Into the Impossible With Brian Keating - SETI and Beyond: A discussion with Brian Keating, Paul Davies, Jim Benford and Mat Kaplan (#035)

Episode Date: February 10, 2020

   Books mentioned in this episode: The Eerie Silence: Renewing Our Search for Alien Intelligence by Paul Davies The Demon in the Machine: How Hidden Webs of Information Are Solving the Mystery of Life by Paul Davies Starship Century, Edited by Greggory & James Benford A technologically advanced extraterrestrial civilization could likely detect life on Earth, if such beings exist. Life on Earth could be detectable in our planet’s atmospheric spectral lines for over a billion years. Most of our atmospheric oxygen is due to life, and can be observed over interstellar distances — across thousands of light-years. Over this long time, many stars have swept near our solar system and Earth. If extraterrestrial intelligence (ETI) on such “nearby” planets did send probes to remotely observe our planet, where in the Solar System should we look to find evidence of their past visitation? The Moon is the obvious, closest place. Another option would be a newly discovered class of co-orbital objects, an equally logical place to locate for observing Earth. These objects approach Earth very closely every year at distances much closer than any large body besides our Moon. They are an ideal way for ET’s to watch our world from a secure natural object that provides resources an ET life form might need: materials, a firm anchor, and concealment. They might likely be robotic probes, like our own Voyager and New Horizons probes, remaining on site after exhausting their energy supply. Studying the Moon and co-orbitals could be termed “extraterrestrial archeology”. For the Moon, we can use the photographic mapping of the Moon’s surface by the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter. Co-orbitals have been little studied by astronomy and not at all by SETI or planetary radar observations. This discussion describes a str Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The only thing we can be sure of about the future is that it will be absolutely fantastic. Five, four, two. Welcome, everybody, watching out on YouTube and listening in on our Arthur C. Clark Center for Human Imagination podcast called Into the Impossible. And today, it's quite a treat to be joined by three distinguished intellects. On my right is Matt Kaplan of the Planetary Society. Thank you for joining us. Happy to be here and honored to be included in this group of, truly great intellects. I'm not sure I qualify. It's like a crossover episode on my, you know,

cartoons of years past. And to, in front of me is Dr. James Benford, who is a proud hometown hero, a alum of UC San Diego, graduate in the class of 1969 in the PhD program. Thank you, James, for being here. Glad to be here. Always good to come back to paradise. Yes. It's quite lovely. And I should say, James is the president-founder of Microwave Sciences in Lafayette, California. And to his right is Professor Paul Davies, a man who needs no introduction, but I'll give him one anyway. He's the founder-director of the Beyond Center at Arizona State University, which in part is sort of an inspiration for what we wanted the Clark Center to be, a home for intellects and excursions in the intellectual parapetetic landscape that we like to traverse.

And I want to thank you so much for being here and joining us last night in conversation about ET, and we'll talk a little bit about that, with amongst the four of us. and Paul, thank you so much for being here. Well, it's a pleasure to be here and the Beyond Center, we call it the Center for Cool Stuff, and we specialize in the Impossible. Yes, that's right. So as Arthur C. Clark, our namesag said,

the only way to find out what is possible is to go into the impossible a little bit, or in some cases a lot. And last night we talked about the possibility of perhaps lack thereof here on campus in conversation between the two of you about whether or not E.T. is perhaps already here, not that ET will be detected, but perhaps there are ways to detect that ET is actually

already among us in one way or another. And I wondered if we could sort of discuss you both have novel ideas as to how life could arise here on our interplanetary surface that we call home, or perhaps near to us, and yet have evaded detection. But you both point to ways that humankind could make first contact, could discover the origin. of another type of life form, and you both have novel ways that you've decided to approach this problem. I think maybe I'll start with Jim. Jim, what are some of the more likely scenarios in your mind that might pan out successfully to discover the presence, perhaps in the past, of an extraterrestrial civilization?

