StarTalk Radio - StarTalk Live: Building the Future

Episode Date: March 28, 2013

Is humanity on the cusp of momentous change? Neil deGrasse Tyson and futurists Jason Silva and Melissa Sterry explore the possibilities that lie at the intersection of technology, human biology and urban planning. Subscribe to SiriusXM Podcasts+ on Apple Podcasts to listen to new episodes ad-free and a whole week early.

Welcome to StarTalk, your place in the universe where science and pop culture collide. StarTalk begins right now. I'm Neil deGrasse Tyson. I'm the host of StarTalk Radio. I'm an astrophysicist. I'm the host of StarTalk Radio. I'm an astrophysicist. My day job is with the American Museum of Natural History. And I'm here with my comedian co-host, Eugene Merman. Eugene. Hello. I'll be loud-ish. I've got two futurists. We're going to talk about the future of science,

future of technology in particular, the intersection of technology and the human body, the intersection of technology, the future, and of cities. And we're going to start with Jason Silva. Jason, welcome. Thank you so much for having me. Yeah, this guy's all over the Internet gesticulating what the future should be, making you feel bad because you haven't done anything to make it happen. So I'll get back to you on that in a moment. All right. And I've got Melissa. Melissa Sterry, thanks for flying in from London. Pleasure. For this. I'd love that. Say it again. A pleasure. She's also a futurist, and she thinks about what the future of cities would be or should be. And

so we have someone who's thinking about the human body, the human mind. We have someone thinking about human cultures. And I just want to sort of jump right into this, if I may. So we're going into space. I do astrophysics. I'm coming at this from a space, I'm a space person. We're going into space. Many people, myself included, are disappointed that we're not sending astronauts. I like robots, but I kind of would still like to have people doing this. Do you have an opinion on this? Yeah, definitely. Well, you know, I like the idea of astronauts, too.

I mean, I actually like the idea of sending artists and poets into space because I think that they could really communicate. Definitely poets. Yeah. No, there was actually an article in Newsweek a while back. So if someone breaks their dead weight, you know. You said poet fix the engine. This wouldn't work.

Imagine a world with less power. No, but I think that one of the things that people talk about often is that NASA and other organizations don't do a good enough job of telling people why sending human consciousness into the cosmos is its own mesmerizing reward. I mean, that is what it is to be human. We didn't stay in the caves. We haven't stayed on the planet.

Like, we go. We transcend our boundaries. And so I think perhaps by sending artists and poets up there, an article in Newsweek called Rocket Men, actually, from a while back said that this would be an interesting thing to do. But in terms of the argument against robots, I think that a lot of people are deciding that it's maybe less expensive and easier to send these robotic crafts out there.

It's not maybe less expensive. It is so less expensive. Right, right, right. Fair enough. And for those that think, well, we should focus on the humans, look, I think parallel. I think we could focus on humans also, but I think that we shouldn't dismiss these robots as saying that that's not like sending humans because we are, we outsource our cognition to these robots. The mind of man crawls Mars at the moment. I mean, we're there. There's a cognitive philosopher called Andy Clark

who says that technology is like our extended phenotype, right? It's our exoskeleton. It extends our thought, reach, and vision. And so we should think of these robots the way we should think about our iPhones as extensions of our mind. It's us, just like the termite colony is part of the termite. It's exoskeleton.

I think that that's how we should look at these robots. Wow. Don't you think? Okay, okay. No, that's good. I said wow, good, not wow, crazy. Just to make that clear. I read recently on the International Space Station, we're exploring creating sort of an internet

that might work on an interplanetary scale. And someone on the space station controlled a Lego robot in Germany while orbiting the Earth. So this is an example of what you're saying. I saw that. That was pretty cool. Yeah, so this is an example. Sure, I think so. Or they play Will.i.am's song in space, in Mars, actually. I. That was pretty cool. Yeah. So this is an example. Sure, I think so. Or they play Will.i.am's song in space.

