I cannot fail to disagree with him less, if you can parse that, that science proper communication of science is as important as a science

itself. I interviewed his wife, Professor Sarah Seeger, and she also kind of reiterated this stance that sometimes, you know, as we discussed, the higher you fly, the more visible you are, the easier you are to be a target, to shoot down. And I just wonder to push back a little bit on your otherwise excellent, you know, sentiment, how do we need to be? know that a particular scientist isn't, a particular scientist isn't good at, you know, doing public communication until she tries it. You know, I think, you know, Sarah's very candid with some of the struggles she had in her career and so forth. But she's now become this outstanding scientific communicator because she worked at it. She actually told me, and this, by the way,

this episode will come out after the episode we're talking about. So it's a little weird. We talked about it in the past, but we talked over almost two weeks ago. And she said she took classes in public speaking. She's taking classes in management. And I always hear my colleagues who will remain nameless, you know, John Luson. No, no, I won't say that. There's no such person. But my colleagues would say, oh, I'm not good at that. And it's a lot of work.

And I said, oh, yeah, yeah, I forgot. You know, learning about type 2 superconductivity in time nemectic fluids at, you know, in condensed matter. That was really trivial. I mean, you just came out of the loom knowing that, right? You didn't have to work on that at all, did you? And, of course, you know, they have to admit. that they had to work at that too. But what do you make of this, that physicists are so resistant, or scientists in general,

rather, are resistant to it to learning how to do it? And maybe the best way to entree into that question is, how did you learn to do it? You are a scientist, you came from a scientific background, you're very conversant. Did you dedicate some time to this, you know, quote unquote craft, as they say, of being a communicator? Yeah. No. I mean, yes, but no. And I should say that, yeah, Sarah's great.

I was on a panel with her many years ago, and I just thought she was wonderful. And the fact that she said to herself, I need to get better at this and I need to do it in a formal way is amazing. That's fantastic. And I know a lot of people who have done that. And I thought about it. I've actually considered taking improv class because, you know, if you're out there on stage and there's a lot of talking going on, And you have to come up with something that makes sense and is funny and fits in with the overall scheme. That's really what you and I are doing right here.

And you don't want to hog the stage and give long-witted answers that take 10 minutes every time somebody asks you a question. Not that I've been doing that here. You know, yeah. So I think that that's a great idea. I never actually did anything formal. What happened was I just started writing because I felt like, you know, I like to write. I can make a point and it'll be fun. So in that sense, I did it in a very thought-out way where I thought to myself,

if I ever want to write a book, and I think I do, which eventually became bad astronomy, I need to get some notoriety first. I need practice. I need to write that sort of thing. And I started writing articles and publishing them. I started doing some free Q&A type stuff for astronomy magazine. years ago, somebody would ask a question and I have to write an answer to it and it had to be kind of brief, which, you know, that's ridiculously hard for me to be brief, obviously. But I never

took a public speaking class or anything like that, basically kind of jumped into the deep end. And, you know, what happened was years and years ago, I had, you know, I did an interview where they stuck a camera in my face and they wanted to record some things for a pilot for a TV show. And it was awful. I was terrible. It turns out I'm not good at memorizing lines. I didn't understand how to talk to the camera. There's a lot going on there. When you see somebody who's very smooth on camera,

that's very rarely their first time in front of a camera. And just like anything else, you know, like learning about type two superconductivity. This is not necessarily something comes natural. You have to do it a few times and see how you're bad at it and go, oh, next time I'll do this. And so you evolve, hate to use that word, but you change, you learn, you fix things that go wrong, and at some point you get better. And I, you know, it's an ongoing process.

I see, again, friends of mine on camera, and I think, wow, I will never be that smooth in one take. So it's always going to happen. There's always going to be people out there who do it better, but that doesn't mean you can't improve. and if that means, you know, you can take classes now on science outreach. That did not exist when I, one of the reason I never did this formally is because I couldn't. You can get degrees in this sort of thing now. Right. That wasn't true 20, 30 years ago.

