Into the Impossible With Brian Keating - Searching for Habitable Worlds: Richard Powers, Winner of The Pulitzer Prize (#233)

Episode Date: June 19, 2022

Richard Powers is an American novelist whose works explore the effects of modern science and technology. His novel The Echo Maker won the 2006 National Book Award for Fiction. He's won many other awards over the course of his career, including a MacArthur Fellowship. As of 2021, Powers has published 14 novels and has taught at the University of Illinois and Stanford University. He won the 2019 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for The Overstory. Powers’ latest book is Bewilderment in which, The astrobiologist Theo Byrne searches for life throughout the cosmos while single-handedly raising his unusual nine-year-old, Robin, following the death of his wife. Robin is a warm, kind boy who spends hours painting elaborate pictures of endangered animals. He’s also about to be expelled from third grade for smashing his friend in the face. As his son grows more troubled, Theo hopes to keep him off psychoactive drugs. He learns of an experimental neurofeedback treatment to bolster Robin’s emotional control, one that involves training the boy on the recorded patterns of his mother’s brain… With its soaring descriptions of the natural world, its tantalizing vision of life beyond, and its account of a father and son’s ferocious love, Bewilderment marks Richard Powers’s most intimate and moving novel. At its heart lies the question: How can we tell our children the truth about this beautiful, imperiled planet? Bewilderment on Amazon http://www.richardpowers.net 📺 Watch my most popular videos:📺 Weinstein and Wolfram https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OI0AZ4Y4Ip4?sub_confirmation=1 Sheldon Glashow: https://youtu.be/a0_iaWgxQtA?sub_confirmation=1 Neil deGrasse Tyson https://youtu.be/1kxgK6J4S5Y Michio Kaku: https://youtu.be/3to9ymn-XKI Jill Tarter https://youtu.be/O9K9OBd3vHk?sub_confirmation=1 Sara Seager Venus LIfe: https://youtu.be/QPsEDoOTU6k?sub_confirmation=1 Stephen Wolfram: https://youtu.be/nSAemRxzmXM Avi Loeb: https://youtu.be/N9lUceHsLRw Jim Simons: https://youtu.be/6fr8XOtbPqM Be my friend: 🏄‍♂️ Twitter: https://twitter.com/DrBrianKeating 🔔 Subscribe https://www.youtube.com/DrBrianKeating?sub_confirmation=1 📝 Join my mailing list; just click here http://briankeating.com/mailing_list.php ✍️ Detailed Blog posts here: https://briankeating.com/blog.php 🎙️ Listen on audio-only platforms: https://briankeating.com/podcast.php A production of http://imagination.ucsd.edu/ Support the podcast: https://www.patreon.com/drbriankeating Produced by Brian Keating and Stuart Volkow P.G.A Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hello, impossible family. It is I. I am Brian Keating, your fearful host. In the time of pandemic podcasting, luckily growing to a close. Taking some of my first commercial airline flights and years and not gotten too much the worst for it. The last couple of weeks since the last podcast

have been phenomenal in many, many ways, including the involvement. in a wedding. I actually performed a wedding. Your fearful host performed a wedding for two dear friends very recently. And it was quite an honor to be a part of this ceremony. It was between an interracial family.

And that was quite striking for me to do that on the date that is known as Loving Day. A week ago, if you're listening to this live on Father's Day, 22, June 19th or thereafter. So I'm coming off a high. of a lifetime getting asked to join two people in a holy unending union. And it's just really delightful to see, especially in times when you hear so much about the desire for people not to have kids,

not to get married, really kind of an overall depressing and somewhat pessimistic view of looking at the world. And especially on Father's Day, I think it's worth looking into this. and it will play into the conversation that you're about to listen to between myself and Richard Powers, who is a phenomenal human being, an individual who has written, one of the most touching, moving books that I've read. And that's saying something, because his last book was The Overstory, which won the Pulitzer Prize. I'm so delighted that he came on the show.

And this book, Bewilderment, which I devoured, is a touching and ultimately bittersweet book about fathers and sons and struggling with unique circumstances, the loss of a mother, a wife, and really the bitterness and sweetness that is being a parent. And I have felt blessed to have been a father for over a decade now. And I struggle when I think about colleagues and friends that choose, and I don't fault them necessarily, but they choose not to have kids and some can't have kids and that's fine. But everybody can be a father figure, a mother figure, and a vuncular figure to someone in their life. And in doing so, as I said at this wedding that I was honored to perform, you do create a universe. You create this network of connections of love and of

bonding between generations. And I always say, you know, time travel is 100% possible. It's just not possible in the sense that you are used to thinking about it where people want to take their body and their stuff and teleport somewhere around the universe of the galaxy. That's a little bit selfish and unrealistic. But to teleport your values, and you know I always summarize the conversations as I do with Richard Powers in this conversation with existential questions of ultimate meaning, including the ethical will that he and all my guess would like to bequeath to leave for future generations.

And so this conversation, you know, is not typical in the sense of it involving heart science the whole way through, though there is a lot of hard science in this book, ranging from the Kepler satellite to the search for life on exoplanets to dealing with congressional oversight committees and so forth. And I found it really just amazing that this man, Richard Powers, can really delve deep into so many different disparate fields. His mind is quite remarkable. And his humility and his evuncular nature that he inspires and impresses upon everybody who reads his work. And I know that you'll enjoy this conversation, reflections on fatherhood, and help in this progress, if not by, you know, loving and holding and squeezing your kids tight, and we don't need any more reminders than

just checking the daily news every single freaking day in this country. It seems like there's multiple dozens of reasons to squeeze your kids and hold on to them if you're blessed to have them. And if you're not, to think about your upbringing and think about how you can be, perhaps a father figure, a mother figure, a parental figure, to anybody in your life, to a child especially. And hopefully this conversation will help inspire you to do that. And because it's Father's Day, I couldn't resist to include in some dad jokes. Okay, you need some dad jokes.

So I want to leave you with a dad joke on this blessed occasion of Father's Day. And it's one I made up. So I can't claim it's original. It may have come to me, you know, through a dad joke. But here you go. All right. What did the donut say to his lover? Answer, you make me whole.

Okay, I didn't promise it was going to be spectacular. I just said it was a dad joke, okay? So this episode with Richard Powers is about his new book, Bewilderment, covering the exploration of space, climate catastrophe, the search for extraterrestrial life in the universe, how to write, how to teach from a great master, of the art. And I'm really just so tickled. And I hope that you will be as well. So without any further ado, I bid you a bon voyage as we journey into the impossible

with Pulitzer Prize winner, Richard Powers. Let's go. Sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Open the bad door's door, please, how? Ladies and gentlemen, it is I. Brian Keating, your fearful host, in these times of emerging from pandemic podcasting and into a very, very exciting interview for me, which is meeting one of my favorite authors, one of my inspirations. And thankfully, I was trying to get him on the show, as I was saying, for years. And it was only until he wrote a book, this wonderful book called Be Wildermint, that I was able to tie in a little bit of my professional courtesy,

perhaps to someone who writes a book that is a novel, that is heart-wrenching, that is beautifully written, and is evocative of so many themes that we talk about on this channel, including astrobiology, the search for life on other planets. There's a very, very strong theme throughout here of the environment of taking care of our planet while we do search for other planets and other creatures. We also find in this magical book a discussion of some of the upcoming preview perhaps of mind computer interface that we'll talk about when we discuss consciousness. And that's today's guest is Richard Powers, author of Bewilderment. You may know him from the Overstory. And it's just such a delight. He's the professor now. He's up at Stanford,

the Knight Professor. And he is joining us all the way from Northern California. I wish we could be in person, but I have a little bit of a cold, but I wouldn't miss this interview for the world. So, Richard, thank you so much for coming on the podcast. Thank you so much, Brian, and thanks for the generous intro. Have to make just one small correction. Okay. I did leave Stanford a few years ago.