In Mars, actually. I thought that was pretty cool. I think that's too bad. But I mean, look, these robots increasingly, the instruments are becoming extensions of our sensorial instruments. So we're equipping these robots with something, with eyes, with cameras. Maybe they can examine the soil.

They're better than us. Yeah, yeah. And I think the article in Wired were saying it's going to be the future of space exploration to be more like Avatar. So they're talking about robots that we'll be able to control with kind of like full body virtual reality systems. And why not? With the exponential growth curves of these technology, we're going to be able to create

all sorts of immersive environments here on Earth that project us into exotic... We're going to need a lot of unobtainium. That's right. Indicated in Avatar. But my question is, the reason why we're sending robots is because it's too costly to send people. At the moment. At the moment.

I think given the choice, we'd rather go ourselves. Given that it's costly, we send the robot. But can you imagine? And plus, space is supremely hostile to human biology. All right? Absolutely. You know, you get to Mars, there's no air, and it's poisonous, and you die.

Well, yeah, I mean, it seems impossibly complex, but so did the idea of jetliners before we invented the airplane. No, no, wait, wait, wait. You can go further back. Columbus going to the New World didn't have to worry, I don't think, whether the New World had air to breathe, right? Or whether there'd be wood in trees to repair a ship that broke. Imagine Neil and Buzz crash landing on the moon.

So let's just rebuild all the circuit boards and relaunch ourselves. No! That's not happening. But that's the argument of those that are saying that they want to send robots. That's why they make a good point. Here's my question. Do you or some of your people, your community of futurists, is anyone thinking

that you can modify human biology to not be so susceptible to the deathly forces of space? That's a very interesting question of whether we can make ourselves immune to the deathly forces of space, but certainly we're going to be tinkering with our biology. I think biology is going

to be the next thing that's going to be swallowed up by information technology. When biology becomes an information technology, we master those information processes of biology and we can reprogram basically with the canvas of life itself. This is how people become evil scientists. Well, no, but I think it's actually,

I think it sounds really fascinating. There's a guy called Juan Enriquez. He's a great TED speaker, but he talks about life code. And he says that when we can write with biology the way we can write with basically digital code, we have software. The difference is that this time you have software that can write with biology the way we can write with basically digital code, we have software. The difference is that this time you have software that can write its own hardware.

So we can basically write instructions that manifest themselves in physical space. We can basically reprogram ourselves. Freeman Dyson says in the near future, new generation of artists will be writing genomes with the fluency that Blake and Byron wrote verses. So when biology becomes the new instrument for the artist, what new forms of exquisite things might we create? And we're dealing with life itself, so we can turn ourselves into something post-human, much more interesting and maybe not subjugated to the same limitations that we currently

have. I like that. Plus, you can use as a template all the cool things that other animals can do that we can't. Absolutely. Like grow another limb. Yeah, absolutely. other animals can do that we can't. Absolutely. Like grow another limb. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, all that's going to be possible. Biolimicry is going to be the next big thing.

We're going to be able to model ourselves after things that work better in other species and be like, we should have that. We should have that feature. Because I remember growing up, people said, oh, the human body is this pinnacle. We're not a pinnacle of anything. No, in fact, that's probably why we've created such great technology, to extend ourselves through our instruments. Oh, that's very polite to say. I just said to make up for our inadequacies.

Now I would have worded that very same sentence. Fair enough. All these films and books where you see people with a cybernetic skeletal interface of biology and technology. Yeah, I mean, they're saying that, yes, we will be able to reprogram our biology and basically upgrade ourselves. But also with nanotechnology, matter becomes a programmable medium. So when you can build artifacts at the nanoscale, then you have both. Maybe you have blood cell size devices that are made of more exotic materials than biology. They can interface with our biology in ways that we can't even see. So maybe we can replace 30% of our white blood cells or red blood cells with synthetic ones, and we can stay underwater for five hours.