And so, you know, God bless them. The folks coming in now and doing it. They're going to be a whole lot better than my generation. Yeah. Well, yeah. And I think about it. By the way, you're getting a request from Christian Reddy, who is the proprietor of the launch Pat Astronomy YouTube channel, which he has been so gracious to have me on, he wants me to

plug in my spare time you to come on his broadcast, proletarian broadcasts. So I'll work. Email me. Yeah. Okay. I will have him email. Great. So the next topics I want to turn to now, after we've kind of gone through the science

communication gamut, is what fascinates you so much about science and what kind of. kinds of things would you be doing? I'm going to give you, we're going to do a thought experiment. I'm going to give you three different budgets, ranging from a million to $10 million to a billion dollars. And I'm going to ask you what you would do with those budgets. What interests you about science and what do you make of the kind of very high, you know, level of commitment funding-wise, talent-wise, this kind of spectrum of people around the world that we need and get to work with to make scientific discoveries possible. So what excites you the most about astronomy these days or physics or science in general?

What are you most fascinated and what questions are the most burning to you right now? That's interesting. I don't know if anybody's asked me that in quite that way. A lot of it, a lot of what's going on right now is really fascinating. And some of it is not necessarily the sort of groundbreaking work that you expect. like, you know, we're learning about what the universe was like in its first few seconds or, you know, how black holes were. Some of it is just, you know, we're, we're finding new planets orbiting other stars. I love exoplanets. This whole field is just amazing to me that when I was a kid,

we did not know of any planets orbiting other stars. In 1992, they found the first ones. And then in 1995, they started finding them orbiting stars kind of like the sun. And now I haven't even, I don't even know where we are now. It's well past 4,000 confirmed planets orbiting other stars. And that has all been very exciting. I mean, it's really exciting to think, yes, we are now seeing that our solar system isn't special. We didn't really know, right? And when I was a kid, and you'd read these theories about the hypotheses of how the planets formed, and they were always sort of these wacky ideas. And it's like, that doesn't seem like, you know, a nearby star passing the sun pulls off a tendril of gas and this collapses to form planets. It's like, well, that doesn't happen very often. If that's

the case, then we may be the only planetary system in the galaxy. And it turns out that idea is totally wrong. But the bigger idea here is that, you know, are we special in some way or not? And it turns out, no, it looks like a large fraction, if not most stars, have planetary systems around them or did. And they're changing all the time. And so there's a lot of four, a lot of stuff the edge there, on the forefront of science, where we're learning about planetary atmospheres, how planets behave, how they form. And a lot of it is just, I don't want to say stamp collecting, because that's sort of a denigrating term. But a lot of it is simply just, there's another planet, there's another planet, there's another planet. And you accumulate this, you accumulate this.

And at some point, you're not just looking at each one as being special. You're starting to look at each one of them as belonging to a group. And as the numbers get bigger and bigger, you start to see, oh, we're discovering more planets like this and fewer like that. And that sort of thing, that sort of meta-analysis of not just that we're discovering them, but how they're behaving. That's the next step in science. That to me is fascinating. And I don't know why I love it.

You know, why do you love the music you love? Why do you like this genre of literature and not that genre? It just speaks to you for some reason. For me, it's always just been a love of science. And it's hard to disentangle. my love of science and science fiction, for that matter. They say, did the science fiction inspire your love of science, or did you love science and that naturally led you to science fiction? It's both. It can be both and they feed on each other. And I think it's the same sort of thing here.

I just love it. I don't, it's certainly, certainly I enjoy the large philosophical aspects of it. Why are we here? You know, is there a purpose? And there are things like, there are things that science can answer with some of those questions. And that to me is fascinating. But, you know, it's all Also, it's just a thing I really love. And sometimes I think that's enough. We've got a crowd applauding over there. I'm going to take this time to do a couple of sound effects and get my money's worth out of this machine.

We'll do that, an air horn or two. We just love everything you're doing. I'm going to take a little pause. Now, one of the benefits of doing what I do is the money. No, not the money. No, but I get to meet incredible people from around the world, including one, Miguel Tully, who lives in Colorado. not far from Boulder and Denver.

And he as a U.S. Army veteran and a wonderful artist who's gotten into NFTs and he's doing all sorts of blockchain art for me and for people like upcoming guests, Eric Weinstein. Stay tuned for that. I'm going to play a little interlude because we're going to take a little break. Pause, have a little sip of whatever you're drinking. I've got some Simon's Observatory whiskey here that I would be drinking if it wasn't Passover, which forbids me for breaking the. The distilled glutinous beverage known as Scotch Whiskey, but I will take a little break. We'll come back in about 10 seconds. There we go.

