SciShow Tangents - Bonus Backlog Bonanza - Ep. 2

Episode Date: April 15, 2025

This bonus episode was originally posted on Patreon on April 30, 2021 titled "Tangents Bonus Episode #2."Original Patreon description: Ceri and Hank answer your questions about the future of science!��SciShow Tangents is on YouTube! Go to www.youtube.com/scishowtangents to check out this episode with the added bonus of seeing our faces! And go to https://complexly.store/collections/scishow-tangents to buy some great Tangents merch!While you're at it, check out the Tangents crew on socials:Ceri: @ceriley.bsky.social@rhinoceri on InstagramSam: @im-sam-schultz.bsky.social@im_sam_schultz on InstagramHank: @hankgreen on X

["Sideways in the Sky"] Hello and welcome to this iShow Tangents bonus Patreon episode. Every month, Sam, Sari, and I, get together to do a little extra goofing around. But this month, according to the show notes here, at least, it's serious business. Our Patreon patrons have asked us to predict the future of science. That sounds very easy to do.

Look, this is actually kind of part of my job as a science fiction writer. Like that's the whole thing. It's a lot of pressure for me, a so-called science expert on the podcast. as a science fiction writer, like that's the whole thing. It's a lot of pressure for me, so-called science expert on the podcast. I can't fact check the future, so I'm just gonna be saying words. Yeah, that's exactly the difference between you and me.

And this is why I can't run any of our shows, because I'm like, opinions are totally valid. And you're like, opinions are totally valid. And you're like, actually Hank, that's not what we do here. We're teaching people, teachers use these things in classrooms. There's a lot that needs to get done. And there are a lot of big problems, you know,

the climate, the environment, which are kind of two different problems. There's the pandemic. There's also the future pandemics. There's servicing the needs of a growing number of people who have more, which they should have because it is better than the deep injustice and inequality that we have right now.

So how do we get there though? We have a lot of questions from y'all. They're great questions and I'm excited to go over them. Miss Brock asks, will there be more eco-friendly or biodegradable household items to help with pollution like plastic-free floss or biodegradable razors? Well, plastic-free floss, that's what we used to have. Do you guys not remember that?

Is that like an old person thing? That's like a waxed string is vaguely familiar to me now. I don't remember it. I guess I'm at least, I don't know, 10 years older. I don't know how old you are Sam. I'm 33. Okay, so you had a string and a waxed string, that's biodegradable. That's natural.

I can't imagine pulling that through my teeth anymore though. That must hurt like a mother. Kids these days have the flat thing and that's much easier. Yeah, it is better. That's why they do it. This is part of the problem that if you can make a better product with plastic, then it's kind of like why wouldn't we? The big question I have is,

to what extent is plastic pollution a problem that's gonna be solved? Like, which way are we gonna solve that problem? And also, where does it rank on our list of problems? By the end of this episode, you'll have our list of problems. Yeah. But yeah, I know that there are more biodegradable plastics.

I'm also not entirely sure what that means. I know, because I know that it means different things for different plastics. I also know that it means like, you can't recycle them. So you can't put them into the recycling stream, which makes recycling more difficult. Not that plastic recycling is great anyway. Yeah. So biodegradable, from what I can can tell generally means a substance that can be broken down by microorganisms within a fixed period of time.

So like not eons and eons of decay because everything will break down because entropy. But that still feels like sort of a vague definition in the way that like composting has different tiers of it where you have industrial composting versus what you can do in your backyard. So I don't know if there is a standardized definition for biodegradable. And my sense is that all the plastics that we're making, that even labeled biodegradable,

need some sort of specific microbial environment. They're designed to be broken down by certain microbes. You can't just like throw it into your backyard and it'll disappear within the year. Like my sort of like stock answer has always been like we need to get away from disposables. But the more I live in this world, the more I feel like that's not going to happen. This is a hard one. So another thing that you've put in the notes here is something about bioplastics aren't always biodegradable. So you can make a plastic from something that wasn't like oil. You can make it