I think that's the example Kurzweil uses. So let me ask you, Melissa, do you see human-organized places, communities, towns, cities being touched by this thinking? Yeah, it's all about connectivity. And one of the things I do is look at biomimicry and looking at the way that ecosystems respond to natural disasters. You use the word biomimicry. Yeah, it just means bionics, basically.

It's just mimicking nature. I don't even know what that means. Bionics is literally looking at nature and stealing great ideas from it. So what you were saying about copying species that can do stuff better than us, that's all it is. Okay, so biomimicry means you're using the palette of the tree of life as a source of ideas. Yeah, it's your database.

Like Velcro came from some plant. Absolutely. And if we were thinking about how we might apply this to exploring space, we found possible planets that are maybe bigger than Earth. If you think about inhabiting those, the gravitational force would make walking and running a very different experience. And things would sag even more

than they do here on Earth. Sadly so. And if you didn't engineer the human, you'd have to create an exoskeleton to respond to that. And maybe one of the places you might look for an answer to that would be at the bottom of the oceans where the pressure forces are extreme and looking at how you get what appear to be very delicate creatures

in these incredibly hostile environments. Okay, so there's still a lot to be learned. Absolutely, yeah. But it's interesting. A lot of this biomimicry actually happens inadvertently. Like there was an interesting thing that came out recently talking about how when forager ants hunt for food, the patterns in which they do that mirrors the TCP IP protocols that govern information flow on the internet. Wait, wait, wait. Say that again.

That basically the way TCP IP protocols work to send information, this smart engineered way that we figured out how to send data on the web, mirrors the way forager ants hunt for food. Like they share the same patterns, which is really interesting. Or how the information sharing systems that comprise the internet look exactly like neurons in the brain. These man-made things that we call man-made, like non-natural, when they work really well, they tend to mirror these patterns from natural systems, which I think goes to the bigger picture is that we're of nature and anything we make is just an extension of nature too. Take the long view and you look at Earth as a single system. Everything that we call synthetic or man-made is just evolution.

It's just nature unfolding in another way. It's part of the continuum. Kevin Kelly calls it the technium, the sort of man-made extension of our nature, but it's still nature. The notion that computers are getting so fast, Moore's Law, right? They're doubling in speed and capacity every 18 months or so. At some point, two things are going to converge. What are those things? Well, here's the interesting thing about the exponential growth curves of Moore's Law that most people don't understand.

We have a brain that evolved in a world that was linear and local, but the world now is global and exponential. And the famous example that Kurzweil likes to give, you take 30 linear steps, you go one, two, three, four, five, 30 steps later, you're at 30. You same those same amount of steps exponentially, it would go two, four, eight, 16, by the 30th step, you're at a billion. That's why your smartphone today is a million times cheaper,

a million times smaller, and a thousand times more powerful than a $60 million supercomputer that was half a building in size 40 years ago. So when you take that 25 years into the future, what do you have? You have basically computers disappearing from the visible space. I mean, we're going to have molecular-sized devices inside of us, augmenting us. You have robots eating people. Robots eating people. I mean, no, but basically... What are the chances of that? Of robots eating people? In 30, 50, 70... Yeah, well... Is there an apocalyptic fear factor?

I think that mostly it comes down to this idea. We keep talking about the robots as them, but that's us. These are going to be extensions... We are the robots that will eat ourselves. No longer scared. Yeah, I think we just will continue to do what we've always done, which is to use

these tools not to make something else, but to extend who and what we are. We've been doing that since the dawn of computing. We've been doing that for our mechanical bodies since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution. We inhabit our exoskeletons. This is not a new thing.