Now I just enjoy Miguel Tully's interlude entitled Yetty Pears. And we are back live on the Into the Impossible podcast. It's a pleasure to be joined by none other than Dr. Phil Plate, the bad astronomer. Followed him for 20 years. I think it's a 20th anniversary of the release of this book that I have multiple versions and copies of. That's right. Bad astronomy, written by a good person. The moon landing hoax, astrology, misuses and misconceptions revealed.

And I want to turn to a delicate subject. And I'm hoping to get your advice because you do so much outreach and connection to the world. I often get emails. And the emails will start off Professor Keating with a lot of lavish praise. We love what you do. And it's wonderful. And there's just one problem with your guest, Frank Wilczek, and Sheldon Glashow and Barry Barish. They don't really know the secret of the theory of everything that I've discovered and that I need access to you because I'm not good at math.

But if you help me, I do promise you that I will share the Nobel Prize that I will surely win. I will share at least the money. Maybe not the money. I'll share the medal. You can borrow it on weekends. So I get this a lot where there are people, you know, kind of saying Einstein was wrong. They thought Einstein was right, but he's actually kind of a little bit of a crank. And he got to made all those blunders, right?

So scientists make blunders. I make blunders. Therefore, I'm like Einstein. But the question I have for you is the other side of things. I get also very serious scientists, your friend, Michi Okaku, is coming on the show next week. And he has a book called The God Equation. And I'll get to God a little bit later if you'll indulge me. But the God equation speaks about knowing the mind of God if we only can come up with a one-inch-long equation that will unite physics and all the physics of the atom with the physics of the cosmos.

And I sometimes wonder, are they cranks too? And how do we, how do you put together a crank detector? I mean, this is an obviously erudite person. Incredibly brilliant. He was one of the forefathers and is of string theory. I wish him a great deal of success. But when you make claims like that, you know, that it's that somehow, you know, so far out and people thought I was crazy or they thought I in someone's crazy. How do I deal with that?

I guess I'm begging you. How do I deal with the kind of, you know, how do I walk the line when someone could be a genius, could have the true theory of everything? Later, hopefully today I'm talking with Eric Weinstein about his theory called geometric unity. How do you know that somebody or it's worth pursuing? Because we only have so much time. It's a very limited resource. So what would you advise? Well, you can't know, right?

You can know when someone's wrong. I get a lot of, well, I don't get as many emails as you might expect for somebody who's stuck his neck out to debunk bad ideas. It's kind of amazing. My friends who do more science than I do tend to get more. I'll send you some. But yeah, thanks. That's okay. But, you know, I can get an email and know right away.

This person's wrong. First of all, if they just say Einstein was wrong, I'm done. Delete or, you know, on Twitter blog. But he was wrong. He made a blunder, right? But he did, well, yeah, sure, he made a mistake. But that was just in a, you know, we're talking about here, I assume you're talking about the cosmological constant, where his equations, when Einstein wrote out his equations of the behavior of the universe, it was thought that the universe was static at the time. It wasn't, it wasn't changing really. But his equations implied that it was either expanding or contracting. And he just said, well, that obviously can't be. So he threw an extra thing into his equation, which made it static. And it turns out that was a mistake.

But it was a mistake made for the right reason. And it turns out his equations were in fact correct, and the universe is expanding. And so even if you want to say that he was wrong about some things, he wasn't wrong about everything. Relativity works super well. You know, if you drove around using, well, not that many people are driving at the moment, but if you're using GPS for your map system in your car or whatever, that won't work without relativity. Everything we see is not working. Now, relativity, excuse me, everything we see in astronomy pretty much is very well defined by relativity.

But not exactly everything. I don't want to over-exaggerate that. quantum mechanics, which talks about the very small and relativity, which talks about the very large, things that are moving very fast, things have a lot of gravity. Those two theories don't talk to each other well when they overlap, and that's a real problem right now. That's hawking radiation out of black holes and all this sort of things is sort of where those two theories have their frontier with each other. And so, yeah, you know, it doesn't explain everything. It doesn't mean it's wrong. Like people say Newton was wrong.

