Science Friday - What Is The Metaverse, Missouri Groundwater Contamination, Eight Billion People On Earth. November 18, 2022, Part 1

Episode Date: November 18, 2022

There Are Now Eight Billion People On Earth. What’s Next? Humankind just hit a big milestone this week: a world population of eight billion people. A hundred years ago, there were less than two billion, and now we’ve more than quadrupled that. But after decades of quick population growth, what will the next few decades hold? Sophie Bushwick, technology editor at Scientific American, explains this to Ira live from the studio. They also talk about other science news this week, like a new initiative from COP 27 to help transition poor countries away from fossil fuels, an ambitious plan to put solar panels in space, how mental health apps aren’t protecting user data, what the discovery of the earliest cooked meal in history tells us about human evolution, and the very first lab-grown meat to gain FDA approval.   Groundwater Contamination In Springfield, Missouri Kept Secret From Residents Early in 2019, Ed Galbraith faced a crowd of some 200 unhappy Springfield, Missouri residents. He wanted to make amends. Galbraith, then director of Missouri Department of Natural Resources’ environmental quality division, acknowledged that the state agency in charge of protecting the environment should have announced sooner that contaminated water had spread from an old industrial site near the Springfield-Branson National Airport. Residents had recently found out that a harmful chemical known to cause cancer had been detected in the groundwater. The contamination came from the site of the now-shuttered Litton Systems, a former defense contractor that had employed thousands of people in Springfield to make circuit boards for the Navy and telecommunications industry. Read the rest at sciencefriday.com.   Can A New Surge Of Tech Interest Make The Metaverse A Thing? Late last year, Mark Zuckerberg took the company then known as Facebook in a new direction. He renamed it Meta, short for “metaverse.” And he promised the company would go all in on building a virtual reality world like the first famous metaverse—the fictional topic of Neal Stephenson’s 1992 novel “Snow Crash.” While many companies have tried to make metaverses in the 30 years since “Snow Crash” came out, including the popular virtual world called Second Life, we seem to be entering a new era of metaverse hype: besides Zuckerberg, Apple seems to be investing in a VR world. And even Nike wants to make a metaverse. So what are users actually getting if these companies succeed at their goals? And are there other, perhaps better, ways to go about bringing people together virtually? Ira talks to science fiction writer and tech journalist Annalee Newitz, and Avi Bar-Zeev, a pioneer of extended-reality technologies for companies like Disney, Apple, and others. Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

This is Science Friday. I am I, Roflato. A bit later, we're going to look at what the metaverse is and could be. What do you think? You got questions or comments about the metaverse? Well, we are live today. Yes, and we're taking your calls at 844-8255-8-4-724-8-255. But first, the planet just hit a big milestone this week, a world population of 8 billion people. A hundred years ago, we weren't even at 2 billion. And now we've quadrupled that. Here with the details and other science news of the week is Sophie Bushwick Technology Editor at Scientific American based in New York. Sophie, so good to see you again. You too. Let's talk about this. How much of that population growth has happened in recent decades? I asked because I remember from my Ecology 101 course that population does not go in a straight line.

That's right. It hasn't been a linear increase. Once it starts growing, it starts growing faster and faster. Although it does look like the rate of growth is going to start slowing down now. So especially earlier in the 20th century, we had a lot of improvements in public health and in medicine. And so a lot of this increase in population is because people who would otherwise have died in childhood of diseases that were spread through unhygienic waste management practices or through childhood diseases that we now have vaccines for, they were surviving. childhood. And so that was increasing the population. And at the same time, fertility rates weren't necessarily dropping in proportion to that. So that's why the population has just kept going up.

How do they know it's $8 billion? Do they count every single person, right? That would take a really long time and a big effort. No, they've got models. And according to the latest, most updated UN models, $8 billion was hit roughly Tuesday of this week. Roughly Tuesday. Roughly Tuesday. Give her take a few hours. Yeah, exactly. Let's switch gears a bit and talk about something serious. COP 27, the climate conference taking place in Egypt, as we talked about it last week.

There hasn't been much progress on the climate front, but there was some, right? That's right. There has been more movement to grant funds to more impoverished countries that already have some electricity, but they're using coal or other fossil fuels to fuel that electricity. And so the idea is this funding is going to them to help them transatliferation. transition to more green sources of energy, to renewable energy. Are these the poorest countries we're talking about, or are they left in a dust again? The poorest countries are again left in the dust, and this is a problem.

So countries, there's been funds for countries like Indonesia and India to help them transition from coal to greener sources of electricity. But countries like Somalia, which already many people who live in Somalia don't even have access to electricity, they're not producing these greenhouse gas emissions. and yet they're suffering some of the worst effects of climate change with drought and lack of water. And they just don't have the same funds available to them that these other countries do. Yeah. So if you're a poor country and you aren't moving towards renewables, no matter how small your carbon footprint is, you're sort of left out.