from a plant, but that doesn't mean that it's biodegradable. And I think that can be confusing as well. I think paper products are still gonna be a part of the solution as well, but it's also important to look at like, what are the problems we're trying to solve? And what are the biggest contributors to that problem? So the part of the plastic pollution problem is like, okay, there's just like plastic in the oceans. And that is a problem, but it's not really a problem

that is caused by floss or razors. It's mostly a problem that is caused by fishing equipment. And then in addition to that, it's a problem that is caused by bad infrastructure for dealing with waste in places that are not the US. So if you're in the US, your plastic bottle 99.9 out to like 10 or 11 decimal places that goes into a landfill

and it's not gonna end up in the ocean. Now there are other problems with plastic pollution as well though. There's like that it can break down and in the process of breaking down, you end up with some chemicals that might end up in the groundwater. Those chemicals can have human health effects

and we don't really understand them super deeply and that's not good. You don't really understand them super deeply. And that's not good. You don't want to be in a situation where you're like, okay, there's chemicals that are in the groundwater that may be affecting our physiology. They may contribute to infertility or to cancer or something, but we're not sure about that. And so this is something that like, I think that is an area that needs to be understood much more deeply.

And then there's also the piece of it that's like, okay, so that's a thing. Is a razor the problem? Not really, because there's not a lot of plastic in a razor and you use it for a long time. The biggest problems are things that you use exactly once and that people use a lot of. And that's almost entirely bottles

in terms of the mass of plastic. And I feel like a better solution to this problem rather than creating new plastics, and I might be wrong, is like if we could create a system where all plastics work the same, and that made it easier to recycle them. Just put them on the same big vat. Yeah. The problem with this, of course, is that there are different advantages to different plastics.

For example, your average plastic bottle actually has four different plastics on it, maybe five. It has the bottle, it has the label, which is a different kind of plastic, has the glue, which you could kind of also consider a plastic, it has the cap, which is a different plastic, and it's got the ring on the inside of the cap that actually does the sealing, that's sort of like a jelly plastic. It's not just that plastic is hard to recycle. There are certain plastics that you can pretty effectively recycle.

It's just that you can't separate them from impurities that will make the recycling harder. And that makes plastic just like a great useful thing for making really effective things for storing liquids in, but really hard to recycle. And that is the bigger problem. And like, interestingly, there's plastic and aluminum cans too.

The label is printed on in a kind of plastic and then there's a plastic liner on the inside of it that's sprayed on on the inside. So everybody who thinks like, I don't want to eat, drink out of plastic because it's got chemicals in it. Aluminum also contains that. Glass doesn't, if that's a concern for you.

This is a very hard problem to solve because disposable containers are so extremely economically useful and valuable. And like, I am sitting here with a coffee cup in front of me and the lid of the coffee cup is made out of plastic. And like, I did that this morning. I made that decision. I think you said economical, but also just like the cheapness of it, where it is both

affordable for people to buy single use plastic containers, and even like if you reuse them a couple of times, but then throw them out when they become no longer useful because they're not designed to last very long. And cheap for companies to mass produce these pieces that come together well and serve a function. And so it feels like if there's gonna be any systemic change, it has to be the people with money saying, okay, we're gonna invest in making plastic bottles

all one type of plastic, or like decreasing the cost of these biodegradable bioplastics for everyone else, because that's what helped plastic take off, is that it's so cheap and so affordable, because it was like, oh, well, why have a material made out of solid wood or metal when you can have very cheap plastic? And then all of a sudden, it's way more affordable. So you have to counteract that and it's way more affordable. So you have to counteract that convenience of it as well, which is a very difficult societal problem.

I see there being options, but I see them being options available to the people who are willing to pay more, which is always gonna be a very small subset of people. But it's also, I don't think the biggest problem we face. Sometimes I think because we interface with this particular thing so often, we think that it's a bigger issue

than it might actually be. I feel like when I was a kid, it was made out to be the hugest issue of our time by all forms of media, basically. Yeah, we had a lot of recycling, like talks in the gym as well. Even in the games. Yeah. Why do you think that is?