Einstein showed Newton was wrong. He's like, no, he didn't. He improved what Newton had come up with. Newton just was incomplete. Einstein added to that. And so we're going to have another theory that'll add to relativity at some point because we know relativity is incomplete. And so is quantum mechanics. The thing is, if somebody says, I've been able to do that, you know, who needs a college education and math? And I'm like, well, you kind of have to understand the math to show how quantum mechanics and relativity work. You have to understand how they work. first before you can show how they're wrong. And if somebody just jumps right in with an email to me and says, Einstein was wrong, yeah, we're done. Yeah. But if somebody says to me, Einstein was incomplete and I've got this idea, typically it's, you know, it's going to be over my head. I'm not a cosmologist. I'm not a relativistic physicist. I don't know that stuff to that level. So it's some, it's, if it seems right, I'll email them back and say, this is interesting, but you know, I can't help you. You need to talk to somebody else. And if it's if it's clearly a crackpot, away it goes. How do you tell the difference? I don't know. You kind of know it when you see it. Helping out here, Phil.

Well, it's like everything else in the universe. It's not binary. It's not crackpot and right. There's a spectrum along this continuum here. And you just have to decide at what point it gets too fuzzy for you to be able to say one way or another. And we see this over and over again. an astronomy, we see it in human behavior, we see it in everything. And I don't, you know, and scientists do this too. I, you know, I've, I've known scientists who later in life, typically, have kind of lost it. They've lost their way. And they're making these grand assumptions that are wrong, or, or at least not based on good evidence. And I can't say anything about Michoakka's book. I haven't read it. I haven't read Avi Loeb's book about Omuamua.

I've just seen what he's written online and stuff like that. And I can say, I think saying it's a spaceship is going too far. If somebody comes out with a book that says, you know, we are approaching an equation which describes God, it'd be like, well, you know, let's define our terms here. What do you mean by God? And if you mean you have an equation which unites quantum mechanics and relativity and can, when examined correctly, can explain every. known phenomena in the universe, yeah, let's talk about that. But if you want to jump into a religious

aspect of this, I kind of back off and go well, I'm not so sure. Yeah, I always say, you know, a theory of everything is sometimes not as good as, or not as bad as a theory of anything. And oftentimes I have to, I'm trying to call it up here, but the end of Kaku's book, and again, I have great respect for him. I always treat my guests with, you know, fairness and conciliation or conciliatory approach, because I do think, you know, debates are rarely won, right? I mean, you're really like, oh, you made a great point. Now I'm going to vote for Trump. You know, I mean, this is not going to happen, right? I don't think I could convince you of that in any case. No, no. Yeah, but looking at, looking at, you know, religion and, you know, I think I had on, as I said, an intelligent design proponent, and that was a lot of fun and we were respectful.

However, I do feel like the God card is overplayed a lot in signs by people that are secular. For example, the last few words of, Kaku's book this time, the God Equation, are the last three words from Stephen Hawking's Apocal, A Brief History of Time, which I'm sure you read and I read and influenced me greatly. And those words are, you know, when we can come up with this equation or this theory, then we will truly know the mind of God. And we've heard about God particles. We've heard about, you know, the mind of God, the God equation. So I just feel like it is kind of bandied about.

And I don't think that does a lot of service either to God. because I think a lot of times, even from a theological standpoint, you know, people that, you know, are so distant from it, they might be looking for the authority that religion connotes. Or in Bantam's case, in the case of Stephen Hawking's first publisher and brief as year, the editor supposedly put his, you know, foot down and said, you have to, you can't rule out, you know, God, you know, half of our audience is going to be cut out. And the other half will be cut out by the equation that you had in the book. You know, he famously said, every equation reduces your audience by half and every man. mention of God doubles it. So I now want to turn to, you know, kind of science and and, humanity, but more on a political standpoint, not not your politics, but just how do you do, how do you handle things that have a scientific impact on human affairs where, you know, it's almost as if the scientists play a role in the governance of human beings. And we like to see nowadays that the budget's increasing with the current administration. That's all wonderful. But then you hear other things like, we're the party of science and we believe in science or

follow the science. And I'm afraid that sometimes it might mean like obey scientists. And I feel like, no, I voted for the president. I didn't vote for like some unnamed, you know, phalanx of unaccountable dictator scientists, right? So the question specifically in the chat room is about Starlink, you know, which will provide internet, low cost, cover the whole planet perhaps and bring bandwidth as Joe Biden, our president, just mentioned a couple of days, that's a huge priority to bring internet to underserved populations. On the other hand, that might impact science, right? It might destroy certain astronomical

measurements, specifically in cosmic microwave background research where the signals are in our band, so to speak, but also in optical astronomy. So what do you make of that? The kind of unelected nature of science and the fact that we're asked to listen to scientists, sorry for rambling, but how do you balance the listening to science? You mentioned three different things. Yeah, I mean, any one of these three topics, could be like an hour-long discussion. We're halfway done. We're almost wrapping up, so I promise.