Why is everyone talking about it like it's a new thing? Pretty much. I mean, Terence McKenna says we live inside of condensations of our imagination, but that's pretty much skyscrapers, jet engines. These are things that the human mind basically spit out, and then the human mind now resides inside of these things. So why all the talk of a singularity? Actually, Kevin Kelly says we've had singularities before. The emergence of language was the first one. We could not have imagined a rich symbolic world of language when we were the early hominids on the other side of that line. And I think the metaphor that's applied

into the future now is that we're getting to the point where it's almost impossible to make predictions because it's like staring into the sun. We can't really see what's going to happen when that inflection point happens, the acceleration reaches a point where it transforms everything. And that inflection point is? Well, Kurzweil says it within 35 years or something like that. No, no, no, not when. That we'll become living rocks? Well, that's what I'm trying to ask.

Oh, okay. Yeah, yeah. Well, I think... Point of inflection means... Everything becomes linked with everything else and matter becomes mind. So no reason to fear Iran? It means we basically impregnate the universe with intelligence. I mean, basically, the full flourishing of nanotechnology turns all of matter into a programmable medium.

The full flourishing of biotechnology turns all of life into something for the aesthetic artist to manipulate. And then artificial intelligence means non-biological intelligence that's smarter than we are and that can upgrade itself ad infinitum. Who's the dude who played the Jeopardy? Watson. Watson. Watson wiped the floor. 100%. With the best players Jeopardy ever had.

Right, and it had to use natural language. It's already happening. Well, because we're taking now Watson and we're making it read all the medical journals in the world, so we're going to make Watson into a doctor now. You have the tricorder. I don't have an issue with that. Me neither. Why would you?

We have machines that replace our physical body. Of course. Effort. People have pacemakers. It's not some singular moment where all the world is going to be different one second after that happens. Yeah.

Well, I think it's just a series of incremental steps that are going to be happening so fast. But I think that the world that we live in today would be unfathomable to people even 100 years ago. So I think that even when the singularity arrives, we might not notice it because of our own kind of hedonic adaptation. It's like that funny video where the guy's talking about being on an airplane when the internet doesn't work and he's complaining. And he's like, dude, you're flying through the sky connected to the internet and you're complaining when the signal drops.

So, Melissa, tell me about transportation. That's been influenced greatly by technology, of course. From horse-drawn buggies to the automobile to the airplanes. But I can't help but be a little disappointed that planes today are not faster than planes were in the 1960s. If we don't have the flying cars, I blame you. Fair enough. I think the problem is that it's going back to the light and the dark. There are always different forces at work.

Sorry. The dark, yes. Yeah, from Star Wars here. But when it comes to technology, we're seeing essentially our world split in two because there are those who are embracing it and running with it and there are those that are very resistant to it. So I think we'll see quite a mixed picture.

We're at the point now where advances in transportation are definitely on the edge and they will happen in some of the most ambitious smart city projects and the kind of things that will facilitate them will be smart data. And I'm not just talking about information

flowing from your smartphones, but I'm referring to projects like Planet Valley in Portugal, where there'll be 100 million sensors across that smart city that will be able to track everything from what's going on with the environment, with the wind direction, with the temperature, to where people are, where stuff needs to be going on.

And that can inform innovation in transportation that's not necessarily really radical in terms of the vehicle itself, but in terms of the organisation of the vehicle. And I think that is replicated across all the spaces where we're seeing huge advancements. Meaning cars will know where to park. Yeah. Think of how much time you waste trying to work out which route, where to park, should you go on this kind of transportation or that.

If you can get that information straight away. The amount of time humanity wastes on free will, I don't know. I know. I don't know about free will, but the amount of time we spend on the banal. I would like to park, but I would like to still have free will. I need some banal every now and then. All of life can't on the banal. I would like to part, but I would like to still have free will. I need some banal every now and then. All of life can't be not banal. Well, but I mean, if we can just free up

our mental faculties to machines so that we can have more space to be contemplative and dream about what might be... I've already done that. My computer calculates pi for me. That's great. To memorize the digits. And Einstein had famously said don't memorize anything that you can just look up. Right, but I think it was actually Socrates. He used to say that the technology of writing was

bad because if we wrote things down, we wouldn't remember things that would atrophy our brains. And there's always been this fear of basically outsourcing certain faculties to a technology, whether it's writing or something else. But in the end, I think it frees us up to do something far greater. I think we get to free up space to probe what Steven Johnson calls the adjacent possible, which is kind of this shadow future that hovers on the present state of things. It's a map of all the ways.

