Science Friday - Artemis II Astronauts, AI Research Pause, Terra Nil Video Game. April 7, 2023, Part 2

Episode Date: April 7, 2023

An Open Letter Asks AI Researchers To Reconsider Responsibilities In recent months, it’s been hard to escape hearing about artificial intelligence platforms such as ChatGPT, the AI-enabled version of Bing, and Google’s Bard—large language models skilled at manipulating words and constructing text. The programs can conduct a believable conversation and answer questions fluently, but have a tenuous grasp on what’s real, and what’s not. Last week, the Future of Life Institute released an open letter that read “We call on all AI labs to immediately pause for at least 6 months the training of AI systems more powerful than GPT-4.” They asked researchers to jointly develop and implement a set of shared safety protocols governing the use of AI. That letter was signed by a collection of technologists and computer researchers, including big names like Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak and Tesla’s Elon Musk. However, some observers called the letter just another round of hype over the AI field. Dr. Stuart Russell, a professor of computer science at Berkeley, director of the Kavli Center for Ethics, Science, and the Public, and co-author of one of the leading AI textbooks was a signatory to that open letter calling for a pause in AI development. He joins Ira Flatow to explain his concerns about AI systems that are ‘black boxes’—difficult for humans to understand or control.   NASA Announces Artemis II Crew For Next Moon Mission This week, NASA announced the four person crew of the Artemis II mission to the moon: Commander Reid Weisman, pilot Victor Glover, and mission specialists Christina Koch and Jeremy Hansen. The crew has three firsts for a moon mission, the first woman, first person of color and first Canadian. While these Artemis II astronauts will not actually step foot on the moon, it’s an important milestone for NASA’s first moon mission since Apollo. Ira talks with Swapna Krishna, host of the PBS digital series, Far Out about this week’s announcement and the future of the Artemis mission.   Will Rising Temperatures Help Batters Swing for the Bleachers? As the planet warms, melting ice and shifting seasons aren’t the only things changing—the traditions of baseball may be affected as well. A report published this week in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society finds that warmer air temperatures are connected to a slight increase in the number of home runs hit in major league baseball. The effect, the researchers say, is due to a decrease in air density at warmer temperatures, which allows a hit ball to fly slightly further than it would in cooler air. So far, the effect is small. After correcting for other factors, the researchers say they can attribute about 500 additional MLB home runs since 2010 to warmer temperatures. Most of the observed increase in home run hitting isn’t attributable to the climate. However, they say, each additional one degree Celsius increase in temperature may lead to a two percent increase in home runs. And while ballparks with an insulating dome won’t see big shifts from increased temperatures, open-air parks with a lot of daytime games, such as Wrigley Field, will see more significant effects. Christopher Callahan, a Ph.D. candidate in geography at Dartmouth and lead author of the report, joins Ira to talk baseball and climate.   This Video Game Prioritizes Restoring An Ecosystem Over Profits If you’ve played Rollercoaster Tycoon, Cities: Skylines, the Civilization series—even Animal Crossing—you’re probably familiar with this gameplay pattern: extract some kind of resource from the land, industrialize it into a theme park or a city, and (step three) profit, ad infinitum. But Terra Nil, a new game from the studio Free Lives, fundamentally challenges this oft-used game loop. Instead of maximizing profit at the expense of the local ecosystem, the player’s focus is to make a healthier, natural one instead. You start with a barren wasteland (one that you assume has been completely desolated by human activity, perhaps the aftermath from one of the previously mentioned games), and with the help of advanced eco-tech—like wind turbines, soil purifiers, irrigators, and more—restore it to a thriving, diverse ecosystem. The player’s ultimate goal is to take all the tech they used to restore the land, recycle it into an airship, and fly away, leaving no human presence behind. SciFri producer D Peterschmidt speaks with Sam Alfred, the lead designer and programmer of Terra Nil, about how Free Lives designed this “reverse city-builder,” how the studio took inspiration from the flora of their local Cape Town, and how he hopes the game challenges players how they think about traditional gameplay systems and their effect on our world.     Workout Worms May Reveal New Parkinson’s Treatments Scientists built an exercise pool for tiny worms. Why? A team of researchers at University of Colorado Boulder are looking into ways to help treat people with Parkinson’s and other neurodegenerative diseases. They’re turning to tiny collaborators, C. elegans, worms which measure just one millimeter in length. These scientists wanted to see how exercise affects brain health by putting a bunch of these worms in an exercise class—in a tiny pool. Ira talks with the co-author of this fascinating new research, Dr. Joyita Bhadra, post-doctoral researcher at the University of Colorado Boulder.   Transcripts for each segment will be available the week after the show airs on sciencefriday.com. Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato. Later in the hour, the connection between warmer temperatures and home run slugging, yes, and a hopeful video game about climate change. But first, last week, I was having this deja vu. I was recalling a time way back in 1975 when scientists called a halt to their research to discuss the possible consequences of what they were doing. And back then, it was the shiny new tool of genetic engineering recombinant DNA that caused Paul Berg and Maxine Singer to organize a meeting of scientists to draw up voluntary guidelines to ensure the safety of recombinant DNA technology. It was called the Assyllamar Conference. Well, I was having those deja vu thoughts last week when I learned of another group of scientists releasing an open letter warning of hazards of a current