Oh, sorry. And I've been working full-time as a novelist since then, living in the Smokies, which we can talk about. It has a bearing on the book. But I happen to be back in Northern California at the moment, on an extended book tour for bewilderment. So back in my old stomping grounds, but for different reasons right now.

Well, any excuse that brings you closer to us, we will take. So, Richard, as I explain, every author that graces me in my audience with their guest appearance, I always ask the same question that you're never supposed to ask, but for people that aren't familiar,

what else do they have to judge a book by, besides its cover? And so I want to ask you about the title. I want to ask you, about the image on the cover and this wonderful, some of the other features we'll get into in just a bit on the cover as well. So can we now do the famous segment judging books by their covers? How'd you come up with the title and the cover design, please? Well, you know, let's start with the image. That can be a very fraught process. And what's

interesting about it, you know, people don't always consider this. But for a book like Bewilderment that gets translated into, you know, several different languages, is that process happens again and again and again in different cultures and in different language groups. And there is a lot of difference between what an author would like to see on the cover and what an editor would like to see on the cover and what a publicist would like to see on the cover. We all have our personal agendas. And, you know, they want some kind of mystical resonance with things in the story.

The, you know, the editor wants some kind of professionally identifiable set of semiotics for positioning the book in a bookstore. And of course, the publicist wants an image that will connect to the broadest number of possible readers. There was a good presentation of cover possibilities for the book after I submitted my final draft. And I actually blocked up several of myself in my own amateurish photoshoppy way with an eye toward suggesting the scope of the book. The book concerns a widow in his late 30s, Theo Byrne, who is an astrobiologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and his nine-year-old special, unusual son, Robin, whose mother has died about two. years before the start of the book. And Theo, Robin is neurodivergent and is experiencing increasing behavioral difficulties in his school. Theo is trying to get him adequately diagnosed and get

a proper response to this boy who's having more and more trouble coping with his own anxiety, including acute ecotrauma. So the cover had to suggest those things. And it also And also, you know, I really wanted it to suggest an element of science speculation in the book that becomes very important, both in terms of subject and theme. One of the very few things that calm Robin down is when Theo, in place of bedtime stories, takes Robin on a journey across the galaxy, across the universe, visiting examples of the kinds of exoplanets that have been turned up by planet hunters in recent years that have been considered contemplated explored by his own field of astrobiology so i wanted a cover that suggested that kind of cosmic subject matter that also invoked the intimacy of the story it's told entirely by theo in the first person as a memoir of his year

tragic and difficult ear with his challenging son. I wanted to suggest that father's son relationship. The first covers that we were looking at also, I think, being nudged by the people at my housing house to suggest a much broader accessibility, a much simpler style, a shorter, more straightforward book than I've written in the past. They wanted to invoke a kind of crossover book. the covers that they were suggesting had human figures on them set on a sublime or a spectacular earthly landscape with a big, big sky in the background. But they had a kind of young adult tint or tinged to them that I was okay with. But I thought we could do better and create a more universal look.

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Start your carpet project today at the Home Depot, how doers get more done. Exclusions apply for licenses, seehomdeeper.com slash license numbers. And I actually found the image that we ended up using. What was interesting is the image was cropped very, very differently so that the horizon line, the aspect ratio of the picture, and also the figure. There was only one human figure, the man, the figure on the right as you look at the cover. And through great magic, the design folks at Norton, were able to add a second figure of a boy. They cropped the sky.

They added this light show, this comet or spectacular object, meteor perhaps moving across the low horizon. And all of a sudden it seemed to me that we had a very elegant, very simple design. Now, it's been interesting to watch the book be taken up, as I say, by other countries. The UK had a very beautiful image, almost like an Archimbaldo, a lush image filled with earthly life that in a kind of visual pun forms the profile of a young child. And I thought that was very beautiful too. And that's been taken up in other countries. But it's funny when you put them side by side, you do realize, although you're not supposed to judge a book by cover, you are being subtly, psychically influenced by the cover every time you pick it up and get back into the story. Yeah, I love it.

I always used to say, you know, Richard, that, you know, I never understood. why books have these jackets, you know, because what do they call? They're called dust jackets. And I was also saying, like, how much dust is like flying around people's shell, you know? And then, funnily enough, my book is all about cosmic dust, which makes an appearance in this book. Also, my book was published by Norton. Norton graciously introduced us. So it's wonderful to have that connection. And I want to get into all the phenomenal science, really heavy-duty research science. you know, one of my favorite things to do is when my kids tell me that they found an error, you know, in one of my books or typos, which they have found more than I care to admit.

But, you know, at least the first book, I had professional editors and everybody reading it, right? So I can't only be blamed. But I couldn't find any scientific, you know, gaffs or flaws or anything like that in this book. It's really an impressive book. And the following up, of course, on the previous, you know, smash success, also in kind of the naturalistic genre. And I want to get into in the future, if we have time, you know, what comes next? Is there a trilogy in this sort of, you know, Uber theme of nature, the world, the universe?

But we haven't finished the cover yet because there are some other things on the cover that I want to get into. First of all, there is winner of the Pulitzer Prize. And I've had on 11 Nobel Prize winners. I've had on, you're the second Pulitzer Prize winner. I have the third one coming up, Ed Young, who wrote, I contain multitudes, is coming on for his new book in June, so stay tuned. Please subscribe to the channel fact. But then there's this thing. There's a sticker. Whoops. Oprah's book clubs. Did you get to meet Oprah as well as

what is the meaning of this? It's interesting. I was stunned. I was in bed in my cabin in the forest of the smokies reading and the phone rang. And it's almost always. a telemarketer but this one had a 312 area code Chicago area code and you know my family comes from Chicago I still have family in Chicago and I have a lot of friends in Chicago and I didn't recognize a number but I thought I better answer this you know the telemarketers tend to come from the West Coast so I picked it up and and she said you know Richard Powers this is Oprah and my immediate you know thought was one very statistic friend of mine is doing a very good voice imitation But, you know, that voice was too famous to imitate so perfectly.

And it turns out that she was a great fan of the overstory, but that book at 500-plus pages with very complex and multiple narrative styles unfolding over a large period of time. And on a fairly esoteric subject, didn't fit well with her book club. And so she was delighted when Bewilderman came out, shorter, more accessible, much more intimate. You know, it can be read as a family drama, as a father-son duet. She was delighted that she finally had a book of mine that fit better with her club. We did a long interview. She's extremely well-read, better read than I am, and such a great interlocutor and has such a

an art in extracting from novels, all the stalient, emotional, and thematic components. And as she told me, you know, after that interview, she said, she does the club out of the love of fiction and makes no money on it. And she just does it because novelists are her rock stars. So it was quite an experience. Getting to like that and getting a chance to talk to her at length. Well, maybe you can turn that to some support for Astrobi. We certainly can use it.