My favorite example of that is, was all the fear that when technology influenced the assembly line, the productivity of assembly line, society would be so productive, you'd only have to work two days a week. Yeah, exactly. So, Melissa, I'm old enough to remember you didn't go more than a week or two before the weekly magazines would extol the virtues of the city of tomorrow the homes of tomorrow transportation of tomorrow the kitchen of tomorrow everything was about tomorrow we were

coincidentally en route to the moon when that was happening. The World's Fair Flushing Meadow Queens did not create the 1960s. The 1960s created that World's Fair. So what happened to all the cities of tomorrow? And how can we not make that mistake again? Because you professionally are trying to create the city of tomorrow. Policymakers are a big problem. You just punted that. You're going to blame...

Yeah. But we vote for policy makers. They are... Exactly. In a democracy, we vote for them. One thing I notice in the world of science is in your area, no idea can be big enough. The bigger, the better. It could be at a cosmic scale. But for example, if you think about city planning, city planning historically has been segmented into a sum of its parts. So for example, if you think about city planning, city planning historically has been segmented into some of its parts. So for example, if we're thinking about resilience to natural hazards, the flooding team are over here, the heatwave team are over here, and it's all segmented.

Just a quick point. I think you have more heatwave teams in London than we have here. Because here we have air conditioning. Yeah, we have a heatwave solution. Yeah. We have a heat wave solution. Yeah, we have a heat wave solution. And inside each of our homes. Exactly. It keeps us cold. Yeah, you don't have to worry about that one.

You make a good point. There are these sort of crack teams that are specific to tasks. But if you look at, for example, a forest, think about how a forest responds to the seasons. Spring, it's budding, it's gearing up to regrow. Summer, it peaks. Autumn, it's losing its leaves. Do you know what I mean? The whole year is a series of changes.

That's a forest. If we look at a city, well, how does your city really change to the seasons? The changes have been very superficial, but we now have the technology. We have smart materials. We have adaptive structures. We have smart materials. We have adaptive structures. We have entire buildings that can move. And we have the sensors, the information systems,

to inform those processes. Okay, so that just means when the next disaster comes, you just know more about how you die, right? I mean, it's not preventing the next disaster. At the end, that's what you want to do? It's where you set your level of ambition. You know, you could say, well, we're happy with what we've got. It's like looking at a car and saying, well, I'm happy that it can reach this maximum speed and it's safety to this degree. Or you can say, that's not good enough. You can have that ambition to make it faster, to make it safer.

We've tended to accept that our cities are as they are. They don't have to be this way. Yeah, but part of why they are as they are is because its own citizenry created it out of their own energies. It's why you have a community here that's different from a community there. This is older, this is younger, this is hipper, this is more educated. And that's the personality, the organic growth of a city. Some of the most failed cities that I've read about...

Are the planned ones. We are the city planners. We will plan the city. No, you're not. But that's the irony. I mean, in nature, things are bottom up. For example, if you think about MassDar City, MassDar City reminds me of the Dome City in Logan's Run because everything is so organised and planned and then the citizens rebel. But as long as you allow people to participate in this process of adaptation, to create, if you like, the seasonality,

whether or not that is the resilience to natural hazards or that's the cultural activities that are going on. You know, for example, today we see billboards that use LEDs. It's all very static. You've got layers and layers of materials. Imagine smart materials that organize themselves at a molecular level to restructure themselves. To have ads inside our minds.