I've proposed recently that we might look near Earth at the moon or the newly discovered group of co-orbital objects to see whether or not extraterrestrial intelligence had in the past, including the distant past, located a probe to observe Earth and the residual probes now inactive might be found, or even active probes today. In a sense, then, we would be looking at interstellar archaeology, artifacts from the distant past observing the exosphere of Earth. Would this not be similar to another creation of our namesake, or a reliance? related to it, in 2001, the monolith that the, that is discovered on the moon and the concomitant

discovery of gravity by primates on Earth. Is that not what Sir Arthur C. Clarke was perhaps expressing in that same thing? Yes, and in the predecessor, a short story called the Sentinel in which the monolith was not buried. It need not be, because you couldn't have seen it with telescopes from Earth, you have to go there. But burying it made it detectable. only by magnetic field and therefore you'd have to be very sophisticated and have orbiters in order to find it. It's very much like that. I'm talking about extraterrestrial artifacts. Yes. Interesting. So Paul, here, as you know, we have the world famous San Diego Zoo.

And whenever I take my kids and they're reasonably well-behaved, at least half of them are, and as we go there, we are always careful to observe the regulation that you may not pound on the cages of the apes or the primates or whatever, that you have to keep a low profile. And might it be possible for aliens to escape our knowledge if they treat us sort of like those same zoo creatures where they just don't interact with us, but they're here in some other form? Is that not a reason that they could be lurking amongst us? One of the difficulties about guessing the motives of an extraterrestrial civilization

is that they could be stupendously far in advance of their own. And indeed, there's no particular reason why they will be flesh and blood beings. This may well be here on earth that we hand over the heavy lifting, intellectual heavy lifting to design systems. People use words like computers and robots, but they fail to capture what in 100 years or 1,000 years is going to take place here on Earth. That these will be designed systems. and the motives of the endth generation of design systems are utterly beyond us. And so if we imagine some other civilization out in the galaxy, perhaps taking an interest in the solar system, an interest in humanity,

what will they be trying to achieve? Will they want to make themselves known to us or observe us without being known, or will they ignore us completely? We have no idea. So my attitude to searching for signs that we're not alone is to search wherever we can using whatever technology we can, particularly if it's cheap. And so at the moment, SETI has been dominated by the idea that E.T will be beaming messages at Earth and we should sweep the skies with radio telescopes hoping to stumble across that

message directed to humanity. I don't think that's terribly credible. I think we need to simply search every database because alien technology may manifest itself in a way that we would not even think of. And by searching every available database, I mean, I'll give you a quirky example. One of the things that's being done at the moment it's free on the internet is sequencing genomes like crazy. So in the cancer research community or the biological community generally, this is the technology

of choice these days. You find some sort of weird microbe, you sequence it. And all of this stuff is out there. So why don't we just search the genomes of all of these organisms, viruses, bacteria, anything else? You can get your hands on. It's all there. You can write algorithms that can search through to see if there's a message from ET concealed in them. Why might that happen? How might that happen? Well, we can edit and engineer genomes with our own technology to put messages in genomes. Craig Venter did just that. He put his email address and some poetry of Feynman into the genome of an engineered organism. So you can upload information into bacteria with viruses, retroviruses. Is it conceivable that advanced civilization has done this maybe in the deep past and that this

message is somehow preserved? We don't know how it would remain stable over a long period of time, but if they've solved that problem, the truth might be. inside us. It should not be in here, right. So you're widely credited with popularizing an idea that perhaps because of the exchange between the planets, in particular between

Mars and the Earth, over a relatively short period of geological history, maybe tens of millions of years, perhaps microbial life could be exchanged. And I think you've said in the past, we might find life on Mars, but it may have come from Earth or conversely, life could come from Mars to the Earth. And to my right

is, of course, Matt Kaplan, who's a member of an organization who spent a lot of time thinking about Mars. And it's pretty interesting because you think back to Percival Lovell in the early part of the 1900s thinking that he saw canals on Mars. And yet the popularity amongst the public of exploring Mars, for example, is still so enduring. And can you speak about why is Mars so important, at least in the popular cognizance of a place to look for life or is it that, you know, we're looking for water and that might be a harbinger of potential life on Mars. What is it about Mars that's so captivating? Why do we keep sending so many very sophisticated missions to go to Mars?

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Saturday, May 16th at 9 p.m. Eastern Center time, 6 p.m. Pacific time. I think it's largely, well, I mean, the interest goes back to ancient times, but I think Percival Lowell had a lot to do with this because he really was part of that move at the turn of the 20th century and a little before. Getting people to think, Mars may be very much like where we live.

And wouldn't it be reasonable, therefore, and of course, when he thought he saw those canali and that the Martians were smart enough to bring water from the poles to the equator where it was warmer, you know, that's when you first started talking about many, right? The messages, we were going to build gigantic semaphores and tell the Martians, hey, we're over here, your neighbors. I think that stuck with us. I mean, just look at science fiction and a lot of bad science fiction movies set on Mars that push this. And of course, you know, NASA's gone from fall of the water because we followed it.