Is it because it's easy to see? I think it's easy to see. I think it's like giving kids a way to feel like they're part of the solution. And then it's good for kids, but it's kind of not good for 25 year olds. To be like, oh fuck, I have to think about this too. Wow. I was like, Hank knows a lot about recycling. And then I remember that you started a blog called EcoGeek a billion years ago. Yeah. I mean, that's what my graduate, my graduate degree is in environmental studies, not like recycling.

You are indeed an EcoGeek. Well, I'm realizing as you were talking that these questions are all downers, and I should have thought of some fun future questions. There are some that aren't. That's just one that we don't have a lot of good solutions to. There are others that we do have better, exciting things in the future for. Here's another question for you. It's kind of a lot of good solutions to. There are others that we do have better, exciting things in the future for. Here's another question for you. It's kind of a long one from Emily M.

I've heard recently that some people have a goal of all cars sold in America being electric in 10 years. Do you think we will eventually all have electric vehicles? If so, how would they work for people who live out in the middle of nowhere or in cities that don't currently have access to chargers? How will that work for people who live in older apartments that don't currently have access to chargers. How will that work for people who live in older apartments that don't currently have that infrastructure?

That's a great question. To this like this, like the first part of the answer to that question is, so 10 years from now, it's 2031, and only electric cars are being sold in America. That means that the last gas powered car that will leave the roads, will leave the road will leave the road sometime in the 2060s.

So like, it's not like the day that no more new gas cars are being sold, there are no more gas cars in America. There will still be lots of used gas vehicles being sold. And the average car on the road right now is like 11 years old. And this is a thing that people don't get. Most cars that are being driven right now are older than 11 years old and this is a thing that people don't get most cars that are being driven right now Are older than 10 years old so like a lot of them are much older than that

So this transition takes time, which is why it's important to do it quickly There will still be options available for people who don't have like who need that problem solved differently I think farms are probably a good example of like there there might not be the infrastructure necessary, though also, you know, it may end up being that it's cheaper and that and I've already seen some examples of non-gasoline powered farm equipment that farmers are actually excited about. So that's a that's a piece of it. And the other piece of it is the hope is that by 10 years from now, filling up a gas powered car and filling up an electric powered car will be roughly equivalent experiences.

They are not currently. I think that the fastest you can charge an electric car up to like 80% so that you can get another 250 miles out of it is on the order of an hour rather than on the order of like, how long does it take to fill up a car with gasoline? Five minutes max, if you include like going into pay. But that infrastructure obviously isn't there all over the place, but it will be there. Like there isn't a way to do this

without spreading the infrastructure so that there are lots of places to charge. And I think it's really important to recognize also that if you live in a house, you can be like, oh, I should put a plug out here or run an extension cord out. But if you live in an apartment that has underground parking or something

or overground parking, but there's no building there, you will have to build in that infrastructure. But I think that it won't happen. And so a lot of people will continue to buy cars and there will be a robust and strong market and used cars for a while after that transition happens. I also don't, like if I'm gonna make a prediction here, I think that there will be lots of people

still selling new gas cars in 10 years. But like we really do need to make that transition because there isn't a way to do gasoline better. Like we can't make bio gasoline that's carbon neutral. We can say like, let's capture the carbon that's produced by the cars, but like we don't have good practical ways of doing that. Moving it to electrical infrastructure

is just better in like dozens of ways. So moving it to electrical infrastructure is just better in dozens of ways. So we need to do it. I guess I imagine it's got to be cheaper to transport electricity than to transport gas too. Or it's easier to start an electric gas station than it is a gas station, probably. Yeah, yeah. Well, I mean, there's a bunch of advantages to it.