And speaking of astrobiology, this book is replete with really very, what I would call hard science fiction. I've had on Andy Weir, who is a graduate. And I should say that there's a lot of science fiction that comes out of UC San Diego, and particularly Arthur C. Clark Center for Human Imagination and the Clarion writer's workshop that we run. We have David Bryn as an alumnus. We have Kim Stanley Robinson as an alumnus.

We have a lot of good hard science fiction. And this is very much in that vein. I mean, I listened to it and I read it as well. And the audiobook is just a lightfully narrated. The narrator did a very wonderful job of communicating the tenderness, the angst, the anxiety that we have as parents. And I want to turn to that because as I understand it, you're not a parent. And I would like to kind of, you know, again, I'm just overawed by both the graciousness

that you treat the father-son relationship, the widower relationship. etc. But before we do, I do want to give some red tofu to to my more, more astronomically inclined audience. So this book is really a tale of other worlds in some level in the inner space and outer space as frequently comes up. So Robbie is the special needs kid, neurodivergent, perhaps autistic. We don't know. There's so many different definitions. And as I was saying, before we start recording, you know, Richard, you know, when I was a kid, the first time I met somebody that had a peanut allergy, I was 30 years old. A lot of these things come up and especially these new diagnosis, which is the most common diagnosis for kids. But one of the things,

the only things that can really soothe him during his episodes where he is kind of overcome by this inner torment that he might be suffering from is by his father's bedtime stories. and his father takes them through journeys through the galaxy and beyond. And I wanted to, you know, we often hear here at the Arthur C. Clark Center and the Clarion Writers workshop about world building. And this book literally has more worlds in it than any other book I've ever read, even Andy Weir's books. So I want to ask, yeah, what is the inspiration for that? I mean, how to, I mean, I always find it very challenging when you talk to like a comedian.

And you ever watch like Jimmy Kimmel and he's talking to a committee? He said, what makes you so funny? I guarantee you the next things that comes out are not funny. Like, well, I'm very like, but so I don't want to ask you like, how do you do what you do? But what was it about astronomy, astrobiology, that appeal to you? Well, gosh, you know, there's so much on the table with what you've just said and asked. And let me let me start by talking about the way that my books have possessed. themselves in the relationship between science and fiction over the years.

You're considerably younger than I am, as is Theo in the book. But the age is important in the case of this subject because astrobiology is a young discipline. And I wanted to create a character who was old enough to see it go from non-existent to fairly well established in a short period of time. But before this book, this is my 13th novel, I have spent many of those 13 books exploring the social and personal consequences of lives spent in science, in particular scientific research. And I've explored the effects of those sciences and the technologies that have spun out of those sciences on what we call the human condition. And my books have not always been science fiction in the hard sense of the word.

That is to say, they haven't always ventured into speculation. They haven't changed the rules of our existence here. They haven't explored distant futures. They've dealt with what often science fiction writers will explore, which is the near-term future, just that next horizon into the impossible, where the impossible and the possible are just starting to kind of change their respective boundaries. But by and large, I would say my fiction has been up until now largely literary in nature, but using scientific research as subject matter for literary fiction.

That is, you know, literary fiction will do this on occasion, but often it's fairly rudimentary. It's fairly crude. There's a test tube bubbling away in the background or somebody who's got a white coat on, you know. But I really want to write these books as a way of inhabiting the mind and the worldview of people who are in these pursuits. My friend and science studies author, Bruno Latour, was trying to introduce the word scientifician for a while to distinguish between SF and literary fiction that wants to use science as its subject matter and its theme. The word never really got traction, and you can kind of see why it's not an elegant word.

But nevertheless, I think it's a good distinction. what I've done in the last two books, I think, has turned a little bit. It's tried to open up that more realist, more naturalist fiction that I've been writing for, you know, almost a dozen novels before these two, and introduce elements of speculation, introduce elements of spiritual reflection and strangeness to expand the ways in which the the story is able to explore the ramifications of a world being profoundly changed by the rapid advances of our knowledge and our ability to manipulate the physical and temporal worlds. So astrobiology, when I was an undergraduate, didn't exist at all. In fact, I began my undergraduate career studying physics.

And this did involve flirtations with astronomy and cosmology. And at the time, it really was taboo to say anything at all about what life out there might look like. You know, there was almost a consensual agreement that, you know, I mean, there's always that positive this prohibition against talking about things that you can't know. And at the time, we couldn't because we didn't have the tools to go out and even see what that. term in the Drake equation of how many planets per sun per star there were right we had no idea you know we had one case to reason from right so it was all a bit you know it was all a bit suspect you could if you were carl sagan you could get away with a little bit of lyrical speculation um but by and large i think the the the field correct me if i'm wrong but the general feel was that the the field shied away from

any kind of professional speculation. Yeah, I think that's right. And I had on both Carl's daughter, Sasha Sagan, who's a wonderful writer in her own right, and his widow, Andrewian, as well, who wrote the novel Contact with Carl, his only fiction book. And you're absolutely right.

I asked her, you know, what was his reaction? Because he was almost shunned in some sense by the scientific community, famously being denied entry into the National Academies of Science. Some said because he had too much of a personality and outward facing. And yet nowadays, if you look Richard at the case being made for telescopes like the James Webb, which there is a thinly veiled reference to the James Webb Space Telescope, was written, of course, published before the web was launched successfully.

And I want to get into your hopes and aspirations for that project. But you see it now for these giant telescopes, some rivaling the cost of Webb Telescope or the next generation telescope that you talk about in your book, billions of dollars. And their primary capstone key project is to look for signals of life in the universe. That never would have been visible to someone like Sagan even 20 years ago. But you see, yeah, in retrospect, that Sagan's speculations and his general attitude about what we're doing and how we might go about doing it have been vindicated many times over. And you have also had on Sarah Seeker, and, you know, who, you know, has been at the center of this search for exoplanets.

And it is absolutely mind-boggling what has been put on the table in just a matter of a few decades. So we had the Galileo Telescope in 89 and followed 20 years later by Kepler. and all of a sudden we're not stuck in this little reasoning from one case anymore. And it's mind-blowing to think of the foundational work. I mean, when you think of stellar dimming and wobble and planetary lensing, you know, gravitational lensing as methods for determining what I think many astronomers when I was an undergraduate would have thought would never be possible. It's really a revolution.

And it's time for fiction to catch up with that revolution and realize that our thinking now about who we are, who the neighbors might be, you know, what the what the potentials and possibilities for life are. all of those questions have changed profoundly. And so they should change the stories that we're telling about ourselves, about life here on planet Earth. Yeah, absolutely. And we have, you know, kind of I see science fiction as a way to kind of pregame

or do what Einstein used to call Godunkin experiments, thought experiments. What could the future be like in our namesake here at the Arthur C. Clark Center, Arthur C. Clark famously predicted things like telepresents and satellites and even things like FaceTime and iPads and so forth. But I wondered, and I wanted to pivot to, you know, kind of reflections on the Fermi paradox that you do discuss in the book. It's one of Theo's, you know, he intuits it. Sorry, Robbie, the son, intuits it in a certain sense. And I wonder, you know, with all these wonderful discoveries, as you've just said, is that making us feel more, more alone, more isolated, more kind of terrified?