I won't be under anymore. When a politician on behalf of their party says, we are the party of science, yeah, make sure your hands on your wallet and your back pocket and not going to get stolen. In this particular case, you know, politicians can say things like that. And I know, in fact, there are politicians who have been saying we are the party of science now. And the evidence is not there for that. the evidence is quite strongly against them.

Here's the thing. Our society depends on science right now. Engineering, if you want to put science and engineering in the same lump, and I'm okay with that in this case. But we depend on this critically for our civilization. We are talking over the internet right now. I'm talking to you through a camera which uses quantum mechanics and electrical equations and relativity because of the satellites, there's just all of the science that goes into the

internet and our economy is strongly dependent on the internet. The science is showing us that fossil fuels are making our planet uninhabitable in some senses. That is science. That is a scientific conclusion. And that sort of science, you know, if I discover that spiral arms in a galaxy wind one way versus another, that's probably not going to affect how you're going to buy food next week. On the other hand, if somebody has a bogus science research thing that says, if we dam this river, it's just going to be money flown into your bank. You know, that's, you've got to be careful here. There is science that absolutely impacts you directly in your daily life. And, you know, if in 20 years, you're probably not going to be able to find

a gasoline-powered car to buy, maybe not 20 years, but in some time in the near, future. That's a scientific decision that is influencing politics when the politicians say, yeah, you know what, we're going to ban CFCs because they're destroying the ozone. We're going to ban, you know, we're going to make sure we're going to test for mercury in your water. These are scientific findings that you have to be applied to our lives. Science is going to be political in this sense. It's not always obvious what the choice is. We saw this with the vaccinations over the past year, and just with COVID itself, how is it spread? Is it spread by touching? Is it spread by aerosols? Is it, you know, this, that? Should we wear a mask? One mask, two masks.

It would be indoors, outdoors. The science wasn't obvious at first, and that caused some confusion. Now we have a lot better grasp of that thing. So you've got to also realize that you can't just take the first science that comes along and apply it. We have to learn what's going on. There can be subtle effects that we don't understand. People don't like to think that way, and that makes it harder. But you know, you're not electing shadowy dictatorial scientists. You know, these scientists are out there doing their thing. They have to talk. They are beholden in their position to talk to politicians. Politicians are beholding to listen to the scientists, not pick and choose the science they like and don't like, which is what the party of science

is doing right now. But to listen to them and say, you know, how sure are we of this and what kind a policy can we put into place now that is best given what we understand right now. That, I think, is the role of science and politics and politics and science. Right. And yeah, you have to be careful. You don't end up like Galileo and get, you know, fact check false by the prevailing scientific authorities of the day. Yeah, well, he also irritated the authorities at the time, too. He went out of his way to do that. So that's a good lesson for scientists, too. Although not one I think, I seem to have taken terribly well. I pick on politicians all the time. Yeah, and it's not like he didn't have an example. Bruno was only, you know, 10 years older than him, and he suffered as well for being slightly

impolitic, as they say. So yes, I won't be saying anything negative about the director of the National Science Foundation today. So I'm just showing on the screen here of the triumph of human reason. If we find an answer to that, Hawking says, it would be the ultimate triumph of human reason. And for then we would know the mind of God. Well, we've been privileged to be picking the mind of Phil Plate, bad astronomer, good person, fun to talk to. And Phil, I'm going to wrap up the stream as I do with all the guests who honor me with their presence here. We have a tremendous fan base here for you. And I do want to encourage people to go to Phil's Twitter handle, which is at Bad Astronomer.

and give him a follow. He is worth following, and he has a wonderful newsletter about astronomy news, which comes out every Monday. I read it religiously, and even will sometimes not read the full edition, the print edition, a physical review D.

So I can just concentrate on Phil's newslet. Phil, what I do typically is I ask. I'm not peer review does. Not yet. That's right. When you pay for the version on Substack, then you get the peer review. That's right, yeah.