We found it. We know it's there. Quite a bit of it to let's now really start the serious look for life. I can't, I'm, as my boss would say, Bill and I, the science guy, our CEO, that if we found life on Mars, it would change everything. Even if we discovered, as Paul said, that that life maybe were cousins. Right. For me, the fundamental question is, is life, as we know, it just a freak accident that occurred in some little corner of the universe, and we are it, and maybe it's spread

around a bit, maybe to Mars, maybe slightly beyond, or is the transition from non-life to life built into the fundamental nature of the universe. Do we live in an intrinsically bio-friendly universe in which there's some sort of life principle or progressive tendency right at the level of the laws of physics and chemistry? Now, if there is such a life principle, we haven't found it yet. And if you talk to physicists and chemists about this teleology is the technical term, that there's a sort of goal-oriented march of progress built into nature, it's anathema to them. And yet, the same people will say, oh, the universe is teeming with life on the assumption that this transition from non-life to life is a very natural thing.

I might say that this has occurred just during my career. In the 1960s, I was really gung-ho for SETI and looking for aliens and so on. And I might as well have professed an interest in looking for fairies. Everybody thought it was absurd, that life was a bizarre freak, it was limited to Earth, complete waste of time and money to look for any life beyond Earth. And now everyone says, oh yes, the universe is teaming with life. Yet the fundamental science really hasn't changed very much in my career. We still don't know how non-life turns into life.

Nothing makes a scientist more mad. So speaking of messaging into space, you know, what are the, one of the chief concerns about messaging to space, as expressed by Stephen Hawking, who was, Paul has pointed out in the past, came up with sort of a version of the Fermi paradox, famous case of if life is teeming and abundant throughout the universe, how come where are they? You know, that's his question.

And Hawking had sort of a corollary, not just in space, but in time, you know, where are all the time travelers? You know, there should be abundant ability for time travelers of the distant future to transition and make these quantum leaps backwards in time. And yet we have to date, although there are some people, I think, are quite spacey and quite out of time that I know personally on the faculty. No, they're not my colleagues here. But nevertheless, Stephen Hawking also warned against the broadcast of our presence here, perhaps by high-powered microwave systems, such as the kind that you've pioneered and written about in your books. But do you have concerns about this messaging, Medi, messaging extraterrestrial intelligence in that it might be, you know, an eat-hear kind

of sign for the planet? Well, I'm a moderate in these matters, middle of the road, meaning I think we ought to have a deep conversation about it through international means. But that opinion, which I've held for a long time, has not caught a lot of interest. We're not talking about it widely. But I think since it is now possible for a billionaire to build a beacon that's visible across hundreds of light years, we ought to be thinking about whether or not we want to allow that to happen or ask him what kind of message he's going to send and whether that we in fact want to be heard at all.

That's a conversation we need to have, and I would encourage your universities to advocate such. Do you feel like we're on the verge of becoming, you know, at least junior freshman level interplanetary species? We will actually send thanks to these benevolent billionaires. I don't know if they are or not. But with this capability, as Jim just said, to broadcast, but also to fund space missions.

And as Elon Musk said, he wants to die on Mars. And as Lord Martin Rees told me when he was here, he's worried that Elon will die on impact on Mars. But besides that, are we on the verge of becoming an interplanetary species ourselves and perhaps using ourselves as a messenger to outer space? Well, if you count our robotic emissaries as being among us, as truly representing us, we have been an interplanetary species for decades. we certainly are becoming more so.

As we speak, Congress is putting its, I won't say best foot forward, but a foot forward into whether and how we're going to get to Mars and put humans there, and whether that should come before or complement what we're doing at the moon, the current administration, and therefore NASA have a somewhat different view that is part of this Artemis program. One way or another, and I'm only talking about the U.S., of course, I think we will actually be a flesh and blood, multi-planetary species at some point, if only Mars,

maybe Mars and the Moon. Because really, where else would you want to live, except maybe on some huge O'Neill Space Station? That's questionable, too. But I think we're headed in that direction, especially if somebody comes up with a way to make money out there. And they're still working on that. Right. And so, Paul, you gave some arguments as to why an extraterrestrial civilization

of an intelligent beings might not want to send themselves or their emissaries here. For one thing, you know, the energy requirements needed to get a massive object here of a reasonable amount of mass and then to decelerate that object so that it can have a nice soft landing and become a lurking beacon on an inter-solar system object, as James has. professed, what are some of the arguments against, as you presented, and as you present in the eerie silence, the book on which in part our conversation was based last night, what are some reasons to be pessimistic about the existence of life elsewhere and especially technological life, not just intelligent life?