Right. There's been some talk of maybe eventually getting funds to these countries, but for a lot of the people who are living there, that's just, you know, vague future promises aren't enough. A lot of people have been already been displaced and had to just leave because they can't support themselves. They can't live there. And climate change is making people move too. That's right. Climate change is driving a lot of migration in a lot of countries where they're suffering the worst effects of climate change despite contributing the least to it. Yeah.

Speaking of carbon footprint, let's talk a bit about clean energy. There's a plan in the works that is quite literally out of this world. and that's putting solar panels in space. This is something not a new idea, is it? This idea, yeah, it dates back to the 60s. Yeah. And the problem was, in the 60s, the idea of putting a solar panel up in space

was just not technologically feasible. But we're starting to have the technology for it, and so this old idea is being revisited. Because if you put a solar panel on the ground, it's not going to have 24-7 access to the sun because it's not daylight all the time, and then there's clouds that come and cover it up. So it's not as consistent.

If you take that solar panel, put it on a satellite in orbit, you all of a sudden have more access to that solar energy. And you can actually use microwaves to beam the energy from space back down to Earth. Would you have to be careful not to fly into that beam? Oh, yeah. There would be a lot of logistics to be worked out. So despite that, you know, I think it sounds quite complicated, but there's multiple different groups that are currently working to make this happen in the U.S. and the U.K. in Europe, Japan, China, all of these places. There's researchers working on pilot projects and estimates on how to make this type of thing happen on Earth, but also possibly on the moon.

What, you mean putting the panels on the moon? Or just when you're on the moon, you need your electricity. When you're on the moon. So, you know, the Artemis program from NASA, they want to send humans back to the moon. And if they have, if they want to set of installations on the moon surface, where are those installations going to get power from? There's some suggestion that they might be able to put a satellite in orbit around the moon and have that be gathering solar power for some of the installations. And on here on Earth, yeah, I'm sorry, on here, on Earth you could make power available to off-grid communities too, right?

Exactly. So if you're not someplace where there's an energy infrastructure connecting you to the grid, you could still get access to energy that's beamed down from orbit. Well, as you say, we've been talking about this for decades. Right. Is there any movement on it to actually make it real? So one initiative in the UK is saying that in 2030 they're hoping to launch a pilot, an orbiter that will be a proof of concept for what they hope would become a whole fleet of satellites gathering solar energy. 2030. Wow.

I have to wait for that. I hope it's not one of these things that's always 10 years away. I mean, that's also a possibility. Well, let's move on to something more down to Earth and happening right now. There's news that mental health apps, mental health apps are keeping your data. are not keeping your data as safe as you'd think. What's going on there? Right.

So news broke that an app that ran a crisis hotline was actually recording that. And then they claimed they were anonymized. This was a non-for-profit. But then they were passing off this data, which they claimed had been anonymized. So people couldn't be identified from it. But then they were sending it to their for-profit branch of the, that was connected with them and using it to train AI models. So the idea wasn't that they were necessarily going to be publishing this data,

but they were using it. It's valuable because they're selling it if you sell it. Exactly. Exactly. So the problem is there wasn't necessarily an outside party checking on their work and being like, are you sure it's as anonymous as you think it should be? And the other thing is just when people call a crisis hotline, they're in crisis. Some people are at their lowest moment.

They don't necessarily want that information to be saved, let alone to be used and made money off of. So the goal here was what, to train AI with the data that people have? Exactly. There's been a lot of push for AIs that will identify emotions, that could maybe pinpoint when someone is in crisis or having a mental break, or AI that is just better at customer service, AI that can detect how the person on the other end of the line is feeling and to respond to calm them down if they get upset, for instance.

So this is a field that a lot of companies are investing a lot of money in, and they need data to train all of their AI models. So where is the model currently falling short? Where are the regulations falling short in what area? So direct-to-consumer software like this isn't necessarily covered by HIPAA, which is the act that prevents a doctor from talking about your personal medical information with your neighbor. So there's not regulations in place necessarily, but there has been suggestions that maybe certain governments. regulators should be looking into this. And then there's also a push for the people who are developing this technology to have a step in your process where you consider, is it possible for the data that we're using to be de-anonomized and how can we protect it? Or to take another step and say, how is this model going to be used? You know, could it be, if it identifies that someone's

in crisis, could it be used to automatically trigger a wellness check? You know, what is going to happen to people if your AI thinks that they're in trouble. What are you going to be doing with that information? Very interesting. Let's talk about the holidays. They're just around the corner, right? And if you're, if you like me, you're thinking about food. I am. Now, I know that there's a new study that gives us a sneak peek into what the earliest cooking looked like. Tell us about that. That's right. For the, for some early humans, it wasn't turkey on the menu, but it was fish. Fish. So there's an archaeological site that is looking at the remains of the remains of of early human ancestors, possibly Homo erectus, from 780,000 years ago.