Because, yes, at least you could hide in the background in 1986 and say, well, you know, we only know of one. planet where life could even have liquid water around a G-type star, and you talk a lot about all these analogs. Is it making it worse on the knowledge that we get? Is it the curse of knowledge? Now we're even, Fermi's paradox is even more crisp than it was perhaps even when he asked it the first time. So it may heighten our anxiety in one sense, but it may also do something very powerful and beautiful for our sense of earthly morality on another. And I'll get back to that. In the unlikely event that your viewers don't have a reference for the Fermi paradox,

I'll just step it through in a sentence. So, you know, it references a famous event back in 1950 at Los Alamos over lunch when the astronomers of the time were starting to get a good sense of the age of the universe and the rate of stellar creation, which are the first two terms in Drake's famous equation. And the immense, the mind-boggling size of the sample set that we were talking about was first coming clear to people. And, you know, Fermi, hearing these numbers stopped over lunch and said, then where is everybody? And that question gets more and more acute because now we have a pretty strong sense. And again, please, you know, correct this

auto-didact novelist at any turn when, you know, if I pull out any numbers that are wrong or any not likely. If we're talking about on the order of hundreds of billions of galaxies, each of which have on the order of 100 billion stars. And we now know from Kepler that those stars are likely to have at least, you know, a handful of planets, two or three planets. That's a big number. And little nine-year-old Robin, who's listening to his father, you know, whose father says, take the number of grains of sand and multiply them by the number of trees, and that's how many stars there are out there.

You know, Little Robin is saying, what Fermi asked, you know, then where is everybody? And your question about whether this makes our existential loneliness more acute, that we have not, either through SETI or through subtler searches by astrobiologists for less pronounced forms of life, microbial life, using things like spectroscopy of the light

passing through atmospheres of these newly discovered exoplanets, we have not yet turned up anything credible as another fingerprint of life. There is some interesting dispute and I don't know where

I think Sarah Seeger was involved in this group that we're saying possibly we've overlooked biosignatures on Venus in the atmosphere of Venus. That's right. Which is kind of mind-blowing. Yeah. You know, when you think of the conditions there.

But, you know, one, before trying to close this argument about its effect on our earthly morality, one, it does bear pointing out that astrobiology is not just a search for life on other worlds. It's a broader field, a multidisciplinary field, that's primarily concerned with approaching the larger questions of the relationship between life and its location. So biogenesis, the whole question of how life emerges in the first place, what kinds of chemistry life might be able to be based on? You know, all of these questions that the astrobiologists are searching have great bearing for life here on this planet. Whatever we, you know, whatever biosignatures we may or may not find out there, we are learning to look at and think about the resourcefulness, the ingenuity, the toughness, and the range of life here in new ways.

And there's been an interesting feedback back and forth, you know, as we become really interested in the possibilities of very non-standard habitats, even looking, you know, looking for life in places that ordinarily would have not been included in, what we would have considered to be habitable zones a short while ago, rogue planets where there's, you know, energy coming from gravitational forces that, you know, could produce life in the absence of a star. I mean, that's pretty wild. But those kinds of thought experiment, but also rigorous data gathering back and forth,

have retroactively widened our appreciation for where life is found here. and vice versa, you know, discovering extremophiles on Earth in places at temperatures where my biology teacher in college would have said life could not exist, has been sobering and humbling and also exciting because, you know, just it throws open all kinds of possibilities. I read just yesterday new speculation about Europa, moon of Jupiter, and how how the ridges on this crust. There's always been suspicion that there's liquid

water underneath this crust and that that could be the first place off of Earth where we find life, not on a planet itself but on the moon of a planet. And again, because of energy from unexpected sources, that this is looking at those

ridges, comparing it to ridges in Greenland and deciding that yes, this is a very exciting indication that there's shallow salt water in conditions that are very hospitable to the generation of and the sustenance of microbial life. So it's an amazing project. But let's say, you know, there are two possibilities. I mean, I'm not sure whether you've had SETI people on. I've had on Jill Tarter and Seth Schaugh-Sach. Yeah, the great luminaries of that Of course, yeah.

You know, they could call a press conference tomorrow. It is entirely within the realm of the possible and say, yes, this is a non-random, non-random, non-geological, non-physical signal. It's being sent by some biological entity. They could do that tomorrow. Now, does that make us better or worse curators of this planet? To know that, you know, once that K-N-plus-1 has been found, then we have this kind of induction proof of, well, it's probably everywhere then.

And does that make us more cavalier or more careful about what we're doing to this planet? The other question is, suppose we go on decade after decade and we can't find biosignatures anywhere. What does that do to our sense of where we've landed? And I think actually, honestly, in both cases, it should hugely increase our sense of how unthinkably lucky the convergence of affordances for life I have occurred on this planet. And, you know, to treat the one place in the universe that we know of that is perfect for the existence and sustenance of life, the way that we've been treating, has something to do with the lack of thinking about just how big it is out there. Yeah, I couldn't agree more. And in fact, I feel like it should, I'm kind of a, a little bit of a contrarian when it comes to life on other planets. I actually don't think there is a very high likelihood of it.

And I, you know, because I'm kind of trying to be driven by data and even the most fervent, as you say, you know, Jill Tarter and Sest Shostak would be the most pleased to have verified the existence of not only life, but extraterrestrial technological intelligence. We'll get to that in a minute. But speaking of, you know, as I mentioned before, you know, this ability for science fiction. And again, this is extremely hard. It's not even science fiction. It's based on actual, you know, discoveries data. I mean, they're real people in this book, thinly veiled. Granda Thunberg makes an appearance.

Donald Trump makes an appearance. And I love it. But because it's so it's such a fantastic, fun read, especially for audience members like me who are very hardcore geeks and dweeps and nerds. I'll just devour it. But, you know, there's a scene in the movie contact. I mentioned Andrewian past guest. And there's a scene in the movie version with Jody Foster,

who plays Jill Tarter, Finley Veiled, and it shows, you know, a press conference with Bill Clinton on the White House lawn. And that was not CGI. That was an actual event that took place in 1997 when fossil hunters and meteorite hunters discovered a, what they claim was the either byproducts of respiration of a Martian, you know, organism, or the organism itself. And that, Richard, was a peer-reviewed paper. That was, you know,

NASA doesn't do press conferences unless it's peer-reviewed and accepted and published. I believe it was in science. And to my knowledge, that discovery has never been refuted. So, in other words, it has never been disconfirmed or confirmed. It arrived in a meteor shower, 13,000. years ago. And in 1984, an American scientist on an annual U.S. government mission to search for meteors on Antarctica picked it up and took it to be studied. Appropriately, it was the first rock to be picked up that year, rock number 8401. Today, rock 8401 speaks to us across all those billions of years and millions of miles. It speaks to us. of the possibility of life.

If this discovery is confirmed, it will surely be one of the most stunning insights into our universe that science has ever uncovered. Its implications are as far-reaching and awe-inspiring as can be imagined. Even as it promises answers to some of our oldest questions, it poses still others even more fundamental. We will continue to listen closely to what it has to say.