The big one being you don't have to have a big truck pull up and pump gas into the ground. Right. My children might never know the sweet smell of gasoline being pumped into a car. Oh, no. What a terror. But also I think if we have to wait an hour for our cars to be charged up,

maybe we'll see the return of like roadside attractions and tourist traps and stuff. Right, like, yeah. I mean, that is how it should be. Like there should be a place for you to charge your car and like come through the maze and see the thing. Yeah, I want to see the thing really bad. Every gas station will be like walled drug.

You ever been to walled drug? Yeah. I went to see the largest ball of paint right before the pandemic had actually. And it should have had an electric charger at it, except it was just a guy's house, but it was awesome. And I suggest you go see the world's largest ball of paint. Like a part of me wants to own the world's largest ball of paint. Like I want to like set up like a trust and be like,

I'm gonna pay you this amount now. And when you die, I get the paint. Well, okay. But I think there's also other things I'd like to do. It does seem pretty full time. Can I be the caretaker of the ball of paint, please? It's not in Montana. Well, I know when you get it though.

It's in like Indiana, I think. I'm not going to move it. It's giant. Oh, it's got to stay where it is? Yeah. It's just like hanging off of a like steel girders he's built. You can just roll it, roll it to Montana. What do we got next? Emily M asks, will water desalination

become more of a thing as fresh water becomes more scarce or will we come up with some other way to deal with the lack of water? It will definitely become more of a thing. Is it really, really hard or something? Is it already a big thing and I just don't know it? Yeah, it's already a thing. It's very important in some places.

It is not important, I think globally. It's not a common source of, I'm sure it's less than 1% of water consumption, but in certain places it's vital. Now, the big problems are that it's expensive, energy intensive, and also at the end of the process, you have this like, you don't have salt, you have like a very salty water.

And you have to do something with it, and generally what you do with it is you put it back into the ocean, and then that area of the ocean is too salty. So it also has an environmental impact. Do you know more about this, Sari? A little bit. Like what I've read about it is that they're looking,

like I don't know if there's a way to make it less energy intensive, but I think they're trying to find ways to make that energy more renewable. So like using solar panels by the ocean to like help with the desalination plants and like these processes in addition to improving the engineering of them.

The other main solutions that I've read about are finding ways to use water more efficiently that we already have in practice. So wastewater treatment plants or things like that, and finding ways to extract as much water from those treatments as possible. I don't know currently what percentages go through, but by making those processes more efficient, then we are contaminating less water, making it unusable. And agriculture is the biggest freshwater use in the world. According to this one metric, 70% of the world's freshwater is used for agriculture. And so if we take better care of the soil and think wisely about irrigation systems,

then that can help us conserve freshwater. Right. and help us conserve fresh water. Right, and there's also the reality that a lot of agriculture goes to feed and water animals. And there may be, so like, this is weird to go from desalination to fake meat, but there may be ways to get us off meat in ways that decrease our water use. This is definitely the case in the US.

And like, we're okay on water right now, but like long-term, and also like a bigger worry, like super worrying thing is if we have a lot of agriculture infrastructure in places that are sort of expecting the climate to be the way that it's been for the last 200 or 500 years, and then suddenly the climate isn't the way that it used to be.

It's like, oh, so it's not going to rain and there's not any aquifer. So we've got like a lot of sunk costs into growing potatoes or wheat or almonds or whatever here, but we can't anymore. Part of the reason agriculture functions is that it relies on nature. And if nature changes, part of the reason agriculture functions is that it relies on nature. And if nature changes, you know, for non-natural reasons, then we end up having to solve some very new problems. And I think that, you know, desalination might be a part of that, but I think the bigger part of it will be like

just moving things around and doing it differently. Yeah, and I think as climate change affects areas, like in addition to desalination, not everyone is by an ocean. So like that specifically desalination is useful if you're like on a coast and you don't have enough fresh water and so you can like extract it from the ocean.