And they found remains that suggest that they found these teeth from a fish. And based on the fact that they found teeth but not bones, they think this fish has been cooked. Cooking makes bones softer. And so they're more likely to break down and not remain in the archaeological record. But teeth are a little sturdier, so they stayed behind. So they figured they were eating fish, that they find old dishes piled up in the sink? They did find stone tools, but those weren't necessarily what was being used to cook the fish. Their evidence for this was the fish remains, and also they studied these leftover fish teeth.

And they, based on crystals in the tooth enamel, they determined that these weren't just eaten and then the remains tossed in a fire to discard them. They think they were at a lower temperature, so high enough to cook them, but not high enough to suggest they were just tossed in a fire. So they used tools then to cook them? Probably. They could have been, you know, laid near the main source of heat to make it, to make it hot enough to cook and eat it. Just like we do on the campfire. Exactly. Yeah. You know, our cuisine has come a very long way, and we started here with grilled fish, as you say. And now, to-dam, drum roll, we have lab-grown meat. What's new on that front? It's moving forward, isn't it?

That's right. The FDA has approved lab-grown chicken for the first time. And so at first, this is going to be. available at a restaurant in San Francisco, I believe. But eventually they're hoping that it'll be available to a broader range of people. Is it a whole chicken? Does the chicken grow like different parts? Or is it just the breast or the wing or something? It's just the specific meat. So, yeah, this chicken starts as cells.

And then the cells are in a bioreactor and they're fed, a slurry that encourages them to multiply. And so you're just going to get meat. You're not going to get like a drumstick, for instance. Do we know what it tastes like? I would guess that it tastes like chicken There you go We have chicken that tastes like chicken And how far along are we?

When can I order this in my restaurant? Is it out there yet? I think the big obstacle here isn't necessarily going to be availability but probably price. So for instance, in Singapore, you can already, if you want to go take a trip to Singapore,

you can buy lab-grown chicken there already. The problem is it's expensive. So it's likely that some of the companies that are making lab-grown meat are going to start by mixing their high-tech meat with a plant-based meat substitute so that the price won't be too out of range. Sophie, always great to have you and you bring such great stories for us. Thank you for taking time to be with us today, and happy holidays to you. Happy holidays. Thanks for having me.

Sophie Bushwick is Technology Editor at Scientific American. We have to take a break, and when we come back, an investigation into groundwater contamination in Springfield, Missouri, and how the government and local industry knew about it for decades before telling the residents. Stay with us. We'll be right back. This is Science Friday from WNYC Studios. Hi there, folks. I want to thank you for being here. I want to take a moment to say just how grateful I am to you. By downloading or listening to this podcast, you're making my work more fulfilling, sharing in my curiosity and love for science. You're also keeping the conversation going beyond just Fridays. Science Friday continues to make an impact because of people like you and you. your commitment to factual science news and information. Our work and this podcast depends on public support. If you haven't already, please make a donation to Science Friday and help us continue to share science with the world. You can go to science friday.com slash support to make your gift. Thank you,

and happy holidays. This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato, and now it's time to check in on the state of science. This is KERNO, St. Louis Public Radio News, Iowa Public Radio News. Local science stories of national significance. In 2018, residents of Springfield, Missouri were a shock to learn that their groundwater contained elevated levels of TCE trichloroethylene. This chemical was used for years at a local manufacturing plant and is thought to cause cancer. But a recent investigation has found that both the company and the Missouri Department

of natural resources knew since the 90s that contamination from the company's property had seeped into the surrounding community. Why was this kept secret for so long? Joining me now are my guests who unearthed this information. Eric Schmidt, Economic Development Reporter at St. Louis Public Radio based in St. Louis, and Steve Vachrod, investigative editor for the Midwest Newsroom based in Kansas City, Missouri. Welcome both of you to Science Friday. Thank you so much having us, Ira. Thanks for having us. Nice to have you. Eric, this story starts with the company Lytton Systems. Tell us a little bit about Lytton and what they made. Sure. Litton Systems started operating in the Springfield area in the mid-1960s, and they were a defense contractor,

and part of what they made there were these real big, thick, chunky circuit boards. And in the process of manufacturing these, it is dirty. You have tape. You have grease, you have this residue. And so the company would use various chemicals, including trichloralethylene, to basically take away everything that they didn't want on these boards after they were made. And it's really good at getting this gunk away. Eric, when did concerns start to be raised about TCE in Springfield? There are a couple answers to that question. On the side of the government and regulators, It was in the 1980s and 1990s, but for regular everyday citizens who lived there, it wasn't

until around 2018. Were there signs among the workers that they feel ill? How did they know that there was something bad happening? Yeah. So we did speak to a couple different workers who described how working with the chemical they would feel dizzy after inhaling the vapors from it. Even one of them, she talked about how she passed out multiple times because she just didn't know that it was in the air. Steve, let's talk about the Fantastic Caverns, a tourist attraction,