As we continue to search for answers, answers and for knowledge that is as old as humanity itself, but essential to our people's future. I think actually the current thinking on it is that there may be other possible sources, yes. Yes. A hundred percent, yep. And that's sort of my meta point is that for 20 plus years, Richard, we live with this ambiguity of whether or not there was life on another planet.

And yet the average person, it made no difference to their lives. In fact, most people don't even know that that was retracted or not retracted. There was this claim of extremophiles living in Mono Lake here in California, also published in Science magazine, also retracted, you know, when it was found. It wasn't arsenic life after all. It was in contamination potentially. It's not really clear. So these discoveries, to my mind, illustrate exactly what would happen. You know, a lot of times I talked with folks and they say it would change everything to know that there's life in the universe.

And I think it could. But then we have this counter example that people just went about their life and they kept polluting the oceans. I mean, Richard, if you or I want to find life, we can just go out into the ocean. You know, it's a couple miles away. Scoop up a glass of Pacific Ocean water. And they'll be teeming, teeming with organisms uncountable. So, I mean, yet we're so cavalier, as you say, about our stewardship of the planet. So I want to ask you, does that depress you?

I mean, it depresses me. Yeah. No, those are all very good points. But again, I think an ambiguous non-biological trace in rocks that was already being qualified and disputed at the time of the public announcement is too subtle for the public to really have their imaginations captured. And, you know, honestly, I don't know when you say you're skeptical about finding. other forms of life out there, whether that extends all the way to the microbial. But even unambiguous biosignatures, strongly suggesting microbial existence, would be a bit mediated and removed for the public, you know, show us the pictures, tell us what the, you know, what the

underlying, you know, replication methods are, you know, tell us the precise chemistry. of those things are going to happen in our lifetime. So we're away from those kinds of, you know, epical, monumental consciousness-changing announcements. But that's where fiction comes in, you see, because, you know, there's a line in overstory. It's all, all the best arguments in the world won't change a person's mind. The only thing that will do that is a good story. Yes. And this, This is what I'm trying to do with my novels. This is what people, you know, the folks who you mentioned earlier, you know, from Andy Weir to to Kim Stanley Robinson are trying to do.

They're trying to excite the imagination, the narrative imagination of people here on Earth about this incredible drama that we are a part of. The movement of the inanimate universe into something biological is a It is a narrative I will never be able to wrap my head around. But it's a narrative that you can tell stories about. And if you create a father who's looking for things out there, if you create a son who is terrified by what's happening to the world around him, who wants to know, are you serious?

Is half of the large animal life on earth going to be gone by the time I'm your age? What do you say to a nine-year-old? You know, that question, I think, can make even a non-scientific reader stop, catch their breath and say, oh my God, how would I raise that child? And yeah, maybe this is a good time to pivot there. I just wanted to take one quick detour before I do that, just to remind folks I'm talking Richard Powers,

Pulitzer Prize winning author of The Overstory and most recently, 13th novel, Bewolderman, which is just a delightful book about astrobiology, about what it means to be a father. a son to be a child in the universe and leave a legacy. But one thing in the astrobiological sense, you know, there was Fred Hoyle, who was the biggest critic of the Big Bang theory who really ever lived, went to his deathbed. He actually visited San Diego many times. He worked with a colleague of mine, Jeffrey Burbage.

And they discovered how life, you know, could come out, perhaps be spread about not origin of life, but, you know, spreading of life called panspermia. which sounds dirty, but it's not. And one of the other kind of refutations that I use to bolster my Bayesian confidence in the lack of life elsewhere in the universe is that we haven't found it on Mars. And the argument goes like this, that, you know, I've got this little chunk of cosmic space dust here. I'll see if a little meteorite. I'm going to give it to you when we meet up. Someday we have to meet up.

So this is a meteorite that comes from a type two supernova that blew up in our galaxy five billion years ago. And it's been cruising around. And I actually have a couple of pieces of gram-sized samples of Mars in my laboratory. And it's just for fun. I don't do research on it. But this meteorite sample from Mars has a particular characteristic. It's matched by the Viking landers. And they can prove it's from Mars.

It landed on Earth after being Mars was pummeled by the same meteorites that hit the Earth, hit Mars. Travel around the universe and then hit the Earth. And that's how they think this Antarctic meteorite. land on Earth. So the fact that, you know, to date, we, we don't see any geologic evidence. We don't see any other, you know, physical evidence. Even microbial or tardigrades, which you talk about in the book, you know, how these things could, could even exist on Mars. Of course, we haven't searched the whole planet. And the lack of, you know, evidence is not proof of lack of existence. But I wonder, you know, is there any, you know, and this will be the last topic in the kind

of search for microbial life, or at least in our conversation. But is there any, you know, you know, piece, and I admit what I just said is not like, you know, a proof, but is there any evidence that would cause you to rethink your belief that life is abundant and replete throughout the cosmos, or is that something that cannot

be refuted, so to speak? I'm actually agnostic on the matter. If you were to ask me to bet, I'd place a bet on finding microbial life ultimately once all the tools are in place. Just simply because of the

the sample size of possible habitats and, you know, the, you know, if you roll the dice often enough, you know, in a large enough field, you're going to have conditions close to those here. On the other hand, you know, there are interesting. The fact that life originated so quickly on Earth relative to the origin of the planet, you know soon we got out of that haiti and things settled down it was there but there was there is also something sobering you know when astrobiologists look at uh the history of life on this planet the sobering thing is that the single cell if and i think i'm right on the on the time from here the latest thinking on this went for almost a billion years yeah that's right before endosomyosis

you know so you know could could earth have never been anything more than single cell. Well, it was for a good chunk of its history. You know, four and a half billion years, half a billion years or so after, you know, after planetary origin, we start seeing first life and then nothing for the next billion years except these very simple cells. So that may be what we see most places. You know, if we ever do get signatures, it may be that. And whether or not, you know, that is a, is a, is a, you know, an existential landmark for us remains to be seen. But you know, you've done great work with Galileo.

You know, you've recorded audio versions of his seminal books, earth-changing books, and remember that the facts that he was put. I mean, simply saying, there's something out there that has bodies rotating around it, right? that was a nod in our head. And it helped provoke all kinds of social and political revolutions down the line. So never underestimate, you know, the slow catalytic effect of news from out there. So one of my listeners, Jimmy asks the question of you, do you believe that understanding consciousness is somehow related to understanding life in the universe?

in other words, might there be forms of life that we couldn't recognize unless we fully understand consciousness, which is, I always say, Richard, there are all these chicken or egg problems, you know, which came first, you know, matter or the universe or energy, which came first, you know, life or consciousness. And all these chicken or the egg. And one of my kids once said, I know how to tell if, you know, which came first, the chicken or the egg. And I said, how do you do that? he goes, just order a chicken and an egg from Amazon and you see which company? There is science in action. So can you tell me your views on consciousness?

Is it as, you know, past guest, Deepak Chopra said, you know, the universe is conscious. Donald Hoffman, you know, said, you know, reality sort of doesn't exist. It's all this kind of, you know, tablo of kind of iconography that representative, you know, of activity. and realism is not correct. So can we understand, you know, would life bite us on the rear end? And we wouldn't know it because we are not attuned to his consciousness in some sense. And we'll get into the fMRI. Sure, yeah.