Well, I already mentioned the big error bars that surround the probability that non-life will turn into life, given a habitable planet. So there's plenty of real estate on which life could pop up. But what is that pop-up factor? That we don't know. But even if it gets going, we still, of course, don't know how likely it is that simple microbial life will eventually turn into complex, intelligent life. However, we do know the process. It's called Darwin in evolution. We don't know the process that turned on life into life. So that's still the big one for me. Didn't Darwin say something? It was be as foolish to look for the origin of life as for the origin of matter? He did. And it's interesting that we physicists have now explained the origin of matter. But we're still stumped with the origin of life.

But even supposing it gets going and you get some advanced civilization, then the question is how do they best explore their environment? And the idea of traveling, you know, flesh and blood beings in big metal objects hurtling through interstellar space, we've been misled by too much science fiction, I'm afraid. This just makes no real sense because why would you travel? You travel only for exploration or colonization. Now, if you want to colonize, that's a different matter. If you want to explore, you would send robotic probes as light, as micromaneturized as possible,

at highest speeds possible. It's still a very slow process. So if we were to send out probes even to the nearest star, at 20% of the speed of light, you're still waiting like 20 years to get that information back. And so it's really a very long-term project might undermine the motivation of even the most curious society. But travel for colonization is a possibility,

but there are formidable obstacles. So let's just imagine we might do it. Wouldn't it be great to send, say, a thousand people? My dean took one another. Right, right. We can all think we all have our favorite list of who should go. But if we're talking into stealth, now, then probably we would never achieve without some sort of science fiction technology

like warp drives and so on, but with any physics we know, would never achieve anything that would get you there in less than several thousand years. And that's okay if you can hibernate the crew. But the one thing that really bothers me, and this has only emerged in the last 10 years or so, is it's not enough to send human beings and sort of basic foodstuffs. potatoes, for example, you have to send the entire microbiology. So we've got more cells in our bodies that are bacteria and archaea than our own cells. So this is part of the so-called microbiome. This is the life support system of human beings. And every other organism has similar microbiomes.

And if you ask the question, well, what is the smallest subset of terrestrial ecology that you can isolate and be self-sustaining. We don't even know how to go about answering that. It's no good getting halfway there and find some vital microbes been left behind. So we don't understand enough about the web of life at that micro level to know just what it would take. So when you get to the other end, you might find a wonderful planet, which is habitable, but you're lacking some really critical stuff to have a self-sustaining ecosystem at the other end. Another one of your brilliant graduates, Kim Stanley Robinson, in his book Aurora, which upset a lot of people. He explored exactly, Paul, what you're talking about.

And the difficulties of getting a colony ship to any place, dealing with the microbiome, and even just dealing with elements that would be dissipated, you wouldn't be able to, you'd have to bring enough, I'm trying to think of what some of them were, some of the compounds that you would need. It disappointed a lot of us who would, you know, have always believed that, you humans would spread across the galaxy. But it's a very thoughtful book. Well, let me say I thought the plot line,

and in fact the basis of it was actually wrong. How so? Well, he wanted that answer, and so he got it. You can write a story with any ending you want. But there were, in fact, my brother and I wrote an extensive critique of that that appeared. You saw that, yes. Your brother, Greg Vanford, we should mention. Yes, New York Review of Science Fiction published that.

And it said basically there were a lot of choices he deliberately made that made it difficult, not because he didn't discover it being difficult. He wanted to be impossible. He's an opponent of interstellar flight. And I wanted to mention that what Paul is saying, he wrote about extensively in a very nice piece. And if people want to know more about it, It appears in a book that I edited called Starship Century,

and he has an extensive discussion of those issues about how do you export an biosphere. So I want to read from the Erie Silence, speaking of your brother. This is Paul's book from 2010. So it's the 10th anniversary of this book, which itself was written on the 50th anniversary of Frank Drake and the Osmo Project, the first real search for extraterrestrial intelligence in West Virginia with an enormous radiotoscope. as I said, built in the 60s. And as you say, it's depressing on one hand how little we've made despite the truly beyond Moore's law increase in capability.