Have ads inside your minds. Google Glass. You've got to monetize these things. It'll be right in front of your eyes. It sounds awesome. You guys writing this down? No, but that's a very interesting point that you made about the planned cities that didn't work out,

because the best cities seem to have a kind of self-organizing property to them, and I think Jeffrey West from the Santa Fe Institute talks about how cities are really like organisms, they exhibit metabolic properties, and I think that's fascinating, because it goes back to the whole idea about the man-made as just another manifestation of nature, and cities are us, and they're an extension of us and they create spaces in which ideas can flourish and the best cities they tend to follow those patterns those metabolic patterns i think that's fascinating melissa if you look at any city take new york not that it's an average city but it's certainly an interesting city their buildings built a hundred years ago

and buildings built yesterday and so how do you, let's put all smart materials everywhere? You can't rebuild everything. No, you can adapt the structure, though. I mean, you could have smart coatings on buildings that, for example, were in the same way that a species would change colour in response to environmental conditions. So they adapted their environment. They mitigated the heat island effect.

They could turn invisible and hide from a hurricane. Hopefully. They mitigated the heat island effect. You could turn invisible and hide from a hurricane. Hopefully. Yeah, I mean, you know, and also the great thing about the moment is that there are experiments in cities going on all over the world. And those are very much taking the character of those nations. And the most interesting things are happening

where there's space for experimentation in the developing world, in Brazil, in China. And you've got kids that are experimenting and they are hacking technology. And necessity is the mother of invention. And I think we'll see more of that culture in the developed world, in places like New York City. And particularly if you get to a point when, hey, insurance aren't going to cover the damage that was done by this hurricane. Or when you get to the point where no one's going to sort you out, and you yourself have got to create that solution. And think about the weird thing in the digital sector.

If you were using technology that was 100 years old, would you be in business in the historic cities? You know, this is a Victorian city. It is crazy. The built environment is on the cusp of acknowledging, my God, we've actually got to get with the times. We've got to take advantage of these new opportunities. Can nature survive an asteroid impact?

You know, the creative is aligned with the destructive, so they're both part of the same cycle of events, and one leads to the other. And actually, nature does have a positive response to some asteroid impact sites. There are bacteria that thrive in those sites because they're eating up the new nutrients that have arrived on site and that are exposed. It's positive for those species that didn't go extinct. Absolutely. We can't survive an asteroid impact. But I would argue that something like Sandy or

some of the extreme events that we've had, there are technologies, there are new engineering innovations and new systems that could build greater resilience to these things. And whether or not they're taken up depends on policymakers and ultimately depends on people knowing about this stuff. If you don't know it exists, you're not going to fight for it. Okay, so we need technologically literate policy makers and then better communication of these ideas and these technologies. What are some of the things that could help against something like Sandy that you know? Hurricanes are the tough ones.

I mean, the first thing you've got to think about is the complexity of the site. Whether or not a hurricane is really going to affect you from a structural position is obviously going to depend on the site that you're built. You know, New York, it's going to suffer from liquefaction. It's built on very unstable foundations. So it's not very well positioned from the perspective of... You don't have to be mean about it.

It isn't. I'm just saying it's here. But, you know, had somebody kind of thought a little bit more about it, they might have thought, OK, well... But some of the resilience we could possibly bring in, obviously looking at the way that nature builds resilience, you could, for example, to stop the storm surges, you could put barriers, which are, you know, not the kind of

classic levees but where you created a more graduated system that would would help prevent that which is obviously one of well really your biggest problem is that the storm surge when we're engineering buildings we haven't really thought too much about extreme storm systems you know we've tended to build stuff that is you know just full frontal to whatever wind systems are there we can plan cities that are intelligently interacting with the wind so that, you know, think about, okay, from what direction will the wind help cool the city? How could we break up the kinetic impact of wind?

Exactly the same with tsunamis. That's really interesting. So when buildings, when skyscrapers are designed, they're not designed to deal with extreme... Well, wind engineering is part of it, but not at extremes. Yeah, the swaying stuff, but not at the extreme level. And part of that is because of this assumption that insurance will pick up the tab. You know, and that's why when you look at Tornado Alley, I mean, you know, these buildings.