So I ask all my guests the following three questions. One is going to take us into your personal future, 60, 70 years from now, when you depart this mortal coil of natural causes in your sleep like my grandfather and not like those people in the backseat of his car. No, no, I'm just kidding. That didn't happen. But it revolves around what is known as an ethical will. And it's partially related to the Nobel Prize in that Alfred Nobel didn't have children.

It didn't have errors, biological at least. And he endowed this prize to partake in activities that would lead to the benefit of all mankind. So it wasn't purely about material or technology. It was about benefiting human life. I want to ask you, what would you put in your will that revolves around wisdom? So we call it a wisdom will, a zaba a in Hebrew. It means basically an ethical will. What kind of thing would you want for future generations to know specifically about you?

that I had a joy about science. And in this case, I mean science as a method of understanding reality as best we can. And that there is joy in it and there's passion in it. And that when you truly start to understand the way the universe works, it becomes a thing of beauty, a thing of art. And that art and science are simply two sides of the same coin. Wow, that's lovely. And it fits in very nicely with Sir Arthur C. Clark,

who is the namesake of this institution that I co-direct for Human Imagination at UC San Diego. And we'll get to the final question relating to the name of the podcast in just one bit. The second question now takes us not to your far future. You know, as Woody Allen said, you know, what do you want people to say about you in 100 years? He said, I want them to say that I look pretty good for 180-year-old. But I want to ask you, in a billion years, what kind of a sentence would most encapsulate what humans have learned about science as of 2021? And I'll give you a lead in how Richard Feynman passed guest on my podcast.

No, no, he wasn't a guest on my podcast. And he was actually famous for saying the first principle is that you shouldn't fool yourself. And the second principle is today's April Fool's Day, but hopefully I haven't been too foolish. But getting back to Feynman, he said the most important statement that contains the most information in the fewest words is that everything is made of Adams. I want to ask you, what discovery about science or, you know, in one sentence or two maybe, would you put on a monolith like these monoliths that appear in 2001, a space odyssey that would last for a billion years? Is there anything that encapsulates how much, how grand humans have achieved, the grandeur of our achievement, that in scientific terms, that you would feel is worthy of portraying on a time capsule to last for billions of years, perhaps? that is a tough question that's an interesting one um i i might quote somebody else and say that um life is the universe's way of knowing itself that the universe without life is just a thing that exists but when

life can actually comprehend what the universe is and life's part of that universe you know that's that's when things get very interesting so uh i would say probably the universe doesn't revolve around you. Humans finally maybe started to figure this out. We took our first steps towards figuring that out. That we were part of a much larger reality that we had that we had ever known before. And that we strove to seek out how that how the universe works and what our part in it is. Wow. So I have a question from Creon Levitt who's joining us on Clubhouse. I guess I wanted to know if you came up with that yourself about the universe and about life being how the universe becomes aware of itself, or if you are aware of John Wheeler's statements and aphorisms in that direction of great physicist, John Week.

Oh, yeah, I mean, like I said, I'll quote somebody else here. I wasn't sure who said it. I've seen it so many times in a different way. But it's such a wonderfully beautiful and fundamental thought that without life, the universe is, just, you know, it has no way of studying itself. But life, yeah, you know, I don't like when people say, what's the meaning of life? And I think, well, there's no meaning to life. It's not like there's a law written down that says, here's what you have to do. It's, it's more like what, you know, what meaning do you find being alive? What meaning do you find in the universe? Those are, it's a,

it's a subtle difference. But I like it. And I like the idea that without life, the universe just exists, but with life, it's, you know, when we study the universe, we are studying ourselves and vice versa. And Carl Sagan has said, oh, go ahead. That's something that Sam Harris certainly has brought up many times, which is, it's kind of like,

without conscious, without, what you mean really is consciousness, because life, I mean, I don't think that slime molds are busy studying the universe, but maybe they are. But anyway, I think we're maybe conflating consciousness with life here. But here's the issue. Like a universe without life, presumably, although not assuredly, is without consciousness. And then the issue is, well, the universe without consciousness is like an utter failure. Like there's nobody home.