tool called artificial intelligence. It sounded all too familiar. and it stated, quote, we call on all AI labs to immediately pause for at least six months the training of AI systems more powerful than GPT4 and called for researchers to jointly develop and implement a set of shared safety protocols governing the use of AI. The letter was signed by a collection of technologists and computer researchers, including big names like Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak and Tesla's Elon Musk. But others called the letter just another round of hype over the AI field. Joining me to talk about that is Dr. Stuart Russell.

He's a professor of computer science at Berkeley, director of the Kavli Center for Ethics, Science, and the Public, and co-author of one of the leading AI textbooks. And he's a signatory to the open letter I just mentioned. Welcome to Science Friday. Thank you, Iris. Nice to be with you. Okay, as I say, you're a signatory to this letter. Why did you signatory? Why do you think a pause is needed?

In my view, the AI systems that are currently being developed and the ones that have been released recently based on a technology called large language models represent a type of technology that is intrinsically very difficult to understand and very difficult to guarantee that it's going to behave in a safe way. So in a very immediate sense, it presents risks, not the sort of a apocalyptic risks of taking over the world and extinguishing the human race, but real risks, for example, last week in Belgium, a man was reported to have committed suicide directly as a result of his relationship with one of these chatbots, which was actually advising him and, as it were, holding his hand while he was in the process of committing suicide.

The reason why these systems are very hard to provide any guarantees for is that they are enormous black boxes. Can you sum up for me in 2,500 words or less how these systems work? So a large language model is something that very simply predicts the next word given the sequence of preceding words in a text or in a conversation. And so you can use that for an interactive conversation. If you put in a question, then it will start generating words that look like an answer. And how do you make them? You start with the blank slate of about a trillion parameters in an enormous what's called neural network. You do about a billion trillion random modifications of those parameters to try to get that network

to become very good at predicting the next word from a training set that is maybe 20 trillion words, which is roughly comparable to all the books that the human race has ever written in the history of civilization. So that system, when you interact with it, displays remarkable abilities. And I don't want to disparage it in the sense that it can provide lots of benefits for users, for companies, but it's a black box. We do not understand anything about how it works. and the only way we have to get it to behave itself, for example, not to advise people on how to commit suicide, is to essentially say bad dog or good dog. And that's the process that OpenAI, the creators of GPT4, went through to try to get it to behave itself. They just hired a lot of people who would engage in lots of conversations.

And every time it did something they don't like, they would say bad dog. And if it produced a good answer, they would say good dog. And then hopefully the system would adapt its parameters to produce bad behavior less often. And they proudly announced that in terms of these forbidden things like advising people to commit suicide, telling people how to make chemical weapons, giving unlicensed medical advice, that it was 29% better than the previous iteration of their system. but 29% better is still a very long way from perfect because they have actually no control over it. So we're simply asking that before you get to deploy a system that's going to affect the lives of millions or even billions of people, you take sensible precautions to make sure that it doesn't present undue risks and that it remains within predictable guidelines and so on.

So that's the real reason behind this request for a moratorium. I think there are longer term issues at stake here, not from the present systems, but from future generations of AI systems that may be much more powerful still, and they present correspondingly much greater risks. Well, do they these future systems present the risk that Stephen Hawking was talking about in 2014 when he said the development of full artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race? Theoretically, we don't know when that type of system, which we call sometimes artificial

superintelligence, we don't know when that's going to arrive. But if it does arrive within our current approach to how we build AI systems, in particular these black boxes, we would have no way of ensuring that it's safe in the sense that its behavior is actually aligned with what the humans want the future to be like. And then you're basically setting up a chess match between us and a system that's actually much more intelligent than us and has already thought of every possible countermeasure we could try. And so that's in a real sense the loss of human control over the future. So that's the risk that Stephen Hawking is talking about.

I want to emphasize the current systems do not present that risk as far as we know, to the extent that we understand them at all, which is not very much, we think they have some fundamental limitations on their ability to plan their future activities. But at the rate of progress we're seeing in AI, we need actually to develop methods to ensure that when we build systems that are more powerful than us, we somehow retain power over them forever. If that sounds like a difficult problem, it's because it's a difficult problem. Well, practically speaking, then, what do you expect people to do who are in AI research? You know, is the horse already out of the barn? And are people willing to listen to the signers of this letter and

pause? Or is it doesn't take a lot of, you know, fancy lab equipment like it did with genetic engineering to move ahead? So I think this is a great question. And your example of the genetic engineers is a really good one. And so Paul Berg, who was one of the organizers of that 1975 workshop, in 2008, he wrote a retrospective. And the last paragraph says there's one lesson from Asilamar, which is where they had the workshop, a lesson for all of mankind. And basically, once commercial interests start to dominate the conversation, it will simply be too late. It's all about the money. It's all about the money. And, and, Often people's thinking and decision-making becomes very distorted when we're in that situation.