But there are also like need to be innovations in rainwater harvesting systems or like other forms of water that aren't just like using wells from the ground because that's not always reliable. But like already some countries are importing freshwater from other countries because of like the imbalances of climate and the like the exaggerated imbalances of climate change.

And so not just investing into energy and technology that help some countries that are already nearby water, but also like finding ways to work with the changing climate that we've caused to make fresh water accessible to places so that we don't have to like spend a bunch of energy transporting it across countries if need be. Occasionally, if you always say like, what do you mean we're running out of water? It's not going anywhere. I'm like, okay, but like, we expected it to be somewhere. And now it is that we don't have enough to do all the things that we need to do. So we only need to do less or we need

to get water to those places and getting water water to those places, that's using energy. Like we use even in a normal place, every time you turn on the faucet. It's not like that water is shooting out of your faucet because it wants to, no, we like pumped it. Like energy is required to push the water out of your faucet, which is cool. I don't really think about that on a daily basis,

but like you can't just, it's not just water. It's not just the water needing to be there. It's that it has to have pressure. Pipes are, pipes are crazy. As somebody who owns a bunch of pipes now, I just look at them in my basement and think, how are you doing what you're doing? I took Oren to the DFTBO warehouse and there's like

upstairs and you can, the big pipe that has all the sprinkler system in it is up there and he like put his hand on it. And he said, I'm glad I could touch this pipe. Wow. Yeah, I'm like, I'm glad you could touch that pipe too. Find your, find your joy. Let's talk about a nice thing.

Richard Martinez asks, what is the future of sci-com? Over the past few years, it has become strikingly evident how alienated and jaded, okay, maybe this is kind of nice. The general public is, with science as a whole, how do we get more accessible sci-com into schools? What is the future of scientific outreach, especially for underrepresented minority students? I mean, that's like the biggest question.

I was talking to someone else, a grad student about this the other day. I mean, the conclusion that I came to after like half an hour of talking was that inspiring the desire to question the world around you is something that is like, it feels to me to be at the foundation of scientific literacy,

whether it's like questioning where a fact came from and like how true that fact is, because the longer you spend time in science, especially academically, like the more you realize how much you don't know. And I think oftentimes science is taught as laws and rules and lists, yeah, lists of equations that it's like, we know this happens, like we know gravity exists and we know that plants have these pieces and you can diagram them. But it doesn't emphasize as much like the discovery of those things. And I think that, one, humans are naturally curious. We touch pipes and are like, I'm so glad I touched this. And like, I'm like wondering about even the most mundane things are like mundane to adults is not mundane to kids. And so I think the

more that we gear science education towards asking questions and having open-ended answers, then that helps with scientific literacy moving forward and helps with this kind of like general societal resistance that we're seeing in some cases to not having a concrete answer, like saying that a vaccine is 90% effective. People are worried about that because they're like, that a vaccine is 90% effective. People are worried about that because they're like, well, gravity is there 100% of the time. And they're like trying to contrast these ideas in their heads. But like everything has a probability. And so like emphasizing that at the very roots of scientific education will help, I think,

future generations understand that like, yes, there is a place for you in science because you don't have to be, you don't have to have the confidence of, like, an old white man who is just theorizing about the universe to do it. Like, you can make guesses and you can be wrong. And you can come up with a probable answer, but that's not going to be be definite and you can still make a big difference in the scientific community. That's, I think that's very well put. And it is very much in the same vein as,

and like adds to this thing I've been thinking about, which is like the power structure of scientific knowledge. I hadn't realized, and this took me too long to realize, that to a lot of people it seems like a power that is being exercised over them, but is not earning its trust, improving its legitimacy by giving it that context of how did we figure this out? And then the moment you start to question something,

people come at you and are angry about it because they're like, no, you can't say that that's wrong. Scientists figured this out. Instead of being like, that's wrong, be like, well, let's look at it and see it like test that and like compare it and like use that as a door to open a conversation. I've been thinking about the difference