I would put it that not only could life do that, but it has throughout a good part of human intellectual history. And I'll backtrack around to make that point. But on the chicken and egg, I do love the evolutionary genetics. suggestion that something not quite a chicken, laid an egg that hatched a chicken. So in any case, this idea of all things being in flux means that you can arrest that equation at any point and decide the precursor. But the serious answer to Jimmy's question, and I've been thinking about it again, having just recently read a really good book by the philosopher and science writer Peter Godfrey Smith called Metazoa, in which he tries to step through an evolutionary

view of consciousness. And his point is if you look at the emergence of agency in living things, primarily, you know, the kind of agency that animals and fungi evolve, and And if you look at the evolution of perception, that what you really are looking at are precursor forms of consciousness. Precursor, I mean, rudimentary intelligence, you know, what's increasing called minimal intelligence, and that there may not be a hard problem of consciousness per se, that these, to look at this as a, as a, as a functional evolution of the ability to flexibly respond to the environment. That step by step, there you have consciousness. And that kind of thinking has actually allowed us to be a little less blind about the forms of consciousness in life all around us. You see, in the book, Thea Robin, come to the conclusion that there is alien life, it's everywhere.

And, you know, we're walking past it all the time. and we're failing to see just how ingenious and intelligent and resourceful it is. And, of course, by that, they mean all the creatures of planet Earth. But again, once again, not to keep ragging on my professors back in the day, but I distinctly remember sitting in psychology class and having, you know, the instructor say, when your dog jumps all over you, barking and slurping and kissing, it's not happy to see you. Right. It's just following its instincts. And now it just seems silly to us that, you know, our kind of anthropocentrism prevented us with a good, you know, a good faith desire to

keep anthropomorphism out of the equation, prevented us from seeing what clearly is conscious behavior in other animals. And of course, overstory is a great exploration of the ways in which minimal intelligence is already present even in plants. Yeah. In the ways that they flexibly respond to the environment and the way they use chemical signaling and, you know, resource sharing and. Network. Network dynamics.

Yeah. It's unbelievable. Yeah, that is such a fascinating. And I want to go now from living organisms to silicon organisms and ask you in the book, there's quite a bit without giving any. anything away. I always hated it when I would come on a podcast and so I would say, can you tell us everything that you read in the book? So, you know, I'm like, so people don't have to buy it. Yeah, sure, of course. But there is the techniques of what it's called decoded

neurofeedback as a tool using functional magnetic resonance imaging takes place. Because as, as you've already said, you know, Robin's mother passes away and there's a, there's an opportunity for them to kind of connect, and that's all I'll say, but it uses a decoded neural feedback. First I want to ask you about that. Do you feel things like Elon Musk's neuralink project or that there will be sufficiently brain machine interfaces such that someday, you know, you may share the Pulitzer Prize with GPT3 or some, you know, computing artificially intelligent general, artificial intelligent being? So talk about what. What was this, what is this field like?

Because I understood you did a lot of research on this, on this new technology. That, uh, that technique is an existing therapeutic modality. Uh, it's been around since about 2011. And, uh, the early work was on things like, uh, pattern formation in, in the, in the optical, you know, visual cortex. of the brain and the weird ability to train a target brain or a student brain on a pre-recorded target target and have a kind of apprehension. In getting feedback to train closer and closer to the target and the student brains were, you know, producing some uncanny ability to reproduce the stimuli in the target brains.

It's a therapy that's now, you know, most of the money is going into exploring its uses for PTSD and other kinds of, you know, clinical trauma therapy, which is understandable. I mean, that's where that's where the money would be. but I do this speculative fiction extrapolation of that technique and I push it, you know, one or two steps into the impossible and produce some uncanny results, some ambiguous results, some results that Theo knows can't really be produced by that, you know, by that procedure, but nevertheless are starting to appear in his son. So I had great narrative fun with that. And I think it's a, it's a wonderful kind of lever to approach this black box of the brain and to tell the story of Plato's allegory of the cave again in a contemporary way.

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GoogleFi Wireless is not subject to data traffic deprioritization during times of high network usage. Yeah, so do I think that technologies are going to converge, that the ability to do this kind of very high resolution fMRI in real time, the ability to have deep learning and massive data sets produce pattern recognition and extrapolations in an automated way and an odd kind of brain machine links. Are they going to produce things that right now we would call impossible? No doubt. No doubt.

I mean, I'm 64 years old. Half of the world that exists right now would have been impossible. for me to deceive of or credit, you know, when I was Robin's age. That's wonderful. So speaking of that, well, you know, just I was thinking instead of post-traumatic stress and I should check, Richard, do you have another 15 minutes? Is that? Oh, sure.

Okay. I beg your indulgence on that, please, and your forbearance. But you're so delightful. I can't allow my audience to be denied the pleasure of hearing these remaining thoughts from you. So you spoke of this in the book as dealing with PTSD post-traumatic stress. syndrome. But I wonder if one of the themes of the book, which is kind of eco-trauma, as you say, is almost like pre, I mean, nobody, very few people are dealing directly with, with the effects

of, you know, anthropocentric genetic climate change, you know, right now. We don't have billions of refugees and we don't have the scenarios that are playing out. Not yet, yeah, yeah. But it's coming. And so I wonder, could this type of tool be used as, you know, pre-traumatic stress disorder? I mean, I can see being used in a negative way to placate people to indulge compliance. But I don't know. Is this tool? I think it's maybe part of a greater narrative that the book evoked in me. I came away as I do.

I'm an alien pessimist, but I'm a techno-optimist. I feel like people like Robbie, you know, who, you know, he's like a young Elon Musk or something like that. These are the people that change the world. And I feel like, you know, with him in, you know, in decades or whatever, people like him, right? And I'm not going to go into the details of the story. But I want to know what about the future are you optimistic about? I mean, is it existing technology? Is it political?

Is it social, cultural? Do you have a role, you know, as a writer as well as someone who's an educated layperson in science? And me as a, you know, poorly educated writer, but a good scientist? I mean, what are you optimistic? about when it comes to climate change. Well, can I start with this question of therapy and the transformation of conscience? You see, I wanted to write this book in part to address this pandemic of the mental health of children that we're in the middle of.

I mean, this is a grave medical crisis, and we're increasingly aware of the size and the intensity and the magnitude of this problem. Our children are traumatized, and they have a right to be. And I think the kind of eco trauma that Robin suffers from is not unusual in children, even younger than him, all the way up to the teenagers who I've been talking to when I've visited, schools on this book tour, you know, whose sense of despair is palpable. So, you know, the question is, how do you preserve hope, if you define hope as a meaningful engagement with the future, a belief that there are things, there are ways of being that will continue to make the future meaningful for us, right? And yes, we can turn to technologies. And you mentioned Kim Stanley Robinson, And I think his Ministry of the Future, recent book, is a wonderful exploration of the ways in which existing human technologies through improved social institutions could finally get a handle on these double catastrophes that we've unleashed and start to work meaningfully toward rehabilitating the earth.