The lights aren't on. There's no joy. There's no love. There's no suffering. It's dead. And it's very interesting to consider not, it's very interesting consider the implications of that. And particularly, as you might know, it's extremely interesting. considering the implications of that

because whereas if you're one of these typical scientists who I work with for so many years at NASA, not universally, but typically, who are like, oh, for sure life is everywhere in the cosmos and there's consciousness and technology, you know, hundreds and thousands of planets.

It's like, yeah, well, in that case, it doesn't really matter what happens to us, and that's a great way to get fatalistic and neelistic because if humans don't matter, who the care, who cares, someone else will carry it to behave as if we are. entire future of the universe inches on us. Okay, great. Thank you,

Krian. We've got one more time for one more comment from Martin. Hayam. How are you, Hayam? I'm doing good, thanks. So I have one question, actually two. One is that UBI could help

realize the totality of human creative force and if politics doesn't work, what is your favorite sci-fi book and Okay. Thank you very much. The first part was garbled. What was the first part of the question? He's asking about universal basic income, which I do think makes an appearance in many different

Yes, in many different sci-fi scenarios in one form or another. So first about that. And then if you have time as a second question as well. Oh, we'll have time for the second question because I can't answer the first one. I'm not an economist. And so I have no idea if that's. the right way to go or not. I like the idea of raising the minimum wage to keep up with inflation so that people who are doing important jobs are paid for. I think everybody who works should be recompensed at a rate where they can afford to live. And so that to me makes sense. I don't even understand why we're not paying people enough when we have the money to do this.

So that aside, I don't have a favorite science fiction book or movie because it's, you know, everything's neck and neck. And it's like, what did I read last? I mean, I was talking about the expanse earlier. And that's probably my favorite science fiction TV show that's on right now. I love it. I also love Star Trek. I like the expanse books. I've read all the books up to the last one that were just coming out soon.

when I was a kid, you know, I loved Larry Niven and Arthur C. Clark. I've actually got somewhere, oh, look at this. I've got the coming of the space age. No way. The first edition by Arthur C. Clark. And it's even got his book. Wow. Oh, shoot.

It's falling out. His book plate. Holy cow. And he signed it. This was given to me, actually. Wow. Yeah, this was given to me by somebody who knew him many years ago. I never met him.

What a child. But, you know, and it's like anything. Do you have a favorite piece of music? And it's like, well, it depends. You know, if I'm happy, I want to listen to this. If I'm sad, I want to listen to this. So I try to avoid those kind of superlatives if I can't. Got it.

I'm not trying to be weasily. No, no. I'm actually trying to be a little bit more subtle and allow a little more complexity to the question. God forbid you ever weasel out of anything. Those aren't allowed in Colorado. Oh, I will. Yeah.

You're living near a weasel farm out. there in Colorado. We're joined also today by John Michael Godier of the Event Horizon YouTube channel. Please, everybody subscribe to that. I have some rumors that I will be on that channel very shortly, the Event Horizon channel. I've been on it before, and it's one of my favorite of all time, as well as Launchpad Astronomy run by Christian Reddy. These are just some of the brightest and best channels and audience in the known multiverse. But for now, I want to conclude, because I know your time is so valuable with everything you're involved with, Phil Plate, the Battastron. I'm going to ask you one last piece of advice. In this case, it revolves around the namesake, Arthur C. Clark, of this podcast,

who said once, the only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible. And that's the name of the podcast. That's how I came up with that. I want to ask you, advice to your former self, what aspect of life, of science, of the universe, once mystified you, but eventually you found the courage to go into the impossible and became that much richer for doing so. Wow. That's such an interesting question because I'm not sure I ever have, right? Like I said, I wasn't really this groundbreaking scientist.

On the other hand, some of the work, well, yeah, some of the work we did on Hubble was looking at things that nobody had ever been able to see before in such clarity, disks of gas and dust, forming planets around stars. And again, when I was a kid, we didn't know if there were other planets out there. So scientifically, I would say basically, you know, kid, don't worry. A lot of the questions you have right now, they're going to work out. You're going to figure this out. And you're going to work with people who know the stuff even better and you'll learn from them.