You saw some of the experimental capability we have today just in UC San Diego. And throughout the whole world, radio astronomy has become phenomenally sensitive. And yet we haven't seen it. And so the probability you say here, Paul, the possibility that alien civilizations might look long ago have created powerful radio beacons and that humans have the means to detect them has been studied in detail by Greg and Jim Benford, twin physicists working in California. Greg is an astrophysicist and also an award-winning science fiction writer, where Jim is an expert on high-intensity microwave beam technology. The way the Benford see

at ancient civilizations could have many reasons to build a beacon. For example, it could be a high-tech monument of pride to what may be a glorious but now long-vanished civilization. The funeral pyre. Yes. A beacon is also a great way to attract attention and simply make first contact to anyone detecting it would redouble their efforts at SETI. And lastly, it could conceivably be an artistic, cultural, a religious symbol, or even the cosmic equivalent of graffiti. It might be a cry for help. Or, as with the humble lighthouse, a warning.

Do you still stand by these words that were quoted by Paul in this book, 10 years after its publication? Yes, there are many possible motivations. One you left out is it might be a religious message because a lot of human history is like the history of Islam is, let's spread our religion. And that's what a lot of people use the airwaves for already. I think that the fact that we haven't found any beacons is starting to make that look less and less probable,

and therefore we're approaching a time when we can say that that's a proposition which has been falsified. But we haven't looked that much, because as you pointed out, you need to stare at a fixed patch of sky for a long duration because this thing is going to sweep the plane of the galaxy, and that signal will repeat, and I don't think anybody has really put in a big systematic effort. Well, recall, though, that the Breakthrough Listen program is spending $10 million a year doing exactly that,

and they're going to do it for a decade. At the end of that, I'm sure that Uri Milner, who funded it, would like to have at least a partial answer. Yes, but we're not there yet, I think. Yeah, we're six years into it. Yeah, of course, and it's frequently said, and you brought this up last night, that, you know, lack of evidence is not evidence of absence or absence of evidence, not evidence of absence. And yet it is a, you know, depressing thing to think. But we're 60 years on from Frank Drake. He's still, thank goodness, alive and well in Northern California, his eponymous Drake equation being kind of the foundation cornerstone of it.

As Paul, as you point down in the book, it's really an expression of our ignorance and how little we know about it. I always say if my undergraduates turned in an equation that had no error bars associated with it, I'd flunk them. But thinking about looking for nothing, you know, basically in all the right places, it's got to do something to the field. And that's why I do, you spoke last night, Paul, very eloquently about the possibility of a shadow biosphere. Can you say a little bit more about that? We had a conversation on the occasion of Primo Levy's 100th birthday, what would have been his 100th birthday, a couple months ago, 2019 on his famous book, The Periodic Table, and also the, which also had its 150th birthday last year. A lot of things had their, the Dustbuster had its 40th anniversary last year, very

important to those of us with kids. And I want to know, you know, we had a conversation with a chemist here who studies this difference in polymerization and handedness, chirality, bio-chirality. You mentioned something which, you know, is very widely underappreciated, I would say. Can you say something about this kind of thing that could be hiding in plain sight, perhaps in our own bodies or in our biosphere? Yes, I think this is really important. I've stressed already that the big unknown factor in the Drake equation is the probability that non-life will turn into life given a suitable planet. We have no idea what that is. But if we now take the optimistic view that most of my astrobiology colleagues choose to take,

which is that life will pop up all over the place, given half a chance, then it means that that transition from non-life to life is really very likely under Earth-like conditions. While no planet is more Earth-like than Earth itself, so shouldn't life have started many times over right here on our home planet? Well, how do we know it didn't? Has anybody troubled to look? And the answer is almost nobody has looked. We could imagine that life may have started hundreds of times on Earth. Is it possible that more than one form of life has survived to the present day. Now, it could be that life, as we know, it simply eliminated all the competition. But we know that even among life, as we know it, there are, for example, microbes

called archaea, we know microbes called bacteria, and they've coexisted peacefully for a very long period of time. So might they be coexisting with another microbial form that is not just another branch on the known tree of life, but a separate tree altogether, separate genesis, And how might we tell? And so we've held meetings at Arizona State University in the Beyond Center to try and come up with a strategy. Where would you look? What would you look for? It's actually pretty hard.