I think those stories are absolutely essential to tell. when I say we need a transformation in consciousness, we need a way of thinking that isn't based on human exceptionalism, that isn't based on mediating meaning entirely through acquisition and through commodities, thinking of meaning as entirely a private thing that we make by and for ourselves, but rather to recover older indigenous ways of being on the earth, of seeing interbeing, of seeing kinship with the more than human world of understanding ourselves as part of an enormous experiment of the life principle that ramifies and branches and manifests itself in all these different species, all these different kinds of intelligence. If we can come back to that community, if we can live here on earth, land back on earth, as Littor likes to say, you know, if we can find kinship in the more than human, we will be halfway to hope because all of a sudden now there's an infinite amount of meaningful work ahead of us in May.

making planet Earth habitable again. And whether or not, you know, we can succeed in preserving a way of life that's, you know, much like the present is no longer the issue. I mean, a lot of the way that we live now cannot be brought into the future. The numbers don't work, right? And so we're all in shock. We're all in mourning for a way of life. That's the only way of life that we know.

What we need are kinds of technologies, kinds of therapies, kinds of machines that can inculcate that sense of excitement, of awe, of kinship, of belonging, of community. Right. And I use one in my book, and you've latched onto it as a possible interesting technology, a literal machine that can increase our empathy, that can increase our sense of excitement. excitement and, you know, tranquility and purpose. But the technology that I'm staking my claims on is the other kind of empathy machine that we call art and story and narrative. Right. These, the decode decoded neurofeedback and bewilderment in a way is a kind of functioning analog. of what we try to do when we say, imagine if you were somebody else,

imagine you are this father raising this boy, that itself is a kind of guided neurofeedback into being someone other than yourself. And if we can find those stories, then we can begin that transformation of consciousness. Because we've seen rapid shift in social consciousness because of stories that people have told. We've seen the civil rights movement, the LGBT revolution, all these other massive and essential social transformations that have gone from very outside marginal dark-horsy kinds of concerns

not penetrating to the mainstream, you know, the invested power of this culture to, you know, to basically consensual agreement, you know, and acceptance. So we know that that can happen. And we know it can happen relatively quickly. So, yeah. Yeah, no.

There's reason to be optimistic as well, yeah. So, yeah, the last kind of major subject I'd like to talk about before we pivot to the final questions that I love to ask my guess. It has to do with the craft of being an artist, of being a writer. And I heard a quote yesterday. I want to get your reaction to it. One of the things I'm always obsessed with is, you know, can you teach X? Can you really teach, you know, somebody to be a writer, to be a physicist, to be a poet? And I wonder your reaction to this following quote from Hunter S. Thompson, who said that he hand wrote out the Great Gatsby once so he could feel for the first time what it's like to write a great novel.

When you were a professor, how do you react to this? Is it possible to teach the creativity, the craft of being a writer, or is it only possible to teach the technique? I love that Thompson story. You know, because you go to the Museum of Art, and you see people with their easels propped up in front of the great masters and just reproducing that painting. And there's nothing like it, you know.

There's a great porges short story called, Pierre Menard, the man who wrote Don Quixote. And what Pierre Menard wants to do is not copy the Quixote. He wants to write it again from scratch, the same way that Cervantes wrote it. He wants to reproduce this book. And I've always loved that story. It's just been, you know, it's been glorious inspiration for me.

There are many, many things you can teach about the craft of writing. There are many, many things you can teach about the spirit and the nature and the philosophy of writing. You can train someone to pay attention and to be present. And you can also teach them about register, indiction, and syntax, and scenes and character creation. Whether or not they'll become a great writer, I don't know,

but they'll become their best faster with good instruction, for sure. Wonderful. Yes, it's something we even experimental physicists have to grapple with, because like with children, you don't want them to be, you don't want them to be just little carbon copies of you. And for those of you out there who are too young to know what a carbon copy is, it's the CC in your email. I mean, I don't know how many people know what CC actually stands for. That's super interesting.

I haven't thought about it. Yeah, it's one of those holdovers from like three generations of technology, let alone don't even get into blind carbon copy. Richard, it's been such a treat talking to you. and I want to just get into these kind of existential questions. If you'll indulge me with your forbearance for a few more moments, I want to ask you what I call The Thrilling Three. So, Richard, the first one of these questions involves what will happen to you

when you reach the biblical age of 120 years old, which is the age that Moses got to be, but he didn't get into the promised land. And we all have our own promised lands that we don't get into, I suppose. I want to ask you what would be your ethical will, not your monetary, you know, physical will, but what wisdom or values do you cherish so much that you want to articulate as an inheritance to generations that come after you, both, you know, ideological and other words. And what a great question to meditate on every day. Yes. You know, if we could do that for a few minutes every day. Yeah, the Talmud, the Talmud says, write your will the day before you.

you die. But of course, you don't know when you're going to die, so you should think of it. Now would be a good time. Yeah, I think of all this Huxley's answer to that question. So Huxley, you know, one of the great, you know, progenitors of the speculative fiction. Yeah. He said, you know, he said, I'll get the quote slightly mangled, but it was something like, it's embarrassing to have spent an entire lifetime studying the human condition and to have nothing more insightful to say than pay attention and try to be a little kinder. But that's a big, that's a big too. And if you can do them both together, I mean, notice the way that they would play off each other. But the real question is, how do you

continue to pay attention and how do you continue to try to be a little kinder, despite all the the the habits that we fall back into, you know, with all our best intentions. And, you know, the hinge on that, I think, would be, you know, another quote would be the William Goldman quote. You have to remember that nobody knows anything about anything. And that that degree of skepticism and uncertainty should be pointed inwards and produce a kind of standing condition of humility. Whatever you think you're sure of right now is probably wrong in some ways. And, you know, if you can hold that in mind, then of course it gets easier to say, well, then pay attention and try to be a little kinder because that's all we have.

You know, we're all in this vulnerable state of contingent knowledge. Very good. Beautiful. So the next question has to do with the famous scene from 2001, a space odyssey. Where are these monoliths, these structures? We don't really know what they are. They're perhaps built as a time capsule, a warning, some sort of braggadocio from an extraterrestrial species. And we're not really clear what they're supposed to be.

But now we're going to go from 120 years in the future to a billion years in the future. And I should say I asked Andrewian, this and she said, oh, I did this. I recorded my brainwaves and Carl put it on a Pioneer 10 golden plaque. Right. The question makes me think of the things that they

put on these probes that were going, leaving the solar system. That's right. Yeah, exactly. She actually created eco music. I think what's called, you know, or earth music or something like that. There was no concept of world music back then.

And they sampled all these different, you know, cultures and their musicals, you know, in different kinds. But I want to ask you, they put whale song on it too. Yeah. Yeah. Her brain waves. And it was just after she had fallen in love, she said, with Carl. And it was really quite beautiful.

But I want to ask you, you know, with that massive buildup, you know, don't be intimidated. But what would you put on as a sort of a way to maybe for us to brag about what we've accomplished as a species or what kind of, you know, basically advertisement for the earth and for the human species, which as we already said, is the only at least known species of life that exists of technological and conscious behavior that we are familiar with. What would you put on a monolith destined to last for a billion years? It's super interesting. And, you know, not unrelated to the kind of corollary question that a film my contact asks, okay, we've got them on the line. Now what do we say to him?

And Lewis Thomas actually wrote a great essay on this. You know, the physician, medical researcher, and essays who wrote, you know, columns for nature, I think, years and years, and were collected in great collections like the lives of a cell. He wrote on SETI and he's saying, okay, so now we've said hello, it's going to take 200 years to reach them, and then it's going to take 200 years for the high, how are you, to come back from them, you know, and civilizations are rising and falling. Or Zoom, you know, can you hear me? Can you hear me? And now we have to, you know, we have to do that bragging. Here's who we are. You know, here's what we know.