where people can tour a cave under Springfield in a Jeep drawn tram. What was discovered at Fantastic Caverns? So Fantastic Caverns was an important inflection point in this whole saga because the presence of TCE in the community was not particularly well known until Fantastic Caverns started speaking up about it in 2018, saying, you know, there is TCE at our location. We're about five miles north of the Lytton system site. And they attributed the presence of TCE at Fantastic Caverns to Lytton and their long-ago activities with manufacturing. The company has maintained that there could have been other sources in Springfield that

contributed to the contamination in the groundwater. But Fantastic Caverns has said that TCE was found in areas that tourists didn't visit. And they later drilled ventilation holes to let the vapors escape from the caves. It was at that point that the Missouri Department of Natural Resources started to undertake a deeper investigation of where the contamination was in Springfield. And that's when some people started to discover that their private wells, you know, where they got their groundwater, to drink, to bathe, to cook, had TCEs. In some cases, the levels of TCE were higher than what? even the EPA consider safe. And so that was the first time in decades that people had gotten the idea that the groundwater was contaminated, that it had spread beyond this contractor's site,

and that people had been exposed to it. Yeah. Yeah. And Eric, what do we know about the health effects of TCE? We know that breathing in TCE can cause some types of cancer. And we spoke with Litten workers who they attribute working with the chemical and breathing it in with the deaths of many people in their community. One of the people who we spoke with was Pat Brighance. She says that her friends, her sister, her brother-in-law, who we also interviewed for this story. And in fact, died a few days after we spoke with him. She says that that was the result of working with those chemicals. I'd hate to say how many people, but they died with cancer. And that everybody that we get together with talks about it because there's so many of them.

It's really important for us to say, as reporters, we can't say whether or not TCE causes cancer. There haven't been enough epidemiological studies or real scientifically founded investigations to say that TCE causes cancer. And even some of the lawyers that we spoke to during the reporting of this story were cautioning us about whether or not we can make those claims. If the Missouri Department of Natural Resources knew since the 90s that there was this contamination, why was it held secret and how are they dealing with exposing that knowledge? We found documents in our reporting that showed that as early as 1993 and continuing for years afterwards, there were employees at the Department of Natural Resources in Missouri who were saying,

look, based on this data that we have, the ground-wise, contamination and the contamination from Lytton systems has to be spreading further. When are they going to investigate further? But in 1993, the company and the state reached this agreement that said, we will clean up the contamination on our site. The agreement didn't say that they would investigate beyond their site. And so that's what they stuck with until that jet fuel spill I was talking about in 2002, which kind of forced everybody's hand because the realization was, you know, from a third party now that contamination had been had been spreading from this site. You know, the Department of Natural Resources has publicly apologized.

They apologized again to us in a statement when we were doing this reporting saying that, you know, they didn't live up to their mission and that in future cases like this, they're not going to rely on assumptions. They're going to do more investigation. And so they have acknowledged that they didn't quite do the job that they needed to do. Well, I want to thank you both for taking time to be with us today and telling us what you know. Thank you for joining us. Yes, thanks for having us.

It was a blast. It was a pleasure. Thanks for having us. Eric Schmidt, Economic Development Reporter for St. Louis Public Radio in St. Louis, Missouri and Steve Vachrod, investigative editor for the Midwest Newsroom based in Kansas City, Missouri. And if you want to read Eric and Steve's full investigation, you can do so on ScienceFriiday.com slash state of science. Late last year, Mark Zuggabberg took the company then known as Facebook.

He took it in a new direction. He renamed it meta, short for Metaverse, and he promised the company would go all in on building a virtual reality world like that first famous Metaverse. The one was in the fictional topic of, it was a fictional topic of Neil Stephenson's 1992 novel Snow Crash, great book. And in that novel, people could work and play and shop and connect with each other. Well, fast forward, people really did build a working metaverse called

Second Life in 2003, and Science Friday was actually part of that metaverse, and it's still around. But so far, building a new metaverse has been more talk than action. While many companies have tried to create one in the 30 years since Snow Crash at the bookstores, we seem to be in an era of metaverse hype. Besides Zuckerberg, Apple seems to be investing in VR world, even Nike wants to make a metaverse, but so far, no soap. So what are we actually getting? What's the dream? What would we even want to spend time in a metaverse? Why would we? Here to help us envision, prognosticate, and analyze the tea leaves of what is possible, probable, and perhaps never going to happen, is science fiction writer and science journalist Annalie Newitz. Their newest book coming out

in January is the Terraformers, and Avi Barzev, president of the XR Guild. and pioneer of extended reality technologies for Second Life and companies like Disney, Apple, Microsoft, and others. Welcome, Natalie. Welcome, Avi. Hey, thanks for having me. Nice to have you. Thanks for having me, you too. We want to hear from our listeners also. What is your vision for an immersive virtual world? What would make it useful to you?