And I can give you one example where it would stand out. And this is, you mentioned chirality. Life, as we know it, is based on left-handed amino acids and right-handed sugars. That is that if you look at these molecules in a mirror, they are certainly allowed by the laws of physics and chemistry, but we don't find normal life using them. But we can imagine mirror life where life gets going a second time and everything is around the other way.

And these two life forms wouldn't be in competition, really, apart from resources. They wouldn't be eating each other because they'd be indigestible to each other. So we could go look for mirror life. That's a long shot. Obviously, all these things are a long shot. But there's a whole lot of other things we could look for. And one that is my favorite is that we know there's an upper limit of temperature for life that we know, which is about 125 degrees Celsius.

You find organisms living at those temperatures in deep ocean volcanic vents. Extremophiles. Yes, we call them extremophiles. They like particularly like these extreme conditions. But the temperatures coming out of these vents go right up to 300 degrees, something like that. Now, so if we found that there was nothing living from 125 to 150, and then we find organisms that living 150 to 180, say, then we would zero in on those. The internal biochemistry would be different, so it would be more heat resistant, and that would

stand out. Much harder would be if there is a, we call it a shadow biosphere, this hypothetical alien life that will be all among us, if it was intermingled with ordinary life and like the same conditions and then separating the sheep from the goats, so to speak, would be very hard. You can't tell by looking under a microscope, just little bugs, and you need to delve into their biochemical units. You need to know what to look for. Did you have a comment you want to make to?

I want to ask, Paul, how much looking would one have to do in order to begin to falsify that proposition? Well, to falsify it, that's a difficult one. to say that there are, that we can be absolutely sure that 100% of terrestrial microbes are life as we know it. The truth is, only a tiny, tiny fraction of terrestrial microbes can be cultured, and only a fraction of those can be sequenced. So we just scratch the surface of this microbial realm. We don't know what all those little bugs are.

They're in there countless trillions, they're all around us, and then we have the viruses as well. we have got the whole virus fear and we really I know we're near but because the techniques of microbiology are customized, the life that we know it's not going to work with anything that won't

cooperate and if you go to a lab and there's some post student trying to get their PhD working with some sort of extremophile organism and they have an organism that doesn't cooperate and there's floods and tears and how you're going to get your PhD

and what happens to these organisms don't cooperate while they go down the sink and they work with something else and that's the problem everything is customized to life you go looking for A, you'll find A you won't find B confirmation bias

I want to close with a few more questions for each one of you so first Matt what if the falsification comes I mean to what extent would that impact society I almost feel that there's an urge, an urge to feel that we're not alone. And sort of hinted at it in Paul's book, right, the eerie silence, that there's something perplexing, paradoxical, and maybe unsettling to the human psyche, that what if we are alone? What would the implications be if the hypothesis of alien life or even not technological if we somehow knew that we're it?

What would that mean for humanity? Seems like a pretty big burden for us to carry if we learn about that, because then it says the universe is off. And what do we decide to do with it? How do we bring the supposed benefits of whatever our species is achieved across, at least our piece of the Milky Way? I think you're right. I think that we do want to believe that we're not alone. And yes, I hadn't thought of the significance of the word eerie and your title, Paul, but you're right. It would feel strange. Nobody wants to be all by themselves. as at least very few of us. Who was it that said that if we learn, whether we learn the galaxy is teeming with life or whether we learn we are by ourselves,

either way isn't that the most significant thing we may ever learn? I think that was Arthur C. Clark, of course. I imagine for a moment that Columbus had landed in the new world and found no one there. That would have been very eerie for them because every land they knew was occupied by humans.

And in fact, the new world was too. That's right. They watched him discover it. So, Jim, you've worked on the interface between and with your brother as well, between hard science, physical science, science fiction, science nonfiction. What do you think impels or compels you so vigorously to explore these really different, or are they different? Maybe I shouldn't impose my own viewpoint on things. But as a non-fiction writer, purely a non-fiction writer, I might spend six months on a single line or equation or result or data point in a paper.

Whereas in a work of fiction, it's a far more liberty. What are the aspects of these two different genres that appeal to you? Are there commonalities? And lastly, can you teach someone to be creative in this way that the human imagination is so well adapted to, but in such disparate ways? the technical, the fictional, et cetera. Is that a skill that can be taught? The fundamental thing that's necessary to be successful in those realms is one common trait, curiosity. You've got to be curious about the world.