I'm going to issue everything you just said, if I may. You look at some old photos of New York from a century ago. Oh, look how quaint that is with the horse-drawn carriage and the cobblestone. Oh, I wish I was back in that time. I don't wish I was back in that time for many reasons, but leading the list, I would say, is the streets smelled like horse manure.

Oh, yeah. There were flies everywhere. Can we remember this, please? The streets were dusty. That's why people wore spats to prevent dust from getting on your laces. There's aspects of that world I don't want any part of, let alone whose servant I would have been. So there was a big issue about how to make the streets healthier or less offensive than they were, because all

these flies, flies are a health concern, all right? So they talk about, well, things you can put in the horse feed to prevent the flies from wanting to reproduce in the horse. There was a whole conversation about this. And so what solved the problem? Cars. All right. That was the solution to that problem. There was another one. There were theories about the maximum number of people you could possibly have live per acre because of the communicable diseases that would run through it like wildfire. You wouldn't be able to stop it. So there was a health limit that was posted and no one thought about like antibiotics. So here you are trying to have a city survive a hurricane. And I'm saying, if we're going to think about the future, let's bring out the top folks

and say, let's prevent the hurricane. Geoengineering. Yeah. Stuart Brand talks about that. Geoengineering. A monster that eats wind. Yeah. I want the day to come where I don't need you.

I don't want you to have to tell me how to survive a storm. It's like the medical community today, living with AIDS, living with cancer. When I grew up, we cured this stuff, all right? Now it's living with it. No, give me the cure. When you grew up, did anyone have to live with anything? Because people died a lot. Yes.

I'm not saying I remember the 50s, but I think a lot of people used to die all the time. That's why they couldn't live with it. They died. All right. That's why they couldn't live with it. They died. That's true. But actually now we do have the tools through the interdisciplinary approach. We're now able to bring the earth sciences together on a global scale to really understand what's going on. And when we really understand what's going on, we can see those cycles, we can see those pattern of events. For example, we used to think that when a natural disaster happened at a natural virgin site, the best thing to do was to go in and apply all these ideas we had.

Now we've actually started to really study and understand that ecosystems have their own repairing strategies. They're better at it than we are and it's hardly surprising. They've been doing it for billions of years. And I think now people get a bit scared about geoengineering and they think, oh my god, we're going to be designing the weather and it's all really scary. It could be stuff that actually is pretty incremental. It could be very subtle. Think of how amazing it is whenever we watch a time-lapse video of a skyscraper being built, like three months accelerated,

and we just see that it's just being realized in real time when seen through time-lapse. Well, I think that full mastering of biotechnology nanotechnology makes all of the physical world basically our clay for us to literally realize into being we can turn deserts into oasis it's like dream engineering we're talking world building stuff but in time lapse mode like it'll be on that scale of being able to transform. We're going to try some of this stuff, though, first in Brazil and China, right? Well, listen, if you were able to see an entire city,

if you were able to see New York and fast-forward, you know, 500 years of development or 300 years of development, you would see that literally our thoughts transform the world and manifest the decisions of individuals over time and economic decisions people make. Change the topography of a place. We change the topography of a place more than geology does. And if we could fast forward that, it would be like that.

Manhattan, I think, used to be a mountainous place. And now we left a few mountains in just for scenery. Otherwise, yeah, it's our island. We can terraform. We talk about terraforming other planets. We can terraform our own planet. I love it. In Manhattan, we say, you know, this is really expensive real estate.

Let's add some more. You know, take a landfill and put it in another building. I mean, look at the Palm Islands in Dubai. I mean, that's just astonishing. You look at that from the sky. So is this the future of the Earth? And might there be unintended consequences? We're facing now climate change.

Yeah. That is where... There's always going to be unintended consequences. We're facing now climate change. Yeah. That is, there's, there's always going to be unintended consequences. The man that discovered fire was probably burnt at the stake by his neighbor. So technology extends our sphere of possibility. You're going to extend it in positive ways and negative ways, and there can be unintended consequences, but you know, it's a, you look at it as a single system. It's a self remedying system. We'll, you know, when something doesn't, and then if that, well If it doesn't, then we would die out.