between like a dumb question and a great answer. And I think that anytime you see something as a dumb question, it eliminates the opportunity to give a really great answer to that question. Like if the person being asked the question sees it as a dumb question? Yeah, if I hear like, how do we know the earth isn't flat? And I'm like, oh my God, instead of being like,

oh, like this is an opportunity to talk about all kinds of different cool things about like our observation of our universe, our experience, our planet. I had somebody asked me recently on TikTok, they asked, how can you take two gases, hydrogen and oxygen, put them together and make a liquid? It doesn't make any sense. Like my first instinct is like, that's not how chemicals work at all. Like, obviously. But my second instinct was, wow, I have amazing news for you. This is the very kind of question that Lavoisier looked at and was like, what the fuck? You know, like created chemistry because he like broke gases, he broke solids and liquids apart.

And then he was like, they're not disappearing. They're not disappearing. They're turning into something else. And the something else is gases and I can weigh them and feel like I can have their mass. And then I can say, oh my God, they didn't go anywhere. That's how chemistry was created, was that question that that person asked.

And no one's calling Lavoisier dumb. Like. Okay. That's right. Except all the people who murdered him because he was a tax collector. Oh. Okay.

That's not dumb. They just called him evil, probably. Yeah. You're a dummy. Shink. Yeah. Yeah. That's very similar to one of the early fights I got into with my partner.

She showed me a video of, he has made the rounds on the Internet where someone takes like a charcoal briquette, covers it in peanut butter, sticks it in the fridge and then pulls it out and then like a quartz crystal is there. And she asked me if I was real and I just laughed. like a quartz crystal is there. And she asked me if I was real and I just laughed. Like, how dumb do you have to be to think that this is real? And then I was like, oh, that's really hurtful actually.

And then we had like a longer conversation about how like, well, what is peanut butter? Peanut butter is like a fat and what is a charcoal briquette? And like, is there being any pressure exuded? And like, these are all different chemicals. But yeah, I think as science communicators, we have to catch ourselves when we have more knowledge and something that seems like a dumb question

is actually such a great opportunity for learning. And like admitting that, like, oh, that was rude of me to laugh at this situation, because actually like this is a great learning opportunity. And there's a really weird thing with something like that where like what those people are doing is they're questioning the world, which is the exact thing we want them to do.

And the fact that they might be saying that in opposition to science can make us defensive and be like, science says this, but I think this. And then I'm like, now we're having a fight. But like, the very instinct we don't want to shut down is I want to ask questions about the world. But I think that oftentimes, because science is sort of presented as this like list of shit to remember, that you can end up sort of wanting to be curious in opposition to science because it isn't presented as a curiosity.

It isn't presented as a process. It isn't presented as, you know, like the context of like people like asking weird questions and figuring out answers. OK, now you have to lightning speed actually answer all of this people's questions or this person's questions. So what is the future of outreach and how to get it into school

and to like underrepresented people and stuff like that? I think that we need to rethink a lot of how we assess, which is very hard because like, particularly with science and math, like the assessment is like, ah, this is so easy. We just like figure out whether the right answer is and, and then I can do multiple choice and Scantron. And I, I don't, I don't actually know how to fix that problem because like education is a really tough nut.

And that's what we're trying to do all the time. Yeah, a little bit. Kind of, right? Yeah, a little bit. Yeah, a little bit. OK, we have time for one more really fast one. Oh, Kirk asks, could plastic replace steel as a cheaper and potentially stronger construction material? It's depends on what you mean by plastic polymers. Yes. But like, it probably wouldn't be the thing that we think of as as plastic.

You know, you talk about like carbon fiber is kind of a, is a kind of polymer, but it's not a plastic. And I don't actually know what the difference between those things is, but I, instinctually I feel like it's not. I also don't know how to draw the boundary around plastic. I feel like it's pretty broad category of things that are considered plastic.