And Thomas says, you know, the first temptation is to put something, you know, like F equals M.A. or, you know, some really foundational physics or chemistry insight, you know. And then he says, nah, you know, if they're reading this and decoding it, they already know that. So, you know, let's try something. And, you know, there would be a temptation to say, well, you know, here's the double helix and here's how it works. And then again, you say, well, you know, that's either going, you know, it's not likely to be directly interesting to them. It's going to seem like a little parochial thing, like, okay, we'll put that in a footnote in our, you know, in our own. anxiety of other problems.

And Thomas comes up with a great answer. He says, I would vote for the music of Bach, streamed outwards into outer space continuously, all of Bach. And he says, we would be lying, of course, about who we are. But there would be plenty of truths of that time for the harder truths later on. I've always loved that. All right. So Richard Powers answers a CD-ROM with Bach on it.

Hopefully they'll be able to play the CD. I would actually, my answer, you know, when I think, well, what's the, what is the, what keeps coming up in all different human disciplines? What do we keep discovering again and again and again as a foundational truth? And the closest thing that I know to that in disciplines all the way from cosmology to theater is, you know, the summation for it would be for me that, you know, the little soundbite of Alford North Whitehead saying, there is no independent mode of existence. Everything is what it is by virtue of everything else. And this desire, this, this search for an independent mode of existence, truths that are true everywhere and for all time, is a kind of limited endeavor. And you, in order to go much farther than that, you have to really start to, you know, absorb.

this idea of interdependence. Yeah, I like that very much. Very good. Okay, Richard. The final question, we've looked into the crystal ball. We've looked out in the universe and the future, what it will behave. But now we're going to go back in the past. We're going to use a telescope with Galileo called a perspective tube to reveal what wisdom you might give to your former self. And I call this question the into the impossible question because it's one of Arthur's, famous laws, and the third law says the only way of discovering the limits of the possible, of the, sorry, 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 origin of the name of the podcast. So I ask you, what mysterious aspect of life may have perplexed you as a 20 year old or 30 year old, that with the clarity of, and wisdom of age and, and life events that you've experienced would give you the courage to go as you've gone into the impossible. And it shouldn't only be the fact that you were going to be a physics major. And yet you didn't decide. I'm disappointed personally. But there's always time. I've got some non-traditional students coming back. So maybe maybe one day. But what would you tell yourself? Yeah. Well, gosh, yeah. And I do, I do love that Clark quote. And I, you know, I should tell my little Arthur Clark story, which is in in 1997, I was part of a of a conference at the University of Illinois

celebrating the birth of hell. Wow. And as he gave it a birth date in his novel, yeah, that's right. And in the novel, he says, you know, when hell is being disassembled and he's regressing to childhood, he's saying, I'm a hell 9,000 robot. I was born in Urbana, Illinois in 1997. So we in Urbana decided we were going to have a birthday party for him. And we had to get Arthur Clark to that birthday.

But by that time, he wasn't leaving Sri Lanka. We had one of the very, very first live telepresence with Clark in Sri Lanka. And it was spotty. It was dropping out. But there he was on this enormous screen in an auditorium in Urbana talking to us and answering our questions in real time. That's impossible. Well, here we are, Brian.

The technology's been smoothed out a little bit in the intervening years. But there's a message there, right? And, you know, it has to do a little bit with my first answer and a little bit with my second answer. But ultimately, it has to do with calming the anxieties of the young Richard by saying, look, your equation is missing a, Delta T, right? Do not be too anxious about your current state, what you know, what you don't know. Do not pursue too vigorously the eternal verities, because everything that you know, everything that you can know, and everything that is available to be known out there,

all of those are works in progress. That's my message to my younger self. Let it unfold. time. Wow, that is very delightful, and it involves the most mysterious aspect of life, which is time. We don't understand it. And yet it emerges and we all experience it. But Richard, I want to thank you for spending so much of your valuable time with me. I hope we can meet in person. I have a stockpile of gifts that I'd love to give you for all the gifts you've given me with your wonderful writing. And I wish you remaining lovely time in our fair state until you return to the

great smoky mountains. It sounds so. so romantic, so beautiful. Richard Powers, author of many books, 13 books, including this, which is actually in addition to Oprah, one of the many things we have in common, it's one of my favorite books,

and you simply must give yourself the gift out there, listening to it and reading it. It is such a delight. Richard, thank you so much. I really appreciate it. I'm so grateful. It was a great pleasure for me, Brian.

Thanks for having me on. Any sufficiently advanced is indistinguishable from magic. Well, that's a wrap on this episode. What did you think? We have so many phenomenal reviews coming in, including just people from around the world, around the country. We've up to a 515 ratings and reviews on Apple platforms,

wherever you're listening to this. We've seen one recently. A Bright Star in the Sky from Chris Battle 2000. Great Discussions of Serious Physics. not dumbed down at all. Eric Weinstein was brilliant, as usual, with Alex, Brian, Joe, and all. There's more quality science media available now than ever. Please keep up the great work, Brian.

Well, I will, Chris, and I will also be involving our good friend Eric Weinstein in conversation with Avi Loeb. Look for that very, very soon. And if you wouldn't mind leaving a rating and review on Apple platforms, if you can, or a rating, which you can also do on Spotify or on Audible, and many other platforms are letting you at least leave a rating. It really does help. It gets the attention of a booking agent responsibilities

so that we can get more and more great guests. We have William Phillips, winner of the 1997 Nobel Prize, just an interview with him, about how measurements of length and time have been made throughout the ages. You're going to really want to tune into that. He's the kind of physics professor that I aspired to be that you wish you had growing up. He's infectious.

The interview was so much fun. I didn't want it to end. And there's some amazing visuals that he has crafted from his work at the National Institutes of Standard and Technology, where he works, and it has since the winning of the Nobel Prize, which you'll hear a little bit about. If Anna Eges, Dr. Anna Eges, a proponent of the bouncing cosmological, or cyclic bouncing cosmological models, she's one of the most brilliant people. I've had the delight to talk to, and we have many, many other interviews coming up.

Don't want to miss it, so please subscribe, hit those, the plus button in the upper right. if you're on Apple or follow, subscribe on Spotify, and do leave a review if you can't, because that's the only way that you can give me feedback and really the only things I'm less looking forward to. Oh, that and join my mailing list because I'm giving away real, honest to goodness, space dust in honor of my appearance on StarTalk Radio, so you can get your chance to win some space dust, some legal podcast dust that will come to you via the U.S. mail. Unfortunately, only available in the U.S., you'll see terms and conditions apply.

but it is free, but join my mailing list, Brian Keating.com slash list, uh, to do that. And that's one of the best ways you can support me. It's free. Uh, and I do a lot of fun giveaways of books by my guest authors and of meteorites and all sorts of cool stuff, telescopes and stuff. So you don't want to miss that. Brian Keating.

com slash list and my YouTube channel, Dr. Brian Keating for now. Signing off your fearful host in all things podcastable. Thank you from the depths of my heart and wishing you if you are indeed, observing Father's Day, uh, that is meaningful to you and you hug those kids extra tight. Be well. Thanks for going into The Impossible.