Do you already spend time in some kind of metaverse? Let us know what's going on in your life. Our number is 844-724-825-8-4-8-4-Sai Talk or tweet us at SciFry. Tell us what's on your mind. All right, let's start with some definitions. How do you explain the concept of the metaverse? What does that word mean at its most basic level? Avi, let me begin with you.

Oh, there are so many definitions at this point. It's a little confusing. First, you mentioned Snow Crash. That was the first definition. And then we added this idea that it's the fusion of the virtual world and the real world, which I always just called augmented reality, but now people are calling that the Metaverse too. And then people came along and said now it's blockchain, NFTs, and decentralization. They call that the Metaverse also.

And they may not even be thinking about the 3D part of it. So at this point, the word has kind of exploded so much that the only way I can describe it is the undiscovered country. Like it's not even a noun anymore. It's like cyberspace, right? Which was just an idea. we don't really go to cyberspace. But there are real things.

There are real promises there. But we may need to find some better words to describe them. Annalie, how would you describe it? I know this year marks 30 years since Neil Stephenson's book Snow Crash, which we talked about, which coined the term metaverse. But where did this idea of a metaverse, not just the word itself, come from in the first place, Anali? It's a really good question.

And Avi mentioned the idea of cyberspace, which is the kind of proto-metiverse. idea, and that comes out of William Gibson's fiction, particularly his novel Neuromancer, which is from the early 80s. And he talks about imagining, William Gibson talks about how he was walking past a video arcade in the early 80s, and he saw all of these people who were physically present, but it looked like their brains were elsewhere. You know, they were just, they were standing stock still, their fingers were moving, but they were clearly in another world. And that was how he got the idea for cyberspace, which is an immersive 3D consensual hallucination, where we all hang out and we're in these avatars and we're, you know, our cyber versions of ourselves.

And our bodies are off maybe just doing nothing while our brains are in this kind of magical land. And I think the promise of cyberspace and the metaverse have always been this idea that you could abolish distance, you know, that you could be sitting in San Francisco. and hanging out in a cafe in Mumbai and with, you know, with someone from Finland and that you would all feel like you were there. And the other fantasy, oh, go ahead. No, I'm sorry. I'm sorry. Go ahead. Finish your thought. My, I just wanted to say that I think the other fantasy is about transcending our bodies and being able to do things that feel real in a fantasy world so that you could feel like you were flying or feel like you had wings or tentacles or whatever you wanted. I remember when we were in Second Life, when Second Life came out, the difference I always felt

because we have social communities that you can meet other people in other parts of the world, right? Right. Right. Right. And you really can't be anonymous in other social communities. You make an avatar of yourself, you show off clothing, but people, you know, you could, you could role play there where you couldn't before, right?

I think that that's part of it for sure, and that's part of the fantasy of transcending your body, right? You could have any kind of body that you want. You could be anonymous. You could be, you know, an insectoid queen who rules over her tiny larvae. You know, you can be whatever you could possibly imagine. Yeah. This is Science Friday from WNYC Studios. We're talking about the Metaverse with Annalie Newitz and Avi Barzev. Avi, you've been working for decades on projects that aim to make this sci-fi vision. a reality, how many different kinds of metaverses have people tried to make in that time? You know, they've been trying for as long as I can remember. If you go back and include, you know, the textual multi-user dungeons, you could call that kind of proto-metaverse, where people, you know, role-played together. And in Second Life, you mentioned, we see a lot of variations as well.

Some of them fit the model that you seem to imagine, which is that we're anonymous and we're role-playing. and some of them are very grounded in real life, especially when you're starting to think about augmented reality. The company, Niantic, has what they like to call the real world metaverse, right? There's a variation on this idea where you can play games in the world, and maybe even in the future do commerce. And for some of those things, we probably do want to be somewhat identified. We probably do want to be ourselves because these worlds are there to help us augment our lives,

to have to live better lives. And it's really hard to imagine for a lot of people if you haven't, seen it or experience this kind of thing. But the best way to describe it that I can think of is just imagine the three of us feel like we're in a room together. It doesn't have to be a fantasy room. It could be, I picture myself here in my office, and Lee sees themselves in their location and Iri, you see yourself. We all see our everyday location, but we also see each other, as if we're coming together in a kind of a face-to-face conversation for the course of this conversation, and then we go off and do whatever else we want to do. So it is folding space,

building time. And that's for the worlds that work out there, for the ones that have a lot of people already in them, that's the thing that I think most people are coming for. They also need something to come for that's an activity. Like, again, Fortnite Roblox are good examples of those. Let's go to the phones. 844-724-8255. Hi, welcome to Science Friday. John and Huntsville. Go ahead. Hello. Hey there. Can you hear me? Yes. This is John in Huntsville. I'm a CEO of an organization called Geeks and Nerd in Huntsville, Alabama. So I don't have a question, except I have an opinion about virtual reality, in that, you know, I think when we talk about virtual reality,

we're simply talking about the fidelity increasing over time because we, in fact, live in virtual reality. Everything we see and feel is a perception and subjective, and we create that reality in our brain. So when we talk about virtual reality technology increasing or metaverse, it just means that we're able to increase the fidelity over time, and that's a technology or the concept itself has existed for thousands of years. Okay, let me get Avi. Do you have a reaction to that?