It's probably kind of like glass. It's more on like the material properties of it. Like is it bendy? Does it flex at a certain temperature and get hard at a different temperature? But I think it's in progress. I think in the way that we were talking about plastics being a cheaper alternative for a lot of things, they're also like a cheaper alternative than steel and oftentimes easier to mold in ways and repair in other ways. Cause it's like, you don't have to weld

pieces of plastic together. You can like, like we would describe with water bottles. Like there are other ways to join them and there are other types of plastics that can be used in conjunction with each other to serve the same purpose. And so all that I could find it was like, it's a promising field of research. We haven't been able to mimic the durability quite yet. And like, this is just like a lot of material science jargon, so I'm not going to get into

it and I didn't get into it in my reading. But the benefits of steel are that it's really strong and it's really lightweight. And plastic can be both those things. And it's just like, in what ways do we want to make it strong? Do we want to make it strong against water pressure pushing outward? Do we want to make it strong against like earthquakes shaking it? Do we want to make it strong against a bunch of forces pushing down and across like in a building truss?

So all of those are different material science problems. And so we have to look at like the situations in which we're using the steel and then create a polymer that can mimic that type of strength. And that's like a bunch of engineering is testing different types of strengths and figuring out what materials are good for what purposes. If you made a plastic skyscraper, would it blow away? Would you have to put a bunch of sand in the bottom of it or something to keep it down?

No. Well, like you've built big Lego things, right? It starts to get heavy. Yeah. It adds up, but also it's not just, so like a skyscraper isn't just steel. It's also like you've put concrete in there and you still got to put bricks and stuff on it. Right. So plastic would be like the rebar part.

Well, thank you guys for being so smart about the future. Next time you have to ask me questions about the Transformers or Mario or something. And I can be smart too. Well, Sam, you posted the question for questions about the future. I sure did. Yeah. I sure did. I didn't think they'd be so good, though, or so relatively grim. I think, look, the future, we're going to be OK.

When I say that, I believe it with at least some percentage of my body. Oh, you're not even going to say more than half or less than half? Majority? No, not really. I don't want to be so certain. I guess you're right, Sam. I'm not comfortable saying that we're going to be okay. Your star rating, if you had to give a star rating for what you think the future will be like, how many stars? How far, how long from now? Out of five.

Uh, a hundred years. Pshhh. Ah, like a two? Oh no, Zari? I was gonna say three. I think there's gonna be a handful of good things that will make it very cool to be alive. And then, mentally, that will outweigh some of the good things that will make it very cool to be alive. And then mentally that will outweigh some of the bad things that we're experiencing.

I think no matter what, what we will see is that it will be, as everything has been thus far, much more a question of justice than of technology. And that people in certain places will be doing fine and people in other places will be doing worse. And whereas for a fair bit here, everybody's been doing not like the same amount of better,

but better than they once were. Whereas I think there will be a lot of, in a hundred years, my guess is there will be a lot of places on the planet where things will be worse than they are right now, which isn't just real bad. That's upsetting. But I could be wrong. And the realities of whether or not

I will be wrong about that will really come down to how the wealthy use their resources, which I don't have a ton of faith in, but like maybe I'll run about that. Not looking great so far. Yep, and also like what technologies we have developed to handle these challenges. Yeah, I think that's where my hope is coming from

is like the collective effort of people who are growing up right now, like the wealthy using their resources is always the factor that can change a lot of things, but I think as far as like people's awareness of like the collective action that we need to take feels like it's increasing. Yeah.

And like all the new technologies, even though there are like technologies that are putting on racism filters, there are more people calling those things out as wrong and like trying to form thoughtful efforts to combat that kind of reductive thinking that hopefully things will be better. I don't know. I'll be dead, so. Yeah, doesn't matter. I'm gonna rate it one star, cause I'll be dead.

That sounds like it sucks, there's no Sam. Yeah, well, if you're listening to this in a blasted wasteland in the future, far from now, if you found this buried in the sand, an iPod, put this on it. We hope you enjoyed it. Goodbye! Goodbye!