And what you're curious about may not be as important, not nearly as important as the fact that you are curious. Because you're truly curious, you'll keep being curious about more and more things. And that's what makes life lively for people like us, right? Someone said, you know, Einstein said that curiosity is more important than knowledge, but, you know, I know I want my heart surgeon to be more knowledgeable than curious. You know, what is this red beating thing in my chest? But it's not easy to make people curious. There are, you know, lots of people who are not curious.

And a lot of people, if we found that we were alone, would just say, let's stay home. It's comfortable here. That's right. I didn't catch a fish. Besides, it's too expensive to go out there. Yeah, I can watch it on TV. I didn't catch a fish when I took the glass of water down to the Black speech. And Paul, maybe we'll close with you.

You've written 31 books. Last time I can. Yeah, I understand right at the second you're writing another book, which is really impressive. You know, as we're recording this podcast, you're on number 32. To, you know, what is your process like? I've always been perplexed because you are so phenomenally creative, but you have this throughput that spans and goes literally from the biological. to the astrophysical, from the microphysical to the cosmological. Is this something that you can teach?

I mean, you're a professor, your day-to-day job as being a professor. Can you teach this to young people? And what do you think of the future of all these different fields that you're working in? Well, it's interesting you should ask about teaching, because I've just been co-teaching with my wife, who's a former BBC radio science journalist, co-teaching a course on science communication. And when I was a youngster, I had no idea whether I never thought about writing.

In fact, I barely scraped through English in high school. And the first piece of science exposition I had to do was my PhD thesis. And it was only after that that I thought, well, actually, I quite like explaining all this stuff. and I could probably, as we would say these days, dumb it down a lot, and it started off from there. But nobody ever taught me how to do it. And what I found, and it's interesting that the entire students were female. And among these young women, a couple of them really had what it takes. They were writing sample essays that could have been published right away.

And some of them were totally hopeless. And so I don't think anything we taught them, apart from a few. obvious things, you know, try to come to a conclusion and don't exceed the number of words and so on. I don't think it really helps very much. I think you've either got it or you haven't. And I write about things I'm thinking about anyway. I'm very fortunate that the Beyond Center has enormous scope and in my life I regard myself as really a theoretical physicist. That's the only real research as far as I'm concerned. But I've wrote to astrobiology and cancer research and philosophy of science and so on.

So I'm thinking about these things anyway. So for me to write a book, if you said to me, could I write a book on black holes, I could probably do it in a week? But if you give me something more challenging, like, I don't know, condensed matter physics or something I know less about, it would take much longer. And so, you know, I tend to write what I'm right about what I'm thinking about. It doesn't take that long. It's the actual writing part. As Blaise Pascal said, if I had more time, I could have made it shorter. I do want to ask you, because I don't have these opportunities very often,

if there's a hyper-intelligent species of alien somewhere or God or something like that, what question, one question, would you most like to know the answer to during your lifetime? I've spent a lot of time thinking about whether the fundamental laws of physics, which is, you know, this is the sort of daily bread of physicists. In the textbooks, you use them. Where do they come from? Could there have been otherwise? Einstein said that the thing that really interested him was whether the good Lord had a choice, you know.

And what he meant by that, you don't have to be religious, but could the world be otherwise and still have inquiring beings like ourselves within it? And that's something I've spent a lot of time thinking. about throughout my career. I sort of got it from Fred Hoyle, actually, that he was thinking about those things, even in the 50s. And we don't know the answer to that question. It's very profound, because it transcends actual science. It's about why is the universe comprehensible and why can human beings actually understand it? And could that word have been otherwise? Otherwise, fascinating. Very good. Okay. Well, that satisfies one of my questions. That would be the one question I would ask.

what would Paul Davies ask the old one? Matt Kaplan of the Planetary Society, James Benford, Microwave Sciences, and Paul Davies, Beyond Center, Arizona State University. Thank you all so much. I want to encourage everybody online to subscribe to our YouTube channels

and to our podcast, on Apple Podcast or Stitcher or wherever you get your podcast. Please leave a review and a rating. It really helps us very much to attract and grow the audience. Thank you so much. Brian Keating from the campus of UC San Diego

at the Arthur C. Clark, for human imagination. The only thing we can be sure of about the future is that it will be absolutely fantastic.