Yeah, I think that's right, actually. The idea of virtual worlds originated really with psychology, because we create the world in our own mind, and it's a reflection of what we're sensing through our eyes and ears and other senses. So the version of the world that we interact with the most is the one that's in our brains and imaginary, and that's what makes it possible to use technology to create simulated worlds or to add on to the real world, we experiencing it the same way, and that's one of the values of this tech.

There's a lot of things that go wrong, but one of the values is it can be the most natural computer interface that we've ever made because it works just like reality for us. It works just like dealing with objects and people and all the things that we have evolved to be good at. We're just taking advantage of all those natural pathways that exist in the sensory and everything, and I think it's fair to say.

But that's also where some of the dangers lie in that reality can become very subjective when it can be modified and when companies that we may not trust can also affect our realities. We have to start to have some caution. All right. We have to take a break. A lot of people on the phones are number 844-825-8-4-Sy-Talk. We only have about a minute until a break, so I don't want to take a call and then have to interrupt somebody. So let's go to that break and we'll come back and take lots more calls with my guest. Avi Barzev, President of XAR Guild.

and Annalie Newitz. So stay with us. We'll be right back after this break. We've been talking about the so-called metaverse. That's the immersive cyber world of first science fiction that Mark Zuckerberg and others say they want to make a reality. And regardless of the success of those corporate efforts, we want to know what a metiverse could be if the right people were making it with the right tools. With me is science fiction writer and science journalist Annalie Newitz and Avi Barzev who worked on. on developing technology and infrastructure for virtual reality projects for many, many companies. Our number 844-825. Annalia, I'm going to go to that last thing that I mentioned.

What could the Metaverse be if the right people were making it with the right tools? What would you like to say? That's a really great question. And I think Avi touched on this a little bit when he mentioned augmented reality, which is a kind of blended version of virtual reality and the real world.

and if you've ever played Pokemon Go on your phone, that's kind of a little bit like augmented reality. You're going out into a physical space, but you're playing a game, and the game is connected to physical spaces in the real world. And I think it would be fantastic to have something like that with maybe a nicer display. If it were in your glasses, you know, that's one possibility.

And you could be using something like the app LeafSnap, which is for identifying trees, or Merlinbird, for identifying birds, I would love to take a hike with some kind of augmented reality, metaverse-like thing, just telling me what birds I'm hearing. And the other thing I think that would be great is for scientists who are conducting experiments at laboratories that are one-of-a-kind labs, like maybe there's only one lab in the world that has the facilities you need. And you could be running an experiment there using virtual controls. And you could be looking at the results. So I love those applications for it.

You were speaking of nature. Let's go to the phones because Christina and Sebastian, Florida. Is that right? Christina has a question about that. Actually, comment and a question. I want people to spend more time tuning in to nature and seeing everything as being sentient and respecting and or respecting nature. I want to get people away from the computers because they're doing too much of it already.

I think there could be, and so personally I have no interest in doing it except you, as always, are bringing in something that might be interesting. What about going on a walk and having somebody with you to tell you what everything is? So far, none of the apps have been that good at doing it. So I'm on hold, and I'd like to know, I'd like to know more about how it can be used in a way that helps people be part of the planet and love and cherish and be grateful for each other and everybody and everything on the planet. That's a great question. Thanks for that call. Anna Lee or Avi, you have any suggestions? Sure. I could, you know, just starting with the idea of taking a nature walk, I love this idea. But now imagine you're in a city. and you're taking a walk and you want to make the city more beautiful and more natural than it was.

There's a game that one of the other games Niantic does lets you do virtual gardening out in the world. But that doesn't change the world. But what if you go a step further and say, if 100 people beautify a certain street corner, then the city will come in and plant a tree in that location and actually improve the world based on things that people did virtually? You could easily imagine that being used to fix a pothole. If enough people send in the information there's a pothole, we can come and fix that.

but I think we could also increase the natural beauty of the places that we live that may not have retained it after we've colonized and built all our buildings. I think that's one aspect of it. And then there's another aspect of all this technology that's about connecting with people. And I would say any time that we're able to use technology to better connect people that really brings them together, not in a superficial way that I'm going to show you my posed vacation photos that show you how great a time I have, but a way that really connects people so that they feel the sense of community and they feel like they're really together, that's going to be a positive,

especially in times where we might be isolated for various reasons. So I'm really bullish on this idea that we can bring people together in a real way that we haven't done on the web so far. Interesting. We have a tweet coming in from Philip who says, I'd love to have VR headsets on airplanes or MRI machines for people who are claustrophobic. I can second that last question being claustrophobic.