It's not in our interest. It's not in evolution's interest for that to happen. It's like if evolution becomes self-aware, that might be a little arrogant, but if we can take control over our evolutionary destiny, then we can remedy the consequences that we didn't choose. Like global warming.

Fix it after the fact. Or see it coming before it's too much of a problem and address it. the consequences that we didn't choose, right? Like global warming. Okay, this is not good. Fix it after the fact. Well, yeah. Or see it coming before it's too much of a problem and address it. So what then of the forest analog, which I thought was so beautifully conveyed, where things are imbalanced over the billion years that it took to figure out what balance was, it's imbalanced. And everything we do that trips up what nature wanted to do on its own is going to have

some Rubik's Cube effect down the line, and maybe it'll get ahead of us. Why else is it that every science fiction novel I've ever read that reached for the latest discovery of technology portrayed a dystopic future? Because that makes a better story. But I think that the fact that we're still here, I think Matt Ridley wrote a great book called The Rational Optimist, and he did a TED Talk called When Ideas Have Sex, and he basically talks about the last 100 years of progress

and all the ways in which the world is getting better through all these incremental increases, but that stuff doesn't make the news. What makes the news is if it bleeds, it leads, and we have these brains that overactive amygdalas looking for danger, because that's what we've inherited as a way to survive. It's positive.

You know, you have Steven Pinker, the myth of violence. The chances of a man dying at the hands of another man today are the lowest they've ever been. We have increased the population of the world, but the percentage of people living in poverty has actually gotten smaller. I mean, there's all of these ways in which we have improved the world, but it's not given that spin in the news because it's just not what we pay attention to. I think, there's all of these ways in which we have improved the world, but it's just, it's not given that spin

in the news, because it's just not what we pay attention to. I think the important role of science fiction is bringing humility, because it's very easy for us to get above ourselves and to think we've figured it all out. But the subject of fear of technology that you were talking about, I mean, Future World is a great movie to watch,

1976 film, where the idea is that artificial intelligence susses out that humans are a threat to the planet so it decides it's going to kill off our leaders and replace us with clones and those clones are going to direct us and totally over the top as you find so far i'm sold yeah we should be scared about unintended consequences but you know what if you don't get the good guys doing it the bad guys are going to do it anyway so of course so we got to wrap up here just if we have enlightened policymakers and if money flows in all the ways it needs to technologically how long into the future before we have the city of the future that you imagine very soon that's No! I want a more quantitative answer than that.

We will have very smart cities by the year 2020. Eight years. Yeah, within eight years. The kind of bionic city I'm talking about, I'm giving a timeline of between 2040 and 2050. Okay. So a city that is like the forest. It's seeable.

Yeah. It's touchable, smellable. Yeah. Do I have an estimate as to when that might happen? Yes. You know, well, if Kurzweil's predictions are correct, I think over the next 30 years, the world is going to be transformed in ways

that make the last 30 years look negligible. I think that we could see that level of transformation. Yeah, however, every exponential growth of anything, every period will say that about the previous period. Fair enough. That's what exponential growth means. Probably the case. I have a quote from the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, the year 1900, December 31st.

The editor writes, we can scarcely imagine that any advances in transportation in the 20th century will rival that which we have accomplished in the 19th century. Right. They had railroads and they had dirigibles. Right, and with the Industrial Revolution, we transcended the limits of our muscles. With the Digital Revolution, we're transcending the limits of our minds. We transcend and transcend and transcend.

Your counterparts back then could have made the same statement at each period. Yes. I'm just saying, so I don't see your statement now as special over time. It's just the next person saying the next thing. You're absolutely right. I think we can always...

On an exponential growth curve. I think that we can always rely on our cosmic restlessness to assure that we're never done. I think we should end on that sentence. Join me in thanking my panel for StarTalk Live.