There's an old saying, you can't get someone to understand something if their livelihood depends on not understanding it. And I think there's a little bit of that going on here. In the past, some of the principles such as Sam Altman, the co-founder of Open AI, you know, Sam has said that there may come a point when governments need to intervene and important. oppose constraints and basically not release further systems until they meet certain kinds of safety properties. And the petition is simply saying, well, maybe this is that time. It's also worth noting that the OECD, which is, you know, an international organization that all the advanced Western economies are members of have issued AI guidelines called the OECD AI principles that have been ratified by all the member states that very explicitly say that AI systems have to be

robust and predictable and you have to show that they don't present an undue risk before you can deploy them. So arguably, all the major governments have already supported the petition that we are making. You know, in genetic engineering, there are all these ethical guidelines, but there are still people who want to clone a baby. Is there a way to protect against a rogue age? researcher who wants to ignore ethical guidelines? That's a tough. I mean, the road thing, I think we have to work with the hardware manufacturers because they're the bottleneck, right?

And there's only a handful. And they've already agreed in the past, for example, with digital rights management. You know, that was a global operation to get the hardware manufacturers to implement digital rights. So, you know, I think it's not impossible that we could get safety management. mechanisms built into hardware where they just will refuse to run programs that are not certifiably safe. So where does your mind take you from here? Are you hopeful about the AI future or more fearful than hopeful? I mean, you've got to have a little bit of both there, right? So I'm,

I think I'm sort of naturally an optimist and I've been working for about 10 years now on trying to understand how do we retain power over systems more powerful than ourselves, right? That's what I call the control problem. And I think there's a feasible path to solve. that problem. Then we've got to convince everyone to adopt that approach so that unsafe systems are not created. And then we've got to make sure that somehow no one either deliberately or accidentally creates an unsafe system and unleashes it on the world. So there's a lot to do, but I'm cautiously optimistic. Am I thinking that I'd better hurry up, or we had better hurry up in nailing down these solutions and getting them into the policy process.

I think, yes, I think my estimate of when we'll have powerful AI systems that could present a major control risk has moved closer to the present than it was a few years ago. Well, from your mouth to AI's ears, Dr. Russell. Thanks a lot, Iris. It's been nice talking to you. Dr. Stewart Russell, Professor of Computer Science at Berkeley. He's director of the Covley Center for Ethics Science and the Public there, and he's the author of the book Human Compatible, Artificial Intelligence, and the Problem of Control. Thanks again for joining us today.

Thank you. Bye-bye. After the break, a look at the crew for the upcoming Artemis mission to orbit the moon. Stay with us. This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato. This week, NASA announced the four-person crew of the Artemis 2. mission. That's a mission to send astronauts to circle the moon. There's three firsts in the group. First woman, first person of color, first Canadian to travel to the moon. And while these Artemis

two astronauts will not actually set foot on lunar soil, it's an important milestone for NASA's first moon mission since Apollo. Think Apollo 8 V2.0. Joining me now to talk more about this week's announcement and the future of the Artemis Mission is my guest, Swapna Krishna, host of the PBS Digital Series, Far Out. She's based in Philadelphia, PA. Hey, welcome to Science Friday. Thank you so much. Thanks for having me. You're welcome. NASA really pulled out all of the stops this week announcing the crew for Artemis II, even making a video trailer, we might call it, of the crew, which looks and sounds like a Hollywood movie trailer. Let's listen to that. the mission specialist.

I'm Jeremy Hanson. I'm a mission specialist. I'm Victor Glover. I'm the pilot. I'm Reed Wiseman. I'm the commander for the Artemis II mission. To the moon. To the moon. To the moon. Wow, that is to the moon. Swap. Is it not? It is. It is. It's absolutely hilarious. I love it. I love the pomp and circumstance around these things. So, like, personally, I love it. But it's also so earnest and so cheesy. And it just makes me laugh. Who is it aimed at? I think it's aimed at kids. I think it really is like it'll get

anybody pumped up. This is the Hollywood treatment as you mentioned of astronauts in the movies that we've seen this bombastic music, you know, the stepping out of the shadows. I showed it to my four year old and he said, mama, these are heroes. And like, I was like, okay, yeah, I see that. Yeah, I mean, this is a generation that that's just seen robots going to different places. places, Mars, the moon, things like that. And not people like I did when my generation. I grew up loving space, but we didn't get this. So, you know, it's about the younger generation.