That would be a really interesting thing to have. You know, on airplanes or an MRI machines. I wanted that for years. Like imagine if you put cameras around the airplane, you could make the plane be invisible in sense and see the world as you're flying. That would be a dream of mine, yeah. You know, because right, they have apps that let you look at the ground

and they don't work so well from up there 30,000 feet. But, yeah, virtual reality about what you could see around you. But also what I think that the tweeter is pointing out is that it could also have a therapeutic purpose. This is for people who might be, you know, uncomfortable in an enclosed space. And so you can use your VR rig to kind of mock up a big open space to be in. And I think that that's another area where augmented reality could provide a lot of help for people. There's many different kinds of therapeutic applications that you could imagine for it. You know, you were talking about augmented reality in nature. I have an augmented reality app. When I do astronomy in my backyard,

I can hold it up to the sky and it will show the constellations and the planets on my own sky in my own backyard. It overlays it, right? I love that. I have that too. It's really, really cool. Speaking of cool, let's go to CC and Corda Aline, Idaho. Did I get that right, Cici? Yeah, this is Mike from Cordelaine, Idaho. Ah, okay. I was close. Go ahead. Yeah, it's similar to the last question, but I've always been interested in augmented reality or virtual reality from the Velt by Alda Tuxley or Ender's game where they kind of engage in these, you know, otherworldly experiences.

But I was originally going to ask the question about what uses there might be for therapy. But the other thing that I think kind of relates to that is your ability to experience experiences through the eyes of others and maybe gain some empathy and things like that where we would maybe be able to get rid of some of our prejudices if we understood where we came from a different culture or things like that. I'm wondering whether or not there's been any studies or applications or anybody's pursuing that kind of thing. That's a cool idea. Avi, any thoughts on that?

There have been. There's a little risk here too, but the positive side is it's a great way to step out of your own self into another. It was a brilliant experiment at a conference a few years back where the researcher put cameras down around waist high instead of up by your head. And you can now see something as if you were half your normal height and gave you little hands that looked like kids' hands. You could experience the conference from what it would be like to be a kid.

there from back, you know, it's hard to remember when we were that small. And that was, I thought, a pretty amazing thing. And other therapeutic examples are it's being used a lot for meditation now. You have good examples of being able to get to altered states of consciousness without having to take any kind of drugs or medication, that the headsets can help you get into those natural mental states. You know, and many, many good uses. The danger is for something like, take, for example,

the Holocaust Museum played with using VR to help experience, that terrible reality, you don't want to go so far as to put people in a virtual concentration camp because you can actually create trauma. There's something about VR especially that is so real that we remember the experiences as if they were real. And so trauma that happens in VR can affect us in our real lives as well. So you have to be very, very careful not to take it too far. That's very interesting.

Does that answer your question, Mike? Are you still there? Yeah, yeah, yeah, very interested in your thoughts. And thank you. That was helpful. Thank you. And speaking of this, Annalie, wouldn't this be a great topic for a science fiction novel where you could put on glasses and get through other people's experiences? I mean, certainly it is a trope in science fiction.

It kind of comes up again and again as an idea about how empathy could work, but also about trauma. And the idea that people would be traumatized in virtual worlds. And as a kind of real world example, there was an app called Rec Room that was a VRKROM. that was a VR app that people were using for a while. It may still be out there. And when you'd go in, you'd get a simple avatar, and people who went in with female bodies were getting groped a lot. And so the makers of the app had to create a special toggle

where you could set up your avatar to be unapproachable for up to six feet so that people just couldn't physically touch you because it was such an incredible problem. and people were reporting feeling traumatized because there's something about being in that 3D space, even if it's a cartoony space, it just feels more invasive than somebody like dropping by your Twitter and saying something offensive.

It's much more visceral and real when it happens to you and you're physically in a space. That's very interesting. Let's go to the phones again. Let's go to John in Williamsburg, Virginia. Hi, John. Hi, how are you doing? Hi there.

Go ahead. Hey, I got a question. When I walk around the real world, I see branded clothing and advertisements and billboards. Do we think they'll ever figure out how to pay for the Metaverse with ads like that as you walk around? Good question. Who's going to pay for the Metaverse, Avi? Oh, wow. Yeah, this is a big, big question.

And I think we've seen so many issues with social networks and how the harm. that can come, especially to younger people, using just a 2D social network. Today, we can imagine that a future ad-driven metaverse could be even more harmful, given the invasive sensors that we have, the things that might track your eyes or know what you're looking at or know how you feel. In any given time, the marketing opportunities are insane. And that's one of the reasons we have to be super careful here. And I'm not the only one that said this.