If I had life advice to myself as a kid, it would erase my reality now quite substantial. because I've talked about this in other interviews before, but I was a very privileged kid, right, in the social sense of privilege these days, very isolated in my thinking, not, didn't really understand how other people thought. And wound up growing out of that in a series of rapid, sort of need of the stomach sort of oof events where I, you know, where you get very embarrassed and you have to think back as like, oh gosh, I've been. a jerked this whole time. You share one, one of those films? Are they... Just, you know, attitudes about everything, about, again, about other people, prejudices, misogyny, all of that sort of thing when you grow up in that environment and you don't think

about it and then you get out of that environment and all of a sudden you realize, wow, I really was in a bubble and I got a lot of learning to do. And that, for some people, that happens over their whole life. Sometimes it happens as an epiphany. for me it was a series of small embarrassing epiphanies and I'm still trying and so what I think in that case I would say to this kid you know you're living your life a certain way and seeing things a certain way there are other ways of seeing this you have to venture outside of what you think is the only way things go and that's going to seem hard and it may seem impossible to use that word

but you know event if you if you do this on your own you will avoid a lot of a lot of embarrassing situations later. So I think that would be my advice. And am I still here? Yeah. And it didn't work. Oh, wow. As you go, did you actually teleport back?

Great reference there. And I think it's all the more appropriate, although I am devoutly Jewish. It is Easter weekend, and we do want to recognize the ability for human beings to achieve redemption. I think that is one of the good aspects of religion that we don't treat people. There's so much cancellation and so forth. And just as you say, you should be able to forgive yourself, Phil, because you've done tremendous good for the planet, for the universe. We look up to you.

And you've given a tremendous amount. And the company in this audience now has even expanded even further than I thought it would. Now we got Fraser Kane in the crowd, who is another hero of mine, a friend of the show, a delight in all ways. And I just want to thank you for coming on the show. I want to encourage my whole audience. Please, please, please, please visit. it all the great stuff that Phil does. You can find it, bad astronomer, sci-fi.

We didn't get a chance to talk about sci-fi. I do want to talk about that someday. That's okay. All the cool stuff. I write a lot. You can find it. And yeah, you'll find it in the bad astronomy newsletter. You've got to subscribe to that.

Get the paid version. Give them a little bit of feedback monetarily, which we've only been doing since the late Phoenician period on Earth. Subscribe to this channel. We have Neil DeGrasse Tyson coming next week. We have Mitchie Ocuckoo coming next week. I'm going to have to space these guys out. John Matherer.

Sarah Seeger. We have unbelievable guests coming up on The Into the Impossible podcast. And I just want to extend a special thanks to you, Phil, for really going out there a long time ago, taking a risk, going into the impossible, writing a wonderful book, continuing as a scientist in the public eye. The public looks to you. You have a huge platform. I just can't thank you enough for the way that you use it. So I want to wish everyone blessings. If you do celebrate the holiday season of Easter, enjoy that otherwise.

friends, enjoy the rest of Passover, and we will have you and see you next time with great guests. We may even get a visit from Eric Weinstein later today. It is April Fool's, and he did promise a special release. So stay tuned, subscribe, like, do all those cool things, and subscribe to everybody that you can in the chat room as well. For now, signing off and thanking Phil from the bottom of our hearts for joining us on the Into the Impossible podcast. And we'll take us out with, again, another beautiful musical interlude from one of my greatest friends on the channel, who I wouldn't have met if I didn't do this podcast, Miguel Tully, U.S. Army veteran, and Colorado Inhabitant, Yeti Tears is his name.

So for now, signing off. Have a wonderful rest of your day. Thank you, Phil. Thank you. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishing from magic. Hello. I'm Stuart Volko, producer. of Into the Impossible. If you enjoyed this episode with Professor Brian Keating,

please let us know by subscribing, commenting, sharing, and most importantly, rating and leaving reviews. It really helps keep our universe expanding. We appreciate hearing from you, and read every review and comment. We're always open to your suggestions for future episodes. Watch our YouTube channel at Dr. Brian Keating, and join our premieres every Tuesday at 8 a.m. Pacific time for live chats. Follow Brian on Twitter, Medium, and support us on Patreon at Dr. Brian Keating. That's DR. Brian Keating. For free access to exclusive content, please visit Professor Keating's website and sign up for

his informative newsletter at briankeating.com. Into the Impossible is produced with the Arthur C. Clark Center for Human Imagination in the Division of Physical Sciences at the University of California, San Diego. Eric Viri, Director, Brian Keating, co-director, Patrick Coleman, Associate Director, produced by Stuart Volko and Brian Keating. For more information on the Arthur C. Clarke Center, go to imagination.ucsd.edu.