Sure, but like for us, it's always exciting to send people to space regardless of where they're going. But it was very much, you know, why aren't we doing this? Why aren't we going further out? We've been to the moon. Why are we not there now? And so it's exciting for me to see this as well. Let's talk more about the makeup of this four-person crew.

Who are they? We've got Jeremy Hanson, who's a rookie. He's our Canadian astronaut on this mission. Christina Koch, who I believe she has the record for the longest duration, single spaceflight by a woman because of her stint on the ISS. She's a mission specialist, as is Jeremy Hansen. We have Victor Glover, who's going to be the first person of color. And he was the pilot for crew one. So very experienced. And then Reed Weissman is the commander of the mission. Also very experienced. And he was the chief of the astronaut office before my speculation is, you know, he resigned because he wanted this flight. So there were a lot of questions. Why, you know, why do you resign? And I think now we know.

You know, I look at the diversity and I think that's what NASA is aiming for, right? A diverse crew to land or at least be the first people. to circle the moon. And I'm thinking that, wait, you know, to be clear, NASA deployed diverse crews to the space shuttle for what, 30 years. And now it's, you know, isn't it almost an everyday thing, an everyday occurrence? I think it absolutely is for, you know, going to the ISS, going to lower the orbit, but we've only ever had white men go to the moon. I think it's good that we're paying attention to it. I think a lot of people are a little cynical about like, well, this should have already happened. But yeah, we haven't been in the moon in 50 years. I am glad they're making explicit that this will be the first woman, the first person of color.

And that's been a part of the Artemis program ever since the former NASA administrator, Jim Bridenstein, kind of pulled together this program from, you know, what was left after it had been gutted over and over again. Let's talk about the mission itself. As I say, it's not actually landing on the moon. What is the purpose? The purpose is basically to test the hardware and the software. We've been to the moon, of course, but as much as I wish, you know, the bombastic trailer makes it feel like a movie, but it's not a movie. You can't just like boost Apollo 11 from the National Air and Space Museum, stick it on top of a rocking, go back to the moon. Like this is all new hardware, all new software. So we need to test it. And before we can

land on the moon, we need to test how it does in orbit. We did that a little bit with the first mission, Artemis 1, which took off in November, but now this is the first crude mission of the program. So what they're going to do is take off and do a lot of testing of the hardware and software in low Earth orbit and higher Earth orbit and then around the moon and back. And you know, we're always testing how space affects people, right, the radiation, the time in space. Basically, because of the radiation trapped around the Earth, thanks to the Van Allen belts, we don't have a ton of data on what happens on longer duration space flights to the moon and back. All we have are those Apollo flights. So what this will do is it's going to test

what kind of radiation these astronauts are exposed to outside of, you know, the Earth's magnetic field, what will happen to them when they pass through the Van Allen belts? And how safe is it to send astronauts on these long distance and duration space missions? We don't know. Yeah. And we're also recreating the iconic Apollo 8 mission, which went around the moon. And Bill Anders took that iconic Earthrise photo of the Earth, right, peeking up behind the moon. Are we going to have a moment like that, you think, on this mission? A hundred percent. We are definitely going to have a moment like that. I think there wasn't as much awareness, especially the early days of Apollo. There wasn't as much awareness of how important photography was. Earthrise was actually

an afterthought by Bill Anders. They saw this view and roll. oh, we probably should take a picture. I'm sure somebody will be assigned to take a picture and to take many pictures as we come back around from the far side of the moon, as this mission does. The images are so important. The science is important. The text is important. But in terms of communication, you cannot beat somebody who has a busy day who doesn't feel like they have time to sit down and read an article about the mission, but they can get captured by a photo. Now that we have all this anticipation, do we know what day we're talking about for this launch? we don't even know what year we're talking about yet.

The mission is currently scheduled for no earlier than November 2024. That is probably unlikely. You know, 2025 is likely, I think, for this mission. Delays are part of the game when you're talking about space and, you know, SLS did have a lot of problems for Artemis 1's launch. There was a lot of stuff to work through. And because this is going to be the first mission that humans are on, there's going to be even more to work through. But hopefully they'll have figured out a lot of these propulsion issues before the rocket has even rolled out. And that's a big difference also between the Apollo mission. I mean,

it took only seven months between circling the moon in, what, December, and then they landed on the moon back in July. And that bingo, it wasn't years after that. Why such a big delay here? It's really simple and it's money. It's basically, there's just not enough funding to get done what they want to get done to save money. SLS's engines were literally ripped out of the space shuttles. Those RS-25 engines were taken from the space shuttles and put onto LSLS in an effort to save money, but it has actually been the biggest cost, one of the biggest cost overruns in NASA history. It's always about the money, isn't it? Yep.