Many of the pioneers of the field are saying we cannot let the metaverse, whatever it turns out, to be be ad driven because it really optimizes for the wrong things. It optimizes for endless engagement and getting people emotionally wound up, pushing their buttons. And once the algorithm knows what your buttons are, if it can push your buttons, then you're toast. You're going to be trapped and you're going to be exploited even more so than we've ever seen. So we have to be super careful. The fortunate thing is there are many other business models. Nobody has to go with this tired old business model of advertising on the web to make a free product because you have the business model of, for example, transactions. It's very successful to say, kind of think about a credit card

as the example of if lots of commerce flows through the system and it really is buying and selling things and trading things, then a company only needs to take a very small percentage of those transactions, 1%, 2%, or even less in order to make their living. And that's the business model, I think that's going to win out at the end of the day. This is Science Friday from WNYC Studios. Talking with Annali Newitz and Avi Barlev. Go ahead, Annali. You wanted to jump in there?

Oh, yeah. So the advertising model, the marketing model is already here. There's been a joke going around based on an actual ad that crops up in Metaverse, which is Target, the company that we all know, has created a Target goth world in the Metaverse where you can go shop for all the goffy things that Target sells like black couches and silver jewelry and silky black shirts, but you can do it in the Metaverse. And you know, you have to think about where the Metaverse is being built when you see something silly like visit Goth Target in the Metaverse. And, you know, it's coming to you from the people who built

Facebook. Meta, their biggest, most lucrative product is Facebook. So when you think about how Facebook makes its money, which is entirely from advertising, then you have to ask, well, what will Facebook's, what will Metaverse look like? It's going to be full of things like goth target. And Avi's right to worry that this can create incentives to inspire technologies that are addictive. We want to keep people in there and get them addicted. And, you know, we've already seen where that took us with social media. So maybe we don't, want meta to be running the Metaverse. Here's a tweet, an interesting tweet that says, I believe the, Chris on Twitter,

I believe the biggest barrier to the Metaverse at this point is actually content creation tools for everyone. I wonder if your guests agree. Yeah. I mean, if Meta has the content creation tools, as you say, Annali, they're going to be making the content. What about tools for people who are not part of that giant world? Yeah.

There's the question of people making content, you know, where is the kind of Minecraft type space of the Metaverse? But there's also the question of just access. I mean, right now, if you want a virtual reality rig or an augmented reality rig, it might cost you up to $5,000. And some of the lowest in ones are $300. And so it's basically, it's either the cost of a really nice phone or the cost of a completely fancy computer.

and there's not much content out there. It's not just that there's no user-generated content. There's just, there's a few games, there's a few spaces. So I really think that what we're going to see first is basically stuff like meta's partnership with Microsoft to create places for people to work. You know, your company will provide you with a virtual space. It won't be a fun, you know, a fun thing that you do where you build a castle in the Metaverse.

You go to work there. And then eventually the costs will come down enough that people will be able to build their own stuff. Mavi, you agree? Yeah, I think, and it's definitely right. I think, though, the bright spot here, and certainly that's, you know, what they're talking about is what is now. Right now it's about meetings and industrial use cases. Some of the biggest use cases are remote assistance and training and simulation. But we will get to a point where content creation is cheap, and anybody could do it.

Like, we all have this vision of the holodeck where you just talk to the computer and call it what you want and it's made real or virtually real in front of you. Whether it's physical or not, that's another story. But we'll get there. If you take a look at things like Mid Journey, Dolly, Stable Diffusion, they're already being able to take text prompts and turn them into pictures. And so we're maybe just a couple of years out from being able to take verbal prompts, what do you say you want, and turn it into 3D things in space with you.

And that will enable lots of people to be able to create these worlds. But there'll still be lots of jobs for the people who, make the high quality stuff because there needs to be content in order to cede the content that everybody else wants. We're getting closer and closer. It's very exciting. And that's what got me in the space in the first place. I just wanted to make things.

And it just wasn't ready yet 30 years ago. And we're getting close. You have to wait to the big companies to set something up and then little people move in and do other things. So we'll have to just, yeah, we'll have to wait. Thank you both for taking time to be with us today. It's been a pleasure. I've had science fiction writer and science journalist Annelie Newitz.

Their newest book coming out in January is the Terraformers. Thank you, Anna Lee. Thanks so much for having me. You too. And Avi Barzev, president of the XR Guild and a pioneer of extended reality technologies for Second Life, companies like Disney, Apple, Microsoft, and others. Thank you for joining us today. Thanks for having me.

It was a pleasure. And here's Shoshana Bucksbaum with some of the folks who helped make this show happen. Thanks, Ira. Kyle Marion Viterbo is our community manager. D. Peter Schmidt and Emma Gomez are our digital producers. Sandy Roberts is our education program manager, and I'm Shoshana Buxbaum, radio producer. Thanks for listening. Well, thank you, Shoshana.

B.J. Linderman composed our theme music, and we helped this hour from audio engineer Kevin Wolfe. And the Science Friday and a Vox Pop app. What science stories have made you thankful for this year? We want to hear from you. Tell us on the Science Friday Vox Pop app wherever you get your apps. I'm Ira Flato.