Would any of the astronauts in Artemis II, the folks who are going on this mission, beyond the mission that follows and actually step foot on on the lunar surface? Not in the mission that follows, just because NASA doesn't assign astronauts back-to-back missions. It's likely that the Artemis 3 astronauts will be assigned in training by the time that Artemis 2 takes off. But so no, not the next mission, but it could absolutely be a subsequent mission. I would not surprise to see somebody like Christina Koch or Victor Glover assigned as a commander of a future mission. Yeah, yeah. We always hear that the eventual goal here in these moon missions is a stepping stone to go to Mars, right? How close are we really to that space mission to Mars? The short answer is we are not close. As much as we would like for it to happen fast, we need to get used to working and living in lunar orbit and on the lunar surface before we can move on to Mars. Artemis 4, which is 2030 at this point, is around.

putting lunar gateway in orbit of the moon, which is a lunar space station. It's going to be like the ISS, but in lunar orbit. That's going to be the hub for the Mars missions, but that has to be assembled first. So if we're not talking about assembling lunar gateway until 2030 and then completing, you know, five to ten years to complete that, then we can go to Mars. And, you know, so it's going to be a while is the short answer. Well, we'll all look forward to this Swapdown, and you'll keep coming back and talk about it, will you, please? I will. Yes, human spaceflight, it makes my heart flutter. So I'm so excited about this.

Very exciting. And I hope everybody who's watching it, this generation will be as excited as I was and all the other folks in, you know, when we finally got somebody to land on the moon in 1969. Swapnakrishna, host of the PBS digital series, Far Out. Thank you for taking time to be with us today. Thank you. Yes, the baseball season is in full swing, and you know I love baseball. And the new rules imposed this year are aimed at making the game even more enjoyable. But Mother Nature may be imparting a bit of her own rulemaking. Research published this week in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society says that climate change, specifically global warming, may make the weather more favorable for home runs.

and it may favor some teams over others. Joining me is Christopher Callahan. He's a PhD candidate in geography at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire, and lead author on that report. Welcome to Science Friday. Hi, thank you very much for having me. You're welcome. Okay, so how does warming make for more home runs?

Well, when temperatures go up, the air is less dense. This is a basic physical mechanism that we know about, and we know that when the air is less dense, there's less air resistance. So it's easier for a ball to fly through it. And so a batted ball will simply carry farther and is more likely to be a home run. And how big of an effect are we talking about here? At present, the effect is relatively small. We can link climate change to about 500 home runs over the last 10 years, which is only about 1% of the number of home runs in total that were hit in Major League Baseball. That being said, if we move into the future and keep emitting greenhouse gases

substantially, this effect could get much larger and we could be talking about hundreds more home runs per year later in this century. Wow, would we need an asterisk? You know, in the pre-climate change days? Yeah, maybe. A new type of a new type of asterisk. Can you actually compare a hit in two different ballparks? Well, there's so many things that are different between ballparks. We know that they have different dimensions. They're at different elevations. the teams are different if it's two different teams playing. And so it is difficult for us to say that any two individual hits are comparable. But we have enough data over the course of the last 60 or 70 years on nearly every baseball game,

including the home runs and the temperature in that game. And so we can make these sort of general claims about average changes in home runs due to climate change, independent of any particular hit in any particular ballpark. Can you actually put a number on it? I mean, how many hits per every degree of temperature? Yeah, so we found that for every one degree Celsius increase in temperature, there's about a 1.9% increase in the number of home runs in that game. Wow.

Now, there's only two or three home runs in any given game on average, and so that effect is not all that large from the perspective of any one game. But once you start thinking about climate change over the last several decades across many ballparks and many years and then moving into the future, the numbers can start accumulating. This is Science Friday from WNYC Studios. You know, a lot of research papers are statistical. They look at the statistics of stuff and they extrapolate.

Are you looking at actual hits by actual batters in your work? We are. I mean, we are using the statistics of those actual hits. So we have data on the number of home runs in each game, the temperature of that game. And then we also use data on individual batted balls from the more recent era when we have this data from the stat-cast system of high-resolution, high-speed cameras in each ballpark.

And so we can use data on actual hits by actual batters and say, when a temperature is warmer, those hits go farther, and we can observe that using real data. Can you factor in any other changes, perhaps differences in the ball? You hear people talking about some years the ball is juiced or they think there's something wrong with it. Can you factor that in? Absolutely. So we do our best to control for those other.

factors. We know that there are changes in the construction of the ball over time. We also know that different ballparks have different dimensions and different climates and different elevations. And so we can factor out those other things and say, what is the influence of temperature independent of those other things? Now, to be clear, because we find that temperature has not been the single thing driving increases in home runs recently, it is still very valid to say that much of the home run surge might be due to, for example, a juiced ball. And so our results should not be taken to disprove that theory. It's just an additional thing on top of that. So are there teams or ballparks where this would be most significant? So we find moving into the future, there's going to be an increase in

home runs due to climate change. But as you said, it's going to be different in different places. And the things that shape how different that effect is, aside from simply how much global warming there is in each individual place is do these ballparks have domes on them that insulate them from ambient conditions? And are they playing games in the middle of the day or in the evening? So, for example, Wrigley Field, which is walking distance from where I grew up in Chicago, is going to see the highest increase in home runs in the future. The reason for that is because it's open air, so it doesn't have a dome that insulates it from the ambient weather conditions. And most of its games are played during the day when it's hottest rather than in the milder evening conditions.

Wow. Are you ready to go make book on that? I am not. So luckily, Red Sox versus Yankees should have similar effects. We'll see, potentially. This is great. It looks to me like you're obviously a Chicago Cubs fan, correct? Absolutely. Did you get into this line of reasoning and line of research, because you're a baseball fan?

Yeah, I did. I definitely would not have been motivated to think about it if I was not already thinking about baseball on my spare time. I knew that people had hypothesized about this sort of link between temperature and air density and home runs. And I'm interested enough in baseball

that I decided, well, I'd like to go see if that effect is actually there in the large scale data that we can use. And so that's what motivated me to go do it. Well, in a season where they're looking for more base hits than home runs, we'll take your advice and keep an eye out on it. Thank you for taking time to be with us today.

Thank you very much for having me. Christopher Callahan, PhD candidate in geography at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire. After the break, speaking of climate, a new video game that lets you take on climate change with a hopeful outlook. We wanted to try and make something that was inspired by the genre of building games, but instead of building a city, you were building nature instead. Stay with us. This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato.

Now, if you follow our video games, you'll recall we've been covering how game developers are responding to climate change in their games. Some are a little dystopian, you could say. Others are a bit more hopeful.

Producer Dee Peter Schmidt is here with me to play one that I hear falls into the ladder camp. Hopefully. Hi, Dee. Hey, D. Hey, Ira. Tell me about this game. Yeah.

So it's called Teranil. Have you ever played games like roller coaster tycoon or city skylines or civilization, anything like that? Yes. Well, you build stuff up, right? You start with zero and you build like a city or something. Exactly. Kind of have this like godlike view of a huge area of land and like maybe you're growing crops to start a town. Right.

Which leads to chopping down trees to build buildings, which could lead to like building factories or something like that. And eventually have this kind of like satisfying machine loop kind of running. I wish I were that good at it. Yeah, but yes, I know what you mean. Yes. So Teranil is kind of the reverse of that. So you start with a barren wasteland that you assume has kind of been like ravaged by climate change. And it's just like dirt and some rocks and, you know, polluted stuff.

But your whole goal is to restore it to like a thriving natural ecosystem. And then the other part of your goal is just to straight up leave when you're done. Remove any trace that you were ever there, no human presence. Wow. It's like camping in the forest, right? Yeah, leave it better than you found it. Yeah, exactly. So you have the game pulled up on your end, right?

I have it up. Okay, so I'm going to press the buttons as new restoration. It's just a barren land with a tree and one leaf that just blew off. Wow, that's very sad looking, like the face of Mars here. Yeah, that's not a good sign. Oh, it's now starting. It's providing me electricity. Tap to select the turbine. And it's blowing. I see the wind is turning the blades. Yay. A toxin scrubber. It says it's cleaning the soil. Wow. I see.

there are green batches there now. There we go. So that's kind of the vibe. I love it. Yeah. So I talked to the lead designer of Teranil. His name is Sam Alfred to just talk about how the game came together, what sort of scientific research they had to do for it. And I started by asking him how the idea for it came about. So we wanted to try and make something that was inspired by the genre of building games, but instead of building a city, we're building nature instead. So starting with this barren wasteland and you're bringing life. back to it. That's where it all began.

Yeah. So it's working within the city builder genre. Can you describe how those games have traditionally been designed and played and maybe what was like frustrating to about those games? So typically everything, particularly the natural world in a building game, is important for what value can be extracted from it. Like forests are valuable insofar as you can chop down the trees so you get the lumber so you can build industry or rocks are valuable so you can build castles or ore is valuable so you can run your factory. And Internal makes the argument, not overtly, but through its design, that nature and the natural world is intrinsically valuable, that it has its own value rather than value from what you can gain from it. So there's not a lot of

that feeling in the builder genre. It's very much a kind of numbers go up style of game, where you start with a village and you want to turn it into a town and then you want to turn it into a city. And in order to do that, the environment is just a tool. It's just a tool. And we wanted to instead try and make a game where the environment was not the tool. The environment was at the forefront of the player's mind when they were playing the game. In the moment to my gameplay, you are constructing wind turbines or toxic scrubs or irrigators, water pumps. And it's like this very relaxed, slow-paced, meditative and restorative.

Yeah. What kind of scientific research did you and the team do for the game? So our studio is based in Cape Town in South Africa. And I've always had a deep love of the environment and of nature. I spend my childhood hiking all over the country. And in Cape Town, there is this incredible biome of a wildflowers called Fainbos that only grows in the Western Cape around Cape Town. And it also has this incredible property that require fire to germinate. They need to be burned in order to release their seeds.

And what this does is it means that all the grass and the scrub and the bushes that might have been competing for resources are no longer there. And the seeds can grow in the nutritious apps that's left behind after the fire. So the first kind of major update we did was taking this inspiration from Fainbos and putting this controlled burn fire mechanic into the game. That was kind of the first real idea that, hey, it makes. Maybe we can look at the natural world and find some incredible examples of ideas that people don't usually put in video games. Yeah, actually, when I first used the controlled burn mechanic, I just love that controlled burn as a mechanic exists at all in a game. But I ended up almost burning my entire plot of land. That happens more often than you think.

And I definitely had to hit the undo button. After that, I was like, oh, my God, no. But when you and the team were trying to think of different methods of restoring the land, were you ever like, oh, we need some way to do X to the land? And actually this real-world method would be like a perfect verb for the player to take. Yeah, there are a couple of other really good examples from the game. We looked to five broad categories and I think 16 subcategories of biome classification on Earth. And we thought, wouldn't it be really cool if we could make one level for each of the overarching classifications?

And so the approach to the gains development became, okay, we're going to make our tropical region now. Let's do some research about what kind of plants grow there, what kind of biomes could you find. And so one of the elements you have to restore in the tropical area is coral reefs. Coral reef destruction and coral bleaching is a real big problem in our oceans today with sea temperatures arising and shipping, things like that. Coral reefs are getting destroyed all over the place. So we did some research into how coral restoration projects work in the real world and found some really interesting stuff there. So coral restoration projects often happen on land first in coral nurseries where there are these pools of ocean water that have steel frames in them. And coral apparently grows really well on steel.

In the case of a coral nursery, the steel frame is used as like a skeleton for a new coral reef. and existing coral is taken, and then through a process called micro-fracturing, is spread out over the frame and adhered to the frame all over the place. And that increased surface area of the coral means that the coral growth is sped up significantly. And then once that coral is mature,

it can be dropped into the ocean, just as is. And over time, the coral will come to completely overgrow the frame and just use it as a backbone. And natural coral reefs do this too with rock, But in this way, we can sort of speed up the process of coral reef growth. So in Terranil, we have a coral laboratory that you construct on the land in the tropical region and then use a monorail network that's an important part of the challenge of that particular level

to move that coral core into the ocean to then grow a reef. Yeah, you know, before I started playing this game, you know, I was kind of like, okay, it's going to be about climate change in some ways. And I think I was kind of subconsciously preparing myself for it to be like kind of heavy. But instead, the overwhelming emotion I got when I was playing, it was like, oh, wow, like all of this restoring our ecosystems, focusing on balance, actively making the environment better around you. It didn't only feel really good, like in the short term kind of like rewarding dopamine hit that strategy builder games are like really good at, but also big picture like feeling optimistic about.

action we can positively take about our future with climate change. Like there is this massive task ahead of us, but this game really gave me a firm sense of like, oh yeah, like we can do this. It's going to be a lot of work, but we can change our perspective about the work that will be involved with combating the climate crisis. And how much of that did you and the team have in mind while you were making the game? Well, I mean, it's really nice to hear that because this idea of climate positivity to combat climate apathy is very core.

to what we were trying to do with the game. We're very much of the belief that the things we consume as a culture, the media, but also the cultural preconceptions and cultural beliefs are kind of like a self-fulfilling prophecy, where if every game ever made is just about dystopian futures and cyberpunk cities, then it feels almost inevitable that we'll end up there. At one point in the development of the game, we did have many discussions about whether or not we should include what happened

to cause us to get to this point. But in the end, we decided to include none of that because it's not a game about brow beating the player with. These are all the things that went wrong. It's a game about imagining a better future. So, yeah, that's really nice to hear. That's exactly what we're going for. You talked before about, like,

you and the team didn't want to make Terra Nill be, like, infinitely replayable, which is something a lot of other developers try to do with their games. Can you talk about the impulse behind that? Yeah. So quite early on in the game's design, we realized that if this was going to be a game about balance of ecosystems,

in a level of Terranil, you have to have wetlands and forests and fainboss all in the same landscape. Creating too much of one means that you can't use that space for another. And so it's very much part of the game's identity to be about balance. Being finite is kind of a natural extension of that idea. If we just gave you the option to just, I don't know, buy more land, because you grew too many trees, now you need some wetlands. It would kind of undercut the philosophical idea we're going for that more important than growth is balance.

It's a game where at most the level will take you two hours or something like that, as opposed to being able to build the same city for 100 hours and the fact that you can't just keep playing it forever, that balance is the ultimate goal. Infinite growth is not the goal. And this is, again, about the environment, but it's also a little bit of a statement about society and some of the problems inherent in the way we view economic growth

and the value we put on your quarterly returns. It's got to be bigger of this quarter than there were last quarter. Sustainability doesn't come into it. Yeah. What role do you think games serve in the context of climate change and climate action? I think games can be this incredible window into what is possible. Games are things people do for fun. Generally speaking, they're a recreational activity, and therefore, they're a really great vehicle for getting people to think about things differently because they're relaxing.

They're not being forced to engage with something. They're choosing to engage with it, right? So you can use your video game to let people know that there are things that exist that maybe they hadn't heard of before and think to themselves, huh, I'm going to look this up, I'm going to find out more about it, and maybe even go a step further and be inspired to do something else. the real world. And I think games have a unique opportunity in that respect, because unlike a film, when you're playing a game, you're playing the game. You're not just receiving it. You are taking the actions. And so if we as game developers can help players take interesting actions that let them think and learn in different ways, it's a hugely powerful medium. I think that's a great place to end it. Thank you for taking the time, Sam, and thanks for the game. Cool. Thanks so much for

having me. Sam Alfred is the lead designer of Terranil, developed by the studio Free Lives. Terranil is playable through Steam on PC and Netflix games on iOS and Android. And if you want to check out the trailer for the game, yes, head over to our website, ScienceFriety.com slash environment game. Next, an exercise pool for tiny worms. Yes, all in the name of science. Here's the backstory. A team of researchers at CU Boulder are trying to help treat people. with Parkinson's and other neurodegenerative diseases. That is no small feat. And to do that, they're turning to trusted collaborators see elegans. These are tiny worms just one millimeter long,

and they are often used to study human health. You've heard us talk about them before. The question is, does exercise affect brain health? The method is putting a bunch of these worms in an exercise class, and I'm not talking about weights, but in the warm. water in a tiny pool nicknamed Jim on a Chip. Here to coach us through the new study is Dr. Joita Badra, researcher at the University of Colorado Boulder. Welcome to Science Friday. Thanks for having me. That was nice to have you. Okay. Before we take a swim in the worm, Jim, what can C Elegance tell us about the human brain? What do you hope to see here? So C Elegance is a simple organism. However, for one third of its body cells and neurons.

So we see about 300 neurons in C-Elegance. And it's very easy to visualize under microscope. Another reason we use it is because it's very fast. It actually reaches its adulthood within three days. So it gives us an excellent tool to study any age-related diseases because you know you don't have to wait for months to look at them. So how does a gym on a chip work? What's the concept here?

Okay, so you can think of these as small swimming pools for the worm. We use electrodes to generate wave on the surface of the chamber, which creates these whirlpool. So the worms need to constantly fight against this whirlpool. In this way, you can actually control the intensity of exercise. Wow. You know, years ago, we talked about a shrimp on a treadmill, but never a one. worm and a pool. And so as they're swimming, as they're exercising against the tide, so to speak, against the whirlpool, what are you looking for? The worms that we used for this particular

study are a good model for Parkinson's disease. So these worms actually have human alpha-sinucline overexpression. So human alpha-synucline forms these aggregates that are called lewy bodies, and that can cause neuronal loss in humans. And we can see the same phenotype in worms as well. Well, can you tell if the exercise does prevent the, you know, the neurodegeneration? Yes, actually, it does. So with only five minutes of exercise for two days, we have seen a significant loss of neurons, specifically the dopaminergic neurons in these worms.

We know this in humans, that exercise is good for us, right? You're discovering that exercise is good for neurotransmitters and good for keeping your brain healthy, at least in the worms. Can we apply this to people? The reason for our study is this video that came up in, I think, CNN on some other news channel from Cleveland Clinic, Dr. Alberts did some experiments. So one of his patients is a Parkinson's patient. And he went for a tandem bike riding with his. and after that, the tremors in his hands almost disappeared. So this kind of told us like, okay, so exercise intensity is important because tandem biking is of assisted exercise. Our main goal was to find out what is the optimum intensity and duration of exercise. What we found is that there is a sweet spot. Too little exercise does not help and too much exercise.

also does not help. It's just this optimum intensity that causes the maximum benefits in a response to neuronal loss that we observed in these worms. Wow. Can you translate that to people where that sweet spot is? Now, it's hard to translate that in people and that's okay. Parkinson's disease is an age-dependent disease. Mostly it affects people who are above 60 years old. And it causes this. tremors and then there are a problem in movements which makes it more difficult to exercise. Our goal is actually to use this device for drug screening. We are looking at the markers that gets changed due to this perfect optimum intensity of exercise. Once we get those, we're going to do a drug screen to look, identify the targets and see if these drugs can maybe complete

replace exercise altogether, or maybe enhance the benefits of exercise. Hope to have you back when you've gotten more results. I hope so, too. Thank you very much. You're welcome. Dr. Joita Badra is a researcher at the University of Colorado in Boulder. We'll see you next week. I'm Ira Flato.